#and also very very mentally ill

[stil-lindigo]

lead balloon (the tumblr post that saved me)

if this comic resonated with you, it would mean the world to me if you donated to this palestinian family's escape fund.

--

no creative notes because this isn't that kind of comic.

I know I don’t owe any of you anything but I still felt compelled to write about my long term absence. And I feel far enough away from the dangerous spot I was in to be able to make this comic. I have a therapist now, and she agreed that making this could be a very cathartic gesture, and the start of properly leaving these thoughts behind me. I am still, at seemingly random times, blindsided by fleeting desires to kill myself. They’re always passing urges, but it’s disarming, and uncomfortable. I worry sometimes that my brain’s spent so long thinking only about suicide that it’s forgotten how to think about anything else. Like, now that I've opened that door for myself, I'll never be able to fully shut it again. But I’m trying my best to encourage my mind in other directions. We'll see how that goes.

I am still donating all proceeds from my store to Palestinian causes. So far, I've donated over $15K, not including donations coming from my own pocket or the fundraising streams which jointly raised around $10K. In the time since I made my initial post about where this money would be going, the focus has shifted from aid organisations to directly donating to escape funds.

If you'd like to do the same, you can look at Operation Olive Branch, which hosts hundreds of Palestinian escape funds or donate to Safebow, which has helped facilitate the safe crossing and securing of important medical procedures for over 150 at-risk palestinians since the beginning of the genocide.

[y-avann-a]

What the fuck? Why am I sucking my stomach in and sticking my breasts out while posing for a picture with my sisters? I am ELEVEN YEARS OLD in this picture - why do I have body image issues? I hate this stupid thinspo-dietculture-fatshaming-bodyharm culture

[starry-bi-sky]

on a completely separate note; shizun luo binghe with a disciple shen yuan who fell into the abyss??? *thinks about LBH canonically stealing SQQ's corpse for 5 years* he'd hallucinate i think. like, like visual and audial hallucinations.

Keeps thinking he's seeing SQQ in the corner of his eyes, or wandering between the trees, amongst a group of disciples. Thinks he hears him calling for him, but its just the wind or another disciple.

Gets Xiu Ya reforged but patently fucking refuses to make a sword mound. Because his disciple Is Not Dead :))) There was No Body. He's Not Dead. And If You keep Insisting That He Is, He's Gonna Skewer You :). He's holding onto Xiu Ya so he can return his most favored disciple's sword when he returns. It's on his hip right next to Zheng Yang where it's supposed to be.

Also this motherfucker?? does not sleep btw. He has the image of SQQ, wide eyed and hysterical and standing at the mouth of the abyss burned into his fucking eyelids. Can't use the dreamscape to escape it either because he keeps trying to save him and either he does and it's an incredibly cruel trick to wake up to, or he doesn't and he gets his heart broken in several different pieces again.

There is no convincing this man that Shen Qingqiu is dead. Absolutely nothing at all. He is buried so deep in denial that moles would be jealous of how deep he is. He keeps making tea for two in the bamboo house only to remember that it's just him. SQQ's fans are hiding everywhere, little reminders of his presence. He goes to wake up SQQ on the mornings he sleeps in-- only to find the room empty.

[mysterycitrus]

their relationship is complex and not entirely definable but if u look me in the eyes and tell me that dick grayson isn’t bruce waynes first kid im not gonna take u super seriously. sowwy

[chirrups]

I feel like I have nothing to ask, I simply would love to hear more about them fucked up mermaid and murderer

And I would absolutely love to tell you about them, Tin.

This AU takes place somewhere vaguely in the Pacific Northwest (circa. 1970s-80s) in an isolated fishing town along a storm-wracked coast.

Fisheries in and around the bay have collapsed due to extreme winter weather patterns + overfishing + an oil spill from a tanker run aground down the coast, leaving most of the bay's inhabitants to live pretty much hand-to-mouth off contaminated fish in recent years.

get ready for LORE (and more drawings but mostly the LORE)

general warning: this is pretty long

The "story" as it were, kicks off when Gem finally gets fed up with another fisherman in the area, Grian, over continued conflict about ownership of fishing grounds in the mouth of the bay.

She orchestrates his death (with the eager assistance of Scott and Impulse) out at sea and passes off his death as a tragic accident in the winter swells with her being the unfortunate finder of his remains.

And it works.

See the thing is: Gem has a history of causing disappearances. It started with some accidents with out-of-town poachers. She would chase these people off and one or two would just slip overboard and happen to drown. It wasn’t her fault and besides they deserve it. But things start to escalate from there. Poachers become outsiders become fellow townspeople. Grian is someone Gem’s known for years, whose friends are tangentially her friends or acquaintances. His death is a cold-blooded murder driven by hatred and frustration. This time something is different about what she's done and Gem knows it.

But Gem is a reputable and well-known person. Her prices are fair, she drives poachers out of the bay and maintains order around the pragmatic fishing ground policy that undoubtedly helps everyone to survive.

She is the type of person to look to for guidance when things get hard because she can make those hard choices. So how on earth could it be her fault?

No one is wiser until Grian's funeral brings an old friend into town who is more than a little suspicious about the circumstances of his death.

Scar was one of Grian's crewmates when they did trawling much further south. They split when Scar took up (illegal) whaling and Grian moved into the bay.

As an outsider, Scar isn't so swayed by the goodwill the town has around Gem's name. He's no detective but for the sake of an old friend, he might as well try.

In this AU, mermaids are social mammals part of the Hominidae family that went back into the ocean similar to Cetaceans. They live in matrilineal family groups or in any other female-led organization of pods and have a very "survival-oriented" global culture (with regional variation).

Pearl is a lone mermaid whose pod lived in the bay until they were starved out by the collapsing fisheries. PNW mermaids are more territorial than other ecotypes and value strength over anything else. Pearl's inability (read: unwillingness) to oust other pods for better fishing grounds and the loss of one of her pod members summarily lead the other two to abandon her.

Without a pod to help her, hunting enough in her dwindling territory has been difficult and lonely, leading her to slowly starve just as the humans in the bay have begun to.

She took to trailing fishing boats to steal from their catch, which is how she met Gem who was mid-throwing some unfortunate soul overboard.

They have an interesting relationship.

Gem is enamored with Pearl at the halfway point between a person and a large apex predator. She loves the way Pearl needs her to live and the way Pearl, as a social creature with no pod, craves her attention. It's thrilling to have a predator at her beck and call like this and, in turn, to be so desperately needed. She also loves the way Pearl doesn't look at her like she's dangerous (the way Scott and Impulse have begun to when they think she doesn't see them). Her interest in Pearl seems to be leaching into something more than just wildlife admiration. She's begun to learn the mermaid language just to talk to her. For what? Who really knows. Meanwhile, Pearl is hungry enough to eat just about anything Gem throws her (including human bodies) and desperate enough that she lets Gem get much closer than many humans in this area have ever been to a mermaid. (They even touch, scandalous for mermaids.)

It's skewed for sure. From Gem's perspective, they've got something special going on. From Pearl's... not so much.

This being Secret-Life based, you can imagine how this story ends...

Bonus piece: Pearl and her old pod.

IN GENERAL, Biological females are generally larger with a set of rotated tusks protruding from their lower jaw for dominance displays. Biological males are commonly smaller and more agile, with more dexterous hands due to decreased adipose tissue distribution over their bodies. (They actually have 3 biological sexes and tons of social gender variation but that's a talk for another time). Pre-cultural awakening, these pods would form around a biological female and their harem for reproductive purposes. That female would then protect the harem from other females looking to "steal them" or their territories (like horses but reverse-style). In modern times, these pods are often composed of groups of friends/related family members as sort of "platonic life partners" and stealing other pod members is seen as a very archaic sort of thing. Territory stealing, however, is still up for grabs.

[obsob]

here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud!!

✷(print shop)✷

[boatemboys]

part of my tooth fell out earlier so if u need a reminder/wake up call that dental hygiene and eating healthy is Important Actually here it is 👍

[oakbuggy]

a little p2 to this post !

full thing on ao3 as always hehe

[fansblogs]

just by doing what i’m able, with my elbows on the table.

"So many people write songs about horrible, horrible, horrible things. Famous people are always gonna be bad, and always gonna have supporters."

[autumnhortsnort]

Hello coauthor! A Residuum reader here. One thing I really like about your comic is how the consequences of the characters' actions feel so plausible, but what stands out to me the most is the pacing in how they're presented throughout the story. Do you have any tips for structuring a plot? Every time I try to outline mine, it feels a bit incoherent, and the scenes don’t seem to flow well together. I’d appreciate any advice 🐢

best advice? Write the whole outline down as much and as far as you can, doesn't matter if it makes sense, that's for editing you to figure out. Then edit the ever-loving daylights out of it, add in connecting actions, and take out things that don't work. Residuum has had Five different drafts, with major tweaking as we go. The outline is not set in stone.

Also don’t share it outside of friends, that can make you feel pressured to stick to (the previous plot) even when it doesn’t work for how your story has progressed. There’s a reason we didn’t share any of the potential endings when we were still trying to figure out where the story was going. When the first arc was being posted we had an idea of the plot til about halfway through arc 4, but we didn’t actually have a concrete ending.

how we structure a plot (and do pacing)

Write out your main plot points and then write what the characters need to do to make that event happen. We basically do the plot mountain structure, but for each arc (there are 4 of them) we tend to make the climax of each arc into turning points or decisions that the main characters have to make that they cannot undo. here's a good article to read about structuring plots. (Note! This is for the broad spanning major plot beats, each update actually gets written as needed, they aren't written into the outline.)

When it comes to character decisions it’s more about, “what would make the character do this?” rather than, “would the character do this?” You can make characters do things they normally wouldn’t if you give them the right incentive.

For the pacing with residuum, because it’s serialized, we try to have something progress with each update. Either you learn something new, the plot has progressed (aka the status quo has changed), or there's set up/foreshadowing for later, most updates actually have all three. When writing in a serialized format (each chapter getting its own release) it’s a good idea to treat each update as a complete chunk. Try asking yourself: what is the goal for this part? are you using this update for anything actually important? are you conveying anything new and/or important to the plot? Is this something you want to focus on? Are you writing this to meet audience expectations or because you want to? There are parts where residuum gets almost no interaction but, importantly, those parts still meet our individual update rules. If you're writing for audience engagement you are going to get discouraged from writing long spanning plots very quickly. The audience doesn’t know whats coming, so they won’t interact with anything that doesn’t have their current blorbo™, even if it’s plot important.

for how we make the consequences make sense

Make things make logical sense? honestly i don't what to tell you.

We read. a. lot. I used to read 400 books over a school year, beaze has read about 13.6K fanfics on Ao3 over the course of 4 years. plus a ton of manhwa and manga, and that doesn’t include nonfiction, stuff from sites outside of Ao3, course assigned books, reddit fiction, royal road. Most of how we understand and structure plots is instinctual because we fire hosed our brains with them for years.

I'd recommend watching watching Overly Sarcastic Production’s Trope Talks, and reading stuff that's not rise related, as well as researching nonfiction stuff that's relevant to what you want to write we are at a place where we aren’t writing the outline anymore, just editing it if needed. We use the outline structure to make each update because it gives us a objective for the update, and gives us a road map for when to place the set up for future updates. But if you struggle to use outlines you can just… not use them. Garden writing is a valid writing strategy, I use it for one shot AU’s of residuum.

For long spanning stories written garden style the first draft can be your outline. Just edit and flesh it out once you’ve written it.

[the-knife-consumer]

Bill is the villain of the series. Not Mabel. Not ford. BILL. oh my god. If I see one more post pinning literally everything on Ford I'm going to lose my mind. And before it was Ford it was Mabel. Mabel was a little girl terrified of growing up who got tricked by BILL pretending to be someone else. She didn't make a deal with him she got tricked (and even if she did?? Literal twelve year old she's just a kid). Also yeah ford did a bunch of horrible shit because BILL fucked with his head. Bill MADE him trust no one and isolate himself. Mabel and ford are not the bad guys the BAD GUY IS THE BAD GUY. SCREAMS AND RUNS AROUND IN CIRCLES. COME ONNNNNMN

[felixcosm]

new tag game, tell me what tma fear entity your family would be assigned to

[poltergrease]

So I had a thought...

(Do not repost elsewhere)

[nyaa]

what got you so into pulling slight pranks like the pictures actually being gifs stuff

short answer is last year when I came back to tumlr for awhile i made this gif for that yugioh reblog

and people started commenting in the tags about how they felt they were losing their minds not realizing it was a gif at first so I got really into the idea of how I could play with the website itself as a medium to illicit a distorted perception of things. not out of malice. It a sort of vicarious thing for me.

You know when you were really young (before internet access) and playing a weird video game and u didn’t know why things were happening the way they were because you hadn’t quite grasped the concept of game development, or like whether or not something was a glitch or intentional (I played a lot of majoras mask and morrowind as a young kid) that’s kinda the feeling I like to bristle against.

[sicklytenshi]

my mother ordered me some dark girly kei clothes this morning and I eventually ended up infodumping about jirai kei (since most fashion sellers list it as “jirai fashion”)

when I got around to telling her what the jirai stands for, she told me that she thinks it's accurate for me, only that I'm more likely to implode than explode👍

[radlymona]

TRAs having no empathy yet again

Teenagers who are pushed towards transitioning aren’t “pushovers” they’re mentally and emotionally vulnerable young people who shouldn’t be allowed to make life-changing medical decisions. Acknowledging this fact isn’t stopping adults from transitioning. It just aims to stops other vulnerable teenagers from doing the same.