Welcome To The Tortured Showgirl Department

Elucien week day one: Heartbeats

The thing is, there’s no way to know where these people are coming from. In the before, when fandom was more in the corners we all knew about, you could search LJ or a message board or whatever social bookmarking site we were using. You could join the community and participate.

You could get a little dopamine hit by seeing someone tell their friends why they loved your story.

Anymore, those recs are hidden in discords, or in tiktoks or instagram slideshows that you can’t search for. They’re inaccessible, not discoverable unless you’re already there. You may never know why 27 people left kudos on an old story of yours, what they liked and found in your writing. You just get the thumbs up and a kinda lonely feeling, cause these could be your people. You could like them, maybe. You could be friends.

But you’ll never find out why they stopped by, or what people are saying about you behind your back, and that’s sad.

“No, I still thought you were a massive prat.” Lily confessed, “But it was all I could think about. You were all I could think about. ”

James stared at her. She had seen them kissing in that cupboard months before it happened. She had been standing in her mother’s garden, apparently minding her own business and not thinking of him at all, when the universe had deposited her into a vision of James Potter snogging her senseless.

He shook his head slowly. “So you wanted to what—kiss me after that?”

She gave a breathy sort of laugh. “Er, something like that...jumping your bones was more like it...”

He fell back onto the sofa at her side groaning. “Whiskey!”

Lily went very still and James watched the answer form in her expression before she spoke it.

“Yes?” She was trying to act coy. 

The word landed heavily between them.

For a moment, James said nothing.

canon is what happens in the text. e.g. merlin tries to poison morgana

a headcanon is a fact that you have personally made up as an elaboration of canon. it is your invention. e.g. i think morgana and gwen had a teenage lesbian situationship before the events of canon. or, i think modern morgana would love evanesence.

an interpretation is how one reads the existing text. it is not an invented fact nor is it a headcanon, it is a reading. e.g. i think merlin tries to poison morgana out of misplaced self-hatred. or, i think that one line was delivered with suppressed malice and shows a nuanced relationship.

fanon is the general fandom’s accepted headcanons and interpretations that elaborate or recontextualize canon. e.g. merlin is a badass waif and morgana is a bitch.