I Identify With This Panic! When I Was In High School, I Shared Some Really Explicit Harry Potter Fic

I identify with this panic! When I was in high school, I shared some really explicit Harry Potter fic with my cool older cousin. I don't think she particularly liked it, but it didn't change our relationship. I also gave some dark or just niche kink fic to friends in HS, and they occasionally tease me about "remember the time when..." but seem to have accepted it as just another personality quirk. Obviously, it depends on the person, but thought I'd share. (Oh, and then there was the time the Sex Workers Art Show came to my college, and some pretty conservative housemates knew my org was one of the sponsors. One of them told my friend afterward "I didn't think I'd approve of it, but I went home and tried that thing the woman did with the tassel twirling on her boobs, and it was fun!" So you never know what will strike someone's fancy...)

I don't know why I'm asking you, but I hope you can help. I NEED HELP. I was drunk at a party and admitted to a friend I wrote a fanfic. She was surprised, but said she would read my fic in support. I was overjoyed at first, and told her how to find me on AO3. But then, thinking about it, I realized she would see my other fics, and my bookmarks, which are much darker contain more porn. I'm now freaked out that she will see that. I'm on the verge of a panic attack. What do I do?

Take some deep breaths, eat a little snack, look at some cute pictures of baby animals. Don’t panic if you can help it. This is not nearly as disastrous as you think it is. Unless your friend is super conservative and also your mom or your boss or something, the worst this can be is embarrassing, and it’s probably not even going to be that, because the most likely outcome–the really really overwhelmingly likely outcome–is that nothing happens.

If your friend is not familiar with fanfic or the AO3, it is most likely that it just won’t occur to her to navigate to your other fics, let alone your bookmarks. It seems blindingly obvious and inevitable to people who read fic and use the AO3 regularly, but it’s actually much less obvious to someone just looking at a fanfic there for the first time. Bookmarks, especially, are NOT intuitive to the random non-fannish friend off the street.

Odds are if your friend is not that into fanfic they will forget to read the fic or put it off. If they do wind up reading it, as a gesture of supportiveness to you, again, they’re probably only doing it for that reason and they’re not then going to be like “oh man I need to also read everything else this person has ever written and check her bookmarks!!” Even if they like the story you meant to link them to, the impulse to check out everything else a person has written and see what they’re reading is fanreader behavior, not noob-dipping-toe-in-for-the-first-time-because-their-friend-linked-them-to-their-fic behavior. 

If they DO go looking, odds are it’s because you got them interested in fic and they WANT to read more, in which case you have earned a toaster for converting somebody. If they tell you about this, it will probably be in the context of “I read all your fic, is there more fic somewhere?!” (This has actually happened to me.) (Literally. I still have that toaster, it’s a nice toaster.) If they don’t like it or don’t see anything else that interests them, they probably just won’t mention it.

Look, for several years my only paypal account was linked to my fannish email address. This led to me giving my mom that email address in order to send me money one time, which led to her using that email address on mass-emails that included tons of aunts/uncles/cousins. It would be SUPER EASY to find my fic by googling my email address, and a lot of my fic is FUCKED UP (haha who wrote hundreds of thousands of words of sibling incest with a main character with the same name as her younger brother? THIS GUY). It’s even possible that someone WOULD google that email address because it’s not obviously attached to my real name, so they might want to figure out which relative that email address belongs to! Totally plausible! PRACTICALLY INEVITABLE!!

It has never happened. Or if it has, no one has ever mentioned it or given any sign of it, so same thing.

My dad used to regularly read my fandom LiveJournal, including during the period when I was writing hundreds of thousands of words of sibling incest fic starring a main character with the same first name as my younger brother. If you look at the profile on my LJ, there is, to this day, a note asking him not to, which he probably never saw because he almost certainly never once navigated from “recent posts” to “profile.”

He’s never mentioned the fact, and I am dead certain he never read any of my fic. He was only there to check for signs of life and see what I was up to lately, so my fic posts just weren’t of interest to him and he ignored them. (Blessedly, he has now moved on to liking every single thing I or any of my brothers post to Facebook, including comments on other people’s posts and five-star ratings for gay romance novels.)

Bottom line: Fandom and fanfic are just not as interesting to other people as we think they are. Your friend thinks you drunkenly told her about a weird hobby you have, which she may or may not later remember to show support for by reading the story you posted on some website somewhere. The only reason she’ll ever go looking for anything further is if she happens to decide she’s interested in it herself (or if it turns out she was secretly in fandom all along). Otherwise the odds are overwhelming that it will simply pass her by unnoticed.

I love seeing the faces of these people as they sing this song together. I love that with just one sheet of paper, a few minutes' practice, and some experience with choral singing, the person standing in the far back of that room can be united with the person in the front row in co-producing this sound together. I love that this version of a beloved song - different, relatively simple arrangement - will only ever exist once, because those people chose to come together in that room to make it. 

*this may sound a bit strange* Can y'all sum up each house by only using ONE gif from The Princess Bride?

Gryffindor: 

Hufflepuff:

Ravenclaw: 

Slytherin:

It's Not 'Cute' When Dads Threaten My Son For Dating Their Daughter

While the role of overprotective father is not a new one, it is a tired concept that needs to just die, already. Aside from the assumption that my daughter (yes, I also have daughters) is incapable of good judgment and protecting herself and her standards, this ridiculous concept imagines my sons likewise incapable of the same good judgment and standards. [...] And rationalizing that young men have overwhelming urges that cloud their judgment and force them to make poor decisions regarding young women is nothing more than excusing bad behavior. [...] Above all, realize and come to terms with the fact that teenage sexuality is not a “boy thing.” Teenage sexuality is a teenage thing. Young men and young women alike are going to be curious, interested, and looking to learn more about sex.

This.* Is what I think every time I read the ‘overprotective dad with shotgun’ - or ‘overprotective friends threaten bodily harm if date hurts friend’s feelings’ - trope. Especially in fics in which the people dating are both adults and capable of consenting and of making honestly-intentioned mistakes! It’s not cute and loving; it’s violent and patronizing.

*(Minus the heteronormative focus of the article - but it’s apparently autobiographical, so.) 

‘Star Wars’ and the Fantasy of American Violence

The real gap is between the fantasy of American heroism and the reality of what the American military does.

On the stories we tell of ourselves. 

"Thirteen years ago, I spent the Fourth of July on the roof of a building in Baghdad that had once belonged to Saddam Hussein’s secret police. Our command had suspended missions for the day, set up a grill and organized a “Star Wars” marathon — the three good ones — in an old auditorium. But George Lucas’s lasers couldn’t compete with the light show playing out across Baghdad, and watching a film about the warriors of an ancient religion rising up from the desert to fight a faceless empire seemed, under the circumstances, perverse.

“So instead of “A New Hope,” I watched scenes from Operation Iraqi Freedom: tracers, helicopters, distant explosions in a modern city under an increasingly senseless occupation. I could see the United Nations compound that would get bombed later that summer. I could see the memorial to the soldiers who had died in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, a giant turquoise teardrop sliced in two. I could see Sadr City, the wire-crossed slum that would give birth to Shiite death squads, and the Green Zone, where American proconsuls forged a new Iraq.

“I was a Bicentennial baby, born in 1976; “Star Wars” was the first movie I saw, strapped in a car seat at the drive-in. The film must have implanted deep in my infant subconscious a worldview, an idea of justice and the desire to wield a light saber, all entangling as I grew older with the Bicentennial celebrating the American Revolution, another story of scrappy rebels fighting a mighty empire.

““Star Wars” managed a remarkable trick. Two years after the fall of Saigon and America’s withdrawal in defeat from a dishonorable war, Mr. Lucas’s Wagnerian space opera recast for Americans the mythic story so central to our sense of ourselves as a nation.

“In this story, war is a terrible thing we do only because we have to. In this story, the violence of war has a power that unifies and enlightens. In this story, war is how we show ourselves that we’re heroes. Whom we’re fighting against or why doesn’t matter as much as the violence itself, our stoic willingness to shed blood, the promise that it might renew the body politic....

"The real gap is between the fantasy of American heroism and the reality of what the American military does, between the myth of violence and the truth of war. The real gap is between our subconscious belief that righteous violence can redeem us, even ennoble us, and the chastening truth that violence debases and corrupts....

"There is another version of America beyond the noise our fireworks make: not military strength, but the deliberate commitment to collective self-determination. Perhaps this Fourth of July we could commemorate that. Instead of celebrating American violence, we might celebrate our Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the ideals those documents invoke of an educated citizenry deciding its fate not through war but through civil disagreement. Instead of honoring our troops, whose chief virtues are obedience and aggressiveness, we could honor our great dissenters and conscientious objectors. And instead of blowing things up, maybe we could try building something.

"It’s our choice. We make our myths. We show by our actions what our holy days mean. Forty years after the American Bicentennial, 13 years after I stood on a rooftop in Baghdad, and 10 years after getting out of the Army, I won’t be out under the fire, cheering our explosions. I won’t be watching “Star Wars” either. My America isn’t an empire or a rebellion, but an ideal; it’s not a conquest, nor a liberation, but a commitment."

Watch: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s UPenn commencement speech will move you to tears.