#I was so worried when writing the fk au that it would be weird to have Maijabi and Henry be found family

[bansheeoftheforest]

(Part 1) The Lodgers not knowing the ghost is Henry and thinks it's dangerous. Must have some kind of mind manipulating powers as well. Why else would Maijabi be so obsessed with keeping it say? Since Zosi won't let them try to hurt or get rid of it they instead get a magic jar that can trap even the strongest spirit. Once trapped the ghost's energy is completely cut off so Zosi can't find it. With it's energy cut off now they just wait for the effects to wear off Majabi.

You come onto my inbox, and send me this thing, and now I'm crying into my nonexistant breakfast because I just woke up. What the hell Percy /lh

First of all, imagine how scared Henry must be? Trapped, placed on some dust shelf somewhere, unable to get out or make someone find or help him? He can't communicate, he can't move, he is just trapped in this tiny, tiny little jar and the Lodgers are sneering at him like he is a mouse that got caught in a mousetrap and since Maijabi and Zosi don't know that he is trapped, they don't even know what they are looking for. Can you imagine the claustrophobia he has after that, when he finally is freed? Can you imagine how scared he would be of the Lodgers from that moment on? Can you imagine how guilty the Lodgers would feel when they realized they trapped Henry?

But god... It would completely ruin Maijabi. After all, no matter if it is the amnesia route (although it probably would fit best there? Just looking at Maijabi's and Henry's relationship?) Maijabi still sees Henry as his son and he promised to protect him because Henry has no idea what's happening, he can barely process his own death, the fact that he is dead, and he is going through so much and he basically only has Maijabi and Zosi. And then he just suddenly disappears and Maijabi has no idea why. Did Henry get upset and leave voluntarily? But where is he then? He isn't in the alleyway he died nor his grave if he has one of those at this point. The ghost activities completely cease and his devices can't detect anything. And then he tries to ask the Lodgers about it and they refuse to tell him anything, only proving that they did something but they are refusing to tell him, saying he should just be happy that the ghost is gone because it was probably dangerous. No matter what Maijabi does, they won't tell him anything, thinking that the ghost somehow manipulated him into protecting him... So Maijabi, so tired and sad because he broke his promise to Henry and now he can't find him and he can only imagine what the Lodgers did to him, just... Stops. Stops caring for resting and taking care of himself because he can't rest until he finds his goddamn son but he doesn't even know if Henry's ghost exists anymore and if he is able to be found. Imagine the Lodgers trying to talk to him to convince him that it's probably only the side effects from being free from the manipulation, can you imagine if Maijabi cracks and reveals that the ghost was Henry all along, and they essentially trapped or murdered Henry again, after he had already suffered a traumatic death when they didn't even care for the fact that he disappeared months ago? Can you imagine the guilt and panic as they realize what they have done and try to find the jar? Can you imagine them breaking it open and Henry immediately flees from the Lodgers and hides behind Maijabi, Zosi going haywild because Henry is finally back again but he was gone thanks to the Lodgers? Or, alternatively, if Maijabi doesn't tell them anything but instead overhears the Lodgers talking about the jar-trapping and "having to be careful so that Maijabi doesn't find it". Maijabi searching the entire society for every goddamn jar he can find? Finally finding Henry and being so incredibly pissed at the Lodgers because Henry is shaking and is so scared? JSADHFJASDASD

[epochryphal]

fictionkin anon (kind of unwieldy as a name) 3/ I worry that from poking around those links I'm going to develop shame from the other side by disrespecting the idea of fictionkin. 'you're just latching onto a favorite character, you don't actually /feel/ it.' other concerns: alien character when going outside of the human boundary feels even more taboo than human fictionkin stuff, character that is referred to as male when I'm agender (but alien genders???)

you can go by fk? that’s a Cool name right

the whole being firmly guided away from “kin” is a real thing & worry, yeah, from all sides. there are a lot of folks who have strong opinions about **it’s identifying AS, not identifying WITH** and very firm boundary lines and “it’s not LESSER to not be kin, you just AREN’T - but you can make your own community, people are starting to” and...

well.

there’s a lot to discuss around “words should have definitions” and “identities are tools to connect to people with *similar* experiences, not *exact* ones” — and maybe you’ve seen me wrestle with that about neutrois, back in the day, the way neutrois vs agender vs genderless was an Issue and the boundaries were being actively hammered out and there were camps for and against dysphoria as the difference

but i’ve been through a lot of nb, ace-spec, aro-spec, and general mogai wordsmithing and community boundary wriggling (and of course the current exclusionist movement), and my feel is increasingly that the kin and alterhuman and nonhuman communities can be eerily similar

if someone’s telling you “you’re weakening the meaning of [asexual / kin], you should use [grey-asexual / otherhearted]” or the like... They Suck

maybe it sounds pedantic of me to insist that they Not Say That but saying “oh, that’s not usually how i/my cohort interprets it, and have you considered this other word that to me sounds potentially more relevant?”

but i think those qualifiers are deeply needed; that no one should be a self- or community-appointed Authority as to Sounds Like Us, because that will always go awry; and that the true awful pedantry lies in insisting that the Word Choices with which someone tries to express their experience Points to what that experience Truly is, when um, we all have different relationships to language and english

bluhbluh you know i’m about broad inclusion and grey areas and solidarity and there being room for people to messily grasp to articulate things

anyway i *would* unfortunately recommend staying away from most Otherkin Forums, or at least looking into how they gatekeep (“encourage proper reflection and proof of serious consideration rather than faddishness to prevent later confusion and a loss of meaningfulness to the term”).

if someone is asking you questions that Don’t Feel Useful, are Pressurey, feel Prying and Unbalancing in a way that you’re not sure is helping — i’d recommend stepping away from them. maybe contemplate/discuss those questions/feelings, sure, it can be hard to tell if it’s a paradigm-shift good-identity-crisis unbalanced — but do it on your own or with someone else. you can always come back to that person later if you feel they were a positive influence.

it’s okay to split up the roles of “being given food for thought or challenged” and “being given a safe[r] space to process your truth.” nobody can handle Intense Questions all the time, and you’re not required to Defend your Conclusions about yourself.

(also, shocker, a lot of the gatekeepers are specifically against fictionkin-without-Solid-Memories and other atypical folks. because ‘glitch’ isn’t a legit, Serious identity but ‘psychopomp’ has Spiritual Tradition. anyway.)

...that’s my longass spiel on “disrespecting the idea/core meaning of fictionkin” because that’s bullshit if it’s being used to mean “watering down our TRUTH with your DEVIATING from our DEFINITION” instead of the truly disrespectful “lol wtf this isn’t real.”

as for alien & gender things:

ok gender is actually easier to address. hi hello why am i kin with all these dudes when i am Not Dude? especially with one whose fandom depiction is Cis Male Gay With Masculinity Hangups? well you see it’s because fuck off. fuck off is why. iterations, versions, au’s, headcanons, why is this character Essentially Male oh look they’re not. oh no i’m Losing part of the Point- fuck off. nono i’m Erasing FUCK OFF. is it because male characters are generally better written? is it because it’s easier to relate to non-women due to dysphoria and representation and misogyny and- God Fuck Off. who cares. i do not. i did not Pick this and, just like my kinks, just like my grey-asexuality, it is not Actually a Political or EthicoMoral Statement about me. write your thinkpiece about the prevalence of male characters in fictionkin spaces but remember that’s societal not individual. we ain’t Betraying the Anti-Patriarchy or Representation. god. we’re usually transforming them into our gender because they’re us!! and of course it’s scarier to claim a woman character as a different gender because *that’s* oh no decreasing representation!

gender is a fuck and is utterly irrelevant to Legitimacy Of Connection. arguing otherwise is falling prey to some creepy essentialist shit, often framed as not being appropriative but actually motivated by some idea of Hard Boundary Lines or by trolls. (the idea that “you can’t kin outside your race” was popularized by trolls masquerading as marginalized. and extended into “you can’t have fictives of a different race” etc which is NOT HOW BRAINS WORK. just be respectful. and know a lot of people are sensitive to any discussion of Not This World negative experiences, as if it’s always trying to overwrite them with More Oppression Points and is a Threat. sucks.)

aliens is. shrug. “oh look they’re trying to be so Special” is already in play. they say that about anyone who “makes a big deal” aka has an intense non-normative experience, wants to talk about it, considers words.

these taboos are against being Cringey and Like A Teenage Girl and caring about something Weird and being Kinda Crazy. why not embrace the whole fucking package? why stop at “well, *human* characters aren’t too attention-seeking” when the point is what resonates with you and they’ll always call you a Bad Bad Attention Seeker anyway?

i’m not super empathetic about these last two problems i guess, sorry, i’ve been a proud outcast for way too long. it can be hard to swallow in a new arena, i know. but man, restricting yourself to the Less Cringey TM sector of a widely-mocked thing feels kinda pointless to me.

/will answer next part separately because Long, Jeez

also if you didn’t see! in the notes on my last reply to you, @paradife-loft was offering to jam with you about not-claiming-fictionkin-but feels (and has Excellent villain meta as well)

[boarsnsmores-blog]

The good folk over at @sqsupernova are doing a spotlight this week on my disasterpiece and asked for some of my thoughts on it, so here they are. There are spoilers so read at your own peril.

I planned exactly one line:

And so Regina, who did not want to die but could no more bear the thought of Rocinante dying, chose the middle path. Cold and hungry were surely better things to be than dead.

Which proceeded to sit in my ideas file for half a year before I rummaged it out for this shindig

It is inspired by “Ivan Tsarevich, the Firebird, and the Gray Wolf” because Ivan is consistently useless and I felt for the poor wolf who had to save Ivan at literally every juncture

I am sure Ivan represents some kind of Russian folk hero, but I sort of probably mangled that when I wrote Regina as Ivan. Sorry.

I really thought this was going to be a straight retelling of the Firebird until I got to the Emma in a tower scene, at which point I realized:

Emma as the princess would be a disservice to her as a character

Emma in canon was technically some kind of abberation to the reality and had no Heroes & Villains alterego

???

Panic???

Emma’s Aladdin, basically, but follows the plot of this firebird variant

Sometime between chapter iii/iv, I spent a night looking for one of my favorite childhood fairy tales instead of writing because I couldn’t remember it and that irritaed me

You haven’t lived until you’ve tried to google a fairy tale with word vomit like “Jinn spear throw cave”

It was “The Magic Carpet” in the Reader’s Digest - The World’s Best Fairy Tales, if you were curious

I needed a sword and the Jabberwocky from Once Upon a Time in Wonderland conveniently had one available

All the angst was a nice bonus too

At around the 25k mark (of what was supposed to be a, at most, 15k fic), we had not yet overthrown the monarchy

I seriously considered writing an entirely different fic because when the hell was this story going to end

But @heartofamethyst-studios had signed up for a fairy tale rendering, not a weird Tattooist-Florist/Soulmates/Hipster AU that no one would ever ask for

Three days later we finally overthrew the monarchy and I could have wept

My friend spent those three days offended because she thought I wanted to overthrow Queen Elizabeth

For the record, I do not

I didn’t know how to come back from Emma dying like I did not think this through at all

so I made large parts of it up

If you were wondering when I knew who the Jinn was and what Rumpel’s scheme was

literally when I started the chapter

If you were wondering when I thought up of anything, the answer is most likely ‘literally when I started the chapter’

Anyway, if you thought this was a well-planned and calculated fic, well, it’s not. I’m sorry to ruin the illusion but behind the curtain there is no machine, only me, panicking while reading the manual to a completely unrelated machine.

For posterity, so that we can all laugh at my naivety, here is the outline I wrote apparently sometime while I was writing the Emma in a tower scene:

gtfo

no regina we are not jumping

okay i guess we are jumping

that is a wolf

why is it sniffing at me stop that

do not eat me stop it

no i do not taste like magic what does that even mean how is this wolf talking

regina: k lily we’re off

emma: yes lily that is me

regina: …that is not you

emma: no no it’s not

red: wow you’re really useless aren’t you

regina: shut up if you’re not lily then who the fuck is lily

dragon in the distance

ah

well this is unfortunate

procure lily, bring her back to maleficient

great, dragon lady here’s your dragon spawn give us the horse

wtf do you mean you can’t ride bareback

wtf do you mean you can’t ride this horse without its bridle

fk we gotta go steal the bridle now gdi

shenaniganssssss

k got the horse we gotta go get the firebird now

wtf do you mean you want to keep the horse

just give the fucking horse up regina

no cruella is going to eat it or something you’ve seen her coat that shit ain’t fake fur that’s for sure

(this is at a tavern) red: hello friends

red wtf we thought you were a wolf

no guys i’m a guardiant that means i’m a shapeshifter

emma: guys I have a brilliant idea

red: wow this is a dumb idea

emma: no no it’ll totally work don’t worry

get chased by a lot of angry dalmatians

return to the path

red: bye friends i am gone the forest has fulfilled its part of the bargain; you’ve come back regina

regina: :(

shenanigansssss

what do you mean we have to overthrow the monarchy

I am but a simple thief

You are but a shitty bandit

meet Granny

yes go overthrow the monarchy

so when you say ‘overthrow’ do you mean ‘peacefully take the crown’ or…?

murder i mean murder

oh okay just making sure

dramatic showdown between regina and snow

can’t do it

emma: well that’s okay we can just go back to being a thief and a bandit

emma: hey I have an idea let’s go steal shit with other people too

Merry Women!

All things considered, 10/10, would cry and do again. Thanks for reading and remember to thank our organizers, friends.