#hope you find it insightful

[knightforflowers]

if you can’t tell what this is about, i’ve had enough and i want out

[imagoddamnonionmason]

TF141 as vines

This includes Franca, my oc.

Major, looking up from sorting out her medical supplies: Ghost, what do you have? Ghost, running after Johnny: a knife. Major: NO!

*prank time in TF141 can reach serious heights, of which Franca will revoke her title as Medic to avoid dealing with the aftermath*

_

Ghost: why'd you dim the lights? Major: to save power, duh... and I want to suck your dick.

_

*Soap and Gaz talking about how Soap got injured during their recent mission while Franca hasn't had her morning coffee* Major: you know what, I'm about to say it. Gaz, trying not to laugh: go on, say it. Say it. Major, looking at Soap like she's not slept in weeks: I don't care that you broke your elbow. Soap: *gasp* Fran! _

*Franca recording and giggling behind the camera, as Soap cranks up the radio full blast in the car. Ghost looks ready to tuck and roll out to escape the chaos* Gaz: ooooh oooh ooh tainted love- Soap, shouting: DON'T TOUCH ME PLEASE I CANNOT STAND IT Ghost, staring into the camera like he's on the Office: Major, kill me. That's an order.

_

[javelinbk]

The Life of Riley

Modern AU based on @pie-of-flames's @beatleskinkmeme prompt

John is a terrible driver, but a broke one, so he lets his aunt get him a job as a chauffeur. His first passenger is Paul, the wealthy son of a successful businessman, whose father wants him to follow in his footsteps. It soon becomes clear that neither men are happy with their current situation in life.

Chapter 1 - Haven’t had a dream in a long time

Chapter 2 - The luck I’ve had could make a good man turn bad

Chapter 3 - I find I spend my time waiting on your call

Chapter 4 - Who’s gonna pay attention to your dreams?

Chapter 5 - You take my pride and throw it up against the wall

Chapter 6 - Why pamper life’s complexity when the leather runs smooth on the passenger seat?

Chapter 7 - Who needs a lover that can’t be a friend?

Chapter 8 - Is that the way we stand?

Chapter 9 - Turned over a new leaf and then tore right through it

Chapter 10 - Is my timing that flawed?

Chapter 11 - But to lose you would cut like a knife

Chapter 12 - Heaven knows I'm miserable now

Chapter 13 - Come on baby, we better make a start

[askpokepelago]

Moon, Gladion, and Hau’s Silvally playing tug-of-war on the shores of PokePelago

[fierrochase-falafel]

Reasons I love Xie Lian's character

Maybe this is more of a personal post, but I really appreciate Xie Lian's characterisation and his character arc because of his humanity. He's grown up being seen as special and different, and he really was special and different, and yet is shown at his lowest, falling all the way down from his position to rockbottom and he STILL makes it out alive. Not even alive by choice, but he makes it out nonetheless. And everyday he has to make the choice to see the good in humanity, after having been exposed to the worst human responses and knowing the extent of the damage he and others can do under certain circumstances. Even when he seemed perfect, he never was, and when he seemed despicable, he wasn't that either. He's jaded but not inconsiderate, angry but not vengeful or brash, guilty but slowly learning to love himself. He has the potential to be the most fearsome calamity or the most powerful god, but he decides to spend his time in a little shrine he built himself with his ghost king boyfriend. He can be cold, he can be cunning, he can be naive, he can be reckless, he can be clumsy and he can be stubborn. He can have so many flaws that may go under the radar, so many virtues that go unappreciated by the people around him. He can be the kindest or most scary person you would ever meet, and the only thing stopping him from being the latter is his will to choose to be kind. He is complicated, like a walking oxymoron. And he is traumatised, and he is repressed, and he is trying- he is still trying after everything. He is one of the most human characters I have read despite being an immortal, and gives you the hope that in the face of everything in all its complexity, our choices matter and we as people matter too, no matter how awful our position may be. Maybe the compassion of even 1 other person we meet could be the thing that saves us after all, and maybe no matter what, we're never too far gone.

[willosword]

:(

[lucky-clover-gazette]

if you think it's exaggerating when i write my self-insert character bluntly jeopardizing a romantic scene to talk about feelings and philosophy, consider that i literally did that with a guy for like 3 hours last night

[weedpoop]

ms paint drawings from my recent shroom trip. hope these help you or make you worse

[babblingbat]

Heiji looks so good in his suit in the Osaka 3 K's case! Between the yellow tie and the way the animators did the highlights on his suit, he's just so handsome!

[grokebaby]

One night, Siru isn't quite feeling it. This one night she didn't sleep well enough, before Pesticinger summoned her from her home, flew her out to the distant woods, and had her vivisect a bird. She was going along with it - what else would she do.

But really.

She does these gross out rituals for it. She finds and brings her items. She trains her voice sore during their little band practice.

I know I got into this basically out of boredom and an inescapable need to numb the pain - Siru thinks. But really, what's in it for me. What is the follower of the plague supposed to get from this.

"When are you giving me something?" she asks, bluntly. The bird perks, tilting her head stupidly. "What am I doing this all For? What should I be getting out of this? What are you supposed to give me in return?" Siru elaborates, giving Pesticinger a bunch more words than the first sentence. It coos thoughtfully, not really saying much.

The knife Siru always uses is still in her hand.

Her black patterns start spreading, turning her a night-dark color, as a pulse of rage flows through her. She yells at Pesticinger. She curses out her life. It's alot of anger and not alot of blame that Pesticinger really deserves. Siru knows this, but fuck if she isn't good at keeping everything in until she explodes at her loved ones.

Not counting the plague as a loved one, of course, but the point still stands. The bird tries to give her words in return for hers - Siru rarely talks this much at once! Pesticinger feels it fair to give her many words in exchange. But Siru doesn't listen to it, for once. Now she's the one talking.

Unfortunately so, because whenever she says too much, she ends up regretting alot of it. That's why she doesn't talk much. She either says bad things, or worthless things.

Siru growls, and tosses the knife at Pesticinger, scaring it off. The plague takes flight, and in a heavy gust of air, she disappears into the night.

.. Great. Another interpersonal relationship wasted. She already feels guilty.

Is she really mad at Pesticinger, or is she just tired? Does she really want something out of the plague, or does she just wish she was better. Wish she didn't need the company of a monster. Wish she felt like remotely good company to said monster.

She walks home. It's very early when she gets there, and her mother is leaving for work. She's worried, and Siru says nothing to her. Nan dutifully helps her to bed. Knowing her concerns won't be answered. Siru hates herself for it. But she'd ruin even more things by telling her mother everything.

I can't believe it - she thinks. Did I really scare off A Plague? What kind of monster must I be?

Well. At least I won't have to spend nights up doing horrors anymore..

She sleeps until the next midnight.

She wakes up abruptly to the sound of something on her window. She jolts up, praying to the mistress her mom doesn't hear it. She follows the sound outside, all the way to the edges of the village. Pesticinger stands there with a bag in her beak. Siru is.. A bit shocked, to see her again.

"Listen, I'm.. I'm sorry, I just.. I feel like nobody really.. Nevermind.." Siru starts, but draws back. Pesticinger drops the bag, and with vigorous head bobs, urges her to speak more. "I listen, yes! I'm listening. Listening now!" she sings, taking a few hops towards Siru. She's.. Taken aback by this. "You feel like nobody listens to you? Do they only take never give? Is that why you're angered like this? You feel so worthless I know, this is what you said to me, but now you should say more. Say say! I listen. I don't hear you speak much. Speak more!" it continues, it's tone urgent and cautious - and maybe, just maybe.. Apologetic?

"What's.. In that bag?" Siru asks, instead.

Pesticinger blinks. "For you! Bag for you! It's givings to you, things for you, for you!" it repeats and blabbers, nudging the bag towards Siru with it's beak vigorously. It jostles to her feet, and Siru.. Still, taken aback, picks it up.

She looks inside, firstly finding the knife she threw earlier - realizing she left it there in the woods. She looks more, finding scarves. They're of fancy material and knit, with patterns, and tussles on some of them.

Oh.. Because she knows I.. Wear head scarfs.

She finds more. There's bones unclear in origin. There's instruments. Mostly flutes and other carriables. There's claws and talons. More sharp weapons. She can easily extrapolate why Pesticinger, a little bird fond of pillaging humans, would pick all these out for her.

Except...

The tie.

"Is this.. Like.. For me to wear? Dressing business casual?" Siru asks the plague. Really, it doesn't look like anything the humans from this realm would wear. It looks.. Futuristic to her. It's beyond fancy too, and made with materials she doesn't immediately recognise her villagers to have.

"If you want, you can wear it! Very stylish, Siru always stylish!" Pesticinger currs in flatteration. But it's not an explanation.

"Where.. Did you get this? Did it.. Belong to someone?"

"Sparrow's other chickling!"

Siru freezes.

"You.. Took this from.. Lassi?"

Pesticinger nods.

[rachelberryy]

Santana Lopez, Gender Performativity, and the Gaze-Death Dichotomy

For @tuiyla

This is a follow-up from this essay on Santana and Bejewelled by Taylor Swift. It also probably looks the way it does because of this post that I read recently.

(I dug out my old university notes for this, because Judith Butler is a GOAT and I felt like going big brain mode)

i.

The top line of my notes on Butler’s gender performativity theory reads, “Gender may be naturalised and taken for granted, but it is still socially constructed and created through the repetition of everyday acts”. As far as I can tell, that isn’t a direct quote, so I’m going to presume it’s a paraphrased summary on my part. It’s the ideological descendant of an idea from Simone de Beauvoir, probably the most influential feminist philosopher of the twentieth century: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” (Incidentally, the idea of gender as a social construct in western feminist literature goes at least as far back as Mary Wollstonecraft. As per usual, TERFs don’t have a clue what they’re talking about.)

Okay. Let’s talk Santana.

Santana is an Afro-Latina lesbian, and a woman. All of those things are relevant in one way or another. We learn that when she was young, Santana was quite the tomboy, until she was socially conditioned into abandoning that particular persona. Given what we know of her family, I think it’s a reasonable assumption that her abuela had something to do with that. That delivers us to the version of Santana we get for the first season and a half of Glee. She’s a bitch, she’s aggressively sexual, she’s notoriously promiscuous, she’s a cheerleader - the feminine high school archetype. In other words, she’s both a stereotype of the idealised high school popular girl, and a whole bunch of things for which women are typically demonised.

Patriarchy, like all reactionary ideologies, is deeply idiosyncratic, almost by design, and creates these catch 22 situations where women cannot conform or rebel enough, it will hate you anyway, because that is its point. That is complicated by the fact that Santana is a fictional character (and one created by a team of male writers, at that), and therefore is also a construct of the male gaze without any agency of her own. This is doubly true for Santana, who starts out as a side character whose first proper story is as Puck’s ‘woman on the side’, and whose second proper story is sleeping with Finn.

The whole thing is a mess of contradictions, an ill-fitting mess of female stereotypes. Slut, bitch, queen bee (once Quinn is deposed). She’s the opposite end of the ‘fucked up ways in which patriarchy constructs female sexuality’ spectrum to Quinn. She’s also, as we later find out, completely fucking miserable. She’s acting, all the time, allowing the only emotions that slip through the cracks of her walls to express themselves as anger. It’s all, you guessed it, a performance. A version of her that didn’t exist until society forced it to. Those aspects of her - so many of them distinctly gendered - are entirely constructed, against her actual nature.

ii.

And then she quits the Cheerios, realises that she’s a lesbian, and begins to deconstruct herself. Glee is an exceptionally manic show, with so little time afforded to monologues by anyone not named Will Schuester. And yet, at the end of Sexy, Santana is given quite a lengthy one, explaining and exploring her character up to that point. (I can think of one other single moment where the pacing of Glee gives Santana specifically a second to breathe: the pause in the middle of RHI/SLY.) The promiscuity, the bitchiness, the anger at the world. The knives turned out so that they don’t cut inside. So much repressed self-loathing.

Part of the reason that sapphicism broadly and lesbianism in particular are such an affront to patriarchy is because they don’t abide by the rules of the game. In other words, it challenges the way in which patriarchy has determined that womanhood and femininity should be performed. That doesn’t mean, however, that it isn’t a performance, if only because, within Butler’s framework, performing and lying are not the same thing.

As I explained in the previous essay, Prom Queen, conceptually and functionally, is about gender roles in a lot of ways. Kurt bucks gender norms with his outfit choice, by embracing the prom queen title, and by dancing with Blaine at the end of the episode. Quinn, in her desperation to be popular, and validated, and feminine, chases the prom queen crown ruthlessly, because it’s the ultimate prize for a popular girl. Again, like the cheerleading, it’s one of the classic high school archetypes. The whole idea of prom king and queen is so aggressively gendered, obviously. It’s binary, and heteronormative, and rooted in about seventeen different forms of social hierarchy. It’s gender performance taken to the extreme.

The conclusion of Santana’s storyline in that episode is her reconciliation with Brittany, and Brittany telling her that part of why she lost was because people could tell she was hiding something. Exactly who and how many people knew about Santana’s sexuality and when they knew it is something the show can never quite seem to be able to make its mind up on (side eyes at Finn Hudson), but the conclusion in this moment seems to be that the performance has, to some degree, gone awry. Because what use is a performance if nobody believes it? In that moment, it’s Santana’s worst fears about being punished for her transgression come to life - she is performing femininity incorrectly, and therefore she is denied the title that represents patriarchy’s feminine ideal.

iii.

Santana comes out is outed early in season 3, and we finally meet the person who has probably shaped her character - and her performance - more than anybody else we hadn’t met to that point (so, basically, more than anyone but Brittany). Alma Lopez. Abuela.

With some of the crumbs we’re offered up to that point, I don’t think it’s too unreasonable to see Alma’s treatment of Santana to be emotionally abusive - and this is only doubled down upon by her reaction to Santana coming out to her. It’s pretty explicitly stated that Alma is one of the main reasons that Santana is as vicious as she is. In other words, she shaped the performance. She’s clearly a pretty big female role model in Santana’s life, which is why the rejection hurts as much as it does.

The Glee subreddit is home to a wide variety of deeply stupid opinions. That might seem slightly mean, but one can only read so many defences of Finn Hudson objectively bad actions before one becomes slightly cynical. One opinion I’ve seen bandied about on there that I usually don’t have much time for is that Alma herself is a deeply repressed lesbian, largely stemming from the fact that Alma’s main issue with Santana’s sexuality seems to be that she’s willing to live it openly. Its slight difference from the usual ‘hate the sin, love the sinner’ line. I do think it’d be interesting to touch on it here, though. Santana, in many ways, learnt her performance from Alma, which is why her open embrace of her sexuality here - after so much angst and drama - is such an act of defiance, and that’s only doubled with this particular reading of Alma’s reaction.

iv.

While we’re on the subject of Santana’s family background, I’d like to talk briefly on the stereotyping of women of colour in particular, and the way that intersection plays into the idea of gender performativity. Santana’s race and ethnicity are a little ambiguous in certain ways. She refers to Mexican heritage, and Alma has a Dominican flag in her home, if I remember correctly. However, since it’s never explicitly stated otherwise, I’m going to run with the idea that Santana is Afro-Latina, like Naya herself was.

Santana, particularly in her initial presentation (read: performance), very much fits into some of the stereotypes often assigned to Latina women. She’s sexually aggressive and promiscuous. She has a ‘fiery’ personality type. (I’m not overly fond of that word, especially in this context, but I think that’s really kind of the point.) As she says herself, ‘My job here is to look hot.’ Of course, that line can be read shallowly, because I really don’t think Ryan Murphy or any of the lead Glee writers thought that deeply about these things, but most of this essay relies on Death of the Author theory and my reading far more into this story than its creators conceived. It also speaks to Santana’s lack of agency, both in and meta to the narrative itself. She also is hot but w/e

A worthy point of comparison here, I think, is Mercedes, who of all the main characters is probably denied agency the most; who is so infrequently allowed to be much more than a foil to Rachel, both by the writers and, perhaps more depressingly, by much of the fandom, particularly back in Glee’s original heyday. She is also frequently desexualised, again by both the writers and sections of the fandom. There is probably an essay to be written on the variety of reasons that Quinn (thin and white) is read as a lesbian and Mercedes (fat and black) is often read as asexual or earnest in her religious reasons for her celibacy when Quinn’s canon reasons are basically the same. I don’t think all of those reasons stem from those differences, and I definitely don’t want to criticise people for sexuality headcanons that offer them representation - because an asexual, fat, black woman would be kind of revolutionary, if indeed that was what Mercedes was. I also really don’t think I - a white person with half a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and a Sociology A Level taught by a person for whom I once had to define intersectionality - am the person best suited to write that essay.

Which brings us back to Santana, and the ways in which her ethnicity impact her performance of gender, especially in the first two seasons when that performance is inauthentic. Death of the Author is, again, critical here - and I’m going to talk more about that at the end - but so is Gaze theory and Santana’s multi-layered lack of agency. As with all of the people of colour on Glee, Santana’s race and ethnicity are often ignored until it’s comedically convenient. I’m not saying the jokes don’t always work - Sam’s ‘Quinn once had sex with a Latina lesbian - learned that in glee club!’ comes to mind (I think part of why that works is that it’s one of the only times that it’s explicitly shown that homophobes are often deeply racist as well) - but I think that is notable that that’s often the only time it’s ever seen as worth mentioning. Santana, though played by a woman of colour in Naya, is ultimately a construct of the white men who created her, and it is through their Gaze that she exists. She has no agency in the real world, because she’s a fictional construct, and a distinct lack of agency within the narrative as a queer woman of colour.

So how does all of this relate to gender performativity theory? Said theory might be pithily summarised thus: “Gender is something we do, not something we are.” (I promise I do have a degree, I’m not just copying buzzy phrases from the inside cover of a sociology textbook lmao.) This, then, might fairly easily be mapped onto other socially constructed categories of being. So, how does one do their gender, or race, or ethnicity, or sexuality, when one has no agency of one’s own, when one is entirely a construct of the Gaze of others? When the puppet strings of the performance are juggled and manipulated entirely by someone outside the self? Ironically enough, things become even more of a performance, in multiple ways a construct. Santana the character is constructed, in the same way Santana the person, the queer woman of colour, is. Which is, of course, why critical literary analysis is such an apropos way to explore these ideas, because everything is a constructed performance anyway. And, in this way, we see how Santana’s character is flattened, whether it’s in the vaguely afterthought-like quality to any consideration of her ethnicity, or the wholesale ignoring of her blackness, or the fact that Santana the character, as opposed to Santana the person, is herself a construct.

And then the author dies. More on that in a bit.

v.

Santana has parallels with a lot of characters. Quinn is the obvious one, which is very well-trodden ground analytically speaking - narrative foils, both craving popularity because they can’t just up and admit that they want to be loved, both very gay and very repressed, both in love with Rachel - and season 2 makes Santana’s parallels with Dave quite clear. There are also certain parallels present with Kurt, though - and it’s not just because they’re the two principal queer characters - the two token McKinley gays, as someone put it once.

The relevant mirror here is on expression. Kurt starts out as very experimental, as far as his dress-sense is concerned. It’s also fairly androgynous. “Fashion has no gender,” he tells us. Over the course of the series, however, his fashion becomes more conventionally masculine - not overly so, but certainly more so than at the beginning. In Santana, this shift is even more pronounced. The main windows we get into her fashion is late season 2 and then season 4 and 5 in New York, and while it’s not exactly like her season 2 choices were all that transgressive, they were certainly more experimental than her tight dresses from later on. Now, this isn’t me hating on this style - because girl looks good - nor is it me saying that lesbians can’t adopt a more conventionally feminine sense of style. I would hope that goes without saying. Regardless, I think there’s something worth discussing here where agency is concerned.

Because, of course, Santana isn’t a real person - a real woman and a real lesbian; she’s a construct of a team of male writers. I think the easy explanation here is that the producers got lazy, on a whole range of fronts where costuming was concerned. And that is, at least to an extent, a reasonable line of thinking. To gesture to a fairly straightforward example, after a point they just started having Rachel... mostly just dress like Lea. However, I think there’s a more interesting lens of analysis to be had here where Santana is concerned when we recall that scene where her mother informs us that she was a tomboy growing up. The three points we have, really, are that snapshot of Santana as a small child, season 2, and season 4-5. In season 4 in particular, Santana is portrayed as feeling generally directionless and unsure of herself; of where her path is headed now that she exists outside the rigid hierarchies of McKinley High. And, so, her performance of femininity is exaggerated. It’s a continuation of what the cheerleader role represented for her earlier on: burying herself in the typical female role to hide from internal conflict.

I think there’s also more to be said, at this stage, on the way we can see this in Quinn as well. In season 1, she’s the church girl: babydoll dresses, sundresses, and, of course, her Cheerio uniform - something that she uses as a wall of self defence in a similar way to Santana. In season 2, her wardrobe is largely a more mature version of that - she’s been through the ringer, and being homeless and having a child have forced her to grow up, but, as we see in her determination to be Head Cheerleader again, she’s still desperately clinging to the version of herself from Before. The biggest departure is obviously Skank!Quinn, where she briefly leans fully into a more androgynous punk look before adopting, again, a fractionally more androgynous version of her season 2 appearance, namely the addition of her blazers - which might be read as something as a symbol of male soft social power. Her story in season 3 obviously continues to bring the angst, but it’s also a period of self-actualisation. The most traditionally feminine we see her presenting after that is in her brief appearances in season 5, where it is pretty explicitly established that she’s behaving inauthentically. It’s all fairly on the nose, especially on that latter point. Obviously we can’t map that onto Santana directly, but I think it’s an interesting lens of analysis, given that, as I established at the beginning of this section, the two characters parallel each other pretty strongly in a whole smorgasbord of ways.

vi.

I’ve been dancing around the whole ‘death of the author’ bit for a while now, so let’s get into it. The post that I linked at the top of this essay describes DOTA as 'once a work is complete, what the author believes it to mean is irrelevant to critical analysis of what's in the text’, and I think that’s a reasonable definition to work with here. In other words, the fact that this essay takes Santana as a person with agency of her own, outside of her creators’ intentions, is not necessarily incompatible with my argument that we might use the fact that she’s a fictional character to explore the idea of social constructs, because the former exists outside of the latter. Santana is a construct of fiction, and the author is dead. The two lenses of analysis go hand in hand, inverted as they may seem.

I don’t think it’s too controversial a statement to say that Glee isn’t a particularly tightly written piece of fiction. (Maybe it is controversial on the subreddit. Shit’s wild over there.) Santana is no exception to that. Her character is messy and inconsistent, and the writing varies in its willingness to explore her depth. It would be trite to say that within that uncharted depth lies the DNA of a brilliant character. I also don’t think that that’s entirely accurate, because Santana Lopez is brilliant. The brilliance, which I think I’ve explored quite widely in this essay, is in the margins, in the unsaid, the unexplored. It’s in the performance. Reading between the lines, we see the carefully constructed image that Santana herself created. That is the foundation upon which the character is built. And from that, we can analyse her in myriad ways - along with the myriad ways in which she is, herself, a constructed performance, both within and outside of the narrative, constantly deconstructing and reconstructing itself.

The author is dead. Long live Lopez.

[celestialtrolls]

this is genuinely very enlightening

[monmuses]

I hope this doesn't come off as clingy or annoying or offensive, but out of curiosity, how do you manage to get so active? It seems you always have tons of threads with hundreds of partners, and even though you rely on queuing your threads, and have your queue set to 10 a day, it still takes a week to cycle through to your other partners. (This is not a bad thing, I'm commenting on the amount of threads you have queued.) I've been running a few different rp blogs over the years and am constantly struggling to find people to write with, so even if I reblog memes, post starter calls, inbox calls, or post open starters, I have almost no engagement. I don't want to send in meme after meme after meme because after a certain point, I fear I'm annoying the other person.

Again, I hope this doesn't come off as annoying or offensive, I just want to be able to write, and you seemed like the person to ask. I love your work 💜💚

unprompted asks - always accepting!

hello hello!! i love these questions, they're never annoying or offensive for me when you just wanna know more. it's totally okay! i don't mind them.

but with being active, it's really just knowing time management and knowing when i can write and if i have enough writing juices to do so. activity is weird for me because i have days where i'll answer EVERYTHING and days where i can barely write one or two words, and it happens. some people are higher activity while others are more in the middle or very low activity. my other partners also run on a queue and a lot of them treat their blogs as a fun hobby, and there's no harm in waiting for stuff.

finding partners is not hard, it's really just "oh you like this? i like this too, let's write!" most people here are SUPER chill and do this for fun. i would look for any promo posts of blogs that are posted by your mutuals or you - those are huge in finding people, same with those roleplay masterlists for various fandoms. some look like these examples here: overwatch, the witcher, cobra kai, scream, ouran highschool hostclub. these are some of the easiest ways to find people because it networks you to other partners of similar interests!

for me, when it came to writing, it really takes a lot of getting out of your comfort zone with talking to people and interacting. as easy as it is to reblog or post inbox calls & starter calls, a lot of it is also reliant on you reaching out for stuff. that requires interacting with their inbox calls & starter calls, sending asks, etc. start small, too, don't try pushing yourself to interact with EVERYBODY, sometimes you can work on just writing with one or two partners, which isn't bad! it takes time to work up that courage and be confident in your writing, because that will help you be more comfortable and getting more interactions that way.

and i promise you are not being annoying to your partners if you're trying to get yourself out there. sending asks is the EASIEST way to start threads and interactions, so NEVER be afraid to send stuff. unless the other partner has said that they prefer plotting & starters over asks or have their askbox closed. you're not causing any harm when you send stuff, because most of the time, people love getting asks.

but yeah, tl;dr work on coming out of your comfort zone and opening up to approaching people, because sometimes you have to. everybody here has some form of anxiety and it takes one person to take that step forward to get stuff going. always know that this is a hobby, so don't treat it like it's a full-time job, it's just something fun! but it takes work to know what you can write, who you write with, etc. you're gonna deal with problems and issues with finding partners, but don't let it push you away!

i do appreciate your kind words though, you seem like a really sweet person! i hope you find decent partners soon for your blog and i hope this stuff helps! ♡

[kyouka-supremacy]

Not to say one can't consume media they don't 100% agree with (I do the same so like), but you talk a lot about how the core views of TPN vs BSD change your entire way of enjoying these two, and I was wondering what drew you in into BSD if there are so many aspects of it you disagree with?

(Not meant as an attack or as a questioning of you enjoying it, I always am interested in your analysis so this is just out of curiosity, and also I am planning to pick up TPN again sometime this year)

[lipstickontheglass1985]

day 2 of being 21 years old: got so pissed off by ryan mccartans objectively wrong opinions on heather the musicals west end production i literally started crying

[oneknightlight]

Listen don’t get me wrong I think on-the-surface spamton is funny and neat, but I really like to dig my heels into the whole poetry and lore of “guy who was doomed to be thrown away time and time again, will claw at and kill for a chance to see the light of day and feel loved.”