Dancinbutterfly on every platform but "real life"

[Dancinbutterfly on every platform but "real life"]

archiveofourown.org

Fuckboi Dream Was Forced To Experience The Mortifying Ordeal Of Being Alive And All He Got Was This Stupid Husband (by Fall Out Boy) - dancinbutterfly - The Sandman (Comics) [Archive of Our Own]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Organization for Transformative Works

[dancinbutterfly]

Chapters: 1/?
Fandom: The Sandman (Comics), The Sandman (TV 2022)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Dream of the Endless/Hob Gadling, Dream of the Endless | Morpheus/Hob Gadling
Characters: Dream of the Endless | Morpheus, Hob Gadling, Desire of the Endless, Original Male Character(s), Kyle Williams (Original Male Character), Leon Pemsbrooke(Original Male Character)
Additional Tags: With A Twist, Human AU, BDSM, Desire And Dream Have A Relationship, Good(ish) Sibling Desire, Dominant Hob Gadling, Bottom Dream of the Endless | Morpheus, Submissive Dream of the Endless | Morpheus, Harnesses, Collars, Drug Use, negotiation, Fuckboi Dream, 2000s, Other Additional Tags to Be Added
Summary:

“If you don’t stop me, I’m going to keep you,” Hob murmurs into his ear, holding him tight through the spasms of his laughter. “You mad, ludicrous, delightful slut. I think you might be exactly what I’ve been looking for, for ages.”

It starts when Desire drags his ass out to a fetish party in Brixton when he would rather have been tucked safely away in his studio. It starts with a few hits of MDMA, an unwise promise, and a conversation over heard in the smoking section. It starts with a man named Robert who smiles like the sun, takes takes him in hand and takes him a part, one piece at a time.

Look, Dream knows he’s a mess, in almost every way, but he just came out to Torture Garden to ostensibly have a good time. He didn’t intend to have every aspect of his existence turned upside down, inside out, and unraveled. Yet here he fucking is.

[dancinbutterfly]

Here’s the mood music playlist for the first couple/three chapters if you like that kind of thing :D

[dancinbutterfly]

Show Chapter | Archive of Our Own

Chapter 2 is up, sluts.

[Dancinbutterfly on every platform but "real life"]

[professoraurabolt]

You know the fighting between the “Cecil is a key part of Tumblrsexyman history and should therefore get the title of Tumblrsexyman” side and the “Reigen is allowed to do anything he wants so long as it’s funny and should therefore get the title of Tumblrsexyman” side is exactly they type of fighting I wanted out of these polls, like are you committed to Tumblr history or are you a bit silly? Both options are so valid and also so wrong and I hope there’s bloodshed over this, and I love that no one is fighting over Sans vs The Once-ler like gUYS.

[Dancinbutterfly on every platform but "real life"]

[rnorningstars]

There’s also a large grey area between an Offensive Stereotype and “thing that can be misconstrued as a stereotype if one uses a particularly reductive lens of interpretation that the text itself is not endorsing”, and while I believe that creators should hold some level of responsibility to look out for potential unfortunate optics on their work, intentional or not, I also do think that placing the entire onus of trying to anticipate every single bad angle someone somewhere might take when reading the text upon the shoulders of the writers – instead of giving in that there should be also a level of responsibility on the part of the audience not to project whatever biases they might carry onto the text – is the kind of thing that will only end up reducing the range of stories that can be told about marginalized people. 

A japanese-american Beth Harmon would be pidgeonholed as another nerdy asian stock character. Baby Driver with a black lead would be accused of perpetuating stereotypes about black youth and crime. Phantom Of The Opera with a female Phantom would be accused of playing into the predatory lesbian stereotype. Romeo & Juliet with a gay couple would be accused of pulling the bury your gays trope – and no, you can’t just rewrite it into having a happy ending, the final tragedy of the tale is the rock onto which the entire central thesis statement of the play stands on. Remove that one element and you change the whole point of the story from a “look at what senseless hatred does to our youth” cautionary tale to a “love conquers all” inspiration piece, and it may not be the story the author wants to tell.

Sometimes, in order for a given story to function (and keep in mind, by function I don’t mean just logistically, but also thematically) it is necessary that your protagonist has specific personality traits that will play out in significant ways in the story. Or that they come from a specific background that will be an important element to the narrative. Or that they go through a particular experience that will consist on crucial plot point. All those narrative tools and building blocks are considered to be completely harmless and neutral when telling stories about straight/white people but, when applied to marginalized characters, it can be difficult to navigate them as, depending on the type of story you might want to tell, you may be steering dangerously close to falling into Unfortunate Implications™. And trying to find alternatives as to avoid falling into potentially iffy subtext is not always easy, as, depending on how central the “problematic” element to your plot, it could alter the very foundation of the story you’re trying to tell beyond recognition. See the point above about Romeo & Juliet.    

Like, I once saw a woman a gringa obviously accuse the movie Knives Out of racism because the one latina character in the otherwise consistently white and wealthy cast is the nurse, when everyone who watched the movie with their eyes and not their ass can see that the entire tension of the plot hinges upon not only the power imbalance between Martha and the Thrombeys, but also on her isolation as the one latina immigrant navigating a world of white rich people. I’ve seen people paint Rosa Diaz as an example of the Hothead Latina stereotype, when Rosa was originally written as a white woman (named Megan) and only turned latina later when Stephanie Beatriz was cast  – and it’s not like they could write out Rosa’s anger issues to avoid bad optics when it is such a defining trait of her character. I’ve seen people say Mulholland Drive is a lesbophobic movie when its story couldn’t even exist in first place if the fatally toxic lesbian relationship that moves the plot was healthy, or if it was straight.                          

That’s not to say we can’t ever question the larger patterns in stories about certain demographics, or not draw lines between artistic liberty and social responsibility, and much less that I know where such lines should be drawn. I made this post precisely to raise a discussion, not to silence people. But one thing I think it’s important to keep in mind in such discussions is that stereotypes, after all, are all about oversimplification. It is more productive, I believe, to evaluate the quality of the representation in any given piece of fiction by looking first into how much its minority characters are a) deep, complex, well-rounded, b) treated with care by the narrative, with plenty of focus and insight into their inner life, and c) a character in their own right that can carry their own storyline and doesn’t just exist to prop up other character’s stories. And only then, yes, look into their particular characterization, but without ever overlooking aspects such as the context and how nuanced such characterization is handled. Much like we’ve moved on from the simplistic mindset that a good female character is necessarily one that punches good otherwise she’s useless, I really do believe that it is time for us to move on from the the idea that there’s a one-size-fits-all model of good representation and start looking into the core of representation issues (meaning: how painfully flat it is, not to mention scarce) rather than the window dressing.

I know I am starting to sound like a broken record here, but it feels that being a latina author writing about latine characters is a losing game, when there’s extra pressure on minority authors to avoid ~problematic~ optics in their work on the basis of the “you should know better” argument. And this “lower common denominator” approach to representation, that bars people from exploring otherwise interesting and meaningful concepts in stories because the most narrow minded people in the audience will get their biases confirmed, in many ways, sounds like a new form of respectability politics. Why, if it was gringos that created and imposed those stereotypes onto my ethnicity, why it should be my responsibility as a latina creator to dispel such stereotypes by curbing my artistic expression? Instead of asking of them to take responsibility for the lenses and biases they bring onto the text? Why is it too much to ask from people to wrap their minds about the ridiculously basic concept that no story they consume about a marginalized person should be taken as a blanket representation of their entire community?

It’s ridiculous. Gringos at some point came up with the idea that latinos are all naturally inclined to crime, so now I, a latina who loves heist movies, can’t write a latino character who’s a cool car thief. Gentiles created antisemitic propaganda claiming that the jews are all blood drinking monsters, so now jewish authors who love vampires can’t write jewish vampires. Straights made up the idea that lesbian relationships tend to be unhealthy, so now sapphics who are into Brontë-ish gothic romance don’t get to read this type of story with lesbian protagonists. I want to scream.      

And at the end of the day it all boils down to how people see marginalized characters as Representation™ first and narrative tools created to tell good stories later, if at all. White/straight characters get to be evaluated on how entertaining and tridimensional they are, whereas minority characters get to be evaluated on how well they’d fit into an after school special. Fuck this shit.                            

[fierceawakening]

I’ve had people fuss at me for writing sassy effeminate gay men.

My bff in college was a sassy effeminate gay man. I write them being cool because of someone I love and miss who was very goddamn cool, thank you very much.

[kyraneko]

If you avoid stereotypes, you create obligations. “No effeminate gay men” means compulsory masculinity for them, and no representation for the ones that actually exist. “No angry black women” = black women not allowed anger. “No bury your gays, no dead women that’s fridging” or the like limits one’s ability to genderswap characters or put a same-sex romance into a story if the character in question is dying. “No queerbaiting or anything that can be accused of it” means bisexual characters can’t end up with the opposite-sex love interest if there’s a same-sex one around.

Obligations are a shitty thing to do to a story, and even worse to do to actual living people.

The real solution is more stories with more representation so the stereotype-hitting ones are a fraction of the total message, but also, well-rounded characters whose stories are built to showcase them as real whole people whose coincidence with a stereotype is only a part of them, should not be thrown out with the bathwater, so to speak.

The opposite of stereotyping is not puritanical avoidance of stereotypes. The opposite of stereotyping is complexity.

[Dancinbutterfly on every platform but "real life"]

[wineonmytshirt]

thank you gifmakers thank you gifmakers thank you gifmakers thank you gifmakers thank you gifmakers thank you gifmakers thank you gifmakers thank you gifmakers thank you gifmakers thank you gifmakers thank you gifmakers thank you gifmakers thank you gifmakers thank you gifmakers thank you gifmakers thank you gifmakers thank you gifmakers thank you gifmakers thank you gifmakers thank you gifmakers thank you gifmakers thank you gifmakers thank you gifmakers thank you gifmakers

[Dancinbutterfly on every platform but "real life"]

[the-polyhedron]

People need to get over this phase of abandoning fandoms so fast. There are 70 year old women still into Spirk and you people can’t hold onto a man for a month. Shape up and stop abandoning your gently used blorbos in wet cardboard boxes on the side of the highway after a week

[dduane]

As it happens, I’m a 70-year-old woman. One responsible for this.

And I’m…well…  supportive of spirk, at the very least (or K/S, as we called it when dinosaurs walked the earth – and where do you think the now-blanket term “slash” came from…?). Partly because it’s really difficult to parse some parts of ST:TOS without getting a sense of a most unusual depth of relationship underlying the actions of two members of the core triad. It’s (as one of another pairing I’m fond of might say) “not much of a leap” to suspect something more.

But also: I’ve been a fan of this character since I was sixteen. To this day my left eyebrow has more wrinkles above it than my right one because I taught myself to do The Eyebrow before I was old enough to vote. (I can not do The Eyebrow on the other side. No idea why.) I will never give this character up. He’s given me too much.

In relationships (even with the fictional and immaterial), persistence counts. Hang onto your blorbos. You have no idea where they may yet take you… :)

(PS: some other purportedly science-based views in that article are bullshit. For one thing, starships are properly built in space / at the top of a gravity well. Once their keels are flown above their home planet, there’s more than enough gravity nearby to do whatever trivial calibration’s needed. Those lads just wanted that shot with Jim on the motorcycle. [eyeroll] …I could have written them something better. But boys will be boys.)

[seiya234]

genuinely truly mean this, we are blessed that Diane Duane is on here, dropping wisdom, being lovely, and also gently, casually, flexing 

[Dancinbutterfly on every platform but "real life"]

[yearning-butch]

people who experience psychosis and anger issues and paranoia and delusions and intrusive thoughts and addiction and dissociation and other “ugly” non-romanticized mental health issues i love you and i believe you and you are not a bad person

[Dancinbutterfly on every platform but "real life"]

[metanarrates]

you can instantly make a cool female character if you just take any stereotypically masculine character type and make him a butch lady. easiest trick in the book. you can try this at home

[metanarrates]

im not talking even about broad scale archetypes like Action Hero. those are cool don't get me wrong but if you take more specific stock characters such as "cartoonish mob boss" or "gentleman detective" or "elderly mad scientist" then you have an instant hit on your hands. lesbians WILL love you forever and you WILL be the most interesting person around

[dancinbutterfly]

Disclaimer: In fiction

Irl if you do this you will just be lonely

[Dancinbutterfly on every platform but "real life"]

[facille]

this in the singularity

[kindlejim]

Someone is legit going to get deradicalized as a kink

[gutsygills]

whatever it takes, man

[dancinbutterfly]

Sophie may stay when I destroy the dangerous AI as I think she might be a golem

[Dancinbutterfly on every platform but "real life"]

[detectivehole]

some of you are miserable because you're mean. like you're just mean to people and things

[detectivehole]

"why don't i have any friends" because you are mean

[detectivehole]

this can be fixed at least in part very easily though! just stop being mean. i believe in all of you 👍

[roach-works]

‘but i’m not mean’ ok, cool! do you:

• point out people’s mistakes and failures to them? in front of others?
• belittle their accomplishments and successes? in front of others?
• make fun of people and laugh at them? in front of others?
• do all this secretly to your ‘friends’ because friendship means being able to ‘joke around with’ each other, or ‘be brutally honest’ with each other?
• bring up past grievances with people over and over until they’ve apologized ‘enough’, or just to shut down arguments with them, or get out of conversations you don’t want to have?
• refuse to do favors for people? like when you feel they haven’t ‘earned’ your time or effort? or at all because you don’t want to be ‘taken advantage’ of?
• try to get out of paying your share of bills, doing your share of chores? spend time figuring out exactly how little you can contribute to groups in terms of time, effort, and money, without anyone noticing or getting too mad at you?
• get angry and jealous when people are happy about things that don’t concern you? get angry and jealous when people pay attention to each other and not you?
• spend any amount of time ‘getting even’ with people?

THIS BEHAVIOR IS MEAN.

you might feel like you’re a perfectly nice person who cares a lot about people but also speak your mind and take no shit! but if you do any of this stuff, people won’t like you anymore, because it fucking sucks to be around you. you suck to interact with. no one fucking likes being mocked, criticized, picked on, upstaged, pushed around, mooched off, or revenged upon. they will, if they have any self-respect at all, avoid you.

the worst case scenario actually isn’t that you end up alone. it’s that you end up with other people who are just as mean as you are, and you all mutually tear each other to pieces on your way to drug addictions, losing all your money and property and kids, and jail time. this happens a lot, i have seen it go down, and it’s not fun even for bystanders. please consider putting the time and effort in to be nice, instead.

[tlbodine]

A lot of people need to hear this.

[Dancinbutterfly on every platform but "real life"]

[bluebeardsfinalgirl]

when internet people are like “i love gothic literature but i hate anything that discusses incest, sexual violence, oppression, misogyny, abuse, torture, gore, murder, or death”

[bluebeardsfinalgirl]

no actually me and everyone else who’s ever watched crimson peak were brainwashed by guillermo del toro into believing that incest and violence are cool and awesome. sorry

[bluecaspian]

my favorite show is breaking bad because it taught me to always blow up your competitors using chemicals ❤️ Im majoring in meth production now

[dancinbutterfly]

[stares into the camera in has to or had to deal with substance abuse, all kinds of violence, oppression, and SA including incest in her job]

Go touch some grass and watch some Borgias, Hannibal, Crimson Peak, and Breaking Bad on your phone in the sunshine you nerds.

[Dancinbutterfly on every platform but "real life"]

[sedoretu]

I’m reading The Deviants War: The Homosexual vs The United States of America and the entire point of gay pride as a concept comes from police raids on bars, clubs, public restrooms, etc where gays were humiliated and outed in the newspapers (sometimes with their addresses!) and had careers ruined and lives upended by being associated with perversion and vice squads and all that and they responded by going “no I’m proud” and took that pride to the streets in defiance of the huge mechanism of shame that existed to oppress the gay community into obscurity and so the fact that people are now trying to apply conservative dogma to pride parades to make them “safe for children” or in other words “safe for people with oppressive conservative values” is simply insane

[sedoretu]

To phrase this more clearly: “public indecency” laws were the primary tool for brutally enforcing gender and sexual conformity, so applying a “public indecency” lens to pride parades of all things is a slap in the face of everyone who ever suffered under gender & sexual oppression and took their anger (and yes their pride!) to the streets. If it makes you uneasy or uncomfortable maybe you’re not on the side you think you are!

[Dancinbutterfly on every platform but "real life"]

[melonsap]

Okay but genuinely why is the no fly list a USA government secret. Shouldn't it be public knowledge anyways? Genuinely who benefits from keeping it secret.

[hussyknee]

The government benefits. Because the point of these mechanisms of surveillance, arbitrary detention and extra-judicial criminalisation is not, and has never been, to protect citizens. It's to fucking terrorize you all into compliance. The point of accruing power is accruing power. And to justify maintaining and expanding this monopoly of coercive power, you have to find targets and scapegoats. It does not matter whom, only that a sufficient number of "threats" keep them in business.

The creation of things like Homeland Security, TSA, No-Fly List, Patriot Act etc. were pretexts for the US government to target literally anyone that made trouble for them, including anti-war activists, civil rights activists, journalists, politicians and anyone the CIA got annoyed with for any reason. Unlike normal court-issued travel restrictions and bans, the No-Fly list is one based entirely on surveillance. People aren't told if, when and why they're placed on it, just that they suddenly can't board a plane once they get to the airport, or that the Feds show up at their door after they leave. It's a means arbitrary criminalization. Obviously, it disproportionately targeted and continues to target Muslim Americans and Muslim Canadians, but there was little space to prove it because the governments (Canada also has one) refuse to release the list.

Usually, arbitrary suspensions of fundamental human rights like this in democratic countries are limited to periods of national emergency or security crisis, like with martial law. Even then these temporary measures removing transparency and oversight for "the greater good" have drastic consequences the world over, esp for marginalized people, journalists and activists. The US No-Fly list otoh, has been in place for 21 years now. It's fascism in every conceivable way, chipping away at democratic freedom and normalizing the surveillance state. Cartoon villain shit that would have been considered politically outlandish at any point before Sept 11. The 2019 No Fly list that our catgirl hacker stole had 1.56 MILLION NAMES ON IT. What the FUCK. Do you actually think that that many people could be a legitimate threat to the country with the biggest military industrial complex in the world?

We've always known that a ridiculous number of people get placed on it entirely by mistake because these morons rely on fucking airline software to flag people. If someone has the same name as a weapons dealer, or it's just the result of a misspelling, random citizens suddenly find themselves placed on a goddamn terrorist watch list. No small amount of these "false positives" belong to Muslim children under the age of ten, even under five. That's right, literal toddlers on a terrorist watch list. Many of them are still fighting to get taken off it. Google "no fly list kids" if you want to feel like day drinking. All of this is still happening.

Protesting at your politicians' houses isn't enough. If y'all understood the scope of terrorism and fascism you live under every day, you'd be throwing Molotov cocktails through their windows. It's why the US government keeps throwing whistleblowers in prison and trying to lose the key.

[melonsap]

No Fly List Kids - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Hey what the fuck

[hussyknee]

For some reason I can only find news articles about children placed on the Canadian No-Fly List. The No Fly List Kids is a Canadian advocacy group. The Wikipedia article mentions the children stuck in the US one, but my cursory Google-fu isn't turning up any but a 2010 NYT article.

However, here's what happens when you fight the US govt for years and are finally taken off of it – you get harrassed by other governments.

Maniar said that he didn’t have anything to tell them (Pakistani authorities). Frantically scanning his mind for something that could explain his situation to the ISI agents and get him out of this, he went back to the no-fly list letter. That one-page document, issued under the letterhead of the Department of Homeland Security, permitting him to fly and clearing his name of suspicions of terrorism back home, had been his ticket out of the nightmare of law enforcement harassment he’d been experiencing for years. But somehow the message that he wasn’t a threat hadn’t been communicated abroad.

Maniar tried with increasing desperation to explain the letter and how he had resolved his issues in the United States. As he was speaking, a black bag came down over his head.

...

In 2014, a major investigation based on leaked documents was published by The Intercept shedding light on how the terrorist watchlist was constructed. A 166-page document titled “March 2013 Watchlisting Guidance,” exposed a covert program that blacklisted large numbers of people based on unchallengeable secret criteria. The watchlisting guidance revealed the levels of “derogatory information” that could lead to someone winding up on the list, exposing an opaque system with few checks and balances that was ripe for abuse. It was easy to get yourself on the list and suffer its consequences, but very difficult to know how to clear your name if you were actually innocent.

...

Handeyside added, the simple fact of sharing information with foreign governments suggesting that someone might be a terrorist can create enormous dangers for them: “To the extent that the U.S. government is using and sharing watchlist information at all, it creates serious risks. You can have a hell of a time clearing your name with the U.S. government but still be detained, targeted, interrogated, or searched very intensively abroad, based on information about you that is outdated or inaccurate.”

When it comes to the no-fly list specifically, U.S. citizens and permanent residents can now go through a legal process to remove themselves from the list. But even if they are cleared to fly, it remains possible that they could remain on other secret lists or that negative information about them could wind up persisting on databases maintained by foreign governments. The dangers of this could be very serious, particularly when individuals who have been watchlisted are traveling to foreign countries where legal protections are weak.

“The entire watchlisting enterprise is predicated on the idea of guilt by association,” said Gadeir Abbas a staff attorney for the Council on American-Islamic Relations who represented individuals on the watchlist. “People are connected to others based on their associations, and based on those associations, potentially determined to be higher risk and subject to more scrutiny.”

It was that formula of guilt-by-association that got Maniar listed in the first place, trapping him in a web of problems from which there seemed to be no escape.

(Source)

How did this guy land on the No Fly List? He became friends with a British Muslim woman and talked to her about the Syrian war over WhatsApp. Her Facebook posts about Syria got flagged by British intelligence, who confiscated her electronic devices and flagged anyone she had been talking to. The Feds then started harrassing this guy.

I don't know whether he and his friend were posting pro-terrorist or edgelord shit about Syria or simply criticizing the West's responses to the war. These agencies are staffed by extremely paranoid personnel with military and police conditioning. In either case, it's the exact precedent established here that might well lead to your house getting raided for posting "ACAB" on Instagram. Reasons don't matter, because once you give a government the power and precedent to circumvent due process and suspend democratic human rights, all that's left is finding an excuse.

[Dancinbutterfly on every platform but "real life"]

[landwriter]

seeing a fandom friend react to the incredible bookbinding of their superb fics, done by a different unbelievably talented fandom friend, with the inclusion of stunning art done by ANOTHER wonderful fandom friend is frankly making me lose my shit

i love this website i love fandom i love the joyous ouroboros of consumption and creation between humans i love us loving things together

(also yes this IS @ you @that-banhus @chubsonthemoon @fishfingersandscarves you’re all menaces and sandman is lucky to have you)

[chubsthehamster]

GLOAAMMMMM FRIEND thank you for this tag and for making my evening AHHHH ily!! You are SPOT ON - the ouroboros of creation and love is absolutely bonkers and I'm so glad to be on this wild crazy wonderful ride with you and the rest of this fandom <3

[moorishflower]

watching y'all do bookbinding and seeing the final results is like MAGIC, like

The process of designing cover art, of actually BINDING books, making the covers, it's wild, it's SO FREAKING COOL. Tangible crafting is so fascinating to me!!! The book that @violetequus8 made of Ecdysis is STILL wondrous to me and gets its own shelf high up away from the cats and my copy of Wings that @fishfingersandscarves made me sits in the most obvious space on my other bookshelf (that is also cat-proof because they pull things down because they're menaces), it's all SO WILD <3<3<3

[dancinbutterfly]

I cannot wait to figure out to bookbindddd

[Dancinbutterfly on every platform but "real life"]

[odinsblog]

This Republican representative from Missouri, Vicky Hartzler, cried at the prospect of the Respect for Marriage Act being passed. So glad to see people giving her the business for her crocodile tears.

[Dancinbutterfly on every platform but "real life"]

mathomhouse-e asked:

Greetings! For the color palette ask: 8 + Hob Gadling please?

teejaystumbles answered:

[dancinbutterfly]

GASP!