play with matches if you think you need to play with matches

Michael, 28, they/them. all my posts should be considered official policy positions which will be implemented in the era of my dark rule. minormendings on ao3 where I am on richard bachman yaoi lockdown until I run out of writing energy

[skeletonislandtheme]

🧭 for put me back in it, 🏴‍☠️ for the new york one that might not get done, and 🔮 for the black sails fix-it to shake things up

hi kiran im sorry this has been sitting in my inbox for weeks i really appreciate the questions !!

🧭 What was the key choice or decision you had to make for this story? If you had chosen differently, what would the story have turned into?

put me back in it was insanely easy to write because it changed so little from concept to execution. once I made some initial decisions it was like it was just fully formed in my brain. so the key initial thing I had to figure out was why Pete even wound up in the walk. and I’ve changed my mind a bit on his state of mind going in because when I first saw the movie I got fixated on it being so, like, Greek tragedy of this guy who's fixated on seeing the light losing his love and doing something he sees as so contrary to his core being. guy who is not suicidal or violent hits a turning point and commits a suicidal act of violence. so in put me back in it you see pete realizing there's a life after he completely loses anchoring parts of his identity and pulling himself back up from rock bottom. but now i think i see him as more suicidal to begin with even if he doesn't realize that about himself, so i think if i wrote it with that in mind the internal conflict would be more about realizing the ways his faux-zen "i'm calm because i genuinely don't care what happens to me" mindset was inadequately papering over self-disgust and suicidality.

🏴‍☠️ Were there any points in which your characters tried (or succeeded) to commit mutiny against your planned plot? Where did they most want to rebel?

oh dude. im abandoning this for a couple reasons (i think im going to recycle the ideas i liked from it but also that i need to completely start over or it'll just be a badly frankensteined story) but the biggest reason that isn't "too much sci fi plot that i can neither solve nor get re-interested in" is "conflict over sex dynamics that is no longer believable or interesting to me." one specific thing that got chucked from an earlier draft is i wanted ray to get into some kind of self-hatred-fueled situationship with a government agent, which i still think would be fun but i could NOT make it work

🔮Have you imagined what happens to [character(s)] in the future? Or does the story only exist to you as a moment in time?

definitely lean more "moment in time!" but while the goal of writing that was to somewhat realistically "solve" the tragedy, get the characters ideologically back on the same page, i was not at the time that interested in nonideological conflict between them. so i think if i were to write a postscript it would be about the messy consequences of inventing polyamory in the 18th century. i've become much more of a silvermadi understander in the time since writing and i have honestly never been that interested in thomas apart from his role in flint's story but i think i could have fun pingponging them all off each other.

[skeletonislandtheme]

ive gotten kind of manic post wedding because i made like zero plans for afterward so now that im bored and understimulated im like i need to look into powerlifting classes. i need to try getting cartilage piercings again. i have to write a novel's worth of fanfiction. i need to start knitting a sweater i must go to the club i need to buy an expensive sex toy i have to go camping in the adirondacks i gotta visit every friend who came from out of state to my wedding. like whoah there soldier try getting your normal hobbies back first and answering your 186 unread text messages

[fnordseer5]

our idiotic ancestors used to believe stuff that's not true but luckily we've now figured out all the true things to believe in

[spikedru]

and apparently hes also going to adapt the mist. oh brother

[tlirsgender]

We need more women characters who are Male Protagonists. You know. Slightly haggard. She's splashing cold water on her face and gripping the edge of the sink staring in the mirror for a minute. She's coping badly with her deadwife

[tlirsgender]

Ok listen I get that people tagging posts with men is a rule of physics on this hellsite but it's kind of bizarre how badly some of you have failed the assignment on this one. A generic male protagonist archetype who is a man is nothing. That's just the normal cliche I'm talking about subverting. What?

[tlirsgender]

Like if you are For Serious headcanoning your blorbo as a trans woman I am kissing you on the head. But I KNOW most of you are not doing that. Come on. For one dollar name a fictional woman. No being a loser does not make him a woman try again

[unheardoracle]

I love characters who are like "I'm a terrible person" but when you look closer it's more like

"I adapted to survive something and now I don't know how to stop being that version of myself."

[taydaughter]

not all your fave blorbos can be masochists some of those fuckers gotta enjoy beating the shit out of someone during sex

[ludcake]

Studying the hundred years war so I can study the war of the roses so I can read Shakespeare so I can read Macchiavelli so I can study the 30 Years War so I can appreciate Rembrandt so I can understand the rise of colonialism as a means of European hegemony so I can read Victor Hugo so I can read Marx so I can read Edward Said so I can read Dune so I can read Fevre Dream so I can read ASOIAF so I can write au fanfiction on the internet

[free-my-girl-tourney]

i will be honest i am so torn about the m/m shipping thing. i see m/m shipping as a refuge from the misogyny perpetuated on women both in real life and in fiction, so i write a LOT of fanfiction for m/m ships. i sometimes write f/f or f/m side ships, or even main ships (i've written a lot of female dragon age characters, for example). i just write for m/m a lot more. writing f/f or f/m means reckoning with whatever misogyny they experience in their canons, like imagine being a fan of the women in The Pitt and wanting to make fanworks set in the canonverse but not having to deal with its misogyny. R-I-fucking-P, my condolences. and canon or not, writing f/m is even worse than f/f because tropes that aren't inherently unequal in a same-gender ship suddenly look a little different with the lens of real world gender based discrimination and violence put over them. fandom is my escape and my refuge, so i just plain don't want to reckon with the forces making my real life worse daily in every fic if i can avoid it. it would suck all the joy out of it.

having explained my reasoning, i still feel like a hypocrite. i have a lot of opinions about female characters and ships and the way they are so poorly treated, and i want better for female characters and female ships - but i rarely am the one to put my money where my mouth is and make stuff for them.

i don't know how to reconcile this. i'm sending this ask because i bet i'm not the only person struggling with this issue, and i wanted to support anyone else who feels the same way. loving female characters can be tough no matter how genuine.

look. no one is telling you not to write m/m fics if that's what you enjoy. this is fandom, it's for fun, and this blog is not about making people feel bad for things they like. with that said, i personally really don't agree with the argument that m/m is the only possible refuge from having to deal with misogyny.

writing about women doesn't have to be about misogyny if you don't want it to be. i mean you could make a similar argument that because m/m is about queer men, you necessarily have to deal with homophobia if you write yaoi. but a lot of people don't do that because it's fanfiction. you can write about whatever scenario you want and deal with whatever issues you're comfortable dealing with. you gave the pitt, as an example, right? write about mel and santos having crazy omegaverse sex after singing karaoke together; write an au where aliens exist and mohan and mckay go on a date in a spaceship (look we all have our crack ships, this one's mine, leave me be); write about dana missing collins so much that she moves to portland to be with her. get creative, go crazy. i just really dislike the idea that it's impossible to write women in a fun escapist way.

another issue i have with this idea is that often the male characters being shipped in popular m/m ships are themselves misogynistic. so, for example, the two most popular ships for the pitt, at least according to ao3 numbers, are robby/whitaker and robby/abbot. now robby is a character that i personally really like and enjoy, but i don't think there's any denying that he's sometimes casually misogynistic (and a little racist) in a condescending old liberal white guy way. so when you say writing m/m frees you from writing about misogyny, what do you do about robby or dean winchester or any other beloved male character who is pretty obviously misogynistic. do you only have to deal with misogyny if a character experiences it, but not if a character perpetuates it? i don't really get that logic.

also, i understand if you turn to fanfiction for escapism from real world issues, but speaking for myself, i sometimes like seeing characters deal with misogyny in fic. i think it can be pretty cathartic to see people actively confront the systemic ways they're mistreated. i totally understand that not everyone enjoys that sort of thing, but i must assume that at least some m/m shippers do actually enjoy it, because i know a lot of m/m fic does actually address how homophobia affects its characters. so if we can do that for homophobia, why can't we also do it for misogyny and racism and ableism and other kinds of bigotry?

again, i'm really not trying to call you out or anything, anon. like i said, if m/m is what you enjoy writing for, then the last thing i want is to make you feel bad about that. but i do think that there are plenty of ways to engage with f/f and f/m without having to deal with misogyny if you don't want to, in the same way that people write about m/m without really engaging with homophobia (or misogyny for that matter). and i kind of resent the idea that the presence of women in a story necessarily sucks the fun out of it.

[skeletonislandtheme]

there were some social dynamics I was manifesting for my wedding such as:

matchmake my poly friend with someone so cool that they dump their longtime evil bald boyfriend

my irritating yet intelligent and thoughtful uncle defeats my wife’s most smugly unpleasant uncle in single combat

two of my most earnest and strange friends hang out

figure out what the fuck is going on between my two college friends who have been in the world’s most protracted interstate situationship for eight years

meet my cousin’s baby

and what I got was

threesome planned and then rescheduled among the wedding party (they are on different coasts but I have faith in them)

attempt to matchmake poly friend goes instantly wrong when they mention astrology to an astrophysicist

meet my cousin’s baby and also that cousin’s sister’s surprise baby! who nobody told me about

earnest and strange friends hang out

half of the situationship is overheard introducing the other half as “my girlfriend”

friend who likes ‘em hot and stupid finds her match in the bartender

outdoorsy STEM west coast couple gets obsessed with indoorsy arts east coast couple and makes travel plans together

everyone in the world telling us about the gay people in their lives including 1) 76-year-old Italian lady who asked with complete earnest politeness which one of us was the husband and then told me about her gay first boyfriend “and I was a tomboy so maybe that’s why” many such cases honestly 2) “you HAVE to follow my daughter’s wife she’s an influencer” 3) nonbinary teenager at Smith College

get informed that my second cousin’s girlfriend seems serious because “they’re going to move in together as soon as his dog dies….well they didn’t say it like that but it was implied”

[skeletonislandtheme]

fav terra ignota characters? or most interesting

I am so obsessed with Mycroft that I can’t even pick a second favorite and I know it’s because it’s his POV but his POV is so so insane. madame d’arouet is also awesome

[hasdrubal-gisco]

Stealing this from twitter but I liked the concept: put in the tags where were your 8 great-grandparents from (given modern borders) ?

[nalivaa]

the mexican football team has a 17 yrs old player and one of the funniest outcomes of this is that he cannot appear in any ad for gambling or drinking so he only appears in candy and milk advertisements. his first world cup and he's not even legally allowed to drive. his nickname is "morita" (little berry). he's three apples tall.

[lelouch]

they couldn't put him in the beer campaign so he was represented by a bunch of berries

[skeletonislandtheme]

actually what it is is an endless tug of war between Bad Succession fears and Cameron Ranged Touch saying “melodrama is a neutral descriptor of the register a narrative is working in” in my head

[lyinginthesnow]

i like to entertain myself by thinking about Bad Succession -> (alternate reality succession where it sucks). constant sepia-tinted flashbacks to traumatic childhood memories, with echoey abusive dad dialogue. post-car accident kendall is haunted by a hallucination of the waiter everywhere he goes. shiv has girlboss moments where she triumphs against misogynistic men and they learn not to underestimate women. once you get started you can’t stop.. the ideas are endless. they would try to make kendall into a rebellious bad boy type with personal demons. he would have a scene where he stares into a cracked mirror to represent his fractured psyche

[skeletonislandtheme]

I have GOT to get more information about how normal sexuality and romantic relationships work in Terra Ignota. Mycroft get out of the renaissance reenactment brothel show me how the fuck people date each other if you can only in rare circumstances acknowledge that people have genders and you’re only attracted to some of them

[skeletonislandtheme]

thinking about how the only time sexuality is addressed, and one of the only times anyone but Mycroft and Madame’s disciples addresses the concept of gender, is two instances of people saying I don’t like boys/I didn’t know you liked boys to refer to being attracted to adult men. now what does that mean. “Boy” isn’t a taboo gender reference but “man” is ? also thinking about how there is no concept of transness because of the social gender taboo BUT there’s a reference to how the 21st century made medical advances that made biology not matter to gender. In the terra ignotaverse can you get a vaginoplasty if you tell the doctor you don’t want to be a girl you just want it just ‘cause?

[skeletonislandtheme]

have just learned that there are gender segregated sports in this world. I’m on my knees begging for a narrator who’s clear eyed about gender in this society. an in universe feminist theory paper. a dating advice column. a transcript of the commentary on a gender segregated Olympic event. ADA.

[skeletonislandtheme]

I love that the very beginning of terra ignota is about you and Carlyle finding out that magic is real at the same time. you open it and you’re like well i guess this world has magic healing potions made out of crayons in it, i will adjust my conception of this book from “science fiction” to “genre crossover science fantasy,” and then you see Carlyle have an existential crisis