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.

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.

Apologies for being gone from the long-form fan networks for so long! I've been sporadically on Twitter but that's all until this week.

I was out of town for a week for Thanksgiving, including 4 days mostly without cell phone service, and I didn't bring my computer. The day after I got back, thanks to a billing issue that was probably totally my fault, our Internet service at home went down. The day after that, my computer went to sleep and wouldn't wake up.

Also, last week I started a new job! As you may or may not know, I'd been taking an extended vacation for over a year and I was just starting to think about going back to work. Someone I knew from my former job got in touch with me and before I knew it he was offering me a position. It's at a small but funded startup and the office is only 2 miles away from where I live instead of on the other side of a large lake. So that's pretty cool.

After a completely ridiculous saga about the Internet connection in which we had to sign up for a new contract, cancelled that when they wouldn't even tell us when it could be activated, then switched to a different ISP and waited for it to be activated and bought two different modems and waited another few days for a technician when the automatic activation didn't work, we FINALLY have it back. And after a moderately but not ridiculously expensive trip to Apple, my 4.5-year-old laptop is back with a new motherboard.

So now I'm going to work every day and have no time, but soon I will have income again, which is nice, and now I have structure, which is also nice, because it was getting pretty depressing having tons of time but never accomplishing anything.

( A synopsis of my time away, in annotated tweets )

Like most people, I learned to wash my clothes from my parents. My mom separates colors militantly (light, dark, bright, red), washes all her clothes in cold water, and hangs almost all her clothes to dry.

But I'm having issues with this. Question for people with vaginas: how do you wash your underpants? The internet tells me to wash "underwear" (I guess they mean white men's briefs?) on hot, but "lingerie" on delicate cold. All my nice underwear, including fancy mens' underwear with prints on it, says to wash cold and hang to dry.

( tmi? )

Definitely the prettiest city of the trip. Went to Edinburgh Castle and learned that the site has been continuously occupied for 3000 years, although most of the buildings are pretty new. I spent a lot of the time considering it as an inspiration for Hogwarts.

No one wears heels in Scotland. I saw one other woman in heeled boots in Edinburgh and she had a suitcase. Even women going out clubbing were wearing flats with their short skirts. It was definitely a challenge walking on the cobblestone streets in my boots, and there's no way stilettos would work there. I did buy a pair of flat boots, which I've been wearing every day in Paris.

We walked around aimlessly quite a bit, window shopping and exploring. Then, since we had a long drive to Cardiff, we left early in the afternoon for The SOUTH.

Have I mentioned that the road signs in Britain have reinforced my belief that Winterfell is in Scotland? Going there on the motorway, all the signs say things like:

M6
The NORTH
Glasgow

Now I'm just imagining the signs on Westeros
Kingsroad
The NORTH
Winterfell
The Wall

We drove out to the Isle of Skye and around it. There are a few farms, but it's very wild there, and mostly devoid of trees except where they've been planted in farms. We headed back over the bridge, which the proprietor of our B&B in Fort William told us used to be a toll bridge and people protested for years by not paying and being arrested until finally they made it free. Stayed in a hotel in Kyle, which was a wholly unremarkable little town where we had unremarkable dinner and left in the morning for Inverness.

Moving into the Highlands, everything is hillier and more desolate. We did, after a little backtracking, find the bridge that the Hogwarts Express goes over. Other than that, still some sheep. Fort William is right below the tallest mountain in Britain (at 4,400 feet), which although it’s not very high looks pretty impressive because it’s near the ocean so the land around is close to sea level. There’s been a path up the mountain, which we did not hike, for over a century. The fact that they once drove a Model T up it is impressive. The existence of the mountain did not particularly impress me, because I am spoiled and can see a mountain three times as high from the top of my street at home.

There’s a history museum in Fort William, where I finally learned what the fuss about the Jacobites is. Also that changes in the clan system in the 1700s and 1800s, when clan leaders centralized farming, eventually destroyed the old way of life and reduced the population. We saw a lot of emptiness and plenty of old farm ruins.

We went to a pub, had some local beer that K thought was boring but I liked (I suspect he finds anything that isn’t Guiness boring), and listened to some folk music. I don’t think I’ve ever heard bagpipes playing recognizable songs, accompanied by other instruments even, so that was new.

Trying to catch up...

We came, we ate the best Indian food I’ve ever had, went to a non-exciting museum in a gorgeous building that looks like a haunted castle at night, we left.

Well, there’s a little more, because that day we went with L to the airport for her flight home, rented a car there, and drove from there to Scotland. The countryside was, unsurprisingly, picturesque and full of sheep. Encountered our first castle, which was nicely free of visitor’s center/gift shop/charge but still had a helpful sign with historical information.