J.K. Rockin' on the tumblrphone

ALT

Author/illustrator Trung Le Nguyen has been live posting reading Pride and Prejudice for the first time on bluesky and just hit the first proposal. The replies are basically the sickos meme

it’s not weird to love it and comment and leave kudos because the author will probably still see it someday and it will make them happy.

it’s not weird to like said author’s work so much that you want to go look for other fics from them.

it’s not weird to go through the authors profile and look for other fics from the ships you like (or maybe some that you’ll give a chance because you liked the author) and maybe bookmark them for later.

it’s not weird to read these other fics and like them too and comment on them because you actually like them and you want to let the author know.

it’s not weird to read fanfiction from 5, or 8, or 10 years ago and actually enjoy and engage with it because it’s perfectly normal to relate to something that’s less than a decade old!

let’s stop treating fanfiction like they’re instagram posts that stop being interesting in 24 hours! fanfiction is NOT social media, fanfiction is art!!! and art doesn’t get old in one day, one year, or even a decade!

It's, it's just that dragons are the primordial embodiment of avarice wrought into fire and flesh. They are truly, supernaturally good at finding large amounts of valuables, that's why the big mines hire those Dragon Scouts to go sniff out their lairs and mark them on the maps as potential mining ventures. You know, in case someone slays the relevant dragon. Which doesn't happen often because, milord, they are simply not that easily slain.

No I know you've hired many knights, blooded warriors and true. Yes, I was there when you gave the ten most impressive ones their special sashes. Very grand, very high honors, of course. Ehm. It's just, none of them have ever actually faced a dragon. Yes no I know Sir Edbert says he did but Sir Edbert is rather notoriously prone to exaggerated and tragically unverifiable tales---

Well no milord of course I would not doubt the word of a sworn knight. Perhaps his sobriety, but not his word, as such.

The point is that the grand treasury, while surely grand and a very special notion, is just... it is mayhaps not the ideal way of handling the realm's finances? Perhaps a series of smaller vaults, capped well below the dangerous wealth threshold at which gold is known to whet the appetite of colossal winged harbingers of death, in different corners of the realms or...?

No, I, yes well I do realize that will impede anyone's interests in coming into the vault to hurl around the gold coins and go "whee, I'm so rich!" I am aware of its deficiencies as a plan in that regard. No, I see I've misjudged a few things.

Actually, thinking on it, milord, I truly believe what you need is a fresh set of skilled wizards on this job. The court magician and I, we cannot keep up with your visionary thinking. We're too old-fashioned. But the wizards revolutionizing the eldritch academies seem to be more on this sort of level. I hear they've made some truly remarkable choices in terms of outsourcing all of their spellwork to the Ever-Whispering Void, such that it takes mere minutes for them to set up an entire defensive array. That's just the sort of innovative thinking you require.

“As the days go by…”

Children aren't born having a full understanding of gender or religion — they have to be indoctrinated into it. It might be inherent to people to seek out some kind of gender expression or spiritual belief, but the way we do it is not innate. We aren't born knowing that skirts are for girls and big trucks are for boys.

There is no law of nature that proves it is Wednesday. Days are real - the Earth rotates, the sun rises and sets, that’s physics. Deciding to build our entire westernised lives around 1/4 of the moon’s orbit is made up. There is no law of physics that links this moment in the lunar procession to ‘Wednesday’.

And yet it really is Wednesday. Mum, you need to go to work and later your choir who practice on Wednesdays will be pissed if you skip practice because ‘Wednesday is a social construct’.

It’s also completely valid to have a favourite day of the week - Sunday for my mum since she goes to church, doesn’t work and avoids domestic chores on Sunday. And all those feelings about Sundays are completely valid in the absence of any law of nature which proves ‘it’s Sunday’.

i think those are most of the. the ones you can't do without, if you want it to be relationally healing or whatever. people will be able to tell if you do not really think they are a person with interiority in the way they are. they will not like it.

most of us flatten others to some degree and we do this bc we need psychologically to be able to justify the fact that our brains only have so much social categorization capacity. if you're doing it to the people directly around you, they'll notice.

I didn't understand why people were reacting to me the way they were until I understood what my behavior had been saying to them! then it made perfect sense and I was like "oh shit that's not what I wanted to communicate to you at all, geez, I have to get better at understanding this language so I can make sure I'm showing the things I believe with my behavior in a way this person will understand and that will not instead harm them! i definitely do not want to be harming people but I was sort of unpersoning this person to justify how I was acting because I was making choices based on what I wanted and not what they wanted. if someone asked me straight up "do you want to have interpersonal relationships where you're always making choices based on what you need and discounting what the other person needs and wants?" i would say "no! i don't want to have those kind of relationships! i value not hurting people!" but in those individual instances I was ignoring behavioral communication that I was receiving to just go ahead with what I wanted.

i don't think it's evil to say things like "look buddy I don't care if you're having a bad day, I really did NOT like being spoken to that way" to dismiss someone's feelings. but if someone you claim to care about is behaving in a way that YOU CAN READ as hesitant or reluctant to bring up what you are doing and how it is hurting them, then you better respond to that by saying "hey if you don't want the same things that I want, that's okay. i just want to know the real answer so we can be on the same page. i really value you and it is important to me that you be able to trust me. i have not behaved in a way that has made you feel that I am trustworthy. i will behave differently in order to communicate that to you better"

like sometimes someone's answer is truly "well I don't really see you as a full human person with interiority" like for real for real. and boy howdy that can sure change your interactions if you can read it, right? like when a doctor has shown me that I can't trust them to believe I am a person who is accurately reporting what is going on with my health, that changes EVERYTHING about the interaction. And if someone i LIKE and who I VALUE tells me that they weren't considering me to be a real person, that's a whole different thing.

I'm not saying everyone is always telling you exactly how human they see you as at all times. but like. its there subconsciously! some people are fine with this and some people grapple with it. i grapple with it a lot. its really hard right? sometimes not seeing yourself as uniquely different is hard. sometimes you know that it is important that you see others that way all the time because it's what is true; we are all human beings. no one can value every single other human the same as themselves or the people they love because we would go insane I think. sometimes it's easy to slot someone you like a whole lot into that grouping a little bit, sometimes, because you want something. sometimes you want that person to play a role in your life that they are not prepared and don't want to play. if people feel like their needs don't matter to you as much as your own, they will not feel fully safe in the relationship, and they'll be right.

this can describe a lot of dynamics and obviously one end of the spectrum is abuse but stuff that isn't abuse can also involve an amount of doing this. its just that the amount and kind of harm it causes depends on the specific circumstances in each case.

this is my most truest hottest deepest cptsd hack. all trauma is relational. you have to regain your own personhood not by denying the personhood of others, but by believing in the personhood of the people around you. and then include yourself.

now maintain that.

sometimes someone's answer is truly "well I don't really see you as a full human person with interiority"

is sooo difficult to confront when you are the one doing this because you've been conditioned to believe thats how everybody is interacting. like as a child I struggled to feel seen + understood as a real person by nearly everyone around me, and I think ultimately that led to a rejection of my own responsibility to see others as whole people in their own right. I started to assume that all my social interactions would involve my personhood being ignored and by assuming that I was implicitly refusing to see others as people themselves! So no wonder I was never overcoming the canyon between myself and others and felt incredibly alone.