Give Dionysus Potatoes

❤️Love❤️ all my Dionysus lovers and fellow practitioners, and honor them as you may with grapes that's awesome...

But grapes are overrated.

Yeah yeah, grapes make wine, prefect, but give this man some hops! Give this intoxicated god some barley, give them sugar cane for their rum! Give them potatoes for their vodka!

Give Dionysus a bit of coke for a mixer, a bottle opener in his name.

I saw your post about reading fanfiction and I love it so much. My enjoyment of fanfiction doesn't challenge my availability to like understand Shakespeare. But, I know my enjoyment of fanfiction is because a.) It's Fun, b.) It's Comforting and I Feel Seen, and C.) It's Accessible.

I had a good high school education as in I went to a tuition free private school. It's easily the best high school in my area and some parents explained it as "An A in a public school here is just a C at this private school." It was common for straight A public school children to /fail/ our enterance exams. So, I know I'm very privileged to have this education where even middle of the pack was better than being left to the wilds of our county system.

I also know that I grew up poor and my grandmother hated buying me books. She saw them as a single use item even if I excitedly reread everything I owned. It was very rare for me to get new books of my own. I scavenged for free or someone gave them to me as a gift. You know what was free and readily available at this time? Fanfiction.

Now, I'm dealing with debilitated mental health where I rarely have enough spoons to do more than get out of bed, eat simple foods, and shower. Sometimes I have really great days! Other times, I have worse days.

Fanfiction is readily available on my phone, doesn't take as much mental energy, and isn't frightening because it's not an entirely new series. It's more like interacting with a new series in the same universe. I'm not having to forge new bonds with brand new characters or hope a series pans out even if the reviews looked good.

Writing fanfiction is also a hobby of mine. It brings me great joy. To solve the puzzles to fit in what I want to happen. Or, I connect little details I discovered and want to use.

As a reader and writer, it also gives me a chance to explore my own identities? My sexual and romantic orientations, gender, and polyam natures can appear in my favorite series now. They aren't being done in passing but have the chance to be fully explored in a way canon wouldn't really allow. It's fantastic.

It's also disheartening when people want to reduce a hobby that brings a lot of people joy down to "It's for the stupid masses." When that's not at all what's happening for majority of people? It's a free, enjoyable hobby that I watch person after person do as a passion project. This is just thing written from the heart with love.

💜

I think it has become cool to shit on fanfiction recently in a response to the navel gazing self satisfied posts that were going around a bit ago about how fanfic is REVOLUTIONARY and ANTICAPITALIST and NECESSARILY INVOLVES BEING PROGRESSIVE and engaging in Fandom is A RADICAL ACT, being in Fandom is a MARGINALIZED IDENTITY, etc

Which, yeah. Those takes were frustrating in a lot of ways and failed to address a lot of nuance. But I think the sheer *glee* with which a lot of people have jumped to going "THATS NOT TRUE AND ALSO YOUR HOBBY AND SUBCULTURE ARE BAD AND STUPID" is... not a flattering look for those people either. Lol

It's something that brings people a lot of joy. It's a hobby! It means a lot to a lot of people. And that doesn't mean it cant have issues just like any other hobby subculture (most of those issues mirror the issues present in Mainstream Society, though. Usually these are not brand new never before seen issues invented by Big Fanfiction. Lol)

I'm glad you have an activity that brings you joy and a space that you feel you fit into. That's important for people to have and I think we should be glad when people have that in their lives. It brings me joy that people have joy in their lives!!! It's hard to be an alive human!!! God bless stuff that makes it less hard for anyone

one thing that kind of confuses me is like... i've seen people say that buying from certain companies because they/companies related to them in some way do animal testing, even when those items aren't necessarily the items that were tested. but does that make it wrong to buy vegan food (purposeful or accidental) from a brand/restaurant that also makes things with animal products? i guess i'm just having a hard time understanding what's different about these situations

This is a really good question, I think there are a couple of reasons. The first and foremost is accessibility; it is relatively easy to boycott all animal testing companies and not miss out on any essentials, whereas if you were to boycott all stores/companies involved in animal agriculture then you’d be boycotting pretty much everyone. Even most of the vegan brands are usually part or entirely owned by companies or investors with significant stakes in animal agriculture, just because that’s the stranglehold these large corporations have over pretty much everything. As a consumer it wouldn’t be reasonable to avoid those, you’d have to buy everything you own solely from small, 100% vegan companies who are self-owned, which just isn’t reasonable to expect.

Secondly, with animal testing It isn’t the case that some it some items from a particular brand are tested and some aren’t, animal testing companies are either for it or against it by policy, if they test on animals then the the entire brand supports animal testing. Take L'Oréal for example, they sell in China so they test all products which are available in China, and they won’t release information on which of their products are tested in China and which aren’t, they simply say “we only test on animals when it is legally required to do so.” 

This is muddied even further by the fact that a product only available in the US will contain ingredients they have tested in their other products which they do sell in China, so it may be that a particular product hasn’t at any point been tested on animals, but all of their ingredients have, because those ingredients are contained in their other brands which are sold and tested in China. It’s pretty straightforward to just boycott the entire brand because they test on animals, and it’s far better to support non-animal testing companies anyway.