tannertan36
d e v o n
taylor price
wallacepolsom
art blog(derogatory)
YOU ARE THE REASON
shark vs the universe
roma★
todays bird
AnasAbdin
$LAYYYTER
Cosimo Galluzzi
Claire Keane
JVL
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
oozey mess
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styofa doing anything
JBB: An Artblog!
Janaina Medeiros
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@anxiousresearchraptor
genuine writers getting wrongly accused of using ai because of witch hunt and proper grammar/structure in their works must be what being a woman in the 1600s who is wrongly accused of being a witch because she can read and is intelligent feels like
thinking about smut/erotic fanfiction/art practices. the communal queer (in the expansive sense) experience of shared pleasure that is decidedly not a sexual encounter/relationship by any normative definitions; a particular type of liminal intimacy and affectual connection, transcending temporal and geographical and relational borders in fascinating ways.
thinking about the practices like beta'ing (please tell me, did it make sense, the way their bodies moved in space? how did it make you feel? did it touch your soul? were there any typos?); translations, illustrations, affectual comments: the ongoing reciprocity of affect and the labor that goes into that.
thinking about fanfics written to be gifted: combing through a friend's ao3/blog/etc to make sure you know exactly what kind of freak they are because you want to give them the ultimate pleasurable fantasy experience (happy birthday, here are some feels, i crafted them for you by hand). then posting it publicly as a tagged gift so everyone else can join in too. a present for all.
thinking about the history of slash fanfiction practices spanning the last 50+ years and the way female and queer fans clawed out spaces for that, not only within the heteronormative patriarchal culture at large but within fandom spaces:
het fanzines and later websites refusing to publish slash or, at best, doing stuff like publishing it with a whole page warning and on a differently colored paper
cishet women writing and drawing slash smut for each other and having to hide it from their husbands; their secret, erotically-charged lives shared only with other women
diy typing out and printing of slash zines, of a 100, 200 pages each, to avoid printer screening and tracking; having to start own printing shops or finding queer-run ones; the materiality of it all
mailing slash zines for free and in secret to avoid not only copyright but sodomy and obscenity laws, like the (still active) federal mail law that criminalized mailing pornography, whether images or text (and how, when the 1964 Supreme Court ruled it inapplicable to noncommercial letters between consensual adults, the precedent excluded homosexual letter exchange)
thinking about fanartist Virginia Lee Smith, who, in the 1980s, drew explicit af K/S smut for a dozen zines, and her interview in 2009 about donating her 200 zines collection, where she said, laughing, "The reason I handed this over is because I know that my poor kid, if I die, will be so embarrassed[...] I know he's gonna burn them. Lost forever. So, I have no idea how many k/s fanzines have been burned quietly for that reason." thinking about how she said she outgrew it when she stopped drawing; and yet she kept all 200 of them anyway.
thinking about the ephemerality of pleasure and the continuance of shame.
thinking about what purity culture, carceral feminism, and moral panics do, and how short collective memory is. thinking about how we keep going in circles, unable to escape from the paranoid, queerphobic lens that is always in search of predatory boogeymen, always vigilant, a cop on duty, armed and ready to go.
patterns.
my instagram explore page loves showing me those like erotic dark romance novel tiktoks and i really have to wonder: why do all these straight women desperately want to fuck a mafia boss
Okay, let's try and break this down.
Sexual fantasies are, by their very nature, transgressive. Yes, even the fluffy, romantic ones. As long as general culture remains negative about sex and sexuality in any form that isn't cishet procreative sex within the confines of matrimony with the woman not as an equal actor but an object sex is performed onto, this is going to remain true.
And the thing about fantasies is that our brains like to take the things we crave the most and mix them up with our fears, anxieties, pain, and trauma into a melange of, sometimes, truly epic levels of fuckery.
But here's the secret - things we fantasize about, from the most wholesome to the bizarre to seriously fucked up? They are very, very often NOT what we literally want.
Being into dubcon or noncon doesn't mean you actually want to be raped or rape. Being into monsters doesn't make you a zoophile. And fantasizing about violent, obsessive men doesn't mean you wouldn't run as far the fuck away from a man like that the second one of them set their sights on you.
If you're really interested in the subject, I recommend reading My Secret Garden by Nancy Friday, a compilation of anonymously submitted women's sexual fantasies. And, as it turns out, women fantasize about a lot of really violent, uncomfortable, and just plain screwed up stuff.
And, for most of them, even when they don't actively realize it, it's about reclamation. Of fear, of trauma, of loss of power. It's about THEMSELVES and how THEY feel. As weird as it's gonna sound, the men featured in those fantasies don't really matter, they're just a vessel, a manifestation of the extreme version of what you're dealing with and/or crave. A safe, cathartic way to experience something profoundly unsafe, unwise, and terrifying.
For women fantasizing about criminals, villains, monsters, and anti-heroes, it's very often about the idea that someone like that - intense, violent, with single-minded focus, and immense power - would love her, want her, always put her first, go against all his instincts/training for you without a second thought and be a clear and present danger to everyone but warmth and safety for her and only her, and burn the world itself down for hurting her in even the slightest of ways. It's a sexual version of the fantasy of having a pet tiger, one that would never, ever attack you or hurt you in any way.
And just like the people who want to boop the forbidden snoot, the women fantasizing about their fantasy Mafia Boss Lover are very well aware of the fact that 1) men like that don't actually exist, 2) the criminal world of their fantasy has all but nothing to do with reality, and 3) that the thing they're actually fantasizing about is being loved, wanted, and safe... just in a REALLY intense, exaggerated way. And, let's not mince words, there's also often a more or less strong D/s dynamics at play in the scenario, too.
Now, you can choose to be judgy bitches about it (goodness knows plenty of you in the replies, comments, and tags are), in which case I would suggest you examine why you're feeling such a profound need to shame women for enjoying themselves in their own little world, or you can apply the YKINMKATO mantra and understand that straight women, living in the constant state of preyhood, sometimes consciously or subconsciously reclaim power over that situation through transgressive sexual fantasies.
Also, fuck this idea that queer people only fantasize about healthy and wholesome relationships, romantic, sexual, or otherwise, as if at least half of Tumblr isn't simping for, oh, for example, Hannibal fucking Lecter. Do you have ANY idea how many Mafia and Thug BL content there is out there?! FFS, Tom of Finland, a WWII veteran who fought against Nazis, drew art of exaggeratedly masculine men in Nazi uniforms in pornographic situations as a way to dissociate himself from those traumas and fascists themselves as far back as the 1950s!
So yeah. Less judgement, and more taking some responsibility for curating your online experience if seeing someone's kink truly offends you this much.
"Booping the forbidden snoot" is a good way of putting it
prev tags, text ver. below the cut
I'm going to try to explain this without sounding completely deranged but like, okay: IMO, there are two kinds of fantasies. let's call them horses and unicorns.
a horse fantasy is something that is theoretically possible. I do not currently own a horse, and the reality of owning a horse would involve boring stuff like paying for its food and mucking out its stall, but it is something I could do in real life. like, horses exist and can be owned by humans. lots of fantasies can fall into this category: traveling to a foreign country, living in a cute house with just you and a cat, winning a marathon, basically anything that is technically achievable even if it would be difficult to do so in real life.
a unicorn fantasy is something that is definitely (or almost definitely) impossible. I do not currently own a unicorn, and there is no version of reality where I could own a unicorn, because unicorns are not real. the actual logistical issues that might arise from owning a unicorn, like paying for its food or mucking out its stall, are completely immaterial because it's not something that could ever actually happen. and like, it's in my brain! I control it! I can imagine a unicorn that only eats marshmallows and shits potpourri if I want to!
I think the disconnect comes in when people assume that a unicorn fantasy is actually a horse fantasy. to use the tiger example from upthread: you can own a tiger. you can't have a completely domesticated tiger that would never hurt you, not even by accident. so saying "I want a pet tiger" is a unicorn fantasy, because everything necessary for that fantasy to work (it being completely domesticated and incapable of harming you) are not things you can have in real life.
now, serial killers/war criminals/normal criminals/etc. are all things that exist. and there are definitely people in relationships with them in real life! so it's tempting to assume that something like "I want to fuck a serial killer" is a horse fantasy: something you would want to do, and could do, if given the opportunity.
but for the vast majority of people, that's not the fantasy. the rest of the fantasy ("he's a serial killer, BUT he only kills bad people and he's nice to me and is both able and willing to protect me from literally anything and has sex exactly the way I want to because he magically knows what I want because, again, this is happening in my brain") is what makes it a unicorn.
This is obviously not exclusively a cishet woman thing but cishet women do deal with a different flavour of sexual repression than queer folks (not better or worse, just a different flavour!) and those fantasies really are about power, just not how you think.
The fantasy is that here is a powerful, aggressive, even violent man, and he wants you and needs you so much that he would burn the world down for you. The central fantasy of the romance novel is that the heroine is so desired and loved by the hero that he is both metaphorically and literally forced to his knees for her. I'm not with my books or notes right now so I can't remember the exact quote, but I think it was Jayashree Kamblé who said that this aggressive/Alpha male subtype of romance heroes is "a lion among men who is a lamb before his woman". That's the fantasy. It's really powerful! If your life experience has told you to expect to do all the care work and to minimise yourself and your needs to be palatable to others and to be grateful for any crumb of attention because you're too fat or too outspoken or just generally not perfectly feminine enough, the fantasy of someone going absolutely feral because they want you so much is really powerful and empowering!
Again, not exclusively cishet women, and also sometimes you just think a scenario would be hot if it happens within your mind where you are 100% in control and can just stop if it feels bad. That's also fine! That's normal! We need to stop shaming people for their romantic or sexual fantasies, especially those of us who clearly have no idea what a fantasy is and what it does for the person indulging in it 🙄
A lot of the "you're supposed to like X" cultural baggage is, IMHO, effectively dubcon with the coercion outsourced to some other actor, usually society, but with the "love interest" willingly profiting from that coercion, at your expense.
The effect is something like when you've got a persistent unwanted suitor doing "romantic" shit like sending you flowers at work and lovebombing you and otherwise making a big deal out of his feelings and your coworkers or your family or your friends are all encouraging you to give in because "it's so sweet" or "he wants you so badly, it's cruel of you to deny him" or "I wish my boyfriend did that for me, you're so lucky" and none of them will understand that a) what they want isn't what you want and b) the persistence, the control, the disregard for your wishes all make him the romantic equivalent of food that's been pissed on---and neither does he.
The whole effect is viscerally uncomfortable, and even the echoes or memories of coercion taint the whole concept.
And I think a key factor in the fantasy is a variant of that unicorn situation up above, to wit:
Your church, family, repressive upbringing, and/or purity-focused socialization will never approve of you dating a mob boss or a monster
Therefore
Your church, family, repressive upbringing, and/or purity-focused socialization will never force you to date a mob boss or a monster.
Therefore
Your fantasy about the mob boss or the monster is effectively free from the coercion you're used to in your real life and trying to escape.
It is, ironically, coercion-repellent, directed at the existing dynamics of coercion that might be present in your life or in your past.
Finally, the thread I've been using in my lectures has reappeared on my dash <3
Honestly, as a German I can not quite understand the obsession of the English speaking world with the question whether a word exists or not. If you have to express something for which there is no word, you have to make a new one, preferably by combining well-known words, and in the very same moment it starts to exist. Agree?
Deutsche Freunde, could you please create for me a word for the extreme depression I feel when I bend down to pick up a piece of litter and discover two more pieces of litter?
um = around
die Welt = world
die Umwelt = environment
ver = prefix to indicate something difficult or negative, a change that leads to deterioration or even destruction that is difficult to reverse or to undo, or a strong negative change of the mental state of a person
der Müll = garbage, trash, rubbish, litter
-ung = -ing
die Vermüllung = littering
ver- = see before
zweifeln = to doubt
-ung = see before
die Verzweiflung = despair, exasperation, desperation
die Umweltvermüllungsverzweiflung = …
This is a german compound on the spot master class and I am LIVING
#my german is still too basic for this but I desperately want a compound word for how much these compound words piss me off
das Monster = monster
das Wort = word
der Groll = grudge, anger, malice, rancor
der Monsterwortgroll = …
Monsterwortbildungsimitationsunfähigkeitsverzweiflungsgroll
die Bildung = formation
die Imitation = imitation
un- = un-, in-
fähig = able
-keit = -ility
die Unfähigkeit = inability
der Monsterwortbildungsimitationsunfähigkeitsverzweiflungsgroll = anger about the inability to imitate the formation of monster words
Linguistikfehdenhandschuhwurf
die Linguistik = linguistics
die Fehde = feud
der Handschuh = glove
der Fehdehandschuh = gauntlet
der Wurf = throw
der Linguistikfehdenhandschuhwurf = throwing down the linguistic gauntlet
*slowly backs in fear*
@shiplocks-of-love, @thatswhywelovegermany
Monsterwortbildungsunfähigkeitsangstverzweiflungsrückzugsecke
Monster=monster // wort=word // bildung(s)=formation
unfähigkeit (s)=incabability // angst=anxiety
verzweiflung(s)=desperation // rückzug(s)=retreat // ecke=corner
=the corner in which you retreat when you´re desperate because of your fear when being unable to form monster words
*eye twitch*
But what I want to see now is two germans arguing over the construction of one of these monster words.
@shiplocks-of-love I don’t think that will happen. The words make perfect sense. I think if German is your mother tongue you get a feeling for combining words, like a
Monsterwortbildungsgespür
Monster = monster
Wort = word
Bildung(s) = formation
Gespür = intuition
;-)
Sprachirrgartenbelustigungsbeitrag
die Sprache = language
• irren = to become lost (also: to err, to be mistaken; to wander, to stray)
• der Garten = garden
der Irrgarten = maze, knot garden
• be- = prefix with a variety of functions: ¹as part of a compound word, it denotes a processing or change of state; ²as part of a compound word, it denotes a touch; ³as part of a compound word, it denotes a more intensive preoccupation with or thematization of something; ⁴it forms from a noun an adjective with a pseudo-participle form because the corresponding verb does not exist; ⁵as a prefix, it forms a transitive verb from a previously intransitive verb; ⁶as a prefix of a verb, it shifts the focus and thus changes the sentence structure
• lustig = funny
• -ung = suffix turning an adjective/adverb into a noun
die Belustigung = amusement, entertainment, merriment
der Beitrag = contribution, article in a newspaper or magazine, posting on social media, input to a discussion
Bloody love this language <3<3<3
The thing is, since in German you have to decline/conjugate many words in relation to the noun they are refering to those monster words actually serve a purpose of making the language simpler. A common example is a (as in any) red wine (ein roter Wein) as compaired to the compound a red wine (ein Rotwein). If rot is an adjective it has to be conjugated: der rote Wein - des roten Weins - die roten Weine - and many more. But it if rot is part of the noun you only have to decline Wein: der Rotwein - des Rotweins - die Rotweine. So, die Verzweiflung über die Vermüllung der Umwelt is way longer than Umweltvermüllungsverzweiflung and you would have to know three grammatical genders and the words’ respective declinations. Whereas for Umweltvermüllungsverzweiflung you only need to know that Verzweiflung is grammatically feminine (die) and its deklinations.
Ok, now I want to see Germans playing Scrabble
Doomscrollaufhellungsrepost
Doom scroll // self explanatory
auf- // lit.: „up“ indicates rising, or something becoming bigger, better, healthier
hell // bright
aufhellen // to brighten something up
-ung // makes a verb a noun
-s- // the glue that keeps german compound words together
repost // self explanatory
Doomscrollaufhellungsrepost // a repost to brighten up your doom scroll
You‘re Welcome!
As a German I dig that. And I nodded because all of these words make _perfect_ sense.
Research Questionaire
Hi there fellow fanfic writers and readers!
I'll be teaching a course on fanfiction this coming term and I've prepared a questionaire on – what I currently title – the state of fanfic/fan works. (sounds grander than it is) I'd love to hear from seasoned (or not so seasoned) readers and writers. The questionaire is a bit longish, but should take no more than 15 minutes (depending on how much you want to share). 😅
Please feel free to share the link: https://forms.gle/baSCxienmPZuEfDN6
Feel free to hit me up here on tumblr too, if you've got questions :)
requiem for vanished birdsong
I took some of your many suggestions and made it better.
You right you right
The last one speaks to me. Unfortunately.
u know the ship is good when one of them is dead
But imagine how good it could be if …
…both are dead. But don’t know it.
"i asked chatgpt-" yeah well i asked dc chris skelton and he talked to me about martial arts for an hour
lom is a show about a very specific kind of british masculinity and the way men with trauma retraumatise the men around them, especially their sons, brothers, and mentees, meanwhile a2a (s1) is a show about working mothers and the way they are driven apart from their daughters not just physically but emotionally, in this essay I will-
I know "60s housewives who invented slash fanfiction" has taken on a life of its own as a phrase, but Kirk/Spock didn't really exist until the 70s and THOSE WOMEN HAD JOBS. They were teachers and librarians and bookkeepers and scientists and they damn well spent their own money going to conventions, printing zines, buying fanart and making fandom happen. Put some respect on their names.
Salute to our troops (70s careerwomen who put their hard-earned dollars into homemade gay erotica)
It was women with secretarial jobs doing a lot of the heavy lifting, if memory serves correctly.
They had training in type setting, could churn things out quickly, knew how to organise mailing lists, and had easy access to Expensive High Tech like photocopiers.
Boss make a dollar, she makes a dime. That's why she's printing Kirk X Spock zines on company time.
I don't understand why this "housewife versus career woman" binary exists. We know who was writing fan fiction back in the day. I mean, literally, we know many of their names and what they were doing. They were housewives and women with jobs. Most had college educations that they didn't really get to use, and few opportunities for creative outlets.
(But that's also not a strict binary; we know from their own writing that many were part of the mainstream science fiction community and interested in writing original work and/or arguing that their Star Trek fic was worthy of a Hugo Award. Joanna Russ wrote Kirk/Spock fic, and she absolutely had a career and a creative outlet.)
We don't have to speculate. There are a lot of zines on the Internet Archive, we can go read them ourselves.
Me: I'm not nosy
Me when I see drama that is 100% none of my business:
"He looks like he's waiting for the player to do something," he said and I simply had to draw Cormoran Strike in the style of a good ol' Point-and-Click Adventure (which are by far the best kinds of games :D).
I definitely have a new appreciation for anyone who does pixel art, because that took me around 3hrs and it's definitely not as polished as I would like it to be.
"Strike had the high, bulging forehead, broad nose and thick brows of a young Beethoven who had taken to boxing […]. His thick curly hair, springy as carpet, had ensured that his many youthful nicknames had included ‘Pubehead’." (CC 2013: Part One)
Imagining Strike, but a bit younger and less beaten.
Fictober25!
Fictober Event, the prompts for 2025
Here is the list for October this year. Write something short (or long) and tag it with #fictober25 in the first five tags. Let’s see your creativity!
"Just take my hand."
"This is new."
"I don't need a reason."
"Can you hold me?"
"But you promised!"
"This is annoying."
"You'll have to try harder than this."
"I know it sounds impossible."
"They didn't even touch it!"
"I'm here, am I not?"
"Stupider people than us have done this."
"Does this help you?"
"It's a balance."
"Do we have a plan?"
"It's rather complicated."
"I will never forget this."
"You're not alone."
"I think I see it."
"Yes, I missed this."
"Trust me, this will work."
"Just be honest."
"And how did that work out?"
"I believe in us."
"There's not enough time."
"We've done this before."
"It's been a while, hasn't it?"
"Why would they do this?"
"I'm not lost!"
"Where did they go?"
"Do you trust me?"
"I still love you."
This event is open to fanfiction and original fiction. Start the first of October. You do not have to do the prompts in order. Tag your posts with #fictober25.
Please state at the top if your entry is original fiction or fanfiction and what fandom. State common warnings and triggers at the top and tag accordingly.
No AI generated text or art.
I reserve the right to not reblog fics that I find inappropriate. I will reblog things here on @fictober-event, follow this blog to see all the entries. Go forth and write!
