Actual shipping gripe for a moment: people who write Aiden/Damien with the assumption that Aiden's holding the reins in that relationship. Because I feel like we haven't played the same game if you come out of WD1 with the impression that Damien hasn't been giving Aiden the runaround from the very beginning.
I have been SCREAMING lately about how much I hate fluffy portrayals of one of my fave trash ships. Spoiler: pearlrose, emotional fuckery, trauma, they're Awful okay Like, okay, PearlRose is one of my all-time favorite ships, most likely. It's incredibly compelling and I love both characters. It is also, as portrayed in canon, tremendously unhealthy. I get the impulse some might have to write fixfic where everything's happy between them, but...can we please stop portraying them as fluffy and Pure when it's pretty clear that there was a lot of what was arguably, in some cases, straight-up emotional abuse going on between them? Even if it weren't kinda gross to erase that, it's just so much less interesting. There are plenty of good fluffy ships in this show, let me have this awful one.
in canon we see dave + karkat using humor to deal with their issues and being dicks to each other/japing on one another then in retcon tl we see them doing some pretty weird shit like dancing around & karkat smiling but i feel like it could easily go the way of karkat/terezi with karkat becoming too overbearing and destroying the relationship but there's still that thin thread of attachment that makes them resistant to losing each other because of the vulnerable moment in their lives/all the people they've lost i used to HATE davekat because of shit like this they kind of get yaoified into this perfect couple when its actually a really relatable masc relationship
...I would not even know what to tag my fic tagged "Abuse" to make it more specific, honestly. "Systematically destroying someone's life with time travel in a misguided attempt to 'protect' them" is not something that has an easy shorthand. :::PPP
Yeah, I really do not think "abuse" is a good tag at all. I think "pseudo-incest" is a terrible tag so we're going to have to disagree on that one, but "abuse" does not tell the people who want to avoid certain kinds of abuse if this is okay and it doesn't tell darkfic people seeking abusive stories what flavour they're getting either. (I may have Tumblr-related issues regarding the expansion of the definitions of words like "incest" and "pedophilia" to the point where nothing makes sense any more. If you use the grossest, harshest and not even necessarily accurate words to describe something, a lot of people who might actually want to read your fic if they knew what it was really about won't touch it. I won't go near anything labelled pedophilia because it might actually BE pedophilia, but people have labelled some things that I ship pretty hard as "pedophilia". Like Agent Cooper/Audrey Horne, even if you age her up. An adult having a thing with a high school senior is BAD, but there are other words for it. An adult having a thing with another adult that he met when she was in high school is...two adults having a thing.)
People who think that Wrench would top, as in role, not positioning. In like, an actual, confident, knows-what-he's-doing kind of way. Not, you know, Marcus letting him be in control because he's fucking terrified, that I can see, or him making a dominant move with a girl because that's what he thinks he should do and collapsing into an awkward pile of dork who has to be rescued from his own front. This is a person who cannot walk around in front of people he doesn't know (or many people he does know) with his face showing and be comfortable. I don't care how much black leather he puts on every morning, no.
Honestly the ao3 tags especially are tricky enough to navigate that I've halfway given up :P Just because when you're trying to get specific, you've got to guess the particular wording they decided to lock down for that. And if you stumble into one of the giant fandom-specific tag lists, it gets worse (like typing episode gets you a list of sherlock episodes. it happens other times too, I'm just blanking on examples). I wish there was like.... a canon tag dictionary/thesaurus somewhere that was easier to poke at when you're looking for nuance. (fake edit: tried a term starting with unwanted. 'unw' got me ten million 'eggsy unwin' tags that nobody needs, jfc. Eggsy Unwin is a virgin? Tag the character, then tag virgin, specify it in the author's notes if it matters *that* much to you, because you are CLUTTERING. EVERYTHING.) (fake edit: possessive dean. possessive hannibal. possessive steve. possessive harry. possessive sherlock. possessive derek. possessive jensen. possessive castiel. possessive sans. fuck offffffffffffffffff) (fake edit: memory. I can't even lay out the specifics, because they're not even on a theme, and for most of them, nobody. cares. A canonical tag system is a powerful thing, and nobody!! cares!!!) But mostly I just try to lay out enough in sentences in the author's notes at the beginning that a reader knows approximately what they're getting into. Like, a future fic is 'two people with nonconsensual mind blending and induced attraction, which was done TO them, but not for sexually exploitative reasons. also a shared extra tenant in their brains, and lost grasp on physical autonomy in non-sexy ways, because robots+combining.' Like, I'm never going to be able to tag for that, and it gets frustrating trying to guess how to come at that. Attraction / Body Sharing / Mind Manipulation / Viruses / Body Dysphoria / Past Abuse / Sharing / Memories (because sharing memories, shared memories, nothing about the act of sharing memories is turning up any results). And that mess of tags gives a really shaky picture of wtf I'm talking about, and it's going to be misleading in terms of 'someone stuck their fingers into these two people's brains and stirred. which is relevant to memories of past abuse, induced attraction, and new feelings of physical dysphoria.' And this is a really specific situation, but I run into this sort of frustrating problem surprisingly often :T The canonical tag system is really nice in some ways, but it's also unwieldy and hard to come into from the author's direction, if you're trying to get into not-commonplace particulars.
I could write a book on how much they don't care. I get that they're all about "if you don't like it, get involved and fix it yourself" but I was talking to them when they were first getting started and I have zero desire to argue with those people about meaningful labeling in canonical tag systems (and how useless ratings are) ever again. They said that they were going to drop the movie rating system and they did, but they replaced it with another system that basically asks you to decide what age range you think your writing is suitable for. Given that you can legally buy the Kushiel and Black Jewels series in any bookstore if you're 13 and nobody will stop you, but at the same time there are 19 year olds on tumblr calling themselves children and expecting to be protected from badthoughts, I don't know how the hell we're supposed to do that. Honestly, since the purpose of ratings is (and they told me this when they refused to add a tag for Explicit Sexual Content similar to the Explicit Violence tag) to say how much "sex" is in fics, they should probably just keep Explicit for things that are Explicit because I don't know what the hell "Teen" and "Mature" are even supposed to mean in this context. Second and third base? Heavy Petting for Teen, Going all the Way for Mature, and Explicit as Advanced Kink?
I'm gonna touch it because guhhhhhh Look, dubcon doesn't bother me, but if you're going to tag in the first place, let me know what I'm walking into! why does the tag run the full gamut from "kissing someone to shut them up" to "both parties are consenting just drunk" to "sex pollen/aliens made them do it" to "mind control them so they like it" to "literally forcing someone at gunpoint"? yes those things are all technically "dubious" consent, but if I read your fic am I going to get something that didn't even need to be tagged, or something horrifying? It's a surprise!!!! (also if the threat of physical harm is involved, that is absolutely rape, and should be tagged as such)
I feel like this is one of those things that has suffered from definition expansion. I remember that it was once used for situations in which someone's consent was literally dubious, as in: underage but physically mature and very willing; drunk or stoned; sex pollen, etc. This definition expansion tends to be self-protective, though, rather than a manifestation of scrupulosity and a fear of upsetting people. It's because people who write stories about rape that are not the currently acceptable rape-and-recovery tropes get threats and abuse. I used to be into writing bodice-rippers in HP fandom (it's been like 10 years since then and I'm not into it now, but it used to be a thing I did). I am a survivor and I don't want to read or write a realistic darkfic about how horrible rape is or an enlightening fic about recovery from trauma. I don't really want to think about that stuff a lot. I liked stories where someone was technically not consenting but was actually having a blast, in which nothing happened that they didn't actually want. I don't know why I was into that; I'm not into it now. But there are other people who like that stuff, so I got a lot of requests on Pornish Pixies and Erotic Elves on LJ. And I got nasty responses from some people, which I really resented because the labels on my fic correctly represented the content, and they didn't have to read it. I even had an archive owner bitch me out after I asked that comments be removed (which was allowed on the site, which was called "Freedom of Speech Fanfiction" and was meant to be a haven for all the stuff that was thrown off Fanfiction.net when they used the 9/11 commemoration as an excuse to ban explicit material, so I really expected better from her). And I'm talking about someone saying that they hoped I'd GET raped so I'd know what it's like, which was ironic af given that I am a survivor, not that I would tell someone like that such a thing, and saying that these stories (not a billion pickup and MRA sites out there) were giving men excuses to believe that women want to be raped. Do we want a derail thread for bitching about tagging and rating issues?
yeah I guess. i didn't mean to say that people couldn't write stuff or tag it how they wanted to. sorry.
When any Kylux starts with Kylo and Hux having any sort of mutual respect for one another I die a little bit. Every single extra canon tidbit we get on their relationship is pretty clear on the fact that Hux thinks very little of Kylo or the Force or any of his mystic bullshitery, and Kylo feels about the same re Hux and bueracracy and proper military procedure. And like, yeah, no, you don't gotta read any of the extra crap or take that into consideration, but I don't get how anyone looks at their in movie interactions and goes "hey, they already have the kind of relationship that could easily turn romantic at any moment!!" Sexual tension, sure. Genuine respect and admiration? Fuck no. I read enemies/rivals to lovers either to see dickheads treat eachother wrong or to see the kinda major changes both of them have to go though to make a relationship work. If they start fluffy or healthy then it's just. Who gives a fuck? But hell it ain't like I don't understand the desire to just mash pretty people together, so. And nobody's gotta devote any energy into writing a story to please me, so. Blah blah pointless bitching.
Also there's this tendency in Kylux to make Kylo less conflicted about his allegiance and morality and whatnot in order to make him and Hux, who definitely 100% believes in and relishes in what he's doing, gel better, and like. Eh. Eh to that. I once read a snippet of a fic where Hux was less certain in the First Order's methods and cause than Kylo, and how the fuck does that character interpretation even happen? Hux is an anxious ball of indecisive wangst who has no say in how the First Order is run and cries every night over the senseless loss of human life? Yeah. Sure. That's the kind of dude who gets promoted to General and put in charge of superweapons.
Did they miss the scene where Hux is giving his Hitler speech and every inch of his bearing suggests that they probably had to specially tailor his pants to hide the raging boner that firing a superweapon to destroy a star system was going to give him?
Hux's genocide o face is the second best thing about him, right after the snooty little "daddy loves me best" look he shoots Kylo after getting the go ahead to fire Starkiller.
....I don't even go here but hoo boy this ship sounds like it could go some fun toxic directions. I appreciate things where they're both assholes being terrible to each other and it's just eternally fucked and awful. give me more of that please
