the following are concepts that i quickly learned my way around when growing up in fandom, but that seem to have fallen out of use recently. i’d like to propose a revival of…
NOTP: a pairing that, for whatever reason, you simply cannot stand. it can be because the ship repulses you morally, or because you hate one of the characters, or love them both but despise their dynamic – or just because looking at it makes you uncomfortable, for whatever reason.
different from labeling something a “bad ship” in that it implies an entirely personal preference.
calling a ship your NOTP informs others that you really, really, REALLY dislike it, while also acknowledging that you don’t know what other people’s reasons are for shipping it, or what interpretations they may have that makes it work for them.
a cool way of avoiding stuff you hate while also not morally condemning thousands of complete strangers for liking it.
squick: similar to notp, but goes for anything, not just romantic pairings. something you just don’t like, either for specific reasons or just because it irrationally repulses you.
not as severe as a trigger in the sense that it doesn’t cause any extreme and potentially harmful reactions – it’s just something you’d rather not see, because it grosses you the fuck out. and that’s okay.
decent people respect other people’s squicks, while also remembering it’s cool for other people to like things they personally are squicked by.
this works as long as everyone agrees not to be dicks and shove stuff in people’s faces in unwarranted ways.
crackship: a ship that just doesn’t make any sense. there’s absolutely no chance that these characters would ever end up together.
perhaps they’ve never interacted. perhaps they are on opposite sides of a war. perhaps one of them died a thousand years ago. for whatever reason, there’s zero possibility of this becoming canon.
still, you’d like to see how they’d romantically mesh, to explore their dynamic or a what-if scenario – or maybe they’re just two characters you really like to imagine smooching one another.
the fact that it isn’t and never will be canon doesn’t matter, and can even be part of the appeal. it certainly does not invalidate the ship’s existence. the ultimate form of doing something just for fun.
these words all help describe the cool concept of doing stuff you enjoy, while also realizing others may be doing things you hate, but not in order to victimize you personally. live and let live! give people the benefit of the doubt! it’s a good time. we should all try it.
fandom: I’m anti [this] and here’s why you should be too. Lemme lecture you and everyone about this thing it’s important we all come together to hate on it. 🙂 I just wanna be positive and this thing is nOT POSITIVE AND HERES WHY I HATE THIS THING. I JUST NEED To HAVE A CLEAN PURE BLOG. BUT PLS HATE THIS THING WITH ME. me:
Stunning Abandoned Homes Are Surprisingly Full Of Life
“Abandoned homes are the kind of thing you typically only happen upon when your GPS leads you astray. Unless, that is, you’re author Ransom Riggs, who’s on a mission to find them.
“writers always know exactly where they are going with their work!”
r u sure
“no writer does anything by mistake, it’s all very strategic”
r u sure
“they use symbolism in everything. for example, a simple sentence symbolises directness and-”
R U SURE
The best moments in writing is when you discover you did something absolutely genius by complete accident.
A miscellaneous world-building detail from ten chapters earlier accidentally saved a character’s life once
“Omg this line is genius and the best reference!” “Thank you I did that entirely on purpose!!” *sweats*
READER: “(points out symbolism and foreshadowing and depth)”
AUTHOR:
I once literally flipped a coin to decide which character was going to die in a multi-award-nominated novel.
I was once rereading a manuscript before editing it and discovered that in an early chapter I’d put in a line without any forethought that ended up aligning perfectly the plot and is now my favorite line in the entire book even though when I wrote that sentence I hadn’t even come up with that plot point yet.
In my book series, I have done various things on accident and then, looking back, yelled BRILLIANT and went with it. And, often times, my characters just DECIDE things, like one character was in love with another and I was “WHAT?” but went with it because it was actually a VERY good story and made some of the plot stuff that much more interesting.
If you ever wanted to know my creative process for writing, congratulations, this is it.
Writing a story like
There’s an author’s note in an Isaac Asimov short story collection – Isaac Asimov, mind you – and I can’t for the life of me remember which it was because my mom has a billion of them, but basically he went to a lecture on his books where the teaccher was lecturing on all the symbolism and themes and such and Asimovewent up to him and was just like “Uhhhh…. I didn’t put any of that in? It just…. no? Not really?”
And the lecturer legit looked ISAAC FUCKING ASIMOV straight in the eye and said, “What do you know, sir? You’re just the author.”
And Asimov described it as being a fairly profound moment in his career.
Using references is the most important step. After you get the hang out of shapes, you can start and experiment with different angles and make it more cartoonish, depending on what you want.
I-want-my-IWTV 