#finding the emotional core

[puppetmaster13u]

Prompt 339

So erm, Danny might’ve fallen through a portal. And might have no clue where he is right now. 

He fell into an alleyway! Right into a dumpster! Which isn’t the worst thing he’s fallen into but still. Ew. Well, Dad should be able to find him and bring him back home! …Right? 

He shakes out his itchy fur and scales, already impatient and bored in the single alley despite it only being a few minutes. What’s a realms hatchling to do but explore? Well, besides taking care of his shed, but it’s too dry where he is anyway. Maybe he’ll find a lake! 

Hm. He can’t understand what anyone is shouting or freaking out about. It’s like they’ve never seen a dragon or something, geeze! Oh well, he’s on his way to find water, he’s not built for the desert…

[brainrot-jikan]

im not the biggest alhaitham/kaveh shipper (because im a rare pair ho) but it seems to me that in alhaitham/kaveh getting-together fics tend to be... unequal.

the beautiful thing about alhaitham and kaveh is that they're both equally right and equally wrong and equally dicks about it. but the writers for alhaitham/kaveh much more frequently seem to give alhaitham the burden change (the burden of the character flaw) instead of kaveh.

in any good character arc, the main character has a fatal flaw or misconception, and by the end of that arc they have addressed that flaw in some definitive way. scrooge was a scrooge and learned that being that way was detrimental; merlin from finding nemo was overprotective to a fault and had to learn that he couldn't (and shouldn't) control everything and to let go; the wolf from little red riding hood learns that you should stop while you're ahead.

stories centering around romance tend to lean heavily on character arcs, which makes sense. and since romance generally requires two individuals to be vulnerable and open and emotional with each other, it makes double sense that alhaitham/kaveh authors zoom straight into alhaitham's lack of emotional vulnerability.

this bothers me.

in society, individuals are expected to experience and present emotions in a specific way. if someone dies, you cry. if someone smiles at you, you smile back. if you're at a party, you're supposed to be having fun. if you don't do these things, you're seen as impolite at best and a inhuman freak at worst. when these behaviors are frequent it's often viewed as emotional immaturity, or a lack of ability to feel at all. the inability or lack of willingness to conform to societies emotional expectations of you is seen as a flaw and a reason for exclusion.

alhaitham is canonically disliked and avoided for being the way he is. he prefers it this way, but that doesn't mean the people perpetuating this avoidance are in the right. they are the societal pressure to conform that alhaitham blows off. alhaitham could be the way he is for a lot of reasons: avoidant attachment style, trauma, following someone else's example (eg. his grandmother), or just his base personality. it doesn't MATTER. he is the way he is. kaveh having to accept that should be part of the story.

putting the burden of the fatal flaw on alhaitham, making the way alhaitham treats kaveh and the people around him the problem, feels invalidating. it implies heavily that alhaitham's way of interfacing with the world, alhaitham's very SELF, is incorrect. my suggestion is to flip a larger portion of that burden onto kaveh. kaveh 👏 character 👏 arcs 👏

some examples/recommendations:

- make kaveh project his insecurities onto other people but especially onto alhaitham; he's overly reliant on other people for his own self worth, and he perceives alhaitham's lack of positive feedback as a direct reflection of how alhaitham feels about him. but learns along the way that alhaitham doesn't hate him, kaveh's actual struggle is with hating himself and being unable to his own self as worthy of love. maybe throw in how you are responsible for your own recovery, other people can help but you can't rely on them to carry you through self actualization.

- or, kaveh tries to make alhaitham behave more like a "normal" person, to be more pleasant and emotive and forthcoming, and then realizes he's in the wrong for trying to make alhaitham into something he's not, possibly for all the wrong reasons (not because he likes alhaitham better like that, but bc society says that's healthier and a better/more conforming way to be)

- or you could go ahead make alhaitham's issues the main problem but they're too complicated to overcome in a short period of time, so kaveh has to accept alhaitham is doing his best in his own way and not push for unrealistic and unhealthy changes. he could alter his own behavior to give alhaitham space and time and a safe place to land.

that got sappy so it's past time for me to dip out. go forth and ship things; but maybe consider letting alhaitham be a rude stone-faced bastard if he wants to be.

[jerreeeeeee]

i don’t know if i’m ever gonna write the fic but i’ve been thinking abt like. the eternal stockade. the implications. lup, a lich who was trapped in a dark featureless cell for a decade completely isolated with nothing to keep her sanity but her own mind. she has to put people in the eternal stockade. how many liches does she see herself in. how many liches started out just like her. how many liches are truly too far gone. and the only liches we ever see other than her and barry are edward and lydia. they’re certainly evil, but mad? they seem pretty sane. they’re not, like, tattered echoes of souls, they’re definitely still people. even as much of a grudge as lup surely has against them, wouldn’t they remind her incredibly strongly of herself? do they deserve to be trapped just like she was? for eternity? isn’t eternity what turned john to existential despair in the first place?

[sparkling12]

I'm curious, in general do we prefer Poison Ivy with Green Skin or Nah?

oh reblog for more responses please lol

[donnatroyyyy]

Good Talia characterization and good Damian characterization can co-exist easily, they are not mutually exclusive whatsoever. Good Ra’s characterization along with good characterization for either Talia and Damian cannot coexist eight out of ten times, they are mostly mutually exclusive.

[idkaguyorsomething]

me searching through bbc merlin fanart and fics for the heart of the show.

(IMAGE ID: Doomguy in a red area fighting off hordes of monsters, captioned “WHERE IS GUINEVERE”)

[aroaessidhe]

2023 reads

The Deep Sky

scifi mystery thriller

on a deep space mission traveling from an environmentally devastated earth with hope to restart humanity elsewhere

when they’re halfway, an explosion kills 3 crew and pushes them off course

the only witness is the Alternate who has no specific role, and she has to figure out who caused it & if they might continue to sabotage, while they're figuring out a way to get back on course with limited resources

flips between present and the past: of her childhood and training for the mission, her identity struggles, and relationship with her mother

questions the ethics of ‘restarting’ humanity elsewhere vs putting resources into fixing earth

[shirogane-oushirou]

🌊🦦 Summer Beach Time 🦦🌊

soooo i made comments in the tags of another piece i made about how i want to go to the beach (or a lake tbh, he's a lake guy) with him, and watch him get the zoomies in the water and just. walk around and make the 🥺 face at me when i'm sitting at the edge of the water and he wants to be close.

(i'm obsessed with this pair of dino pattern trunks... ren core...)

[crossbackpoke-check]

Looks like that video is about a month & a half after The Trade and trevors broken ankle 😣

re: this video… anon 😭 i had suspicions but it is so much worse to have them confirmed that really was like. trevor’s first Public Appearance without jamie AND post-broken ankle which is traumatic in and of itself no wonder every beat reporter was like ‘oh yeah trevor’s just devastated’

wouldn’t you be miserable too if your best friend just got traded and your body betrayed you and what if it was maybe all your fault!!!

[96percentdone]

I feel like it bears repeating on like a daily basis, but I do unironically think Nirvana Initiative is like. Demonstrably superior in craft and meaning than the first AI: The Somnium Files. Like I'm not doing a bit on this blog or anything I just actually think AINI is that good and deserves the world. This is the hill upon which I will die, I'm right, fuck you.

[puppetmaster13u]

Prompt 198

Now Bruce was not expecting to reincarnate upon his death. At least he thinks he died, he’s pretty sure he did. There wasn’t any other reason for him to be a well, literal baby. Around two he thinks, which fits well with the fact that it’s around that time that babies start forming memory recall, if he, well, remembered correctly. 

But while he knew about reincarnation thanks to Shayera and Carter, he’d never exactly given it much thought towards himself. Because seriously, what were the chances of such a thing as him being given another chance? 

So he was quite surprised at his situation, experimentally opening and closing pudgy hands that looked well, just a tiny bit off. He’d never been that pale before, he thinks, even back when he never went outside like, ever. 

He turned his gaze towards the mobile above him with a sort of idle curiosity- a mixture of bats (ha) and other trinkets he wasn’t familiar with. It also caused him to get his first good look at his parent, asleep on a rocking chair right next to the crib. 

Huh. They had the same pale skin he did, albeit in the light it looked like it was slightly tinted blue, and while their hair was white they didn’t exactly look old. They looked surprisingly well rested for raising a toddler too, unless they had a nanny or something similar… He rolled over, managing to very shakily push himself to his feet with the help of the crib. 

Why was standing so hard as a toddler? And why did he have his memories of everything except how he had died anyway? 

His head whipped up from where they were staring at his feet when he heard a snort, finding his parent awake and standing. Somehow silently enough that he hadn’t noticed- or he was that easily distracted by the unfamiliar giddiness bursting in his chest. 

“Morning little bat,” his parent easily picked him up and held him while he inwardly sighed at the nickname. Of course his bat motif would follow him into this life. A low rumbling almost caused him to jump, his body relaxing before he could fully register the sound. The… purring? 

Oh. 

He wasn’t human this time around. 

[bluejaybytes]

I’m curious why you found Inside Out 2 insulting? I recognize that everyone is different, but as someone with an anxiety disorder I personally found it pretty relatable

Throughout my teenage years, when my anxiety was at its most debilitating and my coping skills were basically nonexistent, I was repeatedly met with the idea that "every teen is a bit anxious". This, to an extent, is true, being a teenager IS scary and you're probably going to have some level of anxiety. However, I had an active anxiety disorder. I was prone to frequent panic attacks, skipping school because I couldn't even fathom the idea of going to class out of just sheer intense dread and fear, and all around just having an extremely bad time. I went into the movie with an already decently negative expectation because of that, I didn't like how anxiety was shown to show up ONLY when Riley became a teenager, BUT I was willing to set aside my own distaste of it for the sake of like, I do get why they went the direction of adding new emotions as characters, as much as I disagree with that.

However I found it wildly insulting because I feel the level of intense anxiety Riley is shown to have breaches what I'd consider a "normal" level of anxiety and instead feels more like an anxiety disorder, which, again, it angers me to be once again met with the idea that you only get anxious once you're a teenager, or when signs of much higher levels of anxiety than just normal nervousness are brushed aside with that excuse.

Barring that issue, though that is the biggest in my opinion, basically at every corner I was annoyed by something. This movie felt like it could've been incredibly relatable to me, I was a horrendously anxious teen (Still am anxious just not a teen and also I'm better at coping now) in competitive highschool sports (Yes marching band IS a sport I DO die on this hill), but like... it just continually let me down. The coach is genuinely an asshole, doing things like not showing what the expectations are and then proceeding to single out who she knows are the newcomers as breaking rules that had not been properly established, failing to recognize Riley clearly struggling mentally, and honestly, the biggest sin, fucking letting her in the sport at all. Riley's outburst at the other players should've gotten her taken out of the running entirely, I refuse to believe otherwise.

Which, this is kind of all over the place because I'm not really writing this as a full proper breakdown and more just "Jay angrily rambles to an anon with no direction", but hey, SUPER don't like that Riley's over-practicing isn't really called out at all as being harmful. The ROOT of it is, we know she's only doing that because anxiety is driving her to do that, but like... she performs really well. She's met by the older student (I forget her name, God) with positivity for this, and I'm personally just kind of uncomfortable with how her overworking herself is viewed as just like... neutral. And it's only the fact it's stemming from anxiety that's bad.

There's a lot more (I found the pacing bad, I think, ESPECIALLY given that this is a childrens movie, Riley should've been given EXPLICIT help from the people around her barring just "her friends say they're still friends", I think things like anxiety driving her to look at the notebook yet NOT considering the janitor walking by is just... stupid, and in my experience, not at all how anxiety manifests, ect, ect), but ultimately this is not like, a serious breakdown, more just me listing off the top of my head the things that really fucking annoyed me. Also, Ennui was a stupid character. I mean all of the new emotions were fucking stupid because they're all VERY derivative of OTHER emotions if you've made the commitment that the entire range of human emotion be boiled down to just joy/sadness/anger/fear/disgust, but whatever.

I thought the video game guy was funny though. I'm a sucker for those kinds of jokes. I like that his hair routinely was clipping through his outfit

[stackslip]

bulma i think is a shit parent in the casually neglectful/sees her kid as her bestie sense and also is a billionnaire who just gives her son whatever to make up for the time she spent six consecutive days in the lab and forgot trunks' birthday so he had to spend it alone because no way in hell would vegeta remember it. she's funny and cheerful towards him and also thinks that because he's half saiyan and because she met his older self he'll be perfectly fine no matter what. she lets vegeta train him and hurt him because that's what saiyans enjoy doing right, so clearly it's fine. trunks learns to bury his most negative feelings in order to please his dad and because his mom is too busy/superficial to dig much deeper in the roots of his issues. as long as he doesnt complain surely hes fine. his other self grew up during the apocalypse and he turned out pretty well after all! hey kiddo wanna see a nuclear blast from real up close im sure you'll be fine

[deva-arts]

You got isekai'd into SYSTEMA. What now.

Be amazed.

Remember I spawned into the "everything sucks" world.

Break down and cry.

Consider death as an escape.

Summon the global chaos by leaking insider secrets that could make about 200 new conspiracy theories.

Hope that Sera's conspirator ass tries to find me before one of the hits get me first.

Ending 1: I get sniped.

Ending 2: I get jumped.

Ending 3: I get kidnapped.

Ending 4:

Ending 200: It worked! Sera insults me. I cry from both the height she's holding me at and the insult respectively. She tells me to quit sobbing so I weep in incognito mode.

Make it into the Manumission. Wipe my face. Contemplate death again.

Get interrogated.

Get welcomed in! (I am still under close observation)

Quietly fangirl about my characters in 4k then feel incredibly weird about how much I know.

Get interrogated again.

I know that Nathaniel knows that I know but he doesn't know how much I know until I make it known that I know that he knows.

Consider death as- oh. He heard that too.

Literally everyone freaks me out for different reasons. I hang out with Sonia. She calls me fat. I still like you Sonia.

Live in the manumission under witness/informant protection and try not to die.

[ashinaisshin]

it is done! i love this game...

[memento-mariii]

Villainess isekai as horror: your identity, your autonomy, your very own body is stolen and puppeteered by some unseen foreign entity. Not only do your loved ones fail to notice the change, they seem to genuinely prefer the copycat over the real you. Your entire existence was overwritten in a matter of seconds, and the worst part is, the world seems objectively better off for it.