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eggsnatcheskneecaps · 1 year

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i have a question ab transformers and im too scared to google it bc of what i think ill find but is there anything in canon that tells you if transformers reproduce??? and like how? do they have some sort of build-a-baby or smth??? sorry i know its late and this is absurd but its been plaguing mind for 4h now and i had to ask

Fjgng you're right to be afraid of what you'll find. There... Is a sea of fics out there.

The fandom has an extremely well curated Wikipedia, so if you're up for something more in depth, read through this article or browse through other ones.

Anyway, this is an excuse to ramble about Transformers >:) but I'll give you info on just the medias I've consumed, or know enough of.

The answer more broadly, there are cannon forms of reproduction, not sexual, per say, but the Transformers writers have a. Well. Long and weird relationship with Cybertronians having sex and especially pregnancies (yeah, you heard me right-)

To start off:

1. In one of the really old TF comics, we have a couple formed of a human woman (Cover Girl) and Brawn. They are married and also, they have a child. ...the child is not adopted. I don't if it's stated how they got there, but y'know.

2. In Beast Wars, we get protoforms.

In multiple continuities, they are basically the first stage in a robot's life. Kind of like infants. All they need is a spark (soul) and alt mode code (what they transform into) in order to develope into a fully grown Cybertronian.

The weird thing with this tho, is that you'll have characters such as Cheetor, who have been here from the start, and they'll be treated like the teenager of the group (although he IS the child appeal character), but then you'll see the ones who come along later, such as Silverbolt, who are immediately treated as an adult with full agency. Sigh.

But that's not all on reproduction in this show.

You have Rattrap at some point talk about... Bars on their home planet where waitresses walk around tits out, basically.

There are also some sex jokes, if I remember correctly. The femme fatale character takes a rod to cut it, her boyfriend cringes, and another one calls her emasculating.

For less cannon stuff that still sprung out of here; the official artists who worked on the show made a 3D render of Dinobot (main character) with... Dinobot Jr. Out on full display.

Also, at some point during the show production, someone decided to play a prank on someone else in the studio by submitting a pornographic parody of the episode script they should have originally given. Why does the fandom know this? It was leaked way back in the day before the episode aired.

Anyway, can you imagine being some poor fool thinking you're getting some exciting leaks to read and instead you get smacked with porn of the character who's literally inspired after Hannibal Lecter- also he transformers into a crab.

3. In Transformers Animated, protoforms make another return.

They basically work about the same way as they do in Beast Wars, except this time, we get Sari.

She's a protoform that somehow landed on earth, and her father, a human, touched it, which caused her to imprint on his DNA and become a hybrid.

In this show we also get several instances of objects being hit by the power of a Cybertronian relic, and making them come to life. Now, I don't know if they count as Cybertronians, since they are random ass earth objects, but they have a consciousness. Also, the same relic has been shown to be able to bring back Transformers from the dead. So.

...........

Ok. So. I received this ask forever ago, I'm so sorry for not getting to it. I've gotten busy and I can unfortunately feel my cognitive dysfunction kicking in, so I'll try to just get this done, but it'll be less detailed from now on and kinda disjointed.

Plus I was a while into writing this part and I lost the progress-

So. IDW1. The comics. They are a mess and weird.

Also, I read these years ago and I don't really remember the details.

You have hot spots on the home planet or moon. That create sparks (from the ground). Sparks can also pop out from Cybertronian relics, such as The Matrix.

Titans (HUUUUUUGE Cybertronians. They turn into cities or battle ships) may also carry hotspots that make robo babies.

Sparks harvested from this sort of thing either become cold constructs or forged. I'm not going to go into technicalities, but basically cold constructs are sparks who were taken and placed in a premade body and forged were allowed to develope naturally. If they are having trouble, a blacksmith may help them along by shaping their body. Or so I recall, at least.

I think I remember a mention in the comics about "A turbofox in heat". Turbofoxes are Transformers animals.

IDW1 also... Sports a lot of allusions to pregnancies. And. Pregnancies in general.

A lot of metaphors for pregnancies. Character is in a coma for 9 months. Another one gets a body upgrade and the entire thing is reminiscent of birth- an actual Cybertronian being mpreg with an organic alien------

^btw there was no narrative significance for this last one to happen

And. One of the main writers had... two? fanfics before he started writing cannon works. Telefunken and Eugenesis. Robots giving birth- to be fair, from their chests, from what I've heard. But the entire thing. It's. It's yeah.

Now!

IDW2.

Kiddies pop out of the ground. They are given one or two mentors. Mentors help them along to find what they want to transform into and their future jobs.

Earthspark, the Nickelodeon show, has come out pretty recently and I haven't watched it, but I think it has 3 robot kids as main characters! From what I know, they also popped out of the ground, except this time on Earth.

^also this one is canonically non binary sob

Transformers: Prime

I thiiiiiink they say Cybertronians pop out of The Well Of All Sparks? Which is a hole in their planet. Don't remember it being explored much. In the movie, a bunch of sparks fly out of it by the end, but I think it was a sort of- everybody gets revived! Yay!

The live action movies. Are also. Trippy

The ones directed by Micheal Bay are shit, but I gotta talk about them. You've got robots being sexual and creepy. But you also have sparklings. They pop out of goo eggs- I don't remember if in these movies energon or other relics posses and bring to life - I think they do tho.

However, that's an occurrence in the Bumblebee movie.

PS: I thought I posted this before I was done and I had a heart attack

#ask #squicksquak #transformers #sari sumdac #i can't put anymore picturesssss #nightshade #twitch #thrash #gauge #rubble #connie

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gnine2 · 5 years

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Trope I wish was more common -- ‘fake dating’ is everywhere but it’s ‘fake hating’ I can never get enough of. Teammates/friends/lovers/siblings pretending to despise each other, be it for undercover purposes, to protect a secret identity, hiding from the media, whatever it may be, when in reality they couldn’t be closer. Gets me every time, especially that moment when the truth comes out...

#fanning #tropes #random musings #was reading fic for a random fandom that has multiple instances of it #and yet I just kept looking for more #love 'em all #especially outside pov #when the observer has the sudden realization #they're actually going to kill each other...no...wait...opposite #will kill anyone who hurts the other

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dreadfutures · 3 years

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aight let‘s talk ao3 tags again

the very nice tag wrangler I’ll be quoting from has given me permission to share their kind and thorough responses (all bolding/emphasis is mine) without identifying information. and we very nicely go through some of my own tags from my long fic Dead Pasts, Dread Futures. Many, many thanks to this wrangler for explaining so much to me.

Anyway. I present these discussions as a peacable offer of: these are many writers’ concerns, and they are valuable, and worth considering. don’t dismiss concerns about the tag limit off hand, and don’t insist that edge cases don’t matter.

tldr; at the moment, after all this discussion and back and forths and bullying, I still believe that having 75 tags, period, as the limit across ALLCharacters/Relationships/Fandoms/Additional Tags penalizes longfics. Period. If it were even a limit of 100 tags, or broken down by Tag Type, it would be a little more forgiving. For advertising and for content filtering purposes, it only helps writers and fic visibilty to be specific and thorough in tags. A limit like this just so clearly has the potential to negatively affect large fandom/large ensemble/long fics.

It feels like this decision is being very broadly based on a "for the majority" mindset, which has never been what AO3 is about, without actually physically looking at the kinds of fics it will affect. The tag system on AO3 has been able to give fic filtering and reader-judgement a nuance that no other platform has accomplished, and longfics and large ensemble fics still, I think, depend on that as both a courtesy and necessity. I saw the rough math someone did and know that almost all fics currently on AO3 are <25k or something like that, and sure, for the average oneshot, or for even a fic <100k, a tag limit that's very strict across all tag categories probably won't be felt at all. But it's clearly something that people who write certain types of fics, and take them very seriously, will feel. Like I genuinely don't want to have a million tags. I want to tag relevant content that allows potential readers to filter & include & exclude my fic as they so choose, but also, if it does show up in their search, I want to give them the information they want to be able to decide if they want to read my fic or not. I don't want to have to put all my content warnings into a giant summary, or into a giant author's note that grows and grows. The tags have been a very helpful way of accomplishing those. Being able to cut down on parallel/synned tags is great, but it still seems like longfics that deal with multiple fandom entries, large casts, and require content warnings will butt up against that limit very quickly.

tag limit discussions:

- long fic writers adding tags as they go

- writers of franchises with many installments and ensemble casts

- writers with extensive content warnings

- use of tags to clarify a filtered tag

- use of tags to demonstrate how content is handled

off the bat - stop being jerks

look, I know objectively fics don’t need to be tagged at all. I lived in the wild west, too, when “lemon” meant anything from the merest mention of arousal to an explicit vanilla sex scene to all out dead dove craziness. a large part of me still is of the opinion that readers should just read shit, and if they decide they don’t like it, just dip. but that’s not what we’re about here. tagging is a kindness that we voluntarily undertake, and it’s also a form of advertising.

tags are useful for their specificity, for filtering and exclusion purposes

(that’s one of the cruxes of the arguments both pro-shippers and antis make: you can filter things! But you can only filter things if they’re tagged.)

I also understand that a few asshole writers have ruined this for all of us by purposefully adding so many tags it slows down the site and makes pages fail to load and hides other fics because the tags take up 10 pages. i also am frustrated with kinkmemers who just have prompt fill fic dumping grounds that span multiple unrelated fandoms and are impossible to navigate.

...the answer is not to suggest to writers that we put all our content warnings and pairings and etc. in our summaries, or our A/Ns, or to insert a first chapter that is a placeholder summary/tags page/world state. tags are useful for their specificity, for filtering and exclusion purposes.

I also have been dealing with people being murderously angry, and super self-righteous and targeting and mean about my own tags, and tags in general. people who are anti-tag are being giant fucking dicks about it. like get over yourselves and let’s just talk about a website function lol. tags are useful for their specificity, for filtering and exclusion purposes.

THE ANSWER IS NOT TO GET RID OF TAGS.

Alright, so now that we’ve gotten that flippin’ straw argument aside.

The next thing anyone has been doing is going to my page and critiquing my tags. Let’s address redundant tags.

(the wrangler has done this nicely! no ridicule necessary!)

using my fic as an example:

If you tag your fic Female Lavellan/Solas (only), it will show up in the following searches: Inqusitor/Solas, Female Inquisitor/Solas, Lavellan/Solas, Female Lavellan/Solas. If you tag your fic Inquisitor/Solas (only), it will show up only in the Inquisitor/Solas search and in none of the others. If you tag with the most specific version, it will show up in the more general versions, but not the other way around. So there's no real reason to tag with the more general tags.

Though I will point out that if you don't use the canonical tag and tag your character or relationship with a custom name it will be synned to the nongendered version, because at some point the DA wranglers decided that they didn't want to make gender assumptions. So "Annabelle Lavellan" will be synned to "Lavellan (Dragon Age)" rather than "Female Lavellan (Dragon Age)", and someone searching for works with specifically "Female Lavellan" won't see it.

Response: In the fanfic writers server I'm in, we've talked about how tags work and are supposed to work extensively in the past. There's just always been a lot of confusion, which I think has been added to when people go and try to double-check for themselves and find instances where this treeing/synning is broken. Someone put out this guide (also here) for AO3 meta text this year, which has been referred to by multiple people in the server, and it says:

What if you wrote a fic for something where there's a movie based on a book, but the movie's really different, and you've used both things that are only in the movie and things that are only in the book? In that case you either tag your fic as both the movie and the book, or see if the fandom has an “all media types” tag and use that instead of the separate tags. If the fandom doesn't have an “all media types” tag yet, you can make one! Just type it in.

“All media types” fandom tags are also useful for cases where there are lots of inter-related series, like Star Wars; there are several tellings of the story in different media but they're interchangeable or overlap significantly, like The Witcher; or the fandom has about a zillion different versions so it's very hard, even impossible, to say which ones your fic does and doesn't fit, like Batman. Use your best judgement as to whether you need to include a more specific fandom tag such as “Batman (Movies 1989-1997)” alongside the “all media types” fandom tag, but try to avoid including very many. The point of the “all media types” tag is to let you leave off the specific tags for every version.

Which I believe is in direct contradiction to guidance to use the most specific tags, so that's definitely one source of confusion. The most recent ao3 meta text guide (https://archiveofourown.org/wrangling_guidelines/2 I think this one) doesn't present itself in a way that makes this clear for writers tagging their own works. The way authors usually go about tagging things (and what's in the FAQ) is to start typing into one of the boxes and look for what populates the drop down, which doesn't lend itself to knowing that there are trees, or knowing what tags are interrelated (it seems like a whole grab bag of tags get suggested, some in-fandom and some outside of fandom, some canon/parent/meta and some children/random freeform, in just about any field you start typing in).

I'm not sure what can really be done about this. Many of us have turned to ao3-comment-of-the-day and their posts about using Tags, and various sources on google, and have clearly come up with a whole load of conflicting advice.

Fundamentally, finding parent/meta tags for a tag as you’re tagging a fic is NOT clear to writers. The fact that a nested and a meta tag can both be suggested one after the other when filling in tags largely contributes to redundant tags.

Writing for Multiple Fandom Entries

Here’s what a tag wrangler had to say about my fandoms:

As with the relationship tree, you can look at the fandom tree here: https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Dragon%20Age%20-%20All%20Media%20Types and see how the fandom tags are related. Going back to your story Rogasha'ghi'lan as an example, it's tagged with Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: The Last Court. But as I said, you only need to tag with the lowest relevant level(s) on the tree in order for your fic to show up under the higher levels. So if you tag with Dragon Age: Inquisition and Dragon Age: The Last Court, it will show up not just under those categories, but also under Dragon Age (Video Games) and Dragon Age - All Media Types. And of course because you've tagged with the specific, if someone searches under, say, Dragon Age (Video Games), but doesn't want Inquisition or Last Court fic, they can use the exclude filter to show only the earlier games.

(So that's two more tags you can remove with no effect on searchability!)

In my (but not only my) own case, I am indeed writing for Origins, DA2, Inquisition, and Last Court extensively within the same fic, so I should be tagging for all of those, specifically, still. In order to make sure my fic is seen by the correct fans, I need multiple specific tags.

Longfic Tag Bloat (adding tags as you write a fic)

And like many other longfic writers, even if I narrow down my character tags only to those with dedicated character arcs longer than 5 chapters, I still have Loads & Loads of Characters (including Dalish from the Chargers!).

A lot of longfic writers I know add characters, relationships, and content warnings as they go along.

At 170 chapters/580k words, Dead Pasts had a ton of important relationships (for example, like Vivienne & Lavellan), and as a story it's nowhere near done. I found myself planning an arc from 171 onward that would introduce a very important relationship (Felassan & Lavellan). This is how longfics end up with so many, many, many character tags and relationship tags, which is another major criticism people seem to have about "people who abuse tags."

A solution that people propose online is "split your fic." Which is actually what I ended up doing...but the old relationships and fandoms from DPDF still apply to Rogasha'ghi'lan, so Rogasha'ghi'lan will have the same number and more tags than DPDF.

If I hadn't split the fic, I would have just kept adding tags to Dead Pasts...and still had the same problem of continually adding tags. They're not superfluous tags: someone who wants to see a plot that is deeply influenced by Vivienne & Lavellan will find that in my fic; someone who is looking to see a major Felassan & Lavellan friendship grow and drive plot will also find that in my fic.

My fic is long; there are other fics that are longer, or are going to be longer, with casts that are just as large or larger, with many relationships, and that's not even talking about content warnings.

Polycule / Relationship Tags

"Tagging a polycule like Iron Bull/Dorian/Lavellan requires four tags: Bull/Dorian/Lavellan, Bull/Dorian, Bull/Lavellan, Lavellan/Dorian"

This assumes that people who like Lavellan/Dorian will want to read Iron Bull/Dorian/Lavellan, which is often not the case. If your story Is Iron Bull/Dorian/Lavellan, tag it that way! It doesn't make any sense to me to tag with the pairs as well unless the story would be of interest to people who read for that pair, or unless that pair relationship is a big step in the story (like, if you have established Lavellan/Dorian, and then they bring in Bull, you might tag for both that pair and the trio). I mean, you can tag how you like, there's no requirement that tags correspond to content. But for me, personally, if I search on Dagna/Lace Harding (I am weak for dwarf women!) I do not want to get a Dagna/Lace Harding/Sera fic.

My personal tastes don't include poly fics, but several writers I know who write poly fics are adamant that: tons of readers will not know of the possibility of the poly fic until it shows up in a search result, and the individual relationships often are significant to the fics, especially in fics that are not oneshots. For example, a great number of "fav fics" are stumbled-across! We aren't interested in the Sera/Dagna/Lace polycule ourselves, but someone might not have considered it, found it, and said, "Hey! That's my new favorite." But if polycules are segregated and only searchable by the polycule itself, alas, what's the option for visibility at all if not tagging it as Lace/Dagna in addition?

Additional Tags

Knowing when something is a "character" and when something is "additional"

Knowing that "Warrior Lavellan" (or the [Name] Mahariel) would be more useful in an Additional Tag vs. a Character Tag is also something I'm not sure how we're supposed to know? Like, I'm glad to know it now, but it's definitely not at all obvious without you telling me why it would be more useful in Additional vs in Character. Especially when to me: Warrior Lavellan is a character, and the fact that it populated the Character tag for me says that it's a Character. Because like I said, the guidance has been: start typing, and if it appears in the drop down, use it. Or, for example, my friend has the Well of Sorrows personified as a Character. Like an actual character. Does that have to go under Additional Tags, or as a Character? How do I know?

Additional tags as tone/content indicators

A lot of writers / readers have approached the Additional Tags as a surface-level overview of understanding how an author is approaching many topics concerned in the fic. Like, Vivienne is a character in my fic, but specifically I am Vivienne-positive, which I feel is important to denote because she's important to my fic, and she's a divisive character. Mood/tone/theme indicators like "Pro-Vivienne" or "we are Vivienne-positive in this house" (or like Male-Female Friendship, or "Expansive Lore" vs "Lore - Freeform" which denote different things to me) in tags (which in the comments section on the ao3 blog post get derided as "chatty tags") are still important to me, though they're useless or far less likely to be used for filtering. (I had the thesis of the conflict of my fic: “empathy is the enemy of free will” “but hope is a choice” as “chatty tags,” among some that were more mundane but important: “sera shows up late in fic”)

More seriously, there are fics that have content warning tags for filtering purposes but also clarify those content warnings to give context to readers and allow them to make a decision whether or not the content actually fits their preferences, ie, one that specifies domestic abuse as a tag (which would be in the Additional Tags) for filtering purposes but also specifies "domestic abuse not present in x relationship" (which would also be in the Additional Tags, but is useless for filtering purposes, but is immensely helpful and demonstrably used by readers to decide if they're going to even bother reading the author's note of that fic).

People are also nervous that not being able to thoroughly tag content warnings is going to end up with unhappy readers amid all the purity culture flaming that's going on lately.

Like, personally I err on the side of "suck it up, reader, and just read and find out," for a lot of things (not talking about content warnings, but talking about mood/tone additional tags), but also, given that there is already a venue here to let readers know what they're in for...taking that away sucks.

I hate a giant fic summary as much as people hate 10 pages of tags, but at least one can hide tags in their preferences, and likewise the thought of starting a fic up front with a giant author's note that gets continually updated with content warnings also isn't super appealing. Leading with a giant author's note that lays out: this is my world state and this is my character's spec and this is my character's background so you know how I'm going to approach this and these are all of the content warnings for the fic as a whole, just feels like getting into "My Immortal" territory. There's definitely a balance to be had between the art of writing a summary, what to include in an author's note, and what to include in tags, but this still seems like it's going to be fairly limiting for writers in these large franchises, especially for longfics that span a lot of topics.

Like I genuinely don't want to have a million tags. I want to tag relevant content that allows potential readers to filter & include & exclude my fic as they so choose, but also, if it does show up in their search, I want to give them the information they want to be able to decide if they want to read my fic or not. I don't want to have to put all my content warnings into a giant summary, or into a giant author's note that grows and grows. The tags have been a very helpful way of accomplishing those. Being able to cut down on parallel/synned tags is great, but it still seems like longfics that deal with multiple fandom entries, large casts, and require content warnings will butt up against that limit very quickly.

#ao3 #ao3 tags #long post #writing #look i really don't want to engage with anyone else but the amount of dimissive takes #and bullying #i see on my dash / have been targeted by / my friends have been targeted by #when we're trying to be conscientious?#is ridiculous #i'm just going to leave this here

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sapphicwhump · 2 years

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Since the replies are open, I can probably ask you anything, so I want to ask some things...

Well, before that, I want to thank you for updating the fic about Karla. I love Karla to death, I enjoy whump, I love female whump and your fic seems to be everything I've wished for. (The thing is that previously I've only seen m/f Karla fics, which is tolerable, but then they're mostly porn, and, the worst thing for me, none focus on her trauma or even mention it. (Well, porn could've been interesting too, they could've leaned into Karla wanting to "play master" as some form of coping mechanism, but they don't—... Oh, I think I strayed too much from the topic)).

This chapter was great, just as the previous ones. I'm bad at giving compliments and there's nothing in particular I liked, but I enjoy the slow development and the fact that fic explores how fucked Karla's mental state is and doesn't jump to the romance immediately.

Also, I like your writing as a whole, I've even read Co-Workers despite having no interest in Destiny.

So, now, the questions:

1. How are you enjoying Elden Ring so far? As a game itself, I mean. Also, do you have any favorite characters in ER? (Women or not). Have you found any whump potential there?

2. You've reblogged a post about whumpee archetypes. In your opinion, which archetype does Karla fit in?

Also, sorry if this was too long of a letter from a random Tumblr user. Hope I don't seem creepy, suddenly barging here with this long-ass message.

Thanks! I'm touched that people are following my stories. Chapter 5 is mostly done, and should be out sooner than chapter 4 was. I fully agree that Karla is a deeply interesting character that isn't done justice by either the game or the fandom. To answer your questions: 1. Ranni the Witch is my favorite character in Elden Ring, and I'm so glad she has an entire romance questline. Big witch hats are very gender and I project onto witch characters a lot. She also seems to have the most optimistic ending, which involves being free of the influence of the gods. Elden Ring definitely has a lot of whump potential; there are multiple instances of torture and noncon in the game, including one character who attempts to drug Ranni. I already have some fic ideas, but I won't write them until I finish with my current WIPs. 2. I think Karla mostly has elements of the Stoic. In Irithyll dungeon, she would’ve attempted to be stoic at first, but then quickly crumbled due to the unrelenting horror over such a long period of time. After her rescue, her main struggle is needing to project an image of strength and being unable to accept that she's been hurt, even as her trauma is tearing her apart. She wants to be stoic, fails at it, and hates herself for it.

#whump #whump ask #lady whump #after irithyll #ashen one and karla

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illfoandillfie · 3 years

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ok sorry but how many people do yall think rog has ever slept with cos i’m guessing four figures no lie

okay, i don’t normally respond to messages like this because, frankly, i dont really feel like its my place to speculate on roger’s sex life. Theres a difference between writing a fiction story with a character named after and inspired by him and discussing his actual personal life which i have no real knowledge about. What he gets up to in his free time is between him and the women he does it with. but i didn’t really feel able to ignore this one. please don’t take this as me telling you off or shutting you down or anything like that. If you want to speculate about roger’s body count thats up to you, go nuts with it. and i love when you guys message me and I don’t want to discourage you from feeling like you can talk to me or just send me your random thoughts or whatever about any subject. But I feel like I need to address why I disagree with this sentiment. Also so I can ask ya’ll to please stop asking me questions like this.

So firstly, just to get this out of the way. 1000 is a lot. even 100 is a lot. I think if rog had slept with 1000+ people he’d have a least a few illegitimate kids and probably would have been checked into rehab for sex addiction (not to mention STIs and such because lbr people in the 70s specifically probs werent the most careful especially if drugs were involved). I mean even if we were going to say Rog got lucky with a different woman after every show we wouldn’t reach 1000. According to google, Queen played around 700 shows in their entire career. If we add shows played by The Cross thats only another 67 odd shows (according to wikipedia).

now, i think there are 3 things that contribute to this idea of roger as especially promiscuous. 1. His attitude/demeanour/general way he sells himself. 2. the generally held conceptions about rock stars and rock star behaviour. and 3. what i’m going to call fandom dumbassery (but i mean that with a lot of love)

So lets start with the man himself. Roger Taylor is loud and opinionated and not particularly humble. He knows he’s talented and attractive though for at least some time he was a little self-conscious about how feminine he looked. He’s always up for a laugh, likes to party and has admitted to enjoying his drink and his women. He’s had kids with two different women, who’s relationships “overlapped”, and is currently married to a third. At least that’s the perception we can gleam from his interviews, behind the scenes videos, and other public appearances.

It’s easy to see how that image leads to accusations of being a womaniser and a cheater and basically a bit of a slut lmao. But here’s the thing. I think Roger, in part, markets himself that way. The thing is, if you look at his solo songs and the relationships he currently has with his kids and their mothers, and things other people have said about him/his relationships over the years, I think it’s fair to say he also has a bit of a romantic streak maybe? idk if thats the best way of describing it...he’s self confessed to not being a fan of marriage and the like but he’s not opposed to writing and singing love songs and seems to believe in ~love~ as a concept/power. He certainly cares deeply for those closest to him. Whether or not that translates to an agreement with monogamy I can’t say for certain. It’s hard to draw conclusions here because a lot of what we know of his personal life was fed to us through magazines and news paper gossip column articles and they were never looking for the truth, they were looking for scandal and sensationalism.

For instance the whole thing with the overlapping relationships. I think most people who have read anything about roger and dom and debbie realise that it’s not as cut and dry as “he was cheating with debbie and left dom for her” even though that was the story being sold by the press at the time. The reality (or at least the version closer to reality since obviously no one outside of them and whoever they were closest with knows all the nitty gritty details) is that rog and dom had already split when they got married. it was a marriage of convenience to make sure her and the kids would be looked after financially etc even after he’d moved out. So while it looked to the public like he married one chick and 30 odd days later was spotted with another, there really wasn’t anything untoward happening. I’m not saying he never had casual hookups or one night stands and i’m not saying he never cheated, but I do think some of it’s been exaggerated, whether by him to encourage the rock star perception or by newspaper/magazine articles.

Now, obviously, we have stories of rog, particularly in the late 60s and into the 70s, being with multiple women. There’s that bit in the Interview with a Queen “Groupie” (which is a fantastic read and i defs recommend checking it out if you havent already) where she talks about roger being a chick magnet and says that, at the time, it was pretty common to sleep about. But, she also says she didnt notice him doing it more or less than anyone else and seemed to mostly be with Jo (his girlfriend at the time). This is the same Jo that got a mention in the Queen in 3D book (”i think we all had the feeling that these two were together for life, but it was not to be”). Conversely, we have that quote (which i cannot find rn but i’ll link it when i do) about roger sometimes having one girl upstairs while another waited in the garage for them to be finished. I think it was about Rog in the mid-late 60s in Truro but whatever. Obviously he wasn’t anywhere near celibate and it’s likely was sleeping with people outside of his relationship(s). But one has to assume that as he got older those kinds of antics stopped happening, at least as frequently.

There is one potential story that I remember reading somewhere along the way about Roger cheating on Debbie while she was pregnant. But, take that with a grain of salt because I can’t find the article again and also I think it was from like The Sun or something equally as rubbish. The press was notoriously always printing mean shit about the boys and that might have been another thing they published to create scandal. Even so, if we assume it’s legit that is still only 1 story. Not to throw him under the bus but Brian is the one with multiple confirmed affairs, who literally wrote songs about it all. So why is Roger the one with sleazy reputation?

This is where my second and third points come in. There is a pervasive idea about what it means to be a rock star. The whole trashing hotel rooms, sleeping with groupies, passing out drunk every night thing. And I’m sure that Queen was like that to an extent. I think it’s pretty common knowledge that all of them got up to shit on the road. Between innuendo laden interviews and songs, videos and accounts of their parties, stories CT has put online, and other stories like the one of Roger bringing out lines of coke as dessert when he was having dinner with motley crue. They definitely embraced the rock and roll lifestyle. And I think with Roger’s personality being what it is, it’s easy to link him to those traditional rock star tropes and say it was all true all the time. I also think Roger has done nothing to counter those beliefs. He’s been open about how he wanted to be a rock star since the minute he picked up a guitar, he’s labelled himself as a great lay in magazines, he’s joked about girls pulling their tits out over dinner in interviews (though he said he didnt take her home), he’s written songs like One Night Stand and Dirty Mind and Airheads which explicitly mention his preference for women and alcohol. I think it’s fair to say he’s kind of encouraged that view of himself. Whether it was just a side effect of being part of such a well known band and having such a boisterous demeanour/personality, or whether it was intentional as a version of promotion i don’t know. maybe a mix of them? I mean I’m sure it didn’t hurt sales and stuff. it’s the whole guys want to be him, girls want to be with him thing, right? Maybe that’s just me being cynical though lmao.

Anyway, the fandom brain has taken all of that and compressed it into memes and jokes about rog being the band slut. Which i’m not complaining about, lord knows i’ve made the same jokes and reblogged the same posts and used those tropes in my fics. They’re funny and lend themselves to interesting fic concepts. Plus, i think roger is the sort of person who would probably laugh about most of it. But it’s an idea that keeps feeding into itself through fandom, perpetuating what is probably a misguided view of his personal life.

Again, I am sure he’s had his fair share of fun and I’m not trying to make out that he was always perfect or whatever, but I don’t think he’s been with as many women as the popular discourse would imply and I certainly don’t think he’s in the 4 digit numbers.

#i7558vjvug #please god dont let this start anything #im just here to write smut and have a good time

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gretchensinister · 3 years

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I was tagged by @marypsue Which is great because I was looking for a way to procrastinate my actual WIPs tonight!

Name: GretchenSinister, here and on AO3

Fandoms: Rise of the Guardians, mostly, with random forays into other stuff like Venom or Thor. I have a thing to say about Phantom of the Opera and I really hope I manage it. I’ve made costumes for Over the Garden Wall and the game Journey.

Two-shot: At first I was like, DO I have any two-chapter stories? I’m the kind of person who either provides like, a novel with mainstream chapter lengths, or looks at something that’s 20k, 30k words and is like “it just doesn’t split up into chapters.” (Ao3’s line break yes, I’m not that experimental.) But as it turns out I do have this two-shot, “The Magician Wife and the Heart of Lead,” which is fairy-tale styled Pitch/Sandy including elements of the Cupid and Psyche myth as well as East of the Sun and West of the Moon. It exists as two chapters on Ao3 because I posted it in two chapters on tumblr, because I wanted to post something daily for a Blacksand week, and couldn’t finish writing the whole thing in one day.

Most popular multi-chapter: Based on hits, it’s “Without Contraries There Is No Progression,” which I would call a moderate-burn movie-verse blacksand fic. Of course, the number of hits is also a function of time, since if I’m doing the math correctly this has been out for eight and a half years; it was the first fic I published on Ao3.

Actual worst part of writing: When you try to be sneaky with yourself and fail! I have had multiple instances where characters are having a conversation alluding to some secret, and I didn’t write myself a note about what they were referring to…and then I had to take a break from writing the story. And then when I came back I had to be like, “huh. sure would like to find out where this mysterious thread is leading” but I CAN’T because I’M supposed to be the one setting up the mystery! I am 100% sure plots have changed because I didn’t remember where I was going. I’ve no-spoilered my own stories to the degree that what I was hiding from myself is lost forever. I don’t put anything out there that I think is bad, but I sometimes wonder what could have been. I leave myself many more notes than I used to.

How you choose your titles: Main story element or oblique reference to a main story element/theme. Rarely poem lines or song lyrics. I like to read books where a title drop will make me go ooooooh, so I try to do that when I get a chance.

Do you outline: Sometimes, but not very effectively, as a thing I’m writing now has an “outline” where a point could take 1 paragraph and then another point could take multiple pages.

Ideas you probably won’t get around to but wouldn’t it be nice: Would require some messing with dates, but—Matilda (teenage) and Miss Honey find Carrie before she dies and take her back to their place and help her heal.

Callouts @ yourself: Remember when you wrote short things? And finished them?

Best writing traits: I’ve been told that my dialogue is good. I’d also like to think I’m good at submerging a reader in a scene/image/mood but APPARENTLY the equivalent of just standing in a forest and looking at the trees for fifteen minutes is not what the people want. (This evaluation based on a couple of grad school writing workshops. I couldn’t say anything during the discussion but in my head I was like…okay you don’t like it but I 100% did that on purpose.)

Spicy tangential opinion: When it comes to queer experiences, fantastical/metaphorical representation often has a lot more power to it than literal representation that makes it into the mainstream.

No pressure tagging: @alienfuckeronmain, @incurablenecromantic @rachie-neyiea, really if you write fic feel free to claim that I tagged you (and then tag me in your reply, I’d love to read about people’s processes while putting off other things).

#meme #rambling

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mischiefiswritten · 5 years

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11/11 (Make a Wish) Tag

Thanks @capshorty for tagging me!! :D

To play: Answer the 11 questions asked by the person who tagged you, then ask 11 more for the people you tag.

1. How old were you when you realized writing was something you wanted to do? How old were you when you actually started doing it?

I've always been involved in this love affair with words. My dad read to us our whole lives, and since then, stories have just been alive in me. And something I surround myself with. I wrote my first multi-chapter story in... either the third or fourth grade, but I was a writer from the start. I didn't even know writing was a Thing(TM), so it wasn't any given moment that I decided I wanted to do it.

2. What are your favorite fandoms? Do you read or write fanfiction for any of them?

Too. Many. To name. Honestly I've got fandoms out the wazoo. (Hmu and we'll geek out forever.) I've read fanfic for a TON of them too (lots of Mass Effect and Dragon Age of late and KOTOR forever) but I only recently started writing fanfic (unless you count one ancient X-Men: Origins oneshot that is still out there but I will not tell you where to find it). I've posted fics for Marvel, Dragon Age: Origins, and Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords. Those you can find here and on my linked AO3 account.

3. What was your first story idea that you really felt was solid?

Great question. I've been thinking about this for some time, but I can't quite remember what came first, especially since several of my ideas have evolved into several different versions. I think in jr. high I first came up with a pretty decent idea or two. One was a heist type novel that I might just come back to one day. (Fictional heists are my drug. I literally cannot get enough.)

4. What’s your best solution for getting over writer’s block?

I wish I had a really good one, but I think mostly I just rely on consuming other media. I step back, submerge myself in other people's storytelling in all forms and wait for my head to clear and new ideas to surface. (Or if I really need to write, I find a totally separate project, like fanfic.)

5. What book(s)/author(s) have you read that you think of influenced your writing most?

I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings for the first time in the third grade. Since then, Tolkien has been (and will always be) the ultimate storyteller in my mind.

6. Which of your story was/is the easiest to write? Which was the hardest?

Honestly it's all hard. Plot is the bane of my existence, but random dramatic/emotional/fluffy scenes from all over the timeline (or not in the story at all) come pretty easily to me.

7. What are some of your favorite tropes to read/write?

Slow burn, mutual pining, friends to lovers. That is my trifecta. I love lots of tropes (among them, found family, chosen one [fight me], reluctant hero, and occasionally a good love triangle depending on story/media), but those are my ultimate weak spot.

8. If you could date ANY fictional character, who would it be?

There are so many good choices out there! (Assuming I would not die immediately due to the hazards attached to some of them.) There was a time not too long ago I would have said Four, of Divergent fame. I could happily accept a dinner invite from Aragorn (and a lot of other Tolkien men), too, and there's the classic answer: Mr. Darcy.

9. What are some of your favorite things to do outside of writing?

Play videogames, watch tv and movies, and have game nights to name a few! I'm also a hobby artist and like crafts/diy.

10. Where would be your ideal place to live?

Somewhere green and open that has four seasons and that's close to my family.

11. What’s the most underrated book you’ve ever read? Most overrated?

War Horse (both the book and movie) is criminally underrated. Why does no one ever talk about War Horse? I think I've probably read a lot of books over the year that I really enjoyed but no one else had seemed to read. Likewise I've read some books (mostly YA) that, for me, didn't live up to the hype. Paper Towns, for instance. I really did enjoy it, but I don't guess I get the insane hype around John Green.

I'll tag: @ren-c-leyn, @katekyo-bitch-reborn, @thewritertiffany, @zburatorii, @battlestargalaska, @writing-and-nutmeg, @literarycritique97, @thewrittenpost, @contes-de-rheio, @the-violet-writer, @writingwithellie. Anyone who wants to play is more than welcome!

Questions for you lovely folks!

1. Who has been the biggest supporter(s) of your writing? How have they supported you?

2. If you've written multiple pieces or worked on multiple projects, what are some common elements you find in several of them?

3. What are your go-to sources for writing advice/references/tips?

4. What are your favorite tropes to read and write?

5. If you were going to be known for a single great book, in what genre would you most want it to be in?

6. Fans of what currently published books (or other works of fiction) would most enjoy your WIP?

7. Honesty hour: Have you given pretend interviews in your head about your wildly successful novels? What topics did you talk about most in your "interview"?

8. If your WIP were going to be adapted into another form of media (TV, film, audio drama, comic, videogame, stage play, etc.) which do you think would fit it best? Which would you most like to see happen?

9. How well do your tastes in reading align with your tastes in writing?

10. Do you read or write fanfiction? If so, for what fandoms, and how do you think this has influenced your writing?

11. Asking who your favorite OC is is like asking about someone's favorite child. But come on, you know you have favorites. Who are they?

#11/11 tag #tag game for writers #mischiefiswritten #writeblr #writing

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ark-of-eden · 7 years

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R is drunk and raving (not in the party way).

(R:) Additionally, I’m procrastinating like a fucking champion at working on fic construction, so you know the best use of my time is going off about random social media crap on the internet.

tl;dr: Putting all commentary in tags on Tumblr makes R cry and shit thousands of words into the Internet.

Every social media site inevitably develops sets of unwritten social conventions. Some of them actually make sense as being derived from meatspace etiquette and therefore you don’t really have to stress about remembering them as long as you play nice like a decent creature.

And some of them just don’t make any fucking sense that I can see. Folks on Twitter using a deliberately space-limited form of media to write a page’s worth or more in a string of 30+ rapidfire tweets? This is just how it’s done over there? (Tweetlonger exists but for some reason these massive chain-tweeters never seem to use it. Same with posting the whole thing in a long-form site like LJ/DW/Tumblr and just linking it to a tweet.)

And Tumblr has things that I literally had to put effort into learning after I migrated here, and after I learned about them I frankly decided to ignore them because I couldn’t see the point in them. Tumblr has this bizarre allergy to commentary and, likely derived from that, the practice of instead commenting by putting it all in awkward tags that render the tagging system not especially useful and are harder to get to if you’re actually interested in an individual’s thoughts about a thing and not just the twelfth instance of the same post crossing your dash in a day or two. It’s not like you can’t engage with people, because asks and messaging and such exist, but like...there’s this strong sense that it’s Terribly Ill-Mannered to weigh in with your own impressions right there, in the body of the post, typing your own words in that seductive, wide-open text box that appears all on its own when you go to reblog something. The properly-socialized Tumblrite eschews that tempting text field and instead posts weird sentence fragments in tag form (interspersed with actual tags that might serve to usefully categorize the post’s content), to the extent that some people can add on a good couple paragraphs of material down among the hashtags where others need to go looking for it on purpose if they want it. (I, at least, haven’t been able to find a plugin or something that automatically expands full tags on all posts so that I don’t have to fuck around with extra interface elements to get to them. I admit that I haven’t looked super hard, though.)

Preserving the original form of the OP’s post is a noble practice that I heartily support, but how is adding commentary a problem if you’re only adding a separate thing, not taking away or altering anything in the original...? This was already a practice/convention/code of social interaction on Tumblr when I got here, so I was never in the front row to witness this element taking shape. I suppose it must have made good sense at the time, but every time I see ten people reblogging the same post with no additions and a paragraph of tags appended to it, it’s like a splinter in my brain that has been digging into me for years now.

And I’m not hating on people who do that! I get that that’s The Way It’s Done Here and I am the deviant weirdo for continually adding comments directly onto things that I reblog. Tags are where individuality lives here, unless you’re producing your own original posts, which I guess other people are then supposed to reblog without commentary so that you have to go hunting after all the reblogs individually if you want to get an actual sense of what these people were all thinking when they reblogged your thing. It all just seems...so...WORK INTENSIVE, refusing to use site functions as they were intended??

Look, I absolutely know that my commentary is not the work of incisive genius that unfailingly adds value to every post I find worthy of my attention. We’re pretty much solid shitposting on this blog. Because I’m a little loaded at the moment and that gives me a handy excuse to run my fingers like an idiot (plus I put that readmore up there, so if your eyes are actually consuming these words, you have only yourself to blame for being here), let me run down relevant history of how we got here.

LJ was home for a good long while. Then shit got seriously messed up and Dreamwidth was created as a better LJ, so we migrated all our stuff over there. And journaling sites along those lines still feel like a native environment. I, in particular, am the most long-winded piece of shit we know and I am honestly incapable of talking about anything of worth in short form. It’s a sickness and I just sort of have to own it. :/ But that’s why journaling sites are a good place for me to live, because that’s where people go when they have the inclination to read meandering scrawls about the depths of other people’s lives or whatever.

We went to Twitter for a good while because all the cool people we knew from LJ were going there for some unfathomable reason. These people wrote things that were complex and fascinating to read, so all of them jumping ship to a place that limited them to 140-character chunks made no damn sense, but we loved those people and wanted to trust that they knew what the hell they were doing. And they probably did, and a couple of us were actually okay with Twitter, but I, being the long-winded shitpiece, spent a lot of time frustrated and kind of overstimulated.

Then things started going to hell more and more consistently for me personally (and us generally by extension, but that’s unnecessary detail). Bunkering down specifically to protect people that you care about from the fallout of your crazy is a fairly common thing for mentally-ill people to do, I think. So I’d shut up online until I felt stable enough to talk to people again. Those periods lasted a few days, then a week or more, then a month, then eventually I stopped talking entirely. I missed the LJ/DW format, but in the past I’d written about life events and things I was thinking about and such, so...at the time, all I really had to write about was the bad stuff. So LJ/DW was basically unusable as well.

I literally came here to be as shallow as I could possibly manage. Tumblr had a rapid, chaotic flow similar to Twitter, but could hold longer content like LJ/DW. We’ve never really used the site’s full functionality at any point, though. For at least a year, all we were following was the most lightweight, zero-calorie entertainment that we could find. (We actually came here for Flight Rising content, so there was a lot of that.) Being engaged with fandom in any consistent respect is an extremely recent thing.

And I’m not saying that fandom hasn’t got depth and complexity because it absolutely does and that’s one of the beautiful things about shared fan experiences. I kind of got into that sort of fandom by accident after getting here and rediscovering Transformers. But the unvoiced policy that I’ve always had here is to avoid the Too Real and dodge serious topics whenever possible. Thus, no gender theory, no neurodivergence or multiplicity, no nonhumanity, no religion or UPG, nothing with real substance behind it that bared real vulnerabilities. (Apparently this was a good move anyway because the nonhuman and multiplicity situation here on Tumblr is a bit of a clusterfuck? I honestly wouldn’t know, as I haven’t made a lot of effort to link up with those folks.) That’s still the policy. That might remain the policy forever until I reach some vaguely-defined threshold of sanity that makes me worthy of talking about those things in places and formats that other people can interact with.

And I’m sorry for all this talk about mental illness, but it’s simpler just to explain things clearly. I likely won’t go into any more detail about it on Tumblr. Or anywhere else, because I care about people even if I’ve never met them or talked to them at all and I still want to keep it all in the bunker to protect good people from the crazy. Sometimes, all you can do is just prevent the damage from spilling out into other people’s lives, and that’s the place that I usually operate from.

I’m still pretty drunk, so I’m allowed to ramble from too much truth serum, but all of that explanation was to get around to saying that the format of online communication that is most intuitive to me is the long, oversharing gut-spill of random people talking about things that are really meaningful to them - not in the sense of elaborate philosophy or artsy epistles to the cosmos, but just people being super real about things that are meaningful to them and going into lots of detail about them because gushing about things you love is great. And it’s possible to get that sort of discussion and gushing in Tumblr fandom, and I love it because it reminds me of better times, and the fact that I love it is WHY IT MAKES ME SO GODDAMN FRUSTRATED that Tumblr culture is basically stifling discussion and feedback and RESPONSE to things that people find interesting!!

Like, here’s how I see it. Unlike on LJ/DW, where you were limited to hyperlinking to a cool post in one of your own posts if you wanted your readers to go check it out, on Tumblr, if you find a super cool thing, you can pull it directly into your space and let other people experience it directly, exactly as you experienced it. But the thing is, I also subscribe to the My Blog My House concept. If I pull a thing into my “home,” I do it because there’s something homelike about it; it belongs in my home for some specific reason. I don’t take “ownership” of an item in the sense that I’m claiming it in place of its creator, but I’m taking ownership of it in the sense that it’s part of my Stuff now and it’ll get my fingerprints all over it and be blended into the general morass of Stuff that I recognize as my home. I don’t just pull random crap into my home for no reason at all.

And I just figure that other people are similar in the sense that they reblog things for distinct, unique reasons, not in the sense that they have some master plan for their blog content (some do, but it’s not necessary), but just that they have compelling reasons why they pick certain bits of content out of the larger river of their dashboard and put it in their own space for people to experience with them. I follow people based on the interesting things that they find interesting. I’m interested in why they’re interested in those things. They seem like interesting people to me because they’re interested in what they’re interested in.

But the WHY is a really important part of the equation for me. Did this person reblog that photo because they’ve been to that place themselves, because they like that kind of tree, because they reblog photos with that color scheme every Thursday? Did that person reblog that piece of art because they love that character, because they’re studying that art medium, because it reminded them of something funny they saw somewhere else? People attach their own context to things that they latch onto. It’s so freaking weird to me that people have to hide their interpretations or impressions in tags here on Tumblr, making them unimportant and optional in the process of sharing things they like with others. (Okay, people also share a lot of things they hate, but reasons for outrage are still part of the context that one adds to content.)

I WANT TO KNOW WHY YOU CARE ABOUT WHAT YOU’RE SHOWING ME. I WANT TO KNOW WHAT MAKES IT IMPORTANT TO YOU. I WANT TO KNOW WHAT IT MAKES YOU THINK AND FEEL. Even if it’s a blurb about how giant robots fuck or a cute kitten video, I NEED TO KNOW THESE THINGS.

Not in excruciating detail or with insightful analysis or even a lot of text at all. Mostly, the things that people put in tags are things that, to me, are a really crucial part of the experience of being able to go into someone’s “home” and see the Stuff that they chose to put in it. Reducing oneself to a glorified signal repeater is...okay, I guess, though it turns a Tumblr blog into a kind of faceless stream of other people’s material a lot of the time. The personal touch is what makes it all interesting. And I’m just unutterably frustrated that, somewhere along the line, it was decided that personalizing an experience by sharing one’s own impressions of it became rude enough that polite society decided that it had to be hidden away in tags. I want all of it, so I do go looking for it, but omg it requires MORE EFFORT and BURNING CALORIES and BODILY MOVEMENT and WAAAAH, you know what I mean. :P

And possibly Tumblr society is right and it’s done for a good, decent purpose and I’m being pigheaded and uncool by insisting on doing things my way without bothering to try and understand the local customs. I’m not usually that much of an asshole, but I am about this, for some reason. And I admit that my craving for those personal touches could very well spring from how utterly isolated and lonely I am, so maybe normal people really don’t need all the extra info and actually do just want mostly-impersonal streams of content. And that’s fine, since I know I’m kind of a weirdo even on my best days.

I’m pretty sure that that was all that I really wanted to say. I’m probably overreacting about the whole comments-in-tags thing. Like I said, it’s kind of an irrational irritation. Also, I need to stop before I write myself sober and no longer have an excuse for all of this. If you actually read all of that, you are an awesome, generous person and I’m pretty damn certain that I love you even though I have no idea who you are.

#long post #social media #mental illness #personal history #content tagging #really i should illustrate the issue by putting a shitton of additional material down here in the tags but i'm kind of cashed out now #does anyone else experience that thing where typing directly into tumblr's post box lags like an absolute motherfucker #istg typing this out took me twice as long as it should have because i kept having to wait for tumblr to catch up to the last 20 words #not like i exactly type like a wind ninja necessarily but just that tumblr exists in a perpetual state of shitting on itself #i kind of feel bad for the poor thing #that feels faintly stockholm-syndrome-like but oh well #gratuitous tag abuse #i totally wasted an evening but at least that is all out of my system now #tbh i hate relying on alcohol for things like helping me write stuff easily but i feel more emotionally de-constipated now #seriously bless everyone who actually read all that shit #you are loved

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