I know discourse is the word of choice in fandom nowadays but I kind of wish we would have stuck with “fandom wank” because it carries the implication that the anger involved culminated into effectively nothing and that the act was wholeheartedly masturbatory in nature rather than for any greater cause.
I saw this post about an hour after I saw a post that said, essentially, “There should be a word for that thing where [exactly describes ‘squeeing’].”
I feel like the time has come to produce something like this:
Squee: The noise you make when something is so good that all you can really do is squeak or squeal. A high pitched sound of delight, often accomanied by hugging yourself or others.
Squick: A fic/art/concept/topic that is repellent to you, so you reject association with it and instead retreat to your personal comfortable spaces- all the while remembering that someone else’s comfort is not your own.
YKINMKATO: Also called “kink tomato.” Abbreviation meaning “your kink is not my kink, and that’s okay.” Used to explain why you are rejecting art or fic brought to you by someone else. A solid mantra to recall instead of sending flames in people’s comments
Flames: The comment equivalent of anon hate.
AMV: “animated music video” or “anime music video.” Often, this is stylized to fit a specific fandom, such as a “PMV” (pony music video) in my little pony. May also be referred to as a lyricstuck.
Filk: Combination of the words “film” and “folk,” this is a music genre, to which “fan songs” and “fan parody covers” belong. If you don’t really understand what this means, take a quick listen to American Pie, then compare Weird Al Yankovic’s Saga Begins
BNF: Big name fan. You know that one person who is just so fuckign popular in your fandom? Their art is always on your dash, everyone knows their fics? Being spoken to directly by them is basically being noticed by everyone ever’s senpai? That’s what these people are called.
DL:DR; Not unliked the teal deer (tl;dr, or “too long, didn’t read”), DLDR means “don’t like? Don’t read!” It’s a reminder that you are under no obligation, ever, to expose yourself to uncomfortable (or, squicky), or potentially harmful (or, triggering), material. Not ever. If you don’t actively like something? It’s not worth your time. Skip it.
Gen: or “genfic” “genart” etc. Fan works which contain no or very little romantic content. Often these are styled after the canon material, and may be called “episodic” ro “slice of life” in addition.
Lemon: Work containing strong pornographic elements
Lime, or Citrus: Work containing mild or implicit pornographic elements
Sockpuppeting: The surprisingly common scenario of someone making a bunch of fake accounts/sideblogs to send themselves reviews or hate, to try to increase views or drama surrounding a work. The accounts they make are called Sockpuppets.
WAFF: Warm and fluffy feelings. A genre of fic that exists just to be therapeutically sweet. Nowadays, usually just called “fluffy.”
Schmoop: Take WAFF and somehow make it even more syrupy. You’ll know it when you see it.
Whump: Imagine if you will, a hurt-comfort fic. The comfort might be considered WAFF. The hurt? That’s the whump.
Wapanese: When white autors pepper their anime fanfic with random, tonally inappropriate japanese words.
Anthropomorfic: Nowadays we just call these “humanstuck” or “humanized AU.”
Wank: Wildly disproportionate drama that crops up because someone wrote/drew/did something that someone else didn’t like. Seriously, I cannot begin to express the fiascos that have come about from all this. Just… Just go look at this.
Plot bunny: Story ideas that you probably won’t ever actually deal with, but that multiply entirely out of control, creating huge worlds in your head that you’re probably not going to write. But hey! You might! And until then they make great sideblogs/askblogs/tumblr posts.
Casefic: Fanfics that try to create an episode-like feel for procedural and crime dramas, moster of the week shows, etc.
Jossed: When popular fan theories and fanon are addressed in the canon of a series, and whoops, turns out we were all very, very wrong.
Kripked: When popular fan theories and fanon are addressed in the canon of a show and, hot damn, we fucking called it.
Secret Masters: The people who run the websites/ communities/etc that we all do our fanning on. Less relevant now that we have things like tumblr, but when everyone had to run their own archival and social sites for each fandom, it was more important to pay our respects to the strange and powerful beings that brought us all together and gave us our fannish homes. Think the staff of AO3, for example.
Bashing: When a writer purposefully writes a specific character as a horrible, horrible person so that they can throw them out of the storyline, usually to allow their OTP to get together without trouble. Distinct from fridging in that it doesn’t require the character to die, but rather to be such a screaming harpy that they get rightfully removed from the main characters’ lives for being an abusive hell beast. Generally, a type of character hate. Be wary of people who bash women, queer people, and POC with consistency: they are not safe to be around.
‘Squick’ also has an alternate horrible meaning for Harry Potter fans who were in fandom a while back. Dear god.
Also:
Purple prose: Fic that is excessively flowery and complicated. Basically the “me, an intellectual” meme. If it has the phrase “cerulean orbs” you know it’s purple prose.
Beige prose: The opposite of purple prose. Basically, the plainest (and, if done wrongly, the most boring) type of prose.
R&R: Read & review. Back from when fic comments were called “reviews” and there was no such fucking thing as the kudos button.
*wipes a tear away* I feel so vintage.
Know your history children.
important history lesson
*stares out. breaks fourth wall*
Lemons.
For all you young’uns out there.
Also, I’ve seen people tag a ship-focused fic both M/M and Gen on AO3. Just because it also features friendships doesn’t make it Gen! If the main focus is a romantic relationship, do the Gen readers (which is not me, but they do exist) a favor and don’t tag it Gen.
^^^^^^^ THIS. filters are only useful if things are tagged correctly and i can’t search for non-ship fic when everything is tagged for both ship AND gen 😦
please for the love of god tag responsibly and don’t make people who are looking for non-romance fic suffer
I miss proper gen, and the expectation of it in specific places. I wish that was still a tag that followed specific conventions
I actually had a look at that fandom wank link, and it reminded me of another term that’s gone a bit by the wayside:
TOSsed: when an online community was kicked off a platform for (real or alleged) violations of the Terms of Service. This was not infrequently the result of complaints about queer content specifically.
Never forget why we needed an archive of our own, folks.
In corollary to the “If the drive is romantic don’t tag it gen” thing, if there are romantic relationships but they exist as total background nonsense (example: Character A asks her parents to put together a Princess AND Pirate theme birthday and wacky hi-jinks ensue trying to book a fairy princess actress and a schooner shaped bouncy house on the same day, both parents love each other but wish they’d share details like who ordered the cake) THAT’s gen, not het or slash. Don’t tag it as het or slash, you’ll drive away the pure-gen readers who actually want confetti-canon crisis fics.
Vulgar is a conlang (constructed/fictional language) generator created to help literally generate a language for you. No, really. No tricks, and it’s super simple to use. It’s my favourite tool right now for writing fantasy, even as someone who loves creating his own languages, it’s an amazing starting point.
Want a random conlang, straight away, with no prep or fuss? Just visit http://vulgarlang.com/index.html and click “Generate New Conlang”… and that’s it. Scroll down and through your brand new, generated, completely original conlang.
If you’re a little more advanced in terms of conlanging and want to specify IP phonemes to be used, you can add them too, but even with no knowledge of linguistics you can create a language at the click of your fingers.
This version of Vulgar is completely free, sure…. but! the guy who created it has not only made an amazing thing (which I repeat, is absolutely free at it’s most basic point), but is also planning on updating it more and more!
Under the “Buy” tab on the Vulgar website, he links to his email, where you can offer to pay for the full version of Vulgar, which is a total steal right now at a sale price of only nineteen dollars. Considering professional conlangers and linguists could charge you, like, a metric fuck ton of money for the same data you’re getting here for just nineteen, that’s a major steal.
Not to mention, buying the alpha build now gives you free access to all of it’s updated versions, which I can guarantee are just going to get better and better! I’ve already bought it and I adore it, and this is a tool the likes of which we in the conlang community have never seen in such an awesome way.
Please consider helping Vulgar out, because the creator is a damn genius
Vision has no hair anywhere on his body–no armpit hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes. No fingernails. His skin tastes like metal. Sometimes, he forgets to breathe for minutes or hours at a time.
Captain Marvel smells like burning. When you touch her, your hand comes away cold because she’s absorbed your body heat. If she gets cut, she bleeds light. She can tell you what the inside of an explosion feels like.
Bruce Banner vomits after de-hulking. His skin is always red and peeling. He looks sick, like he has a fever, and he ingests more medication than actual food. There are blisters on his lips.
Tony Stark has a huge, sunken scar on his sternum where the arc reactor was removed and his chest aches each time he takes a breath. He has callouses in odd places–so does the whole team, really–and there is a permanent bald spot on the back of his head where it has been cut open every time he gets thrown around in his suit.
Spider-Man sometimes forgets which way is up–if you put him in a room with identical walls, floor, and ceiling, he couldn’t tell you which is which. His hands and feet are prickly to the touch, even through his costume. He is very nearsighted.
The Scarlet Witch has no sense of boundaries; if you can’t tell she’s spying on your thoughts, why should she stop? She doesn’t do it out of any malicious intent, just out of curiosity and convenience. She never loses arguments.
Thor speaks about events that happened thousands of years ago as if they were last week. Cats arch their backs and stare at him. Something about him–his eyes, or his skin, or the way he moves–seems slightly off, like he doesn’t belong on Earth at all.
stuff like that.
This is so legit.
This is so cool.
captain america smells like flowers and feels like sunshine when he’s in the room with you
6) Tolkien’s hero was average, and needed help, and failed.
This is the place where most fantasy authors, who love to simultaneously call themselves Tolkien’s heirs and blame him for a lot of what’s wrong with modern fantasy, err the worst. It’s hard to look at Frodo and see him as someone extra-special. The hints in the books that a higher power did choose him are so quiet as to be unnoticeable. And he wouldn’t have made it as far as he did without his companions. And he doesn’t keep from falling into temptation.
A lot of modern fantasy heroes are completely opposite from this. They start out extraordinary, and they stay that way. Other characters are there to train them, or be shallow antagonists and love interests and worshippers, not actually help them. And they don’t fail. (Damn it, I want to see more corrupted fantasy heroes.) It’s not fair to blame Tolkien for the disease that fantasy writers have inflicted on themselves. […]
Fantasy could use more ordinary people who are afraid and don’t know what the hell they’re doing, but volunteer for the Quest anyway.
It’s misinterpretation of Tolkien that’s the problem, not Tolkien himself.
The whole point of The Lord Of The Rings… like, the WHOLE POINT… is that it is ultimately the hobbits who save the world. The small, vulnerable, ordinary people who aren’t great warriors or heroes.
Specifically, Sam. Sam saves the world. All of it. The ultimate success of the great quest is 100% due to a fat little gardener who likes to cook and never wanted to go on an adventure but who did it because he wasn’t going to let his beloved Frodo go off alone. Frodo is the only one truly able to handle the ring long enough to get it into Mordor – and it nearly kills him and permanently emotionally damages him – but Sam is the one who takes care of Frodo that whole time. Who makes him eat. Who finds him water. Who watches over him while he sleeps.
Sam is the one who fights off Shelob.
Sam is the one who takes the Ring when he thinks Frodo is dead.
Sam is the one who strolls into Orc Central and saves Frodo by sheer determination and killing any orc who crosses him. (SAM THE GARDENER GOES AND KILLS AN ACTUAL ORC TO GET FRODO SOME CLOTHES LET’S JUST THINK ABOUT THAT). And then Sam just takes off the Ring and gives it back which is supposed to be freaking impossible and he barely even hesitates.
Sam literally carries Frodo on the last leg of the journey. On his back. He’s half-starved, dying slowly of dehydration, but he carries Frodo up the goddamn mountain and Gollum may get credit for accidentally destroying the ring but Sam was the one who got them all there.
Sam saved the world.
And let’s not forget Pippin and Merry, who get damselled out of the story (the orcs have carried them off! We must make a Heroic Run To Save Them!) and then rescue themselves, recruit the Terrifying Ancient Powers through being genuinely nice and sincere, and overthrow Saruman before the ‘real’ heroes even get there.
Let’s not forget Pippin single-handedly saving what’s left of Gondor – and Faramir – by understanding that there is a time for obeying orders and a time for realizing that the boss is bugfuck nuts and we need to get help right now.
Let’s not forget Merry sticking his sword into the terrifying, profoundly evil horror that has chased him all over his world because his friend is fighting it and he’s gonna help, dammit and that’s how the most powerful Ringwraith goes down to a suicidally depressed woman and a scared little hobbit.
Everything the others do, the kings and princes and great heroes and all? They buy time. They distract the bad guys. They keep the armies occupied. That is what kings and great leaders are for – they do the big picture stuff.
But it is ultimately the hobbits who bring down every villain. Every one. And I believe that that is 100% on purpose. Tolkien was a soldier in WWI. His son fought in WWII. (And a lot of The Lord Of The Rings was written in letters to him while he did it.)
And hey, look, The Lord Of The Rings is about ordinary people – farmers, scholars, and so on – who get pulled into a war not of their making but who have to fight not only because their own home is in danger but so is everyone’s. And they’re small and scared but they do the best they can for as long as they can and that is what actually saves the world. Not great heroes and pre-destined kings. Ordinary people, doing extraordinary things because they want the world to be safe for ordinary people, the ones they know and the ones they don’t.
Ordinary people matter. They can save the world without being great heroes or kings or whatever. And that is really important and I get so upset when people miss that because Aragorn and Legolas and Gimli and Gandalf and all the others are great characters and all but they are ultimately a hobbit delivery system.
It is ordinary people doing their best who really change the world, and continue doing so after the war is over because they have to go home and rebuild and they do.
Just last night my dad, a Vietnam vet, said that people ask him what war is like and he always says “It’s just being scared 24 hours a day every single day.” And he said their reaction is always confusion because in their minds soldiers are brave heroes.
The truth is they are most often just scared kids moved around a map like pawns on a chessboard.
The
girl in the white suit hid her nerves behind the cigarette.
The
curtains opened. A pale man in pressed flannel frowned.
“Who
are you,” he said, rubbing sleep from his eyes, “and what the
hell are you doing on my window-ledge?”
The
girl balanced on her bare heels, rocking back and forth.
“I…
am a fan,” she said, “Don’t worry. I’m perfectly safe.”
“I
wasn’t worried,” he said, “Lose the cigarette.”
“Sorry,”
she said. Her face twisted, as if her muscles used to make apologetic
expressions had atrophied through neglect.
“I
wanted to ask some advice,” she said as she flicked the cigarette
into the void behind her.
The
man thought of his breakfast cooling.
“Make
it quick,” he sighed.
There
was silence, or as close to silence as the rumble of the city far
below would ever allow.
“I
have so much I want to do, and so little time,” she said, “I want
everything. Is that so much to ask? Everyone says so. Everyone says
‘be reasonable’. But then I look at you, and everything you’ve
achieved, and know that ‘reasonable’ is defeatist. Any one sliver of
what you’ve done would be an enviable career. That it takes it all
in, is an impossibility. There’s so little time, and so much work I
want to do. I’m going to die but I want to be immortal. I’m trying so
many things, but I’m afraid of losing myself in a–”
“Enough,”
said the man, “I’ve two things for you. Listen carefully.”
“Always
finish the album,” said the man, “and get the hell off my window
ledge.”
The
girl nodded.
“You
were my inspiration,” she said, as she stepped backwards, turning
to a shower of ash and sulphur, leaving tiny sooty footprints on the
ledge.
The
man sighed as he turned from the window. A girl dressed in a white
suit, smoking, with that hair? And I was apparently
inspiration? No shit.
Still
– she was far from the first, and she’d be far from the last.
People should do more “meet ugly” and less “meet cute”. For example.
“I broke your nose at a mosh pit” AU
“I hit you with my car and was the only one to visit you in the hospital” AU
“You were chased by the cops, got in my car and just yelled ‘Drive!’” AU
“You punched me in the face while gesticulating wildly to a friend” AU
“You laughed in a restaurant but you have an ugly laugh and I thought you were choking, so I spent the last three minutes awkwardly humping you while performing the Heimlich maneuver” AU
“We met each other on a Sunday morning, both doing our walk of shame” AU
“I get really sick on roller-coasters and you had the misfortune of sitting in front of me so, uh… sorry…” AU
“You’re the bastard who keeps parking right in front of my house so I retaliated by keying your car and you caught me” AU
“I work at a department store and if you take out and unfold a shirt and then leave it one more time I’m going to stuff it down your throat” AU
“You broke into my apartment drunk thinking it was your friend’s house and I should call the cops but my cat kinda likes you so we’re good” AU
“My new dealer has friended me on Facebook and I’m unsure of how to react to that” AU
“You saw me reading the same book you did and we got into a heated discussion on how much it sucks” AU
“This is a five-hour-long plane ride, we’re sitting together and you’re deathly afraid of flying” AU
A Beautiful Monster 