@pagesandposeidon / pagesandposeidon.tumblr.com
Someone: this is how I imagined all the characters! *shows images of several extremely conventionally attractive & perfectly-featured people, even for the characters described as having conventionally unattractive features like large noses, body fat, dark skin, or acne* Yes it’s perfect!
“does fiction influence reality?” fiction is part of reality.
real people write, publish, distribute, profit off, read, learn from, interact with, form communities around, use as a rhetorical device, project onto, and take action based on experiences with fiction. writing fiction is itself a real life set of behaviors that people do. fiction is influenced by and influences culture because fiction is part of culture.
there is no way to separate out what humans do (whether that’s writing stories or conducting scientific studies or having sex) from the culture and systems of power that humans do those things within. there is no behavior of humans that is isolated from and unrelated to our connections with each other.
It’s much more useful to discuss how our behavior relates to our places within existing power structures, our culture, our values and beliefs, and how that behavior impacts each other, and why.
I’m not interested in the question of “does it influence reality?” I’m interested in the question of “how is this piece of fiction impacting real people and why?”
I just wanna say, as a neurodivergent fan who is very indecisive yet picky, it’s okay if you have multiple contradicting headcanons or if your headcanons and theories frequently change / are very vague. It’s okay to not always be consistent, it’s okay to have duality! You can engage in multiple alternate worlds, theories, and headcanons at the same time!
thinking about going off the rails and becoming one of those people fixated on an undeveloped character to the point where their projections and headcanons have made them into an unrecognizable fully fleshed out entity
this is unironic btw i think these people are braver and more creative than any mainstream creator and they’re the backbone of every fandom
No one admits is but everyone’s REAL favorite ship dynamic is just
Person A: Character you can project onto
Person B: Your type
i like twitter but tumblr always feels safer for true unhinged acts of fandom. like on twitter the vibe is always “yikes, the creator might see this, sorry if i offend!” but on tumblr it is like, “yikes, the creator saw this? sry 2 them for breaking into my house????”
Ya know what I love about fan fiction?
You wanna write a cliche? Go for it!
You want your story to be super angsty and way overdramatic? The more the better.
You want so much fluff it hurts? Write it!!
You wanna mix werewolves with a sitcom? Why not??
You wanna write a 300 word one shot? Cool.
You wanna write 200k+? Also cool.
You wanna write a story that’s been written a thousand times over? Do it anyway!
You wanna write something so outlandish and specific that it only has a target audience of like two people? Well, then those two people will love it.
It’s such a beautiful and nonjudgmental art. And yes, it is an art. It’s an art that is actually solely about bringing joy to you and your audience.
And I love that.
Okay, but some people really sleep on the pure goodness that is friends-to-lovers ships. It’s a beautiful, wonderful dynamic to have characters who start out as friends (or even enemies who became friends) with a strong, playful, platonic bond, and watch it slowly evolve into a budding romance, with long dates recalling mutual memories under the stars, with cuddling on the couch with hot cocoa, with laughing over the lamest joke ever. Some people really miss how blurry the line is between The Best Friends and The Lovers. Because sometimes they’re the same thing.
Commenting fanfiction is the easiest thing in the world once you start doing it.
I leave a comment on every single fic I read. Sometimes when I read published books I go and leave a comment somewhere the author can find it. Granted, I literally majored in ‘leaving comments on fics’ (English Education), but once you start doing it it just becomes second nature. Now you’re gonna go to the Ozymandias school of leaving comments:
Beginner: This is a second/third/fourth Kudos
Advanced: This is my second/third/fortieth time reading this, I still love it so much. Here are a few new things I noticed. I like the way you personally do x, y, z compared to other authors I’ve read (in this ship/genre/fandom).
Beginner: Just list what you did to read this fic. “I stayed up late reading this”, “I read this on a crowded train”, “this kept me company while sick”.
Advanced: X,Y,Z parts made me get butterflies, and I had a physical reaction to this part of the story, I squealed outloud when characters did x,y,z. I blushed at this part. I laughed out loud here. Whatever.
Beginner: Short answer: you won’t EVER annoy the author (unless you’re needlessly mean) But to start, be generic, you don’t have to spill your soul in the comments section. “I liked this” “I enjoyed reading this” “nice fic”.
Advanced: This really meant a lot to me that you wrote this. This is something I feel like I’ve always wanted to read. This fic hit me in all the right places. Etc.
Beginner: My beginners go to is to highlight a line, put that in your comment and say “i liked this” or to identify basic emotions you had while reading and comment those “this made me happy” “this part made me sad” “i almost cried” “you made me laugh” Advanced: “Highlighted line” This line made me smile because it has to do with character development/it’s really romantic/it’s so unique/it’s moving. Sometimes I don’t highlight a line at all, I just talk about the stuff I’ve noticed were unique to the fic. “I love the way you did this particular thing with this character”.
This? This is an amazing post. This is the Captain Awkward of commenting posts—it addresses all your fears directly and gives you actionable scripts for each one.
Does anybody else like, revert back to the books/tv/movies u loved as a child whenever things in your life are about to change
me packing my things for college:
Okay, but some people really sleep on the pure goodness that is friend-to-lovers ships. It’s a beautiful, wonderful dynamic to have characters who start out as friends (or even enemies who became friends) with a strong, playful, platonic bond, and watch it slowly evolve into a budding romance, with long dates recalling mutual memories under the stars, with cuddling on the couch with hot cocoa, with laughing over the lamest joke ever. Some people really miss how blurry the line is between The Best Friends and The Lovers. Because sometimes they’re the same thing.
I love those ships because of the way they portray love as something that grows organically over time.
“don’t like don’t read” is meant for things like, “if you don’t like coffee shops, don’t read this coffee shop AU,” not, “i can be as racist as i want and you have to deal with it because i used a disclaimer.”
………..!!!!
Y’all need to learn that headcanoning a character with no confirmed orientation as something other than the popular headcanon is not actually a problem or a bad thing.
If a character has no canon orientation, seeing them as bi instead of gay or aroace instead of gay is not homophobia. If the character or creators say ‘they are gay’ or ‘they are bi’ then yeah, it becomes an issue if people are headcanoning differently but up until then, it doesn’t actually hurt you to have different, less popular headcanons out there.
This is a jar full of major characters
Actually it is a jar full of chocolate covered raisins on top of a dirty TV tray. But pretend the raisins are interesting and well rounded fictional characters with significant roles in their stories.
We’re sharing these raisins at a party for Western Storytelling, so we get out two bowls.
Then we start filling the bowls. And at first we only fill the one on the left.
This doesn’t last forever though. Eventually we do start putting raisins in the bowl on the right. But for every raisin we put in the bowl on the right, we just keep adding to the bowl on the left.
And the thing about these bowls is, they don’t ever reset. We don’t get to empty them and start over. While we might lose some raisins to lost records or the stories becoming unpopular, but we never get to just restart. So even when we start putting raisins in the bowl on the right, we’re still way behind from the bowl on the left.
And time goes on and the bowl on the left gets raisins much faster than the bowl on the right.
Until these are the bowls.
Now you get to move and distribute more raisins. You can add raisins or take away raisins entirely, or you can move them from one bowl to the other.
This is the bowl on the left. I might have changed the number of raisins from one picture to the next. Can you tell me, did I add or remove raisins? How many? Did I leave the number the same?
You can’t tell for certain, can you? Adding or removing a raisin over here doesn’t seem to make much of a change to this bowl.
This is the bowl on the right. I might have changed the number of raisins from one picture to the next. Can you tell me, did I add or remove raisins? How many? Did I leave the number the same?
When there are so few raisins to start, any change made is really easy to spot, and makes a really significant difference.
This is why it is bad, even despicable, to take a character who was originally a character of color and make them white. But why it can be positive to take a character who was originally white and make them a character of color.
The white characters bowl is already so full that any change in number is almost meaningless (and is bound to be undone in mere minutes anyway, with the amount of new story creation going on), while the characters of color bowl changes hugely with each addition or subtraction, and any subtraction is a major loss.
This is also something to take in consideration when creating new characters. When you create a white character you have already, by the context of the larger culture, created a character with at least one feature that is not going to make a difference to the narratives at large. But every time you create a new character of color, you are changing something in our world.
I mean, imagine your party guests arrive
Oh my god they are adorable!
And they see their bowls
But before you hand them out you look right into the little black girls’s eyes and take two of her seven raisins and put them in the little white girl’s bowl.
I think she’d be totally justified in crying or leaving and yelling at you. Because how could you do that to a little girl? You were already giving the white girl so much more, and her so little, why would you do that? How could you justify yourself?
But on the other hand if you took two raisins from the white girl’s bowl and moved them over to the black girl’s bowl and the white girl looked at her bowl still full to the brim and decided your moving those raisins was unfair and she stomped and cried and yelled, well then she is a spoiled and entitled brat.
And if you are adding new raisins, it seems more important to add them to the bowl on the right. I mean, even if we added the both bowls at the same speed from now on (and we don’t) it would still take a long time before the numbers got big enough to make the difference we’ve already established insignificant.
And that’s the difference between whitewashing POC characters and making previously white characters POC. And that’s why every time a character’s race is ambiguous and we make them white, we’ve lost an opportunity.
*goes off to eat her chocolate covered raisins, which are no longer metaphors just snacks*
FUCK YES THIS WHY IS THIS SO DIFFICULT FOR SO MANY PEOPLE TO UNDERSTAND
this is a really great way of explaining representation. Note that it also applies to LGBTQ, disabled, and neuro-atypical characters, as well as any other minority or oppressed group.
GOD why are people always headcanoning characters as cis without any proof :/ yall need to stop projecting lmfao
