Listen I’m not sober and am having feelings. Therefore, since my roommate is not hear to listen to me, I am taking it to the void of tumblr.
Okay? Okay. This is all stream of consciousness so buckle in, it not be coherent.
Listen.
I was on TikTok, zoning out but vibing to 60 second music while enjoying some smoke. And I don’t watch this anime so I don’t trust myself to spell the name but my friend reposted this edit:
Now see, I’m vibing to the music bobbing around, I always stop on what he reposts and it is so many of these two. He loves them, I’m happy for him. I don’t know this Anime outside these edits and what he’s ranted at me. From what I understand they were boyfriends (but not really) and there was a bitter break up in front of a KFC (but not really) when the one with dark hair decided to be a villain (a hot one apparently) and now they are bitter enemies (devastating-ly).
I’m vibing, I think ah yes the lovers to bitter enemies troupe. Heart breaking.
This lead me into thinking about said trope. How sad it is that our characters are on opposing sides- fighting someone they once wanted to make happy.
They hate each other and they hate what’s happened to them as a couple but they don’t love each other any more. At least not like they use to. They now love each other as fond memories, as shared dreams, of happiness and warmth and home.
They love each other as a time when everything was good and soft and sweat. And it wasn’t perfect but there was nothing they couldn’t bounce back from if they were together. Until there was. Until something did.
And maybe they blame the other or them selves or both but they still care. And it hurts. They are still so bitter.
They could, or maybe have, accepted their reality. Their fate to stick to this path that was of their own design.
(You can argue “well this happened,” or, “well they just felt.” You can rationalize why they would choose something that would break the best thing they have in their lives. You fantasize about it that’s why we have fix it fics.)
It doesn’t mean that when/if one of them comes to serious harm from the others actions they won’t hate themselves just a little bit more. (And maybe one of them enjoys hurting the other/ being hurt in a martyr/“i deserve this type bullshit way.)
The point is they don’t want to kill each other directly. They will stop before the finale blow or find an excuse when the other obviously has had too much. They will shield the other indirectly under some disguise, lying horribly. (Or not horribly or lying at all but acting like he really cares because the other is bad at hiding it so he’s waiting to “double cross” them but that never comes. And it’s just a vicious cycle of pretending that he doesn’t know how he really feels anymore.)
Anyway, they care on some capacity and both know they do so they don’t kill each other. There is an unspoken (or maybe spoken in like wired declarations) pact between them to not kill the other directly. Like when they meet in weird places to talk cryptically at each other. they are not allowed to kill or attempt to kill each other in these moments because they respect each other to much.
(Or are like Charles Xavier and Eric Lehnsherr/Magneto (I keep wanting to call him Eric Kripke - that’s the creator of supernatural) type shit where they don’t want to kill each other, it’s mostly political. So like the scene in the movie where they playing chess in Eric’s cell.)
Are you with me so far?
Now imagine:
They love, respect, and care about each other. They meet to play chess, or sit on a bench, or get coffee in a polite and often cryptic way.
They have stood, shook hands and said their not-really-a-threat-nor- a-proper-goodbye. One turns to start walking away. The other doesn’t move but watches for a second. They wait a beat and call out. Or maybe they don’t. Maybe they let the other face them first or maybe they don’t want to see their face.
To see their face (maybe it’s the more trusting one to have given his back to his friend enemy) when the gun fires. When the blade plunges deep. When the take down happens.
Either way the one bleeding out will do so in the lap of the other as they mourn how things could have been.
And there are so many ways to play this trope because what if the one bleeding out is shocked, betrayed and the other is unremorseful or so wrecked with guilt and shame. Or the one who knows they’re going to die in that moment just accepts it and smiles and forgives the other (whether they want it or not and oh how they don’t deserve it but they need it like they need air because once they had been happy and good together.)
Or their last words are of love, of comfort, sent heard because other doesn’t take them into their lap but instead turned and walked away leaving their love victim to smile at the sky in peace.
i say i like tragedies and everyone’s all like ‘why do you like sad stories? are you depressed?’ and never ‘how was the catharsis? was the catharsis fun?’
Honestly pokemon is the ideal universe not just because there’s cute animals that are your life companions, but because they have walkable cities and adequate biking infrastructure
You guys are commenting on the fics you read right? You’re at least leaving kudos on the Astarion smut and the pairs that have less than 20 fics for them too? You’re bookmarking stories you really like that are still being updated and ones that haven’t been touched in over a year right?
You know that even the smallest interactions are like cocaine to fic writers right? You understand how important a string of emoji hearts left behind on chapter at three am is right?? Right????
You’re treating AO3 like a community and not a content factory….right?
for anyone that doesn't know, i recently started school again! (that's why ive been so mia) so ill be posting class projects whenever i finish them,,, this was a figure drawing assignment :)
sometimes while i think about that while a lot of adults did not treat me very well as a kid i also get a lot of 'in hindsight this person was so good to me and i didnt even realize it until now' as an adult. today i was thinking about how the first anime convention i ever went to was when i was 10 and i asked the man working the manga cafe what manga was/what a good place to start was (because the con was very overstimulating for me and i had gotten lost) and he asked how old i was before recommending yotsuba and asking if i wanted any water or something to eat. its really simple but theres a lot of bad things that couldve happened or he could've been careless in his recommendation, but instead yotsuba has remained one of my favorite manga for years, and probably a large portion of why i continue to read manga as an adult... i think adults who try to involve kids in the world safely/kindly even in little ways make so much more of a difference than they ever really know.
at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"
like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.
"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."
... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.
and i'd still keep writing.
i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.
i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley
"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"
and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.
it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.
Book 2 au: sparring sessions and short hair katara
They like to have sparring sessions in order to keep their bending skills sharp. They allow themselves to go all out and not hold back at all cause they know if anyone got hurt, Katara could just heal them
But anyways, wouldn't it be kinda funny if Zuko accidentally burned Katara's hair tho? Aofkqldkkajfjd
The "I think we can save the hairloops" line is from @linnoya-writes thank you for that!! :>>
Do you guys notice how when Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers union, started planning a general strike, he did it by a) targeting his messaging towards unions with the ability to safely and effectively strike in large numbers, b) laid out a clear, actionable plan for those unions to follow (setting contracts to all expire at the same time, since many unions cannot strike while under contract), c) is using union contracts to set clear, actionable demands that can be met in order to gauge success and provide an end goal, and d) started organizing FOUR YEARS before the proposed strike date to give people the chance to plan accordingly, because it takes a really freaking long time to get tens of millions of people organized?
You notice how he didn't do it by slapping a message on Twitter saying 'hey nobody go to work on Monday, that'll really show 'em'?