#also free moodboard to whoever guesses the movie they watch

[gellavonhamster]

tagged by @notprincehamlet (thank you 💜)

were you named after anyone? my grandmother

when was the last time you cried? late June, I believe? Not that long ago. My health sucks right now, so it's a constant pity party around here

do you have kids? no

do you use sarcasm a lot? wouldn't say I use it *a lot* just, idk, when I feel it's appropriate

what's the first thing you notice about people? good question, I've never paid attention enough to register it! Either face or hair, I guess

what's your eye color? green

scary movies or happy endings? scary movies WITH happy endings

any special talents? unless you count constantly injuring myself by accident in various creative ways of different levels of stupidity, none

where were you born? the same city I live in - Riga

what are your hobbies? reading, watching movies/shows, occasionally making moodboards/aesthetics, occasionally cross-stitching or some other crafts, occasionally writing (very rarely). Basic bitches nation rise

have any pets? no :(

what sports do you play/have you played? to be honest, I haven't really done any sports at all unless you count a bit of aerobics and corrective gymnastics as a teen. Not proud of it

how tall are you? 161 cm

favorite subject in school? literature

dream job? as you've already said, I Do Not Dream of Labour, but if I absolutely had to pick a job provided I'd be paid well enough for it no matter what the job is, I'd just go back to working in the museum gift shop. Enough to do not to get bored but also plenty of time to do some stuff for fun, no stress (and when it is stressful once in a while, it's still interesting, in a way), pleasant environment, beautiful things around me, free tickets, lots of communication but not deep enough to be draining. Literally the only problem I had with it was the salary (or rather near absence thereof), but in a dream world this problem wouldn't exist :)

tagging @carnivorous-horses-lover, @katecaru, @catwingsathena and whoever else that wants to answer! As always, no pressure, ignore this if you don't want to answer, and so on, and so forth

[lesbianlovelanguage]

I’m Real (And I Don’t Feel Like Boys)

Harringrove for BLM prompt for the amazing @gideongrace who requested some asexual Robin and Barb. Hope you like it bb.

You can find out more about my HfBLM here, or a whole list of others who are contributing here.

--

Robin’s least favorite stereotype was that all band kids were hypersexual. Sure, band camp got a little wild sometimes, but more because of the weed almost all percussionists had on them at all times or the bottle of tequila the clarinets managed to sneak in. Not because everyone was sucking face and putting instruments in unsavory places. For fucks sake, band camp was even the first place she had ever heard the term asexual in her life. A euphonium player from California casually dropped it in sectionals, and after grilling her on what it meant, Robin had never looked back. It just clicked, like when she realized she could like girls. So, if anything, band camp was where she found out she didn’t have to have sex to be normal, not some month-long orgy.

But, here she was. The first bell hadn’t even wrung and some jock asshole was already giving her shit.

“I bet you know exactly what to do with that cute little mouth, huh Buck?” He leered. Robin tried to ignore him, instead focusing on Great Expectations, one of the summer reading books she hadn’t read. He wasn’t deterred though, instead leaning closer to get in her face as he smirked.

“Ah, come on. Don’t ignore me. We all know you band geeks are little sluts, let’s just have a fun time.” Before she could rip him apart though, a red-haired girl in a frilly blouse stepped between her and the mouthbreather. She was facing Robin, continuing the act that he didn’t even exist. 

“Oh! Hey! Just the person I was looking for! Did you do the homework for Mr. Jackson’s class?” Robin wasn’t even in Mr. Robinson’s class, had tested out of French 103 her sophomore year, but the look on jockhole’s face was enough to convince her to play along.

“Oh, totally. It was so easy, took me like ten minutes tops.”

“Lucky! Maybe you can help me with it at lunch?”

“Uh, sure. Study room in the library?” 

“Perfect.” And just like that, her mystery savior was gone, just as the bell for first period rang through the crowded halls of Hawkins High. All she saw was the look of pure fury on jockhole’s face as she scrambled to her first class. 

-

“This is stupid. She’s not going to be there. Get yourself together Buckley.” Robin muttered to herself as she headed for the library during lunch. She didn’t even know if the girl had the same lunch period as her, but she felt the overwhelming need to try, see if she could thank her for swooping in and rescuing her from a situation that would have most likely ended up with her in detention. 

Once she reached the library, she made a beeline for the study room in the back. It was empty.

Told you this was stupid she thought bitterly. She turned to leave and accidentally bumped into someone.

“Watch where you’re going, dingus,” she snapped before looking up and realizing who she bumped into. Of course it was the girl. Just her luck.

“My name is actually Barb, but I guess dingus works too,” the girl, Barb, said playfully. She was smiling a little despite Robin being a jerk and Robin felt her heart swoon. She hadn’t gotten a good look that morning, but Barb was cute. Not in a traditional way maybe, but Robin had never been one for tradition. But the intense smattering of freckles across Barb’s face, combined with the way her large glasses framed her eyes and made the honey flecks stand out made Robin’s face heat up a little and smile back. 

“Sorry about that. Did you- I mean were you…” Robin trailed off, unsure of how to continue, but wanting to find someway to get Barb to stay.

“I was serious about needing help with french, yeah. And your reputation as having a wicked talent makes me think you’re the perfect person to help.” Barb said smoothly. 

At least one of us is smooth. But there was no way she had a shot. Even if Barb happened to be gay, which was highly unlikely, she definitley wasn’t asexual, probably would sneer at Robin and call her delusional. But, Robin had never been great at self-preservation when it came to pretty girls, so she found herself agreeing to tutor Barb. She followed her into the study room and stood awkwardly as Barb sat down and started to unpack her french work. She looked up from her folder, black sharpie cursive labeling it as French 103, and raised an eyebrow at Robin’s nervously shuffling her feet by the door.

“Are you going to sit down?” Barb asked, not unkindly. 

“Oh,” Robin blurted out. “Yeah, sorry. Let’s see this homework.”

They passed the entire lunch period like that, Robin slowly working through verb conjugation and encouraging Barb everytime she messed up the pronunciations of harder words. With 5 minutes left, Barb began to pack up and looked over at Robin.

“Your accent is really good.”

“Thanks. My ears are kind of little geniuses,” Robin joked. 

“I believe it. You speak a bunch of other languages, right? And you’re in band?” 

“Yeah. I speak Spanish, French, Italian, and Pig Latin. I also play trombone.”

“Wow. That’s the slidey one right?” Barb asked, and Robin couldn’t help the small chuckle that slipped out.

“Yeah, it’s the slidey one.” 

“Cool.”

“Thanks.” Tension began to creep in as their conversation came to a stilted end, but before it could completely fill the small room, Barb spoke up again.

“Would you mind meeting again tomorrow? I just, you’re a really great tutor.” 

“Yeah,” Robin responded quickly. “Yeah, totally. Not like I have much else to do during lunch,” she confessed, thinking about how last year she had spent almost every lunch period hidden away in a practice room by herself. Even if Barb was straight, it was better than the musty walls and silence.

“You’re the best.” With that, the bell rang and both girls headed their separate ways.

-

Lunch tutoring became routine for the girls, after Barb confessed that her best friend, Nancy fucking Wheeler of all people, had been absorbed into Steve Harrington’s group and kind of left her for dead. 

Tutoring progressed into hanging out after school where Robin would bring over french films her parents owned, and then Barb returning with weird B-list horror flicks that they ridiculed together. 

It was during when the kids were climbing into an ice cream van during what was clearly a knock-off of It that Barb surprised Robin in the best way. She reached over and tangled their fingers together where they had rested next to the popcorn bowl. 

Startled, Robin looked over at where she sat and the confusion must have been clear on her face, because Barb simply shrugged and spoke in a soft whisper that was almost drowned out by the movie.

“I like you, I hope that’s okay.” Robin’s ears were ringing, heart in her throat as she bobbed her head dumbly. 

“Yeah, yeah. It’s great,” Robin confessed. 

“Great.” And just like that, Barb turned back and instantly began to make fun of the crappy special effects. 

The warm feeling stayed firmly in Robin’s stomach through the rest of the film, and only intensified as Barb walked her to the door.

“I hope you liked that,” Barb said softly, and Robin knew she wasn’t talking about the movie.

“It really was great, Barb. I, I really liked it.”

“Good. Could I take you to the movies sometime?”

“That sounds perfect,” Robin agreed, and quickly dipped in to press a soft kiss to Barb’s cheek before darting out the front door.

Barb’s smile stuck with her as she drove all the way home.

--

tag team: @lostnoise @gideongrace @stevefuckingharrington @a-magey @trashmouth-hargrove @catharrington (lmk if you would like to be added/removed from the list!)

[sineala]

How would you say fandom culture has changed over the years? What are some differences you notice between older and younger fandom folks?

I’ve been thinking for a while about how to answer this, and I’m not sure I have a really good answer, but I’m going to try.

I’ve been in fandom since approximately 1995. Maybe 1994. At that point, the world wide web was a relatively new part of the internet, and the fandoms I was in had most of their activity on privately-hosted mailing lists (predating eGroups/OneList/Yahoo Groups) and on Usenet newsgroups, with fiction beginning to be available on websites as part of either fandom-specific or pairing-specific archives as well as authors’ individual pages. Fanfiction.net did not yet exist. LiveJournal did not exist. AO3 definitely did not exist. If you wanted real-time chat, there was IRC. I was coming in basically at the tail end of zine fandom; zines were no longer the only way of distributing fanfiction, as fandom started to move online. So I have a selection of zines from 90s-era Western media fandoms but even by then zines weren’t where I was doing most of my reading.

I think in terms of generally “what it was like to be in fandom,” the big-picture stuff hasn’t changed. Fandom still produces creative fanwork and likes to, y’know, get together and talk about fandom. Also, almost every fight or complaint that fandom has about something is a thing that has been going on for actual years. People complain that, say, the kudos button is ruining comment culture because back in the LJ days the only way you could comment on a story was, well, by leaving an actual comment, or sending an email on a mailing list, and this might mean that people who would have otherwise commented have left a kudos instead. But back in the LJ and mailing list days, people were complaining that commenting was going downhill since the days of zines, when in order to comment on a story you had to write a real paper letter and mail it and because you had to do that, the quality of feedback was so much better than you got nowadays because people could just dash off a quick email or comment. You get the idea. Top/bottom wars are not new either. Pairing wars are not new. If you’ve been in fandom a while, you will pretty much have seen all the fights already. I think one thing that is new, though, is the fandom awareness of things like privilege and intersectionality and various -isms, as well as things like “providing warnings might be nice” (do you know how much unwarned deathfic I have read? a lot!) and I sure won’t say we’re perfect at any of this now, but I think fandom is trying way way more about all that stuff than it used to.

There are some fights we actually don’t have anymore, as far as I can tell. I feel like it’s been years since I’ve seen the “real person fiction is wrong” battle, but also I don’t hang out in a whole lot of RPF fandoms, so it’s possible that’s still going and I just don’t see it.

There also used to be a recurring debate about whether gay relationships that were canonical were slash or not. When slash started, obviously this wasn’t a question because there weren’t canonical gay relationships in fandoms, period. But as gay characters began to appear in media, people started to wonder “does slash mean all same-sex relationships, or does slash mean only non-canonical same-sex relationships?” Now, you may be reading this and think that sounds like an incredibly weird thing to get hung up on, but that’s because what appears to have happened is that the term “ship” (originally from X-Files Mulder/Scully fandom) has, as far as I can tell, come up and eaten most of the rest of the terminology. Now people will just say, “oh, I ship that.” For any pairing, gay or not, canonical or not. Fandom seems to have decided that for the most part it no longer actually needs a term specific to same-sex relationships as a genre.

Similarly, there are a few genres of fic that we used to have also pretty much don’t exist anymore. There are also plenty of genres that are well-entrenched now that are also extremely recent -- A/B/O comes to mind. But there are some kinds of fic we don’t write a lot of now. Like, I haven’t seen smarm in years! I also haven’t seen We’re Not Gay We Just Love Each Other in a while. There was also a particular style of slash writing where you’d basically have to explain, in detail, what made you think that these particular characters could be anything other than straight. You’d have to motivate this decision. You’d have to look at their canonical heterosexual relationships and come up with a way to explain why all those had happened in order to reconcile how this one guy could have romantic feelings for another guy. When had he figured out he wasn’t straight? Who might he have been with before? How does he interact with people in ways that make you think he’s not straight? That kind of thing. You had to, essentially, show your work. And these days a lot of fanfic is just like, “Okay, Captain America is bisexual, let’s go!” It’s... different.

Fandom also used to skew older, is my sense. A lot older. I don’t know, actually, if it really was older, but I get the sense now that there are some younger people who are surprised that adults are still in fandom. I have seen people saying these days that they think they’re too old for fanfiction because they are not in middle school anymore. And I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that the barriers to access fandom are a lot lower than they used to be. You used to basically have to be an adult with disposable income (or know an adult with disposable income who was willing to help you out; but even then if you were reading explicit fiction you also had to swear you were 18+, usually by sending in an age statement to whoever you were buying the zine from or to the mods of the list you wanted to join, so a lot of fandom was very much age-gated). Internet access was not widely available. Even if you had internet access, you maybe didn’t have your own email address, so you couldn’t sign up for mailing lists; free email providers didn’t exist. If you wanted to buy zines, you had to have money to buy them. If you wanted to go to cons, you had to be able to afford the cost of the con, travel to the con, et cetera. If you wanted to have a website you had to know HTML. Social media did not exist. You want to draw art? Guess what, you’re probably drawing it on paper! You might be able to upload a picture to your website if you have a digital camera or a scanner, but both of those things are expensive, and also a lot of people don’t have the capability or the money to download pictures from the internet (some people have data caps with overage charges, and some people have text-only connections!), so they won’t get to see it. Maybe you can sell your piece at a con! You want to make a fanvid? We called them songvids, but, anyway, you know how you’re doing that? You’re going to hook two VCRs together and smash the play and record buttons very fast! If you want anyone else to watch them, you are either making them a tape personally and mailing it to them or bringing your vids to a convention. Maybe you can digitize them and upload them, but it’s going to take people hours to download them!

(Every three hours my ISP would kick me off the internet and I’d have to dial in again. If it was a busy time of day, it might take me 20 or 30 minutes to get a connection again. And that was assuming no one else in the house needed to use the phone line. Imagine if your modem went out every three hours now.)

And now, for the cost of my internet connection, I can read pretty much whatever fanfiction I want, whenever I want it. I can see all the fanart I want! I can watch vids! Podfic exists now! Fanmixes exist! Gifsets and moodboards exist! If I want to write fic I can write it with programs that are completely free, and as soon as I post it everyone in the entire world can read it. If I want to draw or make vids that may require some additional investment, but I may also be able to do it with things I already have. Do you have any idea how good we all have it?

There are a couple of kinds of fan activity that don’t seem to exist anymore, though, and I miss them. I know that roleplaying still goes on, but I feel like these days most people who do real-time text roleplay have switched to things like Discord. I know that in the LJ days, RP communities were popular. But I really miss MU*s (MUDs, MUSHes, MOOs, MUXes..), which were servers for real-time text-based RP with a bunch of... hmm... features to aid RP. There were virtual rooms with text descriptions, and objects in virtual rooms with descriptions, and your character had a description, and they could interact with the objects as well as with other characters, and you could program things to change descriptions or emit various kinds of text or take you to different rooms, and so on. Just to, y’know, enhance the atmosphere. It was fun and it was where I learned to RP and I’m sad they’re pretty much gone now.

I also don’t think I see a lot of fanfiction awards in fandoms. Wonder where they went.

Going back to the previous point, the barriers to actually consuming the canon you are fannish about are way, way, way lower now. You can pretty much take it for granted that if right now someone tells you about a shiny new fandom, there will be a way to read that book or watch that show or movie right now. Possibly for free! Of course you can watch it! Why wouldn’t you be able to?

This was absolutely, absolutely not the case before. I’m currently in Marvel Comics fandom. If there is a comic I want to read, I can read it right now on the internet. I have subscribed to Marvel Unlimited and I can read pretty much every comic that is older than three months old; the newer ones cost extra money. But I can do it all from the comfort of my own home right now. I was also, actually, in Marvel Comics fandom in the nineties. If I wanted to read a comic, I had to go to a comic book store and hope they had it in stock; if they didn’t, I had to try another store. Not a lot of comics were available in trade paperback and they definitely weren’t readable on the internet. I used to read a lot of Gambit h/c fic set after Uncanny X-Men #350. I never found a copy of UXM #350. I still haven’t! But I did eventually read it on Unlimited.

Being in TV show fandoms also had similar challenges. Was the show you were watching still on the air? No? Then you’d better hope you could find it in reruns, or know someone who had tapes of it that they could copy for you, otherwise you weren’t watching that show. It was, I think, pretty common for people to be in fandoms for shows they hadn’t seen, because they had no way to see the show, but they loved all the fanfic. The Sentinel had a whole lot of fans like that, both because I think it took a while for it to end up in reruns and because overseas distribution was probably poor. So you’d get people who read the fic and wrote fic based on the other fic they’d read, which meant that you got massive, massive amounts of fanon appearing that people just assumed was in the show because it was a weirdly specific detail that appeared in someone’s fic once. Like “Jim and Blair’s apartment has a small water heater” (not actually canonical) or “Blair is a vegetarian” (there’s an episode where his mother visits and IIRC cooks him one of his favorite meals, which is beef tongue).

Like, I was in The Professionals fandom for years. I read all the fic. I hadn’t seen the show. As far as I know, it never aired in the US, and it certainly never had any kind of US VHS or DVD release. I’d seen a couple songvids. I eventually saw a couple episodes in maybe 2003, and that was because my dad special-ordered a commercial VHS tape from the UK and paid someone to convert it from PAL to NTSC. I didn’t get to see the whole show until several years later when I got a region-free DVD player someone in fandom sent me burned copies of the UK DVD releases and then I special-ordered the commercial release of the DVDs from the UK myself. But if I were a new fan and wanted to watch Pros right now? It is on YouTube! For free!

I think also one of the things about fandom that’s not immediately evident to new fans is the way in which it is permanent and/or impermanent. There are probably people whose first fannish experience is on Tumblr or who only read fanfic on FFN and who have no idea what they would do if either site, say, just shut down. But if you’ve been in fandom a while, you’ve been through, say, Discord, Tumblr, Twitter, Pillowfort, Imzy, DW, JournalFen, LJ, GeoCities, IRC, mailing lists. And sure, if Tumblr closed, it would be inconvenient. But fandom would pack up and move somewhere else. You would find it again. It would, eventually, be okay. Similarly, if you’ve been in a lot of fandoms, if you’ve made a lot of friends, drifting through fandoms is like that. You’ll make a friend in 1998 because you were in the same fandom, and then you might go your own ways, and ten years later you might be in another fandom with them again! It happens.

But the flip side of that is that I think a lot of older fans have learned not to trust in the permanence of any particular site. If you like a story, you save it as soon as you read it. If you like a piece of art, you save it. If you like a vid, you save it. Because you don’t know when the site it’s on will be gone for good. I have, like, twenty years of lovingly-curated fanfic. And I feel like people who have only been in fandom since AO3 existed might not understand how much AO3 is a game-changer compared to what we had before. It’s a site where you can put your fic up and you don’t have to worry that the webhost is going out of business, or that the site might delete your work because they don’t allow gay fiction or explicit fiction or fiction written in second person or fiction for fandoms where the creator doesn’t like fanfiction, or whatever. Because all of those things have absolutely happened. But, I mean, I still save pretty much everything I like, even on AO3, just in case.

So, basically, yeah, fandom is a whole lot more accessible than it used to be. I think fandom is pretty much still fandom, but it’s a lot easier to get into, and that has made it way more open to people who wouldn’t have been able to be in fandom before. There is so, so much more now than there ever was before, and I think that’s great.