#but they don't focus on it enough tbh

[rainedroptalks]

It sucks that teen titans vol 3 annoys me so much cuz there are some cool concepts and all but I physically cannot read too much of it in one sitting lest the demons get me

[kumakuma-circus]

hanamura bros save me... hanamura bros... save me hanamura bros...

[pekoeboo]

ugh. some thoughts.

really been trying to find the joy in drawing/writing again and honestly it's been such a challenge. friends have told me it's most likely depression that's making it hard to feel motivated and tbh they're probably right.

hoping to get back into being creative in the way I Want to be at some point tho. I miss it. there's still so much with my stories and characters that I haven't been able to share or explain and I wish I knew how without it feeling like this daunting, impossible task.

I don't know when I'll get around to actually sharing art again (or writing, if ever). was hoping that I'd manage to get some of my mental and physical issues in check recently for just long enough to get back into the swing of being creative, but that hasn't seemed to work. everything feels bad, both artistically and physically. I'm struggling to keep up with the frantic pace at which my brain comes up with story concepts and intriguing character interactions, even tho everything in me wishes I could turn it into tangible artistic expression so I can get it out of my head and share it. it used to be easy. I don't know why it's not now.

I'm just . tired, I guess.

[cowboywithacunt]

browsing through your blog makes my denim fetish go wild, keep it up cowboy ;)

I don't know if I have a denim fetish necessarily, but that seam between the legs on jeans does hit just right sometimes, if you know what I mean...

[pastafossa]

Hey I just wanted to ask a writer question. I really admire your writing and the amount of work and dedication you put into your stories and characters. You are one of my favourite authors ever. I have been wanting to get into writing and I was wondering how you flesh out your characters? For example you have a character that you’ve thought out, do you have a template that you fill in? Or just write a whole bunch of points about the character in a Google doc? I know that question might not make the most sense but I have a few characters that I’ve given quirks and backstories in my mind but I have no idea how to transfer them onto paper? Like Jane from TRT, is there just a big template or doc where you randomly put points into or some other type of organization? I know it’s not an easy thing to answer on text or even something you might not want to answer but even one sentence of advice is much appreciated :) Thank you so much for everything! I appreciate you. I will also put this into the ask thingy if you want to answer on there instead of PM 😁

I've managed to hammer this out in bits and pieces over the moments I've been more coherent so I think I'll make sense. First, thank you so, so, so much! I honestly love these characters so I'm always happy to hear someone likes it, even if I enjoy the work! 😭

Second - I do in fact have a template in doc form that I use to keep things organized! It's one I've been using since I took a novel writing course years ago by a published author, and in one particular class we went over character development, which is where I learned the template. The way I was taught (and the way I develop major characters) - first, even before filling in the template, I figure out their archetype(s). What story role are they filling? Who will they be a foil for? I like to think of those as your foundation, because every character is an archetype of some kind, and you can use that to build them up. To use Jane as an example, she's an antihero archetype, yes, but I've also pulled elements from: the Unscrupulous Hero, the Sympathetic Murderer, the Combat Pragmatist, and the Ineffectual Loner. Compared to Matt's hero archetype, she's the Lancer. Archetypes can help you if you're struggling to build up from the bottom.

Once I have the archetype, I start filling in the Major Character/Hero template, which roughly looks like this (if you don't fill it all right away, that's fine, because there's a step after this to fill it in the rest of the way). I like this one because I feel like it covers VERY important things that a lot of online character profiles skip, and has much less of a focus on looks (which I find way less important from a writing perspective):

Name: Age: Family History: Career: Physical Description: (include things like scars, notable or unusual features) Preferred Style of Clothing: (instead of listing brands, try to instead describe their style of clothing as it relates to their character - ex: Jane wears upper-end pantsuits in muted colors when meeting clients, because they carry a strong emphasis on professionalism; when hunting things down, she wears what is practical over anything to do with aesthetic) Goal: (every character should have one; what are they trying to do?) Motivation: (WHY do they want that goal?) Big Secret: (if it were Jane, it'd be what happened in Los Angeles; so what are they hiding? Keeping to themselves?) Self-image: (How do they see themselves? Are they confident and secure? Insecure and depressed?) Internal Conflict: (what are they struggling with?) Game: (What's some little game they enjoy?) Pet: (if applicable) Temptation: (what's aaaalways going to lure them in?) Vehicle: (if applicable; alternatively, how do they prefer to get around?) What makes them unique: (our fake post-apocalyptic character we made as a class had his teeth sharpened into points to scare people; Jane is often fidgeting with threads; just anything that stands out) How do they speak: (do they speak very precisely? Use lots of slang? Do they have an accent?) Quote: (What quote sums them up, or what quote do they relate to most? I have an entire folder of these for Jane tbh, and some for Ciro as well) Lesson Learned: (All characters should grow in some way, rather than stagnating. So how do they grow? What do they learn through the story?)

Now, this is something I was encouraged to do after the template, and also something I was already doing on my own. Once you have the template as finished as you feel comfortable with, you might feel like you need to develop the character a little further to fill in the rest, or solidify what you already have. The way you can do that? Write something short with this character. It doesn't have to be anything you need to post; it can be based on a short scene, based on a prompt, things like that. I like dumping them into: humorous scenarios, angsty scenarios, and Action Oriented (TM) scenes. Those really help you get into the meat of the character (aka: how they react to teasing/flirting/jokes; how they react to strong emotion; how they react in situations that might cause panic). Basically, it's your way of introducing yourself to them and becoming more comfortable writing them, because often a character might act a certain way in a cold, rigid template, but behave entirely differently once you drop them into a scene. Alternatively, you might get to writing and realize you need to make an adjustment so that they have better chemistry with the other characters. Writing a new character's a dance, and you're both going to step on each other's toes in the beginning, but once you learn how they move, it gets easier. And it helps them develop and grow as you learn about them!

[quietlyblooms]

i'll admit that the people pleaser in me always wants to give y'all every single option that gets a vote. it's a problem :' )

[things-methinks]

Talking to [leftist/socialist/progressive/whatever] white people as a brown girl is always an experience

[potatoesandsunshine]

sometimes the unhappy marriage of the rulers of ferelden.... is something that can be so personal

[chemicalarospec]

The funniest thing I wholeheartedly believe is that I have a neurodivergency not catergorizable or diagnosable as any currently recognized disorder. (disorder emphaized because heavily impairing functioning is generally a requirement of the clinical definition and a condition of diagnosis, and although i'm vexed i still Get By Just Fine)

because like yes those probably exist; there's no way psychiatry is in its final form now and there are definitely levels of neuro-difference that don't qualify as disorders, but like. that's so random and it's kinda pretentious to make such a bold claim about yourself. like oh u wanna be special, huh? 🙄 just be AuDHD like everyone else (<- joking)

[mintacle]

A trend in whump fanfiction that has been bothering me for a while actually is the conflating of morality messages with whump stories. 

As a great fan of the catharsis through Whump (Whump is like “Angst with a happy ending” or “extreme Hurt/Comfort”) I’ve been noticing that it greatly irritates me when the character being saved out of the bad situation of the premise has to either prove their moral worth before or after being rescued. 

The two characters who get the most whump attention are Tim and Jason, and I want to talk about each of their cases and why implying the need for moral goodness is problematic.

Tim is commonly going to “deserve” his salvation through silently suffering prior to his rescue. These stories enforce the mentality that it is good to not speak up about one’s suffering, that other people will notice if they really love you and that your best hope to be saved is to comply as far as possible with the expectations placed on you, to the point of self-neglect or self-harm.

Jason will commonly “deserve” his rescue through punishment or repentance after the fact. Often he is portrayed to be ashamed of his actions, asking for forgiveness and promising to change his ways. Along the lines of Tim, if silence is rewarded, then Jason’s willingness to speak up about his trauma must be punished. Often the defense for this is to say that Jason has killed people though, and surely we all agree that is just wrong. And indeed, in the real world, we do. But Jason is a fictional character, and his killing is more of a symbolic action for the demand of extreme justice in reaction to one’s trauma than meant to be understood purely literally. 

If we suspend our disbelief for the dressing up in a Batcostume and child-soldier-indoctrination of Bruce to be part of the medium, then we ought to understand Jason’s character with the same degree of abstraction. In the real world context Bruce suffers from severe delusions and Jason commits arbitrary murder. Suffice to say, this is not the story these comics are purporting to convey.

However a lot of fandom whump works choose to include an overt or covert moral message within their work. While it is understandable to cathartically want to feel that one deserves to be relieved of one’s suffering, it is troublesome that the implication arises that one ought to deserve it. The truth is that everyone deserves help and support, regardless of whether they in turn act in the ways we think would be best for them. After receiving help, a former victim should be entitled to the same freedom of self-determination as anyone else. There is no moral debt created by the act of having been saved by someone else.

Where Tim is usually the “good” victim and Jason typically the “bad” victim, they both get measured according to the same insidious metric that pervades the western cultural ideal of victimhood. Silence in suffering is expected and rewarded, complying to the demands set by the abuser is seen as more deserving of outside intervention than standing up for oneself and the narrative that being understood and having people agree with you, means that you are right and that you are loved. I find these implied moral conflations to the whump element of the story upsetting as a former victim of abuse. 

Because, look, the fact is that you aren’t more likely to be saved irl no matter how good you are. Victims don’t have to deserve help, everyone inherently deserves to be helped out of respect for them as a human being. No strings attached. 

[selfinflictedgunshotwound]

imo everyone on earth should be talking about Him (don't want this showing up in the tag even though it's not a diss) but everytime i go to the tag and there's only like 3 new posts i'm like. oh yeah almost no one cares except me and like 5 other ppl on here

i ran out of tags KFHSJENNXN i don't think that's literally ever happened to me before anyways don't read them because it's just me being insane as per usual

[la-cocotte-de-paris]

OKAY i managed to write out the general outline of this other play i'm gonna have start working on soon

[izzy-b-hands]

edible bby u gotta Do More than this general vague relaxed thing rn. i dont wanna press u and also don't wanna use more of u rn so. cmon. pls. blease

[sxcret-garden-archive]

,

[thehealingsystem]

was just going to comment but I figured this deserved a more in depth response. so now I ask users of tumblr to STOP MAKING POLLS LIKE THIS

for warning there is rampant aphobia in the notes, as expected but really fucking sad because I thought most of our community moved past this shit. but apparently not

asexual and aromanticism is inherently part of the lgbtq+ community. no ifs ands or buts. not on the condition of being queer in some other way, not on the condition of how much oppression they experience. and from reading the comments, people need some reminders

gatekeeping who is "lgbt enough" based on how badly a group is oppressed is bullshit. first off, a bunch of you obviously haven't read into any discussions or research on aspec folks and the experiences they've had with this. because I can assure you that we ALSO are on the receiving end of the harm from heteronormative views of society and having our orientations questioned, criticized, and rejected. just because you refuse to even LOOK at what aspecs are saying about their own lives and don't experience that yourself doesn't mean you can completely deny that we aren't oppressed.

and to be fair, I am queer in other ways and being aspec isn't the most important part of my identity for me BECAUSE I've been a lot more hurt for those other parts, such as being lesbian or being trans. but I obviously don't speak for the entire community

but secondly, it's not the best thing in the world to base whether or not someone is allowed in the Exclusive Minority Group around how badly they've been hurt. this has been done to hell and back and has shown to only be harmful. transmedicalism bases itself off of this, and I see it in a lot of transmeds to this day. that they're hurt and suffering due to being trans, therefore anyone else who is trans has to be hurt and suffering too or else they're not REALLY trans. Not REALLY a part of the group. Because if they're not oppressed enough obviously they don't belong here right? literally the logic people are putting in the comments right now

And by god, people NEED to get normal about alloaros. if a guy doesn't experience romantic attraction and is just sexually attracted to women, that is it. he cannot choose his orientation. he can't change anything about who or who he isn't attracted to

seriously there's replies saying with their full chest that he's just trying to distance himself from women while still being sexually active with them in order to use it as a scapegoat for his misogyny. which also shows that we still see asexual and aromanticism as an ACTION rather than an actual valid orientation. what the hell do you want this hypothetical man to do??? suddenly gain romantic feelings??? pft

so many have problems with split attraction for so many reasons that go straight into basic plain old queerphobia. towards non-aspec sam and aspec sam alike. that the labels aren't valid and we would just use something else, to that no one can actually have attraction like that because romantic and sexual attraction are always the same definitely (/sar), our labels are useless and there's no point in them, we're trying to invade some sort of community, that we're literal predators and trying to make people attracted to us, the list goes on and on

please stop giving these people a platform to spout their queerphobia. I've seen so many polls like this asking questions of whether they think xyz identity is valid, and while I may have let loose with the contradictory identities one bc it was mostly positive and I just wanted to express pride in it, there's so many that go all wrong, asked in bad faith meant to bring out hateful discourse

this is a poll with 15980+ votes so far with 4746+ voting no. are you kidding me. aphobia? in our year 2023, nearly 2024? literally just stop already

[thoughtvoid]

Now that my work schedule is drying up faster than a puddle in a desert, I have to say. Holiday retail is getting really weird now.

It might just be for the store I work for, because management is making some really weird decisions, but some part of it feels like the shoppers are just. Not doing things at the right time, too.

Like. My work has slashed hours to nothing, to the point that I wouldn't even say we have a skeleton crew 90% of the time. Unless we're a skeleton with a couple of missing limbs. But during holiday, we of course have seasonal workers. Possibly not as many as usual, but also enough to make things noticeably better for the months leading into the Big Sale time. And for the Big Sale time, we had all hands on deck on Friday and Sunday/Monday.

But, while we did have a lot of orders to deal with, the amount of people we had scheduled to work them were actually struggling to have a good consistent workload. There weren't enough orders to keep us all busy, and most of our work was from taking care of the orders made during the holiday when we were closed. But as far as dealing with what came in all day, it was just us juggling with taking whatever had come in during the past ten minutes. Orders started to build up a bit over the weekend, but nothing like what I've experienced in the past and came to expect. The 'peak' days were fine and manageable.

...The days after the Big Sale days were hell, though. Employees to process things slashed immediately back to one person per shift a day, two shifts total. The company advertised a pretty good coupon the day after the biggest online sale day of the year. One day use, so anyone interested would have to order that day. I wasn't originally scheduled for orders, we had freight coming in that I was scheduled to help with instead, but I wasn't at all surprised to get pulled off that to chip away at orders instead. We didn't get the numbers under control for a couple of weeks.

I blame most of the insane workload on our company. Us backroom people weren't given a single break, not one single day without a sale to let us catch up with the orders that the Sales left behind. And our hours for backroom were divvied out to other areas of the store. (Which, granted, the floor upkeep people are basically treated as so low of priority that most of the year we might have one person scheduled to keep up with the entire store. And during the holiday time, they might have been given a couple of extra people who were more expected to back up registers.)

However. The customers were also just making the most inane choices. There were so, so many orders coming in like crazy after the Big Sale days, up until a week before Christmas.

I get that the "Big Sales" are overhyped at this point and not always the real lowest price they ever get to. But I've been at this store long enough that the price they get to is pretty much the lowest things will be through the rest of the year. The sales can be lower, or the coupons higher, but they usually aren't as good or are only just as good as the Big Sale day price. During the year, the sales and coupons might match up to more savings, but during holiday season? Everything's getting roughly the same deals throughout the last month and a half. There's no real need to hold off during the days when stores are prepared for high workload. With all the cost cutting, the store only bolsters its workforce for those specific days. And immediately afterward, they leave all the workers to deal with the floods that came afterward, be it with pushing people to work harder, asking them to stay more hours, pulling people from other shifts, or ultimately calling in people who managed to get a day off.

When it's a one day 40% off one purchase, I get it. That's a company screwing us over problem, and they don't even tell us at the store level when they give those limited time deals. That's something we would prepare for, if the company gave a damn about us being prepared for it. But the one week 25% during subpar sales? I'm sorry, I will be calling everyone who ordered during that kind of sale stupid. There was no need to wait compared to the better sales and coupons earlier. There was no need to have the two people scheduled per day struggling to keep the order numbers under control. And the people ordering the week before Christmas to have things shipped to them? 1) I hope they weren't seriously ordering for Christmas, and were just ordering something for themselves because 2) I hope none of those packages got there in time. In previous years, the website used to have a countdown for when something ordered online would be guaranteed to arrive. They stopped doing that at some point, but the deadline used to be 14 or so days before Christmas. (And they may have stopped giving that countdown because they wanted people who don't plan things well to place more orders even if it might not arrive in time.) My patience is thin during holiday season, and I have no good vibes to send to people who didn't jump on the sales they should have and wait until functionally the last possible moment.

TLDR: Retail holiday season has gotten weird because the Sale days aren't a problem, but for various reasons, the time between those days up until Christmas were horrid.