#it was strikethrough on lj | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

olderthannetfic · 4 months

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hi, as someone who is tragically gen Z and only ever read AO3, can I ask: what was so great about LiveJournal? Like, I know that there were fics posted there (and I've even read about the "purge", so I get why it isn't used anymore) and that it was sort of a forum-type thing. But what I don't understand, wouldn't Tumblr fill in the latter function? How was that site any different? I see a lot of people reminiscing about it and I'm confused

A big factor in LJ's greatness is timing and nostalgia.

It was genuinely great, but it wasn't quite as great as all of the Lo, shall the Golden Age ne'er come again? posts suggest.

LJ arrived at a pivotal time in the development of the internet both in terms of technical stuff and how many people had access. Many fans who are now in their thirties to fifties first discovered fandom through LJ and many were at a time in their lives when they were feeling energetic and up to making lots of new friends—and to figuring out how to make a site work for them.

I got on LJ in 2002 when it required invites. Fandom arrived in droves in 2003, first via coordinated campaigns to get invites to key people and then when LJ opened up free account creation to everyone. Back then, LJ's features sucked. It was impossible to search properly, among other things. At its height (2005-7, let's say), there was a reasonable site search, and fans had developed all sorts of community resources for finding each other.

People often remember this phase but not the early days of suckitude.

This development parallels how Tumblr used to not have that private chat feature and how a lot of fuckyeah[whatever] type tumblrs have helped curate the site and make it much more usable for fans. Fandom draining away from LJ after strikethrough also parallels people draining away from Tumblr after the purge.

There are people who talk about Tumblr the way my cohort talks about LJ...

And to the shock of no one, they are people who came of age on Tumblr, who found fandom via Tumblr, who were on Tumblr during pivotal times in their lives and ones when they had energy to make friends and figure out how a site worked.

Those same Tumblrites are now making all the same geriatric-sounding posts we LJers do about how other sites lack the required features to be good for fandom while missing that 90% of tumblr's "features" at its height (2012-2016, let's say) were actually fan-created and were basically the same as any fandom newsletter or links page or all the versions of this kind of personal curation stretching back to long before the internet existed.

What life phase you hit a site at matters.

With all of that said, no, LJ was not a forum. It was a blogging site with threaded comments.

The key point to understand is that conversation was always happening in a specific person's space. Unlike on a true forum, people were in the comments on a particular post in a journal owned by another fan. (On a forum, there's the first post in a thread, but it's still more of a communal space with less of a hierarchy.)

Overall, the LJ format can have a feeling a bit like you're over at someone's house for tea. There's more of a sense of intimacy and also behaving yourself in front of community members.

Tumblr being obscure and impossible to find anything in does give it some of the same vibe relative to Twitter, but it's still part of modern social media that tries to shove every rando into the face of every other rando.

But it wasn't just vibes: LJ also had robust privacy features where you could lock a post to this or that group of friends. You could moderate your comments section properly. Tumblr has far fewer controls to force people to behave or leave on a technical level.

The biggest thing many people miss about LJ is the threaded comments. At least by late LJ and on Dreamwidth, you can expand and collapse threads, making it far easier to deal with a massive comments section. But more than that, things are properly threaded with multiple levels of hierarchy that are all easily visible in the same place.

On Tumblr, it used to be extremely difficult to find all of the actual commentary on a post. Nowadays, it's far easier, but you still have to scroll chronologically, and multiple versions of a post with a long chain of commentary may be much more divorced from each other than what would happen in a LJ comments section.

But could we use Tumblr pretty much how we used LJ?

We could.

I do.

The key things that people tend to miss about LJ, aside from the younger and more excited version of themselves or the friends they've lost since then, are:

Heavily text-based

It may sound odd on the modern internet, but there are a lot of people whose brains don't like or handle an image-heavy site well. They were everywhere in SF book fandom. They were everywhere on the early internet. Today, they're hanging out on Dreamwidth and still going to their SF cons. They're usually not on Tumblr.

You could follow the discussion

Threaded comments help, but a lot of it is about having some place you can check for updates. It wasn't actually that easy to follow big LJ discussions unless you were subscribed to comments and reading along as things were happening instead of coming along after the entire mass of comments had been left.

The tone of the discussion is intellectual and one's enemies are "idiots", not "problematic"

All this requires is a penchant for longwindedness and an itchy blocking finger to remove anyone slinging ad hominems from the comments section.

On tumblr, it's as simple as conversations happening in the replies on a popular account and that person not tolerating suibaiting and threats.

(And make no mistake, a lot of LJ discussion was in the comments on popular accounts, not spread equally between everyone's.)

It does require that multiple people like that tone and want to engage in that way, but lots of people do want to.

These days, I interact with tumblr by checking my askbox and reading my activity page. The vast, vast majority of my posts are ones where I'm the OP, so if I block someone, they're booted from the discussion entirely.

For me... yeah, Tumblr functions almost exactly like LJ.

Also like LJ, while I'm hosting the conversation, if you hang around, you'll see the same people again and again in the comments. They may or may not also host that kind of conversation in their space, and there's a larger pool of lurkers who have some notion of which people count as regulars. Other people are watching from the shadows, enjoying or deriding the takes of the usual crowd.

People presumably do like reading my lengthy commentary or they wouldn't be here, but my tumblr wouldn't be popular like this without a healthy pool of other people who chime in regularly. It's not just that there are more people: it's that you see the same people over time. There's a bit more sense of place and community than on some parts of the internet.

So, in my opinion, the failure to just recreate LJ fandom on Tumblr was a skill issue.

Threaded comments were great, but LJ culture came from mailing lists, and mailing lists had the same issue as tumblr with the diverging threads.

We solved that back then by clipping out only the parts we wanted to respond to (you'd write "snip" around the quotation to show it was incomplete). We solved the smaller LJ issue by linking to other posts we were referencing and doing discussion link roundups. We solve it on tumblr by, again, linking to what we're talking about and even quoting multiple reblog chains in our own reblog of just one chain.

Tumblr's technical features and even general crap-ness aren't really the problem. 90s and early 00s sites regularly went down for periods of time unthinkable today.

The missing piece is people.

When one is in an active fandom with others who curate or with friends who let one know what's up, a site with imperfect features is easy to figure out and retrofit for fandom's needs. When one already feels out of touch and is between fannish passions—or at least fannish passions anyone else cares about—seeing the potential in a new site is hard.

Threaded comments are different and better.

LJ's built-in way to see everyone's blog in your own style was better. The automatic timestamps and the ease of seeing a paginated archive of an entire blog was better than tumblr's endless scroll and lack of clear date labeling. But some of that can be fixed with xkit or knowing your way around tumblr well.

A lot of it is nostalgia for the lj era and a refusal to take the time to figure out how to use tumblr in an oldschool internet way.

So by all means, people, weigh in about what made LJ great or how the culture felt at the time...

But if I see one more god damn response going "You can't have a conversation on tumblr!" in reply to my tumblr, which contains nothing but conversation, I am coming for you.

#fandom history #fandom meta

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bomberqueen17 · 8 months

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disturbing

I was writing a post and at the end I was adding tags, as I do, and I typed the singular first person pronoun, I, and a list of tags popped up as suggestions that took me the fuck out. It was so disturbing I took a screenshot.

[image ID: a list of suggested tags, screenshotted. It's titled "popular" and the list is "I want to [star emoji]ve" "i wanna lose weight" "i sell content" "i love him"]

I wanna star-emoji-ve???? Well there's some pro-ana shit for you.

I don't know if the kids these days remember this but back in Livejournal around the era of strikethrough (the '07-'09 time period is where I remember noticing it) there was a movement to censor pro-self-harm blogs, that were support groups mostly supporting one another in more and more extreme anorexic/self-destructive/eating-disordered behaviors.

This is absolutely that. And they were like "it's self-expression" and everyone else in the world was like "it is actually a toxic encouragement of self-harm" because they were like, concretely instructing one another and recruiting vulnerable people to join them in ways to literally starve to death, they were support groups for killing yourself more or less, and so those tags would occasionally get banned or delisted or removed from search or whatever, but remember this was very early in the history of such things, and there was no algorithm. But people did use the browsing of blogs' "interests" to find one another, it was a feature of how Livejournal worked, and there wasn't a lot of moderation but the deactivation or delisting of those self-harm-encouraging tags were a hotly-contested bit of debate.

And so they got more creative, and found other ways to find one another, and people starved to death or otherwise irreparably damaged their bodies and their mental health and so on. I cannot emphasize enough, this was not fiction. These were not fictional stories depicting fictional scenarios that weren't happening, these were real people posting stories and encouragement and photographs of their real selves, showing off how much damage to themselves they were doing, concretely encouraging one another to do the same. This was not fiction.

But they kept finding new ways to talk about it so it couldn't be censored.

And then LJ deleted blogs for posting about fiction instead, and we all kind of forgot about it and moved on.

Highly displeased to find that it's all alive and well on Tumblr, to the point that it's the number one suggestion when I type the fucking first-person pronoun into the tag field, and I can't opt out of seeing that. COOL.

#someone told me to report this to tumblr #but i don't know how #so i'm posting about it instead #it's not like a blog i can link to #it's their fucking automated suggestions i can't opt out of #if i type it now it doesn't come up #because i have no idea what criteria they use for this #it's clearly contextual in some way #what are they analyzing idk #what about my blog led their shitty algo to decide i'm into that #idk but it's upsetting as fuck #and here we are worrying about fictional depictions of shit omg

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thisweekinfandomhistory · 1 year

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It's a big one, y'all! This week, V and Emily rage their way through the anniversary of Strikethrough, or a mass censorship event on LiveJournal that destroyed huge swaths of fannish history for no fucking reason. Or rather, because a Christian special-interest group that hates queer people said that things were icky and LJ caved. If you haven't heard of Strikethrough or need a refresher on why archives that aren't beholden to advertisers are essential to the survival of fandom and fanfiction, come take a ride with us and let your blood pressure hit the roof. Were any of your fandoms a victim of Strikethrough?

This Week In Fandom History is a fandom-centric podcast that tells you… what happened this week in fandom history!

#fandom #fanfiction #strikethrough #livejournal #fandom history #anti anti #Spotify

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trishacollins · 4 months

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about this post (sorry I just don't want talking with other people but wanted to comment): I guess people just don't know how is it living with censorship for everything. ru censorship started from "let's protect our children from porn and drugs" and look where we now. queer people are terrorist and talking about them is illegal. so many news resources just banned. you can end up in jail for your words in social networks. sorry for infodamp I should shut up

Being Queer should be something that helps us recognize the slippery slope of censorship. It always starts with moral panic and false equivalence. Being Queer. Being an outsider in a society we helped create - I like to hope that the people who push it are just naive, not malicious. But I have seen too many communities and fandom spaces infiltrated like this. I lived through Strikethrough on LJ and yahoo Groups purges and Fanfic.net adult fic bans.

Writing about horrible things is catharsis. It doesn't mean you wish to see them become reality. And fictional charcters are not people, they're dolls we project our lives on.

Fandom purity tests are exhausting.

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not-poignant · 8 months

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Out of curiosity, when did the, 'fanfic doesn't need to adhere to canon, everything is valid and good, don't give concrit unless specifically asked for' attitude become the norm? Genuine question.

I was active in fandom back in the LJ days, when sporkings and comms viciously mocking Mary Sues were the norm, but then I sort fell out of fandom spaces for the past (checks notes) fifteen years holy shit. The current attitude seems diametrically opposed to what I remember fandom being like (kinda shitty, it was 'cool' to be an asshole back then), and I'm just curious as to when and how the shift happened. I mean, I assume it was a gradual thing, but is there anything in particular that stick out to you?

(Also, because tone doesn't convey very well through ask, and I don't want to leave you with a poor impression-- this is by no means a defence of the 2000s attitudes, nor an aspersion on the current ones. I'm genuinely only curious about the evolution from one to the other; I hope that comes across.)

Hi anon!

TL;DR because my response got LONG -> Anon this existed before Livejournal as an attitude, in fact modern fandom was literally born out of being not canon compliant (*waves aggressively to Spirk shippers*) and this existed on Livejorunal too and there have always been big pockets of fandom that really frowned on sporking even there, like that was not cool when I was on LJ, unless you were a certain age, or in certain spaces in fandom.

But also AO3 was its kind of final death knell re: making it cool to bully 13-16 yo writers (who were largely the victims of sporking) and killing dreams, which was born out of meta happening on LJ and in other places about like... not trying to make people miserable for writing a free fic out of the love in their heart that someone else didn't like or think was good enough.

Anyway, the longer version of this under the read more!

(For everyone else, welcome to some of the uglier aspects of 00s fandom!)

So there was actually criticism around all the stuff you mention 15-20 years ago as well. I was also on Livejournal during that time and there was a pretty big proportion of people in certain fandoms who recognised even then that like... setting up communities to mock say, Mary Sue writers, was actually a pretty weirdly cruel thing to do to people who were providing free labour and the literal only 'payment' they could get in a kind of energy exchange was people just not being complete dickheads to them.

So things were already changing, especially in many LJ communities and awards communities. There were a lot of big debates over whether concrit should be asked for, and a growing movement of authors who said they welcomed constructive criticism for example, instead of assuming it should automatically apply. There was also a lot of meta around the function of fanfiction and whether it should even be 'good' by published standards if the author was just doing it for themselves, and for fun (esp if they were just going to get punished for it by folks who were elitist, judgemental, grammar purists etc.)

Things really changed around the time of AO3 (2009-2010 - literally around 14~ years ago, you may have just missed the big change anon!), Strikethrough and the Dreamwidth exodus. There was a massive swing away from leaving concrit unless the author specifically asked for it, and fandom became a lot more generally able to recognise that a lot of labour goes into fanart and fanfiction and that paying with public criticism is shitty actually. Also people were just more able to recognise that like most fanfiction writers aren't trying to become professional writers and many don't want to be.

(I would actually say things changed around the time of fanfiction.net too - rude comments there were definitely noticed and could create some pretty forward 'hey why are you doing this on something you literally don't have to read' responses from fellow readers - idk what fic sites you were on. The small indie fic sites where you could often only comment via email for example, definitely drew a lot more critical attention than sites that tended to have public comments).

The 'fanfic doesn't need to adhere to canon' literally exists since the very first Spirk slash fic in modern fanfiction in the last few decades. Literally, as soon as you write Kirk/Spock, you're not adhering to canon. Our fanfiction 'ancestors' literally paved the way for a legacy which is about not adhering to canon in order to see the world/s and thing/s you want to see, be entertained by, by turned on by, or enjoy, from the very beginning. You may not have been in slash circles anon, but the foundation of queer same sex fanfic is in many ways the foundation of fandom. But yeah, this is literally where fanfiction started! As soon as you're shipping characters that aren't canon for fun (or for whatever reason), you're making it pretty clear that you want stories different to canon, and you have to change things to often keep those characters in-character.

So yeah! That's been there for decades. Idk what circles you were in on that front! While it was fairly common for a while to criticise characters for being OOC (Out of Character), imho, a lot of folks started to recognise that they literally weren't paying for what they were criticising, and they could just walk away and potentially not like...blast the fanfic. Some folks started to recognise more that people were writing with ESL, or were teenagers (some 40 yos in fandom realised they were mocking literal 15 year olds in their proto-podcasts and websites and realised actually that's just...mean? Really mean? Not the way to nurture new generations of fanfiction writers. Definitely in no way encouraging), or were writing for themselves, or writing for like one other person, or writing for fun, or writing for free, or writing for personal reasons etc.

'Don't Like Don't Read' wasn't just about political stuff, it was also about just walking away if you feel the urge to slam a fanfic in the comments.

I've been in fandom for around 2.5 decades anon, and there were so many spaces that were not actually as shitty or mean-spirited as the ones you were in? Or ones that at least had a lot of different thoughts etc. Like, sporking (mocking/bullying badfics and sometimes the folks who wrote them) was disapproved of by a lot of people in fandom even while sporking was at the height of its popularity (the Fanlore page goes into more detail about this). It might have just been the fandoms you were in, or the people you were hanging out with (and that might have been dependent on your age or just if you were around people who wanted to be 'cool' back then - in the same way that being an 'anti' is cool among certain crowds today. It's possible to spend years in certain crowds and never get an image of broader fandom for example - we can all end up in spaces like that! I know I have.)

When I started writing fanfiction (which no one will EVER find lmao), generally giving positive comments was normal. Constructive criticism was actually pretty rare and there were already fanfiction aggregate sites that generally disapproved of it in their Rules of Conduct. People were encouraging and polite. And this was around 20 years ago on Livejournal and private indie fanfiction websites.

I would actually say there was never exactly an evolution from 'one to the other' because like thousands of people in fandom already believed this and argued in defense of supporting fanfiction and transformative works via accepting that people are labouring for free and that not everyone wants to become a 'better writer' etc. - the meta was there on Livejournal in the 00s. There were communities where sporking was seen as hip/fun, and communities where it was literally banned or at the very least, super frowned upon.

There were meta fandom communities where sporking was the subject of discussion and you know eventually in a lot of those meta communities, that's where a lot of folks decided actually that calling out the fanfiction of 16 yos as 'cringe' or 'badly done' maybe said more about us as human beings and what we wanted fandom to be, than it did about the actual fanfic itself. By the time AO3 came around, people built it with this in mind.

To this day on AO3 it's mostly considered appropriate to say you want concrit in your author's notes, and to otherwise assume as a reader it's never welcome if it's unsolicited. That started during the LJ era. And it was talked about at great length. There's obviously going to be people who disagree! But for the most part I'm a big believer in compassion and 'not everyone is here for the same reason' and 'they literally gave this to us for free and it's meant to be fun' (like yourself! What we do/think/argue 10 years ago on LJ is sometimes different to what we do 10 years later lol, I used to be against trigger warnings pre-AO3! Times change a lot :D )

So yeah, this was definitely something that was around before you and I came to fandom, and it was something that continued to grow as an attitude during, until finally it kind of won out on AO3. But yeah fandom as we know it was born in people literally not being canon compliant to make some gay dreams come true (Spirk shippers bless them all), at a time when there was no representation.

Even in the earliest days of fandom where comments could only happen via email, one of the earliest phrases authors used were things like 'flames will be used to roast marshmallows.' For those reading who don't know, flames are hate comments, critical 'this fic is bad because' comments etc. Except you emailed them directly to the author, because there was no place for comments on a fic.

And this started because authors in part got death threats for writing gay stuff.

So you know, from the very beginning, authors in fanfic have by and large had a very low tolerance for criticism / hate over something they're doing for free and making no profit out of, when they're changing/altering the canon as they please to create representation (or hotness lmao), that is literally a labour of love in a world of very little representation. From there, things have just grown. The whole 'flames will not be tolerated' existed even before Livejournal did.

Honestly there are still people who love sporking and you could probably find groups and Discords dedicated to that even now (actually you literally can, there's a Dreamwidth group for it), it's kind of wild but it started to get cool again. Just like 90s clothing :D (Which is also wild because I can just take that crap out of my closet and wear it again).

But yeah it also sounds like you may have been in some pretty crappy pockets of fandom! When I was on LJ in the 00s I avoided those places and still got to experience fandom across multiple fandoms (mostly NCIS, Captive Prince, HP, Profiler, The X-Files and some others) and communities.

I was super active in some fandom communities and saw a lot of meta happening, and my view during the early and late 00s was that sporking was largely pretty frowned upon after a very brief (like 3-6 month) era where it was cool for only some folks, and then everyone (including some - but not all - of those folks) was like 'heyyyyyyy hang on a minute.' It was something that the bullies did, and enjoyed, and otherwise folks kind of stayed away from it, especially once they learned people were becoming too scared to write fics, which is the inevitable outcome of mocking/bullying folks and fics that have been made purely out of love for something.

Like, publicly making a spectacle out of what a 13 yo (they were often teens - and it's kind of sad how many 40 yo women were doing the sporking :/ ) wrote out of love, just for fun/clout was not considered cool by everyone even back then, because like, a lot of us saw that as killing new generations of fandom (some folks who sporked considered it a win if a fic or account got deleted, this is not based behaviour), not actually creating good writing, internalised misogyny (Mary Sue hatred and self insert hatred), etc. It's hard to explain because I do really think we were in different corners of fandom at the time, but I don't know anyone personally from my time on Livejournal who actually liked sporking as an idea or enjoyed it or enjoyed listening to it or reading articles mocking fic.

I knew about it from very lively 'is this okay' 'actually no it's not even if it's just for fun this is trying to hurt people and saying 'it's just the fic' is not going to be the bandaid a teenager needs to understand why older folks (generally) in fandom are mocking them for being new at a skill' discussions on LJ in meta fandom communities. So this is how much I could be in fandom and not be a part of it and also have like a wildly different experience to your LJ experience!

I think if I'd been a teenager during that era it would have seemed a lot more appealing (in the same way that many teens are antis now before they grow out of it), and fuck it if I was a more bitter person who was just around people who liked to make fun of what other people created, perhaps I would have enjoyed it too, I can see a lot of reasons why a person would fall into that in LJ -> but I was an adult on LJ trying not to be mean to people or what they were creating, so yeah I was maybe just in very different spaces! (Don't get me wrong, I have my giant fucking character flaws, but I was very scared of people hating me so like I didn't want to do things that would make that happen, lol, and also I was scared to put up fic myself during the era of active sporking. I know for myself that sporkers didn't just scare away writers of 'badfic' - they...intimidated a LOT of people).

Before AO3 I was on FF.net, posting fics on LJ, posting on Schnoogle, gossamer, and a couple of other archives. So I don't think my experience was that 'narrow,' I just think I wasn't around like... anime at that time or other places where it might have been happening. I also avoided like...Draco/Malfoy where CC drama was happening and I know sporking was popular in that specific arena / pairing for a while as well (er, as well as anything to do with Mary Sues).

So yeah! That's about where that is. Generally gatekeeping fandom is just seen as not a great thing to do to people, and that creates other kind of beliefs that are generally upheld as being more inviting/nurturing. After all, if someone truly wants to get better at writing, they can ask, or do courses, but as we all know, everyone has to write some bad stuff to get good at it, but not everyone wants to be good. Folks are in fandom for different reasons. I'm rambling now so I'm going to finish my lunch! :D

#asks and answers #pia on fandom #pia on writing #god i do not miss sporking #but it's still happening tbh in some sections of the internet #and it always will!!!#there will always be fics that piss us off or that are just written painfully #generally speaking it's just encouraged to share that with afriend privately #instead of creating a website and recording an interview or discussion or slam #or writing an article for fandom to see #and using BNF energy to chase fic writers out of fandom #it's wild that it was actually around for as long as it was #on LJ #i feel like that was the mean-spirited click-bait era before click-bait then came around #anyway it's grown in popularity again because of Tiktok!#such is life :D

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cleverthylacine · 5 months

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jfc I really am old aren't I

BTW I am old and I used to be in the HP Fandom and I was one of the people who actually knew Ms Scribe. Here's a funny story: she saw me arguing with a close friend over IRL politics in my LJ and told us we shouldn't argue like that because friends were too precious to lose. Meanwhile she was playing "Let's You and Him Fight" with me, who ran Nox et Lumos, and Arabella, the person who ran the Sugarquill site.

I also was the person who found and told the CEO of SixApart that their abuse department had gone off their rockers, and that roleplay journals, lolita fashion journals, etc were being taken down during the 2007 Strikethrough purge on Livejournal.

Don't try and teach your grandmother to suck eggs.

#fandom and its discontents

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icescrabblerjerky · 3 months

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Idk actually cos... fuck... fuck

Dragon Age Origins came out BEFORE TUMBLR EVEN EXISTED. I know because I was there, trust me babies.

And then Dragon Age II came out... well. Let's just say I didn't have a tumblr when DAII came out and my DA fandom was actually mostly established on formspring and LJ. And then Dreamwidth because strikethrough.

Inquisition was the first Dragon Age that came out when Tumblr was an active platform. And honestly, by that stage most old school dragon age fans had already cancelled everyone who was going to be cancelled.

I am... interested. Intrigued even, to see what happens next. From a fandom perspective.

#dragon age

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ultranos · 7 months

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*stares at Tumblr for the first time in 4 days* Am I having flashbacks to LJ Strikethrough? Have we learned nothing?

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catgirl-catboy · 1 year

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Okay, for fandom yougins that don't know the history...

they rarely lead with "okay, we are taking away ships you like."

They lead with "I'm taking away stuff a large amount of the population doesn't like" and then unequally enforce it, or once some censorship has happened they do more.

It happened with lj. It happened with strikethrough. I fear it is currently happening to tumblr.

So yeah, I'm considering abandoning tumblr over ships that squick me the hell out. Odds are, I'll be next.

#proship #anti anti

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tumbloggingattheendofitall · 13 days

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What I was really getting at with that one post is that. look.

Supernatural the show Did Something to culture. It was around 15 years which is legit the majority of a generation. There's literally such a thing as Before SPN vs After SPN

And I also have noticed that its fandom timeline actually exemplifies the LJ Strikethrough and all similar events

Like. Jfc I'm still not coherent enough but I have this weird half-baked and semi-sociological theory

And if I can try to nutshell it, I guess I'd phrase it as an equivalence

"Supernatural had done to modern pop culture, roughly, what perhaps Marilyn Monroe or Rosemary Clooney brought to the cultural table with their collective and specific roles, talents, and Vibes"

Which still doesn't actually hit what I'm trying to say but the Thing is

I think Supernatural is actually a Lot More like, say Star Trek or Star Wars - culturally, specifically and globally - But Also

I don't feel comfortable selling an equivalence to a thing I've never watched. And while I've certainly Seen some of both, I'm simultaneously proud and embarrassed to admit - I've Never Watched Star Trek Or Star Wars, and thusly, everything I know about both has either been against my will or cultural osmosis (Often Both, actually) which actually feels like the perfect explanation for Supernatural to me.

#nah man.#this one is either dying or finding its target audience. no other tags needed. ok one more tag #kayleigh thoughts

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prosopopeya · 11 months

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Twenty Questions for Fic Writers!

Tagged by @binickandros!!!!!

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

26 apparently

2. What's your total AO3 word count?

460,406

3. What fandoms do you write for?

supernatural now mainly, though i've written for house md, spring awakening, and bare: a pop opera

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

these are all dean/cas fics:

inevitable homoeroticism in spanish romantic heroes (spanish grad school au)

like real people do (my return from the spn grave, basically a reaction fic to The Confession Scene)

command me to be well (angsty post-canon dean gets cas back; sort of a love letter/spiritual sequel to my first spn fic, which is also on this list)

flying in circles inside a jar (a classic s5 era fic with some deeply awkward dialogue that i don't like now but i mean this was written over 10 years ago)

some boys are sleeping alone (my first spn fic and basically my thesis on dean's bisexuality that would feed....just about every fic to come after)

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

i try, though inevitably i get overwhelmed (even by like, one comment) and then time passes and then it's just overwhelming and awkward. but i try! it's hard especially when i just am rephrasing "thanks, i'm glad you liked it!"

6. What is a fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

100% something from the house or spring awakening era. (does anyone else remember when apocalypse aus were all the rage for house or was that just me and my friend angie.) a lot of those aren't on ao3 though, so probably the saddest ending over there is hm... "some boys are sleeping alone." or, shout out to my bare: a pop opera fic, still going strong over there: all the stars bend over sideways.

7. What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

there are a lot of happy endings to be found now but maybe for the sheer weight of the force behind everything building up to its ending, let me come home. that one or "command me to be well," which i swear i remember someone somewhere saying that it doesn't just relieve the angst at the end, but it luxuriates in the happy ending.

8. Do you get hate on fics?

not really, no, at least not to my face. i've seen some commentary somewhere about people not being into post-canon fic that doesn't involve jack, but i still have barely seen the jack seasons......... oops

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

yes, usually i throw something in there. inevitably it winds up dom/sub-y in some way. my favorite manifestation of this was the slow evolution of dom-y cas in "let me come home," especially when writing from his headspace bc that's not the usual for me. but other than that, my favorite is cowboy's sweetheart

10. Do you write crossovers? What's the craziest one you've written?

ohhhhh boy. back in the day i loved a challenge for the wildest mashups people could think of. freddie from chess/donuts was the quintessential example of this, written in the wake of strikethrough on lj. one of the few that i still allow to see the light of day: thank you for being a friend, a my little pony/supernatural crossover.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

not that i'm aware of though someone did put "inevitable homoeroticism" and "command me to be well" on goodreads.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

i've had someone podfic one of my fics! though the recording isn't up anymore i don't think

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

YESSS @marbleflan and i had a great time with:

r/relationships: inspired by an r/relationships post where a guy is sleeping with a woman only for her...husband to walk in on them, oops, and oh no surprise also, he's really hot??????? wait is this gay????? (it is)

perfect match: inspired by the season 8 of are you the one? an mtv reality dating show. the typical premise of this show is to put pairs of people in a house and tell them that they have to find their scientifically, dr. love approved perfect match out of all the people in the house, and if you all guess wrong, you lose money; if you all guess right, then you win money. but in season 8....everybody was bi/pan/queer, so anyone could be your match. it was supremely messy and also great. many key moments were lifted from that season including i think the drunken orgy, the theme dance night, and the intervention. i have a lot of memories of furiously writing/editing my portions of this to and from my in-laws' for thanksgiving while my husband wanted me to, like, participate in conversation in the car.

14. What's your all-time favorite ship?

i mean.................... guess.

15. What's a wip you want to finish, but doubt you ever will?

man i started this really great one about dean and cas accidentally arguing about not having sex when they both actually wanted to have sex and i really want to finish it but idk! i refuse to put the dean watches heartstopper fic on here bc i WILL finish that.

16. What are your writing strengths?

i think character voice, through dialogue and narration. i like situating myself in a character's head and feeling things out through their perspective.

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

repetition, and like.... plots.

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic?

been there, done that. wordreference carried me.

19. First fandom you wrote for?

lizzie mcguire, i think, and labyrinth. also if i recall, buffy, and star trek: voyager.

20. Favorite fic you've written?

"let me come home." i think it has to be. it has just about everything in it, every thought or feeling i've ever had about supernatural. i'm really super proud of it, and unlike inevitable homoeroticism, i'm never going to feel like enough people have read that fic. like i just want more people to read it. usually i'm pretty good about just going with the flow, the whims of ao3 and what people seem to respond to, and not really being bothered by how popular a fic is or isn't. but man i want it to crack that top 5 list so badly. (it can replace flying in circles. the others can stay.)

if you write fic, you are tagged, but i scrolled through some pages of my followers to look for mutuals in the fic writing game; if i missed you i was just reading too quickly!!!! you are tagged!!!!: @ltleflrt, @blanketforcas, @hauntedpearl, @goldenraeofsun, @jewishdeanwinchester, @bbcphile, @wanderingcas

#meme tag

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