Just Ducking It Out

It was interesting seeing the confrontation in Action Comics #1050 get a lot of attention and speculation from the wider fandom and then interest fall off when it became clear Williamson was taking it in a direction people didn't expect. And that's just what you find. The wider fandom is very quiet on the complexity of this relationship.

I love how much of their relationship revolves around both feeling lonely and apart from humanity in their respective ways. I think when you think of it like that it's a lot easier to grasp why Clark feels this connection to Lex.

And vise-versa. A lot of the time Lex's relationship with Superman is framed as pure obsession, projection and fear, and that is a huge component of it, but there is also genuine love and admiration in there.

Wanting something requires dopamine signaling, but liking something doesn’t.

If you have a mental illness/disorder that affects dopamine, you might feel that you don’t want to do the things that you like. You do still like them. You will appreciate having done them.

Let your likes guide you.

(If you want to read more, here’s one experimental paper about it. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5171207/ This theory called the incentive-sensitization theory was originally created to explain behaviors in addiction but can be applied elsewhere as well)

Is there a way to address callouts about your fics like this without invalidating their trauma?

yes, tell them:

“I’m sorry about what happened to you. but no matter how tragic your story is, the world does not revolve around you. people — strangers — don’t have to censor themselves in order to cater to your personal comfort.

if you don’t like something or are triggered by something, and if you go out of your way to seek those things, so you can be triggered by them, then that is entirely on you. no one forces you to read what you don’t want to read.

not to mention, a lot of victims and survivors use dark fiction to help them cope and heal from their trauma. just because dark fiction does not help you heal does not mean you have the rights to invalidate how other victims and survivors heal from their own trauma.

and just because you personally are triggered by dark fiction does not mean you have the rights to force other people — whether or not they themselves were victims — to censor themselves in order to cater to your personal comfort.

that is not how freedom to create works. that is not how the world works.

again, the world does not revolve around you.

what happened to you is terrible, but it does not give you the rights to be entitled, it does not give you the rights to harass or shame other people who are just minding their own business, people whose actions do not harm anybody in real life in any way, shape or form.

it is your job and your responsibility to curate your own internet experience by blocking, muting, filtering out what you don’t want to see.

oh we also have X and it means the same!

that looks like X but misspelled

that's just the archaic variant of X

this sounds a lot like Y from another slavic language I know which means X in mine so this almost 100% also means X

this word is completely different but I can kinda tell the meaning from the morphology

what

okay right now I'm gonna have to dissect the entirety of this language's history to figure out how the FUCK did y'all get to the point of calling X that and not something more normal

I don't even have to look at the blog and I just know this is from a Pole about Czechs

KAKAOVY CHLEBICEK???!!!???

for example

(Polish: are you looking for a squirrel?, Slovak: excuse me, he is doing what to the squirrel?)

(also "hladna pića" means "cold drinks" in Croatian. means "hungry cunt" in Slovak and Czech)

("you're weird" in Czech is the same as "you're amazing" in Croatian, while "you're amazing" in Czech is the same as "you're terrible" in Croatian)

The wedding afterparty was in full swing, everyone was drinking and partying.... and an elderly Polish lady approached my two aunts (who were also drinking a lot and partying hard) and commented something along the lines of "jesteście odporne". Which in Polish means "you're resilient" (as in they're handling the alcohol well) but in Czech it means "you're disgusting".

Czech vision: ah yes an emergency button to press in case of emergency

Polish vision:

'pozor' in Czech means 'watch out!', but means 'shame' in Russian

droga in czech means drug, in polish it means road

záchod in czech means toilet, zachód in polish means 'west'

odchod 'to depart' in Czech means very specifically 'to depart by foot', while in Slovak it has a bit wider meaning, and buses and trains also combine with 'odchod'. To a Czech speaker this gives the funny implication that departing trains grow legs and walk out of the train station

Croatian 'mrdati' = to wiggle, means 'to have sex' in Czech

'Čerstvý, voňavý chléb' is Czech for 'fresh, nicely smelling bread'. In means the opposite in some slavic languages 'stale, stinky bread'. This kind of 'good meaning in one but bad meaning in other' duality happens surprisingly often actually, see also úžas and odporný above

otrok in Czech means 'slave' but in Slovenian and perhaps other South slavic languages it means 'child'. Very funny when combined with bazaar, turns a perfectly fine baby bazar into a slave bazaar

My friend has a fun sentence from Slovenian - "Hitri otroci kuhali jed na Dunaji". Literally none of the words here mean what a Czech thinks they mean. No not even Dunaj. Czechs read it as 'smart slaves were disemboweling poison by the Donau river', original Slovenian meaning is 'fast children were cooking food in Vienna'

And sometimes fanfiction is, ‘Watch me do a fucking KICK FLIP off this cool sentence!! Also here's some sex'