#which is something i didn't realize as i was writing them

[lukalnst]

Hi, could you write Luka from ALNST with a reader he absolutely loves to “discreetly” follow around during their anakt garden days ? Like he has a crush on them and badly wants to become closer but he sucks so much at relationships that the reader is the one that ends up speaking with him first 🫠

ENAMORED!LUKA X READER

Contains: Luka is whipped for reader, gn!reader, Luka is bad at socializing,,, but he's trying his best!!!, fluff

Luka loved to watch you.

It sounded weird to think about it, no? He couldn't help but hide in places where he thought you wouldn't find him just to observe your every movement. He liked to see you talking with other people, and he liked to see how you'd react to what they had to say, amongst other things.

Oddly enough, you stood up from the rest to him. He felt a weird sense of love for you, but it wasn't exactly that — It felt much stronger than love itself. Maybe it was an obsession? He didn't exactly experience what love really was, so he guessed it made sense for him not to know what it was.

Maybe you could show him what it was, though.

But, as much as he loved to think about you and imagine little scenarios about you in his head, he could never actually approach you. It was quite irritating, he had to admit.

He could imagine himself doing many other things, but talking to you wasn't one of them. As much as he tried to, he simply couldn't.

Perhaps it wasn't meant to be. Some people are better left off in your head. Some things are better left off in your imagination, no?

... That was what he thought, and that was what he tried to convince himself.

Luckily for Luka, you had noticed him staring at you from behind a tree that was only a few meters away from you. You were a bit confused at first. Did he really think you couldn't see him? He was basically peeking from behind the tree.

When he realized that you were taking a few steps closer towards the tree, he pretended to be doing something else. You surely wouldn't notice, his plan was perfect.

... Or so he thought.

"Hey... uhm... Do you want to be friends?" You gently asked as you observed him trying to act as if he wasn't just looking at you intently from a place which he didn't even bother hiding properly.

Luka turned around and was hesitant to reply. He didn't want to seem like someone who was desperate. "... I guess. My name is Luka, yours?" He questioned.

As you said your name, he had to pretend as if he didn't hear other people saying it repeatedly when talking to you. "That's a nice name. I'm glad to meet you," he smiled at you. It took basically everything in him to not start smiling stupidly. You had talked to him, you really had —

"Luka! Do you wanna play with me?" You gently tugged at his arm. His eyes were slightly open, and a smile made its way towards his lips. He simply tried to keep his act up as if it wasn't one of the best days of his life.

"Yes, I'd love to..." He gently murmured.

...

Something that you didn't have to worry about was about Luka finding another best friend. He seemed to only enjoy spending time with you, and he made it known.

Whenever other people tried to talk to him, he just glared at them and placed you in front of them, as a weird way to say, 'I don't want anyone else other than them'.

Other people thought he was odd, but he had grown into your best friend. Someone who you could easily rely on.

Someone who would love you no matter what.

[dostoyevsky-official]

I'm aware of how swing states work. People across the entire WORLD are aware of how American swing states work, even though we shouldn't have to be, because your country has truly outsized power and we have to watch your elections like hawks.

It's not just about your individual vote, and relying on condescending "mY vOtE dIdn'T MATTER" bullshit is just a misdirection and you know it. It's about spouting & spreading shitty dangerous rhetoric and participating in the disenfranchisement of your own rights. Apathy and disengagement is what your right-wing populists WANT from your country's voters. You helped them spread that, and that's on you.

You really think you're going to do any better at direct action and community organizing if you're willing to hide behind the 'I'm just one person and my actions don't matter' line? That's all of activism, sorry. Being just one person who still gets up and takes action even if the odds are stacked.

My family is from a country that has had voting as an option taken away from them. You can be as condescending as you like, and it doesn't change the fact that the rest of the world is looking at Americans who threw away their votes with disgust.

you don't understand how american elections work and you don't understand what happened last night. you need to familiarize yourself with swing states. you need to learn what they teach in fifth grade here about the electoral college. if this is how you closely follow american elections, you were badly misled by someone.

i can show you any number of electoral maps, the vote distributions, the swings, the irrelevant stein voters in wisconsin, but none of this is getting through to people making this argument. it's a shame. there were 47,741 write-in votes in nyc, 1.85% of the vote. think about that number. these were not "disenfranchised voters" but rather people expressing their dissatisfaction through the ballot box.

i'm deeply flattered that you think my posts and follower count, which couldn't pack an opera house, had any effect, but they didn't (otherwise i'd take credit for NYC props2-5 failing, which passed). i don't think any posters on a moribund, embarrassing website had any effect. streamers like aiden ross did; joe rogan—why did kamala refuse to sit with him?—did. you and others are frustrated about the results, you're looking for an answer, you're angry, i get it. but this explanation, if taken seriously (protest voters in safe states cost the election), is one of the worst conclusions you can arrive at, somewhere in the ballpark of "Peanut's martyrdom swung the vote;" you're not even considering what the candidate said (or didn't) that caused people to protest vote. we are absolutely doomed if people run with this, and, mercifully, it's so stupid that it won't be taken up by the democratic party. they will more readily blame protest voters in michigan than those who voted like i did.

you need to realize it's apocalyptic if this is your key takeaway, and that your political insight into america is worthless if you stick by it. please channel your frustration into something more productive.

feel free to send me more votescolding asks, but i won't be answering any of them. this is my last word

[irisbleufic]

@eidetictelekinetic, I'd like to follow up on something we keep discussing in comment threads to my Devil's Minion stories, because I've found the paper trail in my archives. There's indeed something I wrote as an undergraduate ca. 2005 that I had forgotten about that underpins a common theme (namely: Daniel and Armand wondering what might've happened if they'd met when they were young in Armand's time and place, when he was still mortal) periodically haunting the dialogue across my various unconnected stories. I'm somewhat in disbelief that I can prove this exists, and I needed a spark of joy like this in an otherwise bleak, snowed-out week.

This is a ghost story in that the work I'm discussing here was written under my deadname, but I don't tend to shy from people knowing it. Still, it's times like this when pieces resurface that I realize I block facets of my former self so thoroughly at times that I do my writing history a disservice. This felt like knocking down a wall, and I'm really startled at what's sitting covered in dust on the other side. Mindfuck your characters long enough and you might even mindfuck yourself.

In the spring of my senior year at Wellesley, I took a poetry seminar with Frank Bidart. He didn't like my work much, which was a source of amusement to me; if somebody doesn't like my writing, I just dig in and crank up the annoyance factor by being even more myself. The number of professors and editors that I've gone out of my way to irritate in my higher ed and writing careers is vaguely embarrassing at this point, but that's another story for another time.

At the same time as I was in this poetry seminar, I had also overloaded my schedule with Medieval literature seminars. I'd done that for about four consecutive semesters, actually. The Early Modern and Medieval course offerings at Wellesley, at least at that time, were so numerous that you really could do about two years solid of nothing but that type of coursework. I was fluent in French at the time, so I was able to pull some unhinged shit like reading La Chanson de Roland in Anglo-Norman with minimal dictionary assistance while reading it in English in one of the courses, and then I started haunting the used bookstores in Harvard Square and digging up volumes of lesser known Anglo-Norman ballads and fragments, and there was this one book that focused on early surviving trobairitz poetry, songs by women from that period. There was one fragment that really, really haunted me. I don't know if I still have the book, that's the one piece in the documentation chain I'm still hunting down, but I have my translation of that fragment because I found the poem I wrote around my translation. That poem got published twice after I graduated; that publication history is neat in its own right.

So, the poem I wrote for the seminar is really the thing I want to talk about here. I had this short 10th-11th century trobairitz ballad fragment that I translated out of Anglo-Norman, and I was very excited about it, because it was very gay. I thought, hmmm, I'll write a narrative poem about a couple of nobodies set in that time period. Who are my nobodies? I'm picturing teenagers, just a couple of boys. They can't be more than sixteen or seventeen. Where are they? I'm also taking a class on crusader states at this point in time, and I'm extremely interested in various cultural migrations in and out of Italy and Spain (the good, the bad, and the ugly). So I just go, okay, I'll have them fleeing a noble household in Italy, heading for Spain. My head's entrenched in those places thanks to a history class; it gives me something to hang onto as geographical starting and endpoints. Why are they running away? Kid attached to the noble household has fallen in love with a stonemason's apprentice from somewhere a lot further abroad; they don't speak the same language, but since when has that stopped people from falling in love? Stonemason's apprentice wants to save the kid in a bad situation in the noble household, get him out of there. Yeah, let's do that. And I'll cover just the journey, not what happens before they leave or after. And I'll show what they run into along the way, and they'll hear someone perform that piece of the song, and one of them is able to translate it for the other as they gradually learn enough pieces of common languages to communicate with each other.

This poem was never going to be long; the poems in our portfolios for this class couldn't be long. The concept work behind it was much longer than the poem itself, as was the work I put into the fragment translation. This kind of storytelling in lieu of confessional poetry was going to annoy my professor. I knew exactly what I was doing with all of this: satisfying a storytelling itch, letting myself practice translation, being the inveterate fandom writer I already was by that point, just being generally obnoxious in my early 20s. It's a living.

I wrote the poem. It got workshopped in class; classmates loved it, Frank made faces and was barely polite about it. The written feedback in it on my final portfolio called it "pseudo-medieval pastiche," and I was so happy I could've framed that shit. I put the poem away for a few years and didn't think about it. I moved to the UK and started an MA program in Medieval Studies. My poems started getting published in SF/F/Spec publications. In 2009, I learned about a call for poems for a 10th anniversary special issue of a magazine called Mythic Delirium, and something about the themed call made me remember my pain-in-the-ass, labor-of-love portfolio poem, which was called "Journeying." I submitted it.

"Journeying" was published in Mythic Delirium Issue #20, which, (in)famously, also first featured a poem by the now-disgraced Neil Gaiman called "Conjunctions." If I'm honest, it's bizarre to have that as a major point of memory in this poem's first printing. Here's how "Journeying" looks in that issue of the magazine:

The italicized portion at the end is my translation of the trobairitz ballad. It's all that survives of one particular song that happened to be written down. It always amazes me that so few lines can express so much longing across so many centuries.

Flash forward a few more years to when I learn about Erzebet YellowBoy's brilliant Papaveria Press hand-stitched limited artbook editions of poems. One of my oldest friends, Paige (@dreambreathing) and I decide to collaborate as we've done so many times before: they did a set of two watercolor illustrations for the poem conceived as a fold-out frontispiece and backplate, and we pitched it as an artbook. Papaveria said yes. In 2012, "Journeying" was released as an edition of 18 of these little books:

You never see the boys on the road or under the tree overlooking those ruins (those ruins, those fucking ruins, I forgot) until you pan in. Don't get distracted. Look closer. Imagine me, @eidetictelekinetic, getting more and more spooked every time we talk about this recurring thing in the dialogue I'm writing across stories. Why am I doing this? Why is it familiar? And by the time we get to "Guard Your Heart," why do I have the feeling it's hit peak hilarity by the time Daniel's looking at those Talamasca photographs?

This is an awfully long punch line, but it's here. I wrote it, some version of it, some version of them, in another life. And for me it was another life, too, a life with the name of a girl I now barely recognize. Who is Adrienne? I know that Adrienne wrote this poem, but I no longer know her as well as I would like. However, I do know that she gave up almost everything she had to give me what I have now, and I'm the writer that I am because of her. I carry these characters with me because of her; she's the one who first read them.

(Also, here's another shout-out to @dreambreathing not just for being one of my best friends through all of this and one of the most talented artists I've ever known, but also for being the namesake of my current biggest troublemaker in Caldera. Love you, Paige.)

[laylanightingale]

Broken-Smitten Parallels

Ok, so we do see how my beloved fits Smitten in the Tower. Devoted, loving, nigh-impossible to talk out of that "delusion". Although the leader-follower position is painfully reversed.

We all know (or may have a hunch) that Fury for the Broken is like Burnt Grey for the Smitten. They're both going through a lot of grief due to having lost their beloved at our hand. The Broken, however, instead of redirecting his anger to just one Voice, calls out the entire gallery ("heathenS"), which could show him as being more emotional and less selective about it (Smitten calls out The Narrator, then the Cold and then the Hero). He also is less confident in this regard, needing a coping mechanism and sending out less than credible arguments ("It didn't even work, it doesn't count." regarding the stabbing attempt). They both hope for their beloveds to be alive to... "salvage things". Clearly not in the best of states, both of them.

Come Apotheosis and the Broken starts defending his Lady ever so vigorously, even disregarding his teammates. He also sounds a lot like Hamlet intonation-wise as he panics ("It's just a fluke, an accident, that's all!") Mate clearly stands with Her, but unlike Smitten, he can at least be convinced that it's his Lady who's bad, not the surroundings or partners. Smitten won't have this nonsense, it's the vile Narrator's fault.

My mind is getting hazy, since I'm about to write the part that I love. Fact is, Broken can't just be convinced that Apo's bad. He understands the fact himself. How do I know this? If we listen to the dialogue before that, my boy sounds like his normal self, squealing slightly higher as Apotheosis wrangles his hooves, but should we choose to [Fight back], after the Paranoid and the Hero have chimed in in their usual demeanors (for the route) the Broken sounds like:

A. He just got the coolest idea ever. In secret.

B. He's proven a hidden hunch to himself.

C. He's finally fed up with Apotheosis' shit.

The sudden change of intonation shows that something inevitable has clicked inside his brain. Like he has understood the gravity of the situation. And I mean gravity, because his voice from there on, countering the physical pain, gets extremely deep.

The Smitten's voice upon Damsel's death gets higher instead, showing that the poor guy has just witnessed a murder (to my beloved's credit, he barely had time to react to his). Hamlet's crying, partially rasping his lines out. In Burnt Grey he turns into a deep grumpy gus... unless he's thinking his beloved's alive. On a physical level.

With the Broken, the gash is much, much deeper. It's mental now, the realization that the one he's been protecting and adoring this whole time would do something worse than hurt them all. To escape alone. Leaving th-- him behind. That is much, much worse than Not Good with Rejection. And it's hella justified. So as Smitten fluctuates from deep hatred to excited chirping, Broken stays down, likely a true bass. Growling like a guard dog ready to pounce any second now.

One final detail I want to notice is that Broken also wants revenge and actually does it, but unlike Smitten, in Her direction. He keeps saying he wants to "show her how we've felt", trying his damndest to keep himself in check, his sanity slipping. The Smitten, on the other hoof, unleashes a barrage of insults, prompting the Hero to be the therapy dog - here though, no therapy is needed. The damage has already been done and the retribution awaits... her.

And as I listen... I notice something weird. Is it just me or Brook is gasping for air the entire time? What's wrong? Is he being super overwhelmed with emotion and holding back a ginormous scream? Or is he... crying? [Was that the breakdown I was looking for?] The Smitten definitely did cry as he mourned his Damsel on the spot and swore revenge to the gallery. Here tho, it sounds much more mise-- no. Forlorn. Betrayed. Abandoned. Bereft. Those are exactly the passions, echoing in the depths of his bereavement that we wanted to hear in the Smitten... we get to hear them here. Like it's the final call. Like it's the end of the line just for them both. She's dead to him. They're through. Forever.

The abused finally stood up to the abuser. No other party wants to see each other no more. Especially, the abused. Nothing even to tell her in return to her apology, because never will it ever be accepted. It's over.

I... can't but bring my condolences to my best Voice as a recent divorcee and... that's exactly where I see the deep, profundo beauty in him.

Discussion open. I apologize for the wall.

[antianakin]

I'm gonna toss your tags on here, too, since I'm kind-of responding to that, as well.

The amount of times I started an AU and it went WILDLY in a different direction than I thought are too numerous to count. Half the time I start an AU it's out of some level of bitterness or spite towards something I didn't like and then I spend a lot of time on those questions that are like "Wait would this character ACTUALLY do that? Is that ACTUALLY how they'd likely react?" and of course the most frustrating "Is that actually how I WANT them to react?"

My Caretaker Luke AU was supposed to basically be a very bitter answer to the question of what would happen if Vader actually survived ROTJ, and then ultimately it became an exploration of what might actually help Anakin HEAL in that situation, what would it take to truly help someone like him genuinely come back from that darkness he'd stewed in for almost three decades (because no matter what kind of sacrifices he made, there's NO WAY he'd be completely snapped back to being a good person if he survived, that bitch is STRUGGLING). I made an Obitine AU that looked at how miserable Obi-Wan would've been if he'd actually stayed with Satine and married her when he was in his teens and that ALSO ended up with an exploration of how to save Anakin (though for different reasons this time). Sometimes these fuckers have a mind of their own and the more I take myself down that rabbit hole the further from my original concept I seem to get. It's not always a bad thing, often it's still really fun, but it's such a weird experience to look back at all this work you've done and not quite understand how you even GOT here when this isn't where you thought you were going when you started.

I made a point in the last AU I came up with to just... ignore some of those questions to focus on what I WANTED to happen (in this case, I was ignoring how Padme realized Anakin wasn't good for her and how she managed to actually escape him and that relationship and what path Anakin went down afterwards as a result because I just wanted to focus on Padme's NEW relationship and how that helped HER heal). Why did things happen? Because I wanted them to, next question.

And while I'm not a writer really by any means, it seems like a lot of writing is just... finding a balance between following that rabbit hole and seeing where it leads, and knowing when to say "This thing happens because I want it to in order for the next thing to happen." Not everything NEEDS an explanation, but it can help YOU to flesh out the culture and its intricacies and where certain traditions and feelings came from in order to lend a feeling of authenticity to the story even if you never actually explain any of it in the final draft. Even if you don't end up using any of the purity culture stuff you put in your last reblog, hopefully it was still helpful to think about how you might answer some of those questions and work through what parts are important to keep and which parts you think ultimately don't work.

I found your thoughts on how the clones might end up feeling about the idea that their "species" as such might eventually disappear really interesting! I also personally tend to think of them as their own "species" in a lot of ways, but that's usually for my own internal purposes rather than a way to consider how the CLONES think of themselves. I often have only really considered how the clones differentiate themselves in terms of their lived experiences and not necessarily in terms of their physical differences. They're obviously visibly human and would pass as human to most people and I imagine there's probably plenty of clones who would prefer to simply be considered a slightly augmented human rather than considered a whole separate species, while other clones would prefer the opposite.

I really respect your willingness to consider how the clones might end up with problematic values as a result of their experiences, to give them qualities you would personally consider unlikable. I'm not quite as good at that, so I really admire the way you work through some of that, even if you ultimately decide you don't like it and don't want to use it in your worldbuilding.

I've decided that Rex is the one who paints Kanan's eye mask with his bird of prey design.

Kanan's feeling pretty low still just after Malachor, he's still distancing himself from everybody, and Rex decides to go try to talk to him at one point and the first thing he comes up with to say is to point out that his new mask is pretty plain. It's awkward, he regrets it immediately, but then Kanan says that it gets the job done and Rex is abruptly reminded of himself so so long ago back at the beginning of the war.

He sits Kanan down and tells him a story about how, at the beginning of the war, only a few of the clones had paint on their armor, to designate things like rank and battalion in order to make it easier for officers to find them in the middle of a busy battlefield. The paint was practical and it was limited to a very select few. But the Jedi almost immediately started trying to encourage the clones to utilize the paint less sparingly, suggesting that maybe everybody could wear at least a LITTLE paint and use more individualized designs so that it was still easy to tell the commanders and captains apart from the others when needed.

Some of the clones had taken to it with gusto, but others had been more hesitant, and Rex remembers having been one of them. He remembers telling Obi-Wan that there was no real REASON to paint everyone's armor and especially not to come up with personal designs. The armor was practical and it served its purpose with or without the paint and special designs. But the Jedi had insisted on at least TRYING to come up with his own design and if he didn't like it, he could always take it off, so Rex had given in and chosen something to paint on the armor. And, somehow, it felt a little lighter the next time he put it on. It didn't erase the horrors of war or the pain of loss or anything like that, but it helped.

He tells Kanan that the mask right now is just a reminder of the pain of the injury and whatever other feelings he's still got all caught up in the Malachor mission (guilt over what happened with Ezra, grief over Ahsoka's loss). But if he puts his own design on it, it might turn the mask into something other than a constant reminder of something bad. Instead, it's a reminder of who he is, the combination of the person he once was and who he's become. He is more than just his injury or this mission and he can use the mask to declare that if he wants to.

Kanan says he never realized Rex and the other clones had cared so deeply about their armor and Rex says that the armor itself was meaningless. It's better than what's being handed out to stormtroopers, but not but a LOT. It was the design on it that had meant something and, more than that, it was what the design REPRESENTED: having a choice about how you were perceived by others.

Kanan asks why Rex had chosen his particular designs, the bird of prey eyes on his helmet in particular. Rex explains that he chose it because he liked birds and thought it looked cool, but he's kept the helmet for as long as he has because it's come to mean something ELSE now. It's not just a cool-looking design, it's a reminder of a better time in his life. It's a reminder of when he'd been a part of something greater than himself, with the other clones and the Jedi. It's a reminder of a time when he'd had hope that he and his people could one day come out the other side of this war towards a brighter future.

Kanan looks at the mask he'd grabbed from storage somewhere or something just to keep light from hurting his eyes as they recovered and to cover up the injury from other people's stares (even if he couldn't see them staring), then hands it to Rex and asks if Rex minds sharing that symbol because he'd like a reminder of that, too. Rex remembers the 332nd and their helmets that they'd painted to look like their chosen Jedi, almost blindly giving away their individuality in favor of that loyalty that had been stripped from them anyway. And then he looks at Kanan, choosing to make himself look LIKE REX, someone who had shared his face with millions once, because he wants to honor both the connections he'd lost as well as this new connection the two of them have built together now. And Rex says he'd be happy to share.

[gideonisms]

Noticing horrible tense mistakes in my old fics and bad wording choices and formatting fuck ups SO tempted to just spend the afternoon editing little errors from 2019 instead of either a) working on my new fics and short stories or b) studying like I'm supposed to be doing!

[harrowscore]

why are you, as an adult in 2024, still hung up on reylo. why are you still mocking the shippers. why do you believe yourself to be superior only because you dislike a stupid ship from a fucking space fairytale. girl (gnc) get a grip

[birlwrites]

one of the things that i've accomplished due to the low barrier to entry in writing fanfiction is writing novel-length stories as a matter of course. like, i used to think of writing a book as this massive, monumental task - and in some ways, it is! but in other ways, it's still just a story. and it feels much more approachable to me now that i've done it multiple times, posting chapter by chapter because that's something you can do really easily with fanfiction. i didn't go into it believing i could do it - i found out that i could by just giving it a try and seeing what resulted.

there's also a certain wild creativity you can find on ao3, the result of people just doing whatever they feel like doing - sometimes it results in incoherence, sometimes in incomprehensibility, sometimes it falls flat, but there's so much variety in storytelling forms, if you look for it. people will deep-dive into anything. 'marketability' is laughably far from being a concern. what is a story, anyway? people will strip the idea down to its bare bones and rebuild it in infinite ways if they have the space. that space doesn't exist in barnes & noble.

i'm a firm believer that you should read the types of stories you want to write, and that you should also read broadly, because that's how you avoid getting stuck recycling the same handful of ideas over and over. i think the same thing applies to writing. write what you want to write - but also, experiment. try other things, even if they seem silly or impractical or irrelevant, even if you don't think they will work. even if you don't think you can make them work.

if you don't feel like you have creative freedom, then you'll fall back on the tried-and-true. you'll recycle. it won't feel like your voice, because it's been filtered through layers upon layers of 'acceptable' and 'marketable' and 'reasonable' and 'broadly appealing.' the only way to understand your own creative limits is by testing them, constantly. you can't truly believe that you can write whatever you want until you prove it to yourself.

and even if your voice turns out to be acceptable and marketable and reasonable and broadly appealing after all - if you try all sorts of things and find out that's where your creativity flows best - you still know it's yours. you still know you're writing the truest possible expression of your own creative abilities. you owe it to yourself to find out what it feels like to write unfettered.

write something weird.

[doctorweebmd]

so there's this post floating around about like, feeling like an outsider even in a group of outsiders and i almost reblogged it being like

'aha i do that'

except. like. i know exactly why that happens, and its 100% my fault

i just have trouble maintaining relationships because i'm a poor communicator. that's been the case since high school. i dont really initiate conversations or remember to text or call people. its not from a place of indifference or anything like that - i'm sincerely an 'out of sight out of mind' kind of person.

i can not talk to and not see someone for months or years but my feelings for them don't change. it doesn't bother me if people dont check in on me or don't hang out with me or don't text me. i still like them. unfortunately that is not how 99% of the population communicates. people (rightfully) assume that when someone doesn't initiate conversation or hang-outs or doesn't check in on you, that they don't care about you. for me, thats not the case at all. like if i like you and consider you my friend, you are ALWAYS my friend. i would do anything for you and would be more than happy to talk/see each other/support you/etc. its just the day-to-day communication that i really struggle with. but thats how most relationships form - regular, consistent communication.

i've gone through periods of extreme guilt for this where i sincerely try, and make new friends, and re-connect with texting and phone calls and hanging out more often but inevitably something happens, i get busy or i forget and suddenly all this time passes and people think i dont care anymore. unfortunately that's not the case whatsoever - time is kind of abstract to me and i dont understand that while my feelings don't change, others feel more distant or abandoned.

and i've really hurt people in my life like that. friends that i've known for many years from high school/college are a LITTLE more forgiving because they know i'm just 'like that' but still. it does hurt people. like i haven't spoken to my dad in probably at least a year - not because i dont love him, but because of that same reason. he doesn't reach out and i forget and it just steamrolls because he gets hurt, doesn't reach out because he thinks i'm intentionally 'ignoring' him, and i continue to forget, and its just this viscous cycle. i haven't talked to my grandparents in months. my mom knows better and texts me every week or so, but it still hurts her that she has to reach out so regularly. she also plays these games where she sees how 'long' it takes for me to remember to reach out. a lot of people in my life have done that. its like i'm being tested on something without ever being told its a standard test, ya know? i'm always destined to fail it because i dont know how long is too long. at which point will the time and distance be unacceptable? i still dont know the answer.

and i think it makes me come off as a really heartless and callous person. its made me kind of keep people at arms-length because i know i'm not capable of being a part of most people's lives. i have perfectly normal and pleasant relationships with my coworkers and all that, but i'm generally not close with them. and i can see the confusion, because we hang out and i'm pretty normal or whatever and we have fun and then they don't hear from me for months and they're like 'uhhhh.... okay? so i guess you don't like me?'

i do. i just have different relationship maintenance standards than others i guess. so i just overall avoid being around others just because i know i'll disappoint them. it is what it is but it really is sad, in a way.

[ironwoodwolves]

🎵 I am trying this link thing again. This time, a creature I created, so not getting into the details of it yet. We'll see how that goes. I want to try it. I do like the idea of getting some choice in at least one of my various identities. Plus I kinda feel like everything is out of control right now. And like it's not even my life anymore. So yeah. Which I suppose makes it a copinglink, since that's... literally the reason I want to try doing this.

[abyssembraced]

Where did Ghost really go before returning to Hallownest ?

Frankly, the question that was asked of them was one that Ghost wouldn't mind knowing the answer to themself.

Their memories... Even their early ones from when they first returned to Hallownest were hazy and fragmented. The more challenging fights they'd faced in the Crossroads and their first encounters with the bugs they'd come to call their friends still existed in their mind, yet lay scattered and untethered from each other with unknowable gaps in between, with no certainties as to even the order in which any of the events occurred.

Before that? They knew hardly anything of their past.

What did they do in the vast, endless wasteland outside Hallownest? What caused them to return to the fallen kingdom? Why did they even leave it in the first place?

They didn't know.

They typically didn't care to think on those questions much, either—it made more sense to focus on the present, and the things they knew now, rather than dwell on an unrecoverable past. Yet, here they were, being asked to recount those lost memories.

They... Could at least make an attempt?

Grasping at those memories was hard. Though they knew for a fact that they had spent much of their life outside the kingdom's bounds, it was as though the memories of that time had never existed in the first place.

But... They could fight. Even before coming back to Hallownest, they already knew how to wield a nail. So, then... They must have met someone out there. Travellers, perhaps. Someone who taught them how to fight—or at least the basics of it, anyway. Perhaps they were even the one to gift them the nail that had since carried them through many battles, or maybe that was a different Someone.

But who? Ghost couldn't picture them. They didn't even know for sure that such a person had even existed, but it only made sense, right?

...

There was only one time that they had ever managed to recover a long thought lost memory, and that was with the Dream Nail. If they were to enter their own dream once more, unlock the hidden secrets within their own mind... Would that give them answers? Would it do anything at all?

Although... Did it even matter? The stranger's curiosities aside, they... Didn't particularly care about discovering their past. It wasn't as though whatever it was that had happened back then could be changed. Nor did they think that learning anything new about it would affect their present life. They were happy where they were right now, with their family and friends in the recovering Hallownest.

Yes.

They didn't remember what they did before their return to Hallownest, but that was okay.

[ranger-kellyn]

look, i love ALL the avatar's equally. i think they all have a unique and fascinating story, and are all well-suited for the issues of their times. i can't pick a true favorite.

anyways, time to go plan out my fifth avatar fic where one of the primary settings is kyoshi island, and one of the characters connects with her spirit--

[ereborne]

Song of the Day: May 14

"Diamond on a Landmine” by Billy Talent

[rainbowresurrection]

I ended up reading The Price of the Phoenix and while it didn't make me want to bleach my eyes like Killing Time, I still didn't like it as much as I hoped I would. Don't get me wrong, the homoeroticism was intriguing to me, but the actual writing and storyline itself left me with a headache. I think I get my hopes up with these books, given all of the possibilities that the written word has for Trek, and it inevitably sets me up for disappointment lol

[mintaka-iii]

My mental health can't possibly good if an essay on the found family trope gives me such an indescribable feeling of hollowness and yearning

[unproduciblesmackdown]

one in a million when i watch smthing in the horror genre and don't end up disappointed to/and/or pissed off about it so like "also yeah i liked it. ooo" is like relative to that an off the charts rave review of media of the millennium. also i did think about mh a lot along the way so would recommend its affect/effect if you like mh's horror too