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ghostbustermelanieking · 1 year

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I’ve been wanting to get into reading more ghost stories, so send me all your recs please!!

ok ok!! i fucking love ghost stories

(sorry i didn't italicize titles, i'm probably gonna add it in later -- tumblr mobile is just really shitty about that for some reason)

so if you're into kids books at all, the all time ghost story master is mary downing hahn. she's got several middle grade ghost stories (and some witch stuff too), and they're all excellent. legitimately scared me as a kid and hold their own now. there's one with a haunted lake, one about pranks turning into real hauntings, one set in victorian london, one set during the Spanish flu pandemic, lots of spooky dolls, several involving some lite time travel... highly recommend, and not just bc of nostalgia. other middle grade ghost story favorites: the dollhouse murders (a betty ren wright classic) and the ghost of fossil glen

if we're talking young adult, katie alender is a particular standout. she has several good ones, but my personal favorite is bad girls don't die, a story about sisters and ghost stories and spooky dolls.

if we're talking adult books...

stephen king is kind of a horror cliche but i legitimately love some of his stuff... his ghost stories are the shining, and pet sematary (what, shut up, it totally counts), and these are both special favorites of mine. frequent rereads (especially now that i have better copies!).

thirteen storeys by jonathan sims (writer/narrator on the magnus archives!) is a tremendous ghost story -- or more like thirteen ghost storeys fit into one (lol). i haven't actually read his newest, family business, but i actually just downloaded the audio book and plan to listen on my impending 7 hour drive friday. fairly sure it's a ghost story and i'm sure it's excellent

the deep by alma katsu is one i remember enjoying a lot. it's a ghostly spin on the titanic and brittanic and features real historical figures as well as fictional characters. (it's not a ghost story, but i loved her other novel the hunger, which is a horror take on the donner party, so maybe check that out if you enjoy the deep! she's got another historical horror novel out that i need to read.)

shamefully, i haven't finished this one -- but heart shaped box by joe hill is also a very good ghost story. i don't actually know why i didn't finish it. it's legitimately spooky and awesome. the premise is an aging rock star who collects spooky shit buys a haunted suit.

one of my favorite ghost story novels is the drowning kind by jennifer mcmahon. it's about a haunted swimming pool, and is set in the 1920s and present day. super spooky and a poignant family story. i also enjoyed the invited by mcmahon, a story about the construction of a haunted house. mcmahon has several other ghost stories that i haven't read yet, but plan to soon!

not exactly ghost stories -- although one, cackle, does contain ghosts -- but i have been love love loving the work of rachel harrison lately. like reread her books about five times since october crazy. she has three books: the return, probably closest structurally to a ghost story, but it isn't exactly one -- about a friend group who reunites after one comes back after two years of being missing; cackle is a story about a woman who moves to a new town after a break up and befriends a witch; such sharp teeth is about a woman being turned into a werewolf while staying in her hometown with her pregnant twin sister. all are tremendous both as spooky reads and as moving character driven stories about female relationships. also, rachel harrison has some short stories out there: an anthology of four spooky short stories called bad dolls (one of the four is definitely a ghost story); an audible original short story that's also a ghost story called the veil (in the process of listening [edit: i actually finished listening while making this post and can confirm it is excellent); and a short story here.

old country by query and query is one that i bought and read recently... it's actually based off of a no sleep story on reddit. its about a couple who move to the country in idaho and learn from their neighbors that there is a spirit who will haunt the land differently each season. i found it to be unique and fun, and legitimately unsettling. (mixed feelings on the ending but otherwise a fun ghostie read.)

a head full of ghosts by paul tremblay is sort of a ghost story and sort of a demon story? a young woman recounts the supposed demonic possession of her older sister that occurred when she was a child. there was a reality TV series made about the possession and exorcism; years later, the main character is grappling with that legacy.

if you're looking for more vintage ghost stories, i remember legitimately enjoying the haunting of hill house, despite finding it a little hard to read. (thats just me, i have a hard time with older-sounding texts. i would like to reread it soon.) it's nothing like the 2018 TV show (although that show draws heavily from it in certain ways), but it's an excellent novel in its own right, and a big inspiration to the horror genre.

the only good indians by stephen graham jones is sort of a ghost/folklore/slasher story, but it is excellent all the same. it reads like a movie, which i love. i remember loving it when i read it. four native american men are forced to reckon with a hunting accident from their youth when a supernatural force comes back for revenge. very spooky, but also a slasher in its own right, if that is at all your thing.

for a festive ghost story: a christmas carol is great on so SO many levels (listen to the podcast jacob marley is dead!!) but also excellent as a ghost story, and there is an excellent audio book version on spotify that i love

the broken girls by simone james is a ghost story i remember enjoying. it's got a haunted boarding school and operates on two different timeliness. simone st. james has some other ghostie stories i haven't read but that i intend to.

beloved by toni morrison is a book that i've only read once, and that i need to read again, but that i remember really liking. it's an excellent read. sethe, a former slave struggles to escape her past, particularly the death of her beloved young daughter many years before. her life is upended by the arrival of a mysterious young girl called beloved.

when the reckoning comes by latanya mcqueen is one i really enjoyed. a woman travels to her white friend's wedding at a former plantation, where she is one of only two Black guests, and the ghosts of the slaves who lived and died there linger.

nothing but blackened teeth by cassandra khaw is a novella that i thought was really fun. a group of friends attend a small wedding at a haunted house in japan. the house is said to be the site of a bride who was sacrificed and buried under the house.

hex is an honest to god unique ghost story. a town is haunted, and essentially held captive, by the ghost of an executed witch. eventually yknow. horrible hijinks ensue.

some popular books will make you think they're ghost stories but there really was never a ghost all along!?!! this annoys me DEEPLY.

honestly check back in a couple months and i'll probably have more. i have a whole stack of ghost story books in my reading queue ❤️

#grace talks about books #books

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xxarmchairphilosopherxx · 1 year

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Why we love Five Nights at Freddy’s a tribute to an unexpected fandom

So, Five Evenings at Frederick von Ferdinand’s…

Ok stay with me here guys I swear it will be ok. No convoluted lore timeline analysis here… Though I can’t promise that one day I won’t throw my hat in the ring and complete my insanity completionist speed run. But until that point inevitably comes, I wanted to take a step back from all the games, comics, and hot topic merch to ask that all important question. Y?

No seriously how is this franchise so popular? It’s not just with the older audience either but with its apparent core demographic of kids. Which to be fully honest with its release being almost 10 years ago now all us technically started this journey as little ones, so I guess that’s not as surprising. Hm somewhere between Fazbear and today we all grew up… But I digress.

Let me answer this question by asking another, Why is Harry Potter so popular? Some of you may say “oh it’s the world building or the characters or this that and the other thing lengardium LEveOsA!” No that’s not good enough, 10 vbucks away from Snuffleclaw house!

These are not unique to Harry Potter, these are qualities that almost any franchise needs to become popular. But what was key to harry potters success?

It’s not a fantasy novel, it’s a mystery novel.

Seriously it may not seem like it but almost everyone likes mystery stories. Look at Sherlock the brilliant Brit is one of the most famous characters in all of western media even though most people haven’t even read the originals. Crime tv is the only thing keeping cable tv alive, and the funny kiwi man tells me this mystery box is all he needs to make a good star wars movie! Ok maybe not all of those are the best example but that’s where the magic (heh) comes in. JK “rolling on the floor” hid the mystery series under a fantasy story about wizards, dragons, and all that actual fun stuff. But what made us stay there and not head over to re watch Lord of the rings for the 20th time to tell our friends that Viggo broke his toe, was that human trait so deadly to cats; curiosity.

We just love what we can’t understand. We need to know it and that’s what keeps drawing us back, not only to the escapades of the least dangerous school in England. But with the recent happenings at old Freddy Foozler’s Italian Cuisine. You know a mystery is good when not even the sharpest minds of Reddit can figure it out… Ok, another bad example, but still this shit is cray just look at these timelines.

I can’t even tell how many kids are dead anymore! Just like Nancy Drew gets the kids’ reading, so does Harry potter, but more importantly Freddy FazeClanBear get those nerds out of them books and into gaming like God intended.

Oh, and an aside to this is the pure fact that kids, despite all signs saying no, the little munchkins love to be scared. You know how it felt right? When you watched that episode of goosebumps with the pig head kid with all the lights off? You felt a little braver when it was all over. And it’s the same reason why we all loved to play those violent games or raunchy episodes of family guy when we were kids. When a youngin sees the ratings anything over their given age that’s a challenge. Adult stuff has been and always will be seen as cool and edgy; and gosh dang it if there’s one truth in this world besides the indisputable fact that blue is a flavor and can be only distilled in the 7 eleven slushie machine. It’s that kids want to be cool, and the Possessed Chuck e Cheese Copyright Infringement Brigade got the keys to that all so coveted cool kids club.

Another aspect that’s gonna get a bit strange is the idea of Character…

Now logically you will ask “how can a bunch of possessed animatronics with a vocal range of distorted child scream to guttural groan from the depths of hell, have any actual character?” Well, My good friend take a trip with me to the forbidden forest of the human subconscious: The internet!!!

Well mainly one aspect I’ve noticed through my many hours spent trudging the coded catacombs in search of the dankest and rankest of memes. That is, when faced with fear we usually try to make it funny. The following are in cannon possessed by a dead kids.

This comedic-fication of Freddy and the Gang came form two sources. First of course was wanting a sense of relief. You can’t be afraid of something when it’s got a mouth full of blunts dancing to snoop doggy dog’s Cremate Cannabis Customarily. And also it was just a natural consequence of the game itself for example. You in the back what is the equation for comedy?

(Pause for your stuttering response)

That’s right!

Misery + Time= Funny

Exactly! Good job gold star for you champ see me after class and maybe you’ll get a little treat~ Wait sorry wrong script hold on (shuffles papers).

Ahem here we are... These games while also being scary were at times insanely difficult to the point where even the man behind the game itself was unsure if its higher difficulties could even be completed. But from the misery of fear and rage, came the memes of dank and WANK… No no stop no nsfw here! Gosh these scripts are all over the place hold on.

Ahemx2. Now these comedic bits also happened to mix with some of the core gameplay behaviors of the animatronic animals which lead to some odd things starting to rise to the surface. A Character.

Take Foxy for example. An aggressive gameplay loop, mixed with his implied solitary nature in Pirates Cove made him generally a grumpy kind of guy who hates the night guard. Maybe he’s even more aware of the situation than the others. Then the big Faz himself with a more strategic code and being the main cheese himself, maybe he’s like the begrudging ring leader of the group and just too tired for this shit. And Bota Bing Bota boom in the primordial soup of Tumblr and deviantart… and hint of furry. You have characters! and characters need stories, and drama, dynamics, backstories, and ships! Oh the ships, the ships like FEDEX!!! And since these primordial soup characters are 50% meme by volume, there is no cannon! But then also, everything is cannon!

So just like that weird doujin writer taking a bunch of legendary characters and making some weird dating sim and taking up whatever lore he wanted because that’s what everyone did before him (ie Fate Stay Night). So too did Xxgoldenshadowfreddy1987xX using MS paint make his series of comics detailing the break room shenanigans of Freddy and Co. And also inspired the likes of Thisaccountismine23 to write the most poetic story about the end of life, the eternal essence of the soul, and how it can be seen in the eyes of a child. Which just so happened to be set in the Fnaf 2 location with Mike Schmidt and his oddly attractive robot furry friends.

You see what I’m getting at here? This is why it’s so damn popular. It’s this weird combination of memes, murder, and mystery; it creates a beautiful canvas that’s both as blank and as filled as any creative person wants it to be. And its self-feeding loop too. Fanon affects how one sees the cannon, and with a canon in constant flux and a fanon that shouldn’t even exist, you got yourself a recipe for a once in a lifetime Super Fandom.

And to wrap this up in a nice little bow you could show your therapist this Friday, I wanted to take a moment and say a few words. 434 to be exact. If there’s one thing I learned growing up and working with kids allot, especially as I got older myself, is that there’s nothing worse than seeing yourself become that adult whose not just out of touch but who mocks a kids hobbies and interests and makes them feel bad for what they’re into. I knew what that was like and I’m sure anyone watching young or old knows what that’s like too. It hurts and it can make that thing that you liked, that gave you a bit of joy or comfort, have a sour taste in your mouth. And that can hurt all the worse. So when I caught myself being like that to these little ones, I didn’t like it. So I swore to be better than that. Now I joke about ‘fuck them kids all the time’. But it’s only a joke pure and simple. I don’t call any of these things cringe anymore even if it doesn’t jive with me, even if I feel cringed by it, I try not to be that way anymore. I don’t like shitting on what could be a kids first forefronts into art, music, or writing. I sure as hell don’t want them looking back on their old work and feel ashamed. If they moved on or not it doesn’t matter, they should be proud of their work, any work, if they gave their all. Hell, you can take a good look at my YouTube channel (@lazyboywiseguy) (#shamelessplug). I know damned well some of that stuff could be called cringe today but I’ll tell you what. Some those vids did some numbers and that means that someone somewhere enjoyed them. To that someone and to me they are not cringe. I like those things and the things I made with them. I like FNAF and the weird ass community it made for itself. And I just want to say to you at home, don’t worry about cringe or based, just be, for that is based-est thing of all. And kids don’t let some old bat say the stuff your into is wack yo. And to any older readers don’t be ashamed of anything that gives you joy. In reality that’s a lesson for young and old. Life’s too short for that, be happy and be good, that’s all you need.

Sorry to end this on a less than memey note but I think that’s enough out of me. This FNAF lore script won’t put me in the insane asylum itself. So back to my mad ramblings I go, until next time. Smell ya latter.

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sarcasrnspasrn · 2 years

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I think the reason I’m taking so long to finish watching hataraku maou-sama season 2 is that I don’t want it to be over.

And not just because “oh the anime’s so good” kind of way (though that is part of it). I feel like when it ends... I’ll lose my connection to her.

There was a babysitter my parents would hire for us on occassion. It’s not that they really needed a babysitter, they weren’t ones to frequently go on dates or anything. It was more like they’d usually hire the babysitter and then figure out what they wanted to do in order to get out of the house. It was a little bit of socialization time for us kids, having a unique experience of parents not home with a babysitter that’d been accredited by some of their friends for their own kids.

My parents would get a take-n-bake pizza from the local pizza shop and leave a box of kraft mac ‘n cheese, and that would be the dinner us three kids would have. Pizza for my brother & sister, mac ‘n cheese for me. She’d help us make the food and my sister was scarred upon seeing what kraft mac looked like while being mixed up. (I wasn’t adversely affected). We’d learn little things, like how we could dip cookies in milk, and just have a fun time playing games with her. She’d tell us about her boyfriend and her annual trips to Tahoe. I interviewed her for an elementary school project. She was the coolest.

Of course after your kids are a certain age having a babysitter isn’t as important. I can’t remember the exact context of how this happened, but somehow I ended up going to the local minigolf place with her. Just me & my babysitter, when I was almost certainly old enough to be at home by myself (middle school aged or early high school). We chitchatted about the good and the bad, and for some reason or another I mentioned my budding interest in anime. We then both discovered that we had watched the same anime--The Devil is a Part-Timer! We talked about how Emilia and Satan were totally endgame and how it was such a charming little show, and one of us introduced the other to the idea of the god-baby that showed up later in the novels that the two raise together.

A few years later I learned from my mom that her cancer had taken a turn for the worse. And shortly after that, I learned she had died. I’m not the best at understanding ages, but I don’t think she was much older than 30, if that.

Part of me doesn’t quite internalize this fact. I think a small portion of me still expects that somehow I could still see her face one day, even now that I’m an adult with absolutely no need for babysitting.

And then, just a few years ago, an absolutely insane announcement dropped. The Devil is a Part-Timer! season 2 was in production and going to be released. I, of course, lost my shit. But shortly after processing that season 2 was coming, my brain remembered her. My babysitter, who would never be able to see this second season continuing the characters’ arcs.

Every time I watch an episode of the newest season, I think about her. How she’s doing. What her life was like. If she would have even remembered this series now, or thought about the girl she went mini-golfing with.

Maybe, just maybe. If I take longer finishing this series. She’ll exist for just that much longer. Maybe once it’s over she’ll really be gone. Can I really go through with that?

I don’t know. It’s kind of a silly reason, isn’t it. But it’s where I’m at, regardless. I’m not ready for it to end.

#ylimespam #idk if there was a real point to me posting this. it's kind of silly #but it's something that's been going through my head a lot

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upside-down-uni · 3 years

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Hey! Idk if this is too much t9 ask, but could you rec me 2, 19, 20, 45, 55, 63, 69, 71, 72, 75, 86, 104, 111, 116, 131? sorry if it’s a lot but thanks in advance if u can rec me some! :)

Hi, you're in luck! I have an essay to procrastinate on and this ask is just the right thing to distract me! Here you go, I hope you'll find something that you like:

2. a book with a blue cover

Radio Silence by Alice Oseman. When i read it for the first time I was just on the brink of going to uni, still figuring out what I even wanted to study and this book just wrapped me in a warm blanket and said "it's going to be okay". I love the main characters Frances and Aled, their arcs and especially the really nice and quiet queer rep in this book.

19. a book that put you in a reading slump

The Knife Of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness. When I start a book I generally have the feeling that I can't put it away until I have finished it. With The Knife Of Never Letting Go my problem was that I did want to read it but it didn't fit my mood, so I couldn't bring myself to read it but also beat myself up about not reading it until I put it back onto my shelf. So, I basically pushed myself into a reading slump over this book.

21. a book with a red cover

Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers. I enjoyed this book so much but probably not for the reasons most people would think I enjoyed it? The wlw romance was definitely nice and I really liked them being dramatic but also kind of mundane? What really got me though was the strong theme of found family of young adults and queer friendships, that really yanked the yearning hours wide fucking open for me. (I also liked that in the end the book wasn't as much about romance as it was about finding yourself after surrendering yourself to academia for ages and working through your issues.)

45. a book featuring the friends to lovers trope

The Priory Of The Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon. I adore this book. It's so long and there's so much incredible world building and history in it that it made reading an untter delight! Coming in it was a bit hard to acclimate to the slow paste but after a while I just settled in and enjoyed the ride. It's a breathtaking story in a breathtaking universe and afaik there's a second part coming!

55. a book with a satisfying ending

Yolk by Mary H. K. Choi. Yolk doesn't really have an ending in the sense of a "happily ever after" but I really loved where the author chose to leave the characters and how she did it. The book is quite different from what I usually read, tonewise, but especially that ending made me leave the book with a warm feeling. (also the cover is yellow and really really gorgeous)

63. a book that actually made you laugh out loud

I would've reccd Red White and Royal Blue but judging by your url you've read that already...sooooo, it's Snapdragon by Kat Leyh! Super cute graphic novel, with a weird and adorable storyline and such lovable characters!

69. your favorite mythological retelling

I haven't read a mythological retelling in ages, so basic Percy Jackson by Rick Riordan will have to do.

71. your favorite LGBTQ+ fiction

now that's just rude how am I supposed to choose?? I'll say it's Every Heart A Doorway by Seanan McGuire and Gideon The Ninth by Tamsyn Muir and Loveless by Alice Oseman. I feel very strongly and very distinctly about all of them, if you can get your hands on them my only comment is READ. (and maybe make sure you're okay with gothic sci-fi horror for Gideon The Ninth)

72. a book with a gorgeous cover

Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth. It's her adult gothic horror debut after The Miseducation of Cameron Post and not only is the hardcover just stunning in black and red, it also got illustrations inside!! (And all teh women are queer and it's deliciously fucked up!)

75 a book featuring the I'm not like other girls trope

I think the closest I can come to that is The Lady's Guide To Piracy and Petticoats by Mackenzi Lee. The main character has to unlearn a bunch of stuff really fast if she wants to get along with the only other people that will help her. We have road trips in the 16th century, kidnapping and asshole husbands to be, piracy of course and friendship!

86. a book with an insane plot twist

Sawkill Girls by Claire Legrand. Sawkill Girls was my first touch with horror and I have to say I have no idea whether there was heavy foreshadowing. I think I remember thinking that there was something else to come but when the shit hit the fan I just sat there with big questionmarks over my head because I had read the book in a frenzy in one evening and truly did NOT anticipate it. As someone who did not read horror or thriller before this I have to say I was already insanely confused and disgusted by a bunch of stuff that went down. But then...uh. the thing happened and I was just lost. (In a good way though.)

104. a fluffy sweet read

Let's Talk About Love by Claire Kann. It's been a while ever since I read it but it's essentially a cute summer story about Alice who's a disaster bisexual when she sees people she finds cute. Which is a little inconvenient because the new guy at her job is really, really, really extremely cute and she ceases to function around him. There's best friend drama, eating pizza iirc and figuring shit out!

111. a book writing a book

I assume it's either "a book about writing a book" or I am literally supposed to rec a book that is writing a book...I'm going to rec a book that is about books! (because I can.) It's The Girl Who Reads on the Métro by Christine Féret-Fleury and it follows a young woman called Juliette wo gets sucked into an old bookseller's world of life saving, life changing books. A really quiet, really cute book.

116. a book with multiple povs

the Reckless books by Cornelia Funke! Simply divine stroytelling, a vibrant world and amazing characters! I have to say that I only know the German original so I don't know what the English translation might be like.

131. recommend any book you like

um. so knife gang members and people who follow my main, you'll once again be subjected to me being a mess because of lesbian necromancers in space! I've mentioned it before, it lives in my head rent free, it is the one, the only Gideon The Ninth by Tamsyn Muir! It's an insane sci-fi horror fantasy blend where Gideon has to play cavalier to Reverend Daughter Harrowhark I-love-being- an-absolute-pain-in-the-ass-to-Gideon Nonagesimus to help her become an uber-necromancer (like Harrow needs motivation to become even more of a nerd and shockingly good at necromancy) for the Necrolord Prime/Undying Emperor. There's BEAUTIFUL WRITING sprinkled with MEMES when you least expect it. There is incredible toxic codependency and repression. There's MURDER. There's fancy necromancy theorems and DUELS. There's enemies to begrudging allies to ??? Staple your socks to your feet or this book will blow them clean off!

#book rec asks #mo answers #thanks for asking!#idk when you sent this ask but it popped up in my inbox just today so here you go!

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marumafan · 3 years

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Hey, marumafan. I’ve been reading through the light novels as of late, and Yuuri’s family are all supportive of same sex relationships, but Shouri is actually making it his mission in life to fight for same sex marriage in Japan, and he reminds Yuuri of that fact a few times. We know from the light novels that Miko thought that Yuuri liked girls because she stated that Yuuri’s mind is only ever on baseball and girls. His father doesn’t really state his opinion. Shouri doesn’t seem to make assumptions about Yuuri, however, and merely seems to have been insistent on supporting gay marriage, particularly around Yuuri since before Yuuri ever even went to Shin Makoku, it seems. What’s your opinion on the idea that oniichan, loving, attentive and protective as he is, always knew, or at least had an inkling, that Yuuri was gay (or bi, depending on your opinion)?

Hello @nuttythesquirrel

This is a packed question, let’s take it part by part.

- -

Miko

Although Miko used to dress Yuuri up in girl’s clothes, she used to do this for her own amusement. She wanted a girl because “boys are boring”. So she grabbed baby Yuuri and simply put him in girls clothes as often as possible. She also chose the name Yuuri, which is a girl name for him. But here’s the kick, in Walpurgis Nacht we see another side of Miko. In the story “ Change” (also known as “Convert”) where we see this scene unfold: "But despite that, you spend all day in your room, decorated only with baseball posters and next year's CALENDAR of the Seibu Lions which you pre-purchased. You don't have a single porn book, and what I thought was a DVD for adults labeled "Seibu Lion's path to victory", didn't have any porn in it, but contained what the label actually said." "You went through my room!?" "I can't take it, there's such a big difference between you and your older brother that MAMA is worried. Could it be that the reason is 'that', Yuu-chan?" She lowered her voice."... That you only love people in UNIFORMS?" "N-no! You're wrong!" "Do you want to go to therapy?" "I don't~!" "Oh, my. It's fine Yuu-chan, you don't need to cry. There's nothing wrong with you. It's not like it's a serious illness or anything like that." It's not unthinkable that I may want to start crying. Is this what a real mother does? To simply say out loud the things that they figured out about their son? A self proclaimed progressive mother is struggling with this? ------------------------------------------- (-> uniforms = guys) And scene. So there you have it. Miko claims to be progressive but when confronted with her child not being heterosexual she’s uncomfortable, she brings it up, asks Yuuri if he wants to go to therapy. We also see here that Yuuri is very much aware that he likes guys. He’s also aware that his mom is struggling with it despite her ‘cool mom’ facade. So there you go. Progressive Miko seems not as understanding as we’d hope...

- -

Shouma

In Gaiden Novel 12 (adapted to the manga Vol. 10 chapter 57), Shouma throws a hissy fit when he sees Yuuri dressed as a girl (by Miko, when Yuu was 3). He gets into a huge fight with Miko they start talking about divorce. Small Shouri (9) picks up his brother and they leave the apartment (they’re in NY? Boston? I don’t know much about American cities), and they’re wandering the streets. Miko and Shouma eventually realized their children are gone and go to the police. A lot of situations take place, but eventually at the police station the parents see Yuuri at the Gay Pride parade and when the police says something (jokingly), like Yuuri is coming out, Shouma loses his shit. Furthermore, there’s Shouma’s insistence on getting Yuuri into baseball (for some reason he didn’t do it, or it didn’t work with Shouri). It seems like he’s trying to ‘make Yuuri a man' by getting him interested into a manly sport... like baseball. Now of course Shouma doesn’t know this, but it kinda backfired cuz Yuuri now fantasizes about all those dudes and their muscles and legs and butts, and spends all day looking at them. (he also jacks off in a bathtub thinking about ‘baseball’ as per the information available in "WC or NPB? Yuuri and Muraken During the World Cup” ) So Shouma was trying to make sure ‘Yuuri is straight’ since he was a baby. Yuuri used baseball as an excuse to look at hot guys. It all worked out just fine right? Now Yuuri is simply in DEEP, DEEP denial. What a life! (/s) Yes, Japan’s society and their views on homosexuality (their view that ‘being gay is just a phase, when you grow up then you get married to a girl’ -> Edit: here's a link to a recent reddit post), is also pretty shit and fucks with Yuuri’s head. All in all, I’m not sure where Shouma stands in being ‘accepting’ of Yuuri getting married to a guy. (Interesting how in the ‘NY ending’ of it happens to everyone, Yuuri’s parents were nowhere to be found)

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Shouri

Here’s the thing... we can see that even before Shouri understood much of anything, he loved and wanted to protect Yuuri. In that novel where the parents are fighting, this happens: (Shouri) "Don't yell in front of a toddler." (the toddler is Yuuri) (Shouma )"Ah, sorry. Papa was bad." (...) (Shouri)"I don't think it's good to judge people on what they're wearing." ----------------------------------------------- And there you go. Shouri already has a moral compass that makes him think you shouldn’t judge people by what they’re wearing at age 9 (despite of his parents ideas). On top of that, at the end of that chapter Shouri meets Bob, and it seems like Bob explains to him how important Yuuri is. Making Shouri even more protective of Yuuri than he was. So Shouri may have issues (they call it a “brother complex”, like he loves his sibling way too much), but overall, if you ask me, Shouri is simply thinking about passing same sex marriage laws and such because he might sense that 1) Yuuri’s bi or gay and 2) that their parents are not supportive. So what is my opinion? Well yes, I think the whole family knows that Yuuri is bi or gay and they all deal with it in very different ways.

#kyou kara maoh #kkm #maruma

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bettsfic · 3 years

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how i got an agent, or: my writing timeline

when i started writing, i had no idea how publishing worked and i had a lot of misconceptions about it. but i just signed my first literary agent so i thought i’d share what my experience has been getting to this point, in case it helps anyone else with their own publication goals. i’m also including financial details, like submission fees and income, because “i could never afford to pursue writing as a career” is something that kept me from taking the idea seriously.

for context, i write mostly literary fiction and i’m on the academic/scholarly writing path. this process looks a lot different for other genres.

i didn’t write this in my pretty nonfiction narrative voice; it’s really just the bare-bones facts of how it went down, how long it took, how many words i wrote (both fanfiction and original fiction), and how much it all cost.

background

2002 - 2005: read a fuckton of books, wrote some fiction, wanted to be a writer but knew it would never happen, journaled every moment of my life in intimate detail

2006: started working full-time (at a chinese restaurant) while still in high school, also started taking courses for college credit; no time to write, and forgot i had ever wanted to be a writer

2007: graduated high school, started college (psych major), still worked at the restaurant, moved out of my parents’ house into an apartment with my boyfriend; my dad got diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer

2008: continued college full-time, quit the restaurant and started part-time as a bank teller, broke up with bf and moved in with a friend at an apartment where the rent was obscenely high; had to pick up a second job altering bridal gowns

2009: continued college full-time, started dating someone else, moved in with him, had to support him, took a third job as an admin assistant

2010: continued college full-time, still had 3 jobs; my dad’s cancer became terminal

2011: my dad passed away; i graduated college with a 3.9 and $31k of debt; quit 2 of 3 jobs; got promoted at the bank; my bf cheated on me and we broke up; moved back in with my mom

2012: a very dark time; also, bought a house (because where i’m from, it’s cheaper to buy than rent)

2013: discovered fandom

2014, age 24

this is the year i started writing and posting fanfic. prior to that i was a compulsive journaler but had no drive or desire to become a writer, despite how much i had written when i was a teenager. it seemed like a very childish dream. at this point i assumed writing was just a phase like all my other hobbies i’d picked up and set down.

but fandom proved to be really healthy for me, and i made some good friends who encouraged my writing and made me want to be better at it. i was really not very good at writing. i don’t think i had any natural creative talent whatsoever, or even a particularly vivid imagination. the only thing i had going for me was the ability to put thoughts into words after a decade of obsessive journaling.

i started writing in spring, and by the end of the year my total word count was 311k. i was making a decent income at the bank, insofar as my bills were covered and i had health insurance. i still had a significant amount of credit card debt from college that i was trying to pay down, and which was eating up all my extra income.

2015, age 25

i continued writing through 2015 and went to visit @aeriallon, whom i’d met in fandom and who told me i should consider applying to MFAs. i was miserable at the bank and knew i wanted to go back to school, but i didn’t think there was a chance in hell a grad program would accept me, since my writing wasn’t very good and i hadn’t so much as taken a single english class in undergrad. she told me to just look around and do a few google searches to see what i found.

when i started searching, i assumed i would probably be more compelled toward an MEd or MSW programs and go the therapy route, which is what the plan had been in undergrad before my dad died and my life got derailed. i never wanted to be a banker, but i’d got a promotion into commercial finance that paid decently, so i took it and told myself i’d work for a year before going back to school. but then i kept getting promoted and one year became many.

i ended up being more drawn to creative writing MFA programs because they seemed to want people with weird backgrounds like mine. also the classes sounded fun and the programs were funded. i didn’t know how i would be able to afford my mortgage payment or sell my house on a fraction of the income i was making at the bank, but i figured i’d apply and see what happened.

it took 6 months to get a writing sample ready to apply to MFAs. it was the only ofic story i’d written as an adult, and in retrospect i had no idea what i was doing because at that point i didn’t read literary short fiction. but i got the sample as good as i could get it and completed my applications. i applied to 6 schools and got accepted into 1.

in 2015 i wrote 250k. i can’t find my application spreadsheet from that year, but i probably spent between $300 and $400 on application fees. early in the year, i had finally managed to pay off my credit card debt and save a little bit of money.

2016, age 26

the school i got into was within driving distance of my house, so i didn’t bother moving. i tried to quit the bank but my boss convinced me to stay on 2 days a week working from home. i agreed to it, because my grad stipend wasn’t enough to cover my bills, and i was counting on what little savings i had accrued to get me through the program. i still had no drive or interest to publish. i mostly just wanted to go back to school so i could learn how to be better at this thing i really enjoyed doing.

in the MFA, as you might imagine, i had to read a lot of stuff and write a lot of stuff, and was encouraged to begin submitting some of the short stories i wrote for workshop. i was not particularly into the idea, considering it seemed like a lot of work for little reward, and also i didn’t think my stories were very good.

i also started teaching english comp. i hated it and decided that after the MFA, i never wanted to do it again. haha. hahahahahaha

in 2016 i wrote 343k. i didn’t apply/submit in 2016 so i didn’t pay any fees, but my grad stipend was $14k for the academic year, plus the income i was making at the bank.

2017, age 27

i did a complete 180 and decided i loved teaching more than anything else in the entire world, and i was willing to do whatever it took to become a teacher. i realized that to become a teacher, i needed to publish. begrudgingly i started submitting to literary journals. i also applied to summer workshops and got into tin house, which i highly recommend if that’s something you’re interested in. at tin house i met my dream agent, who seemed really interested in my work and encouraged me to query her as soon as i had a book done.

a lot of personal drama happened that year. i was still working at the bank in addition to teaching a 2/2 and taking a full course load. in summer i had a long overdue mental breakdown.

2017 was a rough year. i wrote 149k. this is the year i started keeping a dedicated expenses spreadsheet. i spent $174 in submission fees. tin house tuition with room and board was a little over $1500 + travel. i thought it was worth it because i met the agent i thought i would later sign, but that didn’t pan out. (i made some great friends though!!) tin house was definitely an unwise financial decision; i paid for it out of what little i managed to save in 2015.

2018, age 28

early in 2018, i went from teaching comp/rhet to creative writing, which only cemented my desire to teach writing as a career. i realized i was far better at teaching writing than writing, but i knew i had to keep writing to keep teaching (shocked pikachu.jpg), so i kept submitting to journals. i got my first story accepted. i didn’t receive any payment for that publication. i quit the bank early in the year (finally! after 10 years!) and was terrified about money, in part because my student loan payments were coming out of deferment and i was still paying off my hospital bills from my breakdown.

in spring semester, i won a few departmental awards (totaling $500ish) and got a second story accepted (again, no payment). i also got accepted to another workshop which i will not name because i hated it. i graduated in may and defended my thesis in july. the thesis would later become my short story collection, zucchini.

in fall, i stayed on at my school as an adjunct, and started writing training wheels which would later become an original novel called baby.

i wrote 450k in 2018. i paid $373 in submission fees. i was also nominated for an award for one of my publications but didn’t win. the workshop i went to was like $4000 with room and board (it was a month-long workshop). i got 75% of it covered with scholarships and i paid for the rest of it out of my savings, and even though i’d intended to drive there, my mom ended up buying me a plane ticket. again, i met a lot of big-wig writers i thought for sure would help me get an agent. i told myself i was networking, and that publication was all about Who You Knew. but that turned out not to be true for me.

as an adjunct i made $3200 per course, and i taught 3 classes in fall. in winter, i got my shit together and started applying for creative writing PhDs, mostly to convince my family i was doing something with my life, with no expectation that i would get in. in winter i applied to 2 schools. with application fees and the GRE, i ended up paying well over $500.

2019, age 29

in spring semester, i taught 2 classes while i revised training wheels into baby. when i had a completed manuscript, i finally pulled the plug and used all my networking contacts to get my dream agent i’d met at tin house. i queried her, and a very popular and well-regarded author i’d met at the other workshop emailed her on my behalf to tell her good things about me. i thought for sure i had it in the bag. this author also touched base with a few other agents whom he thought would like my work.

i didn’t hear back from any of them. not even a “no thanks.” i set down querying for a while.

i got a third story picked up and published around this time, and i was paid $25 for it. they also nominated me for an award, and i don’t think i won? but i can’t find out who did win so idk.

my grandpa passed away and i decided to sell my house and move in with my grandma so she wouldn’t be alone. i got rejected from both PhD programs i applied to and decided to get a “real job” instead, and began applying for random positions that offered health insurance, because i knew i was drastically undermedicated and it was becoming a Problem.

near the end of spring semester, i moved out of my house, put it on the market, and was interviewing for a community development manager position for a nonprofit. at the same time, i found out about another university that was taking late-season applications, and i applied. five days later, i got accepted. one day after that, i got a job offer for the nonprofit. since i had no idea how long it would take for my house to sell, and being unable to afford both rent in a new city and my mortgage payment, i deferred my PhD acceptance for a year and decided to work at the nonprofit for a while. the risk was that i could only defer my admission, not my funding, so there was a chance that the following year i wouldn’t get the same funding package.

i lasted one month at the “real job” before i had another breakdown and ended up quitting.

my house sold for well under the asking price and i received only $4000 in equity once it was all said and done. that’s a lot of money to me, but considering that i’d been paying on the house for 7 years, i was expecting a lot more.

i had a year to kill until the PhD so i decided to take a break from teaching and apply to artist residencies instead. i applied to 8 residencies and got accepted into 4, but only ended up attending 3, because the 4th was outrageously priced and there was no indication of the cost when i had applied.

in winter i picked up querying agents again. i queried 10 agents every other week. i also got a ghostwriting gig writing children’s books that paid $800 a month.

in 2019 i wrote 417k. i spent $441 in submission fees (to residencies and contests, not agent queries. never pay money to query an agent!!). i ended up teaching 3 classes fall semester.

2020, age 30

i started out the year driving across the country going to residencies. the first cost $100 (no food), the second cost $250 (A LOT OF VERY GOOD FOOD), and the third paid me $500. i was at the third when the pandemic hit.

the query rejections started rolling in. i gave up in february after 60 queries. of those 60, i received 7 manuscript requests for baby, but the consensus was that it was too long and plotless (you got me there.jpg). at the second residency completed and revised zucchini and decided to begin querying with that instead. i could only find a few agents who accepted collections so i only queried 16. i got one request for the manuscript but then didn’t hear back. i gave up in april shortly after the pandemic hit.

when i figured the collection, like the novel, just wasn’t publishable, i started submitting to contests which is the more standard route for the genre. i submitted to 12 in total and was a finalist in 1. i was rejected or withdrew from the rest.

the PhD program reached out to ask if i was still interested in starting in fall, and i said i was, so they put me in the running for funding again and i was accepted. the stipend was $17k per academic year.

like most of us, i got totally derailed in spring and stopped doing basically everything. the ghostwriting gig started paying $1500 a month and i also started my creative coaching business, which slowly but surely began to supplement my income. i also received the $1200 stimulus.

when school started, i quit the ghostwriting gig. i had no intention to continue querying either book, but i saw a twitter pitch event called DVpit (diverse voices) and decided to participate. for those who don’t know, a twitter pitch event is where you tweet the pitch for your book and use the hashtag, and agents scroll through the tag and like tweets. if an agent likes your tweet, you query them.

i got one like, so i followed up with the query. the agent asked for the full MS and a couple weeks later followed up with the offer for representation. we talked on the phone, she sent me the contract, i asked for a couple changes, and then signed!

so far this year i’ve written 375k and paid $518 in submission fees. i’ll give more details when i do my end of year roundup next month. oh, and i finally paid off my student loans.

totals

word count: 2.3 million

agent queries: 77

agent MS requests: 9

agent rejections: 28

agent no responses: 44

short story submissions: 86

short story acceptances: 3

short story income: $25

total submission/application fees: $1472

my (final) query letter

honestly this query letter probably isn’t very good which is why i got such a minimal response, but it got the job done eventually.

Thank you for expressing interest in ZUCCHINI through this year's DVpit event.

ZUCCHINI is a collection that views sex through an asexual lens. It poses inquiries into constructs like gender, sexuality, and love to dissect the patriarchal/puritanical foundations from which our social perspectives often derive. Being a collection about asexuality, each story portrays a relationship that develops from forms of attraction other than physical.

In one story, a grieving widow purchases her first sex toy; in another, a woman uses sex to cope with the death of her abusive father, and later in the collection faces the long road to recovery; an administrative assistant seeks out a codependent relationship with her boss; a masochist hires a professional sadist to lead him toward self-actualization; a woman begins to recover from her sexual assault by staging a reenactment on her own terms; and lastly, two lifelong friends in a queerplatonic relationship decide to get married. Asexuality is an under-acknowledged identity within the LGBTQIA community and is often misunderstood. In seven stories, ZUCCHINI dissects the notion of attraction, explores the intersections of sexual identity and trauma recovery, and conveys the experience of intimacy without physical desire.

Three stories in the collection have been published in literary magazines. “Lien” appeared in volume 24 of Quarter After Eight and was nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. “An Informed Purchase” appeared in the summer 2018 issue of Midwestern Gothic and won the Jordan-Goodman Prize in Fiction. “The Ashtray” appeared in issue 16 of Rivet Journal and has been nominated for a 2020 Pushcart Prize.

Complete at 53,000 words, ZUCCHINI is a collection in conversation with Carmen Maria Machado’s HER BODY AND OTHER PARTIES, Lauren Groff’s FLORIDA, and Samantha Hunt’s THE DARK DARK.

If ZUCCHINI is of interest to you, I would be happy to send you the manuscript. Per your guidelines, I've appended the first twenty pages below, which is the entirety of the first story.

what comes next

i’m going to spend january revising the collection per my agent’s feedback. when i send it back to her, she’ll shoot it out to the first round of publishers. my understanding is that the goal is to get multiple offers on it so that it has to go to auction. if there are no offers, she’ll do another round of submissions, and so on, until we’ve exhausted our options. if that happens, we’ll reassess, but by then hopefully i’ll have another novel finished.

meanwhile, i’ll be continuing the PhD which entails teaching a 2/2, workshop, and 2 lit seminars per semester. i’m also still doing my creative coaching, writing fanfic, and working on my original projects. in summer, i’ll finally be moving to hopefully start going to school in person next fall.

the PhD is a 3 year program with an optional fourth year. i don’t see myself finishing in 3 years so i do plan to take the extra year unless something comes up. after the PhD, i’m not sure what i’ll do. a lot will probably change by then so i’m trying not to commit to one idea. i might apply to post-doc fellowships and tenure track positions, or i might leave the country and teach overseas, or i might move to LA and try to get in a writer’s room somewhere. i’ve got a lot of options.

overall thoughts/stuff i learned

first of all, you don’t have to go through all of this to publish a book. you could feasibly just write a book and query agents. the only reason it took me this long is because my PTSD brain was sabotaging me every step of the way and i didn’t start taking anything seriously until i found something i was willing to fight for (teaching). i went the MFA/literary route but other, faster routes are just as good. maybe better. probably better. actually if there’s any chance you can go a different route, you should take it.

reflecting on all of this, very little of it has anything to do with talent or being a good writer. nor does it have to do with being at the right place at the right time. i’ve only made it this far because i took very small steps over and over again, and during that walk met people who could help me -- the authors who have mentored me, the editors who accepted my stories, the agent who signed me. and as i got further along my path, i started being able to help other writers in the way i was helped.

i don’t believe i’ll ever be a great writer. the best thing i can say about my writing is that it’s competent and accessible. everything i write sets out to do something and most of the time it gets the job done. i don’t imagine i’ll ever be able to financially support myself with publishing, and i’ll certainly never be famous or well-known, but i’m good enough to keep making progress. i’ll probably continue to find opportunities that are adjacent to writing and that will keep me afloat, pending my health and provided the country doesn’t devolve into civil war.

probably the most important thing i learned in all this is that having a wide appeal isn’t the goal. you don’t write to be lauded or liked. you have to stay as true to yourself and your interests as you possibly can, so that the people who come across your path can see you and help you. you’ll need those people; no one gets anywhere alone. if you pander, if you’re too concerned with praise and success or being adored, you won’t make it very far. the rejection will eventually kill you.

with all that said, my advice to you is this: never stop writing. the ability to share our stories is the single most precious thing we have. you can’t let anything stop you from telling your stories the way you need them to be told.

#writing advice #the writing life #writing update

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carriagelamp · 3 years

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April l was apparently the month for me to revisit some children’s authors who are steeped in controversy at the moment. So here’s my hot (well, lukewarm) takes on issues that absolutely do not need a single other person talking about them. Also some actual good books that I read this month!

Badger in the Basement

The Animal Ark books are a childhood classic — though I recently found out that apparently there’s a difference between American and British publications, and the American versions didn’t include a lot of actual COOL animals which is… bizarre. As a Canadian stuck in the middle of this, this nonsense drives me nuts. This one was about the main character, the daughter of pair of vets, trying to protect a local badger sett from men wanting to participate in badger digging and baiting. These books are always feel-good, and it was a nice single-day-read while I waited for a library book to come in.

Chi’s Sweet Home

The cutest manga series about the misadventures of a little kitten, Chi, who has been adopted by a loving family. I’ve never bothered to read them in order, but apparently this time I stumbled across the last in the series -- whoops! Still, stood on it’s own pretty easily, and it was a fun read! Things get tense when the family realize that they may have found Chi’s original home… and may have to give up Chi forever.

Earth Before Us: Dinosaur Empire!

This was an odd graphic novel, I feel like I’m not sure who the target audience was exactly. It was a nonfiction comic done in a Magic School Bus style, with the purpose of teaching current, up-to-date facts about the animals that lived in the Mesozoic Era. If you’re into dinosaurs, you’ll probably enjoy this! The art is absolutely adorable, I love the dinosaur illustrations, and I learnt some really neat facts. That being said, the pages are really dense, and there’s a lot of info crammed in… some of it will probably go way over a child’s head without specific additional teaching or a very strong personal interest. But that being said, a dinosaur obsessed kid is still probably going to really dig this… as would a dinosaur obsessed adult. It wasn’t my cup of tea exactly but I’m sure it is someone’s.

assorted Dr Seuss Books

I love these types of controversies because it means getting to listen to every moron who has never had an opinion on Dr Seuss ever start generating a mile of them out of the aether. So many people are so mad about the six books that are getting retired and I bet most of them haven’t even read them. These are not the friggin Cat In The Hat or The Lorax or even the likes of Yertle The Turtle. I was raised by a grade one teacher, was a voracious reader who loved Dr Seuss, and wrote my university thesis on children’s literature, and I still only knew two of the six books on that list. So by all means, if you want to write an essay explaining why those specific books are worth clinging to, feel free, but if you haven’t even heard of them maybe it’s not a big deal. *grumble*

Anyway, my grousing aside, it gave me the urge to reread a bunch of Seuss books, including the two retiring books I personally knew: McElligot’s Pool and To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street. I do still enjoy both, especially McElligot’s Pool which always sparked my imagination, but it’s obvious why they’re being retired and I personally think it’s the right choice. There’s so much good kidlit out there, we can survive without these.

Goodbye, My Rose Garden

A f/f romance manga, fairly standard fair though cute if you’re looking for some historical angst, pretty dresses, and mutual pining. A young Japanese woman moves to England in the hopes of meeting a writer (Mr Frank) who she has long admired. Along the way she is employed by an enigmatic woman with plenty of money, rumours, and melancholy following her. I’ll be honest, uncut romance isn’t really my genre, but I’ll probably still try to the second book to see if the story picks up.

From The Holocaust to Hogan’s Heroes: The Autobiography of Robert Clary

It’s no secret that I’ve been on a Hogan’s Heroes kick. This is the autobiography of Roberty Clary, who plays my favourite character in the show, Louis Lebeau. And holy shit what a life this man has had. He was a Jew growing up in France before the start of the war, and who was one of many children taken away from his family and sent off to the concentration camps in Germany. This was an amazing, intense, inspiring, and heartbreaking read… it has Clary’s voice all over it, and it tells everything from the charming childhood he had, to the horrors of the concentration camps, the brutality of survival, and then about his exciting journey into the entertainment industry afterwards. It’s an experience, would recommend if you’re a fan of the show.

The Ickabog

The second controversial author I read this month. Originally I was going to give Rowling’s new book a miss, given everything that’s been going on over the past few years, but in the end my curiosity got the better of me. Politics aside, it was a fun read! Not groundbreaking, but enjoyable enough and written in an interesting style. It didn’t read the same as a lot of modern kidlit, it felt more like a cross between a classic fairytale and a Dahl book. Perhaps a bit like Despereaux. It tells the tale of how an idyllic country gradually falls into ruin through the ignorance, inaction, and greed, and how a supposedly fictional monster hides the very real, human monsters at the heart of the country. It was cute and pleasant and I’m glad I decided to get it from the library, though for anyone who is choosing not to engage for political reasons: you aren’t missing anything major.

Franklin In The Dark

A Canadian classic. I don’t think there’s a single person my age who hasn’t read or been read a pile of these books, and the nostalgia is so comforting. I found this on Youtube and listened to someone read it to me, and honestly 10/10 would recommend for a calm evening.

The big reason I decided to seek this one out though, was because I finally got to the M*A*S*H episode that inspired this entire series! In the episode C*A*V*E, in which Hawkeye is freaking out over his claustrophia while the camp is forced to take shelter in a nearby cave during some intense shelling, he mentions that if he had been born a turtle he would have been afraid of his own shell, and that the other turtles would make fun of him cause he’d be forced to walk around in his underwear. And so this first story about a young turtle who’s afraid to sleep in his own shell and drags it around behind him. So if you were ever curious, Franklin the Turtle is in fact named after Dr Benjamin Franklin Pierce. (this is also why the French version is named Benjamin!)

Wolves of the Beyond: Lone Wolf

I loved the Guardians of Ga’Hoole books as a kid but I never read the Wolves of the Beyond series. This first book was an interesting read, Lasky does a great job creating worlds and societies for the animals that inhabit them. Lone Wolf is about a deformed wolf cub who was abandoned in the wilderness to die. And he would have, if a desperate mother bear, who had recently had her only cub killed, hadn’t stumbled across him and saved him, vowing to raise him as her own...

Petals

A “silent” graphic novel. It has beautiful artwork and is told entirely through pictures, no text at all. It’s loves and heart-wrenching, though it left me feeling somewhat unsatisfied… I felt like there should have been more. Still, a neat story.

The Southern Book Club‘s Guide To Slaying Vampires

What a banger of a novel!! I can’t recommend this one enough. It’s about a group of suburban mothers in the ‘80s who form a book club out of a shared need for community and a love of grisly true crime novels. But when a strange drifter appears in town and starts setting down roots… and when children begin disappearing… these women need to band together to confront the horrors that have invaded their neighbourhood, and face down not only a terrifying monster among them but the patriarchal system that allows it to flourish. To quote the preface:

“Because vampires are the original serial killers, stripped of everything that makes us human — they have no friends, no family, no roots, no children. All they have is hunger. They eat and eat but they’re never full. With this book, I wanted to pit a man freed from all responsibilities but his appetites against women whose lives are shaped by their endless responsibilities. I wanted to pit Dracula against my mom. As you’ll see, it’s not a fair fight.“

The Weirn Books: Be Wary of the Silent Woods

I love Chmakova’s graphic novels, though I’ve only ever read her slice-of-life middle grade series before. This one is pure fantasy and very fun. It’s about two cousin “weirns” — witches with demon familiars — who attend the local night school. Things get strange though when an ominous figure appears outside the old, abandoned school house deep in the Silent Woods, and begins tempting children down its path…

I’m very much looking forward to word of a second book and was honestly kind of surprised that I haven’t heard more about this book given how popular her other series is. This has all the same charm and quirks but for those of us who prefer stories based in fantasy rather than reality.

And A Bonus...

For some masochistic reason I got a Garfield book out of the library. Jeez, if I didn’t love these as a kid, I found them absolutely laugh out loud hilarious, and now I just don’t see it anymore. But here I will share the one strip in the book that actually made me laugh

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kinsey3furry300 · 3 years

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A very confused Star Wars Fan desperately tries to justify their belief that “Caravan of Courage” shows the way forward for the franchise. No, really.

Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve loved Star Wars. And I mean, all of it. The books, the games, the Lego, the spin-offs: I even enjoy the Holiday Special in a The Room so-bad-you-just-need-to-see-it sort of way. But particularly the films. But here is when we run into the big problem: I’m just the wrong age. The original trilogy launched before I was born, the prequel trilogy hit cinemas when I was already a teen and while I went and saw them and enjoyed them, I was at that age where I was self-conscious about seeing a “kids” film, and hyper-aware of how silly and cringy those films were in parts. So my indoctrination, my inoculation with the Star Wars bug didn’t happen in the cinema, and it didn’t happen with any of the main franchise works. It happened on home video, on a skiing trip in the French Alps in the early 90’s. I’d have been about 6, and this was the first time I’d ever been abroad other than to see relatives in Ireland. And I loved it: to this day I love skiing, but more than that, I have very, very fond childhood memories of this trip. This was shortly before I lost my biological mother to cancer, she’d have received her diagnosis just after we got back from the trip. This was when my younger sister stopped being an annoying screaming thing and became and became an actual person I could talk and play and share ideas with, this was before the combination my mothers long illness and my father having just launched his own IT start up meant I didn’t see him or her any more, despite the fact they were in the same house as me. This was this wonderful, nostalgic child-hood bubble when my family was intact, and nothing could ever go wrong. I skied all day with mum and dad, and would come back to the chalet in the evening. It was an English speaking chalet, I met my first real-life American there, and having grown up in the 90’s in the UK nothing was cooler than making friends with an actual American my own age. He had a hulk Hogan action figure with springs in the legs so if you put him on a hard surface and punched his head down, when you let go he’d jump really high in the air. We used to play with it together in the bath, back in that weird 90’s time-bubble when it was possible to convince two sets of parents that this kid you’d just met was you best friend in the world and of course shared bath time was, somehow, normal and appropriate. And fresh from bath time, tired from the day, the parents would give us some hot coco, dump us kids in front of the tv and grab the first shitty low-budget VHS they could find to keep us distracted while they went to the bar. In this particular time, in this particular place, that shitty low budget cartoon was the complete set of the 1985 Lucasfilm/ABC Ewoks cartoon, plus the two spin off movies, and to this day that cheap, kitschy, kind of bad series has a special warm and cosy place in my heart. I remember being enthralled by the world, in love with the characters, applied by the bad guys and the injustice they caused (to this day I’m still irate about that time Wicket lost his set of beads documenting his progress towards becoming a full warrior and the older Ewoks basically said, tough, you need to re-earn all those merit badges from scratch. This struck me as exactly the sort of bullshit an adult would pull, and pissed me off) and on tenterhooks about what would happen to the characters.

It was also, by a coincidence, the first ever Star Wars media I was exposed to, and the above combination of events probably explains a lot about me.

So I was surprised, the other day, when scrolling Disney+, to find they’d added Caravan of Courage AND Battle for Endor to the roster in my region. Surely Disney wouldn’t want their slick, cool brand associated with this old trash? Surely there could be no place for this in the post-Mandalorian Star Wars cannon? Surely this is a horrible mistake some intern made, right?

Unless…. What if I’ve miss-remembered? What if it’s not just rose-tinted nostalgia goggles, and it’s, in fact, secretly really, really good?

I rushed to my comfy chair, got a blanket, dimmed the lights, made some coco (with rum in it, because why the hell not?) and sat down to re-examine this lost gem.

And wow: it’s every bit as shit as you’d expect.

It has aged exactly as poorly as you’d expect a cheap, mid 80’s direct to video spin-off to age. Caravan of Courage? More like Caravan of Garbage, am I right?

And yet… I still enjoyed every moment.

And it was sitting there, in my pyjamas, watching a cheaply made direct to video cash-grab from just before I was born, seeing it again for the first time in nearly 30 years, and I realised something.

It doesn’t really matter if this film is bad, so long as I enjoy it. And if it doesn’t really mater if this is bad, then I, like many Star Wars fans, wasted a huge amount of time and emotional effort on being butthurt about stuff I didn’t like about the Rise of Skywalker and it’s ilk. Because somewhere, right now, a tired and frustrated parent is putting Disney+ on to keep their kids quiet for two hours. And they won’t think too hard about what they put on, so long as it keeps little Timmy busy for a bit. Somewhere, right now, a kid is watching Rise of Skywalker, and it’s the first Star Wars media they’ve ever seen.

And that’s okay. Because we don’t know what that kids home life is like. We don’t know if it’s good or bad. Maybe it’s great, maybe it’s about to take a dramatic plunge like mine did, and this moment here will be the cosy, warm memory they look back on in 30 years time, and that’s beautiful. They’re getting introduced to a fun, wonderful fantasy world that could be with them all their lives, through good times and bad, and as fans we should be happy about that.

Star Wars will never, die: it’s too darn profitable, Disney will never let it. And while I hope they learn from their mistakes and make sure every future Star Wars is a timeless gem of story-telling, statistically, if you keep making enough films, some of them will be bad. And while I’d like them all to be great, it’s still okay if they’re bad.

Because nothing can take away my memories of that week in that chalet. Nothing can take-away my memories of when they put the original trilogy on in cinemas for the special edition and I had my jaw hit the floor with how good it was on the big screen, not knowing or caring who shot first. Nothing can take away you memories of the Original Trilogy, the Prequels, or the Clone Wars. Nothing can tarnish the bits of the sequil trilogy that you like, and there are good bits in there.

But wait, what about continuity? What about the sacred, perfect written time-line that used to exist?

Well, what about it? Have you seen any other big, epic fantasy universe before? They’re all a mess. A work of fiction, particularly fantasy, can be extensive, or tightly written, but not both. Harry Potter is only seven books, and the last two feel, tonally, like they’re from an entirely different series. I love them, but the grim-dark kicked in so fast you’ll get whiplash. The Hobbit is a perfect written self-contained novel, and LOTR is *The* big boy high-fantasy trilogy: fast forward 50 years, and Christopher Tolkien is desperately squeezing every last drop of money out of his father’s corpse by finishing and publishing every unfinished note JRR ever wrote right down to his shopping lists. Even Dune goes of the rails with sequels. I can only think of four fantasy works that are both extensive and consistently tightly written, Song of Ice and Fire, Wheel of Time, Malazan: Book of the Fallen and Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere universe. And even then, the prequels and spin-offs mess with the timelines: the Dunk and Egg novella’s change some character’s canonical ages and timelines, Wheel of Time was going slowly off the rails even before the Jordan died, Forge of Darkness made what was a good metaphor for the creation of it’s world into a literal war deep in the past, and Sanderson’s first Novel Elantris got a re-write to bring it more in line with the rest of the shared universe. The MCU, oft held up as the modern example of tightly planned, well thought out ongoing storytelling, is a lie: it was never as pre-planned out as Disney wants us to think; the first Iron Man, apparently, barely had a script, with Downey ad-lib-ing most of his scenes. None of the MCU films are direct sequels to each-other other than Infinity war and Endgame. There are three Iron Man films, and Three Thor films, and none continue an ongoing story line across multiple films, and the Cap films barely continue an arc, but only where Cap’s relationship with Natasha and Bucky is involved. Much like these, Star War’s cannon is a complete, nightmarish, confusing, tangled, illogical mess. And it has been since 1984, as Caravan of Courage proves. It was never consistent and well planned.

And that’s okay.

I used to care about plot holes. I used to care about which works were cannon in Star Wars lore. I’m over that now. I’m happy to imagine the books, films and games not as a blow-by-blow historical account of a galaxy far far away, but as campfire stories from within this fun, imaginative world that we’re all invited to listen to. Stories that are in-universe myth and folklore, that we can all snuggle up and listen to while drinking highly alcoholic rum and remembering better times, knowing that wherever the future throws at us, no matter how the world goes to hell around us, we’ll still have the memories, and the ability to make our own new stories in the wonderful Star Wars world we all share.

And that’s okay. No, more than that: that’s beautiful.

Also Star Wars is completely unambiguous on the fact we’re allowed to kill fascists no matter how many times they keep coming back with a new logo, so that’s timely I guess.

So, there’s my hot take two-years after everyone else stopped caring about this stuff, as per bloody usual. Tell me why I’m wrong below, and does anyone else have any truly awful spin-off shows that they kind of have a nostalgic soft spot for?

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afriendlyblackhottie · 4 years

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Ransom Drysdale Must Die (Chapter One)

Summary: Ransom Drysdale is a serial cheater. The only way to get him to pay for what he’s done is for him to die. Or at least be extremely humiliated. As long as you don’t fall for him.

Pairings: Eventual Ransom Drysdale x black!reader, Ransom Drysdale x Multiple OC’s

Warnings: Swearing. Eventual smut.

(Author’s Note: I was watching John Tucker must die and it made me think of my favorite sweater wearing murder daddy.)

Tags: @night-of-the-living-shred

Word Count: 2.0k

It's not that you were invisible. You preferred to think of it as keeping a low profile. Growing up, you didn't really have a choice but to keep things to yourself. What was the point of trusting people if all you were going to do was leave? You couldn't make friends or keep them if you'd be moving in another four to six months anyway. Not that it was your choice.

It started at a really young age. Technically before you were even born. Your mom had been a teen parent. Your dad didn't stick around which was all you knew about him. It didn't take long for you to get used to the myriad of men walking in and out of your life. Then you got used to seeing your mom, your only constant, getting treated like garbage over and over and over.

She never had an issue with dating. It was them sticking around that was apparently tricky. The problem is that when it would happen the same thing always happened. She'd binge on chocolate. Use you as a shoulder to cry on. Then you'd be moving to flee into the next city. It was kind of fucked up.

While she cried over the hundredth guy your nose was either buried in a book or painting which had been your only escape. You never wanted to judge your mom. She didn't deserve to always have her heartbroken. But, you also didn't deserve having a mom that wanted to pack up at the first sign of trouble. She didn't seem to get that.

As an adult, you promised yourself that you would find one place and stick to it. It might have hurt your mom a little to watch you go, but she understood that you had to go away for college and stuff. Which is how you ended up in Boston. You kind of remember living in Boston once back in the day. You liked the winters surprisingly and the way the trees looked in the fall. You remembered being happy which is why it sucked so much to leave.

You’d gotten your degree, but finding a job had been difficult. Which is how you ended up working at this country club. Though you could live without all the snobby rich people being total assholes, at least they tipped well. You mostly waitress in the clubhouse where it was usually the older crowd and the families that sucked up to them for the inheritance.

It was also how you first noticed him. Hugh Ransom Drysdale. From the moment you laid eyes on him you could tell he was dangerous. Just like those men, your mother would fall for that would inevitably break her heart. That same air of arrogance hanging over him like a cloud, except much better looking with a trust fund to go along with it.

He insisted everyone in the clubhouse call him Hugh. Which according to everyone is what he insists the help call him. God, he's a fucking asshole.

You remember the first time you talked to him. He was so enchanting. It was annoying. He was like Gaston come to life. Just as handsome, just as charming, just as scummy. Sure he made those white polos he wore to play golf look like he'd just stepped off a shoot for GQ. His gaze was enough to make any woman swoon. Even you as much as you hated to admit it.

It'd been one of the few times you'd worked at the bar. Someone had called out and being the new girl you were told to take their spot. "Sweetheart, be useful and get me a bourbon," he'd said in this rude tone.

"Not even a please?" You muttered under your breath as you turned your back to get a glass.

"What was that?" He asked, with a quirk in his eyebrow.

You kissed your teeth before turning back to him, "Excuse me?" You plastered a sweet smile on your face.

"You got something to say? Say it." He challenged.

You shook your head. "I didn't... I didn't say anything."

He chuckled. "Okay, lo-"

Your jaw dropped as you put your hand on your chest. "Oh my god, Sir, if you're already drunk I can't serve you. You'd be a liability."

"That's a big word. Did they teach you that in community college?" The glare in his eye was intense and you couldn't help it as a smile spread across your face.

"Actually I think I learned it from where you get your trust fund."

You were surprised when he laughed. But, not that little sarcastic chuckle. Like an actual laugh. "Usually I'd call the manager over and enjoy them firing you in front of me, but lucky for you I'm in a good mood and kind of enjoying this. Now get me my bourbon."

"One bourbon coming up." You shrugged.

You talked with him for the rest of your shift surprisingly. The conversation going from hostile to surprisingly pleasant. He’d told you about some issue he’d been having with his grandfather that he hadn’t told the rest of his family he laughed at the idea of them finding out. Said he couldn’t wait to see the look on their faces when they found out everything was going to the nurse.

It was the trashy rich people drama that you craved.

“I know there’s gonna be a lot of bullshit when they find out they aren’t getting that house,” he’d scoffed, looking up at you from his drink.

“I’d be pissed too,” you replied. “I’m sure that house looks like a museum. I’d love to see it.”

“It’s insane.” He nodded. “Imagine like a horror museum with one of those escape rooms.”

You laughed. “So like plastic spiders? Cobwebs? Ghosts!” What a turn around this had been from the initial conversation the two of you were having.

“Not at all,” he said laughing. “It’s more like everything he’s ever thought for his novels, he just adds to his home. Like he needs the visualization. He has a secret window and a chair with knives. It’s insane.”

“That actually sounds pretty cool. Your grandpa sounds like a pretty cool guy, you must admire him a lot.”

“I mean... yeah, but I’d never tell him that.”

“Why not?” You asked with a chuckle.

“It’s complicated,” he answered, before bringing his glass up to his lips. “Like, I love him, but....”

“No. I get it.” Of course, you did. Your mom was a complicated figure in your life, but you could never not love her.

“I’ve done a lot of shit.” He shrugged. “So, I think it’s mutual.”

“At least his house sounds interesting. Like a work of art. I’m kind of a sucker for art.”

“Do you paint? Draw? Doodle on an iPad.” The way he smiled up at you, you would have never guessed that he was the giant asshole everyone made him out to be. There was this softness there even if it was hiding under his arrogant exterior.

You chuckled. “I paint. Though I do partake in the doodling on iPads.”

“I’d love to see your work sometime,” he said. “Do you sell?”

“I haven’t,” you replied. “But, I’m open to it. I guess. I’d show you now, but I’m not allowed to have my phone on the floor.”

“Oh so I’m not worth risking being fired for, I get it,” he joked, shaking his head as if he was offended.

You laughed, tilting your head back. “I know right. I’m already risking it by even talking to you. Harrington is so strict.”

There was this squint on his face as he kind of looked you up and down. It felt like he was studying you and it made you feel like you were under a microscope. “You’ve got a cute laugh you know that?”

No. Don’t give in. You had to tell yourself. You didn’t want to get involved with anyone you’d have to workaround. Besides, it was Ransom Drysdale. You’d just seen him with a woman yesterday. “Thank you,” you brushed him off. “Can I get you another drink?”

He sighed, checking the time on his phone. “As much as I’d love to stay and chat. I have to get going. Maybe I’ll stop by soon so we can talk again. Maybe show me some of your work?”

“Sure.”

He’d left you a forty dollar tip. You were not expecting that.

You’d left work that night feeling pretty good. Not that you were expecting him to fall in love with you or anything. Or for anything to happen at all. It was just a nice encounter with the guy everyone was obsessed with here. Besides you promised yourself you’d never, ever fall into the same trap as Mom had.

It’s not that you didn’t date. You were picky, though. The few relationships you’d had were okay, but you didn’t want to get hurt so you never wanted to get in too deeply.

Then the next day you had come to work, he’d walked in with Marissa on his arm. That stopped any and all thoughts you may have had. It was during that lull between when they'd stopped serving breakfast and brought out the lunch menus. You weren’t surprised that a man like Hugh Ransom Drysdale would be dating a woman like Marissa Clermont. She was exactly the type of woman men like him go for. You know a model IT girl type of deal.

It wasn’t just because he’d been dating Marissa. Of course not. It was because the day before you he’d just come in with Amber Taylor. The daughter of a retired Boston Celtics player. Also, a beautiful woman (also a model you think) who clearly didn’t know her boyfriend was two-timing her.

“Fascinating isn’t it?” Your co-worker, Britt, interrupted your thoughts as she’d come back from taking their drink order. Her arms were crossed as she tried to not make it too obvious that was she looking over at them. “He comes in here with different women and none of them have any idea.”

You frowned as you saw him whispering in her ear, making her giggle, probably telling her the same thing he told Amber just yesterday. “Yeah, I see that,” you replied. “How does he get away with it?”

“Ladies! Back to work!” Harrington, your manager, barked towards the both of you which made the both of you scurry off before she even had the chance to answer. You didn’t even get to talk to her because her shift was over soon then you were off the next day. You weren’t even sure why you cared so much.

When you got back to work it was during that lull time. Ransom was there of course with a different woman. Chloe Daniels. A blonde that had been the sole heir to her husband’s entire fortune no matter how much his ex wife or adult children tried to fight it. You were happy you got to witness the drama for that.

“He messes around with girls that don’t talk to each other,” Britt was finally able to explain. “So, they never find out. At least, that’s what the story around here is.”

“Wow he has a whole system worked out...” you crinkle your nose. Ugh what a fucking pig. Just like your mother and those douchebags she dated.

“I mean, I kind of get it,” Britt said. “He’s hot. I might put up with being treated like trash for that much. Hell, I’ve put up being treated like trash for much less.”

You held in the laugh you wanted to let out as you could see Harrington lurking around, waiting to say something to the two of you. He never missed his chance to give out orders.

For as long as the couple sat through you couldn’t stop staring. Britt was right. It was fascinating.

#ransom drysdale #ransom thrombey x you #ransom x y/n #ransom drysdale x reader #ransom drysdale x black!reader #ransom drysdale x poc!reader #chris evans #chris evans x reader #chris evans x poc!reader #chris evans x black!reader

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bandomslayed · 3 years

Note

I’m not saying you should focus more on racism, I’m just saying that that’s something that the community as a whole needs to focus on and try to repair, I’m sure they all already know that people don’t like their ships. If that’s an issue, then groups can have a strict age limit. Easy solve. The other things are things that can be taught and learned but with hostility all that’s going to happen is a deeper divide. You said you wanted to argue with people about the things you don’t like that they do in this community. I’m paraphrasing, but why not instead want to educate them. No one will ever react well to feeling like they’re being ridiculed or patronized. People worth spending your time on are the ones you can talk to without it being a shitshow. We’re having a dialogue. I’ve felt this entire time like everything I say, someone is going to search for one thing to deliberately misinterpret or magnify unnecessarily when, if there’s something that they have an issue with, it could be a perfect opportunity to educate me instead of people being hostile. I’m college educated and can think critically, I’m moderately well spoken, I’m open to instructive criticisms and discussing things that aren’t agreed upon so I’m just sort of confused by the fact that what I’m saying is being picked apart by other anons and to a degree, you. You all want to change my mind about age gaps, despite me being with someone older irl and feeling safe and genuinely valued for the first time in a relationship in my life so why do you think that calling my dead grandpa names, redirecting the conversation and then kinda mocking me when I attempt to understand wholly and agree with some of the things you’re saying? That’s not going to convince me or anyone else. It just makes people feel defensive. Reiterating here that I’m not saying YOU specifically need to talk about racism more, and I’m not trying to diminish your experience or anything like that In just saying that those topics (discrimination of any kind, abuse of any kind) in the community are things we should be discussing instead of ships we think aren’t comfortable. I feel uncomfortable with relationships in real life and in rp all the time but that isn’t up to me to say it’s wrong or bad. It’s no ones right to tell any two consenting adults that what they’re doing is wrong. But it is a human right to tell someone when they’re being insensitive, and that’s a flaw in the community that people can be educated on and learn to handle with more sensitivity and knowledge but we’re never going to reach that point if we’re all just hostile and cruel to one another. Also reiterating that I’m not using personal examples to get cred, I just like examples because I think using them shows where I’m coming from so that any person who wants to have a dialogue can have a frame of reference for why my opinions are what they are on any topic. If I’m wrong, or insensitive, or just kinda dumb I want to know that but simply telling me I’m wrong or insensitive or dumb doesn’t teach me how not to me. And this doesn’t just mean me, I mean the whole community. It will never improve if we all just talk about the things we don’t like and give no feasible solutions.

alright i see what you want so let me switch to my white pleaser voice and deliver since you're so keen on being patronizing and in the same breath, acting like me taking what you say "the wrong way" is the problem. in bullet points so next time u come back to keep going at it u can pinpoint exactly what it is i misconstrued because u will do it anyway.

you're asking the community as a whole to care more about racism but you're talking to me who's leading the conversation in the first place. i understand you didn't imply i specifically should care more about it, but you're still using racism to discredit my point of view on age gap relationships being an important topic to discuss as well, and watering it down to just me not liking people's plots when that is not the message.

nobody is telling anyone how to live their lives. im bringing awareness to the fact that this culture is not okay. it's dangerous to our young. it NEEDS to be uncomfortable to you (you, plural) to invite to this so called critical thinking.

im not saying your partner doesn't have a right to be loving or grandpa and grandma had abuse masked as a good relationship. im saying, since it needs to be spelled out with no room for misinterpretation; the culture behind someone 10+ years older finding it completely okay to pursue someone that much younger — especially when we're talking 18 - 30 age range — needs to be looked at more closely. it's not safe in general. do exceptions exist? absolutely, but the whole two consenting adults point is a terrible one to make when at 18, you're considered that when you're still essentially just a child.

a strict age limit, which most groups adopt now, does little to actually prevent age gap relationships within roleplays. moreso, uneven power dynamics within plots being glamorized. my boss is not over 5 years older than me, but he is my boss. kpop boybands don't have age gaps of 10+ years in groups, usually, but there is a leader most times acting like a father figure, not to mention korean culture is heavy on emphasizing age-related hierarchical order, so a literal still wet behind the ears child establishing a romantic connection with someone who is not their equal? dangerous.

now let's halt. i already told you, i don't give a shit about respectability politics. it is not my job to be nice and educate anyone. and i don't mean just on this blog... most of you whites have come to assume and expect, even, that poc will be subservient, docile, and always willing to switch and nicely explain to you why the very core of the way you think about the world because you grew up sheltered w/e is not the whole picture for everyone. the worst part? most of them do. most of them do put their thinking caps on and write these novel worthy, intelligent, respectful, calculated think pieces only for the white in question to turn around and still deem it aggressive, etc. i don't do that. that is labor that most of you do not deserve.

the implication that there are feasible solutions for these problems that don't require for people to literally rework their entire mindset is naive at best. what am i supposed to do? be like nooo don't be racist, racism is bad BECAUSE it hurts people. i think all of you are old enough to know that by now. you definitely have enough internet exposure to know that, even if you grew up in all white sundown town america.

i explain my points. i actually explain my points more than the average person, yet here we are still saying im not doing enough to educate those around me as if it was my responsibility to change the way people think with sugar spice and everything nice so they feel their hand is held and it's safe to make a mistake that will consequently hurt other people as many times as they need to make it to finally grasp the reality of it and be able to just... not do that in the future. when no. no. when you hurt me, im allowed to react emotionally, not intellectually. when im angry and upset and still explaining why, its YOUR job to swallow it down and listen to what im saying, because YOU hurt me. i don't owe you civility (again; you, plural). i especially don't owe you civility when ive given you nothing but in the past and the end result is still me being an aggro freak who doesn't care for your precious feelings.

you're also assuming things. for example, assuming that im mocking you specifically when i really have not done that. if im going to mock you, im going to reply to your anon and say "okay stupid", then yeah, im mocking you. otherwise? don't assume im directing anything at you.

we're having a dialogue and this whole time all you've done is tell me to stop talking. your messages have all, in essence, said, if people want to date other people who have a shitton of years on them, that is not a problem and you look prettier talking about something else. yes, that's also paraphrased. you didn't say that, of course, but why are we still here if not because you feel personally scrutinized over the reaction to the life examples that you willingly provided?

nobody is trying to change YOUR mind, you're just not willing to consider that your age gap relationships that have been beautiful and loving and safe coexist within a culture that is wicked. a person who's 10+ older than me, 24, has no business seeing me as a potential partner. it's not appropriate. yet if they do, and i also see them as a potential partner, there's nothing inherently evil about that specific instance. it is the circumstances (past), that lead to this kind of thinking in the first place what im asking everyone to analize and understand. and it does matter. it matters as much as racism, abuse, ooc mistreatment of rp partners. again, issues do not queue and wait for something to end so they can begin anew. every conversation i choose to have i consider worth having. you're free to stay out if you don't deem it important.

you're exhausting me thinking by turning my inbox into ap debate we're achieving grand things sooo hope this helps 🖤

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shadowess · 3 years

Text

It’s Alright It’s Ok

I jump out of my bones as my father's angry yell erupts from the house like a slamming door. Instantly my heart feels the frost of fear glaze over the surface of my beating organ. Swallowing thickly I get off my bed and hide my computer under my bedsheets, closing it's lid to hide it's light. Silently slipping out of my bedroom I move into the hallway and walk past the laundry basket, heading into the kitchen where my parents argue, the tension that has been building for two weeks finally bursting open like a damn. I would give it a day, maybe two, before their bedroom door be locked while my father hurt my mother. Then it would take either myself or my sister bursting into tears to get them to stop fighting for another few months. Swallowing thickly, I kept my eyes down as I moved into the battle zone, Shadow, my cat, rubbed around my legs, demanding biscuits. He didn't care about the chaos, he was probably use to it by now. Opening the cabinet under the sink I got his food out as my father and mother screamed at each other.

"Shut up Carol!" The man yelled, his eyes bulging and veins pulsing in his neck. He was in my mother's face, screaming at her. The woman who had for ages from my childhood had mostly cried and screamed at this man to get off her, had began to fight back. She did that often. It only increased the fighting.

"You Shut Up!" She screamed back. I patted Shadow's back as he ate. He was a big black cat. Strong and in his youth. Going to the fridge I took a certain of milk and poured myself a glass, downing it quickly. The sound of the tv came from the lounge room. Going into the room I looked at my little sister who was watching one of my favorite cartoons. Kid vs Kat. Managing a smile, I took my place beside her. I always rooted for the cat. I don't know why, perhaps I just loved cats. Plus I could relate the mischievous chaoticness of the character. Or at least that's how I wanted to be. My mother's form entered the room just as the boy and the alien cat jumped into a cloud of dust meant to depict fighting.

"Ingrid, have you done your homework?" I sighed; couldn't she see I was trying to watch something?

"Yeah." I lied. I should have said I didn't have homework.

"Ok, well, let me have a look?" Although I appreciated my mother's involvement in school, as anyone who was anyone knew that my autistic brain couldn't understand anything the teachers gave me on paper. I also wished she wasn't as involved. I just wanted some space. I was sick of homework.

Begrudgingly I got up and went to my room, dragging my books out of my school bag and dumping them on the desk. I went and got a slice of left over pizza from the fridge and poured myself a cup of coke to try and calm my racing heart.

"Ingrid you have homework. Why did you lie?" I rolled my eyes, why did she think? I wished I had headphones like all the other kids at school. I just wanted to shut her out as she started to lecture me. Casting a blank wall around my brain I sat down at the table and started on the maths homework. My worst subject. Contrary to popular belief depicted in movies, not all autistic people are good at maths. I myself am a better at English than this. I had finished a six inch novel in a week. And I was the best story writer in class. But this doesn't matter much to the adults.

After being left alone to my own devices, I sat and stared at the first math question for about ten minutes before attempting to answer it. I know I am highly likely getting the answer wrong, but I just want to finish this and escape to my room. I wanna do this without my parents coming to help. Before I know it, it's seven in the evening. I've by now attracted the attention of my father who started by trying to help, has now ended up yelling after I have proved once again useless at math.

"Are you stupid!" he screamed at me as I sat with unwavering tenseness, staring at the page and refusing to move my gaze from the sheet. My chest was shaking. There was no other way to describe it. Outwards, I was calm. But inside my chest shook like a autumn leaf. I could feel everything building up inside me. I tried to level myself. Don't cry. Don't cry. Don't start crying. I repeated in my head.

"For God's Sake Ingrid! This is easy stuff! A Year 1 could do this!" He hollered and slapped my arm with a ruler. I didn't so much as flinch. I didn't want to give him that satisfaction.

"Do you even go to school!!??" I felt the first hiccup as I clenched my eyes shut and my sobs burst from my chest.

"Oh, great. Now your gonna cry." He muttered seethingly as though my melt down was a inconvenience. Mother was already serving out dinner wordlessly. This was a regular occurrence in our house. Homework that should only take five minutes, took three hours. Trying desperately to numb myself I packed up my homework to continue with tomorrow and wiped my eyes on my sleeve, trying to stop crying so I could eat dinner.

It's four in the morning when I sneak out of the house, dressed in my black hoody and trousers and my school bag on my shoulders as I lock the door behind me, take a breath, and take off running down the street. My runners pound on the side walk as I breath in the cold air of the early spring chill. I need this. Cold air, freshness, darkness just before the sun rises. Cars that pass through the street don't bother with the site of a teen girl running through the streetlights as though she were being chased. Even when my legs ache and I feel like my lungs are about to burst I don't stop. The sun's rays are barely kissing the trees by the time I reach the cultural center of my town. My throat crack a bit as a I swallow, having been dried out from my panting breaths. Rubbing sweat off my forehead I straighten up and stare at the sky. For a moment I want to disappear into the purple abyss above me. That'd be nice. Perhaps it'd be like in my stories. Just.... A life worth living perhaps. That'd be nice.

"Language!!" comes a shrieking yell from across the street. Snapping back to reality I look over to the collection of shops opening for the morning. I smile, feeling a familiar sense of warmness fill my numbed core as Bad is laughed at by his best friend, Skeppy, as the demon boy opens the shop door, peering at me with friendly white eyes. "Marr?" he calls. My smile softens as he uses my preferred name. I approach, shoving my hands into my pockets as a show of nonchalance. "Hey Bad." I raise a brow with amusement. Though he isn't fooled. He never is. I find myself pulled into a hug before I can even protest. Closing my eyes I hug him back, savoring the physical contact. That is until there is a photo snap and the blue haired boy snaps a picture. I frown and pull away.

"Skeppy! Delete that right now." I grumble, folding my arms with a frown.

"Nah. I think I'll add a few heart emojis." He teases as I fluster and puff up my cheeks. The demon beside me frowns, though his smile shows, he can never be mad at his friend. Rolling his white orbs he looks down at me gently.

"Breakfast. On the house." Bad and Skeppy were the only people I trusted. They didn't ask questions. Or offer to call anyone. They just let me hang out with them before work hours if I didn't want to be at home.

Nodding my head, I entered the café and sat down in a booth. Bad squeezed my shoulder and started the coffee brewer as Skeppy set up the tables and chairs for the day. Folding my arms to keep my fingers warm after I had pulled some of my hair out of my hood, I looked up slightly. Trying to think of a good way to start conversation.

"Did you guys sleep ok?" is it alright to ask that to people you don't live with?

Our words went back and forth in friendly small talk. Occasionally Skeppy would swear and get playfully told off by his friend. I would just laugh. Everyone in life is super serious. So it feels nice sometimes to just be around two goofs. I was given an expresso and hot pie. I savored the warm gravy taste, I wasn't even stressed but it was hard to not scoff it. A few people were starting to come in now. People on their way to work, stopping for a coffee and picking up take away. I wondered if it was nice. Living in a steady sense of movement. Where everything was the same and you knew what to do. Instead of struggling to hold together a toothpick structure simply cause nothing makes sense. I've missed opportunities for jobs simply because they've been offered while I was in the middle of a shut down. Same goes for friendships, or dates with boys, because I will just stare at them with a dumb panicked expression for a good five minutes while I try and figure out how to respond. In the end I am mistook for either rude or stupid. I am neither—Well ok I can be rude sometimes. But I'm definitely not stupid.

Feeling my anxiety levels raise I scull the rest of my coffee. Bad's tail stands on end in alarm as steam comes out of my mouth. "Careful you Muffinhead! You'll burn your tongue!" I shrugged with a smirking grin. "Hey look. I'm a dragon." I blow more steam out of my mouth. Skeppy busts up laughing from the kitchen as the demon sighs, rolling his eyes he ruffles my head. "Muffinhead." He mutters with a smirk. I hold up the cup. "Re-fill?" my hoody sleeve falls down slightly and the movement. Bad's smile slips and his eyes widen. "Holy shit what happened to your arm?" Skeppy chokes on a cackle. "Bad!?" finding it hysterical that the normally passive demon actually swore. I blinked and checked over my arm briefly, ah. Right. Pulling my sleeve down to cover the red marks from the ruler I shrugged. "Nothing. I'm fine." The demon stares for a moment before sighing in defeat. "At least let me get you some ice." Seeing the opportunity, I snicker, "But it's freezing!" Bad rolls his eyes, "For your arm, you Muffinhead." I poked out my tongue playfully.

With a cloth full of ice resting on my arm and a fresh cup of steaming coffee in front of me, I watch the pair work. Skeppy's diamonds are starting to sprout out of his arm. I do wonder how that doesn't hurt. But I'm just glad I'm not that kind of hybrid. Not that I'm any kind of hybrid. Considering how much the world changed after the Rifting, it's surprising that I'm not physically different as I am mentally. Even my sister is a Hybrid, despite my parents being human. She's a dog, by the fur coloring I'd say she's a kelpie. A car pulls up in the parking lot. It looks old, but the good kind of old. Kind of vintage, but not fancy. Just old. Through the windscreen three boys fight and seem to be bickering amongst each other. A tired looking man gets out. I recognize him. That's Philza, he shows up at school every now and then whenever Techno gets into a fight, or Tommy's pranks go horribly wrong, or Wilbur sasses out the teacher one to many times. He's a hybrid, either that or an angel. It's hard to tell. But he enters the coffee shop and walks to the counter. Huge black wings folded against his back.

"Bad, morning." He greet cheerfully and tips his weird stripped hat he always wears. I never liked that hat. It made me dizzy. He reads out a bunch of orders from a piece of paper, something about one flat-white, a mocha, a caramel latte, and a decaf frappe for Tommy. Bad nods his head and asks Skeppy to handle the order. I frown and tilt my head a bit. The strangely serious demon comes out from behind the counter and takes Philza by the arm, talking softly with him. I blink in surprise when they both look subtly towards me. I look down at the welt on my arm, pulling down the sleeve I bring my hand to my mouth and start to chew on my thumb knuckle. It seems I have over estimated the level of trust I should have given Bad. Rocking back and forth a bit I pick up my coffee cup to down it in one go. Don't trust grown ups. I'm about to pull my hood up when Philza comes over to my table, smiling down at me softly. I stare up at him with confusion. Fiddling with my fingers nervously.

"Hello, your Marr, right?" He raises a brow, his green eyes glinting with humor. My face heats up, and I avoid his eyes. "Uh.. yeah.. I think so..." he chuckles at this and puts his hand on the chair on the other side of the table. "Can I sit hear?" I blink in surprise, teachers and my parents never asked permission before they did things. Atleast my mum never did when she went through my school bag. Nor my did my dad when he turned down the music on my computer. I nod my head, continuing to rock back and forth. Sitting down he took off his hat, putting it in his lap. I stared at his blond hair that hung down to his shoulders. A crooked smile came upon his face, before it faded slowly. "Are you ok?" I started to scratch my arm. "I'm fine." This was my default response to most questions. He nodded his head as if this was a appropriate answer, he didn't pry. "How do you plan on getting to school, do you take a bus?" I shake my head, shrugging. I normally walk. Which is why I'm always late. He chuckles and takes his hat, putting it back on. "Well mate, if you'd like I can give you a ride, no strings." He winks good-naturedly. I look down, thinking for a bit. I don't trust strangers, even people with kids my age are dangerous. I look at Bad, chewing my lip. The demon smiles warmly and nods. Ok, I guess I'll give it a shot. I nod, "Yeah.. ok."

The hybrid gets to his feet quickly, "Great!" just in time for his order to be declared ready. With crow like laugh he takes the tray. "Welp, come on! The boys'll kill each other otherwise." he chuckles and heads out the door. After a moment of hesitation I follow him. The boys seem surprised when they spot me. Through a open window Philza hands the tray to Techno, a piglin hyrbid. I try not to stare at his tusks, it's rude. "Wilbur scoot over." Philza instructs his eldest son, opening the door for me. Tommy and his brother exchange a look before Wilbur undoes his seatbelt of shuffle over. I feel awkward as I get in, doing up my seatbelt and doing my best to avoid looking at the boys. As Philza turns on the engine there is a awkward, surprised silence. Until there isn't. "Who's the woman!?" Tommy inquires loudly. I wince.

#dream smp #dadza minecraft #wilbur soot #tommy innit

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