#love the format of these tags bc i tag different pieces of media in its own little section

[foralltheshaniacs]

the watcher boys are just like taylor swift:

left their old company to do what they were already doing under their old name and remake their old content but Different and Better

releasing important content on july 7 2023

have you ever seen them in the same room? that’s what i thought

[ap0stle]

WIP questionnaire tag game

THANK U FOR THE TAG @astramachina

umm the wip in question is TMNTDT aka Tell Me Not to Do This aka teenage mutant ninja turtle...dookie time

What’s the first part of your WIP that you created?

oough that was back in like... 2016? 2014? and i started with the first chapter right away which ended up being the fourth chapter and then became Nothing At All because i have wrecked this thang beyond recognition <3

If your story was a TV show, what would the theme song/intro be?

definitely Burn a Church by Coma Cinema bc it's been in my mock-soundtrack playlist for years and fits the vibes really well :3 the playlist in question is kind of a mess and old as hell but i'll link that too just in case ^_^

What are your favorite characters that you made? Why?

curtis definitely, i think i get caught up on the details of everyone but he is the most wholly developed and also umm. very similar to me so i love him dearly. he is the worst.

What other pieces of media do you think your fanbase would share?

if you like weird indie movies about young mentally unwell people that may or may not be queer and/or on da spectrum... you will enjoy my garbage and such movies as I Am Not a Serial Killer, As You Are, Super Dark Times, etc. ALSO magnus archives fans maybe bc of the whole Mold Cult thing that is still under development

What has been your biggest struggle with your WIP?

settling on a format was and is still my number one struggle lol. i have switched between a book, comic, videogame, screenplay, website... i have like 50000 drafts scattered across different websites and applications and if this thing ever comes to life i think i will actually fucking ascend

Are there any animals in your story? Talk about them!

ssssssssssort of. there are a lot of dead animals. and fungi. and mold. there have been some minor pet ideas thrown around for the more. Safe Environment characters but for the time being no actual lovable creatures :/ maybe eventually!

How do your characters travel/get around?

Juno's car because mr. dumbass dumped his murder truck into a river ^_^

What part of your WIP are you working on right now?

....yes. in all seriousness i have so many different versions in different POVs and tenses it's a toss up as to what i work on and if it will even make it to the next round of editing LOL

What aspects (tropes, maybe?) will you think draw your audience in?

its not quite explicitly queer (in the latest version) but heavily HEAVILY implied and i feel like the stories that are sort of ambiguous about their queerness tend to draw more people in ?? or they're more popular anyway LOL. so trope: queerbaiting ????

deeply unwell man who has not slept properly in 600 years. the ladies love that shit

^ unreliable narrator ?

religious horror sort of?

bury your gays except. is he actually dead?? .....

What are your hopes for your WIP?

to settle on a fucking medium LMAO. i cannot for the life of me stick to one, or a point of view, OR a tense so um . makin a goddamn decision would probbaly make the writing process like 600 times easier

tagging UM. shaking my brain for writer mutuals ik ive tagged yall before but i cannot think rn so @hammity-hammer @aether-friskets @xxdrowninglessonsxx @deviantartidentitydisorder

anyway if anyone else wants do this just pretend u have been personally tagged ily THANK U AGAIN MITCH ♡♡♡

[formulatrash]

What are your thoughts on fanfic writing in the f1 fandom? I am pretty sure I saw you tweet about it at some point something small but I was too scared to interact with you on it over at twitter :D

So, this is a hotter topic than I’d really like it to be on my Tumblr and it’s my own fault but. Here we go.

RPF has some questionable ethics and some even more questionable origins. I’m ancient enough that it just used to get straight-up published as a ‘5 minute fantasy’ in young women and girls’ magazines where you’d get like, some 15 year old’s daydream about meeting a boyband member on holiday and falling in love and this was for some reason just treated as an absolutely normal bit of publishing not like ‘what the hell, that would be illegal’ and ‘why is this the fantasy we are encouraging girls to have as an ambition when it comes to sports or even pop success’ and y’know. 

Anyway, the 90s: really can’t emphasise enough how fucking weird having only a few sources to get your media from makes them.

Back to RPF; its roots are in political obscenity, if you want to talk about the bawdy stuff. The French Revolution, in particularly, wrote lots of erotica (the kinkier the better) about the royal family as part of refusing to acknowledge their divine rights under the church. It was an anarchical refusal to accept the situation as it was and to undermine it. 

Beyond that you’ve got historical fiction - Thucydides was all about working up a really good narrative take* on the Peloponnesian war back in the fifth century BC. Extra scenes, big dialogue, you know. If he’d known about self-lubricating buttholes then you BET Herodotus would have put them in the Histories.

Point is: writing fiction about real people isn’t really that weird, Shakespeare did a load of it. But we tend to problematise RPF and consider it strange, even amongst fanfiction.

Now, to 21st century sports and specifically F1. We speak here on Tumblr dot com, the audience where F1 fans skew most largely LGBT, non-cis and female or non binary rather than every other platform which is full of cis het men. Here is where we talk about fanfic. Because they don’t know we’re here, I assume, is the logic.

(they kinda don’t, to be fair)

Most of us do not see ourselves in sports. Most sports media is not aimed at the way that a lot of us were socialised to engage with stuff and most of us - lucky buggers like me aside - do not get to write the narratives of the way sport is engaged with or talked about or who does it. 

A lot of us who live here on god’s abandoned internet have drifted in and out of fandoms and a lot of that will have involved engaging with fanfiction. Fanfiction is a really fun sandbox to play in, as an adult - we get told to stop playing, as we grow up and it’s no surprise that we still want to. 

There’s a six monthly cycle of some AAA game that asks the question “is shooting people bad?” that prompts 10 broadsheet newspaper pieces on Videogames: Not Just For Kids Anymore (and sub in comics/superheroes/etc for games there) that makes everyone who knows that roll their eyes. Games and comics and superheroes are big, legitimised industries now that turnover hundreds of billions of dollars.

Fanfiction is an outlier, as the purest form of play in a lot of senses. Unfettered, it’s the democratic media platform; there’s no minimum standard for publishing, there’s no real limits beyond your own ethics on what you can publish. it doesn’t turn a profit, by its very definition and it allows lots of games and versions of itself within that. 

For something with a ludicrously broad definition that encapsulates hugely different types of works, it has defined forms; from drabbles to wingfic, as structural formats, we also recognise fluff or hurt/comfort as genre. Fanfiction isn’t really the thing itself, it’s the bookshop and what you find in it will vary on where you look and often, the advice of the bookseller or friends you speak to.

If you’ve enjoyed wandering that bookstore and adding to its shelves as part of the way you engage with media and then you come to a sports fandom? Well, you’re gonna look for the fic. If you don’t see yourself in the sport, as a woman or a queer person then you can write yourself in. It’s sad that we sideline the fantasies where we exist - given they’re entirely normal to have - into places where we jealously guard them away from the reality we daren’t intrude on but that is how it is.

And fuck: if your whole reason for liking F1 is cus you wanna marry a driver and you’re writing those 15 minute fantasies about them like you’re 15 and they’re a poster then it’s not doing any harm - it’s a lot healthier than stalking them. You might even work out what you really want or more things about yourself, in the process.

(if it’s ‘to marry an F1 driver’ then I suggest you take some boring swimwear snaps somewhere that looks expensive, stick ‘em on Insta and wait for the DM slide)

One of the things I like best in fanfic is the possibility of a queer narrative without complications, of telling queer stories without having to justify them as Issues, of letting us see ourselves and our own awakenings because fuck, you know the big book shop (if such things still exist) has one shelf of expensive, niche published novels you find difficult to related to and three sex ed books.

F1 fanfic was one of the ways I wandered back to the F1 fandom and one of the reasons I work in the industry now. It was enough of an in to make me want to really think, to have that new crush energy of obsession and enjoyment, about motorsport in a way I’d drifted away from as I felt sidelined from the sport through my early-to-mid 20s. I found brocedes much more compelling, as an interpretation and a way of processing the intense rivalry between Lewis and Nico - even knowing it was fictional conjecture - than I did the equally fictional conjecture about their psychological states and potential weaknesses published in the sports papers.

So, yes, I have read some excellent Formula 1 RPF. I have written some frankly mediocre and in retrospect very poorly edited F1 RPF that I posted to Twitter in a drunken moment of excitement because I was happy I’d finished it and forgot, idk. I have a tricky relationship to being a Notable Person I guess, I hadn’t intended any harm and was mostly worried I’d get flack from the industry. Lol. Anyway, only saying it cus like; this isn’t just me talking about things theoretically.

There’s a lot of F1 RPF that is more insightful than a lot of columns about ‘inside the drivers’ minds’ working off very little more than the RPF is.

Some of it, I won’t lie, I find really fucking weird but I guess like, that ain’t for me. There are a lot of problems with RPF - it’s too male, too frequently misogynist, too keen to reinforce homophobic ideas, too often white and blonde, not radical enough but those issues are for the advanced class rather than the 101 overview I was aiming for here and go well beyond F1 or RPF.

Shit I should be writing the weather report. Fuck. I’m the worst. Err, there you go, that’s a whole thing.

(I don’t read very much - I am busy af - but occasionally and especially on long haul flights when the idea of anything other than soothing is impossible)

*Actually tbh Thucydides couldn’t write for fuck but it was early and you know how when a tag’s young you’ll read a lot of mediocre stuff?