What we do here: ship and let ship. It may not be MY ship, but if it’s yours, go for it! Some ships in this fandom are not my fave and I’ve made that no secret, but if it’s yours then you do you boo! It’s not hurting me or literally anyone else.
What we do not do here: shame people for their ships. Yes. Any. Ship. We don’t call people creepy or say they’re loosing their grip on morality (even if we feel that way) because FICTION. IS NOT. REALITY. (Read those last four words again until they sink in.)
What we do here: write what you want! Literally. Write whatever the fuck you want. There will be an audience for it and even if that audience is just you then GOOD. THATS WHY WE WRITE FAN FICTION. For ourselves! And if people like my silly little stories then that’s just a nice bonus.
What we do not do here: tell people what not to write. We do not do that. If you don’t like it, don’t read it. Plain and simple.
All I ask is that we tag appropriate ships and also trigger warnings. None of this is that difficult.
do y'all even know how much i hate being an “elder queer” at 40? a whole goddamn generation before me was wiped out by a plague that politicians deemed not their problem bc it was killing the “right” people. like. this was OPENLY STATED. i spent a large chunk of my childhood going to funerals. nevermind the fact that killing queer people for being queer wasn’t codified into law as a hate crime until i was a junior in high school.
i should NOT be an elder queer, i should be middle at most. i am a middle aged queer. most of the elder queers died.
when i was growing up i didn’t go to pride parades, i went to pride marches. because that’s 100% what they were in the 80s and 90s.
from the absolute bottom of my heart, LEARN OUR FUCKING HISTORY. a generation was nearly wiped out so you young queers could be here. don’t let that have been in vain, please.
mother-entropy
the fact that people have reblogged this and tagged it “q slur” makes me want to eat glass.
The original tweet summarizes it pretty well. Fanfic tends to be popular among certain types of neurodivergent people (aka people most likely to read excessively as a child, and have burnout as an adult) for the same reasons that we tend to hyperfixate–neurochemical signaling (I hope I’m using that phrase correctly). What I mean is, for people who are really dependent on changes in dopamine/serotonin/neurotransmitter levels, who have low levels or wonky neural reward systems (perhaps the most common types of neurodivergence)…people like us rely on dependable external sources of those neurochemicals. In order to function, we spend a lot of our free time trying to level out our brain chemistry using things that can reliably bring us a steady stream of joyful moments (rewards) without costing too much of the mental effort that is already in short supply.
significantly: the investment of reading has to be balanced with a steady “return on investment”–and this return has to start fairly quickly. because again, we don’t have a lot of attention/energy to invest on tiring things. we have perpetual “low batteries” in that regard.
that doesn’t mean these stories are “simple,” or that they lack complexity or value–only that the reward has to come in short regular intervals, and it has to have a low “upfront cost.” these stories are only “easy” to read in the sense that the effort we put into them is rewarded in a timely manner. which is why fanfic stories are so perfectly formulated for neurodivergent readers–they are often beautifully written, but skip a lot of the upfront costs (of introducing new characters, of world-building, of getting the audience emotionally connected to the story elements).
the nature of fanfiction is that the reader has a pre-existing relationship with this world and these characters. that–combined with the shorter average length of fics–means that fan fics very quickly start rewarding the reader in a way that traditional fiction struggles to. that’s not a bad thing! and maybe it’s something more traditionally published writers should be paying attention to.
Fanfic, as a genre, has been uniquely helpful and accessible to many neurodivergent readers who would otherwise struggle to immerse themselves in stories. I’m glad so many of you have found a way to love and enjoy reading again! The important thing is that you are spending time inside stories you love–the way those stories are published or presented to the world is just one detail. The fact that you find joy in the process of reading (or listening!) to stories–that is what matters.
a bunch of people have reblogged this with the default “i feel called out” reaction….and i know when we say that we mean it tongue-in-cheek….but this comment sorta blew my mind & shifted my perspective up and to the left a little thank you♥
remember a certain line but not the episode it’s from? plug it in here. remember a word a player said but not the context? plug it in here. want a specific timestamp for a line? plug it in here.
it’s an absolute goldmine in terms of rewatch value and it seems like not many folks actually know about it so! PSA
that “if youre over 24 and still on tumblr it means mental illness has won” post is so funny. rip to you all but i’ll still have hobbies and interests when im in my 30s
Sam I have an important Chicago question: just north of the DuSable bridge there is a statue of what looks like Abe Lincoln excitedly taking a man in a knitted sweater on a first date. I only saw it from a bus, so didn't get either a photo or an explanation. Can you explain this phenomenon? Are Abe and Sweater Man happy???
You have triggered the rage within me, so now you will ALL be treated to an outside-the-readmore screed about SEWARD GODDAMN JOHNSON.
I don’t normally attack artists because a) it scares my friends who are artists (I love you all, you are beautiful, don’t be afraid) and b) honestly most artists don’t deserve the level of vitriol I’m about to employ. I want you all to remember that the seething hatred I feel for Seward Johnson is driven in large part by class consciousness.
But not entirely. So let’s begin.
First what you have to know is that Seward Johnson is a “sculptor”. If you google “seward johnson sculpture” you’ll get an idea of his work, most of which is terrible. I feel okay calling his work terrible because he is also the scion of the family that founded SC Johnson, so he has all the money he needs and could step back, do his art for funsies, and let people with actual talent or two original thoughts in their heads exhibit their art, but he doesn’t, he forces his terrible art on all of us.
The reason I harbor such animosity towards Seward Johnson is that he has been exhibiting on Pioneer Plaza (that area north of the DuSable Bridge) for almost a decade now, and when I worked in the north loop I had to walk past his art every day. It was bad enough when the sculpture was American Gothic, rendered without talent or meaning into three dimensions and provided with luggage.
How very fucking dare you, you talentless hack
These things are sculpted out of what amounts basically to styrofoam painted in rubberized/weatherized paint, so they are fragile, and tourists were constantly climbing on Farmer’s shoes and falling into them when they found out it wasn’t the cheap but supple fiberglass you would expect of a tacky monstrosity more suited to a roadside motel than the business district of a major metropolitan city. (I would imagine this is why Abraham Lincoln And The Mayonnaise Sandwich has a little fence around it.)
But American Gothic Motel Attraction was mostly just annoying because it was meaningless, derivative, and CONSTANTLY covered in gawkers getting in everyone’s way.
Additionally, Seward Johnson’s sculptures on the Plaza are very popular photo spots for tourists, who carry lots of cash and are constantly distracted, which means beginning with The Assault On American Gothic it became a very popular spot for pickpockets. Which means members of our staff, who had nothing to do with this mess, got pickpocketed as collateral damage about once a week during the exhibition of….
Forever Marilyn.
SEWARD JOHNSON GO FUCK YOURSELF
This is a very famous image of Marilyn Monroe which is horrifying for the following reasons that Seward Johnson appears not to have understood nor cared about:
a) The day this was shot, on an open set with people leering at her all day, her husband, professional athlete and dirtbag Joe DiMaggio, found out about the filming. Rather than comfort his wife, who had been through some shit already that day, he became angry she’d been showing her panties in public and beat her so badly the neighbors called the police on him. Joe DiMaggio also go fuck yourself.
b) IT’S IN A MOVIE INFAMOUSLY SET IN NEW YORK. To quote a local newspaper, “Did Chicago lose a bet?”
c) Yes, you can look up and see her panties. While this is juvenile, it’s not nearly as juvenile as the literally thousand of photographs I angrily photobombed of some douchebro from Fuckville Middle America in a backwards baseball cap standing between her legs with his face tilted upwards and his tongue out.
Oh and btw before it was unveiled it looked like this:
For literal days, before it was installed, she had a bag over her head. (For more on this, though the pictures are now missing, you can read my reaction post here.)
In any just world, there would be a trap door between her legs and everyone who tried to do the upskirt shot would fall into a pit where they would be forced to give five dollars to women’s shelters before they were allowed to leave. THAT would have been interesting art.
Sidebar, both as contrast and because I love it: Marilyn left a few years ago and was briefly replaced by a refreshing and beautiful piece called The Watch, by Hebru Brantley. The Watch was playful and interesting and didn’t have a single upskirt. Hebry Brantley is a wonderful artist in his own right, but he was also a welcome breath of fresh air after Johnson’s mediocre tribute to sexual assault.
It is an unfortunate coincidence that Confused Closeted Republican there is wearing khakis and a white shirt, the new uniform of the alt right, and it’s also coincidence that this is facing Trump Tower, but it’s not exactly helping Seward Johnson’s cause that he chose the blandest outfit possible for Paean To Confused White Bread. The sculpture is meant to be Lincoln, the darling of Illinois, welcoming a visitor to our fair city, but it sure does look like fresh meat is about to get a free trip to Boys Town with the Sixteenth President of the United States.
This is what I mean when I say Seward Johnson lacks not only skill but also understanding: he clearly didn’t know that Lincoln’s sexuality is under enough debate to have its own wikipedia page, and he either didn’t know or didn’t care that Marilyn Monroe was nearly killed by her husband for shooting that scene. All he cares about is image and he’s bad at reproducing image. That is not a well-executed rendering of how human beings are, and dynamically speaking it’s boring. If he were good at visuals or if he had something meaningful to say I would be less angry, but he is mediocre at best and the statements his sculptures make are banal pap if they make any at all.
But he is rich, and I guess either he likes Chicago or he’s got blackmail on Sam Zell, owner of Pioneer Plaza, so he gets to spatter his hideous, meaningless masturbation in my city. And lest you think Seward Johnson got here on his own merits, Forever Marilyn, now on tour from coast to coast, is owned by The Sculpture Foundation, which is heavily subsidized by Seward Johnson. He basically founded a nonprofit to ensure his work gets toured around and publicized and to ensure that if no museum wants it, it has a place to go to die (Palm Springs, CA).
In short, I hope Abe and Sweater Man are happy, because at least then something good has come out of Seward Johnson’s astounding mediocrity. That said, if you are passing his latest work, spit on it for me. As performance art.
one of my favorite things about fanfiction is how many writers don’t necessarily consider themselves fans of the original work. lots of writers just saw the movie or read the book and were like “that was unsatisfying but now I have yet another canon to fuck around with”
Some times fanfiction is a love letter to canon. Some times fanfiction is just a friendly banter with the canon. And sometimes, fanfiction is “11 things the canon did wrong” nailed on the church’s doors.
