#I don't think a lot of the popular templates have Home so i thought i include them here :]

[rainbowwyrm]

Oh and one more thing: here's a blank version of the template I made! Now you can use it however you like (with credit ofc)!

[no-where-new-hero]

☕ - booktok and I'm cheating to add the state of YA in general 👀

Disclaimer at first that I don't have TikTok (proudly) so that my experience with social media book discourse is through Instagram (which also has a lot of TikToks transferred over, obviously) but I'm not sure if the IG algorithm shows me different things from what TikTok would. Anyway.

I'm going to start with the state of YA actually because I feel slightly more familiar with this but also I think BookTok/Bookstagram trends are absolutely contributing to its hellscape. I may have talked about this in the post about where LMM would be shelved, but I think YA is losing its own identity. It's no longer about finding your place in the world or coming to terms with identity or dealing with themes that will help provide a bridge between childhood and adulthood. Romantasy abounds as much as in adult fiction, maybe just with a little less sex (though that's debatable). Contemporary feels reducible to a Pinterest moodboard (Portrait of a Thief, which I honestly liked in a lot of ways, suffered from this in my opinion). Fantasy without romance is almost nonexistent, and SF is more and more negligible.

All of these issues are perpetuated by BookTok. In a small video, there's only so much of a story you can share. Romantic tropes, aesthetic pictures, over-the-top dramatic lines sell well on there because they're catchy and cater to a romance- and visual-centric society. But I think it has given the false impression that you can stretch a skin of plot over these bones and call it an animal, and because everyone is accepting that this is an animal, the proliferation of such simulacra continues. Especially when the plot itself is none too strong.

You mentioned the trope problem, and I'll drill down on it because I definitely see this as the fanficification of published literature and the deterioration of rigorous plotting: A, because people enjoy it. B, because a majority of new authors grew up in the fanfic heyday and cut their teeth on that style, so they no longer know how to break free of it. C, because it's easy: you have narrative assumptions baked into rivals to lovers, in there's-only-one-bed, the coffeeshop au, etc. They're in fanfic because they're easy and provide a handy template for the meat of the story, which is the characters. But translating that into original fiction runs the risk of creating a predictable story. Predictability can mean palatability, which doesn't hurt on the whole. But it again inscribes this misbelief that if that's all that's on the market, that's all that people want.

The publishing industry absolutely is perpetuating it too: to sell a book now, you need to give comparative titles, "the books yours will sit next to on a display." There's more and more pigeonholing, which the fanfic style enables.

I could also get into the moral turpitude of some of the books on there (cough anything by colleen hoover not to mention HAUNTING ADELINE cough) but that will sound unnecessarily judgy, so I won't. Suffice to say that I feel sorry for anyone trying to "become a reader" by taking their recommendations solely from an app driven by popularity, shock-value, and the cultural capital of prettiness and success.

(Okay I need a last footnote to say that I understand that ALL advertising is driven by popularity, shock-value, and cultural capital. But you remember in the old days when you could go into the library and find a dusty book that was published in like 1990 or something and it smelled like it was growing mildew and it probably had a horrible cover and the author was someone you'd never heard of and none of your friends knew what the book was but you would bring it home and it would completely change your brain chemistry and everything you thought about the world? THAT'S HOW YOU BECOME A READER FELLAS. As a librarian in training, I'm going to die on this hill.)

[ignitesthestxrs]

fuck yeah I'll come talk to you! my goodness. I've long been hesitant to send asks to blogs I don't know or consider popular.

I followed you for your pjo writing, so I was very surprised to find out that your url is from matthew stover's ROTS novelisation. two-ish years ago I watched star wars for the first time and fell in love with the prequels, it is probably still the fandom I most interact with on here.

I notice most (all?) of your star wars fics on ao3 are sequel things. I haven't seen the sequels yet because of general negative internet sentiment towards them. although this is bad logic because the internet feels negatively about a lot of great things, including ("great" is subjective I suppose) the prequels.

as someone who still mainly associates you with pjo, I guess I'm just curious about you and star wars in general. did you watch the movies when they first came out? or did you, like me, discover them later? and would you care to make a case for watching the sequels?

and as an aside - how do you feel about anon asks. do you prefer when people are non-anon?

truly genuinely i dont think i've ever met a person on this website, Popular Online or not, who has been upset about receiving genuine asks. LIKE as someone who prefers to be approached rather than to approach people i very understand the reticence to make contact, but if you ever have hesitance because your brain is like 'ooooh they aren't gonna want to talk to meeeeeee' i really truly think you can let that one go. esp because anon is an option - the worst thing that happens is that someone doesn't respond, which is also not personal and is usually related to brain death on the part of the person receiving the ask

BASICALLY i really think that most people making themselves available on the social media want to use the media to be social - if they didn't, they'd close their ask box.

MAN okok i love to talk about a personal fandom history LOL star wars is a weird one for me! i came into the fandom extremely sideways - while it turns out i had watched at least one of the prequels in theatres as a child, i had somehow wiped all memory of them from my mind, leaving only a residual obsession with padme amidala's lipstick lingering in my hindbrain

so my first Real Encounter with star wars as a fan concept was via Livejournal Role Play lolol, the premise of which is that you would roleplay as characters either in an AU setting, or an isekai-your-character-was-captured-from-their-home-world-somehow setting. so i was playing sakura from naruto in a harry potter/final fantasy fusion AU (there's a fun sentence) when someone joined the game with Jaina Solo from the star wars extended universe, and i just thought the character and player were the fucking coolest?

so that's how i ended up learning about like, the post-original Star Wars trilogy EU books first LMAO and then eventually i watched the original trilogy and re-watched the prequel trilogy (this was back in 2009/10 so sequel series were not on the horizon at all). i rp'd a bunch of star wars characters in a bunch of games (most notably middle aged Leia from the later EU books and a man called Kyp Durron who i refuse to believe was not the template and inspiration for kylo ren), and also played the Knights of the Old Republic games, and eventually helped create and moderate an rp based on those games. so my first star wars creative endeavors were very rp based, and kotor based, and any fic i was writing at the time was like, kyp durron and alyss from a ya novel adaptation of alice in wonderland are falling in love in the harry potter/final fantasy fusion setting where we also included pokemon so kyp has a shuckle for a pet because jaina gifted it to him as a gag. all that fic is littered around the internet - lj accounts and dreamwidth accounts and defunct aim group chats, where you'd write stuff for like the three people who were into your extremely, impossible to replicate cross canon ship instead of doing your stats homework, it was heady shit.

the username came about after i decided to abandon my old internet handle/identity of 'feilyn' lolol. basically i made up 'feilyn' as a name for myself when i was like 15 and used it everywhere, which resulted in most online friends i made at the time calling me 'fei', which in turn got cuteified into 'feibean', which is what i originally called this blog right up until someone sent me an ask going 'hey feibean' and i went oh NO i HATE that, and decided that i needed a username that was like, Poetic and Pretty

the funniest part to me is that i hadn't actually read the stover novelisation at that time? i just knew about the passage it came from because a friend had quoted it at me before and i was like oh that's Beautiful. so i did probably the most pretentious thing in the process of making a pretentious internet handle, which was to refer to a thing i hadn't actually read (i have since read the novelisation LOL and highly recommend it to anyone into star wars i general, but especially if you feel the prequels had Great Themes and Poor Execution - the book does a much better job at the execution part)

SO by the time the sequel movies were announced i had been into star wars for like, 5, 6 years? and it had been a staple part of not only my creative life but also my social and romantic life, so i was primed to be fucking obsessed. at that point i wasn't journal rping anymore, and most of my creative energy was split between fic (pjo and grisha at the time) and trying to make my original book idea work (it did not), and i had gotten into the groove of Writing Fic For An Audience.

and then the first sequel movie came out and i fucking loved it! like sure it was a little derivative, but it had so much of what i loved about star wars in it, and it especially helped that kylo ren really did seem like a kyp durron expy, and i was right in the middle of my weird heterosexual lesbianism phase where all i wanted to write was Overpowered Man Gets Stepped On By Brunette Teenager He Underestimated so reylo hit me like a fucking freight train.

i think in the first month after that movie came out i wrote like, 21 fics in he space of a month. i went to my first ever music festival and was just lying in the tent writing fic on the budget smart phone i had bought so my actual phone didn't get stolen. it was SUCH a flurry of creative energy for me, because star wars before that point had been not a dead fandom, but certainly not a fandom that had a lot of Fic-Centric Life in the spaces i was in, and the movie brought so much new blood and voices and interest and readers to the canon. so if i told people i felt like writing x thing and asked for prompts, i'd get like 10 or 12 requests at a time - more than i could fulfill, certainly, but also so many that it really fed the fire of my interest and determination to Provide Content

and then, you know, the Drama and the Discourse and the weird creation of shipping as identity where people became A Reylo instead of shipping reylo, and this formation of Antis as a thing, and on and on until fandom in general becomes this place of adversarial combat that is supposed to reflect on your ethics and moral as a person and Oh Man i do remember being exhausted by all of these arguments at the time (and now tbh, but these days i am not actively participating in them). eventually i dropped out of star wars as a fandom from like, creative and discourse burnout i think, and also my relationships with the friends i shared the fandom with were changing, and i was also changing as a person and then TROS came out and was really a death knell to any joy i'd gotten out of the fandom or canon from that point.

as for a case for watching the sequels - i think if you can watch them without needing them to Be Anything In Particular, you can have a good time with them. like, for example, i think TROS was an objectively bad fucking movie, but i had a lot of fun when i watched it because i went it with a baseline of curiosity about how or if abrams could pull this off, and the answer was 'by trying to split every fandom argument of the last 4 years down the exact middle' and 'no, he can't pull it off'. that shit isn't a movie, it's a video response to every star wars trending topic between 2015-2019. and at the time of viewing, this was very fucking funny to me. i had a ball.

SO if you can watch them with the contextual understanding of like, these are massive corporate enterprises created by committee, with different people at the helm of different movies who had very different understandings on what the point of this trilogy was, i genuinely think they can be a good time. there's pew pew lasers, there are some real affecting moments, and there is a lot of bewildered amusement to be had at nature of attempting to create Billion Dollar Art.

if you are looking for a story that is going to leave you feeling fulfilled and as though the creators had consideration and respect for either their viewers, their actors, or the story they were telling, then give them a pass. like i really really think there is a lot of fun and interest to be had in watching the sequels for both 'here is a space fantasy laser fun time' reasons and 'what does art look like when it's primary purpose is to create obscene amounts of wealth based off the nostalgia of nerds but also the concept of modernising a franchise for the 21st century' reasons, and these are both big reasons why i engage in any kind of media LOL

but i also understand the special place star wars holds in a lot of people's hearts, and not wanting to engage in material thatg feels like it has sucked a lot of the joy out of that special place is always legit. so like, if you are intrigued, give them a shot, and if you find yourself hating the experience then stop watching. trust ur heart babe

FINALLY i have no strong opinion on whether people are anon or signed in! it's all about your comfort level truly, i do not put emphasis on one mode or another. sometimes people will send me something signed in and ask me to respond privately, which i am always happy to do, and sometimes people will send messages anon, but identify themselves as like 'oh im the anon who asked about sunflowers, i'm sunflower anon'. SO YEAH whatever combination of identifiers is personally comfortable for the person sending the ask is how i prefer people to communicate.

THANK U for ur ask clearly i love to Talk & Engage and i appreciate u giving me the opportunity <3 <3

[frostycatblr-fandom-files]

Why I use _____ in my fics: Mando'a Edition:

My take on the thoughts of typical, popular fanon-use of Clones Using Mando'a:

Some of my fics like the upcoming Sorry, Wrong Comms! will have a lot more than in Rough Stuff but (hopefully) not overboard. I have a loose headcanon/reasoning for why I think the Batch uses Mando'a in Typical Fanfiction Writer Fashion™ in addition to other languages/slang across the galaxy because these people saw war on many planets. They're bound to pick some scraps of these languages up and incorporate them into their squads/batches/family units the Clones are likely to make for themselves. (Don't tell me Waxer and Boil of TCW didn't start calling each other, at the very least, Nerra thanks to little Numa after their mission to liberate the Twi’lek hostages on Ryloth in Season 1.)

[In my fics mostly specific to] The Bad Batch uses Mando'a familial terms most out of everything from the language because of Omega's series-accurate use of calling them and thinking of them as a family.

As such they probably learned a few other phrases out of curiosity mostly thanks to Tech. As he's the one who divulged Omega's status as a mostly unaltered clone of Jango Fett, to me it makes the most sense that he'll also be the one who digs into what can be found on their template for the purpose of my fics even if not explicitly stated. He probably taught little bits to the Batch.

I'd hardly call them fluent, though? If anything they'd probably bastardize the language because *they'll probably make it their own and it essentially becomes a dialect unique to them. Troopers of the 212th under Commander Cody will likely “sound” different than those of the 501st under Captain Rex even though they’ll all have the same base-language. I **know there just has to be unit-specific jokes, language-adoption, and the like, like real-life military units. (We can also get a little silly with it on this blog due to it being fiction-based but not outrageously wild.)

"Kamino is the closest thing we Clones have to a home." Forever breaks my heart as an emotional sap, thank you very much Captain Rex, but as such that line opens the door to interpretation of the "where do I belong and what sort of culture am I adopting now that this is all over, for better or for worse?" plotline question many Pre/Post Order 66 fanfictions take. (It's really all it is at the end of the day: it's not that deep because it's interpretation, and fiction first and foremost by nature so we can get silly and serious with it in equal measures.)

*They'll use lots of slang that stems from Canon/Legends use in and by the GAR (and the Jedi), naturally. (They're soldiers and have the training to be soldiers that will include a lot of military-rooted jargon. My brother is active military at the time of writing this explanation to fit into my masterlist. Even when he has leave or can make a call home he's still using military slang either habitually or in recounts of what he's **done with his unit since the last time he's talked with/seen us.) 

I also don't know what is and isn't Canon vs Legends material. It's part of why my "disclaimers" or explanations like this are so freaking long sometimes. There is simply too much lore for me and my hell-brain to keep track of. I do my best. Sometimes it's simply just "Canon In My Heart" and nothing else and I do my best to tag it as such.

I change my mind all the time lmao. Indecisive should be my middle name. Some headcanons I had a year ago when I was writing Rough Stuff are very different today.

Fics I share with others will have a lot less Mando'a than fics I'm keeping to myself but I also use it because I find the language fascinating. 

Like holy hells you're telling me the base "vod" [vohd] means brother, sister, and comrade(/'mate' seems to apply in an informal/unfamiliar sense) and "ba'vodu" [BAH-vod-oo] means aunt and uncle without making it specifically gendered outside of contextual conversation? Or the popular "ad'ika" [ah-DEE-kah] can mean any of kid, lad, boy, sweetie, darling, son, daughter, child likely from the base word "ad" [ahd] (ignoring the "ika" [EE-kah] diminutive suffix for a moment) meaning sons, daughters, child and it's similar word of "ade" [AH-day] simply just being children? To me that's all pretty neat. It's a verbal trail of threads connecting one thing to another that I've been having fun with from what I'm seeing in various fan-made glossaries I've referenced while working on things like Sorry, Wrong Comms! and the like.

Whether the status of certain bits of the Mandalorian culture that gets referenced in anything I write-to-share falls under Canons or Legends classification I won't even pretend to say I understand so if I look like I'm flying blind into the asteroid belt maybe I am oops-

I'm doing this explanation more for fun than anything really- nothing here is meant to be defensive or hostile. <3