#{ and my motivation is awful and I have more active threads on my other blog so I've been trying to focus on those instead }

[captainkurosolaire]

I challenge you to pick five Tumblrs in your social circle and tell them something you admire about their blog!

Only 5? I could probably do 500. However, that's determined by what's considered my social circle. I'm often in my head being incredibly social continuously is really a challenge of mine. I'm always actively marching to something, my flame of passion when I have it, I can do some crazy stuff but it diminishes relatively quickly, so I try to cling. But I'll up your thing and list 25 of my fave people. Ask me this same thing in a Month, I'll keep doing 25, until I do all the people. How about that? (If anyone wants to be taken off mention let me know.)

@eligos-venator

- Has one of the most intelligent and sophisticated minds, I've had the pleasure to know. Literally admire all his aesthetics, work, head-cannons, ideas. It's only a benefit that the dude shares some OC characteristics to my own (Winning features). I really enjoyed the short-thread we did. It was incomplete, mainly because of my faults. I want to actually be better to give him a proper delivery and RP worth his time, but he's incredibly worth the investment of eyes.

@mischiefandmystics

- If there was a Mount Rushmoore of writers who kept me in this endeavor, encouraged me. Sun'ra is one of them. His characterization skills, writing, the delivery and how believable his character is, they're masterful acts.

@mishivymendi

- I wouldn't be nearly tamed or as creatively freed if it wasn't for this gem. She broke my shell, I really didn't at a time ever see myself being anything really beyond a smut writer, but Mishi not only saw potential in me, but brought it out. Her stories and world's she brings to life are so majestically colorful.

@asymphonyofash

- My go-to. He's another pillar individual who saw things in me past just the obvious perception, (Probably second longest XIV RPer I know.) Taught me a lot of the lore, I shot him up and he's sort of become my stapled rock. He's right aside Sun'ra met them about the same, both took me under their wing's as I quietly observed and absorbed.

@lavender-hemlock

- We're always up and front with each other, never feeling like I couldn't say anything around, extremely rare to share that these days. Her gif's are legendary, something on my own terms I want to soar in quality. The writing she does is astounding. Character has so many mysterious pages that are quite addictive to want to explore and learn them. (Encore 20 below-cut)

@under-the-blood-moonlight - Her sweetness and artwork and overall is just a friendly presence to be around. I cherish them so much. One I can jive with more darker undertones with. She's one the most hardworking and ambitiously creative people. I'd mail them infinite hugs if could. Thanks for being you! @roxinova - I owe a lot of credit to her. She's constantly OOC and everything was nudging me too be more inclusive to things and involved heavenly. It's rare for me. I'm really horrible about that my autism sets me back socially, I constantly will be drowned by the next day and be reverted back to better off alone, that's my major crux and weakness. But her thoughtfulness, these things, aren't ever foreign to me, I do pay attention probably better than any would ever give me credit. She's a beacon model to have as a friend. @corpse-dancer - Haven't ran into many words with them, but her character, screenshot game, expressiveness, they're all a marvel to constantly see, alongside her attitude and bringing life character. I do think if I were better, we would click quite splendidly. They've recently reminded and motivated me to pick-up my daily-practice, or try too. Keep being a rockstar. @fair-fae - Few who wouldn't know who she is in this community. She's been in my opinion a huge core. I'm certain she's inspired many who weren't even RPers too try it by seeing her at the Quicksands or elsewhere, a tyme ago. Making no exception, I was even one of those. I used to be in QS every-single day and was often doing my shameless stuff. Though her presence first did show me there's a lot more. I admire her in all fields. Also appreciate her adopting me to the FC and her always thinking of others and giving events, or her aesthetics and portrayal, its the epitome of swan elegance. @thorcat - One of my most treasured friends. Been RPing with them for a longtime. There's never anything complicated between us or a rift of drama, it's just let's go and have fun. We really mesh well, I've welcomed nearly ever character and got the privilege to RP with nearly all them. They always open up envelope and help me, settle on back and just laugh. Whether used to be waking up to their characters humping my afk one or use randomly having a hardcore banter between Ufah and Captain and capturing them as a voidal pet. Memories with them isn't something I'd ever want to lose. I love ya! Never stop enjoying life for anything. @lukawarrioroflight - I get in the gutter find myself lacking motivation or writing, discouraged even... But I never have felt, I could ever do any wrong with this person, they bring the light out of me. So no matter what, how many hospital-beds I yearly visit, it's because of this rare nature, that I come back, even if they're the only one's ever to read my stuff. I would do it for them alone. @scholarlybreadbun - I've only been back recently and they've so much warmth. Their presence is the sun of inviting. The couple and posing all the shipping that stuff makes me even melt. I'm not particularly talented in regards to posing couples, but I took notice of them along time ago and set on quietly improving. Really like them for them, wouldn't ever want them to change that. Ideally look forward to be in their orbit longer so I can bask in them. @seascrapes - Been mutual with them for a while. Their aesthetics and character is all S+ level. I appreciate throwing back tagged prompts with them, one of many people I really think would be enjoyable to collab with any other seafarers. The artwork and pieces of Tal Brook, are breathtaking as ever exceptionally too, not to mention. Love your stuff matey, you're a king. @mai-takeda - Is a myth. Her absolutely sheer friendliness and her attitude, are so positive influencing, I was so thrilled to be welcomed with her and boosted by them early on. I couldn't see myself, wanting to exist where they didn't have happiness like the same she always delivers by just doing so many soft-things. Not to mention her writing... She's a whole world to throw yourself gazes

under. @zhauric - It doesn't go far either without the same breath of Mai, I could say about Zhauric. He's someone worthy to look-up and also recognize they're passionate and inviting, hoisting up literally everything. Could easily find any of their characters comrades with my own, or jiving alongside. Not to mention last XIVWrite, they slaughtered it. So enjoyable to read them all. I like how organized their blog is too, motivated me recently to redux my entire thing. @cadrenebula - They have so many diverse characters and their entire roster is vibrant and is imbued with a massive flux of life. They are able to encapsulate so many character's voices and portray them so effectively too, I really admire that greatly. They've made me think bigger and try myself recently at actually undertaking a huge roster of characters too. I've taken many breaks, but I always am so graciously returned often with them close-by and that's so incredibly sacred. I've seen a lot of people get discouraged or quit, leave, departure, etc. But they always seem to have a bigger house then they had last I took a break and I enjoy peaking in. @silvernsteel - Her artist and gif-work are awe-aspiring, there's little unrecognizable by her photo-sets and edits. They helped me even tip-toe into uncharted with giving me the recipes to try incorporating gifs into my arsenal. Plus so delightfully pleasant to actually talk with and just chill. I want nothing less in life, than the beauty they give, to be returned to them for eternity in all their glorious air. If ever needed anything of me, they've got me. @spotofmummery - We talk about passion or friendliness or overall a person to even remotely try to be, I got to include them. Their web-series and writing, screen-work, everything they do is fantastic. And that's furthered back nearly any I've met showcase or immortalize how just genuine of stellar person they are. I wish them always the energy to create and sparks. @snow-covered-moon - They've never been anything less but absolutely a diamond to know. I enjoy their character, their almost always abundant of energy that's very rub inducing. Their WoL character stories, writing, screen-shots, everyday they open up a new pandora box of joy, there's no mistaken love behind their character and that's infectiously easy to also enjoy something when the author does too. Always healthy to be around, I never feel short of vitality when they're close-by. @letheofthelost - Always cheerful or least encapsulates with me, they're a carnival ride. Just pure epic story-telling and engaging equally as passionate, constantly writing characters, not looking for anything outside of RP or anything really just being their selves, they fade all others. I love their presence, them as a person. Enjoy any character they'll ever come and throw under me, or a change of pace. Always feels easily understandable between one another. @crow-iv - Together we're an unfiltered, unstoppable wake of pure passionate writers and art. But I would say they're far ahead of me, in every regard. Already able to portray multiple characters in a scene and do such in-depth thinking, alongside even sketch or draw right afterwards or a scene. They're so talented, huge reason I set-out on giving them a Crew of cast and actual stories to-tell when I'm actually caught up and if they interested and we both have the room, I really think if further myself, I can be better and supply more for them to draw and I want to see them soar. I want to give them all my improvements and effectiveness. @trishelle - They've such a reinforcing personality and aura around them that easily bolsters anything that dares thinking they're about to be depleted so energizing. Aesthetics, characters, all them are so lively that further compliment their own mun's great welcoming presence. Worth hundreds of smiles and stars, keep high. Wish I had more time to dedicate to learning you! But I do notice and appreciate you. @fracturedfantasia - One of my people, I like to retreat and just talk my full

head-cannons with or learn, share insightful and inquisitive thoughts about philosophies and multi-culture things. Or plotting and in-general, they're a well of information and brimming ideas, they are every making of what makes a quality friend. When you can generally be open-about-all that's a real one right there. Their characters and tarot readings, I always would implore if they're offering. Thanks for giving me any-time. You're truly a treasure. @violet-warder - Never have even came to words with them yet unfortunately but didn't mean as a mutual, I haven't admired all their screenies, writing, or the aesthetics they bring of their character. Glamours is real end-game, I like all what you've done and put together. I care strictly about what represent and give, I don't want to see them ever think anyone want's them gone, they are abundantly so talented and possess things only they can deliver. I think recently came back too, and I'm glad to share, hopefully, overtime I can build you better up. Or eventually even talk, but I'm certain you are a busy-body person too, so we're relatable. @layla-grey - I have a lot of underline issues that set me back as a flawed person, but I've never not been anything but someone who's open, it's why I always do include my f-list in anything or etc. I'm not here to present this facade, and really don't care to be an image crafted by another. No one as of recently or now, am I close with as an RP partner or friend with then this stunning masterpiece. I never let-up on story-telling or anything so I can eventually use my Crew or other Characters, to give them anytime a master entertaining day, they push me to not be short-changed. IC and OOC I would devote my full attention too cause they've never shed from me. Didn't ever matter how much silence or anything, they're always around. And don't expect anything out of me or pressure. Just accept me and I equally share that sentiment, I want you to have everything in this world has to offer. ----- This is just a fraction of people, I've paid attention, noticed or know. I've been around in this Community for many years. There's a lot of things I could say about it, more probably then anyone else. But what matters to me, is recognizing the people who are here, that work hard, build others up, support, constantly are a beam. I don't need to interact with everyone, to know when someone is generally out for good. Or they're out for bad I've learned inquisitiveness longtime ago, I had to survive and remain afloat. I just go out and be me, and along the way, I get to find people like these, who help bring out the best me. I am nothing without these people, creators, writers, artist. I'm a terrible friend, horrible person, I don't have the energy to interact NEARLY with as much as I'd like with you all, If I could clone myself, or if things were different, I would drop it all to be in your orbits more if could. But, do know I appreciate you. And even if you ever do depart from this whole community or anything, know that anything you share, or give, that stuff does matter, somewhere, someone was aspired, if nothing else, by me. ONLY you can give the worlds you see and I am thankful. Do love yourself.

[vs-redemption]

who are your favorite top ten black clover characters & ships? talk about them! ~tat!

From Cindy: Hello tat! I hope you are doing well today and thank you for visiting my blog. It was really fun to write this because I got the chance to really think about the characters in depth. I’ll be honest, I’m not much of a shipper so I couldn’t come up with 10. I did my best to think of and write about as many ships and brotps as I could though.

Also, I got your other ask about BNHA as well! I have a Japanese lesson I need to prepare for this evening, but I’ll definitely get that posted tomorrow sometime!! Thanks again!!

This is very long, so I put it under a cut :)

Top Ten Black Clover Characters

Yami Sukehiro

I love everything about this guy. He’s hilarious, number one. Everything he says cracks me up and the nicknames he uses for people are gold. I like that he insults people and makes toilet jokes so casually. He comes off crass, but it’s the fact that he treats everyone equally that makes me respect him so much. He holds everyone, including himself, to the same standards. He doesn’t care about your past, wealth, appearance, gender, unconventional magic abilities or wacky personality. No matter who you are, he will call you out if you’re not acting the way you should, but will also back you up and support you when it’s needed. He’s a great leader because he treats everyone equally and is also very accepting that everyone is different.

Luck Voltia

Luck was one of the first characters I fell in love with. I don’t have a lot deep meaning behind how I feel like I do with Yami though. I just really enjoy his chaotic energy and the fact that he wants to fight people all the time. I also think his magic is super badass. His little lightning boots and gloves are so cute. I just wanna cuddle him and ruffle his hair.

Finral Roulacase

I feel so bad for Finral. This poor love starved boy doesn’t deserve the heaping amounts of anxiety he always seems to be feeling. I know he’s supposed to be the ‘perverted’ character, but compared to characters from other anime (Mineta [BNHA] Meliodas [SDS]) he’s not that bad. He tries so hard to be a gentleman by taking people on dates, complimenting them, giving them flowers, and not physically molesting them lol but they never give him a second glance. I also love his character growth so far. Watching him find self-worth beyond being just a mode of transportation, and confidence enough to stand up to his brother has been really fun to watch. I’m so proud of him and I think he’s amazing!

Zora Ideale

This guy. Haha His blunt honesty is so uncomfortable but hilarious at the same time. Like Yami, he calls people out but is somehow so much more offensive about it. I love how he just gives people unsolicited criticism and then adds injury to insult like “oh by the way, here’s a freaking stink bug in your nostril.” To be fair though, he is just as harsh on himself and will acknowledge (to himself) when he made a mistake. His backstory is also so tragic! It is seriously messed up what happened to his dad, but I love that Zora uses that trauma to try and change the word for the better by being the best magic knight he can be and also encouraging (threatening?) other magic knights to be better too. He could’ve so easily become a villain, but he didn’t and I think that’s really honorable.

Mereoleona Vermillion

Oh my god. I love this woman so much. The fact that she was supposed to be the captain of the Crimson Lions but said “nope” and then just went off by herself to live in the most dangerous places in the wild to get stronger is just phenomenal to me. I also really like that, even though she’s a royal and a member of the Vermillion family, she doesn’t just focus on her own squad. It was great when she showed up at the Black Bulls hide out and straight up kidnapped them to have them join her training. I’m just in awe of both her physical and mental strength. She was so cool when she went up against all those elves by herself. I’m not caught up with the manga, but I think I saw a spoiler about her recently and I’m very excited to find out more about it. I pretty much wish I was Mereoleona. She is my spirit animal.

Charmy Pappitson

There is a lot to adore about Charmy. First and foremost, she is an adorable badass. I love that her passion for food is something she shares with her allies and friends instead of being something that makes her greedy. I feel like Charmy is underrated because her magic is great for restoring mana, defense and offense. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t she one of the highest ranked knights in the black bulls? I also love how she gets away with a lot of shit just because she’s cute. The episodes where she straight up just hops onto the wizard king’s lap and feeds him snacks without anyone batting an eye get me every time!

Vanessa Enoteca

Sometimes I think about how Vanessa was willing to give up her own freedom just to save Asta’s arms, and how she gave up drinking for a few episodes in order to focus on a way to not only make herself stronger for upcoming battles, but the rest of her teammates as well. I like her dedication to the Black Bulls. Her thread magic is also pretty cool and I like the clever ways she’s learned to use it.

Fuegoleon Vermillion

Poor Fuegoleon is so calm and sensible compared to his siblings. I like that he’s a fair leader that makes sure to consider all angles before passing judgement on someone. He is also a dependable captain and full of great wisdom that aids in character development for important characters like Asta and Noelle. I love how he competes with his sister though, and watching them bicker in the episode where they throw a birthday party for that nun lady was silly.

Asta

How can you not like Asta? He has such a big heart and the best self-discipline out of anyone in the show. He would always rather talk things out before resorting to fighting and likes to understand the motivations behind the actions of his enemies. He is unashamed to be himself and continues to pursue his goals even when other people mock him or put him down. I also like that he is more perceptive of how people think or feel than it would seem sometimes.

Sekke Bronzazza

His personality is pretty much the worst (and I think he actually tried to kill Asta after the magic knight exam… asshole) but the way he always manages to fit “ha-ha” into his speech is so funny to me and always cracks me up. And the way everyone calls him the “ha-ha” guy is very amusing to me, especially when he tries and fails to politely correct them. I also love how he always ends up in the most random situations (in Yami’s bathroom or working for the king).

 Top Ten Black Clover Ships/BroTPs

Finral x Vanessa

I guess I just think back to that fight against the Despair guy from the Third Eye because both Finral and Venessa sort of worked together and pushed past their limits for the first time. I think Venessa is also the one that put the green in Finral’s hair, right? I don’t know. Venessa is good for Finral because he’s so insecure and she’s so supportive of other people. They’re cute together.

Yami x Charlotte

I think everyone ships this? lol Charlotte’s independence and personal strength are important to her, and the fact that Yami acknowledges and respects those traits in her makes them a great match. He also constantly encourages her to show her softer side, saying that it’s okay to lean on other people and ask for help. He could help her find balance and be comfortable in her own skin.

Asta x Mimosa

Mimosa is a much better match for Asta than Noelle because Noelle constantly needs validation and attention that she’s just never going to get from Asta. His brain just doesn’t work that way. Mimosa is content with supporting Asta with her magic as best she can, and doesn’t get jealous or competitive in the way Noelle does. Mimosa is soft and gentle which is a nice contrast to Asta’s loud and rough personality.

Yuno x Charmy

I know this is almost like a crack ship, but I can’t help but like it anyway. Like Asta, Yuno isn’t going to be the type of guy to actively pursue a relationship or be overly affectionate. This doesn’t seem to affect Charmy who seems fine with even the most minimal of interaction haha. I think it’s so cute how much she supports and roots for him when she sees him in a fight. And Yuno doesn’t seem to mind her trying to feed him and take care of him either.

Magna x Luck (brotp)

Lucky’s personality is quirky, chaotic, and frankly just difficult to understand, so I think it’s hard for people to get close to him. He comes on so strong with the pranks and desire to fight, plus he doesn’t really know how to hold back. The fact that Magna can endure all that while also seeing Luck as a person on a deeper level than just being some spazzy boy is really wholesome to me. I think it’s good for Luck to have someone who can respect him that way without asking him to change his behavior. I do not think this would work romantically though. Magna is actually pretty sensitive and emotional, and gets pretty upset when Luck is stronger or does better than him in something. It ultimately just drives Magna to work harder, but I think that sort of competition might be bad news in a romantic relationship if he’s always feeling inferior.

Yami x Jack the Ripper (brotp)

I want their friendship! I really do. The way they go from relaxed and having fun to ready to beat each other’s asses is hilarious. And there’s literally no reason for it, they’re just like unnecessarily competitive and I’m living for it. Whether they’re celebrating at a festival, about to have an important meeting with the wizard king, or in the middle of a huge fight with a major bad guy, it doesn’t matter. They will trash talk each other and probably end up brawling. I love it.

Gauche x Grey

The episodes where Gauche had to fight with Gordon and Grey were really cool because those three are probably the oddest oddballs of the Black Bulls. I don’t know if I ship them romantically or just at friends, but the development of the relationship between Gauche and Grey has been interesting and I wouldn’t mind seeing more. Also, please give Gauche something else to obsess over besides his sister lmao

Mars x Fana

I don’t have any strong feelings for them as characters individually, but I like that they fought so hard to protect each other as kids and how they continued to fight for and protect each other after being reunited.

[thekidultlife]

IT'S OUR 2ND ANNIVERSARY! 🎉🥳🥂

@Authors' Note: This is Leanne and Hyeri's story. Please bear with us as we try to reminisce over the past years and celebrate where we are now as writers, as friends, and most especially, as individuals who have grown a lot and changed a lot through the years.

Warnings: Contains a semi-reveal of what we actually look like in real life lol so if you’re interested, keep reading down lol.

We started this blog in 2017. We deactivated in 2018, just weeks before what was supposed to be our first anniversary. We stayed silent throughout the rest of 2018 and 2019, but we picked up where we left off this 2020. Despite the messy history of this blog, though, and the changes in our lives, we are extremely happy that we did come back. And the reason why we came back? Well, it’s pretty simple. 

The same love for SEVENTEEN, which made us start this blog, brought us back again.

We’re not lying when we tell you that this blog was what made us closer and what our friendship grow deeper. 

Back then, we were just classmates who found common interests in each other (history, writing novels, analyzing politics, and being one of the ‘Big 3′ in our class lol) but didn’t know how to bond over these interests. But when we both started sharing a room in a dormitory close to our university in 2017, things changed. And things changed because we both found SEVENTEEN. 

LEANNE: I wasn’t really a K-pop fan during that time. But I remember sitting beside Hyeri at our study area, watching her as she watched DWC and thinking to myself, “Maybe this could be it. Maybe this could be the ‘thing’ that we could bond over and could make our friendship grow. And so I leaned over and asked, “Oooh, which group is that?” What followed then was a night where I became a convert, and SVT became a part of me forever. 

After that night, we found ourselves always talking about them because they became the thread that made us close. And while bonding over SVT, we started to become more open about our lives and about ourselves in terms of personalities. We didn’t know why but we just clicked. Before we started becoming really close, we had different sets of friends. But then, we just knew that our friendship was different because we truly understand each other. 

HYERI: I wasn't a Kpop stan before either. Like if my high school me knew I'd become like this, she'll cringe in embarrassment. But it happened. A friend recommended me to watch React to the K because I'm a huge classical music nut, and I discovered Seventeen there. I seriously can't remember that exact moment when Leanne asked, but I do remember that one time when I showed her the dance practice for Aju Nice. It was one of the first things I showed to her, and then without knowing, we've already watched a lot of Seventeen videos. 

Whenever I look back at that time, I just remember how happy we were even though it wasn't really a good moment in our lives. There were a lot of stress and problems, and everything just seemed to spiral down from there. But I just feel a warm feeling in my chest whenever July and August comes, I smell the rain, and remember how many nights we spent binging on Seventeen, talking inside the nearby 7/11 until 1am, knowing that classes were cancelled the next day because of the weather. It was truly a magical moment for me because I never had a friend like Leanne, like sometimes we just have the same thought patterns, and we bonded over Seventeen so much. We would just talk endlessly about them, brainstorming ideas for fics and so on to the point that we only stopped because the 5AM alarm went off lmao Those times were just absolutely incredible.

LEANNE: We also have kind of the same goal back then: to have a platform where we could practice writing. Hyeri suggested that we try creating a blog for fanfiction. I agreed because I truly wanted to try and I was so obsessed with Choi Seungcheol back then. So we planned our first fics, who posts first, and we created it. Just like that. On August 12, 2017, we made our first post.

Our first name was “diabolically-diamondiferous”. We wanted something different (and we now admit that we did go overboard with the bing different thing lol) and so we agreed that this would be our URL. We chose it because of the concept that there is a duality in this blog that readers should look forward to, a dynamic that they would only see here, I guess? That was the goal. That was how it all started. 

HYERI: I was a Wonwoo stan back then. I had already written Love is A Fallacy and a bit of 30 Nights before we even created the blog, and I wanted an avenue where I can post it. I admit I myself can't think of a better url than "diabolically-diamondiferous", so I just went with it. 

Honestly, the blog has helped me a lot with writing. I used to write anime fanfictions and original stories, and I've already established my style back then. This blog has really helped me a lot with refining my writing style and experimenting with new ideas and ways to tell a story, as well as being able to write quickly. I do think I've improved with my dialogues and the way I pace my stories, and make them feel organic. And with that, I've never realized I've already written a lot, until I arranged the masterlist recently.

What began with a few stories turned into hundreds as we started pouring our hearts into this blog. And we would be lying if we told you that it was pressure-free. 

LEANNE: During this time, my responsibilities at uni, family and other personal matters made me unable to focus on the blog a lot. I really feel sorry for Hyeri during this time because she was the one who was more consistent with posting her stories. I joke every now and then these days whenever she couldn’t write that it’s okay, you once had too much weight and now I’ll carry my share and more, too, if it gets hard for you. Even though I was busy with other things, however, Hyeri really pulled through and made this blog come alive. And as a friend, she really helped me get through my darkest moments. This blog, too, became my crutch. Whenever my heart got broken, I would write here. I would try to find my voice (and at that time, I couldn’t find myself, either. Just ask Hyeri why, lol.) in writing. I was experimenting what voice I had while writing and what genre fits me. 

HYERI: Following Leanne's, I guess after our trip to Korea, things became way harder. I had a lot of low points back then as well: losing my scholarship and just so much responsibility in life and at school. I did carry much of the weight of the blog after that semester, and I'm surprised how I managed to do that. I kept on badgering Leanne to finish some requests, but she really had a lot going on as well. Not to mention our plans to join an exchange program to Korea which was another hell we signed up for. It was extra difficult because our department doesn't want us to leave, thinking we're just running away from the strict (and often unfair) professors (ironic when our major is International Relations).Seventeen and this blog was the only way we could bond together and have fun and just forget about everything. I could remember sending each other fake messages from Seventeen just to cheer the other up when things get depressing, or imagining what it would feel like to be an idol and whatnot. It sounds silly now, but that was the only way we could cope with how intense and exhausting our lives were. It was the only thing that kept the constant dread in our nerves from taking over.

What began as an experimental way to boost creativity became something like a career, and steering our motivation, was of course, the boys. Our boys. The amazing people that we write about and that we imagine about. They made us happy during the times when there was nothing to be happy about. They made us take risks that brought out the braveness we didn’t know we had in us, and they made us feel hopeful about the future. 

However, we hit a hurdle we couldn’t bring ourselves back from hurdle after hurdle during our second semester as juniors in college.  

LEANNE: Second semester of junior year in college was really hard for me. The bottom line of it all was the manipulative relationship that I was in with my s/o back then, but a lot of things piled up as well: school responsibilities (I was handling three classes at one point as a professor’s assistant and then ran for a student government position I didn’t really want but felt obliged to). All the while this was happening, I was really feeling myself slip away. I was suffering from depression but I had a lot of things going on around me that I could not just drop because people were depending on me. The only way I thought I would be able to not give up is by going somewhere else to finish my studies. Yes, the environment got that toxic. I really needed to get away. Around this time, I wasn’t active on the blog anymore. Right after elections, I lost my motivation to do anything. I would sometimes pitch in to help Hyeri with some requests, but it took way more effort than I thought it would. 

Hyeri and I decided that we needed to take the risk of applying for the South Korean exchange program, which was one of the best that our uni had to offer. We figured that since our grades were okay, it would be easy. Boy were we wrong.

HYERI: The Coldest Human, The Warmest Robot was the last fic I've posted in the blog before the hiatus. I couldn't do it anymore. There were so many problems and issues with the exchange program that I could no longer handle the blog alone. Leanne had withdrawn too, considering how she has her own things to face as well. It was a really difficult time. After being rejected a visa, I just can't think of writing, or even Seventeen anymore. Just their presence seemed to only remind me that I had been rejected after months and months of preparation. Their songs only reminded me of our disappointments. It was awful and I knew I can't face them at that time. I found myself in Taiwan. Alone. Leanne had stayed and it was depressing. I had to move on despite that, but it felt like an empty success.

We planned to become a part of an exchange program in South Korea, but it didn’t pull through at the last minute. We had staked all our bets, and we lost motivation in a lot of things. One of those things was this blog. We just knew that we had to let it go during 2018, because it was impossible to maintain it when you don’t feel inspired about life anymore. 

HYERI: The Coldest Human, The Warmest Robot was the last fic I've posted in the blog before the hiatus. I couldn't do it anymore. There were so many problems and issues with the exchange program that I could no longer handle the blog alone. Leanne had withdrawn too, considering how she has her own things to face as well. It was a really difficult time. After being rejected a visa, I just can't think of writing, or even Seventeen anymore. Just their presence seemed to only remind me that I had been rejected after months and months of preparation. Their songs only reminded me of our disappointments. It was awful and I knew I can't face them at that time. I found myself in Taiwan. Alone. Leanne had stayed and it was depressing. I had to move on despite that, but it felt like an empty success. Right after going back home for winter vacation, I remember I was angry crying because I knew Leanne can't do anything because of her circumstances, even if she wanted to go to Taiwan so much.

LEANNE: I was miserable during first semester as a senior because everything did not go as planned. I was really losing the resolve to keep going on because nothing had gone the way I had planned it to be. I think the only silver lining during 2018 was that my parents and friends finally stepped in to protect me from the person who had been harming me emotionally and therefore affecting my self-esteem and resolve. We also went to Macau, where I really healed a lot as well while teaching music with close friends from church. But beyond that, I could see no other way to get through the last semester except to follow Hyeri and go to Taiwan. It wasn’t just her friendship that I was missing; it was also about that goal I had in my mind: to find peace and quiet away from everything that had hurt me and drained me.

We didn’t have any high hopes about what lay ahead, but the biggest plot twist came.

LEANNE: By some miracle, I managed to convince my parents that I was well enough to go to Taiwan and that I would be safer there. It all happened so fast. February I was still crying, standing at the train tracks, telling our other friend that I wanted to just end it. But then March came and my visa got approved on a Friday. Three days later, just packing whatever I had with me in my apartment, I left for Taiwan.

It was a miracle Hyeri and I still talk about a lot. We started to heal from everything that we had gone through. We started to re-explore our friendship and in the end, after so much drama and after so much challenges, we finally concluded that this friendship of ours was really something that we wanted to keep forever. We grew a lot through the years.

HYERI: Who would've thought that with a lot of begging and pleading and praying, Leanne was finally able to go to Taiwan. I was so happy. It was one of the happiest memories of my life so far. Being in Taiwan, away from the world, from the responsibilities back at home, it was such a liberating time.It was also the exact period which we started to heal from past disappointments. Seventeen no longer gave me the pain I used to feel, and to this day, You Made My Day---the album which was released before everything happened, and reminded me a lot of what had transpired---is one of my favourite Seventeen albums.

But here we are now, in 2020. It was really because of Hit the Road that we decided to come back. We agreed to start writing again come June 2020. We started doing what we loved again. 

HYERI: We had fully healed from everything and we're fully ready to come back to writing about our precious boys! I am so happy to be able to finally celebrate the actual anniversary for this blog!

LEANNE: And now, here we are, celebrating our anniversary! The first one we really had! This is all impromptu editing but we really wanted to make it special. 

Highlights Throughout the Years:

💎 Love is A Fallacy (Lawyer!Wonwoo)

The first ever fic I've written for SVT. I remember I wrote this while I was at the dorm on my bed, it was a miraculously stress-free night. The song I kept on playing was "20" and I could imagine it being the OST if this was a kdrama 😂 This was at a time when Wonwoo was still my bias.

💎Adagio Cantabile (College Student!Jihoon)

A fic I first wrote after Jihoon became my bias. I could still remember, I was so inspired by a fic titled Customer Satisfaction, that I wrote this one. Plus I'm really into Classical Music, that I could just write one whole fic about it. I'm still amazed how we were able to write fanfiction even though we were swamped with school work, and I mean, SWAMPED, like a lot of exams, graded recitation, things to memorize, super long essays, but we still managed to write. 😂

💎Saffron (Victorian AU DK)

This was written shortly after Leanne and I went back from Korea. I was so blissfully happy back then. I think I've spent a night or two writing this. This was heavily inspired by the game "Chocolatier" which I was playing days before I've started writing 😂 I really love writing for DK, he's such a positively innocent character who was so endearing.

💎The Coldest Human; Warmest Robot (Android!Jihoon)

This was probably the last one shot I've posted before the hiatus in 2018. I remember finishing it in my hometown when we went there for summer vacation. It was a really bad time ngl I lost my scholarship and was supposed to go to an exchange program to South Korea with Leanne. Back I didn't know if I could support that dream financially.

💎The Most Convenient Escape (Soulmate!Jihoon)

This was the first fic I've written after the hiatus. Truthfully, over 2018-2019, I lost my love for SVT. It was painful to be reminded of the fact that we weren't able to go to Korea, so I avoided them while I was in Taiwan. But I came back around this year and started to write this one. It's heavily inspired by the book "Voices of the Past" which is a compilation of American newspaper articles over the years, and anime reviews which talked about Deconstructing a genre (i.e., Madoka Magica and Evangelion). Right now I really do want to finish this series.

Highlights Throughout the Years

💎The Return of Superman Series

My first work, TROS Seungcheol, was the first fic in the entire blog that I was truly proud of. All my other works were too rushed, too experimental for my own taste even, and just doesn’t look like what I, Leanne, if you personally know me, would write about. I strongly believe that there is a unique voice in each story, a voice that belongs only to its writer, and back then, I was still trying to find that voice. The Return of Superman was my breakthrough in writing. I suddenly found an AU that I truly loved to write about, and, most importantly, my voice in writing.

💎After-Party, Only Us, and Afterglow | Yoon Jeonghan

This is the spin-off series that came from Yoon Jeonghan’s The Return of Superman. I started to become more comfortable in my style of writing as I wrote these. You will notice a change of style after the first part, “After-Party”. My writing style has matured, and I really congratulate myself a lot for that. It took me years and tons of experiences to get that flavor I had always wanted in my works! Haha. 

💎The And Series

This is another one of those imagines that really brought out the hopeless romantic inside me, and for that, I am proud of it. It’s still mostly in the works, but I  am really happy about how it’s turning out.

💎Through the Seasons Series

Ah, this is my pet project. All my heart is poured into this one. This is the first series that I truly explored the beauty of love in realistic settings. My writing process here is done by looking at real couples LOL and also tapping into beautiful memories of mine about love and about life and all the drama that comes along. I’m really glad that a lot of our new readers liked the first one that came out!

Our story-time ends here. 

All in all, we just want to say thank you. Thank you for everything. For being with us through this crazy ride of a blog, truly, sincerely, thank you. From our followers since the beginning, to the new ones that we are finding joy in communicating with now, thank you. From the bottom of our hearts!

LET’S MAKE MORE MEMORIES TOGETHER!

- Leanne and Hyeri. 

[wirewitchviolet]

“What shouldn’t I do to avoid making things worse?”

Just a day or two after I wrote this post, I happened to find myself in a position that did quite the job of reminding me I need to write this one. Someone randomly decided to say something positive about a person I know, and encourage people to check out their creative output. Almost immediately, someone else chimed in to inform them that the person they were giving that plug to is A Bad Person Who You Should Not Promote. When confronted about this, this was of course followed up with That One Link that people always give out when people speak positively about this person, and after a bit of back and forth, the whole post saying the person I know was cool and promoting their stuff was removed.

It's pretty typical for people, particular the farther they are from being a cis allistic abled straight white dude, to have That One Link that "proves" they are A Bad Person Who You Should Not Promote, and they basically all follow the same pattern. It's either a blog post or a dedicated forum thread, it's the length of a novella, it has roughly 200 links to or embedded screenshots of random posts from forums and social media, all of which are old and lacking context, and whenever it’s linked to, there is an unspoken assertion that it is the work of a detective so thorough in their research and uncompromised in their ethics that only a complete monster would question the legitimacy of anything contained within. Also being the sort who routinely does double check, I’ve found the actual contents of such to more or less invariably be a mix of misinformation and petty grievances nobody should care about. The best known example of one of these is probably “The Zoe Post,” and I’m really not the frst person to talk about this sort of crap.

In this particular bit of recent context, the person I know essentially stands accused of getting... into a nasty fight with someone marginalized along significantly fewer axes and far more established in their shared field, using something like a dozen different user names. Setting aside the incredibly skewed power dynamic there and the lack of verification on whether all of those names belong to the same person, and just taking the whole accusation at face value... I don’t particularly understand why I should care. Mind you, when this person first began interacting with me and I immediately got the all the warnings and That One Link, I took a very cautious approach, did a lot of independent research, and really did not at all see the person described in the person talking to me. Not particularly relevant whether that’s due to the whole thing being BS or personal growth happening in the... decade or so that elapsed since That One Post was written.

For some reason though, people consistently get their wires crossed about this sort of thing. Even the people you’d really think would have their heads on straight. I can’t count the number of people I know who constantly sit around pontificating about white supremacy and the patriarchy and the way marginalized people can never make a single mistake or be perceived to, who then constantly play purity police, actively and vocally making sure anyone who gets That One Post written about them is completely cut out of life to the maximum possible extent, until the end of time.

Now mind you, there are totally situations where advocating that everyone shun someone is totally called for. Nazis exist, nazis should totally be exposed as such and treated like garbage. I’d explain who George Zimmerman is if I saw someone pal-ing around with him. Monsters like these. These are pretty good examples of people to badmouth. But you don’t spread the word to everyone you can not to even mention someone just because you don’t like them/had an argument, or have a friend whose behalf you’re acting on, or a celebrity.

All that said, my original plan was to list all the crap like this I personally have to deal with, so let me get to that. Presented here is a partial list, roughly in chronological order, of the many absurd lies people have come up with to rationalize doing everything they can to keep me from ever interacting with anyone. Not one item on this list has ever blown over, nor been too ridiculous to be believed by people I was very close to before they started shunning me over it:

- All the standard smears against trans women are a given. I’m an evil seductrice, I want to sneak into women’s restrooms, turn all the children in the world trans, and am of course a big ugly bearded man in a dress.

- My opposition to murderous nazis and pedophiles is the result of me being paid vast sums of money by George Soros.

- I am a wealthy heiress.

- I have some completely irrational, possibly racially motivated hatred for some random woman I have never interacted with, have no mutual point of contact with, and have never seen anything written or spoken by of any sort.

- I am a dangerous terrorist ringleader trying to murder a long-time friend I constantly speak positively about and defend from various attacks.

- I am not actually a trans woman but in fact a man whose entire life is a vast web of lies.

- I am not actually trans but in fact a cis woman.

- I am secretly a nazi.

- I am an undercover cop from Brazil trying to bring down comumnist revolutionaries by blocking people who send me violent threats on Twitter (and have long conversations with said people despite neither party being able to see the other’s messages).

- I am part of some sort of elite club of pretty popular girls who all eat lunch together at the Cool Kids table or something.

- I am a horrible scolding prude.

- I am a huge slut.

- I am straight.

- Any woman I have ever been friends with I am actually trying to seduce.

- I used to be and maybe still am a member of Something Awful’s forums, and probably also an oldschool 4chan poster.

- I am attempting to destroy Patreon.

- I am running some sort of elaborate scam through Patreon.

- I have longstanding vendettas against an additional 30 or so people whose first names I am supposed to recognize, absolutely no other context apparently needed.

- Name a cause, I’m vocally against it.

- I run a vast media empire.

- I slept with a famous bigot.

- I refused to sleep with a famous bigot.

- I paid a king’s ransom to a famous bigot in exchange for something or other.

- I’m friends with untold numbers of people I’ve never heard of but have been assured are all quite vile and repugnant.

- I am a “pedophile defender,” shouted with no explanation as to what that even means.

Again, there is not an item on that list which, when randomly shouted and blindly repeated, did not cause at least one person I care quite a lot about to cut off all contact with me, without a word of explanation, forever. And there are people who actively scour for anyone ever interacting with me in any way, even as minor as liking a post on twitter, making sure to hit them with as much of this as it takes to keep them from ever having the slightest thing to do with me.

This has, in fact, driven away every friend I ever had (though people let me know if there’s any exceptions who just haven’t checked in in a while), destroyed all my career prospects, has me constantly dealing with dangerous stalkers, violent threats, and violent actions and if I’m really quite honest, when buying a new stopper for my bathtub recently the thought was definitely going through my head that apparently slitting one’s wrists when submerged in warm water is the most painless way to stop being alive.

It’s entirely possible it’s too late for me, but again, people attack people with this sort of garbage constantly, and people who should really know better constantly perpetuate it. So just try to internalize this, and in the future whenever you see someone talking about how someone is A Bad Person Who You Should Not Promote, loudly confront them about it. Make a scene. Everyone should be feeling really awkward when you’re done, and whoever’s giving out the “warning” should be reconsidering their approach to life.

[niflheimqueen]

THE POSITIVE & NEGATIVE; Meme.

Mun & Muse

fill out & repost ♥ This meme definitely favors canons more, but I hope OC’s still can make it somehow work with their own lore, and lil’ fandom of friends & mutuals. Multi-Muses pick the muse you are the most invested in atm.

tagged by:   @deathboundinautumn​ tagging:   aw man anyone that wants to, steal away friends!

MY MUSE IS:   canon / oc / au / slightly canon-divergent / fandomless / complicated.

IS YOUR CHARACTER POPULAR IN THE FANDOM?   YES? / NO. (I’d say so?)

IS YOUR CHARACTER CONSIDERED HOT™ IN THE FANDOM?   YES / NO / IDK. (’step on me mitsuru-senpai’)

IS YOUR CHARACTER CONSIDERED STRONG IN THE FANDOM?   YES / NO / IDK. (In all senses of the word, I think!)

ARE THEY UNDERRATED?   YES / NO / IDK. (I don’t think so? She’s relatively popular as far as I can tell.)

WERE THEY RELEVANT FOR THE MAIN STORY?   YES / NO

WERE THEY RELEVANT FOR THE MAIN CHARACTER?   YES / NO / THEY’RE THE PROTAG. (Romance option baybeeee)

ARE THEY WIDELY KNOWN IN THEIR WORLD?   YES / NO. (Heiress to a global conglomerate? Yeah.)

HOW’S THEIR REPUTATION?   GOOD / BAD / NEUTRAL. (Mostly very positive, but there are more than a few people who have Beef(TM) with the Kirijo Group and so by extension probably aren’t her biggest fans. Even Yukari doesn’t really like her to start off with.)

HOW STRICTLY DO YOU FOLLOW CANON?   —   Mostly pretty strictly! One of the great things about Mitsuru is that there are so many layers to her character even in-canon, so I can explore all sorts of different concepts and situations and still mostly be following canon. (That said, I am a sucker for a good AU.)

SELL YOUR MUSE! Aka try to list everything, which makes your muse interesting in your opinion to make them spicy for your mutuals.   —   Oh boy. I’m going to try and be concise with this but... Mitsuru is everything you could possibly want in a character? Strong woman who can and will kick your ass? Check. Secret heart of gold? Check. Tragic backstory and motivations if you look deeper? Yeah. Tangible character development over the course of the year, actively growing as a person before your very eyes? You bet. Flawlessly beautiful? God yes. Honestly I could gush about her until the end of time and I still wouldn’t be at the bottom of the list of reasons you should love Mitsuru Kirijo.

Now the OPPOSITE, list everything why your muse could not be so interesting (even if you may not agree, what does the fandom perhaps think?).   —  I mean good luck getting to see anything below the perfect surface. She won’t talk to you unless you’re a certified genius, and even then not until the final months of the game. Until then all you get is a cold ice queen who stays three steps removed from pretty much everyone and is definitely too busy to care about you.

WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO RP YOUR MUSE?   —   I was inspired to start writing Mitsuru because I had been writing Margaret over in the P4 community for a while and I reblogged this meme asking people who else they thought I could portray. I think at least three people said Mitsuru so I was like sure, let’s give it a try. And now here she is, my wife, and I couldn’t be happier.

WHAT KEEPS YOUR INSPIRATION GOING?   —   Honestly, my adoration for the character - and the fact that whatever I’m in the mood to write, she’s probably well-suited. She can do angsty, she can do cute little dorky things, she can do it all. That and the P3 community is filled with wonderful people, which keeps the motivation up for sure.

Some more personal questions for the mun.

Give your mutuals some insight about the way you are in some matters, which could lead them to get more comfortable with you or perhaps not.

DO YOU THINK YOU GIVE YOUR CHARACTER JUSTICE?   YES / NO / I SINCERELY HOPE I DO? (I hope so???)

DO YOU FREQUENTLY WRITE HEADCANONS?   YES / NO / SORT OF? (I do! I hold off on posting them sometimes though.)

DO YOU SOMETIMES WRITE DRABBLES?   YES / NO (Absolutely! I love writing drabbles. Sometimes I just have feelings about a situation that need to come out, man. Drabbles let me explore certain events in a slightly different way than a thread with a partner can.)

DO YOU THINK A LOT ABOUT YOUR MUSE DURING THE DAY?   YES / NO (all the time. this is my wife.)

ARE YOU CONFIDENT IN YOUR PORTRAYAL?   YES / NO / SORT OF? (most of the time? It seems to be generally well-received in any case, but I do sometimes get a little paranoid lmao)

ARE YOU CONFIDENT IN YOUR WRITING?   YES / NO / A LITTLE BIT. (Generally, yes - but I have my ups and downs for sure. Sometimes I read back through my own stuff and I’m like chef kiss, and other times I barely even want to post it lmao. I think that’s probably true of everyone, though?)

ARE YOU A SENSITIVE PERSON?   YES / NO. / SORTA.

DO YOU ACCEPT CRITICISM WELL ABOUT YOUR PORTRAYAL?   —   I think I would? If it was constructive, for sure.

DO YOU LIKE QUESTIONS, WHICH HELP YOU TO EXPLORE YOUR CHARACTER?   — Uhhhhhhhh absolutely. Anyone that sends me a question out of the blue has my total and eternal love.

IF SOMEONE DISAGREES TO A HEADCANON OF YOURS, DO YOU WANT TO KNOW WHY? — Sure! There’s always other perspectives, and if there’s stuff in-canon that proves me wrong I definitely want to see it. If it just comes down to personal interpretation though I’m.... probably not going to change it?

IF SOMEONE DISAGREES WITH YOUR PORTRAYAL, HOW WOULD YOU TAKE IT?   —  Eh. There are other blogs out there, I’m not going to be offended if you prefer a different iteration. Just let me have fun over here, and you can go have fun over there!

IF SOMEONE REALLY HATES YOUR CHARACTER, HOW DO YOU TAKE IT? — What’s not to like about her!!! But honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever come across a person who straight up hates Mitsuru as a character. I’m sure they’re out there somewhere, but I’m going to stay right here with my motorcycle queen and mind my business.

ARE YOU OKAY WITH PEOPLE POINTING OUT YOUR GRAMMATICAL ERRORS?   —   Of course! I try and catch them but when they slip through feel free to point it out if you care.

DO YOU THINK YOU ARE EASY GOING AS A MUN? —  I like to think so? Sometimes I don’t put myself out there so much in terms of ooc conversation - I have this really neat thing called anxiety, soooooooo yknow. Don’t want to bother people and stuff. But! If you come and talk to me it’s like a 99% that I’ll love and appreciate it.

[betweengenesisfrogs]

The Future of This Blog: A Retrospective, Or: Dubiously Useful Notes on the Epilogues

Q: What’s next for this blog?

Q: Are you going to discuss the Epilogues?

A: Good questions!!!

The Epilogues may have killed me. They resemble two dogs who each put a sword through my chest and slew me with a Heroic death and a Just one, respectively. They are unfathomably powerful and should be feared by all. Genesis frogs lie destroyed in their wake.

I say this as someone who genuinely adores them and thinks they’re great. (For the most part, with a few frustrations and quibbles. I guess that’s Homestuck in a nutshell for you. ) I think they do amazing things.

I just don’t know what I want to say about them, or indeed, if I have anything to say.

Mainly, it’s that, as I suspected would happen, the landscape of Homestuck analysis has changed in their wake.

The original impetus for this blog, back in 2017, was that people were Wrong About Homestuck. People are still Wrong About Homestuck today, but in a totally different way, which I feel less equipped to engage with.

For the last few years, I think my primary motivation was to argue against what the Perfectly Generic Podcast has called “The It’s Not That Deep Crowd.” Those who saw Homestuck, especially Act 6, as meaningless random mess, or a failure born of creator laziness. My goal was to counter that by articulating the many themes and conceptual threads that give structure to Act 6 Homestuck, so that people would recognize how much is going on within it. In doing this, I grew to align myself with Team Homestuck is Good. I do think late Homestuck is much more good than bad, but in retrospect that wasn’t really what drove me. What drove me was frustration at the It’s Not That Deep Crowd (which was strongly aligned with Team Homestuck is Bad) for their refusal to engage with Homestuck, to recognize that it was trying to do specific, deliberate things. I would have welcomed someone saying that Homestuck ultimately failed, if they were willing to take on the complexity of that failure, but no one seemed to.

So I wrote a whole bunch of essays, some better than others, to try and get a sense of Homestuck’s thematic complexity out into the world somehow. I’d like to think I succeeded, though of course I wasn’t the only one.

Things are very different now, Post-Epilogues. The border lines of the fandom have totally shifted. First, the It’s Not That Deep Crowd have been pretty exhaustively refuted, in part because the Epilogues established from the get-go that, yes, we were indeed dealing with themes of metafiction, fandom, demiurgic oppression and personal potential. At the same time, many of those who were on Team Homestuck is Bad totally warmed to the Epilogues and returned to the fandom, while some part of those who were beating the drum for Homestuck is Good had a strongly negative reaction to the Epilogues, and now comprise Team Epilogue Bad.

I’m delighted by the former and wistful though not surprised about the latter. I’m just not sure how to engage with the new place we’re in. Previously, I felt I could explain things people didn’t understand, and help them more deeply appreciate Homestuck.

With the Epilogues, it’s more like: either you’re into it, or you’re not. There are things you have to think about quite a bit to understand, true, but I also think there are people who get what the Epilogues are going for and just don’t enjoy it.

Honestly? I find that completely understandable. As I alluded to above, the Epilogues carry an unfathomably powerful destructive, negative energy. They are meant as a provocation, a violent act of storytelling that Hussie codes Meat (okay, also Candy) and likes to do after a pause of any significant length. They deliberately tear down many of our hopes and dreams for these characters and offer a contrary opinion. I admire the audacity. I’m also completely sympathetic to being horrified by this.

The night the full epilogues came out, I finished them late in the evening and spent the whole night wrestling with a powerful, dark emotion. A kind of grief and awe and horror, all at the same time. It took me a long time to fall asleep, and when I slept, they were very uneasy dreams. In the weeks that followed, I remember thinking, over and over: I’m glad I gave this time to Homestuck, but I need a long, long break from it. I loved the Epilogues, but I don’t think I could ever read them again. I felt utterly full of Homestuck, and wanted not to write, think, or do anything more with it for a long time, until I finally digested the darn thing.

So, about how you’d feel if you gorged yourself on a hundred pounds of candy and raw meat in one night.

Others seem to have reported similar experiences. Dirk’s words about Detective Pony: a gripping, cathartic read, draining in the best way possible—these come to mind. I’m not surprised that fandom reactions have been so passionate, so overwhelmed, and so vehement.

So I find it harder to be critical of Team Epilogue Bad than Team Homestuck Bad. I think I understand exactly where they’re coming from. I may not see the Epilogues quite the same way, but I don’t really feel the need to tell these folks they’re wrong, either.

Weirdly, that means I don’t feel as strong a need to talk about the Epilogues. The ideas I wanted to put out there are out there. What there is to say about the Epilogues has already been said, by people who’ve said these things much better than I could. It feels like the community doesn’t need me anymore. My work here is done.

So I don’t know how much I’m going to continue writing here. This coincides with a drop-off in my internet activity in general and with me putting more effort into personal career goals. Plus, a break from Homestuck has felt like the right thing for the last month, and may be the right thing for a while.

Probably what’s most likely though, is that I keep reblogging the most interesting essays on Homestuck, and maybe offer my own opinion occasionally, in a much more scattershot, spur-of-the-moment way than before, if I feel like I have something to say.

I do have an additional short-ish Epilogue thought coming later today, for instance, so look forward to that.

The last thing I want to say here is: if you’ve chosen to declare the Epilogues non-canon, to erase them from your idea of Homestuck, and keep creating your own worlds, futures, and afterlives for these characters—

Not only do I support that, I think that might be precisely the point.

The Epilogues begin with a detailed discussion of the ambiguous and contested relationship they have to previous Homestuck canon, and are described as being “of dubious authenticity.” They are, explicitly, Homestuck fanfiction, while also being a continuation of the story. There’s really nothing else like them in literature. Sure, the Meat timeline is described as “canon” by merit of its connections to the Lord English story, but the bizarre, fanfic-like Candy timeline is entangled with it, as are all other possible realities. Ultimately the word canon ceases to mean “what is real within a given story” and becomes something far stranger and much more ambiguous.

How do we determine what’s real/canonical within Homestuck? It’s just as Rose teaches us: it’s what’s true, essential, and relevant. In other words, what is meaningful to us as readers. So, by definition, the Epilogues are as real as you want them to be.

I wrestled a lot with the discrepancy between the darkness of the Epilogues and the utopian, transcendent Gnostic themes that permeate Act 6 Homestuck. I think the answer is this: the utopia, the transcendence for these characters lie largely in what we, the readers imagine for them.

As writers and artists and fanfiction readers, we have always created the futures for these beloved characters, and that’s exactly what we’ll continue to do.

I mean, the Epilogues themselves are fanfiction, created by fans, presenting us with two very provocative AUs. It’s hard to get more fan-made than that.

It’s a nice way of solving the problem I alluded to here. Homestuck gets to have it both ways, and so do we.

I leave you with my favorite example of fan-created transcendence, The Pumpkin Path, currently available as a draft on OptimisticDuelist’s Patreon and hopefully everywhere soon.

If you’re interested in deepening your understanding of the Epilogues (love them or hate them), OptimisticDuelist and the Perfectly Generic Podcast continue to do amazing work carrying the Homestuck conversation into the future, and following them will connect you to a rich, thriving Homestuck interpretive community. For now, I’m more than happy to leave the conversation in their hands.

See you when I see you!

As always, thanks for playing.

<3 Ari

[ncumenia-archived]

📱MOBILE-FRIENDLY RULES📱

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Since English is not my mother language, I apologize in advance if there are some grammatical errors or I use wrong words to describe an action. If something is not clear to you, just let me know, I’ll fix it as soon as I can.

Roleplay Rules:

TAG DUMP HERE!; (NSFW too)

Mun&Muse are both 21+. This blog is selective, 18+ exclusive, canon divergent, duplicates crossover, AU, fandomless, etc… friendly!  

Besides the obvious fact I won't rp smut or ship with minor muns/muses whatsoever, do not follow me if you're underage. This because I feel uncomfortable interacting with minor muns due to the huge age gap that might be between us. (Mun is currently 25 as I write this) Please, don't take it too personally, it's just for my own comfort. Furthermore, if your rules and age (mun is 18+, mun is 23, mun is of age and so on...) are not present on your blog I won’t rp with you at all. Lying about your age will result into a permablock and reported. The same applies if you're underage or your age is not stated and you dare to interact in any kind of NSFW way with me (This also includes liking/commenting my nsfw posts or sending me nsfw asks)

I refuse to ship/interact with: aged up muses (Nunu, Annie, Zoe etc…) and only smut-oriented blogs since they both make me uncomfortable. So, please, if you’re one of these blogs do not follow me.

No godmodding. If our muses are fighting, I’d like to discuss first with the other mun, in order to avoid it as much as possible;

I don’t like “follow for following me back, and if you don’t follow me I’ll unfollow you“ philosophy because I find this kinda disrespectful. I’m also available to interact with you even if we’re not mutuals! Usually, the reasons why I unfollow you are these: spamming too much without using a proper tag, talking shit about other people here on tumblr, spreading useless drama or rumors, posting stuff that makes me uncomfortable or if I somehow assume you’re not interested to interact with me.DMS are always open for plotting!

Currently available verses: Canon, Odyssey, Modern/Academy, Bloodmoon, Deity Please, before interacting with my muse in one of these verses make sure to read the lore and, if something is not clear to you, dm me anytime!;

I’ll try to match length more or less, so don’t worry about that. And please, TAKE YOUR TIME to reply. I have a life too, so don’t worry I’m not the one who runs after others! I tend to easily forget threads, so if I didn’t reply to our thread for like a couple of days dm me!;

I do believe in reblog karma, it’s your choice to send me a meme, but please reblog it from the source and not from me if you don’t want to send me one. If you reblog a meme from me without sending me one for more than once, I’ll block you. I’m sorry about this rule, but after some time this becomes quite annoying;

Any kind of hate toward a nationality/gender/sexual orientation and so on will result in a report and permablock. I believe everyone should respect a person, regardless of their gender/ethnicity/sexual orientation. If you don’t, you’ll get permablocked. Period. The same goes for every kind of insult or anon hate toward me, a ship or a friend: not only you’ll be ignored, but, if it is necessary, I’ll report and permablock you.

This blog is against any kind of fake/unfounded rumors and drama. I'll only reblog callouts that provide evidence about the problematic individual, and mostly about extremely serious topics (like minor hunters, abusers or if someone who is seriously in danger) I'm not afraid to callout people if they have a problematic/gross behavior or if they support/justify problematic/disturbing/traumatic topics.

I won’t rp and tolerate extremely disturbing topics like incest, rape (non-con/dub-con as well), pedophilia, child/animal abuse, and similar. The same goes for every kind of ship where these themes are involved. Mentioning these topics during a thread is okay (For example if you’re talking about your muse’s past), but I’d rather talk with the mun first so we can plot things properly.

Any jokes about child death, rape, racism, disability, sexism and so on are not allowed here. If I see one of them, I may go to your dms and telling you that’s not okay writing these things because they’re harmful, and to stop with that stuff. If you’ll ignore/insult/make fun of me you’ll be permablocked. [Added: 09/07/2019]

This blog may contain triggers such as blood, angst, smoke, drugs, gore, mental health etc. I’ll tag everything and I’ll use “read more”. (I’ll tag my triggers using, for example, “tw: blood” without air quotes) Before rping this stuff with you, I’ll always ask you if you’re okay with it, so do please tell me if you have any triggers or I should tag something specific in my blog! For example, my muse, when she’s overwhelmed by certain feelings or recalls what happened to her kin, she bleeds from her mouth and sternal scar. Please, if this makes you feel uncomfortable don’t be afraid to tell me it; Regarding sexual content, it will also be present, especially during Sinday, but I will always tag everything accordingly and put everything under read more.

Please, tag these two topics: needles and stepping on people. I feel extremely uncomfortable regarding the latter because it's heavily connected with animal abuse, and it makes me feel so sick I start to panic. I only ask you to tag these two topics.

I’m a human being, and sometimes I make mistakes too. If I made something that offended you/made you feel uncomfortable, PLEASE LET ME KNOW. I want to learn from my mistakes.

Shipping rules:

Even if I’m more than aware of the fact an 18+ mun is legally an adult, I realized I feel more comfortable shipping with both muns/muses who are 20+, especially in the case there will be some nsfw. That’s my personal preference, and this is NOT negotiable and it will NEVER be.[added 06/05/2019]

If you don’t want to keep our ship going on, that’s TOTALLY OKAY. I will NEVER get mad at you, neither asking you the motivation. If you don’t feel comfortable anymore, that’s okay and I respect your decision!

This blog is multiship exclusive, that means I'll only ship with one muse/au of that muse. Furthermore, I'll be highly selective with whom I ship with, and I mostly prioritize people I've been friends with for a long time. [EXCLUSIVE SHIP LIST]

I state in advance I don’t ship my muse with Diana, since she sees her as a mother-like figure. So… This basically would be incest, and I feel very uncomfortable with it. Furthermore, I won’t ship with Taric, Leona, Aurelion, Soraka, Zoe (But this is almost needless to say since she’s a minor, but prevention is always better than the cure), and yordles.

Even if I’m extremely fine with a platonic/non-sexual relationship, I’m also okay with some smut and that may occur with a serious plot, and ONLY if I feel comfortable and I trust my rp partner enough. Unfortunately, I don’t feel very comfortable rping it on Tumblr, and I’d rather rp it on Discord. [Please check the smut rules here] DON’T FORCE IT WITH ME, otherwise the ship will be deleted and probably I’ll block you too.

My muse is a revenant (I’m talking about her canon verse. In Odyssey! and Modern! she’s a living being) and NO, shipping with her is NOT necrophilia (She’s NOT a lifeless, nonsentient, smelly and rotten body who cannot give consent. She has revived thanks to Targon/Moon’s magic, and she’s ABLE to consent and she doesn’t smell bad, she’s not rotting and so on). I’m writing this because I’m kinda sick of this subject because “Shipping with Ernye/Pyke/Thresh/Kalista/Yone is necrophilia1111!!1!!”, and I’m more than sure these people are the first who fall in love with a vampire. If I receive any anon asks about this stuff in which there’s written I cannot ship her with anyone or other offensive things toward me or my muse (both ic and ooc), I’ll ignore and permablock them. No matter who’s the person who sent this. Again: I’m sick and tired of this stuff because basically there’s no problem in shipping with a psycho who can basically kill/abuse you any moment, meanwhile, GOD FORBID a revenant/vampire and stuff like that. So, better safe than sorry. If this bothers you so much you can unfollow me.

Respect my right to say “NO” if I don’t want to ship with your muse. So, don’t force it or I’ll block you.;

About the Mun:

You can call me Silkie, and I’m 25 years old;

Discord for mutuals only;

Pronouns: she/her (They/Them is also fine, if you feel more comfortable with it, no worries);

Chickens, cats, chinchillas, and Castlevania addicted;

I consider myself as a friendly person, so if you wanna know me or rp with me just send me a message! I suffer from diagnosed GAD and depression, so I really need time to open up to people and my activity may be sporadic because of this. And, please: if I make/say something that makes you feel uncomfortable TELL ME ANYTIME since I never mean to hurt anyone here through my words or acts;

Remember Muse ≠ Mun. Ernye’s actions don’t reflect my personality, or what I think about you;

Please DON’T FLIRT WITH ME, it makes me extremely anxious and uncomfortable due to many awful experiences I had in the past, and also because rp is a hobby and I want to have fun, and I’m not looking for a romantic partner. If you ignore my warnings I’ll permablock you. And yes, this also applies to every NSFW question about me. If you dare to do so you’ll get immediately reported, permablocked and the whole chatlog saved. I will also NOT tolerate any kind of NSFW anon ask about me.

The cringy art you see on my profile is made by me unless stated otherwise. Constructive criticism and bits of advice are more than welcome and encouraged ♥

[ If you have read my rules send me “Has the killing moon come for them?” That’s optional, of course, you don’t have to send it to me!]

[itspatsy]

Okay, after much thought, here’s my attempt to explain how I’m generally okay with Trish’s trajectory this season in theory, but why I feel the writers slipped up in execution. 

Addiction is a monster. It takes over your life, every facet of it, mind, body, and soul, and tears it to shreds. It controls you. It consumes you, fully. It leaves you lying to everyone around you, rationalizing, making excuses and justifications. It destroys your relationships. It makes you use, manipulate, and discard people, whether they be total strangers or your closest loved ones, because nothing is more important than getting your fix. It forces you to do things you never thought you would do, awful, immoral, degrading things. It twists you into someone you can’t even recognize. I get that. I get that this is what Trish’s storyline was about. And I get that none of the other characters were really in a position to help her deal with any of it, and how that shows the importance of having a support system to help you through a mental illness like this. 

And it wasn’t a character assassination, because all the pieces were there. The barely contained rage and taste for violence, the self-protectiveness and need to be in control, the fear of vulnerability, the reckless self-destruction and lack of impulse control, the low self-esteem and feelings of worthlessness, the undeveloped sense of self, the egocentrism and self-righteousness, the self-defensiveness and difficulty admitting wrongs, the envy of what others have, the obsessiveness, the apathy and trouble understanding others’ feelings, the overwhelming ambition to contribute something meaningful to the world, the desperate need to be someone that matters, really matters, to people. And there were shades of unhealthiness in her relationship with Jessica: codependency, envy, high expectations, the idealization, trying to live vicariously through her, pushing her into things that weren’t always best for her. 

Those were all aspects of Trish, some more negative or harmful than others, and most of them very much a response to severe trauma and abuse. I’ve talked a lot about those aspects of her character in the past. They were part of her in s1, but tempered to manageable levels, because she was in a reasonably stable place in her life and was making an active effort to improve herself and to get better. But then her best friend and only support system disappeared for 6 months, she was almost murdered multiple times despite all her self-defense training, she broke 10 years of being clean with Simpson’s pill to protect Jessica, and her abusive mom found a way to slither back into her life by hanging information about Jessica over her head. That stability and any sense of safety and control she’d been able to develop was gone, all of her resistance was lowered to critical levels, and it opened her up to this relapse, which then ate away at the most positive parts of her personality and amplified the worst ones x1000. I get that.

One quick look through this blog will show that I was not one of those fans that ever thought Trish was some pure precious cinnamon role and moral paragon. I knew that under her put-together facade, she was a walking disaster that was as traumatized and damaged and desperate and conflicted as Jessica. And I did want the show to explore that damage and how trauma presents itself in many different ways. I wanted it to be clear to viewers Trish is actually not okay and is still struggling with her past. I wanted her issues with addiction to be examined. I wanted then to move towards Hellcat. I even wanted her and Malcolm to interact more and develop their own dynamic. So I should be happy, right? They technically did what I wanted. Shit, like 90% of the songs on my Trish playlist just became significantly more relevant. But no, I’m not really feeling happy about it, because I got the wishing on a monkey’s paw version. 

A quick personal note: Trish means a lot to me, and her relationship with Jessica means a lot to me, and that’s something I can’t really put into words. My initial reaction to the season was just… an overwhelming sadness. And I don’t feel as bad now, but I keep bouncing between “sure, it does make sense” to “this is so awful, oh god, why would they do this???” Sometimes I feel this inspiration to write thousands of words of meta, but then it just as easily turns and suddenly I can’t stand thinking about it because it makes me nauseous. For the last year, I’ve thought about Trish every day in at least some capacity. I thought about her as I went to bed, when I drove, when I went for walks, when I had any short moment of time to myself. I’m not here to talk about whether using fictional characters like that is a particularly healthy coping mechanism, because that’s not the point right now. The point is, it was a pleasant distraction for me that helped me cope with other life things, but now it’s something that causes me pain and anxiety, and I’m stuck feeling like I have to detach from the thing that was helping me detach if I ever want to feel better. 

I’ve been trying to pinpoint what it is about all of this that’s making me feel that way. Why do I feel like someone literally died? I don’t think my problem is with the characterization in and of itself because I knew those things were sitting under the surface, and it’s not with telling this story of trauma and addiction and putting the full ugly reality of it on display. It definitely isn’t a problem with the acting: Rachael Taylor was amazing and knocked it out of the park. So what’s the problem? Why isn’t this sitting okay with me? I’m generally pretty rational, but I think most of my issues here are very perception and emotion based rather than anything obviously intellectual, and it’s hard to verbalize. I’ll try my best. And I don’t know, maybe my feelings will change if I watch again, but right now, the idea of that still hurts too much. 

So. The writers deconstructed Trish, which is fascinating in theory, but I just feel like they did it without… kindness? It felt like pure merciless brutality. Even mean-spirited sometimes. They debased every part of her life and her accomplishments, cheapened them, and put her in publicly humiliating situations at every opportunity. They left her without a shred of dignity, without her heart, without one positive relationship. And, no, addiction isn’t at all kind, it is cruel and demeaning and heartless, but I didn’t feel a sense of compassion from the writers themselves in how they handled her and her trauma and mental illness. That so many viewers are reacting so negatively to Trish doesn’t strike me as purely a failure to understand the impact of addiction, but that there was a failure on the writers’ part to show it in an empathetic, understanding way. Even I, someone that loves Trish so much and spends a lot of time in her head, feel like I have to do extra legwork. 

It felt as though they were prioritizing and emphasizing her motivations in a way that was intended to put her in the absolute worst light possible. Her most selfish motivations (”unholy” ambition, jealousy, wanting to be the special one) were on full display and consistently pointed out by other characters, but they often underplayed her more sympathetic, obviously trauma based motivations or the motivations that were sincerely about helping other people. She talked the talked about doing good, but there was no point where it was shown in action. It was almost always a manipulative ploy to help herself or get her fix. I know Trish does sincerely care about people, wants to make sure they never have to feel as small and helpless and voiceless as she’s been made to feel, and I think probably the writers do think of that as one of her many conflicting motivations, but they didn’t show it, they only told it and then contradicted it. It also definitely didn’t help that it felt like they were villainizing ambition, and as a result, villainizing her for daring to have it. I don’t think I need to explain why the implication that women having ambition will lead them down a road of power-hungry obsession and selfish callousness is… not great. 

And I feel like they just didn’t carry over what should have been obvious threads that would’ve helped make more sense of this downward spiral. What I said above about how her behavior here connects to the events of s1? That’s all headcanoning from me. The show didn’t actually draw those lines. It wasn’t clear that she was still reacting to having her vulnerability shoved so brutality back in her face by Simpson and Kilgrave. That she’d opened herself up to relapse after taking Simpson’s pill. That Kilgrave fractured her relationship with Jessica and the cracks still hadn’t been patched up. Or even that letting her mom near her again was reviving old traumas and pressures and expectations and unhealthy coping mechanisms. I think the whole thing moved too quickly, and they decided to give us the Darkest Timeline Trish without fully adding up the elements and explaining when and how we crossed the veil and dipped into that timeline. When I was plotting out an AU where she never met Jessica, s2 Trish is actually what I pictured. But that’s kind of the key point: it was a Trish that never had anyone’s love and support. That wasn’t true here. And I think at least pulling threads from s1 would’ve added more depth to it, instead of making it seem like she was only being driven by some desperation for MORE MORE MORE. 

And I don’t know, maybe it’s all just in my head, but I perceived a kind of near softening of Dorothy (not completely, obviously) that almost felt designed to pull even more sympathy away from Trish. It just felt like they were pulling back on her. There were a few points where it seemed they were trying to veer her closer to lovable asshole territory and trying to gloss over things we know she did from s1. I think viewers do need reminders sometimes, especially if you’ve been off the air for over two years, and it doesn’t help to have things completely vital to a character’s identity and formation mentioned offhandedly in a quick conversation. That Dorothy literally pimped her daughter out was sort of brushed over and the repercussions of her role in it weren’t examined. Even their body language shifted compared to the defensiveness of s1. Trish just let Dorothy into her personal space, let her casually touch her, like it didn’t mean anything, like there wasn’t years of physical abuse. And then to put Dorothy in a position to be the voice of reason was just… wow. To leave viewers with the ability to say, “damn, Trish is a selfish prick, and Dorothy is just telling it like it is,” it felt gross. 

By the end, the execution of all this felt more like a grueling punishment of the character than a complex, human story told with careful thoughtfulness and compassion. It felt villainizing. It felt like darkness for the sake of darkness. And listen, I love angst. I love complicated, difficult characters sometimes doing the wrong things. I love characters failing and falling and learning and building themselves back up. But I’m just so tired of hopelessly grimdark stories. I’m tired of shows destroying their light in a quest to compete for the title of sickest, saddest world. 

And yes, this show was already harsh in its first season, and it didn’t back away from cruel reality, but it wasn’t hopeless. It had its heart. And that beating, bleeding heart was the relationship between Jessica and Trish. But they chose to rip that heart out. And that’s the thing that bothers me the most. They took away the most positive thing in these women’s lives, and the most positive thing in the show and something the fandom loved, and for what purpose exactly? In s1, they gave us these broken, codependent women that could be messy and wrong, that could cause each other pain, but still shared a love that was powerful and supportive and uplifting. That’s an infinitely more valuable and meaningful thing to put on the screen than another common, cliched story about petty jealousy tearing women apart. 

And I’m aware it wasn’t as simple as a petty need to be the special-est person in the room driving Trish, that this envy stems from her knowing if she’d had Jessica’s power she’d have been able to protect herself from the things that still leave her feeling empty and small, how it continues to feed into her feelings of worthlessness and lack of control, that she’s been conditioned to believe nothing is good enough and she needs to be better and more than herself and have more than what she has if anyone is ever going to love her, but I also spend a lot of time in Trish’s head, thinking about her motivations and traumas. I doubt most viewers are going to take the time to dig deeper. And I don’t know, I can’t entirely blame the fandom for failing to afford Trish the same sympathy and understanding they’re willing to offer Jessica and her fuck ups when it feels like the show itself didn’t seem to want to give it to Trish or didn’t try to paint the fullest picture of where she was coming from. So the takeaway for a lot of people is going to be that the writers took this special, well-loved relationship and ripped it apart by making one of them a jealous, resentful, toxic creep. I can’t blame anyone for feeling upset or betrayed.

I can tell myself there was a point to all of this. I can tell myself they’ll pull Trish back from the edge, that she slipped, lost the plot, but that recovery is on the way, and she will make an honest effort to get better and be better and work to become her best self, which is the thing that makes a true hero. I can tell myself they’ll repair her relationship with Jessica, and the two of them will come out of this with a stronger, more healthy dynamic because they’ll finally openly address the ugly things that were festering. I can tell myself that, but I can’t trust it. 

I trusted the writers once already. I trusted them to treat Trish with compassion and kindness, even as they broke her down and took her to dark places. I trusted them to show a difficult, complicated but still ultimately affirming and unconditional love between her and Jessica. But they broke my trust. How can I have faith about what they’ll do next season? How can I believe they’ll lift Trish back up and mend things with Jessica instead of taking her down a path of outright villainy? Honestly, making her a villain seems about as likely as anything else at this point. So I can’t trust them, and because this show doesn’t follow a typical schedule, I also won’t even get to know what direction they’ll take for at least another two years. And it’s just not a good feeling to have to sit with. It sucks when you invest so much of yourself into something, and then the things that meant the most to you about it get pulled out from under you, and you can’t even trust that it’ll actually get better.

[elizabethrobertajones]

Do you really think current Cas couldn't end up being The Empty? I don't necessarily believe that because I think Cas is not acting like himself but the "All Magic Comes with a prize"-stories, of there being a downside to major "mircles" like resurrections are pretty common, plus having a newly introduced major foe that looks like Cas (+ can access his memories) thats not explored yet, plus being told that Cas would be back "slowly" or "at least his most important parts"

*shrugs* I mean if they’re doing it they’ve basically wasted an entire episode of supposed Cas stuff plus 2 previous ones that only made sense with Cas’ reactions and actions if it was him, so the only way it would happen is if we do already have our Cas on screen, but there’s a catch or some consequences yet to hit about the resurrection and Cas BEGINS to belatedly suffer side effects which retroactively cast into doubt how much he was here or just suggest something was wrong with him all along and waiting for some reason to activate, as he’s not currently being depicted in any distress whatsoever. I agree the clothes are suspicious and I was saying all along since the beginning of the season or before, mostly as crack posts since I don’t like speculating, that if Cas gets handed an outfit out of thin air instead of picking it for himself, that concept fits what I figure would be symbolism warning that Cas has ongoing problems, but as someone who deals with speculation in about that much vagueness I really don’t have any sort of solid ideas beyond that.

For me, talking about TV shows isn’t really fun to guess what will happen and I would just want to end up writing it myself or go down convoluted threads that the writers wouldn’t keep up on, and trying to stay in the lines of what might actually happen is an enormous headache and no one is particularly great at it unless they’re extremely vague or only analyse the very obvious threads and offer generic scenarios they could play out in, e.g. how we could predict a reverse crypt scene, because it was basically a looming issue not a wild speculative idea, but being threatened for most of the season subtly or not. 

I mostly live entirely in the moment for TV shows if I can help it, and I prefer watching things I’ve had at least mild spoilers for when it comes to things I would want to get emotionally invested in, even if it’s really just scoping out the personality of the thing. Watching Supernatural as it airs is pretty messy for my anxiety about not knowing what comes next, and after a little while in fandom I realised how pointless speculation is for ever making you feel better about anything. If you’re right you’ve bored yourself out of the story, if you’re wrong you’ve made yourself annoyed or built up your expectations. 

And if you’re super invested in a fictional character and scour the internet for spoilers about them because you’re worried about their well being, and analyse every inch of the show for clues about what might happen to them while creating potential worrying scenarios, that play out or not, you mostly get into a huge panic about them, start treating your imagination as if the horrible stuff has already happened, and lose a lot of objectivity as you start to perceive the writers going out of the way to do bad things to your fave because you’re super focussed on what bad stuff will happen to them, and blah blah character stanning cycle of being protective and angry etc. I’ve seen it consume too many people since I got to fandom :S 

So… Something is probably about to happen to Cas or because of Cas, and the trip through the Empty seems like it maaaay have been too understated or an under-utilised resource (but I also have immediately made my peace that that’s all we’ll see of it, even if it isn’t, because I just can’t LIVE like that with expectations and serious plot demands and trying to construct versions of the season that only make sense if X Y and Z are in it and then getting upset when they aren’t) and we missed a few important steps between bargaining and resurrection considering the new clothes and Cas’s moment where he took in that he was dressed in them. There’s also left over weirdness about him and Jack which also has a lot of unexplained things he and Dean need to talk about and may or may not cause a serious problem now Jack has legged it.

I don’t think he’s acting strange, because there have been no blatantly obvious cues for the people at the back about him acting strange, e.g. lingering shots where he was pulling weird faces, lines in the Empty to indicate it wanted anything other than to go back to sleep, or hints that anything is particularly coming for Cas based on the MotW obvious mirrors (which have been pretty low key because the MotW have been very secondary to the emotional drama so far). Billie never hinted about Cas more than that he was dead because he killed her, and now we have spoilers that it seems most likely the Winchester knocking over the house of cards will be Jack seemingly motivated on his own steam to do something good, so that literally covers every doomy portentous line this season that wasn’t completely incidental, although I have been joking about some, I don’t really get into conspiracies about them… 

We’ve had lingering shots with Cas squinting in a very familiar Cas-like way with understandable exasperation at whatever’s going on, and he’s had emotional moments with all his family and generally been presented as mostly fine and not visibly perturbed or confused by not being able to heal the guard for example, just resigned that it was too late for him to do anything, and he hasn’t been dangerously put in any crosshairs in the symbolism. I can’t think of anything really at all that’s threatened Cas in the symbolism or foreshadowing and nothing he’s done on screen has been suspicious about his personality or characteristics or actions. Dean’s not suspicious. Sam is a little concerned about *how* he got back but not *if* he is Cas.

Like, of course they might blindside us with something, but considering they spent time on emotional moments with Cas dealing with ongoing characters arcs between him and the rest of them, it makes no sense a fake out Cas would be getting Cas’s emotional development. Unless it was laden with dramatic irony. Remember in 11x11 when Casifer was talking to Dean? Even if you didn’t know that he was Lucifer and pretend they never revealed that detail and this is the first time we see him since, there’s a billion things wrong with his interactions with Dean in that scene. There was stuff visibly wrong with him before we knew for sure he’d been possessed in 11x10 just in how he hung back from the team and watched them all very, very carefully, and took too long to reply while weighing his options.

Cas already did come back slowly because it took him until episode 6 to actually be back in the game, even if he was restored in episode 4, so at this point I figure that spoiler was being careful about revealing how Cas’s appearances in the start of the season were spread out, and not commenting on Cas’s internal stuff.

I don’t know, bad stuff happens to them all the time on the show so of course I just assume something is coming, but I’m not worried about it like it might happen to a friend or something because it’s just a part of the story so I don’t get being worried about stuff happening to your faves as if it’s the end of the world… Cas is currently occupying the very centre of the story along with Jack, possibly MORE important than him since he’s important to Jack in turn. I feel like Cas is the actual beating heart of the story in season 13 so far based on his entire blanket presence in the empty spaces caused by Jack and Dean’s need/want for him. It’s a bit ridiculous to now hope because he’s back he’s going to just settle into the family with them and have no troubles, though of course that’s a point I’m always happy to be proved wrong on, it’s better just to use bored eyes and just… ¬_¬ something’s gonna happen to Cas… ¬_¬ your way through the story. And it will be something that’s probably super important to the main arc because Cas has been so far, in a deep, intrinsic way, so whatever happens I’m down for it, unless it’s some randomly abject level of awful that no one could have called, and his treatment in the story, against all odds, is somehow really horrible.

Aside from horrible character-trashing worst case scenarios, though, the manner in which is happens is, to me, completely arbitrary as a non-speculating blog that just analyses what ends up on my plate and occasionally wonders what the OBVIOUS cues mean without committing to theories beyond musings and wondering out loud with obvious disclaimers that I’m just thinking and don’t care if it does or doesn’t happen. 

Like, I’m analysing all the themes as they show up and I assume whatever happens will fit the themes and character arcs and whatever. At the moment I see Cas as being Cas because I just got handed an incredible Cas episode on a plate where Cas was being very Cas-like all over the place, and his biggest problem was Jack, who was not directly threatening him at any point, and if anything it seems like Cas futilely chasing after Jack trying to stop him getting intro trouble (nearly shot by Dean, actually shot by Dave the Cowghoul) would be the one theme I’d wonder has any actual suggestion that Cas is going to have Problems, but that’s not directly happening to him, that’s just his issue with not being able to help Jack and stop him getting in trouble. And, I guess now, chasing after him before he does that. And based on episode descriptions for upcoming stuff, not very successfully, so we already know that symbolism pays off, however Cas ends up going about this :P

So that’s my one and only reason to be worried about Cas right now… Granted, I’ve only watched the episode twice while extreeeeemely woozy with a migraine but I’ve been reading my dash all day and seeing discussion of most parts of the episode and all the Cas bits and I’ve been rewatching bits here and there and nothing is leaping out at me that anything is currently trying to warn us to brace for Cas, except the general sense of ¬_¬ about something inevitably coming his way because of course he’s not in every episode - but he could just leave entirely of his own agency to go look for Jack off screen and even without the worries about what Jack may or may not have done to him in season 12, given what they set up, it would be entirely understandable for him to do it just because he’s Cas. 

[captainurahara]

Hey everyone.

I’m not quite sure how to say this, but—I feel like I’m slowly drifting away from Bleach and the RP scene, at least for the time being. I wanted to come back, I really did, but I’m beginning to realize how little motivation I have right now. And... to be honest, I don’t know if it will ever come back??? I hope it does but I just don’t know. There’s a few reasons.

This fandom and the attitudes many have about the series (some of the problems created by the author himself) are draining to me. It’s so draining to see so much heteronormativity, sexism, transphobia, abuse apology, racist attitudes, etc. around, even though I do my best to actively avoid it. It can seem really minor at first but that’s what makes it harmful, it just keeps piling on and snowballing until it really does sap my energy and my motivation. The fandom at large, what’s left of it, is still so awful that I’m beginning to have a lot of trouble trusting anyone who I don’t already know. I’m unable to make new connections, new RPs, new friendships because of this. It makes it difficult. On my personal blog I swear I have half of the Bleach fandom blocked, which happened when everyone was so terrible to each other about the ending. And then I think: Every Bleach RP blog I don’t know could be someone who was horrible to other people, someone I blocked. It makes me kind of paranoid, because I don’t want to talk to those people and have RPs with them only to find out who they really are.

Another reason is that... I’m just losing interest, y’know? I’m getting into other shonen series that are interesting and exciting, and because these series also treat characters well and develop them so well, I look over to Bleach and see how sad and shoddy it is in comparison. As much as I hate to say it, even my own muse had let me down and didn’t truly have character development despite having a pretty important role as The Mentor figure. It makes me sad and makes me lose motivation because in order to fix up Kisuke how I envision him I have to work through a lot, throwing away things and adding new things to his character, which I am always afraid of being judged for. This fandom has never took kindly to rejecting canon unless it fits a certain narrow narrative, so it’s always something looming over me. It really is hard making your character go against what you know others want to see.

Another reason is that I’m a shy person. RPing is a social activity and it’s hard for me.

One more reason is simply my mental health. I’m doing ok right now but I’ve become extremely distracted now that I’m on break. There’s so much I want to do to relax over the remainder of my summer break before the Hell Fall Semester starts, and even if I want to be here RPing I find myself doing other things in its place like reading, drawing, watching shows, and playing games. I want to enjoy myself and go with the flow of what activity draws me to it rather than sitting down and forcing myself to do an activity because I think I should.

The last reason is just... I’m not really much of a writer, I don’t know how else to say it. I don’t even like to say writing is a hobby of mine because I do so little of it. I have a desire for writing, but making the words come out is so hard. It takes up a lot of my mental energy. For some reason I’m able to just talk/write stream of consciousness just fine, but when it comes to words written on behalf of a character I become too careful about it. I don’t allow sloppiness and become very perfectionist about it, because I’m not portraying myself but rather someone else who is far beyond me physically and intellectually. Words don’t come out, I labor over word choice and tone and style, it takes forever to write, I check it a million times for errors, yadda yadda. It’s just not a simple process, and RPing requires me to do it over and over. I become frustrated or tired when I can’t think it through and I end up not replying back, that’s 99.9% why I drop threads/don’t answer asks.

I don’t really know where I was going with this, but I guess what I’m meaning to say is that: Bleach and the RP comm and writing in general tired me out. I will still give this a lot more thought of course, but... I’ve been thinking about putting my blog on a real hiatus, possibly an indefinite one. I love Kisuke with all my heart, he’s still my #1 favorite anime character, but... I think writing him in front of an audience is something that’s too much for me to do all the time. He’s the powerful genius who’s the star of this blog, not me, I’m just the medium. Sometimes Kisuke, and what I have to deal with to be able to write him, is too much.

Regardless of whether or not I come back, I need to allow myself a hiatus to give myself time to think of what I want to do and what will work. This is really long and rambly I know but it’s 3am and I need to say something about it before I forget.

[nothingman]

For years, Reddit’s r/TheRedPill forum has been one of the worst corners of the internet. It’s the home of the pickup artist movement, it gave Milo Yiannapolis a fawning fanbase, and it’s the hub of the perceived “manosphere”–a community built around the “men’s rights” philosophy that feminism is a sham built to oppress men.

Reddit is deliberately designed to protect anonymity. But that doesn’t mean users don’t also have to work to protect themselves–something that someone probably should have told Robert Fisher of New Hampshire, who has just been outed by The Daily Beast, via a trail of usernames and custom URLs with ties to Fisher’s email address, as the creator of the misogynistic forum.

Fisher, by the way, also happens to be a member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, not that the connection is very surprising. If I had to name the two communities most vocal in their loathing of women, I’d probably go with Red Pill dudes and the GOP.

In addition to Red Pill, Fisher’s reported aliases had also written and published a pickup artist site, a blog attempting to “Explain God,” and one site titled “Existential Vortex.” He also was or maybe still is a singer-songwriter and kazooist in an “indieelectronic” band. Basically, he sounds like exactly the sort of bro-ish college kid, straight off a few frat party rejections and his first philosophy class, whom you would expect to found a misogynistic Reddit forum with a name referencing The Matrix. (Except Fisher had, at the time of Red Pill’s creation, aged out of the follies of youth excuse. He’s 31 now.)

Fisher’s reported “Pk_atheist” alias started the subreddit in October 2012, just before he lost his first election—one he ran as a Democrat. He won his seat in November of 2014, by which time the subreddit had grown to 83,000 members. He had already stepped down as a moderator in early 2013, but continued to be active in the community.

The Daily Beast writes that “within hours of contacting Rep. Fisher, and after delivering by email a summary of his apparent connections to The Red Pill kingpin, his two primary Reddit usernames had been wiped, and four blogs connected to him were deleted or made private.”

[Update: His own colleagues, on both sides of the aisle, are already calling for his resignation. Fisher responded with a statement asserting he is “not disappearing,” adding, “I will continue to stand strong for men’s rights and the rights of all.”]

But the internet doesn’t let you hide from your awfulness that easily. Through archived posts and comment threads, we have way too clear a window into this man’s mind and his motivations for starting this giant sexism feeding ground. Here are just a few direct quotes.

Content warning for, well, for everything Red Pill is about. (Misogyny and rape denial abound.)

–If you want the short version of his views on women: “I find women’s personalities in general to be lackluster and boring, serving little purpose in my day to day life. So I usually only compare body types.”

–“Because when I told myself I thought they were smart, I really had the footnote in the back of my head … smart … for a woman.”

–“I don’t hate women. I just understand what use they are to me. Stimulating conversation is not one of them.”

–“Understand that in the old days, women were not brought up the way they are today. Before feminism, there was less freedom, and therefore it was not necessary to teach women consequence. Consequence was strictly a man’s game.”

–“Women are not oppressed- they’re literally free from a lot of the responsibilities men are- to the extent where women have no need for the functioning every-day knowledge that most men have by the age of 18 … If you took the conversation skills, the sub-par intelligence, the lack of curiosity and put it in a man’s body- would you hang out with that guy? No! Would he be successful? Hell no! Those things are useless without a woman’s body attached.”

–In a post with “seduction” advice, he proposes “There’s a good girl voice inside each woman telling her that she needs to make sure to be proper and avoid being a slut.” He follows up with a lot of tips on how to invade the “good girl’s” personal space and trick her into letting out the “slut.”

–In response to a question about the Free the Nipple movement: “Hot women are a cartel, and they will continue to keep prices as high as possible. Anybody “freeing” their nipples will either be low-quality, or they will have a smear campaign against them to make them seem low-quality, despite the equality implications supposedly working for the cartel.”

–He defended being sexually attracted to teenage girls. “15 year old girls have boobs. Puberty doesnt strike at 18 overnight. Secondly, not creepy- 15 year old girls and guys are commonly sexually active. Its just illegal.”

–In one of his many comments alleging women frequently falsely accuse men of rape, he says he has a video camera in his room, presumably to record his exploits for proof of innocence.

It’s bad enough that someone could hold all of these beliefs, let alone feel confident to enough to put them out in public (even if anonymously so). Add to that the fact that there are, as of now, nearly 200,000 subscribers to the subreddit.

But nothing is scarier than knowing that this is what at least some (and some is too many) of the men who make our country’s laws think about women. And if you think Fisher’s purported Reddit persona is all talk, it’s not. It’s clear that his misogyny infects his platform.

Taking a quick look at Fisher’s terrible, stock-photo-filled campaign website, you can see the threads. In the site’s “Family” section (complete with a stock picture of what I assume is a random family of strangers, so you know he really cares), he says he wants to “strengthen the family.” But all that seems to mean to him is something about the family court legal system. He writes, “It is long over-due to bring oversight and accountability to our family courts. Every parent deserves justice in our courts regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, or orientation.”

This obsession with family courts looks to date back to 2012, when his colleague and fellow men’s rights activist Joshua Youssef began publicly decrying the “feminist judicial tyranny” over a custody battle with his ex-wife. A reddit username the Daily Beast attributes to Youssef posted a lengthy rant about the “corruption, deception, greed, lawlessness, and feminist entitlement-mindedness, of the family court” to /theredpill, with Fisher in the comments defending him.

Remember that comment about “low quality” women exposing their nipples? Another one of New Hampshire’s Reps, Al Baldasaro, insulted the physical appearance of a female legislator who was fighting a bill, written by an all-male team, which would have outlawed breastfeeding in public.

Just four days after the 2014 election that put him in the New Hampshire House of Representatives, with only 100 subscribers, Pk_atheist wrote a manifesto of sorts, explaining the point of the, as of then, two-week-old forum.

“Our culture has become a feminist culture,” he wrote. “A president cannot be elected today without succumbing to the feminist narrative and paying them tribute. How many times has Obama given credit for his manhood to his wife? How many times has the debate hinged on women’s pay gap – which is a myth that gets lip service because if you don’t you’re a misogynist!”

Yet he maintained, “It’s too easy to blame feminism for our troubles.” He’s all for equal rights, he says, although he takes care to specify, “Equal rights are something I strongly am in support of. For men and women.” As opposed to unequal equality, I suppose.

His big message is that feminism has led not to equal rights, but to female domination. Women, as he puts it, control the conversation. “I am here to say, for better or for worse, the frame around public discourse is a feminist frame, and we’ve lost our identity because of it.”

Therefore men, he proclaims, need to take back this role of central dominance from women. The Red Pill is “men’s sexual strategy,” designed to counter feminism, which is, apparently, nothing more than a sexual strategy itself.

This, through the Daily Beast’s sleuthing, appears to be Robert Fisher’s worldview. This is a man who gave a space to hundreds of thousands of others looking to blame and conquer women, while simultaneously being elected into public office, where he has the ability to affect real policy.

Here’s the kicker, and keep this in mind the next time you think your vote doesn’t matter: In Fisher’s small New Hampshire district, he won his re-election by only 700 votes. He won his first election in 2014 by 276 votes. Squashing the internet’s rampant misogyny is a challenge too big for any one of us, but if you’re eligible to vote, you can do your part to keep immature, idiotic monsters like this one out of office.

  (via Daily Beast, image: Shutterstock)

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—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—

via The Mary Sue

[culinarystrategist]

Name: Jo Gender: Female Eye Color:  Blue Hair Color: Violet-red Relationship: Married Zodiac: Gemini Favorite Color: Green Favorite Season: Spring Favorite Place: My library Favorite Holiday: Anything that gets me a couple of days off work Favorite Video Game: FFVII Last show you watched: I watched the first episode of War and Peace on Netflix last night

What’s your honest opinion about your muse? - At first, I didn’t really care much for any of the main FFXV boys, but they really grew on me as I got to know them. Ignis is my type (RP-wise) and I felt that I could understand him the best out of all of them. His motivations and behaviours make sense to me. He’s a good egg and I adore him. Would you date your muse? - Probably not. I don’t think we’d be at all compatible because we’re too similar in some respects, and too dissimilar in others. What are your favorite kinds of threads? - I have a very deep and passionate love for crack. I want to have fun and laugh with other people. But I do love serious stuff too - I like darker themes, exploratory threads and threads which get me thinking. Are you a selective roleplayer? - Ehhhh, semi-selective? Tbh, with me, a lot of it is a time/energy factor. I’d like to do all the things with all the people, but alas I cannot. Do you have a favorite muse (if you have more than one)? - I think, by virtue of his being my longest, continually running muse, my main blog would be my favourite. Having said that, I’m spending far more time with Ignis of late, because he is new and shiny. What made you decide to join the fandom? - I’m terrible at running more than one blog (honestly, really awful) but I enjoyed the game and thought I’d enjoy writing in the FFXV ‘verse, and @ancaire encouraged me. Do you see yourself staying with the fandom for a long time? - I really don’t know. Running two active blogs is difficult for me because life is busy and exhausting and I’m quite lazy, but for the moment, I’m content on Iggy so I’ll certainly be here for the foreseeable future. I’ve met a few really awesome people who make it worth sticking around. There are still a lot of things I’d like to explore with Ignis and I don’t feel like I’ve even scratched the surface of the character. I’ll be here until I’m not.

Tagged by: @pxlsatiio & @fxrtem Tagging: @forxthexfuture21, @noctiscrosses, @nightfallprince, @gnzlngr, @sagefiredaggers, @heterochromiairiidum, @divinamxultionem, @dexturatua

[inmemoratum-blog]

.

[thelowercasegimmick]

YA Review, 8/8/16: Hungry by H.A. Swain

...is this even a real book?

If you’re familiar with this book, it’s probably because you’ve seen someone making fun of its premise.  In short: this is a dystopia novel, and the element that makes the world dystopic is that there’s no food, and instead of eating, people take pills to get nutrients.  It’s an easy premise to riff.  If you go through this book’s GoodReads page, a fair number of the reviews are from people who have never read the book making fun of the premise.  But I have read this book, and... holy shit, guys.  The premise is just scratching the surface in terms of the sheer incompetency of this book.  This is probably the worst YA book I have ever read from cover to cover.  There are worse books that I’ve started without finishing, and I’ve read worse books of other genres, but in terms of YA novels I’ve read all the way through, the only one that could compete with this one in terms of sheer awfulness is Very LeFreak (2009).  I legitimately feel at a loss to describe how unbelievably incompetent this book was, on every level imaginable.  This is YA’s answer to an M. Night Shyamalan movie - I can’t even point to what went wrong, because there are so many deeply incompetent elements that it all just runs together into a big blob of terrible.  I have a lot to get to, and I have no idea if I’m even going to remember to mention everything that made this book so bad.  But this is my best attempt to sum up the unfathomable levels of awful that make up this book.  Join me, as I embark in what will probably go down as the most negative review I’ll ever write for this blog, as I try to come to terms with the fact that a professional editor and publishing company actually allowed something this horrible to be released.

The only way I know to organize this review is to just give you my experience reading this book, as I had it.  There’s no way to come up with a more intelligent and cohesive structure than that - you’ll experience each element as I did.  Going in, I figured this book would probably be bad just based on the premise, but it was the opening lines that let me know I was truly in for a clusterfuck.

In the ghostly branches of a hologram tree, light winks off the shiny side of something red and round.  I hesitate to reach for it.  It’s just a projection of the past onto the present after all, but it looks so real that I can’t help myself.  I raise my arm.  My body feels hollow and slow.

“Hey, who are you?  That’s not for you!” someone calls.

I try to tell this stranger my name, Thalia Apple, but the words burble up from my throat and pop like bubbles in my mouth with a taste that’s faint and far away.  My jaws work, unable to grasp the last word sitting smugly on the tip of my tongue.  So I pluck that red and shiny thing from the tree and shove it in my mouth, feel it slide down my throat then watch as it falls out of a perfect empty circle carved from my hips to my ribs.  I try to snatch it before it hits the ground but it changes shape and flitters away on delicate wings, too fleeting to catch.

I recently wrote a whole essay on opening lines, and in my research for that essay, I read dozens of opening lines from YA books.  And yet, this might be the worst one I’ve ever come across, simply because of how criminally incompetent the prose is.  This looks like a parody of bad purple prose - the images that Swain is describing are just plain silly, even for a dream sequence, and she does so with some truly baffling word choices.  Why does the light ‘wink’ off the apple?  How can your entire body feel ‘slow’?  Why does Swain seem to be comparing the experience of being unable to speak to throwing up in your mouth?  Why is the word Thalia can’t think of sitting ‘smugly’ on the tip of her tongue?  Why does Swain, in a passage trying to be as detailed as possible, skip the action of Thalia chewing the apple, leading me to picture her swallowing it whole like a giant aspirin?  Why does the apple literally sprout wings and fly away?  The entire passage feels like Swain knew she was trying to be fancy and descriptive, but she didn’t actually care about what she was saying.  So the result is that the image feels like it was dreamt up by a ten year-old, and her word choice just exasperates the awkwardness.

What I’m saying here is, the writing is awful, from start to finish.  Thankfully, Swain doesn’t spend much time waxing poetic, so most of the prose isn’t quite this unbearable.  But even when the tone is neutral, Swain’s prose is still painfully awkward.  And the dialogue isn’t any better - it’s stilted, unnatural, and full of cliches.  Everyone talks in a somewhat didactic voice, always explaining, and Swain’s overly-wordy style makes for a lot of clunky exchanges.  It’s so consistently terrible that I almost have trouble believing that a professional editor looked at it.  If things like this were allowed to slip through the line editing, what kind of awful stuff was corrected?  This is the kind of thing I would expect from an inept self-published book, and it’s legitimately distressing that there are publishing houses that allow this kind of content to be released.  (Spoiler: That’s going to be a common theme throughout this review.)

The next thing that struck me about this book was how bad Swain is at writing characters and their arcs.  Our protagonist is Thalia, and her character arc is so incoherent that I can’t help but wonder if Swain was just making it up as she went along, and never went back to change the early chapters.  The bad characterization and bad worldbuilding are intrinsically tied together, so it’s kind of hard for me to talk about one without discussing the other, but I’ll try to stay on topic.  At the beginning of the novel, Swain attempts to paint Thalia as a noble, righteous character, the only one who sees through the society’s bullshit.  I say ‘attempts to’ because while I can tell that’s what Swain was trying to do, she does a terrible job of showing us what Thalia was fighting against and why she felt strongly about it.  We’re told, for example, that she doesn’t participate in interactions in the internet-equivalent because they’re shallow and illegitimate, but we never actually see any of these interactions in detail, so we never end up feeling the same way about them that Thalia does.  She just comes off as smugly anti-social.*  Likewise, we’re told that her work as a hacker is noble and revolutionary, even though we only see her doing harmless pranks.  My problem with this isn’t so much that she’s flawed, because characters should be flawed.  But Swain never gives us any indication that we’re supposed to be critical of her actions.  People go into dystopias with certain expectations, and one of those expectations is that we’re supposed to dislike the world and agree with the people who rebel against it.  Without any indication telling us not to do that, that’s what the audience is going to do based on instinct.  So when Thalia’s rebellious actions are underwhelming, it reads as a failure on Swain’s part - I could tell how I was supposed to feel about Thalia, but I never actually felt that way about her.

But then the second act comes around, and to my surprise, Swain decided that she felt the same way about Thalia that I did.  Without getting too much into an overly-complex plot summary, Thalia is forced to run away from her family and go into hiding with Basil, a poor boy whose goal is to bring real food back to society.  If there’s anywhere in the novel that I saw the slightest glimmer of potential, it was in Basil’s interactions with Thalia in the second act.  Basil is a lot poorer than Thalia, and to my surprise, there is some attempt at an exploration of how this affects their dynamic.  Basil calls out a lot of the same behavior that annoyed me in Thalia, and with a better author, this could’ve worked as an exploration of how privileged people’s activism is often useless to the people who actually need it.

But it fails for two reasons.  First, this clearly wasn’t planned from the beginning - or if it was, Swain has such a poor understanding of her audience’s expectations that she can’t communicate basic concepts.  Thalia’s actions in the first act are framed as legitimately rebellious, and the revelation that this wasn’t the case was a gradual realization rather than a twist.  That just doesn’t work - the payoff doesn’t match the buildup.  Second, when I talk about all this, you have to remember that Swain is a godawful writer and nothing ever really works the way she intends it to.  Thalia doesn’t actually undergo any character change; this isn’t an arc that takes up a significant portion of the novel.  It’s set up as an arc in her initial discussions with Basil, but after only a couple of scenes where it’s addressed, this thread is completely dropped.  The last time we see it is toward the end of the second act when Basil gets mad at Thalia about the issue… and then apologizes to her and says he was overreacting.  This character flaw doesn’t really inform any of Thalia’s actions after the first act, and by the third, it’s completely forgotten.  This is what I mean when I say that Thalia’s arc was incoherent - there’s nothing that makes it fit together.  In any given scene, Thalia’s characterization doesn’t have much to do with anything from previous scenes.  Same goes with Basil, who starts out with a little development (it’s established that he’s angry about the world and passionate), but this doesn’t really inform his actions that much, apart from basic plot motivations.

And speaking of incoherent things, let’s discuss the worldbuilding.  My first problems with the worldbuilding were twofold - first, as I discussed above, we were simply told a lot of elements instead of being shown.  We never really saw what social interactions were like, and almost all vital information in the first act was infodumped in Swain’s awkward style.  My second problem with the worldbuilding was how derivative it is.  The other problem with it is how derivative it all is.  You might think, based on the title, that this book would borrow a lot from The Hunger Games (2008), and while Swain might’ve been hoping to capture the same suspense and themes of revolution, it’s clear those weren’t her main influences.  No, Swain’s main influence was obvious: Jennifer Government (2002).  For those of you who haven’t heard of it, Jennifer Government is a near-future dystopia about the evils of unbridled capitalism.  It’s really not a very good book, mostly because it seems to care more about action than putting any substance into its allegory.  So you can imagine my dismay when I realized that Hungry’s worldbuilding uses a lot of elements from Jennifer Government.  Like that book, Hungry has corporations as the villain (unusual for dystopias, where the villain is usually the government), and said corporation runs schools where people are indoctrinated in how evil corporations are.  Also like Jennifer Government, Hungry puts a big emphasis on how manipulative advertising is, and both novels involve a revolution that turns out to be fairly corrupt.  It’s not so bad that I’d call it a total rip-off, but there were definitely lifted elements.  Swain’s major innovation is that in her novel, the major corporations issue pills to regulate people’s hunger, emotions, and hormones.  You might recognize these as the pills that Jonas takes in The Giver (1992), except that there, they didn’t regulate hunger.  So basically, Swain’s only real innovation is that there’s no food - everything else is either cliched or clearly lifted from better dystopias.  In other words, the only thing Swain adds is the gimmick.  I’m not even going to bother harping on how awful this particular gimmick is - there are lots of people who have already done that.  The horse is dead, no need to keep beating it.  What I do want to impart, however, is that this gimmick is the only thing original about the novel.

At least, that’s what I thought in the first act.  Like the characterization, things sort of break down as the novel goes on, and by the time you reach the end of the book, it’s hard to see any connection between where you started and where you ended up.  It’s hard to talk about this without spoiling, but in brief, in the third act, the allegory completely falls apart.  I mentioned earlier that this novel had some potential in the character interactions.  Part of that potential also came from the context that those interactions were in.  Basically, there is more to why this world is so bad than ‘there’s no food’ - the evil corporation is selling the nutritional pills for profit, and often, poor people have trouble getting access to them without back-breaking work and being exploited.  That could’ve been a legitimate exploration of a real problem.  The privatization of basic necessities is a huge problem with capitalism, and the fact that poor people are exploited just to be given their basic rights is one of the biggest injustices in the modern world.  But once Swain sets up this allegory, she doesn’t take it anywhere.  In fact, the third act sees a change in setting that makes every single bit of thematic setup Swain did in the first two acts completely irrelevant.  I can’t really elaborate without spoiling, but in short: the worldbuilding was sloppy, incoherent, derivative, and ultimately built to no thematic end.

And, finally, the plot.  Well, in this book where the character arcs are incoherent, and the worldbuilding is incoherent, you can guess what my main criticism of the storyline is going to be.  Swain seems to be flying entirely by the seat of her pants - in any given scene, it’s not clear what we’re building up to, and I usually didn’t even have the slightest idea of what the next scene might contain.  Not only that, but the pacing was just flat bizarre.  One memorably bad scene was when Thalia was arrested and put into a facility for correcting rebellious people.  When this happened, it seemed like the next section of the novel would be interesting - it’s a great opportunity for an exploration of the world, and perhaps to meet some interesting characters.  But no, it took less than ten pages before Basil had broken Thalia out of the facility, and the novel moves on as if it never happened.  This is just one example of the various pacing problems throughout the novel.  It tends toward a generally slow-ish pace, punctuated by a few incredibly rushed scenes that needed to be slower.  Pacing should be used to build up the tension, and to emphasize certain scenes as more important than others.  Swain doesn’t use the pacing for either of these purposes.  She rushes through scenes that should be important, and drags on sections of the book that don’t feel important at all.  And there’s no tension to speak of, even though the stakes were fairly high, because the plotting style doesn’t make it clear what the novel is building up to.

And then we get to the final act of the novel, and everything falls apart completely.  I know I already mentioned this section when I was talking about the worldbuilding, but I have to bring it up again, because the last 100 pages of this novel was perhaps the most baffling reading experience I have ever had.  The entire plot is essentially thrown away, and Swain starts a new conflict from scratch, for no apparent reason.  This doesn’t contribute anything to the thematics, tension, or characterization.  I wish I could talk about this in more detail without spoiling, but suffice to say, it’s some of the worst writing I’ve ever seen.

I know this review was way longer than my reviews normally are.  But goddamn, there’s just no way to adequately sum up all the ways this book fails.  It’s an overwhelming nightmare, and at some points, I even got angry at this book for being so bad.  There were points where I legitimately wondered how a professional publishing company could have the audacity to release a book this bad and ask me to like it.  This is one of the worst YA books I have ever read, and I recommend it to no one, unless you want a great example of how not to write a book.

*That, by the way, is the correct use of the word ‘smugly’.  It should describe pretentious assholes, not words you can’t think of.

[beautiful-lusamine-blog]

Lusamun, do you have any advice for someone who really wants to write something, but can't get the motivation or courage to write it? You're a really good writer, so I was wondering if you had advice.

{Ahhh! I don’t think I’m that good but thank you very much :D 

Okay, so this one took me a while, because I really wanted to make sure I responded properly. Behind a Read More because of length}

{Go ahead and skip to the last two paragraphs for the answer to your question, unless you want a huge story about my life in fandoms and other random shit. Which you probably don’t. 

So as you may or may not know, I haven’t been an active member of the Pokémon fandom for that long. I’ve always been a fan of the series, having played my first game at about 6 or 7. I just haven’t ever been involved in the fandom, per say. I may have read a couple of fics, but I never really got involved.

Now let’s talk about writing. Creative writing is fun, but it’s really, really hard. I wrote a lot of random stuff a few years ago - Just during Study Hall I would write little books (when I probably should have been doing homework so I wasn’t quite as screwed some nights), but I could never find the motivation to continue them. I had no idea where things were going, the characters and settings were unrealistic (Even by the standards of fantasy and sci-fi novels), and after a few chapters I just started to hate the setting, story, and characters I had created - This is unrelated, but I also wrote things that were very heteronormative and centered on relationships... Which was a super bad idea, because when I started to realize I mayyyybbeeee wasn’t interested in girls I grew to hate my protagonists even more. They seemed to taunt me, and at the time I was still very confused, so that didn’t help at all.

Then, I found fanfiction. Fanfiction is something I previously had a very skewed image of - Only what I’d heard people say about it: It was all shippy and all porn, it was all terribly written with awful grammar and stories that realistically make no sense (Why would a mom leave a fourteen-year-old at home alone for  a month!), by twelve to fourteen-year-old girls, stuff like “Naruto and One Direction are all married and all adopted me now they kiss and touch each others’ butts every night and then touch MY butts!!!” (If you get that reference because you’ve seen the parody video “Welcome to Fanfiction (And Wattpad!!)” good for you. It’s a brilliant satire. Have a cookie.)

But I was so, so wrong. I just kind of, I don’t know, stumbled into fanfiction. At first I just read shippy fluff (And sometimes smut to be honest) because I thought it was all that was available. This isn’t related, but through this fanficiton is kind of how I realized that a certain type of paring happened to appeal to me a little more - I always knew I was fine with that, and would ship it if the ship was good, but I didn’t ever consider, you know, empathizing with it in a weird sort of way. Without fanficiton I’d probably still be very confused.

Sorry. I’m rambling. Point is, I found stuff that wasn’t just that! I actually found a Yogscast fanficiton with good plot to it. MindfulWrath’s “The Rise and Fall.” (She is on Archive of Our Own for those interested! If you say Lusamine sent you she will probably be very confused XD) I CRIED. Literally! Over someone else’s take on fictional characters! Anyways, I tried my own hand at writing Yogscast fanfiction.

What I did wasn’t very well written, but it got better over time. I knew what I wanted, though. I knew how it would end, and I knew the story along the way (Except for a tinnny gap at the beginning), and I had an idol to encourage me. I thought it would work great! Annnnd.... I lost motivation. I tried to come back, but the gaps between chapters became larger, and larger, and larger.

Eventually, it all stopped. I tried another one, which also kind of copied MindfulWrath. But I didn’t really care. I just wanted to write. I had foreseen such cool scenes, but I could just never get trough the exposition, never could actually write them, and that sucked. My second Yogscast fic turned out pretty much the same. So I stopped writing.

Fast-forward to the release of Pokémon Sun and Moon. I knew a few things instantly: I HAD A MASSIVE CRUSH ON GLADION. I also knew that it was one of my favorite Pokémon games of all time. I loved the characters, the darker, more personal story, the dynamic between Gladion, Lillie, and Lusamine, the complexity of Lusamine, Guzma, Gladion, and Lillie, the music, Lillie’s desire to be braver and be just like her trainer friend, which I related to a lot. The music was also phenomenal. Oh, and shirtless Kukui/Masked Royale. That was pretty nice, too.

So somehow I just found these RP blogs for Guzma and Plumeria. Don’t really remember. They led me to one of Gladion, which I of course followed. I did that on my personal account, I think. I also fell in love with branch-chief--faba’s blog. I knew I wanted to make one, to interact and write stories with others, and to understand a character in a new way.

Lusamine. I knew instantly, it had to be Lusamine. She was abusive, she was regretful, she was determined, ambitious, and obsessive; she was possessive, she was brutal, she was tender, she was awful, she was redeemed by the end, and oh my goodness, just such a deep villain. Her facial expressions in-game (Especially that manic smile one) made me certain that she was the character I wanted to RP. Definitely.

At first, things were a little shaky. I didn’t have that many people who wanted to RP with me, and since I didn’t get many Asks due to my low follower count, I didn’t really have anything to do.

But, the numbers climbed steadily, if slowly, and then I went on vacation for the holidays. While there, I started a thread with branch-chief--faba for the first time (Who was super nice and didn’t get bothered by the fact that I had literally no idea what I was doing!!), and posted a couple of Ask memes.

Within a week, I went from like 40 followers? Or maybe 30-50? TO 100. It just happened so quickly, it was crazy. People were being nice, and following, and encouraging me to keep going. I loved it. So I started actually writing things for the blog - Things that were actually pretty long, many, many paragraphs. It was a lot of work, but I didn’t feel exhausted at all - Because people always said nice things when I did! It replenished my energy easily! It became a privilege when someone sent an Ask that allowed me to write something long.

I’ve never thought about stopping the writings I do for this blog.

So what’s the moral of the story here? What does this have to do with your question, you ask?

Well, here’s the thing: Writing is really, really tough. And if you write things that no one sees or compliments - It’s hard to keep going. Really hard, in fact. But here on this blog, it’s easy for me. What I’m trying to say is... Umm...

Don’t do what I did. Don’t just get confused and angry when the words stop coming out for a particular thing you’re writing. No, the story isn’t bad, you’re not a bad writer, it’s just not happening anymore. And if it happens again someday, that’s great, but sometimes it doesn’t. That’s okay too. People grow. Writers grow and , just like all people, and sometimes you realize you don’t want to write that something anymore. Ideas are fluid, and sometimes things change - Your opinions may change, your thought process may grow and you won’t be able to write things anymore, but it’s okay. Don’t force it. And, I can’t stress this enough, get your writing out there. Because if it weren’t for people complementing me, I wouldn’t be writing for this blog. That’s why I do. You’ve all been so amazing and supportive, and if you hadn’t, I would have stopped doing this a long time ago. Don’t worry about getting motivated - Just think about all of the coolest things you plan to write, and then start. Let people see it, put it up online, take constructive criticism. And if at some point you lose motivation? That’s okay! It’s okay! You’re not an awful writer, it might just be time to reconsider things, or take a break, or maybe give up on the story - which isn’t a bad thing at all.

Try your best and you’ll accomplish it!!!    

[40sandfabulousaf]

*There're 6 photos of this green combo, which I'll use for 2 to 3 posts, depending on my mood. And these are the white topaz hoop earrings Crystal bought me. I love them! 😍

Hey guys, it's Tuesday here in Southeast Asia. Here's a doctor's Twitter thread which I found rather interesting and her explanation could indicate that actual Covid19 deaths in the US are far higher than what is currently reported. I wasn't able to read the Washington Post article, alas, but her opinion is clear and concise.

Before any of you scream at President Trump or any of your governors for their initial slow action, I would like to highlight that even though people were aware of the new virus at the time, there was precious little research information about it outside of China and Italy, beyond the fact that it is easily transmitted and kills many quite quickly. So please don't get riled up, okay?

The purpose of sharing this is so that people don't downplay the potential severity of Covid19 and take the risk seriously enough to wear a mask in public as well as take precautions to avoid contracting, as well as spreading it to others.

Now for a little fun.

Articles have highlighted the benefits of doing some cardio workouts during this time and my old fave, Anna, is leading the way with a motivating video of herself being active.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Anna OBrien (she/her) (@glitterandlazers) on Apr 26, 2020 at 1:41pm PDT

What caught my attention was this sentence: 'I wish we heard more stories about how movement built character, improved mental health and allowed people to experience the world differently.'

I'll start the ball rolling by sharing my experience in the context of this current awful pandemic, although a lot of it is probably apparent from my previous posts. Firstly, my daily workout of up to 1 hour releases dopamine, a feel-good chemical which calms me down (and keeps me sane) and results in relatively good quality sleep.

As a result, I'm mentally alert and also rational enough to search for ways to boost my own immunity so as to give me the best possible survival chance rather than panic or sink into depression. This provides me with something to focus and work on and I share my tips based on emerging research information so that family and friends can do the same.

Am I experiencing the world differently right now? Perhaps. I can't tell since at the mo, I can't physically see what others are doing, apart from social media. I'm doing some of the same stuff, except I probably spend more time trying to ensure my nutrition is adequate and my meals are balanced. I'm also sharing new info I find along with my own tips if I come up with them with family, friends and also in this blog.

Has it built my character? Again, it's hard to answer the question. I just believe in taking action rather than helplessly panicking. Perhaps by doing what I do, someone else out there can increase their chances of survival and recovery. Because it isn't enough that my close ones and I are protected; anyone else who isn't could bring the virus back to this region 😅 Thus, it is in everyone's interests that we survive the pandemic. Together.

It would be great if our bigger friends can share their own experiences as some may find them more relatable. I hope you find mine helpful.

Till the next post, stay home and stay safe.