attackfish | Getting to know you weirdos meme

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Getting to know you weirdos meme

Ganked without attribution from people on other people's f-lists

I know very little about some of the people on my friends list. Some people I know relatively well. But here's a thought: why not take this opportunity to tell me a little something about yourself. Any old thing at all. Just so the next time I see your name I can say: "Ah, there's Parker ...she likes money and cereal." I'd love it if everyone who's friended me did this. (Yes, even you people who I know really well.) Then post this in your own journal [only if you feel inclined]. In return, ask me anything you'd like to know about me and I'll give you an answer*.

*Providing it's answerable/suitable for public posting.

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I think more than is wise about scenarios where I would be disabled again, up to and including a zombie apocalypse.

What makes you read-- and, having read, like-- a fanfic?

I horrified my 10th grade lit professor when I told her quite frankly that were I stranded with my class Lord of the Flies style on a jungle island, I would kill myself before my brain and body began to deteriorate without medication. She gave me a detention, and it took me a lot of explaining to convince her I wasn't suicidal.

*Blinks, rereads question, and blinks again* okay... I like to think that I like what I like based primarily on quality, but hah, we all know that's not true (and what defines quality anyway?) I like things that hit my non sexual, literary kinks. I love slavery/captivity fic, but not the fluffy crap a lot of people like. I don't want to see good masters and happy slaves. I want to see being a master ruin someone who might have been good. I want to see slavery and power differentials taint and slowly destroy what might have been real love. And most of all, I want to see people with everything against them fight. Win or lose, I want to see them fight, and get free, or negotiate a place for themselves in the screwed up world they find themselves in. I also love anything starring characters with disabilities that isn't about those disabilities, where they are treated like any other person with this challenge. I love Fantasy written from atypical cultural perspectives, and I have a special love for fantasy from a Jewish cultural perspective. I love smart, sarcastic, depressed main characters who fight like hell, especially when they're girls, but I like the boys too. I like reading about people working through trauma, or failing to work through trauma, or looking back on trauma. I like fiction where I get the feeling the side characters have thoughts and feelings that don't revolve around the mains. I like fiction that says it's okay to be afraid, to be angry, to be hurt and not to forgive. I like fiction that says it's okay to choose who you love and who you don't love, and that it's okay not to love someone who has hurt you, even if that person is related to you, even if it's your parents, or your sister, or somebody everybody else loves, that shows that some relationships can't be saved, and there's nothing wrong with cutting ties. Oh, and I like seeing bisexual characters where it isn't anything special. I like to see myself in what I read.

Teachers can be really terrible.

My standard procedure for self-inserts is to imagine that it's taking place in an alternate universe where my med-requiring condition has disappeared, and-- because I feel like it's not fair to just upgrade myself like that-- so has all my knowledge of canon. It makes things interesting.

I'm disturbed to learn that there is fluffy slavery fic. On the other hand, your fic likes sound interesting.

Oh boy, that's for sure.

Self inserts? When I said I liked to see myself in what I read, I meant it more that I want to be able to identify with the characters. *shrug* I did use a lot of my personal flaws to create the main character of my current novel. That sort of counts, right?

It's mostly kinksters who find it hot and don't want to deal with the underlying realities of power dynamics, which is okay, as long as you acknowledge it's all a fantasy. But it's really really not what I want to read or write, and I have to sort through.

I understood what you meant; it was your speculation about what you would do in a Lord of the Flies situation that I was responding to with that comment.

It was worded as "What would you do if you crash landed with your class on an island?" and I said first of all, we would be rescued very quickly, given modern plane tracking, and our pictures would be all over the media. Then I was told that we wouldn't be rescued, so stop injecting reality into the speculation. Then I said once it became clear rescue wasn't coming, I would kill myself. The only question was how long I would hold out hope. So I wasn't really using my canon knowledge. It didn't help that I hated the book and the premise, and disagreed with the idea that my teacher was pushing that taken away from society, humans fall into chaos, seeing as we're the ones who build society, thank you very much, and planet earth is effectively one big island we're stranded on. So I was like, you can all hang out on your island without me, 'kay?

I like your answer, and I hated that book, too. To be fair, Lord of the Flies did lightly imply that rescue took so long because their country of origin was involved in a nuclear war and didn't expect to see them again for a very long time.

Yeah, but my teacher didn't specify that the situation was identical to LotF, and I was a born malingerer.

I never understood why LotF was seen as so meaningful, or why teachers kept pushing it as a rousing adventure. No.

Lord of the Flies is not a rousing adventure. It suffers from a lot of What Do You Mean It's Not Symbolic (or, to be more respectful, it's a book with WDYMINT, if you're in the US, or a What Do You Mean It's Not Symbolic book, if you're in the UK), and a lot of it makes very little literal sense, which would work better if the symbolic meaning were itself cogent and well-argued.

Speaking as an American, what does the T stand for in WDYMINT? We use What Do You Mean It's Not Symbolic too.

which would work better if the symbolic meaning were itself cogent and well-argued

Oh, this, so much. And if Golding hadn't used religious symbols that to me as a non-Christian didn't mean much. *shrug*

It stands for "oops, chordatesrock made a typo."

The symbols didn't mean much to me as a Christian, either. The book is bad that way.

Oy.

Yeah. The scene with the pig-hunt in the meadow is particularly bad about that. I think I managed to weasel out of writing about LotF for high school English, which was a good thing for my mental health.

I didn't, but I excoriated it in essay form instead. The failing grade was totally worth it. It was even more worth it when I appealed the grade and got an A.

You are officially awesome. I would love to read that essay.

*blushes shamefaced* It was an in class essay, and as soon as I was done with the class, it when straight in the recyclables. I try to pretend that I didn't write anything before my eighteenth birthday, because while I was cogent, and argued a good case, I was pretentious as fuck.

That's a shame. I have a tenth-- or maybe eleventh-- grade essay arguing that Tristan and Iseult is about how good intentions can lead to terrible outcomes. That probably sounds reasonable to you, but, actually, as an example, I cited the "fact" that the entire story was accidentally masterminded by sentient birds as evidence of my point.

(On that topic, you cannot convince me that the lepers weren't secretly planning to release Iseult. Otherwise, the story is just too problematic.)

When I was fifteen, I wrote an essay all about how the holy grail stories across Celtic and Germanic Europe had their roots in pre-Christian myths of a cauldron of plenty, and had nothing to do with Jesus's bloodline or Mary Magdalene, thank you very much. The Da Vinci Code really annoyed me, if you couldn't tell, so I wrote it for kicks, though I later submitted it for extra credit. I also attempted a feminist analysis of Guinevere and Morgan le Fay, which in retrospect is kind of adorable.

It makes me very sad that you didn't save these.

I'm just glad the world has been spared their continued existence.

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Getting to know you weirdos meme

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