…well, that escalated quickly. I posted it way back at the end of 2014, it got reblogged by several BNFs in quick succession yesterday, and then it proceeded to rack up like 2,000 notes in one day, so apparently it still needs to be said:
Yes, you are allowed.
You are allowed to write the fic you want, rather than the fic you feel obligated to write. You’re allowed to write crack, crazy realism-defying stunts, self-indulgent trope fic, fucked-up fic about problematic people doing unhealthy things. Fic that doesn’t go through the pre-flight safety check for every swordfight and every BDSM scene, fic that glosses over the ugly real-life fallout of psychological trauma and/or jumping out of a quinjet without a parachute. Or, hey, if that’s your thing, fic that dwells on psychological trauma in loving, messy detail and has at least three punchlines about characters not being able to defy the laws of physics. Any of those things! All those things! We contain multitudes!
Any fic you write is probably going to be a net positive for fandom. The people who were looking for something in your niche get it, the people who didn’t know they wanted something in your niche discover a new thing they like, the people who don’t like it click the back button, the people who really really hate that entire genre of fic get to stroke their hateboners and get high off their own self-righteousness.
If it upsets people? The back button is a failsafe and instantaneous safeword. If it’s not as ~quality~ as other people’s fic? Don’t make me break out that “holy shit! TWO cakes!” comic. If someone takes away a disturbing, unhealthy, or otherwise less-than-wholesome message from your fic? You are not responsible for their failures of critical thinking or reading comprehension, to say nothing of those reading with outright malice looking for something to pounce on after interpreting it as uncharitably as humanly possible. Jesus fucking christ, it’s fanfiction, if people legit want sex ed they should be on Scarleteen. It’s not your job to educate them, certainly not with your fic. It’s not. It’s not. Fic serves so many other purposes. You are allowed to write what you want.
If you are a writer, read this.
You are a creator. Your voice is unique and beautiful and flawed and human and inherently precious. You do not define yourself in opposition. You do not seek to validate your existence by silencing other voices. You create. You add value to the sphere of existence by sheer force of will and your own efforts. Ignore the bullshit from psychotic antis who hate pretty much everything about human beings (especially sex, hoo boy). Ignore the squawking rabble of vicious little demons whose only satisfaction comes from trying to crush everything they see into the same ugly, grey, joyless conformity, and just write. Do it.
this particular screenshot of king boo from dark moon is so funny to me why does he look like luigi just got done saying the wildest shit to him and he’s just really concerned
“They’re afraid of losing friends, being ridiculed in class, getting worse grades and are even afraid of being assaulted and physically hurt.”
good
no, not good. because if we hate them as much as Trump and his supporters hate certain groups, we are no better than they are.
yeah I am
“if you hate these bigots you’re just as bigoted as they are”
This “we’re no better than them” mentality makes the critical mistake that hate itself is the problem.
Hate is not the problem. At all. Hate can be constructive. Hate can be defensive and come from righteous outrage.
The problem is irrational hate towards innocent people.
Hating a racist is COMPLETELY fucking different from hating a race. A whole race didn’t do anything wrong. A racist did. Hating the racist is 100% proportionate, justifiable retaliation.
Fucking. Mic. Drop.
The reason that hate groups like the Klan have been driven so near to extinction is because of this exact thing. It became unfashionable to be publicly racist, and the backlash against those kinds of groups became unbearable for them. It drove them out of the limelight and into the very fringes of society.
This postmodern “hating the hate makes you just as bad” bullshit is what’s allowing them to re-prosper.
Fuck that.
Expose them. Make them lose their friends. Ridicule them in classes. If you can get away with it, beat their asses. Show them what it means that we will not go back to that way of life again. It’s time for the racists to be the ones who live in fear.
Hating bigotry does not a bigot make.
Imma just leave this here
The paradox of tolerance is that you cannot ever tolerate intolerance of any name or nature or tolerance itself will be snuffed out.
Punch your local Nazi. Make them bleed.
People of color, Jewish people, queer and trans people, immigrants, and a whole bunch of people can never truly exercise the full extent of their freedom of speech so long as Nazis are exercising their freedom of speech. You literally cannot let everyone have unlimited freedom when a big group of people wants to use their freedom to, at best, keep other groups of people from being free, and at worst wants to keep other groups of people from being alive. It is 100% impossible to accommodate the viewpoints of every single person at the same time.
So you actually have to choose whose rights you want to preserve. There is nothing to be gained by defending facists’ right to free speech, as doing that inherently attacks the free speech of a bunch of other people. You have to choose, you can’t be wishy washy about this. Not making a choice just means choosing the status quo, and the status quo sucks. Actively fight facists.
You know, with all the language throughout Star Wars about “giving in” to the Dark Side, how the Dark Side makes you more powerful, how the Dark Side makes you age strangely and destroys you, it sure doesn’t sound like an “opposite side of the coin” so much as the “deeper end of the pool,” like it’s actually the true form of the force and being a Jedi is about keeping it tamed so it doesn’t eat you the way it actually wants.
the force is entropy
Eldritch Jedi pls
This is one of the reasons i love the second Knights of the Old Republic game, wherein one of the major characters (who defines herself neither as Jedi nor Sith) actually views the Force this way, saying “I hate the Force. I hate that it seems to have a will, that it would control us to achieve some measure of balance, when countless lives are lost.”
It’s also the game that gave us the two most entropic, eldritch characters in the franchise: Darth Nihilus, whose dark-side-borne ability to feed on the Force and consume life itself has twisted him into a half-living “wound in the Force”, more presence than flesh
and Darth Sion, whose entire body is a ruin, his flesh nothing but ragged scar tissue, every bone and muscle broken and torn, kept animated by will alone as he forces himself, second by agonizing second, to exist
I wish there were more horrifying perspectives on the force like that
This is one of the reasons the term “Light Side” never felt right to me, even before it was used in any official media; The Force always struck me more like an ocean than a binary concept: the deeper you go, the darker and more crushing it gets — at a certain point becoming an effectually consistent darkness — and while light filters down and fades for some distance, if there is a truly light “side” it’d be the surface.
Which isn’t to say “the Force is evil unless you flounder about near the top” — just that it’s a natural force, and as such is something you need to respect and be adequately prepared for. (Take electricity, for example: super awesome and pretty dang useful, but OH HOLY SMOKES don’t try and harness it unless you REALLY know what you’re doing!)
In this sense, being tempted by the Dark Side is less a case of “Hey, I wonder what’s on the other side of this coin it looks pretty cool haha oh whoops I’m Space Walter White now,” and more one of “The deeper into this thing you go, the harder you’ll need to fight to resist the ever-increasing pressure, to remain whole, even to just see whatever the heck you’re actually doing.”
(which is why Jedi training is so important: those padawans gotta build themselves a mental Deepsea Challenger!)
THIS META BLESSED ME
Okay but let’s suppose, for a moment, that the Force is actually malevolent.
That would make a lot of sense.
Consider, for a moment, an eldritch parasite. This ancient being feeds off of the life-force of other creatures. Not that unusual, as most living things also consume other living things, to various degrees. But this one is technically somewhat removed from the usual structures of biology. It is a passive and opportunistic predator, for the most part. Whenever a living being that is connected to it – however weakly – dies, it consumes part of its energy, and gets bigger.
As life in the galaxy flourishes, and time passes, this singular entity gets bigger, and bigger, and bigger. Like a catfish; the only limit to its growth is how much it can consume to fuel it. The larger it gets, the more it is able to sink its invisible claws into other living beings, until eventually there is hardly any life out there which hasn’t been ‘infected’ by it, and slated to become its spiritual dinner as soon as its biological form gives out.
And here we actually come to – of all things – the midichlorians. Which, the Jedi use to measure someone’s sensitivity to the Force, which works because midichlorians are the vehicle for the predatory parasite to infest living beings. The immune systems in some people begin to develop a certain degree of resistance to them, which is why some folks have more, and some have less, and this directly correlates to their Force sensitivity. The more midichlorians you have, the worse your immune system is at fending off the parasite.
The Force counters the risk of being bred out of subsequent generations by developing camouflage, and adapting itself into a more seemingly-symbiotic relationship with its prey.
What the Jedi see as the ‘light side’ of the Force, is a reflective layer that this predator has created via its connection to all living things. This network is the honey trap that encourages the beings still strongly connected to it, to spread that connection, because it affords them advantages while they are still alive. But its elements are comprised mostly of echoes and reflections of their fellow prey organisms. Force Ghosts that resemble the departed. Emotions that are transmitted along this layer and between individuals. Small amounts of power that can be siphoned off to impact the environment, and can also spread the Force to whatever living thing it comes into contact with.
This being is huge now, it needs a lot of juice in order to maintain its existence, let along continue to grow. And like most predators it’s willing to expend a certain amount of energy in order to guarantee a bigger pay-off.
The deeper you go into the Force, the more the Force starts exerting its own will through you. And the less you see of the reflected camouflage of it, and the more apparent it becomes that the Force wants large swaths of death to feed it. Which is why Dark Siders often become so preoccupied with things like Death Stars.
But it’s a balancing act. A large population of relatively peaceful Force sensitives, like the Jedi, cost more than they’re worth, because beyond a point they take too much energy from the Force and don’t kill enough people to pay for it. A single individual abusing their powers for self-gain and murdering left and right, though, accomplishes the goal of feeding it. The Force obviously doesn’t want its food supply to die out completely, but this explains the persistent cycles of the Star Wars universe – as a soon as a group of peaceful Force users becomes prominent, they get wiped out by a few Dark Siders who have tread too deeply past the reflective surface of the Force, and become actual vessels for its will.
And then when the Dark Siders have finished killing a whole bunch of people, it’s time for them to go, too, so that they don’t wipe out the entire populace and kill off the Force’s food supply beyond its ability to reasonably recover. The peaceful types then see an upswing, as they are more adept at spreading the Force. So the cycle goes – Jedi spread the Force, Sith kill the Jedi and feed the Force, Jedi kill the Sith and resume spreading the Force. It’s a planting and harvest cycle, and the galaxy is populated with the Force’s living spirit crops. Anakin Skywalker, who was arguably one of the beings most closely connected to the Force, and had an extremely high midichlorian count, basically lived this cycle in its entirety as an individual – he spread the Force as a Jedi, he killed people as a Sith, and then he ended it all in order to preserve his progeny for the next round.
tl;dr – the Force wants to eat your soul. The reason the ‘light side’ types always get so up in their own asses is because what they perceive as the Force is basically their own reflections dangling in front of them like an angler fish’s lure. The reason the ‘dark side’ types get so messed up is because they’re basically the equivalent of those grasshoppers who get infected with a parasite that makes them drown themselves.
This point of view would actually explain both No-Attachment rule and the Order’s cradle-robbing – some more self-aware Jedi saw the Force for what it is and pushed for a rule that potentially would cut births of Force-sensitive kids to a bare minimum. And those who were born Force-sensitive thanks to a quirk of the Force are to be taken from the society in the quickest way possible before they mess up, given tools to keep it at bay, and indoctrinated to never want to dabble in the deeper ends of their ability. It would also explain the whole debacle of Unifying vs Living Force and why Jedi seem to prefer the former – all of the description of the Living Force I came across present it as more ever changing, nearly organic entity and Jedi that use is as more responsive to its nudges, so potentially more inclined to being “corrupted” by it.
I love how this doesn’t fit OT canon for Jedi (when George was a more conscientus writer) but it fits PT canon Jedi (when he had already lost his fucking mind) perfectly.
Okay, head’s up. This little critter is called a slow loris. NEVER TAKE ONE AS A PET. They’ve experienced a boom in popularity as pets in parts of Asia and then the rest of the world, and this is not okay.
Why?
A) They’re endangered
B) They’re venomous. The only known venomous primate, to be exact. They store it in their inner arms.They’ll get in defensive posture, suck the venom from their glands, and them bite. And the bite can kill a human. (Seriously, one nipped Lady Gaga in Feb 2014 when she thought it would be a good idea to use one in a music video. They dropped that idea, thankfully.)
C) They’re endangered directly BECAUSE OF THE EXOTIC PET TRADE
D) When the poachers trap them, THEY CLIP THEIR FUCKING TEETH TO MAKE THEM “MANAGEABLE.” Many slow loris’ will die before ever being sold because of complications with HAVING THEIR FUCKING TEETH CLIPPED. (There’s a reason the loris’ in the videos are only eating soft foods…)
E) The exotic pet trade on slow loris’ BOOMed because of youtube videos like the one above.
And please make it very clear to everyone who thinks these videos are cute, that the animal in question has been stolen from it’s natural habitat and horrifically abused just so it could be a “cute” pet.
hi i have seen a lot of people talk about how they’d describe this but the truth is that (in my opinion) there’s a lot of stylistic choices here that i just want to talk about for a hot second 🙂 just some ways of thinking about it? that might help you get unstuck?
is your book even the kind of book that has long paragraphs of description? if you’re seeing something beautiful, you can just say, “there was a beautiful green and flowering field with a nice lake, a rolling fog, and mountains beyond” and let people make their own assumptions about what it looks like and movetf on.
“no raquel i really like long paragraphs.” okay time to get into The Senses. imagine yourself there. what would the grass feel like underfoot? is it soft, well-watered, or is it crunchy? do the flowers smell like death or do they smell good? is that fog or the gunsmoke from beyond the frame? are the mountains something to be passed over or surveyed? walk through all the senses. i really like adding smell because it’s the one most tangibly connected to memory (look it up). if i say “the field was green and smelled of wildflowers” that’s something connected to your senses. if i say “the lake, although still, reeked of blood” this is a whole different type of story. senses matter!
on that note, think about the poetry of it. are you the person who just says “clouds” or “rolling fog”? it’s okay if you’re either! i often switch between the two, because i don’t like long descriptions in my pieces and i don’t know why. and the tone of your piece should define that. if this is looking back on a fond memory, it should maybe be airy, light, full of “gentle, sun-kissed flowers” and “lambs-wool grass.” metaphors and similes and lots of fun things. but if it’s something like … this is a place we’re spending 12 seconds in during the story, don’t? bother? wasting your time? maybe the tone is being rushed, you’re looking out a train window and only get a glimpse. close your eyes and write what 12 seconds would give you in memory – a morose “it was beautiful out there, green and full of water and fog, mountains on the border” or a weary, “out there, in the fields and clouds and mountains”. see how even a few words changes tone?
sometimes there’s such a thing as trying too hard. plopping a word like “verdant” casually in there? great. when it’s “verdant green and crimson red flowers” etc it gets really tiring to write and read. make either your descriptions interesting with unusual terms – “bloodmoon red” idk – or stop driving yourself wild with more ways to say “beautiful.” say it and move on. this is also where tone is important – “verdant green and soft, whispering red flowers” is different than “violent green, with flowers shining in bloodspills upon it”. tone is …. crucial in expression.
i personally hate long descriptions. if you read half my stories, i straight up won’t describe things, because i don’t want to. here’s what i do instead: character-led discovery. instead of the narrator walking us through it, we discover it w/the characters, making it a little less outside of the story and a little more fluid. “he sat on the verdant grass, his fingers reaching to pick one of the many wildflowers. his head tilted to let the sun on his face, watching the clouds move at the foot of the mountains beyond.” aww so sweet 🙂 for me this is even like. more description than usual? because honestly unless these mountains gonn be important, who cares.
secondarily this is more what i think of when people say “show not tell” because everyone always stops at the senses but you gotta show like… how do your People interact with it. example: i’m colorblind. how i interact w/this gorgeousness is totally different.
but then you can also like ? let your characters literally do it for you:
“It was a field,” she shrugged, “It was like, super green and flowery and shit. I don’t know. there were clouds clouding along and mountainous mountains. what do you want from me. i felt like a deer frolicking in the got damb meadow come to dip my little deer nose into the nice little lake.” she slumped over. “i’m tired,” she added.”
literally let them talk for you. let them have your voice and say what you want the audience to get. “dude come look at this lake. it’s like. got a little halo of grass and flowers shit is so got damb cute” “nah man look at the mountains” “you’re all wrong check the ghost-clouds” “woooahhhh” actually works, and dialogue is a million times more fun to read and write (imho only tho) than like lines and lines of trying to force people to see what you see
on that note, unless it’s crucial people do see what you see? give up. let them figure it out on their own. watch a new scene: “she swore and went back for her shoe, dangling useless in the sewer grate, trying to keep her stocking foot aloft as she navigated the crowded sidewalk.” chances are, many of you saw a different shoe. in my head, it’s a red heel, but it’s not about the color – it’s about her being stuck w/out it. many of you probably naturally filled in the gaps – she’s in the city, she’s frustrated, her stockings means she’s not wearing pants (probably a skirt), the shoe getting stuck in the grate implies a heel, and, wherever she is, it’s crowded. she also looks like a pigeon in my head while she tries to work back to her shoe – but we don’t need to be told that, because our brains fill it in. if my piece was about that single red shoe, i’d name it. if it’s about how her day is going wrong? don’t bother.
sometimes it’s not you, it’s the scene. if the story don’t naturally take you there, it might be telling you – just hang on a dandy second, they wouldn’t go here. “but i want bella and edward in the field kissing” okay my guy. chill. take a second and ask – hey do i need to just skip this and move on? do i need to have them take a second? “bella, come with me,” he begged. she stared at him. “I’m not getting murdered,” she replied” – now that would have been some believable dialogue.
worst comes to worst, try it in a different style. if you’re usually all quick facts, elaborate more. if you’re usually paragraphs, have edward beg her to come by describing it through dialogue. help you and your story stay fresh with interesting techniques.
okay good luck out there. go write beautiful meadows that are more than just green or maybe just green and that’s enough for me. 🙂
Like. Why do we hate her exactly? Is it bc she likes attention just like the rest of u losers or?
Because she rubbed her ass on sacred rocks in hawaii, knowing they were sacred, and laughed about it on national tv.
She knew they were sacred and was aware that you are not supposed to sit on them because it’s disrespectful.
“Waving a glass of white wine and at times unable to speak due to laughter, Lawrence said, “one rock that I was butt-scratchin’ on came loose”, prompting a landslide.
“And all the Hawaiians were like: ‘Oh my god, it’s the curse!’” she said, imitating shaking her first at the sky. “And I’m in the corner going, I’m your curse. I wedged it loose with my ass.””
I thought it was because she’s a shitty actress with horrible public opinions and that rock almost killed a guy and damaged the movie equipment.
Yeah that too. It’s all of that.
The thing that really stands out to me is how visibly uncomfortable Chris Pratt was while she was telling the story.
Like he wanted SO BAD to call her out but didn’t want to make a scene on a major interview.
The way he balled up his fist lol his knuckles were white with rage
AFIAK Chris Pratt is a deeply religious Christian so it makes perfect sense he’d be deeply offended by a culture’s sacred ground being disrespected and damaged.
He can empathize first hand with how important holy objects and ground are to religious cultures.
You don’t have to be religious to understand why what she did was so shitty. Even if that site had no spiritual connotations, even if it was just a bunch of meaningless boulders, what she did was inexcusable. If someone was in my house and rubbed their ass over my lamp, I would kick them out.
Also I think he lived in Hawaii while he was homeless, which only makes it worse because she was technically also being disrespectful to him.
she also ridiculed a venezuelan reporter, Juan Pablo Fernandez-Feo, who was using his phone to record her answers to his questions
Thank you all for understanding. As a Hawaiian, our land is the most precious thing to us. The rocks were a haiau, a burial site for someone’s ancestors. The fact that she did that doesn’t just insult the culture, it’s insulting the person or people that were buried under those rocks. The Hawaiians put their land above themselves, our state motto is “Ua mau ke ea o ka aina i ka pono”, which means “the life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness.” our land is our life source, if something changes then we all change as a culture. Where I’m going with this is that, the land in Hawaii, from the smallest grain of sand to the largest mountain, is a apart of who we are. Thank you for listening to my TED Talk
So well said. And fuck Jennifer Lawrence.
Remember when Chris Pratt kept cropping her out of photos? Good times
rip tumblr 