#Like sure it's fiction it's your story whatever you say is the rules is the rules

[sibblank]

not sure how to word this but having the embodiment of the sin of lust in your edgy story set in hell care very seriously about consent, has the same energy as when people convince themselves that spamton would hate nfts.

#Like sure it's fiction it's your story whatever you say is the rules is the rules #But it's obvious you're just treating your own moral standards as inherent laws of the universe that even literal embodiments of evil agree #It reeks of virtue signalling for lack of a better term

[noose-lion]

Maybe it was just my childhood special interest in martial arts and combat, but the bsd fandom drives me absolutely crazy on how they talk about the characters.

Specifically in combat abilities, fighting 'stats', body builds, ect. ect.

I mostly blame the anime, because it made everyone into twigs, but still. Some of my fellow fans out there are sometimes outright drawing lines over a character in a manga panel and going 'Look at this snatched waist' all the while ignoring basic perspective and forshortening rules. Chuuya is victim to this a fuckton.

For a starting example I'll talk about Kunikida. (Because if I start with Dazai or Chuuya I'll get the "He's petite it's not a crime to call him that" hecklers again).

Because remember folks, no need to get heated about fictional characters that were made up to tell a story.

Kunikida is a martial artist. He has a strong center of gravity, and a great deal of muscle mass. He's shown, (even in the anime mind you), to be competent against opponents who have both the height and mass advantage (that one time he swapped with Dazai mid fight, doing the cool grappling hook switch thing). He's a tall guy and he's drawn in the main manga as very broad shouldered and thick limbed. He's your average combat driven male. Built like a boxer.

He's not really the main talking point I see though. He's usually never called petite or delicate or any of the, quite frankly, ridiculous descriptors for a man of his size and build. It's usually Chuuya and in extension Dazai.

First off, ripping the bandaid off quick and easy. Chuuya isn't petite. (Sure technically petite only means short, but ancient also technically only means old. It's about the connotation.)

Chuuya is also a martial artist. Unlike Kunikida, who relies heavily on grappling technique and using his opponents own momentum and mass against them (a defensive fighter) Chuuya is almost purely offensive (most defense being left to his ability). His center of gravity is less stagnate, more fluid. He's acts quickly, crushing his opponent with efficient and well calculated brute force. Chuuya's body build reflects this. He's got a strong torso and thick limbs, strong shoulders that are lined with cords of muscle that absorb the impact of his attacks. He uses his legs a lot, kicks and jumps, and there is muscle concentration in his thighs and calves as a result. In the main manga, he's drawn with a lean torso, broader shoulders and thicker thighs. He's got a baseball player or a mixed martial artist build. (Broad shoulders and large thighs paired with his choice of suit cut is what creates his 'hourglass figure' so many of yall are obsessed with.)

Second bandaid I'm ripping off. Dazai isn't weak or delicate or whatever, but he is not buff or a tank either. And against men built for combat like Kunikida and Chuuya he's at a fairly large disadvantage.

Most of the athletic ability we've seen Dazai exhibit is evasion based. In the main manga he's drawn broad shouldered and thin, usually cloaked by his coat. Dazai has lean, muscle concentration in his shoulders, upper back and core. He doesn't have the thicker limbs of a boxer or martial artist. He better resembles a swimmer, gymnast, or even rock climber. He's not a stick, as flat as he may be. He's also probably a good deal softer then his martial artist counterparts, not living the stricter healthy life style most martial artist adhere to. Dazai doesn't do well against large heavily muscled opponents, he just doesn't have the needed mass for it. If he doesn't get the upperhand quickly he will loose. Evident in how he struggled so much against that one guy he did the cool grappling hook swap thing with Kunikida.

All this to say, almost every individual in bsd is built for their combat filled life, specialized to fit their fighting styles. It's not a big deal, but I find such thinking and analysis fun.

#inkedmyheart's recent post had me once more thinking on this #bsd #my stuff #screaming into the void #and the void screams back #bungou stray dogs #bungou gay dogs #bsd kunikida #kunikida doppo #bsd chuuya #chuuya nakahara #dazai osamu #bsd dazai #soukoku #jester thinks #bsd meta #bsd analysis #bsd headcanon #bsd headcanons

[keiththecat]

Most Vicious Animal

Pairings: Platonic Sam Winchester x Reader (You), Platonic Dean Winchester x Reader (You)

Summary: You're bored and ask the Winchester brothers a silly question.

Word Count: 521

Author's Note: Hello friends! Just a short little something inspired by a real conversation. As always, Y/N is your name, and feedback is always welcome. Thanks for reading <3

Disclaimer: I do not own Supernatural, or any of the related characters. The Supernatural series is created by Eric Kripke and owned by The CW Network. This work of fan fiction is for entertainment only. I am not making a profit of any kind from this story. All rights of the original Supernatural series belong to The CW Network.

AO3 link here

You had run into the Winchester brothers several times over the years before you finally moved into the bunker with them. There wasn’t really a discussion that led to it either; you all clicked so well that you just went back with them after a hunt, and now you’ve been living with them for months. Sometimes the three of you hunt together, sometimes it’s just them or just you, and sometimes it’s you with one of the brothers. You got along equally with both brothers, and you often spent your downtime hanging with one or both of them.

Now, you are having a slow day with both brothers in the bunker library. Sam has his face buried in a book and Dean is scrolling on a laptop. You are sitting sideways in a chair, legs hanging over the arm of the chair and your back against the other arm. You’re staring at the ceiling in boredom. “Hey Sam?” you ask.

“Hm?” Sam responds, acknowledging you but still reading his book.

“What is the biggest, most vicious animal you think you could beat in a fight?”

“Um, I don’t know, maybe like a wolf or something,” he answers, brushing off your question.

A few moments of silence pass, Sam absorbed in his book again. “You’re no fun,” you accuse. “Dean, what about you?”

“Depends,” Dean closes the laptop, clasping his hands and setting them on top of it, giving you his full attention. “Can I pick the fighting arena?”

“Uhhh, sure, why not.” You figure it can’t hurt, and you want to see how far Dean will take this.

“A great white.” He states confidently.

You stare at him in disbelief, eyebrows raised. “A shark?”

He nods as if it’s the most obvious answer, “on land. A beached great white. I could throat punch it.”

Sam’s attention now fully on the conversation, he looks up from his book to give Dean the most are-you-kidding-me glare, and you burst into laughter. “The lack of water would kill it before you could! That doesn’t count!”

“Not if I throat punch it fast enough! I’ll kill it first!” Dean argues, seeming offended.

You are laughing so hard there are tears forming in your eyes.

“What?” Dean asks. “You didn’t give any rules. I could fight a shark!”

“If Dean gets to do that, I’m changing my answer,” Sam says. “I could fight a frozen mammoth.”

“Mammoths aren’t real, Sam!” Dean yells, making you laugh even harder, tears pouring from your eyes.

“Not now, but they were, Dean! You said it yourself, there aren’t any rules!” Sam yells back.

“Boys! Boys!” you interrupt, trying to calm down and catch your breath. “You’re both cool and strong, no arguing.”

“Yeah, I’m so strong I could fight a great white,” Dean smugly states, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms.

“Well what’s your answer?” Sam asks you.

“I wouldn’t,” you shrug, smiling, “I’d trip both of you and run away from whatever it is.”

Dean’s jaw drops and he places a hand on his chest, pretending to be offended. “How rude.”

“Smart though,” Sam says, nodding.

#sam winchester #sam winchester x reader #gender neutral reader #dean winchester #dean winchester x reader #supernatural #sam winchester x you #dean winchester x you #dean x you #sam x you #spn imagine #supernatural imagine #spn #reader insert #fanfic #fanfiction #pov you #keiththecat

[theyanderespecialist]

Base Yandere Shang Li Headcanons: Protector (Mulan Animated)

[Hello, My Sexy Muffins! I am here with another chapter! This one is going to be yandere Shang li! So please enjoy this chapter and hope you are all enjoying the Lunar New Year!]

(Disclaimer: Shang Li is NOT Yandere in canon, this is just for fun and not to be taken seriously at all! Simping for fictional characters and yanderes is fine, just do not be gross or illegal about it! Yanderes are not ideal partners to have in real life. Also, remember to separate fiction from reality and headcanon from canon!)

-Base Yandere Headcanons With Shang Li (Mulan)-

.Shang Li is the Son of General Li.

.He is smart and capable.

.He is also very strong and has very good looks.

.He also might be bi or pan in canon (Which here is a bit of history in Ancient China men could have boyfriends along with their wives (Mainly in royal families) because in Ancient China being gay was not considered a Sin like it was in the West but these men still had to have wives because you ARE going to carry on your family name right? Which was expected at that time. So men being attracted to men was not treated the same as it was in the West at this time. There is even a story where a Chinese emperor was sleeping with his boyfriend and when he had to go leave for work instead of awakening his boyfriend he cut the sleeve of his clothes so he would not wake his boyfriend if he moved them) because he was very likely attracted to Mulan when she was dressed as a man and he thought she was one and as a woman.

.In this he has not mulan but he has met you and regardless of your physical form he loves you and is smitten with you.

.Just like the song that played when getting ready for the Matchmaker he is a man who would go to war for you to make sure that he can keep you safe

.He adores you for who you are and wants to keep you safe, he is a very protective yandere to the core. That he is willing to risk his life for yours.

.Though at first, he is very strict on rules and such so he does his best to follow them.

.Although over time he will break those rules if he has to, to be with you, that is for sure.

.He wants to also be able to prove himself to you, that he can be a good man and protect you and be worthy of you.

.He would defend your life and save face for you (Saving/save face is how you should say it, not save my honor or save you honor or restore my honor, western stuff is the one obsessed to us. Saving/Save face is how you would say it, fun fact!

.You are just not a partner to him, but the love of his life and he will stand by your side through it all.

.He is though a bit of a stick-in-the-mud kind of guy with certain things, and a bit more strict with those things.

.In other words, he would at first expect you to do as he says and not disgrace his face.

.He is holding you to a high standard.

.Of course, again he gets better. Learning you are his partner and respecting you as it.

.He is also a self-sacrificing yandere

.With that and the protective side of him he will do whatever it takes to save your life and keep you safe.

.It does not matter what he has to do to protect you he will do it.

.How does he deal with rivals? Most likely beats the poo out of them… But.

.His dark side as a yandere would have certain rivals framed for crimes they did not commit where they were executed or exiled.

.Also, if they are exiled he most likely will pay someone to kill them even after the fact (Another fun fact is a lot of framing court officials and having them killed when they are exiled happened a lot in ancient China a lot so this is very accurate lol).He would confess to you either before he goes off to war, so you could wait for him to return and then Marry him.

.Or After he comes home from war and he picks you up and kisses you.

.If you do accept his feelings he will be with you right away.

.If he can he will marry you.

.If he cannot he still will be with you and he would plan to never marry but adopt kids.

.If you turned down his feelings and or worse been with someone else, he will kill your partner and then take you as a prisoner keeping you locked away where no one can steal you from him again.

.You turned down his love, he will make sure he is the only one you can love.

.He of course is still loving and affectionate, but now you know he will do whatever it takes to keep you as his and his alone!

[YASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS another chapter is done! I hope you all enjoyed this! I also, hope you all are having a good lunar new year! And stay sexy, all of my sexy muffins!]

#yandere #yandere shang li #yandere mulan #yandere headcanons #headcanons #mulan #mulan shang li #shang li mulan #shang li #li shang #bi legend shang li #bi legend shang #shang li x reader #reader #gender neutral reader

[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)

[bestworstcase]

Ancillary to the posts about wet paper bag oz: I would love to see a RWBY prequel special or something set during the great war? I would bet REAL LIFE DOLLARS whatever he did with the sword was also when he finally had to admit that Salem was right all those years ago, and it fucked him up so bad we got the weak attempt at unification via the huntsman system and his next incarnation disassociating on the regular.

I am rattling him like a cookie jar. What horrors have you seen old man.

i think about this SO much. like

The King of Vale personally led his army into battle alongside the soldiers of Vacuo and decimated the enemy forces. Crown atop his head and armed only with a sword and his scepter, he laid waste to countless men. As the sand was soaked red with blood, the Grimm came in droves. It was the single deadliest battle of the war, and legends of the greatness and terror of the Warrior King were born that day. Historians will tell you that most of these stories are nothing but grandiose hyperbole. Unusually violent weather conditions, combined with Mantle's unfamiliarity with desert combat, are likely what led to such a high death count. But whatever the reasoning, everyone bowed to the King of Vale by the time it was over. The Great War had ended. The world was ready to live under the rule of Vale. But the King refused.

laughs weakly. this is a war that began with oz rolling out a welcome mat for mistrali colonists in his own kingdom, ignoring the protestations of his own people, so desperate was he to avoid an armed conflict. (with… the imperial power busily conquering his kingdom wshgfk OZMA. PLEASE.)

ten years later he ends it doing… that. the great war broke something in him sure as sure. i think that final battle was his:

“you said we had to bring humanity together; in order to do that, we have to spread our word, and destroy those who would deny it”

decimated the enemy forces. the sand was soaked red with blood and the grimm came in droves. the single deadliest battle in a war that lasted ten years. unusually violent weather conditions. the greatness and terror of the warrior king… who laid waste to countless men and routed every army on that battlefield. even his ally surrendered.

it’s also. well. the great war. extremely pointed thing to call your fictional global war that happened 80-90 years ago, following a century marked by increasing global tensions and smaller scale conflicts between imperial powers, and is now remembered for precipitating a devastating military arms race, the complete destruction of innumerable settlements, and ending with a treaty that "redistributed territories" ie gave independence to vacuo and menagerie as new sovereign states. oh, and an indeterminate amount of time later there was a second huge war that is now remembered for [checks notes] …the genocide.

glances at modern history. ok.

glances at

this nonsense also, courtesy of general "never fought a war but rules the country that made cosplaying the great war its whole national identity" ironwood.

it was trench warfare. that broke him. king oz sat in the trenches under never-ending artillery bombardment watching soldiers die by the thousands in a miserably futile grinding war of attrition for ten years until he shattered and personally slaughtered more people than had died in any single battle in ten years of TRENCH WARFARE with the divine relic of destruction. the war to end all wars, right?

and then—if it didn’t happen within that lifetime—he reincarnated to humankind being "quite, quite adamant about centralizing the faunus population in menagerie" (😶) and consequently another major war lasting at least three years.

what horrors has he seen, indeed.

tiny tdt draft snippet because when i say i think about this a LOT… ->

“I…” Wetting his lips, Osiander rasps, “want to put an end to war.” “You’ll need to consult my sisters,” the spirit says without inflection. “Abstractions are not in my purview.” Of course. There’s a poisoned laugh caught between his ribs, a bubble of reckless despair; he shuts his eyes, and grits his teeth, and grinds out, “This war, then.” “Narrower.” “I want,” Salem, indifferent, advising him to crush those who would not see reason. Salem asking him to try. Paradise. He chokes back a sob. “To rout every army on this battlefield,” he says. “I want a victory so absolute that it cannot be answered by anything less than unconditional surrender to myself, personally. I would end this, here and now.”

he’s fine. he’s fine

#i am SO ready for the vacuo arc #when all of this comes due. man.

[steveshairychest]

Been spinning a Maleficent steddie au around in my brain for days now.

Eddie as a fairy in the moors that protects the other smaller fairies because he is the largest and strongest of them all; his wings are so big they drag behind him when he walks through the soft grass. His first time meeting a human should have been the last, but he is unable to resist the human boy's call from the edge of the moors.

His name is Steve, Eddie thinks it's quite an odd name, but he finds it suits the boy with the soft face and freckled cheeks. They meet as often as they can. Eddie takes him by the hand and shows him his world; he shows Steve every fragile piece of himself because he believes he can trust Steve, believes that maybe the human loves him as well.

He is wrong. So very, very wrong.

Eddie never understood the power greed had over humans until the man he thought he loved stole the only thing that mattered to him; his wings. And all so Steve could sit on a throne and call himself 'King Steve'.

Eddie watches from afar as Steve rules from his castle; well, his spy, Gareth, watches the king from a windowsill in the castle. With a wave of his hand, Eddie changes Gareth into whatever beast he needs, whether it be crow or wolf or horse or man, he knows that Gareth will do his bidding. He's quite a loyal bird.

Eddie knows that he's let himself be consumed by rage and revenge. He knows it even as he climbs the steps of King Steve's great castle to meet the newborn prince. "I am quite upset I wasn't invited to the party, Stevie." He peers into the crib to stare at the little face of Prince Dustin and is struck with an idea; a way to get his revenge on Steve.

"I'd like to give him a gift." Eddie says with a cruel smile before bestowing a curse onto the innocent child.

What Eddie doesn't expect is his own inability to leave the child alone as he grows up in a cottage with two fairies that are very unequipped for raising a human child. Robin and Nancy flit about the poor screaming prince and try to feed him carrots and beets from the garden. "Maybe he's a shy eater. We won't look, my prince." Robin yells while shoving Nancy out of the small nursery.

Idiots. Eddie thinks before waving Gareth over to deal with the starving prince. He needs the baby alive to complete the curse, that's all.

But as the prince grows and begins to wander the forest, Eddie finds himself always one step behind, his footsteps completely silent so that he doesn't startle the child. He's not stupid. Eddie knows he's quite frightening with his horns and dark clothes and permanent scowl, even his old fairy friends give him a wide berth as he stalks through the moors.

Except, instead of screaming and running away, when the child finally spots Eddie, he runs up to him and demands to be picked up, his dirty little hands tugging at Eddie's cape. Eddie scowls down at him, his hands shaking slightly as he gives in and scoops the little beast up. "This doesn't mean I like you." He hisses. Dustin just smiles.

They become an unlikely pair. The other fairies watch in awe as Dustin, now 15, weaves flowers into Eddie's long hair and tells him stories about how he wants to be a knight like his dad; his fictional dad that Robin and Nancy said had died in a carriage accident. "I'm sure my dad would have liked you. You're strong and brave like him."

Eddie scowls down at his hands, he's fiddling with a pretty rock Dustin found him outside the moors. "Let's talk about something else." He grumbles as Dustin tugs a little roughly at his hair to thread a daisy. "Your birthday is in a few days." He says quietly, afraid that if he speaks too loud, Dustin will hear the guilt that bleeds into his words. "What have you got planned?"

Dustin instantly lights up at the mention of his birthday. He flails his hands around excitedly and jumps up to his feet to pace around in front of Eddie, who sits under a great tree. "I'm going to tell my aunts that I want to live here with you. In the moors."

"With me?" Eddie asks in disbelief.

"Yes! I've already planned a birthday mud fight with the river fairies and I have my speech for my aunties planned out. It'll be perfect." He flops down into the soft grass next to Eddie and stares up at the clouds, his fingers tracing patterns in the clouds only he can see. "I can't wait to be 16."

Eddie's stays quiet. The curse still lies in wait for Dustin's 16th birthday, Eddie can feel the power of it thrumming in the air around the boy. He's tried many times to lift it, but he fails each time; the words he spoke all those years ago echoing around him, taunting him. He's screamed and cried and hated himself all these years for doing something so evil to someone so pure, so full of life and love.

He can't believe he did this to someone he'd eventually grow to love with all his heart.

A voice Eddie thought he'd never have to hear again calls out for him the day before Dustin's 16th birthday. Eddie hates that he can't resist the pull, hates that he can't ignore it and go about his day.

"Eddie!" Steve shouts from the edge of the wall of thorns Eddie built to protect his people from the king himself. "Eddie! It's Steve!"

With a wave of his hand, Eddie clears a path through the thorns and stalks angrily towards the king; Gareth follows beside him in the form of a wolf, his snarls a clear warning to not make a single move. Eddie is filled with so much rage, his magic hums beneath his skin and begs to be unleashed upon the traitorous king.

"You are not welcome here." He seethes and presses the tip of his staff to the centre of Steve's chest. The king doesn't flinch. He just stands there and continues to stare at Eddie with those sad, hazel eyes; always trying to convey a message Eddie can't read. A quick glance around the area tells him that Steve's come alone, not a single knight stands with him.

He's not wearing his crown either.

"Leave or I will kill you."

"I've come to apologise."

Eddie laughs; it's a loud, hysterical sound that causes Gareth to cower away. The wolf can sense the magic stirring in the air around him, he can feel it crackling around Eddie as he takes a step closer to Steve, his staff now pressed close to Steve's heart. "No words will ever make up for the damage you caused me. You mutilated me for your own gain."

"You tricked me into... into loving you." Eddie spits the words at Steve's feet. He's never let himself dwell on it too much, but having Steve stand before him to 'apologise' makes all those ugly feelings bubble to the surface to choke him. "I trusted you." He jabs a finger behind him towards the moors, towards his people. "I let you into my home. I let you.. know me, and yet that still wasn't enough."

Eddie scowls and turns his back to Steve. "Enjoy your sleeping prince." The words are like daggers in his heart. He wants nothing more than to keep Dustin safe in the moors, but he knows the power of a curse. He knows there's no way he can stop what's already in motion.

He's about to disappear back into the safety of his own kingdom, when Steve calls out, "I brought them back."

Eddie doesn't turn around. He doesn't dare even breathe as he hears Steve lift the blanket off the back of the cart he'd used to get here. (A bit of a downgrade from his royal carriage). "I know it won't fix anything. I know I fucked up and did the worst thing imaginable but I have changed."

Eddie's feels their magic, feels the strength in each feather as Steve unbinds them and let's them soar across the small distance to Eddie. The sensation is overwhelming. He feels as if he's been struck by lightning and welcomed into a warm embrace by a friend all at the same time. He can't help the cry that slips through his lips as he falls to his knees and lets the comforting weight of his wings ground him. He's whole again.

"I'm not the king anymore." Steve says after a moment, his voice barely heard over the thumping in Eddie's ears as he tries to resurface from the pure euphoria swimming through his body. He doesn't want to be on the ground. He needs to be in the sky. He needs to touch the clouds and feel the wind glide through each feather of his wings.

"Eddie." Dark eyes snap over to the king. "I'm here for my son. I need to get him far away from here." The from you goes unsaid.

"Your son can't escape his fate." He hates how his voice cracks, hates how broken he sounds by the truth. Dustin would love Steve, Eddie knows this. Steve has shown every single ugly shade of himself to Eddie, and yet he can't deny the truth he sees before him; Steve's changed. He's let the crown fall from his head and gone out of his way to make some form of peace with Eddie. He's given Eddie back his wings, his life.

"This doesn't mean you're forgiven." Eddie says without meeting Steve's eyes. He once again turns his back on the king and, with a flick of his wrist, turns Gareth into a crow. "Fetch the prince. His father wishes to see him."

Steve bows his head in gratitude. Eddie lifts his own higher. "I will visit him once he falls into his slumber."

And he will find a way to break the curse.

He knows that true loves kiss is foolish, a fairytale, but that doesn't mean he won't round up every girl in the area to kiss Dustin's lips and wake him from his eternal sleep.

But he's not doing this for Steve. No. Eddie needs to do this for himself because Dustin means the world to him. When Eddie thought all was lost, Dustin stumbled into his life and showed him that love could bloom even in the darkest of hearts.

Eddie will do everything in his power to feel the warmth of Dustin's love once again.

#i didnt proof read this #SO OBVS I MADE MY OWN ENDINF AND OBVS STEVE HAS SOME SERIOUS SUCKING UP TO DO TO MAKE UP FOR BEINF A RAGINF DICK #but i probs wont write anothr part lmao this was just a ramble #ANYWAYS BYE #steddie #stranger things #eddie munson #steve harrington #st4 vol2 #steveddie #stranger things s4 #dustin henderson #eddie is dustins real dad

[meruz]

another ask post

i mean i also read it because a friend whos rly into queer SFF fiction circles recced it but she did kinda lead with "the writer used to write hs fanfic...tasmyn..taz...?" to which i replied

of COURSE I read the locked tomb because i heard taz had written a book. of course. ill consume most any media made by a beloved homestuck bnf. thats also why i played undertale. and read like..snotgirl. and idk... watched the new dub of neon genesis evangelion.

if u made homestuck fanwork 10 years ago and havent even made it since chances are I still remember and I love you for it.

sdlkfhsg its funny you sensed that because that drawing did in fact start kinda more........ well, I'd be lying if I said my hands never wrought a drawing toeing over the pg-13 line LOL...

NOT to say i have a secret stash of porn or anything. in general im more interested in the implication of sexuality or mature themes over any explicit depiction. like everything i draw is so softcore itd almost feel silly to make a nsfw acc for anything.

but im not rly jumping to post anything on main either bc i get the sense i have a lot of kids in my social media following. it varies from site to site and fandom to fandom but the themes in my work often circle around childhood, coming of age etc and in general i like stories about kids so the fandoms i draw for have a lot of kids in them. even stuff like IT (stephen king) which is about kids but isn't necessarily for kids.. there were a lot of kids in that fandom lol.

actually thats why ive been censoring swears in comics lately because the tmnt fandom comes across to me as a little young...IDK I've had MULTIPLE people ask me what "sodomize" means because of the joke in this post and I'm like... I Cannot be the one to explain this to you. you have to look it up on your own klfsdhsdg like i wouldn't be doing this if i were doing a comic for mgs or even homestuck wherein the characters textually swear constantly LOL but sometimes u gotta change tacks depending on the faces u see in the crowd yknow.

i HAVE been thinking abt drawing nsfw of sunspot/richard rider/kobak from x-men red just because that comic seemed to be really asking for it. who knows.. if the need rly arises maybe my separate account policy will change.

its rly more a matter of the fact that i havent read/watched much of any other iterations... im sure id like most lol. I like most things related to my interests regardless of quality. i rly like the marvel ultimate alliance games for instance. sometimes seeing my fave guy is enough he doesnt have to be well written LOL. i dont exactly have a wealth of free time tho thats the real impediment.

i did watch the 2007 movie on new years eve and found it quite charming overall. and i have read about 30-40 issues between the mirage and idw comics. still feels like im barely scratching the surface but i liked em. i rly want to read all the sophie campbell stuff bc i think her work is interesting. jason aaron will be a mixed bag i think lmao. i say as the worlds biggest Wolverine and the X-Men (2011) fan.

hmm this is kinda hard bc i feel like i naturally draw very loose and the hard part for me is tightening it up. maybe some suggestions tho...

1) hand excercises. i think its easy to forget this when many artists sit in front of the computer all day but drawing is a physical activity u do with ur actual...bodys...muscles lol. if u feel urself tightening up it might help to strech (any google search for "artist hand excercises" should yield good results) or do a page of loose practice strokes like..big circles. long lines. scribbles. that kinda thing. whatever feels good for ur hand. this is also just good to do as a general warm up before u sit down for any drawing sesh.

2) draw further away from the canvas. as a general rule...when ur painting traditionally you do the big strokes with your whole arm outstreched and a long handled brush. and when you do the details its smaller wrist movements and a shorter handled brush. so it might help to take a step back or push back from ur chair a little.. or hold ur tablet a little further away. and hold your pen further away from the nib.

3) change mediums / brush types. some brushes and mediums are more suited to loose sketching and some more inclined towards detail work. so changing ur tool could help. also! i personally have this problem where sometimes if im using a brush i feel really familiar with the pressure to make a "good" "finished" "perfect" drawing is greater... if i want to force myself to loosen up ill switch to a tool i dont use as often so it feels like the pressure is off. a lot of times for me this is switching from digital to traditional. but sometimes its switching from a small pen to a big marker. or a smooth pen to a textured one. or a nice brush to a shitty dried up marker.

but also every body is different so i dont think these tips will work for everyone. u should listen to what ur body and mind tell u and how drawing feels to you

bro just sign up and set it up i dont think theres much to it... i dont rly think too much abt my itch.io store because its digital goods so u just upload the file and let it do its thing. no distribution work needed on ur part. youll notice i barely even advertise my itch unless i have smth new on there lol.. its easy. but good luck!!!

idk if im the best person to ask this im more a comic fan than i am a comic professional... a comic hobbist.

well. scott mcclouds understanding comics and making comics are good books on the craft. i think i had to buy them for a class in art school once.

other than that idk just keep at it. comics are really laborious i think for a lot of people the hardest part is sitting down and doing it.

i think a lot of people have a very instinctive understanding of how to read comics and what they look like so whatever you think seems like good way to tell the story you have in mind, its probably right. if u get stuck, study comics that have done something similar. most people in comics are relatively self taught and actually it can be problematic bc you can tell when a lot of comic artists are all copying the same like 5 old white guys LMAO. but on the flip side if you make sure to reference and study broadly your comics will almost assuredly feel unique.

sorry im responding to this anyways. this is just a really nice ask. i like when people reference my older work bc i feel like sometimes theyre subtly implying it wasnt very good LMAOOO. but its true! at least compared to the work i make now ^^ and the fact that im still making art is whats keeping me from being embarassed abt how much of my old art just floats around online lmao im never ashamed to be growing and learning. isnt that a nice thought <3

#ask #too much art talk in this one

[ryunumber]

Does Misa Satsukino (Gundam Breaker 3) have a Ryu number? [I don't know if this is against the rules because while it is a game it's very much based on an anime.]

Misa Satsukino has a (Limited) Ryu Number of 3/does not have a Ryu Number.

(explanation below)

Gundam characters usually aren't too difficult to link given the series's long history with Super Robot Wars, but the key point here is that moreso than being a Gundam game, Gundam Breakers is more accurately a Gunpla game.

Gunpla, of course, being the wildly popular model kits based on the titular mecha, and most importantly for this blog's purposes, not actually the mecha themselves.

To that end, while the likes of Amuro are technically present in the recently shut down Gundam Breaker Mobile, they appeared as AI pilots you could assign to your Gunpla while participating in Gunpla battles, instead of the in-universe flesh-and-blood Gunpla nerds the game was ostensibly about.

So in a sense, these pilots all "appear" in whatever game-like system the Gunpla battles take place in. But does that count as an appearance in Gundam Breaker Mobile alongside the actual Gunpla battlers?

While I'm generally pretty hard-nosed about not counting depictions that are fictional in-universe, which kinda comes part and parcel with the Gunpla conceit, the Twitter account's judgment on in-universe media appearances is "How lazy is it?". In that sense, you could make a decent case that this is worth carving out an exception for. They all came with their own set of stats and characteristics, they were all voiced, and while this is personal speculation, if the primary appeal of Gundam Breaker as a series is playing with Gundam models by assembling and battling with them, the secondary appeal of Gundam Breaker Mobile was getting your favorite characters to pilot said Gundam models. So in a sense, you could assert the in-universe Gunpla battles were the actual core of Gundam Breaker Mobile, and the story with the "real" characters were little more than periphery flavor.

Now, my gut is to keep being a hard-nose about the in-universe depiction thing separating the two levels of fictionality at play, but complicating matters is that the game also added its own story characters as AI pilots.

So now there's characters that exist in both the fictional universe of Gundam Breaker Mobile and the artificial Gunpla battle system that exists within the fictional universe of Gundam Breaker Mobile. Are those the same character and character appearance within Gundam Breaker Mobile? I don't know, this is the exact situation I try to avoid with Extended Ryu Numbers and real ass people, just wrapped around another layer of fictionality. (Which itself could imply that, if you take the dubious step of extending the Gundam Breaker Mobile universe by asserting that other fiction beyond Gundam exists almost exactly as it does in real life, these characters have in-universe Ryu Numbers, which has to be by far the most ridiculous phrase I have ever seen fit to post.)

Not complicated enough for you? There's also AI pilots from Gundam Breaker Battlogue, the tie-in ONA for Gundam Breaker, which naturally includes Misa herself.

Honestly, if I'm twisting myself into this many Gordian knots just to establish some basic ground truths, I may as well cut it myself by saying that yeah, sure, she can have a Ryu Number if you want. It might even be Limited, going by when the Misa AI pilot was available. I don't know. Embrace and reject nuance simultaneously.

(Also, there's multiple Haros don't fucking @ me)

#misa satsukino #satsukino misa #gundam breaker #gundam #gunpla #mobile suit gundam #ryu number

[wetcatspellcaster]

Hi! Sorry to bother you again, I'm the one who asked you a while ago if it was okay to ask for some tips on writing dialogue. Thank you so much for your availability and time 🙇‍♀️ I'm mostly curious about how you structure your dialogues and how you manage to build chemistry between the characters through banter. Do you follow a particular set of rules or does it just come natural to you? You write so many ideas and cool dialogues, how do you manage to come up with so many? In general, if you have any tips for a fledgling "writer", they are super welcome. No pressure, of course, I really don't want to intrude/steal your time. P.s. I forgot last time to tell you that I also really loved your AU fic, Party Favours. I was hooked from the first lines and I had so much fun reading it. It was a really comforting and entertaining read, like drinking a hot chocolate in winter. Honestly, thank you so much for gifting us with such a warm and funny story. 🥰☕

Hey! Thank you for being so nice about my writing and the strengths you think I have - I didn't know I had them, so it was interesting to see my work from someone else's perspective.

And also don't worry, it's not a bother to answer this question. Although I'm not sure how helpful I'll be as I have no formal training and that might mean my explanations aren't useful!!

I'll try to answer as best I can :)

I don't really have rules for chemistry, I'll be honest, but my favourite dynamic (as is fucking obvious from many a fic I've written) is overconfident flirt/straight-laced practical killjoy. Luckily for me... there are a lot of these in media (Howl/Sophie, Tamaki/Haruhi, certain flavours of Buffy/Spike, Jude/Cardan from The Cruel Prince, Labyrinth fanfiction, whatever was going on with Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Faeries)! So I guess, if I was to give advice on that... I'd say if you really like a certain dynamic, go and look for examples of how they work elsewhere. Work out what it is about the pairing that makes your brain itch, or examine how these characteristic interactions play out, if there's any kind of formula to them - for instance, in Party Favours, the bit where Astarion is actively and overconfidently faking while talking to Threnn while Rose gets more and more flustered, was based partly on a fake relationship episode of Buffy lol. Like I didn't copy it word for word or anything, but it was an idea I saw elsewhere that I knew would be good for the pairing. .

Coming up with ideas... again, idk how idiosyncratic my process is. I maladaptive daydream a lot, and I really like scripting arguments (see above about what dynamics in fiction work for me, lmfao). i just love to hallucinate bickering, apparently. If I have any lines of dialogue that occur to me in any situation, I tend to put them into my notes app on my phone, to revisit later. If I have a scene with a particular purpose, I might look through my dialogue on my phone and try to find a series of quotes that work. Other times the maladaptive daydream for a few days might be the scene, and I'll write down any notes on what I want to happen and let it percolate for a few days before I actually write it. Sometimes pieces of dialogue will come to me before the scene does - Astarion's speech in chapter 7 of pieces happened before any of the rest of the fic, and then I was like "fuck. well. now i've got to get myself there." Mostly, this seems to just be a result of having these people live in my head rent free, but I'm also pretty autistic and so I script conversations a lot in social interactions anyway. .

Dialogue. I think dialogue comes naturally to me (see above comment about autism) and as such, I don't really follow any strict rules, I'm afraid... but these are some things I do formally try to do-

If a person is talking at someone (again, see how much I fucking love writing people bickering), you need to make sure it's not just a wall of text. Adding in paragraph breaks, even if it's a monologue, is kind of essential (speaking as someone who did not do this in the beginning, and it shows, particularly when you're reading my earlier fic on mobile rather than desktop). Often I will break it up with a one sentence interjection, a false start from the other person trying to get a word in edgeways, or a stage direction. I had a problem with one pairing I wrote for where one of the characters just would never speak... I needed to engineer lines for him to say even if it was completely superfluous. Sometimes, now I look at my writing, I feel like these are obviously fake and unnecessary... but they help break up the text and give the reader pauses. So they must be helpful, even if they're kind of just... there. it makes the dialogue a dialogue, with two people involved and reacting to each other. -

Similarly, speeding stuff up can be useful when creating banter, to keep pace and avoid people monologuing at each other. The key ways I tend to speed stuff up is usually a) characters finishing each other's sentences (derogatory or affectionate), b) interrupting each other (you'll notice my repeated 'Astarion-' is often used to get Astarion to just talk quicker and at more length and in more detail until Rose loses her goddamn mind), c) quicker back and forth where you don't need dialogue tags or stage directions bc characteristic voices will make it clear who is speaking. -

I read everything aloud as I post. This is how I proofread. Reading aloud helps me find spelling errors/sentence errors, but it also means that I have to speak all my dialogue aloud to my own wall like a crazy person. If I'm speaking it aloud in a different way, like the phrasing changes subconsciously to what's more natural in my mouth, I will often edit the dialogue to reflect that. I speak it, to see how it is spoken. -

Second to the above point, if you have a character who's voice you struggle with, listen/watch clips of their voice. I do not think I can write Lae'zel (or Gale tbh, and I'm now writing a whole fic from his pov so I clearly hate myself). I watch back clips of them all the time, and then I go to my dialogue, and see if I can hear it in their voice. If I can, I keep it. -

...Be brave enough to tell jokes. I genuinely can't tell you how much I don't think I'm funny. Every joke I write in my fic, I have no idea if anyone else will enjoy it, or if it only makes me laugh. But I put it in there, for me. I'm lucky, bc now some people tell me they found a joke amusing, and I'll know it landed with someone else other than me. But you tell jokes with your friends, presumably, and you're playful with them. So allow your characters to joke with each other, even if you're scared that no one else will 'get it'. If no one else finds it funny, at least the characters are having fun! -

Anyway, those are my main 'tips', I don't know if any of them are helpful!!

My other one main piece of advice is... read. Seriously. Even if the media you want to write for isn't a literary novel, read other people's writing, and I do mean both fic and published books, because published books (if they're good) have an editor. I read a lot of books/webtoons/manga before I ever wrote a fic... like for 12 years or something. I was a big reader, and reading good writing is useful - it's inspiring, it's also just technically helpful. These writing tips might be useless, because lot of what I've done in my own writing I've learned through osmosis - just by reading a fuck tonne of books, good and bad. I'm not saying you have to read 60 books a year or w/e, but read like, a few good books!

(also, just write a bunch. I am only becoming a 'read' fic author on my 11th project??? basically??? so I've had a lot of practice at this point, and grown in confidence. The more things you finish, the more ambitious you get. I couldn't have conceived of Pieces when I was writing my first fanfic, bc I thought plot was my main weakness... now I'm writing an almost entirely original premise and that's bc I've learned a lot since I started writing!)

#asks #i hope this is helpful!!! #lovely words from lovely people #long posts #emma rambles #my writing #personal #honestly... a lot of my advice boils down to 'my brain does things i thought were normal until it took a therapist exactly 18 minutes- #-to diagnose me' #also the way all the formatting got lost is sending me

[thelittlestaxolotl]

glad you enjoy long asks ^^

I’ve got some more :

For Blue

What’s your favourite potion (idk if Blue makes potions in this AU if he doesn’t ignore the question , I have another one just in case) How frightened of Alan were you when you met him on a scale to 1-10?

What kind of food do you eat?

How are you feeling => ?

For King

4. If you are King who do you rule?

5. Do you care about purple? Like look after them , give them food?

For Yellow

6. Do you like to read books? If so what kind of books? If not what do you enjoy doing?

7. Does Yellow like using redstone? (He might not in this AU-)

8. How’d you and Alan meet ?

For Green: (a lot of em)

9. Do you enjoy hugs or head pats or whatever cuz Purple enjoys headpats ^^

10. If we would tell you where Purple is what would you do?

11. How are you? You might be a bit shocked about your friend but..

12. What kind of music do you enjoy? Perhaps just singing?

13. Do you sometimes try to talk to Alan?

14. What’s your relationship with other fairies? (Not purple)

1.1. "My favourite potion? Oh, so many to choose from, I can't de-"

"Awkward potion."

"-H-hey, that's my ask!"

1.2. "11/10. I thought he was a hunter who poisoned my river to make me get out. Good thing Sec were with him that time."

2. "Fish, shellfish, seaweed, whatever you can find in a river and on shores. Although I'm an omnivore, so I can eat whatever others would prefer."

3. "Numb. As always since the poisoned river incident."

4. "King is more of a nick name. I'm a viceroy of one of the biggest towns in our country."

5. "...Yes? I don't think he agrees with me, but I look after his safety and well-being."

6. "Reading? I don't like fiction, but I always read any redstone directory I and Alan can find."

7. "Damn yes. This is the main reason I befriended a human. They can do so much stuff with it, it's all just incredible!"

8. "Unlike the others who were forced by circumstances to get along with a human, I did it purposely. I was watching them for a while, joining them more and more and slowly blending into their lives."

"Long story short, it was slowly but surely."

9. "Purple's weird. Whatever affection that doesn't include messing with my hair."

10. "Went to save him! What kind of question is this?"

"You surely wouldn't know what are you doing."

11. "I'm fine, but still worried."

"He hadn't slept last night, like, at all-"

"SHUT YOUR NON-EXISTENT MOUTH"

12. "All of 'em! And I mean each and every."

13. "We all do. It mostly looks funny."

"We've worked out several ways of communication, so this is not such a problem now."

14. "I can't remember my colony and I've never seen Purple's colony. That's all I can say."

#avm au #in character purple #in character sec #in character green #in character blue #in character king #in character yellow #in character alan

[the-cooler-erinsintra]

stupid shit i believed (and did) in as a kid

I thought parrots could talk. Like, talk for real, like a cartoon character. When I visited my aunt, who kept a parrot as a pet, I kept trying to engage in small talk with it, and was pretty disappointed when I realised all he could say was my aunt's name.

I once read this comicbook story about a magical tree that was immune to the flow of time, and such its leaves did not change colour during autumn nor did they fell during winter. I live in a tropical country, and all the trees here are like that, so I just assumed they were all magical as well.

If you ate fish and drank water afterwards, the fish would come back from the dead inside your stomach.

I thought these things (idk how they're called in english) were tiny DVDs for ants.

I would refuse to eat seedless fruits. It didn't matter if they tasted good, it didn't matter if they were cheap. They were an unholy creation of mankind and would never be welcomed inside my mouth.

When my mum yelled at me, I would go to my grandpa and ask him to ground her. It did work once.

In my head, the Moon was a giant living being that could see us from where she stood on the sky, and I was 100% sure whe was following me wherever I went.

Wasps were the boy version of bees.

I believed George Washington was like Santa Claus for Americans and he also wasn't real.

Whenever I heard a cicada singing (or ringing? idk), I would sing back to them so they wouldn't feel lonely.

When presented with a new kind of food, I would first imagine myself eating it. If I didn't like the taste inside my head, I wouldn't even bother eating the actual dish. There's still a shitton of stuff I have never tasted because of that rule.

When I was like, seven or eight, I watched a few clips from the Chucky movie on youtube. After that, I started to believe all dolls had the potential to become evil muderers, and so I would always be nice to the ones I owned (asking them if they were okay, sitting them comfortably on my bed instead of laying around on the floor) so if they ever turned evil they would at least spare me.

I believed the voice in my head was a different person, and whenever "it" got mad at me, "it" would start endlessly listing all of the things I feared in order to make me anxious. I still don't know how to explain this, but I'm glad they stopped doing that.

For over eleven years of my life I genuinely believed everyone in Greece still went around wearing togas and worshipping the twelve Olympians. I was rather disappointed when I learned they are mostly Christian nowadays.

I was one hundred percent sure the Easter Island was not real, and it was instead some sort of fictional fantasy place like Wonderland that at some point became public domain and everyone started using it. Even nowadays, I still go "oh, right, this exists" whenever someone mentions the place.

When I raised my hands in a windy day, I could feel the wind passing between my fingers. I thought I was the only person who could do this, and this I had secret airbending powers that would show up when I got older or something.

Johnny Bravo was the grown-up version of Johnny Test. I mean, they were both blond, from the same channel, and were both named Johnny. It made perfect sense.

Whenever I closed my eyes to wash my hair at the shower, a demon showed up in my bathroom to try and kill me, so I had to open my eyes as fast as possible, even if I got some shampoo on them by accident, otherwise I would die.

I couldn't sleep in total darkness, I always needed some light source near me, however small it was. I wasn't necessarily scared of the dark, or anything lurking in it, I just believed that if my eyes suddenly vanished for whatever reason, I wouldn't know I had been blinded if it was dark. I don't understand that part either.

I thought Halloween was an American celebration about having burned all their witches and the reason we didn't celebrate it in my country was because we still had witches here.

My mum once gave me this fancy plastic cup with a built-in straw and a small extra cavity to store tiny things and I loved it so much I would only drink water from that specific cup. I also started drinking water a lot as an excuse to use it, and whenever I was sad, I would drink more water because using the cup made me feel a little bit better. To this day, I still drink a lot of water when I feel upset.

I had my own place at the couch, just like Sheldon Cooper from Big Bang. I wouldn't mind if anyone sat on it, but I would never sit in another part of the couch unless explicitly forced to.

#story time #stories #it got better #tumblr stories #fyp #fypツ #memes #tumblr fyp #explorepage #explore #hilarious #funny #fypage #foryou #fypシ #foryoupage #viral #meme #dumb shit #shitpost #shitposting #tumblr #haha #lol #memories #childhood memories #childhood

[thelaurenshippen]

I'm just a starting writer, I did a little nanowrimo this year and wrote 39k words about a vampire gamer, I've always been a vampire girl, but here's the thing I don't know what to do with it.

Currently I'm unemployed for a variety of reasons but I'm lucky enough to have a partner who has a salary that can support us both.

But also I love writing, all my life I just wanted to write and being unemployed this year during nano gave me the opportunity to try and do that.

And now I'm curious is there a way to get paid to be a writer? Not as a marketing copy writer but a fiction writer, or essayist?

So what does one do?

Should I just publish whatever I wrote on a blog and put up a donation button?

Should I just publish on Tumblr?

Should I do it on AO3/Wattpad?

I'm at a loss.

I also don't have social media only use Tumblr and a little BlueSky after twitter exploded, and I really don't want to go and "build an audience on TikTok and booktok" (please gods no).

ah, yes, the eternal question: "how do I make money as a writer?"

I wish I had a good answer. I wish I had any answer. and I would love for other writers on here to chime in with their perspectives, because I am constantly struggling to answer this question for myself!

to answer the specific questions first: there are websites that post jobs for writing gigs - fiction, essays, etc. the one I'm most familiar with is upwork, though I've never gotten a job myself through there so can't speak to the experience. I will say that writing jobs tend to be in high demand and writing in general can be quite competitive, so working on your resume and improving your craft is an important thing to do whether you're just starting out or have been writing professionally for years.

self-publishing is absolutely an option! if you do, I would recommend getting a beta reader (or just a few friends) to read through your manuscript before you publish - it's always good to get feedback and to get other eyes on your work, no matter how complete or polished, for typos/grammar/formatting/etc. I'd also recommend reading about the best ways to self-publish - again, I can't personally speak to this as my three novels were traditionally published, but I know that folks publish through Amazon a lot and there certainly have been successfully novels (and especially graphic novels!) that have started out as blog posts/blogs. I don't recommend publishing an original story to ao3 or Wattpad if you're hoping to make money (if you're publishing for fun, go for it!) - ao3, my beloved, is an archive and therefore does not allow you to link to any kind of patreon/kofi/etc., so can be difficult to monetize. I'm less familiar with Wattpad, but I do know that they are actively trying to get into the publishing game themselves and sometimes pluck stories from their site to bring up to trad publishing, which I've heard can be....a mixed bag.

but there are a lot of authors on here and on their personal websites writing about self-publishing, so there's definitely better info out there about how to do it and how lucrative it can be!

a very good rule for self-publishing imo - whether that's through a site like amazon, your own blog, a podcast, a webcomic, whatever - is always give people the option to pay you. so, yes, put that donation button up. it doesn't matter if no one has read or listened to your thing yet, just making sure the option is there from the start is a good thing!

that's about the extent of the straightforward answer I can give you. if I were to give you a step-by-step guide of how I got to a place where most of my income comes from fiction writing, it would look like this:

write your own fiction podcast, get some actors from acting class to come over to your apartment and record for free, and produce the whole thing yourself

publish said podcast and then spend the next 2 years spending as much time on social media, at conventions, conferences - anywhere there are fiction podcast fans and creators - as you can talking about your show, all while writing and producing the show for free

get lucky and have the show take off. start to get some ad money that allows you to pay your collaborators. watch the show get better as a result. see the show take off even more. keep grinding away at social media

get a cold email from a book agent who wants to talk to you. convince that book agent to represent the YA novel you want to write in the world of your podcast

expend whatever leftover energy you have on ensuring that when people think of fiction podcasting, they think of you, even if other names are coming first. be everywhere. talk to everyone. keep grinding away at social media.

get a cold email from a fiction producer in England who wants you to write on his show. convince him to let you co-showrun it with him.

use your growing network of audio friends to get an agent and manager. use those people to get a pitch to marvel. convince marvel to let you write a podcast for them.

finally quit your day job, after doing 4 seasons of a successful podcast and selling spin-offs to a tech company, getting a 3-book deal with a major publisher, being hired to co-showrun a big budget mystery, and selling a show idea to marvel. then make all of those shows.

finish the podcast you started with, now seven seasons long. try to pitch out other ideas to all the people who wanted to buy that podcast off of you. watch them say no to anything new.

get lucky and sit next to a netflix exec at a dinner. convince her to let you write a stranger things show.

keep pitching. use the money from your other jobs to fund your indie shows. sell one show. lose another halfway through development. have your ideas optioned for television over and over and get used to hearing no's when you go out to pitch. produce and direct as much as you can to pay the bills. keep grinding away at social media.

????????

profit

that's obviously a simplification of my journey but I'm currently in that ???? stage. I don't say all of this to freak you - or anyone else - out. being a creative is hard. it gets easier in some ways and stays just as hard in others. I'm better at my job than I used to, so making shows is easier, but getting jobs and getting audience feels as hard as ever, even if I am several steps ahead than where I started. I thought I could build off the success of @thebrightsessions to make my other originals instant successes and that's just not how it works at all. you're building from the next step up after every success, not the top of the staircase.

but, like I said, I'm not trying to scare you - the thing that's positive in my weird crazy journey is the reality that there is no one right way to do something. there's a million different ways to make a creative career, especially in the age of the internet. which means that my advice to anyone who asks me how to start a career in audio fiction specifically is: just do it. don't wait for someone to give you a budget, don't try to cater to what you think the AD audience wants, just tell your story as you want to and get it out there. the best job application is being able to point to your own original work that's already garnered an audience.

I have no idea if that could as readily apply to prose writing/publishing. that is definitely beyond my knowledge base, but I'd say if you want to get a taste for what it's like to be a freelance creative, apply to jobs on upwork or similar sites, work on your original work, and find a platform that works for you on which you could potentially build an audience. and then get to know as many people as you can in your given field - I would not be where I am at all without folks like Gabriel Urbina, or Jeffrey Cranor, or Jenny Turner Hall. making friends in audio drama from the start who could recommend me for jobs - and being sure that I do the same now that I have more power - is vital. make friends with your peers (also bc they're great and you'll learn so much from them).

finally, I want to pass on advice that my uncles gave me when I was a teenager wanting to go to broadway--both of them work in musical theater (one conductor, one musical director, they are quite the power couple and my heroes) and when I was growing up, they told me "if you can think of anything else that will make you just as happy, do that instead". it sounds like harsh advice, but it's good advice. people don't pick creative careers because it's easy and stable--if there's anything else you're equally passionate about that could make you money and be more stable, there is absolutely nothing wrong in pursuing that and then writing for the love and joy of it, without the pressure of making a living. and that doesn't mean that that won't eventually lead to you being a successful full-time writer! but choosing to pursue writing full-time because it's what you want to do with your life is a very particular kind of path.

anyway, I've gone on way too long. I hope some of this was helpful - the last-last thing I'll say is that a) I obviously have a very limited perspective so nothing I say here is the be-all-end-all way of viewing things b) I had a very stable data entry job while I was making my first show that was very flexible and work-from-home (oh, to be able to get that job back now...since the pandemic, those types of jobs are obviously in high demand) and c) I got lucky. luck and timing are, unfortunately, a huge part of success in creative careers. if anyone tries to sell you on the idea that there's a guaranteed path to success that you can control if you work hard enough, they are lying to you and probably want you to buy something.

finally-finally, a vampire gamer story sounds so fun!! I love that idea!

#lauren writes things #self publishing #traditional publishing #advice #also your ask was one of the ones that didn't get eaten but thank you for sending again! #I hope this answered your question but feel free to send more! #long post #lauren answers things

[coldresolve]

I’m sorry if this comes off as ignorant, that is not my intention.

What is torture apologia? I haven’t been able to find a specific definition and it’s confusing for me. What does it look like in regard to the whump community? On top of that, what are some ways to avoid this in writing?

If you don’t want to type out a response to this, how can this be researched? You make some good points in your post about it, and I want to make sure my own writing isn’t based on stereotypes and misinformation about the subject. I am very, very new to the “whump” community, so I don’t fully understand the ways that torture apologia might be displayed in some of the popular writings.

Thank you for your time, and I apologize if this comes off as ignorant or confrontational.

hey no worries, youre not gonna offend me by asking a clarifying question. what pisses me off are the people who flat out dismiss everything i have to say without actually engaging with it. youre nowhere close to that lmao i promise

uh. i use the sexual assault r-word a bit here, because i just came up with a good rule of thumb that requires drawing similarities between torture and r-word, so. trigger warning if you dont wanna read that

there is no real definition of torture apologia out there, but i treat it in the same way i would rape apologism. and i actually think theres real worth in keeping with that similarity, because rape is considered a form of torture. so like. yeah

id go as far as to say you can switch out "torture" with "rape" in your story to see if the logic holds up, if you might be saying something you don't want to say. for example, "my hero tortures the bad guy, and this is framed as a form of vigilante justice", swapped with rape, uh, might not exactly be the sorta message you would want to send lol. your hero can torture the bad guy ofc, im not saying they can't, but you better be ready to grapple with the full fucking depth of morality of a situation like that

off the top of my head, things i'd steer clear of:

anything that implies that torture is useful for any purpose. torture just traumatizes people, that's about it, and it's dangerous to spread ideas about whatever imagined utility, because your average person has zero grasp on basic ethics - this is what turns your "useful" torture into "sometimes justified". a third of people globally believe torture can be justified "in some cases". like i can't stress how real this issue is

torture works as an interrogation method or as a way to obtain false/forced confessions (useful)

torture can be used to make someone obedient (useful)

torture can be used to change people's beliefs (useful)

torture can be used to brainwash people/control them (useful)

stockholm syndrome through torture is included in ^ (useful and also just. ehh)

any variant of the ticking time bomb scenario (useful + justification)

torture being portrayed as "scientific"; torturers being "experts" in the "skill" or "art" of torture (implies utility)

when the bad guy does it, it's torture; when the good guy does it, it's vigilante justice (justification)

there's a handful of ideas people use a lot in fiction that i wouldn't necessarily categorize as apologia, but which do still send a message you maybe should think twice about sending. torture victims/survivors being "broken", they'll never be able to live full, happy lives, etc. and there's also this idea that torture only negatively affects the person who is being tortured. i especially think showing the effects torture has on perpetrators is worthwhile, but that might just me having a weird fascination with perpetrator trauma. torture also tends to fuck up the organizations that use it, so

#asks #rape mention #torture discussions

[thewertsearch]

FCG: LET'S CHANGE THE SUBJECT, WHAT WERE YOU ORIGINALLY GOING TO ASK ME. [...] CGA: Is Magic A Real Thing

Magic is tricky to define. Personally, I’d consider a fictional phenomenon to be ‘magical’ if the story ignores any scientific principles which may underpin it. If the story presents a phenomenon as something that doesn’t need to be explained to the reader, then that phenomenon is, or may as well be, magical.

FCG: WE CAN ALCHEMIZE PRACTICALLY ANYTHING WITH THE RIGHT MATERIALS AND GRIST. FCG: WE CAN, AND DID, MAKE SUPER POWERFUL WEAPONS AND ITEMS THAT CAN DO PRACTICALLY ANYTHING. FCG: WHAT ADDITIONAL ADVANTAGE COULD MAGIC OFFER? ALL THIS SHIT IS PRACTICALLY MAGIC ANYWAY. FCG: BUT MORE LIKE FCG: GOOFY SCIENCEY MAGIC. YOU KNOW?

So I agree with Karkat - and actually, I’d go even further. Sburb’s basic mechanics aren’t practically magic - they are magic. 

That’s not to say these mechanics have no rules. Alchemy is well-defined, and I can happily theorize about it - but the comic will probably never explain how an Alchemiter creates matter from nothing. That’s magic. 

CGA: I Need To Figure Out A Way To Stoke This Volcano CGA: In Case You And The Others Are Successful In Recovering The Queens Ring

What, are you going to pull a Frodo?

Oh my god, you are! 

So that’s what the Forge does. It probably melts it - and given that this is the Forge, the metal is probably used to make something else. Raw material for the Ultimate Alchemy, perhaps? 

CGA: Still Baffled By What Would Conceivably Cause Such A Crisis In Awesomeness Post-Victory FCG: WELL FCG: FOR STARTERS FCG: HAVE YOU SCROLLED UP TO THE TOP OF THE TIMELINES YET?

Whatever this is, it takes place hours in post-session Karkat’s future. After a certain point, Trollian completely flips out, and refuses to load anything past this position on the timeline. 

The simplest explanation, of course, is that there’s nothing to load. 

I prefer the boots, but that is pretty sick. I award it second place on the podium of Sburb mobility devices. 

DRAGONSPRITE: sniff sniff DRAGONSPRITE: hey terezi! DRAGONSPRITE: heeeeeeeyyyyyyy! DRAGONSPRITE: hiiiiii terezi!

The intelligence of a sprite is proportional to its ingredients. Dragons are typically rather clever, but this one is just a wyrmling, so she’s probably comparable to Jaspers. 

If sprites age, that could change - but I’m not sure she’ll have the time. The trolls’ sprites are conspicuously absent from the Veil.

CG: OK I GOT YOUR MESSAGE CG: THANKS FOR NOT HASSLING ME ABOUT IT IN ONE OF THE MEMOS TO GET MY ATTENTION, I APPRECIATE THAT. CG: UNLESS YOU DID, BUT IT WAS IN A FUTURE MEMO I HAVEN'T WRITTEN YET, IN WHICH CASE HAVE A BIGTIME FUCK YOU ABOUT THAT IN ADVANCE. [...] GC: M4YB3 1 W1LL ST4RT MY OWN BULL3T1N BO4RD GC: 4ND 3V3RYON3 W1LL B3 4LLOW3D TO R3PLY 4NY T1M3 TH3Y W4NT GC: 3XC3PT FOR GUYS W1TH NUBBY HORNS, OH NO, TH3Y W1LL NOT B3 4BL3 TO R3PLY 4T 4LL

These two are pretty messy, but here’s my full read. 

I’m fairly sure that Karkat was referring to Terezi here. He has a flushed crush on her, but her personality mildly annoys him sometimes. His irritation, paired with his genuine attraction to her, is confusing him, making him wonder if this is actually a blossoming kismesissitude. He’s therefore started forcing himself to insult her, even in places where it doesn’t naturally fit. 

You see in the paragraph above, where he sincerely thanks her for her tact, and then immediately pivots to flaming her for potential rudeness? That’s clumsy pitch flirtation, from someone whose heart isn’t really in it. 

Terezi, meanwhile, is harder to crack. I’m pretty sure she’s attempting both pitch and flushed flirtation, but I can’t tell what she actually feels. She definitely likes Karkat, but I don’t know what direction. There’s a decent chance that she just doesn’t know herself - which is, if nothing else, pretty realistic. 

CG: THIS IS AN EMPTY THREAT, BECAUSE IF YOU MADE A BOARD AT ANY POINT ON THE TIMELINE I WOULD BE ABLE TO SEE IT RIGHT HERE AND READ THE WHOLE THING ALREADY. CG: WAIT... CG: OH GOD, YOU ACTUALLY DID.

C’mon, dude, you know her better than that!

#2567 #homestuck liveblog #full liveblog #act 5 #s47

[counting-eyerolls]

this is me being angry about people's reactions to creative decisions in media so rambling under the cut.

jjk 236 spoilers for those who did not see the tags.

i think it's genuinely concerning how some people consume media. it's your comfort piece of art and something that you adore with all your being and you write about it and post about it and talk about it but the second your favourite dies (said favourite happening to be one of the "hot" characters) boom it's shit and you shouldn't have read it and you come up with insults and slurs towards the creator.

in the past 1.5h i've been awake today i have seem so much hate towards an artist all because of a newly posted chapter and the way it progresses/ends.

yes this is about jjk and chapter 236. (spoilers ahead, last warning)

i feel like the point of any creative piece (writing, visual art, music etc) is to send a message and have the readers/watchers etc feel something because of your work. it's to send an emotion.

remember how we all felt when geto was dying? i sure do. he was and still is my favourite, dead and all. broke my heart -- it all did, not just his death but everything leading up to it (in terms of satosugu moments and symbolism for example). i didn't see this much hate though. maybe this is because by the time he died, he had already become one of the negative characters and people already had new favourites to focus on, heck if i know.

still.

i mean obviously, nobody likes the fact that your favourite character gets killed but it is about the vision of the author/artist etc. geto dying gave us so much symbolism and so many parallels and character development (for gojo, for example) etc without which he probably wouldn't have turned into the character everyone is obsessed with. it was part of a complex backstory and character development, it showed us how the specific character was dealing with problems which aren't that easy to deal with, it showed how the influence of those around him (or lack thereof) affected him and why he ended up choosing the path that he chose etc. yes, it was sad that he died, but it was part of a bigger story. still i think it's unbelievable to insult and criticize someone so much because of a choice they made with the character they created. i get that it sucks that your fav dies or suffers but try to appreciate the fact that no artist owes anyone anything and they are still creating and publishing and putting their art out for you to consume and sharing their creativity with you. would you have preferred that you never had said art piece at all?

imagine you come up with a story that's so awesome to you and you're proud of it but halfway through you start getting hate for it because you kill someone in the middle of it. when it was your story to begin with ?? so you are allowed to do whatever you like ?? literally no rules. but the people criticizing you don't know what you plan to do with this in the long run so they just, well, hate. this is what i cant accept, no matter the fandom or the characters, whether they're fictional or based on real people or stage personas etc. not agreeing with a creative decision (in fiction or otherwise) is perfectly acceptable. sending hate to the creator because you do not like it? unacceptable.

stop consuming it then. it's just as easy to stop as it is to pick up.

and it disgusts me that people who should know better are doing this. people who are fic writers themselves. maybe not directly sending hate to the creator but commenting and posting about it (using dare i say quite shitty wording as well). this is not only telling everyone that you share this opinion but encouraging others who feel the same to follow your example, even if you are not explicitly doing it. you are encouraging, for example, followers that are younger and do not know better (not because "when you're young you don't know anything", but because it is true that at a younger age you are not able to fully understand certain principles and thought processes and what is right or not) to do the same and who knows, said influenced people (whether old or young, doesn't matter) can then take the hate further to the creator. you are inactively telling people who do not know better that it is okay to do this. why? because to you it is "so serious ong" or because "you are disgusted" by this creative decision and so on. as a fic writer on tumblr you sometimes become somebody that readers and those who do not have the confidence to share their work look up to. and you normalize this behaviour because you are upset that the sexy white haired guy died when you liked to write fics about him. you normalize this behaviour and find it acceptable to do this (because if you didn't find it acceptable, would you be doing it in the first place?) just because you refuse to take a deep breath and look at things from another perspective.

in my opinion it also shows that you are unable to take a step back and see the bigger picture or appreciate said creative decision in relation to the whole creative work. how do you know that your favourite dying will not change the story in the best way possible? you do not know, because the story is still ongoing.

so you are basically consuming the media but not actually appreciating any of the work and thought that go into it. you don't see it as something that is trying to send a message. you don't see the work that gets put into it. more importantly, you don't think that maybe the point of the author/creator is to do more than just write hot characters. so you are not appreciating the thought process behind it but when you don't like something? you are way too quick to criticize and insult. i am not saying you should like or agree or enjoy everything that happens. but you also cannot choose to insult and slur your way out of something you don't particularly like, especially when it doesn't seem like you give praise and what is deserved when you do actually agree and like the creative decisions that have been taken. so if you cannot do the opposite (aka being positive about moments in the media you consume) why do you feel the need to be so vocal and negative about things you do not agree with. has it occured to you that maybe you don't understand the full creative thought process?

disagree with creative decisions, come up with actual thoughts on why you think it wasn't right to do so or why it shouldn't have been done in the first place, come up with arguments and reasons why you think it doesn't make sense or why it isn't realistic. analyze the characters and the actions that the creator is making them do. maybe it's out of character or maybe it's a plot hole. who knows. come up with an opinion and justify why it is so "disgusting" for you to experience said part of the work. you will never achieve anything with insults and slander just because you are unhappy.

i don't feel the need for people to validate what i am saying or agree with me. but if you do not agree with me at least try telling me why. this is the essence of what i am saying: you can have a different opinion and not agree with someone but still be respectful of their decision to think or act that way. in art or in the real world.

you will also never know why the person thinks a certain way if you don't at least try to understand or ask them about it.

anyway yea.

#you belong to a community of creative people and you have probably experienced receiving hate #so why do you do the same #why do you normalize this #why is it so hard to detach from media that you consume and think like an actual human being instead of being like this #jjk manga leaks #jjk spoilers #jjk manga spoilers