Down the Rabbit Hole

I need non-Black people/shippers to stop viewing Haalingham through a default white lens when one of the men in the ship is literally a Black man. Y'all love to talk about dismantling top/bottom and Alpha/Omega stereotypes, but then turn right around and force a Black man straight back into hypermasculine tropes—and admitting you "don't consider race" in your headcanons is not the gag you think it is and only exposes just how pathetically ignorant most of you are. How are you writing a Black man without actually considering his Blackness, or are you just picturing a white guy and swapping the skin tone? Like admitting to ignoring someone's race is WILD and isn't the progressive take you think it is. Y'all are adding onto our erasure and not even hiding it. Let Black men be Omegas, let them be soft, vulnerable, and allowed into gentler tropes for once after centuries of being aggressive-coded—we deserve that space, and it's getting real tired watching most of you completely miss the point.

People often choose familiar pain over unfamiliar peace. That sounds dramatic, but it is basically pattern learning. If chaos is what your character knows, calm may feel like a setup. If neglect is familiar, attention may feel like surveillance. If love always meant losing power, being loved may feel like being trapped. This is why “just choose happiness” is not an arc. Happiness can be the scariest room in the house.

Something I had to unlearn: giving your character a tragic backstory is not the same as giving them a wound. A backstory is just information. A wound is the thing that makes them flinch at something totally unrelated fifteen chapters later and the reader goes "oh." If the backstory doesn't leave a nerve ending somewhere in the present-day plot, cut it. Nobody needs the trauma. They need the flinch.

Non-Black people writing interracial ships really be like: "But wait! What if the white guy bottomed? That’s so revolutionary, literally never been done before! You see, the white man is just so soft, gentle, and delicate, so he obviously deserves the passive role over the Black man... who, okay, sure, is also soft and gentle and openly in touch with his emotions, but whatever. The white guy deserves softness MORE. It’s not like we’ve been aggressively stereotyping Black men since the dawn of time or anything! Having the fragile white guy submit to the Black man is so peak actually. God, we’re so progressive! We’ll dismantle every single stereotype that personally affects our reality—even while claiming 'it’s just fiction'—and completely ignore racial stereotypes, because who cares if one half of the ship is Black? We literally never think about this foundational part of a person's identity that dictates how they maneuver the world. Yay! Bigger white bottoms and smaller Black tops... so revolutionary!"

thank you ao3 for being an archive and not an algorithm. thank you for letting me like things without consequences, thank you for being free with no ads, thank you for having lawyers to defend our freedom of speech. thank you tag wranglers. thank you to all authors and thank you ao3

Vessel and ii 😂