#bc unless they're recent or i keep referring to them for whatever reason i have otherwise almost definitely forgotten where they were

[presumenothing]

heyooo this is probably a weird question, but what's ur learning process exactly? like you've been doing the gifs thing, and you seem pretty knowledgeable, so i was curious

not weird at all!! i just (a) don't know how informative this answer is gonna be, and (b) have clearly deceived you into thinking i know anything at all ever, because while i do in fact Know some things my decision making process also literally looks like this:

though in terms of what i Know about the particular sort of gifs thing i like, i literally just posted this which is a hilarious coincidence

but you asked me about my learning process, so!! i have to add a term and condition (singular) here that i'm apparently an unusually fast learner for anything not requiring hand-eye coordination, but that aside… insofar as i have any Process™ it goes something like this:

decide to do the thing. in this case it was "fell into the zhou shen pit" meets "be the content you want to see in the world"

start doing the thing as quickly as possible. i don't wanna say strike while the iron is hot but.... there is truth to that. my first gif wasn't great but it was there

read a lot. i'm sorry, video tutorials, i'm sure you have actual content to offer but also 99% of the time i do not care. fortunately most tumblr posts where the gif tutorials are continue to be in text (never change)

though what and how i read has shifted over time, from initially reading pretty much every general gif related tutorial i found (there is so much So Much to read about colouring) to narrowing down to specific things i'm interested in

aside from more standard gifs (mostly interview gifs? probably??) i usually start out having a strong idea of what i want to make, then it's a matter of looking up or figuring out myself how to achieve the effect i want. (sometimes it's the other way around – i save a cool effect for reference and then the stars align and i get to use it!! very nice of them)

make stuff, post, and repeat. imo especially when you're just starting out to gif, it's important to set the "good enough" bar reasonably low-ish? your stuff is never gonna look as good as what experienced giffers make, at least not yet, and there's probably even a fundamental difference in how you're making your gifs that makes the comparison nonsensical.

basically you're likely to learn more and learn it more quickly by going for quantity first, especially since part of giffing is learning how to deal with inconsistencies like the source video lighting never being the same dammit. insert that story about the two halves of the pottery class here

considering that i started out with 0 knowledge aside from some dusty leftover recollection of using gimp like a decade ago, i think i'm doing pretty good! but also – and i cannot possibly overstate this – i have made a lot of gifs. the birthday countdown alone was more than a hundred. some things you just learn by doing

(if this sounded suspiciously like "step 1: get hamster brain obsessed with one thing step 2: ???? step 3: Profit" that's because it pretty much is. it's the most effective and fun way i learn anything. the lifehack is always to catch your brain with the correct bait)

(the other lifehack is to have some organisation, even if not in any form recognisable to polite society. my gif stuff is in the realm of tidy because i have a channel in my notes to self server literally called giffing where i put everything from "cool thing i saw" to "thing i want to gif" to "not even sure this effect is in the realm of possibility but it would be Cool yknow??". my fic stuff, on the other hand,,,)

#i...... do not think that actually answered anything. oops #if you have a more specific question feel free to send another ask! though admittedly i can't do much in the way of linking resources etc #bc unless they're recent or i keep referring to them for whatever reason i have otherwise almost definitely forgotten where they were #definitely a lot of it was read on tumblr though!! since well. nobody else really makes gifs like this hellsite (affectionate) does #also idk if you were asking about my learning process in making gifs specifically but then again #this pretty much also applies to everything else i have learned for fun and nonprofit #just that it's been months for gifmaking as opposed to literal years for learning japanese and fic writing #well more like a decade plus for the latter But Anyway. when do i get my fandom veteran card and what benefits are there #long post #asks #anonymous #journey to the gif #if you go /chrono on this tag there are probably some text post documentations of when i was actually learning? all the way at the start #the internet really is just my commonplace book now huh. that's fine actually #anyway right now there are Too Many siken bot quotes in that channel labelled with some variation of 'dammit wkx' so that's where i'm at #ramble tag

[dictacontrion]

(1) So feel free to ignore this if it's too fraught, but I really value your insight. Recently you wrote “[Queer history] WOULD shape your characters btw. doesn't matter if they're wizards...#it's pretty impossible not to be shaped by understand that there are people in the world who would kill you for what you feel." And then I saw this other post that was like "gay ppl who inject the concept of homophobia into...fantasy worlds bc they want to use their own work as an outlet: i get you...(cont)

(2) “straight ppl who inject…homophobia into…fantasy worlds bc the concept of gay ppl being happy and accepted is too “unrealistic” and…just included it for the sake of watching us suffer: [cat with a machine gun].” This is probably too contested to come up with a pat explanation for, but any thoughts on these two sort of opposing views?             

Writing about identity in fantasy worlds is a tricky business. As writers from this world, we bring a lot of baggage with us. When it comes to something like sexuality (or gender, or race) what bothers me the most, what strikes me as most unrealistic, is when people abandon only the parts that are hard to write about.

If your fantasy universe is completely distinct from ours and has no homophobia, that’s fine - there’s no reason why cultures have to develop homophobia - if you do the work of thinking about what that would look like. A world without homophobia wouldn’t be a world with only straight people or straight-acting queer people. There need to be queer couples around. The lack of homophobia needs to show through in customs and institutions and basically every part of world-building - because a world without homophobia would be a really different place.

(and i don’t just mean reimagining how life is for people who are queer, i mean fundamentally rethinking how people think about sex and who has sex with whom and builds a life with whom and how gender and sex and sexuality are established and policed. homophobia plays a massive role in the construction of gender and interpersonal relationships and desire and attraction and beauty standards and all of that would need to be thought through.)

But: all of that only goes for worlds that are totally separate from ours.

If you’re writing in a world that has any connection to this one - as is the case with the Harry Potter world, where the protagonist, among many others, grew up in our world - you can’t avoid homophobia.

Why? Because your characters couldn’t.

That is the honest-to-goodness, hand-to-whatever truth, and I write that as a queer person who’s been out for longer than some of y’all have been alive and who grew up in one an exceptionally accepting place. Queer people on this planet cannot avoid being shaped by homophobia.

That said: I don’t think that’s incompatible with the other person’s tags. Because queer people can be happy and accepted. That’s not unrealistic. But we’re still affected by homophobia. It comes down to a distinction I think about a lot, between fear and shame.

Queer people don’t have to be ashamed. Not all of us are. Which is fucking miraculous, considering, but in a good way. You can be queer and happy. You can be queer and be accepted by the people in your life. (though who is in your life will be affected by homophobia; i would have had way more work friends in a lot of different places if coworkers’ low-key, often unconscious homophobia wasn’t so alienating and shitty to be around, and i know queer people who have cut family out of their lives because those relationships became too painful.) You can be queer and have happy, loving relationships with friends and lovers. You can be queer and have p h e n o m e n a l sex. You can be queer and do work that you love. You can be queer and be loved. You can be queer and be good. You can be queer and be happy.

But you don’t really stop being afraid, not completely. Afraid that someone will see you being loving with your partner and give you a dirty look for it, or make a lewd comment, or call you names, while you’re just going about your business, if you forget that you’re supposed to hide. Afraid that someone above you at work is a homophobe and will keep you from getting promoted because they don’t want people like you around. Afraid of telling your doctors because it changes the way they treat you. Afraid that your family will kick you out or disown you or be ashamed of you or stop loving you. Afraid that one day one of your straight family members or friends will ask you to hide who you are because it makes someone else uncomfortable, and you realize that someone else’s comfort is more important to them than letting you live honestly, that they think your sexuality would reflect poorly on them, that they are a bit ashamed of you. Afraid that your supervisees or employees or students will see it as permission to talk about what you like in bed. Afraid that people will reduce you to just this one part of who you are. Afraid that you won’t be understood. Afraid of being told that what you need and who you are is fundamentally wrong, because even when you know bone-deep that it isn’t true, it’s still awful to hear. Afraid that one day someone will come out of nowhere with a chain and a bat and tie you to a fence and leave you to die, that one day someone will come out of nowhere and try to rape it out of you, that one day someone will come into a place where you feel happy and accepted with semi-automatic weapons and kill you for being there or pack you off to a camp somewhere.

That’s our history. That’s our reality.

That’s something only straight people can ignore.

If you live with that - if that is the background noise in your daily life - it does not disappear. It isn’t something that you can avoid being aware of. Even if you do the almost-impossible and are only ever with people and in places where you feel safe and accepted, you know on some level that you’re staying in that one slice of the world because things might fall apart in a profound and fundamental way if you ventured outside of it.

And that would be true for any character who has, or had ever had, contact with our society.

Plus a lot of people are afraid and ashamed. That’s not unrealistic either, and it’s not something I want to say that straight authors should never recognize.

Straight authors do need to do the work of understanding the history and experience of queer people, should try living their lives while imagining what it would be like if their sexuality was taboo, and should be really careful about what’s realistic and what’s gratuitous. Unless it’s a coming out story (which is a different can of worms) it doesn’t need to be the focus of the plot or the cause for angst or the catalyst for drama, and I think that’s what the other poster’s tags were referring to, too: stories where being queer is the reason things go to hell, as opposed to stories where someone is queer and things go to hell. The latter scenario still takes research and thought, though; the ways your character responded would be shaped by homophobia, by knowing where they can and can’t go, who they can and can’t go to for help, what options get crossed off the list automatically.

tl;dr: I don’t think those views are opposing. I do think people who are writing queer characters need to do a lot of thinking and research about what homophobia means for their characters, because there’s no way, in our world or one like it, that homophobia doesn’t mean something for their characters.

#i have a lot of other thoughts about this and am happy to answer more questions about this generally and/or re: this post #i just didn't know where to take it from here and it's already really long #lgbt #writing #representation #queer #queerness #on writing #idk how to tag this idk idk #i might legit make a pride month 'if you want to write queer characters and you're straight' resource list #would ppl find that useful? #dcsays #yay asks!