ascel-vibes - Tumblr blog

[ascel-vibes]

Friendly reminder that you should

Write that fic

Draw your OC

Redesign that blorbo

Plan that comic how you want

Create the content you want to see

Be cringe

Be free

The only thing that matters is you having fun! Not what others think!

[ascel-vibes]

I cannot stress this enought but it is absolutely okay to be wrong about your sexuality. It is perfectly fine to find a label that you think fits and then later figure out that it's not right after all. Idk the age demographic of my followers but if you're like 13 and unsure if you should identify as aro or ace because you feel like you're too young, it's literally fine if you do so now and change your mind about it when you're older. I was convinced I was bisexual for most of my teens and guess what, I was wrong about that. It's literally fine.

[ascel-vibes]

[ID: Various icon edits of Flowey/Asriel from Undertale with the loveless aro flag. The loveless aro flag has colors of dark to light greys and greens in the middle.

The first six images have the loveless aro flag in the BG, and the image sources in order are;

Dancing Flowey plush from Fangamer, Smiling Flowey Line sticker, Smug cheeky Flowey Line sticker, Creepy smile Flowey line sticker, Smirking shadowed face Flowey Line sticker, and Asriel holding golden flowers from the UT 5th anniversary poster on Fangamer.

The seventh image is on a white background, and is an edit of Asriel's ingame overworld sprite but with the shirt colors replaced with those of the loveless aro flag. /End ID]

loveless flowey and asriel canon ⬆️

[ascel-vibes]

Most fucked up thing i ever drew...

[ascel-vibes]

god I fuckign love ocs. my characters. my friend's characters. the characters of mutuals ive never spoken to. the characters of artists ive followed and maybe spoken to a little more. the characters of complete strangers I see in passing and think "aw that's cool". if you have ten fans I am one if you have one fan it is me etc etc. I love you

[ascel-vibes]

Reminder to be kinder to Palestinians on this platform (and in general tbh). They deal with a lot of hatred, insensitive comments/questions, and a lot of things in general both on this platform and in real life. They're human beings. They have emotions too. Please be kinder.

My heart hurts every time I see Palestinian creators here deal with so much negativity and having to constantly remind people that they're humans too. Again, please be kinder. Stop dehumanizing them.

[ascel-vibes]

people are way too comfortable being dismissive of children and teenagers. if a toddler comes up to you and starts explaining skibidi toilet lore or if a 13 year old asks you if you want to hear about their mha ocs you have to listen with utmost sincerity or at least pretend to. this is the only way you will get into heaven.

[ascel-vibes]

This ABSOLUTELY works.

I have used this for many years. Definitely b do it.

[ascel-vibes]

Navigation: Helpful Posts

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Complication of posts from CrippleCharacters, as well as other blogs providing advice on writing disabled characters!

This list will continue to be updated with new posts.

Last update: 23/04/2024

Character Making Basics and Ideas

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How to Start Doing Research When Writing a Disabled Character Ideas: crutch users Ideas: facial differences Ideas: rollator users Ideas: little people Ideas: intellectual disability General Ideas

How to Describe XYZ?

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Blindness Tropes: the "Blank Look" Describing Characters with Facial Differences as Pretty First Description: when to mention the Facial Difference How Often Should You Mention Mobility Aids? Dialogue and Speech Disorders Sign Language in Dialogue

How to Draw XYZ?

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Tips for Drawing Characters with Facial Differences Drawing Blind Characters Drawing Amputees

General

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Writing a Newly Disabled Character Writing a Visibly Different Character Including Disabled Communities Disabled Characters in Historical Fiction Coming up with Fictional Disabilities Tokenism Discussion Disability and Superpowers Curing and "Fixing" Disabled Characters Is It Realistic to Have Multiple Disabled Characters? "Jaws Effect": how media affect the real world Worldbuilding with Accessibility in Mind How to Let Readers Figure Out the Character's Disability

General Tropes

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"Super-Crip": Magic and Disability I Did a Trope but It's Too Late - What You Should Do - made with the mask trope in mind, but could be applied more widely Magical Cure - made with blindness in mind Including Healing Magic without Disability Erasure

Mobility Aids

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General Overview Overview, but with More Options - not writing advice, educational Magic Mobility Aids Tips on Writing Wheelchair Users "But Mobility Aids Wouldn't Exist in my Fantasy World"

Amputation/Limb Difference

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Constructing Characters with Limb Differences: Discussing Fetishization Do Amputees Always Wear Prosthetics? Does a Character with Amputation Need a Prosthetic? Does a Character with Upper Limb Amputation Need a Prosthetic? Designing a Prosthetic Arm Making a Character with Upper Limb Amputation Genius Amputee Mechanic: Discussing the DIY Prosthetic Trope Causes of Amputation

Blindness

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Making a Blind Character: what to add, what to avoid Designing a Blind Character: Discussing the Eye Covering Trope What to Give Your Blind Character Blindness Tropes: Daredevil, milky eyes, and blindness-negating magic The Blind Prophet Trope Guide Animals: Dogs, Horses, and Their Fictional Equivalents Blind Characters with Superpowers Portraying Photophobia in Pre-modern Times Characters with Albinism Fetishization of Albinism DeafBlind Character not Wanting to be Blind

Deaf and Hard of Hearing (HoH) Characters

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Creating Deaf/HoH Characters Writing D/deaf/HoH Characters Tips on Writing Deaf Characters Visual Indicators of a Person being Deaf Tips on Writing about Hearing Aids

Facial Difference (FD)

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Introduction to Facial Difference: basics, tropes, what I want to see Constructing a Character with an FD: Discussing Disfiguremisia and the "Mask Trope" Does My Character Need a Prosthetic Eye?: alternatives What Would Happen to A Character with a Scar Through the Eye? Personal Opinion on the Scar Through the Eye Trope How Scars Affect the Character, and How the Character Affects the Scar (in the technical sense)

Other

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Introduction to Writing Intellectually Disabled Characters: basics, tropes, how it actually works Down Syndrome and Historical Fiction Writing Characters with Tourette's Syndrome Introduction to Writing Characters with Speech Disorders Writing Little People (characters with dwarfism) Writing and Drawing Burn Survivors: basics and resources Caring for a Burn Scar: the everyday things Writing Characters with ASPD Dwarfism and Fantasy Stories Stereotypes around Characters with Dwarfism Writing a Character with Russel-Silver Syndrome

Making Your Content Accessible to Disabled Readers

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Image Descriptions Tutorial Writing Image Descriptions for People Who Can't Write Them "But how do blind people even use alt text" How to Tag Your Posts (Tumblr)

Recommended Blogs

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@blindbeta @cy-cyborg @a-little-revolution @mimzy-writing-online

[ascel-vibes]

Tips for writing black characters

Day-to-day practical and minor stuff, specially regarding hair

If you have curly/afro hair then you are only going to need to wash it one or twice a week

But it can take a while. When I had long hair it used to take me 2h in the bathroom to properly wash it. That's why I only did it once a week. But it really will depend of the thickness and lenght of their hair.

It can be a little harder to find products for their hair, because straight/wavy hair products don't work on ours

If you wash curly hair many times a week it will eventually lose its nutrients, differently from straigh hair

If your character originally had curly hair but straightened it, it's probably going to look a little drier than naturally straight hair. it's a case-case scenario, though

If they have a skin care routine or want one they'll also need products made specifically for black skin

Your character is not immune to sunburns. It's harder to see if it gets red depending on how dark their skin is, but it's there. The more melanin they have, the more protected from the sun they are, but it's not gonna 100% prevent them from getting sunburnt.

Oh, and it can be pretty hard to dye it because first, if your hair is very dark, you have to decolor it, and depending on how black it is it can take a while and a few tries to get in a tone good for dying.

If they have long hair they're probably going to take a while combing it because you have to apply the hair cream lock by lock

They may have a haircare routine every month or so. Not everybody does it but if your character is disciplined and wants their hair to be extra healthy and neat they'll probably have one

If they care a lot about their appearence they'll probably have a lot of hair brushes of different types because depending on your brush you can comb it in a variety of ways, making your hair look fuller, making the curls look defined, etc.

[ascel-vibes]

The Untrustworthy Fake: Disability Tropes

[ID: A screenshot of Willy Wonka from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as he limps towards a crowd using a cane. In the picture, he has a brown top hat in his hand, and he's wearing a suit with a purple jacket, multicoloured bow tie and cream coloured pants. Beside him is text that reads: "Disability Tropes, The untrustworthy Fake" /End ID]

Tell me if this sounds familiar: A new character is introduced into a story with some kind of disability - usually visible but not always. Maybe they're a seemingly harmless person in a wheelchair, maybe they're a one-legged beggar on the street, or maybe they're an elderly person with a cane and a slow, heavy limp. But at some point, it's revealed it's all a ruse! The old man with a cane "falls" forward and does a flawless summersault before energetically springing back up to his feet, the wheelchair user gets to their feet as soon as they think the other character's backs are turned, the one legged beggar's crutch is knocked out of his hand, only to have his other leg pop out of his loose-fitting tunic to catch him.

All of these are real examples. Maya and The Three introduces one of it's main protagonists, Ricco, by having him pretend to be missing a leg in order to con people (something that works on the protagonist, at least at first), Buffy The Vampire Slayer had the character Spike, pretend to be in a wheelchair, until the other characters leave and he gets up, revealing it's all a ruse and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory introduces Wonka by having him slowly limp out into the courtyard of the factory, only for his cane to get stuck, causing him to "fall" and jump back up, revealing that he's actually perfectly fine. Virtually every single major crime show in the past few decades has used this trope too, from CSI to The Mentalist, Castle, Law and Order and Monk all having at least one episode featuring it in some way. Even the kids media I grew up with isn't free from it; The Suite Life of Zack & Cody sees Zach faking being dyslexic after meeting someone who actually has the condition in the episode Smarter and Smarter and the SpongeBob SquarePants episode Krabs vs Plankton has Plankton fake needing a wheelchair (among other injuries) after falling in the Krusty Krab as a ploy to sue Mr Krabs and trick the court into giving him the Kraby Patty Formula.

No matter the genre or target audience though, one thing is consistent: this trope is used as a way to show someone is dishonest and not to be trusted. When the trope is used later in the story, it's often meant to be a big reveal, to shock the audience and make them mad that they've been duped, to show the characters and us what this person (usually a villain) is willing to stoop to. Revealing the ruse early on though is very often used to establish how sleazy or even how dangerous a character is and to tell the audience that they shouldn't trust them from the get go. Gene Wilde (The actor who first played Willy Wonka) even said in several interviews that this was his intent for Wonka's character. He even went so far as to tell the director of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that he wouldn't do the film without that scene because of how strongly he felt this trope was needed to lay the foundations for Wonka's questionable intentions and motivations. His exact words are: "...but I wouldn't have done the film if they didn't let me come out walking as a cripple and then getting my cane stuck into a cobble stone, doing a forward somersault and then bouncing up... the director said, well what do you want to do that for? and I said because from that point on, no one will know whether I'm telling the truth or lying."

There's... a lot of problems with this trope, but that quote encapsulates one of the biggest ones. whether intentionally or not, this trope ends up framing a lot of actual disabled people as deceitful, dishonest liars. Now I can already hear you all typing, What?! Cy that's ridiculous! No one is saying real disabled people are untrustworthy or lying about their disabilities, just people who are faking!

but the thing is, the things often used in this trope as "evidence" of someone faking a disability are things real disabled people do. A person standing up from their wheelchair or having scuff-marks on their shoes, like in the episode Miss Red  from The Mentalist isn't a sign they're faking, a lot of wheelchair users can stand and even walk! They're called ambulatory wheelchair users, and they might use a wheelchair because they can't walk far, they might not feel safe walking on all terrains, they might have unstable joints that makes standing for too long risky, they might have a heart condition like POTS that has a bigger impact when they stand up or any number of other reasons. Also even non-ambulatory wheelchair users will still have scuff marks from things like transferring and bumping into things (rather hilariously, even TV Tropes calls this episode out as being "BS" in it's listing for this trope, which it refers to as Obfuscating Disability). A blind beggar flinching or getting scared when you pull a gun on them isn't a sign they're faking their blindness like it is in Red Dead Redemption 2. Plenty of blind people can still see a little bit, it might only be a general sense of light and darkness, it might be exceptionally blurry or just the fuzzy outlines of shapes, or they might only be able to see something directly in front of them, all of which might still be enough to cue the person into what's happening in a situation like that. Even if it's not, the sound of you pulling your gun out or other people nearby freaking out and making noise probably would tip them off. A person needing a cane or similar mobility aid sometimes, but being able to go without briefly or do even "big movements" like Wonka's rolling somersault, doesn't mean they don't need it at all. Just like with wheelchairs, there's a lot of disabilities that require canes and similar aids some days, and not others. Some disabilities even allow people those big, often straining movements on occasion, or allow them to move without the aid for short periods of time, but not for long. Some people's disability's might even require a mobility aid like a cane as a backup, just in case something goes wrong, but that still means you need to carry it around with you, and unless it can fold down, it's easier to just use it.

Disability is a spectrum, and a lot of disabilities vary in severity and what is required of the people who have them day to day. This trope, however, helps to perpetuate the idea that someone who does any of these things (and many others) is faking, which can actively make the lives of disabled people harder and can even put them in very real danger, physically, mentally and even financially.

Just ask any ambulatory wheelchair user about how many times they've been yelled at for using accommodations they need, like disabled toilets or parking spaces. How many times they've been accused of faking and even filmed without their consent because they stood up in public, even if it was to do something like get their wheelchair unstuck or as simple as them standing to briefly reach something on a high shelf. I've caught multiple people filming me before, so have my friends and family, and it's honestly scary not knowing where those images have ended up. This doesn't just impact the person either, a friend of mine was filmed while standing up to get his daughter (who was about 4 at the time) out of the car. He was lucky to have stumbled across the video a few days later on facebook and contacted the group admins where it was posted to get it taken down, but had he not stumbled across it by chance, pictures with his home address and his car's number plate, his child's face and his face all visible would have just been floating around, all because a woman saw him stand briefly to pick up his daughter.

Many people don't stop at just saying a nasty comment or taking a photo though, a lot of people, when they suspect people are faking, will get violent. I have many friends who have been pushed, slapped in the face, spat on or had their mobility devices kicked out from under them. I've even been in a few situations myself where, had I not had people with me, I think the situation would have turned violent.

There's even been cases where those photos and videos I've mentioned before have been used against real disabled people and they've been reported to their country's welfare system as committing disability fraud. While cases like this are usually resolved *relatively* quickly, in many parts of the world, their payment will be halted while the investigation is in process, meaning they may be without any income at all because of someone else's ignorance. If you're already struggling to make ends meet (which, if you're only living off one of those payments, you probably will be), a few weeks without pay can mean the difference between having a home and being on the streets.

Not to mention that when there's so many stories about people faking a disability in the media, especially when the character is doing it to get some kind of "advantage", such as getting accommodations or some kind of disability benefit, it perpetuates the idea that people are rorting the systems put in place to help disabled people. If this idea becomes prevalent enough, the people in charge start making it harder for the people who need them to access those systems, which more often than not results in disabled people not even being able to access the very systems that are supposed to be helping them. A very, very common example of this is in education where accommodations for things like learning disabilities require you to jump through a ridiculous number of hoops, especially at higher levels, only to have some teachers and professors refuse to adhere to the adaptations anyway because they're convinced the student (and usually disabled students as a whole) is faking.

Yes, the "untrustworthy faker" is a fictional trope, and yes, it does occasionally happen in real life, but not as often as media (including things like news outlets) would have you believe. However, when the media we consume is priming people to look for signs that a disabled person is faking, it has a real impact on real disabled people's lives. "Fake-claiming" is a massive problem for people in pretty much all parts of the disabled community, and it ranges from being just annoying (e.g. such as people spamming and fake-claiming blind people online with "if you were really blind, how do you see the screen" comments) to the more serious cases I mentioned above. It's for this reason a lot of folks in the disabled community ask that people leave this trope out of their works.

[ascel-vibes]

Things To Ask Yourself When Questioning, "Am I Aplatonic?":

What is friendship to you?

What is friendship to the people around you?

How closely do those descriptions align?

Are you satisfied with any current friendships you have (separated from how you might feel about the people themselves)?

How were your past friendships?

Why do, did, or would you have friends?

Do you feel platonic attraction?

To what degree?

Do you know what platonic attraction feels like?

Do you see friendship as an important facet of your life, present or future?

Do you want friends?

What do you see as platonic?

Thinking about each of those things, how do they make you feel?

Is there anything you would want to change or adjust about your current friendships?

Small influx of people in the tag, wanted to contribute. Feel free to add on!

[ascel-vibes]

As a kid, when your parents are poor, you're poor. If they don't have money, that means none of you have money. But if someone's parents are rich, that doesn't necessarily mean the kid is. Sometimes rich peoples' kids aren't rich kids, they're just some rich freak's exotic pets that can talk but aren't allowed to.

[ascel-vibes]

leitmotifs never get old to me like holy shit dude there’s this melody that corresponds to this one guy and if you hear the melody it means the guy is there. holy shit. and sometimes it refers to ideas too not just guys. has anyone heard about this

[ascel-vibes]

I don't understand why pedestrians are so eager to replace wheelchairs in fantasy worlds. no, in Pokemon wheelchair users wouldn't be riding Pokemon everywhere they would be using wheelchairs. wheelchairs are just fine. they don't need magical fantasy replacements

[ascel-vibes]

At some point in your life, you were taught that being slightly annoying is an unforgivable sin. Maybe it was by your parents or a teacher or a friend or a bully or an older sibling. But someone taught you that being slightly annoying is a crime punishable by death.

You must unlearn this.

You must accept that all people will be annoying at some point or another in their lives, maybe all of their lives, and that this is okay. It is okay for strangers on the bus, it is okay for children in the grocery store, it is okay for people on social media, and it is okay for you.

If you ever want to truly love your fellow humans, if you ever want to truly love yourself, you must have forgiveness for being annoying.

[ascel-vibes]

While I understand that shitpost-y footnotes about titty pills are bound to have more notes than telling people about my book, it’s still a bit sad when the former gets 150k notes and the latter gets like 900. 😫