#virtual strangers

[7kgnhiagdp39581]

season 2!!

i love them dearly, it’s my favorite korean bl novel honestly!! 😭 work in progress, might finish some time :3 but i have a bunch of merch of them lined up, but i might have them made end of the year instead

[neatnete]

[yuuuvie]

Guildmate Nextdoor (gmnd) ;; Ji9star (worldstar) design

[memebigboi-118]

So excited for season 2 to get translated!!

[kyungraeist]

s2 of gmnd looks interesting

[rachaelstray]

Virtual Strangers - review (AD)

I was kindly given an advanced electronic copy of Virtual Strangers by Sam Canning in exchange for an honest review*. Virtual Strangers book blurb Do you believe in love at first type? When Ada set up her own PR firm from a coffee shop, she didn’t expect to meet journalist Fraser. Also working there daily, he soon becomes a friend. Reporting on interesting things to do around Edinburgh, Fraser…

[rosemarytales]

yes all the themes of all of us strangers but also "if you could hear me crying why didn't you come into my room" and "how come no one found me" coexisting and not in the way we think, like the way adam is implying that he would have done better, he would not have ignored the cries for help and actually done something, but in reality when it came to harry crying for help it barely even registered not because he didn't want to help but because he was too stuck in his own private bubble of pain to notice harry's

[elowmojo]

New mod by Beaniebby coming soon

[7kgnhiagdp39581]

ghibli au

[penny00dreadful]

Happy @subeddieweek everyone. Who doesn’t love a bit of manhandling?

[kalinara]

(Fall of the House of X #3)

I never get tired of these two.

[h-i-raeth]

Feels like there needs to be more fics where Corroded Coffin is successful but not fucking. Rockstar levels successful. Successful as in they're well known within their niche and not at all outside of it. Successful as in their early albums are coveted but you're not going to stumble onto them on any mainstream radio station. Successful as in they're doing enough shows on a fairly active circuit that they can quit their day jobs but they can't buy a house off of the profits.

[infiniteentertainment]

if they show steve's parents in s5 that's your sign he's dying

[umbrx]

Number six is my number.

Today, November 6th, I went to take a written exam and have an interview for a position as a researcher on a project at my uni. I received the results and scored a whooping 95/100 points, making me the top candidate they will take on the project. I had a good feeling in the morning regarding it, and an even better after it was all done. This is why I was gone for a long time, to finish my Master thesis, defend it, finish my last exams and apply and prepare for this job.

Hard work paid off, and I will likely start working this December. I will get the opportunity to enjoy a book fair next week, treat myself and write some too.

December 6th, though, is another wonderful date as Wind and Truth gets published. Moral of the story, 6 is my number. 666 is Doffy's. Hope to spend more time here now that I can finally breathe again.

[laundrybiscuits]

So I was playing around with an expanded version of this wlw vamp!Eddie snippet (tentatively titled heard you like magic) for Monsterfucker May because, well, 1) it’s pretty good incentive to write something I’d been thinking about anyway 2) I am procrastinating on a fuckton of work right now.

Anyway, I started jotting down some thoughts that wound up being practically a whole-ass essay, and the expanded fic definitely isn’t going to be posted before tomorrow, so…I thought I might as well post this. It’s not very exciting; it's about 1300 words of me ruminating on the worldbuilding/character decisions I’ve been making about adapting Steve’s gender. 

The heard you like magic fic is really just me sort of iterating on the loose sketch of cisgirl!Steve I started noodling around with in feel how you fit around me. Obviously it’s not the same timeline at all; I hadn’t really thought through this AU very much, since it was spontaneously birthed from skimming the lyrics to “Red Wine Supernova” and getting inappropriately stuck on “her canine teeth in the side of my neck” but I’m using it to play with similar ideas. 

I do think a very similar story to canon could have been created with cisgirl!Steve. (If female!Steve is trans, the timelines get a little complicated and there’s literally no way she could have socially transitioned and achieved an unquestioned popularity in the 80s. It could be a good and interesting story, but it would have fundamentally different beats.) Canon!Steve’s initial thematic/narrative function as the hot, popular boyfriend who embodies normality and social acceptance (at a cost) within the context of high-school-drama-turned-supernatural-horror could absolutely have worked with some of the genders shuffled; admittedly, it would likely have been received by audiences very differently. But from a purely thematic/structural perspective, yeah, I think the same story could have been told. 

So the specific question I’m poking at here is: what does that Steve look like, if his largely unquestioned shifting relationship to masculinity becomes a largely unquestioned shifting relationship to femininity? Part of what makes him such an interesting character is how he navigates taking on a babysitter/caretaker role within the group, because that runs counter to his gendered expectations about who he is and what he’s good at. For a teenage girl, though, “babysitter/caretaker” is a pretty conventional role. 

I’ve thought a lot about approaching this as “What would have to change to make female!Steve commercially viable?” Honestly, I do think the production machine would probably have killed her off as planned; she’d be too unlikeable. She’s hot and bitchy in a way that is simply unforgiveable in an 80s-inflected horror narrative. 

But what if they didn’t, though? What’s the minimum amount of change needed to make Stephanie Harrington work in the story and world of Stranger Things?

If we’re cleaving as closely as possible to canon’s themes and structure, Nancy has to be male. Their relationship needs to represent convention and safety, because Nancy’s journey is partly about her inability to let things lie. For better and for worse, she’s not the kind of person who can pretend that everything’s okay when it’s not, and Steve exists to be the temptingly normative option. 

Jonathan Byers is basically already Ally Sheedy in the Breakfast Club, so that’s straightforward enough: he’s a trope of the artsy “unsafe” alternative, the one Nancy’s parents wouldn’t approve of, but the one who understands and enables her rejection of easy answers. If we’re not concerning ourselves with marketing decisions, he could still be male and fit the same thematic role in M!Nancy’s arc, but that would change Steve’s journey pretty significantly. 

I think it could still be a good story! There’s a lot of potential there. But if we want to keep Steve’s confrontation with Jonathan as a turning point for his character, it just works much better if Jonathan’s a conventional rival. The dynamics also play out pretty differently if M!Jonathan gets in a physical fight with F!Steve—it’s hard to imagine any version of Nancy being super chill about that. F!Steve is also slightly less likely to default to that kind of physical confrontation as socially acceptable/expected, although I could definitely see it similarly escalating to physical violence with F!Jonathan. 

The Stobin dynamic more or less works with the genders exchanged. This is pre-Will and Grace; the concept of a “fag hag” existed but was not nearly as mainstream as it would become in a decade or two, so there wouldn't necessarily be a lot of expectations or models of what their relationship should look like. One minor shift: the public imagination had a much more specific concept of what gay men looked and acted like than it did for lesbians, so Steve would probably be a little more resistant and/or take a little longer to get it. 

The Party can still keep their canon genders; I don’t think that would affect the older teens too much. It might shift the dynamic of Dustin seeing Steve as a role model, but I think that’s a sufficiently indirect/unstated part of their relationship that it could translate reasonably well. I do think Dustin might get a highly embarrassing and often-denied crush on female!Steve, but he absolutely would not admit it. 

Max would probably be a little closer to F!Steve, since she’d have a bit less older-brother baggage, and less drawn to M!Nancy. Mike would hate F!Steve exactly the same amount, and neither Lucas nor Will seem to be that invested in canon!Steve anyway. 

More generally, though, I don’t see F!Steve as taking refuge in “at least I’m a good babysitter,” because to some extent that would be expected. F!Steve probably didn’t babysit for spending money as a younger teen, but it wouldn’t be out of the question. I really cannot stress enough how much growing up in small-town midwest USA pre-Y2K was oriented towards training young girls for motherhood. They got explicit and implicit instructions that young boys simply did not.

I’m not completely convinced that F!Steve would be as inclined towards a big family as canon!Steve, either. For Steve, whose familial model is an almost wholly absent father, a big family is part of the fantasy of belonging. While I do tend to read him as having honest intentions about pulling his weight, he doesn’t have a very practical understanding of what childrearing is like, and anything he does above the bare minimum is going to be praised. F!Steve would be more keenly aware of the scrutiny she’d be under as a mother, as well as the sheer scale of labor involved. Also, she’d be much less likely to want to pop out six kiddos from her own uterus. The calculations are different.

I grew up in a very conservative area with girls whose primary worldly ambition was genuinely to become mothers. When we talked about “careers,” it was with the explicit understanding that it would be a side gig to help support their main role as a mother. Some of them do now literally have six children.

Steve does not strike me as that kind of person on a fundamental level. He has certain normative ideas about what family and relationships look like—his arc really is all about disrupting and complicating those ideas. In the context of F!Steve, though, I don’t think that thread of clinging to hegemonic norms would manifest in wanting a big family; it seems more likely to me that she’d have some vague ideas about two or three kids and a wealthy, attentive husband. 

I also don’t necessarily see her being quite as keen to lean into a tank role. The “woman warrior” trope was gearing up for the cresting wave of girl-power third-wave feminism in the 90s, but it wasn’t quite there yet—certainly not for someone whose narrative category is “the conventional one.” I actually think that could be a good angle for F!Steve’s development; while canon!Steve has his established/normative role as the tank to counter the subversive dynamics of his role as caretaker, F!Steve could potentially flip those: it’s not weird or unexpected for her to babysit, although she might be surprised by how well she does with Dustin, but translating her athletic ability to combat could propel her towards accepting that she might not be 100% conventional after all.

Anyway, I really need to stop thinking about this and get back to the core of this story, which is “what if vampire!Eddie wildly underestimated how much of a monsterfucker Stevie is, and also what if they were both girls”

[angel---eater]

bashing my fucking adhd riddled head against the wall because i need to fuckin prep this character sheet for tomorrow but executive disfunction is leading into actual dissociation and i just wanna give up. like goddamn i dont wanna play 5e with this dm we're just NOT vibing as people. ugh. thank god for conflicting schedules. just gotta get through tomorrow