Becca: she/her
Eternally in love with: Eivor Varinsdøttir, Kassandra the Eagle Bearer, Carol Danvers, Olivia Dunham, Felicity Smoak, Lady Vex'ahlia de Rolo Baroness of the First House of Whitestone and Grand Mistress of the Grey Hunt, Abby Anderson [Insert Predictable Fave here]
Not afraid to multiship.
We don’t want that kind of pearl clutching ‘christian’ conservative sitting on the AO3 board. Keep Moms For Liberty out of our fanfiction.
this is the second fucking year in a row someone has tried to pull this crap. but if you’re still on the fence about it (though fair warning, I am not copying everything she wrote as a response, which you can read on the OTW website):
Would you be in favor of creating a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee? Why or why not? I see no reason creating another committee would help anything in light of the continued staffing issues, and see several ways it could hurt. Lumping nonwhite, and non-English-speaking, and non-American volunteers together in one committee is just tokenism with a bow on top. Those experiences are not singular or universal. The DEI consultant to be hired by the organization will be able to speak to this far better than I can.
The cost of becoming a member/voting in elections is prohibitive for many users, particularly disabled, international and POC ones. Do you have any ideas about how this could be improved to make the otw more inclusive and less privileged? No.
Also, just for some proof of the “Republican” part, from Twitter:
like, it’s not a pejorative, it’s how she’s self-identified
also, ENTIRELY unrelated to this crap, but she’s only been a volunteer for about a year and a lot of her answers to questions about ongoing problems is “I don’t know because I’ve only been here a year.” she doesn’t even know what PAC is.
She resigned from OTW today. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
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(image description in alt; click for link to tweet)
one of the things that i loved about barbie (2023) that i think a lot of the posts making fun of male-written reviews miss is that, though the movie presents itself as a commentary on the patriarchy and sexism, the message at the core of the film isn’t actually limited to being about (cis) women. it’s about anyone who is Other.
i went to go see the movie on thursday afternoon before all the big midnight premieres, and the theater was still packed. there wasn’t an empty seat in the entire theater. i had a seat at the end of the row, which i had picked out in a faint (futile) hope that no one would sit next to me. thirty seconds before the trailers started, a family of about 10 black people walked in and split up, presumably because they’d only just bought their tickets and there were no longer 10 seats together. the dad and the son, who was maybe a few years younger than me in his early-20s, a good foot and a half taller than me, and who i recognized as one of the football players at the local university, ended up taking the two empty seats next to me with the linebacker in the seat right next to me. and that was pretty much the last time i thought of them until the last twenty minutes of the movie.
see, in the last twenty minutes of the movie, america ferrera makes an impassioned speech about not just the limitations that male-dominated society puts on women but the limitations that women put on themselves in order to survive in said male-dominated society. it’s about the contradictions that we’re subjected to–you can’t be too much, but you can’t be too little either. you have to lift each other up but you’re also in constant competition with other women for the shredded dregs of respect that men have left over for us. you can’t say yes to a man because then you’re a whore but you can’t say no because then you’re a prude. it was passionate and bitter and furious and it had every woman in the theater, myself included, in tears.
and in the silence of the theater following america ferrera’s plea for barbie not to make herself less just so that society isn’t threatened by her, the linebacker sitting next to me said fervently, “i feel that.”
it brought everything to a screeching halt. now i’m a white woman, and though i’m fat and nowhere near as gorgeous as margot robbie, from the very first trailer, it was obvious that this was going to be a movie for me. and if done right, it was going to be a movie for all women (and i would argue that it was). but the thing that it also did right was that though the surface of the message was about women making themselves lesser, the core was that it was for anyone who makes themselves lesser to fit in. yeah, it’s for women who are trying to fit into a male-dominated society, but it’s also for bipoc who are trying to fit into a white-dominated society. it’s for trans people trying to fit into a cis-dominated society. it’s for gay people trying to fit into a heterosexual-dominated society. it’s for anyone who’s been Othered and has to shrink themselves in a desperate attempt to survive.
i love the posts making fun of male-written reviews that are butthurt that this movie isn’t for them just as much as the next person. but i think it’s important that we don’t forget that those are representative of the people in power, the people that could never understand this message. barbie is for me, yeah, but it isn’t just for me. it’s for my trans friend who is six feet tall and has a beard and wears pink dresses every single day because they make her feel pretty. it’s for my labmate who could practically be a barbie herself and irritates me every time she talks about thinphobia but also can’t find someone who wants to be with her because she’s brilliant and not because she’s beautiful.
it’s for the black linebacker who sat next to me in the theater and felt heard when a fictional character in a movie told him not to make himself smaller just to fit society’s standards.
“ao3 should have an algorithm” ao3 should continue only giving me exactly what I ask for which happens because I know how to use the search, sort, and filter functions
Now, I’m not saying romantic relationships are inferior, or that they’re useless, or that you being in one or that you shipping some characters romantically is Bad or something off the walls like that. What I’m saying is that two people (or characters, since we’re talking shipping here) can be just as devoted to each other, love each other just as deeply, mean just as much to each other while being in a platonic relationship. The end point of caring about someone doesn’t have to be romance.
Friendship isn’t a stepping stone between strangers and romantic partners, it’s a different path. And you can follow that path as deep into the wood as a romantic one if you want, and neither is inferior to the other, they just have different views.
i have a brain problem that prevents me from understanding people who need so much specifically newly-released TV shows that they’re upset by the prospect of going a few months without new ones being produced
like they could stop making video games and books today and I wouldn’t notice until sometime in 2026. honestly if they’d stop making new video games for a while that’d be kinda convenient. everyone take a break and let me catch up. I still haven’t even played Persona 5.
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