thequeenofthefallen

I love stuff... a lot. 🇬🇧 she/her

[status-quo-hater]

I think one of the funniest abortion stances I've heard was from my parents neighbor. He's a like, hard-core libertarian viking larper guy who is very tall and very fat and very bald.

He believes a fetus is human with a soul, but also its "basically attacking the woman's body" so if she wants to get rid of it, that's "basically self-defense". He compared it to shooting a home invader. So he supports abortion not as healthcare, but as killing a baby in self-defense

[galvanizedfriend]

Chloé Zhao, who just won an Oscar for best director, writes fanfiction.

That's the kind of validation I needed in my life. Thank you, ma'am.

[absurdthirst]

To all those that think there is an age limit to fanfiction or you “have to be this” to write fanfiction — fuck off.

[fadinggalaxysalad]

I hope this reaches every author on this site. If they haven’t written a word in years, only are writing in their head and haven’t put it down yet, are hip deep in their own War and Peace wordcount fic. 

[abbykmtr-13]

“Dinner's on me”. A short story starring Spider-Man and Daredevil!

[starlitsecrets]

Remember when joining fandom as a younger person meant lurking for a bit and figuring out the vibe and etiquette instead of coming in on day one and calling people weirdos for liking weirdo shit in the weirdo factory.

[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.

[merlinoutofcontext]

[thealogie]

[storybookprincess]

being sick & miserable objectively sucks, but it has become significantly easier to cope with since learning that “sickness behavior” is a well documented part of the body’s immune response

feeling not only physically but also emotionally like fucking garbage is unfortunately an extremely effective way to force your body to prioritize fighting infection & keeping you alive. i don’t have to like it, but knowing why i get weepy & pathetic when sick does help at least a little

[autumn2may]

i just found out that this is not common knowledge and am reblogging so more people know

YOUR BODY DOES THIS ON PURPOSE

YOU ARE NOT A BAD PERSON BECAUSE OR "WEAK" WHEN YOU ARE SICK IF YOU CAN"T CARRY ON AS NORMAL

[tartrazeen]

Rereading this on my sick days 🙏🏽

[gothiccharmschool]

Why do I feel like I should print this out, frame it, and hang it in my office?

[cynicalclassicist]

That is useful to know.

[thememedaddy]

[wifegideonnav]

“bits to use in everyday conversations”

[gladosisalesbian]

something that I feel like is missing from fandom nowadays is the idea that you dont have to have a unified, chronologically/tonally consistent interpretation of your favorite work. your fics dont have to fit within the same version of canon, even if theyre all canon-compliant on their own. your headcanons can contradict each other. be a multishipper. write metas that take two totally different interpretations of the same plot point. write a character as a villain and then write them as the hero next time. write a character as a lesbian and then write them as straight next time! engage in hypotheticals and drop them when you get bored! make up the rules as you go!! have fun with it!!!

[spirkbitch]

They keep trying to make trek for modern sensibilities but they’re just making tos look excessively slutty

[spirkbitch]

Exhibit A

[spirkbitch]

I liked these tags but I had something to say about it

I already assumed that the dresses were a choice made by the female crew, mostly for my own sanity. They do show (very infrequently) women in tos wearing pants

And they show men wearing dresses in tng, but only ever in the background (unless you count the dress uniforms)

And obviously I like that these were included, but they were clearly a cop out decision.

“Yeah see men can wear dresses, women can wear pants. They just don’t choose to” reads as “of course I’m not sexist, women just like wearing tiny little dresses in the future”

And thinking about it from a late sixties perspective, many women did see more revealing clothes as an empowering choice to make. Men wanted women covered and modest, understated makeup, only exposed or done up for male enjoyment. Some women took that in the opposite direction and chose to wear more extravagant makeup, revealing clothing, and brighter colors. It was a progressive time, and some of the choices made in an attempt to highlight that in the show did not age well.

But at the same time, you can clearly see that some of these “progressive” points were only added in as a write off.

[anghraine]

And thinking about it from a late sixties perspective, many women did see more revealing clothes as an empowering choice to make. Men wanted women covered and modest, understated makeup, only exposed or done up for male enjoyment. Some women took that in the opposite direction and chose to wear more extravagant makeup, revealing clothing, and brighter colors.

I think it's worth emphasizing that this very genuinely is the main reason for the "sexist" miniskirts. IRL, women were often not choosing between sexy miniskirts and non-objectifying pants, but long skirts (respectable) and short skirts (rebellious). Deliberately wearing short skirts as rebellion against patriarchal control that mandated long skirts or maaaaybe loose slacks on a good day is still hardly unknown among girls/women leaving conservative communities in the USA, and was only more commonly coded that way at the time.

Sally Kellerman, the actress for Elizabeth Dehner, found the close fit of the supposedly more feminist pants uncomfortable and is often given something to hold in front of her because she was so intensely self-conscious about them. Grace Lee Whitney (Janice Rand) loathed the more "proper" initial look and worked with the (gay) costume designer, William Ware Theiss, to design a different, more daring and cool-looking aesthetic for women of the future that appealed to her personally. That was what resulted in the miniskirt uniform design. No doubt it served the objectifying tastes of various straight men involved, but literally zero of them were responsible for the design of Whitney's and Nichols's uniforms.

Not only did Nichelle Nichols not consider herself suffering from the miniskirt, she admitted later to sometimes deliberately lifting the skirt even higher at Uhura's station to show off more of her legs because she hadn't worked so hard on her body to not show them off. Meanwhile, Jill Ireland, the actress for Leila Kalomi, was nervous that she might have to wear the kinds of revealing costumes so many other TOS actresses did, and Theiss instead designed her the comfortable overalls she wears as Leila in "This Side of Paradise."

The kneejerk backlash against short skirts (in decidedly more reactionary eras of both Star Trek and US culture) led to both the large-scale disappearance of the skirts and the snide commentary on them throughout later iterations of Trek, with zero consideration of the fact that they were designed by a gay man to suit the preferences of the leading actresses at a time when they commonly represented rebellion. The Berman-era Star Trek productions tut-tutting at the old costumes while actually putting actresses in uncomfortable, form-fitting uniforms they disliked is ... uh, something else.

Even while the female Starfleet costumes shifted towards pants (and militarism) in the movies, btw, Nichelle Nichols insisted on getting to wear skirts as Uhura—because she liked them and she had little patience for 80s respectability.

[toastyglow]

I often think I could be such a good writer if I were better at writing

[icemankazansky]

Unfortunately, the only way to improve your writing is to write.

[hollowboobtheory]

ok but like. there are two different types of privilege. there's type a "everybody should have this, but some people don't" and type b "nobody should have this, but some people do"

there's having parents who can pay for your application to any college, and then there's having parents who can bribe your way into any college. there's owning your own home, and then there's owning 50 houses and getting rich off hoarding a vital resource. there's not fearing for your life whenever cops are around, and then there's being the cop and being allowed to murder anyone at any time.

idk i just feel like that's an important distinction to make.

[loveridden1999]

[baxs-tblr]

Being a fan of a morally grey character is frustrating because people will try to reduce them to either being an innocent little angel or a completely heartless monster and both of these interpretations just take away what makes the character interesting

[ars-theurgia]

uk giving 12 points to france feels like a betrayal of the entire 16th century

[byjove]

Most of us have a gross food at a friend’s house while growing up story but mine was sooooo wild. We sat down to dinner, the side dishes were like white rice and broccoli and the main entree was shrimp. Just shrimp. Unseasoned steamed shrimp. Pink. Not a shred of any sort of herb or flavoring on that thang. I do not enjoy shrimp on the best of days but I can tolerate it, I bit into one just to make sure there wasn’t like a clear lemon sauce or something that wasn’t visible but no, this was really and truly completely unseasoned shrimp. This was a predicament. I was in maybe the third grade, I really wanted to make a good impression so I politely asked if there was any cocktail sauce to dip the shrimp in as that was what I was used to doing. Her dad laughed and said no.

I straight up could not make myself eat it. I tried very politely to nibble on the side dishes and I did not place additional shrimp on my plate as to be polite and not waste food but it was fucking surreal. The whole unseasoned meal combination was not human food, it was like a fancy meal for an expensive dog. Her, her parents and her brother are eating it like unseasoned rice, broccoli and shrimp is a completely normal meal. I feel it is important to note that this was occurring in North Carolina so I’m not used to dealing with this, I had never experienced an unseasoned shrimp with no sauce in my 9 or 10 years of life. I also feel it is important to note my friend is biracial, Black mom, white dad. This is not a midwestern Caucasian mom mealtime disaster, this is 100 miles inland from the fucking coast in North Carolina. Shrimp is not a cheap food so it’s not like they just couldn’t afford to season the protein. To this day, I still do not understand. Maybe they were health freaks, maybe someone in the household was on a low sodium diet but not a single HERB??? NOTHING????? WHY WERE THEY EATING LIKE THAT???????

My friend’s dad mentioned to my dad that I hadn’t eaten at dinner when they walked me home, presumably because he didn’t want my dad to think they had me over for dinner and refused to feed me when I went home starving. My parents taught me to always be polite and gracious and I’d get in trouble for being rude for things I did not completely understand were slights but I knew bonding over food is a big part of the culture in the south so not feeding someone when they’re at your house and/or not eating when offered is considered rude and bizarre. I waited for them to leave and I was sooooo worried I’d be in trouble but I explained the unseasoned shrimp dilemma to my dad and the look on his face was like 😟, he was also truly fucking baffled and I was absolved of all guilt.