scrumptious

Ship and hedcanon whatever you want that's what fiction is for <3

[finnfrei]

I’m totally normal about these two (no)

[kayas-kosmos]

Whenever I draw an absolutely horrifying monster, there's always someone who thinks it's the cutest thing ever and wants to pet it.

But hey, monsters need love, too!

[slavicafire]

far from prudish but just got blazed porn of someone's pussy spread out so hard and up close like it's a map of the polish-lithuanian commonwealth and I'm king and grand duke sigismund II augustus inspecting his lands to plot defense against the swedes

[coffee-without-anesthetics]

[valtsv]

yes yes acts of violence often evoke eroticism and stabbing someone is potent penetration imagery but sometimes when i kill someone it's just because i want them to die

[valtsv]

honestly it's so hard to dispose of people you genuinely despise these days. can't fight them, that's too horny. can't impale them on your blade, that's way too horny. guns? don't make me laugh. killing them with your bare hands? having gay sex would be less gay. really anything that draws blood is off the table. can't hit them with your car because that's a sex thing too. tying them to train tracks - rope, bondage, nope, that's out. tossing them off a cliff requires skin-to-skin contact. poisoning them is kind of like an indirect kiss if you think about it. and arranging an assassination is too obsessive it's like having a crush.

[artisimpossible]

I used to work for a trade book reviewer where I got payed to review people's books, and one of the rules of that review company is one that I think is just super useful to media analysis as a whole, and that is, we were told never to critique media for what it didn't do but only for what it did.

So, for instance, I couldn't say "this book didn't give its characters strong agency or goals". I instead had to say, "the characters in this book acted in ways that often felt misaligned with their characterization as if they were being pulled by the plot."

I think this is really important because a lot of "critiques" people give, if subverted to address what the book does instead of what it doesn't do, actually read pretty nonsensical. For instance, "none of the characters were unique" becomes "all of the characters read like other characters that exist in other media", which like... okay? That's not really a critique. It's just how fiction works. Or "none of the characters were likeable" becomes "all of the characters, at some point or another, did things that I found disagreeable or annoying" which is literally how every book works?

It also keeps you from holding a book to a standard it never sought to meet. "The world building in this book simply wasn't complex enough" becomes "The world building in this book was very simple", which, yes, good, that can actually be a good thing. Many books aspire to this. It's not actually a negative critique. Or "The stakes weren't very high and the climax didn't really offer any major plot twists or turns" becomes "The stakes were low and and the ending was quite predictable", which, if this is a cute romcom is exactly what I'm looking for.

Not to mention, I think this really helps to deconstruct a lot of the biases we carry into fiction. Characters not having strong agency isn't inherently bad. Characters who react to their surroundings can make a good story, so saying "the characters didn't have enough agency" is kind of weak, but when you flip it to say "the characters acted misaligned from their characterization" we can now see that the *real* problem here isn't that they lacked agency but that this lack of agency is inconsistent with the type of character that they are. a character this strong-willed *should* have more agency even if a weak-willed character might not.

So it's just a really simple way of framing the way I critique books that I think has really helped to show the difference between "this book is bad" and "this book didn't meet my personal preferences", but also, as someone talking about books, I think it helps give other people a clearer idea of what the book actually looks like so they can decide for themselves if it's worth their time.

[gingerly-writing]

write for the audience you want, not the one you’re afraid of

[headspace-hotel]

write to delight the audience you want and piss off the one you’re afraid of

[mareebrittenford]

Write for the audience of yourself and trust that there’s other people out there who are just as weird as you are

[thispreciousthing]

So a free tool called GLAZE has been developed that allows artists to cloak their artwork so it can't be mimicked by AI art tools.

AI art bros are big mad about it.

[themirokai]

I got this comment on a story from my Other AO3 Account this morning.

(Info redacted because I prefer keeping these accounts separate but no one follows me on the side blog I have for that account.)

The story was posted almost a year ago and is relatively “popular” by my average statistics even though it has tropes and themes that are big turnoffs for a lot of people (hence separate accounts). This popularity is undoubtedly because it’s a Marvel Loki story and that fandom is massive.

So there is obviously an algorithm or a bot scrubbing ao3 statistics and leaving this comment on fics that meet a certain metric with the main character of the fic inserted into the comment.

I had a little time to kill this morning so I decided to investigate further. And y’all this is so predatory. Come on this journey with me. It made me mad. It may make you mad.

First, if you go to Webnovel’s website, you HAVE to choose between male lead or female lead stories before you can go any further. WTF?

And that’s weird, but this gets so much worse. This is basically a pay-to-read site that has different subscription models. Which… okay BUT! The authors don’t get paid! Look at that comment again. They’re promising a supportive and nurturing community, but zero monetary compensation. It’s basically, “post your stuff here so we can get paid and you can get… nice vibes?” I mean look at this Orwellian writing:

Using the phrase “pay-to-read model” in the same sentence as “qualitative changes in lifestyles for authors” deliberately makes you think that you can get paid and maybe even make a living on this website. But that’s not actually what it says and authors will not receive one red cent.

Oh but wait, the worst is still to come. In case this breaks containment (which I kind of hope it does) this is where I mention that I’m a lawyer in the US.

I don’t do intellectual property or copyright law but I do read and write contracts for a living. So I went to look at their terms of service. It was fun!

Highlights the first, in which Webnovel gets a license to do basically whatever they want with content you post on their site. This is how they get to be paid for people reading authors’ writing without paying them anything.

Highlights the second, in which Webnovel takes no responsibility for illegally profiting off of fan fic. This all says that the writer is 100% responsible for everything the writer posts (even though only Webnovel is making money from it).

Highlights the third which say that by posting, the author is representing that they have the legal right to use and to let Webnovel use the content according to these terms. So if a writer posts fan fiction and Webnovel makes money from people reading the fan fiction, and the House of the Mouse catches wise, these sections say that that’s ALL on the writer.

So that’s a little skeevy to start off with but the thing that is seriously shitty and made me make this post was that these assholes are coming to ao3. They are actively recruiting people in comments on their fan fiction. And they are saying they are big fans of the character you’re writing about and that they share your interests.

They are recruiting fan fiction writers and giving every impression that you can make money from posting fan fiction on their site and hiding the fact that you absolutely cannot but they can make money off of you while you try, deep in their terms of service which no one but a lawyer who writes fan fic and has some time to kill will read.

I see posts on here regularly from people who don’t understand how this stuff works, don’t understand that they (and others) can not legally make a financial profit from fan fiction. And there are tons of people who will not take the time to dig into the details.

Don’t deal with these bastards. Fuck Webnovel.

[star-anise]

So what I’ve learned from the past couple months of being really loud about being a bi woman on Tumblr is: A lot of young/new LGBT+ people on this site do not understand that some of the stuff they’re saying comes across to other LGBT+ people as offensive, aggressive, or threatening. And when they actually find out the history and context, a lot of them go, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I never meant to say that.”

Like, “queer is a slur”: I get the impression that people saying this are like… oh, how I might react if I heard someone refer to all gay men as “f*gs”. Like, “Oh wow, that’s a super loaded word with a bunch of negative freight behind it, are you really sure you want to put that word on people who are still very raw and would be alarmed, upset, or offended if they heard you call them it, no matter what you intended?”

So they’re really surprised when self-described queers respond with a LOT of hostility to what feels like a well-intentioned reminder that some people might not like it. 

That’s because there’s a history of “political lesbians”, like Sheila Jeffreys, who believe that no matter their sexual orientation, women should cut off all social contact with men, who are fundamentally evil, and only date the “correct” sex, which is other women. Political lesbians claim that relationships between women, especially ones that don’t contain lust, are fundamentally pure, good, and  unproblematic. They therefore regard most of the LGBT community with deep suspicion, because its members are either way too into sex, into the wrong kind of sex, into sex with men, are men themselves, or somehow challenge the very definitions of sex and gender. 

When “queer theory” arrived in the 1980s and 1990s as an organized attempt by many diverse LGBT+ people in academia to sit down and talk about the social oppressions they face, political lesbians like Jeffreys attacked it harshly, publishing articles like “The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians”, arguing that because queer theory said it was okay to be a man or stop being a man or want to have sex with a man, it was fundamentally evil and destructive. And this attitude has echoed through the years; many LGBT+ people have experience being harshly criticized by radical feminists because being anything but a cis “gold star lesbian” (another phrase that gives me war flashbacks) was considered patriarchal, oppressive, and basically evil.

And when those arguments happened, “queer” was a good umbrella to shelter under, even when people didn’t know the intricacies of academic queer theory; people who identified as “queer” were more likely to be accepting and understanding, and “queer” was often the only label or community bisexual and nonbinary people didn’t get chased out of. If someone didn’t disagree that people got to call themselves queer, but didn’t want to be called queer themselves, they could just say “I don’t like being called queer” and that was that. Being “queer” was to being LGBT as being a “feminist” was to being a woman; it was opt-in.

But this history isn’t evident when these interactions happen. We don’t sit down and say, “Okay, so forty years ago there was this woman named Sheila, and…” Instead we queers go POP! like pufferfish, instantly on the defensive, a red haze descending over our vision, and bellow, “DO NOT TELL ME WHAT WORDS I CANNOT USE,” because we cannot find a way to say, “This word is so vital and precious to me, I wouldn’t be alive in the same way if I lost it.” And then the people who just pointed out that this word has a history, JEEZ, way to overreact, go away very confused and off-put, because they were just trying to say.

But I’ve found that once this is explained, a lot of people go, “Oh wow, okay, I did NOT mean to insinuate that, I didn’t realize that I was also saying something with a lot of painful freight to it.”

And that? That gives me hope for the future.

[star-anise]

Similarily: “Dyke/butch/femme are lesbian words, bisexual/pansexual women shouldn’t use them.”

When I speak to them, lesbians who say this seem to be under the impression that bisexuals must have our own history and culture and words that are all perfectly nice, so why can’t we just use those without poaching someone else’s?

And often, they’re really shocked when I tell them: We don’t. We can’t. I’d love to; it’s not possible.

“Lesbian” used to be a word that simply meant a woman who loved other women. And until feminism, very, very few women had the economic freedom to choose to live entirely away from men. Lesbian bars that began in the 1930s didn’t interrogate you about your history at the door; many of the women who went there seeking romantic or sexual relationships with other women were married to men at the time. When The Daughters of Bilitis formed in 1955 to work for the civil and political wellbeing of lesbians, the majority of its members were closeted, married women, and for those women, leaving their husbands and committing to lesbian partners was a risky and arduous process the organization helped them with. Women were admitted whether or not they’d at one point truly loved or desired their husbands or other men–the important thing was that they loved women and wanted to explore that desire.

Lesbian groups turned against bisexual and pansexual women as a class in the 1970s and 80s, when radical feminists began to teach that to escape the Patriarchy’s evil influence, women needed to cut themselves off from men entirely. Having relationships with men was “sleeping with the enemy” and colluding with oppression. Many lesbian radical feminists viewed, and still view, bisexuality as a fundamentally disordered condition that makes bisexuals unstable, abusive, anti-feminist, and untrustworthy.

(This despite the fact that radical feminists and political lesbians are actually a small fraction of lesbians and wlw, and lesbians do tend, overall, to have positive attitudes towards bisexuals.)

That process of expelling bi women from lesbian groups with immense prejudice continues to this day and leaves scars on a lot of bi/pan people. A lot of bisexuals, myself included, have an experience of “double discrimination”; we are made to feel unwelcome or invisible both in straight society, and in LGBT spaces. And part of this is because attempts to build a bisexual/pansexual community identity have met with strong resistance from gays and lesbians, so we have far fewer books, resources, histories, icons, organizations, events, and resources than gays and lesbians do, despite numerically outnumbering them..

So every time I hear that phrase, it’s another painful reminder for me of all the experiences I’ve had being rejected by the lesbian community. But bisexual experiences don’t get talked about or signalboosted much,so a lot of young/new lesbians literally haven’t learned this aspect of LGBT+ history.

And once I’ve explained it, I’ve had a heartening number of lesbians go, “That’s not what I wanted to happen, so I’m going to stop saying that.”

[simonalkenmayer]

This is good information for people who carry on with the “queer is a slur” rhetoric and don’t comprehend the push back.

[theroguefeminist]

ive been saying for years that around 10 years ago on tumblr, it was only radfems who were pushing the queer as slur rhetoric, and everyone who was trans or bi or allies to them would push back - radfems openly admitted that the reason they disliked the term “queer” was because it lumped them in with trans people and bi women. over the years, the queer is a slur rhetoric spread in large part due to that influence, but radfems were more covert about their reasons - and now it’s a much more prevalent belief on tumblr - more so than on any queer space i’ve been in online or offline - memory online is very short-term unfortunately bc now i see a lot of ppl, some of them bi or trans themselves, who make this argument and vehemently deny this history but…yep

[ryttu3k]

Or asexuality, which has been a concept in discussions on sexuality since 1869. Initially grouped slightly to the left, as in the categories were ‘heterosexual’, ‘homosexual’, and ‘monosexual’ (which is used differently now, but then described what we would call asexuality). Later was quite happily folded in as a category of queerness by Magnus Hirschfeld and Emma Trosse in the 1890s, as an orientation that was not heterosexuality and thus part of the community.

Another good source here, also talking about aromanticism as well. Aspec people have been included in queer studies as long as queer studies have existed.

Also, just in my own experiences, the backlash against ‘queer’ is still really recent. When I was first working out my orientation at thirteen in 2000, there was absolutely zero issue with the term. I hung out on queer sites, looked for queer media, and was intrigued by queer studies. There were literally sections of bookstores in Glebe and Newtown labelled ‘Queer’. It was just… there, and so were we!

So it blows my mind when there are these fifteen-year-olds earnestly telling me - someone who’s called themself queer longer than they’ve been alive - that “que*r is a slur.” Unfortunately, I have got reactive/defensive for the same reasons OP has mentioned. I will absolutely work on biting down my initial defensiveness and trying to explain - in good faith - the history of the word, and how it’s been misappropriated and tarnished by exclusionists.

[brightlotusmoon]

[prismatic-bell]

Worth noting here is a sneaky new front I’ve seen radfems start using:

Yeah, okay, maybe older LGBTs use queer and fag and dyke…but they’re cringey, and you don’t want to be cringe, do you?

I’m not even joking. They strip the loud-and-proud aspects of our history out of all context, remove every bit of blood, sweat, and tears the queer community poured into things like anti-discrimination laws and AIDS research funding, and use those screams of rebellion to say we’re weird, and you wouldn’t want to be WEIRD.

Stop and think about that for a minute.

Yeah. They are not the arbiters of our community and they never were, and it’s important to not give them the time of day.

[systlin]

Look I have no problem with aces being part of the community, but historically queer was never used as a slur against them, so as someone who has been called queer as a derogatory insult plenty of times, I'm pretty uncomfortable with them using it. Reclaiming the word queer is fine, but not if it wasn't directed at you in the first place.

Hey.

Quick tip. 

You are not the Queer Pope. You don’t get to decide who is and isn’t queer. 

Also, get off my blog. 

[damnfool-of-a-took]

Not only is anon not Queer Pope, they’re also factually incorrect. For others champing at the bit to be the next grayface too chickenshit to be wrong with their URL attached: 

Google “the spinster movement”. 1920′s and 1930′s. Ace women considered “queer” by straight society for not complying with the demands of compulsory heterosexuality (i.e. marry, let your husband fuck you whenever he wants, produce hordes of children, probably die of tuberculosis (well, that last bit’s not compulsory heterosexuality, but I digress)). 

Better yet, look up stuff from the research of Alfred Kinsey and/or Magnus Hirschfield (of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft- the Nazis burned it for advancing knowledge and acceptance of ace, trans, and gays & lesbians- all enemies of the State because their existence undercut the Aryan call for men FATHER MANY ARYAN BABIES and to FIGHT FOR THE FATHERLAAAAAND and for the women to manage Kinder, Küche, and Kirche (children, kitchen, church). 

Here’s a nice excerpt from a 1935 newspaper on how asexual women should be barred from teaching (one of the very few jobs a woman could hold in those days) based on their sexuality:  “The women who have the responsibility of teaching these girls are many of them themselves embittered, sexless or homosexual hoydens who try to mould the girls into their own patten.”

In the Victorian era, there was a movement for decades in favor of evicting spinsters (read: asexual and lesbian women) over 30 from Britain, and send them to Canada, Australia, or the United States instead. 

They were at best, “surplus females”, and at worst? Here’s another quote! This one is from Eliza Linton, a Victorian writer quoted in a more modern work analyzing Victorian families, describing spinsters in contrast with “naturally” celibate women, that is, widows: “Unnatural and alien: Painted and wrinkled, padded and bedizened, with her coarse thoughts, bold words, and leering eyes, [the wrong kind of spinster] has in herself all the disgust which lies around a Bacchante and a Hecate in one…. Such an old maid as this stands as a warning to men and women alike of what and whom to avoid.”

TL;DR YOU EXCLUSIONIST SHITHEADS KNOW NOTHING ABOUT THE HISTORY OF YOUR OWN COMMUNITIES, LET ALONE BROADER QUEER HISTORY. SHUT YOUR MOUTHS, OPEN A FEW WEBPAGES, AND READ. 

[elldritch-horror]

Spicy-brained friends, I would like to propose an update to the very useful ‘if you hate everyone, eat, if everyone hates you, sleep, and if you hate yourself, shower’ mantra to live by

Have you suddenly become a petty, hateful little gremlin who thinks people should face the firing squad for (checks notes) leaving teabags on the counter, breathing loudly, or daring to exist in the same space as you? Perhaps mundane and reasonable requests like ‘hey, we agreed to hang out now, let’s hang out’ make you want to scream and move to a yurt in the woods.

You. Are. Overstimulated.

People talk a lot about being overstimulated, and the physical/mental effects of it. What I haven’t seen is people talking about what it does emotionally, and it took me an embarassingly long time to link up those nitpicky, resentful emotions with the state of overstimulation/meltdown/shutdown.

These feelings do not mean that you’re a bad person! They probably aren’t how you actually feel about the people around you. They probably do mean that your nervous system is at its absolute limit and any request/demand/stimulus is Too Much and taking you into fight or flight territory.

Go lie down in a dark room for an hour, or find somewhere safe and familiar to stim for a bit. If it’s happening a lot, schedule yourself regular low-stimulation shutdown time

Signed: someone who moved in with their nearest and dearest only to have a massive crisis of faith about Suddenly Hating All of Them. I don’t hate them, it’s just overstimulating living with people. If I can spare anyone else a similar 9 months of suspecting that they may actually be a bit of a shit person, then this post is worth it!

[h-l-w]

[outdoorsavannah]

Carpet Wall for a Cat

#cat #cute #aww #wholesome

[vertigo-vertere]

Most shows with overpowered supernatural characters always try to come up with elaborate excuses to explain why the characters can’t just magic themselves out of every situation. Good Omens doesn’t really do that, but you don’t really question it because you completely buy that these morons are so unequivocally incompetent that they straight up forget that they have the powers of fucking demigods. They’re like high-level d&d characters who only use the same three moves and have completely forgotten about the 73 magic items sitting in their inventory. 

[vertigo-vertere]

Crowley: I was totally planning on teleporting to this galaxy 4.3 light-years away but then you died and I was sad :(

Aziraphale: Oh I’m sorry. But listen, I need you to go to this village about an hour outside of London

Crowley: You Want me to GO WHere?? How the– how the FUuuck am I supposed to- I can’t Drive, it’s Rush Hour! You want me to WaLK?? In the Rain??! Please, be Realistic.

[tanoraqui]

I cannot express the effect this post had on me. I read it aloud to my roommate and she burst into helpless laughter because it had never occurred to her that Crowley could do anything to get to Tadfield but drive the Bentley. It absolutely never had occurred to me, either. We both have been reading, rereading, and loving this book for about a decade now.

[queen-bitchiest]

how dare you hide this in the tags omg

[probuccalfat1]

this community has weird dark vibes lately

[cellyhwondertainment]

its all rhe ******* and )****(

[probuccalfat1]

girl is this wheel of fucking fortune give me a vowel or something

[secondlina]

Check out my ongoing comic Crow Time. It has crows, and also neat pantheons of epic beasties.

[gilraina]

About AO3’s Related Works feature, how it works, and why the Approve button is really really important you guys pls I’m begging you to click it

If you post your works to AO3, there may come a day when someone creates something inspired by your work: a translation, podfic, fanart, remix, etc. If they post it to AO3 and mark it as inspired by your work, you should get an email* like this:

Notice the link: Approve relationship and link back to this work from your work. It will lead to your Related Works tab. You can also access it from your dashboard on AO3. There, you will find all the works marked as related to your works, and next to them, the Approve button. If you click it, it will create a link from your work to the related work - in the opening notes if it’s a translation, or below the end notes if it’s anything else, like so:

or

As you can probably imagine, it means a lot to any creator to have a direct link to their work from the work that inspired them, but it’s especially important in the case of works like translations or podfics, which improve your work’s accessibility. If you don’t Approve the relationship, then your readers won’t know that there’s a translation or a podfic available (or a fanart, or a remix, or a vid, you get the idea).

Of course, you’re not required to do this. It’s entirely up to you if you want to Approve the work or not. But I do get a feeling that a lot of creators on AO3 don’t do this either because they don’t know how this feature works, or don’t remember to Approve the relationships (and I get it, the system is not exactly the most intuitive). So if that’s you, then now you know/here’s your reminder!

*I say you should get an email, but the notifications can get buggy sometimes, so you may want to check that Related Works tab once in a while regardless (especially if you give blanket permission for transformative works, and their creators don’t tend to contact you about them other than linking them to your work)