#don't mind me i'm back on my rarepair bullshit

[laireshi]

i've been thinking about tal/alaris some more bc they absolutely Ruin me

and now i'm wondering. what if they never got together-together. because they definitely love each other and are the closest of friends. so what if their love was a slow, slow burn. and by the time one of them even started to think about confessing, tal becomes aarkein devaed. and then he's too ruined by guilt for anything else, for a long time.

and then the slow burn continues. but by the time tal realises his feelings, he also makes his choice about el/shammaeloth. and then it's obvious alaris chooses the other side. and tal keeps lying about everything... but he can't lie about everything and them, too. not when he knows how it must end. maybe alaris asks; maybe tal says no. maybe he doesn't need to ask, or maybe they both pretend they don't want more.

and then tal wipes his own memories, and caeden doesn't remember anything but gets all those feelings in his chest when he sees alaris, and maybe he remembers a moment when they were close for whatever reason, and he draws his own conclusions.

maybe he kisses alaris, very sure it's not the first time, wanting a moment of comfort among the heartbreak of fighting his friend. and instead of recognition, he's met with such a naked shock in alaris' face, and longing, too, and neither of them knows how to proceed.

#licanius trilogy #licanius #caeden #tal'kamar #alaris #don't mind me i'm back on my rarepair bullshit #ugh i love them

[azulaang-chakras]

Would love to see you go off about Zukka mah guy 👀 (and then idk Zukaang 👀)

Oh, you want me to go off on tumblr, comrade? ON TUMBLR!?

Okay.

First, let me start by saying to my followers that I'm a very mellow kind of guy. If I dislike something you like or even love, there's nothing wrong with that. Live and let live, whatever floats your boat. So long as no one goes out of their way to be a dick to people, no one should be getting hate or harassment for what they enjoy. Just because I'm not in your lane doesn't mean I'm going to throw a molotov cocktail over to see if someone crashes. My parents raised me better than that. Plus, if I find posts I don't like, I block them. If I find people who annoy me, I block them. These are good pieces of advice, my friends.

That all being said, I'm not going to hold back when I decide to speak my mind, and zukka is fucking terrible. If it was a rarepair with only a small audience, I wouldn't care. It wouldn't rustle any of my jimmies, it wouldn't grind more than a single nerve if at all. But because it's so fucking popular I have to see that shit so frequently. I see talented fanartists use their talents on that ship and I frown cus that energy should be spent on better outlets.

Zuko and Sokka ain't got nothing to build a romance on from canon. The deepest their conversation goes is, "I love my girlfriend." "My girlfriend is awesome too." "Sucks that yours turned into the moon, my dude." Zukka is only as popular as it is because they're both almost 18 and they're conventionally attractive and masculine. The funny (and infuriating) thing on that last part is that a lot of zukka shippers want to feminize the ship by putting them in soft colors, softening their features, and/or putting them more in touch with their emotions and feminine side. This is bad because they will flat out ignore their canon personalities/aesthetics and also badmouth Aang, a man who is canonically in touch with his feelings and feminine side and is super confident in his softer side. This boy will wear a flower crown with a smile. Your fave will canonically never.

(I don't have time to get into why fandoms will feminize masculine men instead of thoughtfully engaging with men who are canonically in touch with their fem side, but the point is there. I will also say that a lot of zukka content is clearly not created by actual MLM. No disrespect to real MLM zukkas, but your club is full of straight girls and also your ship is terrible)

Zukka content, from what I've seen and heard of, is full of bad characterizations that ignore the show and flat out make shit up, and shippers will also make shit up to badmouth other characters. Zukka is so bad that it harms both of them and everyone around them. Just for an example on the two boys themselves:

.Zuko is not an uwu soft boi, this man used to terrorize villages on a weekly basis. If you ignore or try to minimize the parts of a redemption arc where the character was a fucking villain/antagonist, you are doing the character a disservice.

.Sokka is intelligent and it's great that he put in the work to unlearn sexism, but he's not Stephen Hawking and he was pretty sexist. He GREW over the course of the series, but stans and zukka shippers (which is a venn diagram with a huge middle) try to pretend that he was actually perfect from the very beginning. Also, if you honestly think that scenes of Sokka being the butt of a joke (which are 9/10 hilarious) are abusive on the writer or the other characters' part, do yourself a favor: never hang out with Irish people. Google may describe slagging each other as abusive, but it's really not. Slagging is a treasured past time of our people between family and friends.

If every cringey incorrect quotes post was a ship, it would be zukka. Zukka is overflowing with jaded klance shippers who took their bullshit from Voltron and fired it upon ATLA en masse like Persian archers at Thermopylae. Zukka is a notp. I will never write for it, I will never willingly seek out content of it, and if any pissbabies want to start shit over this 100% accurate argument, I will laugh at anything you send me.

As for zukaang, that ship do go deep. "If he's your love interest, why is he my narrative foil?" Protagonist/deuteragonist is top tier shipping, as is enemies to lovers. Their relationship, both on a micro scale as individual people and on a macro scale as the avatar and fire prince, is the cornerstone of the plots of some of the best episodes in the series, including The Storm, The Blue Spirit, The Avatar and the Fire Lord, and the Firebending Masters.

I sadly haven't read much of it, and I raise my eyebrow at just how much abo there is of such a relatively small ship, but I think zukaang is a great ship.

I hate that I spent so much time trashing a bad ship and so little praising a good one, but that's how it be sometimes.

#asks #lady tortilla chip #anti zukka

[not-poignant]

Hi Pia! Hope you don't mind if I ask you a question... Both of the fandom I'm in I've been in for awhile and I love them but I've gotten kind of burnt out on them... I used to write fics and be really involved but I can't anymore because the fandom have started to make me hate everything about it, especially my fave ships :( I want to get involved again but I'm scared and don't know how... What did you do to help comfortable to stay writing again for rotg?

Hiya anon!

You might not like my response, so I’m going to give you two responses lol.

Response one:

I dealt with toxic shit in the RotG fandom by leaving the RotG fandom. I finished out my stories (at the time finishing ISWF was really hard, and there was covert harrassment in the tags re: what I wrote), and I unfollowed most people connected to the fandom or who were reblogging stuff to do with the fandom, and I stopped reading fanfiction connected to it, and I took like...god, about a year and a half off.

In that time I wrote two RotG stories without re-engaging with the source material or reading any RotG fics. I didn’t tag surf, I didn’t discuss meta with anyone else, and I usually knocked back requests to engage in the fandom again. The only RotG thing I’d engage on, was SAL. 

I didn’t do it to cope with the fandom, I did it because I was thoroughly over the fandom and its bullshit. There were a lot of folks at the time who wrote the majority of the early, popular fics who actually all checked out at that time (or over the following six months), and almost no one has come back. The drama was just too blech, and even a year and a half ago / two years ago, people talked about like...how ‘dead’ the fandom was. People moved onto other things.

So, this is probably not what you were expecting. As a coping mechanism, if I based any advice off that, it would be ‘leave the fandom and stop writing your fic until you want to write it again.’

When I came back to RotG it was because I really wanted to, but in order to avoid drama, I still don’t follow many RotG blogs and I don’t tag surf except on the rare occasion.

Response two:

So let me talk about another fandom that I came to mostly despise and yet still wanted to keep writing a really long fic. And that’s the Dragon Age fandom. *takes a deep breath, sighs it out.*

When I started writing Stuck on the Puzzle I began to follow fandom blogs and meta blogs and I think all in all I was following about 20. Dragon Age, at least when I was writing SotP was filled with tons of callout posts - often very aggressive and based on dogpiling and outrage culture. No one was free from this, regardless of what they were doing, and the character I was writing (Cullen Rutherford) drew a great deal of ire from people I respected. I didn’t like blind Cullen love, which often meant I was dealing with blind Cullen hatred. Or alternatively fans who sought to ‘prove’ that they could be Cullen critical to the popular, dogpiling crew of the time.

The push to guilt-trip readers for not commenting has a huge piece of heartwood in this fandom too. So there was just aggression everywhere. The readers weren’t good enough. The writers weren’t good enough or writing the right themes or doing them well enough. (It’s incredibly crushing, btw to keep writing in this environment). If writers quit it was the reader’s fault, or Tumblr’s fault. If readers quit it was the fault of the writers, or Tumblr. Basically everything was always someone else’s fault and people didn’t really own their shit. This was the place where I got introduced to like, preliminary purity and anti culture before the words ‘purity’ and ‘anti’ became words.

So here’s what I did:

- I unfollowed everyone except about 2 people in the DA fandom on Tumblr. Yes, this meant dropping a lot of people, even people I really liked. If they supported the drama, they were out. - I stopped tag surfing everything except my incredibly rarepair. - I went back through my DA tag and specifically looked at artwork and all the things I’d come to love that inspired me to write the thing in the first place. - I re-engaged with the source material.

In other words, I dropped out of fandom while still producing a fanwork. It was the best thing I decided to do. It was never really the meta and shit that inspired me the most anyway. It was always the source material and my interacting with that. And it was maybe a few pieces of fanart. Otherwise, everything came from my brain anyway, and I didn’t need anything else. I certainly didn’t need the drama, and getting the occasional awesome piece of fanart floating across my dash wasn’t worth everything else happening.

And those two/three people I kept around still posted awesome fanart and stuff from time to time anyway. Also they’re awesome people.

But yeah, I never stayed comfortable writing for RotG. In fact, for a while, I hated it. I’d been really hurt by certain things within the fandom, and the drama hit too close to home, and I decided it wasn’t worth it. It’s fine to do that by the way, you’ll find another fandom eventually (I found many), and if you’re meant to find your way back to the fandom, you will.

If you really want to stay in the fandom though, I do recommend some pretty drastic actions to stay in it. Fandom drives a lot of fanwork/content producers away sometimes.

Also, additionally, it’s just normal to kind of not want anything to do with a ship or a fandom for a while? Even if you love it? Burn out is normal, and may just signify that you need something from a fandom that your current fandom / ships aren’t giving you. Being in that space between one fandom and another kind of sucks, but it may be worth using this time to like...explore other things you love, watch some new shows and movies, read some new books, and remember the joy of what it is to engage in the source material in the first place. I wish you luck!

#asks and answers #pia on fandom #pia on fanfiction #personal #i mean i've burnt out on fae tales #it's partly why there's been such a long gap between TIP and COFT #because i just wanted to do other things for a while #and i did my Dragon Age fic #and still couldn't escape the drama #honestly like i have come to cherish tiny fandoms #for their general lack of drama #huge fandoms with source material that's more diverse than average but still problematic #(like everything is) #are often the worst fandoms lol #administrator Gwyn wants this in the queue #Anonymous