Not everything has to be extensively analyzed to fit within the bounds of your headcanon I think. Sometimes characters just do and feel things that contradict a little with what you think of them and that’s fine so long as you aren’t pushing your interpretation as fact
not reading wips feels anti-fanfiction to me. and i don’t mean that in a “so you’re a bad person if you don’t read them” kinda way. do what you want. but i also feel, that you are completely missing the point. with fanfiction you’re supposed to come along for the ride. the epic highs and lows of highschool football. the comment sections. the conversations. the theories. the “sorry i didn’t update last week i was abducted by aliens and then my cat got stuck in a tree.” LIKE. if you just want a story that’s fully finished and polished go to a bookstore. fanfic is an EXPERIENCE. and ALSO. participating in the process is part of the way you make fanfic writing worth while. it’s part of how you thank authors. like why would anyone write fanfiction if no one was going to interact with them until it was done? it again feels like a way that fanfiction is being eaten by consumer culture. you’re waiting for your product. but this is supposed to be a club. you don’t turn up to drama club like “where’s my play bitch?” NO ma'am. we’re supposed to paint these cardboard trees together. ok. i may have lost control of this metaphor. BUT YOU GET IT.
Yep. I mean, I get it and I definitely sympathize if someone has memory or attention issues that make it difficult to follow a WIP, but there’s another subsection of fandom that just refuses to read WIPs on… principle, I guess? They’ll yell about how WIPs don’t get finished and how they’ve been “burned” by authors who abandon WIPs (or just take a while to finish them, because I’ve definitely seen people write fics off as abandoned after a single month) and never give a second thought to why some fics don’t make it.
There’s always a human being on the other side of the screen, working their ass off to put those words on the page for you to enjoy. And sure, it sucks to get invested in a story just to see it stop one day, but if you’re the type of person who thinks they’ve been “burned” by a writer, spare a thought for what things look like on the other side. Every chapter that takes 30 minutes for you to read could easily mean DOZENS of hours of work for the writer. Any disruption in your real life that might make it harder for you to read a new chapter could hit your favorite writer just as easily, but while you can probably catch up on reading the latest chapter of your favorite fic in half an hour, a writer might need to find twelve (or more) unobstructed hours to catch up on their writing (and that’s not even considering the energy, motivation, and focus that we need to get stuff done).
Believe me, I know what it feels like to watch a WIP I love being abandoned (and orphaned), or being put on a possibly-indefinite hiatus. But as someone who’s been on both sides of the fanfic community, the disappointment I’ve felt as a reader whose favorite WIP got permanently discontinued is nothing in comparison with the discouragement I’ve felt as a writer whose hundreds of hours of work and years of dedication to a fic were completely disregarded because “she’s probably never going to finish that fic anyway” (BTW, I have gotten extremely rude comments to that effect on my WIPs in the past, and the fics in question HAVE since been completed), or the disappointment in myself when I had to take longer than usual to update a fic.
Readers - we can’t force you to read our WIPs, but if you want to see more completed fics in the world, please try to support us anyway. Writing is hard work, and if for some reason you can’t keep up with our WIPs, it would be nice to at least know that you’re interested in what we’re working on. And at the very least, please stop making things harder for us by encouraging this transactional culture in fandom.
yeah we’re really catch-22-ing ourselves this
shiv was not being altruistic nor intellectually self-interested when she voted against kendall. that was pure raw visceral desperation to maintain some semblance of dignity that she felt kendall being ceo would shred her of. sometimes people do not act in other people’s best interests or their own best interests. sometimes people do the wrong thing for the wrong reasons just because it feels like the right, the only, thing to do. shiv could not let kendall be ceo. she just couldn’t. not because she wanted to sacrifice herself to “stop the cycle,” not because she made a calculation and decided tom was her best interest — because the thought of kendall being ceo and acting like That the rest of their lives when shiv earned that job, she fucking earned it, that was too much to fucking bear. watching him sit in dad’s chair, conduct that vote, grin with entitlement and cockiness and certainty — seeing that elicited a visceral painful all-consuming sensation not dissimilar to overwhelming nausea that, summed up in two words, would simply be: fuck. no. she couldn’t live with that. she just couldn’t. it’s not kind. it’s not smart. it’s just human. painfully, destructively human. because sometimes, that’s all there is to it. not just for shiv, but for everyone. god knows roman and kendall have had those same feelings, made those same self-destructing yet necessary-feeling decisions throughout the show. why does it have to be different for shiv? why can’t she be painfully destructively human, prone to impulsive ill-conceived viscerally felt actions, like everyone else? why are we incapable of allotting her the same nuance and humanity (the good and the bad), the same trauma-informed self-destructive life-ruining hamartias, as we do her brothers? why can’t we fit a whole woman in our heads?
listen people who keep saying that shiv is smart really underestimate how far pettiness and just sheer anger can get you without being smart.
rippedstitches
silvyysthings
probablyasocialecologist
gwainestarroyco
incognitotoro
lestatslestits
brookheimer