The Colour of her Hair

He had his eye on the prize and he went for it

I am so glad you got so much joy out of it! NGL I thought there was a small chance you’d be like “WTF I didn’t want him to see this shit” (and also that he’d be like “WTF r u tryna say” hahahah), but I figured on the whole we were all on the same page, and good times were had. The one thing I was remiss about is NOT RECORDING HIS REACTION #whyself. I s2g when he got to the punchline he laughed so loud and long and suddenly in a skyward direction. Then he wrote my name and hesitated with his pen poised for like a full half minute going, “I want to say something so bad but I shouldn’t…” and eventually settled on this. 

WHY DIDN’T YOU RECORD IT??? I mean, it’s fine, but also WHY IS THIS NOT DOCUMENTED?????? D: No but seriously, it’s fine, I’m glad you at least got to witness his reaction and retell it to everyone!

Regardless, I’m so happy you and your friend had an amazing time with the post and his reaction to it! Thank you for sharing the story with me! It honestly made me so happy I didn’t stop thinking about it for hours! :D

Honestly, the only reason I didn’t @ him on Twitter directly is because I didn’t know how he’d respond. In face-to-face interactions, it’s much easier to gauge that sort of thing, especially if you’ve been talking for a little while. Online, it’s harder to know. With people you’re becoming friends with, that’s not a problem, misunderstandings happen, but he’s an actor and I admire his work. It’s a different kind of situation. Especially since he followed me on Twitter and I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHY AND IT’S BEEN OVER A MONTH. But I’m glad he got that it was a joke and not me throwing some serious shade his way. I would never!

When we were all laughing about it I was like “DAMN I should have recorded this” but I didn’t want to pull my phone out and be like “HEY YO I’M RECORDING THIS NOW BUT KEEP ACTING NATURALLY”

Sent: I just wanted to let you know that he loved it, full body head thrown back laugh included. I had no say in this caption but it’s exactly what I expected. (I don’t think he read your tags dw)

- “Yes, I’m shirtless a lot. I wouldn’t wear clothes most of the time if it weren’t legally required.”

- “My uniform stays pristine because of ~future technology~ that makes the blood just fall off. And honestly I probably 3D print a new one every morning.”

- Wilson: “I remember you, were you wearing that [DISCO shirt] last time, or a uniform?”

Me: “I was wearing this.”

Wilson: “Yeah.”

Me: “And I also picked you up.”

Wilson: “OKAY NOW I REMEMBER”

(throwback:)

- (upon seeing the above) “OMG I almost wore the same shirt today, thank God. Aw, look, we’re cute! (to his handler) I was heavier than she expected.”

[Side note: He wasn’t; Doug wasn’t; even Shazad was exactly as heavy as I expected. Anthony, who took a flying leap, was A LOT FUCKING HEAVIER THAN I EXPECTED.]

- Me: “This morning I misread your Instagram caption as, ‘I hope to see you at @bignipplecomiccon!’”

@aemarachlian: “Well, which one are you most likely to be at?”

*taps desk, thinks about where to begin with this*

All right, so: anyone who knows me knows the following things.  One, I’ve been in fandom for 23 of my 36 years; it is very difficult to faze or shock me.  Two, I actually do believe in letting people ship what they ship and write what they write; if I don’t like it, I just steer clear, and I expect people to do me the same courtesy.  Three, there are some things out there that I don’t like, and for very specific reasons, and I only talk about those things when people ask, because discussing them otherwise is pointless.  I do not abuse people just because I dislike what they’ve written, but, anon, you’ve just made it necessary for me to give an account that some people in Pacific Rim are going to remember very well, largely because they had the same unsolicited negative experiences with the author of DCWT that I did.  I will try to make this brief.

In December of 2013, I saw Pacific Rim for the first time.  I fell head over fucking heels.  That’s an understatement, really; to this day, Newt and Hermann are two of the characters that I’ll defend more fiercely than most of the others in my backlog, barring Aziraphale and Crowley.  I started writing Anthology without intending for it to ever be a series.  What’s currently the first chapter was only ever meant to be a stand-alone, but by the time I had managed to add nine more installments to it, I thought it was close to done.  It had evolved into a series, but how much of one, I didn’t know.  By that point, I had also managed to write a couple of stand-alones, Become What We’ve Always Been being the chiefest amongst those early ones.  I bring it up because it figures into this social account.

By that point, in my participation in PR fandom, let’s say January of 2014, I had received several obnoxious messages from a Tumblr account called elementals_ao3.  This account claimed to be the “fandom assistant” of the author of a piece on AO3 called Designations Congruent With Things, which I had not investigated because a) I was extraordinarily busy reading my new friends’ stories in PR fandom and the writing I was doing on my own account, and b) well, this weird elementals account was being obnoxious and messaging me about it, and I don’t take kindly to being harassed to read something by a stranger.  It was in January that I consistently started getting messages from friends saying, roughly, Hey, can I talk to you?  There’s this fic called DCWT that’s getting super popular as fast as your Anthology is getting popular; have you read it?  It’s disturbing in extreme ways and doesn’t tag or warn for the ways in which it’s disturbing.  The author’s got this weird sidekick that keeps messaging like all the high-profile PR blogs it can find, and it’s getting really obnoxious.  Not only does the fic not warn for what it’s doing, but the author seems really unrepentant and thinks they’re all that.  Thanks for writing something I can read to get away from the weird, cult-like DCWT hype.

And I thought, oh God, it’s that fic I’ve been messaged about by that elementals account a handful of times.  Huh!  But I still didn’t look at it until near the end of January, possibly early February, because that was around the time when cleanwhiteroom read Become What We’ve Always Been and left me a comment.  When someone I don’t know in a fandom I’ve newly entered comments on some of my work, I consider it common reciprocal courtesy to check out their work and comment on at least one or two pieces (more if I end up genuinely enjoying their work).  So, armed with the wary knowledge that this was not only the fic that the elementals person had been harassing me about, but also the fic that had traumatized so fucking many of my new friends, I decided to take a look at it.  I chose a bad night to do that.  I’d been doing laundry for about four hours; it was three in the morning when I finally clicked.  I think there were between ten and twelve chapters of DCWT in existence at the time I read.

I had never before that point been physically ill due to a piece of written media in my life.  Enough said.  Many of you know that I’m fine with exploring twisted relationship dynamics as long as that’s what I know and accept from the base-canon, but to see a relationship that I saw as so essentially stable and hopeful warped beyond recognition, and also have no clear warnings on either the piece of fiction or in the concerns that friends had sent me?  Yikes.  Maybe now you understand why Precursor-possessed Newt is such a trigger-point for me, and why I’m so disgusted by the majority of the new film’s comment.  I backpedaled in a hurry.  And continued to get the occasional creepy advertising message from elementals_ao3, and saw a number of comment threads in which cleanwhiteroom completely dismissed readers’ concerns about the lack of warnings.

To put it bluntly: harass me (or have your “assistant” do it for you) and show me that you have no regard for your readers’ well-founded advice, and I will never have a reason to think well of you or what you’re writing.  Furthermore, I couldn’t stand to see Hermann suffer, and, worse than that, I couldn’t stand to see real people I care about suffer.  People can love DCWT all they want, but this fic has some seriously messed-up social history that ended up on my doorstep solely because the creepy elementals person, whoever they were, decided I should be bugged and bugged to read because I was another high-profile-ish writer in the fandom.  Or maybe that wasn’t the reason.  I will never know the reason, given DCWT vanished from AO3 sometime between 2014 and now, and CWR and elementals likewise fell off the radar.

One thing I can tell you, though: the more trauma people set before me, the more determined I was to keep adding to Anthology.  For every reader that seemed rabidly in love with DCWT, there was one or more hurt by it.  Upset people I love, whether intentionally or not, and I will do my utmost for them.

In some ways, I must partly thank that situation for the sheer determination that permitted me to develop Anthology to the extent of what it became.  My CoT series in Good Omens fandom was nowhere near as long then as it is now, and I had never written something as sustained and involved as Antho in my life.  It was the strangest two years (2013-2015) of my online existence, but I learned just how much writing I can get done when it feels necessary.  Pacific Rim fandom is singlehandedly responsible for the largest group of people that I have ever bonded and stayed in contact with (yes, even more than Good Omens fandom, at this point).  Oh, the stories I could tell you from the experience that was Shatterdome ATL 2015.  It was wonderful.