There's that tumblr post that's probably ascended to an iconique status at this point, which I only took screenshots of so will summarize thus:

[Screenshot of an ao3 comment]
My husband was reading over my shoulder and snorted when he saw, chapters divided in sfw / nsfw / exceptionally nsfw
He says, "What? Does that mean Steve and Bucky hanging out in a coffee shop / Steve and Bucky having all the butt sex / Steve and Bucky organizing a labor union?"

[Comic]
Steve, in uniform, in front of a counter, with Bucky behind it in a green apron. Steve is saying, "you make HOW much an hour?"
Next panel: Steve in a different outfit walking away with coffee, saying over his shoulder, "we have nothing to lose but our chains." Bucky replies, "steeb pls."

[Reply] UNIONIZE 👏 COFFEE 👏 SHOP 👏 AUS 👏

Ever since then I've been noticing when I read workplace AUs (which I like, in general, since I'm the kind of person who has gotten into serious relationships with coworkers in real life... thrice even) is how rife they are with boss/employee relationships. If not outright romantic relationships, managers and business owners are treated on an equal level with workers. Sometimes things about the job suck, and most of the time the things that suck are customers which, realistic, and occasionally businesses are struggling to get by but this is always a struggle for the owner character. What's strikingly missing here is the real power dynamics of a workplace: that we as workers need jobs to be able to eat, we don't just do it for fun. And of course people who own businesses are people, just like everyone else, but they also are taking on a role in our economy that not just means having control over whether someone else will eat, but being incentivized to use that power to their advantage if they want to succeed.

If you have a problem with sex worker/customer AUs because consent issues? Well let's talk about AUs where someone is actually someone else's boss! This isn't just about whether someone can consent to the relationship itself. After 15 years in fandom I'm comfortable with lots of power imbalances in romantic relationships as long as the author acknowledges them. It's that the portrayal of the workplaces themselves are universally fun and lighthearted and do not deal with those power dynamics at all.

More than anything else, workplace AUs, especially service industry ones, seem to be a fantasy of a universe where work is, if not always fun, at least partly fun. And I get that -- I want to live in a world where I'm friends with my coworkers. I've even been there.

Actually, let me tell you a story about that.

( Read more... )

So, story over. There isn't a clear conclusion here but I'd love to see a workplace AU where the canonical villain is cast as the owner. Or even where characters have to deal with the dynamics of a manager they like as a person, who wants to be friends and hang out, but who also is in the position of disciplining them. Dealing with the manager wanting to be friends with everyone when what the workers need is time to hang out without them there, to talk about the real stuff before they confront their boss with what they'd like to see changed.

And I'm biding my time for the right juggernaut fandom to come along for me to write the story about the characters unionizing their coffee shop.

Content note: discussion using a common fic labeling term that references animal harm

Hi I have missed some days but I am still here having thoughts, the next one got too long but I posted this on tumblr and figured I'd repost here for posterity and better discussion:

I’m not reblogging any of the specific stuff that’s going around the Witcher fandom about event rules (I agree with everything I’m seeing from the people I follow though), but I want to be clear:( Cut for discussion using a common fic labeling term that references animal harm )

I tweeted a bit about character archtypes in ships and connecting with them across different ships and fandoms:

"Saw someone on DW who’s not on here describe a pairing as “Goodposture Ironedshirt/Disreputable Smirkingman” and now I want to collect all the lovely and evocative names transformative fandom uses to talk about character tropes" (referring to this post)

"I can definitely get down with this ship as long as the uptight one isn’t ridiculous about it but the true ship of my heart, my warm and fuzzy blanket, is charming disaster/competent awkward nerd"

And then there was a little discussion about whether competent awkward nerd/charming disaster is in fact a subset of Goodposture Ironedshirt/Disreputable Smirkingman. When I see people talking about shipping, especially iddy or what they think of as tropey fic that they either love or hate, there's usually a pleasing contrast between the two characters. But we don't want them to be complete opposites on every possible thing, they need something to connect over. So one of the ways I distinguish ship types to myself is which contrasts are being played up. Of course, that can vary within a pairing depending on the author's interpretation of the characters, too.

So yeah, this is basically a taxonomy discussion, and if you feel like this way of looking at things is too focused on binaries then you probably won't connect with it. But it works for me.

To me, Goodposture Ironedshirt/Disreputable Smirkingman is characterized primarily by the character's relationships to rules and propriety, and also usually to how emotionally demonstrative they are. This is the most popular fanon characterization of Arthur/Eames from Inception. Goodposture Ironedshirt can show up by himself as a character who I saw a tumblr post about once that I can't find again: "The Ghost." The Ghost is always a white man who's got a smaller part in canon but gets read into a lot by fans. He's uptight, particular, fussy and possibly effeminate about his clothing and hygiene, and smaller and slighter than any counterpart he's shipped with. Basically, fanon Hux from Star Wars, though he's not paired with a Disreputable Smirkingman. Kylux isn't my bag so I'm not even sure quite how Kylo Ren is usually characterized to be paired with him, but I'm betting it focuses on his physical strength and unrestrained emotionality.

My favorite ship dynamics are contrasting in aspects like outgoing/reserved, active/passive, "smooth"/awkward, stoic/expressive, serious/fun-loving, but not focused on contrasts in competence, gender coding (different from gender expression? This is hard to explain), height, or rule-following (I like characters who feel pressure to fit in but not characters who are deeply internally compelled to order).

Fic and general media fandom has coined some excellent terms for talking about characterization tropes: spacetoaster, the aforementioned Ghost, Golden Retriever Boyfriend. We should keep coming up with more! I don't know how to end this ramble so let's move on to the personal section of the Twitter thread:

"The meta analysis of this is that these are the animus and anima of my own personality?"

"What’s wild about getting older is the number of things you realize were vastly warped about your perception of yourself your entire life, like would it have been possible to embrace my chaos in my 20s and if I did who would I be now?"

Recently, one of my friends that I know through tech activism was shocked to find that I consider myself an introvert. I mean, I do use what I think is a more original Jungian version of the term -- it's about being focused on my own internal world and also being more reflective than active. I am a lot more about not doing things than doing things. I used to think I was "quiet." In retrospect, I have never in my life been quiet, not even when I was a super awkward teenager. But I have a sister who's very, very loud and I grew up comparing myself to her.

So I always saw myself as the awkward nerd, I guess. Yet somehow in my whole life I have had zero relationships with charming disasters. I thought because I was so focused on the intensity of what was going on in my head that I don't usually show to other people, I must be the awkward nerd and to have value I must fill out the rest of the archetype: I have to be together, organized, conscientious. That just because I'm "together" in interpersonal emotional interactions, that should somehow correlate with having a clean house, paying all my bills on time, and being able to finish any fun project I think about.

Reader, it does not.

The avoidance spiral from not living up to that makes it even harder to keep on top of everything, actually. I'm curious to find out what happens if I stop trying so hard.

Something typically associated with extraversion that I appreciate when I see it in other people is being interested in others, focusing on them. It's something that makes someone a pleasure to be around just as much as purely being "fun," and definitely more surely than being full of brilliant ideas which just makes you annoying when it falls flat.

So something I'm going to try to do this year is be a little more chaotic. To forgive myself for dropping things sometimes in hopes that will help me actually do the things that are important with less anxiety. And to be genuinely curious about other people's inner realities so that we can actually connect.

I have posted exactly one fic this year, so there's not much point in doing a roundup of writing or anything. I do have three Star Wars stories I could still potentially finish -- I thought I'd give up on everything after RoS but now that there's been a little time to process I think I can get away with just ignoring everything about it without explanation, whether it's a story set in the same time period or in the future. I fantasize about a regular Dreamwidth posting schedule in January. We'll see. If you follow me on Twitter, you know I've fallen into a bizarre and embarrassing spiral of reading bandom fic. I don't even go here, I was neither into it when it was an active fandom nor into the music back before then. I'd like to say I was too old and too cool, and maybe I was a little too old (I am... older than half of FOB?) but the only music I listened to was what I could swing dance to. To this day I hate talking about what music I'm "into," those conversations have a magic power to throw me back into feeling like I'm in high school and "what kind of music do you like" is a code for your entire social identity. Anyway this is all the fault of my non fannish friend who's DMing a game of the Witcher tabletop RPG for a group of us and is very sweet and serious about it. I had no idea what I wanted to do for a character, with the party it seemed like we needed a human who could make money and do the talking to other humans so I was like "I'll be a bard I guess" and then I thought it would be funny if I actually played recorder when my character played music, I already have a bunch of recorders, and then I thought it would be even more fun if I found stuff the other players would like, so I went back to a conversation they'd had on our discord server about bands, and there had been a whole long thread about emo, so after I learned a LoTR medley and a Muse song I decided to do The Black Parade, and I was like "I'll just transcribe it myself this time rather than trying to find sheet music and then adapting it" like a person with no sense, so I pulled up the video on YouTube since I don't have spotify or whatever and watched it on repeat for 2 hours while writing it down, and then I was like, hmm, I remember this was like a whole thing, a whole fandom, what if I looked on the ao3 for fic. At least one person sang along to my epic recorder cover over the video conference so I'll call it a win. We won our first fight last session against some wraiths. I'm planning on using the ukulele basics I've been working on during the pandemic and singing The Unquiet Grave next session to celebrate. I haven't performed singing in front of people ever in my life, I refuse to even sing at karaoke, so I'm kind of terrified but also I want to? If I survive that, next it's got to be Chicago Is So Two Years Ago because DM is a sweet boy from Chicago who misses it very much and also he said "dude take this to your grave is all bangers, front to back." This is 10x more terrifying. Also one of my housemates only ever leaves the house to do martial arts in the park and the other one isn't on the same schedule so when she gets back from this monthlong trip and is done quarantining I'm going to have zero time alone in the house to practice. The singing bits, and ridiculous sounding vocal exercises I should probably do because I have no idea how to sing? Everyone in the house plays instruments and is chill about practicing them at least. It's weird to be suddenly back into it and talking to housemate S about music theory. I played clarinet pretty seriously as a kid and also dabbled in piano and sax and since it's not a thing most people do as adults I both forget I used to do it and also forget that not everybody had access to that education at an age where it just sinks into your brain and you don't have to think about it to read music and can just kind of figure out how to play things on any instrument after a basic explanation of the technique.

Meme stolen from littlestclouds

Pick a character you know I know, and ask me to answer these questions about them:

1. How I feel about this character
2. All the people I ship romantically and/or sexually with this character
3. Favorite gen relationship(s) for this character
4. My unpopular opinion about this character
5. One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon.
6. Random pet theory about this character that you won't convince me is not true.
7. A song or piece of music I associate with this character.

 Hello. I have now watched The Magicians, kind of. As in, a "queliot cut" of seasons 1-3, which despite the label is more of an Eliot and Margo cut. Reading fic when you're trying to pick up an entire season and also Quentin's actual personality by osmosis is a fun adventure!

( Spoilers )

 I have too many thoughts...

• The mid-s2 theme of interlopers in your home and not feeling safe was bizarrely close to home as I was dealing with a RAT in my HOUSE at the time. Did you know rats can chew through plastic plumbing really easily? 3 plumber visits! 1 weekend with the water turned off while we tried to evict the rat because what's the point of getting it fixed only to have it chewed through the next night...
• I saw someone online describe this show as "what if Glee thought it was Twin Peaks" and yeah
• I feel like I could read so much meta on race in this show. The combination of random spurts of wokeness in dealing with stuff like slut shaming, rape culture, and colonialism while also casting the marginalized Southside as whiter than the Northside power players is... interesting.

( Spoilers ahoy... )

If I did write it, the Leverage team would be doing the same thing but in the fae world. They'd run into Bo and her crew on a job that brought them to not!Toronto.

And if I did write it, Nate would be a luck fae and Sophie would be a Seniatta and Parker would be a dragon (looks human, loves treasure, can fly) and Eliot would be a Lupercus (shifting into a German Shepherd) and Hardison would be human.

 Does anyone in my circle have advice about getting a sure skin that actually works for mobile? Or even a comm or anywhere I can ask questions short of opening a support ticket. I’m using the Lynx skin and on mobile Safari my reading page has a narrow column of text on the left and the icon on the right with no text wrapped below it. This makes posts hard to read, and if the post itself has indented paragraphs I end up with

Example of how this post looks: