#Is the writing actually bad or are you just not the target audience?

[coockie8]

why are so many of your ocs super overpowered though??

Ever since I was a really little kid, I've been very frustrated with the fact we invented all these super awesome powers and concepts for story telling purposes, but then, somewhere down the line, decided we actually aren't allowed to use like any of them because it's "bad story telling", or some other such nonsense.

Like, no, if I wanna write an impervious, God-like character with a cheeky personality and barely addressed flaws that everyone loves, then I damn well will, and if you have a problem with that, then clearly you are not the target audience.

Not everything is for everyone, and some of you people seriously need to learn to make your peace with that.

[samarecharm]

Random question about the “they should make persona for people who like good games” post. Do people think the persona series is that bad? I know they aren’t perfect but I wouldn’t call them bad games.

I had a wholeass essay written out before i realized im too tired to make it sound coherent. AND my only experience is p 4 and 5, so my opinion on it means jack shit. All i can say is that the most recent titles suffer from bad writing. (And repetitive gameplay, but thats a different issue). Be it poorly written characters and dialogue, or poorly written interactions and plot, it is hard to take some of the stuff in the more recent games at face value. One could argue that that just means the game is subpar, not necessarily bad, but thats subjective; bad means different things to different people. And i say this as someone who thinks this game is Not the best but still found it incredibly engaging and entertaining.

[mantisgodsdomain]

Apparently there's a fic reading challenge thing this year, but after doing a quick skim of the goals... we don't think we'll be touching it with a ten-foot stick. Some of these goals put a VERY bad taste in our mouth. The idea of a "diversity checklist" isn't supposed to be... literal, we don't think? No? We're remembering that one quote about "listening to people of color being like eating your vegetables for white activists" and we're feeling like it may actually have been understating whatever the hell is going on here.

[vincent-sinclair-deserved-better]

first of all: I have nothing against people posting those huge word lists (words to use instead of X, synonyms for X, etc)

however, I am not sure how many people consider "accessibility, for lack of a better term (I can think of rn at least)

like, I can only really speak from perspective of a non-native English speaker, but if I am reading a story where I have to look up every second (exaggerated) word to figure out its meaning, chances are I won't read it

and still, that only the specific issue of word meanings or translations

words being used wrong, like in the wrong context, can also be really confusing

if I want to read something hard to understand I'll go back read classic literature ahshsahab

[aethersea]

another thing fantasy writers should keep track of is how much of their worldbuilding is aesthetic-based. it's not unlike the sci-fi hardness scale, which measures how closely a story holds to known, real principles of science. The Martian is extremely hard sci-fi, with nearly every detail being grounded in realistic fact as we know it; Star Trek is extremely soft sci-fi, with a vaguely plausible "space travel and no resource scarcity" premise used as a foundation for the wildest ideas the writers' room could come up with. and much as Star Trek fuckin rules, there's nothing wrong with aesthetic-based fantasy worldbuilding!

(sidenote we're not calling this 'soft fantasy' bc there's already a hard/soft divide in fantasy: hard magic follows consistent rules, like "earthbenders can always and only bend earth", and soft magic follows vague rules that often just ~feel right~, like the Force. this frankly kinda maps, but I'm not talking about just the magic, I'm talking about the worldbuilding as a whole.

actually for the purposes of this post we're calling it grounded vs airy fantasy, bc that's succinct and sounds cool.)

a great example of grounded fantasy is Dungeon Meshi: the dungeon ecosystem is meticulously thought out, the plot is driven by the very realistic need to eat well while adventuring, the story touches on both social and psychological effects of the whole 'no one dies forever down here' situation, the list goes on. the worldbuilding wants to be engaged with on a mechanical level and it rewards that engagement.

deliberately airy fantasy is less common, because in a funny way it's much harder to do. people tend to like explanations. it takes skill to pull off "the world is this way because I said so." Narnia manages: these kids fall into a magic world through the back of a wardrobe, befriend talking beavers who drink tea, get weapons from Santa Claus, dance with Bacchus and his maenads, and sail to the edge of the world, without ever breaking suspension of disbelief. it works because every new thing that happens fits the vibes. it's all just vibes! engaging with the worldbuilding on a mechanical level wouldn't just be futile, it'd be missing the point entirely.

the reason I started off calling this aesthetic-based is that an airy story will usually lean hard on an existing aesthetic, ideally one that's widely known by the target audience. Lewis was drawing on fables, fairy tales, myths, children's stories, and the vague idea of ~medieval europe~ that is to this day our most generic fantasy setting. when a prince falls in love with a fallen star, when there are giants who welcome lost children warmly and fatten them up for the feast, it all fits because these are things we'd expect to find in this story. none of this jars against what we've already seen.

and the point of it is to be wondrous and whimsical, to set the tone for the story Lewis wants to tell. and it does a great job! the airy worldbuilding serves the purposes of the story, and it's no less elegant than Ryōko Kui's elaborately grounded dungeon. neither kind of worldbuilding is better than the other.

however.

you do have to know which one you're doing.

the whole reason I'm writing this is that I saw yet another long, entertaining post dragging GRRM for absolute filth. asoiaf is a fun one because on some axes it's pretty grounded (political fuck-around-and-find-out, rumors spread farther than fact, fastest way to lose a war is to let your people starve, etc), but on others it's entirely airy (some people have magic Just Cause, the various peoples are each based on an aesthetic/stereotype/cliché with no real thought to how they influence each other as neighbors, the super-long seasons have no effect on ecology, etc).

and again! none of this is actually bad! (well ok some of those stereotypes are quite bigoted. but other than that this isn't bad.) there's nothing wrong with the season thing being there to highlight how the nobles are focused on short-sighted wars for power instead of storing up resources for the extremely dangerous and inevitable winter, that's a nice allegory, and the looming threat of many harsh years set the narrative tone. and you can always mix and match airy and grounded worldbuilding – everyone does it, frankly it's a necessity, because sooner or later the answer to every worldbuilding question is "because the author wanted it to be that way." the only completely grounded writing is nonfiction.

the problem is when you pretend that your entirely airy worldbuilding is actually super duper grounded. like, for instance, claiming that your vibes-based depiction of Medieval Europe (Gritty Edition) is completely historical, and then never even showing anyone spinning. or sniffing dismissively at Tolkien for not detailing Aragorn's tax policy, and then never addressing how a pre-industrial grain-based agricultural society is going years without harvesting any crops. (stored grain goes bad! you can't even mouse-proof your silos, how are you going to deal with mold?) and the list goes on.

the man went up on national television and invited us to engage with his worldbuilding mechanically, and then if you actually do that, it shatters like spun sugar under the pressure. doesn't he realize that's not the part of the story that's load-bearing! he should've directed our focus to the political machinations and extensive trope deconstruction, not the handwavey bit.

point is, as a fantasy writer there will always be some amount of your worldbuilding that boils down to 'because I said so,' and there's nothing wrong with that. nor is there anything wrong with making that your whole thing – airy worldbuilding can be beautiful and inspiring. but you have to be aware of what you're doing, because if you ask your readers to engage with the worldbuilding in gritty mechanical detail, you had better have some actual mechanics to show them.

[taylor-titmouse]

hey i want to talk about how you should be promoting your work as an erotic author/illustrator

i'm writing this up because the marketing aspect of my work as an erotic author/illustrator is a science to me, and also because i'm the guy who gets unreasonably annoyed when i see other creators not properly advertising their work. you presumably want to make money off your work. this post will be written under the assumption you want to make money off your work but are doing a bad job at it. it will be very confrontational. if you read this and feel attacked you're right and i am attacking you.

this is geared toward selling erotic comics/writing/books/art as products. i will probably write more than one post about this subject so if i didn't touch on something you want to know more about, comment/send me an ask and i'll keep it in mind for the next one.

i will start with my first and least specific but most important point:

DON'T GET FUCKING CUTE

hi are you paying attention. i'm gripping you by the sides of your face. do not get fucking cute with what you are trying to sell. you are not a big enough property to get cute, nobody LIKES it when big properties get cute, and you are selling porn. you have to own this. you have to be up front about this. don't be tongue in cheek, don't be all teehee i wonder what this could be~, don't be secretive. you are selling a product. you have to fucking act like it. you are an adult selling pornography to other adults. i am GRIPPING your HEAD you NEED to understand this.

and to be clear when i say 'cute' i mean coy. i don't mean cutesy, as in the aesthetic. you can be as hello kitty pastel ten emojis a post uwu as you like when you're building your audience and generating hype. but when you start trying to sell, don't be vague, don't be sarcastic, don't mislabel your work as a joke and assume everyone is on it. because they're not.

you must always assume 75% of the people seeing the thing you are advertising have no fucking idea who you are. and that includes a huge chunk of the people who already follow you. they do not know who you are or what you've been working on for two months or why they should care about it. they just got here. somebody just reposted it. they are seeing it for the first time. most people are only looking at social media for a tiny chunk of their day. they are not keeping up with you. you cannot get cute about what you are trying to sell because nobody knows what it is until you tell them.

okay are you still with me. we are going to talk about clarity now.

YOU GOTTA TELL ME WHAT IT IS

good lord the amount of times i have gone to buy somebody's comic or book and had no idea what's actually in it or what it's about. who are the characters? why should i care about them? what do they do in it? what is the premise of this thing you want me to spend $5 on? why would you not tell me? i'm shaking you again. please i have to know what i'm buying i only have so much money to spend on porn.

porn, arguably more than any other genre, relies on knowing exactly what is in it. you do not want to surprise your readers with a kink they were unaware of! and on the flip side, you do not want to miss out on your target audience! if your book contains a hot spider babe laying eggs in an elf, you have to say so. not just so people who don't want to read about eggs know it isn't for them, but so the people who are egg crazy can see that and go "oh fuck YES i love EGGS here is my $5 and an extra $2 tip for catering to me specifically". a contents/features list is as much an advertisement as it is a warning!

as for re: who the characters are and why should i care, i'm sorry but you need to learn how to write sales copy. you have to write blurbs. you have to get good at the shit that goes on the back of a book. we all hate it but we have to do it. i want to know who the characters are and what the context is. i, personally, am not interested in contemporary stories as much as fantasy and historical. please tell me what genre this porn exists in so i know if it aesthetically appeals to me. pull some books off your shelves and see how they do it. hell man go look at mine.

while you're there, note that every single book of mine has a sample of what's in it. this feels like such a no-brainer to me but again! the amount of times i have gone to buy somebody's work and they don't show me what their work looks like! you gotta give me the first page or two! just enough that i know if i like the way your writing sounds, or the way you draw your comics! i don't know you! i am not going to trust that you're good at what you do just based on a cover. the cover is to get me to this step, it is not the only step. you have to show me that you're worth spending my money on!

to put it less cynically, you want to catch my interest. you want me to go 'oh i want to see more of this', you want me to go 'ahh i want to know where this goes!' you need to get me invested and craving more. earn my $5!!!

YOU HAVE TO MAKE IT EASY TO GIVE YOU MONEY

hey go look at your bio right now. go look at your pinned post. do you have a link to your patreon there? do you have a link to your itchio/gumroad/whatever? do i have to click more than once to get to the places you want me to go to give you money? why? why are you making me click twice? have we learned nothing from every website making you click an extra time when they make some stupid UI update and how much it pisses us off? i have already given up, i have forgotten you, i am not giving you my $5 today. put your links in the easiest places to get to them.

god literally as i was writing this post i went to go find somebody's itchio to see how they described their work and it was not anywhere on their profile. grabbing you and shaking you PUT THE LINK WHERE I CAN FIND IT. don't make it hard! make it easy! i am a dickhead sitting on the toilet scrolling, saw your post, and was interested enough to read further. but you made me go to your bio to find your linktree and oops i have already gone back to my timeline to look at the boobies in the next post. stop wasting precious bio space on DNIs and put your fuckin links there!!!

this is more for the twitter people, but: just put the link in the damn post. just say the word commission. just say it's for patreon. "wuh wuh the algorithm" it is not the damn algorithm it's that everybody hates advertising and nobody wants to retweet ads. putting slashes in the words doesn't do anything and you look like a fool. i have posted so much art that says it's 'a commission for ___" and it did exactly as good as any other art despite having the word commission in it. and by doing the slashes you just made it impossible for anybody to search your account for your commission information (which should be at the VERY LEAST in a post under your pinned tweet if you're not actively posting about them being open).

okay that went on a tangent i'm going to back to the point of putting the link in the tweet. put it in the first post. not in the first reply. don't tell them to go to your bio. put it in the post people are actually going to share. it's fine to put more information in the thread but people are only ever going to share the first post. so put the link there. you have to make it easy. putting links in tweets can hurt you algorithmically, even in the replies. so you're better off having it in the post that actually gets seen and shared. i don't want to open the tweet and scroll to get to your sales page where i ASSUME you will have put all the information anyway. put it in the tweet that just got retweeted by itself onto my dash!

also you have to share it a ton of times. i repost my shit every few hours when i'm trying to push a new product. as i said before people are not 24/7 looking at their timelines. they missed it the first time. they missed it the second time. they didn't get paid yet that week but they were after the eighth time and you reminded them again so they finally bought it. that i will still get sales every time i repost a book ad weeks after release says there are always people who missed it, or who only just showed up.

abandon your pride and shill. shills pay their bills. anyone who gets annoyed about it isn't giving you money in the first place. don't worry about looking like a sell out. don't apologize for plugging your own work. post about it often, post about it in different ways. post about it. post about it. you are not going to make money if people don't know you have something to sell them. if you want to make a career out of it, you need to act like it.

I DON'T HAVE A FOURTH POINT

kisses your forehead. i'm sorry for yelling at you. i've been making and publishing and selling adult art for the past two-three years and have got myself to the point where it pays my rent, and i got there by paying attention to what does and does not work.

please do your best to make money. i want you to make money.

as i said above i plan to write more posts on this subject, such as cover design, how to actually write sales copy, and best practices with running a patreon, but if there's things you would want to hear more about leave a comment or send an ask! i will probably be less aggressive on future topics. these are just things that have grinded my gears for a grip.

[burstinn]

You accidentally sit on their face, And they actually enjoy it

HEADCANONS

Warnings and Notes:

All of these aren't serious hcs, I was high again and wanted to make this

I made this for funny

Slight nsfw

Gn reader, target audience is male

Haha face sitting

People mentioned:

Riptide (Tide), Soap, Gaz, Ghost, König, Makarov, Keegan, Horangi, Price, Krueger, Roach, Logan, Graves

You are tired, after agrueling training from a grouchy superior who had a bad day so he had to take it out on you and your comrades. You needed to sit down, badly. Your legs are about ready to give up.

Once you reach the common room, fucking finally. You pull out your phone to find something to watch, while you make your way to the sofa.

And you sit down, Before you felt something poking you, something.. Wrong. You immediately look down realizing you.. YOU SAY ON SOMEONE'S FACE

"OH MY GOD, I'M SO SORRY"

RIPTIDE

- He immediately sits up looking at you, well if his mask was off he would be confused at fuck

- "Sorry for huh??"

- Seems like you say on him while he slept

- "... ", "nothin"

- Weird, but okay.. He tells you go off while he layed back down to continue his eye rest

- Thank fucking god, Thank the holy stars he didn't catch you sittin on him

- BUT.. The holy stars didn't feel like saving you right now. Because apparently a rookie caught you accidentally sitting on Tide and told him after he woke up.. That fuckin snitch

- Now you have to face the embarrassment of Riptide confronting you about it the next day.

- Tide sounds upset as well while confronting you, how humiliating

- Well the thing that you don't know is. The thing is, he angry cause HE DIDN'T GET TO FEEL TO ASS ON HIS FACE. HE DIDN'T GET TO FEEL A PLUMP ASS SITTIN DOWN ON HIS FAAACE

- and by God would he find a way to let you sit on him.

SOAP

- Yknow.. You know how I write this man..

- He saw you walk in, distracted by your phone.. Obviously making your way to the couch while he sitting down.

- Then he got the bright idea.. To yknow.. Lay his head down to just... Idk stretch.. Totally

- He had the pleasure as well to watch your ass slowly sit down on his face, well for a few seconds anyway. Then you immediately get off his face. Sad life fr

- "huh? What's up why'd you get off?" "Your ass is nice to look at btw"

- " you saw me about to sit down on you and you didn't say anything?!"

- "A man gotta do to experience something new man.."

- You would hit him. But you would also get in trouble for that.

- he would joke the shit about it as well. He would tease the fuck outta you for the rest of the month for this.

- Bro won't even hide to shamefully ask you if you wanna sit on his face again ( in a joking way)

- (He's actually serious)

GAZ

- He was about to shut his eyes when he suddenly saw an outline of an ass about to sit on him.

- His eyes suddenly opened and he tried to get up but nah.. Too late bro you gotta feel the full plumpy moons first

- When you got up his eyes were wide and his face was red.

- "no.. It's okay.."

- he got off and left. Leaving you in your shame

- He had to leave to compose himself.. He found something new about himself and he isn't sure how to react

GHOST

- His eyes were closed.. Then he felled something soft on his face.

- Then a scream oh my god I'm sorry

- Oh.. Shit...

- He sits up, realizing you sat on his face.. He doesn't say anything.

- His face is fucking red under the mask. Your ass suddenly looked twice as big as before. Don't know how that works but go with it fr.

- He got hard, you noticed.

- "dude.. Sir..?.. Are you.."

- He just looks at you. He has that look in his eyes

- Cmon, yknow what you gotta do.. YOU KNOW

- SIT ON HIS FUCKING FACE RUAUAAAAGHHH

KÖNIG

- He wasn't expecting ass in his face, he thought he wouldn't enjoy something like face sitting but hey.. It's actually.. Nice?

- He doesn't say anything when you suddenly sit up embarrassingly trying too apologize

- He just nodded..

- He wanted you to sit on his face again so fucking badly..

- So badly he would lay down on literally anything sittable while you were in the room

- It was so fucking obvious it was almost funny

- You had to confront him about it. And he just.. Confessed, yeah, he wanted you to sit ok his face

- .... Cmon bro.. Be a man and sit on the guys face, Make his wish come trueeee

MAKAROV

- " sit back down"

- "excuse me? Sir.. No-"

- you better sit the fuck back down on his face

- He will literally pull a gun on you and force you to sit back down on his face

KEEGAN

- No fucking lie he literally took a fucking huge sniff

- You know because you fucking heard that comically loud sniff

- You had to cut your apology short to look at that dude in disbelief

- "Did you just fucking sniff my ass?!"

- Bro will literally look at you with a goofy ahh face and just look at you.. Not saying anything, not even a fuckin nod

- "you gonna sit back down on me or..?"

- He made you sit back down on his face

HORNAGI

-EHEHEHHAHAHAHAHAAHAAHAHAHAHAHEHRHEHEHHhahahahahaahHAHAAH

- He will literally squeeze your ass, then pull your legs and make you sit back down on his face

- Don't even try to fight. His hands are fucking locked down on your thighs to keep you stuck on his face

- He made you sit down on his face for so long, you were literally concerned if he was breathing

- if you ask him if he's alive, he would just squeeze your leg to show you. Yeah, he's good

- if you look behind you, He's hard.

PRICE

- would smile and assure you it's okay.

- Pats your back, for more assurance. But he literally wants to Pat your ass

- Bro would imagine what it would be if you sat on his face

- Naked. Yes, if you sat on his face naked.

- If you did his beard would tickle you.. Which was what he wanted fr

KRUEGER

- He would say something like in a very angry and demanding tone

- "Why'd you get off?"

- "huh?"

- "Sit.Back.down"

- You did

ROACH

- Yo.. He feelin something he never felt before. Haha lie he just found a new kink he would actually enjoy

- He would literally follow you around and tug your shirt and point at your ass then his face

- If you would say no, He would leave and come back a few minutes later and do the same thing

- He would do it until you say yes..

- He's very happy. He's a very happy bug

LOGAN WALKER

- Would scream at you

- because you made him discover something about himself

- He's angry because of that

- He would force you to run 15 laps because of that.

- Then when you suddenly tired, sweating yo legs shaking from how tired you are

- He would silently and gently ask you ( he would toss you over his shoulder and walk you off to his room and make you sit on him)

- He won't explain why he did that. He just wanted to

GRAVES

- Would look at you like 🤨

- Then be like 😐😒😏

- stands up and slaps your ass

- and asks you to sit on his face

Everyone mentioned

- You will face fuck them

- Do not fight me on this, they will make you face fuck them

[physalian]

What No One Tells You About Writing #4 (100 Follower Special!)

Have you got any that deserve to be on these lists? Don’t be shy! Send ‘em over.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

*This list contains mentions of assault, #4

1. Zero cursing is better than censored cursing

I made the mistake in the early days of writing a self-censoring character, and every “curse” she said just took the teeth out of the rest of the statement. I’m talking gosh, darn, dang, etc, not world-specific idioms a la “scruffy nerf herder” or “dunderhead” instead of “dumbass”.

Look to any American TV show that so, so badly wants to use f*ck or sh*t but has to appease the sensitive conservatives who still somehow believe strong language is worse than graphic violence and horrifying psychological damage. For shame! Your characters can be angry without expletives, so rework your sentences to include equally damning insults that don’t resort to potty mouths if you’re concerned about ratings.

Or go full-throttle into the idioms of the world or the time period like Pirates of the Caribbean. Or just… don’t. There’s zero modern cursing in the Lord of the Rings adaptation and not a single sentence that censors itself. The dialogue is above vulgarity and feels more *fantastical* that way anyway.

2. “Yeah, you aren’t the target audience.”

It’s kind of hilarious seeing the range of reader reactions to two characters I intend to have a romantic relationship. Some will go “I ship it!” after the first page of them together… and another will go “wait, I thought they were just friends” up until they kiss. Sometimes you might be too subtle, other times it might be better to just accept that you can’t rewrite your entire book to please one naysayer.

When I’m pitched a fantasy adventure book that turns out to be a by-the-numbers romance where no one is allowed to be a peasant and every important character is royalty in some way, with a way cooler fantasy backdrop, I get severely disappointed. That doesn’t mean the book is bad, it just means I’m not the target audience.

3. There is no greater character sin than making them boring

Unless you live in the wacky world we find ourselves in where any flaws whatsoever are apparently harmful depictions of so-and-so and not at all written with things like ~nuance~. I will gush over your heinous villain committing atrocities because he’s *interesting*. I will not remember Bland Love Interest who’s a generic everyman with zero compelling or intriguing traits or flaws.

There’s another tumblr post out there that I cannot find that says something like this, and I believe the post goes “his crimes are fiction, my annoyance is real”. Swap annoyance for boredom and you get what I mean. So, I don’t care what your character does so long as they’re memorable. I will either root for their victory or their doom, but I do need *something* to root for.

4. The line between “gratuitous” and “respectful” is actually very thick

Less what no one tells *you* about writing and more what no one tells screenwriters. Y’all do realize you can write a character who experiences assault without actually writing the assault, right? Fade to black, have them mention it in their backstory, or have the horrific aftermath as they come to terms with it. An abrupt cut to this devastated character when it’s all over and they’re alone with themselves can be incredibly poignant and powerful. This goes with anything sensitive, especially if it’s not coming from experience.

If you want to write it or film it respectfully, romanticizing assault, for instance, is when it’s framed as if either character has earned or “deserves” it. If the narrative in any way argues that it's justified. The victim might have "earned" it for any of the BS reasons we use in the real world, or the perpetrator might've "earned" it because of temptation, desire, pressure to assert dominance, etc. Representation is important, but are you “representing” to shed light on a misunderstood and maligned topic, or are you doing it to satisfy a fetish or bias in yourself?

5. Don’t let your eyes get bigger than your stomach

Fantasy has no limitations, which means you can dig way deeper into the well of your worldbuilding than you realize, until you look up and realize you’re stuck down there. I have never seen a more obvious inevitable disaster looming than the pilot of GoT season 5. Why? Nobody has any plans. They’re all just led around by whatever side quest the writers throw them on, twiddling their thumbs until the writers deign to pull the trigger on the White Walkers.

To the point that what should be a major character can skip an entire season because his arc is meaningless. Everything in the last half of that show was one big “eventually” while the story toiled around in an ever-expanding cast of characters and set pieces (seriously, it’s hilarious how jarring the extended version of the theme music became compared to the pilot episode to fit all these locations).

When you have too many directionless characters, too many plot elements, too many ideas you want to fully mature and get their due spotlight and then somehow combine them all together for a common foe in the end, writing can get tedious and frustrating very quickly. Why, I imagine, the book series remains unfinished. Fantasy is great for being able to create such complex worlds, but don’t be the snake that eats its own tail trying too hard.

6. No one cares about your agenda if you insult them to push it

This deserves its own post but here we go. Peddling an agenda is a paradox: those who agree with you won’t need to be preached to, and those who you want to persuade will instead reject you further because they feel belittle and disrespected. This is why so many recent “strong female characters” fail on both sides of the aisle. Feminists see an annoying caricature of the movement they’re passionate about. Antifeminists see an insufferable, shallow, liberal mouthpiece when they just want to be entertained. You have failed both sides, congrats.

The answer? Write a strong, nuanced, well-developed character. Then make them a woman. I know this has been said before but this BS keeps happening so clearly the screenwriters aren’t listening. Entertain me first. Entertain me so well I don’t even realize I’m learning.

7. Today’s audiences won’t react the same way as tomorrow’s

Sometimes genres or tropes get oversaturated and need a few years to cool off before audiences are receptive to them again—teen dystopia, anyone?—that doesn’t mean your story is inherently bad because it’s unpopular (nor does it mean it’s amazing because it is popular).

You should always write the book you want to read, not the book that chases trends. I can pick up a well-written teen dystopia I’ve never read before and enjoy it. I can continue to ignore Divergent because it has nothing to say. Write the book you want to read, but then accept that you might make no money because no one else wants to read it, not because they think it’s bad. And, who knows? You might get a boom of chatter months or years down the line when readers stumble upon an uncut gem.

8. Your characters don’t age with you

Depending on how long you’ve been working on your world and what age you were when you started, the characters, concepts, morals, and story you set out to tell might no longer reflect who you want to be as an author when all is said and done. Writing can take years, some of which can be incredibly turbulent and life changing. I wrote the first draft of my first original novel in my freshman year of college. Those characters and that draft are now unrecognizable and has left a world I’ve poured my heart and soul into in limbo.

I’ve slowly creeped up my characters’ ages. My writing has matured dramatically. The themes I wanted to explore in the height of the 2016 election are just demoralizing now. That book was my therapeutic outlet and, as consequence, my characters sometimes reflect some awful moods and mindsets that I was in when writing them. But nothing in that world grows without me tending to it. It’s not alive. Despite all the work I’ve done, there’s still more to be done, maybe even restarting the plot from the ground up. When I think of what no one told me about writing, staring at characters designed by someone I’m not anymore is the hardest reality to accept.

—

If you think I missed something, check out parts 1-3 or toss your own hat into the ring. Give me romance tropes. Mystery, thriller, historical fiction, bildungsromans, memoires, children’s books, whatever you want! Give me stuff you wish you’d known before editing, publishing, marketing, and more. 

Also, don’t forget to vote in the dialogue poll!

[olderthannetfic]

BKDK is such a queer-bait ship, I feel bad for the shippers when they end up not canon. I don't care if "jump won't allow it" or "it's so hard to even openly support queer in Japan". I don't think that creator actually cares tbh, no wonder the ending sucks

--

Uh...

Look, as a lover of buddy cops and wuxia hoyay alike, I have to tell you that this just isn't how the straight dudes see these things, and it's stupid and obnoxious to keep holding out hope instead of seeking out media aimed at us or just enjoying canon for what it is and then making them queer in fanworks. I had a guy watch my thesis film, which is all about slash fans and Miami Vice, and he was legit surprised when the characters kissed at the end. It was telegraphed to hell and back, and he was still startled. That's how a lot of the authors and target audience are: they just don't see it like we do.

Major series that run in Weekly Shonen Jump are primarily aimed at straight teen boys. Epic male friendship is a lot of what that audience is after, so that's what's going to be in canon.

If you don't like it, maybe read one of the eighty bajillion other manga that aren't Weekly Jump series?

Yes, it does seem like Jump authors have started including more fanservice for fans of m/m in the last couple of decades. I gather that girls are reading WSJ more and shojo magazines less. Presumably, that's why. But that's a secondary market.

No, the creator doesn't care.

Either financially support fujoshi writing about superheroes who do go bang their same-sex bffs or deal with not being the main audience.

It's not queerbaiting. We just like a thing that wasn't meant for us.

[bellewintersroe]

Charles Leclerc smut x reader - part 1

Little bit different from my normal writing, but I’ve been obsessed with f1 atm and can’t seem to shake the thirst for the drivers 😬 so anyway here’s a Charles smut x Vasseur! Daughter. Don’t know if this will hit the target audience but it’s fine!

this hasn’t been proof read so could be kinda shit.

Jenny never had a good relationship with her father, the current principle of Ferrari. He’s brought her to many of the 2023 Grand Prix races in order to bond, however she seems to have turned her efforts elsewhere when she meets a certain driver who can’t seem to keep his eyes off her. Their relationship is forbidden, hidden make out sessions, late night drives, the two are getting closer and closer until neither of them can handle the tension between one another.

“Looks cold.” I commented, half distracted as the Monegasque struggled to lower himself into the ice-bath. Fuck, he was so sexy. My eyes dropped down to Charles’ bare torso, he was so toned, his tan skin was smooth and I wanted to run my hand down there so bad. His chest rose and fell heavily, fast enough to get my imagination racing.

“Probably because it is!” Charles teased back, letting out several gasps that had me turning away in order to rid the dirty thoughts from my mind. I couldn’t control my mind around Charles, we’d been getting closer for the past two months, out of the four we’d known one another. Secret, friendly drives and late night takeaways turned into heated make out sessions in hotel corridors and, tense, sex fuelled texts from one another’s rooms when our hands were the only tools to satisfy our own cravings. If it wasn’t for my dad, Frederic Vasseur, principle of Ferrari, and therefore Charles’ borderline manager- or whatever you wanted to call him- I was positive I’d have had Charles in the way I wanted several times at this point.

Growing up I’d loved attending races, placing in the cars, I enjoyed being around here, but living in England with my mum strained my relationship with my father, my teenage years having interests elsewhere than race tracks and cars. This year, I’d made the effort to follow my dad around and Ferrari, accepting his invitation and staying with my 3 siblings and step-mum. I was glad I did, not only for the family time, but for the fact I’d met Charles. Wondering off, I didn’t really know where to linger, none of my family were here, so I just kinda stood on my phone inside, revealing a text from Charles before I’d seen him outside. Let’s go for a drive tonight?

Smiling, I was quick to text back in agreement before I scrolled up ever so slightly. Sexts. Fuck, intimate, graphic pictures, I ignored my own and glanced over Charles’s, pulling my phone closer to me so nobody could see. Not that there was anybody about. Pictures of his cock, exposed, hidden beneath his boxers, strained under a towel, wrapped in his hand- I had to quickly flick off the chat to control my breathing. How I needed him, so desperately, I’d yet to see him naked in real, I’d yet to touch him. The video he sent me from the night before plagued my mind, the way his breath trembled as he jerked himself off, how he’d spat into his palm, lubricating himself and, how he’d moaned and gasped my name as he came over his bare torso. My stomach churned with butterflies, my hand scraped through my hair, fidgeting as I let out a quick exhale through my nose. I was officially sex deprived. Turning down to my phone, I started texting Charles again, not knowing if he’d see it or not. I really need you

Much to my surprise, he read the message almost instantly. He must be out of his ice-bath already. Why, are you okay??? I physically face palmed at his message, feeling a slight humiliation covet my face. Maybe if I dirty talked in the small amount of French I knew he’d actually take the hint? I don’t mean it like that hahaha

Oh

Where are you? I see you

Glancing up from my phone, I noticed the shirtless boy walking towards home, glimpsing behind him to see if anybody followed. “You thought I was hurt?” I giggled when he got closer, biting down on my lip as he placed a hand on my lower back. “I am an idiot.” He laughed, his accent thick. “I know.” I hummed out, gazing up to him as his eyes lingered over me.

He moved down, pressing a kiss to the side of my forehead before his other hand ran over the back of my hip. “This way, my love.” He sweetly spoke as I felt that familiar pulsating in my core. Fuck, I needed him, and I needed him now.

I didn’t ask any questions, I just allowed him to lead me down past the gym and into a small changing room. I could feel my breathing grow heavy, the anticipation of being completely and utterly alone being too much as I spun around as soon as the door was shut. “Charles.” I whispered, a little breathy as I slid my hands over his shoulders, simultaneously clashing our lips together. His hands were still holding my hips, the front now, smoothing over my white summer dress that was maybe a little too short.

“I needed you so bad.” I practically whined, pressing our bodies closer together as his fingers tightened over my hips. “Fuck, in here?!” He whispered, the kiss breaking apart for a second as we stared back to one another with the same wild look in our eyes. “Please.” I hushed, bucking my hips a little into his as his eyes fluttered shut, hearing him let out a small breath. “I thought about you all day in this dress.” Charles muttered, pushing my head back into a bruising kiss. “Mmmh.” I hummed, hungrily against his mouth. “What about?” I giggled, desperate to hear more of his dirty words. My hand smoothed down his front, knowing we didn’t have much time and rested over his lower abdomen. Charles gulped harshly, lips grazing over mine.

“You are a dirty girl, wanting to hear about it all, yes?” He let out a breathless laugh as I giggled, nodding and leaving a second lingering kiss on his mouth. When I retracted, he attempted to move closer again, letting out a noise of discontent when I moved away from the kiss he chased. “Oui.” I teased as he smirked. “Oh, tu veux le faire en français?” I vaguely recognised he was asking if I wanted to do this in French. “Mmmh.” I agreed, feeling one of his hands fall down as he smoothed over the curve of my ass.

Charles lowered his head, dipping it into the crook of my neck as I swallowed, letting out a breathy moan at the sensitivity I felt when he trailed his lips over my exposed skin. “Tu veux entendre parler de toutes les choses sales que j'ai pensé de toi?” He hummed as I simultaneously let out a moan at his French tongue, whispering into my ear. I was entirely too distracted to translate what he was saying. “God.” I gasped out, head lolling back, the tension thick between us as he pressed my hips into his. “Don’t run away.” He borderline tutted, attaching our lips again. This time, the kiss was deep and there was no breaking apart, Charles stumbled back, into the wall, stumbling around as he hummed lowly, running his hands over my back, pinching my ass and pulling it desperately into his already hard front. “I wanted to get up this skirt all…” I felt him wince when he couldn’t think of the word. “Day?” I giggled. “Day.” He breathily laughed, kissing me gently. “Since you sent me those pictures.” His hand reached down to the bare of my leg, smoothing over my thigh and up my skirt.

“So, so sexy.” He hummed, fingers grazing over my core, top to bottom, all the way to the top of my pubic mound, over the slit. My hips bucked at the sensitivity, it had been a while since anybody other than myself had touched there. And now Charles was the one running his fingers over me, my pussy ached for him. I didn’t think I could be patient, Charles and I took a second to glance at once another before he now nudged me back into the wall, the kiss becoming heavy and sloppy as he breathed harshly against my lips, pushing his fingers into my thongs as his rough fingertips rubbed over my wetness, sliding easily against my throbbing clit.

“Si humide, putain, j'ai tellement besoin de toi.” He borderline whimpered as my hand wrapped around his clothed cock. He was rock hard, he felt so big against my small hands, and as I rubbed my hand up and down, Charles’ breathing grew heavier. “I need you too.” I choked out, letting a soft gasp escape my lips when his fingers pressed down harder on my sensitivity. “Fuck.” I whimpered out. “Please, I need you to fuck me.” My head fell against his shoulder as he nudged my face up with his. “Are you sure?” “Yeah.” I nodded, surely, his hand creeping out of my underwear, resting on my exposed hip. “Just take me here, please, we can make up for it later.” I squeezed the tip of his cock as he choked out a French curse word. “C’mere.” Charles then quickly ushered, lowering himself down onto the bench as I was quick to follow, watching him pull out his cock. He was just as big in real life compared to the numerous pictures and videos he sent me. I wanted to taste him. Just as I was ready to get on my knees his hand stopped me by the elbows.

“Non, non. You wont do that the first time we sleep together.” He insisted, pulling me on top. “I don’t have much time.” Charles admittied, guiding me to climb on top, knees either side of him. It was the first time we’d been in this position, and I could feel myself growing a little red in the cheeks. I’d been so caught up in my sexual desperation, that I didn’t fully realise how exciting and fun this was to do with Charles.

“Are you sure you want to do it in here?” He paused, running a hand over my cheek, some strands of hair catching between his fingers. “Yeah.” I nodded, smiling a little shyly at the vulnerable moment. “I’m on the pill as well. La pilule.” I translated as he nodded, lifting his head to kiss me more gently now. Charles fingers pushed the shoulder of my sleeve slightly, exposing my skin as he pressed a kiss there before spitting in his hand to lubricate himself and angle himself at my entrance.

I gasped at the slight stretch, sinking down slowly on his cock as he let out a sigh, fidgeting a little at the sensation as he smoothed a hand down my back. Fuck. He felt so good- I felt so full. Just how if needed. “That’s good?” He asked me as I nodded. “Yeah.” I squeaked, moving forwards for another kiss as he began moving me up and down with the thrust of his hips, the small noises he was making causing me to gasp out myself. The angle was intense, immediately hitting a sensitive spot deep inside of me as I struggled to remain quiet.

“Oh my god.” Charles hushed against my ear, pressing a kiss to my neck as I whined, gripping at him tighter, I began moving my hips, bouncing on his cock as I started a rhythm that made his eyes roll back into his head. Fuck, he looked so good, I couldn’t speak, I was struggling to hold back my moans, so if I opened my mouth I’d get us into trouble. “So good.” I sobbed against his neck, hiding my face in there. “Oui.” He agreed, strained as he bucked his hips up again, once, twice, three times, before he started fucking me at a much faster rate. “Fuck, like that, fuck me Charles.” I practically sung as he let out a gasp of a moan, my hips jolting forwards.

“Been waiting for this.” He grunted out, pulling my hips down to grind over him. “For so long.” He groaned, dropping his head back as I whined, grinding myself over him. “Fuck.” I choked out as he lifted his head again, watching me with an open mouth. He tensed his jaw, one hand on my shoulder, the other gripping my ass as he began fucking into me. “Tu le veux plus fort?” I moaned out in response, “yes, yes.” I choked, overwhelmed by the pleasure as he continued fucking up into me.

“Needed you for so long, Charles.” I whimpered, forehead resting against his own as he continued bucking up into me, beginning to sweat as he huffed at my words. Now we’d been so deep into our intense love making, I felt all the confidence to begin babbling. “Fuck, I needed you to fuck me like this, watching you touch yourself over me.” Charles let out a much louder groan at my words now, one of his hands slamming on the longer besides us for support. “I can’t.. I can’t, I’m going to cum if you keep talking like that.” Charles paused, breathing heavily as I gasped out from the loss of movement. Instead, I began bouncing my hips up and down, hands resting on his bare torso. “That’s what I want.” I admitted as his eyes squeezed tightly shut for a moment, gripping my flesh harshly. “Baby, baby, baby.” He hushed, pulling my front closer to his. “I want you to cum first. Tu jouis en premier.” He whispered, inhaling sharply with another snap of my hips.

“I’ll finish too fast.” He settled a hand on my hips, freezing my actions as he smiled a little shyly. “Charles?! Charles?!” A man’s voice began echoing as I turned over my shoulder. Charles let out a frustrated sigh, dropping his shoulder against mine. The door was locked. “Yo, Charles you in there?” The man asked as I made direct eye contact with the boy still inside me. No, I needed him, fuck, I didn’t want this to end.

“Can’t I get two minutes alone with you?” Charles muttered, head leaning on my chest now. His hips gyrated the slightest against mine as I let out a quiet sigh, trailing my hands over his shoulders. “Yeah! Just on the phone!” Charles exclaimed. “Oh! Okay, sorry! You’re needed outside, bro!” Charles winced as I went to slide off him, he shook his head, wanting me to stay there, but I dropped to my knees causing him to sit up straighter, stunned by my actions. I smirked up to him, licking a stripe along the bottom of his cock as his jaw dropped.

“I-I’ll be 10 minutes!” He choked out, holding eye contact with him for as long as I could before I sunk my lips down over his erection. I’d wanted to feel him in my mouth for so long.

“Okay, bro, sorry for interrupting!” The man called out again, I think his name was Marcus. “Merde.” Charles muttered maybe a little too loud as I hollowed my cheeks, sucking a little faster now. His hand hovered over the back of my head, resting it there lightly as I felt his whole body tense. My lips ran over his veiny tip, the taste of myself and his precum filled my mouth, edging me on.

“What?” The guy called out again. “Nothing!” Charles exclaimed, miming out a soft, “oh my god.” Biting down on his hand, I glanced up to him before going down as far as possible. He jumped and hunched forwards. He was going to cum, I could feel it, I wanted it.

“Ah, alright man, see you in 10.” The footsteps slowly got quieter as Charles finally sighed out.

“Si bon, Jenny tu es si bon pour moi.” I knew that was him telling me how good I was, fuck, I needed to hear more of his praises as I bobbed my head up and down. His soft breaths soon became heavy and shaky, as he struggled to keep his composure and keep quiet. “Je vais jouir.” He warned, “merde! Baby!” He held his breath, tapping desperately on my cheek, but I didn’t pull off as his whole body seized and began shaking. I moaned against his twitching cock, pulling off just as he spurted his cum everywhere, the breath he was holding coming out as one loud groan, the desperation soon replaced with content as I smoothed my hands over his wet cock. Charles’s hand landed on top of mine as he caressed my fingers that stroked over his dick. That was too good… making him cum for me with my mouth, I’d never done that before.

“Oh, baby!” He moaned out, exhaling and sitting up straighter as he pulled me up, kissing me several times. “You didn’t have to do that.” He breathed, still coming down from his high as I smiled, kissing his cheek. “I wanted to. Plus, you were in a rush.”

“Fuck, you are so good. I owe you big time.” He shook his head, glancing down to the mess we’d both made. “No you don’t.” I swiped my fingers under my lip, cleaning myself up as my pussy still throbbed, I was in pain with the amount of sexual frustration I had. “I do.” Charles nodded firmly, “I want to properly fuck you. For as long as you want.” He shook his head, his words making me groan playfully as he giggled. He knew exactly what he was doing.

“Don’t make yourself cum until I can. Tonight.” Charles grabbed my wrist once more as I bit down on my lip. “If I can wait that long.” I eyed him up and down as he slowly eased himself onto his feet. We shared a few sweet kisses before he apologised profusely that he had to leave. I was fine with it, kinda satisfied from the fact we’d finally got to- pretty much fuck. Now all I had to do was wait until tonight without touching myself. Kinda difficult when I’d been worked up to the edge of orgasm by one of the hottest guys I’d ever seen. I wasn’t sure if I could wait that long ….

[yuri-is-online]

I'm asking this question because I find it an interesting topic. It relates to the criticism the Tokyo Debunker MC receives.

It's not just TD's MC—it's a common theme in otome and gacha games. Genderless MCs in games like *Obey Me!* and *Twisted Wonderland* face less criticism than female MCs. Even though the genderless MCs get some hate, it’s nowhere near the backlash female MCs receive. For instance, *Twisted Wonderland* had debates about a female MC being unsuitable for an all-boys school, despite the presence of monsters and robots. This debate ended with a female MC in the *Savanaclaw* manga.

Another example is *Tears of Themis*, where the female MC is well-received in my opinion due to her having a character. I am very happy that she isn’t a self insert and people seem to agree.

In contrast, female self-insert MCs like TD's MC and *Love and Deep Space*'s MC get a lot of hate for what seems like trivial reasons. TD's MC is often criticized for being ordinary, while LADS's MC, who is strong and brave, also faces backlash, with some claiming she's rude despite evidence to the contrary.

In conclusion.

woman mc in this day of age can’t have flaws now….wait no they can’t be prefect either! As then they are Mary sue! What do you mean that LI are grey sue as well? No that not true Leo having a backstory would justify his actions don’t you get it? What do you mean we should hold the male characters as same standard? Jin treating mc as a servant is her fault as she didn’t say no…..😐 

... so I have two lines of thought about this particular topic, it is something I have thought about for a while because I am working on my own game/games and pay a lot of attention to what people think.

It isn't personality people like it is competence

The love and deepspace MC and Rosa from tears of themis actually have very similar personalities. They are bad at/hate studying. They really love food. They both are sort of dorks and known for being kind. What people like about them isn't any of those things, what they like is that both of them are adult women who you can believe live on their own. They actually have skills related to their jobs, you can believe Rosa is a lawyer and that MC is a hunter, the love interests aren't the only competent people in the narrative. I think this can sort of relate to the target audience for both of these games being working women, but that's for a different post. Right now I really want to focus on that concept of competence: the two other otomes I really love and want to bring up are Amnesia: Memories and Hakuoki. The Amnesia MC makes a lot of really stupid decisions, but as the game title gives away she has amnesia. There is an underlying explanation for why she's a bit dim so I don't see too many complaints about her personality (outside of Toma's route but that is a different story) because you don't exactly expect her to be competent. The same goes for Hakuoki's MC whose name escapes me at the moment, she is the daughter of a doctor so she is never made out to be incompetent in medical matters, but she isn't the best fighter. And she doesn't need to be that's the male love interest's role in this particular story.

The problem with MCs like our dear Luna? I believe you said her default name is, in Tokyo Debunker is that we don't exactly have anything she is stated to be good at beyond boosting Stigmas. The various ikmen games get around this by giving their MCs a job, but we don't have that for Luna so we don't have anything to show some backbone or character so people read her as being a bit of a doormat. Like I have said numerous times before, I don't mind this and think that so long as they keep allowing us to see her thoughts this the writing will be good. A relatively easy fix to this could have been to make her someone who really loves music and constantly talks about it, she was going to a concert at the start of the game so that little bit of character would go a long way for her to be more of a human for people to project themselves onto. Generally speaking, when writing an MC, it is perfectly acceptable to give them certain personality traits and a history. But if you do that you need to make sure the narrative respects that interest and does not use it as an excuse to make the male lead look cooler.

Gender Neutral MCs

*sigh* so you bring up Twisted Wonderland and I uh... have some experience with that fandom! And I have observed the gender wars over Yuu with a weary heart. I genuinely could not care any less about how people identify or the type of o.c.s they make, but some people really really care and if I am honest I find that a bit disturbing. It honestly makes me sad to see fanfic, which used to be a really accepting space, fight over writing... well anything really. m/m blogs screaming about how they don't want fem aligned reading their things, f/f blogs screaming about men, the f/m fic writers feeling the need to defend themselves writing for a female reader- doesn't that exhaust you? Why do you care so much? I do not have the energy to care about people writing fanfic I am not interested in reading, is this because I am anemic or have I managed to be normal about one singular thing?

My personal theory is that the commodification of fanfic and fandom has made people think there is something fundamentally wrong with properties that are marketed towards people who are not them. The reaction to Love and Deepspace not having a male MC option sort of cemented that for me, there is nothing wrong with wanting a game where you can be a man or non-binary and date anime boys. There is also nothing wrong with writing m/m fanfic for a property like lds, or wishing you could play as a man in it. I think there is a genuine market gap in good games for people who aren't fem aligned, but you do not get good games by harassing people or implying they suck for wanting games where you can play as a woman. You get that by financially supporting projects aimed at you! There is a blog I follow on here called @amaregamesdb. They post a bulletin of projects, both vn and if, with an emphasis on making people aware of projects that aren't simply otome (ie male love interests with a female protagonist.) I think the people who run it are also the people who coined the term "amare game" to use for games where the MC isn't necessarily female. They also ran a blog to help people like me learn how to code if/vns so I am very grateful for them, so please do give them your support.

I write for a gender neutral reader because I wanted to write interactive fiction and felt like I needed to practice doing so. I have continued to do because honestly? I really enjoy it. I love seeing how many different people identify with my writing and are moved by it. There are some projects I want to do in the future (original works, not fanfic) that I probably will lock the MC to female for, but I want to continue providing gn fic for people for as long as I write. And original projects too! I have two in particular I am working on behind the scenes. The solution to the problems like "what gender is yuu really," if you will permit me to preach for a second, is to not care. Yana said Yuu was meant to be you, and dear reader I don't actually know who you are! So you can be whoever it is you wish to be in your heart and I will make room for you to sit next to me. I'll even make tea (｡•̀ᴗ-)✧

[young-dumb-and-vaccinated]

Okay I know I promised a rant, but it came out like a bunch of bullet points instead, so sorry.

The time skip was entirely unnecessary and makes the job of writing a finale harder

Having the umbrellas split up again undoes all of the character development up to this point

The relationships between the siblings have changed in the interim and needs to be explained through clunky expositional dialog

Why is there no learning curve after six years of not having powers?

There is no reason to include children and it actually works to the season's detriment

The children are non-entities and only exist to motivate Diego and Lila, just like Claire in season 1

The entirety of season 3 was just a testament to how bad at parenting Diego and Lila would be

Watching Diego and Lila bicker about domestic disputes is just boomer humor at this point

Your target audience of queer people do not want to see the people they're supposed to root for abandoning their children

It would have been both entertaining and entirely in character to keep the Diego/Lila dispute to suspected infidelity

Lila moonlights as a FBI agent but Diego thinks she's cheating so he goes through all the woman scorned tropes

This way it subverts the trope and gives us more opportunities to see duplicitous Lila and himbo Diego

I really thought Nick Offerman and Megan Mullaly would bring the energy, but no

I've never seen three hilarious people be so unfunny in my life

I cannot take David Cross seriously as a villain. He is so unthreatening.

Luther is the only one allowed to keep his character development and I just kinda wish they let him keep his wife

Allison is back to being an unrepentant bitch and does not earn the family's trust back

With a title like "the unbearable tragedy of getting what you want", I thought the episode would follow Allison trying to feel like she deserves to enjoy her life with Claire and Ray while dealing with the guilt of selling out her siblings

Considering that her entire season 3 arc was backsliding

But what it actually meant was okay I guess we'll never know

I heard a rumor??? Allison I think I heard a rumor about this guy?

Can we please give Klaus a break

Klaus can now clip into pushing daisies episodes

Klaus is trying to escape from his Angel Dust prison

Five looks like he's twelve

I'm always going to be suspicious of a showrunner that's trying to manufacture situations in which infidelity/incest is okay

Can we please give Viktor something to do

I do not blame him for fucking off to the middle of nowhere

Emmy for Elliot for depicting transmasc rageyt665ikju

I wish elliot would remove my marigold

Viktor has the power every autist secretly wants: to rule the fucking universe

Viktor between you and me I don't think this family is worth saving

Idk if Ben's arc is racist but it sure don't feel right

It's fuckin SHORTER. Why does it feel LONGER.

The no volume balancing is really fucking annoying

It would have been interesting to see hargreeves interacting with more than just one sibling at a time per season

Is being in your family like being stuck in a constant apocalyptic nightmare? You might just be transgender 

[devsgames]

"Is Tumblr Blaze Worth It For Promoting My Indie Game?" - a Postmortem

Lately I've been thinking about marketing and promotion of my games and wanting to explore new avenues. Tumblr Blaze was one of those things I wanted to dip my toes into a bit to understand how it works and if it has potential for advertising my sort of stuff. Like as not, there's no point in making games if nobody actually plays them after all!

Conversely I have also heard bad things about Tumblr Blaze; that it's not very targeted, the reach is fairly limited, and people on this site generally hate anything that is Blazed to them.

I wanted to test all these waters a bit to see if it's something worth investing in, and share what I found for my own benefit and the benefit of others. Finding various info on topics like this for indie dev can be a pain, so why not share my findings?

The Plan and Goal

While Centauri Dark is still in development and is the thing I actually want to advertise more of right now, Bombing!! 2 is already out and is much more marketable with some cool art made by community members. I think as a first impression it tends to show well, so I decided to make my test post with that to get exposure to it and see how it goes.

My goal was mostly to see what a Blaze post does for advertising a launched indie game and how much "eyes on" it actually gets in terms of actual engagement.

Posting

From the outset I knew I wanted to make a post that 1) wasn't annoying to people just looking at the webbed site 2) featured a call to action of some kind I could measure 3) wouldn't break the bank.

Here's what I came up with:

The intention was to flash some cool looking art to grab their attention, explain what they're looking at, and then link the game a couple of times while mentioning "Buy or Wishlist" for good measure as a call to action.

Since Bombing!! 2 is such an art-forward game, I found the coolest art pieces made by community members that felt the most "Tumblr" to match the audience, and would also show off the range of art you could make in the game. I also wanted to make it personal, like me writing a message to whoever would read it instead of something that sounded like a standard ad. Generally I think it was a fairly reasonable little post that catches some interest and doesn't overstay too much of a welcome. What I think also helps is it's explicitly a "hey this might interest you" sort of framing (as opposed to a more "why am I even seeing this" sort of post you tend to get from Blaze sometimes).

I also think it's worth emphasizing that writing a posted explicitly intending to be Blazed was a much stronger approach than just Blazing some random post I had made for my own followers months ago, because I could align it to my promotional goals. It also assumed that random people on the Internet would be the ones seeing my post, and not the followers and friends who already know me and my work.

Blazing

As I looked into Blaze early on there was actually a few key things I wasn't fully aware of about the system.

It guarantees a minimum amount of views

It guarantees it will be Blazed for a minimum of 24 hours no matter how many views

You pay a single base rate for the whole campaign (great compared to some ads which tend to price based on views/engagement).

You can define an audience explicitly (some info that was floating around lead me to believe this wasn't the case).

Campaigns come in a few amounts:

I paid for the 2nd tier; $17 USD for a campaign, which amounts to $25 CDN. I wanted to go a little more into it than the lowest tier offered, since I figured the lowest wouldn't give me as much data as I would've liked and I wanted to know what to reasonably expect should I decide to do it again in the future.

Since Bombing!! 2 sells for ~$20USD I also figure if the Blaze campaign prompts at least two people to buy the game then the Blaze would have paid for itself.

Blaze lets you use tags to define which audiences you want to reach. Unfortunately it doesn't let you view that data after you've applied it, but the tags I chose were generally anyone who spoke English and has an interest in Digital Artist or Video Game circles.

The campaign ran for 24 Hours, starting yesterday and ending today.

The Results

I definitely noticed a sharp uptick in engagement during the campaign! It hit the target audience of ~7k around one hour into the campaign, after which point I noticed engagement take a sharp decline.

Here's the Blaze campaign analytics provided by Tumblr (which was also very helpful to have):

So it seems ~12.5k views from Blaze, ~370 likes, ~80 reblogs, 5 shares elsewhere. The post itself has ~520 notes, so I assume there's some reblogging and liking happening from beyond the Blaze campaign that isn't pictured here. The good thing is that despite having reached its 7k target after only 1 hour, it continued to circulate and be Blazed until 24 hours later. Eventually the post made it to ~12k views overall, which was nearly double the amount promised by the campaign - I attribute this mostly to a strong post/target audience/subject matter and I'm sure it's not standard.

Here's the general velocity of engagement around when the post was Blazed:

It jumped much more than I honestly expected, but you can tell Blaze seemed to put it in front of people's faces more than my regular posts do. You can see it drops off sharply as I hit the quoted amount as well, back down to the normal amount of engagement I get on Tumblr.

But this stuff isn't really what I was looking for; I was looking for sales and keeping an eye on 'conversions' - or how many users followed my call to action because of the post. Likes and stuff are fine and cool, but how many people bought or wishlisted the game on Steam as a result of seeing the post on Tumblr?

Tumblr and Blaze obviously have no way of telling me this, so I'm looking to Steam to show me changes there.

Here's what Steam shows me happened to the Bombing!! 2 views yesterday:

That's not nothing! This shows the last month's worth of traffic to the Bombing!! 2 page, and that number was at least double yesterday as it was regularly. It's very cool to know a number of people did actually click through to the game page in order to view the game from the Blaze post.

But the real REAL question is how many bought or wishlisted the game because of this post?

I'll start with Sales, on a graph of 1 month of data:

Flat line :( Which is fine though, as the game wasn't on Sale and was just reaching people for the first time. I didn't honestly expect any immediate sales from this, and was more focused on other engagement anyways. Honestly I would be surprised if someone saw the game on a Blaze post and bought it immediately. I mean it's good but it's probably not THAT good!

Now to Wishlists, which can be a good indicator of who might likely buy your game in the future. Basically if someone has added a game to their wishlist, there's reason to believe they might buy it in the future, which is good for your game.

Here's the Wishlists for Bombing!! 2 from the last month:

That's 23 Wishlists in one day! That's roughly ~18 Wishlists more than an average day!

It's hard to know if some of these are because of the post or just a statistical fluke. However, when compared to previous trends on the game page that's quite a noticeable difference. It means even if no one bought it now, they were interested enough to add it to their shortlist. Looking at it another way, if two people who Wishlisted decided to buy the game in the future the campaign will have paid for itself.

Conclusions

I think like any advertising if you go into it with a plan in mind and try to build something around a specific action, Blaze seems pretty worth it to me especially if I just want to get eyes on something. On top of the obvious data telling me people were interested in the game, there was a few folks who just plain complemented the game or acknowledged it 'was the first Blaze post they were actually interested in', which felt worth it in it's own qualitative sort of way. It's also worth noting my game sells for $20USD, so the margins are large enough that making it back isn't too challenging.

I think having an idea of the message I wanted to send really helped, and I'm sure I'd happily do this again with a larger audience and another plan (and probably will do it for when Centauri Dark releases).

[thearchercore]

As a film major undergrad and then entertainment business major post grad. The artistic elements of the F1 movie drive me insane AND THEN THE FINANCIAL AND MARKETING ASPECTS TOO!!

Apple is pretty notorious for just blowing huge amounts of money on shows and films that no one watches. So, it’s not even the $300 million budget that surprises me . It’s how little anyone seems to understand what this film is about or who it’s even for!! AND I CANT EVEN TELL WHERE THE MONEY FOR THIS FILM HAS GONE EXCEPT ON BRAD PITTS PAYCHECK BECAUSE THE TRAILERS COLOUR GRADING IS SO BAD IT CANT POSSIBLY BE ON POST

Maybe it was just a terrible trailer but the reason films like Rush and Le Mans 66 (Ford v Ferrari in some countries) is that they had something for both racing and non racing fans. 

Both based on true stories, with a compelling emotional core, recognisable actors (appeals to non racing fans mainly). Beautiful cinematic shots of cars going fast appeal to racing fans because those are views that you don’t usually get watching an actual race. 

the fixed cam shots of the drivers in the cars do nothing!! Because non racing fans will find them boring and racing fans would just rather watch a real race. Not Brad Pitt fucking about in an F2 car (which racing fans on Twitter have picked up on already!) The jet shots in top gun maverick (same director) worked because, hey people don’t usually see that sort of stuff, especially not from a pilots POV,  but we see fixed cam POV shots from car races all the time!! AND HOW ARE YOU DOING AUDIO FOR THAT??? is just going to be Brad Pitt breathing heavily the entire time??  

The exaggerated noises and car movements are fun to watch because F1 cars don’t move like that anymore! We don’t get to hear that classic WHOOOSHHH. hell even Michael manns terrible Ferrari movie was FUN because the story was interesting and the shots of the cars driving very fast around very scenic parts of Europe is entertaining. 

F1 (2025) is not based on a true story and the trailer was way more focused on the cringe “car for combat” line rather than what might actually make for an emotionally compelling story. An old racer thrown aside by the sport being dragged back to help an up and coming racer because that’s the only way he’s able to get back in a car. For the first time in his career He’s now the number 2 driver.

But it seems like we will get none of that and if we do the writing will be…uh bad!

ALSO THE TWITTER MARKETING!!! Who is that for!!! The only people who are interacting with that are already your target audience (F1 fans) they know the movie exists, they’ve already made up their minds about whether they are going to see it or not. And if non f1 fans see it they’d just be confused about it being a real f1 team and likely just ignore it. If this is your early marketing what on earth are you going to do next!! You can’t get Brad Pitt to do stunt drives for promotions cause he’ll probably die!! You are relying on name recognition to get non f1 fans to go the theatre and sign up to Apple TV for this and you didn’t even say FROM THE DIRECTOR OF TOP GUN MAVERICK in your trailer when that was the second highest grossing film of 2022 and had pretty much universal critical acclaim!!!! 

Brad Pitts old ass was also a terrible choice for this movie. Micheal Fassbender was right there!!! He’s literally done Le Mans, had an entire Porsche YouTube doc about his training and hypercar race attempts. And at 47, is a very believable age to play “retired driver but still young enough to come back” and he’d likely have been able to a lot of drives/stunts himself. 

I also dread to think how the real drivers are being included in this. I get wanting authenticity but these boys may look like models and actors but they are not!!! If anything I feel like it’d just ruin the emersion of the film because how jarring it’ll be to see real drivers, with their real names in a fictional movie!! 

This movie makes me crazy, it’s only been 1 trailed and some BTS info and I’m already like this. Watching the actual film ( which I do encourage people to pirate btw don’t give Brad Pitt money) is going to kill me 

i will be very surprised if they do pull it off because every move they've done so far was just objectively bad. naming it f1? awful. the ip will get lost in search engine tools because Real F1 will overshadow it. the trailer? no plot. brother is building a car for combat as if the FIA would allow anything like that. the closest we got was mclaren putting spikes on their car this year.

the trailer showed us zero plot, introduced zero stakes in the story. okay you're building a car, why? why do you want to win? what is the driving force of the story? the emotional core? why do i want to root for brad pitt's character if my driver is an actual character in the story??

so far the only people excited for it are real f1 fans that are going to see it to see max verstappen walk in the background in IMAX for 4 seconds. and those people take it as a joke, a hatewatch even.

they all know the f1 drivers can't act... like this whole thing seems so insane to me i cant believe how its an actual thing that's being filmed lol

and dont get me started on how the filming is taking two years (also bc of the strikes last year). two teams have completely different name. cars look different. suits look different...... like if they're fixing all in post god bless that team bc they'll be using more VFX than marvel

[suhmingo]

I, uh, don’t know how to actually preface this. It’s really just a mini rant/pseudo-analysis of chapter 167. Which was pretty crazy. But, I loved this chapter, and yes I’m typing this with two hands.

But first let me try and do some housekeeping.

It’s perfectly fine to have an emotional, even visceral reaction to 167. That’s the point

If you feel grossed out, betrayed, unnerved, dumbstruck, or any form of bamboozled by today’s chapter then good! That means the emotional weight of the scene is working, and that you are a proper, feeling human. The

The whole point of fiction is to explore themes that would be difficult, even dangerous to experience from a place of safety. To me that’s, like the entire reason I ever wanted to become a writer, one of the most unsung broke boy jobs in the history of the world. My desire for Denji to get better in a world that is dead set on making him fail is the entire reason I have an emotional investment in the first place. Stories are inherently about conflict and the struggle with resolving conflict, that should make you uncomfortable.

Say what you want about Chainsaw Man. I can take it, I’m a big boy. But one thing that it has always had since Chapter one is a well-defined through line about the complexity of our innate desire to find some type of love fighting against the pain-wrought pathway that it leads us down. In a good story, every chapter should have some way of showing the highs and lows of that theme, and I’m pretty confident when I say that 167 perfectly shows us that.

It’s bad. Don’t let people who brag about their trauma tolerance tell you otherwise. You are well within your right to feel. But I think it would behoove people to 1. Realize that this is fiction, and its effects, though evocatory, are ultimately abstract, and 2. Realize that exploring dark themes allows people, especially a 16-25 (Or whatever the target audience for CSM is) to grapple with and think on human concepts as all encompassing as love.

From a writing standpoint, one chapter has escalated the tension of the entire story more than anything that has happened in Part 2 so far. It’s admittedly a bit early to call it peak. But looking at it as a simple story beat, that’s a fantastic chapter as far as the medium goes.

Listen, the whole point of stories since, like, Mesopotamian times was the tension between wanting a character to achieve happiness vs the hardships and trauma that life happens in life. They’re supposed to put you in a sensitive state emulative of a tense environment. I’d argue that the prevalence of escapist fiction and fandom has changed how we emotionally digest fiction. But that’s a whole nother essay.

The events of 167 aren’t some horny non-sequitur. Everything that happened is entirely a logical, if graven, extension of how we know characters.

Denji is at the lowest point we have ever seen him at. He was literally dismembered and put back together less than 10 chapters ago. The last chapter literally had him groveling on his knees at a cauldron’s brew of his own weakness, immaturity, stupidity, and horniness. I think we can all understand why he would not be in a good mental state to just lose himself in the moment. You can’t even blame Denji in this situation. He was in an entirely vulnerable state that was exploited entirely by

Yoru. Who is the literal embodiment of war. If you think that someone who represents the human fear of war is going to play fair. Turn on the news for five minutes. Yoru is a character we are not supposed to like. She’s fun, because she’s a work of fiction, but she’s arguably less trustworthy than Fami. She’s a violent, exploitative being who possesses a dead teenager. There is no “too far” for her if it’s the fastest way on the road to conquest. Reminder that before she caught feelings, her plan was literally just to castrate Denji because she thought that would further her goals. The fact that it turned into kissing was actually sparing a worse fate. IMO that savior was all in the actions of Asa.

Asa. I genuinely believe that, subconsciously, Asa wanted to kiss Chainsaw Man. Not like how it happened. Never like how it happened, but her desire for Denji/Chainsaw Man's affection has always been evident. She gets irreparably upset when she’s stood up, she makes cringe poetry for Chainsaw Man, and her entire goal as of now is in some misguided desire to make him happy. I also don’t think Asa is actually demisexual, or averse to sex. She is afraid of intimacy, which stops her from ever acting on her urges. Notice that both times Yoru has kissed Denji, it was after the idea of sex and intimacy was explicitly brought to the conversation. To me that screams that Yoru is spurred on by her host’s innate desires. Hell, it’s been shown that in the same way that Yoru has made Asa more proactive of a human being, Asa has made her feel emotions. I don’t think it's a coincidence that Yoru is blushing while kissing Denji. None of that was part of her plan. That’s Asa’s emotional influence getting the better of her in what I predict to be a fantastic role reversal of their initial contract.

This is thematically in line with how Chainsaw Man presents love and sets up deeper themes.



Remember way back in Part One when Denji was just an initial horndog and everybody kinda hated him? I hated Denji back then! When I first heard of Chainsaw Man I genuinely thought it was going to be a mommy-kink fuelled power fantasy. But I was wrong. Wonderfully wrong. Fujimoto used the allure of that idea in Makima to present a story about how dangerous and manipulative the very idea of grooming is, and how damaging that can be to a person. The same way Denji’s desire to get the approval of Makima was poisonous to him is mirrored in his desire for vapid, instantly gratifying sex is being portrayed here. I genuinely think this chapter is going to age like fine wine, and I am absolutely willing to take egg on my face if I’m wrong.

[ofbreathandflame-archive]

I think there’s a precedence in SJM’s work that subtly punishes her marginalized characters. This develops a kind of aversion to these conversations, as the unwritten narrative is that the any criticism of these characters will result in further punishment by the author. What I mean is, I’ve noticed this reluctance to criticize SJM’s work in some marginalized audiences is driven this idea that she will continually brutalize the character.  It seems obvious that, to some extent, SJM is aware of the problems in her stories (see: the “alphahole” conversation, the Mor situation). SJM actually does seek to address these issues, that is, in a way that I think emphasizes the point I’m going to make. Instead of just addressing the issues directly in her story (and the characterization in the story), SJM instead opts to mock the issue to her reader; she’s signaling that she’s aware of the issue, but still continues to write her characters in the same way. The issue is so unaddressed that readers interpreted her ‘alphahole’ conversation as merely another dig at unfavorable characters, such as Tamlin.

For example, Morrigan introduces our first openly queer character (of precedence) in the entirety of the series, yet immediately following this addition, Morrigan is completely phased out of the story. Her presence in the story is visibly diminished once she comes out as bisexual. Lucien immediately losses relevance once he is explicitly retconned as being a man of color. Even characters like Emerie, who potentially written to be queer, is still the most underdeveloped person in the entirety of the Valkyries. All I’m saying is, there’s seems to be a consistent negativity or erasure of characters that operate in marginalized spaces. I think that sets an environment in fandom and intellectual spaces, to tiptoe around these conversations, either in the hope that SJM will magically just improve after almost fifteen years of writing, or in fear that she will dimmish or remove the character entirely. Even the way these arguments sometimes are said echoes a similar sentiment; this proximity to the Inner Circle means that the character may/may not be treated a certain way. Even within that dynamic, characters of color such as Amren are still purposely written to take the brunt of the criticism (see: Amren, potentially Merrill, Madja). Even though Morrigan is ranked higher than Cassian and Az, she’s often not actually consulted in the story, with WAR taking it even a step further with diminishing her character. Think about how Eris (white, cis male) has now become more prominent than Morrigan and Lucien.  He’s written more prominently – even sympathized with. It’s also noted that, initially, Eris is an antagonistic character in both of their tragic backstories. I’m not saying its bad to elaborate on a villainous character, but I am saying that its noted to me that story has pushed two characters who are marginalized after they’ve been explicitly written as such. Not only that, the story chooses to retcon and elevate yet another white chatacter It sets a precedent for her audience to either stop asking for better representation or it vaguely establishes that criticisms result in canning. Either way, its yet another reason why I feel like the racism in SJM is much more targeted and intentional than just “you know Sarah….”

I think this thought could even be afforded to a broader understanding of marginalized communities. Characters such as Feyre I feel like operate in this space too; mothers are always characterized as vapid, nameless, or dead. Though, I think this thought is more so one that is nurturing in brain then a fully fledged thought.

Crescent City, in my opinion, is a bit more heinous with this as it seemingly mitigates all of its most prominent characters of color into the background. I talked about the way Hypaxia is actively phased out of prominence of the story by her white, blonde-haired, golden sister. Fury, Andromeda are paired together than pushed into the background of the story. Hunt is completely sidelined; by the end of the trilogy (I did not read hofas, so please correct me if I am wrong), all of the characters of color no longer remotely operate positions of importance in the story.