are you REALLY a tumblr user if you don’t see a post on your dash filled with misinformation presented in a hostile manner like youre the idiot for not knowing these 100% bullshit lies at least once a day and have to physically restrain yourself from starting shit with the OP
Obviously sometimes we write things because we just like them, and sometimes to explore an idea that’s not possible to explore in the real world, and sometimes to test our own boundaries, and so on. Anyway, I like to write about assholes in love, and while some of it is one of the above things, it’s also because I believe really, really strongly that even assholes deserve to be loved, heh, because that means that even when you’re at your worst and think of yourself as a garbage person (hello, mental illness), you’re still worthy of it.
When my partner and I got engaged, I was still on the fence about getting married at all – insert political rant about the treatment of LGBTQ+ people here and my discomfort with dialoguing with the State and its myriad oppressions – but the thing that convinced me is this: J listed all the reasons they wanted to spend the rest of their life with me, and probably without them even knowing this, everything they listed was something someone else had told me was wrong with me. Every single flaw I saw in myself, those imagined and thrust on me by someone else’s definition, but also those that are very real and that I continue to struggle with, got to be something worth loving.
And I absolutely carry that forward into my storytelling. Because it’s literally the single most romantic and affirming thing that has ever happened to me, and for several years now, J has consistently proven that these weren’t just words. We still argue and complain about each other and get on each other’s nerves, and we had to learn how to “do” relationships and that’s a lifelong process of growth and negotiation and sometimes even stumbling back into bad habits. But I never have to doubt that I’m loved. It literally never factors in. I like people working through problems – internal and external – together, and I like knowing that it does take work, and I like knowing that even if you think of yourself as kind of an asshole, you still deserve to be loved.
Obviously in fiction, we can stretch this and make it more surreal, make those flaws bigger and the asshole moments much more over the top than they often are (for the everyday person, anyway), but it’s still the same kind of story. I think you can – and I often try to – even write fluff this way. So when I see the insistence that relationships in fan-created content always have to be healthy or wholesome or pure, or characters can’t have certain flaws, or there’s only one way to get to a healthy relationship, I get a little defensive, because I think everything I described above is way more wholesome than any flaw-free, conflict-free portrayal of a relationship could ever be.
ppl are so annoying “you can’t paint ur bedroom pink you’re an adult” i did not spend my entire life waiting to grow up and control my life to paint my bedroom beige
I had a sales woman in furniture store try and tell me not to buy a hot bubblegum pink loveseat because she wanted me to “think about the future”
Bitch, I am thinking about the future. I already got a hot bubblegum pink couch at home and now I need a loveseat to go with it.
when I first bought my house, I announced my decision to paint my bedroom purple. I had wanted a purple bedroom for thirty damn years, you fucking bet I was gonna have one now. My friends decided, for some reason, that I meant what one of them referred to as “14 year old girl purple” (through what’s wrong with the colors a 14 year old girl chooses, I don’t know, even if they’re not what I want as an adult). They didn’t believe me until they saw the color on the actual wall, even thought they helped me pick out paints. My mother, meanwhile, decided to get worried that if I painted my bedroom a “dark purple”, it would be “depressing”. As if, with an entire house to live in, I would spend all my time in the bedroom, which I wanted to be dark because I would be sleeping in there. In the damn dark.
I had like one, maybe two friends who were all like FUCK YEAH YOU PAINT IT WHATEVER COLOR YOU WANT, PURPLE BEDROOMS ARE AWESOME.
But when they actualy saw the finished bedroom, every single one of them was like, “Oh yeah, that’s really pretty.” (Well, the ones who supported me from the beginning were more like WOOHOO.)
And the moral of the story is: Fuck ‘em, please yourself. Either they’ll come around, or you can safely ignore every question of taste they opine about for the rest of time.
This applies to other adulting activities, too. When I was a kid, I decided that I wanted to have a wedding cake made of doughnuts. When I got older, I figured that I would be “mature” about it and get a traditional cake, which the older adults approved of. Now that I’m 25 and facing the possibility of actual marriage in the near future, I’m just like “marriage is a social construct but it comes with tax & insurance benefits, so just give me that goddamn doughnut cake.” If they don’t like it then they don’t have to come to my wedding.
Here for the underdogs 