#Truly the og Mary Sue hurt comfort

[spectralarchers]

Me, six months ago, the instant I found a new traumatized military man and this time he wears a fucking mask:

[yandere-sins]

Good Afternoon! If seen your spiels and tales for a while now and may I just say I adore it all, you’re quite talented in your work and you should be proud of yourself! I aspire to write as well and I’m wondering if you have some tips for the long run?

Hey!

Here are my latest posts with links to the ones where I actually went a bit more into details about what I recommend doing.

For the blog

For writing

Honestly, not much has changed, at least for me. It would be interesting to find out whether the tagging rules truly are still the same from the past but from recent experience I can tell you that posting regularly is the key to building a following. But at the same time I know now, more than ever, it's just not doable under normal life circumstances unless you find a rhythm to write and use the queue to schedule your posts.

If you want to write yandere stories specifically, personally, for me it's very important to be balanced. Like a super strong yandere is always cool, but it's cooler if they are so delusional that they will end up hurting their darling with their strength. Or a manipulative yandere is fun and tricky, but if it turns out they are deadly afraid of being left alone and are a bit pathetic about it, that's yummy! Also, depending on the darling, the yan's personality might change as well. I guess what I want to say, balance out the parts of the story to keep it more "realistic" and less Mary-Sue-Behavior. Not always possible or necessary because an OP yan has its benefits in certain situations, but it makes for a good story if there are some flaws in everything.

Also use the tropes. As harsh as it is, no idea of yours will ever be completely original. But I love retellings of ideas! And so do others! I don't care how many more times I read the same "chased by a monster only to be pinned down to the dirty ground" I will literally inhale these stories!!!! I love them!!! And you will put new words and new spins to it, so it will never feel dull!! So yeah, absolutely nothing wrong to lean into tropes and cliches. It might even be very beneficial for bringing your writing closer to people.

For warnings, I'd say, depending on if you do requests or your own work, always warn everything you find problematic in your own works before the story starts and add warnings if someone asks for them. For request, do the same if you derail from the original request too much to not warn (like, have sexual acts/gore/etc. suddenly even though it wasn't specifically requested). I'm not a fan of warning if the request is very clearly what the story will be, but do as you are comfortable. It's your blog. In the end, no one can tell you what to do, but of course don't be mean about it.

Doing requests is fine, but doing your own ideas is also fine. Of course, starting out with only your original ideas can be hard if you don't have a community built already, but you can always mix fanworks with OG writing. I know it's tempting to say "others do it too and they manage to just write their own things" or "I don't want to write for fandoms" but it will be very hard if you do. It's just the truth, tumblr isn't for original content in writing, it has always been for fandoms and blogging and art. It got better over the years but it still is.

Following up with this is: don't compare yourself to other writers/artists on here please, honestly, if you keep finding yourself discouraged by how much more likes and interactions they get, you should unfollow them. It's harsh. I love the stories and the writers of some blogs here, but I had to prioritize myself. Sometimes I sneak back to check out what I missed, but it will still get whiplash and compare myself.

In the same notion: If someone is mean or an idiot in your asks just block them and move on. Drama can entice people to interact with you, but it's not the kind of interactions you want constantly. And it honestly ruins you vibes if your blog becomes dramacentral. It's okay to speak out sometimes and make it clear that you don't want certain kinds of interactions, but feeding the trolls will only end in more and more and soon you feel bad and your followers feel bad, while the trolls are thriving. 9/10 cases it's just not worth it. Block and if it was a crossed boundary, let your people know afterwards unrelated to an ask.

And most importantly: pease just have fun. Put your ideas out there for the sole reason that no one will ever put them into your words the way you would. Of course it's impossible to ignore likes and interactions because it really does fuel the motivation. But I wish you two that you can create because it makes you happy. The rest will follow.

[robbiethompsonlongcon]

so does anybody else see carlos a bit as like deans... ideal self? or self insert? lil bit like deans mary sue (honorific)? like how dean would like to be, or how he wants to perceive himself? or at least the version of dean we perceive together as a fandom's ideal self? not literally, i don't think dean is creating the characters or making the story up diagetically as the New Chuck or anything, but in that way the OG show sometimes does metatextual parallels between two characters who otherwise have no control over the narrative.

carlos is.. beloved by all. disaster bisexual. gender!! so much gender!! genderweird, genderfastandloose, genderplayful. unbound by gender roles entirely. a wonderful tapestry of masculine, feminine, both and neither. truly knows who he is, and is comfortable with that identity. celebratory of it, even! hes got it, hes gonna flaunt it. tastefully slutty. constant quips. sassy as fuck. so charismatic it hurts. talented performer. incredible hunter. frequently pokes at his beloved, sibling-type lorenerd hunting partner about her books. selfless and loving as thee central personality trait, buried under a layer of protective bravado. but also very aware he is very pretty and very talented. competent!!! but knows his strengths, and plays to them. nurturing. free and wild and a little reckless, a little superficial but never in truly harmful ways. if carlos goes or stays, it's because he wants to, he decided for himself, not because anyone told him to. willing to express boundaries. getting therapy. not afraid of feelings. do no harm take no shit. and just. so, so, SO very cool. in every way. even the "nerdy" things about him are cool. he's flawed, imperfect, but that's kinda what makes him ideal. he's just so.. real.

plus, john actively loves him, and loves him for who he is. john leans on him for support, sometimes even takes his advice. and he never tells carlos who to be or how to act. john and carlos are friends, they're FAMILY. john never tries to make carlos more like himself, at least he hasn't so far. carlos can be as silly, as emotional, as nonconforming, as distractable as he wants and john, at worst, breezes past it. lets him be himself. oftentimes john just supports him. john RESPECTS him. sees him as a worthwhile and complete individual, a valuable member of the team. they're like brothers. and why wouldn't dean want to be like brothers with his dad? it's not weird for him, he's already something of a dad to his brother. the boundaries between brothers and fathers and sons are already blurred for dean, and have been since he was four years old. and his relationship with bobby is more fluid than fatherfigure and son, too. bobby is father figure, uncle, coworker, mentor/teacher, childhood friend, war buddy and co-conspirator. in fact, none of deans relationship roles are so clear cut. and for all his complicated feelings about john, and all his traumas.. at his core he really does want johns respect and affection. marys, too, to be fair. carlos has both.

and then there's the story line in 1x08. carlos was given a Mark that forces him to kill, took the Mark in order to stop a dangerous and malicious entity from wanton murder before knowing the full terms and ramifications. the whole team researched the Mark and tried to find ways to get rid of the curse. but when push came to shove, they failed. the entity behind the curse was a lot more powerful than they thought. so carlos's options were either: to do what the Mark and the entity wanted and choose a victim's life to take, satisfying the conditions of the Mark and hope the entity didnt move the goalposts. or to say, nah. the life i choose to take is my own. and for once, that was the right answer!! carlos saved the day and defeated the enemy not by fighting, not by the deaths loved ones or innocents, not by cutting losses or solving for x, but by refusing to play, by sacrificing himself. and just being willing to was enough, he didn't have to actually die. carlos won. by giving up. nobody died because of carlos' decision to take on the burden from jericho, nor his decision to turn it inward. when carlos called the shots, everybody lived.

every time dean tries that, it backfires spectacularly, and usually winds up getting just as many people hurt or killed as the callous and selfish option would have. dean wants to be good and selfless so badly that he often rushes straight to self sacrifice. hes like plan a) ask nicely whoops i forgot to be nice. well that failed OK PLAN B) martyrdom. it's like, every time dean is faced with the trolley problem, his first answer is to throw himself in front of the trolley. as though he thinks the trolley is going to be satisfied and just disappear. or at least this way he won't have to see what happens next.

in carlos' situation, that was the LAST resort, not one of the first. they really were in a kill-or-be-killed, 11th hour hailmary situation. they tried everything else. the trolley was upon them. and carlos chose to die, not out of a wanton desire to prove his worth/worthlessness or martyr himself, but because they DID try every other thing they could first. it was a last resort! carlos DID NOT WANT to die, he wanted to save everybody, including himself! he had thoroughly considered the possibility that he would have to die, but he put that on the furthest backburner. he didn't want to die, but when it came down to it, he said, i won't be manipulated and i wont play god. back me into a corner, twist my arm, i won't do it. fuck you, i won't be your plaything. deans whole thing is that he doesn't wanna be anybodys plaything! not chuck's, not azazel's, not even john's. and he always is. and giving up never works for him. he never gets to choose. hes trapped in the game against his will. he doesn't even want to win the game, he just wants to quit playing. but the rules are that if he doesn't play, that's still playing, and he loses. if he does play, he loses. its rigged. there's no winning and no forfeit for dean. but for carlos, there was both this time. quitting was winning. everybody lives. the ideal outcome, if your name is dean winchester.

carlos is everything dean wishes he could be, or wishes he could believe he was. brave, strong, confident, smart, funny, drop dead gorgeous, selfless, complicated, sensitive, intuitive, comfortable, endearing. and he wins the way dean always wished he could.

[kleenexwoman]

Fanfic Writer Emoji Ask

😅 💋 💞 🧠(Emma Frost)

😅 So there's a LOT of work on Fanfiction.Net that I decided not to import over here in my initial sweep. Like, a lot. There's some middle-school science rants about the Animorphs, Smallville Mary Sues--I wrote someone else's goth Mary Sue as being best friends with my wacky overpowered Mary Sue (that was genuinely fun, she wrote me into hers, but I feel like it loses a lot without context), some extremely edgy and horny Harry Potter surveyfic, and a Harry Potter friendfic where I borrowed a lot of world building from Michael Swanwick's "The Iron Dragon's Daughter", and just... A ton of stuff, really. I'll probably quietly recycle my more ambitious ideas into something more polished someday.

💋 First kiss fics are my jam. The tension just before a kiss is SO GOOD, I love how much authors can ratchet up the chemistry and touching and flirting before the mouth actually seals the deal. Sometimes with first-time fics I actually lose interest by the time the sex starts, depending on the writing -- like, if you're giving me some really intense and specific horniness, the actual fucking better at least hold up to the standard you've set, otherwise you're really better served by a well-timed fade-to-black.

💞 Magneto is my villain comfort character because I'm a Jewish mutant. I feel safe standing behind Metal Zayde, whether it's facing a Neo-Nazi threat or an anti-mutant threat. (I know I don't have an X-gene. I'm autistic and I think that's enough for me to identify with mutants as a group.) Yeah, I assume I would have a mutant power of some kind and that it would be not very useful in a fight. I would cling to Mags like a limpet.

As far as heroes go, OG Napoleon and Illya are honestly pretty comforting. If I'm an Innocent, they're not gonna let me get hurt (too badly). Illya will be a dick but not much of one. Napoleon will adjust his flirting style to being charmingly avuncular once he realizes I'm just a nerdy lesbian. And in the case that I end up being the mad scientist they're trying to stop, I'm pretty sure I can go, "THRUSH made me do it! I'm so scared of them, can you just get them all out of my base so I can keep working on my, uh, healing machine?" and then hit them with my genderswap ray under guise of treating their booboos. Level One, here I come!

Aloysius Pendergast used to be a comfort character for me, but then he let a math demon hang out his brain and started dating his hundred-year-old-teenaged ward, so he's kinda not that anymore.

🧠 Emma Frost was actually a flapper. She has that mutant slow-aging gene, and enough healing gene so that her body tends to revert back to how it was before her cosmetic surgery slowly, which is why she keeps getting them. She just mentally adjusts things so that nobody realizes how old she really is. She did still genuinely come from money, though, her backstory is just a little longer. She uses her mental image of her old self when she wants to be truly unrecognizable. Sometimes she thinks about just letting all of it go, letting the implants push themselves out, her nose revert, her roots show, her stretch marks and wrinkles and cellulite all appear on her body again, but she's terrified nobody would recognize her and that she'd forget how to reconstruct the ideal body she keeps carefully maintaining.