#descriptor

[tanjir0se]

Disclaimer these are just a small sampling of some possible writer traits I’ve noticed either in myself or in fics I read. Also consider a rb for sample size !

[2pen2wildfire]

Really hate that the queer community's response to the creation of a gender trinary (girl, boy, and nonbinary, which is still not all-encompassing) was to... reinvent the binary. We just started grouping all genders into "masc/male-aligned" and "fem/female-aligned" and it's so fucking stupid. Even with the occasional allowance of "neutral/unaligned" it still maintains the binary as the standard. And then they don't let you use certain labels if you don't have the "right" gender alignment. The fuck.

[chamomile-tea-time]

i actually rly like it when authors (OCCASIONALLY) use a descriptor for a character we've already bene introduced to rather than a name/pronouns (ex: the florist eyed him suspiciously // max eyed him suspiciously). it has to be used well ofc, ideally when the descriptor is relevant, but yeah i get a kick out of hearing the protagonist think about "the tall man looked down at him" or smth like!!! yummy piece of description you have there bro

[glorious-spoon]

i'm very picky about tv shows, but my pickiness has only an incidental relationship to whether or not a show is "good". it needs to scratch a particular itch in my brain at the right moment. do i know what the right moment is? no. do i know what the itch is? also no. i can be relied upon to get instantly bored of 85% of tv shows and then turn the remaining 15% into a central facet of my personality for 3-5 business months and even i am incapable of predicting which one it'll be ahead of time.

[dreamyintersexouppy]

did we collectively forget that not including the space in trans women is a dogwhistle or are we just accepting transmisogyny now

[chococrystal]

I’m sure this has been done already but whtvr

It’s literally their dynamic 🍃💨

[jeeb-roski]

I think a LOT about how Soap has canonically referred to Price's beard as the dick tickler. 😭

[beneathsilverstars]

normal dashboard simulator !

(username didn't fit into the screenshots well but op is by hermitcraft-8)

[trans-axolotl]

my gendered experience growing up as an intersex person was overwhelmingly defined by my responses and resistance to everything that got me labeled as a failure: failure to quickly get a gender assigned at birth, failure to go through a normal puberty and grow up into a woman, failure at meeting the standards for "complete womanhood" because of my intersex sex traits, and yet simultaneously failing to ever be acknowledged as a "real man" and being treated as a threat when I expressed I wanted to transition.

before i realized i was a man and came out as trans, the ways that girlhood was denied to me was very often humiliating and painful. locker rooms filled with other girls were a frequent source of shame. there were many big and small ways that i was told that my intersex body made me insufficient, incomplete, broken. i was forced onto estrogen, forced into shaving my body hair, and was constantly being told to change myself to better fit this mystical idea of a "normal woman." and even though I ultimately ended up becoming a man, the denial of girlhood was painful.

but i think that these things would have been even more difficult to navigate as an intersex girl if on top of everything I already said, i was having to cope with the denial of my girlhood while i was forced into boys locker rooms. if my doctors were forcing me onto testosterone hrt and refusing to even discuss estrogen, if all my legal paperwork had "M" on it and was a logistical nightmare to change, if every support group for my intersex variation labeled it as a "men's support group," if the LGBTQ community spaces i tried to join were misogynistic towards me often to the point of exile, if my self determination as an intersex girl was denied in most spaces of my life, and on and on and on. while listing all these things out i also don't want to make it seem like it's all about suffering and pain--so much of transition for me has been about joy in my self determination and how much it feels like a reclamation of autonomy to decide what I want my body and self to be like--i know this is an experience i share with so many of my trans intersex friends.

as an person who was AFAB, although there were many ways that trying to grow up as an intersex girl were a painful, logistical nightmare, many times and places that i was excluded from woman's spaces, etc. however, there was a simultaneous affirmation that i was right to strive for that in the first place. which is logic rooted in some fucked up compulsory dyadism, but also which would have made some things slightly easier or even possible at all if i had wanted to embrace being an intersex girl within this fucked up system.

pretty much every time i've seen people on tumblr talking about "afab transfems" in an intersex context, people seem happy to collapse these experiences and act like there's no meaningful distinction or point in distinguishing between different types of intersex embodiment. it seems incredibly extractive, to be perfectly honest with you--taking terms already used by a community to make meaning of their experiences and to expand and dilute that term enough that it means something pretty different than the original.

it's making me think about the concept of epistemic injustice, which is a term coined by Miranda Fricker to describe oppression related to knowledge, communication, and making meaning of the world. There's two subtypes of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Testimonial injustice refers to the dynamic where marginalized people are labeled as not credible, excluded from conversations, and their testimony and knowledge is labeled as unreliable, even when they're the ones who are experts and have first hand experience of what people are talking about. (this is why i probably won't make this post rebloggable--i've noticed this pattern on tumblr many times where trans men speaking about transmisogyny get lots of notes and are given a lot of grace, where trans women are silenced, attacked for not having perfect wording, and otherwise delegitimized.)

the second type is called hermeneutical injustice. it describes how marginalized people are denied the right to make sense of the experiences in their own lives. this can look like preventing people from building community, terminology, a political understanding of themselves, and the interpretive resources needed to process how you live in the world.

this is a form of injustice that I think almost all intersex people are very familiar with--we are denied community and interpretive resources to the point that we're told we don't even exist, that intersex isn't a real word, and so many more examples that leave us isolated and with very few options for understanding what we're collectively experiencing. as an intersex person i really intimately understand how frustrating, confusing, and painful it is to not have words for your experiences, your identity, your life.

so it makes me really sad and pissed off when it seems like intersex people seem to be replicating this exact same type of epistemic injustice towards transfems and specifically towards intersex transfems. pretty much every time recently i see people talking about "afab transfems" they're doing so in a way that seems to deny that trans women even have the right to make sense of their own experiences in the world. there seems to be this mindset that these political frameworks, these interpretive resources that transfems have built up are just up for grabs for anyone. and then on top of that has come with it a lot of cruel, hateful language and direct attacks towards many intersex transfems who are facing so much harassment right now.

an important value to me is this idea of reciprocity as a foundation for solidarity. to me reciprocity means that we're prioritizing the ways we care for each other, we're thinking about how we can uplift each other, and we're watching out for extractive or exploitative patterns where one group is constantly expected to be in "solidarity" with another group without getting the same respect and care back toward them. i think that there could be so many ways that intersex people of all genders could share our overlapping experiences and actually be in true, meaningful solidarity with each other, but i barely ever actually see that happen on tumblr. and that pisses me off, because i do think that there's so much we have in common that we could celebrate and support each other with. i feel so much kinship with so, so many of my trans intersex friends, and ways where i see our lives converge. but i don't think that can happen in an environment where there's no acknowledgment of the ways that our experiences will sometimes (often) differ from each other, and the ways that we have unique needs.

another frustration i've had based on this most recent couple months of transmisogynistic intersex posting on tumblr is how intersex people have been mostly ignoring intersex community resources and devaluing the existing intersex terminology that people created to try to meet our needs. so much of what i've seen people describing on tumblr seems to really line up with the term ipsogender. Ipsogender is a term coined by an intersex sociologist Cary Gabriel Costello, and is used to describe intersex people whose gender matches the gender they were medically assigned at birth, but who might not feel like cis or trans fits them, might experience dysphoria, and who might feel like they've ended up transitioning medically or socially in some ways. this is a word that exists that an intersex person put time into coining because they wanted other intersex people to feel seen, embraced, and have ways of understanding themselves and communicating to others, and that's something that's super meaningful to me! and yet, i've rarely seen anyone reference it, and also seen multiple people making fun of it in other spaces online.

there's also intergender, which is another intersex specific gender term used to describe when your gender is inseparable from your intersex traits, and that your intersex identity is intertwined with your gender identity in some way. some people just identify as intergender, others use it as an adjective and exist as an intergender man or woman. intersex terminology like this is really important to me, especially because we're so often denied the right to make sense of our own experiences.

i think ultimately what i wanted to say with this post is just that when i think about intersex community, some of the most important values of intersex community for me are solidarity, care for each other, and affirming our right to define our own existence. and i don't think that can happen in a community where people are acting in extractive ways, harassing and attacking their fellow community members, and being dismissive of the realities of other intersex people's lives.

[dykealloy]

franky (has never met bepo before): tarao what's your first mate like law: he's a bear franky: weird way to describe him but okay 👍 franky: 🏳️‍🌈❤️✨ law: how are you doing that with your mouth

[a-s-fischer]

I just can't get over how much of a confession it is when somebody says, "I'm not antisemitic, Jews aren't even really a semitic people anyway".

What you're saying with that line of logic is that yep, you hate Jews. You just don't want to be called the word for people who hate Jews.

[nyancrimew]

OHHH THATS WHY. Youre european and using european party terms when you see america. American liberals are not european liberals

that's not really how this works bestie, yes the word liberal is used differently in the US, it's used as a catch all for anything left of republicans which makes it completely meaningless for actually describing your political views. that's the point I'm trying to make. also no it doesn't just magically mean something else in the US, it's just that the overall politics of the democrat party more broadly matches what passes as a centre right if not right wing party in europe with an ever so slightly more socially progressive tint.

that's not to say there isn't also people further left describing themselves as liberals, it's just that these words don't mean much in a two party system where both parties have an insane range of actual political ideologies.

[anassemblageofpassions]

The thing abt john winchester is that he is too complex for the majority of the spn fandom and for a good portion of the writers on the show too.

Because at his core john is about love over everything else. When he looks up at his sons (yes, up, the fact that they’re both taller than him>>>>>), there is love seeping achingly from every single pore of his being even as he abuses them, as he destroys their souls beyond belief. He does it all entirely out of love. And he is so, so wrong for it. A part of him knows it. But he wants to keep dean alive, and he wants to keep Sam pure. And he loves them so much. And he damages them so horribly. John Winchester is the foundation upon which they are both built, they only become more of what he made them as the series goes on. Sam stops fighting it, Dean continues to mold into his image no matter how hard he tries to fight it.

Hell puts them both on steroids, but their individual trauma responses that influence this are the foundations that John built into them. No wonder azazel wanted sam to win so badly. John Winchester crafted his sons into alastair and Lucifer’s ideal victims, respectively, and dean was a better (worse) john than John ever was. John held out in hell. Dean acquiesced to his abuser despite all of his efforts to fight him, and he’s never been the same since.

Sam fought like hell, and he fought destiny, but at his core, he did what John always wanted him to by doing what dean wanted him to do, and then he stops fighting at all, loses the fire he showed john in adolescence that john immediately notices when he returns in s14.

And the sad thing is. They filled their roles so well that John is saddened by what they’ve become. He didn’t want dean to break. He didn’t want Sam to be dimmed. He’s sad to see what Sam is like in s14. In the process of recovering his wife, he ensured he would mold his sons into what he wanted them to be, and when he got what he wanted, he was devastated.

John Winchester is so driven by love and grief and he’s so filled to the brim with both that it’s painful to watch him on screen because he destroyed his family because of it. And he wanted this all along but he didn’t realize what he’d have to give up to get it.

[literaryvein-reblogs]

100 Words for Worldbuilding

Some sensory words that can enhance your story/poem.

A-E

Acid - sour, burnt; vinegary

Acrid - strong, biting (e.g., something on fire)

Airy - natural smelling, (e.g., clean, fresh air)

Ambrosial - fragrant; having a pleasant smell

Aroma - strong, yet pleasant scent

Aura - smell surrounding something

Balm - soothing scent

Billowy - scent that surges and wanes

Biting - pungent, sharp or harsh

Bouquet - blend of floral scents

Briny - salty

Buttery - smooth; rich; greasy

Citrusy - crisp notes of any citrus fruit

Clean - very light scent, clean and natural

Cottony - soft; smooth or delicate

Creaky - squeaky; showing signs of deterioration

Crisp - fresh and natural

Crystalline - strikingly clear or sparkling

Dirty - nasty, unpleasant odor

Doggy - odor like an unbathed or wet canine

Downy - soft, soothing; silky; delicate

Earthy - recently dug or tilled soil

Essence - basic, natural scent

F-M

Faint - very light or mild; can barely be detected

Feminine - floral fragrances

Fetid - decaying or rotting smell

Fishy - smelling of fish; pungent, strong, unpleasant

Fleecy - shaggy; woolly

Floral - scents associated with flowers

Flowery - fragrance similar to flowers

Foamy - frothy; bubbly

Fragrance - pleasant smell

Fresh - natural smelling, rather than artificial

Fruity - having the flavor or aroma of ripe fruit; sweet

Gaudy - excessively showy

Gingery - pungent; sharp, robust taste or aroma

Globular - spherical

Gossamer - light, delicate, or insubstantial

Grainy - coarse; sandy; unrefined

Heady - very strong aroma

Incense - strong scent

Lemony - tart, piquant citrus notes

Lilac - rich floral scent combining rose with vanilla

Lime - refreshing and zesty citrus smell

Loamy - fragrance with an earthy note

Masculine - earthy fragrances

Medicinal - earthy; often unpleasant

Mildewed - soaked in wetness that has gone stale

Minty - menthol-like smell (e.g., mint tea or peppermint candy)

Misty - mild fragrance, not overpowering

Moist - smell of dew or rainfall

Moldy - damp, fungus-like odor

Musty - old smell; stale and probably moldy

N-R

Nauseating - odor that makes one sick to the stomach

Odorize - changing the scent

Overpowering - too strong of a smell

Peppery - hot, pungent, fiery; stinging

Perfumed - artificial fragrance, not natural-smelling

Pheromone - natural scents

Piercing - loud, shrill; biting

Pine - crisp, refreshing evergreen smell

Piquant - pleasantly pungent, sharp, or spicy taste

Plastic - artificial chemical polymer odor

Poignant - pungently pervasive; piercing

Prickly - stinging; irritating; itchy

Pristine - fresh and clean as or as if new

Pungent - strong fragrance

Putrid - stench of decay

Rancid - spoiled; food that has gone bad

Rank - offensive in odor or flavor

Redolent - having a strong, permeating odor

Repulsive - off-putting odor

Rich - strong, resounding smell that is appealing to the senses

Ripe - brought by aging to full flavor or the best state

Rose - spicy yet sweet fragrance

Rotten - spoiled, rancid, unpalatable

S-Z

Savory - spicy, salty scent that has no elements of sweetness

Sharp - pungent fragrance that permeates the air

Skunky - noxious smell that lingers; sulfuric (like rotten eggs) odor

Smoky - scent of burning wood

Soapy - smooth and slippery

Sour - rancid, sickly sweet smell

Spicy - sharp, heady, can sting or tickle the nose

Spoiled - rotten; something that has “gone bad”

Stale - old, dusty, stagnant odor

Stinking - unpleasant, foul smell

Sweaty - perspiration odor

Sweet - sugary smell

Tangy - having a powerfully stimulating odor or flavor; acidic

Tantalizing - arouses or stimulates desire or interest

Tart - sharp fragrance or taste

Tasteless - arousing no interest; dull

Tempting - having an appeal; enticing

Trace - a tiny amount of fragrance

Velvety - soft, smooth, thick, or richly hued

Vinegary - sour; disagreeable, bitter, or irascible

Whiff - a fleeting scent

Wispy - hint of fragrance in the air

Woodsy - forest-like smell

Zesty - sharp and pleasantly stimulating

Sources: 1 2 ⚜ More: Worldbuilding ⚜ Word Lists ⚜ Writing References

[theshriekingsisterhood]

The way I SPRINTED to my computer to make this the second Risky showed me this textpost

[lady-harrowhark]

For me, the thing is that "confusing" just... isn't the right descriptor for my experience reading the Locked Tomb books. I wasn't "confused," I just didn't have all the pieces of the puzzle yet, and I was aware of that fact. I feel like I generally knew what I was meant to know, as a reader, at the point in the book where I was at. And for a very significant portion of the series, what the reader is meant to know is, "not much." I was less "confused" and moreso "searching for the explanation that will connect everything." This is absolutely a series on the very high end of the "unknown quantities" spectrum. They're an intellectual escape room.

But the shorthand way to convey that is just that yeah, no, these books are super confusing.