#fiction tag

[airitree]

I wrote/illustrated/hand bound a fantasy book for my final senior thesis!

Click HERE for the link to read a chapter 1 preview! And check out my "#lamb at arms tag" to browse related art ;-)

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"Lamb at Arms" is an illustrated fantasy novel, featuring a world populated by beastfolk and animal giants, after humans mysteriously vanished into nothingness. The story focuses on a lamb knight who was born from an ageless Eden paradise, hoisted into the real world to track down a lost serpent."

Disclaimer: Not a published book, but will I attempt to shop it around? Yes.

[morallygay]

okay forget anything else I ever said, being seen as a monster is the number 1 feature a character can have that will automatically make me grab them with my fist and lodge them some place in my chest forever

[soul-struck]

oh, because love is like that feeling i get in my ribs after drinking black coffee and forgetting to eat, a fluttering in my chest, in my fingers, the shortness of breath when i stand up and that strange weakness in my legs. why is love always pain and forgetting for me. i wish i could love like my brother, like buying birthday cards and keychains and necklaces, why can't i love like love isn't pain to me?

and, oh my god, you think i'm being so overdramatic when i tell you this, but you don't understand. someone once told me that i fall in love with any kindness someone shows to me, because once i fell off my bike and i didnt cry because i thought it didnt hurt that bad, but when a stranger offered me bandages and antiseptic, i started sobbing.

im so terribly unequipped to fall in love it sickens me. because i enjoy storms and lately it rains with the sun still out and i hate it because it feels all wrong.

[warriors-of-heavy]

A Meeting and a Departure: Chapter 1

[holy shit why did a tonberry break my writer's block wide open.

this is a rough retelling of Stormblood's Samurai questline starring Rogberry, the tonberry of light! obviously, spoilers for that questline, though there aren't any in this chapter since it's focused on scene setting and fleshing out headcanons I have about how tonberries work.

I don't think there's any hard trigger warnings on this, but there are mentions of violence and prejudice towards tonberries and lalafell within, so now you're warned.]

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Rogberry sat in the shade near the bustle of the Sapphire Exchange, gleefully drinking in the atmosphere of merchants enticing passersby. It had been months since he found himself stuck in this fun-house version of Kijoyo calling itself Eorzea, but even now he was still tickled by the novelties of living in one place for extended periods of time. The daily routine of the city was soothing to someone so used to change and chaos.

Tonberries like Rogberry weren’t as despised in his own world, but even there they rarely stayed in one place long. They had friends or family they’d travel with, but too many tonberries in one place was always risky. Still, he had no reason to dwell on such depressing things at the moment. He was probably the only tonberry in the city-having the warrior of light vouch for you opens up a lot of doors-and besides, he was going to be late for Vateli’s performance at the Celestium.

As Rogberry starting slipping his way through a sea of shins and knees, he was once again thankful for the heavy robes and hat of his profession. Not only did they hide the fact that he’s not a lalafell from random passers-by, but its aetheric charge also blocked out most of the emotions of the crowd, which is what made living in a city as large as Ul’dah possible for him in the first place. Of course the hat also made it near impossible for him to look up high enough to see where he was going, so he just had to follow the flow of the crowd for now and hope he popped up somewhere closer to his destination.

Ugh, of course he’d end up in the worst part of the city, and with that paladin nearby too. He never caught her name, all the Eorzeans speak too fast for him to worry about details like that. She was going on and on about some competition, and before he could even say anything she picked him up under her arm and carried him in. Thal's balls.

Now, Rogberry wasn’t against the idea of violence on principle. Any place that would let lalafell run around freely could be considered lawless at best, so he’d been in a fair number of scraps by this point. the problem was the crowds. The Bloodsands were as crowded as the Gold Saucer on a good day, and no matter how cheerful they were, there was always a pungent undercurrent of bloodlust in the air. Violence is addictive to all races, ones that can sense others emotions especially so. Bloodshed begets bloodshed, until a Grudge has taken hold in even the most stalwart of berries’ minds.

While Rogberry was trying to sink further into his robes for extra protection, he caught wind of something very different than the crowd pressing around them. A man stood down in the sands. Not only did he give off no emotion at all, but he gave off a lack of emotion, creating an eye in the storm of anticipation. He wore no armor, but his sword meant he wasn’t a mage either. His opponent already charged, cocksure and hungry for fame, but the strange swordsman simply stood there. He hadn’t drawn his blade by the time the younger fighter was upon him and then-

The fight was already over. In the time it took to blink, the strange swordsman had stepped past his opponent’s attack, unsheathed his sword, and delivered a blow that by all accounts should have shattered the slender blade in his hand, knocking the younger fighter to his knees and ending the match. Every movement was perfect, smoother than the very air currents blowing through the arena. But none of that matted to Rogberry. It was the man’s implacable calmness that he took most notice of. In any other fighter, he would have seen some sort of tell-a flicker of anger, or a burst of pride. But this man’s calm was ever present, as though his opponent had simply tripped in front of him. While the rest of the crowd cheered or groaned, depending on who they bet upon, Rogberry knew one thing for sure.

He had to meet this man.

[azuremist]

I love saying “this anime romance plot would be better and make more sense if they were both boys” (I am always right about this btw)

[lepertamar]

hypocritical characters who state beliefs and values that are contradicted by their own actions or backstory........this is soooo very common/predictable/passé in the construction of 'i believe in [cool value] [acts heinously]' that i'm not interested in it, and 'i believe in [heinous idea] [acts coolly]' is not very far behind it in terms of played-out-ness at least in the subgenre of writing that includes fanfiction with eg woobie adjacent tropes? but a more morally neutral/lateral sort of thing of 'i believe [x][behaves in y manner or exhibits y traits or y experiences that contradict x]', where both x and y are technically morally neutral but this character has unpredictable deeprooted personal reasons for why they are attaching so much weight to x, is...........so sooooooo ripe..........

[pyroinfusedtiger]

Posting this everywhere til im not obsessed with it anymore

[morallygay]

nooo don’t betray your own moral code and rewrite history to save me you’re gonna make the audience think we’re gay haha

[morallygay]

[ID: 2 versions of the meme of a tiktok caption that reads "he would not fucking say that" edited to read "they would not fucking have kids" and "they would not fucking start a family" /end ID]

are we still doing this because i have a late submission

[soul-struck]

that place where we’re half asleep and half awake is when we can glimpse the afterlife, i think. i can hear you laughing in the living room, and i realise i havent heard you laugh like that in years.

im still asleep, i can feel the blanket over my shoulders, my eyes are closed, but im thinking about that one quote about how you can replace a lover, a friend, but you cant ever replace a brother.

when i was deeply sad, when i was taking ice cold showers in the winter to feel something, it was only the thought of losing you that i was afraid of. and even though im still asleep, i wish i could keep hearing you laugh like that for eternity.

i hope when my life ends, i hope death is when i finally wake up and join you in the living room, and drink energy drinks with you that our mom hates while playing video games together for hours like we did when we were children.

i hope that i can live an eternity in our memories, in me hugging you everytime you came home from college at 1am at the airport while it poured rain outside, in holding your hand when you cried after your fiance broke up with you, in the late night talks over facetime about our lives which were the only spots of light in the darkness that was my life for many, many years.

i was never afraid of death. because i knew that whichever one of us died first, we would wait for the other. we would wait for each other, before facing whatever comes after, my dearest older brother.

[skyrim-forever]

big plans tonight

[vulpinesaint]

quiz enjoyers! i am now inviting you to come create something in my workshop❕

[morallygay]

[ID: tumblr tag by @kkomaism that reads:

#literally like a base-boosted version of 'did it hurt? when I told you to look it up and I was right?'

/end ID]

[beepboopappreciation]

Is this anything

[aesethewitch]

When I was a kid, we moved into a house that had a huge lilac tree out front. It was mostly rotten, and it needed to be taken down before it fell. It took a while, but eventually, it was gone.

Mostly. A couple years later, little lilac babies popped out of the ground in its place. My mom was determined to get rid of them, because she'd planted a beautiful flower garden there, and the lilac trees would overshadow and kill the whole garden. I insisted on saving at least a few saplings. She said fine, but I had to dig them out and put them in pots myself.

So, I did. I spent days digging little lilac bushes out of the ground and putting them into pots. Some couldn't be saved, but some could. When all was said and done, I had five brand-new lilac saplings. Seven or eight years old, and it was my absolute pride and joy.

Three died due to sun scorching, severe drought that no amount of watering could save, and perhaps just being moved from their place in the ground. But two survived, and I was awfully proud of them! I'd go out and talk to them every single day. I watered them by hand and made sure they were fertilized properly. I learned all about their favored environments, and I was determined to make sure they lived.

One of my mom's friends saw what I was doing with the lilacs. She asked if she could have one to put in her backyard, and I agreed on the condition that she take very, very good care of it.

It's now fucking enormous. I'm talking ten feet tall and bursting with beautiful purple flowers every spring. My mom still gets updates each year as they start to bloom, which she forwards to me. And all I can think is, "That's my friend! Thriving some twenty years on, there it is."

The other tree nearly died, too. It lived in a pot for far, far too long. I wanted to plant it somewhere in my parents' yard, but my mom was reluctant. Eventually, we agreed to put it in the far back garden. It grew okay for many years, despite the shade, but in all these years, it's never bloomed.

Last year, the massive tree casting massive shadows over the lilac and the garden cracked in half and fell. It tumbled into the garden, crushing part of the nearby shed and destroying a few plants beneath it.

It missed my lilac by inches.

The clean-up is long done. The rest of the tree has been cut down, and my lilac has full sunlight for the first time in fifteen years. It won't bloom this year, I know. But it's got new shoots up. It's taller than ever. I spent half an hour a few weeks ago praising it for surviving all this time, dreaming about its future and telling it how I believe it'll become the tall beauty it's always been meant to be.

I think next year, I'll see flowers.

[daisywords]

One of my biggest nitpicks in fiction concerns the feeding of babies. Mothers dying during/shortly after childbirth or the baby being separated form the mother shortly after birth is pretty common in fiction. It is/was also common enough in real life, which is why I think a lot of writers/readers don't think too hard about this. however. Historically, the only reason the vast majority of babies survived being separated from their mother was because there was at least one other woman around to breastfeed them. Before modern formula, yes, people did use other substitutes, but they were rarely, if ever, nutritionally sufficient.

Newborns can't eat adult food. They can't really survive on animal milk. If your story takes place in a world before/without formula, a baby separated from its mother is going to either be nursed by someone else, or starve.

It doesn't have to be a huge plot point, but idk at least don't explicitly describe the situation as excluding the possibility of a wetnurse. "The father or the great grandmother or the neighbor man or the older sibling took and raised the baby completely alone in a cave for a year." Nope. That baby is dead I'm sorry. "The baby was kidnapped shortly after birth by a wizard and hidden away in a secret tower" um quick question was the wizard lactating? "The mother refused to see or touch her child after birth so the baby was left to the care of the ailing grandfather" the grandfather who made the necessary arrangements with women in the neighborhood, right? right? OR THAT GREAT OFFENDER "A newborn baby was left on the doorstep and they brought it in and took care of it no issues" What Are You Going to Feed That Baby. Hello?

Like. It's not impossible, but arrangements are going to have to be made. There are some logistics.