What's Your Opinion On Fanfiction + Why?

What's your opinion on fanfiction + why?

It's a good creative outlet

Some more ripe berry varieties.

Jostaberry, yellow raspberry, black raspberry, Japanese wineberry, polarberry, white currant, red gooseberry and balloonberry.

i love trans men who wear crust pants i love trans men who talk loudly i love trans men who smell i love short trans men i love trans men who work out i love trans men who dye their hair i love gay trans men i love masculine trans men. i love trans men who have high voices i love trans men who wear makeup i love trans men who wear skirts i love trans men who have soft voices i love ‘sickly’ trans men i love trans men who are straight i love trans men who go stealth i love trans men who don’t pass. i fucking love all trans men and fuck people who don’t agree.

When I was a kid, maybe 14 or so (which is, you know, 20+ years ago), I belonged to a Yahoo! mailing list for an anime called Gundam Wing. It was mostly populated by other teens, of varying ages, as it was started by a teen and her friends. Eventually it migrated, when Yahoo! groups started as forums, and even branched off into non-GW related stuff in a second forum.

One of the things I remember the most clearly is the oldest person in the group. Her name was Steelsong. She was a 40-something Dom with a sub whose name we knew even though we knew nothing else. She ran her own fanfic archive because the web was still handmade HTML and navigated in webrings and I’m pretty sure Google didn’t exist or was only barely, barely launched and not well known. She was kind and patient and we loved her. She treated everyone on the group with the respect given any adult, even though most of the rest of the world was still treating us like we were children. Not teenagers even, but children. She never once condescended to any of us, never made our youth a barrier to her respect, never treated us like we were incapable of being full people or like we were less than her because we were young.

I remember that she hosted our fanfiction, as absolutely terrible as it was (and I still have some of it, I am WELL aware of how cringingly terrible it is, just absolute nonsense garbage), right there alongside of other fic that was soul-achingly beautiful. Not a separate section for her friends or for kids, just right there like we were good enough to feature alongside other authors. I never once received crit from her that I didn’t ask for, only support. Only love. I am still writing today partly because Steel was so kind about our fic, fanfic and original.

I remember that when I started doing clay sculpture, she commissioned a tiny pair of dragons from me, to support me doing artwork. She sent a check my mom cashed for me, and my mom helped me mail it when it was finished. It broke in transit, and Steel assured me that she mended it and that it was still beautiful. It was a small gold dragon curled up with a small silver dragon.

I remember that her patience knew no bounds. I remember that she was there for us, regardless of reason. When we wanted to know silly things like what to do with a single AA battery, she answered. When we had serious questions about sex, she answered.  When we had questions about writing, she taught us. When one of our group members, a young gay teen in Australia, ended up in the hospital and then stopped making posts, and we all knew what had happened, she let us talk to her about it because we couldn’t go to our own parents, even though we had just lost a friend.

She was not a replacement to my parents, but she was an extra parent, in some ways. A friend, certainly, but someone that had been through more life than we had and was willing to pass on knowledge if we asked for it. Someone older that we trusted with things that were too uncomfortable to go to our parents or teachers or whatever about, because we already knew she wasn’t going to judge us or something, and that we would get an honest answer.

I don’t know why I’m remembering this so hard tonight, and I’m not sure if there’s a point to sharing this, except that I know she’s gone now. She was ill the last time we spoke, and her site went down a long time ago, and I miss her. She was a huge influence on my life, then and now. She was hope, for me, that life as an adult didn’t have to be boring, it wouldn’t have to mean giving up the things I loved and Becoming Only Responsible With No Fun. Her presence meant I had hope I could still write and play with friends even when I wasn’t ‘a kid’ anymore. And she’s gone, and I miss her, and I wanted to share her from the perspective of youth, and the perspective over twenty years later has provided me.

And I think of her, when people go off about older folks being in fandom with younger folks. I’m an older folks now, or at least middle aged folks because there are certainly folks older than me still, but I wasn’t always. I’ve been here since i was a younger folks, and I know how much Steel’s presence and support meant to me, how much she helped not just me but everyone on that group. And I think of the people saying older folks don’t belong in fandom, and that they shouldn’t interact with younger folks at all, and I just think… I can’t agree. I needed that kind of solid presence in my life back then and even at the age I am now, I need the folks older than me to stay. I want them here.

So I guess, like, if you’re here and you’re 40 or 50 or 60 or 70 or 80 or whatever, I want you here in fandom with me, still. Your presence here is a comfort. It is hope. It is a reminder that life will continue to be fun, even as I get older, myself. And if you’re younger and you have this sort of elder in your groups, I hope that they are like Steel. I hope they are kind and patient and supportive, and that knowing them gives you hope for your own future. I hope in twenty years you look back and remember them fondly.

Which wolf clipart?

this fucker:

I call it Lumpy Kiba and I’ve seen it used for car decals, stickers, clipart, traced with varying degrees of obviousness by artists of all skill/experience levels, I’m pretty sure I saw it in some small local company’s logo once.

here’s the original still from Wolf’s Rain (which is not a lot less weird-looking, but it looks fine in a stylized anime where it’s supposed to be), which I saw early in high school and ever since have had to live with apparently being the only one who knows that all these people just fucking traced an anime wolf.

it’s like the goddamn wilhelm scream of lazy art, once you see it you will never unsee it again, and it’s everywhere. and you can always tell because it’s frankly a pretty mediocre trace of an already wonky-looking wolf, so like. you can tell.

here it is on two different bumper stickers (two of MANY, just google ‘howling wolf bumper sticker’ and at least 70% of the fullbody ones will be Lumpy Kiba):

jewelry:

clipart collections that REALLY show off the Lumpiness compared to silhouettes referenced from actual wolf photos:

random art, including my personal favorite, a watercolor where the artist could just as easily have looked up an actual photo of a wolf but chose Lumpy Kiba instead:

a tattoo:

and THIS mcfuckery where he went through the whole process of sketching and refining to make it look like he was drawing a wolf from scratch (the gods know what you’ve done, jon harris):

anyway Lumpy Kiba is the bane of my existence but if I point it out I sound insane so I’m glad I had this opportunity to curse you all with the burden of this knowledge.