the-femslash-wishlist - Tumblr blog

[the-femslash-wishlist]

No one reblogs on tumblr anymore.

No one leaves comments on Ao3 anymore.

Seriously people the lack of fandom interaction these days makes me genuinely depressed, it never used to be like this, makes me wonder what's the point of coming online to do anything anymore.

Reblog a post so other people can see it.

Leave a comment so the author doesn't feel like giving up.

Fandom cannot live on Likes or Kudos alone.

[the-femslash-wishlist]

“Xena was the kind of heroine no one had really seen on TV for a long time, if ever. Sure, the show was campy, and with her whip and Betty Paige bangs, she pinged a few fetish bells, but she also kicked ass unapologetically. This was an awesome action hero who happened to be a lady—something that’s still rare and precious. Just seeing her on television was empowering and inspiring for girls and women everywhere, and Xena became an instant sensation. The runaway success of the warrior princess blazed a trail for all the Buffys, Sydney Bristows, Starbucks, and Peggy Carters that would follow by proving how awesome, and successful, a female hero could be.”

—

Twenty Years Later, a Look at How Xena: Warrior Princess Changed Television

(via

themarysue

)

[the-femslash-wishlist]

Another idea: Communities on Tumblr

For a while now folks have asked us for better ways to connect with other people who share similar interests. We’re listening, and at Labs we’ve been looking into fulfilling that need, Tumblr style.

Introducing Communities, a new place to connect with others on Tumblr:

Here in Labs, we’re working on big ideas that could transform how Tumblr is used, while keeping that Tumblr vibe alive. You can see one of those ideas above. We’re calling it “Communities”, a new dedicated space on Tumblr for people to share and discuss all the content they love. Communities can cover topics like your favorite show, artist, movie, video game, your school, your board game group, friend group, big or small, whatever you want.

Each Community has their own semi-private safer space away from the regular dashboard where you can interact with other Tumblr users who share the same interests and passions as you. There are moderators and members (you!), rules, and privacy settings. Each community has its own feed of posts from members, separate from your Following and For You feeds. Interactions within community spaces stay there and replies will work more like a traditional comment section. Folks will be able to reblog posts into a community, but not out — at least not yet.

We’re very excited for you to try it, and help define the best path forward. What we have is a prototype to help us validate the idea, but there’s still plenty of questions that need answering. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be reaching out to people across Tumblr, and the internet at large, to try our prototype. Based on the feedback we get, we’ll iterate on the idea to see what resonates best with all of you on Tumblr.

If this sounds interesting, please like, reblog, or reply to this post, and we’ll invite you to beta test this feature when we roll it out to a wider Tumblr audience, as a little perk for following the Labs blog.

Stay tuned for more!

[the-femslash-wishlist]

“I feel very strongly that if historical romance can give women a happy ending, it can give queer people a happy ending. M/f historical romance doesn’t tie itself in knots over the likelihood of the rake having syphilis, the terrible dentistry, the lice, the prolapsed uterus after multiple pregnancies, the prospect of death in childbed, or the horrifying legal discrimination against married women. We don’t close the book on the wedding scene reflecting that the heroine can now be legally raped, has just lost all her property to her husband…and would be vanishingly unlikely to obtain a divorce. Historical romance readers aren’t stupid; we know this stuff, but we choose to believe our heroine will be one of the lucky ones. And I don’t see why we can’t extend that happy glow to other stories, too. If women’s lives don’t have to be blighted by social oppression in romance, neither do those of people of color or queer people. Moreover, human nature doesn’t change. A lot of what we read about LGBT people in history is appalling because the rec­ords we have are the legal documents, the newspaper reports, the accounts of people who were victimized. We don’t generally have the hidden stories of the people who lived under the radar…. But we know…people we’d now call gay, bi, trans have always existed and [that] as a matter of statistics plenty of them must have lived and died without ever coming to the law’s attention. Which is not to hand-wave the horrors of the past but only to say that horror isn’t the only story, and it’s not an acceptable reason to deny marginalized people their happy-ever-after.”

— KJ Charles (Library Journal interview)  (via bookgeekgrrl)

[the-femslash-wishlist]

To illustrate this post by @mayahawkse I would like to visualize to you the difference:

A post in 2023:

A post in 2014:

A zoom out of the same post:

This is what a community looks like.

See how in 2023 almost all of the reblogs come from the OP, from their few hours/days in the tag search. Meanwhile in 2014 the % of reblogs from OP is insignificant, because most of the reblogs come from the reblogs within the fandom, within the micro-communities formed there. You didn't need to rely on tags, or search, or being featured. Because the community took care of you, made sure to pass the work between themselves and onto their blog and exposed their followers to it. It kept works alive for years.

It's not JUST the reblog/like ratio that causing this issue, it's the type of interaction people have. They're content with scrolling and liking the search engine, instead of actually having a reblogging relationship with other blogs in their community.

Anyways, if you want to see more content you like, the only true way to make it happen is to reblog it. Likes do not forward content in no way but making OP feel nice. Reblogs on the other hand make content eternal. They make it relevant, they make it exist outside of a fickle tumblr search that hardly works on the best of days.

If you want more of something, reblog it.

[the-femslash-wishlist]

Here are the other fandoms which made most of us start shipping femslash ships, after Wynonna Earp (with 210 votes):

Sailor Moon 173 votes

Homestuck 126

Steven Universe 84

Legend of Korra 82

My Little Pony 82

Naruto 52

Kim Possible 41

Undertale 37

South of Nowhere 31

Rizzoli & Isles 30

Wicked 27

Grey's Anatomy 26

Warrior Cats 26

Puella Magi Madoka Magica 24

RWBY 24

Merlin 22

Harry Potter 20

Skins 20

Batman the Animated Series 19

Star Trek: Voyager 18 Pokemon 17

Pretty Little Liars 17

Teen Titans 16

Tokyo Mew Mew 16

Percy Jackson 15

Lost Girl 14

Person of Interest 12

Avatar: The Last Airbender 11

Blue's Clues 11

Cardcaptor Sakura 11

Doctor Who 11

Orphan Black 11

Revolutionary Girl Utena 11

Sonic 10

Victorious 10

Degrassi 9

Life is Strange 9

Pitch Perfect 9

There are 278 more unique fandoms and femslash shipping experiences shared after these first 50, from Bleach to Yu Yu Hakusho. There are a few more people who sent in answers in the tags.

This count is as of 8:30pm AEDT on 16th of November.

Thanks everyone for participating!

Yes, yes, The L Word intentionally excluded.

Place your answer in the tags if it’s none of the above, especially if it’s The Facts of Life, or South of Nowhere, or Sailor Moon, or Skins, or Rizzoli & Isles, or Grey’s Anatomy, or Person of Interest, or Orange is the New Black, or Orphan Black, or Steven Universe, or Agent Carter, or The Bold Type, or Killing Eve, or Captain Marvel, or The Haunting of Bly Manor, or Critical Role, or Warrior Nun, etc. etc. etc. eta: or Legend of Korra, or Wicked, etc. etc.

It was hard to whittle the choices down to 12, okay?

[the-femslash-wishlist]

[the-femslash-wishlist]

Happy birthday to AO3 🎂🎉

[the-femslash-wishlist]

Yes, yes, The L Word intentionally excluded.

Place your answer in the tags if it’s none of the above, especially if it’s The Facts of Life, or South of Nowhere, or Sailor Moon, or Skins, or Rizzoli & Isles, or Grey’s Anatomy, or Person of Interest, or Orange is the New Black, or Orphan Black, or Steven Universe, or Agent Carter, or The Bold Type, or Killing Eve, or Captain Marvel, or The Haunting of Bly Manor, or Critical Role, or Warrior Nun, etc. etc. etc. eta: or Legend of Korra, or Wicked, etc. etc.

It was hard to whittle the choices down to 12, okay?

[the-femslash-wishlist]

@i-miss-faberry that’s all up to you. You define your reading. For me, it would depend on where the one shots are. If they were on livejournal or tumblr, then yeah, 1 per one shot. But if they were presented as one collection on ao3 or ffnet, then not.

P. S. I miss faberry too lol

Place your estimates in the tags

[the-femslash-wishlist]

“Fandom is focus. Fandom is obsession. Fandom is insatiable consumption. Fandom is sitting for hours in front of a TV screen a movie screen a computer screen with a comic book a novel on your lap. Fandom is eyestrain and carpal tunnel syndrome and not enough exercise and staying up way, way past your bedtime. Fandom is people you don’t tell your mother you’re meeting. Fandom is people in the closet, people out and proud, people in costumes, people in T-shirts with slogans only fifty others would understand. Fandom is a loud dinner conversation scaring the waiter and every table nearby. Fandom is you in Germany and me in the US and him in Australia and her in Japan. Fandom is a sofabed in New York, a roadtrip to Oxnard, a friend behind a face in London. Fandom talks past timezones and accents and backgrounds. Fandom is conversation. Communication. Contact. Fandom is drama. Fandom is melodrama. Fandom is high school. Fandom is Snacky’s law and Godwin’s law and Murphy’s law. Fandom is smarter than you. Fandom is stupider than you. Fandom is five arguments over and over and over again. Fandom is the first time you’ve ever had them. Fandom is female. Fandom is male. Fandom lets female play at being male. Fandom bends gender, straight, gay, prude, promiscuous. Fandom is fantasy. Fandom doesn’t care about norms or taboos or boundaries. Fandom cares too much about norms and taboos and boundaries. Fandom is not real life. Fandom is closer than real life. Fandom knows what you’re really like in the bedroom. Fandom is how you would never, could never be in the bedroom. Fandom is shipping, never shipping, het, slash, gen, none of the above, more than the above. Fandom is love for characters you didn’t create. Fandom is recreating the characters you didn’t create. Fandom is appropriation, subversion, dissention. Fandom is adoration, extrapolation, imitation. Fandom is dissection, criticism, interpretation. Fandom is changing, experimenting, attempting. Fandom is creating. Fandom is drawing, painting, vidding: nine seasons in four minutes of love. Fandom is words, language, authoring. Fandom is essays, stories, betas, parodies, filks, zines, usenet posts, blog posts, message board posts, emails, chats, petitions, wank, concrit, feedback, recs. Fandom is writing for the first time since you were twelve. Fandom is finally calling yourself a writer. Fandom is signal and response. Fandom is a stranger moving you to tears, anger, laughter. Fandom is you moving a stranger to speak. Fandom is distraction. Fandom is endangering your job, your grades, your relationships, your bank account. Fandom gets no work done. Fandom is too much work. Fandom was/is just a phase. Fandom could never be just a phase. Fandom is where you found a friend, a sister, a kindred spirit. Fandom is where you found a talent, a love, a reason. Fandom is where you found yourself.”

— http://hesychasm.livejournal.com/187818.html (via dazebras)

[the-femslash-wishlist]

Place your estimates in the tags

[the-femslash-wishlist]

“I think fanfiction is literature and literature, for the most part, is fanfiction, and that anyone that dismisses it simply on the grounds that it’s derivative knows fuck-all about literature and needs to get the hell off my lawn. Most of the history of Western literature (and probably much of non-Western literature, but I can’t speak to that) is adapted or appropriated from something else. Homer wrote historyfic and Virgil wrote Homerfic and Dante wrote Virgilfic (where he makes himself a character and writes himself hanging out with Homer and Virgil and they’re like “OMG Dante you’re so cool.” He was the original Gary Stu). Milton wrote Bible fanfic, and everyone and their mom spent the Middle Ages writing King Arthur fanfic. In the sixteenth century you and another dude could translate the same Petrarchan sonnet and somehow have it count as two separate poems, and no one gave a fuck. Shakespeare doesn’t have a single original plot—although much of it would be more rightly termed RPF—and then John Fletcher and Mary Cowden Clarke and Gloria Naylor and Jane Smiley and Stephen Sondheim wrote Shakespeare fanfic. Guys like Pope and Dryden took old narratives and rewrote them to make fun of people they didn’t like, because the eighteenth century was basically high school. And Spenser! Don’t even get me started on Spenser. Here’s what fanfic authors/fans need to remember when anyone gives them shit: the idea that originality is somehow a good thing, an innately preferable thing, is a completely modern notion. Until about three hundred years ago, a good writer, by and large, was someone who could take a tried-and-true story and make it even more awesome. (If you want to sound fancy, the technical term is imitatio.) People were like, why would I wanna read something about some dude I’ve never heard of? There’s a new Sir Gawain story out, man! (As to when and how that changed, I tend to blame Daniel Defoe, or the Modernists, or reality television, depending on my mood.) I also find fanfic fascinating because it takes all the barriers that keep people from professional authorship—barriers that have weakened over the centuries but are nevertheless still very real—and blows right past them. Producing literature, much less circulating it, was something that was well nigh impossible for the vast majority of people for most of human history. First you had to live in a culture where people thought it was acceptable for you to even want to be literate in the first place. And then you had to find someone who could teach you how to read and write (the two didn’t necessarily go together). And you needed sufficient leisure time to learn. And be able to afford books, or at least be friends with someone rich enough to own books who would lend them to you. Good writers are usually well-read and professional writing is a full-time job, so you needed a lot of books, and a lot of leisure time both for reading and writing. And then you had to be in a high enough social position that someone would take you seriously and want to read your work—to have access to circulation/publication in addition to education and leisure time. A very tiny percentage of the population fit those parameters (in England, which is the only place I can speak of with some authority, that meant from 500-1000 A.D.: monks; 1000-1500: aristocratic men and the very occasional aristocratic woman; 1500-1800: aristocratic men, some middle-class men, a few aristocratic women; 1800-on, some middle-class women as well). What’s amazing is how many people who didn’t fit those parameters kept writing in spite of the constant message they got from society that no one cared about what they had to say, writing letters and diaries and stories and poems that often weren’t discovered until hundreds of years later. Humans have an urge to express themselves, to tell stories, and fanfic lets them. If you’ve got access to a computer and an hour or two to while away of an evening, you can create something that people will see and respond to instantly, with a built-in community of people who care about what you have to say. I do write the occasional fic; I wish I had the time and mental energy to write more. I’ll admit I don’t read a lot of fic these days because most of it is not—and I know how snobbish this sounds—particularly well-written. That doesn’t mean it’s “not good”—there are a lot of reasons people read fic and not all of them have to do with wanting to read finely crafted prose. That’s why fic is awesome—it creates a place for all kinds of storytelling. But for me personally, now that my job entails reading about 1500 pages of undergraduate writing per year, when I have time to read for enjoyment I want it to be by someone who really knows what they’re doing. There’s tons of high-quality fic, of course, but I no longer have the time and patience to go searching for it that I had ten years ago. But whether I’m reading it or not, I love that fanfiction exists. Because without people doing what fanfiction writers do, literature wouldn’t exist. (And then I’d be out of a job and, frankly, I don’t know how to do anything else.)”

— “As a professor, may I ask you what you think about fanfiction?” (via meiringens)

[the-femslash-wishlist]

If you were in a fanfic, would you be the pining idiot or the oblivious dumbass?

post it in the tags!!

[the-femslash-wishlist]

I really like the word “smitten”. because at first glance you just think of sappy lovey-dovey stuff but also you have to remember this is a word that’s born of the word “smite.” a devastating word. a word that, summarized, means stricken. smitten means stricken as well — struck with devastating affection.

[the-femslash-wishlist]

[the-femslash-wishlist]

Other (reply or place in the tags)