#with other people who are going to have similar experiences to them wrt this kind of thing

[starswallowingsea]

every time i hear about anyone screaming and crying about sex ed for children all i can think of is the sex ed i got when i was 8 years old which was literally just "these are your swimsuit parts and if someone touches you here and makes you uncomfortable you should tell a trusted adult about it"

[voxceleste]

hiiiii you’re one of my favorite fic writers ever and i admire you so much. i wondered if you had any advice for other writers of how to improve? especially for someone who has been writing for years but feels like they’ve hit a point of stagnation/knows they’re “good” at writing but feels like they’re just not hitting their full potential. also, if you had any advice for the differences in working on shorter pieces vs longfics, any guidance or methods that worked for you would be so appreciated!! your work has been very genuinely inspirational to me and i hope you have a great day <3

thank you for your kind words! <3

mileage varies more with regards to writing advice than maybe anything else, so it's possible none of this will work for you.

a common framework in education theory/neurobiology/psychology/etc is that there's a goldilocks zone between comfort and frustration wherein most learning happens. games studies has a similar idea, that a game has to be mentally engaging enough to keep the player invested without making it so punishingly hard that they quit.

writing is pretty much free. unlike most other creative mediums, the scope of a project has no relationship to the value of the materials or tools needed to produce it. you're only limited by your own energy, time, and effort--which can be formidable restrictions, to be fair, but it's not like being a filmmaker, where good-quality equipment and collaborators simply take more resources to afford. writers should take advantage of this. we're really lucky in this way.

the best thing you can do to improve your writing is to attempt projects that feel a little too big for you, or that you're not confident you can pull off. it doesn't have to be "big" in terms of length; a short piece could qualify if the style, tone, structure, subject matter, etc is outside of your comfort zone, but in my experience this has often looked like longer and more complex projects. then again, i love writing long stuff, so take it with a grain of salt--some people just don't, but you mention wanting to try your hand at longfic, so i assume it's relevant. the point is that in order to grow your skills, you have to stretch them.

past fic projects that stick out in my mind for having pushed me to grow as a writer:

story with 4 POV characters, alternating POVs at a regular cadence, where goings-on in each section would affect the other chapters

story with a real-world historical setting that required research wrt material culture as well as timeline/"who was where when"

story that blended a codified and formulaic genre template (het romance novel) with seemingly incongruous story elements (protag being a passively suicidal closeted trans woman and ex-evil mastermind)

the common denominator is having a very specific story i wanted to tell about these specific characters, and digging my teeth into how to do that in a way that felt specific and not just a recycling of common fanficisms… though in all cases, there were at least one or two other fics i looked at for inspiration, if only in a distant way. (those fics, in turn, are often what i'd consider examples of "fanfic that is also just good, ambitious writing," whether or not they would stand alone as original fiction--but that's a different post that's already been made by others.) (they are also full of tropes and are very fanficcy in their own ways!) i had to put a lot of thought into how to approach them in a way that was most true to what they wanted to be in my heart, and usually had one or two specific touchpoints of non-fanfic media that i used to get my bearings, which is a good habit to get into whether or not you're interested in branching out into original fiction writing.

with regards to the transition into longfic writing… writing processes are idiosyncratic and whatever advice i give you has a good chance of being totally useless. it'll probably involve a lot of trial and error, unfortunately. some tidbits:

the worst thing a story can be is boring and this is doubly true for long stuff. i would always rather an author turn the dial a little too far than not far enough to be impactful

can't overstate the utility of a good beta reader as well as a good cheerleader or two to whom you can dump your 2am story thoughts and troubleshoot your plot issues

start the story at the latest possible point in time; many a longfic idea dies on the vine because the author thinks they have to do way more setup than is actually required. this doesn't mean you have to open in medias res with an action sequence, but if you're opening on something more quiet or "expositiony," you should know *why* you're starting there, and should be able to draw up that scene vividly and characterfully

putting a little bit of effort into fleshing out your setting and side characters can help you a ton if you write yourself into a corner. if you're stuck, it's hard to come up with a story element from nothing when your story revolves around two floating heads in featureless rooms

the period between being 1/3-2/3 done is the actual fucking worst. it's miserable every time. the story is no longer a beautiful shining thing in your head, it's an ugly blob of misshapen clay, and you haven't seen it all start to come together yet. it's not you or your project, it just sucks and there's no way out but through

trust your idea! trust your own ability! trust the magic that can be worked in the edit!

if you bite off more than you can chew with a project and aren't able to finish it, or you're disappointed by how it turns out, that's really disappointing and difficult, which i don't want to downplay. but it's not wasted time, even if no one else sees the results of your work. that effort and experience will make you a better writer.

other advice that may or may not work for you:

read a lot of fiction; read fiction that is not fanfiction, especially; read outside of your usual genres/favourite authors; read authors who are known for unusual or singular styles. challenge yourself to write something imitating one of their styles, even for a page or two. what are the characteristics of a paragraph by octavia butler? how does she approach sentences? how is that different from a similar length of text by victor hugo?

read about writing craft, not from bloggers but via well-regarded books. even if you don't agree with all the advice (which you probably won't) or it's not all directly relevant to you, these texts will address fundamentals that apply to almost all kinds of prose and prompt you to develop unglamorous good habits. steering the craft by ursula k. le guin spends each chapter on an element of writing, such as sound & rhythm or punctuation, and includes exercises to put her principles into practice. on writing well by william zinsser is a classic--its focus is nonfiction, but much of the advice is widely applicable. both of these texts are full of example excerpts from great english prose stylists. books like this aren't likely to introduce groundbreaking new ideas so much as train you to become more consciously aware of elements of style you may be less attentive to than you could be.

your only hard limitation as a writer is your own creativity; drive your stories like cars in GTA. you're here for a wild time, not a long time, and if it blows up you can just get a new one.

[pollyanna-nana]

Thinking about Thistle’s potential character dynamics with the others.

He and Marcille have so much in common I bet after the initial awkwardness they’d have so much to talk about wrt feeling out of place and being scared of watching loved ones die before you.

I think he and Chilchuck would squabble a lot but in the “oh this is a punk ass teenager” kind of way. Ultimately though Chil’s a dad he can’t hold it against him.

I bet he’d be rly annoyed by Laios’ monster infodumping but secretly be fascinated and love listening to it. Probably gets called out for it at least once and is extremely embarrassed while Laios is oblivious (as always).

Senshi I actually think they’d get along well upon realizing that they both have a lot of experience thinking about and tending dungeon ecosystems but from different directions (as dungeon dweller and dungeon lord). Plus he would absolutely try to get Thistle to eat more.

Izutsumi I can see them clashing because their backstories actually have a lot of similarities except with very different reactions to the circumstances (Izutsumi hating her captors/the people who bought her and Thistle desperately wanting to please them) but in reality I think if they ever got over that they’d be terrifying together. Absolutely unhinged potential sibling energy if I’m being honest.

Falin would mother hen him into the ground but that’s a given. I can foresee him having to hide from the Falin-Senshi tag team “you need to take better care of yourself!” duo on a regular basis lol.

Mithrun. lol. Obviously Thistle hates his guts for (mostly) irrational reasons but I think hilariously Mithrun has a lot of respect for him. Bc like. He had a really good reason to become dungeon lord comparatively and we all know Mithrun’s favorite thing is talking about how much of a lil bitch he was prior to getting his desires eaten.

Kabru I’m not sure but I think there would be hostilities. Thistle I think would call him out for being fake immediately and with Kabru’s Elf Baggage™️ it might not go well at least at first.

Basically. Give him the found family he deserves.

[zazozaliad]

ramble I keep saying I'd make about sunday wrt adoptee trauma

so this is the promised screed where I talk a little (a lot) on the way society treats adoptees, which Sunday and Robin are & which I think is uhh a detail we're kind of easily prepped by Orphans As Media Trope to not really dwell upon on a deeper level. and I get it. but star rail is in fact writing these two on a level where this is an extremely important detail of who they are as people, it's intrinsically part of how they TICK. they don't just have a Complicated Flock of Dad Situation, they don't just have religious trauma, they have the adopted child version of these things which is every normal part of it but also backwards on roller skates while someone calls you ungrateful for wanting to stop and fix your skates' laces when they start coming untied.

from my own admittedly limited perspective — I am one, but it was a kinship adoption; I thus recognize the limits in my point of view and also want to try and elevate the voice of other adoptees whose experiences of displacement were different than mine. for instance: here's a great article by mirah riben, that also comes full of links for further reading.

anyway. they're adopted. this is an extremely critical decision in the halo sibs' design, and going further into the narrative foils territory the Aventurine and Sunday similarities don't stop at 'Aventurine and Sunday both lost their home and parents.' There is a next step, and it is 'Aventurine and Sunday were both once trafficked children.'

Soooo let's get to it! Ahem. Adoption, as it exists in modern society, is a multi-billion dollar industry. it is not, in fact, a noble act of salvation, undertaken by adopter on behalf of adoptee. It is, in blunt distillation, an intentional act of putting a human being under another's care — or, "mercy," how about we call it? That's a great word, isn't it.

With them at his mercy, Gopher Wood treats Sunday and Robin, these 'twins of Order,' as his golden opportunity. He used power and influence to secure the chance to raise them, after the senseless disaster that uprooted their lives. This last bit is a fact neutral statement, by the way; even if he turned out to be the coolest flock of birds dad ever, he still plucked them up like they were some choice shinies left laying around. They perfectly suited his personal needs, so that's the whole reason he's in their lives, and that they're in his.

I'm framing this merest act of adoption in a highly uncomplimentary way for a reason. By the way, peep the bits of canon showing Robin and Sunday as really young children, and how they aren't explicitly being called 'Robin' and 'Sunday' there. But moving on!

Adoption, and not just the circumstances leading toward adoption, is traumatic. It doesn't always result in unresolved trauma, because different people have different levels of resiliency to different things; a stressor is a stressor, whether you tanked it well or not. It is a disconnect with, or even a destruction of a portion of one's personal identity. The places we are from, the way those before us lived, these are intrinsic parts of our selves an adoptee loses partial or full access to.

Star Rail is pretty decent at showing this, actually; we've met adoptees in every major area (even arguably Amphoreus, if we stretch for the case of Pasithea) and each and every time you can see how the experience complicates. Bronya discovers the bittersweet answer to that hollow in herself in front of us in real time. Yanqing is maybe one of the Softest depictions of this, and he is still a relentless workaholic who itches to show himself as worthwhile. Because that's the thing.

Because society frames adoption as benevolent sacrifice, there's that weight, always there, in the mind.

In truth, adoption is acquisition, the factual motion of a supply (of people. of a person) meeting a demand. You don't, actually, pledge to take care of a child on accident. That's not a real thing. A child adopter is, when we ignore all pretentious sentiment, a person enacting a desire to acquire a child.

Sunday, I think, is my favorite depiction of a Star Rail adoptee thus far. He continues to commodify himself into adulthood to the point we see him literally turn himself into a big craftwork of unfeeling metal and porcelain. But they specifically chose to Not make him unrelentingly gracious toward his 'rescuer,' a move that has given me terminal brainrot about him, irrevocably, forever! ...And actually, by the time we meet him, he's gotten kinda fuckin' bitey at his "father," while still carrying out his Big Plan? It's a fascinating thing to see and a breath of fresh air, because it would have been pretty easy to write him a different way, and may have even made him more 'sympathetic' by showing him as just being some poor misled soul waiting for a wake-up call in the form of a train to the face.

but instead we have who Sunday actually is.

Sunday is, in fact, well aware of the wrongness of his own lived experience getting exploited for the Oak Family Order Conspiracy's ends, but ….

...he still chooses to do what he does because sure. You can know. You can know it's all fucked up, you can have that conversation until everyone involved is blue in the face, but there is a version of reality you would prefer to be true and then there's the version of reality that you personally live in, and Sunday, if anything, is quite used to feeling like he's the person starkly forced into facing the latter, so much so, he thinks, okay. What if I could make it so that I was the only one who ever had to live that, from now on?

…

there are no easy answers to tragedy. The 'answer' Sunday has dedicated the majority of his life to is that if he could simply personally suffer enough, conform enough even through the bitterest moments, everything will become easier and more harmonious for the world at large. this belief propels him on through acts of great endurance, into doing some real mean shit, and also, into crafting a fake fantasy version of reality ("I am okay with this state of affairs") to push other people to live in because things will be more convenient that way.

This is, in fact, "the vibe," of being an adoptee, In The RL. It doesn't matter if you win the fucking lottery and get adopted by the sweetest person to ever live, the messaging of society at large is still gonna blare ever in your ear: you're so lucky. you should be grateful. aren't you grateful? why aren't you grateful? what's wrong with you? if you won't appreciate what you have, you should imagine what it's like if it gets taken away.

an adoptee doesn't have to imagine what its like to lose what they have, by the way. even if their adoption happened when they were an infant. and even as sunday tries to seize the mantle of becoming 'the strong,' to reforge himself into a guiding star, he speaks from the perspective of one who has been 'the weak.'

I do not have my fandom PhD in Robin studies yet so I don't feel like I can get as in depth here as I like, but also, the trauma of being an adoptee is where I feel that a lot of Robin's more implicit characterization comes from, and also where a lot of potential misunderstanding of her comes from, because people I think.. don't very easily relate to the adoptee perspective, and instead think of it like a more 'normal' (bunny ears) (massive. massive bunny ears) family dynamic where there isn't that particular sword over the head. I am extremely understanding of this! if you haven't lived it, it can be hard to grasp how bone deep it goes into you. in everything. every moment. every day.

but. uh. TO ME, there are so many moments she is saying "blink twice" to Sunday while being very careful to not potentially have him pull away, because she sees him as way more 'in deep' and indoctrinated than she is. I think Robin sees her brother for most of the plot and fears she's looking at a Grateful Adoptee(TM), and it is a brick wall between their ability to communicate earnestly with one another. have you seen the letter Sunday almost-but-didn't-send her by the way? ho-ho-holy shit. I need someone to write that canon divergence yesterday, but that's also me huffing copium over the idea that that letter would have ever made it off planet when people were canonically reading sunday's mail.

...by the way, I think it's really interesting that robin's activist work seems to be aimed to try and stabilize areas in need, rather than rescue people from those places. this, too, is a mark of someone who understands The Problem With Adoption, To Me,

uhh. I don't really know how to end this. I just really need people to think more about this specific angle of his character other than it just being a source of sadness in his background he has moved past because it's actually extremely formative of his Everything and also I stare into the darkness between stars when we talk about Welt signing adoption papers. It's fine. I'm not gonna come for you for saying that even if I try to remove it from my own vocabulary. But oh my God. Oh my God. Please commit to EXPLORING THE CONNOTATIONS I would love to see people make fanworks of him reckoning with the extremely mixed and difficult emotions that "Welt attempts to dad at him explicitly" would inspire.

ok... peace..... I've spent way too much time writing this when I am sick and should be resting....

[bandtrees]

AAHHHH!!! AAHHHHHHHH DIALTOWN AAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

okay i've had a night to sit on the evil route and put my thoughts together and holy shit dude. ALL OF IT- all of it was so good but i'm obviously (being the callum and gingi guy) going to focus on the callum and gingi stuff. spoilers ahead if you have not done the evil route gooo do it!!!!

i think looking at the worst end of the evil route is best to view through the lens of "the literal opposite of ch3" and also "knowing who milt and marla and all of them are" because - for starters - i think the approach dogman has taken, out of universe, is genius. i know milt and marla aren't ingame mostly for writing constraint reasons, but the specifics of their lives (milt's especially, being basically erased from history) not being something you ever get is really really good because history just... does not remember them!

milt committed suicide but according to dogman that's not even public knowledge, as far as anyone in-universe knows he just disappeared and all of the turmoil that took place is kind of lost to time. and i think knowledge of his name, much less what happened to him, being something you have to dig through paratext and get an easter egg of a fuckin tie-in web quiz to learn, is... probably the experience you'd more or less have in-universe. he's someone you only really know if you're really into the subject.

and to be honest i dont think i would have it any other way, because what the dlc does to you if you're one of those who know is MADDENING. it's everywhere. the hat motif. i have very strong feelings on evil route peter essentially having the exact role marla must have - the conversations gingi has with the narrator, with roger, is soooooo gooooood. it's a subtle background puzzle you get to piece together that (i reckon) also would hit hard for any player who doesn't Know(tm).

(and that also segues into a general feeling i have about the dlc, being that i am not a dsaf guy at all, i was into dialtown first and i have no interest in dsaf i'm sure its great but just not something i think i'll ever look into: for a bit before this dlc i was worried if it would be enjoyable as someone who's not into dsaf or has context for any cameo characters or references - but it was and is :D the characters all exist perfectly in dialtown and the references that exist still have merit on their own and are funny/etc on their own even without whatever added context im sure dsaf gives. which is good and i love it.)

all of that to say, i really really love what this dlc did for so many characters, but especially gingi and callum (and the narrator!) - i love how, as seems to be callum's destiny with maladjusted people, gingi only sees him as an incomplete and biased ideal to strive for. we simultaneously get so much weight and nuance to callum through seeing gingi go down a similar path, but also get so little of it because the only thing gingi cares about wrt callum is him being the "greatest salesman ever" and completely discarding the parts of him that made him anything but an industrial supervillain.

i think it wouldv been easy for it to just be "phonegingi is basically becoming (the worst parts of) callum and so, when they're working with mingus, finds some degree of kinship in the pictures etc of him" but the fact they're completely dismissive of mingus and her family history in every way, demanding the pictures of him be taken down, making a jab at him being "forgetful", staining and ruining them, etc, is even MORE telling of what they've become. much like callum was, they've found success and don't really think about how they got there or who helped them get there!

(see: mingus having marla's hat, which gingi takes from her when they execute her - you could say that hat symbolizes the genuine good that callum did despite his mixed legacy, and the love that he had for his wife and those closest to him: and that's something gingi is completely ignoring in favor of having it be another symbol of their (and callum's) power :D)

also the space ending. You're telling me gingi became wildly successful and then in an act of innovation-induced hubris, locked themself in an inescapable box, alone? Good god man. callum is INESCAPABLE in this route its so fucking good. elements of him and what happened to him and the path he went down are everywhere - even in other routes, there's roger's amnesia, there's gingi making other people suffer for their mistakes: it's so horrifying when you realize what's happening but in retrospect the signs were always there. roger's plant is literally crown mechanics. no wonder that man's juices are all over the goddamn place!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

also gingi getting a cat tail in the bad ends is genius. 10/10 design choice. really good dlc. this is not a coherent ramble but i'm hopped up on being insane about what iv witnessed this weekend and also we have like no food in the house rn. we dont even have fucking milk iv had to make pb&js with this strangely tasting strangely textured squeeze bottle jelly and not even have milk with it. roger is the only thing keeping me stable

and roger himself is like... god, i dont even know what to say about him really? i adore him so much. he's a brilliantly written character. it's to the point where i cant even like analyze anything i just kind of have to point at him really hard and hope you understand. i related to him a lot as i'm sure a lot of people did. inexperience and "stupidity" and forgetfulness are traits that often get flattened into either completely sympathetic non-flaws or completely unlikable annoyances and i think how the dlc touched upon those traits of roger's - funnily a lot of the time, yet very respectfully and sympathetically when the time came for it, while never letting you forget the genuine harm it was causing to the people around him - was reaaaaally good. you love roger but you understand why others might not - but even then, like the rest of his workers, you still care about him first and foremost, not what he can accomplish.

and i think that duality being present in the good/evil routes is really good: roger's good ending is one where he flubs the presentation and hands the reins over to someone he trusts more to fix up the place, and he acknowledges his workers love him as a friend more than they do a leader. and the evil ending is the one where he has a wildly successful, energetic presentation that people love, and he's getting praise and is saving the plant and everyone's so excited, because not only is he promoting an underhanded shitty scam, but it's not him. he IS, like gingi, becoming a HORRIBLE version of himself: the point where good intentions or even ignorance begin to matter less and less in the face of actual harm being done. again, much like callum!!!!!

i also love peter. oh my god peter. in his marla crown era

i 100% had more to say but i'm beginning to lose it. oh yeah THE FUCKING INSULIN SCAM IS CRUEL. that part had me with my hand over my mouth and my eyes just agape at how fucking grim it was. the reveal that peter's wife is also diabetic makes it go from "pretty fucked up!" to "actively devastating". truly gingi at their worst. both it and the blowout argument they have with the narrator afterwards are done excellently. taking advantage of peter's tendency to worry about roger, roger's not wanting to upset peter, peter's fucking diabetic wife, is so so cruel and i love it. really really gets into the weight of what you're doing and how fucked up scams are, we are out of the realm of silly jokes about crypto and in the realm of ruining peoples' lives. it's so good.

anyway. really good dlc. i will surely have so much more to say and create about it. it maddens me that it's only five dollars because i dont think i will ever be the same again after that to be quite honest with you!!!! literally my only gripe is the way it's kind of carried on dialtown's general problem with its non-main female characters but that's something people have talked about more and articulated better than me.

good dlc. really good dlc. cough up the five dollars because it is truly worth so much more i havent even been able to touch upon here. and if you havent played dialtown cough up the eight dollars and then cough up the five dollars. its real good.

[iridescentscarecrow]

self indulgent semi critical stream of consciousness thoughts on p2 & csm's writing style --

re: the comedy point: i do say this a lot but fujimoto uses the same tension for both comedy & horror -- the punchline of a Joke disrupts just as a rupture of tension -> horror occurs. & this is why i appreciate the writing last chapter, personally. the crassness/hilarity to it almost contributes to how i'm reading it. he hates his body/the body becomes a point of comedic objection. this kind of relies on being able to see how this meshing of telling & character overlap: which i find q. compelling re: how sexual trauma works, the way it kind of deprecates, lessens your sense of self. it's a story very lived in & deeply Felt wrt how all its characters are written (the butt of the joke refuses to simply Be that, if it makes sense. kobeni's distress in the family burger chs is hilarious but its also a haunting, empathetic, portrait of corporate/family violence; comedy further built on the hollowness of what the CSM being there/going through This Motion means.)

this for sure won't work for every reader, tbh, & i understand this because it's a fine line to tread between portraying this effectively & it just coming off as insensitive. i'm personally very interested in genres & working within genres|how horror/comedy/character presentations conflict, intersect so i'm enjoying it... but it's true that p2 often feels hollower of a story than p1 & this isn't Bad, per se: i think what fjmt is trying to say is a lot more ambitious, a lot more immersed in technique - that it often takes away from some of the contemplative rawness (which does, by contrast, feature in some of p2's more widely loved chapters) that fills p1. p2's ruptures of tension are more at the forefront, a lot of the frame behind it is *so* based on minimal technical nuance that it doesn't really nestle onto you in the same way, if that makes sense? i'm mostly positive about plot elements on main but i've been eyeing the asa erasure with skepticism for a while. it's really a much weaker story without her, no matter what thematic point that i think is being made here. i mean, perhaps because when you deplete the asa to the story you're left with denji - who is mostly *passive*, doesn't produce narrative (unlike asa/makima) which writes the story for you. denji's brilliance is in spurts, contrasted/set against other character's selves - often in refutation of them - in a desperate kind of <proof of life>, of having been imbued with thus written experience, of this being so deeply felt - & this is what gets to fans too, i feel. his life as visible through <written> form/against, caught within structure & other's wants. this is also why i think those nayuta chapters (as an extension of mkm) were so great because of what it did for nayuta & denji. you see him through her eyes, & then you see *him.* i think the issue with asa is that a large amt of her character also has like a (similar to denji) self hate, a repression which makes itself known very well when we're inside her head but atp rn we can't see that at all, because she's modelled herself (& i think this is rlly cool narratively) around the idea of the CSM she's meant to work as an extension of. & this self modelling paired w. being Out of her head makes her feel (to me) awfully flat. & this is upsetting, because i really like asa!

but at some levels i appreciate the ambition to p2's greater story that i can forgive individual characters being diluted in the fray. but this isn't true for everyone | shouldn't even be because csm is a story *felt* through its characters, within its absurdity... the reason most people like it is because aspects of it resonate with them. & this kind of jarr is pretty much fjmt's biggest writing issue - it's what i've personally criticised / seen others criticise w. p1 (power's character's writing towards the end) & it's why i see people rightfully criticise p2.

this is already a very self indulgent thread so i'm also going to bring up *why* i like characters such as reze, makima, togata: their character presentation compels enough to really intertwine with the flesh of them in ways that are... kind of hard to ignore to fully receive the story. if that makes sense: their surface is so much condensed trope.. in fact, this is true of even aki who i think i'd argue is the best written character in p1 functioning outside the (makima-denji) centre w. the revenge trope.

anyway: it's kind of also because of these reasons that i feel that p2 will just *work* better when read as a whole,, because of the frame fjmt has himself set up it becomes a little difficult to resonate w. it in individual moment, chapter to chapter, because atp you have to either be (a) incredibly aware of this larger structure which is... difficult to do for a weekly release at least to sustain a good amt of immersion or (b) recognise the narrative that emanates from trauma reltd. mechanism & since this is more personal: it's harder to find yourself here & it becomes.. disconnected, frustrating moment after moment where it becomes not just a <character work> but a <one character work>. & i find this hits in these instances w. people who empathise w. denji as do i! but i find little discussion of this as Implication rippling into story structure (although fjmt's story is built on/into his main character as it was in p1)... it's Hard without a writing force like mkm to make denji cohere into a largely invisible narrative.

honestly could talk more about this for ages:: even wrt. my issues with like... a large amount of the back half of Fire Punch which don't come from a place of thematic incoherency at all. i legit feel fujimoto needs a frame for his story to work <within instance> & i see him trying to bring in katana etc. here (& other male characters) in order to deploy what he's saying but their framings don't.. linger enough to really grip into you as Story imo. the single family callback into p1 makima shook me far more.

wishful thought but i think asa's head would be interesting to get into because we *have* yuko there as meaningful setup in order to really direction... i loved the yuko dialogue use in 165 but her ghost feels. Almost too subtle rn, imo. this is just like,,, a small portion of my thoughts regarding p2 & its criticisms rn;; bear in mind, i really like/hold bias towards the themes p2 is playing with [concurrs a lot w. my interests] but i also really enjoy going on & on about storytelling technique LMAO. i'm looking forward to seeing how this arc concludes.

[purpleheartskies]

For now, I'm going to include a note in some of my posts asking that people not reply or reblog with comments or tags that do things like:

insult the writers

claim "bad writing"

say things like "the show is dumb", or "we're not supposed to see it that way", or "it happened off-screen [even though we have no proof]" (if there's no proof that something happened off-screen, it's not canon)

say that s5 was rushed and not written properly and/or the s5 finale is the "real ending" because the writers thought that the show wasn't going to be renewed (which the writers have outright refuted and which is illogical given their decisions for the plot, characters, and characterizations in s5)

say that the writers are too afraid of the majority of the fans to have the story in s6 go any way that might upset these fans, or that Netflix is affecting the writers' decisions or forcing them to give fan service. (I know there's usually politics involved with networks and production companies wrt show runners having creative agency, but the consistency in the storytelling style and characterizations indicates that the writers still have the same level of the creative agency as in early seasons.)

any dismissive statement about the writing of the show

These types of comments and tags minimize the contents of a post and effectively shut down conversations about important topics related to the characters and their character journeys.

I enjoy healthy conversations and debates, and I'm used to certain CK fans dismissing my opinions and posts because I'm a "Robby fan". But, most of my interactions with fans after s5 just have me tired of not being able to talk about the story itself and the storytelling without people minimizing what I'm saying with their negativity and condescension towards the writers and the writing.

I know a lot of people are upset with how the story has gone so far. I'm also not happy with a lot of the narrative decisions. I've also mentioned before that I'm not happy with a lot of the messaging so far. However, the nuance in the storytelling is still there. It's been pretty consistent since the start. The characterizations have been consistent too. So when people say "bad writing", I disagree. I think of bad writing as gaping plot holes, inconsistent characterizations, incongruous timelines, etc. I don't think of narrative decisions that I don't like as bad writing. I recognize how the story is framed, but framing is just one aspect of the story and is a tool for storytelling. The context, subtext, and a lot of what we have in the story itself tells us so much that is in contrast to the framing. This show has some of the best indirect storytelling I've seen in a show. I find the storytelling and characterizations to be really interesting, and I hope to keep discussing Robby and his story without my posts being dismissed.

And tbh I wonder where people's imaginations are. This is a fictional story, and a lot of things can still happen. For example, I actually don't think the baby plotline is meant to continue. If you take the time to analyze the story, it's pretty obvious that the baby was used as nothing more than a plot device this season for a few negative reasons, and this new "family" itself isn't meant to be a/the "happy ending". That's all I'll say about this plotline in this post. I'll see how some of my new posts do before I share my full thoughts on this plotline in a later post about how and why I think things may go a certain way. In general, I want to keep talking about the story as if it's a story.

Robby and his journey represent certain people in society and the traumas and struggles they experience. So far, the story and other characters haven't been too kind or sympathetic towards Robby, and sadly, the world and society irl aren't too kind or sympathetic towards many people who have similar situations to Robby's. I think his story is important, and I want to keep talking about it. I want to keep the conversation going about the important topics being explored in Robby's story.

[fursasaida]

fucking hell

Ed Yong, bless him, just published a long form piece on brain fog (re: long COVID, but appropriately situated wrt other conditions as well - chemo brain, ME/CFS, etc).

Early in the piece, in describing one patient's experience, he includes the line: "For Davis, it has been distinct from and worse than her experience with ADHD." This is it. This is the only mention of ADHD in the article. Which is fine, because it is about brain fog and not about ADHD. Let us note that the line is clearly conveying one person's subjective experience.

And yet. There are dozens of ADHDers in the twitter replies going full "I AM UNCOMFORTABLE WHEN WE ARE NOT ABOUT ME???", claiming that this is "dismissive," that it "denies any similarities," that it "invalidates my experience." This is because brain fog affects executive function (....no shit), and I guess they think they own executive dysfunction. Never MIND that if anybody's "invalidating" anybody's expérience, it's them invalidating that patient's experience--and mine, for that matter; both she and I deal with both issues, and it is clear from their comments that they've never had brain fog. [points, yells, OWN VOICES!! OWN VOICES!!! FLAG ON THE PLAY!!!!] Never MIND that overlapping life impacts is not the same as shared symptoms, aetiologies, or sensations. Never MIND that there was nothing dismissive about any of this until they showed up. Never MIND that their evident refusal (even when challenged) to reason about the possibilities that might exist for brain fog to share impacts with ADHD while remaining distinct shows that they are just reacting without thinking it through at all. We are here!! To yell!!!!

I just really hate everyone (except for Ed Yong). I can understand this kind of behavior from people with ME/CFS because that illness is so widely dismissed and understudied, and they absolutely have to advocate for themselves relentlessly. There are occasions when I think their "but what about my thing" reactions are misplaced, but I understand why that happens and I'm sympathetic. It's an inevitable, ancillary aspect of the appropriate response to their situation. This, though--it's not like ADHD is venerated or extremely well understood, but people broadly agree it exists and there are medications, treatments, dozens of books and podcasts, just way more resources. (Yes, many of us have people in our lives who will dismiss something as a consequence of ADHD and insist we're just lazy. It is not the same thing. Not everything that sucks is the same as everything else that sucks! Sorry about it!!) I just do not see any justification for this besides "you said it's not ADHD but then you mentioned my stuff and I can't be bothered to think of any reason why that would be other than that you are discriminating against me. And it's MY stuff, MINE."

Like, god, all of this is made up. (INB4: I'm not saying symptoms are imaginary or that there are no physiological aetiologies, I am saying the diagnostic system for sorting, grouping, and explaining them is constructed and varies by time, place, culture, etc, DO NOT START.) It is a higgledy piggledy pseudo-taxonomic pile of overlapping buckets. It has the structural coherence of Gormenghast castle and the rational planning of an unreconstructed medieval town. No bucket holds anything exclusively--not a symptom, not a feeling, not an effect on one's life. There can be many reasons why someone is unable to walk, but this is does not mean that talking about amputees is invalidating or neglecting people with paralysis. It's not like it's news to me that people over-identify with diagnoses and use the medicalizations and reifications involved in those diagnoses to make it everyone else's problem, but once again, with especial feeling this time: Shut up. SHUT UP.

[stillness-in-green]

The Spinaraki in me is screaming but the Villain society stan in me is disappointed that Spinner doesn’t seem to think more about his fellow mutants.

It certainly does make for a curious confrontation in the making with Shouji (my assumptions, let me show you them), anon! In this corner, a guy who’s always kept his head down and lived behind a mask! In this corner, a guy who just wants to get his boyfriend out from under the thumb of his controlling dad! And behind the scenes, a bunch of people who are definitely all-in on this confrontation, but have a bunch of ideology gumming up the clarity of the message! Truly, are there any heteromorphic people out there who just want to speak their own truths?!

Well, maybe, maybe not.

I don’t think Spinner doesn’t think about his fellow mutants, really; he just has other priorities. Spinner, despite his early feints otherwise, has never been an ideologically motivated villain, and I don’t expect him to become one now. As he told us himself, he was never really into Stain because of the content of Stain’s antisocial ideology, just the fact of Stain having an antisocial ideology. Even that, Spinner’s long outgrown.

As @codenamesazanka lays out here (in response to an extremely silly anon), none of the League are really societal reformers or principled anarchists who want to make the world a better place.(1) And for the most part, I think that’s fine. I’m perfectly happy to continue passing out Stan the MLA propaganda for all my principled villain needs, especially since they’ve gone ahead and provided me with a specific sub-group who very much are thinking about their fellow mutants. I also don’t think it’s such a bad thing that Shouji has mostly kept his head down and Spinner’s got more pressing concerns; both of those are perfectly realistic responses to real-life experiences of bigotry and oppression, especially from people who, having grown up with it, may well have grown jaded about trying to change it long ago.

My trouble is and remains that the story desperately needs to find someone who a) can speak to heteromorph problems with intellectual honesty and rigor and b) isn’t going to get stomped flat in the first hero fight they come up against and get thrown in prison where no one has to think about the points they were making anymore. The closest people we have to that right now are Shouji—who has problems with the intellectual honesty department—and Average Woman Heteromorph Gal, whom Horikoshi has still not even seen fit to name.(2)

I very much do not like the current set-up, in which no one with active involvement in that plotline is just there because they believe it, without some kind of outside cause/manipulation. I quipped somewhere once that the heteromorphs need a Tsukauchi Makoto, and I stand by that. Sadly, I don’t think we get characters that well-spoken in history and law and social analysis outside of Vigilantes, because Furuhashi Hideyuki is, himself, either more interested in or freer to explore those things than Horikoshi Kohei.

Thanks for the ask! Let's hope for the best together, anon!

----

1: Dabi and Compress probably come closest; Compress might even still get there, if he deigns to someday give us a proper explanation of exactly what his motivations were wrt to the League, but I think at most he and Dabi are probably in a similar place of “Burn out the rot and what’s left, no matter how shit it is, will still be better than what we have now.”

2: I was and remain unbelievably salty that someone with as much importance-relative-to-bit-characters as she has didn’t even get a name on her goddamn volume compilation character page, while the small fry villain chump who lived and died in two pages, just long enough for ShigAFO to crash through his living room wall and try to pass New Order off to him, got named upon his introduction. That’s a crock of shit, Horikoshi. Give her a name.

[arcyrus]

HI cyrus or colress please if you like ... for quastions 1 9 10 18 maybe <3

oh MAN [cracks knuckles] i am literally going to do answer all of these now i hope you know what can of worms you opened here. putting it under a readmore in case it gets too long LOL

anyways starting with cyrus.

favorite things about the character: genuinely my favorite aspect of him is how much of a fucking hypocrite he is. "get rid of human spirit and denounce emotion" my ass, when he's out here being the most spirited and emotional character in the whole game. the kind of person who thinks he's emotionless or can trick people into thinking that but in actuality feels way too much and Hates it. i want to drown him in lake verity specifically. also i love the entire galaxy / sun / etc aesthetic with him and team galactic (<- biased astrophysicist moment)

9. favorite headcanon: i'm going to use this as an opportunity to talk about why i gave cyrus a volcarona in my au stuff LOL. his parents gave him a larvesta as his first pokemon (quite uncommon and hard to train) and it goes with their high expectations of him... he holds his larvesta to the same standards that he does himself, and pushed it very hard to live up to his parents' expectations - and it ended up evolving quite quickly relative to most volcarona....

10. who do i ship with this character: i crossed the event horizon of accretionshipping too long ago to seriously consider anything else honestly. i have chosen this rarepair as my hill to die on and it is entirely worth it. who cares if cyrus and colress have never interacted in canon and likely never will, it's my city now and i make the rules!!

that being said i do respect cyrus / cynthia as a ship, i like the dichotomy and whatnot but personally i just like them as a very complicated (former) friendship than romantically.

18. what i associate this character with: hooooo boy this is a loaded question. some of it is a bit more towards my particular story stuff that sits in my head but here's some of it:

the sun - easy answer, but true. center of the solar system, incredibly important, yet scorching and unforgiving. there's an icarus / moth too close to the flame parallel i can make here wrt the legendary stuff he gets involved with too

a black hole - this is just an upgrade to the sun theme really and is also because i am biased towards them in the astrophysical sense. but still similar to the sun stuff ultimately just on a bigger scale... a supermassive black hole is at the galactic center and influences the entire galaxy around it even if it's not "active". they do weird things to time and space that are honestly just ridiculous

various pokemon types - dark and flying obviously (seems like the kind of person to wish he could fly), but also fire and dragon. the former tying in with the sun thing, passion, etc, and dragon because legendaries lol

i'm going to stop now for the sake of how long this is getting but let it be known i think about this way too much.

ok colress time

favorite things about the character: somehow colress is genuinely the only fictional character ever to make me experience cuteness aggression. sometimes i draw him and it makes me want to strangle him. anyways my actual favorite thing about him is his complete lack of care for like, anything other than the pursuit of knowledge? to the point of possible apocalypse? i love that he really is gray and is open to all possibilities as answers to whatever questions he has. i don't know he's just really great and i like him.

9. favorite headcanon: colress cynthia lusamine family truther. colress and cynthia are about the same age while lusamine is decently older, so he's actually somewhat closer to his cousin cynthia than his sister lusamine. i like to think that cynthia also has an interest in his primary research question of "how to bring out the power of pokemon" so they bond over strategies for this and whatnot. i've had this headcanon for so long that i've honestly forgotten it's not canon LMAO

10. who do i ship with this character: see above!!! i cant say how much i think about these two honestly its a problem LOL. i'll take this question as an opportunity to say that like with the previous one i understand why people ship antigrav in this case but personally it's not my thing. i like ghetsis but i am too rarepairpilled to ever consider it myself ahaha

18. what do i associate this character with: here we go again!

mercury: this one is entirely based on my own au but i don't care. mercury as both the planet closest to the sun (simultaneously scorched and freezing), and as the liquid element that was used for all sorts of things and poisoned people before they knew what they were dealing with

various pokemon types: steel of course, but also psychic very heavily bc he gets up to more stuff related to this in my au than canon HAHA. ice as well, both because of the kyurem stuff and to contrast cyrus :P

i honestly would have put some more but i need to go leave for a thing now hahaha. i am absolutely always willing to elaborate on any of this at any time

[goodbyenorthernlights]

I think I've mentioned before that I RP Rezo on dreamwidth sometimes, and the RP community on dreamwidth does a lot of ooc/meta chat on a second website called plurk. I keep my plurk account private (and I do not particularly recommend plurk as a site, tbh, I'm just there because it's where other people are) so. Figured I'd repost some of the stuff I've written about Rezo for the 1.5 people on tumblr who might be interested.

Here's a meta post about Rezo and Zelgadis's relationship that I wrote 9 months ago, featuring some commentary (in italics) from the Zelgadis-mun I was playing with at the time.

Gonna ramble a bit about my take on Rezo and Zelgadis's relationship, so, uh, CW: Child/familial abuse and general dysfunctional family stuff.

This need to ramble inspired by a tumblr post I saw along the lines of "does turning your grandson into a chimera count as physical abuse."

Now idk how one would classify that because obviously nobody in the real world has been able to do such a thing. Although I'm sure there's a precedent for people doing nonconsensual medical experiments on their children, which would probably be the closest analogy?

Anyway, after a bit of thinking I kind of picture that Rezo would have been like. A mixture of psychologically abusive and neglectful.

wrt the neglect I also think a lot of it would have been cultural- like WE'D consider a guy letting the teenager in his care go on dangerous raids against bandits to be a blatant act of supervisory neglect but in the Slayers 'verse nobody really bats an eye at Lina, the teenage protagonist, going around getting into zany adventures.

And this is headcanon but I imagine Rezo started working as a healer at a similar age. So if anyone called him out on that he'd just be ???? and think they were like. Smotheringly overprotective.

But based on the way we see flashback!Zelgadis behaving, I do think Rezo was generally pretty good to him as a kid. I can see him being distant, and/or leaving a lot of Zelgadis's actual care up to other people, but I don't think he hit Zel or insulted him or anything like that.

I think the abuse started very suddenly and rapidly got worse, basically.

Basically, imagine you've been raised by your grandfather. He runs a nonprofit and is very busy with it, so he isn't around as much as you'd like, but he's always been kind to you and you also know the people he works with and they're always kind to you as well, and life is generally okay.

But then when you're fifteen he drugs you out of nowhere and you wake up missing a kidney, and after that he just keeps getting colder and more distant and starts getting involved in crime and makes you help him out and it all comes to a head a few years later when somebody finally fucking shoots him.

And then you're just left there like ????? well i'm gonna need a fuckton of therapy after all that.

Also, as Zelgadis's player, the fact that it was a revelation made him wonder how much of Rezo's prior actions were less about 'I love my grandson' or 'I have an obligation to this kid' and more 'I have a hidden agenda'.

Yeah, it's a wonder Zel is capable of trusting anyone at all after that happened. I imagine there might have been warning signs that Something Is Wrong With Rezo but 1) Rezo was doing his level best to hide them, and 2) Zel was a kid, not fuckin' Psychologist Sherlock Holmes, so from Zel's perspective it came entirely out of nowhere.

I mean, I assume it's why he stuck with Rezo because you get the sense that he honestly didn't believe anyone else would believe him over Rezo. He was shocked Zolf and Rodimus sided with him when he did defect

Yeah, I can imagine that the adults Rezo was interacting with were more "Hmmm" about him, it just kind of varied on where they went with that "Hmmm"

I think Zolf and Rodimus probably went "Wow okay so he's ACTUALLY a bastard" especially after he cursed Zel, whereas Eris went "oh no...... poor little meow meow......."

i do not know what to conclude about dilgear and noonsa although it is interesting to me that they're both nonhumans.

[pluviophile-imagines]

Could I ask what your sexuality headcanons are? I love comparing mine with other peoples’!

Ok second half of this; this is just like. non-students who i Actually have thought about HJBAFV not at all a comprehensive list. Again disclaimer i write all these chars as bi in my fics, also i am bi myself so the vast majority are also bi, and also leaving a lot of these vague so u can imagine ur favorite ship or urself or w/ever

ok lets start this off with Aizawa. I think....... hes another one who's rlly unlabelled, doesnt super care to think it through and define it, but calls himself gay bc his interest in women is very, very rare and it's just way easier to say than explain all that. Definitely do buy into the idea that he had a crush on Oboro in hs but i do NOT buy into the easermic agenda sorry. Definitely not someone who goes looking for dates, but doesn't say no if someone asks him and hes interested (also im not gonna give her a whole section but i saw a hc a while back that the Ms. Joke stuff is literally that shes a lesbian and hes gay and shes fucking with him and i love that so much i just wanted to put it out there)

on the topic of the erasermic agenda: Hizashi's pan and knew it before HS, had a sudden & intense crush on Aizawa for the first month they knew each other and then immediately got over it in favor of a similar sudden, intense, and then immediately fading crush on Midnight. Hizashi and Aizawa r just rlly good friends imo; maybe they messed around for a bit in their twenties but it never went anywhere serious. He dates around a lot, not even necessarily to settle down just to have some fun

Midnight is aro/ace but does get in qprs & gravitates towards women wrt that. Most people dont read vigilantes but theres a woman in that, Kazuho, who i imagine she's been in a long-term qpr with; her relationship with aizawa and hizashi leans a little more towards a qpr than a normal friendship, too, but it's not rlly defined that way

All Might is married to justice queer but v much not interested in relationships. He and that one guy from the first movie are ABSOLUTELY exes and i won't hear otherwise; it's the only relationship he's ever had, and they broke up bc he had to go back to japan. He was heartbroken but did eventually get over him; his lack of romance afterwards is from genuine disinterest and not being hung up on his past. I can see him finding someone else in his later years, after he's retired. Definitely feels like he's not worthy of it tho

Hawks is bi but unfortunately didn't get to figure that out until like Now in the timeline...... if youll let my dabihawks history shine through i think dabi was the reason JHBASFGJHB he was basically brainwashed by the commission to become a hero so he didnt have time to Figure That Shit Out; he knew he was into women bc that was easy & what the commission expected from him but then he started this undercover assignment and met dabi and realized Oh...... Fuck. Hawks is hard tbh, bc i think between the control that the commission has over him and his own convictions as a hero he doesn't pursue any romance (tho he does get crushes or find people attractive) and most of his flings are done to keep up his prettyboy act, not out of genuine interest in being a fuckboy. Can't imagine him having a relationship until well after canon but I do see him being interested eventually

Onto the villains, Shigaraki is unlabelled but probably would call himself queer if asked. Definitely admires women more but isn't very interested in romance; AFO actively encourages him to pursue the things interested in so imo if he were he'd talk abt it more lmfao. I kinda see him as demi as well, not the type to fall immediately but requiring a friendship beforehand; tho unlike Bakugo as i said in my last post I dont think it happens suddenly but rather slowly. Y'all know im a big fan of shigaraki being absolutely whipped for his s/o so i do thing hes a big piner, tho he's also pretty bold and unashamed of his affections. I'm a big fan of him falling for a member of the league or a civilian; definitely can't see him falling for a hero unless the hero was already halfway to turning sides already. I think he's also attracted to intelligence and someone who pushes him to think more abt his ideology...... maybe im just projecting at this point JSHDFBVAJKSHD but my point is that the gender of his partner is definitely the least of what he considers/notices

Dabi is bi and, here's my bold take, demisexual; not interested in sex unless its with someone he loves. Absolutely doesn't even think abt romance for most of the years where he's on his own. He's got revenge to plan. By the time he joins the league that hasn't changed much, and he's demi so he's not interested in sleeping around, plus he rlly denies any attachment to people at all. As I said in that other ask tho I do rlly like the idea of him with Magne, so I think they have a fling for a bit before her death :( it's one of the things that leads him to isolate himself further, unfortunately, even from Jin and the other League members with whom his relationships aren't romantic. I can see him dating someone post-canon bc i think hes gonna be redeemed lol. It could be someone he knew before but they probably didnt date again bc he was v guarded; i think magne was rlly the only person he dated

Magne is pan and heres the kicker: I think shes t4t, which led to a little moment just before she and dabi got together where he was like "she wouldnt be into me :/" but she was into him anyway so all was good. She got around in her circles, mostly casual stuff tho she yearned for something more serious.

Spinner's bi & trends towards women but does occasionally get things for men and they're almost always intense. He thought he was straight for a while even once he joined the league and then suddenly got a crush on Shigaraki (around the time of MVA) and realized otherwise LMFAO he's definitely a hopeless romantic type, the whole mutant prejudice thing makes it rlly hard for him and i can see him being rlly happy with another mutant-type; i feel like as he matures he starts to gravitate towards them

Toga is canonically pan to my understanding, iirc her interest in Uraraka and Deku is the same (and romantic) in canon tho i might be wrong. Poor girl just needs therapy. I like the idea of the two of them becoming her friends over her being involved with them but i totally can get behind her having a thing with Uraraka (and maybe Tsu) at some point post-canon (presuming she gets redeemed), tho I think a qpr between the two/three of them would be longer lasting. And again presuming she gets therapy i can see her settling down with someone, gender irrelevant

Jin is unlabelled bc he hasn't much thought abt it, definitely had a thing for dabi and for hawks which does make me sad on both counts. I think he likes women slightly more abstractly/aesthetically and gets crushes more on men,. The dabi thing fades as they get closer and start to view each other as brothers. In his later years he doesn't rlly care about romance, I think he enjoys the experience of crushing but doesnt like dating people; his found family in the League is far more important to him. But i can see him falling head-over-heels for someone quite suddenly and having a bit of a whirlwind romance. Also someone for whom gender isn't much of a factor

Mr Compress is also queer and also hasn't rlly thought abt it. Definitely leans more towards women; he's like 30 but i like to think he also goes for older partners, 10 or 15 years his senior KJBADSJFHB idk he just has that Vibe with the way he calls himself an old man etc. A lot of the league i cant see sleeping or dating around much, i feel like they prioritize each other, but I do think mr compress gets around more than the others. i can see him having a bit of a fuckbuddy who he catches feelings for

Kurogiri is fun; as Oboro I do think Aizawa's crush was reciprocated, tho he wasn't around long enough for them to act on it :( he's bi, tho kurogiri isn't supposed to have personal interests. I like to imagine the brainwashing isnt as good as AFO wants it to be tho so I like the idea of him falling for someone anyway. I also like the idea of the heroes managing to undo the nomufication and I 100% can see him, aizawa, and someone else (someone he was involved with as Kurogiri) ending up in a triad as a result of aizawa and the third partner helping him through the aftermath of all that shit

Lady Nagant is a manga-only minor character but im in love with her so imma talk abt it. Shes bi and leans VERY heavily towards women, probably spent years questioning whether she was rlly bi or a lesbian before finally having a fling with a guy that she genuinely enjoyed. Has only ever been in long-term relationships with women and I v much think she has a gf at home who stayed even when she was arrested 🥺

Finally imma talk abt Natsuo bc i love that boy. He's one of the few unmarried chars with a love interest and he canonically has a gf. I do see him as IDing straight in canon ngl, but the kind of straight where he might actually be bi but his preference leans so heavily towards women and he grew up in a bad home so he just doesnt rlly think abt it bc hes v happy with women anyway. In shiganatsu thoughts shigaraki is the first man he has a thing for; i rlly can see the two of them in a triad with a woman specifically, who helps the two of them find each other and is the one who initiates bc its definitely a weird situation for natsuo

[ao3-sucks]

my own ao3 experience was that i got into it when i was in a huge fandom that had a bunch of underage and incestuous pairings and fics. i really started getting into it when i was like fresh into middle school and not soon after that id start reading a bunch of explicit fics. basically pretty sure reading that stuff is what made me feel anxious around my 2 older siblings and like if i showed any kind of affection like even a hug or just laughing at a joke sometimes itd be seen as a sign of attraction. im in my 20s now and it still really affects me. i feel like less valid with my online trauma somehow bc i did it to myself lol.

  Anonymous said to ao3-sucks:

I got manipulated by an adult into writing an extremely triggering fic about rape and abuse between two young siblings, and ended up having to draw on my own traumatic experiences for it. I pretended to be okay with it, and let them say it was my fault it was like that, and when I finally got tired of hiding it and publicly called them out on it, multiple people defended them, using that pretense against me. I still haven't fully recovered from that. Sometimes I wonder if it really was my fault. 

Anonymous said to ao3-sucks:

thank you SO MUCH for this blog, I was groomed into thinking the wildest of things were acceptable by fandom people, and it wasnt until i was about 15 or 16 that i finally wised up and dropped the thinking once and for all. thank you again and have a really good week!

Anonymous said to ao3-sucks:

I don’t really know how old the post that talked about the experience of one of the mods with ao3 is, but just in case, this is about that post that had mentions of r//pe and @“cest. And damn, I’ve never stopped to think that my aversion to sex maybe came from my early exposure to that kind of stuff, now I know that I’m asexual, but it’s comforting to see that I’m not alone in this, so thank you for sharing your story

Anonymous said to ao3-sucks:

god this is probably stupid and you dont have to post this if you don't want to, but thank you so much for making this page. ive had similar experiences in online fandom and ive really struggled with classifying any of it as "real" since it was all online. that post talking about your experience with everything was really eye opening for me. thank you for reminding me im not alone.

Anonymous said to ao3-sucks:

wrt your ao3 essay // thank you for sharing your story about ao3. ive had some similar experiences, but i never interacted with anyone on ao3, just read ff. in around a 1-2 years of consuming that content, i had developed some psychosis relating to sexual trauma, but i never had anything happen to me so i didnt really know what to think. i was just scared. its nice to know that.. it wasnt just random? that more people are talking about this? something like that. thank you. i hope you are well.

Anonymous said to ao3-sucks:

i just read through your experiences and while i was never really involved with fanfiction during my childhood, i WAS exposed to plenty of other weird interactions on other sites starting probably as early as 11  and just realized that me starting to use the internet more probably coincides with me showing similar things such as starting to hate being touched and consider myself asexual/sex repulsed. it was nothing that i'd considered to be that impactful or big a deal before and there weren't really specific people to blame, but i definitely don't know how to feel about this knowledge now.

Anonymous said to ao3-sucks:

just read that post abt your ao3 experience and holy fuck, so sorry you had to go through that. but also, thank you. its scary to think tht ive cldve been in the same situation since i was browsing the internet from a v young age. i was huge into roleplaying and thereve been a few times where it became, uuh... not completely sfw (unknowingly to me, i just wanted to rp). but the moment it became too weird, i ghosted n blocked (i had a very anti-internet-stranger policy). again, thanks. take care

Anonymous said to ao3-sucks:

I was 12 when I got my first ship. I got into it because of the cute art online and I never once thought about it being bad. It was pedophilic amongst other things. I just started writing fic, so I wrote for this ship. I was asked to write straight up human AU "porn where xyz is a pedo" by people far older than me. I didn't know any better, I wrote it and every other request like it. It go so bad that I though that pedophilia was OKAY. It took me so long to unlearn that and many other things because of that ship and I still feel bad for ever having shipped it. So when people say things like "fiction doesn't effect reality" it makes me mad. It teaches little kids that things like pedophilia and rape are okay.

I opted to answer these as a group because they are all so similar. It breaks my heart how often I get anons, post replies, and reblogs about my AO3 essay from people saying that my experiences closely mirrored theirs. I hope that everyone who has sent me these messages can forgive themselves for what happened to them, and know that it’s not your fault that other people decided to take advantage of you. I’m working on healing, and I hope you can all do the same.

- Mod Daft

[queenangst]

Soooo I'm curious, what do you mean when you say your being ace affects fandom for you? In what way?

so all of this is what i think and it's certainly not scientific or anything, but our identities absolutely shape us as consumers and creators - what kind of media we consume, our preferences, and what kind of media we create & that includes being aspec (which nobody really ever talks about the intersection of, at least not that i've personally seen)

in terms of fandom what that often means is gravitating towards media that aligns with our identities and thus our preferences, or gives us the space to do so for example, bnha is a very team-focused, found family-esque, no overtly shown romantic relationships, which is a wonderful space for a lot of aces to be drawn to because it's media that can reflect our own relationships and so on

and for a lot of the other media that i have consumed in the past, especially in regards to fandoms, they end up being really similar in that regard (not to say that i don't consume or enjoy media with romantic relationships, which i do, or that every ace has the same preferences) but i do think it tends to happen

going onto what kind of media we create

i kind of touched on this a few months ago in this post i made about gen content in fandom (though i put my personal thoughts about how being ace affected that in the tags) wherein gen is often disregarded by larger fandom and shippers in a lot of fandom spaces 

and in the tags i wrote: 

i didn't write this in the post but also: this is even more complicated by my own identity and experiences as well while i share this information willingly i will say no writer OWES an explanation for why they write what they write or why you might make them uncomfortable i share this willingly here in the tags bc its more personal than i want this post to be 

but for me im aroace and that directly affects the content i want to produce as well as interpretations and me identifying with certain characters even IF i NEVER make any allusion to, or say so explicitly and its not like that for everyone people are different creators are different and as a sidenote i ship HAPPILY i love shipping there are some ships i am so passionate and excited about and love as romance, but when i make things platonic i kind of... want them to be platonic lol? you know???? and its not Exactly the same if u reverse the situations bc ship to gen content proportionally is not... the same

i absolutely create content that is for me, and that content is for a large part gen! and it's gen because i'm ace!

there are a lot of characters that i implicitly write as ace, and characters that i implicitly interpret as ace (aroace) bc i strongly identify with them (like all might and aizawa, which is why when i write them they are never in romantic relationships, and why personally erasermic sometimes makes me uncomfortable) 

so while i don't generally go into fandom like "i am ace and i only want to make this content and consume this content" it still strongly affects what i consume and create regardless of if that is my particular intention

because it is a part of who i am, it informs the way i view the world around me, and we like to see ourselves in the media around us

also, wrt "why are so many of the people here ace?" i think a lot of ace people in fandom tend to be drawn together (i.e. in this server) because we make and consume similar content (on a larger scale, the media, on a smaller scale, the fanworks based on that particular media). like to like is generally how things go, we are naturally drawn to people who share similar experiences and taste. thus, the reason this server, or other servers, or other parts of the bnha community is where you might find a lot of ace fans is because we end up finding each other through the content we make, share, post about, and so on.

post edited for clarity purposes.

[lonelier-version-of-you]

I don't really watch Holby but I'm always looking for autistic representation, so if you dont mind me asking why do you headcanon Henrik as autistic??

I mean, “headcanon” implies looking into something that isn’t there in the canon. Henrik being autistic is 100% there, he fits the diagnostic criteria to a T, they just refuse to use the word. But I get your point.

This is going to be LONG and I’m sorry. There’s a lot to cover.

Reason 1: He doesn’t understand social cues.

This is pretty much the entire foundation of his character: that he can handle formal, scripted situations fine but is terrible at personal relationships. He’s admitted it himself.

A non-exhaustive list of examples:

In S13E44, the hospital chairman’s ex-wife Ella tries to flirt with Henrik. It goes right over his head all the way up until Ella literally starts unbuttoning her blouse.

In S15E42, Henrik treats a patient with amnesia. While operating on the patient in theatre, Henrik’s ex-girlfriend Maja says what a tragedy it must be for the patient to not even remember who he is. Henrik responds by saying that, in some ways, it might actually be a good thing and that he’d like such an ‘opportunity for reinvention’. He doesn’t even seem to consider that the patient doesn’t see this the same way as him, or that this might seem insensitive to the young man’s plight - he just assumes that because he’d like the chance to start over, surely this patient must too.

In S18E33, Henrik’s worried about Arthur Digby (who is suffering from terminal cancer)’s wellbeing, so he arranges a meeting between some of the hospital staff to talk about it. When Arthur walks in and asks “Is this about me?”, Henrik starts to bluntly reply “yes” - Sacha has to jump in and save the situation by saying “nope”.

In S20E19, Dominic Copeland admits to Henrik that he’s recently been infected with Hepatitis C. Henrik doesn’t know how to respond at all, and when Dom says “this is usually the part where you bestow me with wisdom”, Henrik says “Is it?” - implying he had no idea what Dom wanted out of the conversation.

In the latest episode, S22E15, he goes to visit his friend Essie who’s having chemotherapy. He brings her a book called ‘Surviving Cancer’ and doesn’t even realise how this may come across as inappropriate or too on the nose until Dom points it out to him.

Reason 2: He has a flat affect.

This one’s obvious. He’s not very expressive, and he tends to speak in a monotone. This tends to lead to other characters assuming he doesn’t have feelings, because he doesn’t show them in the way they’d expect.

Reason 3: He stims a lot.

Self-explanatory. If you pay attention, you can often catch him fidgeting with his hands during his scenes. Here are some gifs of him doing it:

He also tends to hum or sing to himself pretty often, which could be vocal stimming.

Reason 4: He has low empathy.

Mr. Clarke the psychiatrist in S19E03 even comments on this. He’s using it as an insult, admittedly, but the whole point of the episode is basically “Mr. Clarke is an asshole, but an asshole who’s right”.

Henrik struggles to relate to people, and can’t feel their emotions. I refer again to S15E42 for one of the best examples of this:

Maja: But he [the amnesia patient]’s so lost. He’s alone in the world. You must feel... something?

Henrik: Not particularly.

I have a whole post on this scene alone it’s so accurate and perfect. (The phrase “a whole post” is a link you should click, BTW. Unfortunately links don’t display on my blog until you hover over them so I just want to clarify that.)

This is another thing that tends to lead other characters to think Henrik doesn’t care about others. They’re 100% wrong. He cares incredibly deeply about those around him, to the point it hurts, he just can’t empathise with them. The show makes a point of reminding us of this regularly. We love good low empathy rep. ♥

Reason 5: He has sensory issues.

One recurring joke with Henrik is that he really, REALLY hates tomatoes. He’s gone so far as to label them “the devil’s fruit” on multiple occasions. Despite this, he’s fine with eating tomato soup, which implies it’s a texture issue.

He’s very sensitive about touch. I don’t think he’s touch-averse, necessarily, but it’s seemingly a more intense experience for him than for others. He’s bothered by people he doesn’t know well making physical contact with him. (One example: in S15E50, his colleague Antoine Malik hugs him. Henrik just stands there awkwardly, not reciprocating the hug, and asks Malik to stop.)

In S15E04, Henrik is shown going into sensory overload from too much stress and too many people talking at once. I’ll just leave a clip of that here. (Again, that last sentence is a link!)

He also wears the same kind of outfit a lot, which could potentially be another sensory thing. In particular, he’s almost always seen with some kind of layers on. Hell, we saw him in his pyjamas with a dressing gown over them in the middle of July last year.

Reason 6: He’s not good at emotions.

I’ve already been over how he doesn’t understand others’ emotions well, but he’s not really any better with his own. He’s clearly alexithymic, and has admitted as such:

One major storyline in series 13 and 14 is Henrik’s romantic feelings for Sahira Shah, a woman he used to mentor. Except... he doesn’t realise he’s in love with her. A similar storyline happens in series 20 with his old friend John Gaskell, but because the writers of this show are heteronormative cowards, no one actually goes “hey Henrik are you in love with John” only for him to passionately deny it (which happened several times WRT his feelings for Sahira). But if you pay attention to the subtext, there’s clearly a late-realisation-of-love going on there, and the actor seems to approve of it (“[John was someone Henrik had] loved for thirty years”, “[Henrik was] blinded by his affection for John”), so.

In S20E28, we see Henrik trying to fill out a therapy worksheet asking him to describe his emotions. He struggles with it throughout the episode, and keeps trying to write something only to give up and shove the paper back in his pocket.

He has very strong emotions, but prefers to try and shut them down, focusing on facts and logic instead because they’re what he can understand.

Other reasons I won’t go into too deeply because this post is long enough, but I want to mention them:

- Reason 7: He takes things literally often. He doesn’t get other people’s jokes and sarcasm, and they don’t get his.

- Reason 8: He has very strong moral beliefs and he sticks to them.

- Reason 9: He literally had a meltdown once (in S20E13).

- Reason 10: Other characters have compared him to autistic/-coded characters in pop culture, such as Rain Man, and the Vulcans from Star Trek.

- Reason 11: This scene with him and the show’s canonically autistic character Jason, wherein Henrik only fucking goes and likens himself to Jason while contrasting the both of them with [allistic] people as a whole. (There’s another link BTW)

There are probably even more reasons I could think of if I tried, but I’ll stop there. I think this is quite enough proof that Henrik is autistic as it is. 🙂

[cardboardqueen]

some thoughts on asexuality as represented in fanfic

this is by no means a condemnation of any particular action or group, just a representation of my feelings which don’t necessarily have any affect on the feelings or actions of others

but I am honestly so tired of the “but I like making you feel good” approach to asexuality in fan content. 

(under a cut bc apparently i have some feelings about this, TL;DR at the end.  if you’re sitting there going ‘how dare they’, please just scroll past this)

Again, it’s a completely valid and often very healthy way for people in an ace/allo relationship to go about things but oh my god i’m so tired of it!  Because I don’t! Yes, I love making my partners happy! I don’t like giving my partners sexual pleasure!! At all!!! I used to (think I did) before I realized that boundaries are a thing that you’re allowed to have with people you love, and that’s definitely had a huge impact on how I feel about this sort of thing, but it just feels so damn ubiquitous and it’s infuriating. 

I’ve experienced this mostly in The Magnus Archives and Good Omens fandoms.  Jon is canonically asexual  and (as of S5) in a relationship and angels/demons are described as sexless with Crowley and Aziraphale’s interactions having a lot of queer subtext.  I have seen lots of wonderful and incredibly sensitive portrayals of asexuality in fic (and art too, but i’m focusing on fic here) both with and without a sexual component.  But (esp in magnus in my experience) there are so many fics where the ace character saying “I like making you feel good” feels like it’s dropped in because the author just wants to be able to write their porn without putting much effort into thinking about or engaging with asexuality.  Which, I get it, that’s totally fine, the pwp tag exists for a reason.  And I go to a fair amount of effort to police my own experience wrt content I’d rather not consume.  But seeing it so frequently is kind of disheartening as an ace person who frankly would rather not make my partner “feel good” in that way. 

It feels very much like asexuality is ok as long as it doesn’t actually affect allosexuals in any tangible way.  Like, there’s the whole “I don’t find you sexually attractive” hurdle when you’re dating an allo person, but if the ace person is still down for sex (and there are ace people who are) then you can kind of ignore the more internal aspects of asexuality.  As long as the ace person is still happy to make their partner “feel good” then the allo person doesn’t actually have to engage in asexuality or how our sexuality affects our relationship with our bodies, our self worth, and the people we choose to date.  But it does! I didn’t realize for the longest time but my relationship with sex (and my body as a sexual tool) is COMPLETELY different than an allosexual’s.  It took me so long to realize in part because I thought that as long as I could still go through the motions and make my partner “feel good” then what did it matter? I could get into a whole thing about that, and maybe I will some other time, but my main frustration is this:

I often see fics where the allo character will ask their ace partner if they’re sure they’re ok with having sex, that they don’t want them to be uncomfortable.  And the ace character replies “don’t worry about it, I like making you feel good” or something similar.  Which is lovely as a display of communication and consent when it’s an actual conversation between two autonomous adults.  But when it’s 80% of the fics that deal with asexuality at all, it sends kind of a strong message that that’s the expectation.  You can be ace as long as you can still perform sex adequately and as long as you’re willing to put your partner’s sexual pleasure before your [preferred alternate activity/ comfort/ mental health]. 

What if the response was “Actually, no, I’m not ok with this.  I know I said I was earlier but upon closer reflection I’m actually really uncomfortable, can we not do this now or maybe ever again”? It doesn’t lend itself well to smutfic, which I understand is often the point of the thing, but it’s so incredibly gratifying the rare times you find it.  To have our comfort put above our partner’s sexual pleasure is (in my limited experience) so rare and so precious, and I feel like i only see it from ace creators (or very occasionally from allo people already in an asexual relationship). 

I think what I really want in my heart of hearts is for some allo creators to acknowledge that yes, actually, our comfort is more important than their sexual gratification.  Whether that comes in the form of fic I can enjoy without pushing through nausea and intrusive thoughts, or the potential future interaction where someone (an actual allo person with sexual desires) is accepting and supportive of a me (an actual ace person with firm boundaries). 

And again, I cannot stress enough that this is an expression of my own frustrations, not a condemnation or accusation.  But, to be honest, the fact that I feel the need to bend over backwards to assure allo creators that they can continue to make porn whose content makes me uncomfortable is just indicative of this whole thing, because apparently i’m a parody of myself

(and there’s a whole other post in my about the difference between “I’m having sex because its an activity I enjoy” and “I’m having sex because my partner likes it” but again different post)

TL;DR: having an ace character say “it’s ok, I like making you feel good” in order to write them into porn is all well and good, but is so popular in fanfic that it sometimes feels like that’s the only acceptable way to be asexual