#if you have opinions on this

[sparklyoats]

Absolutely hate making phone calls🥴 but pulled myself together and called the church office to make an appointment to get lil man baptised 🥹 so thats taken care of👍🏻 now i just need to find a place for the 'party' afterwards 😍

[fahye]

ARE YOU TAKING PROMPTS NOW????? (i also have a morality question i saw moana and absolutely loved it, and what i do when i love canon is to write fic. but i'm desperately afraid that i won't be able to respect the polynesian culture enough. so. to fic or not to fic?)

UM NO NOT REALLY. I took the SHARKS!! warning off my askbox simply because I’m no longer writing ficlets with such regularity, so the DELUGE of prompt requests had slowed right down.

there’s a fair chance I will chuck a hissy fit at my novel at some point in the next few months and need to work on something short and fanficcy; if I decide to do ficlets in response to prompts, I will make a post about it, and make it clear when this period OPENS and CLOSES.

***

as for your other question: I am definitely the wrong person to be making a decisive morality call on that one, given that I am the whitest anglo-australian to ever white. if you want my opinion, you can have it.

there are a fair amount of articles and thinkpieces out there about writing other cultures and diversity in sff; I really like this one by aliette de bodard.

my personal view is that fanfiction is a slightly different beast given that you’re not trying to make money from your portrayal of a culture, or from having your voice amplified over that of people from within that culture; you’re engaging fannishly with a portrayal that already exists. but here are some things to consider:

doing some research when you’re writing about a culture you don’t know is still a VERY GOOD IDEA

you might get some things wrong. we don’t know what we don’t know! I’ve seen a couple of fascinating posts on my dash from the yuri on ice fandom about misunderstandings and mistakes that non-japanese people make when writing about japanese characters and culture; nobody’s suggesting these writers are being appropriative or that you shouldn’t ever write in the fandom unless you’re japanese, but it’s worth recognising that we’ve all got cultural blindspots.

you might be accidentally offensive, and this might be pointed out to you, and you have to be prepared to own it gracefully if that happens.

and I mean, if we’re talking about moana specifically, there’s also commentary out there about the ways in which moana is and is not considered a respectful portrayal by various people from various polynesian cultures, and the problems with discussing/portraying ‘polynesian culture’ as a monolith. this article mentions or links to some of that commentary.

so, look. just as with most aspects of pop culture, no single entity is going to descend from the heavens and proclaim CONGRATULATIONS, THIS THING IS ~UNPROBLEMATIC~. there’s no consensus on that. not even for the canon itself. if you want to write the story as an act of love and appreciation for the film, then write it. make your own call about whether you want to post it, if you’re ‘desperately afraid’ of being disrespectful.

but that decisive morality call you want? it might not exist. and I certainly can’t arbitrate it for you.