Roque Amadi

A/n: I know I already posted this one a while ago, but Tumblr went “duck this drabble in particular” and it just vanished without a trace. So sorry, re-posting it. 

Imagine being a member of the Fellowship and after the Ring quest, half the Fellowship wants to set you up with Faramir and the other half wants you to pick Boromir.

The prompt was offered by @roqueamadi​ - I’m sorry, friend, if you’ve noticed it was gone, I swear it wasn’t me. I had no idea I’d lost it. 

I made some minor changes, but nothing beyond two words and one phrase. :) 

Enjoy.

Two is too much. 

“I’m not telling you…”

Mouth on mouth. He’s kissing you deeply, teasingly. You return the favour, making him growl with badly repressed impatience, as your lips part at last.

“Who?” asks he again – breathes it into your ear, your skin breaking out with goosebumps.

Me: I think you don’t know how many of my daily actions revolve around the likelihood that an angry cisgender person might murder me.

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Anyone?

IDK if I'm really the best person to advise on the job-finding part.

If you're asking about household expenses, peanut butter is a good meal and very cheap. Most supermarkets have a section of things that are getting too old that are sold at very reduced prices. If you cook your own food, the vegetables in that area are good for stews and things. If you don't have consistent kitchen access, a jar of peanut butter is a better investment. Dry beans are one of the healthiest and most economical options. They taste a lot better than canned too. But they take time. Big bags of onions are another favorite of mine.

Join those "Buy Nothing" groups on facebook and other such places for a stream of other people's free desks, couches, and possibly old clothes.

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I can, but I'm going to say up front that I will be rejecting all asks that are like "bawwwwwwww, here are 15 random examples that are different from your objections". I don't read YA widely, so I'm guaranteed to get a bunch of people whining that I'm stereotyping it.

YA obviously can include a wide range of things, like other marketing niches, but it has some tendencies I dislike:

Low heat: I don't require a book to have sex, but if it's a romance, I like fucking. Some YA feels like it was supposed to have sex and was then censored instead of feeling like it organically did not want to interrupt the narrative for sex. A subjective feeling, but one I have often. Some of it also feels like it overtly pushes conservative values with a fig leaf of "appropriate for children" hiding its bad values—and people give this a pass!

Too self insert-y for me: A lot of popular examples trade on my ability to feel a lot of identification with one central lead, while I prefer books that have equal POV time with two romantic leads or that don't ask me to self insert quite so much.

Only young people do anything interesting ever, and at 30, you're past your sell-by date. (This is not an objection to YA as read by 13-year-olds so much as an objection to YA for older readers.)

Sounds like the author has only watched genre TV, not read genre books: This one is extremely subjective, and adult genre fiction is often also guilty of it, but it has been a hallmark of the YA I've been exposed to.

A walled garden: Lots of YA writers and readers don't seem to have explored beyond YA ever. Sure, every genre has fans who just read that genre after figuring out what they like, but the vibe is very pronounced here (to me), both in the works and in the community around the works.

"Wholesome": Waaaaay too many descriptions of the joys of YA use this word, especially if anything queer is in the book. Ughhhhhh. Say you're an anti without saying you're an anti, why don't you?

Present tense: DIE IN A FIRE! This filthy pestilence spreads outwards from YA to infest other genres. It's fine in short fanfic porn, but keep it the fuck out of my long narrative fiction! (Yeah, yeah, it's common in litfic too, but I also dislike litfic.) Ooh, it's "immediate" and "authentic"!! No it's fucking not. It's contrived, mannered garbage for anything over a few thousand words.

Ahh yeah as someone who read the Silmarillion a while back and never got really invested in it, I feel that too.  <3 Every time I think of the Silmarillion, I think of what Tolkien himself said about it:

I am doubtful myself about (the Silmarillion.) Part of the attraction of the L.R. is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed.

I wish I could be as excited about the Silmarillion as so many other fans I see online are, because I love how much they love it, I love the art they make, and I love how interesting they make the characters seem! But I think that quote from Tolkien is exactly why the Silmarillion falls flat for me-- Lord of the Rings does a beautiful job of Implying the history of this epic fantasy world through fragments of stories that the characters only half-remember; through subtle details, or through things like a character’s traditions or names. Reading the books feels like playing an ARG where you’re piecing together the world’s history alongside the characters.  So something gets lost when the history/mythology is flatly over-explained like a textbook. XD .(That’s just how I feel though haha.)

And I could go on a bunch of different tangents but I also just personally don’t like a lot of Tolkien’s explanations? It’s sorta like “wow,,,,,..... I liked this better when you Didn’t explain it and just dropped a couple ambiguous hints and let me reconstruct it myself” skdjfsdkfsf. Lord of the Rings makes you ask so many questions about the history of Middle Earth, but I personally found a lot of the Silmarillion’s answers to those questions underwhelming, occasionally even in ways I thought weakened the story of Lotr.

I also feel like it’s important that the Silmarillion is an unfinished collection of stories Tolkien was never completely happy with and that often wildly contradict each other, not the Definitive Lore Bible Textbook(tm) people often insist it is. I don’t like to play the game of “Tolkien’s intent is the only thing that matters,” but if people want to play that game I feel confident that there are reasons Tolkien thought the Silmarillion/Unfinished Tales/etc/etc weren’t ready to be published? Which is is why I kinda think it's weird that everyone talks about them like they represent his Real Definitive Final Intent.

The biggest reason the Silmarillion never grabbed me, though, was probably just the absence of hobbits XD. Ok I’m joking but I’m not. I think the central appeal of Lord of the Rings/the Hobbit for me, personally, is the contrast between a sweeping post-apocalyptic fantasy epic and a group of simple ordinary little best friends. Without the hobbits, there’s nothing to contrast all the Swords and Sorcery, nothing to anchor the world to something warm and intimate and human.

My qualifications: Hello, I'm so-called Ms Boba, a software engineer that's been working on a fandom-oriented social network for a couple years. When Tumblr's Absolute Porn-Banning Betrayal™ happened, I got so pissed I decided to learn all I could about entrepreneurship (from actual classes, to seminars, to books), and figure out what it would take to build better online social spaces.

The backstory: someone asked @olderthannetfic about features for a fandom platform, and she decided to nerd-snipe me into ranting about the topic. Please enjoy.

Since time immemorial, the question of "which features would a (transformational) fandom platform need" periodically makes its resurgence in our corner of the web. While this is a totally cool and fun exercise to do, I want to take some time to explain why this is the wrong question to ask—at least unless you know how to ask it.

Note that none of what I say is set in stone, and there's many nuances this post will be too short to contain. But, while you should take all I say with a grain of salt, I hope these points will be a good trampoline to bring the "fandom platform of our own" discussion to a more productive place.

So, lo' and behold: a collection of platform-features-related "basic startup wisdom" gems I've collected during these years.

Basic Startup Wisdom #1: Successful products are not about adding more features

One of the very first things they teach you in any "building successful startups" class, is that adding nice-to-have-features on top of products people "mostly enjoy" is a horrible strategy for deciding a product roadmap. This is true even when people tell you they would 100% move to a platform that does everything their current favorite does, if only it would fix the glaring problems, add a couple of absolutely-fundamental-can't-live-without features, and get rid of all the annoying bugs.

A japanese-american Beth Harmon would be pidgeonholed as another nerdy asian stock character. Baby Driver with a black lead would be accused of perpetuating stereotypes about black youth and crime. Phantom Of The Opera with a female Phantom would be accused of playing into the predatory lesbian stereotype. Romeo & Juliet with a gay couple would be accused of pulling the bury your gays trope – and no, you can’t just rewrite it into having a happy ending, the final tragedy of the tale is the rock onto which the entire central thesis statement of the play stands on. Remove that one element and you change the whole point of the story from a “look at what senseless hatred does to our youth” cautionary tale to a “love conquers all” inspiration piece, and it may not be the story the author wants to tell.

Sometimes, in order for a given story to function (and keep in mind, by function I don’t mean just logistically, but also thematically) it is necessary that your protagonist has specific personality traits that will play out in significant ways in the story. Or that they come from a specific background that will be an important element to the narrative. Or that they go through a particular experience that will consist on crucial plot point. All those narrative tools and building blocks are considered to be completely harmless and neutral when telling stories about straight/white people but, when applied to marginalized characters, it can be difficult to navigate them as, depending on the type of story you might want to tell, you may be steering dangerously close to falling into Unfortunate Implications™. And trying to find alternatives as to avoid falling into potentially iffy subtext is not always easy, as, depending on how central the “problematic” element to your plot, it could alter the very foundation of the story you’re trying to tell beyond recognition. See the point above about Romeo & Juliet.    

Like, I once saw a woman a gringa obviously accuse the movie Knives Out of racism because the one latina character in the otherwise consistently white and wealthy cast is the nurse, when everyone who watched the movie with their eyes and not their ass can see that the entire tension of the plot hinges upon not only the power imbalance between Martha and the Thrombeys, but also on her isolation as the one latina immigrant navigating a world of white rich people. I’ve seen people paint Rosa Diaz as an example of the Hothead Latina stereotype, when Rosa was originally written as a white woman (named Megan) and only turned latina later when Stephanie Beatriz was cast  – and it’s not like they could write out Rosa’s anger issues to avoid bad optics when it is such a defining trait of her character. I’ve seen people say Mulholland Drive is a lesbophobic movie when its story couldn’t even exist in first place if the fatally toxic lesbian relationship that moves the plot was healthy, or if it was straight.                          

That’s not to say we can’t ever question the larger patterns in stories about certain demographics, or not draw lines between artistic liberty and social responsibility, and much less that I know where such lines should be drawn. I made this post precisely to raise a discussion, not to silence people. But one thing I think it’s important to keep in mind in such discussions is that stereotypes, after all, are all about oversimplification. It is more productive, I believe, to evaluate the quality of the representation in any given piece of fiction by looking first into how much its minority characters are a) deep, complex, well-rounded, b) treated with care by the narrative, with plenty of focus and insight into their inner life, and c) a character in their own right that can carry their own storyline and doesn’t just exist to prop up other character’s stories. And only then, yes, look into their particular characterization, but without ever overlooking aspects such as the context and how nuanced such characterization is handled. Much like we’ve moved on from the simplistic mindset that a good female character is necessarily one that punches good otherwise she’s useless, I really do believe that it is time for us to move on from the the idea that there’s a one-size-fits-all model of good representation and start looking into the core of representation issues (meaning: how painfully flat it is, not to mention scarce) rather than the window dressing.

I know I am starting to sound like a broken record here, but it feels that being a latina author writing about latine characters is a losing game, when there’s extra pressure on minority authors to avoid ~problematic~ optics in their work on the basis of the “you should know better” argument. And this “lower common denominator” approach to representation, that bars people from exploring otherwise interesting and meaningful concepts in stories because the most narrow minded people in the audience will get their biases confirmed, in many ways, sounds like a new form of respectability politics. Why, if it was gringos that created and imposed those stereotypes onto my ethnicity, why it should be my responsibility as a latina creator to dispel such stereotypes by curbing my artistic expression? Instead of asking of them to take responsibility for the lenses and biases they bring onto the text? Why is it too much to ask from people to wrap their minds about the ridiculously basic concept that no story they consume about a marginalized person should be taken as a blanket representation of their entire community?

It’s ridiculous. Gringos at some point came up with the idea that latinos are all naturally inclined to crime, so now I, a latina who loves heist movies, can’t write a latino character who’s a cool car thief. Gentiles created antisemitic propaganda claiming that the jews are all blood drinking monsters, so now jewish authors who love vampires can’t write jewish vampires. Straights made up the idea that lesbian relationships tend to be unhealthy, so now sapphics who are into Brontë-ish gothic romance don’t get to read this type of story with lesbian protagonists. I want to scream.      

Or in other words, stop thinking of minority-identified people as just their minority identity.  Let them be fully human.  Let them explore all the possibilities for human experience inside your head.