#so I wanted to say thank you quickly

[caycanteven]

How the fuck did I get here.

Where did you all spawn in from—

Well, I appreciate you all so fucking much for sticking around and enjoying my stuff. THANK YOU FOR 600!!!! 🫶❤️

[hollowflight-propaganda]

I think it's time I change my bio to say it's been 11 years since I started to watch Ninjago.....

Gosh. Where's my senior discount on the lego sets, huh?

[musashi]

me, a generally incendiary bitch who refuses to overexplain myself because it annoys me how much i see other autistics feel they have to do that: eh maybe today i will do a little clarifying that i am not trying to be combative

the person who i risk seeming combative to, immediately: OKAY WELL IF YOU ACTUALLY TOOK THE TIME TO READ MY THOUGHTS INSTEAD OF JUST ARGUING WITH ME--

me: nevermind i am never clarifying or explaining myself again

[dayurno]

are you going to read tsc when it comes out? and, if not: would you like your acolytes to give you the important kevin day updates or would you rather not?

oh my acolytes huh! well i don’t know :) it’s so nice of you to ask and i’m very touched actually…. nice to me 🥹…. i guess any (good) kevin updates would be nice and probably sway the balance on whether i read it or not, but at first glance i probably won’t read it unless it sparks my curiosity once it’s out and the story starts making its rounds around my circles :) i’m plenty interested in the period where jean stays with the foxes but i don’t much care for the trojans nor the proposed storyline*, though even a picky reader like yours truly can be convinced into buying a story if kevin day’s in it

*by this i don’t mean that i Dislike the process of jean healing but it’s just overall not my favorite theme and, to be frank, i don’t have much interest in reading about a normal well-adjusted team either. from my view tsc is aftg without my favorite parts (namely kevin day as a main character, the foxes’ messy dynamic, problematic and controversial side characters, neil’s narration, The Mafia, andrew in general) and while i am always and forever a ride or die for jean moreau, and i am glad he’s going to get better and be happy, a lot of my feelings for him don’t really stem from the idea that there is a softness underneath all the grit but actually and sincerely the fact that he is crazy. i Love jean because he’s horrible and scared and cruel and i don’t know if i’ll care much for him once he’s out of that state :) i meant it when i said a few months ago that i would’ve been more onboard with a story about the ravens (no matter how gruesome) or even a glimpse of jean’s pov in the nest, though of course nora sakavic should probably choose to be happy every once in a while so i wouldn’t ask her to write that

so tl;dr: you can send me good and relevant kevin updates if you want to and if they’re interesting enough i might read tsc in the future

[compacflt]

I have an anecdote about when I worked for a company and a co-worker left to work in a different state on military aircraft. He had to get a TS clearance and because we had worked for several years together he asked if I would be okay with being interviewed for his clearance. I said sure and an interviewer w the gov, arranged to come to my place of work and conduct the interview there. I was asked questions about him like how well did I know him, and whatever answer I gave led to more specific questions like if I answered a question about knowing his wife, they would ask if I thought his marriage sounded secure etc.

This memory of that experience was on my mind while I read your story and I wondered who Iceman would choose for his TS clearance interviews (and who the gov would choose for him) and what would they say? I feel like their "secret" would be uncovered in even a low level clearance (years later I had to submit names for a low level Public Trust clearance for my job) It was so embarrassing because I did not have many friends I was comfortable submitting for that as I kept my work and home life very separate.

Anyway, that is my "cool story, bro"

Thank you for such a great and well researched story!

this is indeed a cool story bro and touches on what is literally my story’s fatal flaw, which is: Yeah, a shitload of people would’ve known about it. I am going to hijack your question to talk about that, so my apologies, though i will get around to your question by the end. This is gonna be a really long post. I have a lot to say and a lot of ground to cover.

So I wanna start out by talking about the structure of this story and its core conflict, because while I’d like to say this story is rooted in an accurate depiction of the US military, obviously that’s not true; it’s rooted in the dynamic of the story that i wanted to tell, which is the story of a guy coming to realize the truth behind a Big Lie—him passing as straight. And that’s a pretty universal story, but it’s made more specific by the fact that a) the guy canonically wants to be the best in an institution that enforces the Big Lie and b) the guy canonically is so successful because he follows the rules/orders of that institution. So, for character growth, to put it simply, the guy (Ice) has to come to the conclusion that the Big Lie is a lie by himself. He can’t be told/ordered that the Big Lie is a lie, otherwise he hasn’t grown out of “just following orders.” (I’ll get to the Big Lie in a second. I made charts and story structure graphs below.)

The only other story about a Big Lie I can think of off the top of my head right now is Passing (1929) by Nella Larsen, which is about a Black woman in Chicago trying to pass as both white and straight. It’s a great book and I’ll try not to spoil it, you should really read it for yourself, but the terminology I’m going to use in this post comes from an analysis of it, so just to bring you up to speed—Clare, the woman trying to pass as white, is recognized by a friend, another Black-but-passing woman, Irene, who is shocked that Clare has abandoned her heritage (the truth of her, that is) and married a hyper-racist white man who doesn’t even know that she’s Black. So the book sets up a dynamic of the Big Lie that I’ve outlined here (hopefully it makes sense):

I built on this dynamic for my fic. Ice is both a “dupe” and a “passing figure,” in that he believes the lie that he is straight and also passes for straight—but it’s also more complicated than that because he’s not actually straight (getting to that). Mav is an “in-group clairvoyant” and can recognize Ice as passing because he is also straight-passing. The Navy are a bunch of “dupes.” But…what is Slider, for instance, or your question’s hypothetical government official who, yes, will 100% find out because people always find out?

In comes my ginormous-and-overly-wordy WWGATTAI Plot and Character Dynamic Summary Graph. You don’t really have to read it all, the only important bits for this discussion are the leftmost column (“plot”) and the green quadrant (“out-group clairvoyants”).

To summarize—people who know the truth can’t actually act on it, because for Ice’s character growth to make sense, he has to come to the truth himself. This forecloses the possibility of any outwardly homophobic action (by which I mean someone like a govt official or one of my lame OCs actually challenging him on his illegal relationship) in the plot, because for 90% of the story Ice is so fragile that he would probably just cave immediately and double down on the internalized homophobia. So, for plot purposes, everyone—including Mav, as it happens—has to sort of tiptoe around Ice’s obvious not-straightness and give him an unreasonable amount of grace so he can figure it out for himself. 

And therein lies the fatal flaw of this story. It is, like, not conceptually viable. Of course people would find out, of course the government would interrogate him about it, of course he’d have to confront the truth much sooner than TWENTY-FIVE years after he first starts messing around with Mav.  Which literally breaks my heart because I didn’t realize it was a fundamentally busted story until long after I had finished writing the base plot & couldn’t fix the overarching problems 😭 The thing is, it had to be this way, because there is at least a thirty-year gap between TG86 and TGM22, and TGM is obviously the emotional climax of the series and my story had to match that. So—fanfic and its canon constraints, everyone. 

But also… I can explain away these logical inconsistencies with story structure & character dynamic graphs to make the story make sense, sure, but it doesn’t change the truth of the matter, which is that… I hadn’t ever really thought about things like security clearances, and therefore wrote around them because I didn’t even know to consider them. And I know there are a bunch of other details in this story that betray my immaturity (anytime I talk about alcohol, for instance—I still am not legal to drink in this stupid country & have only cheap bad experiences to draw on; THE HOUSE—if i could rewrite this story from the beginning they would not have bought a fucking house together, what was I thinking???) and the lack of thought about the real-life logistics and consequences of secrecy is one of them. 

And it’s exactly what I mean when I say “I look at this story and all I see are its flaws,” which is why I wanted to write this post & get it on record. I have just enough life experience to read my own writing and know that it’s fundamentally unconvincing, and not enough life experience to know how to fix it. :(

But, to answer your original question, you’ve got me brainstorming a scene where Ice is asking Slider to be his character witness & Slider’s like “Look bro do you want me to lie to the federal government under oath for you because I will” and Ice has to be like “Legally I cannot ask that of you but”

[gibbearish]

anybody else like. dislike the concept of putting the ways youre privileged in your bio in general

[daydadahlias]

Not me using the wayback machine to try to find your old panic fics (yikesssss for that fandom) 💀

In all seriousness though, much respect to you for taking charge over YOUR work. People can be so gross sometimes. Like why plagiarize when you can just leave a nice comment for the author saying you love their work??

pretty crazy how this ask is acknowledging that it's my work and my decision and I should be able to take ownership of it while simultaneously saying that you went actively against those wishes to try and use other means to find said work after I took it down.

it's almost like you're saying "not me being disrespectful lmao! sorry abt everyone else who is also disrespectful!! they suck."

Pot meet kettle.

[mod2amaryllis]

my albino kribensis died tonight :( I'm still looking into it, I'll put like test details and stuff in the tags, I'm so at a loss....i found him probably minutes within death because i check on them so often. was going around saying goodnight to tanks before lights out and found him. super super bummed. it was barely more than a week but i really liked him...

[boltlightning]

i know there was a lot going on in at world’s end, but i’m really stuck on norrington’s sacrifice

like. i’m well aware that his death = redemption here. but there is a world where stubborn, capable, clever james norrington survives elizabeth’s escape on the flying dutchman. imagine for a second, if you will, just for one second, that he eschews his pride once more. he duels with bootstrap bill and davy jones just long enough to escape to the empress with elizabeth.

then james norrington goes to shipwreck cove, witnesses the inauguration of Pirate King Elizabeth Swann. he serves as her adjutant, having finally picked a side. james doesn’t have to be happy to be working with pirates, but damn if he didn’t outplay everyone to give beckett the heart of davy jones, one of the finest acts of trickery in the franchise, and hasn’t felt like himself since. damn if he won’t protect elizabeth and grieve her father with her, because weatherby swann was a friend to him until the end. damn if he doesn’t love the swann family. damn if he won’t stand right by elizabeth’s side, king of the pirates or not, to finally tell cutler beckett off.

imagine for a second, just a wee little second, that james norrington fights with elizabeth swann aboard the black pearl in the final fight. he’s a veteran captain and can help barbossa at the helm when the shit gets messy, and, as we know, shit does get messy when the dutchman’s crew starts to board. james is best man at elizabeth and will’s impromptu pirate fight wedding. james helps barbossa keep the pearl afloat in the midst of calypso’s malestrom. recall for a moment that he, y’know, destroyed a royal navy ship and lost his commission after chasing the pearl into a hurricane. how’s that for redemption, disney?? how’s that for bookends, DISNEY?????

sacrifice is well and good and emotionally touching in all the most heart-wrenching ways, but hot damn. imagine, for just one more second if you please, the defiance and satisfaction of james norrington, a man of honor willing to die for his cause, instead living out of spite. imagine him finally forging his own path from the wreckage of his mistakes.

[beauceronn]

I've acquired a bit of an old man sleep schedule. I can't stay awake till 11 most nights and usually wake up naturally around 445-530. Not that I'm complaining, I am much happier as a morning person than I was as a night person, but it is a bit funny.

[leemarkies]

.

[and-stir-the-stars]

hi if Cas had a soul I feel like he wouldn't love Dean anymore. He just wants his missing piece

So we need to get him a soul somehow

Or we can teach Cas that who he is, is already an amazing, brilliant, and worthwhile angel, and that he doesn't need a soul (re: to make himself "more human") or to change himself to be worthy of being treated with love and respect

[castielmacleod]

I think Max Banes would have joined Rowena’s Mega Coven

[diari0deglierrori]

Seriously…. And then they ask why I’m mad so often

[astrxealis]

small snippet ...... under cut bcs i'm shy ( no spoilers btw !! )

pretty.

joie hadn't realized they had said that out loud until the man she had just accidentally complimented turned to her with wide eyes, his hand still on his chin in contemplation.

"ah, did you say...?" "n-nothing! think nothing of it, just a slip of the tongue!" themis slightly tilts his head to the side as joie swiftly jumps to explain themself, though they can tell his movement is not just out of curiosity (not fully that, at least) when he raises an eyebrow and the corners of his lips lift up.

"is that so, then? you don't think that i'm, well, pretty?" he muses lightly, a certain sparkle in his eyes.