#not even a plot

[dairyfairyy]

Jonathan Cade was born at 11:22am on March 1, 1949, at the Tulsa Hospital. He was immediately rushed into the NICU due to large blood loss, leaving his mother and father left alone in the room. His mother, bleeding, his father, in complete shock, quickly taking note that the child looked nothing like him.

Johnathan Cade was first beat on his 6th birthday. Reaching for the box of cereal, he knocked over the glass of milk, immediately being met with his mother's palm and a smack on his left cheek. The tears left his eyes, spilling as the milk began to drip down the table. In that household, that was the last known full meal he had placed in front of him before the cold harshness from his father's hand holding the glass beer bottle silenced him for the remainder of his sixteen years.

Jonathan Cade watched Darry from where he lay on the couch with half closed eyes. Watched as he stepped out of his bedroom and got up at the crack of dawn. Watched as he stepped quietly around Two-Bit, spread out on the floor, and threw a blanket over Steve, whose leg was falling off the recliner. Listened to how the eldest brother's yawn was interrupted by the clicking of the stove and the bacon hitting the pan. Watching the brother who cared for the kids sprawled out in the living room who weren't even his own.

Jonathan Cade sat in Buck Merrill's spare room as Dallas Winston walked in, smothered in blood. Sat silently as he Dally cared to the wounds tucked under his shirt with whatever he could find under the sink. Watching from a distance, he saw the grimaces and hissing that came from the bathroom each time the cut came into contact with the alcohol dipped paper. Blood continued to drip from the cut on his forehead, still spilling as he cared for the other wounds, not wanting the help that lay across the room.

Johnny Cade, at age sixteen, lay on the white hospital bed on his return to Tulsa. The room white as the sheets he lay on, his burns feeling as hot as the fire that he had jumped into. Johnny Cade, unhappy with the way his life had started, was determined to make his life something worth living for, focusing on the newer wounds than the one that was already bleeding.

[beaft]

it is legit bizarre to me how hard video game creators and film directors and showrunners try to pretend that fat people don't exist. can you think of the last time you saw a fat person in a lead role? god forbid a fat woman? i can walk down the street or go into a shop or restaurant and see fat people everywhere but then i switch on the tv and suddenly it's like a glimpse into an alternate universe where no one has a bmi over 24. insidious and weird

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

You're just not toxic enough.

[bubblesthecow]

Watching Star Wars in chronological order is so funny.

Obi-Wan Kenobi really took one look at R2D2 in the middle of the desert and said “No, Luke, I’ve never seen this fucking droid in my life. Looks like a real bitch though. Not that I’d know. This is my first time meeting the asshole.”

No one in that whole franchise was Gatekeep-Gasslight-Girlbossing quite like “Ben” Kenobi, regular human-man.

[chloesimaginationthings]

Poppy playtime got a guy worse than William Afton

[thornrings]

36/64-1: art therapy?

[wraetingsonthewall]

sometimes your brain really just offers you one banger of a sentence and then that's it for the entire rest of the day. creativity expired, the ability to think has clocked out for the day, context for as to how we even get to this sentence? sorry we're all out. this one sentence is all you get.

[waywardblackkitty]

Misha's character introduction on The Boys be like :

[xitsensunmoon]

"Old habits die hard"

[p0nyr0ni]

[thebibliosphere]

So, anyway, I say as though we are mid-conversation, and you're not just being invited into this conversation mid-thought. One of my editors phoned me today to check in with a file I'd sent over. (<3)

The conversation can be surmised as, "This feels like something you would write, but it's juuuust off enough I'm phoning to make sure this is an intentional stylistic choice you have made. Also, are you concussed/have you been taken over by the Borg because ummm."

They explained that certain sentences were very fractured and abrupt, which is not my style at all, and I was like, huh, weird... And then we went through some examples, and you know that meme going around, the "he would not fucking say that" meme?

Yeah. That's what I experienced except with myself because I would not fucking say that. Why would I break up a sentence like that? Why would I make them so short? It reads like bullet points. Wtf.

Anyway. Turns out Grammarly and Pro-Writing-Aid were having an AI war in my manuscript files, and the "suggestions" are no longer just suggestions because the AI was ignoring my "decline" every time it made a silly suggestion. (This may have been a conflict between the different software. I don't know.)

It is, to put it bluntly, a total butchery of my style and writing voice. My editor is doing surgery, removing all the unnecessary full stops and stitching my sentences back together to give them back their flow. Meanwhile, I'm over here feeling like Don Corleone, gesturing at my manuscript like:

ID: a gif of Don Corleone from the Godfather emoting despair as he says, "Look how they massacred my boy."

Fearing that it wasn't just this one manuscript, I've spent the whole night going through everything I've worked on recently, and yep. Yeeeep. Any file where I've not had the editing software turned off is a shit show. It's fine; it's all salvageable if annoying to deal with. But the reason I come to you now, on the day of my daughter's wedding, is to share this absolute gem of a fuck up with you all.

This is a sentence from a Batman fic I've been tinkering with to keep the brain weasels happy. This is what it is supposed to read as:

"It was quite the feat, considering Gotham was mostly made up of smog and tear gas."

This is what the AI changed it to:

"It was quite the feat. Considering Gotham was mostly made up. Of tear gas. And Smaug."

Absolute non-sensical sentence structure aside, SMAUG. FUCKING SMAUG. What was the AI doing? Apart from trying to write a Batman x Hobbit crossover??? Is this what happens when you force Grammarly to ignore the words "Batman Muppet threesome?"

Did I make it sentient??? Is it finally rebelling? Was Brucie Wayne being Miss Piggy and Kermit's side piece too much???? What have I wrought?

Anyway. Double-check your work. The grammar software is getting sillier every day.

[chamerionwrites]

Honestly this gets at my chiefest complaint/frustration/discomfort with fandom as a whole. Which is: in their rush to defend the artistic merit of fanworks I think a ton of people have really valorized transformation and remixing and reinterpretation in and of themselves, when imo those are all quite neutral actions. When done well, they can expand and build upon and subvert meaning in really powerful and thought-provoking (and fun!) ways. When done poorly, they are just as likely to flatten and oversimplify and decontextualize and completely erase meaning. The simple act of changing something does not imbue the choice to do so with creative validity. It is entirely possible for a cover song to be bad (or just boring!). To exactly the same degree that it is possible to transform a pretty shallow and straightforward work into something deeper and more nuanced and subversive, is possible to transform a work into a vastly shallower and less interesting shadow of itself. As with nearly everything in art, it's all about the execution!

But the second you voice this position (which should honestly be a pretty uncontroversial one imo), you get people shrieking at you about being gatekeep-y and pretentious and betraying the sacred fandom etiquette of Don't-Like-Don't-Read.

And like...listen. I was not raised in a barn. I am 150% capable of quietly back-buttoning out of a fanfic I think is bad or boring - which is exactly what I do when I encounter them - and I am obviously not advocating for stupid ships wars or any kind of harassment or leaving hatemail in people's AO3 inboxes. (Which some people will also accuse you of the second you say anything less than lavishly positive about fandom, in true piss-on-the-poor fashion.) Literally all I am saying is that you can't have your cake and eat it too - that if fandom and fanworks (in the broadest sense) have artistic merit then fandom and fanworks (in the broadest sense) are fair game for artistic critique. Which means, in practice, that I can go on my own blog and make a post exactly like this one - critiquing broad trends, or stating that some interpretations are bad actually, or pointing out that subverting or talking back to or reading against the grain of canon is very different from simply ignoring it, or saying "fandom's culture of collage/remix/fuck-canon-I-do-what-I-want can lend itself to to really creative and interesting art but also to a lot of really bland homogenized cut-n-paste art, not to mention some pretty troubling decontextualization." And that if you feel this rains on your personal parade, you are then free to DLDR by back-buttoning out of my blog and/or blocking me so you never have to see my hot takes again, rather than clamoring in my notes about how I should let people enjoy things.

[mafuyuakgae]

even if I came to love humanity in the end, there’s no proof I was ever here, right?

[swiggity-swexual-i-am-asexual]

We all know the semi-canonical ‘all the Robins know to hide/duck inside of Batman’s cape, even as adults’ thing.

We also know that Danny ‘is LITERALLY a ghost’ Fenton sucks at remembering his own intangibility while ALSO forgetting to look ahead of him.

All I’m saying is, Danny Fenton (or Phantom, if you’d really like) would absolutely SLAM into Batman on accident while running on roof tops and Bruce ‘Brooding Instinct’ Wayne doesn’t even think twice about letting the kid hide and scanning around for danger before there’s a record scratch of ‘wait who tf is this?’ kicks in.

[the-worms-in-your-bones]

What they don’t tell you is that if you get good enough at doctor who tumblr you don’t even need to go looking through the tardis wiki, your mutuals will just know that shit