19 · he/she · cat lover · bi i guess · lover, fighter, weeb, bookworm · biphobes please interact, I live for petty arguments · I don't who any of these characters are I just like cool art
inspired by this post, I made a graph about how many fics on Ao3 have Postal Service song names in their titles:
Method info/additional details below the cut
Data notes:
The counts are the number of fics on Ao3 that contain the song name somewhere in the title (i.e., the full fic title could include other words in addition to the song name), as of 9/8/2025. I used the Ao3 “Any field” search with the modifier “title:” added, since the “title” field search didn't seem to support exact phrase filtering, for some reason. The counts don't include restricted fics
To be clear, I'm not claiming the counts equal the number of fics named after the songs (especially for the songs with shorter, more generic names) :)
Notably, there’s at least 1 fic on Ao3 with an exact title match for every single song on Give Up except for “Clark Gable”, although there is a single fic that mentions Clark Gable in its title
Also, here's the graph again but sorted by album order, because why not:
Bunny by Mona Awad is a book that grabs not-like-other-girls by the shoulders, looks them in the eye, and says "I understand how you feel. I understand where your coming from. And I sympathize. But you're wrong."
Samantha is alternative. There is a societal pressure on women to be feminine, which weighs on Samantha. Samantha is lonely. All the other creative writing students are friends with each other, but Samantha doesn't fit in with them, because they are all hyperfeminine. Samantha is not hyperfeminine, and she knows if she tried to fit in with them it would make her miserable.
These things result in Samantha developing an intense revulsion toward femininity and being extremely critical of the bunnies. She hates everything about them, to the point of interpreting their affectations as sinister and a sign they must be deeply, deeply weird.
The same loneliness-magic that created Ava turned the Bunnies into what Samantha imagined them to be: a creepy hive mind that is only interested in cute and pretty things.
In the end, it turns out the house was just a normal house. What this experience was like from the Bunnies' perspective is unclear.
While I am admittedly no horror afficionado, my understanding is that the terrifying thing in a work of horror fiction is usually gore, mutilation, death, that sort of thing. In Bunny, the terrifying thing is femininity. There is some gore and death, but the centerpiece (is that the right term?) of the book, the most intense bit of horror, is the sequence where Samantha has totally assimilated into the Bunnies and is hanging out with them.
Am I saying that this book relies on the reader having internalized misogyny in order to be scary? idk
one of the funniest things I see people say about "standard english" btw is californians who are like "yeah basically all american english speakers speak the same way so it makes sense to call that 'standard american english'" because you know they only perceive it that way because californian english has like every single vowel merger simultaneously so they can't tell the difference between other american english varieties. they're fish who don't know they're wet
There are so many fucking different American accents where the people who have them love to go "oh I've just got a generic American accent!" and NO YOU DO NOT, and THAT ISN'T A THING.
Posting only a snippet to protect the person's identity and because I don't want to attack them personally but comment on the many similar opinions I have seen:
[ID: a screenshot of a tumblr post reading "Don't get me wrong. But translating a poem loses it's meaning and soul."]
No one is as aware of translation loss as translators themselves. No one is as aware of translation gains as translators themselves either.
On tumblr, there are many posts about how reading something in translation "can't make you grasp the original" or how subtitles or dubs are "inaccurate". This is incredibly unkind to translators who work very hard and usually get paid very little to make books or audiovisual media accessible to you at all (not even to mention all the other areas of translation you're not even aware of).
Of course, some translators make mistakes. But writers make typos too and some make it into published books. Of course, there are cases of manipulation or censorship, I wrote my thesis on this, but more often than not these cases were caused by outside forces not the translators themselves. There are bad translations like there are bad novels or films.
I want more people to think of translation as a creative process that has nearly infinite strategies and choices. Translations differ because they are made by humans. They differ because there are as many ways to translate something as there are to write something. A translation will always necessarily differ from its source because, and it sounds really silly saying this out loud, it's in a different language. And at the same time, the translator is in a constant dialogue with the author and audience, trying to bridge a gap between them.
Translation is not meaningless and not soulless. It adds to the original the soul of the translator.
Am I the only one who thought it was neat that the bar in I Saw The TV Glow is called Double Lunch? I thought it was neat. Brought me right back to high school.
Have you ever done an analysis of which fandoms are most dominated by a single ship?
I hadn't done so before. I just took a quick pass at doing so, but only among the biggest fandoms on AO3 as of Jan 2024 (ones with over 10K public works at that time). I sorted them by the size of their biggest ship relative to the size of the fandom. This gives us a bunch of very big fandoms with a high % of works tagged with a particular ship:
The raw data used to make this graph, including the corresponding biggest ships, is available in a spreadsheet here, or at the end of this post.
A few notes:
This is based on January 2024 data. Some things may have changed!
Not all these works are necessarily about these ships. Especially in the cases where the ships are canon, they may often be tagged as background ships.
There are undoubtedly many smaller AO3 fandoms that have higher percentages devoted to the top ship.
I removed some highly overlapping fandoms (e.g., Good Omens book fandom).
This is AO3 data only, and (as always!) AO3 does not represent fandom overall. In particular, ship popularity tends to vary A LOT by archive/platform. See some past cross-platform shipping comparisons from 2019 (comparing het vs. slash vs. gen on Wattpad/FFN/AO3), and 2014 (comparing popular ships from HP, SPN, and Sherlock on AO3/FFN). One highlight:
Raw data:
Fandom | Top relationship | % tagged with most common ship
Shameless (US) | Ian Gallagher/Mickey Milkovich | 92.5%
There are three main models of disability that are in common use. The moral model, the medical model, and the social model.
You may not have heard of the moral model before, but if you are disabled, you have felt the impact of it. The moral model is disability as a failure of character. It sources the problem of disability in the character of the disabled person. It's the people who insist that if you just tried harder, were better, had a better attitude, that you would no longer be disabled. It is a model that is used by ableists in order to conceptualize of disability as a failing of the individual. An extreme example of this mindset are the Christian Scientists, who believe that all illnesses and disabilities should be healed by the grace of their god and that if you are not healed, something is wrong with you. It is the the most cruel of the models, and the least successful at assisting disabled people.
The medical model is the model used by the medical establishment and by those who put their stock in medical authority. It sources the problem of disability in the body. It measures disability against a theoretical average person, and seeks to make disabled people match that average person more closely. This model works very well for disabled people with disabilities that can be measured, have a potential treatment plan, and want their disability gone. It does not work very well for people who do not match all three criteria. If they match the first and second but not the third, then strict adherents of the medical model often fall back on the moral model, stating that they are stupid, lazy, or selfish for not being interested in being cured. This also often happens if treatment fails to improve the condition of the disabled person.
The social model is a newer model, largely designed by disability activists and scholars and often defined in opposition to the medical model. It sources the problem of disability in the interaction between the disabled person and their physical and social environment. It argues that the solution of disability is to change the environment so that impairments are no longer an issue. This model works very well for disabled people who consider their disability not to be an issue when fully accommodated. It does not work well for people who consider their disability an inherent impairment and/or desire a cure. Strict adherents of the social model often fall back on the moral model when considering these people, stating that they are short-sighted or that they worship the medical model. These are the people who state things such as that depression would not exist in a world without capitalism.
When a disabled person fails to behave as expected by the model a person has of disability, the moral model is almost always the fallback position, because many people cannot conceive of why someone would disagree with them other than a lack of good character. This is a problem, because the moral model proposes no solution but to ignore or abuse the disabled person until they behave as expected.
Another notable interaction is that adherents of the medical model can often be persuaded to support the more traditional parts of the social model, such as providing large text resources to people with impaired vision, so long as there is empirical research backing it. However, they rarely support more radical arguments that challenge how we define disability and how society should be structured or restructured.
All three models have major failure points. The moral model fails every disabled person it is applied to. The medical and social models both fail different disabled people when adhered to strictly. The best approach at the moment seems to be hybridizing the social and medical models, so that they cover each other's weak points and fit the needs of the widest spectrum of disabled people. The main barrier to this is that they are often defined in opposition to each other.