#i turned on anon but if anyone tries to engage me in something tiresome it's going off again

[butchlilith]

daphne/niles, arthur russell's a little lost!! for the songfic meme!!!

this only took me a couple millennia; i hope it’s no disappointment!! even if it is i hope everyone listens to this song bc you’re the reason i listened to it (and also tea milk and honey on a separate occasion fghjkl thanks) for like a day straight.

It starts slow, your realization. It starts in the holding of a door, the offering of a jacket, the paying of a compliment. She’s always done these things, Dr. Crane, and you’ve loved her for it for years, the way she can make the smallest gesture fill you up. The way she never thinks anything of it, or never seems to, but it doesn’t start like that. It starts with you noticing, in the weeks after you first learn the thing you should not have learned, how she does it. Noticing how she moves. Noticing her hands, flitting around in her lap in the quietest way, fingers folding and unfolding. Just barely grazing your shoulders as she takes your coat from them before admiring your dress. Stretched out flat as you apply aloe to the burn, then curling inward just as you flinch away, skimming your palm. Worse, resting at Mel’s sides, delicate, as they kiss and staying there long after.

Mel‘s the first person you’ve ever seen her kiss, and you tell her as much in the quiet of her apartment, just the two of you on her couch, perfectly alone. You mention this because the weight of her invitation still hangs around your shoulders like her jacket at Christmastime—the way she’d guided Mel carefully from Frasier’s apartment, hand at the small of her back, then reached out to you with the very same one, voice soft: “Oh, and Daphne?” You mention this because she’s lit the candles in her living room tonight, casting shadows like water on her ceiling, and she’s only lit them once before, when she was meant to be on a date. You don’t know what to make of that if not the thing you fear.

Anyhow, you say it, and a nervous flash of a smile reaches the corners of her lips. She must have intended to tell you tonight, if she still feels the way she once did, but you’ve stolen the moment with your jealousy. “Is she?” she asks, and you do your best to smile in return. Years ago—even months, even weeks—you’d have been thrilled to see Dr. Crane as comfortable as she is with Mel. Now, entirely without meaning to, you wonder about it. You wonder whether she kisses as gently in private as in public, whether she kisses everyone the way she does Mel, whether she’s dreamt of kissing you like that.

But it’s not right to wonder such things about a woman with a girlfriend, and surely worse to wonder them as one with a fiancé, so you shrug. “Far as I can remember,” you say.

She frowns. “In six years?” she asks, but you’re still thinking of her dreaming of kissing you. It’s a disorienting idea, that. That a woman like Dr. Crane would ever dream of kissing you. You feel more certain still that you’ve made a mistake.

You say, “I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

“No, of course not, no.” She shakes her head, not quite looking at you, the saddest you’ve seen her in years. “It’s funny, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think it is.”

“Not in the conventional sense, but…” She sighs. “No one?”

“No one.”

“Well, I suppose that makes sense, doesn’t it? With the woman I was seeing when you and I first met—“

“Maris,” you insist, because the avoidance hurts more than the ache of knowing your name can never fill that place.

“Oh!” She’s relieved, you think, almost edging up on a genuine smile. “Oh, that’s right,” she says. “I’ve told you all about that, haven’t I?”

“Not quite all.”

“Well, I’m sure you remember…”

And you remember everything. The moment she stole in the kitchen, whispering fragments of a romance longer than any you’ve ever had. She was nearly shaking, by the time she was through, all for some half-hearted embrace of Donny’s joining you at dinner. The thought of it—of a relationship so long, of Donny, of those two things bound up together, written into your future—frightens you into speaking. You say, “You were together ten years, weren’t you?”

“I would hardly call it together—“

“Oh!” you say, and you know it’s terribly rude, but you remember, in this moment of trying desperately to occupy your mind, something a woman who loved you could not forget.

She turns her head back to you, and you take in each detail of her face: the fractional raise of her left eyebrow, the once more barely upturned corners of her mouth, the faint glint in her eye—not the one Mel talked about, that comes before one of her jokes, but the one you’ve only just started noticing. The look she gets when she thinks she knows what you’re about to say. “Yes?”

You say, “We’ve kissed, haven’t we?”

You search her face for anything resembling the love you’re meant to have been missing for years but miss it still. Just a small laugh, the lowering of her eyes, a faint touch of the back of her hand to your arm. “You know, we have.”

“Although,” you say, searching for a reaction before you even get the words out, “I suppose it wasn’t really us, if you think about it.” And you mean it, of course, because you can’t lie on top of everything else. Because Dr. Crane doesn’t kiss the way Niles kissed you, passionate and certain and somehow new. She kisses like a habit, when she kisses at all, she and Mel, always the same.

You watch her smile falter, feel her draw her hands away. Pushing her glasses up her nose, so that you can hardly see her face, she says, “Oh, well, I suppose not.”

“Was in public, though,” you add like you’ve been on the subject all along. Like you haven’t been spending the evening watching each movement of her mouth, even longer the movements of her hands. You reach toward her in the same manner she had you not two minutes ago. “Been a long time since I kissed someone in front of so many people.”

A smile and an exhale, close enough to a laugh for her, or even for you, if not the rest of the world. She says, “Well, it won’t be too long before…”

“Three months.” You sigh. There is more you want to say, that kissing her never felt like something to tolerate, or that you’d count it if she would, or something better than that, but she doesn’t let you.

She says, “You must be thrilled,” and, God, she’s always been terrible at knowing when your feelings don’t line up with your words, but this is…

“More nervous than anything,” you say, and it’s your chance, maybe the only one you’ll get. “You know, it’s funny, but I wasn’t at all nervous when we kissed.”

Dr. Crane looks to you with surprise, and you think she may finally get the courage to say what she wishes. Her hand moves closer to yours, as if to take it, and she says, “That’s perfectly normal.”

“You weren’t either, then?” you ask, and you don’t even know what answer to want.

She shifts, enough for you to feel it, buying herself time and drawing her hand once more away from you. “You know, I was. I just mean— You know what that night was for me. It’s similar, in a way, to your nerves about kissing Donny now. To express such an intimate feeling, in front of your friends, your family— Is there anyone whose presence might be weighing on you, so to speak?”

It’s hers, of course. The thought of her standing just behind you, steps away from where she could be, silent. The visions about it have stopped, now, so that it’s just your imagining. She’s the only one you can stand to see there, even when the voice sounds nothing like hers. You force a laugh and say, “Just left of the altar.”

She smiles at that. “Ah,” she says. “Well, that’s understandable. Often—“

“Could we talk about something else, please?” You sound angrier than you’d meant, with her being so kind to you, and you swear you see her eyes go wide.

“Oh! Is that—? Are you sure you want to? I mean, I’d feel irresponsible not to—“

“Thank you, but I think I might prefer hearing more of your thoughts on the floral arrangements, if that’s all right.”

“Of course,” she says, and she seems to become someone else almost instantly. Dr. Crane smiles in the way she does in crowds—not quite pretend, but not the one you’re used to—and says, “No, I can’t overstate how thrilled I am with your choices. Of course, I’m typically partial to a more narrative approach, but the rhododendrons should be lovely. Unconventional.”

“‘Unconventional,’” you repeat, mock-offended. “Listen to you. Well, you haven’t got to pretend to like them for my sake. Your brother certainly didn’t.”

“Well, I’m not my brother, am I?”

Without an answer that leaves whatever it is you feel hidden, you supply none. “What do they mean, anyway?”

“Rhododendrons?” she asks. “There’s no need to humor me.”

“No, really. I’d like to know, if you don’t mind.”

Apparently, she doesn’t. “I’m sure you know they’re the state flower,” she says, when she should really be less sure of it, “but, you know, traditionally, they’re—“ Settling back into her old self, she stumbles, trying to find the best words.

You smile, lean into her so close that even your hips touch, and she smiles, too, so nervous you can feel it in the air, a silent encouragement. Three months later, it’s the same energy, almost the same touch—your elbow around her neck, then sliding down her back, the skimming of hips—just before you kiss her. (And you do kiss her. You’ll try and fool yourself about this the next minute, but you kiss her before she can so much as finish a sentence.) You have to stop yourself from laughing as you pull away, realizing how careful she’s being, but you never can stop hearing her tell you, “They’re usually something of a warning.”

send me a song and a character/relationship/etc and i’ll try to write a fic!

[battlestar-royco]

Considering my place in the anti community

So, I know that might be an alarming title, but rest assured I don’t see myself deactivating or ceasing discussion of SJ/M’s books any time soon. But a lot of things have led me to the decision to explicitly veer my blog in another direction. I’ve said more than once before that I made this blog around May of 2018 as a joke between me, myself, and I, as a way to vent my disappointments with the T0G and AC0TAR series into this dumb blue void. I kid you not, I literally did not expect anyone to interact with me at all, and aside from mutuals on my main, I’d never been sent an ask in all the (then) six years I had a Tumblr. I didn’t expect to meet and befriend such a passionate, salty, visionary, thoughtful community. A little over a year later, I’m interacting with too many people to keep up with, I find myself being tagged and reblogged by reputable bloggers with way bigger followings from all over Tumblr’s diversity-forward fandom communities, and I even have run-ins with anon hate and stan ridiculousness every so often. The anti community as I know it has been a welcoming home that has taught me so much. That being said, there are a few reasons I want to slightly switch gears. So here goes. This is a long one, so thanks for sticking it out, if you make it to the end.

What will remain and what will change?

More will stay the same than will change. I will still absolutely be answering asks about YA books and SJ/M, and I will be posting about the issues within them and how I think they could have gone better. I will also still be tagging such things as anti. I really enjoy discussing the nitty gritty of characters, worldbuilding, and how all that coincides with the handling of diversity and feminism in the books. This type of discussion is, I think, how I gained most of my following, so I don’t want to turn my back on you. Also, in the near future, I mainly just want my blog to be a place where diverse representation across all identity vectors and forms of media, especially fantasy books, is a focus. I want people to feel they can talk earnestly about their issues with xyz representation and/or discuss diversity struggles they come across with their own writing.

I feel like the anti community stagnates periodically and we devolve into cold wars with stans, picking apart miniscule details of the books, scouring SJ/M’s social media, repeating ourselves, or other similar activities. Going forward I want to reduce the conversations that are founded in pettiness or insulting other Tumblr users or SJ/M for things that honestly have nothing to do with the books, the YA/publishing community, or problematic behavior. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of things worth discussing re: problematic author/stan behavior, but it’s easy to lose sight of the reason for antis to exist in the first place. On to reasoning:

1. The connotation.

This is something many of you know about me as well, but it bears repeating: I never hated SJ/M’s books. My blog is a result of my passion and enjoyment of the earlier books twisted into disappointment. I wouldn’t have bothered making a blog about these books if I hated them from start to finish. I wouldn’t have made an “anti” account if I’d felt that my opinions would be accepted among stans. I felt there was a lack in both the anti and stan community for my experience, so I’m here to give voice to that. Although I started out talking about the negatives, I don’t think my blog has ever fit most people’s idea of “anti” on this site. There are a lot of truly toxic anti communities all over Tumblr who exist just to shit on creators and fans or to be negative out of spite, and I really have never identified with that desire, nor have I tried to exhibit that behavior. But thanks to worst of the worst on this site, anyone who calls themselves anti is automatically associated with that. I also think as a whole, every SJ/M anti is doing completely different stuff with their own blogs. We’ve got book cover criticism, opinions and advice about publishing, T0G rewrite projects, shitposts, etc. I myself started expanding months ago into providing writing advice on diversity and generally writing meta. It’s not a group of angry people yelling slurs at each other like I’ve seen other anti communities do, so I don’t think it’s the right label for me.

2. Stans.

This goes a bit with the connotation point. I feel like, especially because of how I’ve branded myself and because of antis who preceded the current batch, stans really have no idea what I’m about. I have always been clear that I do not wish to attack them or their enjoyment of/engagement with the books. And yet I’m constantly being vagued about, having my words twisted, or having my arguments and blogging style very purposely, transparently ignored/misinterpreted/ridiculed in said vague-blog posts. All this despite stans’ frequent claim that they ~never~ go into anti tags or check out our blogs, and despite their other frequent claim they don’t believe in the anti/stan divide and that we’re more alike than not. I agree that this divide is dumb, but it’s kind of hard to distance myself from it while constantly being thrown under the bus by SJ/M BNFs. I don’t mind anyone viewing or interacting with my posts, because transparency and all, but it’s tiresome to constantly defend myself because I’m being misrepresented by accounts that are 4, 5, 6 times bigger than mine who either don’t know how I run my blog or purposely mischaracterize me. I can’t control other people’s behavior and I don’t want to, but this is a change I’m making for my own mental health and to promote better behavior among both communities, and I hope others follow suit.

3. Things I’ve handled poorly and how I want to do better.

Anyone with an ask blog for a minute inevitably acquires their share of public fuck-ups. I can think of a few instances in which I would have handled a situation differently. For example, a few months ago the community as a whole was asked to expand our conversation to more than just presenting SJ/M and Bardugo as foils, and I wish I’d been less defensive there. That day made me think a lot about the way I carry myself on this blog and how limited the conversation can sometimes be. I really do appreciate any and all criticism for the community, and looking back, I feel like my reaction to that didn’t go along with the way I usually try to handle criticism. I think it would be good to try and, like OP said, infuse more book promotion into my blog in general, to try to support and read more books by marginalized authors in the future so we can discuss them more thoroughly here.

In closing/TL;DR:

This isn’t inspired by any particular event or person, but rather a lot of things that have happened in the past several months on Tumblr, in the world and the media, and in my personal life. It’s not a change that was inspired out of negativity, but more out of trying to generate a more positive framework for my Tumblr activity and seeing how I can effect change through this blog. I’m still here for rants, masterposts calling out problematic books and characters, pretty much all the book talk I was doing before. This is just a really long-winded announcement that I want to expand my blog to a general spot for discussing diversity in media. Thank you so much for sticking it out if you made it all the way down here. Here’s to improving ourselves.