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writersnatural

@mybrainproblems / mybrainproblems.tumblr.com

alex | he/him | 30s | nonsense word salad conspiracies | inveterate tag rambler | nephil!cas truther | AO3 | my writes | my art
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The old school lack of transparency on tumblr is amazing because you assume the people you follow must all be equivalent to you and then you see someone write “I brought my youngest to college today” and someone else write “my mom wouldn’t let me listen to Ariana Grande when I was a kid” and then your head explodes

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formerlyanon

and we need that! keeps us humble. 

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dabouse

Then I'm just like WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU’RE AN ADULT

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tomboy014

It goes the other way, too, because WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU'RE A CHILD?!!

I'm 16, that's like, barely a child

I'm in my 30s. You are baby

I'm older than both of you in a trenchcoat.

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kabretoss

honestly one of the best things we can do for ourselves is realize that people of different ages than us can still be the same kind of person as us. it's humbling and it gives everyone involved a sense of continuity, and it busts those stupid generational stereotypes media is so fond of.

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What's the worst thing about fandom in the last 20 years, and what's the worst thing about fandom that's always been true of it?

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The worst thing about fandom in the last 20 years has been the incentivizing of fandom-as-conflict: not merely as a field in broader culture wars but as the field for endless intra-group battles.

This manifests in many ways: as seven hour videos complaining about The Last Jedi, as Twitter backlash campaigns, but also as stans defending their faves from any and all criticism real or imagined, as the endless boom-and-backlash cycle to any fandom meme or joke you see on Reddit, and as the drive for people to look for evidence other people discussing a thing they like are hysterical illiterate dolts, before anything else.

Or, in other words: a lot of fandoms are full of assholes these days, whose main interaction with fandom is using it as a reason to be an asshole, and to defend being an asshole. The actual “fandom” part of fandom no longer really exists for them. The discourse more or less is their fandom; someone whose main fandom activity is sharing videos about how Steven Universe is a fascist (?) isn’t in the Steven Universe fandom, they’re in the videos about how Steven Universe is a fascist (?) fandom. I mean, the chief fandom for many people is their side in the fandom war. What type of fanfic you write is secondary to what your affiliations are vis-a-vis battles over fanfiction

(One trend I've noticed is people who aren't at the stage where they only talk about what they hate and not what they love, but are at the stage where they can only talk about what they love in relation to what they hate. "I love this movie...and it proves this other movie is bullshit made by a hack". No ability to say just "I love this movie", period, end of sentence. This is how like two-thirds of Film Twitter talks about film, the remainder are all the grindhouse people going "man you've GOT to see Wrong Turn 5")

Another one, that I think is related, is that fandom’s become...more transitory, maybe? There’s Big Fandoms that are inescapable and then everything else feels like it’s here for a weekend and then it’s gone. And we’ve always had fandoms that endure and fandoms that vanish quickly, when the show runs short or turns out to be bad/boring, but we did use to have a lot of enduring if small fandoms for Okay shows most people hadn’t heard of and now you don’t really. Or they burn themselves out fast.

So we’ve reached this stage where fandoms are either so big they have seven hour long discourse videos, or they’re a smattering of fanart over the course of two weeks last August. But that isn’t really the fault of fans so much as modern media release schedules.

A lot of fandom activities of old are just...impossible now, with many shows? The slow build of speculation and fan works and in-jokes and theorizing and analysis simply can’t exist in a world where the premiere comes out the same day as the finale, and you can’t talk about the finale because you have no way of knowing if the person you’re talking to binged it all in one weekend or is still on episode four. That was the kind of thing that sustained the fandom of something that wasn’t a big hit, or even something that was. My fave fandom experience ever was watching the online Lost fandom wildly theorizing for all six years of Lost, and we’d never get “and what if the Smoke Monster is a dinosaur but only the head?” under a Netflix release model. Now at a base level, we either have shows nobody can discuss because nobody’s sure who’s seen or what, or shows where everyone just discusses the finale right away, and where you get One Week of Show and then a massive hiatus, which either kills all momentum or...drives fandom in the direction of hyper-analyzing everything and fighting because, well, what else is there to do? And that plus the outrage cycles of social media plus the fact that “man who yells at Star Wars” is now a viable career choice result in, well. *gestures upwards* All that

(Really, shout out to Cartoon Network for engineering the Steven Universe fandom to Be Like That through their inscrutable strategy of dropping episodes during one random week every five months or whatever)

As for something that's always been with it...cliques and a certain fannish elitism, like, that sees engaging with media in a fandom sense as more creative or analytical or intelligent than your average person. You see it now in the form of, like, people holding up fanfic above published fiction as more representative or authentic (I’ve seen more than one post on here strongly implying queer rep doesn’t exist in mainstream non-fic storytelling???), or going “well, we think about shows, unlike those normies watching sports”. But that was probably way more pronounced a thing in the past, in the 40-50s sci-fi fans were calling non-fans "mundanes" and calling themselves "slans" as an in-group signifier (a reference to a book with superintelligent psychic mutants known as slans). Like at the very least we should be happy no one’s calling non-fans “muggles” anymore. In the evolution from “mundane” to “muggle” to “normie” normie’s probably the least bad one

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when you dig up the dirt and feel the confessional priest meme ascend the ladder of your consciousness

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swiftispunk

*THIS WAS SENT TO A FRIEND. NOT ME*

the friend who received this is too nice to say something about it but i have reached a point now where i have seen them receive so many messages like this that i just can't keep my mouth shut anymore

this is straight up evil behaviour. whatever lighthearted tone this anon thought they were sending this with, i don't care. it's gross in every sense.

i'm speaking directly to whoever sent this now and frankly, if you follow me, non, unfollow me right fucking now because i don't want this energy anywhere near my blog. it hurts enough that you've targeted my friends with it.

listen up because apparently it bears repeating for the millionth fucking time -

FANFICTION AUTHORS ARE HUMAN BEINGS. they have lives and jobs and school and things they struggle with. maybe they've even spoken publicly about their struggles in the hopes their readers would understand them a bit better because at the end of the day this is a community and they have every right to use this space however they fucking want to.

"don't start a fic you can't finish" - literally shut up. shut up! we are not paid to do this, i will start and not finish whatever the fuck i want.

and holy shit, anon. as if this message wasn't disgusting enough, please let me state plainly something you "desperately" need to hear: no robot can give you what a human writer can. and the fact that you even threatened to just go to AI at this point shows how little you care about storytellers and all they provide for you.

again, i don't care if every word of this message was sent in jest or meant to be read playfully. it's not fucking cute. this shit hurts writers and ya'll need to realize that.

if you take time out of your life to send messages like this, you're a bad person. period. this is not how fanfic works, it's not how the world works. if you can wait two-three years for a movie or a new season of your favourite tv show, you can wait a few months for a fanfic to update. or you can wait forever. we literally owe you nothing.

i'm done sugarcoating it, ya'll. disrespectfully, grow up. grow up! enough is enough.

anyway

Hey anon if you've got that big a bug up your ass about works taking too long to get finished here's a handy goddamn tool for you:

You're welcome you ungrateful fuck.

Something people need to remember when reading fan fiction: someone isn’t presenting you a finished novel, you’re reading their private notebook. So sure sometimes you are getting a completed story but sometimes you’re getting the framework, a cute drabble that grows, or even just ideas with fun doodles/art. To reiterate what OP said, you are not owed anything because you’ve taken an interest in something someone made for themselves.

AO3 puts the filters there so you can find exactly what you want including it being finished. Act accordingly and be fucking respectful.

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Zuko finds out Katara was parentified from the age of eight and was a single mom friend of three until he stumbled into the position of gaang dad friend. So when she visits the Fire Nation Zuko dotes on her, making sure her every need is anticipated and catered to. He even goes as far as - to the horror of his council - kneeling to remove her shoes.

Because of this she earns the nickname Lady Katara among the palace staff which she finds amusing but a little confusing. So one day over tea she asks Iroh why they call her that and he explains:

"They're just practicing."

"Why would you need to practice a nickname?"

"Well my dear, they expect that within a few years Fire will preceed it."

And that's about when Katara chokes on her tea.

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say what you will about gotye's "somebody i used to know" but i gotta appreciate a song that ends with a second party rebutting the entire rest of the song, while still in the song. imagine if more songs did this. incredible.

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y'all... i am... i think overwhelmed isn't a strong enough word.

The Scripthunt's really, truly, absolute last fundraiser is almost halfway to the goal we set out to raise. Considering we opened the thing just over a day ago and intend for it to run two months, this is... truly overwhelming :'D

Look at all these amazing prizes, make a donation, and enter the drawing. You've got plenty of time before it closes, but at this rate I'll be spending the next few days on the floor

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