#I mean. The Problem with saying

[brooklynislandgirl]

SHIP Beth and Bill (the big one)

do i ship our characters together?: yes | no | not yet but maybe soon @tangleweave and I have worked tirelessly behind the scenes creating the unfolding story of these two. They are both young, lost, and besides the company of Scuttlebutt, the personification of Bill's actual ship, very much alone as Bill seeks to fulfil his promise to get Beth home after a tragic and random coincidence strands her in another universe, very far from everything she knows, while fulfilling his purpose of caring for his people and finding them a new place where they can finally settle down.

would i like to ship with you?: yes | maybe, i'm willing to try | no

type of relationship i could see: childhood or high school sweethearts | exes | engaged | married | long-term relationship | crushes | unrequited love | fling | long distance | online relationship | just dating | new relationship | toxic lovers | friends with benefits

tropes i'd enjoy writing for them: friends to lovers | enemies to lovers | exes to lovers | fake relationship / dating | forbidden love | grumpy and sunshine | star-crossed lovers | surprise pregnancy | second chance | soulmates | amnesia / mistaken identity | forced proximity | secret relationship | slow burn relationship

would i rather plot first or jump right in and see where it goes?: develop their relationship first | jump right in | something in between ( what specifically? )

Honestly because Alien/Human relationships are hardwork, and it's taken us a while to unpack them, I think development comes into play. In many ways, I think Bill is a little like Beth {maybe not demisexual like her, but certainly not looking for a relationship or expecting anything to grow between them} and he has some relationship drama, doesn't he? {Absolutely looking at you, Sif, in the Argent Star story-line!}

what now?: let's plot something | send me shippy memes | i'll send you shippy memes | write me a random starter | i'll write you a random starter All the memes, here but also we're working on sending each other things.

anything else i want you to know about me / my character / my shipping habits: We have several {dozen} interactive verses here where we mix and match our storylines, characters, npcs and so on. None of our verses ever feel stagnant, we might have 3+ different ways that relationships start/end/evolve. The only thing I will add here is that I love Tangleweave as a ship partner.

[inkskinned]

please i love you i'm begging you bring back suspension of disbelief bring back trusting the audience like. i cannot handle any more dialogue that sounds like a legal document. "hello, i am here to talk to you about the incident from a few minutes ago, because i feel you might be unwell, and i am invested in your personal wellbeing." "thank you, i am unwell because the incident was hurtful to me due to my childhood, which was bad." I CANT!!!!

do you know how many people are mad that authors use "growled" as a word for "said"? it's just poetics! they do not literally mean "growled," it's just a common replacement for "said with force but in a low tone." it's normal! do you hear me!! help me i love you please let me out of here!!!

[cozylittleartblog]

Columbo and the Knight (1984)

put me in the universe where Columbo ran through the 1980s and had a crossover episode with Knight Rider. I think they deserved it, and I am not just saying that because they're my two favorite Old Shows. @telebeast wrote a little fanfic blurb about it and I HAD to visualize it into a comic (which is also the longest comic I have finished thus far at five pages...), so writing credit goes to them.

Autism W!

[chloesimaginationthings]

Michael Afton knows the FNAF Mimic’s secret..

[bluegiragi]

everything (part 1)

full version on patreon on bluesky

[screambirdscreaming]

Something that peeves me whenever I see another post going around with some variation on "autistic people take things literally which means we are the only people who communicate Clearly and Directly" is that - for any given statement, there is not one singular, agreed on, universal Literal Interpretation. If there was, none of this would be a problem!

The nature of language is that there's always some degree of interpretability. Words have several different meanings, often overlapping, and there's nuance of context, cultural references, and so on.

Faced with a statement, most people will quickly come up with an interpretation that to them makes the most sense. But if you asked a roomful of people to explain in detail their interpretations, everyone's would probably be a little different, even for a pretty simple statement. Regardless of whether those people are autistic! Everyone conceptualizes the world a little differently, and everyone has a unique personal history of all the language they've encountered, and these things effect our interpretations.

In order for communication to be workable, given this slosh in interpretability, there's another couple of processes that go on. As conversation goes on, people reassess if their initial interpretation matches up with additional context. If it doesn't, they revise it, or ask clarifying questions. And on the flipside of this process, the other person in conversation is tracking if your reactions make sense with *their* understanding of what they're trying to convey to you, and offering context or rephrasing things if it seems you're out of alignment.

These processes are social skillsets that are, like most social skillsets, not ever directly articulated or explained. Many people are bad at one or both. Sometimes you encounter someone who is really, notably good at it - the vaunted "good listener", who puts in the effort to really understand what you're trying to say, or that really excellent teacher who engages with you back and forth until you really get it. But a lot of the time, it's a sort of passive social friction - people just not getting each other.

Sometimes, you encounter someone whose brain works so much like yours that talking to them feels almost effortless - you just get each other. But that's a pretty rare occurrence for anyone. More often, as you get to know someone, you start to understand the shape of the way they interpret things and learn to account for it, so over time it's easier to make sense to each other.

It's honestly not uncommon in society for people to aggregate in groups of people who interpret things similarly, and who are thus easier to talk to, rather than actually building the skills of communicating across interpretation gaps. Particularly egregious are those groups of men who talk about Women as an incomprehensible monolith, but it turns up to a greater or lesser degree on a lot of levels.

I suspect this is the root of a lot of parenting problems - people who have never built this communication skillset, and relied on choosing friends who make sense to them without a lot of effort, and who are then totally unprepared to interact with a child who interprets things in ways they don't expect.

Obviously I can't speak to The Universal Typical Experience, not least because it doesn't exist. But in general I would posit that:

Most people, give or take a few assholes, are not trying to say things that are confusing. Most people think they are communicating clearly, because the first interpretation *they* would come up with on hearing one of their own sentences is the correct interpretation.

Many people are not very good at accounting for different ways people could interpret things they're saying. However, it is normal and polite social behavior to be somewhat flexible about this and forgiving of misunderstandings. If people are being shitty to you about not understanding them, they are assholes. And I wouldn't assume that the rest of the communication they have with everyone else they know goes totally smoothly for them.

I suspect there is a bit of an unfortunate feedback loop, where people have bad experiences when someone gets mad at them for not getting something, and learn to hide when they're confused. Which then leads to larger, more complicated misunderstandings, which other different people get upset at them about, because those people think they should have asked for clarification in the first place.

Truly you can't win with everyone. No one can win with everyone. There is no monolith of "neurotypical communication" which resolves all these contradictions - all those people you're lumping in together under "neurotypical" have just as much trouble with each other.

[sapphicdalliances]

there are so many people who keep @-ing me lately who are obsessed with the idea of WWX being this underprivileged victim who suffered unfairly at every turn…

no, he wasn't a "scholarship kid" in contrast to JC being a trust fund kid, his family paid for him to go to college exactly the same as his brother, where he had the confidence to behave with absolutely no regard for consequences; before the war he carried a platinum credit card with JFM's name on it and he had job security from like age 10 as JC's future head of R&D

no, he was never treated as a servant, he was the HEAD DISCIPLE of a top 5 sect and afforded much of the privilege and respect that came with that. after the war he was JC's right hand, being second in the sect only to the sect leader. even in the burial mounds he never did a single chore and in fact got lightly scolded for creating more chores

he wasn't hated by the cultivation world because he was an uppity servant trying to climb beyond his class and making the gentry look bad through his own integrity and righteousness, he was hated because he was extremely powerful and super scary and violated a ton of social taboos and behaved erratically in public and seemed beholden to nobody

like girl… you're thinking of Meng Yao!

[everythingwasnormalhere]

There's so much wrong with "everyone is a little bit autistic"

Yes, allistic people might know a lot of facts about the things they like. Yes, allistic people might get a bit overwhelmed or underwhelmed sometimes. Yes, allistic people might not get an expression sometimes, mostly if it's the first time they hear it.

That doesn't make them autistic.

Those traits only make someone autistic when they become disabling. Because, big shock, autism is a disability. Yeah, even if someone is low support needs, because that doesn't mean they don't need any support at all.

Saying "everyone is a little bit autistic" is like saying "everyone struggles with this, so suck it up, you have no right to need help". Which is just pure ableist bullshit. It denies the fact that autistic people have higher support needs than NTs, no matter where in the autistic spectrum they are. We're not "neurospicy", we're disabled, and denying this fact is denying us the right to get the help we need, we deserve, to have a good life.

(yes, this rant is just because I made the awful decision of listening to "neurospicy (interlude)" by Jax. honestly I'd rather be called a slur than listen to that shit again.)

[lazylittledragon]

so uhhhhhhhh. not to be cryptic and bitchy on main but congratulations to everyone in my messages for like 5 months on being right i guess

[peopleareaproblem]

Colourblind Fiyero

I'm sure I'm not the first person to have this idea but I thought of this literally half-asleep at 1 AM and bolted up to note it down.

Anyway what if movie!Fiyero is red/green colourblind and when he and Feldspar almost run over Elphaba, he doesn't see the Elphaba on the left, but the one on the right? reblog if u think the girl on the left is j-

And the reason he looks like this when he sees her face:

... is not because he is realising it's too late to stop himself from saying the words "blended in with the foliage" to the green girl, but because he has two eyes and a heart and just saw Cynthia Erivo in the woods. (And Feldspar sure as shit doesn't notice anything either because horses cannot see red and he is used to people looking kinda green.)

Fiyero arrives at Shiz well after everyone sings a song about how green and annyoing Elphaba is, and the day after he arrives Galinda has taken her under her wing and made her popular, causing people to stop talking shit. So, what if Fiyero just does not find out Elphaba is green until like 2/3rds through the movie? He just straight up misses it, does not know she is an outcast, and just thinks she isn't into him for some bizarre reason. And only when he finds out she has green skin does he realise that he said the foliage thing, which she would definitely have taken as a jab, and actually he was incredibly rude to her. ... Oh no.

LOOK. Obviously I love that Fiyero just is not Fantasy Racist™ and doesn't think there's anything wrong with Elphaba being green. HOWEVER, wouldn't it be funny if-

[the-mpreg-guy]

the hill that i will die on is that cas would have never said he loved dean if he had to deal with the consequences of it afterwards, meanwhile dean (who was SUPPOSED to tell cas he loved him in the original crypt scene script) would have eventually worked up to saying it without external pressure

[anghraine]

It's interesting (if often frustrating) to see the renewed Orc Discourse after the last few episodes of ROP. I've seen arguments that orcs have to be personifications of evil rather than people as such or else the ethics of our heroes' approach to them becomes much more fraught. Tolkien's work, as written, seems an odd choice to me for not wrangling with difficult questions, and of course, more diehard fans are going to immediately bring up Shagrat and Gorbag.

If you haven't read LOTR recently, Shagrat and Gorbag are two orcs who briefly have a conversation about how they're being screwed over by Sauron but have no other real options, about their opinions of mistakes that have been made, that they think Sauron himself has made one, but it's not safe to discuss because Sauron has spies in their own ranks. They reminisce about better times when they had more freedom and fantasize about a future when they can go elsewhere and set up a small-scale banditry operation rather than being involved in this huge-scale war. Eventually, however, they end up turning on each other.

Basically any time that someone brings up the "humanity" of this conversation, someone else will point out that they're still bad people. They're not at all guilty about what they're part of. They just resent the dangers to themselves, the pressure from above, failures of competence, the surveillance they're under, and their lack of realistic alternative options. The dream of another life mentioned in the conversation is still one of preying on innocent people, just on a much smaller and more immediate scale, etc.

I think this misses the reason it keeps getting brought up, though. The point is not that Shagrat and Gorbag are good people. The point is that they are people.

There's something very normal and recognizable about their resentment of their superiors, their fears of reprisal and betrayal that ultimately are realized, their dislike of this kind of industrial war machine that erases their individual work and contributions, the tinge of wistfulness in their hope of escape into a different kind of life. Their dialect is deliberately "common"—and there's a lot more to say about that and the fact that it's another commoner, Sam, who outwits them—but one of the main effects is to make them sound familiar and ordinary. And it's interesting that one of the points they specifically raise is that they're not going to get better treatment from "the good guys" so they can't defect, either.

This is self-interested, yes, but it's not the self-interest of some mystical being or spirit or whatnot, but of people.

Tolkien's later remarks tend to back this up. He said that female orcs do exist, but are rarely seen in the story because the characters only interact with the all-male warrior class of orcs. Whatever female orcs "do," it isn't going to war. Maybe they do a lot of the agricultural work that is apparently happening in distant parts of Mordor, maybe they are chiefly responsible for young orcs, maybe both and/or something else, we don't know. But we know they're out there and we know that they reproduce sexually and we know that they're not part of the orcish warrior class.

Regardless of all the problems with this, the idea that orcs have a gender-restricted warrior class at all and we're just not seeing any of their other classes because of where the story is set doesn't sound like automatons of evil. It sounds like an actual culture of people that we only see along the fringes.

And this whole matter of "but if they're people, we have to think about ethics, so they can't be people" is a weird circular argument that cannot account for what's in LOTR or for much of what Tolkien said afterwards. Yes, he struggled with The Problem of Orcs and how to reconcile it with his world building and his ethical system, but "maybe they're not people" is ultimately not a workable solution as far as LOTR goes and can't even account for much of the later evolution of his ideas, including explicit statements in his letters.

And in the end, the real response that comes to mind to that circular argument is "maybe you should think about ethics more."

[inkskinned]

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Bonus 12: Beware the Grapes of Wrath.

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[chloesimaginationthings]

FNAF movie Mike and Michael meet their younger selves..

[buckwheeler]

I rlly see buck having a very like ‘No Laurie you’re being mean’ type of moment with an Eddie who’s trying to tell him he loves him. because buck deffo is convinced there is no universe in which Eddie could ever want him Like That -he just thinks that’s categorically impossible and he thinks Eddie knows this and that he knows, because he must, how buck feels, or how he would feel if it was possible but he doesn’t because he can’t. and this whole tower of suffering and bucks whole project of denying and bearing the weight of his feelings and the things he can’t feel- is built on that presupposition- the presupposition that Eddie does not could not can not want him. And so the thought of Eddie saying something that doesn’t align with that and in fact refutes it would feel surreal, impossible and cruel. So I can so see buck’s face going hard and just saying that’s not funny. And Eddie kind of offended by the idea that he could make such a joke saying I’m not joking. And buck saying you’re being mean, then. And Eddie so confused saying I’m not being mean and buck saying you are Eddie. you’re being mean