Some day I want to see a show that does the “no filler episodes” thing from the opposite direction. Just a whole season worth of low-stakes character pieces that seem to move the overall story absolutely nowhere, then episode 26 pulls all the triggers at once and this massive Rube Goldberg machine of a plot the show’s been quietly setting up in the background the whole time hits you like a truck.
I know this is a tiny part of the wider problems born of diet culture, fatphobia, classicism, and racism but like god the idea that "healthy" food must inherently taste bad has completely ruined us as a society.
Like this is personal and anecdotal and I do recognize that I am probably in the minority here (or if not, that people with a different experience are definitely way louder about it). But. Personally speaking, I am significantly more likely to be triggered (and WAY more likely to be badly triggered) by a story’s framing than by its content. And content warnings are themselves part of a story’s framing. Ironically, blackly hilariously, this actually means that an exhaustively tagged story which overlooks something is vastly more likely to do a number on me than a story labeled with some kind of extremely nonspecific Yeah Shit Gets Fucked Up Here tag.
Again, I recognize that this is personal and anecdotal and that I am likely in the minority. But I also don’t think this is in any way unique enough that it shouldn’t be something we consider when we talk about why people might go a less-is-more route with content warnings.
I noticed the old/original version of this piece got some retweets recently and I haven’t posted to Tumblr in awhile, and it’s a pretty good time to dust off my account.
I call this piece “Butterfly Effect” because I just couldn’t resist that title no matter how hard I tried.
5x7″ and 11x17″ prints are available on my website.
If posting fic online has taught me anything, it’s that I have no idea how the reader will react to anything. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Not the faintest clue.
Fics that I think I scribbled off just to get them out there get the kindest, most rapturous feedback. Fics I slaved over, agonized over, bled my soul into get a couple tepid replies. Fics I thought were me revealing the darkness and weird kink that lives in my brain, scared to even post it for fear of judgement, get, “Aaaw that’s so sweet!” replies. Baffling.
My conclusion? You just never know. You really just can’t know. When I did a workshop with 20 other writers I would try to guess what their critique of my story would be and I was right maybe 1 in 20 times. Only one other writer would have the same critique for my story that I had. And it wasn’t even always the same person.
The encouraging part about this is, if self recrimination, the fear that you know what people won’t like about your story, is holding you back, just say fuck it! You’re almost certainly wrong! All you can do is make it the best story you can for the energy you have. And yeah, sometimes that means scribbling it out in an evening and kicking it out to the void of the internet before you can change your mind or worry about editing it more than once because then you’ll never post it.
It’s all chaos, man. You don’t get to decide what the audience thinks. All you can do is create it and put it out there for them to decide.
Secret to getting to know other fans on tumblr is reblogging. This sounds like a trap to get you guys to reblog art and fics and gifs which yes that’s an added benefit but also the way you get a feel of followers or mutuals is the little comments in the tags of a post like subtle little whispers and you start to recognise names like oh that’s the one who’s always nice to artists or that’s the funny one or maybe they have a funny queue pun tag or maybe there can be a little prev tags interaction like that’s how you start creating your own little likeminded souls club here. Also you get to put pretty art and fics and gifs on your blog