It's just like in The Shape of Water

edited my toy story fic to make the time shifts more clear (just emphasized particular passages in chapter 2) because while reading other fics, i realized how extraordinarily young the fan base is and how young the writing is- which is no surprise because it's a kid's movie and people who try to write romance fic for box office kids movies are generally teenagers and early 20 year olds who haven't extensively seen or explored adult aimed media (I was like that up until a few years ago- Owl House was the last kids/YA aimed media I fixated on and felt compelled to write for*). anyway i felt kind of funny after publishing my fan-fiction because i was trying to explore more complex themes about grief and changing attachment styles in a fandom space where a lot of teens are sexualizing the plastic toilet paper roll character because it is a safe manner/environment/character on which to project their nascent sexuality. i'm out here quoting virginia woolf because while i came out of the "kid's media" realm of fan-fiction i've spent a great deal of time in more adult aimed media fandom spaces (wlw ships and Good Omens especially) where it's completely normal to quote and reference classical literature and play with timelines and tense- to treat your fan work as literature- and that's second nature to me now. to bring this style of writing back to a playing field where people are just writing fics about characters recounting to each other the plot of a film and where the height of romance are ships slow dancing to pop songs suddenly feels pretentious and maybe inaccessible and it makes me want to delete my work a little bit. but then i remember being young and reading the odd-man-out writing of older more seasoned fan-fictions author in a younger aged fandom and the tremendous impressions those sort of stories made on me and how it made me want to be a better writer, so i think i'm gonna keep it posted just so it can hopefully be that for someone else. and i'm not touting my work as "good" it's just funny when you realize your writing is now tonally and structurally different from where you started and that it's okay to have proof of that.