Another few pages done after 40 years! Thank you to the patrons who doodled and decorated on page 2! Thank you to @abananasaurus , @moon-wolfie ,@bloody-hugs, @the-one-teapot, @sp00kybl00ky, Tobi , and CaptainAllBlue!
Thank you, Black people in fandom spaces. Thank you, Black creators and Black lurkers. Thank you Black artists, Black writers. Thank you, Black bloggers, Black influencers. Shoutout to those Black characters, both canon and original. Thank you, Black people, both queer and cishet.
Your perspectives matter. Your representation matters. You are not bothersome for demanding equal treatment in fandom. It is not your responsibility to make fandom more welcoming and inclusive to you. It is not your sole responsibility to create all of the Black-centered content. You are not "ruining" anyone's fun for demanding better for yourself, and anyone who says otherwise can go fuck themselves. Any fandom worth being a part of should have no room for racism in it.
Black people in fandom, you are wanted. You are needed. You are loved and appreciated. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
And since they don't get told it near enough, thank you, Black women especially!!!
You are not "ruining" anyone's fun for demanding better for yourself, and anyone who says otherwise can go fuck themselves. Any fandom worth being a part of should have no room for racism in it.
one of the best ways iâve found to combat that inherent depressive pessimism without veering into toxic positivity territory is simply the phrase âiâm open to the possibilityâ
this particularly works with anything negative iâve forecasted. âi woke up feeling like shit today, so my day is gonna suckâ isnât a particularly helpful thought, but âitâs a great day to be alive!!!!!â feels hollow and insincere when i have a pounding headache & am running on three hours of sleep
instead iâll tell myself, âi really donât feel good right now, but iâm open to the possibility that coffee and breakfast might perk me up a bit.â or âiâm in a lot of pain today, but iâm open to the possibility that my workday might still have fun parts despite thatâ
sometimes, when your impulse is to slam the door on anything good, but youâre not exactly up to going out & hunting it down yourself, leaving the door open just a crack makes all the difference
she is a princess and you are a dragon. she will be married tonight. do not keep standing outside of her room like that, go inside. go get her. that is what proper dragons do.
not that you have ever been a good or proper dragon. when you hatched out of your egg, your eggtooth was too smooth. the other dragons were rough with you, put little holes in your wings.
you were not bold. you were odd. you liked rippling water and the shine of chitin when bugs scuttle and of course the movement of the stars. those were all acceptable interests albeit maybe not traditional. perhaps you had inherited these through some great-great-uncle or something. certainly a dragon may be wise, or clever, if they are not bold.
yes, you have been a great deal of a puzzle to the other dragons. your body is smaller and rather more soft than it ought to be. so speed should have been yours, perhaps - your mother said it would be like fighting a shadow. if a dragon is not aggressive, it may instead be cruel, sly; a backstab. but alas your scales - so iridescent that they almost shine like the moon at night, a glow from within - you are not a shadow, you are a beacon like the flash of a knight's blade. your father has said at least you would make a fine egglayer, a nice mate to a good male. a dragon like you may still be a good mother perhaps; and that is a fine thing to be; although of course it would have been better if you'd been a trove-hoarder instead.
what a dragon must not be is kind.
you have watched her now for six moons. what a good and proper dragon would do is to go inside and to snatch her. a very proper dragon would have kidnapped her many times over, but you will be the delight of your brood to princess-snatch even at all. when you catch her in your jaws and bring her home, they will love you, then. they don't think you're capable of it, but you are, because you're a proper dragon. you can show them that. if you go in, now, right now.
you are rather too glossy to hide in the shadows, so instead you have learned how to appear flat and round, a puddle of light. (how your siblings would mock you! a dragon should be matte, to blend with the night). you dapple your flank with mud. you perch in odd angles atop of trees, scuttle like the bugs you love - hither, tither, frantic.
what you must not do is fly with your wings full-out. alight, you will be limned by the moon's corona. you will be a beacon. you must remember this when (not if) you snatch her.
____
you found her because of the lake. this lake in particular was your favorite - nestled deep in the woods, between two mountains. it is very quiet; there is nothing to horde there so no other dragon bothers you. a gentle waterfall spills over into a deep cove, and there are many mossy caves you've spent your afternoons napping in. while it is not proper for a dragon to prefer such things, you like to lay in rolling tenure just under the water. you have become excellent at holding your breath, can do it for hours. it is the easiest way to appear as a patch of sunlight.
she was not sunlight. she was the night's joy. the dark press of water. her face at first concealed by many diaphanous layers. her breathing quick and quiet.
she had pulled them back to drink from her water flask. and there she had been: a princess. your first very-real princess. right there, only the reach of a single talon from you. if you had simply lunged then, you would have been able to take her easily, in one single movement.
but you did not take her.
she had startled you a bit; you'd been daydreaming about music, which you'd just discovered, and rather liked. you'd heard it from a little house while you snuck in and stole their sheep.
but you knew the sound of fear, of being followed. you'd been chased too many times, you knew what it looked like. the rapid jolt of fear.
you smelled her then; cinnamon and onyx, and perhaps that was what had blinded you. perhaps your mouth was just watering. whatever the case, you waited until she had fled back into the forest; and then you waited a bit longer. in her wake, a garrison of men, their hands rough.
oh. so they were not knights. they were just men chasing a young woman through the woods. perhaps they did not even know a real princess had been running from them. well, that was a relief. you are not good at fighting with knights, who have swords instead of cudgels. these were just men, so you rose from the water in the quiet way you'd learned from the fish. they did not hear you coming.
and besides. proper dragons do violence so well.
___
once you had smelled her you could find her, although such things have always been easier for you than for the others. you spend a great deal of time studying things - it allows you to analyze them. you have tried to explain to the other dragons that sometimes it is best to slow down, but of course no dragon should be slow.
at first you did not understand the confusion of the people's umwelt. they relied so much on their communication (only words and actions!) and what they could see with their eyes. you and the other dragons did not use these as much; but you liked prying out the little sonic differences between hello that means "i like you" and hello that means "i don't like you."
so it took you a while to learn that you were responsible for what had happened to her. men had gone missing, and even bad men going missing makes a big fuss. (you know that if it had been girls missing, it would be okay. many proper dragons steal girls because it will not bring a knight to their door). for a while she had been trapped on the palace grounds. it was determined that it was no longer safe for her to be just a princess, she must undergo some human transformation and become a wife.
and then you saw her descending from the window of a castle, quick and agile, moving like a whisper, clad almost entirely in black. you could see her quite well of course, although you were not seeing her; but instead her heat and her smell and her sound and all the other sensory noise all humans give off.
you followed her, keeping yourself in a cloud so you appeared as if mist. she stole off into the woods. you were interested in that, and watched her scuttle - although of course you could have taken her then. she did not seem to do much in the woods, only run around cry into her little hands.
she appeared to be looking for something. she did not get far that first night; scurried back to her bed. over and over this happened - she would run as far as she could, only to go back again. it seemed rather boring to you, but of course you had been free your whole life.
and then one night - finally, she arrived at the lake. she sank to her knees then, her hands pressing into the water. her head tilted to the sky. her dark hair spilling in a caught breath behind her.
this is how you heard her voice for the first time. when she came again the next night, she did so more quickly, more assured. straight to the lake, as if it had called her.
she had skipped a pebble over the surface of the water. this action was dangerous, because it almost hit the sail of your wing. you had structured yourself very finely to look like a rockslide.
"three months." her voice was like her: it was deep and smooth and dark, a low violin string. "they want me to marry that bastard in three months."
and then she cried into her hands again, and the sound of it almost broke you.
so you followed her maybe more than a proper dragon should, then. more than back to the castle. you hid along her daily walks and watched her in the throne room and saw her out riding horses. she was good with dogs and nice to her people and very much a proper princess, although you know a proper princess ought not to slip out at night and run around barefoot through the woods.
you discovered she is terrible with directions. you have often had to make a path more clear so she could get home again. she cannot hunt better than an egg; you have had to kill fish and push them subtly up to the shore.
but she appears to love the lake as much as you do. you have seen her read by candlelight (how foolish. the entire woods saw her each time). you have seen her build little paper boats to float along the surface. you have seen her strip her many layers and dive in, have seen her lay with her belly to the sky, floating like she is suspended by the hands of darkness itself.
oh. so she loves the stars, as well, then.
__
you must go in. she will be married tonight. that is a human thing, but you have learned what it has meant. she will go to somewhere else, and you will not see her again, maybe ever. and then how will you be a proper dragon? go!
you have made yourself in the form of a gargoyle, hiding in the white stone. you can see into her room; and the tapestries that seem unlike her. everything in her room is very bright, which is bad for a proper dragon. there are many knights in the hallways and in their rooms, and their smell is itchy and repugnant to you.
her dress is white, which does not seem like her. you have only seen her wear black. she is sitting at some kind of desk, and she is crying again. she smells of cinnamon still, but moreso of grief. you can feel the heartbreak in her as if it was inside of you.
you cannot watch her cry anymore. you have watched too often without moving. that is shameful.
you nose the door open. you can move quiet, because you are not very big. she is within a cave of you, then a wingtip, and then she is standing up, looking into your eyes.
"it's you." her hand on your jaw is warm. "i thought i was imagining you, you know. i turned around that day. i saw what you did to those men. i have been looking for you since. i told everyone that i had an angel to protect me. they locked me in here anyway."
you are not an angel, you are a dragon. you have to keep your wings locked tight or you would explode the walls of this place. it makes you feel big, suddenly. you are not used to that sensation. you do not like to be locked in a tower. you believe maybe the princess does not like to be locked in a tower either.
you take her in your jaws. she is very small, and does not resist you. although you are not a strong flyer, you must take off in a single push. any other movement would be too slow. you must also hold your breath so you do not smell her, the clove and cinnamon and little bird of hope. your mouth would water and you would drop her.
against the full moon, you do the thing that is impossible. you stretch yourself out all the way, a bold and beaming arrow, and you fly. you can hear them cry about you now, loudly. a banner that would strike pride even into your father: dragon. dragon. dragon.
on the eve of her wedding, you snatch the princess from her tower.
an arrow whisks for you, and then dozens, and then hundreds. you are not afraid of pain. you have learned long ago how to fly with holes in your wings. you hold her very gently still, and you push past the smell of your blood.
in the night you are a star. someone somewhere could look up and see you and make a wish.
there will be another lake, you decide. you can find another lake. somewhere very, very far from here. however long you must fly, however long you must hold your breath: you will take her home, because you are a proper dragon.
___
sometimes they come for her, your treasure. you have built her a little castle here, deep in the forests off the map. and of course for you: a silver round lake like the shift of her iris. you bring her books and she brings you bugs to study. you let her saddle you, and together you ride through the clouds and fog banks. she is a shadow on your back; a warm and velvet thing. she makes you music and lives the way she should; free in the night like a promise.
but they do come. you have stolen a real princess, and they do not want her to be a princess. they want to make her into a brood mother, or into bait, or into prey. they always look into the caves first; into the places proper dragons stay. they are real knights, not just men with sticks. they are loud and their smell still makes you itch.
but she has made you brave now, and cunning. if a dragon is not big, it should be cunning. and since you are a proper dragon, and since your treasure is your most precious thing, you lay in wait.
let them come. you will let the light drip off of you, and then you will pour through them.
afterwards, your princess will tell you a story around the fire. she will patch your wounds as she did that first time. she will sing to you.
and in that moment, neither of you will be a title nor a story. she will just be herself, and you will just be you.
don't you hate it when ur coworker that you may or may not have a crush on turns out to be the among us imposter and starts cosplaying as themselves pre-incident ughh
The Rodeo Rule: you only have to do it for the first time once.
The Rohan Rule: if you are at a social function full of new people and you want to be liked, find someone doing important work like setup or food prep and offer to help.
The Tutorial Mode Rule: to navigate an unfamiliar situation where you fear you will mess up an interaction, preface the interaction by mentioning that you've never done this before, and let them know if you have a specific concern or question.
The Rocket Science Rule: most new things you want to try seem very complicated but are simple when taken step by step.
The [X] Will Remember That Rule: if you need to make small talk with the same person on a regular basis, try to save one fact or current event in their life from a given conversation and bring it up next time you talk.
The Cool Binder Rule: by wearing clothes and accessories that are to your taste instead of trying to blend in, people will be more likely to compliment you and show interest in you as a person.
Thesis statement: The popularity of "found family" is a great thing, especially as it celebrates the importance of non-biological, non-romantic relationships. However, an overemphasis on this relationship model can lead us to undervaluing philia in favor of storge, in much the same way that an overemphasis on shipping can lead to undervaluing philia in favor of eros. It can also lead to an erasure of the differences between philia and storge, treating these two types of love as interchangeable instead of celebrating the distinctive aspects of each.
...Yeah, this could definitely be an Entire Literal Essay, actually. This is...not the short version, but it is the shortest I can manage.
So my main thought is that Friendship is the hardest form of love for our culture to see as distinct and important in its own right, and âfound familyâ often (though not always) ends up as a sort of...middle ground between that point and the âOnly Romance Is Importantâ idea. In a ship-dominated culture, Friendship is often reduced to Level 1 Romance, andâat least in some waysâa found-family-dominated fandom culture can end up reducing Friendship to Level 1 Family.
In practice, I think that....even when we know that we donât see or want to see an important relationship as Romantic, a lot of us still struggle with the idea of Friendship by itself being equally valuable or important. So we equate âfamilialâ with âimportantâ (because family is undeniably as important as romance, right? Or at least itâs a lot easier to make that caseâand also, there is the not-at-all-insignificant benefit that it marks your view of a relationship as CLEARLY platonic!), and then we try to fit every relationship we love into a clearly-labeled Family-Shaped Box, in order to affirm its importance and give it legitimacy that âjust friendshipâ might not.
...which is, ironically, what shippers are sometimes doing when they seem to be putting every relationship they love into a Romance-Shaped Box for the same reason. Thatâs the highest-status box there is! Donât you think this relationship deserves the highest Relationship Rank??
But Friendshipâphilia, using the Greek word (or at least using it as C. S. Lewis uses itâisnât a weaker form or âfirst stageâ of other loves. Itâs its own form of love. Not lesser, but different. And if we keep following our instinct to âlegitimizeâ it by conflating it with family/storge, we end up doing both kinds of love a disservice.
(And I am definitely including myself in the group of people with this instinct! Thereâs a fandom Iâve gotten into recently thatâas not infrequently happensâhas a central relationship you could easily consider âfather-son,â âbest friends,â or a mixture of the two, and thereâs variance within the fandom. I personally view this relationship pretty much purely as âbest friendsâ in my own interpretation, but...a few years ago, I would have been much closer to the âfather-sonâ camp. And even though Iâve consciously changed my approach to character relationships over those last few yearsâmainly due to a variety of other fandom exposures over the past few years, and the pro-friendship opinions Iâve formulated while thinking about themâI still have some of those pro-familial instincts I entered fandom with! Theyâre very much what I came here with, and even though I now like other approaches better, theyâre still in my brain.)
The disservice to philia comes in the fact that we are still not celebrating it as a non-romantic, non-familial form of love in its own rightâwhich stinks, because itâs great!! and important to humans!! and we should all appreciate how wonderful Friendship is without feeling like we have to turn it onto another kind of relationship once it passes some Importance Threshold. Itâs also a less-important disservice to specific fictional relationships that we try to fit into a Family Box and maybe end up misrepresenting or oversimplifying in the process.
The disservice to storge comes in the fact that, with the label of âFamilyâ so highly valued in itself, it tends to get overused and slapped on everything until itâs started to lose all distinctively familial meaning. It becomes harder for us to explore the depths and beauties of distinctively familial love when weâve lost the verbal distinction between ârelationships founded upon specifically familial roles, a strong shared background, and/or an unchosen yet unbreakable connectionâ (which is how I would identify storge relationships just off the top of my head) and the âfound familyâ definition of âany group of people who love each other not-exclusively-romantically and arenât related.â
Personally, I kinda miss alternative labels like TVTropesâ âTrue Companionsâ or âPlatonic Life Partners.â Characters donât need to be spouses or siblings to be important to each other. They can be solely and purelyâthough not âjust!ââfriends.
stormborns
jacobvanloon
gracieabrams
areudirty
dailybridgerton
snowghoul
amandla
tangentwithtanner
