shenanigans

June of Doom 2027 ⚡︎

Hola, Doomers! It's July 15th, so here's the June of Doom 2027 prompt list for all your doomsday planning! All the good stuff's below the cut!

Previous Dooms: 2023 || 2024 || 2025 || 2026

The very first experience it has with the base crew is that they save it from people shooting at it, give it warm hugs, and kill the people trying to deatroy it. After that it attacks and impersonates an unknown (at the time) member of the crew. After that it gets surrounded by dogs who are angry but too scared to approach, then it changes, then it attacks the huskies, and only then does anyone in the base camp treat it with hostility.

The entire first act of the movie is devoted to establishing that they know each other with an Intimacy so deep they can anticipate one another's actions and attitudes. They have been in an isolated arctic base for months and months where they can barely leave the same building. They are in one another's personal space throughout the movie. It's a vital plot point that the Thing can immitate people down to memories and personality traits. It's a vital metaphorical point as well. It's so deeply and fundamentally superficial and factually incorrect to call them unfamiliar with each other that it implies total inattention to what is happening on screen.

The Thing is, at heart, not a movie about any singular decision or behavior creating a bad outcome. Baked into the 1982 movie is failure, death, entropy, inevitable loss. It's not a movie that's meant to have a right solution, or a right decision - but when someone comes at this very bleak story without a good grounding in horror, there's a kind of urge to treat it like a puzzle. If only they were closer. If only they communicated.

That's not meeting it where it's at, because it rests on a situation where none of those elements really exist. People acted the best they could in the circumstances with the tools and information they had - and it simply was not enough. Nearly everyone dies. Even with the ambiguous ending, whoever is human is going to die, because it's winter in Antarctica and he is hundreds of miles from anywhere with no shelter and no food and no transportation. That's the sort of horror it is, the idea that when faced with extinction humanity's best efforts won't succeed. Creating an interpretation where if we had "just" this or that is shying away from the bleakness. But at the same time, not facing up to the idea that some things really might not be solvable, that the worst can happen in spite of it all, is a necessary skill. Not one we need to indulge in constantly, but we should have that knowledge.

There are two ideas you need to understand when you're trying to post media on AO3. Those two ideas are hosting and embedding.

hosting means (basically) storing and sharing. You upload a file to a host and that host then serves your file to the people or websites that try to access it.

embedding is (basically) displaying or presenting.

The host holds the file and shares it with AO3 when you embed it in your work. It then gets displayed when you post.

Both archive.org and soundcloud.com are hosts that can embed directly into AO3. Other hosts might not work but I know that those both do.

Since you're new to podficcing, I'm also going to recommend Azdaema's Newbie's Guide to Podficcing and GodofLaundryBaskets' Keep it Simple: A Highly Biased Podfic Guide for Absolute Beginners.

Podficcers - please add in any other resources you think might be helpful!

Podficcers who work with Duck Prints Press also threw together some tips we have here:

Love, grief, and magic in the mundane

yes 💔💔 #myrosebride

before i elaborate more on yue, i would also like to point out something crucial about katara that i think a lot of people neglect: from the ages of 11-14, her village was almost entirely female. with the exception of sokka, everyone she interacted with on a daily basis during these extremely formative years in any child’s development were with women and girls of various ages. while women of course can still maintain the system in the absence of men under patriarchy (and we do see this to be the case in their village to an extent), katara does not have to worry about being abused by the men around her, because there are no men around her. of course, her life is under potent threat, but that threat is external, not from her own people. sokka may be a pain in the ass, but he doesn’t actual wield any material power over her. she takes out her frustration with being forced to do domestic labor out on him, but he’s not even the one ordering her to do that: their grandmother is. sokka only has any authority whatsoever because he tacitly agrees with everything kanna believes, and she is truly the one in charge. katara feels stifled, miserable, and angry in her village not because of the traditions of her people, but because of the genocide they are facing. perhaps, in a world where the fire nation did not devastate the southern water tribe, katara’s greatest gripe would be the patriarchal traditions of her culture, but we really have no way of knowing that. she takes her anger out on sokka primarily because she has nowhere else to put her rage, and as her older sibling, he is the easiest target. that is the social dynamic that characterized her early teenage years.

while katara did technically still grow up in a patriarchal society, it was a highly unusually organized one, since it was still being led by women, with no men save for a single teenage boy. katara has the ability to fight back against the sexism she faces because she was actually raised to value herself. she is confident in her own agency and strength and feels it is distinctly cruel and foolish to deny a woman their rights on the basis of their gender because the only misogyny she ever truly faced growing up was her brother saying “boys rule girls drool” and inane shit like that. she was certainly never raised to think she couldn’t be a great waterbender, and we see from hama’s pov that for at least a century women waterbenders in the south have been at the vanguard of the resistance and actively fought against the genocide of their people. the fact that pakku denies her is thus totally absurd to her, because from her point of view, it’s quite literally the first she’s ever heard of the notion that women cannot use waterbending combat forms. of course she is familiar with the idea that men and women each have distinct social roles (and she has definitely internalized some of these notions subconsciously, even if she also resents its most obvious manifestations), but she has never once truly entertained the idea that her life’s only value is to serve men, so she balks at the idea that she “belongs in the healer huts,” that she is already engaged despite only being fourteen, that she must be the one to apologize to someone being unreasonable and cruel to her simply because he is an old man and she is a young girl. she has the frame of reference to notice how fucked up these manifestations of patriarchy are, because she grew up in a village surrounded by women telling her how amazing and special she is, and so she knows her own worth and will never compromise that for anyone.

yue’s situation is entirely different. after all, katara is not her mirror; sokka is. if anything, katara is her foil, her opposite. katara has the agency yue is denied. yue was raised with privileges katara was not: wealth, safety, resources, comfort, security. but katara had the privilege of being allowed to value herself. keep in mind that even though kanna may torment katara by making her do laundry, she’s still the type of person who crossed the entire globe to get away from cultural values she disagreed with, and those are the kinds of beliefs she is imparting upon her granddaughter. katara would never stand for being forced into an arranged marriage against her will; to her, the very notion is unthinkable. but to yue, it is her duty. she is a woman (read: just turned sixteen, therefore of marrying age) and a princess, and so she has equal duties to her father and her people (note that katara is also the daughter of the chief, but she displays absolutely no feelings regarding this fact whatsoever one way or another; hakoda is just her dad to her, nothing more). although yue is clearly a person brimming with desires, emotions, passions, interests, hopes, dreams, joys, fears, thoughts, humor, excitement, wisdom, and curiosity, her personhood is not recognized by anyone in her tribe (that we see). her father sees her as a symbol, her fiancé sees her as an object, and they both view her as property to be traded in an exchange she is not privy to and has no real say in. yue does not want hahn in the slightest, and yet she will be expected to bear his children, his heirs. in a beautifully tragic way, becoming the moon spirit was actually the best option available to her. in her final moments between human and spirit realms, she can finally exercise her own autonomy, and chooses to kiss sokka without guilt or shame. she can only reclaim her agency once she renounces her humanity.

there is a lot to be said about the ways in which yue and sokka parallel each other. it is, after all, yue’s primary relationship in the narrative. she was constructed specifically with this dynamic in mind. I could and often do enumerate the many ways in which they function as mirrors to each other, the most obvious being the ways in which their duties to their respective father-chiefs and cultures/people leads them to fully internalize the notion that their martyrdom is not only logical and necessary, but indeed, the ultimate exercise of their utility, which means that self-sacrifice is actually aspirational, because all they are good for is performing their duty. yue’s duty as a Woman and sokka’s duty as a Man involve functional differences when practiced, but ultimately arrive at the same conclusion: their ultimate purpose is to die for their people. their bodies are mere vessels, they must endure their pain silently for the sake of their people, their lives are not their own. yes, sokka complains a lot, but never where it counts. yes, yue cries a lot, but she never renounces her duty. and sokka would never force her to renounce her duty, because even if she claims he doesn’t (which is funny in its own way, lol he literally doesn’t tell anyone anything!), he understands what that’s like. sokka and yue’s story could only ever end in tragedy, because as much as they love and value each other, they do not value themselves enough to fight for their happiness. had the siege not happened, yue would have married hahn, and been miserable. the only person who could possibly intervene on their behalf and advocate for yue’s agency is katara, not sokka. and that is not because katara loves yue; after all, she barely knows yue. but unlike sokka, and unlike yue, katara loves herself.

The first time I read Mockingjay, I was probably about 12 and had only really read either middle grade fantasy or other YA dystopia books, and even though I was a voracious reader, because I’d always been reading Chosen One novels, I had no way to contextualize that this series was different.

The ending where Katniss gets into the president’s mansion and kills Snow was my EXPECTATION. It completely fried my brain when she didn’t make it and instead Prim died and Katniss had her mental break. I fully did not understand what was going on, or why it was more realistic and more powerful that Katniss WASN’T the one to storm in and kill Snow. My understanding, from other books, was that Katniss was always in control. She was the Mockingjay after all, so how could she not be? District 13 was Katniss’ ally, Coin was the GOOD GUY (until the Prim thing).

Then, re-reading as an adult, all of this HORRIFIED me. Katniss’ desperation, the way that 13 stood by for 75+ years while the other districts suffered, Coin using Katniss and the propaganda throughout.

The whole point is that Katniss is NOT a Chosen One.

Her status as accidental symbol of the rebellion comes with power, but in order to use that power, she must submit to being controlled, ultimately losing many of the things most important to her. AND SHE DOES, because she doesn’t want the power just for herself. Isn’t the biggest reason she agrees to be the Mockingjay to defeat Snow and free the districts?

And then it happens AGAIN in The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes except SNOW actually DOES think he’s in a Chosen One novel.

In direct contrast to Katniss, he sees HIMSELF as the Chosen One. So of COURSE Tigris stays up all night to help him. Of COURSE Gaul singles him out among his classmates. Of COURSE Lucy Gray is able to win (ONLY with his help, of COURSE). Of COURSE he isn’t going to spend his whole life as a Peacekeeper, he’s Too Special. He’s Going to Be President Some Day.

And this, this self-obsession, especially combined with his ambition, and the expectation that those around him can and SHOULD be manipulated (because they are lesser-than in Snow’s eyes) is what lets him rise to power as a fascist dictator.

Aw, what a sweet question!

That’s fine if you feel like doing it, though no one should feel obligated to do so. I doubt most wranglers would consider a single thank you tag “more work,” given that we don’t have to connect it to anything and can just move it over to the land where everything that doesn’t belong in a single fandom lives. It would honestly be a rather nice counter to the times people randomly curse at us in the tags. :’)

Without seeing the wrangling interface, I think it can be hard to know what’s really work and what takes a few seconds at most?

Tags that are “work”:

Unmarked OCs that might be minor characters from canon, especially a canon that doesn’t have a wiki. More info here.

Tags in a language that very few (or no) members of the Translation team speak. (Omg, if any of you speak Turkish as your first language, please apply the next time Translation recruitment is open. Please. I’m begging you. You would be a hero to wranglers.)

Confusing tags that stay in draft forever, or where the character or referenced thing doesn’t show up yet in the work, so we have no idea what the tagger really means.

You know those collections of tiny Tumblr ficlets that people put into a single work instead of a series? And then some of those people only tag with first names for characters and relationships? While tagging like a dozen fandoms, so we’re not sure which Jack and which Harry they meant? Yeah. Full names are a wrangler’s best friends.

Generic character or fandom names being used for different characters or fandoms, forcing us to do the disambig dance. It’s not the fun kind of dance. It’s more like the macarena out of tune with zombies kind of dance. Save us from the macarena zombies. More info here.

Works tagged with RPF fandoms but that have just fictional characters, and works tagged with a fictional fandom that have just real people characters. More info here. (This is one of those things people yell at us for in the tags, but we have no control over it.)

Tags that are easy:

Single-use freeforms/additional tags that clearly either have a filterable meaning or not. Syn and done or move and done. Wranglers can handle hundreds in an hour if they’re all clear, regardless of length. To repeat: we don’t care about length! Chatty is fine. “Tumblr-style” is fine. It’s not more work for us.

Using a tag that already exists (canonical or not) for the same meaning that it was originally used for. We never even have to look at it.

Original characters that are marked with (OC) or something like that. So fast, much move.

Characters from canon with their full names used, or if they only have one name, the fandom name in parentheses after it.

Relationships using characters’ full names.

Fandom tags that use the full fandom name, and if that’s kind of generic, having the media or author or year in the tag as well (depending on which makes the most sense for the fandom). No longer the sad, plaintive wails of “which Empire? which Librarians? which Ghost?” No more zombie dance.