Guilty Pleasure

Giveaway Contest: Thanks to the generosity of @harperperennial, we’re giving away all eight of the new, limited edition 2016-17 Harper Perennial Olive Editions! Won’t these look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these books, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will randomly choose a winner on December 15, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, Harper Perennial has agreed to make this an International giveaway! Easy, right? Good luck!

So.

As you might imagine, my inboxes have been flooded over the last few days.  My fic represents, for a lot of people, either their start in Avengers fandom, or the safe place they retreat to when the angst and infighting and shipwars got too intense.  Which I get, and I appreciate, and I’m so glad if my old fics can give people a little happiness, even after all this time.

But there’s a thread I keep picking up in comments, that kind of worries me.

That things that happened in the MCU have taken the fandom away from them.  That the way things happened in Endgame have left people distraught, or angry, or just grieving.  And a lot of people have worried that they’ve ‘lost’ these characters.

And look.

Look.

I say this as a fandom old.  I say this as someone who reads comics.  Who came from the Trek fandom.  Who’s lived through bad movie adaptations and subpar ghostwriters and writing staff changes that have destroyed tv shows before they had a chance to really fly.

Don’t let canon take anything away from you.

You can be disappointed in a thing.  You can have your heart broken by a writer.  You can hope against hope that something that means the world to you will be ‘true,’ but don’t let a corporation take your heroes away from you.

Every one of us has to pick and choose what we keep and what we leave behind.  But every single version of Captain America has been fanfiction since Jack Kirby and Joe Simon put their pens down.  He’s owned by a corporation, and they can decide what’s on screen, who gets paid to write him, who gets the big platform.  They get to decide canon.

But canon is meaningless.

Canon is a way to win an argument in a bar or in a schoolyard.  It’s knowing publication dates and issue numbers and who wrote what arc and when the reboots happened.  It exists.

But when I think of Hawkeye, canon is only part of the picture.  I do think of Matt Fraction’s run on the comics.  I do think of those early years, sneaking my brother’s issues of West Coast Avengers.  I think of the weird, wild, off beat run of Secret Avengers.  But I also think of @dr-kara’s art of him.  I think of fanfic long since deleted, that introduced me to the fandom tropes of Clint living in the vents.  I think of the Tumblr posts, diving deep into the psychology of trauma, into his place as the most human and the most pointless of the original six, into a thousand stupid memes.  Caw-caw, motherfucker.  I think of the comments I got, telling me he was OOC.  I think of the Hawkeye cosplayers I’ve met, including the one guy who was in full gear at Star Wars Celebration in Florida.  I asked him why, and he shrugged and said, ‘Clint would’ve.’  I agree with him.  

I think of the first time a friend put a bow in my hands, and showed me how to shoot, wobbly and uneven, at a straw target all the way across the yard.

I think of the bruises that dotted my arms afterwards.

So canon can add new things.  Take bits away.  Make me think.  Make me hurt.

But nothing canon does will ever cause him to be different, not on any fundamental level.  Clint Barton started forming in my head when I was eight years old.  He belongs to Marvel, but the version I carry with me has a lot more sources than that.

Guys, this is a long way of saying: find your own version of the character.  Find what you need in a fandom.  And think of canon like that one fic that has a million kudos on AO3 and you just. Don’t.  Know.  Why.  That one fic, that everyone talks about, that you just can’t stand.

If canon doesn’t work for you, then discard it.  And move on.

But don’t let a corporation take a character you love away from you.

Don’t ever let that happen.

But I miss you most of all my darling, when autumn leaves start to fall.

APH | { Autumn. } Portugal.

After every game, my former teammates kept asking me why Kagami-kun could jump so high. Kise-kun wondered if there was a trick to it that he could copy. Midorima-kun thought it was special training. Akashi-kun asked which higher power we bribed to get the ability, and what pentagram we used to summon it. I won’t even repeat what Aomine-kun said, because it was too stupid, even compared to Akashi-kun. The truth is, Kagami-kun gets a huge elevation bonus from his moral high ground, an advantage the Generation of Miracles will never, ever have.

Kuroko Tetsuya (via incorrectknb)

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Don’t be pushed by your problems. Be led by your dreams.”

“He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.”

J.K. Rowling

“Anything’s possible if you’ve got enough nerve.”

“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.”

“I would like to be remembered as someone who did the best she could with the talent she had.”

John Green

“What is the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable?”

“If you don’t imagine, nothing ever happens at all.”

“At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid, and it hurts, but then it’s over and you’re relieved.”

“In spite of it all, hope is not misguided.”

Ernest Hemingway

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”

“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.”

“The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by it.”

“Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual.” 

Marilyn Monroe

“Sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.” 

Dalai Lama

“Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.”

Unknown

“What you do today is important because you are exchanging a day of your life for it.”

“Happiness is not the absence of problems, it’s the ability to deal with them.”

“Decide that you want it more than you are afraid of it.”

“Adventure may hurt you, but monotony will kill you.”

inspiration

Giveaway Contest: We’ve partnered with Alma Books to give away five of their beautiful Alma Classics Evergreens editions (pictured above)! Won’t these look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will randomly choose a winner on June 4, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, Alma Books has agreed to make this an International giveaway! Good luck!

Giveaway Contest: We’re giving away ten vintage paperback classics by Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, Kate Chopin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ray Bradbury, and others. Won’t these look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will randomly choose a winner on March 5, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, we’ll ship to any country. Easy, right? Good luck!

Artist Documents Tender Notes Over Acrylic Illustrations From Her Travels on a Moleskine Notebook

American artist Missy H. Dunaway documents her travels across the US, Europe, Turkey, and Morocco with extreme romanticism and poetry. Dunaway illustrates on her Moleskine journal a beautiful scenery with acrylic paint from her time in a specific location, then autographs each painting with a sweet excerpt of nostalgia.

She often composes goodbye notes on her journals, as she bids adieu to each city. Each cityscape portrait reveals a tender thought or memory of heartbreak or a desire for wanderlust.

Some of the lovely anecdotes read:

“Standing in Asia. Looking at Europe. Thinking of New York.”

“I moved to Istanbul (alone). I’ve been looking out my window more than usual.”

“I’ve discovered I have the gift to feel at home jus about anywhere.”

“I’ll press you in a book.”

“I was staring at the blinking lights  of an airplane and waiting for sleep when a shooting star passed across my view, clear as day. I haven’t seen a shooting star in a whole decade.”

We highly urge everyone to click on each image to read the stunning passages. You can find these notebooks and more of her original work in her Etsy shop.

View similar posts here!

These are Alma Classics editions by Alma Books. I seriously can’t take how gorgeous these are. *sigh* I’ve reached out to Alma Books about sponsoring one of our giveaways, so if you want a chance to win some of these editions, please reblog to help me convince them! :D

Giveaway Contest: We’re giving away ten vintage paperback classics by Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, Kate Chopin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ray Bradbury, and others. Won’t these look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will randomly choose a winner on March 5, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, we’ll ship to any country. Easy, right? Good luck!