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You did it. You killed me.

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we as a society do not explore proxy sex enough………….

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Loving this letter that one deeply hilarious National Trust employee was clearly tasked with writing to dress one of the rooms at the property we visited today:

I'm sure they never anticipated Dr Tall Gf and I, who spend half an hour minimum in every single goddamn room, and will therefore notice every single thing, including your funny little jokes!!!

(Letter reads:

Fourth Dec. 1772

Dear Brother,

Whilst I am most delighted to welcome you to my home I must also let you know that quite recently I did engage a local artisan-builder to undertake the plasterwork here at Mompesson House. I have had many wonderful ideas for the plasterwork: to whit, peaches, Inigo Jones and Alexander Pope, King Midas, shells, a Green Man who is most distinctive, the Goddess Athena, a lady with the head of a cornucopia, a Large Eagle, several sundry fruits as well as the aforementioned peaches, and so on. Suffice to say, it will be most grand but also cause a lot of mess. Anyway, my great hope is that one day the plasterwork will be so historically significant that it will pass onto some kind of National Trust that protects buildings and their furniture and so forth. I am sure the employees of such an institution would be kind, generous, thoughtful, attractive, most engaging and witty, probably extremely sexy and certainly in general a delight to be near. Visitors of the future witnessing my noble plasterwork will be so grateful that they will no doubt spend plentiful money in the tea room and secondhand bookshop I should think.)

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gay 70s copaganda thesis is actually about the inherent homoeroticism of the western genre and the cultural image of the male cowboy it borrows from. or as Susan Sarandon once put it, "They got their guns out because they couldn't get their dicks out"

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“Magneto’s backstory should be changed, it’s unrealistic that he’d still be alive after all this time!” Have you forgotten what franchise he’s from?

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i always click the "track package" button as soon as i get the email. "oh boy i wonder where my package is!" warehouse.

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Teen LGBT Squad

Another Hometar Runner fancomic for pride month, this time starring the Teen Girl Squad.

This was mostly an excuse to make that “ow mein kampf” joke

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you guys were right about hawkeye pierce. he wears bathrobes and hawaiian shirts to work. he's chronically sleep deprived. he's extremely good at his job. he's a pacifist. he causes problems on purpose. he's campy and silly and emotionally repressed. he's six foot two. he has a gin still in his sleeping quarters. he's a staunch ally of the oppressed and ostracised. he's even from maine.

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Hmmm

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the big list of things I promised not to do in Disco Elysium fanfic

I wrote this list when I couldn't get the tone of my early fanfic drafts right. It was originally for my own reference but it might be useful for other people!

Some context: At the point I wrote this, I'd read a frankly embarrassing amount of the AO3 KimHarry tag. These were the themes I noticed repeating. Not all of them are Bad, exactly, but seeing them over and over, especially next to each other, WAS bad. Often when a scene in my fic wasn't working it was because I had repeated one of these themes without thinking about it. I'll also say that I like creating stuff around Disco Elysium because a lot of the themes that frustrate me in other fandoms aren't present.

Also: I'm not subtweeting any specific writers or fics for doing these things. This is about a cumulative effect, and I don't think the presence of (most of) these things makes a story automatically bad (what is a 'bad' story, after all?). That said—I DO think it's valuable to step back and think about what cultural narratives our writing is challenging or reinforcing. Fanfic writers are really weirdly positioned when it comes to this—often we think we are progressive just because we're more progressive than the material we are writing about, but adding gay kissing to a text doesn't actually remove biases from our own writing OR from the world of the original text. (My favourite example of this is: you can make the wizard boy Jewish as much as you want, but your readers still know the Gringotts goblins exist in the background).

So, with that preamble, here is my list. It has a lot of swearing in it. My creative process is extremely spite-motivated.

What do I even want out of fanfic for this video game!!?

Plot, worldbuilding, and tone

It is Funny

It doesn’t downplay how gross/gritty/unfair the setting or world is

The crimes aren’t cosy mystery-adjacent. They need drugs and murder!!

It doesn’t try to fix or solve or idealise the world

People can just be assholes and not everyone can be redeemed (or must be redeemed)

Sobriety isn’t magic and doesn’t run off the power of friendship

ACAB values

Becoming a cop isn’t a good outcome for kids (Cuno will not be redeemed by becoming a cop. He will be exactly the same person but this time he will be allowed to carry a gun.)

The RCM is not one big happy family. This isn't Brooklyn 99; cops know not to trust other cops.

Cops aren't good, the justice system isn’t Good, arresting people isn’t Good, prison isn’t Good—all of these things should feel serious when they happen.

Jean isn’t nice after one heart to heart

Harry does not “learn about toxic masculinity” or “about consent” from other cops. Fuckin 40% man!!

Martinaise does not get policed into being clean, tidy, and everyone being best friends with each other (or worse: friends with the police). That’s just gentrification. Fanfic that does this is just raising property values.

Characters are goddamn adults

No infantilisation of Harry for addiction/mental health/amnesia; he isn’t childlike, confused, or unaware of what he’s doing

No YA-ification of grown-ass men: stop having adults blush so much, stop having adults being so shy about sex. The sentence “making out like teenagers” is on its final warning

No codependency. They do not Complete Each Other. They do not stop being flawed people because of love... they keep being flawed in new and interesting ways.

Unassimilated queer shit

No more desexualising or feminising Asian men. None of this white power fantasy of 'getting your hands all the way around his tiny doll-like waist'. Kim isn't that short or small or Fragile. He certainly isn't automatically a bottom because he's like a couple centimetres shorter and not white. If he's gonna bottom then he isn't going to be shy and uwu and nervous about it... he wouldn't stutter. He is 42. Write him confident! (Yes, people can write whatever they want, but if they wanna write racist gender binary bullshit, I am going to ask questions about the motivation behind it.)

No ‘Kim can’t tell if Harry is straight or not’… he can tell! You don't need strong gaydar to pick up signals like 'he wears heels' or 'he still loves disco.'

I refuse to do 'Harry needs Kim to explain bisexuality to him’. The word is not the missing piece he needs. I am tired of him coming out being followed by making out—as though the only thing holding them back was the lack of having The Perfect Label.

Nobody should be asking if they have consent to hold hands, oh my god!! (Perhaps my most cancellable note, but: this isn't even an exaggeration—I've seen writers conscientiously having characters doing consent check ins for if Gay Hand Holding is okay in other fandoms. The assumption seems to be that queerness needs more consent check ins because ~it's inherently unnatural~ and it would be horrible to do a gay thing with someone without regularly checking if they're still gay throughout. Nobody expects authors writing straight romance to use the traffic light system; we know that their characters are into what's happening because of prose, body language, dialogue, and their reciprocation. I promise: anyone who jumps to label a queer sex scene as predatory and abusive just because the author didn't have a character stop to get verbal consent was gonna think it was predatory and abusive anyway.)

A police precinct isn't a safe or pleasant place to be out and cops especially wouldn't be trying to set two of their male coworkers up. If there is a betting pool on when Kim and Harry get together... it is not going to be in a Fun And Friendly Way.

'Homosexuality was decriminalised' is different to 'homosexuality is legal.' Both are LIGHTYEARS away from 'we have marriage equality.'

Queerness should exist outside the realm of two people and manifest outside of the romance. Other queers exist in the world and outside the main cast of characters, and they recognise each other without needing their identities to be explicitly spoken aloud.

Fashion. Drama. Eye Contact. Gossip. They are all parts of day-to-day queerness! Naturally straight people do not write about these things because they do not realise how much we talk about them when they are not in the room.

Okay that is my list! If you have pet peeves in fic feel free to drop them in the comments or my ask box... I love to talk about weird trends in fanfic and I also just generally love to talk shit 😌

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The Toymaker 1966

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Komodo Dragon

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There should totally be a movement called “Sleep in Public” where people defend their right to sleep on public property. Sleep in your cars. Sleep on benches. Sleep at the park. Just make it a mundane and regular part of life to see someone napping in the library. It would make it much harder to single out the homeless for harassment if everyone else is doing the same thing and much harder to argue that it’s a “threat to public safety” when it’s so clearly harmless.

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one of the things i love most about doctor who is its ability to use the sci-fi genre to give you these really intriguing character breakdowns in the most straightforward way possible like every story where we have two versions of the same character speaking to one another is such a neat way to give the audience an internal monologue and allows you to get into that characters head without the need for any extrapolation. like. well… i know that one hates herself because she literally stabbed herself in the back. twice. :(

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Pride and Prejudice (1995) + Text Posts (6/?)

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I’m too hot! HOT DAMN. Call the adequately-funded community alternatives to policing including robust peer support, trauma-informed & non-coercive crisis counseling, safe consumption sites, housing, food assistance and guaranteed basic income. And the fireman.