saraht

Someone bookmarked a couple of my Holmescest stories (*) with "0." Just..."0."

YOU GUYS KNOW YOU CAN SET YOUR BOOKMARKS TO PRIVATE, RIGHT?

(*) Including the one which I believe to have been one of the very first in BBC Sherlock fandom that didn't involve John/Sherlock. You can still see from the comments how scandalous it was. You're welcome, world.

Dare I dream that some day not too far off I will actually have free emotional energy to sink into fandom...?

I've been hesitating to make this post, because I don't have the energy to engage properly with the topic right now, and being cursory can cause its own problems, but...

I regard the AO3 as an astounding accomplishment of fandom, and I'm proud of even the extremely modest (no false modesty here, they were modest) contributions I've made to the organization. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that (for various reasons, more and less understandable) active anti-racism has never been a high priority for the OTW, and I think it's time it became one.

I know that some requests people are making are in tension with the fundamental approach of the AO3 (which regards itself generally as more akin to an archive than a social media platform and thus takes a different approach to content), and some of these tensions may be irreconcilable. But many suggestions being made for technical changes to reduce the possibility of abuse of users strike me as good ones. Maybe not immediately attainable, but if we're setting goals, they should be among them. We need to be aware of the possibility of their abuse by bad-faith actors, certainly. But they're just not all bad ideas and the problems they are trying to address ought to be problems the AO3 tries harder to fix.

I know some people thrive on suggestions/prompts, so I've included one or two for each fandom, but, honestly, if I could think of the story idea myself, I could probably write it myself; I'd much rather read what your own brain comes up with.

While I'm a slasher of old, these days it's a lot harder for me to find men interesting. So I'll probably enjoy a story that emphasizes the women characters more, with the exception of Alien, where the synthetics occupy a very strange subject position which is not really that of men.

I included rape as a "do not want," but I'm not averse to antagonistic or mutually violent pairings or even scenarios of more uncertain consent--just not straight-out sexual assault, including anything involving underage (<16) characters. (You can decide for yourself whether Alien synthetics are capable of giving consent.)

Thanks, and have fun!

P.S. I'm going to be away from my keyboard for an indefinite period over Christmas. I truly don't know when I'll be able to respond to the story. I haven't forgotten it, I don't hate it, I am just not going to be available for some time!

OURS ARE NOT USES IN COMMERCE

"HUGO" IS NOT A FAMOUS MARK FOR DILUTION PURPOSES

CAN WE CUT IT OUT WITH THE AMATEUR HOUR

Title: the watery part of the world

Fandom: Alien: Prometheus

Pairing: Elizabeth Shaw/David 8

Rating: Explicit

Summary: “Who said you get to be a person?” (~17500 words)

the watery part of the world

One of the betas for my latest can't do it, and where the hell does one find a beta for a heterosexual semi-porn story featuring actual grown people set in an expiring franchise like X-Men movieverse these days???

If you want to write Wacky Crowley Escapades, Naughty Crowley Sexytimes, Sweet Historical Crowley Flirting, AU Barista Crowley, The Right Way Is To Serve Neither Heaven nor Hell So Crowley Is Great Now, Hey You Know Heaven Obviously Sucked Too, Doesn't That Compromise Aziraphale, And What Does This God Character Think She's Doing Anyway...all good!!!

But if you're going to deliberately sit down and write analysis about Crowley's moral status as if many people didn't get seriously hurt because of conditions he engineered with the explicit intention of hurting people, you're just straight-up ignoring what the text is telling you. Slathering "queer" over it doesn't actually make what he did any better.

The show didn't even go the easy route of having Crowley do things that we might personally regard as not immoral even if sinful by Christian standards. Tempt a priest to sleep with a lady? The problem there (for us) is...? No, that's small potatoes for our Crowley! What we saw him do was deliberately create large-scale unhappiness that would inevitably redound to the harm of innocents. Twice!

There's definitely a greenwood spirit to the show that allows you to take everything that happens lightly if you want to, but if you decide to take it seriously...well, there it is.

But I wish people would stop saying "[x] looks like a Renaissance/classical/whatever painting" when what they actually mean is "this image is recognizably well-composed according to generic premodern Western conventions." The former is a reference to a particular set of genre markers and if you invoke them without knowing what they are (as so often seems to be the case), you just sound pretentious.

On a genuinely unrelated note, I spent a lot of time this hot hot weekend bathing my brain in the cool pinks and blues and golds of Fra Angelico, and I'm sure Aziraphale is in those paintings somewhere. He has the true spirit of a Fra Angelico angel or saint (though admittedly you could also do a lovely Vermeer of his more corporeal aspects).

I would go so far as to say that Aziraphale's ability to love and forgive Crowley as a demon shows his true participation in the divine nature. That "I forgive you" after Crowley's snarled earlier that he's "unforgivable", categorically, as a demon, is one of the most touching little moments of the show. I will never understand people who latch onto difficult pairings and just imagine all the difficulties away. If you want sweet, anodyne romance, you have so many options! Leave the stories of the people who are awful but can't quite put themselves beyond the reach of another's love alone.