get bibled, gayboy

A sad girl's pleas

Butch Yang Week is back! Celebrate Yang's masculinity and how it applies to the butch identity from 7/20/26-7/26/26.

Please review the additional updates and guidelines in the posts below before participating.

This will be the last Butch Yang Week for some time. Thank you for your support, and have fun!

In short, that dialogue, more than anything, makes or breaks a fanfic. What do posts like "He would not fucking say that" and "They would NOT have communication skills that good" have in common? Talk. Characters expressing themselves to one another. The faithful recreation of identifiable speech patterns is weighted heavily in the evaluation of a fic's quality. By "speech patterns" I do not just mean the semantic content of a given character's expression, but idiosyncrasies of style and slang, vocabulary and idiom, even gesture, musicality, and rhythm.

Of course believable dialogue is far from the only thing that makes a good fanfic Good. And there are forms of fic writing, particularly highly abbreviated ones like drabbles and ficlets, that in practice tend to de-emphasize its significance. But if we are talking about the romantic, erotic shippy stuff that is the meat and potatoes of online fandom, dialogue does the heaviest lifting short of the consummation itself. Arguably more so! It's the real keystone to the catharsis, and often the catalyst for it. Is there a confession occurring? A provocation? An evasion or ultimatum? Zoom out, big picture: What is the most potent and fundamental mechanic for developing complexity, tension, and transformation within a relationship, getting it to go from one thing to another? Making these two idiots talk to each other! Often clumsily and indirectly and maladaptively, at the worst possible time and in the worst possible situation, about anything or everything but what they should be — but talk they usually do.

What makes fanfic specifically so challenging and rewarding in this regard is that the talking is as much a feat of translation as invention, because both reader and writer are working off an existing model. Liberties taken with plot, form, and even narrative voice have wider buffer zones; you can get creative with circumventing the events of canon while still conforming to its emotional and substantive essence.

you are a better knife.

@thepittmonth 6/10 relationships: Victoria Javadi and Cassie McKay

Sometimes your first week as an intern goes terribly. Sometimes you go to a bar and pick up a stranger about it. And sometimes that stranger shows up six months later to bleed all over your doorstep and you just have to go with it.

or

the one where Caitlyn and Vi accidentally find themselves in a strangers-with-benefits situationship except the benefits are medical care and anxiety

The first time it happens, Caitlyn is just barely home from a twelve-hour shift that turned into a twenty-hour shift, tired enough that her eyes feel like they’re shivering, and assumes the knock on her door is an uber driver with a burger and way too many fries. Jayce has – annoyingly – worked out that she’s more likely to actually eat something when a meal is presented to her directly, and that it’s much harder for her to decline if he skips the offering step and just orders food for her.

So sure is she, in fact, that she opens the door looking at her phone instead of through the peephole, texting Jayce a thank you sandwiched between demands that he stop misusing Find-my-Friends, and she only glances up when no vaguely greasy bag is thrust towards her.

The woman she finds does not have too many fries.

“So this is weird,” the oddly-familiar stranger says, holding up the hand not folded over her stomach. “I know this is weird, and you have no reason to help me, but you said you were a doctor, and…” She uncurls her other arm, presenting Caitlyn with a limb wrapped in an oddly-patterned fabric.

It takes Caitlyn’s exhausted mind a moment to realise that the darkest part of the pattern is slowly spreading, that the red smears continue from the cloth wrap onto the woman’s skin and short-sleeved jacket.

“Is that blood?” Caitlyn asks – an automatic, pointless question because it very obviously is blood.

“Yeah.” The stranger shoots her a lazy grin that curls something warm and tight in Caitlyn’s stomach, even as the woman’s confident demeanour is undercut by the haze in her grey eyes. “Don’t worry, not all of it is mine.”

Shadowheart thinks she’s so edgy and mysterious but deep down inside she is all about the dad jokes.

Bonus: