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Sithara R

@sitharawrites

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Writer, zine maker, and chronic birthday girl 🎂
sithara42 (@) gmail.com

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I have a confession to make. Substack isn’t the first orange-and-white writing app I’ve had a viral post on. In 2013, when I was 15 — the perfect age for a Y/N — I threw my hair up into a messy bun and wrote a multi-part fic about being kidnapped by One Direction.

I can’t claim to have engaged earnestly in the One Direction fandom, nor did I know very much about them at the time (I inexplicably thought that Niall was named Dexter?) but I was a teenage girl of the hater variety. Predictably, I also thought sparkly vampires were lame and Justin Bieber was cringe. (Ironically, these are also classic traits of a Y/N.) When I first found Wattpad, I was so overcome with hater energy that I seemingly blacked out for five minutes and returned to consciousness with a multi-part parody complete and posted.

My fic followed the popular Wattpad formula: Y/N wakes up, observes her sapphire orbs in the mirror, then goes downstairs to get traded by her mother for crack.

Over on Substack, I wrote an incredibly deep dive of the sold to 1D trope, from an 18th century proto-Y/N to a scholar’s work on romancing the (death) camp. :) xx by @sitharawrites

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2 months ago

Thank you so much @cake_zine @alizarae for letting me tell this story. Migration stories are so important to me as a first gen migrant (🇱🇰->🇬🇧) and I’m really really super grateful to have been able to share Bilal’s*. I’m so happy whenever I see any outlet platforming stories that humanise migrants instead of blaming or patronising them. Particularly in Times Like These™️.

Went to Dim Sum Cantoneses to celebrate :)

Thanks @jesseasparks for editing this piece and congrats on the great job you did with it! And thanks @beardfoundation and most of all thanks Bilal* for all the break time chats!! Miss being your neighbour.

*fake name chosen by him lol by @sitharawrites

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4 months ago

(CW: EDs mentioned) Wrote a piece for @teenvogue about how the recent trend in cannibal girl literature might be a response to extreme diet culture. I’ve been loving this trope and all the ways authors use it to tackle such a wide range of issues. Read the full piece on Teen Vogue!

Thank you to the incredibly smart women who lent me their opinions on this topic:
@elle.literacy
@lucyrosecreates
Sorcha Ní Fhlainn

🥩🪩🫀 by @sitharawrites

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9 months ago

I made a zine about all the tech-based birthday cakes in the Australian Women’s Weekly Birthday Cake Book. I hope my mum doesn’t see this because this is the first version of what’s going to be her Christmas gift. If you don’t know, the AWWBCB is a recipe book with no recipes (all the cakes are made with box mix). Instead, it consists of IKEA-style assembly instructions, advising Commonwealth mums on how to apply NASA-level engineering skills to sculpting spine-chilling clowns out of buttercream. But for all its horrors, the AWWBCB is also a fossil record of contemporary tech. #zines by @sitharawrites

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7 days ago

To celebrate spooky season I made a very dumb zine about byronic dweebs. These guys were everywhere in the heyday of tumblr. I have a project coming up about sexy monsters (keep your eyes peeled, it’s a collab with some friends!) I will say, there weren’t very many byronic dweebs of colour. I think it’s because this trope relies on sympathising with the dweeb, and fandom back then (and now, rip) was known to hold characters of colour to a very different standard. I could do a whole new zine on that, but for now, my next one’s about cake :) I’ll post it in a week or so :-) by @sitharawrites

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23 days ago

“What happened to Zoella” content has been all over my feed, and so I had to dig a bit deeper into girl bedroom culture and surveillance. I dive deep into blogs, bedroom culture and a really unfunny SNL sketch semi-saved by Olivia Rodrigo. (I got the wordcount down mostly by removing SNL slander.) by @sitharawrites

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a month ago

I made a zine about this creamy foot-shaped ice cream. It has a surprisingly fun story behind it, representing decades of shifting cultural desires. Empires may rise and fall but the foot will prevail.

(Backgrounds are stock photos, I took these pics in my living room x) by @sitharawrites

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2 months ago

In June, I pitched a magazine a piece about the slow creep of religious language into mainstream secular dating culture, using Love Island as a lens.
The editor never replied, so 2 weeks later, I turned it into a zine! :) You can read the failed pitch at the end! by @sitharawrites

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3 months ago

Happy World Cup or whatever! I’m not a big football head but I do love crisps so I reviewed all the Lays/Walkers FIFA World Cup 2025 flavours. Hope this helps someone in some way xoxo by @sitharawrites

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3 months ago

Love Island zine!! Love Island has always reflected the dating culture of its moment, but does it also reflect the court politics of a mishmash of time periods? Probably not, but let’s explore it anyway! Follow for more very intellectual zines xoxo by @sitharawrites

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3 months ago

No spoilers for Backrooms (2026)! I’ve always had an irrational phobia of video game glitches, especially the one on monster-creation game Bamzookie when you zoom too far out and find that your monster exists on an infinite chequerboard. An endless liminal space! 🤮 So to me, the theme of liminal spaces has always been tied to the digital. The Backrooms in particular is a part of digital folklore that, in my opinion, also works as a metaphor for the internet. Here’s a mini essay about it, but you can hear all my liminal space horror thoughts on the Further Reading podcast! Link in bio xoxo by @sitharawrites

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4 months ago