glorious_spoon | Entries tagged with rl: ranting

Ugh. I know I haven't posted since, like, the beginning of time, but I thought I'd pop my head up and let anybody who's still reading this know that I'm not actually dead yet. So: my life recently in bullet form!

My old junker car was perilously close to giving up the ghost (as they always seem to do right in the middle of the winter), and I had to get a new one. In the interest of not dumping tons of time and money into another junker that's just going to die a year from now, we bought a new (-ish) car. It's a wonderful vehicle, except for the part where it cost about $200 less than my total annual income.
Speaking of total annual income, I just did my taxes and found out that I would owe the federal govt. $500 if it weren't for the academic credits I get for tuition. As it is, I'm breaking even.
I sold my old car for less than a thousand dollars. Considering that it had a bent frame, no functioning dash lights, a radiator leak, a rattling muffler, and a hood that had to be opened with a jury-rigged bent clothes-hanger hooked to the release, that's not actually that bad a deal.
I started classes, full-time. And I'm applying for another job, which will bring my working hours up to 45 hours/week and my free time down to zero. And still no health insurance or bennies. I haven't had a day off since the last time I called in sick, which was, oh, thirteen months ago. Give or take.
I still have not caught up with SPN. I keep meaning to, but it keeps not happening. I have been addicted recently to Leverage, Sherlock Holmes, and 80's Brat Pack movies, but I haven't actually had any time to write. It doesn't look like I'll be getting any anytime soon, either. :/
I've pretty much quit drinking. I can't afford the time sink. Although in the interest of having one awful health habit at all times, I'm considering taking up smoking again...

Anyway...I miss you all. I miss fandom. I will be back....

Dear

spnanonhaven nonnies:

Seriously, I have better things to do with my time than troll every single author thread ever posting self-recs.

I'm aware that this has been going on for the better part of two weeks by now, and that everybody who's going to hear about it probably already has. The author in question has been taken pretty thoroughly to task, so I'm not going to go there. I will say that I skimmed the fic and that the criticism has been, in my eyes, entirely apt.

Two things:

1. 'Racist' is not an insult. Really, it's not. Calling someone out on racist behavior (and yeah, it's happened to me and yeah, I get that it sucks to feel like the bad guy) is not the same thing as 'calling them names'. It's saying, 'Hey. You did this thing, and it was racist. It offended people. Maybe you didn't mean it to be offensive, maybe you really didn't know better, maybe you just didn't think it through--whatever. It was still offensive. People were offended, whether you meant them to be or not.'

Ignorance is not an excuse, and the fact that you may not consciously hold any racist attitudes doesn't mean that you are exempt from the possibility of ever doing something racist.

2. Apologies work better if they are genuine and unqualified. This means you don't get to make excuses for your behavior (unless those excuses include 'somebody held a gun to my head and made me post this'), you just say that you fucked up, and you're sorry. If you can let go of your defensiveness long enough, it's a big fucking step toward alleviating any hurt you've caused. Also, pretending it never happened or that you weren't really wrong or that there's some mitigating circumstance that makes it all okay does not actually help your reputation in fandom. You become that writer not just by writing offensive fic, but by refusing to acknowledge that you really did anything wrong.

That's all I'm going to say on the subject.

( Cut for spoilers )

Things about the SPN / J2 fandom that bug me lately, in no particular order (ranting about it here because

fanficrants is (a) sick of SPN rants and (b) doesn't allow for my entitlement complex):

1. Shipping wars. Jesus fuck, the shipping wars. It hasn't quite reached the Heron vs. Harmony levels of animosity, but the Wincesters and the Dean/Castiel people are starting to get close.

2. WHY THE HELL DO SO MANY PEOPLE WRITE JARED/HARLEY? WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU??

3. Yes, rape, torture, and incest really ought to be warned for. Even in SPN.

4. No, Wincest is not canon. No matter how much you want it to be. Neither is Dean/Castiel. NEITHER OF THESE PAIRINGS IS CANON, OKAY?

5. Yes, Sam really was a bastard in Season 4. He's been doing a lovely job of owning it and trying to make up for it, but he. Was. A. Bastard.

6. J2 shippers take note: shyness is not a disability. And JA might be somewhat reserved compared to his costar, but he doesn't seem to be cripplingly reticent. Observe.

7. Even people who are painfully shy often do not take well to having their more extroverted friends treat them like they're damaged toddlers. See above re: shyness not being a disability. Shy people are also not necessarily nicer, more naive, or more sensitive. Some of us just hate people.

8. John was neither a violent child molester nor a saint. Dean and Sam are good men, and he had a hand in that, but they're also pretty fucked up. And John had a hand in that, too.

9. Please stop bashing the girlfriends/wives of J2. It's skeevy.

So, I think I'm gonna finish it. Like, really, actually finish it. That'll be a first for me. *fingers crossed*

....of course, that doesn't mean that the damn thing will be any good. My pacing is a mess and my characters keep drifting, and I guess it's a good thing that it's already well in excess of 20K, because I'm gonna need to do a serious hack-job on this monster once it's done.

And of course, it's Dean/OMC, so I'm all paranoid that nobody will want to read it if Dean's not paired with a canon character. Seriously, if I could have figured out a way to make this story work with a canon character, I would have, but I couldn't.

Man. I'm so freaking stressed about this thing, you have no idea.

They spend most of the fall in this town with pretensions of being a city somewhere in southern Wyoming, doing research. Or, well, Dad spends it doing research and Dean spends it going slowly out of his mind with boredom. --From Chapter 5 of the Monster Fic from Hell

Just re-watched Mystery Spot.

Two things occurred to me. First of all, it's kind of interesting to come at this from a Season 5 perspective, because the Sam we saw in that ep was a scary new thing at the time. Sweet little Sammy, turned into a killing machine. Who could believe such a thing?

Now it's just SOP.

It's really true that those boys can't function without each other. And they both go crazy in the same ways; if you look at the way Dean was in 5.04, it's pretty much the same thing. It's interesting. Fandom makes them go tragically mad, all tears and PTSD and fractured psyches, preferably to be cured with lots of Healing Cock and cuddles. I kind of prefer the canon take. Neither Sam nor Dean will stop being able to function when they lose their minds. They'll just stop being human. Which is both a lot more disturbing than most of the angsty fanfics I've read to that effect, and a lot harder to fix. It's a rare thing for me to prefer a show's canon handling of emotional issues to the standard fanon handling of same.

The second thing is...where the hell does the popularity of Sam/Gabriel come from? I keep seeing it everywhere, and while I kind of get it as a hate-sex thing, or even something that you could eventually work into a romantic relationship, why are people acting like Sam and Gabriel are just going to be the best of friends right off the bat? Dude, Gabriel destroyed Sam's life, on purpose, for the fun of it. The weirdest part is that these same people can't seem to conceive the notion of Dean/Gabriel, because "It would be an explosion of tempers!"

Dean violently dislikes Gabriel, I won't argue with that. But it's nowhere near as personal as the beef Sam has with him.

It's like Harry/Draco again, except like 3000X worse.

So, RPF.

I have mixed feelings about RPF. If I think about it too much, I find the entire concept more than a little creepy--but I do read it on occasion (CWRPF having totally broken down my resistance), so I can't really judge.

( In which I ramble on and on... )

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30

Glory to the Spoons!

Entries tagged with rl: ranting

(no subject)

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