If You Want To Watch BBC Sherlock On 15th Of January But You Don’t Live In UK You Have Some Live Streams:

"Hey so it turns out that the people of earth accidentally did a global experiment to see if every individual could course correct climate change through mass personal change of habits, and it turns out, no! We can't! It was massive corporate activity all along!"

For the people who are out there “fighting the good fight” and “trying to make fandom a better place,” I have two important questions for you:

1. Is the author dead? x

2. Is your baby in the bathwater? x

What do I mean by those things? Let’s start with #1. The Death of the Author is a type of literary criticism, the extreme cliff notes version of which is that art exists outside of the creator’s life, personal background, and even intentions. I’m using it slightly differently than Barthes intended, but that’s okay, because the author is dead and I’m interpreting his work through my own lens.

In fandom, the author is dead. In fact, the author was never alive in the first place, not really. The author has only ever been the idea of a person, because unlike published fiction, the only thing we know about a fanfic author is that which they choose to tell us about themselves.

Why is that important?

Because it might not be true. Hell, that happens in real life with published authors, who have SSN’s on file with their publishers, who pay taxes on the works they create and have researchable pasts. If the author of A Million Little Pieces could fake everything, why can’t I? Why can’t you? Why can’t the writer of your favorite fic in the whole wide world?

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: “you can only write about [sensitive subject] if [sensitive subject] has happened to you personally, otherwise you’re a disgusting monster that deserves to die!!” Or maybe “you can only write [x racial or ethnic group] characters if you’re [x racial or ethnic group] otherwise you’re racist/fetishizing/colonizing!”

You can play this game with any sensitive subject you can come up with. I’ve seen them all before, on a sliding scale of slightly chastising to literal death threats.

Now, I could tell you that I’m a white-passing Latina whose grandmother was an anchor baby. I could tell you that I speak only English because my family never taught me to speak Spanish, something which I’ve been told is common in the Cuban community, though I only know my own lived experience. I could tell you that I’m mostly neurotypical. I could tell you that I’m covered in surgical scars. I could tell you lots of things.

Are any of these true? Maybe! I could tell you that my brother has severe mental development problems, so uncommon that they’ve never been properly diagnosed, and that he will live the rest of his life in a group home with 24-hour care. Is that true? Am I allowed to write about families struggling with America’s piss-poor services for the handicapped now?

Am I allowed to write about being Cuban? After all, I did just say that I’m Cuban. But is it true? Can I instead write a character that’s Panamanian? Maybe I really am Panamanian, not Cuban. Maybe I’m both. Maybe I’m neither. Maybe I’m really French Canadian. Should we require people to post regular selfies? I can’t count the number of times I’ve had someone come up to me speaking Arabic, and I’ve been told that I look Syrian. What’s stopping me from making a blog that claims that I am Syrian? Can you even really tell someone’s race and ethnicity from a photo?

Am I allowed to write about being a teenager? Am I allowed to write about being a college student? Am I allowed to write about being an “adulty” adult? Can I write a character who’s 40? 50? 60? How old am I?

All of this is to say: you can’t base what someone is or is not “allowed” to write about on a background that may or may not be real. No matter how good your intentions. And I get it - this usually comes from a place of well-meaning. You’re trying to protect marginalized groups by stopping privileged people from trampling all over experiences that they haven’t suffered. I get that. It’s a very noble thought. But you can’t require a background check for every fic that you don’t like.

If you say “you can only write about rape if you’re a rape victim,” then one of three things will happen:

Real survivors will have to supply intimate details of their own violations to prevent harassment

Real survivors will refuse to engage and will then have to deal with death threats and people telling them to kill themselves for daring to write about their own experiences

People who aren’t survivors will say “yeah sure this happened to me” just to get people to shut up

Has that helped anyone? I mean really - anyone??

So now let’s get to point #2: is your baby in the bathwater?

If your intention is to protect marginalized people from being trampled upon, stop and assess if your boot is the one that’s now stamping on their face. Find your baby! Is your baby in the bathwater? Which is to say: find the goal that you’re advocating for. Now assess. Are you making the problem worse for the people you’re trying to protect? Does that rape victim really feel better, now that you’ve harassed and stalked them in the name of making rape victims feel safe?

Let’s say you read a fic that contains explicit sex between a 16 year old and a 17 year old. Is this okay? Would it be okay if the writer was 15? 16? 17? Should teenagers be barred from writing about their own lives, and should teenagers be banned from exploring sexuality in a fictional bubble, instead of hookup culture? Is it okay for a 20 year old to write about their experiences as a teenager? Is it okay for a 20 year old to write about being raped at a party as a teenager? Is it okay for a 30 year old? How about a 40 year old? Is it okay so long as it isn’t titillating? Is it okay if taking control of the narrative allows the writer to re-conceptualize their trauma as something they have control over? Is it okay if their therapist told them that writing is a safe creative outlet?

Is your author dead?

Is your baby in the bathwater?

Now let’s take a hardline approach: no fanfiction with characters who are under 18 years old. None. Is the 16 year old who really loves Harry Potter and wants to read/write about characters their own age better off? Should they be banned from writing? Should they be forced to exclusively read and write (adult) experiences that they haven’t lived? Will they write about teens anyway? Should they have to share it in secret? Should 16 year olds be ashamed of themselves? Should we just throw in with the evangelicals and say that the only answer is abstinence, both real and fictional?

Let’s say that no rape is allowed in fiction, at all. None. What happens to all the hurt/comfort fics where a character is raped and then receives the support and love that they deserve, slowly heal, and by the end have found themselves again? Are you helping rape victims by banning these stories? Are you helping rape victims by stripping their agency away, by telling them that their wants and their consent doesn’t matter?

Is your baby in the bathwater?

Fandom is currently being split in two: on one side, the people who want to make fandom a “safer” place by any means necessary, even if that means throwing out all of the marginalized groups they say they want to protect - and on the other, people who are saying “if you throw out that bathwater, you’re throwing the baby out too.”

The whole point of fandom is to be able to explore all kinds of ideas from the safety and comfort of a computer screen. You can read/write things that fascinate you, disgust you, titillate you, or make your heart feel warm. This is true of all fiction. People who want to read about rape and incest and extreme violence and torture can go pick up a copy of Game of Thrones from the bookstore whenever they want. Sanitizing fandom just means holding a community of people who are primarily not male, not straight, not cis, or some combination of those three, to higher and stricter standards than straight white cis male authors and creators all over the world.

There is nothing you can find on AO3 that you can’t find in a bookstore. Any teenager can go check out Lolita, or ASOIAF, or Flowers in the Attic, or Stephen King’s It, or Speak, or hundreds of other books that have adult themes or gratuitous violence or graphic sex. The difference is that AO3 has warnings and tags and allows people to interact only with the types of work that they want to, and allows people to curate their experiences.

Are these themes eligible to be explored, but only in the setting of something produced/published? Books, movies, television, studio art, music - all of these fields have huge barriers to entry, and they’re largely controlled by wealthy cishet white men. Is it better to say that only those who have the right connections to “make it” in these industries should be allowed to explore violence or sexuality or any other so-called “adult” theme?

Does banning women from writing MLM erotica make fan culture a better place?

Does banning queer people from writing about queer experiences make fan culture a better place?

Is M/M fic okay, but only if the author is male? What if he’s a transman? What if they’re NB? Who should get to draw those lines? Should TERFs get a vote? What if the author is a woman who feels more comfortable writing from a male character’s perspective because she’s grown up with male stories her whole life, or because she identifies more with male characters? What about all the transmen who discovered themselves, in part, by writing fanfiction, and realized that their desires to write male characters stemmed from something they hadn’t yet realized about themselves?

How can we ever be sure that the author is who they say they are?

Who is allowed to write these stories? How do we enforce it?

Is it better for none of these stories to ever exist at all?

Have you killed your author?

Have you thrown out your baby with the bathwater?

::Wildlife camera in a national preserve in the Yukon captured a large family of wolves and their pups::

Honestly, I love the idea of a vampire who only drinks blood taken from blood banks and hospitals, because it so beautifully encompasses someone who's more concerned with the vibes of something than the actual impact of it.

Drinking from someone on the street, barring some other condition they may have, isn't likely to kill them unless you gorge yourself. Taking blood packs? There's always a shortage of blood, and having even less of it runs the very real risk of getting someone killed in a way that is wholly out of your control once you've sipped on that blood. Someone you can't assure the innocence or guilt of, if you're the type of person who cares about that.

Despite that, in popular stuff, I often see discussions of drinking from a blood bank being somehow better or preferable, and yeah. No. The only thing it does is make you feel better while doing more harm, because of that degree of removal. You're effectively drinking blood from someone on the cusp of hypovolemic shock, but since it's not straight from the tap, some people seem to think it's better.

i'm AWARE this is a stupid hill to die on, but like. trope vs theme vs cliché vs motif vs archetype MATTERS. it matters to Me and i will die on this hill no matter how much others decide it's pointless. words mean things

IDK if someone has posted this, but I found it and zomg, I've been laughing for ten minutes xD my sister says I'm crazy but I don't care xD

one of the greatest/funniest things about being a mdtb shipper is that you simply cannot explain it to a random passerby.

Like okay so there is this very popular show, called Naruto about a little ninja/shinobi guy who is shunned by his entire village for reasons yet to be revealed but despite this wants to prove himself to them and become their super ninja leader president or Hokage, the show follows him, a girl he has a crush on, a traumatized boy with special magic eyes, and their chronically late sensei. This show is in two parts and has 720 total episodes, many of which are filler - so as for the ship: you meet Tobirama first... sort of, for like a couple of minutes in episode 69 and then don't see him again for another 521 episodes, as for Madara well we don't actually meet him until episode 322 of the second part (so 542 episodes in), the two of them do not appear on screen at the same time until episode 367 of part 2 (so 587 episodes in), which notably takes place in a flashback because - surprise every time we have seen either of them up to this point (which mind you is barely at all) they have actually been dead/reanimated corpses. Including both flashbacks and reanimation they talk to each other maybe a total of three times (and that is definitely a generous guess). Madara for sure most definitely hates Tobirama because Tobirama killed Madara's last living brother back when they were both alive and fighting on opposite sides of a war between their two clans. Madara is very unpersonable and only ever had one friend, that friend is Tobirama's older brother - his most displayed character trait is that he is very very strong, with a LOT of chakra and loves a good fight - also he is another person with super special magic eyes. Tobirama is also seemingly pretty unpersonable, and his biggest character trait is that he has the mind of a jurassic park scientist which he uses to create many questionable or chakra intensive jutsus (including the one that reanimated the both of them), he is also implied to be one of the greatest sensors of all time and appears to hold a big grudge against Madara's clan. so anywa-

oh? what? why do I ship it? Well one day i was reading Naruto fics and stumbled across a Mdtb fic and it was such a masterpiece that I kept reading more and more bc the mdtb fic game is honestly S tier.

Local fire department with the severe weather analogy we can all understand

it’s the 21st day of the 21st year of the 21st century.

you can only reblog this today.

Translated the drama CD track from the One Punch Man Vol. 1 DVD, titled ‘A Festival with Saitama,’ where Saitama and Genos go to a summer festival together. Enjoy!

—

Saitama: One Punch Man Special CD, a Festival with Saitama. Saitama: On that day, I was in quite a hurry. Saitama: All right! And with that, I’m done washing my clothes. Hey Genos, did you get the clothes? Genos: Yes! I have finished collecting the clothes, Sensei. Saitama: Awesome, so once we’re done folding the clothes we can be done with these chores. I’ll help you with the folding. Genos: No, it’s fine! Saitama: But there are this many t-shirts alone, so if we do it together it’ll be faster. C’mon give me a few so I can help out. Genos: It’s okay. I am very confident in my folding skills. Look at this, Sensei! *folds the clothes* Saitama: Dang, you’re right. You’re super methodical. *folds another shirt* Genos: Ah! What was that? Saitama: Is something wrong? Genos: What just happened? What is the meaning of this…the speed of Sensei’s folding…it’s not normal! *calculating* TWO SECONDS! Saitama: Why are you suddenly speaking so loudly? Genos: With my calculations, even at the fastest speed, folding these t-shirts would still take five seconds. Saitama: Eh? Genos: But then with this over-accuracy, there is a possibility that I would damage the fabric of the shirt. Saitama: What the? Genos: BUT SENSEI ONLY TOOK TWO SECONDS AND― Saitama: What? Genos: Not only that, but not an inch is out of place! The shirt is perfectly folded! Saitama: Genos, what’s wrong? Genos: How is this possible? Saitama: Hey, why did you grow so serious all of a sudden? Genos? Genos: SENSEI Saitama: Whaat? Genos: Please fold this t-shirt one more time. Saitama: But I just did! Genos: No, please once more! Saitama: Huh? Are you interested in how I fold things? Okay so one more time…I’ll demonstrate with this t-shirt right here. Genos: Yes! Saitama: You ready? So you take the two sides of the t-shirt like so, put them against each other and then you just kind of flip it over and look! Didja see that? It folds instantly! Amazing, right? Genos: Amazing…as expected of Sensei! Saitama: Eh? You’re that surprised? Genos: Sensei, where did you learn such an amazing method of folding shirts? Saitama: I was watching TV and saw this show about how to save time by doing…HEY YOU! Why are you messing up the clothes I just folded JEEZ? You must be kidding me! Genos: I see now…With this t-shirt folding mechanism in place, I seem to be hung up on an existing form of this art. Saitama: Are you even listening? Genos: I understand now, Sensei! For a normal way of folding t-shirts, you would first take put the back up the shirt facing up, fold the two arms in, and then fold the shirt in half. Just like that, right? Saitama: Yeah, I guess so. Yeah… Genos: But Sensei’s method is different! I have captured a bias in that form. Saitama: Uh…what are you talking about? Genos: For the sake of speed and progress, you change the way you fold your clothes. It is an impeccable change of thought process! As expected of you, Sensei! Saitama: Like I said, people who know how to do it this way would do it like me. And besides, I just saw some lifestyle improvement tips from the TV that included this anyway! Genos: Please wait a moment, Sensei. I need to write this in my memo. Saitama: Just memorize it normally. Okay, whatever. Just hurry up and clean up since today I would like to― Genos: Now that you mention it, you did say you were looking forward to some event today, right? What kind of event was it? Saitama: Oh, did I not tell you? Today is―

*cellphone rings*

Genos: So Sensei, what was this important thing you were trying to tell me again? Saitama: Wait, aren’t you going to pick that up? I’m interested in what’s going on. Genos: Oh, uh…okay. Hello? Yeah, it’s me. Oh really? Where? Saitama (to himself): That guy…there are things I just don’t get about him. And we ended up not folding anything! That guyyyyy!!!!!! Genos: It’s a call from the Hero Association. Saitama: What did they say? A monster appeared? Genos: Yes, today in Z City a single monster has been advancing within the city. At the moment, we are waiting on confirmation. According to witnesses, this monster does not seem to be a major threat. The level of the monster is low, so Sensei will not need to be involved in such trivial matters. Saitama: Oh? So I don’t need to go? Genos: Yes, although the Hero Association did call for us, I do not think that it is necessary as Sensei is looking forward to the event later today anyway. If anything, I can handle this alone. Saitama: Really? By the way, where is the thing located? When it’s over let’s meet up. Genos: It’s in Central Park. Saitama: What…did you just say Central Park? Genos: Yes. I did. Saitama: Wha―whaaaaatttt!?!?!?!?!?

—

Festival Monster: Ehehehe! I finally made it to the festival! All of this stuff was made for me to destroy! Yes, I will never forgive the stupid summer festivals for ruining me! I’m going to destroy it all! I became so jealous of all these girls and boys attending the festival and got so angry that I became a monster! I am the Loner Festival Monster! Saitama: Hey, you! Festival Monster: Who are you? Some kind of random priest?

*punch* *monster goes flying*

Festival Monster: Guess I’m off!!!!! Saitama: I’m not bald! And this is a yukata! Genos: Sensei! Saitama: Ah, Genos! Seems like the monster has not interrupted the preparations of the festival! Genos: Yes, the monster did not cause a large commotion yet. Saitama: Thank god we made it in time. But it was super risky! If this guy were to really mess things up, the Summer Festival would be cancelled! Genos: Sensei…do you mean that the event you were very excited about was this festival? Saitama: Yeah, this festival. Genos: That’s what I thought. I am not sure what makes festivals so fun, but if Sensei says so, then perhaps there is something more than meets the eye at these ordinary events that might be linked to why you are so powerful…? Saitama: No no, that’s not it! Stuff like this is just FUN! It helps you forget the bad times! See? Festivals are the epitome of Summer! Look at all the kakigori (shaved ice) and yakisoba (fried noodles), and all the bustling food stands! For a normal young person, this kind of stuff really gets you in the mood, right? Genos: I am sorry, Sensei. I am not like other normal human beings as I have artificial parts and… Saitama: No, this has nothing to do with parts! *sighs* I just thought that, well, you’re always fighting monsters and taking all these notes, always being so serious and putting yourself under stress. I thought that maybe going out to places like this will be good for you. And it’s free too… Saitama: I see…I guess you’re not really into those kind of things? Well, it’s been a really long time for me as well… Genos: No, it’s not that I am not interested in this, but it’s more like I do not know much about it. Saitama: Eh? Do you mean you’ve never come to a festival before? Genos: No, it is a bit different. I do have memories of coming to a festival when I was very young with my family, but I am not sure if that memory is real or not. I have been so caught up in my goal that I try not to remember much about my past. Saitama: Oh, I see. I assumed so. You seem to be quite complex. It’s my bad… Genos: No, it’s fine! I see now… so this is what a festival is like!

*Bon Odori music starts playing*

Saitama: Seems like the Bon Odori* is about to start over there! Genos: Bon…Odori? Saitama: Shall we go, Genos? Genos: Of course! Let us go together, Sensei! Saitama: Yup! Besides, we already defeated the monster today as well! Genos: Right! And if we hurry, we can go back home and fold the rest of the t-shirts, Sensei! Saitama: Wait a minute *nudges Genos* what do you even mean by that? That’s all on you, man! Jeez!

—

T/N: *Bon Odori is a type of traditional group dance done during the Obon Festival (usually around August), which is done to honor one’s ancestors and heritage.

And uh…festival date much lol?