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What is this "shame" of which you speak?

@twodefenestrate / twodefenestrate.tumblr.com

Fandom blog. Used to be MCU, now my collection is eclectic at best. Come for the snark and the sass, stay for the banter and heartache. You may know me as Like_a_Hurricane on AO3. Hello!

We don’t appreciate the fact that Bruce Wayne is a Kardasian level celebrity enough. Everyone knows him. I want more one shots and crack fic moments where the League (Pre identity reveals) just openly talk about Bruce Wayne in front of Batman.

Just imagine them playing fuck, marry, kill with famous actors and such and throwing Bruce into the mix. And Batman just sits there, silently suffering as he listens to the reasons why Flash and Lantern would marry, fuck, or kill him. He prays they choose kill. They don’t.

Barry: Eat the rich!

Bruce: Oh thank Go-

Clark: Oh, I intend to 🥴🥵

It’s Batman’s turn. Bruce needs to decide whether to marry himself for the money or throw himself off the cliff.

Okay but can you imagine what kind of identity reveal situation that would be?

“I would fuck —-, I would marry —-, and then I would commit suicide.”

“Batman, that’s not how the game is played. You have to choose for Bruce Wayne.”

“I did.”

“…WHAT?!”

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“I would kill Bruce Wayne just to get him out of this conversation.”

This works best if the reveal comes after literally everyone else has played, and half of the people have said “I’d marry Bruce Wayne for the money” and the other half have not only said that they’d fuck him, but been reasonably graphic as to how.

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Flash: So, tall, dark, and scary, what’ll it be? Are you going to marry Bruce Wayne so he can fund all of your sick gadgets? Maybe you’ll be a gentle lover to him like Aquaman here, work him over like a hunk of meat like Supes? Or maybe Brucie is the one person in the world you break your code for. Come on, what’ve you got for us?

Batman: -pauses- Honestly, I don’t think there will ever be a better time for this. -pulls off his cowl-

Justice League: -horrified screeching-

May I sugest that Oliver Queen was also an option and before the face reveal, Bruce goes to Green Arrow and says “harsh night, Ollie” in his trademark high school Bruce tone and Oliver - who was already having a bad time - just goes “BRUCIE?????” and we have a dual bilionaire identity reveal.

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I think that more fanfiction should be written with the aim to tackle the original meaning of hanahaki. Because when the concept of hanahaki disease was originally created, it was intended to be a metaphor for suppressing one’s feelings.

Your feelings are this beautiful garden of flora inside of your chest. When you express how you feel honestly, you allow for it to grow freely. But when you hide how you feel out of fear of rejection, and try to make it smaller and smaller, the flowers become cramped inside of you, until you choke on your own feelings. Every flower you cough up is something you’ve felt, but refused to say.

The whole “dying” thing is intended to be more symbolic especially. You’re killing off bits and pieces of yourself and how you feel, because you’re afraid to express yourself.

It’s not really supposed to be, “The one I love doesn’t love me back, and I’m dying from it.” Rather, it’s more along the lines of, “Repressing your emotions is bad for you, and it’s better and healthier to express them freely, even when it’s scary.”

Which is to say that, one, the cure for the disease should be telling the person that you are in love with how you feel. How the other person feels about the person afflicted should have nothing to do with it, as the trope is meant to be about feeling your emotions unapologetically.

And that, two, it’s not an inherently romantic trope. Obviously, it has romantic applications, but it can be written for any situation where a character is hiding how they truly feel. This can include a refusal to address a specific trauma, a desire to indulge in something that they’re ashamed of, and even really practical things, like wanting to ask one’s boss for a higher position.

Although (as an aromantic person myself) I don’t agree with this conclusion about the trope, this application would also avoid people calling it arophobic. When the thing killing the character is a refusal to be honest with themselves, rather than an unrequited love, it’s on nobody’s hands but their own to save their life.

There are a ton of ways that this interpretation of the hanahaki disease could be applied in new and interesting ways in fanfiction, and I’d love to read what things people could come up with!

Theres a novel by Poul Anderson called The High Crusade, which has an alien spacecraft land in rural England in 1345 during the Hundred Year’s War. The local baron has been raising an army to help King Edward against the French, and immediately assumes this must be some kind of enemy trick.

In a way, he’s correct: the aliens are scouts for a brutal and repressive interstellar empire, which has dominated numerous planets through their devastating technology.

Unfortunately, this reliance on advanced weapons means they’ve completely forgotten all forms of melee combat and Sir Roger of Tourneville leads his militia to defeat the aliens easily.

They spare a single enemy, forcing him to fly the ship at spearpoint. They intend to raid behind enemy lines, capture the king of France to end the war, and then go onward to reclaim the Holy Land using the same tactic.

In an attempt to outwit the knights, the alien pilot actually travels to the nearest Imperial planet, where he expects the occupying military forces to save him.

I won’t spoil the details, but the knights accept this as a challenge and declare the launch of the “high crusade”.

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That last picture is so stupidly badass I might tattoo that next to my dick cause it ain’t getting any better after that

if shes your girl then why have i slowly been replacing her parts until there’s nothing left of her original body? is she then still your girl?

They ship of theseus’d my girl

Can’t have shit in Detroit

this actually perfectly demonstrates the transitive property of memes: you can replace a meme piece by piece until it only structurally resembles the original, and it is, in fact, the same meme.

call that the meme of theseus thesis

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tumblrites can have a little intertextuality as a treat

my naym is ship and when i’m broke the broken part from me they toke

replace the part had been the plan but in the morn hand door car man

*me shoving transitive properties into my purse* sorry, I have to go

I got this comment on a story from my Other AO3 Account this morning.

(Info redacted because I prefer keeping these accounts separate but no one follows me on the side blog I have for that account.)

The story was posted almost a year ago and is relatively “popular” by my average statistics even though it has tropes and themes that are big turnoffs for a lot of people (hence separate accounts). This popularity is undoubtedly because it’s a Marvel Loki story and that fandom is massive.

So there is obviously an algorithm or a bot scrubbing ao3 statistics and leaving this comment on fics that meet a certain metric with the main character of the fic inserted into the comment.

I had a little time to kill this morning so I decided to investigate further. And y’all this is so predatory. Come on this journey with me. It made me mad. It may make you mad.

First, if you go to Webnovel’s website, you HAVE to choose between male lead or female lead stories before you can go any further. WTF?

And that’s weird, but this gets so much worse. This is basically a pay-to-read site that has different subscription models. Which… okay BUT! The authors don’t get paid! Look at that comment again. They’re promising a supportive and nurturing community, but zero monetary compensation. It’s basically, “post your stuff here so we can get paid and you can get… nice vibes?” I mean look at this Orwellian writing:

Using the phrase “pay-to-read model” in the same sentence as “qualitative changes in lifestyles for authors” deliberately makes you think that you can get paid and maybe even make a living on this website. But that’s not actually what it says and authors will not receive one red cent.

Oh but wait, the worst is still to come. In case this breaks containment (which I kind of hope it does) this is where I mention that I’m a lawyer in the US.

I don’t do intellectual property or copyright law but I do read and write contracts for a living. So I went to look at their terms of service. It was fun!

Highlights the first, in which Webnovel gets a license to do basically whatever they want with content you post on their site. This is how they get to be paid for people reading authors’ writing without paying them anything.

Highlights the second, in which Webnovel takes no responsibility for illegally profiting off of fan fic. This all says that the writer is 100% responsible for everything the writer posts (even though only Webnovel is making money from it).

Highlights the third which say that by posting, the author is representing that they have the legal right to use and to let Webnovel use the content according to these terms. So if a writer posts fan fiction and Webnovel makes money from people reading the fan fiction, and the House of the Mouse catches wise, these sections say that that’s ALL on the writer.

So that’s a little skeevy to start off with but the thing that is seriously shitty and made me make this post was that these assholes are coming to ao3. They are actively recruiting people in comments on their fan fiction. And they are saying they are big fans of the character you’re writing about and that they share your interests.

They are recruiting fan fiction writers and giving every impression that you can make money from posting fan fiction on their site and hiding the fact that you absolutely cannot but they can make money off of you while you try, deep in their terms of service which no one but a lawyer who writes fan fic and has some time to kill will read.

I see posts on here regularly from people who don’t understand how this stuff works, don’t understand that they (and others) can not legally make a financial profit from fan fiction. And there are tons of people who will not take the time to dig into the details.

Don’t deal with these bastards. Fuck Webnovel.