#hyperliteral

[dnfity]

i got an anon a few days ago asking me why no one was surprised about dream's autism diagnosis and well i cant find the anon now but just to put it into perspective these are the types of things he used to tweet

[burntoutuserboxes]

[Don't take this user's words hyper-literally.]

[elena-ferrante]

tv shows that while you're watching make you feel smart: my brilliant friend, babylon berlin, 2017 howards end and mad men. that's it.

[not-poignant]

Underline the Blue (Nate/Janusz - Omegaverse)

Title: Underline the Blue

Pairing: Nate Prince/Janusz Bodanowicz

Notes: This is another story in the Underline the Black universe! Set prior to Underline the Black.

Summary: Nate, an omega, has been sent to Hillview by his alpha partner who doesn’t believe he’s good enough to claim or bond with, and wants him trained up at an omega rehabilitation facility to be a better partner. Nate is paired up with the alpha Janusz, who soon realises Nate has been micromanaged and ‘trained’ already to the point of having his soul shattered, and a journey of slow recovery and rehabilitation begins.

Underline the Blue - Chapter 19 - on AO3!

In which Nate successfully navigates eating in a restaurant for the first time in a long time, but not without a few small hiccups. Then Janusz mounts him for the first time since the traumatic mounting they both went through.

Underline the Blue (early access) - Chapter 21 @ Patreon || Ream

In which Nate’s anger at himself for not being a good enough omega cracks violently to the surface, and Janusz suggests therapy, as well as helping Nate to understand that anger is a human emotion, and not one that needs to be eliminated or repressed.

Early access chapters are released in the Augus & Gwyn tiers and higher on both Patreon and Ream. :D (Folks are only charged once a month on Ream, hence the slightly higher fee - that and I set my tier prices 10 years ago and cost of living has gone up a little since then! T.T)

– Thanks to all the Patreon and Ream supporters for making this (and my other writing) possible!

[umathurwin]

it gets to a point where maybe this just isn’t the show for you

[suenitos]

He was saying that the ideal room would George’s office BUT downstairs which then Sapnap said so your office and he was just like oh yeah, like he forgot that was an option

aurrrrrrrrr. thank you thsi actually makes sense as well lol

[boopilydoop]

Is this good I don't know

I got the Top 4.47% on this English Vocabulary test

[transfaguette]

It's less that Steven universe didn't kill the fascists and more that they had fascists in the first place AND didn't really punish them in the slightest

listen man. did steven universe really “have fascists.” or was it fundamentally a story about emotions and love and family and growing up with the set dressing of something more grand to make it exciting. which, i’m not even saying they never wanted to make sociopolitical statements, they did, or that the wires between the themes and worldbuilding never got crossed in bad ways. but maybe you could just walk away saying “well, that was imperfect and I would have handled things differently” and understand this criticism only exists through the lens of hyperliteralism and also years of smear campaigns against the creator.

[the-joju-experience]

Mumbo in the Life Series isn’t disloyal, he’s just very literal about the rules.

His first season was Last Life, where you formally could not remain with your team after a certain point. He then took off two seasons where the culture shifted back to reds sticking with their team (in Double Life, you were still soulbound to your partner, and in Limited Life, everyone was going to be red for a third of the series because of the timer, so why bother exiling?).

So Mumbo comes back in Secret Life to a very different server and becomes one of the first reds. No one thought to tell him that the norms had changed. They tried, the Mounders told Mumbo that he could stay, but he was so hell-bent on his task that he didn’t process that he didn’t have to do this anymore.

We come into Wild Life with Mumbo, hyperliteral with the rules, in a series with the defining mechanic that the rules are always changing. Whatever he’s going to do will be incredibly entertaining.

[ndcultureis]

Neurodivergent culture is a primary school classmate repeatedly asking you "wanna go?" and you keep responding "where are we going?" not realizing that the little punk is trying to challenge you to a schoolyard fight, resulting in being bullied for your hyperliteralism, trying to defend yourself from it and being victim-blamed by every adult who hears of it.

.

[tanadrin]

Watching someone work themselves up into genuine irritation that somebody’s offhand metaphor for a social situation does not correspond one to one to the situation to which they are attempting to apply it, deny an experience could be reasonably common just because they have not personally experienced it, and insist this is some pathology or deficiency of people in the media. Idk man seems like you just have a difficult time with hypothetical social situations? I’m no expert but this sort of hyperliteral thinking and lack of cognitive flexibility sure seem like symptoms of ASD or similar disorders. Maybe find a therapist who can help you with that, or read about useful coping strategies, or spend less time on social media, rather than being belligerent in other people’s notes?

[elizabethaethertownusa]

More waiting room drafting / doctor’s office bathroom looks, which I thought was a funny thing to do while I was doing it—the uncropped original includes ranks of unused collection cups—but which seems less funny now, if I am honest with you. But I looked cute.

I provided a sample and put it in a little cubby in the wall behind a lifting door; I closed the door and heard a dim soft thump; I opened the door again and the sample had disappeared. I sat there laughing. The swiftness and secrecy were so funny to me. It was like one of the imp puppets from Labyrinth had shot up and taken it.

I am reading Angels In America and I dislike it. It makes me nostalgic for serious theater but aside from that—I am bored any time an author imagines people outside his set as basically quaint, repressed, operating from instinct, etc. I am telling you this here because it bears on a choice I made a few years ago, which was never to try to imagine my way into a protagonist or close secondary character whose mind and inclinations I found uninteresting or for which I had contempt. In other words, I decided to strictly write about people who interest me, the sort of people I would like to know. I recognized making the decision that it would make my work very specific and would seem kind of funny to unsympathetic readers—for some people it would seem funny to imagine a world exclusively populated by the hyperliterate self-taught, religious and weird—but I so deeply dislike writers whose efforts at seeing into someone unlike them fall into guessing what that person might do based on what the writer has seen them do. It’s always false, it’s always superficial, it’s always dull, it always smells like self-congratulation. I won’t do that.

It’s not the main reason I decided to write exclusively about people I actually like—the main reason was my own fulfillment and interest. I felt I was given permission when I read a novel by Maylis de Kerangal which hopped around a gigantic cast, every one of whom was fascinating in a way an American editor would object to as improbable. Specifically I was moved and impressed by a section where a surgeon (I think—I am going off memory) returns home after a long day and watches The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man in the Moon Marigolds because he thinks from the title that it might have something to do with psychedelic plants, his principle interest and which he gardens himself in his apartment, and even though the film is nothing like that he finds it hugely emotionally affecting and thinks about it with the dreamy discursive hopefulness he prizes, mentally, while making himself eggs in the small hours before bed. It was such a lovely scene. I thought, that’s the sort of idea and scene and person I am interested in. That’s what I’m going to do without apology.

I am in for a bad four weeks of heavy meds and physical discomfort and, most difficultly for me, uncertainty. It will all get progressively easier as the meds begin to work and test results return and enough time passes for other tests to be available. I think I’ll be different at the end of the next twenty eight or so days than I was at the start. I hope it will not go on hurting me emotionally as it has. I feel very much diminished. I feel disheartened. I am unhappy. I have handled it so far with zero dignity, at least where those closest to me are concerned. Probably everything is perfectly fine. But I am very unhappy.

[lakesbian]

i love the wildbow novel brand of hyperliteral metaphors. what if your abusive family cut off every good & free part of yourself, crammed them into a reflection of you defined by being The Person You Could've Been, and then forced you to literally kill them. would that be fucked up or what

[umathurwin]

Did u see ‘@kaliforniahigh’s take on kiarafe😭😭

LOL

not touching the age gap thing because some people are just really conservative about that. 17 and 19 is a very appropriate gap where i am, but it’s not necessarily normal everywhere and i can’t do anything about that yknow

other than that, it looks like this is just an example of interacting with a series extremely literally. everything on screen is to be interpreted exactly as is, and the context or meaning behind any action is as irrelevant as it would be in the real world

in the boat hangar, kiara and rafe are fighting and when she calls him a murderer, he grabs her throat. interpretation in context = rafe cannot cope with his own actions, and any attempts to face them are met with overwhelming emotion and a loss of control. hyperliteral interpretation = rafe hurt a woman and is an irredeemably bad person for this. and like... i guess technically neither of these are wrong or right, but can you see how the latter is kind of a stale and shallow way to interact with the source material? these are not real people or even representations of them; they’re tools for telling a story, a story about family and adventure and love and change. conflict is inevitable. don’t be afraid of it!

then again, on the other hand, i’m reading about power imbalances and control and fear and i get a hard-on so intense my vision goes blurry for a few seconds so who knows

[funstyle]

hyperliterate white child named grammarleigh

[baltears]

idk how else to describe this like i think the kind of traditionalist/hyperliteral read of buffy not catching feelings for spike until late s5/s6 just misses the level of iron grip buffy keeps on her feelings. apropos of nothing other than seeing this read one too many times and im not up on my buffy meta scholarship so forgive me if im making the same points everyone and their mother has been making for the past two decades

keeping tight control over her feelings is not something buffy started doing after a certain point, it's a behavior she has coming into the pilot bc we see that at that point there's already a level of emotional distance between her and joyce (not only re the slayer stuff and the later retconned-in betrayal & invalidation trauma from being thrown in an institution when she tried to tell her parents the truth, but also for instance the intensity of buffy's distress over the divorce). she already has a home life consisting of not voicing most of her difficult and 'close to the chest' emotions. when she tries to be genuine in a way that asks for space for her frustration or anger or more 'selfish' feelings, this is often not met with understanding (worth mentioning that giles does a MUCH better job on this than joyce for the most part, but other characters including willow and xander respond poorly a substantial number of times). as a result she is well practiced at suppressing emotions that are too inconvenient or complicated to feel acceptable to verbalize, so she tends to just kind of whistle past things that feel hard to tackle until she reaches a point where she can no longer bear to ignore them. this is a core part of her canon characterization that is also visible at many points in buffy's relationship with angel (s3 comes to mind, when she spends a good chunk of the season operating under the convenient belief that they're in a functional platonic friendship when she subconsciously knows they are still too hung up on each other for that to be feasible). so like we know this is something buffy does. it is not at all unusual for her to feel things that she keeps beneath her conscious awareness + does not allow herself to process and admit to having felt until well after the fact.

this takes me to the oft cited point that from the first time she interacts with spike, there is a different vibe happening than is typical for buffy and vamps. it just feels very obvious to me that from basically minute one (or maybe more accurately from their first fight, when she isn't so much on the back foot) she registers him on some level as a person who happens to be really interesting and hot, but has a fairly easy time of it keeping this feeling out of her conscious awareness bc 1) he's also an unsouled vamp, meaning she can choose to dismiss his personhood as nonexistent and his personality as mere performance or game-playing (ie he is not a 'real' person, therefore the relationship need not be acknowledged as 'real' either – taken to extremes in s6 when she has to actively abuse him and continually reaffirm his lack of humanity and lack of worth in order to sustain the self-told belief that she doesnt see or experience his personhood and doesnt feel a human connection with him), 2) they're mortal enemies, 3) he likes to be really annoying on purpose + as a vampire also has a baseline level of generally acting like a bit of a creep, and 4) for much of their relationship she has other romantic objects on whom she can more acceptably focus her attention (insert reference to spuffy being a queer coded relationship here).

i think this state of noticing-slash-not-noticing persists from 2.03 through s3&4 and into season 5. by then she is so good at studiously ignoring how weird and flirtatious and intense their dynamic has always been that the revelation that spike is now acting very obviously like hes in love with her, to the extent that someone else could notice, takes her totally by surprise. getting more specific idk how else one could possibly explain how her ass was acting in something blue pre-spell, like i absolutely canNOT see buffy behaving like that around any other vamp literally ever. they were both being so unceasingly annoying with their creepy little flirty back and forth that both giles and willow were completely over it and just wanted them to shut up and stop paying so much attention to each other. ig the point im getting at is i think it's weird and dont get it when ppl seem to read buffy's character as if shes basically just saying the things she feels and vice versa rather than like regularly and even habitually lying to herself, bc i just don't think that's in line with the character that we're shown. buffy SAYS for a very long time that she doesnt care about spike and basically says and does everything possible to deny that she has any attachment to him at all, but frankly i think the level of aggression and frequency with which she expresses variations on that sentiment in and of itself gives the lie to that idea. anyways i think she was down bad pretty much immediately and just took a very long time to let herself notice