For reals, it doesn’t even have to be a whole cat.
…That sounded wrong.
Anyway, I have a neighbor who rescued a frostbitten, bedraggled little kitten with a badly injured leg, he had to have some amputations done at the vet’s and though Admiral Nelson has some battle scars, he’s the dearest, cuddliest tri-paw’d, one-eyed, half-tailed thing ever, and sure enough, the judges considered him Best in Class for his personality and demeanor. He didn’t just get a ribbon, but a little medal and he did so well at the cat show, that’s how come my neighbor decided to get him formally certified as a therapy cat. Now he has a little vest, and alternately a sort of navy uniform one with a pinned-up sleeve, and when humans are dealing with orthopedic surgery, amputations, even just being unwell in general at a rehabilitation facility where my neighbor works, they sometimes get to spend time with him and often feel quite a bit better.
There was an awkwardness when a nurse had a tuna salad sandwich at the charge desk, the Admiral decided to leave his sleeping patient and go inquire if a deserving cat might have a quick bite between watches, a different patient spotted him in his naval uniform and was worried her medication was causing hallucinations, but apart from that, the little guy does awfully good work and is a popular fellow.
it fucking sucks how you can do all the therapy and self healing in the world and you still have to wake up living under a capitalist death cult that’s killed community and crushes your soul
congrats you want to live and be happy
bad news the world doesn’t want that for you
I’ll still love fully and crawl to hope until my body gives out anyway I guess
having friends is so cool like here’s a person i love soooo much and i get to make inside jokes w them and make them laugh and be there for them when they’re sad and share in their suffering as well as their joy. what a beautiful and sacred thing. friendship is holy
i think my favourite part of leverage is the way that they keep putting eliot in situations. they make him a baseball star. a country music legend. a pro fighter.
#eliot spencer you are soooo barbie coded (via op)
i love when ppl ask writers questions about their ocs and they’re like “uhh i think so?” as if they didn’t invent them. like they’re just mild acquaintances we have
Ah, but see, in a way they ARE just mild acquaintances. The phrase “you can never really know someone” applies just as much to fictional characters in your head as it does to people in meat space. Because, just like in the world around you, the only angle you can truly see is yours. You choose where to look, you frame your view in a certain way.
This is Even.More.True about your OCs. Because they fit into your story a certain way if they actually cooperate with your idea of what you’re supposed to be writing (but c’mon, how often does THAT happen?). So you frame them in one certain way. You know everything about them in that context.
Then boom, someone comes along and asks you a question about them that you just… never had to think about. And you’re stymied for a moment because You Don’t Know. Conversation never came up, because you were too busy arguing with your OC about how far off the path of the story they keep straying and would you just cooperate already???
So yeah. Questions create new openings in the story sets. You ask the question of us poor writers and open a door that was supposed to be fake background scenery, or not there at all, and all of a sudden we have to figure out what should be there. Your entire character can end up changed because of one simple question that you had to come up with an answer for and now you’ll never see them, or their place in the story, the same again.
This is why it’s both a blessing and a curse for us to be asked about our characters. Pro: we get to learn so much more about the random hordes in our brain. Con? We actually have to think it up right on the spot or it’s going to bug us forever now and probably change the whole flow of the damn story, thank you very much you wicked sadist with your cursed curiosity.
hey so, as a man who works with other men, here’s a quick relationship tip: if he doesn’t much like cats, that might be just a personal preference. if he hates cats, if he tells you he hates cats as soon as he hears that you have a cat and love your cat, he’s an asshole. he’s telling on himself.
every guy i’ve ever worked with that makes a point of telling me how much he hates cats as soon as i mention that i have a cat and love my cat, is always someone who is regularly cruel for fun and who laughs in the breakroom about the mean things they do for fun to their girlfriends and children.
I wish I could articulate all the ways this makes sense and why it makes sense and stuff but it’s just like… something something misogyny something something resentment of creatures that don’t need you and don’t hang on your attention and approval all their lives.
My dad gave me this exact same advice when I was a kid. “Anyone who hates cats is a control freak and an asshole.”
See, historically there have always been people who saw an extra layer of gayness on certain pairs of fictional people (you just thought of several), and people Back Then even wrote their own fanfic (or as they were called at the time, “pastiches”), but the first widespread queer fanwork to really define the fanfiction genre was KIRK AND SPOCK. Kirk/Spock. K/S. The very first slashfics.
Why this work was vastly, overwhelmingly written by straight women is a discussion for another time, but it was, so that’s the main perspective I’m gonna consider here.
How do you - a statistically middle-class, 30+, stay-at-home wife and mother - how do you write slashfic ao3-style in the 1960’s before the internet?
Carefully.
Through letters with friends, phone calls, pen pals, and sometimes - sometimes - clandestine meetings of small groups. Whole novels were written communally, round-robin style, by sending typed or handwritten additions chapter by chapter to each other. These were all underground, some deep underground; even the early Trekkie fanzines of the time wouldn’t touch them.
And keep in mind, few of these stories were explicitly even sexual! But they were all about a very, very close relationship between two men. In the 1960’s.
Guess how cool everyone else was about this.
Actually, for their part, Gene Rodenberry and the other writers were fine with it, saying that they had deliberately written the characters to be two halves of a whole, and if you wanna read it that way, yeah sure, go right ahead. Shatner and Nimoy took it all in good humor, and seemingly still do, each guy basically gesturing to the other and chuckling “I mean, who wouldn’t?”
But elsewhere there was vicious backlash against The Premise, and not just within the fandom. This was still at a time in the US and UK when various “sodomy” and “decency” laws made no distinction between homosexual sex acts and just, like, directly lighting another man’s cigarette with your cigarette in public. (That, sadly, is not a fucking joke.)
It was probably the closest some suburban cishet women came to understanding the pain of being in the closet. They had to protect this secret from their friends and family at all cost. There were cases of divorces where women lost custody of their children because their writing had come to light.
Can you imagine having such a burning desire to write for your OTP that you were willing to lose everything over it? Even if you were never caught, you still had to be willing to wait weeks, months, to receive a letter in the mail that you had to carefully intercept, read in secret, and then add your own chapter t, also in secret, and then send off, perhaps never to be seen again.
These people were goddamn heroes, and they laid the foundation for the world we live in today. A world where we can read, write, comment on, or share - in a matter of seconds! - literature about two background characters from two different franchises enjoying a really specific kink involving vacuums or something. And that’s objectively amazing.
Raise a toast to our fanfiction elders, who simped in the darkness so we could simp in the light of day.
