My Ladder to the Stars

Rachel. 30+. She/Her. MDNI. Sometimes I write!  Masterlists are pinned.

[missredherring]

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[daintyartisan]

High Fashion SpongeBob by WISDOM KAYE (2023)

[maelwife]

Maybe one reason time seems to speed up in adult life is because when your full time job leaves you roughly 5 hours of free time a day plus two days off a week your life turns into a sort of monotony that makes the days blend together and creative pursuits move in slow motion as you can only get to them when other your commitments are done.

[maelwife]

When you look back and think damn 2019 wasn’t that long ago where did the time go? Job. Your Job took it.

[ee33]

sorry for staring i was just looking at the space where ur neck meets ur shoulders & thiking about it

[sin-djarin]

[targetedknowledge]

[frankiesbullshit]

someone tell OP i did it, i spent about 3 hours on it

[cyphir-spacerobot]

Victor Frankenstein after achieving the impossible and building a fucking person from scraps of the dead: Oh god, ew, ew it's ugly! Yucky! Yucky! Gross! Ew! Ew! Yucky! Yucky! Gross! Ew!

[koiagain]

[acecroft]

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (2026) dir. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett

[wesandresons]

SHAWN HATOSY as BRETT RICHARDS FIRE COUNTRY 4.03 “The Tiny Ways We Start to Heal”

[iero]

x

[aretasreads]

[ducissatenebrarum]

The “Pillar-biter” (Dutch: pilaarbijter), 1509–1517 — a rare late-Gothic satire carved on the lower choir/rood screen of St. Bavo Church in Haarlem.

The figure grips the column framing him and literally bites into it, his face twisted into a grimace, while a rosary on his belt hints at the message: a warning against excessive, performative piety and hypocrisy, looking devout in public, but acting differently at home.

[a7estrellas]

PEDRO WILL GET A STAR IN HOLLYWOOD WALK OF FAME 🥹

[feralforsilverfoxes]

He’s just standing there and I want to devour him!

[misscrazyfangirl321]

Being an adult will have you unironically craving a vegetable

[misscrazyfangirl321]

Being an adult will have you unironically sad about a parasite outbreak in fresh vegetables.

[amusementforme]

[retquits]

Fat women see you out there drawing Lavender and loving her, and feel that we can be drawn and loved too

FAT WOMEN EVERYWHERE YOU ARE LOVED AND ADORED !!!

[hircyon]

I’m really curious to know if the mary sue scare is still a thing that affects how people write and work with their OCs, or a pressure that people put on writers, or if the prevalence of readerfic/self-shipping/anti-cringe-culture has made that less of a forethought. Genuinely curious.

[mercurygray]

OP, I know this post is from February, but a friend found it this morning and I also think it’s a really good question and I wanted to give my answer to it, which is -

I think the prevalence of readerfic is one of the results of the Mary Sue scare. It’s just that the people doing a lot of this writing don’t know what a Mary Sue is and don’t know they’re living in the shadow of something that happened before.

It’s been my experience that writing OCs is usually one of the first things we do in fandom, right? (I say this as someone who is still doing it fifteen years later, so I’m not going to call it a phase.) And for a lot of us who started writing during a very particular period in fandom culture, when things were moving online, digital space was cheap and you could put up literally anything you wanted, including a lot of baby’s first fanfic.

Some of it was good; some of it was bad. Lots of people had strong opinions about it, and better writers than me have written about the role that (largely female) wish fulfillment fantasy plays in fanfic. But I think there is a generation of writers, and I am one of them, who are VERY self-conscious about writing OCs because the phrase Mary Sue was used very liberally in spaces I was in when I first started.

Keep reading

[hircyon]

See, this is an angle I probably wouldn’t have considered to this depth, so thank you for the insightful response! It’s a fascinating parallel. I remember the Mary Sue era well and I still have residual fears about my OCs as a result, but I wasn’t creatively active in fandom when the shift from OC-centric fic to reader-centric fic started.

There’s just a lack of dimension to readerfic that makes it hard to engage with, IMO. I can totally see it as a way of trimming all the fat off what an OC or a perceived Mary Sue did for the reader and getting straight to the wish fulfillment. No design or characterization to get in the way. At least, that’s been my experience; I’ll admit I don’t read a lot of readerfic because the directness of it is not what I’m looking for.

I agree, I wish we could go back to writing original characters. Not because I hate readerfic, I really don’t. Because creating a character outside yourself is a fan-to-narrative interaction you really can’t replicate in any other way. It does things for representation and for building a story that you just can’t with an implied character. I’d love to see people really utilize the specific narrative distance readerfic creates and see what they can make with that, too.

[mercurygray]

I want to thank everyone who responded so eloquently in the tags - @yeswevegotavideo’s ’#why do you think I’m reading fiction? It’s certainly not because I want to spend more time with myself ‘made me laugh.

And you’re absolutely right, @hircyon - there usually is a lack of dimensionality in Readerfic, because I don’t think the point has ever been to explore the canon characters - it’s to comfort the reader, and the reader has a thousand faces. (At least, we hope it’s a thousand. Two thousand would be better.)

Because there’s another element here that I didn’t mention in my first reply, and that’s the commondification or gamification of fic culture, which is to say, I am here for a good time, not a long time, and I am posting this thing for the specific purpose of chasing likes and stats.

Mary Sue fic has a very low barrier to entry - readerfic does as well. And if you’re just starting out, what do you want? For people to read - you want to be in the moment, and the moment is getting shorter and shorter.

Keep reading