What My Friends Think I Learned From Writing Fanfiction:

my English prof teaching abt cover letters today and me trying not to bring up the luke skywalker cover letter post:

"ai is making it so everyone can make art" Everyone can make art dipshit it came free with your fucking humanity

exactly.

it’s been so very frustrating trying to reason with some caitvi stans that when i criticize some writing choices in season 2, i don’t hate the ship and/or the characters i criticize, i’m just disappointed that the show prioritized getting them together at the expense of individual character developments.

and somehow by doing that, i got accused of being lesbophobic (and somehow racist because caitlyn is half-asian 💀), even though i am a bisexual asian woman myself - if anything, caitlyn IS the closest thing to representation i get from arcane and i’m just supposed to be grateful for that abysmal character assassination or whatever caitlyn’s arc in season 2 is supposed to be called. these people take every bit of well-meaning well-deserved objective criticism as a personal attack and project that hostile energy towards any discourse regarding caitlyn and/or vi and/or caitvi. i’m not saying they can’t enjoy girls kissing girls on their tv screen everytime it happens, i’m just saying better representations can be and have been done before, so why do we settle for less?

that particular flavour of caitvi stans screeching at critics of S2 about how, "you just wanted a simplistic happy ending! you can't handle the NUANCE! you have no MEDIA LITERACY!" while simultaneously insisting that we should all unquestioningly accept and praise arcane for giving us caitvi, which they hold up as the sine qua non of wlw representation, because their primary basis for comparison is... legend of korra. is she-ra. is owl house. is steven universe.

none of this is shade on those shows. all of these are okay-to-good-to-great shows, that did genuinely brave things with regard to representation and which often handled mature subject matters in age-appropriate ways. you know what they also are?

children's cartoons. they are cartoons for children.

sorry, when shows like black sails and andor exist, which have prominent wlw characters/ships, and which embed those ships in actually well-written, complex, adult narratives about freedom, oppression, rebellion, and self-determination, arcane doing a, "diversity win! your cops are lesbians!" is not enough for me to give it brownie points.

If I could see you / once more to see you…

“You are allowed to shit talk your NOTP as often as you’d like” and “If you shit talk them on other people’s posts or in the main tag, you are a dick” can and do coexist.

You are allowed to feel grossed out by ships.   It doesn’t erase basic manners.

If you like it then you'd better put a ring on it :v

LOOK AT YUURI PROUDLY SHOWING OFF VICTOR’S HAND. HE LIKED IT. HE PUT A RING ON IT. VICTOR IS HIS, HE HAS TAKEN HIM FROM THE WORLD.

AAAAAAAAH

One of my favorite things is modern adaptations that leave people with the same careers they had in the original material, because unless you’re a cop or a doctor that practically never happens.

Irene Adler’s an opera singer. We still have those! They don’t have the same subtext exactly, but nothing is going to because we aren’t the Victorians. She could continue to be an opera singer. I have never seen this happen.

Jonathan Harker can still be in real estate. That’s a job people have. A modern story that still involves Dracula contacting his firm to help him purchase property sounds amazing actually.

someone I follow on the bird app just announced they’re starting a very exclusive private fic server because they and a bunch of other people want to talk about how much they love the fics they’re reading, and as an author can I just say that a really great place to talk about a fic you love is in the comments for that fic

I understand that people are trying to create safe spaces, but as the number of comments that I get on my fics dwindles with each passing year, knowing these spaces exist where my fics are being discussed, places that I am excluded from, makes me want to write fic LESS

I mean I guess who cares, right, because if I stop writing, there’s 10,000 other people that will continue…but if you participate in a fic “book club” server and you say nice things there about a fic you loved, maybe copy and paste that into a comment on AO3?

the only thing fanfic writers are asking for in return for hours of hard work is attention. please don’t rob us of the one thing that we hope for when we hit “post”

warm hug