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Underrated form of intimacy:

The quiet discussion and good-luck affirmations between you and the person helping you don your armor. The comfort of knowing that the straps and buckles are perfectly secure, because the person who did them up loves you more than words can say.

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I think the weirdest form of fatphobia I keep bumping into is writers suddenly becoming deeply concerned with physical realism when a fat character is involved even in contexts where everybody's physical capabilities are explicitly bullshit. "They're fat, it wouldn't make sense for them to have super speed" and it would make sense for the 98-pound twink to be able to run at Mach Fuck? That's something skinny people can do in real life, is it?

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i feel like an often overlooked downside to 10-episode seasons and the death of the "monster of the week" format is that we get way less whump variety nowadays. used to be that there'd be dozens of opportunities for your fave to get punched or kidnapped or hypnotized or what have you. these days if it doesn't fit into the main plot, it just doesn't happen. this is a tragedy. we should be protesting.

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if you make that female character less goth as a sign of her ~healing~ or ~improving her life~ I will kill you

make her MORE gloriously dark and over-the-top. she's growing into herself. she's getting comfortable being who she wants to be. do you see the vision. I am crying and throwing things

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One of my favorite tropes is character with a nasty toxic personality who tries very hard to do the right thing anyway

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sometimes you guys yurify a couple and suddenly theyre all cutesy and innocent and perfectly loving. wrong. those girls better be making out nasty style and stabbing each other and being ugly and weird and irascible just like their male counterparts. in fact. even MORE so. they should be NASTIER and BLOODIER and CRAZIER!!!!!!! NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!

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every piece of ""autistic representation"" in hollywood sucks not just because of the infantalization and inspiration porn but because movie executives always fail to realize the real universal autistic experience: spending your childhood slowly and unfalteringly realizing all of your friends not so secretly hated and/or merely tolerated you at best and you've missed every social signal about it ever

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joining the war on kids reading any book they want on the side of kids reading any book they want. simply you will be fine. it's even good to be confronted with things you don't understand and even find upsetting, uncomfortable and difficult. it's a surprise tool that will help you later.

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taking off a mask to reveal what lies beneath as a romantic gesture is overdone, and besides i want to see the romantic or even platonic potential of protecting someone's identity beneath the mask, without any expectation of ever being allowed to see what's under it. picking it up and holding it gently to their face when it's knocked off and they're in danger of being exposed, without trying to catch a glimpse of what they "really" look like under there. throwing yourself in front of them to hide them from view while they put themselves back together without taking advantage or looking back to see what you're protecting. learning to read them by body language, tone of voice, and behaviour so well that you never need to see their face to feel like you know and understand them.

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Somebody shared the following today saying: "I found this video on tiktok and it explains m.e so well" and "I saw it and thought to myself I relate so much" Here's the TikTok link: https://www.tiktok.com/@jeremyandrewdavis/video/7135061608316833070

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“this character can’t/shouldn’t be trans because it doesn’t have a purpose or serve their narrative” god who the fuck cares. sometimes people are just trans.

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I would love to see a fantasy novel where the lore that the reader / protagonist learns at first is not true

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One of my biggest pieces of advice for writing--or, really, for anything--is to learn to love the mechanics of it.

This is not to say that you need to love every second of every part of writing to be a good writer, but I find people who dislike the actual act of writing don't usually make good writers.

I think that this is, in part, where the AI stuff comes from--people who like the idea of writing but don't like (or know how to do) the mechanics of writing choose to rely on AI because they see it as handling the mechanics, which they see as the less important part.

But the mechanics are a huge part of it. The plot, the characters, the world, the idea--all of that is important. But writing is also about the paragraphs and the sentences and the words. It's about playing around with wording or sentence structure or phrasing to see what works best. It's about literally writing the sentences--all of the sentences. It's about choosing where the paragraph breaks are, where scenes end, where chapters end.

And if you hate doing the mechanics of it--if you hate putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard or however it is you draft--you will hate writing, and you will come to hate your writing. Because you will resent the actions required to do it. You will hate having to sit down and do the writing, because you hate actually writing.

There's nothing wrong with not enjoying actually writing. You can tell stories in other ways. Record a podcast. Sing. Tell stories to your friends.

Or teach yourself how to enjoy writing. Figure out what parts of it you do like and make those a bigger part of your process. Is text to speech easier? Do that to start. Do you not want chapter breaks for your first draft? That's fine.

Anyway, tl;dr: you will be a better writer and have a better time at it if you enjoy the mechanics of writing.

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Begging writers not to delete their old work because yes I understand it feels cringy and embarrassing but I cannot tell you how good it is to reread something you wrote a long time ago, and be able to see just how much you've improved. Even if you still have a long way to go, you're always improving and nothings more motivating that having direct proof of your efforts

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so what do u think about plays

i like how in a theatre time and space are necessarily metaphorical. i don’t like how plays always have to begin with someone walking onstage and talking. too many directors try to work around this by having someone walk onstage and brood in silence for a moment before talking. this is worse. 

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i love you character who’s trying to do better but cannot outrun your fate, i love you hope in spite of all proof of doom, i love you despaired attempts at making it right, i love you blind trust even as you know a knife in the back is awaiting, i love you love that doesn’t mean anything when faced with greater forces, i love you slow descend into madness at the unfairness of it all, i love you pure heart not strong enough to withstand tainting, i love you justified anger