can we please bring back “in poor taste” as a concept
Because at some point it got folded in under “problematic,” and now every damn thing that has Unfortunate Implications or deals with sensitive topics indelicately enough to raise hackles or gores somebody’s sacred cow is treated as a grave injustice or a threat to society. Online activism culture has lost the vocabulary to express “this deals with touchy stuff in a way many people might find inappropriate, and you should probably avoid it if insensitivity on this subject gets you angry/upset, but it’s not promoting hateful ideas or demeaning people or affecting anything but my opinion of the creator’s sense of tact.”
I think this really an important post.
We’ve fallen into such a rut of “everything is right or wrong, no inbetween” that stuff that’s merely in poor taste is conflated with things that are actually offensively malicious.
this is so well worded like i been trying to say this for awhile thank you
♛It’s probably for the best that he doesn’t know how much he captivates us all, how even his prone and unconscious form strangles my heart.
He also detests being praised for his physical appearance unless he put his own effort into it; after all, he didn’t give himself those piercing green eyes or the tender crease that appears between his brows when he’s worried about me. His beauty lies not just in his features, really, but the way he aches for the beauty of the world around him, his openness, his dignified demeanor even when I’m testing every last bit of his resolve. And I don’t think he considers any of that to be effort on his own part, it’s just the way he is.
That would be the Piano Sonata in Eb by Joseph Haydn ;D
WHICH, IIRC, Tom had to actually learn how to play, because we do see a shot of his hands. His version sounds tuned differently than the version below, and if so, that would make sense bc Lestat himself is ~tuned differently~ in this scene.
^Go to 3:18 for the start of Lestat’s piece.
He plays Haydn in that scene because Claudia loved his music. It was a taunt.
break up your paragraphs. big paragraphs are scary, your readers will get scared
fuuuuck epithets. “the other man got up” “the taller woman sat down” “the blonde walked away” nahhh. call them by their names or rework the sentence. you can do so much better than this (exception: if the reader doesn’t know the character(s) you’re referring to yet, it’s a-okay to refer to them by an identifying trait)
blunette is not a thing
new speaker, new paragraph. please.
“said” is such a great word. use it. make sweet love to it. but don’t kill it
use “said” more than you use synonyms for it. that way the use of synonyms gets more exciting. getting a sudden description of how a character is saying something (screaming, mumbling, sighing) is more interesting that way.
if your summary says “I suck at summaries” or “story better than summary” you’re turning off the reader, my dude. your summary is supposed to be your hook. you gotta own it, just like you’re gonna own the story they’re about to read
follow long sentences w short ones and short ones w long ones. same goes for paragraphs
your writing is always better than you think it is. you just think it’s bad because the story’s always gonna be predicable to the one who’s writing it
I’m trying to find this great graphic I saw ages ago about types of fanfic, where, say, the source text would be a continuous line, and an augmenting fanfic would be a line that takes off at at angle, or an AU would be a line separate from the canon line—does this ring a bell with anyone?
THIS. Is one of my favorite posts re: fanfic and I am so glad I found it again to reblog it here. Such accurate description of what fanfic is/seeks to achieve in its many forms. I’m sure someone out there is thinking it’s incomplete, and maybe that’s true, but I love this for what it explains anyway and so HERE IT IS.
I would add that Drabbles and Additions exist within canon, filling out interstices of the overall story.
And I also find this diagram creatively inspiring. If you’re stuck, you might find a way through by choosing a different route based on these diagrams.
There are a couple of things about current shipping culture that confuse me.
1. The focus on whether or not a pairing will become canon as a reason people should ship something or not. Do you not understand what the “transformative” part of “transformative works” means?”
2. This idea that saying “I ship that” means “I think that, as presented in canon,this is a perfect, healthy relationship that everyone should model their relationship after.”
Sometimes shipping something does mean that. Sometimes shipping something means “Person A is a trash bag who doesn’t deserve person B but I would love to explore how Person A might grow to deserve Person B.” Sometimes it means “I want these characters to live together forever in a conflict free domestic AU.” Sometimes it means “I want Person A to forever pine after Person B. Nothing is beautiful and everything hurts.” And sometimes it just means you like their faces and want to see Person A and Person B bone in various configurations and universes.
Listen to your parents, kids.
This really should be one of a handful of Public Service Announcements randomly and chronically inserted into one’s dash.
Hell man sometimes it means “these two are TERRIBLE and I want to watch them burn like a catastrophic forest fire as a proxy for all the shit I don’t actually want in real life (like to light my own apartment on fire and scream) and then laugh at the destruction at the end.”