Avocado's Hypothesis

I hate to break it to you, but I’m not actually the boss of anyone. Similarly, you are not actually the boss of anyone. What adults choose to post on AO3 is at their own discretion. But don’t worry, the beautiful thing about AO3 is that everything is neatly labeled and clearly tagged so you needn’t worry about accidentally stumbling into a fic which squicks you.

And to my writers, I do urge you to respect people’s desire to easily avoid fic they know would upset them by clearly labeling and properly tagging your fic if you choose to post it; our fandom will fucking self destruct if we start having high (potential) squick factor fics cropping up all willy nilly, unlabeled and tricksy. And I’d care some what less about that except I’m the one at whose blame is going to be laid.

And I would like to say, to those of you have decided that the Kink Meme is little more than a breeding ground for sexual deviants. Yes, hello, thank you for forcing me to turn off anon. On an (admittedly rushed) search of the ~100 filled prompts (way to go, perverts) only ~15 of them rate trigger warnings and that includes the 6 consensual, of age Daddy! or Mommy!kink fics because I know for some twee and precious flowers people that is squicky. But frankly I shouldn’t really have included them because even if they were real people (which they aren’t) everyone in them is a consenting adult. Is there stuff on the Kink Meme which might upset people? Yeah there is, but a great deal more of it is Abby getting lucky with everyone like the mega space babe she is, and one time Clarke and Harper took a bath (personal favorite).

To your tags “ #ANYWAY#I think I asked nicely the first time lmfao ”. You absolutely did ask nicely which I’m appreciative of. However, being thankful that someone chose not to accuse me of molesting a child I lived with (my inbox has been wild) is a surreal place to be in my life. 

I use squick for a couple of reasons, the first of which being that I’m nearly 30 and have been active in the fanfiction community since the 7th grade so I’ve always called it a squick. The other, more salient, reason is that a squick is not a trigger. I’m firmly of the mind that fandom in general uses trigger with little regard for the actual significance for people who are triggered by things. Not offended or grossed out but genuinely triggered. While I’m sure that there are absolutely fics which have genuinely triggered people and I of course can’t speak to anyone’s personal experience, the vast majority of people who say fic is triggering them are not, in fact, suffering from a resurgence of deeply harmful psychological trauma which significantly affects their ability to lead “normal” lives. They just don’t like it. Being upset by something isn’t the same as being triggered by it. 

To that end if you are making AO3 your “safe space” and expect that you will not be confronted by content that you find offensive you are acting in error. As was pointed out the last time I tried to run a Kink Meme for this fandom, AO3′s mission statement from conception has been to host fanfiction without morality policing or censorship with some very few exceptions (personal attacks and plagiarism being two such exceptions). AO3 and quite frankly fanfiction in general shouldn’t be where you look to find a safe space; There are too many people looking for too many disparate things. 

If you want safe space within the Bellarke shipdom or fandom in general I heartily encourage you to create that. Back in the day (#fandomgrandma) personally run fanfiction archives were all the rage. I’m sure that the (free) source code for those, complete with forums, is still floating around on the internet. If my experience in the Bellarke shipdom has taught me anything it’s that you will absolutely get a bite if you decide to host a The 100 or even just Bellarke archive with morality rules. If you’d like to see what those kinds of private archives can look like: Pomme De Sang was my stomping grounds for a while. Yeah, I made some questionable choices in high school but the PdS archive and forum are a pretty standard example. 

edit to add: 

Actually, fuck you. I’m really over this fandom being so moralizing and self important. I worked really hard on being clear and articulate and non-confrontational about something which is a really sensitive subject for me. In case you were wondering, yeah I’m still raw about last time and the things people have been saying to and about me in my inbox or on GG run the gambit from exhausting to legitimately terrible.  

I treated your concern with respect and actually addressed it because I know that it’s important to you and it’s shared by other people. I don’t want to blow off your experience and the parts of it which are troubling that I play a role in just because I disagree with where you’re coming from. So I tried to be helpful, I gave resources and a good fucking idea. It’s this off hand dismissal of anything that might complicate a narrow, clinical world view which makes me so sick of this fandom. 

You try to run something nice and you get shit.

You know what the worst part is? I’m very annoyed and yet still sitting here being genuinely and notably grateful that a) you’re not a former friend who has decided to go for the throat and b) you’re not accusing me of being a rapist. I honestly can’t even tell if fandom’s gotten worse of if I’m just a lot more tired. 

Also: @bob-morley I don’t think that this is so much a matter of who’s “old” and who isn’t, as opposed to who has experience in fandom.

People who are experienced in fandom already know what squicks are and triggers are, and they already know that it’s perfectly fine to have either and to not want to read/see things because of them. Seriously! Not everything is for everyone! And that’s fine!

They also know that Ao3 is a website that is literally founded on the principles of allowing any and all types of fiction to be posted and respected. They have actual real life lawyers to protect said fanfictions and the people who post them. So by all means, send them an angry letter, sign a petition, become a lawyer and boycott the website all together: do what you want, I don’t care. They’ll laugh in your face, and that’s assuming that you even get a response in the first place.

(I do want to add: there’s no shame in not being experienced in fandom!! We all start somewhere. The real problem is when we pretend that we know everything about the culture that we’re immersing ourselves in. It’s a problem when we bust in here like we own the place, then start telling people who have been doing this for years and literally built the culture that we now get to enjoy and share: “you’re doing this wrong and you’re a piece of shit person because I said so.”)

You are far from the first person to decide that “my own personal ideals are the highest of the high, and everyone else needs to leave so that way I can enforce my safe space” and you will absolutely not be the last.

However, if you were experienced in fandom, you would know just how dangerous this mentality is. You would know that all it takes is for one thing to be compromised (ei: no rape/incest fics) and then everything comes tumbling down.

“But Avocado! Aren’t you jumping to conclusions?? Surely we can just take out the bad things without getting rid of the good things like LGBT+ rep and freedom of expression??”

Unfortunately, my sweet little sugar plum, people have tried this time and time again. And guess what? It’s failed. Time. And. Time. Again. One thing gives and before you know it you have a website where you’re only allowed to post PG fanfics with M/F pairings and no premarital sex or violence or drugs or literally anything like that and no I’m not exaggerating. It has happened. Time. And. Time. Again.

“So what are we to do?? There are so many horrible horrible things out there and by golly, I shouldn’t have to read them!!”

Well, here’s the real kicker: you totally don’t have to read anything you don’t want to! I KNOW. SHOCKING. BRAND NEW INFORMATION. I highly suggest that you make use of Ao3′s extensive tagging system, which is fully decked out with Rape/Non-Con warnings, Explicit Warnings, Violence Warnings, and honest to god so so many tags that it’s almost like you could tag absolutely anything and everything on that damn website.

Oh wait-- YOU TOTALLY CAN.

“But Avocado!! What if there’s a fanfic that isn’t tagged properly???”

Well, my precious baby dew drop, you could always politely ask the author to properly tag their content. But after that? You’re just going to have to close the fic and stop reading it. I know. It’s an impossible task, but when you’re left unsupervised on the internet you’re going to have to be your own advocate. Don’t read what you’re not comfortable reading. It’s that easy. You’re allowed to stop reading at any time too! I promise. It’s totally allowed.

“BUT AVOCADO!!! WHAT IF THEY’RE WRITING EXPLICIT INFORMATION IN THE DESCRIPTION???? WHAT IF THEY USED BAD WORDS AND THE VERY SHORT DESCRIPTION WAS ENOUGH TO MAKE ME EXTREMELY UNCOMFORTABLE TO THE POINT THAT I FELT COMPELLED TO SEND ANGRY MESSAGES TO PEOPLE ONLINE?????”

Note: there are also abuse survivors who do not think it’s abuse. 

I have experienced emotional abuse that directly parallels Karamel and for someone like you, who knows nothing about me or my experiences to tell me that Karamel is “objectively” not abuse tells me that you’d also say that my experience was “objectively” not abuse and sorry, but you don’t get to make that call. 

Don’t police people’s individual experiences for a ship??? Like???

And I’m not going to get into the second part of that discourse but all I know is I don’t keep people close to me who justify Mon El’s actions towards Kara as healthy and normal behavior. Enough said.

As for your own experience, I said nothing about it. In fact, I literally said, and I quote, “You can find it uncomfortable, can say that it reminds you of your experiences, but that does not change the canon of the story”. To clarify, I had a parental figure that was emotionally abusive to me. Because of this, I would likely really dislike watching a show with a man that looked and behaved similarly to him and perhaps raised his voice to a younger girl, made her cry, etc. However, I also know that my experience is not EXACTLY the same as a characters. I might not like said character because I associate him with my experience, but it paralleling your experience in some manner does not make it exactly the same??? Because our experiences are NEVER exactly the same.

And as for you saying that I’m invalidating your experiences, I’m sorry, but that’s an emotionally and personally charged claim that has no evidence to back it up and is a fallacy. You’re saying I’m invalidating your experiences by pointing out that the ship does not display warning signs of abuse, but all I am doing is stating fact based on canon. I don’t know anything about your personal experience. You’re extending what I say about a fictional relationship to yourself. I did not say a thing about your own experience.

The fact is that I could go and list all of the signs of emotional abuse and they would not fit Karamel. That is not opinion. That is what canon has shown us and what the warning signs are, as a whole, for emotional abuse. 

You having a personal stake in it definitely means something, but you can’t act as if you’re a mouthpiece for all abuse victims either. Even people who are a part of a marginalized group or a group of victims can be wrong about the story. 

If one abuse victim says that it’s minimizing abuse to call Karamel abusive (and I actually did see a post like this… though I’d be damned to find it. But, although I don’t have experience with romantic abuse, I still am an abuse victim myself) and another says that it’s wrong to say it’s objectively not abuse, what then? Does a black hole form because we’ve got ourselves this unsolvable paradox because we can’t disagree with anyone who has a personal stake in it?

I’m sorry, but no.

And P.S.: most abusive relationships/characters are not explicitly stated as so in canon. Octagon is not explicitly stated as abusive, but she is. She literally has a pattern of being verbally/physically abusive to every POC she’s gotten close to. I stopped watching Supergirl because they dropped the black man as the love interest just so they could introduce a crusty white guy. Because GOD FORBID the black man be the white heroine’s love interest 🙄 anyways, yeah I’ve stopped watching that show, but based on what I’ve seen from actual karamel shippers and anti-karamel people on my dash, mon-el is a toxic POS.

How could anyone stand against you when you have such a noble and valiant cause? How could anyone claim that your intentions are anything but pure and selfless when you’re defending abuse survivors.

Who else do you use as a mask to spread your petty, self entitled, hypocritical agenda? LGBT+ members? POC? Homeless veterans? Disabled puppies?? Who else do you use as a prop to hold up in your arguments, when genuinely? Your discourse and agenda does nothing to help anyone in real life.

And I’m sure you know that.

Oh you mean like what they were doing to belomiklark up there? Attacking real people over “fucking what? a differing opinion regarding television”

Huh. Funny.

Wanna know something even funnier? You went and looked up “how to tell if an avocado is rotten”, screen-shotted that thing, then responded to a post that doesn’t involve you, all in a hilariously pathetic attempt to “drag” me. Goddamn. Wow. I’m gonna go cry now because I’m a rotten avocado. Obviously people are always what their username is (and honestly, I’m not even remotely surprised that both of you missed that my name is clearly a play on Avogadro’s Hypothesis. That’s asking far too much of the both of you. Keep it to the avocados, sweetheart)

I’m also not surprised that spiderdoctor up there completely disregarded the point of my message, then blocked me after “dragging me” so that way it’ll seem like my heart was so crushed by their incredibly eloquent and heart wrenching statement that I was rendered entirely unable to respond. That combined with a gif of someone rubbing a middle finger in someone else’s face?? Oh god, how will I carry on??

But lastly, before you climb back on your high horse, respond with another pointless “drag”, then block me before I can respond like your friend did up there, I want to make this very clear: what you are condoning is nothing short of bullying. And you need to treat that like the legitimate issue that it is, instead of blindly pretending that you aren’t taking part in it. Neither of you are doing anything good with your “discourse” and you are not helping anyone by attacking people with different opinions.

What I’m doing? Not a matter of opinion. I don’t give two shits about what you or spiderdoctor or belomiklark ships. I do, however, care about who thinks it’s okay to treat other human beings like they’re garbage.

Oh, and spiderdoctor? I’m bi too. It’s right there on my blog. Not even hard to find.

Note: there are also abuse survivors who do not think it’s abuse. 

I have experienced emotional abuse that directly parallels Karamel and for someone like you, who knows nothing about me or my experiences to tell me that Karamel is “objectively” not abuse tells me that you’d also say that my experience was “objectively” not abuse and sorry, but you don’t get to make that call. 

Don’t police people’s individual experiences for a ship??? Like???

And I’m not going to get into the second part of that discourse but all I know is I don’t keep people close to me who justify Mon El’s actions towards Kara as healthy and normal behavior. Enough said.

As for your own experience, I said nothing about it. In fact, I literally said, and I quote, “You can find it uncomfortable, can say that it reminds you of your experiences, but that does not change the canon of the story”. To clarify, I had a parental figure that was emotionally abusive to me. Because of this, I would likely really dislike watching a show with a man that looked and behaved similarly to him and perhaps raised his voice to a younger girl, made her cry, etc. However, I also know that my experience is not EXACTLY the same as a characters. I might not like said character because I associate him with my experience, but it paralleling your experience in some manner does not make it exactly the same??? Because our experiences are NEVER exactly the same.

And as for you saying that I’m invalidating your experiences, I’m sorry, but that’s an emotionally and personally charged claim that has no evidence to back it up and is a fallacy. You’re saying I’m invalidating your experiences by pointing out that the ship does not display warning signs of abuse, but all I am doing is stating fact based on canon. I don’t know anything about your personal experience. You’re extending what I say about a fictional relationship to yourself. I did not say a thing about your own experience.

The fact is that I could go and list all of the signs of emotional abuse and they would not fit Karamel. That is not opinion. That is what canon has shown us and what the warning signs are, as a whole, for emotional abuse. 

You having a personal stake in it definitely means something, but you can’t act as if you’re a mouthpiece for all abuse victims either. Even people who are a part of a marginalized group or a group of victims can be wrong about the story. 

If one abuse victim says that it’s minimizing abuse to call Karamel abusive (and I actually did see a post like this… though I’d be damned to find it. But, although I don’t have experience with romantic abuse, I still am an abuse victim myself) and another says that it’s wrong to say it’s objectively not abuse, what then? Does a black hole form because we’ve got ourselves this unsolvable paradox because we can’t disagree with anyone who has a personal stake in it?

I’m sorry, but no.

And P.S.: most abusive relationships/characters are not explicitly stated as so in canon. Octagon is not explicitly stated as abusive, but she is. She literally has a pattern of being verbally/physically abusive to every POC she’s gotten close to. I stopped watching Supergirl because they dropped the black man as the love interest just so they could introduce a crusty white guy. Because GOD FORBID the black man be the white heroine’s love interest 🙄 anyways, yeah I’ve stopped watching that show, but based on what I’ve seen from actual karamel shippers and anti-karamel people on my dash, mon-el is a toxic POS.

How could anyone stand against you when you have such a noble and valiant cause? How could anyone claim that your intentions are anything but pure and selfless when you’re defending abuse survivors.

Who else do you use as a mask to spread your petty, self entitled, hypocritical agenda? LGBT+ members? POC? Homeless veterans? Disabled puppies?? Who else do you use as a prop to hold up in your arguments, when genuinely? Your discourse and agenda does nothing to help anyone in real life.

And I’m sure you know that.

Note: there are also abuse survivors who do not think it’s abuse. 

I have experienced emotional abuse that directly parallels Karamel and for someone like you, who knows nothing about me or my experiences to tell me that Karamel is “objectively” not abuse tells me that you’d also say that my experience was “objectively” not abuse and sorry, but you don’t get to make that call. 

Don’t police people’s individual experiences for a ship??? Like???

And I’m not going to get into the second part of that discourse but all I know is I don’t keep people close to me who justify Mon El’s actions towards Kara as healthy and normal behavior. Enough said.

As for your own experience, I said nothing about it. In fact, I literally said, and I quote, “You can find it uncomfortable, can say that it reminds you of your experiences, but that does not change the canon of the story”. To clarify, I had a parental figure that was emotionally abusive to me. Because of this, I would likely really dislike watching a show with a man that looked and behaved similarly to him and perhaps raised his voice to a younger girl, made her cry, etc. However, I also know that my experience is not EXACTLY the same as a characters. I might not like said character because I associate him with my experience, but it paralleling your experience in some manner does not make it exactly the same??? Because our experiences are NEVER exactly the same.

And as for you saying that I’m invalidating your experiences, I’m sorry, but that’s an emotionally and personally charged claim that has no evidence to back it up and is a fallacy. You’re saying I’m invalidating your experiences by pointing out that the ship does not display warning signs of abuse, but all I am doing is stating fact based on canon. I don’t know anything about your personal experience. You’re extending what I say about a fictional relationship to yourself. I did not say a thing about your own experience.

The fact is that I could go and list all of the signs of emotional abuse and they would not fit Karamel. That is not opinion. That is what canon has shown us and what the warning signs are, as a whole, for emotional abuse. 

You having a personal stake in it definitely means something, but you can’t act as if you’re a mouthpiece for all abuse victims either. Even people who are a part of a marginalized group or a group of victims can be wrong about the story. 

If one abuse victim says that it’s minimizing abuse to call Karamel abusive (and I actually did see a post like this… though I’d be damned to find it. But, although I don’t have experience with romantic abuse, I still am an abuse victim myself) and another says that it’s wrong to say it’s objectively not abuse, what then? Does a black hole form because we’ve got ourselves this unsolvable paradox because we can’t disagree with anyone who has a personal stake in it?

I’m sorry, but no.

And P.S.: most abusive relationships/characters are not explicitly stated as so in canon. Octagon is not explicitly stated as abusive, but she is. She literally has a pattern of being verbally/physically abusive to every POC she’s gotten close to. I stopped watching Supergirl because they dropped the black man as the love interest just so they could introduce a crusty white guy. Because GOD FORBID the black man be the white heroine’s love interest 🙄 anyways, yeah I’ve stopped watching that show, but based on what I’ve seen from actual karamel shippers and anti-karamel people on my dash, mon-el is a toxic POS.

Raising Kittens

katzenkinder?

literally: “cat children”

DUDELSACK

doodle sack

seriously

But then their word for skull is Totenkopf, as in Death’s Head. 

So German basically has two settings, kawaii and metal, and there is no in between. 

also we have an obsession with pockets apparently

flashlight = “Taschenlampe”, pocket lamp

paperback = “Taschenbuch”, pocket book

tissue = “Taschentuch”, pocket cloth

also the sausage thing is kinda legit because there’s a song that contains the line “alles hat ein Ende, nur die Wurst hat zwei” meaning everyhing has an end, but sausage has two