ChasingTheStars

Fanfic writer. Too Old. Use whatever pronouns you feel like I don't care. Blog dedicated to HP. Mostly. Multi-Shipper and lover of rare pairs

[xysidhe]

I Posted My Fic!

First chapter of my Marauders Era fic is out!

Toujours pour toujours

What if?

What difference could a choice make? What kind of chain reactions could a single choice set off? How will fate diverge with the making of a single choice?

What if Regulus and Sirius talked, before Hogwarts? What if both brothers understood, rather than resented each other for their chosen method of survival? What if Regulus stood by Sirius when he was sorted Gryffindor? What if Regulus sacrificed his own safety for his brother's?

What if Regulus had a little more Gryffindor bravery? What if Regulus had a little more Ravenclaw wit? What if Regulus had a little more Hufflepuff loyalty? What if Regulus kept his Slytherin cunning but donned a robe of blue and bronze, rather than silver and green?

How would the fates of two brothers, and the fate of the very wizarding world change with a few simple choices that become far more than anyone ever expected?

It’s going to have close Black Brothers, smart, powerful Regulus Black. Starchaser, Wolfstar, Dorlene, Rosekiller. Horcrux hunting, Animagus Regulus, Ravenclaw Regulus. No one dies! Except the bad guys. 

Anyways check it out if you want! First chapters is 7k words! 

[kosmogrl]

get in loser we’re gonna try again despite it all

[daysleftofsecondterm]

Trying again despite it all the next 960 days

[kalfyaarts]

sokka nation rise up

[bauliya]

so women are supposed to grin and bear the books, the comics, the movies, the plays, the tv shows, the stories, the sci-fi, the translated ancient poems, the fucking millennia of men writing about their self inserts torturing women and it being declared as High Art by other men, we’re supposed to read it in our free time, study it in classrooms, include their styles in our own writing, accept their cultural influence as natural, watch it in the cinema, write about it, talk about it, accept it, aspire it, but men can’t tolerate three seconds of female wish fulfilment of a woman snapping the wrist of a creep without feeling personally kicked in the balls.

[darkshrimpemotions]

This reminds me of something I observed in college while I was doing my honors thesis on women in modern horror films. I watched a LOT of horror during that time as part of my research, and sometimes that was done with my family around.

And my dad and brothers? Were deeply disturbed by the movie Jennifer’s Body. I was flabbergasted. It’s not scary! It’s not even that gory. But they were horrified by it. These men who grew up on 70s slashers were legitimately shook by 90 minutes of Megan Fox eating a few teenage boys, mostly off-screen.

Similarly, my all-male reading panel for my thesis? Were so disturbed by my synopsis of the film Teeth that they couldn’t even talk about it. One of them said he couldn’t look at his wife for a week after reading it.

Again, grown-ass men who study and teach media for a living. Who definitely watch and enjoy horror movies. One of whom was a huge Tarantino buff. We watched and read worse in his intro to mass media class! But one movie about a girl whose vag could bite was enough to haunt him.

Then of course you have things like the Gone Girl backlash–men yelling that Amy Dunne is evil and women clamoring to assure everyone that they know she is not someone to emulate–the backlash against Carol Danvers, and, more recently, the griping from MRAs against the upcoming film Hustlers, which is about strippers scamming their Wall Street clients.

My conclusion? Most men–at least most straight, cisgender men, who are both my sample population and most of the ones whining that Carol is a “villain”–are perfectly fine with, and desensitized to, media where men do violence to women (horror movies), or men do violence to men (horror and action movies). They’re even sort of fine when women do violence to women (“ooooo cat fight!”).

But they get intensely uncomfortable when women are depicted doing any kind of violence to men, especially in films that tilt the balance of power to the other side of the m/f gender binary beyond a single moment or scene.

So woman as flesh-eating monster with men as her preferred cuisine? Woman who responds to unwanted sexual contact by biting it off? Woman who frames her cheating husband for murder? Woman whose response to harassment–behavior that many of the loudest whiners know is both creepy and reflective of their own thoughts/actions–is to break something?

Too scary. Unacceptable. Disturbing. These men hate being presented with the idea, even in fiction, that their position of power is socially constructed, that it could easily be flipped the other way. It terrifies them.

In feeling that terror, they experience a tiny modicum of what living, existing, moving, being perceived as a woman in the world is like.

And they flinch every time.

[tzikeh]

Here have a newspaper comic from 1993

[lastoneout]

I really do think it comes down to desensitization and a lack of learned sympathy. Imo it’s why cishetperisex white abled majority men tend to react so badly when the protagonist of a game or movie or whatever is a woman. I think when society more or less caters to you via media and representation you never have to learn to sympathize with people who don’t look like you, or at least not in the way marginalized people do. Black men and boys have to learn to see themselves in white ones, women in men, queer folks in straight, disabled in abled, we do not get catered to, so we learn to find ourselves in places we don’t exist and we learn fast. It sucks, and it never feels 100% natural, but we learn.

And yes, we all are supposed to learn to see ourselves in others by default, that’s an important part of being a person and also engaging with stories, I should be able to understand why my lesbian neighbor is upset that her amazon package got dumped on someone else’s porch even though I’m not a lesbian, and I feel like Clark Kent and I could talk about growing up in the middle of nowhere and find common ground even if I’m not a white male alien superhero but like, it’s different when you HAVE to do it ALL the time JUST to engage in media and feel represented and seen. And that’s what we do and we get really good at it because if we didn’t we’d never enjoy anything.

Quick obligatory disclaimer that plenty of men are perfectly capable of learning to do this, as well as everyone else, and do it all the time, this is not a natural state of white manhood this is something chosen that can be discarded–but your average white dude who grew up with all the media around him being about him just straight up does not have years of hard training in “seeing myself in the other” because he doesn’t have to. He doesn’t have to try to find himself, he’s Luke Skywalker, John Wick, Superman, he’s always seeing a reflection of himself.

So what happens when suddenly he’s looking in a mirror and sees someone else? He gets uncomfortable, angry, confused. Which at it’s core is understandable, this is a skill that you have to learn and it’s normal for your brain to respond with discomfort or anger when you don’t know how to do something, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to let it fester into resentment and bigotry and hate….which is what these dudes do. He can’t relate to this person, he doesn’t know how to look for things that are similar like where they grew up or shared interests, things that we look to when connecting with a character to relate to them enough to be invested in their story. And some are so bad at dealing with that discomfort they lose it at the thought of having to think that hard about relating to a story, get pissed that they’re being asked to consider that humans exist who aren’t like them and who also deserve to be in the spotlight sometimes, but I think at the core it’s insecurity born of a lack of a skill our society necessitates everyone but these men learn. They don’t know how to do this and they have no idea how to handle that.

That’s similar to the logic of the horror stuff, women and minorities spend so long learning to like horror despite us being the fucking bad guys and victims in everything, but I remember I thought of this originally after people got mad at the Charlie’s Angels remake having the biggest male character turn out to be a villain. These guys weren’t just mad that there wasn’t more men, they were mad that they were specifically being painted as the bad guy, and I was like…confused? At first, because like yeah dude that doesn’t actually say much about you as a person, sometimes the bad guy looks like you….and then I was like oh. Oh. The bad guy never looks like you, does he? And you don’t know what to do now that you’re looking at a character you’re supposed to hate and seeing yourself.

Because the other thing we as minorities have to learn to do is love the bad guys because WE’RE the bad guys. The torn queer kid who wants to be Aladdin but sees so many of his mannerisms in Jafar and has to just…deal with that. It’s like horror for me, I love horror, but I’m disabled and mentally ill. I am almost always the bad guy in horror. The face in the mirror is my own, and I like horror, so I and everyone else in the same place learns a delicate act of like, sympathizing and seeing yourself in the characters but also not and trying to root for the good guys who aren’t like you or just not doing that and rooting for the bad guys the whole time, like I’m not describing it well, but it’s hard to articulate despite being something again, almost all of us have to go through at some point.

And god I remember Ghostbusters 2016 having the bimbo be a himbo instead, dudes were SO fucking uncomfortable and I was just laughing because yeah wow that….that sure is just how some men write women!! And they do it all the time, and it’s really fucking stupid and sexist and weird especially seeing it come from a male character, but like dude fr me @ these men do you seriously have absolutely 0 tolerance for a depiction of a person who looks like you in a story being negative??? You literally never learned how to deal with that???

But they didn’t. They never had to. Because even when the bad guy looks like them there is always a good guy who does too. Charlie’s Angels and Jenifer’s Body and Ghostbusters make them uncomfortable and angry because the bad guys look like them and the good guys don’t. They have no tolerance for that discomfort, they are not desensitized to their only representation being the villain or the victim or the idiot, and they also seemingly have no idea how to not internalize the idea that the bad guy looking like you doesn’t mean the story is saying you are the bad guy.

I mean they do to the rest of us but for majority white men it doesn’t because:

I mean fuck half the horror movies out there explicitly just say “all mentally ill people are crazy dangerous murderers you should never trust” and I learned to live with that somehow while Charlie’s Angels just says “this one particular dude sucks” and it’s the end of the goddamn world to every white dude who suddenly forgets other people aren’t them. Almost funny if it wasn’t so infuriatingly immature and deeply bigoted.

It plays out in smaller ways, white people failing to see themselves in folks of color, skinny people refusing to humanize fat ones, hell it even plays out in adults refusing to attempt to relate to children, every axis has a side that is not asked to see themselves in the other as often and it leads to this disconnect and discomfort and anger and lashing out when you actually do get asked to do it. To learn to like a story even if the bad guy is wearing your face, to relate to a hero you know has nothing in common with you, seeing yourself in the other is not something asked of everyone, and not being able to do it messes you up.

I think that’s why it’s so uncomfortable for men to see themselves as the victims of women or as the bad guys, they never have to learn to be okay with being treated like shit by a narrative, or at LEAST just not being the main character, and they hate that.

But they’re just experiencing what the rest of us have been for all of human fucking history and we’re perhaps a bit too exhausted by it to humor it for long and just gotta give a firm

[shamebats]

"it's just stress" oh thank god, it's just the silent killer that slowly kills you, perfectly harmless, no need to worry

[depsidase]

[quietwingsinthesky]

all the “peer pressure is bad” education we give kids is practically useless because all it cares about is telling them that Drugs Are Evil rather than the much more useful lesson of ‘the person who responds to you saying you don’t drink by telling you they’ll find a way to get you to is also going to be shitty about all your other boundaries’.

[quietwingsinthesky]

god forbid you teach kids that their consent should be respected rather than about the inherent immorality of all the sinful actions of their peers

[azaablue]

the best fanfiction you've ever read was written by a woman in her 40s before she made dinner for her kids. it was written by a teenager after school when they should've been studying for a history test. and a barista came up with the idea while they cleaned the espresso machine and busser fact-checked it on their break and the post-doc edited between writing grant proposals and the nurse apologized for typos in the notes after a long shift and behind every drabble and one-shot and multi-chapter fic there is a person with a wonderful and interesting and chaotic life and it is such a privilege that we get to be apart of it because they decided to do this thing we all share, for fun.

[ooppo]

A PORN BOT UNFOLLOWED ME?

[ooppo]

not that i care

[ooppo]

[goatedgreen]

i hate that when you try and look up shit for writing purposes it starts linking suicide hotlines and addiction advice articles like bro i just wanna know the information im not killing myself i promise. now tell me what i wanna know

[wingkink]

btw it's so fucking stupid you can be anxious physically in your body even after you've decided mentally you don't care. I'm supposed to be in charge here

[stazvlt]

BDAY ART RAFFLE

I got one year older today yay!! therefore, to celebrate i want to host an art raffle. There'll be two winner! Prize: One Headshot AND One Halfbody skeb illustration. If you won you can request for any character whether its original or from other media

To Enter: Follow Me Reblog and Likes this post

Ends 15 June !!

[fibro-memes]

[unspeakablearchives]

[mycatwantstoeatpins]

[Description: Even repulsive fiction must be protected, because the alternative - letting government dictate which words may be written - is far more dangerous than any story could ever be.

/end description]

[1000-life-hacks]

[archeologist-prophet]

Lovely to see we have spaces where you can gain access to so much literature!

[enki2]

[tlirsgender]

Crazy thing about #healing #recovery Small Victories is when you'll have some shit going on that's like, saying this would involve admitting how you used to be doing. You know? Like hey guys good news I'm gonna change my bedsheets this year

[tlirsgender]

That's the thing about Doing Really Bad you kinda keep it to yourself. And then you start doing a little better & when you try to tell people this the vibe is like "what do you mean you were living in the sewer this whole time are you good?" while you're standing there like Yeah that's not the important part never mind that. I'm literally out of the sewer