Hannah, || ASD. Depression || Genderqueer, they/them, Asexual, Demi-Panromantic || Artist, Atheist, Feminist, Sufferer of Wanderlust and Fan of various things || Expect art, writing, rambling and reblogs of prettyful stuff || ko-fi.com/amalukofi
If tumblr is selling data to FUCKING Midjourney and OpenAI for real, I hope every user on this site makes sure they get nothing but the data equivalent of a fucking nuke. FUCK image generating algorithms.
2 Big Tricks In Life That They Don't Tell You About:
Be straight up whimsical. Find beauty in everything you see. Force yourself to see that beauty if you must. Just do it. Theres so many things in this world that can be found beautiful in so many different ways. Today I looked at my pen as I was noting something down and thought of it as beautiful because I have been using it for such a long time. I also made art I didnt really like but I submitted it anyway and the receiver found it so beautiful that it helped me see it as beautiful too. Everything can be beautiful and lovable if you open your eyes wide enough
Get strange. Be weird. Let small things become part of your soul. Talk about everyday things as if they were extraordinary. Indulge. Indulge a lot. In everything that makes your soul shine bright. Have some strange beliefs. Be happy , even if you might be feeling completely neutral / numb (<- A "fake it til you make it" kind of thing - though its good to keep in mind that it doesnt work for everyone all the time. Do what you think is best for you). Make things that appeal purely to you. Prioritize yourself and your own heart , soul and mind. Embarrassment / cringe is temporary and a speck of dust compared to this whole life ahead of us. Authenticity is the precedence. Be the strangest & cringest version of yourself
I’m tired of hearing people say “Disney’s Cinderella is sanitized. In the original tale, the stepsisters cut off parts of their feet to make the slipper fit and get their eyes pecked out by birds in the end.”
I understand this mistake. I’m sure a lot of people buy copies of the complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales, see their tale of Aschenputtel translated as “Cinderella”, and assume what they’re reading is the “original” version of the tale. Or else they see Into the Woods and make the same assumption, because Sondheim and Lapine chose to base their Cinderella plot line on the Grimms’ Aschenputtel instead of on the more familiar version. It’s an understandable mistake. But I’m still tired of seeing it.
The Brothers Grimm didn’t originate the story of Cinderella. Their version, where there is no fairy godmother, the heroine gets her elegant clothes from a tree on her mother’s grave, and where yes, the stepsisters do cut off parts of their feet and get their eyes pecked out in the end, is not the “original.” Nor did Disney create the familiar version with the fairy godmother, the pumpkin coach, and the lack of any foot-cutting or eye-pecking.
If you really want the “original” version of the story, you’d have to go back to the 1st century Greco-Egyptian legend of Rhodopis. That tale is just this: “A Greek courtesan is bathing one day, when an eagle snatches up her sandal and carries it to the Pharaoh of Egypt. The Pharaoh searches for the owner of the sandal, finds her and makes her his queen.”
Or, if you want the first version of the entire plot, with a stepdaughter reduced to servitude by her stepmother, a special event that she’s forbidden to attend, fine clothes and shoes given to her by magic so she can attend, and her royal future husband finding her shoe after she loses it while running away, then it’s the Chinese tale of Ye Xian you’re looking for. In that version, she gets her clothes from the bones of a fish that was her only friend until her stepmother caught it and ate it.
But if you want the Cinderella story that Disney’s film was directly based on, then the version you want is the version by the French author Charles Perrault. His Cendrillon is the Cinderella story that became the best known in the Western world. His version features the fairy godmother, the pumpkin turned into a coach, mice into horses, etc, and no blood or grisly punishments for anyone. It was published in 1697. The Brothers Grimm’s Aschenputtel, with the tree on the grave, the foot-cutting, etc. was first published in 1812.
The Grimms’ grisly-edged version might feel older and more primitive while Perrault’s pretty version feels like a sanitized retelling, but such isn’t the case. They’re just two different countries’ variations on the tale, French and German, and Perrault’s is older. Nor is the Disney film sanitized. It’s based on Perrault.
@seaglassandeelgrass coming in with the good tags:
#faerie tales #also they’re folk tales; there is no ‘One True Version’ #and the static literized version found in collected tales is going to be synthesised by the collector (possibly from multiple sources) #to make it fit for publication (and to what degree of editorialising; bowdlerization; moralising; or simple editing for written rather #than oral clarity you’ll likely never know) #meanwhile the active tales in oral tradition change with each telling unless there’s a very strict accuracy-of-transmission structure #which most stories commonly thought of as ‘Fairy Tales’ in Western popular culture are not coming from that sort of formal oral tradition #and you get lots of floating elements that pop up in a wide variety of stories; nebulous overlap between what’s a variant and what’s a #unique tale in its own right; crossover and exchange of stories between different cultural traditions #and some that have been volleyed around so extensively it becomes a chicken-or-egg situation of who originated what #and plenty of stories which such relatable elements that they evolved convergently without any common root #lots of ‘don’t be wasteful’ 'be polite to your elders’ 'be careful smallchild where you stray’ 'this is why this bit of nature is this way’
woodsgotweird said: man i just jumped on the bandwagon because i am a sheep. i have no idea where it came from and i ask myself this question all the time
Maybe someone made a typo and it just got out of hand?
I kinda feel like panic!at the disco started the whole exclamation point thing and then it caught on around the internet, but maybe they got it from somewhere else, IDK.
It’s a way of referring to particular variations of (usually) a character — dark!Will, junkie!Sherlock, et cetera. I have suspected for a while that it originated from some archive system that didn’t accommodate spaces in its tags, so to make common interpretations/versions of the characters searchable, people started jamming the words together with an infix.
(Lately I’ve seen people use the ! notation when the suffix isn’t the full name, but is actually the second part of a common fandom portmanteau. This bothers me a lot but it happens, so it’s worth being aware of.)
“Bang paths” (! is called a “bang"when not used for emphasis) were the first addressing scheme for email, before modern automatic routing was set up. If you wanted to write a mail to the Steve here in Engineering, you just wrote “Steve” in the to: field and the computer sent it to the local account named Steve. But if it was Steve over in the physics department you wrote it to phys!Steve; the computer sent it to the “phys” computer, which sent it in turn to the Steve account. To get Steve in the Art department over at NYU, you wrote NYU!art!Steve- your computer sends it to the NYU gateway computer sends it to the “art” computer sends it to the Steve account. Etc. (“Bang"s were just chosen because they were on the keyboard, not too visually noisy, and not used for a huge lot already).
It became pretty standard jargon, as I understand, to disambiguate when writing to other humans. First phys!Steve vs the Steve right next to you, just like you were taking to the machine, then getting looser (as jargon does) to reference, say, bearded!Steve vs bald!Steve.
So I’m guessing alternate character version tags probably came from that.
100% born of bang paths. fandom has be floating around on the internet for six seconds longer than there has been an internet so early users just used the jargon associated with the medium and since it’s a handy shorthand, we keep it.
I just had a discussion with my friend about fanfiction and how we tend to assume that women are the writers without any actual proof. Then I said, hey, I know fanfiction written by gay and trans dudes. But then I remembered, wait, I think I know one writer who just must be cis het based on his work. Anyway, all writers, be honest, who are you?
Please reblog if you're interested in the results.
If you have ever written any fanfiction, tell me your identity, pls
Just for fun, I decided to crunch some numbers so I could see the following:
actual (rough) numbers of voters for each category
what the percentages look like if you remove the 'other/prefer not to tell/see the results' votes*
recombinations: how many queer ppl? how many cis ppl? etc
putting it all under a cut.
actual (rough) numbers of voters for each category.
Three caveats:
a. the percentages are only given to the tenth of a percent, which isn't very accurate
b. related to (a): if even one person selects an option, the poll must reflect a number bigger than 0.0%. Since the smallest option is 0.1%, that is the number that will appear. Therefore, these numbers reflect the rough maximum number of trans het women that voted.
c. there's no way to know if anyone voted more than once using multiple tumblr accounts.
With that out of the way: How many people (roughly speaking) actually selected each of the options?
cis het woman: 8,135 votes
cis queer woman: 25,177 votes
trans het woman: 86 votes
trans queer woman: 2,141 votes
nonbinary person: 19,354 votes
cis het man: 1,028 votes
cis queer man: 1,456 votes
trans het man: 257 votes
trans queer man: 8,564 votes
other/prefer not to tell/see the results: 19,438 votes
The actual numbers help show how big even the smallest percentages are. the tumblr fic writer population is a bit more diverse in gender/orientation than I expected!
--
what the percentages look like if you remove the 'other/prefer not to tell/see the results' votes
I wondered what the percentages look like if you assume that 22.7% of the votes are purely curiosity-to-see-results votes.*
(*when I drop these numbers, I'm certainly excluding a number of people who either (a) have a gender/orientation that fits so poorly into the categories offered that they chose 'other', or (b) didn't want to share for whatever reason. However, there's no way to separate those people from those who only wanted to see the results.)
Removing the 'other/prefer not to tell/see results' votes leaves 66,198 total votes, split as follows:
cis het woman: 12.30%
cis queer woman: 30.03%
trans het woman: 0.13%
trans queer woman: 3.23%
nonbinary person: 29.24%
cis het man: 1.55%
cis queer man: 2.2%
trans het man: 0.39%
trans queer man: 12.94%
if you assume those 19,438 votes were all just to see the results, cis queer women fic writers top the charts at about 30%, with nonbinary fic writers a close second at 29.24%. The third largest group, trans queer men who write fic, trails distantly at about 13%, with cis het women right on their heels at 12.3%.
--
recombinations
Let's break down these categories into different combinations for fun.
Assuming that everyone who responded 'other/prefer not to tell/see results' meant 'other'*:
nonbinary/other: 45.3%, or 38,792 responses (!)
In this scenario, 45.3% of respondents are somewhere off the cis/trans/het/queer scale. That's a lot of respondents!
(*ie they were expressing that they do write/have written fic, but their gender/orientation doesn't fit into the offered categories: for example, being non-cis but not trans or nonbinary, and/or LGBTAP+ but not queer (or het.))
--
Separating gender and orientation:
cis: 35,796 responses
trans: 11,048 responses
trans/nonbinary: 30,402 responses
het: 9,506 responses
queer: 37,338 responses
woman: 35,539 responses
man: 11,305 responses
I also turned these numbers into percentages.
'inclusive' means 'including the 19,438 responses of 'other/prefer not to tell/see results' in the total'
'exclusive' means 'excluding the 19,438 responses of 'other/prefer not to tell/see results' in the total'
taken as individual categories, queer people (cis & trans) made up the largest number of responses. the number of cis respondents (het & queer) was just slightly larger than the number of women respondents (cis & trans). These categories don't perfectly overlap with one another, but it's no surprise that these are the top three broken-down categories given that the most common response to the poll was 'cis queer woman'.
(trans/nonbinary as a combined category make up a not-so-distant 4th. There's a lot of non-cis fic writers on tumblr, and I love it.)
--
Cross-combining categories in various breakdowns:
cis het: 9,163 responses
cis queer: 26,633 responses
trans het: 343 responses
trans queer: 10,705 responses
cis woman: 33,312 responses
cis man: 2,484 responses
trans woman: 2,227 responses
trans man: 8,821 responses
het woman: 8,221 responses
het man: 1,285 responses
queer woman: 27,318 responses
queer man: 10,020 responses
I also turned these numbers into percentages.
'inclusive' means 'including the 19,438 responses of 'other/prefer not to tell/see results' in the total'
'exclusive' means 'excluding the 19,438 responses of 'other/prefer not to tell/see results' in the total'
expressed in percentages:
cis het: 10.7% (inclusive) / 13.85% (exclusive)
cis queer: 31.1% (inclusive) / 40.23% (exclusive)
trans het: 0.4% (inclusive) / 0.52% (exclusive)
trans queer: 12.5% (inclusive) / 16.17% (exclusive)
Crunching these numbers took longer than expected (of course - always does, lol).
as an informal poll on tumblr, these results are (maybe) indicative of the fannish fic-writing population on tumblr only. They can't be verified and we can't be sure of the reach. Did this reach enough people across tumblr, or did it recirculate in a limited circle of tumblr users and limited fandoms? We just don't know.
by its language, this poll also will necessarily exclude anyone who is hostile to terminology such as 'cis', 'trans', 'nonbinary', and/or 'queer': ie trans-exclusionary radfems (TERFS) / other transphobes, 'gender critical' people (GCs), anyone who believes 'queer' is a slur that cannot be reclaimed by anyone, etc. (It also may exclude people who dislike using the word 'queer' to identify themselves even though they aren't straight/shunt them into a category that includes ppl who just want to see the results.)
I bring this up because this may skew the poll results towards queer & trans fandom, excluding the portion of fandom that wouldn't take this poll b/c they're trans- &/or queerphobic.
That said: this poll suggests that fic-writers on tumblr are
overwhelmingly queer compared to het (43.6% queer, 11.1% het)
considerably nonbinary/trans (41.8% of respondents identified as cis: not much more than the 35.5% identified as trans or nonbinary)
majority-minority women (41.5% women, 22.6% nonbinary, 13.2% men)
only 10.7% identified themselves as cishet; 9.5% as cishet women specifically. so much for the mythical straight cis woman majority fandom - at least here on tumblr.
while cis women make up a large majority of the women who replied to this poll, more than 2,000 trans women also responded! Considering how hostile the heavy radfem influence has made tumblr to trans women in particular, I'm not surprised the number is comparatively small. wishing a very radfem-free tumblr experience for every trans respondent (including me), but especially trans women.
the majority of men who responded to this poll are trans men, but over 2,000 cis men responded to the poll. Still, men made up only 13.2% of respondents. I'd love to know why men are comparatively underrepresented in fic-writing, at least here on tumblr. the numbers alone can't tell me that.
tl;dr if this poll is even sort-of in line with tumblr's fic-writing population, it's exactly as you'd expect: very queer and very women, majority-minority cis but with a loooot of trans/nonbinary presence as well.
it's just fun to see some actual numbers that quantify my impressions.
soo I’ve been looking for a particular sterek fic that I hope you might recognise? Stiles is kidnapped by hunters (because they want to use him for bait or something) and stick him in a cabin with a feral derek ( who they kidnapped a little earlier). Stiles and derek don’t know each other - and they eventually communicate through magazine letters and stuff? I’m sorry that this might be too vague 🙏
Yeah! Such a great fic.
Stand Fast in Your EnchantmentsbyDevilDollandRahciach
(3/3 I 76,956 I Explicit I Sterek)
“Stiles knew damn well what a pissed-off wolf sounded like, and every hair on the back of his neck was telling him that somewhere in this room was a very pissed-off werewolf.” An AU in which Derek is feral, Stiles is magical, and they eat a lot of fast food.
Yall wanna hear a kinda funny, kinda sad story about my grandmother and hetero-normativity?
Ok, so... when my grandmother was in her 50s (I was an infant), she met a woman at the Unitarian Church. And, as can happen when you meet your soul mate, this event made it impossible for her to deny parts of herself that she had fiercely hidden her whole life.
All the drama- their affair being found out, the divorce with my grandfather, the court battle over who got the house, happened while I was a baby. Even in my earliest memories, it's just Mama Jo and Oma, and my grandfather lived elsewhere (first his own apartment, then a nursing home, then with us.)
But here's the thing- no one ever explained any of this to me. No one ever sat down and was like "hey, Rosie, so do you know what a lesbian is?" It was the 90s. It was Texas. I think my mom was still kinda processing all this, and just assumed that like... I was gonna figure it out. Don't mention it, let it just be normal. Like I think my mom thought that if she explained the situation, she would be making it weird? I dunno.
But like. In the 90s, in all the movies I had seen and books I had read, do you know how many same sex couples I had seen? Like. 0. Do you know how many "platonic best friend/roommates" I had seen? A lot. I had no context, is what I'm saying.
I literally thought this was a Golden Girls, roommates, besties situation until I was like...I dunno, 11? 12?
It was actually their parrot, an African Grey named Spike, imitating my grandmothers voice saying "Johanna, honey, it's getting late", that triggered the MIND BLOWN moment as I realized that *there's only one master bedroom and it only has 1 waterbed* when all the pieces finally clicked.
Anyway. I think it's a real important thing for kids to know queer people exist, for a lot of reasons, but also because kids can be clueless and it's embarrassing to have your grandmother be outted by a parrot because everyone just thought you'd figure it out on your own.
Anyway, here is my grandma and her wife, Oma, after they moved to Albuquerque to be artsy gay cowboys and live their best life. They helped run a "Lesbian Dude Ranch" out there (basically just with funding and financial support. As Oma has explained "traditionally, most lesbians don't have a lot of money" so they wrote the checks and let the younger ladies actually run the ranch.)
[id: a photograph of two older women at a ranch wearing blue jeans, short sleeved button down shirts, and cowboy hats. they are looking at each other lovingly with huge grins on their faces. /end id]
Similarly, I didn't figure out my aunt was gay until I was 12(?) and we went up to visit her and her then GF and obliviously asked 'oh, but where's X going to sleep?' when we were shown to the guest room I assumed was her partners bedroom. Sigh. Section28 did a number on my generation in the UK.
Con O’Neill, MCM Comic Con panel with Nathan Foad and Kristian Nairn, London May 27, 2023
Q: As someone who was a teenager for Section 28 Part 1, I just want to […] say a massive thank you for speaking up about Section 28 Part 2. What’s it been like at the moment, working on a show that has got such cool and interesting things to say about gender broadly and masculinity more specifically?
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