veliseraptor

[veliseraptor]

[veliseraptor]

Rebecca Sugar cooked with "Character whose entire existence is devoted to the service of another character who's now dead and now they have no idea what to do with themselves except live." I love that shit. I forged myself into a tool for you and now you're gone. I'm sniffing this like a bloodhound

[veliseraptor]

Google docs isn’t deleting your docs just because they have lewd text.

OP turned off reblogs of the post due to being debunked, but here’s a link of the reblog so you can still read stuff. Hate Google all you want but misinformation helps no one.

[veliseraptor]

Which inhuman characters do you like the most?

(A) Inhuman character trying their hardest to be a human person.

(B) Inhuman character foregoing developing any human interiority in favour of mastering the art of pretending to be human. Unseen, unknown.

(C) Inhuman character lazily putting on their human face, content with the fact everyone around them knows there is something alien underneath.

(D) Inhuman character rejecting any pretence of humanity. Yolo.

and now that the cat is off my lap and I hit my word count goal I can finally get to this ask

continuing with the "i'm not going to know how to tag this" questions! this is a fun one - if also one that, even more than the other question, has me going "but these are all fun for different reasons and with different characters!" like, they're doing very different things and have very different flavors, and I feel like sometimes a character can inhabit more than one at different times.

for instance I can say that I am very weak to a character who is overall trying to be a human person very hard but then for whatever reason ends up in a (c) or (d) situation. especially because if it is a character who has a relationship to wanting to be human-ish for more than just convenience or even safety - i.e. something in their self-conception finds the notion of being human valuable - then casting that off and embracing (ideally) some form of monstrosity, for whatever reason, can be a very fun thing to force a character to deal with.

I will note, too, that by "inhuman" too we can mean a lot of different things, especially in the world of fantasy where there may be technical non-humans who are still in some sense more loosely construed as "human" - basically, humanity can run along a gradient in some settings. an elf isn't human but it's more human than a mermaid is more human than a dragon, etc. for the sake of this ask I am going to consider "inhuman" to mean "a category of being that is typically excluded from 'normal' social contexts" and call that good enough.

so considering that...I guess of these (b) is probably the least compelling for me personally? it can be fun, and it certainly makes for a good potential plot driver, but I don't find it adds a lot of spice to the character themself.

(a) is a lot of fun as someone obsessed with stories about identity and agency - what kind of choices can we make, and what are the choices made for us? how are we defined, and by whom? and, in this particular context, the always fun "is being human (whatever that means) the right choice? what's being given up in that choice, or what might be gained?"

(c) is...I feel like it maybe does less for character interiority but it does a lot for character aesthetics. personally find the "I know you know I'm not human but I don't care" very sexy. it certainly conveys something about the character, don't get me wrong - that attitude can speak volumes to express things about the character - but I don't have quite the same immediate jump to "oh but what are the things we can explore here" that I do thinking about (a). that being said the aesthetics alone are so good I have to say yes.

(d) is another one that gets my brain pumping on the "there feel like a lot of fun things to do with this storywise" front. I mean, I am obsessed with characters who look at themselves, recognize their inhumanity (again, whatever that means), recognize the fact that it's going to make them a perennial outsider, and go "fuck it." it's part and parcel of the performative villainy thing that I go insane about. like (c) it potentially conveys a lot of character information, can drive an interesting story, and shape a character arc in a lot of different directions. a character approaching the world this way can easily be an antagonist but a protagonist version of this is also very fun.

it's all the questions again! what is the character's relationship with their inhumanity? are they truly embracing it or is it a matter of what feels inevitable? do they believe that they are better or worse for it? why make the choice to not conform, and what are the consequences of that choice? identity! agency! yells.

after writing all of the above I guess what I am coming up with is roughly an order of DACB or possibly ADCB depending on the day I'm having. not sure any of that made sense.

and since I did this for the last one and everyone likes to push a button, how about another poll:

[veliseraptor]

i had writing plans. the documents are open. unfortunately,

[veliseraptor]

Bumpy sticky

[veliseraptor]

what i'm coming up with is: swim. grocery store. make bed. write something. and I think if I've forgotten something else that might just have to be something I forgot

i feel like i have so much to do today and yet when i sat down to try to make a to do list all that was coming out of my brain was "go swimming" and "vague, incoherent, stressed out screaming" which is not real helpful

[veliseraptor]

[veliseraptor]

i feel like i have so much to do today and yet when i sat down to try to make a to do list all that was coming out of my brain was "go swimming" and "vague, incoherent, stressed out screaming" which is not real helpful

[veliseraptor]

The Bystander, England, July 20, 1921

[veliseraptor]

I need her

[veliseraptor]

Every time someone comments on my old fic, i feel like I'm an old actor getting paid residuals. Appreciate you, old-fic-commenters. Key source of emotional income, tbh.

[veliseraptor]

Jiang Cheng haters defending Jiang Fengmian:

[veliseraptor]

okay so I've been playing a bunch of No Man's Sky, a game whose main unique feature is its mind-bogglingly huge universe of procedurally generated planets, most of which have still never been encountered by human players. when you make first contact with an undiscovered planet, it starts out with a random name. just today I've discovered Snesfin, Inkiew, and Roranbu-Anuki. but a minute ago I landed on a planet with, and I must stress this again, the randomly-generated name of:

[veliseraptor]

I just know hospital staff hates to see him coming

[veliseraptor]

Girl wearing a collar and leash with a big orange vest that reads "Therapy Dog" cheerfully ordering two cheeseburgers for herself and the socially anxious girl holding the other end of the leash

[veliseraptor]

The Wheel of Time commission for @kaiartx