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fandomtrumpshate 2024 obligations (1 fic, 2 podfics) scarygirlynight fills ficwip’s the fic that haunts you 2025 ficwip drabble prompts ficwip’s A Picture’s Worth 1000 Words event ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elasticella’s Sapphic Stocking Stuffers event yuletide
I didn’t know when this job became such a burden
It crept up so slowly
You wouldn’t know it
Until it slammed you in the back
So, I beared it
Because I’m a fighter in actions not words
The yelling
The judging
The nagging
The blaming
The rambling
The what-could’ve-meant-something’s
If they came from anyone else
The empty praise
I used to take
Because I was so good at faking
Accepting the bare minimum
Knowing I deserved better
I spilled my heart out;
The responsibilities I wasn’t supposed to have,
And what the last year took out of me
To all the souls who understood
I never got the respect
Or recognition
All I got were
Red eyes
And red skin
To prove that the hurt
Was(n’t) worth it in the end
That the pain I’m forever marked with
Had a purpose
That my broken pleas
Were heard
And my desperate dreams
Were realized
This is
What Home looks like.
Happy children. Wide toothy smiles.
Hugs for a family photo. Arms around each other.
Standing around the kitchen. Eating and drinking at the island counter.
Bilingual conversations in the living room. Voices you need headphones to muffle.
Huddling close to the fireplace in winter. Grasping for a spot in front of the fan in summer.
Home is not always a place. Home is the people we adore.
Home is where everything lies. Home is in the little things.
Home is that dusty photo album on Uncle’s cluttered desk.
Home is that one stuffed animal you are too fond to throw.
Home is dancing to the oldies in the living room with you.
Home is stargazing in tents on the backyard lawn with you.
Home is friends who ride on all the rollercoasters with you.
Home is sitting in the living room as Aunt braids your hair.
Home is Brother dropping crumbs from Mom’s soda bread.
Home is Dad tucking you in again at night after nightmares.
Home is you, me, and everyone around with a beating heart.
Resisting Conformity
Uniqueness defines humanity. Sameness is the desire of the people in the world of Lois Lowry’s 1993 novel The Giver. The story follows a boy named Jonas who’s tasked with the job of becoming the next “Receiver of Memory”. He is the new person in charge of keeping all the memories of the past, pain, and pleasure in a world that has erased any semblance of those things. After receiving these memories, he decides to challenge the status quo. The 2014 film adaptation employs techniques such as tone, both in a visual context through color and an emotional one through the score and sound, and Jonas’s styling to convey his rejection of conformity.
The film starts with Jonas riding his bicycle to the Nurturing Center along with his friends Fiona and Asher. Here, he meets Gabriel, a newchild he quickly grows fond of. The novel follows different events, starting with a telling of feelings around the dinner table. Jonas doesn’t meet Gabriel until his father brings him home a couple of chapters later. “It was the first thing Jonas noticed as he looked at the newchild peering up curiously from the basket. The pale eyes” (Lowry 25). In the Nurturing Center scene, the film takes the focus away from their connection, instead making it the first time Jonas sees color—the red of Fiona’s hair. This establishes his uniqueness within the first five minutes. Everything around them is gray, but Jonas suddenly sees Fiona’s hair color and the voices are drowned out by melancholy music, highlighting the importance of this realization and “heighten[ing] the effectiveness of the image” (Cahir).
When Jonas is gifted his position, he has to travel to the edge of the city. The film puts distance between him, his peers, and his family with this location as opposed to in the novel where it is located behind Fiona’s workplace—the Center of the Old. As he goes to work for the first time, the viewer sees him wearing an outfit that makes him stand out. Fiona even comments on how important it makes him look. As the film progresses, the viewer sees his outfits change to be more casual within the Giver’s abode, such as a loose-fitting t-shirt and pants. Within the memories, his outfits match the scene, such as him wearing a jacket, beanie, and gloves during the snow and sled scene and more traditional clothes with the dancing scene. In the novel, he wears the same tunic, sometimes in different colors, but the reader doesn’t see his clothes change in a drastic way like in the film. This styling makes him feel further differentiated from the others.
At first, all the viewer and Jonas see is gray, but as he receives memories from the Giver, the viewer sees the world fill with color at the same time he does. No one else can understand what he’s going through, despite his desire to share his newfound knowledge. In the novel, he conceals, only sharing when necessary, until the end when he travels to Elsewhere, letting the memories go. On the other hand, the film has multiple instances in which he attempts to share his experiences, such as when he simulates the feeling of sledding with Fiona or convinces her to stop taking the injections that inhibit their emotions. These sequences work to develop a romance between him and Fiona that is not explored within the novel. There is a clear shift in tone in the scenes they are in together. Often they are slowed down as music plays over them, creating tension, especially during the scene where Jonas kisses her.
The last third of the film reflects the last part of the novel with Jonas’s final act of rejection, escaping to Elsewhere with Gabriel. The elders try to stop his escape, disliking his defiance. Intense music plays in the background, setting the tone for the emotions the viewer is meant to feel. The viewer is at the edge of their seat, waiting to see if Jonas can successfully escape.
All in all, the film allows the viewer to visualize Jonas’s resistance and rejection of the sameness due to seeing colors within the memories, different styling, and tone established through the score.
Passing Time
Time is a relative concept. It’s always moving, but it’s a question of perspective on the speed at which it does. Different mediums of storytelling can turn this concept on its head to make the consumer interpret time in various ways. Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 novel A Wrinkle in Time showcases this through a way of space-time travel called tessering. Tessering allows the main characters Meg, Calvin, and Charles Wallace to visit other worlds in a short time as they work to save Meg and Charles’ father, Dr. Murray. With atmospheres all their own, these worlds are distinct from Earth. Ava DuVernay, the director of the 2018 adaptation of the novel, attempts to capture this travel through space and time as well as the distinction in worlds with the use of techniques unique to filmmaking—special effects and color grading.
The beginning scene of the movie is fairly different from that of the book as the movie provides the audience with a memory of Meg’s past, doing an experiment with her father, whereas the book starts directly in the next scene where Meg is in bed during a dark and stormy night. This contrast provides framing to how Meg feels about her father since the audience doesn’t get to see her inner thoughts as much. The memory is also brighter than the present day, conveying the passage of time before it is told.
When the three beings who bring Meg, Charles, and Calvin to these other worlds, Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which, are presented to the camera they’re shown to be colorful against their surroundings. Mrs. Whatsit’s white dress stands in contrast to the dark and stormy night, Mrs. Who’s shimmering sequined dress stands out against the brown floors and dark walls of her house, and Mrs. Which’s ethereal appearance, despite being in darker colors, shines against the colors of the nature outside. They appear larger than life in the film, the same way they do in the novel.
As they tesser, an effect makes it feel like the world is shifting around them. It feels wavy in this transition. In the in-between, “[s]he was alone in a fragment of nothingness” (L’Engle 40). The film reflects this nothingness for a mere moment before they’re in another world called Uriel. Here, the sun shines down on them, whereas back on Earth it has almost set. The sky is blue, while just mere moments before orange shrouded it. Everything in this world is bright with its green hills, blue waters, and flowers of all colors. The audience gets to see “a garden even more beautiful than anything in a dream” (L’Engle 45) along with the characters as they traverse through Uriel. Special effects create a magical feeling present in the world as Mrs. Whatsit transforms into a creature who can fly and the flowers move to save Calvin as he falls from her back. This brightness, as well as, shorter shots make it feel like the viewer moves through Uriel at a faster pace (Cahir).
Very unlike Uriel, another world they visit, Camazotz is dark, a world covered in shadow. Over the wall of shadow, there is a town with a monotonous smattering of yellow-painted houses and a continuous rhythm of kids bouncing red balls before their mothers call them in for dinner. The world then transitions to a crowded beach, full of muted colors. As Meg and Calvin run across it, the beach morphs into a gray building called Central Central Intelligence. The darkness and longer shots between transitions make everything feel slow and drawling as the audience feels the tension build while Charles loses himself to IT and Meg saves their father and him. The novel doesn’t follow the exact sequences but has that same feeling of time passing slower with longer passages spread over multiple chapters during this climax.
In the end, while not the perfect adaptation, the film translates the bigger concepts such as time and space to portray a story that maintains the themes of love and familial relationships present in the novel. Concepts in which time transcends.
Community and Chrononormativity in Queer Speculative Fiction
There is an old African proverb that says, “If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Adam Silvera’s 2017 novel They Both Die at the End as well as Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s 2019 novel This Is How You Lose the Time War are examples where two are better than one. While the former presents a story of two teen boys living their last day together and the latter presents two women time travelers on opposite sides of a years-long war, both are stories in which characters find community within each other. Community can commonly be defined in one of two ways: a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common, or a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing attitudes, interests, and goals. People normally think of a community as large and encompassing, but these stories show that it can come in different forms.
In They Both Die at the End, the main characters, Mateo and Rufus, live very different lives before they meet each other. At first, Mateo is cautious and reserved, only being very close with two people, his father and best friend, Lidia. On the other hand, Rufus is more daring and willing to take risks, tight-knit with a group he calls “The Plutos”, living in a foster home. This is shown plainly by the difference in their situations when receiving the Death-Cast call. Mateo is at his apartment alone reading a blog on his laptop, while Rufus is out with his friends Tagoe and Malcolm beating up his ex’s new boyfriend. Mateo reflects on his call, thinking, “The list of people I’ll miss…is so short I shouldn’t even call it a list: there’s Dad…my best friend Lidia…And that’s it” (Silvera 12). Contrast this with Rufus, who is close with the people in his foster home and asks to have a funeral after he receives his call. “You guys gotta do me the biggest favor. Wake up Jenn Lori and Francis. Tell them I wanna have a funeral before heading out” (Silvera 30). Despite the fact Rufus’s community is larger in the beginning, both his and Mateo’s offer support to one another, thus fulfilling the notion that a community can mean finding fellowship with one another.
Having a community can also mean having strength, having courage, and being brave. There is nowhere that is more apparent in showcasing that than with Mateo’s growth after meeting Rufus. He learns to be adventurous and have more fun as being with Rufus brings out another side of him. Rufus offers for him to ride on the back of his bike and while initially he refuses, the next time, he vows to be brave. “This bike isn’t the worst thing…It’s freeing…When we reach our destination I’m going to do something small and brave” (Silvera 157). When they reach their destination, Althea Park, he jumps off the bike. It may be a small action, but as Rufus points out, “he’s…always want[ed] to do something exciting, just [was] too scared to go out and do it” (Silvera 158). This is an achievement for Mateo who has lived his life thus far paranoid of the things that could happen instead of living in the moment. Even something as small as jumping off the back of a bike is exciting. After this, he makes more adventurous choices, doing the “Rainforest Jump!” at the Travel Arena and singing in front of the crowd at a club called “Clint’s Graveyard” (Silvera 180 & 192). His development shows the importance of having a community, no matter who’s a part of it.
Finding a community can be like finding a home as well. Near the end of the novel, Mateo invites Rufus back to his apartment and Rufus says, “Take me home, Mateo” (Silvera 211). It is as if by this statement Mateo’s home—which is seen as his safe space—is just as much his as it is Rufus’s. In his chapter in the book Queering the Family in Young Adult Literature, entitled “Adam Silvera’s They Both Die at the End, Familial Disruption, and the Space of the Home”, author Angel Daniel Matos makes a similar observation, saying, “...We must acknowledge that it is Rufus’s presence in the home, and not the home itself, that emanates this sense of safety” (191). This fits into the concept that home is not always a place and that people can find home within each other. Mateo and Rufus fell in love in a day, finding themselves along the way and establishing a sense of belonging with one another.
In This is How You Lose the Time War, the circumstances are vastly different, but the main characters, Red and Blue, still find one another, redefining what it means to have love transcend all. Despite being soldiers fighting on opposite sides, Red for the Agency, and Blue for Garden, they communicate in secret with coded letters. Manifesting in different ways, these letters start off in a sort of snarky manner with lines like, “I must tell you it gives me great pleasure to think of you reading these words in licks and whorls of flame, your eyes unable to work backwards…” and “Remembering our last encounter, I thought it best to ensure you’d twist no other groundlings to your purpose, hence the bomb threat” (El-Mohtar and Gladstone 10 & 14), but, eventually, as their letters back and forth continue, unforeseen feelings develop. “I stand at cliff’s edge, and—hell. I love you, Blue. Have I always? Haven’t I?” (El-Mohtar and Gladstone 87). Blue reciprocates these feelings, professing, “Red, I love you. Red, I will send you letters from everywhen telling you so, letters of only one word, letters that will brush your cheek and grip your hair, letters that will bite you, letters that will mark you” (El-Mohtar and Gladstone 94). With these letters, they inspire each other to keep going with their language, becoming each other’s reason to continue. They think they’re being inconspicuous, but soon enough, the Agency as well as Garden catch onto their relationship. Red expresses contempt for them. “Garden, panicked, slithers shoots upthread to catch her, chase her, kill her; Commandant, feeling this, sends her own agents in pursuit. Fuck them” (El-Mohtar and Gladstone 111). Blue expresses a similar sentiment with this harrowing ending statement to the novel, “I don’t give a shit who wins this war, Garden or the Agency—towards whose Shift the arc of the universe bends. But, maybe this is how we win, Red. You and me. This is how we win” (El Mohtar and Gladstone 130). Even with all odds against them, they choose each other, going against the very systems that birthed them. Together, they resist.
Both of these novels present narratives of the enduring nature of love and community no matter how much time one may have. As Wendy Gay Pearson puts it in her article, “Speculative Fiction and Queer Theory”, “queer speculative fiction…speaks to…issues of queer time and the ability to critique chrononormativity (the normative sense of time across the life span) to subvert assumptions about linear time and “normal” life.” They Both Die at the End gives readers a glimpse into a world in which one knows the day they’re going to die, making them think about the impermanence of life, while This is How You Lose the Time War goes in the opposite direction, creating a world in which time travel is possible and people can change how the world looks by moving a single mug to a different spot than it was in the original timeline, but achieves the same questioning by the reader. With their different approaches to critiquing chrononormativity, both novels do a fantastic job of creating characters that challenge the readers’ assumptions about what it means to be human and how to live their lives.
In the end, these stories show how valuable spending time with loved ones is. The current reality doesn’t let people know when they are going to die nor does it have time travel to try and prevent that death from occurring. But, life is not meant to be lived worrying about the future or the past. Life is meant to be enjoyed in the present and to the fullest, surrounded by good company.
Works Cited
El-Mohtar, Amal., & Gladstone, Max. (2019). This is How You Lose the Time War. Simon and Schuster.
Matos, Angel. Daniel. (2023). Queering the Family in Young Adult Literature. In Routledge eBooks (pp. 183–194). https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003269663-18
Pearson, Wendy. Gay. (2022). Speculative Fiction and Queer Theory. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.1214
Silvera, Adam. (2017). They Both Die at the End. Simon and Schuster.
Parable of the Sower and Patriarchy
Patriarchy: a system of society or government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it. This system has been prevalent in much of American society. Throughout this country’s history, women have been put in positions secondary to men. Sometimes, it feels like women can finally have power within this society, but it never lasts long. Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower is a brilliant example of this. The protagonist Lauren Olamina, a black girl, fifteen years old at the start of the novel, grows and develops over the course of its three-year span. Even though this story is framed through her eyes, it is not entirely about her. There are fundamental male characters throughout the story that impact her journey; her father, brothers, Harry, Bankole, the community, and God. Lauren herself for a portion, even masquerades as a man to present herself as stronger while traveling. Despite the protagonist being female, men are significant to her plot.
The first person Lauren mentions in the novel is her father. In the first paragraph, she writes, “Today is our birthday—my fifteenth and my father’s fifty-fifth” (Butler 8). This seems like an unnecessary point to mention, but Lauren views her dad as an important figure in her life and makes the effort to write that her and her father share a birthday forty years apart. She wants us to know this information. In the following sentence she writes, “I’ll try to please him—him and the community and God” (Butler 8). A traditional stereotype of women is that they exist to please a man, thus taking away their agency. Lauren is aware that she’ll never meet this expectation, qualifying the sentence with “try”. This is also the first mention of God in Lauren’s narration, creating a precedent for how God will be portrayed moving forward. However, this precedent is underscored in the following chapter when Lauren mentions “...my father’s God stopped being my God” (Butler 12). In this statement, Lauren creates a divide between her and a significant male figure in her life, signifying a rejection of pretenses and a move toward establishing her own identity. But, she doesn’t want to upset him by admitting that. “...I’m a coward…I let my father baptize me in all three names of that God who isn’t mine anymore” (Butler 12). Lauren still wants to appear good in her father’s eyes despite harboring different beliefs. Her defiance is kept to herself. That in and of itself acts like a form of submission.
Her younger brother, Keith, on the other hand, openly defies her father. “...Keith lives outside” (Butler 101). He takes his life into his own hands, goes past the gates, and is only reprimanded the first time he comes back. Lauren doesn’t dare to go outside as her dad instilled a value in her not to do so. She only leaves when it’s feasibly impossible to stay. By this point, her father has passed away and her community is reduced to ash. Having nothing left makes her feel like she can take control, yet she is still in the grasp of a society that sees women as vulnerable. At the start of her travels with Harry and Zahra, Lauren voices, “I was thinking of traveling as a man,” to which Harry replies, “That will be safer for you” (Butler 168). The belief that being a man will make one safer is a consequence of a society that has for years deemed women as docile caregivers and men as strong breadwinners.
Appearing as a man gives Lauren an edge in her travels. She does what Micah Moreno refers to in their thesis as gender passing. As they state, “Lauren passes as male to avoid the acts of violence that she might be subject to as a female” (5). Being a woman, let alone a black woman in this society is difficult. When Butler exposes sex, pregnancy, and rape to young children within the novel, Lauren is expected to handle it as girls like her are seen as more mature for their age. So, it’s no wonder Lauren wishes to pass as a man as one way to increase her chances of survival. While Moreno discusses the concept of gender passing in their thesis, they also address the intersection of race, as, generally, passing is a concept for racial identities. Those who are lighter-skinned could pass as white, granting them more privileges. Lauren, while passing in gender, is firm in her blackness which presents its own problems. As Lauren discusses passing as a man, Zahra points out, “Mixed couples catch hell whether people think they’re gay or straight. Harry’ll piss off all the blacks and you’ll piss off all the whites” (Butler 168). This world isn’t entirely accepting of those who go against the grain. It’s a rough situation either way. So, Lauren chooses to maintain her identity while also putting on this performance; a sort of stance against the power structures of society that dictate how people are supposed to act. This is similar to how singer-songwriter Janelle Monáe “only performed in tuxedos for the first ten years of [their] career” (Rodine 154). They are unapologetic in their presentation of non-conformity but are still very present in their blackness. The performance for Janelle is a form of liberation, but for Lauren, it’s for survival. “It…felt strange to be called ‘man.’ I didn’t like it…” (Butler 200). Lauren doesn’t like having the masculine label but accepts it because otherwise, people would have different things to say about her capabilities.
Later on, Lauren meets a man named Taylor Bankole as she travels north. She feels almost immediately smitten by him. “I like him too much already. I’ll have to be careful” (Butler 238). The moment she meets a single man on the way, she almost loses herself. Bankole possesses power over Lauren, no matter how much she believes she’s in control. There is an inherent power dynamic in the relationship due to their age and experience differences. Bankole even calls himself a child molester when Lauren reveals her age (Butler 266). Although they’re technically both legal adults and have mutual feelings, their almost forty-year age difference raises eyebrows for the reader about the true nature of their relationship. Amidst this revelation, Bankole acknowledges that “You should have a nice youngster…I should have the sense and strength to send you off…” (Butler 267). This statement showcases he wants to take responsibility for letting a relationship like this happen, but won’t as he has something to gain from it. The conversation between Lauren and Bankole when he asks her to leave the group with him denotes an air of finality as he ends with the line, “Yes. You’ll come” (Butler 273). Lauren comes to the conclusion that this is not out of disregard for her objections but rather something else. This something else is not explained. She makes an excuse not to doubt his intentions to maintain her seeming control. Bankole agrees to her proposition to start the first Earthseed community at his property because he wants to marry her and it’s easier to accomplish that if they are settled in one location. Lauren needs the assurance that he plans to do that. Bankole wants Lauren to feel like she’s the one in control, but he has the power. “Do you imagine for one minute, girl, that I would let you get away” (Butler 279). With this agreement, Bankole leaves Lauren no choice in the matter.
The first person in the novel mentioned is Lauren’s father. The last person is Bankole; besides the group. Throughout the novel, we follow Lauren navigating her life over three years. It’s important to highlight the fact that the novel starts and ends with Lauren in relation to a man. The novel portrays Lauren as strong and independent, but at the same time, she lets men have at least some control over how she acts, from her father, to Bankole, to how men around her influence the way she presents herself. Her father convinced her not to go past the gate, she built Earthseed off of Bankole’s land, and she dressed as a man to survive better because society puts men in a real position of power and women in positions where they feel like they have power when in reality they don’t have nearly as much as the men. So, they do things to make it seem like they have that power like being in charge of a small group and guiding them to relative safety. In this world, that’s not even guaranteed. The people in charge create systems that perpetuate a cycle of harmful stereotypes that lead women not to be able to have true control over their lives without the presence of men. Lauren as a character has her own agency, but in the end, as society presents it, that will always be overshadowed by a man.
Works Cited
Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower. 1993, ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BB15997733.
Moreno, Micah. “Survival by Any Means: Race and Gender, Passing and Performance in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents.” Springer eBooks, 2020, pp. 195–212. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46625-1_11.
Zoë Rodine, Janelle Monáe, Dirty Computers, and Embodied Posthumanism, MELUS, Volume 47, Issue 1, Spring 2022, Pages 154–174, https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlac018
dear you,
today i finally lost.
i just couldn’t take it.
i thought i was strong,
i guess not.
maybe
i should’ve given you another chance
perhaps
i should’ve held on longer
or
given you the benefit of the doubt
given you more advice
been able to understand your joke
said something earlier.
i can give
a million excuses
to blame it on me.
but, there’s no excuse
to call me
a [redacted].
didn’t you stop
for a second
to think
that maybe
that was
wrong
to say?
did
you
really
think
that
of
me?
i hope not.
i hope
that
was
only
just
a
twisted
joke.
because for four months
you made
a mess of my mind.
you said i made you feel confident.
you said you loved me.
but, a lover wouldn’t call me a [redacted].
now, that i think, were we even friends either?
because a real friend wouldn’t do that.
even as a joke.
i’m glad
i blocked
you.
Her touch.
A match.
The start of an eternal fire,
Within
That nothing could quench.
Her lips.
A heart.
Beating inside,
Begging for release.
Her arms.
Enveloping me,
Similar to fresh linen
Draped over an otherwise barren mattress.
Her aura.
Reminding me of the sun in June.
A bundle of light,
Always bright.
Her voice.
Lulling me
Into a peaceful slumber.
Her.
I see now,
Just how much
That word means.
Toronto
A freezing February morning
Snow falling at an angle.
Beautiful, but I suffer.
Stuffing gloved hands into pockets,
Taking off fogged glasses,
Wearing a hood bigger than my head,
Fitting a mask around my face
The layers I packed weren’t enough.
My feet; numb.
As I walk on salted sidewalks
With white on either side.
The roads gray,
and wet as tires
Skid across them.
A city.
Trapped in the shadows.
Of winter.
wilting flowers
I don’t understand
The conventionality of flowers.
Why are they such a symbol of love?
After a week or two
You wilt alongside them
You too droop when you see them.
They are as temporary as
The love they are given with.
Or maybe the love they never had.
A bouquet of
Snapdragons
Tansys
Marigolds
Purple Hyacinths
Two-Toned Carnations
Yellow Roses.
They look beautiful in the moment
But only because you
Accept them at face value.
You let them sit in a vase
Thinking the water would stop them from wilting
The same way you think that receiving them
Would save your relationship.
sarkenforthwritten