one thing tumblr has unironically done to improve my mental health is completely rewrite how i view disgust as a concept. there is no higher compliment to me than being told i have something wrong with me and should be ashamed of myself when i'm just living my life in a way that is perhaps odd and hard to understand, but ultimately as harmless as you can get in our society. which probably wasn't the intention of all the advice i got in therapy to reframe my negative thought patterns as more positive ones, but it's doing great things for me.

people around me: ugh what a freak. loser. weirdo. if i were you i'd be so embarrassed. how do you convince yourself your life is worth anything when you choose to live it like this.

me, who found some of the kindest and most passionately purposeful communities of people among the freaks, losers, weirdos, and other unwanted rejects:

im not sure if i fit into this category from outside, because I somehow managed to be a young adult that the society loves at first sight because she has "done everything right", but sooner or later they discover my love for anime and cosplay and fanfics and we get to this loop; so I relate <333

(AU) Norman and Ray are childhood friends, both were raised in conservative, doctrinal homes. Norman had romantic feelings for Ray, but it was a forbidden love and was never confessed. In adult life, Norman pursued medicine, and Ray became a priest. They were still good friends. Norman's family pressured him to get a bride, but no woman caught his attention. Then, Norman meets Emma, ​​a country girl who lived on a farm. She was totally different from what he had seen. Emma is very, very interested in Norman, society expects her to be a lady, and expect to be courted, but Emma doesn't know these rules, so she starts hitting on Norman, leaving him surprised, but curious.

guy who is seriously going through the horrors of being fifteen

Wolf in sheep’s clothing.

My boy :(

Enough guilt you can make a bouquet out of it

What determines if something is fandomizable isn't how good it is, it's how much room there is to play around in it. A satisfying story that is straightforward in how it's told (not in the sense of the story itself but whether it's through a single movie vs a tv show vs a franchise) doesn't have nearly as much to mess around with as much longer stories with lots of different aspects to them and a lot of possibilities to play with.

Like I hate this idea that "good" media doesn't have fandoms when so many of the examples used are like. Two hour long movies with a satisfying conclusion and very little space to explore other possibilities, compared to tv shows with 12 seasons or comic franchises that have been getting published and adapted to other media for 70 years. It contributes to the idea that fandoms are built out of dissatisfaction or a desire to "fix" stories rather than out of passion for shared interests.

A hallway taking you from one room to another has a lot less stuff to do in it than a park does. That doesn't make the hallway better, it just serves a different purpose.

i love an author’s relationship with fanfiction. could we be doing much more than writing 200k of a fanon couple falling in love in a third different way? we could. but we’re pleasantly attached to these character who we relate to, who we dearly adore, and we want to engage in their world through any mean it is allowed. i think that is fairly what writing and art embodies.

it's kind of crazy climate change has occurred at such a remarkable pace that I and everyone else around my age can remember a completely different climate in our childhoods. I truly watched winter gradually disappear in my life.

"You're too young to remember this, but there used to be so many insects outside that you would have to clean them off the windshield after a long car ride" is the kind of sentence that would have been in a cheesy scifi short story earlier in my life, perhaps submitted to a literary magazine and accepted to show support for its environmentalist message - now it's something I've said in earnest.