#put other people above themselves

[canwriteitbetterthanueverfeltit]

I'm finally doing character analysis stuff for my nano and this alone got me REALLY hype about these characters and how they fit together

[arkiwii]

very sad still see the saria/silence divorce headcanon still going around

have you ever tried to consider that they never dated before lone trail because it would be unrealistic with the timeline and the events and also because it would be overshadowing the actual truth of why they couldn't get along

[savetheghost]

im gonna need more meat

[bumblingbabooshka]

Tuvok & B’Elanna - Poor Coping Mechanisms - Vicious Cycles “You need to find some other way to deal with this” “I don’t know how.”

Heavy Balloon by Fiona Apple // Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath // Stubborn love by the Lumineers // New York Movie by Edward Hopper // under the burden of adversity by Theodor Axentowicz // Birthday Present by Sylvia Plath (cut)

[my-thoughts-and-junk]

Sometimes I see sexuality or gender headcanons about characters and im just like dude im pretty sure they don't know what half those words mean

[perilegs]

i wish rook was a real character in game so someone else would compare him and wyll as foils of sorts. they're so good together agh

[headspace-hotel]

I'm trying to write a post about tick safety and avoiding tick bites, but a lot of the info on websites is like "Avoid going in the woods, in plants, and where there are wild animals" and "Activities like hiking and gardening can put you at risk" and I'm like thanks! This is worthless!

As ticks and tick borne illnesses are expanding their range, I think it's important for people to be educated about these things, and I think it's especially important to give people actual advice on how to protect themselves instead of telling them to just...avoid the natural world

Rough draft version of Tick Advice:

Ticks don't jump down on you from trees, they get on you when you brush against grass, brush, bushes etc.

Ticks get brought to an area when they get done feeding from an animal and fall off them. In the USA, the main tick-bringing animal is deer, but I've seen plenty ticks on feral cats and songbirds.

Ticks get killed when they dry out so drier areas with more sunlight are less favorable to ticks.

The above is useful for figuring out whether an area is likely to have lots of ticks, and how vigilant you have to be in that area.

Wear light-colored, long pants outside. Tuck your pants into your socks, and tuck your shirt into the waist of your pants. Invest in light, breathable fabrics idc

IMMEDIATELY change out of your outside clothes when you come back from a tick-prone area, wash them, and dry them on high heat to kill any ticks that might be stuck on.

Shower and check yourself for ticks after coming inside. Hair, armpits, and nether regions in particular. You can use a handheld mirror or rely on touch; an attached tick will feel like a bump kinda like a scab

While you're outside, you can just periodically check for ticks by running your hands down your legs and checking visually to see if anything is crawling on your clothes. Light colors make them easy to spot, and they don't move fast.

Combing through each others' hair to check for creepy crawly critters is a time-honored primate ritual and is not weird. When hiking, bring a friend who will have your back when you feel something on your neck and need to know if it's sweat or a tick

If you're careful, you can usually catch ticks before they bite you, but if one does bite you, it's not the end of the world. Since tickborne diseases are different regionally i suspect this advice will differ based on where you are, but the important thing is remove the tick with tweezers (DON'T use butter, a lit match, or anything that kills the tick while it's still attached, please) and contact a doctor to see what to watch for. Most illnesses you can catch from ticks are easily treatable if you recognize them when symptoms first appear

[a-soft-fluffy-girl]

TL;DR: Steam just made library sharing so much fucking easier and so much fucking better. Instead of login-trading, it's just a simple goddamn invite.

Read this. Really. It's a good read. Because it shows that, full-stop, Valve isn't just doubling down on their stance to make sure that people can and should be able to share their copies of digital goods as easily as they can physical ones, but they're making it better and easier than ever.

But you know how Steam allowed you to, with either friends or family, link accounts with another person to be able to establish an ability to share game libraries with one another? The general gist of Steam Family Sharing was that, with a limit of five people plus you (six in total) on a limit of ten computers total could share account access to willingly mix your libraries. You could play theirs. They could play yours.

This was a huge boon. It was meant to emulate sharing a physical copy of a game. A way to allow children to play games their parents or siblings had bought without having to fork over double the cash to buy it a second game. But it had some major limitations and drawbacks, and was archaic to use.

If a person did not share the same computer, you had to manually log into that computer to give it and the accounts on it access. This wouldn't be a problem if both accounts were used on the same computer, but many households (and astronomically more family and friend groups) had multiple computers, all used by different people.

If that computer, at any point, was hard reset to any point before the sharing occurred, you lost access. And had to do the whole process again. This was also an issue with computer transfers. The whole kit and kaboodle needed to be redone on upgrades. On top of that, the old computer is now just dead weight that you may not realize you have to manually revoke access to.

Putting your account information on another person's computer opens up security issues. They could, intentionally or accidentally, land themselves on your account if the login information was stored. Which could easily lead to purchases or bans you did not want to happen.

If anyone was, at any point, playing any game on their own library, you had no access to their games. Even if it was a totally different game, you had to wait your turn as if waiting for their computer to be freed up to sit at. (Admittedly this is kind of like the "mom said it's my turn on the xbox" meme, but hey, kinda archaic.)

You could not choose whose library you accessed a game from. Not at all. It always prioritized the first library it gained access from, DLC access and multiplayer be damned. If another friend you were accepting games from had more DLC? Too bad.

And yet here we are. Steam Families Beta fixes EVERYTHING about the above issues. By just going through Settings > Interface > client Beta Participation and clicking onto Steam Families Beta? You get:

No more login sharing. No more computer links. You can now choose which person's library you borrowed from. And you can play any other game from someone's library, even while they're in-game. It just needs to be a different game than what they're playing.

Pick five people. Invite them to your family. And now everyone has access to everyone's library. My goddamn library went from 150-ish to almost a goddamn thousand in ten minutes of setup.

Account sharing and password sharing are dirty words that "lose" billions of dollars. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Max. They aren't game storefronts, but they still allow you to access massive libraries and scream like you murdered their firstborns for daring to share your password with your mother after you moved out.

Microsoft tried pushing to demonize and undercut used games sales and borrowed copies of physical games. Remember the first attempt to reveal the Xbox One? People forget, but these vultures tried to make an always online console that checked to see if you were the account that owned the game, even if you had a physical disc, and prevent access to the disc's contents if you weren't the original downloader.

Valve walked the fuck up. Valve tapped the mic. And Valve dropped the fucking thing right onto the ground with one feature's revamp.

About the only issues I can see with this are twofold:

If someone sharing your library gets banned from a game's servers... so do you. No one else in the family does, but the both of you do. This is... rather unpleasant, because banhammers can be dropped quite frequently by mistake. I'd urge Valve to rethink this one, but I see the logic: don't cheat and effectively bite the hand feeding you. Still making me side-eye that, though.

If you leave a family you've joined? You have to wait a YEAR to join a new one. It's to prevent people form jumping ship to another group and screwing over who's in the former one in the process, but a YEAR? OUCH.

Problems aside, though... it's probably the biggest fucking power move I have ever seen a media distributor make in the current economic climate. It's the kind of thing that would let so many new games be available in a way that's easier than ever. Just a few clicks to send or accept an invite, and bam. Permanent access to dozens or even hundreds of new games with so much more freedom than earlier drafts of the system.

It's the kind of thing that slaps you in the face with positivity after so many Ls from the games and media industries. And I'm all the fuck for a W like this.

[casterlypriderock]

house of the dragon tags are practically unsearchable when you’re at best emotionally indifferent to a/licent h/ightower

[luna-azzurra]

Character flaws for an anxious character

Constant worrying: Obsessively fretting over even the smallest details.

Overplanning: Creating elaborate contingency plans for every possible scenario.

Indecisiveness: Struggling to make decisions due to fear of making the wrong choice.

Social anxiety: Feeling extremely nervous or uncomfortable in social situations.

Perfectionism: Setting impossibly high standards for themselves and others.

Avoidance behavior: Dodging situations or responsibilities that trigger anxiety.

Overapologizing: Saying sorry for everything, even when it's not their fault.

Hyperawareness of physical sensations: Being overly sensitive to bodily sensations and interpreting them as signs of impending doom.

Catastrophizing: Jumping to the worst-case scenario in any given situation.

Need for reassurance: Constantly seeking validation or reassurance from others.

Rumination: Getting stuck in a loop of negative thoughts and overanalyzing past events.

Difficulty relaxing: Finding it hard to unwind and let go of stress.

Overthinking: Overanalyzing every word or action, leading to anxiety about social interactions.

Physical symptoms of anxiety: Experiencing symptoms like sweating, trembling, or rapid heartbeat in stressful situations.

Avoidance of confrontation: Going to great lengths to avoid conflict or uncomfortable conversations.

People-pleasing: Putting others' needs and desires above their own to avoid conflict.

Overpreparation: Spending excessive time and energy preparing for events or tasks.

Self-doubt: Second-guessing their abilities and decisions due to fear of failure.

Fear of the unknown: Feeling anxious about uncertain or unfamiliar situations.

Imposter syndrome: Believing they are not worthy of their achievements and fearing they will be exposed as a fraud.

[boundinparchment]

Read your tags in the "fandom hierarchy" post, and honestly? Based. So real.

The fandom is a sandpit with all our dolls and action figures. Sometimes we make them fight, sometimes we make them kiss, and sometimes we're weirdos eating sand and worms

at the end of the day, we’re all here to have fun. maybe interpretations of characters are different, maybe some of use different recipes to achieve similar desserts, and our works resonate with some people and not others.

that’s perfectly fine and totally normal. if everyone in a single group agreed, there’d be no variety and variety is the spice of life. that’s boring and awful and sanitized. a cult that doesn’t want to explore outside of itself and sees everything as other and therefore bad.

and a hierarchy implies gatekeeping. implies some people over others. that there is an authority that should be heeded and respected all because of a majority agreement. we all do this shit for free and for fun. why would you put that constraint on it? let us eat sand if we want to eat sand, dammit.

there’s at least six different instances in fandom history that demonstrate how detrimental that mentality is. the human ego is a weird thing.

[racefortheironthrone]

Hi- er, this is my first-ever writer's strike, how does one not cross a picket line in this context? I know how not to do it with things like Amazon and IRL strikes, but how does it apply to media/streaming?

Hi, this is a great question, because it allows me to write about the difference between honoring a picket line and a boycott. (This is reminding me of the labor history podcast project that's lain fallow in my drafts folder for some time now...) In its simplest formulation, the difference between a picket line and a boycott is that a picket line targets an employer at the point of production (which involves us as workers), whereas a boycott targets an employer at the point of consumption (which involves us as consumers).

So in the case of the WGA strike, this means that at any company that is being struck by the WGA - I've seen Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Disney, Warner Brothers Discovery, NBC, Paramount, and Sony mentioned, but there may be more (check the WGA website and social media for a comprehensive list) - you do not cross a picket line, whether physical or virtual. This means you do not take a meeting with them, even if its a pre-existing project, you do not take phone calls or texts or emails or Slacks from their executives, you do not pitch them on a spec script you've written, and most of all you do not answer any job application.

Because if this strike is like any strike since the dawn of time, you will see the employers put out ads for short-term contracts that will be very lucrative, generally above union scale - because what they're paying for in addition to your labor is you breaking the picket line and damaging the strike - to anyone willing to scab against their fellow workers. GIven that one of the main issues of the WGA are the proliferation of short-term "mini rooms" whereby employers are hiring teams of writers to work overtime for a very short period, to the point where they can only really do the basics (a series outline, some "broken stories," and some scripts) and then have the showrunner redo everything on their lonesome, while not paying writers long-term pay and benefits, I would imagine we're going to see a lot of scab contracts being offered for these mini rooms.

But for most of us, unless we're actively working as writers in Hollywood, most of that isn't going to be particularly relevant to our day-to-day working lives. If you're not a professional or aspiring Hollywood writer, the important thing to remember honoring the picket line doesn't mean the same thing as a boycott. WGA West hasn't called on anyone to stop going to the movies or watching tv/streaming or to cancel their streaming subscriptions or anything like that. If and when that happens, WGA will go to some lengths to publicize that ask - and you should absolutely honor it if you can - so there will be little in the way of ambiguity as to what's going on.

That being said, one of the things that has happened in the past in other strikes is that well-intentioned people get it into their heads to essentially declare wildcat (i.e, unofficial and unsanctioned) boycotts. This kind of stuff comes from a good place, someone wanting to do more to support the cause and wanting to avoid morally contaminating themselves by associating with a struck company, but it can have negative effects on the workers and their unions. Wildcat boycotts can harm workers by reducing back-end pay and benefits they get from shows if that stuff is tied to the show's performance, and wildcat boycotts can hurt unions by damaging negotiations with employers that may or may not be going on.

The important thing to remember with all of this is that the strike is about them, not us. Part of being a good ally is remembering to let the workers' voices be heard first and prioritizing being a good listener and following their lead, rather than prioritizing our feelings.

[prideprejudce]

people saying that users aren’t being compassionate enough towards the billionaires stuck in the death coffin at the bottom of the ocean and calling us “ghouls” for bringing up the absolute absurdity of the entire situation and it’s like……of course no one ever deserves to die by suffocation or freezing to death and it’s a hope that by some miracle that these people are found and somehow saved. however people are aloud to point out the irony of how our current wealth gap is so high that there are people who are able to spend 250k, an amount that most people don’t see in their entire lives, like it’s a movie ticket. except instead of seeing a movie they are entering a death chamber to the bottom of the ocean so they can gawk at the mass grave of over a thousand people

“the CEO of the company tricked them and he’s the real capitalist villain while the other passengers are blameless” I agree that the CEO (who is also stuck in the submarine with them) is as grimy as they come and cut corners in order to make as much money as possible. that’s a given. but as we are seeing now, most people who have never even stepped foot in the ocean their entire lives could see that this was a disaster waiting to happen. you don’t have to be a maritime expert to see that. the submersible has no emergency beacon, is controlled by an off brand game controller, made from parts from a camp store, navigated by texts from above, is bolted in from the outside, and has a contract that passengers sign that mentions “death” three times on the front page. most people couldn’t be paid to step foot in it - and these people paid 250k to go to the bottom of the ocean in it

once again, no one is relishing at people dying stuck in an essentially gutted out minivan at the bottom of the ocean. especially when one passenger is 19 and the other is a legitimate titanic researcher. but people are allowed to be mad that thousands upon thousands of dollars of taxpayer money and resources are being used to try and literally pluck these people out of the ocean and save them from a grave that they literally helped dig themselves into without a care in the world. they are the 1% who can put themselves in peril as much as they please and spend money and waste resources like it’s water but will always expect to be saved from the brink of death by us regular folk so they can call themselves an “adventurer” at their next luncheon

[derinwrites]

The Three Commandments

The thing about writing is this: you gotta start in medias res, to hook your readers with action immediately. But readers aren’t invested in people they know nothing about, so start with a framing scene that instead describes the characters and the stakes. But those scenes are boring, so cut straight to the action, after opening with a clever quip, but open in the style of the story, and try not to be too clever in the opener, it looks tacky. One shouldn’t use too many dialogue tags, it’s distracting; but you can use ‘said’ a lot, because ‘said’ is invisible, but don’t use ‘said’ too much because it’s boring and uninformative – make sure to vary your dialogue tags to be as descriptive as possible, except don’t do that because it’s distracting, and instead rely mostly on ‘said’ and only use others when you need them. But don’t use ‘said’ too often; you should avoid dialogue tags as much as you possibly can and indicate speakers through describing their reactions. But don’t do that, it’s distracting.

Having a viewpoint character describe themselves is amateurish, so avoid that. But also be sure to describe your viewpoint character so that the reader can picture them. And include a lot of introspection, so we can see their mindset, but don’t include too much introspection, because it’s boring and takes away from the action and really bogs down the story, but also remember to include plenty of introspection so your character doesn’t feel like a robot. And adverbs are great action descriptors; you should have a lot of them, but don’t use a lot of adverbs; they’re amateurish and bog down the story. And

The reason new writers are bombarded with so much outright contradictory writing advice is that these tips are conditional. It depends on your style, your genre, your audience, your level of skill, and what problems in your writing you’re trying to fix. Which is why, when I’m writing, I tend to focus on what I call my Three Commandments of Writing. These are the overall rules; before accepting any writing advice, I check whether it reinforces one of these rules or not. If not, I ditch it.

1: Thou Shalt Have Something To Say

What’s your book about?

I don’t mean, describe to me the plot. I mean, why should anybody read this? What’s its thesis? What’s its reason for existence, from the reader’s perspective? People write stories for all kinds of reasons, but things like ‘I just wanted to get it out of my head’ are meaningless from a reader perspective. The greatest piece of writing advice I ever received was you putting words on a page does not obligate anybody to read them. So why are the words there? What point are you trying to make?

The purpose of your story can vary wildly. Usually, you’ll be exploring some kind of thesis, especially if you write genre fiction. Curse Words, for example, is an exploration of self-perpetuating power structures and how aiming for short-term stability and safety can cause long-term problems, as well as the responsibilities of an agitator when seeking to do the necessary work of dismantling those power structures. Most of the things in Curse Words eventually fold back into exploring this question. Alternately, you might just have a really cool idea for a society or alien species or something and want to show it off (note: it can be VERY VERY HARD to carry a story on a ‘cool original concept’ by itself. You think your sky society where they fly above the clouds and have no rainfall and have to harvest water from the clouds below is a cool enough idea to carry a story: You’re almost certainly wrong. These cool concept stories work best when they are either very short, or working in conjunction with exploring a theme). You might be writing a mystery series where each story is a standalone mystery and the point is to present a puzzle and solve a fun mystery each book. Maybe you’re just here to make the reader laugh, and will throw in anything you can find that’ll act as framing for better jokes. In some genres, readers know exactly what they want and have gotten it a hundred times before and want that story again but with different character names – maybe you’re writing one of those. (These stories are popular in romance, pulp fantasy, some action genres, and rather a lot of types of fanfiction).

Whatever the main point of your story is, you should know it by the time you finish the first draft, because you simply cannot write the second draft if you don’t know what the point of the story is. (If you write web serials and are publishing the first draft, you’ll need to figure it out a lot faster.)

Once you know what the point of your story is, you can assess all writing decisions through this lens – does this help or hurt the point of my story?

2: Thou Shalt Respect Thy Reader’s Investment

Readers invest a lot in a story. Sometimes it’s money, if they bought your book, but even if your story is free, they invest time, attention, and emotional investment. The vast majority of your job is making that investment worth it. There are two factors to this – lowering the investment, and increasing the payoff. If you can lower your audience’s suspension of disbelief through consistent characterisation, realistic (for your genre – this may deviate from real realism) worldbuilding, and appropriately foreshadowing and forewarning any unexpected rules of your world. You can lower the amount of effort or attention your audience need to put into getting into your story by writing in a clear manner, using an entertaining tone, and relying on cultural touchpoints they understand already instead of pushing them in the deep end into a completely unfamiliar situation. The lower their initial investment, the easier it is to make the payoff worth it.

Two important notes here: one, not all audiences view investment in the same way. Your average reader views time as a major investment, but readers of long fiction (epic fantasies, web serials, et cetera) often view length as part of the payoff. Brandon Sanderson fans don’t grab his latest book and think “Uuuugh, why does it have to be so looong!” Similarly, some people like being thrown in the deep end and having to put a lot of work into figuring out what the fuck is going on with no onboarding. This is one of science fiction’s main tactics for forcibly immersing you in a future world. So the valuation of what counts as too much investment varies drastically between readers.

Two, it’s not always the best idea to minimise the necessary investment at all costs. Generally, engagement with art asks something of us, and that’s part of the appeal. Minimum-effort books do have their appeal and their place, in the same way that idle games or repetitive sitcoms have their appeal and their place, but the memorable stories, the ones that have staying power and provide real value, are the ones that ask something of the reader. If they’re not investing anything, they have no incentive to engage, and you’re just filling in time. This commandment does not exist to tell you to try to ask nothing of your audience – you should be asking something of your audience. It exists to tell you to respect that investment. Know what you’re asking of your audience, and make sure that the ask is less than the payoff.

The other way to respect the investment is of course to focus on a great payoff. Make those characters socially fascinating, make that sacrifice emotionally rending, make the answer to that mystery intellectually fulfilling. If you can make the investment worth it, they’ll enjoy your story. And if you consistently make their investment worth it, you build trust, and they’ll be willing to invest more next time, which means you can ask more of them and give them an even better payoff. Audience trust is a very precious currency and this is how you build it – be worth their time.

But how do you know what your audience does and doesn’t consider an onerous investment? And how do you know what kinds of payoff they’ll find rewarding? Easy – they self-sort. Part of your job is telling your audience what to expect from you as soon as you can, so that if it’s not for them, they’ll leave, and if it is, they’ll invest and appreciate the return. (“Oh but I want as many people reading my story as possible!” No, you don’t. If you want that, you can write paint-by-numbers common denominator mass appeal fic. What you want is the audience who will enjoy your story; everyone else is a waste of time, and is in fact, detrimental to your success, because if they don’t like your story then they’re likely to be bad marketing. You want these people to bounce off and leave before you disappoint them. Don’t try to trick them into staying around.) Your audience should know, very early on, what kind of an experience they’re in for, what the tone will be, the genre and character(s) they’re going to follow, that sort of thing. The first couple of chapters of Time to Orbit: Unknown, for example, are a micro-example of the sorts of mysteries that Aspen will be dealing with for most of the book, as well as a sample of their character voice, the way they approach problems, and enough of their background, world and behaviour for the reader to decide if this sort of story is for them. We also start the story with some mildly graphic medical stuff, enough physics for the reader to determine the ‘hardness’ of the scifi, and about the level of physical risk that Aspen will be putting themselves at for most of the book. This is all important information for a reader to have.

If you are mindful of the investment your readers are making, mindful of the value of the payoff, and honest with them about both from the start so that they can decide whether the story is for them, you can respect their investment and make sure they have a good time.

3: Thou Shalt Not Make Thy World Less Interesting

This one’s really about payoff, but it’s important enough to be its own commandment. It relates primarily to twists, reveals, worldbuilding, and killing off storylines or characters. One mistake that I see new writers make all the time is that they tank the engagement of their story by introducing a cool fun twist that seems so awesome in the moment and then… is a major letdown, because the implications make the world less interesting.

“It was all a dream” twists often fall into this trap. Contrary to popular opinion, I think these twists can be done extremely well. I’ve seen them done extremely well. The vast majority of the time, they’re very bad. They’re bad because they take an interesting world and make it boring. The same is true of poorly thought out, shocking character deaths – when you kill a character, you kill their potential, and if they’re a character worth killing in a high impact way then this is always a huge sacrifice on your part. Is it worth it? Will it make the story more interesting? Similarly, if your bad guy is going to get up and gloat ‘Aha, your quest was all planned by me, I was working in the shadows to get you to acquire the Mystery Object since I could not! You have fallen into my trap! Now give me the Mystery Object!’, is this a more interesting story than if the protagonist’s journey had actually been their own unmanipulated adventure? It makes your bad guy look clever and can be a cool twist, but does it mean that all those times your protagonist escaped the bad guy’s men by the skin of his teeth, he was being allowed to escape? Are they retroactively less interesting now?

Whether these twists work or not will depend on how you’ve constructed the rest of your story. Do they make your world more or less interesting?

If you have the audience’s trust, it’s permissible to make your world temporarily less interesting. You can kill off the cool guy with the awesome plan, or make it so that the Chosen One wasn’t actually the Chosen One, or even have the main character wake up and find out it was all a dream, and let the reader marinate in disappointment for a little while before you pick it up again and turn things around so that actually, that twist does lead to a more interesting story! But you have to pick it up again. Don’t leave them with the version that’s less interesting than the story you tanked for the twist. The general slop of interest must trend upward, and your sacrifices need to all lead into the more interesting world. Otherwise, your readers will be disappointed, and their experience will be tainted.

Whenever I’m looking at a new piece of writing advice, I view it through these three rules. Is this plot still delivering on the book’s purpose, or have I gone off the rails somewhere and just stared writing random stuff? Does making this character ‘more relateable’ help or hinder that goal? Does this argument with the protagonists’ mother tell the reader anything or lead to any useful payoff; is it respectful of their time? Will starting in medias res give the audience an accurate view of the story and help them decide whether to invest? Does this big twist that challenges all the assumptions we’ve made so far imply a world that is more or less interesting than the world previously implied?

Hopefully these can help you, too.

[abyssalpriest]

22y/o me's "i really want to take some sunflowers down to the ocean for (the Storm Mother) to apologise for everything I've ever done because she hates me and I'm disgusting and I just want her to be ok... I'm not supposed to go near sunflowers bc they're related to her but I just want to apologise and make it right and nothing else ive done has succeeded in that" vs 26y/o me's "I want to buy sunflowers for myself because I deserve it and they remind me of her but fuck it, mine now, and I want to visit the ocean w Storm Mom for fun and spiritual purposes bc we're close and she never hated me, I don't even need to think about that" fight

[katkit-42]

I can't stop thinking about Gwen in ATSV. She mentioned about how she, in every other universe, died when she was loved by spiderman/Peter Parker. Peter B., Noir, Ham, and Peni didn't talk about it, but I can't help but think about how Gwen is in this organization where literally thousands of people were in love with her and she died. When she walked through Neuva York, every Spiderman was tripping over themselves to call out to her specifically and receive a "hey :)" back. Not Spider Jess or Hobie.

And then there's Pavitr and, love him of course, but I wonder how it felt to see him talk about Gayatri. I know it's a joke but how does it feel to see yourself put on this pedestal. You can't help but compare yourself and wonder "did my Peter see me that way? How would I have acted if he did?" To see her dad in Officer Singh. To see herself trapped in a bus, desperately pounding on the window as she dangled above certain death again.

In the original Spiderman India comic, they skipped over Gwen/Gayatri entirely, and instead had Meera Jain. Which I get why they did from a meta perspective, but in universe, how does it feel to know your replacement is out there. Every Spiderman is happy with their MJ, and they think of Gwen fondly, but like.... Gwen is replaceable. She is the first love, but she doesn't get a future. It's a canon event.

The horror of being a fridged woman.