#Kind of a spur of the moment rant so might be messy

[fandomsoda]

Y’know I’m convinced most people in this fandom aren’t ready to accept the fact that Underlust was never supposed to be an easy-to-swallow AU.

The whole purpose of UL was to address very difficult and dark topics, ideally in a respectful and proper manner. It was built to address subjects that cannot and should not be sanitized or watered down. It was a serious AU at its core. It’s not supposed to make you feel comfortable, it’s not supposed to be easy to sit with. It addresses a lot of problems present in our society today and it’s supposed to make you think.

The original creator of UL was very much weird asf and I do not support them in the slightest as I have said multiple times, and there is definitely room to question their motives, but for the most part, at least in the properly canon parts of the AU and from what I remember, these darker aspects seemed to be handled with a lot of gravity and seriousness.

I’m tired of seeing people trying to “remake” Underlust. I’m sick of AU’s seeking to replace it. Because while it is definitely a flawed and unfinished project, riddled with strange remnants of its creator’s concerning behavior, it is now public domain and therefore we have the right to try and fill in the blanks and clean it up, to do it justice. We don’t need to replace it, it’s laying on the ground right there, we need to fix it. And you know what fixing it doesn’t entail? Erasing the serious subject matter.

Underlust’s more serious topics shouldn’t be swept under the rug or removed, they should be handled with care and tact, treated with the respect they deserve. Because while these subjects should never be glamorized, romanticized, or fetishized, they very much should have a chance to be depicted realistically. Not gratuitously, not graphically, not vulgarly, but realistically. Respectfully. Carefully. Accurate and respectful depictions of serious subject matter are a very important aspect of trying to combat their romanticization.

And I am sick and tired of seeing people claiming Underlust to be nothing more than that, and that no one should like it or try to do it justice. I’m tired of people just throwing it to the pro/shippers to be regarded as that kind of material when all that does is let the pro/shippers win. Don’t let them win, don’t throw UL to the dogs. It has the potential to be a very meaningful story if given care and time.

none of this is to say that you always have to depict UL in a super serious manner, nor is it to invalidate the discomfort some may feel surrounding its creator, but what I am trying to say here is to try and make future fleshings-out of this AU more considerate and to not villainize it. It just aggravates me how people will harass others for liking UL or will try to remake it in a super sanitized, comfortable manner, because UL is public domain and can be so much more than the strange actions of its creator, and at the same time it’s not supposed to make you feel comfortable. These subjects are serious, they’re uncomfortable, that’s natural. Making them seem comfortable just normalizes them.

hoping all this makes sense I promise I’m not angry I’m just- yeah

#text post #soda rambles #undertale au #utmv #semi serious post #underlust #fandom issues #fandom psa #Kind of a spur of the moment rant so might be messy

[lostinfic]

Christmas Eve (stuck) in the Lab

Chapters 1-7/10ish

Summary: Dr. John Smith and Rose Tyler both work at the Natural History Museum in London, he as a scientist in the labs, and she as a salesgirl in the gift shop. They are only friends, but the upcoming staff Christmas party promises developments they’ve both been longing for. But John and Rose end up stuck with Martha, Donna and Jack in the laboratory, and shenanigans ensue: decontamination showers, cocktails in beakers, a game of truth-or-dare and a Secret Santa rigged by meddling friends.

Tags: mutual pining, friends to lovers, fluff with light angst, found family

Rating: Teen (for now)

@doctorroseprompts​

Many thanks to the lovely and generous @onthedriftinthetardis​ for the beta.

Ao3

❄ 

Prologue - May

Rose got off the bus in South Kensington and nearly ran into a passerby.

“Rose?”

“Shareen?” She barely recognized her old friend, she looked so grown-up with her cinched trench coat and laptop bag. “How are you?”

“I’m great. I’m on my way to university. Last exam of the semester, and then graduation.” She crossed her fingers with a hopeful smile.

“Wow. Congratulations.”

“Thanks. You?”

“Oh, I’ve a job interview.”

One look at Rose’s jeans and hoodie told Shareen the kind of job it might be.

Rose lowered her head and bunched her sleeves over her hands.

You were right about Jimmy, Rose wanted to say, I shouldn’t have chosen him over my friends.

“We should do something, sometime,” Shareen said, her smile conveyed pity rather than affection.

Rose nodded, though she knew it wouldn’t happen. They wished each other good luck and went in opposite directions.

As soon as she had her back to Shareen, she lost her smile. That could’ve been me too, she thought. She shook her head; nah, I wasn’t made for university.

Around the corner, the Natural History Museum loomed, cathedral-like, with its two towers framing the main hall and the large arch above the entrance. On the East and West wings, two storeys of Romanesque windows reflected the grey sky. Lions, bats, wolves and pterodactyls carved in stone looked down at her from their perches on the facade.

Rose avoided their stony glares.

She was interviewing to work in the gift shop, no reason to feel intimidated by this great institution.

She took a deep breath, then entered the Museum.

In Hintze hall, the skeleton of a blue whale hung from the ceiling, suspended mid-swim, gigantic yet tranquil. Underneath, groups of school children walked single file, bumping into each other, distracted by the grandiose hall. Clusters of visitors, map in hand, planned their visit and photographed each other.

Something about the echo of footsteps and chatter, and the way sunlight streamed through the glass roof took her right back to her childhood. Even then, she knew Jackie brought her here so often because it was free. They would spend hours here in winter, leaving the flat unheated to save on electricity. But she didn’t care, she loved it.

Tears pricked her eyes as she remembered how curious and full of wonder she used to be as a child. She longed to be that girl again.

Oh, but she really wanted to get this job now.

❄

Standing in a corner of the gift shop, Lilian, the manager, gave Rose’s resume a cursory look.

“Band manager? For three years?”

“Yes, I booked gigs in clubs, oversaw the budget of the tours, and managed the promotional merchandise.”

And did all the laundry and the cooking and the cleaning, turned a blind eye to his drugs and alcohol use, and believed him when he said the other girls didn’t mean anything to him. 

Three years of living for someone else’s dreams.

“Your last job was at Henrick’s. Only six months. Why did you stop working there?”

Rose mimed an explosion.

To be honest, she might have blown up the place herself if someone else hadn’t beat her to it. Bunch of snobs, they were.

“Oh, right.” Lilian laughed and placed a check mark on her form. “Now let’s see your customer service skills.”

Unbeknownst to Rose, the museum, a centuries-old, respected institution dedicated to science was home to one messy-haired, Converse-wearing, chaotic genius who loved a little shop.

“Oh no, not him,” Lilian said, but too late, Rose was already walking toward him with a big smile on.

“Hello—” she eyed the badge attached to the breast pocket of his lab coat— “Doctor. How may I help you today?”

He was scanning a display of rubber figurines. He grabbed two miniatures of prehistoric mammals.

“They’re two for one,” she tried.

“What was the smilodon doing on the territory of the diprotodon?”

He moved the tiger-like figurine toward the bear-like one. He stared at them as if they would talk to him and reveal their secrets.

Rose bit her thumbnail. Did he really expect an answer? Was this part of the interview?

“Maybe he was looking for food?” she ventured.

“Kilometres away from his home?”

“I’d walk miles for the best chips.”

He grinned and looked at her, properly, for the first time. There wasn’t a trace of mockery in his smile, only genuine delight. She found herself smiling back.

Suddenly, he gasped.

“Yes! Chips!”

He spun on his heels and rushed out of the shop.

Lilian patted Rose on the shoulder. “I don’t know how you did that, but you’re hired.”

“I think I just let him just steal those figurines.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll put it on his tab.”

Rose sighed with relief and thanked Lilian.

“So, who was that?”

“Doctor John Smith, he’s the research leader at the Ancient DNA lab. The youngest one in the lab’s history, I’m told, hired before he’d even finished his doctorate.”

“Really? He’s a nutter.”

“Oh yeah, but harmless overall.”

❄

Over the months following Rose’s hiring, the frequency of the Doctor’s visits to the shop increased. Her coworkers even began to tease her about it.

He would show up and babble about multiplex sequencing of mitochondrial genomes or rant about sample degradation of human remains in the field.

Rose didn’t understand everything but got a kick out of his wild gesticulation and experiments with items from the shop. She would ask him questions, and sometimes they would be the right ones to help him out.

Although she was becoming fast friends with many museum employees, of all her new acquaintances, the Doctor was her favourite.

She didn’t know him — not really. But what she knew, she liked. She liked the way he treated everyone with respect, from the janitors to the curators. Although he had his moments of bad mood and anger, he found joy in every little thing. It was contagious. They spurred each other on, it seemed. They raced wind-up toys from the shop after hours, gave silly names to specimens in the exhibitions, pranked the tour guides and hid treats for the kids staying overnight for Dino-snores. But that’s the thing, they only ever saw each other at the museum. The closest thing to a date they had was attending the same lecture one night in November. His hand had brushed hers on the armrest.

She would be lying if she said she wasn’t disappointed on days he didn’t show up. But Rose refused to read more into his behaviour than there was. She had made that mistake before, seeing love where it wasn’t, and stayed in an unhealthy relationship. So, until proven otherwise, the Doctor was just an eccentric bloke who came to her when he was bored or stuck.

Read more on Ao3

#ficandchips #Ten x Rose #doctor who fanfiction #this updates regularly and pretty quickly #and I've already finished writing it #just needs some editing #in case you're reluctant to read incomplete fics #lostinfic writes stuff #xmas in the lab fic

[spiderdreamer-blog]

Assorted/Jumbled Thoughts on She-Ra: The Final Season (MASSIVE SPOILERS WITHIN)

Well.

I think I can safely say I was not expecting much of that to occur. So in lieu of either incoherent screaming or a larger analysis post (though I might do that upon a full series rewatch), I’ll instead offer miscellaneous thoughts on the final season of Noelle Stevenson and DreamWorks Animation’s Netflix Original Series, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, below in bullet point format.

-So I was admittedly a hard sell on canon Catradora endgame leading up to this. I thought the relationship itself was great: complicated, messy, and full of both positive and negatives that they had to work through while still caring so, so much about each other. But a lot of the fandom was, well, let’s be real, pretty obnoxious about it and the usual kinds of infighting occurred that I think are really petty and stupid (call it Klance Syndrome). Surprise surprise, when you actually involve good writing and acting instead of weird fan projections, I’m way more invested! In particular, Aimee Carrero and AJ Michalka do their series-best work by a longshot in a number of scenes here, particularly The Big Gay Moment. Well done.

-Tying into the above, I thought Catra’s “redemption arc” (as noted, I’m on record as hating that phrase/it should be called “self-improvement arc”) was extremely well handled, probably on the level of Zuko’s if in some notably different directions. The key, as with our favorite fire prince, is that she makes a dramatic, notable change in behavior and has advocates to back her up. Glimmer spurs her into action and is the first to sell others on the idea that she’s changing, and it’s enough to convince Adora to keep reaching out. What I also appreciate is that the frustrations and hangups still play a role: Adora gets aggravated by Catra’s continued reluctance to open up to people, while Catra finally articulates her big problem with Adora’s self-sacrificial tendencies in a way that leads to real emotional breakthroughs. Even things like Bow teasing her about her cuteness or Perfuma making a connection with her through their shared bond with Scorpia make a real difference in how she is seen and perceived (also, Perfuma offering to help her with meditation techniques to start unpacking “your abandonment issues and negativity” is Genesis Rodriguez’s funniest line delivery in the whole series).

-Micah being afraid of not being seen as a Cool Dad thanks to interactions with Frosta is deeply fucking hilarious. I love that Daniel Dae Kim gets to offer a quirky performance here that is reminiscent of Reshma Shetty’s work as Angella, Sandra Oh’s Castaspella, and Karen Fukuhara’s Glimmer, thus showing how he fits of a piece in their family. And the big mind-controlled fight with him and Glimmer in the climax is one more great emotional beat to add to the whole pile of their reunion.

-Melog is a good space kitty and I’m glad Catra gets to have them. That is all.

-ENTRAPDAK FUCKING RIGHTS.

-Okay but seriously no, Hordak asserting himself and tossing Horde Prime’s ass off a ledge Palpatine-style is one of THE most triumphant moments in the series. I’m intensely glad my dumb bat-eared son got to be with his autistic science girlfriend.

-On that note, were it not for the rest of the cast, especially MIchalka and Carrero, doing the aforementioned series-best work (Lauren Ash and Krystal Joy Brown also really shine as Scorpia and Netossa in their respective focus episodes, and I have to give Noelle props as well for getting to give Spinnerella some varied emotions, esp. since she’s not a “traditional” VA), Keston John would easily be the season’s voice acting MVP. As Horde Prime alone, he gets to do so much in building a proper endgame villain, by turns cool and collected cult leader (seriously, that backup group of chanting clones is massively fucking creepy), then slowly trying to wrest control of the situation, and finally a gleefully ranting extremist brought down by his own hubris. But THEN, he not only does “our” Hordak in a new and intriguing “lost” way, he does all the other clones in their clipped-but-pleasant manner AND the delightfully unexpected creation that is Wrong Hordak, who you just want to give a hug within about five seconds and is also the provider of much of the best dark comedy in the season.

-It was also really good to see Entrapta come into her own and genuinely focus on doing the right thing while still getting to be her glorious nerd self. I like how her hair began to act a a visual conscience/reminder of the important things she NEEDED to do in particular.

-The more I think about Shadow Weaver’s final moments, the more I like them? She’s always been a character defined by believing in her own bullshit, but this season starts to show some real glimmers of self-awareness (asking Castaspella to stop her if she tries to take the Heart for herself) even as she continues being awful (gestures at everything else). Yet I don’t think it’s as simple as “she Finally Realized She Cared”; even as she tells Catra she’s proud, there’s something else going on there and how she takes off her mask for the “You’re welcome” callback, appearing truly vulnerable before us for the first and last time (her flashbacks as Light Spinner still had the partial face veil, after all). I’m not sure what it is, and I think that’s the point? Catra and Adora were both hurt and abused by her, but they also did look up to her as a genuine figure of authority and trust. They’re going to have to live with their complicated feelings about that and not ever knowing who she TRULY was as a person for the rest of their lives even with the happy ending they’ve been granted.

-I think this season finally had what I could call some really great action scenes and fight choreography, and a big part of that is the immediately raised stakes via Prime and his clones/drones. The generic Horde soldiers were always pretty pathetic/easily swatted aside cannon fodder, but these guys don’t mess around. The use of the chip zombies also adds a lot of great tension to power brawls like Netossa and Spinnerella, or Mermista and Scorpia showing off their powers in truly dangerous-to-others ways. It’s still not up to the level of, say, a Studio Mir-animated series or something like DuckTales with its variety of chases and fights, but I welcomed the smoothing out of the series’ key weakness visually.

-I suppose one could say there are “flaws”: some worldbuilding that could’ve been fleshed out more (we mainly get it explained to us how Horde Prime and the First Ones brawled for control; a flashback might’ve been cool), some arguable conveniences that crop up (they JUST SO HAPPEN to be by a planet that holds Prime’s weakness, guys!), and characters I would’ve liked to see more of (Double Trouble, though their big cameo is awesome, Huntara, and the newly introduced Star siblings). But they’re ultimately small things/probably a Pressed For Time issue.

-Though I will say the one reinvented character who’s never really worked for me is Swift Wind. Which is frustrating because it’s not like he’s awful/a drag/I want to get out the shotgun every time he was onscreen. I think it’s because he’s always felt jarring as a screen presence with his comedy stylings and that I’ve never really been sold on him as this boon companion for Adora, especially since her relationships with everyone else are so compelling. He gets some okay moments here, but it’s the only real misfire in the series in terms of updating characters for me. Ah well.

-Bow got to step up in major ways this season as a leader, getting a big heroic rallying speech and everything. It’s what he deserves/I’m proud of the guy. I also appreciated things like Glimmer telling him he could still be mad at her as long as he needed, but that she wasn’t going to give up or leave him. And while I’ve never been a shipper for them, the moment where they admit their feelings before running off to battle IS genuinely sweet. It was also fun to see his dorky dads again and get a truly awful/wonderful dad joke in the process.

-I enjoy how the series doesn’t give us a “where are they now” epilogue like many other recent series, but leaves things off on a note where the future’s just ahead and able to be defined by our Best Friend Squad, now with a fully enveloped Catra. That feels right.

That’s it for the moment, though as said, there might be more posts, even longer ones, in the future. For now, I wanna say thank you to Noelle Stevenson, Josie Campbell, Katherine Nolfi, Shane Lynch, Jen Bennett, Adam Henry, Chuck Austen, Sunna Wehrmeijer, Mary Elizabeth McGlynn, the aforementioned terrific voice cast, animation studio NE4U, and everyone responsible at DreamWorks and Netflix for making this wonderful, queer-as-fuck show. I wish them all the best in their future creative endeavors and look forward, like Adora, to what’s over the horizon.

#she-ra #spop #spop spoilers #she-ra spoilers #analysis

[dravocn]

The Book of Life Chapter 3, Relationships: Maturity

How to Love

One of the great intellectual puzzles that daily life forces all of us to consider on a slightly too regular basis is: ‘Why are other people so awful? How come they are so unreliable, aggressive, deceitful, mean, two-faced or cowardly?’ As we search for answers, we tend quite naturally to fall back on a standard, compact and tempting explanation: because they are terrible people. They are appalling, crooked, deformed or ‘bad’; that’s simply how some types are. The conclusion may be grim, but it also feels very true and fundamentally unbudgeable.

However, when things feel especially clear cut, we may be goaded to try out an unusual thought experiment, which stands to challenge a great many of our certainties and render the world usefully more complicated: we can try to look at our fellow humans through the eyes of love.

The experiment requires particular stamina and is best attempted at quieter, less agitated times of day. When we manage it, it may count as one of our highest ethical achievements.

We are normally resolutely on our side, deeply invested in our own point of view and prone to trade in settled and moralising certainties. Yet, very occasionally, we have the strength to look at other people through a different lens: we notice that their reality is likely to be far more complicated and nuanced than we first expected – and that, contrary to our impulses, they may be deserving of more sympathy and consideration than we thought, even though they have hurt and frustrated us, even though their behaviour runs contrary to what we expect – and even though the temptation is to call them idiots and numbskulls and move on.

Looking at another person through the eyes of love involves some of the following:

– Imagination

Moralistic-thinking identifies people closely with their worst moments. Love-thinking pushes us in another direction, it bids us to use our imaginations to picture why someone might have done a regrettable deed and yet could remain a fitting target for a degree of understanding and sympathy. Perhaps they got very frightened, maybe they were under pressure of extreme anxiety and despair. They might have been trying to say or do something else, and this was all they could manage.

Those who look with love guess that there will be sorrow and regret beneath the furious rantings or a sense of intolerable vulnerability behind the pomposity and snobbishness. They intimate that early trauma and let-down must have formed the backdrop to later transgressions. They will remember that the person before them was once a baby too.

The loving interpreter holds on to the idea that sweetness must remain beneath the surface – along with the possibility of remorse and growth. They are committed to mitigating circumstances; to any bits of the truth that could cast a less catastrophic light on folly and ‘nastiness’.

– Hurt Not Bad

Love-thinking refuses to believe that there is ever anything such as evil pure and simple. Bad behaviour is invariably the consequence of hurt: the one who shouts did not feel heard, the one who mocks was once humiliated, the constant cynic had hope snatched from them. This is not an alternative to responsibility, it is just a knowledge that acting badly must be a response to a wound, and never an initial ambition.

The fundamental step of love is to hold on, in the most challenging situations, to a distinction between a person’s overt unpleasant actions and the pity-worthy motives that invariably underlie them. 

– A Story, Not a Headline

Moralistic thinking likes headlines; love-thinking goes in search of stories. ‘Angry spouse abandons family’ will have its origins decades before, in the old house, at the hands of unsteady parents, when innocence was first lost and stability destroyed. ‘Scandalous CEO ruins company’ isn’t a story of greed or venality, but one of loss, grief and mental illness. In the face of caricature, the task of love is proper curiosity.

– The Child Within

To consider others with love means forever remembering the child within them. Our wrongdoer may be fully grown, but their behaviour will always be connected up with their early years. We’re so keen never to seem patronising by treating someone as younger than they are that we overlook the need occasionally to ignore the outward adult sides of others in order to perceive and sympathise with the angry confused infant lurking inside.

When we are around small children who frustrate us, we don’t don’t declare them evil, we don’t bear down on them to show them how misguided they are. We find less alarming ways of grasping how they have come to say or do certain things. We don’t readily assign a negative motive or mean intention to a small person; we reach around for the most benevolent interpretations. We probably think that they are getting a bit tired, or their gums are sore or they are upset by the arrival of a younger sibling. We’ve got a large repertoire of alternative explanations ready in our heads.

This is the reverse of what tends to happen around adults; here we imagine that others have deliberately got us in their sights. But if we employed the infant model of interpretation, our first assumption would be quite different. Given how immature every adult necessarily remains, some of the moves we execute with relative ease around children must forever continue to be relevant when we’re dealing with another grown-up.

– The Possibility of Tragedy

Moralistic thinking is sure that people get what they deserve. Love-thinking believes in the existence of tragedy, that is, in the possibility that one can be good and still fail. Tragedy teaches us that the most shocking events can befall the more or less innocent or the only averagely muddled and weak. We do not inhabit a properly moral universe, disaster is at points distributed to those who could not have expect it to be a fair outcome, given what they did. Love-thinking accepts a remarkable, frightening and still-too-seldom accepted possibility: that failure is not reserved for those who are ‘evil’.

– Patience

Moralistic thinkers reach their certainties swiftly; love thinkers take their time. They remain serene in the face of obviously unimpressive behaviour: a sudden loss of temper, a wild accusation, a very mean remark. They reach instinctively for reasonable explanations and have clearly in their minds the better moments of a currently frantic but essentially loveable person. They know themselves well enough to understand that abandonments of perspective are both hugely normal and usually indicative of nothing much beyond passing despair or exhaustion. They do not aggravate a febrile situation through self-righteousness, a symptom of not knowing oneself too well – and of a very selective memory. The person who bangs a fist on the table or announces extravagant opinions is most likely to be simply rather worried, frightened, hungry or just very enthusiastic: conditions that should rightly invite sympathy rather than disgust.

– Redeeming Features

Love-thinkers interpret everyone as having strengths alongside their obvious weaknesses. When they encounter these weaknesses, they do not conclude that this is all there is, they know that almost everything on the negative side of a ledger could be connected up with something on the positive. They search a little more assiduously than is normal for the strength to which a maddening characteristic must be twinned. We can see easily enough that someone is pedantic and uncompromising; we tend to forget, at moments of crisis, their thoroughness and honesty. We may know so much about a person’s messiness, we forget their uncommon degree of creative enthusiasm. There is no such thing as a person with only strengths, but nor is there someone with only weaknesses. The consolation comes in refusing to view defects in isolation. Love is built out of a constantly renewed and gently resigned awareness that weakness-free people do not exist.

– We Are Sinners Too

The single greatest spur towards a loving perspective on others is a live awareness that we are also deeply imperfect and at points quite plainly mad. The enemy of generosity is the sense that we might be beyond fault – whereas love begins when we can acknowledge that we are in equal measures idiotic, mentally wobbly and flawed. It’s an implicit faith in their own perfection that turns some people into such harsh judges

Looking at the world through the eyes of love, we are forced to conclude that there is no such thing as a simply bad person, and no such thing as a monster. There is only ever pain, anxiety and suffering that have coalesced into unfortunate action. We are not just being kind in this notion; this isn’t merely an exercise in being nice, it’s an exercise in getting to the truth of things, which may – when we get down to the details of human psychology – be roughly and almost coincidentally the same thing.