#boosting-your-ego

[aroacesafeplaceforall]

Thing about being aroace (cough just me cough) is that you both don’t care if others find you attractive but at the same time know that they will because your the hottest thing that ever walked this mother fucking planet

[jovialoddity]

Hey look a little guy drew smth for professor puzzles!! Let's see what it is

What a amazing drawing!!!

(This totally wasn't a excuse to give professor puzzles more love in a childlike wholesome way by giving him a student that sees him as a idol)

(DON’T WORRY THESE ARE HAPPY TEARS)

Man, he LOVES it!!! It’s rare for his students to even like him, let alone give him a gift, so something as sweet as this absolutely made his day. He’s framing it and putting it on his desk for EVERYBODY to see so he can brag about it

[longing-for-rain]

You want to prove Zuko is the better man so bad but he only got 1 kid and Aang got 3 so who’s the ‘alpha’ now?

😬😬😬 Maybe I spoke too soon when I said Kataang shippers weren’t as outwardly misogynistic as they used to be

[yukipri]

If someone told me I was a handsome, perfect little boi as frequently as I say it to my cats, I too would probably walk around like I owned the place, sitting on/knocking over whatever I please

[gailynovelry]

Thinking a little bit about that one "I'm an English major and a professional as opposed to you amateurs" anon. Gonna roast 'em a little bit, but with the intention of addressing a thing we've had in mind for a while.

Real talk, coming from someone who WAS an English major; majoring in English is not necessarily a guarantee that someone is a good writer. For one, you can be bad at your major, full stop. For another, it's not even a guarantee that someone identifies as a writer to begin with. English as a major is pretty broad, and it covers reading too, among other things. There's library science, analytical academia, historical preservation & interpretation (MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPTS HELL YES), editing, nonfiction trades (often crosses over with STEM majors), marketing (crosses over with business majors), and also book design and typography (<3 <3 <3 our favorite, crosses over with art majors).

Someone can major in English and take a specific minor with the goal of falling into a trade that is not writing literary fiction. In fact, we would argue that most people who get something useful out of their major are the ones that do that.

It's also worth noting that it's possible to be an English major focused on "lowbrow" fiction. There are people who major in English and use the experience towards the end of writing erotica. There are people who major in English with the intent to write genre fiction. There are people who major in English to study the history and social context of fanfiction.

These things are, in fact, worthy fields of study! The realm of the "amateur" is the realm where a lot of cultural conversations and innovations happen!

Expecting English as a major to be a tract specifically for producing acclaimed literary fictionists is not realistic, not how the discipline typically works, and it's certainly not a thing you can use to hold over other writers' heads. It is perfectly possible for people to write good things (professional-grade things even) without ever touching a college course.

I sat through so much bad writing in college. Technically bad, thematically bad, gramatically bad. And I routinely bump into non-graduate authors who write texts, formal and informal alike, that blow my own writing clean out of the water with their quality.

In short, dismissing other people in your general field as "amateurs" who are beneath you is an incredibly unprofessional thing to do.

[buwheal]

"I just feel if you're going to do a non-conformative statement it should have meaning behind it."

God forbid I am whimsical and silly for the sake of having fun

[tubbytarchia]

I just saw a few "beginner artist" animations and posts that had gained some traction and their comment sections actually made me pretty seethingly upset.

"Experienced" artists really just jump on "beginner" artists to tell them all the 2 to 5 to 50 things that they can do better. All under the guise of "I'm just tryna help" and coated with "you have potential!". Well I am also a fellow artist and that is so haughty and discouraging to me. Some artists need to get off their hyper realistic objectively superior anatomically correct high horses and give the goofy newbie ones some fucking room to breathe. Leave beginner artists alone, a tip or two is fine but they do not need 20 people correcting all their "mistakes" and giving tips and criticism where it was never asked for. I genuinely feel so bad for these beginning artists who put in effort to create something, and that's the foremost beauty of art, only to get jumped like prey by all these other artists who fail to appreciate the very core of what they claim to teach. If you do that, THEY DON'T NEED YOU to grow as artists, and that's assuming you even wanted to help and not just having a superiority complex

[kalied0skull]

being agender is funny because I'll have these moments of "i wish i could be a boy :(" or "i wish i could be a girl :(" until i remember like, bitch why do i have to be one or the other i can just Percieve Differently

[aroacesafeplaceforall]

Aroace but knowing you’re the baddest bitch in this goddamn room

[madame-mongoose]

I would do anything for Barry like I am down bad in the most queer platonic way possible like you don’t understand I would have killed the dinosaurs for him if he wanted me to I will edit any book in his favour like I am DEDICATED

He doesn't get compliments like that often lol

[mxtxfanatic]

Yi City Arc: Spooky Edition

Since I'm doing a spooky edition liveblog, that means y'all will be getting some spooky edition metas, and what better place to start than with everyone's favorite Yi City parallels! In this meta in particular, I want to discuss how mxtx weaponizes these parallels to temporarily trick readers into considering the wrong antagonist as the main villain.

I say it here that Jiang Cheng is introduced to us like a villain. In fact, up until this point in the novel, we don't have a villain. Every antagonistic character is dead, and Wei Wuxian has no fetters or obligations holding him back. But then Jiang Cheng enters the narrative, and unlike Lan Wangji's introduction, he is juxtaposed as cruel and bloodthirsty. In traditional English crime and mystery literature, Jiang Cheng would be Suspect #1. However, Suspect #1 in a mystery is almost always innocent of the main crime being investigated. Likewise—though I haven't read a lot of specifically mystery-genre cnovels—in cnovels with plots about protagonists uncovering the truth behind who schemed them into ruin, the first and most obvious antagonist thrown out is almost always just the cover for the true villain still lurking in the shadows. In mdzs, rather than using the characters' own deductions to mislead the audience—Wei Wuxian never suspects Jiang Cheng because none of their actions have ever been secret or hidden from the other—mxtx, instead, uses the Yi City arc.

How does this work?

Well, first she sets up heavy parallels between the major Yi City arc characters:

Wei Wuxian identifies heavily with Xiao Xingchen, particularly through his morality, dedication to justice, and his ending:

— To end up like that due to something that originally had nothing to do with him, that’s seriously...if Xiao Xingchen had been born a few years earlier, or if I had died a few years later, things wouldn’t have turned out like this. If I had been alive, something like this would never have been brushed aside. And I would definitely have become friends with a person of his character!

—Chapt. 30: Morning Dew III, fanyiyi

Inside the coffin home, Xue Yang paced as terrifying abuse flew from his mouth, full of both fury and rapture. “Saving the world! It’s so funny, I’m going to die of laughter. You can’t even save yourself!” Wei Wuxian felt several sharp pains stab at his brain. But this pain did not originate from Ah-qing’s soul. ... That very moment, as Wei Wuxian looked upon Xiao Xingchen’s body, he saw himself. A miserable failure, covered in blood, impotent, fingers pointed at him, furious denouncements shouted in his face. Powerless to reverse the motion of the sky. Powerless to do anything but weep.

—Chapt. 41: Flora IX, fanyiyi

Jiang Cheng, on the flip side of things, shares the same moral and life philosophy as Xue Yang, the villain of the arc.

If you are paying attention and connecting dots, it is at this moment in the narrative where you should start questioning if Wei Wuxian is actually the bad guy (if you hadn’t been already)—especially given how we see Xiao Xingchen so easily scapegoated for Xue Yang’s crimes simply because nobody bothered to verify any of the rumors they heard. However, this is where the red herring comes in: while Wei Wuxian—like Xiao Xingchen—proves to have been victimized by the scheming of others, Jiang Cheng, unlike Xue Yang, is not the main schemer behind Wei Wuxian’s downfall but, rather, an easily manipulated pawn, the perfect archetype of Suspect #1.

Jiang Cheng may have gleefully participated in and benefited from Wei Wuxian’s downfall, and we are even made privy to a slew of motivations for why he would do so, but what he lacked in the end was drive, ability, and initiative, the things that separate Suspect #1 from the true villain while making suspects such good false leads. An obvious answer throwing itself in front of the audience to attract its gaze is the easiest way to distract from the real mastermind sitting off-stage pulling strings. And if you, the reader, get so overconfident in your deduction skills that you stop looking at evidence and start making guesstimations and assumptions, you’re more likely to overlook the curtain in the background with the suspiciously human-shaped shadow inside it. After all, isn’t how Xiao Xingchen was labeled a vengeful murderer by the cultivation world because his sword was used as the murder weapon by Xue Yang proof enough of this?

[tunapesto]

you can't even be silly anymore. because of Woke

[petrichormariposa]

Queer people are still getting killed on the streets from violence getting fanned by the flames of the newest wave of hatred in this country and people think it’s cute to start off pride month by picking a new letter off of LGBTQIA+ to turn into a scapegoat punching bag for “cute jokes” like don’t piss me off they wanna kill all of us

[theropoda]

i hate that Media Literacy is the latest new thing the tortured underground posters of tumblr have latched their sense of moral superiority to bc like like here's a life skill that's actually essential, invaluable, incredibly important for navigating day-to-day life, that is objectively a Good Thing, a lack of which is something that ought to be cause for concern (all of which is unlike previous subjects that have been paraded around as Indicators of Superiority like having sex and doing drugs and going to clubs or whatever when theyre literally just things people choose to do) but people on this site cannot go a single day without being so fucking condescending about it and making it less about "genuine issue in modern society we should talk more about" and more "uhhhh i interpreted this anime Better Than You Did which means im better and smarter than you completely ignoring the fact this is a skill that is learned/taught and not born with and isnt an inherent indicator of morality".

[sasaleletrebol]

Thanks for always agreeing with me, it's a boost for my ego

I mean, what can I say... It's not my fault that you're always right.

[ocelotlesbian]

hey wait what the fuck