#Like really fucking personal

[withacapitalp]

i’m gonna be real here, and i mean this in the kindest way - i loved your wayne & steve series so much when i first read it, and i just stumbled on it again and saw it was still updating and thought ‘now why didn’t i subscribe???’ and then went back to reread and catch up, and then i got to the end of the fifth fic and remembered why - it seemed like you were turning it into one of those fics where billy is a rapist, who abused & assaulted steve, & you didn’t tag that you would be using him as a villain, and in your end notes you said that arc would feature heavily in your next fic, but then i go to that fic and i don’t see any relevant tags or warnings and i didn’t want to read and get even more attached and then be caught off guard, again, by such a harsh depiction of one of the characters without any warning.

idk. i get that a lot of people don’t like billy, and that’s fair and it’s up to everybody which characters they do and don’t jive with. it’s not even like i haven’t read and enjoyed fics where billy is set firmly as a villain or presented in a really 2 dimensional way, because i have. but it’s different when you go into a fic, wanting to read about a certain dynamic and certain characters, and are blind-sided with hate towards another character that you like - especially when the author has decided to depict that character sexually assaulting somebody and implies that the character is a repeat sexual predator. that’s really heavy to be sort of thrown into on a fic where you’re not expecting to see that character at all, you know?

like i said, i really enjoy most of your fics and i think you’re a great writer. i guess i’m just disappointed that i’ve now TWICE had the experience of happily reading your fic and then being blindsided by such a dark depiction of a character who wasn’t even tagged. it’s really disconcerting and upsetting. ao3 has a great tagging system and i wish you’d chosen to use it a bit more effectively, i guess.

looking at your sixth fic in that series, it’s not tagged for domestic violence, sexual assault, anything like that, and it also has no tags for billy, a past steve/billy relationship, or even just a general ‘this fic is not billy friendly’ tag. looking at it i’d never think you’d have any of that sort of content in it, especially because you DID tag for /other/ potentially triggering content, but then in the end notes of the fifth fic you said that the sixth fic would deal very much so with that introduced plot line. it just sucks because i’d probably read it if i didn’t feel so much like i was clicking on a youtube jump scare video.

Long ask and long reply so I'm going to put my thoughts under a read more but TL:DR This is the kind of constructive criticism that is incredibly valid, and I appreciate your courage and energy that you put into writing all this. Also I'm going to get slightly personal here so if you don't want to read that just continue on

This is like, strangely, the fourth or fifth ask I've gotten about A New Perspective today, which has forced me to look at it again and admit to myself why I stepped away from it.

I use my fics to work through a lot of my own personal things. This fic series and the relationship that Billy and Steve have in it is based entirely on a real life relationship I had with an ex. They have an incredibly complicated sexual relationship that is inherently unhealthy for both of them. Not just Steve. Not just Billy. Steve does not think of himself as a victim, he sees himself as the problem. In reality it's both of them. I think Billy Hargrove is a really interesting character, I don't talk about him a lot here because he's really divisive in the fandom, and I don't need to get involved in Billy drama tbh.

For this fic he isn't the villain to Steve, even if he might seem like a monster, and I hope that gets across when I eventually come back to this series. I took a break from it for a lot of reasons, but part of it is needing to reevaluate what I'm getting out of writing it, and if it's healthy for me. I don't know if this is an exceptionally harsh depiction of Billy, it's not necessarily positive, but it does have a lot of different layers. Finding a nuanced way to portray that relationship (and a way to work through my own thoughts and feelings about mine) isn't easy, but I don't really think I write it in a two-dimensional way. I'm not sure if you were saying I did, but if you were, I'll just have to respectfully disagree and leave it at that.

As for tags, well this one I just have to own up and say I'm sorry. I didn't really know how to tag it, because I still didn't know what to consider for them. I don't really know how to consider my own relationship, which is what this is based on. So tagging it with things like sexual abuse or with things like SA...I don't know I just haven't worked through if it would even be considered that?

Regardless of my personal journey with my writing though, there's outside readers who have their own journeys. It's something that you explained in a really clear way, so I appreciate that you took the time to make me see where I was leaving a gap. I don't want people to think it was intentional? I don't think of my fics as a 'YouTube jumpscares' but more as a complicated web of a lot of things I work through in my own mind.

I put the note on my fifth fic to let people know that there would be a lot of complicated stuff going on, and so they could choose to opt out or not, but I understand that wasn't enough. If anyone got triggered or upset by what I wrote, then I do sincerely apologize for that. We talk a lot about curating your own online experience, but to do that you also have to be properly prepared for the experiences you go into. Where I didn't help contribute to that is on me.

As for people who might be worried about the series mentioning this a lot after this? It won't. I work through things in my own way, and I knew I wanted to make this part of Steve's journey, but it's not his entire journey. After this there's just a lot of fluffy parts like the first few one shots again. This was just something I needed for myself.

It's funny, I owe that series a lot, but I honestly just kind of hate it right now.

I don't really know if 'being blinded by hate' is really fair to say about the relationship I'm trying to portray, because I don't hate Billy and neither does Steve. There's love there, and a wish for something better that they'll never get to have, and I hope that you can stick with it to see how it all plays out. I like to think I'm writing for more than just bashing on a character. As for just dropping it in, well I've known what I want to do this entire time, but I can understand where people would come from thinking it was just dropped in.

I'm sorry if you're disappointed, but don't forget, writers are just humans too. We do things and we make mistakes, and this was just one of mine. I think I have everything properly tagged on the series now? If you feel differently though, you're welcome to DM me. I don't bite. I struggle with ao3 tagging in general, so I'm always grateful when anyone suggests tags I should be adding. Someone told me today I should add a genderfluid Steve tag to my latest fic, and I didn't even realize I forgot to.

Anyways. Long and probably too personal, but I figured I wanted to explain best I could. If you don't care about any of that, well, the tags got added.

[its-your-mind]

[lazylittledragon]

dedicating a whole page of my flash book to the special boy <33

[panstarry]

my final from last semester that i made into a zine. cooked this one up in a couple hours before the critique (the ink was still wet!), so it's very raw and kind of sloppy but the sentiment is there. i love you trans people of color. we are the backbone of this community 🌟

[ratbastarddotfuck]

if you're a white person taking pleasure in the idea that Trump voters of colour are experiencing racist violence from white trumpers because "they got what's coming to them" I don't think you're anti-racist at all, I think you were just waiting for an acceptable target, and you're also fucking weird.

Bad Person Deserves Punishment For Their Sins give me a fucking break and get yourself out of the fucking catholic church. you're all prison abolitionists until you see someone you don't like.

[lambert-simnel]

Did you know Nana Visitor said in an interview she wasn’t considered a beautiful actress in the 90’s? absolutely insane

I actually had a hard time finding reference images for early season short hair big shoulder pads Kira. I guess they did less promo and the camera quality was maybe a bit shit in early on idk but this is my favourite outfit of hers ever I literally wrote about it for uni once

Anyway I can see definite improvement from my Dax painting, i’m still colour picking from the reference so I might challenge myself not to do that next time. I think this took around 3 hours? I should probably start timing myself

I’m really happy i’m getting better at digital painting but it has made me a little sad that I do so little traditional art now. that being said this is soo much easier to post getting a photo of the VVitch poster was so difficult and it would not scan correctly!!

all art is under #my art ,click for better quality !

[yanderespamton78]

Edit since a lot of people seem confused - your "real" name is the name that you want to be referred to in real life. It doesn't have to be your legal name. So if you're trans and you have a different name to whats on your birth certificate, even if not many people call you by the name, it still counts as your real name.

Edit 2 : Holy shit guys please stop reblogging this post my poor inbox im getting like 20 notifs an hour asjfhkajshdkh /lh /srs

[lycandrophile]

it’s so funny to me that people used to try to warn me “if you go on t it won’t make you androgynous it’ll just make you look like a man” because 1) i do want to look like a man, that is famously a major part of being a trans man but also 2) t literally has made me androgynous?? like they were wrong on both counts. i got most of the looking-like-a-man changes that i wanted (deep voice, broader body, hair all over my body including my face) and i also give every single cis person in a five mile radius a stroke every time they try to figure out my gender. the assumption that trans men wouldn’t actually want to look like men and the assumption that cis people are good at correctly gendering us once we’re on t are both weird as hell.

[vaguely-concerned]

the more I play the more I think lucanis basically knows it's illario who betrayed him right from the beginning (he's had a year in the ossuary to think. not that many people knew where he was going. when you ask him 'did Illario know you'd be on that ship' his only answer is the hardest flattest 'yes' you ever heard). so it's not so much about figuring out who the traitor is (because that's ludicrous. we all know. immediately. they didn't really bother to hide it lmao) as about methodically closing off every single avenue of denial lucanis has clung to that whole time with as much or little gentleness as you might prefer until he has no choice but to admit it. because the moment he has to admit it, he'll have to do something -- feel something -- about it. and that's such a catastrophic event in lucanis' inner landscape (he has had TWO people in this whole entire world up until now and will do anything to hold on to them with a heartbreaking child-like desperation, even at and especially through the detriment of his own self) that he'd rather just. not. what if we quite simply. didn't. what if we just stayed here in the emptiness where we can both pretend you didn't hurt me in a way I should never forgive. I have so much practice in that with caterina already it's always worked out great for everyone so far. (press x to fucking doubt but that's trauma logic for you lol)

after everything illario did, so much of the storm of lucanis' emotions around it is 'what the FUCK did you get yourself tangled up in this time and how do I get you out of this mess safely'. what's worse: the fact that your brother murdered you, or that he put himself in horrible danger doing so and thus exposed you to the risk of losing him forever. lucanis' heart certainly has an opinion here and it's fucking unhinged (affectionate)

the themes of dissociation in lucanis' character in general makes me feel nuts. allllll these contradictory messy things he needs to cut off from each other because they can't coexist or be easily reconciled inside him. but all remain stubbornly true separately anyway and will have their due one day. love and resentment. tenderness and fear and rage. terror and longing. love and freedom don't coexist. the burned out golden child anthem is playing in the background. he was always caterina's favourite and he has to keep striving to deserve that dubious honour with every breath he takes and then, presumably, mercifully, some day he will die and be excused and can rest. and until now he's suppressed all the -- natural, healthy, protective! -- negative feelings that threaten the few attachment relationships he actually has, at the cost of ever actually having his needs for connection and safety met and leaving his core self imprisoned and compromised. and spite goes 'what. no. that's dumb fuck that' (*spite voice* I do not understand that and even if I did I would not respect it) and does not allow him to fall back into that, which I think is what saves his life, ultimately. it took being possessed by a demon for lucanis to even contemplate telling anyone he loves 'no' in any way, but hey. whatever gets you there right lol

lucanis is dealing with the freeze response allll the way down baby. and he was even before the ossuary, that just turbo powered it and brought it to a breaking point way before it could happen naturally. but something was going to break eventually no matter what, and I'm just glad that in the end, through the power of friendship and also pure spite, it doesn't have to be him

[thewiglesswonder]

"NO, I WANT TO KILL HIM!"

[lady-raziel]

because there is nothing to lose the people saying biden should resign now so kamala can still be the first female president are absolutely right but why stop there? inauguration day is 70 days away let's make "president for a day" a real thing. say "fuck it we ARE going to do the arbitrary quota DEI bullshit you accuse us of" and speedrun first [category] presidents. revolving door type thing.

first female president. first openly gay president. first transgender president. first president who has been to space. first president gamer president. first mime president. just play president bingo and hit as many categories as possible while we still can. make all of trump's #47 merch unusable by forcing him to be the 115th president instead. who cares anymore let's peacefully transition power but do it in the most chaotic hot-potato way possible

[corpsentry]

a glass sun 1/2

[aunmenosheteroenespanol]

2.12 Chimney Begins - 2.09 Hen Begins - 2.16 Bobby Begins Again - 7.04 Buck, Bothered and Bewildered

Tommy's family arc

[bixels]

tarpit site.

[shaftking]

It’s truly amazing the sort of doublethink it takes for leftists claiming to be countercultural or revolutionary turning around and saying “well Jews throughout history have been persecuted by pretty much everyone, so maybe there’s a valid reason for that 🤔🤔🤔” like ooh so clever now do gay people. Now do trans people. Now do disabled people. Now do mixed race couples. Now do gender nonconforming people. Now do

[uncanny-tranny]

Diversity win! All the male mannequins in the nursing class I was in had vaginas (literally all)!

Diversity loss! Everyone was Weird about it