#garbage writing was garbage

[saman-tics]

Real tired of the Castlevania anime discourse, especially where Nocturne is concerned. I mostly see complaints about the characters and story not being faithful to the source material. Yet, these clowns don't realize that the games were never big on storytelling and characterization. Especially the older titles. It's hilarious cuz I was a fan of the games before the anime and I love the show because it does so much better with characterization and story than the source material its based on. The only criticism I have is the absence of Grant in the original series, and Hector's characterization.

Grant was my favorite in the legendary heroes of Castlevania 3, and as always people forget about him. Then there's Hector who's character was butchered cuz sexual predator Warren Ellis had a hate boner for his voice in the show. He left out Grant cuz of his last name, which is really immature and stupid. I'm glad he's not writing the series anymore, but I'll never forgive them for that. Not to mention, season 4 was awful for so many reasons, and I disliked Greta. She was definitely a shoe-in for Grant, and that makes me mad.

I honestly think Clive Bradley is a better writer and Nocturne a better show. Not to mention the other writers like Testament and the ladies who wrote the Annette-centric episodes. Definitely a step-up from the original series.

Also, I hated the way Trevor and Sypha's relationship was handled at the end. There was build-up, only for it to end up in an anticlimactic scene of them in bed together. No confession. No kiss. Nothing. Absolutely boring and a letdown. Nocturne handled the romance department better for sure.

[edains]

Rick Riordan constantly trashing the movies for not sticking to his books then releasing a show in which he rewrites everything and loses the spirit of the books entirely

[adharagranley-writer]

there are two moods reading something you wrote months ago:

this is garbage

i am a GODDESS

[iratempestatis]

Mornings

Xiao x gn!reader, fluff. Just fluff. Just some cuddles, winged Xiao, you help smooth out his mussed feathers. Some suggestive mentions, but just barely.

You've never been more annoyed with the sun.

Warm, rude tendrils of light creep in through the window across the bed, prodding and poking your eyelashes, bouncing off of them into your pupils.

Damn them.

You've been considering moving your bed against another wall but have refrained- the harbour view in the morning is lovely, after all. Waking up to it, lazily walking over to the window and leaning out to blink sleepily at the waves as your body catches up with your wakefulness is a pleasure you'll never find humdrum. No alarm has ever worked for you, and the neighbourly harbour clamour never will- and so the sun has been your best friend, inconsiderately rousing you every morning.

You consider crawling out of bed to draw the curtains tightly shut, but honestly, after the night you've had, you don't think you can. 

Nor do you want to, with Xiao’s head tucked sweetly under your chin, soft cheek pressed against your collarbones. The bruises he littered across them the previous night itch a little, but you'd sooner lose a million Mora to Shitou’s scams than move even a little. Anything to let him rest just a bit longer.

An asleep Xiao is a rare sight to begin with, after all, but him cuddled against you comfortably, unworried for once about his karma is even rarer. 

And the rarest sight of all is that of his wings stretched out on either side of you. 

They're massive- the ends of them fall right off your bed on either side, elegantly folding against the floor. They're heavy, and full- you've been warmer curled up beneath him than you would have been under any blanket. Stiff feathers along the top and softer feathers beneath, pressed against your sides. Gold so deep it's honey brown, teal as iridescent as mother of pearl. 

He's so beautiful.

His tousled hair strewn across his cheek, the teal of it almost green in the warm light. You unlace your fingers through his and bring a hand up to cover his eyes with your fingers. This wretched sun.

He stirs a little at that, body tensing momentarily before he pushes his head further into your chest. A moment, two- and his breaths even out again. You reach up a hand to stroke his hair, then his back, smoothing the ruffled feathers across his shoulder blades into place. His wings twitch a little when you brush against the newly grown feathers, still in their loose sheaths. Hm.

You recall the way Xiao smooths them out- quickly, harshly pinching at the tips to tug the translucent sheath out before smoothing the feathers in place with his thumb and forefinger. You're pretty sure he ought to be gentler, but your moniker isn't Alatus, so you refrain from scolding him. 

When you reach out to brush at his wings with your fingers, though, you find that some of the pinfeathers smooth out quite easily, with just a gentle touch. You gently press at some others and they deign to pliantly unfurl beneath your ministrations.

When Xiao wakes up, he wakes up nearly purring with pleasure.

It's not overt- just a gentle satisfaction. Your fingers gently feel his wings to find any irregularities, then settle his ruffled feathers into place. He's nearly frozen- how long has it been since someone caressed him like this? Centuries. Not since Bonanus, he's sure.

He figures you feel the same contentment when he runs his fingers through your scalp. He always worries as he does it- his claws are sharp and the number of lives they've taken is far higher than even that of the cups of tea they've held. But you insist, and so he does it. He does a lot of things at your insistence, he muses quietly to himself. You find a spot further down his left wing, and he tugs it closer to his body, onto the bed. You place a soft kiss on his temple. He can feel your lips, warm and gentle and curved into a smile. But ah, where was he? 

Right. So many things done at your insistence. Oh, that feels good. This world seems to have crafted your fingers specifically to pet and caress him. He lays a kiss to your collarbone, then two, then three. He bought some new clothes because you insisted. He remembers you… were upset. Because he wasn't warm enough. He's an adeptus… he doesn't need…

You blink. He blinks slowly back at you, then shuts his eyes again, as though his eyelids are weighed down by the spears forming Guyun themselves. 

Oh. You bite back the urge to squeeze him ever closer, pepper kisses all over his beautiful face. He's sleepy. He’s fallen asleep again. 

You're definitely missing work today.

[jesuistrestriste]

art donaldson mercilessly fucking you while he whimpers “imagoodboyimagoodboyimagoodboy—!” into your neck

his voice breaking and his hands clawing at your flesh, his entire body trembling as he’s able to focus on nothing but chasing the high of being inside of your convulsing warmth

[forlix]

𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗱𝘀・572 / 𝗽𝗮𝗶𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴・felix x gn!reader / 𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗿𝗲(𝘀)・fluff, established relationship, lots of kisses hehe, slightly suggestive

“See you tonight, angel,” Felix says, leaning in to press a kiss to your lips. It’s chaste, short, familiar; your favorite form of farewell, exchanged inevitably before you part ways, even for only a few hours.

But this time, Felix doesn’t pull away afterwards, instead remaining so close to you that the tip of his nose is almost brushing yours, and there’s an ineffable glint in his eyes when he speaks again. (You should’ve known you were in danger.)

“Hang on,” he murmurs, his voice low and sweet, and then he leans in again.

When he presses his lips to yours the second time, he moves with an intensity that you aren’t prepared for. You feel his fingers slide over the nape of your neck and tangle gently in your hair; your head tilts backwards from the weight of his kiss, his tongue feather-light against the seam of your lips, his mouth laving over yours as tenderly as if he’s trying to drink you, savor you. Dimly, you feel your waist bump against the kitchen counter, and Felix doesn’t even think when he moves a hand protectively to the small of your back, returning you to your rightful place against his chest.

You are breathless and lightheaded when your boyfriend breaks the kiss, his lips flushed and hair messy, looking like a walking dream.

“S'that a new lip balm flavor?” He asks.

Bastard.

You collect yourself just enough to give him an answer, but it sounds more like a blissful sigh than a spoken response: “Strawberry.”

The smile that crosses Felix’s face is mostly bashful, but you don’t miss the self-satisfied huff of laughter that comes with it.

“I like it,” he hums. “A lot.”

And he kisses you one more time, and then another.

He ends up being late to practice that day, his rushed apologies to Minho falling out of strawberry-tinted lips.

𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤? please consider reblogging, commenting, or sending me an ask to let me know; or, read my other works here. thanks so much for the support ♡

© 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐢𝐱 (est. 090323) · all works are pieces of original writing and all characters and relationships are purely fictional. please do not repost or reuse for any reason.

[muzsmocsing]

Shen Qingqiu: you dumbfuck HACK AUTHOR just HOW MANY disgusting plants does a novel NEED??? And that scene with the feet??? Literally what possessed you to-

Shang Qinghua, artfully dodging the fan attacks:

[drferox]

So I have been massively burnt out this year, partly due to illness and separation stress, but I have been trying to do all the self-care things that I encourage people to do when you’re trying to make a brain be well, and one of those is writing fiction.

Just short fiction, because my brain balks at the idea of picking up the really big, long neglected projects. But short fiction is still fiction and if I write enough of it, then maybe I’ll build up enough momentum to pick up the bigger projects again.

So I thought that maybe if I can write enough fiction, because there’s a bit of horror flavour running though these pieces, I could narrate them for YouTube and work on the momentum for yet another project that fell by the wayside between the MS, relationship breakdown and single parenting.

Which is why I searched for ‘how to run a scary stories YouTube channel’.

And boy oh boy did that induce some rage.

I genuinely hold the art of writing in high regard, and I recognise that it’s a learned skill and difficult to do. All creative pastimes are. But there are a bunch of ‘entrepreneurs’, and I use the term with a great deal of sarcasm, that have decided to use A-Bloody-I for every single part of telling a story, except one. And for that single piece that they do not outsource to a computer program, they simply copy what has worked for other people.

There are videos providing instructions for people about how to use A-Bloody-I to:

Generate a YouTube channel name, banner and profile picture

Generate a story of the desired word length

Generate a fake voice to narrate that story

Generate a background image and thumbnail

At which point why did they even bother? They don’t even listen to the story that they generate before uploading. I know it’s all about the dream of money, they think 5 minutes of work every day will earn them an income, but what they have generated is soulless garbage.

The results have all the dressings of a horror story, but they don’t have the body of one.

It is like fae realm food- looks a little too good and all the reflections are wrong if you look too close, but it won’t satisfy the way the real thing does. You can’t really live off it.

But the more I know to look for it, the more of it I find. Particularly with fake voices, that seem to have trouble with words like vague or Dalek for some reason.

My main solace here is that these ‘entrepreneurs’ seem to be employing the same strategy in their own niche, flooding themselves with endless AI generated content coming from the same one idea, so at least they get to create their own hell I suppose.

[gay-otlc]

This is a take I've seen fairly often- that trans men & mascs only think they experience transandrophobia because they refuse to accept that what they're experiencing is misogyny.

It's also a completely ridiculous take. The fact that trans men/mascs are targeted by misogyny is a fundamental part of transandrophobia theory. Trans men/mascs, and others who regularly discuss transandrophobia, emphasize over and over again the ways in which trans men/mascs experience misogyny. For example, the idea that they are women and therefore are too stupid and brainwashed to be trusted about their genders, or the sense of entitlement to trans men/mascs' bodies (how dare you ruin your perfect breasts, how dare you transition in a way that makes you unable to carry children, how dare you not be the beautiful woman i want you to be).

In fact, the people who deny that trans men/mascs experience misogyny tend to be the same people who argue against the concept of transandrophobia. They insist that trans men receive male privilege, and in fact actually benefit from misogyny rather than suffer from it.

When trans men/mascs point the ways that they are affected by misogyny, they are accused of spreading TERF rhetoric (as though acknowledging the ways in which people who were assigned female at birth are oppressed automatically means you believe in "sex consciousness" and "afab unity" against anyone assigned male at birth"), or accused of implying that trans women aren't affected by misogyny (they absolutely are, the belief that trans men and women can't both be affected by misogyny stems from oppositional sexism)

All this to say: The people who talk about transandrophobia are well aware that trans men/mascs suffer from misogyny, and aren't denying this out of dysphoria or internalized misogyny- they aren't denying this at all. The people who deny that trans men/mascs suffer from misogyny are the people who believe transandrophobia doesn't exist.

And, transandrophobia isn't "just misogyny." Misogyny is a crucial component of transandrophobia- again, no one who talkes about transandrophobia is denying this- but not the only component.

Trans men/mascs being denied access to gynecological healthcare (that cis women are able to access) because they appear to be men, or have their gender legally changed to male isn't "just misogyny."

Trans men/mascs to losing their friends, support, and abuse and mental health resources when they come out and transition, or reach a point of being "too masculine," isn't "just misogyny".

The belief that going on testosterone will make trans men/mascs dangerous and violent, and the negative rhetoric about bottom surgery, isn't "just misogyny."

Being called a gender traitor and accused siding with the enemy and only transitioning to gain male privilege isn't "just misogyny."

Trans men/mascs being impregnated specifically as a method of forcing them to detransition isn't "just misogyny."

Choosing to use a women's bathroom (either due to safety concerns or transphobic laws) and being kicked out or assaulted for looking male isn't "just misogyny."

Trans men/mascs getting violently attacked because "if you want to be a man so bad, I'll beat you up like one" isn't "just misogyny."

People who talk about transandrophobia very much recognize that trans men/mascs experience misogyny (and are trying to get people who deny transandrophobia to recognize this as well), and there are aspects of transandrophobia that go beyond "just misogyny." Neither of these things contradict each other. In conclusion, "'transandrophobia' is just misogyny but transmascs don't want to admit it" is completely false all around, so I wish it wasn't such a commonly held belief.

[tossawary]

Trying to judge Kakashi for his teaching fuck-ups is hard because everything keeps getting skewed by everything that is wrong with this man and also everything around him. He ends up being graded on the triple wonky curves of: 1) "You know, I'm not sure that you specifically could have done much better." (Child soldier as a preschooler, isolated genius prodigy fast-tracked out of childhood, violently orphaned twice, war veteran, late teenage years and nearly half his life spent in black ops, he's only like 26 years old, etc...)

2) "I'm not sure that the average Konoha ninja could have really done much better in Kakashi's shoes." (Inconsistent prior Academy training for students, little to no apparent teacher training or solid child development resources for genin team teachers, inconsistent oversight from neglectful superiors, promotion exams where it's apparently normal-ish for participants to be either killed or permanently injured, etc...)

3) "I don't think anyone could have handled this situation well, honestly. It was fucked up before Kakashi showed up." (Sasuke.) (Also Naruto if his personality had been slightly different, after 12 years of neglect and shunning. What the fuck.)

[dreadfuldevotee]

"The Vampire Chronicles characters are exercises in the cycle of trauma and abuse and how they are capable of complex emotions and receiving and giving love and empathy alongside all the horrible shit they do to one another" and "Anne Rice herself was a bigot and had some shitty personal beliefs and just because the genre is Gothic Horror doesn't mean you ignore the way those ideas bleed into the writing. Not all commentary is good commentary" are two sentiments that can and SHOULD co-exist, what the fuck are we doing.

[foldingfittedsheets]

My kindle was bought and paid for years ago, but apparently you need to pay extra to get the screen to stop downloading and presenting you new ads. I fucking hate the very principle of this.

Previously they’ve been trashy romance books with women embracing dragons which I didn’t care that much about. It was a vague annoyance.

But now they’re fucking insane AI generated garbage.

This one popped up recently. At first I was like, “Where the fuck is his thumb.” But then other things started jumping out. Like the insane words. “The Sprit”. The gibberish plinth they’re standing on.

In a similar vein

I like to call this one, “Oops all bodies” as the main unicorns are just fused together. They must be fucking either Sleipnir or Shelob cause then you start to see all the extra legs on those monstrosities.

There’s also a strain of Rugged Manly Books

This atrocity popped up. They doubled down on that tricky hand and made it facing both ways just to be safe. Also gave the sword two hilts. Just to be safe. Couldn’t bother to fit the text on the cover or decide where the rest of the sword was.

This title can’t even be deciphered into English. That poor fire is being menaced by the weirdest dagger of all time and the hands once more trying to cover all their bases.

[deadtiredghost]

we deserved more of 2018 Casey

[thefatesofspring]

Another thing I’ll never understand about the ACOTAR fandom is why playing an instrument is an ick!!

Tamlin playing the fiddle which is just a violin basically (believe me I’ve seen art depictions of people confusing a fiddle with a flute) is honestly amazing to me, the violin/fiddle is also one of the most difficult instruments to master & yet Tamlin plays it so well it captivates EVERYONE!!

You know what is icky THE BAT BOYS.

Tamlin has ACTUAL hobbies: playing the fiddle, writing poetry, a few times it’s been eluded to that he likes gardening

meanwhile the flying rodents do nothing but drink, gamble, fuck, lie, steal, beat, bully, torment, harass, exploit, abuse, imprison, gaslight & manipulate, dress their partner in clothes made by their mother, breed, force people to secrecy, attack, buy more homes than need be. There’s probably more but off the top of my head that’s the basics & none of which are hobbies or anything to fall in love over.

[nibbelraz]

Airplane Bro, please write some plot

[mediumgayitalian]

prev

———

Step One: A Question

———

The thing about vitakinesis is that it is intensely difficult, if not impossible, to perform on oneself.

There is a kind of separation between the conscious and unconscious mind, you see. The body, constantly sending signals, communicates mostly with the unconscious brain. The unconscious brain could even, honestly, be argued to perform the vast majority in function to keep the body alive. Very rarely are you aware that your heart is beating. Rarer still do you know your stomach acid boils food down to molecules. And never, do you notice, the split and pull of your cells.

The body is a very busy thing. And the unconscious mind is very good at taking that information, processing it, and storing it in the appropriate filing cabinets. A pinnacle of administrative excellence. The conscious mind is really only barely aware of what’s going on; not unlike most straight men, it certainly thinks it is in charge, but really can only handle so much before it cracks and rages and spirals down into a hole of despair fixed mainly by binge drinking and stress-induced amnesia.

All this to say that when Will places his hand gently on the strongest pulse point of his patients, he takes that grand, endless flow of informative signals from the body of another and interprets them in his own conscious mind. While certainly an overwhelming process to learn, it has become over time something like reading — unbelievably difficult in nuance to learn in infancy, but second nature in constant practice. His unconscious mind works merrily away on his own body, filling up those filing cabinets. His conscious mind flicks over someone else’s files before they’re tucked away. Simple.

The difficultly comes in when trying to decipher his own files. For all the ease in reading someone else’s, his own are tucked away — since his body, conscious mind, and unconscious mind are all connected, he cannot simply dip into a stream of information and filter out what he needs. He has to detangle all that shit. And anyone who has ever taken a brush to a pile of curly hair can tell you — that shit is hard. Honestly, impossible. He has no idea what’s going on in his own body other than it’s probably not bad.

Thank the gods for Gracie, or else he never would have gotten the chance to find out.

“It’s like grabbing fish from a moving river,” he tries, having never fished even one time in his life. Lee fished, though. Gracie looks at him with wide, nervous eyes. “A little noisy. A little scary. A little maybe-you-fall-in-and-drown-y. But mostly, you just gotta chill out and grab the first little fish that pops out at you.”

“I don’t want to drown,” worries Gracie, hunching even farther into herself, and wow, in hindsight, Will needs to work on his brain to mouth filter. Any word choice would have been better.

He pats her on the head. “Nah, kiddo, you’ll be fine. You healed that little bunny yesterday, remember?”

Instantly, the fear melts off her face, replaced with her narrowed eyes and scrunched up little nine-year-old nose. Gods, Will wants to squish her. She’s so godsdamn cute. Who authorized that? She certainly didn’t get it from their father.

“Damien should not have kicked it, even if it chewed up his underwear.”

“Yes. And then you did a great job healing the bruise you left on his nose. See? You can do this. You’re just all in your head.”

HA. There. Will can be normal. He just needs a second try.

Finally, she agrees, hesitantly reaching out her hand and wrapping it around Will’s elbow. He squeezes her free hand encouragingly, breathing through the little twinge in his chest as his body remembers the last time he did this, hand over Lee’s elbow, searching for his nod of approval.

“You got this, squirt. Close your eyes. Breathe out. Listen to the rush of the water, and when it’s not so loud, grab the first fish you see.”

Gracie closes her eyes, breathing slowly and leaning ever so slightly forward as a rush of information buzzes through her softly glowing hands. She scrunches her forehead, hands tightening — for her sake, Will tries to make his own vitals easier to read, but remembers quickly he has no way of doing that and abandons the idea — and twists her mouth the way she does when someone says something stupid at dinner and everything gets a little chaotic. Sweat beads on her forehead.

Will holds his breath.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Five.

Her eyes fly open.

“Your heart rate went from 60 BPM to 90! I felt it!”

“Awesome!” he exclaims, holding up his hand for a high-five. “You got that fish right from the tail!”

Lord, he needs a new metaphor.

Regardless, the fear has completely fallen off Gracie’s frame. She bounces on the tips of her sparkly light-up sneakers, braids flopping all over the place.

“Again! Again! I wanna see if I can get your glucose levels!”

He snorts. “Knock yourself out, kid.” He blinks. “Or, well, maybe stop one step before that. Here. Have a Kit-Kat bar.”

She takes it, likely more because it’s chocolate and she’s nine than for its restoration abilities, but regardless. He sits back in his chair, reaching over for his clipboard and lazily running through some paperwork as she digs her nails into the crook of his elbow, cheering every time she gets a new reading.

“Your glucose reading is average!”

“Dope.”

“Your respiratory rate is within the expected range!”

“Love to hear it.”

“Your blood pressure has an abnormally high reading at 140 over 90!”

“That would be your older sister’s fault.”

So on and so forth. He keeps an eye on the time — from his own experience he knows that she can do fifteen, maybe twenty minutes of this before she hits the ground, and he would like to learn from Lee’s mistakes and stop her at fourteen — but mostly lets himself space out and his sister go ham. Absentmindedly, he watches her wide, missing-teeth grin, her fluttering hands, her bright green eyes. He can’t hold back a smile and wouldn’t anyway. He’s so freaking pumped to have another nerd in the house.

At the ten minute mark, he starts tuning back in, tapping her shoulder.

“Two more minutes,” he warns.

She pouts. “Aw. I wanted to see if I could find out what you had for lunch based on your blood sugar levels.”

“Girl, you were there.”

“Still!”

“Just — fill out this chart. Height, weight, resting heart rate, things like that. Practice.”

She does, scrawling it out in print worse than his — a little doctor in the making, he is going to melt — and more, flipping the page over to record every bit of information she gleaned from checking it over. He finds himself peeking over her shoulder, tilting his head in curiosity. Huh. His red blood cell count is a little high. He didn’t know that.

He never gets to know any of his stats. Chiron always says something about his obsessive anxiety disorder and some of the worst ADHD impulse decisions he has ever seen, blah blah blah. As if. He’s pretty much almost kind of sixteen years old. Geriatric, as far as demigods go. So it’s fine. He can find out. Plus, Chiron is a big fat exaggerator. So.

The timer on his watch beeps.

“One more minute,” Gracie begs. “I want to know how much water you have in you.”

The gears in Will’s brain don’t even turn. They spin like a test tube in a centrifuge.

“Not sure that’s entirely medically relevant,” Will says absentmindedly, and the faintest itch starts tickling the back of his throat, as if his infernal and nonsensical allergy is calculating the percent truth level in his words. The brain gears spin faster.

Now.

He’s not taking his own vitals. So. Technically, he is not breaking any rules. He’s not trying to steal his medical file from the Big House again. He’s not following Kayla around stretching out pleeeeeeeaaaaasse until she snaps, loses her shit, and shoots him in the shoulders. In all honesty, he didn’t even ask for all this. It just happened, really, it’s fate, and who is he to tempt Fate?

(Now. Is it unethical to maybe kinda sorta lightly manipulate his baby sister into letting him make questionable (but interesting!) medical experiments.

Perhaps.

But, honestly, so is training her in the medical arts at nine years old, so. Penny, pound, et cetera.)

He checks his watch. Time is up.

“Okay,” he says, gently peeling his sister’s hand off his elbow and holding it, steadying her as she sways a little (he checks. She is fine. All is well and mostly ethical). Her whining makes the corners of his mouth twitch. “Write down what you learned, okay? We can practice again another day.”

Gracie pouts. “Fine.”

She scribbles down everything she can remember, far out-writing the chart’s answer boxes, then dashes off (after several Kit-Kats and also an apple, ‘cus Will’s healthy like that) to play. Will waits a heroic seven seconds before snatching the paper up and reading it with more care and interest than he’s ever read anything in his life.

“Oh ho ho ho,” he mutters to himself, well aware he sounds like a villain in an eighties cartoon and choosing to ignore it, “oh, the things I can do…”

Not all of it is new information. Height. Weight. Vibe (which is not part of the chart, but he appreciates Gracie’s rating of ‘pretty solid’ regardless). Resting heart rate (average). Blood pressure (bad).

But GCI. Red blood cell count. Total water content, gods above.

The gears finally slow to a stop. A question floats to the very forefront of his mind, in Times New Roman, 12 point, stark black. The Mrs. Rightman in his head cheers.

He carefully folds the paper. He sticks it in his lab coat pocket. He grins.

And he runs to find the one person in camp who can help him with phase two.

———

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