#theres this very specific feeling that I think a lot of writers and storytellers relate

[milder-manners]

Take your time! We'd rather have you unstressed and well rested and have it take a while for the next comic, than have you push yourself to get it done fast at the cost of your health. You're not a content producer, you're an artist, and good things take time. And there's no shame in taking breaks!

I really love your White Dragon AU, all the worldbuilding and seeing the ccs personality shine through (like Dream being super kind and Sapnap being super loyal), as well as the little things, like Dream's cat-ear beanie to hide his horns. I can see the love put into the story. Just wanted to let you know that you've made something really cool and that there are many people out there who enjoy it. More than the notes show. Dtblr is known for having many lurkers (I'm one of them). So think of this as my likes/reblogs on every part of the comic!

This really means a lot to hear anon, thank you truly.

I guess I'm just so excited to show you what I've got planned that I'm disappointed in myself when things don't follow through (oh man this kind of sounds like one guy that I know ...). But you're right, art takes its time and that's ok.

I'm really glad to hear that you're enjoying the big and little aspects of the AU as well as the world-building. Genuinely glad you're entertained.

also here's a sneak peak of the first page for anyone who wants to see:

[actualbird]

meg you are so very intelligent, both in how you view the potential of storytelling in fandom and how you describe trauma. im WHOLLY sorry for adding onto this post but i very much would like to add to the discussion (bc im procrastinating writing my own damn fanfic)

on hurt/comfort (from a hurt/comfort lover)

in fanfic, it is more common for me to see hurt/comfort narratives as something linear. hurt builds up and then comfort happens and then things get better. which is great! but also not how it works irl, most of the time. i understand why writers are hesitant to write that tho, it's not the classic Freytag's Pyramic story structure. it's messier, redundant, even. sometimes things do get better and then they get bad again. and again and again. sometimes it's a neverending slog. so i get it! hell, ive written stories like these! theyre comforting in a way that says "it's going to be okay"

but i think theres literary and emotional value to the messier stories. the ones where it IS a slog. where things go well and then go bad. these ones i see less often and theyre much harder to pull off, but when done well, theyre comforting in the way the says "it's going to be okay. it'll be hard, but keep going. there will be good days, and those matter. dont forget that."

on how i think fanfic labels and communication plays into this

im seeing a LOT of people, both readers and writers alike, simplify huge chunks of stories into categories irt what emotion it's most likely to evoke. if it hurts to read, it's angst. if it hurts to read but then it makes u feel fuzzy, it's h/c. if it's funny, it's comedy, and so on so forth. this is obvi iffy since like, emotions r different and caused by different things, but i understand why this happened and why this continues to happen. it's a matter of archival organization and also the most efficient way to communicate what the reader will "get" out of this story

i worry about this as a writer now too. a few months ago i wrote a fanfic about a character's experience with his terminal illness. it was not a happy story and i tagged it as Terminal Illness but then i stopped and wondered "oh god, what if readers think i tackle this issue in this fic in a chill and lighthearted manner? theyll cry and then throw rocks at me for mislabeling the fic" so i hesitantly tagged it as Heavy Angst. even if i believe that like...this shouldnt be categorized as angst, that feels, to me at least, hugely diminishing of what my story was about

EDIT ADDITION: yes please make your characters flawed

idk if it's just me but i cant relate or enjoy characters that are perfect. yeah i joke about my perfect little meow meows, but what makes me love them is how theyre fucked up or how theyre hypocrites or how theyll actively put another person in danger just so that theyll look cool (last one is a specific example and i love that character to death). deffo advice to writers: give ur readers a reason to want to punch the character

if im not mistaken, doesnt "woobie" mean like, you just find this dude SO GODDAMN PATHETIC? like if he was a kitten, he fell face first into the dish of milk and sniffled sadly? i can see this being used as an excuse to make a Pure Cinnamon Roll tho, like oh, the world is only ever hurting them, theyre never hurting the world. but thats on the writing. woobies inherently are just soggy fellas i wanna blowdry lovingly.

adjacent thoughts i cant fit into a category (HOW FITTING, HAHA)

a part of me kind of misses the livejournal days where fanfics just gave the readers the wordcount, ship (if there is one), and a title. whatever inside is a surprise!!! which can lead to tears or the biggest laughs i ever had. sometimes both, if author is insane!

people derive catharsis (and all emotions tbh) from different stories as well. i once got the most comfort from a fanfic about the characters as a dog and a cat. like, what. how to categorize that? the human experience is too vast to predict

yep, huge agree at ur last paragraph. recently i saw a soulmate au where ur blind until u hear your soulmate, or where ur deaf until u see your soulmate. tagged as hurt/comfort. and what the fuck? dont do that.

all in all: write with some kind of empathy, or if you have trouble with that like me, write with some kind of care.

Can you talk more about hurt/comfort, woobiefication, trauma and the way you write? You always seem to really sink teeth into the emotional ramifications of major experiences in ways that feel new and interesting!

Oh fuck yeah. Usual disclaimer that I haven't taken an English class since 12th grade.

What is catharsis! (I have read maybe two greek plays?)

In a theatrical sense, catharsis is the emotion felt in the audience when they watch a tragedy. Aristotle puts it as a 'purging', kind of an induced release of pent-up emotions incurred by living before modern plumbing. I think of it while writing as a 'release of tension'. Usually specifically emotional tension. It's traditionally associated with theater, but I think a lot of 'feel good' works carry an element of catharsis with them too, and basically any story that works on a heavily emotional or character driven gas.

Catharsis (and tragedy, to a lesser extent) is appealing for the same reason that crying is appealing: we live most of our lives trying not to feel these awful emotions because we have taxes to do and a mortgage to pay, and we don't give ourselves permission to wallow. When watching a sad thing and crying over it, that's permission - it's 'allowed', and socially acceptable. That's why you see dudebros admitting to crying during Pixar movies. It's OK to cry at that scene during Up, bro. Means you have a heart, bro.

When I talk about writing trauma narratives and emotional arcs, of course the nature of that narrative varies VERY highly. But I think of it as, like everything else, an arc: character basically begins the story with trauma. Something happens that forces this problem in the forefront. Their trauma responses and/or their situation create more and more and more tension, things get worse and worse, and then you get to the peak - the 'release', the popping of the bubble, the confrontation, the anagnorisis. Then the deflating and the healing begins etc.

What is H/C! (I don't read H/C?)

Hurt/comfort (and for future note, I'll be viewing H/C mostly through the terms of fanfiction although it is very much not fanfic exclusive - the relationship of traditionally 'fanfic tropes' and conventional media is really interesting though) can be interpreted as a desire for catharsis. If a little to the left - I've seen H/C interpreted by a friend as the expression of the desire to be taken care of and fussed over and paid attention to. I interpret it as aiming towards catharsis, where you get the buildup/tension of the whump and then the release of the comfort. The lead usually serves as a stand-in for your emotional desires.

It is not my thing. Which is funny considering how many cathartic narratives I write. There is never sufficient buildup for me, there is usually an over-emphasis on somebody providing the emotional resolution instead of it being a self-driven achievement and realization, and I think mostly importantly - it frames the lifecycle of whump/trauma as the creation of trauma, then the resolution of trauma. Which cuts out the entire middle of the arc there. Where the fun stuff happens. And, double importantly, because the main character has to remain a stress-relieving emotional stand-in, there is little room for them to build up a narrative 'tension' of things getting 'worse worse worse' and struggling to cope with the trauma before finally finding their equilibrium and the 'release'.

What is a Woobie! (I don't actually define these terms because I assume you also spent most of your childhood on TVTropes!)

People are just bad at giving their characters meaningful faults.

And they especially struggle with it in these trauma narratives. Because the point is the catharsis, and in that you need relatability. You need sympathy. The audience needs to be able to put themselves in this character and ride this emotional rollercoaster with them. Obviously if they're perfect people get put off, but there's a list of acceptable faults that characters in whump/HC/trauma narratives are allowed to have. There's a list of acceptable reactions. For most of them, the only person who the characters hurt is themselves. If you stray outside of that acceptability, then you run the risk of losing audience sympathy.

And the lack of realism in the H/C is nice and stress relieving, and it provides catharsis. But I believe that people connect deeper with a narrative, that they grow even more attached to it, and that it's even more cathartic, when the narrative genuinely reflects experiences that people have. Emotions they feel, struggles they've experienced. It's almost oxymoronic - though keeping a character relatable and sympathetic you're kind of taking away what makes them human.

Because trauma responses are often very, very ugly. They are frequently unsympathetic. Somebody's trauma responses can make them a bad friend, a bad partner, can make their life tailspin, and sometimes it even results in a cycle of abuse. People react in ways that don't make sense on the surface and that are maybe pretty irrational. Bad coping mechanisms abound here. From what I can tell people are especially terrible about writing 'anger' as a coping mechanisms or trauma response. Not sure why, but anger seems to be a strange taboo.

And somebody's bad coping mechanisms and problems send their life spinning out of control. And it gets worse, and worse, and worse...and then, in the trauma narrative, there comes a moment where it's very clear - you can heal, things will be okay, things will not be like this forever. It, figuratively 'ends'. And the healing starts.

That's the catharsis, because these moments don't always happen in real life. For me, I write catharsis as the moment when you realize things will be okay, even if they aren't right now. It's the exhale.

From what I can tell people struggle with this because they do not trust their skills as writers. They're afraid of alienating their characters from the readers and they don't think they can make them sympathetic and/or a hero if they're an asshole. But I think the persistent 'give your meow meows faults' issue is most important in trauma narratives because I consider serious faults and cracks in the character kind of the cornerstone of the narrative. Character faults give an insane amount of tension in stories, because they can lead to both interpersonal issues and bad decisions that make the plot spiral worse. That's the tension. If you don't blow up the balloon the balloon can't pop.

I think fiction can get pretty powerful once it connects with people and their experiences, and puts to words what they have problems saying. Part of the reason why I write about trauma so much is because of its nature as the 'unsaid' - an underlying yet unseen basis behind a surprising amount of what people do. It is an extremely powerful force that shapes who people are and what they do, but as a general rule we do pay taxes and have mortgages and we try not to talk or think about it too much. But people are kind of obsessed with their own traumas, in a weird way, so I think it can feel good to finally be allowed to walk through that trauma narrative and find the healing at the end - because a trauma narrative is, essentially, a narrative about healing.

Also stop writing disability as hurt comfort what the fuck is wrong with you stop doing that. Why are you doing that. Disability is not hurt comfort. What is wrong with you.