#i really can’t tell people anything

[slfcare]

the most difficult thing about growing as a person socially, as in getting out of your shell and noticing that you are, is that there will still be times when it doesn’t feel like you’ve grown at all! times when you can’t really connect with anyone around you, times when you fail to enter into an existing conversation, times when you say the wrong thing (or nothing at all when in hindsight you probably should’ve). but that’s also kind of the best thing, because that’s the thing that helps you realize that sometimes, it’s not you or your lack of skills or any shortcoming. sometimes certain environments just aren’t for you and certain people aren’t your people, and that’s okay. that’s human. it’s okay to not feel the progress you have made all the time.

[quietwingsinthesky]

i really do think the desire to paint ten as unambiguously The Worst™️ when it comes to his relationship with martha is out of this desire to uncomplicate their relationship. to decouple them as friends and people who profoundly impacted each other’s lives. it’s just an easier narrative to swallow: that ten was Awful to her and then martha kicked him to the curb when she realized she was too good for him. easier, maybe, then dealing with the troubles of unrequited affection don’t have to be anyone’s fault, or that ten shut martha out in a lot of ways but let her in in others that he wouldn’t let any other companion near, or that they were still friends, they still wanted to see each other and be around each other, even though it was messy and sometimes hurt. you know?

[dykedvonte]

I keep seeing fanarts of ppl's OC's being on the ship, so do you think that if there was 6st crewmember (specifically, another woman) Anya would've been more safe? Like, someone to actually call Jimmy's begaviour out, someone Anya might wanna trust? Is there a possibility something might have changed (even if a little) or it would not have mattered at all?

-💀

I feel like the game would make it part of the commentary on where she would believe and help Anya but still be sort of dismissive? Like the whole “don’t waste time crying and being scared keep going and move on, don’t let him win”. It’s supposed to be positive and reinforcing but sometimes it does more damage in those times of mourning and grief, it feels patronizing, like you don’t understand what you’re going through but they do. Even if they did call out his behavior it’s still on Curly to act and while another voice would help, it’s still 4 against 2 on guys that don’t get it until they have to vs women who always have to.

I don’t mind mouthwashing OCs but I do get a bit bored as they tend to be borderline saviors or like Jimmy aligned. They are either more complicit than Curly or just Jimmy haters for no reason, outside of what the creators know about what he did to Anya. I am never irked by OCs but in a story like mouthwashing you really need to think about what your character adds to the commentary, especially if they are there during the crash. It’s nice to have like characters on Anya’s side more whole heartedly and interesting to see characters who placate Jimmy but sometimes it’s one note.

I can’t and don’t want to police peoples OCs it’s never my intention when I comment on trends I notice, but I do feel like the way people make their OCs interact with these two characters and especially Curly, really show a grave misunderstanding of the narrative and these characters as people vs roles in the story. Still, I know people just make up characters for fun and that’s fine. Great even, but I guys I’m focusing more on OCs that are supposed to have those serious dynamics. My favs tend to be pretty-Tulpar or post-Tulpar au OCs.

The inevitably of the crash is on Jimmy. He did that not because he wasn’t stopped but because all his means to kill Anya were taken. The gun, the axe. Even if Curly did strip him of his co-pilot privileges and try to keep him contained there’s only so many people. An extra body helps but they have jobs they have to do, he’s the only one steering the whole ship and Jimmy would likely have an out: food, bathroom, etc. He’s not new and if he couldn’t crash the ship directly, who’s to say he wouldn’t sabotage something else? A clunker like the Tulpar wouldn’t take much. An extra person helps but it’s just another thing that prolongs what a person like Jimmy is willing to do to shirk responsibility.

It’s more than just needing someone to stand up to him and think that’s what is missing when it comes to inserting a character into the mouthwashing setting.

[toddtakefive]

thinking about todd and his resolve toward… not quite isolation, but being alone in a room full of people again. he goes along to the study room to sit on his own and do his homework, he sits at the poets table and follows along with what’s being said while keeping quiet, he goes to the meetings at all but doesn’t necessarily contribute (in fact, if you watch him when cameron is telling the story ‘from camp in sixth grade’, you can see that he recognizes it before any of the other poets but doesn’t voice it until they all have). he’s not alone, necessarily, if you want to get technical about it, he’s just lonely, and he’s generally okay with that. he doesn’t have friends and that’s fine, he doesn’t participate in class and that’s fine, he doesn’t have a relationship with his family and that’s fine—he could live without any real connection and he’d have been, more or less, fine.

the thing about when he says “i can take care of myself just fine!” is that he isn’t really wrong, you can infer that he’s been doing it his entire life anyway, it’s that ‘taking care of yourself’ isn’t the same thing as really living or being happy. todd’s an introvert, certainly, and even as he gets closer to the group he defaults to sitting quietly in the background, but he’s also denying himself community out of fear not introversion. todd isn’t friendless because he’s an introvert, although that definitely plays a part, he’s friendless because he pushes anyone that might want his company away. if anyone has every wanted for his attention in the first place. (neil’s unwavering interest in him is unique (even when it comes to the rest of the poets, who are fine with todd coming along and joining the group, but aren’t really hellbent on him being there in the beginning) and his refusal to accept it is a direct result of being so lonely growing up.)

there’s obviously something to be said about the implications of his parents neglect, and the more than likely fact that he grew up friendless, and how those both play a part in in him being so skilled at dodging social interaction/being so avoidant of it, but by the time we see him in the movie he’s all but accepted his fate as being alone his entire life. he’s already accepted being the family disappointment, and he’s already accepted he’ll never amount to anything, and he obviously doesn’t like it, but he’d have managed living with that knowledge without the confirmation that it was all wrong. would he have been miserable? almost certainly. but he’d have managed. he’d done it for that long already, anyhow.

[beastking-golion]

Did christian linke actually do anything wrong beyond saying he didn’t see jayvik as romantic or are you guys just losing your shit over a difference of opinion?

[gothteddiesdotcom]

thinkin about how important it is for submissives to take control of their own submission and understand their own agency in kink and to communicate for themselves

[sweetpapercroissant]

i don’t get the appeal of an incest ship if you’re only ever going to focus on the good romantic feelings and not the icky negative ones. the resentment the feeling of being trapped shackled wanting out and away from the person who knows so much too much about you since before you even knew to not allow it but at the same time you can’t imagine living in a world without them being away is like tearing a limb a piece of your soul you will never again be complete without them. no one else will ever understand you the way they do no one else will ever get so deep under your skin and you may hate it but you hate the thought of them not being there even more you can’t stand to see anyone else get to a part of them you didn’t and even worse when they get it before you. you push and you push and you push but when they let go it’s like you’re free falling and it doesn’t matter how far away you run you will never be far enough away because you carry them inside you everywhere you go. you tell yourself you want nothing more than to get away but they’re the only home you will ever have and you won’t ever let anyone get that close you’re already moulded to only fit in perfectly with them and you didn’t have a choice but this is who you are. there’s nothing you could do to make them let you go but there’s nothing you could do to make them let you go. you want to be so close to them you want to merge your bodies into one you hate how crowded you feel when they’re in the same room like they’re sucking in all the air and there isn’t any left for you and you want to get away so you can just breathe but you don’t even want to breathe in the air that hasn’t passed through their lungs first you hate that you feel this way you wish you could claw it out of your veins but then who would you be without it without them you want so much and it’s so ugly and you’re ashamed of how raw that need is how you want every part the good the bad the human you wish none of this had ever happened you feel dirty you never even had a chance to find something else be something else but then you look over and you love them so much so much and when it comes down to it nothing else was ever going to be enough for you anyway.

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

Howdy, Syn! Hope you’re doing well. I’ve got a fun little ask for you:

If you’ve got some spare time on your hands, I was wondering if there was a little (non-spoilery) detail in—well, any of your stories, I’m obsessed with all of them—that you really enjoy but don’t think anyone’s picked up on yet. If there is, I’d love to hear any ramblings on it 👀

Have a good one!

This ask is ages old but I’m working on chipping away at my backlog little by little. Since I’m in a pez dispenser debris kick right now, let’s look at that.

I honest to God can’t remember if I’ve discussed this before, so sorry if it’s redundant, but one of the main points of pez dispenser debris is that the conflict is Man v. Self to the exclusion of all else.

Like, to an extent, there’s a secondary conflict of Man v. Society, but that 1) primarily (but not entirely) exists in Izuku’s past and 2) feeds into the Man v. Self conflict by being the primary driver behind both Izukus’ actions.

I decided to eschew any kind of genuine conflict between Izuku and the people in his life because I didn’t for a second want the narrative to get confused by considerations about whether it was safe to have told his loved ones about his past.

I very easily could have chosen to explore a plot line where the people around him feel betrayed or question him. At the very least, Mirio could have had a moment of “what the fuck, man, I’ve spent my whole career being looked down on as the world’s Quirkless hero and you didn’t think to fucking mention you grew up Quirkless?”

Close to the entire class has been vulnerable with him. Todoroki told him about being abused his entire childhood. He knows about Uraraka’s financial traumas. Iida nearly killed that guy the one time. Kirishima made him look at that suspicious bump in the unfortunate place.

These are kids who have spent the past three years in the trenches together. They’ve been in actual, life or death scenarios since the age of 14-15, and the only thing that they could count on was each other. And then here they are, at the very end of it all, and they find out that the guy they’ve been trusting with their back the whole time seemingly didn’t trust them enough to tell them a single detail of his life before they met him.

They could have been a little more conflicted about the revelation. At the very least, they could have questioned deeper how their friend went from 0 Quirks to a suspicious amount of Quirks when they spent their entire time at school with Guy Whose Entire Thing Is Transferring Quirks And Like. Trying to Murder Kids Who Are Specifically Them took personal issue with every single field trip they’ve ever had.

But every single outside POV is like “obviously we can trust him. It’s Midoriya. Anywho I will now be questioning my own character because he can’t be the problem so it must be me.”

If I explored plot points like that, it would have divided the conflict’s attention between Man v. Self and Man v. Man. The plot would have to devote time and focus to resolving Izuku’s issues with his loved ones and regaining their trust, and that would have detracted from a major theme of this fic, which is that this wasn’t about not trusting the people around him. He didn’t tell them because of an internalized issue.

Midoriya trusted his friends with his life. This wasn’t about fear of them rejecting him because he grew up Quirkless. The conflict is with himself.

I also eliminated sources of external conflict by having it all come out to the entire class all at once. I didn’t want to waste plot resources on what Izuku would naturally do in this situation, which is try to hide the little shit by all means necessary and quarantine his very existence. There would be too much time and energy wasted on slowly revealing the truth to select members of the class one by one.

And don’t get me wrong, that could have been an interesting plot—it just wasn’t the one I wanted to write.

This fic is about having to grapple with the part of yourself that is still hurt and angry about it. The part that cannot process the past to the point where you fear it endangers your future. You want your trauma to just go away and not exist anymore, because things are better so it means you shouldn’t have to be them anymore.

The older Izuku wants the younger one to be gone. He wants him to, at the very least, stop talking about what happened in the past and accept the future for how it is, because he doesn’t want to lose what he’s gained. But in doing so he mirrors the denial of self his younger counterpart is being far more explicit about.

Because both versions of Izuku are refusing to believe the other is them.

Young Izuku is doing it in a very literal way. That guy ain’t me. He killed and replaced me. There is absolutely no way I am him. He refuses to accept that there is any version of him who could become like his older self.

But the older Izuku is doing the same thing, just in a less literal sense. Hes almost acting like his old self is somehow legitimately a distinct entity. He slips and says it to Aizawa—stop looking at me like I’m him. The older Izuku wants to just bulldoze over his past and pretend like it doesn’t belong to him, but it just doesn’t work that way.

That’s the conflict I wanted to capture for this fic. Just this absolute refusal to reconcile your past and your future because to do so would require processing the trauma you’ve been through. And so I cauterized off all other sources of conflict, because they’d just detract from what needed to be center stage.

[clegfly]

“Of course you have an Other Brother,” he says, waving off her denial as he opens some nearby cabinets. “Who else would I be if I wasn’t?”

Small WIP sketch of the Other Brother from IDKSomethingClever99’s fic “Mari in the Pink Palace”!!! OMORI and Coraline are my two biggest interests ever so this fic was like winning the lottery for me. Not to mention how good it is… please go read it ragh

[speedwayy]

Brothers of the Head (2005) dir. Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe

[almonddirge]

Furina, being put on trial and her worst fears coming true. Her people suspect her of not truly being the Hydro Archon, which she knows will lead to the end of them all. She has to keep pretending she knows more and can do more than in truth. Yet, the worst possibility is coming to pass. She wasn’t a good enough actor and everyone will pay the price.

Neuvillette, putting Furina on trial despite not wanting to. He wants to trust her and believe that she really has a plan, but the Poisson incident took things too far. She has to answer for so much, no matter how much he doesn’t want to do this. He doesn’t know why she’s acting the way she is, and by the time he finds out, there’s nothing he can do.

[goldkirk]

.

[queer-reader-07]

it is so vitally important to me that aziraphale and crowley not only love each other but choose to love each other.

i don’t want it to be fate. i don’t want it to be god’s will. i want it to be a conscious and continuous choice.

i want aziraphale choosing every day of his goddamn existence to love crowley and all that he is. i want aziraphale choosing to love crowley not in spite of being a demon, but because he is a demon. i want aziraphale choosing to love crowley’s curiosity and creative wonder. i want aziraphale choosing to love crowley’s love of plants and gardening.

i want crowley choosing to love aziraphale’s passion for books. i want crowley choosing to love aziraphale’s desire to do things the human way even if he could just miracle it. i want crowley choosing to love aziraphale’s angel-ness because it is a fundamental part of him.

i want aziraphale choosing to love everything about crowley and vise versa. and i want it to be a very conscious and intentional choice.

it being fate negates the entire point of the story. good omens is a love story between an angel and a demon, yes. but that’s not all that it is. it’s a story about two occult/ethereal beings who choose humanity over the great plan. two beings who choose the world over armageddon. and they make those choices because despite it all they have chosen to fall in love with the world and with humanity.

it only makes sense that they choose each other. that they choose their love. it being fate or god’s will ruins the foundational pillar of their relationship. that they choose each other over and over and over again. year after year, century after century, time and time again. they always choose. they choose the arrangement, they choose saving the other from harm, they choose lying to protect the other.

it is always a choice. and it better stay a choice or i am going to be so devastated.

[simcardiac-arrested]

zavijava info PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE!!!!! PLEASEEEEE ZAVIJAVA COME HOME ... PLEASE .... umm um um ill tell you about umm . tma au im making for nastya if u tell me about her .PLEASE!!!!!!!

so she is definitely a star of some kind. i mean she is an angel but in that story in particular The Stars are kind of angels. like they’re otherworldly beings and they jus kinda hang out. cosmically. it’s a different dimension separated from the human one but like, obviously stars still exist for humans, they just don’t do anything crazy because the rules of the world dictate that their realities shouldn’t interact. angels can observe the other world from far up above yet they still exist on a different level. But tbh zavijava had never enjoyed the otherworldly ethereal whatever lifestyle—she just didn’t feel like she fit in there. she is a #1 humans fan though so she knows that’s where she’d fit in. so she does just that. she fits in perfectly :) and normally :) yay :)

[cartoonchaos]

“gee i wonder why there’s still so much more fanfiction about male characters” “we need more morally complex female characters” “i love relationships that are doomed by the narrative” “more stories need to treat mentally ill characters with compassion and respect” “all his problems could’ve been fixed if he only went to therapy” you fuckers can’t even handle the ending of fionna and cake

[s1lly-gh02tz]

Im filled with GUILT. WHY. WHY ON EARTH. DO MUSIC ARTISTS WHO HAVE DONE SUCH TERRIBLE THINGS. MAKE SUCH FUCKING GOOD MUSIC. I WANT to listen to them. I REALLY DO. BUT I FEEL SO GUILTY.