in honour of the new season starting tomorrow, i think it would be only fitting to do a little quiz to get to know the people still here in 2022!

now you might be thinking 'what the hell is she on about we obviously all know eachother', but i've seen some new blogs on this tag and i think it would be nice to make everyone feel welcome and warm ourselves up for the new season!

so please take this quiz and make me suffer through analysing more answers (it won't take much of your time i promise)

Day 6 - Have you ever been to a competition? If yes, describe a little your experience, if not, what competition would you like to attend?

So far I’ve been to Wisła (SGP 2017, SCoC 2019), Kranj (SCoC 2018), Oslo (SCoC 2018, WC 2019), Planica (WC 2019, was supposed to be there in 2020 as well, but corona happened  🙃), Szczyrk (ladies’ SCoC 2019) and Lahti (WC 2020).

Wisła in 2017 was the competition I chose to go quite spontaneously. It was only after half a season I was into ski jumping, didn’t really know anyone in the fandom. I managed to convince my brother and friend (who is not really into sports) to go with me. I hope they had a good time 😀

In Wisła we’ve met few people (with whom I sadly have no contact, I’m not good at this 😟) to fangirl with. Got to sing national anthem twice, as team Poland and Dawid Kubacki won the team and individual comps 😀 One thing I remember very clearly from after the quails, when I lost my group and was trying to locate them, saw two girls taking a photo together next to me. After a moment I realized they were not two girls, it was a girl and Anders Fannemel 😅 Well, I judged from height only 🙃

I’m glad it was not too hot, considering it was July.

old phone, sorry for shit quality

Kranj 2018 was the first time I was flying a plane ever and also my first time traveling abroad alone. Already in Slovenia I met two girls from tumblr sj fandom. I got to see the town, which is very charming and the hill (obviously first journey destination, when I had some time alone). The comps itself made me fell in love with CoC, such a nice atmosphere, ski jumpers walking among the crowd and easily accessible. Oh, and I’m visible on a transmission from that comp 😂 Before going to Slovenia, I had to buy a new phone, as in Wisła the old one trolled me with its battery and turned off in the middle of a qualis, when I was taking photos 🙃 Funny thing was that in between the rounds there was a little archery contest for chosen fans from the crowd watching competition. And, considering it was CoC, there were quite a lot of people. You can really tell that Slovenians enjoy sj.

Also. Locate Domen’s car 😂

 Going to CoC in Oslo in September of 2018 was possible thanks to the fact we were already visiting family’s friend who lives in Norway (yes, I suggested the date, luckily it was also this weekend the plane tickets were cheaper). Only saw one comp, on Saturday. Sadly we missed girls jumping, as we needed like 3 hours to get to Oslo and it was simply too early (instead I followed text transmission while on a train to Oslo). When we arrived to Midtstuen station, obviously we took wrong route to the hill and somehow, through the woods, got to the smaller hills 😂 Anyway, we found the right hill quickly. The comp was not attracting almost any interest at all. Apart from my brother and me, ski jumpers and their families, there were barely a few people. Sometimes bikers would stop and watch for a moment but as the water break start, they would go. The barriers were prepared but not used at all, you could just walk wherever and nobody seemed to care. Nice. The café did not sell all the coffee and waffles they had prepared, so this lady was walking between  people and offering them for free 😀 I cannot eat waffles and my brother didn’t want any (why?) so we politely declined.

It was the first comp of Andreas Stjernen after an injury break, he did nice finishing third. And also gave me a weird look when I was shouting something in Polish to my brother, as he passed me by 😂 I got to see flower ceremony standing right next to Joakim Aune 🤩 And by a coincidence, during the second round we stood behind Marius Lindvik’s… family, I guess? Daniel was there too, not jumping himself but cheering on the ones who did.

WC in Oslo in 2019 I described earlier. I can add that on Saturday there was a snowfall since morning, I’ve almost froze my fingers off (stupidly sensitive hands). Also – seeing a bunch of Norwegians traveling at 9 am to watch cross-country skiing, leaving metro station and already getting drunk, dancing to party music being blasted out of the nearby windows – quite something.

photo from Sunday, with metro station mentioned

Planica 2019 was my very first time seeing ski flying live! Again with Slovenian crew. But because I’m an idiot who did not book place to stay at early enough, had to travel to Kranjska Gora every day from Kranj (like an hour and a half with a bus if I remember correctly) 🙃 Missed evening attractions of Kranjska that way 😅 But back to sj, got to see some really nice flights, personal best results, Ryoyu’s record of Letalnica (holy shit, the excitement that went through the crowd!), last jump of Robert Kranjec’s career (one of childhood faves ❤️),  team Poland’s first ski flying win, Žiga Jelar playing with his band and much more 😀 From personal experience I don’t recommend forgetting sunscreen to Planica. Ended up with sunburn in a shape of sunglasses and a beanie 🙃 And I was really surprised how hot it was in full sun on the stands. It truly turned from snowy winter on Thursday to full spring on Sunday. Felt like spending two seasons there in just four days 😀

 CoCs in Szczyrk and Wisła in 2019 were basically joint events, same week in two nearby towns. First day I went to girls’ event alone, on the next Julia @lewanarta​ joined me. And what sort of sj trip would that be without a fuck up by me? This time, apart from not having courage to approach Virág, who jumped in Szczyrk twice to fifth place (pleasure to see), I could not watch last jumps of second comp and flower ceremony because at the time I was throwing up in the toilet of a bar by the hill 🙃 Took wrong backpack in which I had no painkillers and got surprised by period 🙃🙃🙃 But until that, watching jumpers from the so called ‘river tribune’ was a very pleasant experience.

Also hill in Szczyrk is the very first I was to (and at), in 2005, before it was rebuild to its current state.

Having in memory SGP in Wisła two years earlier, the chill CoC comp without crowds was a nice change. Obviously, it’s Poland, there were still people, but not as many. First day was rainy… But only between rounds and after a comp. And as always, my job was following the comp with text transmission on my phone, while Julia was asking for autographs and taking photos 😀 I’m always trying to follow results during watching live, but it’s almost impossible with all these distractions 😅 And how nice it is to finish day spent on watching ski jumping live with watching ski jumping on tv – Courchevel was the same day 😀

 And finally WC Lahti 2020, the last thing before everything went nuts because of corona. Again with Julia, we’ve planned for a while to go to Finland. First sj related experience we had still in Warsaw – it turned out we’re on the same flight as team Poland. Later, at Helsinki airport, we’ve waited for a bag together with Norwegian xcs and noco teams as well 😀 we’ve been at the Lahti Ski Games since very morning as I wanted to see noco sj part, so we’ve had plenty of time to see the place, small hills, tracks, big hills… Surprisingly, there was no snow, apart from the artificial one produced for the events. Local people seemed a little bit sad because it’s usually naturally snowy around the time of Lahti Ski Games. It also turned out that we were to the 1000th individual comp in World Cup’s history. We’ve met Finnish Tumblr crew and I had an unexpected encounter as among them was a girl that I’ve briefly met in Wisła in 2017! World is a small place, isn’t it? And at the end we’ve had photo together with God of Wind himself. Last occasion, couldn’t let it pass. Oh, and I got a bouquet from flower ceremony 😀 No idea whose, it was given to me by Austrian staff member after team comp 😅

Uf. That was a long one. Congrats and thanks if you’ve read it all ❤️ I’m physically unable to write ‘a little’ 😅

Re: your recent posts about fandom entitlement, do you think there's a corellation between that growing entitlement and the trend towards demanding ships etc. be canon? I 100% get wanting representation, but it feels like something else is also going on with all the demands for canon ships, canon validation, treating headcanons as absolute fact etc. It's like fandom HAS to be validated/legitimized, and just exploring possibility - which has always been the core of fanwork - isn't enough anymore.

Yes, I think that there’s a correlation, BUT I also think that the interaction within fandom often makes people believe that there is a secret conspiracy going on, and that sometimes fans tend to get lost in their meta. On tumblr, specifially, the narrative that is conveyed about a show often doesn’t reflect the actual narrative. 

Back in the days, when the first couple of seasons of Teen Wolf had Sterek become so vastly popular, many new fans pointed out that they had expected a completely different show, based on the gifsets and meta posts on tumblr and the hype accompanying Sterek. Of course, the showrunners didn’t help: if there has ever been a case of the showrunners, cast and press people intentionally queerbaiting, Teen Wolf was it. But apart from that, it sometimes seemed like Sterek fans, myself included, were watching a completely different kind of show. 

The same goes for Supernatural. For close to six seasons now, Destiel shippers have been expecting Destiel to become canon any second. I know because I was one of them. When I was waiting for season nine, I let myself be caught up in a growing excitement among fans, which basically said: “Even casual viewers have noticed that the writers are hinting at Destiel”, and I wrote a couple of meta posts that contributed to the madness that still get the occasional reblog, three seasons later.

I think TPTB have mostly stopped trying to convince people that they are not secretly planning to make Destiel canon. Simply because whatever they say, people just won’t believe them. Though I also think they’ve made it abundantly clear - through various tweets during season nine as well as in “Fanfiction” (the episode that was basicallly a love letter to their fans) that it’s not going to happen. Yet there’s a narrative in fandom that tells you otherwise. And I know that if I read enough of those “color theory hints at LGBT themes”, “there was a ship in the background last episode, and Castiel was on a boat on this one, it’s a hidden message”, “look at this gifset, they’re standing much too close together and Dean is clearly looking at Cas’ lips”, there’s a good chance I would start to believe it. And then, if I actually watched the respective episode, I’d think to myself, “well, that wasn’t quite as obvious as the meta posts made it seem”.

TJLC is another good example. The Powers That Be have stated, time and again, that they don’t intend to make Johnlock canon, and yet there was a bunch of shippers so deep down the rabbit hole that they just wouldn’t believe it, who were extremely disappointed by the last episode. And that’s when the nastiness sets in and they start looking for ways to accuse the showrunners of homophobia, misogyny, and so on. 

Yes, part of the problem is entitlement, but part of the problem is also that fandom, as a whole, tends to develop its own narratives based on exagerrated meta, slow-motion gifsets, and the human ability to cherry-pick (to take only certain details and ignore others entirely). 

I think the problem here is that both the sense of entitlement and the meta narratives tend to work to gether to raise expectations to an unrealistic level. People let themselves be convinced by meta that there’s a real chance of something happening, and the fandom-wide cry for representation and the SJ-flavored way to engage with texts then make them believe that they are entitled to seeing it happening, and when it doesn’t happen, they feel very, very upset, and channel their disappointment and frustration into vitriolic “criticism”. 

Yes, the whole thing is steeped in a sense of entitlement. When “The Cursed Child” came out, it was almost like people resented JKR simply for the fact that she dared to do something with the universe and the characters she hadn’t cleared with fandom first. Fandom tends to stake a claim, tends to get possessive. I’ve often seen posts that basically said: “Character X should be saved from this lousy bunch of writers”, “the showrunners are ruining Character Y”, “Z would never do that” as if the characters had a life of their own, even though they only ever exist in writing. Also, there’s a difference between saying, “well, I didn’t like what the writers did here, it doesn’t fit with the characterization we got so far” and “the showrunners deserve to die because they turned Cap into a Hydra agent”. 

Well, this post got away from me. TL;DR: I think that entitement is a part of it, but it’s often supported and reinforced by meta that develops a life on its own. 

Does that make any sense? 

2/26/17

I am now over 6 weeks into my 4th semester at Berkeley. And today I didn’t feel good- I mostly felt tired and stressed, which is what i’ve been feeling these last 2-3 weeks. 

Last semester, I would often feel like I had too big of chunks of time, and too much time in my own head. This semester, my commitments are taking up more time, my classes are significantly harder and more work, and I’m devoting a lot of mental energy on new things- like my SAO cases and Moulay, so I feel like I’m drowning all the time in the amount of things I have to juggle. Last semester I wished I was just a little busier, or that my day was just a little more structured- this semester I want a little bit more time for myself. 

But that’s hard because with that time for myself I don’t want to be at home. Home feels lonely and negative. This weekend it did. I don’t like being around or even thinking about let alone talking to J or S or a combination of the 2. I think its the fact that they’re blatantly in my face and disrespectful and immature and gross, but also that they are a slap in the face of a nuclear co dependent relationship that is the other extreme of what mine feels like. If I want to go home and not think about dating and relationship structure and time spent together- I can’t because theres SJ planning their entire lives around each other. 

I had that with Adi. I’ve also been thinking a lot about Adi. I miss him- he made me feel better than anyone else had. He just showered me with affection and love and actions and humor. I wonder if and when someone is going to make me feel that way again. 

I have really good friends here. And a few new friendships that I am feeling really really thoroughly good about. And I am feeling good about SAO too- my role is evolving, I am getting more confident, more central and important socially, I am soon going to transition into a leadership role or another, and I am evolving a lot as a caseworker. Its not perfect- no community or organization is- and its evolving so much with Arman and Selina graduating it’ll be different- but I invest in the things and the people I care about full on and I am proud that that is emerging as a marking characteristic of my personality. 

DS is hard. Its like Econ last semester- always an undertone to worry about. And then Econ and SW isn’t easy. and History of Migration is a lot of reading. But I am enjoying all of the subjects themselves, and I need to get increasingly used to getting bad grades. I do feel like my energy towards school and work ethic could be better though- I do feel like the amount of effort I am putting is diminishing relatively to high school. I don’t take as much identity anymore from being a good hard working student- it doesn’t feel as intrinsic to me. I need to find that again- or maybe realize that there are other things that are intrinsic- like showing up and being hyper-involved in club stuff. 

Orli just walked into the room but I really wanted to keep writing. She keeps talking about Sonya. Its really negative and I need my own space- So I start basically talking to myself. 

It feels off and broken and far away with M. It feels wrong and like there isn’t this intrinsic connection and understanding the way there was when we were friends. I’m upset all the time. Little little things- just now showing up for me, reaching out to me, supporting me, or celebrating me - he’s not doing it. I get upset all the time. I’m back to sophomore year Sophie who cries because Varun sleeps through their hang out and all she does is go to his house hooks up and back- there isn’t a proactive lets do something together feeling to the relationship because he’s a homebody. And everything she tries to stick up for herself or talk about why she’s not feeling good- he gets in her head, he brings it back to her, he out logics her, he blames her for making her feel guilty, instead of just understanding that the base issue is that she doesn’t feel loved by him and that’s she’s crying because she likes him a lot and this is her trying. I was so excited for Cuba- I don’t even have the energy to process what it means that he’s not coming or that now I’m going on a trip with 5 boys I don’t know that well and that I’m going to have to be on socially for 5 days. I wasn’t interested in Cuba as much as I was interested in a trip, any trip, with M. I’m sad for myself so I can’t be there for him even though I’m sure he’s feeling very disappointed. Maybe thats why he was mad yesterday and today and he’s also being distant. I can understand us needing space. But also I’m just done trying. Monday Tuesday and Wednesday I’m going to study a lot, have a good dinner with maureen tomorrow and lunch with Sohini Tuesday. I’m sure I’m going to be thinking about it nearly constantly but it doesn’t feel obsessive or overwhelming yet- just quiet calm processing. I’m sad but also feeling more in control and more self-aware. I am not going to put myself through another long idolized tumultuous relationship. I had an idea of Moulay in my head. He’s an incredible and special person who I gave so much of myself to in our friendship. He might just not be ready or the right person to be in a relationship with me- I am looking for something very specific- someone i respect intellectually but who is also very outwardly involved in his external environment, but has deep reflection for why he is doing what he is doing, who understands me culturally but also makes me feel celebrated culturally, who is outgoing and social and inclusive, who is progressive and moral but reasonable and can challenge me when I steer too far away (like my family), but above all someone very very affectionate and constant and present and who will go out of his way for me always and make me feel special and loved. Adi had some of that. Varun had some of that. Moulay has a good amount of that- but the parts he doesn’t have maybe are a deal breaking. Which hurts and sucks because I have never been so excited entering in a relationship- or felt like so much of my life was around it- I am going to think. And write him a letter.