#also i like both pjo and hp but honestly? i feel like pjo is better

[someone-online]

Imma fite InReelLife for saying PJO is the Star Wars prequels of young adult fiction

[ilikebigbooks-and-icannotlie]

What are your favorite blogs? You reblog from so many different ones so I was jw ha ha (LOVE ff&ss btw!!! Please keep writing!)

Aaahhhh!! Thank you thank you! It’s still so weird to me when people say they love my writing, lol, but there will be lots more to come!! 

Oh man, this is such a loaded question anon, you don’t even know - my list of favorite blogs is so long, and I have lots of different ones, and I don’t know how to narrow it down? The categories of blogs are going to be kind of weird, and some will have descriptions and some won’t so just get ready (also be advised that they are in no particular order and that they are not in order of how much I love them because that would be unfair as I love them all in varying amounts for different and many reasons) :

The Squadre - first and foremost, for reasons I talk about often, I love @highlady-casandra @miladyaelin and @shortie-stories so so so much!! If you check my sassacas tag, you’ll see a lot of love for these ladies - the first two of which are wonderful SJM blogs if you’re about that life :)

@frankiefasthands - is one of my oldest and best friends in “real life” (we’ve now known each other for like 11 years, which is kind of insane?) and her blog is always cool, though most of my reblogs from her go to my personal blog, @they-did-the-do

The Hannahs - so these guys are all together because they’re all named Hannah, but that’s pretty much the only similarity between the three of them lol@propshophannah is the SJMaas Hannah, and an amazing writer, and a great person, and really wonderful all around and I love her and her blog so so much - probably my favorite SJM blog, if I had to pick one. But also, if you need life advice, or have a sex ed question that you’re really uncomfortable asking anyone else, she’s probably already answered it, or will happily answer it if you send her an ask, because she’s just the best, and just really positive, oh man, just so wonderful@ignitesthestars (also known as New Zealand Hannah, lol) is also a really great Hannah - her blog is also really wonderful, really happy, really feminist, just generally a good place, always makes me smile :) She’s got AMAZING fic, always my go-to recommendation for people if you’re looking for tgt or soc or pjo fic (or star wars fic, but I’m not personally on that train, but Hannah’s basically the conductor, so), and I just love her so much honestly - her fic is breathtaking, she’s honestly a queen, I lack the words to express it, but oh man she’s great@ananbeth is another FANTASTIC Hannah, and I love her very very much. She’s a fantastic writer, and she’s the reason I’m into Skam (which I recommend to everyone so much, and one of my fave pjo writers, and I just appreciate her a lot. She’s also co-author of the Wimbledon AU (one of my favorite fics of all time), the coming soon “call me percy” AU (which I’m already super invested in), and the coming not as soon Devil Wears Prada AU (which I’m also super excited for). She’s half of an amazing dynamic duo that I adore so much.

The Sophiis - they’re actually the same person, but I follow two of her blogs and love them both for different reasons, so I’m tagging both and highly recommend both; she is also the other half to the above Hannah’s dynamic duo@blackjacktheboss is Sophii’s pjo blog and is honestly a blessing tbh - she’s the queen of AUs and headcanons, and I have literally scrolled through her tags for hours I love her so much omg, she’s captain of the S.S. Tratie and her Ichor Group AU is what I live for and any time her and Hannah play tag, or generally @ each other or write anything, I just cry (any time Sophii writes with anyone, honestly, except Dan, because their angst stresses me out so much - actually that makes me cry too? so yeah any time she writes with anyone I cry)@furbyhater is Sophii’s other blog and it’s basically all sorts of wonderful happy things that make me laugh, and is the reason I caught up to Jane the Virgin, but again most of this is reblogged to my personal blog because it’s not very book-ish, but either way I recommend because it will much joy and happiness to your blogThe rest of the PJO fam - so I have this ridiculous like crack headcanon about these guys, and I love them all a lot, and basically they’re my faves and it’s best when you follow all of their blogs and cry over all of their perfectness@son-of-rome is the self-proclaimed lord of angst but he’s secretly a huge softie ssshhhhh and any time he’s involved with anything it’s bound to give you a small heart attack, whether it be because it’s so beautiful, or incredibly sweet retaliation fluff, or heart-wrenching angst, it’s always great, plus he’s generally hilarious and brilliant so basically I love Dan a lot and him and The Wife are the otp 5ever and anyone who ships him with any of the rest of the squad is automatically wrong sorry I don’t make the rules@percyyoulittleshit is a precious marshmallow and I adore her and Mari is the #1 fan and biggest source for all things tlt musical and if you (like me) are still sobbing over the fact that you didn’t get to see it, then Mari will 100% feel those feels too, and generally she’s just really precious and makes my days better, so 10/10 would recommend Mari’s blog@bananannabeth is  a ray of sunshine and happiness and all good things basically except for when she writes soul crushing angst to fuel dan’s anger but we don’t talk about that and is responsible for some of my fave fics - including the famous percabeth FWB fic, and one of my favorite renditions of everyone’s fave skater!percy AU, and Ashlee’s generally a precious flower so highly recommend!! (She’s also where a lot of my hp content comes from lol)@greenconverses is just ... I’m not sure how to put Jess into words, but she’s the reason I started reading fanfic in the first place, and is honestly super important to me, and she’s a brilliant writer, and generally super cool, and anything she writes is basically magic, so I love her a lot and everyone should check her outAs far as other generally cool pjo blogs go (this is getting super long so this is just gonna be a list sorry :/) - @riptidescap @shanlightyear @suchastart @burdge @lesbabeths @demidorks @cindersart @rongasm @romanitas @flyingcrowbar and so many others are so so so so wonderful!!!! And I know I’m forgetting some because there’s so many but oh man, honestly great people this fandom is surging with talent and love and it crushes my soulThe SJM fam - lol this list has been trimmed down recently - there was a lot of discourse recently, and a lot of mean things were said about a lot of people, so I saw bad sides of a lot of mean people, and so yeah, not the longest list in the world, but I digressFor super wonderful content: @azrielsiphons, @rowan-buzzard-whitethorn, @paperbacktrash, @elidexlorcan, @lu-cien, @salvaterre, @nightcourthighlordrhysand, @highfaedaily, @deathgoddessnesta and  so many more that again I cannot think of off of the top of my head are really genuinely wonderful blogs and really genuinely wonderful people that I recommend so so so much!!!!For super wonderful art: @witchlingsandwyverns, @meabhd, @meabhdbutsexii (lol and just general hilariosity), @charliebowater, @jessdoodlesthings, @projectnelm and soooo many more - this fandom is rampant with super talented artists!! Lots of people make super sick edits, too, but I can’t think of them off of the top of my head and I’m sorry, these are the ones I have notifications turned on for, so I can see immediately if new art is posted, because I’m a loser lolFor general people I appreciate a lot: @rowanismybae, @fictionalcharactersaremyreality, @snaps7, @the-north-star, @throneofstars, and a few others that I’m probably forgetting (and totally apologize for) are super sweet and super cool

The authors - I follow a lot of authors on here, and that’s always really cool! Some good  ones include @sabaatahir @vaveyard @stdennard and @lbardugo, as well as @worldofsarahjmaas which is not actually run by Sarah but is where all new Sarah info comes from. Sarah and Sooz also started a super amazing cool not published anywhere else story together at @thestarkillerscycle, which is super duper good, though not finished, but I still recommend itSPEAKING OF LEIGH BARDUGO!!! - I get notifications for exactly 4 Leigh Bardugo blogs (including Leigh herself, and the previously mentioned Hannah) not because I don’t love her books (I do, lots and lots) but because her fandom generally aggravates me lol so I like casually scrolling past them on my dash, but I don’t want to be notified every time they post. The two big blogs I obsessively check are @zoyalina and @savagekaz both of whom are really on top of edits and fics and such, and Cassie in particular is really strongly invested in tgt, so if you’re about the Leigh Bardugo life, her blog is 100% the place to be. She has also just started reading PJO, so a lot of wonderful edits are coming from her on that end, and it’s absolutely magical.

Okay I think that’s all I can think of off of the top of my head without scrolling through notes and my blog and who I’m following? I’m actually really impressed with myself for remembering this many lol. If I’ve forgotten anyone, I’m so so so sorry!!!!!!! But yeah, here’s a mostly comprehensive list of my faves :) I’m sorry this got incredibly long and is poorly organized to the max :/ Hope it’s helpful? I’m not even checking for typos, so I’m sorry if you’ve reached the end and are deeply offended by any of them - enjoy, lol

[prixmiumarchive]

So, Shadowhunters is good, then? I've thought about watching it but have also thought that it looked like it was kind of over dramatic.

***VERY PERSONAL SHADOWHUNTERS DISCOURSE TO FOLLOW***

Cut for length and to avoid annoying people.

My tl;dr answer is: yes, with caveats, a lot of baggage, and a “it is a Freeform show” disclaimer. So, good music, pretty people, pretty lighting, engaging character chemistry… All there. Melodramatic? Maybe, but really, what were you signing up for?

I got into Shadowhunters because my friend @thethirteenthhouse showed me an episode, and I’m still only like five episodes in with her? I enjoy it, though. At the time that she first showed it to me, I hadn’t really made the full connection that it was another attempt at making a film adaptation of The Mortal Instruments series by Cassandra Cla(i)re.

I realized pretty quickly, though, because they resolve the City of Bones stuff pretty quickly, which was the name of the first TMI book which I had been very, very dimly aware of in high school I guess. I had been put off TMI and Cassandra Cla(i)re (hereafter CC) not by its own content but because of the controversy surrounding CC’s presence in Harry Potter fandom.

I have only recently started to work my way through the Harry Potter series. My parents are not really ax-crazy conservatives, but they occasionally listen to said breed of conservatives, so when I was in the Harry Potter generation, I was denied access to Harry Potter because my parents didn’t want me opening my mind to Dark Magic or something. I mean, we can get into that, but it’s really another story, and I love my parents, and they’re very not-bad-as-parents-go-if-you’re-anything-but-a-heterosexual-vanilla-delight-of-a-human. Anyway, so, Harry Potter is pretty new to me as a person, though I did go through my childhood with a kind of indirect exposure to it. I just didn’t really get to delve in? My parents let up on most of those such edicts after a while, and I did read a few (the first three?) Harry Potter books when I was really into reading in high school. However, I wasn’t really engaging with anyone about it, because I was kind of embarrassed that I was so ‘behind’ compared to my peers who had basically learned to read on Harry Potter. Then, I got sucked into PJO (the first few books of that).

But even though I, personally, was not a Potter kid, my childhood best friend definitely was. She and I had overlapping interests and diverging interests, and she LOVED Harry Potter with no parental chagrin. We used to sit side by side on an office chair and scroll through fansites related to things we liked (GeoCities! Angelfire! Wow.) and eventually got turned onto fanfiction.net as being a thing and other, more restrictive and selective and focused groups and fic archives that existed in the days of yore.

I’m explaining all of that to say that I was actually aware of the Draco Trilogy before all of it was published and when it was popular without a real whiff of controversy having been brought to anyone’s (or at least my childhood best friend’s) attention. If you don’t know about the whole Draco Trilogy mess and want me to do a short fact-finding mission, send me another ask, but I’ll wait in interest of expediency. TVtropes and fanlore websites both have links and information if you just search for “the Draco Trilogy.”

I read excerpts of the Draco Trilogy that had particularly pithy dialogue, funny, or sexy overtones that my childhood best friend wanted to share. I also seem to think that we read a fair bit of Draco/Hermione fic in this manner, which I do not know if CC ever wrote but which I bring up because I was sorely disappointed to find out that Draco/Hermione dynamic that I imagined based on these fics (inspired, in part, by a certain fanon-hopeful interpretation of Draco popularized, at least, if not completely and solely originated by CC) was totally not what I got the impression of as an undercurrent from the films. Basically, the fact that Draco was not as CC imagined him which I had developed a conception of through being-in-internet-fandom-if-not-very-into-Harry-Potter was a major disappointment and probably one of the reasons that HP was not high up on my list of Things To Make Happen when my teenage rebellious ingenuity was at its fullest swing to read Parentally Discouraged Books. And, you see, THAT IS THE THING about CC, The Mortal Instruments, why I kind of like Shadowhunters, and why I will probably never stomach delving further behind the curtain than the Shadowhunters TV series itself, though I know there are loads of people who have done so in ignorance/innocence.

This is a serious case of “I can enjoy a thing while being super-critical of, like, everything about it on a meta level.”

Co-opting some descriptive terms from things I’ve read about the Draco Trilogy, a short summary of its impact on its fandom at the time was, apparently, that it was a fanfiction of such phenomenon that some people began to prefer the Draco Trilogy to the direction canon itself was going. And, as fanfiction power goes, that is like the Holy Grail. It is the Goal when canon is in any way disappointing you and your fellow fans. It’s incredible, it’s impressive, and I’m still sitting here impressed that no matter what hellfire CC has had rained down upon her that there was something in her work that resonated with people to a point that there are many willing to forgive unrepentant and repeated acts of plagiarism and bullying in order to resolve the cognitive dissonance of really loving something that was written by and born from a generally jerkish person.

I say that, consciously, as a person who accepts Moffat Who for the most part in spite of all of the Discourse in that direction, too.

The issue with CC’s Draco Triology was certainly not its plotting, its craftsmanship (in terms of its parts making a whole), its characterization, or anything else that would make it a bad fic. I have yet to revisit the texts, though I have procured them as a funny and fanlore matter of interest for my Harry Potter reading log blog @100privetdrive (which tumblr doesn’t wanna link right now), as someone who knows the controversy, and I never read them in full, but I am led to believe that there are many fans who would still like to revisit the texts but feel bad about doing so because they are tainted with plagiarism and a lot of ugliness that followed. CC’s dedication to her work certainly led her to produce a completed trilogy of interconnected longfics, not to mention her one-shots that she produced for the Harry Potter fandom during her stay. Most of them have vanished into the realm of myth when she retreated from fandom life upon getting her book deal (and upon ducking away from those who were out with pitchforks in the fandom at the time), but the Draco Trilogy was of such renown that it has (for now) escaped permanent erasure from record in spite of CC’s attempts.

What I’m telling you is that people like(d) the Draco Trilogy.

CC’s characterizations of the Harry Potter cast were not necessarily consistent with canon, but they were consistent within what she imagined at the time could be or wished was. It is certainly not the case that her fanfiction and the story she quilted together was devoid of original thought or emotional investment in her characters and what she was writing. The problem was, someone discovered that she was essentially lifting word-for-word passages from some quality-but-then-out-of-print fantasy books for sizeable portions of plot-heavy parts of her story, in addition to much of her pithy, interesting dialogue being straight-lifted from popular television of the time such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Honestly, for the latter, few people would call her out for that. She did credit that she borrowed some dialogue from shows she liked, and when trying to defend herself against accusations of plagiarism, she mentioned a kind of in-joke, intertextual referential humor she shared with her fandom friends. Basically, she was doing the same thing as all those incorrect[series]quotes tumblrs that are pretty popular right now, and she did admit it. The issue was what she would not admit when someone found her out and the bullying and war and response that followed.

There is far better documentation on this situation than I can give you, because the entire thing about this drama is interesting hearsay for my part. Again, if you ask, I’ll go on a brief fishing expedition for you, but it will involve a series of search terms you could just as easily google yourself. If any of my recollection is fuzzy, it is because it is solely recollection of things I’ve read about and become aware of as a fandom resident for more-than-the-past-decade.

Getting back to Shadowhunters, the thing about it is, I never really wanted to like anything CC had anything to do with for a long time for all of these reasons. I didn’t really feel good about supporting someone who made the transition from fan-to-creator in a way that felt a lot like she didn’t care who she hurt in the process. I also felt, a little, like it was a betrayal of the spirit of transformative and fandom work to completely remove oneself from the process (by deleting as much as you could of your fandom contributions) when you achieved success. I know of a lot of active fandom writers who don’t do that if and when they become published. However, those people also don’t plagiarize their own work.

Again, this is a-thing-I-read-about because I have not read the Draco Trilogy in anything close to full or ANY of TMI series except screencaps of pages I’ve seen on tumblr. That said, Jace Wayland is CC’s Draco. Clary Fray is CC’s Ginny Weasley. Alec Lightwood is CC’s Harry Potter.

So here is my complicated relationship with kind of liking and getting into the Shadowhunters tv series at this particular juncture in time, space, and my personal history and observation of fandom: I think it is really cool when works influence and can relate to each other. TMI is a far better example of this than 50 Shades, no doubt. However, there is the load of baggage surrounding CC’s success, unapologetic or deflective attitude toward anything she ever does wrong, and so on. But, then again, Shadowhunters is based on her work. Another recent example that might be similar is the CW’s The 100.

The 100 is another show that I genuinely like-what-I-have-seen-of, though I’m behind the point when some people got mad and wrote it off. It is also based on a YA lit book of the same title. However, its similarities with the book diverge sharply after the first few episodes, and it, as an adaptation, is doing its own thing, unrepentantly. I have been told that Shadowhunters is also doing this, and I think that it is an aesthetically pleasing show. It also has interesting concepts at play in its worldbuilding which I will say to my mind are unique in spite of the myriad parallels to a darker-teenier-edgier Harry Potter that will never go away. I also appreciate that the Shadowhunters showrunners are said to care about how their representation of LGBT people plays. It is not an exclusively-white show. It has pretty music. I like the actors’ enthusiasm for the characters they play and the journeys they seem to be taking. I think parabatai is a pretty neat concept. It’s pretty standard as far as what runes themselves are, but the rune usage and tattoos are pretty cool.

There are a lot of things to like about this show. There are a lot of things about them that, without evidence, I am sure are the brain children of CC. I wish that I could just full on and without equivocation go “kudos” to someone who made such an incredible transformative leap from one fandom into her own worldbuilding. However, the divorce of Shadowhunters/TMI/pretty much any of CC’s work feels incomplete and disingenuous on a certain level, no matter how much I am simply enjoying a tv show with-my-criticisms. I feel that a denial of is direct relationship to fanfiction, fandom itself, Harry Potter, and CC’s own past is just an effort to flatten out cognitive dissonance that comes from liking-what-is-intriguing-about-it that simply doesn’t come that easily.

I am enjoying the show in part because it seems really interesting on some kind of fandom-sociological level. I also like it for all the good-things I mentioned above. I like it because my some of my friends love it with an untainted and genuine enthusiasm. However, I’ve got to say, that I actually find watching the Shadowhunters series with my friend feels non-icky in a way that pledging any kind of allegiance to CC’s little empire that actually benefited it in any way does not.

I enjoy Shadowhunters as, basically, the biggest budget AU fanfic I have ever seen, but I think that on some level it has its own soul, too. But I’d be a lot more willing to credit the cast and crew and the Harry Potter fandom of the early-00s with that than I would CC on her own.