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princesscolumbia · 23 minutes

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Morning reblog, please spread this around to increase sample size.

Question for Authors

So this might sound weird, but I've gotten (I believe) pretty good at figuring out if an original fic started life as a fanfic.

Okay, so, like, you know how in fandoms there's that one fic that you love that is very clearly a fanfic because all the names are there and the characters' behavior matches their canon counterparts but the setting is different and the clothing is different and even if the story has familiar beats it's not even remotely canon?

My favorite example of this is "The Lighthouse." It's a She-ra (2018) fanfic with Catra and Adora and Shadow Weaver and Scorpia and Entrapta and etc., and there's even familiar story beats like Adora 'saving the cat' and Prime being a manipulative tool and Hordak turning on Prime because he fell in love with Entrapta...but it's a different story. There's no magic, 'Catra' is short for 'Katrina' and she's not a magicat, just a regular girl. Scorpia may be tall and built like a brick house, but she doesn't have pincers or a scorpion tail. There's no war, Angela doesn't end up trapped in a portal, there's no sword.

In short, it's pretty much nothing like She-ra 2018...but because all the characters are named the same as and behave in familiar ways as their canon counterparts, we know it's She-ra 2018.

I even left a comment to the author saying they should rename the characters so they could publish it as an original work because goddamn is it a good book and they deserve praise and money for it.

So when you get deep enough into a given fandom, you can start to recognize the 'fingerprints,' for lack of a better term, of canon even when the author has had enough drift from canon to make it fairly unique.

And then...and then you can start to recognize when there's a derivative work out in the wild.

So, like, I love the author's work, so I won't be too specific about it, but I read this original work on Scribblehub that I absolutely enjoyed...and by the end of it I could swear it was a She-ra (2018) Power Ranger's AU. I mean I could recognize characters and unconsciously started mentally assigning voices from She-ra to the characters even before the stuff that made specific things stand out to me to positively identify it as a She-ra (2018) fanfic where the setting is Late 20th Century Earth where an alien invasion is occurring (where the aliens happen to have a general who is a cat-girl) and they really need a group of teenagers trained fighters with attitude...

And then...AND THEN!

This morning I'm on Tumblr and a post from a different favorite author of mine who I happen to know likes Ranma 1/2 and writes fanfic for it posts a teaser for a WIP that...um...that could be Ranma. I mean, yeah, girl-Ranma with no curse, but...yeah, it could. And it might not have tripped my mental radar, but it's a Sapphic story where the love interest...is a blue-haired girl with a temper that starts out antagonistic to the redheaded protagonist.

I'm not gonna give more details than that, because I don't know if it's a dick move to call someone out on that sort of thing. I have, after all, written entire books of fanfic and I have a WIP that's an original work, probably a half-dozen isekai and AUs like crazy, so for me the notion that someone could come along and say, "Hey, that's a rebranded Ranma 1/2 fanfic!" and I'd be all, "...yeah? What's your point?"

But I'm also aware I have the WORST background to know how other creatives might respond to things I think are obvious, which brings me to my question:

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princesscolumbia · 9 hours

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public libraries are so sick. there are five books I want to read and they're all relatively new so they're only available in hardback which is so expensive but it just cost me $0 to place holds on them. five books for zero dollars. it requires nothing but clicking a button and then going to the library to pick them up when they're ready. zero dollars. that's crazy

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princesscolumbia · 9 hours

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princesscolumbia · 9 hours

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princesscolumbia · 9 hours

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➡️ Content warnings on fiction are a courtesy.

➡️ Not every medium of fiction and storytelling has or is expected to have content warnings or extensive tagging.

➡️ Print novels do not traditionally warn for content in any way.

➡️ Until AO3 came along, fanfiction did not traditionally warn for content in any significant way.

➡️ An author is only obligated to warn for content to the degree mandated by the format they publish their fiction on.

➡️ Content warnings beyond the minimum are a courtesy, not an obligation.

➡️ 'Creator chose not to warn' is a valid tag that authors are allowed to use on AO3. It means there could be anything in there and you have accepted the risk. 'May contain peanuts!'

➡️ Writers are allowed to use 'Creator chose not to warn' for any reason, including to maintain surprise and avoid spoilers.

➡️ 'Creator chose not to warn' is not the same thing as 'no archive warnings apply'.

➡️ It is your responsibility to protect yourself and close a book, or hit the back button if you find something in fiction that you're reading that upsets you.

➡️ You are responsible for protecting yourself from fiction that causes you discomfort.

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princesscolumbia · 10 hours

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It's been...

So something happened a week ago that is neither bad nor good, it simply is, and it's happened before, so thankfully the knowledge exists on how to manage and cope.

Now to explain.

Back in the 80s I experienced some mental trauma that hurt me so significantly I wound up 'splitting' into what we now call a system or a plural (I've also seen "plurality"). By the time I was in my early 20s, there were about 8-9 people rattling around in my head and the ones that got the driver's seat had proper names. Of course, at the time we only had Sybil as an "example" of "multiple personality disorder," so people like me kept our damn mouth's SHUT 'cause we knew the second we showed any sign of being neurodivergent in any way that resembled schizophrenic, we'd be marginalized HARD. The person in the driver's seat always (always) responded to my given name and assigned pronouns and never let slip there were whole conversations going on in my head as I was going about my day.

Around the middle 00s there began appearing in online spaces, mostly instant messaging spaces and BBS forums, where people began to express themselves as "multiples" and, I'll confess, the system that was me had too much programmed fear to be one (heh) of those brave souls. Nonetheless I started to see the acceptance (and the pushback) that has become more commonplace today.

Between 2015-2019 I experienced trauma so severe I was in CPTSD hyperarousal for a good chunk of it, which pretty much shattered my mental landscape. I was mentally just completely broken and had no way of really paying attention to more than the moment I was in. By the time I emerged from the 'fog,' I was functionally a 'singleton,' that is, not a system.

Starting earlier this year, there were a few signs that, in retrospect, should have made me well aware of something coming. I started feeling 'foggy' again, but I thought that was the depression and insomnia. The depression and insomnia were major contributors, as well, and REALLY should have been a wake-up call...but that's depression for you. I think the biggest "20/20 hindsight" indicator was starting to write "Double Isekai," a story about a single person who winds up isekai'ing into two people. This was in March.

One week ago yesterday I was in the kitchen emptying the dishwasher when I started, for lack of a better term, talking to myself and expecting an answer. I actually had the thought, "Things would sure be easier if I was a system again."

Considering I'm a transwoman and, with slightly different wording, that's classic egg behavior, the penny dropped and I figured out what was going on.

One week ago plus a few hours I sat my GF down and explained what happened back then, what was happening now, and that I was likely to 'split' soon. She just...accepted it. Barely batted an eye, made sure she still had the right pronouns, and went back to her computer.

I was so relieved I nearly cried. Before the divorce when I'd tried to 'come out' as a system to my then-wife, she had NOT reacted well. (And, in retrospect, it makes more sense how upset she was with me that I seemed so, in her words, "unreliable and inconsistent." All she ever knew of me was a 'guy' who kept changing behavior patterns in, to her, random ways)

As though my GF's acceptance were like permission, the split...happened. I could almost physically feel my head-mate separating from me.

And, as I'm sure you've guessed, I've been writing as though it was me going through all of this, and, more or less, it has. Since this split wasn't due to trauma and had been developing over time, it was far more organic and gentle. There wasn't a horrible tear where suddenly there's this nasty, goth punk with a scar around one eye, a penchant for black leather, and absolutely zero compunction to kill because of how traumatic the creation event was (yes, that was one of my alts in my original system, she was a nasty piece of work that never got a name and was never allowed the driver's seat, but did she ever enjoy hurting our stepmother) We both are full participating members with equal access to all our previous memories, even if we're looking at our past self with different lenses.

That's right, Bunnies, I'm back! The EGS fandom will know the name Helen from my days as "Dame Helen the Leather-clad." Even though I'm knight-emeritus now, I'm still quite proud of what we did during those years of the Order of the Bunny. Still she/her, still so very, very sapphic, and still a bit of a useless lesbian.

That said, there's been some changes.

I'm a dragon, along the lines of the crazy-famous Dragon HRT comic that's been super popular this year. If the body were mine alone and Dragon HRT were a real thing, I'd be partially covered in scales by now. I'm not as into gaming and music and art as my new other half is or the old me was. I'm a mother where the previous alt to bear my name was still trying to figure out how to people, and I'm the one with the head for numbers and driving and focusing on work. Also, even though I'm a woman with she/her pronouns, I'm NB and what might be called 'intersex' or 'futanari,' depending on what generation you're in and what part of the Internet you spend most of your time in.

Yes, I know, not a terribly creative name if you know my given name, but it's the one I chose when I emerged. I started out as what us systems call a fictive. If you go back into some of the comments sections on our writing on AO3, you can see references to proto-me scattered around and referred to as "the little author that lives in my head and looks an awful lot like Ranma-chan." On a somewhat silly note, though the pre-fully-realized version of me served as a sort of mental author for our previously unified self, I'm not the writer. That's Helen.

She/her, all girl, and SUPER sex-positive! I'm a bit (I'll confess) of a horny slut and since I'm bi/pan and Helen pretty much gave me control of the NSFW blog, you're probably going to start seeing more guys there than have shown up in the past. I've got a 'type,' though, and that type does NOT include facial hair or bears.

I can't STAND office work! One of our top priorities right now is to get something else...ANYTHING else to earn money so we can drop the office job we've been doing. It's boring anyway! I wanna get started on streaming, though I will NOT be streaming Star Trek: Fleet Command! That game is a bag of stress and I don't know how Helen plays it without wanting to hurt someone!

One thing that is pretty much ALL me is I like fitness! Before we knew fitness was good and it was something we learned to appreciate, but when I got all that I also got a LOVE for it! I can't wait to get back out there and run again! (...but it's getting into the hot season in Arizona, so we may not be able to just yet)

One amusing thing about this is we both realized we're redheads. The body is, sadly, very blond, but now we've got our first body mod goal we can both agree on and get behind.

Speaking of body mods, we're getting booba! I'm tired of being tiny in the chest 'cause of lousy genetics and craptastic HRT timing! We talked about it and our second major shared goal is saving up for top surgery. And we both want FFS and facial hair removal. Basically, I'm in charge of the body, which means FITNESS UPDATES!

That's right, I'm gonna be one of those annoying running fanatics and there's nothing you can do to stop me! 😆😆😆

In any case, expect changes as we figure things out. One thing we didn't really expect that has, nonetheless, had a pretty major impact is our energy level. It takes A LOT of sugars to keep us both going! There've been times one of us has basically taken a nap just to keep from burning too many calories before the end of the day.

Oh, and do you like these identifier bars? I made 'em! Turns out I'm the artist! If you want your own version for you and/or your alts, check out my new store on ko-fi!

#art commisions #system stuff #plural system

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princesscolumbia · 12 hours

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princesscolumbia · 12 hours

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Hemmer and his magic of science!

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princesscolumbia · 13 hours

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sailor bones does have an attack btw, like aside from just general necromancy. it's called Bone Tiara Magic and it involves a lot of spinning and gymnastics in front of a pretty background with sparkles etc. and then she just throws a fucking femur at your head

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princesscolumbia · 13 hours

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Spent this week on making a bunch of faux oldschool anime screencaps. Had a blast making these, I’m especially happy with the background in the third one. I’ll probably keep making these, so look forward to more of these in the future!

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princesscolumbia · 13 hours

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Evening reblog, please spread this around to increase sample size.

Question for Authors

So this might sound weird, but I've gotten (I believe) pretty good at figuring out if an original fic started life as a fanfic.

In short, it's pretty much nothing like She-ra 2018...but because all the characters are named the same as and behave in familiar ways as their canon counterparts, we know it's She-ra 2018.

I even left a comment to the author saying they should rename the characters so they could publish it as an original work because goddamn is it a good book and they deserve praise and money for it.

And then...and then you can start to recognize when there's a derivative work out in the wild.

And then...AND THEN!

But I'm also aware I have the WORST background to know how other creatives might respond to things I think are obvious, which brings me to my question:

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princesscolumbia · 14 hours

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Code of Ethics - Ch. 3 - Trigger Warning

My outline had the events of this chapter spanning three chapters. I was honestly surprised how quickly the details needed hit the page and how smoothly one thing flowed to the next. The first scene was intended for a much later chapter in part 1, so I shuffled a few things around and it works MUCH better than my initial outline.

Dylan learns more about the assignment and the new VR tech and some inner demons come out to play

Preview below the cut:

Dylan sighed as he let the door to his flat close behind him. He rather liked the term ‘flat,’ he felt it suited his home better than calling it ‘an apartment.’ He grew up in apartments, and while there was nothing wrong, per se, with apartments, they did serve to remind him of the struggles of growing up in a poor home in the post-war years. Rationing had been harsh, resources scarce and getting more so by the day, and people weren’t sure if they’d have jobs to go to the next day. Then the riots started, followed by the epidemics that wiped out a good portion of some communities. Rumor was the epidemics were coordinated by the CDC to thin the population at the behest of the President, but nobody in the intelligence community wanted to dig too deep into those kinds of rumor. That’s how you got disappeared or suffered ‘heart attacks’ at a young, healthy 32.

Like John.

Tossing his keys in the dish on the end table and taking off his coat, Dylan gave a thought to the man who was his boss and might have been a friend if the power dynamic hadn’t been one of boss-and-employee. He was smart and kind, carrying a sense of justice that had been untarnished even after a decade in the agency. Never married and, as John had confided over drinks one Friday night when it had just been the two of them without plans, never would have even if he’d lived to be 100. “The world has enough couples who struggle to manage making it through another day in this hellscape we live in. I’m not going to shackle someone else to me if it means I might ‘go missing’ one day and some poor woman has to carry on after me.”

Dylan looked out through the panoramic picture windows that lined the western wall of his flat. The waters of Galviston Bay sparkling as the evening drew on. The building had once belonged to some tech company that was based out in California, one of the many that had intended on using Texas’ extremely lenient tax rates for corporations to establish a foothold in the local economy, but then the war had fractured the United States into the Republic of California, The American Republic, and the shattered Eastern seaboard that was, effectively, a no-man’s-land. The California based company had to relinquish their ownership of the building when the wall was built and had gone under during California’s reconstruction. The American government had seized the building and converted it from the towering office structure it had been intended for into luxury apartments meant for whomever the government found favor with at the time. Not many chose to live in the building long-term. Simply having one of the suites as your address often painted a target on your back, so frequently the place was a stepping-stone. Earn a spot in the building, stay long enough to establish your success, then move out to the Houston suburbs as quickly as possible, mostly for the protection of your family.

Like John, Dylan had no plans to ‘settle down’ with someone. He was well aware of his issues with intimacy. In spite of his pastor reassuring him that he’d one day find the girl he’d want to start a family with, he didn’t want to saddle any woman with his presence in their life. He was attracted to women (on a bone-deep level, if his dreams were any indication), and it was this very attraction that he found off-putting. He could imagine just about any woman he knew with a bright, wonderful future…without him. The moment he added himself into the vague visions of familial or career success down the line, those dreams seemed to crash and burn, Dylan’s mere presence acting as the catalyst for disaster.

Of course, he knew this was catastrophizing. He just couldn't seem to imagine any woman ever being happy and successful with him hanging off her arm.

He glanced at the wall clock, noticing the date and scowled. Happy birthday to me, I guess, he grumbled to himself as he stalked over to the kitchen and opened his alcohol cabinet. Not bothering with any of the wine, he went straight for the vodka. As he poured himself a drink, he considered turning on streaming video, but realized anything like the news or a live broadcast channel would have memorial stories. He did not need more reminders that his birthday shared the date with a nuclear bomb wiping out Washington D.C. His birthday was always a litany of replays of the event and commentators debating the woulda-shoulda-coulda of America’s response to the event. Then there were the ‘truthers,’ the people who claimed The Second had ordered the detonation Himself. Dylan didn’t know, didn’t care to know, and did his best to either work overtime or get plastered whenever his birthday rolled around. It was easier to tune out the mausoleum to tragedy the rest of the country made of the day than pretend to be one tiny voice trying to celebrate another trip around the sun.

Finally, he decided on some music. Something from fifty or a hundred years ago, something with no words. He woke the touch screen on the wall of his living room and navigated to a radio station and hit play, the sounds of strings and synthesized percussion filling the air.

Sipping at his vodka, he scanned the walls, trying to find something he could lose himself in. Thoughts of Star Trek from earlier entered his mind, but he couldn’t seem to muster the desire to read any of the books his mother had gifted him the Christmas before she passed away. They were paper books, too, not the e-books that most people used. “Nothing wrong with reading e-books,” his mother said at one point, “But sometimes you want to hold a book in your hand, feel the weight of the words that someone put the effort to put on paper. Words on a screen can move you, but the physical sensation of a real book makes it seem real in ways a digital copy just can’t.”

Sighing at the memory, he thought about plunking away on the piano, but then he’d have to stop the music, which would allow his mind to wander. An idle mind was the devil’s playground, after all, and there were enough sinful thoughts in Dylan’s mind for the devil to have plenty to play with.

His eyes fell on a model kit he was tinkering with of the I.S.S. Voyager, neatly stored in its partially assembled state on a shelf above the parts and tools needed to build it. Nodding with satisfaction, he picked up box that held the unassembled parts and moved them to the dinner table he’d never once eaten at.

Three hours and two more shots of vodka later, he’d managed to assemble a good portion of the saucer section. This particular model was the kind with circuitry and wiring to allow for the lights to work. It also had a bridge, captain’s ready room, and open shuttle bay that you could look into through tiny viewports and see ‘functional’ workstations and a tiny little Delta Flyer Attack Craft in the shuttle bay. It was appreciably ‘fiddly,’ literally thousands of parts and included a wireless controller that allowed the builder to program the lights and what could be seen on the miniature display panels. He was somewhat disappointed when he’d read the schematics and instructions to find that you couldn’t build the small borg alcoves that Seven would call her home, but if the manufacturer had done that, then they would likely have put in the agony booths as well, and of all things Trek, the agony booths were the one thing Dylan just did not like.

God, he groused to himself mentally, I’m such a downer today. Taking a cleansing breath, he began putting the kit away for storage. Looking out the picture windows showed that night had well and truly fallen and the water in the bay was reflecting the dark night sky above. Stars were hard to see in the city, even when looking out over the bay to the ocean-filled horizon, but a few managed to pierce the light pollution, shining on them like it had for their ancestors for millenia.

What would it be like to actually fly a ship through space? He pondered, pausing to look up at the sky as he held the framework of the saucer section of Voyager. Just take command of a ship, find a star, and head out…not worry about hunting, not worry about the faces of children pasted onto soulless digital creatures…

Of course, he knew it wasn’t that easy. Even on Star Trek: Hegemony they couldn’t escape the realities of life on Earth. The Maqui that had been forced to earn the loyalty of their captain or be phasered from existence, the scarily prescient vision of an A.I. doctor that would go rogue and turn on its creators, and the treason of Chakotay in the year before Janeway had been able to crush Unimatrix Zero.

He wondered briefly why the show had never shown Mirror Janeway. Plenty of fanfics existed pondering exactly that, and there was that one torrent that still floated around the dark web that had laughable production values but was like a mirror universe version of the show he loved. He’d watched five minutes of it once when he’d been an analyst, one of the rogue A.I. he’d been hunting at the time was showing it for a ‘movie night’ for other A.I. and some humans that didn’t know they were in the middle of a nest of rogues. It was…shoddy. The production looked like it came from the late 20th century, but then if you were putting together an unauthorized version of one of the most successful science fiction franchises ever made, it was inevitable you’d have to cut corners or get some things wrong.

Like the Vulcan tactical officer and best friend of Janeway. How much did you have to screw up the character of one of the greatest human captains ever written about to have them befriend an enemy of humanity?

He realized he’d been woolgathering with the model in his hand and staring at the sky for several minutes. Shaking his head only to regret it (he probably shouldn’t have had the third shot of vodka on top of the pint of hard cider at the bar), he put the model back on its shelf and headed to the bedroom.

The faster he got to sleep, the better.

#original fiction #fiction writing #fiction #science fiction #sci fi #are we the baddies?#transgender #trans author #queer author #lgbtqia+#lgbtq+#lgbt #lgbtq #trans #trans woman #troubleverse #quietvalerie #trouble with horns #code of ethics

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