A/n: I know I already posted this one a while ago, but Tumblr went “duck this drabble in particular” and it just vanished without a trace. So sorry, re-posting it.
Imagine being a member of the Fellowship and after the Ring quest, half the Fellowship wants to set you up with Faramir and the other half wants you to pick Boromir.
The prompt was offered by @roqueamadi - I’m sorry, friend, if you’ve noticed it was gone, I swear it wasn’t me. I had no idea I’d lost it.
I made some minor changes, but nothing beyond two words and one phrase. :)
Enjoy.
Two is too much.
“I’m not telling you…”
Mouth on mouth. He’s kissing you deeply, teasingly. You return the favour, making him growl with badly repressed impatience, as your lips part at last.
“Who?” asks he again – breathes it into your ear, your skin breaking out with goosebumps.
If you're a cisgender woman and you assume that trans people can't be afraid of you because you're a woman it's very possible that you're the type of cis person I'm afraid of in public.
#friendly reminder that#assuming all cis men are violent#and all cis women are safe#is in fact a common transphobic/terf talking point#specifically designed to lure people into their rhetoric
A lot of people either forget, or don’t want to realise or remember, that the work of defining, enforcing and policing the borders of gender is often performed by cisgender women.
It is mainly women who will do things like choose “appropriate” toys for children, choose “appropriate” clothing, choose “appropriate” hobby activities, “appropriate” reading materials, “appropriate” television viewing, “appropriate” online activities and so on; and will either encourage or discourage the choices of the individual children themselves. It is largely people who identify as cisgender women who will pass comment on another person’s appearance in public (often drawing attention to the ways this person is not in compliance with social norms). It is cisgender women who create the social codes of behaviour which are considered gender-appropriate, right down to the shibboleths which are used to determine whether a person is “really” of one gender or another. It is cisgender women who will turn on other cisgender women for NOT performing these actions - for not being willing to police the behaviours of others, for not being willing to put in the full performance themselves.
since we're all talking about jobs, does anyone have any tips on how to survive when you don't have anyone in your life who'd put in a word for you at their job and the entire economy seems to chug along like this?
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Anyone?
IDK if I'm really the best person to advise on the job-finding part.
If you're asking about household expenses, peanut butter is a good meal and very cheap. Most supermarkets have a section of things that are getting too old that are sold at very reduced prices. If you cook your own food, the vegetables in that area are good for stews and things. If you don't have consistent kitchen access, a jar of peanut butter is a better investment. Dry beans are one of the healthiest and most economical options. They taste a lot better than canned too. But they take time. Big bags of onions are another favorite of mine.
Join those "Buy Nothing" groups on facebook and other such places for a stream of other people's free desks, couches, and possibly old clothes.
A lot depends on whether "survive" means "make cash by next week so I can make rent" or "figure out how to manage my life long term so I can move out of my abusive parents' house" or something else.
It goes like this: crap unpaid internship -> better unpaid internship -> crap paid job -> (then, eventually, probably taking a few years at least) good paid job
can you elaborate about the quirks of YA and why you dislike it? i'm genuinely curious 'cuz i think in all my life i've read like, four YA books ????? but i really can't tell the difference between YA and Het Romance 'cuz everytime i read summaries of YA books I only encounter het romances and That's Not My Thing
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I can, but I'm going to say up front that I will be rejecting all asks that are like "bawwwwwwww, here are 15 random examples that are different from your objections". I don't read YA widely, so I'm guaranteed to get a bunch of people whining that I'm stereotyping it.
YA obviously can include a wide range of things, like other marketing niches, but it has some tendencies I dislike:
Low heat: I don't require a book to have sex, but if it's a romance, I like fucking. Some YA feels like it was supposed to have sex and was then censored instead of feeling like it organically did not want to interrupt the narrative for sex. A subjective feeling, but one I have often. Some of it also feels like it overtly pushes conservative values with a fig leaf of "appropriate for children" hiding its bad values—and people give this a pass!
Too self insert-y for me: A lot of popular examples trade on my ability to feel a lot of identification with one central lead, while I prefer books that have equal POV time with two romantic leads or that don't ask me to self insert quite so much.
Only young people do anything interesting ever, and at 30, you're past your sell-by date. (This is not an objection to YA as read by 13-year-olds so much as an objection to YA for older readers.)
Sounds like the author has only watched genre TV, not read genre books: This one is extremely subjective, and adult genre fiction is often also guilty of it, but it has been a hallmark of the YA I've been exposed to.
A walled garden: Lots of YA writers and readers don't seem to have explored beyond YA ever. Sure, every genre has fans who just read that genre after figuring out what they like, but the vibe is very pronounced here (to me), both in the works and in the community around the works.
"Wholesome": Waaaaay too many descriptions of the joys of YA use this word, especially if anything queer is in the book. Ughhhhhh. Say you're an anti without saying you're an anti, why don't you?
Present tense: DIE IN A FIRE! This filthy pestilence spreads outwards from YA to infest other genres. It's fine in short fanfic porn, but keep it the fuck out of my long narrative fiction! (Yeah, yeah, it's common in litfic too, but I also dislike litfic.) Ooh, it's "immediate" and "authentic"!! No it's fucking not. It's contrived, mannered garbage for anything over a few thousand words.
I can put up with omniscient narration a la 1930s detective fiction in my modern genre fiction. I will not put up with present tense.
What you said in the tags about being indifferent to the Silmarillion hit home with me. It took me literally years to manage to finish it. I felt I had to, eventually, so I kept trying. Starting, giving up, restarting, giving up again and trying to pick up where I left off, and so on. I haven't picked it up since, even though I've read The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy many, many times each.
Ahh yeah as someone who read the Silmarillion a while back and never got really invested in it, I feel that too. <3
Every time I think of the Silmarillion, I think of what Tolkien himself said about it:
I am doubtful myself about (the Silmarillion.) Part of the attraction of the L.R. is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed.
I wish I could be as excited about the Silmarillion as so many other fans I see online are, because I love how much they love it, I love the art they make, and I love how interesting they make the characters seem!
But I think that quote from Tolkien is exactly why the Silmarillion falls flat for me-- Lord of the Rings does a beautiful job of Implying the history of this epic fantasy world through fragments of stories that the characters only half-remember; through subtle details, or through things like a character’s traditions or names. Reading the books feels like playing an ARG where you’re piecing together the world’s history alongside the characters.
So something gets lost when the history/mythology is flatly over-explained like a textbook. XD .(That’s just how I feel though haha.)
And I could go on a bunch of different tangents but I also just personally don’t like a lot of Tolkien’s explanations? It’s sorta like “wow,,,,,..... I liked this better when you Didn’t explain it and just dropped a couple ambiguous hints and let me reconstruct it myself” skdjfsdkfsf. Lord of the Rings makes you ask so many questions about the history of Middle Earth, but I personally found a lot of the Silmarillion’s answers to those questions underwhelming, occasionally even in ways I thought weakened the story of Lotr.
I also feel like it’s important that the Silmarillion is an unfinished collection of stories Tolkien was never completely happy with and that often wildly contradict each other, not the Definitive Lore Bible Textbook(tm) people often insist it is. I don’t like to play the game of “Tolkien’s intent is the only thing that matters,” but if people want to play that game I feel confident that there are reasons Tolkien thought the Silmarillion/Unfinished Tales/etc/etc weren’t ready to be published? Which is is why I kinda think it's weird that everyone talks about them like they represent his Real Definitive Final Intent.
The biggest reason the Silmarillion never grabbed me, though, was probably just the absence of hobbits XD. Ok I’m joking but I’m not. I think the central appeal of Lord of the Rings/the Hobbit for me, personally, is the contrast between a sweeping post-apocalyptic fantasy epic and a group of simple ordinary little best friends. Without the hobbits, there’s nothing to contrast all the Swords and Sorcery, nothing to anchor the world to something warm and intimate and human.
But again, I do see why people like it-- for a lot of people, the Silmarillion Does have that “archaeology/ARG” type feel. For a lot of people, the Silmarillion doesn’t flatten Middle Earth, it just opens up new areas for them to explore. For a lot of people, the unfinished and fragmented nature of the Silmarillion gives them that feeling of “distant towers gleaming in a sunlit mist” and makes them excited to expand on the story even more on their own and to find the humanity in the historical-epic-fantasy-characters.
Not for me tho XD. But yeah I'm reassured to hear I'm not alone in....Not Caring about the Silmarillion asdkdf.
‘your parents just want what’s best for you’ that is objectively not true for a lot of people, sometimes they want what’s best for them or what looks the best to other people, or what they think is best for you is based on outdated, backwards and messed up values & beliefs. even if their intentions aren’t bad doesn’t mean they even remotely know what’s good for you
kudos to whatever medical professional named it "toxic shock syndrome". Not once have I forgotten a tampon change and I fully attribute this to whoever gave tss that fucking terrifying name. No way in hell am I gonna find out what that shit is like
Why "a (transformational) fandom platform of our own" is not about writing down a list of features
My qualifications: Hello, I'm so-called Ms Boba, a software engineer that's been working on a fandom-oriented social network for a couple years. When Tumblr's Absolute Porn-Banning Betrayal™ happened, I got so pissed I decided to learn all I could about entrepreneurship (from actual classes, to seminars, to books), and figure out what it would take to build better online social spaces.
The backstory: someone asked @olderthannetfic about features for a fandom platform, and she decided to nerd-snipe me into ranting about the topic. Please enjoy.
Since time immemorial, the question of "which features would a (transformational) fandom platform need" periodically makes its resurgence in our corner of the web. While this is a totally cool and fun exercise to do, I want to take some time to explain why this is the wrong question to ask—at least unless you know how to ask it.
Note that none of what I say is set in stone, and there's many nuances this post will be too short to contain. But, while you should take all I say with a grain of salt, I hope these points will be a good trampoline to bring the "fandom platform of our own" discussion to a more productive place.
So, lo' and behold: a collection of platform-features-related "basic startup wisdom" gems I've collected during these years.
Basic Startup Wisdom #1: Successful products are not about adding more features
One of the very first things they teach you in any "building successful startups" class, is that adding nice-to-have-features on top of products people "mostly enjoy" is a horrible strategy for deciding a product roadmap. This is true even when people tell you they would 100% move to a platform that does everything their current favorite does, if only it would fix the glaring problems, add a couple of absolutely-fundamental-can't-live-without features, and get rid of all the annoying bugs.
While one might think this belief comes from a place of condescendence ("clearly we can't trust people to know what they want"), it's not up for much discussion: the fact that people are bad at discerning what would get them to use a product is just a reality of how humans work, and has been proven over and over by people studying how to build successful ones.
In fact, reality goes even further: believing that people will jump ship if you add more of the features they ask for is the #1 mistake any wannabe entrepreneur makes before reality teaches them better. That's why they teach it to you first.
Basic Startup Wisdom #2: To build a successful product, build a "pain killer" not a "vitamin"
So, if it's not about "adding more features", what is it about?
A good metaphor people use is the idea of seeing products (and features) as "vitamins" vs "pain killers".
Vitamins are nice to have, and, when all their basic needs are met, people will gladly use them to improve their current lives. Vitamins might "sweeten a deal", but won't (on their own) be enough to motivate most people to switch to your product.
Pain killers, on the other hand, solve unmet, fundamental needs of those they're designed for. When a product solve a real pain that potential customers actively seek to solve, it's a lot easier to get them to use, and—most importantly (sorry)—pay* for it.
So the big questions here is not "what features does fandom want?". The big question here is: what is the greatest pain fandom people face right now? And what is the minimal set of features that we must build to address it?
*If transformational fandom people are not the ones paying for a product, they're not the customers of the product. While this is a too-big topic to enter into in this post, I want to stress: no matter how much we all love the idea of building a platform for "transformational fandom", the customers vs users separation must be taken into account if we hope to have a space that focuses on our own pains and needs.
Basic Startup Wisdom #3: Directly asking people which features a platform must have yields meaningless results
Going to fandom people to directly ask them what their pains are and which features to build to solve them is an entirely meaningless exercise—unless you know exactly how to do it . When talking with people about what features they would use (and most importantly pay for), there is a simple guiding rule:
Of course, I'm being a bit silly. But, as I mentioned before, this is such a well known issue that I even have a favorite book on the topic: The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick.
While I could go deeply into it, I instead suggest you read some quotes. Here's some choice, relevant ones:
They say that startups don’t starve, they drown. You never have too few options, too few leads, or too few ideas; you have too many. You get overwhelmed. You do a little bit of everything.
The world’s most deadly fluff is: “I would definitely buy that.” It just sounds so concrete. As a founder, you desperately want to believe it's money in the bank. But folks are wildly optimistic about what they would do in the future. They’re always more positive, excited, and willing to pay in the imagined future than they are once it arrives.
When you hear a request, it’s your job to understand the motivations which led to it. You do that by digging around the question to find the root cause. Why do they bother doing it this way? Why do they want the feature? How are they currently coping without the feature? Dig.
Truth is, it's very easy to ask for features. After all, asking is free. There's nothing in the way of people asking for more: they are—rightfully so!—not thinking of the constraints, the costs, the trade offs needed to actually deliver the feature. If someone asks, "hey, do you want the product to also do this?", users have nothing to lose by replying "yes".
But will people eventually use the feature? Will they pay for it? As the book says, "[people are] always more positive, excited, and willing to pay in the imagined future than they are once it arrives". Unless you know how to ask the right questions and interpret the answers, the conversations are bound to give back a ton of confusing, likely misleading noise.
Basic Startup Wisdom #4: Build as few features as possible
Speaking of "The Mom Test" quotes, let me paste another one:
We want to believe that the support and sign-off of someone we respect means our venture will succeed. But really, that person’s opinion doesn’t matter. They have no idea if the business is going to work. Only the market knows. You’re searching for the truth, not trying to be right. And you want to do it as quickly and cheaply as possible.
The "you want to do it as quickly and cheaply as possible" is where the real catch is: money (and time) are not infinite; what you think are the answers might not be the actual answers. As I said before, the questions is: what is the minimal set of features one must build to address the customers' real pain? The only way to know for sure whether your answer is the right one is to put your product out there before spending too much time and effort on it, and test your hypotheses against reality. A long list of features is of no help here.
In this sense, the classic wisdom of how to build a product is this:
To keep it short, what's hard is not getting the bottom part of the pyramid filled, but making sure that you build that vertical slice and slowly keep expanding it to the right. After two years building BobaBoard let me tell you: that is really, really, really hard, time-consuming work, especially when you have a limited amount of resources. A list of features expands the actual surface of the pyramid horizontally, but doesn't do much in terms of moving that colored part in the right direction.
(Entire books have been written about Minimum Viable Products, so I invite you to google the name if you're curious to read more.)
Ok, but: where do we redirect this "features discovery" energy?
I hope by this time I've convinced you that, while a list of features needed in a fandom platform would be a fun, it's generally not that impactful of an exercise. Still, the last point did give me an idea.
If you do want to do an impactful exercise in this space, here's what would be useful: take a feature you know people want in a fandom platform, and research what a good user experience would look like. Don't think about it in terms of adding features, but think about it in terms of researching:
Which platforms already implement similar features? How are they structured?
What aspects of these implementation do people like? What aspects do they hate?
How do people use these features? Why do they use them?
How do they fandom people get around the lack of them in platforms that don't offer them?
What are the possible pitfalls one should be on the lookout for when thinking about this feature? Which disasters loom at the horizon?
What would a V0 of the feature look like? How small can we make this feature before it stops being useful? What would incremental progress look like?
What sequence of inputs would a user need to give when using this feature? What would be the constraints of each input? How do we explain the user what to do next? What are the possible error states we should take into account?
How would this feature impact the rests of features you know a fandom platform would need? What are the edge cases? How do existing platforms solve them?
An abstract set of more stuff to build is not the problem. But how to build features that are the right slice of functional, reliable, usable, convenient, pleasurable and meaningful is.
The harsh truth is that writing all of this down in a way that's well-specified and thought-out enough that one theoretical, overworked fandom entrepreneur could pay someone else to implement it without making more problems for themselves is an extremely hard, sometimes boring, and overall time consuming task. But at the end of the day, if we want a theoretical fandom platform to have features that are delightful to use, someone will have to think more about the how than the what. That exercise is very much worth doing.
(Alternatively—but no pressure, really, this is not why I wrote this—you could also consider "subscribing to my Patreon" so I can one day afford to pay others for the parts I'm overqualified to do, and have more space to do the work I'm talking about myself.)
Here you go, anon who wanted to maybe Build The Thing. Take ms. boba’s advice, whether you perhaps throw your lot in with bobaboard in the future or found some other platform fandom also sorely needs.
Features matter some, but the focus on them is not going to solve our problems. I would try looking at the fandom platform issue more from this perspective.
There’s also a large grey area between an Offensive Stereotype and “thing that can be misconstrued as a stereotype if one uses a particularly reductive lens of interpretation that the text itself is not endorsing”, and while I believe that creators should hold some level of responsibility to look out for potential unfortunate optics on their work, intentional or not, I also do think that placing the entire onus of trying to anticipate every single bad angle someone somewhere might take when reading the text upon the shoulders of the writers – instead of giving in that there should be also a level of responsibility on the part of the audience not to project whatever biases they might carry onto the text – is the kind of thing that will only end up reducing the range of stories that can be told about marginalized people.
A japanese-american Beth Harmon would be pidgeonholed as another nerdy asian stock character. Baby Driver with a black lead would be accused of perpetuating stereotypes about black youth and crime. Phantom Of The Opera with a female Phantom would be accused of playing into the predatory lesbian stereotype. Romeo & Juliet with a gay couple would be accused of pulling the bury your gays trope – and no, you can’t just rewrite it into having a happy ending, the final tragedy of the tale is the rock onto which the entire central thesis statement of the play stands on. Remove that one element and you change the whole point of the story from a “look at what senseless hatred does to our youth” cautionary tale to a “love conquers all” inspiration piece, and it may not be the story the author wants to tell.
Sometimes, in order for a given story to function (and keep in mind, by function I don’t mean just logistically, but also thematically) it is necessary that your protagonist has specific personality traits that will play out in significant ways in the story. Or that they come from a specific background that will be an important element to the narrative. Or that they go through a particular experience that will consist on crucial plot point. All those narrative tools and building blocks are considered to be completely harmless and neutral when telling stories about straight/white people but, when applied to marginalized characters, it can be difficult to navigate them as, depending on the type of story you might want to tell, you may be steering dangerously close to falling into Unfortunate Implications™. And trying to find alternatives as to avoid falling into potentially iffy subtext is not always easy, as, depending on how central the “problematic” element to your plot, it could alter the very foundation of the story you’re trying to tell beyond recognition. See the point above about Romeo & Juliet.
Like, I once saw a woman a gringa obviously accuse the movie Knives Out of racism because the one latina character in the otherwise consistently white and wealthy cast is the nurse, when everyone who watched the movie with their eyes and not their ass can see that the entire tension of the plot hinges upon not only the power imbalance between Martha and the Thrombeys, but also on her isolation as the one latina immigrant navigating a world of white rich people. I’ve seen people paint Rosa Diaz as an example of the Hothead Latina stereotype, when Rosa was originally written as a white woman (named Megan) and only turned latina later when Stephanie Beatriz was cast – and it’s not like they could write out Rosa’s anger issues to avoid bad optics when it is such a defining trait of her character. I’ve seen people say Mulholland Drive is a lesbophobic movie when its story couldn’t even exist in first place if the fatally toxic lesbian relationship that moves the plot was healthy, or if it was straight.
That’s not to say we can’t ever question the larger patterns in stories about certain demographics, or not draw lines between artistic liberty and social responsibility, and much less that I know where such lines should be drawn. I made this post precisely to raise a discussion, not to silence people. But one thing I think it’s important to keep in mind in such discussions is that stereotypes, after all, are all about oversimplification. It is more productive, I believe, to evaluate the quality of the representation in any given piece of fiction by looking first into how much its minority characters are a) deep, complex, well-rounded, b) treated with care by the narrative, with plenty of focus and insight into their inner life, and c) a character in their own right that can carry their own storyline and doesn’t just exist to prop up other character’s stories. And only then, yes, look into their particular characterization, but without ever overlooking aspects such as the context and how nuanced such characterization is handled. Much like we’ve moved on from the simplistic mindset that a good female character is necessarily one that punches good otherwise she’s useless, I really do believe that it is time for us to move on from the the idea that there’s a one-size-fits-all model of good representation and start looking into the core of representation issues (meaning: how painfully flat it is, not to mention scarce) rather than the window dressing.
I know I am starting to sound like a broken record here, but it feels that being a latina author writing about latine characters is a losing game, when there’s extra pressure on minority authors to avoid ~problematic~ optics in their work on the basis of the “you should know better” argument. And this “lower common denominator” approach to representation, that bars people from exploring otherwise interesting and meaningful concepts in stories because the most narrow minded people in the audience will get their biases confirmed, in many ways, sounds like a new form of respectability politics. Why, if it was gringos that created and imposed those stereotypes onto my ethnicity, why it should be my responsibility as a latina creator to dispel such stereotypes by curbing my artistic expression? Instead of asking of them to take responsibility for the lenses and biases they bring onto the text? Why is it too much to ask from people to wrap their minds about the ridiculously basic concept that no story they consume about a marginalized person should be taken as a blanket representation of their entire community?
It’s ridiculous. Gringos at some point came up with the idea that latinos are all naturally inclined to crime, so now I, a latina who loves heist movies, can’t write a latino character who’s a cool car thief. Gentiles created antisemitic propaganda claiming that the jews are all blood drinking monsters, so now jewish authors who love vampires can’t write jewish vampires. Straights made up the idea that lesbian relationships tend to be unhealthy, so now sapphics who are into Brontë-ish gothic romance don’t get to read this type of story with lesbian protagonists. I want to scream.
And at the end of the day it all boils down to how people see marginalized characters as Representation™ first and narrative tools created to tell good stories later, if at all. White/straight characters get to be evaluated on how entertaining and tridimensional they are, whereas minority characters get to be evaluated on how well they’d fit into an after school special. Fuck this shit.
“White/straight characters get to be evaluated on how entertaining and tridimensional they are, whereas minority characters get to be evaluated on how well they’d fit into an after school special. Fuck this shit.”
This is part of why I keep pushing the idea that the most important form of activism anyone can undertake in the privacy of their own heads is this: allow people who are identified as being on the “lower” end of a power differential to be just as complex and complicated and human as those people who are identified as being on the “upper” end of the power differential.
Or in other words, stop thinking of minority-identified people as just their minority identity. Let them be fully human. Let them explore all the possibilities for human experience inside your head.
Don’t make the cognitive mistake of thinking the opposite of an error is the right thing, either - most often, the opposite of an error is the opposite error, particularly when you’re dealing with people.
yousharknotpass
romaincrisis
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