Noumena

Honestly? I think the entire notion of cultural appropriation is a bit of a tempest in a Tumblr teapot. It's just another face of the "ban the patriarchy" hysteria, and largely as well thought out.
We have, all throughout history, appropriated bits and pieces from other cultures. If we strip the English language of all it has "borrowed," we'd be reduced to grunts. Shakespeare borrowed Roman culture and traditions freely, among others, and we're not burning his plays in the street. Hemingway, hack that he was, is lauded for his depiction of people from other cultures. I am prone to borrowing bits and pieces from the mythology of various cultures, and I am not at all inclined to apologize, especially if it's my own cultural background.
Being 100% respectful is impossible in a world where opinions are shared as widely and as swiftly as the flicker of electrons over a fiber optic line. Someone, somewhere, is going to take umbrage, and broadcast that ire over social media, where others will take up the cause to make themselves feel a part of something in an increasingly isolated world.
I notice no one is defending the rights of witches, or correcting the misuse of the term warlock by JK Rowling and pretty much everyone else out there writing about things they don't understand. As a pagan, I could take umbrage a dozen times a day, but because I'm a rational human being who was born before the urge to share every single thought that crosses one's mind, I behave like the adult I'm supposed to be. I remind myself that people derive most of their education from the media, and therefore know nothing about my beliefs, and I just smile. As a person of Irish ancestry, I get to endure the farce known as St Patrick's Day, with green beer and drunken idiots wearing shamrocks. The Viking portion of my ancestors are not rolling over in their graves over the Marvel depictions of their gods, so why should I growl?
So, personally, I think people need to take a step back, and stop expecting the world to be perfect. Then again, I'm a cranky old thing.

In the event I get back into writing, it’ll be without my old Microsoft Word 2000 / Wordpad combo (for rtf formatting). I’m now on a not quite as old, but still ancient, machine and I can’t find the old CD to try a re-install! I’m not interested in pirating software, but there’s freely available options like OpenOffice, LibreOffice that I don’t know a lot about.
I need something with a word counter and spell checker, and maybe some of Word’s grammar check functionality like double words and so on. I’ve heard a lot of good things about Google Docs, but I am not sure how powerful it is. Thoughts? 
There might well be an old discussion thread about this somewhere but I’m assuming that the tech has moved on some.
Thanks in advance for everyone’s thoughts.

Over on a somewhat quiet forum I occasionally check through, but won’t link because advertising, and because said forum has a policy that no other sites exist, the author LL asked this question:
My initial reaction was that it should only be after Snyder as “Snyder’s Summers Sexfest” because it sounds like it’s really gonna be his sexfest with Mrs and Ms Summers taking part, but when I went to write this reply I found my grammar explanations have decayed to the point where I couldn’t explain this to my own satisfaction as I would be able to if the question were about, say, “Snyder’s House Party.” I checked my own grammar and english usage books (including such helpful tips as “english should have a capital”) and I still find myself unsatisfied. As such I was a) unable to give an answer to LL and b) bugged.
Can anybody give me an answer that satisfies me, and that I can then therefore take to LL (with appropriate credit)?
Edit: For the cock up in the first line.
Thanks for your time
 

The most important part is to write, it’s like a muscle.  If you wait until the story is perfect in your mind, it’ll likely never get written.

The challenge lies mainly in understanding motivations, and knowing character back stories, I think. Most of the time, we don’t get to know a lot about a character’s past, or we get only hints of motivation. Character A hates small spaces, but why? Character B is prone to flip one-liners, and doesn’t engage in any deep conversations, but is he shallow, or shy, or hiding something dark? Those are the places where fan fiction writers can find openings.
As far as romance and sex, well, sex is such a basic drive. It’s not hard to find that in a character, a need for companionship, or relief, or even a sort of control over another character. Does one character’s simmering anger mask feelings of attraction to another character, feelings he fears could never be returned? Sure, it’s cliched, but so are most of the plots in movies, shows, books, and games. There are redemption arcs for less than lawful characters, although it’s harder if the character is deeply evil. And maybe it doesn’t work out. There’s no rule that you have to have a happy ending, after all.
And if nothing else, it’s a brilliant method for honing your writing skills. You have a world, a canon handed to you, complete with characters. Now you get to have them act in ways no one’s seen in the canon settings, and if you can make then believable to other people who know and enjoy the canon world, then you’ve done your job as a writer, and not just as a fan fiction writer.

I am not a fanfic writer, but very recently I suddenly found myself in the grip of an urge to become a fanfic writer.
I’ve written other things, of course, but I’ve never seen the value in a fanfic. In an ordinary fanfic, I would just be pitting my ideas against the ideas of a show that I love, and there’s no way that I can expect to meet that standard, so the whole enterprise seems pointless. I would be better off writing something original so I can see something that I couldn’t get elsewhere in superior quality.
An adult fanfic is a different matter. I don’t need to match the skill of the original writers to create something interesting in an adult fanfic. The original writers would never show us these characters having sex, and that’s a very exciting idea that we just can’t get from the source material. This makes an adult fanfic far superior to an ordinary fanfic, because it’s justifying its existence by breaking new ground that the television show would not ever touch and showing us a new side of the characters that we love.
The most important skill will be to stay true to the characters. Random people having sex is boring. If I can’t show off the personalities of the characters in my fanfic then my fanfic fails before it begins. If I can make the personalities shine through, then nothing else I do really matters, but that one thing seems like a daunting task. How do you get into the head of your favorite characters to decide what they will do next? How do you get them to have sex without unbelievably altering their personalities?