lan qiren’s look of disapproval when they’re all stuck in the cave during the second siege of the burial mounds and nie huaisang asks “how can we mend the array?”
being on the receiving end of that resigned sigh would kill me
Maybe not the biggest culprit behind the Radioactive Bad Takes on this website, but the one that’s bugging me the most lately: Please, I am begging you, learn what genre conventions are and read the text accordingly.
Fiction is not reality and pretty much every genre of fiction has certain standard ways in which it deviates from reality. And I’m not just talking about how we shouldn’t nitpick the physics of how Superman is able to fly. There will be ways in which the characters’ behavior and relationships will be informed by the genre as well and it makes just as little sense to judge them by realistic standards as it does to complain about something in Star Wars being scientifically implausible.
For example, “Adults are Useless” is a well-recognized trope in children’s literature. But that’s not because children’s authors are all going around writing adult characters who are terrible parents or teachers. It’s because the protagonist of a story written for children is almost always going to be a child, and the protagonist of the story has to get into trouble and solve problems themselves for the story to be any good. Yes, in real life, teenagers shouldn’t be fighting in a war. But if the grown-ups stepped in and stopped the teenage protagonist of your action-adventure series from fighting, there would be no story.
Does that mean the grown-up characters in that series are evil people who use child soldiers? No, because we accept a child being in these kinds of situations as a conceit of the genre of children’s fiction, and we interpret the characters and their choices accordingly. We don’t apply a realistic standard because the very premise is unrealistic to start with.
Another example: An adult hitting a child in real life is horrible. But if the child is a superhero, and the adult is a super villain, and they are in a cartoon, then we can’t read it the same way. All cartoons with any kind of action or fighting in them use violence unrealistically, and if the child and adult characters are presented as equally matched adversaries then that’s how any violence between them has to be understood. The villain might be a real bad dude, since he’s, you know, a villain, but hitting a child superhero in the context of a super-fight does not make him a child abuser, specifically.
I’m focusing on children’s books and cartoons here because I think that’s where tumblr fandoms have the biggest trouble with this but it applies to everything. Characters in a romantic comedy won’t behave realistically, characters in fairy tales won’t behave realistically, characters in police procedurals won’t behave realistically, all of them will behave as characters within their specific genre have to in order to make that genre work. The second you start trying to scrutinize every single action a character takes by realistic standards, you miss the point.
Repeat to yourself: “It’s just a show, I should really just relax.”
reminds me of how every couple years some dipshit comes along and says, ‘i’m going to FIX the romance genre! i’m gonna DEFY convention! my characters don’t get together and they don’t live happily ever after because that’s how real life is!’ and then everyone who bought their book, which was billed as a romance, judges it to be a terrible romance book, because it doesn’t do what a romance book is supposed to do. and then the author flips their shit because how dare people judge them for being bad at the thing they failed at on purpose.
Shoutout to the geniuses STILL whining about love at first sight in fairytales and Shakespeare plays. Get the fuck over yourself and learn what suspension of disbelief is.
In the same way, critics who set out to talk about a fantasy novel without having read any fantasy since they were eight, and in ignorance of the history and extensive theory of fantasy literature, will make fools of themselves because they don’t know how to read the book. They have no contextual information to tell them what its tradition is, where it’s coming from, what it’s trying to do, what it does. This was liberally proved when the first Harry Potter book came out and a lot of literary reviewers ran around shrieking about the incredible originality of the book. This originality was an artifact of the reviewers’ blank ignorance of its genres (children’s fantasy and the British boarding-school story), plus the fact that they hadn’t read a fantasy since they were eight. It was pitiful. It was like watching some TV gourmet chef eat a piece of buttered toast and squeal, ‘But this is delicious! Unheard of! Where has it been all my life?’”
Don’t like certain themes in a fic? You can always stop reading and move on to something else.
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Don’t enjoy the characterizations in a fic? Is it too OOC for you? Feel free to stop reading and move on to something else.
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Content of a certain fic might be triggering or upsetting to you? Please stop reading and move on to something else.
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It is *always* a reader’s responsibility to decide what they do and do not read. It is *not* the writer’s job to adhere to anyone else’s standards or preferences.
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If you send hate to an author because of something you didn’t like about their plot or characters or warnings, that is you trying to misguidedly place blame on the author, rather than taking your own responsibility for not putting down the fic and just. Moving. On. To. Something. Else.
I highly appreciate the “happy ending” tag on angst fics, dark fics, etc. Its existence increases the probability of me reading by a significant amount
but some people are like “why even read those fics if you already know how they’re gonna end?”
Well, it’s kinda like going on a roller-coaster. I wanna experience the ride. The ups and the downs, the twists and turns. But I also wanna know that at the end, it’ll come to a safe stop and I’ll be able to get off of it completely unharmed
If this happens to you, remember that stealing a person’s mail in the U.S. is a federal crime, one with a penalty of up to five years of jail time and heavy fines, which compounds with every individual offense. Know your rights, especially your rights as a tenant. Fuck landlords
Report them to your local post office, notto the local police.
USPS Inspection is pretty much the only law enforcement agency worthy of respect. They’ve literally always resolved any problem I reported to them (albeit often slowly) and I have never once heard of them extrajudicially murdering someone.
And when I say “always” I mean, there are law firms around the country that will happily advertise themselves as able to get you off the hook for police, statie, FBI, CIA, and UCMJ situations with an almost 100% success rate. And they will outright refuse to go up against postal inspection, because that’s a legal fight no one else ever wins.
Cops will take the landlord’s side.
The USPS is here to help you.
(Which is probably why the feds keep going out of their way to try and nuke the entire postal service tbh)
I had a neighbor that kept stealing my mail. To prevent this, I had to be outside when the mail carrier arrived. I informed them of my dilemma, how long it had been happening, I had photographs of them doing this. The carrier then only delivered mail at my door after knocking and waiting for me to come to answer. It took several months, but my neighbor got landed with almost ten years in prison for this because 1) USPS doesn’t fuck around, 2) I had pictures of over a dozen instances; they often took my mail, poured beer or soda on it, and then dumped it in the trash, and 3) I wasn’t the only person they did this to.
The cops took no interest and told me to just get a PO Box. FYI, those aren’t free and getting to the post office is difficult when Disabled.
I wasn’t required to go to court. It was all taken care of. No more mail was stolen. The USPS does not fuck around, they fuck you up if you fuck up.
Dang. I wonder if there is a any Canadian postal board like this? I should have reported the idiot identity thieves breaking into my mailbox over and over and over that one year to whatever Canadian equivalent there is of this, because yeah, the cops literally didn’t do a single fucking thing to help me out.
Kids. Teenagers. As someone staring 40 in the face lemme tell you a thing.
You are going to be horrified and embarrassed at some point by the shit you are doing now.
And you are going to wish with all your might you’d done moreof it.
You’re gonna wish you had more selfies, more photos, more videos being dumb with your friends. You’re going to wish you’d had your hair even higher or your shoes even sparklier.
Go. Document the shit out of your ridiculous life. Fuck trends but if you wanna be trendy, go all in. Fuck in-groups and subcultures but if one sings to you, do it all. Be exactly as cool or punk rock or goth or fandom or country or hardcore or hip hop or whatever, and don’t let anyone tell you differently.
Just don’t hurt people. That’s the only thing you’ll ever genuinely live to regret.
I think I have talked about this before, but because life doesn’t end at twenty or thirty or forty or fifty and thinking that folks are going to fall out of social media or that there won’t always be someone your age and my age and twice both of our ages interested in [insert anything, ever] is a very limiting worldview.
Somewhere there is a sixty-five year old who unironically loves Taylor Swift’s music and a fifty-two year old writing Superwholock fanfic and a ninty year old who absolutely livesfor the next episode of Archer and a seventy-one year old that can kick anyone’s ass in k-pop trivia. There will always be these folks, and all the Internet has done is give fans of all ages a chance to interact in a way that they never had before.
Before BBSes and the Internet and Usenet and the World Wide Web and fanrings and forums and social media, those people would just love it in their own way, in the privacy of their own homes. But now anyone can make an Ao3 account or a basic fansite or tumbl about whatever they want, and sometimes you’re gonna learn those people are old but they still getit, and sometimes you’re going to find out those folks are still kids, twelve or fourteen at the oldest, and marvel at their maturity and skill and attention to detail.
And that is rad as hell, that is fucking incredible, that is… whatever the kids are saying these days, hah.
As a sidenote, once, about a decade ago, I decided to email one of my favourite authors before she bit it … she was pushing 90 at the time. ( … she’s still alive now).
Anyways, we got to having a long discussion, because I shared my deadname with her late husband, and I actually had quite a long conversation with her.
The part of the conversation I’d like to share with you about this now pushing 100-tear-old author isn’t that she developed a liking for her breakfast eggs from her honeymoon in Vienna, or that her Husband would sometimes steal her drafts to read them as soon as he could, or that she superglued a potted plant to her bookshelf to watch her orange cat try to knock it over and fail.
Nono, I mention this to bring up what she would do as a writing exercise whenever she didn’t feel like writing her serious work.
In short, erotic darkwing duck slashfic. You can find it online.
This is the greatest addition this post has gotten so far.
