#wrangletangle

[destinationtoast]

Several readers suggested that the F/F surge might be due to the recent influx of Chinese creators.  (Thank you, folks!  Great point!)   But it turns out that’s not it:

wrangletangle replied to your photo  “Help me, femslash fans! ��‍❤️‍������ So I’m about to publish some new...”

I checked. Chinese creators are posting about 2.5% F/F, whereas the archive as a whole is over 8%. So it's probably not them. Good thinking, though!

Thanks for investigating!!

[beatrice-otter]

wrangletangle replied to your photoset

Can someone tell this oft-disappointed queer - is this a thing that's actually happening? Is this all hands on deck for realz? No bait, no straight?

I think the creators think the Kara and Lena stuff is just girls being friends--they’ve been very consistent about having male love interests for Kara, even though fandom is mostly slashing her, first with Kat and now with Lena.  So don’t get your hopes up there.  I don’t think it’s baiting so much as they really don’t realize how gay some scenes look.

However!  This season, Kara’s sister Alex has had an AWESOME gay storyline, in which she gets an AWESOME girlfriend in Detective Maggie Sawyer, and it’s a really cute relationship with depth and goodness and sparkles, and everyone is happy for them.  It’s so beautiful.  And it’s also why I don’t think the Kara/Lena stuff is queerbaiting--they don’t seem to be afraid of having a happy, acknowledged, public lesbian mixed-race couple in their main characters.  They don’t need to queerbait; they’ve already got enough gay representation to get that audience.

[destinationtoast]

@chriscalledmesweetie omg you're the best!! Thanks for doing actual additional research, and for the fascinating FFN info -- that makes sense as a way of skirting the policy there, but hadn't occurred to me.

@wrangletangle Interesting -- thanks for confirming this! The only RPF fandoms I've ever poked around in before which were related to fictional works were huge (e.g. Sherlock, Supernatural), so it was easier to miss this pattern.

[destinationtoast]

@justamusedmusings replied to your post “Hee!  Somebody bookmarked one of my works with the note, “Pretty good...”

Ahhh! Would anyone mind telling if author's can see private bookmarks?? I've always assumed they couldn't as they are 'private'.

No worries!  Only the bookmarker can see their private bookmarks.  :)

@solrosan replied to your photoset “Somebody sent an anonymous ask a while back asking about my old...”

It's not often I feel completely out of the loop, but damn... I'm almost a complete hit-and-miss for what's popular in the got/asoiaf fandom, apparently...

Yeah, I’ve been a die-hard fan of the books since the 90′s and the show since it first aired, but I’ve never read much fic, for whatever reason (and I used to read a lot of fan theories, back at least a decade ago, but haven’t read much meta, either).  Which is kind of mostly how I was a media fan until I encountered Sherlock... not sure why.  Anyway, I wouldn’t have guessed the fandom popularity of some of the characters, ships, and tropes!

@wrangletangle replied to your post “Hee!  Somebody bookmarked one of my works with the note, “Pretty good...”

Am I the only one who thinks "pretty good author" is strong praise? I think perhaps not everyone is extremely effusive with caps and exclamation marks and everything...

Not just you!  There were a bunch of people who said similar.  For me, it wasn’t the punctuation, but the use of the qualifier “pretty,” which to me reads as “less than unqualified good” or “meh.” That’s apparently a quirk of my dialect, though, based on other responses.

[muggle-writes]

Hey, you asked about tagging minor characters on AO3. The screenshots you gave all look great! That's all a wrangler could ask for, really. Thanks for thinking about us!

(following up on this post)

thanks, good to know! Glad I didn't cause unnecessary headache with the tags.

To be fair, when I first tagged and put those links in the notes, I was thinking mainly of the readers' potential confusion, but when I see "here's how to be nice to the tag wranglers" advice I try to internalize it and be kind all around. Also if there was something I could do that was noticably better than what I already have, I could always edit those tags now and be a good example to other writers less familiar with ao3's process (I was baffled the first time one of my tags got synned and replaced with a canonical - I was sitting there going "I don't think i capitalized that; why is that the only tag with Actual Capitalization?" - lol most of my tags are too sentence-y to actually get replaced when they're synned with something - and before that I didn't realize anything was going on behind the scenes... I know now ofc, so I try not to take the wranglers and other volunteers for granted 😘)

[coconutice22]

People in the US typically don't know the full cost of their premiums while they're working, because the employer pays a percentage and the rest comes out of their paycheck before they see it. To know the full cost, you have to lose or quit your job and go on cobra, where you pay 102% of your full premium yourself. When I was on cobra 10 years ago, the cost was $315/month for one person on a crappy plan that didn't meet national standards, with $40 copays.

...Okay I’m a little speechless at this information. Wow. Thanks though, the more I learn the more horrified I am at the insurance system. 

I don’t know how it got to this stage where the corporations are even legally allowed to blatantly overcharge for medical care this much. I know from an American doctor I’ve worked with that the health system prices are grossly inflated in the US but to be paying that much a month just stuns me. 

[destinationtoast]

Regarding Duo's app, I'm going to run it from the beginning to help with submitting alternate English phrasing, so I'll check the particle usage. That said, は should replace が or を, not に. You can literally stack the place/movement particles with it to get には or では, though the latter is often a set phrase. (Also, the group who built this course are mostly native Japanese speakers, so I'd tend to trust their Japanese phrasing very strongly.)

Oh, great to know!  Thanks. :D  And I look forward to hearing about your experiences as you do so, if you end up sharing them!

[pameluke]

@wrangletangle  replied to your post “ok, so I know, Oskar our cousin from Iceland would kill me, but fuck...”

I'm the exact opposite. We should trade seasons! ...Except we're both in the northern hemisphere. Darn it.

It’s not the actual season I have trouble with, it’s the daylight saving thing. Or in this case, ONE HOUR OF SLEEP THAT IS BRUTALLY STOLEN FROM US EVERY FUCKING YEAR.

In Dutch that’s called Summer Time, hence the confusion  :D