a-whump-muffin

[a-whump-muffin]

game over (02)

masterlist

art inspiration: here (cw: blood) cw: box boy universe, dehumanization

The room had been bleached hours ago and the exhaust fans were set to run at full power, but the air still stung Allen’s nose and lungs when he entered. The trainee was probably suffocating in the chemical haze, but he seemed nonplussed when Allen stopped in front of him. His expression was pensive, almost bored.

Allen’s skin crawled and his instincts screamed at him to take a few steps back, distance himself from this madman who likely put his colleague in a casket. However, he knew it was a rookie mistake to show any weakness in front of a trainee. That was the first rule of the job.

He needed to start the trainee on the Drip immediately. The small briefcase in his hand held all the necessary components. It took an immense force of will to make himself prepare the materials in front of the murderer he was supposed to turn into a fawning pet.

Allen made sure the lid blocked the view of his hands, which were shaking as he prepared the syringe. He had done this countless times before, but this was the first time he nearly stuck himself with the needle or dropped the vial.

“How rude. Aren’t you even going to introduce yourself?”

Allen nearly leaped out of his skin. He cursed himself and his nerves. The trainee was restrained properly. His words were his only weapons. Allen was safe, for now.

“I’m your handler,” Allen said, stiff and harsh, his voice sounding louder and infinitely more confident than he felt. “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll hold your tongue in the future.”

“Quite impossible. My hands are tied.” The young man’s voice was smooth and low, deceptively warm like the fake smile on his lips. 

“That was your one and only warning. Shut your mouth.” Allen reached for the remote at his belt. His mind flashed to the video, and a chill crawled down his spine.

He pressed the button for a medium level of voltage. The trainee instantly flinched, a physiologic response. His breathing hitched and he shivered.

When the intensity of the shock faded, the young man’s gaze narrowed, false amusement playing at the corners of his eyes. For a moment, Allen was frozen beneath that stare. Frozen, like a mouse under a cat’s claws.

This was ridiculous. Allen was the one who was in control. He prepared the first dose, his hands no longer shaking quite so bad.

“So, this is how ‘pets’ are made,” the young man mused, his voice light and uncaring, as if he was standing next to Allen as an equal, not bound hand and foot. “How interesting. All that fuss the pet liberationists put up is true, then.”

“…You don’t sound very concerned.” Allen had to ask, had to know, before this man was wiped from existence. “Aren’t you even going to ask if that handler you mauled is going to make it?”

The young man blinked up at him, and the lack of interest was very much real.

“Mauled?” he repeated, as if this was a ridiculous statement, an exaggeration. He didn’t even twitch when Allen slid the tip of the syringe into his arm. “I’d hardly call it a mauling.”

“What would you call it, then?” Allen asked stiffly.

The young man smiled at him, a thin, condescending smile. It was distantly polite.

“If you snatch people off the street for a living, you should expect some degree of retaliation. You haven’t erased my memory yet, but you already want me to pretend I want to be here?”

Allen decided that they had exchanged too many words already. He shook his head and stood up. He played with the remote at his waist, but it wouldn’t do much good to punish him now.

The itch beneath his skin intensified as he gathered his supplies and left the trainee to his fate – a fate that was almost too good for him.

[a-whump-muffin]

game over masterlist

WRU makes a fatal mistake, which Handler Allen Rosburg pays for with his life: they unknowingly make a pet out of a serial killer.

WRU is a company which promises ordinary people a second chance at life as long as they are willing to give up their current one.

But out of those ordinary people, there will always be wolves hiding in sheep’s skin.

When you have a wolf by the ears, you can neither release it nor keep hold of it safely.

Allen Rosburg had no way of knowing that he would become this particular wolf’s latest victim.

part 1 - part 2

[a-whump-muffin]

game over (01)

WRU makes a fatal mistake, which Handler Allen Rosburg pays for with his life: they unknowingly make a pet out of a serial killer. masterlist

i wanted to write a thing with red flag protags, so here's the result.

music inspiration: growing wings cw: box boy universe, dehumanization, murder

Allen saw the video.

This assignment was a death sentence, but he accepted the paperwork anyways. He didn’t have a choice. It was either play their game or accept defeat, and Allen wasn’t ready to hand his employers the smoking gun just yet.

He ignored the hushed commentary in the breakroom and hallways. He turned his head away from the twisted frowns and arrogant smiles. On a normal day, he would have joined the gossip mill – no one in the facility who couldn’t mingle harmoniously with the odd personalities the job attracted lasted very long.

However, Allen had been the gossip mill’s most recent chew toy for his catastrophic failure. The displeased client was chomping at the bit to sue the company if his shiny new “toy” wasn’t fixed to his exact specifications. In Allen’s opinion, which was apparently worth less than dirt, the man should have requested a Romantic if those were the services he wanted out of a pet. Now, his head was on the chopping block and his superiors obviously didn’t forget it in all the chaos of the morning.

“So, according to the grapevine, Mark might not pull through,” Paula from Intake told him in an unnecessarily hushed voice. “I wouldn’t want to be the one who’s got to break it to his family if he really does, you know.”

Allen toyed with the idea of ignoring her. He was already a pariah among the other Platonic handlers. Everyone was keeping their distance, mainly out of self-preservation, and Allen hadn’t bothered to rock the boat. It wasn’t personal. They didn’t want to end up on the next executive’s naughty list.

“How bad was it, really?” Allen asked, briefly meeting Paula’s eyes. Her false and clinical friendliness faltered slightly.

“Bad,” she said. Allen swallowed around a knot in his throat. Paula had been working here for eight years, so a single word from her spoke volumes. She might have loved gossip and chatting over lunch, but she never minced words when it came to work. “He did some major damage in transport, too. No one could get close enough to stick him with a sedative, so they came in hot. I barely saw him, actually. I heard they want to get him on the Drip immediately and worry about the intake afterwards.”

The involuntary acquisitions, or ‘assisted walk-ins’ officially, were actually much rarer occurrences than those pet liberation fanatics lead the public to believe. They weren’t usually worth the effort, resources, or risk unless a client had a specific preference that couldn’t be matched through normal means.

There were plenty of fully willing and desperate volunteers, after all. WRU didn’t accept any and all applicants off the streets. There was even an official waiting list.

This new trainee must have been acquired for a specific client, which meant this was another high ticket assignment. Allen had more or less felt like the living dead for the past few weeks, and this recent development filled him with dread.

Mark Simmons was supposed to be the new trainee’s handler, but he was carted away in an ambulance due to massive head trauma earlier in the morning. Allen saw the security footage of the handler dragging the acquisition into a training room, completely skipping over the signing process.

Mark’s fatal mistake was insisting on using his usual training protocol and refusing the help of any other handler. It wasn’t an entirely egotistical decision. In many cases, isolation training was a valid method that worked well on stubborn and aggressive trainees. The desperation to please became a necessity of survival.

However, in this case, isolation became the reason Mark was completely overwhelmed and mutilated on the floor of the training room.

Allen held his breath when he watched the moment it happened.

The trainee was a young man of a fairly tall stature, dark brown hair matted with blood. The bruises and cuts on his face from the struggle to apprehend him were obvious. He seemed, at the time, too exhausted and disoriented to put up another hellish fight. He was locked into handcuffs, deep in the belly of the facility.

Mark was transferring him to the built in restraints in the center of the room when the trainee moved.

In a burst of incredible strength fueled by adrenaline, the young man grabbed hold of the remote control strapped to Mark’s waist. It was a black box no larger than a phone, used to activate the shock collars all trainees wore.

Instead of mistaking the remote for a taser, as some trainees had in the heat of the moment, the young man slammed the device against the side of Mark’s head. Mark managed to deflect the first blow by bringing his arm up, but the man was not deterred. He swiftly struck him again. This time, the strike landed, and Mark fell like a sack of bricks.

However, instead of trying to steal the keys or run for the door, the trainee hit him again. And again.

By the third hit, Mark’s movements were sluggish, probably from the head trauma. The trainee fought like he was possessed. Once, Mark managed to push him away with one flailing hand, which the man surprisingly bit as hard as possible, tearing a chunk of flesh from the meat of his palm. It landed on the floor after he spat it out.

It was terrible, but the longer he watched the bloody scene unfold, the harder it was to look away. The violence was so unhinged, it almost seemed unreal. Mark was barely able to retaliate. The trainee was out for blood.

The camera caught a glimpse of the trainee’s face a few times throughout the assault, and the sight made Allen drop the tablet, numb with terror that sank, cold as ice, down to his bones.

A deranged smile and light brown eyes dripping with malice stared back at him from the screen. For a brief moment, it was as if they made eye contact, as if this beast in human skin was staring at him across time and space.

The young man easily grabbed the baton strapped to Mark’s belt while the handler was writing in pain, trying to scramble to his feet. The trainee didn’t even bother reaching for the keys to unlock the handcuffs on his wrists. He just resumed his assault, each blow heavier than the last, until the alarms began to wail and other handlers burst into the room to subdue him.

It was clear after watching the video just once that the new trainee didn’t attack Mark out of self-defense. He actively enjoyed the violence.

Despite his situation – kidnapped and transported to a white, featureless room to be wiped and trained as a human pet, he still had the mind to take great pleasure in the raw brutality and violence. When the handlers shocked him with a taser and nearly broke his arm trying to secure them behind his back, the young man’s wild, mute grin stared them in the face the whole time.

He never said a word. He never even screamed.

Allen didn’t think he was alone in believing it was impossible to ever make this person a successful pet. A person this unhinged and violent could never truly be made docile and pliant, even if they pumped him full of drugs.

Allen’s breath caught in his throat and he put down his fork, no longer hungry.

This was not the first time this man had killed someone and it would not be the last.

[a-whump-muffin]

bad apple!! (2)

the start of a manhunt...

CW: box boy universe, no whump just a seedy megacorporation stalking its (former) employees

---

Roy Himmel isn’t a real person, and disappears from this world just as quickly and quietly as he entered it. 

Karl almost doesn't believe his own eyes when he takes a proper look at Himmel's file. He was hired from a career fair at Syracuse University, a university he definitely did attend and graduated from with a degree in linguistics. It has all been stored alongside his resume and onboarding paperwork. After he was hired, those files were basically forgotten and left to collect dust.

When Karl is asked to unearth Himmel's file for the first time in five years, he initially finds nothing remarkable about it. It's not until he reviews the man's emergency contact list to report if he has any relatives or significant others to worry about his sudden disappearance that Karl runs into a dead end.

The phone number listed under his emergency contact is out of service. The person he listed as his emergency contact is the owner of a bookstore in a city halfway across the country, who once communicated with Himmel over the acquisition of a rare book in Romanian and nothing more.

Karl's job is almost entirely based around facts. There is little room for speculation where he is concerned. He runs background checks and investigates potential acquisitions all day long, and he knows an anomaly when he sees one. People lie, but the records don't.

He is determined to make Roy Himmel's life make sense, but the deeper he looks, the more it begins to defy all logic.

Although he doesn’t normally leave his department, he finally accepts that he isn’t going to learn any more about the man from his personnel file. He decides to head straight to the staff room to find out what Himmel’s file can’t tell him. Himmel was apparently friendly and well-liked by his colleagues. Karl hasn’t met many people who can resist talking about themselves to their colleagues at least a little bit.

He turns to the most normal of the day shift handlers - Petersen, who isn't likely to string him along for the fun of it.

"Hannah," he starts, plastering a smile on his face. She notices him entering the room, but doesn't lift her head until he approaches the table where her lunch sits, mostly untouched. "Can I ask you a few questions?"

"Is this about Roy?" she asks, amused. A hint of derision colors her words. The handlers always make such a big production of it when one of their own "leaves" the job. Karl suspects it's out of necessity. They're a decently close-knit bunch. No one wants to be associated with the dropouts or failures.

"Yeah." Karl slides into the chair across from her, takes out a notepad. "Did he ever talk to you about his life outside work, what he did on the weekends? Any family, friends, anything?"

Hannah hums in a teasing, speculative sort of way that's entirely intentional, but her eyes wander off to the side in thought and she takes a second too long answering.

"...Well, come to think of it," she says, her brow furrowed slightly. “No. When you were talking to him, you weren’t talking at him, if that makes sense.  If you told him about your girlfriend’s stupid sister getting in your face about what we do here, he’d actually listen, not just nod like he had better things to do. But, now that I think of it, he never really talked about himself.”

“Can you think of anything?” Karl presses. “He had to have mentioned something.”

Hannah picks at her nails as she thinks back to all of her previous interactions with the man. She was hired only a few months after him. Karl doesn’t believe that Himmel managed to avoid talking about himself in the five years since he started working at WRU.

“I don’t think he was very close to his family,” she says, but she doesn’t sound too confident. “He always said he didn’t have any particular plans for the holidays.”

It’s purely speculation, not a fact, and that grates on Karl’s nerves to no end.  

“He wasn’t going out with anyone,” she adds. 

She can’t remember him ever mentioning any hobbies, either, and he has no social media accounts. Nothing. A few stories from his college days, but Karl already knows he attended Syracuse University. That’s nothing groundbreaking. 

Karl has a diploma and the tax documents to prove Roy Himmel is a person who really exists, but he’s beginning to have doubts despite the proof. 

He receives more or less the same answers from the handler who mentored him when he first joined the company. 

“I kinda figured he didn’t want to talk about it for a reason,” Cruz tells him with a shrug.

Karl is grasping for straws when he suggests, “Was he an internal hire?”

An internal hire is someone who was initially in the pet program, who for one reason or another makes a better handler than a trainee. They’re rare, but it happens occasionally, and some of them have already had their memories wiped by the time they transfer roles. It could explain why he never spoke about himself — he might not have remembered anything at all.

“Nah,” Cruz says. “Not as far as I know, though he’s definitely got the looks for it.”

Karl shoves his discomfort with the statement to the back of his mind. Handlers are known for being flippant and crude — it doesn’t matter that this was once a colleague. 

“But he never once said anything about his past? Nothing?”

“Nope. I kind of figured he came from the Midwest, but he’s real good at languages. Can imitate any accent you name, so who really knows? If you asked him where he’s from, he’d just say ‘nowhere interesting’ and turn the question right back at you.”

Great. Nothing but more speculation. For the first time since he started working here, Karl goes home with more questions than answers. 

—

Karl opens a much deeper investigation the next day. He worked for a private investigator for a short time before WRU hired him, so he already knows all the tips and tricks of the trade. WRU holds the certifications and licensing needed to run as thorough a check as anyone can ask for, so all he needs to do is run the queries. 

When he uncovers — or, rather, what he doesn’t uncover — is at once astonishing and completely predictable based on his current progress. 

Roy Himmel didn't exist prior to his enrollment in college. The high school transcripts he used to apply to the school must be fake, and needless to say, no birth certificate exists either.

Any pets that enter the system are erased as people from that point onward, but no one is denying that they once existed and had rights and a life like any other citizen. This situation with Himmel is impossible. People’s pasts don’t just disappear like this — wholly and completely. 

The only reasonable conclusion is that Roy Himmel was a lie all along. 

“In short…who the hell is this guy?” Karl says, flicking the file with a snort. He glances at his manager, Collier, but he seems just as perplexed. “As far as I can tell, Roy Himmel doesn’t exist. Whoever doctored his identity did a pretty good job, but they didn’t go that far back.”

“The question is why he bothered at all,” Collier says, which is a perfectly valid point. As long as there’s nothing egregious about the applicant’s history, WRU’s handler program will hire just about anyone who suits the job. According to the things his coworkers said about him, Himmel never gave off any red flags. If his past was so unsavory he had to hide behind a false identity, Karl doubts he would have been able to come across as so normal and unassuming. 

There’s only one lead Karl has left, which he didn’t think to investigate initially because no one would steal company property, then proceed to hide somewhere as predictable as his home address.

“Wait…where did he live before he moved into company housing?” Karl says with a sense of urgency.

“How am I supposed to know?” Collier replies, vaguely amused as he watches Karl flip through the printouts he compiled. “That’s your job.”

“Right, right,” Karl murmurs, distracted. He pulls out the onboarding documents and searches for Himmel’s permanent address. He had to list one when he was hired. They wouldn’t have accepted a temporary address. And if he has a home address, he can track down everything. 

There. 

“Here. Chicago!” Karl circles the address in triumph. Collier leans forward and whistles as Karl searches the location on the internet. “What is it?”

“That’s on Lincoln Avenue,” Collier points out. “How and why did he end up working here? If he’s from that sort of neighborhood, he should have been a client, not an employee.”

It’s a simple matter to look into the residence’s purchase history, but revealing the name on the deed to the house doesn’t tell him much at first. He already knows Roy Himmel isn’t real. He has no way of knowing if he has any relation to Morgan Seidel, the owner of the house at that address. 

“Okay, not the same guy,” Karl says under his breath. He ran a quick search for one Morgan Seidel, and the results brought up the photo of a tall young man with auburn hair. Apparently, he’s the art director of an art museum in the area. Most importantly, he bears absolutely no resemblance to Himmel. Karl exhales harshly. 

It seems this is a mystery that will take longer than a single afternoon to uncover. As aggravated as it makes him, it’s been so long since a challenge like this one has presented itself at his fingertips.

[a-whump-muffin]

go to settings > to the right, under "Blogs," pick the blog you want to change the settings of > scroll down to visibility settings > turn on "Prevent third-party sharing for [blog url]" > do this for each individual blog you have

[a-whump-muffin]

bad apple!! (1)

I’ve finally finished enough of this new bbu story to show the world!

bad apple!! is the story of a former trainee and former handler, both on the run from WRU for the last eight years. This piece focuses on their unconventional relationship, and the very real concern the people around them have regarding it…

CW: box boy universe, condescending and unhelpful caretaking, references to violence, murder, and self-harm

---

“You couldn’t have possibly chosen him of your own free will.”

Nate despises those words.

“No,” he says each time, barely able to stop himself from snapping. If he’s too defensive, they’ll dismiss him without a second thought. He suffocates the anger stirring in his chest before it crawls up his throat, each and every time. “I know exactly who I fell in love with.”

He can never find the words to convince them. In their eyes, they only see a broken man who had been a boy when his entire life was stolen from him. In their eyes, Nate will never be fully in control of his own fate. The memories that were stolen from him will never return and the pain he suffered while collared like an animal will always cloud his decisions.

It’s the most infuriating part of the pet liberation movement. No matter the pretty words they use, they clearly don’t see him as their equal. The rescues don’t always understand, either.

However, Nate can understand their concerns. He has grown used to deflecting them. He is used to having to prove his own competence. What he hates, and can’t forgive as easily, is when people like Stefan say those words where Roy can hear them.

“I don’t need people telling me who to love,” Nate says with a hint of scorn.

“That’s the point,” Stefan tries to convince him. “The handlers do it on purpose. They make themselves the center of your world, make you willing to do anything and everything to please them. You know how this works. Just think about it for a second!”

Nate shakes his head. If he had anything in his hands, he would have thrown it across the room in frustration. It’s not fair that he has to swallow his anger until it burns. 

He doesn’t know how to explain that he fell in love with Roy at his worst, long before he ever saw a glimpse of his gentle and considerate side. He fell in love with the man who didn’t so much as flinch when his colleague bled out in front of him, who is willing to dirty his hands again and again to earn their freedom.

Roy, who was supposed to destroy every last part of him but reminded him of the man he killed long after his name and memories were wiped from his head. He didn’t remind him as a form of punishment.

“Remember you killed someone,” he’d whispered at least once a day, out of sight of the surveillance cameras and too soft for his voice to be picked up. “Hold onto that feeling. And, one day, when you need it most…

“Don’t hesitate.”

“I don’t want to hear it,” Nate says, finally irritated enough by the baseless accusations. He tries to keep his voice level. “You don’t know Roy. Yes, Roy, not ‘the handler’. He has a name, too.”

“You-”

“No, you listen to me.” Nate’s voice turns cold enough to startle, and Stefan has the sense to be wary.

He is reminded of something else Roy once told him, before they ran, before running was even a possibility.

“You and I, we’re not so different.” Roy was always quiet when he said those words. A distant, troubled look would cloud his eyes. He would never elaborate. Later, Nate knew what he meant without being told.

“Roy has risked more than you know to keep everyone safe.” Nate takes a deep breath. He is sick to his stomach with the knowledge that Roy can hear everything they’re saying. “He’s done some awful things in the past, and what he does now can’t make up for it. But he’s not asking for your, or anyone else’s, forgiveness. Who I choose to love, and choose to forgive, is my own business.”

Nate doesn’t let Stefan have the last word. He stalks away before the man can respond, effectively ending the conversation. He probably hasn’t convinced him in the slightest, but Nate feels better for having said it

He heads straight for the room he has been sharing with Roy, who treats it like solitary confinement. No one is forcing him to stay, but it’s also unbearably awkward for everyone involved when he shows his face around the common areas.

Nate finds him sitting against the wall next to the door.

“You heard all that,” Nate says apologetically, leaning down to tug Roy to his feet and off the floor. He follows without protest. Nate avoids his hands, which might still be sensitive from the night before when he scrubbed so hard he made himself bleed.

“He’s not entirely wrong.” Roy’s voice is soft but not uncertain, just a little tired. Nate makes him sit on the edge of the futon and stares until they meet each other’s eyes.

“Don’t say that,” Nate says, heart heavy with regret and affection towards this man who has probably defied all of his expectations for a life partner. He is sure that the boy he was would never have imagined himself with a guy like Roy. “Like I said, no one has a right to tell me who to love. Not even you.”

Roy’s eyes flicker with a bit of warmth. His lips twitch upwards in a half smile. He winds his fingers between Nate’s, and he sees now that Roy has been picking at the bandages. It’s a nervous habit, but Nate is relieved to see that Roy is comfortable enough to let him see it.

“Alright,” Roy says mildly. “I won’t argue with you.”

Nate rolls his eyes.

“I love you of my own free will,” he insists, careful not to squeeze his hands too hard. “I don’t appreciate people telling me that what we have isn’t real.”

He knows it’s real, not only because of his own feelings on the matter or the way Roy leans in to capture his lips in a kiss filled with just enough heat to steal his breath away.

The bandages are rough under his fingers. He traces the frayed edges gently with his thumbs.

If Roy didn’t love him, he wouldn’t tear himself apart doing all these jobs he hates. Roy became a handler to escape the family business. He had wanted a “normal” life - or as close to one as he could get.

Nate took that away from him. 

“They’re your family,” he’d said, once, when he’d had enough of seeing Roy’s hands tremble long after he came back from one of those jobs. Like every other time, he refused to explain why it left him so shaken. “Won’t they understand if you need a break? Or want to do something else?”

“Everything has a price,” Roy had said, as if it was an unshakable truth. “It’s just a matter of how much you’re willing to pay for what you want.”

Roy isn’t a good person. His family is probably way worse. 

Still, Nate doesn’t believe that they’re as uncaring and cruel to their own as Roy makes them out to be. He has overheard Roy’s conversations with his older brother and the light banter between them doesn’t sound like they don’t care about each other. His brother knows about Nate, and even asks about him sometimes. 

Roy reads into every remark and question his brother makes as a threat. Nate doesn’t know if it’s true or if Roy is just being paranoid.

The other pet lib members think he’s a ticking time bomb. That might very well be the case, but Nate knows he is more of a threat to himself than anyone else. 

“Don’t listen to them,” Nate reiterates. “I know what I want.”

[a-whump-muffin]

[a-whump-muffin]

Ooh definitely let me know when you get further!!

I’m binging it now surprisingly and it’s super interesting the changes they made to the original. I like the direction they took overall!

I haven’t seen the anime in yeaaars but still remember all the iconic parts. YYH was my childhood and I’m thrilled they did it so well for this live action. There are a few things I have an issue with my doesn’t take away from the overall enjoyment of the show

Hey! Started watching Yu Yu Hakusho live action bc of your reblog and it’s actually really good overall! Btw the guy in the screenshots you reblogged is a fox! I won’t say more since spoilers :3

!!!! WOOH

Im super slow in watching, but Im liking it so far! I ended up getting the first manga from the library

Fox!!!

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I'm finally...finally almost ready to come out with one of the fifty million whump stories I've written....

I've always wanted to write a bbu story set in modern times as is the usual setting. I've finally written one that satisfies me (somewhat...the brain is never truly satisfied...but it's going to have to deal this time). It's kinda dramatic and unrealistic but more grounded than the modern fantasy/supernatural aus i keep coming up with.

anyways, soon I'll roll out the first installment, about a boy who escaped wru's clutches and the handler (now his globe-trotting partner) who helped him do it.

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sometimes I go wild and try a new writing style, and sometimes I actually like it (even if just for that one story), but problems arise when I take a break and go back to it, then can't get back into the mindset to write that style again because it's not my normal one lol

(me when I write in first person...i thought a bbu story in first person would be fun, the not so fun part is taking a million years to get back to it and trying to pick up where I left off)

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you ever dig up something you wrote a while ago and think huh...that was actually pretty good...

then, sometimes, I actually forget I wrote the thing I dug up lol.

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So... I found this and now it keeps coming to mind. You hear about "life-changing writing advice" all the time and usually its really not—but honestly this is it man.

I'm going to try it.

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I used xkit to make the overall site font size smaller and somehow it’s made this new stupid layout a lot more bearable for me to use.

still hate it, but everything was too large and in my face before. 

also restored the old blue theme bc the neon colors hurt my eyes. used a different extension, Palettes for Tumblr, for that. they also have dark mode and other themes for people who like those better. personally, dark mode actually gives me a headache and the text always looks blurry, especially if it’s a pure white/black and not a more grey/off-white and black. that might be my astigmatism, though. most people I’ve met irl and online don’t seem bothered by dark mode colors at all, even the ones who don’t prefer it.

anyways, eternally grateful to the ones who develop these neat little extensions.

[a-whump-muffin]

Also reminder to new Tumblr users, if you are on desktop (it might be available on mobile? Idk how it would work with the app), you can download an add-on called Xkit Rewritten, a new new version of the old Tumblr supplement, Xkit, which lets you make tweaks to the website. It's kind of similar to RES on Reddit if you ever used that.

Here are the ones I have turned on:

I also just noticed it lets you hide Tumblr Live as well, if that annoys you.

The one I find most useful is Quick Reblog which includes the ability to add tags, where you just separate them by a comma:

and of course if you even want to hide your follower count from yourself, you can do that, too.

Have fun.

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I might just...post all the weird shit I’ve written over the past few years. I just want to get it off my back and out of the black hole that is my google docs folders. Just in that sort of mood lol.

I have a lot of stuff I actually kind of liked, but I’m really bad at continuing stories, so most of it has a cool premise or the beginning written before I ran out of steam.

Ahem, my problem may also just be that I cannot find anything and therefore can’t work on it if it’s buried under 10 layers of ‘untitled document’ files...

My entire google docs looks like this...

[a-whump-muffin]

I was looking over some of the other stuff I’ve written but never posted, and found the one time I was trying to imitate the writing style of Dogra Magra...Actually, it’s quite fitting for a bbu setting. Think one flew over the cuckoo's nest but with more mind-fuckery.

One really interesting element from Dogra Magra that you also see in other Japanese works today is the idea of generational or ancestral memories. Like Jung’s idea of archetypes being part of a collective unconscious.

[a-whump-muffin]

I have written the beginning of a dozen different stories, but I inevitably get “bored” with one idea and start a different story that holds my attention for a few days, and then occasionally we cycle back around to an old idea and I’m like oh, I liked that one, let’s make some more progress on it, but then I write like two paragraphs and dip again.

It’s so annoying. Part of it might just be me not plotting things out and being bad at writing transitions (I’ve usually got the beginning and key middle scenes in mind when I start). Other part might be me not being able to focus on one thing at a time. I also tend to like to work on things in a linear way, but I was probably the most prolific on this blog when I didn’t write things in order.

I even have a few decently whump-y works in the works (and a few bbu ideas I actually like), but not enough progress that I’d feel they’re ready to see the light of day.

I’ve also got this long genshin fic in progress, which is actually the first time in years that I’ve written canon characters...? I think? Really surprised myself with that one.