#paperlesslove30

Sometime between the end of Season 2 and finishing “Ascension”, I hit this epic milestone. Which honestly was unthinkable when I first started out. As some of you know, I started this blog so I could have an outlet for my first Sprousehart fanfic, because I was worried I’d get hate for writing RPF. Paperlesscrown the Blog was meant to be a failsafe, a buffer zone.

How wonderful to recognise that sometimes, when you’re expecting hate, you get the exact opposite: love and friendship and joyful flails and inspiration.

So, thank you. Holy smokes. I didn’t expect 3000 of you to be following me, but here you all are. Whether you started following for fics or shitposts or just because you wanted to flail with someone who also loved Riverdale and Bughead and Sprousehart... THANK YOU.

There’s so many people to thank and love and show appreciation to. It’s not possible to contain them to one post. So here’s what I’m doing:

I am doing a post a day for 30 days for friends, mutuals, writers and buddies I’ve grown to love through this blog. It’s an exercise in gratitude for this fandom that’s given so much to me. Sometimes I’ll write about one person, sometimes I’ll write about a few. But as much as possible, I want to do a whole month of appreciation for the wonderful, amazing people who have my fandom experience such a dream.

(In celebration of 3K followers, I am doing 30 days of positive shoutouts to all the incredible people I’ve met through this fandom. Here’s Day 1!)

Everyone knows @jandjsalmon to be a rockstar. The class president. The school captain. The voice of reason who also happens to have the voice of a fangirl. 

But here’s who I know Jandy to be: a true friend and an empowering force.

I first encountered Jandy when I crept into her inbox as an anon and shyly asked if I should pursue writing this Sprousehart fanfic that I couldn’t get out of my head. I didn’t know who else to turn to. In all honesty, I expected to be shut down. But I wasn’t. Instead, we managed to get in touch via D/M’s and she ended up being my beta for “Tomorrow” and every single fic I’ve written since then. I’d never written fanfic before - the best I’d managed was a half-baked Dramione idea. So Jandy is basically, indirectly responsible for my entire fanfiction career.

Jandy doesn’t ask to be heard or listened to: she just is, because she’s usually right. She's like a life beta. If I have questions about the show, about Bughead, about Dylan’s teeth, about Cole’s college career, about Sprousehart, about the fandom, about things in my actual real life, I go to her. I know I’ll get a good answer.

She has been a steady, unwavering friend from the very beginning, my Wakefield twin (shoutout to all the Sweet Valley fans who understand this reference) and I cannot imagine my Riverdale experience without her. 

(In celebration of 3K followers, I am doing 30 days of positive shoutouts to all the incredible people I’ve met through this fandom. Here’s Day 3!)

Fandom can be exhausting, y’all. Participation in it vacillates between screaming excitement and furious uproar; between ecstatic crying and angry crying. The entire thing leaves you with emotional whiplash.

Which is why you need your constants. You can’t operate alone. You need calm, measured, rational people who will usher you through your freak-outs and talk you off the ledge when Bughead breaks up for the second time. Or when the inevitable “did SH break up because he didn’t like her photo” anons circulate. You need people who talk your language and keep you sane but also know how to fangirl and flail with you.

Enter my brain trust, my B&G girls - @a92vm @amab1060 and @gingerheel. Together, we make either the four Sex and the City girls (although that doesn’t work, because we have three Mirandas and one Samantha), or the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Either way, they are my lifeline, my constants.

I’ve already spazzed out on @a92vm, so today’s about the amazing @amab1060 and @gingerheel.

Let’s start with @amab1060. Let’s start with how you could basically just follow her blog and no-one else and still know everything about SH. Let’s start with how she deals with anons with such patience and kindness but also fierceness. It was amab who taught me the motto that I live by in fandom: be kind, but take no shit. In other words, be nice and respectful, but be intolerant of anyone who impinges on your boundaries. She’s a legend in the fandom, but to me, she’s a smart, valuable and awesome friend.

As for @gingerheel, she was one of the first friends I made in the fandom. We bonded over fact-checking for “Coming Home” (because she’s a damn OG and could probably write a SH history book), shared opinions on our favourite fanfics and flailed over our love for Lainey Gossip and the Fug Girls. She’s sharp as a tack, thoughtful, and an amazing cheerleader. Whenever she tells me that she likes my fics, I take it onboard, because I value and trust her opinion so much.

(In celebration of 3K followers, I am doing 30 days of positive shoutouts to all the incredible people I’ve met through this fandom. Here’s Day 6!)

There is a massive Australian contingent in the Bughead family, and I am super proud to be part of it. We’re a tight-knit bunch, mostly because we’re online at the weirdest of times (everyone else has gone to bed and cried over the latest episode, and we’re still counting down the minutes to the Netflix drop. Haha), and our humour is odd and a little weird and we make strange references all the time. Whatever, we’re cool, okay?

Our side of the Riverdale fandom is ably captained by the loudest, funniest, kookiest Kookabughead of all. That’s right - you know who I’m talking about. It’s the lovely and hilarious @smoochmejuggie​.

Teegz and I got into the fandom roughly around the same time. We realised quickly that we had a lot in common - mainly a love of dirty jokes and a tendency to yell at each other across the void. It was the foundation of a true and wonderful friendship.

Teegz is a prolific and awesome writer, and most of you probably know her for her wonderful fics. A lot of the writers in the fandom would also know her as a constant, supportive presence in their inboxes. When I’ve had shitty days of not believing in myself, of staring desperately at the blinking cursor on a blank document, somehow, she’s always come through with words of love and encouragement. It’s like she senses negativity and sets out on a mission to squash it.

She is kind and funny and a constant source of laughter for me, for all of us - one of the brighter, sweeter spots of the fandom. I’m so glad that I know her and that I’ve experienced fandom life with her always on the horizon, ready with a quip or two (or, you know, an amazing Photoshopped picture of Jughead on Buddy Franklin’s body, lolol). 

(In celebration of 3K followers, I am doing 30 days of positive shoutouts to all the incredible people I’ve met through this fandom. Here’s Day 7... a little late!)

Do you ever have those mini freak-outs when someone infinitely cooler than you likes or reblogs your post and adds a flail-y caption? This happens to me on a regular basis because, let’s face it, there are some amazingly cool people here on Tumblr.

Anyway, this actually happened to me when @stark reblogged two of my fics last year. And then it happened again when she reblogged some random shitpost I put up. I replied, she replied, some weird gifs were exchanged, and suddenly I was friends with one of the cool girls in the cafeteria.

Mila is an incredible and gifted creator - she is a wonderful writer and a gif queen. She rarely ventures out to share her opinion, but when she does, it’s usually accurate and right. Her blog is also the most organised you’ll ever see - her tags are on point and her aesthetic is always flawless.

But here’s why Mila is truly special - she has a gift for taking the disparate threads of fandom and creating a community out of it. She brings people together through a unique blend of positivity, common sense, passion and organisation. If she chose to run someone’s presidential campaign, they would probably win, because she’s always two steps ahead of the pack, anticipating needs and problems and solving them with remarkable ease. I imagine her as someone who forges paths for others to tread upon - someone who pioneers ideas and movements.

More than that, personally for me, Mila is an incredible and supportive friend - the kind who’ll support you and your BFF’s weird headcanons of Cole using Korean face masks, the kind who would wait in the wings to fight your battles if you ask her to. She is remarkably kind and funny and just an all-round wonderful soul.

(In celebration of 3K followers, I am doing 30 days of positive shoutouts to all the incredible people I’ve met through this fandom. Here’s Day 4!)

Do you ever talk to a friend so much that you’ve basically (and quite literally) written an entire fic in your D/M’s? Welcome to my friendship with the wonderful @theatreofexpression!

Ava and I first started chatting six or seven months ago. We were messaging about my SH fics way back when there were only two of them (“Tomorrow” and “Coming Home”), and her insight on them was so good, so spot-on, that I invited her to jump onboard as a second beta for “Apparitions”. 

It was an epic journey - 11K words of pain and endless conversations and constant editing. But she and Jandy were such incredible cheerleaders that I managed to stumble across the line. Ever since then, I’ve spoken to her daily, constantly, about anything and everything.

Seriously, everything:

Crazy idea about an Ocean’s 11 Bughead AU? Send to Ava.

Random thoughts on Duan’s newest vlog? Send to Ava.

All-caps SH flailing? Send to Ava.

Angry rant on Trump’s latest tweet? Send to Ava.

Extended appraisal of Aussie guys and how hot they are? Send to Ava.

Existential crisis as a writer? Send to Ava.

Other fun parts of being friends with her: She and I have headcanons for about 26 smutty fics at this point in our D/M’s (hahahahahahahaha. She also knows the extra reason why I’m laughing at this). She can flail and meta with the best of them. She talks me off a ledge when I feel like my work is trash. She prefers Cole while I prefer Dylan, so that means we don’t have to share. She’s upfront and honest.

I’m truly thankful that I met her in this fandom - that I have someone I can throw not just ideas but points of discussion to, knowing that we’ll have a long, thorough and satisfying conversation about it.

(Omg, guys. I am SO late on these. I’m gonna start pumping out like two a day.)

The other day, I called @gershwinn​ a Lili fiend (which he is). But before that, he was my school bus buddy. And before that, he was the OG shipper.

Nick was one of the first people I noticed posting regularly about Riverdale and Sprousehart. When I was still lurking, I basically reblogged everything from him. I loved his happy-go-lucky attitude, his realness, his passion for the show and for a certain Miss Lili Reinhart.

But let’s pause there. Let’s all take a moment for the fact that literally anytime we see Lili looking like a goddess (i.e. everyday), our first thought as a fandom is, “Is Nick okay? Did he survive this? Should we send help?” LOL. I love that. I love that he’s such a dedicated, unabashed fan, and he lets everyone know about it, too.

(Also, he is one of the quickest gif makers on this fandom and I literally think he’s made of magic, there is no other reason.)

Nick and I live in weird timezones, so literally when I’d go to sleep, he’d just be waking up. So back in the days when we’d all freak out over the smallest SH breadcrumbs, I’d wake up to multiple messages from him about whatever it was I missed. And we’d both flail over it. Repeatedly.

As for the school bus buddy comment, this is my forever headcanon about my friendship with Nick:

We take the same bus, and we usually sit in the same back corner. We captain our schools’ debate teams, and more than once we haven’t made it through our speeches because we’ve ended up laughing at each other. At parties, we sit in a corner and judge people while you keep trying to show me pictures of your crush (“I get it, Nick, you like her legs” “PFFFT. As if you haven’t been showing me all your creepy pictures of this Norse god dude”)... after graduation, we bribe the bus company to let us take a picture together in the bus with our caps and gowns on 🙌🏽🙏🏽

(In celebration of 3K followers, I am doing 30 days of positive shoutouts to all the incredible people I’ve met through this fandom. Here’s Day 9 - superrrr late!)

I’ve never tried making a gif, but it sounds pretty freaking hard. In the Bughead fandom, we are hugely blessed with some of the quickest, most talented, most creative gif makers ever. And I say blessed for real, because without gifs, us Aussie viewers (who get the episode LAST) would not have been able to anticipate or prepare ourselves for the absolute emotional whiplash of Season 2 (I saw the infamous 2x05 kiss via gif first and managed not to throw up when I finally saw the episode, but I digress).

Let’s start first with why gifs are important. I love this quote from the makers of visual text-sharing app Pop: 

"The meaning of a GIF, like all visual symbols, is built through common cultural understanding. The reason a GIF of Jack Nicholson knocking on the door in The Shining says so much, so quickly, is because of the shared lexicon of popular culture. In this way, GIFs are elemental building blocks of the Internet’s language."

So our gif makers aren’t just artists: they are the builders and creators of the visual language of Bughead and Riverdale. They provide us with a common vocabulary through which we can communicate our flails and our cries and our excitement.

We are lucky to have so many of them. I’ve already mentioned @stark​ as one of our gif queens. Today I want to give some love to two of the best, who also happen to be some of the loveliest people: @aunt-imogene​ and @anasteeles​. 

@aunt-imogene​ is a gif-making legend and just an all-round amazing person. In the beginnings of my obsession with Dylan, she was right there - her and @jandjsalmon, being Norse god co-conspirators - quietly coaxing me along the path of no return, gif-ing video after video and sending me into a permanent Dylan spiral from which I have thankfully not recovered. She was also there to receive all my flails, to encourage my smutty fanfiction writing experiments, and to just be a friend. I know life has been a little tough on her, but I am grateful for her always and glad that she’s back in the fandom after a brief break. 

@anasteeles is what you would get if you put together a big bunch of pink roses, a cup of chamomile tea, and every 80s power ballad you can think of. She’s sweet and calming, but also epic and loud in her positivity and awesomeness. Her gif sets are top-notch, but beyond that, she is an incredible person who supports people so visibly, so unapologetically, and it’s just the greatest injection of spirit into the fandom. To hark back to the quote I put up there, not only is she building the language of visuals in our Bughead family, she is also building the language of empowerment and encouragement.