#the great big migration to ao3

[levithestripper]

Wanna Bet?

summary: 

“Jesse’s hands meet your hips, thumbs rubbing circles into your clothing. ‘That’s a lotta big talk there, baby. Want to put money where your mouth is?’ You smirk, putting on a show of pretending to think it over. ‘I’m game. I bet you’ll go to every single class and love it.’”

or, Jesse wants to take a woodworking class, and you propose a bet.

warnings: gender-neutral reader

length: 2.1k || read on ao3

notes: this has been sitting in my drafts for god knows how long, i hope you enjoy it!

Sharing his rented condo with you is everything Jesse could ask for and more. Having moved in a handful of months ago, the two of you were settling in nicely, making a good home for yourselves. With you around, Jesse regained something he lost when he began cooking with Mr. White: a sense of normalcy. Never having been in a committed, long-term relationship before you came along, this newfound feeling of stability in his chaotic life was a godsend. Gaining a new safe place allowed Jesse to discover new things about himself. He finds himself doing things he never used to enjoy, like watching sitcoms and cheesy made-for-television movies.

But if Jesse was forced to pick one thing he likes most about living with you, he’d pick watching you do the things you love. He doesn’t know what it is about watching you put together a puzzle or draw in your sketchbook; it just fills him with insane amounts of joy. It lit a fire under him, inspiring Jesse to rekindle the old hobbies of his childhood, specifically woodworking. The thought of returning to woodworking excited him yet filled him with anxiety at the same time. After a week of keeping his worries to himself, Jesse asks for your advice over dinner one night.

“Yo, so I was thinking—”

You snort, interrupting him, “No wonder I smelled smoke earlier.”

Jesse makes a face at you, rolling his eyes. “Oh, shut up. Anyways, as I was saying, I was thinking about taking up woodworking again.” He broke your gaze, looking down as he picked at the food on his plate. “What do you think?”

You hum with a mouthful of food, finishing your dinner. “I think that’s a great idea, love. You said you were good at it in high school, right?”

He nods, still picking at his food. “You think I’ll uh… you think I’ll still like it?”

“What? Of course, you’ll still like it! Why wouldn’t you?”

Jesse sighs, slowly finishing his dinner, stalling for time. He mumbles something unintelligible, regretting bringing it up. 

Being practically fluent in Jesse-ese, you sensed something was up, not like it was hard to notice. You knew there was no use in trying to pry whatever was wrong out of him, so you didn’t waste time trying. Instead, you take a different approach. “Jess, I can’t blame you for being worried. You’re stepping out of your comfort zone; that’s hard for anyone to do.” You reach across the breakfast bar and grab his hand, giving it a squeeze of reassurance. “If anyone can do it, it’s you; I believe in you.”

“Thank you, baby.” Jesse offers you a small but sweet smile, which you happily mirror. “You’re sure ‘bout this?”

You kiss each of his knuckles, making him chuckle like always. “One hundred percent sure. When am I ever wrong?”

He raises an eyebrow, teasing you. “You really wanna go there, sweetheart?” Jesse’s confidence returns quickly, his anxiety curbed by your words.

You get up from your chair and walk to his side of the counter, sitting on his lap, arms draped over his shoulders. “Mmm, I don’t know, maybe I do. After all, I am always right.”

Jesse’s hands meet your hips, thumbs rubbing circles into your clothing. “That’s a lotta big talk there, baby. Want to put money where your mouth is?”

You smirk, putting on a show of pretending to think it over. “I’m game. I bet you’ll go to every single class and love it.” 

“And what do you want if you win?” he asks, teeth gnawing at his bottom lip. His hands migrated from your hips to your back, sliding under your shirt.

The unexpected sensation of cold hands touching your skin made you shiver, only fueling the fire you had lit within Jesse. “When I win, you mean.” 

“Yeah, whatever, babe, just tell me what you want if you win,” he replies, a smug look on his face.

“When I win, I want you to make me something with the skills you learned from the classes.” Your fingers twist the short hair on the back of his neck into points. The tingly feeling ran up the base of Jesse’s skull, pulling a shiver from him; revenge for touching you with freezing hands.

Jesse grumbles at you in a half-hearted attempt to appear apathetic, but you see right through it with practiced ease. “If I win, which I will, you have to do whatever I say for twenty-four hours straight.”

“Deal, but your demands must be within reason.”

“Deal.” Jesse tugs you down for a kiss, sealing the bet with a smug grin.

———

Once he found a co-op offering free beginner’s lessons, Jesse signed up for two months of classes. Every Friday night after dinner, Jesse kissed you goodbye before leaving for the co-op, never hinting that you were winning the bet. And he hated it, hated how you were right—like always. Jesse had forgotten how rewarding it is to create things. It took nearly all his self-control to keep himself from living at the woodworking studio. He revels in every moment he gets to spend there, questioning why he ever quit in the first place. 

As weeks pass, your excitement grows as you wonder what Jesse could be working on. You’re hopeful he’ll bring a project home with him, but it never happens. Every Friday night, a routine forms between you, beginning with dinner in front of the television. As he’s getting ready to leave, Jesse kisses you on the forehead and says, “See you in a couple hours; love you.” 

Every week, you ask how it went, and Jesse replies eagerly, happily talking about what he learned. But when you inquire about what he was working on, all you get is a variation of, “Nah, it’s nothing special. Don’t wanna bore you by talking about it. It’s coming along nicely, though.” Jesse’s uncharacteristic defensiveness plants a seed of worry within you. You hope that his reasoning for brushing off your inquiries was that he was nervous to show you his work, nothing else.

———

Moonlight filtered in through the living room curtains, illuminating the room in a soft glow. You sat at the breakfast bar, working on something unimportant, the TV playing in the background. The front door opened, quickly drawing your attention away from your laptop. You stand to greet Jesse at the door, but he beats you to it, rushing over to the counter to give you a kiss. Fumbling with the TV remote, you turn it off, far more interested in your boyfriend. “How was your last day? Finish everything you were working on?” you ask, sitting back down. 

Jesse sat down across from you, nodding as he did. “Yeah. Place had a real great vibe to it, you know?” He gnaws on his bottom lip, eyes flitting between you and his lap. “Might sign up for a higher level class. Haven’t done this since high school; I forgot how much I enjoyed it.”

A loving smile spreads across your features. “I’m proud of you, baby. Wish I could’ve seen the pieces you made.” You don’t miss the subtle blush that dusts itself over Jesse’s face, the sight making your heart flutter. There’s a pause between you two, and you’re quick to fill the heavy silence. “You know I’d never make fun of you or your work, regardless of how good or bad it is, right?” You take his hand to reassure him, worried he didn’t bring anything home for fear of criticism. 

Giving your hand a squeeze, Jesse fixes his posture, leaning against the counter instead of slouching. “I’m sorry I’ve been so secretive about,” he motions with his free hand, “all this.” He scratches his head through the black and yellow beanie covering his hair. “I know you never would—” Jesse stammers, “—would be scared to show you anything.” You sigh with relief, Jesse’s words lifting a weight off your chest.

“Then why did you hide your enjoyment from me?” you ask, sadness laced throughout your words.

Your question pulls on Jesse’s heartstrings, only now realizing how his actions had affected you. He squeezes your hand again, kissing your knuckles apologetically. “Close your eyes, and I’ll explain?” he offers, pulling out the big guns: his patent pending puppy dog eyes.

You look him once over before complying, wondering what he has up his sleeve this time. Whatever Jesse was doing, he was quick about it as you were opening your eyes after what felt like mere seconds of having them closed. The first thing you see is your boyfriend nervously fidgeting with the drawstring of his hoodie and chewing on his bottom lip. The second thing you see is a small trinket box. It’s stained a deep, rich color and sanded to such perfection that you could almost see your reflection. You look at the box, then at Jesse, silently asking permission to touch it, which he gave. Gently opening the lid, you saw the inside was patterned with a different style of wood, something striped to contrast the solid color on the exterior. “Oh, Jesse,” you whisper with awe, “This is beautiful, a work of art.” Your fingers trace the edges as you take in his stunning craftsmanship. “Is this what you’ve been working on the whole time?”

Jesse nods, still playing with his hoodie’s drawstrings. “Took forever to get it just right. The inside is zebra wood; I had to wait a week for it to get restocked. Made one like this back in high school. Loved it more than anything; even my parents liked it. Everyone said I should gift it to my mom,” he pauses, needing a moment. “I almost did, too. But I traded it. Barely got twenty bucks of pot for it.” Jesse shook his head as if he were dismissing the bad memories from view. “But that’s not why I remade it.” 

Engrossed in his story, you do your best to reign over your emotions, rubbing your eyes free of tears. “Why did you remake it then?”

Jesse motions for you to turn the box upside down, which you do. “Your answer is on the bottom.”

Looking at the underside of the box, you find words—along with the year—carved into the woodwork.

Thank you for believing in me ♡ 

—J

Once he’s sure you’ve read it, Jesse continues talking. “Remade it so I could finally have the chance to gift it to someone I love.” He meets your gaze for the first time since he revealed your present. 

You got up from your chair without saying a word, rushing around the breakfast bar to pull your boyfriend into a near-bone-crushing hug. “What did I do to deserve someone as perfect as you?” you ask rhetorically, face buried in his neck. “I don’t even know where to begin; I love it so much.” Jesse wraps his arms around your midsection, hugging you impossibly tighter. He peppers soft kisses over your cheek and jawline, holding you close to his chest.

“I should be the one asking that, little bird. You have no clue how nervous I was, worried you wouldn’t like it or it wouldn’t turn out how I wanted it to,” Jesse sighed against your skin, and you could feel all that anxiety he spoke of leaving his body. “Not mad at me?”

You can’t help but giggle as you lift your head from his shoulder. “Not mad. Although, I’m not used to you being so lovey-dovey and mushy like this. Kinda like it, if I’m being honest.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Jesse rolls his eyes with a smirk. No matter how badly he tried to hide his amusement, you could tell he liked it, too. He moves a hand to your cheek, pulling you in for a kiss. One kiss turned into two, three, four, all soft and full of stupid amounts of love. Jesse squeezes you tightly once more before releasing you. “Just wait; you’ll like what I make next even more.”

“Oh yeah? You sound pretty confident about that,” you smirk, tugging teasingly on the ends of his hoodie.

Jesse bit his lip, looking up at you with a glint in his eyes. “Oh yeah, you wanna put your money where your mouth is?” he snarks back, his hand moving from your cheek to the back of your neck. He uses his newfound leverage to drag you back in for another kiss, only this one has the heat of a promise behind it the previous ones did not. 

A promise of a long, sleepless night for both of you.

#jesse pinkman #jesse pinkman x reader #jesse x reader #jesse pinkman breaking bad #jesse breaking bad #jesse brba #breaking bad fandom #breaking bad fanfiction #breaking bad fic #breaking bad x reader #breaking bad x you #brba x reader #brba x you #brba fandom #brba fanfiction #x reader #x you #gender neutral reader

[necronatural]

Yaoi Essay: It was Ice Age Okay

My friend @tshirt3000 organized a friend zine where we talk about yaoi that was formative to us. It's a sizeable 80 pages, and you can read everyone's formative yaois in the digital copy here.

My essay was written in a single night and primarily primes you to pattern-seek so you can see my vision. My divine truth.

Before I speak, I need to prime you with the knowledge that you understand me. Even if you think you don’t, you actually do. So.

In seminal AO3 fandombait television program Teen Wolf (2011), the main point of fascination is Stiles Stilinski; a doe-eyed ADHD obsessive who chases his every thought with a frenetic intensity that often steals the scene he’s in.

Stiles being a fascinating little creature means that people want to ship him. I’d say he has three main people to do that with, and the big ship on campus was none of them. It was practically mandatory to ship him with Derek, the dark, brooding werewolf anti-hero.

I don’t think the suffocating pervasiveness of this ship is really that deep. Derek is a sexy paranormal tall dark and handsome boytoy. I’ve never seen the Vampire Diaries but I’m sure he wouldn’t be out of place in the cast. And hey, everybody is already obsessed with Stiles. I don’t think people actually care about the text of the show, just the pretty men they’re fixated on. The shit they made in their heads is so obviously just a gay version of every romance ever at the time.

But there is a secret recipe at play. Because in 2011, alongside Teen Wolf, a film was released. It was called Thor. You know, from the MCU? In Thor, the titular character’s treacherous baby brother (adopted) imprisons Thor on earth to steal his position. On Earth, Thor meets the love of his life, her father, and a zany bit character added for comedic relief. 

Now I love Loki an abnormal amount for someone who cares as little about the MCU as I do. I love pathetic men and pathetic villains. As an avid fanfiction reader, I spent a lot of time trawling AO3 for Loki content, realizing they don’t think he’s pathetic, and clicking away. And over the years, I began seeing a weird pattern. Loki/Darcy. The comic relief girl. Her quirky antics were somehow enough to warrant a ship in a fandom that only blows up mandatory Two White Guys couples. And Loki is clearly NOT a brooding paranormal romance boy, but the ship had that Sterek stink on it anyway. A lot of it.

It seemed so mysterious, yet I remember, now, that Sterek wasn’t just popular with paranormal romance swooners, but people who just like funny ships. A zany idiot tormenting that brooding villain. A genderless mass appeal. An Entrapta and Hordak. The raw impulse for Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint readers to pair Kim Dokja and Yoo Joonghyeok before they started developing any chemistry at all, simply by nature of the kinds of characters they are. 

Okay. Listen man. I need to talk to you about Ice Age.

If you’re unfamiliar, Ice Age is about a cynical mammoth named Manford taking a great southern migration as a chance to be alone. When he rescues criminally annoying sloth Sid, he’s forced to share his newfound alone time with him. He is not happy. Meanwhile, a pack of sabertooth tigers is on a vengeance quest against the humans who hunt them by eating their tribe leader’s baby. One of them, Diego, accidentally lets the human mother jump off a waterfall to escape, delivering the baby downriver to Manny and Sid. Diego presents himself as a tracker who can hunt the humans down, and the three of them decide to travel together to bring the baby back to the humans, one way or another.

I will be clear; the homoeroticism exists, and it exists between Manny and Sid. The chemistry exists, and it exists between Manny and Diego. Manny is the heart of the film. And I don’t care. Baby’s First Yaoi, the thing that really boiled my brain, was Diego’s extremely intimate threats to Sid’s life and Sid baiting him like a barking dog. I’m sorry.

The film never really stops insisting that Sid is genuinely annoying — it starts with his entire family leaving him behind and ends with him being kind of a fuckup too — but he’s key to the synergy regardless. There’s no great moment that announces ‘well maybe they weren’t seeing Sid’s true value!’ because he doesn’t have any. He’s a lazy, annoying, unempathetic, impulsive, smug little womanizer. He never learns. The film proposes that well, he doesn’t really have to— Manny is a deeply isolated person (mammoth?) who drives people away, and he needs someone who’s annoying and can’t understand boundaries to teach him to open up again. No matter how much he swats Sid back, Sid is confident in their friendship. Just like how no matter how many times Sid’s family abandoned him, he still went looking for them. They are lonely people, and Sid being an obnoxious little pissant forces them together.

On the other hand, I can’t imagine a film with just Manny and Diego. They get along well and have a great rapport, with Diego’s bad boy fun uncle attitude and Manny’s asshole with a heart of gold routine. But the thing is that they are two dudes who mind their own business. They are only casually uniting, and Diego is only doing it so his pack of evil sabertooths can eat the baby. The warmth of friendship doesn’t exist, and it has to bleed from Sid terrorizing them. They need their idiot to unite against. And since they don’t actually dislike Sid, it can only become camaraderie.

Diego is aware Manny is a smart guy and will take any threat extremely seriously, but he acts like himself from the beginning with Sid. After a while, it becomes clear Manny doesn’t care if he threatens Sid — because Sid is annoying, and he himself has threatened Sid plenty of times — but he also doesn’t intend to leave Sid alone where he can get hurt. Diego is 100% serious, but after a certain point he finds his own threats also becoming empty teasing. By the end of the movie, he’s openly endeared and friendly. He gives death threats like he gives a noogie. 

There is something so unreal, to be honest, about forcing a born killer to hold you in his teeth after he repeatedly threatened to kill you, and him holding you there against your will because he thinks it is so funny.

Diego’s heel-face turn is obviously inspired by Manny, but over the course of the film, it’s clear that he, too, was lonely, and he, too, benefits from an extremely annoying person filling his loner life. His pack is dog-eat-dog, ready to abandon him if he doesn’t do his job, but Manny is willing to die for him, and — this is key to my childhood brain — Sid trusts him unconditionally despite doing nothing to earn it. Sid would follow Diego all year if he suddenly abandoned him for migration. He is just that kind of person.

That’s the secret recipe. What made Sterek mandatory even for people who have no interest in paranormal romance hunks. Why Darcy was thrown at Loki. This underlying vein of True Yaoi, of a dynamic based less on actual relationship and more on the core of the kind of people they are, and the kind of synthesis that is possible between those two ingredients. The zany idiot and the villain have this chemical reaction you could see from space. TO ME!

You need a zany person to do a whole lot of impulsive shit, and you need that zany person to be stupid enough to not notice they’re unwanted, or in danger, or that their dynamic is shifting, or the subtext of anyone’s behaviour. You need the person tormented to be a genuine threat, and they need to not melt, but be worn down. The simple pleasures of having your day-to-day life filled with life and noise, your every interaction with the world commented on, to the point you allow yourself to be defanged.

Sid does this to Manny, sure but it didn’t click even with the gay jokes because Manny is a kind, caring Dad Friend kind of guy who would fold for anyone. Diego is a fucking baby-eating tiger. But he trusts Manny, and Manny is endeared and receptive to Sid’s constant noise because he is lonely, and because of that, Diego, who is also lonely, allows himself to be endeared too. He had Sid’s throat in his mouth, and all he thought was that it was a funny thing to do.

My friend Hyde tagged me in this post.

#yaoi zine #wheeeeeeeee

[no-psi-nan]

🥺🥺🥺 not 2 be sappy on main but omg I actually started off in Deviantart ages ago, that was the closest thing to social media for me until the tumblr migration lol. But I never really interacted with people on there, and even upon moving to tumblr, never really interacted with people here too often either. At first I had my main blog which was meant to be more professional since I was selling art to get a little college income, so I didn't really make too many irrelevant posts. Then I decided that I wanted to be able to reblog art and support other artists, so I made a side blog where I carefully curated and tagged the posts I reblogged. I made a few original posts but no one ever interacted, and eventually I realized that people only ever sent me asks there if I tagged anything wrong. Also I found out that adding stuff like series and character tags to a reblog on tumblr is basically useless because the op will pretty much always tag those things which makes it searchable on your own blog even if you don't tag it yourself. And if op DIDN'T tag it those things, your tags will make the post searchable on your blog but NOT in the general search, so it doesn't give op any more of a boost than just reblogging it tagless. So I made another sideblog, which I still have today, and I just rapidfire reblog literally anything I find shareworthy lol. Not any interaction there but at least I'm not wasting my time meticulously tagging strangers posts hsfjdlshfks. Since I was best friends with a big name fan in my main fandom (we became friends when I left a long emotional comment on their fanfic btw <3), I helped run some small fandom events and met more people as well. When I switched fandoms, it was a fandom event that gave me a new friend too, my posts never got any traction. Large fandom discords didn't really work for me either. But on this blog I was lucky, and for the first time people started like actually responding to my comments and posts, and get conversations going! And genuinely that's what's kept my brain rot so powerful I think, because bouncing ideas off each other and joking around and shitposting is genuinely the most fun I've ever had online!! I have to thank desta and oatmeal for the fun times especially, and hillbilly---man left really nice comments on my first few fics that really encouraged me, and I always have fun trading ideas with alienn, saikikthoughts, and crookedlyinnernightmare, plus everyone else who's on here, that's too many people to type out. AND I TYPED UP A BUNCH MORE STUFF BUT TUMBLR FUCKING DELETED IT!! Are you shitting me.... Well I think I remember saying that even if it's been getting kinda quiet and boring lately so my attention is starting to wander (I've pretty much posted all of the meta that's not deep fanfic hc at this point and my drawings take me a long time to make), I'll never delete this blog and I'll still be putzing around online until the day I die probably. And I'll always remember these days fondly and hope to find another great community like this one. And also I highly encourage everyone to post, reply, interact, and play with fellow fans! I've made lifelong friendships over blorbos and even if we don't have the same blorbos any more, we're still friends. Obviously stay safe online, never send money to strangers, probably wait like a year to start shipping each other stuff but still, reach out because you never know who you might meet! I've been lonely irl for most of my life for various reasons, and my online friends have been a lifeline honestly, they're all really important to me. Two of my best friends today come from fanfic comment sections!! Also I need to get around to archiving my meta on AO3 lol (yup, it's for meta too!) but that's gonna be a lot of work so -_-U).

#notes to nopsi #🥺thank u for making an old blogger like me emotional at 7 am #even if tumblr fucking pissed me off by deleting half the post #Also I appreciate the 'hate' anons because even though it must have been super embarrassing for them #it was fun to do some more analysis on a topic I usually don't think about <3

[displayheartcode]

wait you wrote your thesis on people monetizing fanworks? that sounds super interesting, i'd love to hear more about that!

My exact thesis title was Alternate Universe – Canon Divergence: Exploring How Fanfiction Has Changed Publishing.

I had six chapters:

Evolving Definitions, where I talked about copyright law and the many historical origins of the hobby.

A Brief History of Fanfiction in Online Spaces, where I explored the history of migration – from LJ to FFN and AO3 and Wattpad, etc.

The Lexicon of Fanfiction, where I talked about language and marketing with how it overlaps with current trad tactics.

Authors Behaving Badly :-D. This was wild because I got to fact-check so many online urban legends. MZB, Anne Rice, CClaire, the A/B/O lawsuit... Even 50 Shades had a lengthy footnote! I discussed a lot about ethics, both online and offline practices, where people draw the line between filing off the serial numbers and plagiarism, etc.

Surveys. I talked to five people who have a foot in both wolds, editors and freelancers and writers, and asked them on how they defined certain terms, spheres of influence, use of monetizing, etc.

The conclusion, which had a super fun feature about the Realm of Ruins disaster. I also went into detail about Big Bang Press, and what can be determined for the future. (SPOILER: Not much! Between the evolving online landscape and the increased monetization, we are in unknown territory!)

Once again, major thanks to people like @battlestar-royco, @longsightmyth, @colubrina, @flyingcrowbar and others for supplying quotes and extra reference materials. Great motivators and people!

#libraryleopard #my thesis advisor used to work with CClaire and then also at the house where 50 shades was published #i apologized so many times in my emails to her about the cursed information #the moral is when you give rachel carte blanche on a paper topic you should expect information overload #and she will fact-check like hell #laptopgate was blown out of proportion and i could find only one case where rice used a c&d on a fan #rachel in real life #rachel talks pub

[cyrilphd]

CYRIL MASTERPOST

going to upgrade this post to be a Cyril masterpost SO hii this is my vtm OC he makes me crazy

CARRD

this is where most of the context you'll find on him is, minus a few things like his big overarching goals and his planned horrid form as not to be spoilery to the other players in my campaign (none of them follow me on tumblr though, so...)

REF SHEET & ART

big thanks to cain for bringing my guy to life

and continuing to take my money when i pay him to

TAGS

#cyril merricks - actual content, art, and various asks i've answered to flesh him out

#cyril - meme posts that remind me of him

#c - aesthetics and vibes

STUFF I'VE WRITTEN

underneath the cut is links to the individual fics and a short summary of each one

AS PROMISED I have migrated my Cyril works off of google docs into much more presentable ao3 fics so here they are once again in chronological order, each of them (so far at least) takes place before our campaign starts

Debut Oeuvre

Cyril is tired of being out of the loop when it comes to the teachings of vicissitude, his sire is being difficult but promises more information if Cyril completes just one vaguely defined task. 'Let's just get it over with' He thinks, not fully understanding the consequences of what 'it' might be.

Employment Opportunity

Tyson's prospects aren't looking good, he's getting on in life and he doesn't particularly have a great retirement fund, relationship with his children, general odour, et cetera. He counts himself lucky that his landlord is a real upstanding guy, willing to be flexible as Tyson tries not to end it. This is another of those moments, being given a small job that has a great payout for him. This would be a learning experience on how to negotiate better terms and really read the fine print before agreeing to anything.

Dubious Allies

The prince of New Hammington, Ohio, has just been diablerized, which is bad news for Cyril because he happened to be his entire support system. What's worse is that the new prince has managed to dig up dirt on him, and knows that he is both a Tzimisce and a former Sabbat member, things that the Camarilla doesn't typically enjoy. In his time of trouble, a vague missive is delivered to him, and he decides to follow its instructions, because really, what does he have to lose?

Feeding Time

Ruben lives a life of a typical shut-in, with the benefit that he at least has a job... Though not a glamorous one. His apartment is comfortable enough and he doesn't need all too much room, so he's happy to live there. The landlord seems to have a lot of strange rules in place, though, such as only being able to pay in cash... And his attitude is really very offputting. Tonight, he's about to find out why those rules have been put in place, and perhaps understand why his landlord is so standoffish with him.

#vtm #vtm oc #vampire the masquerade #tzimisce #cyril merricks

[kiwiana-writes]

7, 10, 13 for the beginning of the year asks!

7. Will you change anything about the way you interact with other writers?

I’ve been trying really hard to get over my chronic crippling fear of being annoying/too much/unwelcome and actually sliding into the DMs of people I want to get to know—it’s not something that comes easily to me at all but I’ve made some really special friendships in the last year and I’d hate to miss out on more of those, so. I’ll keep working on it 😅

Apart from that, trying to be more consistent with my commenting because I know how much comments mean to me as an author (including going back and commenting on stuff I bookmarked when doing my initial whip through the fandom tag after I gave up on trying not to hyper fixate here lol), continuing to share snippets of other authors’ work on tumblr and get hype, and maybe the big one—get better at subscribing to authors I like!! I’m great at subscribing to individual fics but for some reason I keep forgetting author subs are a thing and then being annoyed I’ve missed fics from authors I love 😂

10. Will you keep a record of all the fics you write and/or post this year?

Yes! My nerd ass has actually spent a decent chunk of today not only migrating my batshit Google sheets stats tracker into Airtable to make it a little easier to manage (something something 229 works on AO3 fml) but also adding a pretty cool WIP wordcount tracker into it as well. Because right now it’s all scattered across 52+ docs and a pain in the ass to track. It’ll also have the benefit of letting me see what WIPs I’m ACTUALLY working on…

I also got Zapier set up to create a new row in Airtable whenever I create a new Google doc in my WIP folder, because again, nerding out.

Definitely gotta put some thought into what stats I want it to calculate, though.

13. Aside from fanfic, are there any other fan works you’d like to try creating? Fanart, or fanvids, gifsets, or podfic? 

I have taken the tiniest of baby steps into gif making in the last month or so with my WIP Wednesday/Six Sentence Sunday/etc banner and what I learned from that process is that gif makers are even more ridiculously talented than I already thought they were. Definitely want to play with that more, maybe.

Also neither of them are new things to try, but I did pull back on both podfics and bookbinding in the last year and I’d LOVE to get back into both of those.

[fanfic asks for the new year]

#fanfic asks for the new year #cha-melodius

[syoddeye]

for the ask game!!

💭 What's something you haven't written about that you'd like to write about?

🚦 Why/when did you start writing fanfiction? Why did you start posting? (you’ve def mentioned this before but i’m curious lol)

Hope you’re having a great day!

hiiiii friend!!! 🫶 you too, i hope your week is going smoothly!

💭 What's something you haven't written about that you'd like to write about?

There are a few things. I'm kicking around an enemies to lover story for Kate Laswell and her wife. I'm also noodling on two different Gaz fics, both inspired by 50 word fic challenges: a smutty lil thing about missing a dinner reservation and picking up a hitchiker!gaz.

🚦 Why/when did you start writing fanfiction? Why did you start posting?

I treated this question like an old man reminiscing on his porch. My bad. 🧍

I started writing fanfiction as a preteen. I don't have a specific year, but it was during the time of Geocities and webrings. I belonged to two Sailor Moon webrings and ran two sites. One dedicated to Sailor Mercury, and another dedicated to Tuxedo Mask. I wrote and posted fanfic to both of them with ridiculous OC inserts. My first big fandom I wrote for was 2009 Star Trek (specifically ONTD Star Trek lmao), and posted to FF.net. I later migrated to AO3.

I've fandom-hopped over the years and took a break from writing fanfic back in 2015/2016? I started writing again after I was sucked into the COD fandom a la thirst edit of Soap, in pain, in Las Almas. I only started to post when I re-joined tumblr.

#sy asks

[dont-offend-the-bees]

Dreamling Ficlet #1

I used to be able to just post little fics here and there, without worrying about making them a big thing or editing them 6 times. I miss it so I’m gonna start trying to do it again. I spent no more than two hours on this, most of that making my mad messy first draft a bit prettier. 1.5k, sweet and soft.

Enjoy <3

(The song playing over this scene is Across The Great Divide by Frank Solivan. It’s one of my Hob songs <3)

[Read on AO3]

*

“Are you the king of songs, then?”

“Hm?” it takes a moment for Dream to become fully cognizant of the query; immersed as he had been in the gentle flow of music through his ears, of the warmth of Hob Gadling where he stands pressed close, swaying in time. “What makes you ask that?”

Hob shrugs, a bare shift of his shoulders against Dream’s. Somehow, in the time they’ve been dancing, they’ve migrated closer, closer. Drawn inexorably together, almost to the Platonian ideal; a single creature reunited, boyd and soul. There is no place more fitting for Hob to lay his head, Dream decides, than the welcoming crook of Dream’s own throat. “Well. You’re the king of stories,” Hob explains, soothing his palms where they rest upon Dream’s upper arms, their elbows touching, crossing, a bridge between where Hob clings high, and Dream low. “A song’s a kind of story, isn’t it? When you think about it. Some more than others, perhaps.”

It’s an interesting thought, and one to which Dream’s never given much consideration. He considers it now, turning the question over, pondering it while his hands ponder the slight dip of Hob’s strong waist. While his soul ponders the quietude this position brings. He thinks, and Hob lets him do so uninterrupted. Content, it seems, to enjoy a similar peace; to slide his hands across Dream’s back, grounded in the press of palm to spine. Content as he has been all this time, though how much time that is Dream cannot possibly say. Hob is quite adept at making Dream lose track of it. However long it has been, they’ve been dancing for much of it. Though the slow, subtle sway and shuffle they’ve subsided into could hardly be called ‘dancing’ by any formal definition.

But now is not the time for formality; and dancing, in Dream’s admittedly limited experience, lies in intent as well as execution.

“I do not think I can claim sovereignty over songs, no,” Dream eventually concludes, the truth seeming rather apparent when he alights upon it. “At least not solely. They belong to all of us.”

“All of the Endless, you mean?”

“Yes.” He balances his chin against Hob’s shoulder, for they are almost of a perfect height to do so—a little twist of serendipity, that his chosen form should prove such an easy match for Hob. Dream looks thoughtfully into the dwindling crowd that dances alongside them. Older humans, silver hair shining in the multicoloured light, the lines of weathered faces deepening with their smiles. Dream had dropped in on the New Inn, as he is wont to do, unaware that the back room had been hired or for a bi-monthly seniors dance social. Unaware that Hob would gleefully grab his hand and haul him onto the floor, their youthful appearances be damned, because they were older than the combined age of all these people and it is, after all, his pub, thank you very much.

They had been met with no resistance, though Dream has spotted a handful of the elderly attendees sneaking glances over at them, occasionally smiling, waving. Cooing amongst themselves about those ‘nice young men’. How young they would all feel, Dream thinks, if they knew what manner of creatures really danced amongst them. How young they appear in his eyes, not even a century to their names; with lively eyes and vital hearts as they seek one another, twine their weathered fingers, indulge in the simple joy of touch, of music.

Dream’s hand slides up, presses to Hob’s back. He can feel, dulled through muscle and bone, the quiet thrum of his heart, beating in perpetuity. “A song may be a story, that is true enough,” Dream elaborates, voice pitched low for Hob’s ears alone. “But there are unnumbered reasons for why a song may come into being. Some spring forth from delight—and indeed, Delirium. Innumerable compositions originate in the contemplation of Death. Songs of mourning and remembrance, fear of what lies beyond, hope for where the soul may come to rest. Since the first human mouth opened to speak, songs have been song from the bloody, howling beast of Despair that bares every beating heart raw at one point or another. And.” He purses his lips around the reluctant concession. “I suppose Desire also holds their fair share.”

“More than that, I reckon,” chuckles Hob, quite correctly.

Dream rolls his eyes. There can simply be no accounting for taste. “Destiny, as well. Even Destruction, I’m sure; tragedies on a large scale have served as artistic inspiration for centuries. All have their share of music composed in their name. If ever a feeling was felt, it was likewise put to music; it is in the nature of humans to attempt to describe the indescribable. Music bonds us, my siblings and I. We each receive our offerings.

“I suppose songs are rather like stories in the sense that I can’t imagine humanity will ever cease in their composition, or their refrain.”

He closes his eyes, lets the music of this present moment bleed into him. Soft strings, a pleasant voice. The earthbound musings of a rambling heart. “I have always been… fond. Of the music of humans. I hear it often, in your dreams. I hear masterful compositions, orchestrations experienced once in person and subsequently never forgotten. I hear the rhythm that pounds so loud it reverberates in your lungs, the cacophonous chorus of a thousand voices crying out as one. I hear those short, repetitive refrains; the disjointed lines of verse you simply cannot get out of your head.” His fingers find Hob’s long, soft hair, and probe wonderingly at the base of his skull. “They follow you as surely as sleeping as in waking; your minds sing to me, even deep in slumber. The strains of the subconscious.”

Hob swallows, a dry sound in Dream’s ear. “Yeah. Always loved music. I like the stuff that feels alive, the stuff you’re meant to holler; reckon there’s not a drinking song in this country from the last half dozen centuries I couldn’t at least belt out the chorus to.” He tugs on the back of Dream’s coat. “Got a favourite?”

“I have many.” He tucks his nose into Hob’s hair, adding the clean, slightly salt-tinged scent of his scalp to the symphony of his sense. “This one is beginning to grow on me,” he adds with a slight smile.

He feels himself lovingly caged as Hob’s arms lift, draping around Dream’s neck. The suede of his jacket rubs at the bolt of Dream’s jaw, a pleasant irritation. “We’ll have to write a song,” says Hob, a matching smile in his voice. “About us.”

“About us?”

“Yeah, don’t you think? Got plenty of material. C’mon, I’ll start.” He taps a lilting rhythm on Dream’s back as he clearly enunciates. “There once was a young man named Hob.”

Dream casts a withering look into Hob’s hair. “I believe what you have there is a limerick.”

“Go on; add a line!”

“The song of my love will not be a limerick, Hob Gadling.”

“Fine, I’ll keep going,” Hob sniffs, tugging Dream’s earlobe. “Who fell in love with an inveterate snob.”

To his utter mortification, Dream honks out a short, inelegant laugh. “Hob,” he admonishes, a less-than-pleasant feeling of warmth rising in his cheeks and the tips of his ears.

Hob’s laugh is not nearly so undignified; although it comes on the tail end of snorting snigger. Coarse though it may be, it slides on the wings of the waning song and lingers in Dream’s head and his heart as its own small, subtle melody; sung low and loving into Dream’s skin as Hob’s smile presses into his neck.

“Alright, alright, we’ll do it properly” Hob concedes, with a discreet kiss beneath Dream’s ear. “Later.”

There is a quiet vulnerability in the way that Hob makes him feel. In the dryness that rises in Dream’s throat, in the way his hardened heart begins to race rabbit-fast at Hob’s mere proximity. It is a feeling of smallness, too vast to contain. It is an exultant embrace of the terror of truly living. It is seeing, and being seen.

Dream wraps Hob tight in his arms, and reminds himself, barely, not to handle him with too crushing a grip. “Ours will be a lengthy song.”

“Yep,” Hob agrees easily, setting them once more to swaying. Dream hadn’t realised they’d stopped. “And it’s going to get longer, and longer, and longer—”

“Will this song ever be finished?”

Thanks for reading <3 Reblogs and comments always appreciated ^^

Hob kisses him once more, and his voice whispers across his ear, a simple strain that sets the universe in tune. “Not if I have anything to say about it.”

*

#the sandman #the sandman netflix #dreamling #hob gadling #dream of the endless #my fanfic

[ussjellyfish]

16. What’s your most common “Additional Tags” tag?

17. Your favorite character to write this year?

29. Favorite line/passage you wrote this year?

16. What’s your most common “Additional Tags” tag?

I have tagged pregnancy 75 times. That's only 18% of all my fics! (It's a big chunk of my word count...but...uhhh). I feel bad, and don't, and do...I like it, I'm good at it. Someone has to do it? It's a valuable fandom niche.

17. Your favorite character to write this year?

I have written mostly Michael Burnham and Laira Rillak, mostly together. I wrote a handful of drabbles and other short things (like 3000 words worth) but most of my word count has been these two.

I love Michael's logic, and her kindness, how she thinks and feels deeply about everything. She has this great impulsive side too, that's fun to write. She's very thinky, and gentle. I love her caring and optimism.

I love Laira's patience, and her calm. Her sense of humor and her commitment. I love how she's so classy and important, but a wild space pilot at heart. She's more chaotic in her internal monologue, her heart is more of a mystery, while Michael knows hers.

29. Favorite line/passage you wrote this year?

In migrations and other recurring phenomena (Star Trek: Discovery, Michael Burnham/Laira Rillak, rated E). Laira manages to very carefully avoid saying she is or isn't ill, distracting Michael from climbing out of the turbolift they're trapped in. It's all very careful dialogue (Michael worries, Laira evades, in the end she's totally fine and they have sex). It was really fun to write. The flirting and the not-flirting. I loved it.

I also really love this section that I haven't published yet.

"In this hypothetical scenario, are you still pregnant?"

"Is there a universe where I'm not?"

"Maybe one or two."

ao3 wrapped questions.

#thank you for asking! #ao3 wrapped #rillham

[spiraldancing]

you know, i’ve been watching the whole explosion over the AO3 board of directors voting thing and what really really really gets to me is all the antis who are trying to decry AO3 over and over for the fact that it hosts “pedophilic” content or “it has rape/non-con fic!” really not understanding it.

yes, i know antis are stubborn and that you can point out over and over and over that just because people write or draw this stuff does not mean that people want to see it happening in real life. i myself have written non-con & incest & very gory things over the years. but does that matter to antis? no. because i like to write/read non-con & incest fic, it obviously means that that’s something i actually support in real life. it obviously means that i am someone who should be told “go kys” as i have seen antis do over and over. i’ve never seen a proshipper harass someone; i’m not saying it hasn’t happened, it possibly/probably has, but the discrepancy here is that i see antis being the ones to throw around death threats, harassment, and more much more often. the amount of times i’ve read “proshitters” by this point just has me sigh so loudly.

but here’s the thing.

the reason why the whole thing with Tiffany G is so fucking huge for we humble peddlers of our ships and wares is that it is indeed a fucking censorship run. i know that many antis are too young to remember the purging of FF.net when they suddenly struck down the whole notion of NC-17 fics ( though you can still absolutely post them on FF.net the site is a wasteland and i return there only to reread really old favorites of mine ) and now those fics must be posted as M. or, hell --- the whole fucking thing with livejournal which was also censorship. there were many communities on livejournal which i loved because they had such great content.

and then the banning of queer content began to roll out.

why did that happen? russia bought the rights to livejournal. and we know that russia has a very deep seated history of censoring LGBTQ+ content. they host the servers, they declare what can and can’t happen on the site even now, and it is very literally proof that a foreign nation can absolutely influence the way a website is run and dictate what is and isn’t allowed on it. and if that means that queer content is going to be sanitized from a place that had hundreds of communities of all kinds, from fandom to writing to roleplay and the sharing of doujins and ships and more? well, that’s a big reason why it’s so concerning.

i used to love the community weepingcock on livejournal which was a hilarious place to go read professionally published writing that involved smut. it was great. i have no idea if it’s still alive or not but the point is that when russia acquired it, there were justifiable fears over what it meant for the sake of censorship. those fears panned out as well. there are many dead and defunct communities on livejournal now. i haven’t ever looked at dreamwidth which is where i know many livejournal users migrated, but the point here is is this.

that for every anti going and saying that people who are very pro-fiction and pro-ship and more are overreacting to this? no, we’re not. i remember livejournal. i remember ff.net. i remember them both thriving and then the censorship began to roll through and that is why the Tiffany G situation is so concerning. just because you want to strike down those fics holding such content and you want to sanitize it doesn’t mean that that is going to ever stop those from being written. it doesn’t mean that we’ll ever stop making the works we want to see.

the fact that she is also basing her platform on very easily disproven lies is something else as well. i am very aware that media in china is strictly controlled and that the Great Firewall of China is very much a known thing; the fact that people from China are speaking out against Tiffany G should say everything in how they believe she’ll enforce the censorship. censorship is how people want to enforce the ability to control things. i don’t mean by fic in general. i am talking broad strokes here; there’s a reason why there’s always lists of banned books circulating around. there’s a reason why books such as 1984, Fahrenheit 451, To Kill A Mockingbird, Lolita, Maus, and more are on those lists. these are books that are beloved and books that involve subject matter that can and does make people in positions of power uncomfortable.

but just because you think that the censorship should be enforced or that the fics should be taken down doesn’t mean anything. all it means is that the works which get removed start with what’s seen as “socially unacceptable” and it moves on from there. if the censorship strikes down our works, then it will strike down your works too. and if you think that your way of doing things is so much better because you claim that you’re morally superior for the fact that you condemn someone for wanting to see two fictional characters kiss? then i am sorry for you. i am sorry because you are deliberately remaining insular against so much potential.

i understand there are likely many antis out there who may feel trapped into things, that they want to get out of it - and you can. but for those who want to remain stubbornly in their position? please, go experience life. there’s so much more to it than trying to berate people for what they enjoy consuming in fiction.

life is so much more nuanced than people want to believe. fic and art explore those nuances. i fully respect anyone who looks at something and goes “that is not my cup of tea” because, let’s be honest -- everyone will have different reactions to the same movie or show or story. that’s the beauty of creativity. the ability to see the nuances of how someone has interpreted something is brilliant; it’s a wonder to behold. and censorship would strip that away from us. AO3 is a godsend of a website. it is wonderful for archiving things. there has been so much fic lost out there because archives have gone down. there has been so much artwork forever vanished to the sands of time because websites have died.

so even if you disagree with the site, even if you disagree with the content that’s hosted on there, even if you want to yell and scream about AO3 and the things you can find on it? you should at least respect it for what it represents, especially to those of us who understand the very real danger of censorship and the removal of things from the internet. because if it can happen to us? then it can and will happen to you.

#ao3 #anti-ao3 #pro ao3 #i am a very vocal supporter of ao3 #but i think that people need to remember that this is not a good thing #but i'm just blasting this to both sides because I Am Tired

[kitkatt0430-recommends]

Since I'm going through my old FFnet bookmarks lately, in part checking to see which ones can also be found on Ao3 too these days, here's a rec list of fics that I first read on ffnet back when that was still my main site for reading fanfic. It's the first of what will likely be several lists.

The story descriptions are mine, not the original, so they help convey my impression of the fics.

The Muppet Contracts by Lucinda- A crossover between Angel the Series and The Muppet Show. When a less than reputable agent to the stars is brutally murdered, all signs seem to point towards Count von Count, a dangerous vampire who commanded the respect of Angel's grandsire, the Master. But not everything is quite adding up.

Has a prequel called Counts of Blood. Not long before the Slayer's arrival in Sunnydale, Count von Count visits his old friend, the Master.

They are both rated M by the author for violence, mostly (but not entirely) on the part of the Count who - though still a muppet with OCD - is very much a dangerous vampire here. And I'd say the second fic (the prequel) earns that rating a lot more than the first. Sadly these don't seem to have been migrated to Ao3 yet.

Accidental Drag Queen & the Undercover Detective by serafina20 - Jonathan Crane runs away to Chicago after escaping Arkham during a riot. After his first attempt to start over fails, he finds himself working at a drag bar and cultivating his own drag persona as Sugar. Unfortunately there's a very good chance that the attractive PI who keeps showing up is actually the Batman in disguise...

Rated M for sex later in the fic and for a sexual assault that takes place shortly before the start of the fic. This one has been migrated to Ao3 (yay!) and apparently has an in progress sequel that I hadn't known about (last updated in 2022), which is great since the first fic ends a bit abruptly.

Marching to the Beat of a Different Timeline by fandomlver - A BtVS and Sarah Jane Adventures xOver where Luke and Dawn meet at Oxford and their disparate worlds of aliens and demons collide head on. The fic is complete along with a completed sequel called Travelling in a Wibbly Wobbly Liney Whiney, where the Doctor, Amy, and Rory get in on the fun. The first fic is marked gen (it's really more pre-relationship), but the second fic has Dawn/Luke marked as the main ship.

Both have been moved to Ao3 and are rated T.

Soulworld by Philip S - First of a series. In 1907, Angel and Spike changed the destiny of the world when they invoked ancient magic to return the souls of the dead to every vampire in existence. Angel swore to protect his ensouled brethren and for the last 100 or so years has done exactly that. The arrival of a new Slayer in LA poses a threat to his people... but also an opportunity to save a young woman from the Watcher's Council.

There's a number of other fics in this series that can be found through the Author's page on ffnet, so I'm not going to list them all here. Looks like they're all rated M and none of them have been migrated to Ao3. It's a really interesting concept and I remember finding it quite well done. So far it seems to be holding up on re-read too. It's Buffy/Angel as the eventual main ship and, if I'm remembering correctly, some of the later fics include Faith/Spike as well.

Something More Important by serafina20 - The start of a series where Steve Rogers is a woman. Sort of. She doesn't think there's so much difference between men and women anyway, so what's the big deal if everyone thinks she's a man? Aside from the legal trouble, of course.

Steve's pretty genderfluid in this one and I think it was one of the first fics I read with a character where the genderbended character was giving off major nonbinary or bigender given how her relationship with gender is treated. Which, back when I hadn't yet figured out I was a she/they enby myself, surprised me how comforting and relatable it was to read.

Most of the fics in this series are rated M (some are T) and it is on Ao3 now too. It's both Steve/Bucky and Steve/Peggy ship-wise.

#type: rec list #rec list #fandom: angel the series #fandom: buffy the vampire slayer #fandom: the muppet theater #fandom: doctor who #fandom: the sarah jane adventures #fandom: batman (movies - nolan) #fandom: captain america

[i-revolve-around-you]

I think it's about time I wrote a proper introduction post

Hey y'all, welcome to my blog! I'm a tumblr veteran but decided to start over on a new account recently. Why? Your guess is as good as mine.

🎵 the basics 🎵

nick ~ 28 ~ he/him ~ bi ~ white author ~ musician ~ gamer ~ nerd multi-fandom/shitposting this blog will be (mostly) SFW, but i still would rather not have minors following me. i just prefer interacting with adults, sorry. it's not personal. my likes, however, will be N/SFW, so be warned

my messages and ask box are always open! feel free to hit me up!

more info (including other links, and a list of fandoms/things i like) under the cut

tags: my ramblings | my face

🤩 a bit more about me 🤩

heya! the name's nick. i've been on tumblr since like...2011 or so? i was really big into it in my college years (2012-2017) but after The Great Tumblr Porn Ban of 2017 I've sorta been drifting in an out. When The Great Twitter Debacle of 2022 happened, I decided to migrate back on a new account so I could start fresh.

this account was immediately suspended because of my side-blog. which was a bit too unsafe for work for tumblr's guidelines ig 🙄 not mentioning that they had just recently updated their policy and everything i was posting was PERFECTLY FINE under them but w/e

so i started another one lmao and that's the one that you're looking at right now! my other account has since been restored but at that point I was already situated over here so like. whatever i guess. lol

i'm currently 28, and bisexual. semi-recently out of the closed as bi, actually. for years i identified as gay, but over time i started realizing "actually...i do kinda like girls?" i still identified as "gay" cuz it was easier than saying "so like i'm bi-sexual but mostly homo-romantic but also maybe potentially demi-sexual but only when it comes to real people?" then around 2020 it just kinda clicked with me, and the label of "bisexual" just felt right

anywho you didn't come here for my full life story. here's just a little bit more about me:

i'm a total nerd. i love video games, playing Yugioh, DND (just starting to get into that one), etc. i'm a writer. i've written several fanfics (some of which i'm really proud of, some of which i'm...less), and have a goal of one day publishing a novel (my main genre is YA contemporary with queer themes and characters). i'm a musician. i actually got my bachelor's degree in music (BA in Music). my main instrument is drums/percussion, but i'm learning a bit of guitar and can play a little bit of piano. i'm also a composer/songwriter, though haven't been writing as much these days. if i write anything cool i'll be sure to post it here!

🎭 the artist formerly known as 🎭

previous account: @excuuuseme-princess other previous urls: musicdork, sincerely-whelmed, futuremehatesme, @nickplayswhat, @spearfeld, among others, probably

🔍 other places to find me 🔎

tumblr sideblog (N/SFW, seriously be warned): @fadingfast1 twitter: @libromancerfire n/sfw twitter (again...be warned): @whatifitspriv tiktok: @libromancer_fireburst ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkjaden825698

⚔ fandoms/things i like ⚔

Books 📚

Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli

Orphan X series by Gregg Hurwitz

Darius the Great is Not Okay / Darius the Great Deserves Better by Adib Khorram

TV shows 📺

Arrowverse (especially Legend of Tomorrow [r.i.p. 😢])

Doctor Who

Travelers

Manifest

Movies 📽

Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse

Love, Simon

Cartoons/Anime 🍞

Yu-Gi-Oh! (DM, GX, 5Ds, ZeXal, Arc-V, currently watching VRAINS and Sevens, have yet to start Go-Rush)

Code Lyoko*

Video Games 🎮

Resident Evil (played all mainline games, some spinoffs, faves are RE2make, Village, and Revelations 2, Ethan Winters is my husband)

Horizon (Zero Dawn, Forbidden West)

Persona (mostly 3 and 5, still need to finish 4, but Kanji is bae)

Fire Emblem (have played all except FE1, 2, 3, and about halfway through 5 but keep losing interest, Engage was FANTASTIC, but Ike is my favorite character)

Zero Escape (999, VLR, ZTD, Sigma Klim is my husband)

Life is Strange (particularly LiS2, but I love them all)

The Legend of Zelda

Golden Sun*

Music Artists 🎼

Paramore

Neck Deep

The Wonder Years*

Other

Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG

*fandoms/media I was once very involved in, but not as much anymore, still enjoy though fandoms/media i consider to be some of my faves/am very active in will (try and remember to) update as new things become relevant to me lmfaoo

#about me #my ramblings #introduction post #intro post #introducing myself #i like to talk about myself shut up #long post #readmore

[taestefully-in-luv]

anon who had to re-read the chapter is back! and I'm on my laptop now to TYPE a lot of things lol

FIRST OF ALL, thank you so much for writing and finishing Love Again!!! Not a jab in any way to writers who weren't able to finish their works (I swear I understand them) but it's just so uncommon to me to find GREAT fics that interest me so much and are completed. In the end, fics are free and we have a lot of things going on in life so for me it's not a big problem at all 😆

I'm a silent reader (I'M SORRY) so I have to say now that I'll re-read the whole story for a minimum of 2 times and I hope you know your works are such a gem that people want to re-read them! If not the first, I think your works are one of the firsts I've read here on tumblr after kinda migrating from ao3 AND MAN did you make me stay here on tumblr! 

I started Love Again I think when you were just on the 2nd chapter?? I'm not sure but looking back wow that's a long time I guess? And I just want to say THANK YOU really for the wonderful work. It made me feel a lot of things and realize a lot of things too! The story is very unique for me and your writing style is just so impeccable 😭 I swear like if you were to publish content, I WILL buy them. Seriously running out of words here to describe how great you write and how easy it is to read AND FEEL but the quality is just top notch like??? You're amazing!!

I can't recall a lot from the previous chapters lol but I swear I always had a great time reading. Because it's the most recent, let me talk about the final chapter and just WOW -- you didn't lie with it tying up ends. I also love how everyone had their scenes but I kinda wished there were more y/n & Jimin moments. THOUGH I know that is just self-indulgent lmao because everything aligns and makes perfect sense already but as you said there will be drabbles so please know that we will be here for them 🥰

I was so on edge with Jimin being sus in chapter 14 like I was ready to expect an exes to exes ending lol but it made so much sense. I also recently finished therapy sessions and I guess the last chapter also made me feel seen in some way that therapy doesn't make you weak but it makes you really have brighter days without disregarding the not so good things that happened in the past hehe.

I don't have a line yet from LA that sticks with me (let me insert again my favorite thing you did in red wherein the meaning of the color red became good at the ending 😭 pls my heart), maybe it's the sepanx lol but please know that I'll always ALWAYS remember and cherish this story! Like a favorite book! Everything I didn't know I'd like in a book is here hehe

That's all for now I guess lol. I'm in anon but you'll always have me following this blog and appreciating all your works! I also always hope that you're doing great or okay! Always take care 💜

[inu-fiction]

PSA: Stuff You Maybe Didn’t Realize You Can Back Up To AO3, And How To Tag it

Tumblr seems to be in potential death throes or at least, incredibly volatile and unreliable lately, but we’ve done some pretty good and informative work on canon analysis and reference guides so I was looking for ways to back it up without losing it...and the solution became obvious to me: Archive of Our Own, aka AO3.  “What?” you might ask if you are less familiar with their TOS. “Isn’t that just a fanfic archive??” No! It’s a fanWORK archive. It is an archive for fanworks in general! “Fanwork” is a broad term that encompasses a lot of things, but it doesn’t just include fanfic and fanart, vids etc; it also includes “fannish” essays and articles that fall under what’s often called “meta” (from the word for “beyond” or “above”, referencing that it goes beyond the original exact text)! The defining factor of whether Archive of Our Own is the appropriate place to post it is not whether or not it’s a fictional expansion of canon (fanfic), though that is definitely included - no, it’s literally just “is this a work by a ‘fan’ intended for other ‘fannish’ folks/of ‘fannish’ interest?”  The articles we’ve written as a handy reference to the period-appropriate Japanese clothing worn by Inuyasha characters?  The analyses of characters? The delineations of concrete canon (the original work) vs common “fanon” (common misconceptions within the fandom)? Even the discussion of broader cultural, historical, and geographic context that applies to the series and many potential fanworks?  All of those are fannish nonfiction! Which means they absolutely can (and will) have a home on AO3, and I encourage anybody who is wanting to back up similar works of “fannish interest” - ranging from research they’ve done for a fic, to character analyses and headcanons - to use AO3 for it, because it’s a stable, smooth-running platform that is ad-free and unlike tumblr, is run by a nonprofit (The OTW) that itself is run by and for the benefit of, fellow fans.  Of course, that begs the question of how to tag your work if you do cross-post it, eh? So on that note, here’s a quick run-down of tags we’re finding useful and applicable, which I’ve figured out through a combination of trial and error and actually asking a tag wrangler (shoutout to @wrangletangle for their invaluable help!): First, the Very Broad: - “ Nonfiction ”. This helps separate it from fanfic on the archive, so people who aren’t looking for anything but fanfic are less likely to have to skim past it, whereas people looking for exactly that content are more likely to find it. - while “Meta” and “Essay” and even “Information” are all sometimes used for the kinds of nonfiction and analytical works we post, I’ve been told “ Meta Essay ” is the advisable specific tag for such works. This would apply to character analyses, reference guides to canon, and even reference guides to real-world things that are reflected in the canon (such as our articles on Japanese clothing as worn by the characters).  The other three tags are usable, and I’ve been using them as well to cover my bases, but they’ll also tend to bring up content such as “essay format” fanfic or fanfic with titles with those words in them - something that does not happen with “Meta Essay”.

- I’ve also found by poking around in suggested tags, that “ Fanwork Research & Reference Guides ” is consistently used (even by casual users) for: nonfiction fannish works relating to analyses of canon materials; analyses of and meta on fandom-specific or fanwork-specific tropes; information on or guides to writing real-world stuff that applies to or is reflected in specific fandoms' media (e.g. articles on period-appropriate culture-specific costuming and how to describe it); and expanded background materials for specific fans' fanworks (such as how a given AU's worldbuilding is supposed to be set up) that didn't fit within the narrative proper and is separated out as a reference for interested readers. Basically, if it's an original fan-made reference for something specific to one or more fanworks, or a research aid for writing certain things applicable to fanworks or fannish interests in general, then it can fall under that latter tag. 

- You should also mark it with any appropriate fandom(s) in the “Fandom” field. Just like you would for a fanfic, because of course, the work is specifically relevant to fans of X canon, right? If it discusses sensitive topics, or particular characters, etc., you should probably tag for those. E.g. “death” or “mental illness”, “Kagome Higurashi”, etc. 

Additionally, if you are backing it up from a Tumblr you may wish to add: - “ Archived From Tumblr “ and/or “ Cross-Posted From Tumblr ” to reference the original place of publication, for works originally posted to tumblr. (I advise this if only because someday, there might not be “tumblr” as we know it, and someone might be specifically looking for content that was originally on it, you never know) - “ Archived From [blog name] Blog ”; this marks it as an archived work from a specific blog. And yes, I recommend adding the word “blog” in there for clarity- Wrangletangle was actually delighted that I bothered to tag our first archived work with “Archived From Inu-Fiction Blog” because being EXTREMLY specific about things like that is super helpful to the tag wranglers on AO3, who have to decide how to categorize/”syn” (synonym) various new tags from alphabetized lists without context of the original posting right in front of them.  In other words, including the name AND the word “blog” in it, helps them categorize the tag on the back end without having to spend extra time googling what the heck “[Insert Name Here]” was originally. 

Overall, you should be as specific and clear as possible, but those tags/tag formats should prove useful in tagging it correctly should you choose to put fannish essays and articles up on AO3 :) Oh, and protip sidebar for those posting, especially works that are more than plain text: you can make archiving things quicker and easier for yourself, but remember to plan ahead for tumblr’s potential demise/disabling/service interruptions. The good news: You can literally copy and paste the ENTIRE text of a tumblr post from say, an “edit” window, on tumblr, straight into AO3′s Rich Text Format editor, and it will preserve pretty much all or almost all of the formatting - such as bold, italics, embedded links, etc! But the bad news: keep in mind that while AO3 allows for embedded images and it WILL transfer those embedded images with a quick copy-paste like that, AO3 itself doesn’t host the images for embedding; those are still external images. This means that whether or not they continue to load/display for users, depends entirely on whether the file is still on the original external server! As I quickly discovered, in the case of posts copied from the Edit window of a tumblr post, the images will still point to the copies of the images ON tumblr’s servers. What this means is that you should back up (save copies elsewhere of) any embedded images that you consider vital to such posts, in case you need to upload them elsewhere and fiddle with where the external image is being pulled from, later.  Personally, I’m doing that AND adding image descriptions underneath them, just to be on the safe side (and in fairness, this makes it more accessible to people who cannot view the images anyway, such as sight-impaired people who use screen readers or people who have images set to not automatically display on their browser, so it’s win-win)

#signal boost #psa #archiving #fanworks #archive of our own #ao3 #the great big migration to ao3 #how to #inuyasha #how to tag

[searidings]

You’re my favorite writer so I just wanted to send a small prompt of SC finally getting together because Kara can’t stop looking at Lena in her look from 6x16 (certainly understandable). I hope you have a great day!

(also on ao3)

It's something Eliza had taught her.

Or maybe even Jeremiah, way back in the beginning. A way to cope with the overwhelming, broadening her stimuli response to prevent overload. For anything that became too much – a crowded mall, a car backfiring in a cavernous parking garage, even a loud sneeze – she learned to employ each one of her five senses with deliberate precision, grounding herself in all incoming sensations to prevent any one individually from taking over.

It had helped with the bad and, over time, had also helped her to appreciate the good. Centring herself, focusing not just on the sight or sound in front of her but also on the feel, the taste, the smell— it brings her clarity. Enhances her appreciation, allows for more comprehensive enjoyment.

She hasn't needed these skills for years, has used them only in moments of extreme joy or pleasure that she wishes to capture and remember as thoroughly as possible. But, Kara realises, it's a good thing she has these tools in her arsenal because right now in this moment there is—

i. sight

—and Rao, what a sight it is.

She'd landed on the Tower's balcony just like any other day, walked into the main control centre just like any other day. And then her eyes had fallen on the lone figure seated on a high stool at the work bench, and suddenly it is no longer any other day.

Today, Lena is not wearing her typical boardroom outfit from her L-Corp days, the soft jeans-and-sweater combos reserved for game nights and sleepovers, or even the slacks-and-blouse ensemble she's frequented since her move to the Tower.

No. Today, Lena has pulled the dark wave of her hair up into a big, messy bun, flyaway hairs framing her face that flicker like molten amber in the sharp morning sun. The style accentuates the cut glass line of her jaw, the regal column of her throat where it disappears into a soft black turtleneck. Kara's eyes track the skintight material down, down, down to the leather belt at her waist, the skirt that hugs the curve of her hips and legs save for the slit cut to mid-thigh, the tantalising peek of creamy skin beneath. Her eyes fall lower still to the black suede of her boots, rising relaxedly to cover her knees, no—

Kara's mouth runs dry. Rising to cover her thighs.

Even if only one is visible, and even if only in part, it's still enough to make Kara's head spin. The whole look is finished off by a smudge of dark plum that draws attention to the full curve of her lips, a striking companion to the dark sweep of her brows, her lashes above the crystalline green of her eyes.

This is very decidedly not just any other day.

Kara doesn't move, doesn't breathe, for a solid ninety seconds while her brain tries to compute the image Lena makes before her eyes. Her heart has migrated up into the Sahara of her bone-dry throat, stomach dropping out her ass as her pulse thuds like a bass drum somewhere deep in the cradle of her hips.

Lena— Lena is always gorgeous. Always, in every shade and hue and state of undress and disarray. But this, this, is something else altogether.

Lena notices her at last, glancing up from the book she'd been perusing, one long elegant finger extended to mark her place. Kara's eyes trace her hands, the slender tug of tendons and the delicate lines of bone, the way the contrast of the faded page beneath her palm makes her skin appear to glow alabaster in the sunlight.

“Hi?”

It sounds like a question, one perfect brow arching as plum lips split into an expectant smile.

Kara, narrowly resisting the urge to check her own chin for evidence of drool, snaps herself out of her daze with single-minded determination. She clears her throat, licks her dry lips. “Hi.”

“Everything alright?” Lena asks when Kara still doesn't move, feet rooted to the same spot from which she'd first caught sight of her best friend. “You're, uh. You're staring.”

She certainly is. “Oh. Oh, uh.” Kara shuffles her feet, unsticking them from the floorboards and forcing them to walk without trembling to the workbench in the centre of the room. “You, um. You look really nice today.”

Lena's cheeks flush the palest pink, the first dusting of sunrise on a snowy morning. Kara's eyes catch on the pulse thrumming at her throat, the near-indetectable flicker beneath the hinge of her jaw.

She wonders what it feels like. That blush, that heartbeat. She wonders what it tastes like.

"Thanks,” Lena whispers, ducking her head, twin arcs of dark lashes fluttering. She motions to the pages before her, clearing her throat. “I, uh, I think I might have found a spell that could help us.”

Kara rounds the table to stand beside her, making a show of focusing her gaze on the page before them as Lena explains something about energy transfers and containment spells and varying interpretations of third century classical Latin.

This focus lasts all of half a heartbeat before her eyes begin to wander, insatiably drawn to the myriad details revealed by her new proximity. Her visual receptors are overwhelmed, gaze bouncing erratically between each new discovery like a ping pong ball in a vacuum.

Kara swallows hard. Her eyes lock upon the fingertip Lena's tapping against the incantation at the bottom of the page and she finds herself transfixed once more by how long Lena's fingers are, how broad her palms, how the blunt edges of her short nails round against the smooth canvass of her skin.

Next, her field of vision hones in on the soft curls at the nape of Lena's neck, half-trapped beneath the high turtleneck collar where they've escaped from her bun. This is followed by a brief sojourn on the near-translucent shell of her ear, shot through with morning sunlight, then by a rapt fascination with the fine baby hairs that skirt her temple to the arch of her cheekbone, the downy curve of her jaw.

Lena is still talking, and Kara hasn't heard a word she's said. She's just been staring at her best friend like a dumbstruck fool, and she needs to snap out of it before Lena catches on. Resolved, she sucks in a breath so deep it's almost painful, a misstep on her part that ultimately proves fatal because then in addition to sight there is—

ii. smell

—and any hope she had of regaining her composure dies a quick and painless death.

The lungful of Lena she's just inhaled is intoxicating and before she knows what she's doing she's pressing a half-step closer, eager to breathe her in again.

Lena's hair smells bright, fresh and clean like the expensive sea mineral shampoo Kara has taken to stocking in her own shower of late. There's the cloying chemicals of her makeup and the waxy sweetness of her lipstick, the worn leather of her boots and the musky blush of the perfume at her wrists. The nape of her neck and the soft skin behind her ear smell smoky and rich, the warm base scent of her accentuated by the ever-lingering tang of chemical explosions, propane and molten solder.

Unbidden, Kara's mouth begins to water. She sucks in another eager lungful just as her half-addled brain registers the sudden silence between them, snapping her back to herself with a start.

Lena has turned to stare up at her pointedly. Kara finds herself lost once more in the lush curve of her arched brow, the way the movement sends up another heady cloud of samphire-scented conditioner.

"Kara?” the object of her fascination asks, pulling her so sharply from her enthralled haze that she actually jumps. Lena's brow quirks a quarter-inch higher. “Have you been listening to a word I've said?”

“Of, of course I have,” she manages, breathing pointedly through her mouth so as to avoid another assault on her olfactory senses. “You've found a spell that might help us.”

Lena looks as thoroughly unconvinced as the weak cover warrants, but Kara doesn't have the mental capacity to worry about that in this moment. She's too busy trying and failing to focus on anything other than the utterly overwhelming amalgamation of sight and scent that is her best friend right now.

Blessedly, her Kara Danvers phone vibrates in her boot a split second later and she's shooting off to Catco with a hasty apology before anyone can start asking uncomfortable questions about her behaviour. She doesn't relax, doesn't even breathe again until she's hovering in the empty air high above National City, confident she can manage it without losing her mind.

If the crisp scent of Lena's shampoo lingers on the back of her tongue, that's nobody's business but her own.

-

The afternoon at Catco helps to push some of the lingering enthrallment from her mind and by the time her interview prep is complete and the call comes through that she's needed back at the Tower, Kara feels like she might even be able to face Lena without completely losing her shit.

The thing is, she's an expert at this. A seasoned pro at blocking out overwhelming sensations, at diversifying her sensory input in order to moderate her own response. She thinks back to her first years on Earth, to the soft knit blanket she'd squeeze to ground herself through the maelstrom of untempered superhearing and the scented dryer sheets Eliza would hold to her cheek when her x ray vision became too much to handle. Thinks of the slew of coping strategies she's been forced to acquire throughout her time on this planet, of how they might be repurposed now.

Because, okay, the sight of Lena today – in that shirt with that lipstick and that slit up the length of her thigh – might in fact be too much to handle. May have quite possibly fried her brain, just a little.

But, she reasons, all she has to do is ground herself, focus on her other senses, and keep it together.

After all, this is Lena. Kara's been practicing the essential art of blocking out the more distracting facets of her best friend since the day they first met.

And so, maybe smell isn't the way to go, given the hard reboot her mind had involuntarily undergone when she'd caught a whiff of Lena that morning. But that's okay, that's fine, because Kara has three other senses that she's going to use to remain centred and stop making a fool out of herself.

This is fine, she's fine. She's a seasoned pro. She's got this.

-

It takes all of three seconds for her to lose it again.

The main room of the Tower is deserted when she touches down, but she doesn't even have time for confusion or worry because then there is—

iii. sound

—and every iota of her previous infatuation comes rushing back full force.

Lena's heels click across the worn boards of the control centre, syncopated perfectly with the white-hot thud of Kara's heart. The material of her skirt swishes against soft suede, cotton stretching and contracting around her arms and shoulders as she sets her notebook down on the workbench.

She turns her head to smile at Kara's arrival and her superhearing picks up the gentle clink of the double sets of gold hoops adorning each of Lena's ears, the near-inaudible whisper of stray hairs against the collar of her shirt. Now that she's focusing on it, Lena is a symphony, from her steady heartbeat to her rhythmic breaths to the quiet knock of her belt buckle against the edge of the desk.

“Hey.”

And there, the sweetest sound of all, the melodic lilt of Lena's voice tripping across the space between them, hitting Kara's ears like the light tinkle of windchimes on a summer's day.

“Hey yourself,” she manages, pulling herself out of her slack jawed stupor and crossing the space to join Lena at the bench. “You called? How's it going?”

Because, yes, maybe her eyes and nose and ears are being assaulted by such a whirlwind of stimuli from this woman that she feels a little lightheaded, but there's a limit to how weird she can be around Lena in the span of twenty-four hours without drawing attention to herself, and she has a feeling she's already hit it.

She breathes through her mouth to avoid Lena's perfume, recites the Prayer of Rao backwards in Old Kryptonian in her mind to drown out the beacon of her heartbeat, keeps her eyes on the lines of the spell book so they don't wander off to any nearby curves, and tries her best to get a grip.

She actually manages to focus – albeit briefly – on what her best friend is saying; a rundown of the afternoon she'd spent in the lab, her progress on tracking Nyxly, the revised translation of that morning's spell. Kara's nodding along, mentally congratulating herself on her iron-clad concentration, when Lena reaches out once more to trace her fingertip along the lines of the hexagram on the page.

Kara's watching her, watching the muscles and ligaments shift beneath delicate skin, and then suddenly she's reaching out too and then there is—

iv. touch

—and a bolt of incandescent electricity shoots from the top of her skull to the tips of her toes.

Her hand lands atop Lena's, stilling it against the page and she can feel the confusion in the other woman's gaze, hear the question already forming on her lips.

Her skin is tingling where it touches Lena's, palm moulding to the mountain range of her knuckles, the knocked arrow of her finger and she only has a second to salvage this before it gets really weird. Her brain is still stuck, wheels spinning somewhere between the scent of the lavender soap clinging to Lena's hands and the sounds of her heels shifting against the floorboards, thus executing no oversight of the words that fall out of her mouth.

“Sorry, I just— I missed you today,” she finds herself saying, not untruthfully. “How about, um. A hello hug?”

As soon as she says it her entire being is screaming for it, for an amplification of the feeling of their hands stacked together and the chance to take Lena into her arms.

Lena, to her credit, takes the odd request in stride, which probably says more about her years of experience with Kara's weirdness than it does about anything else. There's an incredulous slant to her brow and an uncertain tilt to her mouth but after a moment, she nods.

There's an awkward second that feels like a suspended eternity as they slot together, angling arms and tilting heads but then they click, the circuit completes, and pleasure courses through Kara's veins like wildfire.

Lena's arms slide around her neck, bobbing up on her tiptoes even in her heeled boots to rest her chin on Kara's shoulder. She anchors her own arms at Lena's waist in return, squeezing lightly as they settle into the embrace.

Lena is so soft, so warm and tactile and pliable to the touch and the sum total of it all, the way she looks and smells and sounds and feels is so glorious Kara struggles to remember why she ever lets her go.

She decides to take advantage of the granted proximity, fingertips playing across the brushed fabric of Lena's skirt, the smooth juncture of her belt and up to the ribbed cotton of that goddamn turtleneck. She charts the ladder of Lena's ribs, meets the straps of her bra through the sheer fabric, up and up until her fingers trip against the folded neckline, playing through the escaped curls at the base of her skull.

She scratches her nails gently against Lena's scalp beneath the tug of her bun and Lena lets out a quiet sigh that hits Kara square between her legs.

It starts to make sense, then.

Her obsession with every minute detail of Lena's existence, her need to employ grounding techniques just to avoid being completely overloaded by her best friend's mere presence, every time over the course of their relationship that she's carefully turned her focus away from the finer points of the woman before her in order to keep a level head— it all starts to sharpen into a picture she's been ignoring for far too long.

This particular outfit, the boots and the bun and that motherfucking turtleneck may have been the tipping point, but the effect Lena has on her is nothing new.

Emboldened by her own crisis of clarity she continues her gentle exploration, knuckles brushing the side of Lena's throat as her other hand thumbs sure circles at the small of her back. Touching her is enthralling, addicting, wonderful, made even more so when Lena shivers against her chest.

"Kara?” she whispers and it's another inundation of the senses; the breathy sound of her voice, the tangible hitch of her breathing, the faintest hint of mint tea on her breath. "What are you doing?"

“You feel so good,” Kara hums before she's fully decided to, tightening her arms a fraction.

Lena pulls back, just enough that they're face to face without breaking the circle of their embrace. Her gaze is searching, eyes roving Kara's face intently as though seeking an answer to a question long buried. “Yeah?”

She looks at Lena then, the sum total of her; the purse of her lips and the skate of her jaw and the flyaway wisps of ebony hair, the viridian crystal of her eyes.

She wants to touch her. Wants to listen to her and gaze at her and breathe her in for as long as she possibly can. She wants to put her mouth on her. Wants to press her lips to the pulse fluttering hummingbird-quick at her throat, feel the bright metallic tang of her earrings on her tongue, paint her own mouth with the glossy wax of her lipstick.

Because, she realises, there's one of her five senses left as yet untested.

“Yeah,” she murmurs, meeting Lena's gaze with a steady kind of surety. She tugs her closer still, tracing paths of worship up and down her sides, squeezing as tight as she dares. “I don't want to let you go.”

Lena's gaze on her face, so heavy, so penetrating, softens at last. A breath sighs out of her, her own grip on Kara's neck strengthening. “Then don't.”

For a moment they watch each other, breathing the same air. She thinks of the question they've been skirting for six long years; sees the answer she'd never dared to dream of etched into each beloved line of Lena's face. She hopes her own answer is reflecting back the same.

She thinks that maybe it is, because in the next moment the tension pulling taught between them snaps with all the heraldry of a divine chorus and then she's leaning in, and maybe Lena is too, and there's one more moment of heady, blissful anticipation and then there is—

v. taste

—and the warm press of lips and the slick slide of tongues, the flavour of mingled panting breath and the faintest hint of fresh mint tea as they come together again and again in the most overwhelming, pleasurable, joyous moment of Kara's life and there's not a single shred of doubt in her mind that this woman, this kiss, is the sweetest thing she'll ever know.

#this has got to be the gayest thing i've ever written #me 🤝 kara danvers: waxing lyrical about every single minute detail of this woman #you know what i'm not even sorry. you all saw that outfit. you understand #thanks for the prompt and the lovely lovely message! hope you enjoy this and also that you're having a great day #asks #anonymous #dings dot txt #supercorp #supercorp fanfic #kara danvers #lena luthor #supergirl

[solosvejs]

Our Flag Means Data

As we all know, Our Flag Means Death has exploded onto fandom in a very short amount of time, and we still don’t have any news about a season 2 so one day at like 3 am I decided that it would be a great idea to see if I can do some data about it. More specifically, I wanted to see if there was any relationship between the stuff that was happening in the show and people writing (or not writing) fic about it. We all remember SPN Finale-pocalypse, when you had to go 50 pages back in the ao3 results to find anything written before that episode - was something similar happening here?

Quick numbers:

We have produced 2131 fanworks in 34 days!!!

The total wordcount was 6,497,681 (yes that’s almost 6.5 million words about gay pirates) - y’all are SO PRODUCTIVE.

Average wordcount: 3042

Est. words per day: 191108   

The first fic on Ao3 was posted on March 9 - six days after the initial batch of episodes dropped (e01-e03). OFMD has a very weird release schedule where they didn’t do the standard one-episode-per-week model OR the Netflix release-everything-at-once model.

By April 3rd, there were over 1000 works - meaning that less than a month after the first fanfic appeared, the fandom was already ineligible for Yuletide.

So far, the day with the highest activity was April 4 - 211 works were posted that day.

The graph above shows very quick growth, but a running total will always look kind of inflated, so lets look at it in more detail:

(full-view for all the data-y goodness)

Here we have the number of works posted per day, and some more interesting patterns. I’ve also plotted the wordcount as the dashed line, and added annotations for when each batch of episodes came out.

We start to see fandom activity start out fairly slow - It wasn’t until after episodes 7-8 (”This is Happening” and “We Gull Way Back”) were released that you get more than 1-2 posts each day. Is this the point at which we all clued into the premise of the show and realized it wasn’t just queer-baiting?

March 26 and 27 saw another spike when the last two episodes came out - you had more fics than the previous day (and it helped that this was a weekend, so people had time to write as many fix-its as they wanted). This is also when the ship was DEFINITELY confirmed, we had an actual kiss, everyone lost their collective shit. The increase after this was a bit slower, but still steady - even if there are falling-off periods like on March 28th, it never does back to the previous level.

I’m really curious about the two REALLY big spikes that we see on April 2nd and 10th.

This graph uses the same daily fic count as the one above, but now we are plotting only the difference from the previous day:

So we are seeing some ebbs and flows in the activity. It’s difficult to make a real comparison to SPN Finale because, well... Supernatural had 15 years’ worth of fic before that, as well as its own fandom migrations, wank, and controversies.

In conclusion...

This whole thing started because I saw someone in the OFMD tag say that people only started watching the show once they knew that Blackbonnet was canon -- I thought, huh I wonder if that’s true, maybe I can do a chart or something. And, well, a couple of weeks later, I don’t know if I have a definitive answer to that question? It’s likely that a canon ship got people talking more and drew some folks in who may not have otherwise been interested -- the “oh it’s queer? Yeah I’m in” argument works on me very often.

Do we see an increase in fanfic production after The Kiss happened? Yes. But because episodes 9 and 10 were released at the same time, it’s hard to untangle which works were written in response to what without looking at the tags. As I was writing this I realized something as well, which I didn’t consider at first: When do we we consider Ed/Stede to have been made “canon” ?

The episode when they kiss is an easy choice, but probably an equally large number of people would say it’s episode 7, “This Is Happening”. I’m sure for some people it was their adorable moonlight exchange in episode 5. Maybe for others it was another moment when they knew it was canon. If you’re David Jenkins, it was probably canon from the very first episode, we the audience just didn’t know about it yet.

Ultimately, I’m not sure it matters. People find different fandoms in all sorts of different ways -- through larger fandom spaces, recs from friends and popular blogs, or even just out in the wild. And people some people did only decide to watch the show once they knew they wouldn’t be queer-baited, which is absolutely their right! Consume your blorbos as you will :)

Caveats and assumptions

I only looked at what was posted on Ao3 because that’s what I have the most access to and am most familiar with in terms of stats and how the data is structured. It’s possible there are other folks who’ve already tracked the growth on Twitter/Tumblr or other social medias.

Data was taken from the main fandom tag: https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Our%20Flag%20Means%20Death%20(TV)/works; Out of the 2131 works, only 55 were marked as crossovers.

“Date posted” and “date updated” a bit tricky to distinguish if you’re just looking at the work results and not going into each individual work/chapter/series. I don’t think it’ll skew the data very much personally, since we’re looking at such a short timescale, but I might look at this in more detail later.

The fandom is VERY NEW. We only have data for a little over a month, so it’s hard to draw any sort of conclusions about whether the trend will keep going or not. 

Currently, OFMD is only available through legitimate means on HBO Max - this will limit the reach of the fandom somewhat; yes, there are people who will consume the show through gifs and memes and fanart, or those who don’t mind reading fic if they’re not familiar with the source material, but it still seems like the relative exclusivity of the show is a factor.

As an addendum to that, I have no idea what/when/how aggressively this show was marketed. I personally only became aware of it through Tumblr, but I’m probably a poor barometer since I don’t have TV outside of streaming and don’t really pay attention to HBO. If someone wants to look at promotional efforts as they relate to fanwork production, I’d be really interested to see that! (Happy to share my dataset but it might be out of date by the time I post this with how fast y’all are writing)

Boring tech info & How to get in touch!

Data was scraped from Archive of Our Own using Python and the BeautifulSoup library. To structure and analyze the data, I used pandas, csv, and collections. Charts (and one pivot table because I am still baby at programming) were made in Google Sheets. If you want a copy of any of my code, or the dataset, please DM me and I’d be happy to walk you through it :) If you’re curious about fandom stats in General, check out DestinationToast, who has been doing this for a lot longer than I have and has a ton of resources!

#fandom stats #our flag means death #ofmd #ao3 #baby's first stats project!!! #(it's me I'm the baby) #fanfiction #solo does stuff #meta #ofmd meta