#make it because you love making it

[roseworth]

i think theres this idea in the general public that the "best" fanfic gets turned into real books like 50 shades of grey. but the truth is that the best fanfic can never be published as an actual book because its intricately woven into the canon material so its inseparable even if you change the names

[batcavescolony]

Katniss is such an unreliable narrator. She says "Then something unexpected happens. At least, I don't expect it because I don't think of District 12 as a place that cares about me" girl you deliver strawberries to the Mayor, you hunt and trade for the district, when you fell at Prim being chosen someone caught you, when you went to Prim people parted for you, when you volunteered EVERYONE stopped. Idk how to tell you but I think you're a pillar of the community.

[gibbearish]

love when ppl defend the aggressive monetization of the internet with "what, do you just expect it to be free and them not make a profit???" like. yeah that would be really nice actually i would love that:)! thanks for asking

[mroddmod]

they are like puppies. 2 me

[inkskinned]

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

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

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

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

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

[what-am-i-doing-in-this-fandom]

the werewolf stan is amazing btw thank you

No, thank you!!! In fact, here's more just because you sent this ask (and probably the other one too, I love you)!!!!! More!!!!!!!!

They are liars <3

Part one is here!! ;P

Part three is here!! 'cause I can't control myself 😔

[eydilily]

would you bite the hand that feeds you?

[chimchiri]

gideon & harrow OR rd and sf as cowboys please please please

It's the cowgirl necro and her gunslinger cav! Who is so damn extra she's got three guns: one left, one right, and one in pole position! (She swears the ladies love it!)

[toodrunktofindaurl]

"Death's child"

twitter | bluesky | insta | 🔞 patre*n

[rockymthorrorshow]

you know, i've been thinking abt creative and artistic pursuits and like. Jobs and shit recently. (working a dead-end customer service job will do that do a gal.) and at the risk of doing my favorite thing, which is belaboring a metaphor, i've also been thinking abt reintroduction of wolves.

see, when they reintroduced wolves to yellowstone national park, it changed the course of the yellowstone river. that's the short version, anyway - the reality is a much longer process of ecological restoration that, for the most part, to my understanding, happened largely on its own. wolves reintroduced = better regulated deer and elk populations through natural predation = increased growth of wetland plants that high desert ungulates like to snack upon = better habitat for beavers and such/more robust plants to hold dirt in place in the face of water in transit = changed course of river. as someone who knows Fuck All about ecology or wildlife biology, i'm probably getting a bunch of that wrong, but it's fun to think abt. wolves changing the course of a river.

(stay with me here, this is the metaphor part.)

i don't think any human being on earth would ascribe such habitat changing effects to one single wolf. that would be silly! it was many wolves, over the course of a number of seasons, in conjunction with many other factors. it's not like the wolves set out to change the course of the river, or regulate the riparian habitat of yellowstone, or even manage the local elk population back to healthy levels. wolves were just Doing What They Do! goin about their days! and it terraformed a whole habitat!

i've wanted to write books since i was little. i'm also not very good at writing! i can string sentences together, i can even manage a pleasing turn of phrase or two, but when it comes to the structural elements that make a book enjoyable to read? pacing, plot structure, character motivation? to say nothing of themes? themes? fuck me, i'm terrible at it! but as i've explored a dozen different career options (archaeologist, paralegal, museum historian, etc.) it's the only thing i can see myself doing as a career in the long term. which, when you know you're not good at something, is a discouraging predicament to be in, let me tell you.

and when you tell people that you want to write books, they always jump to the new york times. "got a bestseller in the works, do you?" they ask, with a wide range of tones between earnest-if-blind-approval and asking-your-five-year-old-niece-if-she's-going-to-the-olympics. and like. not everyone can be a bestseller. for starters, there's a whole discussion about marketing and advance capital and the buy-in of the publishing industrial complex and corporate bookstores because let's face it, if you don't have amazon or b&n or both in your corner from the start it's an uphill slog, but there's also just. the reality of large numbers. only a few are going to hit that list. and that's okay.

as a public historian, you learn to think about the physical reality of archives. certain things get saved. others do not. whether that's because of conscious choices or limited space or the inherent frailty of material objects in the face of time (and don't think digital archives are immune from this, either), archives are more likely than not incomplete. this is especially true of historical publishing, particularly for genre fiction or niche audiences. old comic books get so expensive because they were, in some measure, disposable. same thing with pulp fiction and dime novels and penny dreadfuls and whatever the tiktoks of their day were called for the past three hundred years. even the Highest of Literature of a given era can vanish from view for a myriad of reasons. but behind each and every work that survived, and every work that didn't, there was a person who made that. multiple people, even - someone wrote the script and someone drew and inked the panels and someone colored the panels and a whole host of people brought that 10 cent comic book to a newsstand near your great-uncle Mike's childhood home. someone wrote the novel and someone set the type and someone bound the book that you found in one of those gloriously junky antique shops, tucked between a Better Homes and Gardens cookbook and the fifteenth Nancy Drew #14 that you've seen that day.

there's an inherent drive under capitalism that a company has to beat out the competition at whatever it does, to get in front of the consumer more than anyone else to the point where you have to buy whatever they're selling. and i'm not saying that as creators, marketing is bad. if you don't tell anyone about your stuff, they're never going to read it, and we do, ultimately, create art for the consumption of others just as much as for ourselves. we want people to comment on our fanfics, to keysmash in the tags of the art we post, to compliment the sweater we spent months knitting. we want someone to put our art on the fridge and say it's pretty. that's one of those silly things that makes us human.

but for me? i've found some comfort in the idea that wolves don't have a bestseller list. (see, there's the metaphor.) wolves don't have academy awards for the best elk takedown. they just do what they do, because it's a biological imperative. you don't have to write The Best Sci-Fi Novel Ever. you don't have to painstakingly hand-animate The Best Short Film Every Produced. the things you make can just be things. do your best, sure, but out of respect for yourself and your art form, not out of fear or envy of someone else's work.

i grew up with a saying in fan spaces that boiled down to "two cakes," referencing a cartoon where someone brought a cake to a buffet and found that someone had already brought a more elaborately decorated cake. the second panel is of a different person, looking with delight at the buffet, exclaiming, "holy shit! two cakes!" your work of art doesn't need to be so breathtakingly original and different and exquisitely crafted that it's impossible to create. (caveat: obviously, don't plagiarize someone else's work. it's rude, and you're cheating yourself out of the opportunity to make your own art.) but it's okay to just contribute to the ecosystem. not everything has to be the next Pride and Prejudice, or the next Legend of Zelda. make something that you enjoy, that speaks to the person you are now, in this moment, and share that with people.

your ecosystem will be better for you being there.

[magicicephoenix]

i finally finished reading I see you, Sundrop! by @shirajellyfish and IT'S SO GOOD I CAN'T BELIEVE IT TOOK ME THIS LONG TO FINISH IT RAAAAAAA

i will be gushing about it in the tags but here's a lil animation i made based on the below paragraph in chapter 6 that gave me such a strong mental image that i had to make it real :)

[flagellant]

yeah we might be brothers in christ but so were cain and abel so shut the fuck up before i decide to find a rock about it

[pokimoko]

I can't keep being fundamentally changed as a person by animated movies, it's just not sustainable.

[puckpatties]

i love you forever and ever girldad chilchuck

[fanaticalthings]

the muskification of twitter except it's lex luthor instead of elon lol

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[remxedmoon]

yknow i think their cloak should be a little stained actually. just a little.