Anghraine

In response to this post, yavieriel said:

I don't have particularly strong K/S feelings - TOS Shatner has Dad Vibes too strong for me to overcome - but this has been a delightful journey to watch you take.

I replied:

Interesting, I see that more easily from Nimoy than Shatner, but we all feel the Dad Vibes differently, lol. And thanks, haha—I went from "this is just part of the fabric of the universe of me, I'm not passionate but it just kind of IS to me" to "beating my head against the wall to avoid going insane" so fast it feels like whiplash!

yavieriel said:

Oh that is fascinating, Spock is entirely "hot but unapproachable college prof" to me. I can't even slightly imagine him drinking beer while grilling, or mowing the lawn in cheesy tshirts, or coaching t-ball. Whereas I feel like Kirk would be entirely comfortable with those things, and probably somewhat enthusiastic. My own dad's very stereotypical middle class cishet guy-ness is definitely somewhat performative, but it's not insincere, if that makes sense? Which also matches with Kirk's vibes for me.

I replied:

Ah, I see! My own dad is an extremely reserved and intense programmer from LA with zero interest in the various sportsballs and a great value for reason and debate (and board games that require some amount of tactical thinking), and we've always been conspicuously similar and close. Also Spock continually being on the receiving end of microaggressions is pretty true to the ways my dad has been targeted (as a multiracial Mexican-American man), so Nimoy's Spock feels all the more familiar. That said, I think partly the show sexualizes Kirk so much that I personally find it hard to see him as exactly paternal despite the strong Father To His Crew vibes. But I can see that as a way to read, for instance, Uhura saying she finds it soothing to listen to his voice through the intercom when she's nervous—it could be seen as a shippy thing, but obviously isn't intended that way.

I've talked a bit on Tumblr about it, but my mother has been struggling with her health for several years. She was doing better for about... I don't know, six months, after I bullied her into getting a referral from her distracted rural doctor who mostly just cared about the possibility of her a) abusing her psych meds and b) losing weight, and even when her oxygen levels were hovering around 91% in his own office would just prescribe prednisone at best. She was already disabled when she was hit by a car several years ago (she was driving her mobility scooter through a crosswalk at the time) and she has fairly severe asthma (she didn't even own a nebulizer and I'd also bully her into using mine when possible).

We're pretty sure she had a bad case of long COVID at one point, but anyway, I did insist on her seeing an asthma specialist in the city and that led to seeing other specialists and generally she was doing quite a bit better. But her lungs have been in pretty bad shape for a long time and it was a slow recovery from months on end when she was coughing up phlegm, choking on it when she tried to sleep, and coughing so much that she could barely carry on a conversation until a few weeks ago.

Then she picked up what everyone assumed to be the flu. She was apparently doing pretty badly; we came by to drop off some equipment (including my nebulizer!!), but she didn't want me getting too close because I'm also immunocompromised and she didn't want me catching her miserable flu that was aggravating her asthma. She seemed to recover from that and then got much worse—I later found out that her pulse oxygen crashed to 71% a couple of nights ago, she'd been taken to the local hospital, given treatment that brought her up to 86% while they did some tests to figure out what was actually going on. They sent her back home, determined she in fact has pneumonia, but she crashed another time and my father correctly called the ambulance immediately and she was ultimately taken to a hospital 100 miles away.

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themalhambird responded to this post:

#this is interesting #although if you look at early modern english drama - Shakespeare's stuff #Johnson's #Middleton and others #i feel like the idea of marriage being at least in part about romantic ties is pretty clear

I replied:

Re: your tags—yeah, the idea that romantic marriage was not really a concept until The Rise of the Companionate Marriage™ is very easy to disprove in literature and even history, which is one of the problems with it. But I think it’s pretty clear that the concept as it manifested in, say, the mid-nineteenth century was shaped by quite different cultural norms and assumptions than in the late sixteenth/early seventeenth, and that romantic marriage as the dominating force of all family life was something that, while never unknown, grew very much more prevalent over time.

themalhambird responded:

My dad has been complaining about Guild Wars 2 not being the original Guild Wars for … like, seven years, and in the course of a conversation about it, announced that he wants to get the new GW2 expansion for the whole family when it comes out.

me: I’d love it, but … ?

dad: I want to support ArenaNet.

me: ?????

dad: So that they keep running GW1!

me: …ah.

Tagged: #aedf;addk i love prophecies too #but there is something purely and unswervingly dad-ish about his devotion that i can't quite aspire to #(i'm a weakling who likes being able to jump :P)

She-Ra meets rambling (very rambling) personal/family angst:

So, I’ve mentioned that She-Ra was one of my first fandoms, for a loose value of “fandom.” I was too young for the original show itself (it came out a year before I was born), but my aunt wasn’t, and she gave me all her She-Ra books and figurines, which were the only superhero-ish things I ever loved. And I loved them with my entire five-year-old soul!

In fact, I loved them for several years afterwards, and only reluctantly surrendered the books/figurines when my aunt asked if I still had them. I wasn’t really ever a “now I’m Mature and the things I used to like are Cringy and Bad” person, so I retained a strong affection even when I was older and enjoying more advanced things.

As did my aunt, who is only five and a half years older than I am. She was like my cool older sister for a long time, even though we were very different people, and I vaguely associated this relationship with She-Ra in my head. Regardless, we played together, we shared clothes and toys, she taught me how to ride horses, etc, until we drifted apart.

That happened partly because five years was actually vast at certain ages, partly because my parents moved, but mostly because of our enormous differences in personality and interests. Still, I continued to think of her as Cool Big Sis until various things happened that led to her becoming much more insular and conservative, even for a pretty conservative family (my centrist parents are radical leftists by their standards).

The Bush administration kicked off around the time I started high school, and by the time I graduated, I was determined not to ever vote for any Republican for the rest of my life (I enthusiastically voted for Kerry in my first election and was baffled that so many people I knew hadn’t bothered or, worse, actually voted for Bush out of ~patriotism). End result: I’ve been a firm and reliable Democratic voter for sixteen years, while my aunt gets more far-right every year (…and day, it feels like).

And it’s like … she long ago ceased to be “cool” given that she’s become a raging bigot (by nearly all accounts more than she ever was before, so not just something I missed because I was a kid). She dismisses the racism my father experiences when she's not personally perpetuating it, she’s ~so much for the tolerant left~ about her homophobia (and I’m lesbian), she’s awful and goes off on these asinine screeds to my mother every. single. day. Like, she earnestly argued the other day that Kate Brown is an agent of Satan.

Meanwhile, back when the new She-Ra was about to come out, she heard about it and excitedly forwarded me the link. Whatever else our differences, it’s our thing!

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I talked a few days ago, under f-lock, about some painful RL experiences around being perceived as deeply boring and incapable of feeling pain (or feeling most emotions, really). And I wanted to make an addendum to that, one that I don’t think really needs the f-lock.

I’ve made many complaints about various fandoms + multifandom spaces and trends over the years, and I still consider most of those complaints valid. Nevertheless, fandom has typically been a much less bleak environment for me.

If someone in fandom finds me boring, they usually do not tell me so, or treat me in a way that makes this apparent. They simply don’t interact with me. And people who do follow me or interact with me don’t do it because of my family’s involvement, or because I’m a package deal with more interesting/attractive/charismatic friends, or because of some other figure in my meatspace life at all. In fandom, none of that matters. At least, it hasn't for me.

Even the followers who don’t particularly care about me as a person are following me for my own sake in some capacity, rather than for the sake of someone else. Sure, some of these will leave if I get super into something they find dull, or stop posting or whatnot, but their interest in my opinions about the thing they’re into is still about my opinions of that thing, or how I express my opinions, or something about my online persona.

And there are also people who don’t share my preoccupation with a current fixation, or don’t find my take on it interesting, and are thus kind of bored, but they like me personally enough to stick around, anyway. This doesn’t usually trigger my “oh no I’m being boring” issues, because if they’re invested enough to stay, despite disinterest in my current thing, they’re evidently still engaged at some level with me.

Beyond that, people in fandom don’t typically lecture me on my general demeanor. It’s happened, but not often. In fact, while fellow fans sometimes express respect for my—let’s say, often rather severe manner of presenting myself and my opinions, they don’t generally act like it is required of me to be that way or that it somehow precludes a capacity to feel. We’re all in fandom because we feel things!

And that’s been very powerful for me. I wasn’t diagnosed as autistic until I was well into my 20s, while I’ve been directly or indirectly excluded or distanced from many RL social circles ever since I was a child. I’ve certainly been treated as if I and the things I care about are objectively dull and emotionally unengaging.

But throughout my entire adult life, there has always been one glaring exception to this. There really was a social sphere in which my experience of others and of myself could be different. There was fandom.

For all of online fandom’s many, many flaws, this has been part of my experience of it from even before I was an adult—in fact, from the time that I made my first post. At the time, I was extremely shy and anxious, so I lurked a lot, and was very worried about breaking some rule somewhere if I actually said anything on the big scary Internet. But I had feelings. I was in high school and I had such feelings.

Many of these were Pride and Prejudice feelings. In high school, I started collecting copies of P&P just so I could read the introductions/editorial content and see what other people thought about it, since nobody I knew IRL cared about it the way I did. This was both my first step into academia proper and a sort of proto-fannish activity. But my Austen feelings were not actually the ones that propelled me into breaking my self-imposed Internet silence and detachment from online communities. A lot of Austen fandom didn’t really seem like my people. I was also into Harry Potter, but HP fandom similarly did not seem like my people.

Actually, speaking of boring other people, I’m going to be really self-indulgent and rewind even further for THE FULL SAGA of what brought me into fandom.

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I reblogged a meme about "almost names"—names your parents considered for you but didn't end up choosing. I added:

#'almost' would be putting it strongly but my dad wanted 'dorothea' for my aunt and grandmother #it is pretty! #i really like elizabeth though

I reblogged a six degrees of separation from any celebrity meme and added:

#supposedly my great-grandmother was on speaking terms with maria von trapp #and wrote to her about how disappointing it was that her son (my grandfather) had Married Beneath Himself #said grandfather has a cousin who is a big name catholic asshole #lol fun times