Fic Afternotes - A Humble Smattering · 3:43am Aug 6th, 2020
Like a dinosaur waking up from an amber-sapped coma, I suddenly remembered the existence of this blargh. Since I'm not doing anything else that's productive with my evening, I thought I might ramble a bit about a few Skirts fics from the deep, dark, mysterious past.
My apologies in advance.
Sometimes all you need is the perfect coming-together of themes--like coordinated colors--to have something to t-shirt-cannon-launch at the feature bar. While All of Which Makes Me Anxious didn't exactly dominate Femmefax, I think it did pretty well. I very much liked the comments section and how people publicly mulled over the meaning behind the written piece.
I deliberately wrote it to be as subtle and cryptic as possible. But the meaning should be obvious to those who read it.
Vinyl Scratch is coming to terms with her asexuality. She wants to express her orientation; she no longer wishes to hide it. However, she's very close to Octavia who holds a lot of social influence over her life. What's more, Octavia seems fully inclined to have their relationship be both romantic and intimate. The young woman's blindness to Vinyl's true situation is magnified by the fact that--seemingly--Vinyl Scratch cannot speak.
Blessed Nietzsche do I lurve writing "mute" characters. It goes all the way back to my literary travesties of yesteryear. I think there's something inherently pity-inducing about the concept, but it also makes for an interesting protagonist who is more or less forced to be an observer in a given situation. But what if they have something desperate to say but cannot say it?
I guess I figured that Vinyl Scratch being mute would be a very simple (if not on-the-nose) way of metaphorically representing one's reticence to "come out of the closet." In this fic's case, it's a double-edged sword. It's heavily implied that Vinyl likes the attention that Octavia gives to her and that--if she were to make an action that would repulse Octavia so terribly that she left her life altogether--Vinyl fears that she may never enjoy that degree of camaraderie again, on account of her lack of communicative abilities. And yet--at the same time--it's apparent that Octavia's desire for intimate closeness makes Vinyl verrrry uncomfortable.
I suppose the fic could just have easily been conveyed if it was a male character in Octavia's place and Vinyl wanted to come out as a lesbian but ultimately delayed being honest with herself and others. But... come on... Vinyl-and-Octavia is such a friggin' feature-grab. What's more, I really like fecking with marsupials' expectations for TaviScratch-ness. At the start of 2020, I had a really really really really kaizo!epic idea for a fic starring EqG!Vinyl. I even had fan art drawn for it. While that project has... gone off to the wayside, one of the story elements I wanted to explore was the idea of Octavia being the one to start flirting with and crushing on Vinyl, only for Vinyl to ultimately reject her because... well... Vinyl's ace.
Asexuality among characters really fascinates me. This may not seem legit, considering how many shipping and sissification stories I've written, but I feel like it's something that should be explored more often. Especially among female characters. Yes, that probably sounds insanely sexist, but part of me groans whenever writers (myself included) feel obligated to make any creature with ovaries be paired up with someone else, even to the point of transforming them into lesbians. The best example I can think of is the public cultural perception of Elsa from Disney's Frozen. For the longest time (and perpetuating into current times, I suspect), there's been a movement wishing for Elsa to be portrayed as a lesbian woman. My most sincere response to that is such: "Friggin' why?" In the first movie, Elsa has no suitor, shows no interest in romance, and even refuses to support the engagement between Anna and Hans. Why do any or all of these things necessitate her being sexually attracted to women? If nothing else, it only supports her being sexually attracted to... well... nothing.
I understand that LGBQT representation in media is very... very important for a lot of people. But sometimes I think the push gets a bit too earnest, especially when it comes to female characters. Just because someone has a uterus does not mean they have to be closely involved with another soul, male or female. And while I'm definitely a fan of shipping lesbian relationships in pop culture, I think a lot of people need to dial things back a bit and respect the fact that some individuals simply don't want or need to "get it on." What's the crime in a woman wanting to just... be herself? Without relationships or intimacy or strings attached? It's so dayum common for a male character in movies/comics/literature/whatever to be ambitious, self-serving, and unaffected by accompanying themes of sexual orientation, assumed or otherwise. Why can't the same be with female characters? More often than not, if a woman is the central protagonist of a popular work of fiction, she's doing it out of some sort of romantic or familial obligation. Or, if she is a character who only has her own interests in mind, the consolation is that she's typically represented as a sexual object so that she can serve as eye candy or fantasy fodder while engaging in superficial pursuits.
I personally think that there's a gland inside a lot of people's minds that switches "off" the moment that a female character is stripped of any potential sexual/romantic integration with anything. I don't believe this scenario is limited strictly to heteronormalization. So, in my mind, it's a very interesting platform to make a central female character positively aromantic/asexual from the get-go and seeing where the narrative can go from there. Well... I say this in theory, because I haven't legitimately gathered the courage to write a longform narrative with such a "disinterested" female protagonist. Even Rainbow Dash of the Austraeoh yarn lurves to roll eastward through the hay, if you know what I mean.
And it's only fair that I confess that I've... had a great deal of confusion personally telling the difference between "aromantic" and "asexual." In fact, I think that confusion shows in this fic. In my head, Vinyl Scratch is both of these things. And yet, I go so far as to generalize both categories as being equally represented by the asexual flag that she possesses as a patch inside her backpack. I may not be the only one who commits this overgeneralization, but nevertheless one may cite this fic as an example of writing without a perspective of authenticity.
Funny enough, I used to proclaim to others that I'm "asexual." And--in a lot of ways--I still believe that. But then I took a good long look at the multiple... multiple feminine pinups plastered across the walls of my room and realized: "Yeah, naw, I'm full of it." Although, perhaps, I could go for possessing the "aromantic card." Truth is, I've practiced wizardry for so dayum long that I have absolutely no desire nor need to be romantically or sexually involved with anyone. What's more, I'm not even remotely disheartened by this. People are gross--so why mix fluids with them? Any sort of gratification that there is to get out of life, I can achieve on my own, thank you very much. Death eventually comes to claim all proteins. F'naaaa.
I had a significant other once, and we never... did anything together. It was something of a prolonged social experiment, in my head, which is really shitty and cruel because for a long time I knew that nothing was going to go anywhere and I regret not ending things sooner. In almost every instance, she was the one to be romantic or affectionate or sweet... and I was just a dense block of wood. Bland. Unmoving. I couldn't even be set on fire. Termites--at least--would have distilled a degree of intrigue, but mediocrity prevailed. For my twenty-fifth birthday, after dinner and a movie, she decided to give me a "gift." A token of appreciation. It was a kiss on the lips. My first kiss (yes, at age twenty-five), and while my brain has gone to great lengths to try to block the reality of the matter out, I flinched as it happened. Pretty sad. Also pretty real. I felt it was the best thing to capture and give to Vinyl and Octavia in chapter three of the fic. Although I think it was somehow less awkward for them.
For the title of the fic, I went with an obscure line from an obscure Gorillaz song. It's from their debut album and the song's called "Double Bass." There actually isn't any hidden meaning in the use of this title. I just think of that moment from the middle of the song where the music drops and the line is spoken calmly. I work retail, so it flickers through my brain a lot in given circumstances. I think the line best describes Vinyl's mindset concerning her situation. All in all, I just lurve using song lyrics/titles as the names of fics, and it occasionally makes for good feature bar bait.
The cover--and Octavia's color scheme in general--is remarkably similar to the actual pride flag for asexuality. And while I was trying to be some cryptic genius with the fic's four chapter titles, it almost perfectly matches the look of EqG!Octavia that I used in the title pic. I feel bad for Vinyl, because it's like her inner self is being reflected stabbingly into her face every time she so much as looks at her closest friend.
Truly a melancholic fic...
Something that really, truly gives me a brain-boner is the concept of "impossible space," especially when utilized in creepypasta/horror stories. One of my best literary experiences was reading Mark Z Danielewski's House of Leaves. Supposedly it was the inspiration for Silent Hill 4: The Room, and I find that it has a lot in common with previous games in the same franchise. I've long been a lurker at 4chan's /x/, and it makes me feel really giddy inside whenever there's an image thread about quietly unsettling interior locations, liminal spaces, glitches in the Matrix. All that creepy witching hour websurfing bullshiet. I've stated before (maybe even on a certain podcast recently) that I don't believe in ghosts... but paranormal stuff intrigues me nonetheless cuz it's such a source of creative inspiration. I think horror has a lot in common with both comedy and erotica, in that it's all about tickling innate physical/neural glands within humanity and getting the best (and oftentimes worst) out of living.
I also have a huge fascination with dead malls and the exploration of such. I lurve mallsoft and vaporwave and a lot of other strangely-calming products of apocalyptic post-industrial reflection.
So, last year, when the Backrooms meme hit it big everywhere, you can bet this lemur was on board. 2019 was a real "meh" year for me, creatively. Even though I had "come back" after not uploading a single fic in 2018, my return was... mired, to say the least. The NSFW fic spammage didn't win me any favors and I had lost all the steam I had gathered at the end of 2018 when I first enthusiastically planned on embarking in the first place. Sooooooo... I was super thirsty for shitposts to monkey!fling at the feature bar.
I had the not so brilliant idea of ponifying the Backrooms meme. But it wasn't enough to just do some boring and generic creepypasta on the surface. I had to somehow make it interesting... while at the same time reflecting the overall tone and meaning of the concept. The idea came to me to make the upload and execution of the fic representative of getting lost in the shuffle of the Backrooms itself.
To that end, I wrote the thing "live." I slapped a few chapters together and uploaded them. Then--as I added more installments--I literally shuffled and re-oriented the existing chapters on the fly. Some of the chapters I re-arranged even without having uploaded. The result was a meandering, mutating labyrinth of tiny creepypasta chapters, like the chambers of the machine in the movie Cube, constantly changing and reinventing itself. Not only was Twilight Sparkle stuck in the Backrooms, the readers were as well. I conflated this towards the very end by making some chapters simply repetitive versions of previous chapters that went on and on and on ad nauseam. This resulted in a few chapters actually being over ten... thirty... an I believe even ninety thousand words in length.
This entire writing-and-uploading process carried on for the better part of six or eight hours, long into the night. The fic shot UP the feature bar. I was having people DM me on Discord, utterly enthralled by the concept. People were talking it up in the Fimfic group and on 4chan. And then--when I reached the point where some chapters simply wouldn't upload because of the sheer data weight...
I self-suspended the fic. Thereby removing it from the feature bar. For the better part of an hour, people couldn't even read the thing.
I finally uploaded it into the state in which it now can be read today. But--all things considered--the poignancy of the fic is long gone. It only ever truly served its purpose for those bleak few hours when it was initially uploaded with the chapters (or "backrooms") constantly being shuffled and re-oriented and thrown together at random.
People... ... ...got really mad about this fic. Ell Oh Ell. I suppose I can't blame them. It's very sub-par and derivative at best. But it was still a hella fun experiment, and an example of how fanfiction--unlike most media--has merit beyond the accursed stigma of Sturgeon's Law. Sometimes it's all about the experience of being there, commenting, and indulging in the recursive nature of the "living" narrative. Plebeian as it may be.
[Adult story embed hidden]
In early 2019, I decided to go full broke on the Flash Sentry Feminization Train... ... ...which, as it turns out, only had one passenger.
But, for a blissful yet brief time, there was someone else sitting on that train besides me. I discovered this when, shortly after uploading What Dreams My Cook, another fic about a fabulous Flash came into being.
I speak of this fic, written by the late MythrilMoth. It's... it's... well, it's a fic, alright. Written in the English language, or so I've been told. Long story short, it was obviously a work of meta recursiveness whose outer shell held greater gravity than the literary content contained within. Nevertheless, it wouldn't have existed were it not for the stuff I was churning out in the month of January, the Year of Our Crossdresser 2019. So, I felt flattered. I also felt egged on.
Which is what led me to write Just Girls Gawking, an obvious stab at Mythril Moth's long-standing Just Girls Talking. Similar to Mythril's "Shiny Silky and Elegant," the surface was recursive but the inner material of the fic was alllllllll me. But I still feel like I wouldn't have written it had it not been for his tagging.
It would so happen that he tagged me back. Within a day, no less. This time Mythril Moth posted Flash Colored, which I admit is actually a pretty nifty fic with an interesting take on exploring the physicality of the Equestria Girls universe. In Flash Colored, Mythril attempts to explore themes of gender coding metaphorically--in this case through skin tones. It's no big secret that people in the EqG-verse can exist randomly as all visual shades of the rainbow. Mythril takes this concept literally and runs with it--suggesting that some people aren't satisfied with the skin color they're born with. Instead of attaching race or class strife or sociological history to the matter, skin color is treated as a form of expression and a way of examining self-esteem. In the case of Flash Sentry, he's desperate to transition into a different skin color--something that can be done in Mythril's literary universe, both permanently or temporarily.
Sure, it's far-fetched in places and the fic does take... certain liberties that make me cringe a bit here or there, but I thought "Flash Colored" was a very creative and noble attempt at analyzing social coding along with personal expression. Also, for the most part, Flash gets the girls on board with supporting his "skin transitioning," which is ultimately sweet in a whole lot of ways.
But to Hell with all of that. I had been challenged again. So... KABLAAM!!!... in comes "How Would You Do Flash Sentry," based on one of Mythril Moth's topmost viewed stories. I even enslaved convinced my friend Scampy to photoshop the cover to Mythril's fic so that Sunset Shimmer was Flash Colored (hah... get it?) to look like everyone's favorite femboi.
This was reaching. Even for me. I've never in my life read Mythril Moth's How Would You Do Sunset Shimmer. But I suppose that wasn't the point. This was recursive fanfiction tennis at its most John McEnroeish... although not really. I never felt slighted by Mythril's stabby-stab fic uploads. I think he and I had a lot in common: we both lurved EqG and had a penchant for feature baiting shitposts. This was the very start of 2019, and I was still a manic lemur. I was just glad that someone... anyone was doing Flash Sentry fics besides me. In a way, I felt like I was one of two people on a life raft, floating amidst the waves, wondering when we were gonna try and eat each other.
Mythril Moth passed away in Spring of 2019, about four and a half months after he responded to me with one last recursive fic, which seemingly was going to turn into a longform exercise of its own original standing. He uploaded three more fics after that, along with his usual daily blogging, but then... well... he stopped existing.
I never knew him personally. Aside from interactions on Twitter and very... very seldom crossings of streams on Fimfic, we were estranged names at best. I knew that he had made a splash on Fimfic, and the impression I got from his comments sections and people chatting about his stories abroad was that he didn't entirely win 100% appreciation from his audience, for better or for worse. But he was a presence, a consistent one... a name that I would put up there with the likes of Rainbowbob or Jay David or others who wrote consistently about ponies, schoolgirls, and the hijinks in between.
And he's gone. The source of all that information, creativity, and content is departed from this mortal coil forever. I'm not trying to wax poetic melancholia here. I just find the whole matter quite sobering. In the last few months of his existence, Mythril's quirky and impulsive fic-tennis that he played with me was actually sufficient inspiration for me to keep going--almost daily--with those early 2019 Flash Sentry fics. I know it sounds like a horrible way to eulogize someone, but that's not the point. I just find it fascinating how the most minimal effort can affect other individuals on such a massive scale. And then, without knowing it, the next day one or both of those people may just happen to be no more. It's a reality that I've attempted to grasp with so many heavy-tentacled pretentiously philosophical grim dark fics... and yet nothing quite captures it as the feeling I get when I look back on the quirky EqG crossdressing fic tug-of-war I had with someone I otherwise would never have interacted with.
As for the fic itself, there isn't much I have to add. I'd lurve to write a sequel about it someday. It'd be fun and gay as hell. But it would also feel a bit hollow... knowing that someone responsible for its inception wouldn't be there to comment. I'd have traded tennis for squash practice.
Now there's a lonely echo.
-SS&E
That’s kind of where I was stumped with the story. Being aromantic isn’t the same as being ace and I wasn’t sure if she was aro ace (and thus unable to be with Octavia romantically ever) or just ace (and is insecure about if she could ever have a romantic but non-sexual relationship with Octavia). This blog clarified that, but the story only made Vinyl being ace clear. Mixed orientation relationships aren’t something that many people write or do justice to and I would have really liked to see them in another story/sequel tackling the subject in proper drawn-out Skirtsian fashion, but aro representation is also nice.
As an ace person, I love to see people writing ANY ace characters. There’s so little of it out there and the only reason I got to see characters who were like me before I reached adulthood was because of fan fiction - be it my own or other people’s. Ace representation is that scant.
No it isn't. Eulogies are specifically about talking about things pertaining to the person in question that affected you. Saying that he affected you, that the silly thing you'd created together made you happy, that's not horrible.
I like what you said on asexuality, and it does seem like an interesting topic. I did notice that from TBE, how Noir's romantic side stalled a lot to the point of him being a eunu-.
You could have talked about Appledashery, but of course you didn’t.
As an aromantic asexual, seeing rep in this blargh was a welcome surprise and now I have to go read that story. We're always starving for rep and I swear I will hold close any I can find. Also I totally agree about Elsa and romantically or sexually disinterested characters in general. A lot of characters who don't show interest in anybody end up classified as gay/lesbian, and while I absolutely love seeing rep for other queer people out there, it does make me a bit frustrated when asexuality and/or aromanticism aren't even considered for some reason. It's like the recent stuff with Spongebob, who was long considered an asexual and aromantic character and recently a lot of places just claimed he was gay. Like awesome it's great to have pride in that identity but uh, can't we have pride too? Also also, I'm never gonna ascribe a label to anybody, and I can't even pretend to know you well enough to make any real suggestion, but just from what you said here I'd look into the asexual term "aegosexual." It seems to fit how you describe some of your outlook here, but if it doesn't that's perfectly fine too!
If you do want to write more ace/aro characters into your stories in the future, I'd personally be down to offer some of my own perspective and experiences, and I feel like some others who share one or both of those orientations would be happy to offer perspectives as well.
I for one loved watching you and Moth play tennis with Flash as the ball, and based on my own interactions with him, he'd have loved to see himself remembered in this way.
Also, the retrospective on All of Which has me considering how I can incorporate ace and/or aro characters in my own stories, which I appreciate. Thanks for an especially thought-provoking blog, Skirts.
(And, at the risk of sounding crass, I'll note that Moth wasn't the only one writing Flash stories.)
I'm glad you're writing more blogs.
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The ace and LGBT groups on the site have a library of examples, if you need any!
Doing (heehee) that cover art actually taught me some interesting things about Photoshop, simple as it might've been. Thanks for the learning experience \o/