#i write for you people....

[glowingreverie]

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[butchfalin]

the funniest meltdown ive ever had was in college when i got so overstimulated that i could Not speak, including over text. one of my friends was trying to talk me through it but i was solely using emojis because they were easier than trying to come up with words so he started using primarily emojis as well just to make things feel balanced. this was not the Most effective strategy... until. he tried to ask me "you okay?" but the way he chose to do that was by sending "👉🏼👌🏼❓" and i was so shocked by suddenly being asked if i was dtf that i was like WHAT???? WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY TO ME?????????? and thus was verbal again

[sidhewrites]

Being kink positive makes it really hard to be a hater of media rip. I used to love watching “the WORST book I’ve read this year” booktube videos but now its like I hear them ask, “Who is this werewolf smut even for?” Omegaverse fans, next question. “Why would you write this?” Because they find it sexy, can we stop focusing on the ewie yucky kink part and focus on the fact that the author used the word knot five times in a single scene? It’s bad werewolf erotica, but it’s not bad because it’s werewolf erotica like come on

[bamsara]

I love blocking people I've never interacted with based off their replies on some random popular post. Wow random user on a post with 50k notes with the worst take ever, I hope I never meet you and will make sure we never do

[beepboopappreciation]

Is this anything

[kilgarraara]

"I guess I never really faced my fears before"

[tswkento]

no one is sexier than nanami kento taking his shirt off while ranting about his day at work. and yes, the pants are another story… anyways, so

it pisses you off how he isn’t even trying to be persuasive; he is literally unwinding after an awfully long day at work and you’re watching him while laying on your shared bed with a blanket thrown lazily over your figure.

nanami stands a few steps away, facing the open door of your shared closet whilst his fingers lazily drag over the holes with buttons in them, popping them out one by one. you bite your lip in excitement when he starts taking his shirt off, thick muscles of his back and shoulders flexing deliciously as he lets out a brief relieved sigh(as opposed to your very very bothered sigh).

you mindlessly hum to his rhetoric questions and agree with everything he says while your body chooses to invade nanami’s space, as if under magnetic pressure. kicking off the blanket, you take a few steps forward in time with him putting on his sleeping shirt and wrap your arms around his middle, face burying itself between his shoulder blades, breathing him in, deep.

kento’s movements come to a halt and he turns around in your hold, the corners of his lips curled up slightly as he gazes down at you fondly. so fondly that you even feel shamefully guilty for ogling him while he was ranting about an awful day, exhaustion seeping through his every word like the nasty thoughts about making him feel good through your brain ;))

[inkskinned]

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.

[canonkiller]

but you can't keep holding on like this.

[prolibytherium]

One of my all time biggest pet peeves with historical(ish) fantasy is when the writer constructs a religion with a clear bias that it's stupid and false and therefore only the Stupid People and/or commoners believe in it and all the smart/elite main characters are like, quasi-atheists or otherwise just routinely flout established religious conventions of orthodoxy and/or orthopraxy because they're Too Smart for it or etc.

It's usually an extension of assumptions that people in the past were just less intelligent than in the contemporary, just being like "I know that the sun is a star millions of miles away that the earth orbits, but this ancient religion describes it as a chariot flying through the sky" and not really bothering to learn the context and just (consciously or subconsciously) settling on 'that's a crazy thing to think and was probably believed in because they were Stupid'.

And that whole attitude pisses me off so much. People were as 'smart' 10,000 years ago as they are today. These beliefs aren't just desperate, random flailing to explain phenomena that could not directly be accounted for either, it's not like people just looked at the sun and went "Uhhh I don't know what the fuck that thing is, actually. I guess it might be a chariot or a boat or something?? Yeah let's go with that." and based entire religious practices on this. Every well-established belief system exists within broader contexts of cultural values/subjective perceptions of reality/knowledge systems/etc, and exist as part of a historical continuum of religious practices that came before. Even when not Materially Correct, they have context and internal logic, they're not always dead literal with zero levels of allegory, and they're never a result of stupidity.

[letmetellyouaboutmyfeels]

I am incredibly serious right now when I beg you all, please, and if you have Twitter or Tiktok or whatever to please spread the word: click on an author's profile on Ao3.

You want to know if an author has written more? Want to know if they're still writing? Want to see more from them? Want to know if they've written a trope or kink or sex scenario you enjoy?

Click on their name. And look at their profile.

I cannot tell you how many times in the last six months someone has read a new or newer fic of mine and said they (a new reader who has read nothing else I've done) "can't wait to see what you do next!" I've written 50+ fics and over a million words already.

"I don't know if you're still writing..." click on my profile. I am. I literally wrote a 128k+ fic for that ship last month.

"Would you ever do X?" "Please do Y!" I already did. Click on my name and look at my works.

Archive of our Own is a library. It's an archive. Not social media. It is your responsibility to fight back against the laziness that corporate algorithms have trained into you.

Click my author name. Just click it. Just click it.

Before you demand more, or ask if a writer will do XYZ, or wonder if the author still writing, or anything - click on their profile. Click on the author's profile.

I'm not trying to be mean or condescending or anything like that. I'm just exhausted. It's disheartening and frustrating to repeat myself ad nauseam, because someone couldn't take thirty seconds to do the tiniest bit of work to see if I've written lately, if I've written more for their ship, or scan my works to see if I've written what they're asking for. Please. Please. I'm begging.

Click the author's name, and explore before you ask.

[lazylittledragon]

made a sticker for anyone to slap onto their work if they need to

[tossawary]

This is petty fandom salt, BUT... I've been chewing on this phenomenon that I've been calling "Fandom's Darling". It is related to things like "Author's Darling" and "Mary Sue / Gary Stu" and "Protagonist Halo" and all that jazz, where one character gains a peculiar narrative weight in a story.

"Author's Darling" is when a writer has a favorite character, and the world and all other characters sort of get... warped to put the Darling in the spotlight. It's most noticeable in TV shows with multiple writers, when a character you personally like suddenly has their previous characterization destroyed to make another character look good somehow. Every other character might become weirdly incompetent. The Darling's feelings are treated as The Most Important Feelings in any given situation. The logic of the fictional world seems broken past suspension of disbelief in order to validate this one character's beliefs or skillset or some other fantasy. And so on.

"Fandom's Darling" is what I've been calling the pattern where a fandom essentially crowns a New Protagonist for their fanfiction stories (it's often a side character rather than the original protagonist, but it can also happen to protagonists). This character becomes the self-insert for all sorts of indulgent fantasies, gaining special powers or backstories, and/or becoming the focus of extreme whump, and/or hooking up with all the various hotties, starring in all sorts of tropey AUs, and so on. They're not always an obvious Mary Sue version of themselves, but the character's original personality and interpersonal relationships tend to get warped or dropped completely, and other characters tend to become a little flat around them. I call it "Fandom's Darling" because it's not just one self-indulgent fantasy fic (you do you! Have fun!) with characterization choices that I don't vibe with (I have neither the time nor the desire nor the authority to police anything, I am just venting), but rather a prolific mini-fandom of sorts revolving around this empty doll / fanon version of the chosen vessel character, so it becomes a little unavoidable.

I am salty about this (mildly frustrated) (imagine a soft sigh of disappointment before I just go do something else) because you are FUCKED if you actually liked the canonical version of this character and their interpersonal relationships. It's almost worse than liking an obscure character that no one cares about. There's about a thousand fics starring your fave, but maybe only about a dozen of them are actually rooted in any kind of recognisable canon.

[birdy-babe]

Blitzøs entire life spent being unwanted. So he adapted, and learned how to be something needed, something to be used.

Which is why I think he firmly believes he is being used by Stolas. He simply cannot fathom a different reality, one in which he is wanted for once in his life.

[elodieunderglass]

changes and trends in horror-genre films are linked to the anxieties of the culture in its time and place. Vampires are the manifestation of grappling with sexuality; aliens, of foreign influence. Horror from the Cold War is about apathy and annihilation; classic Japanese horror is characterised by “nature’s revenge”; psychological horror plays with anxieties that absorbed its audience, like pregnancy/abortion, mental illness, femininity. Some horror presses on the bruise of being trapped in a situation with upsetting tasks to complete, especially ones that compromise you as a person - reflecting the horrors and anxieties of capitalism etc etc etc. Cosmic horror is slightly out of fashion because our culture is more comfortable with, even wistful for, “the unknown.” Monster horror now has to be aware of itself, as a contingent of people now live in the freedom and comfort of saying “I would willingly, gladly, even preferentially fuck that monster.” But I don’t know much about films or genres: that ground has been covered by cleverer people.

I don’t actually like horror or movies. What interests me at the moment is how horror of the 2020s has an element of perception and paying attention.

Multiple movies in one year discussed monsters that killed you if you perceived them. There are monsters you can’t look at; monsters that kill you instantly if you get their attention. Monsters where you have to be silent, look down, hold still: pray that they pass over you. M Zombies have changed from a hand-waved virus that covers extras in splashy gore, to insidious spores. A disaster film is called Don’t Look Up, a horror film is called Nope. Even trashy nun horror sets up strange premises of keeping your eyes fixed on something as the devil GETS you.

No idea if this is anything. (I haven’t seen any of these things because, unfortunately, I hate them.) Someone who understands better than me could say something clever here, and I hope they do.

But the thing I’m thinking about is what this will look like to the future, as the Victorian sex vampires and Cold War anxieties look to us. I think they’ll have a little sympathy, but they probably won’t. You poor little prey animals, the kids will say, you were awfully afraid of facing up to things, weren’t you?

[octarineblues]

supporting communities & people impacted by the Southport attack and the far-right riots in the UK

here is a list of community fundraisers I found, starting with those aiming to support the Southport community after the appalling attack at a children dance party, to the fundraisers helping those affected by the subsequent racist and Islamophobic far-right/nazi riots

Edited on 5 August to include Middlesbrough fundraisers. Edited on 6 August to correct the link on the Books for Spellow Lane fundraiser, to adjust the name change for the Belfast fundraiser, and to adjust the wording in the second last paragraph.

Southport:

Southport Strong Together Appeal - organised by the community foundation for Merseyside, for those affected by the Southport knife attack

United for Southport families - the funds will be distributed among the nine families of the children who were at the party

Swifties for Southport - a fundraiser for the Alder Hey Children's charity, which supports the victims and the affected families, as well as first responders and clinicians. Extra funds will also support the wider Southport community

Fundraiser for the Southport Mosque - a fundraiser to aid rebuilding or possibly re-locating the Southport Mosque after the damages it suffered during the riots

Rebuilding Windsor Mini Mart - fundraiser to rebuild the locally-owned grocery store that was targeted during the attacks, broken into, and looted

Liverpool:

Fundraiser for the Spellow Hub - the Spellow Hub was broken into, looted and set on fire at night during the riots. The Spellow Hub is a newly created one-of-a-kind (in the UK) institution, which consists of a library as well as a community centre with a mission to help people get education and pathways to work

Books for Spellow Lane - another fundraiser for the library in the Spellow Hub, to replace the books and rebuild the library there edit: included the correct link

Hartlepool:

Fundraiser for the Nasir Mosque - the Nasir Mosque was attacked following Southport riots; this fundraiser is organised by Hartlepool citizens to help the mosque deal with the damages as well as to show appreciation for the role of the mosque in the community. edit: the funds will be also distributed to the local community!

Rebuilding the Farm Shop - the shop was targeted during the riots, and when the owner and his son tried to protect it, they were also violently attacked. The fundraiser is to help fix the damages to the store.

Sunderland:

help rebuild Citizens Advice Sunderland offices after arson - two of the Citizens Advice Sunderland offices were set on fire during the riots, and one of them is completely destroyed.

Hull:

Hull Help for Refugees - a local fundraiser to support the Hull Help for Refugees charity, the donated money will be re-distributed to community members affected by the riots

Fundraiser for Hull Help for Refugees and Welcome House in Hull - collected money will be donated to the two charities

Belfast:

help fix racially motivated damages - originally the fundraiser for the Sahara Shisha Cafe which was targeted by the far right in Belfast during the riots, now a fundraiser for all affected businesses in the area. edited to reflect the change of the name of the fundraiser to avoid any confusion

Middlesbrough:

Supporting residents after the riots - Middlesbrough has suffered so much during the riots, lots of businesses as well as just regular family homes were vandalised, had their windows smashed or even were broken into. This fundraiser wants to distribute the funds between affected people to help them fix the damages, and to generally support the local community. the newest fundraiser, imo potentially the most urgent one

Fundraiser for a Care worker's car which was set on fire - a car belonging to an employee of a care agency was set on fire during the riots while he was on shift at a care home.

If you want to donate locally but there is no fundraiser to support where you live, consider donating to your local charities oriented towards Muslim or PoC communities, or towards anti-racist and refugee organizations! And go support your local Muslim/Arab/Black/Asian/Refugee owned businesses!

If you have any information about other local fundraisers, feel free to add to the post or don't hesitate to let me know and I will add them here! We have seen so much hate in the past few days, we have to stay strong and keep supporting each other!

Stay safe everyone 💛