Latest Posts by jestlace - Page 6

actually your characters should be pure wish fulfillment and your writing should be entirely self indulgent and it should all be very, incredibly, undeniably horny.

being a marauders fan is a red flag.

it’s also an orange flag.

and a yellow flag. and a green, a blue and a purple one.

you’re gay.

"this book has this trope", "this book has that trope"... what happened to SUMMARIES. what's the PLOT.

When you gotta get rid of all the marble penises in your house

Physics: More pencil tricks

Source

Batkids whenever someone insults Brucie/Batman badly on social medias

headcanon

damian is surprisingly good at playing a non traumatised ten year old. at first he doesn’t understand why he would need to ever play the part until he watches his family act at a gala. he now understands the mission to protect their identities.

he slips into the role easily. he acts shy around strangers and soft around his siblings. even going so far as to let them carry him around. if he notices someone is uncomfortable or not overwhelmed he will walk up to his father with puppy dog eyes taught to him by grayson and say “father i’m tired” the other members of gotham high society will coo at his formal words and father will scoop him up before collecting his other siblings.

he’s also unsurprisingly good at fake crying. (i mean look at the poor kid and all his trauma)

Getting a comment on AO3 is such a magical experience. “Oh you liked what I wrote? You read the whole thing start to finish? YOU SHARED YOUR IMPUT WITH ME?”

Now I want to take you somewhere to get a nice warm drink and tell you about ever little detail I wrote in the fic, my crippling fear of mischaracterization, and also if you want to get married.

He might be 6’0 and built like a brick but i see the rage of a teenage girl in his eyes

Kendrick Lamar - Not Like Us

i want i want i want i want i want i want i want i want i want i want i want i want i want i want i want i want i want i want i want i want i want i want i want i want i want i want i want i want i want i want i want i want i want i want i want i want i want i want i want i want

I feel like the biggest differences w/Gen Z in comparison to some of the older Generations' works are that they're willing to take the Marauders into different universes as children and write about them in a more contemporary style.

Young/new adult (17-28) and older readers were first introduced to Sirius and Remus as 33-year-old individuals, so it was easier for those readers to write S & R as adults attempting to grapple with their background and trauma and grief than it was to reach back and try to make their Hogwarts years more accessible. I think Gen Z writers are coming in and reclaiming their life experiences as young people growing up with technology and texting and the realities of being Online All the Time in a way that older authors weren't doing at the time. I assume part of that comes back to the development of technology and the schisms that exist between gen x/millennial/gen z readers on that front, but I also think older writers may have been less aware of some of JKR's bullshit, which made it less uncomfortable to stick to canon environments and scenarios.

Barring 'All the Young Dudes', many of the currently popular wolfstar stories take place in non-magical settings (college AUs, sports AUs, etc), and while those aren't exclusively written by the youths™, I think their prolificness has likely been influenced by JKR's shitty behavior; it's a lot easier to divorce those characters from their author's terrible views when you remove them from the world she created. That also plays into how large of a factor the characters' queerness plays in the narratives being planned—and as you mentioned, the influx in fics that feature trans, NB, or genderfluid characters is a great side effect of these shifts.

Also, having spent a fair amount of time reading fics in the fandom, I think there was a bit of a high bar to clear in terms of writing quality early on. There are always posts going around that recommend more "literary" wolfstar pieces, and a fair amount of them tend to skew older (specifically: before 2010). By and large, online communities seem to have embraced the "everyone has to start somewhere" mentality a bit more in recent years than they had then, but I distinctly remember getting comments when I was writing in the 2000s where people would drop in to tell me I had utterly mischaracterized someone or that my grammar was bad. All for constructive criticism, but I do have to wonder if the "flame" reviews forced people to either conform to what people were looking for (literary, stylistic writing), switch to another platform (LJ to ff, or ff to Wattpad, etc), or stop writing altogether.

Nowadays, I think our younger authors have an idea for a fic and just...go for it. They don't always have beta readers (which aren't inherently necessary, but can definitely impact style, structure, and word choice) so they'll post things as they come to them, they've got fan-pages on instagram and tiktok and tumblr where they make textposts about characters using modern slang that get hundred of likes/reblogs—they've found a formula that works for them, and they aren't inclined to change it (see: how many texting fics exist). Beyond that, relying on conversational and colloquial writing means they can process their emotions in real time while writing, in a way that we as older writers definitely could have, but didn't usually. When I was reading fics then, and even rereading some of those fics now, it always seemed as if fics danced around trauma a bit more delicately than some of the popular fics do now.

That's not meant as a slam to younger writers, but I do think young people on the internet these days are FAR more willing to share about their personal trauma(s) online, and when they write their fics, sometimes that's obvious. Older authors do/did it too, but I think it's usually a bit more strategically veiled than younger authors are now. It was a poetic thing, and arguably, not always a good one, considering the way mental illness/saviour complexes could often be romanticized. Young authors now fall into the same patterns, which again, aren't great, but I also think that they're the first to acknowledge their own mental health crises and say it hasn't been a great experience—even in a joking manner.

I could go on about this for DAYS but I've already written you an essay, so I'll leave it there hahahah

Thank you for the essay!!!! I love all of these points. Yes, I have also noticed that the big fics in this corner of the fandom tend to be the non-magical AU ones--fics that essentially follow the plot structure of contemporary romance novels, but just so happen to have characters named Sirius and Remus in them. I mean, any one of those fics could have the serial numbers filed off and be published as an original romance book, you know? Up until now, I was just chalking that up to the popularity of romance novels--I figured that the writers were just replicating the structure of the books like they like to read, but in fanfic form. But you bring an excellent point--it might be more that they're trying to divorce the characters from the world JKR created.

This is fascinating. I'm loving all the meta that's ended up in my inbox today.

genuinely it will never stop baffling me how people will wear twilight shirts and talk about team Edward vs team Jacob and then the same people will be like "I'm not basing my personality off of a piece of media (harry potter) made by a transphobe 😌" like good that's great! so you can excuse racism but you draw the line at transphobia? good to know

I think people misunderstand "x fell first, y fell harder " trope because it's not about like the one who fell harder loves the other person harder. It's just that the one who fell first falls in a graceful way, one step at the time, maybe gradually over a span of time. The one who fell harder smashes trough the air, there's blood everywhere, everything is fine-

I think people who consider aromanticism as "basically straight" underestimate how noticeable absence can be to those around you.

Whether you're a kid in school with classmates who won't take "no one" as an answer to who you have a crush on or an adult whose coworkers have picked up on the fact that you've never mentioned a romantic partner; after enough time, a lack or insufficient amount of romantic interest will raise the antennae of friends, family, coworkers, etc... They will notice and they will speculate and they will ask.

It is impossible to meet the societal bar for straightness through inaction.

I’ve got to stop telling myself "I've got to show this to Remus" whenever I read a book,"Sirius would love this" whenever I listen to a song, or "James would never do this to me" when men disappoint me.... Like, sis, they aren’t even real. Stop.

However deep you think you are into a fandom, there always seems to be something else.

I got a comment today that said smth along the lines of "I didn't wanna be weird commenting on a four month old fic"

Baby, bless your heart but four months isn't old by any means and ao3 isn't fucking instagram. Comment on fics you like, regardless of how old they are! The worst that could happen is you make an author's day. Writing is art, not content.

”match my freak” match my melancholy. be nostalgic about a past you weren’t even that happy in. find something to be haunted about throughout every second of your day

When I was 20 and got married, older women loved to try to scare me with stories of what it's like to live with a man.

My marriage is wonderful 20 years later.

Through my 20s into my 30s, older women loved to try to predict when my baby fever would kick in and they'd tell me horror stories of motherhood.

We chose not to have kids and baby fever never hit me.

Now, I'm in my 40s and older women love to tell me about how I'm going to suffer through menopause. They gleefully recount hot flashes, the weight gain, how I'll have to "work harder to be a woman".

I'm not even perimenopausal. I'm only 41. I know about menopause. It's not a secret.

Can women just let women age? This isn't support. This is aggression in pink.

new trend called 'heavenmaxxing' basically where you be really kind to others and help little old ladies cross the road & stuff

love language

I'M FUCKING CRYING LMAOOO

the “best friends who had plans of changing the world together but then one of them betrayed the other and now they’re on opposite sides and the one who betrayed the other is now morally grey and kills people but they still can’t bring themselves to kill the other because deep down they’re still in love with them” trope>>>>