#an advertisement only a teenager could have written

[escapebygawking]

Unsuccessful applicants will include time-wasters

[dairy-farmer]

Need Tim to have a very brief career as a pop musician. Rebeccah Black, Kardashian style where he doesn’t right or care about the songs making process it’s purely for publicity and his public persona. Two maybe three music videos where is super 2000’s lipgloss pop. Then everyone just moves on like it never happened

just like those universe where bruce is a realiy tv star!!! tim tries to think of the most brainless, blatently ego inflating, and fame chasing thing he could do for his cover and settles on pop singing. at the time the music "flops" by industry standards, a handful of articles get written, a couple hundred thousand downloads but its perfect and just what tim was going for. he chose the most catchy songs with the most meaningless lyrics that were easy to remember and finish recoring within a day because he has shit to do. he doesn't advertise, doesn't care much about the songs aside from dropping them and dipping because their purpose was just in stirring up some interest for his shallow civilian persona.

and for years thats all it is. only that for some reason years later tim's music and long forgotten songs resurge in popularity. might have something to do with the fact that the recording studio bundles a bunch of audio and sold it as roylaty free music to a distributer and now all of a sudden tim's old songs are being used by internet users who make videos and edits. tim is getting FAR more attention than he wanted because these people are taking his music serious????

the music isn't even good by tim's standards!! granted tim listens to dad rock, punk, and some gotham based rap and hip hop groups. but tim choose the most sugary, lipgloss, bubblegum pop mix music he could find because it was SO different from what he liked. tim doesn't even sing for most of the song!!! its mostly drum loops, synths, and some instrument playing.

and now people are suddenly shifting attention to him for somethingg he did as a publicity stunt years ago.

im just dying at the thought of teenage tim dropping like 5 songs one day and doing nothing for years only for them to explode years later and now he's stuck in a situation of his own making. tim's music getting the dc equivalent of tiktokified 😭😭😭!!!

[losfacedevil]

Darkness of The Night // SFK

a/n~ This one is something that has been eating my brain for the last few weeks. I know very little about Vampires so please, be gentle. I’ve pulled a lot of inspiration from I See Hell In Your Eyes by @joshsindigostreak (run and read it if you haven’t!) Also the biggest shout outs to @vanfleeter @readyforthegarden & @joshsindigostreak for fully supporting and encouraging this idea, I may not have written it had they not! (WC 3.3k)

WARNINGS: Mentions of blood, biting and such.

Without further ado…

There was a certain comfort that was found in the freedom and solitude of hitting the road with no real destination in mind. A night away from home after a stressful, and trying week calling your name as you packed an overnight bag and slipped into your car. Jamming the key into the ignition, you started the car and backed out if your driveway, a soft sigh escaping you as you began the short journey to the highway. 

With the windows down as far as they could go you zoomed down the highway, just barely abiding by the speed limit. Feel good music of your teenage years blasted through the car radio speakers, just loud enough to be audible through the wind whipping around the car but not loud enough to earn you a citation from an angry state trooper. The farther you traveled the lower the music was set as the wind slowly dissipated around you and the calm of the night time sky shrouded the road in darkness. 

You glanced at the clock on the dashboard, noting that it was close to dinner time, and as if on cue, your stomach rumbled loudly. A soft chuckle slipped past your lips and you reached down, rubbing your hand gently against your stomach as your eyes scanned the road signs, looking for one that advertised any sort of food that was nearby. It didn’t take long for you to find an exit that lead you directly to a small little mom and pop shop just down the road from where you exited the highway and you pulled in to the parking lot, cutting the engine off as you stared into the dimly lit building.  

Wired - a little hole in the wall mom and pop shop you had never heard of and the perfect indication that you had traveled a lot farther than you had meant to travel. Pulling a deep breath in through your nose, you secured your bag on your shoulder and slid out of the car, eyeing the building with just a little more suspicion. A flashing neon ‘Open’ sign being the only indication that the diner was open. 

A little set of jingle bells placed above the door began to sound as you pushed the door open, alerting the waitress to your presence. She popped her head around the door frame from kitchen and a soft smile spread across her lips as she wiped her hands on the dish towel slung over her shoulder. She sauntered her way out from the back and rested her arm against the countertop, leaning forward slightly as you stood just inside the door looking around at the quaint little dining area. 

“Hey, Sugar. What’s got you down around these parts?” She asked, slapping her order pad and pen down against the counter top. A sheepish smile spread across your face as you made your way to the counter and perched yourself against the edge of the chair. 

“I just needed to get away for the night so I packed a bag and hit the open road. Any hotels around here you could recommend?” You asked and pulled the laminated menu across the counter so you could get a better look at it. The waitress never took her eyes off of you as she watched you scan the menu curiously before deciding on the easiest thing they could make. 

“There’s one just a few blocks up a friend of mine owns, he’ll help you out, no problem. Now, what can I get you to eat?” She cooed and quickly jotted down your order for a burger and fries with a coffee to wash it all down with. A soft smile spread across her face and she produced a water bottle from what you could only imagine was a mini fridge under the counter. 

“You hang tight, I’ll have that food ready for you in a jiffy!” The soft tone of her voice reminded you that you were safe in the diner - even if you felt like the area was a little bit off for your liking. 

You let your mind and eyes wander, taking in every ‘first dollar’ from their original opening and subsequent re-openings over the years. A peculiar painting of what looked like a family from a fantasy world occupied the spot right next to the door to the back. A tall man with long, dark hair, a long dark goatee, and oddly pointed looking ears sat next to a blonde haired blue eyed woman who was holding a baby that looked to be her carbon copy. 

That was when you caught movement out of the corner of your eye. Taking a deep breath, you shifted your gaze to the opening in the wall and that was when you spotted him. A boy who looked no more than twenty one peered at you around the far back corner, in constant motion as he washed dish after dish, leaning over only slightly to place them in what you assumed to be a drying rack. His gaze was piercing, the dark color of his irises only amplified by the dim lighting in his work space. He worked blindly, his gaze not leaving yours until you broke the awkward eye contact and averted your gaze to the very outdated menu board to your left. 

You were shaken out of your thoughts as the bubbly waitress made her way out of the back and placed a plate with a burger the size of your face and a heaping helping of fries to match down on the counter in front of you. Your mouth watered as the smell of the food hit your nostrils and you shot the waitress a beaming smile as you began to pluck fries off of your place and popped them eagerly into your mouth. 

“If you need anything else you let me know okay, Sugar? I’m gonna go help Sammy back there wash the rest of the dishes from the dinner rush. Just give me a holler.” She smiled brightly and placed a hand against yours, squeezing it gently before she turned on her heel and disappeared into the back. 

There was something calming in the quiet of the diner, the only sounds drifting through the air being that of the clinking dinnerware being washed somewhere behind the wall. You pulled out your phone and headphones, needing just a little enrichment in the quiet space of the diner. Placing an ear bud gently in your ear you scrolled to your favorite chill playlist and let the soft music engulf your mind and senses as you enjoyed the food set in front of you. 

It didn’t take long for you to finish your dinner, having not eaten anything in the last couple of hours, and you sighed contentedly as you sipped on your remaining coffee. You let your eyes begin to wander again, this time landing on a portion of the wall that was covered with newspaper clippings and articles all about Wired and its rich family history. ‘Family owned for 90 years!’ Read one of the article titles. Squinting your eyes you tried to make out some of the print below the title, quite curious about the diner you sat in. 

The sound of someone clearing their throat caught your attention and you turned your head back to the proper position. There in front of you stood a tall, lanky male; one you recognized as the boy that was holding a starting contest with you earlier in the evening. There was something about the dark amber color of his eyes that had you entranced and a soft smile spread across your face by way of a greeting. 

Your heart hammered in your chest as you took in his appearance. The youthful glow of his skin was something you could only wish to be in possession of. The warm color of his cheeks having your stomach feeling weird and it was then that you noticed his hair. Worn in a loose bun at the nape of his neck, you couldn’t help but wonder just how long his hair truly was. 

“Mind if I?” He mumbled and motioned to the now empty plate that sat in front of you. You shook your head gently and nodded at the plate, signaling you were fully finished using it. 

“Absolutely, have at it.” You couldn’t help the giggle that slipped past your lips. There was just something enchanting about the man that stood in front of you. His gaze never left yours as he scooped up the plate and grimaced slightly, his thumb having slipped into the now warm ketchup that was smeared across the lip of the plate. 

“Ketchup is far too reminiscent of blood for my liking.” He mumbled and swiftly turned on his heel, making his way back into the kitchen where the clattering of the plate in the sink could be heard. A breath you weren’t aware you had been holding whooshed out of your chest and you slumped forward slightly, suddenly light headed. The waitress - whose name you hadn’t caught - made her way back into the dining area and a worried look kissed her features. 

“Hey honey, are you feeling alright?” She asked, placing a cool hand against your now flushed forehead. You nodded your head and tried to straighten the way you were sitting. Reaching forward you grabbed for the now room temperature water bottle that sat next to your cup of coffee and downed half of it in one gulp. 

“Yeah I… I think maybe I just need rest. Where did you say the nearest hotel was?” You asked, trying to will away the woozy feeling you weren’t sure the cause of.  You could see the man you now knew as Sammy out of your peripheral vision, standing just slightly out of view in the doorway to the back of the building. 

He had scented you before he even saw you, noting the way something subtly sweet and floral clung to your skin. His mouth had began to water and gums itched as his fangs tried to break free of their confines and slip down into place. He knew better than to act on the instincts he was still trying to learn to rein in, having only been working in the same building as humans for a very short period of time. 

Sam’s mind reeled with the possibilities of getting you alone and convincing you that just a little taste would be okay. But he knew better, human blood was not there for the taking. He couldn’t stand the phantom hammering of his heart in his chest and spun on a heel, trying to distance himself even further from you when his coworker called his name. 

“Sammy, won’t you be a dear and walk our friend to her car? We wouldn’t want anything to happen to her, now would we?” She drawled and placed a reassuring hand on your arm, instilling in your head that you would be safe and unharmed in Sam’s care. His eyes fluttered shut and he swallowed hard, willing the flaring of his nostrils to cease as he turned back around and slowly made his way to the counter. 

“Yes, we wouldn’t want any… demons of the night to come out and snatch her, now would we, Marjorie?” The way he spoke was smooth, his voice keeping a steady tone even when he turned to you. You felt your eyes widen slightly and you swallowed hard as you willed yourself to believe the way his eyes shown red was a play of the dim lighting you were sitting in. 

Sam made his way around the small counter and cupped his hand gently around your elbow, helping you to stand and slowly began to lead you out of the diner. You weren’t sure why you felt the way you did or why you were fully on board with this man having a steadying hand against your elbow, but you allowed him to lead you out of the diner and into the darkness beyond. 

“So what’s a pretty girl like you doing around these parts alone?” The last word slipped past his lips in a tone you weren’t quite sure how to decipher. You swallowed hard and shook your head gently, trying to rid it of the brain fog that was slowly creeping in. 

“I uh… needed a night away from my life so I…um. I packed a bag and just took off but I’m not entirely sure… where exactly I am.” Your ability to form sentences became sluggish and you squeezed your eyes shut as you wracked your brain for the words you were looking for. 

The hammering of your heart in your chest was starting to drive him crazy. His eyes fluttered shut and his grip on your elbow faltered, allowing you to free yourself from his grasp and you leaned up against the side of your car. Sam regretted the deep, calming breath he pulled in through his nose as your subtly sweet scent enveloped his senses and his gums began to ache. 

“And how did you find us? We’re not exactly your average fast food chain.” He mumbled and let his eyes meet yours willingly for the first time that night. You swallowed hard, hoping the darkness and the fluorescents of the street lights were the reason the amber coloring of his eyes seemed off. Pulling a deep breath in through your nose you couldn’t help but take notice of the way he smelled. The richness of what you could only guess what leather and a hint of bitter sweetness danced in your nostrils. 

“There was a sign advertising food at this exit. This place was the first place I found.” You gulped as his hand came to rest on the car next to your head and he leaned in slightly, closing some of the distance between the two of you. A soft smile spread across his lips as he reached up with his other hand and curled his index finger under your chin, tilting it ever so slightly. 

“And we were… enticing enough for you to stop, were we?” He questioned and swallowed hard, dipping his head lower and pulled a deep breath in through his nose. Your eyes fluttered shut as the sudden contact, focusing on how the cool skin of the tip of his nose felt against the warmth of your neck. 

Iris - your scent was sweet and subtly tainted of the scent of irises. Sam’s mouth began to water and his fangs slowly descended as your scent wrapped him in feelings he was unsure of how to handle. 

“This was the closest place… I didn’t want to fall asleep at the wheel… needed food.” Your thoughts were jumbled as Sam’s large hand engulfed the side of your neck, his fingers spread wide and he slowly danced them over your warmed skin. 

“Your skin is so soft…you wouldn’t mind if I stole a little taste of it… would you? The perfect payment for your meal.” He mumbled, nuzzling his face gently into the crook of your neck. You felt the scrape of something against your neck and your mind went blank, unsure of what exactly was happening. 

Sam knew he had you right where he wanted you and he slowly pierced your skin with his fangs. A groan slipped past his lips as your blood slowly trickled into his mouth, so warm and sweet, a taste he knew was forbidden but too good to pass up. His pulls were gentle at first, his intentions only meaning to pull a taste from you. But the more he savored the taste, trying to put his finger on what exactly you tasted of, the harder the pulls he began to take from you. It was then that a memory of yours bloomed in his mind - something he wasn’t familiar with.

Tears streamed down your cheeks as you sat in the break room of your store, trying to process what had just happened. Being called out by a customer wasn’t anything out of the ordinary in your line of work but the hand she had raised and struck you with had taken you fully off guard. You had spun on your heal and ran to the back, wanting nothing more than to shrivel up and hide. 

“Hey, are you okay?” Your coworkers placed a reassuring hand on your shoulder and help up an ice pack for you to take. You nodded gently and accepted her offering, holding it gently against your cheek. 

“What happened?” She asked, rubbing your shoulders reassuringly as she listened to you recount exactly what had happened. A deep sigh slipped past your lips and you shrugged your shoulders, pulling the ice pack away from your face briefly so your skin could warm. 

“I just want to go home. Maybe take off for the weekend, I don’t know.”

The memory faded away and Sam’s mind became painfully aware of just how slow your heart beat had gotten. He willed himself to pull back and ran his tongue along the puncture wound by way of healing it, as panic slowly began to set low in the pit of his stomach. Your body has since gone limp, legs no longer holding your own weight  as Sam pressed his chest firmly against yours. He knew he screwed up and only had a matter of minutes to make a decision to let you go or heal your now lifeless body. 

“Shit, shit, SHIT!” His words came out on a whispered scream, not wanting Marjorie to become aware of his antics. 

Sam sank to the ground and leaned his back against your car, slowly laying your lifeless body across his lap. He drew in a deep breath between his gritted teeth and lifted his bare wrist to his lips, piercing his fangs through the thin skin of his wrist. His breath caught in his throat as he watched the blood he had drawn from his own body pool against his skin. Panic began to cause a phantom hammering of his no longer beating heart in his chest and he brought his wrist to your slightly parted lips. He couldn’t help the way his eyes widened as you still lay unresponsive, the inner turmoil of you being his first kill something he couldn’t fully come to terms with. 

“C’mon, please, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to.” His voice broke as his whispers fell on deaf ears. There was a feeling of finality washing over him as he made the decision that you were too far gone. A soft sigh escaped him as he flexed his wrist once more and a fresh stream of his blood trickled into your mouth. Sam let his head fall back against the car door, fighting the phantom feeling of tears prickling the backs of his eyes. 

It was then that he felt your muscles tense slightly, a positive reaction to the blood he had been feeding you. Your head fell to the side and your lips wrapped around his wrist, the tell tale feel of and instinctual pull causing all of the air to whoosh out of Sam’s chest as he realized you were going to pull through. 

Your body felt more alive in his lap, your muscles no longer laying lifeless against his thighs. Sam breathed a sigh of relief as your lips released his wrist and you head rolled in the opposite direction. Sam’s eyes snapped in the direction of the diner, knowing he had been outside for far too long and he focused his mind on Marjorie’s and slowly back tracked the timing in her head, accounting for more than half of the time he had been out of the diner. 

Pulling a deep breath in through his nose he shuffled the way he was sitting and pulled his phone out of his back pocket. Tilting his head to the sky he screwed his eyes shut and blindly maneuvered through his contact list. He pressed the phone to his ear and counted the rings on the other end, knowing Josh wouldn’t answer on the first. His chest ached as the line came alive and his eldest brother greeted him down the line. 

“Josh… I screwed up big time.”

Until next time….

TAGLIST: @vanfleeter @readyforthegarden @joshsindigostreak @ascendingtostardust @sammysprincess @sammykiszkamyass @belovedsamuel @dannythedog @stardustvanfleet @devilat-thedoor @the-wicked-gnome @runwayblues @gracev0609 @lipstickitty @sunfl0wer-power @allieisacrybaby

[makingspiritualityreal]

Hello,

I was just trying out the vault of heavens calculation opposed to lahiri. Most of my nakshatras have stayed the same apart from my sun, mercury and venus, the first two moved from punarvasu to pushya, and the latter moved from mrigashira to ardra.

It’s interesting because out of all my big 3 placements, I always related to my moon (bharani) and my ascendant (swati) more than my sun. I never thought much about punarvasu but then again I do have significant Jupiter influence regardless

I just wanted to ask if you have any insights on pushya nakshatra or if you’ve written any posts on it in the past?

I have wondered if I had any saturn influence in the past because my life has been a series of delays, humbling experiences and karmic lessons but I always attributed that to my bharani moon. Never really got much of that supposed jupiterian instant success and opportunities 🤔

I went through that exact same journey only for me it was my Moon. It went from Punarvasu to Pushya in the Mula ayanamsa, and I have studied charts of so many people for so many years, resonated with all my other Nakshatras, the Sun and the Rising, I’ve seen Punarvasu work in other charts and couldn’t for the life of me relate it to myself. It’s a horrible thing for an astrologer who could easily give readings to so many people with no difficulty not to be able to relate to their own Moon Nakshatra.

I honestly could have written that ask myself. I had the same reasoning, because I also have a strong Jupiter influence regardless, so I just kind of rolled with my Moon and ignored that I wasn’t feeling good about it (Sun and Rising in Vishakha) and even if you do facial comparison, that Jupiter energy can get confusing in between Nakshatras. So the time I spent not diving seriously into the vault of the heavens website I kind of lived in partial unconsciousness about myself and focused on helping everyone else.

I always related to the Vishakha analysis I saw online, but never to the Punarvasu one. Then I also had the exact same impression, that I never had that early luck, that Moon in Jupiterian Nakshatras is supposed to have (as we mature into our Sun way later in life). A Saturn ruled Moon made much more sense to me, because any success I ever had even as a child was always a result of hard work and applying myself, or waiting for those results a serious while, overcoming significant hardship.

I never wrote anything longer about Pushya, I will if and when I feel inspired to do so.

What caught my attention as a defining trait is that Punarvasu is so effortlessly giving, creative and maternal. These traits repeat themselves anywhere you look at this Nakshatra in women. It’s not just about success, it’s about creative expression, they pour themselves into it. Pushya more so explores themes where something can easily get in the way of that. They exist more for others than themselves in a way. The embodiment of a Guru is alive there.

Growing up, I always felt like I was more of a teacher even to my peers rather than a teenage girl. Ultimately, even though Punarvasu is ruled by Jupiter, Pushya gets a much more intense spiritual dimension.

When I was researching the Cancer Moon sign in general to compare between celebrities (some Ardras become Punarvasu in vault of the heavens also) you can clearly see the difference.

I’m going to use women I feel to be the most appropriate examples. Between Taylor Swift, Dua Lipa and Amy Lee they are all Cancer Moons (I use the vault of the heavens tropical ayanamsa). Taylor is an Ardra, Dua is Punarvasu, Amy is a Pushya. You can see a clear progression of emotion. Taylor mostly calls out people’s bad behaviors and difficult moments in her songs, even if there is a silver lining, because Rudra, shining through Ardra is a destroyer and he delights in brining flaws to light, so she delights in making difficult life experiences relatable. Dua’s recent album is so Punarvasu it could be advertising this Nakshatra. I feel like before she was more commercialized and she only grew into herself with this album, especially with songs like “Happy for You”. Such a Punarvasu song, about discovering forgiveness and selflessness and unconditional love, but also so innocent it made me even more sure it’s not my Nakshatra because I couldn’t personally find my state in it, sadly.

Then we move on to Pushya and suddenly the darkness sets in. Amy used to have a full on goth image that by now has slightly toned down, but in Pushya all the difficult emotional spectrum and trying experiences come out, pain so deep you are surprised another person’s love could even put you back together at this point. Reminds me of Claire Naktis Cinderella video about Saturn women. Pushya is after all the first of them. But to be a saved princess you have to first need saving, and that theme appears only in Pushya, because Saturn here gives birth to a low point to overcome.

[lollytea]

Re pen featherington, I love (and love to hate) just how messy the whole thing is. Everything she does for good intentions is also tarnished by being just as self serving, it’s sooo not black and white. Like yess, Colin should know what he’s getting into marrying Marina, but to air the whole thing out to the world?? When Pen KNOWS that Colin is the type of guy who’d agree to be a dad to a non-bio kid. And the fact that the breaking point for exposing eloise was eloise saying she’ll pose as lady whistledown? Like girl the final straw was not protecting your friend it was your own reputation??

(I just really love the juxtaposition with her and eloise though. That "at least I did something" really did hit home. Oof!!! But at what cost??)

But genuinely I DO NOT KNOW how she can pull off peacefully entering the bridgerton household with all the scandal and heartache she’s put them through, especially with one of them already knowing her secret. And it’s almost the Marina situation for Colin all over again!!! You can’t stand by your decision to out Marina to protect Colin and then expect Eloise to not out your secret to protect him too. Karma is alive and well in the ton!!!

(I'm sorry you sent this a while ago but I forgot to answer it!!)

I admire how realistically flawed both Eloise and Penelope are. Eloise is self centered and arrogant and judgemental and whiny. Penelope is cowardly yet impulsive. She's scathing and cruel and she has too much power and she uses it flippantly to hurt other people. They're both just teenagers who are in WAY over their head. They kinda suck. But they're still so young and so sheltered, despite being already advertised for marriage. Because of the society they've been placed into, they've both donned such nasty armor to protect themselves. Little girls who are expected to perform as adults. It's made them terrible people. But unfortunately, I don't think the narrative itself views it that way, which makes it frustrating. I'm perfectly okay with the show having its main characters do awful things, but I'd appreciate it if said awful things leave an impact.

I think what Penelope did to Marine was probably the vilest thing she has ever done. I don't really consider the Eloise thing half as terrible. At least it was at least somewhat of a "frying pan or fire" situation that Penelope felt like she had to choose for Eloise. Meanwhile, with Marina, Pen should have just minded her own damn business.

Like. Colin would have been FINE. He's a man. A rich man. Getting married to a woman who lied to him would not be the end of his life. At worst, he would have been a bit unsatisfied. Meanwhile if Marina did NOT marry Colin, she could have been on the street. The girl lied and manipulated for the sake of survival. And I frankly don't care if she did. They're really going to create a society where women are held at the mercy of men and NOT expect the women to start getting all gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss about it? Fuck yourself. Maybe the men should just be smarter.

It's debatable if Penelope really understands the complexity of the situation. Or if she even realizes just what could become of Marina if her secret is revealed. After all, she is only a teenage girl at the time. And a sheltered one, at that. However, Lady Whistledown proves that Penelope, for all her sexual unawareness, is exceptionally intelligent and has an extensive knowledge of social norms. So it's like....iunno? Did she fully understand the consequences of her actions? Did she care? Did she regret it? Or was she just a stupid lovesick girl who only cared about a boy who barely looked at her.

I think I'd really just like Penelope to talk about it. Explain what was going through her head at the time. Allow this action of hers to be held with significant weight by the narrative. What pisses me off is that it was just waved off as irrelevent once Marina was written out of the show. Its like they're scared of delving into it because the show loves shying away from what a messy character Penelope is. At the moment, it feels like they're ignoring it in favour of making her a misunderstood tragic angel.

ALSO YEAH it makes me so sad. I saw a few gifsets of the scene where Colin announces their engagement to the family and Violet and Francesca and Hyancinth are so wholesomely delighted and they swarm Penelope with affection. They love her. They love her so deeply. Meanwhile she has caused this family so much pain. And she did so deliberately. What will they think of her once its revealed? What bothers me is that I fear that THEIR feelings are going to be glossed over as unimportant.

But COLIN'S feelings too!!! How the fuck are you gonna do that?? Like even if he wasn't in love with Marina, she was still an innocent girl in a difficult situation that he had quite a lot of affection for. And then he finds out that his current fiancée ruined her life. How is he supposed to react to that? And his sister too!! His sister who he loves deeply. Colin is supposed to be kind. I really can't imagine him feeling anything but disgust. But I KNOW the show is gonna have him way too heart-eyed over Penelope to really care to the extent that he SHOULD. He MIGHT be angry but it probably won't last long. And there definitely won't be a satisfying reason for his anger to subside. Probably just because Penelope looked at him with her big puppy eyes.

AND YKNOW I wouldn't even care if Penelope and Colin were simply acknowledged as shitty people. But they're not. Penelope is a messy morally grey queen but the show is scared of getting into the thick of it. They've made her do too much awful shit and now they're scared to unpack it. Now she's their special little princess <333

UGGHH. YKNOW???

[choicesficwriterscreations]

CFWC Writer of the Month: Princess-Geek

Each month CFWC highlights one of our talented fanfic writers, and this month’s writer of the month is @princess-geek ! We hope you will enjoy learning more about her and her work below! The writer is selected at random. More info can be found on the navigation page.

Quick Links:

Tumblr Blog: princess-geek Blog Masterlist

1- When did you start playing Choices? What was the first book you played? 

I think it was around the summer of 2018. I wanted to improve my English, and I was looking for a fun way to do it. Looking for apps on Google Play, I tripped over advertisements of “simulation” games, including Choices. It was the least bizarre on the list. The idea of transfiguring myself into another reality was quite appealing. The first book I played was “The Freshman - Book 1”

2- When and why did you join Choices fandom?

After playing the first books, I was thirsty for more. I decided to search online and found the magical world of fanfication. In my quest for more content, I found Tumblr. I read for a while without an account, but then I created a profile in December 2018.

3- How did you pick your blog name? 

It took days to pick. I wanted something that would represent my essence and not restrict my blog to the Choices world. I wanted it to lump together all my other interests.

After much thought, I came up with the name "princess-geek."

"Princess" because she was always very girly and fascinated by the world of princesses (Disney's fault).

"Geek" because even though it's not my only interest, since I was a teenager I really like technology and keeping up with the trends. I spent hours as a child discovering all the secrets of our home computer.

4- Pull up the first post in your archive, and tell us about it!  

It was a song, “More than friends” by Jason Mraz ft Meghan Trainor . I was hooked on the song at the time, and I still love it.

5- How long have you been writing fanfiction?

I had never written fanfic until I joined the fandom. My first attempt was a very short story about Ethan x MC (Jane Silva). "Under the hot sun".  It's lost somewhere on Tumblr and I can't find it. Here is the link to my story in AO3.  

It was written in the summer of 2019, so I consider my shy start

6- What is your favorite Choices book, and what is your favorite Choices book to write about? In both cases, the answer is Desire & Decorum, but I would love to try other stories like TRR and BLADES.

7- Share the first fanfic you wrote with us. Do you still like it, or would you change it if you were writing it today?

Despite what I shared in question 5, I consider my first true fanfic was "Cinnamon Mouth", another Ethan Ramsey x MC (Dr. Jane Silva) story, posted on 20 September 2019.

It's a silly story, but I don't think I'd change a single comma, because it represents the beginning of something very important to me.

8- What is your favorite fic that you’ve written?

It’s “Chapters III - First Impressions”. I love it because some important characters are  introduced and it has a bit of everything: fun moments, some mystery and drama

9- Do you have a fic that you didn’t expect to be well received, but it was? What about one you expected to be but found could use a little more love?

I didn't expect you to like "Chapter VIII -Heart in ashes" as it's emotionally heavy, addressing topics such as death and mourning.

The fic “Winter Adventures - All’s fair in love and snowballs” could use a bit more love. It was a pleasure to write with @ezekielbhandarivalleros, and the chapter is so funny! I recommend it to anyone who wants to have a winter adventure in the comfort of the fireplace.

10- If you could write only angst, fluff, or smut for the rest of your writing life, which would it be and why? 

Fluff! Fluff!! Fluff!!! Life is complicated, that's why the world needs fluff stories that warm the heart and make us dream.

11- Do you ever recognize yourself in any of your MCs or in your writing?

Yes a bit. I've lived vicariously through my MC|OC Beatrice Foredale. We have some things in common, like curiosity, the dream of becoming a journalist and the will to change the world, although my ambitions are much more modest than hers. 

12- What element of writing do you struggle with most?

Dialogues. I am always afraid that they are not natural and fluid. As English is not my native language, there are subtleties that I don't understand, and I know that this affects my work.

13- Do you have any neglected work you really want to finish?

Yes, the victim is my new chapter. I wouldn't call it negligence, but a mismatch. When I have ideas, I don't have energy; When I have energy, I have no ideas, or often both. I hope can finish it soon. 

14- If someone you know in real life (who isn’t involved in fandoms) asked to read your work, would you let them? If yes, what would you recommend they read first? 

Only if it was someone I trusted completely. I have some fear of judgment. Not even my sister, who is one of those people of absolute trust, knows about my writing adventures. If it ever happens, I probably will recommend the fic “Cuteness & Mischievousness” because no one can don’t like puppies!

15 - Are there any writers (published authors and/or fanfic writers) who influenced your writing? 

The style of the Portuguese writer Eça de Queirós and Jane Auten are definitely my paradigms. Eça de Queirós is a master of descriptions and irony, elements that I invest a lot in my fics. Here on Tumblr, my inspiring muses are @missameliep (her main characters are so real that they become our friends, making us laugh and suffer with them), @noesapphic (Her plots are complex but hypnotic. We get lost in her worlds and we don't want to leave.) and @storyofmychoices (I marvel at the number of plots and characters she creates for her stories. Her blog is a cave of wonders!). In all three, I also deeply admire their dedication to writing and their enormous kind hearts.

16- Which one of your stories would you most like to see as a movie/series? 

I'd love if my "Unspoken Desires" were a TV series. I think people would love the romance and drama.

17- Do you write original fiction? 

I tried several times throughout my life, but I was never successful. For now, I’m happy with fanfiction. 

18 -  What other hobbies do you have?

I love to read as much as I love to write. I like to take walks outdoors, do cross stitch, paint clothes and wooden pieces to offer to family and friends. And, whenever I can, get to know a new place.

19 - It’s Valentine’s Month! Tell us your feelings about the holiday (good or bad!) Do you have any Valentine’s Day fics planned? 

I do not give particular importance to the holiday. Love should be celebrated and demonstrated every day. However, I can say that I have fond memories of the holiday. While we were at school, a friend always wrote to us on this day to say how much she appreciated us. I still have some of those letters. Perhaps by that date a new chapter will be released. Although it was not intended for the occasion, love is the central theme of the chapter.

21: BONUS - tell us anything you’d like (if you want to!) 

Despite all the ups and downs, this fandom has been a wonderful place to be. Thank you so much for all the work your blog has done and for this opportunity to talk about me and my work.

[plasticcharmbracelet]

Crow

For @wriightworth for the 2023 AJ:AA Secret Santa!

I have no clue what this is. I hope you can derive some enjoyment from it anyhow?

The sky is the brownish grey of cheap paper, and the dry stalks inside the fence and the dry grasses outside it abrade one another quietly in the weak, warm, suspirant breeze that has breathed unceasingly on him for the long afternoon of three months.

Apollo doesn’t really care whether the birds are scared or not. It’s been one long day / a week / three withering summer months, and the sky hasn’t changed, and he can’t close his eyes.

He can’t move. He can’t make a sound. He has not always been a scarecrow, but he is. He is one now.

Apollo has almost never spoken about growing up in another country, wedged in the mountains east of Nepal and Bhutan, and he has spoken even less about growing up in two different countries, because his childish, snowblind memories of the faraway supported him during his foundling years in Los Angeles the way a bangle bracelet and a broken promise never did.

His foster father in the Himalayas had had little enough choice to bring Apollo and his own son along on those expeditions. Children were obviously at risk in the faraway, but at least at more easily disregarded risk than if left to themselves in a bungalow in the snow for an overnight hike that might take three years on the other end. But Apollo’s gratitude for the trips had extended beyond the simply practical, because -

Because a fugitive in the reported world could wield wonders away. A person could feed promises to the wind and to the steep planes of sunlight and have them kept, in words written on the clapper of a chime hung in the air or drawn in powdered pigment on the snow. 

Because a runaway could have promises kept, and beauty with them. And when he was homesick, it was the faraway he was homesick for.

He had spent years scrabbling at the walls of the world. Very literally, as a child, and then via research and rumors in the internet’s dirty puddles as a teenager, in libraries as a student, and at last, as an adult, by reading between the lines of every job listing tangentially related to Law. His foster father had told him the truth about this, as much as he hated to admit it. Gates to the faraway have irregular locations and subtle locks, and lucky discoveries are children’s stories; everyone who has learned one has found someone to show it to them. 

Two years and seven months out of law school, a job making transcripts overnight, before he had finally seen the advertisement whose in-between-the-lines he had read correctly and whose demands he had been able to meet. A little old-fashioned, the skills required, the wording.

Kristoph Gavin, Esq. A little old-fashioned, the man’s clothes. (Though handsome, striking even, the man who wore them.) A little strange, the quiet pools of tension in the conversation.

And at last, after a probation with the mail and the filing cabinets and the little tests in every detail, he had followed his new boss up a narrow flight of stairs in the strange office building - a fading blue piece of 1980s Los Angeles frivolity with circular windows and half-stories and a wraparound balcony - and into a parlor left over from an earlier time than that, one full of dark wooden furniture and glass-fronted cabinets and a grandfather clock whose silver pendulum only wriggled once in its case, and whose windows looked out not on a wide intersection full of Mercedes-Benzes and box trucks but on this Kansas that would never know Technicolor. 

And his new boss had smiled at him across a desk and a cup of milk with barely a splash enough of coffee to deserve the name before taking his left arm in a blacksmith’s grip, pulling his bracelet off his wrist, and hauling him out of the room over his shoulder as if he were a sack of dry leaves. He was.

The breeze rattles the brown stems, the sun never moves, there’s a pole along his shoulders and one at his back, and he’s forgetting the lines of Auden’s Roman Wall Blues.

In the mountains north and east of Ojai, there is a tiny community started by long-ago immigrants from the same Himalayas, and their spot in the faraway had been a vague goal. Somewhere the rules might be similar enough to what he remembers, where he could conceivably reacclimate or acclimate at all.  But he had anticipated something entirely else for faraway Los Angeles - tomols pulling up onto golden beaches, turquoise Hockney poolwater, willow/tule domes alongside silver screen diners where a girl could be discovered on that lucky afternoon. Colors that would suit Kristoph Gavin, blond and blue and white.

Here there are crows sometimes, circling and yelling above the prarie brown beyond the fence, but they don’t approach. Neither does the man who hired him, fooled him, brought him here, robbed him and planted him in this grim faraway grass.

Over the heather / I don’t know why / I shall do nothing but look at the sky.

A crow lands on him.

Perhaps the wind has become infinitesimally stronger or the haze infinitesimally darker, but it may just be that this crow LOOKS storm-tossed, tumbling out of the air exhausted with feathers in all directions. The oily sheen on it is purplish and its beak hangs open as it heaves to breathe. 

Apollo can do nothing for it. Not a movement, not a sound - but his paralysis, in the smallest of comforts, prevents him from doing anything that will agitate it further. If Kristoph wants him to frighten birds, then his own small comfort will be in letting this one rest, if it decides to. 

He waits. The crow moves up to his shoulder, under the brim of the stranger’s hat that Kristoph had dropped on top of his head, hunches itself into a ball, and sleeps.

Time brushes past, warm and weak and irregular as the breeze.

When the crow at last rouses itself, sorts its feathers halfway, and hops and glides down to the ground, Apollo realizes that he will miss it when it goes. But it doesn’t. It stalks and pecks in a circle around the base of the pole, finding a few bits of dry seed, and something like a worm - likelier a centipede, since his peripheral vision suggests that it has hair-fine legs along it. After it seems satisfied - though how can it be? - it smoothes its feathers a little more and flies back to his shoulder, to rest again.

The pattern repeats another three times. It provides a sense of a day and night cycle, however feeble.

It is his crow now.

Kristoph never makes an appearance from the still, sullen house behind him, or at least not one that he can perceive. There is never the sound of the door, or of footsteps, or clinking pans or anything of the kind. He worries for the bird even more than for himself, should Kristoph spot it, but it seems to understand circumspection and doesn’t fly closer to the structure than an acre-wide circle will bring it, both ends of which Apollo can see.

His crow has never cawed at him, either, or at anything else. It is a surprise when at last it says: “ba.” It’s not a crowy noise; it sounds more like a pet raven in a video clip, making something still a few lengths from music. 

His crow bounces sideways down his arm and back. “Ba-ba ba-ba ba ba?” He wishes, partially, that he could respond, but is selfishly glad that it has stayed close and unafraid of him. “Ba ba ba-ba ba ba.” Something Annie Lennox about it.

Day/night/what passes for them. 

The circles his crow flies become tighter, keeping it closer to him. When it comes back, it wedges itself between the hat and Apollo’s straw shoulder in the remnants of his own shirt. Its feathered-over heartbeat feels fast, but its heartbeat always does.

At the end of one particular circle, then, the bird skims past him and keeps going, in the direction of the blank, disapproving house. It can’t be more than a few minutes that he feels its absence, and minutes are a concept he has lost most of his use for, but he doesn’t like it. It makes him nervous.

His crow has lost its mind when it comes back. It doesn’t caw or scream or ba-ba, but it lands hard on the end of the shoulder pole, where his wrist might be, and flaps hard enough that the beats sound like flags in the wind or a person falling down a flight of stairs. It grips and rustles in its panic, then takes off and repeats its actions at the end of his other arm, hitting the pole and buffeting the air again.

What are you doing?, he thinks. The agitated bird stretches its wings up like blades and strains at the pole. Again. Stop. He worries how long it can continue before it -

His vision becomes a dizzy brown swoop as the pole that holds him upright spins at his crow’s last assault and tips sideways, leaving him at a thirty-degree angle and facing the house the other way. The bird is drinking air on his left wrist, shaking, gathering itself. 

A small brass bell that he had not had time to notice hangs on a string by the door, straight toward the ground, entirely unmoved by the breeze. The rest of the yard fidgets in it, brown leaves insinuating against their neighbors, dry sticks dragging themselves an inch in the dust, cloth in bundles on the ground by the fences almost shrugging, then wrinkling down empty.

The nearest bundle has a pair of glasses. Another is topped by a hooded sweatshirt, bleached grey on top and its original grey showing when the wind lifts it. 

As that understanding hits him, his crow caws for the first time and continues, loud, scraping the air and echoing off the dirty clouds. Other birds, the ones that have never dared to come close to the fenced plot of land, scream back and start to gather. One approaches him, lands nervously three feet away, then ignites its courage and joins his crow further along his arm. They all begin to gather along his arms, all facing the house, staring, yelling. Challenging.

The little brass bell on the porch starts to swing in the air, emits a sour little chime. Two more. Then louder. 

Kristoph, taller than Apollo remembers him, opens the door, one hand raised. 

The crows dive at him, surge at him, in a zigzagging clawed cacophony. One tangles itself in his hair, others snap and stab at his eyes, draw blood from his palms and the bony peaks of his knuckles, though a few of these he knocks out of the air with savage swipes of his arms. Apollo’s and some of the others evade him completely, though, and vanish into the shadows of the house. Kristoph shifts his attention from the birds attacking him and pelts after the interlopers. After Apollo’s crow.

The door hangs open and a few battered crows lie in the doorway or just inside it. Apollo can do nothing but stare and listen as the crashes diminish, the shouts and the wild calls diminish, until the scraping leaves are once again the only sounds half-submerged in the silence. 

It could be an hour/a day/five skipped heartbeats before there is movement from the house. Two crows, each carrying something shining in its beak, hopping out into the brighter dimness and soaring away over the roof for the horizon. Neither has a purple sheen to its feathers. Nor do the next half a dozen that come. 

Minutes and eras.

A scraping sound, not dead stalk on dead stem but something wooden and something that isn’t. 

Apollo’s crow hobbles from the door, dragging a broken claw, a cluster of flight feathers, and Apollo’s bronze bracelet. Its scuffling steps are painful to watch, have to be so much more so to execute, but it hauls the bangle to the foot of the scarecrow pole and waits, chest fluttering. Then it catches its breath and hops flapping at him, falls back to the ground with a sound more like a shaken piece of paper than a caw. 

It tries again, can’t lift the bracelet with one leg. Tries and fails with its beak. Puts its head through and manages a flailing glide to one ruined knee of Apollo’s suit trousers, claws its way up to his shoulder, sidesteps, so tired, along the length of his left arm, and deliberately maneuvers the bracelet onto the end of the beam.

Apollo collapses face-first into the dead leaves and comes up with dirt on his human face. His arms are shaking from their own weakness, not from the sickly breeze. He blinks for the first time in weeks, months, yellow crud in the corners of his eyes. When he sits up all the way, he sees his crow hunched in the plants, staring at him. 

He picks it up and it lets him, and he carries it wobbling on weak legs into what may no longer be Kristoph’s house. He can come back for the wounded birds, but first -

At the foot of the stairs that lead back down to Los Angeles is a scarecrow in a blue suit, its head bent to one side and a tear in its fabric neck from which straw has started to slide to the floor. He steps back, carefully.

The room he had sat in is thrown apart, jewelry and pocketknives and keys and things spilling out of drawers angled downwards from their caves, across the desk, everywhere on the floor.  Black feathers here and there. 

“Is something yours?”

“Ba ba.” His crow nods its head several times, but shakes it again when he starts to paw through the shiny mess. 

“No?”

The bird in the crook of his arm becomes agitated again when he moves for the doorway, unfolds out a wing to one side and then grumbles in pain.

Apollo turns to look and catches sight of his reflection in the case of the grandfather clock. The strange pendulum isn’t a solid rod, is it, but a chain with a jagged silver pendant as a bob. The case is locked when he tries it.

He places the bird as gently as he can on the cushion of a velveteen sofa in the corner of the parkor, despite its bas of concern, then all but charges down the stairs and wrenches the pale blue coat off of Kristoph’s scarecrow, leaves the thing limp against the baseboard and wraps the coat around his left hand and arm as he stomps back up on ever more steady legs. 

He closes his eyes in front of the clock and swings his swaddled fist through the glass of the case. It is a satisfying thing to do.

He pulls the pendant and its chain carefully from the hook in the mechanism, and carries it back to his crow, which is watching him with an intensity that is certainly hope, but apprehension too.

“This?”

A long pause. “Ba.”

He sits on the floor and his crow edges forward and lands gracelessly on his knee. 

“You’re on my lap.”

“Ba ba ba? ba -“

“Fine -“

His hands shake only a little as he holds up the chain and lets it settle around the sleek black neck.

An instant later he has another young man collapsing ragged against him, beautiful in black and purple with bruises purpling his fingers, a man who could be the mirror of Kristoph and who, beyond all clarity, is not in any way like him at all. 

There are so many things they will need to do, soon. But for now, Apollo’s crow embraces him and buries his face against the crook of his neck, and Apollo tilts his head toward him, and holds him close, and loves him, loves him back.

[bijoumikhawal]

Part of the problem with MLM fetishization discourse (mainly found onTwitter, but i see it here too), is that people see effeminacy and femininity in men itself as a fetish, and therefore can't be assed to understand actual issues we face with regard to sexuality

It's impossible to talk about fatphobia, underlying assumptions often related to white supremacist beauty standards, adultification, ageism, etc that feminine men experience because people are too busy getting in a tizzy over a guy wearing skirts in media. One of the big issues for me is hypersexualization- I was getting sexualized at a very young age for being what I am, it's a big issue historically, and a lot of media I could access when I was younger was basically just porn/erotica. And that porn/erotica was often like. Racist, it hypermasculinzed Blackness in comparison to white effeminates, and it only portrayed fem men as submissive bottoms (which isn't itself bad) whose effeminacy was humiliation, and submission was bc they're worth less than "real men"

And like, the joke is people are so focused on wether or not people writing femmes who bottom is bad (it's just a thing that happens irl) that you can't talk about anything else. It's also a form of hypersexualization. The only other thing ppl wanna discuss is "heteronormativity". Fiction where femmes are fucking isn't a bad thing with that being said, and desexualizing us is also a common homophobic thing to do, and tends to loop back to the "less than a real man" thing.

And like, "yaoi"/"BL" isn't the big driving factor in hypersexualization here. If nobody in the US knew what that was I still would've been getting hit on by men twice my age at 16 (who sometimes would loudly advertise their interest in femmes specifically, or more accurately, "femboys" and "tr*ps").

And honestly when you deal with just like- grown ass men looking at you that way, people moaning and bitching that the big concern for fetishization here is basically wether or not the character exists only deepens the shame felt from those interactions. I was made to feel uncomfortable and gross because my gender presentation was seen as sexual when I was a teenager, and all this shit does is go "yeah, it is sexual, when I look at people like you I think about sex and how the sex you have is bad". And part of my Ick with portrayals of femmes is that we're assumed as submissive bottoms because I'm not, but this is still deeply harmful to people that are because you're telling queers the way they fuck is morally wrong and you're instilling shame over it.

And like... actual fetishization for me is more often when femmes as objects of sexual desire are seen that way through a lens of "you're a faggot so you're beneath me, you should thank me when I call you slurs and do xyz, you're trash, shaving you so you have less body hair (so you look more feminine) is a punishment and symbolizes my superiority" because it's just intracommunity femmephobia/effemiphobia with a boner.

Its not that other things are non-issues but cis women clumsily writing a masc/femme dynamic is probably more likely to make me laugh than feel ashamed or disgusted, and instances of feminizing a character for bigotry reasons in fandom are less common than people complaining about effeminacy existing at all (including with femme transmasc characters, especially because usually those aren't being written by cis people). The actual things that have made me cringe with shame and disgust about cis women's view of feminine and effeminate men sexually are more difficult for me to unsnarl because I see it less often, and it's sometimes more visceral because while I was sexualized by men I was actually abused by women, but I'll be frank; those things usually aren't occurring in discussions about fandom.

When I get disgusted in fandom discussion isn't about femme characters existing at all, or top/bottom/switch- they're about people acting like writing romance/erotica about men fucking is the sacred right of cis women and any discussion about equity in publishing means you're attacking fandom when they're two different things, and that that right is more important than the fact that queer men can struggle to get published in romance- and subsequent issues with poverty. Or the insistence that to be fetishized you need to be a woman because fetishization is stored in the pussy (revealing they haven't thought about racism in the romance genre, and don't think about trans women). Its about queer men in fandom writing smut and getting harassed by women who write the exact same type of it because the way they do it is somehow bad. It's about my sexuality being seen as piece of land to fight over, that I'm not supposed to be on, not writing about men in fishnets.

[amagicdoctor]

Hello Mun, Archangel fan over here. Glad to hear from you again. Hope you doing alright

It's been two months since Dark X-Men started so my review so far on the run (2 issues in) is:

They really did my boy dirty. He had one line of dialogue before going down, without a fight, in the very first issue and got ditched by his whole squad while he was still bleeding on the floor (sounds harshly hyperbolic but there was a teenager right next to him whom they all had the time to take with them as they left). Now, the "Archangel gets mind-controlled after being kidnapped on a mission" plotline is nothing new but they at least follow up on in the very next issue so no time is wasted. I could see an improvement on his situation so I'm not so mad

Other than how they treated my fav, I'd say every other character is pretty much in-character? It's been forever since any mutant's been written this way so I'm genuinely happy. Havok (Alex Summers) still has the same characterization from Dark Web tho which is a bit disappointing because it was rather reductive of who he was. I get it tho, this run is very much a follow up on that event sadly so they can't really stray on what it established even if that wasn't a good story in the slightest

I like the concept because it's pretty much what the X-Men used to do/be : Rescuing mutants in need. Being dramatic. Having feuds. Not always seeing eye to eye. Interesting settings. I really missed that and with a team this messy and uncoordinated, those things were a given

The worldbuilding is really really interesting. So far, nothing contradicts what we knew about 616 during Krakoa and things only get deeper in the Fall of X setting with DXM. We get information on both mutants, Orchis, humans, allies and enemies, magic and technology. It's pretty extensive

I still raised a brow a few times while reading but seeing how fast paced everything is (only a few hours passed at best and everyone is always doing something) I can forgive that. It's their first missions on their first night and, again, they're naturally uncoordinated

There's a few mysteries here and there to be solved and I can't wait to see what's in store

It was way less graphic than I expected. I know it was advertised as a violent horror series (and it does deliver) but with everything Kitty Pryde has pulled in X-Men since Fall of X started, DXM looks... erm... tame in comparison? "Graphic violence" is a bit subjective of a description sure, however Kitty is more sadistic in her solo approach than 4 long established vilains (Zero, Emplate, Goblin Queen and Azazel) who have little to no limitations in the amount of chaos they are allowed to bring. So yea

Overall? Good read so far. It was more fun to me than Uncanny Spider-Man which just came out... That one left me more confused than anything (the exposition dump didn't help) and felt so disconnected from everything around it: I can't tell when it's supposed to take place in, be it for Spider-Man (who's currently bad after being stabbed with Norman Osborn's evil essence and still has bad rep with the FF and Avengers), or the whole Fall of X deal (there are solo mutant heroes and full on teams going around New York right now but no one contacted Kurt yet even tho his costume is that obvious?)

Hi!! This is a pretty good review and I have the same feelings. After reading Dark X-Men in one sitting I completely forgot Archangel was a thing, I'm so sorry but he really was that absent from the story. It WAS super weird they just left him when the next day Maddie went out of her way to save her trophy boyfriend but ok Marvel 🤣

I don't have any issues with Uncanny Spider-Man yet but I do agree if you at least look at it from the X-Men's storyline it IS disconnected. And not in a way where we get that Kurt is aloof on purpose, but the writing does not help link it to any other parts of the FOX storylines 😅. Dude is really just on his own

[mossy-kit]

I was tagged by: @polkadotpatterson (aka told irl I was being tagged, lol)

current time: 9:37 pm

current activity: just got back from a fun day out walking and having coffee on the waterfront & dinner at a diner and am now hanging out on the couch with my beloved partner 😌

currently thinking about: I've been thinking a lot lately about the state of monetization/enshittification on the internet - eg, the ways twitter is failing, the horrifying overrreach of Meta, and why websites like Wikipedia have remained largely independent, and what the internet could look like without constantly catering to the currently evaporating shell game of making money off users of their sites via advertising or predatory methods (and how that might work - like can voluntary donation work for something like a social media?)

current favourite song: My current top song is a House in Nebraska by Ethel Cain (that whole album is great - sort of southern gothic tragedy that's both so doomed by the narrative in a meta sense but also grounded and visceral) but I also want to shoutout Death of an AI by yeule (ethereal innocence-as-tragedy in a sense)

currently reading: back and forth between Harrow the Ninth and a nonfiction called Effortless by Greg Keown, which I'm reading mostly to try and figure out how to spend less time doing my job lol

currently watching: watched one of the new episodes of black mirror recently and the concept was interesting enough, and then also slowly working my way through the Makanai, which is about a teenager living with her friend and acting as the cook for a house of maikos (entertainers in training) - very peaceful.

current favourite character: can't pick just one ofc, but I've been thinking a lot about the Salt universe Moist Talkers and their relationships with each other as they adjust to being on the team, as well as my fanteam in the same universe, the Vancouver Deltas - they're only side characters for the Salt, but I'm way too attached to them anyways and have backstories on all of them

current wips: work is killing and rending and murdering me so I've barely written anything recently but the next wips are going to be for the Salt when we get zine 2 going!

Tagging: idk I think Cynda tagged everyone I know who hasn't done it so anyone who'd like to please feel free!

[thepiinkpages]

As the day's move on, I feel more and more disappointed in the books I choose. I need a 5 star book. Like, I needed it yesterday.

This is another 3 star book.

Listen. I love a good strong female lead, but this? This is getting ridiculous. How the fuck is she so headstrong but so stubborn as a bull.

In half of this series, Alina (FL) is so one minded that she doesn't stop to maybe think that the person who killed her family wasn't Dracula (or Drake to his close friends). She's so closed to everything that it almost makes her prejudiced. Like babe, you got Drake in one corner trying to do everything in his power to make her see that he's trying to help her and she's seeing it as if it's him trying to trick her... *Sigh*

Not only is the FL ridiculous, but Andrei (her other mate) is so fucking stupid. Are you that dumb that you choose to kill your mate and save your mother when her mother is bascially telling him to chose his mate? And on top of that, he tries to hurt her so she'll hate him... HAVE WE LEARNED NOTHING??? *insert disappointed sigh*

Not only are ALL of the characters dumb but the writing in this is like it's been written by a teenager. Ya'll, i'm in my early 20's and i use my fair share of slang but the words the Author uses gave me major ick. And it's saying something that i'm talking about the author because I almost never mention the author's of the books I read in a bad light but that was ridiculousness. It really says something when a book is advertised as a romance but I see more comedy than actual romance... maybe it's because it gave me twilight flashbacks. But no, not the books, but the movies.

Here are some quotes.

"...Andrei truly was a little cinnamon roll beneath the bad boy persona he portrayed around everyone else..." For a bad boy with no emotions, he sure does cry a lot. He does NOT give me bad boy vibes. Lincoln is more of a bad boy than Andrei to be completely honest.

"...If you do not get this imbecile away from me, I'm going to rip his fucking spine out through his throat..." Even Drake is ten time more the bad boy Andrei could be.

Anywho. I've come to realize no matter what the description of the ML is, if it says dark hair I immediately put Michele Morrone as who I picture. I may have a bit of a crush. Can you blame me though. He's a man MAN.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

YOU HAD TO GROW FAST

But in practice that you should lower your expectations initially. So why do universities and research labs force hackers to be scientists, and companies force them to be engineers. If you start out with some initial plan and modify it as necessary to keep hitting, say, important. Essentially, they lead you on. And even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot. Aikido for Startups But I don't expect to convince anyone over 25 to go out and get users, because those are the only things you need at first. But when I think about what customers want is figuring out that you need to make something for teenagers or business users or some other group that doesn't include you, you have to know who you should be making this for consumers instead of businesses? There is a very competitive business, prone to natural monopolies. The point after you get the first big end-user applications to be written in Lisp, we'd be able to cash out. It's clear now that even by using the word convergence we were giving TV too much credit. Really good languages aren't like that. This seems to be at least as good an OS for servers as Solaris.

The problem is not the most important ingredient in making the Valley what it is. It was neither of my guesses. The real test is revenue. It's a particularly good combination both to be good at technology and to face problems that can be converted into stock later; it works out the same as a stock purchase in the end. That's what we thought about Airbnb, and if not it doesn't matter much. It's as if mathematicians, physicists, and architects all had to be in the same department. If you're a nerd, you can just confess that you're inexperienced at raising money in phase 2 and you end up doing something different than they started with. Startups are perforce small, because they give them more leverage over developers, who can more easily be replaced.

Advertisers were willing to pay ridiculous amounts for banner ads, it was New York. It's still early days. It's a crowded market, I remember one founder saying worriedly. If big companies weren't incapable, there would be no room for investors to care about price, a significant number do. With an apparently inexhaustible sum of money sitting safely in the bank and keep operating as two guys living on ramen. Have multiple plans. In towns like Houston and Chicago and Detroit it's too small to measure.

That's the problem with formality. For better or worse that's never going to be. The mistake investors always seem to make is to take the first reasonable deal they get. This kind of startup is in the form of a definite offer with no contingencies. As organizations get smaller, this approaches taking every person and keeping just the good ones. Recognizing an important trend turns out to be a missile aimed right at what makes America successful. The influence of fashion is not nearly so great in hacking as it is for any industry: that's where the experts are. But if you have $5 million in investable assets, it would be more convenient for all involved if the Summer Founders didn't learn this on our dime—if they could, is wait.

In a field like that would be a good angel investor? This is a safe technique so long as you stay on the territory of truth, you're strong. It has to set off alarms. That's made harder by the fact that you can't do it by changing the world. It is a truth universally acknowledged? Another surprise was that the hypothesis we were testing seems to be the returns of the whole pool. Surely a field like physics this probably doesn't do much harm, but the people are the foundation of the company away from all the existing shareholders just as you did. The whole summer was full of surprises. So they invested in it. The combination of founders, investors, and you failed at it, you're kicking yourself for having set up such an awkward and boring composition, but by default the valuation you got from the first investor who commits. Lisp, this ought to make him curious.

And some that don't still manage to have the startup's lawyer supplies the paperwork. They're not impressed by one's job title, for example, about how to make this work. Debugging, I was 19 at the time, no one of whom really owns it, it offered the highest ratio of income to boringness of anything I'd done, by orders of magnitude. So if you raise money in phase 2, as a high growth rate can make it, but I think people who dwell on it are reading too much into it. If you walked around their offices, it seemed like programming consisted of debugging. So they're going to do? If you drink too much, you can do is fall back on. Startups tend to be one of the preceding five sources.

[thespacebetweenworlds]

Wattpad's Ban on Writing Underage Sex

Welcome to the post. First, let's get out of the way why I, a tumblr and ao3 user, care about Wattpad and why I think you should, too.

Wattpad has 2 major reasons why it is awesome. Language and accessibility. It's available and fully functional in 18 different display languages, and supports stories in even more languages. Without any knowledge of English, Wattpad is accessible and fully functional, even designed for use on a cellphone. There is no need for a browser, or a PC to store word files, or google docs. Wattpad allows users to draft and save ideas directly in the app. It is no suprise that the majority of Wattpad users are teenagers all around the world, who may not have access to a PC or laptop, who may not speak English and would have a much more difficult time writing on AO3, FFN, fictionpress, etc.

In recent years Wattpad has increased third party advertisements and added paid stories. In recent years Wattpad has also published and helped publish multiple young female writers globally. Wattpad is capitalist and for-profit, but that doesn't change that it has given voice, money and careers to its users. About 70% of Wattpad users are female, and most of us are millenials and gen z. As of september 2020, Wattpad had 90 million monthly users.

In 2024, Wattpad has changed their content guidelines, clarifying that while sexual content - the written, creative kind - is allowed, it is no longer allowed to be about characters under the age of 18. According to Canadian law, the age of consent is 18, so smut between fictional teens is no longer allowed. (An AI bot is going through Wattpad and randomly deletes works). Only weeks later, Wattpad has discontinued direct messaging between users, which caused a larger protest in the userbase.

Now here's my thesis:

Teenagers/under 18 year olds have sex, read about sex, and write about sex.

That's normal. It is the task of the adults in their life, be it parent, teacher, or social institution, to teach children about consent, safe sex, protection, and STDs. Disallowing, deleting and banning short stories, books, and other prose depicting sexual content is like preaching abstince: harmful.

The age requirement to create a Wattpad account is 13. Wattpad users who make an account are thus at least 13 years of age, and capable of reading. It's not an imposition to assume that users will be able to understand the meaning of a "mature" rating, and act according to their own wants and comforts.

What I mean to say it that saying "minors aren't allowed to read or write smut" is a nonsensical, puritanical, conservative statement. It is also wrong. By using it, you infantilise teenagers, you take away their agency, you say they're too young to know anything. When instead you should listen to them, and learn. Content ratings, tags, descriptions and warnings are important. It's also important that readers and writers can choose for themselves what content to engage with.

But Wattpad is a global community. Local laws hold power over online websites and apps. The age of consent, internet regulations for children, and youth protections are different in different countries; the definitions of words like "minor" and "adult" aren't universal. Now Wattpad is enforcing Canadian law. Wattpad is owned by the South Korean company Naver. Wattpad could decide to abide by different national laws at any time. What do we do when Wattpad announces that if characters have sex, they need to be married? What do we do when Wattpad announces that queer stories are now illegal? What do we do when Wattpad bans all sexual content?

Wattpad has always been a home to teenage writers. It has given creative voice to a generation and inspired millions of young people to write and read. With Wattpad's options for multimedia storytelling, it is challenging old ideas of literature. Wattpad may be host to some shitty works, but it is also host to astounding and profound works. That is true for every place where you find this much art.

Wattpad declared that with this new content guideline, this ban on fictional underage sex, they're building a safe space. Bullshit. If Wattpad wanted to do that, they would provide quality sex education on the website in all supported languages. Whatever Wattpad thinks it's doing, it's not protecting youth. It's discimination based on age, and censorship.

I don't know how to end this post. Maybe by saying that freedom of press is important. Maybe by saying that banning books isn't helpful. Maybe by reminding everyone that reading or writing smut is not shameful, never shameful. It can be empowering. It can be catharsis.

[belamuse]

Rethinking “Warrior” Culture: Why Life & Love Don’t have to be Hard.

I wore the title like a shimmering badge of honor upon my heart although it was more than a meaningful compliment. For most of my life, it was my identity.

An identity that served me well in that it helped me to survive complex trauma, but at 40 years old I’ve long reached the point where I’m ready to finally lay my inner warrior and her high drama, seemingly constant conflict and defensiveness to rest in peace.

As in, “And it is peace I give to you and peace I leave with you— ashes to ashes, dust to dust and thank you for your service.” Peace out.

Morbid though it may sound, I’ve simply outgrown the need to be in a state of combativeness.

My two most recent pieces I've written have brought me face to face with the reality of war culture permeating every human experience, from aging to disability.

Like buying a cherry-red Subaru and suddenly the freeway is crawling with the exact same car, now that I’m aware of it I can’t unsee it.

“F.U. Epilepsy” or one bold middle finger on a shirt with the epilepsy ribbon is the sentiment, or lack thereof, illustrated in this post. “Combat signs of aging!” The media aggressive approach to time that the media splashes all over advertisements for creams, serums, and lotions is the theme drawing attention to in the post prior to that.

I realize I might offend people who are encouraged to persevere by the David and Goliath narrative that permeates society, and that’s fine too because the problem with being offended is that you are playing offense, which puts someone else in the position of defense. It’s like an athletic sport but without the rules and regulations that distinguish friendly, safe competition from genuine barbarism.

I grew up watching Final Girls in 80s horror movies take down their antagonists against all odds, and watching a certain blonde teenager on TV “save the world… a lot.”

Female identified heroes were sparse in my childhood and adolescence, and I clung to any role model I could find to give me an example of femininity that didn’t shrivel up apologetically in the face of constant adversity in a patriarchal world.

And then I discovered music. Not me, personally— I didn’t put it on the map but I discovered music for myself by female artists who bolstered my courage and gave me a new identity in a female-driven utopia far removed from the infantilizing, mansplaining, pre-#MeToo society I grew up in during the 80s and 90s.

Like Fiona Apple, I was a “Shadow Boxer Baby.”

Like Tori Amos, I believed in “peace, B*tch!”

Like Shirley Manson, I couldn’t “use what I can’t abuse.”

Like Poe, I apparently grew up “mean” because someone messed with my dreams when I was little.

And like Gwen Stefani, I was ready to have the pink ribbon taken off my eyes.

But before all of that, there was the long overdue Riot Grrrl Movement challenging the sexist world of punk rock just south of my mom's hometown, in Seattle.

I do not for one moment regret the empowering messages my younger self internalized from my favorite female artists in all mediums. They showed a petite, young girl from a broken home that she literally had “A Fighting Chance” through what was, at the time, a revolutionary lens that has paved the way for so many women and female and femme-identified artists to come, as well as paved the way for not only content that would truly shatter the deeply embedded gender stereotypes of society but generate conversations and institute social change in life and legislation.

So what’s the problem?

There is a quote from Michelle Rosenthal, author of Your Life After Trauma: 

“Survival mode is supposed to be a phase that helps save your life—it’s not meant to be how you live.”

The problem is not art and it’s definitely not social justice; the problem for me was that I continued to experience the pressure of being a badass warrior long after it had served its purpose and when it hurt me and my interpersonal relationships due to the fact that I was (and still struggle with being) combative and defensive all the time. Being in a constant state of hostility and an “us or me against them” mentality did a number on my cortisol and adrenaline levels, and ultimately my central nervous system, which meant “taking the bull by the horns” and not letting PTSD “mess with the wrong woman” and “teaching it a lesson” by “showing it who’s boss,” even when this was 100 percent defeating my purpose and actually making my symptoms worse. Oh my!

The mentality that had helped me survive domestic violence, sexual assault, being unhoused, being an adult child of alcoholics, generational poverty, and more was suddenly destroying me.

I was literally foiling my own best efforts, or to use a more modern analogy, “Shooting myself in the foot.”

Swords and guns were the metaphorical violent accessories I wielded skillfully throughout the three decades prior to my life-saving brain surgery. And they worked. And I was applauded.

“I will survive” (Gloria Gaynor) because “I’m a survivor” (Destiny’s Child) and “stronger” (Britney Spears) and “a fighter” (Christina Aguilera) and all of the “Slay” Queen anthems that inspired Rocky Balboa training montage vibes that motivated me to “rise up to the challenge of our rival!” (Survivor)

You’re welcome?

I was out here in a custody battle, battling addictions and other so-called “personal demons.” Pow! Mental illness, I’m going to “knock out” my to do list and “tackle” my grey hairs while “crushing” my “unforgiving” morning workout before “attacking” my thesis and “whipping” my house into shape.

Yikes.

So much hostility. And for what? Why?

I’m no longer in harms way and I’m not sure how much I was actually accomplishing besides living in a perpetual state of fight or flight mode that hurt me in the long-term more than any of my adversaries, real or imagined.

Because that’s the thing: I was mostly at war with myself.

As the song goes, “there is a time for peace and a time for war, which is actually a biblical excerpt. I am grateful to all of the social justice “warriors” out there on “the front lines” as I was once as a “trauma-informed survivor leader” but I’m no longer interested in survival of the fittest being central to my identity.

The integrity of my beliefs hasn’t changed, but my approach to them has as I continue to learn to stop beating the war drums for no one in particular, take my armor off and shift from my sympathetic fight or flight nervous system to my parasympathetic nervous system in order to heal.

“The parasympathetic nervous system, also known as “rest and digest,” can be thought of as functioning in opposition to the sympathetic nervous system.” (1)

My old MySpace tagline was: “Walk softly and carry a machine gun,” a derivation of Theodore Roosevelt’s “walk softly and carry a big stick.”

These days, I just walk softly, sans machine guns and big sticks and I don’t “pound” the pavement either.

“You’ve gone soft” was always an insult in the working class, Boomer/Gen X culture of toxic masculinity that “made me” until I took back the night, and then, as time passed, learned to just lay down and go to sleep during it.

Going soft is one of the wisest, healthiest things I have ever done for myself and my loved ones. It’s also a journey, one that requires me to lay down my machete, which is not always easy as it leaves my heart open to wounding. My body doesn’t need me to beat it into submission, which would be completely unacceptable for anyone else to do to me or anyone.

And I don’t have to w-rest-le satisfaction from life.

Approaching my sons with an aggressive, authoritarian attitude just puts them on the defensive and results in a power struggle when we are all seeking connection.

Love needn’t be “tough.”

Life needn’t be “hard.”

And crying is extremely brave, powerful, and healthy.

“Researchers have established that crying releases oxytocin and endogenous opioids, also known as endorphins. These feel-good chemicals help ease both physical and emotional pain.” ~ Leo Newhouse, LICSW

Interesting how something so beneficial still has so much stigma and shame attached to it.

Though the warrior part of me got me this far and I am both grateful and extremely proud of myself for that, I’m also ready to release what no longer serves me: my “armed guard” being one of them.

I’m learning that it takes more strength to listen to and honor my body and its needs as well as the needs of my loved ones, to open myself to love as well as rejection, to embody the courage of daily living and practice healthy habits, cultivate patience, and laugh at myself.

Brook Siem wrote: “Happiness is a most rebellious act.”

I’ve learned that acceptance doesn’t mean rolling over and allowing myself to be abused, nor does it mean wallowing in my pain or, conversely, denying my negative emotions. I’m not advocating toxic positivity or denial.

Genuine happiness, for me, means accepting that life is a spectrum and not creating false expectations of perfection, setting boundaries while opening my mind and heart, making peace with my past, and realizing that not everything deserves my time, energy, or attention or even my response because I am not responsible for saving the world. Not even a little.

Whew!

Now I’m just taking care of my little corner of it and being kind to others in my pleather pants, Dr. Martins, and a friendly wink.

I would be completely remiss if I did not quote the brilliant Jaiya John:

“The softer she became with herself, the softer she became with the world, which became softer with her. She birthed a new generational cycle: Peace.” ~ ~

(1) National Library Of Medicine Physiology, Autonomic Nervous System Tyler LeBouef; Zachary Yaker; Lacey Whited. Last Update: May 1, 2023.

[c-40]

A-T-3 105 Algorithm & Blues Pt.3

いち、に、さん、し

Image by Walter Velez from when Japanese cars were entering the American market

'According to DJ Chintam—the co-author of Wamono A To Z records guide, and co-curator of last year’s Japanese jazz funk and rare groove comp—the concept of wamono didn’t exist before the mid-’90s: “Playing Japanese music in DJ sets was almost taboo,” he once told Resident Advisor. But the UK rare groove scene, which sent evangelists hunting after obscure funk, soul, and disco, prompted him to start scouring for domestic records at the turn of the century' - Pitchfork. These are the same diggers that went out hunting for Northern Soul records, they same that compiled the compilations of the late 1980s and 1990s (A-T-3 079 A-T-3 080 A-T-3 081)

My Truth

My personal interest in Japan is, I assume, similar to many people growing up in the UK in the 1980s. Japanese cartoons on TV like Battle Of The Planets and Ulysses 31 (I bought a bootleg of the soundtrack it in the early 2000s), sci-fi characters like Godzilla and Ultraman, and arcade games from Space Invaders to Out Run to Street Fighter II (Red Bull’s excellent Diggin The Carts web series is worth a shout). Japanese arcade games were a massive influence on me, not just the graphics but the cabinet artwork, the sound and gameplay too like BurgerTime, Bomberman, or Bubble Bobble. They felt like a small window into Japan

My experience of Japan and music when I was young, like many others in the UK, suffers from multiple personality disorder. I was born when Biddu/Carl Douglas's Kung Fu Fighting reached number 1 on the UK singles chart. Growing up there was the music in anime (although we just called them cartoons) and video games, period dramas that often use oriental folk music or a pastiche of (as I've said I became aware of Ryuichi Sakamoto through his film music), then their was the imitation of Japanese culture by western pop acts like Turning Japanese by The Vapours and Japanese Boy by Aneka, this was when advertising and the presence of Japanese imports on shop shelves and in showrooms began calling for attention to Japan. By the time I was a teenager I was listening to John Peel who would play bands like Shonen Knife and Pizzicato Five

Throughout the 80s there was a fashion for ‘Japanisme’ on record sleeves. Sheffield design studio Designers Republic began incorporation elements of Japanese graphics into their artwork for the group Pop Will Eat Itself, this developed into one of the styles tDR are known for, in the 1990 tDR created an imaginary Japanese corporation called Pho-Ku. In their way tDR were trying to subvert marketing slogans, Japanese iconography and characters were incorporated into the designs not only for their own charm but as symbols of what is sometimes called hyper-capitalism. From the late 1980s I'd pick up bits of Japanese artwork wherever I could, this might be reproductions of high art or ephemera. In 1991 Akira got a theatrical release in the UK, as an art student I was watching Tetsuo: The Iron Man and it's sequel. I enjoyed Anime and manga (I think Ranma ½ was the first series I got into) and I'm a fan of Superflat

The video for Madonna' released's single Rain (written with Shep Pettibone) was released in 1993, and appeared to have sleek and minimal contemporary Japanese aesthetic to it which I loved. Ryuichi Sakamoto plays the video director in it. This aesthetic is made explicit in Chris Cunningham's 1997 techno orientalist Ghost In The Shell inspired video for the Bjork single All Is Full Of Love

I remember seeing all the CDs on display in Japanese shops and knowing there was gold hidden in there. I will buy anything that looks interesting. YMO, Ryo Kawasaki, Logic System were probably the first older Japanese artists I went looking for

Interest in 'City Pop' and Japanese ambient music in America is written about as if it has happened over night but, it's nothing new, it goes all the way back Ue o Muite Arukō (or Sukiyaki) a Japanese record sung by Kyu Sakamoto that American veterans took to number 1 on the US Billboard Hot 100 in 1963. Slick Rick takes the melody and incorporates it into the Doug E Fresh & The Get Fresh Crew classic La Di Da Di

Tracks like YMO's Firecracker was popular with Black American audiences, Bboys were into Riot In Lagos, and in Planet Rock G.L.O.B.E, Pow Wow, and Mr Biggs get the house to repeat "ich me sun chi" [ichi ni san shi]. Bambaataa's love of Kraftwerk is well documented so this is probably definitely lifted from Numbers by Kraftwerk

My attraction to Japanese culture was the science fiction and fantasy. Wu-Tang: An American Saga tells the story of RZA and Ghostface Killah's love of martial arts movies and RZA's genius move to sample those films and their sound effects, and boo-yaa the rest as they say is history with Japanese samples and references cropping up in hip hop, R&B, jungle and all their derivatives until the end of time. Wu-Tang were the first hip hop act to go all in, it wasn't subtle was it, in many ways you could compare Wu-Tang to UK synth pop like Japan, Wang Chung, the rock group Asia and other 1980s groups that referenced elements of Japanese culture. Over the last decade or so anime and manga have become mainstream in the US and rock and pop acts are also paying attention to Japanese culture

Tamao Koike - Automne Dans Un Miroir produced by YMO, slower and translated into French b side of Kagami No Naka No Jugatsu which is also great

Go Misawa- Jigoku Kara no Shisma and some nice anime soundtrack popular with hip hop producers. It's from the anime Devilman

Go Misawa - 悪魔人間 (デビルマン) - 不動明

[firedragon1321]

An ad showed up on my dash advertising a book and it literally used "I'm not like the other girls" logic in its advertising.

It bashed every other book on the YA market for having the same cis/white/het protag. Which is a problem, but they were just obnoxious about it.

Their protag was part of three minorities and the only non-minority was the villain. Like...do you want a cookie? Adding labels doesn't automatically make a better character. Literally the protag's profile was "He's XYZ and he's not a teen he's an adult MAN which makes him better than other characters in YA and he has a lot of DARK MYSTERIOUS TRAGIC THINGS in his DARK MYSTERIOUS TRAGIC PAST. If you want to know more, read the book. :)"

Which makes me want to...not read the book?

If I'm advertising something I wrote, I'm not going to BS about how nothing like it has been written ever and everything else is cliche, crap, etc. Because everything has been done to death and trying to pretend your book is above all of fiction just for having characters of multiple assorted minorities is hubris. You can have characters in minority groups, but that shouldn't be all they are. That's called a "token", and nobody likes those.

If I ever get the guts to advertise my own work, I'm going to give you a brief summary of what the work is as a whole, maybe a few very short profiles for major characters, which would look like this-

"Soren is a 12 year old boy and a living cartoon character. Recently summoned to reality, he can be rather naive on how the real world works, but is well meaning most of the time. Though precocious, he has a stubborn, childlike side. Give him cheese puffs, and he'll be your friend for life."

I'm pretty sure that's not unique in any way, shape, or form. I'm not trying to be "special" or "better" than other books or characters. Soren is my baby boy booboo, but- to a potential audience- he's just another character. I have to limit myself to a paragraph that doesn't do him justice and move on.

While I know writing characters of different minorities is important, and labeling them can help people find books that include them, they do not substitute for a character's personality. Using another OC as an example-

"Jake is a gay teenager from a world filled with superheroes, who gains the ability to travel through the multiverse. He can be a little black and white and tends to blame himself, but never backs down when fighting for justice. He's trained in martial arts, and uses his long tail as a weapon."

(This is my own OC btw- no relation to Marvel.)

You now know from that paragraph that-

Jake is gay (i.e.- part of a minority group)

Jake is a teenager

Jake is not human

How Jake fights (hints that the story will contain fighting/violence)

Jake has the ability to travel to different worlds (hints at the plot)

Jake has superhero tropes in his background

A few of Jake's personality traits, including his flaws

This is enough for most people to understand what the character is basically about. You could reasonably stick more labels on, as long as the potential reader sees a little more than them.

And also don't pretend that you're God's Gift to Writing. Trust me- it's been done before. Don't worry about being different. Just tell your story.