#fandom thots

McKay and Langdon - she’s admitted to struggling with addiction in the past and I think she could offer him support from a more understanding place and I just want to see them become good friends

McKay and Collins - idk we just didn’t get to see them interact a whole lot and I wanna know what kind of dynamic they’d have

I wanna see all the women interact more

Abbott and Santos - his comment about her being badass for doing the REBOA. I think he could be a really good mentor for Santos. They both seem to like taking risks and Abbott seems the most patient of the attendings imo.

Whitaker and Javadi - they’re both students so I’d love to see them become better friends that have each others backs while they both navigate becoming doctors. I feel like they also both maybe have some baggage regarding their parents (Javadi obviously does) and I think it would be nice to see them be supportive of each other in that regard.

Honestly we’ve mostly just seen Javadi with McKay and I loved that but i wanna see more of her in general. Maybe more with Mel or Abbott. Oooh or Garcia, I love the idea of Javadi picking up some of Garcias take-no-shit attitude and learning how to stand up for herself a little more.

I wanna see a kinda of mentorship relationship with Whitaker and Mohan. Idgaf what Robby says, Mohans thorough approach with patients is awesome and I wish more doctors were like her, and we’ve seen that Whitaker is kind of similar with how he is with patients and I’d love to see him become Mohan 2 and they just BOTH take their time to make patients comfortable and the satisfaction scores just go way up

I can’t tell if this a toxic trait or a kink… or both, but because my relationships are driven by sexual attraction, I’ve developed a fondness for people who look like celebrities and/or characters I have crushes on 😅

let me be very clear with this, I understand they are their own person and not a replacement – I just think the similarities are fun, like role play and cosplay in one sexy little package

This morning I matched with a man who looks a little like Ewan’s Tom Bennett and he’s a soldier. Y’all, I’m about to ACT UP.

I’m doing this for all the Tom Bennett girlies and the absolute slut their fics have awakened in me

hella intrigued, I asked why, and he said “because he looks out of place in the Rebellion”

and I was like “you’re right and I love that” 

cuz I agree; Kallus in the Rebellion looks like he’s ‘playing a part’. He’s in soft earthy colors, no product in his hair, is letting his beard grow out, but its at odds with his smooth bond villain voice that he can’t seem to turn off. And I love that. 

I love the implication that he’s out of place and still needs time to adjust. That, for whatever reason, he’s still serving ‘posh bad guy’ on the regular. IMO, he doesn’t want to make waves by being someone people aren’t ‘expecting’, which means he’s still not being genuine. And if that’s not the case, if he’s just fuckin in his bones too posh to pull off the butch rebel look he’s going for, that’s great too. Third option? He’s the kind of fucker who thinks its just plain funny to turn on the villain voice around the ppl he’s been trying to kidnap/interrogate/murder for, like, the last 3 years. Also great.

I like the idea that he’s coming out of the Empire off kilter and has to work to find his identity after years of service in an extremely controlling and hostile work environment. I like the idea that he doesn’t feel ‘safe’ to unmask, or perhaps doesn’t even know who the fuck he is under that mask. I like that he’s out of place and yet ppl are still trying for him and accepting him as he comes, bc thats what the Rebellion should be. the Fair Treatment Zeb promised him.

Like the show that EXPLICITLY tells us from the START that this story is about Sam and Dean and in which every season has them sacrifice either themselves or their found family for each other with like almost no hesitation?! DID YOU WATCH THE SHOW?!

DEAN LICHERALLY TELLS SAM THAT THERE IS NOTHING! N O T H I N G THAT HE WOULD EVER PUT ABOVE SAM! Which includes CAS!

NOTE:  This is a version of the response I made to that post going around that is kicked off by someone claiming that AO3 was started “in response to lj deleting account relating to p//edophi|ia and they explicitly support the posting of such works...”

There’s a long list of responses from fandom crones like me, but some of the memory of that whole time is a bit muddied.

Since I was one of the main people in fandom (BtVS fandom at the time) chronicling in real time, I thought it might be interesting to add my .02 and my perspective on what the future holds for Tumblr.

Just to add my voice to the historical context about the foundation of AO3, the Livejournal strikethrough, and mess that Tumblr has started...

I was one of the main people blogging about the LJ strikethrough back in the day while it was all happening. I weirdly ended up being a centralized hub for information about what was happening. Hell, my LJ is even cited as a source on Fanlore, if you can believe it.

Nice to know my journalism degree and my past as a newspaper reporter wasn’t entirely a waste. [j/k -- sort of]

If you want a pretty good idea about the chaos and panic and how quickly it spun out of control, you can start with this post here, and then follow all of the links to subsequent posts as the bad news kept rolling in.

By the way, to this day, I was the only one in fandom who managed to get any kind of response out of the “Warriors for Justice,” a right-wing, Christian supremacist group who started the whole mess.

It should be noted that “Warriors for Justice,” while claiming to be an “organization of volunteers who work with law enforcement” was never anything more than a loose band of RWNJ who happened to frequent a chat board. For whatever reason, they got a bug up their collective asses about LJ and decided to target it.

Keep in mind, this wasn’t that long after LJ had recently been sold to 6 Apart (owners of Wordpress) and they were trying very hard to monetize what was a  freewheeling frontier of blogspace.

To say it wasn’t going well was an understatement.

They had tried ads. Tiered pricing. Just about everything. To make matters worse, LJ really didn’t have a central identity. It had spheres (fandom spheres, support community spheres, slice-of-life spheres, professional spheres, and yes, some spheres of some really dank shit that would be right at home on 4chan), and there wasn’t much crossover between those spheres.

How badly did it go for 6 Apart? LJ is now owned by a Russian company. That pretty much tells you everything right there.

In any case, that’s the commercial background for strike through. 6 Apart was trying like hell to monetize LJ and not really getting anywhere. Along comes “Warriors for Justice” claiming that they are some big, bad group with big, bad connections in the media and that they were going to start making some noise about all the dank shit on LJ.

And 6 Apart pretty much panicked.

And that’s how we got strikethrough (and eventually bold through and eventually fandom moving off of LJ en masse).

I think I should make one thing clear, though. The main target for “Warriors for Justice” was never the pedos and the other really dank shit on LJ. That was just the handy excuse. Their real target was anything they deemed “unchristian.” Or to spell it out in letters you can understand, their real target was this:

LGBTQA

That’s it. That’s what really pissed them off.

And if you didn’t agree with them, you were branded a “pedo” or a pedo apologist.

(They came to really hate me through all this. I was, according to them, the worst of the worst. They tried to get me TOS’d. One small problem:  They had nothing to get me on. There was nothing on my LJ that could be judged obscene under any law or TOS. By the way, the fact that I had to be that “good and nice” online to avoid a TOSing is, simply put, fucked the hell up.)

Read and learn from the posts and the comments on those old LJ posts, young ‘uns. The panic was palpable. People were losing years of their journaled lives, not just fanfic or fan discussions, but also personal entries where they just talked about their lives. And it could all be gone at the snap of a finger with no way to recover any of it. And if you had a paid journal? Too bad. You were out the money, too.

Not everything that squicks you out, not everything that makes you uncomfortable, is inherently bad. It’s your right to be squicked, it’s your right to be uncomfortable. But it’s also your responsibility to curate your own experience. Targeting people because you don’t like their fannish output puts you on the same side as the “Warriors for Justice.” You wind up hurting a lot of innocent people who never did anything to anyone outside of a fictional space.

And if that doesn’t convince you, do one thing for me. Look at the person to your virtual right. Look to the person on your virtual left. Then look in the mirror. Then realize this one simple fact:  sooner or later when you get that perfectly sterile and safe online experience you crave, someone, somewhere, is going to decide that it’s not sterile or safe enough. And that means that one of you, either the person on your right or the person on your left or even the person looking at you from the mirror is going to find themselves out in the cold.

It happens every single time. Every. Single. Time.

Now I’m not saying that Tumblr wasn’t allowing some fucked up shit, but there were ways to handle it properly. THIS IS NOT HANDLING IT PROPERLY.

It’s the beginning of the end, my Chili Babies. I’ve been in this movie before (hell, I had a significant supporting role in the previous movie). Tumblr will tick-tock along for awhile, but I guarantee people are feverishly looking for the next fandom thing because Tumblr has now proven to be unsafe.

At least fanfic writers have AO3. Right now it’s the fanartists who are pretty much screwed until the next new thing comes along.

So I guess:  Good night. Good luck. And I’ll meet you at the new fandom space when you find it.