darkandstormydolls

[darkandstormydolls]

highly recommend keeping a small portrait of a historical figure who met a grisly end on your work desk. for perspective.

[darkandstormydolls]

i think what bothers me about a lot of "girl power" narratives is that they function on the implicit idea on the idea that women can become worthy of respect. and i happen to think that really caring about women means believing they already are worthy of respect. that historical seamstresses and soccer moms and forgotten sisters and sweet polite little girls and someone's weird grandma matter just as much as the warriors and politicians, even if they, personally, never accomplish anything "cool."

[darkandstormydolls]

12 frames of animation I made using knitting! I spent a long time on this and I’m so pleased with the results, really looking forward to trying more ‘yarnimation’ in the future. Process video out now too! 🐑

[darkandstormydolls]

I feel like I literally sent you this post at some point

You are an angel sent down to Hell every half-century for a routine checkup. One day, you find it completely remade. It is now a luxury resort without a single scream to be heard. When you confront the Big Man, he simply says "Meh, got bored."

[darkandstormydolls]

Daisy’s grandparents bought her a beautiful kimono, so what better place to wear it than the Japanese Gardens? Isn’t she lovely 🩷

[darkandstormydolls]

Some women are conditioned to be fragile and weak, and to believe that it's a sin to outperform a man. Her feminism would involve allowing women to be strong.

Some women are expected to be strong at times when they can't. Her feminism would involve reassuring her that it's okay to not be strong.

Some neurodivergent people are raised to believe that they're too stupid to ever amount to anything. Their disability activism would involve reassuring them that they're capable.

Some neurodivergent people are raised to believe that they're smart and gifted, and are expected to live up to impossible standards. Their disability activism would involve allowing them to fail, make mistakes, be stupid, etc.

Some children are constantly reminded "you're the child, I'm the adult" in order to deny their autonomy. Their youth rights activism would involve treating them like an adult at times when they feel ready for it.

Some children are treated like adults in order to justify increased expectations or to downplay abuse against them. Their youth rights activism would involve allowing them to be a child.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to oppression. Each individual person's experience is different. Whatever trauma is caused by their oppression, the activism should focus on undoing it.

[darkandstormydolls]

fat character who becomes a vampire and loses a ton of weight and blood can not sate their hunger but they can't eat anything they used to like anymore. everyone views it as a positive healthy positive development but they're starving and dying slowly but never truly dying, a living corpse. this is a metaphor for something

[darkandstormydolls]

She has a pet triceratops

@daksicavalry @ominous-faechild

New REBLOG Game

Just fucking lie about the previous poster

[darkandstormydolls]

"you are one of gods strongest soldiers" i say, not even believing in either of those institutions

[darkandstormydolls]

"came back wrong" what about Came Back Afraid. You used to be brave. Too brave maybe, defying the odds at every turn, a fighter, cocky, playing with fire, first to throw yourself at the enemy. Until one day it all caught up to you. You came back, somehow, but now you know all too intimately how it feels to lose, to die, to be destroyed. Now you flinch and freeze and cower at the slightest provocation. Who even are you now if you can't be brave? The grave may have let you go, but the mortal fear still grips you tighter than ever.

[darkandstormydolls]

[darkandstormydolls]

It's amazing how easy it is to start a new craft project when you are 80% finished with a previous craft project

[darkandstormydolls]

"ohh 00s diet culture isn't back because of ozempic, you're overreacting"

idk i keep seeing previously size-inclusive brands remove plus-sized versions of their clothes from their catalogues entirely, even lines specifically aimed at bigger sizes are cutting their size range down and chopping the bigger ones. i keep seeing mean skinny tiktokers get famous because they said something rude about fat people. when i ask my doctor about weight loss (which my country's gender treatment clinic requires before i can access even preliminary talks about hrt), i'm immediately offered drugs about it - drugs which, according to the doctor, we don't know the long-term effects of. but surely! surely it can't be worse than being fat!

like why are people acting surprised? we've made being extremely wealthy the aspirational aesthetic to strive for, made 'being skinny and having a lot of time and money to stay beautiful' a not only viable but lucrative carreer for people, and then released a drug that is wildly expensive and will make people thin.

of course people are gonna make being thin the ultimate status symbol again - it more than ever before signals wealth and leisure-time.

like, do you think it's a coincidence that people are back to constantly spouting 'nothing tastes as good as skinny feels' again? and pretending being fat is a matter of lacking self-control around cake or whatever? as if people haven't spent decades trying to get these fucks to understand that actually healthy produce and the time to maintain your body are extreme luxuries in our society?

anyway my broke fat ass can't find pants i like and can afford because the size-inclusive lines i'd have shopped at previously have axed anything over a size xl

and like. i'm not even that fat. what the fuck do people bigger than me do. it's really heinous right now for fat peeps.

[darkandstormydolls]

obsessed with how fixable society is, on a structural level.

obsessed with how all you need to do is throw money at public education and eliminate most standardized testing and you will start getting smarter, more engaged, kinder adults. obsessed with how giving people safe housing, reliable access to good food, and decent wages dramatically reduces drug overdoses and gun violence. obsessed with how much people actually want to get together and fix infrastructure, invent new ways of helping each other, and create global ways of living sustainably once you give them livable pay to do so. obsessed with how tracking diseases, developing medicines, and improving public health becomes so much easier when you just make healthcare free at point of use.

obsessed with how easy it all becomes, if we can just figure out how to wrench the wealth out of the hands of the hoarders.

[darkandstormydolls]

@ominous-faechild I fear that my more detailed explanation may be a let down from what I previously said, so I need to clarify that David is completely also just a hater. I mean, one of the first things he ever says to Aiden (after something along the lines of “hi who are you and why are you here”) is “oh great, a Baptist. Trust me, I’ve heard enough of how I’m going to burn in hell already”

(Aiden didn’t even really say anything to prompt that either)

I have decided that yes, I will ramble about my new story characters

So

Starting off with Aiden

My beloved little Aiden, the reason I have to keep insisting to my friends that this story is NOT a metaphor or an allegory or whatever, it's completely literal and he has a literal demon in his head

Which is the main plot. Aiden, at age twelve, woke up possessed by a demon. Sometimes it takes over from him and makes him do things he never would of his own free will, often it doesn't have the strength to take full control but it still is talking in his head. The demon just wants to make people suffer, and since it often can't direct that to other people, it settles for hurting Aiden, mostly psychologically (although there are a few points where it takes control and hurts him physically as well). This is not hard, because Aiden is sort of... naturally prone to guilt. He's convinced himself that he isn't really a good person, that this is probably some kind of divine judgment, and that he's inherently evil because of this demon. The demon absolutely encourages this and tries to make him feel bad for all of the things it does and says. And the main plot of the story kicks off when, four years later and desperate to get rid of it, he goes to see an occultist about the matter

Of course, like I said, this isn't his only trauma. Because he was abandoned as a young child (for reasons he doesn't know), but he did end up being raised in a good place with people who care about him, so like... it's not his main trauma

But the main reason I started this story and character was to play around with religion in storytelling and characterization. I mean, I'd already done a little of that with Ashling, but I wanted to do more. Besides, I find religion fascinating, especially Catholicism, and wanted a chance to use actual, real-world belief systems rather than the fantasy one I made up for Ashling. Hence, Aiden exists.

I'm having a lot of fun with it. And as an atheist myself, it's been interesting to figure out the way that religion and faith would affect how the characters see the world. Aiden ends up leaning on faith as a sort of coping mechanism to try and deal with his issues with demonic possession, and still tries to ask God for help even when what he's been through leads him to questioning those beliefs. It ends up being a fundamentally positive force; getting through some of his issues ends up leading Aiden back towards faith.

That, however, is contrasted with another major character, David, who's basically a foil for Aiden's worldview. David is the occultist Aiden goes to, and he's very focused on studying the supernatural and understanding it. He's also a bit of a contradiction; he's very scientific about his occultism, but also absolutely plays it up on the mystic side to impress people, mostly because he uses his knowledge to do seances (mostly just to keep the lights on and fund his other research). But David, in his past, has had bad experiences with religion, and as such, he has a bit of a hard time working with Aiden and his worldview, especially considering that, for Aiden, going to ask David for help is stepping into a world of things that he considers to be fundamentally evil. He wants to help this kid who clearly needs it, but struggles because he doesn't quite get Aiden's internal struggles and because asking the same questions of himself are what led to him leaving faith behind.

Plus, the setting is fun. This story is a lot more "low magic" than I usually write in; yes, there are demons and spirits and things that exist, but they aren't fundamental to how the world works. Plus, I set it in the 1870s (it's ambiguous where it actually takes place, because I didn't want to tie myself down to a specific city and end up getting stuff wrong), which means it's coming off the end of the second Great Awakening, right in the middle of a ton of change in scientific thought, and setting up the rise of occultism and spiritualism at the end of the 19th century, so I'm getting to have fun with the intersection of scientific thought, religion, and spiritualism as ways of seeing the world

[darkandstormydolls]

i really dont know how to caption this but The Truth changed wires in my brain and everyone should be reading it. Some hidden/obscured details in this under the cut!

william's notes, the iconographs that were originally going to be much more visible, and a unused vetinari. below is the article - a combination of the actual article from the book and some stuff i came up with. im sure you won't be able to tell the difference at all

[darkandstormydolls]

I have decided that yes, I will ramble about my new story characters

So

Starting off with Aiden

My beloved little Aiden, the reason I have to keep insisting to my friends that this story is NOT a metaphor or an allegory or whatever, it's completely literal and he has a literal demon in his head

Which is the main plot. Aiden, at age twelve, woke up possessed by a demon. Sometimes it takes over from him and makes him do things he never would of his own free will, often it doesn't have the strength to take full control but it still is talking in his head. The demon just wants to make people suffer, and since it often can't direct that to other people, it settles for hurting Aiden, mostly psychologically (although there are a few points where it takes control and hurts him physically as well). This is not hard, because Aiden is sort of... naturally prone to guilt. He's convinced himself that he isn't really a good person, that this is probably some kind of divine judgment, and that he's inherently evil because of this demon. The demon absolutely encourages this and tries to make him feel bad for all of the things it does and says. And the main plot of the story kicks off when, four years later and desperate to get rid of it, he goes to see an occultist about the matter

Of course, like I said, this isn't his only trauma. Because he was abandoned as a young child (for reasons he doesn't know), but he did end up being raised in a good place with people who care about him, so like... it's not his main trauma

But the main reason I started this story and character was to play around with religion in storytelling and characterization. I mean, I'd already done a little of that with Ashling, but I wanted to do more. Besides, I find religion fascinating, especially Catholicism, and wanted a chance to use actual, real-world belief systems rather than the fantasy one I made up for Ashling. Hence, Aiden exists.

I'm having a lot of fun with it. And as an atheist myself, it's been interesting to figure out the way that religion and faith would affect how the characters see the world. Aiden ends up leaning on faith as a sort of coping mechanism to try and deal with his issues with demonic possession, and still tries to ask God for help even when what he's been through leads him to questioning those beliefs. It ends up being a fundamentally positive force; getting through some of his issues ends up leading Aiden back towards faith.

That, however, is contrasted with another major character, David, who's basically a foil for Aiden's worldview. David is the occultist Aiden goes to, and he's very focused on studying the supernatural and understanding it. He's also a bit of a contradiction; he's very scientific about his occultism, but also absolutely plays it up on the mystic side to impress people, mostly because he uses his knowledge to do seances (mostly just to keep the lights on and fund his other research). But David, in his past, has had bad experiences with religion, and as such, he has a bit of a hard time working with Aiden and his worldview, especially considering that, for Aiden, going to ask David for help is stepping into a world of things that he considers to be fundamentally evil. He wants to help this kid who clearly needs it, but struggles because he doesn't quite get Aiden's internal struggles and because asking the same questions of himself are what led to him leaving faith behind.

Plus, the setting is fun. This story is a lot more "low magic" than I usually write in; yes, there are demons and spirits and things that exist, but they aren't fundamental to how the world works. Plus, I set it in the 1870s (it's ambiguous where it actually takes place, because I didn't want to tie myself down to a specific city and end up getting stuff wrong), which means it's coming off the end of the second Great Awakening, right in the middle of a ton of change in scientific thought, and setting up the rise of occultism and spiritualism at the end of the 19th century, so I'm getting to have fun with the intersection of scientific thought, religion, and spiritualism as ways of seeing the world