Musings, and other such things

This is Kirk's shirt from Star Trek's III and IV. You have never, ever seen it like this before.

I'm not even sure it is a shirt. Why did they do this. Why did they decide to add what they added. Star Trek III and IV are never going to be the same because I am going to be aware that William Shatner's James T. Kirk is wearing this shirt.

Anyway apparently Mr. Eclipse made 5000 years' worth of solar eclipse graphics, which you can find the simpler versions of here

And his website is still up:

their big eggs are actually that size for a similar reason to human babies having massive heads!! being bigger at birth can be important.

kiwi are trying SO HARD to become mammals. fur-like feathers, whisker-like feathers, little beady eyes, nocturnal, great sense of smell.... that's basically a mammal!! they're well suited for life on the forest floor.

their big eggs work alongside these adaptations to give them a leg up in the bird world. their young hatch already feathered! they're precocial, which means they're born with the ability to open their eyes and move around. like foals.

big egg = more powerful offspring from the get-go. babies don't need to spend precious time vulnerable while they develop on the ground when they've already done all that in the egg!

That's the kink

"they can barely/can't control themself from ravishing their partner? How is that portrayed as ROMANTIC??"

That's the kink

"why is the plot so fixated on how tiny the main character is compared to the love interest?"

Grisps your shoulders so firmly

Here’s my portion of the GGC fandom stats panel. This is what my charts from a few weeks ago were for.

I’ve gotten increasingly weary of fujoshi-haters moaning about AO3 as though it’s The Establishment and needs to be rebelled against. The preponderance of m/m on AO3 is impressive, but it’s also unusual. Sometimes, people try to pit m/m and f/f against each other, but I don’t think actual site stats bear out that kind of approach.

The reality is that AO3, like parts of tumblr, is a rare island of amorphous queerness, floating in a vast ocean of het-as-default spaces. If I never again see a hand-wringing thinkpiece about what AO3′s m/m percentage meeeeeans and how it must indicate that No One likes female characters, it will be too soon.

Put simply, AO3 is full of m/m and has a high proportion of fics with multiple ship types as well as a higher proportion of f/f than many spaces (though still not a high percentage).

FFN and Wattpad are both popular, both active, and both full of het and gen. They also both have more fanworks, arguably, though Wattpad works tend to be very short, and FFN’s rate of new works is falling behind AO3′s. Some people who prefer AO3 themselves will take this to mean that only AO3 is relevant, but that’s like standing in the gay bookstore going, “Gosh, it sure is sad that there aren’t any STRAIGHT bookstores! Think of the hets!”

Any fool you see doing this is helping the people who hate queer content to shit on that queer content. Anyone who repeats the myth that most fanfic is m/m is furthering an anti-queer narrative whether they mean to or not. (Yes, even those of you complaining about “straight girls” and “fetishization”.) I’m tired of these bad takes being given a pass.

AO3′s metadata is designed to put queer content on the same level of importance as straight content. It also makes it easy to get shipping stats. Other sites don’t give a fuck about queer content and make it hard to get shipping stats. This has led to very skewed understandings of what fic fandom as a whole looks like–skewed understandings that help bullies go after m/m content with the pretense that they’re striking back against The Man.

It’s time those of us who like fandom stats took responsibility for lopsided, AO3-centric narratives and the social damage they can do.

Here is what fandom looks like actually:

Notes on the chart data below the cut:

Incidentally, I ran a multifandom challenge community on livejournal from 2005-2008.   AO3 culture is livejournal culture and we also used to tag pairing types for exactly the reason olderthannetfic describes, to help people who were interested in a certain kind of pairing to find it. 

Anyway this was a tiny comm but here’s the stats:

There’s no meaning to this, I just felt like being nostalgic XD.

But anyway the majority of discourse, like seriously 99.9% of it, is just this:

Because as @olderthannetfic says, one of greatest things about AO3 is its tagging system, which makes it easy to (a) find shipping stats and (b) find any type of fic you want. If I wanna read het fic for a fandom? Well, I check the f/m box, and guess what? It’s there. Want a ship? Check the tag! Don’t care about ship but want some good hurt/comfort? There’s a tag for that, too.

I realize some people spend their lives trying to control other people, but especially in fandom, a space that already lives in fear of being controlled by canon creators, and for good reason…

if it doesn’t affect you, why do you care. It’s not like AO3 is choosing to host m/m fic over f/f or f/m or multi or gen fic. It hosts all of it! It’s all there! And it’s easy to sort and navigate, unlike other sites.

These are the top 10 fandoms in the two largest categories (Animanga and Books), sorted by P6/P12/P16/P18/P18AVL vs P12 Slash/P16 Slash/P18 Slash/P18AVL Slash.  Note that I had to exclude one top-runner in each category (Pokémon and J.R.R.Tolkien) because they were collections and I’m not doing that to myself today. This is also why the ‘Rank’ (aka total Fics in the Fandom) and ‘Fics surveyed’ differ - for example, in the Hunger Games category, I had to select between Fanfiction and Participationfic. Similarly, The Rick Riordan section actually excludes the 10 or so fics not sorted under Percy Jackson. Drei ??? is a fandom and is spelled like that. I used the read-outs the search of the website provided.

Why did I choose this method? Because this website is a nightmare to search, next question.

Like if I went up to a Longwing dragonet would it kill me? Because I have boobs but I’m not a woman. Would they love my best friend because she’s a woman even though she hasn’t medically transitioned?

An excerpt from Chapter 7 (“Comrades in Arms”) of Allan Bérubé’s Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (1990):

By encouraging men [in the military] to pair up, the buddy systems gave a respectability to devoted male couples, whether or not they included gay men, that was unusual in civilian life. Even constant companions were protected from harassment by temporarily narrow definitions of deviant relationships. “The choice of a buddy,” explained Stewart Stern, who after the war was screenwriter for the film Rebel Without a Cause, “was as or more critical than that of a bride. You'd be living in a kind of physical intimacy which was unlike any other. The classic David Duncan photos of buddies consoling each other, those who had lost their buddies, was very expressive of this. And what greater love song in those days than ‘My Buddy’? Men were having the experience of never having been so close to other men.” Buddies watched out for each other, prayed for each other, did their best not to let each other down. To outsiders the open affection that buddies expressed toward one another, which was captured in wartime photographs, can appear to be surprisingly “gay.” Gay civilians at the time clipped buddy photographs from magazines, such as one from Life of two GIs sleeping with their bodies intertwined on a park bench, as rare keepsake images of male intimacy. In the 1980s the popular wartime song “My Buddy” became a signature piece for many gay men's choruses, who recognized in its lyrics an open expression of male love that was rare in American society outside of gay life.

The photograph in Life magazine referenced above:

Source: Life Magazine, September 13, 1943, pg. 30. Accessed via Google Books.

The excerpt also references the 1922 song “My Buddy,” which is so worth a listen if you’re not familiar:

This is one of the earliest recordings by Henry Burr, and it has been covered many times since. My favorite version is Frank Sinatra’s 1939 cover with Harry James and his orchestra. I’m also very fond of Chet Baker’s 1954 version with his signature soft vocals, but I digress…

The point is, check out these lyrics:

Nights are long since you went away I think about you all through the day My buddy, my buddy Nobody quite so true Miss your voice, the touch of your hand Just long to know that you understand My buddy, my buddy Your buddy misses you Buddies through all of the gay days Buddies when something went wrong I wait alone through the gray days Missing your smile and your song…

Source: “My Buddy” sheet music, 1922. Accessed via University of Maine Digital Commons.

The first time I heard this song I actually looked up the history and etymology of the word “buddy” to see if it had a (heterosexual) romantic connotation in the early 20th century, and could find no evidence that it did. As far as I can tell, this is a song about friendship expressed with a passion that by modern sensibilities comes off as intensely romantic. And, as Bérubé suggests, was adopted by the queer community as early as the 1940’s (and likely before) as an expression of gay love--