insisting a fictional culture uses a sexagesimal number system is all fun and games until you keep having to invent words because so many things in english are rooted in base-10
What kind of words?
Decimate? Decade?
decade, but also measurements of distance. there is now an elaborate backstory for where they get their measurement systems from, which i will never actually use or share, it will just exist in the ether as a weird fact that only i know
You ever try rooting through language for words derived from real-world location names and proper nouns? Words you’d logically have to cut out of usage for a fictional setting? There’s a LOT of them. More than you’d think.
for the most part i don’t worry about it, because literally everything and anything can be handwaved away as a translation—as long as they’re still referring to a person who gets off on hurting people, the word ‘sadist’ is an acceptable translation to english of whatever word they actually use, and regardless of whether their society has secretaries we can still translate whatever they call that weird-ass bird to secretary bird. hell, most of the time i take the handwaving one step further, like “okay well obviously they don’t have ducks on this weird fantasy planet but this bird is similar enough to a duck that if an english speaking person moved there they would call it a duck” because if a ruffed grouse can be a partridge then why the can’t this fake water bird be a duck. if it’s a lumpy brown starch that grows underground then english speakers are going to call it a potato because that’s just how language works. if i’m going to have a fiction that english speakers can read then it’s going to have to be in english regardless of whatever fictional language they would surely use instead and that makes everything an approximate translation imho. BUT my problem is when they are referring to something totally different, i.e., they don’t refer to a collection of ten years because that number has no real significance, they refer to a collection of twelve instead, so the word ‘decade’ doesn’t work at all. or measurements of distance, which are always totally arbitrary no matter what culture you’re from! the meter is ultimately no less bullshit than the foot. no language in real life has a word for “the length of this fictional person’s forearm, which has for a number of historical and cultural reasons become the standard around which our system of measuring length is based” let alone a word for “sixty of that person’s forearm”. you can’t just say a mile, or a kilometer, or a league, because those are different distances! english speakers who moved to this fake place would not just start calling sixty forearms a mile; they would use whatever word the locals used, and then figure out how to convert one length to the other rather than just adopt their perfectly good system of measurement like reasonable people.
which makes writing about it A HUGE PAIN but anyway
This is an excellent post but also I am DYING to read the backstory and info on the base-sixty counting system.
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.
okay just got done typing up a Long Ass Comment for a fic that i love and bc writers Live™ for comments but a lot of ppl seem to find it difficult/scary to write them, here are some tips from me, who has been on both sides of the fence:
we will nut over literally any context for how u read our fics, nothing is too specific or embarrassing
i once received a long ass essay about the exact circumstances under which someone read the new chapter including action and dialogue and i still treasure that comment to this day
if u read the fic a few days ago and are still thinking about it, open that bitch up and tell the author “i read this fic a few days ago and i’m still thinking about it”
THAT SHIT KILLS US I SWEAR
do not worry about being annoying!!!!! oh my god i can’t overstate this enough you are NEVER being annoying by leaving comments. examples of situations in which comments are Not Annoying:
commenting on every chapter
this is honestly our fav thing, those regular commenters are the real MVPs and i’d die for them. it doesn’t seem thirsty or obnoxious to us it’s our lifeblood i pr omi s e u
also this is guaranteed the #1 best way to get senpai to notice u, if that’s what ur after
adding an extra comment w a thought/detail u missed
adding an extra comment w a thought/detail u remembered from 4 chapters ago
commenting during a reread (this is only ever flattering!!!)
commenting an 800-word essay that takes several solid minutes to read
this seriously never comes across as irritating, time-consuming, or trying too hard; the author is the one who wrote thousands upon thousands of words in the first place and we eat that shit up
(ok i lied, there is one exception to this. the one thing that is annoying is demanding updates, especially if u do it on the same day as an update was published. this makes us sad, avoid this :c)
but aside from that: comments, great, always!!!
acknowledge how hard writers work. every time someone tips their hat to me for the effort i put in, it’s like the 12 hour binges, inability to think about anything else even while sleeping, longggg inspiration walks, and constant self doubt become worth it!!!!
let us know u talk about our fics w ur friends…. this is like, the ultimate compliment……… i’m still lowkey waiting for the day someone pastes an excerpt from a chat log they’ve had about one of my fics because i Know it has happened and i wanna see it……………i wanna know what has been yelled……………..
just say thank u!!! a simple thank you means so much more bc it shows us we have actual readers and not just numbers on a screen sfjdgslksg
Remember when we had to read fanfiction on our desktops… Not even laptops. having to get get plopped down in the family computer room to pull up your naruto and yugioh self insert stories on lunaescence archives and fanfiction dot net with god & everyone watching you.
just moving along like everyone else 