Believe me this is for Tumblr but they are too stupid to be allowed to have it:

[apiphile]

When I was a child I began making up versions of stories that I read because I wanted to be in the stories and I wasn't in them. There WERE little white girls, but they were little white girls with pigtails and two parents and good manners who never bit anyone, and I had fundamentally a very strong idea that I was the person sitting here and that

Comments

[klgaffney]

This reminds me of the times when I would go '...so write something else. something you do want? something that reflects your reality?" and everyone would just roll their eyes at it like this was the worst idea they ever heard, my god, what tripe.

I still don't see what's wrong with it. I mean, THAT'S WHY A LOT OF WRITERS WRITE. we wouldn't have had the Harlem Renaissance without that idea. Hell, we wouldn't have any of the Western world's art movements ever without it. I know I'm constantly struggling to write the stories that I think I want to see/read. Dissatisfaction is why things happen, why stuff is created, a large part of what drives Western civilization in the first place--nasty ugly unglamorous mundane things like desperation, self-preservation, and a constant, nagging, all-pervading sense of dissatisfaction.

(The kind of reaction I get to the idea of 'don't like this? create what you want to see' is one of those litmus tests that helps me decide if they're someone that's gonna be good for me to know. Not everyone's got the energy or whatnot for that, and that's fine, but ultimately, I get to pick who I choose to befriend and I'm not interested in befriending people that don't/can't/won't get where I'm coming from when it comes to something this important to me.)

[apiphile]

The worst thing is I don't think the people who are complaining and who throw a fit if you say "yes, it's terrible that these stories aren't being told, YOU TELL THEM" don't even believe what they're saying because they are typically fandom people, and fandom people's raison d'etre is to create and tell the stories that they didn't think were told in the canon. It's not such a huge leap to start telling stories with the kind of characters you want to see as well, surely?

we wouldn't have had the Harlem Renaissance without that idea.

I don't quite get how they're missing things like this: do they think changes in literature and art just happened because the established authors had a new idea and felt like pursuing it? Because that's never been how anything works. Ho and indeed hum.

The kind of reaction I get to the idea of 'don't like this? create what you want to see' is one of those litmus tests that helps me decide if they're someone that's gonna be good for me to know.

Well it does very neatly sort out the whiners from the doers, and you're definitely a doer yourself - why have patience with people who sit in the puddle complaining that they're wet, when there's someone else who is figuring out how to build a boat, a pair of hydrophobic pants, something to fill in the pothole, and possibly a rain-punishing weapon that runs on spite?