#bit of characterisation/liking a bit of prose. i like a lot of the lines surrounding gideon in aofgwm because he was such a fun character

[steelycunt]

top 5 lines you've written x

hi omg!! wait sorry i was late to answering this one i had to like. think about it. and also remember things ive written which was painful. but i did a little scroll through my last three posted works and picked a few bits that i liked xx also sorry they're all longer than a line xx

5: from ilob. Somewhere, there is a very long, meticulously catalogued list of things that Sirius Black does not know. It spans several volumes, actually, page after page bound up in pristine leather, scrawled, dog-eared entries, including (but by no means limited to): what they’re doing here, with all this. How long this could possibly last. What he’ll do when it ends.

What he does know, however, is this: he knows that Remus keeps his toothbrush with Sirius’, in the cup by the sink, and his jacket next to Sirius’, on the stand by the front door. He knows doesn’t want to cut his hair anymore.

He knows he feels odd. If he were to be honest instead of eighteen, perhaps he knows why.

4: from ilob. Remus picks up one of the yellow bottles, drops it into the trolley next to a box of cornflakes, and then he looks at Sirius for a moment and – smiles. Just smiles. He’s got this way of narrowing his eyes, furrowing his brow ever so slightly: this way of smiling at you that leaves you feeling both clueless and complicit in the cause. He’s done it since he was eleven, and Sirius still can’t figure it out; knowing Remus is an entirely separate thing to understanding him, Sirius has come to find.

He’s infuriating like that. He’s a bloody menace. He would destroy Sirius if he were to stop.

3: from otiofad. His thumb swipes over the inside of Remus’ wrist. The soft upturn of his mouth makes Remus think of something impossible—makes him think of those Corradini statues: drapery carved from hard marble. Christ. Christ, here, in a broom cupboard with him, cigarette tucked behind his ear. He feels the slick press of their palms, before they let go; he feels delirious.

2: from aofgwm. Sirius turns at the same time as Remus does; the motion sort of plays out in half-speed, his mind only loosely tethered to his body. There are bits of his brain smeared against his fingertips, and Gideon Prewett is ambling towards them, grinning lopsidedly. The bonfire glints against his dumb fucking nose ring, crackles orange between his teeth and through his hair. He has the look of a person who has already killed and eaten something tonight.

1: from otiofad. It’s—despicable, and pointless, because Sirius is Remus’ one unquantifiable thing: there is no size, no amount of himself that he could dwindle down to where Remus could not feel him. Even if he doesn’t know it, doesn’t care, he’s a thorn in Remus’ side. A broken spring in his mattress. A transplant organ riddled with infection, that Remus’ body is too hungry to reject.

ask me my top five anything!

[iero0]

Hi lovely!! Happy one year! How about 1 and 11 for Dear Stranger or a fic of your choice?

Thank you, my lovely @the-starryknight, both for the congrats and the ask!

1: What inspired you to write Dear Stranger this way?

Dear Stranger was a part of Cluefest and hence prompt based. When I read through the prompt to narrow them down to four or five to chose from then, I read the the prompts in depth and there was this sentence by wanderingeyre that really stood out to me:

"Draco is content running his apothecary shop in Knockturn Alley. If he has few friends left and spends most of his time alone, it's just punishment for the part he played in the war."

Then only comes the part with the anonymous love letters. Now, it sounds a bit lame to say "the prompt inspired me", but hear me out. To me, these two sentences instantly built the whole universe of Dear Stranger, both the characterisation and the social surroundings. Draco trying to make himself believe he doesn't need or deserve more than a quiet life with only very few people in it, a life between being alone, working too much, and trying to find joy in very small things while worrying about money is something that's quite the opposite of the Draco in the HP books and, in my HC, a very reasonable development for his character. His family's wealth is taken away, he gets teased instead of admired, and so he tries to hide and focus on the things he can control (in contrast to Narcissa who, first, stays in denial, especially about poverty).

And in comes something that Draco can't control and that's suddenly new and exciting for him. Someone is charming and fills his life with anecdotes other than brewing potions and Sunday luncheon with Mother, and in my head, the letters mean so much to him because he gets a meaningful glimpse of someone else's life, someone who's even interested in him.

I hoped that the way the prose and the letters alterate would show how much richer Draco's world gets with the influence of his Stranger and that words have actual, meaningful impact on his life, both his thoughts and his routines. Also, I absolutely do have a thing for epistolary, and I wrote several full epistolary stories together with my sweet @ladderofyears! Exchanging letters is something that feels both a bit old-fashioned (which I love) and intimate.

Also, loneliness, I think, is a recurring theme in my fics! In many of my Getting Together fics, everyday life looks pretty bleak and lonely for one or both of our boys.

11: What do you like best about this fic?

Honestly, there are a few thinks I like about this fic, but since I want to narrow it down to answer this question properly: it's imagineing what Harry sees in Draco. We get to hear some of it in his letters (which are ghastly written in the beginning, but turn a bit more wordy and elaborate in the course of the exchange (which I hope I conveyed xD)), how he sees someone who has obviously changed, and he likes that, partly, but he's also compassionate. He can see that Draco isn't complaining, but that he isn't really happy either. I made the line "Hope you had a reason to smile today" a recurring line in Harry's letter. I think it's very on the nose and a bit cheesy, but I thought that Harry really, truly wished that Draco, who had suffered through a lot, even from Harry's perspective, would have a way to move on and find a spot of happiness, even if it's just in the way of some proper self-care.

--Thanks, Starry, for making me think about this fic today!! I loved writing it, and I hope that these insights are a little interesting <3 (also, the other best part about this fic is this wonderful art by @fictional, commissioned by Emma <3)

Read Dear Stranger on AO3

[grubbyduck]

No Man’s Land - an essay on feminism and forgiveness

I have always proudly named myself a feminist, since I was a little girl and heard my mum proudly announcing herself as a feminist to anyone who would listen.

But I believe the word 'feminist' takes on a false identity in our collective imagination - it is seen as hard, as baked, severe, steadfast, stubborn and rooted. From a male perspective, it possibly means abrasive, or too loud, or intimidatingly intolerant of men. From a female perspective, though, these traits become revered by young feminists; the power of knowing what you think and never rolling over! My experience of being a feminist throughout my life has been anything but - it has been a strange and nebulous aspect of my identity; it has sparked the familiar fires of bravery, ambition, rage, sadness and choking inarticulacy at times, sure, but at other times it has inspired apathy, reactionary attitudes, bravado and dismissivness. And at other, transitive times, it caused me to rethink my entire outlook on the world. And then again. And then again.

In primary school, I read and re-read Sandi Toksvig’s book GIRLS ARE BEST, which takes the reader through the forgotten women of history. I didn’t feel angry - I felt awed that there were female pirates, women on the front line in the world wars, women at the forefront of invention, science and literature. I still remember one line, where it is revealed that NASA’s excuse for only hiring six women astronauts compared to hundreds of men was that they didn’t stock suits small enough. 

When I was 13, I tried to start a girl's rugby team at my school. I got together 15 girls who also wanted to form a team. We asked the coaches if they would coach us - their responses varied from 'maybes' to straight up 'no's. The boys in our year laughed at us publicly. We would find an old ball, look up the rules online, and practise ourselves in free periods - but the boys would always come over, make fun of us and take over the game until we all felt too insecure to carry on. I shouted at a lot of boys during that time, and got a reputation among them as someone who was habitually angry and a bit of a buzzkill. Couldn't take a joke - that kind of thing.

When I was around 16, I got my first boyfriend. He was two years older (in his last year of sixth form) and seemed ever so clever to me. He laughed about angry feminists, and I laughed too. He knew I classified myself as a feminist, but, you know, a cool one - who doesn't get annoyed, and doesn't correct their boyfriends' bulging intellects. And in any case, whenever I did argue with him about anything political or philosophical, he would just chant books at me, list off articles he'd read, mention Kant and say 'they teach that wrong at GCSE level'. So I put more effort into researching my opinions (My opinions being things like - Trump is a terrible person who should not be elected as President - oh yeah, it was 2016), but every time I cited an article, he would tell me why that article was wrong or unreliable. I couldn't win. He was a Trump supporter (semi-ironically, but that made it even worse somehow) and he voted Leave in the Brexit referendum. He also wouldn't let me get an IUD even though I had terrible anxiety about getting pregnant, because of his parents' Catholicism. He sulked if he ever got aroused and then I didn’t feel like having sex, because apparently it ‘hurts’ men physically. One time I refused sex and he sulked the whole way through the night, refusing to sleep. I was incensed, and felt sure that my moral and political instincts were right, but I had been slowly worn down into doubting the validity of my own opinions, and into cushioning his ego at every turn - especially when he wasn't accepted into Oxford.

When I was 17/18, I broke up with him, and got on with my A Levels. One of them was English Literature. I remember having essay questions drilled into us, all of which were fairly standard and uninspired, but there was one that I habitually avoided:

'Discuss the presentation of women in this extract'

It irritated me beyond belief to hear the way that our class were parroting phrases like 'commodification and dehumanisation of women' in order to get a good grade. It felt so phony, so oversimplified, and frankly quite insulting. I couldn't bear reading classic books with the intent of finding every instance that the author compares a woman to an animal. It made me so sad! I couldn't understand how the others could happily write about such things and be pleased with their A*. As a keen contributor to lessons, my teacher would often call on me to comment in class - and to her surprise, I think, my responses about 'women's issues' were always sullen and could be characterised by a shrug. I wanted to talk about macro psychology, about Machievellian villains, about Shakespreare's subversion of comic convention in the English Renaissance. I absolutely did not want to talk about womb imagery, about men’s fixation and sexualisation of their mothers or about docile wives. In my application for Cambridge, I wrote about landscape and the psyche in pastoral literature, and got an offer to study English there. I applied to a mixed college - me and my friends agreed that we’d rather not go if we got put into an all female college. 

When I was 19, I got a job as an actor in a touring show in my year out before starting at Cambridge. I was the youngest by a few years. One company member - a tall, handsome and very talented man in his mid-twenties - had the exact same job title as me, only he was being paid £100 more than me PER WEEK. I was the only company member who didn’t have an agent, so I called the producers myself to complain. They told me they sympathised, that there just wasn’t enough money in the budget to pay me more - and in the end, I managed to negotiate myself an extra £75 per week by taking on the job of sewing up/fixing any broken costumes and puppets. So I had more work, and was still being paid 25% less. The man in question was a feminist, and complained to his agent (although he fell through on his promise to demand that he lose £50 a week and divide it evenly between us). He was a feminist - and yet he commented on how me and the other woman in the company dressed, and told us what to wear. He was a feminist, only he slept with both of us on tour, and lied to us both about it. He was a feminist, only he pitted me against and isolated me from the only other woman in the company, the only person who may have been a mentor or a confidante. He was a feminist, only he put me down daily about my skills as a performer and made me doubt my intelligence, my talent and my worth. 

When I was 20, I started at Cambridge University, studying English Literature. Over the summer, I read Lundy Bancroft’s book ‘Why Does He Do That’ which is a study of abusers and ‘angry and controlling men’. It made me realise that I had not been given the tools to recognise coercive and controlling behaviour - I finally stopped blaming myself for attracting controlling men into my life. I also read ‘Equal’ by Carrie Gracie, about her fight to secure equal pay for equal work at the BBC in 2017-2019. It was reading that book that I fully appreciated that I had already experienced illegal pay discrimination in the workplace. Both made me cry in places, and it felt as though something had thawed in me. I realised that I was not the exception. That ‘women’s issues’ do apply to me. In my first term at Cambridge, I wrote some unorthodox essays. I wrote one on Virginia Woolf named ‘The Dogs Are Dancing’ which began with a page long ‘disclaimer for my womanly emotions’ that attempted to explain to my male supervisor how difficult it is for women to write dispassionately and objectively, as they start to see themselves as unfairly separate, excluded and outlined from the male literary consciousness. He didn’t really understand it, though he enjoyed the passion behind my prose. 

The ‘woman questions’ at undergraduate level suddenly didn’t seem as easy, as boring or as depressing as those I had encountered at A Level. I had to reconcile with the fact that I had only been exposed to a whitewashed version of feminism throughout my life. At University, I learned the word Intersectionality - and it made immediate and ferocious sense to me. I wrote an essay on Aphra Behn’s novella ‘Oroonoko’, which is about a Black prince and his pursuit of Imoinda, a Black princess. I had to get to grips with how a feminist author from the Renaissance period tackled issues of race. I had to examine how she dehumanised and sexualised Imionda in the same way that white women were used to being treated by men. I had to really question to what extent Aphra Behn was on Imionda’s side - examine the violent punishment of Oroonoko for mistreating her. I found myself really wanting to believe that Behn had done this purposefully as social commentary. I mentioned in my essay that I was aware of my own white female critical ingenuity. For the first time, I was writing about something I didn’t have any personal authority over in my life - I had to educate myself meticulously in order to speak boldly about race.

As I found myself surrounded by more women who were actively and unashamedly feminist, I realised just how many opinions exist within that bracket. I realised that I didn’t agree with a lot of other feminists about aspects of the movement. I started to only turn up to lectures by women. I started to only read literary criticism written by women - not even consciously; I just realised that I trusted their voices more intrinsically. I started to wish I had applied to an all female college. I realised that all female spaces weren’t uncool - that is an image that I had learned from men, and from trying to impress men. The idea that Black people, trans people, that non binary people could be excluded from feminism seemed completely absurd to me. I ended up in a mindset that was constructed to instinctively mistrust men. Not hate - just mistrust. I started to get fatigued by explaining basic feminist principles to sceptical men.

I watched the TV show Mrs America. It made my heart speed up with longing, with awe, with nerves, sorrow, anger - again, it showed me how diverse the word Feminism is. The longing I felt was for a time where feminist issues seemed by comparison clear-cut, and unifying. A time where it was good to be angry, where anger got stuff done. I am definitely angry. The problem is, the times that feminism has benefitted me and others the most in my life is when I use it forgivingly and patiently. When I sit in my anger, meditate on it, control it, and talk to those I don’t agree with on subjects relating to feminism with the active intent to understand their point of view. Listening to opinions that seemed so clearly wrong to me was the most difficult thing in the world - but it changed my life, and once again, it changed my definition of feminism. 

Feminism is listening to Black women berating white feminists, and rather than feeling defensive or exempt, asking questions about how I have contributed to a movement that excludes women of colour. Feminism is listening to my mother’s anxieties about trans women being included in all-female spaces, and asking her where those anxieties stem from. Feminism is understanding that listening to others who disagree with you doesn’t endanger your principles - you can walk away from that conversation and know what you know. Feminism is checking yourself when you undermine or universalise male emotion surrounding the subject. Feminism is allowing your mind to change, to evolve, to include those that you once didn’t consider - it is celebrating quotas, remembering important women, giving thanks for the fact that feminism is so complex, so diverse, so fraught and fought over. 

Feminism is common ground. It is no man’s land. It is the space between a Christian housewife and a liberated single trans woman. It is understanding women of other races, other cultures, other religions. It is disabled women, it is autistic women, it is trans men who have biologically female medical needs that are being ignored. It is forgiveness for our selfishness. It feels impossible.

The road to feminism is the road to enlightenment. It is the road to Intersectional equity. It is hard. It is a journey. No one does it perfectly. It is like the female orgasm - culturally ignored, not seen as necessary, a mystery even to a lot of women, many-layered, multitudinous, taboo, comes in waves. It is pleasure, and it is disappointment. 

All I know is that the hard-faced, warrior version of feminism that was my understanding only a few years ago reduced my allies and comrades in arms to a small group of people who were almost exaclty like me and so agreed with me on almost everything. Flexible, forgiving and inquisitive feminism has resulted in me loving all women, and fighting for all women consciously. And by fighting for all women, I also must fight for Black civil rights, for disabled rights, for Trans rights, for immigrant rights, for homeless rights, for gay rights, and for all human rights because women intersect every one of these minorities. My scoffing, know-it-all self doing my A Levels could never have felt this kind of love. My ironic jokes about feminists with my first boyfriend could never have made any woman feel loved. My frustration that my SPECIFIC experience of misogyny as a white, middle-class bisexual woman didn’t feel related to the other million female experiences could never have facilitated unity, common ground, or learning to understand women that existed completely out of my experience as a woman.

My feminism has lead me to becoming friends with some of those boys who mocked me for wanting to play rugby, and with the woman that was vying with me over that man in the acting company for 8 months. It is slowly melting my resentment towards all men - it is even allowing me to feel sorry for the men who have mistreated me in the past. 

I guess I want to express in this mammoth essay post that so far my feminist journey has lead me to the realisation that if your feminism isn’t growing you, you aren’t doing it right. Perhaps it will morph again in the future. But for now, Feminism is a love of humanity, rather than a hatred of it. That is all.