Here's a link to the art on tumblr. Although it's now in the final chapter, too! So happy to get to the scene and it means so much to me to have art for the story. Thank you, again, @ciriceart!
The season five premiere of The Next Generation was, according to Steve, a very big deal.
Robin had not understood how big a deal it was until he'd rearranged his entire Sunday around it. He'd checked the TV Guide three times that morning. He finished all his chores before noon and the groceries after lunch. He acquired snacks, a frozen pizza to split for dinner, and a six-pack of beer.
She’d never watched Star Trek on purpose before August, and Steve’s confession of being a Trekkie.
After she told him that, Steve spent the afternoon fretting that she wouldn't understand the episode without the context from the previous season. “You don’t even know it’s Trekker, not Trekkie.”
unfortunately i dont think its queerbaiting if the creator is just so terminally heterosexual that they never remotely considered the same gender relationship their show is centered around could be read as romantic. it is deeply painful however.
By definition you can't accidentally queerbait. Queerbaiting is specifically using a same sex pair from the show to market the show to queer audiences with no intention of ever following through on a romantic relationship.
There is officially licensed Destiel merch signed off on by Kripke. Teen Wolf had a commercial with the actors for Derek and Stiles draped over each other talking about being "on a ship." Both shows actively used scenes between them as marketing while actively mocking fans for wanting them together. Sherlock has multiple characters refer to Johnlock as a couple, including characters we're supposed to believe are never wrong about human behavior and pushed those scenes in marketing. Then they acted insulted when fans saw them as a couple.
That's queerbaiting.
Done on accident it would just be queer subtext. Done because they had no other choice due to censorship is queer coding.
The specific meaning of the word is really starting to get lost and it's a pretty important one to keep accurate. It describes a very specific phenomenon that was done repeatedly and maliciously for decades and is meant to examine that specifically.
Doing it on accident sucks, but it isn't a tactic of capitalism intentionally intended to suppress queer representation while making money from queer fans.
I don't think people who come from wattpad after the purge and now want ao3 to have its own official app understand that one of the main reasons behind the recent wattpad purge that drove them to ao3 was due to pressure from appstore demanding wattpad to be more strict and follow appstore's policy. wattpad complied in order for its app to be able to remain on appstore. thus the wattpad purge.
ao3 doesn't have an app because for it to have an app, appstore will have to approve it first. and if, hypothetically, ao3 needs appstore to approve it, it will also have to abide by appstore's pro-censorship stance and start banning dark and taboo fics, which is against its own core principle of being completely against censorship.
ao3 doesn't need an app. it works more than fine without an app. the reason ao3 can allow dark and taboo fics, the reason it can allow the most disgusting and shockingly vile fics, and be completely against censorship is because it doesn't need appstore's approval. it stands on its own as a non-profit organization with functioning site and a team of lawyers protecting its platform, its users, and every single fanwork on its platform.
everybody say thank you ao3
here's the list of things you need to know about ao3 if you're new to the platform
Robin was thrilled when Eddie started hanging out with them because she thought he'd help Steve realize that he's bisexual but nope. Turns out Eddie is completely unaware that he, himself, is a queer man so every conversation is just
Robin: *tearing her hair out*
Steve: It's not gay to appreciate a man's looks if he's hot. At some point, you look insane for denying it
Eddie: I say that all the time! Sometimes a guy just had a great ass.
#it's not helped by the fact that Steve was besties with the most closeted man in indiana for years#these two are full on fucking btw#not gay though. just two guys being dudes#Robin meets Gareth and is just like: thank god. someone else who sees it
Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson // Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn // Musica Humana by Ilya Kaminsky // Basic August by Eileen Myles // Imitations of Drowning by Anne Sexton // Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? by Raymond Carver // The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner // Atmospheric Embroidery by Meena Alexander // The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath // The Women by Kim Addonizio //
I’ll always love Ronance + Steddie being paired together but, god, Buckingham + Steddie with platonic Stobin and platonic Hellcheer is just perfect. ‘Two sides of the same coin’. The freak and the prep. Mirror images of each other but the genders are switched. I love it.
My friend's three-year-old cracks me up. He heard a siren and immediately sang out, "WEE WOO WEE WOO." Then, in a considerably calmer tone, he informed us, "Fire truck. Gonna help people."
“Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.”
With the recent rumblings about censorship and work deletions on Wattpad, many users are considering posting to AO3 for the first time. If that describes you, you may have questions.
This post is a collection of resources you can use to start finding the answers to these questions. If you don’t find what you’re looking for at the links below or you have something more specific to ask, please feel welcome to post questions in the reblogs and comments here.
If you’re an AO3 pro answering questions in these notes, be kind. We were all new once, and other fans helped us then. It’s time to pay it forward.
Resources (under the cut)
How does AO3 work? What is and isn’t allowed?
My first recommendation for new users is always to skim the Terms of Service FAQ. It explains what AO3 allows and why in plain, straightforward terms. AO3 does not allow placeholder works, commercial content such as commissions links, or “work search” posts.
How can I change the look of the site?
The appearance of AO3 is very customizable! If you just want a basic dark mode, scroll down to the bottom of any page and click “Reversi” under the Customize menu. For more advanced customizations, I can’t recommend @ao3commentoftheday enough. They have so many gorgeous tutorials for everything from site skins to making the site’s content filters do whatever you want.
Wattpad users may especially appreciate the Floating Comment Box extension, which makes commenting on AO3 work slightly more like Wattpad.
How does AO3 search work?
This handy guide by @backofthebookshelf covers the basics. Here is a cheatsheet with more advanced searching tricks.
I’m ready to post my own works. How do I add [specific thing]?
With a little bit of HTML, you can do some incredibly neat things in an AO3 work. Here’s the website running Doom. Here is a very comprehensive guide to Limited HTML on AO3. It may look intimidating at first, but you can get a lot done by copying and pasting and paying attention to the results. As a fun bonus, check out the rest of the series, which includes step by step instructions for making your fic look like text messages on a phone screen, newspaper articles, sticky notes, and more.
Why is Wattpad doing this now? Have similar things happened before?
Fandom creatives have been outrunning purges and legal threats for a long time. Here is a comprehensive timeline of fandom purges and legal actions taken against fanworks, from 1977 to the present day. Here is another timeline written by @olderthannetfic, with associated commentary from other fans.
Purges on LiveJournal and other sites circa 2007 influenced the founding of AO3. You can read in detail about the circumstances of its founding and the construction of the policies it abides by today here.
If you read this far, I’m proud of you. Migrating to a new site is always hard, and there’s so much grief when archives purge content without warning. Welcome to AO3. We’re glad to have you. 🤝
Steve being like, "it's a double standard to be on my ass about a few little seizures but no one says anything about Mike's anemia. Ridiculous."
Mike is just, "...I’m not anemic?"
"No, you are. Pretty sure. You're pale."
"So?!" He exclaims. "That doesn't mean that I’m-"
"Pretty sure it does."
"No, it's-
"Hey, he's trying to distract us," Dustin cuts in, narrowing his eyes at Steve. "I’m on to you, Harrington. You will not - hey! What did you mean by 'a few.' You had more than one seizure?"
