(((Digimon Is Forever)))

i don’t like to rant here but i need to get this off my chest: short fics are NOT low effort. i cannot stress this enough. you can have your reading preferences, we all have them, but dismissing thousands and thousands of stories because the word count somehow correlates to effort and/or quality really grinds my gears. again, personal preference is fine, but explicitly saying low word count ‘screams low effort’ is dismissive at best, and just plain snobby at worst 

packing a punch in 3k or 2k or 1k or 100 words is not easy. it is a skill, it takes effort, it takes practise, it is not easy

(also, like, so what if you don’t put some arbitrary amount of effort defined by some random stranger into your art? effort doesn’t necessarily equate to quality, and quality is subjective, anyway)

i don’t mean to shame anyone who doesn’t want to read short fics (that’s totally fine), nor anyone who can only write long fics (again totally fine)—different strokes for different folks and all that—i’m just very tired of the attitude i keep seeing where word count is equated to quality and effort

i should add that i’ve not encountered this attitude from anyone here, but i’ve seen it increasingly elsewhere, and i’m frustrated, and also very sorry for ranting

(i think i might go through my downloaded fics and make a rec list (or several) of all the AMAZING shorter fics i’ve read and loved sometime over the next couple of weeks, just to do something positive with this frustration)

I try to keep my nose out of shit like this but today. man. today I encountered something that really ticked me off.

today I met a professor who does queer studies. she told me that her teenage gay son yelled at her recently for using the word “queer” in describing her discipline and demanded to know how the university “could get away with calling it that.”

so of course she’s baffled right, and asks him where on earth this is coming from. and he told her he read it on Tumblr. 

listen if you don’t want to be called queer and don’t want to be lumped in with folks who comprise the queer community, that’s fine. that’s totally fine. it is 100% okay. people are allowed to have complicated histories with that word. it’s a fraught signifier. it’s a mess and it’s allowed to be. 

what’s not cool is telling young LGBTQ+ people that queer is a slur in all contexts because now you are stripping away not just the language that we use to describe ourselves but also the language that creates the discipline that lets us study our own lives and our cultures. Queer studies has been a part of American academe since the 1970s (possibly earlier, depending on who you ask). “Queer” has been a functioning and largely unproblematic signifier in American academe since ten years before the AIDS crisis. If you don’t at least know that much, you have absolutely no business trying to educate LGBTQ+ youth about queer history.

Trying to censor the word queer from our collective cultural lexicon is 1) impossible. it’s here now. and 2) an erasure of our lineage of scholarship. I could spend all day lobbing criticisms at American academic culture and I do, but queers created space for ourselves in academe. We built a queer world inside the tower that tried its best to keep us out and now we have a place here. 

I am a queer person and I am a queer scholar. You use whatever words you want to signify who you are and how you live your life and how you love your loves. You won’t hear a peep of criticism from me.  All I’m asking is that you do me and mine the courtesy of leaving our collective body of text very much the fuck alone.

“But I can’t just use the same OCs in multiple unrelated stories with completely different settings” buddy, some of literary science fiction’s most celebrated authors invented entire subgenres of sci fi in order to justify doing exactly that. If you really can’t live with yourself unless you explain it, go with multiverse theory. Go with serial reincarnation. Heck, make the fact that their cumulative backstories cannot possibly add up an explicit plot point and go with some sort of metaphysical “eternal champion” deal. These are old and well-established plot devices created for that precise purpose – the heavy lifting has been done for you.

[TRANSCRIPT:

Paige: Hi, I’m Paige and I’m Autistic

Person 2: You are not autistic

Paige: Well, you don’t know who I am at all, so how can you even make that judgement?

Person 2: You’re nothing like my son, who’s 5 years old and a boy and autistic.

Paige: That’s funny because I’m actually a 20 year old woman, so of course I’m nothing like your 5 year old son.

Person 2: You don’t look autistic.

Paige: What does autism look like?

Person 2: uh it looks like my 5 year old autistic son.

Paige: Did you know every person who’s autistic is different, like any other human? And that I’m especially going to be different from a 5 year old boy?

Person 2: Yes but there are some things that are the same.

Paige: This is true, and this is why I’m diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Person 2: But you don’t show it well.

Paige: That’s because this is a 60 second TikTok.... That is scripted. And I am a 20 year old woman, I’m not having a meltdown 24/7.

Paige: I’m not showing you what I’m like at my lowest because I have clients and I don’t know you nor do I trust you and if I don’t fit what you think autism is, that’s not my fault nor my problem nor do I need to change to fit them. You need to change what you think autism looks like.

/END TRANSCRIPT]

reblog this if you’re a fanfic writer & your motivation to write actually increases when readers actually show interest & give you feedback. even just a reblog or a little comment here and there

Like, yes, this gives me life

Yisssss

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