I swear, the MOMENT I stop regularly checking this thing, I get mail.

For the record, I found this whole message extremely refreshing—I think civil, cross-communication between viewpoints is good, and on a more personal level, its nice to get a compliment like this that isn’t prefaced with ‘you’re wasting your talent.’ I’ll admit I’m kind of surprised/curious that you like my meta so much, just because, from my perspective, my media takes are SO intertwined with my willingness to entertain darker dynamics/implications, but that’s just me. It’s good to know that they stand up even coming from a very, very different critical perspective.

I’m also glad you were able to enjoy some of my fics in spite of knowing what else I wrote. I mean, that’s what tags are great for, isn’t it? I am VERY accepting of the fact that 99% of people won’t like 99% of my fic, I don’t write for mass appeal, but I’d still hope people can enjoy my palatable writings for what they are, divorced from my overall body of work. I think it’s totally understandable/valid to be personally revolted by some of the topics I write about (I have many friends who are!). Being ‘proship’ (admittedly not my preferred term, but we’ll go with it) for me is less of a matter of what I’m personally interested in than it is a question of whether I should be allowed to explore these topics, quietly, in my own space, without harassment or unfounded accusations of absolute monstrousness. And the natural, necessary converse of this is that people also have the right to avoid whatever they want without being bothered or misrepresented, either.

I don’t think you’re a coward, I think this was sweet, and ultimately very restorative of my faith in humanity. Thank you for sending it to me (and I’m sorry it took me… nine days… to notice it).

not me seeing this ask, saying ‘I’ll answer it tomorrow,’ and then forgetting this thing even existed for… apparently 15 days

but YES. yes I do. they’re one of the aspects of PH that’s like, harder for me to talk about, because MOST of my meta is me laying groundwork to extrapolate from or write fic about, and xai and oscar’s dynamic is interesting and meaningful but not in a way where I feel like I have anything to add to it—discussing them would just feel like, repeating an aspect of the text without further analysis/purpose, which isn’t all that fun

BUT that does not mean I do not love them and their parallel—they’re such a small part of the story and yet, such a significant one. It’s that fundamental mirroring between them both as brothers and Oz’s father figures, and the way their differences were really only ever shaped by one life-changing choice. Both of them lost their wives and by extension what they believed to be their family, but Oscar looked at what he had left and chose to love those things instead, while Xai lost himself to bitterness and vengeance, resenting a child for taking away the life he was supposed to have and alienating even the blood family he DID still care for in the process. Oscar was happy because he chose to be happy; Xai wasn’t, because he didn’t. There was no meaningful difference in their circumstances, only in their responses.

And that, that’s why Xai can’t stand the fact that Oscar died smiling. He’d spent the last 25 years deriding his brother for softness and cowardice and foolishness, but when it came down to it, Oscar had been happy, right up to his dying moment, and Xai couldn’t stand that, because it proved to him that he’d made the wrong decision all those years back and, in doing so, wasted his life. It was never Oz that stole a life from him, only himself.

you can, though it’s kind of a hard question to answer succinctly, and it depends on exactly what you mean by it. I’ll do my best though (and I don’t mind being DM’d for a more detailed convo—I promise I don’t bite)

See, as a rule, I don’t go out of the way to use the word ‘proship’ for myself these days—I’ll still self-identify as such for convenience’s sake, but the term has accrued a much larger connotation than what it, at its most stripped down form, means. Also, I don’t really like limiting it to a shipping/fandom issue—not out of any disrespect for shipping or fandom, but because I think it’s a philosophy relevant to art as a whole.

It’s a bit hard to answer the ‘why’ for me in a phrase, because for me, it’s always been like… a neutral value? or, rather, it’s not that I think fiction is NEVER harmful or bigoted or purposed towards destructive means, but that its innocent until proven guilty—if you want to argue that a piece of art is damaging, you need to explain HOW its damaging, who specifically its hurting, and how you propose to solve the problem it causes without unnecessary censorship. Like, so often, people will point out things I AGREE promote bigoted or dangerous views, but that means those stories need to be critiqued, not burned. Or how there ARE problems with very easily triggering horror/nsfw in common spaces with teens or just, people uncomfortable with it, but trust me, there’s no one who wants a safe separated space for NSFW artists more than NSFW artists. There are solutions to this other than ‘run them even further underground’

(and also, yeah, it’s not irrelevant that a lot of this comes to sexual content—antis like to point out the focus as some kind of gotchya, ignoring the fact that they’re the ones who targeted it in the first place. sex isn’t special. it is not inherently a dirtier or more traumatizing part of life than any other common human experience. arousal is an emotion, exactly on par with every other, and just as valid to induce artistically. there is no reason nsfw content should be policed more than violent content… if anything, it should be be the other way around, because—and this is a hot take—violence is worse than sex, actually, on every imaginable level)

The bottom line, really, is that there all sorts of reasons someone might engage with a specific fictional topic, and you literally cannot know it from their art alone. people can make the same things for VASTLY differently reasons, and the only way you’ll ever find out what those reasons are is by talking to them, in good faith. Usually, even terrible people are very happy to tell you what they believe if you ask them nicely (case in point, me taking the time to answer this ask—if you’d come in spewing vitriol, suffice to say, my response would be very different!), including when what they believe is absolutely reprehensible. Like, we didn’t learn JKR was a terf through a deep reading of Harry Potter, we learned it because she told us, very explicitly and very proudly, that she was anti-trans on twitter dot com