#cw overthinking

[ash-isnt-writing]

“Layna. Oh, Layna. You seriously thought people would care about that?” Helix said mockingly. “You might be one of us now, but you’re still a monster. Don’t expect human decency.”

In hindsight, Layna probably should have seen this coming.

Helix wasn’t a sympathetic man. She knew that. But it didn’t mean it didn’t hurt any less that nobody remembered her birthday.

She felt lost. Ignored. Unwanted. It was this way every year, she should’ve been used to it by now. She should’ve. But she wasn’t. She just wanted someone to care.

“…Right, apologies” Layna sighed, turning back to her desk to continue the paperwork there.

She couldn’t help but wonder how Helodite was spending this date. They had the same birthdate, just a couple years apart. She had no doubt Helodite was having much more fun than her on the outside.

She sighed heavily. Would her efforts ever be appreciated? Would anyone ever care? Is it even worth the time?

[schattenhonig]

Actually this is a brilliant story idea! It's probably been done already, but what if you could read in that book and have a peek at what would have happened if [redacted] had come true just like you imagined it? Would you look at the outcomes and say "ok, maybe I'm living in the timeline that's actually worse"?

Does that even make sense? In my head it does...

Crazyheadcomics on Instagram

[nataneet-comicofficial]

[zoomzooml]

Bumblebee overthinks late at night after a fight with one of his teammates

[zedleaked]

A BUNCH OF APRIL TOONS DOODLES BECAUSE A FRIEND AND I WERE LOOKING BACK AT PAST APRIL TOONS STUFF [BECAUSE I'M PRETTY UNAWARE OF STUFF BEFORE HIRES AND HEROES] AND WOWIE!! NO ONE TOLD ME HOW SILLY REDD'S THEME IS??? I THINK REDD IS COOL

[em-mermaid]

“JOEL! YOU— where are you, you little,” Bdubs swears as he storms into Joel’s house. His boots thump loudly against the floor.

When he turns the corner into the storage room, Joel is there, grinning far too sweet for a criminal. “Hello, Bdubs. Fancy seeing you here.”

“You,” he hisses, crowding into Joel’s space, “killed them.”

Joel tilts his head, mocking the look of thinking before he answers. “Killed who?”

That bastard.

“The horsies! You’re a murderer!”

“Oh, do you mean the gift you left for me? Their screams are so relaxing don’t you think?”

Bdubs glares even more, hand going to the sword at his hip.

“What did you expect me to do,” Joel continues, ignoring the threat. “Make cute little houses for all of them? I’m not Etho.”

“That’s it.” He spits out. The sword rings out when Bdubs pulls it from its sheath. “You will pay for what you’ve done!”

Bdubs backs up and swings. The glint of the sword through the air and a splash of red across Joel’s chest.

“You really wanna play that game Bdubs?” “What was that for?”

Joel should be more hurt. Why is he advancing? Shouldn’t he have a sword?

Bdubs swings again, but in his panic he misses, the sword only catching the edge of Joel’s arm. And then Joel is in his space.

His hand shakes— no it doesn’t. He’s strong and has the advantage and Joel was caught off guard by his perfect plan. Definitely not the other way around. Nope.

Joel presses against the blade, until it is trapped between them. The blood is soaking into his shirt and a hand curls into his hair roughly.

“Oh I see,” Joel purrs. “Is Etho not giving you enough attention?”

“You’re one to talk.” His voice definitely doesn’t crack.

“Sure,” Joel grins sharply. His breath is warm against Bdubs’ face. “But, at least he reciprocates my pranks.”

The short kiss to his nose is over before Bdubs processes what Joel is doing. Heat rises to his cheeks and he watches in real time as Joel seems to take in every inch of his face. Eyes slowly devouring him between glances at his lips.

Bdubs pounces. Lips meet his own in a mess of tongues and teeth until the hand in his hair pulls.

Joel breaks away breathing heavily.

“How’s that for attention?”

“You fucker.”

Joel’s inventory explodes onto the floor.

[professorcalculusstanaccount]

hi! loving your art. I was watching your awesome stories/gifs and I was wondering: how did Chang develop his feelings for Tintin? Did he discover them before or after him? How did he react and why? (English is not my first language so if you see a grammatical mistake, I'm sorry. Also, sorry if so many questions made you feel like you were in a philosophy exam)

Thank you so much! As a contrast to the rest of the Marlinspike team I'm writing Chang as someone who makes friends and develops crushes pretty easily!

I imagine he's had a crush on Tintin for some time, possibly from when they first met. He's been at the mercy of his circumstances for most of his life until that point - Tintin basically makes him feel capable of doing stuff.

He's pretty heartbroken after the Blue Lotus. Tintin doesn't contact him for years. Chang is struggling to adjust to his new family and is failing at school, having missed out on a good education for a few years prior. Until Tibet he feels pretty hopeless, he will never live up to the time when he took down a drug ring.

His near death experience in Tibet shakes him out of this rut. He starts to travel and take up hobbies like dance and photography. Didi trains him in some basic martial arts. Tintin makes an effort to actually stay in touch this time. Chang has some abandonment issues as he's frequently lost people throughout his life, so he's someone who's willing to give people second chances, even if they've hurt him badly. Chang thinks he's well over his crush on Tintin when he comes around to Belgium for his studies, but falls for him again very quickly!

Unlike Tintin, Chang is a lot more comfortable with who he is. He's used to being the odd one out and has generally low expectations for himself, so just goes with the flow.

Below I talk a little with how I'm going about writing him and the historical context surrounding this, cw for mentions of racism (sinophobia) and queerphobia:

I'm writing Chang as bi, I thought it would be interesting to explore as Asian men were perceived differently in the 30s compared to today. While Asian men in the West are currently heavily desexualised in the early 20th century they were stereotyped as predatory and deviant. In London a lot of Chinese immigrants were male dockworkers, so when they married white women there was a lot of fearmongering about predatory and disloyal Chinese men.

A lot of depictions of Asian men in Western media reflected these stereotypes (and often used queercoding to push the idea of Asian men being animalistic seducers - General Henry Chang in Shanghai Express (1932) was written to be bisexual while posing as a threat to the white leads). Some examples off the top of my head include Hishuru Tori from The Cheat (1915) and The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932). Novels frequently depicted Chinese drug lords with borderline supernatural powers in manipulation.

On the other hand I've noticed how fans frequently depict Chang as someone who's submissive, demure and soft, which ignores how ridiculously brave and proactive he is in canon (stealing documents from police officers, charging into a man immediately after getting shot at by a machine gun, I could go on!). It's a common example of Fandom Racism (not accusing anyone specifically, it's just a trend I've noticed.)

When writing Chang I'm kinda reckoning with two different eras. From a contemporary angle I'm writing him as a love interest, which as an Asian guy I rarely see in media today. I also gotta consider his own time and context, how he would navigate being a queer Chinese guy, and how that would affect his relationship with others and himself.

[egginfroggin]

(Warning for burns)

"The burns were never from a fireplace left unattended." They came from something far more unassuming, and Ingo finally understands why Emmet never touched anything anymore."

"You, Emmet will burn, Unova will burn, and Truth will be rekindled."

(What is a fireplace, but a prison for flames?)

(What is a spark, but a catalyst that is consumed by its own reaction?)

(program: krita; time taken: about 1 hr 50 minutes)

(close-up under cut)

[liz-wes]

i know i just know you're not gone, you can't be gone

[lethesbeastie]

Pov: you're not sure if the visions are from psychosis or the supernatural

[nataneet-comicofficial]

[phoenix-flamed]

I'm sorry. I know I'm being a giant ball of negativity on here lately, and posting way too much OOC while not posting enough RP replies to people.

There's no need to interact with this post; it's mostly just me yelling into the void to get it off my chest.

I won't ramble. I'm sorry if I'm off-putting. I know some people just don't vibe OOCly, and that's fine -- I have no issues with that whatsoever. But I still want to apologize regardless.

[lightbulb-warning]

wait if Shuichi gets a Kokichi-Pop, shouldn’t Maki get a Kaito one :[ ??

she could grab one, if she wanted to

[puckpocketed]

“First couple of practices he put Tiger Balm in my jock. Then he took my gear outside and threw it on the roof. And then he began to belittle me in front of my teammates, the coaches, whoever would listen to him. He’d make fun of my clothes, the way I spoke. He was two years older than me and a rising star, and he wielded his power over me like I was nothing — like I was subhuman.

If you’ve heard of me, you’ve heard of the hazing incident that took place that season. Thanks to this guy, that was the way I was introduced to the entire hockey world. I was the kid who wouldn’t go along with it. The kid who didn’t “get��� the culture.

I dreamed of my parents reading in the paper back home about their son scoring a hat trick in his first game, or leading his team to the playoffs. Instead they had to hear about my refusal to strip naked and get in a bathroom in the back of the team bus with three other rookies. And, somehow, the whole issue was treated like some sort of discussion. I read headlines like, WAS WHAT HAPPENED TO AKIM ALIU WRONG?”

— Hockey Is Not For Everyone (2020), by Akim Aliu. READ HERE

“When Akim Aliu first told his story in 2020, my reaction was that he was soft and needed to toughen up. In my mind, he was a terrible team player and he sounded like an egotistical, cancerous presence. We all participated in the same initiations, we were all treated terribly by veteran players, and racism was just something that we normalized. I thought he was the issue; it was our job to conform to the norms of the hockey world. Varying from those norms, especially as a player of colour, was highly frowned upon. What’s said in the room stays in the room, and it appeared to me that Akim was breaking the hockey code wherever he went […]

In his letter, he remembered being told that he didn’t get the “culture” of hockey. I now realize that we never understood the word culture. We used the word as an excuse, or an alibi, to carry out these hideous acts on minors that had been a tradition for decades. The difference for me was that I looked the same as everyone else. I soon realized that I was the issue, not Akim. Throughout my career, I was complicit in this behaviour, and I never stood up to stop it. I was ignorant.”

- Conflicted Scars: An Average Player’s Journey To the NHL (2022), by Justin Davis.

[thelunarsystemwrites]

My second attempt.

(...this isn't a story, or a poem or made up. This actually... is real. TW for suicide attempt, depression, use of overdosing as a metaphor, and... yeah, I'm sorry.)

This happened on June 3rd, 2024.

Monday, June 3rd, 2024, sometime around 5 pm.

Was when I attempted to take my life for the second time.

I've been feeling so... uneasy, the past few days. I thought, "It must be one of my moots!" So to every moot in my list, I checked on them. I'm glad I did, I got good and bad news from each one, I got to hear different stories, I got to offer my comfort and congratulations.

...but the feeling was still there.

So I kept asking, my moots, friends, people I've never talked to too much—How are you?

It was still there, eating me from the inside out

...And, on June 3rd... something clicked.

I was kinda thinking of it for the past couple days, of doing this. I think my posts, my demeanour reflected it even before i knew.

I was talking to someone on discord. They might've thought it was a nice conversation... I was planning on taking my life while we joked around.

I think that feeling, might've been me. Might've been my gut saying "Hey, don't do this!" Might've been myself reminding me of a promise I made to my twin. My sister, my best friends, my platonic spouse, my mum, the people I care about. The family I've made here.

...but

I tried... anyways.

Because I just couldn't see any further thsn right now, the heaviness that pushed my body down, the bad thoughts I overdosed on.

And... I didn't tell anyone. That would've been my biggest regret, because I love them all so, so fucking much. They are my family.

And my other friends, moots... I would've missed immensely too.

So... I'm sorry. I'm sorry for trying something so.... stupid. I'm sorry I didn't talk to anyone, I'm sorry I've been distancing myself, I'm sorry if I worried anyone, I'm sorry.

...But the one thing, the one thing I'm not sorry about...

I'm not sorry it didn't work.

I'm glad it didn't. I'm glad I got to tell my family on here, that I love them. That they're a family to me.

I'm glad I got to tell them good morning. I'm glad I told them. I'm glad... I'm here, I think, yeah. I'm glad, grateful for the people I have in my life. Thank you.

[muzzlemouths]

im tired of messing with this. just take it