Mel | 32 | I like fluffy kittens, metal music, fantasy novels, and monsters. My home is a dark cave where I play video games all day and nap under a pile of blankets. I write stuff sometimes. I'm boring. Feel free to say hi!
People love to present “if you’re not getting better you’re not trying hard enough” as this radical harsh truth the world really needs to hear when in reality all they’re doing is regurgitating the most bland, fundamental status quo applauding ableism. Like you’re bringing nothing new to the table dude. This is not just bigoted but also boring
i feel like people forget that sometimes characters in fic are written like that because it’s a reflection of real life.
people have sex without setting boundaries. people have unprotected sex without talking about their sexual histories or producing recent sti tests. people play with kink without discussing it ahead of time or establishing a safeword. they have anal without ‘enough’ prep or lube—they may even prefer it like that.
and none of this is really a fantasy. it’s all pretty normal. you can feel that it’s inappropriately normalised, and you’d probably be right! but it is normalised: one study found that 58% of female undergraduate students on the campus studied had been choked during sex. 20% of those students said that they’d never been asked if it was ok; another 30% said they’d only sometimes been asked if they consented. fully half! (non-paywalled journal article on choking during sex here, including these numbers.) despite a rise in stis of all sorts, condom use is declining. (pdf link to the full text of this study about declining condom use in the us; aidsmap article about an australian study with similar results.)
even when people do talk about things—sex or anything else—they communicate imperfectly. 'yeah, but don’t go too far’ is consenting and setting a boundary, and also relying that the person you’re talking to has the same metric for 'too far’ that you do. for some people, 'the trash needs to go out’ is a neutral, factual observation; for others, it’s a request that the person they’re speaking to take out the trash.
even when people understand each other perfectly, people react unpredictably to things sometimes! we behave irrationally! people laugh uncontrollably at funerals, or get angry at the straw that broke their back rather than the enormous load they were already carrying. they get scared and lash out at people trying to help them. when hurt, most people do not instinctively reach for therapy-approved grounding exercises and 'i feel’ statements.
pretty much any bad choice that characters could conceivably make is a choice that people make in real life, on purpose, all the time. people do things that can have catastrophic, life-changing effects because it felt like a good idea at the time, or they’re leaning into the vibe, or they just didn’t think about it all that much, or an infinite number of other reasons.
fiction isn’t intended as a guide on the best, safest, and most responsible ways to live your life, and fanfic isn’t any different. it’s not a narrative flaw to let characters do things that are messy or harmful or downright stupid—it’s a reflection of what people are actually like, and not something that authors should feel they have to apologise for.
i am obsessed, in the most derogatory way possible, with the people in the notes who are reading this post and then saying, well, those stats you’re pointing at are why you have to make it clear in fiction that they’ve had a conversation about Consent And Safety. if you don’t tell people to use condoms, if you don’t tell people that it’s not ok to choke someone without prior consent, if you don’t tell people that they have to do these things Correctly, you’re part of the problem.
so i will say it again: fiction is a reflection of life, but it is not real life. fiction does not have to set a good example. fiction does not have to be safe, sane, or consensual.
fiction isn’t intended as a guide on the best, safest, and most responsible way to live your life. if you read it looking for that, you are the problem.
hyperfixation please stay with me long enough to complete the project. hyperfixation do not fade. hyperfixation finish what you started for the love of god
“what if kids identify with something and it ends up just being a phase-?” good. stop teaching and expecting kids (and adults honestly) to formulate permanent traits and ideas of themselves. everything in life is a phase. that doesn’t make it any less legitimate while you experience it. let people explore themselves and know it’s okay if what you think about yourself changes.
not to get too deep on main but did anyone else have such deeply rooted issues with their self worth for so long that they thought as a kid/teen that their only redeeming feature was being “low maintenance” and now as an adult you give yourself guilt pangs asking for any more than the barest minimum in virtually any relationship because asking for things might negate your only good quality which is just “doesn’t ask for things”
“I’m an equal opportunity offender. I make fun of everybody.” - Guy whose identities all align with the systemically dominant power groups in his cultural and geographic context
like, okay, consent does literally just mean agree. which is what enables this little rhetorical trick. because there’s all this cultural emphasis on sexual consent, which is just expressed as consent, a lot of phrases whose intended meanings are “rape is bad” can be taken literally to mean “i should get to agree to everything that happens in my vicinity.”
for an example, “i didn’t agree to seeing you wear that shirt” is straightforwardly a fucking insane thing for someone to say, but people regularly make use of this trick to make the (functionally identical) statement “i didn’t consent to seeing that”
Strongly recommend that people familiarize themselves with the white supremacist concept of “right to comfort” because of how scarily that concept aligns with this behavior
THIS is where the logic comes from that drives misogynistic control of what women wear, how fat people exist in public, how disabled people exist in public, miscontrues kink-related fashion as the same as sex itself, and prevents people breastfeeding their children in clean environments.
Its interesting what demographics are effected most negatively by this huh
Contrary to popular belief the biggest beginner’s roadblock to art isn’t even technical skill it’s frustration tolerance, especially in the age of social media. It hurts and the frustration is endless but you must build the frustration tolerance equivalent to a roach’s capacity to survive a nuclear explosion. That’s how you build on the technical skill. Throw that “won’t even start because I’m afraid it won’t be perfect” shit out the window. Just do it. Just start. Good luck.
