#and i think that makes it harder. by a lot. which is what this is referencing).

[ms-demeanor]

You posted about adhd and I was hoping to follow up to clarify something. I’ve explained to my partner a million times about how the borderline-hoarding mess of his space is very mentally draining to me, and he understands but we’ve both essentially accepted he won’t clean his mess because he can’t because of his adhd. You’re saying he’s actually being a shit head?

This isn't necessarily an issue of him being a shithead, but it also isn't a sustainable situation. It's not good for you and there's a level of clutter that's probably not good for him either.

Large bastard is a lot more clutter-y than I am. The solution we've come to is trying to keep our messes at least isolated from one another; he can have his messes and I can have mine, but he can have those messes in his spaces, not all over the place. Sometimes those messes migrate, and that's when it's important for him to make the effort to rein them in rather than trying and failing to make a daily effort to keep our entire shared space tidy.

I think when you say "we've both essentially accepted he won't clean his mess" what I'm hearing is resignation; you're not happy about this but you don't know what to do so you've thrown up your hands and he feels helpless and unsure of what to do to improve the situation. This is the kind of "it's fine" that isn't really fine.

I think it would be worthwhile for you to each separately think about the mess and talk about it together. Are there areas that YOU *need* to have not-messy? Both for utility and your mental health? Are there areas where you can tolerate more mess than otherwise? Are there areas that are going to be harder for him to keep the mess out of than others? Are there things he doesn't *know* about cleaning up the mess?

I'm obviously a big "communication communication communication" person so I'm going to recommend a lot of talking about stuff, which is probably going to mean a lot of thinking about and interrogating stuff. I'm going to say "talk to him about why the mess bothers you" which means you also have to really articulate to yourself why the mess bothers you (for instance I'm not actually *bothered* by a messy kitchen, but I know it's going to reflect badly on us - and me specifically b/c of presumed gender roles - if someone pops by and the kitchen is a disaster, AND a messy kitchen is going to be harder to use). Genuinely, sometimes knowing *why* something is a problem might make it easier for someone with ADHD to do something. And it's not that he doesn't care that it upsets you, it's just that "Oh if I don't wash my breakfast dishes Anon won't have clear counterspace to make lunch" might be stickier in his brain (and less hard to look at emotionally) than "this thing I forget to do upsets my partner so I should do it."

For the record, I think that people with ADHD should read up on Demand Avoidance and see if it might explain some of the issues that they have in their day-to-day life; I've seen some really unfortunate situations with friends where trying to do things that their partner needed became the subject of demand avoidance. *I* have experienced negative outcomes of demand avoidance. The solution to that, however, isn't to stop making attempts to do the thing OR to simply try harder to do as they're asked/told (which reinforces the demand), it's to work on setting up a situation where the partners' needs are not interpreted as a demand. This is fuck-off difficult and requires a lot of patience and care and many attempts to succeed and will be different for each person and relationship.

(Also for the record demand avoidance isn't *super* strongly linked to ADHD and it's not a definitive symptom; like Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, it is something that occurs in some number of people with ADHD and can be a useful lens through which to examine various behaviors; you don't need to have DA or RSD to have ADHD, and having DA or RSD also doesn't invalidate your diagnosis; they're symptoms. For me, DA often feels like "if I don't look at it, it can't get me" - If I ignore all the messages I've got they aren't real and don't have real consequences so I'll just ignore my texts. If I don't look at the vendor email about the order, the problem with the order isn't real and it won't get added to my task list. If I don't look at the requests in my inbox I can't let people down when I don't do them. It's a self-protective coping mechanism but it's *maladaptive* and I can't just ignore the vendor email or all my texts. I need to work on a way of doing the stuff that I'm avoiding in a way that makes it less stressful and doesn't hurt the people relying on me. That takes a lot of effort, personal insight, trial and error, and )

But before I dive into specifics I want to be really really clear about one thing: sometimes people are simply incompatible. Sometimes one person has such a low tolerance for "mess" and the other person has such a high threshold for "mess" that it can't be reconciled. It sucks that this can end up being a thing that people break up over, but it is MUCH better to acknowledge incompatibility as early as possible instead of spending years and years building resentment.

There used to be a great forum called MiL's Anonymous that I spent a lot of time on. It had a lot of people in a lot of difficult situations struggling to get by and hold their relationships together. The question that was used as a litmus test to approach each situation was simple: If you knew today that everything about living with this person would be the same in five years, would you stay?

Because you can't control your partner. You can't control the future. You can only control yourself and your proximity to situations that are harmful to you. If you knew, 100%, that things wouldn't get better in five years, would you be okay with staying in this relationship? If the answer is "no," then that's that. Don't worry about questions of whether or not your boyfriend is a shithead, start the process of ending the relationship because there's a good chance the situation is going to be exactly the same in five years.

If the answer is "yes," and you'd stay in the relationship regardless of whether or not things changed, then it's time to take actions to improve your life within the context of the relationship.

(No judgement on that yes or no, btw. If you would hate living like this for another five years, and you would feel like you'd wasted your time and hadn't done the things you wanted to with your life, get out. Bail. Go. It will be better for you and better for your partner if you split instead of spending half a decade building resentments and and problems that you'll have to spend another half a decade healing from.)

Also, a note: you describe your boyfriend's mess as borderline hoarding - is the issue *mess* or is the issue *clutter*? I have friends who are very tidy, but whose homes are very cluttered. They like things, they have many things, they keep many things around, but their houses are always clean and well-dusted and orderly, just with a tremendous amount of *stuff.* I am addressing all of this as though the issue is mess, not clutter. If your boyfriend's situation is clutter (the space is busy and packed with things but it is functional and clean) and your issue isn't with *mess* (things out of place, things not having a place, things that need to be cleaned up gathering in stacks, falling behind on regular chores like laundry and dishes and taking out the trash) then you definitely need to assess whether or not you are compatible.

For instance here's a room that is messy but not cluttered compared to a room that is cluttered but not messy:

That first room is a *mess* but it would be very easy to clean up in under an hour. The second room is fairly tidy, but would take significant effort to pare down and declutter. BOTH of these can be difficult to live with but the second one is not dangerous or threatening to anyone's health. (The second one is QUITE cluttered and if every room in a house looks like this it can be overwhelming to live with; this is actually harder to deal with in a relationship than the first one in a lot of ways. I don't have a lot of advice for what to do if your partner is a high degree of tidy-but-cluttered because I don't actually think it's a problem or wrong to have thousands of books or bins full of lego or a million kitchen appliances as long as you have the space and can keep it safe and well-maintained; this is a really significant compatibility issue)

Okay, all that out of the way, here's the hard work.

Talk about this shit

Talk to your partner and define "mess." Make sure you are on the same page about what you mean when you're talking about what a messy room looks like versus what a tidy room looks like. Gather reference pictures. DRAW reference pictures.

Explain not just that the mess upsets you, but *why* and *how* it upsets you. In this context don't think of it as your boyfriend's mess, think of it as an unpleasant roommate. Discuss this using "I-statements". "When I have to pick up laundry all over the apartment, I feel like a parent more than a partner." "When there are piles of miniatures all over the table, I feel like I don't have anywhere to do things I'm interested in." "When there are dishes in the sink, I feel frustrated because I have to clean before I can feed myself."

Discuss, frankly and openly, whether he knows how to clean. I'm not trying to make excuses for him here but a lot of people with ADHD have a lot of stress and avoidance around cleaning because they spent a lot of time getting yelled at for not knowing how to clean properly.

Discuss your needs, be firm about what you require but willing to compromise. You *need* some spaces to be clean, and some spaces may be harder for him to keep clean than others. It may be MUCH harder for him to keep a bedroom tidy than it is to keep a kitchen tidy; if you need a clean and empty bedroom with everything put away and he simply cannot do that, that is a compatibility issue. But perhaps you need *your* side of the bedroom to be very orderly and can tolerate a moderate level of mess and clutter on his side. Maybe you're really really bothered by a messy kitchen, but it doesn't bug you if the dining table is covered with projects and papers. Figure out something more workable than "his mess goes everywhere and i live with it because he's incapable of cleaning" because he probably is not incapable of cleaning and you deserve to have places in your home that are comfortable for you.

Reduce friction for cleaning

Sometimes the problem isn't cleaning, the problem is the many many steps before cleaning, or not knowing where something should go when you are done cleaning. One of the absolute best things I've done for myself for cleaning my space is getting a broom holder and mounting the broom to the wall. Sweeping is now essentially thoughtless. I don't have to find the broom or pull it out from a pile of fans or go scrounging around for a dustpan it's right there on the wall, frictionless. So here are some ways to reduce the barriers to cleaning:

Make sure you and your partner both know how to use your cleaning supplies and know where those supplies are. When I switched dishwasher soap I had to re-show Large Bastard where I was storing it and how it was used, because to him what happened was the dishwasher tabs just vanished one day and he didn't know what I was putting in the machine or the process I used. He sometimes puts tools away in places that I can't see (he's more than a foot taller than me) so sometimes I can't get started on a maintenance project until he shows me where he put the battery pack for the drill.

Consider making a how-to chart to or having him make a how-to chart to keep someplace accessible so he can reference it while cleaning. Goblin.Tools Magic ToDo is great for this. Basically a lot of the time people with ADHD have trouble knowing what to do from step to step even if they've done something before, so having a step by step guide can make it easier (I have notebooks full of step-by-step guides for everything from paying for my tuition to removing licenses for my customers to weeding my yard)

Remove obstacles; don't keep cleaning chemicals in the garage in a box that's behind a stack of parts, keep them in the room you'll be cleaning. Don't keep the cleaning supplies that you use to clean the bathroom in the kitchen. Sometimes this means buying two bottles of bleach solution and two scrubbers and two sets of cleaning gloves but having fewer steps (fetch the windex, fetch the paper towels, fetch the gloves) is often the key to getting things done (open under-sink cabinet and grab windex, gloves, and paper towels that are there instead of in the kitchen).

This sort of overlaps with the next category, which is:

Create Dump Zones

One thing that I've found that seems very different between people with ADHD cleaning and neurotypical people cleaning is that neurotypical people are good at getting to a point where the cleaning is "done." They have checked off their tasks and they have finished and it is over. There are *SOME* chores that are like this (taking out the trash is a binary state, the trash has been taken out or it has not) and some chores are perpetual (horrid cursed dishes) but I think with people with ADHD, some chores that are binary for neurotypicals are actually perpetual chores. For instance "clean off the counter" is not a one and done for me. "Clean off the counter" may involve a three day reorganization project. "Clean off the counter" does not mean "wipe down the tile and put dishes away" it means assessing whether or not I need to make vegetable stock and bleaching three tea containers and reconsidering whether or not the sharps container should live somewhere else and going through the mail and figuring out what needs to be responded to and taking out the recycling and on and on and on.

We have had company at the house for the last two weeks, so I asked large bastard to clean off the dining room table, which is largely a project zone for him. Cleaning off the dining room table meant putting away his meds (and since he's a transplant patient that involves a 30 gallon rubbermade tote), throwing away some trash, and totally reorganizing his workshop. It also incidentally involved picking up a table from facebook marketplace and moving my plants, which has now involved moving my former plant rack outside (moving buckets, finding and organizing planters and gardening tools) and taking the former table to the thrift store (not done yet) and cleaning the rug that was under the former table. So "either the table is clean, or it isn't" isn't really true for us.

HOWEVER "hang on we can't eat until the table is clear so let's drive to Pico Rivera to get that console table right now" isn't a workable plan, so you create dumpzones as areas of holding between the start and the finish of the chore.

A dump zone can be a laundry basket. It can be a craft bin. It can be a back room or under your bed. It is a place to put things that you are going to deal with later because if you deal with them now it is going to derail the thing you are actually trying to do, which is set the table for dinner.

Dump zones are vital to cleaning with ADHD and I recommend them for day-to-day cleaning as well. The day-to-day dump zones might be more for you than for your boyfriend. For instance, Large Bastard works with bullets and he sheds bullets all over the house. I used to get stressed when I found bullets when I was cleaning because are these work bullets? Are these recreational bullets? Are they in testing? Do they need to be pulled? Do they go in the workshop or the office or the garage or does he need these today so they have to stay on the counter? And the answer now is "that's not my problem naughty bullets go in the jar." Which is perfectly sensible because he gets to say "mystery yarn goes in the bin" and "art supplies go in the bucket."

I feel helpless when cleaning a lot of the time. I'm frustrated and lost and I don't know where stuff goes and everything I pick up spins off into three projects in my head and every step feels like a wall to scale. Dump zones help me with that when there's pressure or a reason for cleaning beyond day to day home maintenance. People are coming over? The bedroom is a dump zone, I'll deal with that later. I'm just cleaning up because I need to? Okay I can find a permanent home for this new dish soap.

AS A VERY IMPORTANT COROLLARY TO THIS:

Active projects do not go in dump zones while you or your partner are cleaning. This may mean designating a project sanctuary area like a corner of the table or one particular chair in your main room where a project can be placed so as not to be disturbed. (if my current crochet project ends up in the yarn bin, that may mean that I don't pick the project up for another three months, it lives on the windowsill behind the couch because that's where it'll get worked on)

Do not put things away for your partner, put them in the dump zone for your partner. Your partner has to be the one to put their own stuff away in a way that works for them. I tend to find that this naturally puts a limit on the time stuff sits in the dump zone, because eventually you'll go "hey where's my thing?" and will put stuff away. If that doesn't happen, it's still generally better to have stuff in a dump zone than all over the home.

Do not decide you know what things go together from your partner's stuff and try to "put like things together." The neurotypical urge to put like things together is the mindkiller(j/k). You do not know which things are "similar" in your partner's organization schema and attempting to organize things on your own is going to end up with all of the things "organized" being functionally lost forever from your partner's perspective. Large Bastard's mom would do this and it was infuriating, she'd say "oh I put all the electronics stuff in one box" and she would mean soldering irons, transistors, ham radios, HDMI cables, and cellphone chargers. We are *still* going through boxes of stuff that she "tidied up" when he was hospitalized in 2020 and 2021.

To prevent the need for quite so many dump zones over time, you can work on setting up landing zones and "homes" for projects and tools.

Landing Zones

Landing zones are places where things go when you come inside from doing various things. Sometimes your landing zone only needs to be a tray for your wallet and keys, sometimes your landing zone needs to be a place to take off muddy boots and put a trowel and gloves down before you shower.

To make an effective landing zone, consider what behaviors you're trying to minimize and whether the people using it are ACTUALLY going to use it. For instance I was tired of the corner of my hearth getting cluttered with random junk so I hung up some hooks and put a shelf and a basket there and it became a really effective landing zone for my bag and keys and the mail, but it was VERY ineffective for Large Bastard because it's by a door that isn't the primary door he uses to enter the house. As a result I always know where my keys and bag are but he has trouble finding his keys and wallet. He tends to enter the house through our bedroom and has an overloaded valet next to the door and that's usually where his wallet ends up. Mounting a shelf to the wall above the valet and putting a basket and a hook on it will be a better place for his stuff to land. It's not that he's not using the first zone because he doesn't know that it's there, or because he doesn't care about lost time when I'm searching for my car keys after he borrows them, he's not using it because it's not by the door he uses. That's all.

I have a landing space for when I come in for gardening that's different than the one when I come in from grocery shopping. I have a landing space for when I walk into the dining room instead of the kitchen when I get home.

Landing spaces prevent stuff from piling up all over the place because they are a limited functional space that should be used frequently. Mail ONLY goes in the landing zone. If you have mystery mail or if you're not sure it's safe to toss, you put it in the landing zone. You can't let the mail get piled up too high or you won't have a space for your keys. You can't let the change in your wallet tray get too deep or your wallet is going to slide off, etc., but you also don't just put change on the coffee table or your nightstand because the landing zone is right there.

Homes for items are just what they sound like. They're the place the item goes. It lives there. My meds live on my nightstand. You would not believe how poorly I did with taking my meds on my vacation because they weren't on my nightstand. A while back large bastard lost one of his sets of sorted meds and we tore the house up looking for them because he couldn't find them in his nightstand, which is where they live. *I* found them in his nightstand because I emptied out the entire top drawer (he had only looked on the top layer) and found them underneath a radio and a hammock. Even though they were *hidden* they were in their home, so they were findable. I recently needed ink for an art class. Art supplies live in a dresser by my desk. Ink lives in the art bin or the top left drawer. The ink was not in either of these places (it was on a cabinet in the dining room behind a teacup) so it took me weeks to find it.

Sometimes the reason that ADHD spaces are so messy is because objects have been assigned homes in places that are visible and if they get moved they get lost. This is a genuinely difficult problem that requires a lot of effort to solve and can involve a lot of trial and error for creating a tidy living space. For some people, open shelving and visible storage might be a good solution. For some people, assigning a VERY clear home and inculcating that location by habit is the only way to clean up a space. For some people one very cluttered corner to at least isolate the chaos does the trick (for me and large bastard open shelving doesn't work because anything in one place for too long becomes invisible; that means that I rely on assigning things homes and large bastard relies on having contained chaos and a general idea of where to search but what that DOES NOT mean is that he is clean or tidy. His spaces look like an explosion. But he can mostly find his stuff and do what he needs to do and as long as that's limited to specific places in shared spaces I can live with it; the dining room table can be a disaster, the kitchen cannot).

People organize things differently. It often takes a while for neurotypical adults to settle into an organizational style that works for them and ADHD adults may need to settle into a new system every few months for it to continue working. The cleanup and declutter is most likely going to be a permanent project that is always going to demand some level of attention from everyone in a shared space, but "my ADHD means I can't do it" is not really going to fly. Maybe his ADHD means that he can't keep his space tidy, but it doesn't mean you can't move stuff from shared spaces into dump zones or that he can't do stuff around the house.

If he's insisting that his ADHD means that he can't clean it is possible that he's not being a shithead, he just feels helpless and doesn't know where to start and has adopted the belief that he's a useless piece of shit who can't even keep a tidy space like a grownup because he's internalized a lot of shitty attitudes (hello, my internal monologue about keeping a clean house). But it's also possible that he's just being a shithead.

It's something that's worthwhile to investigate with him. If he's unwilling to make an attempt, then he's being a shithead.

It is also not your responsibility to rehabilitate another person. If he wants to clean and it's something he feels bad about and needs some help and support with the way that someone might need help or support for learning to use a mobility aid, that is fine but you don't have to be the one who gives him that support if it's detrimental to your health, and you don't have to be the one to teach him that stuff if it's not something you're capable of. And if he is NOT interested in working on making your shared living space more accessible for you, that is not your suitcase to unpack and you just have to ask yourself the question from the start: would I stay with this person if I knew the situation was never going to change?

IDK, I'm sure a lot of this reads like "anon you must take on the emotional labor of training your partner to be an adult" but it's really meant to be more of a way of assessing yourself and your relationship. If you created landing zones do you think he'd use them? Would he get angry if you assigned a laundry basket as a dump zone for his stuff while you tidy the living room? Is living with him long-term going to be comfortable for you if nothing changes? Do you have enough of a shared definition of "mess" that you're at least in the ballpark for what counts as a clean house?

anyway good luck, and a reminder to folks that I'm compiling a bunch of adhd resources and other information on my personal website, ms-demeanor.com. It's coming along slowly but it will eventually include stuff like ADHD cleaning tips and how to tackle a hoard, so maybe keep your eye on that space.

[hotvintagepoll]

Do you have any opinions on modern (post-1970s) movies that you feel capture the essence (in a good way) of Old Movies?

No, unfortunately. That doesn't mean I don't like modern movies or that modern movies aren't good, but modern movies—and here I'm really using modern to mean post-2010, so contemporary movies—have different standards for pacing, characterization, budget, and production that make it harder (or impossible) to capture some of the magic of old movies. Even when modern movies clearly try to emulate that old-movie feeling—I'm thinking of La La Land, The Artist, The Shape of Water, In the Heights—they play the homage too broadly, or they ignore crucial components that make the original films work.

There's kind of too much to go into here without writing a full essay, but essentially, the Old Hollywood system—ugly, failed beast as she was—made some movies simply more accessible to make, due to the ongoing storage of props, sets, master craftsmen, crew, and onscreen talent that could move from one movie to the next without pause. If you needed a dancer, he was already on staff. If you needed a fancy bed, it was already in the warehouse. That kind of longterm storage is invaluable if you want to crank out movies quickly and cheaply because it saves so much time on individual negotiation and sourcing. Modern production companies have to work out individual contracts for every actor on every film; crew members have to negotiate rental contracts and source pieces from scratch; if you need someone with specialist skills, you have to contract them specially at a high rate, which a lot of small companies can't (or won't) budget to do. There's sand in the wheels where there needn't be any. It's wasteful, and costly, but that's the system modern movies are made with.

Which all means that even if the modern movie system wanted to make a classic movie musical just like the old ones, they couldn't, because the talent isn't already there—it hasn't been trained up enough, and there's not that breadth of knowledge you can only get from people who have been allowed to work in the same department in the same place for decades. Movies like La La Land fail, for me, because they present themselves as descendants of Fred Astaire or Busby Berkley movies, while missing the bit where Fred Astaire was a master of his craft. When you watch Fred Astaire dance—or Moira Shearer, or the Nicholas Brothers, or Ann Miller—you are watching a true artist at work, purposely showcased by the studios because they already have them on contract. Modern movies, on the other hand, tend to take people who already have star talent (as actors) and try to convert them into dancers/singers—or they pull dancers/singers off of Broadway, but then they don't have the star power built in. You end up with lackluster musicals where no one truly knows what they're doing, or they do but they're not built up enough by the studios to sell. And that's me discussing just on-screen talent for musicals—there is a huge loss behind the scenes, as well, for all kinds of movies, where roles that would have been filled by union crew who moved continuously from one job to the next have been swapped for freelance labor who live with immense turnover, financial insecurity, and knowledge loss. You could hand me the budget and I could try to make an old movie, but the industry itself has changed so much it's impossible to recapture that charm of steady, niche talent, the amazing possibilities of bonkers set design, and the ability to take a risk on a smaller movie because the other films being produced by the same studio can help balance the budget.

I've talked way, way too much about all of this! Sorry, I just have a lot of thoughts—and the one above is just one of them; the talent loss and storage issues are only facets of a much bigger problem that extends to how we watch movies today, how we market them, what we expect of them, and what's allowed in them. It's a crying shame because the talent is still there, but times change and so does the industry, for better or for worse. (And, just again to clarify, I don't think modern movies are bad—they're just missing a lot of the juice old movies got to play with, even if there's more talent available than ever before.)

[genderqueerdykes]

i do want to say to the other nonhumans who have been told that their otherkin, fictionkin, therian, alterhuman, or other nonhuman identity is "just a phase" and that it would go away if you "had less free time" or "more to do with your time"- i want to say that at least in my case, that's really just a big fat lie

i began identifying as nonhuman in late 2010, early 2011. i was browsing otherkin forums back then, back when forums were still widely used. it took up a lot of my thoughts at first because it was new and it can take a while to figure out what your nonhuman identity is. as time passed and my life got progressively harder, going through bouts of homelessness, living in hotels, having my trust broken by friends... never did i once lose my nonhumanity.

sure it fell to the back of my mind while other priorities took the wheel, like paying for shelter, but if anything, being homeless and experiencing the "real world" solidified my nonhuman identity more than anything. being exposed to the "real world" make me understand that i do not understand how humans think, and that i still am not one, over 10 years later. i never became misanthropic, but my feelings of "otherness" only intensified as i became more and more confused about the human experience, which lead me to feel less and less like one. something like the feeling of a lost coyote who wandered too far into the city, staring at the city skyline, unfamiliar with this terrain, unsure of how to even begin to adapt.

if something is a part of you, it won't just go away because other things come along. i never stopped identifying as a wolfdog even while i was scared out of my mind and busy facing the challenges of the human world. those challenges and hurdles that don't exist in the natural world literally reinforced my understanding of my nonhumanity. i will simply never get the way humans think or operate, and that's fine. it's literally a non-issue. they don't get me, either.

[foone]

weird thought: I think if I was a teenager now (or anytime in the last decade or so) I think I would have written (and read!) a lot more fanfic than I did in reality, where I was a teenager in the 90s.

See, I've never been hugely into fanfic. Never had anything against it exactly, but it just wasn't something I was into. But I think that has to do with an interesting combination of how my brain works and what time I was first really getting into being a fan.

I've got a "librarian" brain (I'm literally typing this from within a library, WHERE I WORK). It wants to know things like "what are all the works in this series/by this creator?" and "are they all accessible?" and "what info is available about how it was made?"

I'm the kind of person who will watch a show then go look it up on wikipedia to see how many seasons it has, who made it, if they're still making it, check tvtropes for any more info, etc. Or I hear a song I like by a band I've never heard of, so I go listen to their entire discography while researching them. I just focus on things I'm into that way, you know? I don't half-ass my interest. (this is probably related to my autism, of course)

So what does this have to do with fanfic? like, do I go read some fanfics as part of this process? No, and I think the reason for it is when I specifically first got into fandom, as a teen.

See, this sort of fandom-librarian was harder to do in 1997, you know? You couldn't just pull up the wikipedia for that new show and see how many episodes it had. You also couldn't just listen to the whole discography of that band! Forget Spotify or Google Music, even Napster didn't exist yet.

So my interest in fandom focused a lot more on very basic questions: How many episodes/albums/books/whatever are there? Where can I see/hear them all? Like, I remember getting excited because I found some fan magazine that had a list of all the Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes. Just a list! Not even descriptions or anything. I finally could take that list and see how many I'd seen, so I'd know when I saw them all in late-night reruns.

So I'm focusing on these very basic parts of being a fandom-librarian and I stumble across some fanfic. I'm like "oh, is this a transcript of an episode I haven't seen yet?" and I realize it's not, it's a story written by a fan, and I get a knee-jerk reaction of "that's not helpful to my quest to know and find all the episodes". It's like I am on a quest for the holy grail and I found a fake cup. It's not helpful to me, and at worst it's a distraction from my goal.

And the thing is, I think the fact I had that reaction is entirely due to the time and situation in which I first encountered fanfic. It was in that environment of "I can't even find a list of the episodes, let alone a way to watch them all!" and that anxiety that colored my response to finding fanfic.

I think if I instead was first introduced to fanfic NOW, where those fandom-librarian drives aren't so difficult to fulfill, I'd be way more positive about fanfic. If I could get a list of episodes with a quick google search, and watch them easily on netflix/prime/whatever, I'd be less "THIS DOESN'T HELP! I AM STRUGGLING WITH THE BASICS HERE!" and more "yay, more content for the fandom I'm obsessed with!"

Like I said, I'm not anti-fanfic, I never have been, I just never got into it. From the beginning I had this reaction that was "this is not useful" and I never developed any real interest in it. Which is a shame, honestly. Fanfic is great. It just never became one of my interests, and while I've written it and read it from time to time, I imagine I'd be way more into it if I didn't have the weird reaction to it due to the worries of the time in which I first encountered it.

I don't know how many other people have brains that work anything like mine, but if they exist, I'm glad they're now growing up in a world where they won't have these problems. They can get into fanfic without this weird baggage caused by a lack of information.

[chronosdawn]

Attached - Alpha!Wriothesley x Beta!Reader

a/b/o AU, GN!Reader

A/N: I got the idea for this while working on another, longer a/b/o fic so instead of working on that like I was supposed to, I wrote this OTL

Word count: 1.3k

Content warnings: a/b/o dynamics, mild sexual content and themes (minors please DNI)

Not many got the chance to know the Duke of the Fortress of Meropide well. Certainly, almost everyone in Fontaine knew of him, and as the Fortress’s administrator, many people had some sort of contact with him, be they convicts of the Fortress or proprietors of businesses hoping to gain a foothold there.

But among those, very few got to actually know the Duke beyond his title and position, and when you’d first met him, you’d had no reason to think you’d be any different. Sure, you had been invited there by him personally, which was rare, but made sense once you’d learned he was looking to procure resources for some project that was being worked on in the Fortress—something you had a lot of experience doing for members of the Fontaine Research Institute.

Over the course of several meetings—and more than a couple of pots of tea—a tentative friendship had formed between you. One that had turned into something quite different when you’d accidentally stumbled into his office while he was in a rut.

And that, was how you’d come to end up in your current situation—seated in Wriothesley’s lap with your overnight bag discarded by the door to his room. You hadn’t expected this to become a regular occurrence when you’d first offered him your assistance, but for some reason the stubborn fool had refused to seek out an omega to spend his ruts with, even if you both knew that was what he actually needed.

He nosed against the back of your neck before going in with a gentle nip of his teeth, dangerously close to where your small beta scent gland lay.

“Careful,” you warned, “you know our agreement, nothing that can’t be taken back. I don’t want to be the reason your future omega ends up developing some sort of complex.”

Wriothesley stilled briefly before grazing his teeth over your nape once more. “What would you do if I did?”

“What do you mean?” You tried to turn around to look at his face, but the muscular arms around your waist kept you locked in place, pressed tightly against the firm planes of his chest.

“What would you do if I decided to put a claiming bite on you? Right now, you’re not in any position to stop me.”

“You wouldn’t,” you said with absolute certainty, even as he nipped at you again, harder this time.

“What makes you so sure?” His rut had come on enough that even you could smell the pheromones he was pumping out into the air, a rich leathery musk with notes of clary sage.

“I know you, you just wouldn’t.”

“You sound pretty convinced of that.”  He went quiet for a moment, and when he spoke again, his voice was barely audible as he muttered into your skin. “Do you even know what I was originally sentenced here for?”

“I do.” He’d never told you himself but you remembered reading about his trial in the newspaper your father had left out on your dining room table. “But that’s neither here nor there. You’re not the sort of person who’d force a yourself on someone, and I can’t imagine you ever being disloyal to your mate. Even if for some strange reason you seem reluctant to go out and find them.”

He let out a chuckle but there was no real humour in it. “You know, sometimes I wish you thought a little less highly of me.”

“If I didn’t think so highly of you, I wouldn’t be here, you know that.”

“Yeah, I do.” He went back to worrying at your neck, his mouth over your scent gland. Instead of biting down, however, he sucked at the skin in a way that was certain to leave its own sort of claiming mark, but one that would fade within a week. 

“You don’t seem to be in any hurry,” you noted, as he took his time littering your nape with hickeys, despite the growing hardness you could feel pressing against your ass.

“How long can you stay?” His hands began to wander slowly over your body, the heat of his palms burning through your clothes.

“A couple of days.” You let out a sigh, allowing yourself to enjoy the feeling of his touch while you could. “I’ve got a trip to Liyue scheduled to check on some ore shipments and it’s too late to rearrange it. Sorry I can’t be here for the whole thing; I should be able to help you through the worst of it though.”

“And when will you be back?”

“I’m not sure. Some of the merchants we’re dealing with are really dragging their feet for some reason. I should be back before your next one, although whether that’s really a good thing or not, I don’t know. Might have been a good incentive for you to actually seek out a more permanent arrangement.”

“I really wish you’d stop bringing that up.” One of his hands slipped underneath your shirt, sliding beneath your undergarments so he could give your nipple a firm squeeze. “What’s so wrong with this?”

You let out an undignified squeak and chastised him with a light slap to the thigh. “I know I sound like some nagging old aunt, but I just want you to find someone who makes you happy. Truly happy, not just sex.”

“And if I said you make me happy?”

“I can’t, not in the way deserve,” you said a little sadly, before putting the thought out of your mind altogether. It was best not to think about what ifs that could never be, it would only lead to hurt. “Now, what do you say we get a move on, before you get so wound up you tear straight through my clothes. Again.”

Wriothesley loosened his hold enough for you to turn around in his lap, fingers moving to undo the buttons of your shirt as he watched with rapt attention.

“With the way you’re so fond of telling me off, anyone would think you’re the alpha in this relationship.” He made no move to touch you, simply observing as you shed your garments one by one. You weren’t entirely sure how he was managing it, you could see the flush on his cheeks, feel the tension in his body—a piece of elastic a hair’s breadth from snapping. Still, if any alpha would have the self-control to hold themselves back during a rut, it would be him.

“Come on mister, it’s not fair to make me do all the work.” You moved to start helping him out of his waistcoat, his jacket having already been shed before you’d even entered the room.

“Alright boss,” he replied with obvious sarcasm, a smirk curling at his lips. With no warning, you were suddenly lifted and flung onto the bed, Wriothesley following you quickly after, caging you in with his body and leaving no hope of escape. “If you’re that eager, you don’t have to wait for me to go into a rut, you know, you can come here anytime. I’ve asked the staff at the front desk to let me know as soon as they see you.”

“It’s a tempting offer.” You helped him out of his waistcoat as he pulled off his tie and tossed it somewhere in the room. “But I’d hate to be the reason for a decline in the efficiency of management of the Fortress.”

“Always an answer for everything.” You didn’t get a chance to retort before his mouth was covering yours, hot and hungry as he ground his hips against your thigh. It would seem his control had finally failed him, as when you kissed back, he let out a satisfied growl from the back of his throat, fingers digging into your flesh as he tugged you into the position he wanted.

You simply let him, tangling your fingers in his hair as you braced yourself for what was sure to be a long and tiring—if enjoyable—affair.

[gigizetz]

I have an odd question what’s harder for you?

drawing a ✨MAN✨ or ✨WOMAN✨ body type? Or even intersex?

you are an amazing artist so I just wanted to ask as a self taught young artist which one do you struggle drawing more than the others?

I wouldn't say men are harder, but I do find women much easier to draw. Does that make sense?

When I was learning I definitely had more problems drawing men. I think because the shapes are more defined I had to practice a lot to feel as natural as drawing girls.

Still, I enjoy and have a lot more fun drawing women than men (no offense men)

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

On the language debate, I personally headcanon that the main language spoken at NRC is a common one. (?) (Like how English is the business language, or like how generally Native Americans had a common language that they spoke when trading with other tribes.) And Crowley or the Mirror used magic so that You was temporary fluent in that language.

After the ceremony, Yuu has to learn the common language and picks it up really fast (as one would in such a situation). Therefore, Yuu can still speak it when away from NRC.

(I also headcanon English as an ancient language akin to Latin, because I heard that Arabic was canonically an ancient language.)

[Referencing this post!]

I’d buy that everyone at NRC speaks the common language to some level of proficiency; it’s like how international students typically need to speak the language of whichever country they hope to study in and need to prove their fluency in an exam beforehand. As I said in the original post, the light novel does mention a translation spell over the school, so maybe that’s part of the “magic” that helps Yuu to understand what the others are saying.

Now, it’s theoretically possible for Yuu to learn the common language of Twisted Wonderland in a year, but I don’t think immersion alone would cut it (especially since the main story is only up to like 2/4 to 3/4 of a year so far) . They’d probably have to put in significant effort outside of everyday conversations to pick up its rules (because remember that language isn’t just vocabulary but also grammar, syntax, and social conventions). Yuu would also need consistent feedback from people since that’s how one usually “fixes” their incorrect language use. It’s similar to how adults would correct a child learning their first language; ie a kid says “wadur” instead of “water”.)

One site I looked at suggested that, depending on the language categorization (I, II, III, of IV), it can take 24-92 weeks’ worth of time to become an “advanced” speaker. Realistically, just getting to the basic conversational level could be hundreds or thousands (700-2500+) of hours on its own—and Yuu has to do this on their own time between homework, going to classes, and managing all the issues that Crowley doesn’t 💀 To me, that doesn’t sound like a lot of free time. Counterpoint to my own point though, we also have to consider that Yuu is... well, technically Yuu can be any age you want, but most Yuus are implied or portrayed to be 16-18. The critical window for language acquisition is theorized to be anywhere from the first three years of life up to as late as 17-18 years. After this critical window, the ability for language development tapers off. So, thinking about that, Yuu's brain could still be very pliable and able to absorb new language (though they'd have to work quite intensely to pack in as much as they can before this ability starts to decline).

Something that I feel would be difficult for Yuu is that the characters often use slang (Cater, Floyd, Idia, etc.) and/or uncommon words (like Vil’s “pulchritude”). The former may not follow the standardized rules of a language or may be idioms (other non-literal meanings for common words), which could make it hard for a non-native speaker to understand. The latter would not be used that often, so Yuu would be forced to guesstimate what the word means. I’d imagine this would make fluency challenging, because as immersed as Yuu is in Twisted Wonderland, less frequently used words are harder to grasp.

Maybe Crowley cast a translation spell ON Yuu so that they can still converse with people in the common tongue whenever they leave NRC? Or, since the events basically occur in an AU, more than a year has passed so it has allowed Yuu more time to absorb the language. Language in TWST and how it works… It’s really interesting to think about!

[shmaptainwrites]

𝐋𝐎𝐂𝐊𝐃𝐎𝐖𝐍 — 𝐎.𝐑. [𝐉𝐀𝐌𝐄𝐒 𝐖𝐈𝐋𝐒𝐎𝐍]

PAIRINGS — James Wilson x GN!Reader (no pronouns)

SUMMARY — A child is unaccounted for and the hospital goes into lockdown which makes it a lot harder for Reader to avoid Wilson

WORD COUNT — 2.2K

WARNINGS — mentions/decriptions of blood

NOTE — Okay here's a quick little one shot that will hopefully hold you guys over until I get that series done. As you guys have probably already guessed this is set in 6x17 and I have a few more ideas of different scenarios that could happen in this episode so you may be seeing more of that :)

It was always an odd feeling when an OR was quiet. All you could hear were the sounds of your shoes, making the floor squeak as you walked, littering bloody footprints wherever you went. You still had your mask and gloves on and were about to leave so the room could be cleaned and sterilized for the next surgery when you heard an announcement over the hospital’s PA. 

You looked over to your friend and colleague who was just removing his gloves as you listened to them say the hospital was under lockdown and no one was to leave their areas until further notice. 

“Guess we’re stuck here a little longer,” he said and you looked around you. It wasn’t the most pleasant place to be stuck, blood littered the floor like a murder scene and surgical tools were messily placed on tables and stands. 

“Yeah,” you sighed and followed his lead, taking off your gloves and discarding them, followed by your mask. 

“You okay?” Wilson asked, coming closer to you.

“M fine,” you nodded and moved towards a wall so you could lean against it. “Would just…rather be at home. Or in a shower,” you looked down at your bloody scrubs. “How are mine dirtier than yours?”

“Cause you’re a messy surgeon,” he teased. 

“Right, and it’s not because you nicked a vein that sprayed all over me.”

“I said I was sorry,” he came over next to you and leaned up against the wall in the same manner you were. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

“If you’re thinking that if you don’t sit down your legs are gonna give out anyways then yes, I am thinking that,” you nodded and he gave you the encouragement to sit down on the OR floor by taking the lead and doing it first. 

There were a few moments of silence that passed before Wilson spoke up again. 

“Hey are you…sure you’re okay?” he asked. 

“We lost a patient, James,” you sighed. “Kinda knocks the wind out of you.”

“I know, but you know it wasn’t our fault, it wasn’t anything we could have fixed or gotten to for that matter.”

“I know, but it doesn’t really make me feel any better,” you admitted, pulling your knees up a little closer to your chest. 

Wilson reached over and took off your hair cap and you lazily turned your head around before reaching over and doing the same, messing up his now shorter hair. It wasn’t as satisfying to do as when it was longer. 

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked, extending his hand out for you to take. 

You bit the inside of your cheek and reached out, interlacing your fingers with his, letting your back melt further into the wall when you felt his thumb brush against the back of your hand. 

“I don’t think talking will fix my problem,” you turned your head, still letting it rest against the wall as you looked over at him. 

“This isn’t just about the patient,” he inferred. “You’ve been…distant lately.” 

“No I haven’t,” you shook your head and pulled your hand out of his hold. 

“Yes you have,” he sat upright and looked at you curiously. “You just pulled away, again.” 

You pushed yourself up so you were standing again and Wilson followed you. You’d never been claustrophobic, but in that moment, it felt like the walls of the OR were closing in on you. 

“Bee, come on, please talk to me,” he begged.

“You haven’t called me Bee since residency.” 

“You’re deflecting,” he placed his hands on his hips. “What’s going on with you?” 

“I’m trying to tell you, nothing’s going on,” you began to pace the room, wringing your hands in front of you. It’s like you weren’t even trying to be subtle that there was a problem. Every time a lie came out of your mouth your body did something to tell Wilson whatever you were saying wasn’t true. 

“No, you just don’t want to tell me what’s going on,” Wilson conceded. “I just don’t like to see you torn up like this, you know that, right?” 

You stopped your pacing and nodded your head. 

“I miss you, we don’t see each other anymore and I-,” 

“James stop,” you spoke quietly, so much so he barely heard you. 

His eyes fell on you again, watching as you looked down at your hands, your mouth partially open as if you were trying to say something else, but it wasn’t coming out.

“I-I was just trying to-,” 

“I know what you were trying to do,” you said. “Make me feel better, because you’re a doctor, it’s in your nature. You don’t have to make me feel better about this.” 

“But I want to.”

“You don’t even know what it is,” you chuckled humourlessly, moving closer to the OR doors. 

“I-I could, and you could let me try and help-,” 

“James, you're not going to want to help with this.” 

“You can’t know that unless-,” 

“I don’t know what we are,” you blurted and squeezed your eyes shut, hating yourself for being so weak, feeling your back hit the wall again.

“Y-You don’t know what we are?” he looked at you, but you could see past his furrowed brows and concerned features, the thoughts racing in his head, his hands now unsure what to do at his sides. 

“We’ve known each other a long time, James,” you licked your lips and pressed them together. “And throughout that time you have been my closest confidant, my go to person, when I think of someone I can count on and someone who cares about me, I think of you.” 

“I think of you in that way too,” he said, but you shook your head. 

“No, you don’t,” you shook your head. “Because while we joked around, and looked after each other, and followed each other from hospital to hospital you got married, and then divorced, and then married, and then divorced, and then-,” 

“Married, and then divorced,” he nodded his head, filling in the last blank for you. 

“Three marriages, I was there for all of it,” you looked up at the ceiling. “I just thought maybe…I don’t know.” 

He knew what you thought. You thought that maybe since you’d both stuck around for so long, since you’d seen the best and the worst, that maybe it meant something more. 

“I shouldn’t have said anything,” you shook your head, wishing you could disappear into the walls. “You don’t feel the same.” 

“Bee, it’s not that,” he shook his head. “But I-I can’t give you what you want.” 

“If you can’t give me what I want then how is it anything else?” you didn’t understand what he was saying. 

“It’s better if we stay friends, just…just trust me.” 

You nodded and pressed your lips together, trying to push back the tears that were beginning to form, but to no avail. 

Wilson bit the inside of his cheek and shook his head, coming over to you and reaching out to offer you some sort of comfort. You wanted to turn away, shake your head and tell him to give you space, but when his hand came to cup your cheek you just leaned in closer to it, letting your tears flow silently and freely. 

“Is this your definition of friends?” you asked. “Because if it is I don’t know if I can do this.” 

“I…” Wilson closed his eyes, but he could still see the hurt and pain glimmering in your irises. “It’s not you.” 

“Oldest cliche in the book,” you sniffed and wiped away some of your tears. “Still trying to make me feel better, but I think maybe you’re more suited for treating cancer. Maybe you should stick to that.” 

“No, I-I mean it,” his hand dropped from your face and this time you reached out to gently hold his fingers, to maintain some form of contact. “It’s me. My…” he took a deep breath and tried to get himself to meet your gaze, but he couldn’t look you in the eyes. “You said it yourself. I’ve had three marriages, my girlfriend died. Every relationship I’ve had ends in heartbreak. Every person I’ve loved has eventually left.” 

“James,” your whisper drew him closer, his hands coming to rest against your arms, hesitating before moving to hold your face, the creases around his eyes having softened. 

“I thought that maybe if I pretended I didn’t love you you wouldn’t leave and I wouldn’t end up hurting you.” 

You could feel your lip begin to quiver, “You already are.” 

Your voice came out meek and strained, like it took every ounce of your strength to tell him that. 

Wilson pulled you in closer, resting your forehead against his, whispering quiet apologies. 

“I never wanted this, not for you,” he shook his head. “I’m so sorry.” 

Your hands reached out to hold onto his scrubs, the partially dried blood leaving red stains on the palms of your hand. 

“No, don’t be sorry,” you murmured. “Don’t be. Just be honest. With me. With yourself.” 

His voice became stuck in his throat and faded into a whisper, “I’m afraid to say it. I-I don’t want to ruin this…ruin you.” 

“Then I’ll say it,” you placed your hands on his shoulders. “I love you and I’m not going anywhere.”

Wilson nodded his head and you could feel his heartbeat from the pulse in his neck, every move was hesitant. Pulling you even closer, your hearts next to each other, your faces only a breath away. His lips so close to yours, and you did the only thing you could think of to quiet the voices in his head, you told him again. 

“I love you, James.” 

It was like a reflexive response to your words. His lips now moved in sync with yours in tentative movements, as if one wrong move could make everything disappear. 

“I love you,” he whispered first, his lips still ghosting yours before another kiss. “I love you,” his voice now clearer, a quiet murmur. Another kiss, more firm, pushing you back against the wall while your hands moved down, finding any excuse to bring him closer. “I love you,” again, this time fully aloud because you were still there. He had said it and you hadn’t vanished, you’d pulled him closer. “Bee, I love you.”

His lips moved away from yours but only so he could wrap his arms around you, one arm across your back, the other holding your head simply to bring you into what felt like an almost frantic embrace. You reciprocated the urgency, your face now buried in his shoulder while his nose was pressed in your hair, inhaling deeply, relieved.

Wilson could feel your legs shake a little underneath you, in part from the exhaustion of the long surgery, some of it probably due to everything that had just happened. From there it became easy for you to fall back to the floor. Wilson positioned himself with his back to the wall and encouraged you to sit between his legs, leaning back into him. 

His arms wrapped around you, this time his hands now holding yours which rested on your lap. His lips pressed small kisses along your temple and you sighed, easily sinking more into his embrace like you always had, but now knowing there was always something more between you. Maybe it was naïve of you to think things would be different, but at that moment you couldn’t care about the ending, not when things were just beginning.

It felt difficult to speak, you weren’t sure what words would cut it anymore after what you’d said, nothing could be more meaningful than that.

So you sat in silence, absorbing the moment, living in it, sucking every ounce of love you could get from each other sitting in silence. 

“Bee,” Wilson spoke up, but his voice was quiet after the prolonged silence. “You won’t leave right?”

“Not if you don’t,” you shook your head. “I’ve stuck with you for a while yet, James. Just…don’t push me away.” 

He raised a hand to tilt your head back towards him, encouraging you to turn around slightly and meet him in another kiss. 

Just as you pulled apart, the loudspeaker turned on again informing you that the child was found and the lockdown had been lifted. 

You didn’t want to move, but you knew you couldn’t stay in the OR forever. So while you still had the volition, you stood up and offered a hand to Wilson so he could follow after you. 

You pushed open the door and walked out of the OR together, heading towards the now unlocked sector doors to get to the locker rooms to change before leaving the hospital. 

As you walked side by side, you could feel Wilson’s hand brush up against yours before he reached out and properly held your hand in his own. You looked down at your interlaced fingers before looking up at him again, knowing tonight would be different. Tonight you wouldn’t be alone. 

TAGLIST —

@cuntyvicodin @paola-carter @kiddbegins @il0vebeingdelulu @illicit4ff4irs @lynnsthoughts @miarabanana @iwmflbb @shots-of-wilson-and-whiskey @sarcasm-and-stiles @sun-flower-mad @x-uno @han11dh @qardasngan @alexxavicry @lemonxde @mushycore

[colebabey888]

LIVING THROUGH YOUR ALTER EGO | IT GIRL DIARIES

I've had a lot of girl's tell me how hard it is to be an It Girl, just because of the amount of changes you have to make in your life. Which is understandable, it's not easy to just wake up one day and decide to be a completely different person and forget who you were yesterday or your old habits.

Truth be told, I used to be one of those many girl's, I thought I could never be who I wanted to. I could never be that confident diva who achieved everything with ease... so I made a plan, a plan to begin living through my alter ego and eventually, I became her.

🩷🎀🌺💌💋👛💕👠🛍️👑

Here is your Guide for an Easy Start to Living Through Your Alter Ego.

Step 1. | Create your alter ego ( this is who you want to be. Decide what they do, how they think, what they look like and what their daily routine would be. Give them a name )

Step 2. | Create a Vision Board that resonates with your alter ego ( you can find many ideas on Pinterest or head over to my Pinterest here, for a already drawn up vision board, I've create many )

Step 3. | Wake up everyday as your present self and then, start implementing small routines throughout your day that your alter ego would do. Always start small. ( remember, it's harder to wake up and just be different person )

Step 4. | Choose atleast 1 small routine that your alter ego would do and make that a consistent daily routine for yourself ( skin care routine, hot lemon water every morning, reading, walking or doing your makeup ) It doesn't have to be something big and drastic, just something small to give you direction and discipline.

Step 5. | Gradually add in more routines as the days go by. Think of your current reality as plain white cake batter and your alter ego's life as pink food coloring, everyday you add more food coloring into your batter and in the end, you will just have pink cake batter.

Step 6. | Try this for 2 months, this will give you enough time to take things slowly.

Tip : Everytime you've successfully remained consistent with a routine from your alter ego, cross it off your vision board, because this means it is no longer a vision, it is your reality.

( use your vision board as a to do list on this journey )

I hope this helps many of you in starting to your IT GIRL persona and become the pretty divas you all are. 💋🩷🎀🌺

------------

This is your daily talk with @colebabey888

[daydreamalley]

A Ramble about Phase 19 of the Fifteen Manga Ft. Storm Bringer spoilers

Just absolutely cannot get over the 15 manga. I love the light novel so much, but this manga adaptation is so ridiculously amazing. Dazai and Chuuya’s proximity/touching has been amazing of course. I adore the way Hoshikawa draws Dazai and Chuuya as well (my baby boys, especially Chuuya). But these last two chapters with Rimbaud and Verlaine. Like, fuck. The whole “At least, one of them felt that way,” part just hits so much harder in the manga for me, with the art and page placement. And this whole most recent chapter. Like firstly, you don’t have to end every chapter with like Chuuya getting stabbed okay, help me out here.

Comparing the last page of phase 18 with Verlaine and the first page of phase 19 with Chuuya makes it so obvious that Rimbaud is seeing the similarities between them with just that parallel, which is confirmed later with Rimbaud quite literally seeing Verlaine standing behind Chuuya. 

Not to mention in phase 18 the “That’s right Paul, I remember you,” in conjunction with him seeing Verlaine in Chuuya.

Then that flashback with Verlaine carrying Chuuya and Chuuya’s just so small I could cry.

Like, I knew he was small, but he's just so young, I can't. People were experimenting on him. Like, how??

The way Rimbaud wants to ask Chuuya something and Chuuya crouches down to him. Which leads to Rimbaud putting a hand around Chuuya as he tells him to live. How close and personal they are when Rimbaud says all of this just make it feel so much more impactful for Chuuya. Kinda love too that Chuuya isn't just standing over Rimbaud. He's making it obvious he's open to listening.

Rimbaud says a lot of shitty things to Chuuya up to this point, even complaining that he has to kill a kid while only referring to Dazai, completely not acknowledging Chuuya as anything more than Arahabaki. But once he fully remembers what happened with Verlaine, I feel like that’s when Rimbaud remembers what he truly believed about Verlaine and his humanity and how that extends to Chuuya’s humanity. Because Rimbaud’s whole final speech is most definitely things he’d also thought of or told Verlaine before (as I think is confirmed in SB). I think those are Rimbaud’s true thoughts and beliefs on the matter, it just took that long for him to remember the full story and how he felt about it all. Rimbaud saw Verlaine’s struggles with humanity, and now he also remembers why Verlaine betrayed him. And so he tells Chuuya to live, just as Verlaine wanted him to back then, live without the burden of worrying about your humanity or where you came from, because “you are you.” It doesn’t matter if Chuuya (and Verlaine) “are but a pattern etched on the surface of raw power.” In Rimbaud’s mind, and honestly where we eventually end up at the end of SB, is that it really doesn’t matter what your origins are, whether someone is an artificial personality (aka pattern) etched onto raw power, because really everything is some version of a pattern upon the world. And in a word with abilities, a lot of people are a pattern connected to a power. Just as in SB Chuuya decides that even though Adam isn’t human and he knows it, it doesn’t take away from Adam’s actions, his sacrifices, or his dreams. Same goes for Chuuya and Verlaine. Their origins don't affect how human they truly are. Their humanity is significant no matter what. It just took a bit more convincing for Chuuya to get there, a little more than what Rimbaud could offer on his (almost) deathbed.

Anyway, Chuuya holding Rimbaud’s hand as he dies just does things to me. Like, the book described that “Both Chuuya and Dazai quietly listened as if there was something in what Randou (Rimbaud) was saying that they couldn’t allow themselves to miss… Some things, however, would not return to normal: the body of a man who no longer felt the cold, and the hearts of two boys who stood rooted to the spot, staring at him. A gust of wind peered through their souls as it passed them by.”

This page just so well depicts that last line. It truly feels these boys have heard something so monumental, that they won’t ever forget. Standing in the aftermath of their first fight together, hearing these words about humanity that both mean so much to both of them. Dazai’s expressions really convey this to me in the manga, and convey it just so beautifully. And Chuuya being so close to Rimbaud when he speak those words just makes it feel like those words truly are so monumental for him. And also this means that Chuuya fought to kill a man, that to be entirely fair and clear was trying to kill him first, and then held to his hand as he dies, and there’s just something about this added detail that’s so significant to me in portraying the weight of it on Chuuya. Chuuya's connection to Rimbaud is a complicated but important one. But really these words are important for both boys, because let’s not forget that Dazai also struggles with his humanity. Even if he doesn’t have a physical reason to doubt his humanity, like Chuuya, there are many other reasons that he does doubt it. So hearing that all people and all of humanity are really just patterns within the physical world, human or not that’s true of everyone and everything, and that’s important for Dazai to hear too. I think both boys think back to Rimbaud’s final speech quite a bit, if I’m being honest or did for a while.

I am NOT getting over the detail that someone (Chuuya??) put Rimbaud’s scarf on his grave. I just… it does something to me and I love that detail so much. And cutting back to that “You are you” line while Chuuya’s talking to the grave is just so perfect in my opinion, and again just shows the significance of it so, so well. It’s like, he's talking to Rimbaud, complaining about his actions really, and then it cuts to that “you are you” and it just shows almost the contrast I guess between Chuuya feeling unrest at not finding stuff about his past that Rimbaud could’ve given him, but maybe wouldn’t have anyway, and Rimbaud’s statement that those things don’t matter because Chuuya is who he is beyond all that. Also the little dandelion blowing into the wind, to me also signifying a wish being spread.

Anyway, entirely unnecessary to end the chapter with a big knife in Chuuya’s back, thanks. Especially after Chuuya mentions how he’s still exhausted from everything. Like let’s just, stop, please.

He's just a boy, leave him alone for the sake of all things good.

[mdhwrites]

Have you seen the leaked TOH pilot and pitch bible yet? IMO it’s crazy how most of it is better than the final product.

I have! And... I don't know if I entirely agree with that.

What I found most fascinating about it is that a lot of the contradictions and issues of scope with TOH that doomed it are still in the pitch bible itself. Just some quick examples of what I'm talking about: When talking about themes, they talk about Fantasy versus Reality but it's as shallow as it is in the show. After all, one of the episode concepts pitched within it features a plot that has Luz literally going "This is just like in my fanfiction!" and being better able to handle it because of that.

It builds up the emperor of the land and Belos (known as Oberon) when talking about them but NONE of the plotlines include Oberon in the episode pitches or even mention the coven system for that matter. They are still barely a thing to the show with the only episode concept about that part of the show being the one about William.

An utter lack of real stakes like how King has to face the deep crises of a decision of either being a lackey to the people he used to run with while also losing any chance to ever reclaim his lost power... Or he can save Eda and Luz and lose the chance to work with these people again. That's not really a compelling decision, is it?

The pitch also claims that the show will mostly be about Luz and Eda's relationship and how Luz's determination will push Eda to be a better person... And most of the episodes pitched are still not actually about the two spending time together. Just Eda making Luz upset so she goes off to do her own thing, just like the same problem as in the actual series.

You actually have MORE characters in this version which sucks harder for trying to narrow things down, especially since more of them are disconnected from each other than before. At least Boscha, unlike Pascha, has a connection to literally anyone in the main cast.

You also have stupidity with your magic still. "Look! I need to work hard to make small objects float!" And apparently that's enough to make all of Hexside lose their fucking minds. WHY!? In 90% of settings, that is as basic as the light spell Luz learns. It's why it's one of the first spells Harry learns.

Oh and let's not forget "Almost all known portals to the human realm have been severed" but apparently Amity has access to one of those known portals freely enough to attend two schools. It's a small thing but it would cause problems in theory.

BUT.

I will give credit to this: Luz is MUCH more compelling in this version. I think if there is something that is just unequivocally true, it's that. She is way less inoffensively nerdy, instead her interests being more upfront and troublesome, helping explain why that would be why she is rejected and not because, you know, she puts people in danger. Also her rise to power is just better.

Arguably, Luz in canon is a chosen one essentially from episode FOUR onwards. Now, this is up for debate but being given a power almost out of nowhere, with no training, that no one else has, is usually a sign of a chosen in a narrative. Episode 4 is when she gets the light glyph. She doesn't work for it, it's not a big character growth moment, etc. like that. She mostly just oops into it. Making it that Luz ACTUALLY has to work for her magic and the show actually has to explore how the magic works, making it so she has something to learn is just strictly better, especially for the concept of her learning to be a witch. Eda would actually be able to teach her something instead of shrugging and going "Welp, good luck!"

I will say that the bible does also lean more into an adventurous aspect though. This version of episodes would easily be more fantastical and include more magic in them which would help the Isles not feel so much like our realm. I will say the fact that there's also active anti-human prejudice also would be good because then Luz being human would, you know... Matter. Not that the Isles is really given a personality even here besides the oppression they're theoretically under. It's still a very generic fantasy setting.

A lot of the rest though? It's really not that unique or different from the show itself. Lilith is almost exactly the same, Tibbles is just Gus but a demon, there are slightly more restrictions on things like being human or magic but, you know, the show didn't care about its one law, why would it care about three? Even Amity, who does look better on here, is only because it's on paper. This is literally just Amity's pitch in S1 after all. All the reasons people loved Amity are here.

Conceptually it is fine but I am surprised about how not only this got picked up but also how it was greenlit so heavily as to get a pilot animatic, with voice acting, based on these concepts. There's just some very clear cleaning up that needs to be done, basic questions on its own setting and own logic that isn't even playing into the comedy/fantasy angles that could let you let it pass. It's not all of them or even the majority but a skeptical prereader could even raise these basic sorts of inconsistencies like the ones I brought up above. After all, this is half a season's worth of episodes pitched and a fifth of them are still going to Amity and more of them have Luz directly interacting with King than they do Eda.

There's a final thing I have to bring up due to it being why I think the show changed so drastically from this pitch bible to its final form: This is way more complicated. TOH already has extremely decompressed storytelling and too many elements working in tandem. Meanwhile, every character is MORE complicated in this one and less connected to each other, necessitating that each, except maybe Eda, will take more time to get through their stuff. The writing team either had to sharpen how much they could do in an episode or simplify and congregate elements. We see this a LOOOOT in S2A, especially Escaping Expulsion, where it seems the writers went "Even with three whole seasons planned, we don't have enough time to do everything we want to, the way we like to, so we need to start cutting and simplifying even more than before."

One example of this that's really easy: In the pitch bible, Willow is a random witch who lives near Eda. Well that means she'll likely either take time out of a couple episodes as she's introduced or take up an entire episode just for herself. Tibbles is also just on their own, like in the show. Introducing both of these characters is not really an option. However, put them both into Hexside and suddenly you can introduce three characters at the same time organically, like we saw with I Was a Teenage Abomination.

Luz just being gifted magic is another element to this. Her having to actually experiment for every spell and having to have a real system to her spells limits what she can do but also means spending a LOT more time on her magic. You can't just have a flower open up and give her the glyph of the day as easily, nor have her be able to throw her spells around as she wants. Making it so she just needs reams of paper and/or a marker makes it a lot easier and simpler to have her start casting magic.

This version of TOH would have SHATTERED under its own scope while the current version mostly bends and cracks from it. However, if people do use this to go "FUCK DISNEY EVEN HARDER!" I won't be surprised. Grand scope ALWAYS looks better on paper than it does in action. It sounds epic and multi-faceted and complex. The problem is that it still has to fit its format and it is MUCH harder to execute on than a more simple concept.

There's a reason the only perfect project is the one you never do because you can promise the world without ever having to deliver. So, while it's nice to see an earlier version, I am by no means going to say this would have been a better version of TOH.

======+++++======

Sorry for anyone hoping for a link to the pitch bible btw. I just don't have one as I got given it as a document.

I have a public Discord for any and all who want to join!

I also have an Amazon page for all of my original works in various forms of character focused romances from cute, teenage romance to erotica series of my past. I have an Ao3 for my fanfiction projects as well if that catches your fancy instead. If you want to hang out with me, I stream from time to time and love to chat with chat.

A Twitter you can follow too

And a Kofi if you like what I do and want to help out with the fact that disability doesn’t pay much.

[nin-carab-nidh-madt]

I have thought on Jadzia Dax from Star Trek Deep Space 9.

I'm currently rewatching the show (midway season 2), probably my 4th watch through over 8 years? My first time with slightly more youtube-essay-driven media analysis skills. I'm enjoying picking up on a lot more things than I used to but there's one thing that bugs me above all else.

Jadzia Dax doesn't really have a strongly defined character that shines through.

I've spent a while thinking about it. Obviously as a science officer its a little harder to tell stories the audience can understand and relate to compared to Odo's murder investigating or Sisko's exasperated diplomacy, but her stories have issues greater than that.

Both the stories centred on Dax, in season 1 where she stands trial for a crime supposedly committed by a former host, and in season 2 where someone tries to steal her symbiont, are about things that happen to Dax. Not the things Dax does. She is neither the perspective character through which we can see the world of Star Trek, with her own unique views and feelings, nor is she the one actively moving the plot forwards. She's either the victim who sacrifices herselr or quite literally refuses to do anything. Unfortunately this is quite a common failing of writing that's easy to fall into, writing about a character instead of the character making decisions that drive the plot. Its one that sci fi writing at the time seemed to do quite often with a lot (but not all) female characters. Ivanova and Talia from Babylon 5 fall victim to this too, especially in early seasons. In contrast, Major Kira, and even Ezri Dax later on have stronger characterisation and are the centre of their own stories.

I doubt this was intentional, its clear through the successes of writing other characters in the show that the writers, actors, and showrunners are trying to make everyone alive and meaningful, so what went wrong?

Looking at Jadzia Dax's character, I think what's clearly missing is a strong drive for her character. No real desires or vulnerabilities. No questions either. To provide constrasting examples:

Odo (who gets almost too much screen time in season 1) is clearly driven by a sense of justice no matter whatever starfleet rules say. He's in constant conflict with Quark, ever vigilant, somewhat isolated from other people. No one ever asks "Why does Odo do what he does?" His motivations are clear, and they even tie it up with an extra motive that's very plot relevant: the mystery of where he comes from. All things a single episode writer can use and explore.

Major Kira has her own conflict with starfleet, her desire to do right by her own people, to get justice for Bajor, and always stand up for the underdog which creates really good stories as she struggles with her own values and constantly has to make choices that affect the story.

Bashir wants acclaim, accomplishment, romance, and also for everyone to like him. Quark wants profit without putting himself at risk. O'Brien wants to just do his job and go home to his family. Sisko wants to hold everything together with the responsibility of peace and reason on his shoulders while singlehandedly raising his son. Jake wants community, friends, and freedom in his life. Funnily enough Ezri Dax has far better drive. Trying to figure out what she wants in life, handling this enormous change and overwhelming personality, and her own lack of confidence that she's useful to anyone sometimes. She grows and changes more over the course of a season than we ever see in early seasons Jadzia.

What does Jadzia Dax want?

I think in attempting to make a wise 300 year old person who's seen everything, they accidentally wrote themselves into a corner. Jadzia has no strong motivations to do much at all. She does fine as a secondary character, and I love how her friendship with Sisko plays out on screen, but beyond being surprisingly enlightened about a lot of things as the result of age and experience there's no drive there.

And so no drive or motivation, and no stories told from her perspective. We have ourselves a problem.

I thought for a while if I could find a solution to the issue rather than just offer criticism. I originally tried writing an outline for an episode. Jadzia would be a fantastic protagonist for any wacky sci fi short story concept that required a scientist to explore, such as time travel paradoxes, simulations, weird space anomolies that do "plot relevant thing" that she would be perfectly posed to actually explore instead of "technobabble and tap console" until the problem is solved.

Then I decided that all we really needed to have a framework any writer could use is to establish a strong character motivation for her. Here's my shot at it.

Jadzia Dax, in harmony with seven lifetimes of experience, is an extremely competent twenty seven year old woman. She can almost certainly do the job of anyone on the station better than they can. Fix a computer? Better than O'Brien can. First aid? She's there and solved the issue before Julian can get there. Solve a murder? A past host was an invesigator of course she can to Odo's chagrin. She has better ideas of what Sisko can do to bring the Bajorans towards the federation. Hell she's the best representative of federation values on that station and could constantly be presenting that of the story.

Dax struggles to hold herself back when she sees her friends failing at what she can solve the problem for them. She tries not to, that's what her training tells her to do. But out here on the edge of Federation space where there's constantly lives on the line? She finds herself interfering in other people's work more and more often. She just doesn't want it do be done wrong. She pushes herself hard to do too many jobs. She doesn't sleep or eat enough while telling everyone else to take care of themselves better. After a while people start relying on her. It turns from her helping to her having those responsibilities. Pilot. Diplomat. Linguist. Researcher. Mechanic. Leader. So much emotional support for her friends because everything they're suffering she's been through herself. It becomes too much for her and you could make the core of one story her just crashing. Learning how to balance her experience with giving room to other to shine through and solve their own problems, which they're very capable of doing. There's plenty more detail to elaborate on but I think this gives a core drive and conflict that lasts a character a couple of seasons at least to explore and grow through.

I happily invite thoughts as to whether my original observations are astute, or wether you think there aren't any problems with how Jadzia's passivity plays out in the show. If you think there are problems, do you think my perscribed solution helps fix them? How would you go about it?

[princess-of-the-corner]

Was musing on the "Aware of Abuse" AU for the Sad Rich Kids Trio and ho it influences their behavior, or how their perspective has shifted, from least to most detailed:

Adrien: He is not overtly super different, in canon he was already expressing frustration with his father and ducking out from under his control to do what he wanted.

The main shift is rooted in his perspective. Namely that if his father does love him (Doubt) then his love is so toxic Adrien wants no part of it. He deems any concession Gabriel makes suspicious at best and deems any lingering affection on his own part as a childish thing he needs to outgrow.

Beyond that he's simply more blunt, he doesn't make excuses for his father and is a bit more aware of how the other kids parenting sucks. This ironically may actually make it harder for he & Marinette as she'd struggle to see what was wrong early on and presume him kind of a brat or rude for disrespecting his father so much.

Kagami: As one might expect given how heavily controlling and authoritive Tomoe is, Kagami has very little wiggle room to openly defy her or act differently without risking being trapped or extremely harsh punishment,

As a result the shift is more in subtle things and how she communicates and views the relationship. Namely, she does not love her mother and only pays lip service to respecting anything other than her material skills as a combatant. She also feels that given what her mother does to her is largely indistinguishable from hatred (The physical nature of sparring sessions & training are deeply unpleasant) that Tomoe's feelings don't matter.

Thus she's more overt around others in her disregard for her mother and already prone to trying to sneak off or undercut her. She has burner phones and secret social media accounts for example. In this regard she likely does not become Riposte.

Instead her emotions would be mostly fear of her mothers reaction & anger at the situation and what this costs her in general. Thus she likely turns into something intent on seeking her mother out and attacking her, or otherwise trying to force her mother into her shoes. I had a name for this I think, Aku-Gami? Anyway its basically a signal flare to Adrien & Chloe of "One of us! One of us! One of us!"

Chloe: Like with Adrien her shift would be fairly recent. Mostly in response to the clusterfuck handling of Adrien after Emilie's disappearance & her parents being their worst selves about it. She was on her last thread from keeping Adrien's head above water then being booted and so she explodes at her mother over the phone & rejects her father out of anything but necessity. After which she doubles down because she can't un-dig this hole but she can sure as fuck make it big enough to engulf them all.

Put simply, Chloe's ingrained "Fight" mentality has now been turned on her parents in full. She'd still struggle to articulate most of the things they did wrong, or why they were wrong. But she is angry, rebellious and good at lashing out so she does that and only concedes when she has no other choice or legitimately terrified.

Despite this her changes are less overt, her fight mentality is a survival mechanism like Adrien's people pleasing so she can't just turn it off. She's still been actively taught a lot of terrible things like its moral to cheat to win, & un-learning that is hard, especially if doing so makes you feel weak. & She's been mimicking Audrey since forever, that doesn't just go away over night.

At the same time though she has more freedom than the others & any overt issues she can identify she can try to address for good & ill. Her dad thinks she shouldn't hang around with people "beneath her station" Well screw that she's throwing a party in the ballroom for the class/school before the new school year starts & Adrien can come too.

This likely means she doesn't rip up Rose's letter cos that was like, peak Audrey. She might be tempted to do the social media thing with Kim cos that is something someone might do, but she'd also be more able to apologize for it. She may indeed still lock Juleka in the bathroom, unless they are like, actively friendly at this point.

A lot depends on how well her shifts in behavior are taken by the class as she's not gonna suddenly be super self aware or easy to get along with in many regards. Though given S1 still had Kim get a crush on her & Rose trust her with a letter, I tend to feel it makes more sense that not everyone had a bad impression of Chloe going into the year. So it'd vary.

Regardless, Chloe would be both the most extreme in shift, while keeping a lot of thorns. But she'd be more open to changing in general if able to contextualize a negative reaction as tied to something her parents would do, letting her aggressively reject it. If she feels 'she' was in the right though, she'd not shift her behavior at all but dig in deeper.

Fucking hell I do go on don't I?

Oh I love all of this though!!

[inkskinned]

in internet posts it is easy to cut them out of your life. they are hurting you! they aren't listening to you!

they held your hair back. they lent you lipstick. they held your hand at the train station and got you home safe. they rounded on your bully, got loud, said get fucked, spitting-mad in your defense.

they also cut the hair off again. told you that you should really think twice before wearing something like that. took you for granted. took your insecurities and threw them in your face again.

you know logically it should be easy. all the internet advice comments always read it will feel better. like an equation - if a person is rotten, you just remove them. you pull the tooth that's hurting.

but it was never a big flare-up moment. you don't live in a sitcom. they never tried to take your boyfriend or steal from your apartment. they showed up to birthdays and they wrote songs about you and bring you water without you asking. once you found out they carry an emergency inhaler for you, even though you haven't had an asthma attack in years - just in case.

where is the line? people fuck up. sometimes they fuck up badly. sometimes people have raw personalities, like a powerline, and being around them is dangerous. addicting. sometimes they can't help themselves, but you know they're trying. sometimes they are just rough-around-the-edges. sometimes they don't even realize how they sounded when they said that. sometimes it's just - you've both loved each other for so long now, the way this thing hurts goes back to the root.

and that's the fucked up part. you have pushed your fingers against the sweetheart of memory. things these days are electric, tense, harrowing. they didn't used to be. there were a lot of good days in there. sometimes you want to just close your eyes and say can this be over yet? do we still need to be fighting?

doing that would give up any chance you get of getting an apology, but you don't always know that you need an apology, you love them. once they flaked on your birthday party. once they told you to get over it, people are always dying. they also let you crash on their couch for a week after the breakup, handfeeding you when you were so sad you couldn't eat. they are also judgmental about everything, occasionally react to banal statements with an attitude that is weird and fiery. they also love you like a lighthouse sometimes, so strong they cut the storm like lightning.

but the problem is that you might be storm. you might be the thing that needs breaking. what if you are two forces who are desperately, horribly drawn to each other, shaped by the other person's passions, and both good for each other and bad in equal measure.

what if you're both just people, and you're no saint neither.

just cut them off! swallowing the saltwater, you catch yourself in the mirror. you've been shaking more than usual. there's an ache in you that is oblique, loud, impossible to soothe. is this what it looks like? when life is "easier"?

your mouth will always have a hole, is the thing, if you remove the tooth.

[hoofpeet]

I'd probably have to read the printed version and web version back to back at some point to note all the differences but... ough

[transmascutena]

thinking about how akio sees his younger self in utena and wondering if there's any fondness there. doesn't change the horror of what he does to her obviously but i do wonder