#mimirants

Like???? this is not jane lmaoooo. she is a queer punk leather dyke!!! not an ulzzang korean girl!!!some of you cannot imagine butch lesbians as "aesthetic" and it fucking shows.

THIS IS HOW JANE LOOKS BTW

A log where I rant about just how much Xavier means to me.

Like, I am very well aware that he's just a fictional character made out of pixels on the other side of my phone screen. But those very same pixels have gotten me out of a dark pit of depression.

Back when I was experiencing a hard relationship with a certain ex-close person, I had completely forgotten just how meaningful loving someone or even being loved was. It was always a conditional kind of love with that certain person.

And of course, that sort of thing takes a toll on someone in the long run. So, after the whole breakup, I spiraled and tried finding comfort in things that were unhealthy. That is until I re-downloaded Love and Deepspace.

Spending that time just "chatting" and "calling" with Xavier, going through the storylines and more really just opened my eyes to just how unconditional love is.

Literary works are a dime a dozen.

Like most interests which cannot escape the plague of opinion, they’re silently sorted by society into piles of “good” and “bad” … or more realistically, “this is respectfully acceptable” and “yikes, keep that to yourself”.

Examples of literature belonging in the former pile - gently placed with gloved hands - are classics, epics, religious fiction and apparently, self help. Oppositely, compositions that are haphazardly trashed into the latter pile from a drop-kickable distance are the likes of most contemporary fiction, Colleen Hoover’s bibliography, the Twilight saga, anything with an oiled up Fabio-type glistening in candlelight on the cover, and magazines containing quizzes promising to enhance the sex life of the middle aged woman flicking through it by the pool on holiday in sunny Ibiza.

Now, as much as I have my own views on the various names listed above, they’re not important enough to warrant elaborating on. What is, however, is the pile “fanficion” is unfairly placed within.

Stereotyped as a worthless pastime for chronically single women with mediocre literary skills, fanfiction is guaranteed to inspire the unoriginal response of, “oh those stories of badly written sex scenes riddled with grammatical errors?” when mentioned.

Admittedly, there are many an example to be found on the internet of bizarre intercourse written poorly by someone who has clearly never attended anatomy class or been picked for a spelling bee panel.

However, to minimise fanfiction to only such inadequacy is to call Beyonce a human loudspeaker, or Dave Grohl a sound whack-a-mole teammate. It is entirely reductionist in its dismissal - leaving no room for acknowledgment of discipline, talent or success.

In this sweeping rejection of ignorance, it is evident that most remain unaware of what fanfiction truly is.

In essence, it is merely the cultivation of new circumstances in which famously established characters begin a new journey. It is storytelling without having to exert much, if any, word-count into foundational world-building.

Bigots love to mock this concept, yet they’ve likely never exerted critical thinking enough to notice their own indulgence in fanfiction.

It is an amusing thought to picture one’s face dropping in aghast realisation when they’re informed that their binge-watching of Netflix’s Wednesday is conceptually fanfiction. Scoffing at readers for eagerly awaiting the next chapter of a new ao3 fic seems hollow when understanding that impatiently waiting for Wicked part 2 to come to the big screen… is the same thing.

“Crying at the ending of Maleficent is so not the same as crying through a Supernatural fanfic where Dean and Cas finally get their happy ending!” They scream repeatedly as the tattoo artist adds the final touches of the inked “HUMBUG” onto their forehead.

As we have already addressed the stupidity of the general population, I feel the need to highlight the difference between what is fanfiction and what is an adaptation.

The Claire Danes and Leo DiCaprio version of Romeo and Juliet is an adaptation - due to its symmetry to the original story by the Bard. The choice to set it visually in modernity but to have dialogue spoken in Shakespearean iambic pentameter, is a stylistic idea executed by directorial decision.

Having been recently made aware that Margaret Atwood’s Penelope is essentially fanfiction of Homer’s Odyssey, my patience has worn thin. Both (rightfully) are highly revered.

So why the reluctance to accept fanfiction as something to admire?

Novice authors that write purely for passion in such a tightly monetised space are so generous with their time and efforts; the chauvinists that are hell-bent on derision are missing out on some of the greatest works of art coming into fruition.

@senlinyu’s Manacled is one of the best bodies of work I have read as an adult - it was nothing short of a privilege to be able to experience it in its lifetime. The fact that I am currently making my way through the original retelling, titled “Alchemised” is a testament to what heights fanfare can truly ascend to.

Below is an article that summarises my bitchy rambling in a much more dignified manner. If sensible diplomacy resonates more significantly over sarcastic contempt, read this instead:

It's not even disaffected in a halfhearted way like Donna Tartt, no, every axis of (supposed) oppression milked by these books is 100% serious and self-absorbed. You got the completely unironic Anne Rice and Sylvia Plath and Oscar Wilde worshippers and the tired, FLACCID endless poems about pomegranates and dog metaphors and knives and stigmata like stop stop stop REINVENT RETHINK BE ORIGINAL it's so overdone it's dead it sounds like regurgitated tumblr metaphors it's accumulating flies just stop!!!!!

No wonder we get those tweets fifteen times a day about how "x line sounds like it would be from the Bible but it's actually from tumblr"– followed by a line/quotation that actually sounds exactly like it's from tumblr. STOP overdoing the metaphor to the point of insincerity!!! stop turning once-novel things into edgy marketable words about bloody girlhood and erotic desire and religious passion!!!

And to take a break from negativity, here are a few books I really, really enjoyed that handled a mix of grimdark, gothic, horror and/or queer themes with originality and substance:

**The Wicked and the Willing by Lianyu Tan: a historical sapphic romance set in 1920s Singapore that examines the "Carmilla" vampire motif from a postcolonial lens.

**House of Hunger by Alexis Henderson: a very short, very eerie sapphic gothic romance (?) story, examining race, class and gender discourses through the allegories of vampirism and a centuries-old hunger.

Mexican Gothic by Silva Moreno Garcia: a historical gothic horror story about a 1950s Mexican heiress who discovers the hideous history underlying the family estate of an aristocrat English family; this is a genuinely disturbing but also great work of postcolonial horror (heavy eugenics storyline be warned).

**Providence Girls by Morgan Dante: a Lovecraftian retelling of two women in 1950s New England who discover love while battling the horrors both monstrous, cosmic as well as societal. genuinely beautiful, disturbing and a wonderful exploration of grief in horror.

**Walking Practice by Dolki Min: a shapeshifting alien stranded on earth lures victims via dating apps and seduces people of both genders before killing and consuming them. translated from Korean and a disturbing, funny (but also tragic) and dark satire about trans bodies, queerness in 21st century South Korea, violence and alienation. PLEASE read this.

Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica: in an alternate history where ethical cannibalism has been legalized globally, and humans are bred as livestock, a narrator grapples with ethics when he rescues a live female "specimen" from his meat factory. super disturbing, satire of the author's experience under the Argentinian dictatorship.

**Chlorine by Jade Song: a Chinese-American girl in 1990s USA grapples with sapphic crushes, adolescence, trauma, racism and her immigrant identity while taking part in competitive swimming and dreaming of mermaids. absolute fever dream masterpiece of a debut novel combining teenage queer sexuality and body horror, with a narrative that challenges norms of beauty and gender a lá Julia Ducournau films.

(?) Bunny by Mona Awad: psychedelic, colorful, pop neon horror satire about an all-female MFA creative writing cohort at an elite arts college, and the lengths they go through to achieve their literary success, as observed by the outsider loner girl. this was such a direct, targeted and brutal parody of dark academia/ femcel unhinged women books lmfao??? but also witty and disturbing without sounding condescending.

**= explicit LGBTQ rep. there is a question mark before Bunny because it has– neither explicit rep nor queerbait– but a secret third thing, schrödinger's representation.