Unapologetic Lavinia Stan: What can I do to help?
Book!AeneasWouldNever: Keep being you, Ulsie. That’s more than enough. :-)
12
MARCUS LET HIMSELF BACK INTO HIS HOTEL ROOM. IT WAS dim and cold and pristine.
In the bathroom, he splashed his face with cold water, then braced his hands on the edges of the marble vanity and stood over the sink, letting himself drip.
April didn’t want to see him again. That, among all the confusion of their cab ride, was clear enough.
He’d said something wrong. Done something wrong.
It shouldn’t surprise him anymore, and it shouldn’t hurt him anymore, either.
When he finally dried off, the towel was soft against his skin, when he wanted roughness instead. He wanted to scrub and scour his flesh until he’d uncovered a new iteration of Marcus Caster-Rupp. One whose throat wasn’t thick and tight. One who hadn’t lost both April’s friendship and the possibility of so much more in a mere handful of days.
When he opened his laptop and checked Twitter, there they were. He and April, fingers intertwined by a colorful display of rocks. Braced against a rail, body to body, as the ground jolted beneath them. Cuddled close in their planetarium seats.
The paparazzi photos were beginning to appear too, on various entertainment sites. In those, he had his mouth open and hot on her neck, her shoulder, as she laced her fingers through his hair and held him close, chin tipped toward the sun, eyes closed behind those cute glasses.
Whatever he’d done, it was after that. In front of the paparazzi, or in the cab.
The images—
Letting out a hard breath, he scrolled down, down, down, away from them.
After checking one thread of comments at the bottom of an article, he clicked away from those as quickly as he could too, hoping April made a smarter decision than he just had. He hadn’t gotten the sense she was sensitive about her body during the Fanboy Asshole Incident on Twitter, and Lord knew she was gorgeous, but anyone’s confidence could be shaken by enough cruelty.
That said, someone had already created a Twitter account dedicated solely to retweeting pictures of April and adding admiring commentary. Their handle? @Lavineas5Ever5Ever. The follower count had already hit two hundred and kept rising as he watched.
If they knew her Lavineas server name, he suspected a second account might appear: @UnapologeticLaviniaStanStan.
Speaking of which . . .
He couldn’t post there anymore, not without silently confirming that he’d lied to April as Book!AeneasWouldNever about his nonexistent business trip and its nonexistent ban on internet and cell phone usage, but he had to see what everyone was saying.
With one click, he was invisible. Simultaneously outside and within his longtime community. Observing. Taking comfort from his friends, even from a desolate distance.
New threads had popped up along with those new photos of his date with April. New DM notifications too—including one from Ulsie, which couldn’t be right.
He blinked at the screen. Squinted. Clicked after a few moments, his heart rate soaring to uncomfortable levels.
No, he wasn’t imagining things. She’d written him in the last few minutes, even though he’d said he would be out of touch indefinitely, even though he’d hurt her with his obvious falsehood.
Unapologetic Lavinia Stan: I know you said you were going to be off on a job where you couldn’t get online, but I wanted to let you know something.
Unapologetic Lavinia Stan: In case that wasn’t entirely true, in case maybe your offline trip had something to do with my dating Marcus Caster-Rupp: we’re not dating anymore.
Unapologetic Lavinia Stan: Which is a stupid thing to tell you, since you didn’t want to meet me in person, even if I canceled my second date with him. So this was pointless.
Unapologetic Lavinia Stan: I’m sorry. My head is a mess right now, and I wasn’t thinking. I won’t bother you again.
We’re not dating anymore. I won’t bother you again.
Well, that was confirmation he’d neither wanted nor needed.
He wasn’t getting a third date with April. He wasn’t even certain she’d write to Book!AeneasWouldNever after he returned from his fake trip, unless he agreed to meet her in person. Which he couldn’t. In theory, he could probably make up some story about why they couldn’t meet, come up with some plausible explanation about agoraphobia or whatever, but he didn’t want to lie to her yet again.
Yeah, he was fucked, and hurting, and he had no idea what—if anything—he could say in response to her messages. If her head was a mess, his was too. He needed time.
Accordingly, he said nothing. Even if part of him desperately wanted to ask what had gone wrong on her second date.
Shoulders slumped, he navigated back to the main list of threads.
A new topic had appeared. One started by April, entitled A Big Fat Shame. When he clicked, her post appeared, and it filled his entire monitor.
It was eloquent. It was heartfelt. It was direct.
It was also an answer to the question he hadn’t been enough of an asshole to ask.
Unapologetic Lavinia Stan: I’ve wanted to talk about this issue for years now, but I wasn’t sure how to begin the conversation. I’ve been especially nervous because the people in this community—all of you—mean so much to me, and I don’t want to hurt your feelings or alienate any of you. But the simple truth is that some of you have hurt MY feelings, albeit inadvertently, just as I’m sure I’ve done the same to some or all of you without understanding how. (If so, please tell me. I want to know and do better.)
Unapologetic Lavinia Stan: So here’s the thing: I’m fat. Very fat, in fact. Not chubby or merely curvy. FAT. A good part of the reason I was originally drawn to this particular OTP was, I think, for that reason. Lavinia’s story resonated with me. Her character isn’t fat in either book!canon or show!canon, but in book!canon, as you know, she’s described as unattractive in terms of conventional beauty. Several of Aeneas’s men even call her ugly. As we’ve discussed many times, the choice of Summer Diaz—who’s gorgeous even without makeup and in dull, unflattering clothing—to play Lavinia undercut the resonance of that story line, but echoes of it are still there in the show, even so.
Unapologetic Lavinia Stan: I think I desperately needed to read and watch the story of how a woman most considered homely or downright hideous could earn respect, admiration, desire, and eventually love from the man she desired and loved herself. (Aeneas, of course.) I needed to witness how her character, her choices, and her words would come to mean more to him, in the end, than whether the rest of the world would call her pretty.
Unapologetic Lavinia Stan: I wanted that because of my family history. I wanted that because of my personal and romantic history too. I can’t tell you how many times a date, or a boyfriend, or someone I considered a friend, has shamed me for my size. Sometimes they do so directly, but more often in ways I’m sure they consider subtle or don’t consider at all. They do it by urging me to work out or take a walk with them every time I see them, or by discussing their ostensible concern for my health, or by pushing me toward what they consider more nutritionally sound food choices.
Unapologetic Lavinia Stan: But I’m not looking to be fixed. I want to be loved and liked and desired not because of my size, not despite my size, but because I’m ME. My character, my choices, my words. Each time someone I care about shows they don’t care about me that same way, it hurts. It hurts more than I can easily express.
Unapologetic Lavinia Stan: So this ship, this community, is important to me. It’s reassurance that better things are possible for me, and better relationships, and even real, abiding, passionate love. Not because of my size, not despite my size, but because I’m me.
Unapologetic Lavinia Stan: That’s why it’s painful to me when fics coming out of our community use fatness as shorthand for greed, for evil, for ugliness, or for laziness. I’m stunned by how often it occurs, given that one half of the couple we all ship is not considered conventionally attractive in book!canon. The Lavinia/Aeneas relationship, at least in the books, is fundamentally about rejecting appearances in favor of character. Yet I see fat-shaming frequently in Lavineas fanfiction, and it feels like a slap every single time.
Unapologetic Lavinia Stan: To be clear, I don’t think fat-shaming is usually a conscious choice in our fics. Hatred of fatness, disdain toward fat people, is so widespread in our culture, it comes out in ways we don’t intend, and I include myself in that statement. Being fat myself doesn’t exempt me from having to consider my words and actions thoughtfully when it comes to fatness, because I’m part of this culture too.
Unapologetic Lavinia Stan: I’m not asking you to celebrate my fatness or make Lavinia fat in your stories or go back and change any old fics with fat-shaming in them. I AM asking, though, for you to be thoughtful any time you reference fatness in your writing. I want you to think of me and ask yourself, “Would the implications of this hurt ULS?” If the answer is yes, please do better—for me, for yourself, and for everyone else.
Unapologetic Lavinia Stan: As I wrote earlier, I don’t want to hurt your feelings or alienate any of you, because you’re my friends and my community. But I thought this was important, so I said it, and hopefully by discussing the issue, we can become an even better, more inclusive community than we already are.
Unapologetic Lavinia Stan: Thank you, and I’m sorry this ran so long.
Unapologetic Lavinia Stan: TL;DR: Please don’t make fat people automatically awful or ugly or lazy in your fics. It makes me, an actual fat person, sad.
Unapologetic Lavinia Stan: P.S. When I say I’m fat, I’m not insulting myself. I don’t use fat as a pejorative, as some do. For me, it’s merely an adjective, like blond, or tall, or (TopMeAeneas’s favorite) TUMESCENT. Whether it’s offensive depends entirely on context, as with many descriptors.
Marcus sat back in the too-hard hotel chair and let out a slow breath.
Among all the fics he’d recommended to her over the years, at least a few included fat secondary or tertiary characters. He suspected the descriptions of those characters would now make him cringe.