#love all my writers seriously

[deltamel]

feeling sentimental tonight and reread is it casual now. i know it’s only been a few months since i posted my first fic but god it’s so easy to be hard on yourself as a writer! and just reading back through had me being like damn, i wrote this shit?? like this ain’t half bad!

reading something i wrote and haven’t revisited in a hot minute is so gratifying! i feel like i’m getting to experience a little part of my soul that i translated onto a page for the first time all over again. even reading some of my old writing from two years ago is both cringy and so sweet—it’s lovely to see how much a person can improve just through enjoying what they’re doing!!

i don’t know—maybe it’s silly!! the fic is by no means perfect at all, and even reading through i kept picking out grammar to change, clunky sentences, parts where the pacing stutters. but when the foundation of that all is someone who loves to write, and more importantly, who feels so giddy and proud reading it back? it makes it so much simpler to think errors are learning and noticing my mistakes is learning too.

anyway, wearing a stupid grin tonight after revisiting it so i wanted to share. i hope any other writers out there, my mutuals or not, can show themselves and their writing a bit of love tonight!! take it easy on yourselves in this world especially, please 🫂

[destiel-wings]

people who leave comments on AO3 I LOVE YOU

[mydirtyvalentine]

they’re putting pills in the podcasts, that turn the friggin’ listeners aroace

(genuinely though, i’m so grateful for this podcast and how affirming both the canon and fanon representation has been. for every fic writer or artists who’s depicted arthur as aro, and either written or drawn arthur in qpr relationships, thank you. i adore you)

[unrealisticallyyours]

obligatory TW rewatch scott appreciation post bc he's so interesting and fun as a character

i genuinely adore how the writers gave scott such a loving personality? like his first instinct when he meets allison is to give her a pen because he heard that she needed one. he tags along with stiles ep 1 because stiles wanted to see the body (why would an asthmatic with school in the morning want to go traipsing out into the wilderness to see a dead body??). throughout the series he takes in strays (lol) even if they've ACTIVELY TRIED TO KILL HIM in the past. and the part that i love the most is how the writers gave him room to be a bad person, too. they gave him moments where he was a bad friend, a bad boyfriend. but they didn't make those moments ones that outshone his real personality. they were treated like moments he grew from and made him into an even kinder person.

scott doesn't get the love he deserves imo he's such a well written character and someone i strive to emulate

[bumblingbabooshka]

The worst trope in the universe is when someone accuses character A, who is part of a real or fantasy or coded minority, of doing something bad and everyone's like "That's just your prejudice against [real or fantasy minority]!" and it turns out character A actually did do that bad thing and everyone else was stupid for not believing they did that bad thing.

[butterflysonnets]

yes i'm rooting for m*leven breakup because byler is neat but mostly? i'm rooting for m*leven breakup for the sake of el and mike.

to me, their romance was always a puppy love born out of a combination of social pressures, naïve curiosity, and a lack of true understanding regarding intimacy and romantic love and what it really is. it was real in that they do truly, deeply care about each other and they are close friends, maybe even shared an attraction, but a maturing romance is so much more than that. they've grown up and out of being boyfriend/girlfriend, and that's okay! i think television/film needs to show more often that most of us don't have definite "soulmates" or first childhood loves that we spend our whole lives with. it doesn't mean these relationships meant nothing and didn't impact us, it just means they've run their course and that something else is in the cards, and this is part of life!

i've always felt el was at her best and most confident self when broken up with mike, discovering who she was and what she liked alongside another girl her age instead of just relying on mike for mentorship on how to live in the real world. she deserves more of an opportunity to find herself, her autonomy, and her independence, and to love who she is, and she's made it clear she's felt insecure in the relationship with mike because she isn't being loved and understood the way she wants, needs, and deserves from someone who is her partner.

also, it's okay if mike doesn't love her in "the way he should". he is not obligated to love her romantically and stay in a relationship with her just because she's a girl, because she "needed someone", or because he cares about her a lot. he shouldn't be pressured into a romance if it's not truly coming from his heart. he deserves freedom to find out and honour who he is, too, instead of just staying in his non-functional first relationship — one he got into as a child, essentially — and defining himself that way because it's what's expected when a boy and a girl are close. he loves her in some way, yes, but it's okay if he doesn't feel comfortable or secure being her boyfriend anymore, for whatever reason that is. he's felt insecure too, and that's valid and it matters.

they are their own people and are steadily growing and changing every day. they need time to figure out who those people are, and it's become clear (at least in my opinion) that those people aren't meant to be a couple at this stage.

they deserve freedom. they deserve to grow up and be authentic to themselves and not feel like they need to lie for the sake of a relationship. they deserve to move on from this version of their relationship that isn't making them happy and rekindle the best part of their bond: their strong, beautiful friendship. they don't have to be a couple if it doesn't make them stronger and better and happier people.

i think it would be healthy and wonderful for a show, especially one consumed frequently by young adults, to show a relationship starting, progressing, and ending on good terms in this way. sometimes things don't work out, and that is okay.

[qcomicsy]

I have the controversial opinion that maybe, just maybe we stop wanting to go after people with pitchforks for getting characters wrong and not reading the comics inviting them to easy and accessible ways of and making our own content with comic accurate representation

people might feel less anxious about starting comics and misinformation won't spread as easily

[kaytheday]

So weird that I get to have tumblr and interact with authors that literally changed my life. Like, thank you Shakespeare for making my life better, I think about your work of art at least fifty times a day, now let me tag you in a ridiculous challenge about snack foods.

@legends-never-die1 @theblack-dog @fictionalcharactergraveyard @ratwife77 @alittlebitofloveliness @vintagelavenderskies @justme--emily in particular but I love many of you too!

[bekkachaos]

I just think it's fucking wild how novels, like published books, average between 70,000 and 120,000 words and there are fanfic authors out there posting regular 80k+ works for free, for the love of the thing (or in spite of the thing)

[ministarfruit]

trip's tempus slice of life fics mean the world to me

[bottombaron]

there really does need to be a queer person in the writers' room on every show with queer characters, if only to explain how to better describe 'profound' relationships.

bc this happens all the time with showrunners fumbling for ways to describe a not-necessarily-sexually-prioritized relationship between same-sex characters

it's like somewhere in our evolution 'straight' men forgot that you can express your Profound Emotions with sex or other physical ways just to experience closeness and love.

like sexual attraction can evolve from profound emotions. they aren't inherently mutually exclusive. you can have two people who aren't initially attracted to each other and then over the course of knowing each other attraction blooms from simply caring for that person.

it's wild that ppl don't get that. is it a straight person thing? Do you have to be horny for a person from the go or it doesn't count?

like i'm absolutely serious, there needs to be studies on this phenomenon. there's something here in the miscommunication of what love can look like that is fucking fascinating.

[aintgonnatakethis]

Last Line Tag/WIP Excerpt

Thank you to @wyked-ao3 for the tag! 😄

Am adding the excerpt tag in here because I feel like this needs to be read in one lump to do justice to itself. Content warning for trauma due to racism, homophobia, and child abuse. I love Telford but I am not kind to him.

"How long?!" Telford hisses. "How long have you been doing this to me?!" He sounds deranged, drops of spittle flying wildly from his mouth and landing on Everett's face, but it isn't anger driving him anymore. He can't put a name to the emotion, beyond comparing it to being a child and he had done something the details of he can't even recall now and bad things had happened and afterwards he remembers with startling clarity wishing he could go back to before he had misbehaved so he could make it work out differently because things were never going to be the same again because to a child every time something like that happens to you it's the end of the world all over again. "David…" Everett says, and they are no longer children, Telford knows, though it weighs on him like a heavy cloak he is carrying across his shoulders and he has been carrying it for so long he doesn't even try to escape its hold anymore. In this moment he is not First Lieutenant David Telford. He is five and he already knows why the white children treat him differently. He is eight and he shoots a gun for the first time and he feels it. He is twelve and terrified of this thing growing inside him. He is fourteen and standing humiliated and defiant as his mother finds his gay porn magazine and proudly presents it to his father. I always knew, she had said. There was always something wrong with him. With his type there always is. His father's reaction had been disinterest - as was his most common reaction to anything involving Telford - which had made it worse. If his father had been angry it would have meant he cared, if he had tried to dish out a beating Telford could have fought back; but what was he to do when his mother took a belt to him? It wasn't as if he could raise his hand to her. "David?" Everett's voice sounds very far away, even though Telford realises he is pressing his face into the man's shoulder. He is shaking. He is shaking because he is crying. He cannot remember the last time he cried. Everett's arms are around him and Telford wants to punch him. He can't let anyone see this in him. It's poison. If he lets it out it will consume until there's nothing left.

Tagging: @fortunatetragedy @the-golden-comet @lancedoncrimsonwings @finickyfelix @gioiaalbanoart + OPEN

[langfield]

my hot take is that one of double exposure’s strengths was it’s characters, actually! i think people tend to forget how little the characters in lis:1 mattered tbh? they barely had relationships outside of max ( kate and warren are the biggest offenders of this, with kate’s other friends, stella and alyssa, being shown in one photo and warren’s only relationships being with brooke, a girl he never interacts with on screen, and stella, a girl he gets with at random in the vortex timeline ) and would cease to exist once they served their intended purpose to the plot, like nathan, who’s killed off screen after inherently giving max and chloe everything they needed to find the dark room. victoria, bless her heart, is so inconsistently written and suffers hard from the plot manipulating her character to fit whatever role the other characters aren’t filling … etc etc. don’t get me wrong! they’re still good characters! in fact, i love them thoroughly. but you can tell pretty quickly that lis:1 is a plot over characters sort of game -- and that people’s praise for the well written cast of lis:1 is mostly founded in nostalgia and hcs they’ve been personally making for the past nine years. a lot of the dynamics are shallow, nonexistent, or entirely made up from the first game … meanwhile double exposure, with it’s more condensed cast and social media element, was able to do a lot more despite the shakier plot writing.

safi and moses? best friends with actual lore and screentime. safi and vinh? were once in the same friend group, have slept together, he’s in love with her but she doesn’t care for him at all and, if forced to have an opinion, dislikes him greatly. safi and gwen? mentor and mentee, you see how much safi trusts gwen with how she comes out of her shell around her during her experimental writing years, and gwen takes safi hating her to heart because she cared for her too, and ( as heard in a voicemail from vinh ) likely blames herself for safi’s death in the dead world timeline. lucas and safi? former student and teacher, now coworkers, heavily implied safi used to admire lucas before he fucked maya over and now loathes him so fiercely she’s willing to hurt his kid to get back at him, and he’s legitimately scared of her. and that’s just safi’s relationships! a character who the game barely shows on screen in ep2 and ep3. vinh’s relationships are vast and complex, raging from his situationship with reggie ( a dynamic that has a long history that takes multiple playthroughs to understand ) to his intense and bitter rivalry with diamond to his silly, lowstakes attraction to moses to his ‘forged in secrecy and pain’ relationship with yasmin to … so on so forth. moses and diamond have an entire bittersweet dynamic where diamond has found herself loving someone for the first time but not only is moses taken, he also sisterzones her at the end of the game. diamond and reggie are close friends despite their different views and bond over their unrequited love and undergrad struggles. loretta has a crush on reggie! etc etc.

and that’s just the relationships between the characters. the characters themselves are rather distinct from each other -- but that’s a whole other post entirely. are there flaws with the character writing in double exposure? naturally! there are some that aren’t as fleshed out as they could be ( like the lis:1 crew ) and some relationships go nowhere or are inconsistent at best. i could harp on lis:de’s flaws all day, really, because the plot writing after ep3 was rather atrocious tbh!! though i still think people are rather unfair about the pros of the game itself, and the stuff that was genuinely improved upon to a degree such as having the supporting characters exist and interact without max’s input.

[thejadecount]

This pride month made my brain get maxley rot

[disappearinginq]

I hate that people on a whole don't understand a narrative. Like...your English/literature teacher should've flunked people over this.

Probably the people who understand it best are the ones marginalized in life, because hey, we see ourselves in those characters. Other people have the luxury of just going "eh" and moving on.

But when hugely popular shows and movies and even books keep killing off their marginalized and suffering characters as the "only way this could've ended" I want to reach through a screen and choke them out because stop telling me the world is better without me in it., Or I will take you with me, and we'll see who's mourned.

It's not even just Bury Your Gays. In Outer Banks, they kill of the kid who is told from season 1 that you'll never make anything of yourself. You will always be poor, homeless, unloved, and alone. And then spend three and a half seasons showing you that this character absolutely will beat his own narrative - he finds friends that are his family, he finds a life he loves with the people he loves and they love him back, and then - they kill him. BUT THE RICH BITCH FUCKING PSYCHOPATH GETS A REDEMPTION ARC? I don't care how good the actors are, the narrative has now wildly swung from 'you can make it if you don't give up' to 'don't even bother - life will find a way to beat you down to where you belong' and airing two days after the catastrophic American elections - where the billionaires and greed and hate win?

The Umbrella Academy had three seasons of fun, quirky, broken people who tried so hard to fix their mistakes, to fix what they broke, and canonically, are representing marginalized groups that never get the happy endings. But dammit, this family tried. They didn't always get along, they were dysfunctional, but they still came together in the end, and loved one another despite the bad they have done. And then - the narrative again spins a wild one eighty and the story ends with "the world is better without you in it - die". Which is a very real narrative a lot of us live with.

The MCU - kills off Iron Man/Tony Stark, one of the very first popular characters who suffers from extreme CPTSD along with an alphabet of mental disorders; Loki, who is the adopted child and queer across the board, loses absolutely everyone and everything; Steve, who while he isn't dead, his character most certainly is because he goes from the one who does sacrifice everything to making a selfish, personal decision that winds up fucking over everyone; Bucky, who again isn't dead but he is openly blamed for the things he did while he was a prisoner and a mind-controlled assassin for the bad guys against his will by his mental health professional. And the narrative is "no, you should sacrifice yourself so the rest of us who treated you like shit can live a better life."

The stupidity of wanting to punish your audience who is punished enough in the real world often enough we don't need it or want it in fiction is just...mind boggling. And when those are the real words used by writers to justify their shit decisions?

I hope your death serves a narrative purpose, since you seem to think that is the noblist way to go.

[torchickentacos]

Very rarely I'll (accidentally) find someone who's blocked me on pokemon tumblr, and realistically I know that they probably saw one of my posts too many times and just got sick of seeing it or I simply annoy them or whatever. But part of me really wants to believe that my pokemon anime opinions were just too much for someone. I want to believe that someone saw me say 'The absol scene needed better build-up to justify Drew talking to one of his pokemon like that, it goes against everything we've seen of him imo' or whatever and they just put a hand over their heart, wounded, and clicked the block button while cursing my family for several generations, past and future. I really want to think that I had a lukewarm enough drew opinion that someone blocked me about it