#ask questions i am always open to answer

[theghostofashton]

.

[polyamorousmood]

Your tumblr is how i realized that i am in fact not monogamous and now im not fully sure how to feel bout the fact that i discovered im at least ambiamourus from tumblr 🧍

Like imagine someone asking how i figured out im (most likely) poly nd i gotta be like '... tumblr-' 💀 (i am, awkward lol)

Bestie, you do not have to answer that way! 😎

A perfectly reasonable answer that is true and respectable is "I found a collection of anecdotes from polyamorous people, and really identified with a lot of them." Or some such. Its normal and expected that you phrase things to match the social context you're in! And if your brain is a context that prefers "I read some anonymous personal essays" then by all means think of it in those terms!

Also, hi, congrats! I'm honored. Always amazing to have more friends. I'm glad you learned something about yourself here! I do expect you to name your firstborn Polly Anna in honor of the blog uwu its in the contract you agreed to by viewing this blog teehee 😁

[bolithesenate]

I have. So many questions about your version of Tarre but I will try to keep it short

How did the Mando's react when they found out that he was a Jedi?

How did his first Jedi Master die?

Did Tarre manage to finish the tapestry (the one he was trying to finish before the meeting) before the due date or?

Did Tarre one day look up and ask his close circle of Mandos if he was the Mando'alor and said circle had to awkwardly tell him he had been the Mando'alor for a while and they were technically his advisors?

HOW was your Tarre adopted by the Jedi - assuming he has always been a Mando even if he did practice much of the culture? Did he accidentally run away as a toddler and end up in a cargo ship across the galaxy in enemy zone? Did he accidentally set fire at 3 separate houses in the Vizsla Clan and they decided to set him against the Jedi (and did it work even if only for a temple)? Tell me pleaseeee

Also sorry if this is stupid I assume that Tarre has always been a Mando or is he a convert (and if so was it via the god haunting him or was it after he went on the self-imposed exile while everyone thought he was dead)? I'm asking this to make sure I understood everything correctly

okay okay okay. well, let me preface this with saying that I am 1) INCREDIBLY stoked to see someone as invested in cringefail jedi Tarre as I am and 2) I have an incredibly detailed account of Tarre's life in my mind (that I might one day write down in fic form) so you don't know the beast you just unleashed

how did the Mandos react when they found out he was a Jedi?

well, it depends a bit on which Mando. the guy that for a while was his Alor and then became his second in command figured it out on his own after Tarre was a bit too weird about certain things for a bit too long. He mainly was put out that Tarre never trusted him enough to tell him (even tho Tarre himself probably assumed he'd just left the jedi order at that point). Also, it explained just a lot of the general weirdness of the guy, so if anything it cleared things up.

The rest of their inner circle figured it out some time afterward when Fay just appeared in the middle of their dining room, calling him out on his bullshit. I think they were too mortified to see her immediately do a 180° and start a custody war with a literal force-deity to react, really. And again, Tarre being a Jedi explained more questions than it raised (at that point he'd had probably a literal decade of raking up a history of being That Weird Guy TM)

And the rest of Mandalore's populace... I genuinely think many of them might never have known? At least not during their or Tarre's lifetime?

There might have been rumors, sure, but again, Tarre had already collected a lot of weird ass rumors about him by that time, so it kinda was just another one of those? At least this version of Tarre never went out and proclaimed he was a Jedi in some grand sort way. He was way too busy for that. Which I think would explain quite nicely how all subsequent generations of Mandalorians seem to put all emphasis on Tarre being Mand'alor and never really seem to mention his ties to the Order.

2. How did his first Master die?

His first Master, a rodian crèchemaster named Yuumba Doksa, died on a mission where they were supposed to investigate a sudden epidemic amongst settlers on a newly colonized planet. It turned out to be a bioengineered virus commissioned by the Sith, and despite the Force, Tarre had to watch his Master die before an effective treatment could be found. He himself also got infected with it, but because his genetic material was such a wild blend of things, his immune system was a lot more resistent to the virus.

3. Did Tarre finish the tapestry before the meeting?

No.

In retaliation, he just took his loom to all subsequent ones. That was the first in a long list of Weird Things He Just Does I Guess.

4. Did they have to tell him that?

Of course they did.

Actually, and this is getting down into the nitty gritty of my personal headcanons and worldbuilding around Tarre Vizsla, "Tarre Vizsla" started off as two people: Tarre on one side and Marek Vizsla (his alor-turned-second-in-command) on the other. Through a bit of a miscommunication at some point, the spokesperson persona the both were operating under got the name Tarre Vizsla, even though Tarre at that point wasn't a member of aliit Vizsla. House Vizsla yes, but not the Clan. That came later.

So for way too long Tarre just assumed that all these things they were doing, he was doing under a shared name, sure, but they still were two people and Marek was the higher ranking one of them, so naturally he was the one the Mand'alor title actually belonged to.

Until they all had to tell him that 'no, you idiot, you are the one doing all the work here, it's your position. Marek is just here to yell at people and, if necessary, shoot them.'

5. & 6. I'll have to answer together because they share a lot of commonalities

I'm firmly in camp 'Tarre was a convert' (in the end) (kinda).

It's quite possible that one of his parents was a Mando, simply because of the smoothie blend that his genetic are, but they were not around to make decisions when he first exhibited Force powers. So he went through a normal(ish) jedi childhood (minus the truly being bad at jedi-ing) until he went to ilum and came back with an old god as his saber.

But since this was the old republic and things generally were a lot stranger back then, no one - Tarre included (plus, he still was a child back then u know) - really questioned it. Tarre just was one of those Jedi with a weird colored lightsaber. Happens from time to time, right?

(as for why Kad Ha'rangir chose Tarre... who knows what the gods think, right? especially a god that literally is change. The Force works in mysterious ways)

Him properly becoming a Mandalorian was.... well, who can say when exactly it happened. Maybe he was one from birth, just 'temporarily misplaced' due to external circumstances, maybe he became one when a mandalorian god called dibs on him, maybe it happened when an old weaver lady whose backyard he crashed his shuttle in also called dibs of her own, or it's possible it happened when he got his first set of beskar'gam, or when he officially became mand'alor, or when he properly got adopted into Clan Vizsla or perhaps even at some other, small junction of his truly strange life.

Or maybe it never really happened at all? Who knows. I don't think anyone ever made him swear to the resol'nare (if that even existed in that form back then), they just looked at him and said 'yes, this is what peak mandalorian-ness looks like' o(￣▽￣)👍

(half of them were looking at Marek when they said that. that's why the statues look nothing like Tarre)

And I think if you had asked Tarre at the end of his life what he was, he genuinely might have answered with "a Jedi"? Because that's still the thing he grew up with and he only (temporarily) fled from it due to of his own anxieties. Like. All the work he did on Mandalore was because of the things he learned as a Jedi - to help where he can and strive to make a better galaxy for the people around him.

It just so happened that the people around him technically were the Order's mortal enemies.

[rohirric-hunter]

I saw a post where someone was lamenting the fact that some kids will "learn" completely made up "facts" from ChatGPT because they think it's a search engine with access to all the world's information and they said it was perfectly understandable because the kid did exactly what people told him to do, which was to look things up.

So, like, is it okay for me to say this now? Will people get it and not send me anonymous death threats this time? Here goes:

When people, especially kids, ask a question, "Look it up," is not a good answer. It's a dismissive answer that indicates you don't care if they get the right information or not. If you don't know the person and aren't responsible for them then that's fine, but if it's your friend, your student, or God forbid your child, you can't say that to them.

[pathos-logical]

Do you know of any resources or posts specifically about captioning comics? I am very new to this, but I love comics and I make comics so I want to learn how to caption them properly. Thank you for your blog and all you do!

Delighted you asked this, since it gives me the excuse to share one of my top favorite posts about exactly that!!! I used @/TheQueerWithoutFear's addition in this post as a personal bible when starting out with art IDs! I think this post also has advice which is generally applicable to lots of comic IDs, since people can get bogged down writing every single detail of a piece when the broad strokes would do and thus detract from the overall comprehensibility of an ID. I also really appreciate this site as a great resource for examples on how to write concisely and with an audience in mind, and this post also lays out a lot of good tips! I'll round out this post with some general advice/guidelines:

Neither alt text nor caption IDs are better or even necessarily more accessible than the other; what matters is good formatting (so please don't put IDs below a readmore or use anything but plain text, use sentence case and primarily formal language, use brackets and "ID/End ID" formatting for caption IDs but omit them from alt, etc!)

For comics, especially long ones, I personally favor conciseness over strict fidelity to art, though this is highly subjective and depends on the piece and sometimes my mood. What I would boil this down to is that you don't need to include every detail in a piece to write a good ID, and using narration/prose is often more understandable than transcribing visual techniques (Ex: "She notices something to the side" is clearer and more succinct than "Action lines next to her face indicate she saw something to the side")

Organizing an ID's information in a top-down format is best for comprehensibility: start with who/what is featured (and where they're from, if applicable) and what they're doing, and then move on to background, style, and details

Last, you're welcome, and thank YOU so much for reaching out!! Artists like you make the world go round!! Please feel free to reach out if you ever have more questions, and have a wonderful day!!!

[heartual]

had such a good experience with surgery today i can’t even fully explain

[moonshine-nightlight]

Any advice for writting longform stories like NWWD?

@honoikazuchis

thanks for this ask!

thats a pretty open ended question and my answer will inherently be relatively specific to me and the way i write, but i'm happy to share my advice!

I will link a few other posts where i answered some other writing asks:

worldbuilding [x] editing/exposition [x] writer's block/POV [x] plotting vs pantsing [x] how long does it take me to write stuff [x] my writing process [x] writing spicy scenes [x]

otherwise, see below for me rambling way too long about writing.

disclaimer: this is just my opinion and how i do things, obviously there's a lot of variety and nuance for everyone's writing process.

firstly, is that personally, i'm inclined to writing longform stories so thats a bit of a built in strength of mine. generally speaking my story ideas come with lots of lore (see above for my love of worldbuilding) and i like relationships that are deeper/longer, with slow burn being a favorite of mine (why basically all my short stories have the two people involved having met prior to the story starting). that being said, technically the main character in 'Nothing's Wrong with Dale' doesnt meet demon!Dale until the flashback of chapter 2 and why is part of why that story is so long/has a built in arranged marriage premise. Of my two potential long form stories i'm going to do next: one they already know each other (and are basically already in love just being pining idiots about it) or two the story takes place over several months/high stress situations and does not end with marriage etc. But thats more of a concern if you're writing romance.

in general, my advice for longform stories is to already have a relatively complete, high level view of the story when you start. some people can just improvise the entire story as they go--I cannot. i think its very helpful to know where ur story is going to end, more crucially when it is long and you'll be taking a while to get there. by this i primarily mean the setup for the story, then general ending, and vaguely what sort of metaphorical journey they take to get there. you do not need to know every scene and detail in the middle--and plot points/characters can and will evolve as you write and think more on everything--but having the broad brushstrokes figured out asap is critical, in my opinion.

I also, as a side note, don't set out with a story length in mind. i can generally get a good handle on how long a story will be by the idea and outline, but i dont try to make it long. if anything, i did try to challenge myself to write shorter stories, like my novellas, when i started this blog/posting original writing here. that was not only because i do tend to get very complicated/long original ideas, but also because i think it was important to me to actually finish some original work, which i had never done before.

shorter stories tend to have more straightforward plots. not that you can't boil down longer stories to simpler summaries, but generally longer story ideas have more stops along the way so to speak that come to me when i'm developing the idea because i want to cover more with the story. the main character in dale having had childhood illness, dale raised by his grandparents, there being tournament stuff and assassins stuff and uncomfortable parties and most importantly MC figuring out dale was a demon immediately and dale not knowing the MC knew that were all things i came up with (loosely) very soon after i started working on it.

which leads into my next piece of advice: write everything you brainstorm down - you will forget and you will remember there's something u've forgotten and it will annoy the hell out of you. write your notes, write your what ifs, write down possible character names, write down cool ideas for scenes--heck write some of the scenes up then, evn if its for chapter 24 of 35. dont save what ur most excited for as like a carrot on a stick, i find that it doesnt help and that having part of my story that i love existing already is a much better motivator to write the rest

i'm also a big outliner and planner. i think some people think what that means is that u should b able to write a plan once for a story and then never change or deviate from it--but no! change the plan as you go; scrap things that dont work out and add new ideas when they come to you. however, i do think having something down that covers the whole story, lets you get a good idea of the shape of the story, and reminds you of your end goal, are all incredibly helpful. i also keep multiple worldbuilding notes docs; character and location lists; picture inspiration; etc to support the longform idea

i think u also hav to hav confidence/delusion that you will in fact finished. i hav started multiple longform original writing ideas in the past. none of them are done except dale. and part of it was not taking some of my own advice up top, but i think i also just wasnt as committed? lik it'd get lost in worldbuilding, or writing other projects, or life happening (which is all absolutely fine) but dale was the first longform idea where i like, really believed i could write it all and where i was dedicated to putting in the time i'd need to finish it. i knew i would need to take breaks and it would take more than a year (which i did and it did) but i still believed i'd get to where i am now, with a finished draft which i think was really key.

also, practice, i've been writing for years and year; i've been reading for even longer; and i've been writing and posting fanfic for years as well. some of my longer fanfics were such good practice for how to plot a long story without having to generate all the lore myself and having guardrails on for the story/characters in general. aside from dale, my next five pieces of longest writing are all fanfic.

lastly, find at least one person you can talk to about your story. i really think that helped me stay excited and motivated about my longform story in particular. i of course like talking about shorter stories too, but i dont think i felt as compelled to keep talking about them during the process of writing them as i did for my longform stories (even my longer fanfics i talked with other ppl in the big bang about or other writers on discord). and i dont just mean posting the rough drafts as u go like i did, but friends, irl or online, that either are also writers or are just interested in what story you want to make. i think it helps make it more real to you, it gives you ways to talk through issues that come up, its a way to get excited because they're excited, and it makes someone besides you ask how everythings going. the longer stories ideas i had but never got finished are also ones i primarily kept to myself, because i dont think i'd realized how helpful it could be to share them and also because i was still sure that in order to justify telling someone or evn for someone to care, it would hav to already be written, but it doesnt! and in retrospect, i wish i had because maybe those stories would exist--or maybe i'll dig up those notes and talk to someone about them and then find myself back to writing about them (rip to Aftermath, that corrupted external hard drive did u dirty and killed my motivation).

i think getting to understand and figure out your own process, to really look at yourself and see what works and what doesnt (as honestly as you can) is extremely helpful. u'll also figure stuff out along the way--dont hesitate to try to new strategies or drop one that are really not working for you. its all a learning process. be nice to yourself! give yourself the grace to make mistakes (or tell a friend so they can bully you into to cutting urself some damn slack when u can't stick to a weekly upload schedule u made up for urself).

whatever longform story you've got in ur head is one worth sharing and seeing through to completion--and then inflicting on everyone else lol OUR problem now ;)

[peacockrulz]

For requests! I’m curious! Do you have murder drone OCs? If so i’d love to see your drone ocs in a drawing! maybe smooching or holding hands?

To be honest, I don't actually have any MD ocs suprisingly lol (Not Counting Fankids Anyway) but I do have a couple designs laying around i never got to do anything with so here

The girl on top is named R (shes actually just a roblox avatar i got attached to sdlkfjsdf) and the girl on bottom is Mod(el). Niether of them belong to any story or have any actually character but, I thought itd be fun to draw smth for this.

oh and then i remembered the actual request so UH heres them kissing??? enjoy :]

i guess she wanted it to be personal

[jamiesfootball]

Can you talk about oh god you’re gonna get it? Tell me anything. Status? Snippet? Whatever you want to share.

I LOVE to talk about Oh God You're Gonna Get It. HAPPILY!

Chapter two is still underway. I have two more gift fics to get through, and then it moves back up to the top of my priority list! Not that I haven't loved taking a stretch into other things, but I've missed my baby.

I also did a gift fic that takes place during chapter one from Jamie's pov.

In the meantime, thank you for your patience! Here's a sneak peak into chapter two:

If there were one player Roy would rather have nothing in common with, it was Dani Rojas.

Dani's knee made that impossible. Reading his report was like reliving an old nightmare. It may still be in the beginning stages, but the future of Dani's career laid out in front of him like lines on a road.

The injury that had kept him off the Richmond team for the better part of the season three years ago never went away, because inner meniscus tears never healed. They tore, they were removed with simple surgery, and then you spent the next few years convincing yourself that everything was the same. Meanwhile on the inside, the missing cartilage left the leg open to further injury, and if you were the kind of idiot that chased a ball around for a living -- the kind that ran and kicked and jumped -- all of those small twists would eventually tear more of the meniscus, until even a small rip around the outer edge of it might require surgery.

This would be Dani Roja's second meniscectomy, but it wouldn't be his last. As long as he kept playing, there'd be more. Eventually there'd be nothing left to remove.

Then some twat would offer him a position as a talking head somewhere, like that'd ever be an adequate consolation prize for someone like Dani Rojas.

Dani handled the news of his upcoming surgery well given the circumstances. The overall number of brain cells knocking around the Nelson Road may be lacking, but none of the players were dumb when it came to football. Dani could read the writing on the wall just as well as the next guy. Like Sam, he'd taken the news with a pained smile and a lack of surprise -- there was no way he'd been playing the full ninety minutes without feeling it coming.

The meniscectomy would be this week with the same doctor who'd done the first. No expected complications. The tearing was mild compared to the first time. If all went well, he'd be up in running in four to six weeks. Until then, there was nothing to be done about it.

Roy set his report aside.

[mywaywardcupcake]

I wanna hear more of your wild west au aaaaaaaaaaa

Particularly what's going on with Pegasus and the mines cough cough totally not blorbo bias cough cough

Please tell us moreeeee

Also if you need someone to talk to abt it I would love to dm you ;w;

:3c

I am down to talk about this yes!!

So I will be honest the thoughts are still coming together for this but here is the main points I got going on!

My main plot I have going is right now fairly basic. Pegasus is the person who is running the town. Him and his goons collect debts and assets from people when it benefits them. This is how Yugi gets involved. Their family wasn't too keen on Pegasus having so much control, but it became a much bigger issue when Pegasus seized ownership of Yugi's family weapons store due to a falling behind on payments. (Yugi's grandpa swears he made those payments and had the place finally paid for, but the deed seems to have vanished). Yugi is going to get that proof if it's the last thing he does and of course with the help of Joey, they have fun messing things up (such as those shipments on the train that also seemed to have mysteriously vanished) for Mr. Crawford.

Now for the mines. When Pegasus came into town, the mines were already there, though they had been shut down for years. The Kaiba family had said there was nothing left of importance in the mines and kept them off limits to the public, lest someone tried to get in there and see if they could find something for themselves. When Pegasus came, one of the first things he did was reopen the mines. Most people thought it was a silly endeavor, but there has been non-stop activity since it's reopening. While the workers are not allowed to talk with the townsfolk, it's not uncommon to see one at the local doctors with some form of consumption. While getting treated as best they can, many seemed to be in a delirious state and tell of seeing mysterious people in the caves. These shadowy figures don't interact with them, but one swears that one of the shadows was his dead brother.

Most of the story is still being built up, so things may change, but I am always down to talk about it! Also, you can 100% dm anytime to talk more about this!

[brutal-nemesis]

Feel free to ignore this and im sorry if i word it poorly, but I'm asking because I'm genuinely curious and want to learn as I don't know any aroace people in real life! You said you have a boyfriend, but you don't feel romantic attraction. How does that change having a friend vs having a boyfriend?

No worries I'm happy to talk about it!! This might get kinda rambly but oh well shove it under readmore so i can talk forever

So I think for my boyfriend, I think it's just like more intense platonic feelings? The sorts of things I want to do with him are things I would be fine doing with someone else, if that makes sense. Cuz a lot of aromantics/aro-adjacent people struggle with telling the difference between romantic and platonic attraction, myself included. At some point I defined romantic as wanting to do certain things with Them and Only Them, while platonic is like I would prefer to do xyz thing with them but if I did it with someone else it wouldn't be weird. "Doing things" in this case ranges from eating a meal together to cuddling (for me things don't go beyond that physically). Idk if I explained it well enough but that's the definition I use for myself.

So like I still love him and care about him a lot and everything but it's not quite the same way he loves me (he's straight). I at least can sense a sort of difference in how we feel about each other, idk if he can, but it makes me more certain that my feelings for him aren't romantic, and that is okay. He's known I'm aroace since before we started dating (he was super scared to ask me out because of it rip bozo) so we've always been on the same page about all of that.

And you're probably wondering why I did agree to go out with him if I don't have romantic feelings for him. For starters, I've never been opposed to the idea of having a partner, but it was more of a "if it happens great and if not that's fine too" kinda vibe. In the months before we started dating we'd gotten really close as friends and did some cuddling because that shit can totally be platonic yk. He caught feelings somewhere along the way cuz Straight and when he asked I said yes cuz I do want to be with him. I wanna hang out all the time and go for hikes and watch Ghost Files and make dinner together and let him have some of my ice cream.

I could do those things with someone else and still have fun, but I'd rather do them with him. So it's platonic, in my eyes, but it's still very much love.

[radioladynancy]

I'm in ur walls :)

Not anymore bud :)

[monster-noises]

I love second hand book shops, I got to them frequently and always leave with Something and have a good time just peakin around

But i gotta say

It's one of the Worst spots for me in terms of imposter syndrome

I feel like everyone's uneasey with my presence as though i'm a stranger who just stumbled into their inner sanctum and they're.. they're gunna let me stay but they're gunna be weirded out the whole time and breath a sigh of relief when the Strange Unwelcome Freak Leaves

It also happens at record shops and sometimes at small antique shops or cons+festivals

Just this immediate foreboding of being Angrily Tolerated in a Space I Don't Belong

[pinkytoothlesso11]

Hi! I have two questions the first question is are you going to convert Morgana in Challenging Destiny and the second is are you going to do more Dromura. Sorry for any mistakes, I'm doing this with a translator

There aren't any mistakes with the translation, don't worry! I understand what you're saying!

Answer to first question: Yes!! Morgana will be getting eventually a redemption arc, hopefully in a more meaningful way than in Canon. And she is not going to have an easy time with the things she's done to several key members of Team Trollhunters. She's going to have to deal with the consequences of her past actions and a fair amount of guilt.

Answer to second question: probably will be more Dromura, but can't predict how/when that will appear again in the story. Hopefully you're alright with that.

[hrrisn]

TAG DUMP !

[crookedfandomquill]

This is very situational, and sadly may not be realistic for everyone, but I need y’all to understand that a very important part of political activism is fucking talking to your conservative or moderate friends and family.

My dad voted for Trump in 2016. He’s a middle class white evangelical from Arkansas. He raised me with conservative Christian values, just like his parents raised him. When he voted Trump, he was holding his nose, but he didn’t feel too bad about it, and went on to vote red down the ticket in the 2018 midterms, as well.

But I started college in 2017. Higher education and independence changed everything for me, and I went home over holidays and summers with fire in my belly and a thousand arguments ready at the drop of a hat, to my father’s dismay.

I remember crying in my room after emotional, intense arguments with him. I told him over and over that I felt betrayed by his choice to vote for a man who admitted to sexually assaulting women, who built his platform on dehumanizing immigrants and the disabled, who spread overtly-racist rhetoric, who flouted the values of kindness and self-discipline that I’d been raised on. And my dad always had some justification about the “greater good”: fighting against abortion, bolstering the economy, getting other Christian politicians into office.

But over time, as we grew further apart and I lost my will to discuss anything with him at all, he softened. He started asking me why I thought the way I did about the things we disagreed about. He would listen to my answers without interruption, and mull them over afterward instead of expressing his own opinion. And all the while, he watched the Trump presidency become cruel and absurd and devastating.

The first time he openly expressed regret to me, I had come home for a weekend after Kavanaugh was confirmed to SCOTUS. My dad realized he had helped elect a man who preyed on women… and that man had opened the door to more predators. I can’t tell you what it felt like for him to admit that he’d made a mistake, not just in voting for Trump but in defending him for so long. We kept arguing, but it was more debating than fighting. I knew he was capable of seeing my side of things, even if it took a while, and he knew I wasn’t just a sensitive college student with shallow new ideas about the world.

And then 2020 hit. Specifically, George Floyd was murdered, and the events that followed played out on the national stage. My dad was incredibly shaken by it. He asked me if I had any books from college about racial issues. I loaned him The New Jim Crow, one of the required readings for my Race and the Law class. Then I gave him Just Mercy. Then he watched the documentary 13th. Then he joined a racial harmony group he learned about through one of the few Black families at our church and insisted our whole family come. He held up signs at a protest against Confederate monuments in our conservative southern town. In three years, he went from defending Trump’s comments about “Black-on-Black crime” to publicly advocating for racial justice and opposing the death penalty.

We went together to vote in the 2020 primaries. I couldn’t help asking who he’d voted for; I didn’t even know if he’d asked for the Republican or Democratic ticket. He admitted he’d voted for Bernie. fucking. Sanders, then made me promise not to tell my grandma he’d voted liberal. When the election rolled around in November, he voted Biden. I’m sure he held his nose to do it, just like he held his nose voting in 2016. But I know he doesn’t regret it.

I am, of course, unbelievably lucky to have a parent who loved me enough, and was empathetic enough, to choose his relationship with me over his strongly-held opinions. He kept searching for truth because, as much as he’ll deny it, he’s a very smart and curious person. No degree of intelligence or curiosity makes you immune to propaganda, especially if you were raised not to question the party line. It’s easy to dismiss our conservative, conspiracy-pilled loved ones as stupid, hypocritical, and cruel. Sometimes they are. But sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes they will bend to keep their relationships from breaking. Sometimes, if they can be made to understand that their beliefs and actions are harming someone they love, they will make concessions. And sometimes they just need one person in their life to put a foot down, to be vulnerable and assertive and argumentative, to bring the impact of their politics close to home.

As the most important election of our lifetimes approaches, do not put peace over progress. If you have someone like my dad, someone who is good-willed and smart and loves you more than their own opinions, tell them how you feel. Tell them what their choices will mean for you, for your friends, for your community. Tell them what they could lose: your trust, your affection, your respect. Don’t avoid conflict if it could be productive. Because my conflict with my dad didn’t just win him over–it won over my moderate mom and one of my conservative brothers. And it put us in community with other like-minded people and led my parents to a healthier and kinder faith.

All of this to say, there is hope in conflict. There is hope in our relationships with people who think differently from us. There is hope in exposing your fear and anger and pain to people you love. And hope is a form of activism.