#they are allergic of understanding the characters

[mediumgayitalian]

Do you happen to have any tips for specifically writing like, sad/angsty type writing if that makes sense? I’ve found that when I write, (at least I’d like to think) I’m pretty decent at straight up silly goofy, slice-of-lifey type writing and things edging closer to like, horror or like, chilling if that makes sense? But every time I try to write anything just like, sad and with a like, dark but not scary type of mood it just comes out very 12 year old’s 1st wattpad, cringey anime protagonist if that makes sense. I yearn to write heart-wrenching angst but every time I do I just feel like it comes out just like, bad? I’m kinda bad at putting this into words lol

hm. i can't give you specialized advice without seeing what you've written -- i'm sure you're just hard on yourself -- but i tend to focus on concrete, sentient details.

write your character's emotions like they'll be shot by a sniper if they admit them out loud.

of course this isn't a rule. more of a guideline insert pirate joke here. but in real life people are like.....allergic to communicating. writing is already a little scripted because people communicating in noises more than anything, so if you use any more words than you have to, things can read as kind of forced. to make things seem really natural and flow well, try to 1) imply and 2) use senses & gestures.

you wanna talk about how a character is miserable? don't say theyre sad. focus on the bleakness in their eyes, the echoing scrape of their feet dragging on the ground. focus on their tired shoulders and slow-blinking eyes. point out how they eat like every plate is piled with sawdust. how they talk on a careless, broken line, like theyre working around a knife pressed too hard to their throat. how their fingernails are cracked and bleeding.

can you get a kind of image there? this is someone who is joyless, who is not taking care of themselves. it is also someone deeply loved by the person observing them -- loved enough to be notices. you HAVE to trust your readers to understand your metaphors and inferences and allusions. don't spell things out for them.

most of all, though.

PRACTICE.

im not gonna link my old shit because it's v*ltron and im still so goddamn mad at that fandom and embarrassed i wrote for it. but believe me when i tell you my old shit was clumsy. i sounded twelve, too, and that's okay because i was learning. practice and give yourself some grace.

HOMEWORK (all writing tips will come with homework now):

Walk around your home or neighborhood and pick out the saddest looking THING you can find (a drooping flower, a dead worm, a crumpled shoe, whatever). Describe it. A thing cannot be sad -- it has no emotions -- but why does it look sad? What visible or audible (or olfactory, etc) parts of it come off as 'sad' to you?

Pick a character. Pick an emotion. Practice writing dialogue -- this character is trying to tell another character their feelings have been hurt, but they have been cursed so as they cannot say so directly. How do they explain themself? Does the person they're talking to understand? Does your character get frustrated? More hurt? Sad? How does their body show it?

Find a piece of writing you admire that is 'angsty'. Pick one or two paragraphs and closely examine them: what emotion is being expressed? Is there more than one? How do you know? What actions imply certain emotions? What words have certain emotional connotations?

Feel free to send your homework in for grading. I'll deadass grade it.

other writing advice: here, here, here, here, here, and here,

[starry-eyed-steve]

If this is true, they can keep it.

What is this? Can we stop with the Eddie agenda? He wouldn't help Dustin with experiments. He failed to graduate twice and hates school. He wouldn't help him connect with his friends because he doesn't care for the party like that prior to the events of s4. He likes to collect his little "sheep" who listen to his philosophies about society. He sees himself as a mentor who enlightens people, but he is not friends with them. Dustin and Mike were terrified even talking about postponing a stupid game so they could support Lucas. They don't see him as an equal, they admire and fear him.

Dustin's and Eddie's "friendship" is a mentor/student one. It's not like Dustin and Steve's friendship, which is based on mutual respect (at least prior to s4). Steve never made Dustin feel scared to ask him about favors. He respects him and is not acting like he's above him.

Let me have a book about their friendship and the struggles of season 3. How Dustin is navigating the move of their friend, how he deals with watching Max ascend into depression and how he feels about starting high school. With Steve by his site because they went through fucking hell together in s3 (and s2). How is their relationship gonna change after those events? What led to them being that way in s4. We don't need an Eddie-Dustin centric book, especially not about Eddie helping Dustin with his friends.

I swear all we get in that book will be Dustin being absolutely mean to Steve, insulting his intelligence every other page. Steve won't be smart enough to help him out there. No thanks.

[wmiescieinazumy]

the kirino/kariya/shindou trio are so very obizenyuki coded to me

or maybe i just miss obizenyuki.....

obizenyuki pictures borrowed from @/redmemoirs

[womp-womp-waa]

Ben missed how he was.

When he had his voice. When people didn't look at him with pity. When he didn't cry himself to sleep every night. When he could smile.

But that was then and this is now. And now he's lying in Bed, not wanting to move not having the energy. He ignored his parents calls from his doorway, he couldn't respond anyway so there was no point in talking to them. There was no point in talking to anyone. Maybe if he stayed in bed for long enough, he'll wake up from this horrible nightmare and he could speak, sing, laugh.

Maybe. Maybe one day he could learn to live without his voice. One day, but not today.

[kisuminight]

c!George and c!Dream have a bond that lets them feel each other's emotions. It is not a fix-it solution.

~

There is a bitter ember is George’s resonance with Dream. There has been for a while. It started as a small thing, back when Tommy first joined the server. But it grew and grew, until it was a bonfire that George could feel in the center of his chest, winding out from his lungs and strangling his throat like the thorns of a creeping rose.

Dream never named it, but George could guess. It was obvious, from the way it might flicker and wane but always, always flared up again whenever George tried to rely on him these days. First when Tommy burned down his house. And again, when the Badlands attempted their assassination. It’s been an acrid coating on his tongue, worse than brewing potions with spider eyes, since Technoblade… well, since Technoblade.

(George isn’t jealous about him. Isn’t jealous of the way Dream had been excited when Technoblade first arrived on the server, and admiration clicked and fizzed like redstone, even as the bitterness swallowed his appetite and choked at his breath).

The ember has grown into a proper inferno now, like the constant hissing of lava roaring in his ears. It’s hard to hear what Quackity is saying, but the resonance is winding tighter about him because Dream is coming. Dream is coming, and today George is going to demand answers.

-

“Just say you hate me.”

-

Sapnap is dragging George away, away to Mexican L’Manberg. There’s enough lava to drown the whole Nether, a conflagration that could swallow the whole server is burning him from the inside out and he is gasping around the feeling of thorns tearing him apart from the inside. Is this what it feels to swallow a wither rose?

“I don’t—how could he do that? George, let’s go. George—shit, George!”

Sapnap is there. His hands are on George’s arms. George can’t feel it through the armor. Just a bit of pressure as his whole world shakes apart around him. It’s painful, and George can’t breathe. The world is in and out and he can barely make out that they are out of the castle. There are grass blocks underfoot and no walls to lean on.

“C’mon, breathe with me. In one, two, three, four—” Sapnap’s voice curled about his ears, rhythmic and worried. It helped, a little. Gave George enough stability to sooth his own reactions until he could manage something more than panting sobs.

“You’re ridiculous.”

“Shut up, George. Keep breathing.”

“I’m fine. What is this?”

Sapnap’s hands squeezed, keeping George from pulling away. He looked worried, the corners of his eyes crinkled and uncharacteristically soft. “It’s a panic attack, George.” The corners of his mouth dragged down. “Of course the first one you’ve had was caused by Dream.”

“No? It’s not my panic attack?” The pain ebbed as the heat did. It didn’t quite die back down to an ember, but the bitterness receded into something more sour, as the roses in George’s throat wilting into something easier to breathe around.

“Really?” Ugh. Sapnap made a face, and George made a face right back. “Okay, sure. Let’s just get to Mexican L’Manberg.” He turned away, but kept one hand tight around George’s wrist to pull him along.

“You are ridiculous,” George told his back, pretending that the sun wasn’t drying his cheeks into a sticky mess. He used his free hand to rub at his goggles. He tugged at the tangle of emotions in the resonance, feeling it spool out as they got farther away from Dream.

Whatever. It didn’t matter that the wilting had turned into the same soupy-bog in his lungs as when Sapnap killed Spirit. George didn’t care about the return of the almost-pneumonia of grief that settled like a fever and made Dream uninterested in the world for days or even taking care of himself. Maybe Dream would feel George’s fury like a fire in turn, and come apologize to bank it.

Tomorrow, probably, because he was so busy with Eret today. Tomorrow, George could get his answers. Demand what Dream was even thinking, and why he was even being this dumb when it made all this wrongness curl about him like a miasma and twist the emotional bleed into something dark.

Dream didn’t come home that night. Or the next. Tomorrow stretched on into the taught, painful pull of a distant resonance, like barbed wire strung between their hearts.

[scottapez]

franmaya honestly interests me more than edgewright at this point.

[stackthedeck]

well I disagree with you about peter and mj cause they are meant to be together and andrew Garfield version needs his version of mj and vise versa.

tell me you've never read a comic without telling me you've never read a comic.

MJ and Peter are not meant to be together in the same way no comic characters are meant to be together, no couple is "endgame" because there is no end to this game. MJ and Peter's relationship should change and shift as long as Marvel Comics continues publishing. MJ is a dynamic character, she affects the narrative and vice versa. A Spider-Man story is only as strong as the supporting cast which is why modern Spider-Man comics have been so ass, all of Peter's friends are gone and MJ is a doll on the shelf.

I'm not trying to be progressive when I say Peter Parker isn't entitled to MJ, I'm saying it because it's good storytelling practice. Seeing Peter and MJ grow closer together despite not being the perfect couple was an engaging story, seeing them fight and break up every other week kept things interesting, even when they were married they had their ups and downs and major disagreements. Conflict means that the relationship stays narratively relevant. There are very few couples in comics that can get away with the happily married thing, and even then, they still change and are always working together as a team. MJ is not Peter's arm candy, she is an active part of his story, she challenges him and forces him to grow

If we want to talk about meant to be together, it was supposed to be Peter and Gwen, they were the classic all-American couple. And like that's coming straight from the writers at the time. They preferred Gwen over MJ as Peter's girlfriend because Gwen was the good girl. It wasn't until after Gwen died that MJ even became a blip on Peter's radar and even then Peter still believes that he would have married Gwen if she hadn't died and this is affirmed every time she comes back in almost any form. And that's not getting into the countless girlfriends Peter had before during and after his relationship with MJ.

MJ was the radical love interest, much of her clothing was inspired by the counter-culture movement of the 60s and 70s, and much of her dialogue and actions were taken directly from 2nd wave feminism. She's the party girl who uses the fun lifestyle to cover up that she's desperately lonely. So to treat her as nothing more than an object, as Peter's reward for being Spider-Man, it's antithetical to her whole character

Listen I ship Peter and MJ in every adaption they're both present in, I ship them in every comic universe, I adore this couple. But it is infuriating to watch current comic writers and comic fans reduce MJ to just Peter's girlfriend because she used to be Peter's friend. When people talk about Paul cucking Peter, it's about what the two men want and not about what MJ is experiencing which is likely stockholm syndrome.

MJ has had so many opportunities to shine as a character both with and without Peter. She doesn't exist to serve him as a character, they are two characters who are paired together because their relationship presents problems that are narratively interesting. When MJ becomes a cardboard cut out of a person, that's when the writers fucked up and they need to break up through something other than demon magic.

Mary Jane Watson is not a prize to be won, she's not Peter's reward for being a hero, she's not just a pin-up cover waiting to happen. She is a complete character that in order to as be interesting as she was in the fucking 70s needs to have narrative agency.

[natsudragneelgf]

sorry sorry sorry SORRY I can't stand core 5 Riverdale content that doesn't include Toni like it's core 4 anyway why would you add one singular slot to include Cheryl but not Toni it pisses me off to noooooooo fucking end and I'm not willing to argue about it. Include Toni when you open the core 4 bracket or fucking perish very honestly

[stilldancewithyou]

I keep seeing people saying "I hope they don't make Jeremiah the bad guy" and other things like that. They're not making him "the bad guy", it's a not really a good guy-bad guy situation. I don't think this story has a bad guy. What the 3rd book (and probably the 3rd season) do is show you Jeremiah's flaws and the fact that he isn't a perfect person (because no one is!).

I know we've all agreed Belly has a very biased and idealized view of both boys. Once Belly starts dating Conrad and things start to spiral, the bubble is popped for her and she stops seeing the idealized version of him, but I would also argue she starts to idealize him in the opposite way, forcing herself to try to see him as a "bad" person. I also feel like in the 2nd book/season she starts to compare the brothers in her mind and starts thinking maybe Jere was always the better choice (he would have been a better prom date etc). And the first 2 books/seasons spend a lot of time telling you Jere is a golden retriever, a golden boy, an unrealistically "perfect" guy who is always fun to be around and would never hurt Belly or do any of the things Conrad did. But the thing is, no one is that perfect. And especially not kids who have been through the things the kids in this story have been through (ie Susannah), of course they're all going to make human mistakes. Also we're getting all of this from Belly's point of view, and we need to remember that she has always seen them in the radiant sunshine light of all these magical summers.

The 3rd book is when Belly's Jeremiah bubble is popped and she starts to see all the annoying things he does and his flaws (it's actually kinda funny cause the first chapter is like "oh everything is wonderful with Jere he has been so many of my firsts and I've never had anyone like this" and then in the next chapter she's like "Jere is the most annoying mfer I have ever met and here's all the annoying ass thing he does"). And then the whole cheating thing happens...but they were on break so technically he didn't "cheat" but he should have known better, and then he made it worse by proposing to her.

Anyway all of that is to say they are not making anyone the bad guy, they are not making Jeremiah the bad guy. They are showing he makes human mistakes, is flawed and is also very capable of hurting Belly. Yes, he's a fun golden retriever but golden retrievers also sometimes bite and jump up on you and get into your trash, but it doesn't make him a bad dog. It's not sunshine and flowers 24/7. That's just not how life works.

Also just to be clear- yes, the characters in this story make mistakes and hurt each other and are at times a little bit toxic to each other, but no one does anything irredeemable or unforgivable.

[exopelagic]

WHY DID NOBODY TELL ME BURROWS END WASNT FREE

[aroaessidhe]

2023 reads // twitter thread    

The Hummingbird Killer

YA thriller set in a closed city run by assassin guilds

2 years after Isabel joined a new guild in exchange for her life, she’s their most notorious killer,

but wants a normal life again & gets a flatmate & library job

….and accidentally gets tangled up in an anti-guild abolitionist movement. unfortunately things just keep getting worse

[ryn-holt]

Me: *Sees an indie creator making a music about the Odyssey* Oh no, I hope people don’t get super weird and moralistic, especially in regards to the two female ‘villains’

The Fandom: Omg Odysseus is the most perious uwu smol bean who’s never done anything wrong and I’ll scream if you say anything different

[xyywrites]

Tips for writing flawed but lovable characters.

Flawed characters are the ones we root for, cry over, and remember long after the story ends. But creating a character who’s both imperfect and likable can feel like a tightrope walk. 

1. Flaws That Stem From Their Strengths

When a character’s greatest strength is also their Achilles' heel, it creates depth.

Strength: Fiercely loyal.

Flaw: Blind to betrayal or willing to go to dangerous extremes for loved ones.

“She’d burn the whole world down to save her sister—even if it killed her.”

2. Let Their Flaws Cause Problems

Flaws should have consequences—messy, believable ones.

Flaw: Impatience.

Result: They rush into action, ruining carefully laid plans.

“I thought I could handle it myself,” he muttered, staring at the smoking wreckage. “Guess not.”

3. Show Self-Awareness—or Lack Thereof

Characters who know they’re flawed (but struggle to change) are relatable. Characters who don’t realize their flaws can create dramatic tension.

A self-aware flaw: “I know I talk too much. It’s just… silence makes me feel like I’m disappearing.” A blind spot: “What do you mean I always have to be right? I’m just better at solving problems than most people!”

4. Give Them Redeeming Traits

A mix of good and bad keeps characters balanced.

Flaw: They’re manipulative.

Redeeming Trait: They use it to protect vulnerable people.

“Yes, I lied to get him to trust me. But he would’ve died otherwise.”

Readers are more forgiving of flaws when they see the bigger picture.

5. Let Them Grow—But Slowly

Instant redemption feels cheap. Characters should stumble, fail, and backslide before they change.

Early in the story: “I don’t need anyone. I’ve got this.”

Midpoint: “Okay, fine. Maybe I could use some help. But don’t get used to it.”

End: “Thank you. For everything.”

The gradual arc makes their growth feel earned.

6. Make Them Relatable, Not Perfect

Readers connect with characters who feel human—messy emotions, bad decisions, and all.

A bad decision: Skipping their best friend’s wedding because they’re jealous of their happiness.

A messy emotion: Feeling guilty afterward but doubling down to justify their actions.

A vulnerable moment: Finally apologizing, unsure if they’ll be forgiven.

7. Use Humor as a Balancing Act

Humor softens even the most prickly characters.

Flaw: Cynicism.

Humorous side: Making snarky, self-deprecating remarks that reveal their softer side.

“Love? No thanks. I’m allergic to heartbreak—and flowers.”

8. Avoid Overdoing the Flaws

Too many flaws can make a character feel unlikable or overburdened.

Instead of: A character who’s selfish, cruel, cowardly, and rude.

Try: A character who’s selfish but occasionally shows surprising generosity.

“Don’t tell anyone I helped you. I have a reputation to maintain.”

9. Let Them Be Vulnerable

Vulnerability adds layers and makes flaws understandable.

Flaw: They’re cold and distant.

Vulnerability: They’ve been hurt before and are terrified of getting close to anyone again.

“It’s easier this way. If I don’t care about you, then you can’t leave me.”

10. Make Their Flaws Integral to the Plot

When flaws directly impact the story, they feel purposeful rather than tacked on.

Flaw: Their arrogance alienates the people they need.

Plot Impact: When their plan fails, they’re left scrambling because no one will help them.

Flawed but lovable characters are the backbone of compelling stories. They remind us that imperfection is human—and that growth is possible.

[ambreiiigns]

i . randomly thought abt gojo & geto and my chest started hurting

[manwholovescabins]

i understand why people say gemma is a non-character or something along those lines but i believe it’s actually much worse than that, because we know things about her. we know how ms casey acts and talks and moves and there must be some gemma in there. we know she was also a teacher. we know she did crafts. we know she was allergic to nutmeg and liked other people’s dogs and thought cardigans looked ridiculous and when she sneezed, she always sneezed twice. we know she and mark went on hikes with devon and ricken. we know she was nice and supportive to ricken and had conversations with him about his ideas and was grateful for his throat singing dedicated to her, but she did still laugh at it with mark. we know what her loss did to mark, devon and ricken. we know that devon and ricken wanted to name their child after her, but mark didn’t agree. we know she made mark wonderful. we know a bunch of things about her and her presence in and effect on people’s lives, and we know all of it through the people who love her and lost her. and that is so much worse than her just not being there.

[sleepy-bear-tm]

I keep on searching the rp finder tags on here and alas…