i love the way you write kuno. i don't mean the romance, but his faith and his connection to his culture. rather than seeing the higher power as something to be feared, i find it comforting how kuno sees it (ie how you write it) with a sense of loving playfulness. it's so rare to see such a portrayal with how much christianity has taken over mainstream but it feels real, true, kind. this line made me cry too haha it has a permanent place in my gallery
thank you for how much effort you take to be accurate, kind, and considerate of the cultures your characters are from. it's very noticed and very very appreciated
I finished reading an incredible novel last week (Wellness by Nathan Hill) and there's a passage fairly early on that hit me hard. So much so that it made me cry. At the time, I didn't quite understand why it affected me so much, but it finally dawned on me this morning. My analysis will be after the cut. Here's the passage (from pages 208-209):
"It's a lecture Jack gives to his Intro to Art class, during the chapter on American landscapes, how painters educated in the European tradition saw the endless tallgrass prairie of the Midwest and literally did not know what to do with it. They had no training that might have prepared them to depict something so monolithic. They were accustomed to scenes with easy scope and dimension: trees in the middle distance for perspective, rivers and valleys that made for convenient vanishing points, mountains on the horizon as an anchoring weight, all of it evocatively defined in light and shadow. But what do you do with a tallgrass prairie, where the middle distance and the far distance and the near distance are all flat and featureless and identical?
What these artists did, mostly, was ignore it. They kept traveling west until they reached the Rockies and were rewarded with landscapes that matched their schooling, which is why, in the canon of American landscape art, the prairie is so underrepresented. It's not because the prairie wasn't beautiful—most of the painters acknowledged, in letters and diaries, that it was very pretty indeed—but rather that the prairie did not accord with the traditional standards of what was specifically beautiful in landscape art. These painters came looking for the things they knew how to depict—forests and mountains and beaches—and when they found none of these, they declared the landscape 'empty.'
They did not see what was there. Instead, they saw what wasn't.
Jack means it to be a lesson on the difference between reality and the representation of reality. Beauty, he tells his students, is a constructed, not intrinsic, condition. The things we think are beautiful are only the things that have been depicted beautifully. And if it's not depicted, it's not seen. It never enters the imagination. It becomes a nothing.
Which is why the west got Yellowstone, and the prairie got destroyed."
I like to remain a positive space in this fandom for everyone, but I am human and I have my down days. Today is one of those days, so I thought I would (respectfully) wax on about this passage in the context of LGBTQIA+ representation in fandom spaces like Hogwarts: Legacy.
Despite a growing number of creators depicting diverse, queer narratives, there is often a noticeable lack of engagement with these works on platforms like AO3. I sometimes come across comments from users—which I don't think are made with ill intent—about only reading works by popular creators. While I understand this to some extent, as both a writer and a dedicated reader in this fandom, when I come across this sentiment in the wild, it's like a punch to the gut. I know and support many beautiful works that, if you were to sort by hits, kudos, or bookmarks, wouldn’t be considered “popular,” but are spectacularly written with wonderfully fleshed-out characters, and these stories deserve just as much recognition.
Suffice it to say, these stories—more often than not—do not center on heterosexual relationships or cisgender perspectives.
When queer stories are not engaged with, they risk being rendered "invisible" in fandom culture. This doesn’t mean they lack value or beauty, but simply that they fall outside the established norms, just as the prairie did in the eyes of the artists in the shared passage. This lack of visibility isn’t due to an absence of effort or talent but reflects a broader issue where what is unfamiliar or different struggles to be recognized and celebrated.
In this context, it's disheartening to see the potential for LGBTQIA+ stories to expand the landscape of fandom, only for them to often be overlooked. We deserve to see a fandom where all perspectives—like all landscapes—are equally appreciated and supported.
To those of you who do write LGBTQIA+ stories, you are seen and appreciated. Please do not stop writing. I know it can be very difficult to seemingly write into the void. Don't give up. You are doing the world a service.
To those of you who are willing to expand your worldview, go out there and read outside of your comfort zone. You may find a new appreciation for an underrated pairing or genre.
Ultimately, I know this uncomfy feeling of mine will pass. It always does. But if you made it all the way to the end of this, thank you, and perhaps do me a favor. Think of a pairing (or even a story that doesn't have a pairing!) that you haven't explored yet in this fandom. Don't sort by hits, kudos, or bookmarks, as it's likely there aren't many stories yet to shuffle through. Browse the summaries. Does one stand out to you? Give it a try! If you enjoy it, give that author a kudo, maybe even a comment. You'll make their month, I guarantee it.
I suppose that's all besides I love y'all. Yes, all of y'all. <3
"We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity. That is to say, queers—real-life ones—do not deserve representation, protection, and rights because they are morally pure or upright as a people. They deserve those things because they are human beings, and that is enough."
Displaced persons are mostly unwanted where they fled from; unwanted where they are, in refugee camps; and unwanted where they want to go. They have fled under arduous conditions; they have lost friends, family members, homes, and countries; they are detained in refugee camps in often subhuman conditions, with no clear end to the stay and no definitive exit; they are often threatened with deportation to their countries of origin; and they will likely be unremembered, which is where the work of writers becomes important, especially writers who are refugees or have been refugees—if such a distinction can be drawn [...]
In my case, I remember my displacement so that I can feel for those now displaced. I remember the injustice of displacement so that I can imagine my writing as attempting to perform some justice for those compelled to move.
Viet Thanh Nguyen, from his Introduction to The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives
I saw on your stories that you wrote about Poland! If you ever need some expert advice, I’ll be happy to lend my brain for your questions about pierogies and more — I’ll trade it very fairly for an additional date with Mads. Picnic in a park or a forest walk so it can be extra awkward lol.
Anyway, as a Polish person I want to thank you. It’s so refreshing and even a little heartwarming to see my nationality mentioned.
Mmmmmm pierogies 🤤
And of course! I get so excited too when Denmark is mentioned in international media, like, one of the contestants in The Great British Bake off has a Danish grandmother and I'm like "I HOPE HE WINS" purely because of his Grandma 😂
I keep my tattered memories of being a refugee close to me. I cultivate that feeling of what it was to be a refugee, because a writer is supposed to go where it hurts, and because a writer needs to know what it feels like to be an other. A writer’s work is impossible if he or she cannot conjure up the lives of others, and only through such acts of memory, imagination, and empathy can we grow our capacity to feel for others.
Viet Thanh Nguyen, from his Introduction to The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives
The other exists in contradiction, or perhaps in paradox, being either invisible or hypervisible, but rarely just visible. Most of the time we do not see the other or see right through them, whoever the other may be to us, since each of us—even if we are seen as others by some—have our own others. When we do see the other, the other is not truly human to us, by very definition of being an other, but is instead a stereotype, a joke, or a horror.
Viet Thanh Nguyen, from his Introduction to The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives
