#this is like the CRUX of suicidality lol

[rabbitcrimes]

When people are like Wei Wuxian was NOT suicidal it’s like. Ok sure. He just believed that his debt to the Jiangs should be paid with everything up to and including his life. And also that the moral and obvious thing to do in any situation is to put himself between anyone and harm's way. This is because he thinks he’s unkillable but he makes himself unkillable for the same reason he’ll die for a good enough reason: because it’s a way to have worth!

And then famously once everything goes to shit he does beg Lan Wangji to let him die as part of the moment where he is either destroyed by his own evil magic or lets his own evil magic tear him apart, a distinction I don't personally think matters very much at that point. Less explicitly textually, his mentally ill ass behavior after he gives up his core says to me that he wishes that he'd died honorably for Jiang Cheng when he had the chance and doesn't know what to do with himself since he hasn't.

Again I’m aware that he’s operating under a pretty specific set of culturally informed norms as a cultivator and member of a sect but like. TO ME. Everything about how Wei Wuxian conducts himself indicates that he has a box in his mind at all times that says 'in case of emergency break glass' and what’s inside the box is his own death. All the sound of mind actions of a man who has a normal and not suicidal relationship to death.

[silvermoon424]

Wait, how did OnK end? Lmao I am not reading it after seeing your reaction

!!!MASSIVE SPOILER WARNING!!! DO NOT READ IF YOU DON'T WANT TO BE SPOILED ON THE ENDING OF OSHI NO KO!!!

It was honestly a trainwreck lmao. Here's a good, short summary on the final arc of the manga. I'll give my own opinions on why it's bad:

The biggest point of contention is obviously Aqua's death. It just feels really cruel. For most of the series, Aqua has been driven solely by his desire to avenge Ai's murder and doesn't seem to care if he dies in the process of getting it. However, as time goes on, he realizes how much those around him care about him and how much his life means to them.

And then he goes and kills himself to get Hikaru out of the picture. And it's emphasized by the story that this is not his vengeance on Hikaru for killing Ai, but rather an act of love to protect Ruby. It's honestly kind of gross how much the story glorifies Aqua's suicide (because yes, it IS a suicide) and presents it as the only choice Aqua could have made.

Also, it's outright stated that Aqua was reborn for the sole purpose of protecting Ruby, which REALLY undermines his character and his relationships with every non-Ruby character.

It also should be noted that Aqua and Ruby's relationship was hardly touched on until like halfway through the series, and Ruby herself was very sidelined until then as well. So having the entire climax and emotional crux of the series being about Aqua and Ruby's relationship and how Ruby is destined to be the greatest idol ever is... a choice, lol.

Anyway, everyone is devastated by Aqua's death but their grief is pretty much only presented in montage form. It really lessens the impact of THE MAIN CHARACTER'S death.

As for Ruby.... ughhhhh. Despite her stating in earlier chapters that she wants to be a different kind of idol than her mother, she literally just becomes Ai 2.0. Not only does she heavily lean on Ai's aesthetic and mannerisms, she has adopted Ai's "lies are love" mentality and hides her true feelings behind lies and smiles.

So yeah, Aqua killed himself to protect Ruby only for Ruby to fall right into the same toxic lifestyle that killed her mother 🙃

Anyway it's Oshi no Over but I'm not too mad about spending time on this series since it introduced me to Ai, one of my new fave characters lol

[oodlyenough]

i saw you post about Adrian being one of the most poorly written characters from the trilogy, could i please ask you to elaborate on that? genuinely curious why

Well tbh the caveat here would be that I played 2-4 once, a year or so ago, and I didn't exactly find Adrian compelling enough to study her writing intensely or something, so this is general impressions, but:

Mostly I thought the plot of 2-4 sort of dragged her through the mud and then had the resolution be her... deep gratitude towards both Phoenix and Edgeworth for doing that, lol. As soon as we found out about her suicidal tendencies and had her begging the player to keep her secret, I thought, "well obviously Phoenix is gonna have to bust this out at some point", and then instead they had Edgeworth do it very dramatically lmao, and then it's... all kind of water under the bridge and she ends the case like wow <3 the two greatest men I've ever met <3. I think it's probably a casualty of the games having a relatively simplistic moral system. By the end of 2-4 Phoenix, Edgeworth and Adrian are all on the same "team" ie The Good Guys, so the game doesn't want bad blood between her and them. But I didn't think her um... mental health struggles etc were treated with particular care. And the canon having her turn to Franziska as her new stronger-person-to-latch-onto doesn't really solve anything nor do I think teenage timebomb Franziska is well-equipped for that role.

In general I felt like the tone of the writing around Adrian was odd, like they flipped from "look at her, suspiciously competent, probably a murderer" to "alas ... her dark secret is that in reality she's a weak-willed woman" lol. Like we put a few different sexist tropes in a blender. I suppose she was better in AA3, but you still hinge the plot on her goofing up often enough to be the crux of the issue, and Phoenix in court calling her an "accident-prone human". (Also, not really the point, but it raised questions for me about the jail time for tampering with a body lmao. Are Lana and Iris getting similarly short stints?)

I will say the anime cut out most of the parts of Adrian's story that I found awkwardly written, and in doing so I thought they made a much flatter version of Adrian all around, so I guess that's not really a win either. And as I said in the original post, it ended up messy enough that I found myself liking her, lol, in a "date a girl who's bad at everything" sort of way.

[weebsinstash]

Wow the "conclusion" to this is wild. Lmao @ her saying that she'll look at your blog in the future to feel better about herself. Hobbyless behavior. Sorry you got all of that shit for months, it's just so fucking bizarre. I really love your writing and your blog and I hope despite all of that shit that you're having a good day 💕

I'm just like. Kind of sitting here wondering what the point even was.

Like literally at the core of this argument was i posted about a family event and a complete stranger got so extremely upset that they. Literally started a fight on anon, and then after I told them to get fucked, then proceeded to pretend to be an underage rape survivor and said I made them attempt suicide, and then messaged TONS of people saying "weebsinstash is a rape apologist who bullied cjfjfj" and it was literally all a fucking lie. They want to say they bullied me for entertainment but what was rhe point of like. Harassing dozens of other people who weren't even involved. That's obviously not when anything to do with me. That's acting like a freak because you think it's Cute And Quirky

Like. I cannot emphasize enough that the hypothetical child who harmed themselves was the literal only single aspect of this entire thing that could even mildly make me feel bad and this actually stupid fucking cunt gave themselves up, "oh by the way that person was never real" like, damn if you were an actual good troll you never would've revealed that, so you can't even be a little basement dweller correctly

Imagine being like "yeah you know the literal only thing about this that might actually cause you some sort of guilt and was the crux of my whole crusade against you lol yeah it was just a lie and the friends who apologized on my behalf were also me and the people who were nice to you were also me" like wow you were OBSESSED OBSESSED

But there's also so many more layers to that? They made blogs and maintained them to talk to me pretending to be people who were also harassed. They literally gave me emotional support as a "gotcha"? Like how is that a gag. Do you not realize repeatedly popping out of the woodwork saying "hey every mean thing that was said to you over xyz amount of months was me all along" has literally just trained me to automatically blame you for any bad feedback and thus you have granted me the ability to be insulted and not care. Like literally any time I get an ask about anything and it's rude I just assume it's this one single person now. And I don't get hate mail so it was always kind of obvious anyways. But like they literallt actually gave me a gift because I won't really ever believe anything nasty I get ever again :)

But like. The sheer. Actual literal disconnect from reality for this person to fully say with their whole chest, "ha ha yeah I really showed YOU and made YOU look stupid, the way I pretended to be a child, lied about rape, publicly harassed complete strangers, tried to doxx you, made a fake dating profile for you, uploaded your photos in multiple places, sent you stuff on anon to take credit for it later, and maintained disguises for most of a year, haha wow don't YOU look dumb!"

Bro after like one month of this shit I literally just started thinking, "oh it's that one moron again" and nothing was ever hurtful ever again. You have to realize there's a point where someone has made themselves look so stupid and unlikeable you don't care what they think so it's sort of like. Oh woo hoo you called me ugly and fat, got any new material? Like I don't even have to think "oh gosh I'm so ugly and gross and I feel bad cause they said that" I just think "oh wow potshots at my appearance, yeah that's what I would expect someone of your intelligence to say"

I just. Can I just be blunt and say this wasn't even good trolling. It was annoying but they were so blatantly bad at it literally everyone just looked at the kind of shit they posted and immediately called them unhinged. There wasn't a coherent enough effort here to ever actually do any real damage, not to my personal life or my social reputation. I'm literally coming out of this just as clean as I went in. Like shit you really could have tried to dig in on that "look what she said to this poor widdle baby" angle but you just went full retard sending me literal actual paragraphs saying the most basic of insults. Yeah wow there was really ever a chance people were going to seriously believe you, sure

It's just kinda. Yeah. I know I already said this but I can't get over, my end of this is opening my inbox and deleting shit and nothing more, i may answer stuff and discuss it but nothing is happening to me and im not "doing anything back". Meanwhile they were literally making blogs, maintaining covers, trying to stalk me, stalking my mutuals, found pictures of my family, were sending pictures of my family to other people.... but claim THEY made ME look stupid, that I'M entertaining for THEM. OK. I guess that's the level of genuine delusion you have to operate on to even start this shit to begin with

But uh yeah to finish your point I actually had a great day at work and got a good raise recently so I'm doing OK :) I've been uh, you know, working on drafts and maybe someday one of them will see the light haha. If I ever need a pick me up I can always tell myself, "at least I never did anything as stupid as THIS"

[painted-fanbird]

Still thinking about Kelsier because when am I not honestly XD

This time it’s how I’m choosing to characterize Rewrite Kelsier, because I crave a very specific flavor of Kelsier that seems pretty different from the general perception of him I’ve gleaned from scrolling through his tag lol

My Kelsier is many things, much like he is in canon. A drama queen, a dreamer, a man who can’t stay away from a challenge, he’s cunning, he ruthless

But at his core? He is kind, and he loves so, so deeply.

He’s also traumatized and suicidal.

Because to me, it is love that drives Kelsier’s actions within The Final Empire. It’s love that drives the Rebellion, that has him looking after the skaa when he can because they are hurt and traumatized and they need someone to inspire hope. It’s love and kindness that has him plucking Vin off the streets, teaching her allomancy and friendship, and it’s of course love that has him looking at Vin like the daughter he never had with Mare. Then there’s the crew, who you can’t tell me he doesn’t love. Because I think he does, deeply. These are his friends and he cares so much about them.

Kelsier’s methods for change are violent yes, but Scadrial is a violent world. Don’t forget, this is the world where it was codified into law that you are allowed to rape a skaa woman, as long as you killed her after so she couldn’t bear any bastard children. This is the world that held an executioners axe over his, Marsh’s, the crew’s, and Vin’s heads because of the very nature of what they are. He is merely matching what he’s being given.

But then there’s the lynchpin of his entire plan with the Rebellion. To die and mythologize himself as a martyr. That is not an act of selfless love. That is an act of hurt, coming from a man who doesn’t think he has anything to live for once the Rebellion is done. Kelsier is traumatized by Hathsin, Mare is dead, the society he lives in is callous and cruel and uncaring. The fight is all he has left, once that’s done his purpose will be fulfilled. So he makes it a last, brilliant hurrah, so that even if he fails the world might be a better place.

He dies in the best way he could have hoped. Fighting for the people he loves.

Then he doesn’t. Suddenly he’s alive and he’s not supposed to be. The Rebellion succeeded! The Lord Ruler is dead! He realized Mare’s dream!

And he doesn’t know what to do with himself.

So Kelsier throws himself into researching the missing Atium cache, into researching the secrets Rashek kept on Allomancy, both because he is truly curious about the answers to both things, but also so he doesn’t have to look in the eye the fact he wishes he didn’t wake up. The fight is over. What’s left for him?

That’s the crux of his arc in my rewrite. Kelsier has to learn how to live after spending so long trying to be dead. Which he does, ultimately. It’s two books worth of arc, but he realizes that he’s hurt and traumatized, but he loves and is loved. He has the whole crew, he has the kids, and life will get better. You can heal from that hurt. But you have to give it time. It does help that the man causing most of the problems is dead now, so the world is literally a better place to live, but my point still stands lol.

It’s better to live than it is to die, and ultimately Kelsier is a good man. Truly, one of the best the crew has ever known <3

[soupblr]

Thinking ab girl interrupted again the tags have literally died so bad it’s all weird -core shit like go away… anyway the lack of analysis about the characters in this movie annoys me so bad. I have points to make:

Lisa lashed out at and belittled Daisy to reassert her self concept, which was damaged by the fact that Daisy was released from the hospital and she wasn’t. Janet felt the same exact way but was able to express it in a healthy way by crying and speaking her unfiltered feelings about it. Lisa is so resistant to showing unguarded emotions other than anger, that this was impossible for her to use as a way to process emotions until the very end of the movie, when Susanna intentionally tries to hit her at her core. Anyway she was confronted with an unfairness that unfortunately also hit on the crux of her fucking character: Even someone who she absolutely knew for a fact was not fit to be released from the hospital made it out before her. Even super fucking obviously unwell Daisy got out (and to a worse environment, as she pointed out). Not only did that fuck with her sense of self but it also reinforced her messed up worldview. Everything she brings up in that lecture is something she had already turned over in her mind and found issue with, or had been keeping to herself. Obviously she took pleasure in tearing her down especialllyyy at the end. Lisa enjoys taunting Daisy specifically throughout the movie and chooses to point out things that Daisy does not want to confront/admit to, and especially things which she does not want others to know about her. She has buttons.

Following on that: Lisa didn’t intend for what she said to Daisy to result in a suicide, and I struggle to see her saying the same words if she knew it’d end up like that. (Insert commentary i need to go back and rewatch a few scenes to verify before i type lol). Anyway the scene where susanna calls police and lisa grabs the money… she didn’t give it to Susanna because she trusted her to follow after her (even if she hoped she would), and she didn’t give it just so she could yell about it at her later (at the end). Considering the state of the house when Susanna returned, I think it is likely that Lisa had considered a few outcomes by this point and was not taken off guard by what she saw. She had already been thinking of how they’d get where they were going ($$$) which did not involve Daisy as a participant, and she obviously wouldn’t alert authorities by herself. When Susanna called immediately, she created a time constraint. Lisa acted according to the plan/goals she had and prioritized not getting arrested.

Additionally: Lisa always has to run away, so she made running away her choice. When your sense of agency is damaged or taken from you: any choice at all, even those which destroy you, are still choices. If you don’t believe the situation can be changed to give you better options, this can be the only thing that “frees” you. I see her fleeing Daisy’s house as her running away, but of course she would reframe it as a cold decision she made just as easily as anyone who’d say that watching the movie.

Anyway all that to say I miss when ppl would actually talk ab this movie… I feel like all of the characters are so misunderstood bc ppl cannot look at them outside the lense of whatever disorder they supposedly have and it’s a real shame 🫠 y’all they’re literally running away to disneyland to be princesses and we all completely slept on that.

[goetzjpvis]

2/26/24 "Phoenix" JPT3702

A general pattern I've noticed across Tezuka's works is the idea of a minor societal/personal flaw which is then blown up into being the crux of his story's conflict, which is very much something I enjoy! Tezuka's Phoenix is another example of these same storytelling devices, following the lives of several individuals who seek out feathers from the illusive phoenix, several of whom are tasked to retrieve it for the sake of an empress (Queen Himiko) concerned about her looks...!

What does that say about Queen Himiko? As illustrated by the book, Himiko is obsessed with her appearance. She constantly cries about how she is getting older and her wrinkles are showing more, leading her to behave more erratically in order to gain a sense of control. As a result, she orders several generals and those under her army's command to retrieve the phoenix's feathers, in so invading the country of Kumaso.

While on a small scale, this does say that looks are something pathetic to obsess over, it also teaches the important lesson in that you must keep small matters small. Queen Himiko has an insecurity which ends up being the reason for invading and slaughtering another country, which is completely blown out of proportion! In the past, we have seen kings kill their subjects because they looked at them weird, and even now, we can see the invasion of countries for... oil! Tezuka's manga takes a peaceful protest against these matters by displaying how ridiculous Queen Himiko's (and by extention, other's) actions are.

This manga also tackles the individuality complex, which queen Himiko definitely has, and her brother's keen ability to take over the country from within using her insecurity for his own gain. This is likely a lesson to readers to not allow themselves to think they're more special than anybody else, and to not let your insecurities control you. I assume that as a physician who has gone through training, Tezuka must have felt the need at one point or another to conform with his fellow doctors and employees. Perhaps Himiko's brother is a metaphor for society's demands to be "normal"? This would explain why Himiko cracked under pressure so easily from her looks alone.

Another point I want to touch on was the spy, and his invasion of Kumaso. I found it interesting that after everything he did to his wife's village, he ended up simultaneously saving her from the army. I think the dialogue between her and him (in the cave) displayed what I would consider a 'moral weakness' in that he knew it would be wrong to kill his wife's entire family, but he did so anyways, and when faced between a crossroads of his decisions, all he could do was 'save' his wife from a suicide attempt as a means to atone for his selfish decision. He's trying to have his cake and eat it too! This theme I see also in "The wind rises", and this character archetype is seen as deeply flawed. cowardly, and something for those in society to avoid being.

Some funny last things I want to note: Saruta looks literally like a monkey, lol

I also noticed a lot of Tezuka's stylistic choices being derivative of disney..... when the dog was shot in the butt with an arrow early in the story, you could see his "yelp" look like how Mickey Mouse's does when he's struck in the back! I think Tezuka was reading lots of Disney comics and watching their animations when he was writing his own comics!

[lesbianswarm]

sorry im having harrowhark thoughts

htn and gtn spoilers

This is from someone else’s post but I didn’t wanna reblog their post and leave this text so here’s their thoughts that prompted this lol:

This post is kinda strange to me in the sense of like, looking at the totality of Harrowhark and dubbing her strange because she doesn’t fit our societal norms and doesn’t make excuses for it.

I think OP is right in some sense. Harrowhark is performing 99% of the time. She is a symbol. Her identity is so tied to being the Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House, there’s barely any Harrowhark underneath that can be separated from that.

The Reverend Daughter is someone her house looks to as a leader. Their necromantic prodigy. The last child born on the Ninth. She gives them solace as they’re dying and raise their hopes in sermons. They love her. They kiss the ground she walks upon.

Harrowhark Nonagesimus, is a victim. She is unbelievably scared. Her parents committed an atrocity and she is paying the price. She has never been a child. Harrowhark believes everyone hated her. She is guilt ridden.

Harrowhark opened the locked tomb.

Harrowhark’s parents killed themselves.

The Reverend Daughter prays the tomb is forever closed.

Her parents sit behind her in every sermon.

Not even Gideon, her “closest friend”, knew the extent of her grief and hurt. The Reverend Daughter wanted Gideon dead. Harrowhark could not stand a world without Gideon.

Harrowhark’s mask is the Reverend Daughter. She is not dramatic. She is frustrating, untrusting, and a bitch. But she is not “strange”.

She is often “classically” Ninth.

Harrowhark, bare, is a traumatized kid. She doesn’t know how to really socialize. She can’t trust her own sense of reality. She’s insanely paranoid. The only person she actually trusted killed herself to save Harrowhark.

Harrowhark, at her core, is hurting bad.

Harrowhark is the product of 17 years of not getting proper support. All she had was Crux, at best,

What kept her going was the pressure of being the product of her parent’s genocide, the guilt of that. The guilt of their suicide. The pressure to save her house. She loves her house. She loves the tomb. But Harrowhark hates herself very deeply.

Harrowhark tried to kill herself before the tomb.

Once Harrowhark became a lyctor, saved her house, and couldn’t return to bring the Reverend Daughter, that she sort of shut down?

She wasn’t allowed to die, according to herself. But she was only alive for Gideon. It wasn’t until meeting Abigail, who showed her the real support of an actual caring Adult and Magnus explaining Gideon’s sacrifice that Harrowhark can’t kill herself. That she HAS a life.

Harrowhark has always had the purpose of being the All Powerful Reverend Daughter. But what I wish for her is to just be Harrowhark.

I hope she finds tenderness. I hope she finds peace. I hope she is given safety and can learn to have fun.

I hope Harrowhark can have her own identity and learn to be her own person.

[mashnotesofthemythopoeic]

Fic Masterpost

So, in the spirit of full disclosure - all the X-Files fiction I’ve ever written, as memory serves. And some thoughts on how this fine fandom has taught me to write. 

Starbuck (circa 1998)

I’m not kidding, this is really embarrassing, absolute beginner stuff, but we all start somewhere and it’s interesting in an evolutionary sense. I found these on  Zuffy's X-Files Homepage.

Without The Bee  -  I couldn’t bring myself to look at this one. That title says it all. 

Agents of Change: Return from Antarctica  -  Obsessions—the Scott Expedition and the X-Files—collide. Rough early days, but probably with hints of potential. A legit turkey of a title! 

Penumbra 1998 - 2009

(I’m not going to bother with Gossamer links.) Learning the ropes as I went. Oblivious to so, oh so many things. Rickety, untrained writing, but mindlessly in love with creatively inspired by the churlish charms of our two razzle-dazzle creatures of the night. 

Contact High  -  The last line was plagiarized, pure and simple, from one of Gerald Durrell’s books about his childhood in Corfu. It’s bothered me ever since, so the big thing I took from this experience: by all means steal the rhythm of something, but at least change a word or two. 

Vespers  -  Very stoned ramblings. Inspired by John Leonard’s X-Files essay in The Nation that I’d managed to extract off a microfiche in a university library. I have a soft spot for this fic, probably because Khyber picked it very analytically apart, which was like having Jonathan Galassi or someone suddenly pay attention to you. He introduced me to 'show, don't tell', a paralyzing concept if ever there was one, which I yet only fitfully grasp.

Black Hole Season  -  Still breakin’ all the rules. This one was hugely popular, and amidst all the ballyhoo, Punk Maneuverability emailed me and quietly said: ‘Please pick a POV and a tense and stick with it’—vastly important advice that I was probably too full of myself to heed. This one won a Spooky award, one of the greatest moments of my life that I had to keep completely to myself (therein lies the painful crux of fanfiction.)

Parabiosis  -  I was eating cereal and flipping through the dictionary, and there it was: parabiosis. Who knows what it means. I didn’t have a computer, and was working in the mountains, so I wrote the whole thing out on paper several times, unimaginable now. It flowed through my brain as I scrambled through the woods in the evenings. Nothing will ever be that easy again.

Honeymoon Video  -  Promising title, not much there.

Blue-Sky Conjecture  -  unfinished Scully/Kresge

The Cretan Paradox  -  Americana. JET sent me an ear of corn from a corn maze, because she’s thoughtful like that. 

Free Beer Night at the Astrodome  -  Cut years ago in despair out of Heuvelmans’; I think part of it went back in. 

Fathoms Five  -  In one of Gerald Durrell’s books about his childhood in Corfu, his brother steps in a swamp and says that his shoe is ‘full of fathoms five’, so that’s where I got that Shakespearean misquote. I resisted writing this for a long time, but it would creep into my mind as I was falling asleep. I think this is a pretty good story, but it could have used one more draft, so since then, I’ve resolved never to rush to post. Events of this year kind of date this story now. However, it’s rather pleasant to read about a careless, joint-passing, COVID-free 2020.

Fathoms Five Outtakes and gag reels - Sorry about the glitchy old site and bad font.

A random smut biscuit  -  Uncharacteristic, I know!

Octopods  - I loved this one, but it never fit in anywhere.

Maundy Thursday  

Untitled Snippet 

World’s Tiniest Zombie Fic

∩dsᴉpɐᴉsᴉnɯ -  Very flawed, because it was written and posted under a fund-raiser time crunch. I really should overhaul it. The X-Files was ending and I was so depressed when I wrote it, and that’s an unfortunate tincture to saddle a story with. 

The Inscrutable Pair  -  How The X-Files taught me to embrace ambiguity. Goreyesque nonsense à la Gashlycrumb Tinies that also troubles itself to rip off Eliot and Homer. 

(7-Year Cold-Turkey Hiatus From the X-Files)

Gave away DVDs, got some perspective, did a little growing up, tried and failed to write a screenplay, two novels, etc. Then they put The X-Files on Netflix. One lonely night, I thought: what could it hurt to watch Darkness Falls? 44 minutes later, with shaking hands, going for the hard stuff—Redux II. Lol, the hard stuff of ancient philes. 

The Mythopoeic*  2016  - 

Heuvelmans’ On the Track - The nearly suicidal heartbreak that surrounds this story—it was the first X-Files fic I got bogged down in and couldn’t finish, and it left me with a huge mental stigma—sweetens its completion. Under its shadow I tried to become a Real Writer, without success. Give things time, I learned. Just keep working hard. The initial failure of this story taught me stuff that I now wouldn’t trade for anything. 

*I came back just intending to hang out with Philes, and didn’t want to make a big deal, and had no intention of posting fic, so I gave little thought to the name. But, characteristically ostentatious name, check. Still keepin’ it real, pure and self-taught, a bit closer to what Chuck Palahniuk calls a ‘kitchen-table MFA’. Check.

But what I really want to say is this. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to try writing if I hadn’t been in this marvelous fandom, having the method and the means demonstrated all around me by wonderfully competent and encouraging writers for whom I felt such reverence that having them reach out or comment on stuff was earth-shaking. They showed the way, and I followed. Hands on my heart, friends, I owe you everything.

[meggannn]

i'm interested in hearing your thoughts on garrus being shoe-horned into the best friend role if you want to talk about it!

I may not be able to talk about it as much as some people who are super Garrus-critical, but yes I can try!

this really becomes a problem in ME3 more than the other games. basically my understanding of Garrus’s writing in ME3 is that they were well aware that of the fact that he was a fan-favorite, and didn’t want to threaten that, so they made it his crux. they took most of the fandom’s feelings for Garrus and decided to reflect that in Shepard’s relationship with Garrus, but by doing this, they basically ended up pretending a relationship had been there throughout ME1-2 that existed in some player’s heads. of course, Mass Effect is an RPG (well, sort of) so in theory... your best friend could be whoever you want to be, so with that in mind, it’s a little strange for a dev team to go “your best friend is this one character and we will write all of his scenes around that assumption.” unless they really want to play up the fanservice, I guess.

when he’s introduced in ME1, people joke about how they would never not recruit him, but it is a possibility—you could run through the entire game having only met Garrus in the Citadel Tower and never spoken to him again—in which case by meeting him again in ME2, it is a little strange to see that guy you barely remember from the Citadel in the last game show up, but not entirely unwelcome, because at least you, like, recognize him. it’s a little odd how you banter like old friends by making fun of his scars, but what is straight-up bizarre is how in the next game, ME3, Garrus talks about how he was there with you fighting Reapers from the beginning. of course, not a lot of people would specifically go out of their way to avoid recruiting Garrus in ME1, and very few people probably naturally avoided him standing by the elevator in ME1 (which is the only way to not recruit him if you don’t find him in Dr. Michele’s clinic), so the odds of someone not recruiting him in ME1 are low unless they intended to, but it’s still possible.

come ME2, I think they chose to forget that. a few lines have changed in 2 if you don’t recruit him in 1, but not many. remember in ME1, Garrus was an optional squaddie, who had an optional side quest, and his relationship with Shepard there was very much superior/subordinate, or as some people interpret it, more mentor-like. the most personal they get is when they talk about their jobs, the difficulties they face making moral choices, a bit about their families, and Spectrehood. it’s a nice introduction to Garrus’s character but the lines are drawn pretty clear between their roles; by the end of ME1, given the canon dialogue, the closest I’m personally willing to believe of their relationship from helping him deal with Saleon is “subordinate I am fond of,” or post-Saren after Garrus leaves the Normandy, “ally I can call on later.”

and then Shepard dies and is gone for two years. by ME2, when you meet up with him again, I actually find this jump from “subordinate” to “ally/friend” works for my Shepard, but it might not for people who never really engaged with Garrus or even liked him on the SR-1, or those who weren’t thrilled with the idea of him... basically running off to kill as many people as he could on Omega after Shepard got themselves spaced. if you don’t romance him in ME2, he has so little content in ME2: his recruitment mission, post-recruitment convo, loyalty convo trigger, loyalty quest, and post-loyalty convo. if you romance him, you get several more scenes, but compared to other romanceable companions like Miranda or Jack—whose attitudes toward you change the more you talk to them—or even Samara, who you can just chat with while looking out at the stars, Garrus’s platonic relationship with Shepard seems to stall after the Sidonis quest: you gain his loyalty for the suicide mission and then you’re assumed to be all cool. realistically, they could’ve given us a lot of reasons why Garrus might not want to talk—he’s probably still reeling from getting his face blown off and confronting his betrayer again, or if you don’t let him kill Sidonis, maybe he could’ve gotten pissed at Shepard and confronted them—but that’s me trying to justify a lack of content. truthfully there’s very little non-romanceable Garrus content in ME2 to build up that “best friends” angle they want to sell in ME3.

in ME3, you DO get more content that shows how naturally “at ease” he feels working with Shepard: his recruitment mission, longer conversation trees when he joins, more banter from squaddies—including Garrus—on missions, him inviting you to go bottle-shooting, a scene with him after every main mission where he asks you how you’re doing, if you miss Ash/Kaidan, mutual struggles over the burden of leadership, worrying over his family, etc. by this point though, if you didn’t romance him, he’s treating you like his best friend even though he basically ignored you all of ME2. again, you could rationalize that time as his social awkwardness on a Cerberus ship, or him dealing with trauma, but in my friend’s words, it’s really more of bioware telling-but-not-showing that they really wanted you to like this guy but waiting until the last game to give him consistent scenes with the player that reflected that closeness.

on paper, Garrus makes a lot of sense to be close to Shepard, because assuming you recruit him in ME1, he’s been fighting Reapers with Shepard in every game, but also... so has Joker or Chakwas or Tali, for the same reason; so does Ash or Kaidan, for being the only Alliance teammate who was there at the beginning and end (assuming they didn’t both die); so does Liara, for being there every game and only abstaining in ME2 because she was still dealing with the fallout of saving your life (there’s lots of criticism of her being “forced” on the player too and while I agree with some of it, that’s a topic for another time lol). Bioware does introduce Garrus early in each game—I don’t know if this was intentional, because they knew he was so popular so they wanted to give him to the player early—but then he has so little to say in ME2, the game about building relationships, that introducing him early just means he stands around for half game talking about calibrations. a lot of fandom, especially shakarian fans, end up filling the gaps of ME2 with their own headcanons, myself included, to make the relationship development feel a little smoother, but the trouble there is when we start treating it like it was always canon for everybody.

I know it seems weird to complain that such a popular character should’ve had even more content—there are lots of other characters just as or more deserving who got really screwed over (coughs Ashley)—but in my ideal world, they all would’ve had more content lmfao.

[liquidstar]

I'd love to hear some of your recommendations! And I'm good without any content warnings, but since you're posting this for all your followers to see probably best to add them

Alright sure! I’ll be general then and since you’re just starting out this will sort of be bringing up a lot of really popular ones, the really good ones where the general consensus is “you gotta see this!”, but I’ll also try to give ones from different genres so you have a variety of things to pick from, so this isn’t really a list of personal favorites but I’ll throw in a couple of those too lol, but generally think of this as a handy beginners guide with just a little personal bias.

I wrote a lot so I'm gonna put them under the cut here.

Fullmetal Alchemist

Fullmetal Alchemist is a franchise that’s considered a must-watch, it takes place in a world where alchemy is a borderline magical power, but is considered scientific in-universe and follows scientific laws, namely the law of equivalent exchange. Something can’t be made from nothing, to gain something of equal value must be lost. The story follows the story of two brothers, Edward and Alphonse Elric, who at the ages of 10 and 11 committed alchemy’s one and only unforgivable sin, human transmutation, in an attempt to bring their mother back to life. As a result, one brother lost his arm and leg and the other lost his entire body, leaving his soul bound to a suit of armor. However the brothers are resolute to regain their original bodies, and the older brother, Edward, joins the State Alchemists, a branch of the military, to try to gain access to research materials to help them achieve their goal. But was that really such a good idea?

Fullmetal Alchemist can be a bit confusing to get into due to the fact that there are two series: Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) and Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood (2009). The latter is a reboot with a different story that follows the original manga. They both have the same beginning, but diverge paths and tell very different stories. My recommendation for how to watch this show is: Watch 2003 first, and Brotherhood second. Everyone has a different opinion about which is better, but everyone agrees that 2003 has better backstory but a contrived ending, and Brotherhood has a rushed beginning (Because it works off the assumption that you’ve seen 2003) with a great and fulfilling ending. If you can’t do both I say just watch Brotherhood because it will leave you more satisfied and you don’t have to watch 03 to get into it.

For both series the biggest trigger warnings are: Parental death, child death, pet death, war, genocide, dismemberment, religious themes, and miscarriage. For brotherhood specifically: on-screen suicide, and for 2003 specifically: rape (not on-screen) and pregnancy from it. The 2003 series is also a lot darker than Brotherhood which has a more optimistic tone, so that’s worth noting too.

Soul Eater

A show I think is incredibly fun, and a good one for an October watch if you wanna save it. It takes place in a world where certain people have the ability to transform into weapons, and they team up with other people who become their meisters. The characters often travel around, but the main setting is Death City, a fictional city in Nevada based off of Las Vegas but with a huge Halloweentown vibe, and a school right at the top of it called the Death Weapon Meister Academy (DWMA) where a bunch of kids that turn into weapons learn how to hunt down witches and kishins (Beings that consume human souls). The school, of course, is run by the grim reaper, Lord Death himself.

Our main characters for the series are a group of 7 students. Our protagonist Maka Albarn and her weapon partner Soul “Eater” Evans, a scythe. A loud mouth assassin named Black✰Star and his weapon partner Tsubaki, who has many weapon forms. And the son of the grim reaper, Death The Kid, and his two weapon partners Liz and Patty Thompson, who are twin pistols. There are also a bunch of really lively colorful background characters and antagonists, and the cast of the show being as insane as it is really makes it, on top of the great atmosphere and of course the plot, which just builds more and more as the series progresses. Also Crona is there and we all love Crona.

Trigger warnings for this show include: Child abuse (Mental and physical), manipulation, snakes and spiders (The motifs of two major villains), some very surreal moments that can verge on unreality. Also, in the dub and most subs: misgendering of a canonically trans character. Crona is a character who is non-binary, but the dub and subs use gendered pronouns for them due to general ignorance about neutral pronouns in 2008, though this isn’t the fault of the original series and falls on the translators hands.

Also it’s important to note: that the first 3 episodes are prologues and they take themselves less seriously, there’s more fanservice in them than there is in the rest of the series (Except for Blair she stays the fanservice character :pensive:)

Zombieland Saga

Idol anime is really prevalent as a genre, the most popular being Love Live, but my personal favorite is Zombieland Saga. It’s an idol anime, but it’s also a comedy about zombie girls who become idols. It sounds ridiculous but there’s an insane amount of heart in it regardless, it wasn’t a show I expected to get emotional at but I did! It also made me laugh a lot too. The series itself can serve as a bit of a subversion on what idols are, not just because they’re literally zombies, but because of who the characters are.

Sakura Minamoto is a character who starts off as a more typical idol, a peppy pure girl, as the series continues her struggle with depression gets highlighted. Saki Nikaido serves as her initial foil, a delinquent girl with a criminal record who subvers the idea of pure perfect idols. Ai Mizuno, a former idol who has since undergone severe trauma (The way she died). Junko Konno who has ideals that seem very different on what idols “should” be due to the time period she died. Lily Hoshikawa, an explicitly transgender idol. Yugiri nolastname, a former high ranking courtesan, subvering the pure image of an idol by being a sex worker. And Tae Yamada, a completely nonverbal idol who’s still treated with the same amount of importance as the rest of the team. The premise here really is just that these girls don’t fit the incredibly rigid mold of what idols should be and yet they still all deserve love and they gain a fanbase by being their earnest selves.

Trigger warnings for this series aren’t incredibly severe but since they’re zombies there’s still talks about death and they way they died (Including motorcycle/car accidents, plane crashes, getting struck by lightning, and a heart attack), there’s also comedic dismemberment, as in their arms just sort of pop on and off and stuff like that. The most notable thing is the deadnaming of Lily, the trans idol, by her father, but it doesn’t appear to be malicious in any way.

Note: this series is in the middle of it’s second season right now, if you want to wait until it’s over it should be 12 episodes long and just aired it’s 3rd, so about 9 more weeks.

Death Note

This is also absolutely another series that gets recommended to people right off the bat, and for good reason, this show is an intricate game of chess between a serial killer and a detective trying to catch him, and it’s incredibly easy to get super invested in the suspense of what happens next. The story begins when a shinigami, a god of death, drops his “Death Note” into the human world out of pure boredom. A Death Note is simply a notebook where if you write someone's name in it… They die! And who better to pick up such a powerful object than Light Yagami, a prodigy praised for his genius and academy accomplishments as well as his charm and popularity, and with a very strong but juvenile black-and-white sense of justice, likely due to being raised by a cop.

So naturally Light begins his power trip as soon as he finds the notebook, he intends to “fix” the world by cleansing it of all the bad people, but truly he intends to become the world’s new god. Or the “God of the new world” as he puts it. But there’s one thing standing in his way, a detective resolute on catching him with the codename L. The series entire crux is a game of cat and mouse between these two, as they try to outsmart each other and the murders continue, Light loses more and more of his humanity, L becomes more resolute on catching him. There are more twists and turns than a cheetah race, and it’s honestly pretty addictive to see what happens next.

Trigger warnings here obviously include a lot of death and murder, including suicide, but in some cases it’s a forced suicide at Light’s hands. Also abuse, as Light loses his humanity he isn’t above manipulating and discarding people who love him. And one instance of near-rape on screen fairly early on, but the purpitrator dies before it happens and the victim escapes.

K-On!

Slice-of-life is an incredibly popular genre, and K-On! is the quintessential example of it. It’s a series that not everyone will like, because not a lot truly happens, and it can be overly saccharine or “moe” for a lot of people, and that’s fine. But I personally think that despite not a lot happening, the story has genuine substance, more than you may gather at first glance. It’s true that not much in the way of big plot really happens, it’s mostly life events, that’s why it's a slice-of-life. But it’s not about nothing. The real theme of the show is the fleeting nature of youth. It’s about how important the friendships you form at that time are, how they’ll stick with you for a lifetime, and how everything comes to an end. It’s sweetness even becomes a little bittersweet because you knew their after school tea time would end come graduation, and as they realize this it breaks their hearts a little, but they continue on, because they’re still After School Tea Time!

The series itself is simply about 5 girls in a band, Yui Hirasawa on lead guitar, Mio Akiyama on the bass, Ritsu Tainaka on the Drums, Tsumugi Kotobuki on the Keyboard, and Azusa Nakano on Rhythm Guitar (Who shows up later). They’re in a club at school called the light music club where they waste a lot of their time just drinking tea and eating cake, but they’re having fun and that’s what counts! The series has a lot of really great direction and expressive animation despite the fact that a lot of it is just sitting around and talking, it’s incredibly visually interesting so you don’t get bored.

I honestly don’t think there are any big trigger warnings I can give for this series, maybe that Sawa-chan can be a little too forceful when she wants to dress up the girls in cute outfits sometimes but it’s usually not presented as too creepy especially after season 1 where they tone it down due to straying from the manga.

Mob Psycho 100

This series is an absolute love letter to the art of animation as a whole, the artstyle itself may not seem like much to look at but the animation is some of the most expressive, fluid, creative, and vibrant out there right now, it’s the type of series that you can tell was made with a real passion for its medium and it’s story. It’s protagonist is Shigeo Kageyama, nicknamed “Mob”, a term that literally means “Background character”. Mob is a middle school kid and an incredibly powerful psychic, like, insanely overpowered, but he’s currently working part time for a shady conman, Reigen Arataka. Though it may seem as if Reigen is just using Mob for his powers, their bond is actually a very sweet one and you can tell they care for each other, it’s a very important one at the heart of the series.

The core themes of the series itself are what really make it shine, it’s message is stated as clearly as possible in the opening songs, “your life is your own” and “if everyone is not special, maybe you can be what you want to be”. Put simply, you’re the protagonist of your own life, but the other important message of the series is that all the supposed background characters are just as important. The friends you make, the connections you have with other people and the way they impact you, they’re what make you strong. No one is born special, everyone is just a normal person, and everyone deserves kindness. It’s a series that I recommend incredibly strongly for just how powerfully it portrays this message.

Trigger warnings for this series include kidnapping, possession, a scene with a “man in a dress” joke, and a racist design for a background character. Also (spoilers) a scene where it seems like a child was murdered and a scene where it seems like Mob’s entire family was murdered.

Kaguya-Sama: Love Is War!

Hey, speaking of amazing animation, Kaguya-Sama is a romantic comedy series centered around the premise of two incredibly arrogant people falling in love. Kaguya Shinomiya and Miyuki Shirogane are the vice president and president of the student council at the prestigious Shuchi'in Academy, they eventually develop feelings for each other but they’re both simultaneously too proud and too insecure to admit it, so the real crux of the series is the 3D chess they play with each other to try and get the other to confess first. Along with the scatterbrained secretary, Chika Fujiawara, the treasurer in desperate need of Prozac Yu Ishigami, the cast is incredibly fun and they all fit into the comedy great. Every single little game of “do you like me?” that they play is written like the most intense thing in the world, the insane animation absolutely adds to it, making it seem almost like a psychological thriller, the comedy comes from the absurdity of just how much they hyperbolize it.

It’s not pure comedy though, due to a lot of the series being set up around mindgames, the characters are actually fairly psychologically complex with a lot of genuine development stemming from their childhood to explain why they are the way they are. The series may be about mindgames, but the actual narrative frames them as a juvenile way to go about relationships, a way to try to protect yourself from getting hurt because you’re afraid to trust. The entire core theme is that communication in relationships of any kind is the most important thing and you cant replace it with clever little tricks, so the main pair only ever make actual progress when they’re actually upfront with each other. Even if it’s scary to be that vulnerable with someone, especially if you’ve been hurt in the past like they have, the relationships you build off of mutual trust and openness will be worth the risk, and they can help heal you. And one of the things I love about the series is that this doesn’t just apply to the main pair, but it places equal emphasis on the importance of friendship. All the characters' relationships with each other are unique and interesting and they all develop the same way, with trust and openness, and they become better because of each other.

Despite being generally a comedy, a lot of the characters deal with some really heavy things too so trigger warning for: child abuse (not on-screen), child abandonment (again not on screen), anxiety and panic attacks, suicidal ideation- initionally played off as a joke but it becomes very obvious the character in question is legitimately suicidal and in the manga he nearly attempts it but is stopped, this plotpoint will most likely be in the anime at some point as it’s also not complete.

Your Lie In April

Alright I gave you a funny show now I’m going to make you cry. In fact it’s hard for me to type this synopsis because I’m an absolute crybaby and thinking about this show gets me, but I think it’s absolutely worth checking out because it’s a very beautiful sadness. Your Lie In April is a series that follows the stress and trauma young musical prodigies face in their lives, as well as the people around them, and it’s a series about the beauty of music and art, and just how much it affects people. The music in the show is absolutely gorgeous, the way that they convey emotion through it is so beautiful and intricate that it just sticks with you. You feel the music, and you understand.

I’m actually going to give the trigger warnings right now instead of at the end because in order to explain the plot I’ll have to talk about them so tw for: Child abuse (phsyical and mental, on-screen), terminal illness, death, in depth depictions of PTSD, vomiting, panic attacks, the works.

The series follows Kousei Arima, a formal piano prodigy who hasn’t performed since the death of his mother two years ago. Kousei's mother was terminally ill, but she was also incredibly abusive. Kousei has incredibly complex feelings about his mother because of this. The trauma she instilled in him is severe, but because he was a child, he still is a child, and he loved his mom a lot, as any child would, and he didn’t want her to die and he blames himself for not being good enough. He wanted to make her happy, and the only way he knew how to do that was to play the piano. So he played and played and practiced until he was perfect, they called him the human metronome. But he would still get severely punished for being anything less than perfect. He had lost all the passion he once had, and after his mother died it was the final nail in the coffin, his trauma manifests now in a way that makes him unable to play. But all that changes one day in April when he meets a violinist named Kaori Miyazono, a girl full of life and passion for music, she’s someone who according to Kousei “Exists in springtime.” and she’s going to help him play again and refined that love for music whether he wants to or not! Teen drama happens of course, but there are much bigger roadblocks ahead.

Assassination Classroom

This series is thankfully generally more lighthearted… Most of the time at least. The premise is pretty simple, but incredibly ridiculous. An incredibly powerful octopus-like creature is the teacher of a classroom of middle school students tasked with the assignment of assassinating him in order to save the world. The series starts off very slice-of-life as it focuses on introducing the very large cast of characters inside of Class E, also known as the “end class”, but it quickly gains traction and gets a lot more intense as time goes on.

The octopus creature in question, Korosensei, is actually a very kind and genuinely good teacher to all his students. The real crux of the series is that it’s sort of a critique on the educational system, the students in the end class are there because they’ve been ostracized from the rest of the campus, far away in the mountains, to be made examples of. Why? Because they’re students that are considered worthless, instead of getting help they’re only pushed back further down in the system and left to struggle within it fruitlessly. They’re given up on, despite being children with so much potential, because they don’t fit a very rigid mold. That’s what Korosensei wants to help them with, and they’re able to grow as people together. As the series progresses you feel such a great sense of unity for the class, they’re like a family, they stick together and it’s very heartwarming. And watching them work as a team of assassins is so fun!

However the series can get heavy at times too, it doesn’t stray from heavier subject matter at all and i found myself incredibly shocked by it a few times, so trigger warning for: Child abuse (on-screen and off), both at the hands of a parent and a teacher and in one case a parent who is also the principal, misgendering of a character, sometimes as a “joke” but other times played dead serious at the hands of his mother, child death- specifically suicide, a successful one as well as 3 assassination attempts that doubled as suicide attempts by the main 3 characters (weird parallel they all got there huh)

Puella Magi Madoka Magica

Honestly this is a series that is good to go in blind for if you need to tws, it’s a deconstruction of the magical girl genre, but if you don’t want to know more than that you can stop reading here. If you want to know more, it’s a series that starts off very light-hearted and in tune with typical magical girl conventions at first, however by episode 3 it’s made painfully clear that these girls are being led to sign up into something they shouldn’t. It’s heavy, though not incredibly so, but it’s also a lot to explain in a summary. Madoka magica is… It’s Faust with magical girls.

I’ll explain as much as I can without giving too much away. The story begins when Madoka Kaname and her friend Sayaka Miki encounter a creature who calls itself Kyubey, who says it can grant a wish of theirs and in exchange they have to become magical girls and fight witches. Both the girls are hesitant, but Sayaka wants to wish for her childhood friend’s injuries to be cured so he can play violin again, while Madoka is content as she is and can’t think of a wish. Luckily they have a mentor, a magical girl named Mami Tomoe who helps introduce them to everything. However something is stopping Madoka from becoming a magical girl, a mysterious new student who is also one herself, Homura Akemi, is resolute on keeping Madoka from becoming a magical girl by all means possible, for reasons Madoka doesn’t understand. Things get even more complicated when a rival magical girl shows up, Kyoko Sakura, who becomes Sayaka’s new rival. As things get more heated between those two they discover a terrible secret about the nature of magical girls, and what they truly signed up for.

Spoilers ahead but trigger warning for: Child death, parental death (backstory only), decapitation (off-screen), needles, incredibly surreal imagery inside the witch’s labyrinths that may feel unreal, mind control, suicide, depression and despair expressed by young characters. Also don't bother with Magia Record

The Disastrous Life Of Saiki K.

Alright something lighthearted now, there are a lot of comedy anime I enjoy, a lot of series that have made me laugh, but none has made me bust a gut like this series has, it’s absolutely hilarious. It follows the life of a boy named Saiki Kusuo who has psychic powers. His powers are incredibly overpowered, and he absolutely hates them, in his eyes they cause him nothing but trouble. There’s not much in the way of a plot to describe, because there isn’t any, the series is comprised of 5 minute segments surrounding Saiki and an incredibly vast and colorful cast of characters that are just all completely insane, many serve as parodies as types of anime tropes because the series as a whole is very self aware and doesn’t shy from breaking the fourth wall a lot, but the characters surrounding Saiki are what make his life… Disastrous.

Like I said there’s not really a plot to describe but like FMA people may get confused with this one, there are 3 seasons but one of them is titled “The Disastrous Life Of Saiki K: Reawakened” as is a continuation of the first two with just 6 episodes in it. Also for some reason only the second season isn’t dubbed so if you’re planning on watching it that way you’d have to either stop or switch to subs for season 2

The only major tw I can give here is an ongoing joke about a character being into his sister, he’s treated as disgusting for it of course because he’s a parody of that trope but that doesn’t make it any less uncomfortable, luckily he doesn’t show up much.

Little Witch Academia

Little Witch Academia is a series I personally just adore, it takes place in a world where witches are common and well-known among the people, but the era of witches is over and magic is dying out. However that doesn’t mean passion of magic doesn’t exist, the protagonist is a young girl named Atsuko Kagari, or Akko for short. She’s resolute on being just like her icon, a witch known as Shiny Chariot, as she attends the same magic school: Luna Nova! Unfortunately Akko isn’t exactly a magical prodigy, in fact she can’t even fly a broom, but that’s not gonna stop her, nothing will. Just like Chariot said, believing in yourself is your magic.

Once at school Akko gets into all types of crazy shenanigans with her with her two roommates, Lotte Yanson and Sucy Manbavaran, and occasionally her rival, Diana Cavendish. Akko still struggles a lot in school, in fact her inability with magic is pretty explicitly handled as a metaphor for a learning disability, and though this makes it harder for her she’s still resolute. Though the series is generally episodic, a concrete plot starts to form by the second core. Along with the help of her guidance counselor, Professor Ursula, Akko learns that she needs to unlock 7 “words” to bring magic back to the world, each time she learns a new one it comes with an important lesson to her and ultimately relates back to each of the core themes of the series

The series is pretty lighthearted so the biggest trigger warning I can give is one for bullying, two characters in particular tend to target Akko for not being a good witch and it can really sting to watch. Other than that none come to mind

[deripmaver]

7 for the fic ask meme 👀

OMG HEY HEY i lov ur writing your "bubble up in me" series fills me with uwus

this got kind of long bc i couldnt pick just one!!!! so its behind a cut just to be safe

7. What’s your favourite piece of description or narration?

okay im gonna give three examples bc im a cheater. the first is the ending of the aimeric fic:

It does not matter.

The regent is not here now.

Aimeric is completely, utterly alone.

the second is the ending of "the worlds more full of weeping" (spoilers i guess lol):

He sunk his fingers into the dirt. He felt cradled by it, felt warm and cozy as though it was holding him and not these too-small bones. If Laurent closed his eyes and really, really focused, he imagined he could feel the tiny, skeletal hand clinging to his beneath the earth, the two of them connected like one line from past to present.

“I know how scared you were,” Laurent said, eyes filling with tears. “I feel it still, how scared you were. I also feel how happy you were, what you were waiting for, what you never got to do.”

[...]

“I’m all that’s left,” Laurent whispered, peering down into the blackness of the earth. “I am all that’s left of you.”

He thought, maybe Auguste and I should go riding, later today.

and the third, and a completely different vibe altogether LMFAOOO is just this random sexy stream of consciousness from "control" (huge nsfw lauguste warning lmaooooooo):

How had he thought Auguste wasn’t good at this kind of play? He could be whipped, his tits could be beaten until he cried, they could fuck his open, aching cunt and fill him with their hot cum, and he could endure it – this, though, this, not only being opened wide in front of them but being made to cum through it, it was torture.

It was too much. His body was betraying him, again and again and again, cumming no matter how much he begged them to stop from behind the gag, making him enjoy it like a wanton slut. He never wanted to cum again, but they kept forcing him to, and he could not stop it from happening no matter how hard he willed it. His mind did not matter, his thoughts did not matter, he was just a toy, a slave to his body and his throbbing, swollen clit.

Damen, at some point, abandoned the crop for a second vibrating wand, and he and Auguste rubbed it alternately along either side of his clit, drawing the orgasms out faster and harder. Once, one of them dipped their wand low, circling the tiny dot of his urethral opening, and Laurent begged, “Stick it in there, stick it in anywhere, just don’t touch my clit anymore, please, I’m begging you, I’m begging you-”

Then, the next moment, it was back up on his clit, and Laurent’s sobs turned into screams.

for the first two, i like the narration/description because i think both of these were a kind of character study. i like the aimeric one because i think that's the crux of aimeric's character lmaoooo him having genuinely no support. the ending takes place with aimeric at 12-13 ish, but the ending line of aimeric being alone fits aimeric at basically every age, and also serves as a way to describe him immediately before he commits suicide (the passages of him right before his suicide are interspersed with that final "segment" at 12-13 immediately after the regent has left fortaine)

for twmfow (yes im finally abbreviating the title LMAO its too long to keep writing) i like it bc as ive said before that fic is 100% about trauma and ptsd. at the very end, laurent is finally acknowledging that he can never go back to how he was before he was traumatized, and he's letting himself grieve for all of the things that changed bc of his abuse, of course in this fic very literally as his younger, non-traumatized self is represented by a literal corpse (or, well, skeleton). but just to leave things on a happier note, i wanted to write that yeah, laurent cant "go back" like he wanted to at the beginning of the fic, but he can grieve and he can have new happy experiences with the ppl who love him. AND SO CAN YOU, READER!!!!!!!

for "control" i dont have anything really meaningful to say LMFAO i just am an absolute fucking slut for forced orgasms. the whole fic was inspired by this INSANE hentai manga thats basically the same premise as "control" (but actual noncon instead of cnc). anyway this passage was absolutely filthy and intense and i really liked writing it

[coffeeandcalligraphy]

Witness State & Coup de Grâce | Feeding Habits Update #3

Hey People of Earth!

Before we get into this update, TRIGGER WARNING that this chapter discusses attempted suicide, mental health issues, animal cruelty, toxic relationships, and some nods to starvation, so if these are topics you’re sensitive about, I would skip out on this update!

This chapter was a slight nightmare to draft as it went through many, many iterations due to a real struggle to attain the desired emotional arc, and also because of a few logistical problems. In total, it’s about two and a half months of work as it combines some scenes from the old chapter two while also patching areas I cut with new content. Despite the difficulties, I am so happy I pushed through because the final product is quite strong. Here’s a scene breakdown:

Scene A:

We start at the “beautiful place” AKA the cove Lonan and Eliza frequently visit. The last time we’ve seen Lonan was at the end of chapter two, when he had his mild “public freakout moment” on the steps of a cathedral. 

On the beach, he rests on the shoreline while reflecting on all the things he’s been tormented by since chapter two (wicked children, fathers, parenthood etc).

He sees an illusion of his father who is obviously not there (he’s very dead!) which propels him to converse about him with Eliza (remembering that Eliza and Lonan’s father were once romantically involved).

This conversation goes south as Lonan is able to unpiece some of Eliza’s mistruths until Lonan finally admits he wants to see his father again, insisting he’s still “alive” through the darkroom abandoned in Oregon him and Harrison failed to destroy in ch. 1 of Moth Work.

Scene B:

Lonan watches a moth through the window (that moth motif tho). Here he recounts what occurred at the hospital in ch. 2--the mother and her three kids taking him there, and then eventually being whisked away by Eliza.

Lonan heads to the kitchen to drink an acetaminophen but quickly realizes he’s not alone in the main apartment. His father sits on the couch looking over photo albums, each leaf holding the same photo: the postcard of Eliza that Harrison initially finds in chapter one of Moth Work. This vision obviously does not exist and is prompted by sleep deprivation but he doesn't know that lol.

Seeing this photo and his father prompt him to believe that he can only get away from this feeling of being haunted without Eliza in his life and further bad decisions ensue which I won’t get into!

I explained the meaning of the title HERE.

Excerpts:

Here’s the opening bit which is the most recent addition to the chapter:

The water is never murky, but today it doesn’t sparkle. Like it’s taken a low dose of cyan, it foams pale against the shore, an offering that wets the tips of Lonan’s shoes. He sits under the cove with one hand pressed into the current, each singular wave like a finger tottering over his veins. Today, their beautiful place is only an arched wall of stones and roily ocean.

Eliza is sunbathing. She lies on her back in the centre of the cove, where its mouth opens to a ceiling of sun. On the drive from the hospital, they both remained silent, Eliza’s hands taut like leather around the steering wheel, and Lonan’s head soldered to the cool window. Even when she pulled into the lot of a diner, named after a vague Canadian city or perennial flower, she said nothing, exiting the car to return to it with two crayon-coloured slushies, his red, hers orange. By the time she pulled up to the beach, her drink was half empty, his fully melted, urging against the brim of the cup. He followed her when she exited the car, parked against a row of pebbles, and placed his hand palm-first against the water the moment she lay against the sand and closed her eyes. Now, water puckers over the shoreline and between each of his fingers, a sort of absent massage. The water is a dull, vitamin-like blue. Warmer than he’s expected for the middle of February, pleasantly pruning his fingertips.

This is a direct continuation of that:

The sun has started to set. It flares against the horizon, its orange singeing the water’s blue. Like in front of the church, it fills him, its heat a comfortable grip around his throat. Though it should remind him to keep awake, its warmth lulls him closer to the sand until he rests his head just where the water laps. He knows it says nothing. He knows he has not slept in days. But to him, its rays nurse his skin like the loop of a nursery rhyme, and when he is parallel to the sky, he closes his eyes and welcomes the sun like it’s an infection. As colours pulse underneath his eyelids, water soaks the crown of his head, and it truly is like being buried at sea, just him, the sun, and the water at his perimeter.

The next chapter in this update is chapter four, aka Coup de Grace. This chapter was an absolute joy to write after struggling to get a handle on chapters two and three, and I’d consider writing this chapter to be, by far, the best writing sessions of my life. In this chapter I feel I really figured out the “crux” of Lonan’s character/his darkest secret, and that’s essentially that he believes all children are the wicked stems of adults, a belief he actually doesn't want to have, and actively combats until he sort of becomes absorbed by it. I learned a lot about my boy in this chapter and learning such important details about a character I’ve been writing for five years feels like a gift!

This chapter plays with form/the timeline a bit because we jump around on the timeline, almost like a movie that begins at the end. This was difficult to do in fiction, but I think I pulled it off, and am really happy with the chapter. Bear with me tho as this breakdown may be confusing:

Scene A:

We start with Lonan rapidly making his way to his father’s darkroom which sits in the middle of a forest. He’s brought supplies with him to destroy it.

The first line of this chapter mimics the first line of Moth Work, which you’ll see below.

Scene B:

We jump back in the fictive past to the morning that would’ve occurred right after the end of chapter three. Lonan goes about his morning routine but is disrupted by a loud thud from outside. Anya, the woman he’s befriended from chapter two, has jumped from the roof of the apartment complex. This attempt is unsuccessful.

His first reaction is to run to Anya’s apartment to see if her son, Joey, is okay. 

Scene C:

Less of a scene and more of an internal monologue of Lonan reflecting on Anya’s attempted suicide, and that he feels in some ways, she’s administered her own “death blow”.

Scene D:

Eliza takes Lonan to his father’s cabin to “get him away” from what’s happening at the apartment since he’s really taking the news badly.

Eliza tries to get Lonan to eat something because he hasn’t eaten much since Anya’s news, and they have a conversation about Eliza’s motives in volunteering Lonan to help Anya in the first place.

Scene E:

A flashback where 14-year-old Lonan and his father are at the cabin, about to kill a fish using the ikejime method. His father has informed him the fish is dead, but Lonan knows this is very much a lie.

Scene F:

The fictive present, where Lonan lies on a couch inside the cabin, Eliza tending to a fire. He has a bad feeling (he’s right about that lol)

Scene A2:

We continue the events from scene A as Lonan enters the darkroom, only to find out it’s been cleared out save for three pictures hanging that tell a story and reveals a lot of Eliza’s secrets.

All you need to know about these photos is that it makes their romance feel somewhat like a lie lol.

Eliza finds him at the darkroom despite telling him not to go alone, and Lonan tries to process the new info/secrets revealed.

Scene G:

In the fictive present, Eliza cuts off Lonan’s hair and together they burn each weft. They discuss a few things (his father, the women he’s befriended, future children, mating habits of the praying mantis)

Scene E2:

Back to the flashback where Lonan and his father have killed, cleaned, and eaten the fish. They rinse their hands off in the lake before his father knocks them both into the water.

Excerpts:

This is the opening, ft. the mirroring first line which makes me a lil too giddy:

The darkroom isn’t haunted, but a dead man owns it—and he knows exactly where to find him. Through the woods, Lonan brushes past bushes of gooseberries and wild rhubarb, a gas can sloshing rhythmically in his hands. In his teeth, he holds his flashlight so its beam brightens the pathway. It is not yet dawn.

This is a description of the darkroom that leads to the end of the scene:

He shouldn’t know where he’s going. The forest is so dense and unanimous, a duplication of itself, nothing more than repetitions of the same tree, same flower, same stream. But he doesn’t need to see to know where his feet take him—he doesn’t even need the flashlight. He’s memorized the direction to the darkroom like the pattern of veins on his own arm.

He is not surprised to see it still stands. As if protected from rain, thunderstorms, the fallen trees that crisscross at the walkway; it’s always been a divine place. The air is damp, and particles of mist cling to his throat.

He sets the gas can in front of the steel panelling that makes the door with urgency. He does not need to rush but cannot take his time.

Wildflowers burst from in between the cracks of concrete the shed sits on and he knows each species like they’ve been bred in his blood. Wax flowers, thistles, clusters of asters he’d sometimes gather as a boy and leave as offerings in the heart of the forest’s most prominent clearings, like an offering, or a ransom.

Lonan kneels once the first thread of sunlight leaks between the whisper of trees. He is familiar with this forest, the cabin not too far away, the messages the water speaks to him when he sits at its edge most nights, why the darkroom was his father’s favourite place and why it always will be. So when sunlight hits his eyes, he presses his fingertips against his lips, and looks to the sky for mercy.

Lonan watching his fave TV show that leads into Anya’s jump:

He turned the television onto its usual program while on his last three mandarin segments and looked on as a herd of caribou dotted a waterway. They moved like the current, pattering along the prairie, worriless. He should have heard the part where a wolf caught up to the herd, the same wolf that would later go on to single out a young fawn and silence it with two teeth in its throat like bullet wounds. He should have seen the part where the prey was consumed, its flesh a desperate shade of red. But the thud distracted him. Maybe not even a thud, more like a crash. A sound he felt in his temples, a ringing in his ear, like a chickadee. Lonan set the skin of the mandarin onto the coffee table and stood slowly. It’s his body that moved him, no force of the mind, toward the balcony. In one movement, he unlocked and shoved open the glass sliding door, rucking it forward with his body weight when it stuck. On his lip, he tasted citrus and salt, a mixture of fruit and sweat.

He heard death before he saw it. The way each identical sliding door of the apartment units around him shook open, just like his. What a woman on the sidewalk declared, her tone so shrill, he couldn’t tell if she was delighted or horrified, something like, “I thought she was a bird—I thought she was a gift from heaven.” The garbled sound of an infant, confused by the sound concrete makes when a human batters it.

We get Lonan’s first response and some Joey and *that stunning motif tho*:

Lonan did not deescalate the stairs to the ground floor to join the growing crowd. He did not call an ambulance or rush to perform CPR. He ran upward, scaling flights of stairs as if airborne, with little effort. Once he reached her unit, it was the tin of madeleines he noticed first, sitting unopened, untouched, dare he thought, neglected on her welcome mat. It’s this that lulled him, freezing him in place for a moment. He recollected nothing of bringing the madeleines to her the evening previous, of leaving them neatly tucked against her straw welcome mat. Innocently idle there, his gift unrecognized.

Joey sat on the couch. The television was on, projecting technicolor polygons onto the boy’s face. Lonan did not register what it was he watched, which animated shapes pounced and danced on screen. Joey did not cry at first. He sat, staring wondrously at the screen like it was a trap door to a different dimension. The socks secured around his miniature feet looked freshly ironed, and his hair smelled like his mother did when Lonan first met her—like coconuts.

The buzzing of onlookers and neighbours sounded like the caribou running. A constant drumming of a snare, a guttural kind of ambience. He thought of Anya the day previous, her desperate excitement to paint over the wall, the way she mixed that orange juice drink, incredulous, experienced. He thought of the sourdough he never picked up, and there on the counter they sat, one torn down the middle like it was ripped bare-handed, the other skewered with a chef’s knife. He thought of Anya’s hospitality, her coy excuses to help them both avoid embarrassment, the way each part of her apartment transformed into gold. He thought of their conversation, Anya’s initial instruction when she left him alone with her son. So when Joey cried, Lonan knew exactly to reach for the remote and tick the volume up until his sobbing quieted, like the last few minutes of a rainstorm, passionately loud, then stunningly silent.

Here we briefly reference 2 Kings 21:6: “And he burned his son as an offering and used fortune-telling and omens and dealt with mediums and with necromancers. He did much evil in the sight of the Lord, provoking him to anger.”

Anya will never be the mother she once was, in the capacity she longed to be. Joey will grow up without a father and with a mother who cannot mother him in the ways she’d always hoped; he’ll have no one to recreate. That is the real loss—what could have been. Anya burned herself into an offering, administered her own kill shot, provoked her own fate; either life or death, and her fate chose neither.

The following mirrors something Lonan’s sister, Reeve, says in Houses With Teeth about hunger:

The day Anya jumped from her balcony onto the sidewalk below, Eliza took Lonan to his father’s cabin. In a daze, he watched her pack a bag with enough things to tide them over for a month, and in that same daze, they reached the cabin before sunset. That night, Eliza rifled through the cabinets to put together a meal, and her findings assembled as a can of tuna topped with crumbles of saltines—cheap take on a deconstructed pâté.

She served him his dinner on a set of plates he vaguely recognized—terrazzo with a scalloped edge, maybe held a scrambled egg or halved tomato when he was a child. He stared through the French doors, down to the water that padded below. Even when she tried some for herself, putting on her enjoyment in exclamations like “It’s a culinary masterpiece. Refined. Daring. A little spectacular,” she couldn’t convince him to eat. His appetite disappeared when Anya fell from the sky; there would be no hunger as penance.

This is the fish flashback:

Lonan knows the fish is not dead. He is fourteen but not naïve. Sun warms the back of his neck; maggots shimmer over the gummy slick of the water’s surface. Today is what someone would describe as the perfect day. Trees whisper secrets amongst the spines of their leaves. Birds teeter on the neck of birch trees. A butterfly dusts its wings of the shore’s sand and nips at his childish knuckles.

The fish is not dead. This is fact. In his palm, it expands, its gills like the crescent cut of the moon. The fish is not dead. Its mouth kisses the air like it’s a divine thing, each blip of its lips greedy, like the air tastes of gold. The fish is not dead. Its scales grate against Lonan’s palms, shimmering, its prettiness its last defense mechanism. The fish is not dead.

More with this fish memory:

“It’s dead. It does not even know the taste of life. Why save it?”

“I don’t want to save it,” Lonan says. His father’s wedding band digs into his forehead. To an onlooker, it may look like he’s about to dip him forward into the water, not a drowning, but a baptism.

“What do you want to do with it?”

Mourn it, he wants to say. Pity it. Sacrifice it.

The water whistles ahead of them, all the uncaught sunfish gloriously slashing naively in the water. They are unaware of their future demise, and the current demise of their loved ones, bodies all piled into the net as if on display. Lonan’s eyes sting with lake water, a streak of it dripping onto his lip so when his father reaches over him and secures his hand like a marionette around the screwdriver, he tastes salt and doesn’t stop tasting it.

And the end of part A of the fish memory that gets a little gory:

“It dies for us,” his father says, his voice dampened, like the distant blip of the lake. “So we give it mercy in return.”

As the screwdriver’s tip lowers closer to the fish, Lonan licks his top lip and asks, “Why do we need to show it mercy if it’s already dead?”

“Le coup de grâce. A death blow. To end the suffering of the wounded.”

“But it’s already dead.”

“Even the dead still suffer.”

Lonan does not register when the screwdriver impales the fish’s brain. He does not register when his father uses both their hands to slit the fish’s gills with a hunting knife or register the warm spurting of its blood up their knuckles. He stares at the fish’s glasslike eye, and as he and his father gut and scale the fish, puppet and puppeteer, he imagines the way he’ll feel with its head in his mouth.

Here’s a section from the fictive present:

Seven days after Anya jumps off her apartment’s balcony, Lonan lies on a pig’s leather couch his father once towed in from the city, a damp washcloth doused in eucalyptus essential oil pressed to his forehead.

At first, he fears the blinking comes from stars and that the cabin’s roof has been removed. But as he comes to, he smells it, the earthy crack of wood, the wisp of smoke, and he knows the light that pulses is a fire.

Lonan opens his eyes. As he’s thought, he lies on his father’s couch, essenced water dribbling down his temples from the washcloth. Eliza sits hunched on the stone of the fireplace’s ledge, her shoulders ripening under the orange heat. She’s burning something. The scent of scorched film is not unfamiliar to him. Like his mouth, it is dry and acrid, like the lick of a battery.

“You promised,” she says, as if sensing he’s awoken. Lonan does not move, even as the eucalyptus soak drizzles into his eyes.

Eliza no longer wears the parka. She’s stripped to a pearl-coloured camisole, her feet bare and propped flush against the brick. Glossy red lacquer colours her toenails, reflects the light in ovular patterns along its surface.

“A false witness shall be punished, and a liar shall be caught,” she says. “Proverbs.”

Going to leave this tea here casually:

The darkroom was misplaced. This was Lonan’s first thought when he yanked open its steel panel door and entered to reveal its contents. He did not need the glimmer of a flashlight to confirm his instinct. This was not the same darkroom he’d known as a child, or the darkroom he found his sister in, or the darkroom him and Harrison tried to destroy. Everything was slotted away, puzzled back into a configuration so unknown to him, so wrong to him, that the organization felt more like war.

Unlike when he and Harrison had last stepped foot inside of the darkroom, lugging the gas can along with them, not unlike what he did then, the photos that used to string clothespinned in no justifiable order were now taken down. The bricks of photo paper forming a maze around the developing tables, the amber bottles of chemicals—all of it, meticulously put back in places Lonan knew they never had. Under his boots, he did not feel the crunch of glass or slip of forgotten negatives. The darkroom had been swept clean.

Lonan dropped the gas can at the darkroom’s entrance, and removed the flashlight from between his teeth, thumbing it off. He worked his way around the shed like he’d been wounded, staggering, stopping to hold himself upright. Nothing was in its rightful chaos. Expired film lay stacked in a waste bin he’d never seen before. Bad paper cuts had been shredded. The photos he’d been so accustomed to not looking at, all gone, except for three, evenly clipped on the last three lines.

In the distance, an eagle cawed. The stream trilled. Tadpoles cricketed along the embankment.

Lonan approached the remaining photographs like they’d electrocute him. They were displayed one after the other, each on its own line. The first, a picture not unfamiliar to him. Eliza standing in front of a colourful street of vendors. Her loopy signature on the back a jagged indication of where she signed it, most likely wobbling on a train, or in the back of a taxi. He picked it off its clothespin and held it up to a hole in the roof where sun bled through. Nothing had changed from the photo since he’d taken it last year, and he was almost grateful she’d left it fossilized when she took it from his pocket. His gratitude did not last by the time he saw the second photo, so unexpected, he had to glance twice.

His father stood arced slightly behind him, his hands not visible. Lonan knew where they were—one secured around his forehead, the next urging a screwdriver up a stone. Sun scalded the water’s surface, wrinkled it with light. He remembered the song his father whistled as he fried the sunfish on a birch branch, truly less of a song and more of a reminder as he hummed up and down each minor scale, not once stopping to check his work, like he knew better than any instrument.

Lonan plucked the photograph off the line and held it closer. Though he was shaded mostly by his father’s back, he knew they were both in it. He shouldn’t have been surprised when he turned it over to find that same looping signature inked onto the back, smudged, like she’d forgotten to let the ink dry before handling.

It would’ve been easier to think about the second photo’s implications had he not seen the third. He could’ve excused it—a shot taken by a neighbour, though the cabin was remote. A shot that fired itself, the camera discarded on the ground, though it was taken at eye level. A shot signed with familiar initials E.L.K, as if those letters could stand for anything but Eliza Louise Kiang. It would’ve been easier to excuse her presence. To excuse her knowledge of him, to forget she’d ever told him she didn’t know his father had children, that she swore she’d never have been with him had someone informed her. It would’ve been so much easier.

The last photo was not a photo at all, not in the same capacity at least. The ink had gone purplish from the elements but swirled, almost horror-like around the photo’s frame. He could have pretended the white swishes of colour were strands of lace, or the awkward scratch of photo blur. He could’ve pretended to not understand. But there it was. The light funnelling down on the black and white shape so he understood it was not a photograph he looked at, but a child.

I have already shared this line a few times, but it’s my favourite thing I’ve ever written oops!:

When she looked at him, she grinned, and he turned his face to the ceiling where a hole in the roof caved around a branch. The sun’s eye disappeared behind the bullet of the wood, leaving only its outer edges to skirt the sky, a veiling that felt less like an eclipse, and more like evidence of an exit wound. 

Obligatory “I’m the grass” shoutout:

“All people are like grass, and all their faithfulness is like the flowers of the field,” he says without once reading what’s actually written on the page. “Isaiah.”

“Isaiah was onto something, don’t you think? Poor grass, poor flowers—they all die in the end, but they have their God. They have their saviour. Everything dying except for God and his word.”

Eliza cuts another clump of hair. The fire welcomes its feed with haste.

“What does this have to do with children?”

“Do you feel you’re the God of these women, Lonan? Are you their saviour?”

Lonan shakes his head. “I’m the grass.”

And to finish:

After they eat the fish, Lonan and his father rinse their hands in the lake. This is respect. This is self-ordinance. This is a holy act.

His father stoops farther into the stream than he does, water nipping his knees. The sun has disappeared beyond the horizon, the sky now coloured periwinkle, silvering his hair. The taste of sunfish coddles Lonan’s tongue, oiled and briny with saltwater. They share a bar of orange glycerin soap, its scent cloying, like a rotting fruit basket. His father peels the bar between his palms, scrubbing until his fingers disappear under suds.

That’s it for this update! Hope y’all enjoyed! :) I’ll be back soon to update on chapter 5!

--Rachel

[betterbemeta]

Insinuating a trans person of any kind is anything like an incel is disgusting, I’m sorry.

1) you’re not sorry, that’s just something people say to make themselves sound more personable or to soften their statements. commit to what you say.

2) Did you know that “online subcultures that could have trans people in them” and “trans people” are not the same thing? One of them is:

 a subculture that someone willingly participates in and chooses to enter, and chooses to extract social validation from

and another is 

a fundamental crux of a person’s identity and the basis upon which they differ from the social norm.

Like I know that like 85% of us are lost in the sauce on here but the concept of sorting yourself as “truscum” is not somehow an inherently essential thing to a person’s trans-ness. You can continue being trans, but also not belong to a funtime shithouse that’s committed to self-harm and harassing people they think are less respectable than themselves. No subculture is fucking bulletproof just because some trans people might belong to it. There are gay people who support medicalization of gay identity and conversion therapy. It’s not homophobic to call other medicalists out even if it might implicitly include a criticism of those gay people.

There are even cis truscum out there– which reveals that “truscum” as a label is inherently a label that sorts transphobes, not sorts gender identity.

Both “incel” and “truscum/online transmedicalists” are online communities. You can compare and contrast online communities, online phenomena, internet subcultures. As it so happens, they both shock and horrify themselves into a kind of perma-disgust with themselves and other people as a form of decentralized social control. They both target young people who feel like others don’t talk to them like adults with respect offline. They both suicide bait people within and people without their spaces. They are both right wing aligned in politics and goals. 

They have a lot in common. But you’d be laughed off the bus for insinuating that “incel” is synonymous with the identity-demographic that has a stake in it, because it’s not synonymous with that identity. It’s a fringe, voluntary subculture.

Transmedicalist and online “truscum” culture is the same way. It’s something that people voluntarily participate in that is not essential or fundamental of their identity, they choose to draw trans men with “yaoi boi” and “fujoshi” written on a pair of huge tits, they CHOOSE to spread caricatures indistinguishable from the alt-right caricaturing ALL trans people.

They can stop being truscum at any point in time, and it is the choices they make that make them like incels, because trans people don’t have some kind of brain force field that prevents them from being targeted in the same style as incels, and if the only reason why you think people criticize incels is because their numbers contain nobody of “a sensitive demographic” and that they are an “acceptable target with no collateral damage”, think again, because incels also can influence trans people. 

That’s why this style of decentralized self-deprecation online gang is dangerous and we should take them seriously beyond ‘oh lol the straight cis men are sad, let them die mad.’ I shouldn’t need to explain that anybody can be an egg and if you look at any subculture or demographic and don’t think there are trans people in there, either in the closet or fearfully on the margins, I don’t know how to address that.

[momestuck]

Epilogues: Meat ch 28-32 [Epilogue 5]

So now we’re in different hands.

chapter 28

We return to John, this time with alt-Calliope narrating about his alarmingly blunt teeth. Also on further thought I have no more reason to use ‘she’ pronouns for alt-Calliope than proper Calliope (alt-Calliope does not even seem to use the name Calliope in narration, just things like ‘the dead cherub’), so I will use they pronouns, and will edit the previous post to reflect that.

alt-Calliope declares that they are not going to be ‘inserting thoughts into peoples’ heads’, though they will be ‘truthfully’ reporting those thoughts with more clarity than the subject of narration is necessarily prepared to acknowledge.

john would be mortified with human embarrassment if he could understand the clarity and precision with which i am willing to telegraph his thoughts. but his embarrassment is irrelevant to me. as always, the truth is paramount.

This mortifying description of how John thinks of Terezi includes a reference to “gap moe”, because of f u c k i n g course it does.

John worries if this makes him like a creepy weeb who collects body pillows, but in dialogue dismisses this as something that would only make sense to a human. Unfortunately, Tegiri exists to disprove that sentiment!

Despite alt-Calliope’s avowed dedication to ‘truth’, there is obviously more to this than not contradicting the ‘truth’ of events or thoughts... she is deciding how to present the ‘true’ information, what to state and what to leave implicit and what to brush over. a story also concerns what’s ‘relevant’ and ‘essential’, as Rose said so long ago.

chapter 29

Jane, it seems, has been using the trickster-mode lollipop during her campaign. This leads to an argument with the narration about whether or not it’s “problematic” - neither Jane nor alt-Calliope think so, though neither can be considered someone presented in a 100% positive light at this point...

(Jane mostly argues in the in-universe political campaign situation, when of course the argument about ‘trickster mode’ was the whole ‘caucasian’ shitshow)

Anyway, despite her prior statements, alt-Calliope is not above interfering in the narration if it’s for the sake of cherub artefacts.

jane rubs her eyes under her glasses and groans. trickster mode is also quite exhausting. what a strange quirk of human biology that excess euphoria must necessarily be followed by crippling despair. she carelessly tosses the lollipop on the floor, lurches toward her desk...

no.

she turns around promptly, her body jolted by the surprise of her sudden reversal. she bends over, cradles the lollipop reverentially, and situates it carefully in a place signifying respect: atop the mantle, after clearing space for it by shoving several brittle, worthless objects to the floor.

alt-Calliope narrates that she’s totally got Dirk’s number - “he probably thinks he’s a very clever boy, my brother did too” - as Dirk works on a long red rifle in between other tasks designed to distract.

Jane wonders about trying to blackmail Jake by revealing that he’s been having sex with trolls. Dirk challenges this as xenophobic. There’s an odd exchange...

JANE: What ISN’T xenophobic?

DIRK: Well, for one thing, what you just said there?

DIRK: Probably also xenophobic.

JANE: WHAT?

DIRK: Sorry, that’s just how it is.

DIRK: You either gotta roll with the woke shit, or decide to commit laborious, symbolic, melodramatic suicide in the process of utterly giving up.

This may be referring to his suicide in the other branch, I guess? idefk what this is trying to say ><

chapter 30

Karkat and Dave are attempting to win over Jake. This involves a lot of jokes about “neoliberal austerity measures”, super pacs, and so on... and the two of them playing off each other. Dave has been presenting “visionary”, “avant-garde” campaign ads based on SBAHJ.

alt-Calliope notes that Jake has now been freed from Dirk’s indirect narrative control, able to make his own decisions. In tiny text, Dirk grumbles about this. Without his control, he declares, Jake is a purely reactive ‘dead bug’; with it, Jake is like an ant controlled by Cordyceps towards a “greater purpose” (i.e., reproducing Cordyceps ¬¬)

Anyway, Karkat ultimately makes a speech: he doesn’t say he’ll be the best president, but that whichever one wins, it will set a precedent on the matter of troll reproductive rights that will last for a very long time. Jane is, necessarily, far more concerned with nice appearances than doing right:

KARKAT: NO MATTER HOW NICE SHE WAS WHEN YOU WERE KIDS, HER DEDICATION TO THE APPEARANCE OF THAT “NICENESS” HAS ALREADY LED HER DOWN A PATH OF CORRUPTION AND DUPLICITY.

KARKAT: BECAUSE WHEN YOU LIVE INSIDE A SKIN THAT’S A LIE, YOU’LL EITHER GROW TO FIT IT, OR COLLAPSE UNDER THE UNBEARABLE WEIGHT OF YOUR OWN SHIT-SPEWING COGNITIVE DISSONANCE.

KARKAT: TRUST ME, I FUCKING KNOW, BECAUSE I USED TO SPEW AN UNTOLD AMOUNT OF SHIT.

I think this is well put. I think it gets to the heart of a lot of things, that this story is talking about, apart from the free will/alternate possibilities stuff...

Anyway, that wins Jake over to their side.

chapter 31

Back to Terezi eating weird things in space. (Nice!)

Do god tiers need to eat? ...come to think of it, Terezi never actually went god tier.

Anyway, Terezi and John have a heart to heart. About the doomed timeline... and about Vriska. Terezi refers to the Remem8er flash, where she found a connection with the Terezi from the Game Over timeline.

TEREZI: TH4TS WHY 1M OUT H3R3

TEREZI: YOU S33...  

TEREZI: TH4T DOOM3D T3R3Z1 M1SS3D VR1SK4 *SO* MUCH, 1T W4S L1K3 4 HOL3 1N H3R H34RT

TEREZI: 1 R3M3MB3R TH3 W4Y SH3 F3LT, B3C4US3 ON3 T1M3, 4LL H3R M3MOR13S C4M3 FLOOD1NG B4CK

TEREZI: 1 3V3N GOT TO S33 WH4T H4PP3N3D WH3N SH3 D13D

TEREZI: SH3 4ND 4NOTH3R VR1SK4 GHOST F1N4LLY FOUND 34CH OTH3R

TEREZI: 1T M4D3 M3 SO H4PPY G3TT1NG TO F33L TH4T, 4S 1F 1T W4S ON3 OF MY OWN M3MOR13S

TEREZI: 1T JUST R31NFORC3D TH3 F33L1NG TH4T TH3R3 W4S SOM3TH1NG SP3C14L B3TW33N US

TEREZI: 4ND 1 JUST K3PT H4NG1NG ON TO TH4T B3L13F, R1GHT UP UNT1L...  

TEREZI: OH, 1 DONT KNOW

TEREZI: NOW???

TEREZI: 1V3 PR4CT1C4LLY D3VOT3D MY L1F3 TO C3RT41N M3MOR13S, TO TH3 1D34 TH4T TWO P3OPL3 C4N B3 M34NT TO B3 W1TH 34CH OTH3R ON SOM3 COSM1C L3V3L, 3V3N 1F TH3Y 4LW4YS S33M TO G3T 34CH OTH3R 1NTO TROUBL3

TEREZI: 4LL TH4T 1NV3STM3NT, 4LL TH4T S34RCH1NG...  

TEREZI: 4ND FOR *WH4T*?

TEREZI: OV3R 4 SW33P TOG3TH3R, 4ND SH3 JUST D1S4PP34RS 1NTO THE VO1D 4G41N?!

TEREZI: WH4T 4 HUG3 B1TCH

T_T

Anyway, this gets to the crux of the matter: Earth C may supposedly be paradise, but it doesn’t feel like it for either of them. To quote a certain book series, “perhaps some people just don’t have the knack of being happy”.

Anyway, Terezi can’t bear to part with John just yet - so she offers to take a look at his tooth wound. There’s a very funny moment where alt-Calliope narrates the blade drawing in a way so as to personally antagonise Dirk, who is pissed.

Terezi removes the poisonous tooth and then dresses John’s wound - I’ll be interested to hear from @drc4ble if her wound care is up to snuff. Then they have post-surgery makeouts.

Literally any even slightly intimate moment lol (or even a fight)... I miss feeling able to be that affectionate with people.

Although this is a het scene, it actually feels surprisingly... not het. idk. Not sure how to clarify that.

alt-Calliope, I guess, hasn’t lost her obsession with shipping and intimacy from when she was small. She claims she’s merely allowing John to perceive his “true” thoughts - and that’s why he’s being so bold. But that involves a decision, right, about which of his thoughts are “true”?

chapter 32

Apparently “proximity to a black hole”, a proxy for void, renders Roxy’s internal monologue perceptible to alt-Calliope, even though it wouldn’t normally be for those “on a higher textual plane”.

as for alt-Calliope, narrated as Jade:

looking beyond the wall she faces, and beyond everything past it, through the very fabric of narrative itself. they scan the ciliary veins of pacing, motivation, foreshadowing, irony—a continuum that has been upended by the prince’s interference. 

Dirk and alt-Calliope are back to arguing in the narration - about how diverse the crowds are, for example. Dirk dismisses alt-Calliope’s narration as “fake-woke”.

Anyway, despite Dirk’s needling in the narration, Roxy and Dave have a well-observed conversation about like, figuring out your gay/trans/nb/etc, coming out and so forth. Dave talks about like, various stages of more-or-less-ironic self-denial. Dirk gets increasingly irate at the discussion of gender and sexuality that doesn’t lead straightforwardly into like, clear-cut relationships.

Also he’s preparing to assassinate Jake. Unable to force his thoughts into narration, he just speaks out loud, and I guess alt-Calliope reports his words.

Dirk starts climbing the bell tower. Alt-Calliope tries various means to stop him: narrating that his feet feel heavy - he monologues that he has determination to get past this - dropping a bell on him - he monologues that he’s destroying the bell with his sword. Then they just dismiss him as boring...

Alt-Calliope resorts to warning Dave of the assassination attempt. This is turning into Death Note here... “ah, but what you didn’t realise is...” type shit stacking on top of each other. Dave stands in front of Jake, which would be a Heroic death, something Dirk isn’t willing to expose him to. But Dirk’s gun isn’t loaded with bullets, but with... tranq darts. But moreover, he was misleading us as to his intentions.

He wasn’t going to shoot Jake at all. He was going to shoot alt-Calliope/Jade... giving him back control over the narration!

That was interesting though. Cherubs are fuckin’ weird, I’ll totally concede. Still not sure what makes them tick. What they idealize, what they really want. It all comes across to me as a little cloying. Perfection to them is a sweetness beyond comprehension. Sugar so potent it’s poison to us. To our bodies, to our souls. Like the place she was operating from was a realm of self-construction. A bubble of pure, phantasmal confection.

Well, I for one have had enough of that goddamn toothache. I’m back in the protein saddle, motherfuckers. I’m clacking my tongs, and the charcoal is hot.

Now who’s hungry for meat?

Epilogue 5, in toto

So this is just a ludicrously meta version of Death Note now? ok, ok...

Dirk has essentially taken the role of Caliborn, in terms of representing one of two poles of what Homestuck is “about”. Where Caliborn was about tedious masculinity and over the top carnage, Dirk seems to want plots: plans unfolding, some kind of big elegant modernist [that may be incorrect] construction where everything is “in its proper place” according to an artistic vision.

alt-Calliope now seems to want to tell a story about the personal, about complex but ultimately happy relationships, and of course to let these characters fulfil ‘their own will’, somehow...

[wandaluvstacos]

This Fuck Mary Kill test was a mistake, cuz all I can do is take it personally, lol. Like, honestly, people could be like “Kill Peaches, fuck that guy” and I’d be like sure okay fuck Peaches but... Josh and Kasha?

I can’t expect people to know these characters like I do because most people haven’t read the source material, but for reference, to learn about who we’re dealing with:

Josh: Josh befriended Justin a few months before Justin attempted suicide. Josh showed up at the hospital and helped Justin when all the rest of his friends were MIA. Justin is literally alive because of Josh. Justin frustrates Josh a lot of the time, especially when they dated, but he does his best for Justin. And Josh is a great dad who has always wanted to be a dad. It was why Duncan’s sister Asel offered him her unborn kid in the first place-- because she saw how well he did with her older daughter, and she trusted him more than she did her parents. Plus he had told her that his one fear in being gay was that he’d never get to have a child. So she was like “okay, you can have mine when she’s born”, and he spent months thinking about it, and finally decided that he’d take her, once he had the support of his own and Asel’s family. He had to choose between TJ and fatherhood and chose fatherhood (fortunately, TJ stayed on board with it). That’s the crux of the joke in Rainbow Mansion - he’s pretending that he doesn’t want this kid, and it’s funny because everyone knows how much he wanted this kid. He even maintained a relationship with Asel despite her drug and mental problems because he thought it was important that Sonya know her mother.

Kasha: The whole plot of The Duke’s Prisoner is that Kasha falls madly in love with a soldier who goes off to war and doesn’t come back. Then Kasha enacts revenge upon a guy he thought tortured and killed his bf, until it comes out that the dude had nothing to do with BF’s murder. So they go to enemy territory together to find the guy who DID murder Kasha’s bf, where they then find that Kasha’s BF is alive. He’s scarred and nearly blind and heavily traumatized by his experience, and the book ends with BF being like “I’m really broken, you won’t want me” and Kasha telling him that he’ll wait as long as BF needs, that he loves him more than anything or anyone and he’ll always be there.

Plus Kasha adores his child and his band of misfit friends who he shields from other more judgemental rich people, and he gets along great with his wife. He definitely has his flaws, but his romance with his BF at least is super sweet and pure.

In the end, Duncan actually is kind of an asshole, though not nearly as much as Vaughn was. I mean, he’s got some reasons to be a dick, but for the most part that’s just who he is, lol. He fucks real good though.