araglas1989

[araglas1989]

The first asexual person I met outside of the internet was a 65 year old woman.

I’d been interning with her as an artist/executive assistant for some time. To put a long story short she’d developed a tremor that kept her from doing a certain amount of studio work, so in between sending emails and invoices for her I’d chip in and help with line art or drafting on longer projects. A lot of it was the two of us sitting in her basement studio, doing our own thing, waiting for the phone to ring. We got to talking a lot. I’d just moved across the country and was still finding my footing.

There was a handyman she had over occasionally — he was a personal friend who enjoyed her company more than she enjoyed his. She didn’t dislike him by any means, but he definitely had feelings for her that she didn’t reciprocate. One day, after he’d come over to repair something-or-other and left, she and I started talking about relationships.

She asked if I had a boyfriend. I told her I wasn’t interested in being in a relationship with anyone and that I’d never had a desire to be in a relationship. Admittedly, I was bracing for the “You’ll meet the right person someday” response. I knew it generally came from a place of care, but it never changed how much I dreaded to hear it. I really respected my mentor and I was prepared to nod along to whatever response she gave me. Instead of anything I expected her to say, she just kind of nodded and said, “Me neither. I think I’m — what’s the term — asexual?”

I was ecstatic. I told her I was asexual, too. I saw her sigh in relief, the same way I did. I couldn’t believe it.

We didn’t get much work done that day, we just started talking about our experiences. She’d been married once when she was younger and even during that period of her life her disinterest in a sexual relationship didn’t change. She had a roommate after graduating college who confessed to having feelings for her and she had to tell her “It’s not that I don’t like girls, it’s that I don’t like anybody.” The roommate harbored enough bitterness over this that they had to split ways. Her mother told her that she would quote “rather have a gay daughter than a daughter who didn’t fancy anyone at all” unquote.

I didn’t have nearly as many experiences as she did, but I was able to share my own for the first time. I shared how it was easier to say I was taking time to work on myself than to say I had no interest in being in a relationship. We talked about the words “You’ll meet the right person someday” and “You’ll know when you’re in love” and “Don’t worry, one day you’ll meet some guy that changes everything.” As if something was broken.

“I’ve been alive for sixty five years,” my mentor told me, “and I’ve never felt like I was missing something, even if everybody told me I was.”

Currently, my mentor lives with her parrot, her cats, and her backyard-wildlife pals in a house that she owns. She makes art and hosts community art groups and volunteers at care homes and is the most self-fulfilled woman I’ve ever met. And she loves her life. She loves the people she knows and they love her, too. If I could be half as cool as she is when I grow up, I think that’d be pretty amazing.

“Asexuality” isn’t a problem to be fixed or a phase to grow out of. Sometimes you’re fifteen and sometimes you’re sixty-five. I knew in my heart that older asexual people existed but it changed me completely to meet one. We were here before and we always will be.

[araglas1989]

Jaskier walking through a market place past a pen where a bunch of horses for sale are kept. A horse neighs. Jaskier stops, turns around with a grimace on his face and looks at a chestnut mare. "Roach?" Roach nods. "He's lying in a ditch somewhere, right?" Another nod. Melitele above that horse has always been too smart for his own comfort. "I will have to steal you back now, I guess?" Roach neigs rather dramatically and Jaskier sighs. So much for a calm evening. A few paces behind the guy who sells the (stolen) horses backs away, suddenly having decided that that particular mare is not worth the trouble.

[araglas1989]

extremely awkward event when the tornado warning came through and i had to take my whole family down into the gimp basement for safety. not an easy conversation even at a normal volume

[araglas1989]

[araglas1989]

usually when you have a stomach bug your body is like yes sir we'll get this punk out of here, 48 hours tops. then you get a cold and your body is like I dunno ... between a few hours and eleven months ... maybe a week minimum .... you gotta understand we're short staffed

[araglas1989]

we'll fight like twenty armies and we won't give up.

put the anime elf back in an anime or so help me. this was one of the sets i had in mind a couple of months ago when i was like ‘eeehh can i justify buying an ipad’, and let me tell you i hit my procreate layer limit on that last shot (lineart, colour, two layers of combination shadow and highlight - one of which is animated - separate layer for tattoos so i could make them glow in after effects, thirty individual hand drawn frames). and then the movement still looks stiff, lmao. the number of hours that went into this is obscene, but i’m really proud of it.

[araglas1989]

sometimes you gotta bite the bullet and put "text your friend whom you love and genuinely want to talk to" on your to-do list because otherwise it is not getting done

[araglas1989]

Super weird to have innocuously added a silly personal anecdote to a post you didn't realize was super popular...

Only to have it cross your dash a week later and find out that like 12,000 people think you're lying.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[araglas1989]

i feel like something that's missing from some people's understanding of kink fiction and fantasy is, like... in fiction and fantasy, everything is in-scene.

when real people do kink in real life, you gotta do all that good out-of-scene stuff like discuss boundaries, set limits and expectations, check in with each other, do aftercare, et cetera et cetera et cetera... but in fiction, everything can be in-scene!

the people in that fanfic don't exist any more than, like, the make-believe sexy football star and make-believe sexy cheerleader in a couple's roleplay exist. that couple doesn't need to get into character and then pretend to be a sexy football star having an important consent conversation with a sexy cheerleader, because that's a conversation that's already happened out-of-scene and out-of-character. (i mean, if you're into in-character negotiations, chase your bliss.) when they're in that scene, they can just pretend to be a sexy football star having sex with a sexy cheerleader. that's okay.

so like. when fiction does kink in a way that would be unsafe or harmful irl... just keep in mind that you're not watching actual people neglecting check-ins or ignoring their set contract or genuinely harming each other. you're watching a scene without the behind-the-scenes bits, and that's okay.

[araglas1989]

Sebastian Stan on the set of Avengers: Infinity War (x)

[araglas1989]

True equality was reached in Jurassic Park 1993 with Robert Muldoon and Dr. Ellie Sattler wearing the same length shorts.

[araglas1989]

there's a jewish story about a rich man who goes to his rabbi to ask him about building an orphanage, and the rabbi is like "yeah duh go for it!!" and then later the rich guy comes back and is like "actually I've decided not to... I was just doing it for my own image and not coz I cared about orphans" and the rabbi was like "bitch the orphans don't care why you're building the orphanage!!!" and sometimes I wish I could say that to lefties who haven't unpacked their christian upbringing. sometimes motives don't matter!! who give a fuck why a politician wants to do a good thing? bitch the orphans don't!!

[araglas1989]

non-writers will never understand the mental illness of writing an entire conversation in your head while doing dishes and then forgetting every word the second you open a blank doc

[araglas1989]

that "OKAY SO" before someone u love starts infodumping........ most blessed feeling in the world

[araglas1989]

@artistsfuneral now 1h til laundry

Laundry. 2 hours from now

[araglas1989]

Hawke leaving Fenris behind in DA:I

I’ve seen people bring this up, but now that I’ve finally gotten to the point of meeting Hawke in the game I wanted to test this idea:

Does anyone think it’s possible that Hawke told Fenris that they were leaving and Fenris reluctantly accepted it?

I know what you’re thinking; ‘Fenris is too devoted to risk losing someone he loves’ but I have some thoughts on that.

One, I will never be able to believe that any decent Hawke would just up and leave Fenris. Any other love interest I might accept (although it’s still cruel regardless) but Fenris? Hell no. He’s someone with very justified trust and abandonment issues and the idea of him waking up to see the first person he’s ever dared to love has just left would probably scar him for life. Even when Hawke came back and apologized I don’t think their relationship could ever recover.

Secondly, I think Fenris would understand the idea of needing to deal with one’s past on their own terms in order to move on. Fenris himself left Hawke for years because he still had a lot of issues to work out, and I agree with other fans who pointed out that it was a very healthy thing to do on his part. No amount of love and support can magically fix emotional baggage and it’s something someone has to do on their own. So when Hawke asks to go alone to put the whole Hawke legacy to rest I think Fenris would understand even if it hurt like hell. (And that it would be hypocritical to say no, since he walked out before.)

And when Hawke came back their relationship would be all the stronger for it. Fenris trusted Hawke enough that he allowed them to leave and Hawke is grateful that Fenris is understanding enough to wait for them. I know the old adage of ‘if you love something set it free’ is a cliche but it does have a kernel of truth; if a relationship is strong enough to survive separation and reconciliation then it can survive nearly anything.

So, thoughts?

[araglas1989]

on fanfic & emotional continuity

Writing and reading fanfic is a masterclass in characterisation. 

Consider: in order to successfully write two different “versions” of the same character - let alone ten, or fifty, or a hundred - you have to make an informed judgement about their core personality traits, distinguishing between the results of nature and nurture, and decide how best to replicate those conditions in a new narrative context. The character you produce has to be recognisably congruent with the canonical version, yet distinct enough to fit within a different - perhaps wildly so - story. And you physically can’t accomplish this if the character in question is poorly understood, or viewed as a stereotype, or one-dimensional. Yes, you can still produce the fic, but chances are, if your interest in or knowledge of the character(s) is that shallow, you’re not going to bother in the first place. 

Because ficwriters care about nuance, and they especially care about continuity - not just literal continuity, in the sense of corroborating established facts, but the far more important (and yet more frequently neglected) emotional continuity. Too often in film and TV canons in particular, emotional continuity is mistakenly viewed as a synonym for static characterisation, and therefore held anathema: if the character(s) don’t change, then where’s the story? But emotional continuity isn’t anti-change; it’s pro-context. It means showing how the character gets from Point A to Point B as an actual journey, not just dumping them in a new location and yelling Because Reasons! while moving on to the next development. Emotional continuity requires a close reading, not just of the letter of the canon, but its spirit - the beats between the dialogue; the implications never overtly stated, but which must logically occur off-screen. As such, emotional continuity is often the first casualty of canonical forward momentum: when each new TV season demands the creation of a new challenge for the protagonists, regardless of where and how we left them last, then dealing with the consequences of what’s already happened is automatically put on the backburner.

Fanfic does not do this. 

Fanfic embraces the gaps in the narrative, the gracenotes in characterisation that the original story glosses, forgets or simply doesn’t find time for. That’s not all it does, of course, but in the context of learning how to write characters, it’s vital, because it teaches ficwriters - and fic readers - the difference between rich and cardboard characters. A rich character is one whose original incarnation is detailed enough that, in order to put them in fanfic, the writer has to consider which elements of their personality are integral to their existence, which clash irreparably with the new setting, and which can be modified to fit, to say nothing of how this adapted version works with other similarly adapted characters. A cardboard character, by contrast, boasts so few original or distinct attributes that the ficwriter has to invent them almost out of whole cloth. Note, please, that attributes are not necessarily synonymous with details in this context: we might know a character’s favourite song and their number of siblings, but if this information gives us no actual insight into them as a person, then it’s only window-dressing. By the same token, we might know very few concrete facts about a character, but still have an incredibly well-developed sense of their personhood on the basis of their actions. 

The fact that ficwriters en masse - or even the same ficwriter in different AUs - can produce multiple contradictory yet still fundamentally believable incarnations of the same person is a testament to their understanding of characterisation, emotional continuity and narrative.