#and then i joined the tumblr fandom and have trauma i didn’t know could exist now

[skautism]

holy shit (<- regained memory from first time hearing newsies)

[democraticsenator]

anyone who thinks tumblr has always been an ultra leftist and liberal safe space that was all uwu and fandoms and knowledgeable posts is either out of their mind or hasn’t been on here long enough.

I remember being one of the only black KIDS in my sphere of humor blogging and it was so brutal. I was young and unaware at 14 and didn’t know any better. this was the also the same era and sphere where Barbie Ferrera and Acacia Brinley existed before fame. I’m the SAME AGE as them and it wasn’t that long ago.

One of THE FIRST times I was called the n-word in my life was right after I posted my face on here. I was 13 and just hit 3k followers and wanted to do something big for it. Shortly after that happened, I got a barrage of anonymous hate slurs and subsequently deleted that account because it was so bad and I felt so alone.

In 2012, the YouTube video ‘Ghetto Sims’ spread through tumblr like wildfire. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, LOOK IT UP. Any post that had a gif of this YouTube series that featured two black sims with HORRIDLY racist names and tropes could gain thousands of notes in seconds. If you thought Jeffrey Star and Shane Dawson were bad, I guarantee you they found inspiration in that video. THAT was the humor of the time and any argument made against that show got you canceled.

When Obama was elected President, people OPENLY talked about how having a black president would be the downfall of this country and that ‘we’ had to change our urls that had slurs in it.

at 14, I did a few more face reveals and talked about how I loved one direction. Someone printed out my photos and jacked off to them and submitted that to me. I went offline for a bit after that.

at 15, I was obsessed with talking to older people in my friend groups because I wanted to be mature and indulge in adult conversations. I was told by two dudes that “they didn’t like black people” so whenever they were in a Skype call I couldn’t join. I thought this was normal and thought nothing of it.

At 15, one of the most famous tumblr users ever, tumblr user pizza, who at their peak had one MILLION followers, was ‘exposed’ for having a “black people fighting” tag on their blog. Except it wasn’t so much an exposure because the link was easily accessible on their blog. 1 million people followed them, and the tag has been up for 3 years.

when I was determined to go to college at 17 and spent MONTHS reaching out to older people on tumblr to read my college essays and help with my transcripts, I had to consistently sift through messages saying “lol idk why you’re stressing black people can get in anywhere because of affirmative action” and “black people don’t go to college because they’re poor idk why you’re any different.”

The list goes on and I have examples for days but you get my point.

And don’t get me wrong. I’ve had my fair share of fun on tumblr and there were a lot of good moments that outshined the bad. I made great friends here and learned a lot about different ethnic communities and sexualities I would never have been exposed to before. But the pain I endured on here at young age and the media I consumed will never be erased, and I will not say I’ve grown from it because trauma is unnecessary for anyone personal’s development.

To pretend that tumblr has always been this great community for ALL of its people would be a fallacy. However, it has always been good if you were white.

[rosethornewrites]

I don’t know if I can fully express how tired I am lately.

To sum, I’m less and less enamored of my workplace. Academia is hegemonic in structure and basically the difference between castes and power sucks. In the last few years, a significant number of colleagues I loved have jumped ship for a variety of reasons. But the main reason has been discrimination and hostile work environment. To make matters more fun, one of the people who led to one such friend’s departure is now department chair.

On a personal level, I have no trust that the work that I do for the department or university is valued because I’m not the right academic caste. I got a clear indication of that last semester and have regretted all the extra work I have put in beyond my contractual obligations, sometimes at the cost of my physical and mental health, over the last going-on-9-years.

But here’s the sad thing: if I move on, it’s same shit, different institution. I’m disabled and queer, and the academy caters to people who are hostile toward both. Systemic oppression isn’t going away, even when multimarg faculty join the ranks, because guess who gets shat on every step of the way.

It has been 3-4 years since my fibromyalgia diagnosis. Two of those years allowed me to teach from home. Now, with a disability that is largely considered an autoimmune disease (guess what researchers don’t know much about because it primarily impacts afab folks?), I am no longer protected by a mask mandate on my campus. I’m in fact not allowed to mandate masks in my classrooms because fuck me, I guess. I’m just a cog that can be replaced (for free if UCLA is any example). So I self-identified to my students (which frankly should not be any of their business) and appealed to them to wear masks to protect me and others who may have autoimmune diseases. Half of them care if I die, I guess.

I’ve basically inherited all of my mom’s health problems. Fibromyalgia? Check. Bipolar? Not quite, but double depression with a side of generalized anxiety disorder and trauma is aces. And now it turns out that she’s been having mini-strokes, potentially for years. I probably have that in my future too.

She’s also stuck 15 hours away for another week and a half, and I’m taking care of her incredibly spoiled dogs, who have made it their personal goal to shit and piss on every available piece of floor space, and who cannot get on the guest bed by themselves and will howl until I wake up and put them on it. All. Night. Long.

So I’m not really getting good sleep. I managed to rig a system so that one of the dogs can get up on her own, but the chihuahua can’t.

Guess what flares with lack of sleep? Yep, all of it. I spend a couple hours a day soaking in an effort to alleviate the pain. While doing a full time job that doesn’t even value my life, let alone my contributions. While taking care of dogs that are not mine, who are actually traumatized at the separation from my mom because the last time someone left and didn’t come home it was Dad and he died. So I can’t even be too mad at them for the piss off potty mats, for the incessant whining and howling, for the general neediness. Because it’s been 6 years and thinking about Dad dying still makes me sad, so I can’t expect less from the dogs, especially given the chihuahua was his.

But overall, I’m rapidly approaching burnout, if I’m not there already. There are days my spoon deficit is so bad I wish I could just turn off existence for a little while. Like, can I get a medically induced coma as a treat?

Oh, and add to the fact that I had some fandom fucks threaten to dox me 2 years ago for daring to speak out about an abusive asswipe, and I have no idea if they still stalk my Tumblr or whatever.

Yeah, I’m tired. It’s not getting easier.

I really just want to rest.

[curiosityjams]

re: iz*one

first of all, i wanted to say i didn’t plan on writing something about the disbandment. the past few months have been incredibly rough on my mental state to the point where i feel as if i’ve lost all sense of self. shit has been so rough for me, their disbandment being confirmed made that even worse for me. however, i realized i need to learn how to be okay with like...being open about my own emotions in a time of uncertainty and writing them out helps me in a way even if a lot of those emotions i’d rather keep private. i’ve also been going thru a time where i’m currently reevaluating this past year and everything i’ve done/felt in the past few yrs (2.5 of those years being izone’s run), so i thought i’d write something about the disbandment and what iz*one means to me, esp during this point in my life. i’d write more about what led me to this point, but if i did, i’d end up writing a whole novel, so i’m just going to keep this as short as possible.

also if this is a jumbled mess, i’m sorry!!!!

since we’re here to talk about the inevitable, i just wanted to say that i’ve probably had a harder time accepting them being gone than i thought. i knew they were gonna disband eventually bc lol produce group, but also, knowing what happened with the voting scandal and the panasonic, it makes it even worse for me. i hate that they didn’t even bother to handle their disbandment in a way that wasn’t complete horseshit. i hate how the pandora screwed everything up. i hate how we didn’t even get a proper goodbye from the girls. i knew that this was going to happen, but i fucking hate how it all turned out. i can’t say i’m 100% happy with the ending and honestly, don’t think i’ll ever be able to fully accept that they’re no longer a group. 

that said, i’m not here to vent.

while i’m obviously upset that they’re gone, the fact that they were ever a group to begin with--i’ll forever be grateful. i avoided getting into them for the longest time because of my own trauma from being involved in the 48 fandom (smth i’ll talk about at a later time bc it’s a lot), but the moment i decided to watch their “up” performance and actually give them a chance beyond looping la vie en rose, that’s when i fell in love. i fell in love with the music. i fell in love with the visuals. i fell in love with the bond between the girls. most of all, i fell in love with the fact that during a weird transitional period in my 20s, i found a group that gave me the closure i needed in a time where it felt like the world was against me while also giving me the strength i need to move on. 

while we’re on that topic, let’s talk about kwon eunbi.

as you already know from my url, eunbi is obviously my bias. she’s the leader of the group, under the company my ult group, lovelyz, is also in, and THE absolute all-rounder. she’s extremely talented, super fucking funny, a babe of THE highest order, and the best single mom you could ever ask for. every time i watch a video of iz*one’s or look at any of their pics, i’m always in absolute awe of her. while i love all of the girls (j-line has a very special place in my heart bc of my time in 48 fandom) and do consider the entire group to be one full of bias wreckers, it’s eunbi that instantly caught my eye and the one i’m incredibly proud to call my ult.

“now, drea, why is it that you’re taking so much time with talking about how special this group and that girl are to you?” well, it’s mainly because that eunbi and i are the same age (both 95-liners, but i’m older by 2 months) that i’m so drawn to not only her, but the group as well. yeah, it’s normal to be drawn to members born in your birth year, but for me and esp in this case, it’s far more complex than it seems.

around the time i got into the group, i was (still am) going thru a quarter life crisis. i had just finished my a.a., was a few months away from turning 24, and had pretty much decided i was going to take an indefinite hiatus from twitter due to the amount of harm its done to my mental health over 10 years. i felt like shit knowing that so many people my age were living their lives, getting married, having kids, etc all that shit while i felt as if i was frozen in time and like i could never accomplish any of those things because according to society, my time was up. as a woman on the autism spectrum, i never felt like anything i did was enough and knowing that even after years of trauma, the feeling that if i don’t have my entire life sorted out by 24/25 scared the living shit out of me. knowing that a panini happened made those feelings even worse. 

i know it’s weird to like...feel so many emotions over this esp since 23-25 is young and starting your career out at that age is normal. that said, knowing how eunbi was already in a group prior to joining iz*one that ended up disbanding months after they debuted, the road she took to get to where she is now, and the fact that she’s 25/26 and will get so many chances to start over is what gives me hope after such a shit year. i can finally get to where i want to be, i’ll graduate from university, i’ll hopefully get a job that will earn me enough money to move out of my mom’s house, i’ll find love, etc who the fuck knows what’s going to happen? i hate that after years of hating myself and being afraid of getting older because people often have this mentality that you should abandon all sense of yourself once you hit your mid 20s, it’s taken me THIS long to actually start accepting myself for who i am and living my life for myself, but i’m excited to see where the fuck life takes me after years of self-hatred, trauma, and trying too hard to please ppl that don’t give a shit. seeing eunbi just have a fucking blast on stage, take care of her members, and overall be the amazing person she is gave me the strength i desperately needed to actually get to the path i want to be on as someone that’s a few years away from turning 30.

as i said earlier, i’m not ready to just outright accept iz*one being gone. i’ll probably spend the entire month of may just watching their content since there’s still a shitton of stuff i have yet to watch and i’m lowkey embarrassed that as a fan, i’m admitting this, but also: there’s no time limit. i can always watch that video at another time, i’ll like that pic later, etc. i wish iz*one was one of those things that had no time limit because i’ll always cherish them, but in the 2.5 years of their existance, i achieved some big things and survived a pandemic. i left twitter, got closure in chapters i needed closure in, finished my a.a., etc among many other things during that time and it’s partly because of iz*one that i’ve pushed myself to do all of those things. it’s hard esp since it’s easier to just write smth like this on tumblr than actually do it, but the girls and their music were part of the reason why 2020 wasn’t a complete dumpster fire for me. 

most of all, i wanted to write this because i wanted to shout-out the amazing folks at @izonetwork​. i joined super late in the game, but the convos i’ve had, the laughs we’ve had on discord/among us, etc i’ll never forget it. meeting all of you was one of THE highlights of an otherwise shitty year and i’ll always credit you as one of the reasons why i wasn’t completely emotionally distant during such a dark time. all of you keep me grounded and i’m forever grateful. super honored to call you guys my friends. <3

so yeah, thank you iz*one. thank you, eunbi, sakura, hyewon, yena, chaeyeon, chaewon, minju, nako, hitomi, yuri, yujin, and wonyoung. i don’t speak korean or japanese, but know i’m eternally grateful for all the joy, strength and bops you gave me in the past 2.5 years. i’m even more grateful for the friends i’ve met thru my own fandom of the group. i’m excited to see what every single one of you does next regardless of what it may be. 

now if you’ll excuse me, i have to go catch up on all the enozis i’ve missed. 

❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤

[imaginative-spirit]

hii! i found your twitter acc when i was searching for sefikura meta/analysis, and i found your tweet! i wanted to ask if you know some blog posts (or any posts) of their relationship analysis, as i am quite new to the whole ffvii series and i am intrigued by their relationship. i wanted to ask through cc but i noticed you dont have curiouscat so i’m asking through tumblr, sorry ;;

I didn’t mean to put all of this under a readmore but tumblr is being an ass so that’s what we’re doing now, I guess...

Hello!! Unfortunately I can’t really come up with anything on the spot, because despite seeing posts like that around before, I’m very unorganized and bad at keeping track of posts... so I decided to write you one on the spot instead, lmao!! I’ve been planning to write a more coherent, longer analysis for a while but still haven’t gotten around to it, but I’ll share some of my condensed thoughts here. The sefikura relationship is what intrigues me most about FFVII after all, and I usually yell quite a lot about them on twitter!

You say you’re new to FFVII, which means that I should definitely give a spoiler warning here. I’m going to address spoilery stuff from the OG, Remake and also some of the compilation material, because it’s hard to talk about their relationship without doing so. (I’ll also assume you’re familiar enough with the world of FFVII to know what I mean when I talk about stuff like SOLDIER, Shinra, Jenova, the Lifestream and such... this would get too long if I explained all of that here, lol)

Okay, so. Cloud and Sephiroth are narrative foils, which means their stories and arcs parallel each other in many ways. The most central themes surrounding them are their loneliness, sadness and how they cope with trauma.

Sephiroth was most likely raised by Hojo in a Shinra lab, and if you know Hojo, you know that there’s no way Sephiroth was treated as anything but an experiment. He never knew his mother, and the only person he had any respect for - Professor Gast - vanished when he was young and this seems to have given him abandonment issues. Cloud, on the other hand, had a mother but not much else. He felt alienated by the other children growing up in Nibelheim and seems to have been generally disliked by the adults as well, due to them blaming him for the time Tifa got hurt. In other words, they were both very lonely as children.

Shinra sent Sephiroth to war when he was very young (people disagree quite a lot on how old Sephiroth actually is but it’s assumed that he was around 12), and as the years went by, Sephiroth became the poster child of SOLDIER. We know that Cloud grew to idolize Sephiroth for how strong and brave the media made him out to be (A.K.A. had a celebrity crush on him), and that was what inspired Cloud to leave town and try to join SOLDIER.

As we see in the prequel game Crisis Core, Sephiroth at this point is well-respected by his peers after his efforts in conquering Wutai. His two only friends are Genesis and Angeal, who are also SOLDIER 1st Class, but they end up leaving SOLDIER, which means Sephiroth gets left behind. Considering that he already had abandonment issues to begin with, being abandoned by his only friends must’ve hit hard. I’d say this sets the foundation for Sephiroth’s downward spiral. However, at this point, I would argue that Sephiroth is still a good person at heart, despite all the trauma he has endured. He persists, refusing to hunt down his deserter friends, and even begins a hesitant friendship with Zack, who was Angeal’s apprentice.

Cloud befriends Zack as well, but doesn’t make it into SOLDIER and instead remains in the ordinary Shinra infantry, which is a crushing loss for him because he can’t achieve his dream. It’s at this point I like to imagine that if Zack had introduced Sephiroth and Cloud to one another, things could’ve gone better. Sephiroth is older than Cloud and outranks him, but with how isolated Sephiroth has been for his entire life I think there’s potential for a meaningful friendship here. They’re both very lonely and neither of them is really a people-person, so I think they’d get along well once Cloud gets over his hero-worship and Sephiroth manages to open up a bit. I would say that sefikura, if Nibelheim didn’t happen, has the potential to be a healthy relationship.

But of course, that’s not how canon goes. The Nibelheim mission happens, Sephiroth finds out that he’s not human and finally snaps after years of mistreatment, burning the town to the ground. Cloud manages to kill Sephiroth, ends up spending several years as an experiment, gets injected with Jenova cells, goes into a coma, wakes up just in time to watch Zack die, and ends up so traumatized that he creates a false identity for himself as a former SOLDIER 1st Class.

We’ve now reached OG FFVII. At this point, Sephiroth, while technically dead and chilling in the Lifestream, uses Jenova as a vessel to move around and takes advantage of Cloud, using him as a puppet for his own gains. He constantly dehumanizes Cloud and generally doesn’t give a damn about him as a person, while Cloud resents Sephiroth but can’t resist his manipulations. In a lot of ways, I think Sephiroth projects his own trauma onto Cloud here, because if Sephiroth had to suffer as Shinra’s puppet for his entire life, then Cloud should suffer as Sephiroth’s puppet as well. As a victim of horrific abuse, Sephiroth has a lot of justified anger, but he takes it out on the wrong person entirely. It’s definitely a very unhealthy situation.

But of course, unlike Sephiroth, Cloud doesn’t let his trauma define him. He reaches his breaking point and falls apart completely, but he gets back up, because unlike Sephiroth, he has a support system of friends who stand by his side and work together with him to defeat Sephiroth at the end of the game. For most of his life, Cloud has been chasing Sephiroth. This is where he finally catches up and surpasses him.

And here, the tables turn. Cloud kills Sephiroth but that’s never stopped Sephiroth before. This is where Sephiroth first develops his Cloud-obsession. He fixates on Cloud so hard that his hatred keeps him from completely fading away into the Lifestream. Cloud is literally his lifeline. (Isn’t it romantic? lol) He returns in the sequel movie Advent Children, where he fights Cloud one-on-one and basically just taunts him for 10 minutes before Cloud kills him again.  It’s implied that Sephiroth can keep coming back as long as Cloud exists as well.

Canon beyond this has, for a long time, been unknown territory. There’s a sequel game called Dirge of Cerberus that the fandom at large pretends doesn’t exist because it’s... kinda weird to say the least, lol. And it doesn’t really have anything to do with sefikura anyway. People have written post-canon sefikura as something that continues to be toxic, but there’s also fic that offers redemption and forgiveness for Sephiroth, acknowledging that he was a victim too. It’s left very open-ended.

All of this basically explains how I see sefikura. They’re two people who were alike in many ways, who could have been friends before everything fell apart around them, if things had been different. But they never did meet, before it was too late. Instead, they keep chasing each other, full of hate even though they’re probably the only people in the world who could truly understand each other’s trauma. The only real difference is that Cloud had friends to back him up while Sephiroth was abandoned, and I really, truly wish they could get an opportunity to reach some sort of understanding. And that would basically be it...

...but then the Remake happened. Diving into speculation territory here. I firmly believe that the Sephiroth we see in the Remake is a time traveller, or is at least aware of the future to some degree, and that the remake is actually a sequel where Sephiroth is quite literally remaking OG ffvii. He’s completely obsessed with Cloud to a degree that he never was in the OG, and considering how loyal the developers stayed to the characterization of basically every other OG character this immediately stuck out to me like a sore thumb even though it took me until the end of the game to piece it together.

I’m not kidding here. Sephiroth is desperate for Cloud’s attention in the Remake. He's constantly trying to touch Cloud, everything he says to Cloud makes him sound like a pining ex-husband, and he generally doesn’t do anything to harm Cloud except scaring him shitless simply by showing up. He actually has quite a few moments when he’s very gentle with Cloud. At the end of the game he basically even proposes to Cloud by asking Cloud to join him and genuinely seems upset when Cloud rejects him. And even then, he claims he doesn’t want Cloud (nor himself) to die.

For the life of me, I can’t wrap my head around what Sephiroth’s goal is in the Remake and I have no idea what they’re planning to do with his character in future parts, but I’m very excited to find out. The sefikura content in the Remake was very delicious and at this point the only thing they could do to surpass it in the future would be to have them actually make out on screen, lmao.

I hope this is coherent enough to read, I basically just tried to condense everything I could into a neat little essay and there’s definitely things I didn’t mention here, lol. I’ll write a proper, more well-thought out analysis another time!

Also, if you want to ask me anything else or talk to me about sefikura in general, my DMs are always open, both here and on twitter ;D

[veridium]

dragon age day

I know today might be a bit overwhelming for the fandom since it is, of course, the day (the day of all days). When I thought about what I wanted to contribute, if anything, I could only think of saying thanks. As I am in the midst of finals and grading assignments, I don’t have many spoons to spare, except to reiterate what I have said so many times before: dragon age has provided me with so many blessings. 

CW: discussion of toxic relationship, emotional abuse.

Some of you know that around the time I joined the fandom in 2018 (after having only played Inquisition for several months beforehand), I was in the midst of an incredibly toxic, emotionally abusive, and failing relationship. I had just graduated college and was at a crossroads. Because the relationship was the longest and most serious I had ever known I was incredibly attached to it, even as it became detrimental to my happiness. We were planning on getting engaged this past summer. Our entire lives were planned and I was in it for the long haul. 

Earlier that year my ex had gifted me Inquisition after I kept seeing it in GameStop and saying I had always wanted to try it. I played it once, got infuriated by the Hinterlands, and put it down for a long time. Around the time I finished undergrad I decided to give it another try, and quickly became hooked. I would spend hours and hours in front of the TV learning by trial and error how to play. My ex was the more prolific gamer but that quickly started to change. 

That wasn’t the only shift that was happening. 

One of the symptoms of my ex’s and her family’s toxicity and its impact on me was that I had become incredibly detached from art. I have been artistic since I was strong enough to hold a crayon in my hand. My family swore for years I’d be an artist, or an actress. But I have learned that, what all-too-often happens when you choose to love something that doesn’t love you the way you deserve in return, you lose touch with all the things that remind you of why you’re so worthy of a great love. You don’t invest in it, you don’t nourish it, because it becomes all about preserving this person in your life and what you believe they bring to it. When things turn dark the natural inclination is to sacrifice more in order to save it: to prove that you can be as loyal as your promised. 

A year later and I am still unpacking the trauma that was inflicted upon me during that time of my life, trauma I didn’t know by name as it was happening because I had given my all to someone I loved and the future we wanted. But not everything was rosey and blissful, and I am reflecting upon that. I think back to what finally woke me up, and it’s quite literally this: I turned into a huge, enthusiastic, and clumsy nerd. 

Playing a game with such a vivid world took what was perhaps one of the last surviving matchsticks there was, lighting it, and dropping it on me. My imagination consumed Thedas like water after a 40-year drought. I began theorizing characters, researching the prior games, and scrolling through the wiki site hunting for lore. I realized the universe was so much bigger than what Inquisition represented. 

Then, I bought the first sketchbook I had in over a year. 

My characters became my muse, and over time, their portraits grew into stories. I looked up Tumblr and rejoined specifically to engage with the fandom and see what sharing my love with other people could do for my creativity. Even though art and writing were lifelong passions of mine, I had no intention whatsoever of writing fanfiction until I read other people’s work, saw the fun they were having with it and what it was doing for their healing, and I decided to go out on a limb.

The more stories I wrote the more I remembered my marrow: I was so much more than what my relationship, and my partner’s family, warped me into seeing. My original characters started out as projections of the qualities and traits I loved and missed about myself, as well as love letters to the women and queer people in my life. And in the canon characters I grew attached to I saw hope and inspiration for surviving adversities. Tests of faith, conviction, and courage under pressure. In their stories I found refuge and reliability for a terrible era of my life where I felt so completely alone.

As I gave more and more time to my passions, my relationship strained even further than it had. I was no longer hopelessly devoted to its endurance, I had something that was purely mine again, and my partner’s encouragement waned. It turned into jealousy -- for this and many other parts of my life I used as an escape from the sadness -- and rather than bend as I had done before, I pushed back. I protected what was my own and I did not sacrifice it. To be fair it wasn’t always healthy: I would log hours and hours into the game to escape the stress of the relationship, to distract myself from the fact that my mental health was the lowest and frailest it had been in years, and the cold, hard truth: it was over, or else I was going to commit my life to something terrible. 

Months later, I said enough. I ended the relationship once and for all. I was moving my life out of an apartment I had lived in for years, saying goodbye to everything I had fought so hard to build. In your early 20s everything feels like a vast unknown and you have a manual with no writing on its pages. Every serious decision feels like invoking a storm you have to hunker down in. I still deal with that, and am learning from it with every new season. I have also learned that sometimes destruction, and creative recklessness, is about so much more than loss. I had given up security I was paying for with my emotional well-being. 

But I kept me, and my sketchbooks, and my art supplies, and my stories. I had my cat, too, but you know, technicalities (haha).

So, for as imperfect as my fandom experience has been, and for as grumpy as I have become with society’s bullshit (which is quite the high level), I will always be grateful to these games for existing. For giving me something to hold onto when my life was falling apart, a world I could slip away to when I wasn’t ready to face the evils in my own. Because when I was finally ready, and willing to be my own warrior, my imagination was ready to make something out of nothing. These games and this universe helped me save myself.

Thank you to Dragon Age, to the fandom community I have made in its name, and to everyone who makes it worthwhile. But it wouldn’t be me without saying: fuck off to every single bullshit game writer who used its medium to perpetuate harmful tropes and norms, fuck off to fandom racists and racist apologists, to queerphobes who hated my meta on account of it using the word queer even though it was my explicit voice as a queer creative on queer issues (did I forget to say queer? queer!), to Vivienne haters, sexist gamer bros, fetishists; but explicitly to romanticizers of unhealthy power dynamics between couples and friends alike. These horror stories (yes, horror stories) exist enough in real life, take it from me. We don’t need them made into romanticized, co-opted, and misused fictions here. 

The reason why I and so many others write for this universe, and participate creatively, is to combat these influences. With our own blood, sweat, and tears as artists, might I add. I am so, so proud to be included in that community. 

So, happy Dragon Age Day, ya’ll. Let us keep warm on this, our trash can fire. 

[jensens-snackles]

more bad than good (P1)

A spn AU

summary: After John’s death, Sam and Dean are thrown into a normal teen life. Dean is struggling immensely, but his plan to just make it through goes awry when he crosses paths with a special someone. 

pairing: Dean/reader, possibly more (tbd)

word count: 533 (short for the first chapter, it’ll get longer)

warnings: parental death, past trauma, insecurity, guilt, anger, teen crisis.

A/N: so I had tumblr a few years back, I wrote for a different fandom but I’m re-starting here. I hope my writing and navigation on tumblr isn’t too rusty! 

Dean had quirks as any would, but his, if you looked deep into who he was truly, were rooted in his insecurities and dark past. And somehow his trauma, and all his hurt was never obvious, because that’s who he was. He was a Winchester and all. Trained to hide behind a facade as he would to properly kill a demon. But no one is perfect, and so he would let little things slip through the cracks and fall into his everyday activities, and they would be categorized those quirks mentioned earlier. 

An example which could only be seen by the trained eye, was how he would sit on the bus. He always sat exclusively at the window seat, trapped between the window and his bag placed on the adjacent seat. But he liked the security the window seat gave him. And he would never notice it himself, but eventually someone would. And that’s where our story begins. With that special someone. 

But maybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The story really starts with the last hunt Dean went on. It was with his father John, his brother Sam, and himself. The normal crew he ran with. They had successfully taken out a group of demons, but a short drive and a fighting Sam and John caused for an unlikely crash. Sam made it out with only a fractured rib, but John slipped into a coma. By the end of the night, he didn’t make it. 

Dean remembers the guilt and self hatred Sam had towards himself, knowing the crash was his doing. Dean tried to convince him it wasn’t his fault, but it tore Sam apart for weeks. 

But that night changed everything for them. An aunt they didn’t know existed came to the hospital and took them in. A small town in California was where they moved. Sam was put into therapy for a few weeks, things seemed to look up for him. But Dean was having trouble trying to adjust to a normal life. The normality included a somewhat healthy parental relationship. And with the normality came all the freedom he had as a Seventeen-year-old. He didn’t know what to do with himself. He was being treated how he should have growing up, and somehow the resentment turned hatred towards his father grew, even though he was gone. He knew he shouldn’t feel the way he did, and the guilt grew too. 

Because Sam was only Fourteen and Dean was Only Seventeen they were enrolled to the local high school by the time October had arrived. Dean was terrified of what was to come; he hadn’t had formal education since third grade. He knew his times tables, sure, but he definitely wasn’t as educated as he should be for a junior. But Sam had taken a more optimistic approach. Sam was excited for a normal life, he had been wishing for years for a normal childhood. He would go on to Dean at the dinner table about how excited he was to join sports teams, make friends, and he was ready for the positive change. But it was too late for Dean. 

Dean had seen too much. He couldn’t be saved.

[jemmaginary-blog1]

Agents of SHIELD Promo Poster

Because I can never just leave things alone, below is my analysis/thoughts of the poster and what I think it could mean. I very well may be wrong as this is Agents of SHIELD and they like to keep us guessing and make us think we know what’s going to happen but I did try. Some of this may be a reaching a bit or wrong and feel free to correct me/tell me what you agree or disagree with! So I apologise if this is a mess as I’m new to all of this and new to Tumblr so the formatting may not be great.

I shortened this down as I didn’t want to annoy people with my six page ramble.

(Also credit/thank you to jemannesimmons for pointing out that Fitz wasn’t grabbing Daisy’s hand as that is what sent me on this mad spiral trying to see what else I missed and what subtle clues were lurking in the poster.)

(Also did a quick speculation of the previous poster down at the bottom as I hadn’t really seen it before!)

(Also my computer isn’t great so I may have missed things to do with the kree writing as it’s currently impossible for me to zoom in on this picture without it becoming impossible to actually look at and see something other than pixels.)

(Alsoooo need to come up with a word other than also wondering if anyone has any breakdowns of previous season cast photos? Joined this Fandom during the break between S5 and S6 and curious as to what predictions people made last year.)

(Yay it’s been confirmed that there ARE easter eggs/clues in this poster so yay for that. Though easter eggs and clues/hints are different.)

The Last Supper

The fact that it's positioned in a similar way to the Last Supper could be accidental but I doubt it as 'faith,' has been a bit of a theme in AoS and so I think with Mack being director and becoming more of a main character it would be interesting to use the Last Supper as a way to hint to what's going to presumably be a season with a lot of focus on him. So here is me breaking down that side of it first.

I think multiple characters match with the same character or could due to the smaller number of characters in AoS when compared to The Last Supper and the different grouping.

You can somewhat match them up with the identity of the apostles and their grouping, either by their reactions to what’s happening or their placement in the photo frame. Though it does change depending on which one you do.

In The Last Supper it’s broken down into four groups of Apostles:

GROUP 1: Bartholomew, James the Less and Andrew are all surprised.

GROUP 2: Judas Iscariot is taken aback; next to him, Peter holds a knife and looks stormy, while the boyish John, the youngest apostle, simply swoons.

GROUP 3: Thomas is upset; James is shocked. Philip wants an explanation.

GROUP 4: In the final group of three, Jude Thaddeus and Matthew turn to Simon the Zealot for answers.

Out of our eight I’d roughly match them up, reaction wise, as follows:

Group 1: Fitzsimmons and Deke, they’re all surprised although Deke also appears to be up to something. 

Group 2: May and Not!Coulson

Group 3: Daisy

Group 4: Elena

Mack: On a framing/position basis he matches up with Jesus. Like Jesus in the Last Supper he has an expansive pose that contrasts with everyone around him, he's the focus and the centre of the frame. The new leader and he has his agents(apostles/followers) around him. Mack appears to be positioned in a similar place to Jesus, opening up the idea of him suffering some kind of betrayal from those closest to him. Similar to how Jesus was betrayed by Judas. I don't see Fitzsimmons being the ones betraying him because of last season, he's already had conflict with Fitz and then saw him die - so I don't think it'll be Fitz and Simmons had a minor betrayal by siding with Fitz rather than following orders and helping lock him up. For me the most likely candidates are May, Daisy or Elena as they are all close to him.

Judas Candidates:

May could betray Mack for Not!Coulson, Ming hinted towards May having some kind of motive/alternate mission this season that isn't to do with SHIELD/Being a SHIELD Agent and so she could be delving into that.  If May is Judas then perhaps Not!Coulson is Peter although that could shift old Coulson into being Jesus (depending on if when referring to Peter saying he doesn't know who Christ is he's referring to not knowing what SHIELD is - like in the trailer or Coulson.)

Elena and Mack are already slightly strained, the conflict over the death of Ruby and the repeated idea that Elena seems to feel like she has to do what’s right regardless of the others opinions of it. She’s impulsive and headstrong (I love her, putting that in here as it sounds like I’m just criticising her,) which could cause problems as she’s the Directors girlfriend and she’ll probably be going against orders during the Season. He’ll not want to seem like he’s playing favourites, especially as in S2 it was shown he wanted a fair SHIELD and I’m assuming he’ll still want that. Plus Mack will be extremely busy, too busy for them to be as close as they have been. And Coulson/Fitz’s deaths will place a strain on Mack. He’s lost Coulson, been placed into the position of Director and has a hologram with the face of Coulson telling him what to do. I really doubt he’ll be in a great place during Season 6.

Daisy: To me she’s the most unlikely candidate for Judas but I will admit it’s a possibility. Similarly to May it could be a Not!Coulson caused rift as Coulson was a Father to her and she may be feeling guilty over his death considering it was a give the serum to her or him situation. Or it could be because she wants to be the Director, Coulson had been grooming her to be the new Director or at least the new face of SHIELD and maybe she’ll disagree with Mack over how he decides to run things as he will do things differently this season as he’s called Coulson out/disagreed with him multiple times.

Other thoughts:

Fitzsimmons and Daisy are grouped together, hopefully showing that at some point that rift between Daisy and Fitz will be healed. I simultaneously want that Fitz/Daisy bromance back and want Daisy’s trauma to be addressed because it got somewhat ignored last season.

May is drinking what is presumably Haig, somewhat heartbreaking.

Elena is wearing the ill-fated SHIELD jacket of death if Season 3 is anything to go by.

As mentioned in many other posts Mack has his toolbox, offically the Director of SHIELD.

Daisy appears to have different gauntlets, presumably because her powers are stronger this season (after taking the serum) this will probably affect her in some way. Also backs up how she seems to be more powerful/confident in her powers in the Season 6 trailer.

Red Lights

The red light seems to be focusing on three people: May, Fitz and Deke with a focus on May and Fitz especially. 

All people that were separated from the team in some way at the end of the last season.

May: She lost Coulson and was with him as he died. The team left her on the beach as they flew off to find Fitz and so we can assume there’ll be some distance between her and the rest of the team. She is also physically separated from them in 5x22 with the ship flying off into space, though the s6 trailer does show she reunites with SHIELD at some point it doesn’t mean it’s immediate. With her I think the ‘danger,’ is Not!Coulson and whatever his mission/motive is - he looks like the man she lost and loved and so he’s in a position to manipulate her. 

Fitz: He’s out frozen in space and the team are going to find him. Though he may have been abducted which only separates them further. There will also be emotional distance as he died, he hurt Daisy and so he’s going to be shocked. They’re dealing with finding him whilst knowing their Fitz who rescued them from space died and dealing with what happened to Fitz (mental break.) The danger when it comes to him is the physical/literal danger he’s in if he’s been taken captive and taken away from cryo!chamber the team are heading to and the mental danger (maybe why the red light covers his head - brain -> brain injury -> framework!Fitz - the whole dual personality thing) as this Fitz has been hearing the Doctor and there’s still a chance he could go through what Loop!Fitz did. Whether that be because of something that has happened during the time between Season 5 and 6 or sometime during the season.

Deke: The canary in the coal mine, their proof that the timeline changed. As far as the team know he’s gone, he never existed and so to them he’s dead. Rather than them searching for him I think it’ll be the other way around, Deke finding them or them finding him accidentally.

These people are the most isolated from the others and so are in the most vulnerable position. They are in the most hypothetical danger and have the greatest chance of being hurt/influenced right now.

Red is traditionally used to symbolise danger and so the light could be representing that, danger and anger and a warning to the audience that none of these characters are safe. Either during or at the start of the season.

With Fitz there are also alien runes surrounding him, symbolising the fact that he’s lost in space/surrounded by aliens? May’s is simply light reflecting on the metal grating of the background, seeming much more ‘normal.’ Reflecting the fact that she’s on earth/focusing mainly on earth in terms of her plot-line?

In contrast the light around May seems darker, emotionally she’s in a dark place and she’s also in the dark when it comes to the mystery surrounding Not!Coulson.

Also may be reaching slightly but Not!Coulson (how are we actually referring to him?) is looking towards her and the light follows the arrows in his eye-line heading towards May with the light increasing in brightness. Showing he’s influencing/manipulating her this season? Or placing her in danger.

With Fitz and May it could also link to the religious symbolism.

The light around Fitz almost resembles a half halo (because he died and was reborn? Angel? Or because this Fitz is innocent compared to Loop!Fitz) and his light is also the brightest shade of red.

The way the brightest red forms a red triangle almost horn shape. Indicating she could be Judas? or influenced by the devil/Lucifer (Not!Coulson) although I don’t feel as if Not!Coulson is going to be a villain after Captain Marvel (he could be but that movie changed how I felt about the Skrulls and so far I think he’ll be a Skrull.) Maybe it indicates that whilst Fitz was reborn she’s going to die (hopefully not!) or ‘fall,’ by doing some bad deed and/or betraying the team/SHIED.

Look who’s in front of the ‘D,’ and guess what word starts with D?  Doctor.

Also does anyone else see figures in the background of the pink/orange bit? Behind the writing

[neven-ebrez]

i see all your grieviances with s14 and i do get where you're coming from, but everything you see as negative and tiring i see it as... well, not positive, but not the worst thing that has happened. characters being in a stalemate is still much better than reversing back like what happened with s9. it is tiring, but i don't mind the waiting if i can see the light at the end of the tunnel. some got advantages in the race while others are still behind. have some patience, they'll get there.

Whoever sent this, I’d like to think we’ve probably talked before. And I’d like to agree with all the points you’ve made, the sentiment. My gut tells me as much... but like, I’m beyond weary, you know?  I’ve been in the race for a long ass time. And to see people talk about the state of Destiel like it potentially isn’t very, very similar to what the meta community (and fandom) has already been through, what I personally have already been accused of for years…??  It’s like watching old history unfold into yet another heartbroken bloodbath. 

And yeah we’ve come so far from S9 and the quick downward regression, but like… Dabb could still follow straight down Carver’s path (which didn’t end well for Cas fans). Dabb’s faced with a similar problem, prolonging the show past a certain “vision”, and is now being “forced” into the same “stalling route” as his predecessor. And I can tell he knows and doesn’t necessarily want it, given his past pacing decisions. But he has hit the proverbial turn signal just the same. There’s only two ways to go. You take the exit to loop back around or you take the exit after, the one that leads to the road that takes you home. I don’t think we’re quite heading home just yet.

And there’s so much I wanna say but can’t because of what I know that others don’t, what I’ve experienced that other meta writers haven’t, stuff I’ve heard with my own two ears from the people actually making the show. It’s… just different after stuff like this happens. It’s why I don’t actively write meta essays like I used to, on the subjects I used to, and especially not with the language I used to. I feel I simply can’t, knowing some of the things I do and also knowing how much that knowledge can quickly become useless anyway. I’m not interested in leading anyone on and so this is where I’m left.

When all is said and done, I just didn’t want to leave it at no one said just how badly, just how reductive everything could still go… It’s my own worry and my personal feelings, so I’m saying it now, even if it puts a damper on things for some people. Meta writers love to say, “It’s exactly what we’ve been saying!”, and “Look at all the times we were right!” (these are… not good things to say btw… I’d know because I used to say them, a lifetime before I ever talked to any writers or production staff, and I can say I regret them now). No one ever likes to say, “Oh, man, was I fucking wrong as hell here.” But that was me after 9x03 aired and I personally had to face the part I played in the Destiel fandom’s disappointment. Because I thought I knew then what I was talking about. But I didn’t know shit. I… misjudged. Hordes of people left fandom after that as Carver took an exit I don’t think anyone was really prepared for in order to “buy time”. And I was left to explain to those that remained exactly what was happening (a mirror-filled narrative of lovers separated by duty that was painted against a rape metaphor that is, still, today, the worst thing Supernatural has ever done to its brand imo) because I was like, the only structural Destiel meta writer left standing.

I looked… delusional, having to point out what was happening to other characters to figure out and explain how Sam, Dean, and Cas all felt (because the narrative was coding itself to where this was necessary to try and understand what was even happening at times, since the characters were all either lying or saying the “wrong things”!), what we were *actually* dealing with, whether the Destiel narrative still existed as a structural romantic thing or not. Not everyone agreed, but I felt I was right in my analysis then, still do; the show is forever written a certain way (tho narrative mirrors do not a textual and tangible narrative make!), but my expectations… they had shifted. The shift remains, still, along with a pestering voice that will never go away, “But what if?”

It’s the reason I only deal in the tangible, textual narrative now, or, at least when it comes to discussing Dean and Cas. I’ve learned the hard way that nothing else matters. Because the truth is it doesn’t.

Supernatural’s narrative structure is a structure I’ve studied more closely than perhaps any other pro-Destiel meta writer past or present. Almost everyone that has come before me has left. Few remain. I don’t know many who write “meta” now. Do they even know the structural writers that came before me? (Flutie? Sara?) I don’t know this either, most of their stuff has been wiped from this blue hellscape. That I do know. And no one writes sourced essays anymore, especially ones at great length, that aren’t just a speckling of themes and musings that often contradict one another.

Hell, I might be the last one still writing from the “golden age of meta” on tumblr, back from the surgence of S8. And while I wouldn’t say everything in the structure is *exactly* as before (there’s been significant textual gains over the mirror narrative, what’s actually needed before the end), but I do see things now taking a similar route as they did then, especially if by the mid season finale point Dabb has Michael!Dean kill the ailing and seemingly finally killable Jack. Depending on how it’s written, Jack’s death could set Dean back a lot, like… A LOT. He’d see it as him finally becoming his father, the best of intentions to protect gone very, very wrong.

Maybe I’m wrong.

Maybe that won’t happen.

I hope I’m wrong anyway, but I don’t think I am.

Impatient as I am for the end, because I don’t want the detour I fear we are about to take (and I do want to talk about the finished product when we get it finally!), and as much as I appreciate the reassurance, I don’t say any of this needing it. I appreciate it nevertheless. I’m more confident in my opinions now, where before I was blindly, carelessly optimistic in both language and outlook. I simply want to remind people of the truth: we’ve been here before, it didn’t end well then and I doubt it will end well now (here, in the present), for everyone who is left…. so please, PLEASE manage your character development expectations, especially those that are tied into hope for text over Destiel. Jokes about being joined “at the everything” aren’t good for anything, no more than Crowley saying to Dean that he’s like his mistress, because he’s “cheating on Sam” with him. In fact, I’d argue it’s reductive. I don’t think I’d be alone in that.

The things they need to do to pull the Destiel narrative into text…the writers aren’t doing, but it very much is tied into the stalling tactic Dabb has chosen nonetheless. Dean *has* to get past the ghost, the trauma of John Winchester. That’s first. Everything else is after. I doubt we’ll even be that far this season. You’ll know when/if a textual Destiel narrative starts to happen. I’d like to think the windup will become obvious (hint: they’ll actually have scenes together). But wherever we are, with Dean’s last developmental hurdle (as decided by Dabb with S14) and Cas’ need for Heaven closure still staring us in the faces as more proverbial unboiled water left on the stove, we’re just not there yet. And please remember, there’s always room for this to be a tragedy. People always seem to forget that.

Maybe not the meta history lesson you were looking for (which honestly has nothing to do with me separately finding the narrative slow and boring), but thanks for coming by anyway.

[kaikiky]

getting to “aromantic”

ASAW 2019 Prompt 1 | February 17-18 | Discovery : How did you learn you were aromantic or arospec?

So, I’m really bad at participating in community things. I want to, but I have all this baggage in my past from when I would try to enter into something and then just get ignored until I drifted out again. So I became convinced a long time ago that there’s no point to being a member of anything.

But I saw the prompt for today and it made me want to write down my history regarding aromanticism.

(long post under the cut)

I don’t actually remember when I learned about aromanticism, but I’m guessing it was some time in 2013, maybe when I encountered the SAM. Since I can’t remember how I felt at the time I found it, I’ll just do a walk-through of how it all looks to me from my current perspective.

My asexuality has never been in question, because I’ve never wanted sex either on a conscious level or a physical level. But I have had desires for close, intimate relationships. When I was in elementary school, I had a best friend, and that was the person I felt closest to, the person I imagined being with the rest of my life. We talked about how when we had kids (we were like, seven years old at the time, so I could still talk about having kids in a hypothetical way without feeling viscerally repulsed) they would marry each other and then we could be siblings. I was literally imagining being best friends with her my whole life and it was awesome.

And then my family moved and she stopped contacting me, and I was devastated. It’s still a kind of trauma for me being dropped by my best friend, who I had been planning to spend my life with. To me, she was all I had, but she was popular and had a lot of people to replace me with. It destroyed me. It’s part of why I’m scared to talk to people who already have friends because I think, well, if they have friends already they don’t need me. I’m unnecessary.

I never wanted a lot of friends, I only ever wanted one best friend, because I’m an introvert. I don’t have a lot of energy to spend on people, so I wanted that one person who I could give all my social time and attention to. If I had to spread my social energy out among a bunch of people, there was no way I could get close to anyone. So in order to have enough energy to form a deep relationship, I needed there to be just one person.

But I could never find anyone who seemed right. I would have some school-friends, but no one who had the right vibe to them, the kind that made me feel like “this is someone I want to be with the rest of my life”, so I didn’t invest much in them. I was friendly, but I didn’t bother getting too deep because I knew we were going to move on from each other eventually.

And we did.

I went all through school and graduated high school without any real friends, and I was fine with that (college was a bit more complicated...). I was too busy studying to have time for friends anyway. And honestly I was happy being single - in real life.

Instead, I spent my time fantasizing about fictional characters, the ones who seemed like the kind of people I wanted to have those deep, intimate relationships with. Even in my fantasies I was still an introvert who only wanted one relationship at a time. And I interpreted these fantasies as “romantic”, because it felt like the way people described romantic feelings: the fluttery sensation in your stomach and heart, that feeling like you want to be with them all the time and you can’t stop thinking about them, the giddy happiness when you see them, the excitement of feeling like you found “the one”. I had that when I thought about these characters.

But in my fantasies, there was no kissing or hand-holding or much romance-coded behaviors. There was always a lot of quiet intimacy, like talking about anything and everything, feeling like there was something special between us that there wasn’t with anyone else, going on adventures together and trusting in each other when we fought villains (rather than one being the fighter and one being helpless and needing protection). We were equals in all things and there was just this connection like we were always on the same wavelength with everything, so there was never any awkwardness or miscommunication or fights between us. We trusted and respected each other completely and prioritized each other and cared deeply about each other. It was this feeling of perfect compatibility that had nothing physical about it and was mostly just about feeling completely at ease with each other.

That was the kind of thing I fantasized about and wrote stories about, and when I was younger I thought that was romance? maybe? Because I knew that no one else thought of “best friends” as something that intimate. Best friends were like, something you had when you were in school, but you were supposed to grow out of that when you were older. But my idea of a relationship wasn’t something that you grew out of, it was the most intimate companionship you could ever have, and so if the name for that wasn’t “best friend” then I guess it was supposed to be romance.

So I thought I had all these “romantic” feelings for fictional characters because I thought they would be perfect intimate companions for me, people I related to on a deep level and who I thought I would be able to talk to about serious, deep subjects and who I would feel comfortable being close to. I had the feeling that if I was in a close relationship with them, I would have found the one person I wanted to spend all my social energy with.

(And just to be upfront, all the characters I felt this for were male characters, because honestly I don’t relate to or like 99.9% of female characters, and I’m sure that’s because writers don’t know how to write female characters, but there it is.)

So I had been on Tumblr since 2011, but I didn’t join any fandom niche until 2015, and for a while I performed the whole “ecstatic fangirl” role by reblogging pictures of my favorite characters and replying with gifs and all caps fawning and tags like I was having a heart attack over how hot they were. And like, I do think the characters are aesthetically attractive, but I played it up to a sensational degree because that just seemed like what you were supposed to do. But deep down, it felt fake. I didn’t want to focus on how they looked, I wanted to imagine having late-night conversations with them when no one else was around. I wanted to imagine being their partner in a dangerous fight when we had to have each other’s backs. I wanted to imagine wandering alone in the woods together. I wanted to imagine listening to music together and singing along and dancing.

And then of course, there was all the shipping. People coming up with all sorts of outrageous ships or outrageous “proofs” and metas for why the popular ships were canon. But to me, they were absolutely not canon. Every relationship that I interpreted as deeply intimate in a nonsexual nonromantic way, fandom hijacked and put on a pedestal as the ultimate ship. It alienated me from fandom in a way that made me deeply resentful. I was honestly stunned. The yugioh fandom was my first real experience with fandom, so I had had no idea how big shipping was until I stepped in and saw it flooding everything. And it made me angry that the relationships that had always mattered to me because they felt like exactly what I was looking for—deep, close companionship that wasn’t physical or dramatically romantic—were being coded as sexual and romantic.

It hurt me and made me so angry that eventually I dropped the performance of hyper fangirl because I stopped wanting to be part of the fandom. I wanted to retreat back into my own shell where the characters and their relationships were the way I had always interpreted them, not tainted by fandom’s twisted imagination.

And I think that was around the time that I figured out that I didn’t even understand what the fuck romance was. To me, romance seemed to be the kind of bullshit you saw in romcoms. Romance was the factor that made people do stupid things and get into fights over unnecessary miscommunications. It made people paranoid and jealous and possessive in an aggressive way. It made (stupid, ridiculous) drama that distracted from everything in the story that actually mattered. Basically, romance seemed unhealthy and undesirable. So when I finally made that connection that romance didn’t mean intimacy or love but meant unnecessary stupidity and drama, it was easier for me to identify as aromantic and identify those things as what I was repulsed by.

The feelings themselves are harder to separate. Like, I don’t know exactly what romantic love specifically is supposed to feel like as opposed to any other kind of love, but I do know that I’m uncomfortable with a lot of romance-coded behaviors like kissing and hand-holding and grand gestures of love (especially in public) or candlelight dinners or lots of hearts everywhere. Those things turn me off in a big way.

I just want the feeling of intimacy, of feeling like I’m known by someone completely and loved because of who I am, and that in turn I know that person completely and love everything about them. I don’t want the relationship to be defined by the things we go out of our way to do (like setting aside time specifically to go on dates), I want it to be defined by a natural feeling of rightness, like we can exist together and it feels good, like we just kind of naturally gravitate toward each other because our energies are the same, our personalities are the same, our morals and values and likes and dislikes are the same.

There was a time where the term “quoiromantic” felt right to me because of that confusion over what makes romantic love distinct from any other, and I still think that term makes sense. But because of the cultural obsession with romance, I got to a point where “aromantic” felt like the better fit because I actively reject that obsession, I reject the idea that romantic love is the highest kind of love, and I reject all the trappings that come with love that is interpreted as romantic.

So I don’t think of the way I feel toward these characters as romantic attraction anymore, and I think part of what attracted me to these characters in the first place was always because interpreted them as not being interested in romantic relationships either, so it made us a good fit.

[serenagaywaterford]

1) Hey, it's me again. The idiot rambling anon. I wasn't gonna spam you again, but then I read your responses. At this point, I'm convinced you're my alter ego, lol. My thoughts are all over the place, but I'll try to organize them. So, about Nick. I've purposely avoided talking about him so far, but why the hell not? Let me make one thing clear: I'm NOT of of those thirsty fangirls. But even if I was? I wouldn't get offended or butthurt, because another person likes different fictional

2) characters (of all things) than me. I mean, big fucking deal. Each to their own, no need for apologies. ;) (My tone is a little aggressive, I know, but I’m sick and tired of some people on social media –in and out of fandoms– acting holier-than-thou and sending hate messages and even actual death threats (!) to creators or people that express unpopular opinions*. It’s reached a point where many people feel the need to put disclaimers in their posts so as not to be attacked.)

3) Back to Nick. I liked him just fine back in early S1, when he was all mysterious and his background story was unknown to us. When we did learn about it and the fandom started acting like he’s that pure, handsome angel uwu? Nah. Obviously, he’s no Fred/Serena/Lydia,but he’s not a “cinnamon roll” either. (Imo, the only decent dude on that show is Luke.) I mean, if Nick was SO altruistic, he wouldn’t have joined this job. Or even after everything went down, he could have tried to help other

4) handmaids without expecting anything in return. But no, he only helps June and that’s because he’s in love with her. I’m not blaming him for trying to survive under such circumstances, but I won’t idolize him either. Now, in s2? I’m kinda neutral about him. I don’t hate him, but I can’t say that I’m a fan either. Not gonna lie, he bores me at times, because he’s just… there. No sparks, no fireworks. Not sure if it’s the writing that doesn’t do the actor any favors, but his acting hasn’t

5) really drawn me in yet. A counterexample to this? Aunt Lydia. Her personality is despicable 98% of the time and yet. Dowd’s captivating performance makes me want to know so much more about her character.) On the other hand, I’m glad that June has someone (besides Rita) to back her up in that hellhole. She needs comfort and allies. But the whole ‘tRu Love 5eva" fanon thing? No, thanks. Not only it doesn’t fit the tone of the series, but I also believe that sharing an intense, forbidden love/

6) during such a shitstorm is not the same thing as keeping it alive after all is said and done (post-Gilead). Maybe they’ll stay together (as long as Nick doesn’t die), maybe they’ll fall apart. I can’t really see June romantically reconnecting with Luke either. After everything she’s been through… She’s a completely different person now. Unfortunately, the same things goes for Emily and her wife. Even though I’d love to see her interact with both her wife and her child in S3.

———

My inbox is so beautiful right now! Never, ever call yourself an idiot, my friend. (If you are, then so am I!) Brain twins, you see.

(Also sorry about this being out of order lol.)

I was trying not to talk about him too cos generally I just … I prefer not to think about him much. The fangirls, just, *sigh*. I try to avoid as much as possible in this fandom, esp on tumblr. Just hang out in my quiet little, not-Serena-hating corner. I always feel a need to put disclaimers these days cos as much as I don’t really care about random hate, I’d prefer not to have to deal with dogpiles or to look at it lmao. Like people can go around just hating on any character here–especially if they’re women–but say one critical (not even hateful) thing about their male fav and things just go off. 

I’m more than aware the majority of people don’t like Serena and think she’s the worst thing ever. And fair play! (I get it… cos I’m not delusional. She’s awful.) Each to their own. I don’t go around bitching at people who say shitty things or stuff I don’t agree with, or blocking anybody who doesn’t like her. (There are a few posts I do engage with cos normally they seem like they want to go deeper in The Discourse but most Serena/Lydia/Eden/Janine/June-hate I just ignore.)

ITA. S1 was, like, okay. That’s Nick. What’s he up to? What’s his deal? (I don’t really care but I’m not opposed to him either. Just like I didn’t care about Luke’s backstory/escape.) He’s trying to be good to June and she needs that.When we did learn his backstory I was not pleased cos he seemed like a twerp but whatevs. Grey characters are grey. It wasn’t until S2 that I started to get irked by him (and the hypocrisy of his fans but that’s a whole other issue). 

I can’t agree ANY more with your assessment of Nick. Like that’s EXACTLY what I’ve been saying! Firstly, he was RIGHT THERE when the Handmaid/Ceremony thing was first suggested and was like “Oh, yeah, great idea!” to Fred. I get that perhaps he was pressured to go along to keep his job but that’s a stretch imo, and if you can give him that sort of leeway, why can’t characters like Eden, Serena, Lydia and June get the same benefit of the doubt for certain things? Why is Nick’s pressure to keep his job more important and forgivable than anybody else’s pressures? It’s like that entire scene doesn’t exist to fangirls and Nick is so precious and in love and wonderful. Then there’s the rape of June. Like I know it’s pretty controversial to look at it that way, but that first time, with Serena overseeing it like a fucking creepy pimp (YUUUUUUCCCKKKKK I HATE IT THANKS) was rape. June barely knew the guy and I’m pretty sure if she wanted to have sex with him it wouldn’t be like that! And sure, after that, it was totally consensual but that first time was not. And I’ve heard the justification and excuses of “Well, Nick didn’t have a choice either!” which I call bullshit on, cos Nick is not some powerless delivery boy. 

He’s a fucking Guardian who is tight with the top Commanders. He’s a man, if nothing else. Serena can act all high and mighty but she’s still a woman in a highly misogynistic society. I’m not convinced Fred would take his wife’s word over Nick’s tbh, especially if it was like “Dude, your crazy wife asked me to fuck the Handmaid you’re obsessed with”. If he really didn’t want to do it that badly, he could have taken that chance to report Serena. Even if Fred wanted to keep it hush hush away from other Commanders, he would have gone after Serena. Men are far more likely to turn on women than each other, esp in THT. But that’s just my take. Maybe I am missing something about Nick’s status. To me, it was like double rape. Neither of them wanted to do it, like that anyway. But Nick also did fuck all to stop it when IMO he did have some power to do something. He is not a helpless victim in that society, imo. Again, probably not a well-received opinion. 

Don’t even get me started on his “Poor me!” routine in S2 when June tells him to have sex with Eden. I’m glad she called him on that bullshit. (But again, over the fangirls heads. Enough about them!)

Basically, everything Nick has done wrong isn’t his choice; he’s just a victim. In a story about women, Nick’s victimhood at the hands of these nasty women and men is the real issue. Blah. Whatever.

I just find Nick lacks total self-awareness about being part of the shitty ass system. He kind of just floats around thinking nothing is his fault and he’s blameless for it all, and he certainly can’t seem to see it from anyone’s perspective except his own. He’s upset about Fred & June’s Jezebel trips, not for her own safety or well-being but mainly he’s jealous. Of course he’s concerned about her safety but I believe it takes a backseat to his jealousy. He just seems to never take any responsibility for anything.

And BINGO about the previous Handmaid. Nothing we’ve been shown has given any hint he cares about any other woman’s plight in Gilead other than June, and only cares about her cos he had a crush/fucked her/is in wuv wiv her. Basically, she’s HIS so suddenly he cares about her. Look how fast he dumped that Martha as soon as he got brooding about June. He’s done fuckall for anybody except himself and that alone makes me dislike him. He’s no better than Fred in that way for me. But where Fred can occasionally be an interesting villain, cos Fiennes is nasty good, I find the actor who plays Nick just… not engaging. And he’s not SUPPOSED to be a villain! He’s meant to be a good guy! It’s crazy. He’s not compelling, he’s not interesting. He’s bland. He’s not even good looking, lol. I was watching with a friend once and mention I thought Fred was way better looking than Nick and she just stared at me and said, “You shouldn’t say that. But me too.” So, count me in the camp that just does not get the appeal of the character OR the actor.

I don’t hate Nick generally. I am just totally indifferent to his existence. If he left the show tomorrow, I’d shrug and probably be a little glad I don’t have to see that bland moping anymore. If he stays, oh well. Shrug. And I just don’t want his and June’s star-crossed romance shoved down my throat. It’s so… I dunno. I’m not opposed to June finding solace and hope but making it some beautiful forbidden romance, I’m not buying it. Like you said, it’s all well and good in Gilead–but it doesn’t strike me as something that can be sustainable outside it. To borrow from you last time: It’s the Handmaid’s Tale, not The Guardian + the Handmaid’s Tale.

Okay, enough about that pipsqueak. I don’t even like talking about him, tbh. He’s not worth it when there’s so much else going on.

ITA about Luke/June too. I feel like the level of disconnection and trauma that they’ve sustained, especially June, they can try to reconnect but it’s pretty difficult and I think especially with June having a sexual/romantic relationship with Nick pulls that really tight. It’s just two different planets they live on now. I don’t doubt that she still loves Luke, but actually reforming the relationship they previously had seems like an impossible task considering everything both of them have been through. It’s sad, but … sadly true for many people. Relationships can fall apart for far less.

And on the same page about Emily/Sylvia too. She is just soooooo fucking broken, and hopeless, that if they have them just rekindle with no issues, it’ll be bad writing. (I dunno if you see spoilers but there’s one about them.) She needs therapy so much more than a cutesy feelgood storyline.

Back to Lydia: Exactly! There’s a character we know very little about and who is a horrible person, yet the performance by Dowd makes almost everyone go, “TELL ME MORE!” With Nick, it’s the opposite for me. I’m just like, “Please, less of this.”

[blue3ski]

"as he meets personally the person he was taught to hate, questions his own beliefs system and chooses to break away from being that symbol. " lmao he meets her by chance on patrol, she runs away, its implied that he *looks* for her. he doesnt actively *meet* her !!! he searches for information. he doesnt question his belief system, he questions whether children deserved to die. and he never breaks away from being that symbol !!! he goes straight back to russia ! also look up history, (1/2)

the bolshevik did WAY worse than kill the romanovs, stop romanticizing them & saying they’re “unfairly villainized” :)

Thank you for responding to my statement, anon. I’ll address this point by point under a cut because this will, again, get quite long.

First, let’s look at what we have in canon.

“ lmao he meets her by chance on patrol, she runs away, its implied that he *looks* for her. he doesnt actively *meet* her” - I’m sorry, this statement confuses me a bit? Does he meet her by chance or does he not? Based on what we have in story, Gleb and Anya meet on the streets, with him not knowing who she is. Is that not a chance meeting? How can he look for someone he doesn’t believe to be alive?

I don’t think we can say he actively looked for Anastasia because he didn’t even buy the rumors he was being fed, since he believes her to be dead. He was looking for an impostor based on the tips. When Anya is brought in as that person, he does not press a charge despite being aware that she is lying to him (as the lyrics of Still indicate), but gives a warning about the dangers of posing as Anastasia in the current climate. Up to this point, I don’t see anything particularly wrong about their interaction, because he’s right, isn’t he? Is he supposed to encourage her behavior? No, because it is a crime in that environment. When he looks into her eyes and sees the Romanov eyes, he could very well have turned her in merely on the suspicion that she is Anastasia, and I doubt anyone would have questioned him on that. But he lets her go, again with a warning. That by itself was already to some extent an act of rebellion against his government, because he placed a personal interest over the good of the state.

We don’t hear from him again until the train escape. Based on the dialogue, he seeks to arrest Anya, Vlad and Dmitry. And then his superior ups the ante by commanding him to kill if she is Anastasia. The commissioner has to remind Gleb of what his position and office cost, so I think it’s made clear enough the Gleb isn’t exactly over the moon about receiving this assignment. We get Still after, which essentially confirms this.

In Paris, Gleb has a chance to kill Anya at the ballet. He fails and just waxes poetic about his feelings and how his mind and heart are “at war”. If that’s not an internal conflict, then I’m not sure what is. If we look at how his part in Quartet at the Ballet is sung, the lyrics he sings are meant to convince and remind himself of his duty. Why would he need to remind himself of this? Because he no longer holds his ideals as dearly to him as he used to. Something has become so important to him that it has made him unable to do what he “needs” to in that moment as per his beliefs system. That something is his love for Anya - again, a personal interest that would have gone against what he was most probably taught as a soldier and a Bolshevik. So his love for Anya does in fact symbolize a questioning of his beliefs system.

So up to this point, Gleb has had a minimum of 3 chances to apprehend or kill Anastasia, or at least the girl posing as her, all prior to their final confrontation. He essentially fails at all of them. So if he does in fact stay as the symbol of the Bolsheviks throughout the story, then he does a rather poor job of symbolizing them, doesn’t he?

Now let’s look at the confrontation scene. I believe his superior referred to him as the “sword and shield of the revolution.” Yet we meet a character at this point who is anything but. if we gather the context clues based on Gleb’s arc, I think it’s fairly clear that Gleb was never going to be capable of pulling the trigger. He goes through the motions, but he’s intensely torn at this point. And as Anya reminds him of the trauma he saw in the past, he tries to parrot the lines he once said with such conviction and confidence, but now he’s saying them brokenly and weakly. Again, why is this so? Because they’re no longer absolute truth to him at this point. He’s seeing that there is a choice other than “simple duty.” He’s recognizing that a revolution is not a simple thing. I don’t see how we can look at this scene and think Gleb never made a choice to break away from being a symbol of the regime. He tells Anastasia that he’s “not his father’s son.” What is his father? The actual symbol of the Bolsheviks. The effective symbol. Gleb has tried to emulate that symbol, but in the end, he realizes that he is not that man. And so he ends things on a civil note with Anastasia. He recognizes her royal status honestly, and chooses to walk away wishing her nothing but a long life. He calls her comrade, because he has accepted that they can co-exist.

“he goes straight back to russia“ - And what do you think happened to him, anon? You asked me to look up history to be more aware of the atrocities of the Bolsheviks, which I am in fact aware of as a university graduate with some background in International Studies. Do you think that they celebrated Gleb’s glorious return to Leningrad? Do you think that, when he returned with neither Anya nor a confirmation that he had killed her, they just clapped him on the back and said, “you’ll get her next time, champ!“ No. Best-case scenario, Gleb lied about what happened in Paris and protected them both BUT I find this unlikely because he never knew that she wouldn’t claim her identity. Rather, what most likely happened is that Gleb was himself made an example of after his pretty speech in the finale, and was shot and killed by the same government he had served so zealously for the change in his beliefs that led him to spare Anastasia.

Second, assumptions about my thoughts on the Bolshevik regime

“also look up historythe bolshevik did WAY worse than kill the romanovs” - as mentioned in the previous point, I do know my history. In fact, I had to look it up again in the process of doing research for my fic (yes, even AU fanfic writers do historical research for accuracy), so it’s quite fresh in my mind. Yet I find this requirement to be irrelevant because when I joined the Anastasia fandom, I was under the impression that i was enjoying a fictional work that was loosely based on history. I was not aware that I needed to have a degree in Russian history in order to be considered a proper Fanastasia, that I needed to be able to defend my love of a fictional character in this work and my desire for him to have a happy ending in over 2,000 words of essay with a bullet-point analysis of the text. I was under the impression that I would be able to just have fun with others who shared this interest since this is Tumblr, but well, I suppose I expected too much for having an opinion that contradicted that of the majority.

“stop romanticizing them & saying they’re “unfairly villainized“ - I’m…not sure where you got this out of my posts? I stated previously that my political stand is “anti-authority anarchist” because I frankly am of the opinion that all governing regimes, to put it bluntly, suck. Communists have done terrible things - I have family who suffered in Communist China. The monarchy has done terrible things, again as evidenced in international history. Even democracy has done and has allowed terrible things to happen - just look at the current climate. It is my dislike of governmental authority in general that allows me to able to say, that’s the nature of politics - there is always good AND bad on all sides. I will not pretend the Bolsheviks were saints, but neither will I say that every single person who worked under that regime was scum and nothing more. In the same way, the Romanovs weren’t devils, but neither were they angels.

[maychorian]

Weekly Voltron Fic Recs #28

Rules: You can find past weekly rec lists here, and non-list recs in my general fic rec tag. This is stuff I like, and I have a huge bias toward Lance, hurt/comfort, and general fluff, in that order. Gen unless otherwise noted. Please comment on the fics if you read and enjoy them!

Secret of the Blood by exclamation Words: 30,685 (WIP 13/?) Author’s Summary: AU version of season 2. When Keith and Shiro were thrown from the wormhole, they crashed by the Blade of Marmora headquarters and were captured. When the Blade reveal the secret of Keith's heritage, Keith must decide if he can trust these people... and if he can trust himself. My Comments: Really well-written canon-divergence AU. I love all the things that change because Keith meets the Blade of Marmora before he and Shiro can warm up to the idea of there being good Galra out there through Ulaz. It makes a HUGE difference, for them and for everyone else as well, and I love the way the idea is being explored.

The Color Of Our Planet From Far Far Away by LonelyGirlInSpace Words: 13,942 (WIP 3/?) Author’s Summary: A story in which Lance and the team has a lot of difficulties, because they don't sleep and sometimes make poor choices as a result and others are forced to suffer more than they deserve due to those poor choices. Or Lance gets hurt because the team didn't listen and everyone desperately wants to fix it. My Comments: Lance is a little too perfect and the rest of the team is a little too mean for my tastes, at least in the first chapter, but this is a well-written and poignant hurt/comfort fic, and it’s gen, and the third chapter almost made me cry, and I’m very, very hooked. Can’t wait for more.

with quiet words I'll lead you in by strikinglight for goukyorin (sashimisusie) Words: 5,216 Author’s Summary: “You were screaming,” Keith tells him. “I heard you through the wall. ”That wall, Lance wants to point out, is supposed to be soundproof. It shouldn’t let you hear anything, no matter how hard you listen. What he says instead is “I can’t breathe.” “Take it slow.” Keith’s voice is steady, but as Lance’s eyes struggle to focus his face is a blur. The image goes shaky and then comes clear, shaky then clear, like looking into water. “Pretend it’s low tide. Tell me about the ocean again.” My Comments: Klance, but reads platonic to me. Really lovely hurt/comfort fic about kids caught in a war far, far away from home.

Disappear Completely by Bandity Words: 7,053 Author’s Summary: Lance knew something was wrong with him. He thought it would pass on its own eventually, but as time went on, and the pain continued, he realized that something inside of him must be very broken. My Comments: Possibly my favorite fic this week. So far I’ve read it three times. Lance’s trauma is so awful and visceral, and the aftermath is realistic and carefully handled. There are no easy solutions, but things do get better, and everyone is doing their best to help.

Space Mall Take 2 by CondensationOnGlass Words: 3,618 Author’s Summary: Shiro won't stand for the Paladins looking like no-good troublemakers. And with the Galra Empire so spread out and with such a gripping hold, they may need more than what they have. And for some reason the mall seems like the place to get it. And it seems like a great place to have more trouble pop up. Aka: Where Shiro has to play the big brother and apologize for the others making a great big damn mess, and nearly has another one on his hands for picking today of all days to do it. My Comments: Equal parts comedy and hurt/comfort, and a joy to read throughout. Poor Lance.

Nomenclature by Awkwardly_social Words: 7,885 Author’s Summary: It took almost five months to find Lance after the wormhole. And when they finally do, they're stuck on the planet until the castle can come get them. Lance takes the opportunity to teach the team a little about the planet and a little bit about himself along the way. My Comments: Lance has had a rough time, and the gradual way the others find out is really well-handled. Plus the worldbuilding is just really neat. Also read the sequel for some great aftermath and Lance with PTSD.

It Is Enough by nadagio  Words: 1,020 Author’s Summary: Nowhere near close to finding Shiro and uncertain what he should do now, Lance spends some quiet time with the Blue Lion. My Comments: Really sweet fic with Blue helping Lance deal with his grief and figure out what to do next.

mostly void, partially stars by dakhtar Words: 9,403 (WIP 3/?) Author’s Summary: “Werewolves can’t be astronauts,” Derek’s annoying voice had grumped. “Werewolves can’t be pilots. Werewolves can’t be fighter jet pilots, Lance, for God’s sake, Werewolves can’t pilot giant space robot cats that join together to become a giant space robot man and fight an evil purple bat-cat empire!” Well, he hadn’t said that last part, but Derek totally would’ve. (Alt title: seawolf) My Comments: Teen Wolf crossover, but I haven’t seen a single episode of that show and I’m enjoying this fic very much. The worldbuilding is really cool, and I love this take on Lance and the relationships he wants and needs and is trying to build.

Going Up! by Olive_theCat Words: 2,373 (WIP 1/?) Author’s Summary: When Sendak is chosen over Shiro to pilot the main engine test of the new Kerberos shuttle, he's got to take up an offer that Matt gives him: To be a camp counselor at the Galaxy Garrison summer program!Of course, herding five super-smart teenagers through some simulated astronaut training can't be all that bad, right? What could go wrong? Well, with the help of a malfunctioning little robot named Beezer towards the end of the summer...It turns out a lot can.SpaceCamp AU (movie and real life), constructive critisism is welcome! My Comments: Space Camp was one of those movies I watched over and over as a kid, and I can’t wait to see what my favorite space kids do in that setting. The author is having a lot of fun with it, and I am too.

Trust Fall by Pidgeon_Online Words: 2,869 Author’s Summary: Pidge usually dealt with her issues on her own. No one needed to be bothered with her problems when she could easily deal with them herself. Especially when it came to this. There was no way she would ask anyone for help with this. Because she was fine. She didn't need help.or Pidge definitely needs help before her body turns completely against her. My Comments: Poor Pidge, but I wish I had a whole team of adorable boys trying to help when I felt like this, so also not poor Pidge at all, I am jealous.

Uninvited Guest by YukiSkyes Words: 3,375 Author’s Summary: The most interesting stories about Glasycus Mountain, said to be the gateway between Earth and the Abyss, were the ones about the black dragon that guards it. There was no end to the people stupid enough to try to find Shiro and Keith would do anything to protect him and help hide his existence. One evening, Keith comes home to someone already inside. My Comments: This is the first of a series of nine stories so far, with the paladins in a fantasy AU, some of them not human anymore. It’s really fun, a lot of great worldbuilding, and some great character interactions. I’m really enjoying it, and I subscribed to the series.

The Once and Future Snore by hufflepirate Words: 980 Author’s Summary: Allura and Coran think about the past. Coran can't figure out how to tell Shiro he's as welcome to affection as all the younger paladins. Everybody ends up in the same nap pile anyway. (Note: Everybody (on the main team) is in this, but I only individually tagged the people who do something besides trap Coran in the middle of a nap pile while he's too asleep to know how they got there.) My Comments: Absolutely ADORABLE cuddle puddle fic focused around Coran. And can I note how wonderful it is that cuddle puddle fic is practically a genre in this fandom? Because it is.

The Home You Make by rednight16 for psyraah Words: 1,304 Author’s Summary: Sometimes the ones that end up close to you are the people that you least expect. My Comments: It’s so wonderful for Shiro to have friends who he is not responsible for, who can just talk to him as adults and have conversations that don’t have anything to do with saving the world. Yet another reason I would have been happy to have Thace and Ulaz stick around on the show.

shades of blue by behestha Words: 1,104 Author’s Summary: Eventually, Shiro's scales reach a tipping point. OR the one where Shiro has a panic attack and Lance gently helps him. My Comments: I love these two supporting each other in any situation, and this is lovely. Hinted Shance at the end, but reads as gen to me.

Trap by macShitFuck Words: 1,272 Author’s Summary: Alt title: Hell or High Water You don’t consider the amount of pain and panic an animal must go through when they’re caught in a leghold trap until you’re in one yourself. My Comments: Oh man, Hunk whump. This is brutal, but I love how he tries to calm Lance down even while he’s in horrible pain.

Turnabout is Fair Play by CondensationOnGlass for taylor_tut Words: 7,623 (WIP 2/?) Author’s Summary: Iconic pranks, blistering fevers, and fair play.Or, where some of the Paladins pull a joke and then get slammed with guilt about 8 hours later, and for others it is much more immediate.Based off a tumblr post by @taylor-tut. Might change the title. Multichapter, and in progress. I'm slow to update. My Comments: Probably my second favorite fic on this list, and yes, I read what’s available twice already. It’s a very indulgent kind of hurt/comfort that I adore, and I can’t wait for more. The prank the others pull on Lance really was harmless and cute more than anything, but he just happened to be in the middle of developing a terrifying and dangerous fever, so yeah. There’s some guilt there, poor babies.

Swallow the Sun by valkyriered Words: 1,934 Author’s Summary: Shiro has a panic attack. Kolivan tells him a story. Very background Shiro/Ulaz. My Comments: The worldbuilding here is freaking GORGEOUS, holy smokes. Just read it.

Defying the Odds by Mists Words: 13,562 (4/?) Author’s Summary: *Voltron Season 3 AU* Also known as: The Continuing Adventures of Space Dad Cat! Let's just say, a certain cockpit is not quite as empty as the paladins believe... "Highly improbable. Especially for this reality," he haughtily said with a self important air. "The odds of which being: one trillion, seven billion, eight hundred thousand, point three, two, eight, five-" SLAV! New chapter now up! The Voltron Paladins play "Dungeons and Dragons!" Poor Hunk tries to save his campaign from Lance and Pidge. While Keith and Shiro are helplessly along for the ride. Let the craziness begin! Deep character exploration. Friendship, Humor, Team as family! My Comments: Crack alert! This story is super fun, and I’m not just saying that because the most recent chapter has the kids playing DnD with Lance as a bard and Pidge as a rogue, nope, not at all.

The Pizza One by taylor_tut Words: 1,268 Author’s Summary: Like four people requested an AU where Lance is a pizza delivery man and delivers a pizza to the other paladins (modern, college AU) while running a very high fever. They make sure he gets taken care of. My Comments: This author just uploaded a whole CATALOGUE of Lance sickfics, so yeah, definitely check the author profile if you’re in the mood for a whole bunch of short fics featuring Lance injured, sick, feverish, or otherwise in need of care. I certainly enjoyed reading through the whole bunch. Picking this one out as my favorite for the way the others take in lonely, sick Lance who is just working way too hard and needs someone to look out for him. I love it.

Senmō by TheOtakuWithHazelEyes Words: 4,399 Author’s Summary: While under the effects of an alien fever, Shiro dreams of another time when he was sick. Confused and ill, he cries out for the only person he thinks can aid him- his mother. (A moment of Shiro bonding with the paladins stemming from him being sick, and a look into his thoughts.) My Comments: Really sweet hurt/comfort for Shiro, and some backstory that is poignant and lovely.

Day at the Beach by JackieNeedsMoreSleep Words: 1,804 Author’s Summary: The team takes the day off to go to the beach but Pidge has to deal with Lance and some other asshole's shit. My Comments: Really cute, fun teamfic.

Intrinsic by buttered_onions Words: 1,219 Author’s Summary: The first time Shiro felt the Force. My Comments: Miss Onions just writes the BEST AUs, gah. This is full of powerful moments. I’m so proud of wee Padawan Shiro.

Lost in the Fog by oldmythologies for melonbug Words: 2,395 Author’s Summary: Each one of them gives him something on his way back to them. My Comments: Great take on what happened to Shiro in the S2 finale and how the others get him back.

Allura's Twelve by windscryer Words: 2,217 Author’s Summary: The Paladins learn that while there are a great many differences between Earth and Altean culture, movie genres are not one of them. Some things are just universal. My Comments: Cute, fluffy teamy goodness. Just a pleasure to read.

Part of the Team by wingedflower Words: 3,785 Author’s Summary: After a training session gone terribly wrong, Lance finally reaches his breaking point. Luckily, Coran knows exactly what to say. My Comments: I just really really really love downhearted Lance and supportive Coran, gah, just give me all of it, just pour it over me, it’s SO GOOD.

Sweets at 7am by JackieNeedsMoreSleep Words: 1,223 Author’s Summary: Keith walks into the kitchen to find his friends baking. My Comments: Really cute, fluffy teamfic.

Emergency Lessons by Kalira Words: 3,210 Author’s Summary: Pidge, Lance, and Keith land in several 'emergencies' and pull each other through them. My Comments: Really lovely teamfic with a trio you don’t usually see put together. The second chapter was my favorite, but it’s all absolutely delightful.

Five Times: Keith and the Dads of Marmora by EdgarAllenPoet Words: 4,816 Author’s Summary: [Bonus, one time it literally saved his life and he really didn't have a choice but to roll with it]. So actually, this is a 'seven times' fic, but that doesn't quite have the same ring to it." 'If you want to rest more, I will stay. You are safe.' Keith wondered quietly how the person talking to him now was possibly the same leader he’d met at the Blade of Marmora." My Comments: I LOVE THIS SO MUCH. Parts are funny and parts are poignant, but it’s all good start to finish. Favorite line: “Antok, listen. Listen, Antok. They are toddlers.”

and yet by achieving elysium (Ogygia) Words: 1,194 Author’s Summary: After the Castle of Lions is reclaimed from Sendak, Coran finds himself left alone to his thoughts— guilt and sorrow for children who do not belong in a war. written for voltron angst week on tumblr | day one: smile My Comments: Oh man, Coran angst always gets me in the throat. Really good stuff.

7 Times They Noticed by the_unoriginal_fox Words: 5,549 (WIP 5/7) Author’s Summary: Lance was alright. He was happy. He was fine. Except when he wasn't.“Listen. Are you alright?” “Uh…are you alright?” “Are you okay buddy?” “Are…are you in good health, paladin?" Are…are you okay, paladin?" "Hey. You okay?"His team mates, his second family - they noticed. My Comments: It’s a genfic with Lance being supported by his entire team. I love it.

The Great Escape by Eastofthemoon Words: 2,619 Author’s Summary: Keith did not like being cold, but he hated being chased by the Galra even more. My Comments: The latest installment in one of my favorite Voltron fanfic series. Read it all if you haven’t before.

Previously Recced Fics That Updated:

Love and Other Questions by squirenonny familiar by achieving elysium (Ogygia) When You Reach Me by writterings Shifting Sands by Cardigan_Quincy A Dream Away by BossToaster (ChaoticReactions) Here Stands a Man by awkwardCerberus A Song of Storm and Ice by BreakTheDawn Gate Keeper by MoonlitPaladin (MoonlitStardust) for cupcakelevi Masks by TiedyedTrickster As Color Fades Away by IcyPanther Must Surely Be Learning by BossToaster (ChaoticReactions) Someplace Like Home by squirenonny The Meadows of Asphodel by Genesister (papirini) (now complete) Taking One For The Team by ShiningRegalia Little Lions by MidnightCreator (now complete) Truce by kyanve This Is New by TheHomestuckWhovian The Garden of Heaven by Genesister (papirini) It's Getting Darker But I'll Carry On by CamsthiSky A Million Stars Apart by SerenePhenix Coming Undone by Emerald_Ashes

[femslashrevolution]

Why I Love Strangeness, Smut & Fic with Lots of Feelings

This post is part of Femslash Revolution’s I Am Femslash series, sharing voices of F/F creators from all walks of life. The views represented within are those of the author only.

TW: non-graphic references to kink, taboo fantasies, abuse, and eating disorders.

I’ve started this piece about a dozen times, trying to figure out what it wants to be. As a writer, words are important to me, but as a human I want the content to say something true, to be provocative and unflinching. I want the things I write to be a sledgehammer that breaks down the walls of shame that isolate us. Shame wants to stop us from connecting, because if we do, we’ll find out we’re actually not broken or twisted or strange, or that we are but it’s okay. We’ll compare notes and realize none of us have any reason to hide who we are, because we’re all perfectly flawed. 

I write femslash to make connections. I’ve made friends, real friends, in the comments section on AO3. I help other writers, and I have other writers who help me. They’re art midwives; like a baby, sometimes a fic needs a little assistance to be born. Little international virtual villages pop up around characters or ships and we bond with each other over shared fandom. We are different ages, races, nationalities and orientations, but there are parts of us that are the same. 

It goes deeper, to the things that scare us, turn us on or make us blush. I’ve compared notes and realized that society’s “sick and wrong” is often someone’s vibrant fantasy. When I write something that feels “too weird,” either because it’s dark or kinky or too emotionally naked, I force myself to post it. I always expect the comments to say “you’re a sicko” or “how can you write about this?” but usually they’re “I thought I was the only one who was into this” and “This is the fic I’ve been searching for.” We connect over the things that isolate us, that whisper “You’re strange.” 

Maybe we are strange, but we are also the same. Isolate us, make us feel bad about who we are or what we want, and we’re powerless. When we find each other, we learn to stop apologizing for our strangeness and we become unstoppable.

I write graphic sex that’s filthy but full of feelings. I write little heartwarming drabbles about romantic misunderstandings or murderers who find kittens in the trash. I write fills for the weirdest kinkmeme prompts I can find, for pairings that make me think, “That can’t work.” I make it my mission to find a way. I kill off beloved characters, I break their hearts, I build them up, I toss them into bed together, I dissect the worst moments of their lives, I put them in sexual situations that push them too far, I make them lash out at each other, I turn them upside down and shake them until the confessions of love fall out.  

There is not always a happy ending. There doesn’t need to always be a happy ending. My best friend says she reads fic to escape the terrible state of the world. She wants a distraction, and that’s valid, but it’s not the purpose fic serves for me.

I read (and write) to feel things. Grief, rage, discomfort, joy, anxiety, arousal, heartbreak, hope. I process my life by chucking the pieces of it into a cement mixer and flipping the switch until it’s something I can build on. My triumphs and tragedies join up with the things that delight me and the ones that confuse me and the ones that scare me, and then it’s all ground down and shaken up until it’s something solid. 

I wrote the kitten!fic soon after my beloved tortie compatriot died. I used to joke she was so evil she’d live forever, but I guess even cats made of razor blades eventually need a rest. I decided to funnel my grief into something worthwhile by writing something heartrending and sad. Once I started it, the fic wrote itself into something gentle and bursting with hope. 

I wrote a dark fic in the usually-light Ghostbusters fandom; a lot of readers didn’t like it, but there were a few who connected with it in powerful ways. I often write the shades of grey, the complicated parts, the “won’t tie up neatly at the end of our hour-long episode” stories. 

I wrote an intimate fic about taboo fantasies, in which one partner had to admit to the other that she had a rape fantasy. The partner didn’t consider herself kinky, but she listened, didn’t judge and was willing to talk about helping the woman she loved explore that desire. That fic exists because in six years I was never completely honest with my ex-partner about my own fantasies, because I knew she wouldn’t have been that caring and supportive. 

I wrote a story about a lesbian whose bisexual girlfriend wanted to watch interact sexually with a man. She agreed and it was a disaster. The story struck a nerve, because a lot of queer women have had sex with men that felt “wrong” like that. I’d intended it to be a one-shot about the ways we disregard our own safety for the people we care about, but the readers’ reactions were so powerful, it prompted me to write more chapters. It grew into something much bigger about trauma, friendship and understanding.

I wrote a fill for the Ghostbusters kinkmeme prompt “anorexic Holtzmann,” because the mere idea of writing it scared me. I explored her childhood, the difficulty of being much younger than her academic peers, the way she discovered her sexuality, and the people who shaped her along the way.  I dug deep into my feelings of otherness and my lifelong complicated relationship with food and body image. Someone commented that she’d been looking for an ED fic in the Ghostbusters fandom, because she struggles and reading about it helps. “As a smart, chubby girl with an eating disorder, well done and thank you,” she wrote. It resonated with her, because we share something that makes us feel different.

I’ve written more than thirty fics centered around How to Get Away With Murder’s Bonnie Winterbottom. I’ve paired her with half a dozen different characters. Some of the Bonnies I write are fragile and sad; others are voraciously sexual, unapologetic queer dynamos. I love writing characters standing up for themselves and fighting for what they want, and Bonnie? Canon Bonnie? She wants, so desperately it sometimes makes me uncomfortable.

Before I discovered HTGAWM, I’d taken a two year hiatus from writing fic. I’d never been prolific in the first place. But there was something about Bonnie, and her complicated, imbalanced, maybe-not-sexual-but-still-intensely-passionate relationship with her boss Annalise that cut through me. It made me want to write again, made me NEED to write again. 

In Bonnie and Annalise, I saw a dynamic I’d never before seen represented on television, one that I’d lived myself. As more of Bonnie’s tragic backstory unfolded, our stories didn’t align so perfectly, but the moment she knelt weeping at her magnetic, brilliant boss’s feet still lives inside me. It resonates. I saw my past reflected in Bonnie’s devotion, her barely-concealed feelings, her tragically low self-esteem. I saw the truth of one of my own complicated relationships in the way Annalise manipulated her. I watched her give Bonnie exactly enough affection to keep her hopelessly entangled, and just enough praise to make her work until she dropped, and it made my guts ache.

And yet, I knew Annalise Keating wasn’t a monster, because I’d loved a woman who had walls like that. I knew what could happen once the lights were out. I’d seen the teflon shield come down, exposing the sort of wraith that lives inside powerful, beautiful, charismatic women who have learned to be those things to survive. The kind of woman who needs to drink most of a bottle of wine before she can let herself be vulnerable, and who wants nothing more than a moment to be soft. 

Femslash is a small corner of the wider fic world. The HTGAWM femslash community is very small. This year I discovered the Ghostbusters fandom, which offered me another character who reflected parts of myself I never thought I’d see on screen. It was bigger, more active, and the kudos and comments were addictive, but I keep coming back to Bonnie. In my stories, she faces the things I’m scared of and she says the things I wish I’d said. Life tears her apart; she collapses, but then she rises again and rebuilds herself from the ground up. And she’s so very strange. Like I am. Like we are. 

I write fanfic because I’m strange, and by putting my own strangeness on a page, I connect with other people who are like me. I write the stories I need to read, because I know there are other people out there who need to read them too. I write the kinks that shouldn’t turn me on and the confrontations that hurt my heart and the sweeping strangeness because it scares me, but it also starts a conversation. 

Hey. I understand that. I’m the same way. You’re not the only one. And we’re both okay.  

—

About the author

I’m Audrey, I’m an artist in my thirties, I live in Los Angeles and I write smutty literature. On some level, every story I tell is a love story. I like writing deep, complicated feelings into filthy smut, filthy smut into angst fic, angsty arcs into love stories, and profound epic love into fic about kittens. I’m drawn to characters who are broken but persist. My ask box is open and I am always up for a conversation about femslash, “extreme” fic, writing sex, kittens, and any character played by Liza Weil. We are all strange and weird is wonderful.

Tumblr: audreyimpossible.tumblr.com

AO3: http://archiveofourown.org/users/AudreyV/works