#why aren't you mad at anyone?

[sadlynotthevoid]

This is so teenage Og!Cale coded.

i like the term "gallows humor" because it always makes me think of someone getting sentenced to death and being like "i have GOT to be the funniest person at my public execution"

[brainrot-jikan]

im not the biggest alhaitham/kaveh shipper (because im a rare pair ho) but it seems to me that in alhaitham/kaveh getting-together fics tend to be... unequal.

the beautiful thing about alhaitham and kaveh is that they're both equally right and equally wrong and equally dicks about it. but the writers for alhaitham/kaveh much more frequently seem to give alhaitham the burden change (the burden of the character flaw) instead of kaveh.

in any good character arc, the main character has a fatal flaw or misconception, and by the end of that arc they have addressed that flaw in some definitive way. scrooge was a scrooge and learned that being that way was detrimental; merlin from finding nemo was overprotective to a fault and had to learn that he couldn't (and shouldn't) control everything and to let go; the wolf from little red riding hood learns that you should stop while you're ahead.

stories centering around romance tend to lean heavily on character arcs, which makes sense. and since romance generally requires two individuals to be vulnerable and open and emotional with each other, it makes double sense that alhaitham/kaveh authors zoom straight into alhaitham's lack of emotional vulnerability.

this bothers me.

in society, individuals are expected to experience and present emotions in a specific way. if someone dies, you cry. if someone smiles at you, you smile back. if you're at a party, you're supposed to be having fun. if you don't do these things, you're seen as impolite at best and a inhuman freak at worst. when these behaviors are frequent it's often viewed as emotional immaturity, or a lack of ability to feel at all. the inability or lack of willingness to conform to societies emotional expectations of you is seen as a flaw and a reason for exclusion.

alhaitham is canonically disliked and avoided for being the way he is. he prefers it this way, but that doesn't mean the people perpetuating this avoidance are in the right. they are the societal pressure to conform that alhaitham blows off. alhaitham could be the way he is for a lot of reasons: avoidant attachment style, trauma, following someone else's example (eg. his grandmother), or just his base personality. it doesn't MATTER. he is the way he is. kaveh having to accept that should be part of the story.

putting the burden of the fatal flaw on alhaitham, making the way alhaitham treats kaveh and the people around him the problem, feels invalidating. it implies heavily that alhaitham's way of interfacing with the world, alhaitham's very SELF, is incorrect. my suggestion is to flip a larger portion of that burden onto kaveh. kaveh 👏 character 👏 arcs 👏

some examples/recommendations:

- make kaveh project his insecurities onto other people but especially onto alhaitham; he's overly reliant on other people for his own self worth, and he perceives alhaitham's lack of positive feedback as a direct reflection of how alhaitham feels about him. but learns along the way that alhaitham doesn't hate him, kaveh's actual struggle is with hating himself and being unable to his own self as worthy of love. maybe throw in how you are responsible for your own recovery, other people can help but you can't rely on them to carry you through self actualization.

- or, kaveh tries to make alhaitham behave more like a "normal" person, to be more pleasant and emotive and forthcoming, and then realizes he's in the wrong for trying to make alhaitham into something he's not, possibly for all the wrong reasons (not because he likes alhaitham better like that, but bc society says that's healthier and a better/more conforming way to be)

- or you could go ahead make alhaitham's issues the main problem but they're too complicated to overcome in a short period of time, so kaveh has to accept alhaitham is doing his best in his own way and not push for unrealistic and unhealthy changes. he could alter his own behavior to give alhaitham space and time and a safe place to land.

that got sappy so it's past time for me to dip out. go forth and ship things; but maybe consider letting alhaitham be a rude stone-faced bastard if he wants to be.

[lylahammar]

why the fuck is it so socially acceptable to say hateful stuff about people with red hair

[flyingbuddiies]

the day osc tumblr stops fighting over tacomic is the day we all heal [adding my personal opinion in the tags]

[seventh-district]

again and again i find myself lamenting that audio roleplay isn't taken more seriously by some people. like yeah, they often have a romantic element, and by nature they usually directly involve/address the listener- and i totally get that those things aren't to everyone's taste. no art or entertainment is universally appealing, and that's okay! but.. it still makes me a lil sad that the "cringe" reputation of asmr/audio rp precedes it. there's a whole lot of talent and creativity being poured into these audios by so many people that i feel goes unrecognized and/or disrespected simply due to the medium that the stories are being told through.

[musical-chick-13]

Once again: the so-called "General Fandom History," in terms of which things get held up as Iconic™ or Well-Done™ or Worth Analyzing™ has disproportionately focused on (cis, abled) white men. Some of us would like to not have everything be focused on this one demographic and would, in fact, love to not constantly hear--implicitly or explicitly--how stories about people like us are inherently less interesting or less worthy of telling.

"Remember your history," WE KNOW THE HISTORY. AND WE WANT TO MOVE ON.

[cloud-somersault]

every time i hear someone sayin' they only read completed fics but also complain because there's not enough 100k slowburns, i get so irrationally mad.

how do you think fics get completed? do you think the author sits on that 100K slowburn for months and posts it all at once? maybe interact and give some engagement

[fxggotclown]

today i had a meltdown because the target healthcare website has horrible ui and i couldn't figure out how to mark myself as a non smoker and if you don't do that they steal $50 from every paycheck whether or not you opt to pay for insurance for an entire year before can you go in and change it. also you have to do that every year. i was able to figure it out though thankfully.

[dootznbootz]

There's something really special when you don't have to worry about your stims bothering others because you're with people who don't mind your stims or bother you about it! 🥹

Shout out to people who let others stim freely and don't make a big deal about it. You have no idea how much that means!

[lifelonglemon]

Sooooo.... I hear porn fandom is coming back to tumblr.

[blujayonthewing]

man, posts like this make me feel so fucking weird. like, thanks for the shoutout, I guess, but people just Have Tastes, and no amount of moralizing fingerwagging is going to change the fact that much fewer people's tastes will be inclined toward bodies that look like mine. Beauty and appeal are subjective but it's fucking weird to pretend they don't exist. Like, I dunno man, it sucks that I'm not as pretty as other people! It does! But it's still just a thing that is true and that's fine! I want people who give me attention to do so because they actually fucking mean it, not because someone scolded them for not having morally correct enough tastes in women on tumblr dot com

[babieken]

this is random and mildly embarrassing but does anyone watch Grey's Anatomy here?

[pa-pa-plasma]

people are so weird about stopping for animals on the road. sorry but if you don't have the ability to see that the squirrel standing on the side of the completely straight 40kph road 10 houses ahead is going to bolt in front of you, you can't do that with children either & should not be driving. it is literally a skill issue.

[red-queen-on-the-heathen-throne]

I genuinely hate that the author of that article is getting dragged for this.

50 hours in a game is NORMAL. It's a normal amount of hours to spend on a single piece of art in your preferred medium. That's a full work week plus overtime! Unless all you do is work and sleep, have no family, no other hobbies, no social obligations, no chores, no NOTHING, it is absurd to be expected to clock hundreds of hours in a game before you write an article about it. Yes, even if video games are your job.

And frankly? ESPECIALLY if video games are your job. If we generously assume that this person got to play all of Inquisition at work - again, that would have taken up a full week of their job and then some. And people are bitching that they didn't do more? Didn't take their work home and spend every "free" minute of their day on - and I cannot emphasise this enough - THEIR JOB?

It's ridiculous. The ragging and sneering is bizarre to me. When something is your job, that can suck the joy right out of it sometimes, even if you generally like your work. I've been there! There have been years when I barely read five books because guess what! Books are my job! And reading draws on the same battery that writing does. So after a day of work? I might well be too drained to read another book, because I just wrote one.

I guess I don't get to talk about books now? Nobody should buy mine, I guess, because clearly, if I don't spend every minute of the day reading, I'm a hack who doesn't get to have opinions on books.

It's insane to me that this seems to be the consensus. That someone who doesn't let a game consume their entire life shouldn't be allowed to write professionally about it. Most of this person's audience are NOT YOU. Most readers of this article, the ones who can't be arsed to scream about it online, are just like the author - they by and large spend a nice weekend or two with a game, maybe squeeze in some nights during the week, but eventually, they wrap it up and move on. Maybe after ten hours, maybe after a hundred, or maybe after fifty. Because they have lives outside of video games, and they don't owe you a thousand hours in World of Warcraft in order to tell you "eh, it's okay".

Imagine if they had to do that for every game they write about. You don't actually think that's physically possible, do you?

I still can’t get over how the author of that Game Informer article for Veilguard wrote in it that he has less than 50 hours in Inquisition and worded it like that was a large amount… baby girl I got 493 hours clocked in that bad boy

[drop--pop--candy]

talked (read: had an argument) with my mother again. i'm going to start killing <3

[lakecoded]

so mad at my manager rn. so mad.