#or if it's romanticized in a way the reader finds disturbing but not the narrator (like lolita)

[serialunaliver]

what's funny about booktok is they'll actually consider books with the topics they romanticize problematic if those topics aren't romanticized. if you portray something disturbing as disturbing in your book, they think you're a sicko, because they cannot comprehend why someone would write something they aren't "into". I remember watching this one booktok reviewer going over 'disturbing books'. one was a booktok popular story where the love interest sexually assaults the main character (although you're supposed to think she secretly enjoyed it because he's hot! lol) and the other was a book where a man recalls and reflects on essentially getting off on emotionally abusing women. first book with a "woman secretly wanted to be raped" narrative is, according to this reviewer, perfectly fine, but the latter, which is more of a harsh reality, must only exist for Freaks to read. it's a really strange dynamic to me.

[urbeautifulandiminsane]

for the person who was asking about Nabokov's Lolita and if its difficult to read (or just anyone who is thinking about reading it) -

it IS difficult both because of the subject matter and the way it is written. Nabokov has a very complex, descriptive, flowery/embellished and witty writing style. there are so many references, wordplay, puns etc throughout the book, so many that you could read it multiple times and find new things you didnt notice before. ontop of that the vocabulary is difficult as well. but dont let this discourage you from picking the book up. you can use an ebook reader that has a dictionary built in to make it easier.

the subject matter, while disturbing, is not graphic. there are no outright mentions or descriptions of the abuse. the thing that makes it difficult especially if you are young is the fact that it is written from Humbert's pov, meaning, from the brain of the abuser, thus the language used to describe the abuse is very very manipulative. it makes it very easy to romanticize the way he is taking advantage of Dolores.

if you understand that, and are able to see how Humbert is an unreliable narrator, then you shouldnt have any difficulty reading the book. it is quite a good book and has an interesting perspective that we dont see often.

yes this !!!

[cookinguptales]

feel free to ignore this question if its annoying or too time consuming or whatever, but I've just started uni and I'm doing a creative writing course but I don't think I'm particularly good. You're my favourite fic writer so I thought maybe you could explain your process? Your stories always have a way of making me connect and feel for the characters, but I don't know how to write like that or make people give a shit about whats happening in a story, or feel whatever emotion is relevant.

It’s not an annoying question, but I’m not sure how well I’ll be able to answer… I’ve never had any formal training or writing classes or anything lmao.

For me, I’ll usually think of an event or a concept that I’d like to have happen to the characters. Like, to make up some quick OCs, uhh… A & B. Let’s call them Adelaide and Bianca. To take an oldie but a goodie, Adelaide has a crush on her friend Bianca, but doesn’t want to tell her for Reasons.

Now, that’s a basic scenario. For me, the important step here is to really think about this character’s emotional core. What has their life been like? How does their personality reflect that? How do they deal with problems? What are Adelaide’s Reasons? Make sure your character’s decisions reflect their emotional core rather than the other way around. If you’re just bending a character’s personality to fit the story you want to tell, it’ll come off as a little false. If there’s a particular plot you want to tell, work backward. If you need a character to make a specific decision, think about what would bring them to that decision, and make sure that groundwork is laid in everything else this character says and does.

So I need Adelaide not to confess, which is a plot point I’m imposing on the character. I need to think about why this is a decision she’d make. Well, Adelaide’s parents can be dismissive of her sometimes, and she’s never really excelled in anything she’s tried before. So she’s scared to keep trying because she’s internalized this concept of her own inadequacy. To keep her likable, let’s say that she’s scared to try, but her own hopeless romanticism won’t let her give up.

So you’ve decided on a backstory and an emotional core. Now you have to apply this to the rest of the story. How has this personality affected her relationship with Bianca? Why are they friends and what is their relationship? How does Bianca change Adelaide’s thought process? What decisions will Adelaide make going forward based not only on her own emotional core, but on how the other characters affect that?

Adelaide, because she is too scared to say anything but has a big enough heart that she needs an emotional outlet, writes love letters in a diary that she assumes Bianca will never read. It is a way to indulge in her feelings without the stress of sharing them.

And what about Bianca? You can’t make the mistake of only thinking about the emotional core of your protagonist. That’ll make for a flat story. Bianca has a thirst for knowledge. She’s bright and intense and wants to know everything. This brightness is what attracts Adelaide, as she keeps her own light buried, but that is precisely what causes friction between the two of them. Think about how these two emotional cores might interact. Adelaide hides things, and Bianca is obsessed with uncovering them. Bianca must hate that her friend is closed off from her.

Clearly, Bianca is going to read Adelaide’s diary.

Now, you can make Adelaide a good writer or a bad writer based on your own conception of the character. I’ll say that she’s not the best writer, but that the genuineness of her feelings come through; after all, she thinks no one will read this, so she is able to let loose in this one portion of her life and nowhere else. It’s easy to become fascinated with genuine words like that, and a curious person like Bianca, who feels everything too strongly to hide any of it, will be a goner.

A writes a diary about her feelings for an unnamed person. B reads it because they’re nosy. This is really a very basic story, but you’ve already personalized it by getting into their heads. You don’t need to say what’s going on in both their heads; make sure you’re careful about point of view. Your POV character cannot know what is going on inside the other character’s head, so your narration can’t lay that out. But you know what’s going on in Bianca’s head, so make sure you write her with that in mind, and do your best to lay those clues for the audience through dialogue or body language. (Or Adelaide, if you go with Bianca as POV character.)

Now is when it will be most important to keep your characters’ emotional core in mind. You will have to think about where this basic story will go. What would your A do in this situation? Your B? Because Bianca is curious and attracted to these things, let’s say that she keeps going back to read Adelaide’s diary. She becomes addicted to her words. But she also feels guilt about snooping – gotta keep her likable. The more she reads, the more she becomes concerned about her friend… and the more jealous she becomes of whoever Adelaide’s interested in.

So now they’re in a bind. Adelaide has unrequited love. Bianca is worried about her friend, but knows she can’t say anything without blowing her cover. You can introduce a plot device here, but frankly, their own emotional cores make this situation untenable for long. They’ll explode eventually. Bianca will accidentally mention something in conversation she shouldn’t have known, or Adelaide will say something cryptic that Bianca won’t be able to let go of. Secrets will come out, as they must in fiction, and they will fight. Think about their emotions and their backgrounds to think about how they’ll fight. Offensively? Defensively? Will they shut down or will they cry or will they say things they don’t mean?

Adelaide has low self-esteem, but she still has the capacity to get angry. However, because she’s often so angry with herself, those angers will probably meld together. She’ll yell about Bianca’s invasiveness but that will eventually devolve into anger at herself – it’s what she’s used to, after all – and she’ll say something bitter about the diary being trash or her love letters pointless. Because she’s trash and she’s pointless and nothing will ever come of them.

We have reached the emotional height of our story! (Make sure you have one!) The decisions your characters make now will be the most important ones of the entire story. Because you have raised the emotional level up so high, anything you write now, your readers will feel twice as hard. So it should be good!

Bianca, as we have seen throughout the story, doesn’t always make good decisions. But she genuinely cares about her friend. That’s part of her emotional core, and an important one. She has concern for her, so all these confessions disturb her. And that curiosity has finally been sated. Is it worth it? Think about how this fight will interact with every part of Bianca’s personality. In the end, it will come down to her love for her friend and the awe she felt while reading those letters. That will override any anger or hurt she feels during the fight.

She’ll say that the letters were beautiful. That anyone who wrote them is beautiful, too. That she hates seeing Adelaide angry with herself when she’s such a good person. And whoever is the recipient of those letters is very lucky.

This is what Adelaide needs to hear, but it’s also what Bianca needs to say. When these needs intersect like this, you’ll have an effective love story. It makes the characters seem like they genuinely fit together. If you’re not writing a love story, of course, they don’t really need to come together well. lmao. But make sure you keep their personalities and aims in mind when you show how they don’t come together. Show why they have friction, and show why they’ll never quite come together. Make sure your readers understand why they have such irreconcilable differences; it will make fights, hatred, and rivalries seem more well-founded and less like your characters are dicks. (I mean, unless you want them to be dicks.)

By this point in your story, your characters should be changing. A story where the emotional core of a character doesn’t see any evolution is a stagnant one, and it can be boring. Bianca has changed; she understands her own selfishness and is filled with concern for her friend. She’s also, coincidentally, in love with her and her words and the emotional core she read in those words. This here, though, is when Adelaide changes. Not all the way; no one changes that much in the course of one conversation. (That’s important.) But it can be enough for her to start questioning her own assumptions and maybe lend her a bit of the bravery she always wishes she’d had.

She tells Bianca who the letters were to, and Bianca is relieved, but also finds that a part of her really always knew. And everything after that is really cake.

What I’m trying to say here with this stupidly long example, is that you need to think about your character’s emotions first. You can’t simply have them react to whatever you throw at them. You need to think about what is driving your character at every single part of the story, and you need to know your character’s emotions intimately. It’s worth it to spend a long time thinking about what makes your characters tick. It’ll make everything after that easier.

When it comes to fanfic as opposed to origific, it’s easier in one way and harder in another. You won’t need to come up with the scenario, characters, setting, so you can zero right on in how the characters are feeling. You can jump right in. However, you’ll also need to spend time thinking about the characters dialogue and actions in canon so you can tease out their emotional core. If you can figure out why they made the decisions they did in canon, you can figure out what they’ll do in new situations. You need to start with that character’s, well, character before you can do anything else.

Finally, it can be hard to write emotions. I find that it’s usually not particularly useful if a story just says that a character’s sad. So think about what sadness is and what it inspires. How do people behave when they’re sad? How does it physically feel inside your body, what sort of things does it make you think, what lies at the heart of that feeling? Try to express that in your work. Talk about the lump in your character’s throat, or the way they feel like they’re buried in something intangible. Talk about the decisions they make because they’re sad. (This is also handy because it’s a good way to show the emotions of a non-POV character.)

Try not to go too over-the-top here or to rely too much on cliches. Think about what sadness means to this character, and how they’ve trained themselves to respond to it, and that will help make things feel more genuine. Adelaide responds to sadness by burying it inside her and only letting it out in her notebook. Bianca responds to sadness by externalizing part of it, but burying the rest of it in action. They’re very different responses to the same emotion, and when you write that, you’re showing your readers characterization and the characters’ mental state. One-two punch.

As for how to make it relatable… Well, like what happened with Bianca, readers respond to genuineness. If it feels like a fully-realized character with real emotions, readers will find those emotions relatable even if they don’t feel them themselves. Readers who understand where a character is coming from will accept their decisions, even if they aren’t the same decisions the reader would make. Try to speak to universal experiences and emotions, though. Fear of rejection. The excitement of a new discovery. The longing for something better paired with the wariness that things might just get worse if they change. People will respond to things they’ve felt before, even if the character isn’t feeling them quite the same way. Just gotta keep it in-character for the character in question. Utilize common emotions to make it relatable, but make those emotions specific to your character to make things feel real. We all feel the same things, but we feel them all differently. That’s what makes the world lovely and frustrating.

Anyway, I guess that was a real long way of saying that, to some degree, your characters’ emotions should drive the story instead of the other way around. It will make any story feel more immediate and more believable, and will make readers feel greater kinship with your characters. Again, I’m no professional. But you asked me how I do it and that’s how I do it. So uh, I hope this was helpful.

[cbk1000]

I just read the most profoundly disturbing thing I have ever beheld with my own two fucking eyes, and I need to rant about it. You guys can’t help me process it any better, but at least we can all join together in a mighty chorus of ‘what the ACTUAL fuck??’

This is not a funny post lamenting another weird creature/human atrocity that I delved from the darkest depths of Amazon, this is a situation where I’m putting the rest of this rant under a cut because I’m going to include large chunks of text that romanticizes child molestation.

You have been warned. Do not read on if you can’t stand that sort of content.

So, if you’ve been following this blog for a while, then you’ve seen me gleefully lampooning the batshit romances of an author called Mary Anne Graham. This is the author of pee hole fingering fame and that one time a man’s top ho killed herself using a wooden paddle she had carved into the exact likeness of his penis because he was having too much gay sex with his boyfriend and neglecting his harem. There are always anatomical oopsies galore (including a man having two different openings to his anus) and general wtfery that’s usually absolutely hysterical.

I picked up her new book on Kindle Unlimited a while back, read most of it, guffawed my way through it as usual, and then forgot about it for a bit while I read other books that understand metaphors actually have to make sense and melting eyes do not denote desperate infatuation, but rather some kind of deadly disease. I went back to it today deciding I’d push through it to the end, since my Kindle said there were only twenty minutes left to the end of the book.

What a fucking mistake that was.

This book was full of the usual hilarious dipshittery until the last few minutes, when it suddenly took the most disturbing turn I’ve ever seen. I’m going to post the synopsis so you understand the basic premise of the story, and then I’ll summarize the scene leading up to what I’m going to copy and paste, so you understand the context.

Synopsis:  Russian gypsy Prince Vladimir Batalova didn’t await meeting his soul mate. He’d known her for years. She was the daughter of Tobar, the gypsy who married Vlad’s mother and saved her from her abusive marriage. Vlad’s noble father abhorred the youngest son produced by his idiotic marriage to a dirty gypsy. Tobar accepted Vlad, treating him as family, equal to his own son, Nic, and his daughter, Mala. Vlad returned Tobar’s affection and considered Nic his brother, but Mala? He’d never felt brotherly about Mala. Vlad spent years dreading the letter that would tell him of Mala’s marriage to a fine gypsy lad. Instead of a letter, he got Tobar and Nic delivering Mala to London to save her from certain ravishment. They asked Vlad to fulfill his mother’s dying wish: that Mala be brought to him to enter society and find a husband. Now, Vlad must turn the gypsy he loved into a debutante, find her a husband and have her under his roof, within touching distance. Even with the help of all his friends, the sixth sense he shared with his buddy, Boz, and some faerie magic, Vlad knew he could never find a happily ever after. His forever was forbidden unless he convinced Mala that the bond they had shared wasn’t the one they should share – and that taking each other was worth losing the family they both adored.

So, they wind up getting married under English law, everyone is happy, everything is shiny, etc., and then Mala is suddenly carried off by an unknown horseman. Vlad figures out that it’s her brother and that he’s taken her back to their encampment, so he and some of his friends hightail it over there to get her back. Turns out Mala is not willing to go because she has convinced herself that because he didn’t perform a Romani wedding with her, he means to throw her aside and vanish eventually, just like he did when she was younger (shortly after meeting one another and becoming family, he suddenly up and took off and never explained why). He says it’s because he’s a demon or some shit, and the reader is suddenly made aware that he has this deep dark secret connected to why he ran away years ago, though at no point prior to this does the narration mention that something ugly is gnawing at his conscience. (Conveniently, it explains that the secret is so terrible even he forgot about it. But then he remembers it well enough to make a very detailed confession of something that happened years ago.)

Mala tells him that she will not return with him unless he confesses this secret and she can judge whether or not he truly loves her and will be faithful to her for all time.

So he does: ‘”I swear to you that I’m no deviant. I’ve never had a sexual interest in children. Never. Well, never until you were twelve and I came to meet your Papa and attend his wedding to my mother. Mother introduced us and my heart stopped. I froze and don’t even recall if I spoke. Then you ran up to give me a hug in welcome and my most private part unfroze with a vengeance.”

He paused for breath and to give her a chance to kick him and run away--but when she did neither, he continued. “I was horrified at myself, but helpless against the force of my response. Through the ceremony I positioned myself behind a small shrub of a convenient height and vowed not to so much as look at you. Course, I couldn’t look at anyone or anything else. When the women began dancing around the couple after the vows, I watched your budding breasts jiggle when you kicked and imagined myself...,”

A noise in the background halted his words, and he jumped ahead. “That night, around the fire, Tobar gave an amazing, emotional speech, where he said that in marrying my mother, he acquired another son. My blood father hated me for existing as I was a living reminder of his unpardonable lapse of judgment in wedding a damned gypsy. Your father accepted me, Russian blood and all. I couldn’t repay his affection by lusting after my step-sister. I left that night and vowed to stay away until whatever demon that had possessed me was evicted.

He then muses over the following two months, which were apparently filled with a bunch of orgies. He begs Mala not to push him to tell her about this part, because she doesn’t need to know everything. Also, apparently becoming a ‘nude buffet centerpiece that any party guest could stroke or taste or lick or nibble’ is much worse than sexually assaulting a child that her father entrusted to you for protection after welcoming you into his family. Mala agrees not to push him on the orgy stuff, and he continues:

“I thought it possible that I’d exaggerated the event in my mind. I returned about two and a half months after we first met, vowing to treat you as a younger sister. I kept my vow until I spotted you as I rode in, strolling in an area secluded from the caravan by a stand of trees. You were flirting with a lad a couple of years older. He brushed your hair back and tilted up your chin for a kiss he never got. I leapt off my galloping stallion, stormed over and told the brash bastard that if he so much as looked at you again, I’d geld him. I was jealous as hell.”

“You were?” Mala asked. “I thought you were acting like an enraged big brother.”

“No,” Vlad said. “Hell, no. Despite my every vow and intention, my love, I have never, for a single second, felt like your brother. My obsession with you grew worse, and more obvious. Your father says he saw it and so did Nic, but neither of them had a clue how low I’d sink, how evil I’d become. I kept myself mostly under control that visit, save for a few brush ups with some of the other fellows who had dreams and intentions that I destroyed rather ruthlessly. It was my next visit when my demon overthrew my will. That’s when the true evil started.”

“That’s nonsense,” Mala said.

“No, it’s not,” Vlad said. “All I can say in my defense is that the first time was accidental. I was away from the tribe, fishing and trying to clear my head and cool my loins. I succeeded only in aggravating the fish. After I packed up my gear, I strolled in the woods for a bit. A splash and a giggle drew my attention, and I stalked to a stand of trees and dense brush and peered through. ‘Twas you, dressed only in sunlight and your golden skin. You were bathing. Your youth, my supposed honor and morality, all of it commanded me to leave and give you privacy. I didn’t. After that, every night, at every campsite, I did it again and again.” 

Mala blinked. “You watched me bathe? And the other girls as well?”

“There were other girls?” Vlad asked. “There are no other girls, Mala. There are no other women.”

He steeled himself and continued. “And yes, I watched you, but I did more. I pleasured myself as I watched. I invaded your privacy and desecrated it. I reviled myself for it then and every moment since then. I ordered myself to stop but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I’d leave so I’d have to stop, but I could not stay away. Then came my worst transgression. One winter’s night, your father and brother left with the other men to scout and liberate some horses. They asked me to sleep inside the vardo with you. I tried to do the right thing and made myself a separate pallet, but you complained of the cold. It took pitifully little for me to join you in your cozy nest. You cuddled up to my back innocently, for warmth.”

Vlad paused and closed his eyes, but she made a noise of protest so he looked at her again. “My flesh felt every sweet inch of you, and I ate it up like a starving man at a banquet. Eventually, I drifted off to sleep. When I awoke, our positions had reversed. You’d turned over and I spooned you. My arm lay around your waist, but I moved it up until your breasts rested upon it. I jiggled them, slightly, imitating the way I watched them move whenever you danced. You didn’t wake, and I recalled your father and brother’s jokes about how deeply you slept. So I cupped your breasts through your gown, teasing your nipples to pert fullness that I couldn’t see.”

“Oh my Great Duck,” Mala said. “I thought I dreamed that. You turned me over, and climbed atop me, didn’t you?”

“To my everlasting damnation, I did,” Vlad said. “I hiked up your gown and positioned myself against your feminine mound. I moved your gown off your shoulders to uncover your breasts. I sucked you and humped you like an animal until I found the most shameful, the most splendid release of my life. I was beyond disgusted with myself, so I got up, cleaned up, and went outside to build a fire or kindle it or something.”

He goes on to say that he afterwards fled and “signed on to crew a ship leaving for America. I needed an ocean’s distance to keep me away else i’d return and likely do something even worse.”

So, he has just confessed that when she was a child, he took advantage of the fact that he was a trusted family member to peep on her while she was bathing and wank to the sight of it, and then sexually assaulted her while she was sleeping. This confession, btw, takes place in front of her dad and older brother. She probably is disgusted and horribly upset and they kill him with their bare hands, right?

Nope. The whole purpose of this scene was for the heroine’s insecurities to be soothed and for her to realise that the hero has wanted her and only her all along: 

Mala watched shame and love battle in Vlad’s eyes and recognized it as the expression she’d seen there for years. She hadn’t understood it then, but she understood it and him now. ‘Twas with effort that she managed not to dance as she said, “Ask me again.”

He then asks her to marry him once more, her dad and brother are like, “Yay! Let’s get this gypsy wedding on the road”, they have a Romani ceremony, and then the book ends with this scene:

Vlad drew her close for a kiss, but paused to ask, “Do you finally understand that I’ve loved you since the moment we met, that I’ve never willingly spent a second apart from you, and that I will hold you in my arms, my heart and my life until eternity ends?”

Mala was crying too hard to answer, so she nodded as he took her lips with tender intent, feeding her back happy tears, flavored with a taste of forever.

I’m going to fucking DESTROY this thing in a review. I cannot fucking believe a functioning adult actually wrote this as part of a romantic happily-ever-after. This lady likes to talk about how her characters are all a ‘little batty’ because they’re just so in love and it’s all a bit tongue-in-cheek--no, you unbelievably stupid fucking asshole, they are not ‘a little batty’, they are literally child rapists. Confessing to your bride that you were obsessed with her when she was a CHILD and that you FUCKING MOLESTED HER IN HER SLEEP is not a goddamn HAPPY ENDING!!!!!!!!!!!!