What Is Better Than The Taste Of Copper On Your Teeth After Licking The Blood Off Your Fingers. The Lingering

Mmmmm art

that one extremely homoerotic painting of a babylonian man listening to a babylonian twink playing babylonian harp. that one

Fanfolks today need to remember how important The Premise was.

Y'all have heard of The Premise, right?

See, historically there have always been people who saw an extra layer of gayness on certain pairs of fictional people (you just thought of several), and people Back Then even wrote their own fanfic (or as they were called at the time, "pastiches"), but the first widespread queer fanwork to really define the fanfiction genre was KIRK AND SPOCK. Kirk/Spock. K/S. The very first slashfics.

Why this work was vastly, overwhelmingly written by straight women is a discussion for another time, but it was, so that's the main perspective I'm gonna consider here.

How do you - a statistically middle-class, 30+, stay-at-home wife and mother - how do you write slashfic ao3-style in the 1960's before the internet?

Carefully.

Through letters with friends, phone calls, pen pals, and sometimes - sometimes - clandestine meetings of small groups. Whole novels were written communally, round-robin style, by sending typed or handwritten additions chapter by chapter to each other. These were all underground, some deep underground; even the early Trekkie fanzines of the time wouldn't touch them.

And keep in mind, few of these stories were explicitly even sexual! But they were all about a very, very close relationship between two men. In the 1960's.

Guess how cool everyone else was about this.

Actually, for their part, Gene Rodenberry and the other writers were fine with it, saying that they had deliberately written the characters to be two halves of a whole, and if you wanna read it that way, yeah sure, go right ahead. Shatner and Nimoy took it all in good humor, and seemingly still do, each guy basically gesturing to the other and chuckling "I mean, who wouldn't?"

(CORRECTION: At least, they did until Nimoy passed away in 2015. Thanks @richie-is-rich!)

But elsewhere there was vicious backlash against The Premise, and not just within the fandom. This was still at a time in the US and UK when various "sodomy" and "decency" laws made no distinction between homosexual sex acts and just, like, directly lighting another man's cigarette with your cigarette in public. (That, sadly, is not a fucking joke.)

It was probably the closest some suburban cishet women came to understanding the pain of being in the closet. They had to protect this secret from their friends and family at all cost. There were cases of divorces where women lost custody of their children because their writing had come to light.

Can you imagine having such a burning desire to write for your OTP that you were willing to lose everything over it? Even if you were never caught, you still had to be willing to wait weeks, months, to receive a letter in the mail that you had to carefully intercept, read in secret, and then add your own chapter t, also in secret, and then send off, perhaps never to be seen again.

These people were goddamn heroes, and they laid the foundation for the world we live in today. A world where we can read, write, comment on, or share - in a matter of seconds! - literature about two background characters from two different franchises enjoying a really specific kink involving vacuums or something. And that's objectively amazing.

Raise a toast to our fanfiction elders, who simped in the darkness so we could simp in the light of day.

its so funny when usamericans of all people are like omg usa is 50 countries in a trench coat when you're from a country like india where the first language of people changes atleast 20 times across state lines.

lets be clear though, the establishment of the united states involved a genocide of diverse cultures which is precisely what has made it so uncannily uniform today. from thousands of indigenous languages you now demand everyone speak one. sometimes you'll accommodate spanish at best.

My grandma’s on and off again boyfriend that she cheated on grandpa with died today.

phineas and ferb really said “how many characters can we make autistic” and the answer was “yes”

I am now gonna be that guy who reccomends fics. Lmk if yall want fics from these fandoms

BNHA

Harry Potter

Voltron

Naruto

ATLA

Marvel

MDZS

Stranger Things

The Old Gaurd

These are the fandoms i read from the most but i do have some smaller sample sizes from other fandons.

They should block chatgpt on uni WiFi the way they used to block coolmathgames

hell yea man me too

pan-romantic

i want to love women saphically

i am not the same as sappho

i am the same as the beings of heaven

whose celestial shine glows amongst mortals

I want to love men like da vinci

but i am just the scribe that bears his soul

candlelight vigils to me are cool but they dont really feel like a protest, just a way to honor those who did protest or those weve lost. Protests are easy if they are nonviolent, just disrupt the flow of your governments or bosses day to day and you ddid it