#LITERALLY SUCH FUCKING EXCELLENT WRITING

[glockmonkey]

Norris’ first appearance

vs Chester’s. GOD. FUCK. martin being forced to watch as jon is absorbed, once again, by the statements. knowing he’s stuck there by his own actions, but unwilling to leave jon. jon being lured in by the idea of being able to stay with the person he loves, but instead being consumed by the fears again.

[cult-of-the-eye]

I'm going to bash my head into a fucking WALL

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

y'all i've been upset about nanowrimo's shenanigans since last year, when kids weren't safe, and now there's this AI shitshow, and i want to cry about it again, because nano has been SO IMPORTANT to me since 2008--it helped me hack my writing process and make a bunch of cool shit, and i've written so many stories i love using it as a jumping off point. but. we gotta protect kids, and we gotta get the fuck out of here with AI bullshit.

so. the decision i have come to is that i will still be participating in nano. but now it stands for "now a's [that's me] novel writing month." i'm still going to write a book in november, and i'm still going to shoot for the 1,667 words/day (even though my finished projects wind up way longer than that, invariably), because i've structured my creative life around this routine, but i won't be using their site any more.

i will also not be tagging my november project posts as nanowrimo, but i WILL still be tagging them as "nano[YEAR]" (because that's been my tagging system for untitled projects for uh. years.). and it's now a's novel writing month :)

[turtletaubwrites]

Me: *just spent an hour writing my list of references for the perfect job while battling my bad handwriting + shaky ass lithium hands*

"Hey nugs, can you look at this before I send it?"

Partner: *takes his time, nodding and looking thoughtful*

"Your handwriting looks like drunk Comic Sans."

Me: *disappears into the fucking ether*

[boasamishipper]

I feel so sick to my stomach after what that finale did to Nate, I think the entire show might be ruined for me forever. I can forgive a lot, and have given a lot of benefit of the doubt. I cannot do it anymore. My god, that was awful.

you and me both, nonny. i know a lot of people enjoyed nate's arc this season but it just did not sit right with me. like. even taking out the fact that the season's pacing was fucked in general, and that we spent more time with nate at a taste of athens than at west ham, and that we didn't get to see nate quit (we barely got to see him being a coach at all!!), and that after quitting nate wasn't shown getting any offers from other premier league teams (i don't necessarily mind that he waited tables in the interim, it wasn't like he needed the money and i can understand him wanting a break, but for god's sake the man was a fucking amazing coach!! yes rupert hired him to fuck with rebecca but nate is genuinely amazing at his job!! why didn't we get to see teams falling over themselves to hire him!!), and that for some fucking reason the fact that he was the one who leaked ted's panic attacks was just. never mentioned again by anyone, the full character regression we got in the series finale was just insane. okay sure nate is dating jade and played the violin again and his dad said he was a genius and now he's more confident in himself, whatever. but you mean to tell me that nate expected to be brought back on as the assistant kitman when beard told him to come back to richmond?? that's what the team decided when they said they wanted nate back?? that nate was fine with this?? that nate didn't bring up the fact that he was the one who leaked ted's panic attacks in his apology to ted?? that nate didn't get to give the team a pep talk (or give any advice to ted and beard and roy) before they played the team that he spent the last several months coaching?? that we didn't get to see nate roast the greyhounds (but more kindly this time) in a callback to 1.07?? that in the flash forwards, it was roy - whose idea of coaching is tying the players' dicks together - who became the manager of afc richmond, and not the man whose strategy from all the way back in season one won the greyhounds the match against west ham and resulted in the team getting the closest they have ever come to winning the whole fucking thing??

in the words of roy kent: fucking hell.

[charmac]

omg your tags on that headcanon post resonate so much with me. i love reading fsnficiton but it is very obviously whether someone is writing about the source material or playing dolls (which is an analogy i ALSO use look at us. look at us.) and while. full respect to playing dolls that shit ruled as kids still rules now probably like have fun and be yourself godspeed but it is always weirdly dissonant for those two things to coexist without clear distinction from each other. all this to say i AGREE

"it is always weirdly dissonant for those two things to coexist without clear distinction from each other," is exactly the point here for real.

There's nothing bad about taking characters and doing whatever you want with them and having fun, because you can make some really great and creative things that way. It's when people fail to be able to recognise that what they're doing is completely removed from canon that it gets frustrating, especially for anything still actively being made..

Because new canon content is 9/10 times gonna build off previous canon, and there are a lot of fandoms nowadays that exist heavily in the level 3 and beyond space of headcanons that continually act like new, official content not being fanon-compliant is disappointing or problematic, and that people who like the canon content and want to discuss it are somehow the ones that don't belong in the fandom.

Honestly at this point it's often hard to tell if people who complain endlessly about the canon of the thing they're a fan of is due to an actual inability to recognise when popular headcanons are a 3 or 4 or if there's a genuine chunk of people in fandoms who legit dislike their source material and got into the material and/or a character exclusively due to fanon creations and ideas

[wellhungspeaker]

sometimes i feel a little weird doing fandom-y things for rhps (because ive never been in a fandom this small before also because it just feels a little weird sometimes) and ill doubt myself and think "does everything NEED a fandom?? scoffs" even though. im hyperfixated super crazy style.

but then i remember that i have no mouth and i must scream has a fandom and i realize that life (fandoms) finds a way and if there is at least one person who likes something, there's probably going to be fanfic about it and some kind of ship WILL be involved

[musical-chick-13]

Regarding the previous post, I think the way I approach trying to evaluate a piece of art is asking "Do I think the positive things I get out of it outweigh the parts of it that I don't like?" And when I call something a "guilty pleasure" song/show/book/piece of media/etc. it's really more in the sense of, "Given who I am as a person, the flaws I've found in this should be complete dealbreakers for me, but somehow they aren't, and it makes me feel like I'm having an identity crisis."

[yoursonlucifer]

yesterday I was in the tag for Certain Characters and some of the fanart was like. ok I'm gonna need you to go ahead and google a black person. mmhmm yep just go ahead and type that in the search bar. because what.

[whiskeyswifty]

.

[deathlonging]

AUs can be very interesting due to they break down what a specific character is carved out of and question the malleability of those materials but obviously some of these are more rigid than others and subjective as this can be sometimes its undeniable. obviously when thought is put into it you can dive deeper into the character than ever before and that is the ideal scenario bc changing one or two small things about them will always be more boring than analyzing the aspects that survive a massive shift while the transformative narrative is haunted by the aspects that don't. key word here btw being narrative bc that is the driving force and at the end of the day how you show the differences. pretty easy to avoid erasure if you know what you're doing which is why it feels frustrating when people insist on flipping power dynamics or gender with little to no thought about the structural factors in play like.....what place did these occupy in the narrative before you twisted them for a new character perspective? what did that say about the society the narrative is set in? what was its impact on the characters? how would the characters change not only within this new narrative but having lived through the social structures that support it? you can only really bring these up as questions when there's a certain amount of thought that goes into the AU as a character/world study of course like there are different kinds of fanfiction like anything else and being pedantic about the shortsightedness of some when they do not intend to focus on the issues mentioned is pointless. but anyway more often than not aus have the character studied like a bug for example in a world where labs as we know them don't exist. and they do not bother to analyze the difference between a bug studied by a scientist and one studied by a schoolboy in his room. not to imply any inherent superiority of one over the other btw this is just to establish the extremity of difference in these two situations

[blameitontheanon]

Don’t mind me, I’m just getting emotional about the (parasocially projected) potential of this dinner table.

[what-even-is-sleep]

The email I just sent to my bio professor as a struggling adhd fucker 😭. Mayhaps this relates to other adhd-ers?

---------------

Hi Dr. XXX,

I've been trying to transfer my ADHD accommodations to XXX for a while now, but the process continues to be frustrating and slow and I've also just realized that my previous accommodations don't cover something that really affects me in this class. Emailing this to keep you in the loop and ask for some leniency as I struggle with paperwork.

I'm in this class to pass and get college credits to graduate. I need to take a science + science lab for GE requirements at another school. Science and math are my worst subjects partially because of my extraordinarily horrible micro-short-term memory. Having to hold numbers and names in my mind for 1-5 seconds is my Achilles heel. When cooking, I have to look between the ingredients list and the spice rack 5-7 times before I grab one of the right spices. In the graphing lab for this class, I mis-plotted the hand-done Rye Plant graph and when I re-made it, mis-plotted again even though I paid special attention to not do so. 

In the past, I've failed tests and scraped by math-based classes not because I didn't put in the work to understand the material, nor because mathematics takes me 2-3 times as long as other people, but because even with 1.5 time on exams, my atrocious micro-short-term memory meant that I forgot to cross my plus signs. I would do the entire problem in a technically correct manner but fail because I somehow forgot to cross one plus sign, and continued the problem as if it were a minus sign. 

All I want to do is pass this class. I hope small misrepresentations of the data that we'll use for class--technical presentations and solutions the likes of which I hope to avoid vehemently the rest of my life (or hire someone else for)--but that don't discount my technical understanding of a problem, don't become cause for a failure or significant grade knock. 

Thanks for your consideration,

XXX

[shhhhimwatchingthis]

Sort of bums me out that so many people didn't seem to Get the Cat King so here are my thoughts:

So let's start with Edwin's crime. He uses something the cat desires (a sardine) to lure the cat to him and then uses an enchanted string to trap the cat with magic. He demands the answer to a question in exchange for its release. Edwin knows it is dangerous to use magic on a cat, that it violates Rules but he does it anyway.

Binding a creature and agreeing to set them free under a certain condition is very Classic Fairytale. its also a favourite trope of Neil Gaiman's (he did not write this show but his influence is there). In both the Sandman and his novel Stardust (and the film adaptation) trapping a creature with magic and demanding a task/favour in exchange for their freedom is an extremely important plot point. Edwin binding a cat and demanding an answer in exchange is exactly in line with this Fairytale trope

And so is the Cat Kings response. The Cat King is a trickster. What he does to Edwin is exactly what Edwin did to one of his subjects. He entices Edwin, he binds him with magic and when Edwin demands to be free he turns his own words against him "why all the fuss for one little spell?" Edwin did something wrong. He imposed his will/magic on another creature and the Cat King is punishing him for it in a way that is poetic. Its fairytale. its trickster. its classic.

I've also seen people complain that the task Edwin was given 'count all the cats' is 'impossible'...except its fucking not. Edwin does it. He does it so well he actually BEATS the Cat King ("you didn't count yourself" Are.You.Kidding.Me. Classic!Fairytale!Vibes!)

The Cat Kings choice to bind Edwin to Port Townsend is good on so many levels. From a storytelling perspective it forces characters who can travel anywhere in the world to stay in one place, and increases the stakes for these characters who are supposed to be on the run. From a genre perspective...its an excellent use of fairytale tropes using both Rules of magic, a protagonist who is unkind to a seemingly weak creature who is punished by a more powerful law, a binding, a task to complete, etc

Which just leaves the character perspective which it ALSO does really fucking well and introduces the final aspect to the Cat Kings character. He's seductive. He is responsible for Edwin, 100 years old ghost boy, finally unpacking his internalized homophpbia. he is the catalyst (cat pun not intended)

He pushes Edwin, challenges him, at times literally forces the truth out of Edwin, but he really never does violate his consent. Significantly Edwin is attracted to him, like its an important part of his character that he is. He may not like the Cat King but he is attracted to him!

The Cat King is such a great example of a trickster, a morally grey character who imposes a sense of justice on Edwin after he crosses a line, but also has his own selfish interests and meddles. Hes so important to the plot of the show, to Edwin's character arc, to the genre.

And he's just fun. Unapologetically queer, powerful, complicated. Silly little outfits. Petty cat behavior. Deep heart.

Some of you just didn't get it. And I'm sorry for you. because the Cat King is Excellent actually.

[sparrowsfallingfromthesky]

have officially lost the battle against the impulse to make a sort of timeline for this fic 😔

[antihcroes]

a really important thing you should know about me, like an important facet of my personality, is the fact that i want a third n.ow you see me movie more than i want most things in life & would literally sell a kidney if it meant i'd get one