Whenever I look at Marvel fanfiction data, one of the most striking things is the gap between Harley Keener's most popular ship and Shuri's most popular ship.

Harley Keener's largest ship (Harley Keener/Peter Parker) currently has three times the number of fics as Shuri's largest ship (Namor of Talokan/Shuri, despite Harley Keener appearing almost exclusively as an ~11-year-old and never meeting Peter Parker on screen.

If anyone is curious, there are ~5.8x as many Harley Keener/Peter Parker fics as Ned Leeds/Peter Parker fics, despite Ned Leeds sharing five films with Peter Parker.

But I forgot, people only write almost exclusively about (and ship) white male characters because they just so happen to always be the only convenient characters to write about. It's the fault of canon for not giving us any other interesting characters.

MCU ships of characters who canonically interact with fewer fics than Harley Keener/Peter Parker (3,640 fics):

• Yelena Belova/Kate Bishop (3,628)
• Maria Hill/Natasha Romanov (2,890)
• Peggy Carter/Angie Martinelli (2,438)
• James "Rhodey" Rhodes/Tony Stark (1,943)
• Carol Danvers/Maria Rambeau (1,312)
• Namor of Talokan/Shuri (1,196)
• Ned Leeds/Peter Parker (591 fics)
• Riley/Sam Wilson (558)
• Tony Stark/T'Challa (444)
• Nakia/T'Challa (411)
• Pepper Potts/James "Rhodey" Rhodes (315)
• Shuri/Riri Williams (289)
• Katy Chen/Shang-Chi (227)
• Joaquin Torres/Sam Wilson (155)
• Aneka/Ayo (81)

And to be clear, there is nothing wrong with writing or liking ships between two white male characters.

But we also have to be able to talk about how the reason these numbers look like this is racism and sexism. It is probably mostly not conscious. It is complicated. It is tied in to the cultures we come from and the stories we read and the ways we have been taught for our entire lives to approach characters.

There is not something specifically compelling or narratively interesting about Harley Keener that makes him from a pure narrative standpoint a more appealing character to ship with someone than the other characters listed here. It is not some coincidence that random white male side characters are regularly chosen, in a myriad of fandoms, over female characters and characters of color, especially Black characters.

You don’t have to write these other ships. You don’t have to write about these other characters. There is nothing wrong with shipping who you ship.

But we have to be able to talk about how collective trends like this reflect deeply-held and remarkably consistent biases that play out over and over across both fandom and (in different ways) published fiction.

affirmations for writers: i know how to write. i have seen sentences before, and i know how to make one. i can identify up to several words and their meanings. i am not afraid of semicolons.

I keep trying to record something on how books are bad at writing fighting training, and it keeps being like 12 minutes long

Bad as in prose? Or bad as in how training to fight actually works?

I'm just curious

The latter.

Basically, "more skilled person just beats the person they're training at sparring until the person they're training improves without doing any fundamentals or teaching them the right way to do things" is a cruel and useless form of "training" and only makes sense if you're trying to show that the "teacher" is being cruel or doesn't know how to teach. Showing it as a legitimate and useful form of training indicates to me that the author didn't bother to do any real research.

There are sort of two ways to look at it as a trope.

It’s either one of those tropes that has no real world basis, but looks/sounds cool in storytelling and is useful for moving the plot along (see: torture, knocking someone unconscious, a lot of medieval fantasy government stuff)

Or it’s one of those things where the overlap between people who write books and people who practice martial arts is so small that most writers trust the trope blindly and never think past it.

Just a few tips from someone who's been doing HEMA fighting (and training) for about a year

-Drills. So many drills. Just doing the same motion, or set of motions, over and over and over until it's muscle memory. And then do it some more. These can be done with another person, so you can get a feel for hitting someone (else's sword), or they might be done to a dummy, or just to the air as part of a series of steps

-there is a surprising amount of reading! A lot of what we do is based on styles that originated in the 11th-15th centuries, and were literally written in manuals for future people to use. Sometimes the explanations and diagrams are very clear. Sometimes they are not.

- There is sparring, with variations on goals. Sometimes the goal is just 'hit each other'. Sometimes you will have specific caveats, like if you both deliver a 'killing blow' at the same time you have to run to opposite ends of the room and back

- Footwork drills

- lots of wrist and arm stretches, both with and without swords

- Moving through different blocks/base positions, and practicing different cuts from each position

- More drills, wearing armor or other appropriate gear

- Weights and cardio training! Both are extremely important for making sure you can 1. Swing your sword and 2. Keep swinging your sword when you're wearing 15 lbs of armor and have been hacking at people for a full 20 minutes

- Learning how to maintain your gear

- Practicing control of the blade- this is usually done by having a dummy target (or sometimes a real person), and swinging with full power but stopping before you actually make contact. Master swordsman can bring their blade within half an inch of their target.

- Even more drills

Obviously some of this is pretty modern, but I can't imagine that it would be incredibly novel even to people from 600 years ago. And if you have any questions, please feel free to ask!

Adding onto this with even more things, now that I'm nearly 2 years in and have done a couple of tournaments!

• Footwork drills are really important! Learning how and when to move, and shift your weight on your feet, is crucial
• When practicing solo I often do so in front of a full-length mirror so that I can actually see what I'm doing
• There is also just a lot of sparring. Unfortunately you can't really get good at sword fighting without getting your butt kicked. A lot.
• However! A good teacher will give you tips either during or after the fight, or both! A lot of the time it's things like 'you need to improve your footwork more, here are 10 different drills. Go do them.' However, there is also a fair bit of going back over certain 'plays' in slower motion, where they'll tell you exactly what you did wrong and how to fix it in the context of the fight.
• Also, just as a side note, unless your character is the progeny of a wealthy lord, they are probably going to use borrowed equipment. It will not fit right. And it will reek with the stench of 1000 sweaty people. And if you train in it enough, when you do get your own gear that actually fits properly and only smells like your sweat, I swear you get 5x better overnight
• At some point, everyone develops their own style. I've fought people who love to just make huge stabby lunges, people who make wild flourishes, big guys who just brute force it, guys who look like they'd blow away in a light breeze but are the fastest people you've ever met. It comes over time, and from learning as many different techniques as you can
• Not sure how much they did this in Ye Olden Days but almost everyone I've met in HEMA now fights in at least two different styles (usually longsword and Sabre or rapier). As I said above, the more styles you learn, the better you get at all of them; many techniques that you learn from one style are applicable in some way to the other

Thats all I can think of for now, but if anyone has any questions feel free to reach out!

It’s been a while since I’ve done martial arts, but this reminded me of some other points specifically about sparring as a training tool:

• At least in the modern version of sparring, one of the things we learn is how to spar. There are standard protocols to sparring depending on the form you’re learning, and it’s super important that you follow them.
• This is not just about learning how to be the attacker–you also need to know things like how to fall right, which you learn for real life but also for sparring, because it can be really unsafe for both you and the person you’re sparring with if you don’t know the basics of how to keep yourself safe.
• Tapping out! When you’re doing particularly forms where you’re touching each other/grappling/doing joint locks/etc., one of the main ways you signal to stop is by tapping out. This is key to keeping people safe during sparring.
• People can get hurt during sparring, especially if you screw up. I once almost dislocated someone’s shoulder doing a joint lock (they were fine, they tapped out, we talked through it, we figured out what I did wrong), and I had someone hyperextend my elbow once. It also seriously exasperated my wrist’s repetitive stress issue, particularly from someone repeatedly muscling through something they shouldn’t be muscling through.
• You can also give people concussions, cause bruises, or even break bones if you aren’t careful. I got a bruise that took months to heal (probably a bone bruise) from falling the wrong way during some exhibition sparring on a wooden platform.
• If you start sparring/partnered fighting when you don’t have the foundation of how to fight, especially if you’re partnered with someone who doesn’t know how to properly guide you, it’s really easy to build bad muscle memory. The right way to do something, is not always the instinctive way to do it, and if you get thrown into partnered fighting unprepared you will fall back on instinct, not training.
• If sparring/partnered fighting is 100% losing with no real guidance, it won’t teach you how to ever win, it will just teach you how to lose, which is actively unhelpful. The goal of sparring in that way becomes learning how to lose less badly, which may be great for self defense but isn’t particularly great for actually learning how to successfully fight.

Whenever I look at Marvel fanfiction data, one of the most striking things is the gap between Harley Keener's most popular ship and Shuri's most popular ship.

Harley Keener's largest ship (Harley Keener/Peter Parker) currently has three times the number of fics as Shuri's largest ship (Namor of Talokan/Shuri, despite Harley Keener appearing almost exclusively as an ~11-year-old and never meeting Peter Parker on screen.

If anyone is curious, there are ~5.8x as many Harley Keener/Peter Parker fics as Ned Leeds/Peter Parker fics, despite Ned Leeds sharing five films with Peter Parker.

But I forgot, people only write almost exclusively about (and ship) white male characters because they just so happen to always be the only convenient characters to write about. It's the fault of canon for not giving us any other interesting characters.

MCU ships of characters who canonically interact with fewer fics than Harley Keener/Peter Parker (3,640 fics):

• Yelena Belova/Kate Bishop (3,628)
• Maria Hill/Natasha Romanov (2,890)
• Peggy Carter/Angie Martinelli (2,438)
• James “Rhodey” Rhodes/Tony Stark (1,943)
• Carol Danvers/Maria Rambeau (1,312)
• Namor of Talokan/Shuri (1,196)
• Ned Leeds/Peter Parker (591 fics)
• Riley/Sam Wilson (558)
• Tony Stark/T'Challa (444)
• Nakia/T'Challa (411)
• Pepper Potts/James “Rhodey” Rhodes (315)
• Shuri/Riri Williams (289)
• Katy Chen/Shang-Chi (227)
• Joaquin Torres/Sam Wilson (155)
• Aneka/Ayo (81)

Whenever I look at Marvel fanfiction data, one of the most striking things is the gap between Harley Keener's most popular ship and Shuri's most popular ship.

Harley Keener's largest ship (Harley Keener/Peter Parker) currently has three times the number of fics as Shuri's largest ship (Namor of Talokan/Shuri, despite Harley Keener appearing almost exclusively as an ~11-year-old and never meeting Peter Parker on screen.

If anyone is curious, there are ~5.8x as many Harley Keener/Peter Parker fics as Ned Leeds/Peter Parker fics, despite Ned Leeds sharing five films with Peter Parker.

But I forgot, people only write almost exclusively about (and ship) white male characters because they just so happen to always be the only convenient characters to write about. It’s the fault of canon for not giving us any other interesting characters.

Whenever I look at Marvel fanfiction data, one of the most striking things is the gap between Harley Keener's most popular ship and Shuri's most popular ship.

Harley Keener's largest ship (Harley Keener/Peter Parker) currently has three times the number of fics as Shuri's largest ship (Namor of Talokan/Shuri, despite Harley Keener appearing almost exclusively as an ~11-year-old and never meeting Peter Parker on screen.

If anyone is curious, there are ~5.8x as many Harley Keener/Peter Parker fics as Ned Leeds/Peter Parker fics, despite Ned Leeds sharing five films with Peter Parker.

it is a little weird to me to see people take a really hardline stance that you shouldn't (or even simply cannot) intuit any writer's/artist's morals from the work they create because plenty of Good People like to write about dark topics and they don't have a moral responsibility to Condemn those dark things in the work itself because that's some hays code reactionary conservative puriteen shit and they should be able to trust the audience to use their brains and not have the moral of the story spoonfed to them, and you should only morally judge an artist's actions in the real world outside of their work and never draw a connecting line between their art and their real world actions…

which like. i guess true in the very specific scenarios that these people are referencing (generally wrt like Dark Themes in gothic literature or horror or whatever) and i do broadly agree that a lot of people who engage with art want their hands held so they can feel morally clean and are afraid to use their brains, but imo this "any moral judgment of art is reactionary" also does kind of break down completely when you step outside those bounds for even a second and think about like. race or imperialism or whatever lol. like a lot of these discussions really do feel like they exist in a vacuum about a very specific Type of story and morality wrt sexuality and the very narrow interpersonal interactions between individual characters in stories about romantic relationships

like you're telling me you cannot watch a violently racist militaryslop war propaganda film and say hey maybe we should wonder if the people who made that had bad morals in real life? people love to be like ok fiction is not real life and you can do whatever you want forever and never feel bad about it which like yeah i guess true but first of all a lot of people wield that as a way to say that no one who engages with that fiction should criticize it on moral grounds at all ever because that is puriteen cop behavior or whatever, but also it's hard for me to figure out how to separate that idea from arguments that essentially imply fiction does not exist in the real world or is completely isolated from politics.

like sure video games don't cause violence and blaming real world youth violence and crime on video games is absolutely reactionary right wing fearmongering but you're telling me decades of title after title of usamerican military video games where you get to play as a soldier who goes and obliterates faceless brown hordes of disposable enemies didn't contribute to the complete dehumanization of the united states' Real World "Enemies" that we real world bombed and shot and bulldozed by the millions and continue to today? that no teenager signed up for the military based on movies or video games that were literally made with approval from the dod/pentagon or whatever as literal advertisements to get them to sign up for the military? that no one who created those films had any moral responsibility at all even as they met with their usmilitary liaisons to get permission and access and material support, that we cannot make any judgments about their personal beliefs or politics or whatever based on the types of stories they choose to tell and can only call them imperialist bootlicking freaks after we have definitive proof of them supporting a specific "bad" political candidate? ok.

originally had this post locked bc it's probably an unpopular opinion that i do not feel like arguing with people about but i just randomly thought about it again months later so you know what here u go. with the original tags

I feel like portrayals of autism mostly always default to "don't understand social norms/boundaries and so cross them" rather than "don't understand social norms/boundaries and so overcorrect in the other direction to avoid the possibility of crossing them."

Like I don't understand social norms or people's boundaries around casual friendly/familial touch--so I don't touch my friends ever to avoid crossing a potential boundary or violating a potential norm.

And obviously the whole spectrum happens, but I feel like when I see "don't understand social norms" portrayed, it's really just in the direction of "so violates them and doesn't notice and/or care."