#tumblr dot com is kind of stressing me out more than usual

[skippingseaglass]

chat i think this is why they say that social media is bad for people

[zerabsurdity]

Teeny tiny vent post, will put everything under cut cause I don't wanna ruin anyone's day lmao

I havan't been feeling my best lately to be completely honest and I don't know if I am accurately able to explain why.

A few months ago I went through a really bad platonic breakup (or whatever the fuck I can call it) with the people I considered my closest friends, people I thought would be there for me for the rest of my life. I sort of felt like I was finally going to experience forever friendship, the kind I craved since I was a kid.

Not only did these people pretend to be my friends for 5 whole months, but during that time they actively shittalked me with a person I have actively disliked (for extremwly valid reasons), but respected so long as that respect was reciprocated. Moreover, this person has used my ex-best friends multiple times and been shown unconditional forgiveness, which like, what the fuck. There's more factors at play with this which I honestly don't want to get into on tumblr dot com, but the gist of it is that if they spoke to me at the start of these 5 months, the issue could have been solved within minutes. Like I genuinely don't understand if people expect others to read their fucking mind but there's this thing called "communicating like grown mature adults" that I don't think these people are aware of. This whole thing brought back so many past fears and anxieties that I, quite frankly, thought I long solved in therapy.

Then my dumbass gets attached to the first person that shows me attention/affection an unhealthy amount, because innate human need for belonging or whatever. That one's on me though. Should've seen it coming. And while I do believe that I genuinely do care for this person very much, there's always the looming fear that we were just eachothers dopamine rush (for context, both of us have raging ADHD). That or both of us are just preoccupied with exams right now and I'm overthinking everything because of the whole platonic breakup thing. Yeah.

Fast forward to now and I just feel so... numb? Like I'm so full of this energy that I want to get out but I'm just not interested in doing anything. At all. Nor have I been successful at forcing an interest. I've been hoping to get more physically active but I'm in so much physical pain that I can't afford any more activity than absolutely necessary.

As I already said, I am im the middle of some finals right now and I just don't feel anything. No preparation stress, no pre-exam anxiety or like excitement. No fucking sense of accomplishment after getting really good grades. Nothing. Not one thing. The only faint emotion that I've been able to identify is frustration? Because of the fact that I'm not feeling all these intense emotions like I usually do? That's my best shot at explaining the state I'm in right now I guess. I can't even bring myself to talk to any of my friends because I'm so scared of being a burden, of being too much, and it has been taking a toll on me for quite some time now.

Anyways. Y'all want anything from the Lidl bakery?

[theres-whump-in-that-nebula]

Hi! Hope this is alright to ask. Pretty much I am trying to figure out what draws me to whump, and I feel a bit out of place when I try to find answers. I've been through traumatic experiences before and a lot of times I've heard that people cope by putting characters through traumatic experiences but then give them comfort or a happy ending as a way to take your power back/rewrite your personal life story. Personally I don't resonate with that because I don't always include comfort. But at the same time I do feel like I'm using whump writing to cope somehow... I'm just not sure how? Like when I look up articles on 'writing therapy' a lot of what comes up has to do with 'giving the characters the happy ending you would have liked for yourself' but again, I can't really relate. Plus, I also consume whump. Lately a show I'm watching has had one character go through a lot of whumpy scenes and it's sparked an interest in me, like I rewatch those scenes a bunch of times and now have an interest in writing that specific character going through pain when I had never considered that before. And it's also caused my mind to 'branch out' I guess, and get more ideas for what kind of whump I'd want to include in my own writing. Even though I've been interested in whump for a while already, this is really the first time canon whump scenes have drawn me in so much. I know I don't really have to justify liking whump to anyone and some people simply just like it, but in my case, I do feel like it's deeper than that and I just don't know what some possible explanations could be? Thanks if you're able to offer some insight!

Ah, glad you’ve found us here on the Tumblr Dot Com, my dude!

I’m kind of the same way, honestly. I’m mostly in it for the physical sensation (which is cozy and warms me up like a hot cup of tea on a cold, rainy day). It may very well be that whump is a brain chemistry thing that some people are just predisposed to (like how some people feel tingles when listening to AS/MR while others don’t). (I also experience tingles by the way… I know correlation doesn’t equal causation, but hm… it might be worth researching [nudges the psychology academics])

But I do also feel a level of emotional attachment to certain types of whump (particularly if a character is crying or screaming). For me, I like watching/reading those kind of scenes because that’s the only time I react in a “normal” way to sad and/or messed-up things; because I’m usually alone when I do this, so I don’t feel I have to hide what I feel from others. Everything comes to the surface and it’s very nice.

Or sometimes I’m just down in the dumps and I decide to stare at Gilbert Kane writhing on the dinner table for the eight-millionth time and go “Damn I wish that were me.” But like in a very normal, catharsis-seeking way… I don’t have a death wish.

So it could be an emotional expression thing(?) Or (if you’re into the more, eh, one-on-one Whumper/Whumpee dynamic) it could also be seeking validation that what people did to you was, in fact, Very Bad… or not idk.

Or, you could just have a fascination with the weird, disturbing, and gross, which manifests itself in a love of whump. This could be indicated by your other interests.

Or, you could just enjoy seeing variations on a theme; what writers do differently or the same as each other. I know I love binge-watching an actor’s work for a year (or three lmfao) and studying their mannerisms and micro-expressions. I also love picking apart imagery and wording in written pieces. So, it could just be a different type of “Love of the Craft,” so to speak?

Or, it could be an outlet for anger. Sometimes it is for me, but usually it isn’t the case. But generally, when I feel like throttling a person and cracking their skull open like a pistachio shell, I find a whump blogger with open asks and do horrible things to their OCs. I squeeze them like stress balls. Didn’t ask. Don’t care. [violence] [violence] [violence]

Anyway, thank you for asking me! Have fun and keep whumping.

(Autocorrect almost changed “whumping” to “whipping.” Very off-topic, I know… but so, so on-brand djdjdjdjdjdndndn help I’m laughing now)

[paradiselostbythedashboardlight]

Quarantine, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Wrote 430,943 Words of Prose in a Year

As we are coming up terrifyingly fast on a full year of quarantine with no end to the pandemic yet in sight for most people, I’ve been taking some time to reflect on the last year of my existence in a state that most people now refer to as quarantine. Since March of 2020, I, like most other sane people in my country, have stopped traveling, going to stores, seeing all but a limited group of other humans, and begun having recurring nightmares about being in crowds without a piece of cloth over my nose and mouth.

Suffice to say, it has been a bit stressful.

The other thing that I have done since COVID-19 began rapidly spreading across the globe last year is write over 430,943 words of fiction. 

The number seems insane to me still. That is (approximately) one Gone With The Wind, one entire Lord of the Rings series, or the first four Harry Potter books. That is still sadly not yet War and Peace (but who knows… the pandemic isn’t over yet).

So now that I am looking back, I find myself with one question: how did this happen? Why did I do this? What does this mean about my life this year?

Since apparently I answer best by writing a lot, let’s begin at the beginning. Let me tell you a story. I’ll keep it short, I swear.

Part 1: Blast From the Past

In March of 2020, I was still in the midst of an academic semester. There was a long academic document to write and a class to teach. However, as quarantine abruptly robbed me of most of my usual commitments, I was suddenly thrust into the position of having more time on my hands than I knew what to do with. Consequently, I decided to break out the Nintendo Switch I’d gotten for Christmas and revive a childhood interest in video games.

And boy did I. I played the games I owned for all they were worth. I played them during the evenings when I had no social engagements to attend. I played them during the Zoom meetings I was already struggling to pay attention to. By the end of March, I had finished one game, and it had set the wheels turning in my brain.

Here’s a fact about me: I don’t usually tend to write or read a lot of fanfiction about things that I consider really really good. Basically, fanfiction for me has always been an impulse born from incompletion or imperfection. I see no need to add to a perfect story (although I happily consume and create fanart). But for something enjoyable and yet slightly unsatisfying? That’s fanfic territory, bud.

So by April, I had developed a sort of epic fanfiction for this video game I was playing. It was one of those magnum opus kind of ideas, a grand retelling of the story with a huge sprawling plot and Themes (™). 

At first, it was merely a thought experiment that lived only in my head, a sort of entertainment to ponder in the hours before falling asleep. What changed? Well, a friend of mine decided to also write a fanfiction on the same video game and she kindly consented to let me read it.

Suddenly, I was ravenously hungry to read and to write and to share and to consume. I wrote a hundred thousand words of this fanfic in April and into early May, sending each chapter to my friend and being spurred onward by her kind comments. 

The fic became a gargantuan endeavor full of strange little challenges I set for myself. It was a canon-divergence, requiring plotting, worldbuilding, a darker and grimer tone. For some reason, I decided to write each chapter from a different character’s perspective, making the final product into a series of essentially short story character studies which together formed a plot.

By the end of May, the story was published for the world to see. It was well-received, although not particularly popular by fandom standards. And that was the end. I had gotten out my pandemic crazies, the semester was over and now I could move on. I had made my peace with the source material, plumbing all of the little details that I wanted to examine and creating a narrative that I found satisfying.

It was over.

Part 2: Summer Lovin?

Except that it wasn’t.

Confession: as I had been posting my giant fanfiction, I had also begun to explore the fan community itself, mostly curious to see some nice art and gather a bit of demographic info about what was popular within the community. As a result, I found a fanfic recommendations page. Among the recommendations was one author who kept popping up and i finally decided to give the fic a read.

Woah. It was good. Like, really good. Like, professional quality writing and themes that seemed designed to appeal to me. I devoured everything that the creator had posted in a week and then subscribed to eagerly wait for more.

As June rolled around, I realized that I had a problem on my hands. My great big gen masterpiece was finished, but this author had gotten me hooked on something else, something with a nefarious reputation online: shipping.

The term du jour for this seems to be “brain worms” so let’s just say that reading other fanworks had given me some brain worms. Inspired this time not just by the source material of the game, but now the fan community itself, my mind began to develop another idea.

I wrote the fic, about 11k, in a single afternoon of frantic writing. When I finished it, I knew it was one of my strongest pieces. It had just come together, a combination of all the thought that I’d been brewing up and a stylistic execution that just worked with the story I wanted to tell.

I posted it on a new account. Shipping seemed vaguely shameful to me still and my mom reads the other account.

To my surprise, the fic blew up. It got so much more attention than my long fic ever had. Even more significantly, a fan artist actually drew a gorgeous comic of the pivotal scene, completely out of the blue! I was essentially thunderstruck. Honestly, it was probably the first time in my life that I’d ever received so much positive reinforcement from a piece of writing.

While I’d written short stories for undergrad workshops, they’d never been particularly good and I’d never gotten particularly great feedback on them. I’d applied and been rejected by more MFAs and literary magazines than I could count. I’d pretty much resigned myself to writing for an audience of me and me alone (which I don’t mean to sound tragic about, writing for you is great and fun!)

But receiving so much support and praise and feeling like I’d made other people happy or sad or moved? There’s nothing better.

This makes my decision to write another fic for the ship sound vaguely cynical, the action of a person driven by an addiction to praise. I mean, no lie, aren’t we all a little addicted to approval?

But my next fic was another long one, an 80k passion project modern AU that I dreamed up while spending a slow summer alone with my books and only able to leave the house for long rambling walks in the woods. The premise was essentially about characters attending a five year college reunion, something that I myself had missed due to COVID in May of the same year. The fic quickly became a way for me to process thoughts on a lot of topics in my life ranging from relationships to politics to mental health to classical literature.

This fic was also received with far more attention than I was used to and, as a result, I finally joined the notorious Twitter dot com where I found people talking about my fic unprompted, eager to follow me and like my every random thought.

I can’t say that this process was not without its ups and downs. Fandom has changed, in many ways for the better, since my last engagement with it during the 2013 Supernatural days on Tumblr. While fan friendships are often idealized or demonized, they are pretty much like any other human friendship (okay, maybe a little bit more horny on main). There is potential for amazing connection as well as pettiness. But in a year where many people suddenly had no social spaces that were safe anymore, I’m glad that I found a new line of communication with the world.  

So I kept writing fics for the ship, producing a lot of work that I am genuinely proud of and making connections with other people who enjoyed it enough to leave a comment.

To conclude this section, I was in fandom again. While I had not seriously engaged with a fan community since around 2014, I was back with a vengeance. And I had discovered an important truth about what unlocked my ability to write more than I ever had before: community support.

Not simply the kudos and the views. It was the comments. The discourse. The discussion. To add and contribute my thoughts and ideas to a greater network of thoughts and ideas that fed off of one another.

Often I had seen people complain about there not being enough fanworks for particular media or characters. Now I knew the secret. The comments and the community created the works. If I commented on other people’s fics, the more likely they were to write more. I made a resolution I have tried to keep, to comment on any story that I legitimately enjoyed reading, even if I had no particularly intelligent thing to say about it.

Part 3: A Novel Idea

By late October, I had produced a considering oeuvre for my ship of choice and was enjoying slowing my pace as I planned a few future projects.

Remember, though, how I mentioned not having engaged with fandom for the past 5 years? Well, that didn’t mean I hadn’t been writing.

For the past 4 years, I have won NaNoWriMo and completed 4 novels of over 100k each in length. These projects have been massively fun and improved my confidence with executing stories at the scope that I desire.

And so in November 2020, I settled down to write another novel. November is always a sort of terrible time write a novel if you work in academia, but this year, I had more time than usual. I set out to write a comedy fantasy novel, something mostly lighthearted and full of hijinks in order to pretend away some of the quarantine blues (which by this point were well established in my psyche).

This year in particular, I was reminded that writing a novel is… harder than fanfic. That seems like a very obvious point, but I’d written novels before. Suddenly, though, I was realizing how much a novel requires you to set up the world and the characters, while fanfic can be pretty much all payoff all the time.

While the fanfic flowed in wild creative bursts of energy, the novel required diligence of another sort. I wrote 2,000 words every day for two months. It was a grind. Sometimes, it was a slog. 

And sometimes it just wasn't good. The thing about writing your own novels is that the first draft is way more likely to be not good. You’re balancing a lot and it’s easy to let a few balls that you have in the air drop for a chapter or two, with no recourse but to go back and edit later.

I finished the novel by writing a final speedrun of 6k on new years eve, ending my 2020 with another project under my belt. No one has read it. Not even I have reread it.

I’m still glad that I wrote it. I’ll write another one next year. No one will read that one either.

Sometimes, we write for ourselves and no external validation is necessary.

Part 4: Where are they now?

January of 2021 is somehow now behind me, which is terrifying. I’m still writing. Mostly fanfic, although occasionally I go doodle around with some original ideas that are more conceptual sketches for the next novel.

As for the fanfic, I think I still have a few more good ideas left in me, but  I will probably leave it behind before the year is out. That feels a little bittersweet, a sort of temporary burst of fun and friendship that I wonder if I’ll ever experience again.

Coming to the end of this reflection, I suppose I should make a summative statement about what it all means.

In the end, it might not mean a lot. There are some small takeaways. 

It turns out that encouragement makes you write more! Who knew? Also, more free time makes you write more! Wow!!!!

The point that I think this reflection exercise has shown me, the point that I think matters more than any other, is that writing is a way to process my thoughts. Even if it is through the lens of ridiculous video game fanfic or novels about sad wizards, my writing is my way to make sense of my own mind. 

And sharing that is special. If you share it with online strangers, with your family on Christmas Eve, with your close friend who has become even closer and dearer to you since she let you read her work, or just with your mom (the one personal legally required to read your damn novel if you want to share it). To share writing is to give someone a little peek at your beliefs about the world.

And right now? When we’re still isolated and bored and scared and in desperate need of distraction? Binge some TV, play Nintendo, read a book. Take in other people’s thoughts.

But put down your own somewhere as well. It’s a conversation.

And for once, it’s a conversation that doesn’t have to take place on fucking Zoom.

[data-monkey]

AO3 stats project: correlations

Okay. Now for some really fun stuff: correlations between different categories of metadata (like, correlations between ratings and tags, character tags and genre tags, etc). And as with the previous post in this series, some of the content I discuss may not be strictly work-appropriate.

The Data | Basic Questions | Fandoms | Tags | Correlations | Kudos | Fun Stuff

Thanks to @eloiserummaging for beta reading these posts; any remaining errors are my own.  A Python notebook showing the code I used to make these plots can be found here.

All right. We've got a list of top tags now. How do those tags relate to each other? That is, if I have a work labeled "Fluff", does that change how likely it is that that work will also be labeled "Angst"? I'm plotting, here, a matrix that answers that question directly. I can compute how often "Fluff" and "Angst" would appear together if they were just randomly assigned to all 4.3 million works that I collected metadata for. The blocks I'm showing below are colored by whether the actual number of times "Fluff" and "Angst" appear together is greater or lesser than that expectation. (We do it that way, instead of just counting the raw number of connections, because otherwise it looks like everything is correlated with "Fluff", just because there are a lot of works labeled "Fluff" in the data set.) If I pick two tags--say, "Fluff" on the bottom, and "Angst" on the left--I can follow them to where they intersect, and the color of that little block tells me about whether they're correlated. Things that are pink are less likely than you'd expect to appear together, while things that are green are more likely. The diagonal line is always that pale green-grey color because, by definition, "Romance" appears with "Romance" exactly as often as you'd expect, and the graph is symmetric across that diagonal line because it doesn't matter if we take "Fluff" then "Angst" or "Angst" then "Fluff."

So one really interesting thing is that this plot is mostly green (so things are correlated). Not only do these tags appear a lot, but they appear together more than you’d expect, and even when they’re anti-correlated--that is, when being labeled one makes you less likely to be labeled another--it’s not by very much. The strongest correlation is between “Romance” and “Humor”, so I guess the rom com is alive and well! Angst and hurt/comfort also appear together a lot, which I suppose makes sense.

We can make correlation plots like this for other things. How about pairing types?

Per the AO3, “Multi” means “more than one kind of relationship, or a relationship with multiple partners”, and “Other” means “everything not covered by the other labels”. The structure of this is kind of interesting, too. Remember, pink means things are anti-correlated (appear together less often than expected) and green means they’re correlated (appear together MORE often than expected), so M/M is the Lone Ranger of pairing types, making all other pairing types less likely if it's included. Even more than Gen, which you’d expect to exclude other categories!

Now for the REALLY fun stuff: how do all of these things correlate with other things? Here's an obvious one: ratings vs tags. No more symmetry, because we're showing different things on the two axes.

Not too surprised by this: “Smut” has a really strong relationship with rating, because most works of erotica deserve the higher ratings. The other tags are much less correlated with rating; Fluff and Humor incline to lower ratings, Established Relationship to higher ratings, and the others are kind of in the middle.

Do ratings and tags correlate with pairing type?

Hmm. Interesting. Romance is way more likely to be F/M than you’d expect. (Do we not write as many M/M romances, or do we just call them something else? A couple of friends also pointed out to me that this might mean “romance” as in “the publication genre of romance” not as in “romantic plotlines generally”, which makes sense and would make them more M/F-heavy given publication trends.) Established relationship is very skewed to M/M. Gen anti-correlates with most of the tags you’d expect. Apparently only single-pairing romantic relationships can be fluffy. F/F is neither as funny nor as angsty as chance would indicate.

I think this pattern can be explained this way: Gen is way more likely to be a low rating, and the trend you see for most other things is just that we’re comparing to the average--if Gen is way more likely to be rated General Audiences than is typical, then the other pairing types have to be slightly less General Audiences than you’d expect to make up for it. (This argument doesn’t necessarily apply to the other correlations I was showing, because in those plots there are a bunch of tags I’m not showing and because non-ratings tags can appear together.)

How about the top relationship tags--do they correlate with anything?

Huh. Well, most of these ships have preferentially high ratings--I think that’s the same effect as in the rating and pairing correlation: things without a romantic/sexual relationship have lower ratings, so on average the works containing relationships will have a higher rating. That’s not universal--look at Magnus/Alec, for example--but it’s common. The other two obvious things here are 1) Dean/Sam really skews to high ratings, 2) apparently Harry/Louis fans reject the rating system.

Okay, that’s...less interesting than I was expecting. Lots of Harry/Louis smut, lots of Keith/Lance modern AUs. The most likely established relationship is Derek/Stiles. Magnus/Alex and Yuuri/Victor are the fluffiest. Not much romance, except for Draco/Harry, and that pairing also has an unusual amount of humor.

What about character tags?

Hmm. Looks like there are a lot of teen-rated Marvel works, and Supernatural leans towards the higher ratings (which we already knew).

This basically just repeats stuff we already noticed in the relationships plot, I think. One thing I didn’t notice up there is that John and Sherlock are not that likely to be tagged in Established Relationship works, which is kind of interesting as they’re long-term partners (not necessarily romantic partners) in most versions of the canon.

How about characters and pairing type...are there characters that appear more often in one kind of pairing than you'd expect based on randomness? (Note that all these characters appear most in M/M stories, because those are by far the most common--this is just asking a relative question about how much they appear in other kinds of stories.)

Mostly not super interesting, I have to say. Steve, Tony, Natasha, and Harry Potter are all more likely than usual to appear in poly relationships or in F/M stories, apparently, and Stiles and Castiel are less likely than usual to appear in gen works.

Finally, a really fun thing (that I have to link to an external site to do, because tumblr doesn’t like javascript in posts). Instead of just looking at the top 10 tags, here are the top 100 tags portrayed as dots, arranged in a connected graph: the dots represent tags (with the popularity of the tag represented by its size), and they’re connected by lines whose thickness indicates how often the two things appear together, relative to chance. You can also use this kind of setup to work out sets of interconnected tags that are more closely tied to each other than to the other tags. I colored those sets with different colors, so you can identify them. Hovering your mouse pointer over a dot should tell you which tag it is.

Here are the blocks of tags that the algorithm found:

Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Christmas, Crack, Cute, Domestic Fluff, Fluff, Fluff And Humor, Humor, Light Angst, One Shot, Romance, Tooth-Rotting Fluff

 Angst, Blood, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Character Death, Dark, Death, Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, I'm Sorry, Magic, Minor Character Death, Nightmares, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sad, Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts, Torture, Violence

Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Crossover, Drabble, Drama, Family, Friendship, Future Fic, Post-Canon, Pre-Slash, Spoilers

Alcohol, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Established Relationship, Explicit Language, Explicit Sexual Content, First Time, Fluff And Smut, Jealousy, Kissing, Mpreg, Polyamory, Sex, Sexual Content, Slash, Smut

Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Bdsm, Blow Jobs, Bondage, Dirty Talk, Dom/Sub, Dubious Consent, Hand Jobs, Masturbation, Oral Sex, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Rimming, Rough Sex, Spanking

Angst With A Happy Ending, Developing Relationship, Eventual Smut, Falling In Love, First Kiss, Fluff And Angst, Friends To Lovers, Friendship/Love, Happy Ending, Implied Sexual Content, Love, Love Confessions, Mutual Pining, Other Additional Tags To Be Added, Pining, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Swearing, Unrequited Love

I love this! To me, those sets look like: fluffy plot-based tags, violence and disturbing content tags, more action-oriented plot-based tags, less explicit vanilla-ish erotica tags, more explicit or kinky erotica tags, and romance. That’s so cool. (Not everything makes sense--why is Drabble where it is?--but still, cool.)

Or in other words: some numerical routines correctly identified the porn. :)

Up next: what gets kudos?

[bamf-castiel]

(1/?) Okay imma say this here since my blog is SFW, but I've noticed something in a lot of top!dean/Bottom!Cas docs that irks me a lot. They always infantilize Castiel. Make him pale and frail and weak. He's a fucking angel of the lord. Misha is buff as hell. And fairly tan too. He is strong and powerful, and I hate seeing this stripped from him in a lot of these kinds of fics. Yeah, he's kinda dorky and socially awkward, but he's also intelligent and STRONG

(2/?) One thing I enjoy about top!Cas/bottom!dean fics is that they don't take away Dean's strength, his cockiness, his attitude. They /use/ it. I like seeing big tough Dean grinning as he's pushed against the wall (Like he was in the PILOT EPISODE except that was a car), getting all blushy and excited when 'sexy rules' were mentioned, and was pushed down onto the bed by the amazon. He remains strong and protective, but Cas is always weak and soft when he was bottom and it drives me crazy.(3/?) And when it comes to children, especially mpreg AUs, Cas is shown as the mother figure more often. Why? Dean was a mother to Sam, Dean had been shown to be GREAT with children, and likes spending time with them. And are we forgetting the scene when he was making the bunker his home and literally said he was nesting?? Cas is awkward and confused around children, but that's not his own fault. Cas had Jimmy's memories, he knows how to be a father, and he learned about a father's love from him

My dear stressed Nonnie, one more time, I am so sorry I made you feel like you need to apologize fdvbdfjs. Back to your message: 1/? - I agree so much. I tend to avoid fics with this kind of characterization because I personally don’t like it.I mean, I am quite okay when Cas is pale and weakened because of something that happened in the fic - like because of an illness or maybe substance abuse, or anything, really. It would be logical and make perfect sense. But I dislike it greatly when it’s only because he’s ‘the bottom’ in the relationship and people feel the need to make him look smaller/paler/tinier/more feminine in comparison to Dean. I mostly don’t like this portrayal of Cas in fics that are set in canon verse - but that’s just my personal opinion. And Nonnie, you know what I also don’t - personally -  like? When Cas is written as completely naive, like, uh, that makes me nope out from a fic pretty quickly. I absolutely adore the fact that Cas is powerful, tall,  beautifully tan, with shoulders and arms that can lift even my self-confidence. He’s so handsome, and like his hands? Big strong hands that turned monsters to ashes?? His beautiful thighs? Why to take this away? I love that about Cas that he’s this ancient being that can destroy cities and he still can be so soft and gentle. He can touch with such tenderness, smile with such warmth and I just??? There is absolutely no need to take away some parts of him to enjoy the other. You can literally have both. Cas is a complicated character, you don’t need to reduce him to some stereotypes based on some weird views on sex positions. And I will repeat it again - I like bottom!Cas. I prefer bottom!Dean but I like bottom Cas too. But I like it when he’s still Cas, not some meek pale version of himself. And again, that what I, as in me, Emilia aka bamf-castiel on tumblr dot com, like.Personally. Others can enjoy whatever they want to.2/? - again, I agree so much with this! I - again, personally - love it so much! Dean is still very much himself, and I always get few years added to my lifespan when I see it.I love Dean so much, I love Cas so much. I am so happy when in fics they both are described ans strong and as themselves. Those are my absolute fave kind of fics. And I know those are not the same but I do see Dean and low key submissive, and it’s so lovely? He’s such a rough tough guy, he’s fierce and protective and loves so deeply. I enjoy it greatly when people explore the other parts of his character, I love it when Cas takes care of him and Dean lets him. I like it when they are both soft with each other, too. They deserve the gentleness and the softness. But yes, I agree, there is a hug difference how bottom!Dean and bottom!Cas are usually portrayed in this fandom. ( again, I say this based on the fics I stumbled across - I have not read everything, and I have read things that differ from this, I don’t mean to generalize and hurt anyone’s feeling. Plus you have every right to enjoy whatever characterization you want) 3/? - I don’t think I’ve read enough fics with mpreg to have an opinion about it, but I guess I agree? I mean both of them have character traits usually associated with mother/father figures. I think that I see Dean more of a mother figure than I see Cas as one though. Everyone can enjoy whatever they can, but yeah, looking on canon I agree with you here Nonnie.But that’s just my opinion, of course. Thank you for the message!

[robynmarkius]

I wanted to reblog my Website News because I have a lot of Source Tags on this Tumblr for my (dot)Com domain that I lost.

I am still very upset over this and every time I accidentally click when I'm trying to change a link somewhere I still have access to, the sight of my 20 year old Domain up for sale for like $3k makes me cry and get so mad at the same time. I'm so torn because while I lost 20 years of Search Engine cred, all my links in from anywhere over the years, any sudden wonder if anyone will look for me if they see this nonsense... I also realize there was a whole lot of downsides and stress attached to that domain too.

Webmistress is now a defunct email address... That means I had to change some things, but... on the positive side, no more 29k emails a day, (I wish I was kidding,) 80% of which were spam in like 5 different languages. 18% were just harrassment that was progressively getting worse, and there was nothing I could do to stop it or report it. I was the top level of the mails; my husband could only help so much. The remaining 2% were actual emails, but I am certain I have deleted a lot of them in the process of burning the other 20-some thousand digital junk pieces.

I never really made any money off my site. The few donations I got were usually people I knew, save one or two very kind strangers who covered the cost of a renewal one year and a month of hosting another time. I never had any idea what I could do to make any money to cover costs and I have never been confident enough in my artwork (or the time I take to do one piece,) to take commissions.

Most of my site hits were just bots and spam, and I couldn't keep a Guestbook active longer than a day before it had to be taken down or offline because it was flooded with links and spam. It was a horrible mess and super stressful to try and keep after... and I honestly just couldn't. My character; Sailor Shadow/Robyn Markius; is very important to me. I love all my creations, even the villains, and I always refused to take the risk of letting someone help with the site for fear of them stealing everything and then I could do nothing about it; because I let them in.

I keep telling myself that the losses are devastating, sure, but my mental health may be better in time for those. I haven't lost my website itself, just a domain name. I can rebuild with what I have if I actually just sit down and do it come the New Year.

Yes, the domain name meant a great deal. There's a reason it hurts so much to look at that damned reseller page. The weight behind that domain wasn't all good, though, and some of the memories attached to it had sort of become... burdensome. It's like the front door caught fire and can't be replaced due to structure damage. I was holding onto a picture of how the front door looked in hopes it'd keep the few actual people who looked. I forgot there's a side and back door I can use until that's what I (now) have to do. So, tell ya what... let's wall off the front door and just make our side door ([dot]Net) as welcoming as we can. I'm setting a goal for myself to have Lunar Eclipse redesigned and up by no later than Mid-January, (allowing me time for IRL things that need done too,) even if it's not 100% how I imagine it should be. It just needs to function, and serve the purpose the site is for: My Fanfiction and Artwork Repository. Anything else is just gravy.

Sorry for the very long post, but if nothing else, I think I needed to put thoughts into words and throw it somewhere where it can be seen by at least one other person. Thank you for reading the whole way through my rambling. If you did, have some Christmas Cake. ♡ 🍰🎂🍓

Ichigo / My 'Aphrodite Stand-In' says Merry New Year, and be safe out there!

2019 was kind of a bad year.

It culminated in my loss of my domain name (SsilorShadow[dot]Com) to a Domain Reseller with nothing I can do to regain a domain that I owned for 20 years. I thought I had renewed it, but I didn't, and so, it got snatched as soon as the Grace Period expired without my notice.

I do still own SailorShadow.Net and .Org, and I purchased .us to make myself feel better at the loss. I made .Net my Primary Domain now, so please use that to access the site again.

I'm trying to look at the positives, though...

•My e-mail turned into a Spam Dump and there wasn't anything I could do to stop it.

•I haven't been able to send mail for almost 10 years, and now it doesn't matter.

•Maybe losing .Com might kick my ass to get the update done... though, that kept getting put off because I'd think myself into a corner with trying to overdo the fancy CSS. I should just go with simple, instead of trying to make super fancy cool tricks work.

Maybe 2020 will be better, and less of a huge Garbage Fire. See you in 2020, everyone.