Every Homestuck should watch this weekly, if not daily. It should be the Talmud to Homestuck’s Torah.
i just finished this and i am astonished theres a piece of homestuck fanwork that gives me the exact same viscerally unsettling experience as a david lynch film would
You never appreciate how fucking wild homestuck was until you see shit like this and it makes perfect sense.
“You’re not what I expected at all,” muttered Peridot.
Pearl paused mid-weld. It had been a few days since Peridot’s meltdown, since she’d contacted Yellow Diamond only to have her faith in the Homeworld hierarchy shattered. Garnet had spent a day calming her down, and they’d returned to working on the drill, so things were sort of back to normal, but Peridot had barely spoken to Pearl since. No smug superiority, no plaintive whining about her ideas, no backhanded dismissals of her ability (which had actually been few and far between since the robot fight, to Peridot’s credit. The little gremlin was trying, and Pearl appreciated that.)
No, Peridot had just…stared.
Not while she thought Pearl was watching, of course. As soon as Pearl glanced in Peridot’s direction, she’d pretend she’d been completely engrossed in her work, but nobody had ever taught Peridot how to be subtle. It had really started to grate, but Garnet had asked her to give Peridot time to adjust, and so…well, she had.
Izuki eyes his younger
sister. All things considered, her question is not completely off track, but
he’s not entirely sure how she could know that. “What brought you to
that conclusion?”
“He had dinner at our
house,” Mai says.
“Hyuuga has dinner at
our house all the time,” Izuki says. “And I told you, Hayama missed his train—”
“Yeah, yeah, and the
next train wouldn’t be for awhile, I heard you,” Mai says, rolling her eyes.
“But, like, he laughed at all our jokes.”
“Our jokes are funny,”
Izuki defends.
“Our jokes are hilarious,”
Mai says, “But you have to admit, most people who are not in this family don’t
tend to agree with that.”
Izuki nods because yes,
this is a sad but true statement regarding their jokes.
“Also, why are you
even playing with someone from a different school anyway?” Mai says. “Wouldn’t
it get weird for tournaments?”
“I’d only ever play
him in nationals, so, not really?”
“Nationals? He doesn’t
go to a Tokyo school?”
“No,” Izuki says, but
then he grimaces because maybe he had been neglecting to actually
mention… “He goes to Rakuzan.”
“Rakuzan?” Mai
yelps. “In Kyoto? And he was visiting you here?”
“It’s not that—weird,”
Izuki says, realizing that it probably is.
*
“Oh my God!” Mai says,
bursting into his room the next day. “Do you know who he is?”
“Who?” Izuki frowns.
“Your boyfriend! Hayama Kotarou! He’s a super genius basketball player.”
“Uh, yeah, I did know
that. And he’s not my boyfriend.”
“He has appeared in magazines,”
Mai says. “He’s being professionally scouted! His family is super rich!”
“They are?” Izuki
says.
“He goes to Rakuzan,
of course they are! You don’t just have a boyfriend, you have a boyfriend who
is way out of your league!”
“Hey!”
“Don’t get me wrong,
Nii-san, I wholeheartedly approve. You found a rich, successful man who laughs
at our jokes. For the love of God, marry him.”
“Get out of my room,”
Izuki says.
“Fine, I have to go
tell mom and Nee-san about your knight in shining amour.”
Izuki pauses, laughs,
and then nods, “Yes, that was a good one, but he’s not my boyfriend so cut it
out.”
“Are you kidding me?
There are millions of unexplored romantic themed puns this family has yet to be
able to utilize, we’re not letting this one go any time soon.”
A/N: Hahaha, thanks
friend! I am glad you enjoy the series and the HayaIzu! Sorry for the lack of
actual Hayama in this one, but I all of the sudden had an intense desire to
write Izuki interacting with his family. The hardest part of writing this rare
pair ship is having to come up with puns. Hope you enjoyed!
no really though, can anyone explain to me why fictional depictions of violence are only wrong when they’re sexual? why it’s universally understood that simulated violence can be consumed without danger of influencing society, but any depiction of any part of the sexual violence spectrum will inevitably contribute to real world sexual violence? have any antis made an attempt at really explaining that? I’d love to see it
Obviously I’m not an anti, but as someone who has always had an underlying reaction of ‘this comparison doesn’t feel right’ whenever someone calls hating fictional sex but not fictional murder hypocritical, I wanted to respond.
I think it’s a reflection of how society reacts to sexual assault victims differently from murder/attempted murder victims. Specifically: society behaves as if the thoughts and fantasies of a sexual assault victim have an effect on the severity of their rapist’s actions but does not do the same for murder victims.
in other words: in an anti’s eyes, it’s easy to see that only a murderer is responsible for murder. But rape culture (not the rapists) are responsible for sexual assault and anyone contributing to it (i.e. creators of dark fandom content) is/are responsible for cleaning up and ending rape.
*
Frank talk about about rl sexual assault and murder below.
Neutrally speaking, sex itself can be a good or a bad experience. murder or attempted murder can only ever be a bad experience.
When someone says they were sexually assaulted, society zeros in on whether or not the victim enjoyed/wanted/previously fantasized about the sex instead of focusing on the being forced part. If we treated murder victims the same way we treat sexual assault victims, we’d concern ourselves with whether the victim enjoyed/wanted/previously fantasized about being stabbed/choked/poisoned/etc to death instead of focusing on the being dead part.
“[A]s long as society pushes the blame for sexual violence off the abuser/rapist and onto the victim, or the state of society… antis will contribute to this mindset by demanding that the victims and society clean up their act first.”
This is good but I’d like to add: “antis”(or, well, their philosophical ancestors) TOTALLY tried to do this with violence.
For most of the 90s and early 00s, people with precisely this mindset fought HARD to ban or censor games and music(exclusively rap and other “deviant” genres) for violence(and, surely by coincidence, anti-establishment messages) with the same sorts of arguments and on the similar theory that violence in art caused violence in society. That violence and crime in US society during this period were persistently falling inspite of its, to their eyes, ever-increasing “deviance” never seemed to register with them, oddly enough. And before THAT -during the 70s, 80s, and 90s- the same folks campaigned against violence in films, tv, and music. Antis lost all those fights, eventually(well, TV censorship is more complex. The FCC was, and remains, very susceptible to their gaming, particularly on language and sex).
And during all these eras, mostly the same folks were caught up in the anti-porn fight as well. Which also failed. So why does this particular arm of the anti-porn campaign continue? Here’s one theory:
All of this -from slasher flicks to pornography- were normalized by society in the wake of their success; they became, or became part of, billion dollar industries and, in the US, how can something worth billions of dollars be deviant? Commodities are as American as Apple Pie. These are all also Industries controlled by, and profitable to, white men. Fanfic is (mostly)non-profit. It’s non-commoditized and, in fact, very difficult to commoditize due to IP laws. It’s primarily controlled by folks afab. Because it’s non-institutionalized, the sort of structural gatekeeping which keeps poc and non-men out of positions of influence and control aren’t as developed and established(racism and sexism are still social institutions that impact and exist in fandom, obvsl; upholding them is the point of the racist+sexist harassment which happens in it). Fanfic sex remains “deviant”, and thus an open target for christian moralizers(disguised, unaware, or otherwise), because Fanfic communities themselves are “deviant”; more open to those excluded by establishment society, and more difficult for capitalists to integrate into their system of profit-exploitation.
I was cruising through the net, following the cold trail of one of the periodic “Is or is not Fanfic the Ultimate Literary Evil?” arguments that crop up regularly, and I’m now bursting to make a point that I never see made by fic defenders.
We’re all familiar with the normal defenses of fic: it’s done out of love, it’s training, it’s for fun. Those are all good and valid defenses!
But they miss something. They damn with faint praise. Because the thing is, when you commit this particular Ultimate Literary Evil you’ve now told a story. And stories are powerful. The fact that it wasn’t in an original world or with original characters doesn’t necessarily make it less powerful to any given reader.
I would never have made this argument a few years ago. A few years ago I hadn’t received messages from people who were deeply touched by something I wrote in fanfic. So what if it’s only two or three or four people, and I used someone else’s world and characters? For those two or three or four people, I wrote something fucking important. You cannot tell me that isn’t a valid use of my time and expect me to feel chastened. I don’t buy it. I won’t feel ashamed. I will laugh when you call something that touches other people ‘literary masturbation.’ Apparently you’re not too up on your sex terminology.
Someone could argue that if I’d managed the same thing with original characters in an original world, it could’ve touched more people. They might be right! On the other hand, it might never have been accepted for publication, or found a market if self published, and more importantly I would never have written it because I didn’t realize I could write. The story wouldn’t have happened. Instead, thanks to fanfic being a thing, it did. And for two or three or four people it mattered. When we talk about defending fanfic, can we occasionally talk about that?
I once had an active serviceman who told me that my FF7 and FF8 fic helped get him through the war. That’ll humble you. People have told me my fanfic helped get them through long nights, through grief, through hard times. It was a solace to people who needed solace. And because it was fanfic, it was easier to reach the people who needed it. They knew those people already. That world was dear to them already. They were being comforted by friends, not strangers.
Stories are like swords. Even if you’ve borrowed the sword, even if you didn’t forge it yourself from ore and fire, it’s still your body and your skill that makes use of it. It can still draw blood, it can strike down things that attack you, it can still defend something you hold dear. Don’t get me wrong, a sword you’ve made yourself is powerful. You know it down to its very molecules, are intimate with its heft and its reach. It is part of your own arm. But that can make you hesitate to use it sometimes, if you’re afraid that swinging it too recklessly will notch the blade. Is it strong enough, you think. Will it stand this? I worked so hard to make it. A blade you snatched up because you needed a weapon in your hand is not prey to such fears. You will use it to beat against your foes until it either saves you or it shatters.
But whether you made that sword yourself or picked it up from someone who fell on the field, the fight you fight with it is always yours.
Literary critics who sneer at fanfic are so infuriatingly shortsighted, because they all totally ignore how their precious literature, as in individual stories that are created, disseminated, and protected as commercial products, are a totally modern industrial capitalist thing and honestly not how humans have ever done it before like a couple centuries ago. Plus like, who benefits most from literature? Same dudes who benefit most from capitalism: the people in power, the people with privilege. There’s a reason literary canon is composed of fucking white straight dudes who write about white straight dudes fucking.
Fanfiction is a modern expression of the oral tradition—for the rest of us, by the rest of us, about the rest of us—and I think that’s fucking wonderful and speaks to a need that absolutely isn’t being met by the publishing industry. The need to come together as a close community, I think, and take the characters of our mythology and tell them getting drunk and married and tricked and left behind and sent to war and comforted and found again and learning the lessons that every generation learns over and over. It’s wonderful. I love it. I’m always going to love it.
Stories are fractal by nature. Even when there’s just one version in print, you have it multiplied by every reader’s experience of it in light of who they are, what they like, what they want. And then many people will put themselves in the place of the protagonist, or another character, and spend a lot of time thinking about what they’d do in that character’s place. Or adjusting happenings so they like the results better.
That’s not fic yet, but it is a story.
But the best stories grow. This can happen in the language of capitalism—a remake of a classic movie, a series of books focusing on what happened afterwards or before—or it can happen in the language of humanity. Children playing with sticks as lightsabers, Jedi Princess Leia saving Alderaan by dueling Vader; a father reading his kids The Hobbit as a bedtime story as an interactive, “what would you like to happen next?” way so that the dwarves win the wargs over with doggie biscuits that they had in their pockets and ride to Erebor on giant wolves, people writing and sharing their ideas for deleted outtake scenes from Star Trek and slow-build fierce and tender romance with startling bursts of hot sex between Hawkeye and Agent Coulson.
A story at its most successful is a fully developed fractal, retold a million times and a million ways, with stories based on stories based on stories. Fanfic of fanfic of fanfic. Stories based on headcanons, stories based on prompts, stories that put the Guardians of the Galaxy in a coffee-shop AU and stories where the Transformers are planet-wandering nomads and stories where characters from one story are placed into a world from another. Stories that could be canon, stories that are the farthest thing from canon, stories that are plausible, stories that would never happen, stories that give depth to a character or explore the consequences of one different plot event or rewrite the whole thing from scratch.
This is what stories are supposed to be.
This is what stories are.
Fandom and fan creations are a communal act. They do not disguise how they are influenced by each other. They revel in it.
Literature was once a communal act, too. Film as well. It’s only once we decided to extend and expand the idea of copyright and turn stories into primarily vehicles for profit that we rejected this communal structure. The literary canon shouldn’t be all dead white men. They didn’t build the novel. They didn’t build theater. They took what was already there and said “This is mine now,” and we believed them.
Creativity is communal. There is no such thing as the lone genius on a mountaintop. Ideas are passed around, handed back and forth, growing all the time. Fandom is what human creativity looks like in its normal form. Fandom is like this because humans are like this.
We didn’t just borrow the sword. We remade it because we saw in it the potential for something better. And we did that together, all of us.
also consider: there is no singular story that can be told in even the longest human lifetime that can meet all needs
fanworks fill in those missing stories, those missing needs, in our creative media the way vitamins fill in for a stale and repetitive diet lacking in nutrients
because holy shit are humans complicated
we got lots of complicated needs going on at any one time
sometimes you need fluffy feel-good stories to get you through the day. sometimes you need a good gorey violence-fest to get out that anger and rage and frustration.
sometimes you need to process things too painful for yourself to handle by walking a few hours in someone else’s shoes, feel their pain instead of yours, and reach catharsis that way.
sometimes you don’t even know what you need until you find where someone has written it down, laid it out and examined it from all angles, and put words to it you didn’t even know existed. sometimes you don’t learn you’re broken, wounded, until someone holds up the right mirror.
sometimes you don’t know you can fall apart and just let it out until someone breaks you, ever so gently, and helps guide you back together
we need these stories
we need them like air and shelter and safety and food
they are those things for our minds
we need them, and no amount of restriction is ever gonna be successful at keeping them gone unless we all vanish
I wish I’d appreciated more when I was younger and involved in the fanfic world how something can be “bad writing” in the sense that it doesn’t work as a piece of literature, but good in what it’s doing for the writer.
Especially (but not only) for very young writers, fiction can be a badly needed escape or a way to work through their own problems in metaphor. A girl who feels invisible and unloved in the real world can write a version of herself that’s a half-unicorn half-faerie princess with every magic power simultaneously, and whether it’s narratively strong or not, it means something to her that she can be that princess in her story. A person who has no other outlet for their sexuality can write awful “lol, what even is anatomy” porn as part of the process of feeling out what they want and who they are. A boy who’s afraid to express softness and vulnerability in the real world can write unbearably melodramatic and glurgey hurt/comfort fic, and find in it the tenderness that’s inside him.
And 99% of these stories will be awful and unreadable and embarrassing, just as 99% of therapy session transcripts wouldn’t make good one-act plays. But that’s okay. They serve a purpose beyond conventional literature, and while you may not necessarily want to read them, you should still respect that purpose.
no offense but like…..reblog the fics you like. there is nothing more discouraging than having people read your fic without leaving kudos or any form of response. comment if you like it! send them a message! use the tags to talk about how you liked it! share the work so that others can read it too!
too often fic writers deal with people hounding them for updates, but never any feedback. end the cycle. reblog the fics you like. talk about them. share them.
The Schooners win game seven and dethrone the defending champion Falconers to claim Seattle’s first national title.
Eric was definitely not expecting Jack to propose immediately after losing.
(A rework of the ‘Game 7 PVD vs SEA’ prompt that totally retcons some NHL!Bitty stuff, so timeline-wise: the Falconers took the cup Eric’s second year with the Schooners. The Schooners win the following season.)
Game Seven. Third period. Eric’s running on adrenaline, blue Gatorade, and rage.
Jack and the rest of the Falconers first line are racing to catch up, but Eric is ‘criminally fast’ (thank you ESPN for the lovely descriptor), and it’s almost too easy to whip the puck to Carter and wait for the siren.
Snowy can’t stop it. The Schooners will win in regulation.
For a brief, terrifying moment, Eric sees Morin’s breakaway as the death knell of his relationship. He has flashes of Freshman year and he thinks ‘Jack is going to hate me’.
It is important to
Midorima that Takao knows he is not ashamed of him. He doesn’t know the full
specifics, but he understands that this was (in varying degrees) a factor into
why Takao’s previous two relationships ended.
“Yamamoto is a good
guy,” Takao explained once, “And it was probably unfair of me to break up with
him. I just didn’t want to be someone else’s dirty little secret again, you
know?”
Midorima still
remembered the night Takao explained about how his middle school romance ended,
and how furious he’d felt about that. He didn’t know how Takao could talk about
it so easily now, how he didn’t seem to wish any of them harm, despite the fact
that Midorima was all too happy to hurt them. It bothered Midorima a whole lot
that anyone could do that to Takao, to the point where he still wishes
he could hurt everyone who had hurt his boyfriend.
But that’s not what
Takao wanted. What Takao wanted was to make sure it didn’t happen again,
and Midorima will make sure it never happens again.
He’s just not sure if
he’s doing it right.
*
They don’t tell their
parents. First because Takao had said, “Oh God, Mom is going to gloat forever
if she finds out,” and Midorima had pictured having this conversation with Dr.
Kishitani and it had all seemed far too embarrassing.
(Then it became clear
that Dr. Kishitani was dating Takao’s mother, and all things considered, maybe
it was best if they continued to not tell their respective parental
figures about their relationship).
And this is something
they mutually agreed upon but it still makes Midorima wonder if Takao feels
like Midorima is hiding his relationship from his guardian. He worries a lot
about whether or not this is something that bothers Takao.
*
To compensate, they
don’t hide it at school. Not that they do anything different at school than
they ever did before they started dating (although, since everyone seemed to
think they were dating before they started dating, maybe they didn’t need to do
anything different), but if anyone asked, Midorima made sure to always respond
truthfully that they were dating.
“You’re usually such a
tsundere, Shin-chan,” Takao teases after the first time he hears Midorima
declare, “Yes, Takao and I are involved romantically,” to someone’s question. “I
can’t believe you just came out and said that.”
“I don’t know what
you’re talking about,” Midorima says, “I am always very open about my
feelings.”
He’s not quite sure
why Takao laughed at him.
*
They go everywhere
together, with Takao often driving Midorima in his rickshaw, and that doesn’t
feel like they’re hiding anything although Midorima is not entirely sure how
much of a couple they look.
But it is important to
him that Takao knows that Midorima would never hide him, would never make him
his secret, so one day they’re out in the mall and Midorima decides, To hell
with it, and he kisses Takao right there where everyone can see.
He does not expect
Takao to pull back, beet red, sputtering, “Shin-chan! Wh-what—?” and then eyes
him suspiciously and says, “What’s your sign?”
“Pineapples!” Midorima
says, indignantly, remembering their long ago code, “Exactly when would I have
been switched out for Kise or a clone?”
“I don’t know but I’m
not ruling anything out,” Takao says, still blushing. “What is with you?”
Midorima scowls
because this is all incredibly unfair. “I just wanted you to know. That I’m not
hiding you. Or anything.”
Takao buries his face
in his hands and Midorima wonders if maybe he did something wrong but then
Takao looks up and says, “OK, my boyfriend is adorable. Also, not hiding does
not mean making out in public, we are Japanese, not Americans, come on,
Shin-chan. Further also, we need to go home right now where I can make out with
you properly and maybe take off your clothes.”
“Don’t be so
shameless, Takao,” Midorima says, his turn to blush.
“Oh, you never get to
accuse me of shamelessness ever again, stud,” Takao says, dragging him by his
collar.
just moving along like everyone else 