hi there! you've found the tumblr of part-time fairytale witch, full-time vampire s. m. hallow. i write things, i draw things, and you can find links to those things below.
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please god help me remember how to have fun while writing
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"WHY ARE YOU SHIPPING A VAMPIRE WITH THEIR VICTIM 🤮🤮" is. is that not the point of vampires.
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Watching Jurassic Park and I have Opinions on this place as a zoo. Feeding the predators live prey?? There's other ways to provide enrichment! Also that enclosure is way too small for multiple large animals like that! Electric fences? Ha! Electric fences won't stop a fucking goat! Where's the zoo experts? Who designed these enclosures?? Were all zoos this shitty in the 90s???
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i feel like people forget that sometimes characters in fic are written like that because it's a reflection of real life.
people have sex without setting boundaries. people have unprotected sex without talking about their sexual histories or producing recent sti tests. people play with kink without discussing it ahead of time or establishing a safeword. they have anal without 'enough' prep or lube—they may even prefer it like that.
and none of this is really a fantasy. it's all pretty normal. you can feel that it's inappropriately normalised, and you'd probably be right! but it is normalised: one study found that 58% of female undergraduate students on the campus studied had been choked during sex. 20% of those students said that they'd never been asked if it was ok; another 30% said they'd only sometimes been asked if they consented. fully half! (non-paywalled journal article on choking during sex here, including these numbers.) despite a rise in stis of all sorts, condom use is declining. (pdf link to the full text of this study about declining condom use in the us; aidsmap article about an australian study with similar results.)
even when people do talk about things—sex or anything else—they communicate imperfectly. 'yeah, but don't go too far' is consenting and setting a boundary, and also relying that the person you're talking to has the same metric for 'too far' that you do. for some people, 'the trash needs to go out' is a neutral, factual observation; for others, it's a request that the person they're speaking to take out the trash.
even when people understand each other perfectly, people react unpredictably to things sometimes! we behave irrationally! people laugh uncontrollably at funerals, or get angry at the straw that broke their back rather than the enormous load they were already carrying. they get scared and lash out at people trying to help them. when hurt, most people do not instinctively reach for therapy-approved grounding exercises and 'i feel' statements.
pretty much any bad choice that characters could conceivably make is a choice that people make in real life, on purpose, all the time. people do things that can have catastrophic, life-changing effects because it felt like a good idea at the time, or they're leaning into the vibe, or they just didn't think about it all that much, or an infinite number of other reasons.
fiction isn't intended as a guide on the best, safest, and most responsible ways to live your life, and fanfic isn't any different. it's not a narrative flaw to let characters do things that are messy or harmful or downright stupid—it's a reflection of what people are actually like, and not something that authors should feel they have to apologise for.
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terfs would lose their minds if they were exposed to 2000s-2010s "a girl can do anything a boy can do, including beating them at sports" messaging like why are you all acting like nobody has ever said this and that it's radical to think that women aren't inherently worse at things. open your mind. read some feminist theory. touch some grass. the most basic banal middle-class white woman feminism of the 2010s looks fucking radical and visionary compared to the misogynistic victimization complex y'all are peddling
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Hans, from How to Survive this Fairytale by @smhallow
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minotaur defense posting hour again. what the fuck else was he supposed to do, not eat the people? starve? either humans were his natural food source and he was operating on instinct and need or it was the only food source available to him so he was operating out of desperation and need. my boy did nothing wrong has never done anything wrong and theseus is a little bitch for killing him instead of riding him out of the labyrinth to gore his shitty step father. yeehaw.
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There was a witch in the woods.
@smhallow ‘s How To Survive This Fairytale
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so I maybe teared up a little

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@smhallow ‘s How to Survive This Fairytale. A familiar scene from a familiar fairytale…
#love your art style#love snow white's outfit#love the colors#wonderful job and ty for tagging me so i could be delighted#fanart of my books
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I don't know I'm not done talking about it. It's insane that I can't just uninstall Edge or Copilot. That websites require my phone number to sign up. That people share their contacts to find their friends on social media.
I wouldn't use an adblocker if ads were just banners on the side funding a website I enjoy using and want to support. Ads pop up invasively and fill my whole screen, I misclick and get warped away to another page just for trying to read an article or get a recipe.
Every app shouldn't be like every other app. Instagram didn't need reels and a shop. TikTok doesn't need a store. Instagram doesn't need to be connected to Facebook. I don't want my apps to do everything, I want a hub for a specific thing, and I'll go to that place accordingly.
I love discord, but so much information gets lost to it. I don't want to join to view things. I want to lurk on forums. I want to be a user who can log in and join a conversation by replying to a thread, even if that conversation was two days ago. I know discord has threads, it's not the same. I don't want to have to verify my account with a phone number. I understand safety and digital concerns, but I'm concerned about information like that with leaks everywhere, even with password managers.
I shouldn't have to pay subscriptions to use services and get locked out of old versions. My old disk copy of photoshop should work. I should want to upgrade eventually because I like photoshop and supporting the business. Adobe is a whole other can of worms here.
Streaming is so splintered across everything. Shows release so fast. Things don't get physical releases. I can't stream a movie I own digitally to friends because the share-screen blocks it, even though I own two digital copies, even though I own a physical copy.
I have an iPod, and I had to install a third party OS to easily put my music on it without having to tangle with iTunes. Spotify bricked hardware I purchased because they were unwillingly to upkeep it. They don't pay their artists. iTunes isn't even iTunes anymore and Apple struggles to upkeep it.
My TV shows me ads on the home screen. My dad lost access to eBook he purchased because they were digital and got revoked by the company distributing them. Hitman 1-3 only runs online most of the time. Flash died and is staying alive because people love it and made efforts to keep it up.
I have to click "not now" and can't click "no". I don't just get emails, they want to text me to purchase things online too. My windows start search bar searches online, not just my computer. Everything is blindly called an app now. Everything wants me to upload to the cloud. These are good tools! But why am I forced to use them! Why am I not allowed to own or control them?
No more!!!!! I love my iPod with so much storage and FLAC files. I love having all my fics on my harddrive. I love having USBs and backups. I love running scripts to gut suck stuff out of my Windows computer I don't want that spies on me. I love having forums. I love sending letters. I love neocities and webpages and webrings. I will not be scanning QR codes. Please hand me a physical menu. If I didn't need a smartphone for work I'd get a "dumb" phone so fast. I want things to have buttons. I want to use a mouse. I want replaceable batteries. I want the right to repair. I grew up online and I won't forget how it was!
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I feel like some people need to relearn Genre Expectations... "Man, this tragedy sucks!!! Why didn't they just do XYZ, then everything could have ended happily!!" well, then it wouldn't be a tragedy, would it. "Man, this lighthearted teen romcom is terrible, it's so sappy and unrealistic!!" Well, yeah. If it had been gritty and dark, it wouldn't have been a lighthearted romcom, would it. Is the writing actually bad or are you just trying to order a milkshake from a Home Depot
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Btw when people say "if you want to be a writer you need to read a lot of books" that means bad books too. This applies to all creative mediums and also even if you don't want to make it you should immerse yourself in some mediocre slop here and there and even abysmal dogshit on occasion. As a fan of the medium. If all you eat is perfect A5 wagyu prepared by a Michelen star chef youre gonna end up thinking a well cooked and seasoned grocery store ribeye is basically dog food and this is the path to spiritual rot
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Well put. (Source: Writing About Writing Facebook page)
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