Hello hello!

[swingandswirl]

 

Name: Tamanna, but most people call me Tam or Tammy

Age: almost 29, ack!

Location: Asia, shortly to be moving to Europe, if things work out

Gender: cis femme, she/her 

Languages: English, French, and a teeny bit of Spanish

Describe yourself in five sentences or less: Your friendly neighbour cis femme ace queer geek. I am a bit of a Cranky Fandom Old (relatively, anyway) having been here since the 90s, and have increasingly less patience for drama and purity nonsense. I write a lot of fix-it fanfic/headcanons. I'm a translator by trade and a language geek by dint of interest, and I love words in general. 

Interests: Books/TV shows that aren't by/about straight cis white dudes, planning / bullet journaling, exploring new places, fashion, history, cooking, queer issues, disability/access issues, romance novels, podcasts, and more that I can't remember right now.

Top 5 fandoms: Harry Potter (with the caveat that I only acknowledge the existence of the first four books and NONE of the movies), Numb3rs, Check Please!, Superman/Batman, and Star Trek AOS.

I mostly post about: I’ve fallen out of the habit of posting after years away, but I’m trying to post about a combination of daily life (and my - fingers crossed - future move), fannish stuff, including fic, headcanons, and meta, and book/movie reviews. Linkspams, sometimes.

I rarely post about: Politics. If I think too much about the current state of the world I’ll start screaming and never stop.

My last three posts were about: Star Wars fandom meta, squeeing about the Pens winning Game 7 of the series against the Caps, a general State of the Tam post.

How often do you post?: Like I said, I’m out of the habit of posting, especially after years on Tumblr, but I’m trying for about a post a week, minimum.

How about commenting?: I like to comment a lot! I’m trying to be more active, especially since I’ve fallen out of the habit - if you post something interesting, I’m going to at least try and respond, assuming I have something relevant/intelligent to say. 

Describe your day with a gif:

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Comments

[komischkatze]

Hey! I'm another queer relatively fandom old (and definitely a bit cranky) geek :D
I'm into podcasts and queer media, and always looking for recs. I've been meaning to look into Check Please! for a while but never got around to it (so maybe this is a gentle reminder-nudge from the universe, hah!)
Would you like to be friends?

[swingandswirl]

Come to the dark side, we have pie cookies!

Seriously, though, it's a lovely comic and well worth the read, even if the children on Tumblr can be seriously trying, sometimes.

And yes please! /adds you/

[komischkatze]

>:D
I've long-since learned to ignore a large contingent of Tumblr :P I'll likely check it out soon, when I have some free time (finally)!

[jesse_the_k]

Old & former interpreter (ASL, then got sick & broken memory). I'm subbing.

[decepticats]

I am a bit of a Cranky Fandom Old (relatively, anyway) having been here since the 90s, and have increasingly less patience for drama and purity nonsense.

I'm so glad we've already added each other because I've never related to a statement more in recent years, lol.

[flowerfuck]

Ah! A fellow bullet-journaller and Tumblr survivor! Let's be buds? :D

[fuckyeahseb]

I subscribed to you here on DW because I think I will like your fandom and book related posts. Also, maybe seeing someone talking about bullet journaling will remind me to use mine.

[swiftsnowmane]

Oh my goodness, I feel you on the lacking patience for 'drama and purity nonsense' -- one of the reasons I'm here on DW is to find at least *some* kind of respite from *cough* tumblr *cough*. :p

And I'm so curious re: what you said about only accepting the first four HP books as canon and ignoring the films. I personally loathe the HP films and have never acknowledged them. I also recall being extremely devastated by the death of a certain character in Book Five, though I did continue with the rest of the series afterward. I can't presume to know what your own reasons behind feeling this way are of course, but colour me intrigued. :)

[swingandswirl]

/high fives in solidarity/ Tumblr was really fun when I needed it, but I've come to realise the endless-scrolling-with-0-engagement just isn't healthy for me, even leaving aside the drama - and god knows there's plenty of that, but that wasn't helped by the fandoms I was in. (I look at some of what the idiot children over there are getting up to and pray to anyone who might be listening that I wasn't nearly as bad at that age. Then again, the very format of the site seems to encourage fanbrattiness and wank, so.)

/grins/ No problem! You might regret asking, though, I will happily talk people's ear off about HP (as evidenced by the fact that I have MULTIPLE 50k+ fix-it fic in the works to deal with all the things about canon that drive me batty.)

For me, HP is an unfinished series for a couple of reasons:

a) There’s a genre shift in the middle of the series and it breaks things. The thing about the first four books is that they're basically magical boarding school stories, a genre I love and grew up reading (Enid Blyton is/was very popular in my part of the world, and she did two really popular series - St. Clare's, and Malory Towers) and I-IV are very much in that tradition - they’re also very Dahl-esque, in that nobody seems to notice that Harry’s being abused, or that he’s never met his best friend’s older brothers until the plot of IV calls for it, or even that he knows practically nobody outside of his core group, not even two of the girls in his House and year. V-VII… are (or, at least, are trying to be) Adult Novels of Great Pathos, and the rules of the first four just don’t work with the genre shift.

b) The story I got is not the one I wanted or that I-IV got me to expect. I think I would have liked book VII better if the foreshadowing had been better, rather than the Hallows being such an utter Macguffin. Add to that so many potentially wonderful storylines falling by the wayside (what’s in the Chamber? are people going to set aside House divisions? Dare we hope for a Draco vs Lucius showdown?) in favour of Jesus Potter and the Confrontation That Didn’t Even Fit The Prophecy. Add to that the utter bugfuckery that was the epilogue, and I just… nope.

c) JKR has said that Hermione is in some ways a self-insert, and I can believe it, because JKR - like Hermione - has what I like to call Modern Muggleborn Syndrome, the idea that just because something is modern it’s necessarily more progressive. We don’t see good proper purebloods - where are the people who have no problem with Muggleborns but still worry about losing their culture? The people who understand that Muggles are, actually, a threat to a tiny population that’s already in the middle of a cultural genocide because from what I can tell, Hogwarts doesn’t, actually, teach anything about wizarding culture and traditions? Hell, we never even see much of any culture and as a child of colonialism whose own heritage was stolen from her by well-meaning parents, that distresses me on multiple levels.

… er, that got long. But yes. That is why I live very happily in AUs, or at most, a canon that only goes up to Goblet, because the thought of making the rest of it makes sense sends me utterly spare.

[swiftsnowmane]

Re: tumblr - ha , yes, I feel you. I'm still on tumblr, but I find it so incredibly frustrating and unsatisfactory when it comes to fandom interaction that I'm close to despair on a daily basis. Le siiiigh. :p

And with regard to HP -- don't worry at all, I was genuinely curious. I can totally see all of your points on this! While I was perhaps not nearly as attached to the magical school genre as you are, I can and do appreciate it very much (especially the Roald Dahl connection you bring up!). Also, there were other aspects that really upset me back in the day when reading the latter books. (It may sound silly *now*, but at the time, Sirius Black's death almost made me quit the books completely. It just felt unnecessarily cruel to that character. Almost like, 'let's take one of Harry's mentors away just for the sake of *Harry's* storyline with no regard to *Sirius'* arc' Idk. like I said, it sounds silly, but as he was my favourite character, it was just...crushingly depressing to me at the time.)

Again, while I don't necessarily feel as strongly about some of the issues you've brought up (simply as it's been that long since I read the series), I can definitely understand where you are coming from. Thanks for explaining! :)

[swingandswirl]

Heee yeah I know that feel. Especially since I saw from your profile that you're a SW fan, and, well, there aren't many wankier fandoms on the hellsite. (TFA alone makes me want to run screaming, and I've cut my presence on Tumblr to the bare minimum as is...) Pity, since I'm sure I'd like the movies if people stopped being problematic long enough to let me watch them in peace.

(No, no, don't apologise! Sirius wasn't even my favourite character, and I sobbed through that entire bit. I get why it was done from a story perspective - the idea of the Hero's Journey and all that twaddle - but you're right, it did/does feel very cruel, to Sirius primarily but also to Harry. Then again, a huge part of my exasperation with JKR is that she has these excellent building blocks she does nothing with - like, would it have killed Harry to know more about his parents, from their oldest friends? But yeah, OotP was when I dove headfirst into fic, and a huge part of my disenchantment was that I found stories that were just plain better on so many levels, especially in comparison to the last two - let me know if you want recs!)

Heh. HP was such a huge part of my adolescence, then the last two books put me solidly off it. I wandered back in recently basically because a couple of friends are writing a massive sprawling girl!Slytherin!Harry AU and I - as one of the few lionesses of their acquaintance - got pulled along for the ride.

[swiftsnowmane]

Ha! yes, you are absolutely right -- the SW side of tumblr fandom drives me nuts at the best of times. I keep a very active Star Wars sideblog, but I mostly just post and share things rather than attempt much outright interaction at this point. There are some lovely people I chat with via PM there, but I rarely attempt much public 'discourse' these days. :P

And omg....TFA is just.... SO. MUCH. NOPE. UUUUUUGHHHH. I pretty much feel about it in similar terms to how you explained your feels on the latter half of HP. I saw it in cinemas when it came out and have been trying to erase it from the data files of my memory ever since. I am a HUGE fan of Anakin Skywalker/Vader, and his redemption via the father-son connection in RotJ has meant EVERYTHING to me ever since I was a little kid. And well...for me, TFA and the entire premise of the sequels is anathema to this. I just can't even handle it. I have completely and utterly ignored every single thing to do with them for over a year now -- I blacklist everything, and pay zero attention to trailers, promos, spec, etc, etc. I just...don't wanna know. :p I hide out happily in my own lil corner of the SW universe where the story ends at RotJ, as it has always done. :D

(Here's a post that I wrote last year on the subject. It's not a perfect essay by any means, but it's basically just me pouring my heart out over all this: The Chosen One, the Hero's Journey, and breaking the cycle of enslavement in Star Wars.)

And ahhh, yes, again, you are spot-on with that assessment of the Sirius storyline. Of course, even while I was reading it that first, horrible time, I knew it was all in service of the Hero's Journey, blah, blah. But I guess it just stung so much because, as you say, he still had SO much to offer Harry?? It wasn't like, an old, aged mentor dying...this was someone who'd had the best years of his life stolen from him, and who finally had a chance to make good use of his freedom. UGh. It still kills me! ;_;

So omg, wow, yes...if you happen to know of any 'Sirius lives!' AU fics that do him at least a bit more justice, that would be brilliant! They don't even have to feature him as the main character necessarily, just having him around still, or even just for a while longer, would be so lovely. :)

** As you can probably tell, I'm pretty obsessed with stories about characters who are either imprisoned, enslaved, or in a state of mental/ideological enslavement, and then must try to find freedom and/or some kind of redemption/salvation, either for themselves or others. What can I say, it's a topic that resonates with me deeply. I guess I *really* take that quote to heart, about how "the best stories are stories of escape". :)

[swingandswirl]

Oh god the Discourse. That is 99% of why I ran screaming from Tumblr in general and SW in particular. I really wish Tumblr had some kind of friendslock. The problem, I think, is that when you try to shoehorn community/social interaction into a platform that is (in my not-so-humble-opinion, anyway) meant for zombie-like viewing/consumption, it just never ends well, even without fanbrats of any stripe entering the picture.

I... gah. TFA. So I've never actually watched any of the SW movies, TFA was my first. And the thing is. As a movie, on its own and independent of the larger canon, I really liked it - it's a nice reversal of a lot of tropes. As #VII, though... oh my god, get it AWAY from me. Like, seriously, can we NOT fight the same battles over and over again? (This is another 30% of my problem with HP) WHAT IS THE POINT IF NOTHING EVERY GETS BETTER? And OMG, can we STOP dumping even more shit on Leia?

Also, if you haven't got ilyena_sylph and bow_weaver friended, you should! They are SW fans who feel much the same about Ani and TFA as you do, and lovely people besides. :D

(There's actually some very good meta on Ben Solo / Kylo Ren and his coding as a mentally ill character who's been groomed from childhood, but it tends to get lost in the cesspit that is fandom. And forget any chance of an intelligent discussion comparing Kylo and Finn - apparently fanbrats do not grasp the concept that people react to situations differently.)

Someone actually made a very good point about JKR, re: characterisation. She doesn't see her characters as people, she sees them as plot devices - hence Remus fucking off and not keeping contact with the child of his closest friends, Sirius dying, Percy turning against the kid who saved his little sister, among other things.

It's been a very long while since I've read HP fic, but I'll definitely go poke in my bookmarks! Off the top of my head, though, I can recommend Harry Potter and the Nightmares of Futures Past, a fic where a thirty-year-old Harry goes back in time to refight the war in a way that doesn't lead to everyone he loves being dead. Since it starts in first year, Sirius doesn't appear for a while, but I really loved his characterisation here, especially as a mentor to Harry. If you read WIPs (and can put up with an extremely slow update schedule) it's amazing.

[swiftsnowmane]

Yes, you are absolutely right -- the blend of the sjw mentality and fandom just does. not. work. *especially* on such an asinine platfom. It prohibits so much free speech on so many subjects, because you have people either constantly shaming and/or self-censoring left and right. -_-

And on an objective level, I can see how TFA can be an enjoyable film on its own terms. And in fact, if it *had* been a film that had nothing to with the Skywalker saga in any shape or form, then I might have even been able to enjoy it. But as a supposed 'continuation' of it? Oh...oh god. Just...no. D: (And yes, I did not even bring up the Leia side of things simply because it upsets me too much to even discuss, really.... especially after losing Carrie. ;_;)

Thank you so much for directing me to others who feel the same way! It's always great to find people one can speak freely around... :)

And thank you also for the fic rec -- I will definitely be checking it out! ^.^