I was supposed to do this a week ago, but uh, anyways. This is me trying to make up at least 1% for being absolute shit at commenting for most of last year. (My brain pretty much stopped functioning in the beginning of february… damn you sad pirates :() I promise I’ll try to get better at it again though. ❤
This somehow got really long already (because I’m just… incapable of choosing lol), and I’m sure I forgot some gems because I had about 953 AO3 tabs open as I was making this and then accidentally closed them all *sighs*. And um, to make some sort of sense of this for myself I’m only including completed fics on this one. Plus I still have a TON of fics on my to-read list. (This fandom is a damn blessing, I love you guys 😘) I am going to try and make rec lists in the future, as well.
❤ But for now, here goes~ some of my faves from 2017:
“Stop. Talking,” Flint hissed, his nails digging into Silver’s skin. “You are fucking poisonous.”
And then he was gone, the bedroom door slamming behind him, leaving Silver’s wrist aching, his ears ringing, and his lips still tingling from the scratch of Flint’s beard.
The idea that fandom arguments at all involve proving each other wrong is bizarre to me.
Somewhere along the line, we forgot that stories are about exploring human nature through our different, subjective perspectives, and not about discovering absolute truth. There are some people whom I am never going to agree with, and some whom my arguments will never be able to convince, and that’s the point.
The point of exploring media is embracing and understanding our own human subjectivity, not trying to create a false objectivity in its stead.
The point of fandom should be possibility. It isn’t canon, and that means it can be anything. That means you can tell the same story a million different ways, from a million different POVs, with a million different ships, with a million different endings, switching it up the way YOU want to do. Fandom gives you the freedom to experiment, to think about things in the opposite way you’ve been told to, and then to go back to the first way if you want, or to never go back. It lets you pick the ship that will never be canon or the ship that is endgame. Or it lets you never pick a ship and ship everyone with everyone else. Or to change your mind and go back and forth if you want.
The point is, fandom is your opportunity to do the speaking instead of being spoken to; to fight back against being dictated to by an “all-powerful creator” who tells you how and what to think; to throw aside being passive consumers forced to digest whatever someone else has chosen for you and seize your own storytelling and make it into what you want. Fandom can be EVERYTHING…so why would you ever want to reduce it to the tinyness of one single path? What’s even the point of fandom if you just want one accepted narrative and no meandering tangents into different possibilities? Having just one accepted narrative is called canon; you don’t need fandom for that. You can enjoy that perfectly well if that’s what you want! You do you, and that’s awesome! But fandom should be for all of the fun wilderness off the canon beaten path. Fandom should be for remembering that creativity is supposed to be fun.
1. How do they fall asleep? Wake up? Any daily rituals?
silver sleeps on his stomach like a dead man. there’s hair everywhere, he takes up so much space. he usually has an arm and a leg over flint at least–it’s not really cuddling, more like half his body is always sprawled over the parts of flint he can reach. he’s also that guy everyone is jealous of because he’s developed the ability to fall asleep virtually anywhere.
flint sleeps a little more rigid; it takes him longer to fall asleep and he cracks an eye open every time silver shifts or makes a noise. waking up is an affair in of itself; silver jolts into consciousness ready to tackle the world head on while flint is more reluctant–peace is hard to come by and he’s greedy for it to last.
daily rituals include: flint spitting silver’s hair out of his mouth; silver kissing flint’s shoulder until he stops feigning sleep; both of them staring at the ceiling in a comfortable sort of silence until they hear the rest of the men begin to rise.
2. How’s their team work? Do they share well?
outstanding. their team work is outstanding, obviously. the sharing thing sneaks up on them, though–flint only realizes how much silver’s wormed his way in when he knocks on the door of his own cabin one day. it’s a bright and wonderful feeling.
3. Are they open about their relationship? How do they feel about public displays of affection?
gentle fleeting touches are inescapable, probably. knocking shoulders, brushing hands, FOREHEAD TOUCHING when they can get away with it. i mean even when they aren’t touching it’s all over their faces, so.
4. First impression of each other? Was it love at first sight?
emphatically, no. silver saw him and thought: run; flint saw him and thought: kill.
5. Nicknames? Pet names? Any in-jokes?
“captain” eventually becomes so loaded with affection it essentially is a pet-name in of itself. silver probably sneaks in “love” and “darling” when he’s feeling daring. “little shit” is code for “i love you” by the end.
IN JOKES INCLUDE: sharks, silver’s god given talent for poisoning people (even after he’s learned how to cook), flint bringing up silver belly flopping into the sea at every fucking opportunity, silver teaching his parrot to say “the fucking warship” and grinning really wide when flint scowls, etc.
Thanks to @hootenannie’s endless patience and understanding, I should be able to join the streaming of The Great Silence. Hooray.
Supercarrier: fandom flagship. Everybody and their dog ships it. The fandom is glutted with artwork and fic. You cannot escape this ship.
Dreadnought: massively popular. Nearly everybody ships it. You can, with dedication, in theory, reach the end of the AO3 archive for the ship’s tag, but it’ll take a long time.
Cruiser: pretty popular ship. Not everyone ships it, but everyone knows about it. Has a good amount of fic/art, and probably multiple ask blogs.
Frigate: just plain popular. Feels like it could use more fanworks. New people to the fandom might not know about it, but they’ll stumble across it sooner rather than later.
Gunboat: bit of a rarepair. It might have an ask blog or two. A couple big name fans ship it. Probably only takes a few weeks to get through the entire AO3 backlog, and one new fic gets added during that time.
Tugboat: rarepair. Almost never seen except as a side pairing to a more popular ship. You can usually get through everything on AO3 in a matter of days. You’ve forgotten what it is to be picky about what you read.
Rowboat: less than a dozen people ship it. You all know each other. You exist in an endless cycle of the same five people desperately producing art and fic and one person who constantly contributes headcanons.
Canoe: you are one of maybe three people who ship it, and there’s a not-insignificant chance you’ve never encountered those other two hypothetical shippers. You spend your days paddling furiously in hopes of keeping the ship afloat, dreaming of the day you upgrade to a rowboat so you can finally rest.
Submarine: Quite a few people ship it, but nobody wants to admit to shipping it. Will randomly appear and throw the other ships into confusion.
Pontoon: that random crossover ship with that one black dress character/trope/fandom everyone will ship with everything else. Has the potential to turn into a massive party until someone gets sick and everyone goes home.
Pedalo: That iconic bizarre crackship whose proponents claim they’re only into it ironically, but secretly they’re all dead serious.
Paging @amythe3lder for the pool noodle definition.
Barge: Not quite seaworthy, but buoyant in both the literal and figurative senses. Someone is always merrily drunktweeting about it at 11pm on Saturday night and then wistfully sobertweeting about it 4 hours later from their kitchen floor. The kind of ship that generates more playlists than fic. Artfully covered in trash and dirty laundry.
Raft: There’s two-to-four people who Ship It Hard and a few others who grab onto the side for safety when there’s drama on their usual flagship.
Barrel: There’s orphaned fic of it. There’s unsigned art of it. There’s headcanon asks on anon. Someone must ship it, but no one knows why or who they are. Your friend got a glimpse once before they ducked back down.
Pool Noodle: It’s just you, kicking your feet. You named the ship and wrote it on your noodle with a big sharpie. You tell people about it and are met with confused blinking. Most of the fics in the tag were either written by you or for you. You are caught between wanting to shout about how lovely life is on this floating scrap of whimsy and fearing that your noodle can’t bear much weight. Or worse, that someone will come over and dunk you, take your noodle and fwhap you on the head with it.
Lee Van Cleef speaking Italian (as opposed to being dubbed into Italian) is some uncanny valley shit.
This video claims to be from 1968 and Van Cleef notes he’d just made Commandos and Beyond the Law, but he is wearing his wardrobe from Sabata, which was released in Italy in September 1969 and there is no way they were shooting that in even December of 1968.
And in case you’re wondering, Van Cleef has the saloon destroyed because they don’t have any lemonade for him.
Totally delightful. His Italian was fractured, but comprehensible. He honestly admitted that in the US his name had been quite small, but after his time doing Italian Westerns his name had grown quite a bit. He looked genuinely frightened at first (“Italian, very difficult language”) but answered the question whether Hollywood or Italian Westerns were better intelligently (“In Italian Westerns characters are types, like [ancient] masks.”)
Loved the (self-referential????) Line about wanting lemonade and orange drinks instead of whisky and gin – the fact that he was a heavy drinker was well-known in Italy since Few Dollars More.
french recipes: if you’re not making this in paris then what’s the point. fuck you
italian recipes: use the left leg meat of a pig from one of three farms in this specific area of tuscany, or from this day my grandmother will begin manifesting physically in your house
american recipes: buy these three cans of stuff and put them in a pan congrats you cooked
chinese recipes, as handed down from mother to child: season it with a pinch of this and some of that. you want to know the exact amount? feel it in your heart. ask the stars. yell into the void.
English recipes: boil and salt it. Okay that’s it enjoy
Greek recipes: You followed all the right steps but this isn’t quite right. I don’t know what to tell you.
Australia recipes: chuck it on the barbie
Latinx recipes: you will never make it better than your abuela, face the facts
Armenian recipes: spend eight days laboring over the stove. the food will be flavorful with the sacrifice of your sanity. no one will appreciate it.
Canadian recipes: It either needs more bacon, more maple syrup, more gravy, or an unholy combination of the three
Polish recipes: you have to toUCH THE DOUGH, FEEL THE PIEROGI IN YOUR HEART, TOUCH IT. LICK IT. SMELL IT.
Every time I see this post, I learn more about how different countries’ cuisines AND neuroses.
Indian recipes: there are 500 cuisines and that means 500 versions of this dish that has 500 spices so gl
ashki jewish recipes: no, no. no. more onion.
internet recipes: here is a heartwarming story about my baby sister’s third birthday that i completely made up, and a copypaste from alton brown.
Oh boy if you’re mad about the US separating children from their parents, putting people in camps, and having a zero tolerance policy towards asylum seekers that has led to deliberate extensive cruelty as a futile deterrent wait until you hear about Australia.
…what’s going on in Australia?
Buddy! Strap in because there are two parts to this:
The past 100+ years of ripping kids from their families, racism, and attempted genocide
The past 20+ years of racism, but now island torture prisons! LEVEL UP!
Australia has had a long history of separating children from their parents. The government decided that mixed raced children of Indigenous Australians were not OK so literally kidnapped them and raised them to assimilate into white society and “breed the colour out.” This started about 1905 and ended about 1970. We call them the Stolen Generations. This has had long lasting negative effects on Indigenous Australians as it was a decades long attempt to absolutely destroy their culture and commit genocide. “But that was the past?” Surprise! By “ended in 1970″ I mean “the reasons in which we en masse tear children away from their families now has a different reason” and Indigenous children are now being taken away at even higher rates than during the stolen generations. Australia saw its Indigenous population, thought “how do we destroy their culture?” and when we were done thought “gee, how do we blame them for having all these issues in their communities?”
BUT THAT’S JUST THE BEGINNING!
Fast forward to now: Trump is using kids as political leverage to stop people from coming to the US right? Buddy he’s ripping Australia off. Scott Morrison, Minister for Immigration at the time once did that.
OK so for context: when people try to come to Australia via boat seeking asylum because they’re fleeing war/persecution we do either 2 things: turn them back and let them just… die elsewhere… Or we lock them up in detention centres on Manus/Nauru Island. That’s where we keep them indefinitely in bad conditions, give them dodgy medical care, smear them in the press, and react indifferently when they die from suicide/negligence/assault… and cover up sexual assaults from guards and the incredibly high rate of self harm and depression even in children. The entire idea is to be as cruel as possible so other people hear about it and go “geez, let’s not go to Australia. They’ll literally torture us before they give us a protective visa.” And when I say indefinitely I mean indefinitely. Some refugees have spent 5 years wasting away in these prisons. Some children have spent their entire life in these prisons. And the government openly admits that they’re genuine refugees. They’ve been rigorously vetted and known to be safe people with no intention of harming us but it’s the zero tolerance principle. You tried to come here via boat? You go jail but we call it “detention.”
The main line of attack against refugees: “they’re just coming here to take advantage of our welfare.” Oh no! It’ll cost the taxpayer money to subsidise a refugee to live in a safe country! So instead of having them “rip off” the taxpayer with a couple hundred a fortnight we’ll just lock them up on an island where it costs $1 million per person on average over the past 4 years and operational costs have wasted $5 billion in 4 years. Why help someone for barely enough money to survive when you can torture them and keep them imprisoned for several times more!
Scott Morrison, or Sco-Mo as we kids call them, loved the US’s Muslim Ban idea by the way. He said it was proof that the rest of the world was “catching up to Australia.” Yeah. Geez guys. What took you so long to be as bad as Australia?
Mandatory detention has had bipartisan support from the two major parties since its creation by the Keating government in 1992. We have been keeping people in prison for seeking asylum for 26 years.
We also don’t want to get rid of them. There was a deal under the Obama administration to take some of these refugees but this process has carried on into the Trump administration. He was livid the idea that he should uphold this deal because 1) OooOBaMaaaa!! 2) REFUGEES?? In America??? So that’s currently going nowhere. Meanwhile New Zealand, our good ally and close neighbour, has said “I’ll take some of them” and the current PM (Turnbull) has said no. His excuse? We have a deal with the US. We should see where that goes. It’s going nowhere. So he conveniently can just pretend his hands are tied and let refugees continue to be tortured and die under his care.
(And he hasn’t said it but I bet he’ll never let refugees settle in New Zealand because if they become NZ citizens they’ll have travel rights to come to Australia without the same visa restrictions as other countries AND THEN THE REFUGEES WOULD WIN).
So let’s top this all off with the icing on the cake: a phone call between Trump and Turnbull when Trump was getting acquainted with all the world leaders last year. Turnbull explained our zero tolerance refugee policy and the cruelty as a deterrent that is employed and Trump said “That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am.”
“That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am.”
Let that sink in.
And that’s where we’re up to now in modern history. See everyone likes to go to the obvious big example we have of the Nazis and their camps but the truth is… this never stopped. There are similar examples of this abhorrent behaviour happening right now and have been for decades. Governments have been putting people in camps and trying to destroy cultures, or ethnicities, or deny people safe havens from wars, and be utterly heartless and deliberately cruel since forever. This is the ongoing drive of conservatism: keep people out, keep people a certain way, and the current example in the US is just that bubbling over the horribly inescapable surface. We are deluded to think that this cruelty took a 70 year respite when WW2 ended and it’s taken this long to get this strong.
The world has always been racist. Trump just doesn’t bother to filter it. And Australia just wants to keep it on an island so no one can see it.
mici's campfire 