Do I admit to taking a certain degree of pleasure in watching the purity-wanking crowd tearing itself apart over a pairing in their latest favorite show because even they can’t decide on whether or not it is Problematic and therefore evil per their absurd standards?
Yes, yes I do.
In my now very limited time for gaming I’ve been working my way through Pokémon: Let’s Go, Eevee!, which I picked up almost on a whim and because Diablo was boring me. It’s an experience that leans heavily on nostalgia, but as someone who was never all that nostalgic for Kanto in the first place I do have to admit that these games have more to them than a 3D update to a 20 year old game and halfway gutted mechanics (which sounds an awful lot like the FE Archanea remakes now that I type it out…hmm.) For one thing this is the first time in a Pokémon game that I don’t actually mind catching all the Pokémon I can find, with a combination of the EXP Share mechanic that’s been in place since XY, the GO-based catching minigame, and the ability to see wild Pokémon on the overworld and interact with them accordingly like enemies in games like Chrono Trigger and the Mario RPGs. So much better than the the tedious JRPG standby of random encounters.
Even so, I will always take issue with the one annoying constant of this series: its motto is an ode to 100% completion, and yet when version exclusives and trade evolutions and other mechanics that practically force cooperation in an otherwise single-player experience stand in the way of that experience I find it very hard to remain invested in the lofty goal of a completed Pokédex. Despite the much smaller number available in this game it might even be worse here than in other recent games thanks to the arbitrarily restricted online trading system. Sure I’m having fun now, but once I’ve finished everything else I anticipate having a hell of a time getting my hands on Pokémon as trivial as Bellsprout or Sandshrew. And no I’m not getting into Pokémon GO to get those missing entries because I’m not going out into the world and catching these things on my phone…how silly.
I’m not dead – or purged off Tumblr, which is apparently happening to some blogs again – but I have been both ill and lacking in free time lately.
French quasi-aristocrat, thank you very much. My people were all provincial haute bourgeoisie imitating the fashions of the 18th and 19th century Parisian elite, and we were only in a position to do so insofar as we chose to enrich ourselves on a continent (and later country) with no true European aristocracy and did so via an economic system that recreated the dynamics of medieval feudalism. When one considers all the Uptown Anglos and their sycophants who deck themselves out like royalty and parade through the streets as such every Carnival I’d say we’re positively humble by comparison.
As for fandom, it’s cute that for the first time I’m getting lumped in with the “fandom moms” who are apparently the scourge of the anti crowd of Tumblr teenagers for some reason, but I think there’s more than enough sound rebuttal on that subject elsewhere. One’s fannish interests don’t magically vanish once one turns 18/21/25/whatever age you consider someone too old for such things.
Anonymously tell me something you think about me 💭
Many of my favorite tropes have come across before in my meta and other pieces. Crystal Dragon Jesus (specifically the popular pseudo-Catholic version), impoverished patricians, gendered roles/gender play in M/M sex or relationships (not exclusively the province of fetishizing yaoi fangirls, imagine that!), that sort of thing. One relationship dynamic I do enjoy but don’t talk about much is that between a noble or upper-class person and their servant or other subordinate. It’s one of the reasons I don’t mind, erm, Disney Prince Seth in Seth/Eirika fanon very much or that what I’d probably most look forward to in a remake of FE6 would be Perceval/Elffin.
As for headcanons…gay headcanons are obviously my bread and butter and best expressed through my Mercilessly Judging series, and even some of thoughts I have on media not directly tied to sexuality tend to play into that in some way. My headcanon for what’s up with Priam, for example, or that long set of posts I did on Mako from The Legend of Korra which boiled down to why his series-long character arc is much more fulfilling if one headcanons him as bi. Hmm, does my theory about Tellius and the Fates continent being part of the same landmass count as headcanon?
- Send questions about yourself
- Ask questions to/about your characters
- Ask about your headcanons
- Send questions about your works (fanfics, art, music, RPs, etc)
- Ask about popular ships/headcanons
- Ask about plot ideas you’ve had but haven’t acted upon yet (snippets of AUs, a scenario you wish to write/draw but haven’t gotten to yet)
- Questions about other ships/headcanons that aren’t as popular or are rarepairs
- Questions or comments about favorite tropes, headcanons, characters, foods, weather, or anything else you are okay in answering!
So a reader left a comment on byw 56 (really, more than one reader, and more than one comment) which I am addressing on Tumblr instead of on the AO3, because, basically, I did not have room to write a five thousand word essay back to them in my comments. I also apologize for my somewhat stilted use of no contractions before the cut; I am trying to get around a Tumblr bug that turns apostrophes and quotation marks and emdashes into display garbage on the dash.
First, let me back up for a second, because, to me, the most important part of my reply is my reasoning for why I am not, in fact, going to reply very directly to the actual specific questions that these specific readers asked. WELP SORRY! I apologize for this if it is frustrating; but, as those of you that have been around here for a while know, while I was in grad school (and before that when I was kind of perpetually underemployed) my primary source of income was tutoring K-12 students. Unsurprisingly, since I was headed for a STEM graduate degree, I taught a lot of math, but my primary tutoring area of focus was actually critical reading for students who were preparing for the SAT (note for non-U.S. readers: the SAT is the main ~college preparatory readiness~ exam in the U.S., your score on which heavily influences university admissions). And a big part of why I often do not like to answer questions about my writing, including some of the questions that these particular readers raised in these particular comments, is because for most of my adult life, I have fed and clothed and housed myself by failing to answer questions about writing by other people. When you are teaching someone to read critically, particularly when you are teaching young people to read critically, the most effective thing you can do is, very frequently, to not answer their questions, but to do so in a considered and deliberate way.
(Note: If talking about the idea of critical reading in a fannish context is going to peel your onions, you should maybe stop reading this essay right now.)
This is about so much more than queer sex in real life vs. queer sex as it’s written in fanfiction, but that central part made my heart sing.
Canon FE? Tough to say what’s really canon in most cases, and the few hard canon pairings don’t interest me much. Does Ike/Ranulf count?
Canon ships in other media isn’t an easy one for me, as most of my favorites are either subtext or popular fanon. If Sheith becomes canon (or open-to-interpretation-but-probably-canon) in the last season of VLD that would probably count. If not, Lito/Hernando from Sense8 is pretty sweet and has its hot moments.
Favorite non-gay ship in FE…strangely, as little as I care for Eirika I really enjoy her dynamic with Seth, both the idealized fanon version and the messier canon version. Hey, if Seth can carry the game in Hard mode all on his own he can sure carry a relationship.
Gascon-en-exil: Gallophilic Cultural Posturing 