𝘯𝘰𝘶𝘯. writing

I'm gonna take your nightmare and BONK

he likes men now.

i needed to get this out before my hand fully heals

i didnt really translate it well with the other sans drawing I did recently.

Always imagined sans saying “ I’M GOING TO HAVE ONE HELL OF A TIME”

aside from “ GREAT TIME” only because I was thinking of the forgotten underhell name…

1. Is the author dead? x

2. Is your baby in the bathwater? x

What do I mean by those things? Let’s start with #1. The Death of the Author is a type of literary criticism, the extreme cliff notes version of which is that art exists outside of the creator’s life, personal background, and even intentions. I’m using it slightly differently than Barthes intended, but that’s okay, because the author is dead and I’m interpreting his work through my own lens.

In fandom, the author is dead. In fact, the author was never alive in the first place, not really. The author has only ever been the idea of a person, because unlike published fiction, the only thing we know about a fanfic author is that which they choose to tell us about themselves.

Why is that important?

Because it might not be true. Hell, that happens in real life with published authors, who have SSN’s on file with their publishers, who pay taxes on the works they create and have researchable pasts. If the author of A Million Little Pieces could fake everything, why can’t I? Why can’t you? Why can’t the writer of your favorite fic in the whole wide world?

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: “you can only write about [sensitive subject] if [sensitive subject] has happened to you personally, otherwise you’re a disgusting monster that deserves to die!!” Or maybe “you can only write [x racial or ethnic group] characters if you’re [x racial or ethnic group] otherwise you’re racist/fetishizing/colonizing!”

You can play this game with any sensitive subject you can come up with. I’ve seen them all before, on a sliding scale of slightly chastising to literal death threats.

Now, I could tell you that I’m a white-passing Latina whose grandmother was an anchor baby. I could tell you that I speak only English because my family never taught me to speak Spanish, something which I’ve been told is common in the Cuban community, though I only know my own lived experience. I could tell you that I’m mostly neurotypical. I could tell you that I’m covered in surgical scars. I could tell you lots of things.

Are any of these true? Maybe! I could tell you that my brother has severe mental development problems, so uncommon that they’ve never been properly diagnosed, and that he will live the rest of his life in a group home with 24-hour care. Is that true? Am I allowed to write about families struggling with America’s piss-poor services for the handicapped now?

Am I allowed to write about being Cuban? After all, I did just say that I’m Cuban. But is it true? Can I instead write a character that’s Panamanian? Maybe I really am Panamanian, not Cuban. Maybe I’m both. Maybe I’m neither. Maybe I’m really French Canadian. Should we require people to post regular selfies? I can’t count the number of times I’ve had someone come up to me speaking Arabic, and I’ve been told that I look Syrian. What’s stopping me from making a blog that claims that I am Syrian? Can you even really tell someone’s race and ethnicity from a photo?

Am I allowed to write about being a teenager? Am I allowed to write about being a college student? Am I allowed to write about being an “adulty” adult? Can I write a character who’s 40? 50? 60? How old am I?

All of this is to say: you can’t base what someone is or is not “allowed” to write about on a background that may or may not be real. No matter how good your intentions. And I get it - this usually comes from a place of well-meaning. You’re trying to protect marginalized groups by stopping privileged people from trampling all over experiences that they haven’t suffered. I get that. It’s a very noble thought. But you can’t require a background check for every fic that you don’t like.

If you say “you can only write about rape if you’re a rape victim,” then one of three things will happen:

Real survivors will have to supply intimate details of their own violations to prevent harassment

Real survivors will refuse to engage and will then have to deal with death threats and people telling them to kill themselves for daring to write about their own experiences

People who aren’t survivors will say “yeah sure this happened to me” just to get people to shut up

Has that helped anyone? I mean really - anyone??

So now let’s get to point #2: is your baby in the bathwater?

If your intention is to protect marginalized people from being trampled upon, stop and assess if your boot is the one that’s now stamping on their face. Find your baby! Is your baby in the bathwater? Which is to say: find the goal that you’re advocating for. Now assess. Are you making the problem worse for the people you’re trying to protect? Does that rape victim really feel better, now that you’ve harassed and stalked them in the name of making rape victims feel safe?

Let’s say you read a fic that contains explicit sex between a 16 year old and a 17 year old. Is this okay? Would it be okay if the writer was 15? 16? 17? Should teenagers be barred from writing about their own lives, and should teenagers be banned from exploring sexuality in a fictional bubble, instead of hookup culture? Is it okay for a 20 year old to write about their experiences as a teenager? Is it okay for a 20 year old to write about being raped at a party as a teenager? Is it okay for a 30 year old? How about a 40 year old? Is it okay so long as it isn’t titillating? Is it okay if taking control of the narrative allows the writer to re-conceptualize their trauma as something they have control over? Is it okay if their therapist told them that writing is a safe creative outlet?

Is your author dead?

Is your baby in the bathwater?

Now let’s take a hardline approach: no fanfiction with characters who are under 18 years old. None. Is the 16 year old who really loves Harry Potter and wants to read/write about characters their own age better off? Should they be banned from writing? Should they be forced to exclusively read and write (adult) experiences that they haven’t lived? Will they write about teens anyway? Should they have to share it in secret? Should 16 year olds be ashamed of themselves? Should we just throw in with the evangelicals and say that the only answer is abstinence, both real and fictional?

Let’s say that no rape is allowed in fiction, at all. None. What happens to all the hurt/comfort fics where a character is raped and then receives the support and love that they deserve, slowly heal, and by the end have found themselves again? Are you helping rape victims by banning these stories? Are you helping rape victims by stripping their agency away, by telling them that their wants and their consent doesn’t matter?

Is your baby in the bathwater?

Fandom is currently being split in two: on one side, the people who want to make fandom a “safer” place by any means necessary, even if that means throwing out all of the marginalized groups they say they want to protect - and on the other, people who are saying “if you throw out that bathwater, you’re throwing the baby out too.”

The whole point of fandom is to be able to explore all kinds of ideas from the safety and comfort of a computer screen. You can read/write things that fascinate you, disgust you, titillate you, or make your heart feel warm. This is true of all fiction. People who want to read about rape and incest and extreme violence and torture can go pick up a copy of Game of Thrones from the bookstore whenever they want. Sanitizing fandom just means holding a community of people who are primarily not male, not straight, not cis, or some combination of those three, to higher and stricter standards than straight white cis male authors and creators all over the world.

There is nothing you can find on AO3 that you can’t find in a bookstore. Any teenager can go check out Lolita, or ASOIAF, or Flowers in the Attic, or Stephen King’s It, or Speak, or hundreds of other books that have adult themes or gratuitous violence or graphic sex. The difference is that AO3 has warnings and tags and allows people to interact only with the types of work that they want to, and allows people to curate their experiences.

Are these themes eligible to be explored, but only in the setting of something produced/published? Books, movies, television, studio art, music - all of these fields have huge barriers to entry, and they’re largely controlled by wealthy cishet white men. Is it better to say that only those who have the right connections to “make it” in these industries should be allowed to explore violence or sexuality or any other so-called “adult” theme?

Does banning women from writing MLM erotica make fan culture a better place?

Does banning queer people from writing about queer experiences make fan culture a better place?

Is M/M fic okay, but only if the author is male? What if he’s a transman? What if they’re NB? Who should get to draw those lines? Should TERFs get a vote? What if the author is a woman who feels more comfortable writing from a male character’s perspective because she’s grown up with male stories her whole life, or because she identifies more with male characters? What about all the transmen who discovered themselves, in part, by writing fanfiction, and realized that their desires to write male characters stemmed from something they hadn’t yet realized about themselves?

How can we ever be sure that the author is who they say they are?

Who is allowed to write these stories? How do we enforce it?

Is it better for none of these stories to ever exist at all?

Have you killed your author?

Now obviously, that person could have written this fic instead of me, but what if they don’t like to write? What if they would have been too afraid to mention the less-than-exciting aspects of their disability because it’s so often ignored that they feel it would be boring? What if they just don’t want to? What if they needed to FIND this fic instead of create it?

Papyrus just picking Sans up at any moment and carrying his sleeping body around and just continuing to talk to whoever he’s talking to but with a koala Sans snoring in his arms.

Sans doing things that cat owners do with cats that jump real high, because Papyrus can fly. So Sans will just be on the balcony and randomly throw something and Papyrus will jump from the snowy ground to catch it in his mouth. 

Sans having the philosophy “If it fits I sits”

Sans makes Papyrus an Easter egg hunt but he holds all the eggs and Pap’s job is just to find Sans sleeping with an egg and a note somewhere. He actually has good hiding spots and it gets extremely heated. 

Papyrus realizing that when Sans goes down for a midnight snack he just eats cold mac and cheese cause he doesn’t want to wake Papyrus up, so he pre-heats mac and cheese for him and leaves it there.

Every time they go shopping together they can and will by at least one kazoo. They have a secret stash of cheap kazoos for special occations in Papyrus’ closet.

Papyrus starts getting overstimulated at a party and Sans is the only one to notice and takes him home and makes him a mug cake.

When Pap was little Sans would bury himself in the snow and leave a sticky note on the fridge saying “come sniff me out”. Papyrus got so tired of this almost daily ritual and woke up super early and buried himself in the snow. It took Sans all day to find him and that’s why Papyrus wakes up at 4:30 now.

They have gone trick-or-treating as Edward and Alphonse Elric.

They have very different taste in music except they both like Twenty-One-Pilots and Hamilton and they rock out to it in the car.

Both of them legit thought arson was legal until recently.

Someone suggested they watch Coco (because Skeletons) and they both really liked it but when “Remember Me” started playing at the end Papyrus looked over to see Sans fucking silently bawling. He was just sitting there,  the usual smile on his face, and an entire waterfall coming out both eye sockets. No one knows why. 

Papyrus plays exclusively string instruments and Sans plays only horns. But they are masters of their craft. The only exception is the xylophone bc they are skeletons after all. 

Every time Papyrus hurts himself by accident, no matter how, Sans just says: “that’s what you get for being tall.”

Papyrus once came home to Sans upside down on the couch, leg detached, covered in ramen and blue glitter, and crying while watching Breakfeast Club. Papyrus joined him.

Whenever they watch Pooh’s Hefflump Movie and Roo fails to capture Lumpy Papyrus just says “GOD WHAT A FUCKING MOOD” without fail. 

Once they were bored so Sans stuck a bluetooth disco ball in his skull and they headbanged to Living Tombstone with the multi-colored lights shining through Sans’ eye sockets.

Once Papyrus couldn’t find Sans anywhere, like anywhere, and was getting really worried. And then he looked up and saw Sans sleeping on the ceiling bc gravity manipulation is dank.

Whenever Sans is awake but zoneing out, Papyrus will prank him by T-posing and hovering over to him.