ferventrapture

[ferventrapture]

Something just occurred to me. The old dalish curse. May the dread wolf take you...

Did it used to be a blessing? 'May the rebel free you' kind of saying? God, it would be a gut-punch to hear it the first time being used as 'may that evil wolf eat you alive'.

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When I wrote my fanfics, I was always writing a first draft, second draft.... I think this version of Exalted will be the closest to a final draft I've ever written. With actual start and end points and everything. I was never sure how to make things happen the way I wanted them to or what my characters should say, so I was a bit heavy-handed when writing dialogue, which made everything a bit clunky. But I was just getting words on the page. Now, I think I can actually think harder about what I'm writing. Dunno what changed. It can't JUST be the medication, can it?

[ferventrapture]

I'm really tired of seeing this shit: 'You have turned into the purity police, you've slid into hyper conservative-ism', because they're vague as hell and it's for a reason. Are they critiquing: 1. People against actually harmless kinks like BDSM (that follows safe, sane and consensual) because they see all kinks as inherently abusive or something? Why wouldn't you just say so? 2. People who were groomed in fandom and are angry that the pedophiles are still here and being encouraged to keep going? People who want less racism in fandom? People who want less abuse romanticization because even when they try to be careful and avoid abuse narratives, they'll run across one with something being glamorized that triggers them and the author refuses to tag it because they DON'T think it's abusive, despite the fact that it absolutely is? (Possessiveness is rarely tagged in some fandoms, for instance.) And we all know why they wouldn't just come out and say it was one or more of THESE things, don't we? 3. nobody because you're just parroting some bullshit line you've heard over and over again and you've never thought more than 'yeah, kinks are harmless and we all know where the lines are' without actually knowing jack shit about what the person who made the post was actually talking about? If you're agreeing with a vague bullshit post like this, I'm going to think one of two things. You are a person who is in support of all those things the vagueposters usually mean but won't say because other people would see those things and be like 'ew'. Or, you are an idiot with no thoughts of your own who has never done any research in your life on anything.

Wanting black and brown people of color to not be excluded in fandom is not conservative.

Not wanting to be triggered every five minutes because someone refuses to put 'rape fantasy' or 'possessive behavior romanticized' on their story, isn't conservative either.

It's not conservative to say 'I was preyed upon by this ecosystem and I'd like it to stop with me'.

It's also not conservative to say 'if you write something and put it out there, you're responsible for it and what it says about you because that's true about literally anything'.

If you ever see this 'purity police' or 'hyper-conservative' shit and they don't SPECIFY WHAT THEY MEAN, they are literally asking you to show support for pedophilia, incest, abuse romanticization and rape fantasy without any warnings on them, etc. OR they also have no idea what it really means at all and just made the exact same kind of vague bullshit they've seen over and over to feel like they're PART of something. If you support making CSEM or not tagging your shit because you're an inconsiderate jackass, just unfollow me. Do not follow to begin with. Block me. Do the same if you just uncritically reblog vague shit without actually thinking about what it means.

[ferventrapture]

I'm coming back soon!

I've actually discovered something about the issue I've had writing in the past. The reason I was able to do Fanfiction so well was because I basically knew all the background, the characters-- I just had to create some stuff to bridge the gap and make new storylines and I could do that on the fly- for a while.

Eventually though, even though I had lots of ideas, I'd run out of ideas for how to WEAVE them and even though I had a good idea, I'd be like 'wait but no what about this other one' and so I have discovered-

I actually need to plan everything out beforehand. And somehow being on my medication that I've started recently, I think I'm getting a lot more sustained interest in my creative projects? I'm still AUDHD or whatever is going on with my brain, I'll find out soon as I'll be evaluated this month.

But the bursts of creativity don't feel like a sugar high right now.

I've already plotted out part 1 of the new text version of Exalted and I'm planning part 2 and maybe even 3 and 4 before I even get started writing it, but you guys know me. I write really fucking fast when I get started. And if I actually have some idea of where I'm going, definitively and with a set start and end point, I think I could actually go to the end this time.

This might seem like an obvious thing to some people, but I honestly felt that because I wrote like a flowing river, I was just a natural pantser. Turns out I'm just really good at pantsing the actual writing after I make a vague, general plan.

I'd been outlining with my last version, but I didn't really look far ahead and I didn't have defined beginning and end points.

Oh, and I've significantly changed the Narrative again, but I promise this time it's because I discovered ways of adding challenges and character building moments that will make everything make sense instead of having everything moving smoothly without bumps like I used to before.

The Way I wrote Nik before, it was because I saw all the stuff she was capable of in my head but I didn't know how to build her up before they happened so the events would be believable. I think I've got it now, though.

Oh, and all the same OC's will be coming back, no worries if you particularly loved someone, they'll be there!

[ferventrapture]

When we say 'the veil is coming down anyway' it's not a justification for Solas killing a bunch of people. It's just a point that needs to be made. People are going to die then too. It's better to make it a controlled burn than a chaotic forest fire. That doesn't mean his actions don't suck, but it DOES mean it's one of those ruthless calculus moments. Does he wait for it to naturally deteriorate and slowly try to unravel it so it won't kill everything and end the world? Or does he snatch it down real quick and try to heal the burns left behind? The first option is the better one because it would also fix the titan issue. If you could just slowly put the 'souls' back into the titans, they could slowly acclimate to coming back into being. All at once? Absolute madness. So the question isn't 'should we bring it down' but 'how do we bring it down so it's more controlled and doesn't kill as many people' and that's the point of that argument. Not 'eh it was coming down anyway' but rather- OH MY GOD WHY ARE YOU SO DUMB, YOU'RE GONNA BREAK EVERYTHING, JUST GENTLY LEAD IT TO ITS EVENTUAL CONCLUSION, YOU DORK Meaning we condemn the plan and not its conclusion. We condemn ripping it down, not trying to control the damage.

[ferventrapture]

Trying to re-watch the original Charmed because I have NO creative juice and I figure it's better than nothing to watch something old I used to love. Even though I knew it would irritate me. Already irritated on episode one. Two cops, one who believes that witches cannot possibly exist and therefore people can't BELIEVE they are witches, and is therefore a fucking dumbass, and another who doesn't believe IN witches, just believes other people could believe they are and is therefore a normal fucking person. This was a horrible conflict to put between them. It would've been better if the skeptic was skeptical that there was a link just because the victims were into 'wicca' or skeptical that witches and wicca was real while the other guy believed it absolutely had a connection or believed witchcraft COULD be real, maybe. But I guess they thought that was too cliche and instead wanted to go with 'yeah this guy doesn't even believe that people could believe in witches and therefore is the worst cop ever because these women keep being murdered for being witches and he won't even admit THEY thought they were witches.' because... the complete idiocy of that was supposed to be fresh and new???

Like, it's fine if you want to believe most people don't believe in that. It's okay to say YOU don't believe in it. But not putting together the clues in a serial murder case because you think it's too stupid for any singular person to believe in witchcraft?

[ferventrapture]

People saying they can tell if it's been written by AI and putting up examples are making my face tired.

AI write like writers write, dumbasses. They might do the flowery thing and use lots of metaphorical language more than any human would, but they learned it from us. Don't go around accusing people of writing their story with AI if they've just got shit like 'her mind ground to a halt' or some shit in it. This is a NORMAL thing to type. The reason it's so 'overly flowery' if you'd like to call it that, is because it kept picking up on this trend in OUR writing.

People are going to start accusing me of writing all my fanfic with AI even though they were mostly written before we could even get access to them because they won't check that. And I write much the same as other writers, with some metaphorical language here and there.

Like, what do people think human-written stories look like if they don't have metaphorical language, repetitive uses of that human's favorite words and phrases or anything even resembling a pattern????

[ferventrapture]

You know, I didn't know how tariffs worked, exactly, except that it had to do with imposing higher prices on trade. But I still assumed that the prices would go up, even if the other side had to pay the tariffs, because that just makes sense? If they have to pay more money to even get things into the country, they're going to raise prices on their goods and then the us companies selling the stuff will raise prices to recoup their losses... So either way, it would increase overall prices in america, even if you believed foreign companies would pay tariffs??? I don't understand why people think they'd just pay the tariffs and then not raise the price of things.

So really, it's irrelevant if we pay them or they do, either way, prices go up. Why was this hard to understand? And then I realized most people thinking that way either probably never took an economics class or just plain never learned how this stuff works and me, I'm fuzzy because I learned it like fifteen years ago, in high school. But I figured people actually working would have to understand the basic principle, 'when the person selling it has to expend more money for the thing, the price goes up'.

[ferventrapture]

You know, when me and other DA fans said that Fenris and Anders never coming to understand each other or see another point of view and just absolutely hating each other was kind of bullshit, we meant-

That there should've been something in there where they worked out their differences. Not that the differences shouldn't have existed in the first place. And where it concerns the racist/etc systems in the game, we didn't want it to disappear, we wanted it to be ADDRESSED. So people blaming us when we were literally saying 'show us more' not 'don't show us this' because we wanted to dig our teeth into the conflicts and have them learn over time and shit like that... is really fucking annoying.

The people asking for more consideration in certain places did not give you the 'no conflict veilguard' mess. We were asking for MORE of the conflict and MORE of the divisiveness. We just wanted it to be so we could have different opinions and talk about things and address things and take different paths. We did NOT ask anyone to 'sanitize' anything.

[ferventrapture]

I dunno if I actually want to switch to Squidgeworld actually. I am all over the place lately and I don't know what I want to do. Sometimes I just want to stop writing anything forever. I don't know why I'm so burned out. I guess because we don't really have a lot of new stuff being made and I find it difficult to read.... really shitty books wherein the couple gets together on page ten and there's lots of smut off the bat. And I don't want to read anything like I used to, like mystery and thrillers, because I want romance right now. I think I'm going to have to stop writing and start reading again and just skip the ridiculous parts. But that's going to be a bit hard when my niche is basically filled with all this ridiculous smut and barely any plot and when there IS plot, it's like... It's like the sex pollen episode of TNG without the aftercare that actually made it meaningful.

[ferventrapture]

What you should know about me:

I am basically crit-everything. I criticize because I think critically about everything.

I am neither pro nor anti AI. I think we need more laws and regulation on AI but that it could be very useful in helping disabled people lead better and healthier lives. Want to be clear though, I AM against AI destroying the environment. Why can't we just shoot the servers into space on satellites and let the cold vacuum sort out the temperature instead of using water on earth???

I am a crit about everything franchise or fandom, but do not identify with Anti or Proship, but I am decidedly against proship, comship, darkship-- mostly because they have no real boundaries. They don't draw the line anywhere. They don't draw it at 'depiction but not endorsement' or anywhere else. (Don't come into my inbox to say I'm wrong, when you romanticize an act, that is an endorsement of it, whether you say 'I want this in real life' or 'I don't want this in real life' if you write that shit and post it, that's endorsement. There's a very big difference between a rape scene in a horror story that's supposed to be horrifying and a rape scene in a romance story that's supposed to be sexy.) And 'anti' is just an old term that people used because they didn't understand what it actually was and self-defined that way because Proships would call them that like, in an insulting way. (An insult I took as a badge of pride) is something people do a lot and sometimes without thinking or doing research, because they don't think that thing has history if they haven't heard of it before. (I certainly hadn't heard of it at the time.)

I am anti-racism in fandom and anti-pedophilia and anti-abuse romanticization and anti-incest romanticization. I'm an incestuous csa survivor who 'coped' with darkfic and was encouranged to think that what happened to me was perfectly normal, which led to a good eight years or so of nearly-catatonic depression. It wasn't until I realized my brain was literally eating itself trying to fix the damage I was doing to it that I actually got better and was able to do more than sit in bed and stare at something.

I am anti-harassment because I know many of these people shipping these things are just like me when I was 14-20 or so, confused and depressed and wanting the engagement and wanting to believe nothing bad actually happened to them. So desperate that we'll tear ourselves apart on the inside just to stay in the 'community' that feels like it's supporting us because we have literally nothing outside of that. (Doesn't excuse it, but harassment is just going to make minors and young adults like that go the opposite direction. The brain naturally defaults to defensiveness to protect itself. All you'll really do with harassment is push them farther down the rabbit hole.) But 'harassment' is often thrown around when it isn't the case, where proshippers are concerned. So let me make something clear: A bunch of individual people telling you that what you ship is gross, is not harassment. Harassment is a bunch of people who know each other getting together to send you targeted messages or a singular person doing the same. There's also the severity of the messages to consider, It's not five different people all sending you 'wow you're gross', it's five different people sending you 'you should kys'. That can count as harassment because of the severity of the message. But telling someone to 'choke' is not a death threat or telling you to kys.

My stance on booktok and such is that the romance genre is filled with garbage and you shouldn't have to leave the genre you prefer just to get an enjoyable story. My stance is that authors need to step up and instead of publishing smutfest sensationalism, should write actual stories which happen to be romances. (Specifically talking about my niche which is human woman x nonhuman man.) And I also believe that people who grew up in the internet age struggling to read the old formatting styles in books shouldn't be blamed for that. Hell, I had trouble reading through those sometimes and I was born BEFORE the internet really became popular and affordable. (And I DEVOURED books, any books, like one an hour if it was slim and one every two days if it wasn't. That doesn't mean the formatting didn't annoy my brain.)

Also, I think we are living in a capitalist dystopia and you literally cannot be a perfectly good person here, but that doesn't mean you give up, throw up your hands and quit trying to even be decent.

[ferventrapture]

I've said it before, but Veilguard made me think about it again, so: The fundamental issue with redeeming characters is that the writers often seem to have no idea what actions are 'beyond the line'.

Can a person atone, no matter how much evil they've done, if they truly repent and feel sorry? Sure.

Can they be redeemed? Hell no in some cases.

Redemption is a term for someone who was good to begin with and was misled or freaked out emotionally and did a thing in panic or what-have-you.

Loghain might've been a case of redemption, except he sold people into slavery and was apparently aware one of his allies had a torture sex dungeon and did nothing about it? Whatever else he did, those are the big ones I remember and those are both over the line. Having Loghain die in the blight so nobody else will have to is about the best ending I can conceive of for him. Then there's someone like Arcann Tirall who glassed five planets. It would've made a lot more sense for his sister who was utterly unhinged to do that, if they wanted to redeem him. (Not even mentioning it's Vaylin who really needed and deserved that, considering she was a mind-slave to her father for so long and everything.) But if they were goint to redeem him and not her, then that's the line they shouldn't have crossed with him. Even him trying to kill you makes perfect sense, since you have his abuser inside you who he is trying to contain or destroy. As he is a planet-eating monster. Writers, please learn where the line is between 'pursued a woman a bit too enthusiastically for a bit' and 'rape'. Please learn the line between 'killed a man' and 'genocided a whole planet'. Please learn the line between 'I was a cog in a machine that feared for his family's lives' and 'I was a gleeful dictator who made every single bad thing happen'.

These things are only 'equally bad' if you're looking at it from a purely moralist perspective and most of us are grown up enough for actual ethics, you know?

[ferventrapture]

I was re-watching The Good Place. And it hit me.

'I don't experience time like you do. When I remember the times I spent with you, it's like I'm living them' -Janet

Might not be an exact quote. But.

She was describing re-watching the show. When we look back and watch the episodes before, they're still happening but we've already lived them at the same time.

[ferventrapture]

Once again, nobody actually thinks about disabled people.

AI is a problem. We know that. We need laws surrounding it. Moderation of some kind.

But everyone is acting like the only people who'd use it are lazy fucks who want credit for creating something that was computer generated.

To be clear, those people DO exist, hence the moderation.

But do you have any idea how helpful AI is going to be, to disabled people like me? And physically disabled people? Do you know how much it can take out of you to type? Or speech to text? Being able to do MUCH less of that to put less strain on your body and voice is going to be a godsend to people who have to rely on dictation or have a problem with their wrists and CAN'T use dictation.

Describing a scene in 150 words and then having the AI expand it into 250 to 450 so you can then go through and just edit small parts will make it possible for people who would never have been able to write stories, to finally write something. Not to mention it's hard to get your brain to cooperate and focus, but talking to an imaginary person about your project might actually help you do that and eventually finish a project, even though you never have before (like me, adhd and possible autism with executive function so broken I can't do basically anything myself or finish long drawn out tasks like write a book without some kind of outside motivation or stimulation driving me)

And then there's the AI that will go into those brain chips that we're all wary of. That will help people that are totally paralyzed to communicate, control the electronics in their house and so many other helpful applications. I agree we should all be careful and leery. But be aware that there's more uses for this shit than you're thinking of. Try and always ask yourselves if it could benefit anyone, like REALLY benefit, improve their quality of life, before you jump on the 'all ai works should be banned from everywhere' train. Because while I've always been able to write, I've never been able to finish and other people have never been able to write at ALL.

Someone actually had the nerve to come onto my story when I said 'I'm using ai to put like a kind of effect over the backgrounds sometimes maybe and take away hud elements and using AI to help me plan my chapters because my adhd makes that hard on me' and they decided to say something about how THEIR ADHD isn't as bad as MINE so of course I must be using it as an EXCUSE.

Not all flavors of disability are the same. Just because you can do something, doesn't mean someone else with the same disability can.

[ferventrapture]

All this time, I kept seeing... 'Veilguard Sucks! I don't recommend it!' and I was like damn that's just like every other game that had lgbt characters, some slight differences from past games, etcetera. At least let it come out and judge it on its own merits as a game.

Then the reviews from people who actually played it all seemed to say the same thing. I was like 'okay, so it's a bad bioware game like andromeda was but it might be an okay game in general' because I had faith I didn't know I had. I was trying to be fair.

And then I watched as much of it as I could on youtube and I realized, OH! it's just THAT BAD.

Veilguard Spoilers Below:

There are so many things about it I want to go on at length about, but number one?

Mythal was obviously supposed to be set up as a mothering figure to Solas, maybe even a sinister one! And yet she's possibly a past lover? And don't kid yourselves, they put it so you could imagine what you wanted, which they shouldn't have.

With those stories about Ghilan'nain and Andruil, it made more sense for Solas to have been in relationships with THEM in the past, honestly. I was even counting on a 'I was in love with Ghilan'nain once' kind of thing because of how important she seemed to be in that cutscene and how they talked to each other.

Not to mention the cheap Varric twist that totally COULD'VE been good and done well but was done so cheaply it makes me grind my teeth.

[ferventrapture]

Saw some kind of tiktok critique of people saying books are too wordy and they were obviously going to make fun of them, but I clicked off before I could get there because...

That's not exactly what they seemed to mean.

It seemed to me that the amount of words wasn't the issue, but rather the formatting and spacing of the paragraphs. Going from the internet where everything is properly spaced and there's lots of paragraph breaks, to a book where sometimes a paragraph can seem to go on for multiple pages because, let's be honest, the indent doesn't make it look THAT different...

Of course they're going to be uncomfortable reading books when the lines are scrunched together with no space between paragraphs.

And of course they want the information to be sprinkled around instead of having infodumps about everything in long paragraphs or more than one paragraph.

They want: She threw her curly hair over her shoulder and stalked past him, his figure dwarfing hers in a way that made her irritated. Not: Her long artful wheat colored hair cascaded down her back in gentle waves... etcetera for three paragraphs without anyone moving or anything happening. Now, I'm an introspective writer, but I also prefer to have people moving around as much as possible and talking and stuff, so when I realize it's been a whole paragraph or two without that, I'll fix it. Or just put in a movement then and remember it from there on.

I'll have people talking or moving WHILE describing what they look like or how the pov character feels, BECAUSE my brain also has issues with infodumping when reading and I instinctively want to 'fix' it.

I may have, several times, gone on for paragraphs about how a character is dressed, but that's usually because it's important to the story that they are dressed well and I think it's pleasant to know exactly how stylish someone looks and I can't draw.

But any time it's not absolutely necessary, it feels like an extraneous infodump.

We shouldn't make fun of people having issues reading traditional books, when they have been raised on internet formatting.

This just means that authors are going to have to adapt. Like they always have. Adapt language, adapt formatting, adapt style.

You can still be introspective and descriptive, without infodumping or using long paragraphs to describe something useless to the storyline.

[ferventrapture]

Really tired of people coming in clutch to defend 'immortal and teen' romances by saying 'well, everyone is younger than them!' cause we just want immortals to date twenty-five and up, motherfuckers.

Nobody gives a fuck about an age gap when you're twenty-five and up. Nobody is saying the immortals are creepy for dating a fourty-year-old and you know that.

Stop defending fantasy pedophilia and predatory behaviors, dressed up to look nice. It's just gross. And it makes you look like an idiot.

Because your point is supremely stupid.