I've Been Playing Tavern Talk And ITS SO GOOD

Holy shit yall not a new chapter technically, but I ended up skipping a chapter so chapter 6 has been edited to have the chapter I skipped and chapter 7 has the one I skipped to. So sorry about the confusion and I'll have a new chapter either tonight or tomorrow.

Messaging people for the first time is so hard. What am I supposed to say? Like, "You seem really odd and your blog intrigues me. Do you want to have philosophical conversations or perhaps talk about fictional characters?" What! Whatever. I will just follow you back and stare at your blog with my big beautiful brown eyes.

i love you fanfic authors that write AUs. i love you fanfic authors that write canon. i love you fanfic authors that write unhinged things specific to their niche interests. i love you fanfic authors that write against the grain of fanon interpretation. i love you fanfic authors that add to fanon interpretation in even more rich ways. i love you fanfic authors with low self confidence, with all the confidence in the world, with 3000 subscribers, with 2 subscribers, who have written a million words and ones that have written 100. i love you fanfic authors who haven't written a word yet but the stories are still knocking around inside your head. i love you fanfic authors!!!!!!!

Hey, Wake Up by fwlo fits Siffrin and the rest of the party so well dude

(I keep imagining specifically Odile and Siffrin but like... it fits all of them I'm just insane about those two in particular)

ALSO GO LISTEN TO IT AND THEIR OTHER SONGS FWLO IS AMAZING

https://youtu.be/io6AWAhPzaM?si=p67QM0Y5b0XTsTaG

reminder that:

pronouns ≠ gender

gender ≠ sex

romantic orientation ≠ sexual orientation

aromantic ≠ asexual

dating ≠ QPR

thanks for your time <3

Yeah you're right. It WOULD be pretty fucked up if you were a swan but you were raised by ducks and you grew up never seeing another swan or even knowing that such a thing as a swan even existed so you just thought you were a duck with something super wrong with it.

[guy who is aromantic voice] sexual attraction just makes more sense than romantic attraction. like ok, you want to fuck someone. this is quantifiable. it is quite easy to grasp what "i want to fuck someone" looks like, even if you have no idea what it feels like. romantic attraction, though? this is a nebulous construct which seems to largely be "glorified friendship with sex" in the popular imagination. what even is the difference between friendship and romance? the line between friendship and sexual attraction, though both can coexist, is that when there's sexual attraction present, you want to fuck someone. the line between friendship and romantic attraction, so far as i can perceive it within a heteronormative, amatonormative framework, is that it is... friendship where you want to fuck someone. what?

AGISHEBWOEHEBEODUE I JUST LOGGED ONTO COTL TODAY AND NARINDER ASKED TO BE MY VALENTINE THATS ADORABLE AMD AMAZING DEVS I LOVE YOU SO MUCH

one big thing i think people outside fandom (like, all fandoms, fandom in general, not any particular one) tend to misunderstand is they know it's a subculture of people who are weirdly deeply invested in fictional media, and they hear about drama caused by people in those subcultures being unhinged in not-fun ways, and they think the unhingedness comes from the fact of being overinvested in works of fiction.

which is a natural assumption, but in my experience that's not really the case? like in my experience the drama llamas in fandom are usually not the ones who are just genuinely very deeply into the fiction. i've known people who are basically thinking about star trek or x-men comics or supernatural pretty much 100% of their free time and ime that type of person is usually very nice and surprisingly functional in their regular life. when someone's a constant nexus of fandom drama it's usually not that they are obsessed with the actual work of fiction the fandom is about, it's at least one of the following:

what they're obsessed with is not the source material but their unhealthy parasocial relationships with one or more of the people who created it

what they're obsessed with is not the source material but some elaborate shared-universe subset of fanfic about it that's only barely related to the original at this point, and/or an esoteric reading-against-the-text reinterpretation of the source material (often if the canon is active and ongoing this leads to becoming actively hostile toward it for its inevitably increasing failure to conform to their preferred fanon)

what they're obsessed with is not the source material but the fandom itself and gathering clout within it, so that the source material basically only exists to them as a tool for scoring points in increasingly arcane fandom disputes

and very often you get the same person doing 2 and sometimes even all 3 of these, and that's where the trouble really starts