I Never Asked For An Identity

Yuri - 30+ - Agender - Ace - pfp by @3yongg on twt

[chongoblog]

they spent billions on this

[spelldealer]

do the kids today even know about azlyrics? the calming lavender?

[schistcity]

i come from the 8tracks generation where you weren't allowed to just dump three and a half twee indie folk/tswift records into a fanmix and call it done. on 8tracks you had 8+ handpicked songs in rigid chronological order and an accompanying mission statement and thesis defence detailing exactly why each one applied to your derek x stiles coffee shop au AND cover/track-list art hodgepodged from stolen pinterest/tumblr aesthetic photography, and all of this was done under constant threat of death because it was the DMCA wild west and the site was in a constant state of gradual collapse.

[throathole]

That specific sickly, weird, mottled green color that appears when two mirrors are reflecting each other into infinity is so fucking beautiful… I love you weird nasty green of the aether….

[iamonlyhereforthefreefood]

When Everything Everywhere All at Once said “The only thing I do know is that we have to be kind. Please, be kind, especially when we don’t know what’s going on" 

When the Good Place said “Why choose to be good every day when there is no guaranteed reward now or in the afterlife… I argue that we choose to be good because of our bonds with other people and our innate desire to treat them with dignity. Simply put, we are not in this alone.” 

When Jean-Paul Sartre said ”‘Hell is other people’ is only one side of the coin. The other side, which no one seems to mention, is also ‘Heaven is each other’. Hell is separateness, uncommunicability, self-centeredness, lust for power, for riches, for fame. Heaven on the other hand is very simple, and very hard: caring about your fellow beings.“

[quasi-normalcy]

Love that we’ve elevated the conversation to such a degree that, if you’re going to be grimdark nihilistic in fiction, you need to argue philosophically against 4 seasons of The Good Place.

[yayxstitch]

It's coming along. Wish me luck I'm about to use holographic filament for the first time.

[fishiest-fish]

ngl didn't realize this was unfinished at first and thought this was just a really weird shitpost

[oh-great-authoress]

Tags via @imissthembutitwasntadisaster

[thebreakfastgenie]

Sooooo few people are actually willing to defend the basic human rights of people who have committed crimes. Like I know it's not fun but if you genuinely believe in human rights as a concept you can't be okay with the state violating them in prisons I'm sorrrrry. Having moral principles is not always a fun time.

[aetherograph]

[cykelops]

were I to create an original piece of media I would create bait so queer in order to create a fanfic environment I like. I find you guys do your best work under duress.

[cykelops]

I’d say “jeez can two people not be friends anymore?” and then I’d give one of them amnesia in which they only recognize the other above anyone else

[docholligay]

Do you think authors sometimes don't realize how their, uh, interests creep into their writing? I'm talking about stuff like Robert Jordan's obvious femdom kink, or Anne Rice's preoccupation with inc*st and p*dophilia. Did their editors ever gently ask them if they've ever actually read what they've written?

Firstly, a reminder: This is not tiktok and we just say the words incest and pedophilia here.

Secondly, I don't know if I would call them 'interests' so much as fixations or even concerns. There are monstrous things that people think about, and I think writing is a place to engage with those monstrous things. It doesn't bother me that people engage with those things. I exist somewhere within the whump scale, and I would hope no one would think less of me just because sooner or later I like to rough a good character up a bit, you know? It's fun to torture characters, as a treat!

But, anyway, assuming this question isn't, "Do writers know they're gross when I think they are gross" which I'm going to take the kind road and assume it isn't, but is instead, "Do you think authors are aware of the things they constantly come back to?"

Sometimes. It can be jarring to read your own writing and realize that there are things you CLEARLY are preoccupied with. (mm, I like that word more than concerns). There are things you think about over and over, your run your mind over them and they keep working their way back in. I think this is true of most authors, when you read enough of them. Where you almost want to ask, "So...what's up with that?" or sometimes I read enough of someone's work that I have a PRETTY good idea what's up with that.

I've never read Robert Jordan and I don't intend to start (I think it would bore me this is not a moral stance) and I've really never read Rice's erotica. In erotica especially I think you have all the right in the world to get fucking weird about it! But so, when I was young I read the whole Vampire Chronicles series. I don't remember it perfectly, but there's plenty in it to reveal VERY plainly that Anne Rice has issues with God but deeply believes in God, and Anne Rice has a preoccupation with the idea of what should stay dead, and what it means to become. So, when i found out her daughter died at the age of six, before Rice wrote all of this, and she grew up very very Catholic' I said, 'yeah, that fucking checks out'.

Was Rice herself aware of how those things formed her writing? I think at a certain point probably yes. The character of Claudia is in every way too on the nose for her not to have SOME idea unless she was REAL REAL dense about her own inner workings. But, sometimes I know where something I write about comes from, that doesn't mean I'm interested in sharing it with the class. I would never ever fucking say, 'The reasons I seem to write so much of x as y is that z happened to me years ago' ahaha FUCK THAT NOISE. NYET. RIDE ON, COWBOY.

But I've known some people in fandom works who clearly have something going on and don't seem to realize it. Or they're very good at hiding it. Based on the people I'm talking about I would say it's more a lack of self-knowledge, and I don't even mean that unkindly. I have, in many ways, taken myself down to the studs and rebuilt it all, so I unfortunately am very aware of why I do and write the things I do most of the time. It's extremely annoying not to be able to blame something. I imagine it must be very freeing. But it ain't me, babe.

Anyway, a lot of words to say: Maybe! But that might not stop them from writing it, it might be a useful thing for them to engage with, and you can always just not read it.

Also, we don't censor words here.

[ariaste]

Props to OP for answering so gracefully, but I'm not going to answer gracefully. It is more important than ever to call out fascism whenever you see it -- especially the quiet, soft, poisonously insidious kind that Anon is practicing here.

Anon ostensibly wants to know: "Do authors realize that they're writing about things that some people might find disturbing, horrific, upsetting, repulsive, or simply just TMI?" (Yes, obviously they know. Authors are not stupid; that's usually a requirement of the job (not always. But usually).)

But what Anon is actually asking is, "Why don't authors stop themselves from doing a Bad Thing? Why doesn't anyone else stop them?" The assumption underlying that question is: "Surely if they realized that they were doing something disgusting, they would stop immediately." Even more covertly implied: "I think writing about certain things automatically taints you with moral degeneracy--that is, it marks you as a possible or potential criminal."

To that I say: My friend, writing is just thoughts copied onto paper, and thinking is not a crime. Only actual actions can be crimes. What does it matter what other people think about? Literally so what? Why do you want people to be stopped from thinking about those things ("did their editors ever gently ask them...")? Why do you care? Do you feel that an author should provide a list of justifications and excuses before it's permissible for them to write about something? Why? And who do you think should be in charge of that? The government???? YOU???????

To any person reading this post: If the above questions are personally upsetting to you, if you find yourself huffily thinking something like, "Well, I care because it could normalize--", NOPE, STOP RIGHT THERE. 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩 This is a big red flag: You (much like the Anon) are exhibiting some early warning signs of Fascism, and that is not something to take lightly in the current political climate. There are some drugs you shouldn't experiment with even once, and fascism is one of them. Repeat as often as needed: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS THOUGHTCRIME. WE DO NOT LIVE IN GEORGE ORWELL'S 1984.

But we already talk about thoughtcrimes now and then, don't we? I can't remember seeing someone talking about crimestop (also from Orwell's 1984):

In the Newspeak vocabulary, the word crimestop denotes the citizen's instinctive desire to rid himself of unwanted, incorrect thoughts (personal and political), the discovery of which, by the Thinkpol [Thought Police], would lead to detection and arrest, transport to and interrogation at Miniluv (Ministry of Love). The protagonist, Winston Smith, describes crimestop as a conscious process of self-imposed cognitive dissonance: The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented itself. The process should be automatic, instinctive. Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak. . . . He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He presented himself with propositions—'the Party says the Earth is flat', 'the Party says that ice is heavier than water'—and trained himself in not seeing or not understanding the arguments that contradicted them. Moreover, from the perspective of Oceania's principal enemy of the state, in the history book The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, Emmanuel Goldstein said that: Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.

Read that twice, and then reread the Anon's question. Translate it through that lens: "Why," says the Anon, delicately disgusted, "are these authors not practicing better crimestop? I practice it all the time. Why aren't they?"

Great question, Anon. Why AREN'T they? Turn off your crimestop and give it some real thought.

(Hint: If the answer you come up with is "Because they are moral degenerates" or anything in that neighborhood, you are unfortunately still doing fascism. Try again. If you have tried several times and the only answer you can manage to come up with is a still a synonym of "moral degeneracy" then this is above my paygrade and I would recommend talking to a trusted grownup, a therapist, a spiritual leader, or possibly your least-online friend.)

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

I also think it's somewhat reductive to be like "X keeps showing up in a writer's work, therefore they must be obsessed with X". Maybe they are, especially if they keep shoehorning in something really specific, but often it's also just... the simplest and most direct way that they know of to explore something. Fantasy is saturated with depictions of killing and violence; is every fantasy writer obsessed with killing? No. Violence is a very direct and simple way to include conflict with high stakes that you can fill with tension and excitement. Fantasy is also chock full of slavery. Are fantasy writers super into slavery? No. Stories are about power and power differences. Putting a protagonist in chains or giving them an enslaved bodyguard or tangling them up in a slave revolution is a very direct and simple way to explore that dynamic. Authors will usually repeat the tricks that they're used to, and that work. So fucking many of my stories hook the reader with a random inexplicable corpse. So many of my climaxes are like "actually that super special power/big conspiracy/grand prophecy that this entire quest has been about? Fake. Whole thing was a lie this entire time and what's actually going on is something completely different. You've got half a chapter to adjust."

Maybe a writer keeps writing about incest because he actually likes to explore romantic relationships between close family members. Or maybe he keeps writing about incest because he wants to frame the situation as disgusting, and he knows that incest disgusted most of his audience the last three times he wrote it.

[scribbles504]

And even if he did want to explore those relationships through writing, there’s nothing wrong with that.

[txttletale]

ok i've been called a sex freak tranny too i get where you're coming from but like also please be more careful with extremely vague posts about Problematic Kinks

no. people's openness about what two consenting adults can do in private has no bearing on how likely they are to be child abusers or close ranks about child abusers & thinking there is some correlation is a sign that your stance on sexual abuse is mediated more by disgust reaction and aesthetic associations than by structural analysis. there is a pretty hard and obvious line between not condemming consensual sex acts between adults and being a pedophile and thinking that it's some sort of spectrum or slippery slope there imo speaks poorly to your conceptualization of why SA is a bad thing.

people love to say that X or Y kink Normalizes Abuse, but, like, actually think about communities where sexual abuse is 'normalized' in society. is the problem with the catholic church that it's too pro-kink? is the problem with US professional gymnastics that it's too pro-kink? is the problem with the amish that they're too pro-kink? was the problem with the british entertainment industry in the 1970s that it was too pro-kink? is the problem with the prison system that it's too pro-kink? &c. &c. &c.

sexual abuse doesn't happen because people are degenerate perverts and everyone is too accepting of that, sexual abuse happens because society is full of institutions that give adults structural power over children and men structural power over women. giving credence to the former, even in the form of thinking you have to be "super careful" about perverts, is a straightforwardly reactionary position.

[brilliantpines]

do you guys remember when we used to say oh worm all the time. remember that

[brilliantpines]

is anybody out there

[acakewalkofcrocodiles]

[sayatsugu]

A hug. He needs it.

[ariadne-mouse]

I feel fandom would get along a lot better if there was mutual understanding that liking a character, agreeing with a character, and thinking the character is well constructed/executed are all separate (if often overlapping) positions, each with their separate tastes and subjectivities. Also: character portrayals are intended to make the audience feel things; this is separate from (if often overlapping with) analyzing/appreciating their actions and role in the story.

[ariadne-mouse]

Another branch of this: I also think fandom would get along better if there was mutual understanding that what you personally want to happen in a story, what you think the characters should do within the context they have, and what you think the characters will do within the context they have, are all separate (if often overlapping) positions, each with their own tastes and subjectivities, which are also separate from (if often overlapping with) whether you enjoy the story and all that is furthermore separate from (if often overlapping with) analyzing whether the story has laid out and successfully executed its narrative arcs, themes, conclusions, etc.

[ratbastard69420]

Man, I almost drank myself to death yesterday, I can't even remember my name, if only there was someone that could help me.

The the trustworthy and saint-like lieutenant:

[rusemary]

sunrise, parabellum

[ratbastard69420]

Sorry but I can't allow this to remain just in the tags

[prof-grace-aspen]

I'm a fandom oldie and a strong proponent of "ship and let ship", and I defend everyone else's right to ship what they love... But I think that gives people the idea that I like, automatically love every single ship??? Or every single trope?

I don't though!

There are a lot of fandom tropes that are on my "absolutely fuck no" list. There are a lot of irk kinks that are also on my "nope absolutely not" list, too. Personally, this is healthy. I'm able to look at something and go "Yep, I hate it, but it's not harming anyone, so continue to do as you please."

[tuulikki]

I think this is where the rubber meets the road for actually having principles. It’s easy to defend the things we like, just like it’s easy to fight for our own rights and those of people just like us. When you have to use logic to extend your sense of justice to people you can’t relate to, that actually takes effort.

[junkfoodcinemas]

Enemy (2013) dir. Denis Villeneuve

[psychotic-gerard]

me, every single time i see people (especially women) talking about the divine feminine energy, or the sacredness of the womb or whatever it is now:

[image description: a two-panel photo of a person dialling a number and then placing the phone to their ear. the contact is saved as ‘Ursula K. Le Guin’ /end ID]

context is this quote by her:

But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?