#anyway I was dumb and not very introspective

[yonderbeasts]

I realized I was pan in college when we were eating dinner in the dining hall and someone in my friend group asked "would you have sex with your clone?" and the answers ranged from "eww no" to "yeah but only once and I'd look away" and I said "hell yeah that'd be so hot" and someone clarified "but your clone would be female" and I was like "yeah, that's fucking awesome, girls are hot" and everyone just cocked their head to the side with concern like girl... You ain't straight

[moonreader1010]

Pac- how you'll meet your future spouse and some details about them.

Note- minors dni as this reading is very suggestive.

(the pictures used do not belong to me. All rights go to the original owner.)

Pile 1. Pile 2.

Pile 3^

Pile 1: "I'm thinking 'bout you (Ooh no, no, no)

I've been thinking 'bout you (You know, know, know)

I've been thinking 'bout you

Do you think about me still? Do ya, do ya?"

So much water and earth energy omg. You might meet your future spouse in the months of November, July or February. Okay so You might meet your future spouse in a setting that combines both professional and personal growth. Like it will be a setting that combines these two worlds. Office party or something yk. Also I'm really getting that your future spouse will be someone who is really emotionally intuitive and sensitive, could be younger or just youthful in spirit. Despite this young energy they will be very confident, authoritative, and passionate. So yeah you fs might catwalk into your life through a work or financial environment. I also feel that there will be prominent themes of diligence and effort when you meet them. And omggggg your family is gonna LOVE your future spouse. Lol. Your relationship with your future spouse will be very joyful and yk they will feel so fulfilled when they get into a relationship with you. They'll definitely care for you. Very very caring. Alsoooooo this relationship will definitely DEFINITELY align with your ideals and your standards. However, past heartaches or challenges may need to be addressed. Don't let them come between your relationship with your future spouse and listen listennnn it's essential to take time for rest and introspection to heal and prepare for this significant connection because it will be soooooo amazing for you.

Additionally you may encounter this person during a period of personal growth and self-improvement, possibly when you are focused on building your career or finances(get that money bby). They will also be someone who balances practicality with a deep emotional connection. You get me? Like they might seem like someone who is solely focused on practical things but boom suddenly they will surprise you with their emotional maturity. And girllllllll that person is gonna support your aspirations!!!!!!!! Also, they will definitely share your visions. You two will have very similar goals.

Additional- late night drives, play fight, water bodies

Song for you- thinkin about you by Frank Ocean

Pile 2: "They say I'm too young to love you

They say I'm too dumb to see

They judge me like a picture book

By the colors, like they forgot to read

I think we're like fire and water

I think we're like the wind and sea

You're burnin' up, I'm coolin' down

You're up, I'm down"

Okay so the cards kept going EVERYWHERE! Anyway, Meeting your future spouse could be a chaotic journey. It will require you to be courageous and putting on the big boy/girl pants. Your connection is so soooo intense and to understand it you'll require great emotional depth. Andddddddd your fs is soooo Charming? Like for what? Lol. Very charming. Very romantic and dudeeeeee the passion in your relationship will be just chef's kiss. Mwah fr. And passionate in many ways(👀 if you know what I mean). Literally everything your spouse does reflects soooo sooooo much passion. They could very much be physically strong yk. Great physical strength for sure. and wow such a dynamic presence. They could be a water sign or have their moon in 8th house. They will definitely have a really strong sense of intuition so yeah nobody can deceive them. Your future spouse is a legit human lie director. Haha. And your future spouse has this aura around them. Like this air of mystery and they will be so wise!!!!. Andddddddd Your relationship will be marked by a balance of power and mutual respect. Your future spouse will respect you so muchhhh. Such a gentleman. I'm sooooo sure that BOTH of you possess high charismatic energy. Awwwwww. Your connection will be so nurturing, abundant, and full of hope and inspiration. You'll be their muse 😤

Omg girl? you may encounter your future spouse during a time of inner reflection(start journaling bby) or when faced with a difficult decision.and your future spouse will be the one that'll help you find some clarity about that situation. They'll complete you. awwwwww. A very spiritual connection. Heavy themes of inspiration. You two will inspire eachother so much.

Additional- art, Greek, body paint, suits

Song for you - Brooklyn baby by Lana del rey

Pile 3:"Cross my heart, hope to die

To my lover, I'd never lie

He said, "Be true", I swear I'll try

In the end, it's him and I

He's out his head, I'm out my mind

We got that love, the crazy kind

I am his, and he is mine

In the end, it's him and I, him and I"

Very veryyyy clear and straightforward energy. Some of you might meet your future spouse soon or have already met them (👀). And you guys will be sooo quick to know that they are the one. Some of you will get married quickly too. You guys will be so eager to go on your honeymoon lol. Like chill guys. Won't be able to keep your hands off each other. Meeting your future spouse will be an exciting and stimulating (what could that mean👀)experience. And girl your person will be sharp-witted. Like they will have a comeback for EVERYTHING. So sassy omg. But they will also be curious. Like they would be continuously learning something new and will be soooo soooo ready to know everything about you. Obsessed with you. You guys will try a lot of things together (👀). you guys will celebrate a lottttt. Idk why but so sooo many celebrations are there in your relationship. One of you will have an amazing social life. Bby, you may meet your future spouse through social gatherings or community events(interesting). They will be soooooo smart and intellectual. You will LOVE having a conversation with them. Not at all boring. They will make your life more ..... adventurous. One of you(i think you) worries sooooo much and worries all. The. Time. And this other person in the relationship (i think your spouse) will help you deal with it and overcome it.

Additional- bodyguard au, cupcakes, books, anxiety.

Song for you - him&i by halsey and G-Easy

[crumblinggothicarchitecture]

It's Bothering me so much that Taylor Swift is so fake smart-girl coded, I need to say this:

I have a degree in both Philosophy and English Literature....

She used the term Soliloquy wrong in her song by using it to refer to people espousing nonsense while complaining in an echo-chamber about her.

Instead, a soliloquy is the most honest and introspective a character will ever be. Often the character will stand to the front center of the stage and, as if in a dream, speak openly to themselves (and in respect to the audience) lay out the truth, or the agony of whichever conflict haunts the plot. So, anyway she's just plain wrong in her usage of the term.

I am not giving a sanctimonious soliloquy. Miss Taylor Swift, you are wrong, and I am speaking honestly.

She finishes the lyric "sanctimoniously performing soliloquies I'll never see" and I just want to mention that a soliloquy requires an audience... so she does not know what she is talking about by saying that there is no audience for a soliloquy.

Also, for the record, I don't think Taylor Swift knows anything of substance about Aristotle. I, on the other hand, took a three-hour long oral exam over Aristotle's life work while out-of-my-mind-high on Dayquil and pain meds after a surgery. I got an "A", and, somehow, I lived through that, I doubt the validity of Swift's claims to know anything at all about philosophy. Especially, considering how all her songs are about as deep as a puddle.

She's completely lost her credibility.

The woman did not even finish High School in a traditional, well-rounded way. I think she read a handful of Joe's books and now thinks real highly of herself.

Edit: I don't mean to make fun of her for being dumb. I'm frustrated that she's "stepping on my lawn" and making her legion of fans think that she totally knows what she's talking about when it comes to literary references in her work or philosophy. It's obvious that she does not actually understand the concepts she attempts to engage with.

Her only real literary skill is name dropping actually talented writers or philosophers in her songs.

Edit 2: Since some people want to come on this post and tell me that I am being needlessly pedantic about her use of words. Go away. A soliloquy is an ancient literary form, one which transcends cultures and centuries, and I, as a scholar of English Literature, am in the position to say that Swift is speaking about the form incorrectly. She obviously did not even google the form, it's clear she has very little real acquaintance with half the literature concept or authors she names drops.

Sure, soliloquies can be unreliable (Hamlet's "To Be, or not to be" is the most obvious example). However, the fact of the matter is that soliloquy hinges on the Honesty of the character. Swift writing that it's actually the opposite of honesty proves to me that she has no real idea about the literary form.

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

Hello from the other side of the world. Could you share a little about hiraeth? It's okay if not, I know you said it was hard to explain, but I'm guessing the Wikipedia article is, ah, very simplistic.

What was the feeling that made it silent like a church? Introspection? Was it because of the specific music of tha song, or is the subject of hiraeth always this impactful?

Sorry if this is dumb or insensitive or something, I really know next to nothing about Welsh culture (my country wasn't even invaded by the British Empire, if you can believe it), but that part of the story really stood out to me, and the way you explained it so casually to your friend and he seems to have just understood makes me feel like I'm missing a very big piece of context.

Anyway, thanks for sharing your adventures and shenanigans with us, and it's okay if this is too complicated for right now.

The number of places Britain didn't try to colonise is so low that makes you a unicorn, I think. Congrats!

Happy to explain though, no worries. Part of it is the song itself, which is worth a listen to get the vibe; I do mean a bit of a hush fell over the moderately busy restaurant. It's got hella vibes.

But yes, hiraeth is a very important concept in Welsh. The best translation is 'homesickness', or maybe 'yearning', but it's more complex and nuanced than that. Sort of hard to explain. I've seen it used to describe the urge Welsh people get, when they've been away from Wales for too long, to reconnect; to journey back and climb a mountain and look down into the valley and let your soul heal. I've seen it described as the feeling of bone-deep belonging, the sense of coming home that some people feel who visit Wales for the first time, and find it speaks to them. The land reaching out for the soul, the mountains into the mind. That's hiraeth.

(There's a poem that turns up on Welsh tourist tea towels a lot, no idea where from, but it sums it up as: "To be born Welsh is to be born privileged. Not with a silver spoon in your mouth, but with music in your blood and poetry in your soul.")

I've also seen it described in internet memes as "longing for a home you can never return to", which in typical Anglophone fashion, is almost right while fundamentally misunderstanding and stripping away the most important part. Because it's the longing for a Wales we can never return to. The version of our past, without English occupation, that can never exist again. Thanks to Wales having had a fairly complex cultural and historical makeup, we were not unified as a single country until after English occupation; plenty of unified elements existed before that (uniting under a dragon to drive out the invading Saxons, for example), but not what in the modern day we'd understand as a country. But we ARE a country now; so it's a sort of shared dream. The country we could have been, should have been, can never be. The lost version of us.

That's hiraeth. It's all hiraeth. And it's all specifically Wales.

[aritany]

what's the origin story for dgdss? if you don't mind 🥺

oho! well. as it happens, i love telling this story.

if you want to know how my childhood best friend writing a short story about me ended up leading to me getting a big 5 book deal, read on.

tw for reference to self harm and some...... unpleasant commentary (not mine) about it later on, folks.

so.

i was homeschooled until my very last year of high school (yes, like mean girls, except my mean girl dominated the first 15 years of my life and that last year was just blissfully chill) and like many homeschooled children, i was a part of a co-op.

cool, right? it's like School Lite™ where you put a group of feral children in a classroom, except you're all varying ages and grade levels, and also, nobody in the room is an accredited teacher, and nobody seems to have an issue with this.

my mom and her mom were best friends, and we were born around the same time, so naturally, we were best friends too from birth, and we were part of the same co-op all through my elementary and junior high school years.

anyway. i won't air all of the dirty laundry regarding our early friendship, because the whole book deal thing doesn't touch it, and i also think there's no need to be pointing out the behaviour of an Actual Child in retrospect. all you need to know is that we were best friends, our relationship was fraught, and by the time we hit 12-13 it was to the degree that people started telling me, hey man, this is Very Strange Behaviour and You Might Be A Victim, and i had to go do some introspection.

the introspection led to the general conclusion oh shit, but we stayed friends, because obviously. when you're 13, breaking up with a best friend is literally The End of the world, and anyway, there was a lot of good in there too, right?

right?

anyway, things took a turn when we were about 14. i struggled heavily with mental illness and self harm as a closeted religious teenager (who'da thunk?) and i confided in her about a small fraction of what was going on, because she was my best friend. i didn't tell her details, because even then i knew what i was experiencing was heavier than was probably appropriate to burden another kid with (and i stand by it!), but she knew the gist.

several Tense moments resulted, one of which was the day she pointed out self harm scarring in front of other people and asked me what happened, ran away, and refused to talk further about it, so i had to talk to her mom, who told me i should apologize to her, considering my mental health struggle had been so difficult... for her.

yeah, you know the type of people we're dealing with, here.

she was determined to undermine me in front of our mutual friends. anything to make me look worse, in one way or another. anything to step just a little higher. if i was interested in something, here's a public dissertation on why it's a dumb thing to be interested in. if i had a crush, forget keeping it a secret, and forget the notion that it's normal, because it's not, it's stupid, and shallow to have a crush in the first place. if we had a similar interest, here's a dressing down about how all i ever do is steal the things she likes (even if i liked them first).

needless to say, by the time the whole deal with the short story is going down a few short years later, we're on the rocks.

let me set the scene. we hadn't seen each other in several months, due to the On The Rocks of it all, and were meeting up for coffee while our moms were also getting coffee. hashtag classic homeschooled behavior, etc.

we're catching up, and she tells me she needs to apologize for something. i am, as you might imagine, agog, considering the rarity of apologies from this girl. she tells me she wrote a short story and submitted it to her university journal to be published, and that in hindsight she thinks she should have asked for my permission first.

i am, obviously, suspicious. to her credit, she gives it to me to read through and then leaves to go do christmas shopping. it's a muddy-ish faux-deep piece about a narrator who has a best friend struggling with mental illness and self harm.

(oh, you might say. to which i say, yeeeeah.)

in the story, the narrator depicts the struggle of trying to care about somebody who is in pain, referring to the best friend as 'cariad' the whole way through, which is just so weird i'm not even going to touch on it. google it if you'd like. the line that i still remember (and will probably remember until the day i die) is the one where she describes her cariad as feeling the need to use a razor as a microphone.

i honestly don't recall what i said when she eventually came back, but i contained all of the aggression of a piece of pocket lint at the time, so i imagine it was along the lines of oh. yeah, okay. [insert image of the saddest wettest cat you've ever seen]

i never saw her again. we went our separate ways, and that was that. we never talked about it.

(the one upside of it was that my mom, with whom i have a Notoriously Contentious relationship, was outraged on my behalf. that was the first (in many years) and last (ever) time we were on the same side of a battle, so, you know. silver linings.)

but the real indignity of it to me was that my friend never really knew. i never really told her about what was happening in my head. she never knew why i was hurting myself, or how bad it got, because i did everything i could to keep that to myself, and at the end of the day, she thought it was all for attention to the degree she wrote a transparently biographical account of it and chose razor as a microphone as a phrase on purpose.

dead girls started as a way to process the complicated feelings i had about that friendship and then obviously ultimately became a whole different creature in the process. i wanted to write about how it felt to go through that never having had another close friendship to compare it to, and how confusing and nauseating it was to have other people point out shitty behaviour.

it became about healing when you can't get closure. how do you move on when you'll never know why somebody hurt you?

nothing that happens in the book is based on real life events between us, partly because i'm not a hypocrite, and partly because if your work can be traced back to your personal experiences, perhaps you should do what you can to be kind.

'my julia,' as i like to call her (she is not named julia, because, oh my god) is nothing like julia hoskins in appearance or general personality. but the way she made me feel? oh, that's all there. nora feels it the way i felt it.

i wrote dead girls back in 2020, and got agented with it in 3 weeks of sending my first query. we got a book deal for it with a penguin random house imprint 1 year later to the day, and next week it's going to be out in the world, and i'm not going to lie, it feels really damn good.

also, her short story got rejected by her university, because it was bad. so you might lose some, but you win some, too.

[minecraft]

I think the worst thing that romance-centric media as a genre has concocted (which has mistakenly been adopted by a sizable portion of people as something applicable to real life) isn't the concept of soulmates...

...or love triangle drama or even promulgating hetero-normativity etc but is instead a more subtle fantasy that (people you're attracted to) always have these deep meaningful poignant introspective inner lives full of beautiful witticisms and reflections on philosophy etc etc when in reality at least 9/10 times a person's mental state is very simply occupied by base primal things such as being stressed or hungry or too hot or thinking about some dumb shit like why orange the color shares its name with the fruit but we have different names for the colors of lemons and limes. so yeah anyways my point is basically most people's brainspace is equivalent to a plain boring indoor hallway and not some sort of secret cavern full of glowing flowers and otome/romantic-centric media sells people on these fancy-schmancy versions of people with deep and detailed/complex inner thoughts which are ultimately artificial and not found in the real world outside people who genuinely have something wrong with them or are actively competing with/trying to live upto the standards set by fictional characters.

[blackjackkent]

Character Ask!

Tell me about Rasaad, so I can get to know him better.

(Character questions meme)

How I feel about this character

Eyyyyy, my boy Rasaad. <3 Another one of my favorites.

I love Rasaad a lot. Like many great characters, he means well and the ways he goes about approaching his goals are often deeply flawed.

His overall initial presentation is of a fairly stoic, fairly self-controlled, fairly introspective monk focused on spreading the light of Selune to the masses. Most of that is a thin veneer for a man who has been terribly hurt and whose primary motivation is vengeance on someone who keeps slipping out of his grasp - and, as a result, comes close to losing a lot of other things that are important to him.

There is a lot of natural darkness and hotheaded anger in Rasaad but he struggles towards the light anyway, which is always a fascinating dynamic in my opinion.

He's also the reason I made Hector a Selunite monk. XD Although he is not very much like Hector, ultimately.

All the people I ship romantically with this character

Jaheira! \o/ I will shut up about this never bc people keep encouraging me. :P

Also Gorion's Ward if you happen to play it that way. I haven't done a playthrough with his romance (and probably won't at this point) but it is a fun little mess of a relationship. Rasaad handles nothing well about it at all. XD

My non-romantic OTP for this character

Minsc! And Khalid! In my "canon" worldstate, he and Caden and Minsc and Khalid were a really tight buddy foursome and got up to Hijinks together. (This was my favorite moment of that, although it was before Khalid showed up in Siege. XD )

My unpopular opinion about this character

I'm not entirely sure enough people talk much about Rasaad for any of my takes to be very hot. :P

I think he's good of heart and dumb of ass; he makes a lot of decisions that are based on emotion and they come to bite him in the butt. I do not, however, think that the Sun Soul is justified in their opinions of him - they end up accusing him of murder of his fellow monks based on incredibly flimsy evidence. (The fic I'm working on is going to end up positing a reason for this, because it bothers me. :P )

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon.

ALORGOTH NEEDS TO BE SIX FEET UNDER. [foams at the mouth]

Alorgoth is the evil Sharran who faked the death of Rasaad's brother and instead converted him to Shar, revenge for which is Rasaad's primary motivation across the series. He's also responsible for the aforementioned murder rap that Rasaad gets framed for.

He does not, however, actually end up dead at the end of Rasaad's questline - due to (I'm told) copyright issues with him being a WotC character, he turns out to be ALIVE in all of Rasaad's possible epilogues, and in all of those epilogues (EVEN THE HAPPY ONE) he ends up finding Rasaad and killing him instead.

This is the reason Open Your Eyes exists, because all of Rasaad's endings are stupid and I've elected to ignore them.

Fuck Alorgoth. >:(

[fanterfane]

The State of FanterFane, Now in ADHD!~

HEY YA'LL!

That's something I do now I guess, I say "YA'LL"! Either way, It's time for the first status update since the BIG ONE earlier this year. If you don't remember it or you're new, firstly, welcome, secondly, you can read it here: https://www.deviantart.com/fanterfane/journal/The-State-of-FanterFane-950469980. A lot of what I said here I'm still struggling with, and probably always will be, so it's still relevant. I've been told that several people have been recommended that post by Patreon because of it's high engagement, so I feel especial need to give the algorithm something better to serve. Also, this post is mainly about my struggles with ADHD, but it has other things and status updates sprinkled throughout. If you or someone you know has ADHD, I hope this helps!

For the sake of brevity though, I'll do a TL:DR right here. I developed carpal tunnel two months ago, and I've been working on treating it. It's been going pretty good lately, especially now that I finally have gotten my hands on ADHD medication after my long time lack thereof. As such, I've become much more productive and much, much happier! Things are looking up for me, and I'm hopeful for the future! Social acceptance for who I am now is still sometimes rough, but going better. SFW commissions have done wonders for my mental health, and I have plans for new art projects, commission queues, and more to try and do. I hope that you'll all continue to be the thing I get up for in the morning as I work to accomplish them! I'll be going on vacation next week, and I hope you all have a great summer!

Now for the super long part I don't fault anyone for NOT reading, here we go!

Earlier this year, it felt like I was spiraling down an unrecoverable path. Things I tried to do just wouldn't materialize. I would identify a problem like "My car is dirty" or "My room is messy" or even just "I should read and respond to this DM" and instead of working to solve it my anxiety would start up and make it so that I put it off. What if I messed it up? I was always so tired too, I just felt emotionless whenever I didn't feel sad. What if I just didn't deserve it anyway? What if all of this is a mistake? Those sorts of questions would plague me no matter what, preventing me from solving the very things giving me anxiety spiraling into even more anxiety. It was dumb, but mental health quite often is. It was getting so bad, that writing dialog and even just reading things started feeling like an anxiety induced dyslexic impossibility. For the longest time I assumed it was just depression, and that it would get better with time, but it hasn't over the years. Instead, it's only gotten worse year over year.

Now, I always get a little bit depressed every winter. Seasonal depression gets me down every year without fail, but this year was quite a bit more intense. The struggle between the two lives I live was really getting to me. I'd been doing ever more and more introspection, and discovering all the ways the way I was raised screwed me up definitely didn't help. Repressed memories often have a reason for being repressed. It doesn't help when the people you want to love you the most are the least supportive in your life, and might have even been partly the cause of some of your more unhealthy tendencies. Regardless of their intentions.

A big part of this issue though, I think at least, is that I've been unmedicated for my ADHD since High School. I stopped taking it as a Sophomore because I felt like I was smart enough to pass school without it, and that it wasn't helping me. The stigma against stimulants and medication in general was a big part of that decision. I was not self-aware enough at the time to realize that almost immediately my attention started suffering. It started slowly, too slowly for me to realize it at the moment, but gradually it became harder and harder to pay attention to class work over the years. It got so bad that in order for me to NOT fall asleep during class, I'd doodle on my classwork cause it kept me stimulated enough to stay awake. I'd always made good grades though, so I coasted through highschool on information osmosis and went on to community college, where it really started to catch up with me. Although again, I didn't realize it.

In community college, I had a couple of bad classes that really jarred me. Physics and Calculus. Physics was hard because the teacher was bad at teaching it, and 75% of that class failed the final, so I don't feel very bad about it. But the calculus class though, was the first time I'd ever felt like I'd failed myself in a class. No matter how hard I tried I couldn't understand the derivatives they tried to teach me. I passed, barely, but that was one of the times where I think my ADHD caught up to me, even if I didn't realize it. It wasn't much, but it was definitely a sign of things to come.

Once I got out of community college, I took a gap year between it and a longer stay at a university. During that time, I started trying to work on art more and more as a hobby. I started drawing possession, corruption, femboys, all that sorta  wonderful stuff. Then Covid hit. My gap year turned to two, and suddenly that was long enough for me to have started an actual *career* doing this. Which was beyond crazy to me. It motivated me to no end, I wanted nothing more than to create and have fun creating for all my followers.

In the end though, my ADHD caught up to me. Like it always does. Once the initial honeymoon phase was over, and I settled into the hum and drum of being an online digital artist, it reared its head again.

You see, ADHD is not something that goes away. You may not think about it, but it's always there. ADHD, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, potentially being renamed soon to the ASD spectrum, is a mental disorder affecting the brain's dopamine pathway. People with ADHD struggle because they have less dopamine for everything than most other people do. This either leads to hyperactivity, because you need to do MORE to feel the normal amount of reward chemical (how I was when I was younger). Or it leads to Inattention, because nothing you do feels rewarded or worthwhile (how I am now). There's just physically not enough dopamine being released in my brain for it to function properly most of the time. That's why ADHD is treated with stimulants like Adderall or Vyvanse, because they stimulate the release of more dopamine in the pathways. Making everything feel *right*. My symptoms may have changed over the years through things like masking and other stuff, but I realized recently that it never went away.

At the end of last year, I started watching ADHD Youtube videos that were recommended to me by my friends who also have ADHD. Lo and behold, a lot of what I was struggling with was the poster child of adulthood with ADHD. Anxiety, inability to do basic tasks, procrastination, lack of motivation, etc etc. I was especially hit hard by the concept of "Executive Dysfunction". Executive dysfunction, common with ADHD, impairs planning, task prioritization, memory, execution, and emotional regulation. All things I've been struggling with for years to various extents. Also things that got worse whenever I was depressed.

Naturally, the first thing someone might do to solve this, is get treated/medicated. So that's what I tried. I enrolled in a private health care plan (self-employment doesn't get healthcare through their employer, GO USA) just to find out that it was in the middle of a ADHD medication shortage. I was eligible to get approved for VyVanse, the meds I took when I was a kid, because they were 500$ a bottle. My insurance was 250$ a month. So they denied it, citing that I "Haven't tried the other medications." The ones that I tried getting, Adderall and a couple other ones, were never in stock. Even my friends who already had medication started being unable to get any at all. It was around that time that I made The State of FanterFane post, because this really hit me hard. I'd done everything I was supposed to, but the world still shot me down for it.

Then, on top of everything else, I developed Carpal Tunnel. Which screwed me up even more mentally and physically. Suddenly, even when I WAS motivated (which was getting rarer and rarer) I couldn't even draw then because my wrist was constantly in pain. It really started feeling like things really were unsalvageable. I truly felt without hope for the first time since college, and before that high school. Like everything I had done up to that point was pointless, and only resulted in me sacrificing my health for something that would've never worked out.

...Until the first week of this month, June 2023. When one of my friends was able to get their hands on Adderall again, signaling the end of the shortage. I immediately took my prescription to my local pharmacy, and got my first ever bottle of Adderall XR. I had high hopes for what it would do for me, but the thing I didn't expect was for me to regain hope.

The next day, I took my first dose and proceeded to start deep cleaning and rearranging my entire room. I did laundry, folded clothes, wiped away dust EVERYWHERE, organized my belongings and important files for the first time EVER, unpacked moving boxes that hadn't moved in 2 years and much, much more! Essentially, I turned my entire room upside down over the course of a week. I can't really put into words just how liberating it felt, how finally being able to just see a problem, and then solve it immediately without any anxiety or self-doubt changed *everything*. Even better, every task completed was less anxiety to affect me whenever I felt down or depressed. I can't hate myself for having a messy room when it's so clean, it's literally *rearranged* after all!

To put it simply, it felt like my brain was *working again*. For the first time in literal YEARS. Once I was done cleaning, I moved onto working on art, posting, responding to messages and sorting personal files. These past three weeks have been three of the most productive weeks I've had in a very long time. I feel like I've not been this productive since the initial honeymoon phase of Dullahan Dilemma and the Attenborough collection (callback!). All the while, I got better at treating my carpal tunnel, to the point where it's not constantly pins and needling me anymore, and it even feels just generally better all the time! I've been getting better and better at doing various tasks, and I believe I'm truly on the road to recovery now.

Things from here are looking up! Genuinely! I wouldn't be here either if it wasn't for all of you kind people supporting me, even through the toughest times. I'm beyond grateful for that. I'd worship the ground you all walk on if I could. Without ya'll, I would not be here today. Forgive me for taking on a somewhat political tone, but I have no idea who I'd even be at this point without all of you, and all of my wonderful friends that I’ve met while doing this. Perhaps I'd have fallen deeper into the alt-right pipeline as a disenfranchised southern white guy. Becoming more homophobic and repressing my inner self even more than I already had been my entire life due to my upbringing. That was the only place I felt like I could fit into the conservative worldview my folks raised me in, after all. Maybe I would've gone back to school for a degree I couldn't use and in debt, landing in a terrible corporate job that didn't care for me. At least I would've got health insurance then, but also maybe all of my health problems would've gotten worse and worse and never got better, since I never would've had the motivation to fix them by working out, losing weight, and watching my diet. I honestly don't know, and thinking too deeply about the "what-ifs'' of it is pointless.

But now, what I can say is that when all the anxiety clears and the depression abates, I'm truly happy. For the first time in my life, I feel like I actually have an identity. Like my emotions actually do matter and that I'm not just some soulless machine whose only goal in life is to make money. I'm a human being. Although I may not be created in God's image, I have thoughts, feelings, and most importantly, flaws. I'm gay/bisexual, I'm not very masculine nor do I desire to be so, I like having long hair, and I like doing more effeminate things that most guys in the crowd I was falling into would balk at and blame on chemicals in the water. In other words, I feel healthier than ever. Mentally AND physically. I thank all of you, each and every single one, for staying with me throughout all of this. If any of you ever feel like you wanna reach out, especially if I can help you in some comparatively small way, please do. My DMs are always open, it's the LEAST I can do.

Some other things I should touch on- I've gotten a lot of surprising support for my transition from my extended family and friends. The closest is still the most difficult, I can't get my nails painted for instance, I was told not to when I asked, much to my chagrin. I've got a pride bracelet I've been wearing around, and no one has said anything about it, so that's good I suppose. Fox news still blares on the television in the living room, even after all the stuff that's gone down with *that* channel in recent times. I've given up on trying to convince them otherwise. I’ve been discredited anyway because I draw "X-rated shit", that doesn't make enough money. Even though as far as most people my generation are faring financially, I'm doing pretty good!

The SFW commissions have been going fantastic! Especially on the mental health side of things. It's helped me realize that I do in fact, have options. I'm not trapped doing one thing forever, which is honestly the thing that was scaring me the most. Just like the threat of a soul-draining corporate job till the day I die. I don't have to worry about what I'll be doing in 10 years, because I think I've built enough support and especially self-taught skill that no matter what I do, I'll be okay. It's only up from here, and I've even been feeling the flame of passion returning for TF and other lewdness! So you can for sure expect to see much more of that over the next few years, no matter what!

Speaking of money though, I have more plans for the future now too. I'm gonna make more money by doing more commissions and creating more sources of revenue. Just so that I can afford to move out, and get away from this toxic environment I find myself in. The cheapest apartments where I live run for about 750$ a month, so I'm hoping to save up over the next year and move the hell out. I think I'll be able to afford it, provided there are no extraneous events that hurt me financially. I'll be trying things like more YCH's, sketch commission streams like the patreon request streams, art packs, and maybe even merch! Ya'll be the first to be notified about any of this. The first YCH auction will hopefully be this weekend! It will be based on Nyan Cat possession, and the MC will be trying to run away from the cringey 2000's era meme culture that haunts them to this day. Thing is, the past has a funny way of coming back to haunt you!~

Finally, I'm going on vacation next week to see some friends in LA! If you're someone I know/trust around the LA area, and you wanna meet up, let me know in DMs and we'll see if we can arrange it! I may take a further vacation the week after for rest, but after that we'll be back to regularly scheduled LEWDNESS work!

Thank you all from the bottom of my heart for coming with me and supporting me on this journey. Happy pride month, and I hope everyone has a great Summer! I love all of you! Here's to several more years of FanterFane!

XOXO,

FanterFane

[skrunksthatwunk]

HI IT'S SQUISHY fic ask game time:

F: Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

I: Do you have a guilty pleasure in fic (reading or writing)?

R: Are there any writers (fanfic or otherwise) you consider an influence?

X: A character you enjoy making suffer.

:3

YAHOO HI SQUISHY TY FOR THE ASK >:33

ok uhhhh uh uh

F: i think if i had to choose anything, it'd probably be the cat petting circle scene from and who do you think i'll be (without you)?, because i am. really really bad at juggling more than like 3 characters in a scene and this has FIVE and it's still really fun to read, at least for me. it's dynamic, though admittedly the attention still mostly falls on kuwabara and yusuke (sorry keiko </3 i wish you were more prominent in this one but alas) everyone carries some weight. i'm also not great at understanding (and thus writing) anger, so yusuke's bubbling frustration through the scene is like.. kinda cool to me. (a/n: eikichi is kuwabara's cat lol)

i'm also including another two from this same fic bc i think they're neat as well :)

(i'll put a transcript of the screenshots at the end under the read more)

honestly, i love writing yusuke's dialogue no matter what he's saying, so this fic's got a few moments i'm very fond of, but didn't include. anyway it's the only good thing i've ever written (<- exaggerating, but it's probably my favorite fic i've written, and maybe favorite prose piece)

i also remember enjoying some of the dialogue between sagawa and majima in tough love for loveless things, and i assume i liked a lot of the stuff for i long for you and your expert hands, but i... haven't revisited that one in a long time (idk why but i'm a little afraid to?? i haven't forgotten it though), so i couldn't point to anything specific really ^ ^'

I: hm... i think i overindulge in characters just talking about nothing, at least when it comes to my writing. if i like them, i like hearing them talk about nothing, and it tends to bloat scenes and drag on, i figure. i also tend to gravitate towards really specific intensely described points of imagery that barely come up again and totally break the flow of the scene (oops). in terms of guilty pleasures in reading, uh...? i'm kind of a sucker for werewolf stuff because i got that dog in me. im drawing a blank ig sorry <3 OH i've always been hopelessly fond of whump / hurt/comfort / sickfic STUFF. legit since i was a child. i like it when they're out of it i like it when they're woozy. and anything with dumb hijinks and/or slapstick is good to me. comedy's hard and i like seeing idiots be idiots. and really introspective/inner monologue heavy pieces are mmmmwah for writing and reading

R: oh man. whatever i'm currently reading often ends up influencing my writing in noticeable (to me) ways. one time i was writing smth for my fiction writing class and i typed out a sentence that felt at once like smth dr seuss would write (you'll never guess what unit my children's lit class was on) and a line from lolita (because that's what i was reading at the time). it's a mashup that worked weirdly well. ANYWAY to actually answer the question, the little prince ruined me as a kid, and a lot of the way i express sadness and emptiness is channeling saint-exupery there. currently, arkady martine and andzrej sapkowski have been influencing my scenery descriptions in particular, because that's what i was most recently reading, but earlier this year i remember cormac mccarthy's the road finding its way under my pen a lot. for really flowery stuff (i don't think you see it much in my fics, but it's not Never), i think of alfred tennyson's maud quite often. this is not a conclusive list im just empty brained :P

X: ohhohohohohhh. god help me but i love making all of them suffer. to love something is to vivi/dissect it. currently kuwabara is the one i'm putting through the most though (<- channeling personal issues into this orange guy), but majima and kiryu were always lots of fun to break down >:). perhaps that's the real answer to the guilty pleasure section

[SCREENSHOT 1]:

“Hey, why’s she goin’ to Kurama and you and not me?” Yusuke complained, pouting at Keiko.

Kuwabara piped up. “Maybe it’s ‘cuz they have manners, unlike some of us.”

“Or patience,” Botan offered.

Yusuke stuck out his leg and prodded Kuwabara’s arm. “Yeah, and how’re your manners workin’ out for ya? You still look like someone’s been playin’ tic-tac-toe on your hands or did she become a saint overnight?”

“Shut up, Urameshi.”

Keiko spoke up from her spot on the floor. “Aw, I think she’s just sweet. Right?” She put her chin on her folded arms and gently rubbed at Eikichi’s cheek. With a warm smile, Keiko turned her head into her arms further, squishing her face, openly endeared. “Even if she bites sometimes.”

“Finally, someone gets it,” Kuwabara moaned. “Keiko, tell Urameshi that for me, will ya?”

Yusuke didn’t buy it. “If she was sweet she’d be sweet to me, too.”

“Benevolence is nearly always conditional,” Kurama said, leaning over to rub Eikichi’s ears. “Perhaps she senses your standoffishness and simply chooses not to engage with someone who does not seem to want her.” Kurama’s brilliant green eyes swept back to Yusuke for emphasis. “You two may have that in common.”

“Wh—?!” Yusuke spluttered a bit, before settling on, “Watch it, fox boy.”

“Aw,” Botan giggled, “Yusuke, it’s alright, you know. Some of us just have an animal-like charm. Meow meow!” She hooked her hands like paws.

“Right, and I’m saying Eikichi’s not so charming. I mean, she’s been ignoring you, too, Botan, whaddyou think?”

“Oh, she’s just lovely! Simply adorable,” Botan cooed.

“Heheh, looks like you’re outnumbered, Urameshi!”

[SCREENSHOT 2]:

Rocking his chair back lazily, Yusuke noticed Kuwabara’s scratch-laced hands and whistled. “Damn, Kuwabara. It’s kinda beating you up, huh? That cat o’ yours. You look like you just fought me, only smaller.”

“For the last time, Urameshi, Eikichi’s a she! Quit it with the it crap or I’ll knock you into next Sunday brunch.” He jabbed his chopsticks at Yusuke pointedly. “And I don’t think you could get any smaller.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever. She’s beating the shit outta you. But what’s with that? I thought kittens were s’posed to be all cute n’ cuddly.” Yusuke swirled his drink thoughtfully before taking a swig.

“You’ve never had a kitten, have you, Urameshi?” Kuwabara deadpanned. He had the right to do that now that he was a cat-rearing expert, as if he hadn't learned it very recently himself.

“No. ’M not really crazy about animals. Neither's my mom.” Under his breath, Yusuke added, “Knowing her, that’s probably for the best.”

“Wh—? How?!” 

Yusuke shrugged.

Kuwabara huffed. “Ugh, she’s teething right now, okay? And I haven’t got her a scratching post yet. She’ll grow out of it, you’ll see.”

“Whatever you say, man. Just try not to lose any limbs waiting for her to get manners, arright? Don’t wanna make our fights even more one-sided. That’d just be sad.”

“Yeah, right, Urameshi.” Kuwabara puffed out his chest. “Eikichi could take two o’ my limbs and I’d still wipe the street with ya.”

“Hey, try beating me with four limbs first, tough guy.”

The conversation devolved into threats and bickering from there, culminating in little more than wrinkled uniforms and mussed hair-dos, and one final exchange.

“You haven’t even met her, Urameshi, so how could you know what she’s like?”

“‘Cuz you’re carryin’ the proof right there, stupid! Look, don’t take it so personal. I just don’t feel like spending all day roughhousing with someone that far beneath my weight class, even if she is the precious little angel you say she is."

[SCREENSHOT 3]:

Yusuke lounged on the floor, Eikichi sitting on his chest and staring down at him.

“What’re you starin’ at, Stinkass?”

Kuwabara scoffed loudly, fluffing out the pillow Yusuke would use.

Yusuke smirked at him. “Oh, I’m sorry, your highness, I left my manners at home.” He cleared his throat. “What are you staring at, Her Royal Majesty the Queen Stinkass?”

“Man, why'dya only pick mean pet names to give ‘er?” It came out a bit harsher than he meant.

“What?” Yusuke began to sit up, but stopped when he remembered Eikichi’s place on him. He dropped back down and shut his eyes lazily. “These aren’t pet names, they’re, like, insults. That I don’t mean.”

“So ‘Stinkass’ is your idea of an affectionate nickname?”

“Gee, you don’t have to make it sound so damn girly. I’m just callin’ her that ‘cause I like her.”

“Ooh~ so you like her, huh?” Kuwabara sat up on his knees and—once Eikichi got the hint and clambered off—smacked Yusuke’s face with his pillow, holding it over his face. “Whatever happened to not bein’ mushy, tough guy?”

Yusuke wrenched the pillow from his grip and lazily swung it at him, not bothering to get up. “Hey, you told me she doesn’t judge about that sorta thing, right? And I’m learnin’ there’s benefits to bein’ mushy, like kicking ass better.” He shifted to crack his back, then sighed, relaxing into the floor. “I’m just sticking to my way, and sometimes that means calling her Kuwabara’s Favorite Little Shitblaster or whatever.”

[hayleysayshay]

You know I don’t think I’ve ever rly done a post on why I like Mako, my forever blorbo:

He’s just the kind of neutral character I like and I think it’s because I really don’t have a strong personality and I tend to like characters some people think are boringg because they’re the straight man. Scott Summers was my favourite x-man lol.

He has weird eyebrows. It’s a plus for sure.

He has a tragic backstory, but it’s trauma that’s related to poverty. His parents were killed young and he’s been in a caretaker role since he was eight. That leaves him emotionally stunted. Emotional constipation is my jam. There is literally a post compiling all of the characters in the legend of korra crying, and Mako isn’t in it because he doesn’t cry. I think he needs a good cry.

Also his parents were killed by a firebender, he is a firebender, the show never explores this juicy source of angst.

He generally cares and is very protective over his friends. He doesn’t even really hide it, at the start of book 1 it’s clear he only cares about the people he cares about. This changes by book 4 when he sacrifices himself for the city. His world has expanded.

There’s a ruthless side to Mako, he can be a little dark, see how he threatened people for Korra in book 1 (and then Wu in book 4 lol?). He killed Ming-Hua and my own HC is that he was probs fine with because out of the four I think Mako is the most pragmatic (though tbh I don’t think we’ve seen all of what Asami can offer so maybe second most. Think Asami would murder easily).

I like his dynamic with Bolin a lot, and a lot of book 3 slaps because of this (ignore whatever the jail thing in book 2 because it’s just strange.)

I also like his dynamic with Wu which is why I’m a wuko shipper lol.

He is a very bad communicator. I think that’s neat, because communication is actually something people in general suck at talking, and I don’t ever really like people saying ‘just talk!’ A response to characters conflict, because people don’t just fucking talk to each other. Communication is hard.

Mako starts an eighteen year old who thinks he knows everything but really doesn’t. The only person he has had to rely on his entire life is himself, so his outlook on the world is very warped by his own perception of it, so I think he lacks introspection and can’t really relate to many people emotionally so he couldn’t understand Korra’s frustrations in book 2 (though yes to say Korra was also in the wrong). By book 4 he has grown more chill to trust and support Korra implicitly (who has also grown as well).

I love the breakups. Mako and Korra and Asami all seemed to like each other but never really understood one another. A lot of the issues between them were not just started by Mako (ppl forget Korra initiated the love triangle by kissing Mako without asking when she knew he had a gf) and it’s just teenagers being dumb and not being honest with eachother. I don’t think the writers set out do this in book 1 but by choosing to end the relationships in book 2 I feel like there was some awareness to the flaws present in the relationships. It is, accidentally, one of the more realistic relationships squabbles on a kids show. I love that shit because I’m weird.

All of this leads to this incredibly flawed doofus who means well. I think that’s blorbotastic.

Anyway because most of the fandom hate for the relationship drama is towards Mako I feel the need to defend him since it’s just not that bad. I also feel the need to explain every time that Mako dying would have been a very bad way to end the series, please guys, I will fight you in the streets over this.

None of this is very well explored in canon. I don’t think Mako is a blank slate character, a lot of his character is defined early on and is consistent, but it is not well developed beyond the initial setup at all. This is great for fanfic and it’s fun for headcanons. Hooray!

Because it’s underdeveloped your headcanon doesn’t need much time to work with canon as long as you actually watch the series.

[jokeson-u]

obviously i want nat to be friends with the entire team (at least varsity) but realistically..... the only people i genuinely see her canonly vibing with pre crash, are van, lottie, mari, and maybe shauna sometimes. id love her and jackie to be friends but obviously that was.. not the case lol, and as much as i wish she and tai were also close, tai was like. a bitch to her thru the entire pilot so i doubt it. but anyways, i think van and lottie have the most grounds. for mari, i think shes kinda a party girl at heart and sometimes shit talks nat w the girls but she treats nat as a friend outside of that. nat thinks its fake asf but she also just figures thats the type of person mari is. shes a gossip. so nat doesnt rly care and mostly thinks mari is cool like at parties and stuff. shauna, nat thinks shes kinda pathetic but in like.. a puppy way. shes so fucking fucked over jackie and follows her around, and she never sticks up to nat with jackie, but she does when its other people. its better than what she usually gets, and shauna is ok to talk to one on one, so shes.. alright in nats book.

but with van and lottie?? lottie backing up nat, running to catch up to her after nat gets pissed, pulling tai away from nat when she was insulting her and telling her to stop, teaming up first w nat at the party (ok thats a bit of a stretch but still). basically i think theyre opposites in obvious ways but theyre both introspective and observant enough to recognize that theres relatabily between them too. i think they basically has a sort of passive friendship. they dont go out of their way to hang out one on one often, maybe naturally do sometimes, but when theyre together, team setting or not, theyre very comfortable. teasing each other and whatnot (like the bathtub scene which is canonically supposed to mirror their pre crash relationship <3). but its really just the moments in between, not a necessarily... consistent friendship? i guess? idk if this makes sense tbh. anyways now nat is sad and mad bc she thought she did kinda know lottie but didnt wanna admit it but after all the shit thats happened she feels like she doesnt know her at all and maybe never did and.. yea.

anyways w van, i got that vibe from their interactions. even after the crash. specifically tho, the gun scene. idk i was def reading into it but. something about the way that nat was habded the gun for the coin test, and everyone was hyping her up, but van looked more.. idk. not concerned, but idk. and she stood up to stand by nat, like she was making sure she was ok. and then she immediately yelled at travis when he was shaming nat. basically i get the vibe that they maybe had a sort of vague trauma sharing bond. theyre not dumb, and w the lives theyve both had they can recognize similarities in other people. prob bonded first over movies and music, hungout every now and the to trade mixtapes and vcr tapes, and then van..... van has a pretty good idea of what happened when nats dad died. prob better than most ppl. all the papers said was that he died from a self inflected wound to the head, but nats told her enough for her to know that arrogant bastard would never kill himself. she briefly thought nat killed him and they just covered it up to protect her but then she remembered who nats mom was and was like.... lol nvm. figures smthn else happened, unlike the rest of the school who jokes about how theyd kill themselves too if they had a druggie slut daughter, etc. van tells them to shut the fuck up. nyways, nat rlllly fucking pushes everyone away and shuts down for a while afterwards but van actually really understands and supports her from a distance. maybe the get a little closer again as the year goes by

[a-wins-a-win]

okie so ur guy finally got around to watching Bare : The Musical (mouse!! why?? because!! I love comparisons <3) and anyway. thought I’d document my thoughts

tldr; I think I would like Bare: The Musical as a standalone story, but as a Bare: A Pop Opera adaptation/re-interpretation I think it falls short in a lot of ways.

it gets a bit long so under the cut, if you wanna skip the dot points i summarise/reiterate down the bottom of the post

okay no but the photographic memory detail is kinda interesting. kinda sad in a lot of ways too if you think about it

the audio quality is Not It so forgive me if I don’t pass judgement on any of the songs

“Jason you act every day.” “I didn’t fool you <3” they’re cuties // they are SUCH goofballs here! they’re so dumb! teenageboycore if there ever was! I love them <3

it’s so WEIRD to hear a lot of these lines out of order / in a different context

ALSO the lack of singing during auditions is throwing me off

“Do you think your sister’s bi?” “…” “Bipolar?” I laughed—

Matty Patty babey boy!!! he’s so… he’s so something. idk if I like it yet. im very used to introvertedly anxious Matt but this Matt is such a lil cutie

WHOAH OK Portrait Of A Girl is way early

but I think I like a lot of the lyrics - “You don’t have a clue / what she is doing with you / what she is doing to you.”

actually no this is a crazy interesting take on Matt & Ivy and I’m OBSESSED with the way we get to see Ivy’s actual introspection on it in this context

ohhh okay. so it’s That kind of basketball team situation for Jason (+ Peter !! goddamn they really hate that kid)

the art class is a fun character device ! (also I’m screaming over the Math Book exchange)

i am intrigued by the Romeo & Juliet casting in this version ngl

I knew that they merged the Nadia & Lucas characters (lowkey I hate it! I think it does a huge disservice to Nadia + inevitably the McConnell dynamic) but it’s still weird to see it . That said “Out Of Your Mind” [as best as I can approximate what the song’s called??] is kind of a vibe

he was named after Peter Pan r u kidding ?? i am so so intrigued to meet Claire Simmonds in this version now

ohhh nooo I am having FEELINGS over Best Kept Secret (as I always do) but DAMN

“If the word were different and if wishing made it so […] I’m trying just as hard as you!” jason mcconnell you will be the death of me

im SICK why is everyone so MEAN in this version

EMO PUPPY DOG MATTHEW LLOYD I LOVE YOU

^ also goddamn that whole scene was An Exchange. interesting take

“You Don’t Know” is beautiful tho*

“I hear ya.” “Do you?” any glimpse of snarky/sarcastic Peter is a relief (not sure that I’m quite here for this Peter characterisation) . Also the Peter-Diane friendship is somewhat iconic

JASON is the birthday bitch!! that’s. something.

oh okay! this Portrait Of A Girl/Boy reprise is so intriguing to me. this version of Ivy in general is so intriguing to me

snarky Peter Simmonds you are everything to me <3

i miss ‘Are You There?’ hopefully it comes back to me later, I am desperate to see this Peter & Matt have a meaningful conversation

i could honestly not discern most of those lyrics but whatever they replaced 911! Emergency! with seems unnecessarily extravagant? for very little payoff

“Peter did you learn the entire script?” “Maybe.” no I love that for him though. i’m struggling because I like a lot of this Peter’s little character MOMENTS, but OVERALL I don’t like him

again the lack of singing is throwing me off

“I’m NOT your boyfriend!” OWCH

“Your world might not stop!” ohhhh okayyy i am. going a bit insane. over this mcsimmonds.

EVER AFTER !!! EVER FUCKING AFTER !!! (or whatever this version is officially titled)

what is the general consensus on Jason having Role Of A Lifetime?? bc aside from the title not making thematic sense for his character... idk it could just be the delivery but i don’t hate it

i am Not Here for the Nadia-likes-Matt subplot, tbh. i think it’s silly.

there is something so so desperate & violently destructive about this Jason - and it isn’t even like. hidden behind this facade of effortlessness that Pop Opera Jason puts up, if that makes sense?? (yes I am upset that he kissed Ivy first even if it makes sense for this version of Jason)

what an act 1, ngl. I am so anxious for act 2.

oh ok that’s a bit cute

“What if I told the world your story? / What if I told them what you’ve done? / What if I went and shared your secret? / What if I let them know I’m someone?” OH OKAY!!! this Peter is A Character!! and he’s fascinating!!

“I am gonna win… yep, I promise.” oh ow okay that hurts

“What If I Told?” [again guessing at song titles] is doing irreparable damage to my psyche /pos and I can feel it happening in real time

oh shit! i forget that they’re not even roommates in this version!

i feel like this version of the story (or at the very least ‘Touch My Soul’ or whatever it’s called here) is really capitalising on the Ivy-Peter similarities in the way the characters are being played

ARE YOU THERE? <33 WHY ARE YOU SO LATE IN THE STORY???

“Are you there? What did I do wrong? / Tell me and I’ll fix it, get us back where we belong.” screaming crying throwing up what the FUCK

disappointed in the lack of patt meter tho ://

NO BC THIS CONTEXT!!! of Sister Joan putting Peter in!!! i actually quite like it!! i kind of hate the stagings where they have Peter like. butt in, for lack of a better phrase to use. bc that’s so uncharacteristic for him, I always read that scene as he’s stage whispering the lines/doing the motions for Diane to follow along with and he just sort of ends up in the Actual Scene accidentally

ough. the mcconnell siblingsism… it’s missing and it makes me sad

“I don’t wanna be here anymore.” OH NO OH NO I DON’T NEED TO BE THINKING ABOUT THE TRAGEDY OF PETER’S SUICIDALITY NEXT TO JASON’S SELF-DESTRUCTIVE TENDENCIES AND THE WAY THIS STORY PLAYS OUT !!! IM GONNA BE SICK !!

“God Don’t Make No Trash” isn’t my favourite song in the show or anything but I do miss it a bit, even if the replacement song works for Sister Joan + this Peter

ok no now I’m upset do we just not get to know anything about Peter’s mother at all in this version?? look with this version of Peter I don’t feel like she’s a necessary piece of his character/story but still. would’ve been nice

“I have plans, I’m not that girl.” // “If I can’t, then why should he?” Ivy !! i am back and forth on this Ivy! i like a lot of it but I also don’t like a lot of it, those lines tho are so everything to me

“So talk to him.” “We don’t. Talk.” rip to the mcconnell siblingism. like I suppose it makes sense? given the vague family dynamic this musical gives us, but still. I miss them <\3

there is something so physically painful to me to watch Jason have such obvious emotional stress fractures

the lack!! of singing!! is so wild!!

oohhh this Matt is so fucking vindictive - “Is this just another thing you’ll try for the day?” SCREAMING

OH FUCK OKAY

oh I’m gonna be sick watching this meltdown

again!! the absolute sick dog violent desperation radiates off Jason generally but FUCK ME it’s so bad here - like I really truly believe that in that second right after Cross that this Jason made the decision to kill himself**

love the R&J costumes in this version tho ngl, they’re a bit cute

oh shit he’s really just. Dead. like obviously he’s dead in the Pop Opera as well but without Queen Mab it really does just feel like. you blink and he’s gone without any sort of buildup/unravelling

i feel like they definitely tried to recycle a bit of the early versions of the Father Flynn storylines for Father Mike here - like they don’t explicitly go for the queer angle but it feels a little bit alluded to, imo

the fucking bookending!!! i’m such a sucker for that shit

oh. okay. it was certainly A Watch - definitely interesting! full of odd character choices I didn’t love, most notably the basketball team and the way that side plot played out, also the merging of Nadia & Lucas’ characters. I think it does a huge disservice to Nadia’s character, the McConnell twins relationship, Nadia & Peter’s relationship, & I like Lucas as a character (& a plot device) so it really feels like a lose-lose situation. And I would’ve liked to have Peter’s mother at least alluded to, especially given how much more Sister Joan seems to fill a motherly role (and it would’ve made sense thematically! Given his hypothetical conversion with Jason’s mother in You & I, coupled with Diane’s whole spiel about her mom being her best friend - it’s a missed opportunity imo) (even tho as established for this characterisation of Peter it’s not quite so necessary)

that said! credit where credit is due - I am supremely intrigued by the characterisation of… okay most of the cast now I’m thinking about it. Would definitely like to do a comparative character breakdown (let me know if anyone else would care for that at all).

Emo puppy dog Matt Lloyd you are so special (it’s such a silly way to play him!! the show all but eliminates the academic part of his and Jason’s rivalry and THAT makes me sad bc I think it would be so so interesting to play into the rivalry more with this Matt and this Jason - but the way Matt & Ivy’s relationship exists in this version of the show, the absolute lack of any academic focus At All [which?? like they are At School, that SHOULD count for something] and even the play part feels somewhat lacklustre in so regards to the Matt vs Jason element, which again I think is a mark against B;TM)

as I said above - I think I would like Bare: The Musical as a standalone story, but as a Pop Opera adaptation/re-interpretation I think it falls short in a lot of ways. Which is another point - it’s so so crazy to me that The Musical is the adaptation of the Pop Opera, not the other way around. Which kind of sucks! because I think making it into a book musical, not a sung-through show, does give a little more breathing room for character & relationship work and development, but it just seems ill utilised, to the point where it doesn’t even seem to match the Pop Opera, let alone improve/expand on it. Because all the extra dialogue time had to be spent on reordering the story beats so we ended up losing time with the characters in a way.

or at least that’s how it read to me - obviously I am not a professional reviewer/critic so don’t take my word for it, I just wanted to talk it out. or shout it out into the void, as my tumblr may be. if you read this whole thing?? shoutout to you, I love you <3

[lenievi]

Finished reading Perry’s Planet by Jack C. Haldeman II. It was short and fun and very much like a TOS episode.

I thought the characterization was fine, Kirk was stressed like in the Immunity Syndrome, Spock and Kirk's interactions reminded me of their interactions in TVH and up, because Kirk was very exasperated. And since I enjoyed their interactions, I assume fans wouldn't LOL since what I like about Kirk and Spock isn't compatible with what the fandom likes.

There was one exchange that was quite lovely, which reminded me of the scene between Spock and McCoy in A Piece of the Action with the radio, because it had the same wording: "How are you at picking locks?" "It appears to be one of my talents." Spock succeeded this time tho :D (I feel like this is the first novel I've read with this much Spock and Kirk in the same place at the same time lol)

McCoy and Spock didn't get much scenes together, which is sad, but at least what they did get wasn't a disservice so yay for that. Spock also bandaged McCoy's head.

Kirk and McCoy had nice scenes at the beginning and the end, and a few nice interactions throughout <3

McCoy had a relatively big role in the book, with good characterization and good things to do (more to do than Kirk himself tbh. In some way, Kirk was a bit dumbed down, he obviously has the most page time, but you know)

In some way, it's a bit sad that the book wasn't longer and wasn't allowed to get introspective because I feel like that'd be interesting.

Anyway, a fun, non-shippy episode-like book <3

"Fascinating," said Spock. McCoy and Kirk glared at him.

is one way how to describe the book :D

[chen-chen-chen-again-chen]

Hi, hello, hola, and happy Stab Caesar Day! Tumblr ate my original draft because, um, I guess its hunger is horrible and insatiable? But here I am for take two. Thank you to @artsyunderstudy, @larkral, and @forabeatofadrum, who tagged me today and who continue to craft delightful things.

Updates on My Good Egg (Good morning, good night, good morning): My plan of posting Chapter 4 today ain't gonna happen. I updated the author's notes, but the next posting date is TBD. I need to focus on my health right now, and then I'll be travelling for a bit (March 24-April 7). But hey, if you've been meaning to read this one, now's a great time to catch up? 🤣

In the meanwhile, I'll share a snippet featuring several of my OCs, Baz's queer, chaotic uni friends. Behind the cut for mild spice. 🌶️

Bunce goes off with Simon so that she can pump the American bartender for information, and as soon as they’re out of earshot, Emma leans forward, her eyes glittering. “Well?”

“Well what.”

“I told Liu and Ramesh you got kidnapped,” Emma says, waving her hand dismissively, “and of course we’re all very worried and hope you’re doing okay and acclimating to regular life again, but have. You. Ridden. That.” 

Baz regrets downing a few rats before they left for the pub, because it means he has enough blood in him to blush. “We’ve been figuring out this kidnapping situation,” he says coolly. “It hasn’t left much time for carnal pursuits.” 

“Baz,” Liu says, aghast. “Why haven’t you fucked that nice himbo? He’s clearly gagging for it - he couldn’t stop staring at your arse in those jeans.” 

“Is he a himbo?” Ramesh says. He pulls out a pen and starts to doodle a triple Venn diagram on a napkin. “He seemed like more of a twunk to me. And he’s got a great bear belly.” 

“Ladies,” Emma says, her hands fluttering in mock-distress, “please don’t objectify that sweet boy before Baz gets to objectify him. Baz will eat his fill of the man-meat and then give us a report.” 

(Please put in the comments/tags if you think Simon Snow is a twunk, a himbo, or something else delightful. 🤣)

Hello tags and tagbacks: @whogaveyoupermission, @cutestkilla, @facewithoutheart, @captain-aralias, @fatalfangirl, @you-remind-me-of-the-babe, @whogaveyoupermission (THE EDGING CONTINUES), @raenestee, @ileadacharmedlife, @shrekgogurt, @hushed-chorus, @shemakesmeforget, @theimpossibledemon, @imagineacoolusername

More about the hiatus for My Good Egg:

(Warning for some hard stuff, Big Feelings, trauma recovery. Feel free to skip and just bask in Ides of March posts instead!)

Okay, so introspective life/writing blather here... I keep meaning to write a post, at some point, about some of the best practices that I follow when I am writing about material that is heavy, like in Baker boxer teacher grief or the Rosethorn girl universe.

A lot of stuff that works for me is probably self-evident: go slow, be gentle, ground yourself, talk to safe people, have a release valve, be able to walk away, offer yourself a lot of self-care and self-compassion, take care of the soft animal of your body. And don't feel like you have to put everything in - some of what you can write can just be for you, and it can be enough to have written it, and not include it in the finished product.

I honestly didn't expect Good morning, good night, good morning to get me where I live. It is, as I've always maintained, a dumb horny rom com (that somehow developed a plot and backstory and plot TWISTS and OCs but ANYWAY). But there was a line in Chapter 3 that kept rattling around in me:

“You were a kid,” Simon says, his voice low and angry. “You were just a kid.” 

This is not the first time I've been triggered by own fic (and probably won't be the last, LOL!), but this one did me a doozy. I've had to take a few steps back, and just focus on recovering from trauma that's been reactivated in my body. It is wild what the body remembers, and how it holds onto pain.

(There is, at the same time, other stuff happening with my family with grief and estrangement and just a whole mischegoss of hard feelings, so that adds another element into the mix.)

To circle back round to My Good Egg: I'm putting it to the side for now while I tend to my health and just recovering from the past few weeks. It's funny - I don't think it's a particularly angsty story or one that does a super deep dive into trauma, but I need to take some pieces off my plate right now, and this fic is one of them.

I will always keep writing - the WIP game has been a delightful brain refresher, and I have a very fun Six Sentence Sunday post that I'm already excited to share. But for now, My Good Egg is gonna have a li'l nap. When I come back to it, I think I'll switch over to writing the second draft in its entirety, and then posting the chapters weekly, whenever that happens. I'm not putting a timeline on it right now.

Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk making your way through this personal essay, if you've gotten this far. I am continually blown away and delighted by everyone who engages with the fic, and I am so excited to serve you up some treats in the future.

To end on a lighter note, here is an exchange with my spouse, the inestimable EarlobeGreyTea who continues to offer thoughtful and nuanced feedback on this fic, Exhibit A:

EarlobeGreyTea: Did they fuck in this chapter?

Me: No Me: And they didn't fuck in the previous chapter Me: It's the EROTIC Grope Fest. It doesn't have to have explicit sex (yet) EarlobeGreyTea: Yeah, I guess it isn't the Sloppy Fuck Fest

Love you all. ❤️❤️❤️

[too-destiny-panda]

Wyllvember Day 3: Modern AU/The Man

A/N: As mentioned previously, I switched the Wyllvember Day 2 and Day 3 prompts, so this is the other one. Once again, thank you for reading my work, and thank you to @sagscrib and @commander-yinello for posting the prompt lists! -Blue

WC:708

“I’m sorry, you’re telling me we went to school together?!”

The voice of your friend carried itself from the kitchen to the living room where you were lounging a short while before they popped their head into the doorway incredulously. Their shock was amusing as well as bewildering. Who wouldn’t remember the handsome, charismatic young man from your high school days? Sure, not everyone knew about him or what his name was, but surely, he turned more heads than just yours? The way his smile lit up his face, his easy laugh, the elegant steps he would perform after school in the quiet gym or at school events… Yeah, there is no way you were the only one that knew of him.

Still, as you continued to watch the news of the heroic firefighter Wyll Ravengard, or the Blade of Frontiers as some called him (where did that come from anyways? Because he fights fire wherever it is?), talking about the situation that transpired, you couldn’t help but feel a slight disappointment in yourself. He had invited you to dance at prom. He wasn’t your date, you went alone for one reason or other, but he still offered to dance. You declined. You weren’t entirely sure why anymore, it has been a few years, but be it due to your inability to do much more than shimmy from side to side, displeasure at being in the spotlight, or perhaps simple panic at being talked to by an attractive person, you regretted the decision. Your high school crush asked you to spend time with him at one of the biggest events of the school year, and you refused him.

You sighed and made yourself more comfortable on the couch reaching for the remote. There is no point in dwelling on that now, it is all in the past. Despite your mental resolution not to dwell on teenage crushes, you didn’t press a single button on the remote, your mind now working overtime as you remembered more and more details about your school life. Wasn’t he working on a dancing career? Ballet? Or was it ballroom dancing? You couldn’t quite remember, but you were fairly sure he never once mentioned being a firefighter. You did know that he admired his father and the work he did for the city council, so you assumed if not dancing, he would follow in those (very big) footsteps.

As the cogs in your brain started working (who knew simply watching the news would inspire such deep introspection into your former classmate?), your friend walked back into the living room, balancing three different kind of popcorn bowls. As they plopped down, they seemed to put two and two together on who exactly you were talking about, even though it was for a reason entirely different from yours.

“Oh wait, I think I remember him! My cousin, you know the one, she worked for the council for a while? Anyways, she said that one day she walked into the office, and it was chaos, everyone calling and yelling about making sure something wasn’t leaked to the public. Apparently, it had something to do with Ravengard’s son and bad influences, whatever that means. I guess he got disowned or kicked out, or something like that, because it was practically taboo to talk about him afterwards. Wonder what he did?”, they wondered out loud while shoving a handful of popcorn into her mouth, immediately jumping to a different topic after airing out their memory, offering you the bowl.

As you absentmindedly popped a few of the puffed-up kernels into your mouth, you thought about her words. Him, and tangled with a bad crowd? Seemed unlikely. He wasn’t dumb or naïve (well, maybe a little bit), and you just couldn’t imagine him doing something that would warrant his father kicking him out. There must be more to this story. But not much you could do about it. It’s not like you could ask anyone if not even the press knew about it, so best to just let it be.

Little did you know, as meteorologists scrambled to let the appropriate channels know a minor natural disaster was making a surprise appearance, you would find out much sooner than anticipated.

[mangoisms]

ok here are my current thoughts on ck and tim’s silly goose-ness and steph’s very low tolerance to it

aka an excuse to introspect on their past relationship and also my first ever attempt to write a canon character’s pov which might or might not be good so! You Have Been Warned

(also excuse any typos LOL)

“What do you think you’re doing?”

A slow blink. “Updating Redbird’s security protocols?”

The garage of Tim’s townhouse smells sharply of oil and rubber. But he isn’t elbow-deep in the engine today, just seated off to the side, laptop perched on his lap and hooked up to its system. ‘Updating’ it. God knows why. The Redbird’s security protocols are just as stringent as the Batmobile’s.

Jason once regaled them with his plan, way back when, to blow it up. Bruce included. And how he went about it.

“It’s got safeguards like crazy, right? Even when it’s idle or shut down. Come up to it, fire a gun, launch a missile—doesn’t matter. Not gonna touch it before the security protocols kick in. It can sense you on thermal, air currents, video recognition, all of it.”

“So, how’d you get past it?”

“SEAL-grade wetsuit. Invisible to thermal with reflection fibers that play hell with video. But the biggest thing? Going slow. And I mean slow. Like five seconds per inch slow.”

The insane attention to detail and paranoia runs in the family, obviously.

Tim had sat in for that. Stephanie remembers the look on his face. Begrudging respect, combined with a familiar twitchiness that told her he was absolutely dying to run out and start updating his stuff.

Question everything. That’s what Bruce says.

Tim tries to separate himself from it. He really does. It gets tiring, exhausting, to live like that. But old habits die hard and his big brain precedes him sometimes. Wondering at the possibilities, at the million-in-one scenarios.

Ordinarily, Stephanie has more sympathy for him. Really. But right now, after your phone call about his little visit to Circle K…

She’s pissed.

“Don’t play dumb,” she says, crossing her arms tightly over her chest.

“What is it that I’m playing dumb about?” he asks, averting his attention back to his laptop, keys clacking quickly, pausing momentarily as he takes a swig of Red Bull.

She tells him.

At the sound of your name, he stops.

But now that she’s started, she can’t stop. “Visiting her? As Red Robin? What are you thinking, Tim?”

The clack of keys resumes. The set of his gaze on the laptop screen is very intentional now. Avoiding her.

“It’s nothing, Steph,” he says and she almost believes it. But she knows him, so she doesn’t. “It’s harmless.”

“So, why won’t you hang out with us? Her? Because I assume you’re also avoiding her individually.”

A little sigh. Impatient. “I’m not avoiding her. I really was busy. Have been busy. You know how the heat messes with the city.”

It’s the excuse that bothers Stephanie.

Tim is making some kind of choice here. Choosing to favor Red Robin over himself, over Tim Drake, and it makes no sense. Red Robin isn’t your best friend. He isn’t even your favorite vigilante. (Black Canary is. She agrees, though it would be nice for Spoiler to get some spotlight but that is neither here nor there.)

You know who is your best friend? (One of them, anyway.)

Tim freakin’ Drake.

Stephanie knows why he’s avoiding you all of a sudden. The connection will be too easy to make. It’s why she—as Spoiler—keeps her distance. Tucks away her hair, hides her face even more, when she and Cass visit Circle K.

Even though! They had talked about telling you. Stephanie wanted to tell you so badly. You know who her father is. Was. You know how her mom used to be like. You know everything and you never once judged. You were, to be sure, a bit wary of them—the vigilantes—but most were. You wouldn’t turn them away if you knew.

If there is anything Stephanie knows, it is that.

But then she went away to Metropolis for a week and a half and suddenly, he’s visiting you as Red Robin. And he’s not trying to ease you into it, not trying to help you latch onto some clues, to make it easier—because they’d discussed that, too!—he’s doing it because… Well, she doesn’t really know. But there is a reason. She knows that much. A big reason.

It makes no sense to her, considering his feelings. Complicates things unnecessarily. Especially with how he’s avoiding you because of it, because he apparently got cold feet on telling you the truth.

And it’s the excuse… it’s the excuse that pisses her off.

Their relationship, back when they were kids, had some questionable origins. It did. Stephanie did things she wasn’t proud of. He did things he wasn’t proud of. It was messy. She tries not to kick herself about it—about being a silly girl in love, awed at the attention of a boy like Robin, knowing he was dating a girl (Ariana Dzerchenko, her name was, she would later find on) and making moves on him despite that, moves that he always, always went along with. Like two magnets that couldn’t help but fall together.

Don’t get her wrong! The blame is not solely on her. It’s on him, too. She shouldn’t have pushed. He shouldn’t have went along with it, knowing he had a girlfriend, too. He shouldn’t have held his knowledge of her identity over her head the way he did. He isn’t mean-spirited at heart but he had an advantage over her. He knew she was Stephanie Brown. She knew him only as Robin and nothing else. Not until later on that would change and that… that was another mess entirely.

But they were dumb and young. Stephanie tries not to hold it against herself. They know better now. She knows better now. Knows what she deserves.

But this feels too close to him crossing that line.

No, he has crossed that line.

Given one persona up for another.

Approaching you as Red Robin, while you know nothing of him, and doing god knows what…

Someone is going to get hurt.

Last time, it was him. The circumstances, Bruce’s unceremonious reveal of his identity to her—a mistake, an egregious overstep—it all culminated in Tim feeling betrayed. Betrayed that Bruce would reveal that to her without Tim’s say so, without even asking him if he was okay with her knowing. Betrayed that Stephanie went along with it.

This time?

Stephanie feels it in her bones.

The person who is going to get hurt is you.

You, clueless about these lives they lead, clueless as Tim monopolizes your time as Red Robin, all the while you have no idea it’s him. You, her best friend. Stephanie loves you to the end of the universe.

She doesn’t want to see you hurt.

The mere thought of it, of the potential fallout, leaves a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

“Steph. Steph, it’s fine.”

She blinks, coming back to herself. Tim is standing in front of her now, dark brows knitted together, blue eyes intent on her face. Concerned.

“You’re lying to her.”

“We’ve been lying to her.”

“Not like this,” she says quietly. “Not this way. You’re… This is too much, Tim. I don’t understand why you’re doing this. What happened?”

“Nothing,” he says. For what it’s worth, to anyone else, it sounds believable. But like she said. Stephanie knows him. For better or for worse.

And on that end, she also knows he is not going to budge. No matter how much Stephanie wants to drill this into him, grab him by the shoulders and make her point. Once he’s made a decision, he commits.

Or more like he’s dug himself into this grave and he doesn’t (can’t?) want to get out.

“This is a mistake,” she says. “And you know it. I just hope you actually try to fix it sooner rather than later. Because if you break her heart, I’m going to break something of yours.”

Stephanie loves Tim. He’s a great friend. They’ve had their ups and downs—even discounting their relationship—but they’re solid. They are.

But she loves you, too. So much so it sometimes feels like she’s going to burst with it. She’s never had something like that, like this, and in the end, she doesn’t want to choose, but Tim knows better. And because he knows better, you are her first priority.

Even worse, he doesn’t seem bothered by the threat. Relieved, if anything.

“I’m counting on it, Steph.”

Which is so unfair in so many ways (fix it, she wants to yell, don’t rely on me to come clean up when shit hits the fan—do it yourself!) but she’s had enough of this conversation and all the ways this can go wrong.

Maybe he will turn around. Maybe. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

But she doesn’t think so. He won’t. Not until the consequences of this, of his lies, of his excuses, come hit him in the face.

She wishes it weren’t like that—knowing what it will result in.

But some things you just can’t change.

She knows better with Tim.

She really, really does.