whoop whoop

Guess who's back here i guess?

[trashcangimmick]

[lowpawly]

when youre going to criticize someone for being annoying/privileged/entitled then whatever you do dont forget to sandwich in a dig at them being nonbinary it might be your only chance to make fun of trans people in a way that wont make your followers mad

[lowpawly]

"when I move to an apartment in seattle and my nonbinary roommate tells me im toxic for not washing their dishes" what about cisgender jared who doesnt wash his dishes. is it not as funny when its cisgender jared

[the-reconciliation-of-all-things]

how terrifying metamorphosis must be for the caterpillar has no concept of what it is doing, or what a butterfly is, or what will happen to it as it spins itself the cocoon. we r more alike than different

[importantandunavoidable]

there are parts of your future self in you waiting emerge but you have to become unrecognizable slime first

[tossawary]

Learning that a story originated as a fanfiction before having its serial numbers filed off... the filing jobs can obviously vary in quality a lot, but I have found that learning this info often explains something (neutral statement) about the story / world choices that was tickling my brain somehow. The element I've been thinking about recently are the friendships within the former fanfiction story.

Like, it's not weird for wholly original romance novels to have otherwise disposable friend characters who act as author mouthpieces at crucial points in the story. (It's also not uncommon for romance novel characters to have NO close friends or family, in my experience, which is a different thing.) Former fanfics do not even slightly have a monopoly on, "Hey, what's up with this weird friend character? They seem a little out-of-place here? Also seems like you're maybe under-utilizing the weird, comedic relief friend, tbh; they could be doing more in this story."

But with former fanfics, sometimes you get the lightbulb moment of: "Ohhhhh, this was a former Stucky fanfic and this female best friend is Like That (in a same way that every character is probably also a little bit Like That) because she originated as AU Natasha Romanoff before having the serial numbers filed off! I get it now."

[tossawary]

See, in fanfiction as literature, it's pretty much wholly accepted that a character's role in a story can exclusively be... Being That Character in this AU. Which isn't a bad thing. It's just a thing. It's very often fun.

Audience familiarity with (and affection for) the characters and their relationships to one another can be one of fanfiction's strengths re: storytelling. You can play with a lot of reader expectations this way.

Anyway, if I was reading a Coffee Shop AU Star Wars Reylo fanfiction (you could basically use this example fic to ward me personally off like garlic against a vampire, tbh, but let's pretend)... even if Finn had nothing to do as a character in this story besides be Rey's coworker at the coffee shop, I would be even more suspicious and dismayed if Finn was completely missing. We EXPECT to see at least briefly all of the major members of a cast in an AU fanfic of certain length, barring unusual circumstances.

Even if he is almost completely irrelevant to the meet-cute at hand, I WANT to know where Chewbacca is in this AU! I want to enjoy a little chuckle when, idk, C-3PO is turned into a high-strung, middle-aged office guy with either a short, non-English-speaking husband or a Border Collie-Corgi mix dog named Artoo that runs his entire life. It's delightful to see the characters I know and love in the background!

But when you file the serial numbers off of AU fanfiction, a character's role in a story can no longer be Being That Character. Now, you potentially have a bunch of story elements that conflict slightly or conflict very seriously. Now, you may have additional characters whose presence is no longer perfectly explained by the fact that you are expected to include all the Avengers in your MCU fanfic.

Now, Not-Chewbacca's quirks cannot be explained away by him Being Chewbacca. And suddenly, readers are like, "Hey, kind of weird throwaway detail for Not-Kylo's dad to be a former drug runner who lives in a van with an old, foreign war vet! Is that going to be relevant later???" Once you cut the fanfiction strings, your new story may feel riddled with inconsistencies and missed opportunities. Why are these characters here if they're 1) not contributing to the plot, 2) not contributing to character ans relationship development, and 3) not even really contributing tonally (humor, angst, fluff) to the story?

I'm sticking to talking about friendships and background characters here, because it's what I've been thinking about lately, though you could obviously go on forever taking about all the many nuances of what filing the serial numbers off does to a story and the art of adaptation. I just had a "Oh! It's NAT! Hi, Black Widow! Sorry this story made you kind of boring, Nat!" moment recently.

[lycanthrology]

[attempting to flirt] if i was stuck in a timeloop id desperately explain my situation to you every single reset

[arbitraryexistence]

Ever since reading my first time loop-based book as a preteen, I’ve had a Secret Time Loop Code Word. It’s been the same word all these years. I’ve never written it down anywhere or told anyone what it is, just kept it tucked away in my brain. That way, if someone I know ever confided in me that they were stuck in a time loop, I would have a way to confirm it: I would tell them the time loop code word and instruct them to find and talk to me again on the next loop. Of course, if it’s a time loop, I wouldn’t remember telling them the code word. But they’d remember it. So if someone ever came to me and said “I’m stuck in a time loop, and the time loop code word is [X],” and it was indeed the word I’ve secretly held onto for most of my life, I would know that we had had this conversation in a previous loop and that they were telling the truth.

Will this ever be useful? Almost certainly not. But hey, there’s nothing wrong with having a completely absurd contingency plan. In case of time loops.

[jackhawksmoor]

[catgirlwerewolf]

no i dont ride my horse into battle what the hell is wrong with you she could get hurt. she drops me off and then she stands on the sidelines with a gun

[specterthief]

humbling

[specterthief]

people saying "write what you want to see in the world!" and that's always a good sentiment but this post isn't really about "oh no there's no content for my ship", more the feeling of "i looked up something that i thought was so obvious that surely plenty of more seasoned ao3 perverts would have thought of it already, but apparently i'm the weird one"

[lilaccatholic]

Oh to be eleven years old and finding a life-changing obscure paperback in the library

[dogpuppy]

[televisionenjoyer]

My most controversial opinion on this website is that people oughta start knowing what they're speaking about 🙏🙏 define capitalism. name one radical feminist stance besides "trans people bad". name two ways you can run an AI model. name three countries the United States military intervened.

[televisionenjoyer]

"why would I learn about these things, they're bad!" you can't just determine whether something is good or bad from what other people say. That's how indoctrination works. Full disclosure I do hold various levels of negative sentiments towards these topics but they're informed sentiments. You can't just repeat other people's arguments without rationalizing them.

[thedeliaishere]

laughable.

[hypokeimena]

[image description: screenshot of rules 12 and 13 from some forum or website, presumably for discussion of 'narcissistic abuse'. text reads as follows.

12: Narcissists are not allowed to post or comment here. // If you have been diagnosed with NPD or self-identify as a narcissist, you are not allowed to participate in RBN/LAN. Furthermore, do not promote the work of narcissists here, such as Sam Vaknin.

13. No generalizing about groups of people. // This includes race, religion, profession, gender, political party, age, ethnicity, etc. /end description]

#"there's only two things I can't stand in this world: people who are intolerant of other cultures and the dutch” (via @luimnigh

[clementine-kesh]

the big three questions of media analysis: what the author wanted to say, what they actually said, and what they didn’t know they were saying

[clementine-kesh]

for the last one i don’t just mean oh the author inadvertently wrote in gay subtext or whatever i’m talking about media as a cultural artifact which can reveal a ton about societal norms, biases, ideals, etc. it’s all about positionality and an unexamined positionality is often the most revealing of all

[pomrania]

This also heavily ties in to the concept of "all art is political", because even if something just portrays what the creator thinks is normal... "defining what is 'normal' and thus unquestioned" is the win condition for any political position.

[animentality]

[annabelle--cane]

schrodinger's chekhov's gun. a detail in a story that looks like it should have some big payoff but it's too early to tell if that's relevant or if the author just has a passion for lovingly describing guns.

[fallowsthorn]

schrodinger's chekov's occam's razor: you find an inconsistent or inaccurate detail in a work that would be brilliant if it was foreshadowing a plot twist later on, but it's too early to tell whether the author expects you to be smart, and the simplest explanation is that they fucked up

[magical-agatha]

[greatdistractions]

[ID: tags read, "Schrokovam's gunblade". END ID]

[bludraws094]

i love fake plot holes

little inconsistencies that at first you assume "oh, the author must have fucked up", but then later on you realize that no, it was on purpose, they wanted you to think they fucked up but they hadnt

[masterboa]

related: when you think "this has Implications the author didn't think about" and then it turns out the author was thinking about them the whole time

[spiralatria]

girl who's dating a hivemind and she's never really wanted to be infected or anything but simply enjoys having a girlfriend with like 11 bodies

[aliceintheclouds]

Not to kinkshame but how could you date a hivemind and not want to be infected?

[spiralatria]

sometimes on this site we engage in fictional kink scenarios that might be far removed from reality, like there being anyone who doesn't want to be part of the evil girl hivemind,

[cybergm]

Chekhov, holding a smoking pistol in act 1: I-I'm sorry this... this never happens I- it usually last much longer than this