#i hyperfocused on this for so long please read my post

[faderifter]

“Anders did nothing wrong” isn't meant to be taken literally; though it is discussed explicitly on occasion, the general unspoken understanding among Anders fans is that this refers to the ways in which BW and the fandom tried to vilify him for his political actions+beliefs (and sometimes sexuality), not that he is literally perfect and above criticism. I’m very ready to admit his faults, especially when it comes to Merrill, though I’m not as ready to write him off as a bad person or asshole as some people.

The one fault I’m unwilling to recognize, though, is his approval of returning Fenris to Danarius. Not because it’s the most indefensible and I’m coping to uphold an idealized idea of his character, but because I think it’s just one of many cases of bad writing fuelled in part by BW’s shitty politics, not faithfulness to characterization. In centrist/liberal media radical characters are often flat-out villains, or begin righteous and go too far - they become antagonists by threatening a status quo the protagonist must then fight to uphold. This is the well-intentioned extremist trope. The villain’s use of violence is aligned with disorder, justifying the use of heroic violence to enforce the laws of the land, which ostensibly champions pacifism, but tolerates structural violence. The narrative focuses on the innocent who suffer under the force of change and ignores the innocents who suffer under structural violence. Any suffering in the means delegitimizes the end. Sometimes writers will accidentally make “the other side” too reasonable, and rather than rethink their entire plot and message and characters, they try to muddy the waters or delegitimize their cause by forcing in something indefensible (or creating a strawman) regardless of whether it’s believable or consistent with the character they created. This is how you get your puppy-kicking socialist characters.

Anders approving of selling Fenris back into slavery is incongruous with the character they established. JusticeAnders especially is explicitly anti-slavery. Even if I bought that Anders would make an exception for Fenris (I don't), I really don't buy that Justice would tolerate it. DA:A

Justice: I see that your feline companion remains with you.

Anders: He seems happy enough. Isn't that right, Ser Pounce-a-lot?

Ser Pounce-a-lot: (Meow!)

Justice: To enslave another creature does not seem just

Anders: He's not a slave! He's a friend. And he's also a cat.

Justice: A cat that lacks freedom." //

Justice: I believe you have a responsibility to your fellow mages.

Anders: That bit of self-righteousness is directed at me?

Justice: You have seen oppression and are now free. You must act to free those who remain oppressed.

Anders: Or I could mind my business, in case the Chantry comes knocking.

Justice: But this is not right. You have an obligation. This basically prohibits a "freedom for me but not for thee" explanation of his approval, now that Justice and Anders have merged. DA2:

"(The Bone Pit, outside the mine entrance, Act 1) "Generations of slaves died in that mine. I can still hear their cries for justice." -Recognition of slavery as unjust //

Anders: Did you ever think about killing yourself?

Fenris: I could ask you the same thing.

Anders: I'm serious. To get out of slavery, to escape Danarius... don't tell me you never thought about it.

Fenris: I did not. To kill oneself is a sin in the eyes of the Maker.

Anders: You... believe that?

Fenris: I try to. Some things must be worse than slavery.

Anders: Some things are worse than death. Some people read this as callousness or cruelty, but I see this as an attempt at reaching out and relating to Fenris, knowing by act III Anders is planning his own death & giving away his belongings. "Some things are worse than death" refers both to slavery and mage oppression. Anders frequently connects his experiences with Fenris' and attempts to appeal to him that way. Anders views the circle as slavery. He doesn’t like Fenris, but he does see their oppression as something shared. They’ve both suffered the injustice of having their freedom denied to them.

Anders: You ever going to stop harping on the mages here?

Fenris: No.

Anders: They aren't what you saw in Tevinter.

Fenris: The moment they are free, mages will make themselves magisters.

Anders: They're slaves! You should want to help them.

Fenris: I don't. //

Anders: I just want to know, what do you say when people have questions?

Anders: What's your answer when someone asks, "so if Andraste preached freedom and ended slavery, why do you lock up mages and keep them as slaves?"

Sebastian: No one ever asked that.

I don't believe the Danarius approval is in keeping with Anders' character. Either the writers were trying to force a message that their narrative was too weak to support, or, benefit of the doubt, they were careless. It's a choice that isn't much of a choice outside of roleplaying; it would be highly unpopular with players and the game punishes you through hits to approval and loss of a companion for betraying Fenris. Why would anyone choose to do so? A couple approval points creates some incentive, and Anders and Fenris don't get along, so it defaults to him. But Anders views slavery as an intolerable injustice and he would never approve of enslaving Fenris

[auguryofjellyfish]

chapter 4 starts tomorrow!! oh boy! some of my thoughts/predictions before we go in:

who will clean up the crime scenes

not Ken. no way in hell. he wouldn't be able to take it, especially Kamimura's, and he's not nearly self-destructive enough to do that to himself. by the process of elimination, that just leaves Mai as the only one who could. Ken might give her some pointers from what he'd seen Kamimura do and use, but, that's about it.

i have no doubts that Mai could handle this, but…it's still a lot. she's been put through absolute hell, is still in pain, and now this?

this whole cleaning thing made sense only when we'd had Kamimura with us. now it's like…sideyes staffside lazyass fuckers.

Ken

based on his demeanor post-trial, i think he'll just be staying in his room. which- please, don't, i wouldn't want to go through a whole day without an episode with him… if he's gonna be outside, then it's only for maintenance stuff like getting food, or in the library, reading, just for the sake of keeping the routine and having something to do.

if some others seek him out, he won't want to talk, he'll be very subdued and quiet. remember the polite and meek Ken, using lots of hedges and politeness markers? forget about it. if he sees Wada or Hama and they offer him to try their coping mechanism, i think he would decline. he will also be more easily irritable.

i might be sorta off with this, we'll see, but still, he won't be well. i really hope he doesn't cut himself off completely, because then… we won't know what he's thinking, at all. thinking, feeling, or anything. the one person he'd shared himself with is gone. he would be much worse than Wada- that one at least shared his thoughts out loud talking to Isono.

i wonder if Tamba might seek him out? now that would be something. Ken thought Kamimura hated her, and more importantly she kept accusing him of killing Kamimura in the trial, AFTER he'd been exonerated, so, he might not have much patience for her.

actually, Ken might not have patience for anyone. almost everyone considered the accusations thrown his way in the trial to have merit. it makes sense logically, obviously, as it's been stated many times, 'but i wouldn't do it!' is not a valid argument…even in this case.

but emotionally, that shit still gotta hurt, deeply. because we know he'd truly fucking never, not to Kamimura. this, combined with all the fucked up revelations about how Kamimura was treated and the details about the way he was killed…yeah. Ken got fucked over to hell and back. dude got put through a WRINGER. we need to see him tomorrow...

speaking of Tamba…i need her to have more screentime!! she's been so absent in chap 3, it's criminal. i hope she'll get more focus this chapter...

Wada

it turns out that Wada has more connections and support in the wake of Tsuno's death, while Ken has no one. it's like…goddamn. compared to him, Wada has had interactions with like- everyone! even if these interactions weren't often good. but Ken just hyperfocused on one person, whom he liked the most. it was beautiful, until it wasn't.

i'm so, so excited for his development. like, he'd just lost Manami, someone he loved, he's not fine by any means, but..like, he's getting stronger, right? i'm not the only one that feels like it's the case? he was terrific in the trial, with his contributions, and expressed so much righteous fury, and when it came to the matter of whether or not he was beat up by Okazaki, people stood by him. like. god. that made me so fucking happy. he lost so, so much, but i'd like to believe Manami's love won't go to waste.

no… nothing she's done will ever go to waste- even if nothing good happens to them, even if Wada and the whole cast die, she and her love mattered, so much. and so, i'd like to believe that because of her, and others' support, for however long he has, he will continue to grow, and be with other people.

besides, no one is gonna torment him anymore.

and obviously he might get a new sprite!! AAAA!!! chap 4 might turn out to be miserable but at least :3 Wada got new clothes and a haircut!!

i thought of something because of my 'righteous fury' comment...like Manami, Wada is also someone who can't stand injustice, when it's happening to other people. like....imagine him trying to take on Manami's mantle. following in her footsteps. trying to actively become a good person, not just be neutral. to honor her legacy and continue her mission. bruh. that would be Epic™

Hiroaki

my man is not okay. i don't believe that for a second. Ojima saved him, and tried so desperately to find the right words, and his support and presence definitely made a difference, but Hiroaki seriously almost killed himself a DAY AGO. with cyanide!! suicidal intent this strong, this certain, it doesn't just go away.

and Ojima can't just be his sole reason to stay alive. he tried so so hard to be "better" for Hiroaki and it made him break down. he's a very, very caring person and has a big heart but still, this is taking a huge toll on him. he's just one guy.

Hiroaki carried the trial cause he's one of the smartest people there, but there was still an air of resignation to him. he's not okay. also, he's continued the trend of giving stuff away…it was specifically a gift this time. still. still.

ALSO. FUCK. I'M SO WORRIED ABOUT HIM. he said he'd just tried to kill himself, to everyone. during the trial. that puts an enormous target on his back.

if you were a person who doesn't really want to kill, but had to choose someone…i mean…why not Hiroaki? he actively, truly wants to die anyway, right? out of everyone, he'd be the least "morally wrong" pick. one might even be able twist it into almost being a good thing. a sort of "mercy". these justifications could be enough....

Watari

Watari…she will try, but she won't be the same. i hope Hama and others will offer her support, cause…like, she lost her good friend, AND that friend ruined people's lives, irrevocably. it's not Watari's fault, she couldn't have known. but…who will take care of her? even if she seems fine, not as bad as Ken or Wada, like- she's not fine. i also hope nobody will put any blame on her cause holy shit. so many people need support, so many pillars of this cast are gone. this chapter's looking bleak.

chap 4 as a whole

a new floor will be opened, whee. we've had arts, STEM, what's next…sports? after the uhh something that was chap 3. what could they possibly do? is there even a point in doing anything? the kids are not okay…

Kamimura and Tsuno

i miss them. i miss Kamimura. i miss Manami. i miss them a lot. i wish i could write lengthy paragraphs about what they'll be doing as well. it feels wrong, to not be able to do that. the upper part of the list of my Tetro faves feels so empty now. they're still there...but, not. and their absence will definitely be felt more acutely tomorrow…actually, i will say more about this in a separate post.

to sum up:

Ken fan in me: 💀 Wada fan in me: 🥰 Kamimura and Tsuno fan in me: ☠☠☠☠

[t3chborb]

About me & this blog

Hello, call me T3, Birb, or Borb, whichever you prefer.

I've made this silly corner of the internet because I have an unhealthy obsession with a fictional character and want to contribute to the fandom, be it feeding the algorithms with likes n reblogs n shit or my own produce :P

Unique tags found on this blog:

Borb's Scribbles (art)

Borb's Rambles (thoughts, theories, etc)

Borb's Garbage Dump (works in progress, may or may not get finished)

Borb Answers (ask responses. May sometimes also feature scribbles and rambles, depending on the ask)

Not mine (obvious lol)

Unholy Abomination - universal mature tag, may contain either adultery or robot guts. Used liberally just in case, even if the art is technically sfw

Other noteworthy things:

English isn't my native language, my apologies if my words are hard to read or understand

This blog is hyperfocused on Ramram. Probably a stupid idea in the long run but this account is a semi-throwaway anyway

I don't reblog much as I lowkey don't see the point. This is a place for my produce, not a spam blog. That said reblogs do show up on the rare occasion. I do my best to make up for this by leaving likes and comments on other's posts to show support :)

I'm here to have a good time, not cause or experience discourse, so please don't be a jerk, just block me and ignore me if my existence bothers you

I am, to some extend, a pro-shipper. I barely have any preferences when it comes to Ram ships, I'm fine with just about any (including self-inserts and OCs)

There are some shipping dynamics I don't like, one or both characters being OOC as hell, general toxicity and abuse, underage x adult, non-con, things of that nature, but I'm fine with pretty much anything deemed "problematic", assuming the issue is handled reasonably well (and if it's not handled well... the creator has a right to vent via creative media, even if I don't like said media. Better have them let out their frustrations creatively than... you know. Actually acting on them.)

For Ram fandom's "problematic" ship specifically, I'm neutral on Ramyatta, slightly leaning towards the don't like it territory, but for reasons other than the whole pseudo-incest thing (it's not incest in my eyes because robots don't have genes and monastery titles, but I can see how Ram and Zen calling each other "brother" is offputting)

I generally don't take requests, but if I happen to vibe a lot with a certain concept, I might just draw it

I'm open to talking, but I'm shy and perfectionistic. So please don't take it personally if I don't respond for a while ;-; I'll try to do my best.

I am a-okay with naughty topics, just know that I'll probably be embarrassed about it

About my art:

Krita 5.2 + Huion Kamvas Pro 16

My "style" is inconsistent as fuck as I'm going to be experimenting a lot for improvement purposes

If you wish to use my art, I am fine with the following:

Profile pictures, profile backgrounds, device wallpapers (with credit provided somewhere easily accessible, if it's shown publicly)

Coloring uncolored lineart

Side Note 1: I would like to know about you using my work, but telling me isn't mandatory (provided you follow these rules)

Side Note 2: Almost all art posted has been heavily downscaled from the originals (about 3 times smaller), so they may look terrible in certain use cases. If you want the full res, reach out to me privately, I'll send it over if I'm confident that you won't misuse it

I am NOT fine with the following:

Commercial use of any kind

Feeding into AI generators

NFT nonsense

Modifications of any kind EXCEPT coloring plain lineart

Reposting anywhere, especially Tumblr. If you REALLY want to share my stuff, I'm flattered, but please use links instead...

[bitter-sweet-coffee]

look idek what warning to put here, but there's like, a novel and a half below the cut that's just... 6 hours of me going on tangents i never finish or clarify. no proofreading. no organization. it's absolutely not worth your time. but... i literally spent so long writing it that if i don't hit post it'll somehow be even more pointless?!?

basically there are no positive outcomes in any scenario with this post but the only remaining tragedy achievement is me writing all this and then deleting it. what proof will i have that i wrote nonsense for HOURS to avoid my research because i double dosed my meds and had too much caffeine?!? i gotta save this for the memories because no one will believe me if i tell them i live a fucking crazy life and use this as an example.

also for the record i'm goin thru it psychologically at the time of writing this. like, mania-turned-psychotic-episode, overstimulated, disassociated, exhausted, and currently procrastinating a LOT of serious things which only adds to my stress and scatterbrained gibberish. so like... please be kind but also don't get all freaked out either; i have enough psychological control rn to assure you i'm fine and this is just how i am sometimes... but i usually don't make extensive posts online during my more unstable periods. i gotta use the internet rn anyways tho so who's gonna stop me from hyperfocusing on the WRONG tasks?!? 🤪

okay, just had to say all that, and if you think my disclaimer is long? honey... you don't even have a big storm coming just keep scrolling and don't look back. don't click read more. it's not just "read more" like, it's MORE. a LOT more. too much. and like, there's literally nothing valuable there it isn't like my usual longposts that have a point or vague coherence. it was simply a huge waste of my time and it'll be an even bigger loss for you.

i can't even recommend mental stability as armour or a requirement since taking that away from you will make me feel bad, so if you're healthy please don't damage yourself with this.

ADMISSION REQUIREMENT: freaks, executive dysfunction regulars, people in boring classes, insomniacs, and sadists can proceed. and i'm STILL sorry to y'all because i didn't enjoy this either.

... so tell me why social media discourse takes itself more seriously than these people.

i've had profs with multiple doctorates and influential publications that changed academic discussions forever who like, roleplay deltarune characters on discord with students to avoid marking papers or cancel the last 2 weeks of class because they don't want to do 9 am lectures and know that we're all busy and probably gonna skip anyways. profs who change their mind and take assignments out of the syllabus since no one wants to do them and they don't wanna mark them. profs who forget their own publication deadlines because they were reading fanfiction, profs who hate the university administration more than you do, profs with mental health issues, queer profs, profs who play video games, or have tumblr, or make spotify playlists for every lecture and think the grading system is stupid, profs who hand out extensions if you ask because they weren't going to mark them all at once anyways, and profs who assign weekly pdf articles instead of big books and 300 dollar textbooks— even their own— because they're exhausting to read and super overpriced.

so many instructors in english literature are shifting away from academic essays and towards multimedia creations and fun writing prompts. "i don't want to read a 30 page research essay when i can read a brief informal paragraph explaining how this video game has the same vibes as this anonymous poem!" and "you can record a podcast or paint a picture or write fanfiction or do a minecraft letsplay as a character or honestly? do whatever you want as long as there's passion with coherent thoughts behind it!" and "word limits are stupid because adding nonsense to drag out your argument makes the paper worse: write whatever comes naturally as long as you sufficiently explain your argument but please don't make me read 70 pages in a 200 level course this is supposed to be easy on everyone"

i'll be real with you: academics are fucking bored. the content is stale. students dismiss profs because they seem like pretentious assholes who don't care about who/what they teach, but 99.9% of the time profs only seem dry and unapproachable because no one reciprocated their enthusiasm, and it was super awkward during classes, so they stopped trying.

some younger profs haven't stopped trying because they understand and haven't gone numb to their own content yet, and it's so painful to watch them put out good vibes and get ghosted by hostile students too focused on marks or checking things off their to-do list when the profs themselves would prefer conversations over the stupid assignments they're required to give you.

we talk about gamers, artists, other freelancers, musicians, thespians, dancers, and so many other career paths that require sacrifices, risks, and prejudice THAT I AM NOT DISMISSING but at least there are people acknowledging the isolation, instability, mental and physical health issues, social-wide neglect, and resilience of these people. to some extent anyways. people who break free from the mold and do something they love in spite of the consequences?

well, haha, if you voluntarily pay a fuckton of money and spend the duration of your 20's in school when everyone around you is actually earning money from jobs or at least enjoying their friday nights THERE IS SOMETHING DEEPLY WRONG WITH YOU!!! even if you get placement, if you don't have tenure (hard to get) the faculty is gonna dump extra shit on you that needs to be perfect or say goodbye to your crappily paid job. do you know how many publications and conferences and deadlines and actual work goes into that crap?!? you're supposed to answer questions no one in your field gives a FUCK about with no guidance or support or outline even though everyone is demanding you get your research done and then they're never happy with it. the elders in your field hate you (a cycle that hasn't been broken yet because those older esteemed people with tenure were in your boat once too) and i have a feeling no one outside the academic world likes you either since you're too hard to understand, pretentious, have no life, etc...

oh and on top of that? you gotta teach a bunch of people who don't wanna be in your class, hate the content because a) another instructor ruined it for them or b) it's a degree requirement and tbh you probably didn't have a choice either since 9/10 times this isn't what you wanted to teach and/or the faculty admin made you include it anyways. all that other work? well now you have to grade shit that a bunch of people didn't wanna write: even if profs have TA's to help with grading they're still required to handle a chunk of it and also deal with TA questions/concerns/regradings/pissed students/policies they're confused about that you're ALSO confused about. oh and a bunch of stupid questions since people don't read instructions and decide blame you for that?

also... do you know HOW FUCKING HARD IT IS TO TEACH??? you have to like, triple understand it and predict/plan for every fucking misunderstanding/question/problem that you can think of. including stupid questions. you'll also get a lot of people who ask things you either don't have the answer for or have the answer for but someone doesn't like it. and even if you're a flawless instructor who can handle every academic/behind the scenes/personal/basic human responsibilities or task (unlikely but i know profs who come close for at least 2 of those) someone is gonna be a dick about it.

... that dick is probably a student who is pissed they had to actually go to at least one lecture, semi pay attention, and read assignment instructions to get a good mark.

... brats who get mad about deadlines because they have other responsibilities and need extensions who go batshit insane when marks aren't released yet

... some y'all aren't gonna like this one: disabled students who say academia is ableist and profs are always evil if they don't accommodate and show sympathy because mental/physical health hinders their performance... but the thought that their prof might be disabled never crosses their mind. just like how you don't need to disclose that information, they don't either! profs can be neurodivergent. they can have conditions you aren't aware of. suffer from chronic pain. are battling an illness you don't know about. they can have mental illnesses. trauma. so many other examples, and this isn't a disability per say but THEY CAN HAVE PERSONAL EMERGENCIES TOO. maybe it's menstrual cramps, executive disfunction, someone close to them died, they relapsed on SH or addiction, are being abused or have been abused in the past, forgot their meds that day, cried all night, couldn't get out of bed, their favourite/comfort character died so they're feeling sick and can't focus on the lesson, didn't have time to eat because a loved one needs them, got triggered by the subject matter and don't know how to teach it, have a surgery next weekend and are worried about giving extensions since they won't he able to grade/put your marks in before THEIR deadline, had a bad interaction or just woke up feeling like crap so they're crossing their fingers the lecture runs smoothly, only to get shitty emails or bullied on rmp?

and y'know what? i don't care if your prof seems like a dick, because we're open minded about those appearing to be rude who are actually victims that didn't receive enough support to to their personal experiences and/or generational/ethical conditioning... until they're a 60 year old white guy who rolls his eyes when someone slyly ask a question or counters something he said to "school him" and "prove he's an overpaid, outdated, problematic bigot." maybe it seems really badass to people who are 2 weeks into the course... but he's been correcting that crappy misinformation for 30 years and your "okay boomer" attitude couldn't be more misplaced; this guy has probably been in the field longer than your parents have been alive and you think he missed this obvious oversight after teaching this course for decades?

if you think for a second that someone like my imaginary prof has it easy because of gender/race/sexuality/religion/ableness there are so many flaws to you logic because a) you can't confirm any of that shit and b) do you think extensions, accommodations, and other resources were available when they were getting their degree or even during most of their lifetime? i mean shit, we're all about helping meemaw understand what pronouns are and how they're used until it's your prof who was beat by his dad and classmates because "university is for devil worshipping snobs and faggots! if you think you're too good for the family business you're dead to me" and thinks this is normal. it doesn't matter if his peers/instructors were all "cishet white men" (since no one else counted as a person and they couldn't be anything else anyways) because if they were all forcefed toxic masculinity and misinformation that literally no one else could correct, embracing the privilege was their only move.

yeah yeah this isn't limited to profs since it's a sloppy and reductive commentary on entire generations that i'm not putting enough effort into, so take it with a grain of salt and try to hear me out in good faith since i'm improvising as i write this in a very unstable state with no intentions of proofreading or ensuring my point is clear. basically, the privileges we acknowledge in others are not the only ones out there because WE have privileges they don't. if you want "privileged people who benefit from the prejudiced foundation of a society that oppresses and profits off of suffering minorities" feat. more social media hot take discourse buzzwords etc etc etc.

"fuck reductive labels because they're inaccurate and build on outdated western mentalities, but also i'm gonna continue to judge someone based on labels i give them because i 100% know a person's race/gender/sexuality/ableness/psyche/religion/other things i consider to be privilege better than they do because they don't know what these things are and if they do it's wrong!!!"

okay, maybe YOU can pick and choose queer content based on if a contributor has a "your fave is problematic" entry or if the representation is approved by the community, take "am i gay?" quizzes in middle school, overcome internal prejudices through social media discourse, learn ethics through fandom trial and error, see enough cancellations to understand what NOT to do, or get enough adhd tiktoks on your fyp to self diagnose/get a formal diagnosis/access medical support/read articles and understand the medical side of things to validate your experiences/practice coping mechanisms and google tips/talk to other people with adhd/work on accepting you aren't a defect who didn't try hard enough/receive accommodations/know you aren't alone even if your current environment doesn't accept you because other places and people do. maybe this segment is too long but you at least has the time and ability to read it, on an electronic device, which you can access almost any time btw, and it'll give you access to endless content (which is somehow even more endless if you download a vpn and switch regions: yeah, infinity plus infinity level shit. oh and that's like 1% of the internet we're using all the maths in this parentheses tangent that's within a tangent within a tangent multiplied by a billion more regressed all inside a whopping procrastination activity. yay me! ok no more meta shit i already forgot where this fragment/sentence/paragraph/section/rant was going 7 times now)

okay. maybe you got this far and are totally lost, and i have no way of knowing how extensive the psychological damage is because I'M not even reading this post, so the real conversation is between you and the words on your screen, i have nothing to do with this experience. my fingers may have typed everything so far but my brain has been playing shrek 2 the entire time, so this is your mental health check since there is no thesis or sense of direction but i'm exhausted despite not being mentally present unlike you. i am just typing words as they appear based on writing patterns and routine from when i'm awake.

^^^ that's not a joke or shitpost btw so even if i've led you to believe it is at some point, so i am gonna be fully transparent in the caplocked paragraph below. it is as close as you're getting to me, bitter-sweet-coffee or whatever name you know me by, being aware and in control of my actions for the entirety of this derailed rant:

OKAY, BEFORE WE RESUME OUR SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING, I AM FORCING MYSELF BACK INTO MY BODY AND STEALING BACK MY SENSE OF SELF JUST TO EMPHASIZE WHAT I'M ABOUT TO SAY, SO YOU KNOW I AM BEING HONEST. BABES, I AM REGAINING CONTROL OF MY PSYCHE TO ENSURE THAT AMIDST ALL THIS DISASSOCIATED WORDVOMIT, YOU CAN TRUST SOMETHING 100% THAT I ACTUALLY MEAN. A MOMENT IN THIS BITCH THAT MY LESS UNSTABLE SELF WILL ALSO AGREE WITH. CLARITY BURIED IN THE 11TH HOUR OF THIS NEVER-ENDING STREAM-OF-CONSCIOUSNESS WALL OF TEXT. MY DARLINGS, i have no fucking clue what this post is supposed to be. there was probably an outline or vague concept 3ish hours ago when i started, but good luck asking me what it is now! some parts read like a viral tumblr psa but there are way too many rushed ideas that branch into tangents and unanswered questions. yeah i know there's no fucking coherence, but even though i'm aware everything i'm putting online this week is extremely concerning, it doesn't make anyone feel better if i say i know or put disclaimers because instability makes people uncomfortable. yeah we like freaks on the internet and y'all expect this shit from me by now, but even this is too much for my shitposting reputation, because at least i typically have enough control over my brain to proofread or follow a train of thought. i mean shit, not even i'm following this and it's my writing, which isn't even the most confusing thing i'm able to decipher, so unless you're god or extremely unstable this is probably the most incoherent thing you've ever read or at least since beowulf... or like, french. or russian cursive. or doctor-handwriting. or flat earth conspiracies. or the code to sonic 06 because NO ONE knows what the fuck happened there. actually, if you've used wattpad or twitter there's a chance you can make sense of this, but if you use either of those apps enough to comprehend their contents you're probably not fluent enough in actual recognized languages to successfully open tumblr and get here in the first place. okay, i can't think of anymore jokes that aren't even good so let's move on! basically, i love y'all, and even if i know this post is a train-wreck of a mistake that will worry people, it ain't gonna stop me. sure i might be goofy, unstable, informal, and hard to understand, but i also have credentials as an academic, well-spoken, published, articulate, accomplished, REPUTABLE person when i need to be in formal settings offline. FOR THE RECORD that's not a flex: we know i don't do labels or ego stroking beyond semi-satirical rarepair supremacy jokes and sonic lore flexes. my genuine intelligence has been my saving grace because i just KNOW if people thought i was some american teen from tiktok with no formal education or career accomplishments who regurgitates misinformation they saw on twitter y'all would REPORT ME!!! I WOULD BE BULLIED OFFLINE! "who's this cunt with the bad takes?!?" followed by "no no dw it's just another bsc moment on tumblr" is so important to bring up rn because it's not supposed to be a brag guys, my educational reputation is all i have to justify the stupid shit i post on here �� if i didn't remind people i am smart and accomplished when i need to be you'd think this is all i'm capable of and conclude that my stupidity is my full potential... THIS ISNT EVEN MY FINAL FORM! gah, i'm getting imposter syndrome and this was supposed to be the shorter heart-to-heart in a "brief" intermission that turned into another derailment. alright, even if there are glimmers of big brain theses buried anywhere that just needed an author from a healthier time and place, we know damn well i'd procrastinate/overthink/forget them if i deleted or drafted this monstrosity for another day... also i'm on mobile we know tumblr won't fucking save this LMAO IF THIS DELETES OR THE APP CRASHES (if you're reading this it obviously didn't, so idk why i'm @ ing a nonexist target) I'M GONNA BE SO MAD EVEN THOUGH THIS IS GARBAGE, SO A GLITCH FROM TUMBLR WOULD DO EVERYONE A FAVOUR. ITS MY GARBAGE THAT I WASTED VALUABLE TIME AND ENERGY ON!!!

wow. i discovered the text-block limit, that's embarrassing. at least it forced me to finish a thought (kinda) and complete my moral takeaway from like, 3-5 thousand words ago. SO LET'S GET BACK INTO IT!

okay look, i'm not suggesting it's everyone's job to be a doormat to mean old professors. that was where this was going, right? because even though spent a really long time on privilege and how older generations that are stuck in their ways deserve more compassion, you shouldn't let some dude hatecrime people and torture students. generally speaking, you shouldn't write off bad behaviour as a trauma response because even though i believe everyone is a good person if they have enough support, compassion, resources, and are encouraged to want to change... bitch this isn't a fucking utopia we're living in a fucking death circus. the last thing on people's minds is giving harvey fucking weinstein a redemption arc even if that would fix some shit because awful people learning to be good people teaches growth and self awareness that leads to more accountability and prevents more bad people from hurting others because resources and normalized support and systemic causes for bad people blah blah blah even I'M sick of my own tangents.

actually... this proves my point— the most recent unfinished one that is. YEAH, WE CAN UNPACK THE MORALITY AND PROGRESSIVE IDEAL COURSES OF ACTION AND UTOPIAN TAKEAWAYS FOR EVERY FUCKING SITUATION. NOT EVERYTHING IS BLACK AND WHITE. NOTHING YOU SAY CAN EVER BE ALL-ENCOMPASSING BECAUSE WORDS ARE HUMAN INVENTIONS THAT ARE NOT DESIGNED TO ACCOMMODATE EVERY SCENARIO. YAY, MISQUOTED NIHILISTIC DERRIDIAN HOT TAKES FOR MY GAY SONIC BLOG, RIGHT?!?

we all get it (probably). everything has an exception. but, as i stare anxiously at my clock and try to calculate how many hours i've been typing for instead of working on my actual work that matters, it's kinda obvious:

we don't have the fucking time or energy to do in depth discussions for every conceivable thing. no position will ever be enough, no words will capture truth in its rawest form because humans... have no clue what the FUCK they're doing. language, arts, the scientific method: the tools we use to express ourselves, the very resources we rely on as we try to pinpoint something undeniable, something constant, the way we go about actually PROVING something??? we can't even fucking agree on those! we made maths and sciences and words and arts but we can't even trust them because... well. if WE fuck up a lot and established ways to not fuck up... they're also fucked up.

sure we programmed computers and say they make perfect numbers but girl,,, WE made the computer and the numbers. sure it finishes our formulas better than we do but did the guy making the formula do a good job? maybe, but how do we know it hasn't been warped over time to an unrecognizable degree. there are billions of languages with endless dialects and regional variations for each one. WHO GENDERED THE FUCKING NOUNS IN FRENCH??? YOU'RE TELLING ME THERE ARE WORDS THAT ONLY EXIST IN ONE LANGUAGE? LIKE, THERE ARE NO TRANSLATIONS??? okay, so what the FUCK does that mean if we're the ones inventing translations in the first place? don't make me think about all the dead languages and their secrets or all the lost texts and stories... aight now i'm just sad

sceptic prompts aside, i hope you understand what i mean when i say we're never gonna do a perfect job of explaining shit. that's probably why i started so many things here and got distracted because i predict "what if's" and feel the need to sub-explain every ambiguity. that's not a valid excuse for this literary hatecrime but it's a bit of context i suppose.

where was this going? see my point?!? okay this was supposed to be the quick return to my pre-intermission thoughts that fixes shit, but nah it caused more problems. adding to the never-ending pile of jibberish.

RIGHT THE CRAPPY PROFS. yeah you have bigger things to worry about just don't be a dick and treat academia with a petty attitude but then demand acceptance and understanding because peace and love and social justice mantras. the diversity you're advocating for should extend to those who didn't have it, even if those people are shitty and misinformed as a result of their less progressive upbringing.

BASICALLY, EVEN THE PEOPLE YOU DONT THINK HAVE IT HARD DESERVE THE COMPASSION I WAS PUSHING EARLIER. the sobstory profs and the absolute cunts you want to strangle are both dealing with shit and i don't expect you to "fix them" but if i see people using bad prof anecdotes to justify hating all/some educators i'll eat your skin like it's kfc or something. idk, apparently people LOVE chicken skin! insert a featherless biped joke here if you want and if it'll make sense for you, i just wanted a threat that wasn't gonna be too mean because reading to this point is punishment enough even if you deserve worse lmao. the "privileged" profs still went through hell and the last thing we need are more generalizations based on profiling. mean profs could have been nice once so maybe power through the rbf and dryness by continuing to be nice and attentive: you might just save someone! and future students! and your gpa!

okay, no more lectures. here's some crap i wrote at the beginning that kept getting pushed lower and lower as i went on a billion tangents. it's probably more academic advice and silliness but i'm not gonna bother checking so uh, take it away past me...? yikes, good luck:

so, you don't wanna do that assignment? well, the prof doesn't wanna read it, neither does the TA. same shit new term, no one benefits, and they're marking a LOT more essays than you'll ever have to write

so, you didn't understand the reading and are afraid to say something in lecture in case you don't know what you're talking about? chances are your prof is either in the same boat and has no coherent plan for the lecture and also doesn't know wtf is going on, or this is their special interest they dedicated their career to and they'd rather just infodump the whole class anyways.

"i'm scared to go to office hours" these guys either have no social life and/or family, or they do and none of them understand what the fuck they're saying. do you know how hard it is to have normal conversations or make small talk when 99% of your brain is shit no one but maybe 4 other scholars in the world give a shit about?!? EXAMPLE FOR YOU FANDOM FOLK: IT'S NOT JUST INTERACTING WITH NORMAL PEOPLE, IT'S TRYING TO MAKE FRIENDS IN A DEAD FANDOM WHEN YOUR FAVOURITE CHARACTER IS A NOBODY AND YOUR FAVOURITE SHIP HAS NO CONTENT BESIDES YOUR OWN, EXCEPT FOR MAYBE 2 OTHER PEOPLE WHO YOU'RE TOO AWKWARD TO INTERACT WITH BEYOND FRIENDLY TAGS WHEN YOU REBLOG THEIR ART.

short answer to that ^^^ go to office hours. especially humanities profs or weird science profs, not just because you will do a LOT better on assignments but because they're lonely and appreciate it. when i go to office hours my profs are either trauma dumping or incoherently rambling about blorbos from their manuscript or batshit crazy theories no one wants to write/hear about.

like, think about how you feel when you get asks or nice tags or comments on your fanfic/art/videos. even questions about your au or opinions! hot takes maybe?

what about when new people follow you or ask questions about the fandom you've been in for years: when someone asks a silly question about the lore are you more likely to see red and fucking kill them, or use this as an excuse to infodump and excitedly point them towards secondary content and inform/motivate them, even splashing in your own personal theories? i know it's the second one don't lie to me or yourself.

at the end of the day, i just want people to know that the stimulating debates people have online in the 21st century are the fucking green forums, while the "scholars" and esteemed academics that so many people write off as pretentious or too serious are fucking losers. they're freaks. i want every academic to have tumblr because they're SO FUNNY OH MY GOD!!!

when i see y'all talk about blorbo from your shows all i can think is "damn this is more coherent than when i ask my prof a question and she excitedly rambles for 20 minutes without actually answering anything because she's so overjoyed someone finally asked" and am reminded of all the special interest/hyperfixation positivity. researchers are just people paid to get lost in their own thoughts and words because their niche is their universe and it gets lonely when no one else bothers to check in.

oh, and if they're dedicating their entire life to something no one gives a shit about and worker their ass off to make it profitable... they're one of us. probably into fandoms. assigns music to their work. make memes about their theories because no one takes them seriously anyways. absolute fucking LEGENDS

TLDR which i know y'all need:

profs are based as hell fjdksldldlds go talk to your instructors they're lonely like you are and listening goes a long way. the internet is way too serious now to the point our "serious" communities that we believe are more strict are actually the most lax places.

so like... when we talk about tumblr being the worst place ever and brought up it's cursed reputation for YEARS but then actually witness 2022 and go "nevermind.... this is the only fucking place online to exist safely" because what the FUCK are those other places doing???

yeah. that's academia. the tumblr of conversations (aka full of freaks but the fun kind: WAY LESS THREATENING AND PSYCHOLOGICALLY DAMAGING than the "silly sites" which have evolved into... no i don't even have a metaphor or joke for this one. it's just awful lmao)

cool idk how to end this after wasting 1/4 of a day making no sense, here's george:

[warhammer-fantasy-muses-archived]

Venting Post Ahead

Vent is under the cut.

Okay. I feel like this is a long while coming, but I kind of have to get it off my mind right now, after having spent quite a while talking about it with my fiance, who was merely worried about me and my mental state. I’m not here to try and seem like I’m suddenly going to up and vanish from this blog. I truly do love the Warhammer franchise, especially the Fantasy version, this’ll always remain true.

But I just don’t know if there’s too much interesting me, and those few options that are of interest to me, I don’t know if I am capable of doing them well.

Humans, Elves and Dwarves of all kinds are in every single kind of Fantasy world, and so most (not all) of them are so bland and samey that they don’t catch my interest.

The Forces of Chaos are cool and diverse, but seem so hyperfocused on the one thing that defines them that it’d just feel restraining for me to try any of them.

Ogres and Greenskins are majorly dumb brutish creatures that are too simple for me to enjoy playing.

The Undead can be interesting, but again, they’re also a big staple of Fantasy culture.

So that leaves me with the two factions that do really catch my intrigue; Lizardmen and Skaven. Especially the latter. I don’t really know of any major Fantasy realm that has a race of sapient, paranoid and jittery rat-men who arm themselves with scrap metal and the Fantasy world’s equivalent of uranium, and that makes them interesting for me. Lizardmen are cool too since they’re actually trying to perform good for the world, but everyone judges them ‘cause they’re giant lizard-people and THINK they’re evil for opposing the other races.

But, more focus on the Skaven again. I love the rat boys, they are insane and destructive, but I love them so much for how creative and fun they are. I love Queek’s insane bloodlust and desire to claim heads for his rack. I love Ikit and Throt’s whole mad scientist schtick, where Ikit is a literal mad scientist who’s replaced major parts of himself with prosthetics and machinery, and Throt is a master surgeon and genetic mutator that has self-experimented on himself and driven himself mad with it.

... But I don’t know if I can truly portray them well enough to do them justice, or make me worried that I’m coming off as a bad person.

I know how the old adage goes; “Mun does not equal Muse” and all of that, I know of it. But honestly, with me being an Autistic fuckhead who over-analyzes and overthinks a whole lot of things, and not being quite understanding of social cues or reading a person’s expressions well enough... it’s not enough. I can keep repeating it in my head ‘till I can literally hear the words echoing in my head when all else is quiet around me, and I’d still be constantly worried of people’s impression of me. I do love roleplaying as these insane, objectively evil rat-people, but I just can’t help but to constantly worry about people’s impression of me as a person, for roleplaying as a Fantasy race that backstands and deceives their own kind, and either kills or does god-knows-what to others.

I know they’re an evil race, I know. But I just don’t want their actions to rub off on me as a person. If anyone has any genuine tips and hints on how to disassociate themselves from objectively bad muses and how to play them, please let me know. I’m genuinely asking for help. Because I want to continue playing as these characters, but I just wish I could stop worrying about what people would think of me as a real-life person.

[kyidyl]

Aphantasia anon: So my recognition of smell isn’t impacted. If I come across an apple I am able to identify the scent as apple. But I don’t make association with smell. I know which perfume my mom uses because my brain has stored the fact that mom wears X perfume but if I come across a person wearing the same perfume my mind doesn’t make the connection to mom. There’s also no remembrance of memories where my mom is wearing her perfume. A smell is just a smell for me. Same for the tastes. It’s

Ok sorry I got sucked into Tiktok, lol.

That thing about the smell is still super interesting for me. Like clearly your brain identifies the smells and whatnot but you're also obviously forming long term memory in a really unique way. I'm not well-versed in neurology enough to be able to go into detail there but scent is often one of the things most strongly connected to memory, but yours doesn't connect like that. Your whole experience is so wildly different and it's very cool. I bet you have a lot less of a problem really enjoying the moment in front of you. I have ADHD so like I do a lot of daydreaming and whatnot, or zoning out, and sometimes it gets in the way of me actually engaging with what's in front of me. I'm always thinking of something else and I'm literally incapable of simply enjoying what's in front of me without hyperfocusing. Do you have autism or ADHD? BC now I wonder if it's possible for someone with aphantasia to have that kind of neurodivergence considering how often vividly imagining things while zoning out is reported as an experience we have. Do you zone out/daydream? If you do, what's the quality of it? Is it basically just like talking to yourself in your head?

If your head voice is bland and muffled (mine is muffled too. It has a weird like...fuzzy? Quality to it. Like it's far away.), I can see why long descriptions of things would get tedious for you. That's a very quick trip to sleeping....wait, do you dream??? I'm assuming you do cause everyone seems to. Do you remember it when you wake up? What are the memories like? Also re:reading, do you have trouble with metaphor or simile? If so I imagine English classes (if you're American...for all I know this is your second language.) must have been AWFUL.

Ye gods school must have been (or must be) really difficult for you. Do you think that there was something that teachers could have done/should do to make things easier for you? If you're trying to do something like geometry does it help to draw it out on a piece of paper...like maybe an external kind of visualization? And do things like google maps help you when you're navigating, or not so much? If having things in a place is helpful to you, I bet your house is pretty orderly. No idea what that's like, lol.

Hahahahha I've seen that post, too. That was also when I learned about aphantasia, and I think it was really interesting then, too. It's so hard for me to understand what it must be like to just no visualize because my mind like...it's almost like a physical space. So to me when someone says no visualization I picture a blank space. Like a TV that's off. Like closing your eyes. But I once saw someone describe their blindness by saying "what do you see out of your elbow?" well, nothing. You don't see darkness you don't perceive a sense of space or anything out of your elbow. Is it like that? Or is it like a TV that's turned off? Like a space for visualization that just doesn't turn on, or no? Like it's so hard to describe but my mind feels like a whole other place. Like...the inside of a Tardis. So when I try to imagine aphantasia my brain just supplies like this idea of a big, empty room with a very important voice in the room. But I'm guessing that it's more like you just don't have the room at all....I hope that doesn't come across as rude. It's 2am so I'm probably not being as articulate as I might otherwise be. I'm not trying to insinuate that you're empty-headed, just describing the image that my brain spits up for me.

That description of how your memories work is really cool. I'd love to read a book by someone with aphantasia just to see the differences and see how you guys write and what you emphasize. That sensory thing just is still blowing my mind. Oh man...I bet your acculturation (assimilation of your first culture.) process was totally different. Does the lack of visualization make it harder for you to interpret facial expressions? Like maybe you don't remember which expressions mean which thing bc you can't see them in your head? BTW please don't feel like you need to answer a question if it's accidentally too invasive. It's 100% ok to just be like "yeah not comfy with that".

Ok so I'm going to bed now, but go ahead and answer whenever you feel like it. I'll reply tomorrow. :)

[arsonistblue]

Hi!! I am writing a spy novel featuring an autistic character, and while I have been doing research on autism and the do’s and dont’s, is there anything you would suggest/mention?

I am allistic, and my character—Person A—is an adult Black woman in her twenties. She stims a lot, has turn-offs (like touching gross fabric or eating weird textures), is good at social cues, but isn’t very good at recognizing her own emotions. Is this a good/accurate autistic person? What should I remember while writing her character?

I also want to include another character—Person B—who is a very close friend of A. Person B is highly empathetic (although not as much as you’ve described in posts about your hyperempathy) and helps Person A recognize and handle her emotions. Would this be acceptable? I don’t want to push the idea that autistic people need assistance to recognize their own emotions.

hi!!! thanks so much for sending this! i’m glad you’re being so respectful and good about doing research. but just a reminder, whatever you do, ask autistic people like you have been doing, don’t go to sites like autism speaks. 

i should preface this by saying that i’m only in high school, and i am white, so it won’t be exact.

that sounds pretty accurate, yeah! i stim a lot (for me it’s pretty subtle, fidgeting too, though i flap my hands or rock back and forth sometimes), and that is in part because of my adhd. and the texture thing is super important!!! while it doesn’t happen to every autistic person, it’s pretty common, and it can be very random things (one of mine is elbow pasta. not pasta in general, i love pasta, but i hate elbow pasta specifically. i cannot stand it.) such as velvet or tin foil or wet grass. and vice versa, there are also textures we might love (especially plush or soft things)! 

and social cues can be a difficult one. i myself am pretty good with social cues, but some other autistic people aren’t. everyone is different; and it’s important to remember that autism is a spectrum, but not from “less autistic” to “more autistic.” it’s more like a soup. you can have more or less of different “ingredients” like social cue understanding, stimming, hyperfocusing, verbal communication, etc! 

the emotion thing is also a great question! like with other parts of autism, emotions (both how intensely you feel them and whether it’s easy to recognize them) are different for everyone. 

as someone who is hyperempathetic because of my autism, i think it’s a great system of support! (and for some extra tips for character B, maybe have them occasionally get overloaded with emotion, and try to assign tells to their own emotions!) 

this is especially a great system if, as you said, characters A and B are close friends. there’s nothing wrong with leaning on friends and getting support! just make sure that all of your characters (based on personalities and potential trust issues, ofc) all rely on friends, so it’s not just the autistic character who has support. but yeah, that sounds awesome! 

also, whatever you do, steer clear of the sheldon cooper archetype, or the robotic, factual personalities we see all too often in autistic characters. we’re people! there’s nothing wrong with having your autistic character be intelligent; in fact, that’s a good thing! but don’t make them the super smart, math whiz, all-knowing nerd type, yk? again there’s nothing wrong with being autistic and a nerd, but don’t do the stereotype. 

that said, some of us do enjoy very “left-brained” things. but in general, don’t make us sheldon coopers. 

sorry this answer was so long! any other autistic people please feel free to chime in in the notes/reblogs!! and feel free to send any other questions you might have.

(also, spy novel with autistic main female character of color???? amazing, 10/10 would read)

[space-city-traffic]

wait dude you’re reading frankenstein???? Please I wanna hear your thoughts on it it’s my favorite book :0

oh my gosh YES!! I’ve only finished half so far, but I have SO MANY thoughts. here is an assortment, in no particular order: (i apologize in advance because this is a pretty long post)

the sailor dude in the introduction is so gay. so very gay. you did not need to describe “his lustrous eyes” or “his full toned voice voice” or “his lips” or “his thin hand” in so much detail or so many times. you don’t have to call him “the divine wanderer.” it’s okay, we all have a little bit of a crush on Victor, but please chill.

seriously though, the intro is actually really cool, because it introduces one of my favorite metaphors in the book! the gay sailor is on a quest for a land of endless sunlight, and it’s super neat how that’s meant to parallel Victor’s dangerous quest for endless knowledge.

Victor has ADHD, I promise. like, he learns misinformation because he was self taught about his random obsessions? he hyperfocuses on his experiments until he forgets to eat and sleep and makes himself physically sick? “I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit”? he instantly spirals into blame and self loathing because one thing he did went wrong? this is a former gifted kid with ADHD, I am convinced.

the theme of constant loneliness with the sailor, victor, and the creature makes me SAD

for a science guy, Victor is sure hung up on fate, destiny, and doom.

sunlight keeps being used as a metaphor for knowledge and certainty!

but in that epic scene where the creature comes to life, the light is described as a half burnt out candle and the “dim and yellow light of the moon”—knowledge gone wrong. and then the creature is first described as having yellow eyes! it’s associated with all these distortions of true light and knowledge immediately, and i just go feral for color symbolism.

Clerval has all of the rights. i would like to hug him.

the creature is always associated with storms, and he always appears in a storm. i have yet to figure out if that means anything.

Victor is very smart and very stupid, and I admire that. maybe his problems would be fixed if he had a cup of tea and took a break once in a while.

i love how Victor describes himself as sickly and barely able to cross the plain, describes the creature as 9 feet tall and bounding across the plain effortless, and immediately goes: “yes I’m gonna try to take this guy in a fight.” like, what are you gonna do? you’re anemic??? go home

the creature’s first lines are ICONIC. he starts off with a whole syllogism (demonstrating his ability to reason), then he goes on to demonstrate his understanding of ethics, and then he talks about duty and conditions with Victor, proving that he understands society and politics and how to live in a relationship with others. this is a whole person by any definition. please respect him, Victor.

also the line “I will glut the maw of death” is very iconic.

the first thing the creature experiences is light!!!

he references Paradise Lost but casts himself as one of the demons :(

so yeah, I’ve basically just gotten to the point where the creature starts telling his story. also, I’m so sorry this is so much at once, lol. im just a little bit obsessed with this book right now. so I’d be super curious to hear your thoughts, too!!!!!!

[soupcorvus]

hello to any artists who happen to stumble upon this post, i’m in need of some art advice (this could potentially end up being kind of long so i put it under the cut), thank you in advance to anyone who sees this and offers any advice! there’s more than one thing that i would like advice on, so if you don’t have any advice for one thing, it’s possible that you might for another.

so i’m having trouble with making my characters not look flat (and often stiff) when i draw them, here are a few examples of my work for reference:

i don’t know if this is the issue for sure, but i think that the problem might be that i’m having trouble drawing them like they’re in a 3d space, as well as drawing people from different angles. i feel like a part of this might be the lineart, but who knows honestly

if anyone has any tips on how to better imagine or draw characters as if they’re in a 3d space, please let me know them!

the other thing i need advice on is improving my sketches (which honestly sounds kind of weird when i write it out like that because it’s a sketch, there shouldn’t be too much thought put into it, but hear me out). i tend to overthink them, repeating over lines and hyperfocusing on small details on the first pass. so the main thing i want to fix is to make sure that my first pass stays simple and easy to read, with lines repeating over themselves kept to a minimum.

additionally, if you have any recommendations for brushes i could use for sketching, that would be great (i use procreate, so keep that in mind while giving any advice on that)!

any and all advice is greatly appreciated!

[aprito]

hello <3 since i got these asks at the same time i decided to combine my thoughts on them in this post. yet another annoying sjw essay from yours truly on this blog 

before i get into these i think i need to preface why im like. i guess overly hyperfocused on a certain unproblematic base (same age au / platonic canon) for them and avoid the ped0philic content like the plague lol

tw for pedophilia ment, rape ment if that makes you squicky. ALSO THIS IS LONG AND RAMBLY

as i’ve mentioned a couple times already, ive been into the ship since i was 12, back when it was very very common to not only post untagged (nsfw) canonverse content of the two in writing and in drawing but also non con and the like, so you can imagine how bad my first impression online was. thinking back on it ...as a child i found it disturbing but didnt really register how problematic it really was?? (i know, but i also lived in the middle of nowhere and had no one explain this to me) 

skip to 2014 aka me coming back to naruto at 17ish and i had kinda become hyper aware of the fact that there was an increasing amount of people online who had come forward with explaining how fictional problematic content, mostly pedophilia, had been used to groom them into starting relationships with adullts. it was also a time where a lot of people didnt believe these victims, not registering how common it was for minors to be online friends with adults who had no boundaries and no qualms exposing them such content. not gonna get into my personal life here but i was lucky to not having gone through this myself. like... it kinda was my first time truly realising how fiction can EASILY be used to manipulate others irl (and yes i will not argue this, if you dont think fictional media can form and manipulate people’s opinions on attitudes, countries, cultures and virtues, pick up a book about the effects of propaganda media at least once please) 

i, being young, still liking the dynamic but not really the romance, would point this out here and there in the fandom and get into fights with grown adults in their mid 20s who assumed i automatically hated the ship(s) and tried to restrict their freedom of speech or whatever, heard everything from the “age of consent doesnt exist in naruto” to the “sasori looks like a child what does it matter” despite people clearly playing on him being older and experienced. it made me so upset that people were just consuming all this content uncritically and exposing children to it tbh?? not really just sos but a lot of minor/adult ships in naruto in general. and thats where i sat down and thought, i do not want to be a grown adult talking down to children that point out how unsafe the fandom is. theyre absolutely right in drawing these boundaries and calling out adults who defend the uncritical consumption and creation of this content. i do not want to consume or create content that predators could use to groom minors, and i absolutely do want to let younger people in fandom know that i am respecting their comfort zones and want them to have a safe and fun experience. after all, naruto is not an adult show and i think a lot of people forget that!!!! i am not perfect in that regard but its something that i, at the age of 23, am very passionate about and strive towards to.

and i guess thats where same age au was born for me and i have been sticking to it ever since. 

so finally we can move to the first question 

aside from the fact that we both dont like canon sos, i dont think it would work out even if i wasnt prejudiced to it anyways. in all honesty, 35 year old canon sasori is not a redeemable character to me, given the fact that he’s easily amongst the cruelest villains in naruto (torturing and killing and taxiderming people for his own fun personal gain, never for a goal that served anyone but himself. how do you redeem having over 300 corpses in your backpack that you felt absolutely no remorse for killing). sasori was legit one of the only cruel villains that didnt had someone else pull the strings, which sends a clear message on kishi’s part, who absolutely loves to redeem villains LOL.

being that old, he obviously had already been very manifested in what he believed in, even if it was shakey, to the point where the first crack in that world view (sakura and chiyo protecting each other) immediately had him give up on his life all together. that, in my opinion, is not a man who’s going to know what healthy relationships would look like, regardless of it being romantic or not. 35 year old sasori to me has the same appeal as an expired can of tuna and he’s probably very happy 6 feet under. he’s supposed to be a failed gaara in that sense that he had no one to look out for him and therefore was never going to experience anything but a bad ending in life. its fine that hes dead honestly, it wraps up his short character development the best IMO.

adding to that, seriously, sakura was obviously interested in knowing why he was that way, and called him out for being seriously fucked in the head, but it’s weird to me that people assume she had any interest in actively rehabilitating him, let alone starting a serious romantic relationship with him. sakura who’s not only very, uhm, immature and straight forward when it comes to her romantic viewpoints also, as a big bootlicker, wouldnt soil her standing in the village by starting anything with a disgraced and far too gone criminal like sasori. shipping that version of sasori with sakura intimately is still going to set her up for a huge power imbalance that would be difficult to handle imo, even if she was the one in the fight ultimately exerting her power over him. i would still look at it and think damn she deserves better than having to play therapist for man like that lol.

additionally, even if you ignored all of this, you cant really ignore that sasori had already known her as a child, and that had been his first and most impactful impression of her. i dont think that sasori would look at 35 year old sakura and see her as a grown woman and not the little green girl she was in the fight. plus, you easily fall into predatory comparison territory between the “childish” and “womanly” and i have seen way too often in fic just being boiled down to her now being fuckable. a lot of of ships do this and i would just like to remind yall thats it not normal for adults to want to start relationships with children they have seen grown up or known as a child when they themselves were fully grown adults. therefore, maybe if sakura hadnt met sasori before it would be less of a problem? but that also obviously defeats the point of the dynamic and the reason he died in the first place. so yeah, it sounds kind of doomed especially if you were to make it romantic. 

WHICH BRINGS ME TO THE SECOND QUESTION

let me preface this that im not fundamentally against age gaps, even if im not super interested in it. after all, colorblind had a 5 yr age gap (with sakura being 21), even if, say, i wrote similar fics today i probably would make it smaller lol. i think it can be handled well if both parties have enough life experience to deal with it, and the author is cautious of where the age gap starts, i think a 10+ year age gap would be fine in a scenario where the younger party (i guess sakura) was at least 25-27ish, meaning she has completed most of her most formative life stages and probably had been in relationships before, meaning she would be able to handle it without having to fear a huge power imbalance. the older the younger party is the less the age gap is going to matter tbh .TsukiHoshino and AngelOfDeath10 both handle age gaps in their fics really well imo, so i do not mind reading about them.

unfortunately, a lot of people in this fandom think making sakura barely "”””legal””””” (18, not even 20 which is hilarious to me because the source material is obviously japanese) because they both cannot stand her being past her “prime years” of being young fertile and fuckable to much older men as well as thinking a 20 year old is automatically old enough to handle that type of relationship. ive seen a lot of unironic takes that believe it will absolve them of callout posts if they throw around age of consent and “shes 18 now suckers!!!” enough lmfao. absolutely hilarious. aging a minor up without aging the adult down seriously reeks of predatory “cant wait until youre 18″ narratives and thats why i find it similarly disturbing as straight up pedo shipping.

ultimately, sasosaku is and will always be a inherently problematic ship in canon, which is why i think it should always be handled a little more responsibly in fandom spaces, ignoring or outright excusing the main problem factor, which is sasori, isnt going to convince anyone that the dynamic in itself is well written and interesting enough to explore in aus, like giving sasori the redemption most of us wanted him to have by aging him down to a point in time where he was still realistically going to allow being positively influenced, similar to gaara. 

so really, what i think is well handled age gap and how most people handle age gap in the naruto fandom are two different worlds at times lol 

tl;dr

canon shippers have never been anything but gross when i was younger and i didnt wanna be like that, even if youre “smart”enough to differenate, actual creeps dont really care and might use your content to blur the lines, sasori isnt rly redeemable so romantic canonverse realistically wouldnt make much sense and is still iffy, age gaps are fine if they are handled well, but given that the dynamic doesnt really need the age gap to still work im not that invested on making that an essential part of my shipping experience.  

thank you for reading and hope this makes sense!

[mallowstep]

I wanna hear about the PO3 au's the anon left out! skyclan, loner, po5. Im guessing loner is Crow/Leaf raising the 3 outside of the clans. I love hearing you talk about your au's!

aww thanks! okay, same plan as before, details below the cut.

skyclan po3: it's, uh, pretty on the nose. crow and leaf run to skyclan with their kits.

loner po3: this is a catch-all term for three aus with similar premises, but i don't have a clear/short title to differentiate them. one is leafcrow, one is mothpool, and one is just leafpool. i'll talk about each of them.

po5: this is my internal name for the jaywing au. this, if you don't remember (and why would you), is a bit of a parallel to the dovefeather/med cat dovewing au where jaykit and dovekit are siblings.

skyclan po3: "they move on tracks of never-ending light" (title song)

the au title for this in my notes was "whitewater," but i think i'm going to save something else for that. (if you're confused why i have two titles for all of the aus: when i make a big au, it usually gets a temporary title that's short and easy to search, but i replace it with a permanent title later. sometimes they stay the same, like ashes, but usually i change it.)

so my only notes on this is

crowfeather and leafpool make it all the way to skyclan with a trio of newborn kits.

and like yeah, that's basically all i've figured out.

uhhh i know skyclan will come to the lake sooner, obviously, and i know that jay's character arc plays out really differently because there's less ableism.

(even in the windclan au, jay is intertwined with ableism: in that case, it's "either you're the same, or you're not capable." but leafstar is a sensible leader who doesn't have that problem.)

otherwise, yeah, i don't really know where i'm going with this, other than i think it'll be fun to explore, since leafpool is firestar's daughter and named after leafstar.

loner po3: the common thread in all of these is what happens to thunderclan's medicine cat after leafpool leaves?

(tbf, that's a common question in quite a few aus. but it makes itself a central conflict in these three.)

loner po3 I: leafcrow. "on and on we run in loops"

uh, yeah. they run away, and stay away. this one isn't supposed to focus on the kits that much, but rather, leafpool's struggle with duty and desire.

i've got this:

“There’s a loner,” the kittypet said, her voice languid, claws extended, but with an air of ease, “named Leaf. She’s been helping out loners for, oh, a season or two.”

as a quote from it. it's my least favorite of the loner po3 aus.

loner po3 II: single mom leafpool. "between us, i'd trade you for them every time"

i've talked about this one actually quite a bit, but it's probably going to take me a while to write it. it's inspired by "butterflies and hurricanes," but instead of leafpool dying, crowfeather dies.

also, the chapter titles come from "marjorie" which is basically 90% of why it's going to take me a while to work on it, that song makes me cry a lot and uh, things are a lil Much right now.

i've got a few scenes sketched out, from holly running away, and leafpool panicking, to leafpool worrying about bringing her kits to thunderclan.

loner po3 III: mothpool. "to make a choice in all this mess"

this is the au competing with divided po3 for next po3 au to write, and i'm...i love it. (as a note, i won't write two aus for the same time period at the same time. that's why i was waiting to finish wfmisus before i got back on doahins. now it's all messy. but i get confused lmao.)

anyway, i have the least written for this, but i'm very excited. in my first warriors fic ever, "if you love me any, let me know it now", leafpool thinks this:

(Leafpool should have left. She should have found Mothwing and told her and left. Maybe pause to say goodbye to Squirrelflight. Mothwing would have gone with her, and things would be alright. Not like they are now, all tangled and impossible.)

and well. i'm weak.

i don't have a ton of concrete stuff to say about it, especially considering it's so high on the list, but i mean, i'm excited.

po5: "wing and feather"

alright, this is an old one. since it's also high on my list, i want to explain where it came from rather than what it's about, because that will cover what it's about in a broad sense, without tempting me to give away the details.

(also, w&f is a working title. much like "feather take flight," i may change my mind.)

anyway. i started getting into warriors with "cloudtail's daughter," an au where dovewing and ivypool are brightheart's kits.

in a post so old i had to go to my main blog to find it, i said this:

i also want him to be dovewing’s brother. but the au where brightheart gives birth to dovekit, anxiety child, and jaykit, blind, and feels like a failure despite the fact that its not like her half-blindness is genetic, is not this au. that is another au.

and the seeds were planted.

so right, i'm writing up ctd around when i'm first reading "flightless dove, poison ivy," which will go on to inspire dovefeather (med cat dovewing au, but as you'll see, dovefeather is the assigned working au name. after i decided i didn't like feather take flight, i reverted back to its initial working title, dovefeather.)

so i've got these two things rolling around in my brain.

dovefeather comes first, because i reread fdpi so many times and i just. i want dovepaw to stay in riverclan. i don't want her to leave. i want her to be happy. (also please! i'm still finishing ch 2 of fdpi no spoilers it's taking me embarassingly long to finish.)

but anyway, consider this a bonus au talk because explaining what po5 is, imo, requires me explaining what dovefeather is. like, in an au talk scenario. they're unrelated aus, from a reader perspective.

so i come up with this list of "things i want to be different in oots":

dovewing should be cloudtail's daughter

dovewing and jayfeather should be siblings

dovewing should be a medicine cat

dovewing should go to riverclan

ivypool should be the fourth cat (but i'm not revealing which aus this applies to bc big time spoilers)

and this creates a bit of an au matrix. pick and choose, you know? ctd is (1).

dovefeather is (3) and (4).

but i still wanted (2), and so it seemed pretty natural to make a (1), (2), and (3) au.

but that's a retrospective analysis, what really happens is, i get like fourteen "what ifs" deep, until i'm writing fic for my fic for someone else's fic. kind of.

dovefeather diverges pretty sharply from fdpi, especially based on what i've read of ch2. it takes the same core idea, and because my idea of riverclan was inspired by fdpi, there are plenty of similarities, but i think it's functionally very different, and superficially similar.

(also, hollowflight ends up in a completely different trio lmao dovepaw hangs out with rushpaw, troutpaw, and mossypaw.)

but anyway, i'm trying not to write another au of the same time period, but i just finished writing out the full outline for ashes, and the next chapter (i.e., ch 12, which i'm hopefully posting today if all goes well) gets me thinking, and i can't let it go: i want (2) to happen.

so i look at my outline for dovefeather, because the rule is, it has to be very different from this.

since dovefeather is like 70% drafted (altho that number seems low, because i suspect i'm going to end up adding a lot into the fourth chapter), i now know that was never going to be an issue, but at the time, i was very worried.

so i was like! well, that means i'm going to fuck with every part of po3, and we're going to get ivypaw and hollypaw roped in, and jaypaw is always going to be a warrior, and i think i made squilf his mentor? or maybe sandstorm lmao.

either way, it ended up being defined by jaypaw, which i didn't initially plan on. but that's po5: squilf's litter lionkit, hollykit, ivykit & brightheart's litter dovekit and jaykit grow up together.

it's got a similar vibe to ashes IMO.

okay wow that ended up being a lot i've been hyperfocusing on dovefeather all weekend, and in my head, it's inextricably linked to ashes, ctd, and jaywing/po5, so uh. yeah.

hope this was what you were looking for?

<3

[zet-sway]

@the-wip-project day 24:

Have you ever read a thing in a book or seen in a show/movie where you thought: "Oh, this is good, I'm gonna steal that!" What was it?

Well recently the only media I've consumed outside of video games has been documentaries and podcasts. I did one audiobook in the science fiction genre but it was generally pretty boring (and a lot of UST, what a waste :c ). But when I'm reading other people's fics I really do want to steal shit all the time. I just don't do it.

I'm hyperfixated on wordplay.

Every time I read someone else's fic there's always some line that jumps out at me and I feel like - damn I'm jealous I didn't think of that.

It's not a mean kind of jealousy. I love and enjoy the differences between writers. I am just so damn hyperfocused on finding new and exciting ways to string words together. I take a long time to edit my fics because I'm lost on tiny details like "did I start too many sentences with pronouns" and "did I use the same sentence formula twice in a row" and "wow here I go again throwing unnecessary adjectives where they don't need to be" (please tell me I'm not the only one who does this omg).

One time I read someone's profile on FF.net (literally back in like 2011) that said one of their pet peeves was adverbs. They hated adverbs, called them lazy writer shortcuts. Now I'm anxious about using adverbs. I still use them because I think they're lovely (hahahahahahaha I did that) but I do try to cut back, re-arrange words, eliminate them when they become overused.

I think I focus too much on how the words flow together and when I see someone write a bunch of words I've never seen in the same sentence together, I get all excited and I wanna "borrow" them.

But I don't do it because here in the shrios community we're a pretty small group and it would be very obvious if I did that. I will admit to stealing some wordplay from authors I read a long long time ago, but at what point does it become just fuzzy memory? I truthfully can't remember where I read "feeling his jaw work as he ate her." I know for sure I read it somewhere, but fuck I really can't remember where or when. That's why I decided to borrow it (with my luck that person is probably reading this post lol I'M SORRY Jfjslfsdjf).

I enjoy reading other people's fic even outside my OTP because people are so clever and it's very exciting. When I write, I try to think of a new mechanism I want to try, instead of stealing other people's words. I still hyperfixate on wordplay but I try to curtail this urge by re-reading others' work, trying to understand the storytelling rather than saying like "pretty words look gud me likey."

And since we're here - I AM ABOUT TO GO OFF ON A TANGENT - I saw this great post about how every artist thinks "wow when I can draw like that I'll know I finally made it" and how that mentality prevents them from enjoying what their viewers love about their work - their own unique style. I am trying to tell myself I have my own unique style.

But even if I don't, the fact is, the fanfic writing community has actually - truthfully - literally (lol adverbs again) - never EVER treated me bad. YOU PEOPLE ARE SO KIND WHAT THE FUCK???? I just came out of a 2+ year WoW gaming binge in which I tore myself apart DAILY because I could not measure up to the community's expectations. People are fucking savages on multiplayer games. I'm not traumatized but I'm also not willing to accept that kind of environment for myself anymore. The kindness of writers has been earthshattering for me. Yes I am going to continue on my tangent yup yes I am

I'm starting to see why for years, I lost the drive to be kind. It's exhausting and lonely to put positivity out into the world only to have it returned with vitriol. That's what my WoW experience has been like over the last 12+ months. It's become so dog-eat-dog over there. I'm not saying I'll never play wow again, but holy shit I needed some distance to get my fucking priorities straight.

Being on tumblr has been a sobering reminder that there are spaces where people exchange kindness. I'm not trying to say that every wow player is a piece of shit, because they aren't. But the loudest and most hurtful ones really left a mark on me. I'd just like to give a big heartfelt mushy thank you to tumblr and my followers and anyone who's ever offered a helping hand instead of verbally eviscerating a stranger.

[iconsumeheadcanons]

persona characters autism headcanons!

hi im autistic and i started my day with sun so now im !!!!!!!!! some of these headcanons are from elsewhere on tumbr, but i dont know where :(((  so i am hoping someone out there knows that n that everybody knows that i love them <3

(also go check out mollypaup and i think hypeswap if you havent already! they post some good stuff autism+adhd hc too!!! i think.. oh! and thieves-in-the-palace!!!)

P5

Joker

there was some artwork from someone on tublr..where they pointed out that he doesnt really talk outside the metaverse so--hes hyperverbal as joker and just near nonverbal as akiren

he stims ALL THE TIME. that phone thing, the pencil thing, the little tappy tap of his foot, pulling at his bangs when hes embarrassed/smug. someone get him a fidget spinner. he’ll prob learn to do tricks with it

he probably sucks at focusing in class, like i know its just the game design but hes always surprised out of his daily “star out the window at the nearby office building” when his teachers ask him questions

mona mentions when the pt is at Wilton for the first time (after they run into shido) that joker eats like shit, and that could have multiple causes at the start of the story of course, but when i first played i thought that joker was a picky eater and that the variety (and amount of food) at the buffet would be an Ordeal...

tho mona makes that comment bc joker looked pale after having a little ptsd moment from shidos voice, but i didnt know that the first time i played

maybe when joker makes a face at ryuji putting so much ginger in his gyudon? joker probably does not like pickled ginger lol

his favortive foods are all spicy, which is why the curry he makes for his friends is always ‘overly spicy’, and why kasumi makes him a curry bento and joker kept going “...?” .... “....?!”

overly reflective glasses have been a great plus for him bc now he never has to make real eye contact every again!

mona Soft. play with Ann hair. maybe Braid. nice

puns (Gorou the Goroumet)

he has so many options to be straight up rude sometimes in game. he probably no clue on his own, which is why he defaults to Not Talking. people probably mention his constant scary face, which is just him being nonexpressive, squinting at all the fucking bright lights, and Tired

executive function who? we do everything last minute folks

high pain tolerance, which is why he was the kid that was always climbing trees in elementary school to get basketballs unstuck from the branches

his sixth sense lets him see treasure and possible places to climb/crawl bc 1. Shiny? Steal it. Steal it Now. and 2. Could i fit in that? Time to Find Out

probalby a bit of a klepto too oops. he’ll return it tho!! but he has to do it dramatically or he’ll die

cant sit properly to save his life

smells and touch are Great, they can keep him grounded when his brain goes off to police or dead rivals or guilt or

if a friend hung out with him and gave him total reigns of the agenda, he would choose to nap on the floor while his friend does something off to the side quietly

hyperfocuses on handy tasks (i.e. lockpicks, coffee brewing, cleaning, his part time jobs) and some things like movies and books. everything else is a tossup

his (normal) navigation app is his most used app bc he still doesnt know where hes going, even though he only goes to the same few places in the city

hates being sweaty, literally cannot stand it. probably double exhausted during the summer

but Needs Compression so hes often Struggling

Futaba

paraphrase from p5d “i have no motor skills so i cant play rhythm games :(” need i say more? (i will regardless)

echolalia all the time, from anime, memes, the PT

those headphones she wears all the time? noise cancelling ear protectors babey

only talks about her interests, “normal” talking is Not Easy, but she is still communicative w others despite her worries. shes not “hard to understand” at all but she feels the anxiety nonetheless

only talks informally, cannot talk ‘politely’ with out imitating someone around her

shes had meltdowns and anxiety attacks in game :( i relate so hard

Technology. thats it

def had an egypt phase that pops up every few months. probably came from yu-gi-oh

has Immune to Bright Lights buff.  joker is very jealous

“Time to make like a tree and leave!” and 30 other iterations

video game metaphors are the only ones that makes sense to her

probably relates hard to robot characters in anime for their general androgyny and confusion about human emotions and connections

probably gets told that shes “too smart to be on the spectrum” by teachers >:( she fails their classes on purpose

wakaba’s autistic too that just how it is

the Connection that she establishes with Joker is so Warm. my life goals include adopting an older brother like futaba has lsdkfjslkfj

also eater of 5 foods only, i mean, she brings cup ramen to the beach. i just really admire her...

hides in small spaces for comfort

doesnt she have like uhhhhh hyperthymesia or something like that?

Yusuke

art

his entire social link is learning how humans work, which i relate

talks seriously all the time

“sarcasm? who is that? are you saying I was sarcastic?...how?”

cant remember to take care of his body, and madarame did not help with that either

lot of uncomfortable staring, hes overdoing the eye contact thingy

infodumps all the time, doesnt know hes doing it

needs a lot of support even if he doesnt think he deserves it. no one ever complains about helping him out tho

visual stims my friends

he didnt know that you could look up pictures on the internet but he does know you can stream live videos of waterfalls and fluffy animales!!

I am certainly in the mood

for something salty today.

he and joker are scared of math. numbers do not interact

Yusuke, futaba, and akiren are a trio and i know this bc their first day of non-thievery interacts is Akiren clearing Futabas room w/o permission, futaba hyperfocusing on destroying medjed, and yusuke rearranging futabas figurines so they are more visually appealing

morgana is a support friend for all of them bc igor knows they need it

P4

Souji/Yu

yes, he mostly wears gray semi formal clothes bc parents tell him to, no, he will not changes this

Schedule or Death

“sorry, could you repeat that?” “huh? oh yeah, i was saying that--” “yeah that’d be cool.”

cats, fishing, he just likes to be quiet. you can literally spend a day at the beach just to think if you want, and that is what yu want

has a lot of scripts for things (of which he shares with nanako!) but if he runs out he just stops talking..

inaba is a godsend bc its so fucking quiet and warm

he Yearns to hold his friends hands, but he shies away from a lot of touch (excepting yosuke, teddie, and nanako)

Cooking and Cleaning makes the world better. he and joker vibe together with this

unlike akiren, he strong arms any executive dysfunction into Be Productive or Else. his punishment is feeling the pure anxiety of having to make up for ‘lost time’. (another symptom of his workaholic parents)

writes everything down, notes are very neat, has pages dedicated for bad doodles when hes not feeling his usual Super Classroom Focus

Cannot handle secondhand embarrassment (most often caused by yosuke) and will quietly slip away to random cats or origami folding

hungry, crunch crunch folks. probably needs chewelry bc he used to chew on his shirt collars when he was younger.

cleans up after everyone in the food court, constantly worries about them accidently hurting themselves. likely spends half of group conversations watching peoples hands

he canonically eats expired food, nanako plz help your brother

really clumsy, but people only notice after they decide that he is a cool person

video games are too chaotic for him

exhausted every night from the pure amount of masking he does, if a friend spends the night (or is like yosuke) they will know his more comfortable weirdo self (tho everyone knows hes a weirdo eventually)

hyperempathetic, sometimes just understands animals and children better than peeople his age or older

Yukiko

her jokes

she and souji get in ‘trouble’ together, she and joker commit crimes together

she and chie have to coordinate outfits, its important

actually understands metaphors, but does not understand people

like me, had no clue that creepy kid was flirting with her

she is very angry when she has meltdowns that might involve slamming doors and shouting. her parents call these ‘tantrums’ and ‘unfitting for a polite daughter’ but really thats because her meltdowns tend to be caused by arguments w her family after a long day of school and TV world traipsing

the metronome meme, except hers goes between Loudest Person in the Room to Quietest Pin Drop in the Planet. she is completely unaware of this

her atmosphere brightens when chie appears. that is not only the lesbian energy within her, but also because chie is like her Favorite Person

Cannot wear Pants. No (tho she wants to try it! but she puts them on and her soul instantly squashes)

happy flappy lesbian! watch out!

Naoto

the pouty face. all the time lskdfjlasdkf

hes really snappy sometimes and i love that for him. he and akechi should fight just to see what would happen (please read Bang Bang Shoot Shoot on AO3)

“do not touch me or my hat, thank you”

no one has ever seen him shutdown and no one ever will (except for his grandpa)(and kanji)(and rise)

probably likes certain food textures and will stand for nothing less, probably feels embarrassed about his preferences with friends

constantly jumps between ‘everybody hates me so i should act like them so they dont hate me’ to ‘i refuse to be anything but very comfortable as myself, and i dont care that im making you upset sir’

he and souji are the king and queen of subtle stims, but for unhappy reasons :(

does not make jokes. cannot joke around. understand? yes, do? no.

loose clothes are the only good clothes, but all tags and obtrusive seams will be obliterated by kanji tatsumi

not very empathetic so he probably comes off as an asshole to strangers (like when he throws away his classmates confession letters without reading them) but he tries so hard to sound comforting when his buds are struggling.

his understanding of others emotions/reactions come from his learning as a detective, which seems cold+clinical to others, especially compared to souji, whos completely unexpressive but very introverted people person

P3

Hamuko/Minako/Kotone

big personality!! very people-oriented!! koromaru and her are buddies!! when shes having a real bad time, shes very quiet and expressions turn off

interrupts herself in the middle of conversations all the time. no one knows where shes coming from. her brains is thousands of km ahead of her body

bouncey legs, swingin arms, twirlly skirt, little somersaults! when will she stop? never!

very obvious music stims with her hands and arms! people are like “oh there she goes! happy as usual!” shes listening to minatos heavy metal playlist

switches from exhausted to excited within milliseconds. no one can predict, not even her

SEES has to ask her for context all the time cuz she’ll just continue shit from 2 weeks ago without warning

professionals will assume shes very childish bc of how chipper she is, but she is beyond mature for her age and only feels comfortable enough to have serious conversations if a person has proved themself able to handle it

collects every little thing. her room is a mess and she has to get rid of most of it every time she moves :(

hates cleaning! smells bad, feels bad hhhhhgggg

dont let mitsuru-senpai see her bedroom

gets lost in the middle of conversations with others bc shes thinking about a story connected to one(1) word that was said earlier

 no sense of time and place, she just sees her friends and goes “ah, this is the right place, then” but junpei and akihiko are also lost so now theyre all screwed

Minato/Makoto/Sakuya

no talkies, no walkies

his story in the movies is him literally learning how to function around people he cares for

doesnt get jokes, expressions, body language, empathy, subtlety, metaphors, physical contact, or eye contact. aigis is probably the only person he truly understands right away

he is still nice to people because he doesnt see a reason not to be, but also he has very limited energy so only his senpai and old people get his most polite-kindnesses

cannot describe feelings for the life of him. the team wont know hes injured or sick until hes passed out

everything is too loud, time to drown it out with my loud ass music

rocking and chewing stims, ryoji is the first person to point him out for these subtle stims (not accusingly of course, just general pure curiosity and love for the uniqueness of humanity)

likes to cover his face with whatever is available, lives like a bat in a dark dry cave

will wear anything that has pockets and his blue/gray/black palette

sleepy at all times bc he never has much energy

when he was younger he probably needed a lot of support, especially after his parents died, because he wouldnt communicate like a neurotypical and would shutdown for hours in the middle of school without warning. probably missed a lot of lessons and field trips out of pure overstimulation

eating at all times. no preference, just whatevers closest

his meltdowns probalby include humming whining noises and curling up in a ball, which makes people want to touch him, but that is the LAST thing he wants. put a blanket on him! play some music! do not talk and do not expect him to speak

aigis is the only person who can touch him normally bc her hands are cold and he likes cold

never nude, feels mmmmmmmmm without clothes and probalby wears a full robe in the hotsprings

will not do things that take more than one step w/o someone else walking him thru it, which Same

[chibisquirt]

You don't have to answer, but if you wouldn't mind. What are some things you've learned about ADHD from Tumblr that are applicable to you, or others you may now? I've been reading more on it and how it manifests in girls/women and was curious when I read your rb on that post about Grammarly

I don’t mind at all!  Fair warning:  this is gonna be LONG.

I’m going to start by repeating something I mentioned in that post:  I was diagnosed in third grade, which was over two decades ago.  I had my diagnosis halfway through elementary school, much less high school and two rounds of college.  So a lot of the old information about ADHD I learned as a young person, and those things are worth exploring, too.  

Example:  It’s not that I’m not listening, Mrs. Nock, it’s just that if I try to keep my hands still, then the only thing I will retain from the lesson will be keep your hands still and not the things you trying to teach, which are supposedly important! 

(Mrs. Nock was the one who said to me, “I believe you believe you’re paying attention.”  Yes, it’s been fifteen years.  Yes, I’m still mad.  If you can’t have basic respect for your students, don’t teach.)

I figured out half on my own, half because of the counselling that if I had a fidget tool that didn’t require words I would pay better attention than if I tried to sit still.  (I still remember being mocked by my dad for fidgeting well after making that discovery, though.  Apparently diagnoses should only inform compassion when they’re his.)  On the same lines, I also figured out that music in the background wouldn’t work for me if it had words, and television is too distracting for me to use at all.  (I have a friend, though, whose ADHD works the opposite way:  he has difficulty focusing if there isn’t a television in the background.  Yes, both are valid.)

So, the Classics:  

I always had trouble with organization and cleaning, had trouble with schedules and calendars and managing my time.  Those are the things they’ll warn you about, the things they’ll tell you in counselling are natural and normal things for people with ADHD to have trouble with.  Trouble paying attention, sure.  Trouble sitting still.  Procrastination.  Got it.

But if you turn those traits around and re-frame them, they become a new set of symptoms.  Adaptations for these new symptoms are more personal and universally applicable in my life, and therefore, to my mind, more useful.

Take Procrastination.  (No really: please take it.)  That just means “putting it off until tomorrow,” and there are lots of reasons to do it:  “don’t have the tool I need” is one of the biggies, “want to conserve steps” trips me up a lot, “I still have time to get to it” is HUGE for me...  But a lot of times, these are just superficial reasons.  The re-framed symptom is, Trouble making yourself do things you don’t want to do.  

ADHD is an executive function disorder.  That’s a phrase I first learned on Tumblr, by the way; it may have been mentioned by one of my earlier counsellors, but it definitely wasn’t taught.  

This is why soooo many of us have struggled with the perception (including self-perception) that we’re lazy!  But no one tells the kid in the wheelchair he’s just lazy for not playing basketball.  (Okay, they totally do.  People are terrible.  Ignore that, stick to the point.)  I reframe this the way I do because acknowledging this as a symptom, taking the blame out of it, makes it easier to find adaptation.

Now, this is a personal post.  YMMV.  But I have an easier time managing my conduct if, instead of calling myself lazy a procrastinator, I say, “I keep not doing that --> oh it’s because I Don’t Wanna --> how can I con myself into doing it?”  (Strategies include bargaining, making it easier, powering through but then allowing yourself to stop afterwards, just acknowledging that I Don’t Wanna and allowing that to be valid...)  Procrastination is an action, but “executive function disorder” is a disease and “I Don’t Wanna” is its trigger, just as much as an allergy and a clump of ragweed are.  “Procrastination” is a powerful sphynx against which I’m helpless, but “I Don’t Wanna Disease” lets me start cultivating my metaphorical catnip and researching the answers to common riddles.

And while we’re talking about procrastination--and trouble with deadlines, and schedules in general--let’s talk about Time Insensitivity.  Missed deadlines and perpetual lateness (perpetual) are external actions, just like procrastination, and they can have all sorts of explanations.  

(Shoutout to Mrs. Pollack, who looked around a classroom containing thirteen-year-old me, and, knowing full well that I was chronically tardy, declared that “anybody who’s always running late, deep down, they just doesn’t care about anybody else’s time.”  Great job with calling the thirteen-year-old a heartless bitch, Mrs. Pollack!  As you can tell, I definitely forgot it very quickly, and didn’t at all have a self-critical breakdown about it, periodically revisiting the question of my own inherent selfishness for years!!!)

But ignoring the external actions, let’s take a compassionate look inside the head again.  Executive function includes regulation of, and awareness of the passing of, time.  Again: you can’t play the basketball with no legs.  We literally do not realize what time is doing.  Sometimes we do--if we devote enough of our attention to it, which may be a large amount for some, a small amount for others, or a variable amount for the same person.  But our brains literally don’t process it the same way.  

But hold on a minute--let’s go back to that analogy.  Because actually, people with no legs can play basketball!  It’s just that you have to use the adaptation of wheelchairs to do it--and that’s an adaptation for the game and for the players.  

I use alarms.  I’ve recently seen a post about audio memos as alarms.  There are people who just slap clocks everywhere.  When I was forced to work in a kitchen with no clocks, I used the multi-setting timer and set it for like four hours so I would know if I was keeping on schedule.  I also chose a job environment where much of my shift is the same as itself, and rigid punctuality isn’t enforced--that’s adapting my environment, instead of myself.  There’s all kinds of adaptations.  But you have to know you have the condition before you can compensate for it.

Here’s a fun little story:  when I was... oh, eleven?  Twelve?  My Quaker Meeting’s youth group (#7 whitest phrase I’ve ever written) went to the museum together.  One of the stops was in the children’s section, there was a... a pegboard, I think?  With some kind of problem on it.  A puzzle.  Me and a couple others sat down at it, and it took me a while, but eventually I solved it, and I looked up.  

I blinked.  “Where is everybody?” I said.

“They left,” said my mom.  “Half an hour ago.”  

I was stunned.  “Half an hour ago?!  But I couldn’t’ve spent more than ten minutes on this!”

“I promise you, it was half an hour.”

“Why didn’t you call me??  Why didn’t you say my name?”

“We did.  Several times.”

To this day, I will swear myself blind that I never heard a thing.

Hyperfocusing.  They’ll tell you about the problems focusing; oh yes.  They’ll tell you allll about that one.  But they won’t tell you about the flip side of it.  They won’t tell you about the times when the rest of the world falls away, and the only two things in the world are you and whatever problem you’re trying to solve.  

D’y’know what, I bet that’s the reason I test well.  I just realized this now, phrasing it like that, but--I’ve always tested well, even when my actual practical applications of things are mediocre I do well with the classroom testing on it.  I scored a 39 on the MCAT, back when it was out of 45 and not whatever it is now.  (To those with the plain good sense not to want to be doctors:  that’s pretty good.)  And I just bet it’s because, once I get focused on solving the problems, the other problems--nerves, intrusive thoughts, anxiety--just don’t have room to get in.  Hyperfocusing can be a superpower, if you can harness it.  

But it can also blind you to everything else.  And it works in smaller ways, too:  once I think I understand something, it is very difficult for me to perceive information that contradicts that understanding.  I still get the map of the Elflands backwards every time I read The Goblin Emperor, just because I pictured it one way, and every indication in the text that it was the other way just fell on deaf ears.  

And this one leads right into the next, which is Rejection Sensitivity Disorder.  RSD is hyperfocus, but it’s hyperfocus on how everyone must hate you.  It’s delightful!  I’ve been diagnosed with anxiety and depression, as well, and I do have both of those things, but for my money, I think that this one symptom of ADHD--which no doctor has ever even mentioned to me--has hurt me more than both of those conditions combined.  

The last one I’m going to bring up is Auditory Processing Disorder.  Now, I’ve gone and gotten re-diagnosed twice in my life, and the last time was just a few years ago, so they actually used this one in the test.  The psychologist told me about it, she just didn’t use the phrase Auditory Processing Disorder, and she didn’t tell me that it was its own symptom--she just used it for the test.  

What she did was, she gave me two hearing tests, one to test whether or not I could hear, and then the other a list of words that all sounded alike, and I had to mark which one I was hearing.  The second part of that was very long, and very boring, and despite scoring perfectly on the first test, I got several wrong on the second.  I was actually surprised by that; I at no point suspected I had heard any of them wrong.  When she gave me the test, told me this was proof by contradiction, that we were ruling out hearing loss as an alternative explanation for my difficulties.  It was only after the test was done that she explained that the pattern I showed was actually part of the diagnosis of ADHD; that we get bored, and stop really paying attention, and that we don’t even know we’re doing it.

...Okay, but you couldn’t have mentioned the part where I also do that every day in real life, lady?!?!  It’s not just when we’re bored, it’s not just for long processes.  I do this all the time.  I actually tell people now that “I actually have a neurological condition that makes it hard for me to hear; I can tell that you’re speaking, but I can’t tell what you’re saying.”  

This is 100% true.  It is a neurological condition.  

We label this a condition, but as a society, we don’t treat it that way.  Society treats it as yet another excuse.  It’s not.  You’re not lazy, stupid or crazy.  Neither am I.  

I have a condition.  Acknowledging that is the first step of treatment.  Not five thousand sticky notes, not binders or filing systems or even taking all the doors off the cupboards (although I definitely plan to do that one as soon as I possibly can).  Not counselling sessions with so many different people I can’t even name them all, for the love of god please understand that you can’t just fix it with pills.  

(Although mad props to the people who thought Concerta would magically solve me at the age of nine!  Spoiler alert:  it did not do that!  But it did mean that my parents felt comfortable blaming me for all my failures again, so it did at least some of what it was designed for, I guess. :) )   

I have spent the last few years re-understanding my ADHD it as is:  a neurological condition, a disability, and a simple fact of life.  A starting place, instead of yet more proof of my own inherent insufficiency.  And you know what?  When you take the blame and self-hatred out of the diagnosis--when you stop cursing it as the cause of all your problems and start trying to work with it, instead--it gets a lot easier to manage. 

[trashahime]

LOL. Some people out there really think I'm serious about all the ridiculous theories I post on here. I always thought it was clear they were huge stretches. With RT's practice (and Sunrise by association) of reusing character models and story elements it's most likely coincidence and I knew that going in.

It's still fun and entertaining to me. I literally have nothing better to right now than lie in bed, hack my lungs off and distract myself from depression by hyperfocusing on silly Yashahime theories while sick and quarantined due the 'rona. Some of my theories even contradict each other.

For the record, and for all of those I know are reading my tumblr so they can mock it, the only thing I am serious about is the Moe Higurashi is kitsune theory.

And I am not really serious about my modern day twin theory but I am a little obsessed with it. I even drew shitty fanart for it. That's how much about it I am.

I only deep drive into babymama theories because it's connected to that. I really don't care about who fucked Sesshomaru. I don't want it to be Rin but accepted it could be from the beginning and decided it wasn't enough to turn me off from watching the show.

I even explore ways she could be the mom because there is evidence for it. Evidence you SR fans don't seem to know about because you are smug and complacent, thinking you already won.

I could be wrong, but I really do think Sunrise is messing with you. If that's true, the time will come when you guys are the ones who are going to have to get creative and maybe connect dots that ought not be connected. And it might lead you to great evidence for mama!Rin. Because it did for me. I've managed to convince myself Rin could be the mom more than any SR shipper has. And Im against the ship being canon. That's how compelling it was. But you're not finding it right now because you're resting on your laurels and ridiculing the theories and evidence that goes against your ship.

And you're free to that, but also take note of the tactics we're using because you may just have to employ them yourself someday.

And will someone please tell me how I can shorten my stupidly long rambling posts with a keep reading link? I am not seeing it in app.

[serenechaosblogs]

Bless me with motivation (please)

I don’t know about anyone else, but finding motivation for anything is like finding a needle in a haystack.

I’ll blame that on my executive dysfunction.

If you don’t know what executive dysfunction is, here’s Google’s definition: “Executive Dysfunction is a brain-based impairment that impacts a person's ability to analyze, organize, decide, and execute things on time. It causes assignments to be lost, deadlines to be missed, and projects to overwhelm”

Yeah, it’s a load of fun.

Imagine procrastination, and make it x100.

Throughout my whole school life, this had been a major issue for me. (lucky me finished my final HSC exam a few weeks ago, no more school for me)

Think of people with Executive Dysfunction as the rulers of procrastination - the Kings and Queens of failed time management.

Take right now for example. I’m sitting in my room, on my bed, with two baskets filled to the brim with washing that I have to fold before someone gets home. Yet here I am, typing away on my phone and chilling on a Discord call.

It’s not that I don’t want to do the task (I mean who wants to fold washing, but that’s besides the point), I just really want to get it over and done with so I can relax while snacking on a bowl of corn chips.

I just can’t bring myself to physically do it.

I’m not purposely trying to avoid it, but the task itself is too overwhelming for my brain to cope with.

I know folding washing doesn’t seem like such a big deal, but with executive dysfunctioning, it feels like one.

Small tasks become extremely overwhelming and even thinking about them is enough to make you want to curl up into a ball and cry.

On the opposite side, I’ll have moments where I hyperfixate or hyperfocus on a particular thing (hyperfixating being intensely invested in whatever I’m doing for a long period of time, hyperfocusing being intensely invested in whatever I’m doing for a short period of time); like reading, or drawing, or researching a special interest (we’ll cover that in another post). And if something or someone dares to interrupt me while I’m hyperfixating. I struggle big time to leave the task I’m doing to focus on something else.

Being forced to leave something you’re hyperfixaded/focused on is very agitating, and all you want to do is go back to that task.

It can be a good thing, and a bad thing.

If your hyperfocus kicks in when you’re writing a school paper, then it’s very much a helpful thing. But if you’re hyperfocusing on a blog you’re writing when you have a bunch of washing to fold -

Not so much.

Different people have different experiences when it comes to executive dysfunction and hyperfixation/focus, not everyone experiences it the same.

But those who do experience it can relate to others that do too.

Whether you have experienced these things or not, I think most of us can relate to lack of motivation and procrastination.

And to that I say,

Me too.

Until next time,

Serene Chaos