or midnight

multi shipping, poly shipping, swearing in tags. lots of star trek. If I ever nail down a gender identity or sexual orientation I can assure you that my tumblr bio is the last place I will ever post that information.

[or-midnight]

Something that is never going to really sink in for me is the fact that people do creative and/or transformative fandom as a Normal and Civilized Activity. Wrecks my entire worldview each and every time I encounter it. I am here to drink things, smoke things, break things, and fuck, not in any particular order. If I were packing a bag to Go To Fandom, it would have medical tape, everclear, a roll of quarters, and at least one can of spraypaint in it. I would have boots on.

[or-midnight]

blessed be the local burrito joint, you know the one I'm talking about

[rubybweek]

full prompt list | faqs

[or-midnight]

things I have seen people be mad about that fan creators did with women characters

Used her first name instead of her last name

Used her last name instead of her first name (same character)

Wrong Position In Sex Scene

She was angry about something

She wasn't angry enough about something

She ate a food someone didn't like

She was . . .

You know what it's almost exactly like living in the world as a woman. No matter what you do you're doing it wrong, and to a degree i even understand that because just existing as a woman in public is something of a thesis statement, even now, and we're all horribly accustomed to defending that thesis.

And this isn't to discourage the discourse or whatever, women and women in fiction are certainly as capable as anyone of doing difficult and problematic and outright shitty things that are great for discoursing about, and bigotry should NOT get a pass, but hell.

Makes it a whole lot easier to just fantasize about the guys doing guy sex because then the grilling isn't automatically about me personally, you know?

(Anyone who uses that last line as a cudgell to attack writers writing women will be set on fire with my mind and I'm also having a little daydream about ways you might wind up owing a dentist a lot of money, just for the record.)

Final addendum: in order for me to care about anything you add to this discussion you must have written one centrally-important-to-the-work fictional woman in a place where people can talk about her to your face. If you haven't done that yet, get busy, and I don't automatically mean that in a mean way.

[becquerel]

the awesome thing about the internet is i realized i can just do to female characters what people do to male characters all the time

[becquerel]

"she's underdeveloped everything you write about her is fanon" yeah people do that for 2739472 white guys i wanna do it for the chicks now "those two women havent even met" people shipped onceler yaoi with alternate forms of himself because there was no one else to ship him with. there is literally no stopping the fanon you make. so long as you love it.

[theriverbeyond]

i think "turning into a pumpkin" is my new favorite way to articulate the state of things when I am at a function and very overstimulated and it feels like my brain is melting. it's like no i can't be a person anymore i have to leave i'm turning into the pumpkin. the time is up yeah i gotta go. yeah see u later. pumpkin time.

[andthepeople]

love that jabba in the original trilogy is like BRING ME HAN SOLO!!! HUNT HAN SOLO ACROSS THE GALAXY!!!! I WILL HANG HIM ON MY WALL LIKE A CHEAP PAINTING!!!! meanwhile chewie who no doubt also cheated jabba out of whatever they cheated him out of has no heat on him whatsoever. even jabba's not ballsy enough to start shit with a wookiee. no solid evidence chewie could rip a hutt's arms off but jabba is not going to be the idiot to test that

[philliptheprinceposts]

thinking about how the chiss ascendancy books show such a genuine love for young women and girls and such an empathy for them, it's so often you see young women be reduced to plot devices and symbols of pure innocence and such but in the chiss ascendancy novels I think the writing of the navigators inner lives is so accurate bc like when you're growing up as a girl you have an awareness of the world around you and know that there are certain societal expectations of you, but yet you still need someone there to help you and guide you because you are still small and don't know everything ugh anyways read the ascendancy books

[or-midnight]

absolutely agree with this but also I fucking lost it over Thrawn just. Absconding solo with a pre-teen navigator without seeming to think there was anything potentially weird about it. Hey kid, i got this sweet minivan, wanna go on an incredibly dangerous road trip through an alien war zone to steal some hot tech with me? You can eat as many peanut butter sandwiches as you want and I'll teach you how to drive. Insane drug dealer neighbor behavior. And then they get back and he's like, eh, she's fine, I taught her how to fly by herself, she had a great time.

Meanwhile, somewhere across town, Ba'kif's one remaining black hair has gone gray and he desperately doesn't want to know why.

[supertaliart]

Happy May the Fourth! I added a second page to this comic from last year!

[or-midnight]

Zahn and Thrawn fans: if you're considering diving into the back catalog and aren't sure if you want to venture beyond the star wars stuff, I strongly recommend The Icarus Hunt. Noir in space that has aged remarkably well. Good cast, cool premise, fun mystery. Also it lent itself extremely well to audio, and the reader did a great job with it if that's your thing.

Finally somebody please join me in shipping the main guy and his business partner, the subtext was ever so generous.

Important addendum: I'm putting some content warnings in a reblog! (Gender and race related)

[or-midnight]

Important note: by "aged well" I don't mean to claim the book is some kind of blueprint for writing inclusive fiction! I'm ass at content advisories, but three main things that merit a content note are:

Only One Girl On the Team

Humans being xenophobic about other species as an allegory for racism (can get badly tropey in scifi, although it didn't seem to here for me)

Character with substance use disorder/dependency (noted only to advise that the content is present. I actually comprehensively liked and appreciated this inclusion.)

These weren't handled horribly, just perhaps heavy handedly. None of things that made me go "hmm" were load bearing thematic features so with the exception of underrepresented women, I think a decent editor or sensitivity reader today would have addressed them all with like. Literal one line edits. More detail on each below:

Only one woman on the main team. There was one throwaway line that was jarringly sexist and weirdly unnecessary, but the general tone was not and that made the line all the more jarring. She got equal screen time and development with the rest of the ensemble and I liked her. There was a brief, oblique threat of sexual violence from a villain. The main team basically said wtf You Will Not. She had a typically-for-zahn vague romance side plot, but it was chill and characters besides the potential romantic interest demonstrated respect and even caring for her without competitiveness or unwanted advances. I am mainly mentioning all of this because the Ascendancy books have an abundance of delightful and multifaceted women, and this book suffers somewhat in comparison. 1B: One of two other women in the story was a sex worker who helped the team in a tough spot. Not particularly original and a bit gratuitous but it . . . did not bother me? Cliched but not hatefully so especially given the genre.

Xenophobia as a stand in for racism: I take it back this was slightly load bearing (villain is defeated in part by his own racist assumption about a non-human character) but the way this was deployed in the narrative felt, idk, just honestly ok to me? Like. Statistically and socially probable? Racist fucks do seem determined to re-invent themselves with every passing generation, and sometimes a racist fuck will suffer a self-inflicted injury about it. The specific phrasing in one scene made me wince a bit and go "yeah, this book is almost 30 years old" but there wasn't any white savior complex or gratuitous ~gritty realism or other weirdness. They all kinda went "wow villain is a huge bigot, sucks to suck." And that was it. So: I might tweak the delivery very slightly if I were editing this work right now today but I would not remove the theme nor change the overall placement or use in the story. But mileage may vary.

Character with substance use disorder/dependence: this honestly aged really well and I'm glad it was included in the way it was. Again, mileage may vary. Character was not defined by the dependency nor dehumanized because of it, and it created realistic challenges. This was either extraordinarily well researched, drawn from real life experience, or both. A+ work.

[or-midnight]

Zahn and Thrawn fans: if you're considering diving into the back catalog and aren't sure if you want to venture beyond the star wars stuff, I strongly recommend The Icarus Hunt. Noir in space that has aged remarkably well. Good cast, cool premise, fun mystery. Also it lent itself extremely well to audio, and the reader did a great job with it if that's your thing.

Finally somebody please join me in shipping the main guy and his business partner, the subtext was ever so generous.

Important addendum: I'm putting some content warnings in a reblog! (Gender and race related)

[or-midnight]

a follow suggestion, in these bullshit times of ID checking and obscured ~mature content:

@awalkonthelightside

really lovely lingerie photography focused on lighting and the male form.

[lipsredxasarose]

I hate the push that you can quit addictions by pure willpower because it perpetuates the idea that people who can't have committed a moral failing of some kind. We all may know some people who did quit an addiction cold turkey, and with no aid, you may be one of them. And that's fantastic, but it is not the norm. It is more than okay to need help to quit an addiction. Relapse is also part of the process. Many people relapse several times before they are able to quit for good. Let's have compassion.

[anarchistmemedistro]

not only that but depending on the substance quitting cold turkey can kill you

[sileana]

ALCOHOL. It’s a very common dependence and cold turkey CAN KILL YOU. A lot of people don’t know this. Doctors can literally prescribe beer in the ER to save a life.

Be careful out there.

[anarchistmemedistro]

[or-midnight]

Reblogging specifically to lob this in the notes:

SMART Recovery is the leading evidence-based addiction recovery program. Join a free meeting today and begin experiencing a Life Beyond Addi

You dont have to join AA to get support. This org is so fucking helpful and real about shit. Everything's free unless you want a paper copy of the workbook. Meetings all over the place and online. Evidence based. App for your phone. You got this.

[lesbianbloodritual]

my body is not a soft animal you dumb asshole i need amphetamines

[shitpostingkats]

Palpatine: And in exchange for your sworn fealty, a lifelong service to my empire, and your intel on the Unknown Regions, what must I give you in return?

Thrawn:

[galileosballs]

This interview with Ncuti Gatwa crossed my dash again, and I was reminded of how much I like it. Because it makes the rare Third Argument for representation in fiction, the argument I think is the best, and I'm always happy to see it. I quote:

At times, Gatwa’s casting in those projects has been dismissed as an exercise in ‘box-ticking’. Gatwa scoffs. ‘First of all, you don’t know anything about me. Secondly, tick fcking boxes! People need to be fcking seen. What are you going to do, tell the same stories? Have the same people fronting things for all of eternity? Representation and inclusivity and branching out… it enriches us all. How embarrassing. You people with your tiny mindsets – open a book, look out the window and then f*ck off.’ (source)

What do I mean by the Third Argument? Well, I'm not sure I've ever made a post about this directly, but as far as I can see it, there are three main arguments for greater diversity in popular media. The first two are the most common, and they go like this:

It is good for media to be diverse because it is good for people to see people like them on screen. That is, the beneficiaries are marginalized people.

It is good for media to be diverse because it is good for people to see and learn about people who are not like them through art. That is, the beneficiaries are non-marginalized people, who then (hopefully) pass on the benefit by treating marginalized people better.

These two arguments are the source of a lot of debate here on ye olde tumblr. Despite both being arguments for representation, they pull in different directions. What counts as 'good' representation for the purposes of Argument 1 often would not be good for the purposes of Argument 2, and vice versa. Authentic versus sympathetic. Ugly or over-sanitized. You see this debate play out constantly. It's really hard for a piece of - say - queer media to do both at once.

But these debates tend to leave out Argument 3, the one that Gatwa is making above. And that argument cuts through a lot of this debate.

3. It is good for media to be diverse because art needs variety. The beneficiary of representation is art itself, absent any social effects that may or may not be present.

For this argument, diverse stories are intrinsically good. It is good to make art that's not just the same thing you've seen a hundred times before. Putting the kinds of people who don't often make it into mainstream media into your art is an extremely efficient way to make that happen. It's not the only method, but it's a really good method.

For representation to be 'good representation' according to Argument 3, all it needs to be is interesting. A story you haven't heard before, at least not in that medium. That which counts as 'bad representation' by the lights of this argument are stock characters, like the Eternally Patient Mother, the Gay Best Friend, the Wise Black Advisor. Perhaps there was a time in which these characters were new, but that time has long passed. There's no art in pulling a bog-standard character trope off the shelf. Show us a new kind of guy. The world is infinitely diverse. You're not going to run out. Telling the same stories with the same voices for all eternity, as Gatwa says, is boring. Even if there was nothing else wrong with it, this would be. Art isn't supposed to be boring.

And that's why Argument 3 is my favourite. I do want the world to be a better place, of course, and I think art is a part of that. But the main job of art is to be good as art. And diversity in all aspects of the production of art makes art better.

[or-midnight]

if I may "yes, and:" what arguments 1 and 2 have in common is that they are both frequently deployed as marketing strategies. They're about the audience-as-consumer much more than they're about the art. They're based on who you want to sell something to and why. This is . . . fine, sort of, and we're certainly all used to it by now, but it really places some limitations on the kind of art someone might make.

Diversity and creativity are two branches of the same tree. Good art creates its own audience, and the audience for good art is often wonderfully diverse, especially if the art is.

[or-midnight]

scrolling the notes of a post that references the department of motor vehicles, suddenly seized by a deep suspicion that absolutely none of these people has a driver's license in any US state.