INTJ, 5w4, male, victim of l’esprit d’escalier, sarcastically hedonistic, obsequiously romantic. The Kalevala is an epic poem; Sage is a nickname. A Californian hailing from Canada. Aspiring theatrical lighting designer, harpist, occasional playwright, fully bilingual (French with a strong Québecois accent), poorly trilingual (Finnish), wee bit taken with Scandinavia.
Salut Jarku ! I am actually the Suzanne you're seeking. I'm happy to see you're on tumblr and in the LM fandom. I haven't been particularly active in it recently, but you've correctly surmised that I was, at one time. It's a good thing another friend of mine stumbled across your post, or I'm afraid you might never have found me. You see, I'm generally known in fandom circles by my old pseudonym, Estelle/Estella. Mind if I follow you?
Holy fuck it worked. Perusing your Tumblr, I'm ruling that you have nothing to disclaim about your fandom activity: your involvement therein is still dramatically more recent and more regular than mine. It's baffling that I'm recognizing the usernames of apparent mutual followers/followees between our blogs...six degrees of separation, yo.
You may, of course, follow me à ta volonté, with the caveat that I am an aggressively un-private person--I mean, yeah, you might have seen the rainbow flag on my wall that one time, but that's not quite enough to extrapolate that I desperately want to bone Combeferre; meanwhile, one cannot immerse oneself very deeply into my blog without happening upon my (often blatantly sexual) personal babble. I have no idea if this would be disconcerting to a Tumblr user I happen to know IRL (you'd be the first, regardless of how briefly we've met), let alone one in whose former bedroom I fantasize about nerdy, glasses-clad French revolutionaries.
That's a disclaimer. I intend to follow you.
(And I'll likely see you before you return to Paris--Égalité has to undergo some checkups before she can fly, right?)
Oh, good, we've now traded more words online than face to face.
"Lo the Many Moons Ago," or, Who is Kalevala-Sage?
[23/12/2013 12:23:23 AM] Pilfering Apples: "You vanished off the face of Tumblr lo the many moons ago!"
Miserable Holidays. Common sense would have my few persisting followers to (correctly) assume that I hold the handle kalevalaSage on the Archive of our Own; I've never been particularly interested in cross-posting to Tumblr as I find fictional fanwork inherently less pretentious than the nonfictional (without entering the queer theory versus lived queer experiences argument that has recently drifted Gascon's way--yes, I've been lurking a little)...and this blog revels in pretension. While I view none of my fictive prose, transformative or original, as mon œvre, I nonetheless partook in the Miserable Holidays exchange last week with a dedication to Bromir. I am inspired and compelled to return to the fandom, in part*, because of the impeccable piece I received from Ark (Thank you!!).
Who is Kalevala-Sage? After my hiatus began this July, I sought a late September return--for reasons obvious to those close to me, this didn't manifest, but my gargantuan would-be return post has sat in a Word document since about then, mostly expressing quiet, intensely personal, would-be poetic rage against CPS and the legal expectations of juvenile delinquents, i.e. teenage runaways. Rereading the document, I continue to astound myself with the positive correlation between my distress and my lexile indices, but as I've only just, in a handful of months, distanced myself from the content of that prose, I have no desire to sift through it at the given moment. I'm sure that acrimony will sometime manifest on this blog--possibly as social justice (it's about time!!)--and, consequently, force my hand in terms of my RL identity, but I continue to enjoy an online façade of privilege, even as I'm not endowed with it in the world at large.
Who is "Suzanne?" Dear Tumblr--since we last spoke, I've begun subletting from a multitalented woman whom I would succinctly describe as a Francophone rabbi. The room was vacant because its owner, the master renter's daughter, has moved to France with the intent of acquiring a graduate/doctorate degree in French revolutionary history. While I've appreciated the room's 1790 map of France and tolerated "Égalité," her housecat to whom I am allergic, most fascinating has been the plethora of French Bricks and LM film adaptations laying about the common room. According to the master renter, their owner--a storied "Suzanne"--acquired them after digesting the Brick in English and deciding, in her early teens, to repeat the experience en Français...thus spurring her Francophilia. I raise the point because I find it entirely possible that this lady participated in LM's earlier fandom days (2005-2010 or so), allowing me to revel in the improbability that I inherited the room--anyone?
*#pontmercy pontmercy pontmercy, or, why am I really here? Given the prior content of this blog, this is entirely unwonted but in the past month or so I have met Combeferre. He's shorter than fanon would pin him but just as skinny, and favours contacts over his spectacles, but his character is unmistakable. A long string of tech startups has led him to some rad-left company wherein his boss incessantly encourages him to get himself arrested; his own future plans entail an infinitely long deliberation between the acquisition of an MD or an MFA (we bonded, predictably, over Rothko and Lewitt and Jess rather than...whatever it is medics discuss). He slips into French colloquially. He's a scholar of literature and a fashion mogul and, bafflingly, a SAG cardholder. He's fine with ducks but refuses to pursue the subject of geese beyond his expression of rather strong dislike. He lives in the Upper Haight and, oh, evidently he likes men. I told you so, Fandom. Er, what I mean to say is--in the past month or so I have met, kissed, and lost Combeferre.
For the want to preserve my online dignity and pseudo-scholarly import (ha), my ramblings have never quite slipped the degree of my unhingedness. Only under the protection of the expectation that all will tl;dr do I confess here that I struggle with anxiety and with manic compulsions, in the form of a voice that I conceive of as a Deity's. It offers me blessings and bargains, like a karmic exchange--after all, there is logically only so much good fortuity one can plausibly deserve in the world--and in spite of the sane, sensible conversations I've had with my therapist about an over-internalized locus of control and an overestimation of the bounds of my responsibility, I find I consistently lose out if I do not accept Its conditions.
So I'm here because, when directed to choose one gift between physical safety and Combeferre, I chose Combeferre--in spite of it all, I remain alive and aware and vastly unbroken, albeit with a few potentially worrying ailments...and in spite of it all, Combeferre changed his mind about me. This is the most honest admission I can muster: that I am afraid I will miss out on something wonderful if I do not return to Tumblr, now. It is a benign mandate, after all, and a good one at that, as I've been intending to return; this is simply a divine deadline. Now. I am returning now, and I am, potentially, returning insane.
The face of Tumblr has been altered; little if any of my followed content is arriving on my dashboard; the return key shortcuts to post; rooting through my physical notes, I have outlines to write, and rooting through my old archives, I've got 58 drafts but a bitch ain't one--I may even begin a queue, if my normal text-dense content can make it up to par (it has never quite been up to par).
In taking Pontmerciful strides toward discretion it appears I've unwittingly blacked out all the relevant information, but you're going to have to trust me on this one, it's exciting.
Should wait until my flailing arms subside to open it. Because fits of delight are probably beyond the comprehension of my knife. You know.
I asked the man at the theatre entrance when the strobe lights would come on. He said it was not really strobes, and it was just flashing lights. I told him that that could really hurt me, and I can’t even look at certain GIFs on the internet. He seemed surprised, but he told me he didn’t know what to tell me. I asked to speak with the manager. The manager seemed to care a bit more, and he was nicer about it, but he did not know the musical very well.
Lovely review! I’m sorry to hear you had trouble with the front of house staff in regards to the strobe lighting. When the 3NT was last here in Toronto in 2005, they actually included an announcement that mentioned there would be strobes used in the second act and also gunfire, but I haven’t heard an announcement about gunfire probably since then, as they didn’t warn for it with the recent US tour either. (I guess we’re considered desensitized to it now or something, idek.)
Whoa, strobes? During Final Battle, is it? THANK YOU BOTH FOR THE WARNING. Hoooopefully the theater will alert folks if that's gonna be a thing, but if not, now I know to be ready!
Alerts are generally to be expected for any theatrical performance entailing the use of strobe cans, smoke/hazers, or onstage ("herbal") cigarette use; often these will take the form of signs posted in the lobby or, less frequently, notices in the playbills. You probably won't get a pre-show announcement about it, though.
A couple of technical notes--Frafeyrac's house manager was correct in asserting that there are no strobes in Les Mis Toronto (assuming, that is, that the preservation of the 25th Anniversary U.S. Tour staging and the re-use of Paule Constable as LD imply the same lighting design), even if that answer was a bit pedantic: the word "strobe" refers to a very specific kind of instrument, and your house manager might have been literally answering that there were just no actual strobe cans hung. I've seen LM's gunfire accomplished by flashing ministrips, which are not strobes but which may or may not be capable of epileptic triggering. It's pretty damn difficult to accomplish a true stroboscopic effect with an instrument that wasn't especially created for it, and as I remember, the gunfire at the barricades in the tour/Toronto are nowhere near the 8Hz seizure threshold, but looked more like a random/quasi-random chase among a half-dozen fixtures (maybe PARs?).
That said, I would not recommend bringing these issues to an usher or house manager. As their title suggests, FOH staff are generally employed by the house, not the touring production; doubly, their training will typically involve hospitality-esque stuff and not rehearsals, so they're not likely to be as familiar with the show. If possible, I'd ask to talk to the stage manager/PSM or light board operator if there's a concern about the cues, because even if they can't remember they totally have an instrument schedule delineating exactly this kind of information.
Finally and perhaps most unhelpfully, while this information is useful for the photosensitive epileptics pondering Les Mis Toronto, Pilf, I have no idea how your production tonight will be staged. The videos on the Zach's website suggest they're not using the original West End-style roto, but it doesn't really appear as if they're replicating the new staging/lighting either. If it's any help, the regional production I worked only fired its strobes for the top of the runaway cart scene, and aside from that and the gunfire bits I artistically can't really see them being used anywhere else (I mean, possibly during the robbery, but that would be so, so OTT I'd have to revoke my previous use of the word "artistic"). So maybe avert your eyes there if you're worried and can't catch a crewmember before the show.
I feel as though I’m done something of a disservice to the Les Mis Tumblr fandom. After months of writing little else and racking up a respectable following for it, I all but dropped out of the fandom at the beginning of the summer and haven’t made any sort of meaningful contribution since. This, unfortunately, is not my comeback post, though it’s directly inspired by my interactions with various Les Mis fans and especially those just coming to the book/musical/other adaptations for the first time. A few weeks ago I found out in my summation of major appearances of Louisiana Francophones in literature that I rather like writing informal literary recommendations despite the effort involved...
The sound of you discussing literature is always a pleasant one, though it's a little disappointing to hear you'll be passing over the respective kings of existentialism and absurdism (on the other hand, I would eagerly snatch that baton from you and pontificate on Huis Clos and La Peste myself--if only I wasn't so failing my preestablished Tumblr commitments!). Oh, and I've certainly heard of Pamela, and once began but never finished Tristram Shandy...but at this point I'm just showing off my pretentious lit cred.
Downvoting Tartuffe because it's inane, is one or two centuries premature for any Romantic interest, has very little in common with Les Mis as the ostensible common thread of your rec list (and may perhaps be its thematic antithesis in terms of its portrayal of religion), and is, setting aside that it's *ahem* topically relevant to your personal inclinations, possibly overrated...
...but heartily seconding your recommendation of Candide if one is in the mood for a little satire. I've argued elsewhere that the Lisbon earthquake both in itself and as depicted in Candide were landmarks in the neoclassical overturn of teleology, which is a fairly uncontroversial assertion except that theoretically the Enlightenment had taken hold up to a century previously (but, I mean, you still had nincompoops like Alexander Pope at large, how enlightened was that), which would make it rather a staple of the French (if not the global) canon, not to mention a rival of LM in both snark and politics. I'm sure I'd only embarrass myself making Candide/Marius parallels due to my own similarities with the latter, but I feel like it could be accomplished--and potentially even rationalized by Hugo's fanboying over Voltaire (that link also contains a public domain translation of Candide, though I know there's also a French edition somewhere out there with an illustrative plate for the chapter with the monkey sex. If anyone is into that. Or just wants to see a completely straight-faced depiction of bestiality.
I feel the need to reblog this again right now, and send our Pontmercying friend love and luck.
love for my pontmercying friend you can do the english and french already so really you just need to learn German better than having to learn two languages like the original isn’t it?
Hah! If someone of our society had crash space to offer the parallels could be complete. I should have priority there, but I have no home live several states away in a crackerbox trailer, it’s less than ideal:P
Awww, you guys. Bear with me for a moment as I may be in the process of tearing up--at risk of becoming a sentimental blogger, this genuinely made my day and I love you.
I've been having nightmares for several nights running--being covered in snails and having to pluck them off, missing rehearsals and work shifts, programming a show in an isolated control booth under the assigned supervision of one incredibly predatory Combeferre only to have him try to rape me (possibly my worst dream in recent memory, and possibly some karmic negation of the, ah, nocturnal emission I had a few weeks ago concerning another, kinder, gentler Combeferre)--so it's no surprise that I've been waking comparatively early, pledging my mornings to my internet haunts and offline productivities. Today I decided to masturbate.
It's with the aid of the kink meme that I end up with a plug in my ass, and I'm feeling it and such and starting to get off when I close my eyes and the next thing I know I'm dreaming.
I'm working a production of Next to Normal at a specific theatre a half hour north of me, clumsily explaining the plot to my straitlaced mother and her impatience for psychiatric wellness. I manage it somehow and make it to focus, where I'm assigned to a certain front of house position one has to squat on a pipe a couple stories above the ground to reach. The prospect of falling through, though entirely possible, doesn't unnerve me, but the fact that I can lift four PAR64s, all clad in faders, plus the taildown pipe they're on, does. I probably can't carry that off the ground, much less up in FOH where I'm preoccupied with, I don't know, the mere act of balancing (in hindsight, one wouldn't likely put PAR cans anywhere FOH anyway). My incredulity alerts me that this is a dream, and I wake.
I check my phone to learn I've been out exactly eleven minutes, which means, I suppose, that I dropped immediately into REM sleep. I suddenly feel and remember the butt plug; rousing the laptop beside me, I'm shown the pornographic fanfiction I fell asleep getting off to. Apparently.
I've never been aroused to the point of passing out, by the way, or is this what all those kink meme prompters are referring to? It's not especially sexy, for the record--my dream wasn't even explicit. Boo.
And I never said it didn’t have a fandom already, or that they were all straight white girls. What I was trying to convey was that just like the Les Miz fandom before the 2012 movie was pretty much the territory of older Broadway geeks and was later adopted by the wider demographic of straight white girls who love (real, hinted, and imagined) gay themes, the same would probably happen with a new version of Maurice. Especially with a cast like the one I suggested, and people like you ready to jump at whoever is late to the party.
Your point about the (new, via-the-movie transformation of the) Les Mis fandom is spot-on, but your argument suggests to me that Maurice isn’t a like-with-like case.
• Les Mis used to be ‘the territory of older Broadway geeks’, but has now been adopted by ‘a wider demographic of straight white girls who love gay themes’ – read female slash fans – thanks to the impact of the recent film.
• Maurice, by contrast, already has a following from your ‘wider’ female slash fan demographic, and has done for some years, without any nudge from a 21stC remake. In Maurice’s case, the ‘nudge’ is more that 1987 Maurice’s Alec Scudder (Rupert Graves) is now rather famous (in his older incarnation) within the huge (and very slashy) BBC Sherlock fandom.
See what I mean? It’s a moot point whether a new, differently cast, version of Maurice would ‘gain’ your wider slash-girl demographic because the 1987 film has already captured them.
Good discussion all around, though I have to agree with Exponential about Maurice not needing a film remake since the 1987 one still resonates very well with all the relevant audiences - female slash fans as well as gay men (like myself). I did want to make a very tiny point about the Les Mis fandom though. Members of the online fandom have been writing slash and talking about queer issues in the book and musical since the early 2000s at least, and the 2012 movie has only really made that much more visible thanks to a huge influx of new fans. I don’t that movie compares very favorably with a hypothetical Maurice remake, if only because I know many older Les Mis fans are ambivalent toward some of the major shifts in the fandom in the half year since the movie debuted, among them the acceleration of a large scale shipping war between a gay ship and a straight one that’s prompted unending allegations of queer erasure, queer fetishization, and other contentious subjects. I don’t think there’s really anything present in Maurice to inspire that sort of thing, but all the same I highly doubt a remark would constitute a net positive when the original is already so good.
Hi, and thanks for your sensible input. I can’t compete/compare with your special expertise on Les Mis and its shifting fandom – so this is all interesting, especially the ‘large-scale’ gay v. straight ship war (and I’m reblogging for reference, if that’s OK).
The impact of the 2012 Les Mis movie in ‘ma[king] that much more visible thanks to a huge influx of new fans’ has similarities the factors that have made a Maurice fandom ‘much more visible’, but Maurice hasn’t attracted anything like the gay/street ship wars (as you imply, there’s little in Maurice to ‘inspire’ straight ships anyway) or big public disputes around queer erasure and queer fetishization, that you describe re. Les Mis. That doesn’t mean that these issues are absent in relation to Maurice and its fandom(s), but they don’t tend to get expressed as big, explicit public conflicts.
What you call ‘basic queer fetishization’ is actually driven more by my interest (as a British person from a similar class background to Alec) in the class dynamics and my desire to give Alec, as the working-class character, more agency and power; my attempt to think about what a different, ‘masculine’, ‘gay’ (rather than romantic, female-friendly) film version of Maurice might be like (are you seriously suggesting it wouldn’t be more sexually forthright than in 1987?); and my reaction against (over-romantic, classist) tendencies I’ve seen in some female-authored Maurice fanfiction.
So what you’re saying is I called you a straight woman (which you didn’t deny) and “pissy", you called me an abusive, "immature (and possibly misogynist) little prick", and yet, somehow, you’re the offended one. Huh. What exactly did I abuse? Nothing. Would you have called me immature if I hadn’t mentioned my age? Probably not. Is there any reason for you to call me a misogynist? No, there is not. So please, before calling me mean or any of those other things, evaluate your own defensive attitude towards a book I literally finished yesterday, a movie I watched yesterday, and which you are kind of ruining for me with your name-calling.
And you’re also saying you study gender and sexuality while holding outdated and offensive opinions about tops, bottoms, and their roles in a relationship. Or even worse, their roles in society. I say this because you imply that Alec doesn’t have agency and power in bed, just because he doesn’t have it in society. Please stop, and don’t you dare tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about. Unless you’ve been a man in a sexual relationship with another man, this is not your discussion to have.
‘Is there any reason for you to call me a misogynist?’: you repeatedly tell me that I have no right to evaluate or analyse the characters in Maurice because I am a woman. In your latest reply, you extend this to saying that even lesbian and bi women have no right to comment (‘this is not your discussion to have’). So yes, you are. Please take a look at yourself.
‘You imply that Alec doesn’t have agency and power in bed, just because he doesn’t have it in society’: No, I don’t. ‘While holding outdated and offensive opinions about tops, bottoms, and their roles in a relationship. Or even worse, their roles in society’: No, I don’t. Stop perversely distorting everything I actually say, or think. But, hey, none of it can be right because I don’t have a dick.
Might be a bad idea for me to chime in mid-flamewar, but there's certainly a perverse irony at work here as "straight women have no place in adjudicating the fetishism of a gay male ship" was the crux of the Les Misérables circlejerk to which Gascon alluded, with the caveat that I can count all the non-women of the fandom on one hand, and the non-straight women on two. As the conflict rages on its arguments are more and more frequently self-righteous regurgitations of the same tired manifestos, but #Enjonine continues to be about 60% wank, and #Enjonine for TS and #TW: Enjonine will get you there if you, I don't know, itch for a spectacle. Or if you want to see people Wrong on the Internet silencing non-queers--at some point a few months ago accusations were actually slung about some participants being "vague bisexuals," i.e. faking queerness so they'd have a right to defend their heteroship and say they didn't feel erased by it.
In other words, I'll readily acknowledge that Tumblr is absurdly cruel to straight women, even from my vantage as a person who is neither of those things. And I do highly defend your right to an argument, Exponential, but at risk of dwelling on trivialities too close to those raw nerves, you do beg the question of the queer's right to identify queer fetishization and whether that exists only when terms as vague as "queer" allow a congruency between the identifiers and the fetishized population (as doesn't exist between incongruent groups like gay men and lesbian/bisexual women). This might just be my dash coalescing, but Gascon recently put into words a stance I've previously expressed somewhere on my own blog stating that it's either a) impossible or b) if possible, a non-issue to fetishize one's own identity, as it's only problematic when "the object becomes an Other--instead of...something positive within one’s own experience." He also names "reductive" fetishization specifically, which I believe was Frank's fear surrouding your (not necessarily incorrect) association of topping with dominance, as exists almost all of the time in slash but isn't so absolute IRL. Both these traps of Otherness and reduction can be sprung along the distance afforded anyone who isn't a member of the group they're slashing, but easier to evade the less distance/congruity one has (ETA: at risk of redundancy, but to mitigate my putting words in Gascon's mouth, my take on the exoticism debate is here)--which isn't to dismiss your authority on slash on the grounds of your femininity, but rather to suggest your instinctual responses may not be as valid as a gay/bi man's (but may in turn be more valid than those of a straight woman's). I'd hazard that your academic credentials have allowed you to surmount your experiential/instinctual defecit here, absolutely giving you some agency in this conversation.
That said, if it followed in the footsteps of Les Mis, Frank's hypothesized film adaptation would bring in throngs of his "straight girls" with, at least initially, nothing more than their (straight, female, and generally irrelevant) instincts to steer them from (gay, male) fetishization. Maurice now has as much a niche literary fandom as did Les Mis pre-2012, which is why I can't see Frank's desire for a cis gay white boy adaptation as anything but counterproductive on the fetishization front.
*whispers out into the ether* …but I don’t want platonic Enjolras/Combeferre, I want them to be banging like an emotionally constipated egalitarian screen door in a hurricane
While this is a call for more E-slash-C, I’d like to take the opportunity to do a raise of hands for people who ship them romantically. The friendshippers are pretty much a solid base, and while I myself belong there, I think this romantic ship deserves recognition too. The people I know who do ship this are only few, composing of, well, Marianne and Jarku, so raise your hand if you do as well!
Reblogging with transparent intentions of Good Faith. And also because I'd like to keep tabs on this salacious "headcannon;" are we becoming a real ship yet?
This one's a different post on a tangentially-related subject
More specific than the last, though, and to address the concerns of the few parties in last night's Pilf-Skype:
[23/06/2013 11:33:25 PM] *** Jarku Virtanen has changed the conversation topic to ""Porn is inherently hilarious though" --Pilfering Apples" ***
[23/06/2013 11:33:32 PM] Pilfering Apples: ...JARKU
[23/06/2013 11:33:34 PM] Pilfering Apples: CHANGE IT BACK
like one exasperatedly tells a puppy not to lick everything in its excitement while conscientious of the lack of good it will do. And I took "MARIUS, REST" and "GO TO BED JARKU" as more of the same, especially considering they immediately followed my announcement that "OH NO I CAN'T LEAVE NOW THAT YOU'VE MENTIONED E AND C." I sincerely thought I had just made one too many nuisances for the night and was no longer welcome, especially with my absolutely brainless (and also apparently absolutely wrong) Brick commentary. And while a more removed mind might have realized the light and warmth and centre-ness that is Pilf would never boot a friend, it's at times difficult to take the aforementioned "Don't slash C/E within earshot" rule kindly when
[21/06/2013 1:36:45 AM] Pilfering Apples: Perry, Jarku represents the E/C slash community.
[21/06/2013 1:36:47 AM] Pilfering Apples: All of it.
makes it feel absolutely targeted. I understand that if I don't have friends to ship with, then the fault lies with me, and I've completely accepted the social burden of the outsider. On the other hand, my ensuing isolation is fairly irreparable, which perhaps has made me far too sensitive to accurately separate what has been accepted as part of my personality with wry smiles from what ventures too far into unwelcome subject matter.
To be brief--I misconstrued genuine concern for my sleeping habits as teasing deprecation, and proceeded to offer back some of my own snark, which in turn was mistaken for my anger, because I'm a Pontmercy with no interpersonal skills, and I apologize truly for any annoyance I was interpreted to have felt toward anyone because of it.
...And then recall how agonizingly creepy it was regardless.
I woke up this morning to a draft of my last post and continued typing where I left off, not bothering to check my dash--so it happens that I missed both Hana's summons for slashers and the hatemail Hammy received about the Zeppelin's Platonism. Had I seen those developments I wouldn't have contributed my own, as my intent was only to shed a bit of pith on what I've seen as a trifling fandom issue, not truly out of aggravation but out of good-natured exasperation. I hear, though, that I missed pith by a mile. I'm sorry about that.
Guys, not that this isn’t a nice conversation you’re having, but I feel like you should all know that the capitalization “FRIENDship" is a riff on the ugh-you’re-ruining-the-friendship argument (based off a person who once wrote it this way, and was serious), and has since become a memetic satire of the concept. (Example: This fic) It’s practically a dead giveaway this was a troll.
Never saw that fic before…absolutely cracked me up, and I don’t even read much Ike/Soren. What I’ve always wondered about this easily parodied argument is if it’s ever been applied to any het pairings in any fandom - not just saying that they work better or are more enjoyable as friends, but that shipping them romantically actively damages their relationship in fanon. I’m guessing not.
I've never seen that fic either, but it read with an eerie familiarity...principally because minus the satire this is fandom's approach to Combeferre/Enjolras in a nutshell.
I mean, really...still waiting to get lynched for holding the unpopular opinion that sometimes these two have penises for these "platonic kisses" to evolve into platonic dickfic.
I was at a drum circle once and this girl told this story while around the fire, this errie slow drum beat behind her, and this caused me to remember that moment, something that still sends chills down my spine
Except the Natives on Tumblr have specifically said 3532547890432748905723 times that this is some white man bullshit created to further fuel the stereotype of the "~*~*~*MyStiKal NDN*~*~*~" trope.
This "story" makes me itch for some good old-fashioned physical aggression as my father has thrown it around an immodest number of times over the past few weeks--well, no, that's not strictly true; he's been proclaiming a variant wherein one of the wolves is cis/straight and the other is queer.
Except, father, by your own admission, deviance is unnatural, so what are you doing sticking queerness in nature via wolves, eh?
