#I'm always trying to be a better writer

[tea-cat-arts]

I simply think this fandom doesn't give Wei Wuxian enough credit for the various ways in which he saved Lan Wangji

[dapper-lil-arts]

What are your opinions on seasons 8 and 9 on MLP? They seem to be very unpopular within the fandom. (Personally, I'm not a fan of the last two seasons either)

I don't think any season was terrible per-se, but I will admit a lot of those two final seasons kinda just flew by me, it didn't really stick with me. I don't hold them in particularly high regard because I'm kind of ideologically opposed to them I guess? Not that I hate them, but still. Ok, I'll explain. I'm ideologically opposed to a school of friendship that implies that the other people of Equestria don't have 'friendship' and are inferior to ponies, lmao. I'm ideologically opposed to the idea that a child like cozy glow is an irredeemable bad guy that needs to be sent to hell, I'm ideologically opposed to the idea of discord supercharging bad guys just to give twilight a final boss and that being okay and fine, and I'm ideologically opposed to the idea of Twilight ascending as the ruler of all Equestria when she literaly has never even gotten laid-- Like, she has not gotten to live a normal, long life to teach her to rule as an immortal.

I don't rly care to hate the show for those choices, cause hey, its a show for kids, they didn't need to think very deeply before deciding to make ponies be the master race of Equestria, and they sure as hell didn't need to think of the implications of Twilight Sparkle's friends dying of old age.

Its obvious to me, but it doesn't have to be for anyone else that a co-rule with another immortal being is ideal. But hey I don't have an agenda :) I tottaly don't think there was a perfect candidate to rule alongside her or anythin :)

[soaps-mohawk]

When it comes to kneeling, with the first kneel was reader on the floor and then Price in a chair? Then second kneel session they were both kneeling?? I like when authors describe the actual positions of the characters but I think I got a little confused 😅 I was trying to figure out the positioning just so I could make more sense of the scene. If you know what I mean?

I get what you mean!! I'm so bad at remembering to describe things like this properly too 😭

So in both instances Price was sitting and reader was kneeling on the floor next to him. To give the clearest visual, Price was sitting facing his desk, and reader was kneeling right next to him on the floor beside his chair also facing the desk. Price only drops down to kneel next to her once they're done, mostly just because reader's kind of boneless and has very little control in those moments and he's not going to let her fall and hurt herself.

I hope that clears it up lol.

[msnihilist]

BEN: I'm a little surprised to see you, considering. JULIE: Considering what? BEN: Considering the fact that you broke up with me. JULIE: I didn't break… It's not that simple. BEN: You said we shouldn't see each other. Sounds simple to me. JULIE: I said, "considering how little time you have for me lately, we might as well be broken up." BEN: That is not my fault. JULIE: Look, I didn't want to ask you for help, but I don't have a choice. BEN: Help with what? JULIE: I was playing with Ship, and then he got a signal from Baz-el, and then he took off like a rocket. BEN: So you're just here about Ship. JULIE: I'm worried about him. BEN: Well, I wouldn't. He's gone away before. He'll be back. JULIE: Ben, you're not listening. This time is different. BEN: Sure. Well… Good luck.

Ultimate Alien S2E2 'Eye of the Beholder'

Call me crazy, but am I the only one who just... really doesn't sympathize with Julie in this convo??

Well, no. I sympathize with losing a pet. I've been there. And it is scary, but also, Ship is an alien who is more than capable of taking care of himself. Julie always seems to forget that Ship isn't a regular dog, for some reason.

But more to the point, the last conversation that Julie and Ben had ended with her saying, "We might as well be broken up." To me, that sounds like she dumped him. Or they're at least "on a break," as teenagers do from time to time.

I don't hate Julie, she's a fictional character. It would be silly to hate a character. But I just don't understand the writers' need to make everything about her. She clearly wants Ben's help because, much like in "Vreddle, Vreddle," she sees Ben's assistance with Ship as a sign that he really does care for her. I get that.

Ben is hurting here, too, though. He's right — he can't control that he's pulled away to literally save the world on their dates. Julie needs attention and time, and Ben, through no fault of his own, couldn't provide it, so Julie dumped him. And Ben is clearly still torn up about it. This is the episode right after he tried to rebound with Eunice, which also failed spectacularly. He's feeling like shit, in regards to his love life, and his ex approached him just to use him, basically.

Julie didn't have to go to Ben. She has Gwen's number. She could have gone to her, and used Kevin's spaceship without going to Ben at all. But she went to him because she wants Ben to prove that he cares about her.

Why is Julie never the one proving that she cares about him?

[thousandyearphantombunker]

i watched the movie Akelarre and it's this great period piece story about a group of basque girls accused of witchcraft when the men of their home are away and inorder to postpone their execution they bid time by tempting him with the witches sabbath- what I love about it is their is no supernatural element. None of these girls are actually powerful witches- they are normal teenagers who lie to and fuck around with horrible sexist men with guile and you see how stupid the logic of their inquisitor is.

I've talked about the oppressed mage trope before and why while I don't think it's a bad trope that needs to retire- its certainly very lazy and not a very good mirror to real world oppression at all and their are more believable and compelling ways to depict power as a curse or generate conflict. aang as the avatar is expected to reject a massive part of his cultural identity (his pacifism) and has to let go of his worldly attachments (katara), he has to be the one to save the world cause no one else can and him being rejected by his peers when he wanted to play and being excluded makes sense and he is oppressed for reasons outside of his powers. Steven universe has to struggle with his powers a lot, he almost ages himself to death and ages himself rapidly in reverse, and he projects his anxieties and subconscious thoughts onto technology beyond accident (that sounds like a fucking nightmare) heck RWBY while deeply a flawed show, shows why being a maiden would suck- Amber seems to have been isolated from the rest of the world for her protection (to keep her away from other more powerful magic users that would use her) and Fria an older woman with Alzheimer's or some other form of dementia is isolated as well stuck in her hospital room only allowed Winter's company to ensure that Winter would be the last person in her mind so that the maiden powers would be given to her both woman saddled with incredible responsibility, ice kings's powers came at the cost of Simon's sanity. And it's so much interesting than the shit x men and owl house pulls- love both but whenever they try and make real world parallels to gay rights or civil rights it kind of falls flat.

Whenever I've heard people complain about the issues with this trope it's always from the racial or gay perspective so I wanna try a different lens- disability. discrimination against disabled people often uses the idea that people with mental illnesses are dangerous or have an 'unfair' advantage.

People with BPD and ASPD are often kicked out of therapy and helpful services because of how demonized these disorders people with psychotic disorders are often ignored by police and gaslit on top of having a disorder that can make their grip on reality tenuous- they aren't seen as trustworthy, People with learning disabilities are denied opportunities and scholarships if they mention it and boy oh boy if your special Ed in any capacity say goodbye to AP classes and say hello to being more restricted in what your allowed to do compared to your able classmates, physically disabled people are accused of being fakers and 'too sensitive' and the world isn't all that accommodating (I've seen way too many videos of ramps that aren't useful to wheelchair users at all) and too many people who freak out over disabled people getting accommodations/help of any kind- kids getting extra timr on tests, more bathroom breaks, financial assistance, interpreters etc- to many people they see these as unfair advantages

I remember a boy in my class broke both of his legs at one point and people called it unfair he got to use the elevator and that the rest of us couldn't- i knew another boy who had a concussion who was allowed to opt out of computer class and do math instead and he got crap cause 'he was basically skipping class. My sister had to take highschool all over again because she was a special needs student (dyslexia and ADHD) and the diploma she earned was considered 'invalid' and when she got so sick she passed a lot and needed to recover from a traumatic emergency surgery she got yelled at and got in trouble for using her temporary extra accomodations- i was told growing up that i didn't belong in normal classes because I needed double time to complete tests, that if I couldn't do it in the normal amount of time that meant I didn't know what I was doing and that I was too stupid to be in the second grade and needed to be kept in kindergarten and that went on for years- I'd be told to stop reading the books I bought to school because I was too dumb to read them basically and every tiny mistake I made was used to forcibly push me to be put in special ed (i barely made mistakes btw- so no i didn't beed to be put in sped- I read at super high level as a kid) my classmates would fuck up just as much as I did- no one would bat an eye, i would catch onto patterns faster than my classmates, id point out details they never seemed to see but because of my shit memory and misunderstanding what the teacher was saying meaning that I needed some extra time to complete a test meant I was r34@!d3d and obviously because i needed that extra time i again was told i didn't know what i was doing, my other sister with dyscalcula was forced to take a test without accomodations they knew she needed to prove she was disabled again despite having an iep that was given to them because reasons i guess also she has a personality disorder that she doesn't want fully specified to avoid the problems that could come from a bpd or aspd diagnosis- I remember at one point being told i was basically a cheater for needing extra time, that my autism symptoms was just being bratty (and the way autism symptoms where described made people with asd sound like godawful immature people) and again that if i 'didn't know what i was doing' I didn't belong- the thing about this is these excuses people used to justify this shit are used in fiction towards a group of people that actually are super dangerous and actually have an unfair advantage- they get oppressed using the same excuses but in their case this shit is true.

Disabled people are oppressed because they get disadvantage and that disadvantage is used to justify oppressing them- even your part of an oppressed racial or sexual minority you can still walk and have a normal brain capacity- being black or gay doesn't effect your ability to walk or read or feel emotions it effects your treatment, the way people judge you- but being disabled does in fact effect your ability- it effects your empathy, your physical strength, your intelligence negatively so that already makes life harder than able people then people see that you are unable in someway and use that to make life even harder cause we equate ability with worth and what treatment a person 'deserves'. It's because of shit like that, that I know people with powers wouldn't be oppressed- they'd be beloved, any fear toward them would be justified if their power level reached a certain point and in general they wouldn't be oppressed because oppression flows from power not to it.

With antisemitism Islamophobia and racism and lgbt-phobic rhetoric they have to make up excuses too- they make shit up like 'black men are rapists, Jews are always genocidal hoard all the wealth and are secretly running the universe and are at fault for everything baf and are pedos, Muslims are terrorist and gay people will corrupt our children into being sex toys' none of which is true! Also again disabled people's accomodations (extra time, breaks, getting a bit of extra focus, getting to use an elevator or ramp cause their on a fucking wheelchair) aren't unfair advantages that are negatively impacting able people (me getting to take a short break from class does not take away from your experiences or cause you problems Deborah)

It's funny in the real people are oppressed because they don't have power or even have disadvantages and they have problems like incontinence or being unable to get out of bed and in fiction they are oppressed because they have too much power and are super cool. I love x men Scott Summers has been my favorite x men since i was like 8 but the x men makes zero sense, they would not be oppressed, REAL advantages are never used to justify oppressing people- REAL advantages are used to oppress people (I emphasized REAL for a reason as someone who has accomodations they are not an actual advantage over my neurotypical classmates). Jewish people, gay and trans people don't have special powers so you can throw them in jail easy, people with Crohn's and learning disabilities and cerebral palsy have disadvantages/struggles which are used to justify oppression meanwhile people in fiction are oppressed for their advantages and lack of struggle. The girls in Akelarre have no powers, they only narrowly escape their execution via trolling the guy abusing them into thinking he can see the witches sabbath if he lets them live until the time the men come back, and that's how you do write irl oppression, fma also knew what it was doing with the Ishvalans- no special powers just normal people with a different appearance. Let's not retire the oppressed mage trope there is a place for it but let's be aware that the excuses used to justify it mimic irl ableist excuses and that because of that it can lead to uncomfortable implications if your not careful

it feels like that trope in fanfic where someone is a straight up god mod sue and none of the conflict feels believable because of them having such extreme power that the conflict should be a corpse,.so the writer just makes shit up. I Love stories with this trope (I actually like the god mod sue fanfics and I'm willing to ignore bullshit conflict so long as the drama that ensues is juicy enough) and I'm not offended by it (again x man fan) but again I would love to see people come up with better conflict than nonsensical fantasy racism allegory that doesn't work as an actual race allegory when you apply logic to it. It's overdone and I wanna see people get creative.

Tldr the oppressed mage trope makes no logical sense (how the fuck do you oppress magneto?) and irl peoples disadvantages are used the excuse to oppress them and when the excuse is that the oppressed party has power that power is made up/ its fake/greatly exaggerated.

Also the last time I linked this article the link didn't work so here I go again:

[zenaidamacrouras1]

I saw a post today ranting about how social justice has made people afraid to write whatever they want and people should be free and not worry about offending anyone and I am like... should they???

Is it such a bad thing if my fic doesn't accidentally harm or marginalize people? Do I want to ruin someone's day by making them feel like garbage because of biases in my writing?

I'm not super comfortable with a freedom that makes other people feel like they are invisible and not welcome in fandom.

All of us will always accidentally be a bull in a china shop at many points in our lives. I don't really see that as a point of pride or essential to my creative process.

[bombusbombus]

I swear I'm way better at literary analysis than writing

[navree]

under the weather and re-reading his dark materials, never gonna understand how tf certain religious people get so mad at the critique of the organizations of religion in certain fictional works

[welcometogrouchland]

I am going to try and rewatch thanks to them 😎 (<- unaware of the horrors)

[shesboundtobruise]

I've said it probably 100000xs by now, but to this day, Lou is one of the best written OCs that I've ever had the pleasure of getting to know. She is clear and distinct. Rarely do I feel like I've gotten to know a character so much that I can actually make an assumption about them and being correct; that's because you've developed her so well and so consistently that she is a complete and knowable person. Not even with just Lou, but all of your OCs and my mind still boggles how you can juggle so many and yet none of them lack the qualities of a well written character.

HOW'S LOU'S PORTRAYAL? | always accepting tbh ( @eversolo )

Why must you make me blubber all over everyone's dash like this??

[luxraydyne]

honestly thinking abt it i’d definitely have preferred if danganronpa v3 had actually fully committed to the “fiction that hates you and mocks you and wants you to question why you still enjoy it bc you become brainless amoral voyeurs whenever you engage with it, you people kinda suck ass tbh actually” reading all the way to the bitter salted earth end. like i doubt i’d have *liked* the weird superiority complex vibes from it and the whole deflected creative ennui onto the audience still. but i’d for sure have to at least *respect* the gumption, the sheer full-chested audacity of the choice, especially in the context of this specific franchise, if the writing didn’t spend like an extra hour pussyfooting around doing a watered down, sugarcoated little backpedal into “oh no, not you actually bc you specifically are special and nice and good and don’t count”. this trial is way too fuckin long anyway like pick your bit and stick to it binch. call me a sucker to my face binch come on!

[oblivions-dawn]

Sometimes [I’ve made an executive decision] you just [I hate the scene I have] have to [So I’m going to delete it all] start again [That’s 351 words down the drain] to get it right

[asterdeer]

told the therapist about how shitty it makes me feel being inundated with this new approach to mental illness being "at some point if you're still depressed it's because you're not trying to be not-depressed hard enough, you have to go talk a walk and do hobbies and talk to people or else you're making other people uncomfortable" and she basically said "yeah that works for some people. but also you don't have mild depression so that's not going to work for you in isolation. you're severely depressed you dumb bitch [affectionate]." and my kneejerk reaction was huh? no i'm not. i'm just a weak cowardly piece of shit looking for excuses to be miserable. which is probably exactly what a severely depressed person would say

[ifievertoldyou]

we did peer reading for the essays and the person reading mine literally didn't leave Any feedback at all, while i gave her like 50 different suggestions and also a bunch of comments on the things i liked..

[heycoyotegirl]

always wild to find out a blog you've never interacted with blocked you

[becausegoodbye]

A home to treasure, a home to flee

(**This post contains big-time spoilers for Citizen Sleeper and Life is Strange: True Colors. No way around it! **)

In the last year, I've had two experiences with video games that unearthed some interestingly divergent intuitions in me.

In one, the game let me make a precarious little home for myself, and even though it kept giving me opportunities to leave – it really seemed like it hoped I'd leave, to strike out somewhere in pursuit of a better life – I clung to the fragile little home I'd created, savouring its small earned pleasures.

In the other, the game gave me a home, aesthetically dazzling and too good to be true, with a hideous past which the game desperately wanted me to forgive and to stay – laying it on thick about how beautiful it would be if I stayed – and I found I couldn't flee fast enough.

It makes me wonder a bit about my relationship to home.

*

Citizen Sleeper is one of my favourite games I've played in a long time. It's quietly etched its place on the list I keep in my mind of "proper Hall of Fame indie games", along with Celeste and Immortality and at most a dozen others. It's a game whose ambitions are restrained, but the light touches of its writing are pretty much all paintbrush-perfect.

In it, you play a Sleeper, a degraded kind of worker-clone, carrying the emulated consciousness of a real person inside a crummy bio-android body that'll fall apart if it doesn't get regular injections of corporate-controlled medicine. Your entire existence is a method of skirting labour laws. You managed to escape your corporate labour-camp, but now you're on this random space station with no money or friends, and your biological meltdown-clock is ticking. Just gotta keep moving, keep working, keep trying to figure something out.

I won't give a full review of the mechanics and story; what I really want to talk about right now is the apartment. In Citizen Sleeper, you're always choosing how to allocate your limited time and energy, and if you want, you can choose to spend an irresponsible amount of both fixing up an abandoned apartment unit, using scrap metal to try to plug up the holes and make it livable. This is, frankly, the best thing. With how nightmarishly precarious every aspect of your existence as a runaway Sleeper is, just to be able to lay your head somewhere that's yours is blissful.

And then – most special of all – once you've fixed up the apartment, a stray cat will sometimes stop by, and you can spend some money to feed it some crushed-up crackers. The cat never becomes yours (it always maintains its independence, coming and going as it pleases), but you can know each other. You can become part of the weave of each other's lives. Even in this hostile capitalist hell-hole, even with a body constantly on the verge of betraying you: you can eat some delicious spiced fungus and have a cat stroke itself against your thighs. Things can be worth it.

As I got on top of my finances and found a steady source of medicine, I only found myself more and more attached to my apartment. Some missions take you right over the other side of the space station, and (because it can take ages to get back) the game frequently offers you places to crash that are much closer to where you need to be. I didn't use them once. Once I'd fixed up the unit, I slept every single subsequent night of the game there, even if it meant traveling a silly distance to get there and back. I wanted to get back because, first, it was my home, and second, I had to feed the stray cat. It might miss me if I were gone.

As you get further into Citizen Sleeper, the game offers you all sorts of ways to get off the station. You can work/cheat your way onto a huge colony ship that's set to begin populating a new and uninhabited planet. You can hitch a ride with a mercenary and start a more knowingly dangerous kind of life. You can fuse your consciousness with a cyber-organic plant-consciousness, 'Grow Vast and Strange', and lose your sense of a distinct self entirely.

I didn't go for any of them. I got my friends on board the colony ship and waved goodbye to them. I gave the mercenary the cold shoulder. I thanked the plant-consciousness profusely for the opportunity, but wistfully turned away from what it was offering. I kept choosing to return to my own small world on the station: to the apartment, to the stray, to Emphis' spiced fungus stand, to Lem & Mina & Tala & Riko, and to all the tiny meaningful markers of the life I'd built for myself here.

This was my life. I'd made it, and that meant everything.

*

Life is Strange: True Colors is a much weirder game, and one I'd recommend to far fewer people. I've written before about my complicated feelings about the Life is Strange series, which have a tendency to take huge emotional swings with subjects that they're not really mature enough to handle responsibly. That's part of their appeal, admittedly: these games absolutely go for it, and even when they stumble, it's usually pretty compelling.

In True Colors, you play as Alex Chen, a shy 21-year-old orphan with a kind of superpowered empathy. She can read people's thoughts a bit, sometimes even accessing their memories, and when somebody near her is experiencing a big emotion, she gets overwhelmed with a mirrored version of it. This got her branded as 'emotionally unstable' in the Oregon foster care system, so she struggled to be adopted. She lost touch with her older brother Gabe after he was placed with a different foster family, but eight years later, with his own life straightened out, Gabe was able to track her down, and invite her to come live with him in the idyllic little mountain town called Haven Springs.

I won't go beat-by-beat through the whole plot, because it's bonkers and byzantine, but the key points are these. (Again, full spoilers.) After Alex and Gabe's dad abandoned them when Alex was 11, he ended up working for a locally hegemonic mining company called Typhon in Haven Springs. Later, Gabe tried to track him down, and Haven Springs was where the trail went cold. This turns out to be because their dad died in a hideous mine collapse, along with several other miners. A local foreman named Jed Lucan got credited as a 'hero' for saving the miners who survived, but in reality he was the one who chose to abandon the others to their deaths, and Typhon conspired with him to cover it all up.

When Gabe came to Haven Springs looking for their dad, that same foreman, Jed, now the owner of a local bar, felt guilty about having left this kid fatherless, and treated Gabe with a lot of generosity. He set Gabe up with a job in his bar, let him rent the great loft apartment upstairs, and really just ensconced Gabe in Haven Springs life (obviously without telling him the murdery truth). Then, when Gabe is finally able to track down his little sister Alex, he wants to pass on the generosity, and offers you the loft. He’s moving in with his girlfriend, you and your brother are finally back in each other’s lives, and it all seems too good to be true.

It is. Almost immediately after arriving in town, Gabe is killed – by the very same mining corporation – while up in the mountains trying to rescue his girlfriend's kid. Typhon were told that there were people in the area and they needed to delay their blast, but they knowingly went ahead with it anyway, because (it turns out) they needed the noise to cover up a second, more illegal scheduled blast nearby. That second blast was to fully cave in the old mine and bury the evidence of the incident that killed Alex and Gabe's father, in preparation for a coming inspection that could have uncovered the deaths.

So essentially: your brother was murdered casually, incidentally, as part of covering up your dad's murder from years ago.

I'm delivering this information in a totally different order than the game does (there, the relevation that Jed let miners die and your dad was among them comes very late), but I'm laying it all out so you understand the chronology of events. Just lay it all out flat in your mind. You're Alex, and you find yourself living in this town that seems pretty wonderful – picturesque and warm, with an economy of little other than bars and flower shops and record stores – but you eventually discover that both your father and your brother have been murdered here. You also discover that the person who's been kindest to you, the surrogate father-figure who let you work in the bar and live in the loft virtually rent-free, is the evil fuck who killed your dad.

You do eventually empathy-detective your way to exposing all this, of course. By the end of the game, Jed is going to prison, and Typhon is facing the absurdly (but not unrealistically) softer consequences of 'their CEO resigning' and 'their stock price taking a hit'. But then – and this is the part I've needed to go over all this melodramatic plot in order to talk about – the game wants you to stay in Haven Springs.

Alex's final choice is whether to stay or leave. Somehow, you're still living in the loft of the murderer you put in jail, and it's implied that you can just keep doing that. The game gives you an option to leave – to go off on a scrappy music tour with your indie girlfriend Steph – but the game gilds the lily heavily in favour of staying. You have an entire conversation with an imaginary ghost-projection of Gabe, and he spins this whole fantasia about how wonderful your life could be if you simply stayed, let "time do its thing", and commit to transforming this place.

But like ... fuck that, right? Fuck that!!!

As far as I'm concerned, this is a "noping out of a horror movie" situation. By the end of True Colors, Haven Springs feels cursed. This tiny pretty town is where every existing member of your family was murdered. What, you're literally just gonna stick around limply hoping they won't murder you too? While the hegemonic mining corporation is still stalking around, knowing you did this to them?

Like, Alex. Dude. These white people are not safe. The Chens are seemingly the only Asian-American family in a hundred miles, and the track record of Chens not getting murdered by the biggest and most powerful local employer is bad. Sure, that one guy is in prison now, but the problem was never that one guy. Underneath this town is a seam of raw murder and lies and evil, and everyone being so saccharine-sweet to you all game long only makes that fact worse. You can’t escape your trauma, you can’t escape your brother and father having been killed, and you can’t escape the horrorshow of capitalism – but you surely don’t have to stay here.

It's hard to overstate how repulsed I felt by the prospect of staying in Haven Springs. While Citizen Sleeper had me taking pride in the modest, scrappy life I'd clawed out for myself in the margins, True Colors felt like the complete opposite. It felt like a series of overbearingly loaded gifts, all lush and pretty and tailor-made, but with a violent catch spring-loaded inside every pocket. It felt like the bashful smile of a poisoner offering you a drink. All of my instincts were to run.

*

Some day soon, I'm sure I'll be able to write a thing about videogames without tying it back to transness, but look – I'm two months on HRT. Right now everything feels connected with transitioning, and I'd be lying if I said the trans-relevance of this little parable didn't occur to me immediately.

My body is the home I was given, and I’ve always lived here uneasily. I’ve never known what to do with the ‘gifts’ that came with being read as a guy (most of them are still half-unwrapped in the back of my closet). Everyone wanted me to like it here, expected me to like it here – why wouldn’t you like it here? – but I just didn’t. A seam under the surface was wrong, and kept itching. I don’t want this to come across as a matter of pure contrarianism, but being real: the amount of contrarianism at work here probably isn’t zero. The world tried to give me a gender I’d like – a whole sweet-ass loft if you just ignore the murders – and I’m leaving. I’m off to make my own thing. And even if it’s objectively shittier in tons of ways, I’m confident I’ll like it more.

Between Citizen Sleeper and True Colors, my inescapable conclusion is: I would rather sit alone in this cold empty abandoned apartment than live in Haven Spring's paradise. I would rather chew fungus and scrape for corpo-medicine as a girl than be the beloved centre of a twinkling idyll as a guy. Haven Springs is so pristine and gorgeous, so flush with friends and flowers and foosball, but at a certain point you just can't unsee the seam of wrongness under everything. Whereas the kind of life you can build in Citizen Sleeper – the crummy apartment, the stray cat, all the friends you make and all the people who pass you by – feels infinitely stronger to me. Infinitely more earned. Infinitely more durable and darnable and real.