Tumblr Archive: The Why of Personal Preferences

[lirazel]

June 3, 2026:

i was talking with sawthefaeriequeen about how i hate fantasy novels that are based around competitions which make up a distressingly large amount of fantasy novel plots these days.

and for the first time i'm able to articulate to myself why.

first of all i just don't find competitive events that interesting. i've never been into sports, and the few i have liked (figure skating, rhythmic gymnastics) are more about the art side and i spend the whole time wishing everyone could win. i am not a competitive person by personality. i enjoy playing games for fun with my friends (i can play nerts or dutch blitz or whatever for hours and hours!), but watching other people doing something competitive is just not fun for me.

add to that that i hate zero sum situations. my worldview is that collaboration, cooperation, and compromise are the keys to building community, and community is the only really important thing in life.

high-stakes, cut-throat situations in which there can only be one winner just piss me off. i don't really think there are many zero sum situations that arise naturally; almost all of them are created by humans behaving badly towards each other.

and, like, people create zero sum situations a lot! all the time! one could argue that capitalism is nothing but an unnecessary zero sum situation created by humans! and obviously i can enjoy stories that are about zero sum hierarchical situations. just not when they're based around some kind of formal competition because the process of competing is not compelling to me. combining them is like two terrible tastes that go terribly together!
#i liked hunger games fine but i was never as into it as everyone else
#i can like sports movies because they tend to be more about the emotional stakes than the competitive ones
#can this team bond? can this athlete overcome their own psychological shit that's holding them back?
#that can be compelling!
#my favorite part of the olympics are the little mini documentaries that they show between events about the athletes
#because people are interesting!
#the competitions themselves? not so much
#i will watch for five minutes to marvel at what humans can accomplish with their bodies
#and then i'm done
#unless it's something that's more artistic like figure skating or gymnastics
#probably no one cares about this
#but i am always delighted when i learn something about myself
#something that explains a 'why' of my reactions to things
#anyway

May 26, 2026

Anonymous asked:

i’ve been loving your recent kingdon commentary (mel pregnancy fics & ambivalence about insta-love kingdon) because a lot of it jives with some thoughts i’ve been percolating lately about how often romance arcs slot too easily into cultural scripts that an audience may take for granted. and i’m not even sniping at tropes here; i think there’s just a tendency for Romance to look a certain way in stories that can become ooc because the plot will just zoom forward on the engine of its familiarity, while platonic pairings or non-traditional arcs demands specificity in the character to work, if that makes sense!

of course, a lot of romances are executed well! but a lot of them also are not. and i do feel like reframing/interrogating the parts of them that are taken for granted would help a lot in giving them a sense of freshness and uniqueness (sorry if this ramble is a little incoherent, it’s very late 😅)

no_where_new_hero

YES YES YES YES YES. as always, thank you for giving me an excuse to ramble about romance!!! i feel like in the last couple of years i've really pinned down what works for me and why!

i think you(?) and i and maybe batrachised have talked about how romance novels as a genre don't work for us even though we really enjoy romance when done well? and i think it's because romance novels, being their own genre, have certain beats they want to hit, certain tropes they lean into, a certain setup that clearly works for many, many people but that simply does not work for me.

pretty much all the romances i've been most invested in in my life (spuffy, wangxian, gen/irene, rick/evie, mulder/scully, peter/harriet, junghoo/youngshin, nick/nora, josh/donna, kirk/spock, my various ot3s, even jane and rochester) are relationships that are very important to the text and the characters' arcs but that are not the primary focus of the story. the romance, while in some cases contributing to the driving of the plot, are happening in addition to lots of other things. importantly, both (or all three) members of the ship have lots of other things on their mind and other goals, including something or more than one something that is taking up more of their time and energy than the romance is.

because of this, there's not a lot of room for those romance genre beats. the romance has to unfold in a way that works with the rest of the story. it is shaped by the larger story. their overall journeys have impacted the way the romance plays out in a very precise way. and so the romance becomes specific in a way that romance novels or romcoms mostly aren't.

(it also explains why the two romance novel writers whose stuff i consistently like--georgette heyer when she isn't being antisemitic and joanna bourne--work for me: heyer because the setting is always as important or more important than the romance and bourne because her characters are also spies who are doing shit. oh and i will say that some writers are very good at specificity--two of the only romcoms that work for me--when harry met sally and while you were sleeping--are very good at specificity).

specificity is EVERYTHING to me in romance. there is no trope that is bulletproof for me. there is no dynamic that i always like. it always depends on execution, and the execution depends on how much i believe that these two specific people have a compelling dynamic. the example i've used before is: if they were stuck in an elevator and could only talk, not touch each other, for like six hours, would i find that enthralling?

i tend towards pairings (or ot3s) where i believe the people really like each other, where they make each other better in a specific direction, where i believe they will have things to talk about in 30 years. do these people like each other as people? would they be friends if they weren't attracted to each other?

that isn't always the case--i can love a messed-up dynamic (early gen/irene, season 6!spuffy, fanged four stuff, the tony/michelle/sid mess in skins, and i will probably be into the messed-up polycule when i finally watch iwtv) though i don't tend to write about those kinds of relationships myself. i have been trying to write a messed-up kingdon fic for, like, months now because there are a handful of messed-up kingdon fics by other people that i adore, but it is so hard for me!

i often wonder how much of this is just a personality thing and how much of it has to do with my ace-ness, including the fact that i am on the aro end of the spectrum in that while i think i am perfectly capable of falling in love (and would indeed like to do so), it has never happened to me. i think the barrier for entry for me as far as romance goes is MUCH higher than most people, and this probably affects how i connect with romantic stories. for instance, most of my favorite romances tend towards codependency, slowburns, friends to lovers, partnerships in accomplishing something, etc.

and i don't like skipping steps! nothing turns me off of a romance like feeling it's being rushed, that these people don't know each other well enough yet. i need to see the work; a romance is a theorum (i'm not a math person, maybe this isn't the right analogy) where someone has to prove to me that these two people know each other well enough to be in love. i need to understand what aspects of the other's character each is drawn to. i need to understand what things are missing in each character's life that the other character provides. if that's not on the page, i'm not going to buy the ship.

as for the cultural scripts, the established trappings of romance in our society have no appeal to me. long-stem red roses? not my favorite flowers. valentine's day? gross. fancy jewelry? a waste of money. being proposed to? why would you do that when you could just have a balanced conversation about whether you're ready to marry? big wedding? that's really just to make your mom happy.

romance is being known for who you are as an individual and the person showing that they care about your comfort and interests. a "this just made me think of you" gift is better than all the diamonds in the world. the person doing a chore you hate because they know you hate it is so much swoonier than some big romantic gesture. doing something you both enjoy doing on a whim is so much better than a planned date.
#no-where-new-hero
#you may notice i never have my ships go on dates
#this is because i think dates are silly
#doing stuff together is great!
#but making it some formal event just feels like the opposite of fun to me


May 25, 2026

my idea of what's romantic is just different than lot of other people's. maybe is the aceness, maybe it's my age, maybe it's my personality. but i like specific people choosing each other for specific reasons. i like to see how people's specific life paths have led them to a place where they can be good for each other. i just think that's fun.


May 20, 2026

i do not mean this in a snide or passive-aggressive way, but in a genuine one: it's so interesting to me being on tumblr where the most vocal and largest group of people are white americans who grew up in at least vaguely liberal areas

and who haven't spent much time thinking about how those of us who grew up in conservative, immigrant, religious, or non-usamerican contexts might react to art (or anything else) differently than they do. that things that seem innocuous to them might trigger something in us that they don't expect.

[getting a bit personal about my background and about kingdon behind the cut]

my reactions to things about gender are completely shaped by the fact that i grew up in a conservative religious environment in which women were literally not allowed in leadership, everyone was expected to get married to someone of the 'opposite' sex in their 20s and start having babies right away, the acceptable ways to perform femininity were extremely narrow, queerphobia was sacrosanct, people genuinely believed that if you didn't believe the right things and behave in the correct ways you would go to an everlasting hell, 95% of people were white, and no one had experiences outside of their bubble.

i escaped through the power of the internet, an incredible public library, and my own natural instinct to find differences fascinating instead of threatening (none of these are things i can claim credit for. i got lucky). it was enormously costly for me to make that break. i am so incredibly glad i did, but i will also carry a great deal of pain about it till the day i die.

and as i move through the world, i react to things around gender expectations and roles in a way that probably seems confusing to people who have grown up in environments where they felt free to be or love whoever they wanted. anything that smacks of gender expectations (like the top/bottom discourse that i found so off-putting in cql/mdzs fandom or even just my reaction to mdzs!lwj as opposed to my lovely lovely lovely cql!lwj) just feels gross and oppressive to me in a way that probably seems completely unreasonable to people who grew up in a different way.

one of the reasons why i was into the major fandom ships i was into (spuffy, wangxian, my kpop ships) was precisely because i felt like they did interesting things with gender and defied stereotypes and let me explore dynamics that didn't feel as uneven as the patriarchal relationships that i saw around me growing up. they felt even and egalitarian and full of compromise and created a structure in which the characters could just be themselves without worrying about whether they were doing their gender roles (especially related to sex) correctly.

so it was very much a surprise to me that i ended up being into kingdon as much as i am because they're very stereotypically het. mel doesn't perform femininity the way that the world i grew up in or instagram models expect people to, but she's hardly butch, and you can't find a more stereotypically hot white guy than frank.

i am entirely drawn to them because of the way frank sees and values mel when no one else does. i don't find him appealing as a romantic prospect on his own and i can't imagine shipping him with anyone else (whereas i can imagine shipping mel with lots of different people if i thought they would treat her right) even though i have come to love him very much as a character.

i feel like when i expressed some discomfort around the kingdon fandom obsession with mel being pregnant, people thought that i was being one of those people who complain about fandom not catering to them. that's not the case. kingdon fandom writes a TON of fic that is Not for Me for various reasons, and that's cool. i just don't read it or i hit the back button!

i also do not begrudge anyone who has fun with the idea of pregnant!mel and/or kingdon have a nuclear family. have fun! do whatever you want!

but the monolithic nature of the fandom stance feels oppressive to me in a way that probably doesn't make sense if you didn't grow up in a world that expected you to have babies and that wouldn't allow you to be queer.

in theory, i think the idea of mel becoming a mother is fascinating, actually. but the fact that i can only think of one fic out of all the (hundreds, definitely, perhaps thousands) many i've read since i got into this fandom that had mel choose to have an abortion is...kind of weird to me. that i have seen almost no fics or tumblr-y headcanon posts where she chooses to remain childless or even has conflicted feelings about whether to become a mother and has to sort through complex emotions about it...yeah that feels weird to me too.

mel!preg stuff has the potential to ask so many interesting questions--what might it be like for mel to accomodate motherhood to her neurodivergence? how would she actually juggle her career with motherhood, a thing that is notoriously difficult even if you have a supportive partner and even if you don't work 12-hour shifts? would she ever decide that she does want to have kids eventually but now is not the right time? what would her conversations with frank look like if he does or does not want kids and she disagrees?

i'd like to see more people who at least have her consider not wanting to take on more caretaking responsibilities. i'd love to see at least a handful of people write a mel who says, "i have been taking care of becca for my entire life. i just don't want to take on another caretaking role. i cannot handle the pressure of being responsible for a pet of my own, much less another human being. i'm TIRED. i want to center myself and my relationship with frank and my friendships and my career. and i'm happy being a step-mom, because it means i have kids in my life who i love and get to help develop as human beings, but i am not ultimately responsible for them, and that is SO nice for me. so i'm good, actually. i don't need children of my own."

or fic where she hates the experience of being pregnant even if she really does want kids. this would be SO interesting because i know so many women for whom that is true and i can only imagine it's even more complicated when you have the kind of sensitivities that come from being neurodivergent in the way that mel is. i can imagine a fic written by an autistic writer who would explore this with great depths and insight and it would be AWESOME.

or just more frank-takes-care-of-mel-after-an-abortion fic, because whoops my bad is my JAM! ilu forever for writing it, meg!!!!

and no one has the obligation to write any of that for me. everyone who just wants to write/draw/imagine fluffy kingdon in love having babies should continue to do that.

and before i get the "you should just write it yourself" reaction: i have written this stuff that i want to see on occasion myself and will do it again, probably centering it more in the narrative rather than having it be part of the larger texture of the story. i haven't felt driven to do it thus far because writing about motherhood is not usually something i feel the drive to do, but i do believe in writing more of the kinds of stories you want to read, so i guess i need to do it more! maybe no one will read it, but i'd like other people to have options too!

because goodness gracious, as a queer, childless-by-choice woman who had to escape from a world in which i was expected to have babies, the lack of variety is uncomfortable for me personally. it feels prescriptive in a way that i am CERTAIN is not intentional on the part of anyone who's participating in melpreg summer. y'all are playing with barbies. it's not your fault that the way you play with those barbies looks like the life i was told i had to live. i am really not trying to make anyone feel guilty. this is not at ALL like people christianwashing robby or showing unconscious racism towards the characters of color.

i just want to express why i feel the way i do and to let anyone who is interested in writing a more knotty, complicated exploration of mel and potential motherhood know that i would EAT THAT SHIT UP.

and also just invite people to talk more about why they react to fandom trends the way they do because it's so so interesting to me and i want to know everything about how usamerican assumptions drive everyone else insane and things like that! tell me about it please!


April 7, 2026

a blorbo can just be a blorbo, a squick can just be a squick

welcome once again to reader-response corner with aunt lauren. please enjoy this stupidly long meta or at the very least read it in a posture of good faith since i mean it with the best of intentions.

i've been thinking a lot about how people are conflating consumer choices with moral action and how this manifests in the pitt fandom.

so much has been written about how in a world of rising authoritarianism and economic inequality, people feel less and less like they can affect change in the world in which they live (this is false, btw, too many people just refuse or feel unable to do the work of organizing, but that's another post). when you marry this to the rise of social media and the idea of the individual as a ~brand~, what you end up with is a belief that the only real way to be a good and moral person--and, perhaps more important, demonstrate to your 24/7 audience that that you are a good and moral person--is through what you consume.

we see this in consumer goods, but we see it far more in ideas, art, culture, etc. especially in left-leaning spaces, people care more about having the right stance on a given issue and about performing that care by using the right language than they do about the way they treat actual people in the real world. (right-leaning spaces have other problems altogether.)

as a result of this, people have started to believe they have to frame their subjective likes and dislikes in moral terms.

that isn't new--i am positive some classisist could cite me some ancient greek or sumerian examples of people doing the same thing, and if we're just talking about fandom, how well i remember the ship wars that embroiled buffy fandom over whether angel or spike was the more morally correct partner for buffy. (as an aside, the answer is: neither, morality didn't have anything to do with it really, and the long arguments about souls and responsibility were never going to be conclusive because in the buffyverse, a soul was whatever the writers needed it to be that week. there was no consistency in that worldbuilding, so it was a stupid thing to fight about. but again: that's another post.)

but i do think that this tendency to frame all of someone's likes and dislikes, kinks and squicks, in terms of right and wrong, abuse and oppression, sociopathy, dysfunction, [fill in whatever therapy speech you want to use], has become far more pervasive in all cultural dialogue in general and fandom in particular over the past decade.

and it results in people judging each other, being cruel, and internalizing a lot of really gross ideas in an attempt to justify their own tastes.

thesis: people don't seem to be comfortable with admitting that their own subjective experiences and their irrational tastes shape how they react to narratives and characters.

if people got comfortable doing this, it would make for a healthier fannish experience. if someone could just say, "yeah, character a did x, but i just don't care because i like character a," that would be a huge step. it would be an even bigger step if they could then say, "and i like character a because they remind me of this person in my life/myself/the kind of person i want to be/etc. but character a is not real, so i don't need to be defensive over them in the way i would a real person."

for example: consider the langdon of it all. the fights about him have become about addiction, punitive consequences, "boymoms," etc. in a way that's really doing nobody any good and is frankly (heh) exhausting.

things would be so much easier if people who dislike langdon would say, "he reminds me of the kind of men who make my life difficult, and i would love to see a privileged white guy be held responsible for something. the way he treated trinity really bothered me, and the fact that he got to come back to the pitt reminds me of all the times i've seen a privileged white man get away scot-free after doing something that would destroy a life/career/reputation if it was done by, say, a woman of color or a trans person or a poor immigrant. it would be cathartic for me to see him be punished, and it really bothers me that he isn't."

that's a completely reasonable emotional response to have and i don't blame anyone for having it.

but because people feel the (often outwardly-imposed) need to morally justify their stance, they start talking about addiction in really gross, reductive ways with a focus on blame and punishment. they take what is a single story about a fictional character and either make sweeping statements about how real life addicts should be treated or--perhaps more frequently--people who are reading their words interpret what they're saying about a specific fictional character as being how they feel about all real-life people with substance issues. they think that if someone is saying "langdon should be in jail" that what they're really saying is "anyone who struggles with addiction should be retributively punished." are they actually saying that? probably in some cases they are! probably in others they aren't!

on the flip side, people who like langdon for whatever reason, from personal identification to appreciation of an addiction storyline to just thinking he's hot (which is a perfectly fine reason to like a character) are being grossed out or enraged by the way their opponents talk about how him in terms of punishment, consequences, responsibility, etc. and they assume (correctly or incorrectly depending on the case) that what someone else says about him being punished is how they think all real-life people with substance abuse disorders should be punished.

so everyone ends up conflating two different conversations: 1. what should our real-life attitudes and policies be towards people with substance problems? and 2. what would be narratively satisfying for people who do or don't like langdon?

these two conversations do affect each other, but they are two different things. conversation 1 is a moral conversation. conversation 2 doesn't have to be.

i do not support punitive approaches to justice, crime, abuse, etc. period. but i do think that sometimes it's okay to enjoy seeing a fictional character get punished as a cathartic reaction. in fact, there is something to be said for us as humans getting out our need for vengeance via fiction so that we don't have to do it in real life.

of course, it's also true that the kinds of narratives we tell can have an influence on how we treat real people. so the people who are horrified by the way that others are talking about langdon being punished also have a point!

which is why i really think what fandom needs is for all of us to stop framing this stuff in terms of morality at all. i just think we'd have more fun (which is what fandom is about) if people were upfront about whether they like or dislike a character without feeling the need to moralize that like or dislike.

i'll start:

i am really mad at robby in a way that i am not mad at any of the other main characters, and this is because of my own specific life experiences and tastes. i am just generally way more interested in female characters than male ones, so i wasn't predisposed to being all that interested in him in the first place. and i like samira more than i like robby, so i get pissed at him for treating samira badly. i hate when men in authority are cruel, especially to women.

i freely admit that part of my wanting robby to be punished by the narrative is that i know that my own emotionally abusive father will never be punished for how he treated me and it would be cathartic for me to watch it happen to another middle-aged white man who's mean to his eldest daughter.

but what i want from the narrative has absolutely nothing to do with what i want in real life. if robby was a real person, what i would want is for him to do the work of teshuva, repentence and repair, and start to build a better, healthier system at ptmc. (this is also what i want my own father to do. he has not done it and is not likely to.)

i like langdon as a character. mostly this is because he treats my favorite character (mel) better than anyone else does. through his relationship with her, i've seen him be gentle and generous. those attributes and the context of what he was going through in season 1, for me, outweigh the fact that he can be an asshole. i also really like the idea of seeing someone who struggles with substance abuse get a second chance to rebuild their life. that's a narrative i find compelling. i love the idea of him coming back to the pitt, making amends, rebuilding his life, etc.

i also strongly believe that people with addiction problems need help, not punishment. but i am not bothered by someone who dislikes the character saying, "it would be satisfying for me to see this character i dislike being punished," so long as they aren't also saying, "i think real people with addiction problems should be punished." and i think those people would be less likely to say things like that if they felt like they could just say, "i dislike this character!" without needing to justify that dislike morally.

the drive to justify that dislike is what leads them to the really harmful statements and perhaps even truly held views about real people who are struggling with substance abuse.

or to take another example:

i think the way that trinity is acting this season is really terrible, but i like her (again for complex personal reasons) and so i'm rooting for her to stop being terrible and start to heal in a way that i simply am not for robby. because i like her better. it's really that simple.

i don't need to be fair to robby or to trinity or to anyone else because they're fictional characters. i can just say "i like trinity better than robby. i'd like to see him punished but i'd like to see her heal and grow and become happy." and that has nothing to do with what i would want to happen to a real person who was behaving either like robby or like trinity are behaving.

by just saying upfront "i like trinity" or "i dislike robby," i free myself from the need to craft a moral narrative wherein robby deserves to be punished because he's a terrible, irredeemable person and trinity deserves to have a second chance because she's a perfect person who has done nothing wrong.

one big caveat to all that i'm saying is that i think it's perfectly valid to criticize the writers for their biases, conscious or unconscious. if you're approaching the show from a doylist perspective and you think the decisions the writers are making for the characters of color, for instance, reflect bias and promote negative narratives, then talk about that.

but i think it would make fandom a better place for everyone if that could be separated from watsonian kinds of conversations that treat the characters like they're real people with agency. they aren't, but in order for narratives to be fun, we have to treat them like they are at least part of the time. and when we do that, i think we would all be well served by ignoring the voice that tells us we need to morally justify our likes and dislikes.

so a blorbo can just be a blorbo. you don't need to have a list of reasons why character a is so good and wonderful that character a deserves to be your blorbo.

you can just be squicked by a certain character, plotline, dynamic, whatever. you don't need to morally justify why it grosses you out by framing that thing as inherently bad. there is no need to craft complicated matrices by which you can prove that people who like that thing that squicks you are doing a morally Incorrect thing.

it's okay to just like or dislike things. i promise.
#there is of course another conversation to be had
#about why people at both the population level and the individual level like or dislike a certain thing
#our likes and dislikes are shaped by culture and the biases built into the system
#so things like racism homophobia misogyny transphobia xenophobia etc. absolutely end up affecting what we like or dislike
#even when we don't mean for them to to
#and i do think that's worth grappling with
#but that is an ancillary discussion that i simply don't have the energy to really dig into right now