#but yeah this show is what happens when annoying over-the-top queer fandom kids grow up

[frillyfacefins]

Just watched some reaction vids by straight guys for Helluva Boss s2ep6 and I realized something

This show is genuinely made by and for a very specific kind of queer people, who are like, in their late 20s to early/mid 30s, socialized on a lawless internet in embarrassing fandoms (possibly even on this very hellsite here), extremely comfortable with both their sexuality and their identity. Also, ex-theatre kids.

It's a very loud kind of queer that doesn't adhere to morally "wholesome" standards of queerness bc when we were kids, "wholesome" meant straight and gender-conforming. It's by and for queer people who like weird, kinky (and possibly occult) shit and don't care enough about other's opinions to act like we don't.

Of course younger generations of queer people, queer people who are not very rooted in fandom, and straight people in general might have issues getting this show. Like how I will NEVER understand why anybody would enjoy watching Sex and the City...

[gilded-green]

Eeeeeeee!!! Congrats on ten years!! I am having FEELINGS about this! All of your OCs are my favourites and I am so grateful for Stingrae’s support. I would commit CRIMES for a rewrite of GG, but mostly I want to know whether you have any favourite things you want to share? <3 <3 <3

Thank you Polly!!!! <3<3<3

We all owe Stingrae so much I stg.

I would also probably commit crimes for a rewrite of GG but frankly that’d still involve me having to WRITE it so idk if it’d help. XD

Oh jeez MY favorite things??? Uhhhh okay let’s see...

The fact that I am STILL loving this story and very devoted to it even after years, many of which were just radio silence. I knew that I was the slow and steady type, but it’s nice to have confirmation. XD

The fact that when I started writing this fic I was younger than Lu Ten is at the beginning, and now I am older than he’ll be at the end. Jk that’s not a favorite thing it’s just a pathetically hilarious thing forgive me lol. XD

I think I was one of the first people to say “actually Lu Ten would kind of be an imperialist jerk” long before I knew the term “imperialist”

ALL THE HISTORY AND CULTURAL THINGS I’VE LEARNED FROM RESEARCHING FOR MY FICS. I learned a lot of history as a kid but good curriculums on Chinese history just didn’t EXIST back then, or at least didn’t exist in the homeschooling catalogs my mother was able to access, so it’s really nice to have a hobby that also helps me learn stuff.

Huang and Wu Sheng. I love them so much and I’m very proud of them and how they always catch new readers’ attention because they are NOT what you’d expect of Dai Li agents. I can’t wait to expand upon them and their backstories in upcoming fics.

Shirong, and how people can’t decide if they love him or hate him or relate to him or all of them at once. XD

The fact that, ten years later, people have FINALLY STOPPED ASKING ME if I took Shirong from a certain other fic, because the idea of different writers looking at the same baby name lists is a foreign concept :P

Literally everything about the Preservation Branch, I’m so proud of my dumb museum guards

The fact that it’s been so long since I first wrote GG and I’ve written so much other stuff since then that a lot of things people REALLY wanted elaboration on back in the day (Enlai, Huang and Wu Sheng) have kinda fallen to the wayside. I get a lot more questions about Nanyue and the Dai family now. The passage of time sure is funny!

Just the fact that I was actually able to write Gilded Green at all. Like. It’s hard to explain. But I had to grow into my writing. Or my writing style, or approach to writing...idk what to call it. But this thing I do? With the worldubilding? And the OCs? And just the careful web of....stuff? I always wanted to do that, even as a kid, I grew up on massive stories like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings with crazy worldbuilding backgrounds and deep meanings and elaborate politics and I could not figure out how to tell stories like that myself. I remember being 12 years old staring at a bunch of concepts for an original fantasy idea I had and realizing that I had no idea how to make them work because I was too young to understand how the world worked. I remember deciding to shelve that whole story because I realized I didn’t even know what I didn’t know. Tolkien and Star Wars didn’t really explain how the worldbuilding happened, it was just THERE and I couldn’t figure out how to make it appear for myself, it wasn’t exactly easy for a child to figure out. Sometimes I envy kids these days who’re growing up with, like, Elena of Avalor, that show lays out some FANTASTIC political responsibility concepts in ways kids can understand, I could’ve used that as a kid. I was also crap at understanding how people actually interact with each other and just....had all these issues with figuring out how to make a story work, not at the writing level, but on a my-understanding-of-the-universe level, which was kinda humbling and also kinda scary. And some of that was youth, and some of that was undiagnosed ADD making it so that I just didn’t Get Things, but either way when I tentatively started writing GG and realized that wait, I think it’s making sense, and the characters are interacting and it’s not weird, and I think I’m GETTING it, omg, AM I GETTING IT??? That was a great feeling, even if it did feel like I was balancing on a tightrope.

ALSO the way in which you can KINDA track me slowly going from raised-in-a-conservative-Christian-environment to WELP-I’m-queer-and-pretty-progressive-now over the course of my writing, tho that may be hard to see if you don’t know what you’re looking at. I can see it tho, lol. I was fortunate in that my upbringing was just kinda incidental because my mother was too tired to consider any other approach to life, and as time went on my family all actually grew into very different, much better people. I was kind of the trailblazer in that regard tho (not fun) and frankly it was fanfiction that helped me get over my queerphobia and internalized misogyny, and it was the racebending protests that cropped up around The Movie That Shall Not Be Named that made me start to realize how racism actually worked and what cultural misappropriation was. If you squint you MIGHT be able to make out where in my stories I started getting excited over my newfound beliefs and started frantically shaking more sexualities over my characters like “I have GOT to de-heteronormative-ize this” XD But yeah this fic has been a big part of my life and you can see me changing as a person if you know where to look.

MY OCs. The fact that my OCs win people over so well! I had a very volatile relationship with OCs in my youth - self-inserts were A Thing Of The Devil in fandom back then and were to be mocked. I was, I’m semi-sorry to say, part of that crowd - never flamed anyone directly, because I was raised to Not Be Mean, but I joined in on the mocking on private message boards. These days I look back on my youthful indiscretions with eye-rolling fondness, because I can now see how much internalized misogyny I was dealing with and I’m very much over the whole idea of Mary-Sues. But the community I was with did actually have a lot of GOOD writing advice as well, and it was a fun group of people, so I can’t fully regret my time there. When fandom drift eventually caused me to float away, I took those lessons on what made an OC annoying and useless with me, and when I started writing OCs of my own, I made sure to go in the opposite direction. It really seems to have paid off!

The fact that I’ve managed to collect a small but loyal following and see the same names popping up after I post something. I don’t think I could handle being a BNF, but knowing that I’ve got a dozen people who consistently read and enjoy my stuff? That’s so cool. <3

There’s a LOT of other stuff, really, but off the top of my head...here you go! <3