#i hope this comes off the right way

[watchthekittycatcher]

"neurodiversity is real" and "pathologizing random human behaviors is dangerous" and "symptoms of mental illnesses can come from chemical imbalances" and "symptoms of mental illnesses can come from environmental and schedule-based stressors" are all statements that are true

[crabussy]

saw a post about this earlier but it wasn't worded super nicely(?) so I'm also making my own to get this out there, sun and moon artists (like myself!! I'm going to take this advice too) have been absolutely FLOODING the fnaf tag to the point where only 1 in every about every 20 posts are not about the dca. I love those two jesters but we're making the fandom experience of other fnaf fans pretty difficult, especially those who are looking for non dca content!!

please possibly stop tagging your sun and moon art as fnaf, and instead tag it with dca, daycare attendant, sun and moon, fnaf dca, security breach, etc!! I know it technically does belong in the fnaf tag but its starting to become a problem!! check the fnaf tag now if you want to see what I mean.

I've also seen people saying a lot of dca fanart is so different from the source material that it's not quite canon enough to be in the fnaf tag, which. fair. if you look at my sun and moon art on @quiltbeast it's not even close to the canon dca. please keep this in mind!! maybe don't tag as fnaf but instead tag as fnaf au (: this keeps the main tag full of diverse art and also allows people to find the dca art they're looking for.

thanks for considering this, and please boost so more artists can see!! lets make fandom a more enjoyable experience for all ((:

[bitethetablet]

you weren’t put on this earth just to endure things people do to you btw just because you can handle something doesn’t mean you should necessarily should have to

[bruhstation]

[swordmaid]

i am wide awake thinking about that post canon jb au again when I should be sleeping …!!! such is the nature of the jbrainrot…

[greenerteacups]

oooh please someday tell us what you think of GOT

oh, no, it's my fatal weakness! it's [checks notes] literally just the bare modicum of temptation! okay you got me.

SO. in order to tell what's wrong with game of thrones you kind of have to have read the books, because the books are the reason the show goes off the rails. i actually blame the showrunners relatively little in proportion to GRRM for how bad the show was (which I'm not gonna rehash here because if you're interested in GOT in any capacity you've already seen that horse flogged to death). people debate when GOT "got bad" in terms of writing, but regardless of when you think it dropped off, everyone agrees the quality declined sharply in season 8, and to a certain extent, season 7. these are the seasons that are more or less entirely spun from whole cloth, because season 7 marks the beginning of what will, if we ever see it, be the Winds of Winter storyline. it's the first part that isn't based on a book by George R.R. Martin. it's said that he gave the showrunners plot outlines, but we don't know how detailed they were, or how much the writers diverged from the blueprint — and honestly, considering the cumulative changes made to the story by that point, some stark divergence would have been required. (there's a reason for this. i'll get there in a sec.)

so far, i'm not saying anything all that original. a lot of people recognized how bad the show got as soon as they ran out of Book to adapt. (I think it's kind of weird that they agreed to make a show about an unfinished series in the first place — did GRRM figure that this was his one shot at a really good HBO adaptation, and forego misgivings about his ability to write two full books in however many years it took to adapt? did he think they would wait for him? did he not care that the series would eventually spoil his magnum opus, which he's spent the last three decades of his life writing? perplexing.) but the more interesting question is why the show got bad once it ran out of Book, because in my mind, that's not a given. a lot of great shows depart from the books they were based on. fanfiction does exactly that, all the time! if you have good writers who understand the characters they're working with, departure means a different story, not a worse one. now, the natural reply would be to say that the writers of GOT just aren't good, or at least aren't good at the things that make for great television, and that's why they needed the books as a structure, but I don't think that's true or fair, either. books and television are very different things. the pacing of a book is totally different from the pacing of a television show, and even an episodic book like ASOIAF is going to need a lot of work before it's remotely watchable as a series. bad writers cannot make great series of television, regardless of how good their source material is. sure, they didn't invent the characters of tyrion lannister and daenerys targaryen, but they sure as hell understood story structure well enough to write a damn compelling season of TV about them!

so but then: what gives? i actually do think it's a problem with the books! the show starts out as very faithful to the early books (namely, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings) to the point that most plotlines are copied beat-for-beat. the story is constructed a little differently, and it's definitely condensed, but the meat is still there. and not surprisingly, the early books in ASOIAF are very tightly written. for how long they are, you wouldn't expect it, but on every page of those books, the plot is racing. you can practically watch george trying to beat the fucking clock. and he does! useful context here is that he originally thought GOT was going to be a trilogy, and so the scope of most threads in the first book or two would have been much smaller. it also helps that the first three books are in some respects self-contained stories. the first book is a mystery, the second and third are espionage and war dramas — and they're kept tight in order to serve those respective plots.

the trouble begins with A Feast for Crows, and arguably A Storm of Swords, because GRRM starts multiplying plotlines and treating the series as a story, rather than each individual book. he also massively underestimated the number of pages it would take him to get through certain plot beats — an assumption whose foundation is unclear, because from a reader's standpoint, there is a fucke tonne of shit in Feast and Dance that's spurious. I'm not talking about Brienne's Riverlands storyline (which I adore thematically but speaking honestly should have been its own novella, not a part of Feast proper). I'm talking about whole chapters where Tyrion is sitting on his ass in the river, just talking to people. (will I eat crow about this if these pay off in hugely satisfying ways in Winds or Dream? oh, totally. my brothers, i will gorge myself on sweet sweet corvid. i will wear a dunce cap in the square, and gleefully, if these turn out to not have been wastes of time. the fact that i am writing this means i am willing to stake a non-negligible amount of pride on the prediction that that will not happen). I'm talking about scenes where the characters stare at each other and talk idly about things that have already happened while the author describes things we already have seen in excruciating detail. i'm talking about threads that, while forgivable in a different novel, are unforgivable in this one, because you are neglecting your main characters and their story. and don't tell me you think that a day-by-day account tyrion's river cruise is necessary to telling his story, because in the count of monte cristo, the main guy disappears for nine years and comes hurtling back into the story as a vengeful aristocrat! and while time jumps like that don't work for everything, they certainly do work if what you're talking about isn't a major story thread!

now put aside whether or not all these meandering, unconcluded threads are enjoyable to read (as, in fairness, they often are!). think about them as if you're a tv showrunner. these bad boys are your worst nightmare. because while you know the author put them in for a reason, you haven't read the conclusion to the arc, so you don't know what that reason is. and even if the author tells you in broad strokes how things are going to end for any particular character (and this is a big "if," because GRRM's whole style is that he lets plots "develop as he goes," so I'm not actually convinced that he does have endings written out for most major characters), that still doesn't help you get them from point A (meandering storyline) to point B (actual conclusion). oh, and by the way, you have under a year to write this full season of television, while GRRM has been thinking about how to end the books for at least 10. all of this means you have to basically call an audible on whether or not certain arcs are going to pay off, and, if they are, whether they make for good television, and hence are worth writing. and you have to do that for every. single. unfinished. story. in the books.

here's an example: in the books, Quentin Martell goes on a quest to marry Daenerys and gain a dragon. many chapters are spent detailing this quest. spoiler alert: he fails, and he gets charbroiled by dragons. GRRM includes this plot to set up the actions of House Martell in Winds, but the problem is that we don't know what House Martell does in Winds, because (see above) the book DNE. So, although we can reliably bet that the showrunners understand (1) Daenerys is coming to Westeros with her 3 fantasy nukes, and (2) at some point they're gonna have to deal with the invasion of frozombies from Canada, that DOESN'T mean they necessarily know exactly what's going to happen to Dorne, or House Martell. i mean, fuck! we don't even know if Martin knows what's going to happen to Dorne or House Martell, because he's said he's the kind of writer who doesn't set shit out beforehand! so for every "Cersei defaults on millions of dragons in loans from the notorious Bank of Nobody Fucks With Us, assumes this will have no repercussions for her reign or Westerosi politics in general" plotline — which might as well have a big glaring THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT stamp on top of the chapter heading — you have Arianne Martell trying to do a coup/parent trap switcheroo with Myrcella, or Euron the Goffick Antichrist, or Faegon Targaryen and JonCon preparing a Blackfyre restoration, or anything else that might pan out — but might not! And while that uncertainty about what's important to the "overall story" might be a realistic way of depicting human beings in a world ruled by chance and not Destiny, it makes for much better reading than viewing, because Game of Thrones as a fantasy television series was based on the first three books, which are much more traditional "there is a plot and main characters and you can generally tell who they are" kind of book. I see Feast and Dance as a kind of soft reboot for the series in this respect, because they recenter the story around a much larger cast and cast a much broader net in terms of which characters "deserve" narrative attention.

but if you're making a season of television, you can't do that, because you've already set up the basic premise and pacing of your story, and you can't suddenly pivot into a long-form tone poem about the horrors of war. so you have to cut something. but what are you gonna cut? bear in mind that you can't just Forget About Dorne, or the Iron Islands, or the Vale, or the North, or pretty much any region of the story, because it's all interconnected, but to fit in everything from the books would require pacing of the sort that no reasonable audience would ever tolerate. and bear in mind that the later books sprout a lot more of these baby-plots that could go somewhere, but also might end up being secondary or tertiary to the "main story," which, at the end of the day, is about dragons and ice zombies and the rot at the heart of the feudal power system glorified in classical fantasy. that's the story that you as the showrunner absolutely must give them an end to, and that's the story that should be your priority 1.

so you do a hack and slash job, and you mortar over whatever you cut out with storylines that you cook up yourself, but you can't go too far afield, because you still need all the characters more or less in place for the final showdown. so you pinch here and push credulity there, and you do your best to put the characters in more or less the same place they would have been if you kept the original, but on a shorter timeframe. and is it as good as the first seasons? of course not! because the material that you have is not suited to TV like the first seasons are. and not only that, but you are now working with source material that is actively fighting your attempt to constrain a linear and well-paced narrative on it. the text that you're working with changed structure when you weren't looking, and now you have to find some way to shanghai this new sprawling behemoth of a Thing into a television show. oh, and by the way, don't think that the (living) author of the source material will be any help with this, because even though he's got years of experience working in television writing, he doesn't actually know how all of these threads will tie together, which is possibly the reason that the next book has taken over 8 years (now 13 and counting) to write. oh and also, your showrunners are sick of this (in fairness, very difficult) job and they want to go write for star wars instead, so they've refused the extra time the studio offered them for pre-production and pushed through a bunch of first-draft scripts, creating a crunch culture of the type that spawns entirely avoidable mistakes, like, say, some poor set designer leaving a starbucks cup in frame.

anyway, that's what I think went wrong with game of thrones.

[specialagentartemis]

“This Planet Needs a Name” is another fun one where the premise is fantastic and then the execution completely falls on its face.

TPNaN is the story of a cryo-ship launched from a dying Earth to try to re-populate humanity on another planet, out of the fear that Earth is not going to be habitable for much longer. It’s a one-way trip. The people who volunteered for this mission can never go back. It’s unclear if, when they wake up, there even will even be an Earth in any meaningful manner anymore. They’re going out of any reasonable communication range; they’ll never know.

This ship is flying to a distant, selected planet with a compatible atmosphere for humans. Aside from the atmosphere, though, it’s expected to be a bare lifeless rock. The core crew of seven are awoken from cryo-sleep once they arrive, preparing to spend the next decades terraforming the planet to meet human needs, and only then wake up the ten thousand humans in cold sleep below to have a new planet to live on.

But when they arrive at the planet, when the crew wake up… it’s not a lifeless rock at all. It’s a planet with a complex, vibrant, living ecosystem, full of complex, vibrant, living beings.

This is a GREAT setup. What a difficult story there is here about hope and horror, wonder and fear, trauma and duty, the realization that you’ve committed the rest of your life to a plan that’s been blown out of the water, that your responsibility to the people in your hold cannot be your only responsibility anymore, that you have so much to learn about this place and you can’t just change it to your will, it already exists. What is your duty to the people you brought with you for a promise of a new, better life, vs. your responsibility to the forests, the oceans, the animals, the whales and the dragons, that already live here? What do you do now when this is not what you planned for at all?

And TPNaN answers these questions by going :) it’s fine :) the fact that it’s already ready for them is awesome and great :) they’ll just terraform a LITTLE bit of the planet :) just enough for a human city :) they all compromise very quickly on this plan :) every conflict is resolved quickly and easily by being nice to each other :) these people do not owe jack squat to anything that already lives here and they are perfectly in their right to treat them like wild animals, curiosities at best and threats that need to be fought off at worst :) they never ever once wonder about their responsibility to learn about this place before they plop down and start terraforming it :) this is a wonderful gift just for them :) this planet needs a name. nobody ever once even slightly wonders if the inhabitants of this planet have a name for it. They’re not people after all

(when they learn that oops these native inhabitants are conscious, thinking people, this prompts a reckoning from nobody because hey look they’re friendly and happy to help)

[sciderman]

I swear I have read your big post regarding Peter Parker's neurodivergence and why it is best to avoid labelling him, but he definitely has a weird brain

Can't find it and feel kinda sad about it cuz I deeply related to it

i know exactly which post you're talking about and i can't find it either! i've raked through my archive, and it's just - nowhere to be seen. i think tumblr eated it (it happens.)

really, tumblr's search functionality is so so useless, i don't know what to tell you. there are plenty of keywords i can search to find it that post, but the search functionality actually just does not work!

undiagnosed audhd-addled peter parker, my darling, my light, my life, my everything.

i think peter parker's such an interesting creature to write, because a lot of people will point to a certain behaviour about him and say "this is an autistic thing, right?" but a lot of those behaviours are actually, in my head, tied to certain traumas in peter's life too.

people say "oh, the food thing, peter's a picky eater because he's autistic" and yes, absolutely. but also it's tied to his trauma with his parents.

peter gets overstimulated, and yes, it's an autism thing, but also he was bitten by a radioactive spider and his senses are dialled to 11.

it's a similar case i've found for myself, too – where a lot of friends i have kind of diagnose me because i have autistic traits, but actually - i'm hesitant to claim the label or pursue diagnosis because, actually, i know where these certain behaviours come from, and they come from certain traumas. there are events i can pinpoint in my life and say "yep. that's where this behaviour comes from."

so - i think there's a lot of overlap between trauma and autistic traits. the brain is very complex! i think the reason for that overlap is maybe as simple as the fact that people with autism and people with trauma are both doing the same thing - developing behaviours to protect themselves or soothe themselves. so - i think it's nice to be able to see a character like peter parker, who may or may not be autistic, but recognise behaviours in him and see yourself in him.

people who go undiagnosed for whatever reason - people who are really good at masking - so good, in fact, that they have no idea they might be on the spectrum - everyone and anyone at all can look at peter parker and recognise themselves. because i think we discredit the thought that every single brain does the same thing! develops certain behaviours in order to survive. every brain has that same software - we've just all been faced with different hardships that we need to overcome, and that's were all the differences come in.

autism is a spectrum, i guess - everyone falls into it to some degree. and i think events in your life probably push you along on it. but i don't know, i didn't study brain science. probably what i'm saying is very stupid and uninformed. of course there's brain chemistry involved. but i know people in my life living with autism and certain events in their life have exacerbated certain behaviours or made coping with it a lot more difficult. so maybe trauma is a catalyst.

[poisonousquinzel]

also also also the idea of Harley returning to crime in Gotham in a Full Evil Villain way can't work because she literally knows who Batman is at this point.... she's known since like 2020-2021 in the Joker War arc...

Like,,,, if they're not on good terms, she really has no reason to not tell the rest of the rogues that he's Bruce Wayne. Joker probably keeps it to himself because he's an obsessive loser.

But Harley's not stupid. She knows how much revealing his identity could fuck with him. Hell, she also knows Tim has a boyfriend !!! she could cause so much havoc for the batfam and it just.... it'd set back so much of her development to make her regress back into Full Evil Villain mode...

and people are praising it like "maybe there's hope for modern Harley" y'all really hate comic characters developing huh?

I'm sorry but that's so lackluster and boring. It'd be a pathetic character arc.

Character development is literally needed when they're the main focus, if she was still just the jester henchwoman from Joker's Favor then fine, she'd be a random member of the clown posse.

But she's not.

I have no idea why this fandom is particular seems so hellbent against real development and growth ...

[quins-makeshift-menagerie]

You know. I’ve been debating this for weeks now but I’m kind of upset with your decision to have a baby. You were one of my favorite Mewtwo artist but now it feels like you’re just throwing your fans to the side like we’re trash. Don’t we matter to you at all? We’re the reason you can even make anything on Patreon but now you’re going to leave us with an unfinished story? Way to make us fee appreciated and loved…

Anon do you like

Need a hug??? /gen

[positivelyadhd]

Reminder that neurodivergent is not just having ADHD and/or autism.

It's anything that impacts the way a person thinks and experiences the world.

When we talk about neurodiversity, we are talking about anyone that identifies with that umbrella. Our experiences as neurodiverse people are unique, not just because there are many different sets of symptoms that fall under the "neurodiverse" umbrella, but because we are all unique and experience the world and societal reactions to our neurodiversity differently.

If you are neurodivergent in any way I hope you know that you are welcome in neurodivergent spaces and that your voice is so important. And that this post is for everyone but especially the people who feel like their experiences go unheard. you are just as valued in these spaces as anyone else and I encourage you to speak up if you would like to!

[griancraft]

There was a violent attack on a lesbian couple in the capital city of my province that isn't being investigated by the police and apparently queer people are being drive by egged at events. I'm so fucking concerned for the parade this year dude. There are almost no events on, and almost zero free ones. What the fuck is happening dude :(

[emily-mooon]

You know when I hear people say they want more messy relationships in ST, I’m tempted to point my finger to the corner where Stonathan sits.

[plumbus-central]

Somehow managed a great "tails gets trolled" face for rick from this comic I made at work.

Minnie's trying to prove that rick was just as much of a 14yr old back then as morty is now

[harwin-breakbones-strong]

WAKEFIELD 1.02 Ryan Corr as Raff

[demonbarberofbeepbeep]

morning toddheads