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Here’s the link:

https://archiveofourown.org/collections/GenAndAroPrompts/profile

Hey - I just wanted to say that I semi-run Gen and Aro prompts over on AO3 - if anyone needs inspiration for AAW20 or just wants to find some gen and/or aro stories; also, I have recently figured out how to bookmark stuff to a collection so if anyone has a story that might fit "gen and/or aro" and they want me to bookmark it to gen and aro prompts, I'd be happy to? (I'm following the #AAW20 tag, but also inbox)

Thank you! If you could provide us a link so we can check it out, that would be great. Thanks again!

— Caro

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Let’s talk about the fabulous aromantics out there

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http://m.dailykos.com/story/2015/08/03/1408341/-Psychologist-openly-admits-he-trains-police-officers-to-shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later S-I-G-N-A-L B-O-O-S-T

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Huh, some content warnings:

* It’s very much “everyone gets a (heterosexual) romantic relationship” 

* There is a lot of rape mention in the first book, and it’s something that has happened in the backstory of more than one character, and something that nearly happens to another; it’s not shown on page though.

* It sometimes gets very, very obvious that most authors contributing are cishet white guys. 

That said, there’s a shit ton of awesome bits that have mostly been mentioned by everyone else - like it being blue-collar workers who get to be center-stage as the good guys, the fact that who gets to vote is a major issue, and Gretchen Richter -

And now I wanna go re-read the first book again because Gretchen Richter.

Hey y’all what if I told you that there’s a fiction novel out there where a 6 square mile hunk of West Virginia, including a small mining town, is accidentally transported to 1632 Germany due to a cosmic accident.

And the local mining union looks around, goes ‘well shit, guess it’s time to organize everything’ and proceeds to deal with all the incredible bullshit that comes with being dropped into the middle of the 30 years war.

What if I told you it’s free to read online

https://www.baen.com/readonline/index/read/sku/0671578499

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@trustmeimageographer reblogged your post and added:

Hi I’m a fantasy writer and now I need to know what potatoes do to a society

They drastically increase peasant food security and social autonomy.

The main staple of medieval agriculture was grain–wheat, barley, oats, or rye. All that grain has to be harvested in a relatively short window, about a week or two. It has to be cut down (scythed), and stored in the field in a safe and effective way (stooked); then it has to be brought to a barn and vigorously beaten (threshed) to separate the grain from the stalks and the seed husks. It can be stored for a few weeks or months in this form before it spoils or loses nutritional value. 

Then it has to be ground into flour. In the earlier middle ages, peasants could grind their own flour by hand using small querns, but landlords had realized that if they wanted to get more money out of their peasants, it was more effective for the entire village to have one large mill that everyone used. Peasants had to pay a fee to have their flour ground–and it might say something that there are practically no depictions of millers in medieval English literature in which the miller is not a corrupt thief. 

Then the flour has to be processed to make most of its nutrients edible to humans, which ideally involves yeast–either it’s made into bread which takes hours to make every time (and often involves paying to use the village’s communal bread oven) and spoils within a few days, or it’s made into weak ale, which takes several weeks to make, but can keep for several months. 

Potatoes, in comparison…

Potatoes have considerably more nutrients and calories than any similar crop available in medieval Europe–they beat turnips, carrots, parsnips, beets, or anything else all to heck. I don’t know if they beat wheat out for calories per acre, but practically…

When you dig a potato out of the ground (which you can do at any time within a span of several months), you can bury it in the ashes of a fire for an hour, or you can boil it in water for 20 minutes.

Then you eat it. Boom. Done. (I mean, if you’re not fussy, you could even eat them raw.)

You store the ones you don’t want right now in a root cellar and plant some of them in the spring to get between a fivefold and tenfold return on your crop.

Potatoes don’t just feed you–they free you. Grain-based agriculture relies on lots of people working together to get the work done in a very short length of time. It relies on common infrastructure that is outside the individual peasant’s control. The grain has to be brought to several different locations to be processed, and it can be seized or taxed at any of those points. It’s very open to exploitation.

TW: Genocide The Irish Potato Famine happened because the English colonizers of Ireland demanded rents and taxes that were paid in grain, and it ended up that you didn’t really get to keep much of the grain you grew. So the Irish farmed wheat in fields to pay the English, and then went home and ate potatoes from their gardens. And then, because they were eating only one specific breed of potatoes, a blight came through and wiped all their potatoes out, and then they starved. So English narratives about the potato famine tended to say “Oh yes, potato blight, very tragic,” and ignore the whole “The English were taking all the grain” aspect, but the subtext here is: Potatoes are much harder to tax or steal than grain.

So… yeah. I realize it’s very counterproductive to explain to everybody why I’m always like “OMG POTATO NO” when I wish I could just chill out and not care about this. But the social implications of the humble potato are rather dramatic.

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Enjoy!

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Someone asked questions and. I have issues not trying to answer questions. I also currently do not have functional impulse control bc I am tired. Okay, I never have functional impulse control.

So - uh. I am blundering along, mostly trying to organize my own thoughts. If I seem to overexplain stuff, that’s because of that. 

There are tropes and depictions that are harmful - say, queer (1) characters dying off in fiction - Bury Your Gays. 

As far as I know, most of the harm comes from the repetition of these tropes.

That said: Appropriate consequences for a content creator using one of these tropes would be… well, some mix of “people not consuming their content”, apologizing, promising to do better next time, and actually doing so unless we’re talking about… idk, say stuff that’s explicitely expousing Nazi ideology, in which case telling people they’re a Nazi is appropriate. And I’m not talking about “and if you view it through this one specific lense were Maybe these things are metaphors” or something like that. I’m talking about either “this is explicitely telling this” or “this metaphor couldn’t be more bloody obvious”

Also, a lot of tropes that often get labeled problematic for fanfic seem to be… fulfilling-fantasies-this-person-doesn’t-want-fulfilled-IRL-y? idk, going with something that squicks me out personally, a lot: Student/teacher fic. As far as I can tell, people tend to like the Forbidden Romance! angle and also often seem to put themselves in the student’s position of “ooh, Glamorous Older Hot Authority Figure!” (that said, if someone who enjoys this can correct me on this... correct me on this) I’m studying to be a teacher, put myself in the perspective of the teacher, consider professional ethics, and get ill at the thought of this. That does not make the existence of student/teacher fic wrong. 

Part of the reason why the above is - well, something I don’t think of as problematic is because people, in general, whether reading or writing this, are very well aware this is wrong IRL, AFAIK. Stuff like - I’m aro, so I’m going to give aro examples: People very seldomly getting non-romantic happy endings can hurt, because it feels like I’m not capable of gaining one; people diminishing the importance of friendships in comparison to romantic relationships hurts because this happens IRL, too, is not seen as wrong, and dismisses the most important relationships in my life. Once again, these are mostly harmful not because of any single depiction(2), but because they’re normalized.

Fandom content creators are the wrong people to metaphorically-shout at for being insensitive in a lot of ways, but in easy reach, unfortunately. Not Ever Screwing Up when we’re all living in an awful system, inadvertently soaking up stuff that may be harmful if we pass it on bc we don’t know better, and doing all the research on your own on how to avoid that, maybe if you’re lucky with at most a handful of other people to spot for you, all of this in your spare time, unpaid, is really hard. 

Fandom content creators also individually, on average, don’t reach as many people as, say, TV Show Writers. Those also get paid. 

So - if we were living in a fairer world, the standards would be higher for people who get paid and reach a large audience, professionals, than for individual fandom content creators. Bc professionals get paid. Of course, then there should be a sliding scale there for “author trying not to drop below the poverty line” versus “movie with literal millions as a budget”; one of those has a much bigger potential research budget than the other.

Leaving awful messages in someone’s inbox generally doesn’t help anything at all, and will probably just harm people. 

Moving in the direction of banning discussion and depiction of something in general is also wrong and will probably harm people. IIRC, and through second-hand knowledge... well, “ban all discussion of CSA” on livejournal apparently ended up shutting down survivor groups, which is explicitely and directly harming CSA survivors. 

How the identity of content creators impacts stuff is Tricky, bc on the one hand it feels - different, to know something about someone like me was written by someone like me; but also forcing people to disclose bits of themselves they aren’t ready to disclose if they want to discuss them through fiction is wrong? And people in power silencing content they don’t like is. Very likely to happen even if you try to make the best possible standards to prevent this… 

I probably forgot something. A lot of somethings. I am tired. Please do not act angry towards me.

(1) I’m not going to discuss me using this. I’m using queer. I’m queer. 

(2) And I think leaving awful messages/shouting/etc at specific people for including these things in their content is mean and unproductive. They’re not doing it to hurt me and people like me, they probably don’t even know people like me can exist. That said, talking about How This Trope Can Harm is something I will do, and hope some of those who have written this do listen and - write sth that doesn’t do this next time they write something?

“I just want us to have a conversation about why people find problematic fic appealing!” says someone who will definitely shut that conversation down the MOMENT anyone says anything they disagree with.

“I just want you to think through the implications!” says the person who flips the fuck out the moment you bring scientific research on what the implications are to the table.

I’m so sick of people going “waaaaaaah we just want to have a conversaaaaaation” when they don’t want to have a conversation, they just want a bigger soapbox to shout their ideas and denounce all others from.

So much of my LIFE is seriously examining the effect narratives and art have on people but fucking nobody who says “well can’t we talk about how fiction affects reality” cares about what I have to say.

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writing Important Conversations

I want to share a bit of my methodology re: how to write about political talks/negotiations/machinations/court intrigue (hopefully) without boring your reader to death. I’m no Aaron Sorkin but writing drama that isn’t inherently “actiony” is definitely a learned skill.

step 1: background

You’ll find it’s much easier to work out the gist of your scene(s) if you figure out a few things before you start writing: 

– what every person in the room wants, generally – what they want out of the specific interaction you’re writing  – what they will actually get out of the interaction – why each character thinks this interaction is happening (may be different from why it is really happening) – the historical context; what led up to this moment, in the short and long term

Think of this like blocking a scene in theater. You need to know where everyone starts and where they need to end up before you figure out how they get there. 

If you’re not sure about that last bullet point, that’s a sign you need to pause and do more research or more worldbuilding, as the case may be. There’s no need to get into gratuitous detail (unless you want to), but establishing a sense of continuity will make your story’s politics more believable and compelling, and it’s hard to do that if you yourself don’t know where your story’s events fall in history. 

step 2: set the stage

People very rarely meet with the explicit intent of just talking to each other. (When someone says “we need to talk,” that’s sort of unusual and scary, right?) So, unless you’re setting up a meeting that both parties expect to be confrontational, you’ll want to make sure they’re physically doing something aside from talking. 

This can be as simple as sharing a meal, but it’s also a great opportunity to sneak in some worldbuilding or exposition. In a court setting, for example, you could set an Important Conversation during a ceremony or other symbolic gathering. The scene will be driven primarily by the Conversation, but the backdrop can tell us just as much about the political milieu. 

step 3: mechanics

Now that you know where everyone is, emotionally and physically, you can write the Important Conversation itself. This will involve a lot of dialogue, but you can break up big chunks of it by 

– describing what is going on around the characters/what the characters are actually doing, and their physical reactions to the conversation – providing more context, like brief(!) flashbacks to what has already happened – describing the characters’ thoughts about this conversation’s implications for their goals, personally

You’ll also want to have an exit strategy; once the plot-moving part of the conversation has occurred, you’ll want to contrive a way of ending the scene, even if the conversation is implied to continue. I’m partial to “jump-cut” transitions that simply skip right to the next bit of action, so we can immediately see the effects of the Important Conversation start to play out, but your setting may also give you an easy out (i.e. if they’re at a restaurant, someone pays the tab). 

Hopefully this helps! Go forth and scheme!

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THINGS WHICH MAKE WRITERS ANXIOUS:

not writing

writing

people reading their stories

people not reading their stories

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golden eagle having a relaxing time

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I live... kind of both in Vienna and in the Glantal (that’s a valley in Carinthia, Austria; for context: I attend uni in Vienna, but grew up in Carinthia and my parents live there), but since I don’t really need to refer to Vienna as “the city” when I’m living in Vienna most of the time, I kinda refer to St. Veit/Glan as “the city”. With all of it’s 12k inhabitants. 

Let’s play a game!

Reblog this post with the general area you live in and which city you mean when you just say “the city.”

Example: I live on Long Island and when I say “I’m going to the city,” I mean NYC.

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So. I still exist, after several months of not logging into Tumblr at all, and am sorry for - well, falling out of contact with the few people here who might’ve missed me. I am also trying to not spiral deeper into depression (yet again), which is. A work in progress, let’s put it like that.

I’m going to try and be online at least sometimes these days.

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As someone who comes from a family that regularly has the problem of “What are we going to do with all the zucchini”:

Do plant them in the garden.

Then feed everyone in your surroundings.

Your friends. Your roommates. The local kindergarden. Your aunt’s chickens. 

Try to convince people to take zucchini in queer meet-ups. Vary recipes as much as possible, and invite people for food. 

(All things I and/or my family have done.)

Following in the example of @gallusrostromegalus we went and got some tubs for our totally legal vegetable garden. Just fyi, these tubs were $5 each at Big Lots. @autumnhound is drilling holes as we speak, unlike me who stabbed it with my knife like a an aforementioned feral gnome.

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Gen and Aro Prompts

(I am sorry this is so late, this is exam week for me and I am exceptionally tired.)

So, about a year ago (more or less), I started a prompt meme on AO3, called “Gen and Aro Prompts”, to encourage people to write more gen stories, and/or stories involving aro-spec characters.

It’s still open, anyone can still contribute, and if you want to write something, that would be really, really awesome. (Especially for those people who want someone to help write out their aro headcanons, but no one who knows the fandom has stumbled over it yet.)

If you want to submit a prompt, and maybe hope someone interested stumbles over it, please do!

So far, there’s 31 prompts, and 26 works.

Not all of those works include explicitely aro characters, but 23 out of 26 (if I counted correctly) means that fics featuring aro characters are by far in the majority.

There’s fics exploring aromanticism in worlds with soulmates, fics exploring certain characters as aromantic, people-coming-out-fics…

Some of my favourites (because there’s too many of them, I can’t list them all):

Of Arrows and Soulmates - the oldest fic in the collection, predating the prompt meme, featuring the Hawkeyes as platonic soulmates. Kind of light-hearted and nice and you can feel the relief when both realize they’re platonic soulmates?

Immortality - I adore how comfy Pidge gets to be with being aro… , and also that this was written in response to one of my prompts; features a Pidge without a soulmate where people start ageing when they meet theirs.

Flingerlings - featuring aro Luna and Harry, and one of my favourite rejections of amatonormativity. Also starring Snape’s corpse, and the rejection of amatonormativity includes Snape’s actions, and just - go read it.

Pangur Bán and Me - Hermione and Millicent Bulstrode both get to be aro immortal friends. It’s awesome. Also, Millicent has an immortal cat. I am probably not very good at descriptions.

The Only One They Ever Reared - Sirius and Remus have to watch tiny!Harry while his parents are away. 

Mattie vs Amatonormativity - Mattie (from the Art of Escaping) discovers the concept of being aro. And aro-allo. I really just… like this kind of fic, even if I have no idea about the fandom?

We Won’t Ever Say Goodbye - another world where people don’t start ageing until meeting their soulmates, and even more non-soulmated aros - this time, it’s Natasha Romanov, Clint Barton and Pepper Potts from the MCU. This is one of several fics I start reading when being surrounded by romance gets to be too much.

Getting Lost With You (600800 Seconds From Valentine’s Day) - where Lavender is an aro robot, and her inner monologue is awesome. Also has a ranty author’s note I’m really fond of. (I should probably comment on it, finally…)

(I also wrote a fic with an aro Luna Lovegood “Romantic Love and Crumple-Horned Snorkacks (Through the Years)”, that is… at least 70% me projecting my experiences growing up onto her and mixing in some bits I heard from other people about them growing up? At least some people didn’t find that unenjoyable.)

I… haven’t really kept up with the newer fics, because uni, and I left out a lot of good ones because this post was starting to get too long, but - yeah. 

There’s quite something there already, and I really would like for a lot of those fics to get more comments and kudos, and to just see more fics in general.

(Also, question to the mods of this blog: Can I just go and submit aro fic that gets submitted to the prompt meme to you throughout the year?)

—————

Mod Caro: Of course! They won’t be added to our AO3 Collection or tagged as part of our Fanwork event, but we’ll gladly share it with the rest of the community if you send them to us.

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The person I reblogged this from deserves to be happy

I tried to scroll past this. I really did

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So… uh, the light was pretty bad, and I kind of used orange instead of gold, but… buttons. (Also, the hug bit is because I am a hug-inclined person.)

So I have… absolutely No Idea whether this interests you, but I might have made buttons for myself with your aro-allo flag, or the closest I could get with coloured pencils.

OH????