#I don't like kidfic but I could write a good one with this experience by now tbh.

[necrotic-nephilim]

Hey there, are you ok?

hey! thank you for checking up on me, this was really sweet!

i SWEAR i did not die. i just got a bit busy doing SladeRobin Week (which i will finish so help me god-) as well as things in my real life. i'm still trying to find the balance of like. fandom creation and working. i am very lucky to have the living situation that i do rn, but it is the sort of schedule where i do have to be ready to watch a baby at really any given point so. it's a tricky balance right now, but i'm going to be active here again! maybe not as many asks answered a day as before, but i want to try to answer like, a few a day and whatnot.

i also think i got briefly overwhelmed, in that i got more asks faster than i answered them. which is the opposite of a problem and something i'm very lucky for! but it did make it difficult for me to keep up and know what to answer next. (this is *not* a discouragement to sending asks! i love them all and pls send as many as you want! i just am a little slow sometimes so i appreciate the patience! <3)

so! i'm back and i'm good, ty for asking! we are back to the regularly scheduled programming <3

[ronearoundblindly]

I just want to start this off by saying you are one of my favorite Steve writers of all time I can’t believe I just randomly found you one day. Every time I read something I think “oh this is her best” and then I go to something else and literally the same reaction so thank you of sharing this for free. The comfort reading your Steve stories give me is unexplainable.

LOL the funniest thing is I found your works on ao3 first and at first I didn’t click the tumblr there so when I found the CEO au here I was like “um excuse me who tf is plagiarizing — oh wait no same person. Thank god”

So I don’t know how you feel about writing about pregnancy and kids but Steve having to deal with that especially in the Sun Salt and Shield AU is so hilarious to me. Is there a hc you have about that? Or just in general about them getting more serious. I love that you didn’t take the easy way out and just “Splash”ify the mermaid reader.

Um🥹😚, all of this is great, and I'm not trying to just skip over all your lovely compliments (also, good looking out on the plagiarism because that issue's going around again 🥲). I just want to jump right into the headcanon of pregnancy and kids for Sun, Salt, and Shield.

This is mostly rambling. Sorry it's not well-formed, but there *might* be a chapter of fic percolating from this. No warnings. No detailed talk of pregnancy or birth, only vague reference.

Just the other day I revisited an ask about MissG/Doll not having the more humanoid body of idk-what-to-call-them classical mermaids?? And I wondered if that (the classic look) could have been a blended species from way in the past between deep sea mermaids and humans--essentially, would Doll and Steve have children that looked more like what we typically see as mermaids?

It's an interesting train of thought, and, frankly, perfectly logical. If they had a kid or kids, that's likely how I'd do it.

However--and this is a big HOWEVER,--I am admittedly not a big fan of pregnancy, kidfics, and all that 'adorable' parenthood stuff. Sounds a little cruel that way, but there you have it. I'm me. I make things more complicated than they need to be.

I would make pregnancy a different experience from humans. Doll's kind would have a different mentality toward offspring than humans. Some hilarious and/or angsty misunderstandings could ensue.

For example--because I don't think too deeply into these matters, shhhh--based on the sheer size of her whole species, I don't think deep sea mermaids visibly look pregnant like humans. Their hips simply get wider and they sort of thicken all the way through their torsos to mid-tail. Honest to goodness, humans truly just think Miss G is getting fat, but just in a 'putting on weight' way, not a nasty judgy way. In this event, and since you/G do not have the vocabulary to explain, your pregnancy goes unnoticed until it is very advanced.

To you, this is a common inevitability in the sea between mates, but there isn't the type of hoopla--for lack of a better term--surrounding the process.

So you're pregnant? Big deal?

Ummmm, wow, the wheels are really starting to turn on this, but also your species doesn't have a calculated sense of time. You live in mostly darkness (and the ambient/changing light of other mermaids' tails), so you wouldn't have any real way of explaining how long gestation for a baby is. Likely, the kid would grow super fast, too. Means Tony still doesn't know the average lifespan of your species because there are no common/known markers to describe how long your 'elders' have been alive.

Stuff I haven't worked out yet: would the child of a deep sea mermaid and a human be able to live in either native environment? That's where I'm thinking the lower-depth, classic mermaid comes into play; still has fins, can breathe air for short periods (but longer than you), probably can't handle heavy pressure for very long though (since you spend far longer in a pool, not the pressure chamber asleep, than most deep sea-ers while pregnant), and is lighter colored in scales and features than you due to the shallower water (more affected by sunlight).

I do think it would be cute for the child to have Steve's blond hair and blue eyes simply because that is unheard of in your species (as are the paler scales and armoring. I should mention that since you have lavender eyes--i.e. very light sensitive--human blue eyes are comparatively dark.

You'll notice I'm not saying son or daughter. When newborn young...I don't think anyone can tell if the child is male or female. I don't thing G's species cares, and I think you'd be very confused by how intently Tony and Steve try to figure that out. Conceptually, it simply doesn't matter at all what sex the kid is until puberty, and even then...it still sort of doesn't??

Hmm. That's all I got on this for now, but I sense I could probably come up with some interesting angst with a happy ending from it.

Thank you for asking!

A/N: Not that it matters, but I love 'Splash.' I've learned that it's fine to explore fantastical things to all sorts of degrees, and as almost all of fandom can tell you, fluff is great, fluff is necessary, and fluff keeps us afloat. Big HOWEVER, it is not okay to wash away anyone's race or heritage (in this case--obviously fake--a species' culture). Be respectful. It's that easy.

[Main Masterlist; Light Masterlist; Ko-Fi]

@fandom-has-taken-me-hostage @leah2901 @blogbog710

[eemamminy-art]

Hi lovely!! 🫶🏻 for the ask meme: 3,4,21 and 22!

These are kind of long answers so I'll put it under a cut!

Fandom/fanfic asks

3. All-time favorite pairing?

At the risk of sounding extremely cheesy……… I think probably the ship that's just my wol x my partner's wol :3 They are evergreen to me (to us both really!) and we made them to play through msq together when living apart (the game was not new to me but I started over so we could go through it together) and to this day it's the main thing keeping us talking about ffxiv and playing it together!! My partner is really private about their OCs so I haven't posted art of them or talked about them publicly in a long while but I think they probably are my favorite of all time 🥰

4. Pairing that makes no sense to you?

Prefacing this with only love and kindness to people who do like this ship, genuinely, not being shady at all! But!! I don't get Estinien/Vrtra as a ship 😅 Don't try to explain it to me, I've heard all the things already, I know why people ship it! But I disagree with the interpretation of the characters and their dynamic. And I know you're probably thinking "aha it's because you like estimeric actually 🧐" but no, I ship Estinien with all sorts of characters besides Aymeric, it's more that I really really like Vrtra and I think in order to ship him in the way people ship him with Estinien, you have to disregard some key elements of Vrtra's character (and on occasion Estinien's character too, but it's usually Vrtra getting flattened in my experience) and I super don't like that 😩

Again, no hate at all to people who like it! I'm happy for you and support you!! I just don't get it and I don't think I ever will, but I'm happy for y'all!! I just can recognize it's not for me and doesn't spark joy in these characters I care very much about, so, I don't ever talk about it or interact with that ship.

Real missed potential for more platonic stuff with them-- Estinien lost his whole family and it changed him fundamentally, you don't think he's talking about that with Vrtra while they're searching for Azdaja? Be so serious!! I've wanted to write a fic about that for a very long time but haven't gotten around to it yet. One day maybe!

21. Favorite fic trope?

I am a simple woman, I love a good mutual pining. I want them to be so oblivious yet so infatuated it's causing them physical pain!! Maybe it's because I'm a lesbian and we are often so bad at discerning feelings in our romantic interest(s) and also quick to dismiss the signs that are there and admonish ourselves, but gosh, that's just so delicious to me. Maybe that's why I've been able to write so much in my slowburn fic lol just shaking them by the shoulders!! Biting my hand!! You know!!

22. Least favorite fic trope?

Oh I don't know… All hurt; no comfort? Infidelity? Break-ups? Kidfics where the kids are biological? I don't know how often these things are done since I truthfully don't read many fics, but I know they are hard no's for me whenever I've come across them. Again, all my love to people who enjoy them, it's just not my cup of tea.

[recurring-polynya]

I know you don't like pregnancy and all things to do with it in regards to talking about it or writing about it-- but do you dislike Ichika? Or is she a character you don't quite like to write?

I actually don't have any problems with pregnancy stuff, at least not the technicalities of it. I'm definitely not into the romanticizing of it, which is usually what people want.

Ichika is deeply uninteresting to me. We've hardly seen anything of her in canon. She seems to have a fairly similar personality to Rukia and Renji, except that their bullheadedness and shouting comes out of the fact that they had to work their way up from nothing and are constantly trying to prove themselves. Without any sort of similar motivations, Ichika just comes off as sort of a brat, but then again, we've seen very little of her, so who knows. I don't really love that shinigami are able to have biological (sort of?) children, and I would have preferred it if they couldn't.

Here is the real reason I don't want to write about Ichika:

I love my kids, but parenting in America today is a grueling, lonely, and largely thankless enterprise. Without getting into it too deeply, I have a lot of issues about loss of identity and value as a person that came with motherhood, which I was not able to work out in therapy. Fandom is a place where I have been able to carve out some space for myself and my interests. I think Rukia and Renji have cool personalities and interesting backstories and complex motivations and I've spent a lot of time thinking about them and writing long, intricate stories about them and learning to draw them. When people say to me "yeah, that's great, but could you write about a generic kid character, I think she's really cute!" it does not make me feel good.

This is very much a me problem. Other people like Ichika, and back when I was taking requests, I would always get tons and tons of requests about her. For a while, I tried to work through this by writing stories that reflected my own experiences with parenthood, instead of the cutesy shit that makes up most kidfic. I do like to write stuff people like, and I especially like to write stuff *for* people I like. I never felt any better about it though, progressively worse, actually, and it feels extra crummy that these fics tend to end up on the more popular end of stuff that I write. Also, a lot of the requests (the ones I didn't write), were clearly fishing for the cutesy shit and it would just really upset me to get that in my askbox constantly. The upshot is, I just won't do it any more, because I don't want to. I have written enough Ichika stories. If someday, I have an idea for an Ichika story I want to write, I'll just write it, but that's on me.

[hopetorun]

9, 17

9: Are there any fics you’d love to see but don’t want to write yourself? What are they?

oooh plenty! i'd love to see some kidfics for several of my main hockey ships at the moment, because i love it when a man is responsible for a baby or small child. there's also some very messy jack/trevor polyamory concepts that i would love to see explored that i do not want to write myself because i find both of their POVs unfathomable so i have no idea where to get started with them.

there's also stuff outside of hockey! which i would read but don't want to write because i'm generally pretty monogamous in my writing when i'm In a fandom. so like as i'm watching season 2 of shadow and bone and thinking about various gregverse concepts those are all things i'd read but don't actually want to write. (details available on request due to not wanting to post spoilers for a show that dropped like 3 days ago)

17: What has been the proudest moment for you so far since you started writing?

i think it's got to be the first time i wrote a truly novel-length fic all by myself! which was this is not the end, which i do think is a good story but also prior to that anything close to that length that i wrote was cowritten (which is one of my favorite things but a very different experience). i spent a lot of my younger writing years being unsure if i could actually write something that long and not being sure how to imagine a story complex enough to need that many words so actually doing it and feeling pretty good about the result was really satisfying!

[narastories]

Dear Yuletide Writer 2024

Thank you for writing for me! I hope this letter might inspire you, and above all else I hope you have fun writing something because that is the most important. I'm excited to see what you come up with!

My AO3

General likes: fluff, moral ambiguity, crack (treated seriously or not), banter, getting together. Can tolerate decent spice-levels when it comes to smut so don't hold back on my account.

General DNW: major character death, pregnancy, kidfic, amnesia (unless canon), infidelity/divorce (unless canon), RL politics, omegaverse, hopeless endings

色 戒 | Sè Jiè | Lust Caution (2007)

I watched this film for the first time this year and it grabbed me by the throat. If you want to read about me screaming about this movie, here are some posts: 1 | 2

I would love to read a fix-it fic, and I'm open to multiple interpretations of what that means :D Basically, it would be super interesting to read an alternate ending to the film. What if she comes clean sooner? Is there a circumstance in which he would spare her? Or maybe the assassination attempt is successful. How would she feel then?

Alternatively, I would be very happy to read a character study of either of the main characters. Especially Wong Chia Chi. What was going through her head when getting involved in all this? Especially when she agreed to this "role" for the second time since they barely got away with it on the first attempt. She's such a babygirl to me, and I can't tell half the time what is going on in her head and if she's acting or if she's sincere in a scene.

A character study about Yee would be interesting too, because he knew from the beginning how these things went. He walked into it with experience and with his eyes wide open, and yet got himself emotionally involved. Wong Chia Chi is the third woman who tried to seduce and kill him, but let's face it, the moment she wrestled with that umbrella, he was gone. He's both the big bad of the movie but also such a looser tbf.

For this fandom, all my general DNWs go out the window lol Because the canon is such a trigger-fest, I'm genuinely more flexible about it. But please don't write any ship with non-requested characters as the endgame. Obviously, Yee has a wife, it's okay to mention her, or how he feels about her. Just please don't make Wong Chia Chi run away with one of her comrades, that sort of thing.

Runemarks Series - Joanne Harris

A Yuletide favorite <3

This book series is very near and dear to my heart, and I would love to read any and all shenanigans with Maddy and Loki involved. Canon-compliant missing scenes or modern AU, I don't mind it, as long as they get into mischief together. If Thor tries to beat the living daylight out of Loki because of Maddy, that's something I always love reading too xD

I have also read the Loki books related to this series, so if you wanted to play with a spin on The Testament of Loki, where Maddy is the one who gets Loki as a hitchhiker I think that could be really fun too. I think it would be hilarious to see how Maddy would handle that accidental spirit possession lmao

Personally, I don't mind it if their relationship becomes various levels of romantic, but obviously completely platonic, gen fic is perfectly good for me as well. I just mention it as an opt-in.

DNW: major character death, pregnancy, kidfic, amnesia (unless canon), RL politics, omegaverse, hopeless endings

Lord John Series - Diana Gabaldon

An oldie but a goodie. Anyone in the fandom wanting to participate in Yuletide, this is your get-out-of-jail-free card (as long as the fic is about John, Percy, Tom, and/or Stephan) ^^" (So far I have never even tried nominating Jamie just because I think it would overlap too much with the main Outlander fandom that is very much not eligible for Yuletide.)

I would be happy to read any ship combinations! LJG with any of the nominated gentlemen is awesome, LJG/Tom/Percy is a great one too if you like it. I'm also very fond of any interaction between Percy and Tom shippy or not. I enjoy reading Stephan getting some love too.

DNW: major character death, mpreg, pregnancy in general, kidfic, amnesia (unless canon), infidelity/divorce (unless canon), RL politics, omegaverse, hopeless endings

The First Descendant (Video Game)

This is such an underrated fandom. There isn't a lot to read out there and I'm pretty much open to reading anything. A character study about one of the nominated characters (Ajax, Bunny, Enzo, or Yujin) would be interesting. We learn little bits about them in the game, and I would love to read more about them.

If you can pair any of the nominated characters up and ship it? Go wild!

On a side note, if you want to include any worldbuilding elements or expand on the lore, I would be happy with that too. Idk if it's just me, but I think the enemy designs are so good in this game too. Sometimes I just sneak into an outpost with Sharen and instead of hacking I just stand there and observe the little bastards. It's also fun if you hack one device because some of them will go "Where are you human?? How did you do that??" It's so funny.

DNW: major character death, pregnancy, kidfic, amnesia (unless canon), infidelity/divorce (unless canon), RL politics, omegaverse, hopeless endings

If you are wondering about what Yuletide is, you still have time to sign-up. All the information you need is on the official Yuletide Dreamwidth here.

Promo image by crantz.

[lebibish]

Yuletide Letter

It's that most wonderful time again! If you are writing for me --Thank You! If you're just interested in seeing what's going on, feel free to explore (and if anything here prompts you towards any kind of creativity, please let me know--I'd love to see it!

Dear Yuletide Author,

Happy end of the year! The Yuletide exchange has been one of my favorite experiences year after year. Below, you will find a lot of different ideas and prompts but DO NOT feel beholden to them (they're in optional details with the key word being optional). I include lots of thoughts because as a writer, I like having some starting places to work from. If you have your own idea or direction you want to go in, I can guarantee I will love any story that you want to tell.

Please no child death, death of pets, grim!dark, or infidelity (polyamory requires enthusiastic consent from all parties). I don't really enjoy character bashing, but that's a really subjective line. In general, I just like to give people (and characters) the benefit of the doubt

I love worldbuilding and cultural details, family relationships (I am especially all about the sibling feels—found family and family you were raised with equally), extremely competent characters, discovering secrets, mythology, and discovering/building competence. You know how training montages are common tropes for saving time in a series? I’d be a happy little clam if those were expanded into entire series where I could watch people building their skills, connecting to the people around them, and learning more about the world. I adore fantasy world-building—the concept of everyday magic, for example, where everyone has their own little piece of the world (always knowing when the phone is about to ring or being able to call how many times a rock will skip on the water) or integrated magic systems where the society has been built around a magic system. I like stories about hope, about survivors who find joy and comfort together (not a request this year, but Kipo and the Wonderbeasts is a great example of the kind of “dystopia” I really love—where people are rediscovering how wonderful the world can be even when there are a lot of terrible things).

Anything from gen to smut is welcome, angst with a happy ending is good but the happy ending is key, kidfic is lovely, all types of pairings or no pairings at all work. If you present me with a love triangle my go-to solution is always polyamory.

Ideas are always suggestions, optional details are optional, tell me a story you enjoy telling!

Emelan

Characters: Dedicate Lark, Dedicate Rosethorn

Why I love this: I love everyone, I love the magic system; the idea that there are people who learn this school-based/book-based magic, but also people who just interact with magic in their own ways. Craft-based magic and magic that flows through how you interact with the world—love it. I loved all of the found-family feels in the books too and I adore fics where we get to see that relationship as they grow up and continue to care for and take care of each other. I especially love the teachers. This one is all about the characters for me--and also characters being actual grown-ups and actual grown-ups being responsible care takers of kids. In my YA fiction? Don't I wish.

Ideas, Prompts and Questions (choose any or none!):

Explore the magic system even more! New characters, daily lives of existing characters, how they interact with each other.

I'd love to dig into the lives and relationships of the teachers.  I’m all in for Rosethorn/Lark, but it’s not a requirement. I’m really interested in all of the teachers and what it’s like to be a teacher in a school like that and how they deal with other the other more traditional schools and what they think about the kids in their care. What about the other students they��ve had in their care over the years?

More about the teacher's backstories and how they discovered their magic and how they have used it in the past.

What conversations are going on between the teachers during canon?

Raya and the Last Dragon

Characters: Raya, Namaari

Why I love this: Badass women. The beginning of a found family. Worldbuilding based on southeast Asian cultures. A dystopian adventure that ends in hope.

Ideas, Prompts and Questions: 

The missing time – Raya growing up. The fact that she and Namaari clearly have continued to run into each other as they grew up and what that looked like (and yes, I very much ship Raya/Namaari).

The perspectives of Raya’s father and Namaari’s mother through the movie and after. Maybe what it means to Kumandra that the dragons are back and how do you learn to trust people when that trust has been lost and broken for such a long time? What needs to be built, how are the different groups working together (where are there culture clashes?) Or, hey, time travel fix it fic.

Sinbad

Character: Sinbad

Why I love this: I ask for this fandom every year because: people with different cultures and languages coming together and forming a functional group/found family/deep friendships, real mythology being played with, magic hiding in the world as science becomes more prevalent…it’s all amazing.

Ideas, Prompts and Questions (choose any or none!): 

Sinbad’s original curse—not being able to stay on land for more than a day and what that would mean if they had succeeded in being traders.

The possibility that Cook has something strange going on with his own refusal to leave the ship. Who is he?

Post-series what these people end up doing and how they interact.

Any and all back-stories will be loved.

Any and all myths, legends or monsters entering the story are brilliant. I’m in it for the magic, for the adventure, for the learning to care about other people and finding a new sense of family. Also, playing creatively with world mythology.

The Hundred and One Dalmations

Characters: Nanny Butler, Nanny Cook

Why I love this: I haven't read the book; this, for me, comes entirely out of illustrations of these two characters posted in media and catching femslash feels.

Ideas, Prompts and Questions (choose any or none!):  All of my ideas are built around these two ladies falling in love, but I would absolutely accept a solid friendship based on the same foundations.

Nanny Cook and Nanny Butler figuring out their new roles and new positions while slowly falling in love (older women in service who maybe never thought to have love of their own…). Maybe there's some jealousy/defensiveness as they worry about being replaced, but ultimately realize they can support each other instead;

Nanny Cook and Nanny Butler met and fell in love a while ago and actually had adorable schemes to get the Darlings together because they just knew they were right for each other.

Devil Venerable Also Wants to Know

Characters: Wenren E

Why I love this: I didn't expect to love this, but I found myself intently invested in this story. I love the twist on "character reads their own story" -- seeing all of the perspectives and information and reasons that weren't in the limited pov novel, Wenren E trying to backwards engineer his own motivation from the story. I loved seeing his (fairly strong) sense of morality that just so happened to clash with other peoples (and my own! Hahaha.) I loved seeing him encourage Yin Hanjiang become his own person, become an equal and then build a relationship from there.

Ideas, Prompts and Questions (choose any or none!):: I don't actually have a prompt or idea for this. Feel free to explore! The past? The future? Alternate universes? Run wild! I absolutely ship Wenren E/Yin Hanjiang.

Mr. Queen

Characters: Jang Bong Hwan, Queen Cheorin

Why I love this: Because every single moment of this show is Queer (man in a woman's body flirting with women a and them flirting back--even if it's a fantasy? Queer. Man in a woman's body having a romance with a man? Queer. You're gender non-conforming one or another, dude.) Because several characters are living in completely different genres and the show manages to seamlessly tie them together into a story. Because the love story felt very real to me. Because Bong-hwan’s cooking was amazing and the fact that he kept retreating into a place where he felt comfortable and confident meant so much to me, because there were so many DETAILS they paid attention to including what modern convenience and global trade networks mean to ingredient sourcing and how ridiculous some of his demands were in the time period.

Ideas, Prompts and Questions (choose any or none!):

 I pretty firmly believe that Jang Bong-hwan was Kim So-yong’s reincarnation, so anything incorporating that (like, I think that after her experiences of being powerless as a woman, when she killed herself she insisted on being reborn as a man, and because she wasn’t supposed to die (or a lake spirit took pity on her? IDK), her future self was called back into her past self to fix things.

I’d be interested to see the changes made in Korea, the butterfly effect of the past, and Jang Bong-hwan finding his own happy ending.

 I’d be interested to see Kim So-yong with both sets of memories, figuring out who she wants to be.

I’m also a sucker for outsider pov—so the perspectives of other characters during or after the show.

The Most Important Thing to remember: I honestly will love anything you write that comes from your own joy, love, curiosity or interest. THANK YOU for participating in this event this year and THANK YOU for everything you put into this!

[kelyon]

Name one plot element, trope or other literary or stylistic device that you don't think you could ever bring yourself to use or to write?

My drive to write comes out of curiosity, so it's hard to put up a limit. As soon as I say I'm not interested in something, there's a part of my brain that goes "but what if we were interested in this?" I've been coming up with answers for a week and I keep coming up with rebuttals.

In general, I would say anything that bores me, or is so far out of my experience that I can't latch onto it. My first thought was "hard sci-fi" because I don't have much interest in the realities of space travel or alien biology. Like, as much as I liked watching Arrival or The Martian, I could never write that material--at least not without spending a lot of time expanding my knowledge base.

I also have a bias against kidfic or YA stuff. This is a thing I'm struggling to rationalize my dislike for because it feels really invalid. From my personal experience being a child, I know that children and teenagers have real struggles, both internal and external. To this day some of the books I most highly recommend are from that perspective. The fic I am writing right now has a 15 year old as one of the main POV characters.

But if I open a fic and see that it's a high school AU, I click away. I can't handle it. There's an overwhelming feeling of "you don't have real problems, you're just 14." (Even while I'm aware that being 14 is a very real problem in and of itself.)

My biggest example of this is the teen drama in Stranger Things. No Nancy, you don't have to choose between these two boys, you need to get out of your podunk town and meet more people. No Will, the world isn't over because your straight best friend doesn't realize that you have a crush on him, you need to meet other gay people and also wear a condom because it's 1986. Yes Eleven, you have real problems and it sucks that you have to go to high school in addition to all of that, and that bitch is lucky you only broke her nose.

Anyway.

I guess it's just so hard to write young people right, so I'm repelled from consuming that material and intimidated to write it. Also with the fics I write, the risk of coming under fire for writing teenage sex scenes isn't worth the scant interest I have in exploring teenage sexuality. Like, people don't know what they're doing when they're adults either! I would rather the story of a 25 year old virgin (or a 45 year old mother of two feeling alive in bed for the first time in her life) than an 18 year old fumbling on a twin bed with another teenager.

This is getting long, but I do want to state my dislike of characters being mean for no reason, especially women being jealous or distrustful of other women. I read a fic (not Rumbelle ) where the heroine checks into a hotel for a tryst with the hero and her whole inner monologue was dedicated to assuming that the female check-in clerk was judging her and the heroine being bitchy in response. And this wasn't part of the heroine's growth or anything. It was a motivationless character detail that made me dislike the author more than any of the characters.

So just, why? Who does this help? What purpose does this serve in the narrative? Especially when I'm writing Belle, I really like to have her be someone who sees the good in people, or at least doesn't judge based on first impressions. (That's kind of her thing!) I just think the narrative is improved by having people work together instead of bickering. And I think you can judge a main character based on how polite they are to minor characters.

Thanks for asking!