Sharing Is Caring, Part Neuf! Fear My Loquaciousness!

[strina]

Coming to you hard on the heels of Part Huit mostly because I have limited 'net access and have been reduced to the text files of random observation again. Also why I am behind on comments (sorry!).

• You know those days where you just feel pretty? I've been having an unusual number of those lately, even before the new hair (chopped off three or four inches and dyed it red). 's nice.
  
  Although WTF, with creepy guys hitting on me lately. A strange, middle-aged man slipped me his phone number at the library. I was at the computer with headphones on! I hadn't even looked up at the guy! Man, I don't like getting hit on; it always makes me bemused, and also uncomfortable, because I suck at the polite refusal thing.



• What the fuck. My roommate is throwing a snit and I'm being the bigger person. But, but I don't want to experience personal growth or the rewards of maturity! I wanted to wallow in immaturity for my last six months as a teenager! This is balls.



• I can't quite decide if it's a positive or negative that I'm so easily contented.
  
  It's two a.m. and I'm sitting here in the dark re-reading Blood Magic and I'm full of good-feeling because I have food and drink and a story and a pile of pillows to lounge on, even if my noodles are stone cold because I can never synch up different courses when I cook, and even if my back is killing me because I'm sitting on my bed with my (huge-ass desktop) computer set up on my nightstand because I don't have a desk.
  
  On the one hand, it's good that I can be happy with what I have, but one the other, I have no ambition to get more if I can be just as happy with the minimum. Either way, it seems unlikely that I'll change my intrinsic character at this late date. So I guess it's irrelevant as anything but an excuse to navel-gaze?



• Even though I've never had an SO on Valentine's Day, I love it. Come on! Day of candy and flowers and those cheesy cards that come, like, twenty a box! Oh, you better believe I still buy kiddie-valentines. Last year I had SpongeBob ones that had Patrick choking the shit out of a coatrack, captioned "I'm Crazy for You, Valentine!". Greatness, I'm telling ya.



• I swear, sometimes it seems like there's a conspiracy designed to deprive me of foods I love! As soon as I like them, the stores stop stocking them. That jambalaya mix, the turkey meatballs, those biscotti, and let's not forget my most beloved, Martinelli's apple cider, which, god, best thing ever. And now, Don Miguel's beef & cheese tacos. Son of a bitch. This shit's not cool!



• I am such a consumer whore. I am relentlessly loyal to brand, too, in a way that's a little horrifying, because what the hell, where did I pick up the Pyrex-love? I was fixated from the first time I went shopping for glassware! And at this point, nothing on earth can make me believe anyone makes a car better than Oldsmobile (oh, my Intrigue, I miss you so).



• Question that never fails to annoy: "Are those your real nails?" Jesus, people, if they were fake, they'd at least be similar in length instead of, y'know, two short, seven medium, one long (current composition - fucking vitamin deficiency).



• I love buying random-ass CDs. I'll know of all one song by the band and just go for it anyway. I did it with the Weakerthans, and the Dresden Dolls, and the Dropkick Murphys, and now, Say Anything. Two disc set for 12 bucks! And it is awesome. Current favorites: Belt, It's a Metaphor Fool, Woe, Admit It!!!, Spidersong, and Wow, I Can Get Sexual Too.



• OMG, I blame my father entirely. He has totally passed on the obnoxious singing habit! I won't be paying attention and then it's all "Holy crap, how long have I been singing that out loud?". At least I didn't pick up the thing where no matter the song, it's sung to the same tune.


• Beautiful. I've now been upgraded from "depressed" to "bipolar". Fun. Stupid autosomal dominance.



• I'd just like to confess here and now that I fail utterly at being comforting. Gah. Crying people intimidate the crap out of me. See, in my family, we don't do the comforting thing. We scream at people and then scurry to our little corners to brood and rage in solitude. Sometimes there's some mild property damage (if my dad ever wants to sell the house, he's going to have to replace basically all of the bedroom doors). But we don't do the thing with the soothing and the it'll-be-okays! I'm always just baffled. Hug? Don't hug? Random caring murmurs or specific assurances? I don't know how you tell! So I always end up feeling frantic and awkward, and probably annoying the crap out of my comfortee.



• It's kind of sad that my hometown has a better library than the state capital. Of course, I may be biased, in that my brother and I were two of our library's best patrons and thus our tastes gradually influenced buying patterns. But whatevs. Still miss it.



• I came to the horrifying realization that I'm going to have weed through my book collection and soonish. When I went home to get my dishes and crap, I kind of had it shoved in my face that my library takes up most of Dad's storage space and we're working with a two-car garage and an even bigger outbuilding, here. Plus there's everything still lurking in random corners of the house.
  
  That is going to be a chore and a half, let me tell you, especially since I'm going to have run everything by Richard or be pouted at forever, since the little bastard likes think he has as much right to my books as I do. I have no idea what I'm going to do with all the textbooks I've picked up...but how do you resist someone telling you "free books! as many as you can carry off!"? I don't know where I got the notion I could teach myself Spanish in my spare time, though. Oooh! I could finally find my old Serendipity books! I know I had like forty of the damn things and they were some of the best kids books ever, except for the ones where the ridiculously cute animal's life ended in tragedy, like the one where the tiny unicorn died alone or whatever. Plus, I could finally find that Edward Gorey book and conclusively prove to my friends that mine were the most awesomely inappropriate parents ever.
  
  Actually, if anybody wanted to give me a random request, I could mail something for cost-of-shipping? I'd rather they go to somebody that'd enjoy them than languish on the shelves of the local second-hand bookstore. I'd mostly be getting rid of romance novels, classic sci-fi (from the seventies or thereabouts?), textbooks, maybe some kids books, random other crap. Like I've got duplicate copies of one of LJ Smith's Nightworld series and Melissa Scott's Five-Twelfths of Heaven. Also, I belonged to the Boxcar Children Bookclub for a while, if anyone has a yen.



• Mwahahaha, I finally get to use Conduit as a prompt. Yes, I totally cobbled together an eighth table just for that. That means list50 now has 399 available prompts. Why not 400? Because I accidentally ended up with both a "Secret" and a "Secrets" prompt. Yeah, I suck. That's a lot of prompts, though! Let's see you do it! Most people don't offer anywhere near that many! Of course, most people are sane...
  
  Anyway. The new table also has such gems as Ninja, Spy, Pirate, Orgy, School Days, Child, Superhero, and Kidnapped. I like it. Even though I can already tell that a few of them are going to give me problems. Eh, I kind of like a bit of challenge. As long as it's not freaking Agape again.


• Sometimes I look at the list of stories I've recced and am just filled with glee, because they're so shiny! And there are so many of them! And so many different flavors! Although wow, is there a lot of apocafic.



• A few things I've learned from doing all these damn rec sets:
  
  You will never find 50 stories on one theme that you like equally. No, really, it's okay. Liking Rituals and Traditions better than Of Mortal Bondage doesn't mean the latter isn't a good story.
  
  You can't think of the numbers. Think of done and not-done, but don't start counting down how many're left until it's finished. That way lies madness and/or substandard recs.
  
  You have to accept that while you can use a story more than once, there comes a point where you have to say no. Having a fallback story cheats everybody.
  
  You also have to accept that sometimes, your instinct to re-rec is right. Sometimes that story you've already recced twice really does belong to that list, to that prompt. Sometimes saying no is cheating, too.
  
  Sometimes you don't like good stories. You read them and they're good and you know it, but you don't love it. Don't rec that story. Even if you have 49 stories queued up and this could be that 50th fic that makes your list postable, don't do it. Reccing like this is about love, not tolerance. It's not a public service where you have a duty to point people at the good things that are out there; this is supposed to be about sharing the stories you love, the stories that get in you and don't leave, that you read again and again, that make your voice climb registers and jump octaves when you talk about them.
  
  Go ahead and start that list you don't think you can finish. There's no time limit; working on it on and off for a few months won't hurt anything. And hey, you can always ask somebody to collaborate.
  
  These lists are hellishly addictive.



• I love Wesley. He's just so many different things at so many different times - from Watcher to rogue demon hunter to full strength crazy guy - and he has such interesting relationships - with Angel, Lilah, Illyria - and I just really, really love him. Dude, badass geek with an accent, daddy issues, and a collection of interesting scars? Who wouldn't love that? And hey, y'all should all check out elgrey for some rock-awesome Wesley genfic. Which I've probably said before, but I just spent the last eight hours basking in Temps Perdu and Belonging and Shadows and Lost & Found. Oh, Wesley. Oh, Angel. Oh, basically everyone. Seriously, these stories always make me remember how much I love my dead shows, even after I do stupid stuff like read really bad Angel/Xander (worst. euphemisms. ever.) or accidentally stumble into Spuffy schmoop.


• I really, really need to find a good Xander/Faith recs list. I forgot how much I like them! I was re-reading some M. McGregor and Liz Marcs over the weekend and I just. That is absolutely, hands-down my favorite Xander/f pairing. It feels possible, y'know? 's nice. Also, hot like burning.
  
  (And again, Xander/Slayer(s) = OTP times a million.)



• Ahaha, how did I forget this story? It is so ludicrous and yet, so awesome! Only in Buffy would you ever see this many wild-ass pairings: Angel/Xander/Riley/Graham, Spike/Oz/OMC, Dru/Anya, Wes/Lindsey/OMC... Plus, hilarious premise, wherein ol' Maggie Mengele uses samples of vampires' blood to "thrall" various people and then it's a whole big vamp-magic-induced orgy.



• Okay, so I've read a lot of badfic, in a bunch of fandoms. But I'm here to tell you, nobody does bad like Buffy does bad. Y'all, it is awesome; I'm currently re-reading one of the many Xander's-raped-by-his-father stories and in this particular one? There's catatonia and regression and oh yeah, six different people deciding they're in love with Xander. Oh, wait, seven, though Faith is currently offscreen. Hi-lariousness, I love it, even if it is a big honkin' WiP. Although it really makes me want to find that one where Xander's gang-raped and like twenty people form teams and hunt down the rapists one by one. Also? Joyce Summers rocks.



• AWESOME. I found a massive series that actually has good and unusual (the SVU detectives! the Bristows!) crossovers and also fulfills my Xander/Slayers kink like whoah; it's Xander/Faith and it has Xander as Watcher to a whole house of Slayers. I love Twisting the Hellmouth.


• HP is the freaking worst for works in progress. It's hella annoying. Of course, it's a big fandom for the crazy epics, and there's probably a connection there. I just really want more of In Memory I, or Gentry Green, or The Winding Road.



• I love how with any list with any real amount of HP fic, I can just slap the character death warning on there automatically. I can't do that with any of my other fandoms. Oh, HP.



• Dude, is Terry Boot the default Hogwarts rapist or something?



• Where the fuck is Harry's godmother? Because you know, godparents generally come in pairs, WTF.



• Know what's fun? hd_complete. It's a rec comm for long, completed Harry/Draco. I've found some good fic there, and also, some amazingly bad fic. Which can be better than good fic, if you're in that kind of mood. That one with cutter, heart-condition, child of Dumbledore!Harry? From hd_complete. I love it.
  
  The comm, not the fic. Oh god, so very much not that fic.
  
  Although I kind of want to go back and read it because it can't be as bad as I'm thinking, right? But I must be strong! Because yeah, totally is that bad. And I've got enough badfic scars for now, thanks.



• I just read catboi!Harry and I feel kind of dirty. But, well...I was an anime fangirl first. I've got fandoms with canon catpeople.



• OMG, Indago is awesome. Creature!fic with sub!Harry and whumping and angst and Draco rips a guy's head off! Like, literally, right off his neck!
  
  I love fanfiction.



• The Sacrifices Arc is finished now and I am torn. On the one hand, I am sad that it's over, because my love for it burns like the sun, but on the other, I made it all the way through without the story being ruined for me, which doesn't always happen with the really epic fics (*cough*Repossession*cough*).
  
  But! Y'all should check it out! Which I've said roughly a million times, but it's no longer a WiP, so I figured I could be forgiven for saying it just one more time. Also, I heard something I either hadn't known or hadn't remembered, which is that the story started as an experiment to see if badfic cliches could be written well (manipulative!Dumbledore, super!abused!Harry, protective!Draco, etc.).



• Know what I love in a story? Comeuppance.
  
  Was reading this fic, blah blah, Harry's growing powers, blah blah, the Dark Lord's equal. Anyway, beginning of the year, Dumbledore warns Snape to stop taunting him, and tells him why. Snape then spends the year taunting him and, as he's DADA teacher, repeatedly hexing him for "demonstration puposes". And then it comes down to an actual duel, for credit. And Harry kicks his ass, because Snape? Taunted him again, about Sirius. And it's pretty much only Dumbledore showing up that stops Snape getting for-real killed.
  
  Anyway, those moments where I can point my metaphorical finger at a character and go "Ha! Suck it!"? HEART.



• Also, HEART for war-trauma in HP fic. Physical, mental, whatevs, I am a sucker for it. Especially aphasia, but that might just be because that's one of my personal horrors. Anyway, just read a bunch of PTSD fic and most of it rocked hard.



• Aw, the first slash fic I ever read! Nostalgia is fun: The Existence of You, Miroku/Sesshoumaru, Inuyasha.



• You know what word I've rediscovered a fondness for? Filthy. It's so evocative. Also, fun to say.



• Aaaagh, "the shamefully alluring pulsing star fruit of his anus". Aaaaagh, why?
  
  And then later, "clenching and unclenching his brown eye"! Stop it! The rest of the story's good and then...out of nowhere! It is very disorienting!
  
  Of course, I remember the days when I wouldn't have even noticed stuff like that. Fucking good fic, spoiling me with its non-abuse of my mother tongue.



• Y'know, hurt/comfort is the genre I feel I should be embarrassed to love. Not the unapologetic porn, not the crack, not the mpreg. No, just the H/C.
  
  Because - I don't know. It seems like I shouldn't like a lot of these things as much as I do. You know, the horrible trauma and the angst and the cuddling and the healing sex and the wildly-unlikely happy ending. The part of me that revels in that is totally an emo 14-year-old who writes bad poetry and listens to "Kill Me Quickly" on endless repeat. But you're supposed to embrace you inner child, right?



• Jeeves and Wooster BDSM. I can't tell if these are tears of joy or horror.



• Dammit, I want some decent Fastlane fic. You know, other than Vision in Green. I mean, come on, pretty, slutty undercover cop with a criminal father and his buff, badass partner who came to town on a quest for vengeance! Plus all the on-screen whumping (torture! poisoning! getting shot in the ass!) and the cool accessories and the hot boss who, by the way, had to go undercover and get close to some lesbian bank robbers. I think they were bank robbers. It's been awhile. Anyway! It's criminal that there's not more fic, is all.



• Stupid cravings. They're goddamn hard to keep up with without home internet. I want epic H/D and I go out the next day and get some and then I get home and all I want is Jack/Daniel with humor and whumping.



• Another thing that bugs the crap out of me, though? When an author wins at concept and then fails at execution. It can be almost physically painful! You can see how good it could have been, but no! It's just another badfic! Makes me twitchy.



• Hey, you know what'll throw you? Reading The Roads Never Lead Where They're Supposed to Go and then Crimes of Humanity, one right after the other. 'Cause you go from Sheppard-without-that-nagging-edge-of-psychosis to Sheppard-all-psychosis-all-the-time. And they're both disturbingly in character. It's weird.
  
  Fanfiction, you are the bestest.



• HEART for the way people randomly play around with Clark's physiology. One prostate! No prostate! Six prostates! Oh, fandom.



• So I found this thing I wrote a couple years ago, when I was bored at work, about how fanfiction pretty much breaks into your brain and just moves in, and you end up with all these lines in your head from all these different fics and then I quoted a bunch of the lines that stuck with me and hey, the "That's my bitch you're trying to fuck", that's from Michael Serpent's The Golden Snitch, right? I know it's H/D. It was the only line I couldn't still name the fic for and now it's gonna bug me. Also? Xander's speech to Dominga in Joli Coeur never fails to kill me utterly. Oh, Xander. So many reasons you're my favorite.



• nixitutta was talking about fangirl superpowers and how, in RL, she can spot a fangirl at twenty paces and how I always find the good fic in my new fandoms freakishly quickly. And I started wondering first, what other people's knacks might be, and second, what fannish superpower do you wish you had? Always getting in on the ground floor of the Next Big Fandom? Sockpuppet radar? Something else entirely?



• Wow but I have a lot of filthy, filthy porn saved on my computer. Good christ, HP writers have no shame. One of the reasons I love them.
  
  It's just that I am now even more afraid to wonder how my dad knew I read fanfiction. Let's never follow up on that train of thought, 'kay?



• This thing. Where people whip out "evidence" of their ships. It.
  
  Frankly, I think most of you are crazy, not just the Harry/Hermione kids.
  
  I don't. What's the point? I mean, okay, as an explanation of why you ship that way. And I guess, if you're trying to predict where TPTB will go with the relationship.
  
  But it seems like a lot of the time you're just screaming about how valid it is to ship your way. And that's just dumb.
  
  It's fanfiction! It isn't going to happen! Ship as randomly and invalidly as you please!
  
  You know what, I am capable of having fully fifteen crossover OTPs at a time. Do I think I'm ever going to see them outside my screwy little head? No, not in canon or fic. Would people laugh at me for shipping them? Yes. And here's the big one: Do I care? NO! Jesus, people, this is supposed to be fun!
  
  You know what, Ron/Hermione is a true pairing now, ie, one with explicit canon backing it up. Does that mean we all should lay aside our Harry/Ron and Harry/Hermione and Hermione/Ginny fic? Absolutely not. To be honest, I think it's perfectly alright to write around canon events you dislike. Fuck, that's why a lot of us are here! Because we ship Buffy/Angel for true and forever or because Janet Frasier never should have died or because Remus is gay, dammit!
  
  Will Ronon and Simon ever meet? No way in hell. Do I think it'd be awesome if they did? Yes, and so I talk about it and hey, it got me a pretty rockin' little fic and even, indirectly, some porn.
  
  Fanfiction does not equal canon. And what's more, it shouldn't. You shouldn't worry about what the source says about your favorite ship. You want McKay/Kolya? Okay! I've seen it! You have people waiting for you! You want Harry/Hermione/Ron? Go with it! Heal the wound of Camelot, even if canon never will! You want Dawn/Hermione? Dude, I will be your slave! Just stop trying to suck the joy out of it for other people! Gah!



• So I've been thinking about my fic kinks lately. It makes me sad how few of them can be found in profic. Well, outside of porn.
  
  God, I love polyfic. Yeah, it makes for smokin' sex scenes, but mostly I like that nobody gets left out. Most sources build in love triangles for the tension and half the time I end up sad for person C even if I really like A and B's relationship. I am a sucker for pining and steadfast devotion and all that (too much classic lit at a young age), but I don't want the love to be forever unrequited, y'know? Plus it's awesome to be able to get payoff of three ships at once (as for example, Buffy/Faith-Buffy/Xander-Xander/Faith).
  
  Strap-on porn: subverting gender roles while also being hot like NOVAS.
  
  Crossovers. Yeah, yeah, multiple fandoms = exponential love and all that, but I also love seeing my fandoms through fresh eyes. It gives the characters the perfect opportunity to reexamine things they may take for granted. 's nice.
  
  And okay, genderswitch may have deeper meaning for some people, and some of the fics I've read may have had some really good points about gender and identity and sterotypes and influence of body-on-personality, but really, I just like it 'cause it makes me giggle.
  
  I already did my whole thing on hurt/comfort (basically? Christina = angst whore who craves a happy ending) and really, isn't apocafic most often just a really extreme set-up for some hurt/comfort? That, or it's a way to alter the status quo enough to allow an otherwise impossible resolution to a conflicted pairing (*cough*Sonny/Vinnie*cough*). Also, as evidenced by the Dark Angel-love, I heart post-apocalyptic dystopias forever.
  
  And finally, the BDSM. To be honest, I only casually enjoy S&M; if it's there, great, if not, no loss. And I love bondage, but really, it's the D/s that gets me. It's incredibly hot, yes. But mostly, it's the trust there, the sub knowing that when they fall someone will catch them. It's gorgeous. And there are the things I like that often come attached to the dynamic of the relationship, the jealousy/possessiveness and the whole "I'm the only that gets to hurt you, dammit" thing.



• Yeah, I know, you're all sick unto death about the list50 babble. But I'm proud of myself! I'm only actively working on, um, eight lists instead of the usual, oh, dozen or more. I've got eight on the enemies list, nine each on the amnesia and vamps lists, 16 on the SGA-only prompt lists, 20 on the regular prompt list, 23 for the dark fic, 33 for Buffy-only prompts, and 41 for the SGA gen list I've been working on for what seems like half my life. I recently finished an all-Harry Potter prompt list (which includes some of the best Trio fic I've ever read, for serious) and this prompt list that was going to be a speed thing and then I ended up forcing myself to cut all of the HP, BtVS, or SGA stories on it, so it ended up with a crapload of Yuletide fic.



• (Note: I apparently wrote the following in early 2005. Wow. Completely unedited, god help me, although HEE, "milquetoast". Jesus, at this rate, y'all are going to end up seeing 2005's inarticulate paen to fanfiction, complete with quotations and random song metaphor.)
  I suck.
  
  No, I really do.
  
  I cannot stand a nice, functional relationship. Or at least, considering my taste in fic, that's the conclusion I've drawn.
  
  I love slashing damaged people. Apparently, the more damaged, the better. Daniel. Xander. Michael. Harry and Draco. Kendall. Harper. Barbara. Spike. Wesley. Willow. Faith. Grissom. Van. Simon. Mal. Paris. Ed. Brian. Crowley. House. Robin. Lex. Clark. Lana. Sawyer. McKay. Charlie. River. Perry. Holmes. Bashir. Blair. Miroku. Seth. Pete. Logan. Josh. Hiei.
  
  I could go on.
  
  These people are fucked. up. In a plethora of ways. And often, the fic fucks them up *more*. Just for fun. Some of these people are victims of torture, rape, abuse, almost any tragedy you can think of, up to and including their own deaths. But that's not enough. They must suffer more. Just so we can have a little bit of h/c.
  
  Committment issues, intimacy issues, people issues, PTSD, amnesia, physical disability, drug addiction, insecurity, overintellectualisation, impending death, species predjudice. All of them experienced, at one time or another, by more than one of my favorite characters.
  
  And I love them for it.
  
  Some people like to write about damaged people so they can fix them.
  
  I don't want them fixed. Some of them *can't* be fixed, not in any reasonable way. Some of them had horrible things happen to them as adults. Whatever. Some of them had horrifying things happen to them as children, and you don't walk away from that unscathed. Sawyer, and Kendall, and Daniel, and Hiei, and Ed, and Harry, and Draco, and Logan, and Xander, and Wesley, and Lex, and Bashir, and Miroku, and Josh are *always* going to be fucked up because they were abused or they lost people or because their childhoods just plain sucked in ways their creators never decided to explain fully.
  
  Kendall's not Kendall if she's not a little bit crazy. Okay, sometimes a lot crazy. And she's insecure and plays fast and loose with the truth, but she loves people so deep it's almost scary.
  
  Draco's dad sucks, but he loves him anyway. We know that. Make him good, make him evil, he's still gonna love his father. Deal with it. Also, just because he chooses to fight for good, doesn't mean he chooses to be *nice*. Nothing worse than a weepy milquetoast Draco.
  
  He's like Spike that way. Spike can be good or bad or mean or nice. He's complex. He's love's bitch, he's said so himself, but he's not a toy. He's not going to roll over for his latest lover like a lapdog. Oh, and he's not going to cheat. Don't even go there.
  
  Bashir's parents basically traded him in for a new and improved version of himself. Don't even try to tell me he hasn't got issues. Come on! He has no idea who he'd be without the enhancements.
  
  Just like the X-5s. Max and Zach and Alec's every day is shaped by what Manticore put into them. It can't help but be. They were *brainwashed*. They watched, over and over, what were basically their siblings die without being able to do a thing. Max and Zach were fugitives for years!
  
  Speaking of fugitives, dont' even try to sell breaking the Tams up. Simon and River would die for each other. They are always going to put each other ahead of anyone else. Change that and I don't know who you're writing about, 'cause it sure as hell isn't my favorite pair of fugitive geniuses.
  
  I like these people *and* their issues. I love Xander *because* of his white knight complex, and I love House for his misogyny, and I adore Crowley for being a demon who likes the world a little too much to destroy it.
  
  I love them. And I love to see them in all their snarky/sad/geeky/angry/lecherous/loving/heroic/ambiguous fucked-up glory. And sometimes I like to see them hurt that little bit, be twisted and broken that little bit more, so that they can be with who I think they need. 'Cause Willow needs someone to hold her hand and hold her back and Xander needs someone to put him first and Charlie needs to get out of his own head and Wesley needs someone to forgive him and Lex needs someone to keep him human and Lana needs someone who'll ignore her tragedy. House needs to admit he cares about at least one person and Daniel needs a touchstone and Percy needs to loosen up. Harry needs to lighten up and Faith needs someone she can't just fuck and Seth needs a smack upside the head.
  
  And I need to see them get what they need and I need to see them still not perfect or perfectly happy because that's not the way it is or should be. And I needed to say that.

Comments

[hermitsoul]

Hug? Don't hug? Random caring murmurs or specific assurances? I don't know how you tell! So I always end up feeling frantic and awkward, and probably annoying the crap out of my comfortee.

Tell me about it! My first instinct is to tell people to suck it up and move on. Not the thing most people want to hear. Instead I try to pass the actual comforting part on to someone else while I focus on the practical aspect - get food/drink, make phone calls, etc.

Fanfiction, you are the bestest.

Agrees.