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Tired of stories where the author worldbuilds a whole religion only to chicken out at the last moment by making the main character a skeptic. You mean to tell me that there’s all this richness in lore and culture, but you’ve trapped me with the one person in this society who doesn’t care about it? So bland. I could meet an agnostic easily enough by walking down the street, but your story is my one chance to hear the perspective of someone who follows whatever religion you’ve contrived. You made this whole world; convince me that your character really is from there.

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crazy how every time a female character gets cliche misogynistic writing we have to explain to people again that fictional characters are not real and do not choose things for themselves.

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The author's poorly disguised punching bag

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fanfic writers what font do you write in

i know on ao3 it's all in verdana but when you're drafting the fic in word or docs or whatever

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Never posting my fanfiction. Call that AO2.

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pissing each other off as foreplay

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realtor whose entire career is just selling (and re-selling and re-selling) the same haunted house

it transpires this is a longstanding con, in which the house (which is hugely haunted) is an active participant

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The fact that people don't think friendship is enough to justify characters doing insane acts of love for each other baffles me. Like have you never loved your friend so so much you want to live in their ribcage. Have you never been really weird about a friend. Have you never wanted to bite your friends parents or shove them down a staircase. Have you never wanted to be buried in the same grave as a friend. Have u never. How do u people live like this.

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Most used AO3 poly ships of all time ranking I found on twitter

Look at fucking number 9

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Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck I need to hurt The Character

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editing is so funny because it's like "damn, i wrote 'before' two times within three paragraphs. they are going to stone me in the town square for this"

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characters going “we were lovers once”: eh, it’s okay i guess. it’s nice enough

characters going “we were friends once”: absolutely devastating. one hit knockout i’m gone

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oh i never know how to explain this properly but i looooooooooooooooove when a story just absolutely TELLS you something and it’s so obvious it goes right by you. like the equivalent of hiding in plain sight. i’m thinking in the original cut(?) of alien where they showed the full xenomorph, crouched and ready to pounce, but because we’ve never seen it before, we can’t tell what it is and interpret it as part of the spaceship. or it’s a detail that seems so out of place or wildly insane that you automatically ignore it and assume you misinterpreted until that exact detail comes back in a big way? (like when noah the raven boy flat out tells everyone he’s a ghost and they take it as a joke, so the reader does too) is there a tvtropes name for this i’m obsessed with it

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Notes on Torturing The Character In The Science Facility

my takes on this trope rarely if ever have anything to do with the character being "special" or being studied for powers they innately have, if they are special its something that was done to them

it's about the medical trauma

it's about the violation and lack of bodily autonomy

the "living weapon" trope, but the key characteristic is catastrophic functionality

i love, love, love the concept of "catastrophic functionality" in a person: character that can tank ludicrous amounts of damage and just Keep Going in virtually all circumstances barring outright dismemberment. They can keep going, so do they "deserve" rest and/or pain relief?

after a lifetime of having their distress treated as whiny and unreasonable, they have what would be a dangerously high tolerance to pain and exhaustion.

another key function of the Science Facility is to fix the damage Character takes, maybe using enhanced healing technologies or 3D printed organs or something. this leads to Character's body being treated as relatively disposable cause "we can just fix them"

extreme version of this: Character can't die even if they wanted to

people who work with Character are informed that they're dangerous and arbitrarily violent, and their fear of Character makes it easier to justify restricting autonomy

It is TRUE, cause Character does not have tools to set boundaries or protect their body other than violence. vicious cycle of being perceived as dangerous and therefore denied autonomy, and being forced to use violence to defend autonomy

the restraints used to hold Character look like major overkill, which underscores how dangerous they are. LOVE this trope

character being desexualized to the point that their non-consent to touch, to being stripped down and examined, or to procedures is trivialized. There is no non-clinical context for their body, and the "clinical" framework eclipses any possibility for bodily violation to be understood as violent.

types of uncanniness: Character looks human but has some subtle inhuman traits or characteristics. (I'm obsessed with reflective eye shine, personally.) OR Character looks like they've been taken apart and put back together, like flesh pulled over a much more unforgiving and indestructible metal scaffold. OR Character gives off "undead" vibes; they're just not quite alive in a way that sets off air raid sirens in people's brains

Often, Character is dead and Came Back Wrong (varying levels of literalness)

anyways yeah. i never stopped writing this trope and probably never will. it's a good one

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gun to my head i would rather die than read this fic. what the fuck are you even doing at this point. whats the fucking point?

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