#so this third era is kind of slower and exploring different angles for stuff that i havent before

[n7punk]

OK I WAS THINKING WDTFD TOO IT IS CRIMINALLY UNDERRATED AND ive literally been spending more time than necessary trying to figure out why, because I would argue it is one of your best and one of the most unique out there in general. You can ignore me if you want but I have a Theory (gonna mark myself with this emoji ⚡️ so you know it’s me)

this is... an absolutely fascinating theory XD i have no clue, to be honest, and always just put it down to 1) being a busy time of year (tho thematically appropriate) when maybe people weren't reading a lot of fic then so it never got that established, and 2) me going dark for a month afterwards while i worked on my novel, resulting in less content to bump me up in the ao3 tag (or on people's dashboards) that might make people check what i'd just done, or help them notice they missed a fic right before it (i have people comment on a new fic all the time being like "OH SHIT i missed the last one, time to binge!").

its interesting to get an outside perspective, because for me personally i notice jumps in interaction around a few fics (knifepoint for example) but i never really attributed a spike to BFM. i was really shocked when i recently saw beg for me was ranked 24th in hit count for she-ra fics (its worth noting that both slas and asdlm rank higher than it, but i also remember lots of engagement with both of those - especially asdlm, there was so much fanart). i dont remember a lot about what was going on when i was writing bfm, so i just assumed it... wasnt a lot XD but apparently it left an impression.

(actually, i did just remember i had anon off while writing BFM because i didnt want people getting Too Horny and crossing into creepy, and that probably had a big effect on the interaction i got and my perception of it)

as far as the smut thing... honestly, no clue, although you might be onto something with vampires being generally slutty (and rightfully so) and WDtFD being lore-focused. i feel like im reluctant to say fics without smut dont do as well, but i think that it might be true and i just dont want to acknowledge it XD i do think that, as far as rating goes, T and E do better than M because... if you dont want smut, you go T, and if you want it, you go E, you know? M is this middle ground i enjoy, but people tend not to be on middle ground with smut XD

i have no clue, but it was fun reading theories, and thank you for the enthusiasm for a fic i really love! to be honest i think if i wrote it a year before it might have been smuttier.... but the idea was also a year old and never had anything but that one scene in it, even if that scene was originally a bit more explicit, so idk. i do tend to go in cycles and whatever i did after beg for me needed to be smut-light because writing beg for me took a lot of time/energy XD see lotd following knifepoint, as well

i really loved crafting a lore fic, i had a whole outline where i tracked what had been hinted at and in what ways, what had been revealed so far, what i still needed to foreshadow/explain, etc, because there was so much stuff i wanted to imply and then reveal, and im realllllly happy with the finished product, so thank you for the love! <3

#ask #anon #its funny because i consider beg for me to be the start of like... #my second era? i guess? #actually no third #1) canon-heavy/summer of 2020 #2) slas onward #3) lotd onward #where like the first one was when the fandom was on That High and i was first getting into writing again #slas was when i started being established and i was just cranking stuff out and constantly having a new idea as soon as i finished the last #and then lotd on was when i had to slow down because that rate wasn't sustainable #and started taking gaps to rest/work on other projects #and from there on i kind of thought people started dropping off #(partially probably because it had been a year since the show ended then and Some people dont get hyperfixations lasting years apparently) #so this third era is kind of slower and exploring different angles for stuff that i havent before #and beg for me was included in that because. well #it started with lotd #but apparently the numbers dont prove that out LOL

[writingwithcolor]

Destroying Imperialism to avoid Discussing Racism

Hello! I wanted to write a mostly light-hearted story about cowboys escorting a mysterious stranger to the Atlantic and the weird encounters they have along the way. I know how racist the Western genre normally is but I didn’t think I was the right person to write about the racism Native Americans faced since I’m not Native. To get around this I created a backstory for the world to explain the lack of it:

A century ago during the Age of Imperialism alien asteroids struck the earth, destroying most of Europe and mutating Earth’s flora and fauna. In the ensuing confusion the Native nations banded together and pushed the invaders out, with the freed slaves staying with the Natives. The cowboys are all descended from these former slaves, with the only white person in the entire story being the escort. Since the story involves traveling the cast will meet a lot of Native people on their adventure.

At first I thought this was okay but as I this was okay but as I thought about the idea more I grew less confident in it. I didn’t feel like it was okay for me to attempt to side-step a very serious issue like this. Is there a way to repair this premise or should I just scrap the entire story since I seem to be coming at it from the wrong angle?

I wouldn’t say “wrong angle” so much as “potentially ahistorical to a fairly extreme degree,” which might not be possible to mitigate. There’s a lot of points in here that need addressing for it to be even plausible, and I’m only covering the major ones.

Point the First: Natives Owned Slaves

Part of it was to get in good with the white man, but this is something that happened. I’m not Black-Indigenous, so I won’t speak for their struggle, but I will say that anti-blackness is fairly large in Native communities, and many Black-Indigenous people are denied any sort of place in the tribe. 

I’m not very well versed in that history, and I would rather pass the mic to Black-Indigenous folks who have in some cases experienced generations of tribal disenfranchisement thanks to prevalent colourism and anti-blackness in Native communities.

I’m sure some tribes were anti-slavery. But others very much weren’t. This is something you will have to explore, extrapolate, and listen very closely to Black-Indigenous folk for their experiences and preferences.

Point the Second: Some Nations (temporarily) Benefited A Lot

The Metis were a nation with a lot of political power and a lot of wealth, all thanks to the fur trade. They came about through political and/or love marriages between white men and Native women, then grew into their own distinct thing with an intermingling of French, Scottish, and primarily Cree settlers in Canada’s Prairie. 

This isn’t counting how relations between Quebec and the Natives in the region were actually very good for a time, the Iroquois were war allies to the British in both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. Texas has a treaty that has not actually been broken. 

These nations/confederacies would be hard pressed to want to throw Europeans out, because for a long period of time, they got a lot of perks. They got money, the ability to expand their territory, help against their enemies, guns, horses, metal, and resources in general.

Point the Third: Colonialism Was Slow To Boil, Or Devastated Quickly

There is no one exact spot where you can pinpoint it got bad for everyone all at once. When America got its mind on manifest destiny, that was terrible for the Plains, Mountain, and West Coast Natives. When the Spanish came (well before the Age of Imperialism in the 1400s) and enslaved practically all of Mexico and Florida, it very quickly destroyed many, many, many nations that are working on revitalization efforts but will never truly exist as they were again. 

Canada’s Prairies got hit hard from the 1800s, onward, but the Inuit were slow to connect with Europeans so their colonialism is very recent and very sudden. The Maritimes in Canada got hit devastatingly before the Age of Imperialism really took hold, but then Quebec Natives hardly had that happen until everything soured. The Iroquois might’ve had even longer in a place of status.

As a result, you cannot assume everyone would either be hurt or feel hurt. In some cases the Natives only realized how toxic settlers were when America actively cheated them out of land. Others when their children were taken to residential schools.

Point the Fourth: Cowboys Existed Because of Colonialism

Cows are a European animal, primarily, as are horses. Ranching began as Spanish and then American people wanted to buy/steal large swaths of land from Natives in both Mexico during early colonialism (I reiterate: before the period your supposed asteroid hit Europe), and the Plains during the manifest destiny era. 

Ranching and Native peoples have a hard time coexisting together, because in the plains, you’ve got rancher needs fighting with buffalo needs, just to name one example. 

It might be possible to create a respectful cowboy situation, but you’d have to think pretty long and hard about how to not push out Native peoples from their territory, and how to share the land for two very large animals and their different needs. 

Also, you’d have to account for how ranching is a Spanish thing, so if Spanish people hadn’t had a chance to import all of their practices, then the whole concept of cowboys in North America would be bust. 

Is it possible to have cowboys be adapted, maybe be influenced from a few places in Asia or Africa  (because Africa does have pastoralists) instead of the Spanish, and make them respectful? Probably. How? You’d have to do your own research on the needs of cowboys, animal husbandry in East Africa, and what tensions existed between them and Native/Indigenous peoples in both North America and whatever region you’re borrowing from.

Point the Fifth: Colonialism Became Self Sustaining Very Quickly

Aka, they wouldn’t have been impacted much at all by Europe getting wiped out, especially the older colonialism like New France (1500s), Mexico (1500s), Rupert’s Land (1670), New England (1600s), etc. They might have lost some trading partners and a reason to over-produce goods, but they wouldn’t have been devastated. These people:

1- did not rely on Europe after a generation or two, maybe 3-4 at most

2- were often already genocidal

It took all of a generation or two for colonial structures to be self-perpetuating (when families came over like in America, or the active sponsorship of girls to come such as the Files du Roi in New France), and to have killed off major swaths of Indigenous people in the area (although New France did take longer to get bad). The Pequot village massacre that is the reason Thanksgiving is annual was in the early 1600s, after all.

This is not getting into the Caribbean, Asia (British shadow-rule of India started in the 1700s, but they had been trade partners for longer), or Africa, or South America. Colonialism was a long, long, long buildup, and the Age of Imperialism was just a small portion of that. 

The likelihood of the Indigenous numbers existing to remove cities that had purposely spent all of their early time “clearing” the land of unwanted Indigenous people is… possible, but low. 

This is why non-violent colonialism is an oxymoron, which I’ve discussed at length this week. Many were violent from day one, so unless you change Europe’s history to remove their manifest destiny attitudes and just have them expand to new lands and not be colonists, then your solution is too little, too late.

Also, news travelled a lot slower at the time. People might not’ve even found out about the asteroid for months if not years.

In the End

I highly doubt it will be possible to get the kind of story you want without discussing racism of some sort. The fact you’ve only targeted the Age of Imperialism, and as a result have kinda majorly glossed over the Spanish era (starting in the 1400s), which was majorly devastating to Mexico/Florida and resulted in many peoples being rendered extinct, plus being the root of cowboys… yeah.

It sounds like you’re trying to avoid learning about our struggles/putting in the work to write respectful background characters. You’re too hung up on trying to make it all better instead of learning how to write situations without making the whole story about that situation. I’d take a look at our Can I Write About X? tag for more information on how to write background stuff.

Like I said. It might be possible to create a respectful cowboy/Western story… but I really doubt that this solution is enough. It just doesn’t account for the sheer length of time colonialism happened, and by the time Native peoples have supposedly banded together, colonialism would’ve been self sustaining in many of the regions you’re discussing.

~ Mod Lesya

#Writing question #submission #cowboys #colonialism #genocide tw #native american #Indigenous Peoples #alternative history #worldbuilding