Island of Dreams

1. Drabbles are 100 words exactly. No more, no less. I seem to be surrounded by fics that call themselves drabbles but contain anywhere from several hundred to several thousand words, and it's making me twitchy. Which is a really dumb thing, I know, but it's like those of us who subscribe to the Drabbles = 100 words theory lost the war at some point and no one bothered to tell us.

Anyway, if you say you wrote a drabble and it's not 100 words exactly, then I'm not reading it. Stupid, butt-hurt reaction? Oh, agreed. But there it is.

2. Cut tags are a thing and you should use them. There also seems to be a bunch of fics where the author either doesn't use a cut tag, or uses it so late in the game that it's kind of pointless. And we're talking fics of thousands of words, which take eons to scroll past. Ugh. Then there was the fic I read over the weekend that was absolutely wonderful, I really loved it... but the author had at least 300 words of pure smut ABOVE the cut tag, and honestly, at that point, I have to wonder why she bothered at all. 

(Not that I think all smut must be behind closed doors. This is tumblr, after all. But jeez louise, if you're putting it out for show, what the heck are you then gonna decide needs to be hidden?)

Anyway, if you write a fic and don't use a cut tag within a few lines, I'm probably not going to read it. And I'm definitely not going to reblog it.

3. I'm not issuing a DNI. That seems to be the thing: "Minors, DNI." (Or MAGA, or terfs, or insert-group-here.) Which, okay, I am all about curating your fandom experience. But it also seems like a lot of the people issuing the Minors DNIs are not all that far from having been minors themselves. (Like, I saw a self-described 18yo with a Minors DNI on their blog. They're 18.) And the thing that really gets me is that a lot of the older people who have them even say when they were teens, they were reading the same kind of thing. "Oh, I shouldn't have been reading that!"

Good God. Says who, exactly?!?! And are you honestly going to tell me that your life was made infinitely harder or more horrible because you did? Because you seem like you turned out fine. And you gotta know, if someone had tried to DNI you back when you were 12/14/16, you'd have just found a way around it? (And some of them admit: they did! They lied about their ages! They read the shit anyway even when it was blocked!)

Look. I have to police my kids' content, and sex? Ain't what bothers me. I'm way more pissed about how kids in media are so mean to each other and their parents and their friends. How yelling at each other and being rude is shown as being funny and normal and just how life goes, and then my kids turn around and act like that with their friends and teachers and me.

I read all the smutty romance novels when I was in high school. No one stopped me. No one said I shouldn't. Don't get me wrong, I knew they probably weren't written with me as the audience in mind; I knew I was probably too young. But I still read them. How fucking hypocritical if I were to turn around and tell a teen, "Nope, you can't read this story." 

Am I going to market to teens? Nope. Do I care if they find me? Nope. Hope they learn some shit about communication and consent and maybe something of themselves, actually. 

(I don't know. I know for some, the DNI thing is a way of curating their internet experience, and more power to them, if so. But honestly? I think for others it's just another form of purity culture by way of censorship. "Oh noes the children must never have access to anything naughty. They cannot know about sex until they are adults!" Yeah, let's just not go there for all the reasons, guys. Seriously.)