Primary-blog-nothing-here - Food And Flowers

30 Day OTP Challenge: Holding hands

Two teenagers are sitting together on a big dusty grey rock: a boy and a girl, admiring the view. Mostly.

The rock is on the Moon. It’s on the peak-ridge of one of the Lunar Carpathians, which is a young and jagged mountain range rearing up over the pale rolling highlands that run down toward the Apollo 12 and 14 landing sites. The rock is the topmost fragment of a boulder the size of a suburban house, cracked off the body of the mountain’s uppermost peak a millennium ago in the wake of an impact by a fragment of an “earthgrazer”-class asteroid. Bits and pieces of the old peak lie strewn all down the mountainside, mingled with older, smaller rubble and assorted displaced regolith. But the girl and the boy are long familiar with this old vista, and pay it no mind at the moment.

They’re mostly looking at the Earth right now, not least because this is one of the best times of the month to view it from up here. Since the Moon as seen from Earth is presently a crescent barely three days old, the Earth is just a shade shy of its full—a hot blue-blazing cabochon jewel in the night, burning green and dun and desert-pale, glowing white with weather. The light of it, this close to perihelion, blots out the view of the nearby stars and shines ten times brighter than a full Moon would anywhere on Earth. That blue-green light, so intense in hue as to seem warm, is washing across the lunar surface and drowning everything in an almost-undersea luminescence. “The old Moon in the new Moon’s arms”, they call it at home: Earthshine. Wizards, of course, have other names for it. But these two aren’t considering those at the moment.

“Things are changing…” the girl says.

The boy nods. “Well, we’ve known for a while it was coming.” He raises his eyebrows in annoyance at the Shuffle, shakes it…

Read More

What does unacknowledged abuse look like in fanfiction?

I’ve had a few people message me saying they’ve read a lot of fics with Laura in them, and don’t quite get which parts might be abusive, so I’ve decided to write a quick overview of the kinds of things I’ve read which I consider problematic.

Before I get into that: sometimes these tropes are so normalised that we don’t notice them until we’re a certain way on our journey in understanding sexism, and learning about feminism. When I was younger, I didn’t notice them either. I sometimes re-read books now that were favourites when I was a teen, and I’m appalled, because the women are treated so badly, and I didn’t even notice back then.

My point is, if you can’t see it yet, don’t beat yourself up about it. Take this as a moment to look at what you’re reading with new eyes, but remember it’s a journey. You don’t need to get understand everything at once. It will come with time and experience.

A good place to start is to ask yourself how you’d feel if you were treated the way the characters are in a story. That will often give you a solid clue if something is creepy or problematic.

TV tends to only name abuse as “abuse” when it’s the really full-on criminal and extreme versions. But the more common forms of abuse are often small things which are hard to explain to someone else who doesn’t experience them. It’s the pattern and intentions behind them that make them abusive. Someone doing them once might genuinely be joking, or it might be a friend who is over-reaching without realising it. But when they are a pattern of behaviour that’s motivated by a lack of respect for the other person’s boundaries, and a desire to have power over them, it becomes abuse. And that’s what fanon Laura is like a lot of the time.

The kinds of abuse in fanfic that I’m talking about are often small scale, but relentless. One of the most damaging parts of this kind of abuse is that usually each thing on its own is so small and petty that in real life if you try to tell someone they look at you like you’re crazy. Their look will say, “So you think they hid the book you were reading? So what?” But when it was a book today, and your keys the day before, and the new box of cereal you just bought the day before that… you end up going, “Did I really put the cereal in the freezer? Did I really put the keys in the houseplant? Did I really put my favourite book in the bin? Am I going crazy?” That kind of abuse is known as gaslighting.

It can be other kinds of things too, like people constantly borrowing your stuff without asking, and then making you feel dumb if you try to complain, or going behind your back and arranging things with mutual friends or family and then just expecting you to go along with it, and saying “But I did if for you, why are you so ungrateful?” if you try to explain why you don’t want to.

Enough warm-up. Let’s get down to some concrete examples I’ve read in Sterek fanfic.

I’ve read stories which have Laura do things like set up a dating profile for Derek without asking, and then bullying him into going on a date, even though he’s clearly unwilling to do so – Derek’s a rape survivor, remember. It would still be overstepping even if he wasn’t, but with that thrown in, it’s a really horrible power play, equivalent to telling someone to “Just get over it.” The fact he then ends up on a date with Stiles and likes him doesn’t magically justify the behaviour. The ends don’t justify the means. This is an example of abuse. If she’d asked first and he’d been tentatively okay with it, it wouldn’t be abuse. If he’d asked her because he was having trouble taking the plunge by himself, it wouldn’t be abuse. It’s because it’s a) nonconsensual, and b) bullying him into something he doesn’t want that makes it abusive.

Other stories will (quite commonly) have her demanding to know everything about his life, especially his romantic relationships, the minute it happens, laying a guilt trip on him if he doesn’t tell her, and not taking “no” for an answer, to the point she’ll steal his phone and snoop, or read his email, or interrogate his friends, and so on. She will come into his room or his house without asking, and interrupt what he’s doing as though it’s her right, even though he’s clearly not okay with it. She’ll spy on his computer usage or the people he meets. Derek won’t feel he can tell her “no”, or will reveal in his internal monologue that he’s “learned there’s no point” trying to get her to stop. This is abuse. It’s crossing Derek’s personal boundaries without consent, not listening to him, and taking advantage of the fact he values his family relationships too much to cut her from his life for this behaviour. If he volunteered the information because he genuinely wanted to share it, it wouldn’t be abuse, especially if she shared back equally. It’s the expectation that Laura has some right to know about Derek’s life and personal choices, even when he doesn’t want to share, that makes it abusive.

Laura sometimes vets his partners for suitableness without his consent, and/or will threaten Derek’s partners with retribution if they hurt him. This is commonly known as the “shovel speech”, but that in itself is an abusive trope. It disrespects the person’s ability to choose their own partner and decide about the relationship for themselves, disrespects the person they are dating, and threats are intrinsically abusive in any case. Again, if Derek asked for Laura’s opinion it would be a different matter, but in many stories she just goes ahead and does it, even though he is worried it will “scare Stiles off”.

There are stories where Derek is so sick of his family pestering him about having a romantic relationship that he fakes a relationship just to get them to leave him alone. In other words, he feels the need to lie and deceive in order to have autonomy over his own life. Again, the fact it works out and he meets Stiles doesn’t make the premise of having a family who won’t let him live his life in a way that makes him happy any less abusive. In real life, what if he were asexual? Or had social anxiety/introversion? What if he wasn’t sufficiently over his PTSD or last partner? What if he were queer and not out? What if he were trans and not out? And so on. This exact kind of overbearing behaviour that lays expectations on people in real life has terrible consequences a lot of the time – it can lead kids to cut, to run away from home, to eating disorders, to drugs, to suicide attempts. Romanticising overbearing family expectations is problematic because it normalises that kind of behaviour. We all want the best for our family, that’s totally normal. But we can’t live their lives for them. Trying to do so is abusive, no matter how well meaning.

These are some of the obvious examples of abusive behaviours which are played for laughs that I’ve come across in Sterek romantic comedies, although it’s by no means an exhaustive list.

it’s not just Laura who does these things either, but when Laura is in a fic, there is often an abusive element to her character – moreso than with most other sympathetic characters. Sometimes it’s not played for laughs, and the author actually makes it clear the behaviour is a problem. But there are also a bunch of stories that present the abusive behaviour as though Laura is being a good sister by doing these things.

I hope that’s helped clarify what I mean when I say fanon Laura is often abusive.

Hey so for the record? I don't generally post on this account. I made it once upon a time, and It had my actual name, and my family knew about it, and I did fannish things on a secondary blog. And it came to be that I made friends and did interesting things on the secondary blog, and didn't use this one, but Tumblr won't let us swap them, of course, so I put a line of code in the script of this blog that redirects there, if you click through. But when I like or follow, or comment, it comes up as this blog. 

If you are hoping to actually get posts from me on your dash? You might rather be following do-what-the-knight-tells-you

Just mentioning it again for the new folks.

Also Hi! lovely to meet you. :) Feel free to talk to me any time. :)

Reblog if you live in North America

I’m really curious about what the distribution of tumblr users looks like worldwide…

South America  Africa  Asia  Europe  Australasia   Central America  (Antarctica???)

#friendly reminder that this is actually Loki speaking