#i will reblog this a few times maybe

[fantasykiri5]

Day 6 of @hermitadaymay and it’s the one and only Sans Undertale!!

[nexility-sims]

dear new followers (& y'all who've been here, i reckon)

i have realized that my pinned post is super outdated and unhelpful at the moment, so redoing it is on my to-do list. in the meantime, feels like a good time to give some quick intro links. hopefully these will help those of you who actually want to know what's going in the N-Verse figure it out.

my current story ("1992") is a prequel-slash-spinoff, and it's new, so now is a good time to catch up / follow along:

you can find the directory of posts here

you can jump in chronologically here

you can find the most recent posts here

the character page is here

there's a gameplay au (yes, another spinoff) here

it's a spinoff of my main story (calling it "house of tecuani"), currently on hiatus, which takes place sixty years earlier. you don't need to read it to follow the spinoff, but nonetheless:

the intro to the story's premise is here

you can find the directory of posts here

you can jump in chronologically here

check out the reference family tree here

i do a lot of worldbuilding, findable here

i post outtakes: past settings and present ones

it's a prequel because it's a collaboration with @/armoricaroyalty, whose half is set twenty-five years later, in the present:

you can jump in where the collab starts here (or, ideally, explore gabe's full story here)

lastly, i am always eager to answer questions, i love spam-liking, i try to reply to comments (altho i am slow), and i'm on disco 24/7 if anyone wants to hit me up, so please interact if you feel like it !

thanks for being here and / or sticking around ♥️

[familyvideostevie]

hey.

okay. hello! i'm back. :)

maybe you noticed, maybe not, but i have been away for a while.

i wish i could say i've been out living my life, so caught up in happiness and joy and loving each day that i've just not had time for tumblr. but....that is not true. i have been having a tough time! being away has been good, as i've had time to do other things that i like and to put energy into my own well-being, but it hasn't been the best time, I'll tell you that.

i peeked on the dash every now and then to keep my queue full and reblogged soothing things to my main blog and tried my best not to feel guilty about it all (i was also booping on April 1 lol). i just...I really needed a break. i've really enjoyed being here the last six or so months as i've changed my blog and entered the pedro/tlou space but i've also felt so, so alone.

and i know that it doesn't really matter!! like, we should all take breaks and go outside and all that stuff. and I know plenty of people are not very active, but this blog has been such a vital part of my life and happiness since I started it almost two years ago, so any lapse in activity feels like a loss. I've met lifelong friends and flexed my writing muscles and learned a hell of a lot. the fact that I have started to feel isolated and alone on here is a sort of personal betrayal, and there is no one to blame but myself.

So, I’m pulling back.

it means a few things — i don’t know how much writing I’ll be doing from now on. For Joel, especially — it’s been wonderful to meet folks in that community but it has also been really detrimental to my passion for both the game and writing. I’d like to return to some other characters on my masterlist, but we’ll see. I’ve got endless personal projects away from tumblr that I want to pour love and time into (my non-reader fics, my newsletter, a romance novel, a sci-fi novel, poetry, etc). I need to fall in love with my own work again.

it's a me problem, I want to stress that. i'm working on it! irl stuff has been kicking my ass. I've had a really, really hard winter and my mental health has suffered probably more than ever before. i let things I love -- like this blog -- fester and become negative and no longer being me joy. writing became stressful and difficult and I was focused on notes and interaction and looking around me and seeing success and then looking at myself and only seeing lack.

but that's why I took a break! i am getting help and support irl, i am putting in the time and effort to feel better about being alive and to be a better friend and person all around. And I want to tell you all about it because I am so grateful for your time and attention and support, even if we’re just strangers on the internet. i know this probably seems silly -- who cares about a fanfic blog? well, i care! i care a lot! it matters to me and therefore it matters!

anyway. on to the important stuff. here I am! and here's what's going to happen on this blog:

I am working on replying to asks and reblogs and comments I missed. Thank you for being patient with me! I don't know if I'll get to them all but know I see them and I am honored every single time.

I made a totally separate ao3 account with this blog url. I'm working on uploading everything I've posted here onto there and hopefully will continue to crosspost. It is going to take a long, long time, so please be patient! (you can follow my other ao3 here for my non x-reader fanfic).

I posted this fic! Jackson!Joel pulled me back into his world. It’s the first thing I’ve written in ages, so let me know what you think. as of now it's the last planned fic for that series, but who knows!

I hit a milestone while i was away that I am absolutely blown away by. I'm planning a celebration around it sometime this spring (hopefully) and I’d love to see you participate :)

lastly, thank you so much to my friends for letting me complain, whine, winge, etc. I am so sorry for missing all of your work, your celebrations, your bright energies, and all the rest. i am so sorry if it seemed like i was ignoring you. you are my guiding lights, my silver linings, my touchstones. you make me want to be here. i will try to make it up to you!

I want to be online less but make sure I’m connecting more in the moments that i am here. I want to pressure myself to write less and not feel bad that I’m not engaged all the time. I want this blog to once again feel like a place that nourishes me and not sucks me dry. i want to stop feeling like shit about all of it!!!!

so. come hang out in my inbox, my dms, let me know what you've been up to. I am really sorry for missing so much. thank you for sticking around. <3

[tamiisnthere]

You know what, I'm done reblogging political stuff, even though I keep saying it. I continued it because I didn't want to feel like an ignorant. It made me mentally sick that a grey hair appeared.

Don't worry, I'll still reblog the Palestine donation campaigns, because this is not politics, but people in need. <3

In fact, I live in a state where totalitarianism has reigned since last year and our government is now destroying our health care, culture, economy and more. I don't like talking about what's going on in my state because it's so chaotic that I can't handle it and I'm trying to get away from it as far as possible.

I'm sick of how the US election turned out, because it reminded me of our election a year ago and I was hoping it wouldn't repeat in the US, but I was wrong. And it was because of uneducated people who ignore anything what that party did in the past and easily fall for their propaganda and lies.

I hope you are not mad at me for my decision.

Just please stay safe and don't give up. 💗

[nakanotamu]

Yeah so between the most recent wave of transphobia, multiple people I care about getting hit with this site's fucked moderation in different ways, and the site just seeming... less functional? Like has anybody else had issues just loading in for like, weeks now? I'm done with tumblr as my main social media site, at least for now. Reblogs aren't very active yet bc I don't have many people to follow but for the stuff I would have posted here I'm now on cohost @nakanotamu and the same urls I used here for relevant side accounts if you're interested.

[0ann3]

During online class, I tend to do doodles just so I won't get sleepy, but idk what came over me to do a drawing of this instead 😭 altho I have a feeling it's bcs I'm in shock that there's almost no drawings of these two when I check the tags??? + all I've been doing recently is doodles/sketches so I need to remember how to draw lolol

I also do not know if Azul's blush being blue is canon or just a popular hc, but Imma just roll with it and edit it out if it's red KASJHAKSJh

Bonus doodle of something like moments before this disaster and a clean version of the img for fun:

Almost forgot to tag @thehollowwriter kJAHSAKJSh

[glass-oranges]

Hiiii I made a core picrew if u wanna check that out I think that would be super cool <3

[luderailing]

chicken doodle soup

[non-un-topo]

I realize I've been so flaky with responding to asks, finishing my drawings or fics I promised, etc. I've kind of been drifting in and out of tumblr without interacting much. Real life just finally started, and I need to build up a ton of motivation and find time before I can work on a fandom project. Just wanted to say that I'm still here and still working on stuff, just slowly.

[kyliafanfiction]

I sometimes feel like characters who do truly monstrous things while also having been victims of some pretty insane shit themselves are sort of an exercise in empathy. Or at least, should be seen as such.

Like, in real life, if a person who has been horribly broken by their experiences and failed by society than proceeds to rape someone - it's hard to feel the justifiable sympathy/empathy for that person (without excusing their rape, never do that) because well, you can look at this actual human person they hurt, or worse, and it feels gross and disrespectful to the rape victim.

And this is understandable. (And applies to more than just rapists/rape victims of course, that's just the most visceral one and thus picked for that reason)

But a fictional rape victim is... fictional. You can't 'disrespect' their trauma, and while obviously rape/whatever else is real, and people may related to the rape victim and thus see your comments about the rapist also being a victim as somehow being about their experience...

Well, it's not.

Because the rapist here, didn't actually hurt a real person. Fictional characters are objects. They're objects that often grab us by the throat and refuse to leave our fucking heads, yes, but they're objects. They are tools used by writers to tell a story, and readers to tell a story.

And one of the things fictional characters are good for is allowing us to consider experiences we never had, and imagine ourselves in other circumstances and lives. (Also just fun and fascinating and interesting to watch their stories).

It's very easy to feel for the rape victim in fiction, and rightly so. That's Level 1 Empathy there. Granted, some people IRL fail that, but that's not really what we're talking about here.

Advanced Empathy, hard Empathy is feeling for the rapist. Not for the rape, of course, even if they feel guilt about it, but if someone really was failed on multiple levels and was broken and damaged and went through the sort of psychological wringer that would leave most of us here on tumblr catatonic - they do deserve the same Empathy any human (any person) who went through all that.

Even after they also do the bad thing, critically they still deserve Empathy. And that is fucking hard. I very often have a hard time feeling bad for truly awful people who also deserve empathy and sympathy, real and even fictional (despite all this, yeah, I'm not perfect on this) for what they (separately) went through.

It also becomes even harder when what they went through is utterly bound up with what they did. How what they went through and experiences is in part responsible for what they did - because they still made a choice. The circumstances may have left them not in their right mind, may have left them feeling without choice, may have driven them to things they normally might not think of or do, but they still chose to do that bad thing. And that's not okay. They still hurt someone.

And yet - one cannot remove the action from the circumstances. So you can still feel empathy, and elucidate all the factors and circumstances as to what led up to their choices and why, and it doesn't change that they did the horrible thing. The rape, or the murders, or whatever.

But circling back - with a fictional character... they didn't hurt a real person. There's no one who is real that suffered. The things the character did IRL are bad because they hurt real people.

So you're not being disrespectful to the victim by feeling that empathy, or sympathy. By exploring the things that they were a victim for. Even by wanting to focus on those things - fictional characters should be compelling in all their aspects, if they're written well.

And yet, of course, if you do that empathy and do talk about what the bad person went through and all that context, people come at you. They call you evil, just as bad as the (again, fictional) character, or they say that you're treading dangerously close to the arguments people use to defend the real people who do these things in real life. Or you're disrespecting all the victims of these crimes IRL. Especially of course, if the person coming at you has a reason this comes close to home.

But again - fictional.

In an ideal world, we'd all feel sympathy and empathy when it's called for, regardless of what the person did. Even the worst most monstrous people deserve human treatment in prison. And if you don't have empathy, that's hard. Even if you do have empathy, that's hard.

So if you look at a fictional character (who doesn't hurt a real person by virtue of being fictional) that does horrible, vile things, but went through so much, and you still can't empathize or sympathize with them... I mean, it doesn't make you a bad person, not even close, this is still fiction, and there's people I should empathize with in fiction that I don't, but...

It's still a failure of your ability to be empathetic. And we're all humans. We're all failing at that, among other things, all the time. But... it's good to be aware of that. at least?

At the very least, bear that in mind when other people are talking about that context, and that victimization. And please, for the love of god, don't fucking pretend that the victimization didn't happen, that this person who did do terrible things (in fiction) suddenly didn't also (in fiction) experience awful shit, as if doing a bad thing erases all the bad things done to you.

Again - it doesn't necessarily make you a bad person, but like... the horrible state of prisons in our society is a real, actual problem. The way we as a society dehumanize people who do bad things is a real actual problem for a lot of reasons (not least because it creates an incentive for authority that wants to dehumanize a person or a group to expand the definition of 'did bad things' to make their dehumanization now acceptable, among other things).

So yeah. Fictional character who suffers but than also makes others suffer - that's a useful exercise in Empathy. And doing that doesn't make you or anyone else a bad person, or actually defending the sorts of crimes, IRL or Fictional, that this character did. Contextualizing is not whitewashing, empathy is not erasing, and humanizing is not disrespecting the victim(s).

So yeah, they fictional character did bad things. But there's more to them than that. And you can say but and talk about what comes after but without disrespecting the fictional victim. Because the fictional victim... is just as fictional. Just as not real.

Is it possible for this to end up being taken too far? Yes. But that's a reason to be mindful of yourself when it comes to real people, not to never do it. And when it comes to fictional people - again, fictional. Nobody was actually, really hurt.

(I really do want to make clear, before people read the tags, that this applies to all crimes these sorts of characters do, rape was just picked as the one to use as the example.)

[tvrningout]

y’all already know this by now, but this is an official post to say i’m on semi-hiatus/hiatus for the time being. i might decide on an official day to come back later to help get me back into the spirit of being here, or i may pop in occasionally if i’m bitten by the writing bug; regardless, i just need a good, zero-pressure break to rest and handle the internal and external issues happening in my life. i could ramble about it, but i won’t this time :’ )

all that said, you can message me on discord at ‘ waitforspring. ’ and that’s with the period! i still wanna keep in contact, and i might even feel up to writing a few, little things on discord, too. just keep in mind that i may be slow to respond at times — i’m known to be a snail, and i don’t think that’ll ever change asdfg

i miss y’all, and i want you to know that whether it’s a day or a month or a year, you deserve to rest. you deserve to take time for yourself. you deserve to focus on different parts of your life, and you deserve to use your time how you want. remember that, and please take care of yourselves, friends 💜

[bluebellhairpin]

I'm getting to the end of my line over here.

[that-was-anticlimactic]

*sprays fandoms with a spray bottle* height is NOT a personality trait!!!

[pardonmydelays]

i think you need to make out with tyler joseph im not sure tho :/ /lh

ohhh you think, YOU THINK-