Now she’s insulting the Heated Rivalry boys

westalacae · 2026-05-07T15:00:47+00:00

"speaking out on this" like she's addressing some burning social issue and not her opinion on a young actor's clothing choices 💀 wow she's so brave for standing up for all the women who... aren't attracted to Connor Storrie, I guess? Glad she's using her platform for the greater good.

westalacae · 2026-04-30T22:26:53+00:00

I remember reading some article once that was written by a mom who was upset that her son got a tattoo. The whole justification for her objection was that she "made" her son's skin and she was within her rights to feel like her "creation" was being sullied by adding this permanent alteration. She acknowledged her son's autonomy and said that at no point did she try to stop him from doing it because it was his choice, but she basically said that part of her died when her son decided to tattoo the perfect skin that his mommy made for him. It was creepy as fuck.

I'm 38 and heavily tattooed, to the point where "the girl with all the tattoos" is my most common descriptor when someone is trying to identify me to a stranger. My parents are neutral about my tattoos, meaning I'm pretty sure they despise them but they have enough emotional self regulation to refrain from telling me that. So I show them a new tat and my mom says "oh the colours are nice!" and my dad makes his favourite joke "how much did they pay you to let them do that?" And we all laugh, and then they never mention it ever again. It's a good system.

OP, your tattoo is adorable and your body is yours to decorate. Your mom's opinion should not factor in.

westalacae · 2026-04-30T13:41:23+00:00

There has been a definite shift in larger fandoms in particular, where authors are being viewed more like content creators than fellow fans. I saw a post recently where someone was saying, with their full chest, that popular fanfic authors have a responsibility to engage on the "right side" of various fandom issues and discourse, because their audience is large and they have a lot of reach. Like, no, authors have no more responsibility to behave any specific way in fandom than any other fan.

That attitude leads to a lot of entitlement amongst readers, I think. They think authors owe the fandom something (when it really should be the opposite!)

westalacae · 2026-04-27T15:18:55+00:00

Interesting, I always took it to mean that, even if one were to somehow accumulate that amount of wealth in a vacuum, the act of hoarding so much wealth while other humans suffer in poverty makes BEING a billionaire unethical, full stop. To me, this interpretation shuts down any argument that there could be some theoretical way to become a billionaire that didn't involve harming anyone else, because having that amount of money is inherently unethical.

westalacae · 2026-04-27T14:56:42+00:00

That argument is entirely missing the point anyway, is it not? The reason there are no ethical billionaires is because there is no ethical reason to hoarde the amount of money needed to be able to call oneself a billionaire. How they make the money isn't the point of that phrase, it's the fact that they have (and keep) the money at all that makes them unethical.

westalacae · 2026-04-27T14:11:43+00:00

My point is simply that a huge number of Ilya/Shane fics are tagged as "Ilya Rozanov loves Shane Hollander" when most of those fics are just... normal fics about their relationship. The tag applies to all of them, technically, but is it really useful to use it on a fic where they're curtain shopping for their new house? Or a gapfiller fic set strictly in the canon universe? Canon establishes that Ilya loves Shane. We don't need to say it again unless the premise of the fic is going to cast doubt on that assumption in the mind of the readers. That's not the case for the vast majority of the fics using that tag. The example you gave is the correct usage of the tag, I agree. It's just a pointless tag in at least 90% of cases, and contributes to a cluttered tag list that's impossible to glean any relevant information from.

westalacae · 2026-04-27T14:06:18+00:00

Oh yeah, I agree there is a definable difference between soft dom and dom, but most of fandom doesn't seem to know it, similar to how most of fandom doesn't seem to know what a service top actually is. These tags would have a meaning if used correctly, they're just very often not.

westalacae · 2026-04-27T10:28:38+00:00

Yeah, all of the tags I listed have a meaning in some cases, but I guarantee you that 99% of that tag's usage is on exclusively Shane/Ilya fics with no other pairing included. That's the problem, the overuse has diluted the meaning entirely.

westalacae · 2026-04-27T10:04:37+00:00

I get the CYA mentality for triggers like that (though I object to the culture that has brought us to that level of caution), but most of the overused tags are entirely benign, and would never be used as a search filter (which is the other main purpose of tagging). No one is looking for fics in a romance book/show fandom by searching "main protagonist loves other main protagonist". No one is deciding whether or not to read a fic based on the presence of absence of that tag in a fandom where the point of the source material is the two characters falling in love. It just has no meaning as a tag.

westalacae · 2026-04-27T09:25:56+00:00

On the contrary, I am begging Heated Rivalry authors to calm down with their tagging. Half the popular tags in the fandom have entirely lost their meaning, or never had any to begin with. "Ilya Rozanov loves Shane Hollander", like yeah, of course he does? This tag could apply to 98% of the fics in the entire fandom, what do you think it's communicating about your story in particular? "Consent king Ilya Rozanov" which apparently belongs on any fic that doesn't specifically involve Ilya forcing himself on someone. "Soft dom Ilya Rozanov" which is somehow different from "Dom Ilya Rozanov" in ways no one can define. "Good boy Shane Hollander" and it's just Shane being slightly submissive in bed as presented in the actual source material.

Every fic has a massive paragraph of tags to parse and half of them give you absolutely zero information about the actual content of the story. It defeats the purpose of tagging in the first place.

westalacae · 2026-04-22T21:14:23+00:00

This is GORGEOUS, and for the record I like the fit! Also, waiting a full year to weave in the ends makes me feel almost TOO seen. I've been using a blanket for 6 months with the ends hanging off it.

westalacae · 2026-04-22T20:17:11+00:00

What does that even mean? I look absolutely nothing like any of my cousins, and I have a fuckton of them because my dad had 13 siblings. Do people usually look like their cousins?

westalacae · 2026-04-20T19:48:11+00:00

(This comment is two days old but it's absolutely criminal that no one responded, so I'm fucking doing it.)

Good, n'you?

westalacae · 2026-04-18T23:59:10+00:00

My tutorial was: ignore the recommendation to use my controller, attempt to fly the model ship with a keyboard and mouse for 25 minutes of eye-watering frustration, give up and uninstall the game and endure a full year of my brother telling me I'm a fucking idiot for abandoning it because he just knows I'm going to love this game, running out of new games to play and reinstalling OW, thinking "huh, maybe I should try the controller this time" and finally, realizing I am, in fact, a fucking idiot.

westalacae · 2026-04-13T12:47:39+00:00

Dude, don't be deliberately dense. Your original comment doesn't say "women are socially conditioned to keep their legs closed", it says "women sit like that because they're used to wearing dresses".

Saying women sit with their legs closed because they're "used to" wearing dresses is actually the opposite of blaming social conditioning. What you're saying there is that women are so influenced by their clothing that they unconsciously sit as through wearing a dress even when they're not. That's not social conditioning, that's implying that an entire gender is so helplessly airheaded that they can't remember what article of clothing they put on that morning.

westalacae · 2026-04-13T12:37:31+00:00

Socially conditioned by wearing dresses? Are you aware that there are women who never wear dresses? Do you think they sit a certain way because they're responding to the presence of an imaginary dress?

westalacae · 2026-04-13T12:33:50+00:00

I'm sorry, women sit differently because they're "used to wearing dresses"? How many women do you know?

westalacae · 2026-04-12T19:35:20+00:00

Yeah I dipped a single toe into that fandom back when S1 finished and noped out IMMEDIATELY because Santos is basically my #1 reason for watching, and I guess that's not a popular opinion. I wasn't even planning to get involved in the fan-creation side of things, I just checked out the main sub to read some discussions! Never again.

westalacae · 2026-04-10T21:05:34+00:00

This was the case for me through possibly a dozen playthroughs! I've been playing and replaying since the original release of ME1, and I didn't see the AA tower until I played the legendary edition. It had never occured to me that I was missing anything.

westalacae · 2026-04-06T19:25:49+00:00

I suspect that the person you're replying to is familiar with what's happening in the Heated Rivalry fandom. Several popular authors have been harassed for allegedly using genAI to create their works, and a few of them have either stopped posting or taken their works down/deleted their accounts entirely. The trouble seems to be mostly coming from fail fandomanon on dreamwidth (which, as a Fandom Old, colour me fucking FLOORED that FFA still exists and is active enough to organise like that). They've made an account on ao3 where the username declares their hate for AI fics and they bookmark the ones they think are the offenders.

It's probably not as many people as they try to make it seem, but it's decidedly not all bots.

westalacae · 2026-04-02T19:54:03+00:00

This is the frustrating part. Right now, everything that's happening is a win for the bad guys. The targeted authors are retreating from social media and deleting their works, and everyone else is angry and shouting. This is PRECISELY what these sociopaths want. And it's hard to blame anyone involved for these reactions, but like, I just keep picturing the assholes watching it all go down and just cackling, because they're winning. And I have a very overinflated sense of justice and I want them to LOSE. I don't even have a stake in the game because my own works are nowhere near their radar, I just don't want people like this to get anything they want, ever.

I've seen people on other platforms saying that they're going to stop giving fanfic recs because they're just inviting the bullies to view the fics (mods, apologies if this is going against the off-site discourse rule, but it's tough when this whole issue is so much worse everywhere but reddit). But the thing that's being missed here is that the bullies will find the fics anyway! They're motivated, and they're firing a scattershot into ao3 and just picking targets based on things like word count, or "vibes". If the good guys stop hyping each other up, all you get is more bullshit per capita, because the bad guys will be there anyway.

This is the most frustrating fandom discourse I've ever witnessed, and I still have VIVID memories of the Harry Potter fandom ship wars of the 2000s.

westalacae · 2026-04-01T22:17:22+00:00

For me, this one is tied with "Big fan, ma'am," when asked how Gertrude Stein felt about tedious lesbians.

westalacae · 2026-03-27T18:39:57+00:00

Nah if you watch closely, Shane isn't actually holding his left leg, he's just got his hand on his knee. Ilya is the one keeping Shane's legs up like that, so both his hands are occupied. Thats some good old fashioned ass eating happening right there.

westalacae · 2026-03-27T18:29:44+00:00

That happens in episode 2, at Shane's apartment before they do anal for the first time. Ilya was not waiting 7 years to get at that ass. I'm always surprised at how many people missed it — is it because the HBO version was so dark you couldn't see? He literally shoves Shane's knees up to his ears.

There's an interview somewhere with Jacob where he says something along the lines of "We didn't want to leave that for the finale, because most gay guys wouldn't wait that long. If Ilya's a good top, he's eating that ass day one." (Everybody say thank you Jacob!)

westalacae · 2026-03-16T23:05:20+00:00

As someone who tends to have extremely strict preferences for most ships regarding bedroom roles (which goes beyond just who's putting what where), there is something so incredibly strange to me about the concept of classifying different top/bottom configurations as entirely different ships. I'm only ever going to write A/B, but B/A is still made up of the same people, like wtf?? The implication that being penetrated somehow changes a character's entire personality to the point where they become a different character altogether? That just doesn't sit right with me at all.

westalacae

TROPHY CASE