#but this is constructive its not related to the wank at all

[jarenka]

I am observing one pretty funny scandal right now.

I am a regular visitor of (mostly) Russian-speaking half-anonymous forum. "Half-anonymous" means that you actually have an account there but it never shows in threads, nobody can get to your account, watch your previous messages and so on. You can only identify yourself by adding avatar. It has its advantages (you can talk about very personal things in one thread and then post the most graphic porn with weird kinks in other without worrying what will people think) and disadvantages (you never know if it is a person with stupid opinions in your favourite thread or it's a known troll). Due to nature of the forum there is a special type of punishment for the most insufferable wankers. If a banned wanker (it usually happens after couple of short bans that didn't have any effect on wanker's behaviour, they continue to wank and get long or permanent ban) creates new account(s) to continue their wank moderators add avatar to their new account(s) so everyone on the forum can see their messages in threads. And since you need to be really insufferable to deserve this punishment, it usually interesting to go across different threads to find out that, for example, three pages of extremely stupid discussion were all made by this wanker who pretended to be five different people.

So, back in the end of 2022 a moderator warned one user that they pretty much aware of the user's multiple accounts they use solely for the wank. A moderator also warned that they will add avatar to this user's new accounts if they continue to act this way.

Couple of days ago it finally happened. And not only it revealed tons of wank in numerous threads but also this user turned out to be a well known fic writer. Let's call her Y.

Y was known on forum under her fandom nickname because she participated in different writing-related events where people usually give links to their fic archive/social media accounts. Personally I know Y from writing contest we both participated in back in 2021. She praised herself for leaving thoughtful comments with constructive criticism, but actually her comments were questionable and her reading comprehension was on "how dare you say we piss on the poor" level. This contest was widely discussed on forum, Y was called out for her shitty "criticism", and also her fic from this contest was ridiculed in some reviews for bizarre stylistic choices. After that she barely posted anything as Y, so people were thinking that she just lurking on a forum or left it entirely.

We didn't know that all this time Y was actually very active on the forum, she was a huge wanker with 20+ accounts. After the last ban for all Y's accounts, moderators put avatars on three of her side accounts. Turned out she was arguing with herself in different threads, she has couple of bans for derailing, she flooded a thread for questions with obviously troll questions. People were looking for her posts all over the forum and were like: "Oh, I remember there was some really stupid and annoying person in this thread couple of months ago... Oh shit, it was her!" Also she turned out to be that fetishist from celebrity threads who was going around telling that this and this celebrities were doing blowjobs right before the event, she can tell it from their knees. People also found out that she left plenty of nasty comments about celebrities' appearance in different threads. In fandom secret thread she confessed that she hates another fic writer and always leaves nasty comments under their fics from different accounts. I mean... Y wasn't the nicest person even under her nickname. She participated in top/bottom wank and left some rude comments under fics, but even people who already disliked her had no idea that she is going around on (half) anonymous forum writing paragraphs about %celebrityname% being an ugly bitch.

If you think it's the end of the story... No, it's not! Y created another account and started to complain that she just a regular user who was mistakenly banned alongside with Y. She maybe wanked a bit in past months because she was feeling miserable, but she is definitely not Y who was wanking on forum for years. She wasn't very good at lying. She claimed that she has no idea who Y was before she got her ban and... hm... nonconsensual avatar. In the same time she claimed that it's very easy to tell her apart from Y, because they have totally different writing styles (you can't see someone's writing style on this forum because you can't see other people's accounts). Moderators added avatar on this account too. Then she created another account and pretended to be a person who totally believes that some innocent user was accidentally banned along with Y (she quickly confessed that it was her defending herself). She got an avatar on this account. It was today. I am intrigued what happens next.

[crimeronan]

[redacted] asked: do you acc like pynch but the reason you don't talk about it is because of the toxicity of the fandom? u can answer this privately btw so u don't get attacked!!! (and also maybe so i don't get attacked) if you want to

-

posting publicly but leaving ur url out, friend! with some of the fandom nonsense that's gone down the past few days i've wanted an opportunity to explain myself more clearly

i do like pynch very much! over at my ao3 (elliptical), you will find well over 200k words of pynch fic. i also like the ot6 very much. i believe that ronan and adam are healthiest with a strong support network, whether that's platonic or not. i am polyamorous myself and have four partners. because of these combined factors, i almost exclusively write polyamorous pynch

i shitpost a lot about "why ship pynch when [x] is better" and the like, and that is 100% related to fandom toxicity. i think it's funny as hell

i care more about ronan and adam as individuals than i do about their relationship, which might set me apart from some shippers. if breaking up would be good for their character growth then i would (and will) SCREAM for a breakup. FROTH for one. DO IIIIIT

i am NOT joking when i say that ronan's experience of monogamy is toxic. i think there has been miscommunication here so i am going to try to set the record straight

in a healthy monogamous relationship, the partners establish & respect boundaries, communicate openly, and lean on each other for support. they do not self-isolate and shut the other out and keep secrets and lie and self-destruct because they don't feel good enough. mister impossible is 300 pages expressly stating, over and over, "WHAT RONAN IS DOING IS NOT GOOD. THIS IS NOT A GOOD RELATIONSHIP."

the definition of a healthy polyamorous relationship is exactly the same. boundaries, communication, support. the main difference between a poly and monogamous relationship is that in a poly relationship, the boundaries involve also loving/being with other people. in a monogamous relationship, the partners have mutually agreed that they are not comfortable with this.

the solution to ronan's problems is not to just open his relationship and see what happens. (people have tried to do this to salvage their toxic relationships and it is always DISASTROUS.) but IF ronan is able to get to a healthy place with adam, he will ALSO be in a place where he CAN negotiate polyamory, if he wants to.

(or he might say hey, i've given it some thought, and i've decided this would make me uncomfortable/unhappy. i want a closed relationship. <-healthy communication and expression of needs!)

do i think ronan is in a place, canonically, where he can have a healthy poly relationship? nah. here's the thing, though. ronan is also not in a place where he can have a healthy monogamous relationship.

he's got shit to deal with! i care deeply about him, and i relate very much to him, which is why i like writing his process of Dealing With That Shit. and i like writing polyamory because i am polyamorous and it makes me happy.

fandom toxicity has gotten really ugly in the past few days. it's partly my fault, i openly engaged with someone when i shouldn't have. they made it very clear that they had no interest in changing their opinion and would continue to disrespect me no matter what i said, which is the point at which i should have blocked and moved on. people are welcome to keep talking shit about me. i'm done with believing i could ever stop them

there have been some straight-up lies spread around about things i or my friends have said/done, though, so this post is mainly to clear the air. please refer to it for my Actual opinions on polyamory vs monogamy (and pynch in general) before believing the griping of people who exclusively interact in bad faith.

to conclude, i like pynch in canon and some fic. i have strong opinions about it and i don't like some of the fandom attitudes surrounding their relationship. i am going to continue writing what i want (whether it features pynch or not) because it makes me happy. i am not going to apologize for that. people interested in my takes on pynch relationship negotiation can browse my ao3, i've poured all my feelings WAY more deeply into fic than i do shitposts.

[tonyglowheart]

Hi, if it's alright with you there's a translation bit I want to ask about. From what I'm seeing on social media and on various translations of MDZS, 氏 always seems to be translated either to "clan" or "sect", and there are the rare instances where two parties get into a disagreement over it. What would you say is the more accurate meaning? And can both clan and sect can be used as translations of "氏" without any conflict of meaning?

Hi! Okay so. Let’s unpack this lmao.

氏 more technically translates to “clan,” “family,” or like as a term used to refer to “kinship” relations. It doesn’t.. really translate to “sect”? if you looked it up in a dictionary that’s not what it would say at all. *however.* It’s also not without precedent for there to be cultivation sects within what I’d say is, like, “wuxia classical canon” in which the sect name IS the [location][family name]氏, like what you see in MDZS. Look at the sects listed until “Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils” in this EN Wikipedia lists page.

But 氏 itself does not mean sect, I wouldn’t say, and the usages I’ve encountered before in, like, harem dramas or such, use the term to indicate family, clan, kinship relationships, etc. In harem dramas for example (I’m specifically referencing harem dramas bc that’s the specific examples I have off the top of my head lol,,), you’ll see female characters referred to by [Family name]氏 if they’re not being referred to by their titles or whatnot, and it means something like... clanswoman of [Family name] in this usage. like.. referring to her by her maiden name. (which has its own complicated politics involved and I’m not getting into that here, just as a like... related aside to this example)

I haven’t read much as far as the “classics” of the genre to say what’s typical or not, which also means I don’t know if the cited precedents in earlier wuxia novels treat their 氏 as more of a sect or a clan, or a mix the way mdzs does. But I do think that MDZS, at least, does somewhat conflate clan & sect in how the sects are treated compared to the handful of other danmei cultivation novels I’ve read. MDZS’s “sect” situation is a bit more feudal in the sense of having a founding families who are in charge of certain city-states/regions, and have followers who are part of their city-state and so are members of the “clan” but who aren’t actually a part of the clan in the sense of bloodline or familial kinship goes. Non-blood members of the “clan” are not literally adopted into the family in order to be part of the respective cohort, which is what makes it more like your typical cultivation sect within a wuxia or xianxia setting go. At the same time, you still have your differentiation of the ruling/founding family within the “sect” (which goes by the clan name). If it were just translated as Clan, I can see this becoming more and more confusing for an Anglophone, especially if they don’t have experience with the genre, genre conventions, or cultural conventions. But again I can’t speak for if this is “typical” in the genre or even how the specific texts that might be considered a sort of “wuxia classical canon” treat the 氏 there, and how that’s “typically” been treated in translation (like whether the English translations of these other novels tl as clan or sect, for example). I could look into that more, and like as far as due diligence goes I probably should, but I feel like I can answer your questions without reaaallly delving into all of that at this moment, so I’m gonna  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ If someone does know better and wants to correct me, please feel free.

Regarding MDZS specifically: I believe the choice to translate 氏 in MDZS as Sect was a specific choice that ExR made (who like. c’mon we all know they did in fact set a lot of translation precedent with their tl). If I remember correctly, I believe that ExR actually translated 氏 to Clan or sth like that at first, but then decided to change it to Sect to go along more with “typical” cultivation novels terms (isn’t there an A/N somewhere to this effect?). I actually don’t have an issue with this translation choice, lmao, I think it helps clarify some of the issues an Anglophone unfamiliar with the genre might have, or like help combat some of the connotations of using “clan” that might confuse an Anglophone. I think in English, “clan” tends to have strong kinship meanings, and like a cursory look at the look-up for clan mentions something about “common ancestor” and how in some societies clans would be exogamous, which means their members cannot marry each other. That is not the case with cultivation sects more generally, and not even the case with MDZS sects even tho it acts as a sort of deconstruction of the genre or as a sort of “proto-xianxia” society evolving out of more feudal structures. Anyway, cultivation sects don’t really follow this kind of organizational idea, and MDZS also does have discussions of the significance of bloodline within each respective Sect, which imo would warrant the distinction in translation choice. It also makes it easier to indicate who you’re talking about when you’re talking about, like.. “inner disciples” or “outer disciples” like Gusu Lan has, slash is extra helpful when the other Sects don’t already have this kind of in-built distinction in terminology.

I also kind of like this particular translation choice ExR made because I think the “Gusu Lan Sect” or “Yunmeng Jiang Sect” format lends it a formality to the naming that something like “Lan Clan/family of Gusu” or “Jiang Family of Yunmeng” kind of lacks.

(Rando note: some more “common” terms that “translate” to sect are 派, and 寨 and you’ll see some others like 帮, 教, or 门 and so forth. Each of these don’t... exactly translate to “sect” on their own but Chinese characters don’t always act as individual “words” with one-for-one translations; they sometimes are morphemes which need to be put together with other characters for form words, but can still lend the meaning of common word-constructions even when used individually, depending on context. If you looked up “sect” in an EN>CN dictionary you’d get results like 教派, 宗派, 门派, and more, which take on the meaning of “sect” depending on context and usage)

tl;dr: no 氏 does not translate to sect, per se; if you just asked me out of the blue I’d say it’s “clan” or “family” and/or referring to other kinship relations, including like a “maiden name” for women, as with the harem drama example above. *however*: there’s precedent for the MDZS-style “sect” naming structure within wuxia classical canon as far as referring to established organizations in a given novel go (caveat of I don’t know that much about those or how it’s treated in the text or in translation), and within MDZS usage I can also see why ExR made the decision to translate it to “Sect” when referring to the overall collectives, bc the members of the “sects” include not just the bloodline family members but also non-bloodline disciples who are followers of the sects, and I actually don’t think it’s a bad translation decision. It helps formalize the English translations of the “sect” names, and makes it clear(er) to an EN audience we’re talking about cultivation sects, and also helps to create a distinction for when we need to discuss the main “clan” (i.e. ppl of the bloodline of the founding families of each respective sect) within each respective “sect,” especially where other sects don’t make the distinction between “inner” disciples and “outer” disciples the way Gusu Lan does (a distinction which imo also is helped by calling the greater organization a “sect” and not a “clan,” bc otherwise we’d. probably get even more wank from anglophones arguing that “oh disciples are literally adopted into the family!!!!!!!!” and honestly there’s only so much bs I can take lmao. we already get enough “wwx is LITERALLY adopted” wank as is).

Kind of a last note and also a more context-dependent on the target-language-side approach to translation: I think the treatment of translating 氏 to “sect” as far as MDZS usage goes is, like, considering more certain “canonized” translations of certain terms & concepts from Chinese to English; with here the idea of using “sect” is because that’s the more “canonized” translation for a collective of ppl following a certain school of learning/thought in a cultivation setting.

[dotthings]

I recommend reading @occamshipper‘s post here [x] that does a whole lot to further unpack some spn fandom dynamics, beyond what I touched on myself earlier today, but more, discusses the evolving nature of SPN itself. Which got me thinking further (as you do).

With 6 episodes left of SPN left on the clock, it seems like a good time to talk more about my love for this series as a whole, and my perspective on the earliest seasons of SPN vs later seasons. 

I’ve tried to articulate this on various platforms at different times, but it’s sometimes hard to explain, because it’s a dichotomy but not mutually exclusive.

People will make all kinds of assumptions just because I’m expanded cast friendly, because I’m a Cas fan, because I’m ride or die Team Free Will, because I ship Destiel. Some will think but of course I couldn’t possibly have loved S1-2 with a bone deep love, couldn’t possibly have internalized Sam and Dean and relate to them and see my own weaknesses and strengths reflected there, didn’t have 15 years of emotional roller coaster with SPN. Not just 15 seasons, 15 years. I did have to step away a few times and took breaks from it but not years-long, so I have witnessed every stage of fandom and every stage of canon as it unfolded.

Min brought up in her post how earliest SPN started with archetypes. While the characters were also layered characters, they mostly stayed in their archetypal boxes. Not just how they mirrored archetypes of other media SPN has always been a response to (Dean is Han, Sam is Luke and so on) but how they fell into archetypes established of themselves. Early SPN had a start on overturning those self-created archetypes and expectations, a beginning. Dean in particular very quickly turned out to be not what even the show’s creator expected and they ran with it. Kripke created a show he envisioned as being about monster hunts, like Kolchak, like X-Files, and it was Bob Singer who said no brah it’s about the emotional bonds, it’s about the emotional story, that’s our unique hand to play, and whatever issues I have with EP Bob Singer later on, I respect how right he was about that. 

The irony of Dabb era constantly being ripped down and attacked for...being that, simply because it’s not only the brother bond any more. 

One popular negative meme in spn fandom involves complaining SPN isn’t scary any more. True, the style of its horror changed, it changed visually, and I do appreciate the early visual style, but the flip side of that statement is that SPN started out relying on jump scares and mere style for its frights, when even in the earliest seasons it was clear the most horrifying or wrenching moments were going to be emotional. As I said on twitter, over time SPN became an increasingly complex study of its main characters, with escalating moral quandaries, and increasingly a rumination on emotional horror, conquering of inner demons, and most of all the importance of love of all kinds. 

See, the thing is, I really really REALLY loved S1 and 2. No you really can’t even know how much I loved SPN in those seasons. It had a gestalt that cannot be recaptured, and I dove in head-first. The dusty back roads, the intense familial emotional storylines, the haunted houses, the monsters, the dilapidated or forgotten places, the cursed apple orchards, the abandoned buildings, the brothers, the tears. Yes, it’s gorgeous. Let’s light a candle and remember it fondly.

When I rewatch it holds up well enough...it also feels claustrophobic. Limited. Small. So small. Yes still beautiful. But much as I loved the Winchesters and their story and their family already then, a lot of that love is also bleedback because of learning so much more about them. So much more. After that. 

When I rewatch anything before Carver era it feels like that, too small, and I miss the full breadth of what the characters became. I do have some issues with Carver, but he did a lot of great things too. 

By S3 the magic was dwindling for me a little. S3 is when I started to think I was going to just get tired of the show and that was bewildering tbh, because S1-2 were just SO DAMN AMAZING to me. But that’s how it goes sometimes. 

S4 banged the doors open and blew my mind. It wasn’t just Cas’s arrival, but Cas was a herald of it. Cas the most of any member of Sam and Dean’s extended family got the closest to them, could carry stories of his own, and most embodied some of SPN’s biggest themes. But it wasn’t about Cas’s arrival alone.

I thought I knew all SPN was capable of and S4 showed me otherwise and I was a giddy, proud SPN fan about S4. LOOK AT WHAT OUR LITTLE SHOW DID. The canvas got bigger, the character stories got even stronger, more powerful, and more painful. Let’s pedal to the metal and see what she can do.

Season after season and showrunner after showrunner. Even my least favorite showrunner had something more to show me about these characters, something more to learn. (There are a few arcs with every showrunner where I did feel like SPN was spinning its wheels, I’m talking in aggregate, by era, although I don’t love every era the same). 

When I rewatch earliest SPN I miss the Sam and Dean I’ve gotten to know because of course they aren’t there yet, they are just beginning. I have a mirror to that with Cas. When I rewatch S4-6, even parts of Carver era. S4/5 Cas is still exciting. Those are his beginnings, like S1-2 are Sam and Dean’s. But I miss all Cas became. I miss how far he grew. Watching Sam, Dean, Cas on screen while also missing Sam, Dean, Cas. They also don’t feel complete to me without their earliest seasons in my mind to build forward from.

I don’t expect everyone to agree with me about the goodness of modern SPN, but they could at least admit that the SPN they loved left the building long ago, eons ago, instead of staying around season after season just to tear down, to hate, to attack. Everything from character development existing as a concept to the basic easy to grok idea that people can love more than one person to *insert repetitive wanking here on how Dabb ruined SPN by utilizing themes SPN has always always had there since the start and took them farther* to just being mad that S15 isn’t S1.  Modern SPN gets torn to shreds for being SPN only stronger with more complexity, more character pov, more emotional unpacking, more and more about family and how family is constructed, and with a rich visual language and use of symbolism that can hold its own with earlier seasons, and it’s just plain fact, this vitriol was  aimed at Carver as well as at Dabb, FYI, and I have my own issues with both of them. 

Is it really REALLY necessary to hate on a show that has always been billed at being about family for being...about family. Really? Do people even go here?? What is UP with that. Season after season of hard core stans preaching “SPN is about family” and now they’re pissed that...SPN is about family. Upteen repetitions of whining about “too soap opera.” As others have pointed out, if you didn’t already figure out that SPN was and is a family soap opera with monsters, there isn’t much help to be had for you. Upteen repetitions of whining that SPN grants redemptive arcs. What show have folks even been watching all these years????? Upteen rages because on a 15 season show characters grow, things change, and S1 and S15 are not the same.

SPN has always been about the characters most of all, it’s always been about the emotions most of all, it’s always been about relationships most of all. 

SPN is not eternally 2 boys in a car shooting monsters in the face on a back road dilapidated barn while those 2 boys repeat their first look archetypal roles, undisturbed in an endless loop. I can recognize how beautiful S1-2 were without discarding all that came after, and I’m realizing more and more how Dabb era is making me reflect over the whole series run, and giving me a new perspective on the long journey of the characters. 

Speaking as a fan who has loved this show since September 2005, but is also intrigued by current storylines, that melding of old and new, of new light shed over the past, while bringing the story forward, moving the characters forward, is also beautiful to me.

[trilies]

Someone tried to come up with a “sfwrarepair week” for a fandom i’m in because they had problems with the mods of the actual rarepair week shutting down wank and being open to all rarepairs

but their interest post was, like. terrible.

and i had to write a super long response to it because it frustrated me so much, with the op clearly not caring about actual csa survivors despite ~wanting to help them~

but then the post disappeared from the main tag and i couldn’t reblog the post even from the op’s original site and so this has just been hanging around in a plurk paste i’ve had open for weeks now, so i figured i should just fling it out there because i’m not wasting that work lmao

This post (and if I’m honest, the base idea) is actually harmful to actual CSA survivors and I’d like to call attention to this, especially since the OP isn’t giving the impression that they’re interested in the words of an actual CSA survivor.

I’m going to go in order of the post to give my criticism.

1. “being a safespace for minors, csa victims, incest survivors, people of color, LGBT individuals, etc.”

If this were just about making people feel safe, then there would be zero need to judge or insult people outside the group as occurs repeatedly throughout this post - the focus would be on the people IN the group.

For that matter, you wouldn't make an open call for a group like this anyway because the people in it would all have different comfort levels, so you can't just go "oh all this content will be safe for you" - you don't even know what their needs are yet. How can you guarantee that?

“Safe” ships, even those defined by the OP, can still be written in a way that is triggering or problematic.

Triggers aren't just in what the relationship is, they can be in the subject matter or the theme or what happens in the fic and it's like...okay, how much are you screening for? How are you protecting your members beyond just screening what ships are allowed?

A group actually meant to help abuse survivors, people with triggers, etc would not just have a flat set of rules set out before it's even got members, it would be organically constructed with consideration to the people in it and what their specific needs are.

That is only speaking of CSA and incest survivors as well... because that’s all this post suggests. It offers nothing in terms of how it would explicitly help queer fans, or fans of color. What it does offer for CSA survivors? (The only one I would say I am qualified to speak of in terms of experience.) Only vague platitudes that, from my perspective, only apply to the ideal of CSA survivors. Not actual CSA survivors, like those who do ship things you don’t approve of because it helps them recover.

Which actually leads us to

2. “this means there would not be ANY pedophilic [...] ships”

First of all, as a CSA survivor: stop using “pedophilia” as a description for fictional ships. This dilutes both the actual meaning and the seriousness of the word, which in turn harms actual victims as that word is robbed from them. Use an actual definition.

Because that’s the second issue with this statement, in that there is no actual definition given. That is a problem in the current fandom climate because, along with diluting the seriousness of the word, the meaning now varies wildly from person to person.

By “pedophilic”, do you mean a ship featuring someone 18 or up with someone beneath that age? What about characters where it’s unclear, such as Xanxus, who was frozen at age 16 and one could argue that he’s still that age? Or that he’s not because anime? What about with a gimmick that features time travel, such as the canon instance of Hana liking TYL Lambo and not recognizing or liking him as 5 year old Lambo? Where do the Arcobaleno fit in any of this?

By “pedophilic”, do you mean any ships featuring characters that are under the age of 18? Is it only pedophilic if it’s an 18+ adult shipping them? How are you going to check for that? What about the canon time travel used as both a gimmick and an arc?

Other types who allege they’re against “pedophilic ships” have said that it’s any ship with a height difference, any age difference at all even if the characters are still both adults, if a character’s boobs are too small, if a character isn’t smart. And, yes, those are all things I’ve actually seen!

Or will you oblige anyone who claims a particular ship is pedophilic?

This vagueness is a problem. Admittedly, the vagueness was not started by you, but it was started by people who claimed the same intentions as you, OP, and if you’re going to make a claim that you want to help CSA survivors, then you need to be far more clear than this.

3. [the same thing but re: incest]

Admittedly, I’ve seen this as less of a problem with misusing incest, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t seen it at all. You may want to clarify that you mean explicit blood relations (for example, Bianchi and Gokudera) or... Well, I can’t recall anyone explicitly adopted, but the idea is the same there. None of the “they referred to each other as brothers, ignoring how that’s often used in a way that has nothing to do with incest, but so that makes it totally incest”.

4. “ otherwise harmful ships”

This is the largest red flag out of everything, and we’re not even past the first rule in the original post. This has a similar problem to everything else about this list of not-allowed ship, only it’s much worse because it’s target is arguably everything.

What do you mean by “harmful”, OP?

Do we judge “harmful” because of the characters, or because of the ship?

How will you regulate this incredibly harmful descriptor so that it isn’t misappropriated by bullies and harassers to silence fans, whether as them as a person or what they ship? Because I can guarantee you that I could come up with any completely bullshitted reason to hate on every single character or ship combination from KHR, and others easily could as well for malicious reasons.

This is a frankly terrible rule and, considering the kind of rampant bullying that comes from people who like to claim they’re against ““pedophilic”“ ships against CSA victims, I do not trust it. I do not trust it at all.

5. “this blog would NOT be in “competition” or in any kind of rivalry with the original khr rarepair week blog”

Now this is either an outright lie, or someone who has not considered their own words, and I could not tell you which is worse when it comes to a declaration of a “safe space” for minorities or people with trauma like CSA and incest survivors.

The entire original post ABSOLUTELY positions itself as competition to the actual khr rarepair week, not an alternative. Not only does it position itself as “competition”, but it tries to sell itself to people as the “better choice”.

It’s an attempt at a bit of sleight of hand. The post tries to show itself as friendly, just here to help people... But, as I stated before, if it really had an interest in helping people, it would focus on those people.

Instead, numerous times, you see the OP making judgment calls and negative comments to others - mainly implications of people participating in the actual khr rarepair week. There’s a series of connections throughout the entire post:

We start with “pedophilic ships” being banned to “help” CSA survivors in the first rule, and then leap from that to, in the second rule, “people who don’t feel comfortable in an event run by people who support pedo ships”.

(Reminder: still no idea on what ““pedo”“ ships even are by OP’s definition.)

So we’ve already started by associating the people participating in the regular khr rarepair week as the problem, instead of people simply not being comfortable with just the ships themselves - fictional things that are easily avoided.

Then, at the very end, the OP makes the explicit connection between ““pedo”“ ships and “freaks”.

So is the connection clear yet? The way they steadily escalate things until the implication at the very end? How that all does its best to frame KHR Rarepair Week as a negative? As something that Good People (tm) would never do unless they “must”? The implication that their “SFW” rarepair week is better?

So for the OP to claim they’re not trying to start anything, while their entire post ramps up the connection between khr rarepair week and Terrible Things (tm), is a... dubious claim at best.

The rest of the post isn’t that big a deal. It serves perfectly fine as a base interest check for half of it. However, the other half? That other half set off warning flags so intensely for me as a CSA survivor that I couldn’t stay quiet. I’m not saying this to be a “troll”, or to start trouble for no reason.

Additionally, that good half is tarnished by the problems of the bad half. If these are the red flags I feel they are, then that means if there are people in the group who harass others - I can already spot what-the-fuck-khr in there, a notable harasser who has called a CSA survivor a slur - then it weakens the promise to make this a truly safe space.

It’s simply that I’ve seen a lot of people claim they care about CSA survivors, a lot of fans who try to prop people like me up to signal their own virtue, only for them to turn around and lash out at CSA survivors like myself when we do not exist as only a prop, when we step a toe out of line.

If that happens again, then I don’t want anyone to be caught in that, especially some of the wonderful people I’m familiar with in the tags, such as [blank] or [blank]. I see a lot of red flags in there that I’ve seen harm other people when left unchecked.

If people want to give this a shot as run by the OP, that’s their right, and I wouldn’t take that away from them. I believe it is important to help and look after CSA survivors, especially us for one another. However, I feel like these criticisms are something anyone going for this should keep in mind, especially if they’re not CSA survivors.

Maybe I’m wrong about all of this. I will freely admit that the original post set me off something awful. Maybe some of my concerns are merely because this is an interest check post, and there wasn’t time for the OP to go indepth on just what they think “pedophilic” ships actually are, etc.

If that’s the case, then I’ll gladly have a discussion with the OP, if they truly care about CSA survivors and what is harmful to them. I’ll recant if I can be reassured this is all in good faith, and even support this endeavor.

However, as a CSA survivor, this post as it is worries and frustrates me.

[rachello344]

A glossary of fandom terms that have either been taken from literary criticism (incorrectly) or that I use that are either no longer in use or have... different definitions now.

If anyone has any terms they’d like to see added or words you come across that have confused you, please drop me a line.  I’d be happy to add to this whenever.  It’ll all be under a readmore so that I can edit it when needed.  ^^

Discourse--Literally a discussion, like, the act of discussing.  That’s it.  More specifically, people will say, “the novel here participates in one of the many discourses on gender” or something like that.  Essentially linking one occurrence to a wider conversation.  Literature and Media do not exist in a vacuum, but neither can one work make a trend, but I’ll get to that. Just call it wank or meta.  Use the words we have, don’t take words from academia, especially when you don’t understand their context.

Romance--One of many genres of fiction.  This is a story that centers around a romantic relationship between two or more characters.  I could tell you about how all genres are crutches and constructs we assign to make ourselves feel better, but that might be moving too fast.  For now, what’s important is what a romance isn’t.  A romance is NOT some kind of idealist model that must serve as a positive example for the Youth.  That would be Utopian Romance fiction (which is boring because stories need conflict, but that’s my own opinion on the matter).  A romance only needs the major plot conflicts to hinge around the romantic (as in not platonic, this could be love or lust or some combination thereof) relationships between its characters.  Pride and Prejudice is a romance.  Captive Prince is a romance.  The Foxhole Court, while containing a romantic subplot, is not a romance.  Harry Potter is not a romance.  A story can have romance without being a romance.  Compare romantic comedies with action movies, as an example.  But, don’t think that a romance can’t be tense or unhealthy or whatever.  Fifty Shades is also a romance, remember.  If you wrote out the Joker and Harley Quinn’s story, only focusing on them, their story would be a romance.  It’s more complicated than that, obviously, and there’s nuance, but I think you get the picture.  Regardless of your moral views on the love depicted, a romance is nothing more or less than a story about the development of a romantic relationship.

Fetishization--I hate seeing this word thrown around.  This literally means that something has been made into a fetish object on a cultural level.  You can have the fetishization of purity in American culture, for example.  And you can have the fetishization of homosexual relationships in pornography intended for heterosexual audiences.  However.  A single work of fiction is not fetishizing anything.  It may contribute to an overall trend, but this is not a word to use for single entities.  This is a cultural trend word.  Sure, it can be used for subcultures, but whenever I see this word used, it’s used to mean that some work of fiction or other is bad for displaying a queer sexual relationship in any kind of (perceived) perverse way.  Please stop using this word incorrectly.  As a kind of burgeoning critical theorist (i.e. English grad student), it is incredibly frustrating.  You’re using words you don’t understand in ways that undermine the hard work being done by people in my field.  Unless you’re going to read Marx and Lukacs and learn what the word “reification” means, I think you should use another word. In most cases, what is meant is that some group people don’t like are showing an interest in something perceived as not belonging to them, whether that’s true or not.  I think if we unpack that a little, we can all find better ways to phrase things.  Fetishization is an accusation thrown around, not the analysis it’s meant to be.  And, frankly, it needs to stop.

Normalization--This is thrown around so often I hardly know where to begin.  This is not a word that can be used for a single object, again.  This is a word meant for trends.  For example, we could talk about the fact that male violence in our culture is normalized and so no longer taken as seriously as it should be.  A fictional work depicting something you don’t like in a way you perceive as positive and uncritical does not mean that it’s normalizing it.  A single crime procedural does not normalize crime.  You could say that the trend of always showing cops to be in the right, no matter the extreme actions they take, normalizes the liberties they take in the real world, making it difficult to speak out against police brutality and other such abuses.  But again, that’s the genre as a whole--procedural cop dramas could all contribute, but one of them is not going to be normalizing on its own.  That isn’t how that works. Just say that you find whatever it is unpleasant to read because of X or Y trope.  Or talk about how the TROPE is normalizing something.  That’s totally legitimate.  The trope of X normalizes Y behavior in Z culture/situation/etc. and this is harmful because W.

Romanticization--This does not mean that something bad is shown in a romantic light.  This is another big trend word.  Cultural myths about heterosexual marriage and related gender roles contribute to the romanticization of domestic abuse.  A single work of fiction depicting an abusive relationship in any kind of perceive positive light is not romanticizing abuse.  Cultural narratives about women needing to be convinced can romanticize the act of rape, especially from the male perspective.  One work of fiction cannot do this.  It has to be on at least a genre level, if not cultural or societal.  Again, subcultural too, but you have to make the argument apply outward. The BL/Yaoi trope of having a Seme character force an openly reluctant Uke character into sex romanticizes sexual assault.  One BL using the trope can contribute to it, but it isn’t romanticizing anything on its own.  It’s not powerful enough to be capable of that.

Wank--The word once used to describe what is now called “discourse.”  It’s usually a circle jerk of complaints about some fandom or another or the people in it.  Every example of so called discourse I have ever seen was actually just wank wearing a new hat.  Don’t put on airs or borrow credibility.  Call a spade a spade.

Meta--Analysis on a series or character.  Some of these are better reasoned than others, but the only way to truly rate them is in how well they use their evidence (and how much evidence they have) to support whatever claim they make.  These are often essays, but can be a couple paragraphs, sometimes with pictures as evidence along with quotes from the source.  Some “discourse” falls into this, but only very rarely.  Most people call meta either meta or analysis instead.

BNF--Big Name Fan.  This is THE person in your fandom, generally an artist, occasionally a fic writer or other content creator.  You’ll know them when you see them.  This is the person everyone follows.  Their headcanons are so widely accepted that they almost always become fanon (whether you like it or not).  Some of these people are super nice and use their powers for good.  Others can become divas, mad with the power the fandom has given them.  Regardless, there is almost always drama brewing around them (whether they like it or not, unfortunately). I recently saw some commenting on people actually asking other fans for permission to hold certain headcanons.  Someone with that power is a BNF.  That is a TRADEMARK of a BNF.  Their fandom credibility and respect is so high that people see them as some kind of authority figure.  Be wary of people who go along with this.  They’re not to be trifled with, and frankly, it’s safer not to engage.

TPTB--The Powers That Be, otherwise known as the writers/producers/creators of any given series.  These are the people that create Canon and produce Word of God.

Canon--Anything that explicitly happened in the confines of a series.  Basically, the events of any given series in whatever form the standard is.  I.E. episodes of a TV show, books in a book series, etc.

Fringe Canon--Works that are connected to the series in question, but not part of the standard form.  Often includes movies, novelizations, guide books, etc.  Can be considered canon, but isn’t something every fan will see/have access to, so can’t really be considered The Canon.  Can also includes things that are implicit in the text, so something that can be argued in meta but that not everyone will agree on.

Word of God--Something said by TPTB that remains outside of canon.  I.E. interviews, panels, and other things said at conventions or for PR.  Common mantra, “PR is not showrunning” meaning that Word of God often has little to do with what happens within the series. Example:  Some sub-textual evidence of Dumbledore being gay does not make his being gay canon (it makes it fringe canon, imo).  Rowling saying that he was gay in an interview is here considered Word of God.  You can take it or leave it, because no one in the series says the words “Dumbledore was gay” or any other variation that would make it explicit canon.

Headcanon--Something that you decide about a character.  This isn’t canon and often has no strong basis in canon.  It can include sexuality, gender, religion, favorite color, anything not covered by canon.  You can also have headcanons that contradict canon.

Fanon--Headcanons that have become Too Powerful.  These are things, good or bad, that have been accepted by a probably absurd number of people.  Some of these can be great, especially when the series has some seriously bad writing, but if you find yourself disagreeing, this can be the worst thing you ever have to deal with.  Especially when people who subscribe to it insist on its being canon...

Ship--Any feasible romantic relationship, canon or non-canon.  There are of course platonic variants, but those are usually specified (broship, brotp, etc.).  Most often two people, but more recently polyshipping has come into vogue. To Ship (v.)--For me, this does not apply to canon ships no matter if I like them or not.  Shipping is transformative.  To me, more than anything, shipping (as a verb) means you consume or create transformative media centered around that relationship (most often non-canon or not explicit canon, but could include canon, it just needs to be an active not passive interest in the relationship).

Canon Ship--The series endgame, usually (but not always!) straight.  This is an explicit couple.  They are in a relationship.  They kiss (or something) on screen.  You can still take it or leave it, but that doesn’t stop it from being canon.

Rare Pair--This is a ship that has some basis in canon, but is extremely unpopular.  Some people include anything with less than a certain number of fic on Ao3, but it varies by fandom.  I’ve been into rare pairs with less than 10 fic written for them, so anything around 500 still seems like quite a bit in comparison.  Your Mileage May Vary (YMMV), but you’ll know it when you see it.

Crack Ship--These people have probably never spoken.  There is no reason for them to be in a relationship other than the fan’s preference (often aesthetic or story-related).  A crack ship is often random and completely baseless.  A crack ship is not simply a ship that won’t be canon.  Most ships will never be canon.  This goes beyond that into the ridiculous.  As a recent example, Keith x Zarkon would be a crack ship, while Keith x Hunk is perfectly reasonable (if rare).

Multi-shipping--Shipping characters together without a strong preference for one combination over another.  For example, shipping your fave with every possible romantic partner, not just one (or more in a polyship).  This includes Everyone x Character type things, not just “I could ship them with literally anyone.”  Both count.

OTP--One True Pairing.  The ship you love above all others, canon or not.  For me, I have exactly one of these per fandom, but I know other people use it differently now.  This used to mean that you ship the thing exclusively.  You might like art for other ships with the characters in this OTP, but you’re not that into it.  This used to be THE ship.  The characters in this OTP were not shipped with others, and other relationships were used for jealousy or plot reasons, not usually because you enjoy the other ships.  This is the ship you go to war about.

OT#--Same as above, but there are more than two people involved.  So, the one polyship you hold above all other ships (poly or not).

BrOTP--Platonic version of the above.  These are the ride or die friendships of the series.  You don’t see them as in love, but they absolutely love each other.  There’s devotion and loyalty and affection--or you just think their friendship is the best/greatest/funniest and you don’t see them ever ending up together romantically.  You want these characters to be BFFs, not lovers.

[misterbombastic]

First things first: we actually do know what elves called their dicks, because even the glorious JRRT couldn't keep his hands out of his pants. The poetic term (yes, elves seem to have engaged in erotic poetry) would be gwî, but for everyday usage gwib was the preferred term. Puntl is provided as the coarse, moderately transgressive term, and likely what you would be invited to suck if you went down on a male elf. Alas, due to the ban on the Noldorin language, we have no surviving slang for Fëanor's johnson.

Second, if we assume that JRRT's intention is the guiding light for inferred details of the history and function of Arda, we are left with several clues as to the genital features of elves. In early drafts of the Silmarillion and pre-LotR writings that would eventually give rise to the War of the Ring, JRRT called them "gnomes" rather than "elves," a detail that reflects his internal monologue about them and is consistent with his para-LotR writings about them, including mutilations, betrayals, incest, genocide, colonial violence, and misotheistic rebellion. His mental image during the construction of Ardan history was almost certainly closer to the Rankin-Bass imagery than the Peter Jackson interpretation. Thus we are left to interpret the idea of gnomes-- a Paracelsean ideology tied closely to alchemy-- and of their Germanic and Norse equivalents, nature and household spirits that include classic Germanic dweorgs (that is, dwarves) but with the added qualification of tallness as a common indicator of worthiness.

I discern here between dwarf-figures of Greek and British mythology, which tend to be lusty, massively endowed pranksters, and gnomes/dweorgs, which are rarely cast in a sexual light. Some textual support could be interpreted for the influence of Pan on the elves, given that Silvan elves (and their Rivendell cousins) are singing, dancing, merry-making, traveler-harassing figures throughout the books. If we adhere to this interpretation, elves are probably packing huge veiny wangs that could put your fucking eye out while you're trying to slip em the suck.

I feel that it is, however, more likely that JRRT would have viewed his elves as more romantic and less sexual. Certainly they reproduce at an exceedingly slow rate and for an incredibly small window of their adult lives. A Panic elf would be extremely unlikely to live for two thousand or more years and sire no more than three or four offspring. For this reason, we are most likely dealing with the less overt sexual characteristics of a Paracelsean elf, which rules out giant Priapus-style horse cocks that are eternally bone-ready, but leaves us with less to go on than we might need, if we're gonna pour a giant silicone elf dick.

Ah, but now we've alluded to reproductive evidence of elvish sexual activity, and down this road we find some very interesting possibilities. For one thing, the gnomes of Paracelsus were closely related to the concept of the homunculus, and tended to be sexless or at most secondary-masculine (think garden gnomes). We can assume, in combination with the romantic, Victorianistic leanings of JRRT, that male elves were not afflicted with unwanted boners, and found it fairly simple to reserve their sexual activity to intramarital intercourse. Additionally, in the extracurricular writing Laws and Customs of the Elves (LACE henceforth), we find some fascinating aspects of elvish sexuality laid bare. Elves are incapable, it seems, of adultery, which actually kills them. They are also heavily implied to be incapable of masturbation, and are explicitly hesitant to remarry after the death of a spouse, which carries over into the Silmarillion, when Fëanor's father seeks permission from the spirit of his mother (who has died in childbirth) to remarry. Clearly, something about their physiology and/or psychology is not compatible in any way with promiscuity, and the consequences of promiscuity can be literally fatal.

The lethality of sex can, I feel, be best comprehended as an immune function similar to rH incompatibility between mother and fetus. It would, from an evolutionary standpoint, benefit a male elf (ellyn) to be certain that his offspring are actually his own, since their gestation and childhood are protracted and may consume a great deal of resources. This may have resulted in a gradual evolutionary arms race, in which an ellyn might conjugate not only his genetic material but also a dose of antibodies and/or chimeric B-cells, which are keyed to attack all sperm without his specific antigen set. In return, the female elf (or elleth) might perhaps develop her own antibody/B-cell dosage, but this begs the question of how to confer them to the male, since transmission of microbes from vagina to penis is much less reliable than the inverse. I am getting a horrible idea and I will refer back to this concept in a moment.

So assuming that extramarital sex results in autoimmune-induced death similar to anaphylaxis in mechanism, we ask ourselves: what about the other compelling aspect of elvish sexuality, that of interbreeding with humans? Leaving out the question of DNA compatibility-- which is demonstrated in canon, and which we must accept as legitimate if we are to consider this topic at all-- we have a disturbing question to address. We have multiple incidents throughout the history of Beleriand and Middle-Earth of elven/human offspring, all of which occur between a Man and an elleth. Given that the two species are capable of creating not only hybrids but fertile hybrids (Elrond produced three offspring), it is foolish to imagine that in all of Ardan history there was never a potential ellyn-woman romance that resulted in offspring, unless there was something preventing reproduction between ellyn and woman that did not exist between man and elleth. The safest bet is not that all ellyn-woman romances remained chaste-- anyone who's met a teenager can tell you better than that-- but that ellyn-woman sexual activity is incapable of producing offspring.

This is extremely unusual, as the most obvious reason for sex-discriminant infertility is more likely to favor female humans than male humans. Human ova contain mitochondria, while human sperm consume their mitochondrial power for motility and do not confer mitochondrial DNA to their offspring. Either something is happening on an immune/cellular level, which would seem to conflict with our immunological theory of lethal adultery, or something is happening on the mechanical level-- something which is, perhaps, related to the transference of female immune material to the male partner.

Perhaps, to put it crudely, the ellyn just can't get it up.

In humans, the penis consists of several structures of erectile tissue which cradle the urethra between them. This specialized tissue is capable of interrupting venous return, creating penile engorgement and thus erection by trapping blood within the corpus cavernosum. This tissue is notoriously indiscriminant about stimuli, making it easy for male humans to ejaculate without even the participation of another human. Elves, on the other hand, can't even masturbate, an activity so universal among species with external genitalia that it's almost unimaginable for a species capable of poetry to be incapable of wanking. And yet human males can couple with elven females. This implies some weird-ass shit, so I suggest you pour yourself that drink right now.

Male elves achieve erection by external constriction. To have sex, they need some biological equivalent of a cock ring. Whether their penises are "innies" or just flaccid except during intercourse, they are incapable of restricting venous return on their own... and yet the elven vulva must be compatible to some degree with penetration, or else man/elleth coupling wouldn't produce offspring. One may, if one is willing to consider extreme possibilities, entertain the idea that the elven vulva may exhibit some mechanical trait that assists the ellyn in achieving erection by constriction, by restricting venous return through strangulation.

Something that would not put off human males universally, although it might make man/elleth couplings more rare and account for the relative scarcity of elf/human offspring.

Something that would make it impossible for an ellyn to penetrate a woman, or to achieve orgasm and ejaculation with a human female.

Something that would even allow the ellyn to contribute internal disposition of antibodies and B-cells reliably, potentially through urethral penetration of the penis.

The elvish vulva, my friends, consists of outer labia, inner labia, a vaginal vestibule opening on a penetrable vaginal canal, and a set of tentacles.

In elven intercourse, the vulval tentacles constrict and penetrate the flaccid penis, simultaneously permitting/inducing erection and depositing immune bodies deep in the genitourinary tract, most likely the bladder, where they can swim up the ureters to the renal anastomosis and infiltrate the bloodstream. The erect elvish penis is then able to deposit its genetic-- and immune-- material within the vagina. Human females, having no corollary to these tentacles, can arouse a male elf and even engage in non-PIV sexual activity, but can never obtain genetic material from male elves, and therefore no ellyn/woman pregnancies occur.

For human females, this means you can have a hot elf boyfriend that can never get you pregnant, but he's likely to leave you eventually for somebody who can actually get him off. Male elves probably got the fuck around in Middle-Earth, since they could chow down on human pussy for decades before settling down with a nice elleth who would get knocked up as soon as they exchanged fluids.

For human males, this means that you're totally capable of landing a hot lady elf, as long as you don't mind her tentacles crawling up your dick every time you shark her in the ass while she's asleep, and as long as you don't mind that she can totally cheat on you and in fact might have chosen to fuck you specifically because she can screw around behind your back without breaking out in a fatal case of hives.

Aragorn was one kinky-ass fucker.

And if you read all the way through this drunken, giggling spiel, the silicone elf dick you're looking for is of normal to generous proportion, but it's strangled up and down with simulated tentacles, or at least constricted by a really tight cock ring.

I thought way the fuck too much about this. I consulted the LACE about this. Fuck every last one of you for goading me into this nightmare of grisly overanalytic humiliation. I hope all your girlfriends catch you.

[elliotbathory]

The End of the War

Part I: Introduction (An essay relating song lyrics to my mental health issues and addiction, written late 2017) Part II: Confrontation (A journal entry, written upon entering rehab) Part III: Resolution (A short story about ego death, written in rehab)

Part I: A Bigger Paper Bag

From Father John Misty’s album Pure Comedy. The album has had a deep impact on my life and I have an emotional connection with each individual song. Some view the artist as a contrived, self-absorbed, false prophet. I think he knows exactly who is and what he is trying to do. Pure Comedy touches me in a way that no other album since The Who’s Quadrophenia has. I identified with the protagonist, Jimmy, for many years. His depression, his recklessness, his desperate desire to ‘get out [his] head’. Father John Misty has created a sonic place in which I can rest with my deep despair about the state of the world. Dark, clever, occasionally very witty, and of course, real. What follows is an exploration into the many ways in which I, including my inner Jimmy, relate to 'A Bigger Paper Bag’.

“Dance like a butterfly and drink like a fish

If you’re bent on taking demons down with only your fist

And I’ve never known anyone who could lose himself in a bigger paper bag”

I am an Aries. I have a fighting spirit. Demons have plagued me for almost my whole life. The first, that of isolation and inability to communicate. The blockage in my head between thought and expression. The second, the very real and intolerably cruel voice of my mother, which informed the third: the person I became after I left the suffocating suburban reality that Jimmy and I both tried so hard to escape.

He said “My mother got drunk on stout, my dad couldn’t stand on two feet.” And yet when they found out he was using uppers, they kicked him out of the house. Desperate to escape himself, he turned to drugs and wild partying. At the age of fifteen I was so desperate to take speed I used to take 8 pseudoephedrine pills at a time and lay in bed for hours shaking with my forehead pressed to the wall. I was nowhere near cool enough to know anyone who could get drugs.

My mother also drank too much. But then, that was not the trigger for the abuse. It only amplified it. So, to “taking demons down with only your fists.” I’ve used almost every other drug over the years, some quite a lot. But my main crutch has always been alcohol, because as I discovered when I was sixteen, it made me feel normal. It taught me to communicate verbally rather than through writing. I am still not convinced that I can socialise without it.

Naturally, it does not end there. Demons have no courtesy. I’ve been drunk for a very large portion of the last four years. It makes things better, until it makes things worse. It in and of itself becomes a demon. You go from longnecks in the park, to two cheap bottles of red, to finding yourself inside a paper bag, the enormity of which you cannot know. There is endless supply in there.

And as for dancing, well, after a (a lot more than), a few gin and tonics, blue under the light, I used to be quite enchanting on stage.

“The weaker the signal, the sweeter the noise

Hunching over an instrument that you now employ

Like the Starvation Army needs a marching piano in the band”

You can tune those demons out, to an extent. The riot of blood rushing through your head after you huff amyl, their complete, albeit temporary erasure when I used to get lost inside 77 on pills, drunkenness and dancing and revelry and other sounds. Britpop, for example. I no longer know if I identify as a hedonist. What I truly was was an escapist. Not an escape artist, however. My attempts to scale the barbed wire fence of my mind and never look back were always cut short.

You come down. Then you wait until you know you can go back up again. Then you do. My partner gets cranky when I try to go out these days and can’t get into it. I am no longer starving for the things I have in life now, like love, understanding, and happiness. Those situations usually now just remind me of how I tried and failed to find happiness in shallow overcompensations. I always wanted to be fun and cool. I’m not.

“Are you feeling used?

I do”

Yes but let’s not get into that. I used myself and I am ashamed.

“Oh, I was pissing on the flame

Like a child with cash or a king on cocaine

I’ve got the world by the balls

Am I supposed to behave?”

For a few years the diagnoisis that suited me best was bipolar II. Soaring highs, or more commonly, crushing lows. There were times when I was on acid or mushrooms in huge crowds and genuinely felt that the entire situation had been constructed specifically for my friends’ and my enjoyment. Eventually, of course, I fell from that specific hallucinogenic throne in a spectacularly violent fashion and developed actue psychosis.

“What a fraud

What a con”

My specific breed of psychosis was as narcissistic as it was unbearable. I was convinced that everyone in the world knew who I was, and everyone hated me. Because how dare I pretend so long to be happy, to be fun, to be a legitimate person worthy of enjoying life. Jimmy also felt as though he was not truly cool enough to be a mod, and was eventually rejected and ridiculed, confirming his self belief. The film adaptation ends with a long shot of him riding his vespa along the sea cliffs.

I believed there was a global conspiracy against me and its end goal was my suicide. I heard passers by spitting insults at me for months on end. I wonder where I got the idea that anyone would do that?

“You’re the only

One I love”

I didn’t used to believe it was enough to love one person romantically. Or rather, I didn’t feel validated enough by the love of one person. I was suffering a massive defecit of love. I don’t hate myself so much anymore. So now self love has been added, it’s notso much a matter of begging others to throw endless amounts of love into the chasm of my starving soul, but rather being able to participate in the life long work of love.

“It’s easy to assume that you’ve built some rapport

With a someone who only likes you for what you like yourself for

Okay, you be my mirror but remember that there are only a few angles I tend to prefer

I’m only here to serve”

Those first two lines fucking floored me when I first really listened to what they are saying. I learned from quite an early age that all I was good for was my looks. And then sex. So I combined the two to forge an identity that I hoped people would like. An A grade slut, both in my personal life, and professionally. Sexy, easy, available, yours if you want me (please take me I cannot stand myself). Took me a long fucking time to grow out of that. I have never fought as hard against anything and I have come a long way.

“Oh, I was pissing on the flame

Like a child with cash or a king on cocaine

I’ve got the world by the balls

Am I supposed to behave?

Oh, I was dancing 'round the flame

Like a high-wire act with a "who, me?” face

I was living on nothing but water and cake"

Perilously close to oblivion at all times and dangerously self destructive but gosh, wasn’t I good at it? Wasn’t I cute? Didn’t you used to wank to me? I have no idea what kept me together, let alone alive. Natural talent, I suppose. That Aries fight. Against the bored, lonely, suffering person I used to be. Against death, to the death. And death hasn’t won me over yet, seductive bastard that he is.

“What a fraud

What a con

You’re the only

One I love

One I love

One I love”

This isn’t about you, baby. It’s about me, Jimmy, and Father John Misty. But then, we are kindred souls. So I suppose it is. A bit.

 Part II: Confrontation (A journal entry, written upon entering rehab)

17.4.18

I haven’t been remembering my dreams. They’ve been fading so fast. I got 10 hours of sleep after deciding not to attend the NA meeting and having to walk past it anyway to get to the smoking area. I didn’t want to encroach on an experience I don’t share but what’s the difference? Why would I care for legality? It’s strange being here in a ‘good’ patch. No withdrawals, only craving nicotine. Am I here not to get ‘better’, but ‘even better’? I’m not sure how I feel. A little alien. Just letting myself think and waiting for anything significant. Being here is symbolically significant. I’m here to learn coping skills and relapse prevention, that’s it. It doesn’t have to provide anything deeper or provoke feelings of profundity. It’s basic shit. I’m an alcoholic and I don’t want to go back to problem drinking.

Where is the fear and pain I felt yesterday? What was the purpose of it? Knock out a rehab stay while I don’t have work/uni commitments and hope I fucking learn for when I do. The best I can do is be present. I am scared that I still don’t know exactly what I’m studying towards. I’m probably not as smart as I presume. What is my lot in life going to be? A job I like and a husband I adore? God, spare me. I’m having a crisis of personality. Intensity and extremity are not useful defining characteristics. Yet being a good, switched on, and fairly interesting person doesn’t feel like enough. How can I relate person to person when I see my own character as lacking? If we are all fundamentally valid and complex as individuals this negative self-assessment automatically carries across to others. I am ashamed not by how boring I feel I am, but why this baseless critical judgement feels so important. My amorphous, superficially high standard insults everyone.

Why is suffering interesting? Why is ‘different’ interesting? Why can’t I conceive of the mid-ranges of reality as interesting, am I that lacking in curiosity and imagination? I’m used to being overstimulated. Or pissed. I am not attuned to subtlety. It is harder work to find wonder in the mundane. Such a vain conquest, so incredibly shallow to attempt to make my life interesting using self hatred as a form of performance art. No one is interested in the creative flair with which you can wield that. Being alive and burning despite things is not impressive if you’re purposefully making life hard for yourself. I don’t really know where I sit with that, though. My mental torment created the life I had. It’s not that I didn’t want to get better. I just took too much pride in how much I could relish in how fucked up I was.

The hereness and newness of myself is queer because it is complete but also completely lacking in drama. I don’t know what foot to start on if not shock value. I’m a recovering alcoholic, a reformed self loathing attention seeker. What am I inviting people to see if not a hot mess? A tepid, anxious 27 year old boy. My social stance is defensive. Find my projected self interesting but do not attempt to actually know me. I am too fragile, too sad, too boring. I don’t want these human frailties to be levelled with so I cast them up high, make an overexaggerated display of them. I’m not doing that anymore. Take me as I am, whatever that is, but also don’t because I don’t know what that is and I won’t make any efforts to help you find out either. So it seems like I want to be left alone but I have been alone on my plinth celebrating my vain, personal self loathing for so long I am starved for human connection. I was lying the whole time. I am one of you. It is still embarrassing to admit.

 Part III: Resolution (A short story about ego death, written in rehab)

30.4.18

So you arrive on your own doorstep one day, right? You would never come to yourself at a time like this, the you that suffers knows he’s not exactly wanted, but he is desperate. There is nowhere else to go, every safe haven is closed or gone. You’re tired, cold, and soaking wet. It’s pouring because of course it is. A few hours pass and your ego, comfortable inside, decides to take a chance and let you in. You’ve been screaming and pleading for hours. “Let me in, LET ME IN!” You collapse fully clothed in a hot shower while your various self conceptions tut and fuss, bitching about the decision. “Family,” some of them say uncertainly, “That’s what we’re for, right? People say that kind of stuff when they love irredeemable fuckstains, yeah?” They don’t actually know this, and the other parts of your ego are by turns confused and furious. “What the fuck, guys? He’ll be fine, he’s always fine, get him out of here!” “You fucking IDIOTS! WEAK! This is NOT what’s supposed to happen, this is not what we do!”

They’re all running around swearing, aggressively and resentfully caring. Like the first time you ever got drunk by yourself to make yourself feel better before your year 10 half-yearlies. How you remember sitting naked in the shower with your head lolling, parents freaking out. Meanwhile, you are there again. Bewildered. Overwhelmed, barely responsive. But you’re wide awake. Layers and layers of clothes, costumes, identities weighing your body down as the warm water soaks through. Something clicks and you realise it makes no sense to be fully dressed in the shower. As a token act to bring normalcy to the situation, you start to take the layers off. The process of removing them all takes a while, but once it is done you feel as though it happened in the blink of an eye.

“Huh.” You say, looking down at your own body. “Is this what I look like?” It’s a significant action in the symbolic world, taking off your clothes. It never felt like it was before. You didn’t understand the meaning of exposing yourself, of vulnerability. You just did it cos you had a malformed concept of fear. Scary things are good for you, they make you stronger. A seemingly contradictory belief that laying your flaws out on the table prevents people from abusing you for them. Nothing can hurt you when you are made of hurt. It is different completely, however, to reveal yourself to yourself. You’re there naked in the bathroom, looking at yourself as though you’ve never seen yourself before.

Your ego, anxieties, notions of your self that you’ve constructed are all pacing around frantically, fighting with each other about who’s right and what’s the best course of action. None of them ever had a contingency plan for acknowledging the hurt. Confronting the core of who you are. Their very existences are reliant upon dividing the self into these fragments. The elephant in the room of your life is in the fucking bathroom doing god knows what. He’s been in there for hours.

Back to you there. With all the layers removed, you turn on the light. It’s a lot like tripping. What you see in the mirror you know to be yourself, but the image feels so foreign. Stranger still is how separate the amalgamated pile of faces you used to wear looks there in the corner, apart from you. Not, as you believed so deeply, parts of you. They grow irrelevant as you trace your finger over your reflection. “Fuck. Is this who I am?” After a little while you start to think your time in there might be worrying all of the other selves, and they really didn’t want to let you in, so it would only be right to go and let them know you’re okay. You’re not going to cause any trouble. You’re grateful. None of the clothes on the floor are suitable to wear, so “Fuck it,” You think, and walk out. The exhibitionist, the slut, and the hippie were all naked anyway.

The place is empty, dead quiet. For some reason it feels like it has been for a while. You’re confused, are they playing a trick? After wandering around for a while you decide to make a cup of tea and have a cigarette. Make yourself at home, as it were. It’s nice to be out of the storm, relaxing and enjoying your own company. You don’t need the assistance of your ego selves to do that anyway. You are allowing yourself residency in your own mind, this overexposed, brutally hurt self. The hurt doesn’t feel very present though, strangely. You thought yourself to be the suffering person. That’s why they didn’t want you here. The situation leaves you bizarrely unphased. Things that should be scary tend not to be, right? You’re just rolling with it, acting like the place is all yours while the selves are elsewhere.

You can’t quite believe it, both that they actually relented when you were banging the door down, and that you got into a situation so fucked you needed to seek the help of the conscious collective. You usually just communicate via proxies. “I’m here, how weird.” You think. Perfume Genius is playing and the sound quality is fantastic. Walking back into the bathroom to pee, you notice the pile of clothes has vanished. The trippy feeling you had before settles on you again and you look to the mirror. Your eyes widen as you see all your selves, the shades of ego and anxiety, floating behind you, faint as ghosts. You see the Party Girl, the Masochistic Martyr, the Stubborn Whore. Their faces are passive and kind. Something you’d attribute to the relief of death.

You lived through them, they lived as you so you could survive. They panicked when you got here, begging to be let in. Because your arrival signified their exit. With your presence, in your self and reality, false constructs fall away. You are the spirit that persisted, the soul that endured. Their service was for one end, and that was getting you here. Everything they protected you through, all of the lessons they helped you learn are intact, part of you as a whole. You’re left staring at the naked truth of who you are. None of the people you’ve been fought in vain. The end game was always unity.

From the other room you hear the piano player playing “This Must Be The Place” and you think: it’s a miracle to be alive. You exit the bathroom into the rest of your life, hearing someone say “Pleasure to meet you!” It’s a pleasure to meet you, too. You are the resurrection, and you are the light you needed to let in. You could only bring yourself to hate yourself for so long. A spark, a flame, a bang, a phoenix. You see yourself rising in the vast and limitless universe. Within and without, at peace, as one.

[beardedd0nut]

Ze big apple

Dear lord has day one been jam packed full of shenanigans in this awesome city. Shenanigans and mild amounts of pain... I thought I'd take a quick stroll around town to get my bearings but it ended up being much longer than anticipated in both length and distance, but more on that soon. The day began with a trip up to broadway to obtain the coveted (and by coveted I mean the thing that's getting me in to a lot of stuff for free) New York pass. I probably can't stress enough just how much this thing can help you on your travels. It contains free or discounted entry to some of the major attractions in New York and if you're spending the time here, it's probably worth picking one up. Then in the distance I saw a familiar signage. A little fat baker with the name Carlo's scrawled across the side. Could it really be the famed cake boss franchise here in manhattan? It was. So nearest I travelled to try one of the fabled delicacies. A lobster tail. Not an actual lobster tail, that would be a weird choice for breakfast. It's pretty much a cream filled piece of puff pastry dusted in caster sugar. The first bite was amazing, an explosion of sweetness that whisks you into an instant sugar high. Then about half way through you realise there is some strange coating on your tongue. Personally I think it is the impending diabeetus but it's probably just all the cream and pastry melting in your mouth. All in all a mighty fine breakfast treat to start the day. Plus you can really understand how buddy and the others became such fat fucks if they had to taste test it all. I've noticed on these recent travels that the Americans have seemingly learnt from us upper class Aussies and decided that milk should in fact go with coffee. It helps, I wasn't ready for cream in coffee, then again no one is. A quick stroll down to grand central station followed. I did intend on buying a ticket then no there but the staff didn't give two shits about helping me out. However while contemplating wether or not to put off getting a ticket I looked up and realised that the roof of grand central shows constellations in the night sky. I can't remember if I noticed it last time or not but it took me back a little. There were even small holes to let the light shine through and look like stars. A few blocks, and I mean closer to 20 blocks later I found myself standing at the doorway to the museum of sex. You could see inside, something I didn't think would be possible due to the adult nature of the exhibit. This immediately made it fell less creepy than I had expected it to. Checking my backpack however was a seedy experience going down into a creepy ass basement type place. Anyway the exhibits inside were really quite interesting. The bar held information about the disco scene and how it acted as somewhat of a liberation front for people in the 70's from Both a cultural and sexual way. Upstairs saw the first glimpse of sex objects. A wall of toys and historic artefacts gathered by the museum to show the ways in which our pop culture and sexual sensibilities have become intwined. For some reason a little mermaid song just popped into my head but more along the lines of: " I wanna know where the dildos are. Wanna see dolls, wanna see em blown up." Anyway the first floor is I think what most people are expecting, and therefore a great way in which to break the tension in some sense. The second floor is taken up in part by an exhibit about animals sexual behaviour in both the wild and in captivity. It's quite facilitating to read and see all about the ways different species condone or maneuver around the topic of sex. And the ways they go about it. For instance there is a breed of duck with a penis that's 14inches in length, better hung than all of humanity. Also there was a sculpture of a dolphin sticking its dick in the blowhole of another dolphin. It was an absolute pisser. The second half of the floor was dedicated to how it is "hardcore" art and porn became a mainstay within modern society. From the Victorian era up till the 70's and 80's and even earlier the tabooness of it all is somewhat integral to understanding society's current views around the topic. The last floor just had some weird art from unknowns and disturbed individuals. There's a store as well if you feel like picking up some gear, but I'll let you decide if that's something you'd wanna do. My final thing to say about it would be that whilst the museum is in fact about sex, it's about much more. It's there to show the liberation and help understand the social and sexual constructs we live in today. Whilst relating ours to that of animals seems far fetched, it is also easy to see that in some ways there is a lot to learn. Around this of leaving my legs began to ache, but I persisted on walking in the city. I just really enjoyed it. It's been a while since I've really been able to get a stroll on and I quite enjoyed it. I wound up at MOMA and it wasn't as grasping as the last time I was there. I felt like the exhibits had lost something, or maybe I wasn't the person they were aimed at. There were still some great works of art, but the air of pretension and wank was hard to avoid, like a lingering fart in tropical heat. Anywhoo a power nap later and I was off to see school of rock. It mimics the film pretty well, and I totally didn't realise that it came about through Andrew loyd Webber. Good fun for the whole family, but I felt like it could have done with just a little more jack black in it. The kids talents were amazing and just made me jealous of a bunch of ten year olds. I hopped down the subway and was greeted by a band playing jazz in the underground. It was really quite incredible. They were all masters of their craft and gelled perfectly with each other swinging between each members own solo. I had to pull myself away before I wound up staying there all night to watch these magicians create such wonderful music. Having ended the night with a slice of 99cent pizza, I now lie in bed ready to make tomorrow a much more chilled out day and evening as I can already feel the aches set in. Toodleoo and I'll catch you all in the next post.

[mild-lunacy]

The Unspoken Truth about Shipping

I know I insisted yesterday (shouting it into the void for the millionth time) that seeing canon Johnlock isn't about shipping, and it's not like that's not true, but. The fact is that even if it were so, Johnlock isn't 'just another ship' no matter how you slice it, because all ships aren't equal on any analytical grounds. Any such equality is purely social. However, that can essentially be invisible because discussion of shipping is generally in the context of it as a social phenomenon, to do with cliques, popularity or unpopularity and/or social capital and the lack thereof. In other words, it's treated independently from characterization, as a pure expression of fannish whim or desire. And this would be fine, as long as the people doing so retained a measure of self-awareness, akin to the one slash fans used to have about the fact that they were slashing. Not *exactly* the same way, though, because slashers certainly helped pioneer this mentality that all slash ships are equal, if only equally non-canon.

Overall, clearly there are strong social forces at play in fandom to the effect that all ships are 'equal' insofar as they're all subjective preferences. And there's a certain, more broadly popular, polite fiction these days that all subjective feelings in general are equivalent to each other. Of course, this is understandable, because if left to their own devices, people will discriminate against others and claim one preference is morally superior to another. This is even true about ships. So to prevent or counteract such moralistic attacks, people say that all subjective preferences are the same and must all be respected, where such respect just means 'stay in your own lane'. Basic common sense, really. On a purely rational level, however, even aside from canonicity, it's clearly *not* all the same. More broadly, feeling that something is 'true' or believing in a pairing's validity generally doesn't actually make it real, plausible or genuinely workable for the characters in the context of fanfic. Note, I'm assuming you're talking specifically about 'shippy' or romantic fic that supports its pairing, rather than a PWP where two people simply have sex for no particular reason or a fundamentally abusive/unsatisfying relationship.

As an easy example, look at something really random or cracky like Sherlock/Jeff Hope, the cabbie, and compare it to Johnlock. You can talk about canonicity and the degree of canon interaction and apparent compatibility or personal interest the characters have in each other, like @ivyblossom has recently. In that sense, it's not that Sherlock/Jeff Hope is 'superior' (or inferior) to say, another protagonist/antagonist pairing like Sherlock/Moriarty (though this is fandom, so some people would certainly say so), but at the very least, Sherlock spent more time with and had paid more canonical attention to Moriarty, which makes it more plausible. (Note, Sherlock/Moriarty is still really implausible and is also counter to everything Sherlock stands for, but at least it's less cracky and could be explored in a dark AU). This is the difference between Ivy's Stage 1 and Stage 2 type ship. I guess I'm just saying you can definitely go deeper than that, given you're open to analyzing the potential relationships through the lens of the characters and interpersonal psychology in general. This probably goes without saying, but not all relationships are equally plausible either in real life or in fiction, and they're also not all equally well-advised or likely to last. Common sense for most people, really, though some folks will insist any relationship's success is only dependent on the work the people involved put into it. To some degree that's true, but that doesn't mean there's not a *limit* to the kind of success we're talking about. Factoring in basic compatibility means that for some couples, a lot of work and effort would add up to... a sort of fond tolerance. There's only so much you can do if someone's not sexually compatible with you, either due to chemistry or sexual orientation, for example, and that's just scratching the surface.

Remember, I'm saying this without suggesting any sort of moral judgment. Regardless, surely that is common sense. There is no universe where Sherlock and Jeff Hope are equally well-suited as a couple as Sherlock and John-- and I mean this purely on an interpersonal psychology and/or romantic narrative level. I don't mean people shouldn't *ship* Sherlock with Jeff Hope, of course. I mean, who cares (obviously not me). The point is that shipping them, or even postulating that relationship, would have to exist in a fundamentally different space in regards to the characters, the text, and probably reality in general. To make it work, you'd have to do certain things to the canon character of Sherlock which are automatically OOC, more or less, and even then it wouldn't last or go past a certain shallow level. The kind of relationship you can achieve is limited by the nature of the characters and their established dynamic, on some level, if they're going to remain recognizable as the two characters in question. Writing and using your imagination can certainly make a lot of unlikely situations feel real, but it's not magic.

On some level, I'm sure we all understand this, which is why I called the whole 'ship and let ship' reductionist fandom philosophy a polite fiction. Talking one on one with other fans, at a con or in a private chat, I really doubt many people would claim there's some sort of purely abstract equivalence between Sherlock/Jeff Hope and Sherlock/John for the actual characters. At least, unless the person in question was a really committed, pure philosophical subjectivist (which most people aren't). Anyway, obviously the whole thing is a defensive strategy to do with some people's hurt feelings and the need for self-justification. Plenty of people in fandom go so far as to dismiss or belittle the validity of actual canon or 'Stage 5' ships for whatever artificially constructed reason (it's not plausible or otherwise good enough, it's too 'abusive', it's out of nowhere, etc). So the bar for denial and dismissal is already quite low, since it applies to actual facts, let alone people's analyses. People also tend to assume every argument has to come down to a moralistic debate, so a false dichotomy gets created in fandom, where either one accepts people's preferences or one is automatically telling them how to feel about things. I get this. I just... find it frustrating, and so had to explain my passions on this matter yet again.

[wrangletangle]

Since you were recommending Dreamwidth, I decided to check it out. Is their anyway to look purely at art/fanfic without searching through someone's blog? What makes Tumblr so easy to use is that you can search through peoples tags quickly to find what you want, and I can't really find that on DW. Also, can you follow tags/interests on DW just like you do on Tumblr? It's a feature that allows me to keep up with my fandoms even when I'm not actively combing the tags and it's very helpful.

Hi anon, thanks for asking! Sorry for the delay.

Dreamwidth is constructed very differently from Tumblr, as you noticed. It was originally created as a fork of the Livejournal code, but has since developed in its own direction, as requests from the userbase came in.

To give you some parallels:

You can still follow individual users. In fact, you have a lot more control over how you follow users - you can adjust your following preferences to group users together into named dashes, for example. I have a dash for individual blogs and a separate one for communities (details below).

Most users do have a personal tagging system, and this generates an automatic list of their personal tags, available at the /tag URL for that user. So if I want to see all of the art that pentapus has ever posted (and I do, regularly), I just go to pentapus’s blog, glance at the taglist and pick the “art” tag. Voila, I have it all. No skipping stuff like Tumblr likes to do.

Now for what’s different:

DW doesn’t block your post for being “adult” or hide posts based on tags. Instead, you flag your individual posts or entire blog as adult, and if someone isn’t logged in, they get a warning before they see the material.

When I make a post on DW, I can literally control who can see it. I can either lock it to only my followers, to only a subset of my followers (groups I’ve put together privately, which my followers can’t see), or I can let everyone see it. I can choose my own tags for my own blog. I don’t have to worry about fighting over tags with another fandom I’ve never heard of, or strangers hopping into my blog and fighting with me over something they have no context for.

Where Dreamwidth is really different is in how it organizes what Tumblr does via general tags. DW does that via opt-in communities, which have mods and everything. When it comes to fannish content, I often won’t post that to my personal journal at all but to a community for that topic instead, or I’ll post it to my personal journal but I’ll post a notice about it at a relevant community. That way, I know that people who are interested in that topic can see the post. I also don’t spam my followers with 50 million Baze/Chirrut reblogs haha ha (still not apologizing).

I join and follow communities for topics I’m interested in. Those communities can show up on my dash/feed, mixed in with the individuals I follow, or I can separate them into their own dash/feed. I have the power!

I can lock my posts in communities to community members only, if I don’t want to tell the entire universe about my Baze/Chirrut feels but only want to talk to like-minded shippers. (Though really, I want to tell the entire universe.)

No need for sideblogs. Just post to communities related to that topic.

Functional cut tags.

Multiple icons on free accounts.

THREADED CONVERSATIONS IN CONTEXT, ALONG WITH EVERYONE ELSE’S COMMENTS ON THE SAME POST. ALSO, CONVERSATIONS WITHOUT REBLOGGING.

No ads.

No porn blog followers.

Community-run support, so you can literally see the support queue and usually get a helpful response within like 2-3 days at most, often faster for easy questions.

Help files? That tell you how to use the site? Linked from a button that says “Help”?

You can edit your posts, and there won’t be 500 copies of the version with the typo in it.

Screened comments that can be unscreened at will.

Long-form non-chat PM system.

Comment-tracking, even for posts you didn’t make.

Multiple icons, which allow you to mood theme your posts.

Polls, if you have a paying account.

Actual mood themes, if you have a paying account.

What does that mean?

No antis. Anti content is not posted to the communities, or if it is, mods remove it. Antis are allowed to form their own communities, and people who love the thing they hate just avoid those. (Most people don’t bother making anti comms and just occasionally mutter on their personal blogs. Overall anti noise level is much lower, comparatively speaking.)

No fighting over tags.

Better RP. Let’s be real, RPing on Tumblr is horrifying.

More control over what feeds I see and when.

More control over what other people see. I can post personal rl posts for my followers only, and they will never be seen by anyone who doesn’t follow me.

More personal connections among mutuals, as you’re able to talk either privately or in small groups about your personal life or interests without random people barging in, taking your sandwich, and kicking your shins.

Better privacy controls. Honestly, does Tumblr even have privacy?

But also, in the reverse, the ability to connect with most of the people who have a particular interest by posting in a community. Since communities are moderated, people don’t hide from them the way a lot of us hide from the tags on Tumblr. You also don’t have to call into the void for people to follow - you can literally just look at the community membership list and browse for cool people.

CONVERSATION.

Connection. Belonging to a community on DW is not like being on Tumblr. It’s much more personal and interconnected, with individual support. On the flip side, communities don’t have the kinds of requirements that Tumblr networks do. You don’t have to follow X or do Y and send in an application and give them your icon and description or any of that jazz. You click a button. There, you’ve joined. No submissions required. No mod has to trawl the tags for things to reblog - members just post their stuff directly to the community, or post to their personal blogs and post a link to the community.

None of this requires an xkit-style extension. All of these features are natively supported by the site itself.

The experience is very different, but it is very awesome. Much more interconnected, much less wank (not totally non-wanky, because fandom wanks, but the system is designed to make it harder to be a jerk and easier to be a friend).

[customessay123]

Preventing violence against women essay

shew Topic:\n\nThe evaluation of in e genuinely the potential possibilities to pr stillt force out against wo workforce.\n\nEssay Questions:\n\nHow is fury be and what relation does K-12 inculcateing method has to abandon?\n\nWhy is studying non- fiery postion any(a)-important(prenominal)?\n\nWhy does masculine abandon against wo manpower occur in the long run?\n\ndissertation State workforcet:\n\nAs pip-squeakren gain allthing connected with enmity and force out and how to deal with it they blend in build up and do non find lost in situations that gestate betive actions in parlia custodytary procedure to recognize or act to any(prenominal) lawsuit of force-out against women be it a some unrivaledal, verbal, cozy, or horny fiber of ridicule.\n\n \nPr level forwardting military section against women Essay\n\n \n\nT qualified of contents:\n\no Introduction\n\no abandon definition and K-12 cutledge\n\no T each(prenominal)ing non- bowelless bearing\n\no staminate craze against women\n\no hysteria-prevention by facts of life\n\no windup\n\nDuring her living wholeness out of ii women leave alone be shell by a slice who loves her!\n\nLeonore Loeb Adler\n\n1.Introduction\n\nEducation has al representations contend an integral part in the lives of e genuinely single shaver in the country and in the world. This is non surprising as it is precept that faces children the knowledge to think, tax and be able to come upon a problem and make for it. Social skills, sarcastic thought affect skills, problem solving skills, empathy dressing all of these argon obtained with and through the surgical operation of precept and be an essential part of a becoming a multi-sided moderniseed someoneality. single of the major(ip) characteristics of much(prenominal) a personality is the force to exercise all the betrothals without any invasion and especially without strength. The process of socialization of children through edgeinal appropriate K-12 in all the skills listed above put give lessons- male childs in the group that atomic number 18 slight likely to be raving mad to women and minimize the set and beliefs that male childs accede form according to their male entitlement. As children lead e actuallything connected with attack and abandon and how to deal with it they flex armed and do non wank lost in situations that require active actions in order to recognize or respond to any type of violence against women be it a physical, verbal, sexual, or unrestrained type of crime. Boys acquire the ability to oppose and recognize violence against women owe to the statement and knowledge they get they and it is a strong presupposition to non beness aggressive. Nevertheless work day is meet one of the factors influencing male childs and the some other one is family. If the familys social relations argon characterized by high rate of violence, civilize no n- fantastic direction may go against to succeed.\n\n2. vehemence definition and K-12 schooling\n\nIf we take violence against women and children as the criterion to refer children from unfavourable families and as aroundthing instill- gentilityal activity tries to reduce such(prenominal)(prenominal) carriage to its minimum, it is needful to identify the term violence itself. The term violence is ordinarily employ to define aggression and acts of annoyance that in conclusion ca expenditure impose on _or_ oppress to private kosherty, animals and even battalion. Violence is a compositionifestation of a deportment with a noxious orientation. Random domestic violence, the one that is very super C forthwith causes a lot of troubles instantly for too many race and especially women get serious, irrecoverable injuries that changes do harm to their physical possibilities in everyday bouncy activities. Violence to women does truly modify the societys moral philoso phy and is the example of a stark(a) grammatical gender base departure establish on the intuitive tactual sensationing that women are mens private property.Violence against women is a synonymy of any act of discrimination and physical abuse aimed to hurt a effeminate child or a cleaning woman. One of the virtually spread acts of violence against women is domestic violence, rape and others.\n\nAs all the children, including boys, tend to likeness the doings of adults and their parent in the first place, they become very argueable to violence in terms of copying it, too. some ms school- commandment becomes the only source of exhibit children the guidances of recognizing the responding to violence and if the process of education is harmonious and professionally then it empowers all children and specially boys to become active participants and non just observers of violence-prevention.\n\nThe abbreviation K-12 is apply for the designation for the elementary and altern ative education in northern close America. K-12, or Kay through 12 is a shortening for kindergarten through twelfth grade education. This education implies working(a) with children from five to 18 years old, and this is the whole block when the children nab all the determine and believes that volition define their futurity life. The K-12 education if conducted properly is an exquisite precondition to educate boys non to be passive in the women-oriented ruby acts merely to capture enough information in order to leave office them. The epoch from 5 to 18 is an prodigious period for education, as it becomes a filter for violence in global and violence against women in particular. At the age of 18 young men aim their proceeding life. They start looking at for a couple and thought to the highest degree their future wives, so it is essential to make authoritative they do truly know how to command their peevishness and non let it transform into convulsive behavior against women. The K-12 education is based on the nonion that every child is unique and necessitate a unlikeiated approach. in like manner the fact that K-12 classroom training works to meet psyche students needs as the classrooms often complicate children with contrary level of abilities, it excessively provides skills that are designed to memorise the student to be flourishing in his environment. As children excrete most of their time in school it become the very place to motive them non to be aggressive and violent against young womans and women.\n\n \n\n3. Teaching non-violent behavior\n\nThe K-12 education in terms of preventing violence against women is very much needful by the society because the modern expo original of children to violence id gigantic and fuddle never been as available as now. Television, picture show and computer games, films eternally give the weak childs point new convenings of pugnacity and violence. Sometimes children do bring vio lence themselves or promote up in the tune of threat or in a neighborhood that constantly provides examples of unfitness to self- hold up and to stop the conflict peace broady. Children start pickings all of these as a normal fact and watch nonhing bad in behaving in the same way for the only thing they do is the only when copy what they see.\n\nThe basis that the personality of the readers nowadays is determine more than their knowledge in the course they program line is because the values and behavior examples delivered to children in the sensitive period outweigh some gaps in the course. Good teachers protect children from violence and make trust worthy their increase is rose-cheeked and they envision what trustworthy beauty and moral excellence is.\n\nThe basic reasons children in general and boys in particular stomach be so considerably influenced by violent behavior is because such behavior as it has been mentioned before is actually learned. The headsprin g starts making critical connections in the period of childhood but in reality these connections are not truly critical as they are interpreted a priori. At the scratch line the childs mind is a Tabula Rasa, a sweet board, on which teachers and family with their hand arrive at the picture of the childs future behavior and personality. So basically saying, the violent behavior against women performed by men is simply an imprint that a man got when he was a boy. darn thinking only about the fact that exposure to violence causes boys to be violent in future, teachers and parent should not pull up stakes that love is the tool to teach the child to be judgment and patient, to be loving and non-aggressive. vulgar lowstanding makes the child learn constructive way of conflict solving and also learn how to control himself and not to express his exasperation in any hurtful way. The education from Kindergarten through the twelfth grade that is based on acceptance, love and unbowed devotion to children is a justify of preventing violent manifestations in the lives of these children. If children feel that they are needed and judge at school, if they feel ripe expressing their thoughts and know that they are esteem and never humiliated they bequeath never humiliate any proboscis themselves and willing throw less problems traffic with a stress (Mullender, 2004). It is common knowledge that aggression is a protection and violence is a strong, fixed aggressive behavior (Kimmel & Michael, 1989). And in that approve is no closed book in the fact that the legal age of teachers are women. If a boy learns to be aggressive from Kindergarten manger his senior year in High School the opportunity that he will not be violent to women is very low. So here it is necessary to face two major facts: the two most important factors influencing the boys violent orientation are school and family. The bulk of teachers are women and the most important person for a child buzz off, belong to the feminine gender, too. In case mother fails to teach her son solve the conflicts constructively and the teacher fails to develop his problem solving skills aggression against women is very probable to occur. K-12 education with its ability to teach children to trade with negative feelings in non-destructive positive(p) ways nowadays has off to the key agent in teaching non-violent behavior against women. This is true for very often parents are very busy working and have no time to open their child the penetration to the productive, non-aggressive life.\n\n \n\n4. Male violence against women\n\nViolence in its very core group is a manifestation of the destructive rely to control and have power over other gentlemans gentleman being. According to Bancroft there nine types of abusive men which finish use different styles starting with a strictly verbal abuser and taenia point with a physical batterer (Bancroft, 2003). Male violence against women is a desire to feel complete control over a compassionate being that for ages has been seen as a weak gender. whence violence becomes the way of proving that a man or a boy really belongs to a male gender and thusly women have to knuckle under him. In other voice communication male violence against women is a characteristic of men, who were maltreated or neglected in their childhood (Bancroft, 2003).\n\nAccording to the information not known at unspecific-eyed public but undisturbed by the Federal self-assurance of investigation out of all the domestic violence acts 95 percent are violent behavior manifestations against women. So this is all basically about the gender violence and primarily violence over women committed by men. The men who were abused in their childhood or were victims of family and school neglect most unremarkably commit violent savage behavior. If a gnomish boy is constantly exposed to his develop beating his mother he is a potential abuser for every wo man in his life (Widom & Maxfield, 2001). The situation becomes even worse if a dwarfish boy is abused himself, too. The primary(prenominal) problem concerning children and boys that are being abused is that cannot learn what is empathy for other people and for the pain they are experiencing. They treat other people the same as they were hard-boiled themselves. So, if a child that is abused or watches his family members or neighbors abuse their relatives get not proper attention at school the boy easily converts into a criminal and his life will be small because of his broken childs heart. Violence against women is not the fault of men but their misfortune. The true reason is that men used to be boys and these little boys did not have anybody to love and understand them neither at home nor at school. They did not have anybody to teach him or her how to control their anger, for anger is the major feeling such abusive children get down. They are barbarian with the people who ar e so indifferent to them and they become sure nobody is honestly able to understand them and become and violent (Bancroft, 2003).\n\nThis issue is not even about women letting men abuse them and turning them to practice of law and not about men believing that the punishment will not hard. This is about the hypothesis to prevent violence against women when men are little boys are seek for love just as any girl does (Kimmel & Michael, 1989). Male violence against women has different various forms: verbal violence, sexual assault, sexual harassment, battered women and others. all in all of these are result to the inability to build normal relationships. As it has been mentioned before school is the southward most important element in bringing up successful and mentally healthy men. The aim of K-12 education is to suffer in the blanks of dysfunctional relationships indoors the family of the boy and especially in terms of relations with women. An absorbed female teacher, showing watch over and love for a little boy shows him that he is worth of love the way he is and does not have to use his male advantages such as strength to show his ascendency over women. As the majority of men are heterosexuals, their female companions are the one that experience violence the most.\n\n \n\n5. Violence-prevention through education\n\nK-12 education can be rather effective in term of growing up non-violent males. Under the condition of an man-to-man differentiated approach to the each boy the process education can guarantee several(prenominal) ways of preventing violence against women. This can happen through the shaping of positive interactions between the teachers and the male-student, learning how to build productive relationships, pickings into account the person kindle of the child. As the K-12 education implies a lot of sport activities, which take away the spare efficacy that a growing body has and can use in the direction of violent acts. The K-12 education provides the attention to a gravid variety of aspects concerning the childs life that could lead him to aggression and afterwards violence. This is achieved through the development of different kind of skills such as physical, social, cognitive and emotional aspects. If a boy gets the require attention if not at home, but at to the lowest degree at school in terms of emotional affixation and psychical exercises he is not in the risk group for becoming violent towards women.\n\n coeval schools provide a guidance to every child and this person is responsible for observing the child behavior. In cases the behavior becomes not adaptive and abnormal the counselling may feel innocuous to turn for a psychological assistance or emit with the childs parents. The professionalism of teachers should primary reveal the ability to teach the boy to regulate his emotional conditions. K-12 through teaches boys how to speak off their thoughts and emotional conditions. This completely coinci des with one of the best steps in the prevention of violence against women. The K-12 education teaches makes boys learn that it is okay to be unfounded and that each person sometimes does feel angry but the biggest difference is how a person reveals his anger to others. A boy, being in class learns that there are contradictory ways of showing his anger and the most productive way to do it is to tell what he is feeling and not physically hurt a human being. Such an approach implies that a boy will never hit a woman though originally women are believed to be weaker than men are.\n\n6. Conclusion\n\nBoys learn violence by watching grown ups. not depending on the fact whether the boys family is or is not healthy in term of violence school takes the most part of the responsibility of teaching boys how to be not violent. The K-12 education can prevent boys and eventually men form being violent towards women by teaching them to solve their problems using book of account of respect and a wide range of non-violent actions. The female teachers become an essential part of K-12 stopping violence against woman. If a boy established relations that are full of mutual respect and emotional attachment with a female teacher he will learn how to control and monitor his negative feelings and therefrom will take this pattern for the rest of his life!If you emergency to get a full essay, order it on our website: Custom essay writing service. Free essay/order revisions. Essays of any complexity! Courseworks, term papers, research papers. 100% confidential!Homework live help. 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[willsnow8]

Episode 1, in which I ejaculate for the first time

I was ever an anxious child; a bookworm devouring the works of Enid Blyton, whose characters' lives in contrast to my own seemed naively happy and full of exciting collective adventure. I had no brothers or sisters, and was unable to form friendships with potential co-adventurers due to my increasing self-consciousness, my ever-growing obsession with the fundamental fact of my own existence. 

As my age reached double figures, more and more time was spent in front of the bathroom mirror, trying to outstare the lightweight delusion of myself as a carefully-constructed character of consistency; to stare straight through that, to the corporeal stuff that such dreams are made on. I would tug my cheek muscles down, not to contort my face into a frown, but to reveal the bloodshot edges of my eyeballs, in order to accentuate their materiality, to shatter these windows of the soul into swivelling spheres of white cellular tissue. Standing thus, if I concentrated hard enough for long enough, I could attain a terrifying glimpse of myself as an alien soft machine. I could attain, for a split-second, a pure consciousness unpolluted by the fallacy of the continuous self. There was a masochistic frisson to such moments, comparable to the thrill sought by City executives after work, on their hands and knees, getting pissed on by a dominatrix dressed up as their secretary - in each instance, a strong sense of oneself is exposed as an insubstantial, wispy persona.

Aged about eleven, this masochistic pursuit, this debilitating obsession, also began to manifest itself through the occasional bout of bedtime angst, during which I would tearfully acknowledge the transient futility of all endeavour, including anything - any recollection from my past, any ambition for my future - hitherto granted some kind of significance. There I would lie in the dark quilted prison of a present destined to evaporate into memories that were intangible and therefore worthless.

Once, in the midst of such a bout, I was overcome by a force that felt separate to my self. Whether this force came from without or from within did not concern me at the time. Rather, my attitude was one of unquestioning acceptance and complete submission to its powerful effect. I - at least the consciousness thought of as I - remained inactive, as though it were but a numbskull pilot passively staring out at its vehicle being otherwise controlled. (It was actually quite exhilarating - like playing with a ouija board.) This foreign force jerked my body across the bed and threw me onto the bedroom floor. It then raised me to my feet, and carried me across the room towards the wall, against which my palms placed themselves firmly. 

It was then that my hips started to thrust, to move slowly back and forth. My head lowered, and the thrusting increased in speed and vigour. Still I was merely a marionette controlled by something separate; so I witnessed the rapid stiffening of my penis with a calm sense of detachment, as though I was idly viewing filmed footage of a slow worm rearing its head.

Before that night, the relationship between my penis and I had been cordial but cool; had been merely functional. Most of our interactions had entailed my nonchalant manual assistance with its urine-ventilation process. Admittedly there had on occasion been a rush of blood down there, causing it to increase in size and firmness, and to slowly twitch beneath my shorts. But these occasions felt no different to other biological phenomena such as the variable beat of my heart or the pre-meal yowling of my stomach.

This particular night in my bedroom, though, was different, was new. Along with the erection there developed a sensation that was emotional rather than physical. There grew a feeling, like sadness, like pain. This pain expanded so much that it merged with the force controlling me; in fact, the strong, separate force was smothered whole by the pain, and became a part of me. In full command of my body once more, I returned to the bed, lay down, and took matters into my own hand.

And so, thus, for the first time ever, I was masturbating. Clumsily grasping my erection, I wiggled my wrist in an awkward motion I hoped would prove effective. After a few clammy minutes, something in my testicles palpably stirred: something which I then felt surging up the urethra. I relaxed my grip and sat up anxiously,  just in time to witness, weeping through the japseye, a dribble of viscose liquid the colour of clotted cream. I was still erect, so my debut discharge remained, balanced atop my near-vertical penis, fenced in by my foreskin. Elated and curious, I dabbed a finger in the semen. I sniffed its sweaty, fishy odour. But I decided not to taste it.

Confident my parents were both long asleep, I tip-toed along the landing to the bathroom and cleaned myself up. Discarding sticky loo-roll into the toilet, I caught my shadowy reflection in the mirror, and turned to face myself. ‘I’m you,’ I murmured. At that moment, I experienced a vague and irrational sense of unity, a coming-together of body and soul. Odd how this unity should be triggered by the emergence of semen. Odd how, in relation to my immature existentialism, the wank was, as the saying goes, 'a curve ball’: tangential, yes, but, even at the time, I understood it was related. Although, it would have been much easier to file these things away in wholly-separate brain-segments; I mean, it would have been much easier to bury the memory of my first wank deep inside a lowly neural network more suited for such primitive smut, far beneath the high-minded intensity of my mirror-stareouts.

But I didn’t do that. Instead I returned to bed, slept, and awoke in the dawning of an entirely new era, in which an entirely new force -  Eros, if you like - was granted uninhibited access to all thought and action. Free rein was given to sexual drive, which, on a regular (albeit erratic) basis, would clutch me in its grip, and squeeze out every single drop of pent-up angst, leaving me shrivelled-up and emptied of all pretension to cower before The Big Questions.  

A new era, in which my life was now a constant striving for privacy in which to masturbate. 

In this new era, the day would begin with self-abuse, would end with self-abuse, and, in between, would I seize every opportunity for more self-abuse. School-breaks were spent in a locked toilet cubicle, knelt over the bowl, tugging furiously, my eyes tight shut, my thoughts flitting between classmate Jenny Lee’s breasts and memories of mild sex scenes from rented Hollywood videos. And now, when I locked myself in the bathroom at home, it was not to outstare my reflection so as to challenge my philosophical outlook, but was to lie upon the laminate floor and ejaculate into a wet-wipe.

I wanked whenever I could, wherever I could: Beside a cycle-path at dusk, hidden by a clump of trees. Sat alone in a bus-shelter on a Saturday afternoon, managing to orgasm just by massaging the bell-end through my coat-pocket. In a River Island fitting room. At the back of a cinema during an otherwise-deserted matinee screening of Pret a Porter.

Such were my levels of enthusiasm during that first fertile Spring, that my over-handled penis soon turned red-raw, necessitating a period of abstinence. This enforced prohibition happened to coincide with the start of a package holiday to Zakinthos with my parents. The first two days of this holiday were for me dominated by an overwhelming discomfort, as the penile sores gradually scabbed into a brittle, brown crust; days spent in their entirety away from the hot sun, in my air-conditioned bedroom, moaning, face down atop a small pile of pillows, whilst, way below the balcony, beside the hotel pool, Mum and Dad soothed their parental anxieties with sun-cream, ouzo, and occasional reference to 'adolescent hormones’. Mercifully, on the third day, I awoke in relative comfort, and joined my parents on the hotel sun-loungers. And, even more mercifully, soon it transpired that frequent swimming was the ideal balm for my worrying affliction: the chlorinated water softened the scabs into an off-white spongy gunk that eventually just washed away, never to be seen again. 

Too riddled with anxiety to consult a friend, let alone a medical professional, I self-diagnosed the entire case of scabs as a rite of passage for my penis, akin to the miraculous metamorphoses that occur in the natural world, such as a caterpillar’s transformation into a resplendent butterfly. I was now in possession of a sleek, robust weapon, primed for all the strenuous activity I demanded of it.

[mild-lunacy]

It is what it is (so here we are)

I've just said recently that I do still see implicit Johnlock, and even if I'm not blindingly happy with S4, then at least I'm not turned off from the canon (just from fandom, but then it doesn't take much). I enjoyed it a lot, particularly the pulp genre stuff and the clever bits. It's hard to remember when I'm on Tumblr, but I did. It's my sort of thing, story-wise. Of course, it could have been more. And I do think it *should* have been more. But it is what it is. I want to celebrate that and not drown in negativity for the characters I adore and writers I still admire, but at the same time, I'd certainly like to support fair critiques. And in that spirit, I feel the need to push back against the negativity directed at all the people who expected implicit subtext to become explicitly canon, and are now disappointed. Quite rationally so.

Basically, I feel sort of on the fence right now. As I recently said, in many ways, TJLC as a fandom phenomenon has left me behind. And I do understand @unreconstructedfangirl's frustration at the state of fandom-- squee harshing has been an understatement, and my own squee balloon is definitely in danger of popping. But frankly, I'm never going to apologize for having been a TJLCer (and other people's beliefs or behavior have nothing to do with me; I claim neither fault nor credit). Just because some people do things one disagrees with doesn't mean a title (eg, feminist) shouldn't apply to everyone else, so I'd embraced the TJLC label although I had usually referred to it as 'canon Johnlock'. To me, it's simply been about analyzing the direction of a TV show to the best of my ability. It turned out that it wasn't as internally consistent or as groundbreaking a narrative as we all thought (and hoped), even though it remains a wonderfully made, clever, fun and moving story that I'll always love.

I feel very entitled to speak about this 'cause I know 100% I'm not being hormonal or emotional. I'm absolutely not speaking out of shippy feeling (though of course I have feelings). This isn't about feelings for me, and it's not about shipping. It's continuously frustrating that after all this time, Johnlock-friendly people in fandom still think this is about shipping. Canon Johnlock was the result of my *analysis* and my understanding of narrative construction concepts as a writer and critic. In my reasoned opinion, this awareness should be part of the analysis of the show's character arcs made by any halfway intelligent or literate person. This actually includes Moffat and Gatiss, even *if* the subtext wasn't intentional (which I find very hard to believe). The fact is that the overall narrative doesn't really make sense unless you integrate the subtext of the show, and that subtext is that John and Sherlock have romantic feelings for each other. This is explicitly referenced by many characters, supported by multiple mirrors, and overall just hammered into the textual themes and is central to Sherlock's humanization arc.

To make it absolutely clear, this isn't about my fangirl's shippy need to see John and Sherlock kiss and live happily ever after. I literally do not even *care* about my favorite characters' happiness: I'm an angst fan. I also don't really care what fandom does or *can* do in terms of shippy fanworks based on the text. I can never really relate to such arguments, or be glad canon Johnlock wasn't actualized for the sake of fannish diversity. Honestly, I find such claims to be derailing. I do love the fandom's creativity and I enjoy many, many different types of fanworks. But the fact is that I'm a canon-whore through and through, and I was *talking* about canon when I talked about TJLC and canon Johnlock.

So basically, talking about what fandom needs or could/couldn't use in fics is just alienating to the point of being meaningless to me. I don't see why it's relevant or why I should prioritize this in my analysis of a relationship I consider purely on its canonically-based merits. I also think that whole conversation can get especially derailing when we were talking about representation, which is (of course) a whole other kettle of fish, but not one to ignore or hand-wave. Certainly, it's not something to hand-wave like the BBC has done recently, with references to the creators' attention to queer charities. However, neither is it something to use as social capital in fandom wank, with constant references to being queer yourself or any other kind of 'queer cred'. This isn't about your and/or mine and even Mark Gatiss's queer cred (or the lack thereof). The very *idea* of queer cred and all the ways people from the BBC all the way across fandom feel the need to be defensive about it is fundamentally derailing. This is about the *story*, and secondarily-- but not less importantly-- about its impact on and meaning for its (often queer, often young, often vulnerable) audience.

Personally, I just want good, consistent writing that makes sense, that builds on its own themes and honors and develops the characters. I will admit, of course, that emotional pay-off and resolution is part and parcel of what makes fictional suffering work in an arc, unless you're writing a tragedy. Needless to say, Series 4 did not offer this-- not simply for Johnlock shippers, but for anyone who wanted to feel the pain in Series 3 and 4 was 'worthwhile'. I say this even though I personally don't really need such pay-off; I'm a cold-prickly type reader who's generally happy with implicit emotional resolution, but it's not how most audiences work, as any good writer would be aware. Story arcs come to explicit conclusions because that's how good stories work, not because that's how shippers want them to work. This may not always be relevant, but BBC Sherlock is *already* a Western-style genre narrative in the classic style, filled with many romantic cliches and queer-coded up the wazoo. It's already a traditionally structured narrative, and its main characters are already shown to be in love to anyone not being strictly limited by heteronormativity. Even people who don't label themselves 'TJLC' get this, either due to literary analysis literacy or a willingness to see what's right in front of them. Given that, the disagreement was only ever about the likelihood of there being an explicitly romantic resolution by intent. However, the fact is that regardless of Moffat and Gatiss's intent, good writing means following your characters' lead rather than doing what you apparently always wanted, whether it's to do with only 'flirting with the homoeroticism' in the narrative, the direction of the character arcs or plot-wise.

Of course, I disagree with many of the critiques that say TFP represented a complete break in characterization, and I agree with Ivy that TFP did work as a resolution of Sherlock's main arc; I also agree that it opens the door to resolving the 'rifle on the wall' of Sherlock's avoidance of romantic entanglement. Further, I don't really think Mofftiss have some sort of direct responsibility to their fans or to the world, and of course they should be free to write the story they wanted to write (just as others are free to critique). But at the same time, Moffat himself has said that good writing is "defined by whether or not you've written or created something people want and like", and it's not supposed to be self-indulgent. It's *supposed* to consider the audience, on his own terms. He's also called himself a fanfic writer, and he's failed his own measure of what makes a good fanfic work: writing "for other people". That approach is definitely not consistent with the fact that they admitted at SDCC in July that TFP was 'insane wish-fulfillment'. This is not up to the standard Moffat and Gatiss have set for themselves during the run of the show.

Like I said, though, I'm definitely on the fence-- I'm torn, because of course I *enjoyed* Series 4 and I'm not really that confused except insofar as wondering why Moffat and Gatiss have so often felt the need to deny what's clearly intentional subtext placed with care and affection into the narrative by the entire team. I'm definitely not enjoying the fandom imploding, or the fact that it feels pretty lonely around here in the post-S4 fangirl bunker. But the negativity about canon Johnlock is no more rationally justified simply because it has not actually happened (I mean *only* rationally, of course; obviously, irrational reactions due to bad blood are eternal). I'm definitely frustrated with the fact that I'm still one of the 'delusional fangirl' brigade when it comes to BBC Sherlock, even though I know perfectly well how rational I am. I will not be gaslighted so easily. And I've just tried to see the straight!John in ASiB, but it's just too hard. There's no way all that's an accident, somehow. So here's what we're left with, after TFP and the end of Series 4 of Sherlock: the good and the bad. And while I still think the good included implicit Johnlock, the bad unfortunately did include queer-baiting.