Reading

Current Mood: peaceful

Entry tags:

What We Carry: Fandom, Recovery, and the Ghosts of Our Pasts

Some quotes sit quietly in your bones, waiting for the right season to echo. This one found me again recently, and wouldn’t let go.

“The Past Is Never Dead. It Is Not Even Past.”
— William Faulkner

That line has been quietly resonating with me lately. Faulkner wasn’t just being poetic; he was pointing to something profound about how our past lives with us, not behind us. It’s not a dusty relic locked away on a forgotten shelf. It’s more like a shadow, sometimes stretching long and unexpected, sometimes warm in the midday sun.

For years, I tried to tuck my past into a box marked Do Not Open. After a long marriage where I was taught to shrink, that past felt like a weight - something to hide or outrun. But just like some of my favourite redemption arcs in fandom - Leverage, Buffy, even Doctor Who - the past isn’t something you escape by erasing. It’s a part of the story, messy and complicated, but also the soil where growth takes root.

In stories I love, characters don’t just leave their history behind. They carry it like invisible scars or secret powers. Those moments when they confront their past, whether it’s trauma, loss, or regret, make their triumphs feel earned, their healing real. The past is part of them. And often, it’s the very thing that shapes their found family, their hard-won joy, their redemption.

That idea feels deeply true in life, too. My past isn’t a chain but a map - sometimes tangled, sometimes clear, always guiding me toward understanding and reclaiming myself. It’s not about forgetting or pretending it never happened. It’s about learning how to live with it differently, maybe even to find strength and hope in the scars.

For anyone feeling trapped by history, whether personal or collective, Faulkner’s words offer a quiet kind of hope: your past is there, yes, but it’s not the whole story. Like any great narrative, it’s the groundwork for something new, something hopeful.

I’d love to know: how has your past shaped your story? Do you find comfort in those fannish moments when characters wrestle with their histories and find their way forward? Have you ever found a character whose history mirrors your own in unexpected ways? Or a story that helped you see your past with new eyes? I’d love to hear about the fandoms, and the feelings, that have stayed with you. Let's talk in the comments.

Current Mood: contemplative

Entry tags:

not what was written, but what was there

there’s a particular way queer people look at stories. not just the ones written for us (rare, strange, often softened by compromise), but the ones that weren't — the ones that forgot us, misnamed us, or pretended we weren’t watching.

we still watched.

sometimes it’s in the gaps: a friendship that runs too deep, a rivalry that brims with tension. the girl who won't speak of why she left, the boy who won’t let anyone in. we know those silences. we fill them in with our own.

other times it’s not subtext at all — it’s just no one else saw it. or maybe they did, and they chose not to say.

we find each other like that. in the margins, in the misreadings. in scenes where something cracks and light spills through. where someone touches someone else’s wrist and the moment lasts too long. where longing outpaces language.

queer reading isn’t about “what the author intended.” it’s about what we needed. what we saw because we were looking for it. sometimes it's survival. sometimes it's reclamation. sometimes it's just delight — the kind that tastes like recognition.

i’ve been thinking lately about how queerness reshapes time in fiction — how chosen families resist linearity, how queer characters so often orbit love at strange angles. how the ending we’re given isn’t always the one we accept.

we rewrite them, quietly. sometimes in fic. sometimes just in the way we remember them.

sometimes i go back to a story i loved as a teenager and realise what i was actually looking for. how the ache between two characters mirrored something i hadn’t named yet. how it wasn't a crush on the lead actor, but something softer, more sideways. how the villain made more sense than he should have. how the girl who ran away was the one i followed, always.

queer reading is a kind of ghost-seeing. it’s knowing there’s something else underneath the surface — something that speaks in our language, even if it wasn’t supposed to.

tell me — what’s a scene you’ve never been able to unsee?

Current Mood: overcast
Current Music: the beautiful south - old red eyes is back

Entry tags:

quiet rituals of connection

some things never have names.
some things never need them.

there's a kind of love that doesn't look like declarations or grand arrivals, but like clocking someone's sigh and wordlessly passing them the right mug. like sending a song with no message attached. like walking side by side in silence, knowing exactly where to stop for the good chips.

what rituals do you share with the people who get you, quietly?

the quiet cup made at 3am because both of you woke from different dreams.
the playlist you always put on when driving the long way round.
the old inside joke you still resurrect like a prayer.
the split dessert order.
the soft glance when someone else doesn’t quite understand.
the swapping of book piles without asking.
the ritual of not needing to say: “i love you,” because it’s there in the shared cardigan, the returned lighter, the text that says just, you okay?

sometimes i think the deepest bonds are built not on intensity but on pattern. the repeated, the known, the small.

and not all rituals are nostalgic. some are stitched in real time — newer threads being added without fanfare:

i send her a photo of the sky when it looks like the sea.
he leaves voice notes where the silence between words says more than the words.
they always say “get home safe,” and it sounds like “don’t disappear.”

maybe the loudest proof we’re understood is in the quietest things.

if you’re reading this and thinking of your own shared rituals —
send the text.
share the song.
put the kettle on.

quiet doesn’t mean unspoken.

Current Mood: pensive

Entry tags:

Reading in the Silences: On The Cut Out Girl

Sometimes Libby hands you something gentle and devastating, like it knows what you need before you do.

I picked up The Cut Out Girl by Bart van Es on a whim — no prior knowledge, just a vague curiosity sparked by the title and the fact that I’d never heard of it. I expected something quiet, maybe a bit historical. I didn’t expect it to sit inside my chest like a weight made of memory.

This is a story about Lien, a Jewish girl hidden in the Netherlands during World War II. But it’s also about Bart — the author — and the act of tracing the life of someone who had once been loved (and later forgotten) by his own family. It’s history, biography, memoir, reckoning. It’s also, in its quiet way, about repair.

There’s a particular ache in reading about a child shuffled from home to home for her own safety, learning again and again that survival means becoming smaller, quieter, less. I felt that with every line. Not because I’ve lived through anything remotely similar, but because the feeling of learning to disappear in order to stay safe… resonates. Loudly.

What moved me most wasn’t just Lien’s courage, or the unbearable facts of war, or even the long tail of trauma (though all of that is here, with clarity and care). It was the complicated tenderness — the author stepping into the history of his own family and refusing to accept the polite silences passed down through generations. The bravery it takes to say, this story matters, even if it’s uncomfortable. Especially then.

It reminded me, weirdly, of fandom. Of how we return to old stories looking for the things no one else saw. Of how we build altars from fragments. Of how remembering can be an act of resistance, or healing, or both.

5 stars, no hesitation. This isn’t a flashy book, but it’s one that left me different than it found me.

Have any of you read it? Or anything like it? I’d love more books that navigate memory, recovery, and the ethics of bearing witness. Or just books that linger in your bones long after you’ve put them down. Those quiet ones are often the ones that change me the most.

Entry tags:

Genre Love: A Tour Through My Storytelling Obsessions

Let’s talk genres - the narrative comfort food of the soul.

There’s something deeply soothing about knowing the shape a story will take, even when you don’t know all the ingredients yet. Give me my favourites, remix them, subvert them, go full trope bingo, and I will eat it up like it’s hot buttered toast after a rainy walk home. Here's a ramble through some of the genres and subgenres that built me, and the ones I'm still returning to like a dog-eared paperback.

🧭 Fantasy (Especially the Coming-of-Age Kind)
Give me a girl with a sword and a destiny. Give me magic systems that require study and sacrifice. Give me quests with consequences and young heroes who grow into their power the hard way. I imprinted early on Tamora Pierce and Narnia and Earthsea, and honestly, I never looked back. I still get a little thrill every time someone discovers they’re a chosen one - or chooses not to be and saves the day anyway.

Subgenres I Love:

High fantasy with political intrigue
Low fantasy with found families in cosy inns
Portal fantasy (especially when someone comes back changed)
Magic school stories, but preferably for awkward adults who don’t fit the robes properly

🚓 Heists, Cons & Capers
A ragtag crew with complementary skills and trust issues? Yes please. I want team dynamics, complicated backstories, clever plans that go sideways, and moments where someone who’s never been protected gets protected hard. Leverage is basically my platonic ideal here, but I’ll also devour anything where someone says “I work alone” and then promptly doesn’t.

Subgenres I Love:

Found family crime teams
Heists with moral ambiguity
Redemption-through-caper arcs
The “we’re not friends” team who bleeds for each other anyway

🖤 Redemption Arcs & Morally Messy Characters
I will always root for the character who did something awful and knows it. Give me the people clawing their way toward better, haunted by what they’ve done, scared they’ll never deserve love - and then being loved anyway. Bonus points if they do something terrible to protect someone else and are genuinely sorry about it later.

Subgenres I Love:

Villain-to-antihero journeys
“I don’t deserve forgiveness” with someone softly saying, “Maybe not. But you have it.”
Stories that don’t handwave consequences but honour the choice to change
Grumpy ex-warriors reluctantly helping kids and accidentally healing

☕ Cosy Speculative Fiction
This one’s newer to me, but I’ve been revelling in it lately like a cat in a sunbeam. I love when fantasy or sci-fi gets small and intimate - quiet towns, quirky shops, relationships that take their time, a low-stakes vibe that still makes you feel deeply. Think Legends & Lattes, or The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. Basically: tea, feelings, and a touch of magic.

Subgenres I Love:

Slice-of-life in magical settings
Queer found families running bookshops or spaceship kitchens
Immortals who have time to knit
Emotional growth as the main plot

📺 Genre TV That Leans Character-First
Okay, not technically a genre, but it’s a throughline in all my favourite shows. I’m here for the character arcs, the long-game emotional payoffs, the bottle episodes where people yell their secrets and then hug. Whether it’s science fiction, supernatural drama, or plain old mystery-of-the-week, I need people I care about, changing each other slowly over time.

Recurring Themes I Seek Out:

Chosen family over blood
Grief and joy coexisting
Women with messy arcs and sharp edges
Team hugs after explosions

I used to think I needed to be a "serious" reader. These days, I’m much more interested in being a joyful one. So give me tropes, give me catharsis, give me the kinds of stories that say “you’re not too broken, actually” and I’ll keep turning the pages, rewinding the episode, rereading the fic.

What genres or tropes do you always come back to? What’s your narrative comfort food?