#and other stuff of that ilk

[aroguexenolith]

I am not fervent enough for fandom discords, but I do have strong opinions on cotton sheets and leather care and easy but really yummy meals to make. So, uh, is there a discord somewhere for millennials doing boring adult stuff where we can talk about 401k rollovers and if they have a specific brand of mattress pad they like?

#those are my people #wherever they may be #maybe someday we will find each other #I guess for a lot of people the obvious answer is ‘this is literally just your friend group’ #but I regret to inform you that if you turn to the index of my life #and go to the f section and look carefully until you find the entry for #friend group - members of #or friend group -year established #and other stuff of that ilk #you will find nothing there! #my friend groups were ephemeral at best! #and anyway I don’t like my mattress pad very much and need opinions other than Wirecutter

[greedbent]

one another thing i'm supremely feral about when it comes to this crowman edgelord mcshadypants is that he legit can be so blindsided by people being legitimately heartless and uncaring

. . . allow me to explain— awnjgoha

yes, he himself is ruthless because the life he lives and the environment he lives in forces him to be. because he cannot risk having any softness or attachments that can be exploited because that's the thing !!!

everyone has a weakness no matter how typically cold and detached you are, there's always at least one thing (and oftentimes one person) that is a . . . shall we say pressure point that can be used against you

and the most interesting thing to me is that kaz often uses people's families and other similar attachments as his leverage. he basically banks on the reality that "hey, this guy cares about his wife, so if she's threatened, he'll do what i ask" or "this woman's love for her children is stronger than anything in the world; she'd bend over backwards to protect them, so let's do something with that"

kaz himself grew up with a good family he had a brother he adored he had a great dad he cannot fathom the dysfunctional families where a parent legitimately despises their kid or vice versa, so when he does come across that reality . . . ?

cough Wylan and Jan cough

it honestly always throws him off similarly to coming across someone who has zero attachments or genuine affection for anyone else; it's wildly outlandish to him and honestly disturbing if he just cannot find anything to them

#〣♚{ headcanon } #i've talked about similar things before but i just !!! always find myself thinking of this stuff #one of so many reasons kaz tries so damn hard to at least SEEM heartless and uncaring #bc bOY HOWDY DOOOOO people CAN AND WILL use that against him #and the other interesting thing ??? :3c #people will use that against him in the worst and most TWISTED ways -- they won't bLUFF #meanwhile kaz may be a heckin bastard but he ain't about to hurt an innocent person #he utilizes that pressure point simply by putting on a convincing show ;) #let the person FEAR that their precious child is in danger and OOP his work is done #buuut he knows how cutthroat people of his ilk are #they would absolutely destroy those he cares about without blinking an eye just to get to him soooo #him gotta be careful ovo; #anyway don't mind me always finding ways to hyper-analyze this freak and be obsessed #i'd be here more often ACTUALLY WRITING with folks if yaknow #kaz was more cooperative and didn't just give me the biggest stink eye #each time i want him to go and interact with someone #honey i know you hate 99% of the population but we're here for a REASON-- plS

[cmgirlie]

man really sucks that we've spent the whole day talking about this bullshit instead of the actual wrestling

#if i ever see meltzer and his ilk it's on sight #you cant even try to focus on other stuff with these idiots flooding twitter with bullshit

[jane-friend]

“Would I be so self-indulgent as to want goat horns and hooves or should I expect the more realistic bear ears and tail” I say, full well knowing that if animal qualities manifested in people that I’d actually probably just be a fucking Guinea Pig.

#same with were-creature stuff #all these posts about ‘wish I woke up with a tail’ and stuff #and others of that ilk #and I can only think that if they applied to me that it’d be already determined and very disappointing

[primatechnosynthpop]

Graduating from album cover parodies to movie poster redraws... might be a lateral move

[ID: a redraw of the poster for Ernest Scared Stupid (1991), which shows him in a moonlit graveyard hiding inside a pumpkin, facing the viewer and looking terrified. The redraw features a cat version of the eponymous character, and the title at the bottom says "Whorlheart Scared Mouse-Brained". End ID]

#im not usually the type to post halloween related stuff in the middle of summer so idk why i drew this #other than that it's arguably the most iconic ernest movie cover or at least probably my favourite #believe it or not i'll probably have more kitty drawings of this ilk ready for you guys in a day or so #then my skill at turning human characters' names into warrior cat names shall truly be put to the test #my art

[redjaybird]

[ive been driven to annoyance by one thing and now im thinking too much about other things that bug me]

#ooc #my stepdad said something along the lines of just chatting and gaming all the time and not doing anything else seems boring or pointless #like I have plans for doing other shit! it just takes me time to get around to things sometimes i cant just art all the time because not #everything works at the same time when itd be convenient #and im also trying to think about what im going to do with myself and i still dont know so SHUSH #and now im off thinking about other stuff #Im sorry i cant constantly work on random projects or dont have wheels in my butt ilke you do!

[doomxdriven]

Jin throwing the occasional party at his mansion(s)? More likely than you think.

#headcanons: jin #//as his ultimate goals draw closer that sort of stuff happens far less. understandably. but up until that point #//you can bet he hosts some interesting parties every now and then. #//sometimes they are themed parties-- masquerade ball is a cliche but guilty pleasure of his. but not the only theme he'll entertain #//sometimes they are just parties of pure revelry. really depends on his mood. #//little events like these are always spread by word of mouth too. its never anything advertised or 'official'. #//that. along with the mansion(s) often remote locations and gothic architecture definitely give these parties a very #//seedy. spooky. & mysterious vibe thats often reflected by the people attending. jin. the other bount & associates but also #//who knows who else. all manner of ilk from all parts of society and creeds 🧐🧐

[elainemorisi]

"We wound up with a world where popularity is king, and discoverability is badly broken... In other words, if you can’t find something you’ll enjoy, you won’t stick around. You can’t hum a song you never heard, you can’t see a movie you don’t know exists, and you can’t read a book if you never so much as learn the title."

I don't think the dude is particularly wrong about problem or existing solution, but I do think he missed the chunk of readers who are both too invested to want top-10 and too time-poor or disinterested to engage in The Exact Right Subcurrent Of Social Media to gain anything from it, and as one of those, this phenomenon is exhausting and intensely frustrating

#it is why I have stopped both reading anything new and trying to talk to anyone anywhere about anything I read/watch/etc #I follow some of you in part because you have a tendency to remark on stuff that's reliably interesting but that's the best I got #and I've not stumbled across anyone who does that often for current sff #which like! I am a SFF Reader I always have been always will be but good god it's exhausting #to pay any attention in the first place given y'know Discourse and all associated Stuff That Isn't Talking About Books #to filter through this problem which imo does actually occur past the top 10 in most subcurrents of social media too #to relatedly also filter out what is effective modern promotion vs a work of any interest #like I am pretty good at browsing bookshelves and random mentions and old reviews of old stuff etc etc #but I sure would like to ever talk about this with fellow casuals and the spaces for casuals seem... slim #talk about and lurk about #that's my other perpetual gripe of this ilk #how lurk-hostile the modern internet is #I actually do think it's relevant right the algorithms gain nothing from lurk in any sense in which I mean it

[lizbethborden]

Its so true, Dworkin and Mackinnon predicted everything about this current era. Porn has become sex now; teenage girls being bullied into anal and getting choked by boys and coerced into sending nudes at an age typically understood as one of “exploration”—now porn defines sex and sexuality; and Gail Dines and many others have talked about the deeply deadening effect of porn on empathy and the ability to recognize women as people. Porn crept ever further into the mainstream and it has totally saturated our culture, from the ‘arts’—not just streaming/TV or Lars Von Trier films, but I’m thinking of stuff as small as frames of comic books traced from porn, art distributed online traced from porn—to the personal intimate lives of human beings, women being choked, spat on, beaten—then again, even back in the 80s, men were using porn to abuse women, and the most widely available stuff was still not as vile as the porn you can find with a 2sec Google search from any phone or computer today. Deepfake porn turns all women existing in public into potential victims of violent and degrading misogynist fetishism and sexuality. OF and its ilk makes it possible for any woman to monetize herself in the form of porn and in a time of increasing economic instability, inflation, high food and gas prices, the upcoming potential loss of health insurance for millions, I’m sure it’s more appealing than ever. Porn terminology is everywhere, “MILF,” “ebony,” etc. And all of this is done under the guise of sexual liberation and free speech, and to argue against it is seen as puritanical, condescending at best, hateful, antifeminist, “SWERF”/“TERF”-y at worst. It is a demonstrated fact of the research done into porn that it shuts off vital abilities to connect with women as human beings, to empathize with women and to reject violence against us; that porn usage conditions the user into seeking out ever more intense, bizarre, violent content to use in order to achieve the same pleasure and orgasm that “vanilla” content used to do for them. What must it be doing to all of us, collectively, to have porn on every level of our culture now? What is it doing to the position of women in our society, already half citizens at best, earning significantly less than men, with our bodily autonomy stripped away in many states, being denied life-saving procedures and medications—not just mifepristone etc but even things like lupus medication and anti-inflammatories that may potentially affect us and our bodies if we chose at some point to maybe get pregnant—even being arrested for drinking or taking drugs while decidedly not pregnant because it could affect a potential fetus at some point? Are we not degraded objects already? What does it mean for us to be reduced to “cumsocks” and pornographic objects on top of all this? How deeply destructive is this society, how much further will it go to enforce the category of woman as hole, woman as receptacle, woman as vessel, woman as meat?

[ossifer-bones]

the paul poll compelled me to just quickly write up my little opinion piece on paul and necromancy in the tlt verse bcs tags are a pain in the ass to elaborate on my opinion in: paul horrifies me. i think that a lot of people read palamedes' interpretation of lyctorhood as being some sort of objective truth and that there is a right way to do lyctorhood and paul is it, but i just don't agree with that; i think in a series rife with unreliable narrators, palamedes' views on lyctorhood should be considered as subjective as any other person's.

“Can one person even be two people? I feel like I’ve only got enough room inside for me, and sometimes like that room’s not even enough.” “Lyctors can,” said Palamedes, “or at least—they thought they could; in fact all they became were half-dead cannibals. I think a true Lyctorhood is a mutual death … a gravitational singularity creating something new. A true Grand Lysis, rather than the Petty Lysis of the megatheorem [...]

what he says here about lysis is in response to nona asking if one person can be two people, and thus it is a very loaded statement when coming from someone heralding from a society where the extreme co-dependence of the fundamentally unequal necro/cav bond is encouraged, especially considering camilla and palamedes are called out by others from that same society as being an exemplary case of co-dependence in that department!

camilla and palamedes are arguably more equal than any other cav/necro pair in series, in part due to that co-dependence, but we even see in NtN that cam does stuff that undercuts that equality (telling pyrrha to lie to palamedes, 'don't tell him i was weak'). and that equality, that love, is shown to be thought of as coming at the cost of freedom: when palamedes says, “I cannot bear the thought of using you.”—camilla responds, “Love and freedom don’t coexist, Warden.”

in the end, every permutation of the necro and cav pairing is irrevocably descended from john + alecto's example and while i think beauty can be found in some of them, they all suffer from the same fundamental imbalance that bond hinges on; nonconformity abates it, but abolishment is required for real freedom from it. the so-called indelible sin of lyctorhood is just an echo of the original sin john committed.

If there was one thing Gideon knew about necromancers, it was that they needed power. Thanergy—death juice—was abundant wherever things had died or were dying. Deep space was a necro’s nightmare, because nothing had ever been alive out there, so there were no big puddles of death lying around for Harrow and her ilk to suck up with a straw.

necromancy necessitates consumption, taking by its very nature: death, especially violent death, is what fuels it—infants producing more thanergy on death is literally a noted phenomena! paul's birth, while it could be seen as triumphant in the sense of it being an act of creation, is literally identified by palamedes himself as a mutual death, death being required to fuel it the same as any other necromantic working. i don't want to say 'necromancy is fundamentally evil' but uh... it is irrevocably tied into john's conception of human nature: "This is the problem, the incorporation, this is the hardest part … It’s the human instinct, to take."

something i always point out about camilla and palamedes' grand lysis is theparallel with gideon and harrow's incomplete petty lysis: both come about as a result of a fully-realised lyctor (ianthe, cytherea) having cornered the pair, resulting in both being threatened with imminent death (camilla critically injured and palamedes facing expulsion from naberius when ianthe re-emerges; harrow necromantically spent and gideon having suffered multiple injuries, both going to die when cytherea breaks through the bone dome). paul's birth only happened as a direct result of the continuation of the lyctoral cycle of violence, with ianthe in cytherea's position; per palamedes, “I am not saying this was our inevitable end … I am saying we have found the best and truest and kindest thing we can do in this moment.”

paul may be the best and truest and kindest thing cam and pal could've done in that moment, but that moment should've never came to pass: the codependency instilled into them through their society, the violence that put them in that position, and the consumptive necromancy that made paul possible. paul is horrifying because they are the most hopeful and kind thing, and they are the product of two people, one sans his own body, undergoing mutual death to fuel their birth.

they're the truest response to one flesh, one end: an oath purportedly coined by cristabel and alfred, who compelled their necromancers to ascend via a suicide pact.

valancy says one flesh one end sounds like instructions for a sex toy. can’t stop thinking about that so can someone stop cris and alfred before the sex toy phrase catches on, thanks.

did the sex toy phrase really need a response?

#the locked tomb #nona the ninth spoilers

[artbyblastweave]

Every once in a while I circle back around to tinkering with something in the "weird town" subgenre popularized by Night Vale, Gravity Falls, and all their ilk. One of the ideas I've had involves said town having the Riverdale/Springfield dynamic of literally every geographical formation in North America be within driving distance of the town- Mountains, Gold Mines, Deserts, Oceans, Forests, Ski resorts, whatever- and at first this is just the same kind of thing The Simpsons does to try and troll attentive viewers, but later down the line it's revealed that the metaphysical geographical ambiguity is a well-understood quality of the place and is in fact one of the big reasons people put up with all the other nightmarish stuff; the jurisdictional ambiguity makes for a fantastic tax dodge.

#thoughts #meta #my writing

[archie-sunshine]

ur hypnosis stuff is the best. the only other transformers fan in the world ive seen who gets it. youre doing a great service to me and my ilk (i preemptively get paranoid about asks so. disregard this if tumblr fucks up and un anons it somehow lol)

TYSM!!!! I really enjoy hypno stuff- I've kinda slowed down a little bit with it bc i havent had big great ideas about it but ive got some asks floating around that have some so im planning on doing a little hypno night tonight!!! (with some JAK and pandora content sprinkled in- because im obsessed with them and its my blog and i do what i please)

anyways heres some first aid <3

#archie answers #my art #transformers #my requests #mtmte #valveplug #first aid #/nsfw #/nsft #hypnosis #lemon

[max1461]

Thought for a moment in the 2010s that we were entering a new serious era (e.g. 1920s, 30s, 40s), but it seems that we're instead in an increasingly tacky era (50s, 60s, 70s). Like look at the change in YouTube. Well you all are textheads you don't do video, I know that. But like. In 2017 there was ContraPoints. Agree or disagree with her opinions, what she was doing was conceptually and aesthetically serious. Even her early, low-production-value stuff. She was talking about incels and other internet shit, but the internet is part of the real world, that's fine. In fact that's what gave me hope for another serious era, people were finally talking about internet stuff the way 1920s German intellectuals or whatever talked about the cultural trends of their day. Maybe because Contra has half a philosophy PhD and was explicitly influenced by those German intellectuals.

Another example from a totally disjoint cultural niche was Digi a.k.a. Trixie a.k.a. Ygg Studios or whatever they go by now. Drunk, smelly, and unkempt—yes. Or at least so went the persona. Talking seriously about anime—also yes. When they claimed they were the only good anime reviewer on the internet it made a lot of people mad. But they were right!

There were thinkers, we had thinkers. My generation, or roughly my generation, had thinkers. To be clear, when I include Contra here I'm not including all of her ilk, I'm not including the leftist-theory-regurgitators and so on. But Contra herself was a thinker! Digi was a thinker! We had thinkers.

But that era is over now, on YouTube at least. I go on there and it's all algorithmic drivel. I look for anime content and as I've explained it's all about #hype and #epic and how the new season of whatever #hits different and other empty meaningless bullshit. No analysis, no thought, fundementally unserious bullshit. Tacky! It's tacky! The the YouTube thumbnail O-face is fucking 70s-ass fake wood paneling tacky bullshit!

MrBeast. I've never seen a MrBeast video but I hate him for what he represents. I used to watch this channel called Wranglerstar, he made videos about different types of axes and forest fire fighting equipment and various other stuff. "Modern homesteading" I believe was the tagline. And it was always evident that he was a far-right guy but who gives a shit, his videos where good. Serious videos about interesting topics, that a fucking normal guy might watch. Well around 2020 he basically started flooding his channel with covid conspiracy bullshit and "the Chinese are going to attack us any day!" bullshit and other unserious crap. And I had to stop watching. How could I find any of that compelling? It's vapid nonsense.

And I don't know if it's a shift in the algorithm or people becoming more savvy to the algorithm or what, but all of YouTube is like this now. Vapid clickbait empty meaningless bullshit for another tacky commercialized bullshit era.

And you know, I felt like it might just be localized to YouTube for a while, but I started to look around, and it just feels like everything is like this. Backsliding to the tacky times. God I hate tackiness. I hate unseriousness. I'm having a little meltdown. At least SMW kaizo hacks are having a renaissance. People are doing serious shit in that space, serious shit that is also not anachronistic, you know, it's kept up with the modern world. It addresses modern concerns (fun to play hard Mario). But it's serious. People are serious. One of the few serious things happening in my orbit.

Even in science it feels like people aren't serious anymore. You know, standard Sabine Hossenfelder complaint about particle physics. But I don't really know enough about that to say. Get the vibe that biology is still serious these days.

To be clear, everything I'm saying here is pure vibes. I'm just saying shit. I'm just saying shit that I feel. But I'll be deeply disappointed if I have to live my youth in another tacky era, god damn it. Even the 80s seem like they were better than this.

#navel gazing #insane-type complaining sorry

[headspace-hotel]

Do you have any tips for solid worldbuilding?

Signed, an amateur fantasy writer whose only prior fantasy worldbuilding knowledge was ToG and its ilk 😭😭😭

Don't get your ideas just from other fantasy books. Get inspiration mostly from real world things that are cool to you. Read non-fiction about stuff that is really interesting to you, even if it's just wikipedia articles. Then imagine what those things might be like in a fantasy world.

If there is any topic that you know a lot about, write that into your worldbuilding. If you know a lot about purebred cats, imagine fantasy purebred cats or purebred dragons. If you know a lot about cooking, go crazy with fantasy food. If you know a lot about fiber arts, guess what

Instead of trying to make up a "new" take on an existing mythological creature, just make something up.

Don't be judgmental. When you are building cultures, remember that cultural beliefs and practices exist for a reason, so always try to see their perspective of the world and why it is the way that it is. There is really no such thing as "superstition," only the tendency of humans to grasp at patterns in situations where they don't have control.

People who are the same religion can have very different beliefs and probably could end up arguing with each other. Also, not all religions are based on "belief/faith" or have heaven and hell, that's mostly Christianity.

Don't try to force big political events in your world to line up with the individual stories of characters; the evil ruler can get killed halfway through your story instead of at the climax of the story. Your character doesn't have to actually fight in the decisive battle that changes the course of history. Your character doesn't have to be a queen or "important figure." History doesn't have main characters; 99.9% of people are just some guy, and the .1% mostly THINK they're just some guy, and none of them understand the historical significance of an event as it's happening to them. Stories are happening all the time, they don't have to link directly to kings and empires.

BUT, if you want to write about main characters who are queens and princes and stuff, don't try to ground them in realistic political issues and down to earth explorations of social problems. Stories where the "main character of history" thing works are frequently interpersonal/familial dramas exaggerated to the world-wide stage AND/OR heavily mythologized to the point where the characters have a demi-god-like status AND/OR soap opera like dramas where everyone's vices and unusual traits and charisma are exaggerated. The climax of Star Wars or of Hamlet isn't ABOUT regime change, it's about the familial relationships of the characters.

Instead of trying to figure out big things like "culture," "food" etc, pay attention to your everyday life for a while and think about how your character would do things you do, like wash their hair or go out to buy food. Where does your character go to hang out? How do they clean their teeth? How do they learn the news?

Just make stuff up whenever you feel like it and you can write it all in throughout later.

Use sensory details to describe otherworldly things and be EXTREMELY specific and EXTREMELY confident about it. If your character drinks a potion, you have to describe the taste in a way that only someone who has drunk that potion could possibly be able to guess. So don't say it tasted "sour," say that it tasted like lemon rind, except with none of the fresh crispness of citrus, but instead a perfume-like burning that seemed to cling to the inside of your mouth and make your throat feel frostbitten.

If you think of an idea that feels a little TOO weird and bizarre, that's a sign that it's exactly the amount of weird and bizarre that it needs to be.

Ignore any of these pieces of advice that you want, don't listen to writing advice too much

#worldbuilding

[beebopurr]

here's another! Even longer! Hope you like it, from @ilk-insolence

---

“–so she just would not give up on those fucking oysters! And after I let her get the last of the lobsters too!”

“Mmm,” Leo hummed behind her.

April placed the box of old paraphernalia on the kitchen counter and began cutting it open.

“And you know what she said to me? She said, ‘only fools would relinquish shellfish to their opponent!’”

“Mmm,” Leo repeated. She heard him haul more boxes in the living room. “And yet, by the end of it, you gave up the oysters.”

“Only ‘cause her kid was cute,” April responded, “but that was weird too! Who brings their kid to a fish market in the middle of the day? Poor thing was going to get crushed!”

Leo laughed. It changed a lot from the chittering April first heard all those weeks ago.

“What?”

“It’s just, funny. You, of all people calling someone weird.”

April shoved down an old self-conscious shadow she never quite managed to outrun and focused on sorting the dusty tea set from the box. “What do you mean?”

“You literally clobber any poacher wielding guns that sneak onto the island with nothing but a bat. You laugh at actual ghosts. You try to catch fish with your bare hands. You’re the weirdest human I’ve ever met April.”

When April was younger, a comment like that came with a sense of failure. Whenever other kids avoided her at school or playgrounds it was because she was too passionate, too rambunctious, too much. Too weird. Admittedly some of those kids were wack, haughty with hindsight; but Leo wasn’t one of them. He was unabashed, self-assured, so if he said April was weird then it was simply true.

Yet, she didn’t find herself minding this time.

Maybe something about a giant mutant turtle who’s ostracized by society being the one to call her weird had something to do with it; made it into a compliment. April felt an easy warmth fill her.

She and Leo continued sorting through the old boxes with possessions the prior lighthouse keepers left behind. April was determined to use some of that stuff for decor or functionality and save herself the money. It wasn’t like the past keepers were coming back for it anyway.

“Oooh, what’s that?” Leo asked.

“Hm?” April peeled away from her box on the couch to peer into the wooden case Leo put on the carpet. “That’s a record player. You put a black disc thingy inside it to make it spin, and then you put the needle on it to play music. Man, I haven’t seen one of those things in ages.”

April looked to Leo. He was staring at the device with a fragile expression. Slowly, he lifted a hesitant hand towards it, then pulled back. Leo still hadn’t told April who taught him English.

Without taking his eyes off the record player, Leo asked, “Can we try it? Play something on it, I mean.”

April winced, “Sorry no, I didn’t find any records here”––Leo’s face fell––”but! But, we can play music from my phone!”

She quickly whipped it out from her jacket, “You want anything specific?”

Leo leaned over her shoulder like he usually did whenever the device was around. “Could it do any song?”

“Uh, nearly any, I think. You got something in mind?”

“Yeah. M–I used to listen to it pretty often. I uh, don’t know the name of it though.”

“Well, you could look up the lyrics.” April passed him her phone.

Leo paused for a moment, a pursed look on his face, then he slowly typed onto the screen. A youtube video popped up as the first hit. He looked to April, confused. She gestured, “Play it.”

The song took a second to load. Then a drawl:

Put your loving hand out, baby

Like a flower, a bright delighted smile grew on Leo’s face. He looked at April, sheer amazement. She was too, she didn’t think she would recognize the song.

Cause I’m beggin’

When the beat hit, April bobbed her head to it, Leo echoing a second after. His delighted smile didn’t take long to turn playful. He stood up, the bobbing shifting down to his whole body. April followed. Together, they extended their hand out to one another.

So put your loving hand out baby

It was stupid; their uncoordinated jigging around the boxes splayed across the living room. April laughed as Leo kept dramatically outstretching his hand whenever the penultimate lyric popped up. After the first chorus helped knock her memory into place, April began belting the parts she knew. They weren’t quite dancing together, swaying a movement that didn’t match the other, but they were having fun together so they were dancing together.

When April looked up, gasping for breath and laughter, Leo was smiling at her like she was the unicorn from the movie they watched together. She felt her chest flutter, a warmth ballooning from within that pushed out everything else.

So put your loving hand out darlin’

When it was over, the autoplay simply moved onto the next song. The boxes around them laid forgotten for some time.

---

Leo’s feet crunched on the gravel that made the entrance of his home. He never really realized how nice the sound was, crisp, firm. He chirped into the cave to announce his arrival. The walls swallowed the echoes with their lovely texture. Outside their cove, the ocean rumbled her endless beautiful song. Leo chirped again, just to hear it in the air.

A following panicked chirp responded. Leo! Leo! It was Donnie. Raph’s hurt!

His blood froze. Leo ran into the cave and nearly slammed into Donnie. What happened?!

Donnie simply ran deeper into the cave. When it widened into their largest cavity, Leo saw Raph lying under the blankets next to their campfire. He could hear him breath heavily. Leo rushed forward, instinctively chirping comfortingly. Raph rumbled back.

Leo pushed back the blankets to see his wounded leg, blood already seeping heavily against the makeshift bandages. It was on his left thigh, the red signaling to Leo that the wound was two-way; something pierced clean through the flesh.

Hunters.

No, no, no, no, not again.

Leo touched Raph’s forehead. Fever. Shit.

I’m okay. I’m okay. Raph rumbled, though the pain lacing his every breath made it extremely ignorable.

Leo trilled, Mikey?

Still outside. Donnie then turned and left for the exit. Leo went to their supplies for more bandages. When he sat back down Raph was still rumbling. I’ll be okay. I’ll be okay.

When did this happen?

Somewhere around the coastal town. They were new.

Shit.

Raph’s hand came up to his shoulder with the old scar. Went through this before. Raph’ll be fine.

It was terrifying the last time too. Leo rewrapped Raph’s leg, making sure to pressure it hard. He also put wet cloths on his forehead. The fever scared him. For a second, Leo thought about bringing up April. She could help, she probably even had better medicine.

But the others didn’t trust her. Raph didn’t trust her. Wounded like this, he’d be even more reluctant to open up.

Donnie came back with Mikey before complete sundown. Together, they hunkered in for the night.

Deadass you should put this on ao3 or sm I'll share the link

#lighthouse au

[olderthannetfic]

First as a disclaimer: I'm pretty sure I'm not an anti (I'm anti death threats and am fine with incest, age-gap, abusive ships etc)

However I'm probably still a social/political enemy for various reasons but you sometime post asks from people you disagree with I think and I think you might know this answer.

Anyway onto my question I'm the kind of shipper who likes canon compliant ships and looking for hints and stuff but these days it feels like everyone boasts about how much their ships deviate and poop on canon etc. Do other shippers with my mentality still exist and I just don't notice them (Outside of anti spaces) or are we actually a dying breed?

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Eh. I think "political enemy" has a pretty fluid definition if one is really into playing politics. If you aren't out campaigning on a white supremacy platform, we probably have some goals in common.

I usually block people for being extremely annoying on a day I'm feeling hormonal or for attacking people particularly viciously in my comments, not for nominally being in some other camp.

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I think the more canon-adjacent fandom flavors are actually really common.

They're a little lost in the tumult of "My headcanon is actually canon!!!" stuff on tumblr that we like to laugh at on my own blog.

They're also less common in oldschool m/m-shipping spaces because those are often inherently non-canon ships. In the past, it was because homophobic censorship wouldn't let anything be made. These days, it's because the flavor of m/m a lot of people like is more easily found by adding romance to a buddy canon than by trying to add buddy-ness to a romance canon in many cases, and this can be true even if canon is original m/m aimed at fandom types.

Here's the thing: oldschool m/m shippers tend to be particularly prone to building community spaces and recording our history precisely because it's so easily erased and so often attacked. This type of shipper also tends to have more of a cohesive identity. That makes it far easier to name ourselves and set up little fiefdoms on modern social media.

I'm one of these people. Shittons of the people doing amateur fandom history work are. Much of the OTW old guard are. And lots of us know each other at least a bit, so if you're running into one of us, you're probably running into more of us.

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However, that doesn't actually mean this type of shipping is the most common or that there have never been spaces devoted to something else.

That old Beauty and the Beast tv series with Linda Hamilton had epic canon shippers. So did Moonlight (the vampire tv series). So did and does Twilight.

A lot of these shippers had this as their first and possibly their only fandom and carried on being obsessed long after canon was over.

Lizzie/Darcy shippers put anything I have ever been a fan of to shame. No matter what the AO3 numbers show, this ship far, far exceeds the popularity of Destiel or any of the other m/m heavyweights.

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I think the problem you're running into is that in the modern era of binging things on Netflix and regular joes being huge media geeks, analyzing canon in a nerdy way and obsessing over your canon ships is just how a big chunk of the population engages with media.

Fan theories that are closely tied to what was actually on the screen/page are the bread and butter of water cooler conversations and have been since The Sopranos and its ilk.

Yes, I know some fuck will immediately show up and go "Ahem, ahem, I am a GEEK and SPECIAL and the people around me never have intellectual conversations about media literally ever!!!!" just like every single time we have this conversation. But times have moved on, and being overinvested in canon theorizing just is a normie activity now, and that's great! Except when you want a special term and space to find your people.

The only time canon shippers really stand out from that is if they're extremely fic-focused, and then they often start straying farther from canon, especially if they stick around the same fandom for a long time. Either they start becoming more fans of some fic writer or they start wanting to diversify what they themselves are writing.

The really good close-to-canon fandom activities are at their best when lots of fans find the same currently-running canon at the same time and before canon itself passes its prime.

Even I started out on alt.tv.x-files, analyzing the shit out of season 2 and not caring much about non-canon things. (Though, admittedly, I was more NoRomo than MSR.)

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That said, antis are not actually that canon-focused in most cases. They will do the "My headcanon is reality" thing as much as anyone. They just tend to spend a lot of time hating on explicit m/m and a lot of explicit m/m is of non-canon ships.

Honestly... anon... you might want to figure out what the latest CSI-ish franchise is and find the obviously-future-canon het ship from that. Those tend to get the 10 seasons of build up and fan theories that don't stray too far from canon.

This stuff is not only not a dying breed, but it's so common that one of the editors of NCIS delivered a deeply cringeworthy lecture at my film school about what "shippers" are and how the Tiva shippers affected the production.

People into those ships don't need tumblr: Major entertainment magazines are publishing their fan theories for them.