#banshee cheekbones

A new Momofuku restaurant had just opened and Adam had, against all hopes, managed to get a table for their group. 

They were all so pumped about it — critics said the restaurant was like nothing ever done before, and it was supposed to be An Experience. 

There was just one little thing. 

It was stupid, really. 

Everyone was paired up — Andrew and Thespi, Niki and her wife, Adam and his girlfriend, and Annie didn’t feel like, once again, being the odd one out. The seventh wheel. 

It was dumb, feeling sorry for herself when she should feel lucky she gets to experience the restaurant at all, but it kinda felt like Valentine’s Day all over again. 

She’s frowning as she accepts the calendar invite and a hand sets upon her shoulder. She looks up. 

“If you want, we could go together?” Rie’s smiling — not her usual motherly smile, no, something else. Something soft, and a little hopeful? 

“Together?” Annie repeats, feeling a little slow on the uptake. 

“As a date,” Rie says, her hand lingering on Annie’s shoulder. 

Annie’s eyes widen. “Um, yeah, I’d like — I’d love that.”

“I can’t wait, Annie.”

Her name feels like honey between Rie’s lips, and then Rie is leaning close, and close, and Annie might be losing her mind —

Rie kisses her cheek. 

Title: Thank Goodness for Femslash  

This post is part of Femslash Revolution’s I Am Femslash series, sharing voices of F/F creators from all walks of life. The views represented within are those of the author only.

In retrospect, it’s pretty obvious that I exhibited some very not-straight behaviour from a very young age.

The first clear memory I have of such behaviour is from sometime around 2003, which would have made me ten years old. During that time, my brother and I routinely became fixated upon certain movies; if we watched it and liked it, chances were that we were going to watch it forty times over the next month. At that time, our current fixation was Bad Boys II.

(If you haven’t seen it, you’re not missing a whole lot. There’s a lot of explosions, if that’s something you’re into.)

One of the first scenes in the film takes place in a strip club. I’m sure that, by that point, I’d seen half-naked women in some other movie or show, but I remember being enthralled by this scene. I sat as close to the screen as possible every time we watched it. I can’t remember what my reasoning for doing it at the time was; it’s all too possible that I didn’t even think about why I was doing it. I just did it.

As I became a teenager, more and more indications that I was attracted to women popped up. Whenever I was alone with one of my best friends, the urge to kiss her would flood my mind, until I could barely think of anything else. Looking back, I was obviously very clearly in love with her but, at the time, I chalked it up to mere curiosity and boredom.

My denial skills are top-notch. I could put them on my resume.

(I did end up kissing a girl in high school or, rather, three girls kissed me. Two of those incidents occurred at the same party, and both of the girls were severely drunk at the time. One of them was the best friend that I was telling myself that I was not in love with. On the other occasion, the girl was absurdly stoned. To them it meant nothing, except maybe something to laugh about the next day, something to blame on the alcohol and drugs.

So that’s what I blamed it on too.)   

I believe that there were two main factors that led to the development of my top-notch denial skills. The first has to do with where I was raised.

Think about the smallest small town you’ve ever seen depicted in a movie or show.

Smaller. Smaller. A little smaller than that. There you go.

Everyone knew everyone, and anybody who ventured outside the carefully defined parameters of normalcy was bound to hear their own name twirling through the grapevine sooner or later. I wasn’t exactly eager to hear my own name on that grapevine, and I didn’t want my name to find its way back to my grandmother or my massive extended family, so I did my best to try and remain in the carefully defined little box.

The other reason was fandom. More specifically, the My Chemical Romance fandom.

It wasn’t all bad; I met some amazing people through it, it allowed me to grow as a writer, and the music genuinely did help me through some rough days/weeks/months. But, to put it frankly, the amount of misogyny in the fandom was huge. Every last story revolved around men; when women were included in these stories, they were background characters, nagging wives to be cheated on, past girlfriends who were solely mentioned so that their soft curves could be compared to the hard planes of the male love interest.

(As an aside, that shit is still all too common in slash fics, and it has to stop. Seriously.)

The term bisexual, as it was applied in those stories, was essentially used as a synonym for gay. Characters were not attracted to more than one gender at a time. It was like a light switch; as soon as the two men ended up together, that was it. Game over. They were no longer attracted to women (or non-binary people. That wasn’t even a thought).   

There were no wlw in those stories. There was no femslash. There weren’t any fics where I could truly identify with a character, because the characters simply weren’t there.

It’s hard to try and muddle through your feelings about your own identity when the primary source of media that you consume ignores, distorts, or invalidates that identity.

So I continued rationalizing my feelings as mere curiosity or, as was the case most of the time, I just ignored them completely.

Fast forward to university. I went from living in the smallest of small towns to a city of over a million people. The culture shock was rather like being punched in the face.  For the first time in my life, I was no longer surrounded by people I’d known since I was 4.  Only two people that I attended high school with came to my university.  Everyone else was a stranger.

And so many of those strangers were beautiful. So many of the girls were beautiful.  There was one in particular, who lived on my floor, that I fell head over heels for. We only spoke a few times before she dropped out, but I still remember her as the first girl I felt comfortable having a crush on. Even if I didn’t say it to anyone, I could say it to myself, inside my own mind, and the urge to justify it as something else, something that wasn’t a crush, was quieter, easier to ignore.

And then I discovered femslash.  

I’d started drifting away from bandom for a number of reasons; less content being generated, less feedback being left on stories, constant ship wars, a desire to read about something other the same five characters I’d been reading about for nearly five years. I ended up floating into the Criminal Minds fandom, and it was there, after flicking through page after page of fanfiction and reading all the slash that looked good and going back to the beginning in search of something else, that I found it.

The first femslash fic I ever read. The first femslash fic I ever bookmarked. It was called Lover Undercover, the pairing was Emily Prentiss/Jennifer Jareau, and I remember the feeling that settled over me when I finished reading it. It was kind of like a full body blush. It was kind of like a lightbulb going off in my head.

Mainly, it was like something had clicked into place; like the realization that falling in love with your best friend really did happen. There wasn’t anything wrong with it. It could even have a happy ending.

Of course, my writing and reading habits didn’t change right away. There was a three year gap between that fic and the first femslash fic I wrote. Four years between it and the next femslash fic I bookmarked. But it started something. I began to see the side of myself that loved women as more than shame, more than something that constantly had be pushed to the back of my mind, something more than a titillation for men. The thought of holding hands with a girl, of being in a relationship with one, of being in love with one, didn’t seem so foreign, because I could read about it and, because I could read about it, I could imagine it.   

It’s important to note that falling headlong into femslash didn’t end my journey to accept myself. Some days, I still struggle with it, and I actively keep that part of myself hidden from people on a daily basis, because I’m not sure how they will react. But discovering femslash, discovering that there were stories where characters I already loved were like me, definitely made it easier to accept what’s been a part of me from such a young age. I hope that, by writing femslash myself and supporting those who create content for it, I can help other people feel the same way.

Of course, there’s still lots of stories that need to be written. Stories about women of color, stories about trans women, fat women, aromantic and asexual and polyamorous women, disabled women, all the categories of women that don’t fit into the thin, white, able bodied, neurotypical image that is still all too prevalent; more stories about these women need to be written.

Because words are powerful. Stories are powerful, and representation is powerful, and being able to read or view or listen to stories about people like you is one of the most wonderful feelings in the world.

That is what femslash means to me.

Biography

Kaitlyn is still wrestling with what label works best for her, but she’s definitely a wlw. She spends too much time consuming various forms of media and not enough time outside. She can be found throwing her creations into the void on tumblr (banshee-cheekbones.tumblr.com) and on ao3 (http://archiveofourown.org/users/doctorkaitlyn).

Summer Spinoff: a femslash creating fest \o/

Inspired by the incredible femslash100 drabbletags, a fabulous fest for more femslash. The idea is when filling a prompt, you get to also leave three prompts, thus over time creating a treasure trove of prompts and content.

Total 2016 Word Count: 174,853 Total 2016 Hits: 186,500 Other 2016 AO3 Stats: comment threads: 512 bookmarks: 2019 subscriptions (works and user): 463 kudos: 20268

Total 2015 Word Count: 261,589 Total 2015 Hits: 480,140 Other 2015 AO3 Stats: comment threads: 798 bookmarks: 5058 subscriptions: 299 kudos: 44799

links and titles to 2016 works (I’m only going to do the five with the highest word count for Teen Wolf, because it’s just too many to do all of them) 

Life’s No Fun Without a Good Scare | All for the Game | Andreil | 1028

My Own | All for the Game | Andreil | 728

Closer | All for the Game | Andreil | 611

Holiday Cupcakes | Carmilla | Hollstein | 2824 (WIP)

Can You Keep Up | Criminal Minds | Derek/Spencer | 810

Saving You | Shadowhunters | Jimon | 2921

A Thirst I’ve Never Had | Shadowhunters | Clizzy | 2448

Come Closer | Shadowhunters | Malec | 1680

I Got Your Back | Shadowhunters | Clizzy | 1419

No Work, All Sleep | Shadowhunters | Malec | 655

Reflections | Supernatural | Destiel | 3560

Pour Me Another Cup | Supernatural | Destiel | 1168

A Trick to Save the Treats | Supernatural | Destiel | 1073

Once Upon A Dream | Teen Wolf | Multiple Ships | 32,719

Heroes of My Heart | Teen Wolf | Allison/Isaac/Scott | 3945

You’re My Business | Teen Wolf | Cordia | 3800

The Hunter and Banshee | Teen Wolf | Allydia | 3363

Someone You Can’t Imagine Living Without | Teen Wolf | Sciles | 3055

No Goodbyes | The Shannara Chronicles | Amberle/Eretria | 1509

Taste of the Weird | The Shannara Chronicles | Amberle/Eretria | 1486

One Little Bite | Wynonna Earp | Wayhaught | 898

Favorite Fic: Without a doubt: Once Upon a Dream. I love fairytales and I love fairytale adaptations, so figuring out how to work the stories of the characters into the fairytales, finding the parallels, was a lot of fun. Plus, I got to put a whole bunch of ships in one story!! And I can’t forget the artist who made beautiful art for it, of course! 

Hardest Fic: Again, Once Upon a Dream. I’m a ficlet writer at heart, so staying focused on this one story for a longer time was really hard for me. The fact that it was part of a Big Bang, and there was a due date helped a lot. And though figuring out all the fairytales was fun, it was also a pain in the ass.

(honorable mention for Heroes of My Heart, because I had to rewrite it 2 days before the due date, which was when I realized it was in the wrong POV)

Do You Plan to Take Prompts in 2017? Yes, I do!!

What was the best thing about 2016? I wrote some things for new fandoms (Shadowhunters, Shannara Chronicles, All for the Game, Criminal Minds fic, Wynonna Earp), and loved getting inside all these new characters. Doing the Sterek Summer Bingo was also a ton of fun, challenging, but I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

What was the worst thing about 2016? The writers block that hit me in September, and still isn’t really over.

Goals for 2017: Finally, finally, FINALLY!!! finish and post the main story for the Leather&Liquor series (my Sterek A/B/O Biker/Biker Bar AU), and finish my Teen Wolf bingo card (I’m so close!).

sapphic spring \o/

Inspired by the incredible femslash100 drabbletags, a fabulous fest for more femslash. The idea is when filling a prompt, you get to also leave three prompts, thus over time creating a treasure trove of prompts and content.