Things I’m Into – March 2022

StitchLeave a comment

Trying to do a new feature where I talk about what I’m into and a little bit about why!

Webtoons

Right now the webtoons I’m keeping up with are uh… pretty spicy. One is Love is an Illusion – the Queen, a contemporary omegaverse webtoon starring a female alpha, male omega, and male alpha in a love triangle. That’s by Fargo. The other is Wild Eyes by Flowermeat and Sora (original work by Ra-hye). That one is a dark historical erotica about a wild prince and the maiden sent to service him by his scheming stepmother. 

I’m not necessarily recommending either of those – because I rarely rec books with female alphas because the concept tends to be done poorly on multiple levels and it’s better to be safe than sorry and… Wild Eyes is… very much dark erotica. Warnings are a must for both stories. If you want to read either comic and you need to know warnings, ping me please!)

I’m reading them because I haven’t read webtoons in a while and I’ve watched the dramas based off of the ones I liked so I needed to branch out a bit. (Oh, and Painter of the Night is on and off hiatus so i’m expanding my horizons.) I’m having fun and reading challenging things.

Read More »

Stitch Reads Rafael, Chapters 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, and 32

StitchLeave a comment

Notes: This big installment has relatively graphic descriptions of violence, my desire to do violence (it’s really bad, I want to end the villain myself), Hector remains a sex pest near the end, body horror, some death by rats, and I guess I might cuss across this. I don’t know. I wrote this all while screaming.

On the surface, it looks as if I’m having mercy on you all by doing a speedrun through the last six chapters of this book.

But I am not.

If I were to have mercy on either of us, I would make up an ending where they all died and then move on to one of the books I want to go over because of how good they are. Instead, I am consolidating the suffering… by making the few of y’all still here go through six chapters all at once because in total that’s only gonna be like 5000 words max anyway!

Enjoy/Suffer Well!

Read More »

Stitch @ Teen Vogue: Caleb McLaughlin Is a Perpetual Student

Stitch1 Comment

In exciting news, my biggest piece so far is out in Teen Vogue! I interviewed Stranger Things’ Caleb McLaughlin (he’s a delight, a dream to interview, a really cool guy) and did a profile on him for Teen Vogue’s New Hollywood package. It’s a COVER STORY!

You can also share this little round-up piece stemming from Caleb’s love of Euphoria and that was put together by my editor Claire and me!

What Fandom Racism Looks Like: “Then Make Your Own and Stop Complaining”

Stitch4 Comments

A friend sent me a Reddit post in the r/FanFiction subreddit made by a Black fan venting (it’s literally tagged as such) about how it feels for her to read fan fiction while Black and essentially looking for support. Fandom being fandom – aka “racist as hell” – the most highly upvoted comments in the sub on her comment are from people insulting her, insisting that she’s an entitled “Black American” for venting, and complaining about “wokeness” in fandom (and some that even wind up getting in digs at people like myself apparently leading the charge).

A common thread across many of the comments? They’re not just telling the OP to “make your own” – especially in the case of Reader Inserts, but they’re also assuming she doesn’t contribute anything to fandom at all in the first place. If she’s “just” complaining without contributing – even though she says she’s a writer and has a clear history of engaging on the sub and other parts of reddit as a writer -, then it’s not her place to complain.

Read More »

Happy Birthday, Yoongi

StitchLeave a comment

For Yoongi’s birthday, I was going to do a bonus podcast episode all about Yoongi’s best verses/songs (to me). Think about something in the style of the MOTS7 or D-2 reviews but gushier – as the D-2 review did have some criticism that no longer applies. I’m feeling a bit ill and couldn’t do the podcast editing and recording in a timely manner, but I wanted to do this anyway.

So here are 11 of my favorite Yoongi verses, solo songs, or collabs so far in no particular order

(Lyric translations are from Wisha and Doolset and are linked for each song!)

Cypher Pt 2

I love a good diss track and BTS’s Cypher PT.2 Triptych is probably one of the best and most well-aimed weapons in BTS’s early arsenal of clapbacks. While all three verses from the group’s rapline shine like the blade of a knife, Yoongi’s verse is just so…. Delightfully mean. It’s smug, it’s sharp, it’s Yoongi thumbing his nose at rappers who do less but expect to get more because of embarrassing understandings of authenticity in hip hop. It also has a dig at B-free, who I loathe, so that’s nice. This is one of the songs I play when I’m in a fighting mood and Yoongi’s verse, his rough voice… that’s why.

Read More »

Oh Hey! Anniversary!

Stitch2 Comments

Last year, I celebrated seven Marches with my website.

This year is actually… my seventh anniversary. If you’re surprised, don’t be. The passage of time has always been a struggle for me and numbers have always been… complicated for me.

Every year I talk about how big a struggle the past year has been and blah blah blah but this year, let’s try something new despite everything weird and bad happening in my life. Let’s try focusing on good stuff, hyping myself up, and manifesting cool shit for the rest of the year.

Let’s be… mostly positive.

Read More »

[Stitch Takes Notes] Slash/Drag: Appropriation and Visibility in the Age of Hamilton

Stitch1 Comment

Today we’re doing some note-taking over Francesca Coppa’s “Slash/Drag: Appropriation and Visibility in the Age of Hamilton” in the 2018 book Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies.

when bucky barnes comes out with dark eyes and no memory, i think of myself. of how certain words make me fall back into the places i never want to return to. of how i can’t erase everything that’s been taught to me by the people who hurt me, but i’m trying. that love, above everything, helps me ground myself to the present so i’m not sent tumbling.

Coppa uses an opening quote from Tumblr user Inkskinned that really answers some unrelated thoughts and questions I’ve had about the violence people direct towards people who criticize fandom especially in the context of “comfort characters” – which tend to be white male presenting dudes in canon who are queered and, to an extent on top of that, “feminized”. Inkskinned clearly identifies with Bucky and his trauma is familiar and used to unpack and map their own trauma and responses to triggers left behind. So what happens when someone like Inkskinned – who is probably lovely, I do not know them and did not search them out at all as I did notes – sees someone talk critically (unpacking him or jabbing at him) about Bucky? Chances are… even if it’s privately, they’re not gonna have a great reaction because he has become their emotional support damaged white man.

Why slash? The question has been asked again and again, by journalists in sensation pieces, by scholars in academic articles, and by fans themselves in essays and convention panels and blog posts: why have women created this enormous archive of romantic and erotic stories between male characters from television and film? Why Kirk/Spock? Why Holmes/Watson (retroactively dubbed “Johnlock” in the age of portmanteau pairing names)? Why do we ship Dean/Castiel on Supernatural?

Anyway, moving on from that opening quote, Coppa starts by poking at the question/s asked of slash: Why? Immediately, the whiteness jumps out because in the “whys” are revealed some “why nots”.

Why not Sulu/Chekov? Why not Luke Cage/Danny Rand? Why not Scott McCall/Stiles (or another character if you don’t multi-ship your fandom bicycle)? Why is slash fandom preoccupied with white men for the most part? (This has shifted a bit in the years after Coppa’s chapter was published but a hefty amount of East Asian people – different diasporic communities whose homeland’s source media has become popular in fandom spaces – have spoken about how they feel about the way Western fandom understands masculinity/men outside of their narrow spaces.)

Read More »

Stitch Gives Away: Two Tickets to PTD in Seoul (STREAMING)

Stitch17 Comments

I love giving things away! Y’all know this!

For eighth year of running Stitch’s Media Mix (does this count as the seventh anniversary?) I’ll be giving two very lucky readers/followers a streaming ticket for a single day of a stream for Permission to Dance on Stage! Well Weverse shop doesn’t let you buy things for other people, so you’ll get a paypal, cashapp, or venmo transfer for the cost of the ticket in USD! But same diff!

This is a flash giveaway so we’re going to do this REAL quick. It’s ending Sunday March 6th at Midnight EST and I’ll announce the winners when I wake up that day.

So what do you have to do?

Comment with:

  • Your BTS Bias
  • Your favorite B-Side
  • Your Favorite Music video
  • Bonus: A favorite piece of BTS content (blog post, podcast quote, YouTube video or tweet) from me!

After all, this is a giveaway to celebrate my very hard, very stressful work here and thankfully, for the most part, ARMY and BTS have been a balm in trying times. I love them a lot and I want to share the love even though I don’t do as much BTS content these days as I work on other things – the concerts coming up will change that! I made really great friends through this fandom, people who challenge me, introduce me to good music, and have kept me going as I engage with other fandoms intent on tearing me down. I want to make this experience possible for them! So… here we are!

You can comment with your Twitter account or your WordPress account if you have one. (Or other social media? I’m not sure what the limitations are for wordpress comments…) I apologize for not opening this up to more people who follow me/my work, but because of harassment from random people, I can’t just open this up to more comments because hate will happen because people suck!

If you are a reader who’s interacted with me in some other way but don’t have a WordPress or Twitter account, send me an email through the contact form or my regular email and your name will be added to the spreadsheet Editor A or BTS Nieceling will run through for giveaway purposes!

(Comments are auto-moderated so don’t panic if you don’t see yours show up immediately!)

Onwards, We March

Stitch3 Comments

So, February fucking sucked.

I nearly lost my dad and was basically scared out of my mind for 48 hours minimum, my mom had to fly out to be with him because I can’t travel and work since there’s no internet in the house, got rejected from a college I applied to and a journalism opportunity, I found out that some racist freak maliciously edited my Fanlore page with bullshit “controversies” (and I still can’t bring myself to look what the page looks like now), and I possibly got my identity stolen/bank information jacked in a scam!

Even with the good things that happened (two excellent Fan Service pieces, an interview with [REDACTED CELEBRITY], spending almost 2 uninterrupted weeks with my youngest niecelings and my first piece for Joy Sauce… a lot of this happened under the weight of a pressure I didn’t expect to have. (And my nieces being with me is directly related to almost losing my dad because I had to have the girls with me to keep going in case the worst happened and with my mom traveling so initially, that was not fun at all.)

Read More »

What Fandom Racism Looks Like: (Not) Talking About Race

Stitch2 Comments

It’s a truth universally (but accidentally) acknowledged across a ton of books about being a fan of stuff, that fandom does not like talking about race. 

Regardless of how which side of a binary fandom is split into between curative fandom (they primarily collect things related to their fandom) and transformative (they primarily create things related to their fandom), one truth exists: it is easier (and better) not to talk about race at all than to talk about race and racism in fandom. 

Read More »

On Generalizing Entire Fandoms: Revisiting #NotAllFans

StitchLeave a comment

Originally posted on Patreon December 3, 2021. (A few edits were made to the piece before public posting.)

There’s a James Baldwin video from a 1968 appearance on the Dick Cavett show that features prominently in I Am Not Your Negro.

Recently, the clip has been floating around social media, and I think it’s actually incredibly relevant to conversations we keep having in fandom. Especially the part transcribed below the video:

JAMES BALDWIN: I don’t know what most white people in this country feel. But I can only conclude what they feel from the state of their institutions. I don’t know if white Christians hate Negroes or not, but I know we have a Christian church which is white and a Christian church which is black. I know, as Malcolm X once put it, the most segregated hour in American life is high noon on Sunday. That says a great deal for me about a Christian nation. It means I can’t afford to trust most white Christians, and I certainly cannot trust the Christian church. I don’t know whether the labor unions and their bosses really hate me—that doesn’t matter—but I know I’m not in their union. I don’t know whether the real estate lobby has anything against black people, but I know the real estate lobby is keeping me in the ghetto. I don’t know if the board of education hates black people, but I know the textbooks they give my children to read and the schools we have to go to. Now, this is the evidence. You want me to make an act of faith, risking myself, my wife, my woman, my sister, my children on some idealism which you assure me exists in America, which I have never seen.

A common complaint I’ve gotten whenever I mention that a specific fandom is racist or say, generally, that fandom as a space is racist is… “don’t generalize this fandom” or “it’s wrong to generalize a fandom for what a few people do”. Some people literally pull the #NotAllFans approach I spoke of years ago.

This has been a constant over the years with people deigning to acknowledge racism in fandom being bad or terrible but then turning around to hit me with “but you shouldn’t generalize a fandom as racist because that’s just as bad”.

That’s… not how that works.

Racism is absolutely worse than people saying “hey that’s racist”.

Read More »

That Fanlore Shit

Stitch11 Comments

TL:DR – at least one person (twitter user @/GoodyBarwicke) maliciously edited my Fanlore page in August 2021 – I didn’t go to check because no one ever updated it, but once I saw it yesterday, I got extremely upset. That user used Fail Fandom Anon users and people who have been harassing me for years over their love of racism in fandom as “sources” to essentially fill my Fanlore page with a trumped up “Controversies” section that has no basis in truth, lies fully about my behavior, and doesn’t even engage with stuff I have actually addressed even before the “racists in fandom have been harassing me for years and escalated starting in 2019” shit.

So far I haven’t heard back from anyone associated with Fanlore but the article is in edits of some sort but I can’t check because I am violently ill every time I think about this and I just managed to eat for the first time since last night. As far as I know, the user who put the changes in originally is still doing their best to argue that their biased inclusion of hateful anons and reylo shippers who’ve spent years harassing me is relevant – more so than my work, interviews I’ve done, my whole thing about vore, omegaverse, and namjoon – separately of course.

Edited 9:00PM – The Fanlore Admin Team just got back to me. They’ve found that the piece contravened their “Plural Point of View” policy and are reviewing and researching to ensure the page will be balanced. I’m hopeful that they look to people actually talking about what I do, people who like my work or learn from it – even if we don’t see eye to eye 100% (we don’t even need to), and that balance should extend to more than just who I piss off by doing my own shit.

From here

Almost every “reference” link on my @Fanlore_wiki page is a Fail Fandom Anon link and the entire “Controversy” section is misrepresenting what I do/what I write without any recognition of the multi-year harassment campaign I’ve been dealing with (fanlore.org/wiki/Stitch)

Like none of this is true? Not only have I specifically said what could be done at the bottom of this post from SEPTEMBER (stitchmediamix.com/2021/09/08/whe…) but that “stitch advocates for harassment” tweet isn’t even doing what they say and is taken out of its context?

Read More »