I'm Not Normal About That

Yuna Hollander does not hesitate to scoop that charitable opportunity up.

They get their 12 players, one for each month. Shane gets his birth month, May. The tagline on top of his photo is: "I may be a two-time Stanley Cup winner, but I still get checked regularly for early onset heart disease."

During the following preseason, Ilya walks in on the Bears howling with laughter about something. Never one to be left out, Ilya demands to know what's so funny. He's passed a Heartthrob Against Heart Disease 2018-2019 calendar and joins in on the laughter as he flips through these idiots. That is, until he gets to May.

Shane is on the ice, a hockey stick slotted across his broad shoulders, arms draped over it. He's shirtless, only wearing gloves and his baggy hockey pants, ridden down on one side to show off the top of his underwear and the deep V just above his hips. They must have had him do pushups because his abs are more defined than usual, deep cuts across his stomach shimmering with a thin layer of sweat. His hair was messed up, like someone had run their hands through it. He was looking directly at the camera, a little smirk on his face like he knew exactly what he was doing. His biceps...

The calendar was snatched from him, which was probably a good thing, if the saliva pooling in his mouth and the tightness of his pants were anything to go by.

Abusers and creeps are not some species of especially heinous animal or alien or monster wearing the face of a human. They're people. And you NEED to drill it into your head that they are people because you NEED to remember that people are capable of doingn heinous shit. And you are a person. And your loved ones are people.

And about Ilya feeling freer to express his naturally flamboyant bisexual tendencies now they’ve actually talked about their respective sexual identities at long last.

And adding peer review from @reduced-lux

And more peer review from @homoeroticcigarette

Ilya absolutely needs to queen out! Once they’ve both been outed, I devoutly hope Harris starts making Hollanov go to the occasional drag brunch with him and Troy and Harris’s non-hockey friends. So Ilya and Shane can connect with the queer culture they’ve both spent thirty years hiding from.

the first methodology is strongly informed by quantifying and qualifying canon character behavior and then extrapolating from the canon behavior what other behaviors that character is likely to exhibit. in this scene this character exhibits a violent behavior, which means this character is likely to exhibit violent behavior in the future. this character has only ever mentioned male love interests, they will only have male love interests in the future. things like that.

the methodology i find more effective, because this is the methodology i use to understand real human beings* as a very autistic person who needs a framework with which to understand human beings very well and very quickly in order to, you know, live, is this: you qualify and quantify the individual's observed behavior, then you identify the internal processes that inform this behavior, and THEN speculate what sort of behaviors those internal processes might continue to inform.

*yes i know the character isn't a real person, but they are written and acted and directed by real people in order to communicate something about real people, and then real people come and analyze those characters, and i just don't think we're going to get away from the humanity in our dolls, at least not in this discussion

i will use an example from OFMD, sorry to anyone who doesn't give a shit, but this is unfortunately the only mine in which i toil.

ed gets a lot of headcanon mileage in the direction of being a sub, a bottom, a pillow princess, god's perfect baby girl forever, with specific attention to his sexual preferences/behaviors. if you gather up the behaviors from canon that seem to inform this they might look something like: run me through. whip my balls. im your captain. letting stede take the lead on the calypsos birthday sex. bigging his eyes like that 24/7.

from the first methodology, you might land on (and i do see a lot of this) something like "ed has only ever expressed bottom/sub tendencies** so ed is god's perfect bottom sub pillow princess always."

**i'm not going to get into the question of whether you can. fucking. determine someone's sexual preferences from their personality in non-sexual contexts. i'm just repeating lines of thinking i have observed.

analyzing through the second methodology, and i'll just pick one incident, again, as an example, you can look at "run me through". so we know that "run me through" is metaphorically sex, and that ed is the one that gets stabbed/penetrated. but i think it's pretty easy to argue that it was also literally ed wanting/seeking physical intimacy and having no better language for that than violence and pretense, which we're given to understand from how he interacts with jack and the background he's come from. then, looking at his failed attempt to kill stede, we know ed is not capable of hurting stede physically. so maybe we conclude that he "bottoms" in that scene because while he desperately needs closeness from stede he doesnt want to endanger him in any way.

and then you take your internal processes informed behavior and you could extrapolate a hell of a lot of things from that about ed's future behavior. maybe this is a one time thing. maybe he prefers to bottom always. maybe he prefers to bottom until he's had enough safe, comfortable, pleasant sex with stede to feel confident that he can do the same for stede. lot of places you can go but my point is that you've ended up there by looking at the character as a full person instead of a collection of behaviors and therefore you understand that they have depth, complexity, and the unpredictable unpredictability of all people.

and here's the real big reason i like this framework, is when you're working off this framework and talking to someone else who's working off this framework and you end up with different conclusions, i think it's way easier for everyone involved to go "yeah i see how you got there but i don't agree" and maybe even respectfully talk about their differing conclusions and learn something along the way.

#i have found that fandom at large will do the 1st one for female characters & characters of color #and the 2nd one for their favorite masc white male character #i have seen ppl doing the 2nd one for a white guy where they’re like “what if this shitty action has this secretly sympathetic motivation?” #and i’m thinking abt an old twitter poll by a canyonite asking which POV ppl preferred to read/write in their steddyhands fics #and ed was last place by a HUGE fucking margin #i’ve seen a lot of interpretations of ofmd that simply do not consider ed’s interiority at all (& not just from the canyon) #and it’s CRAZYYYYYY bc we literally have a whole episode IN HIS HEAD!!!!! #anyway i do feel like this list is missing “analyzing the character as a plot device” #but that contributes less to the fandom sandbox of fanon/headcanon than the 2 listed here

so first of all yes a billion percent to all of the above. there's no disputing that broad trends in fandom on what framework gets applied to what characters is motivated by internal biases. (racism in ed's case, misogyny when female characters get short shrift from their analysis.) and i think my original post is incomplete without acknowledging that, so thank you.

and two where you're completely right "character as a plot device" is something i missed, and you're also right that it contributes less to the fandom sandbox and i wonder if you might be able to make some sense of some vague thoughts i have about the difference between, like, critical film analysis where you're trying to develop a deeper understanding of just what happens in the source material, and sort of the transformative nature of fandom where you're not necessarily trying to tease out "What It Is", and sort of looking more at "What Else Can It Be?"

However, I do think describing the first type of analysis as people saying "This character exhibits X behavior so therefore they are [Type of person who exhibits X behavior] and will continue to act that way in the future" is maybe a little too... generous??? I don't mean this in a bad way, it is good to be generous to people, but in my experience, the type of fandom analysis that happens the most often is people watching/reading a story and pattern-matching it to other stories they have watched/read in the past so that they can determine the appropriate archetypes to slot characters into, and then those archetypes eat the canon character from the inside out. In fandom, these archetypes come from other fandoms as often as they come from traditional media tropes (and both fandom and traditional media include a bunch of racist and misogynist tropes/archetypes, which people often perpetuate by mapping them onto a canon where they weren't present (ex: when people take Ed and Stede, who are close enough in size that they swap clothes in their first scene, and make Ed much much larger than a tiny frail Stede. this happens so often)).

An example of the archetypes people use is The Dynamic, where (afaict) people were really determined to come up with a sort of hero's journey summary of all ships by boiling them down into combinations of two archetypes, which are descended from Holmes and Watson. Highly recommend the Fanlore page, I think it's really notable how "the dynamic" is often described not as just a pattern but as like, the ingredients of a good relationship?? which is going to incentivize people to cram their blorbos into the archetype because they want their blorbos to have a "good relationship." Personally I think the whole thing is. uh. really reductive and absurd. but that's just me. Ed and Stede absolutely get infected by these archetypes, though.

Another example is the Fandom Ghost, which is a downright spooky thing to read if you've been in the OFMD fandom since the beginning and watched what happened to Izzy Hands. Because fanon Izzy Hands did not come from looking at things Izzy does in canon and extrapolating from that what he might do in the future. Nor do I think fanon Izzy Hands came entirely from giving him motivations to describe his canon behavior. Like people are giving him much more sympathetic motivations than he actually has, but lots of times they are just describing an ENTIRELY different guy. A guy I have never seen on the tv show our flag means death. But he is a guy who shows up in white male side characters over and over and over, so it seems like he really is just coming from somewhere else.

but also, to take a step back and look at it more abstractly, the sort of analysis (or the pattern-matching phenomenon CNK very accurately described) that fandom at large encourages is actually a very specific type of analysis, and i don’t think it’s one that is inherently wrong or bad BUT it is sometimes not the most effective way to understand or engage with a text. imo fandom analysis exists at one end of a spectrum where the other end is, like, critical film analysis/academic-style textual analysis, and because it’s a spectrum it’s impossible to find a clear definitive line between the two! butttttt when you’re looking at both ends of the spectrum you can very much tell the difference, lol

i’ve never been able to describe it in a fully satisfactory way (and in fact i have rewritten this post like 8 times and i am still not happy with it, lol), but to me i find fandom analysis to be very blorbo-centric, with a huge emphasis on relating to the characters, on projecting your own experiences onto characters, on hyper-analyzing the internal psyche of characters to a degree that canon itself often doesn’t (especially when it comes to side characters) to be able to piece together the idea of the character as a whole, complete person with a rich inner life instead of a made-up person who is in the story to serve a purpose. this leads to a lot of fan-produced content focusing on stuff like shipping or neurodivergent headcanons or sending characters to therapy where they have to talk about their trauma out loud or putting characters in AUs that have little to no relation to canon (or maybe this type of analysis is encouraged because this is the sort of content fandom loves to produce? sort of a chicken vs egg scenario, here)

and to be clear i don’t actually think this sort of analysis is inherently bad! i think it can be very cool, fans using characters to explore stuff that canon doesn’t is sexy and fun. having a special little guy (gender neutral) that you rotate in your brain 24/7 is awesome.

BUT i think if it is the only analytical lens being used (and if it is being used specifically on characters that a fan likes the most while other characters are not given this sort of attention, or if it is being used across the board equally with all characters regardless of their actual narrative importance), fandom-style blorbo-centric analysis will lead to a very incomplete understanding of a story. i also think it is an analytical strategy that is better suited to some stories than others (and sometimes to some characters within those stories). like, it makes sense to look at end and stede through this lens, because the show is about their romance and obviously the interiority of the main character(s) in a romance is going to be hugely important to the narrative. it makes less sense to look at, say, ned low like this, because he is a one-episode antagonist who serves a specific purpose in moving ed and stede’s storyline along (and fans are absolutely still ALLOWED to do this, of course, but if you spend all your fandom time pouring your attention into a one-episode side character without thinking as hard abt the text as a whole then your interpretation of the show might become a bit warped)

i think the main reason that fandom encourages this sort of analysis tho is because, broadly speaking, media-centric fandom is for people who cannot stop thinking about a specific creative work and need to discuss it at length and pore over every detail and then, when that’s done, keep coming up with stuff to say about it. and it inevitably gets to a point where canon has been picked clean and there’s nothing left to do but come up with new content exploring the world and/or the characters beyond what canon provide (basically there’s a limit to how long fans can talk about “What It Is” but “What Else It Can Be” is endless). and this is easier to do when you have a complete mental picture of who a character is and how they operate as a person and not as a tool within a contained narrative (or when you have shoved the character into a common fandom archetype that you’re familiar and comfortable working with).

💪 💦

myilya for those who believe