#silverstark

[kurowrites]

silverstark

Yes. The fic is mildly annoying, but not as inescapable as the hate towards it. I wish everyone would calm down.

It also makes me feel very stupid, posting my normal fic in the middle of this mess. :/

[drwcn]

A headcanon: WWX probably uses a bottle of Emperor's Smile as a flower-vase.

okay that vase is TRES AESTHETIC. i don’t blame him. 

[kurowrites]

silverstark

Some months ago (forgive my distorted sense of time), wangxian+fan took an indefinite break from the fandom due to both personal reasons and because they were bullied by trolls.

ibijau

they have been attacked by trolls, and have basically left the fandom sadly. I don't remember the details of what happened, but it was explained on twitter back then. It's really a loss for the fandom, since they were very sweet from what I could tell...

THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS. It was so encouraging always getting nice comments from them, which part of this was a problem???

I hope the trolls are happy about being very shitty human beings. =_=

[kurowrites]

silverstark

I can’t believe I temporarily forgot your profile pic! We were so robbed of Avengers family movies 😫 I will never forgive them for baiting me for that with that little Avengers Tower blueprint scene and then doing THAT.

They found family trope-baited us and I, for one, will never forgive.

[kurowrites]

silverstark

No that American thing is real. 😆 It’s so refreshing to read low-stakes domestic things. It almost feels like a lost art, especially in superhero/apocalypse/military-obsessed American media. Maybe that’s why I read so much fluffy domestic fic.

Oh my god, don’t get me started on the superheroes. I will be like *bangs fist on the table repeatedly* LET THEM SLEEP.

The power escalation is frankly unreal, while the real threat is poverty and state-sanctioned violence. Like. Seriously, let them sleep.

[kurowrites]

silverstark

That’s fair and valid! I had the same reservations about it but just fyi (mildly spoilery), dragons are used to level the military playing field, so colonial activities are mostly fucked up. African, Incan, Chinese, and (to a lesser extent) Indigenous Australian people and dragons all play significant roles in world politics.

It features a lot of violence, but mostly the series is mostly about platonic and fraternal love. I am comfortable recommending it to my feminist friends want female-gazey books as it was written by a Jewish woman who was very much on a MISSION.

That sentence... “It features a lot of violence, but mostly the series is mostly about platonic and fraternal love.” That is somehow such a quintessentially American thing! xD Like, I don’t mean that in a mean way, it’s just so very American, if that makes sense.

I guess my main issue isn’t so much the content of the books than the fact that I work with colonialism and nationalism by day, and when you go home at night you’re somehow like... can I have some low stakes for once, please? Also people whose extent of shittiness is of the degree ‘nosy neighbour,’ not ‘will potentially enslave an entire continent’? I’m so tired man, humans are horrible. When I was younger I scoffed at romance novels, now I write them because it’s like the only drug that keeps me going.

(Ok this is a little overdramatic, but it’s honestly depressing, reading all this shit. I was just reading up on the Opium Wars the other day and UGH.)

I guess I will have to postpone these books until I’ve finished my PhD, and am finally ready to read about this time period without wanting to set things on fire.

[kurowrites]

silverstark said:

Actually now that I said it I have two recommendations if you’re looking for them and haven’t already read them. 1) Temeraire series and 2) “Sorcery and Cecilia or the Enchanted Chocolate Pot” (delightful epistolary novel. Very very fun and scratched the Jane Austen itch)  

I have never heard of the second one, but the first one (side note: I’m not making a judgement of the book itself here!) contains stuff I precisely don’t want in an Austen-esque novel, and that is politics and war. I mean, fair fair, war does play a rather significant role in Persuasion for example, but everything is told from a very domestic point of view, without being somehow dismissive of that domestic/feminine point of view, and that’s what I like so much about these books.

In Persuasion, we know/assume that Anne ended up going on travels to keep her husband company, but that part is actually never shown! That’s the fascinating part of it. It’s the ‘small’ stories that are really the focus of the book, and I love it.

[kurowrites]

silverstark

Omg yes. “Read the Bronte sisters, they’re similar!” Nooo!!!

*underlines this five times and points at it emphatically*