#deathbycoldopen

Dot. Why have you betrayed me by using the goddamn Groucho emoji??? A betrayal of the highest order.

I have no fucking clue what I can even do with this. Something featuring a disguise? I can't think of anything with any notable costumes. I've searched my files for any mention of glasses or moustaches or masks, and I'm only getting things I've already published or things that aren't fic. I can't believe you've done this.

You're getting a random WIP, I give up 😩

This rather messy excerpt is from a canon-universe two-person love triangle fic in which Dean kind-of-accidentally started a recipe blog back around the tail end of S8, and then kept it going for years. The actual fic diverges during Tombstone after Jack kills the security guard, when Cas decides that he should take him to live in the house where he and Kelly had being staying and raise him away from hunting. This excerpt is from a flashback to 2013, when Dean initially starts the blog for hunt-related reasons.

Propping the laptop on his knees as Sam drives them back to the motel, Dean cracks his knuckles and pulls up the blog site to get started. "Okay. What should the username be?" "Does it matter?" "I guess not." Dean types in nope, and a pop-up message covers the screen. YOUR USERNAME MUST USE 7-10 CHARACTERS. "Okay, it says it has to be 7 characters." "Dude, just put anything." Dean rolls his eyes, then huffs and types anything. "Anything is taken," he says. Sam doesn't respond. Dean rolls his eyes again and types out a few other ideas, getting an irritating "this username has been taken" pop up every single time. Impala67? Taken. DeanRules? Taken. SamSucks? Taken. He snorts quietly and saves that information for later, figuring he can send Sam a link when he's not expecting it. "Ughhh," he groans. "Next hunt better just be a basic salt and burn. Actually, how about--" SaltAndBurn YOUR USERNAME MUST USE 7-10 CHARACTERS He hits backspace. Takes out the AND and re-types the rest. REGISTRATION SUCCESSFUL. "Finally,"  he says, and then-- "Shit. Typo." The username he's managed to get for himself is SaltBun. Which... whatever, it's not like he's actually planning to use the account for anything. Once he's logged in, the site forces him to answer several question in a row about his interests. Little pictures representing various topics. Cooking? Sure. Cars? Yep. Movies? An incredibly vague topic, but it'll do if it lets him complete the registration already. The landing page he finally gets directed to is pre-populated with posts the site algorithm thinks he'll like, and right there at the top is a recipe for an apple pie with cheddar cheese baked into the crust. It looks incredible. His mouth waters just looking at it. "Oh, hell yes," he says. "You find something?" Sam asks from the driver's seat, glancing over expectantly. "Oh, uh-- no, not yet." "If you're looking at porn--" "It's 9:30 in the morning and I'm in the car next to you, why in the fuck would I be looking at porn? Just gimme a minute." Pulling a face, he quickly clicks the little save for later button at the bottom of the pie post, and navigates over to Lacey's blog. Here's hoping she's said something that'll help them track down the thing that took her.

For the ask meme, 13 and 25!

13) your strengths as an author

Why would you, a stranger to whom I am definitely not married, ask the most impossible to answer question on this list? I genuinely don’t know what my strengths are. 

I’m going to answer the second question and then come back to it.

OKAY. I think maybe I’m good at evoking visuals? Idk man.

25) copy/paste a few sentences or a short paragraph that you’re particularly proud of

In terms of fic, I’m pretty proud of this drabble I wrote based on a prompt from you Sara, who you apparently are not.

In terms of original work, here’s a tiny part of a script that I’m pretty fond of, but which is just out of context enough that I can safely share it here :P

I APPRECIATE YOU GUSHING! Really. aUGH I can’t believe you have enjoyed all of those fics! I can’t wait to get back to The Katsudon Diaries after tPoL is finished for a fun, kind of angst-free jaunt! :)

@deathbycoldopen replied to your post “38. “You fainted…straight into my arms. You know, if you wanted my...”

ahhh this is amazing, is there more to this au, and if not can I interest you in a bribe to make more?????

ah thank you! I’m glad you like it. ;u; <3 <3 <3 I have one more fic in this... verse, I guess? does two fics make it a verse? xD;

I cannot speak for all Asian-Americans, or even Asian-American men. Please take this as my personal opinion of the kind of stuff that bothers me. And I apologize in advance for being kind of wordy, but I have LOTS of thoughts and they’re very complicated, so it’s hard for me to put them all down.

I have kind of a hierarchy for things that bother me, ranging from “super-racist, holy crap do NOT do this” to “argh” to “sigh.” I encounter “argh” and “sigh” level stuff all the time, everywhere. YOI fandom is no exception.

Super-racist stuff in fandom I will nope out of. Won’t read, won’t like, won’t recommend, will silently grit my teeth at all the positive comments. Argh and sigh? If the fic is otherwise redeeming, I’ll keep going, and sometimes I will even love it.

Super-racist stuff, IMO, is almost never okay; there’s just almost no way to present a character in which it makes sense, and so unless you’re an insider (in the case of writing a Yuuri that speaks imperfect English, that means a Japanese person from Japan who has gone to an English-speaking country and experienced racism for the way you spoke) you probably don’t have the experience to know how to write that well, and your dominant culture has probably given you an idea of how you think that feels for the person who is speaking that is absolutely counter to how it actually feels internally.

Stuff that isn’t at that level--the “argh” and “sigh” level--is harder to classify, and there are fewer hard and fast rules as to whether I argh or sigh. There are things I can say bother me, but someone will handle it so well that I’ll love it unreservedly.

Again, what follows relates to my personal tolerance--other people (including Asians) will not be bothered at all by things that really grate at me. On the other hand, there are things I can tolerate, that will really hurt other people.

Things that hit somewhere between “argh” and “sigh” level for me include: desexualization of Yuuri, making Yuuri a lot less competent than he canonically is, saying that Yuuri has a tiny dick, treating Yuuri as having less agency and being incredibly dependent on others to function, treating Phichit as an adjunct to Yuuri without his own wants and wishes, and... a lot of other stuff. YOI fandom isn’t perfect; it just mostly avoids super-racist.

These things can be quite complicated--there’s a real difference between writing an Asian character who is a complex, wholly functional human being, who is ace, or who has a small dick, or who has difficulty making choices--and writing a caricature where those same things feel like ugly, painful racial stereotypes. I don’t want to suggest categorical rules in these categories. 

(You can already see why this is so complicated--“small dick” is both an Asian stereotype and an insult born of shitty toxic masculinity. Men can have small and/or no dicks and still be men, and be sexy and lovable and good lovers. Likewise, Asian men can have big dicks, small dicks, or no dicks at all. Dick isn’t indicative of anything at all, and in a fic that recognizes that, I do not mind. I do mind when the fic unconsciously accepts as a given that bigger dick=better, and Yuuri is tiny.)

I think it would fall into the “super-racist, don’t do this unless you’re black and can process how this hurts and how to alleviate that hurt” to call an African-American character “boy.” I don’t think there’s a context in which a non-black person can use that word, applied to a black person, in fiction and not get tangled up in the history of that word applied to that person. (There’s a giant asterisk here about portraying racism in fiction that I’m not going to get into because it’s so massive.)

But Yuuri is not African-American, and the characters are not American, and I don’t think it carries that same context. That means that it depends heavily on how it’s handled.

In terms of Yuuri being called a boy, in my mind, this depends on a lot of factors that depend on who’s doing it and what the context is. I feel like friends saying, “Yeah, boy!” to each other isn’t a big deal. The word “boy”--in addition to the specific usage for African-Americans--can sometimes signify friendship (“that’s my boy!”) or queerness or a number of other things other than “young man.” I’ve had Victor call Yuuri a boy--as in “I don’t kiss boys who don’t cry over dogs”--and in that case, Victor is clearly assigning himself as being in the same classification as Yuuri, and that doesn’t personally bother me (obviously, or I wouldn’t have done it). It also wouldn’t bother me to have Yakov calling Yuuri a boy--Yakov is seventy, so both Yuuri and Victor are absolute CHILDREN to him. It probably would bother me if Yakov thought of Victor as a man and Yuuri as a boy, though. It’s more likely to be the reverse--Yakov has known Victor since he was a literal boy, and he met Yuuri as a man.

You didn’t suggest this, but I would also personally be leary of claiming that because “boy” is a slur used to put African-Americans in their place, it should not ever be used to describe Asian-Americans. I personally try not to disclaim ownership over the specific types of racism experienced by black people. Asians are (mostly) not insiders to the incredibly harmful use of “boy” in this case, and representing that it harms them equally implies that they would have the ability to call African-Americans “boy” as insiders, and...no. No. We don’t, we can’t, that’s not okay.

Asians experience racism, but it is not the same kind of racism that black people experience. As Asians can often be guilty of anti-black prejudice, I think it’s especially important to not coopt the African-American experience.