"I'd destroy the world to protect you" but it's a parent/child relationship
i’m sorry but izuku offering another gay blond man his hand and kacchan going wide-eyed is so funny
Yall ever think about how Ford had to relearn how to be a normal human being after 30 years of isolation
i read somewhere that vikings used to gift new brides kittens and immediately thought of viking!simon and a little kitten
big man with small animal? absolutely yes i’m ovulating
c/w: none
you cannot and will not tell me that he will not pick the scrunkliest kitten known to man. little black scruffy thing tucked into his palms and he just puts it in your lap the day after your wedding. mumbles something about tradition before skulking off
he expects you to dump the thing on someone else, not even give little scruff a name. but to his surprise you’re absolutely in love with this little ball of fur. you don’t go anywhere without it, fashioning a little collar for it and speaking to it as if it were your own child
he doesn’t expect you to be in tears when you tell him that the cat didn’t come home last night :( that you’re worried a wolf got to it and you just miss your baby!
huffs and puffs as he hunts around the dark forest, looking for a kitten who may as well be invisible. breathes a sigh of relief when he finds the thing handing on a tree branch. he’d grab it by the scruff before beginning his trek back home,
“ya gave your mum a right scare. don’t do that again.” he’d grunt to the cat who just meows right back at him, tail swishing in the air
maybe i can gaslight myself into being okay
Me reading fanfics about characters in shows/movies I don’t plan on watching anytime soon:
I feel like the biggest differences w/Gen Z in comparison to some of the older Generations' works are that they're willing to take the Marauders into different universes as children and write about them in a more contemporary style.
Young/new adult (17-28) and older readers were first introduced to Sirius and Remus as 33-year-old individuals, so it was easier for those readers to write S & R as adults attempting to grapple with their background and trauma and grief than it was to reach back and try to make their Hogwarts years more accessible. I think Gen Z writers are coming in and reclaiming their life experiences as young people growing up with technology and texting and the realities of being Online All the Time in a way that older authors weren't doing at the time. I assume part of that comes back to the development of technology and the schisms that exist between gen x/millennial/gen z readers on that front, but I also think older writers may have been less aware of some of JKR's bullshit, which made it less uncomfortable to stick to canon environments and scenarios.
Barring 'All the Young Dudes', many of the currently popular wolfstar stories take place in non-magical settings (college AUs, sports AUs, etc), and while those aren't exclusively written by the youths™, I think their prolificness has likely been influenced by JKR's shitty behavior; it's a lot easier to divorce those characters from their author's terrible views when you remove them from the world she created. That also plays into how large of a factor the characters' queerness plays in the narratives being planned—and as you mentioned, the influx in fics that feature trans, NB, or genderfluid characters is a great side effect of these shifts.
Also, having spent a fair amount of time reading fics in the fandom, I think there was a bit of a high bar to clear in terms of writing quality early on. There are always posts going around that recommend more "literary" wolfstar pieces, and a fair amount of them tend to skew older (specifically: before 2010). By and large, online communities seem to have embraced the "everyone has to start somewhere" mentality a bit more in recent years than they had then, but I distinctly remember getting comments when I was writing in the 2000s where people would drop in to tell me I had utterly mischaracterized someone or that my grammar was bad. All for constructive criticism, but I do have to wonder if the "flame" reviews forced people to either conform to what people were looking for (literary, stylistic writing), switch to another platform (LJ to ff, or ff to Wattpad, etc), or stop writing altogether.
Nowadays, I think our younger authors have an idea for a fic and just...go for it. They don't always have beta readers (which aren't inherently necessary, but can definitely impact style, structure, and word choice) so they'll post things as they come to them, they've got fan-pages on instagram and tiktok and tumblr where they make textposts about characters using modern slang that get hundred of likes/reblogs—they've found a formula that works for them, and they aren't inclined to change it (see: how many texting fics exist). Beyond that, relying on conversational and colloquial writing means they can process their emotions in real time while writing, in a way that we as older writers definitely could have, but didn't usually. When I was reading fics then, and even rereading some of those fics now, it always seemed as if fics danced around trauma a bit more delicately than some of the popular fics do now.
That's not meant as a slam to younger writers, but I do think young people on the internet these days are FAR more willing to share about their personal trauma(s) online, and when they write their fics, sometimes that's obvious. Older authors do/did it too, but I think it's usually a bit more strategically veiled than younger authors are now. It was a poetic thing, and arguably, not always a good one, considering the way mental illness/saviour complexes could often be romanticized. Young authors now fall into the same patterns, which again, aren't great, but I also think that they're the first to acknowledge their own mental health crises and say it hasn't been a great experience—even in a joking manner.
I could go on about this for DAYS but I've already written you an essay, so I'll leave it there hahahah
Thank you for the essay!!!! I love all of these points. Yes, I have also noticed that the big fics in this corner of the fandom tend to be the non-magical AU ones--fics that essentially follow the plot structure of contemporary romance novels, but just so happen to have characters named Sirius and Remus in them. I mean, any one of those fics could have the serial numbers filed off and be published as an original romance book, you know? Up until now, I was just chalking that up to the popularity of romance novels--I figured that the writers were just replicating the structure of the books like they like to read, but in fanfic form. But you bring an excellent point--it might be more that they're trying to divorce the characters from the world JKR created.
This is fascinating. I'm loving all the meta that's ended up in my inbox today.
You know your IDGAF attitude has gotten further than you expected once you realized you're literally ignoring half of the student body at this point
I think people who consider aromanticism as "basically straight" underestimate how noticeable absence can be to those around you.
Whether you're a kid in school with classmates who won't take "no one" as an answer to who you have a crush on or an adult whose coworkers have picked up on the fact that you've never mentioned a romantic partner; after enough time, a lack or insufficient amount of romantic interest will raise the antennae of friends, family, coworkers, etc... They will notice and they will speculate and they will ask.
It is impossible to meet the societal bar for straightness through inaction.
Reblog if you loved Vigilante Shit from first listen because I need to know who also has superior tastebuds