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earlier i reblogged a post about body horror that tried to claim what does or doesn't qualify and what is or isn't just ableist tropes.

and people have since reblogged from me with their 2 cents about it. all valid, all very different takes bc at the end of the day body horror is quite subjective, and very "regular" things can be horrific or not. it all depends.

but you know which common health problem is widely experienced as traumatic body horror by survivors? to the point where they develop mental illnesses like depression and agoraphobia? shit that can seriously rewire your brain, but is treated on the daily across the world?

heart attack.

this seems like fertile ground to me for scaring middle-aged men. make a heart attack body and psychological horror. do i know what that would look like? no. but it seems worth considering.

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super simple low-effort ao3 summary methods that are 1000% better and 1000% less annoying than just saying you suck at summaries:

copypaste the first few lines of the fic. u already wrote ‘em. let ‘em be their own damn hook

if ur feeling fancy & don’t mind showing ur hand a bit, copypaste the first few lines of the fic that u feel are esp. Important or Interesting - the ones where u first start getting into the real meat of things

state the main tropes! theyre probably already in ur tags - just say them again - maybe as a full sentence if ur feelin fancy. or with a joke if ur feelin Extra fancy

ask a question. pose a hypothetical. eg what happens if u take [character] and put them in [situation]?

make an equation. [character] + [thing] = [outcome]

just write like a one-sentence summary of what the fuck is going down. just one (1) sentence. doesnt matter if it doesn’t cover every important aspect. or if it sounds bland. any summary sentence is gonna be miles better than “idk i suck at summaries”

just…explain the fic like u would to a friend? it doesnt have to be a polished back of the book blurb. it can just be “[pairing] coffee shop au, but like, still with murder, and also i made everyone trans. enjoy”

just stick a meme in there

honestly who cares

just put literally anything but a self deprecating comment in there & ur golden

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i’ve been rotating a specific idea in my head for a while and that’s the idea that vampires as they exist in most fiction are not fulfilling their original environmental niche, that as the “haha mosquitos” jokes go vampires are parasites that were fulfilling the same niche as mosquitos, namely, redistributing biomass down the tropic levels.

taking small amounts of Stuff from very large animals that get fed back into the environment without those large animals needing to die.

the reason vampires are the way they are — harmed by sunlight, restricted by water, always hungry — is because they’re consuming food (mortal blood) that they weren’t really made to consume, like urban animals getting sick off garbage due to habitat disruption.

what, then, are vampires supposed to be eating then?

well, gods, of course.

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writing is just staring at a blank document thinking, “this is the year i revolutionize literature,” while frantically googling synonyms for “walked.”

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What, the forest-dwelling entities with imperfect human mimicry who insinuate themselves into groups of hikers? Yeah, we had one of those. Clocked it immediately, of course. Honestly it kind of fell in that so-inept-it's-kind-of-charming range. We just played along until it'd had it's fill of marshmallows and shambled back into the treeline. We might have been violating some kind of killjoy wildlife contact best practices but what the hell, can't plan around every little thing. Why, what happened to you guys

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Poetry Day: Day 5

“As Sharp” by Ciaran Carson

is to flat fast is to slow

as fast is to feast most

is to least as high is to low

what lies before now lies behind if

out of sight not out of mind

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you know it really isnt immoral, if you do it right, to raise cows and sheep for meat. so. well. i think there should be a story about, vampires who have a town of humans that they keep well-maintained, so long as the humans donate their blood once a month, like vampire blood farm stuff

but instead of antagonistic everyone's like. no he's a nice man you leave the count alone. he keeps us safe and cared for and he just needs a lil snack now and then, it dont hurt anyone. like a cow that loves the farmer and the farmer that loves the cow, even with both knowing one will end up on the other's table. because its like. its like. cows just have such pretty eyes, you know? they love you so much. i think it should be like that

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I'd loveee a fantasy setting where healing magic is unstable!!!

Archer missing shots because their finger calluses are gone.

Warrior struggling to intimidate the enemy because their hoarse voice was made softer.

Mage with fresh eyesight blinded by their own spells.

Unable to remove enchanted piercing jewellery because the piercing holes aren't there anymore.

Magical tattoos dripping off the skin.

Sensory overload from better hearing, eyesight, smell, touch, and taste.

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on Planet Where Everyone Can Teleport the first person on the moon went there by accident and promptly died. The next dozen or so people also went by accident, and also died. Number 14 figured out that people who go to the moon die and very cleverly brought a sword and six weeks of travel rations. This did not help.

No one on Planet Where Everyone Can Teleport ever figured out why people die in space because they don’t need airplanes and never found it particularly interesting to climb tall mountains. Astronomers use telescopes to take pictures of the ever-growing pile of corpses on the moon.

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I made these as a way to compile all the geographical vocabulary that I thought was useful and interesting for writers. Some descriptors share categories, and some are simplified, but for the most part everything is in its proper place. Not all the words are as useable as others, and some might take tricky wording to pull off, but I hope these prove useful to all you writers out there!

(save the images to zoom in on the pics)

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i think you can be 40 and have a coming of age narrative

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hast thou considered the Shope papillomavirus?

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changes and trends in horror-genre films are linked to the anxieties of the culture in its time and place. Vampires are the manifestation of grappling with sexuality; aliens, of foreign influence. Horror from the Cold War is about apathy and annihilation; classic Japanese horror is characterised by “nature’s revenge”; psychological horror plays with anxieties that absorbed its audience, like pregnancy/abortion, mental illness, femininity. Some horror presses on the bruise of being trapped in a situation with upsetting tasks to complete, especially ones that compromise you as a person - reflecting the horrors and anxieties of capitalism etc etc etc. Cosmic horror is slightly out of fashion because our culture is more comfortable with, even wistful for, “the unknown.” Monster horror now has to be aware of itself, as a contingent of people now live in the freedom and comfort of saying “I would willingly, gladly, even preferentially fuck that monster.” But I don’t know much about films or genres: that ground has been covered by cleverer people.

I don’t actually like horror or movies. What interests me at the moment is how horror of the 2020s has an element of perception and paying attention.

Multiple movies in one year discussed monsters that killed you if you perceived them. There are monsters you can’t look at; monsters that kill you instantly if you get their attention. Monsters where you have to be silent, look down, hold still: pray that they pass over you. M Zombies have changed from a hand-waved virus that covers extras in splashy gore, to insidious spores. A disaster film is called Don’t Look Up, a horror film is called Nope. Even trashy nun horror sets up strange premises of keeping your eyes fixed on something as the devil GETS you.

No idea if this is anything. (I haven’t seen any of these things because, unfortunately, I hate them.) Someone who understands better than me could say something clever here, and I hope they do.

But the thing I’m thinking about is what this will look like to the future, as the Victorian sex vampires and Cold War anxieties look to us. I think they’ll have a little sympathy, but they probably won’t. You poor little prey animals, the kids will say, you were awfully afraid of facing up to things, weren’t you?

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been stewing on an analytical approach to fiction which I call "is this book afraid of me?" and in order to answer this question you determine how hard the book is trying to make sure you don't come after the writer on twitter

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Sometimes I think about how and why some people had such a *bad* reaction to the end of Steven Universe, specifically in regards to the Diamonds living.

Even though they no longer are causing harm to others and are able to actually undo some of their previous harm by living, some folks reacted as though this ending was somehow morally suspect. Morally bankrupt, even.

And I think it might be because so many of us were raised on a very specific kind of kids media trope:

They all fall to their deaths.

Disney loves chucking their bad guys off cliffs. And it makes sense- in a moral framework where villains *must* be punished (regardless of whether their death will actually prevent further harm or not), but killing of any kind is morally bad for the hero, the narrative must find a way to kill the villain without the protagonists doing a murder.

It's a moral assumption that a person can *deserve* to die, that it is cosmically just for them to die, that them dying is evidence that the story itself is morally good and correct. Scar *deserves* to die, but it would be bad for Simba to kill him. So....cliff.

Steven Universe, whatever else it's faults, took at step back and said "but if killing people is bad, then people dying is bad", and instead of dropping White Diamond off a cliff, asked "what would actual *restorative*, not punitive, justice look like? What would actual reparations mean here? If the goal is to heal, not just to punish, how do we handle those who have done harm?" And then did that.

Which I think is interesting, and that there was pushback against it is interesting.

It also reminds me of the folks who get very weird about Aang not killing Ozai at the end of Avatar. And like, Ozai still gets chucked in prison, so it doesn't even push back on our cultural ideas of punitive justice *that much.* and still, I've seen people get real mad that the child monk who is the last survivor of a genocide that wiped out his entire pacifist culture didn't do a murder.

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One of my favourite questions for figuring out a character’s motivations is which qualities they most fear being assigned to them. Are they afraid (consciously or unconsciously) of being seen as stupid? Ungrateful? Weak? Incompetent? Lazy? Cowardly? Intimidating? Like they actually care? etc.

It’s such a fun way to explore into who they are, why they do what they do, what they don’t do out of fear, and how they might be affected by the events of the story. And I love when characters have negative motivations—trying to avoid something (in this case, being seen a particular way) as much as they’re trying to achieve a goal.