ego-ille

[ego-ille]

im joining the war on gross disgusting pornographic content on the side of gross disgusting pornographic content

[ego-ille]

writing is 5% typing and 95% lying on the floor whispering “why would they do that” like a conspiracy theorist with red yarn

[ego-ille]

there’s a thing I think about sometimes when I’m writing that I call ‘the rabies condition’

by which I mean: there are no contraindications to getting the rabies vaccine for post-exposure prophylaxis.

every other vaccine usually has a few contraindications like ‘don’t take this if you’re allergic to it’ or ‘if you’re pregnant discuss the risks and benefits with your doctor’ or ‘don’t give to children below age 6′ or something, but not the rabies vaccine. if you’ve been exposed to rabies, there is literally no medical reason that can justify not getting the rabies vaccine–you can be deadly allergic to literally every single ingredient and the correct decision is still to administer the vaccine, because if you don’t, you’re 100% guaranteed to die of rabies. even the life-threatening allergies are a step up in survival rate (especially since anaphylaxis is something that can be managed, even if there are risks associated with it)

which is to say, the rabies condition: if a character has been ‘exposed to rabies’, aka, in some impending absolute worst-case scenario, like the apocalypse or some death curse or the destruction of their entire city via demons or whatever, then that character has to take action and the consequences and risks no longer matter, because literally any other outcome would be better, and 1% chance of survival is still better than 0%. that doesn’t make those actions necessarily good, the same way that injecting yourself with something you know you’re deadly allergic not a good thing to do, but it’s still better than dying horrifically of rabies. desperate times and desperate measures etc

and then, after your character’s prevented some horrible thing by doing some almost equally bad thing, they should absolutely experience the consequences of those choices.

[ego-ille]

love when stories inflict unspeakable horrors onto a person for no real reason. its not karma. its not payback. its not a lesson. its not your fault. no ones even out to get you in particular. youre not the chosen one or special or anything. it just sorta happened and you were there. sorry man

[ego-ille]

When I was about 11, my father was listening to NPR in the car and I was the captive audience in the back seat with no choice but to listen. It was some gardening and/or food themed show and the host was talking about how carrots grown in the winter produce more sugar. This is an evolutionary tactic on the carrot’s part to survive harsh conditions. And that was when this man dropped the most banger line I’ve ever heard. “When you bite into a carrot and it tastes sweet, that’s the carrot saying ‘I don’t want to die.’” I was floored, changed as a person forever. This line haunts me. The poetry. The emotion. NPR made me the sappy garden idiot I am today, romanticizing senescence and over analyzing the science behind vegetables.

[ego-ille]

your dark fantasy novel doesn't need a logic-based magic system it needs a bear with a human face

[ego-ille]

save me characters doing fucked up things out of self-preservation…..characters doing fucked up things out of self-preservation save me………..

[ego-ille]

To me the most fun part about fix-its is placing dominoes.

Tragedies often consist of escalating series of actions and circumstances which, in isolation, were not clearly leading to the tragic end but form a chain of cause-and-effect directly towards it in hindsight. In equal but opposite fashion, I love starting with small inoccuous changes to canon that in themselves do not obviously fix everything but start a new chain that leads to a better ending.

It's kind of impossible for fix-its to feel fully natural– the reader by definition knows what the original ending was and that this ending will be happier because the writer wants it to be– but it is possible for them to not feel contrived. A big deus-ex-machina, or a character breaking with their pre-established tragic flaws to suddenly make all the "correct" decisions almost always feels unsatisfying to me.

But a few carefully placed small domino pieces slowly knocking over bigger and bigger tiles until the entire story has radically changed? That's a lot more fun.

It recquires the author to both correctly identify the original chain of cause-and-effect and understand the characters well enough to know how they'd react to different circumstances. Because if the story feels like it's fixing the wrong problem or the characters don't act like themselves the magic is lost. But when it works? When it clicks and the reader sees the domino chain laid out in front of them? It's beautiful.

[ego-ille]

I wonder if “we have to torture this special character. in the lab facility. with secret science.” is an interest all 12-year-old children share or were we just the generation exposed to Maximum Ride

[ego-ille]

The Swan, Mary Oliver

[ego-ille]

Never posting my fanfiction. Call that AO2.

[ego-ille]

think that everyone has their own personal theme in life

[ego-ille]

your dark fantasy novel doesn't need a logic-based magic system it needs a bear with a human face

[ego-ille]

by Austėja Liupševičiūtė

[ego-ille]

let your character fuck up. please. let them fuck up on a scale so massive that this particular thing cannot be salvaged. let their fuck up have permanent consequences. and stoooooooooooooooop having them being the smartest person in the room who always has a sharp comeback to put their enemies down, and who always handles their enemies with grace or at least an air of superiority that s justified because they’re so cool and smart and clever™ let them bleed for their mistakes, let them MAKE those mistakes, and let that bleeding be ugly and disgraceful. let them suffer for their own mistakes, and let them suffer in knowing that they cannot fix. and let other people hate them for the shit they’ve done, and for once let the haters not be ‘petty bad people’. Let the haters be right.

[ego-ille]

[ego-ille]

worlds slowest fanfic author tries really really hard