if you miss someone who does not miss you, or who is no good for you, or is unattainable, take all the love you once felt for them and spread it around other places. put your love in worthwhile people and things, turn the romance in to passions for hobbies or admiration for others- enrich your own life. focus on yourself and those who actively make you happy.
It’s worth mentioning that in another thread, in another topic, AR is asked about “But as a long time fan, I’ve ( and many other fans, I´m sure..) never understood the whole “Lestat and Louis- thing” and I think in a psychologically way it is also very interesting. Please, can you POFOUNDLY explain this whole relationship?”
^What CAN she really say that would change one single line in any novel about her characters? She’s told us the story, she’s saying it’s up to us to interpret it however we choose. #Your Headcanon May Vary.
Questions like those are the kinds of things that make her want to explicitly spell it out for us (through Lestat’s POV, in PL, here):
““I love you,” I whispered. In a low intimate voice, [Louis] answered: “My heart is yours.””
In writing/storytelling, as in art, there’s the old adage “Show; Don’t Tell.” In this age of social media where we can ask the artist/storyteller anything, should we? Why do we need her Official Confirmation? It doesn’t hurt to ask, but one should take the answers with a grain (or truckload full) of salt.
It seems to me that it’s better to read the story and have your own interpretation, “Read between the lines,” rather than have it broken down and explicitly stated.
Date someone you can be fucking weird as hell with who at the end of the day still wants to get naked with you.
Can I tell you a secret? You don’t have to be in a relationship.
I mean it. I know they force it down your throat until you choke on it. Girls aren’t pretty unless they’re wanted. Boys aren’t men unless they’re having sex with someone. People aren’t lovable until they’re dating someone.
But a relationship won’t always make you happy, and as wonderful as romance is, it isn’t the only love that exists. I have seen friendships that are deeper and more pure than couples who swear it’s forever – and yet the friendship is the one people ignore.
I have heard so often “nobody loves me” out of the mouths of people who are single. And it kills me because if you ask them: where are your parents, your teachers, your classmates, your pets – they say, yes, okay, but it doesn’t count. Of course it counts, love doesn’t diminish just because someone doesn’t want to have sex with you. In fact, doesn’t it sort of make that love more real that they want nothing – not even a date – out of you?
It is pretty to be in love. It’s magical, I’m sure. But it’s also wonderful to stop for ice cream in your prom dress with six other girls. It’s also wonderful to go visit the world with nothing but a bunch of buddies who are really excited about learning.
The problem is: we’ve made everything about “the one”. But maybe “the one” is just you, loving yourself, having fun, and being happy. Maybe instead of looking for our other halves, we should be piecing ourselves together.
Maybe I wasn’t born unfinished. Maybe I am the one who makes myself better.
dating is supposed to be empowering. it’s supposed to make you feel good. it should be about two people, enthusiastically wanting to get to know each other and spend time together. it’s supposed to make you feel good and add joy and fun to your life
if talking to/dealing with/dating/getting to know a person isn’t like that, it’s probably a waste of time
YES. Lovelies, do not, do not, do not spend time with people who don’t make you feel good. I don’t mean they kiss your ass. I mean, you shouldn’t come away from interactions feeling tired, or less-than, or boring, or embarrassing. Relationships are food for your soul, not a drain on it.
I was cruising through the net, following the cold trail of one of the periodic “Is or is not Fanfic the Ultimate Literary Evil?” arguments that crop up regularly, and I’m now bursting to make a point that I never see made by fic defenders.
We’re all familiar with the normal defenses of fic: it’s done out of love, it’s training, it’s for fun. Those are all good and valid defenses!
But they miss something. They damn with faint praise. Because the thing is, when you commit this particular Ultimate Literary Evil you’ve now told a story. And stories are powerful. The fact that it wasn’t in an original world or with original characters doesn’t necessarily make it less powerful to any given reader.
I would never have made this argument a few years ago. A few years ago I hadn’t received messages from people who were deeply touched by something I wrote in fanfic. So what if it’s only two or three or four people, and I used someone else’s world and characters? For those two or three or four people, I wrote something fucking important. You cannot tell me that isn’t a valid use of my time and expect me to feel chastened. I don’t buy it. I won’t feel ashamed. I will laugh when you call something that touches other people ‘literary masturbation.’ Apparently you’re not too up on your sex terminology.
Someone could argue that if I’d managed the same thing with original characters in an original world, it could’ve touched more people. They might be right! On the other hand, it might never have been accepted for publication, or found a market if self published, and more importantly I would never have written it because I didn’t realize I could write. The story wouldn’t have happened. Instead, thanks to fanfic being a thing, it did. And for two or three or four people it mattered. When we talk about defending fanfic, can we occasionally talk about that?
I once had an active serviceman who told me that my FF7 and FF8 fic helped get him through the war. That’ll humble you. People have told me my fanfic helped get them through long nights, through grief, through hard times. It was a solace to people who needed solace. And because it was fanfic, it was easier to reach the people who needed it. They knew those people already. That world was dear to them already. They were being comforted by friends, not strangers.
Stories are like swords. Even if you’ve borrowed the sword, even if you didn’t forge it yourself from ore and fire, it’s still your body and your skill that makes use of it. It can still draw blood, it can strike down things that attack you, it can still defend something you hold dear. Don’t get me wrong, a sword you’ve made yourself is powerful. You know it down to its very molecules, are intimate with its heft and its reach. It is part of your own arm. But that can make you hesitate to use it sometimes, if you’re afraid that swinging it too recklessly will notch the blade. Is it strong enough, you think. Will it stand this? I worked so hard to make it. A blade you snatched up because you needed a weapon in your hand is not prey to such fears. You will use it to beat against your foes until it either saves you or it shatters.
But whether you made that sword yourself or picked it up from someone who fell on the field, the fight you fight with it is always yours.
Literary critics who sneer at fanfic are so infuriatingly shortsighted, because they all totally ignore how their precious literature, as in individual stories that are created, disseminated, and protected as commercial products, are a totally modern industrial capitalist thing and honestly not how humans have ever done it before like a couple centuries ago. Plus like, who benefits most from literature? Same dudes who benefit most from capitalism: the people in power, the people with privilege. There’s a reason literary canon is composed of fucking white straight dudes who write about white straight dudes fucking.
Fanfiction is a modern expression of the oral tradition—for the rest of us, by the rest of us, about the rest of us—and I think that’s fucking wonderful and speaks to a need that absolutely isn’t being met by the publishing industry. The need to come together as a close community, I think, and take the characters of our mythology and tell them getting drunk and married and tricked and left behind and sent to war and comforted and found again and learning the lessons that every generation learns over and over. It’s wonderful. I love it. I’m always going to love it.
Stories are fractal by nature. Even when there’s just one version in print, you have it multiplied by every reader’s experience of it in light of who they are, what they like, what they want. And then many people will put themselves in the place of the protagonist, or another character, and spend a lot of time thinking about what they’d do in that character’s place. Or adjusting happenings so they like the results better.
That’s not fic yet, but it is a story.
But the best stories grow. This can happen in the language of capitalism—a remake of a classic movie, a series of books focusing on what happened afterwards or before—or it can happen in the language of humanity. Children playing with sticks as lightsabers, Jedi Princess Leia saving Alderaan by dueling Vader; a father reading his kids The Hobbit as a bedtime story as an interactive, “what would you like to happen next?” way so that the dwarves win the wargs over with doggie biscuits that they had in their pockets and ride to Erebor on giant wolves, people writing and sharing their ideas for deleted outtake scenes from Star Trek and slow-build fierce and tender romance with startling bursts of hot sex between Hawkeye and Agent Coulson.
A story at its most successful is a fully developed fractal, retold a million times and a million ways, with stories based on stories based on stories. Fanfic of fanfic of fanfic. Stories based on headcanons, stories based on prompts, stories that put the Guardians of the Galaxy in a coffee-shop AU and stories where the Transformers are planet-wandering nomads and stories where characters from one story are placed into a world from another. Stories that could be canon, stories that are the farthest thing from canon, stories that are plausible, stories that would never happen, stories that give depth to a character or explore the consequences of one different plot event or rewrite the whole thing from scratch.
This is what stories are supposed to be.
This is what stories are.
This is the most beautiful thing I have ever read. Thank you. Read this, @audlie45, and especially @goddessforloki, who doubts herself for no reason. @hallotom, if you can, please tag some necessities you know.
Thank you for this comment, bc I did some real percolating on it and I am happy to answer you.
I tagged it that way bc often I’ll see posts on my dash where someone has used a gif from a source, which hasn’t been tagged, and I’ll see tags or comments like, “Who is this hot guy?!” “Where is this from?!” which is so sad, bc they might really want to know and get into that fandom! So in tagging it #Supernatural, it’s actually free advertising BACK to Supernatural; someone might see my post on their dash, and think, “What is this from? Oh, it’s tagged Supernatural. Maybe I should check that show out, this guy looks like he could be a great actor…” And then you might gain awesome fresh blood in your fandom, who could turn out to be your new best friend (or even something more!, ppl meet the love of their life through fandom, I kinda hope to do so, too) ^_____^
I also enjoy the fact that other fandoms bleed into each other sometimes, bc fandom is an umbrella concept over so many of them (if not all). There are even crossover fanworks (fic, memes, etc.) between fandoms and different works of media, often enriching the experience of both. Especially when you have someone who can make really great meta-analysis comparing some aspect of one fandom to another, they might even make you ship smtg you never thought you’d ship.
As an example: One of our fandom ppl has moved onto the MCU!Avengers, but specifically the Steve Rogers/Tony Stark ship, and they convinced me that that ship has alot of similarity with Louis/Lestat. And now I can’t unsee it, and you could all lose me to Stony someday.
^Lestat/Louis meet Tony Stark/Steve Rogers, hilarity ensues. This is a fanwork that crossovers two different fandoms, and so much is conveyed without any dialogue at all, it’s all in the facial expressions and body positions and it gives me such feels whenever I look at it. Drawn by @americancaptaincomic
All that said, I’m sure I’m not the only one who has posted that gif with the #Supernatural tag. If you want a pure SPN tag, you can run your own blog and keep it as pure and clean as you like! And I don’t say that w/ any intended sassy attitude, it’s just a fact, and even though I wanted to keep my blog purely VC, I have found that embracing other fandoms is more inclusive and really does enrich the experience.
I-want-my-IWTV 