nothing scarier than being a fan of a fic and then becoming mutuals with the author. like hi shakespeare. big fan of your fake dating au

Apologies in advance but I have to get serious here for a minute about the subject of "being intimidated by fanfic authors." This is more con-oriented than Tumblr-oriented but the sentiments are applicable to both.

It makes me so upset whenever I think of all the times I went to a con and couldn't seem to find anyone to talk to. After being on a few panels where I made jokes about the joys of writing about dicks and butts, I would walk around, and it just seemed like folks were all doing their own thing, not inviting me to join them. I would always think, Oh, story checks out, everyone is put off because I'm a weird freak, it's just like in high school. Then I'd go back to my hotel room and wonder what I spent all this money for, coming here to be lonely.

Then, in the days after the con, I would see posts from other con-goers, or receive messages: "omg berlynn i was too shy to say hello at the con but i just want you to know that your fics mean everything to me and you're so amazing."

I really do appreciate those kind words, but...it would have been cool to actually hang out with you, you know?

One time I had the opportunity to chat with with a trio of folks who were the guests of honor at this con because they were screening their gorgeous and charming fan film, and they confessed to me that the day before, they had walked into a room, seen that I was there, and walked out because they were too intimidated at the very idea of being in the room with me. (So I sat alone and silent in that room for 20 more minutes.)

The thing is, even if I was the most popular fanfic writer in the history of the world, connecting with other fans and forming friendships is the only compensation I get. I don't eat better because you liked my fic. I don't get a swag bag worth $5,000 when I check into my hotel room at a con because I wrote that one omegaverse fic that everyone read. I do what I do and I write what I write because I want to be part of a community of fans.

But I should note that all is not loneliness and misery for Berlynn. I have had some of the greatest moments of my life making connections with people who actually did speak to me at cons. Sometimes it was just a hug and a few happy tears, sometimes it was deep philosophical discussions about writing dicks and butts while sitting on the floor of a party suite at two in the morning...but several of my IRL friends are people who were not afraid to just reach out to me after a panel, or say hello at the bar.

Here's how it might go when you connect with your favorite fanfic author: One of my closest friends is someone who was a big fan of my work, introduced to me by a mutual friend. Sitting across from me at a restaurant not too long after our introduction, this person had to point out to me that, whilst gesticulating exuberantly over my meal, I had gotten some macaroni and cheese on my sleeve. After that, they were not so starstruck anymore, and now we live in the same building, which makes it easy for us to hang out and giggle over old TV shows together a couple times a week.

Probably there are fanfic writers who don't want to be bothered, who don't want to be messaged, who aren't in it for the social connection...but they are not the ones following you on social media. They're not the ones with their inboxes open, anonymous messages on. And they're not the ones strolling through the common areas at cons looking for an empty seat at a table.

never ask a woman her age a man his salary your mutual how late it is in her timezone when she starts posting about that bisexual man

No caption needed.

Because we don't teach history right.

We teach history like it's a work of fiction where the characters act the way they do because they were written that way. And not like the real world with real people who were just as human as us and had reasons to act the way they do. And that the same mistakes and foibles they had could happen to us too.

And even this history is woefully undertaught. People learn it to memorize the events of the story and then forget about it. They don't learn to comprehend it, they don't learn to learn from it.

This will be a long story, but settle in, because this is important.

I was fortunate enough to have some great teachers growing up, in a small, fairly well-funded school system (and during times when everyone still agreed that fascism was bad). In 8th grade, our school had an interdisciplinary unit for about a month focusing solely on the Holocaust. Every class taught something related to it, even math. For a month, we read horrifying stories and watched documentaries and did research assignments on the Holocaust. By the end, any one of us would have said we were experts on the subject.

And at the very end, our entire grade (about 100 kids) was broken into four groups, and we were told that as a reward for all our hard work on the Holocaust unit, we were going to compete for a trip to Disney World. Only one team could go, but the entire team would get to travel there and spend a few days in the park, all expenses paid.

The competition was simple: the group with the most team spirit would win. We were instructed to come up with a team name, a catchy slogan, and a logo (something simple and easy to draw). We were allowed to prove our team spirit however we wanted. That was it. That was all of the instructions. The competition would last a week, and short of stopping physical violence, the teachers stepped back and let us have at it.

It was terrifying.

At first, everyone just hung up posters in the halls and cheerfully recited their slogan whenever the teachers were watching. Within a few days, posters were being torn down and shredded. Verbal fights were breaking out in the hallways. It wasn't enough to say your team was the best, everyone had somehow decided. You also had to prove that everyone else's team was inferior. People started making up lies and gossip, saying that everyone in a particular group was lazy or ugly or smelly or what have you (we were 13). Slurs were thrown around. (Again, we were 13.)

By the final day, the groups were marching down the halls in formation, shouting their slogan in unison. Shouting slander against the other groups. The floor was covered in tattered paper.

I was shy and introverted and weird and unpopular and mostly stayed out of it. But those images are burned into my memory. These kids had turned into vicious monsters, all for a stupid school project.

The teachers had us march down the hallway to the auditorium to announce the results of the competition. The groups were little armies now. Most students marched in lockstep, shouting their slogans. We were seated together in our groups. The teachers dimmed the lights, quieted us down, and the teacher in charge of this whole project said that before he announced the winners, he had something to share with us about the person who was responsible for this entire competition. He turned on the projector and displayed a portrait of Hitler.

Everyone lost their minds. Kids were booing and throwing things. We knew that Hitler was a Bad Guy.

The teacher calmed us back down, and then explained that there was no trip to Disney World, and the fact that not one student questioned for a moment that such a massively expensive and complicated prize would be granted for such a silly competition was honestly kind of disappointing. This entire week, he said, was our final exam. The final exam for the Holocaust unit.

We had spent a month learning about this. About how this "bad guy" inspired a whole hell of a lot of people to march in lockstep shouting slogans and plastering their symbol all over everything. That one bad guy had told them that they were special, and other groups were trying to take away what was rightfully theirs for being the best, and they ultimately got extremely violent. We had learned all about the Hitler Youth and the SS and book burnings and, of course, the concentration camps. We'd all read the Diary of Anne Frank. We'd been marinating in this information for a month, in all of our classes.

But we hadn't learned. We hadn't really understood what they were trying to teach us. Not that this happened. But that this happens. It can happen very easily, especially if people aren't watching out for it.

The kids were furious. They shouted that this wasn't fair, that we were only following instructions. The teachers had lied to us. They had told us to do this, and now they were mad at us for following directions?

He was ready for this, of course. Calming us back down again, he pointed out that all they'd done is tell us to give ourselves a name, a slogan, a symbol, and demonstrate "team spirit." That was literally it. No one told us to rip posters down. No one told us to march in the hallways. No one told us to spread rumors and shout insults. No one told us to fight each other.

They didn't have to.

All it takes to get people to behave this way is to tell them that their group is special, they deserve good things, but the good things aren't there because those other people are taking them from you.

The Nazis were not uniquely evil people. They were just encouraged to demonstrate their team spirit. And there were no teachers to stop it from getting violent. Because the person encouraging them wanted things to get violent.

The Holocaust was not the story of Hitler the Bad Guy. He was there, and he was responsible for a lot, but that wasn't the point. Germany during the Holocaust wasn't suddenly, by total accident, full of evil people.

It was just full of people like us.

This time, it just was a lie about Disney World and a week of chaos. But if we didn't watch out, the next time fascism started to rise, we would get swept up on the wrong side of it. We had just proven that we would. We'd be too swept up in making sure that our special group got the prize they deserved to notice that we were being lied to about the prize in the first place.

That could happen. If we weren't careful. If we forgot the lesson we'd just learned.

After he'd let the horror and shame and embarrassment and indignation of that week sink in properly, he reassured us that it wasn't our fault. The point wasn't for us to prove that we understood the lesson of the Holocaust. It wasn't actually a test after all, it was our final lesson. The most important lesson.

He'd known that this test would go this way, because it always did. He did this every year. He said in all his years of teaching, only one student, one student, had ever questioned it. Pulled him aside in the hallway and said straightforwardly that whatever was going on was messed up and he wanted no part of it.

And you know what? That is how you teach history. You give students the facts of what happened. And then you show them how easily it can happen again.

Sadly, most schools don't have the resources for this sort of thing, and these days they'd probably not be allowed to run this little experiment. But I'm extremely grateful to that teacher, grateful that I was part of that experience. It was harrowing, and it made me and a lot of other people vigilant for the rest of my life in a way I know I would not have been otherwise.

It was over 35 years ago now and it still makes me emotional to think about.

Most people never got to have that experience, to properly learn that lesson. But at least I can pass the story on to you. And you can pass it on to others. Because if you think you would have acted differently, that you would have seen through the ruse, think again.

I was writing up a long thing about how the left isn’t immune to this logic even though we think we are and lost it. The basic points:

A lot of leftists assume that we’re more flexible than right wingers, and there’s some evidence for this. From studies I’ve read about, we tend to be more open to new ideas and to trying new things, seeing failure as part of a process to make things better. Where people who gravitate toward conservatism tend to fear breaking things, and that failure will lead to widespread immorality and horror, so we’d better embrace tradition before we destroy ourselves.

Which is helpful! But it’s helpful in the way “some vaxxed people will still get covid and it just won’t be as bad” way, not in the “I am immune to scapegoating people because I care about marginalization, and that’s all I need to do” way.

Think of guillotine memes. Very few of us literally want to violently murder Elon, but the idea that his death would suddenly make a bunch of evil vanish is still popular.

Where if we do kill him, there’s still the logistical issue of “now how do we divert that money into affordable housing units?” That’s still gonna take work.

Work you’d still be doing if you’d gone with taxes rather than violence, but in that case, maybe just do the tax thing? Less blood?

And there’s also a tendency you see a lot in ex conservatives, where they still have the “embrace tradition” thing in their brain, but it moves when they get progressive. “*ists are not welcome in this community! We kick those people out!”

Okay, but what happens when those are the marginalized people you’re supposed to be protecting? I work in a homeless shelter. A lot of people are too busy with their own lives to care that we’re trans inclusive even if they don’t like it, but a lot of people “keep seeing that man in the showers” and make no secret of how they dont like this and exhort us to make life so they don’t have to “see that thing.”

I guess you can progressive stack and say the poor black unhoused trans woman has more marginalizations than the poor black unhoused cis one, and not have to think past that.

But I mean, me personally, the case worker? Not as poor, white, housed. Obligated as a prog to help both, if I take seriously that I owe support and help to people worse off.

So im more inclined personally to take from that life lesson that “bigots” aren’t just well off people thumbing their noses at the working class. Sometimes they ARE marginalized people.

Which means you can’t just go “there’s us, not bigots, and them, the bigots, and we’re the good guys.”

Even though people want to. Even though I want to, especially when the trans lady is friendly and kind to me and the people who think her body is SO WEIRD are generally in bad moods.

It’s tempting to EVERYONE. (If people rant about how dare I be nice to a transphobe in the notes, point proven.)

We ALL have to fight it.

Bits from the Vorkosigan Saga I think about frequently:

“All true wealth is biological.”

“Welcome to Barrayar, son. Here you go: have a world of wealth and poverty, wrenching change and rooted history. Have a birth; have two. Have a name. Miles means "soldier," but don't let the power of suggestion overwhelm you. Have a twisted form in a society that loathes and fears the mutations that have been its deepest agony. Have a title, wealth, power, and all the hatred and envy they will draw. Have your body ripped apart and re-arranged. Inherit an array of friends and enemies you never made. Have a grandfather from hell. Endure pain, find joy, and make your own meaning, because the universe certainly isn't going to supply it. Always be a moving target. Live. Live. Live.”

""You can't make them—whoever your particular them is—do anything, really," said Ekaterin slowly. "Adulthood isn't an award they'll give you for being a good child. You can waste . . . years, trying to get someone to give that respect to you, as though it were a sort of promotion or raise in pay. If only you do enough, if only you are good enough. No. You have to just . . . take it. Give it to yourself, I suppose. Say, I'm sorry you feel like that, and walk away. But that's hard.”

"anne rice must be turning in her grave to see her vampires gay in this show" anne rice discussed loustat blowjobs on twitter with her son. there are literally SO MANY THINGS you could talk shit about anne rice for and you clowns keep choosing one that isn't fucking true.

Say what you will about magical shapeshifters being a lazy plot device, but I Have literally never seen an actor doing the “me pretending to be this other person pretending to be me” bit who wasn’t clearly having a great time.

Body swapping episodes may seem cliche but the actors need them for their enrichment and health and it would be cruel not to give it to them

Ok so who here has seen Orphan Black?

I am convinced Tatiana Maslany will go down in history as one of the most remarkably nuanced actresses of our age.

I’m convinced that Tatiana Maslany was legitimately body swapping with people to make that show

If you ever saw LOST GIRL, you had Kenzi (Ksenia Solo) who was a human girl with an insane amount of energy/quippy dialogue (she and Deadpool would get along like nobody’s business) and you had Dyson (Kris Holden Reid), a centuries old wolf shifter/werewolf originally from Scotland’s medieval period who easily tore people to shreds but was less chatty/more solid sturdy presence. But they switched, and I swear none of the other actors had half as much fun as these two. Reid definitely nailed the impression (side note: Solo dod ballet so her fluidity of movement had to have been hell to recreate but somehow that man did it) and Solo is equally amazing as Dyson-in-Kenzi’s-body as she changes how she holds herself, her cadence when speaking, even how she watches everyone in the room in a dog-like fashion.

Honestly, as I’ve heard it, fans still request at cons for Reid to do “the Kenzi in Dyson’s body dance” that he did in the show, when Kenzi excitedly realizes she is, “kicking it in the wolf man”.

@ IWTV writers please can we talk about [checks notes] season 5: Tale of the Body Thief, please can we have a slapstick comedy sequence where everybody’s soul gets shoved around in everyone else’s body? I would like everybody to get a chance to play everyone for at least 10 seconds. Also Real Rashid is there as well

the great thing about medieval literature is that it returns us to a time when men were men and women were women, *insert gritty realism gif here*, featuring such important and eternal gendered characteristics such as

No matter how progressive or well-read you are, there are always going to be moments in your life where somebody pushes back against something that's so culturally ingrained you never even considered it before. And you'll say "Huh, it never occurred to me to challenge this but you're right" and that doesn't mean you were "morally toxic" before, it means you're a non-omniscient human capable of growth.

people are always like "Oh a vampire wouldn't get horny while drinking someone's blood, that's like getting horny while eating a sandwich" and like man have you never had a really good fucking sandwich?

The sandwich i had for lunch didnt moan and scream and squirm against my body and then become limp and pliable when i was done now did it

(Via @morganpdf )

Matching your freak is beautiful and all but what you really need is a boy who's infatuated with your freak. Down bad for your freak. Deeply intrigued by your freak. Eager to see more of your freak. Supportive of your freak. Gets bricked up witnessing your freak, even.

cloth fibers ranked by how much sense they make to me

introducing my four year old niece to the concept of "moral dilemmas" by telling her that i'm a monster that eats children and that i know it's wrong but i'm so so so hungry and everything else tastes yucky. i've tried all the human food in the world and it all tastes so yucky i can't even eat it. i can only eat children and i'm so hungry

her resolution was that if i meet a kid that has the same name as their sibling, then i can eat one of them. their parents won't be sad, because they have another kid with the same name right there. speaks to an uninformed but fascinating worldview

our history teacher tried a similar tack but the theoretical scenario was "the man who invented the medicine necessary to save your wife is charging more money than you can pay and won't accept credit. you're against stealing but you also don't want your wife to die. what do you do?"

our answer was not only to steal the medicine but to murder the inventor because if he's paywalling life-saving medicine, the solution that involves the lowest body count is killing him. we're ethically and morally obligated to eliminate this threat to human survival

did not go the way he thought it would

I’m gonna pitch a show as “like Game of Thrones but even more gritty and realistic” and then it’s nothing but a baron handling land estimates and organizing road repairs and stuff. There’ll be an entire episode about how a peasant gets brought to court for letting milk cattle graze on communal pastureland even though it’s supposed to be reserved for draft animals.

my ten-episode plan from the writer’s room of this blessed show: -ep. 1: meet the accounting staff of this magical kingdom in a far-off land -ep. 2: land estimates, plenary powers of wizards employed by the office of the royal treasury, and how tax code intersects with succession laws of absolute primogeniture when the lineage in question may have extra-planar ancestry -ep. 3: a full-hour hearing with flashbacks on how mrs. Jones’ cow grazing actually violates three local statutes, is in line with a conflicting royal decree (potentially issued under ensorcelled compulsion), and is entitled to binding arbitration via fey courts. mrs. jones is not entitled to said arbitration, the cow is.  -ep. 4: how land rights and taxation applies to druid circles and sentient treefolk, especially when said land is technically owed fealty to both a human and inhuman entity. we never see any treefolk. -ep. 5: the differing rights and responsibilities of yeomen who freehold land near a lord’s manse vs. yeomen who freehold land held by the lord’s vassals vs. burghers in cities surrounded by forty-foot high gilded walls inscribed with runes so terrible they will burn a man’s flesh just from touching. extensive tax comparisons are made based on type of property held and crop status (cereal crop taxed x, but fiber crops taxed y). -ep. 6 - 9: ep. 3 but for a host of other problems: conflicting tax status for nobles who hold different positions (especially if they technically owe themselves fealty), bridges (just like…in general), a revolt started by a miller, and tax-deductible status for magical family heirlooms and whether or not being part of a dragon’s hoard can be considered “held in escrow.” -ep. 10: the queen kills the king. this is never explained but on a rewatch, isn’t surprising. it does rattle the staff as they look to cook the books and make sure they get paid as revolution sweeps the land. a brief aside is delved into concerning mercenaries. this takes less than five minutes; the rest of the episode concerns a detailed archive of back-taxes owed by the rebel dukes. 

Season 2

Ep 1: Reeves organise teams of villagers to rebuild houses lost during a dragon attack.

Ep 2: The charcoal burner claims to have seen a unicorn in the woods, but Gerard the sexy huntsman decides to investigate and finds out it’s actually just a lost horse. He returns it to the baron’s son and is paid handsomely.

Ep 3: Scandal erupts as local nun writes a letter to the pope demanding he send her some valuable relics currently stored in a church in Rome. The bishop tries to dissuade her, but as usual, nobody ever takes him seriously.

Ep 4: Some Cistercians move in, trying distance themselves from the luxurious life in southern France. Chaos ensues as they unwittingly build their monastery on faerie land.

Ep 5: A travelling judge visits the village. Robert the swineherd accuses elves of stealing his pig, and the elves agree to repay him in enchanted berries.

Ep 6: The priest writes to his friend the next town over, lamenting about how his parishioners never show up to church, even after the Lateran Council of 1215. His friend suggests he learn magic to make his sermons more entertaining.

Ep 7: The charcoal burner tries to drum up support for a crusade. He gets eight people and they only make it to the next village, when it starts raining and they decide to go to the pub instead of Jerusalem.

Where's my Jewish phrase for when you people are being irrevocably horny?

“This, too, is Torah, and I must learn!”

Citation

Behold, a Meme:

I love that they're in differing amounts of allowance, too.

"None of these words are in the Bible": fully opposed, there is no written acceptance.

"This, too, is Torah and I must learn": entirely on board, wants more to happen.

"By Allah you people are dogs. I will reblog as always": "ew guys. really? ... lemme in."

sometimes I read a radioactively bad take and just sit there like "not only do you not understand this story but you fundamentally do not understand how stories work in general, and you have never considered that your discord with every piece of fiction you come across could possibly be a problem on your end"

EXCELLENT TAGS OP SAY IT LOUDER FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK

The thing about Cottagecore is that is a fetishized aesthetic of country life, divorced from labor and idealized by a primarily urban audience with a backward looking ethos of tradition. They are not prepared for the stresses of a rural life: farming; harvesting; tapping pumpkins to ensure none of them have been replaced with flesh; losing out on income by having to use one of your pigs in a blood sacrifice to paint protective sigils over your doors and windows; checking cracks and chimneys for the flesh-vines of the Pumpkin Lord; having to decide, before the Growth is complete, whether that's really your tradwife or an amassment of vines, leaves, and blood in the shape of your tradwife; ignoring their desperate pleas that "I'm me! No! No!" as you burn them alive, realizing too late you picked wrong; and the exploitative corporate nature of commercial farming in 2024. All seen through a deeply colonial lens, of course

When I made this post I did not expect it to be an effective test of which Tumblr users actually read a post fully before reblogging, and yet