#which means that:

[paintedcrows]

Did anyone tell Ford (bonus doodles: Family Movie Night, 70s Classics)

[hecateisalesbian]

happy pride everybody

[bookwyrminspiration]

sometimes a theme recurs in your work without your permission. and sometimes it reaches a threshold where you're like. well now i think this is saying something about me against my will. don't know what though

[thecryptkeeper]

[icewindandboringhorror]

(also feel free in the tags to clarify Why you made the choice you made!! :0c)

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

as an aroace person with limited sexual experience, no interest in watching porn, and poor sex ed as a teen, there IS something simultaneously funny and vaguely tragic about being 28 adult years old and realising how extremely tiny your frame of reference is for genitalia and deciding you should expand this to better understand bodies (yours and others). and then you're just there like "okay so what the fuck do I even google right now, anyway"

[butchfalin]

the funniest meltdown ive ever had was in college when i got so overstimulated that i could Not speak, including over text. one of my friends was trying to talk me through it but i was solely using emojis because they were easier than trying to come up with words so he started using primarily emojis as well just to make things feel balanced. this was not the Most effective strategy... until. he tried to ask me "you okay?" but the way he chose to do that was by sending "👉🏼👌🏼❓" and i was so shocked by suddenly being asked if i was dtf that i was like WHAT???? WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY TO ME?????????? and thus was verbal again

[frownyalfred]

superbat might not be everyone's cup of tea but you have to admit "person who wears glasses as their secret identity but doesn't need them" and "person who avoids wearing glasses until they absolutely have to" is a hilarious dynamic for a relationship.

[barbrapleeez]

[lgbtlunaverse]

To me the most fun part about fix-its is placing dominoes.

Tragedies often consist of escalating series of actions and circumstances which, in isolation, were not clearly leading to the tragic end but form a chain of cause-and-effect directly towards it in hindsight. In equal but opposite fashion, I love starting with small inoccuous changes to canon that in themselves do not obviously fix everything but start a new chain that leads to a better ending.

It's kind of impossible for fix-its to feel fully natural– the reader by definition knows what the original ending was and that this ending will be happier because the writer wants it to be– but it is possible for them to not feel contrived. A big deus-ex-machina, or a character breaking with their pre-established tragic flaws to suddenly make all the "correct" decisions almost always feels unsatisfying to me.

But a few carefully placed small domino pieces slowly knocking over bigger and bigger tiles until the entire story has radically changed? That's a lot more fun.

It recquires the author to both correctly identify the original chain of cause-and-effect and understand the characters well enough to know how they'd react to different circumstances. Because if the story feels like it's fixing the wrong problem or the characters don't act like themselves the magic is lost. But when it works? When it clicks and the reader sees the domino chain laid out in front of them? It's beautiful.

[foldingfittedsheets]

At the store I was covering today a dad walked in with his kid. They were on the teen side of childhood but age was indeterminate to me. He said, “So they need a new bed.” Later he added, “Their current bed is pretty squishy.”

I glanced at the child and said, “Would I be correct in intuiting your pronouns are they/them?”

Both dad and child lit up and he thanked me for noticing.

“It’s no big deal. My wife uses they/them. It confuses people because they hear wife and assume she/her but they’re a they/them. It just sounds so much better than spouse or partner to say my wife.”

The kid was ecstatic and exclaimed, “Yeah cause that’s your wife!”

It was fully heart meltingly adorable.

[the-birdgeoisie]

I love when people Kudos my fic, because that means I get to stalk their AO3 profile and steal their bookmarks to read later >:]

[valtsv]

self destruction really is such a fascinating human response to various factors both external and internal. what if sisyphus could leave at any time but kept rolling the boulder up the hill just to watch it roll back down anyway. what if he kept pushing it even as the rock cut into his palms and his legs began to ache with the desire to rest for even a moment and his body became a canvas of bruises and cuts that never have time to heal. what if he did it because it's the only thing he knows how to do. the only thing that gives him a sense of certainty and control in a world that takes both and offers neither.

[jjs-brainrot]

[inkskinned]

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.