essayofthoughts

[essayofthoughts]

✨ Please reblog the polls before the poll ends to make them reach out to as many people as possible, but KEEP IT SPOILER-FREE to make people listen to the music with an open mind 💖

Artists and titles will be revealed after the poll's conclusion, check the original post for an update! ✨

[essayofthoughts]

Since the booping has returned, reblog if it's okay to spam you with boops!

I wanna be polite and not spam random people without permission , ,

[essayofthoughts]

"kill them with kindness" WRONG boop

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[essayofthoughts]

🎃 👻 🔮 HAPPY HALLOBOOP EVERYONE 🎃 👻 🔮

[essayofthoughts]

There are a lot of abuse and recovery stories out there in fandom.  A lot of them are written by people who’ve never been in an abusive relationship.  That’s fine, that certainly doesn’t mean you can't write it, especially when it’s present in canon.  Unfortunately, it does mean that a lot of people get it wrong.

The usual abuse narrative you see in fandom is a story about absence.  The lack of safety.  The lack of freedom.  The lack of love, or of hope, or of trust.  They try to characterize the life of an abused kid, or an abused partner, based on what’s missing.  They characterize recovery based on getting things back: finding safety, discovering freedom, and slowly regaining the ability to trust–other people, the security of the world, themselves.

That doesn’t work.  That is not how it works.

Lives cannot be characterized by negative space.  This is a statement about writing.  It’s also a statement about life.

You can’t write about somebody by describing what isn’t there.  Or you can, but you’ll get a strange, inverted, abstracted picture of a life, with none of the right detail.  A silhouette.  The gaps are real but they're not the point.

If you’re writing a story, you need to make it about the things that are there.  Don’t try to tell me about the absence of safety.  Safety is relative.  There are moments of more or less safety all throughout your character’s day.  Absolute safety doesn’t exist in anyone’s life, abusive situation or not.

If you are trying to tell me a story about not feeling safe, then the question you need to be thinking about is, when safety is gone, what grows in the space it left behind?

Don’t try to tell me a story about a life characterized by the lack of safety.  Tell me a story about a life defined by the presence of fear.

What's there in somebody’s life when their safety, their freedom, their hope and trust are all gone?  It’s not just gaps waiting to be filled when everything comes out right in the end.  It’s not just a void.

The absence of safety is the presence of fear.  The absence of freedom is the presence of rules, the constant litany of must do this and don’t do that and a very very complicated kind of math beneath every single decision.  The lack of love feels like self-loathing.  The lack of trust translates as learning skills and strategies and skepticism, how to get what you need because you can’t be sure it’ll be there otherwise.

You don’t draw the lack of hope by telling me how your character rarely dares to dream about having better.  You draw it by telling me all the ways your character is up to their neck in what it takes to survive this life, this now, by telling me all the plans they do have and never once in any of them mentioning the idea of getting out.

This is of major importance when it comes to aftermath stories, too.  Your character isn’t a hollow shell to be filled with trust and affection and security.  Your character is full.  They are brimming over with coping mechanisms and certainties about the world.  They are packed with strategies and quickfire risk-reward assessments, and depending on the person it may look more calculated or more instinctual, but it’s there.  It’s always there.  You’re not filling holes or teaching your teenage/adult character basic facts of life like they’re a child.  You’re taking a human being out of one culture and trying to immerse them in another. People who are abused make choices.  In a world where the ‘wrong’ choice means pain and injury, they make a damn career out of figuring out and trying to make the right choice, again and again and again.  People who are abused have a framework for the world, they are not utterly baffled by everyone else, they make assumptions and fit observations together in a way that corresponds with the world they know.

They’re not little lost children.  They’re not empty.  They’re human beings trying to live in a way that’s as natural for them as life is for anybody, and if you’re going to write abuse/recovery, you need to know that in your bones.

Don’t tell me about gaps.  Tell me about what’s there instead.

[essayofthoughts]

✨ Please reblog the polls before the poll ends to make them reach out to as many people as possible, but KEEP IT SPOILER-FREE to make people listen to the music with an open mind 💖

Artists and titles will be revealed after the poll's conclusion, check the original post for an update! ✨

[essayofthoughts]

On wastes of time

There's this recurring thing where people can't tell me what's so cool or important about this show they want me to watch or book they want me to read or podcast they want me to listen to and I know summarising is a skill, but it's also really important if you want to get people into things.

Because currently? Currently what we have drives me nuts. We get "Oh, it's gay!" or some obfuscating description that tells us nothing, or "it's so good i promise" and that isn't enough!

Okay, it's gay. I can go to AO3 for queer fic, I have queer books I know are good, podcasts, shows, etc.. I've been rereading a series where most of the main cast are from a non-human culture where queerness is normal and gender roles are flipped around. Tell me why I should care about this one. Gay is not a genre - is it horror, mystery, romance, fantasy, sci-fi? Is the queerness the whole plot or is it incidental? (Because, and I'll be honest, if the queerness is the whole plot, I will not be interested - some may! But not me.)

"read about this perfectly normal thing!" - well, obviously there's something not normal about it or else you wouldn't be writing about it. Is it an SCP kind of obsessively Normal thing in a way that's eerie and unnerving? A horror story? That could be cool. Is the weird coming from people investigating it, or around it? Does something strange happen to it? Is the thing entirely normal but it's just the setting and the story is about people around it or involved in it? I don't fucking know. You haven't told me.

Okay, so it's good. It makes you yell and feel emotions. What emotions. Why? What invokes the emotions? Why do you enjoy it? What bits stood out, what made it interesting to you? What might draw someone else in?

Back when everyone went feral over the Locked Tomb, I didn't get it. Goth Space Lesbians, okay. That's a cool art piece, maybe a stained glass window, but it's not a story.

You know what got me to read it? A post talking about the swimming pool confession.

That? That cut to the heart of messy interpersonal dynamics that indicated a lot of tension between the characters, a lot of nuance to the dynamics and things which, done right, I could find compelling. It showed history, it showed thought, it showed messy, flawed characters who still had morals and guilt and lines even they wouldn't cross within their rivalry, it showed a trust within their rivalry that they knew where they stood with each other even if that was at knifepoint. It made me curious.

I ultimately didn't really care for Locked Tomb, but that's fine. Sometimes you bounce off something, and it just wasn't my kind of jam. But that one post? That gave me a glimpse. That made me curious enough to try.

But a lot of summaries and attempts to make people start something new I've seen lately? Skip that step. Skip making people curious. Just say "HEY LOOK AT THIS" without ever giving a reason. And I get you may want to avoid spoilers, or go in blind, or avoid giving the plot away but...

What counts as spoilers? How blind should you go in? And does this give away the whole plot, or just that there is one? The kind of genre and tropes that might be in play?

If you tell people nothing, then you've given them a blank wall. It could be thin as paper - easy to step through and see what's on the other side, but if it looks like a blank wall, why would they bother? You have to provide a doorway - something they can look through, and catch a glimpse of what's on the other side. Something that makes them want to step through and see more.

You want people curious. You want people interested. You need to answer just enough questions to make them want to discover more for themselves.

If you want me to spend my time reading/watching/listening to something, then I have to know it's worth my time.

[essayofthoughts]

✨ Please reblog the polls before the poll ends to make them reach out to as many people as possible, but KEEP IT SPOILER-FREE to make people listen to the music with an open mind 💖

Artists and titles will be revealed after the poll's conclusion, check the original post for an update! ✨

[essayofthoughts]

✨ Please reblog the polls before the poll ends to make them reach out to as many people as possible, but KEEP IT SPOILER-FREE to make people listen to the music with an open mind 💖

Artists and titles will be revealed after the poll's conclusion, check the original post for an update! ✨

[essayofthoughts]

✨ Please reblog the polls before the poll ends to make them reach out to as many people as possible, but KEEP IT SPOILER-FREE to make people listen to the music with an open mind 💖

Artists and titles will be revealed after the poll's conclusion, check the original post for an update! ✨

[essayofthoughts]

Sometimes Things That Shake Up the Status Quo are Worse

I keep seeing people insisting that Exandria "can't return to the status quo, which was bad", but rarely do they say anything in support of that argument beyond "the Primes pick and choose favorites!". And while I'm not confident the show itself won't try to make that claim, the reality is that it just isn't borne out mechanically or narratively. Laying aside that non-Divine Soul sorcerers exist (like, and I'm just spitballing here, Aberrant Mind Ruidusborn), the gods work primarily through the on-the-ground efforts of clerics and paladins—people who have actively and consistently put in the work to devote themselves to the divine. This is a setting where resurrection magic, which relies on divine power, has been intentionally made more difficult than it is in DnD rules-as-written. Even clerics only get access to Divine Intervention at level 10 (when they've already spent a long time devoting themselves to their deity) and up until level 20 the chances of it actually working are vanishingly small—and level 20 clerics are both hard to come by and ultimately still limited.

In the rare event that the Prime Deities choose to bless someone who isn't a cleric or paladin, it's someone who has a good reason to have gotten their attention. Vax offered his life during a divine ritual in the burial site of the Raven Queen's most devoted champion and then actively committed himself to her cause. Yasha was an aasimar being mind-controlled by a devil who wound up at a divine altar and chose to worship Kord after he freed her. Orym is the devoted widower of someone who is in Melora's realm and was present at a ritual in a temple associated with Melora, and one of his companions prayed at a shrine to Melora on his behalf. Vex was directly in front of Pelor, had taken a leadership position in one of his sacred cities, and had received a vision from him directly—and even then, she had to earn it. Scanlan also had to earn the right to Ioun's favor and complete a trial, and had previously shown qualities and values that she believed were fitting of her champion. Fjord was a companion of a devoted cleric of Melora who had sought her help in keeping Uk'otoa sealed and made requests of her on Fjord's behalf, and Fjord also chose to meditate and then became a paladin devoted to her.

And in Exandria, if you don't want to follow a god, you don't have to. Percy, Keyleth, Grog, Beau, Veth, Caleb, Essek, most of Bell's Hells, the average commoner in the various cities the parties have traveled to—whether they outright dislike the gods as a whole or just don't have an interest either way, they're all capable of thriving with or without them, and indeed their problems are almost entirely caused by mortals. It's especially egregious when you consider that cities like Avalir were around during the Age of Arcanum, when the Prime Deities physically walked Exandria, and people like Laerryn, Patia, Zerxus, and Lacrytia Hollow—openly disdainful of the gods or even trying to create feats of magic to get on their level—were continuing business as usual. The previous god of death not only willingly abdicated in favor of a mortal during this time, but outright helped her do the job!

The Prime Deities can't win. If they didn't give anyone any power at all, they'd be viewed as selfish. If they'd stayed on Exandria after the Calamity, they'd be foolish and reckless. They're simply not capable of intervening and helping everyone, so they're labeled capricious. If they leave Exandria, they're abandoning not only their refuge and home, but also the people who need and rely on them. You can argue that "no one should have that much power" all you want, but I think it's exceptionally silly to take an argument meant to criticize the wealthy and powerful of our world (whose only unique quality is ultimately that they got lucky) and apply it to fictional deities (beings who are powerful by their very nature) who, while flawed, also think they're too powerful. They tried to protect Exandria from themselves and the Betrayers while still using their power to do right by the people there, and for the most part it was working just fine.

The "status quo" from before all this was and still is the best compromise available. No one has managed to sell a better one that doesn't amount to "cater to my blorbos and my self-indulgent idea of revolutionary politics, which may or may not also ultimately circle back to my blorbos". I think that's pretty telling.

[essayofthoughts]

something more than flesh | 3.2k, Trauma Recovery, Smutty Perc'ahlia

“I don’t want to be afraid,” Percy says, half a mumble against her neck or hair each time. “Not of you. Not of this.”

Read @ AO3 | Addition to That balance may return

For @percahliaweek

[essayofthoughts]

immune to my wiles | 2.8k, Noir AU

Percival de Rolo has known a lot of people and considers himself, these days, to be a pretty good judge of character. This woman in his office, elegant in her dark dress as she perches on his desk, thick dark hair in a braided cascade that obscures one side of her face... Well. She’s something. Percy’s not entirely sure yet if that’s going to be a good or bad thing.

Read @ AO3 for @percahliaweek

[essayofthoughts]

worth you | 6.5k, Masc!Vex AU

Percy thought he was delirious at first, seeing two identical faces at the door to his cell, and it took him a moment to clarify that, no, there were two men there, in different clothes, one with a bow and one already kneeling to pick the lock. Much as it shames him, it takes him a few days to consistently tell them both apart - he’s known twins, yes, but never ones as identical as Vax’ildan and Vex’ahlian.

Read @ AO3 for @percahliaweek

[essayofthoughts]

heal his scars | 2.3k Outsider POV (Sylas Lives AU)

It’s a good thing, Sylas supposes, that Percival stepped out of his grave with the intent to heal his scars.

Read @ AO3 for @percahliaweek

Bonus! Prequel fic to be alive again.

[essayofthoughts]

a glass, tilted in the light | 5.1k; What If Syldor Was A Good Dad AU

“We should have written him,” she says. “You- you were right, he worried about us.” “In my experience, all good parents do,” he says, and swallows. “I know mine did.” “Why don’t you write them?” she asks and oh, oh, he wishes she hadn’t asked. “I wish I could,” he admits.

Read @ AO3 for @percahliaweek