Happy 20th anniversary to Winx Club, my favourite show of all time, my obsession and my favourite thing in the whole world. Winx has been a huge part of my life and has gotten me through some of my darkest moments. Here's to many more years of friendship, love and magic! <3

Short episode jam-packed with a lot of great moments

putting my prediction on record now that the coming decade is going to see the rise of viral-marketed fancy at-home water filtration systems, driving and driven by a drastic reduction in the quality of U.S. tap water (given that we are in a 'replacement era' where our current infrastructure is reaching the end of its lifespan--but isn't being replaced). also guessing that by the 2030s access to drinkable tap water will be a mainstream class issue, with low-income & unstably housed people increasingly forced to rely on expensive bottled water when they can't afford the up-front cost of at-home filtration--and with this being portrayed in media as a "moral failing" and short-sighted "choice," rather than a basic failure of our political & economic systems. really hope i'm just being alarmist, but plenty of this already happens in other countries, and the U.S. is in a state of decline, so. here's praying this post ages into irrelevance. timestamped April 2023

A number of years ago, I was sitting at the kitchen table with my parents. (I think it was lunch? lunch-ish? but I can't really remember.) Anyway, my father kept insisting that if you have hobbies, you should hustle and turn it into a blog, a podcast---something that would use that expertise, and share it with others. But my mother pushed back; she insisted that doing something is an end in itself. You can just read a book. You can think about what you read, turning it over in your head. Maybe talk about it with your local book club! But you don't need to start a LIT CHICKS podcast and read books every month and offer Blue Apron discount codes during commercial breaks, etc. etc.

You can just read the book.

I find myself thinking about that exchange a lot. I can just take a butterfly pinning class, or a foraging class, or a historical walking tour, and that's enough. The world is for doing things in, learning and meeting and seeing---you do not have to turn that into shareable content or a life's passion to give it worth.

no thoughts just Heiji Hattori (HD)

Cannot begin to describe how excited I was in this episode. So much lore. So many reveals. Gorgeous Ankarna-Cassandra art. Fig was right all along. Murph's overwhelming surplus of Nat 20s. incredible

HAPPIEST NEW YEAR, BC COMMUNITY (and BBs fans) 🌅🎊

Am I too late?

I bought a van

.

this isn't a hot take by any means but a lot of you would be so much happier if you stopped having parasocial relationships with celebrities oh my god

rewatched the [kr]cube pv after forever

i JUST realized that literally every time i have started making out with someone for the first time it's been while lying down. every single time. what is this? am i incapable of initiating kiss contact with a new person while standing or sitting? is this my move? do i have a move??

Going to work today

If you're still doing the choose violence ask game: 2 (👀), 9, 10, 22 ?

I got such a rush from finally answering the first ask that I'm doing this for as long as people send me questions. So here we go again!

2. a compelling argument for why your fave would never top or bottom

anon, I'm at work. I'm seeing this at work. :'D

Okay, serious face. Albus Dumbledore is probably my fave if I have to choose between him and Harry on this blog. I just have to figure out why he would never...

Bottom. Albus would never, I'm sorry. He won't. He can't. Like, maybe when he was having his whirlwind summer romance with Gellert, he bottomed every single time they fucked because he was so in love and this was his equal and his partner and so what if he was a little rough and distant sometimes in the bedroom, and always wanted to top and tug his hair and hiss out orders? This was The Man The Universe Had Crafted For Him, and he would absolutely bottom for him every time... and then the summer of 1899 ends. And Ariana dies. And Aberforth breaks Albus' nose. And Gellert fucks off to go be a fascist.

And Albus, alone and heartbroken, resolves to never trust someone that completely again, never love someone that same way, and never let anyone get into a position of power over him where they might be able to use his knowledge and talents for ill. That means physically, emotionally, spiritually, psychologically... carnally. So he has sex with plenty of other people, and even falls in love with a few of them, but he is in control at all times. He never bottoms again.

That's all I've got for that one.

9. worst part of canon

So the first answer that came to mind is posted here, but for fairness' sake I'll try to come up with another worst thing. (That's not related to ships, because I'm trying really hard not to be THAT violent on the violence ask game.)

I think... that if That Woman was going to introduce international schools, students and characters in the middle book of the series, she should have done more with them than having them vanish after Goblet of Fire, only to come back for either fake romantic tension and one line of exposition about the Hitler allegory Dark Lord of the Before-Times (Krum, Deathly Hallows) or to be married off to a Weasley for an aesop of It's Not About His Looks Now That They're Jacked Up (Fleur, Half-Blood Prince). I'm not saying Fleur and Viktor HAD to be best buddies forever with Harry, but it is weird that they have this unique bond that no other young students have had with each other in hundreds of years, they even lost one of their fellow champions, Dumbledore gives this very moving speech about remaining connected and not letting darkness and prejudice sever new ties, and then... nothing. No side adventures in France or wherever Durmstrang is, no communication from either side, nothing.

Feels like a huge letdown in hindsight.

10. worst part of fanon

Oh, no. That's not fair. There's just so many.

If I had to consolidate what I currently don't like about the HP fandom/fanon into a few lines, I think I would say that I hate the pureblood/Dark side apologism. I do believe in nuance in characters. I do believe redemption and/or walking different paths is an important theme in Harry Potter, and I think it's fascinating to explore that with any and every character you can think of, even characters I may not personally like. But I really, really hate the way the fandom has taken that and twisted it into this idea that we were sold a lie at the start: that the British magical government was fine the way it was, and so was the society around it; that Dark magic Isn't All That Bad, Really, and there are actually Good and non-prejudiced things about a few rich bitches passing down their knowledge and secrets and slurs for generations within the Family, and keeping the Family "Pure" is cool actually, and none of this has any relation to real life ideas about miscegenation and classism and racism and eugenics, what are you talking about?

It's just so worrying. As a minority, when I see people on tumblr/twitter/AO3 gleefully agreeing that we need to eat the rich and fix society and eradicate all the horrid -isms and -archys ruining all our lives, then watch them turn around and write a 200k epic where Dumbledore was the evil one for locking the Horcrux books away and championing marginalized members of society, Hermione is just uppity for wanting to make necessary changes to the darker parts of magical society that That Woman was literally pointing out for a reason, and Tom Riddle is only bad because he took the good segregationist pureblood ideas and added murder to them... and when that fic gets thousands of comments agreeing with them full stop with no examination of any of that... it makes me anxious, at a minimum. The same thing is happening now with Grindelwald now that he's actually a figure on the screen and not just some dude mentioned a few times in the book series: same apologism, same justification of atrocities, same good-guy-blame-games, same blorbofication even.

On the one hand... fiction doesn't always directly reflect or affect reality. On the other... this unironic pro-pureblood meta is a pervasive concept that has popped up in thousands of fics written by thousands of fanfic writers. It's happened for years, and it keeps happening, and I see very few fans speaking out against it or even acknowledging it as a problem. So that makes me ask myself, who actually is willing and able to examine the injustices of our society and build a better imaginary society through the lens of HP fanfiction, and who's okay with the prejudice in the HP world as long as it's coming from the faves they're attracted to?

22. your favorite part of canon that everyone else ignores

Happily, this is a harder question to answer because I've been finding so many like minds in the past 5 years who go feral over the same 20 HP scenes as I do. ^^ But give me a sec, I'll think of something.

...

Okay. Got it.

In order to answer this question, I have to go back to the first time I, young teenager, avid reader, recent reader of the HP series once book 5 was out, realized that Harry and Dumbledore had a much deeper relationship than just headmaster and student. The thing that made me latch on to them and project like crazy, basically.

It's the scene in Goblet of Fire chapter 36 where Harry has been rescued from Fake Moody and he's in Dumbledore's office with Dumbledore and Sirius. Dumbledore asks Harry to relay everything that happened to him once he touched the Portkey in the maze—and immediately Sirius tries to protect Harry from having to relive it now, so soon after it's happened. And then this scene happens.

Dumbledore stopped talking. He sat down opposite Harry, behind his desk. He was looking at Harry, who avoided his eyes. Dumbledore was going to question him. He was going to make Harry relive everything. “I need to know what happened after you touched the Portkey in the maze, Harry,” said Dumbledore. “We can leave that till morning, can’t we, Dumbledore?” said Sirius harshly. He had put a hand on Harry’s shoulder. “Let him have a sleep. Let him rest.” Harry felt a rush of gratitude toward Sirius, but Dumbledore took no notice of Sirius’s words. He leaned forward toward Harry. Very unwillingly, Harry raised his head and looked into those blue eyes. “If I thought I could help you,” Dumbledore said gently, “by putting you into an enchanted sleep and allowing you to postpone the moment when you would have to think about what has happened tonight, I would do it. But I know better. Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it. You have shown bravery beyond anything I could have expected of you. I ask you to demonstrate your courage one more time. I ask you to tell us what happened.” The phoenix let out one soft, quavering note. It shivered in the air, and Harry felt as though a drop of hot liquid had slipped down his throat into his stomach, warming him, and strengthening him. He took a deep breath and began to tell them. As he spoke, visions of everything that had passed that night seemed to rise before his eyes; he saw the sparkling surface of the potion that had revived Voldemort; he saw the Death Eaters Apparating between the graves around them; he saw Cedric’s body, lying on the ground beside the cup. Once or twice, Sirius made a noise as though about to say something, his hand still tight on Harry’s shoulder, but Dumbledore raised his hand to stop him, and Harry was glad of this, because it was easier to keep going now he had started. It was even a relief; he felt almost as though something poisonous were being extracted from him. It was costing him every bit of determination he had to keep talking, yet he sensed that once he had finished, he would feel better.

This is one of the best scenes in the entire book, the entire series. It completely refutes the fanon Dumbledore who is often cold, cruel, inflexible and unrelenting in his quest for whatever the author wants him to be inflexible and cruel about at the time. It shows that Dumbledore, the real Albus Dumbledore, is one of the few people who understands what Harry needs and is able to provide it to him, even when others who also care for Harry would rather protect him or shield him from what he needs.

Kid me was particularly taken by how gentle Dumbledore is with Harry here. It made me look back and see how in some ways this scene, this closeness, is the culmination of all the times they've met and spoken before.

(You can imagine how painful it was reading Order of the Phoenix right after this.)

But yeah, that's probably one of my favorite scenes that other people ignore or haven't talked about/drawn/written about much. Which is ironic, because the scene right after that where Harry talks about Voldemort taking his blood and Dumbledore's eyes do the triumphant "lol Voldemort just fucked up" gleam is probably one of THE most talked-about scenes in the fandom (even though to this fucking day in 2023 people still don't realize what the gleam meant, when even That Woman has clarified what it meant in INTERVIEWS).

...And for me, safely at the end of the questions, that's all she wrote.

Hi! Hope you're doing well :)

3. What are some tropes or details that you think are very characteristic of your fics?

7. Any worldbuilding you’re particularly proud of?

42. Have you ever received a comment that particularly stood out to you for whatever reason?

For the ask game! 💖 Hope you have/had a lovely day ✨

This took forever to get back to but I finally am! Thank you Kitty <3 I love these silly ask memes.

3. What are some tropes or details that you think are very characteristic of your fics?

Tropes: *goes to AO3* Lmao, "Hurt Stephen Change" is at the top. Which yes, is definitely characteristic. Other common tags are Canon-Typical Violence, Whump, and equally "Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence" as well as "Canon Compliant". I like exploring both realms with the MCU (in LOTR, it was largely canon compliant as I love the LOTR canon). While I love comedy, I write more angst than comedy likely because it's easier. Doing comedy well is particularly tricky.

For details: I love parenthetical asides and you'll see those very often. Some sort of visual details are seen in all my works, even if the reader's likely aware of what the character looks like. It's good practice in learning how to give interesting descriptions of both characters and settings. You get a lot of internal monologue in my fics, too. Limited third person in past tense is my primary writing style.

7. Any worldbuilding you’re particularly proud of?

I'm very pleased with the alternate reality I've built with Earth-197320 (and I'm so pleased I'm finally posting the final fic in that series to tie everything together).

I also can't believe I managed to pull off the Kamar-Taj world-building in Wong, Target Sales Associate as well as I did.

42. Have you ever received a comment that particularly stood out to you for whatever reason?

I imagine that for many writers, it's easy to forget the good reviews and have the bad reviews that shine through the fog of memory. So while 99% of my reviews through my 20 years of writing have been good, some of the ones that stand out are the bad ones, including the ones that made me leave writing LOTR fanfic back in 2011 when my attempt at a "magnum opus" got some less-than-stellar feedback. I stopped posting and migrated completely to RP for the next 7 years.

The funniest of my negative reviews, though, came about 2 years ago. When I got back into fanfic in 2017, I still cross-posted to fanfiction.net, which included my first DS fic, a DS/LOTR crossover. One of the later reviews I received treated the fic as if it were a Good Reads book review and it was so odd that it still makes me snicker in disbelief. You can't reply publicly to reviews on ff.net so I didn't bother, but if I could I would've told them that this isn't Good Reads and that this is not how this works.

There are some good reviews that stand out over time, too, though. One of them was yours from about 2 years ago! You complimented me on my Carol and that still makes me beam since it shows that I can write characters I don't like so well that people don't notice. It's one of the best compliments a writer can receive, IMO.

Other reviews that stand out are people who tell me they're rereading a fic, a long review that clearly took some time and thought, or anything that catches a detail that I just don't know will be seen by others.