#I love knowing facts too. i love rules most but actual specific facts and examples are cool too. so it's really All Chemistry just atomic

[catboybiologist]

yo I'm actually kinda curious now I'm not a geneticist and I guess you aren't either to my knowledge but what the hell does the y chromosome do? specifically in trans people on hrt and stuff I mean. to my understanding you said that trans women have everything they really need from one x chromosome, so. what's the other one up to. and also for trans men who lack a y chromosome, are they like. missing anything? hormones do 99% of the heavy lifting, right?

much love and whatnot btw. sorry about the freak in your inbox

Bit tired right now, so I hope this doesn't come out too rambly.

The one function that the Y chromosome has on sex determination is the Sry gene. This gene is responsible for testes formation, and ultimately, testosterone production. That's pretty much it. All of the other genes required to make something male or female are present, but inactive, in everyone. Hormones tell cells which ones to switch on and off, and at what times.

There's no explicit reason why Sry has to be linked to the Y chromosome. Most non-mammalian animals have different methods of sex determination, either from different sets of chromosomes, environmental triggers, or similar sex determining genes associating in appropriate ratios.

Why the Y, then?

All chromosomes, sex and somatic, are paired. Each member of the pair has the same genes on it. This is why you have two copies of most genes, and different "forms", or alleles, of a gene are possible. It's why mendelian genetics works. One of the cleanest examples is blood type. Blood types A, B, and O are all different forms of the same gene. You have two of these genes, and can therefore end up in combinations like AB, AO, etc (O in this case is no protein, A and B are slightly different forms of the same protein).

The Y chromosome is different. It's a shortened version of the X chromosome. So every gene on the Y chromosome has a pair on the X, but some genes on the X don't have a partner on the Y. And these genes have nothing to do with sex determination- the gene encoding for the red-sensitive protein in your eyes is an example of a gene in the part of the X chromosome that is "chopped off" to make the Y, and is therefore not carried by it. Every organism NEEDS at least one copy of these genes- from that point, you can upregulated that one copy and end up fairly normal.

Large chromosome deletions are fairly common, but oftentimes lethal to a developing embryo (not so fun fact, this is why the miscarriage rate is something like 70%, oftentimes so early and invisible that even the mother doesn't notice). While we can't know for certain without a time machine, the rationale is that one of these large chromosomal deletions happened to the X chromosome at some point in mammalian evolution. From that point, the only way that offspring can be passed down with that new Y chromosome in the gene pool is if you have a system that somehow forces every offspring to end up with at least one X chromosome.

Sry being linked to the Y chromosome accomplishes just that. It's an evolutionary band aid, a patch, a bodge, on a deleterious mutation. It forces the XX to XY pairing, ensuring that YY offspring don't happen.

In fact, we can see something similar happening in real time with a population of white throated sparrows: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7725849/#:~:text=Thus%2C%20not%20only%20do%20white,et%20al.%2C%202016).

A large chromosomal deletion is forcing new reproductive rules for pairing, to reduce the number of non viable offspring.

Hope this was somewhat digestible! It's a cool topic, but I'm very eepy atm

[utilitycaster]

Would LOVE that essay on combat in dnd because full agree. But not even just for people watching live play, like, combat is an essential feature of dnd as a game system and it endlessly frustrates me when i see dms be like “yeah combat is just too complicated and no fun so i dont do it in my game :)!” Like i guess thats your right, but any non-caster class is gonna be miserable in your game. I saw a video recently talking about how dnd has kind of become the default ttrpg and is marketed as the perfect system for everyone and any style of play which is just. So not true. Combat in dnd is equally as integral as roleplay is and theres really no argument otherwise. Very valid if you hate dnd combat, it sure isnt for everyone, but in that case maybe play a different ttrpg where the characters arent constructed around combat abilities, i promise you’ll have more fun.

So this is one of those things that touches on maybe 99% of my feelings on Experiencing Fiction in general and actual play in particular; I apologize in advance for the length and digressions within this response.

Here are the reasons I have seen or I surmise why people don’t like D&D combat, either in actual play or in home games:

It can get crunchy and involves a lot of rules

There are long stretches in which individuals do not necessarily act (not exclusive to combat but I think this is a factor)

It contains violence

There is a potential for character death

Now, it’s fine if you aren’t interested in D&D-style combat, for whatever reason, when you play ttrpgs. It’s just that this is a core feature of D&D. As you say, this is what the martial classes are structured around - and, frankly, no small number of casting classes/subclasses as well. By avoiding it when you play D&D, you’re avoiding the bulk of the game, and there are plenty of ttrpgs that permit open RP that aren’t combat focused that would probably fit your needs better (eg: PbtA and Savage Worlds are both generic systems that can support a heroic fantasy like D&D without the emphasis on combat skills). I happen to love and prefer D&D, but that is specifically because I love combat, and yeah, there are other games and people should seek out those games if they don’t like combat.

When it comes to D&D actual play though…skipping combat is just straight-up stupid. And to be clear I mean fully skipping it and not watching it at all; while this is piggybacking off my post about spoilers, it’s fine if you are the sort of person who needs to know how combat ends in order to enjoy it! That’s just a personal preference that I respect even if I don’t share it.

D&D combat isn’t just an inherent part of the game; it’s an inherent part of the story. The idea of D&D being split into combat and RP is a false dichotomy. There is RP and crucial story within combat scenes, and you simply do not achieve the same effects by reading an after-the-fact summary. To use examples from Critical Role, consider one of the most famous RP moments from Campaign 1, when Scanlan uses his 9th level counterspell in the Vecna fight. The weight of that moment derives from mechanics and from the fact that it is in the midst of combat and well into a climatic final battle. Or for lighter examples, there’s a ton of Beau/Yasha and Fjord/Jester mid-combat flirting running through much of Campaign 2 that informs those relationships. Molly’s death? Caleb going into a fugue state when he kills humanoids with fire? Yasha destroying Obann? Fjord dying mid-deep scion fight? Those are all moments that have deep character weight and meaning that are within the context of combat, and you cannot divorce them from that context and hope to retain the same effect.

This is what dovetails into a larger discussion of Experiencing Fiction which is a (in my opinion) worrying tendency among some people to truly believe that you can cut up media into the palatable bits and pieces and push all of what you see as icky vegetables to the side of your plate. I fucking hate this. I think it’s what drives a lot of things including a distaste for combat. This is how you get, for example, people who dislike combat because Violence And Death Bad, which, do I think that in the real world violence is most often a thing to be avoided? Do I think that in the real world death is heartbreaking? Yes, but this is fiction. There’s that great Brennan Lee Mulligan quote about how TTRPGs like D&D allow people who usually must be conflict-avoidant in real life to let out their anger and frustration in a place where it is safe and harmless, and I believe that whole-heartedly. I want stories about death because I want to know I'm not alone in how I feel about death. I want stories in which people can express their rage in ways both healthy and unhealthy, because big same. (I also think it’s absolutely not coincidental that people who believe they are ‘protecting’ people by circumscribing what is acceptable in fiction tend to be strongly associated with either bigoted, violent policies in real life, or harassment and doxxing online; maybe enjoy a fucked up movie, as John Waters once said, and you'll calm down.)

This idea that you can cut up media and only consume what you like is also what I think is behind some of the really ill-considered and overly granular timestamped content warnings I’ve mentioned previously. It is fine if there are things you don’t want to watch or which will be upsetting or even triggering to watch! It’s fine if you as an individual don’t like violence! But I think there’s a problem when people believe they are entitled to be able to watch whatever they want and have it mold to their exact wants and needs (and that it’s a failing if it doesn’t), rather than taking on the responsibility of seeking out media that already fits the bill. Actual Play D&D will nearly always have violent encounters. If this will be an issue this is not for you. It is not gatekeeping to say “you can come through this gate, but the gate is in fact here for your specifically requested protection"; and yet people think that instead, gates should be placed around everything else. So (to give an example) this is why the warnings for D20’s Neverafter strike me as a symptom of this larger problem - if you have discomfort with violence towards animals and children, that’s fine, but you are watching a D&D horror series in which over half the player characters are either animals or children. This is not something where you can skip a few seconds of a flashing gif that might be a migraine or seizure trigger, or a case where an exceptionally rough scene of gaslighting can be read instead of watched; this is inherent to the show, and if this is not for you, you need to go elsewhere.

To give one last example, I was looking for fanart for Worlds Beyond Number, and came across a picture of Suvi with a caption of “Suvi but without the imperialism” and like…Aabria has said in interviews that this engagement with the empire is extremely deliberate; that Suvi is intended to be tied into the political structures of this world as an intentional contrast with Eursulon’s status as an outsider and Ame’s role at the smaller, community level. Suvi without imperialism is not identifiable as the same character and it throws the entire story off-kilter; she is of this empire and that is the fucking point. Any story worth telling is not just items thrown haphazardly into a bowl; they are combined and mixed. Someone is giving you a plate of brownies and you are acting like it’s physically possible to take out the cocoa powder without fucking the end result, and buddy, it’s not.

(Truly, I was not joking when I said this is like, the load-bearing pillar of most of my complaints about fiction consumption patterns in general. This is about how people will deny the flaws in characters even though any reasonably intelligent ten-year-old, and I know because I fucking was one once, understands that person vs. themself is one of the core conflicts and overcoming one’s flaws is in many cases the entire story and if you start out perfect there is nothing to be said. Like…I think a lot of people genuinely just want to watch a nonstop Monterey Bay Otter Cam of their sufficiently sanitized, focus-group-tested blorbos baking cookies together, and are affronted when people with the tiniest sliver of empathy and/or curiosity want a story with plot and character growth, which in turn require conflict.)

Anyway. I think the takeaways here are that there’s this awful entitlement people have in which they think that they can simply consume anything and it is the failure of that media if it doesn’t cater specifically to them, rather than a failure of them to seek out that which they would enjoy (and I could go on this rant indefinitely; it is truly the most constant theme among Takes I Think Are Dumb); and also I really want to bake something right now, given my choices of metaphor. Combat is part of D&D as a game and as a storytelling medium, and it is incumbent upon people who do not like combat to find something that doesn’t have D&D combat, rather than try to pull out the vital organs of the story.

#answered #faltermoth #long post #to continue with food metaphors it's really like. you are going to an italian restaurant and being mad there are tomatoes there #girl why are you at the devil's sacrament and so forth #i was going to make a joke about bombing all your coffee shop aus but actually i read a coffee shop au that was like. dark. and good. #(it was also professionally published in a work specifically about retellings though)

[theminecraftbee]

i know this isnt the meme but i would LOVE to hear your mumbo hot takes. whats the characterization thats important to you but "isnt canon" or "is only constructed from your own internal logic inscrutable to anyone else". or otherwise overlooked or underrepresented -girltws

OKAY SO. various mumbo things that are important to Me Specifically in his characterization:

if you have reduced mumbo to grian's emotional rock, you are writing mumbo wrong. mumbo CAN be the one who is acting as the emotional rock, but in the sense of. anyone who is close friends with another person can be. he's not a well-put-together, emotionally intelligent man, though. (i mean. okay IRL mumbo is probably a pretty well-put-together man from what i understand but you know what i'm trying to say.)

further point deductions if either mumbo's sole characteristic is "grian comforter" or "grian comforter about scar", a late-joining addition to my list of grievances.

also further point deductions if you write the grian/mumbo/scar trio but have put absolutely no thought whatsoever into how scar and mumbo interact.

(the above three items incidentally are often the ones that end up problems in the specific kind of watcher angst fic i find hard to read.)

mumbo is not responsible. he will, however, be appropriately flustered and concerned about irresponsible actions. this is not the same as being responsible, and his SCALE for what is or isn't irresponsible and should be worried about is wildly out-of-tune.

mumbo will also retaliate but he will be so wet and floppy about it. he gives as good as he gets he's just also pathetic about it the whole time. do you understand me.

mumbo is a guy who really, really wants his world to fall into order. this is not the same as being a stick in the mud or something - i am going to gesture at everything mumbo does in season eight, actually, as a really good example of "mumbo wants his world to be ordered but he doesn't necessarily mean for it to follow the same rules as everyone else, it's just ordered by his own internal rules". literally everything mumbo does about the potato situation and also the moon situation falls into this. another good example is the whole hobbit thing during hcbbs i think.

oftentimes, mumbo's attempts to maintain an ordered world that makes sense to him makes the world much more nonsensical, both to himself and everyone else. this then has a tendency to spiral.

also, mumbo is, in fact, smart. like, he's also a spoon, but he IS smart, and people lose that sometimes a bit, i think. (or lean too hard into 'smart redstone guy' and then make him the responsible adult for some reason.)

..........when i write mumbo he normally also comes out autistic gonna be honest here. this is at least 50% projection but is also somehow vital to characterizing him in a way i like, i think.

honestly the stuff about "mumbo wants an ordered world but is also a very chaotic person" and the autism beam are probably the most singularly "i am pretty sure these are just me" things and also i'm never good at explaining characterizations i like in plain language but something like this,

#answered #girltimeswithscar #ask game #...sorta? on-topic? i'll leave the tag there.

[minecraftbookshelf]

ok so I know you’re writing and probably already thought of this but I’m case you didn’t: the differences in elven courting rituals and oceanic courting rituals, specifically when it comes to wedding gifts. if you have thought about this feel free to ignore but the way I see it

elves live a while,and probably know about the arranged marriages a decent amount of time before they happen, so in between wedding planning and normal life each half of the marriage is planning some extravagant amazing wedding gift like gardens of gold or giant tapestries and stuff like that

meanwhile ocean/swamp folk who don’t live as long probably have more personal gifts, even in arraigned marriages bc they’re still getting to know each other! but either way the gifts are more personal and specifically tailored to the other half

so keeping track we have Scott, panicking bc he has like zero time to plan a wedding and learn a language and make a wedding gift and so the necessary things for life in however little time he has, Jimmy, panicking bc he doesn’t know anything about scott, no one he knows knows anything about scott, and even when they finally meet scott isn’t exactly an open book! so Jimmy is trying to do the same things as scott (tjough his doesn’t need to be as extravagant) in addition to finding out who the hell he’s getting married to and also ruling a kingdom

AND (you thought I was done NO the adhdemons love this concept and filled the no-box fan void with fictional politics) you have Lizzie, Joel, Xornoth, and Iona, who also had to get gifts for each other

first I need you to know that I saw your url and had the immediate gut reaction of "oh same hat!" XD

Anywho

So courting traditions in general:

I don't have too much set in stone currently, lots of ideas and concepts though, because I'm half shaping the story around it and half shaping it around the story, because writing be like that (rip) but I do have a few things.

Rivendell is basically just Tolkein's elves partly isekai-ed into minecraft, lets be real. So I've yoinked the tradition from there of the bride-to-be's family gifting a jewel (usually of magical or historical or familial importance) to the groom-to-be as a sort of pre-dowry. Only because heteronormativity does not exist here it is usually a mutual exchange of gifts. Tapestries and other labor and skill intensive textile arts also play a role because of the importance of textiles in Rivendell culture (see the ask that I'm answering after this one for more details on that) And there is also just a general idea of "a demonstration of what you are bringing to the table" for the actual wedding exchange. Like the most intense and stressful art show where both your entire extended family and also your significant other/others's extended family will be judging it. (Exact form of art varies depending on the skills and interests of the elf in question; culinary, poetry, musical, metal working...the list goes on)

The Swamp has fewer actual universal traditions. Due to their recent (past few centuries) history they are basically two nations that mixed and mingled and also include a few different diasporas interspersed within them. Jimmy himself tends towards more Oceanic traditions, which include things like feats of bravery and provision. This will go both exactly as well as you think it will and genuinely very well. (Oceanic traditions tend towards dramatic and grand gestures and statements. Ability to protect and provide is a huge thing both in the Ocean and the Swamp.)

Also Jimmy absolutely panics and ends up asking a good dozen random citizens for advice.

You also have the added layer of this specific instance being an arranged marriage (which isn't especially unusual) between two empires (which is wildly unusual at their social level) That custom is, in fact, purely an Oceanic one. (Which is why Joel and Lizzie were the previous example)

Most/all of the other Empires don't tend to intermarry their royals because enough Empires don't use familial succession models that it renders it fairly unstable as an alliance technique. There's more context for the Oceanic take on it but that is a whole nother post/will be in the fics explicitly.

The point of all this is that both parties are kind of stressed and trying to figure out how to compromise/accommodate while not really having a fully applicable framework for this situation (on Rivendell's part.)

Rivendell barely has interacted with the other empires for generations let alone married them.

Xornoth and Iona actually had it fairly easy, outside figuring out how to navigate the religious minefield that is Xornoth's entire existence. It was a very matter of fact, business like courtship that Scott and Iona ran with all the stringent focus of a military operation (which it basically was) and not even Xornoth's tendency towards chaos could really do much in the face of that.

In the context of like, personal gifts Joel and Lizzie actually got off really easy because by the time they got married-married they'd technically been married for several years already.

#sorry if this is a bit rambly #i have lots of thoughts and sometimes they do not sit still long enough to be shared well #flower husbands #rivendell siblings #seablings #shadowbeans #xornoth #solidaritygaming #ldshadowlady #smallishbeans #mezalea is also part of team 'ridiculously overstated gestures' #for the record #ask and it shall be answered #spaceyaceylesbian #another spacey acey lesbian #not me #XD #smajor1995 #marriage of state au #mos: asks #mos: worldbuilding #mos: shadowbeans #mos: flower husbands #mos: xornoth #mos: ocs

[groenendaelfic]

Do you think Simon would actually be willing to become the Prince Consort tho?! Like yes he LOVES Wille but I don't think he'd ever wanna officially set a foot in that system let alone give up his career for being a working royal

The quick answer is yes, I think he’d thrive. Go read my fic Becoming Prince Simon for details.

The long answer is that I think that just like we tend to make Wilhelm into this social justice prince who’d love being a house husband and hates being a royal, when in fact he is quite comfortable with ignoring staff while he walks past them in a ratty old t-shirt and sweatpants because there’s nothing more normal than living in a palace and having staff cater to him for him, and he actively enjoys ordering Jan-Olof to send him food to the middle of nowhere Hillerska, to name but two examples of how Wilhelm very much doesn’t mind being royal or privileged, and just hates being told what to do or say and having to act like someone he isn’t, Simon, too, isn’t this grand idealist.

Sure he’d like being treated fairly, who doesn't, especially when you always draw the short straw even while following the rules while your classmates get away with breaking them without problem, but the truth is he’s rather pragmatic.

He gets back in contact with his drug addict, alcoholic and to a currently unknown degree abusive father so that he can acquire alcohol for his underage classmates to drink so that Sara can attend a party, and then steals drugs to among other things pay for math tutoring because he wants good grades.

I’m not saying Simon would jump at the chance to join the royal family, but he’d come to see the advantages, and I’m not just talking about him being with Wilhelm, but also all the good he can do. He doesn't need to be a monarchist for that.

So yes, I don’t only think Simon would be willing to become Prince Consort, but that he’d thrive once he got accustomed to the idea.

After all modern day Sweden isn’t Czarist Russia or pre-revolutionary France, you can’t just burn that shit down (and get the Soviet Union or Emperor Napoleon), because that wouldn't work and attempting so would do more harm than good. 

You need reform and systematic change, and to change a system you need to interact with it, for example from the inside, and as spouse to the Crown Prince and later King, Simon would be in the ideal position to affect that.

He doesn’t need any actual power to highlight problems and topics important to him or for people to pay attention and listen. It doesn’t always have to be Diana shaking hands with a man with aids in the 80s, it can be something as trivial as the irl second in line opening a fairytale trail in her duchy as a toddler.

What the royal family does (and doesn’t! do) gets publicity and is reported. Simon knows that. He grew up seeing it all the time.

And the people most likely to take note of what the royal family does? Those I dare say are also some of the ones who could do with a bit more exposure to the causes Simon would highlight.

Also not to be mean but give up what career? We know Simon enjoys making music and he wants to get out of small town Bjärstad, but as far as we know he has no great, specific career ambitions he’d have to give up.

I’m gonna end this with a potentially triggering and extreme example, so take care.

When the royal court announced that the irl Swedish crown princess had an eating disorder I was in junior high. I'll always feel sorry for what she had to go through so publicly and it definitely is another point on the list of why monarchies and celebrity culture are the worst, but I also cannot overstate how much good that publicity did when it came to bringing awareness to the topic of eating disorders.

Suddenly that was something that was seriously discussed as an illness by people in power and who otherwise never would have, and not just in a ‘haha those silly teenage girls wanting to look like Kate Moss’ kind of way, because it was the crown princess and not some random pop starlet, and if that can happen to someone like her, then who is to say it can’t also affect our own children etc?

We were taught about it in school, in detail, when my older cousins never were, how to recognize them, how to help, where to go for help. More, there suddenly were places to help, places that were actively advertised which hadn’t been before.

There were clinical programs being opened and awareness campaigns launched, and not just in Sweden. (I’m not saying she was the only reason, it was the late nineties, it was really, really necessary, but she was a big deciding factor when it came to the amount and speed at which things changed)

It sucks that royals and celebrities highlighting important issues can make such a difference, and I’m the first to go yell abolish all systems of inequality irl, but Simon could do a lot of good as a working royal, and he’d actually care about changing things, instead of just finding it a boring necessity like irl royals and the YR royal family including Wilhelm do, which is why I think that in a few years, given time, he would very much be willing to become part of the system if only to bring what change he can, especially when no one else can take his place and do it instead of him.

#king wilhelm ftw #prince simon ftw #ask me anything #young royals #young royals meta #random ramblings

[love-kurdt]

How to Write a Good Fanfiction: A 5 Step Manual

Hello! My name is @love_kurdt, also known as Eva, and I’m a Wattpad Veteran of the early 2010s, where the genres of Slash Fics, Y/N, and Imagines ran rampant. I spent years of my life as a kid scrolling through my iPod touch, weeding through Wattpad’s plethora of profiles, on a quest to find quality fanfictions. I found a handful, which I added to a specific reading list to come back to when I needed a break from screaming into my pillow because of the sheer audacity of thought-criminals who called themselves writers.

When I’d reached the point of reading the same five works over and over in a never ending cycle, I decided to make the life-altering decision to start publishing my fanfictions online. Granted, I was only thirteen at this point, so my writing wasn’t spectacular by any means, but I came to discover that over time, the mere acts of reading and writing can light a spark of inspiration that can carry you to creative success.

I’ve been writing my own works for over ten years now, and can confidently say that I have cracked the code to writing a good fanfiction that will have your readers captivated instead of cringing. Please don’t get me wrong– if you want to just write fanfic on the internet for fun, and not to write a novel, that’s great, too! That’s what the internet is for; exercising your free will. But this manual is tailored towards those who want to hone in on their craft and gain a substantial following as strictly fanfiction authors. So without further ado, let’s jump into it. Godspeed!

Step 1: Choose Your Fandom

What show, movie, or book has drawn you in and left you feeling like there should be more to the story? When one of those media comes to mind, you’ve chosen your fandom!

Step 2: Do Your Research

When writing fanfiction, it’s kind of an unspoken rule that you need to know the canon of the fandom you’re writing about. The canon is also known as the source material. For example, if someone were to write a Draco Malfoy x OC fanfiction (*cough* a 200+ page Draco Malfoy self insert fic written at 11 years old in a series of notebooks bound together with multiple layers of Gorilla tape *cough*), the canon would be the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling. It’s, in essence, what “really” happened. It’s totally fine if you want to write a non-canon compliant fic, too! In fact, they’re extremely popular, specifically within the “fix-it” genre, which usually involves characters that died in the canon but the author kept alive in their fanfiction. Either way, you should have a general idea of how the canon functions within the context of the fandom, so you can make creative choices that diverge from or stick to the canon.

With the canon comes the fanon, which is basically a compilation of fan theories and headcanons that are often common themes in both canon and non-canon compliant fanfics. A pretty niche example of this is the Byler fandom (the ship between Stranger Things characters Will Byers and Mike Wheeler), where there’s an official list of theories on Tumblr that are used in many, if not most Byler fanfictions. There’s FlickerGate, where the flickering of the garage light in Season 1 is actually Will and Mike in the Upside Down in Season 5. There’s BirthdayGate, where the antagonist, Vecna, manipulates the minds of everyone in Hawkins to forget Will’s birthday, which is a central plot point in a lot of Byler fics since no one seems to remember it, not even his best friend. There’s also LetterGate, where Will confronts Mike in the canon about not sending any letters after he’d moved away, but the theory reveals that Mike wrote plenty of letters– he just never sent them because they ended up turning into love letters, which in turn resulted in internalized homophobia. You get the picture. Most theories reach far into the land of delusion, but it doesn’t stop writers from creating incredible work that could easily be mistaken for a script.

But Eva, what if I just think the characters are hot and I don’t give a shit about the cannonball? I can’t tell you what to do, my friend, but I highly suggest you at least consider the canon so you can avoid all the petty, obnoxious gatekeepers in some fandoms who can be unhinged enough to send death threats if you leave out a significant canonical detail. But you do you!

Step 3: Choose Your Platform

There are three popular platforms to choose from: Archive of Our Own (ao3), Tumblr, and Wattpad. There are also a few other lesser known or dead pages such as fanfiction.net, but I honestly wouldn’t bother with those, since they’re more infiltrated with anons and bots nowadays.

This is where you want to think about 1) where most of the members in the fandom you chose reside, and 2) the demographic of readers you want to reach. For example, I observed a higher number of Nirvana fans on Wattpad than the other two platforms, which is why I chose to post my full length Kurt Cobain fanfiction, “You Know You’re Right,” on there. It also helped that my favorite author of another Kurt Cobain fanfiction on Wattpad, @/ugh-nirvana, had hits in the hundreds of thousands, so I was confident that my book would do well on that specific platform. On the other hand, the Stranger Things fandom is in full swing on Tumblr and ao3, so I chose to post those fanfictions on there rather than on Wattpad. It all just depends on who’s where.

You also have to consider how active you want to be on your platform(s). Tumblr is more of a blog situation, while ao3 and Wattpad are solely for publishing the work. If you want to have a life beyond the realms of the world wide web, choose Wattpad or ao3, as inconsistent updates are a bit more accepted than on Tumblr. But if you want to throw yourself headfirst into a fandom and put your whole author-ussy into your fanfic, then Tumblr is the platform for you.

You should be aware, however, that Tumblr involves a lot of upkeep, as well as constant, strategic, and active participation within your fandom. Visual aesthetic is vital to any functional Tumblr blog. Most profiles have directories, with color coded links to each work’s homepage, which is linked to each individual chapter, which are then distinguished by a unique GIF to capture a prospective reader’s attention while they’re scrolling through copious amounts of content. And there are always new ideas and theories in development in certain fandoms, so it’s crucial to keep up with recent updates in order to stay relevant.

After all is said and done, you don’t have to get married to one platform for the rest of your life. You can choose to be exclusive to one or two platforms, or publish everything on all of them! The decision is ultimately yours!

Step 4: Obey the Writer’s Trifecta of Consistency

Yes, I came up with this term, and yes, it should be a real thing. Because in every piece of writing, whether it be fanfiction, a short story, an actual book, a screenplay, what have you, it is critical to be consistent in your People, your POV, and your Plot. Let me explain.

People

Your people, or your ensemble of characters, consists of three hierarchical levels: your protagonist/antagonist, your side characters, and other background characters. I should emphasize the importance of building character profiles for everyone, including your pre-existing characters from the fandom, but specifically for your original character(s) if you have them. That way, you know who serves as a major plot device, who serves as someone who just helps time move faster, and those who are mentioned by name but have very little significance to the events of the story. I’m going to reference Harry Potter again, since most of the world is familiar with the characters. Harry and Voldemort are the protagonist and antagonist; Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger, Professor Dumbledore, Hagrid and company are side characters; and Peeves, Seamus Finnigan, and Blaise Zabini are background characters. Keep this hierarchy in check; don’t let your main characters fade away, and don’t let your background characters shift to the forefront for no reason. If you do plan to move a character up or down the ladder, make sure to have clear motive as to why you’re bringing this character into or out of play.

2. POV

Your POV is the point of view in which you’re writing from. Assuming you’ve been in a typical middle school English class, you’ve heard of the first, second, and third person points of view. I cannot tell you how many times I have read fanfictions that jump from one POV to another, sometimes within the same sentence. I open the door and see Kurt Cobain standing in the corner of the room. She walked across the floor to meet him there. See what I did there? I jumped from first person present tense to third person past tense. Do not attempt this at home.

The least common of the three points of view is the second person, or what I like to call the Y/N point of view. In fanfiction, second person POV is often used in self-insert fics, where instead of a character’s name, it’s replaced with “you.” That’s why a lot of romantic character x reader fics are so popular. You should feel free to use this one, especially if that’s the kind of vibe you’re going for, but I’m going to elaborate a little bit more on first and third person, as they’re a bit more “literary.”

The first person POV confines the narration to the mind of one character. It can also be done with multiple characters, but be sure to do it so it’s painstakingly obvious to the reader whose POV you’re writing from. Also note that if you plan to write multiple first person POVs, try to keep that number on the lower side, as a large number of POVs can get really complicated really quickly. Third person narration can be done from two angles: limited or omniscient. Limited is more similar to first person, in which you’re confined to one person’s viewpoint, but they aren’t the narrator; you’re just seeing the story through their eyes. Omniscient is my favorite, because you can narrate from a bird’s eye view with the freedom to travel from mind to mind and read their thoughts.

Building character profiles can be really helpful when developing both first or third person POV; if you connect with a particular character more strongly than the rest, that should tell you whose POV you should write in. If you choose to switch POVs, be sure to do it either on an alternating/rotating basis, or if you repeat, it should be apparent as to why that particular character is the “voice” of that scene.

3. Plot

Dare I say that Plot is the most important step of them all, so do not skip this one, whatever you do! The biggest mistake most fanfiction writers make is having a concept but lacking a plot. It’s like biting into an apple just to discover it’s a lemon. Many writers are capable of starting off strong, but once their initial story begins to meander, traveling into uncharted territory, their brainchild can become a monstrosity.

In order to write a solid plot, it’s pretty common knowledge that you need to have a beginning, middle, and end in place. It doesn’t need to be overly specific or down to the last detail, you just need to figure out how your characters make it from point A to point Z (the larger scale), and how points B through Y factor into the plot (the smaller scale). There are a few routes that you can take in order to do this: you can write the entire thing ahead of time without any input, you can write the entire thing with the feedback of a beta reader or proofreader to help you work out any kinks or mistakes before you publish it for the entire platform to see, or you can publish it gradually and take feedback from your readers as you go. Should you go with the last option, though, you should be made aware that if you aren’t already an established author, it may feel like you’re talking to a wall, and you will likely feel discouraged from writing the story altogether.

I find it helpful to outline the whole thing. I have a closet door in my house dedicated to a Dave Grohl true crime fanfiction I’m working on. I’ve written the entire story from beginning to end on index cards, split into four different parts with each card representing a chapter. What’s good about outlining is that I can edit my story as I go along. If I decide to change something, I can add or remove an index card, then replace or rearrange the other index cards to work around the change I made, and that way, I don’t have to start over from scratch. It’s helpful to see everything laid out in front of me, so I’m not left at the end of a completely improvised plot with a slew of loose ends that I’ll need to go back and edit. It’s also better than publishing each part individually then having to redo everything after your readers have already seen it. And I don’t know about you, but I enjoy it when I’m able to save some time, energy, and lengthy explanations to random people online. That is, unless you enjoy constant feedback from readers, in which case you can change the plot on a chapter by chapter basis based on their feedback.

Consistency in all of these respects is key. I cannot emphasize this enough. Keeping all of these elements in check will help you create a sort of cohesiveness that will neatly wrap the story up with a little bow on top. 

Step 5: Use Relevant Tags and Content Warnings

Repeat after me: tags matter! Again: tags matter! When you’re about to publish your fanfiction, you’re going to be given the option to add tags to your work. For my first few years spent on Wattpad, I had no idea what tags were, so I didn’t use them. Thankfully, the platform was still pretty small, so people still found my work pretty easily. Nowadays, though, it’s nearly impossible to find what you’re looking for without searching excessively specific tags and using a million filters. It’s unfortunate, but look at it this way: there are so many people contributing to so many fandoms that the content is seemingly endless!

What you’re going to want to do is add as many tags as you can but keep it as simple as possible. I know that sounds kind of oxymoronic, but I mean it in a way that all of your tags relate directly to your story, and not just to the fandom itself. A lot of readers feel misled when they’re scrolling through their filtered search page for, let’s just say, a Byler fanfic, and end up neck deep in a Mileven fanfic in disguise. That’s not a fun experience.

Lastly, please remember that you are publishing your work on the internet, and you don’t know who may encounter your work! Listen, we live in a world where everything needs to be overexplained, everything needs trigger warnings, and everything needs to be neutral or else someone is going to hate you. I get it. I’ve been writing fanfiction for a long time. It might be annoying to add content warnings, especially if one of those warnings spoils a major plotline, but if I’m being honest, I’d rather be safe and add the damn warning than not add the warning and be responsible for someone’s worsened emotional or mental state. Bottom line, it’s just fanfiction! Let’s do our due diligence to create a community full of love and understanding for everyone!

After that, you should be all set to publish! Let’s review one more time for the road:

Choose Your Fandom

Do Your Research

Choose Your Platform

Obey the Writer’s Trifecta of Consistency

Use Relevant Tags and Content Warnings

If you’ve stuck around for this long, thank you so much!

I hope this manual helps you along your fanfiction writing journey, wherever it takes you <3

#fanfic #ao3 fanfic #writers on tumblr #writerscommunity #female writers #fanfiction #wattpad #ao3 #stranger things fic #byler fic #creative writing #ao3 writer

[ms-scarletwings]

I am sorry to bother you but I have to say, I feel Dib got treated too harshly most of the time. It's the point of the story yes but at times it just feels flat out sadistic for no reason.

It's why the Gargantis Array comic storyline sucks to me, it was just two issues of buildup to make Dib a gross fat joke and humiliate him across space. Jhonen just really seems to love torturing Dib more than anyone and it's rarely even deserved.

Oh, this is the opposite of a bother, friendo!

I actually have a lot of reading to still do on the topic of the comics. I’m woefully only really up to good knowledge about issues 46-49 and a lot of bits of pieces otherwise. If what you’re saying rings true, that is sad to hear, but pretty interesting still. I’ve always in the back of my head been a little afraid that Dib’s karma could be flanderized to the point of making him a butt monkey. Especially when we all know that’s supposed to be Skoodge’s job! (waka waka)

As for the show, honestly? I think they managed the balance just fine. It’s not so much that the show was specifically cruel to him, but that sadism broadly was one of its central themes and there were no efforts made to exclude Dib from that. And why should they have? He’s not an innocent woobie, and in fact is actually in the seat of a very ambitious antagonist against the real main character’s goals. Arbitrary events of misfortune and pain were the bread and butter of the series back then, and almost no one was spared. Jhonen (who cameoed himself in the show just to choke on a fish and die for a joke) also from what I hear injected a lot of his own qualities into Dib, so I imagine it probably IS very entertaining to him to give the boy the works.

From what I have seen of the comics, that looks like a much finer line to tow. And this more of an off the cuff ramble, but you know what I think??? I think they made Dib a touch way too sympathetic actually. There’s so much more focus on just him and Zim’s side antics, and the more time you take Dib off world and away from the rest of the Earth side characters, the fewer reminders they give you about how many of his problems are majorly self inflicted and how much of a disturbance he can be to society. And, for better or worse, a less dark overall tone in the comics means that the moments of overtly black comedy are going to stand out a little more against the modernized background by contrast.

And there’s another elephant in the room that kind of gets to me, personally. As well as I can put it well, the art style change kind of really affects the lens he can be viewed through. Maybe more than most people want to admit. And I’m not dissing the rounded down, brightened up change, it’s not a better or worse direction from the show… but it is a different one with different strengths and weaknesses.

Like, look at Dib’s early season model sheets for a base of reference.

Now compare him alongside the comic and Florpus interpretation of Dib Membrane. OBVS I am simplifying a ton here, there’s a ton of room for more range than these examples.

I’m not here to say he’s a better or worse Dib visually, he’s still Dib to me! But is notable how comic Dib actually breaks a ton of the “rules” of what kind of character they wanted Dib to be. To put it one way, they sanded down some of his edges and he’s not as apparently “skrungly” as he used to be.

What I like about the change is that it actually gives the better impression of him actually being the lil dorkass kid he’s always been. He’s got a slight aesthetic shift that shows off his unique interests and it definitely sets him apart from Zim, who actually retained most of his own show design. He’s still got some funny lookin’ qualities and he’s so much more endearing

One of the downsides of all that, however, is probably that he’s so damn endearing and as a default.

I dunno if you ever watched Little Shop of Horrors, amazing musical btw, but, it’s supposed to have this whole tragic ending where the main character’s, Seymour’s, long chain of mistakes catch up with him and he meets his demise. In the movie, they casted Rick Moranis for the character, and he played such a puppy-eyed, adorkable Seymour that it made audiences suddenly too bummed out to even appreciate the dark ending. They hated it so much that the crew actually just changed the ending completely so that Seymour gets a consequence-free happy ending with everything he ever wanted. Even though he’s literally a serial murderer of sorts. You were always supposed to feel for him, but not to the point where watching him fail just makes you feel horrible.

I think Dib works kinda like that on a meta level.

If there’s any ruling on what goes over that invisible line when it comes to handling his character, I think Florpus Gaz nailed it right on the head. Dib is never supposed to just utterly break under the weight of his world. Can he sometimes crack? Yeah totally, especially in the “brink of madness” sense. Or if it’s funny. The golden rule is not to give him more than he can handle, and Dib CAN handle a lot of bullshit. He may be a frustrated lil squirt but he’s been at this for a very long time, and it’s hype af watching how he’s not slowing down even in the face of that. Dib and Zim’s biggest POSITIVE shared trait is the strength of their spirits against a world that is ultimately callous and cruel at every turn to them.

Every second you write Dib where he’s wallowing in despair or feeling sorry for himself is a second you come closer to that line and it’s what you need to dish out in wary moderation.

So I guess the TL:DR of what i think I’m getting at here is… it’s all about perspective.

But I really should read more of the comics.

#invader zim #iz #dib membrane #iz dib #iz analysis #answering asks #woah I finally have asks?!? #🥹 #scarlet talks about things

[phoenix-is-the-hottest-thing]

What are your opinions on mobius?

*stares at current icon, which is Mobius in a santa outfit, drawn by my friend @cloud-ya*

She’s my favorite character

To be a bit less meme-y and more detailed, her chapter in ER is my favorite part of Honkai— she’s hyped up JUUUST right, painted as this deranged mad scientist and villain, and then you peel back the story through upgrading the vessels and talking to other characters more and you realize there’s more to her.

I love that.

Mobius is undoubtedly fucked up. She’s lacking a bunch of morals, and the ones she does have, like specifically ensuring consent to her experiments (the Sim didn’t but the real one reportedly did) can be very… contractual. Like how she gets Hua to agree to experiments by pushing her— sure, she said yes, but she said yes because they’re desperate and Mobius is insisting, and agreeing to retrieve the box didn’t mean agreeing to get possessed for science. Obviously this isn’t true consent, but on a technicality it respects Mobius’s moral code. It’s like a kid getting asked whether they ate yet who pops a single candy in their mouth then says yes. Honestly I relate to that dhdhdhf

I like this contrast, though!

Another fun thing is that she’s probably the eldest of the Flame-Chasers, and the one who’s worked with MOTH the longest, and she absolutely does not have the patience to be. She’s also super autistic? I relate to her a lot. Did you know that when she gets mad she just plops herself on her couch and pops bubble wrap for hours. Iconic work ethic. I love her.

Her stubborn fascination with life and death leads her to subvert some mad scientist tropes, for example her insistence to humanize the MANTIS. There’s also the way she treats her assistants and creations, very unusual for the archetype which tends to be all SCIENCE and no time to raise anybody.

If you paid attention, for all that she can troll them or punish them a little, she’s never cruel and nurtures them properly.

When she hears Fuxi and Nuwa messed up and tried to hide it she makes them copy the lab safety rules, this was very much a pedagogical decision with their safety in mind, not her taking her anger out on them. In fact I don’t think she really does that at any moment?

Even the Sim (more morally dubious already) attacking Mei is doing it with a set purpose, nothing personal. For such an overtly malicious character she… doesn’t actually act on malice very much lol. At most she’s very selfish, and her curiosity drives her to perform cruel actions, rather than an intent to harm. The rest of the time she’s quite serious, wants what’s best for everyone, on paper that’d be quite pleasant uh?

When there’s interpersonal friction it usually comes down to what you can easily read as neurodivergence; Elysia and Hua observe that Mobius makes no difference between herself and others. In other words, she assumes that what SHE can tolerate, anyone can or should be able to, which isn’t true. Struggling with that stuff is very autistic coded. I relate. It makes her struggles and everyone demonizing her more tragic, too. I’d wager that everyone calling her names and alienating her greatly contributed to her cynical ways, making the issue worse.

Despite all that though, she treats her creations well, and instead of trying to control them she makes a point of giving them the freedom to be themselves and supports their choices, even if she doesn’t agree with them (like trying to push ELF Klein away by showing her what working together would be like, because she thought Klein wouldn’t be able to handle it, but since Klein could she gave up and accepted both that she had projected her anxieties and Klein’s own choice).

Big subversion to mad scientist tropes there! This leads to pretty much all of her creations adoring her (aside from the Sim but like, self-hatred go brrrr).

It makes lots of sense when you keep in mind that she’s also a child abuse survivor. She claims she throws her creations to the wolves because even humans are only left to themselves, but she’s lying.

The sim sacrifices herself for Klein’s sake (both of them lovingly protect and raise Klein), the real one leaves a loving message for her sim, to the Gray Serpents of the early days she was so important that they dedicated themselves to understand what it would mean to follow her wish to be free by CREATING MULTIPLE CULTS, and they still lowkey worship her as their creator after 50 000 years…

Yeah she cares a lot. She cares a lot about Griseo too, as well as other Flame-Chasers, like Eden, Vill-V or Elysia (despite being annoyed).

Her relationship with Vill-V is also interesting, because when Mobius realizes she’s similar to herself, her first impulse is to kill her immediately. Ultimately she doesn’t, but it was really a “recognition of the self through the other (derogatory)” moment. She also warns Vill-V multiple times about the weight of failure, and I think she pretty much sees herself fifteen years younger in her— a brilliant neurodivergent scientist with a few moral screws loose about to get smacked with the reality of the Apocalypse. Really can’t see this as romantic but ymmv.

TLDR

My opinion is that she’s just full of interesting character depth and I just eat that up, especially since I have a particular fondness for morally dubious mom types that care very much deep down.

#honkai impact #hi3 #asks #mobius #I support women’s wrongs

[rawliverandgoronspice]

Okay, I just wanna say that Ganondorf in ToTK, despite not having Wind Waker’s pathos, is easily the best Ganondorf we’ve had (which is surprising considering some parts of the story). He’s terrifying whenever he shows his mug, he’s active and damn near omnipresent though Puppet Zelda and the Phantom Ganons/gloom spawns, and he’s easily the most unhinged take on the character we’ve ever seen. As for his motives, it’s as simple as turning hyrule into a chaotic hellish landscape where the only rule is that the strong thrive and the weak die, which isn’t really unique, but the landscape and monsters in the game kinda cements how bad that would be.

I get we were kinda expecting another Wind Waker situation, but what we got is great too because Ganondorf was great in Ocarina of Time and he too wasnt anything beyond pure near omnipresent evil.

I mean... I think it's as good as any a time to bring up a really important distinction to the way I critique stuff in general, which is that there's a part of interacting with art that is kind of is... true at a fundamental level? That fundamental level being the emotional response. Nobody can ever be more right or wrong for their emotional response, it's kind of non-debatable.

So I'm really glad TotK Ganondorf did it for you! I genuinely am. I actually loved some things about his incarnation; the musical motifs and the way they are integrated within the story (!!! so good), the concept of Fake Zelda, the actual final fight which I 100% agree is the best one we ever had (still love the TP one, but, the horseback part is a little eeeh and the swordfight could have been harder), his various designs, Gloom Hand and Phantom Ganon which are probably among my favorite parts of the game...

But yeah, I suppose I'm the kind of annoying player who needs a solid thematic framework to relax and accept the scenario proposed (the kind that is driven by mimicry and meaning, which is, I have to admit, especially hard and ungrateful to design for --and so is, often, completely ignored *sobs*). So I would have been completely fine with a Ganondorf without pathos, but one that did fit better within its own environment and countered the themes of the game and developed an ideological philosophy that you could solidly oppose, and not just treating him as an excuse to usher the gameplay forward (I mean, he did betray the gerudos which stranded him while you get to receive everyone's help, but he is not alone in practice! Every monster stands by his side! He may even have a more devoted and stronger support system than you depending on how you play the game). But that goes beyond Ganondorf: I had much trouble seeing past the self-referential and actually enjoy what Tears of the Kingdom had to offer in terms of emotional texture.

But yeah. Could not get behind the writing and a lot of choices in terms of... I don't know, the timing of his maniacal laughter, for example? I feel like a good maniacal laughter needs to be earned, and there's so many times where it just felt completely cheap to me? Even OoT Ganondorf, who had his share of cheap laughter moments, kind of had them work by the simple fact that they were here to directly mock us, the player, and our actions (if I remember well he only has two in the entire game: one after getting his way within the Sacred Realm, and one right before the final battle). We're not going over the extraordinary WW laughter, which is everything to me, but I also really enjoyed the kind-of-unhinged-but-sober take on TP Ganondorf, where he laughs only once and because he knows that he is close to losing probably. I think that was a great characterization, and I'm kind of sad they got rid of it to replace it with [insert maniacal laughter here] sort of approach that isn't specific to the character built over the years (except for the moment where he turns into a dragon, which was the one I liked the most --but it was greatly overused in my opinion).

So I really think his absence of specificy and the fact that his plans are pretty much nonsensical when you examine them for more than a minute, and the fact that he was all over the place and actually sparring with you and building direct grief with you in previous titles, where here I really wasn't sold on why I was supposed to invest myself in the situation besides a vague sense of duty and "that's what the game expects of me" really... didn't sell me the intimidation or the presence. There are a couple of iconic moments that I genuinely loved to see (the whole fist in the throat was GREAT, and perhaaaaps the "come at me" tho even THAT is self-referential grumble grumble sorry to be like this I'm genuinely sorry, the thought wouldn't even have crossed my mind if everything else about him wasn't a strange patchwork, but, it does pile up), but, I needed the framework to stand on its own to genuinely love him in this game.

But I'm really glad if he scratched the itch for you! Most people seem to agree too, which is great. I just... I mean, I am obviously invested in this not becoming the standard of quality. I think we could keep a lot of what worked here and add a scoop of better writing and thematic consistency, and I'd be on board way more already.

#asks #totk #totk critical #totk spoilers #when will my brain return from the imprisoning war... #ganondorf #oot #wind waker #ww #tp #thanks for the ask! #yeah I'm sorry I was never going to agree haha #but it's fine! I completely can see why people would just ride the epic ride and not be bothered by the rest #I'm just too annoying to interact with media (including the media I work on this has literally Caused Problems)

[fem-the-artist]

Since I’m putting Danny and Timmy in the same universe for this AU, where their cousins, I’m going to bend the rules a bit since fairies are a bit broken when it comes to abilities 

And we’re following more of the rules of the Danny phantom universe than the fairly odd parents one since it’s more linear and consistent in terms of world building

General things 

-fairies in ghosts are not the same (obviously) things that are made to capture, weaken, or be resistant to ghosts have no effect on fairies 

-Using the explanation from a glitch in time of how ghosts are manifestations of human emotions/I have a rough idea of how fairies could be similar yet different

-essentially fairies manifest to fulfill human desire. Specifically those of children, since they’re is the most unfiltered and thus much stronger.  essentially fairies, manifest, and take the appearance of what a child desperately wants.

Ex: for Timmy, because because his relationship with his parents is less than ideal, Cosmo and Wanda manifested the way they did as pseudo parents for him

Other examples of how fairies could potentially manifest if Tootie had a fairy she would manifest to fulfill an older sister role since the one she has is nasty an awful

For Remy it’s a little more complicated because though he craves the love of his parents, he also craves to have somebody to listen to him and do what he says so Juandisimo feels more of the role of a nanny/butler,  someone who cares for him yet is also obligated to stay by his side 

-as for magic, I’m absolutely nerfing the hell out of it some of the standard rules are still in place can’t harm or kill. Can’t wish to get rid of anybody else’s fairies, can’t use them to win a competition.  no love related wishes etc.

-It’s implied that fairies can only create things and not destroy them so I’m going to just state that as fact here, and in terms of creating for this au what a fairy creates with magic is essentially like a solid illusion  which might not make sense, so let me explain it like this

If you were to wish for a roller coaster even though it’s just a solid illusion, it would feel exactly like a real roller coaster and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, but when wishing for some thing like food, you could bite into it, it just wouldn’t taste like anything and you wouldn’t feel any fuller eating it

-Fairies don’t understand how humans work. They don’t understand why food is necessary or how they need to breathe or even some social cues. 

-like ghosts fairies aren’t entirely solid so they can pass through things like walls. Very easily fairies, however cannot turn invisible, which is why they have the ability to shape shift.  tho some ghost can shape shift to it takes effort on their part for a fairy shape shifting is as natural as breathing to a human. 

-fairies are not malicious by nature quite the opposite and they thrive on whimsy and joy which is why they only reveal themselves to children (fairies have a large dislike towards adults since they’re the ones that usually pull children back reality, which can stop out there whimsy)

-fairies are extremely cautious when it comes to revealing themselves most ghosts don’t have a problem with being in broad daylight, or making themselves known, but because fairies are more docile creatures, they avoid any attention that could fall on them 

-fairies are mysterious and almost completely unheard of in terms of their actual nature. Those individuals like Crocker, who want to hunt fairies, and prove that they’re real still exist. They are much far and few between unlike ghost hunters, since ghosts have been proven to be real unlike fairies. 

Getting kind of dark for a second

-fairies can be dangerous, if a fairy deems a child’s situation to be too terrible for them to bear the fairy might just steal the child away (fairies don’t know how humans work much less how to take care of a child, though they are good companions, that can help children through difficult times, when a fairy decides to take things into their own hands, and take a child from their caretakers it’s most likely that the child will not survive considering a Fairy’s lack of knowledge when it comes to actual caregiving and human  necessities)

#fairly oddparents #fop #text post #danny phantom #danny and timmy being cousins #cousins au #got a little too silly

[royalberryriku]

That one post™ I read recently about being transfem gays and transmasc lesbians got me thinking about gender and sexuality and mine specifically and just... I have so many thoughts and feelings about this.

So many queers assume gender to be this: woman, man or non binary (assumed to mean agender). Yet, so many of us just don't fit into that at all. I know it's not out of malice too, and sometimes we even do know that it's not that simple and try to include bigender, gender fluid, etc in that, but even so, we always go back to assumptions; to a set bias of binary of which we struggle to undo the rules we've set in our own heads and perspectives.

Suddenly, we have limits of which do exclude other queers and even sometimes ourselves, we have hypocritical definitions and fall into a habit of drawing lines around what is This and what is That. And I get it; we want to know ourselves better, to word our experiences more exactly and describe to those around us what it's like to live as someone like us. But here's the thing; that's always not going to be 100% possible. There's always going to be differences and variation even within the same definitions and labels. No matter how similar we may be in regards to a shared experiences and shared struggles, there'll always be exceptions.

Gender and sexuality are like that. I'll expand on this below:

For those who are not transgender or who just generally struggle with this topic and don't know much about it, here's an outline:

Gender identity is, in a very general sense, one's perception of their identity as a person; it's that question of who they are and what they want to be referred to and seen as. For example, if you go up to a cis lady and start making her out to be a man simply because she has short hair, she'd get offended, right? Same case with transgender people, if you start pointing at their chest or at a beard or something like that and start assigning an identity that doesn't align with who they are, they'd get offended for the same exact reason; because they are [insert gender] regardless of appearance.

Now, with that understood, I'll continue with this discussion of sexuality, mine specifically, and then move onto my gender and it's lack of conformity.

I'm bisexual; I'm attracted to all genders, all sexes, all everythings. In fact, more so than most people I know, I have a very diverse range of things I'm into and attracted to. But not every bisexual person is like that. Some bisexual people like only certain things and some only like specific genders. We all have our own different preferences and no two people will have the exact same sexuality; because we are all unique in what we like. And even in saying that for myself, this was a journey of discovery after spending years as asexual, then a lesbian, then a heterosexual man, then someone who used both straight and lesbian to describe by love of women as someone whose gender was indistinct and now as bisexual having now realised I do love men and other genders as well. All throughout this process, I was surrounded by a community, one I still feel very connected to and have some overlap with as well. It's interesting and beautiful how these people both differ from me and yet how also similar we still are, even now.

Sexualities are here, as terms, to help us find more people who are similar; to find solidarity in a shared experience. However, it isn't to find those exactly the same because, see, that just doesn't exist. That's why lesbian and gay can actually have some overlap, that's why woman and man aren't opposites, that's why gender isn't this "one or the other" thing; because experience is far too varied to ever be narrowed down to such a degree. It's always going to be general; an inexact estimate of similarities that more or less fit a vague definition.

My gender on the other hand? Now that's even more complicated. As I said before, most assume it's a "one or the other" deal, even with non binary in the mix, but the thing is that these terms are general; they are vague and can overlap. I'm a trans man, but I'm also non binary. I am a man, and sometimes I want to be perceived as the same as a cis man, but not always. This also is something that means I may fit under being gender fluid. However, on top of that, I am more often than not two or more things at once. I'm a man, but I also see myself as a butch lady at the same time. This also fits under the definition of being bigender. Yet, on top of that? There are also times when I just feel removed from gender identity as a thing all together. This also fits with agender.

Now, for those who may not be so familiar with all these terms I'm throwing around, I'm essentially saying my identity in regards to the question "are you a man or woman" or even "so are you neither" is very fluid, but it's also both and sometimes even neither or all of the above. The hard thing is this; we have this pre-established subconscious bias that these things are all opposites, that there's a definitive line that divides them. However, in my own experience, this just doesn't apply to everyone and especially not to me who struggles to know where I'd even begin to draw such a line for myself. Woman and man are simply not opposites to me because I am something that overlaps. I'm a man, 100%, not leaning or "a bit"; I am absolutely, entirely a boy. However, my gender would be something that shifts to the same as, say, a he/him lesbian that may not feel that they are a man per se. The difference is I'm both, and many lesbians and trans men do fit into that both category and have throughout history. Take Leslie Feinberg for instance, the author of Stone Butch Blues. Or the various other cases of butch lesbians and trans men overlapping in history or being mistaken for one another. There is a blurred region that can't be asked or told "oh but which are you" or even "so you're neither" because, at least in my case, I am both. I am 100% of both and it would be inaccurate and a lie to say I am neither, as much as it would be inaccurate or a lie to say I'm one of the other.

And you know what? It's okay if we don't understand what that means or where that fits. It's okay if all of what I said about myself has confused the living hell out of you. You don't need to understand me just like I don't need to understand you or anyone else to simply coexist and respect that we're going to have different preferences and views. I'll never know what it's like to be entirely in a binary, to be able to conform because I am simply unable to if I am to truely be myself and allow whatever that is to just exist. I also don't even necessarily have to understand it, as long I allow myself to exist.

I could honestly go on and on about sexuality, gender, romance, self identity and overall the value of finding community while also loving the value of one's own uniqueness, but I'll settle with this for now. All I'll say in regards to that is that this all also applies to being aromantic, demisexual, demigirl/boy, omnisexual, polysexual, xenogenders, pansexual and many, many other terms. These are all simply here to better understand ourselves and create more understanding of experiences that may no fit into other pre-existing terms. That's awesome and something to embrace. You don't even necessarily have to worry about understanding these or remembering them all. At the end of the day, these people are all simply fellow queers and define themselves in a range of both different or similar ways to the more well known sexualities and orientations, stretching back to heterosexuality and the norm of cisgender experiences. These are all simply terms to describe the differences between each of these lived experiences; all these different people in different terms aren't so different from you and you aren't so different to them.

But I digress, the point here is that regardless of gender or sexuality, nothing is set in stone and nothing can truly all be defined with one single definition. No matter how rigid the definition, no matter who is excluded or included, no matter how much it fits you or someone else, it won't fit everyone perfectly and there'll always be differences even within those labels. That's a fact of life and the beauty of it. It's part of why I am protective of the word queer and gay; a word that means different and a word that means happy. Because to live as truely to yourself as possible, enjoy the splendor of those little quirks and unique bits to yourself, to fall in love with yourself regardless of if you're the same or completely different or what or who you are? That's beautiful and wonderful. It's something to be proud of and celebrated. And it's something I wish for all of us to be able to one day appreciate; falling in love with ourselves and our unique existences.

#transgender #queer #nonbinary #gay #bisexuality #asexuality #lesbian #writing community #gender #writing #politics #gender identity #essay writing #writers on tumblr #sexuality #homosexuality #non binary #agender #genderfluid #genderqueer #bigender #transmasc #transfem #self love #solidarity #pride #trans men #trans women #trans is beautiful #trans rights

[aguineapigcouldntdothis]

a general guide on how to research things online beyond just looking at a few tweets (this doesn't apply for every single thing you search but i hope it's helpful for anyone researching current events, history, science, or anything that's complex enough to warrant something more than a quick google search):

have inspiration for what you wanna research. doesnt matter where it came from it could be that random tweet you just saw! now, find a source that relates to what that inspiration said

find at least two more sources that are directly related to your first source. i like to use the "two is a coincidence, three is a pattern" rule.

examine the people who created your sources! who wrote them? are there any other prominent figures included? what are their credentials? what is their expertise? do they have enough experience in this topic to be discussing it? you can use these questions as a guideline but please please feel free to diverge. the main thing you wanna see is: is there anyone involved in this source who knows enough about this topic to be talking about it.

examine the places in which your sources are published! what are their biases? are those biases present in these sources? what type of information do they usually release? one question i like to ask is "how badly would they be fucked if they got a major fact wrong" this can range from a blogger who may get a few angry comments, to a writer of a huge news source who could be fired and not hired again for a similar position ever. this can help judge how important fact-accuracy is to that specific source.

☆ 3-4 are good steps to use google a lot, which you can honestly do in any of these steps but these particular ones lend themselves nicely to googling the fuck out of things.

5. analysis time! this is my favorite i love it but it can be a fucking pain especially when you're still figuring it out. basically what you want to know is what are these sources trying to do, what are they actually doing, and how do they tie together. sometimes this is really easy! sometimes all of your sources have the same overarching story, the same fact included, etc. however that's not always the case and sometimes you've gotta dig a little deeper to find those strong connections. and other times you'll have a source you thought was good but it just doesnt fit in, so it's time to scrap it and find a new one. this is your time to be super fucking nitpicky about details in the spirit of high school english classes.

6. now put all that together! you have your sources, you have overarching information you learnt, and possibly some specific information too! now you can share that if you wish or not share it.

"my guinea pig loving friend", you may be asking, "doesn't that mean I'll have less information to share"

abso-fucking-lutely it does, yet the information you do share will be a lot more carefully thought out and most likely better. every piece of information you share has the capacity to affect someone and being mindful about sharing proper info can reduce negative impacts. you will fuck up sometimes and that's super normal however you can avoid fuck ups by being careful about the information you believe and share.

i hope this helped someone! idk if it will this is just shit ive used and i think it works well. i might include an example in a reblog if i can find a topic to base it on sadly i am tired and that's not my problem rn

#information #information literacy

[cy-cyborg-draws]

I just want to say I've been loving your story so far! Where did you learn to write? I've been loving how you write dialogue. All of my characters always sound the same.

Thank you so much!

I've been writing ever since I was little, so most of it has just come from lots of practice! That and my partner is also an author and is getting his own book edited lately, so I've been trying to pay attention to the feedback and advice he's been getting too.

But I struggle a lot with my characters sounding the same too (Its actually part of the reason I wanted to write my fic so I actually had a chance to practice on something I could work on quickly, as opposed to my comics that take years to make lol). A method I found relatively recently though that's helped me out a lot is called the "filter method" of writing dialogue. Basically, you write a very direct and to-the-point version of the conversation that establishes what you want to get from the exchange, then you give each character a set of "filters" - things they will or won't talk about and edit the conversation based on those.

So for example, in the last chapter of my fic, Cynder and Valori talk while they head towards the village. The point of that conversation was to establish that Valori (and by extension, the other dragons on the island) don't know much about what happened in the cannon game series, because they're so isolated, and to establish that something about this island is kind of off - specifically the curse Valori mentions. So the to-the-point version of the conversation was basically just that, the two characters stating, point-blank, things about where they live/d and the things they don't know. Obviously that's not a natural conversation though, so this is where the filters come in. The most obvious things you want to filter out are that the characters aren't going to outright say they don't know something, because they don't know to bring it up, so you filter out some of that directness and adjust as needed so the "point" of the conversation can still be addressed. Valori doesn't know what a purple dragon is for example, so Cynder had to say something to lead into that part of the conversation, so she can ask about it. Cynder doesn't know about the curse impacting the island, so Valori had to say something to lead into that so Cynder can ask about it. There's also the personal filters, Cynder's filters are basically anything to do with her history or the fact she has multiple elements - she will not usually mention either of those things in conversation as she wants to keep them secret for her safety. Stuff about her history can be coaxed out of her in certain situations (e.g. after pyra told Valori everything anyway, so she wants to set the record straight), but she won't reveal all of it without a big push. So any mentions of that get edited out, and she'll move away from conversations she thinks are going in that direction/change the topic. Valori on the other hand is a very open book, she has no reason to hide things for the most part, and she knows very little about the outside world. She likely won't bring up anything she assumes is normal for all dragons based on her knowledge of life on the island, because she assumes Cynder already knows them, so those conversation topics will get filtered out, at least until she realizes this isn't the case a bit later.

You can also include smaller, less situational filters too. For example, a character in a comic I'm working on used to work as a botanist and has a special interest in plants (she's autistic), so some of her filters include the fact she talks in very formal language and prefers larger, more specific words. so any smaller words or less direct language will usually get filtered out in her speech, giving her a distinct voice compared to her love interest, who's a farmer who prefers slang and informal language.

Basically, these filters act as rules for how your character behaves and talks that help make them sound different to one another. I saw this method in a youtube video but I haven't been able to find it again. It helped me a lot though, I don't use it all the time but it's a good fall-back if I'm finding a lot of my dialogue between characters is feeling too similar or is just not going the way I want it to!

#writeblr #writing #writers on tumblr #writing advice #writing asks #writng #authors #writing dialogue #character dialogue #on writing #writing tips #fanfic

[tirsynni]

Possibly one of the most disturbing things about a current fandom trend is that I've seen the build-up to it. Right now, no matter where you look, you'll see a growing wave of characters needing a "diagnosis." They need to have a mental/physical health label. They need to have explanations regarding their behaviors, ie, the increasingly popular "I see this character acting this way and thus I am confident they were abused as a child." As I saw one person describe it, every character needs pathologized.

Mind you, if you want to write a character as autistic, ADHD, etc., that is fine. Perhaps you have a diagnosis and want your comfort character to have it, too. Perhaps you want to explore something or just mess around. Whatever. I don't care. It's when people insist on it, make a diagnosis mandatory, insist that their perception of the character with this diagnosis is correct, etc., that it gets disturbing.

While I'm aware that many people are frustrated with the social services and mental health field -- and I completely understand, as I work in these fields and I know how messy they can be -- and turn to the internet for assistance and self-diagnose themselves when official diagnoses seem beyond their reach, I'm also very aware how dangerous this practice is. I've seen this practice grow online to the extent that every behavior has to be pathologized. No matter what anyone does, there is a diagnosis attached ("Ah, this person is so distractible, so clearly they have ADHD") or a specific history (the ever popular "This person MUST have had an abusive family growing up").

I love whumping my characters. I love using them to explore different things, including mental health issues and trauma. (Hell, one of my current LoZ fics has some inspiration from some recent training and me wondering about the character's unique background and if that would increase or decrease vulnerability to certain things.) Sometimes, I'll do my research to try to have symptoms and behaviors at least in the ballpark of correct. This is all fiction, though. When everything is colored through these lens, including how one perceives fictional characters, things become dangerous.

One big rule in the social services and mental health fields is that you are not supposed to diagnose clients. Ever. If a professional looks at a client and arbitrarily decides that they have such-and-such diagnosis, that forever colors how they perceive the client and thus opens the doorway to them mishandling the case, putting their own biases on a client, recommending the wrong care, etc. It can lead to them dismissing many of the client's statements because it doesn't align with the perceived diagnosis. This includes the decision of "I have no actual information about this person's past, but based on their behavior, they must have had an abusive home environment." This can lead to the professional changing how they interact with the client, the client's supports, overlooking other -- possibly dangerous -- factors, etc.

Humans aren't that simple. If someone is displaying a certain behavior, many things could have caused it. Humans are too complicated to decide that "Oh, yes, obviously this occurred in their background." That's absolutely not how it works. That's the damned Sherlock Syndrome in action. Many, many factors affect how people act and react, and the insistence that obviously this behavior must be caused by this is downright disturbing.

When a diagnosis is being made in a professional environment (if the person is, in fact, a qualified professional and actually good at their job), part of the process includes ruling out other factors. Many children have been diagnosed with ADHD when, in fact, they are suffering from sleep deprivation and stress. By treating it as ADHD, they are allowing the other unhealthy behaviors to continue and give the child medication they don't need. Adderall affects people with ADHD and people without ADHD very differently, for example. The professionals are also supposed to have standards to increase the chances of the correct diagnosis. Is the patient tired and distracted? Did something happen this morning which could affect the client's normal behaviors and throw off the assessment? Is there something about the person doing the assessment which is affecting the results? It's like trying to do a medical assessment and constantly getting high blood pressure because the person is afraid of the doctor's office.

I've also seen people tag a character with a diagnosis, and not only is the character themselves unrecognizable, but they end up writing a crude parody of the diagnosis itself. They read less like a character and more like a caricature. The writer went online, did some quick research, and ended up with a character who might as well be a token character on a sitcom. It ends up being actively insulting by the end. In the instances where it's done well enough so it isn't 100% insulting, you still have an unrecognizable character due to the person preferring their perception of what the diagnosis would/should look like rather than the wanting to write the character in question. (Mandatory note: if you want to write someone OOC, no problem. Just recognize that, in order to make them fit your preferred mold, you did write them OOC and not insist that yes, they are completely in character and everyone else is in the wrong for saying otherwise. It's fanfiction. Write what pleases you. Just don't insist that it's something it's not.)

All of this also dramatically simplifies the mental health field. It simplifies the various issues into something you would see in grade school. It simplifies medication and therapy into miracle cures. It reduces the insanely complicated human brain into a child's puzzle. "Ah, this person has this, so they will display these behaviors. Makes sense." "Ah, this person is struggling with this. Give them a therapist and they'll be good as new!" Like, I can imagine that someone is dealing with Stuff in real life and want to write a fic where the character does find a miracle cure. As previously stated, no problem. Just don't insist that everyone else needs to perceive what they wrote as real life miracle cures. That's not how it works, things are more complex than that, and no size fits all, especially in the mental health field.

I've seen it online for a while now: people enthusiastically putting their entire diagnosis up for everyone to see, people merrily slapping labels on themselves, people looking at every video and going, "Oh, I do this!" People insisting that everyone needed a diagnosis slapped on them and, if they didn't have a diagnosis, they were clearly in denial. They pathologize themselves, their behaviors, everything around them, and now one of the first things they do when discovering a new favorite character is ask, "What is their diagnosis?"

This post isn't meant to discourage people from researching their own needs and their own mental health. It isn't angrily forbidding people from writing characters how they want them. It is a statement that the mental health field, humans in general, human brains, mental health, etc., is far more complex than "Oh, I have this diagnosis, so I have these symptoms and here is what I need to do!" It's stating that there is a difference between being aware that someone has certain behaviors and responses and pathologizing everything a person or character does. It is stating that sometimes it is very, very easy to go from "I headcanon this character as this" to "If someone looks/acts/etc. this way, they obviously are this." If these actions are your go-to, then you might want to take a step back and breathe for a bit.

...it's also a tad frustrating as someone with a diagnosis, as someone who works in this field, to see someone tagged as ADHD and being a sitcom stereotype or seeing therapy solve everything. Write whatever you want, but have some self-awareness when writing.

...it's also funny that I see the tag "medical inaccuracies" but never see a tag about "mental health inaccuracies." Hmm.

#rant #long post #fandom rant #mental health #internet pathology #internet culture #fandom culture #chill people #i'm happy to talk about this subject #and i know this was #if a long post #still a very brief summary of these issues #but there is a reason that #the popular response #for mental health #medical issues #etc #is #“Talk to your doctor”

[donnerpartyofone]

your posts about self esteem were really interesting. I hope you don't mind if I ask, but do you struggle with empathy? I've got friends in psychology who say self compassion is correlated to compassion for others, so often low empathy = poor self image. Social skills are often hampered by conditions like autism, and compassion is social.

Thank you for this provocative question, anon! I like that you say those posts were "interesting" instead of like, sad or delusional or something. I had to start blocking people who were compelled to tell me what to think or how to feel about myself, or who thought they were helping by denying the nature of what I was reporting. A few people recently had a more thoughtful or inquisitive reaction and I found that really refreshing.

Apologies in advance for this long dissertation on ME, but I'm glad you asked this specific question because it relates to something that came up recently that I think is important to talk about. More below the break so I don't ruin everyone's dash.

First of all I think I do not struggle with empathy; if anything I seem to have a hyperactive sensitivity to other people's moods and dispositions. One of the reasons parties are hard for me is that it takes a lot of energy to be immersed in other people's, uh, "vibes" or "auras"--please don't take anything mystical from my word choice, it's just hard to describe otherwise. I start syncing with other people to make myself less weird and off-putting (who knows how much I'm succeeding!), and then I need a lot of solitude to get back to my baseline. I'm very concerned with how other people feel, which is why I've been so good in hospitality-related jobs. But I'm sure this is related to the fact that I have major boundary issues, I get so hung up on how other people (seem to) feel that it can make it hard for me to assert myself until someone has pushed me way over the edge.

But I guess there's a limit re: the "reading social cues" bit. I *think* I read the room pretty well most of the time (I must! For my survival!), but I have a history of taking people at their word too much and not noticing that someone has bad intentions until it's too late. Maybe there's a certain amount of literalism going on. Like a really simple example is, I have a hard time with the concept of being "fashionably late"; if a party starts at 8, I will arrive anxiously right at 8, and there's a good chance that I will get there at like 7:57 and lurk on your front steps until the clock turns 8 BECAUSE YOU SAID 8, YOU MUST HAVE MEANT 8. I have finally learned that nobody really likes this unless they're my best friend or something, but I can't tell myself "Just relax and get there when you get there," that's too confusing, I have to say "We will now arrive at 8:20 because this is the secret code of party start times." That's a benign sort of dysfunction, but another version of that is, my boyfriend says he loves me and he doesn't want to break up. Actually he cheats on me all the time and screams at me and scares me, but because he like *technically* loves me and doesn't want to break up because that's what he literally said, my stupid brain thinks that's the rule and the other manifestations of his feelings must be anomalous, and then I'm in a really bad relationship for a long time because I just don't see the subtext until I'm really being beaten over the head with it. There have been a lot of times where I acted like I was legally obligated to come to an understanding of what someone else thinks and feels, when it would have been more rational to say, "This person is being an asshole, it doesn't matter why, I'm ditching."

I *think* this is related to your question about empathy, sorry if I'm being crazy.

So now for your question about self-compassion: I'm grateful for your prompt because I just had an argument about this with someone I love, and I don't think I did a good job of explaining it. I've also fielded some other feedback around these parts that was suggestive of the same idea, which is like: If I say that Behavior X is a crime when I do it, it must mean that Behavior X is an equally punishable crime when someone else does it, so therefore it is rude and inhumane of me to be mad at myself. This argument is missing a consideration of both context, and what exactly criminalizes Behavior X. The first note to make is that Behavior X is usually something that is NOT destructive when it happens just once in a while, innocently--but It becomes a big problem when it happens all the fucking time, like an infestation. If I "innocently" fumble something 50 times a day, that has a much more destructive effect than you making the same mistake just-sometimes. But let's say you DO make the same mistake a lot, so you still feel accused by my personal self-loathing. Now we get to the more important question of what or who is affected by the behavior. I feel sorry for people whose quirks and compulsions and such make their lives hard, obviously I relate! However, if those people came to my house and started doing their quirks and compulsions TO ME, then that's a different thing entirely.

Let's do some examples: If I complain about my weight, that's not the same as saying all fat people suck. What I'm really complaining about is the impact of weight on my own life, the negative effect on my social currency, my inability to find comfortable and attractive clothes, etc. I'm complaining about having to fight with doctors who think BMI gives them a free pass not to treat people, and also about genuine health problems I might struggle with. So my feeling about my own weight really has nothing to do with my feelings about other people's weight, I'm really reacting to my own personal discomfort, which is related to a whole complex of things, but none of those things is truly equivalent to complaining about fat people in general. Similarly, when I complain here about being stupid, I'm not assigning a moral quality to human stupidity, I'm really complaining about the effect of my personal stupidity on my own life. I do believe that there must be something cognitive or neurological going on with me so maybe I can't totally help what I'm like, but I find it impossible not to react to how my own stupidity makes it extremely hard to get through my day. It makes it scary to wake up in the morning. There are so many normal things that I either have to do over and over and over again, or that someone else actually has to do FOR me, which is humiliating and makes me feel hopeless (even though I'm glad for the help because what would I do without it?). Sometimes my life feels like fucking Groundhog Day, it feels like I'm achieving a fraction of what a normal person does in a lifetime, because everything takes me so many tries or is impossible to ever get past. I feel sorry for other people who go through the same stuff, but to me, that's totally separate from how I feel about myself. I hate myself NOT because I am a certain kind of person or because I did something that is objectively a sin, but because I, personally, am the reason I'm suffering and failing. This is not at all abstract or generalizing, it's something I'm forced to deal with, materially, every day. It's just too much to ask, for me to pity myself every single time I fuck myself over yet again. What can I say, I'm not a saint!

So I hope that sort of addresses your question! One of the reasons I get so upset when someone tries to make excuses for my behavior, or suggests that I am just exaggerating because I'm down on myself, is that if I can't have honesty about what goes on with me, then I can't ever get clarity about WHY this stuff is going on. If I agree to the premise that the 25 bad, destructive things I did today were "just because" I was distracted, or flustered, or overworked, or it was an innocent mistake, or it was someone else's fault, or it was a random coincidence, or an act of god, or I just need to learn the right way, or I just need to try harder, or I just have to have a better attitude, et al ad nauseum--that is, if I accept excuses instead of acknowledging a persistent pattern, then I might not ever get to the point of having a useful, explanatory diagnosis like ADHD or autism or...whatever is specifically going on with me. And I mean whatever happens, I WILL always try harder to improve myself, even if sometimes that feels like not learning from history. But it's becoming kind of obvious that a lot of the arguments I have with people could probably be cut off at the pass if I had a note from a doctor that said SEE? I'M REALLY JUST LIKE-THIS. I don't know what I'm going to do about that, with the Adderall shortage and what I'm told is the difficulty of getting an adult autism diagnosis. And like I'd hate to test for autism (or whatever) and have it come back ambiguous, it might make me feel like I'm "just fucking stupid" and I don't have a real problem, and it could also be problematic for these conversations I keep having with people who think I'm basically imagining the whole thing and just being "hard on myself". But I don't know, I think diagnosis may become a bigger focus for me in 2024.

Anyway. Thanks for reading this monstrosity if you did, and thanks for being thoughtful about my depression posting. It's refreshing.

[quetzalpapalotl]

reverse hot take meme: tell me why I should care about Prowl?

I assume you’re talking about IDW1 Prowl. Truly I love him. I love how everyone is so passionate about him whether they love him or hate him. Mmm this was a fun ask and it got long, so under a cut it goes!

He seems like a good character to me, because I can always see where he’s coming from, even if he’s what we call an awful person. I think Prowl is the Phase 2 character with the most cohesion across his different writers. I know that may sound strange, Barber, Roche, and Roberts write him with a different flavor, yes, but I think they all have the same core understanding and just focus on different things according to their respective genres.

For example, JRo’s Prowl feels way pettier and more emotional than Barber’s, which fits with how Mtmte puts a lot of focus on interpersonal flaws. However, I’d argue Barber’s Prowl is just as petty, I mean *point to the whole ordeal with Spike on Earth* or like, he’s willing to let Caminus die so that Starscream doesn’t try to rule all the galaxy which while Starscream did wanted to control the Colonies, he would not start a war against the cosmos again, he knows better than that. Prowl’s motivations are influenced by the fact that he hates the Decepticons and he can’t let Starscream win, but he’s able to rationalize his actions so he can keep telling himself he’s entirely reasonable.

But you asked me to give you specifically reasons to care about him, so I will argue he’s a lot like Megatron (and oh, Prowl would flip a table if he heard me, that’s so fun):

Both Prowl and Megatron are people extremely Machiavellian and willing to do anything for their specific vision of the Greater Good and both are lacking in self awareness and won’t admit to their actual motivations or that their methods are antithetical to their supposed goals. There are both convinced they are the only one that can do what needs to be done. To Prowl’s credit, he’s far less vainglorious, while Prowl does want credit, he doesn’t need a whole cult to worship him. Prowl wants influence rather than power and unlike Megatron he doesn’t actually like violence. He’s actually quite disgusted by it, which is part of the reason he needs other people do it for him.

But both run on paranoia, spite and a need to be war. They both need the war to give them meaning. Again, to be fair to Prowl, I think he actually does genuinely want the vision he claims to want, but anything else will mean he was wrong and all the things he did was maybe not as justified so he has dug himself into a hole of keeping the war running until he gets his desired ending or his whole idea of himself falls apart. While Megatron will use this unrealistic vision to have an excuse to keep on fighting because fighting is what gives him meaning.

Okay yeah, they’re not exactly the same, but they do have neat parallels and you like Megatron, right?

Prowl feels deeply tragic to me, because while he was always kind of a prick, his pre-war self really did seem to operate on a belief that rules and order are good. He had a lot of ideas of the old Cybertron internalizes, yes, but he does attempt to make things better for everyone. He prevents Sentinel from eradicating the Decepticons, he tries to stand against corruption, tries to keep Orion in check. Yet everything still goes to hell, so he sort of goes “fine, if everyone is going to make compromises I will too, except I will do the right ones because I can tell what they are” and now he’s trapped in a cage of his own doing and he’s aware of it but too deep in his own head to change even when he wants to. There’s some delicious irony because more than anything Prowl wants to be understood, but he won’t value anyone’s input over his own.

He's interesting, there's a lot to chew about him. He's a good character. This is fiction so I think that more important than anything else you can say about him. Thinking about Prowl is endlessly entertaining, he's so full of pathos and irony.

Also fun fact: he's Barber's favorite character dasfhgjsa, I believe that, Barber has such fun playing with him. I think JRo also mentioned him being a favorite at some point(?)

#be grateful i skipped the comparison between eugenesis and idw1 prowl #quetzal rambles tf