#like people being worried that the thing they're reblogging is somehow bad for reasons they don't know

[zegollygosh]

Started this in the replies, decided to make a whole reblog with a comment on one thing that I hate with those characters.

I hate when she's badass in the most inconsequential way she could possibly be.

Stop me if you've seen this before: male lead meets her via some organization. She's a badass there, known for being super cool. He's attracted immediately and she shows him up in some way, either by correcting him on something or by physically kicking his ass (or both). Some snarky secondary character says something to our male lead while he's still reeling from meeting a woman who is capable of doing Things.

She joins his party. Usually her "arc" in this section is that she's annoyed by him but is forced to work with him (possibly as his mentor, possibly just as allies). Over this time she occasionally gets the chance to do a badass thing, though where initially we saw her outdoing everyone she's now much more toned down. She MAY get a chance to save someone, possibly even our hero, but it's becoming less likely the better HE gets at doing Things (whatever that Thing is in this story). She warms up to him, probably is attracted to him now, they likely have a few moments of sexual tension.

Then we get to the climax. If the movie isn't the worst type, she's NOT kidnapped and is actually part of the final battle. She has either one or two Things she's tasked with doing and we're told that it's a Very Important Thing that needs to happen for the good guys to succeed, and because we're told it's important we're supposed to be very happy when she does it. If there's a major female character on the villains side, she also HAS to fight that person. But, critically, she is not the one to save the day. It's our male lead every time. If she fights the big bad at any point, she loses. If she's the one to physically stop the bad thing we don't want to happen from happening, it's only because the male lead made it possible for her. She will only do two things in the entire climax: generic cool fights or maneuvers that have very little bearing emotionally with the story but do remind us she's supposed to be badass, and worry about the male lead. We may get a chance to see just how "strong" she is when the male lead dies or otherwise risks his life and she sucks it up to help him, but this is it. It's all in the lense of how she now respects and loves him. After the final fight or after she does the Thing that was so important, she's very likely to go dormant and stop having any capabilities of her own because we reached our quota. She'll be seen driving a car, on his arm, or just generally being a sexy trophy for our male lead that she secretly was the whole time.

It just... Really bugs me, how often this happens. She's given obstacles, but from the second they're presented you know it's only to say she's a strong female. Even if the bad guy has significant ties to her, like he's her dad or something, the biggest emotional progression will still be given to the guy and if it IS given to her, it'll somehow be sullied by sexism (bad guy is her father, she has an emotional exchange with him and it's then pointed to that she is in love with male lead and the discussion will transform into being about him for reasons. If not, the discussion can't take more than fifteen seconds of the climax, lest we forget the movie has never been about her or her own struggles).

It makes me think of the end of suicide squad (first one) when we are told there's some underwater button thing that needs to be pressed and clearly only the croc can do it. It screamed "I have no idea what to do with this character so I'm giving them a task and saying it's important". It doesn't further the conflict people really are caring about. It doesn't effect his character any. It's just fluff to say "this character is helpful because reason", and it's so damn insincere.

Note: while Trinity from The Matrix seems to fall into this, I'd say she gets a pass because she stays consistently badass through most of the story, we actually see her emotional struggle through the story, and she frequently IS actually pivotal to several encounters without needing to have Neo back her up or do most of the work. Like if you removed Neo she wouldn't be bland background lady who robotically fights stuff, I can see her going on and doing actual things within their world. She obviously isn't perfect, but I also think she wouldn't need a complete overhaul if the movies were recreated today.

Just doing this bc I'm curious/research reasons

[asleepinawell]

huge fan of your fics! if you don’t mind me asking, what’s your writing process? i’m always so impressed with how quickly you complete fics, especially when the quality is also wonderful

process is a generous word for it. for the majority of my fics I just...write. no planning, no outlining, just sit down and write and assume plot things will sort themselves out in the end. too much planning ahead makes it less likely I'll finish something because once I know how it all works out I lose interest. I don't usually know how fics are gonna resolve or end, but I often have one or two very clear visuals for a specific moment in time I want to include and I just have to figure out how I'm going to get there.

in the last year though I switched to pre-writing entire fics before posting them. I still don't plan them out or know how they're going to go ahead of time, but it does let me tighten up world building since I can go back and edit early parts with the knowledge of how it ends before I post it.

the trade off is that I don't get the ongoing encouragement/validation of kudos and comments as I go to provide motivation, but so far that hasn't been as big an issue as I thought it would...partly because one of my friends reads my wip stuff a lot which is an enormous help (thank you @themaarika 🙏) and partly because it turns out I really want to know how I'm going to make the story magically work this time!

like it's always great when I'm writing and I realize that some random thing I shoved in the story with very little thought turned out to be the key to how a main plot conflict gets resolved. that was something that happened in a big way in the fic that I just started posting and I was like wow thanks past me!

so I think the writing in full ahead of time thing is working out well for me. it's way less stressful since I don't feel like I run the risk of losing interest and leaving a story unfinished after I start posting it. and I don't feel bad for taking forever to post a chapter. wǣrloga is the longest I've done that with, though originally I'd guessed it would only be 40-50k words and it ended up at 74k-ish. considering stc was supposed to be, like, 60k and ended up at 319k I figure my estimate wasn't too bad by comparison.

so yeah, I usually get a story idea and fixate on it and maybe think up some cool random ideas associated with it. in some specific instances I then pause to do research. for the dishonored au fic I went and read through the book I have that has every single book/note/text from the game and spent a lot of time on the wiki and replayed all the games to nail down the world of the game to make it as accurate as possible. for the lighthouse fic I spent some time looking up how lighthouses worked and diagrams of the insides of lighthouses. a lot of times I'll find ref images too of things that fit the story aesthetically. I very occasionally have a mood playlist as well. I did for this latest one.

then I just open a gdoc and start typing. I don't outline but as I write I often scrawl down notes to myself about things I need to resolve in the plot later. in the case of wǣrloga, which was unique in the fact the world building was entirely original and I prewrote it (as opposed to star wars and dishonored au which were prewritten but based on existing worlds) I made a ton of notes as I went of things I changed slightly to improve world building that I would have to go back and correct after.

once I finish a chapter I usually read it through once or twice and do a rough edit. at that point if a friend is reading it I'm okay sending it to them. there's often still typos (I write everything in gdocs on my phone with a swype keyboard and it makes some wild typos) and sometimes I'll realize I need to add part of a scene, but it's a good draft at that point. then I'll move onto the next chapter. for the last fic, when I finished the whole thing, I went back and fixed some specific notes I had and then edited the whole thing together as one for pacing and stuff.

then I spend like 3-4 days whining about how titles are hard and eventually start posting.

way more than you probably ever wanted to know. and thank you!

[ruby3818]

I have something I really need to get off my chest that I’ve put off for years now but can’t ignore anymore. Under a read more so you can skip it and tagged #negative so you can block it. Maybe this might clear some things up or at least get my side of the story out there. Please read this before making any decision about me from what you’ve heard from someone else.

I am aware that Cap, who I used to be friends with but had to leave the friendship because of their controllive obsession with me is still saying lies about how I “abandoned them” in public forums. Even going as far as to ask my franticshipping mutuals to block me (how she knows who my mutuals are is anyone's guess since I’ve had her blocked for over three years now??). If you see her do this please stop enabling them!! Over the years people have made her feel ok to get aggressive about my very existence and tell her that they are “valid” for feeling jealousy. All it does is reassure her that it is ok to behave like that and not be held accountable for their actions. Cap does not need validation, she needs help.

I have begged her multiple times over the past few years to leave me alone and stop saying stuff about me on public forums but every time she promises to stop I hear from someone else that they're still doing it. Things like; making up stuff that I apparently said in a dream treated as fact, telling my mutuals to block me, saying that I’ve apparently replaced her, telling everyone that I abandoned her, etc.

Because of her I not only lost them as a friend but every single other friend I had because they either believe the lies or they're scared of upsetting Cap who flies into a rage at the very mention of me.

I really tried to help her and then when the jealousy, gas lighting, violent mood swings and controlling behavior got too much for me and everyone else who tried to help I had to do what was best for both of us and leave the friendship.

I've tried for three years now to be the better person and not talk about what should be our personal problems but it's just blown up in my face with no one believing me or wanting to get involved and everyone enabling them (which is triggering to irl experiences but that's another story).

And I do understand that maybe a lot of this frustration I feel is because of the pattern of people abusing me and then everyone around me forcing me to forgive them and be around them for the sake of their feelings leading to the same damn cycle of me being helpless and feeling like a burden for not putting up with it.. It just sucks that even online I have to deal with it when this should be a safe place away from all that. But I also know what emotional abuse looks like due to irl experiences and I know that this is not acceptable behavior. This is abuse. And the only way to stop an abuser is to get their behavior out in the open and have other people know what they’ve been doing.

It also really sucks that the whole reason I couldn’t stand being friends with her was because I wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone else and if I did they would blow into a rage and yet 3 whole years later I still am not allowed to talk to anyone otherwise I’m “replacing them” leading her to tell any potential new friends to block me (Somehow she is finding out who my new mutuals are on Tumblr, Twitter and Discord and dm’ing them to block me which is what some of these mutuals have come forward to tell me). She still has that control over me and I’m sick of it. I just want to move on.

I hate having to tip toe around the fandom not knowing what they’ve said about me to mutuals. I just want to be able to talk to people and have them know the full story and not some fabricated story of abandonment or random crap I apparently said in a dream of theirs.

As for what they did in the past, here’s my side of the story and why I had to leave the friendship;

They would always get jealous when I talked to other people and threaten to kill them self because "I'm just going to replace them". It became such a constant thing that I couldn’t even talk at all in a public server without there being a big drama about it. They even ended up being banned from Specord for their constant harassment of me.

Whenever I would bring this up and ask her (or beg) to not get upset and let me talk to people they would act like they had no idea what I was talking about and say that my depression is making me think crazy things. Even though other people saw it and I also had screenshots I still believed them because (being mentally ill) I really can't trust myself. I've been gas-lighted by people in my family my whole life so this was too triggering to handle on a daily basis so I needed out of the friendship.

She constantly suicide-baited me into taking her back and then made every conversation we had about suicide and self harm. Whenever she felt bad about something I said to her in a dream or if I talked to someone else she would tell me happily how she cut herself “for me” because it was supposed to show me that she loved me and that she somehow deserved it. The constant talk of suicide became too triggering to my own mental health and struggle with suicidal thought that I had to get out of the relationship.

For so long they would make up lies about how I abandoned them leading me to receive death threats from strangers telling me to kill myself, people blocking me and all my friends no longer talking to me so it doesn't upset them. So in the end they still had that control over me.

They even told me in our last conversation (over two years ago) that they were right for overreacting over me talking to anyone else besides them because I "shouldn't be talking to other people anyway". They even went as far to tell me that they hated how I was "popular" and basically wanted to be like me whilst also destroying me.

I know that I could of been a better friend but with my c-ptsd and her own mental health problems it just became a toxic mix. The very mention of my name or seeing my posts or comments at all just sends her into violent mood-swings. I couldn’t handle being emotionally abused on a daily basis and I needed out of the relationship. And I get that they still have friends that care about them, that’s good! They’re going to need the support if they’re ever going to improve as a person and move on from this.

So what is the point of this post? Well mostly just to get this pent up helplessness out into the open so maybe someone might understand. The other reason is that I am sick to death of having to be known as the bad guy just because I tried to do what I thought was the right thing by walking away. I want to be able to makes friends and not have to worry about Cap finding out and sabotaging it for me. I want the hate asks to stop. I want people who I thought were my friends to stop blocking me because of something they heard.

This is a selfish request but I also want people to stand up to her for once and stop her from spreading lies about me in public and feeding her delusions. I want her to know that she can’t bully, manipulate and emotionally abuse people in to a friendship and that she doesn’t get to decide who I can interact with. But mostly I hope that by getting this out in the open maybe this might finally come to an end and we can both move on.

Naturally she’s gone and deleted all of her dm’s with me but I do still have some screen shots that might help people understand. I won’t include any dm’s with other users but my DM’s are open if you need more clarification.

First off her finally agreeing to tell the truth (which she never ended up doing evidentely)

She always worshiped me as someone I wasn’t and thought that she had to be like me to be a successful person but it ended up blowing up into a full blown obsession around being me.

She always said she acknowledged that how she treated me was wrong but she still kept doing it like she couldn’t control herself... I kept thinking that maybe her therapy would help her and we could go back to how it was before but she just kept getting worse with her obsession.

This was the other Cap.. the one that wouldn’t acknowledge what she was doing at all and would tell me I was making it up out of paranoia

These are some screenshots that were sent to me of some of the stuff she was saying about me on other servers?? She would always treat the stuff that I did in her dreams as stuff I actually said but, idk how to control what I say in her dreams?? I would never in my life say this kind of stuff about anyone??

Due to the pic limit I will include other screenshots in a reblog.

If you need any more clarification or just want to talk don’t be afraid to ask. Hopefully this can be cleared up finally and I can be free from her control. She needs to be held accountable for her actions and she needs to move on for the sake of her own mental health as well as for mine.

[etriva]

I posted 1,947 times in 2021

43 posts created (2%)

1904 posts reblogged (98%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 44.3 posts.

I added 1,617 tags in 2021

#q - 1027 posts

#m*a*s*h - 97 posts

#ghosts - 95 posts

#ace attorney - 87 posts

#black sails - 69 posts

#star wars - 60 posts

#cats - 53 posts

#what we do in the shadows - 45 posts

#ted lasso - 44 posts

#mass effect - 40 posts

Longest Tag: 103 characters

#well this explains why all of phase four so far has been people cleaning up messes that the russos left

My Top Posts in 2021

#5

me scrolling through my dashboard

177 notes • Posted 2021-08-07 01:13:16 GMT

#4

183 notes • Posted 2021-04-06 18:47:41 GMT

#3

Shepard brings Garrus with her everywhere, so when Samara needs help with a mission on Omega, Shepard asks him to come along.

This feels like a bad idea to Garrus, for a couple of reasons. He goes anyway.

Shepard brings Garrus with her everywhere. He's not sure why he'd expected that to change, after she'd propositioned him--part of him still expects, just a little, that she'll change her mind. But no, he'd still been part of her squad for every mission, just like he'd been since she'd first recruited him. The only thing that has changed is that the atmosphere between them feels...charged. They're both excited, a little awkward, a little careful, still friends and nearly more than that. The anticipation builds. They don't let it get in the way of the work that needs to get done.

They track Samara's target, investigate her latest victim, find her hunting grounds. Samara lays out a plan that uses Shepard as bait, and Shepard, being Shepard, agrees. Garrus knows he'd never convince her not to, so he doesn't even try.

She goes inside Afterlife's VIP lounge unarmed. She's not vulnerable, Garrus has trouble imagining her vulnerable even in his wildest fantasies, but she's unprotected in ways that she usually isn't. Samara's target kills without weapons and for the joy of it; for Samara's plan to work, Shepard needs to place herself right in the murderer's path. And Garrus, who is eagerly awaiting their, uh, rendezvous, who has been with her nearly every moment she's been off the Normandy since she rescued him from Omega, who likes her--Garrus can't be with her. He has to wait outside, out of Shepard's way, alone.

He paces.

He paces some more.

He mutters under his breath, reassuring himself that Shepard is competent and strong-willed and has a hell of a right hook, that if anybody can pull this off, it's Shepard. He likes that about her. He might love that about her.

He hopes he gets to find out if he does.

Shepard and Samara exit the target's apartment. Samara looks like she's been through the wringer, which isn't entirely a surprise. Shepard looks unscathed but a little unsettled, although she brightens when she sees Garrus.

Even though he's pretty sure that humans are terrible at reading turian expressions, he tries to keep the palpable relief he's feeling off his face. He must not succeed, because Shepard nudges into him with her shoulder. "Aww, you weren't worried about me, were you, Garrus?"

"Worried? Me? About you?" He laughs, and he can tell it's unconvincing because concern flashes across Shepard's face. "Why would I be worried? You've already died once since I've known you. What are the odds it'll happen again?"

Her mouth twists into a smile. He knows, somehow, that she knows what he means. He doesn't have to say it.

He likes that about her too.

He returns her nudge from earlier, shoulder to shoulder contact. She's still in casual clothes, not her armor, so the force of it moves her more than usual, and it startles a laugh out of her. "If you're gonna play rough, Vakarian, it should at least be a fair fight," she says, which makes him laugh too.

"I'm just glad you're okay, Shepard," Garrus says, his voice quiet, more sincere than he means it to be.

"Me too," she says. For a moment, the smile drops and she looks unsettled again. Something clenches in Garrus's chest. He knows it's not what she proposed, exactly, but he hopes that he'll get a chance to take care of her during their, uh, upcoming rendezvous. He's not sure she'd admit to needing it, but she does, and she deserves it.

Just that quickly, though, Shepard's smile returns. "Thanks for waiting."

"Of course," he says. Always, he thinks, unbidden. He files that away for dealing with later; he's felt too many uncomfortable feelings today to handle any more right now.

He follows Shepard back to the Normandy. The galaxy's waiting too.

(also on ao3)

230 notes • Posted 2021-06-04 22:04:35 GMT

#2

how long do you think Trent Crimm stood out there trying to look nonchalant

284 notes • Posted 2021-10-10 18:46:47 GMT

#1

what? no, you must've misheard me, i'm having a Hot GARRUS Summer

320 notes • Posted 2021-06-09 22:42:24 GMT

Get your Tumblr 2021 Year in Review →

[sunlitmcgee]

Reblogging to talk about this some more to give a bit of insight as to Why this form of anon hate is so bad at achieving it's intended goal. Because why not.

When you send anon hate to someone, you have to do so in a way that fits the personality of the person you're being a dick to. You have to study them a bit. Get to know them. Analyze your target. A half-assed "kill yourself" isn't gonna do much for somehow whose persona online is overtly overconfident, and short, small phrases are easy to ignore. You gotta think that shit out.

The anon hate I've gotten that's really freaked me out has been longer, drawn out, blatantly cruel attacks against my trauma, mental issues, interests and general way of presenting myself online. It was sent by people who'd clearly been stalking my blog and every post I made to figure out the root of my interests. Creepy behavior, yes, but the best way to go if you want to upset someone.

And in the case of this anon, we have what was an obvious attempt at what's commonly called "concern trolling" that they tried to backpeddle on. This anon went from snidely remarking that they hope my new hobby "makes me a better person" to feigning innocence and naivety as seen above, acting like they're worried for me and not-too-subtly taking a jab at my reasoning skills in saying they thing it's concerning I think they're sending hate(a very common form of ableism against people all across the ND spectrum is telling them they can't understand things/making them doubt their understanding of reality/what's happening around them)

Concern trolling works best when you stick to the bit. Keep pretending to just be "so worried" and "concerned" for the target, digging in deeper and deeper into their insecurities to drive up the distress the abuse results in. You give them sugar laced with cyanide.

Anon here basically just poured out their entire chamber into my inbox out of the gate, thus loosing the advantage of subtly.

I say all this because this form of harassment really fucked me up when I was in middle/highschool. I've spent many years since learning to unpack the trauma and understand these tactics to sort through those memories, and I hope understanding the mechanisms behind this kind of bullying behavior can maybe help people identify it in their day to day lives, keep them safe, or just give you a better way to bite back when someone's being a dick to you online.

I just thinks it's concerning you assume this is anon hate nor that you want me to call you the r-slur like that's really messed up :(

I just think it's odd you have fun being a self-proclaimed "big bad" and that you hope my new hyperfixation makes me a "better person".

Mostly I think it's odd you're still interacting with me at all.