who's asking?

Back in 2013, I posted a Welcome to Night Vale fic and someone commented, “I’m autistic and I see myself a lot in the way you write Carlos. Did you intend for him to autistic?”

if you were to stay up until 3am, when would you likely wake up the next day? assume there's no alarm or responsibility to get to

I think mostly what young fandom types (and I guess younger people in general) who are very very invested in the idea that “20 is still basically a minor” need to understand is that the feeling of “I’m just a child pretending to be an adult, and everyone else around me is a REAL adult” is DEEPLY universal (and won’t stop, ever, by the way, sorry!) and also is not, like, praxis.

Like I'm nearing 40 and I don't feel significantly different as a person than I did at 20, other than being less depressed.

And stop infantilizing others about it, too. Yes, you're realizing at 25 that you still don't feel like an adult, but you cannot use that feeling to let yourself think of people who are younger than you as "even less of an adult than I am" when they are, in fact, adults. And you have to be very, very careful not to let that feeling convince you that it's okay for young adults to have fewer rights.

You know when there's like, a straight show and everyone's like "it's full of queer subtext between the main straight dudes, and this character is obviously autistic and they really meant to say trans rights"? And then there's a queer show and all of a sudden it's "no but they weren't sensitive about this character's trauma and the queer sex scenes are too short and they're all problematic as fuck, i can't even watch"? And then our shit doesn't get renewed, and we hated on it the whole way for not embodying the perfection we'd never dream of demanding from the straight show?

lukewarm take: fandom thrives off of interaction. regardless of why the author has published their work for others to read (though the end goal should not be searching for popularity) people do genuinely enjoy interaction. so even if you're scared to leave a comment, know that the authors behind pieces of literature that you enjoy will truly appreciate comments that express how much you enjoyed the passion they poured into writing.

grid gala 2025 - drakkonslayer