thinking about the difference between melodramatic, moody angel telling buffy he wishes he could see her in direct sunlight vs. spike just straight up scurrying around Sunnydale with a blanket over his head whenever he gets bored and wants to see buffy during the day
When I was a TA for the freshman art class in senior year my students really adored me. It was so sweet. I’d had classes that were more ambivalent toward me but these guys were all about me.
I loved working with that teacher too. He was the kind of crunchy art nerd whose own kid didn’t know what candy was, who loved bird watching and wearing tweed. We’d chat while they worked and it was just a three hour pleasure rather than work.
When the class switched from charcoal to gouache a devil medium, the evilest watercolor, the students struggled. We’d have in class painting where they’d spend the whole time trying to mix one color instead of just accepting something as good enough and trying to practice other skills.
So one day I showed up to my shift and announced, “I have stickers. If you get color down for the whole composition, you get a sticker.”
They wanted. The stickers. So bad. Students who had agonized before about keeping lines neat and perfect plowed ahead. The first student to call me over I tsked at. “Putting grey on everything doesn’t count,” I chided, “I asked for colors on each object.”
The classroom worked in furious joy, young adults who had seen my bird and cactus stickers and gone feral. The teacher was flabbergasted. “Why do they want stickers? They could just buy stickers…”
I held up my water bottle and showed him a tiny 3D bubble sticker the program director had brought to my game teams space last week. “You never grow out of wanting to earn a sticker.”
By the end of class everyone had a sticker. There was more visible improvement in the work too, which surprised them since they’d been rushing. “Gouache looks terrible before it looks good. It’s okay to start messy and then refine.” The teacher had said the same thing but looking at their frantic sticker paintings they finally saw the truth of it.
Given how much of feline play and social behaviour are imitative in character, I feel like it shouldn't come as a surprise to gamers that their cats want to roll the shiny math rocks, too. Like, you demonstrated that this is a form of play and let them watch you do it. They're participating!
Many different species of lethal embarrassment in the world, but none quite so lethal as convincing a friend to sit down and watch a movie/show which changed your life when you first saw it only to realize with dawning horror that it's mid at best.
My biggest tip for fanfic writers is this: if you get a character's mannerisms and speech pattern down, you can make them do pretty much whatever you want and it'll feel in character.
Logic: Characters, just like real people, are mallable. There is typically very little that's so truly, heinously out of character that you absolutely cannot make it work under any circumstance. In addition, most fans are also willing to accept characterization stretches if it makes the fic work. Yeah, we all know the villain and the hero wouldn't cuddle for warmth in canon. But if they did do that, how would they do it?
What counts is often not so much 'would the character do this?' and more 'if the character did do this, how would they do it?' If you get 'how' part right, your readers will probably be willing to buy the rest, because it will still feel like their favourite character. But if it doesn't feel like the character anymore, why are they even reading the fic?
Worry less about whether a character would do something, and more about how they'd sound while doing it.
My friends who have never experienced flooding, and who are about to deal with it from this storm, please remember:
1. NO. YOU CANNOT MAKE IT THROUGH THAT WATER ON THE ROAD. I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU'RE DRIVING. TURN. AROUND.
2. DO NOT GO WADING THROUGH THE WATER. EVEN IF YOU JUST WANT TO SEE HOW DEEP IT IS. THAT. WATER. IS. CONTAMINATED.
3. IT IS CALLED FLASH FLOODING FOR A REASON. THE WATER RISES AND SURGES IN A FLASH. STAY. HOME.
4. If you're at risk of flooding, raise up any of your belongings now. Put the legs of tall things in buckets. Know where your important documents are.