A good rule of thumb for tagging on AO3:
Relationship tags are for searching.
For any ship that isn’t central to the fic, ask yourself:
If I were searching specifically for this ship, is there a decent probability that I would be interested this result? If not, it probably doesn’t need to be tagged.
If you feel that you need to warn for a background ship, you can always tag “Untagged Background Relationships” and then if you want you can specify what they are in the author’s notes. Search results are more accurate, you’ve covered your bases, everyone’s happy.
Relationship tags are for searching. If you need to warn for a background or briefly-mentioned ship, there are other ways to do it.
All of this is very true for character tags, too.
Author: lebelinoria
when they finally kiss after 65k words
Anyway the LGBT community is for anyone whose identity is outside of the heteronormative rule (heterosexual, heteroromantic and cis, all three of these) and any “older” LGBT person is gonna confirm BECAUSE THEY BUILT THE DAMN COMMUNITY. Try asking them. Ask a 40-50 year old (or older) gay man or lesbian what the community is for. Ask them. Do it though. Learn some of your own history from them, and then come back to me then try and tell me I’m wrong.
You’re wrong.
I’m a 59 year old gay man and I’m telling you in no uncertain terms, You. Are. Wrong.
Here’s a history lesson from someone who both lived it and has read extensively about LGBT issues, as well as being involved in many different organizations. I realized what I was when I was very young. I first came out in the late 60s. I was an activist during the 70s, 80s, and early 90s.
This is long, but history is long. It’s important. I tried to break it down into smaller paragraphs for easier reading. But it’s long. I debated not putting this under a cut, but holy hell it’s long.
If you’re actually interested in WHY you’re wrong, OP, I hope you’ll read it.
what happens when you touch holtby
accidental foreshadowing: the hits
Magnus, in Refuge: Listen, either they die or we forget about them, so, either way. ..
***
Griffin: It’s like an airlock in a spaceship
Travis: Which of course we’ve been in before.
Griffin, very nervously: ….no? probably- probably not…
Clint: Maybe in the backstory!
***
Magnus, indignant for all the wrong reasons: Hey, we don’t know shit about history! We don’t even remember where we are right now!
***
Taako in Rockport Limited: It’s BARRY. How quickly you forget, huh?“
***
Travis after the first inoculation, in Moonlighting: Did we remember anything about the umbrella we found in the dungeon or any of that?
Griffin: No.
Travis: Huh.
***
Magnus: “I go and stand where he (the drifting mysterious incorporeal red spectre) is, and I jump around like ‘hey guys look I’m in a red robe!”
***
Travis: hey, are the voidfish’s powers like…selective?
***
Griffin, dodging like crazy: I mean, I imagine Barry’s voice sounds pretty different when he’s engulfed in flames.
***
Griffin in The Eleventh Hour: I imagine it’d be very disorienting, dying like that and then not dying.
Taako, nonchalant: Just another day at the office, baby.
***
BONUS from Rockport Limited; i just know this one was a two-year-long brick joke thanks griff
Jenkins: Remember, don’t leave anything behind, and you can’t take anything.
Magnus: Well, except memories.
Jenkins: The memories will be obliterated…no, no, no. I’m kidding. Nothing could destroy memories.
Petition to fucking salt and burn the concept of “attention-seeking behaviour” as something intrinsically bad in children
To elaborate: If a child especially* is seeking attention, it’s because they fucking need some attention. “Attention and interaction from adults” is a non-negotiable neurological need. It is as important as food and water and clothing and a place to pee.
There will be times when a child seeks attention that are Unfortunate, either because now is not a good time for attention, or because the manner in which they are trying to get the attention is Unfortunate. See also “TALK TO ME WHEN YOU ARE ON AN IMPORTANT PHONE-CALL” and “I WILL GET YOUR ATTENTION BY SCREAMING AND BREAKING YOUR STUFF.”
But here’s the trick: if they are seeking attention then, and in that way, that means that they are not getting attention they need otherwise. And not reinforcing the bad behaviour is only half the solution. The other half is giving them attention in other ways and responses to other things.
If the only way that a child gets attention is by acting out? They will act out. Their all-powerful lizard-brains (which are absolutely, in children, VERY POWERFUL) will eventually literally just see the negative consequences of the behaviour as the price to pay for getting the attention their brains absolutely need as much as their bodies need food and water and to take a piss.
You cannot get out of the absolute responsibility to give a child under your care regular positive attention and interaction. If the child under your care is starting to show bad attention-seeking behaviour? That is a fail-proof diagnostic that on some level that child is not getting the attention and validation they need.
This does not mean that you do things that will tell them “yes, behaving this way will get you good attention.” But it does mean that you need to start showing them how to get more good attention from you.
You have to start teaching, “No, you cannot crawl all over me when I’m on the phone – but when I hang up the phone you can come ask for a hug or for me to look at your drawing”. YOU HAVE TO DO BOTH PARTS OF THIS. If you need a child to stop doing things like Making Messes for Attention, you have to start GIVING THEM attention for good things (and you know you might have to start at the very very bottom of the rung with “thank you so much for not making a mess today! Let’s play hide and seek!” Or something similar, but TOUGH SHIT, YOU ARE THE GROWNUP, THEY ARE THE CHILD).
… and if the child in question is younger than 12 (well really 18 at least, but DEFINITELY 12) months just fucking pay attention to them, they don’t have the cognitive capacity to understand putting off fulfillment, ok?
You know what the WORST THING possible for a baby to start doing is? Not trying to get adult attention.
Because that means that their brains have decided that you have abandoned them in the grass for the hyenas to eat, so they’re just going to stop developing and start dissociating. And this ends up with attachment disorders that will actually cause the child great difficulties in later life.
If a baby is crying and honestly distressed, fucking soothe it already.
(nb: yes, to some extent babies do need to learn to self-soothe; this lady has an actually sane article about this process which is a miracle, which gets into more detail about the processes involved and how it is a PROCESS, not just leaving the baby there to cry itself into hysterical exhaustion and teaching it that you won’t respond to its needs. PROCESS.) (nb2: sometimes the sleep/soothe process also gets into genuinely Medically Complicated Territory at which point you should be working with an actual paediatrician with specific training/etc, and you STILL don’t just leave the fucking baby there to scream for hours, trust me).
This has been your swear-filled elaboration of a friend’s aggravation for the day. Tip your server.
*adults also need attention, but adults are, well, adults: it is in fact their own responsibility to figure out how to seek attention from people who have the capacity to give it to them, at times that are good for everyone involved, etc. Children, however, are damn well children and it is the responsibility of caregiver adults to fulfill their needs and TEACH THEM how to fulfill their needs as they grow.
*holds a lighter aloft*
That is such a good rant, I adore it and welcome it and validate it! raising a cub of my own, and caring a lot about attachment theory, has really put this into practice in concrete ways. You can actually OBSERVE the cub needing attention to make their brain grow. (sometimes, when I don’t have anything left to say/give, but the cub needs attention, I just smile and burble repeatedly, “Warm eye contact! Warm eye contact to make your brain grow!! Yeahh! Warm eye contact! Positive attention!” because I’ve run out of things to say, but the baby doesn’t know that yet, ho ho ho)
But Discoursing away from baby development, one thing I always question is the CONTEXT for which people dismiss behavior as attention-seeking. It’s always cast as this terribly bad thing, “attention-seeking,” as if people noticing you is this corrosive thing that damages you and everyone around you. This thing that should be punished, by denying attention, like:
- “Ugh! how dare you exist!”
- “I really hate it when babies have needs!”
- “The worst part is when babies have needs and they EXPRESS them.”
- “She has dyed her hair a noticeable color. Probably because she didn’t get enough attention from her father, and she is now trying to use her hair to STEAL ATTENTION from everybody else.”
- “That outfit, which shows some skin, has attracted my attention – isn’t that awful? They should be punished, for using their visible skin to seek attention.”
- “How dare you blog, where I can find it and see it with my own eyes.”
- “Why are you EXCELLING at something? Ugh! Always doing it for attention.”
- “Why are you FAILING at something? Ugh! Weren’t you getting ENOUGH attention?”
- “That sounds complicated. I think you’re making it up. Making it up for attention.”
- “I went somewhere and – can you believe this – there was a young person, quite a young human, MAKING A NOISE, where I could hear it, and their caretakers did not forcibly stop it from doing so!! Honestly. People should be licensed before they have children.”
- “I just saw a reminder that some people use special accommodation [blue badge/designated parking spot/baby on board sticker/service dog/etc] and I am just so SICK of people rubbing their CONSTANT need for attention in my FACE.”
You know how in Harry Potter, whatever Harry does, his bullies and abusers say that he’s doing it for attention, so they dismiss it and mock it? If he publicly has ANYTHING, from a mild compliment to a broken limb – “Weren’t you getting enough attention, Potter?”
“Look at you EXISTING, Potter. Were you hoping to form some kind of human connection? Did you think you could exist, and occasionally need things? Well, we’ve seen through THAT pathetic ploy. REQUEST DENIED.”
It’s pretty weird, is what I’m saying. It’s kind of a thing that shitty people say.
Anyway, I’ve found it pretty liberating in my life (and good for my mental health!) to question this. Why is attention-seeking positioned as bad? Why is asking for it a good reason to be denied it? Why are certain people denied attention, such that everything they do is cast as a desperate ploy to acquire the attention they are not entitled to? How exactly does the existence of crying baby, a woman’s pink hair, or a blue badge apparently manage to suck all of the air out of the room?
Given that we are social animals who require positive attention to grow, maintain relationships, keep our mental health and do our jobs well, what’s so bad about giving it to people?
Given that so many humans are raised in such a broken way that they seek negative attention – resulting in terrible things and a broken world – what is even so terrible about people explicitly asking for attention in a positive way, with something like brightly colored hair, or by creating a piece of art for others to see?
Why is attention-seeking intrinsically bad?
so here’s some meta: the ones who get angry about attention seeking behavior… are seeking attention by doing so.
i have occasionally pointed out that the things people do/say to hurt you betray what they themselves are most hurt by. what i haven’t said is how i first learned that: by observing how often touch-starved allistics described my touch aversion as ‘attention seeking’ when i was a kid.
me: pls stop touching, i need alone time, for god’s sake please let me leave
them: god you’re so needy you’ll do anything for attention
me: i’m trying to avoid attention… to get attention?
them: well obviously it’s working!
it didn’t take long for me to realize that if they were seeing everything i did as a desperate attempt to get contact, they must be lonely as hell.
At Target this lady told her son he couldn’t have a Wonder Woman doll because “that’s for girls” and then bought her daughter the same one. It got me thinking about how often I see people bar young boys from appreciating girls/women as protagonists and heroes, and my own experience with it as a kid.
my mom’s biggest and most bewildered objection to me being a trans man was that i grew up passionately enamored of disney princesses. but those ladies were vibrant badasses who wore beautiful dresses and had animal friends and cool adventures– of course tons of girls want to be them. what’s fucked up is that little boys are trained not to even give them a second look.
TOS Kirk was a by the book fella.
Problem was, they were still writing the book.
So while it looks like he had some crazy adventures and disregarded Starfleet at every turn, that’s a lie.
Most of the time, he spent every other episode calling back, following the strictest of laws, going through proper motions and channels. Every other action was court-martialed and brought to trial. He was, for the most part, a dedicated captain following Starfleet’s rules.
Just because he is now the reason for about two dozen more rules, doesn’t make him the crazy madman adventurer we see him as. Of course he differed from his orders, at times. But those are the most excusable times, and even then, after disobeying, he laid himself up for proper discipline. He knew he’d done wrong in the eyes of his superiors, but his conscience wouldn’t have let him do any different.
Kirk was a rule follower and a rule maker. And only on special circumstances, a rule breaker.
This is as canonical as it gets: Kirk even says as much about himself when talking about his time as a cadet. Even with the Kobayashi Maru, supposedly his “defining” moment of “coolness” and rebellion, Kirk cheats because of how upset he is about the possibility of making a non-perfect grade. Like: he would only violate the rules to protect his GPA 😐
And rather than breaking into the grading system and changing his grade(which would be easier), or trying to finagle extra work/easier grading to make up for it(which would also be easier since everyone, canonically, thinks he’s a hotty), he changes the test so a perfect conclusion is no longer impossible, then achieves that still very difficult, but possible, solution. That’s a very lawful way to “cheat”(and, coincidentally, one that makes it obvious that he cheated since the instructors know the test was designed to be unbeatable. That he wasn’t drummed out for it shows how much Starfleet admires quick-thinking and pluck, so long as it doesn’t go too far).
I think people miss this because:
- Movie Kirk is an almost totally different character from TV Kirk, and anyone born after the original run but before the prevalence of torrent sites(which is most fans these days) met Movie Kirk first. and
- They don’t get how deeply Picard is a foil for Kirk.
I mean, they understand in a surface sense, in that Kirk is popularly seen as a “cowboy” and Picard is seen as a managerial diplomat, but it’s far deeper and more literary than that.
Kirk’s childhood is marred by horror. When he was 13 he was already off-world and lived through a planetary famine… and the eugenicist massacre the colony’s governor implemented to “save” it. These experiences had a huge impact on him and his morality, and shaped the grim, serious, humorless, friendless and by-the-books student he was in the academy.
His career after the academy, and particularly his time as Captain, taught him how to be himself; how to come out of the shell of duty he protected himself from others with, and the dark impulses he realized were within all humans, after Tarsus IV. And it also taught him the importance of his own morality; that while you honor the code of conduct and follow it as much as you can, sometimes adherence to its values and the “humanity” it is meant to instill and promote, require crossing those rules, even as it also requires you face the consequences of that violation.
Picard is the reverse. The shows and movies don’t go much into his early life, but we know he grew up in a loving and supportive, multi-generational family, who didn’t approve of his ambition to join starfleet. So Picard’s career began in an act of rebellion, and that quality of his character -his arrogance and willingness to spit in the face of tradition and convention; his propensity for running mad risks(because he didn’t really know what consequences were)- stayed with him through to graduation. Until his fight with the Nausicaans. A lesson quickly followed up with the Stargazer incident.
Picard’s life was safe until Starfleet, and his life in Starfleet taught him -at the edge of a knife; through his repeated near-death, and the deaths of his friends and mentors at the hands of unknown, unsuspected, almost unseen assailants- why rules existed and why caution, information-gathering, and diplomacy are so important. His early experiences in Starfleet taught Picard to temper his ambition and passion -his tendency to put himself and his assessments before everything else- with restraint, respect for others, and dutifulness to the ethics of his profession.
Picard had to learn to settle down, respect the fragility of life, and trust the rules; Kirk had to learn to be assertive, that hard situations require risk and sacrifice, and to trust himself. Both learned through Starfleet how to balance who they were and the things they believed in with the ethics and heavy responsibilities of their profession. This is a story about two people arriving at the same place(the most respected and trusted officer in the Fleet, entrusted with its flagship) from very different beginnings, and the sort of values and people Starfleet rewards.
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Though I’d have liked if they weren’t both farmboys. ST sure loves its agricultural origin stories :TOnto the main cuz my maintuals all should know this.
i find it very telling that people are so ready to straight-up pathologize donald trump while mentioning his wealth and social status only in passing and almost never as the main reason for why he’s so persistently self-centered and disconnected from reality.
when you grow up rich you’re kind of by default disconnected from reality. you learn that you can just… make things happen. an expensive education? top-quality healthcare? a fancy seat on the plane? you just wave your credit card in the right direction AND IT HAPPENS. you get your way, every time, immediately, and to your exact specifications. you’re also immune to failure by default because if you fuck something up you can afford to start over, so even if you reach your 70s with a trail of financial disasters behind you, you’re still rich, so they can’t have been that bad. you’re blind to your own incompetence. and you’re inevitably going to end up with very few, if any, genuine friends, especially if you’re inherently a bit of an asshole. instead you’ll be surrounded by people pursuing their own agendas, who will tell you literally anything you want to hear: that you’re a genius, that everyone loves you, that you can successfully accomplish anything you set your mind to. which you totally can, of course, but because of your money, not your personal merit.
trump is not a pathological narcissist with the under-developed mind of a child and a half dozen other mental disorders experts have not yet reached a consensus about. he’s too used to being obscenely rich and likely never had a problem in his life he knew he couldn’t solve by throwing enough money at it. and right now he’s angry that he can’t use that to get his own way anymore.
like, there’s enough stigma around mental illness without talking about it as if it’s the reason a rich entitled fuckhead is going to jump-start the nuclear apocalypse.
He also believes that “master race” bullshit. He thinks rich white people are genetically superior. This is a guy who has literally said he thinks success is genetic. Let’s be really explicit about this, most upperclass white people in the US do believe that bullshit that says they are genetically as well as morally superior to poor people and people of color. Old school eugenics is still the norm among the wealthy in the US. Trump isn’t pushing eugenics by accident, he’s pushing eugenics because it’s what him and his buddies firmly believe.
And using ableism as the basis for attacking him isn’t attacking his views and the ideas they rely on, it’s supporting them.
he isn’t mentally ill, he’s just a bad person! perfectly mentally-healthy normal people can still be evil!
The daydream that never stops
This is mostly about maladaptive daydreaming but there’s a part I really want people on this site to pay attention to, particularly young people who are confused about fiction.
In 2002, an Israeli trauma clinician named Eli Somer noticed that six survivors of abuse in his care had something in common.
To escape their memories and their emotional pain, each would retreat into an elaborate inner fantasy world for up to eight hours at a time.
Some imagined an idealised version of themselves living a perfect life. Others created entire friendships or romantic relationships in their heads. While one man pictured himself fighting in a guerrilla war, another conjured up football and basketball matches in which he displayed his athletic prowess.
Their plotlines often involved themes of captivity, escape and rescue – being chained up in a dungeon, for instance, or leading a prisoners’ revolt.
My mother sent me this article because it reminded her of me. I saw why immediately. Even as early as age 5 I remember having elaborate fantasies about stuff like that. Being captured, escaping, adventures, scary things, torture. My first fanfic was literally about an Oddworld OC being tortured and killed. I was 7 when I wrote it. I talked to my mom a bit how a lot of people like me (abused, disabled, different) absolutely have grown up with fictional characters and stories as our reference for experiences, as the way we can try to make sense of our lives and the things that have happened to us. There’s a reason I feel more at home and with family when watching a favorite animated show with all the characters I love so much than in a big group of my actual family. Through these characters I was able to not only survive everything the real world threw at me, but learn very valuable things about myself, dissect my own experiences and feelings, even if at a younger age I wasn’t aware that that’s what I was doing. That’s the beauty of fictional characters. They really allow us the safety to go scary places with them. Even if that place is morally horrifying.
A lot of us survivors explore these kinds of themes. Dark things, unpleasant things.
Just keep that in mind before you get too deep into the purity culture of this site that states that anything dangerous, dark, or twisted being explored in fiction is worthy of, uh, telling that person to kill themselves.
Most of the time, you’re telling a survivor that it would have been better for them to have died than to have survived their trauma, and that’s really dangerous considering most of us struggle with suicidal ideation in the first place.
Not all of us like to deny the darkness that we came from. There is nothing wrong with that.
fuck, i spent so much of my childhood daydreaming badass adventures. and yeah, they were bloody and dark as hell.
my first attempt at a novel was about a disabled man named thorn who was imprisoned at the heart of a dystopic city and could act only through computers; he called himself thorn because the people that left him there called him the thorn in their side, and they’d made him forget where he came from, his name and everything. the antagonist and love interest was a woman with several robot prostheses who worked with a rebel group to sabotage the city, not knowing the ‘comptroller’ they hated so much was just as much a prisoner as they were. when she finally stopped trying to kill him and decided to rescue him, he died a few hours later, unable to survive without his machines.
melodramatic, i know, but i was twelve.
looking back now, as an adult, i’m a little disturbed by how lovingly i described the violence. but i needed it, apparently. it made me feel better, going into my dark world and writing about this pale, wormlike man and his sicknesses, and the cruel things he did without understanding them, because he was a great big obvious metaphor for dissociation. and it was cathartic writing the woman – i can’t remember what i named her, something very cyberpunk and edgy i’m sure, like razor or cobalt – just mowing through crowds of company grunts with a bewildering assortment of heavy weapons. i wasn’t even allowed to watch pg-13 movies yet but i sure did like to talk about guts.
it all felt more real than the real world, sometimes, because the real world was where i wore a rigid mask of neurotypicality and gender and so on.
just moving along like everyone else 