#i got through an entire fic where the romantic relationships were background and not central to the story

[luxflora]

committing violence against amatonormativity in my mind rn. can you people just have fucking friends

[paintedrecs]

For the fandom talk meme thingy: C (not trying to start drama I swear), I, K, R, and X. =D

C - A ship you have never liked and probably never will.

Hmmm, there are a few ways of answering this. One is by listing all my NOTPs, which would be excessively long and ultimately boring because it essentially boils down to “anyone else with either member of my OTP.” I monoship my primary pairings, so I’m pretty strict on what I do and do not like. 

(With the way fandom is now, I should clarify that NOTP means that I personally do not like a ship and I therefore go out of my way to avoid it - by muting terms, carefully filtering tags and search results, curating my own space, etc. It doesn’t mean I think the ship is badwrong or that anyone else should stop shipping it. It just means I do not ever want to see it.)

This feels a little less specific on that front, though, maybe more just: people like this and I’m meh about it?

So Allydia comes to mind. I don’t hate it, and if the Sterek’s good enough I’ll still read a fic with them as a background pairing, but I don’t ever like it as a romantic ship. While I ship Lydia with lots of different characters, including Cora, I’ve always seen Allison as straight, so I suppose that’s part of it? And I love Lydia & Allison as bffs - I see them as entirely platonic, like Scott & Stiles, so introducing romance just doesn’t work for me.

Another one is Sheriff Stilinski/Peter Hale. I...I don’t understand it. Unlike the last answer, this background pairing will prevent me from reading a Sterek-central fic.

I - Has Tumblr caused you to stop liking any fandoms, if so, which and why?

This turned into a complicated and kind of roundabout answer, so I’m putting the rest of the questions under a long-post cut!

I stopped frequenting tumblr for two main reasons:

that whole weird purge thing that made me think everyone was leaving, so I just gave up, which might’ve been premature cause it seems like folks are still going strong on here

the emergence of antis, specifically within the Voltron fandom (although they’re everywhere at this point)

There’s a saying in fandom now: 

“Why is the younger fandom generation like this?!??” “Tumblr raised them.”

For me, for years, tumblr was a really wonderful space where I had a lot of great conversations and read very thoughtful threads that helped me to learn some important things about myself, other people, and a world much wider than my own.

But I was an adult when I joined this site, and it really does seem like there’s a whole new crop of kids who have no actual context for ideas like social justice, the need for canonical representation in our media, and a lot of other things that eventually got folded into a big ball of disconnected rhetoric that they now fling as hard as they can at the heads of fandom creators who are committing the ultimate sin of creating content for ships they don’t like.

It’s late, and I don’t feel like getting into a whole Essay Rant about all that.

So on an entirely personal level, I quit running appreciatejack (my Check Please/zimbits/Jack Zimmermann blog) because someone sent me really vile hate for daring to ship Shiro/Keith from Voltron (two unrelated adults in a cartoon). It’s why I turned my ask boxes/anon/chats off on most of my blogs, and then eventually just...got tired of running them.

When I started up appreciatederek, I got a couple asks from people who wanted to know if it was going to be multiship or just Sterek, and when I said it was Sterek, they presumably went off to find other things they were into, because I never heard from them again. Y’know, the reasonable reaction. And then the rest of it was wonderful: finding content for it, and getting responses from people who enjoyed that content.

I thought appreciateshiro would be similar, but it was all so messy from the very start. The Sheith tag was FULL of hate. I was initially checking it every day, trying to find artists and writers and gif-makers to reblog and encourage and support, like I’d done in Sterek fandom, but instead I’d spend literal hours blocking people who came into that tag just to talk about how much they hated the ship.

Every day, I’d look for content for my OTP, and every day I’d come away from it angry and sad and frustrated. I never seemed to run out of people to block. And they never, ever seemed to run out of hate.

It was exhausting. It made me reluctant to go on tumblr at all. And eventually I just...sorta stopped.

So the answer to this question is more, I guess, “fandom made me stop liking tumblr, and in the process I stopped liking most fandoms.”

I’m sure you can kinda tell from the fandoms I’m currently the most invested in.

I love Sterek, and I will always love Sterek. Part of that’s the ship itself, of course, and part is because I had an incredible fandom experience with it. People within this fandom are still really great - always so welcoming and super excited about new content, even so many years on.

Otherwise, my current fandoms are kiiiiinda tiny:

Xanatowen (Gargoyles), which currently consists of exactly 2 people and 12 fics (3 of which are mine).

Trevorcard (Castlevania), which only has ~200 fics on AO3.

Taibani (Tiger & Bunny), which is an oldish fandom with only ~600 fics on AO3.

Remember, I came from a fandom that has SIXTY THOUSAND fics.

So while I feel very lonely and very sad about the low content levels in these fandoms, they’ve also given me the space to let go of some of my fandom hurt & anger and remember what it’s like to just...peacefully love something. I really miss just loving things and talking about loving those things and searching for other people who also love those things without running into....thousands upon thousands of people who HATE that you love that thing.

(Until I wrote all that out just now, I actually hadn’t realized how much this had still been hanging over me, or why I was so hesitant to come back to “reclaim” a space I’d once been super active and happy in. Essay over! Next questions.)

K - What character has your favorite development arc/the best development arc?

Answered here!

R - Which friendship/platonic relationship is your favorite in fandom?

Answered here! 

X - A trope which you are almost certain to love in any fandom.

Found family. This is probably a big part of why Sterek was my first real fandom, because the idea of Pack makes it incredibly natural to build out relationships beyond just the central romantic pairing. 

It doesn’t have to be a werewolf thing, though. I’m honestly not hugely fond of the whole puppy piles concept - I’m less interested in “biological urges make characters literally physically all snuggle up together in bed” than I am in the actual build of the friendships, and the concept of choosing people who will become the family you’ve been missing for whatever reason.

Maybe it’s reconnecting with biological family, or maybe it’s discovering that your friends have been filling that space for you all along, without you even fully realizing it. (The concept of “home” is another big one for me. Home is where your heart is etc etc.)

And hey! Now I can pull back in another question from earlier: about “pairings” that I might not have initially considered. As I suspected, I do have more! Mostly platonic.

For instance: Derek and Sheriff Stilinski becoming bffs. I thiiiink I can probably tie my ABSOLUTE LOVE of this concept back to HalfFizzbin’s can't be hateful, gotta be grateful. And then Cupboard Love really has to be the source of ALL my alive!Hales feels, which also includes folding Stiles into their family.

Fic is largely responsible for building out Derek’s relationship with Boyd, Erica, Isaac, his sisters...making them into an actual pack and friends and family in the way the show never bothered. And frankly while I don’t like canon!Scott at all at this point, I love his friendship with Stiles in fics, and I absolutely believe Stiles and Lydia would be amazing friends once he got past his crush on her. I’d point to another fic here, owlpostagain’s will to follow through, as the ultimate source for major Team Human feels.

So yeah. I’m always going to be drawn to stories about family, in whatever form that takes, particularly if it’s one that’s a little bit off the normal white-picket-fence path.

In Tiger & Bunny, it’s Barnaby joining the Kaburagi family, and learning how to be a dad and a friend to his new husband’s daughter.

In Gargoyles, I’m completely obsessed with the (canonical!) idea of a family that consists of a man, his wife, their son, and the chaotically loyal fae babysitter/tutor/third parent. It is not a stretch to tweak this the tiiiiiiniest bit to turn it into a nontraditional family structure of a man, his wife, his son, and his fae boyfriend. Honestly.

In Castlevania, the fic that made me sob my eyes out at one point does something the show would absolutely never. It gives Alucard the time to rebuild his physical home while befriending the people in the little town that crops up around it. It’s about Trevor and Alucard falling in love, but it’s also about them making a place for themselves in a world where that kind of comfort and stability and friendship is so badly needed.

I think we all kinda need that in our world right now. So I love being able to find it in fic, for the characters who’ve grown to mean something to me.

[rosedenali]

bluets background/commentary

if you haven’t read the fic, you can find it here !!

so i got like the sexiest comment ever on bluets on AO3, and like.,., i don’t like replying to comments there bc it inflates the number, so i’m gonna answer it here !!! but basically, they were just asking questions about the characters’ backgrounds and what happens after the story ends !!

this is going to be REALLY long bc i love talking about my fics and honestly, with bluets, i have a lot of thoughts. 

Where is Rose and Jasper’s dad? - Yeah!! The elusive father I threw in there bc someone’s name needed to be on the deed to that deathtrap!! When I was putting together the story, I thought about having him there in the house in a scene, but I also wanted to kind of push the idea that the Hale twins are wholly unsupervised and spiraling in their own ways- Jasper with drinking/etc and Rose with her strangled relationship with Logan.

I pictured the absent Mr. Hale having some kind of job on a boat or some other kind of water-involved job to match Bella’s description of the house as a pirate ship. Something like a dredge operations supervisor or something like that, who knows? What I do know is that every time he comes home, Jasper leaves in a cloud of angst, and Rose tries to cultivate a somewhat healthy relationship, but they’re near strangers at this point. He’s met Logan once, briefly. Approves of him, sturdy boy.

Where is their mom? - Not to pull the classic tragic backstory, but in my notes there’s like one sentence about each parent, and all hers says is “died, twins age 2″ so I killed that poor woman off sixteen years ago and never gave her a second thought, until now. 

I’d imagine Mr. Dredge Supervisor isn’t around that much, and when he is, he certainly doesn’t bring up his late wife- and because of this, Rose and Jasper don’t know much about her. It bothers Jasper just a little more than it does Rosalie. But they never knew her and never had a chance to. 

Though alternatively, if she were alive, I’d still need her to be out of the picture. And I’d hate to make her an unfit mother, but it’d be even worse if she had a new family where Rose and Jasper didn’t exactly feel welcome. :’(

I’m gonna stick with Death !! That’s bluets canon now, I just decided. 

Edward - To clarify, Bella, Rose, and Jasper are all 18 (seniors), and Edward is 19 and graduated high school the year before. Edward and Bella dated for most of the year prior and at the beginning of Bella’s senior year. All of the Cullens are spread out across the country in college, and Carlisle and Esme move from Forks and settle in a place where the sun shines bc they can !! They’re human !!

Edward took a semester off to stay in Forks with Bella, but when Carlisle and Esme moved, he broke up with her and moved with them. Their relationship wasn’t nearly as intense as it was in canon, but he was Bella’s first boyfriend, and he just ended it one Tuesday at sunset like it was nothing. :/

Charlie - Ugh, we Lov Charlie!! But honestly, he has no idea what to do or say to Bella. She’s miserable for weeks and then she finally makes a friend, and she seems a little better as time goes. Maybe he shouldn’t, but he puts a lot of trust in her and expects her not to drive around buzzed, which I guess she does a lot in this fic (didn’t even realize how edgy I made that until just now).

I guess that when she’s hungover, he just sees is as her Depression Creeping up on her. But I think the timing of his shifts and school and all her times at the rotten mansion just have them always just missing each other by a few minutes, almost comically, even. Though he probably calls when it’s getting ridiculous. I didn’t really think about this at all when I was putting together the story lmao. Oh we lov plot holes in this house !!

Bella and her funky blue flask - So obviously, a romantic relationship with Rosalie isn’t going to magically stop her drinking. I know I didn’t really focus on it much in the fic, which made it seem like it’s okay, but it really isn’t. Jasper’s still a wreck bc things haven’t really changed for him, but Logan’s gone so Rose is back in a bigger way, and that helps. 

And Rosalie doesn’t like her drinking at all. She doesn’t drink herself with the exception of the pirate crew party, which was mostly just to show her in a way other than tightly wound while still maintaining her sort of natural appearance of togetherness. I have NO idea if that makes sense, but... yeah. That’s a No from her. And when Bella gets fucked up, Rose is just like: fuck you, I’m going upstairs, I’ll see you in twenty minutes when I fall through the ceiling. 

And I think Bella retires the flask on her own, partly bc of yknow healing over time, but mostly bc she doesn’t want to keep taking advantage of Charlie’s trust in her, drinking at school is like dodging bullets in real time, Rose hates it, and it just isn’t worth it in the end. And I know that’s not like romantic or anything, but sometimes things aren’t... romantic. Besides !! There are better things to romanticize than teen drinking, like.,.,., Rosalie !!!!

Other Topics (stuff I wanted to add just bc)

The House - So the house was really just bc I have to have humor in my stories or else I’ll die, and usually I keep it within dialogue, but Bluets was a chance for me to drop kick my usual formulaic fic writing style and use my actual writing style which is admittedly weirder but a lot more fun and more me !! 

BUT it wasn’t without other purposes. The rotten house reflects the Hale twins in a lot of ways. They’re essentially abandoned in the forest and full of unprocessed feelings and teen angst and all that marvelous stuff. Then as the story goes on, it just keeps falling apart, but not because the twins are getting worse, but because things are happening. Just having Bella in their lives is like throwing a wrench into the gears of a complicated machine and it’s changing a lot of things around.

Like.,., it’s not that deep, and I’ll die before I write using symbolism, but it’s kind of fun to think about. 

Blue - So the color blue is extremely prevalent in the beginning and I was going for something more integral to the plot, but it started slipping from me about halfway through. So that’s why Bella points out things that are blue, superficially and less introspectively and emotionally. I tried to make it a central theme but it started to blur, so I just went with it this time bc why not???

But anyway, this entire fic is inspired by the book Bluets by Maggie Nelson which is pretty much a sheer freefall beneath the oubliette of the color blue and depression and all that good stuff. I just skimmed the surface, but it worked for what I was writing lmao. We’re writing twilight fanfiction out here kids, it’s for fun !!

--- So this was probably too long, and I have no idea if any of you actually wanted to know more about the universe, but here it is !!!! But like if anyone wants to know more about Bluets or any other fic just ask !! As u can see I’m more than happy 2 write an essay 4 u !!! <3