#i am forever frustrated that we will probably never get an actual satisfying closure for sense8

[gcrski-blog]

‘     is there something you need assistance with,  miss  ?     ’     jonas barely managed to  SHARE  his knowledge with will,  leaving too many questions unanswered.  he hopes to hear from him soon again.  until then  ?  life goes on,  and will was still a police officer.  though something  EXTRAORDINARY  catches his attention.  the air around her  FEELS  different.  almost as if she knows something about him.

@theoriginalbloodcountess // sc.

[mebpd]

05/09/2017

I did something today which I probably never should have done. But im very happy it happened. Brandon came over and I didn’t tell anyone. Mostly because I knew they would say don’t do it don’t do it. But I knew I needed closure. I also just didn’t think he was serious about coming like maybe he would cancel on me or something. But he came. Late. But he came. And it was great.

I was so nervous. Shaking. I saw him walking to my building from the window when I was smoking. Was shaking when he came in. he looked so good. Smelled like home. But he sat there and I just thought…I miss him but I am ready to let go of our relationship honestly. I just know its for the best but I still want to have a way to have him in my life.

We talked and I read him my letter. He was so emotional as I read it and cried a little bit. The first time I’d seen him cry in all of this. My voice was so shaky. I was shaking. Scratching my foot as I read it to him. But I made it all clear to him that I wasn’t going to do anything to get him back anymore. I just have always felt so comfortable being around him and kissing him whenever. It felt weird but I like the struggle of not being able to fully have him.

I had wanted him to come there mainly so I could fuck him and cuddle him and kiss him one last time. Something everyone would tell me not to do. But I did it anyways. I kept telling him that break up sex is the best. That he can booty call me whenever. That he can come to my place even at 6am. Because I actually think that we work better like that. That im more attracted and interested like that. A relationship without a relationship. I actually feel better like this anyways.

We were making flirtacious comments while smoking for a little while and it just brought me back. Not in a bad way but I hadn’t felt like that in a long time. We hadn’t had banter like that in forever. With no strings attached. It felt amazing. And finally like I was willing or wanting to put in effort. I loved it.

I finally persuaded him or seduced him and he took off his pants. And im not gonna go into detail but I gave him a pretty decent blow job…something I hated doing but there is something about him not committing to my 100% that makes me feel like I want to do it. He was loving it and I kept looking up to see it but then at one point he stopped looking like he was enjoying it. And he was just looking at me with a blank stare. I thought id done something wrong and it wasn’t nice anymore until I realized he was holding my arm or looking at my arm. I cant remember. My reaction almost felt cheesy but it was genuine.

He told me maybe we should stop. Looked at me so seriously with those eyes I can see he cares about me so much and I care about him so much. He told me to never do it again and I said I don’t know. Probably not. He said no don’t do it again. He said maybe we should stop to avoid complication. To try again another day. I said no it will just make it more complicated. Me feeling frustrated. Unsatisfied. Unfulfilled and most of all – rejected for sex. I told him it wouldn’t complicate things to continue. And eventually we continued on.

For the first time in a long time I felt like how I did when we first started seeing each other. Horny and adventurous again. Don’t get me wrong. I always got horny for him but it felt like routine in some moments. And I hated it. I loved our sex always. He makes me cum like no other but it felt mechanical. I missed the adventure. And that’s what im excited for.

We kept telling each other that the other should booty call the other. It was so playful. The most playful ive felt with him since a year ago. Maybe I agree that this is how it should be. To get the adventure back. The spontinaity. The love. Us back. Even if we never get back together. This is really great. Well I say that now but I don’t know how itll be in a few months but if I dissociate myself from our past relationship and see it as a fun single adventure again. I will be fine. This is how we started. And then eventually we realized we didn’t want the other to hook up with anyone else…who knows where this will go in a few months.

At one point he said “see you on snapchat.” Actually before that he had said that he liked the song I was playing. The song I played in a snapchat once where he was the first to see it. I just thought it was ironic. Think he said it so I knew he knew it from my snapchat too. Love the flirty banter there. When he said see you on snapchat I smiled and said “I think its so interesting that for the duration of our relationship you were never on snapchat and now you’re always the first to watch mine hmm…” his smile told it all. I know he goes on to see what I’m doing. And I love it. To see he cares. To make him jealous.

I loved this day. I wont hold on to anymore faith. I’ll hold on to the casualness of it all now. He even accidentally said “on our next date we should go to…” and I said, “date?” and he was like “oh yeah…as friends.”

Maybe this does complicate things. But it satisfies me. Leaves me free. Takes all the bad things out of our relationship which I think mainly for a while was just the pressure of it all. Pressures off now and I think it will do us some good. If anything it’ll make me more accepting of us being over by still getting to do intimate things. Without having the pressure of it all. And that makes me happy.

Right now I don’t regret it. But maybe in a while I will. I just wanna booty call him and make him horny really. And I haven’t felt like that in a long time. It feels like im getting my sexuality back and im happy.

[emperorren]

some thoughts by a long term multifandom-dwelling, meta-enthusiast shipper who has been countless times baited, disappointed, lied to, and kicked in the face by writers and showrunners backpedaling and boycotting their own narrative, taking impossibly stupid decisions, and being overall dumb as fuck:

“canon” is a non-entity. or at the very least a fluctuating notion, especially in the case of huge franchises (think of m*rvel). canon is incessantly rewritten, challenged, distorted, contradicted by new material. think of the ha n-leia romance, how it was a happily ever after at the end of the original trilogy. think of it now. there are old fans who utterly rejected the new trilogy as something essentially extraneous to the star wars story; for them, han and leia are still living their HEA, han is still alive, ben solo was never born, and nothing bad happened. This remains true for them as long as they ignore the new material, whose canon validity is disputable, if you’re a “purist”. These characters aren’t real, they are the product of someone’s imagination, and literally the only thing that separates your canon from THE canon is that the latter is imagined by someone who happens to be in charge of the commercial version of story. When none of this is real, several things can be true at the same time.

i’ve come to terms with the fact that shipping as we intend it doesn’t operate on the same level of mainstream storytelling. Mainstream storytelling is usually black/white and pretty straightforward; shipping exists in the margins and between the lines. For most mainstream writers, “romance” has a very narrow meaning. Very specific stuff has to happen to create “romance” (kisses, sex, googly eyes. “I love you” “I know”). Shipping doesn’t need those things. The shipper gaze is inherently transformative. The real essence of shipping is taking things that aren’t intended to be romantic, and RUNNING WITH IT, changing them, developing them, making them romantic in a way that the wider audience wouldn’t understand, or wouldn’t have the patience to follow in depth.

this is why we saw things as the interrogation and the duel and our brain wheels were immediately set in motion to come up with a million exciting scenarios. If we had seen a romance unequivocally blossoming between these characters, most of us (me included) wouldn’t be so drawn to this pairing.

some of us don’t even like mainstream romance. When people are like “huh, why do you ship this crack pairing instead of the canon one?”, well, this is the reason. Some of us feel a sort of disconnection from standard romantic narratives (and that’s because they are usually written by straight, cis, male writers, and designed to appeal to a generic and primarily straight, cis, male fanbase with little imagination. star wars, I’m afraid, makes no exception.)

because of the above, and because the perception of what qualifies as romantic is deeply subjective, it makes even less sense to talk about “canon romance”. 

I can see two characters holding each other’s gaze for 10 seconds as more romantic than two characters having a long make out session. I can hear a “forgive me, rey” uttered in a mouthful of blood at the end of ix and read it as more romantic than a kiss. Get what I mean?

Lots of us, however, care for those kisses and for an explicit validation. It’s okay, of course. It’s completely okay and natural to want that to happen.

but, again, experience has taught me not to pin all my hopes on THAT. Thing is, the canon story isn’t under our control. It just isn’t. It’s in the hands of a bunch of professional writers we don’t know personally, who do this as a job, who might or might not be emotionally invested in the story they’re telling, who’ll move on new projects as soon as they wrap up this one, and who - i repeat - approach this stuff with a professional attitude (whether they’re good at it or not, it’s another issue), not an emotional one.

what is under our control is how we handle our fandom experience. The ship is ours, and we make what we want with it. Fanart, fanfiction, meta, headcanons. They gave us the basic bricks, we create the building. None of this is less valid than what happens in Rian Johnson’s or Colin Trevorrow’s head. They just happen to have a higher budget. At the end of the day, though, they’re creating a huge toy machine that we’re going to use as we like. 

the biggest ships EVER, the real fandom behemoths, are usually the ships that “never happened”. Why? because no male writer ruined them because their stories were not completed, and it’s a natural human instinct to want to complete a story. Which means fandom tends to gravitate, by default, towards those pairings that weren’t given closure, or were treated unfairly, or had a lot of sexual tension but no resolution in canon.  

I see a lot of (understandable) anxiety over what I’ll call “the j*hnlock fiasco* and LET ME TELL YOU ONE THING:

YES, the TJLC turned out to be a bunch of crap, but in the end, who ended up living in the same house, taking care of a child, and being FOREVER BROS? As someone who witnessed the whole thing from the sidelines, with no dog in this fight, I have zero doubt that Sh*rlock/Watson is, has always been, and was confirmed to be the central relationship of that show, and of that verse in general. The conspiracy theorists fooled themselves (and caused a lot of harm to both their followers, and those who disagreed), because they made it unnecessarily complicated, and pinned their whole understanding of “canon” on something very specific that they were repeatedly told wouldn’t happen. but regular shippers? I know a couple, and they were satisfied with what they got. (frankly, I loved the ending of Sh*rlock, because it left things open for EVERY shipper. I would LOVE for SW to pull a number like that. I wouldn’t feel cheated, at all.)

meta is great. as i said, I’m a meta enthusiast. But please remember that even the greatest meta is nothing but an attempt to make sense of things that remain largely outside of our purview, with limited information, no access to what is in the making, and no confirmation that the writers are actually as competent as said meta needs them to be. Enjoy the speculation. Don’t marry yourself to one. Be a speculation whore. No commitment, no regrets. Worst case scenario, it’ll be excellent fanfiction fodder. 

none of this is an admission that *re/ylo won’t happen in canon* or an encouragement to stop believing it will. This is simply my attitude towards shipping IN GENERAL, and—after countless disappointments—I though it might be helpful for others, too.

remember: 

in december, we’ll see these assholes battling AGAIN, and being intense again, and we’ll be obsessing over inane details and speculating and dissecting microexpressions and shit EXACTLY LIKE WE’VE BEEN DOING SO FAR.

sure, a lot of these things we obsess over might be completely accidental (it’s always good to keep it in mind)—but that’s part of the fun, in fact, it’s the WHOLE POINT OF SHIPPING.

TO CLARIFY:

(because I’ve seen some bizarre interpretations of this post)

while the shipping fanbase might be predominantly female and/or queer, this isn’t a rule. Contrary to what some media outlets and popular forums believe, SHIPPING ISN’T A GENDERED ACTIVITY, and I, for one, am ENDLESSLY PISSED AND FRUSTRATED at the constant, blatant misogyny and gatekeeping with which shipping and fanfiction are treated in mainstream fandom circles. The shipping fanbase is an extremely diverse group, composed by anyone with a more transformative approach to fandom (which isn’t in an either/or relationship with the curative approach, mind), anyone who, for whatever reason, might feel dissatisfied with or underrepresented by mainstream narratives, especially the very simplistic ones we normally see in blockbusters. At no point this post wants to reinforce sexist assumptions about shipping and fanfiction as inherently *female*. 

what I’m also NOT saying, is that we should just passively accept this divide between what we WANT to see and what mainstream fiction gives  us; that we should just suck it up and stay in our lane. No, fam, I’m just presenting the way things (I think) are in blockbuster fiction, and saying that SW is (probably) no different in that respect. But we should definitely fight to change this status quo, and make demands for more diverse, inclusive, non-standardized romantic narratives.