#introspective hours

[the-stove-is-divorced]

🎈describe your style as a writer; is it fixed? does it change?

People see things differently, especially creators of stuff, so I'm wondering how you see your own writing? And if it was a metaphor what would it be? Or an object or something or anything that describe it?

Oh my goodness these are such interesting questions! You got me getting introspective! (o^ ^o)

I think my style generally exists as 2-3 general forms, two of them being incredibly similar, if not overlapping? I think in general it stays within these forms, because I actively seek to curate my style in these specific ways (tho if stop using one, it will get rusty). But for the whole curate thing, I look at other writing I like a lot to get into the mood of a certain style for specific fics! So in my eyes, I've got Comedic Style, Descriptive Anguish, and Voice Strong.

Comedic Style is exactly what it sounds like, it's when I want to try comedic fics with much sillier tones like with Metamorphosis which starts as a more horror-ish but quickly dissolves into silliness. I re-read authors whom comedic styles I adore, which is mostly cereal_whore on ao3! I adore their style! But I've diving so much into angst, I'm rusty with this style again. Ugh (ノ_<、). Still working on the next chapter tho.

Descriptive Style also what it sounds like, it's when I really try to dig deep into figuring out the best way to make physical sensations, more commonly pain 'cause I love angst, and really intense emotions feel almost palpable through descriptions alone. Like, comparing frustrations as a simmering pot that grew into a furious boil, something annoyingly unignorable like an unscratched, terrible itch!References I get for this style are a wide range of novels and fic alike. I even keep samples of styles I like to quickly skim through if that helps something flow better. Novels like "A Certain Hunger" by Chelsa G. Summers (a recent read of mine, I adore horror), or quotes from fics like "The sentence sits between them; decaying and astringent, Fushiguro unapologetically leaves it as such. Yuuji’s sure he’s been decomposing since he ate a corpse's finger."

Similar to this, and hopefully overlapping with the previous to make a fic feel good to me is Voice Strong, also sounds like what it is, haha! The character's mindset determines what their feelings get compared to, kinda like context, if that's the right word? I'm sure I'm over-explaining here, but I don't think I've described this before, since it's always been in my head? To me, it should always be a bit unreliable, a POV's always limited unless omniscient. I'm best at writing high intensity, like panic/stress because than character's actions are so much easier to understand and thus predict. If I can't guess their actions, I kinda can't continuing writing. And if I know their mindsets, I know what general arcs to keep in mind, so the plot can take any form while staying in general directions.

Like with it feels like we only go backwards , Steven 2.0 (human!steven) is pretty much on the verge of a very bad mental breakdown. Consequently, he is incredibly easy to predict and thus write for! It's easy to jump into his voice. It's kinda hard to describe, but he often repeats phrases like "you see?" and "he is kind" when he's really close to losing it because he's trying to cling to his denial as a (bad) coping mechanism. Chunks of him glorifying/romanticizing, for lack of better word, his own discomfort, distaste, or plain hostility, are split by the snippets of truth he can't ignore, like the fact he misses Pinko, or he's angry or he's tired. He repeats stuff alot, often trying to stick to the pedestal he's falling from, like "But perhaps, he hit a bit too hard, a bit too rough, because Steven Universe should be gentle, gentle, gentle, he knows, because he is nothing but gentle and kind, gentle and kind." He wants to be gentle, but in reality he's becoming more and more violent in this scene. Mf is just contradicting at all times. I love him so much. (´꒳`)♡

WOAH, this got really long. (」°ロ°)」 I hope I didn't chat your ear off, haha! But if I had to describe my writing, I'd say water? It can fit into any style if I really try, like water can take the shape of any container, but I try to keep it specific containers. Or, three specific directions to flow through, kinda like three diff rivers? If that makes sense! (・_・ )ゝI get incredibly frustrated when it doesn't move how I want it to (often), so it needs constant upkeep. Me writing is a million re-writes and edits plus scrapping entire chunks, like, constantly. It also has to feel right to be published. Like I have an entire draft of my body's in backwards sitting unpublished but that mf is not getting posted until it feels right. I may or may scrap it entirely. Again. (」＞＜)」

I guess another comparable object is like some kind of hedge/bush/etc I keep trimming for the perfect shape, but never quite looks right until it totally does. Which could take so damn long.

Hope that answered ya question!!! TYSM FOR ASKING (´,,•ω•,,)♡

[kavaleyre]

• The Hanged Man •

“Compared to what Falin went through? This is nothing.”

[lunarmochi]

me suddenly realizing that this head empty, air-headed persona/side of me that i put on is my way of coping with my horrible problem of overthinking

sometimes i have moments where i feel like i'm genuinely going to explode or have a meltdown with how in my head i am, and then i think abt moments where i'm all like "hehe my brain is all squishy and smooth" with my friends and realize... wow holy shit is that why i do that??

ofc it doesn't have to be as deep as that, but... huh, it's interesting to think about. i'm just so caught up in how good it feels to just not think and act like a dumb little monkey that i realize that wow, overthinking sucks.

[star-struck09]

Do you think of me as often as I think of you?

[bacchuschucklefuck]

beautiful! majestic!

[secretly-a-trekkie]

usghsduhfiaofh

[housemdork]

house md rewatch: 2x24, "no reason"

we get a look inside of house's mind that's so intimate, it breaks his own dreamscape. happy season finale!

truly, where do i even start with this one?

this is ultimate house md. it's such a brilliant season finale because it truly feels like everything over the last 46 episodes has been building to this saga, delivered to viewers by way of the show's ongoing plot device - nonreality. and it's only through nonreality that we can finally say that we know and understand house. above all else, i think 2x24 is about generating kindness toward its leading man after he's gone very much off the rails.

sidebar before i get into the meat here: minus the shooting, has anyone had a similar dream experience to house? i've had dozens of nightmares over the years that are so scary and destabilizing that i'm prompted to choose a ridiculous course of action (a la killing a patient in surgery) that forces me awake. it was exciting to find that represented here!

i'll foreground the recap with my take on 2x24's overall premise: house himself becomes the case in 2x24. while there is a patient b-plot, it's only there to reinforce the plot's incredulity. that case is so nonsensical and disgusting that it pushes the boundaries of the episode, and of house, to their respective breaking points. poor guy lol, even if how we know him is just in figment form.

one of the first tipoffs we see that things are Abnormal, i argue, is house's immediate dismissal of the guy who shot him, moriarty (me when they remember this show is another sherlock holmes iteration: !!!). not that i expect him to fly off the handle or take a cameron-esque approach, but there would at least be some diagnostic potential in the psychology of a near assassin. instead, and like always, house will defer to the impersonal, the b-plot patient. 2x24 nearly collapses under this unexpected strain, the combination of the medical (house's sanctuary) and his psyche (his demise).

this dismissal of himself as the patient can only subsist for so long; it's forced to confront house's fear of losing his mind, which he believes (canonically now) is all he has (more on that later). his mind's version of moriarty comes to represent the emotional side of house, house's own person his logical side, and 2x24 posits that these things must coexist in order to solve this case.

this leads to the "diagnosis" - house is "miserable for nothing." he can't logic his way out of this fact, nor can he explain why he clings to his misery via logic. he must confront the emotional, a truth that moriarty knows that house doesn't trust because it can't be objectively measured. so, realizing that moriarty, an inextricable part of house that he hates. it's vindictive, turbulent, and regretful, but it's him. no matter he wishes he weren't human, according to moriarty, it's inescapable.

that's why he apologizes to himself here ^. and this is such an emotional extreme for house that it breaks the dreamscape. in his traditional epiphany moment, he knows that he would never admit this out loud to anyone, and goes to do what neither a logic or emotion-driven person would - he kills someone!

looking ahead, i am obsessed with 2x24's implications for "house's head" and "wilson's heart," btw. that logic/emotion split is heightened, and since they fail to merge, it comes at the cost of the patient. this is such a longstanding binary within house md, and i never get tired of revisiting it.

beyond just what moriarty stands for, 2x24 features a long procession of allusions to house's self-disgust. 2 scenes that i want to focus on in this regard are his conversation with the patient's nonexistent wife and his (extra) hallucinatory confrontation with cuddy and wilson.

^ this scene is intentionally classic greg house diagnostic techniques wrapped in his usual, bland misogyny. yet his insistence that she's too good-looking for her husband (the patient whose entire body keeps exploding in the ugliest ways possible), house can't wrap his head around it. he believes that it must be "a mathematical error."

house equates looks here to more than just pretty faces and conventional attractiveness. her husband's body is failing him, and it looks ugly doing it. house feels that his body fails him, and that it's ugly. him revealing the visuals of his infarction is traumatic, even for the hellacious episode it takes places within (2x13 "skin deep" lol). even the above shot reinforces this - the wife's posture is idyllic, even in heels; house's relies on his cane to carry not just his imbalance, but also the rest of his weight since he's so weak post-gunshot.

not to feed into the men yelling = good acting phenomenon, but hugh laurie ate DOWN here.

his (JUSTIFIED) meltdown in cuddy's office is the counterweight to his internalized physical disgust. i love the dialogue: "what do i have?", cuddy's misunderstanding that he's referring to an illness, and his furious answer: "i have my brain. that's it."

house reduces himself to just one half of his person, and he's also disturbed that the 2 people closest to him can't see it that way. in violating his agency, they've made him categorically nothing. i think that the (false) revelation that cuddy and wilson were in on the ketamine all along was one of the most stressful moments of the series for me. i was disgusted that they just bypassed his agency and went through a worse repeat of the infarction/stacy debacle.

like when wilson just agreed with his full chest that he agreed with cuddy's choice, i literally said: "he would not fucking say that." and thank god he didn't. had he, i would have had no problem with house socking him in the face. in reality, if we follow the logic of the episode, the punch is actually something house would never do to wilson, hence the dramatics:

cuddy and wilson's treatment of house throughout 2x24 showcase a much sadder reality that exists in house's mind: he thinks that they look down on him as a problem to be solved, nothing more. since he evidently reduces himself to so little, he assumes that they would do the same. that's why we can't earnestly share in cuddy's joy when the ketamine is first introduced:

the forced ketamine violates house in several ways: it unwittingly takes away the personal and social meaning of his disability; it introduces a new slew of problems (the convenient 50/50 success rate mirrors the logic/emotion binary in 2x24 well); it minimizes said disability to a measly, simplified issue; and it obviously ignores house's autonomy.

that's what's really so scary about the ketamine treatment when we still believe it was involuntary. if wilson, cuddy, or any other house md character can violate house's bodily autonomy and consent, then the very fabric of the show gets upended. he loses the control that he clings to. this is another instance of house/audience solidarity - we want him to get better, but we want it done on his terms, and we want it to have "meaning" (to quote house; more on this later, too).

wilson and cuddy also operate as interesting foils for the fellows, whose roles in house's dream world are very dissimilar. wilson and cuddy's (nonconsensual) involvement in house's physical and mental health emphasizes how personally involved they are with him. they are confidants and recipients of his vulnerability, which is why their betrayal is exceptionally painful. house and wilson peeing together while discussing his potential mental decline illustrates this pretty well lol:

important to note in this scene is how wilson reminds house of why he has a team: "if you could think of everything yourself, then you wouldn't need a team to annoy." in a wilson-like fashion, he reminds house to have a bit of humanity and that he does, actually, like people every once in a while. but what's more interesting is how this remark showcases how house views the fellows' perceive him.

when moriarty reveals that the bathroom and the argument in cuddy's office were hallucinations, he tells house that he also wet his bed. yet when the fellows show up, he takes on a look of shame and hides it (from 3 doctors who have been dealing with a man with exploding, bloody body parts all day. i think they'd take dirty sheets over that any day).

he tries his best to maintain surety and authority in their conversations, only admitting to "losing it" when he realizes that this is (hopefully) all just a dream. not before they get house some tacos in one of the most kickass shots in the entire show, ofc:

i know i'm not paying as much time to the fellows in this recap, but who i really want to highlight among the 3 is chase. he speaks up a lot in this episode, and before we know that it's all just a dream, it sounds like he's really knocking diagnostics out of the park! yet with the revelation that this is all a dream, this implies that house may either have an inflated view of chase's potential (doubtful), or that chase's success is a continued sign of house's own mental decline.

this more likely that not negates the passive compliment that house gives chase when he's out of earshot. speaking to moriarty, house says that chase must be smart, "otherwise i wouldn't have hired him." oof. it also confirms that house's perception of chase is almost endemically a "yes man," for better or for worse depending on house's diagnostic success. it's only helpful when chase isn't parroting house's incorrect ideas.

lastly - because i could keep going forever lol - i want to talk about "i want meaning" because, for me, this is the episode's great unifier, and a thematically excellent point on which to leave the season. house the atheist admitting that he wants life to have meaning (tbd on whether or not he believes that it has any in the first place), is a massive character shift originating in his confrontation with moriarty. yet house's inability to synthesize this with his belief, or lack thereof, in the powers that be launches him into his season 3 conflict.

by the end of 2x24, house believes that solving his leg pain will grant his life meaning. his dream experience has captured the ins and outs of his rationalization of the ketamine experimental treatment. his leg can represent both halves, the logical and the emotional, because it has ramifications for both, and contributes to his overarching misery. thus, he aims to resolve them both via one treatment. in house's mind, from this will come meaning...but he doesn't know yet that we have to create this meaning ourselves.

leaving the season with the question of "what is meaning for house?" is so exciting. knowing the answer - or lack of one - that they provide is part of the tragedy i've come to love so much about this show.

like i said earlier, this episode is one of the greats. there are a thousand pieces to put together, and a million elements to appreciate, and yet our titular character still shines above the rest (imo). 2x24/season 2 really is That Bitch. i'm so happy i got to write about this one :)

PS: i have to make the note because i am a season 5 fan first and a person second: 5x23-24 is very similar to the 2x24 debacle with the revelation of house's hallucinations, except the amber ordeal is house's own fault, and house md successfully banks on us assuming they wouldn't repeat a similar premise. i love that this episode walked so those 2 could run in the future.

[soundlessdragon]

My dad always drilled into me, "if you're going to do a thing, do it well," which is honestly a great ethic to have, but in practice really fueled a lot of my perfectionistic abandonment tendancies, since the logical antithesis to that statement is "if you can't do it well, there's no point in doing it at all."

[moonchild-in-blue]

If you choose to look at Sleep as an allegory for depression/mental illness, the romantic and co-dependent nature of Vessel's lyrics hurt that much more.

"I hate you and you're bad for me" "I don't know who I am without you" "Please set me free" "Please don't leave me" "You're an intrinsic part of me" "I must become someone new".

Ya feel me?

[divaesque]

to all the yearners 💕

[artistictea]

ur blue skrunkly man fascinates me, please tell me about him (and has he managed to make Halsin worse)

HIII ANON THANK YOU FOR THE ASK <3 His name is Tavryn, he spent two entire arcs being the worst man alive who prioritized money over everything else. Karlach wants him dead. I really did think I was going to play a fully evil character but then Act 3 started and it came with all these heavy hitting questions about morality and.......against all odds, he somehow got fixed. More or less. So I guess Halsin was right.

[thesunnahthebetter]

[scionshtola]

i’m still thinking about this sorry but the idea that the wol’s actions are the same as the garlean army’s actions just really rubs me the wrong way. like i dont think its actually a nuanced position to suggest that theres no difference between resisting imperial violence and committing it. the reason the garlemald section stands out to me is not because well it’s okay, the garleans thought what they were doing was right and we committed violence against them too so who’s to say who is right or wrong. it’s that they are demonstrably in the wrong and we help them anyway. because we can, because they need it.

[star-struck09]

I think I will miss you for a very long time.

[call-me-princess15]

I must have lived

A thousand lives

In my daydreams;

So vividly

Sometimes I wonder

Which reality

Is the one we truly shared.

I wish you knew

We had it all

In my mind,

In my heart,

We had everything

We ever promised

We would.

I think

Maybe

It’s my prison.

- in another life, we got it right

[deathswing]

re: cooking, and showing how much you care for someone through it.

it's not a secret that lucanis enjoys cooking, but more than that, he enjoys being able to show his appreciation and love through it.

at first, he claims it's just so the team doesn't starve, because apparently, nobody else does the cooking well enough for his standards. but you can tell very early on, too, that he does it because he genuinely cares for the team and their well-being. like how he buys spearmint for harding's garden because it soothes dreams and is great in desserts - insinuating he wants to make her something with it to help her.

how he makes two batches of paella - one with seafood, and one without for emmrich.

how he worries about neve only eating fried fish, and buying her fresh fruit.

the dalish seafood recipe bellara wants to make, which i'm sure he happily assisted her with, not only to help, but also to memorize so he can make it for her, too.

buying ground peppers so the food is more "exciting" for taash.

and, of course, making rook's favorite dessert if romanced, or making something special for neve if not.

we know caterina was not the greatest parental figure. she was strict, and not kind, even though lucanis was supposedly her favorite. but food, i think, was the one thing she showed her care with. it doesn't absolve her, but it's how lucanis learned to show his care, too. food can be a very personal thing, and lucanis is hellbent on remembering every little preference, every intolerance, every wish any of the team and his family has ever voiced.

he'll surprise you with a home-cooked meal to make you feel better, to lift your spirits. he'll bring you something he knows you love when you had an altercation and he can't quite find the words to verbally apologize just yet. he'll make you something you mentioned in passing being interested in just because.

lucanis has a big, soft heart, despite everything.