being OCpilled is so fucking mortifying honestly. like oh… yeah….. heres my guy. i invented him. i can’t think about anything else except for him this week. but he isn’t cool or anything. he actually sucks. im just ill.
I don’t know about others but the only reason I put both is so that whichever someone clicks on, they will find my fic. So if there is supposed to be rules, I guarantee you that no writer knows these ones. We can barely get people to comment, you think we’re going to specifically choose & or / ? Hell no.
I’ve been in fandom for twenty years, and “/” means romance and “&” means no romance was literally one of the first things I learned. It dates back to Star Trek fanfiction of the 70s. I’m boggled by the fact that anyone who’s been reading fic on AO3 for more than like five minutes wouldn’t know that, and I’m curious as to what fanfic community you come out of.
I don’t think that tagging with both is actually going to get your fic in front of more readers. People looking for romance often exclude the “&” tag if there are too many gen fics tagged with both. People looking for gen often exclude the “/” tag if there are too many fics with both. So rather than putting your fic in front of twice the people, you are in fact more likely to get your target audience ignoring your fic because it has a tag they don’t want.
Also, by overtagging you are more likely to annoy potential readers away from your fic than entice them. A fic tagged both & and / better have both romance and a ton of platonic interaction between the two characters, like a slow burn romance friends-to-lovers arc. If it isn’t, I’m going to be very unhappy because the author lied to me with the tags to try and trick me into reading a fic with deceptive advertising.
When I’m in a fandom and see tagging where some of the tags don’t really apply and are just there to get it in front of more eyes, I’m going to assume one of two things. Either the author is a newb who doesn’t know anything, or the author is purposefully spamming the tags because they don’t care about lying to their potential audience and think that “spray and pray” is an effective tactic. In the first case, their writing probably will not be very good, so why bother reading their fic. In the second case, the fact that I can’t trust the tags to be accurate means I’m not going to read it to see if it’s interesting even if it has a tag I like. Chances are, that tag isn’t actually in the fic anyway, and even if it is, by spam-tagging the author is making the archive harder to use for everybody. Why would I reward bad behavior with attention? No. Far better to mute the author and move on.
More to the point–and no, I will never stop harping on this, because we have GOT to stop leaving our strongest points in the drawer–it doesn’t matter if you heard of this convention before joining AO3 or not, because it’s in AO3’s tagging FAQ.
[id: the “How do I tag a romantic or platonic relationship?” section of the tagging FAQ here.]
“But Jo,” you may argue, because you’re wrong. “There’s no way to find that without digging through site FAQ menus, and that’s really inaccessible!”
sure
except
that when you go to post a new fic, and you go to put in those relationship tags, you see this
[id: the Relationships field]
and that tooltip, the one THERE TO EXPLAIN HOW THE FIELD WORKS, links to the Relationships segment of the tag FAQ, which explicitly lays this shit out.
I don’t care if you don’t know fandom history. I don’t care if you’ve never heard a goddamn word about the spirk shippers. I don’t care if you’ve never been exposed to fandom culture in your life. It is, frankly, not fair to expect those things of everyone.
What is entirely fair to expect is that you will READ THE INSTRUCTIONS PRINTED NEXT TO THE FUCKING BOX, actually. Forget fandom conventions. It genuinely doesn’t matter whether you agree with or respect fandom conventions. This is a site policy.This is explicitly how tagging on AO3, specifically, works.
ALT
The best thing about Strunk/White fanfiction is that it’s virtually guaranteed to be well written.
you’re a fucking poser if you preach enjoying the early 2000s internet aesthetic and then make fun of kids today for liking skibidi toilet. they used to make mario say a bad word in a ytp and we would laugh. we would fucking holler
“neurodivergent” means disabled. it means disabled in some way involving cognition/emotion/sociability/mental abilities. it is a call to solidarity between the person with adhd, the autistic person, the depressed person, the dyslexic person, the schizophrenic person, the ocd haver, the intellectually disabled person, the person with dementia, the epileptic person, the stroke survivor, anyone who has a mental disability. it’s a call to each of us to be more than ourselves, to be in solidarity against the ableism that affects all of us.
it isn’t a quirky fashion statement. it has always been about disability
I really don’t think it’s helpful to act like schizophrenia and dementia are in remotely the same level of care needs as someone with ADHD, and frankly I think it is a grotesque stealing of valor for anyone with ADHD or the occasional absence seizure to act like their needs are similar to someone who is paralyzed and nonverbal from a stroke or severely intellectually disabled or has the terminal disease of dementia
yknow, I like it when people with mild adhd or anxiety give a shit about my needs, or about funding social programs, or expanding disability benefits, or yknow. When my friends with adhd helped me through the process of getting into a supported employment program, or checked in on me when I was in day programs or the ward. I don’t really care about “stealing valor” and neither do my other friends who have higher support needs than “mild adhd”. We mostly care that people actually listen to us, support us, and take our struggles seriously while acknowledging that we have our own agency. Which is what we find in neurodivergent/mad communities.
My partner and I have been playing Cult of the Lamb together! It’s been so fun, especially when we can customize our cultists appearance so we’ve just been putting our DnD characters amongst others in them haha
“Oh you’re alloromantic? But what if you meet someone one day who puts you off romance forever? I think you should put your life on hold just in case that happens.”
“Allosexual? Don’t say that. You just haven’t had bad sex yet.”
feed the local birds - ideally corvids, but pigeons will do just fine, seagulls if you are brave and fear nothing. Choose seeds, or something else that’s non-perishable but healthy for birds.
get them accustomed to your presence, feed them at different times in a handful of different locations that you rotate between, so they learn to associate the feeding with you, specifically, and not the time and place that you are in. Always keep the feed in your pockets just in case.
teach them a specific word you’ll call out as loudly as possible whenever you’re about to distribute the food.
that specific word is ATTACK!
if you ever feel threatened by another person while walking down the street, you can just yell out ATTACK! at the top of your lungs.
ideally, the threat has no idea that this is the birds’ cue for Food Person Is About To Distribute Food, and is scared shitless by the sight of a flock of wild birds swooping in at your call, and flees.
if this does not work, there is a very low, but above zero possibility of the birds seeing that their usual feeding routine has been interrupted by someone bothering The Food Person, and actually do start swooping at this inconvenience so that they can have their meal.
in either case, feed the birds as reward and payment for their work.
There aren’t enough fucking hours in the day to get real good at chess, violin, piano, singing, crosswords, film photography, contemporary dance, literary analysis, writing, film criticism, historical analysis, political commentary, tennis, Latin, French, German, Italian, identification of invertebrates, programming, cooking, musical composition, watercolour painting, philosophy, stage acting, fencing, psychoanalysis, and sickoposting online.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I, as a trans woman, do not know what it is to be a man. I know what it’s like to be surrounded by men, to be picked apart by them, to have masculinity enforced on me and to have my femininity degraded. I know what it’s like to be targeted for punishment, physically and sexually, for my femininity, for a girlhood the boys and men could see in me, to be queerbashed, to have my head slammed into hard surfaces, to have my genitals fondled, to be injured in all kinds of small and repetitive ways with things like pens, compasses, and so on.
I know what it’s like to be assumed to be a man, and to be abused because I am not. I know what it’s like to be separated from my female friends as a young child because my status as a ‘boy’ meant that I needed to be placed with the other boys, the ones who degraded me and hurt me. I know what it’s like to be beaten and burned. I know what it’s like to have teachers make an example of me because I cannot conform. I know what it’s like to be made afraid of being around other people, because people means abuse.
But I don’t know what it is to be a man. Even after everything they tried, I wasn’t one.
The fact that socialization is a specious argument became obvious to me during an exchange I had with a trans-woman-exclusionist who insisted that my being raised male was the sole reason in her mind for me to be disqualified from entering women-only spaces. So I asked her if she was open to allowing trans women who are anatomically male but who have been socialized female—something that’s not all that uncommon for MTF children these days. She admitted to having concerns about their attending. Then, I asked how she would feel about a person who was born female yet raised male against her will, and who, after a lifetime of pretending to be male in order to survive, finally reclaimed her female identity upon reaching adulthood. After being confronted with this scenario, the woman conceded that she would be inclined to let this person enter women-only space, thus demonstrating that her argument about male socialization was really an argument about biology after all. In fact, after being pressed a bit further, she admitted that the scenario of a young girl who was forced against her will into boyhood made her realize how traumatic and dehumanizing male socialization could be for someone who was female-identified. This, of course, is exactly how many trans women experience their own childhoods.
trans women are everywhere and are so eager to be seen and heard but only if they feel safe around you. if you hardly ever have trans women interacting with you, especially online, then consider there might be a reason for that and you should address it
Remember when people got mad at me for calling israel a glorified us military base which makes them western that was funny anyways israel is a glorified us military base and they’re western
remember when joe biden explicitly stated that israel is an investment for the usa to protect its political and economic interests in southwest asia? it’s actually pretty hard to deny that israel really is just a glorified us military base when the current president outright said it:
“[Supporting Israel] is the best $3 billion investment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.”
btw body horror is stuff that doesnt naturally occur and is used to scare ppl, like extra eyes, animal parts on a human, a mouth opening in the stomach, not. disabled people’s bodies lmao.
This post was a plea to stop treating visibly disabled people as monstrous because of the differences their disabilities have caused. It was not an invitation for people to argue what is and is not body horror. It was a call out for dehumanization, not the horror genre.
bringing this back around for IFEW (international face equality week)!! take this time to educate yourself on disfigurement and similar things, and take the steps necessary to become a more accepting and understanding person!! disfigurement and disability is not something to be afraid of!!
I am so, so sure that my cousin meant to type something else, but I’m going to cry. Welcome to my bathroom themed bathroom… Pictures of other people’s bathrooms on the walls… Little bathtub figurines on the sink… Soap dispenser shaped like a toilet… Life could be a dream… in my bathroom themed bathroom…
ALT
