#the one an only klance post i will be reblogging for the next decade

[somanyfuckingdrinks]

Hi!

I’m Remmie. You may know me from my main blog (remmieismyname) or you may have just stumbled upon this jewel. Either way, welcome!

This blog is for my own OC universe, named “The Drink Universe”. I developed the first pieces of the universe in June of 2018 and it has since grown to be a big passion project of mine (whenever I find the time). I have plans to either turn my ideas into a series of books or maybe a TV show; you’ll just have to stick around to see. I hope you fall in love with these characters as I have in the past two years. These are my babies; treat them with kindness, please. 

Now onto the bigger, more important questions.

- What’s “The Drink Universe” all about?

It primarily follows the four lives of four very different characters: Camila Flores, Lillian Park, Ely Fey, and Jeremiah Midlin. 

Camila Flores (she/her) comes from a large family background as the more overshadowed middle child. However, it doesn’t bother her, as long as her family is content with her and her accomplishments (if there are any). She struggles with who she is (bisexual and maybe, just maybe in love with her best friend) and how people see her. The idea of the future terrifies her as she worries she will never live life to its fullest. She makes sure to hide her fears in favor of keeping those she cares about happy; since that is top priority.

Lillian Park (she/her) has always known where she is going. The future gave her the greatest hope and served as the largest motivator for her success. However, she can never anticipate when a roadblock with appear to knock her off the path; a terrible father, unknown family lineage, a suddenly absent best friend, lack of support, and so on. The surprises only add more weight to her bleeding shoulders and waning spirit, but she refuses to let it stop her. Hitting the surprises with her own curveballs, she knows she can beat the world that tried to destroy her.

Ely Fey (they/them) has never known who they are. Adopted by their maternal uncle, they were shoved behind two overbearing cousins dedicated to the arts. They walked the world alone and always seemed to walk in the shadows. Not that it bothered them; it was home to them. However, upon being shined on by the spotlight of other tortured souls, they start to search. Music draws the soul they can’t seem to show the world out. Leaving the sudden spolight behind, they find a new spotlight, hoping to finally understand just where they belong.

Jeremiah Midlin (he/him) comes from a perfect family. An assorted Disney movie breakfast every morning, fridge covered in years of children’s drawings, the halls covered in scheduled family portraits kind of family. He has always been within the reaches of his parents’ attention, but always just out of reach. His sisters are academic scholars and extracurriculars, while he only has his football and music. Football is the only known to his family. He hates lying, but it’s all he can do to not fall behind, left forgotten. Music gives him the outlet to tell all his secrets in the form of strong melodies and soft bellows of an acoustic guitar. Secrets he hopes to share in his own spotlight.

Complex? Maybe. Do I suck at summaries? I think I do, but that’s up to you.

- What are you going to post on here?

Shitposts! 

No seriously, this blog will be me reblogging prompts, quotes, or funny scenarios that I think fit my characters or universe in general. This will also consist of my random 3 A.M brainstorms and thoughts, so be prepared for that.

Actual storybuilding!

Hah! Surprise! I will also post character notes, drabbles, and world designs. These will hopefully reveal more about this strange, strange universe I have created and nurtured. I take constructive criticism and highly invite it.

*Forewarning, since I do not have the time and skillset to draw, you will see me use the Sims 4 or other platforms like Picrew to create character models and world designs. I need the visuals to create the world. Do not clown me, please.*

- Give me more backstory.

Okay fine, pushy. This universe started at around 7 A.M on a cold June day, maybe 30 minutes before my Geometry summer class was going to start. It’s funny to say and admit that this could have very well been a Klance fanfiction, but I didn’t know how to write the two characters. We said make your own!

I thought of the first plot draft, which dealt primarily with body confidence and being proud of who you are, along with the first two characters. They were unnamed at the time but over the next week they earned the names Camila and Lillian. I made their first character models and soon had a double conflict plot. Over the next couple months of 2018, I added small details and bigger subplots, such as Jeremiah (yes he was a subplot at some point; he evolved). I drew Ely on accident in my Chemistry Honors notebook, and just gave them main character status. I was chaotic and thriving. Especially when I spent 3 straight hours creating a 16 person family tree for just one character. Yeah, I did that.

Now, literally 2 years later, the small idea has turned into an entire universe. There are around 70+ characters with their own (not extremely detailed but almost too detailed for side character status) backstories and conflicts. The timeline spans over several decades, which means many stories to tell. The main four have grown and evolved to having their own character summaries! Improvement! Wow!

There is still more to be created within the universe but you’ll get to see it develop before your eyes from now on. Good for you!

- Why drinks?

There are two main “drinks” in the universe: Pink Lemonade and Raspberry Iced Tea. Pink Lemonade explores the lives of Camila Flores and Lillian Park. Raspberry Iced Tea explores the lives of Ely Fey and Jeremiah Midlin. There are many more “drinks” I have thought of in the time period since it’s creation but these two are the two that will show up the most often on this blog. You could say the “drinks” are like metaphors for the lives you unfold. Gulp it down baby!

Ohmygod! You made it this far? I love you already.

Take your crown, you absolute noble. Drink some water and eat a snack too. <3

[kyashin]

Voltron: The Fandom of You

Soooooo, hi. I want to talk about Voltron fandom, because I have some positive things to say about it. But first, I want to talk about due South.

due South is one of my favorite shows, and the fandom produced some of my favorite fan content. All around, it was a fantastic contribution to the universe. Well done, humanity.

For the uninitiated, the show is: Canadian Mountie Benton Fraser, the most upstanding and honest (and sarcastic) person imaginable, first came to Chicago on the trail of the killers of his father; and, for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, he remained, attached as liaison officer with the Canadian Consulate. It was a buddy cop show, and for seasons one and two, his cop buddy was an Italian-American dude named Ray Vecchio. Some people shipped it.

The show was canceled, and then, after enthusiastic fan campaigning, lovingly revived for two more seasons with Paul Gross––the actor who played Fraser––at the helm as executive producer. Unfortunately, David Marciano was unable to reprise his role as Ray Vecchio, so yikes! Now what? The entire premise of this thing was “sincere Canadian Mountie and cynical American cop shenanigans”. The solution was to replace Ray Vecchio. Literally. Like...in the show.

The first episode of season three has Fraser arriving in Chicago after a vacation in Canada to find this hot blond dude with a way different accent claiming to be Ray Vecchio, who is dark-haired and different-accented and just...you know...an entire different human being. Aaand let’s skip to the end of the episode where it turns out that Actual Ray Vecchio is undercover with the mob, so this new dude is gonna pretend to be him ‘til Vecchio gets back. New dude’s name is Ray Kowalski. People also shipped that.

But the fans who’d like, worked feverishly to get their show back on the air weren’t counting on having half the duo they wanted back erased from the show. !!!!!!!!!!!

Enter the Ray Wars. (Seriously, there’s a whole thing about them on fanlore.)

And a disclaimer: I wasn’t in the fandom for the height of the rage and fury, but I did saunter in as things were winding down, and even then some of the wreckage was still smoldering. That whole kerfuffle was Fandom Infamous for a super long time––and people who’ve been in Fandom long enough definitely know the Ray Wars by name AND reputation. For years, I’d see the Ray Wars held up by others as one of the ultimate examples of “intense fans” and just how Not Good a Look fandom can make for itself.

Here’s the thing though: the Ray Wars took place in the late 90s. No social media, no widespread understanding of fandom throughout the population. Fans were, like, on mailing lists and shit. The people who created AO3 were posting fic on web hosts like Geocities and Angelfire. Some people still called the internet “the web”, AOL was the gatekeeper to the internet things for a lot of people, and fans were figuring out that we could do ~*~*~*this*~*~*~ to make our user names look super unique and cool (not that I did that, just to be real, real clear). In that time, fandoms were very, super insular worlds with very tall, very robust fourth walls separating fans from creators and actors.

And for decades, these niche-occupying fans were accustomed to consuming very heterosexual content––shows and movies and comics and video games––and then writing whole-ass essays about how you could interpret this same-sex ship as legitimate within canon if you tilted your head 23 degrees, closed one eye, ignored the heterosexual ending, and stared long enough at these four screenshots from that one scene in episode 13.

You’d see flinches of contact between Fandom and The Established Source Material Creators sometimes. but it was rare. Anne Rice, for example, haaaaaaaaates fanfiction, and she’d go to great lawyery lengths to erase all she could find of it from the internet. Generally speaking, though, creators lived over there, and fans lived here, and we didn’t have much of an opportunity to interact with each other outside of, like, letters and conventions. There were still disrespectful fans, but you had to, like, make an effort to be a direct nuisance to the cast or crew.

Also, admitting to liking “slash” fanfiction as a woman back then got you “you just like slash because you’re too jealous to imagine your favorite male characters with women” at best and “that’s disgusting” at worst. ...Eh, there was probably worse, let’s be real.

So you can imagine the reaction many of us had when Paul Gross was interviewed about due South’s upcoming third season in 1997 and said of Callum Keith Rennie, the actor who’d play Ray Kowalski, “I tell you, slash fiction is going to go crazy when they see the new guy. He is really good-looking and sexy, the dangerous side of Fraser. It will be totally homoerotic.” THESE WERE THINGS AN EXECUTIVE PRODUCER SAID. IN 1997. KNOW WHAT ELSE HAPPENED IN 1997? ELLEN DEGENERES CAME OUT. AND THEN LOST HER CAREER BECAUSE OF IT FOR A LONG-ASS TIME. WILL AND GRACE WASN’T EVEN A THING YET (1998). NEITHER WAS THE ORIGINAL UK VERSION OF QUEER AS FOLK (1999).

Like, holy shit???

And the thing is? He wasn’t baiting. The show intentionally included a LOT of subtext between Fraser and Ray Kowalski, to the point where the last episode of the show showed Ray having a literal identity crisis because he could tell Fraser wanted to go back to Canada permanently and like, “who am I without him” and then the series ends with the two of them sledding into the actual sunset no I’m not exaggerating that happened WHAT EVEN WAS THIS BLESSING IN 1999.

Were they canon? Eeeeeh. Kinda? It was 1997, I’d call whatever they were groundbreaking, at least for me. And the reason I say it wasn’t baiting is because all Paul said was, “Slash fans will like this,” and many of us did. So, y’know. Truth in advertising. Well done, Paul.

AND NOW IT IS THE YEAR OF OUR QUEERS, 20gayteen, and SO MANY THINGS have changed for the better for LGBTQ folks in the last two decades. Like, Voltron fandom is WILD to me sometimes (in a fantastic way) because some of the fans are actually young enough to have been born after the AIDS crisis, after Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered, after Don’t Ask Don’t Tell––after all these horrible, devastating wounds were inflicted on our beautiful queer family. There are actually fans in Voltron who believe, without a sliver of doubt, that a same-sex pairing can and will become canon.

That’s bananas to me. That there is hope like that! Belief like that! Because I was born at the very end of the AIDS crisis and I didn’t hear the word bisexual until I was, like, twelve, let alone have enough of a support system around me to embrace that label for myself. B A N A N A S.

So of course––of course––there’s a part of me that hopes a same-sex pairing will happen in Voltron. Just thinking about how Dreamworks almost made Miguel and Tulio a canon couple in The Road to El Dorado in 2000 makes my heart twinge with disappointment. (Yes, Chel is great, but.)

See, I’m super attached to Voltron even when the writing is clearly stifled and bridled in by the people whose job it is to sell lots and lots of Voltron toys. I read klance fic and reblog VLD fanart and I have one (1) friend who also watches the show. We talk about it sometimes, and I throw fanart of Shiro at her because he’s her favorite. She doesn’t ship anything, and I am a cheerful little klance-shipping demon. I am in a fandom of two, and it’s pretty great in here.

But.

Voltron’s a lighthearted kid’s show about humans and aliens piloting mecha lions in space to save the universe from space colonialism, and while I will be dizzy with glee if a same-sex couple becomes canon in this show, I want it more for the intended audience of Voltron: kids.

I met a kid last year at Osaka Pride whose mother said, “He came home from school and told me, ‘I don’t feel like a girl or a boy,’” so this young mother brought her child to Pride to learn more about the community that her baby might belong in. And that lovely little human stayed on the fringes at first, apparently shy, until their mother told them, “Go on,” and then they spent the next ten minutes literally jogging around all the booths and beaming at everyone: the trans women in neon dresses cooing at how cute this little sunbeam was, the booth folks selling rainbow-themed merch, the couples hand-in-hand without shame or fear. And when they came back to their mom, they were completely carefree. And I thought, I wish that had been me.

And maybe it could’ve been, if every single cartoon I consumed as a child wasn’t coding gay men as villains, overtly implying that LGBT people had a direct link to actual pedophilia, and aggressively promoting heterosexual romance as The Only Acceptable Way of Love. If I’d grown up in a world where Ruby and Sapphire were on TV being happily in love every week, I might’ve realized what was in my own heart sooner than college.

So there is part of me who understands why people are so emotionally connected to the possibility of a ship like klance becoming canon. I’ve felt that urgent hope, that wild hunger, again and again and again and again in my life, and the only time I’ve ever had that hope realized in canon was in 2016 watching Viktor and Yuuri skate together in Yuri!!! on Ice. I cried. A lot.

I understand the emotion fueling the very, very bad decisions being made. In the simplest possible terms, the people who repeatedly harass the Voltron cast and crew are people who want a thing and are prioritizing getting that thing over the mental health of real people. I think it’s a symptom of internet detachment. When one is flinging words into a void, one doesn’t have to see how they’re received. Their actions––if I haven’t made it clear––are objectively harmful, and I don’t condone them.

But what I want to say––what I wrote this whole thing to say––is that Voltron isn’t a terrible fandom, and it isn’t the first fandom to have loud, overzealous fans who cross the line and make people inside and outside the fandom alike think, Yeesh they’re/we’re all lunatics. Voltron fandom is not The Worst, because I guarantee you if The Ray Wars were happening today, there’d totally be people on Twitter attacking Callum Keith Rennie directly for daring to replace David Marciano. It could have been so, so much uglier than it was, and it was already Bad.

In 1997, the fourth wall still more or less existed, and LGBT content––let alone respectful content––was scarce to say the least, so Fandom Discourse at the time remained generally contained to fan-on-fan unpleasantness. Today, that fourth wall is utterly gone, and I think all fandoms have to adapt to that and learn a whole new code of etiquette. LGBT rep is important, but there are respectful and effective ways to get it that don’t involve harassing the cast and crew. The voice actors and creators and crew of Voltron deserve basic human decency, and to be seen as people first and content creators second. It’s entirely possible for the majority of fandom to interact respectfully with the creators––it’ll just take time and patience, like most things that last.

So listen, everything’ll be fine. Try to have patience with each other. To quote a manga I’ve been translating: “There will be times in your life when you won’t be able to avoid being angry. Don’t make little things bigger than they have to be. Laugh and forgive.” Or, in this case, laugh and ignore. If you like a thing, awesome! Tell people! Or don’t! And if you don’t like something, carefully consider the consequences of what you do after you realize, I don’t like this. I don’t ship sheith at all, but for the last two years I’ve managed to leave alone the fans who do ship it and not send Shiro’s voice actor and his family angry, threatening messages. It wasn’t even difficult, guys. I just, like, read some klance fic instead.

I felt compelled to make this because I keep seeing posts from Voltron fans calling Voltron fandom a raging garbage fire and sure, there’re people playing near dry kindling with flamethrowers more than is advisable, but Voltron fans have created and will continue to create some beautiful content and friendships just for love of a show, and that’s lovely as fuck. If you’re feeling ashamed of your fandom and you haven’t done anything wrong, remember that you’re fandom, too. Keep being respectful, kind, and good. The terrible people won’t go away, but they won’t define the fandom for you unless you let them.

Be kind to each other, and things will improve.

And if anyone tells you your ship is bad, don’t talk to that person anymore, because that person probably has some dry kindling and a flamethrower.

And hey, if you’re at the end of this post and you’re like: Wow, this was way too short, and I would like to read more things this person has written, there’s always my Team Voltron-in-Japan AU. It has klance and Nyma/Allura and I enjoy writing it.

Wow, I’m hungry. Bye! :D/