@siffrininstarsandtime @siffrinsonionquiche @darkotorclash @theweirdqueerthing @oliveleaves @im-bad-at-names-okay @boxdwellerstuck AND OBVIOUSLY OPEN TAGS, EVERYONE SPREAD THIS SHIT
i know this is tumblr and we’re all playing perverts but i just think some of you would be excellent company for a late night walk and a four hour conversation about absolutely nothing
Im sorry but it is so funny how people outside of tumblr view us. Like why are the tiktokers treating tumblr like some professional ass website you need to do extensive prep before you begin posting on. And the follower farming advice is so fucking funny to me when this is the website where people actively hate getting new followers
Tumblr is the website where you ramble to yourself like a madman until someone decides they like you and put you into their pocket like a shiny rock. That's how you get followers
"have some idea of content you want to do", "have lots of drafts before posting" - no, silly, just post whatever comes to your mind at 2 AM. the best thing about tumblr is that you can start rambling about some obscure background character from a 3000 year old poem, and there'll always be someone equally invested
I think by now Hudson and Connor have repeated enough times that they do not want pictures to be taken that we are all aware, yet the stalking continues.
I don't think any of it is ok. The public street pictures help identify their neighbourhood - where they are staying, which gym they go to and lead to increasingly intrusive, dangerous and disturbing stalking like Connor being touched without consent and followed to his private residence or Hudson being photographed inside the private gym clearly without his knowledge or consent.
If you call yourself a fan of either or both of them, please don't spread these non-consensual photos and videos and call out the stalkers instead of encouraging their behaviour.
They will be working in Toronto for months, and the situation is already spiralling badly with stalkers reportedly flying in to harass them. They will be forced into lockdown, it will impact their mental health being hunted for pics, and it will burden the production to have to increase security.
There are no upsides. We should not engage with this kind of content, and wait until they share what they are comfortable sharing.
bitch this is all you’re gonna get. this life, this face, this body. you better not ‘maybe in another universe’ your way out of everything. sit your ass down and face this. go make tea and have a picnic and read a goddamn book. kiss your loved ones, send that damn text, and hug your siblings. this is all you’re gonna get.
Hey if you’re schizophrenic/psychotic I just want you to know that you’re a wonderful person and that you deserve so much better than the demonization, marginalization and stigmatization you face in this society.
Please consider reblogging this/other positivity posts for schizophrenic/psychotic people every once in a while. If you have more than 100 followers, odds are that a couple of them experiences psychosis and that they rarely see positivity posts for people with their symptoms.
So what I think is that there's this default belief in patriarchy that men are superior to women and therefore the "masculine" sphere is superior to the "feminine" sphere. And so, as feminists have fought to expand the number of allowable female activities, men (on the aggregate over generations) have retreated from those activities because they're now seen as "feminine", and so partaking in them is incommensurate with their belief in their own superiority. And, unfortunately, as this has progressed, this has resulted in a lot of men sectioning themselves off from, frankly, everything that actually makes being alive worthwhile. It's a misery spiral, and the only way out is to abandon male supremacy.
#men gave up deep friendships and reading and poetry and colourful fashion#all things that used to be considered manly in the 19th century#they're currently giving up on studying law and medecine#it's so stupid and sad
(I mean, the colourful fashion was more of an eighteenth century thing, but yeah)
#more women in higher education meaning fewer men is incredibly depressing to me. funny in a sad way#what happens when women will finally get into trades? will they just stop working
hi salad! what are some of the things youve learned in your first year writing? tips?
In no particular order:
If writing was easy, everyone would do it.
At the same time, you have to love the struggle. Otherwise why are you doing it?
Try for consistency—as in, a couple sentences a day—but don’t get too hung up on it. Sometimes I go through long periods of reading only or doing other kinds of art. Making yourself anxious about it doesn’t help.
Take a walk if you can’t think of what you want to say.
I’m an outliner. I need to have a rough idea of what I’m doing with a story.
I’m also prone to underwriting, so I’m always trying to add details and emotional beats. It’s not the worst thing in the world to be sparse with your prose, but I also really admire people with vivid and lush writing styles; I think I struggle to let scenes breathe. Speaking of which:
Get a beta reader, ideally one who isn’t afraid to whack you. There is no faster way to improve than to work through edits and constructive criticism. Not everyone cares about that, which is fine; everyone has a different process or goals or whatever.
Beta read for other people. If you can read someone else’s work and pick out moments that don’t land, sentence rhythms that fall flat, pacing that drags, that will help you notice the same in your own work.
Beta reading is critical reading, which I also recommend and do a lot of. I often read books with a highlighter and pencil in my hand. The same goes for fics I really like—if I love something, I often download it and re-read it while annotating. Unfortunately now I’m just describing putting yourself through a creative writing class.
I’m a big believer in Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style: “Vigorous writing is concise.” This is true in every field (believe it or not, I get paid to write op-eds and policy papers, which is where I learned most of the fundamentals of writing), and it also applies to fanfic. Many fics are too long. SORRY! They are. As S&W say, “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.” Your words can tell something other than pure plot advancement, but they have to serve some sort of purpose. S&W have all sorts of tips that are incredibly useful in fiction. At any moment, the easiest decision a reader can make is to stop reading. The worst thing a fic can be is boring. You are trying to tell a story to your reader. Get their attention and hold it!
Along these lines, I’ve found that if something is boring me to write, it’s probably because the scene is unnecessary or could be shorter. This advice comes from the inimitable susiecarter IIRC.
Also, Orwell’s Politics and the English Language is incredible even for fanfic writing. And I’m slowly working through Steering the Craft (thanks Freya for the suggestion!). Orwell, critiquing political writing, says that “As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.” I really do think this is true of fic too. Avoid turns of phrase that are fanfic staples. Don’t be pretentious in writing unless your style calls for it. Be concrete.
Read the types of stories you want to write and write the types of stories you want to read.
Part of putting your work out there is that people are going to have opinions about it. Nothing is for everyone. It’s your art; stand behind it. In other words, stop caring what strangers online think unless you are specifically soliciting concrit.
If you are writing from close third, everything on the page should be filtered through the character’s POV. If your character wouldn’t notice the high ceilings, don’t write about them.
Especially in kink or darkfic, you have to commit to the bit (another Freya tip). What is the meat of it? What makes it sexy? What’s interesting? Get grosser and more perverted and more honest. If you as the writer are flinching away from what you actually find iddy, why should the reader be interested? Why are you writing it if it doesn’t turn you on/make you sick/excite you/make you laugh/make you cry? Don’t let shame keep you from writing something real.
The thing about Heated Rivalry and The Long Game being perceived as both a feel good love story and a true critique of hockey culture as it exists today is that those two things are fundamentally incompatible.
If Shane is Sidney Crosby adjacent in terms of how phenomenal he is as a player, that means he was subjected to the same cruel and unusual treatment that Sidney Crosby faced on his professional journey. If you’re not familiar, Crosby was targeted from as young as 12 with opposing players slashing at him and beaning the puck at him in an attempt to injure him. He was heckled and threatened by parents in the stands at peewee games. Shane is Asian on top of this, and was most definitely subject to racial abuse. If these things happened, obviously they would be traumatic and make the person on the receiving end of it aware of “the dark side of hockey.” (I would really go so far to argue that there’s no chance in hell any real life North American hockey player isn’t aware of the dark side of hockey, because the hazing and the social hierarchies are engrained into the culture).
But if Shane allegedly, the way Rachel writes The Long Game, is blissfully unaware, then they exist inside some alternate universe where hockey culture isn’t anything like what it is in this one.
Ilya’s characterization is also fundamentally incompatible with “the realities of hockey culture.” Hookup culture in locker rooms, and particularly the way hockey locker rooms treat sex and women is inherently degrading. We Breed Lions by Rick Westhead does a really phenomenal job of breaking down the systemic way boys in North American hockey are conditioned growing up to see women and girls. It’s one that has historically encouraged players to view women as status symbols, conquests, and tools for male bonding rather than as equal people. You could make the argument that Ilya was raised in Russia, so it’s different, and I don’t know anything about Russian locker room culture so I’m not going to. But he plays in the American League, alongside North American players during the duration of the book. I’m not going to get into detail about the structure of athletes and hookup culture, and I really encourage everyone to read the book or exerts of it, but they don’t view the people they sleep with as equals. They don’t value consent. Even if Ilya himself (or the character of Ilya contextualized in the reality of what hockey culture looks like) doesn’t partake in the sleazy way hockey players try to get women into bed, he’s at the very least, privy to conversations about it. Whether or not he personally participates in the more predatory aspects of that culture is moot because he would, at minimum, be immersed in locker room conversations where women are discussed as sexual conquests, hear teammates boast about hookups, and witness the attitudes that are deeply embedded within the sport.
But Ilya’s character is a good person, and the narrative supports this. So we know that the reality of hockey culture’s attitude towards women doesn’t exist in this universe. If he encountered the misogyny that is so well documented within professional hockey culture, the character as written would almost certainly reject it. Yet the novel never asks him to. Instead, it simply removes that dimension of hockey culture from the world it has constructed from his narrative altogether. He’s a hockey player and he has a lot of casual sex and those two things exist in two separate places altogether.
Ilya is also a white man, who in The Long Game, dismisses his Asian partner’s ability to accurately perceive how nasty hockey can be if we look at him in the context of reality. But Heated Rivalry isn’t rooted in reality. Instead, it presents a sanitized version of oppression where prejudice exists only when the narrative explicitly points to it and disappears elsewhere based on convenience (or if it can’t be used to paint Ilya as the darling white boyfriend who doesn’t have a racist bone in his body and actually he’s sooooo much more oppressed than his boyfriend!!!! Not that he would ever make it a competition. But Shane just doesn’t understand … good thing white Ilya is here to comprehend it for him!!)
The novel operates with an almost binary moral framework. Ignoring mental health is presented as unequivocally wrong, so mental health becomes a subject the narrative takes seriously. Racism is largely absent from the text, so it effectively ceases to exist within the univese the novel has constructed. Misogyny receives an occasional throwaway acknowledgement, allowing the narrative to sidestep the pervasive sexism embedded in professional men’s sports. (I’m sure it’s more of a focus in Troy’s book, and eventually I will read that, but I’m aware of the major plot beats and I’m aware of Rachel Reid’s tendencies, so I don’t really have high hopes).
My truth is that the show canon is what I take as truth (and you don’t know bar for bar what a character is thinking in a TV show, so omission doesn’t necessarily mean that those things don’t exist, just that we as the audience didn’t get to see them). Even the show’s canon isn’t truly compatible with the reality of hockey culture, but it’s not so blatantly dismissive of Shane and his interiority.
Rachel can write these books and call them romance. Shane doesn’t even have to be as equally fleshed out as a character as Ilya, if we’re going to call it a romance book. But to call it a social critique and ignore the elephant in the room that is race every single time is a slap in the face to the players that most definitely receive the brunt of abuse during their careers when it presents itself as a commentary on hockey culture, homophobia, masculinity, or prejudice. Once a text claims to be a commentary, what it chooses to leave out becomes part of the critique. That selectivity matters because it sanitizes who bears the cost of hockey culture in real life. Players of colour have spoken about racist abuse from teammates, opponents, fans, and even coaches. Women working in hockey have documented cultures of sexism and harassment. These are not peripheral issues!!! They are part of the fabric of the sport’s history.
At the end of the day I am going to interact with Shane and Ilya’s characterization with the lens of what they mean to me, and what their love story and dynamic symbolizes to me. Do I think it’s realistic that someone will never say something insensitive about their partner concerning part of their identity? No, but I’m not claiming to write a critique most of the time I’m writing feel good fluff for the most part. Part of the appeal for me is the fact that Shane is Asian and Ilya is an immigrant and they treat each other with respect and see each other as complete equals, and I see that reflected in the TV show dynamic. But to me, they don’t exist in the real world, because they are incompatible with it in universe.
