the sound of distant quacking compels you

girl who sat next to me at the coffee shop had that Tortured By Computer Work look in her eye so i turned to her and was like Are u doing research? and it turns out she (white) just started working as an indigenous liaison for an ecological wellness surveying company (hired bc she worked with the local nation for a year) so i was like OMG can i share resources with you. and whipped out my 1 million notes and academic papers on ethical Indigenous-settler relations/research and Indigenous perspectives on ecological restoration. she was like omg are u sure this is basically a whole course for free and i wanted to tear my shirt off liek YES!!!! I WANT TO PROMOTE LOW BARRIER EDUCATION TO ADVANCE DECOLONIZATION AND RECONCILIATION!!!!!!!!!!! STEP IN2 MY GOOGLE DOC !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oathbreaker? No. Give me a character who cannot break their oath, no matter how much they may want to. The oath is a yoke they cannot take off. They are physically unable to do anything that would cause their oath to break. Their oath is a leash made of unbreakable chain and held in the hand of their patron. If it was chosen, it became too much to bear, and yet they were forced to bear it. If it was thrust upon them, there was no ability to say no. The oath as a cage. The oath as a curse.

@sashaforthewin

Also sometimes the purpose of a sex scene is to be titillating and that's, like, fine. You wouldn't go out there and argue that movies shouldn't have jokes unless they "serve a narrative purpose" because you understand that generally the purpose of a joke is to make the audience laugh and perhaps release some tension. Being horny is a normal human emotion like being amused or being scared and sometimes media is trying to evoke that particular emotion; the artist doesn't owe you a 30-page double-spaced justification for trying to make you feel something through their art. Your separation of horniness and sex from other emotions and experiences is sex negative and deeply ingrained in cultural conservatism.

Controversial, but I think it's harmful to tell people you're never going to write something good on the first try or it's always going to be pure garbage, like that may be helpful for some on some level, but I personally don't think it's a healthy way of thinking, and it causes others to second guess work that is good. Is editing often helpful? Yes. But you're not going to have to Ship of Theseus everything you ever make. Anyway, the phrase "idk, man, it depends" strikes again.

THIS

fanfic isn't an act of activism by the way. it's a fun hobby. writers write whatever they want for themselves as their silly little getaway/self-care. if you want "more representation" of something in fanfics, then you write fanfics about that thing you want. nobody is stopping you. but saying other fanfic writers as a whole are "the problem" or are "to blame" for "not including xyz" or "not writing about xyz" just isn't how fanfics and hobbies work.