#love to fully go off the rails about something unrelated to literally anything & also does not make sense unless you’ve read the post

[goodtweetbadtweet]

19, 22, 24 and 32! ❤️

Oh thanks for asking 💜 I’m gonna put my rambling under a cut.

19. Tell me a story about your writing journey. When did you start? Why did you start? Were there bumps along the way? Where are you now and where are you going?

I have been reading fanfic since I was about twelve, starting with LotR, but the earliest thing I really remember writing were these stories about this group of online-turned-offline friends that I had when I was fifteen. We all wrote a different ‘alternate universe’ versions of our little group going on some adventure. In hindsight, the stories were relatively cringey and obviously full of inside jokes, but to put it in cliche terms, it ignited a spark. Around that same time I read a really popular HP/marauders fanfic that actually inspired me to read the HP books and then I was brave enough/inspired to write my first fanfics. At first I wrote something that I thought people would want to read (in my own language) so I tried writing stuff like Sirius/Remus, and I was so used to constant praise for my writing (because my readers were all my friends) that it started to feel fake almost. Eventually I just wanted to write something that nobody I knew would ever see, so I chose a username nobody would think to connect to me, started writing in English and wrote something I actually wanted to write which was a self-indulgent, practically self-insert OC romance fic. Cringe, maybe. But so much fun.

So I’ve been writing on and off for nearly 18 years, mostly off, and you don’t even need all your fingers and toes to count the things I’ve finished. I’m not the most productive. It’s the same as with any hobby; I get really into it for a while and then eventually it fizzles out. I take breaks that last months, years even. I am at a point where I don’t know if I’ll ever call myself a good writer, but there are certain parts of my writing that I actually really love. For the first time I’m also writing with intent and not just making stuff up as I go along and I want to challenge myself a little more, exploring some darker themes etc.

22. How organized are you with your writing? Describe to me your organization method, if it exists. What tools do you use? Notebooks? Binders? Apps? The Cloud?

Not very. I am generally an organized person, but when I write I put the whole story and everything related to that into one Google Doc. I can’t stand having to switch between documents or having anything separate.

24. How much prep work do you put into your stories? What does that look like for you? Do you enjoy this part or do you just want to get on with it?

Honestly? Not enough probably. When I have an idea for a story, it can be anything from one scene that evolves into something entirely different or a whole story arc that just appears out of thin air. Like, Kendall/Avery literally started off as ‘Kendall meets a girl in rehab and has sex with her’ and was meant to be a one shot. And Lukas/Gia came to me sort of fully formed late at night. My plans are usually very short, just a quick list of things that happen in each chapter. Since I write exclusively romance/smut/relationships, I start writing from the point where the characters meet because that’s usually very clear in my mind, and then I write a bunch of unrelated scenes that I have already imagined taking place. Eventually I backtrack to the actual beginning and try to write chronologically, but it’s a lot of back and forth and connecting these scattered scenes with each other. But there is always a plan, even if it is constantly evolving it doesn’t fundamentally change, and I always know what I’m writing towards. So basically, no, I don’t do a lot of prep work, but while I’m writing I’m working on the entire story at once. I also don’t like prep work, but it is helpful and it keeps me in check.

Back when I did zero planning, I started writing and posting a Bucky Barnes/OC story chapter by chapter and it went off the rails a little bit and eventually turned into a Tony Stark/OC story which… made sense and it was kind of like the characters had a life of their own, but obviously that wasn’t what my readers had signed up for. If I had a plan, maybe that wouldn’t have happened or I would’ve realized it was inevitable while planning. Idk. That story was/is 130k words and technically I never finished or wanted it to end where it did, but I lost interest and a few years later I came back to it to see that it had run its course and the ending actually kind of worked as ‘the finale.’ Sometimes I have a hard time ending things; a plan helps with that.

32. What is a line from a poem/novel/fanfic etc that you return to from time and time again? How did you find it? What does it mean to you?

“You all know, don’t you, that if people are frightened very often, they sometimes become invisible.”

From the short story The Invisible Child by Tove Jansson. And I don’t know if it’s this line specifically, but off the top of my head this is a story that comes to mind as something that has held meaning for me since I was young and now again as a parent. It’s about Ninny, who has literally turned invisible due to living with her child-hating, abusive aunt. In a nutshell: she comes to live with the Moomin family, finds respect and love and learns to speak for herself. In many ways I relate to Ninny a lot and I think somewhere along the way I overcorrected and instead of being invisible, people pleasing and afraid I became almost confrontational and too tough. Inside I will always be Ninny, though.

Ninny in the Moomin anime

#ask game

[queenitn]

So...I just found something that I'd written one night at like 4am a month into lockdown.

It's pretty much a very unnecessarily angry rant.

I can probably contradict half the stuff I say in it myself. It's just...kinda rude in places and when I'm thinking straight there's some parts I don't really agree with myself. It's not aimed at anybody and I'm definitely a hypocrite but I'm gonna post it anyways so go wild I guess.

So I recently took a stroll through Stucky fanfiction on ao3. For a while there I'd been avoiding it, and I'd nearly convinced myself that my mind was exaggerating the whole bottom!Bucky/top!Steve thing but yeah, I'm not.

Normally, I'd say who tops or bottoms doesn't matter. It's pretty irrelevant. But... since the majority of the fanfictions clearly prefer to write bottom!Bucky, obviously, there is some significance. Wouldn't the proportion be more equal if it truly was irrelevant?

Besides being annoying as fuck, it's also pretty interesting I guess. I have nothing else to do so I'm going to be ranting about a lot of stuff.

So, I mostly try to look for bottom!Steve, right? Because that's what I like. I read a bottom!Steve fic, then I say, "Hmm, this author seems to like bottom!Steve, maybe they've written more?" I go check, and I find...mostly bottom!Bucky, with maybe one or two more bottom!Steve.

It's fine the first few times, but after a while it's honestly weird. Clearly, a lot of very good authors have no problem writing bottom!Steve. They just happen to write more bottom!Bucky. As far as I can tell, that's pretty much the common trend. But why? What exactly does one think while starting a new fic, going all, "Hmm...I think...this time.... we're gonna have bottom!Bucky again." Again and again and again until it's most times.

Why is bottom!Steve so fetishized? I don't mean the fics that actually have a dom/sub element. I mean just pure bottom!Steve itself. Why does it have to be some sort of rarity?

As far as I know, there's...really nothing in canon indicating who would likely top or bottom. (I mean yeah, I do believe that canon Bucky is more likely to want to dom than canon Steve, but that's different.)

So, what is it?

Sure, Steve is taller, has a deeper voice, more muscle, a beard....but those are just physical things. They don't actually have anything to do with taking or giving.

Besides, he used to be small before. Is that what this is about? Previously tiny man likes to be in control? Likes to...what? Prove he's a manlier man? Bullshit. Besides the fact that it's bullshit, it also doesn't seem to fit with canon Steve.

The "Sometimes I think you like getting punched" and the "And you've got nothing to prove" make me think that his proving himself had less to do with showing his dominance and more to do with showing his endurance. I'd say bottoming is exactly what he'd want to do.

Besides, wasn't that exactly what made his relationship with Bucky special? The fact that he didn't have to "prove himself" in any way? Bucky already knew his worth.

Is it because Steve likes to give orders? Some sort of "Oh, this guy was always meant to be the leader"? Well, there's a huge difference between being a leader, giving orders in a battlefield...and giving orders in the bedroom. And I'm pretty sure top/bottom preferences would be completely unrelated to who's the boss at work.

But nevermind that, as far as I can tell, sure Steve gives orders, but he also looks to the people he trusts for guidance. The best example is Nat. The thing that makes their friendship so goddamm precious is partly in the way he always glances at her for confirmation before making a decision. Isn't Bucky sort of like an Ultimate Nat with sex benefits?

Nevermind that too. Steve bossing people around is great, but that's not the point, is it? The point is does he enjoy it? I think, the only movie where he did look like he relished his power was TFA. I'm pretty confident that's because of the novelty of his new strength partially, and partially also because of the rush caused by his back to back successes. Why? Because he never seems to take that kind of enjoyment again. As opposed to...maybe Sam? The guy who gets his literal wings back after (presumably) years and lets out a whoop after being chased by the missile thingies. Sam's joy doesn't wear off. Steve's does.

Is it just me, or has this skew towards bottom!Bucky actually increased over the years? Why? I can say a few things on this.

First, maybe people need to remember a bit more that Sebastian Stan is not Bucky Barnes. Chris Evans is not Steve Rogers. And Steve Rogers is not Captain America.

No matter what you think about the actors, the characters they play are separate. Please.

Second, there is a very interesting theory that exists which says that the reason why Bucky is so popular in the fandom is because his character arc is relatable to women and the queer community in the fact that it's about him regaining his stolen agency. Which is true.

Does this have anything to do with him bottoming though? I mean, I don't know. Fanfictions are important because they allow us to explore ourselves, whether it's our sexuality or our trauma that we're trying to figure out. In that way, it makes sense that maybe we will tend to write Bucky as a bottom more often. Except no.

Partly because, having had bad experiences at a young age myself, and being queer myself, I do not relate to Bucky. And hypothetically speaking, I would totally bottom for Peggy or Bucky, but I would rail the absolute shit out of Steve. I canNOT be the only one.

Partly also because yeah, a lot of fanfiction is projection, which is good for the soul, both yours and mine, but not to the point where we create a fanon version of the character completely different from the canon one. Yeah, you could say that canon doesn't really give us much of a character, but clearly they give us something and we have to build up on that right? It's true for both Bucky and Steve. Bucky barely has lines, but his actions speak enough. There's an absolutely breathtaking character waiting for you in canon if you really want to look. As for Steve, let me just say, sass and the tiniest little hints of PTSD do not make a whole character. Marvel fucked it up, but this goes for the fandom too (this is keeping in mind that Steve technically has three movies dedicated to him and Bucky doesn't)

Stop treating Steve like your personal punching bag, Stucky fandom.

It does happen, if we project our bad experiences on Bucky, Steve often naturally fills the role of the clueless/mildly asshole-ish love interest. Not too much of an asshole though, clearly you love him.

That's fine. Fanfiction is about self expression, but should we lose sight of the canon characters that we loved so much in the first place? And isn't fanfiction just as much about exploring those characters, as objectively as we possibly can?

Another thing related to that...why do we only have to identify with one character? I don't know how to put this, but there's a thing called halo effect and I think that's kind of what happens (I'm not a psychologist).

You see something in Bucky. And then you start to attribute more and more things to him that may or may not actually exist. Like yeah, he's fullfilling the traditional love interest role in Steve's movies, but that doesn't automatically mean he's a bottom. The two things are... actually entirely unrelated. They're only related in your mind. And similar to that, when we see one thing in a character that we identify with, we kind of want to see even more things in them we identify with, but it doesn't have to be like that. That's not how any person works, and it's not how any fully developed character works. You can relate to both the characters in different ways, no need to dump it all in one.

Ok, another thing, that I don't like to think about but it's occured to me and I don't like it. So, Steve is generally coded as a bisexual, right? And Bucky is coded as gay. Look yourself in the eye in the mirror and think about whether you're unconsciously assuming that the bi guy isn't going to want to bottom. I'm a bisexual woman, I will top Steve. I kind of resent this.

Going off on another tangent, I have also delved into Stony on my quest for bottom!Steve. Pretty sure there's even less of that there. Why??? That's crazy.

Normally, I'm pretty sure Tony would be coded as the top. He's much older, richer. He clearly has control issues. That's one of his defining features. Control. (I don't mean that in a bad way.) So....what exactly do Bucky and Tony have in common besides dark hair and short hight? The only thing I could come up with was thotiness. They're both shown as Thots. Is that it? The Thot Bottoms? Ok.

Is it the whole energy thing? "Bucky has bottom energy"? Does he? Can you argue with me if I say that TFA Steve has bratty bottom energy? That TFA Bucky goes from service top energy to mean top energy? Pretty sure that's subjective. But what exactly are we seeing differently here? I'm honestly asking.

Bucky's character is ridiculously strong, stronger than Steve in some ways (besides probably physically). Specifically, it's because of his ability to not only survive, but heal. Can we acknowledge how crazy that is? He's just fucking buying plums, but that's still more than we've ever seen Steve do. You can say his trauma is greater, but it looks like his coping ability is greater too. So is that what this is? Steve doesn't cope. Instead he focuses on external things like being Cap, Hydra, Bucky. I wouldn't call that a healthy way of living...but it's romantic, right? Neglecting to take care of yourself? No, actually avoiding taking care of yourself by focusing entirely on another person? Is that it? We're romanticizing unhealthy behaviour?

Is it because you feel more for Bucky, wearing his hurt on his sleave, versus Steve who wears it hidden under his skin?

Am I allowed to believe that Steve's ultimate shield isn't the vibranium one, but Captain America himself?

That's just me getting off track and mildly pissy but the point stands. We like seeing Steve in control. He wears it well. He's good at it. But that's just not that relevant. You don't just boss poeple around in the bedroom because you're good at it, you have to want it too. Would he want it? Is a commanding voice really an indicator of a person's desire to command? Can we really say because he's usually the one giving orders (because that's his actual job), that he likes it too? Does he look like he especially likes it? No.

I've been around fandoms long enough to know that all fandoms always have a preference regarding who ultimately tops or bottoms. This isn't the first time it's bugged me, but it feels more this time because I just don't see it. And it makes me angry because it contradicts what I feel, are the best parts of the characters. No, Bucky bottoming isn't the contradiction..but all this that I wrote, the connotations of this kind of coding, the underlying thoughts.... some of it is just not nice, but some of it opposes the little things that humanize these characters. It wouldn't matter, except that it wouldn't have happened at all if it didn't matter.

It's not just what happens to them in canon that matters so much. It's also what they choose to do for themselves when they have the chance. It feels like they made their choices and half the fandom ignored it. "Nah man, you'll look better at the bottom. Look at that hair."

Because ultimately, that's what it feels like to me. A mixture of not thinking too much about it (though I know this post probably counts as overthinking), some wierd internalised heteronormativity, and I don't know what just kind of fucks with all of us. All I know is that I hate it. I hate it.

It's not the bottom!Bucky I hate, it's the underlying, unthinking assumptions. The way it's a foregone conclusion. It's not. I really just want to be able to read the goddamn fanfictions again without wanting to tear my skin off.

( You can help by giving reccs)

#steve rogers #captain america #bucky barnes #stucky

[bakechochin]

The Book Ramblings of September

In place of book reviews, I will be writing these ‘book ramblings’. A lot of the texts I’ve been reading (or plan to read) in recent times are well-known classics, meaning I can’t really write book reviews as I’m used to. I’m reading books that either have already been read by everyone else (and so any attempt to give novel or insightful criticisms would be a tad pointless), or are so convoluted and odd that they defy being analysed as I would do a simpler text. These ramblings are pretty unorganised and hardly anything revolutionary, but I felt the need to write something review-related this year. I’ll upload a rambling compiling all my read books on a monthly basis.

If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller - Italo Calvino Fuck me this is a difficult book to break down. It’s certainly among the first postmodern books that I’ve fully embraced and generally been a fan of. I can’t speak much of the literary movement save for reductionist generalisations that I’ve unwillingly picked up on, and what’s more I’m adamant not to learn any more than I need to, so you’ll have to excuse my wilful ignorance of the subject in this ramble. This story is comprised of numerous discovered snippets of texts, connected with the overarching narrative of the reader (i.e. you) trying to make sense of it all, by first trying to find the endings of the numerous story beginnings that have been presented and eventually just trying to find answers to this whole clusterfuck. In a way the constant changing from one story to the next without nicely ending it reminded me of The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, but this book kept it interesting with the element of mystique as to what the next story would entail, whereas Tomcat Murr only switched between one of two narratives. Of course, the fact that there are a number of stories means that there will inevitably be some that are better than others, and I find it rather presumptuous of Calvino to insist that I, as the protagonist (a subject that I will return to in a bit), would find each and every one of them so incredibly interesting and compelling that I must find out how they end. The text is a long and continuous journey from one new discovery to another, and whilst I expected the reasoning behind each dead-end to be founded on magic nonsense, the explanations that the book offers are rather more realistic than I was expecting. Of course, that’s not to say that the completely absurd sequence of events that transpire in the plot are at all reflective of reality, because shit really goes off the rails, but again, I’ll get back to it. The other major gimmick of this book is the idea of the reader being the story’s hero; much of the book is written in the second person, and I love how some of the story beginnings that one comes across are written as though being read by the reader, detailing the idiosyncrasies of the reader’s own internal thoughts and reading techniques. Such stuff is abandoned as the book goes on, sometimes because it is not the reader himself who is reading the stories (i.e. if another character in the story is reading it to you), and sometimes it’s because Calvino got bored of it or something. All of this amounts to a good book, but i do have a number of rather petty gripes about the book generally stemming from my own lack of understanding as to what I should be getting out of this book, that all came together to leave me feeling rather sour about the whole experience. As the story does get more and more absurd, with false explanations and apocrypha running rampant, it does seem like Calvino is deliberately trying to write what is, in his own words, ‘a complex of cogs, tricks, traps’, which is of course a fascinating basis for a book but hardly an enjoyable one, as the whole experience can often seem a tad futile as you read pages upon pages of what amounts to nothing but unimportant nonsense. The story beginnings that we get don’t really inspire intrigue or further thought as to what could happen next, because they’re deliberately written to seem like self-enclosed stories or lazy cliffhangers, and as much as I want to be annoyed about this, Calvino justifies it in-text via a character who acts as a mouthpiece for some of his rambling thoughts on the matter of this book. To go back to how the story goes off the rails, the idea of falsification and deception is all well and good but Calvino takes the theme too far by making whole areas of reality, areas seemingly unrelated to the conspiracy of the plot, completely defined by falsification, changing the tone of the story to a farcical comedy in which the philosophical wittering of before seemed incredibly incongruous in. It’s also at this point that Calvino bores of contriving reasons as to why the story’s protagonist cannot get a hold of a complete copy of the book they search for, because Calvino is too busy wallowing in how clever he is. Yes, all of this is justified at the end, with the idea of a constant pursuit of knowledge destined to go on ad nauseam being proved as folly, and yes the ending did ameliorate my mood (as well as annoying me that Calvino had knocked it out of the fucking park when all I wanted was to be annoyed with him), but that doesn’t mean that I can just ignore everything up to that point that grated on me. Honestly I don’t get this book beyond being able to appreciate it for its novel ideas and great execution; if it’s supposed to be charming, or life-changing, or bring warmth to my heart or any other ineffable soulful feeling, I’m not feeling it, but that might just be because I’m not sure what it is that I’m supposed to be fucking feeling. Whatever.

Today I Wrote Nothing - Daniil Kharms Chances are this will be a relatively short ramble, because I feel that to intellectualise these stories too much would be to do them a disservice, whilst trying to spend time breaking down each short story with subjective criticisms would be bloody daft. Kharms shines when he is writing what is described in the blurb as ‘micro-fiction’, tiny tiny stories of no more than a page or two; because such stories are so short it’s difficult to isolate any one story that shines out of all of them, especially when considering that the stories are often very similar in content and (high) quality. In simple terms, pretty much every story in Kharms' 'Events’ is chaotic nonsense with a strangely aggressive tone, and keeping with the description of Kharms' main tools in the introductory chapter as ‘digression and interruption’, the stories are just as likely to end with the characters anticlimactically leaving the chaos to do something else as they are to clobber each other to death with cucumbers. It’s incredible. The torrent of unleashed insanity amidst a relatively banal normal setting reminded me of ‘Marvellous Pursuits’, my favourite Cortazar story, but other than that I honestly cannot think of much to compare Kharms’ writing to, at least not in the world of respectable literature. Perhaps it shouldn’t be considered surprising that Kharms was linked to the Surrealist movement - all sorts of wacky shit went on with those blokes. Perhaps you could have surmised from my glib and reductionist summary of the Surrealist movement that I know sweet fuck all about what the movement specifically entails, but, as I said above, I’m disinclined to read into these stories as anything other than madness for madness’ sake. However, everything that I’ve said mainly describes Kharms’ ‘Events’, and there’s more to this book than just the ‘Events’, which unfortunately don’t really live up to the amazing standards that the ‘Events’ establish. Fair warning, my thoughts on this are really rather subjective, and I totally acknowledge that it would be rather churlish of me to criticise the content in this book that deviates from the micro-fiction style simply because it isn’t more of the same, but I’m still going to do just that anyway. The short story ‘The Old Woman’, whilst apparently being chock-full of allusions to other literary texts that I didn’t pick up on, cannot capture the essence of the micro-fictions because its significantly longer length leaves the Kharms brand of oddness diluted and insubstantial; what nonsense there is in the text has to be spread thinly over too many pages. And then on the other end of the scale, you’ve got all of Kharms’ miscellaneous notes and writings and incomplete jottings of half-formed ideas; the fact that this book is described as ‘the selected writings of Daniil Kharms’ seems rather daft to me, because it seems like literally every single solitary scrap of Kharms’ writing is published here, as opposed to his exemplary writings being explicitly picked and chosen. Kharms’ miscellaneous writings, both in 'The Blue Notebook’ and just from anywhere else, aren’t as substantial or fleshed out as his ‘Events’, and considering how short and nonsensical the ‘Events’ were, this seems an impressive feat. Even if the texts are complete, sometimes they lack that all-important chaotic nonsense that we’re all here for. There’s some good stuff dispersed throughout such segments of this book, but such gems are relatively sparse when compared to the wider body of boring works from Kharms. Now I obviously can’t be too hard on this bloke; a lot of his writing stems from his own lack of faith in his writing abilities or skills at pumping out consistently good content (hence the title of the whole collection), and so I’m a tad hesitant to bring down harsh judgements on a bloke who wasn’t constantly cracking out gems even when he wasn’t locked up in state custody. I will, however, say that Kharms’ best works are certainly his ‘Events’, and I reckon that unless you’re willing to trawl through all of his notes and nonsense to scrounge for more of the good stuff, just focus your attentions on the 'Events’ when reading Kharms.

Stuff I read this month that I couldn’t be arsed to ramble about: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (which I love, but am holding off on finishing my ramble on until I’ve read Through the Looking Glass), An A-Z of Hellraisers by Robert Sellers (which was repetitive and a tad awkwardly written but nonetheless a very educational and entertaining read), The Time Traveller’s Guide to Restoration Britain by Ian Mortimer (which may even be funnier than the other Time Traveller’s Guides if only because of that randy shitlark Samuel Pepys) and ‘The Body-Snatcher’ by Robert Louis Stevenson (it was pretty good).

#book reviews #book ramblings #if on a winter's night a traveller #italo calvino #today i wrote nothing #daniil kharms #i'm getting more into my history books now #but not like boring world history #i'm talking niche micro histories about dark or banterous subject matters #tumblr was not providing me with the dosage of such as i felt i deserved so i went a-hunting #look forward to some books like that in the future #i mean i won't ramble about them because they'll be non-fiction and there's only so many ways of saying 'the book was interesting' #but you can live your life content with the knowledge that i am bettering myself when it comes to weird niche fields of history