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engraved carabiners

#lesbianism……

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Quick, limited palette Andy for today

#the old guard

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Seamus Heaney

#poetry

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Zendaya at the 2024 Met Gala (May 6, 2024)

#zendaya #fashion

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Went to a panel about slash fanfic at a con. Moderator said, "Welcome to the panel about erotica." The words "slash" and "erotica" were used interchangeably throughout. Panel was great.

There was a Q&A at the end so I raised my hand and said these terms seemed conflated. Moderator explained she'd run this panel for 10 years and it started out being about slash but drifted into erotica and she never changed the name. (She also said she was glad I brought it up and would keep it in mind for the future of the panel.) The guy on the panel who writes original m/f erotica said that slash and what he writes are basically the same thing. I said I had no complaints about the name of the panel or the panelists, I was just curious about what slash meant to them, and whether slash by necessity had to include sex scenes to be considered slash.

Two panelists answered that slash was romance between men but usually had sex. Eventually one of them did make clear that slash didn't have to have sex but that it was what they wanted to read. Another panelist said that to them slash really just meant dude romance but people wouldn't read their fic unless there was sex so they felt they had to put sex scenes in.

Person came up to me after the panel. Said they felt I didn't get my question answered. Then they explained that since the 70s, 'slash' has been used to mean m slash m romance, meaning explicit and sexual. Then they said it sounded like what I wanted to ask about was shipping. They explained to me that shipping is just wanting the characters to be together but slash meant sex. They explained that since the invention of AO3, people had begun to use the ampersand to mean the fic had two characters who were friends and that the slash was used to denote ships, but even though that punctuation just meant romance, the word "slash" in the last twenty years had become synonymous with explicit fic. I explained I had been in fandom longer than twenty years and this was not necessarily my experience. They said, "Bye!"

Though they seemed confused as to whether what they personally defined as slash had been mainstream since the 70s or since the last twenty years (the person was 24), they were well-meaning. The panel was great. I'd recommend it to anyone, though I'm not stating the name of the con here because I don't want anyone involved to feel this is really a critique of the panel itself. The moderator in particular was superb.

I think that this conversation just brought up a whole lot of feelings for me. I think it bothers me that people still think that all fanfic is smutty, that all slash requires porn, and that all fic must have porn in order to be read. I am familiar with this conflation and feel perfectly fine going to a panel that I think is about slash fic and finding out it's about erotic lit, some of which is fanfic. After all, I like both, and I recognize that fandom mushes these things together and teasing them out into separate strands isn't something everyone--or possibly even most fans--have any interest in. I recognize that I am pedantic to a degree that most people find uninteresting.

I have a little bit more of a problem with the idea that slash is "basically the same" as het, but this was said by only one of the panelists. If your panel is actually about straight up erotica and not slash, then the problem is just the name of the panel.

What I found the most frustrating, however, is that whenever I have this conversation, I feel like the default assumption most of my interlocutors begin AND end with is this: smut is why we're here. And I just don't understand that. Away Childish Things has 44,800 kudos, and it has no smut in it. My next most kudosed fic has almost 15,000 kudos and tons of smut. My next most kudosed fic has almost 14,000 kudos and it doesn't even have a kiss.

I'm not talking about kudos to show off how many I have, or because I think kudos make a point about quality of a fic. They have nothing to do with quality. But they do have to do with popularity, and the truth is, sex doesn't sell. It's something else. It's not good writing. It's not a great plot. It's not in-character characterization. IT'S SOMETHING ELSE. What is it?

I've had people say to me, "Well, you're lettered; it works differently for you." DOES IT??? Maybe they meant that because enough people know me as fic author, people will read my fic anyway, but let me tell you, it's always been this way for me, long before my fic was really popular. The ones with smut did not get more praise and attention. The ones that PEOPLE LIKED got more praise and attention. Do people like fic that has smut in it more than fic without smut? Some of the time! Does there have to be smut for people to like it? NO.

Have I had people tell me they didn't want to read something I wrote because it didn't have smut? YES. But the point I'm trying to make is, there are people who want to read fic that doesn't have smut in it. THEY are your audience for the fic you want to write that doesn't have smut in it. Fic does not have to have smut to be fic; it doesn't have to have smut to be read.

I think part of the reason I get so upset about it is that slash as we know it today didn't just emerge because some people weren't getting to read smut and they wanted to. It emerged because women and queer people and other marginalized communities were not getting to see what they wanted to in mainstream media. They weren't getting sex scenes, but they also weren't getting queer content, they weren't getting stories about sensitive men that defied patriarchal stereotypes of male toxicity; they weren't getting stories about disabled folks and people of color and folks who are into kink and folks who have different lifestyles. To reduce fanfic to porn is to remove the rich history of why it exists and who it exists for.

I asked earlier what makes a fic popular, and to me, it's exactly this. It's when you read a thing and you feel, "this is really satisfying to my id in a way that I am not getting from mainstream media." And sometimes what is satisfying to your id is very horny anal sex. Other times what is satisfying to your id is Bucky Barnes getting a blanket and facing his trauma. Sometimes it's Harry Potter being trans. Sometimes it's Naruto and Sasuke getting to just hold hands as the sun sets. I have no idea who those two people are but boy howdy do I know they just fucking need to hold hands.

But the other reason I get so upset about it is I'm so fucking tired of reading a great fic that devolves into mediocre mechanical porn that is there due to the collective brainwashing that states that this is the ONLY reason ALL of us are here.

Discuss.

#hello?? this was a panel?? #also yeah I am someone who mostly reads explicit fic #but my most popular fic i have written is like #wholesome brother fluff #next most popular is a cnc fic in a much bigger fandom #lmaoo #also they could have simply googled the history of the word slash…:.

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🫡

#iwtv

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Because I Liked You Better

by A.E. Housman

Because I liked you better Than suits a man to say, It irked you, and I promised To throw the thought away.

To put the world between us We parted stiff and dry; “Good-bye,” said you, “forget me.” “I will, no fear,” said I.

If here, where clover whitens The dead man’s knoll, you pass, And no tall flower to meet you Starts in the trefoiled grass,

Halt by the headstone naming The heart no longer stirred, And say the lad that loved you Was one that kept his word.

#oh alfred #poetry

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What I need is a good defense, 'Cause I'm feelin' like a criminal, And I need to be redeemed, To the one I've sinned against, Because he's all I ever knew of love.

#HA #iwtv

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mark my words they're going to be like louis takes a more physically dominant role with armand equality <3 girl does the megalodon ever make you feel so safe by letting you hand feed it. and it purrs too and flops over on its back for more megalodon belly rubs and youre like omg my sweet megalodon :') bc it wants you to be the big spoon. But Then the megalodon controls every aspect of your life including your diet and sleep schedule and clothing bc under that onion layer there is another onion layer where you are their beautiful little specimen novitiate catboy which you are of course aware of as a result of the mental and sexual st andrews cross that you are willingly strapped onto in your shared mind palace which coincidentally has bars around it, to protect YOU of course. from the outside world. which you believe :) though at the same time as with all your men you hold the secret trump card which is just straight up leaving, their greatest fear that they have both gone to absolutely fucking insane lengths to prevent, using opposite tactics. mark my words the point is that lestat and armand use opposite tactics to get the same result (louis pussy until the heat death of the universe). mark my words that they are inventing a type of bdsm that is heretofore unseen and illegal in the eyes of interpol

#iwtv #incredible stuff

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#iwtv #STOP

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If its more than one of these, vote the one that was strongest and/or lasted the longest.

I wanted to be a marine illustrator !! Like for textbooks n stuff

#where’s paleontologist #4 the dinosaur girls

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mutuals you would sit on a power line like little birds with

#two birds on a wire.mp3

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the thing about Dick and Tim in relation to Bruce that I am constantly spinning around and around in my head is like

if they’re talking about Bruce, Dick will be the first one to be like ‘bruce is an asshole he’s being terrible fuck him you don’t need him’ while Tim will be like ‘no you gotta give him a chance he’s just struggling and it’s our job to be there for him’

but if something actually Happens, then Tim will be the one like ‘we have to sincerely consider the possibility that bruce may be a murderer while i hold him at arm’s length’ while Dick is already trying to die for Bruce without a second’s hesitation and won’t lose loyalty in a million years

#dc

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“We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

#the dispossessed #ursula k le guin

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The Gazette, Montreal, Quebec, October 23, 1934

#invite me to this party

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i think we should make unethical monogamy the hot new ao3 tag

#shouldn’t be together/mega codependency etc yknow #maybe it’s broader than this too #my problem also is that i’m a multishipper but reading about functional poly bores me to tears #happy for ppl irl who r making it work but on the ao3 i want broken hearts torn loyalties and unevenness

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#so it is