#moonlightsdreaming

Thanks for sending this Moonlight!!🖤🖤🖤😊😊😊 You’re honestly the sweetest person ever?????🥺🖤

Tbh imma read all the fic/smut I can 😩 (god bless you for your recs tbh 🙏🏽)!!!

Don’t mind I’m just crying 🥺😭

Honestly this is so sweet and also YOURE A LOVELY PRESENCE AND A BLESSYTO THIS FANDOM AND I’M SO HAPPY TO BE YOUR FRIEND!🤗🖤

favorite thing about them: I think I’ve told this story on here before, but Natalie Portman is from two towns over from where I grew up. A year or two before The Phantom Menace came out, I was at Barnes and Noble buying some Star Wars novels. The person working the check out looked at the books I was buying, and then informed me that a girl from her school was cast in a major role in the next movie. As soon as I got home, I looked up everything I could about Portman, because it really meant a whole lot to me that a Israeli-American from my area was going to be in Star Wars, and be in such a huge role in Star Wars at that. Once I was actually seeing the movie, all that other amazing stuff like being a politician and being respected as a leader it was all secondary to the knowledge that Portman was a big movie star and also in some small way like me. She grew up in my area, her family was Israeli, she liked science and she was in Star Wars. As far as my ten year old self was concerned, that was the coolest thing in the history of ever. With time I did come to appreciate Padmé’s commitment to politics, to peace, to doing what she believed was right and carving out the appropriate systems to achieve a stable and lasting greater good for the galaxy, the sort that can NOT be gained through war, but there is still a part of me that still views her through the lens of the child I was way back when.

least favorite thing about them: I wouldn’t say it is my least favorite thing per say, but it is def. her biggest flaw and it kind of bothers me to see it glossed over time and time again by the fandom as a whole? Which is Padmé’s massively unchecked privilege (oh yes my father the PROFESSOR WHO TEACHES ARCHITECTURE AT AN UNIVERSITY is ~~~a simple builder~~~, and let me tell you former slave boy about my days at this massive lake mansion as a child as if this is no biggie, and I think I’ll wear my haute couture on this trip to the crappiest desert to ever be crappy even though I have been to Tatooine before and should know better and when one of the people in my employ opens up to me about the fact she is struggling to pay her rent my reaction is to blame the system, and blame it so hard I build an entire speech for the senate around that fact, rather than examine my own role in this problem AS HER EMPLOYER WHO COULD RAISE HER FUCKING SALARY IF I SO DESIRED - also did she even get Tekla’s permission before telling the senate about how poor and unable to provide for her family she is???), I mean compared to the flaws of other people in canon (*cough* ANAKIN *cough*) it is really no big deal, but it is a real character flaw that deserves to be explored (I am faaaaaaaaaar more interested in Padmé as a flawed human and not Padmé as a perfect icon on a pedestal).

favorite line:  “So this is how liberty dies … with thunderous applause.”

brOTP: I have two Brotps for Padmé, Bail Organa and Sabé (I also ship her with Padmé buuuuut yaknow)

OTP: It took me some digging (sorry for the extreme delay between when you asked this and when I answered it, lol) but I found some meta I wrote a while back in a conversation with @sethnakht that really sums up a lot of my feelings with regards to Padmé and Anakin. Because that is part of the problem with Padmé, since (unfortunately) so much of her characterization in the movies themselves was tied to her primarily being there to be the object of Anakin’s affections, it is a key part of who she is and it is very hard to really get at who Padmé is, romantically speaking, apart from Anakin. I also think they are both really…. fucked up romantically in a way that makes their relationship work but would not work with others. I should also say that I was not the least bit sober when I wrote the quoted text:

Anakin and Padmé are that car crash in action I can not look away from or stop thinking about? If that makes sense?

As like… I really 10000000% get why each of them is in love with the other, it makes sense. But I also think each of them had very very different expectations, desires, and long term plans and goals (aka one of them had these things and the other did not at all) and things were compounded by things like them never spending more than a week together ever.

And they fascinate me. They reaaaaally fascinate me, as they both bring out the best and the worst in each other. They draw these thing out of each other and both are so very devoted to the point of being unable to imagine not being together. They are so fucked up, and so sweet, and so wrong, and so right, and they never ever could have worked in the long term, yet they could have managed to get to a healthy place and actually make it if they both just really talked things through.

So like… yeah.

Just… yeah.

Weirdly it’s like if someone asked me if I like Vader? I mean I do on the level of him being an interesting fictional character, but 100000000% not as a person? It’s like that, but for a relationship. They are soooooooooooo good for the story and fit it just right and make so much sense on that level… but I just… I really don’t know if I’d call that shipping it?

Although I suppose enjoying seeing how they play off each other - the ways Anakin draws out the parts of Padmé she never let herself explore too much in the past (selfish desire, lack of planning and forethought, just being young and silly and this weird playacting of normalcy and her pretend suppressed desired life where she just quits politics and is young and in love played out a weekend every other month), how Anakin both builds so much up around her and yet really barely really thinks of actually planning things with her. She isn’t someone he will change for really, a life with her is not a real thing for him, not something he values/desires enough to leave the Jedi for, not really. She is more an object for him to possess than a full and real other person with her own wants and desires for him to consider. He wants everything all at once and will not confront ways he can have something stable and real. He’s fine with how it is so long as she actually puts things down to be there when he is available and it is all such a massive enabling thing for both of them and neither of them would really work with anyone else, I don’t think, as there are these parts of themselves they hide just for each other, and these things they can do for each other no one else can, and just… yeah. YEAH.

nOTP: This made me for a sec try to imagine the worst possible Padmé ships I could think of, and then check AO3 to see if anyone had written any of them. As soon as I discovered 14 whole Padmé/Palpatine fics on there, I decided it would probably be best if I turned back now and stopped seeking that sort of thing out.

random headcanon: Sola knows about her relationship with Anakin, but her parents don’t.

unpopular opinion: I’ve actually never been a fan of her elaborate dresses and makeup. 

song i associate with them: Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn tbh

favorite picture of them:

I have written ONE Sailor Moon fic and it was porn, I’m not linking that.

Lady, I cannot draw pictures for your fic if I do not have any fic.

moonlightsdreaming replied to your photo: My first perfect win in the Advanced arena… and...

I want to do more in the Arena but without better 5* characters (and I have no idea which one I should promote), it seems impossible and without a steady source of dueling crests it seems foolhardy to try…!

moonlightsdreaming replied to your post: “I want to start by saying that @captain-janegay is a truly amazing...”:

I've gone through some similar stuff to this, the struggle to balance my fannish interests (vs fixations) and trying to pretend I wasn't that interested in it (which led to bottling those feelings up), and I've discovered the same thing you have--trying to keep myself from this thing I really loved, even when it was causing me pain because people were dicks, wasn't good for my mental health. What WAS good for me was posting things I enjoyed, just because I wanted to see them on my own blog, what WAS good for me was to immediately stop reading anything I knew was going to be someone being a jerk and just automatically blocking them (but, in fairness, yours is a lot more personal than mine was *hugs*), and eventually I started having really long stretches of Good Mental Health days. It's something you'll have to figure out for yourself, but I have often found solace in the idea of, "Oh, I'm annoying the people who are assholes? LET ME DO IT SOME MORE, LET ME YELL ABOUT MY FEELINGS SOME MORE." and then flat-out ignoring anyone who tries to start drama. It's not easy, I've had a lot of bad days, but it sounds like you want to get back into the swing of fandom, that having that outlet might help you, and, you know, selfishly I want to encourage you back. (There's lots of options, too. You could always start a side blog if you just want a place to be a fan without the baggage attached to this name, for example.) But whatever you decide, whether you come back or whether you decide it's not worth it, I am sending you all the well wishes I can. ♥

Yeah, I have been toying with the idea of creating a side blog simply to post the contents of my many many never ending gdocs somewhere. 

But of course one of the things I’ve found I love about the gdocs is they are living documents I can keep returning to to edit and alter thoughts as my feelings change, recording the evolution of thought as it progresses, and posting it almost feels like I’d be locking in to a set solid state, so I dunno?

But yeah, not talking about the fandom stuff, it really does have a negative impact on me, mental health wise. It’s just isolating, really, because it isn’t like I magically stopped loving science fiction/fantasy or stopped having a lot of feelings about it, all that happened is I stopped having people to talk to about it, and have felt increasingly alone as a result. I know, logically, the rewards of discussing stuff online are very much there, I mean look at the friendships I have made, such as this one!

Yet the negatives, the very real negatives I experienced, are also very much.... there, and they terrify me because I can only deal with so much? Being called that slur, the one I was getting all the time before I stopped posting, it isn’t something I can just deal with. It really deeply impacts me in a very profound way, and as much as I want to be someone who can pretend that friendship is a force strong enough to mitigate things like, it really isn’t, especially not in this current climate.

It’s hard, and it’ll prob be slow going, but I do hope I will be able to figure out something that works so I can have the best of both worlds, be able to make friends who share my passions and interests, engage in meaningful conversations with others about those interests, and also avoid the drama and slurs and wild accusations (I bring it up a lot, but I am never getting over that time I was told I was a nazi sympathizer because I, the child of a Holocaust survivor, am never comfortable with fictional groups in fantasy settings being called as bad as real nazis who murdered real not at all fictional people like my grandmother - and especially because I was worried about what it means in an age of rampant holocaust denial to say FICTIONAL groups and events are exactly the same as actual real political groups and genocides).

moonlightsdreaming replied to your post: “moonlightsdreaming replied to your post: “I want to start by saying...” :

There's also nothing to say that you would have to jump in with both feet all at once again, you could just post some smaller things or the ones you really, really want to have up, as a way to test the waters again. While, yes, these are on-line friendships, there's very much something to how they are still friendships and isolating ourselves from them DOES feel very lonely and has a great impact on us. It's a hard line to struggle with, everyone lands in a different (spot and will differ even within themselves on different days!) and I wish I had a magical wand to wave, because I know that feeling of, "Fandom would be great if people would just LEAVE ME THE HELL ALONE." and having to look at whether the rewards outweigh the risks. There have been times I've distanced myself or genuinely thought I was going to leave fandom all together because of the way certain fans wouldn't leave me alone and it was heartbreaking because the problems and solutions felt SO completely out of my control, that I wanted to stay so badly, but I didn't know how much more I could take. For me, setting down hard boundaries and talking about them a bit more (as in, "If you try to put snotty comments on my posts, I DO NOT WANT IT, I AM NOT HERE FOR IT, I WILL BLOCK YOU AND MOVE TF ON." in a handful of posts on my blog) seemed to really help, but that was also after months of feeling really horrible about the whole thing and really upset at what was out of my ability to control and how much it was starting to really hurt. I think, if nothing else, even just talking about it like you have been in these two posts is a really good step towards untangling all those feelings, though. Yeah, sure, I'd love to lure you back into fandom, but even if it goes no further than just these conversations, I still think you're doing a great job at fighting through the absolute SLOG that is this kind of emotional minefield war zone. It's not easy, anyone in your position will have bad days, but you're still trying to undo all those knots and that's a really admirable thing. ♥

Oh yeah, there is no way I am going right on back to where I was. I mean there was a period where was posting a fairly lengthy chapter of a fic every other week, liveblogging as I consumed content, posting meta, and more all at once and all within the same fandom. I doubt I will be returning to many of those activities ever, tbh.

This was harder to answer than it had any right to be.

1) Every day I walk through the park near my apartment. Every day on my favorite path I see a variety of small animals. That always makes me smile. Here is a picture I took today of a bunny I see in the same spot every day! That bunny always makes me smile.

2) Oh gosh, this is so the one that gave me trouble. It really is hard to pick one canon/fandom out of all the many I love. All the worlds I love to get lost in. In part what makes this so impossible to answer is it is hard to think of a fandom where both the source work and the fandom itself are both something I would advocate for all my friends to take part in? Hmmmmm... All that said, if I was to name one thing, I’d go with a book fandom I think. Maybe something like Tamora Pierce‘s Emelan, or N.K. Jemison’s Inheritance Trilogy universe? I’m not sure.

3) The most Ridiculous thing Justice ever did was spend several years pretending he couldn’t clean his own ass, simply because he enjoyed the attention I gave him. For years, YEARS, he never cleaned himself. I took him to vet after vet, and they all agreed, he was simply too fat to reach. So I would wipe him down, chase after him with wet wipes and clean him multiple times a day. Then a few years ago I went on vacation, and asked a friend to come by and feed him while I was away. I explained his absurd inability to clean himself, and she agreed to give him a good wipe down when she fed him. Except, on her very first day on feeding duty, she texted me to let me know he was cleaning himself. Right in front of her. It seems the only reason he wasn’t doing it in the first place was because he knew I’d do it for him, and when I vanished he wanted to make it clear that only I get to wipe his ass down for him. Anyway after that I stopped indulging him, and he seems to have figured out that the jig is fully up.