#i'm very rarely actually actively seeking out interaction

[dandyshucks]

i will attempt to explain it and people are free (and welcome) to tell me if i'm misunderstanding or speaking out of turn! also I have troubles with tone in writing when I'm trying to be clear, so please read this all in as kind of a tone as possible - there is no bad judgement in any of my words here, nor am i meaning to be patronizing, and I apologize in advance if I come across that way!

(also disclaimer that there is infinite nuance to this situation and I cannot possibly cover all of it, but I feel like maaaybe this is a main theme that people are possibly missing, and that it's causing issues)

but I think what I am seeing is there are vaguely two sides in the selfship sphere - I have labelled them as the "community-builders" and the "scrapbookers" just for clarity's sake; this is not an attempt to divide ppl. the community-builders want to build community and connect and interact with each other. the scrapbookers are just here to post/rb about their F/O as if they're gluing photos and text into a scrapbook and that's it, they're not actively seeking a community for themselves.

both of these things are okay and fine! neither of these sides are bad or lesser in any way, they are just looking for different things in the time they spend on tumblr. (more under the cut bc it's a long post otherwise)

I think some of the issues are arising from community-builders assuming that scrapbookers are ALSO wanting community but just not putting the work in. so to community-builders, the scrapbookers appear as if they're expecting interaction without putting in any effort themselves, but I don't think that's the case. I think scrapbookers are just not looking for community the way that community-builders are - they want two different things from their experience in the selfship sphere!

I think there IS occasionally an issue where some people expect or beg for interaction without actually interacting with anyone themselves, but in that case it is best to block and move on OR let the person know directly (and kindly) that they should try to interact with others if they want interaction themselves.

unfortunately it seems like a lot of knowledge around community building and upkeep is not well-known in the present-day, because of [gestures vaguely at our current societal structure and the way social media functions now compared to how it used to etc etc etc]. so I do feel that posts encouraging people to interact with one another are good and helpful and sometimes even needed, but they are not applicable to the scrapbookers. I wonder sometimes if community-builders see scrapbookers having fun in their own little corner and assume that the they must want attention but aren't getting any, so we end up with an attempted rescue situation where community-builders make a "let's all interact more!" post to try to drum up interaction for the scrapbookers even though they aren't actually wanting that.

i know for myself, while I do enjoy the circle of friends and mutuals I've made, I am not super community-oriented. I interact with my mutuals and friends because I like to do so, and I also welcome in new friends and followers with open arms, but I am never expecting interaction and rarely actively seek it out. If my art gets notes, great! But that's simply a bonus for me personally. So to think that some people might look at 0 note posts of mine and think "oh that poor soul! they must be desperate for interaction! i have to do something about this!", that... feels a little silly and even a bit presumptuous on their part. I'm okay over here in my corner, I promise! :] I'm just here to have a space to love fictional characters, and I don't feel like I necessarily Want attention for that.

and to clarify! it is okay to want community, and to want interaction. we just have different wants and goals from our time here, that's all. neither of us are wrong for what we want and neither of us are better than the other - we just have different things we're looking for in this part of the internet, and that is okay :]

i keep seeing an argument of sorts floating around every couple of months and i think maybe the reason the argument is happening is because people are not realizing they want different things out of this all

[480pfootage]

And now onto how Kate interacts with the other proxies... phew! got this out in time for crp day.. Included: Tim, Brian, Toby, Rouge

Before getting into all the others.. Since the proxy Kate spends the most time with is herself I thought it'll be nice to.. have how she treats herself first. After the circumstances of STA she rarely gets time to take care of herself anymore. It's always victim after victim.. She finds herself thinking her body expendable; her empty stomach will heal after eating itself inside out, her broken limbs will always regenerate. Kate just doesn't treat herself very well...

TIM

Tim often takes the leadership role in any relationship and it's no different with the proxies and or specifically Kate.

Especially since she's one of the younger proxies alongside Toby, he feels the need to take care of her.

Kate doesn't think much of it when Tim finds her collapsed somewhere and brings her back to the cabin Brian, Toby, and him live.. She's happy that Tim takes care of her, i.e. gives her some food, tries to get her to shower, as she interprets it as Tim slowly starting to accept being a proxy and therefore starting to see the Slenderman as the savior he is!

She likes it when the proxies are nice to each other too so she savors the pampering she gets from Tim when injured..

BRIAN

Kate and Brian don't really interact much.

Kate only "visits" the cabin when the Slenderman teleports her broken body nearby and Brian mostly stays cooped up in his room until "hunts"

it's hard for them to actually cross paths with each other.

Brian is also a very apathetic being, stuck between his limbo of given life and death, he can't really experience empathy unless it's for someone he truly cares about (see Tim or Toby on the occasion).

He had to quickly pull Toby from falling to the belief that perhaps the Slenderman is good when he spent too much time with Kate and also some other stuff..

They both mainly stay out of each other's way when necessary.

I'm sure there's been a time that Kate accidentally stole his kill, not knowing the other proxies were already on the victim

Brian definitely got pissy because of that..

He had to be dissuaded from being petty by Tim

TOBY

That is his best friend right there. Probably. Hopefully.

Toby immediately latched on when he first met Kate while on a hunt.

She's actually around his age! Do you know how hard it is to find proxies that you could actually relate with that doesn't treat you like a child...!

Tim and Brian do think that she's a bad influence to Toby. He's quick to do anything to please if it means that someone would tolerate him and that doesn't bide well with Kate's admiration of the Slenderman and Rouge.

He also started cannibalizing some victims because of her.. He just thought it was sick and wanted to try.

Kate appreciates his company whenever it's available, but she doesn't actively seek him out.

Kate makes him not feel bad about just wanting to kill sometimes. It's just more power for the Slenderman either way, if he needs to let off some steam on a random person then go for it!

The thing about Kate is that she rarely speaks above a few grunts. She may spit out a few words, but that's usually it.. Toby likes translating what she's thinking (mostly getting it wrong, but the sentiment's there)

ROUGE

Above all, Rouge is the only proxy still integrated into everyday society. (Tim and Brian may go into town, but that isn't often.. Rouge actually has a nice suburban house..)

That makes it hard for Kate to visit.. It's very upsetting for her..

Rouge and Kate are a little co-dependent on each other.

Out of the proxies they're the ones that actually believe the Slenderman does good which is what initially brought them close to each other..

It's very much a peculiar relationship.. Kate has mommy issues while Rouge is still affected by her miscarriage all those years ago.

Their relationship is built on spontaneity I would say plus Rouge herself is already a very brash person..

Rouge is another person that takes care of Kate's wounds and also buys her things to take care of her burns and cleans her and takes care of her haiirr... a lot of things

Kate looks up to Rouge as she's taught her a lot on how to just past the time. Whether that be wood carving (which she in turn taught Toby), hunting, cooking, kissing ah they just like each other a lot..

The only difficult part of their relationship is the fact that the Slenderman has Rouge patrolling the South while Kate's mostly situated in the Midwest..

[dark-dragon-8]

The upside of liking and/or not minding spoilers (and therefore actively seeking them out): I take everything I find out in a stride and instead of feeling bummed out or like it ruined the experience, it actually makes me look forward to that part of the series. It's how I keep myself interested.

The downside: I now know that Chuck Shurley is probably a bad guy and an evil God and, while I'm looking forward to seeing how it'll be going down, I'm starting to doubt/question every single action/interaction he's shown doing and/or participating in so far. I think this is probably either the first or one of the first very rare times where I was actually bummed about a spoiler, not because I didn't like it (it sounds like an interesting plot twist) but rather because I like his character so much, I don't want this to be something that'll make me dislike him in the future [I relate to him a lot, in terms of both openness and love for his characters & story as well as him feeling like an actual person in ways and struggles that are/can be so mundane (like how he doesn't know what to do without his story, that it's the only thing he's got going on in life and how he doesn't feel like he has a purpose without it. As an aspiring author it's something that's really stuck with me as I sometimes feel the same way about my stories). We don't often get characters that are just so "mundane" and normal and experiencing actual real life struggle outside of things such as miscommunication, codependency, a choice for the greater good, etc (not that these are bad tropes, mind you, I love reading/watching/writing about them as well, they're good tropes, it's just that they're so "novelized" and specific to that characters, again not a bad thing that's how it should be, in a way that they don't necessarily feel normal and/or real anymore). Like, when Chuck said that he's a bad author, that the story was not even his yet this is all he has, it made him feel real and tangible. It wasn't a big part of the plot (I don't think so, not the overarching one at least) but it made him feel human, this was his life's work and he just got the opportunity to keep on making it, it was his, it wasn't his life, it wasn't his story but it was his, his book, his work, his life. And now he might have to give that up because the brothers, justifiably, don't want him to write about them, it's their lives and they don't want people knowing every little thing about them just because].

So anyways, sorry for the long post, I just needed to rant/get it off my chest (I swear, Tumblr is starting to become my weird "fandom diary" at this point).

Also disclaimer that this is not meant to be shitting and/or degrading people for not liking spoilers, this is just my preference and I know not all people are like that and that's okay. Just wanted to say that since I know that sometimes these types of things can be taken the wrong way by some people and I don't want that to happen and end up offending someone because of it.

[shirefantasies]

Am I too late to join in on matchups? If so please just ignore this ask and know that I'm sorry

I'd like a male ship please. I'm an autistic girl with adhd and a couple chronic illnesses like joint pain especially in my hands and dyspraxia so I'm super clumsy. I'm 4' 10" tall with long wavy auburn hair, glasses, pale skin that's covered in freckles and moles and a petite figure. I'm very friendly and bubbly but I can also be kinda asocial and don't actively seek out interaction much. I enjoy writing, drawing (recently I've been getting really into MS Paint art), video games, reading, hiking and researching things that interest me. I'm very intelligent and also witty, I'm actually pretty good at making people laugh! I work as a librarian and am hoping to become a linguist someday too. Thanks!

"Hey sweetie, here's my additions for my matchup description! Thanks so much for taking the time to do all these ships, you're a true saint. I hope these don't conflict with the draft you have set up already

🪆 I’m both very level-headed and very stubborn, and I can also be quite fierce and even argumentative but that’s fairly rare. I just don’t tend to back down easily, and I’m a very resilient person

🪆 I can be a bit of a homebody, especially since I’m disabled, and I get very attached to wherever I happen to be living. I like having a garden whenever possible too, even if it's an indoor one.

🪆 I’m very friendly and sweet, but I also like messing with people a little. This is especially fun because I have unusual interests like botanical poisons or the science of decomposition. I can tend to be pretty morbid without even realizing it. That being said, my friendly side is no facade and I genuinely love taking care of people.

🪆 I especially love cooking for people and trying to recipes for others

🪆 I enjoy working out but am still very skinny. It’s actually funny how my large arms contrast with my Disney Princess-esque waist

🪆 I like to take relationships very very slowly and develop a solid friendship before considering dating someone, so I really don't want someone who takes things too fast. I'm also not a fan of overly flirty people, even if they're completely loyal to me I just get turned off by over the top displays of affection. 

🪆 I have legendary pain tolerance and tend to laugh off injuries more than anything

🪆 I’m addicted to buying new books, particularly on witchcraft and botany

🪆 I know a LOT about different types of spirits and deities, especially as a witch. I could go on and on about spirit lore for hours

Thanks, have a great day!"

Not too late at all! & I was really early on in it so this is fine! I can kind of work to combine them in fact 😁 They just take a long time lmao 😅 hope it’s ok I went LoTR because your man is…

Frodo!

You aren't used to being approached while you work; quite the contrary, in fact, many passersby almost seem to treat you like you don't exist at all when you appear in the peripheries of their vision hunched over your books and scrolls. Which, admittedly, is suitable to you as your work is quite consuming. Quenya translations do not come without focus, after all. So when a voice sounds at your back, your clumsy side emerges as you startle, almost overturning your ink pot before a small, pale hand darts out to catch and right it. “My apologies,” you hear from behind you, “I was just curious what form of Elvish that was.”

Turning around, you see a hobbit, dark-haired and blue-eyed and shyly smiling at you. He is clad in a white shirt and brown pants and something about the navy vest he wears gives him a studious air. You smile. “Quenya, very old. In fact this book,” you motion over the tome you’ve been comparing against the ancient scroll, “is a chronicle of the witches of old. Quick different from anything we see these days.” A mixture of teasing and apprehension crossed the hobbit’s visage. “And what are you doing with a book like that?” “Looking for a way to raise my undead army,” you tease back, leaning forward toward him in your chair. At that, both of you laugh and exchange introductions. His name is Frodo and it would seem his uncle is quite a student of languages as well, teaching Frodo newer, more practical forms of Elvish and studying some Khuzdul himself. In fact, he is only there outside the Shire to have an old book of his uncle’s appraised.

You can’t help the wave of distraction that overtakes you after you offer your own skills, though; adjusting your spectacles and pushing your chair back, you cannot resist asking Frodo about his Shire. He pulls back a chair of his own, taking up a spot at your side with a smile you can only describe as lovestruck. Stubborn as you can be, you give no fight to the derailment of your work as Frodo speaks of rolling green hills, warm hearths and sunny gardens and flowers hung upon fences. You understand his expression completely, a sigh escaping your own lips at his vividly gorgeous words. "We may know little of your witchcraft or translations in the Shire, but it's home. The greatest home I could ask for." He had you at sunny gardens. "I would love to see it," you reply, setting your quill down. "He isn't always fond of guests," Frodo chuckles, folding his arms on the table, "but I think someone with your knowledge and spirit would quite amuse him. Come and visit us. I will have Uncle Bilbo convinced by the time you get there." "Oh, he needs convincing, does he?" "Perhaps you could put a spell of some sort on him."

The older hobbit you quickly learn is Frodo’s uncle Bilbo still looks surprised by your presence at his nephew’s side, but he gets a glitter in his eyes you expect to be quite characteristic once you bring up your meeting with Frodo. You end up talking to Bilbo as much as his nephew at dinner, in fact, sharing many glances with the proudly smiling Frodo as you hear the most amazing tales of dwarf-song and dragon fire and even time spent alongside Lord Elrond himself in the great homely house. Bilbo chuckles at the way your eyes light up, your questions about the magic woven around Rivendell and how different it is from the small spells you’ve attempted. That certainly gets the old hobbit’s eyebrows shooting up! At the end of it, you agree with Frodo’s assessment of the Shire’s warm hearths and have continued invitations to see your friends.

And that is definitely how you see it for quite some time, after all you work with Bilbo as much as you run around the Shire woods with Frodo, dodging his cousins plucking up mushrooms and trading botany facts and tips with Samwise, Bag End’s gardener, while Frodo looks on with the smile you’ve grown to love. Suspicion that he is just teasing you rises one day when he looks at you fondly, half-asking, half making a statement to you. "You really have fallen for the Shire, haven't you?" Of course you have. The hobbits admire your strength, at least for the most part- those that poke at you about big folk disturbing the peace or the Bagginses stirring things up again risk your comebacks, after all, the bite of your wit tearing perfectly back against the bore of their lives and personalities. Every time you swivel from such interactions, there is Frodo and that fond smile that suddenly you aren't so sure how to respond to. You don't know what to do when he takes your hand to show you something or catches you when your feet slip out from under you, hands about your waist. You don't mind, especially given Frodo's knowledge that your hands get achy and cold and somehow his find them right as it sets in, and beside that he was nothing but a gentleman to you. That in and of itself seems to be the sudden source of your hysteria right up to the moment Frodo rises onto his tiptoes and presses his lips ever so gently to yours. He's told you again and again over your compared translation notes, over twisting little charms and flower crowns together, over even blood and bandages and your laughter over the way your dear hobbit frets while you feel next to nothing.

You are lucky in the gift of Frodo as you frequently tell him, as you make known when you take his arm on a hike and share in that fond smile he gives you. Frodo is a gentle soul, affectionate but not so overt in his advance as to deter you. To put it bluntly, Frodo is not a sexual person, so the nature of your relationship as it is and the love you share in your spent time are plenty to satisfy him. Forever you have someone to bring you tea and a kiss to the crown of your auburn head as you pore over documents, someone to bake for and an uncle who laughs heartily at every insistence of yours that he needs to take you to Rivendell to study their wards, throwing in the Lonely Mountain for good measure. Between the three of you, Bag End fills with books in no time, but you certainly cannot complain when some of them are quite ancient indeed, teasing challenges by your favorite hobbits, one of whom sees himself in you and the other who simply sees the beauty in you while you work. Even if sometimes you work a little too hard and he has to help you back into your now-shared hobbit hole to rest your back after a little too long sketching, weeding, and planting in the garden you are beautiful, shining with sweat and dabbed with proof of your connection to the earth. You certainly are the best thing Frodo has brought home on an errand.

Taglist: @lokilover476 @fuckyoumakeart @mossthebogwitch @ibabblealot @kilibaggins @stormchaser819 @pirate-lord-of-narnia @datglutengoblin @letmelickyoureyeballs | Reply/Ask/Message to join 🥰

[ambyandony]

Miscellaneous JJBA OC: Tirami Soo Profilette

Introducing Tirami Soo (aka Tiramisu).

Even more miscellaneous than Maruko; whilst Maruko is attached to Part 4, Tiramisu isn't attached specifically to any one part, he's only related to Part 5 very loosely.

(I fleshed his character out initially while I was rping (as him) with a character ai bot we're not gonna get into it too much but when I say 'he mentioned x in conversation' or something like that I'm alluding to that character ai convo)

Tiramisu is a young man, in his early-to-mid-20s, living alone... somewhere, though where exactly isn't clear. In conversation, he claimed to have lived in Italy at some point in the past, mentioning offhandedly the names of a few Part 5 characters, hence the 'tangential relation'. It can be assumed he was raised and possibly born there; when questioned about his name being Tiramisu, he claims "Let's just say the naming convention isn't unheard of this side of Italia". As for the time period of his depiction here, maybe in the early-to-late 2000s.

An introverted and solitary Stand User who has always known far too much. He was unable to control his Stand as a child and was often burdened by the information and knowing secrets and the such. He dislikes other Stand Users in general, especially those who like to go around picking fights. His Stand's name is 「Family Jewels」.

「Family Jewels」 is a more-or-less phenomenon Stand as it is a passive ability, but when he actively uses it, you might get something like this.

It's a Stand with the surprisingly incredible ability of inference. With its ability, Tiramisu can dig deeper into any and all information told to him, baring any omissions or missing context, and even obtaining further information if its relevant, within reason.

The further it digs from the directly-given information, the more it will likely have a propensity to be inaccurate in details, but thus far, Tirami has almost always been right; he rarely tries for information that is out of reach.

Because of this ability, he can see right through any lies, even—and especially—lies of omission. He knows the full context of all things he's told; sometimes he can even dig up things that are known only 'subconsciously', or, on the very rarest of occasions, not even known to the person who told him the information.

The limitation is that he needs to first be told something or given some information and the resulting information will be related in some way. Tiramisu will automatically gain knowledge of the dug-up information but needs to seek it to actually consciously know it. He usually has to follow a certain train of thought, or, perhaps, a stream of thought to lead to a pool of interconnected information.

It's an incredibly impressive ability, but... not really useful for combat.

Tiramisu has few to no friends; he tends to sit and watch from a safe distance. He has a hard time forming meaningful relationships with other people; he seems to "know everything" because of his Stand, and he is often labelled as 'boring' or 'pretentious' as a result, if not "creepy", when he sometimes brings up things he forgot he wasn't actually told. Nobody much cares to associate, it seems.

He prefers to live vicariously through hearing about the lives of others. Though he keeps to himself, he can often be found perched somewhere in public: in the corner of the cafe, right by the window; up atop a half-wall at a city square; on a bench in a public park... people-watching is his hobby, and though he hates Stand Users as much as he claims, even he can't help but find them the most interesting people to observe... when they're not fucking destroying everything and killing people left-and-right, anyways.

It's been a while since he's really had a particularly pleasant conversation with another Stand User. Most times his interactions with Stand Users have this-or-that to do with 'saving the world' or "Joestars" or The Speedwagon Foundation, or something of that calibre... Those tend to be the most interesting conversations, though. The most he really involves himself with it is when "it seemed dire", or "the situation sounded desperate" and "there was something I could do about it, I guess".

He's pretty helpful when he does get involved; there are probably tons of stories that would otherwise be known to Just Protagonists simply because he overheard something.

He has a love-hate relationship with his Stand as he's pretty convinced that it took years off his (assumedly already quite short by virtue of being a Stand User alone) lifespan with all the fucking stress it caused him in his childhood.

The problem in his childhood was that, not only was the power uncontrolled and unable to be 'turned off', but it was also severely lacking in depth.

The circumstances of Tirami Soo's birth are uncertain, but he was adopted as an infant by a couple, an Italian woman and a Korean man, and ended up with the name Tirami Soo. After being adopted, he was raised in Italy. His mother was a caring woman who was unable to conceive but wished to be able to give a child a good life, his father was a quiet foreign man who worked as a gravedigger and funerary assistant. Tirami's upbringing was normal to the point of him gaining complex thought, by which point his Stand began to have an effect. It was weaker at first, and only gave some snips of information, but the snips of information were random and overall unhelpful: a simple question to his mother suddenly gave him the knowledge he'd been adopted, but the only way he was able to interpret it was that someone hadn't wanted him. A simple phrase from his father as his father got home late one night ("sorry, work had some issues") led to Tirami knowing that his father buried bodies and nothing else. These tough concepts that he didn't yet have the complex thought to elaborate on resulted in undue resentment towards his mother and undue fear towards his father through his earlier childhood until he gained a better understanding of the world.

Even after that point, misery struck him in his adolescence, once more due to 「Family Jewels」. In school, a simple conversation with a benign passing comment by his best friend led him to know his partner had been cheating on him with them. After that, he struggled with isolation, trust issues that led him to hyperanalyse everything people said to him, and a failure to develop meaningful attachments to people.

As he got older, he mellowed out, and though lonely, turned out a demeanour of resignation as opposed to his bitter desperation. He'd always somewhat excelled in school but struggled to find something he was truly passionate about enough to pursue, so he started working instead of pursuing higher education. He's still looking for something that will be a fulfilling area of focus.

Tirami Soo, about his Stand and other Stand Users:

"My ability is okay as a party trick, but as an ability I've had since childhood, this shit fucking sucks! Imagine always knowing way too much! And don't get me started on why other Stand Users suck—they're always fighting, looking for a fight, doing crazy shit and disturbing the peace and putting my life—and the lives of everyone I care about —in danger!

I'm not going to lie and pretend that I don't find some Stands I've encountered or heard of interesting. I've seen Stands that are really fascinating. Even Stands that have abilities that can be and are used for Good and I can appreciate that. It's just that, Stands are so interlinked with the idea of a fighting spirit that every time I see a damn Stand User in this stupid city they always think they need to punch shit.

The problem is the conflation of the concept of 'having a fighting spirit' and the perceived 'necessity for combat'.

People assume "fighting spirit" means fighting other people. It simply becomes a misleading term. It's just willpower. The will to survive. The will to fight your circumstances to persist despite everything. That's what a Stand is supposed to be. It's supposed to be your ability to stand against the odds. It just so happens that for some people, standing against the odds means standing up for oneself physically. Sometimes fighting has to happen because not everyone is rational. But sometimes I feel like people are too quick to jump at the opportunity to fight. It must be something about pride... I don't know.

No judgment towards you, of course. I'm sure you're fine people despite getting in fights so much. In a sense it's inevitable: if you can't just avoid trouble, you're forced to fight it."

Apparently, "parental divorce" is an embarrassingly common thing for 「Family Jewels」 to dig up.

[bumblebeesdoorwings]

wait wait hold oh Rodimus too i forgot him sorry 😭😭 hope you see this

I SEE THIS AND I AM EXCITED!!!! Time to push my unpopular-opinion-agenda on everyone who follows me!! This guy has been a LEECH on my brain lately, so I got lots to say and little sense to make!!

RODIMUS

one aspect about them i love: Despite everything he's been through, despite Nyon, despite dying, despite the WAR.. He's gotta be the only one that's handling the end of the war well in face. You know? He's got that Optimus thing going on with the positivity. Even with the dying sarcasm and adhd and unemployed vibes, he's still got that going for him. It's admirable. He's absolutely depressed, pushes everyone away despite being ''friendly'' with everyone. He's got one single best friend and he still pushed Drift away. Now when I started MTMTE I was expecting a totally different character. There is not much interaction between him and the others, he's rarely around actually. But I'll be damned if he isn't the most positive one on the ship. And I just know that helps somehow. He keeps it lighthearted and bears that agonizing weight of trauma on his own. Sheesh..

one aspect i wish more people understood about them: Despite his lack of thinking before he acts or speaks, I do think he's pretty smart to a fault. He's masking. He's literally masking. Like.. he may not understand the consequences or effect of what he does, but he isn't.. blatantly cruel on purpose? Does that make sense? He's confident and knows himself, but he's... Yeah. OH ALSO: Just because he's got a speedster frame doesn't mean he's a damsel in distress. He can take care of himself. He's not a tiny frail thing.

one (or more) headcanon(s) i have about this character: Here we go, my unpopular opinion: He's Asexual. 1000% Ace. That stuff just doesn't come naturally to him. He's not a prude, but he's not like.. actively seeking it out or jumping at the opportunity. He sees people eyeing him up and tells them where he got his paintjob, where he got his mods. He doesn't realize they're eyeing him up for other reasons. Don't tell him that either. He'll just get mad that people keep treating him like a meal rather than the leader he is. His frame is for being quick, fast, versatile. Flashy, yes, but he picked the colors to be SEEN, not drooled over. Yes, he seeks attention because he's never taken seriously, but he gets that by being loud, wild, irresponsible. Thats uh, thats it. There's no hidden meaning behind his actions or words. Maybe he's had a few flings in his past, or in current, but it ain't nearly as much as everyone assumes. Not even CLOSE. The real secret sex life of Rodimus Prime is that he's not focused on such a life.

one character i love seeing them interact with: Drift!! I love their friendship so much! It's so so soo great to see a close friendship in comics and shows. I have a best friend, an Amica, who I love and adore very much! So I see Rodimus and Drift and get excited! They're besties! They've had their ups and downs, but they're always there for each other!! When Rodimus told Magnus that he WANTED Drift's opinion? Love love loved that. That's his best fuckin FRIEND, Magnus! (Yes, he did do Drift HORRIBLY wrong on the Lost Light, I understand that and I'm very mad at him for it, but we all make shitty mistakes with friendships. This guy ain't had a friend in forever, he's self sabotaging constantly. Its no excuse but it doesn't mean he doesn't deserve a second chance at being a good friend.)

one character i wish they would interact with/interact with more: Okay very very odd, but Starscream. They'd both hate it, but I think they got quite a bit in common if you break them down to their basics and I think they'd have a lot to talk about. They both have this odd... not-so-friends but not-so-enemies with Megatron, (there's some trauma there that's shared with that as well). They both want to be taken seriously and be this leader but neither can really get there and even when they do get there, its taken from them very fast. I just want to see them talk. Just sit 'em down and fuckin crack them open like eggs for frying. If Starscream went Autobot, he'd be Rodimus and if Rodimus went Decepticon, he'd be Starscream. Does that make any sense? Its odd, I know.. BUT..

one (or more) headcanon(s) i have that involve them and one other character: I love the whole 'Ratchet and Rodimus have a Uncle-Nephew type relationship', and with Ratchet ending up with Drift in the end, I LOVE the idea of Rodimus being that tag-a-long that ends up somehow squeezing himself into hang outs with them. They're his friends! He loves them! He just wants to hang with them! All the time, yes, but he's just really enjoying how happy his bestie is, and enjoys being able to mess with Ratchet and get away with it to a degree. He's always in their habsuite eating their snacks. Drift doesn't yell at him for it but Ratchet does. Disclaimer!!! I don't ship them all together, I cherish the friendships.

I can talk forever about this onion. Roddy has so many layers and so much to his character and I am obsessed with diving into him. I have SO much to say and SO little cohesiveness to say it all!!

[misanthropicvampire]

3, 12, 13, 20, 22

3. do I care about being a good person? why/why not?

difficult question and entirely depends on my current mental state. if I had to try to be as objective as possible, I care to an extent, and that extent is likely a lot lower than other people's. I do have my own personal values or code of conduct that I'm unlikely to break, certain lines that I won't cross, but my morality tends to be very conditional, depending on who the person is and how they're treating me. so far in my life I've found that I rarely feel guilt for my actions, and the times that I believe I have felt guilt have actually been irritation at the negative consequences for myself. generally I don't think that I'm evil, and there are many worse people than myself, but neither do I think that I'm especially virtuous.

12. what is my worst trait that affects me?

in day to day interactions, my unconscious arrogance and lack of interest in other people can make forming connections difficult. I usually have to resort to a very restricted, polite mask that doesn't allow me to genuinely communicate with anyone in order to hide my natural attitude/reactions, which most people find rude, pretentious or dismissive.

13. what is my best trait that benefits me?

the thing I get the most out of from npd is an ability to control my attachments, remain immune to other people's emotional manipulation (due to a lack of empathy), and not have to worry about a lack of confidence regarding my abilities. obviously this depends on if I'm currently crashing or not, but when I'm in a high period, the sense of control that I feel over my life and relationships has saved me from a lot of grief.

20. is there a trait from my cluster B disorder I really wish I didn't have?

there are quite a few undesirable traits that come with npd, but for me my main ones are anger management issues/general pessimism/overabundance of negative emotions, a lack of self sufficiency when it comes to feeling pleased and satisfied with myself, intense jealousy, and unconquerable emotional detachment from others, a.k.a not being able to conceive of other viewpoints or recognise that other people have their own internal lives. delusions of grandeur also lead to a lot of disappointment, and can be infuriating because I'm never aware that my expectations are unreasonable until I'm let down again.

22. do I have a hierarchy of how I view people? if yes, what do the 'levels' look like to me?

yes, definitely. I don't generally think about this in detail or consciously move people up and down the 'levels' but, if I had to label them like a pyramid, beginning from the very bottom:

• background noise/cardboard cutouts - the majority of people; I rarely notice or remember any defining features about them and have to be actively encouraged to give them a second thought.

• minor irritants - nothing personal, I've just noticed certain behaviours or mannerisms from them that get on my nerves. I tolerate their company but that's all it is, toleration.

• active dislike - the reason that they're higher up on this imaginary pyramid is that they're able to provoke a reaction in me. I still don't usually think about them unless prompted, but can't be around them without immense stress or having an outburst.

• neutral zone - I'm aware of their existence and remember basic facts about them but they mean very little to me and I would not notice if they became absent from my life. I have no opinion on them one way or another so they place higher as I won't mind their company.

• vague affection - I don't mind their company and would gravitate towards them if there was no one else around who placed higher in the pyramid, but again, I wouldn't feel much of anything about their absence.

• fondness - where most friends that I've had lie; I actively seek out their company and can appreciate a few aspects of their personality. they're useful to have around and I'd feel let down if they disappeared.

• pet - I've accepted them as an extension of myself for the time being and, like the label suggests, view them as other people probably would a pet, something that's comforting and a companion.

• true equal/chosen person - rare for me, only about two people have been placed here to my knowledge, but a chosen person for me is someone that I view as equally conscious and deserving as myself.

[sizhui]

Honestly i do see your point with the post about fanfiction, but on the other hand having been in fandom spaces since very young (probably too young to be honest) I've just come to absolutely distrust fanfic writers (especially on ao3 because well. I'm sure you're well aware of the culture on that site) because on multiple occasions i have been hit by random unexpected graphic (very clearly fetishistic) depictions of abuse in works that seemed pretty solid otherwise based on the summary alone; incest fans are especially egregious for including that aspect with no warning whatsoever in what seems like an otherwise interesting story about two brothers from the summary alone, so like... as much as i agree that we don't need to tag every single generally harmless detail of a story because it significantly dumbs it down and ruins the experience it's also true that whenever i have branched out and tried reading stories that seemed interesting from the summary alone and had a minimal amount of tags i ended up getting bitten by one of my biggest triggers so i feel like... i might as well just read actual published literature (which i do regularly for fun and for school) when seeking something more challenging and with unexpected elements since the culture around fanfiction is just too rancid for me to trust fic writers to tag the appropriate amount and not just deliberately hide "problematic" (=abuse fetish) elements to jumpscare people for fun. So it's like yeah you have a point but it's a bit of a conundrum since a lot of fic writers aren't actually into this to say anything constructive. I'm sorry if it's worded badly English isn't my first language and my tone sometimes doesn't come off great through text so I'm not accusing you of anything or being confrontational. Anyway i hope you have a good day o7

I get you honestly, but I purposefully didn't touch upon the toxic, abusive CULTURE around fanfic and ao3 which actively protects harmful fetishizers and real abusers too - because that's a whole other very serious conversation to be had. My post sought to discuss fanfic purely as a type of watered-down, half-premade story and how it affects the way readers interact with original fiction. I did not discuss the huge problems with illegal content being hosted on fanfic sites because to do that i would have to sit down and write for a long time with utmost concentration, which I have neither time nor will for rn.

I will however say that if my post came off as "keep reading solely fanfic, just without tags, to chaenge yourself" then i failed to express myself correctly. I absolutely meant to convey that the primary focus of every reader should be published original fiction and nonfiction, because the things you can get out of them you won't find in any fic, since the fic culture and system is already established and truthfully a 3 note post will never affect it.

However, though I too havr major triggers, I am not averse to the practice of writing fanfic. I firmly believe that there are just as many perverse individuals among writers of original stories as there are among fanfic writers - abuse fetishism isn't unique to people who write about cartoons, they just got themselves a huge website where they can publish their works for free and expose an audience to it, so the problem gapes open and very obvious. However, there are thousands of people who use writing as outlets for their sick sexual fantasies who have never touched fandom spaces - it's just that you'll more rarely stumble upon their works because it's not as easy to publish them professionally (though look at shit like a song of ice and fire... i find it just as distasteful as some third grade torture porn fic) in conclusion, I don't really think that fandom spaces breed weirdos, i think they just give them an outlet and a spotlight. I may be biased because i've been into writing character studies and alternate endings to stories i liked since i was young, i just dont elevate those so much and call them proper literature and hide behind them like annoying ao3 aunties do.

[beatriceeverytuesday-old]

ok hi three ships! buffy + angel tara + willow and giles + jenny!!

Buffy + Angel

Why don't you ship it?

I'm really nervous to answer this because I don't want to make people mad haha so if you're a Bangel fan, scroll past, this isn't for you. Personally I don't like when people argue in fandom I think people are entitled to their own shipping opinions but I'm always worried I'm gonna start a fight so I don't say much against loved characters but since you asked haha... I have multiple reasons but to name a couple: I'm not a huge Angel fan, I don't like the start of Angel's redemption arc being tied to a (very young) Buffy that he fell in love with at first sight, I feel that Angel is the one with age and experience and knows them being together is a bad idea and still lets it happen, and I feel that Angel treats Buffy like a child and is always making decisions for her rather than with her.

What would have made you like it?

If they weren't trying to get together randomly throughout season 3 when they knew it couldn't work, Angel's one moment of true happiness not being tied to sex with Buffy (personally I think she deserves better than someone who is only ever truly happy with her when they're sleeping together), if they could interact in later seasons without arguing or kissing even though they know it's a bad choice and they're involved/in love with other people, and honestly just...I'm not the biggest Angel fan so changing parts of his character haha??

Despite not shipping it, do you have anything positive to say about it?

So whenever I do a rewatch, in seasons 1-2 I do enjoy the Buffy/Angel plot line and I wish it could have worked for them, but beyond that I don't ship them. What I really want is for Buffy to be happy and if she could manage that with Angel, that's good enough for me. I think they're a sweet first love story but beyond that, they're not my favorite. No hate to anyone who likes them it's just not my thing!

Tara + Willow

What made you ship it?

So I started watching Buffy for stage combat class, got hooked on the plot, and happened upon Tillow completely by accident. As a closeted genderfluid lesbian who had been raised by religious parents who sent me to Catholic school for 13 years, this was the first time I stumbled across something queer without having to actively seek it out in secret. I'd seen other sapphic couples in media before, but I'd had to look for them. I wasn't expecting to discover it being treated as normal in a 90's show about vampires. I was so pleasantly surprised and very quickly became obsessed.

What are your favorite things about the ship?

I love the way the show handles the relationship in seasons 4-5 (ignoring season 6 haha...) I love that despite a slight learning curve when Willow comes out, she's met with pretty solid support from the rest of the Scoobies. And I love that their first onscreen kiss was placed in The Body, so it wasn't the focus of the episode or treated like a crazy big deal. They got to be as natural and normal as the straight couples :)

Is there an unpopular opinion you have on your ship?

So when I first watched the show, Willow was one of my favorite characters. Recently, however, on my latest rewatch I'm having trouble stomaching her treatment of Tara through her magic addiction with the memory wipe spells. I really wish more time had been taken onscreen for Willow to actually have to own up to the harm she had inflicted on Tara, and I wish they hadn't gotten back together so quickly. So I guess my opinion is that I wish they had spent longer apart, so Willow could get over that magic addiction plot line, Tara had time to heal, and so Tara weren't in the house in Seeing Red and could've survived. Not sure if that's unpopular but I haven't seen it said much before haha. My other unpopular opinion I guess is while I was obsessed with them when I first watched the show, they're no longer one of my favorite ships. I still love them, but I rarely seek out Tillow content anymore.

Giles + Jenny

What made you ship it?

Basically the first time they interacted I was into it. I love them both!

What are your favorite things about the ship?

I haven't spent a ton of time thinking about this ship so pls don't hate me if this is an incorrect read but to me they're a straight couple that flips gender roles on its head. Jenny very much wears the pants in the relationship so to speak and I love that. I also love how easily and joyfully she messes with Giles, and how flustered he gets. They're so smitten with each other!

Is there an unpopular opinion you have on your ship?

I don't think so!

[the-storytellers-seer]

A Ramble and a Snippet

I am so bored. That's something that's very rarely mentioned when talking about suffering from medical issues. Especially when one's body is failing them, but their mind is as active as ever.

I've been doing my rewrites for lack of much else to do and I'm running into the same issue I was when I started Heirs of the Throne.

I personally feel like a series of books should have a stylistic theme. Sometimes that theme can be somewhat turned on its head, but by and large if the first story is written in first person, the second story should also follow that style. With perhaps a change in viewpoint characters.

Writing in first person is probably the easiest style for me and I can write quickly. I prefer third person but I write much slower as I tend to find myself falling into the trap of telling rather than showing.

When I first started writing Heirs of the Prophecy, I actually started it in third person, but Sarea was clamoring for a first-person narrative and I ultimately changed it.

This became an issue when I was writing the sequel because I didn't want everything to be from her POV anymore, but I felt like I needed to keep the stylistic theme. But Miraak was MUCH harder to write first person and I feel the writing really suffered.

So, in this rewrite, I'm going third person. And yeah, Sarea is being kind of a bitch about it, but Miraak is the MVP right now. Boy is like, "oh yeah I'll tell you what's on my mind in third person"!

And so, here's a little snippet of the rewrite. Heirs of the Prophecy Rewrite From Chapter Two: Of Dreams and Desire

She was there.

She was the only thing he could feel in his purgatory. The heat of her soul pulled him like a traveler seeking the comfort of a fire in the dead of night. He followed it, keeping to the shadows until he reached the outskirts of the village. She was in a small hut not far. Tentatively, he cast invisibility and was pleased to find the spell worked adjacent to the other. He’d suspected it should, but it was pleasing to have the theory proven correct. He heard voices in the hut as he slid through the door as if it were nothing.

He saw her. She was nestled against the chest of a Dunmer male, looking up at him with large eyes. “You’re not a soft landing.” She chided, her lilting soprano slightly slurred.

“My sincerest apologies.” Her companion teased as his arms tightened around her slightly.

Miraak stepped forward to wrench them apart but stopped himself just shy of reaching for her shoulder. He couldn’t interact with her. He shouldn’t want to interact with her.

His dovah soul protested otherwise. A litany of mine, mine, mine played in the back of his mind.

She buried her face in the Dunmer’s neck. The male shuddered, his fingers flexing as her full curves pressed against him.

“I ought to have suspected you’d be a touchy drunk.”

Her lips brushed against the male’s neck as she mumbled, “’M not drunk.”

There was only one bed in the room and Miraak watched with a clenched jaw and fists and the Dunmer male guided her toward it. “Merdekhes?”

He called her ‘beautiful’. Who was this male to her? Her lover? Husband? More importantly, how quickly could Miraak end his life?

She groaned in a way that heated his blood. He stiffened. His teeth grinding so loudly he was surprised they didn’t hear it.

“Sarea, the bed is less than four steps away.”

Her name was Sarea.

It suited her somehow. He wanted to taste it on his tongue, but he kept himself silent. She was laying down, but she grabbed the mer’s hand. “I think I could scoot over enough for you to fit.”

Miraak didn’t want to see this. He didn’t want to watch her touch the mer any longer.

The mer gave her a fond smile, “Darling, we both know you flail in your sleep. Rest. I’ll see you in the morning.”

The words suggested lovers, but the actions suggested travel companions as the mer hurried out of the hut. His absence unknit some of tension in Miraak’s body. Unbidden, Miraak reached out a hand and nearly stumbled onto the bed with her when he felt her skin. She was soft and warm. Suddenly the world around him was fading and Miraak fought to recast the spell. Darkness consumed him, then he blinked and when next he opened his eyes, he found himself in a room of nothingness, staring down at the naked form of the dragonborn woman.

[nhasablogg]

I know you receive a lot of fic requests, so I'm changing it up by asking if there are any fandoms or dynamics YOU want to read more tickle content of? Your blog is tempting me into making a tfic blog after years of not being on here lol

Hi! If I'm gonna be entirely honest I very rarely read fics myself, especially tickle fics, unless I'm entirely obsessed with a fandom (probably actively watching it), but even then it's rare. I will look up fics briefly, but don't tend to read many of them for some reason, so I don't think I'm the best to ask this!

However, there are definitely types of fics I prefer, such as character studies, character A observing character B, playful knowing teasy interactions. I think I've been so overexposed to actual tickle fights from doing this for years that that's not what I tend to seek out anymore, so anything with more depth and not just fluff (nothing wrong with that though) is more likely to have me eventually read it (though I'm also super picky with the length, especially if I'm reading on tumblr. I truly just have always been more of a fanfic writer than a reader).

But I say go for it if you wanna make a blog! It's fun to at the very least have a space to talk about it :)

[fiercynn]

okay. i am someone who is actually very interested in maintaining intergenerational connections in fandom and being friends with and in community with fans younger than me, including teenagers. i was a teen in fandom who had many, many positive friendships with adults in fandom – including people i'm still friends with years later. i also, as an adult now in my thirties, feel lucky enough to be friends with fans much younger than me, including a few teens, and i honestly would love to be friends with more teens and younger fans. these are the reasons why i care about this topic.

and i think there’s a tendency to immediately come to posts like this with some defensiveness and reactiveness, because of the way these kinds of conversations have been super fraught before. but fostering intergenerational community in fandom is going to require us to pause sometimes and be generous in our readings of what people are saying or asking for. and, frankly, while i think that should come from all sides, i think there is a responsibility on us adults to play a bigger part in actively creating spaces that younger fans want to be in, because we are, you know, adults.

so i want to use this to try and take a step back and actually look at what op was saying, carefully, and then look at the way other adults have responded to it. if you’re interested in these goals too, please read my whole post before reacting!

here's the my first question i have when seeing posts like this: is there a legitimate concern or point here? and i think there is.

that legitimate concern is: “teenagers don’t always know when they are talking to adults on the internet, and that can cause problems, so they would like to know when that is happening.”

note that op:

did not say that adults and teens shouldn’t interact online

did not say that teens don’t want to talk to adults at all

did not offer any specific reasons why they think that teens might want to know that they are talking to adults online

did not name what they think are the problems that can arise

so let's start by talking about that legitimate concern.

firstly, kids in general have access to fewer and fewer spaces where they can interact with each other without being under the eye of adults. in many countries, including the u.s., kids and teens are losing those spaces offline – there are fewer public places where kids can hang out, for free, without being subjected to anti-loitering laws or age-based curfews (by which i mean state-imposed curfews, not ones imposed by parents or guardians). and this is a recent development – this wasn’t true, at least in the u.s., for those of us who got to be kids pre-2000s.

the internet landscape has also drastically changed in this regard. @saathi1013 talks a lot about opt-in vs. opt-out digital architecture, which i find very relevant here. essentially, early internet spaces were "opt-in" for the kind of content you saw and the people you interacted with - you had to seek out mailing lists, or forums, or blogs, or livejournal communities, etc etc and join them intentionally. if you were a teen, you obviously still did not always know whether you were interacting with adults – either if they didn’t share that information, or if they were lying – but you had far more tools to set your boundaries intentionally. for instance, when i was a teen on livejournal, i had adults in fandom following me, but i also could selectively lock my posts, and even custom-lock them so that, say, only my friends from school could see a specific post. i also rarely had to see posts from people that i didn’t know or hadn’t actively sought out, unless i had specifically opted into to following a community or listserv where i didn’t know everyone.

now, we are in a majority "opt-out" world where most social media apps want you to see as much content as possible, and you have to set boundaries with increasingly fewer tools to do so. we don’t even have the option to set accounts to private on many sites, let alone custom-lock individual posts. blocking and muting tools are paltry and do not work well on many sites. that's not the fault of the teens.

so teens not only have a harder time simply finding ways to intentionally interact with other teens, but they are also in an internet landscape where they increasingly do not know who they are talking to. now i want to remind folks that that this has, technically, always been true: there have always been adults who don’t want to share much about their age online, and of course malicious actors who may lie about it.

but in our current internet landscape, that’s not all that teens might have to worry about. they might be drawn into interactions with adults that happen entirely by accident, on both sides. how many times have people gotten outraged about an opinion they’ve seen online, that has been shared onto their feeds, and then gone to op’s page and realized oh this is a fourteen-year-old? yeah. this is not an unheard-of issue.

so. why might teens want to know that they are interacting with adults online?

they might just want to interact with other teens specifically. like. did you always want to hang out with adults when you were a teen? i feel silly even trying to list out reasons why this might be the case! they also might be okay with hanging out with adults, but simply want to know that those people are adults. the friendships that i had with adults when i was a teen in fandom involved both of us knowing that. it's hard for me to imagine that those friendships would have grown as strong as they did if we hadn't known.

also – and please don’t write me off immediately here – there is also the undeniable fact that teens can be harmed by adults. like. it is not a conservative or fascist position to be worried about the harms that teens can face from adults online!

and those, again, can be intentional or unintentional from the adults’ end of things, including smaller harms that can still be super impactful for teens. but we simply cannot take the idea that teens can be hurt by adults – including the potential for sexual harassment and abuse by those adults – as an inherently fascist position.

it is, in fact, the exact opposite, since fascists and conservatives work to uphold rape culture, white supremacy, and cisheteropatriarchy, all of which allow sexual harassment and abuse of young people to thrive unchallenged. conservatives and fascists generally bring up harm to teens as a talking point when it is useful for their rhetoric, not as a true concern, which is why many of them will be fine with child marriage and abuse by spouses even as they spew homophobic and transphobic rhetoric about queer and trans people being groomers.

again, the problem of malicious actors does exist, so even if all adults without bad intentions shared their ages online, teens would still be at risk. but the risk might be lower from those unintentional harms, like potentially being dogpiled for having a bad opinion. or even vice versa: a teen could accidentally flirt with an adult online because they didn’t know their age, leading to discomfort for both of them!

okay, so we’ve established some reasons why the underlying concern op was raising is legitimate. now let’s look at the way that others have responded in the reblogs.

the instinctive reaction that many people seem to have is to assume that op is coming to this from a conservative/fascist rhetoric and intent. i sort of understand where this is coming from: op’s use of the word “lured” seems to imply that they think adults are intentionally trying to hide their ages to draw teens in, and “insidious” could be referring to something like “queer and trans adults are inherently groomers” rhetoric. op also said they think it's "weird" when people over 20 don't put list their ages. and like i said, conversations about adults and teens interacting can be really fraught, so i understand why people would jump to this conclusion and be upset by it.

but – without knowing anything else about op other than what they’ve posted – there is actually nothing to indicate that this is what they meant with their post. the “luring” could be referring to things like teens getting caught up in discussions that get them dogpiled for their opinions. the “insidious” problems could be any of the ones i've listed above. them saying people are "weird" for not listing ages could just be because they believe the underlying concern they've named is legitimate, and they are not aware of the reasons why people might not want to follow it, since op doesn't actually say why they think it's weird.

i want to note, too, that op is not forcing anyone to do anything. op is not even advocating for policies on these platforms that would require adults to put their ages in their bios! op is literally asking for people to do this. they even said please! i guess you could decide that op saying that they think it is "weird" if people don't do this is op putting pressure on us, but let's be clear, op's still not forcing anything, they are just stating their opinion.

and yet, people in the reblogs are accusing op of:

thinking that “everyone over 20 is inherently predatory and creepy towards children”

being a “fed”

“coerc[ing]” people into giving up their privacy on social media

encouraging people to “ignore[e their] own privacy boundaries and discomfort”

“think-of-the-children fearmongering”

thinking that adults who don’t list their ages are pedophiles

“telling people if you don’t do what I tell you, you might be a threat to the safety of our community”

being similar to u.s. president george w. "dubya" bush, a republican, conservative, and in my opinion pretty evil person

saying that adults and younger people shouldn’t interact in fandom spaces

saying that adults and younger people interacting in fandom spaces in itself leads to insidious things

having a “conservative agenda”

“destroying the links between generations”

“do[ing] the masters’ work”

i didn’t even go into the tags or check for other reblogs besides the ones i see here. but let’s be clear. i don’t know what op thinks, obviously, or what they have done or said outside of this post. but in this post, they didn’t do or say any of the things that people just accused them of.

now. there are legitimate concerns that people name in the reblogs as well! one is that listing your age in your bio may not be safe or feel safe even for adults, because it is sharing more of yourself on the internet. another is the fact that truly malicious actors will of course be able to get around what op is asking for.

so with all that in mind, here is how i wish people had responded to op’s post.

firstly, by not immediately assuming that it is a conservative psyop; or that op, by making a request, is trying to impose something on people that they don’t want to do; or that fulfilling the request will destroy intergenerational connections.

secondly, by acknowledging that there is a legitimate concern in op’s post, and that it is in the interest of people who want intergenerational fandom community to try and address that concern.

thirdly, by pointing out legitimate concerns for why op’s proposed solution might not work for everyone, while also acknowledging that it is still not an inherently bad request – there are people who do feel comfortable sharing their ages online, and just because it won’t catch the intentionally malicious actors doesn’t mean it couldn’t be useful for a lot of the unintentional issues and potential harms that i mentioned above.

and fourthly, by proposing alternate solutions that could still get at the legitimate concern op raised, while also being more comfortable for people who don’t like op’s specific request. just a couple ideas off the top of my head: people could put “adult” in their bios without listing their actual ages. people could write and pin a post about their approach to intergenerational connections in fandom - for instance, something like “i am an adult but welcome friendships with people younger than me", or, "i choose not to share my age online but i welcome interactions with people of any age", etc etc, so that teens could then choose whether or not to engage with them. i'm sure there are other ideas that we could all brainstorm together.

finally, i want to name some potential impacts of the way people have reacted to this post.

now, imagine that op is actually everything that people have accused them of – that they are conservative, that their intentions are bad, that they want to impose their request on everyone. that would suck, obviously. but it wouldn’t actually change my reaction to this post.

because the fact that people immediately turned on their post and jumped to these conclusions without any evidence means that a teen who sees this – or anyone else, frankly! – could very well have the reaction, “wow. these adults immediately dismissed a legitimate concern and decided that it was a conservative psyop without any evidence. they could do the same if i raise this concern.”

i’m going to assume good intentions for everyone who has reblogged this, and assume that everyone here genuinely wants to foster and improve connections between teens and adults in fandom and to protect both teens and adults from harm.

but this is not the way to do it. this is not the way to show teens that we respect them and their boundaries, that we care about their wellbeing, and that we would be good friends to them if they chose to connect with us. and if we truly care about intergenerational fannish community, we need to show them that, and live up to it.

@ my fellow adults who use tumblr a lot:

can you PLEASE put your age in your about/sidebar and make sure it’s accessible on mobile. imo if you’re an adult esp 20+ it’s a little weird that you wouldn’t have your age readily available on your blog. if you’re reading this now and you don’t have your age listed, please rectify that. i feel like teenagers get lured into talking to adults in fandom/lgbt spaces that they may not have intentionally sought out because they think they’re talking to other teenagers, and this can lead to a lot of other – much more insidious –problems

[lxvefrxmthextherside]

@heartxshaped-bruises asked: 🛳📫🛍🐠

My rp experience questions

🐠 why i love (or hate) this hobby

I'll give you both!

LOVE: In the past couple of years, I've made connections and friendships with several great and very genuine people that I would not have met any other way.

HATE: A vast majority of people did not outgrow high school. I'll admit it can be fun to watch some drama play out from the sidelines, but by god! It feels like the inmates run the asylum at this point. The mind games, attention seeking, stealing of content / writing, the group think just to name a few things. I've heard some insane stories through the years. Like my god, guys, it's... just a writing hobby... chill and learn how to respect people!

🛳 my opinions on DNI lists

Ohhh, this is a good one. Well, it depends on the DNI? How do I put this? Lol. Once your DNI list reaches more than a specific number of people, I start to think that maybe you're the problem... I mean, there's a common denominator there, right? Have you ever seen a DNI that's just too long? 🚩! Like, don't I need to know every person you've had beef with, block and move on, man! "But I want people to know I won't interact with them if -" So dont!!! It's not a character it's a PERSON!! I understand on the few occasions when the person is like, actively, a danger. But usually, this boils down to Person A hurt Person B's fee-fees, and neither can cope....

📫 my favorite type of ships

Can I just....

✅️ All

Lol!

🛍 the one thing i wish all of my followers knew about me

I'm slow to respond some (okay a lot ☠️) of the time. life has caught up with me this past couple of years. I used to be a rapid replier, and if you catch me at the right moment I can be on a rare occasion. But between being an actual adult (I'm 29 in like a month 🪦) and more than one draining diagnosis it can be hard to crank out continuous writing out no matter how much I want to some days.

[foolishfalls]

I've been kind of just chucking my feelings out into many a void today and I guess I'll do it here. Who knows where I'm likely to get a response??

below the cut i'll be discussing repeat injuries, chronic pain, how my mental health interacts with/contributes to them, and my growing rage and exasperation with the american healthcare system.

I feel like for much of my life I have been grappling with nebulous burgeoning health problems that were rarely serious enough for me to really seek out a doctor, plus, my parents are both notoriously bad at seeing doctors and taking care of themselves too, so living with them into adulthood definitely didn't help. (It's tough as hell being a PDA autistic up against all these very harsh hierarchical systems so full of barriers and demands amirite?)

given the autism with a pretty heavy PDA slant, making and keeping appointments has been a harrowing process for me for my whole entire life, as long as I can remember. It doesn't help that I am also terrible at advocating for myself and have been consistently dismissed by doctors over stuff that I experience... I've just kind of learned to take it lying down which is not a good habit but i get easily exasperated trying to explain myself to doctors. i struggle a ton with even talking to people i see as holding authority over me (i attribute this to ten years of catholic school kind of breaking me mentally and emotionally. if you have been to a religious or catholic school perhaps you have an understanding of this kind of mistreatment)

anyway, i just feel like the pandemic and the ongoing collapse of the healthcare system has just really brought this to a head for me recently. In the last 6 years or so, i've injured both of my ankles several times, rolls and sprains. honestly, the first few times, i was being dumb and not paying attention (i went through a terrible binge drinking period during my 21st year, hadn't yet discovered that i literally cannot wear most shoes besides flat-soled sneakers) but even when I tried to be careful after one or two bad sprains that went unchecked, mostly, I would end up hurting myself. Two of the subsequent times I hurt myself while moving between apartments (I've always lived in walk-ups and have usually moved everything myself with little help aside from friends) and bc of pretty bad cracks on sidewalks (big city infrastructure is total garbage, big surprise!)

like, as my repeated injuries got worse, my capacity for physical activity has too, and I already struggled for years as a kid and teen to develop a decent exercise/activity routine. I think I also have low muscle tone and really slow recovery time due to autism or some co-morbid condition (such as EDS or something. i have weird, weak, clicky joints, but i'm not really typically hypermobile?)

anyway, every time i went in for an x-ray or to see a doctor, i basically got told just to RICE and take care of it at home, so I didn't seek further help. the one time i did was last year, and it took a lot of advocating and was quite hard for me, and then it took months of waiting to even get an appointment with an ortho. This is after 5-6 sprains on my right ankle, and 2 on my left. when i sprained my left ankle the last time, i landed quite hard on my right knee and definitely hurt that too, because it still clicks and acts up.

of course, last august, my ortho appt finally approaches, and i get fucking covid literally the day before. i was so sick and tired i just no-showed and honestly forgot about it. if I miss an appointment and dont reschedule immediately, the likelihood that I will do that is very low. once again, PDA is a bitch.

but, at least since then I haven't actually injured my ankle. However, who knows what the effects of covid were on my body, my joints, who tf knows?? we know it causes and exacerbates all kind of conditions in people. I barely have been able to get doctors to take me seriously about the stuff I'm chronically experiencing, so even bringing up long-covid has felt kind of scary and pointless, tbh.

Fast forward to april of this year. after working in office jobs and sitting for two years straight, which caused me a ton of awful burnout, i end up working part-time at a cafe. while I'm working there, i injure/strain my hip and low back while slipping on a wet floor. this pain keeps me in bed consistently for about 3 weeks and I go to see my doctor about it. he diagnoses me with sciatic pain because it seems to be running and radiating down from my leg and hip. (mind you this is my right hip, which is attached to the knee i've hurt maybe twice, and the ankle i've injured 5-6 times!)

Up until then, I had been receiving some PT at my previous job to help stabilize and strengthen my hips, which my PT determined as the main cause for my ankle injuries. my hips shake when i walk and tend to cause a lot of instability. I made some progress, but I was receiving PT at my old job, and my insurance changed when I left it, so i was uninsured for like three months in the beginning of this year while trying to get new coverage. my hip pain was bad for about a month, after seeing my doctor, i got x-rays and they came back clean but the pain wasn't fully subsiding, so he writes me referrals for PT and pain management.

Because of my shit association with PT due to my old job, and the fact that the pain finally began to subside after the x rays came back (I kind of thought, oh, maybe it was lingering mostly due to my stress, guess im good) I dont make a PT appointment right away. I look into one place i'm referred to and it turns out they dont take my insurance which is bullshit. Then, I go to my last option, the hospital system I see my PCP out of. It's basically the lowest quality medical care you can access with medicaid which is what i currently have, and due to my experience working in a high-end PT office i know what the difference will be. this mental block kind of keeps me thinking it will be pointless so i took a while to make an appointment, trying to do exercises at home for now since i had a baseline from my old job.

While all this is happening, as my hip pain is subsiding, i get a weird lump/bump where my heel meets my right ankle, my bad ankle. it has been this way since about the end of May, now, and it has been the source of some of the most disarming, weird, confusing pain I've ever experienced in my life.

I also didn't talk yet about how realizing I'm autistic helped me make sense of my weird pain tolerance. on one hand, i've always been notably sensitive to even the slightest pain. would sob and sob over the smallest things as a kid. i think due to the reactions of adults around me, i gradually learned to dissociate in order to bury my pain. so, i feel like i both experience pain very strongly and intensely, and at times it can be so debilitating and distracting that i can focus on little else and it almost causes me brain fog and fatigue, while at other times, it is kind of distant and i tend to dissociate from it.

with this new pain in my heel, there's definitely some nerve shit involved, i think... i get twitches/spasms sometimes, numbness, tingling, sharp pain, dull pain. and it's seemingly unpredictable. i wear compression socks or a sleeve almost every single day because it's all that helps. it's past the point of icing helping it much because it's not swollen.

basically every time i have seen a doctor about my pain leading up to now, I have brought up the possibility of some underlying cause, but i always get dismissed. told I'm digging too deep or thinking too hard and just stressing myself out, despite the fact that I've always been clumsy and injury prone and had coordination issues. I guess bc those coordination issues haven't been well documented, and i am not officially diagnosed with autism or anything that could support my claims, i just don't get taken seriously, despite my experience being quite abnormal from what i understand when talking to others!!!

idk where I'm even going with this. today i was at a PT appointment for my hip and was on the verge of tears the whole time. I have to go back to my primary doctor in order for them to even begin attending to my heel despite that being the worst pain, and despite the fact that my hip/knee/heel/sciatica are all definitely related. I'm assuming this is because of insurance bullshit, i know it's pretty basic procedure, but it's exhausting that the american healthcare system is set up this way. it's really hard when you're autistic also and struggle with making and keeping appointments. it doesn't help that i've been dismissed by so many doctors that i just get intense anxiety about even having to go back again.

i'm also looking for a new PCP anyway because i don't like that mine doesn't take me very seriously and i am also transitioning and very scared/a bit paranoid about facing any transphobia or disclosing that fact to him if we have to run any blood tests. so maybe I'll have a better experience elsewhere, but this heel stuff has gone on for so long that i just have to bite the bullet and go back to the same place if it will be quicker to do so anyway.

and like, all procedural/red tape/insurance bullshit aside, bottom of the barrel PT treatment here is like. so dismal. once again maybe it's just bc i have the point of comparison from my old job, but i feel like the treatment is really just. so lackluster, doctors are seeing multiple patients at once, you're rushed through your visit, you don't have time to ask questions. the whole time i've been there no one has so much as taken a closer look at my heel. i know i'm there for my hip and you have to say that on paper for insurance, but like, damn, not even just a quick check??

I am afraid it's because I'm habitually downplaying the pain to cope and because i'm terrified of doctors. so maybe it's my fault.

still, the system is downright hostile to people who struggle with that stuff.

i don't have much else to say. just wanted to dump this somewhere and see if anyone else can understand or empathize with my experience. i don't talk about this super openly or readily because I don't even feel like i can call it chronic pain sometimes despite this being a several month long problem and really an issue that is about five years old, despite it being inconsistent... mostly because i just don't have the affirmation of a medical diagnosis. i have considered getting a cane/mobility aid very thoroughly recently because i know it would help me (and maybe even force doctors to take me seriously) but there's a part of me that feels like i can't or shouldn't. like i'm not valid enough for that, or i can function without it, but i know that's dismissive and so not the right way to think about mobility aids

i mean, it doesn't help that my dad has been limping and had chronic pain for years and has one and still refuses to use it... the internalized ableism runs deep. it's fucked. i'm trying hard to undo it but it's hard when you're already just hard on yourself.

anyway, just sorely needed to get this off my chest. thanks for reading if you do.

EDIT: i also wanted to say,, if you have gone through anything similar, just know you're not alone! so if you want to share your experience or talk about it with me pls know my asks and dms are open.

[staringdownabarrel]

Trauma dumping is a real thing, but I feel like the use of the term tends to be a bit reductive. It focuses a lot on why trauma dumping is a bad thing, and there is some merit to that, but it tends to ignore the reasons why a person might do it to begin with.

When I was in high school, I spent a fair bit of time on the "mental health" side of the internet. This includes places like the depression aesthetic side of Tumblr and also websites like takethislife.com. All of this was a decade or more ago, so even though I'm sure spaces like these still exist, I'm going to be talking about them in the past tense.

In spaces like this, what most people would label as trauma dumping was a common thing. I mean, of course--places like this were filled to the brim with people with all kinds of mental health issues, all kinds of traumatic life events, and so on. To expect these spaces to not have these things happen is to be at least a little bit naive.

The one thing I tended to notice was that, at least among the people I most regularly interacted with, a solid 80%-90% of them were already in therapy for their issues. Because of that, their motivation for "trauma dumping" was very rarely that they wanted this new person they'd just met online to be their unpaid therapist.

Usually what they actually wanted was a friend, and sharing the darkest, most intimate details of their lives was one of the only ways they knew how to connect with a new person. The other common motive was that they wanted a sense of community and the mental health side of the internet was one of the few places willing to accept them as they were, given how debilitating their mental health issues could be at times.

So while they were actively in therapy, often the symptoms of their mental health issues prevented them from being in other communities. There'd often be some issue with some of the less socially accepted symptoms of their mental illness rubbing people the wrong way or they'd be basically shut out of certain friend groups because nobody wanted to be around the known crazy person.

This is a little bit tangential and I can't really prove this, but I wouldn't be too surprised if this ends up being a big reason why so many of the fandom spaces on Tumblr tend to be filled with neurodivergent and mentally ill people. Fandom spaces tend to be one of the few places where people like this can go and be accepted, getting that sense of community so many of them want, without the space also explicitly being focused on their mental health.

Of course, this leaves the other 10%-20% who weren't actively in therapy. When the term trauma dumping first started gaining traction, I thought it was mostly these people they were talking about. These tended to be the people most likely to share details about every traumatic thing that had ever happened to them, without concern for what kind of a position this other person might be in, and expect the other person to be their unpaid therapist.

The thing is that these people had their reasons for being in those spaces as well, and it wasn't always that they were jackasses with no concern for other people's wellbeing. Often, it was because they couldn't afford therapy, their parents didn't believe mental health issues were really an issue (this was especially an issue for people in high school or uni who were still dependent on their parents), or there was the cultural belief that seeking therapy would make them "less of a man".

That last point--the genedered expectations surrounding opening up about mental health issues--tended to be the biggest one I saw. Whenever I encountered someone in those communities that wasn't currently in therapy, it was like two thirds cis boys or cis men, and one third women or nonbinary people. This was especially the case among adults because women, nonbinary people, and trans men who needed therapy but couldn't get it because their parents said no when they were in high school would usually end up going once they got into uni or their early twenties.

There were some issues with men using mental health issues as a way of grooming teenage girls as well. I don't really know for sure how common it was, but situations where suspecting it might happen were certainly common enough that the mods or admins on takethislife.com had to put a post up telling adults to not private message the high schoolers on the site. By and large though, this tended to not be my experience on the mental health side of the internet. People I encountered in these communities who were hoping to groom me (as a teenager) tended to be the rare exception rather than the rule. Maybe I just got lucky, though.

For the most part though, all of this was discussion of mental health issues by people with mental health issues in mental health communities. I don't think it was really trauma dumping in the strictest sense of the term because nobody was opening up their browser, going to one of these communities, and thinking, "Gee, I sure hope that one self harmer I know isn't talking about their self harm scars again today." You sorta knew what you were in for the moment you went to that side of the internet.

Really, I think the issue tended to be that sometimes people in these communities didn't realise that there was a level of venting in mental health spaces that was frowned upon in mixed company. The entire reason those spaces existed was so that people could talk about the issues they wouldn't be able to in mixed company. The thing is that when you spend enough time in those communities, the social etiquette you learn for those spaces ends up being the only etiquette you know. This is especially the case when you get involved in those communities very young.

What ended up happening because of this was some people would talk about their issues to people who really didn't have the skills to cope with what they were hearing and didn't sign up to hear about them to begin with. I think this tends to be the area where ideas around trauma dumping and ideas around a lack of empathy tend to collide and become a little murky because while a lot of people aren't equipped to handle hearing about these issues, a lot of people aren't exactly empathetic to people with mental health issues to begin with, either.

I do empathise with concerns over trauma dumping to an extent because of course most people aren't going to have the skills to deal with hearing about certain things. Even if you do, there's always going to be days where you just can't do it. But also, to pretend that the need to trauma dump isn't often the result of mentally ill people being socially excluded and the lack of accessible mental health resources for a lot of people is to ignore some of the systemic issues that lead to it, in my opinion.

[soundsfaebutokay]

So I've recc'd this video before, but it deserves its own post because it's one of my favorite things on youtube. It's a Tedx Talk by comics writer, editor, and journalist Jay Edidin, and I really think that it will connect with a lot of people here.

If you live and breathe stories of all kinds, you might like this.

If you care about media representation, you might like this.

If you're neurodivergent, you might like this.

If you're interested in a gender transition story that veers from the norm, you might like this.

If you love the original Leverage and especially Parker, and understand how important it is that a character like her exists, you will definitely like this.

Transcript below the cut:

You Are Here: The Cartography of Stories

by Jay Edidin

I am autistic. And what this means in practice is that there are some things that are easier for me than they are for most people, and a great many things that are somewhat harder, and these affect my life in more or less overt ways. As it goes, I'm pretty lucky. I've been able to build a career around special interests and granular obsession. My main gig at the moment is explaining superhero comics continuity and publishing history for which work I am somehow paid in actual legal currency—which is both a triumph of the frivolous in an era of the frantically pragmatic, and a job that's really singularly suited to my strengths and also to my idiosyncrasies.

I like comics. I like stories in general, because they make sense to me in ways that the rest of the world and my own mind often don't. Self-knowledge is not an intuitive thing for me. What sense of self I have, I've built gradually and laboriously and mostly through long-term pattern recognition. For decades, I didn't even really have a self-image. If you'd asked me to draw myself, I would eventually have given you a pair of glasses and maybe a very messy scribble of hair, and that would've been about it. But what I do know—backwards, forwards, and in pretty much every way that matters—are stories. I know how they work. I understand their language, their complex inner clockwork, and I can use those things to extrapolate a sort of external compass that picks up where my internal one falls short. Stories—their forms, their structure, the sense of order inherent to them—give me the means to navigate what otherwise, at least for me, would be an impassable storm of unparsable data. Or stories are a periscope, angled to access the parts of myself I can't intuitively see. Or stories are a series of mirrors by which I can assemble a composite sketch of an identity I rarely recognize whole...which is how I worked out that I was transgender, in my early thirties, by way of a television show.

This is my story. And it's about narrative cartography, and representation, and why those things matter. It's about autism and it's about gender and it's about how they intersect. And it's about the kinds of people we know how to see, and the kinds of people we don't. It's not the kind of story that gets told a lot, you might hear a lot, because the narrative around gender transition and dysphoria in our culture is really, really prescriptive. It's basically the story of the kid who has known for their whole life that they're this and not that, and that story demands the kind of intuitive self-knowledge that I can't really do, and a kind of relationship to gender that I don't really have—which is part of why it took me so long to figure my own stuff out.

So, to what extent this story, my story has a beginning, it begins early in 2014 when I published an essay titled, "I See Your Value Now: Asperger's and the Art of Allegory." And it explored, among other things, the ways that I use narrative and narrative structures to navigate real life. And it got picked up in a number of fairly prominent places that got linked, and I casually followed the ensuing discussion. And I was surprised to discover that readers were fairly consistently assuming I was a man. Now, that in itself wasn't a new experience for me, even though at the time I was writing under a very unambiguously female byline. It had happened in the letter columns of comics I'd edited. It had happened when a parody Twitter account I'd created went viral. When I was on staff at Wired, I budgeted for fancy scotch by putting a dollar in a box every time a reader responded in a way that made it clear they were assuming I was a man in response to an article where my name was clearly visible, and then I had to stop doing that because it happened so often I couldn't afford to keep it up. But in all of those cases, the context, you know, the reasons were pretty obvious. The fields I'd worked in, the beats I covered, they were places where women had had to fight disproportionally hard for visibility and recognition. We live in a culture that assumes a male default, so given a neutral voice and a character limit, most readers will assume a male author.

But this was different, because this wasn't just a book I'd edited, it wasn't a story I'd reported—it was me, it was my story. And it made me uncomfortable, got under my skin in ways that the other stuff really hadn't. And so I did what I do when that happens, and I tried to sort of reverse-engineer it to look at the conclusions and peel them back to see the narratives behind them and the stories that made them tick. And I started this, I started this by going back to the text of the essay, and you know, examining it every way I could think of: looking at craft, looking at content. And in doing so, I was surprised to realize that while I had written about a number of characters with whom I identified closely, that every single one of those characters I'd written about was male. And that surprised me even more than the responses to the essay had, because I've spent my career writing and talking and thinking about gender and representation in popular media. In 2014, I'd been the feminist gadfly of an editorial department and multiple mastheads. I'd been a founding board member of an organization that existed to advocate for more and better representation of women and girls in comics characters and creators. And most of my favorite characters, the ones I'd actively seek out and follow, were women. Just not, apparently, the characters I saw myself in.

Now I still didn't realize it was me at this point. Remember: self-knowledge, not very intuitive for me. And while I had spent a lot of time thinking about gender, I'd never really bothered to think much about my own. I knew academically that the way other people read and interpreted my gender affected and had influenced a lifetime of social and professional interactions, and that those in turn had informed the person I'd grown up into during that time. But I really believed, like I just sort of had in the back of my head, that if you peeled away all of that social conditioning, you'd basically end up with what I got when I tried to draw a self-portrait. So: a pair of glasses, messy scribble of hair, and in this case, maybe also some very strong opinions about the X-Men. I mean, I knew something was off. I'd always known something was off, that my relationship to gender was messy and uncomfortable, but gender itself struck me as messy and uncomfortable, and it had never been a large enough part of how I defined myself to really feel like something that merited further study, and I had deadlines, and...so it was always on the back burner. So, I looked, I looked at what I had, at this improbable group of exclusively male characters. And I looked and I figured that if this wasn't me, then it had to be a result of the stories I had access to, to choose from, and the entertainment landscape I was looking at. And the funny thing is, I wasn't wrong, exactly. I just wasn't right either.

See, the characters I'd written about had one other significant trait in common aside from their gender, which is that they were all more or less explicitly, more or less heavily coded as autistic. And I thought, "Ah, yes. This explains it. This is under representation in fiction echoing under representation in life and vice versa." Because the characteristics that I'd honed in on, that I particularly identified with in these guys, were things like emotional unavailability and social awkwardness and granular obsession, and all of those are characteristics that are seen as unsympathetic and therefore unmarketable in female characters. Which is also why readers were assuming that I was a man.

Because, you see, here's the thing. I'm not the only one who uses stories to navigate the world. I'm just a little more deliberate about it. For humans, stories formed the bridge between data and understanding. They're where we look when we need to contextualize something new, or to recognize something we're pretty sure we've seen before. They're how we identify ourselves; they're how we locate ourselves and each other in the larger world. There were no fictional women like me; there weren't representations of women like me in media, and so readers were primed not to recognize women like me in real life either.

Now by this point, I had started writing a follow-up essay, and this one was also about autism and narratives, but specifically focused on how they intersected with gender and representation in media. And in context of this essay, I went about looking to see if I could find even one female character who had that cluster of traits I'd been looking for, and I was asking around in autistic communities. And I got a few more or less useful one-off suggestions, and some really, really splendid arguments about semantics and standards, and um...then I got one answer over and over and over in community after community after community. "Leverage," people told me. "You have to watch Leverage."

So I watched Leverage. Leverage is five seasons of ensemble heist drama. It's about a team of very skilled con artists who take down corrupt and powerful plutocrats and the like, and it's a lot of fun, and it's very clever, and it's clever enough that it doesn't really matter that it's pretty formulaic, and I enjoyed it a lot. But what's most important, what Leverage has is Parker.

Parker is a master thief, and she is the best of the best of the best in ways that all of Leverage's characters are the best of the best. And superficially, she looks like the kind of woman you see on TV. So she's young, and she's slender, and she's blonde, and she's attractive but in a sort of approachable way. And all of that familiarity is brilliant misdirection, because the thing is, there are no other women like Parker on TV. Because Parker—even if it's never explicitly stated in the show—Parker is coded incredibly clearly as autistic. Parker is socially awkward. Her speech tends to have limited inflection; what inflection it does have is repetitive and sounds rehearsed a lot of the time. She's not emotionally literate; she struggles with it, and the social skills she develops over the series, she learns by rote, like they're just another grift. When she's not scaling skyscrapers or cartwheeling through laser grids, she wears her body like an ill-fitting suit. Parker moves like me. And Parker, Parker was a revelation—she was a revolution unto herself. In a media landscape where unempathetic women usually exist to either be punished or "loved whole," Parker got to play the crabby savant. And she wasn't emotionally intuitive but it was never ever played as the product of abuse or trauma even though she had survived both of those—it was just part of her, as much as were her hands or her eyes. And she had a genuine character arc. My god, she had a genuine romantic arc, even. And none of that required her to turn into anything other than what she was. And in Parker I recognized a thousand tics and details of my life and my personality...but. I didn't recognize myself.

Why? What difference was there in Parker, you know, between Parker and the other characters I'd written about? Those characters, they'd spanned ethnicities and backgrounds and different media and appearances and the only other characteristic they all had in common was their gender. So that was where I started to look next, and I thought, "Well, okay, maybe, maybe it's masculinity. Maybe if Parker were less feminine, she'd click with me the way those other characters had." So then I tried to imagine a Parker with short hair, who's explicitly butch, and...nothing. So okay, I extended it in what seems like the only logical direction to extend it. I said, "Well, if it's not masculinity, what if it's actual maleness? What if Parker were a man?" Ah. Yeah.

In the end, everything changed, and nothing changed, which is often the way that it goes for me. Add a landmark, no matter how slight, and the map is irrevocably altered. Add a landmark, and paths that were invisible before open wide. Add a landmark, and you may not have moved, but suddenly you know where you are and where you can go.

I wasn't going to tell this story when I started planning this talk. I was gonna tell a similar story, it was about stories, like this is, about narratives and the ways that they influence our culture and vice versa. And it centered around a group of women at NASA who had basically rewritten the narrative around space exploration, and it was a lot more fun, and I still think it was more interesting. But it's also a story you can probably work out for yourselves. In fact it's a story some of you probably have, if you follow that kind of thing, which you probably do given that you're here. And this is a story, my story is not a story that I like to tell. It's not a fun story to talk about because it's very personal and I am a very private person. And it's not universal. And it's not always relatable, and it's definitely not aspirational. And it's not the kind of story that you tend to encounter unless you're already part of it...which is why I'm telling it now. Because the thing is, I'm not the only person who uses stories to parse the world and navigate it. I'm just a little more deliberate. Because I'm tired of having to rely on composite sketches.

Open your maps. Add a landmark. Reroute accordingly.