Pal (Billy Hargrove Bingo Fill)

Pal (Billy Hargrove Bingo fill)

Square: B3, "Just look at me"

Title: Pal

Rating: General

Word Count: 16,916

Ship(s): None (just Billy bonding with his new friend the demodog)

Major Tags: Homesickness, loneliness, underage drinking, mentions of animal cruelty, implied/referenced child abuse

Additional Tags: billy finds a demodog and thinks it's just a weird dog, and befriends it

Summary:

Billy meets a dog at the junk yard. It's a weird dog. Big, hairless, deformed - the thing doesn't even have a face - but Billy doesn't want to go home and the dog doesn't seem to mind him being there, at least not after he feeds it. So he comes back. Feeds it again. Keeps it company. He names the dog Pal.

Read it on AO3

Written for the @billyhargrovebingo

I see a lot of positivity posts for fanfiction, these days, but one thing that helps me to remember, sometimes, is that your fanfiction doesn't have to be good.

You're allowed to write fanfiction that is, objectively speaking, Bad Writing.

Fanfiction doesn't have to be good, it doesn't have to change anyone's life, it doesn't have to "fix" canon or do better than the source material that first inspired you.

Whether it's your first time writing, or if you're writing in a second language; whether you're young and still in school, or if you're older but writing was never your strongest subject; whether you've been going through a nasty bout of writer's block, or if it's just been a while since the last time you wrote anything creative just for fun -

It's okay to write fanfiction that just, like, straight-up sucks. Full of grammar and spelling mistakes, riddled with 1-dimensional tropes that have been done a thousand times before, with characters who only barely resemble their canon counterparts. Short fic with plots that meander nonsensically, or a bunch of one-shots that don't quite manage to have a plot at all. Weird sentence structure and paragraph breaks that, in retrospect, don't always make sense. Writing that tries too hard to be Funny or Serious or Good, but misses the mark by a mile.

Write them! Post them!

And when they don't get a lot of hits, when they only get a handful of kudos and a comment or two at best...

Keep writing new stories that make you happy. Write your favorite tropes to death, explore to exhaustion that one single aspect of your favorite character's canon traits that hooked onto something inside you and made you start writing in the first place, and let your plots be as silly or meandering or nonexistent as you want.

And if you keep writing even when your works are objectively kinda terrible, even when they aren't popular, when they don't get a lot of hits or kudos or comments?

I promise, you'll get better.

a few reminders because i’m tired and angry

fandom is a hobby, not a form of activism

adult women aren’t inherently creepy for being in fandom and having hobbies apart from raising babies and doing taxes

the vast majority of people pushing back against the worrying trend of instigating harassment over fictional characters and relationships aren’t incest supporters or pedophiles, actually

liking a m/f ship doesn’t make someone a dirty heterosexual invading your space

preferring gay ships doesn’t make you ‘’woke’’ and good

no one owes you a disclaimer that they are a good person who recognizes that their favorite fictional villain’s actions are evil and that they don’t condone those actions irl

liking a fictional villain is in no way comparable to advocating abuse/murder/genocide/etc and you’re a fucking idiot if you believe that

just because a woman is attracted to a fictional villain doesn’t mean she’s promoting toxic relationships or going to end up in a toxic relationship. assuming women can’t tell fiction and reality apart stinks of internalized misogyny 

some rando’s a/b/o fanfics have none of the level of influence that popular tv shows and movies spreading propaganda have

no one owes you a detailed description of their traumas and mental health problems

abusive relationships are not the same as enemies to lovers ships

y’all need to chill the fuck out over people, relationships, actions and events that don’t actually exist and learn how to enjoy and discuss them like normal people

fandom is a hobby, not a form of activism

feel free to add more

i needed to read this today so im sharing it to all of you!!

@staff Thank you for putting back icons next to the posts on my dash. This is 1000% better, good job.

CAN YALL SEE MY VISION