readingalcove

[readingalcove]

genuinely, honestly, I wish fandom could move past "depiction isn't endorsement".

because it's really meant to be sort of the baby beginner step to media literacy but in fandom spaces it usually acts like a trump card to shut down critical discussions. it's one of the thought terminating cliches of fandom that discourages learning how to interrogate the text beyond "fiction isn't reality, dummy".

yes, the popular whump fic in your fandom isn't endorsing torture, but also, can you tell when the canon for your fandom is endorsing a message? how do you then choose to interact with that canon, and do you get defensive when people are critical of the source material?

depiction isn't endorsement, but can you tell when fandom trends are misogynistic or racist? can you see how killing off a black female character to "punish" her in fanfiction with the framing that she deserves it, and the popular narrative in a certain fandom that a heroic black man is a possessive liar and a white villain is a good man deserving redemption, is endorsing a message in fanfic? do you argue that it's "just fiction" when people get very understandably upset at misogyny and racism in fandom spaces?

yeah, depiction isn't endorsement, but do you think this is where it starts and stops as the only thing you really need to know? do you think people who are critical of things aren't engaging with it properly, or being mean, because they've forgotten the golden fandom rule of "fiction isn't reality"?

nbc hannibal isn't endorsing cannibalism as a dietary choice, but top gun maverick and call of duty: modern warfare were quite literally sponsored by the us military as propaganda for recruitment.

I'm not saying don't enjoy the ip that's making you happy or calling for moral purity in your media habits or whatever. just saying that there's a lot to media literacy beyond the feel good affirmations that periodically circulate fandom, and those affirmation posts both lack necessary nuance and discourage people from engaging with said nuance.

[readingalcove]

Also, y'all know that the “no kink at Pride” moral panic is absolutely going to turn towards drag queens and trans women next, right?

All of this “what about the children!?” crap is classic reactionary bullshit going back decades and the reason you see so many lgbtq people pushing back against it (particularly those of us 30+) is because we know exactly where it’s going.

Look at all the reactionaries and TERFs that have been leading this panic, you absolutely know that’s the next target. They’ve been laying the groundwork that trans women are predatory and unsafe for children and that drag is inherently sexual.

To me, this is the same level as the conservatives that freaked out when a library in the Austin suburbs had a drag queen do weekly story time and would bring guns to “protect” the children and threatened to pull the funds of the library until they cancelled it.

We’re all seen as inherently adult, as inherently unsafe for children. All of us. The L’s, G’s, B’s, T’s, Q’s, A’s, all of us. If we start this “but think of the children” then all of us are targets, soon Pride will be a bunch of cishet parents watching a bunch of rainbow colored Lockheed Martin, Bank of America, NYPD, and Absolut Vodka party floats.

Kink has been as much apart of our community and especially Pride from longer than all of us have been alive. That’s the point of Pride, to be ourselves in our own space without reactionaries and social regressives forces.

It is, at its core, a “fuck you” to those exact people.

[readingalcove]

we are in a media literacy crisis

[readingalcove]

my dad always says "it's not trespassing if you're not planning to do anything bad" which as a legal argument wouldn't get far but as a moral prerogative is completely sound

#this makes me think of my dad #he'd probably say this #he has also left me in a passenger seat in a no parking zone #because leaving the car idling doesn't count as parking

[readingalcove]

I never want to hear conservatives go on about repressive censorship in China, North Korea, and Iran ever again

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I hate being a Debbie downer but I'll admit it hurts my feelings to see people rejoicing over "all the new comments on my fics" or "those 5 people in your Fandom that always comment" as a complaint but... I'm VERY lucky if anyone comments beyond my best friend, and on long fics if I get ANY comments it's not beyond the first chapter or so. It... hurts to see people excited then not continue.

Please. I'm commenting too but please seek out all of us who just... don't get comments for whatever reason. We're not bad just always skipped over. Don't forget us. Please.

IT TOOK ME A WHILE TO FORMULATE A RESPONSE TO THIS BECAUSE I THINK IT IS IMPORTANT.

ANON I HAVE SOMETHING TO TELL YOU. I UNDERSTAND YOU ARE FRUSTRATED. I TOO HAVE GOTTEN NO COMMENTS ON MY FICS THIS WEEK. BUT I DO NOT DO THIS TO GET COMMENTS ON MY FICS, I DO THIS TO LEAVE COMMENTS ON THE FICS OF OTHERS AND BRING THEM HAPPINESS.

WE DON'T SPREAD HAPPINESS FOR THE SAKE OF RECIEVNG IT OURSELVES. WE DO IT TO MAKE THE WORLD A HAPPIER PLACE FOR OTHERS.

THIS IS WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A COMMUNITY.

THIS IS THE JOY WE OWE TO EACH OTHER.

THIS IS WHY WE COMMENT.

#I get comments probably less than monthly #but that's not gonna stop me #I do seek out others with few comments

[readingalcove]

BEKKATHYST 10th Business Anniversary Giveaway!

~This giveaway is in no way affiliated with Tumblr.~

Please read thoroughly before entering!

Hello lovely Tumblr folk! It’s that time again- I have a giveaway for you all. This one is extra special because my business/shop turned 10 years old earlier this year! 💜

We have an online store that could use your support!

You can also find us on Instagram.

About us: My business is a small, family-run establishment that I started here on tumblr in 2013. I’ve been lucky enough to grow to the point where this supports me, my partner, and our daughter. In the US we also had a brick-and-mortar shop in which I employed my mom and a few of my siblings. However, we closed it to be able to move to Austria, my home country! 💜 I strived to put compassion and ethics above all else in my business, and I hope that shines through. We have a website but also run many fun sales directly here on Tumblr!

One of our long-term customers graciously asked to sponsor this giveaway, so I'd like to give a huge thank you to @classicintp !! Also thank you to everyone who voted on which crystal should be featured in the giveaway. Opal won in a landslide!

This giveaway will have two winners.

What the first winner receives:

The two amazing specimens of opal shown above! The darker piece is a boulder opal from Australia with a hole drilled through it (so it can be worn as a necklace) and the lighter piece is a massive rough chunk of welo opal from Ethiopia. The retail value of both of these opals is approximately $650.

What the second winner receives:

A $50 gift card that can be used for our online store or tumblr sales!

Rules:

You must be 16 or older. (If under 18 you MUST have parent’s permission)

You can be from anywhere in the world! I am shipping from Austria.

Shipping is entirely free, I will cover it. But if you live in a country that charges import tax on gifts, you are responsible for it. If it gets sent back to me, you will need to pay shipping to have it sent again.

You must be following me, so you can get updates if anything about the giveaway changes.

Please check out our online shop!

Reblog this post to enter. Likes count as additional entries. No giveaway or spam blogs. If you reblog on a side blog, let me know in the tags what the name of your blog is that you’re following me with.

Please don’t spam people with reblogs- limit 2 reblogs per blog per day.  

At the end, each entry will be assigned a number and the winner will be chosen by a random number generator.

The giveaway ends Tuesday, August 1st, 2023.

The winners will be messaged and must respond with their full name and address within 24 hours, or a new winner will be chosen.

Please respect me and my rules, and have fun!

[readingalcove]

Pay heed to Klaudia Amenábar's words! Don't let the executives weaponize fandoms. WGA Strong.

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i can't believe i have to fucking say it because i'm an educator so like how is it possible nobody else has said this.

unless a person is actively making materials/etc for children, they do not need to worry about your kid.

your child gets respect as a human. that's it. nobody's private life/artistic endeavors/unrelated interests must be controlled for the sake of your kid.

educators and athletes and artists do not have to live in chastity because your kid might see us on our days off. we do not owe it to your kid to only write poems about bunnies and only sing songs about tying your shoes. i do not care how much a person has given to children, if they are acting as an adult in adult spheres, they are allowed to. they are adults. it is your job as a caregiver to raise your kid and keep them out of adult spheres, not our job to keep ourselves out of those spheres just in case.

guess what! adult role models are going to bars and hooking up and dancing and being adults! this is so they have the mental energy to do all the child-centric things.

"it makes me feel weird to picture them like that!" i don't know how to tell you this but actors aren't actually their roles. the customer-service personality your waitress has is probably not her actual personality. the way teachers interact with students is not the way that they interact with their private lives, and it shouldn't be.

"this tells kids this kind of behavior is okay!" actually it's showing kids a normal and natural progression of a person's life, boundaries, and bodily autonomy. it's showing kids that adults are dynamic human beings. kids already know this. they know there's places they're not allowed and things they don't understand yet. it's just that you have icky feelings because you were raised in a society with black-and-white morality.

celebrities don't owe your children perfection, modesty, sobriety. and you know something? it's way healthier when they don't. "this is a person, who gets up every morning and does their job - but also has adult interests, which you'll learn about later" is way healthier as a role model than "you should be perfect like the curated image of this person and if you're not perfect you should be deeply ashamed."

anyway. idk why "think of the children!!!!" is making a comeback as a popular stance. but to be clear? it's a way of saying "this makes me feel uncomfortable, but i don't know why, and i don't feel like untangling it, so i'll blame you for it and hope you feel guilty about my children."

[readingalcove]

to you, it's a shitty sentence. to some random bitch 500 miles away, it's a fire line that'll haunt them for the next 17 years.

you don't know how impactful your writing is because it's been in your brain for far too long now. you've stared at it for hours and repeated "this sucks" over and over again to the point that you killed your capacity to feel anything about your work.

but trust me, once you get your shit out there, someone's gonna go over that paragraph you hate and go "jesus fucking christ" and put the book down to have an existential crisis.

#had someone recently praising a sentence that I didn't think anyone would pick up #like it was a sentence I put thought into #wrote it slightly different than the 'conventional' way because it felt more realistic #but it was a tiny thing #and they were like hey this tiny detail is what makes me love this passage #writing #fanfic #actually the tags are this long already #it was someone realising they were staring and defocusing their eyes to hide it #(rather than averting their gaze) #the commenter did not comment on the difference from the norm #only that they liked the detail and phrasing I did choose #anyway it was unexpected.

[readingalcove]

This is a Moving Forward PSA for everyone using AO3. I am witnessing the results of a culture clash and communication failure. Not a lack of communication, but a misunderstanding caused by changes in fandom culture.

Before fic tagging was common, fics weren’t tagged. You had a pairing, if applicable, an author’s note about genre or general content, and if they were feeling charitable, a vague content warning. There are even a few genres of fic where even vaguely tagging literally spoils the plot and impact (such as horror, psyche thriller, in which the likely content is implicit to the genre). As a result, there is a basic category tag that permits this, as a courtesy to “old-fashioned” writers.

“No Archive Warnings Apply” means the fic is PG13 at worst, probably fluff, totally safe.

“Choose Not to Use Archive Warnings” is the polar opposite. It’s a glaring Enter at Your Own Risk billboard. It means: a shitload of warnings apply but I ain’t telling because this story requires shock value. It’s very important to read the author’s notes for those fics because they might be using that older format from above.

But without the context of fandom culture that generated AO3, it’s understandably easy to conflate the two categories, given their similar wording.

#fanfic

[readingalcove]

Crazy how many people want characters in fiction to speak and act like they’ve had 20 hours of intensive therapy. Could NOT be me I want these bitches fucked up insane

#writing

[readingalcove]

anyway this should probably be common knowledge but if its not;

it is okay to disagree with a person's gender/sexuality headcanon for a character. thats fine, it's all hcs, it's personal preference and you are entitled to your own opinion.

do not. fucking tell someone you disagree with their hc unprompted. dont send them asks dont go on their posts DO NOT go in that hc's tag. bitch abt it to your friends. vague abt it on your blog. just don't start shit.

if you see a post about how Jeff is such a cute trans girl and you reply with "don't misgender a trans man! :)" and Jeff is canonically a cis dude, I am whacking you with a rolled up newspaper and sending you to your room because clearly you do not know how to play nice with the other kids.

[readingalcove]

Poll Tuesday

I feel like I’m exposing myself a little bit with this bc my introduction to fic is soo random I think, but whatever your answer please tell me the story! I wanna know haha

#from an irl friend #either one who was writing fanfic herself (which I never ended up reading afaik but it was RoyAi) #or from a different friend who read(s?) fic and ended up being my reading/writing buddy #these were around the same time so I don't know which was first #probably the first then the second #but either way the second was more impactful #royai friend (not how I'd normally describe her) was visiting from another town (she had moved) and we were having deep anime talks #other friend was local and we talked on the phone all the time and read each other fanfiction and stuff and we also had deep anime talks #fanfic

[readingalcove]

I’m telling you right now if you think authors only read your comment on their fic once you are dead wrong

#fanfic

[readingalcove]

List of Vocal Sounds for Smut

I present to you a - probably quite incomplete, I’m sure I’m missing a lot of speech sounds - reference list and a bit of a guideline for the different ways one can describe the sounds your characters make whilst writing smut. I’ll definitely be referring to it, because I sometimes get stuck on exactly how to describe a particular noise. (aka, “he can’t groan again, he just groaned last paragraph”)

Sounds (noun, both independently and describing speech): breath/breathe, gasp, moan, groan, pant, whimper, whine, shout, yelp, hiss, grunt, cry, scream, shriek, sob, growl, curse, sound, sigh, hum, noise, squeak, snarl, howl, roar, mewl, wail, choke, keen, purr

Sounds (noun, describing speech): rasp, husk, drawl, plea, murmur, whisper, beg

Descriptors (adjective): loud, hushed, quiet, low, high, high-pitched, little, tiny, soft, deep, unrestrained, restrained, strained, breathy, rough, sudden, short, drawn-out, sharp, harsh, hard, thick, smooth, thin, heavy, impassioned, insistent, hungry, passionate, repeated, filthy, debauched, sweet, slow, deliberate, guttural, languid, surprised, husky, distracted, happy, pleased, satisfied, wordless, cut-off, bitten-off, contented, hoarse, extended, long, depraved, aching, choked, strangled, broken, helpless, shuddering, shaky, trembling, urgent, needy, desperate, wanton, shattered, pained, eager

Combine a descriptor and a sound for best effect - for example, “needy moan,” “pleased hum,” or “sudden scream.” You can even use two: “low, rough grunt,” “sweet little cry,” “desperate, filthy noise,” as long as you don’t repeat a word that means the same thing, unless you really want to emphasize it. Avoiding repetition is pretty key here. You don’t usually want to say “hushed, quiet gasp” except on rare occasions when it’s very important how soft the sound was.

Use your own common sense, as well; some sounds and descriptors don’t generally work well together. “Deliberate shriek” probably wouldn’t work well, and neither would “languid grunt,” but again, this is all very situational - play around! Have fun.

Feel free to add to my lists, use for your reference or pass them around. It would be fun to see a randomized generator made, too, I’m just too lazy to do it myself. ;)

#writing

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on fanfic & emotional continuity

Writing and reading fanfic is a masterclass in characterisation. 

Consider: in order to successfully write two different “versions” of the same character - let alone ten, or fifty, or a hundred - you have to make an informed judgement about their core personality traits, distinguishing between the results of nature and nurture, and decide how best to replicate those conditions in a new narrative context. The character you produce has to be recognisably congruent with the canonical version, yet distinct enough to fit within a different - perhaps wildly so - story. And you physically can’t accomplish this if the character in question is poorly understood, or viewed as a stereotype, or one-dimensional. Yes, you can still produce the fic, but chances are, if your interest in or knowledge of the character(s) is that shallow, you’re not going to bother in the first place. 

Because ficwriters care about nuance, and they especially care about continuity - not just literal continuity, in the sense of corroborating established facts, but the far more important (and yet more frequently neglected) emotional continuity. Too often in film and TV canons in particular, emotional continuity is mistakenly viewed as a synonym for static characterisation, and therefore held anathema: if the character(s) don’t change, then where’s the story? But emotional continuity isn’t anti-change; it’s pro-context. It means showing how the character gets from Point A to Point B as an actual journey, not just dumping them in a new location and yelling Because Reasons! while moving on to the next development. Emotional continuity requires a close reading, not just of the letter of the canon, but its spirit - the beats between the dialogue; the implications never overtly stated, but which must logically occur off-screen. As such, emotional continuity is often the first casualty of canonical forward momentum: when each new TV season demands the creation of a new challenge for the protagonists, regardless of where and how we left them last, then dealing with the consequences of what’s already happened is automatically put on the backburner.

Fanfic does not do this. 

Fanfic embraces the gaps in the narrative, the gracenotes in characterisation that the original story glosses, forgets or simply doesn’t find time for. That’s not all it does, of course, but in the context of learning how to write characters, it’s vital, because it teaches ficwriters - and fic readers - the difference between rich and cardboard characters. A rich character is one whose original incarnation is detailed enough that, in order to put them in fanfic, the writer has to consider which elements of their personality are integral to their existence, which clash irreparably with the new setting, and which can be modified to fit, to say nothing of how this adapted version works with other similarly adapted characters. A cardboard character, by contrast, boasts so few original or distinct attributes that the ficwriter has to invent them almost out of whole cloth. Note, please, that attributes are not necessarily synonymous with details in this context: we might know a character’s favourite song and their number of siblings, but if this information gives us no actual insight into them as a person, then it’s only window-dressing. By the same token, we might know very few concrete facts about a character, but still have an incredibly well-developed sense of their personhood on the basis of their actions. 

The fact that ficwriters en masse - or even the same ficwriter in different AUs - can produce multiple contradictory yet still fundamentally believable incarnations of the same person is a testament to their understanding of characterisation, emotional continuity and narrative. 

#writing #fanfic