My Ladder to the Stars

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

[missredherring]

Missredherring's Masterlists

PPCU Masterlist

MSCU Masterlist

Misc Masterlist

Prompt Series Masterlist

Plant Your Hope With Good Seeds Masterlist

[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

[queenofbadlands]

Pedro Pascal as Dieter Bravo

The Bubble (2022)

[acecroft]

#that's one sick puppy

[wesandresons]

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

[rylandsgrace]

The Fantastic Four : First Steps (2025) dir. Matt Shakman

[kedsandtubesocks]

Joel does math off the top of his head or correctly guesses the right measurements to something and suddenly it’s one of the hottest things you’ve ever seen

[roycohn]

there's an old anne rice interview circulating on twitter rn that i remember reading ages ago where she makes a pretty salient point about how submissive men who have bdsm fantasies etc will go to a sex worker and basically order the ala carte version of their fantasy to be performed in real life but women don't really have that same option and certainly not at the same point of availability so they read her horny books instead. and honestly that argument has been in the back of my mind every time people get on their high horses about the popularity of booktok romantasy novels or heated rivalry or whatever the "women are horny and we're upset about that" cultural property du jour is ever since. women, especially straight women, have so few outlets for their sexual desires, especially if they have a partner who doesn't share them, and i will never understand why "someone ELSE'S private sexual fantasy makes me uncomfortable and therefore they should not be allowed to engage with it, even if i am in no way being affected by it or even aware of it at all" is such a popular party line among allegedly progressive young people.

[ariesrin]

I love characters who would die for each other but will not, under any circumstances, communicate a single honest feeling.

[unclefather]

Reblog if you’re a true 90s kid and you remember this tumblr

[superbnature]

Cedar Waxwings by jocelynefeizo1 http://ift.tt/1RM3Kk0

[manyblinkinglights]

#do cedar waxwings ever eat anything besides photogenic red berries#do cedar waxwings ever do anything besides eating photogenic red berries#is there any way this child can get its parent to stop feeding it photogenic red berries

[speciesofleastconcern]

watch how many berries I can cram into this other bird

[strawberrycherrycola]

Still thinking about this psychopath 😝

[whydidisavethistomyphone]