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[senlinyuwrites]

Chapter 34: The Strange Disappearance of Rita Skeeter

“What happened?” he finally asks.

She wets her lips. Her cheeks are burning, and she wants to ask if it looks bad.

“I was — practising spells, and one rebounded.” She forces an embarrassed smile. “Did it to myself. Stupid, right?”

There’s a long pause as she waits for him to react.

“You’re a terrible liar,” is all he says. His voice is soft, but there is something about him that feels angry but in a way she’s unfamiliar with.

He usually goes flat when first irritated, and then explodes when she manages to poke too hard. This is calmer, but far more dangerous than that.

“Who did this to you?”

Continue reading…

[senlinyuwrites]

been reading dramione fics and it’s doing something to my brain i fear

[senlinyuwrites]

Do you know Draco Malfoy? That boy? He goes to Durmstrang

[senlinyuwrites]

Feline

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kissing isn’t enough i need to bite you

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“u look tired” I’m literally going insane.

[senlinyuwrites]

I am entering my Dramione era🦁🦁🐍🐍

[senlinyuwrites]

they're minor inconveniences TO YOU. i WILL consider killing myself

[senlinyuwrites]

i’m a very kind and loving person but also i have a lot of rage and i just want to kill and maim people all the time. but other than that very kind and loving.

[senlinyuwrites]

before everyone was really into shiping two guys named hunter and now everyones really int oshiping a guy named spy and one named family

[senlinyuwrites]

dating and before dating dramione

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Dramione flirting 💖 Valentine’s day

[senlinyuwrites]

All of the above is exceedingly true.

Touching back on the original ask about the inevitable villainization of the BNF, there's a line in The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo that feels particularly apt for a space like fandom. It goes, "Praise is just like an addiction. The more you get it, the more of it you need just to stay even.”

People are extremely good at normalizing almost anything. Praise which previously was worth the world to a person, when given over and over for long enough, eventually just becomes "tuesday." At which point it needs to be doubled, tripled, quadrupled, etc to recreate that initial effect. It takes a degree of detachment on the part of a BNF to realize that their self-esteem, mental health, and praise addiction is not the burden of their readership when they've been using it as a crutch, and are now reaching a point where the exponential growth of their success has tapered off (and/or the fandom has collectively decided they've achieved a degree of success that now qualifies them for criticism).

That dynamic combined with the social nitpicking that generally accompanies social media visibility, tends to mean that many BNF's get trapped there, unable to leave because they need the praise to stay even, while also developing a sense of resentment towards the fandom collectively for being held to an unbelievable expectation of producing high calibre creative work while maintaining a degree of friendliness, engagement, responsiveness, and unproblematic-ness with thousands upon thousands of people based on their specific standards and personal sense of their parasocial relationship with the BNF. Generally it hits a breaking point where that BNF either leaves, reaches villain status, or is forced to largely detach from the fandom and exist and behave as a sort of entity rather than a person.

Additionally, if a BNF is new to popularity, especially online, they generally don't realize until too late that fans and friends are not the same things (especially because early on in fandom, fans and friends can be the same things). Fans can feel like friends on steroids, but often times those fans will enable new BNF's in ways that are self-destructive for them in the long run.

BNF's are definitely the one's ultimately responsible for their own behaviour, but fandoms often seem to go out of their way to make them eventually feel as if there's nothing they can do to participate without being criticized for it.

Do you think becoming a BNF inherently corrupts you? I see weird behaviour from some of them and a deficit of kindness and perspective, so I wonder if it's just what happens when certain people become fandom-famous. It's almost like they become frustrated about not making money like an actual famous person and thus need more and more applause to enjoy the same endorphin high.

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Becoming a BNF is not a transformation sequence but with more sexy evil makeover.

You "become" a BNF at the point that enough randos decide that enough of their friends know your name for you to qualify.

Being in the public eye is awful, and the fandom version has little upside. Why would most people want to be a BNF? And if they perceive that they've become one, why wouldn't they run away?

The real explanation is more likely that the type of person who usually sticks around in the public eye is an egomaniac plastering over their yawning chasm of self esteem issues with perpetual rage highs and the attention of strangers.

Or maybe they're alarmed at how everyone else sane has abandoned The Youth to the tender mercies of radfem "fetishization" discourse and anti-queer ahistoricism. I'm more active here than ever, and it's primarily because people send me a lot of direct questions and requests for help and because I keep feeling like someone who doesn't have values I find actively harmful and loathsome ought to stick around in public.

Extreme neediness or a savior complex: take your pick. Everybody else finds some friends and slinks off into a corner as fast as they can.

So no, I don't think it's the fame that makes them into awful people. Lots of no-name fans have a deficit of kindness and perspective. The famous ones are the ones you hear about because they're more able to do damage.

[senlinyuwrites]

https://tianmani.lofter.com/post/1d192d7b_1cd1a08a0

[senlinyuwrites]

Commission for the wonderful @theheavycrown! Thank you so much! 🖤🌙

[senlinyuwrites]

me: *opens a new doc for a new fic*

the 629 started wips of mine that have been sitting untouched for 84 years: