#the one space where they literally do not exist in the whole world. please. can we have nothing ever.

[koppaiterocker]

Forgot how weird it is when nonlesbians headcanon characters as lesbians like REALLY HARD... Gives me huge icky vibes

[bogkeep]

being in aroace education mode has me all fired up...... one thing i talk about a lot when given the opportunity is Deconstructing How We Think About Relationships - in short, if we put all of our relationships with other people into a pie chart the 'romantic partner' slice is likely to be a very small slice but gets a disproportionate amount of Relationship Infrastructure compared to other categories, such as vocabulary, rituals, attention and narrative scaffolding - entire systems such as dating / finding "the one" / break-ups / the relationship escalator, etc. on the flipside, 'friend' is such a vast category consisting of a plethora of different relationship, all ranging from Friendly Acquantaince to Extremely Close Childhood Friend You Share Everything With, but we have a lot less language and structure for how we think about these relationships even though many of them can be deeply important and intense to us.

the line between romance and friendship is really blurry, maybe even non-existent, but it feels like the way we think about these categories is that Romantic Partner is this one very specific, formalised box of a category, while Friend is a vast and vague landscape where anything can happen - and it's on this free real estate we have built structures like Queerplatonic Partner. the concept has probably existed since forever, along with many other different types of relationships throughout time and cultures, but it's our current attempt at having a Word for it.

are you with me so far? i want to write a blog post about Deconstructing Intimacy.

just putting a CW here that i'm going to say the word sex a lot and touch on the topic of sexual trauma.

one of the very thorny things about This Whole Topic is that sex and sexuality is extremely political. we just do not live in a world where there's any neutral ground to stand on regarding sex. every demographic comes with a lot of assumptions and expectations and moral judgement tied to sexuality. some demographics are desexualised, some are hypersexualised, some are Both At Once, and in addition to that there's lots of stigma, moralizing, pathologizing, and lawmaking. just a whole mess.

so all of That makes it kind of impossible to fully Dethrone Sex. and by dethroning sex i mean stripping it of the baggage it's accumulated in our cultures. Sex Is A Thing You Can Do With Your Body (And Your Mind?). this does not have to make it any less or more meaningful to you than what it already is. what each person considers intimate is very individual. many people find hugging completely inconsequential and will hug anyone at any time, and for some people a hug is A Lot. For some people, sex is a very fun and casual activity, and for others it's Sacred and carries a lot of meaning and a very close bond. sex is intimate - it requires trust and vulnerability.

it is not the only way to achieve trust and closeness, nor the only thing that requires it.

whenever i take the bus somewhere, i trust the bus driver to take me there safely. i put my literal life in a stranger's hands, but it's a very casual affair i don't think about too much. it's not an act of intimacy, just someone doing their job.

i think the way we talk about sexual assault as the evillest most horribly irredeemably worse-than-death thing, and sexual trauma as a unique kind of trauma amongst traumas, is... indicative. and please do not get me wrong, SA is a horrible thing in every way. it's a violation of trust, vulnerability and personal space. it's an abuse of power. those are the things that make it so horrific - but it's not unique.

an abuse of power, a violation of trust and vulnerability, can happen in so many different forms. emotional abuse, non-sexual violence, medical abuse, et cetera - i don't think it's possible to place trauma into a hierarchy from least to most bad. trauma can be incredibly complex and it's different for everyone. if one day the bus driver on a whim decided to drive off a cliff, i think that would severely fuck up my ability to trust other people to drive me around. if i trusted someone with my innermost thoughts that i have never shared with anyone else, and they used them to be cruel to me, that would severely impede my ability to connect with others.

i just... don't think it does anyone any favours to separate sexual trauma from all other trauma - making it seem like sexual trauma is The Worst Trauma Possible You Can Never Heal From, and on the flipside, make it seem like Well Your Non-Sexual Trauma Cannot Possibly Be That Bad.

TRAUMA TOPIC ASIDE, i think the concept of intimacy has a tendency to get flattened into just the one kind. there are many, Many ways for people to be intimate, many activities that require some form of mutual vulnerability or physical contact, but it seems like we're just very used to placing Acts of Intimacy into the Sexual category. kind of like a venn diagram where the two circles are Sexual Intimacy and Non-sexual Intimacy that are largely overlapping. but what if, instead, it's more that Intimacy is a really big circle, and sex is just one of the circles within it?

the way i think this slots into the whole Relationship Infrastructure thing is that We Like To Categorize Things. if we see two people being very intimate in a way that's not explicitly sexual, it's tempting to think ah yes they are in love AND they're having sex, OBVIOUSLY, because they are clearly capable of having that level of trust and vulnerability together. but what if they're not? does that devalue their relationship? does it make them any less close? these are very chewy questions to ask even without bringing shipping discourse into it, and i would prefer Not To because sexuality is political and there is no right answer.

another way this flattening can be frustrating is all the times non-sexual intimacy is treated as Sexual By Proxy. let's say, for example, you're telling a story, and all forms of intimacy within that story get read as metaphors for sex, despite your actual intentions. there's nothing wrong with using metaphors for sex, especially since Sex Is Political and sometimes we gotta be clever about the storytelling - but it can get very messy if people read sexuality between characters who don't have that, especially characters between which it would be very problematic to portray that. we gotta be able to tell stories about all kinds of close relationships, and surely it should be possible without bringing freud into it at every turn.

intimacy is context-dependent, i would say. a moment of vulnerability can be platonic or romantic or sexual or maybe something else depending on a situation and all the factors involved. human connection is an boundless spectrum, not just a couple boxes.

did any of this make sense? they're just my Thoughts, i'm not a scholar on this i just

[windvexer]

"And it's not like the spell is locked behind a glass wall in some faraway astral space (or at least, it shouldn't be... it can be. This is too much for one post, let's stay on topic)" oh please, please elaborate! 🙏

its all well and good for me to use a metaphor that magic is ever-present and really close at hand, nigh tangible, even,

but there's obviously more than that to successful manifestation.

like it's an actual large deal in practical sorcery of how the hell you get the spell to do something, or much more relevantly do what you want it to do.

so a while ago I used to talk on manifestation using a metaphor that there is a conceptual sphere of glass that separates physical reality from magical reality.

as the metaphor (analogy?) would have it, you can set intent and focus willpower and manipulate astral energies all you want, but those things are stuck in magical reality, blocked from manifesting in the physical world by the glass.

so the spell, obviously it's a good boy and it wants to be helpful, it's going around and around the glass looking for a crack or a foothold to find its way into physical reality.

but this spell is made out of a finite blob of energy. sooner or later, the battery is going to run dry. and all that time it's spending trying to get into our world is burning energy.

by the time it gets here, it could have burned a lot of energy and it doesn't have a lot left to produce strong results. or maybe it doesn't find its way at all.

if this is all true, then the solution is to make cracks in the glass yourself.

overall it's a pretty rough analogy and I'm not even terribly sure if I'd consider it to be more than a parable at this point.

to mash this idea together with the underwater shark thing, the concept would sort of be like...

okay, so let's say metaphorically half of a person is above water and the rest is underwater.

and we're where there are sharks, which means the WHOLE OCEAN is under there.

maybe the ocean is an elegant metaphor for the supreme depths of magical reality. certain layers of magical reality are very close to the surface and truly are interacting with the floating humans, right?

but we can go deeper, and deeper, and deeper.

it wouldn't be true to say that a fish from a mile down is touching the floating humans. it's actually really far away and has a long way to travel before it could touch them at all.

so hypothetically, while all humans are (hypothetically) always partially within magical reality, that doesn't mean that everything within magical reality is close to them or can easily access them.

and this would also be true of spells, when the sorcerer has inadequately developed the spell too far down (or too far up), or failed to properly draw the spell to the surface.

of course, all of these ideas assume it's true that when spells are created they exist somewhere far away, or in any location at all.

just to clarify I think all of these ideas are most useful when treated as thought exercises and not in any sense literal. I think its perhaps true of witchcraft, or at least the kinds of witchcraft I'm familiar with, that one of the witch's primary sorcerous (and mystical) jobs is to "bridge the gap" and learn how to bring things back and forth between our world and the spirit world.

but even that being said, I think there's an element of mysticism in sorcerous witchcraft. I think maybe the best way to talk about it is in stories, or extended spatial analogies, because that's just about the truest way some of it can ever be written down.

sometimes I feel like if anyone can really write it down, like step-for-step for real, then it's got to be one tiny part of it. because it's a big machine out there, you know. it's so decadently complex that it might be more alive than we are.

so it's good to know how one or two cells work, step-for-step. but in the bigger picture, maybe the best way to impart knowledge is in stories and poetry.

and with some step-for-step details of the biology of a few kinds of cells, and with some nice poetry, maybe a person can crest a cliff and see something that will put its own stories inside of their mind forever.

which is to say that I don't know how magic works but i've seen some nice landscapes out there ✌

[fairycosmos]

I'm sorry to do this bc I know you get so many ppl venting and you have your own shit to deal with and yet ppl on here constantly implicitly ask you to console them which is incredibly emotionally labour intensive. However all that being said. I found out my cat who is 9 but is very young looking and active and shows no sign of pain or suffering has large cell lymphoma (general prognosis 6-9 months) and I'm literally broken. She's my best friend. I've been through years where I've had no friends but I've always had her and she's everything to me and I've known a lot of cats who live to late teens so I had expected that for her and this has come out of nowhere and is just so soul destroying because she is my whole world and I love her so so much. she's literally saved my life (have been at the point of kms so many times but didn't for her) and now she probably wont be here next year and I don't know how to keep existing without her and I didn't know who else to tell. I really appreciate your kind and honest presence on this site it's very cleansing and healing and ik this is a parasocial thing to say/feel but you are like a friend to so many. so thanks. even just having a space to say this stuff is invaluable. You have helped and comforted and offered love and insight to so many people despite your own suffering. Much love to you, I hope the universe treats you with lots of kindness going forward.

i am so so sorry to hear this - sometimes i honestly can't believe how cruel life can be. i wish there was something tangible i could say that would make a change to what you're feeling but my experience with grief (all types of grief esp preemptive grief like what you're dealing with) has proven to me that words often ring hollow when you're going through it. i do want to offer some understanding and some comfort despite that, i just know it may be hard for you to register right now and that's alright. losing a pet is so so deeply painful and it's completely normal to be devastated and taken aback by this news - anyone would be. at the same time it sounds like your cat is deeply lucky to have you and to be loved so completely by someone. while what you're both going through is horrific, i am so glad she has you to take care of her and that she ended up having a wonderful life with you - the gift you have given her and continue to give her every day just by being her owner is huge and i hope you continue to remind yourself that as you confront there next few months. she is warm and fed and taken care of and she has the best chance of living longer with her condition bc of the care and love you continue to show her. i know this is much much easier said than done but please try to take it one day at a time and make every moment count with her - it's easy to get lost in the idea of losing her but she is still here and you still have time together, albeit not as much time as you both deserve. i can't stand how much of a gamble of luck everything seems to be and how horrible things happen to ppl and animals who truly deserve so much more - that anger, despair and incredulity still hits me day after day and i feel it very hard on your behalf rn. you have every right in the world to process that sense of feeling like your soul has been destroyed on whatever timeline works for you. as long as you continue to move forward, hour to hour or minute to minute despite it all.

are you able to talk to any friends/family about this? i only ask bc pet loss is one of the hardest things in the world to go through and i think having some sort of super system could make the days feel a little more manageable. if not, please feel free to message me and share updates, stories, vents etc about your cat and how you're doing - i lost my childhood dog a few yrs back and i do understand. it's such a heavy feeling to carry around with you all the time. i would also recommend joining a pet loss support group as another option too, bc so so many people sadly completely get what youre going through. i hope your little girl is doing OK today and that you are taking care of yourself as much as you feel able to as you process this news. if you need to break down, go to sleep, scream, punch pillows, be numb - that's alright. there's no wrong way to react to this. i just hope you give yourself some grace as you do. sending so so much love to you both - and thank you so much for the insanely kind words by the way. you didn't have to say that and it really made my night better that you did. so sorry you're in this position. X

[stardustcatcher]

Fluff Alphabet (Josh Kiszka)

Pairing: Josh Kiszka x Reader

Word Count: 3.5K

Warnings: fluff, literally so much fluff (i mean it's quite literally a fluff alphabet so like what did you expect), talk of marriage and babies kinda, not much really, let me know if i missed anything :)

AN: so i just thought this would be a fun little thing that i could do for each of the boys since i seem to be leaning towards writing fluff a little bit more recently but don't really have ideas for a full fic. this is my first time doing a headcannon-ish thing so please be nice to me or i'll cry. as always i hope you all enjoy and remember that all feedback (likes, comments, reblogs) is welcomed, appreciated, and encouraged! i love you guys <3

taglist

A ctivities - What do they like to do with their s/o? How do they spend their free time with them?

Josh loves to do anything at all with you, just your presence makes even the most mundane moments better. Though he is a major outdoor lover, so he loves taking you to his favorite spots out in nature (hiking trails, national parks, just a pretty field he found while out one day). He loves combining his two favorite things, the great outdoors and you. 

B aby - Do they want a family? Why/Why not?

Josh would love a family, he grew up with two loving parents and a gaggle of siblings so it's always been something in the back of his mind. Even as a child, he remembers when Sam was young and his mother and father nurturing and taking care of him, and he’s always wanted that as well. But it’s not something he needs in order to feel complete. If that was something you didn’t want, or couldn’t have, he’d be perfectly fine with that. He’s content with you and only you, a child would be a welcomed addition if that’s what you both wanted but not something he needs to feel whole. 

C uddle - How do they like to cuddle?

Cuddling with you is one of Josh’s favorite things in the world, it’s the answer to all his problems. It’s his favorite way to decompress after a long day and to connect and exist with you. Josh definitely prefers being the little spoon, something about being wrapped in your arms makes him feel safe. Though he is not opposed to being the big spoon as well. During particular days where he’s feeling undermined in his position, whether in the band or in life as a whole, holding you against him, feeling needed and wanted, does just the trick. His favorite way to cuddle would have to be just plopping on top of you, laying his whole body weight over you and just melting. 

D reams - How do they picture their future with their s/o?

Even in the beginning stages of your relationship, Josh often found himself picturing his future with you. In his own words, he’s quite nomadic and fears domestication and settling down, but he found himself unafraid of that with you. He no longer fears domestication but looks forward to it as long as you’re there by his side, though that’s not to say that his adventurous days are over, he loves the idea of taking you along with him. Seeing the world, traveling, and trying new experiences together. Then, once you’re both ready, you can both settle down. And he can’t wait for that day. 

E qual - Are they the dominant one in the relationship, or rather passive?

Josh is neither passive nor dominant in your relationship, you are both truly equal in every sense of the word. No decisions happen without input from the other, everything is thought of with the other in mind. He believes there are two working parts to this relationship and both of you need to be on the same page in order for it to thrive and grow. 

F eelings - When did they know they were in love?

Josh likes to say he knew he was in love with you from the first time he saw you, and while that wasn’t a total lie, he really knew after your third date. It had been at his house, the first time you were ever in his space, and he had picked some of his favorite movies for you both to watch. He could tell that you weren’t overly invested in them like he was, but you listened to every fun fact he gave you with a wide interested gaze and a smile on your face. You were truly listening to him, even though it wasn’t your favorite thing in the whole world, you listened and took in every last thing he was saying because it was something that made him happy. He apologized for rambling so much but you stopped his apology with a smile and a shake of your head saying that you loved how passionate he was about film, that you could listen to him talk for hours and that seeing and hearing him happy made you happy. Hearing you affirm your willingness to listen to his ramblings when others would’ve cut him off and shut it down only solidified the feelings he had for you. That’s when he knew. 

G ratitude - How grateful are they in general? Are they aware of what their s/o is doing for them?

Josh is eternally grateful for you, for your very being and all the things you do for him. Every little thing, even something as small as tucking his shirt tag in, will be acknowledged with a “Thank you, mama,” and a kiss on the cheek. He was raised with very good manners as well as being very perceptive to those around him so there will never be something you do for him that will go unnoticed. One of his biggest fears is that you’ll feel unappreciated so he goes extremely out of his way to make sure that can never happen, even to the point of being obnoxious sometimes. But you know it’s always done with the best intentions at heart. 

H onesty - Do they have secrets they hide from their s/o? Or do they share everything?

He is an open book with you, even sharing a little too much at some points, but it’s always very appreciated. From the start he’s always been very open and it only progresses with your relationship. Honesty is a foundation of your coupling and Josh believes dishonesty to be a downfall in relationships. He looks at you as a safe person to hold and care for all his thoughts and secrets, no matter how big or small, he can trust you with them. And he hopes you look at him the same way. He wants to be the person you can tell anything to. Not just a partner but a friend and confidant. 

I nspiration - Did their s/o change them somehow, or the other way around? Like trying out new things or helping them overcome personal problems?

Josh really only becomes more of himself when he’s with you. While he’s already a pretty outgoing person, he finds himself unabashed and unafraid around you. You’ve inspired him to be his truest self because that’s who you love the most. In turn he’s also helped you with breaking out of your shell and encouraging you to try new experiences, as long as you're together there’s nothing you both couldn’t do. 

J ealousy - Do they get jealous easily? How do they deal with it?

Josh doesn’t often get jealous, and if he does there’s likely an underlying reason for it. He firmly believes that there are all different kinds of love and that love is meant to be shared, he also knows that you love him wholly and only him, so he’s not worried about someone else coming along and sweeping you off of your feet from under him. On rare occasions when he does get jealous it’s often a symptom of something else bothering him, whether that’s him feeling needy or there’s something going on in that messy mastermind brain of his it can usually all be worked out with some cuddles and reassuraces. 

K iss - Are they a good kisser? What was the first kiss like?

Your first kiss with Josh was utterly magical, no matter how cliche that sounded. It was a completely mundane day, he had accompanied you to the grocery store after you’d mentioned feeling a bit lonely and made even the most boring tasks fun. He was helping you put away your groceries, asking where everything went while music floated from the speakers of his phone. He was swaying and dancing along to a song you didn’t know the name of looking positively adorable. At one point, he took the fruit you’d been holding out of your hands, setting it down and gripping your hands in his before spinning you around. You two danced around the kitchen, laughing and smiling and completely content. As the song faded out, he still held you close, resting his forehead against yours. “I really want to kiss you,” he had whispered, his breath fanning across your face. You smiled and gave a little nod before his lips molded against your own, fitting like the perfect puzzle piece that had always been missing. It wasn’t fireworks and sparks like movies and tv always said, it was more like white hot lightning and molten lava coursing through your veins, the burning warmth spreading throughout your body like a forest fire and you felt complete.

L ove - Who says ‘I love you’ first

Josh says ‘I love you’ first after your first holiday season  together. He’d taken you to Frankenmuth for Christmas and after seeing you interact so closely with his parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins he just couldn’t hold himself back anymore. He’d known he was in love with you for a while before, but was just waiting for either the right time or for you to say it first. When he saw you fitting in perfectly with his family, like you’d never been anywhere else, like you belonged, he had to tell you. 

M emory - What’s their favorite memory together?

Like the sap that he is, Josh likes to say that every memory with you is his favorite but there are a few that stick out in his mind. Dancing with you in the kitchen, bringing you home for the holidays, the first time meeting his brothers, all were some of his favorite memories. But his all time most cherished memory with you would be the morning after the first time you slept over at his house. Waking up next to you, your face smushed against his pillow, hair adorably mussed and messy, the sunlight streaming in through the curtains over your skin. He replays it every morning he’s away from you, pretending like you’re right there next to him again. He thought you were the most beautiful like that, safely tucked away in sleep, unknowing that he was memorizing every detail of your face. 

N ickel - Do they spoil? Do they buy the person they love everything?

Josh would say he doesn’t spoil you but that’s a boldfaced lie. From every stop on tour he’ll get you something, whether it's a simple postcard from a gas station in Des Moines or a handmade necklace from a vendor’s stand in Mexico, he’ll get you something. Gifts on holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries are always thoughtful and exactly what you’d wanted, he listens to everything you say and will remember on special occasions just to see your beaming face when you unwrap whatever he’s gotten you. 

O n Cloud Nine - What are they like when they are in love? Is it obvious for others? How do they express their feelings?

It’s very obvious to those around Josh that he is in love, he’s always got a smile on his face and will never pass up the chance to talk about you to his brothers and friends. It's almost insufferable when he’s on tour away from you, the other members of the band don’t know how much “Y/N would love this” or “I wonder what Y/N’s doing right now” they can take. Josh is not shy in expressing how in love he is with you, he’d shout it from every rooftop if he could. The sun shines a little bit brighter, the colors are a little bit more vibrant, the air tastes a little sweeter when Josh is in love. 

P et Name - What pet names do they use? 

While Mama is used frequently, Josh also has a plethora of other nicknames that he calls you. Sometimes they’re cute (ie: sweetheart, baby, lover) other times they’re stupid, like when he calls you ‘old sport’ after watching The Great Gatsby one too many times or ‘my little icicle’ when you stick your cold hands under his shirt. Pet names are just another way that Josh shows affection, his favorite of the many he calls you would have to be ‘honey bee’ or just ‘bee’, because you’re sweet and it feels a little more inventive than the casual sweetheart. 

Q uirk - Some random ability they have that’s beneficial in a relationship.

Josh has the uncanny ability to always make you smile, while some might not see that as beneficial in a relationship, you see it as an assurance that as long as he’s around you’ll never want for happiness. His superpower for bringing about your joyfulness has guided you away from some pretty dark places, you don’t know how you’d deal with certain situations and events that had happened had he not been there. He’ll always look for the good in a situation, and while it can be annoying when you want to wallow in your miseries occasionally, looking back you know that his optimism probably made the situation ten times better. 

R omance - How romantic are they? What would they do to make their s/o happy? Cliché or rather creative?

Josh is a romantic mush, the perfect mix of cliché and creative. He’ll do all the standard things but put his own little twist on them. He’d go above and beyond on dates just to see you smile, going just a little outside of the box just to make you giggle at his outrageousness. He’ll enlist the help of his brothers to pull off a grand gesture. He wants you to know just how much you mean to him and sometimes words don’t feel like enough, no matter how much you reassure him. He grew up watching romance in all the little things his parents did for each other, and he wants to do that for you but in his very own Josh way. 

S upport - Are they helping their s/o achieve their goals? Do they believe in them?

Josh is your number one supporter, he’s your very own cheerleader. There is nothing that Josh thinks you can’t do if you put your mind to it. And if it all crumbles, he’ll be there to pick up the pieces, help you dust off, and try again. You’ll never be afraid to tell Josh you want to do something because you know he’ll be behind you one hundred and ten percent. You support him so much, hold him up when he’s down like a crutch, he thinks it's only fair that he does the same for you. 

T hrill - Do they need to try out new things to spice up your relationship? Or do they prefer a certain routine?

Trying new things with you by his side is one of Josh’s favorite things. There’s a certain type of rush and love shared when conquering a new experience with someone you love. Not to say you don’t have a set routine in life, because Josh also likes things the way that he likes them and won’t stray too far away, but if there’s something you want to try he is always down and ready to do it by your side. 

U nderstanding - How good do they know their partner? Are they empathetic?

Josh knows you like the back of his hand. During the beginning of your relationship, he would watch and study you. He felt the need to know your quirks, tells, and body language just in case a situation ever arose when he would need to know these things. He can tell what’s going on in your head without even asking, he knows what you're thinking with a single glance. He prides himself on his ability to read you and understand you, it helps in knowing what you’re truly thinking if you’re too scared to say it, which is an uncommon occurrence around Josh but it proves helpful when there are others around. You can have a full conversation without words. If you’re at a function and you don’t want to be there anymore, he’ll know with just a look at your eyes and a nod of your head. 

V alue - How important is the relationship to them? What is it worth in comparison to other things in their life?

There are a few important things in Josh’s life: you, his family, and his career. You rank tied with his family, though he considers you family so you could argue that you and your relationship fit into that number one spot. Your relationship is uncompromisable to him, he won’t do anything if it would put your relationship and time with you in jeopardy. Just like he would not consider anything that could compromise his bond with his brothers, he would not do anything that could compromise his bond with you. Everything gets run through you first, if there is even a slight chance you could be made uncomfortable, or a strain could be put on your relationship, Josh won’t even consider it. 

W edding - Do they want to get married? How do they propose? What would the marriage be like?

Josh would love to marry you, it’s probably one of his biggest goals in life. He’d try his hardest to stray away from typical proposals and weddings, coming to something in the middle of your dream and his. If marriage isn’t something you wanted, he’d be a little bummed but could understand. You two don’t need a piece of paper to show you love each other. But if it was something you saw in the cards for both of you, he’d be over the moon. The proposal would most likely be in a significant place from your relationship and on a special day like an anniversary considering how sentimental he is. Marriage with Josh would be a dream, not very different from the way you two were before, but the fact that Josh would get to call you his wife would be enough to make his whole life. To show how much he adores you in front of friends and family is like an ultimate act of love in his eyes, he wants everybody to see just how perfect you are together. 

X OXO - Are they very affectionate? Do they love to kiss and cuddle?

Josh is a certified cuddle bug, physical touch is one of his primary love languages. Because of his job, he can’t always love on you the way he wants to in public, he wants to respect your privacy and keep some of it to himself. But in private or with friends and family, all bets are off, there’s not a moment when Josh doesn’t have at least one hand on you. The people around you will joke that it’s sickening, but his dear ones are truly happy that he has an outlet to pour all that love and affection into. He’ll give you kisses until the cows come home, cheek kisses when he’s next to you, forehead kisses when he’s saying goodbye, shoulder kisses when he comes up behind you and rests his chin on you, and top of the head kisses when you’re cuddled up against him watching tv. With Josh around, you’ll never starve for affection. 

Y earning - How will they cope when they’re missing their partner?

Because of his profession there are long stretches when you and Josh are separated, at first it was really hard and almost a deal breaker, you didn’t know if you could cope with being away from him so much. But over time and with reassuraces it slowly got easier. It’s difficult when timezones get in the way, when he’s just going to sleep when you wake up, or when he’s so busy that it seems like there’s no free time to talk to him, but you make it work. You call and talk when you can, sometimes it's few and far between but he’ll never let a day go by where he doesn’t let you know how much he misses you. Luckily Josh has provisions for when he’s away. He’ll leave you letters or send you packages in the mail, set dates for you to open them and stretch them out for as long as he’s gone. On your end, you supply him with pictures and letters with little dates prompts in the corner. ‘Open when you think of me’ or ‘Open when you can’t sleep’, these little things help him through the long days and nights of tour when he wants nothing more than to hold you in his arms. 

Z eal - Are they willing to go to great lengths for the relationship? If so, what kind of?

There is a very short list of things in the world that Josh wouldn’t do for you and your relationship. He won’t compromise his health and happiness, nor that of the people around him, and he won’t change himself to fit into somebody else’s mold. Luckily, you’d never ask that of him. Other than those few things, Josh would do anything for you. He considers you the single greatest thing in his life and would do virtually anything to make you happy. When you’re happy, he’s happy. He would move mountains for you, pull the sun itself down just to make you smile. And he’d do it all because he loves you.

=

taglist: @mintysammykiszka @peachpitpearls @alexxavicry @spark-my-nature @angelbabyyy99

[lumine-no-hikari]

Dear Sephiroth: (a letter to a fictional character, because why not) #90

I'm not really sure what to write to you about today. I think I might have overextended myself in recent days, and once more I'm finding that my brain feels like soup. The sense of not really belonging in this place is hitting me kinda hard today, I guess. Suppose you would know a lot about what that's like.

Truth is, I struggle often enough with the way I perceive the world around me. I do it weirdly (much like how I do literally everything else... sigh...). I'm not gonna bother to articulate how, though; I doubt you'd be interested anyway. Fact remains that there ain't a whole lot of folks I can talk to about it; even if I could, most wouldn't understand, so why bother. Suppose it is what it is though; no sense in bellyaching. I just wish that it was a thing that could be measured, recorded, corroborated. Something that could be rationalized, explained, made logical. My mind tends to despise uncertainties; it likes everything to be concretized and nailed down.

…Ah well.

Like yesterday, today was busy, and also painful, thanks to Physical Therapy. There's weird stuff going on with the right side of my jaw, and the muscles holding it together needed to be mashed up with metal implements. I guess I'm gonna need braces sooner rather than later, because I really needed braces as a kid, but I didn't get 'em, and now my bite is all messed up, which means now my jaw is all messed up, and having the jaw messed up pulls on the neck, which then pulls on the ribs, and my ribs being weird is why I've been dealing with limited ability to use my right arm for the last almost two years to begin with, but I hesitate to get it fixed because braces cost a LOT of money, and I think most insurances won't cover the cost of it this late in life, so… it's a mess.

My whole existence is kind of a mess in a variety of respects, and… ya know. Sometimes I'm not sure why I bother persisting when all of it seems kind of like a farce; I live in a defective body on a dying planet where everyone is so traumatized that lots of 'em believe that killing each other is the answer to all their problems. Sometimes I just... don't wanna. Waking up in the morning in a world where there is no ethical way to maintain the integrity of my physical vessel seems like a chore.

…But then I remember that there are people who like having me around, even if I can't understand why most of the time. So I gotta believe that something good might come of my derping around on this mossy wet rock hurtling through space, even if I don't yet know what it is.

You ever get the feeling like there's something you're supposed to be doing, but you have no idea what it is, and you're running out of time? Feels like that almost constantly for me. If you know what that's like and know how to deal with it, lemme know, willya? I could use some pointers.

In the meantime… there's some stuff I've been meaning to learn how to do. I'm not gonna tell you what it is just yet, because it would ruin the surprise. But I hope the results will be good, if I can stop being intimidated long enough to get the gumption.

Anyway… Sephiroth. My brain continues to be soup. I think if I keep going, I'm just gonna keep rambling. I'm tired, but… I wanted to write anyway, because you're worth others' effort, even when they're feeling weird. But it's time to stop for today, because I'm having trouble staying on topic and stringing cohesive ideas together.

Please stay safe out there, okay? I don't wanna endure your absence, just like the folks who love me don't wanna endure mine. So let's both keep trying our best to keep our chins up and our eyes on the horizon, okay?

I'll leave you with this today:

I know you're not a little girl, so maybe you can think "little one" instead. Please take the overall message to heart. Please do your best to remain kind and gentle, no matter what tries to come along and break you.

I'll write again soon.

Your friend, Lumine

[stellerssong]

Swan I promise I'll get caught up on your fanwork soon. Soon as I actually watch these overdue DVDs of The Watchman😉. In the meantime consider this an invitation to do a director's commentary from back when Will Graham was a bird?

please enjoy your viewing of the watchman! don't quote me on this, but i hear he (the eponymous watchman) was in a comic book once...really make u thimk.

oh god okay umm...how do i put this politely for the good people in the audience who have not been following me since 2013. so. ok. so i've long maintained that turning a character into a bird monster is one of the truest forms of love i am capable of expressing. "but swan!" you say, shocked and horrified, "surely you mean turning a character into a WEREWOLF is one of the truest forms of love you are capable of expressing! you have a whole thing about werewolves! it's an expanded universe with hinted crossovers! there's internal logic and now a magic system! you have spilled literally thousands of words that are No Plot Just Describing Midcycle Werewolves and you KEEP THREATENING TO DO THAT MORE." and like. you're not wrong strictly speaking. and i do inflict that aggressively upon my favorite characters. but there is something particularly monstery about the bird monster that a werewolf just doesn't get at.

it's the uncanny valley of it all, you dig? a werewolf is, when you get down to it, a wolf whose instincts are fettered to a human perception of the world—hence, functionally, a dog. a very large, gross, dangerous, infectious dog, in some cases—a dog with hands and fucked-up people teeth, frequently—but it's fundamentally the emotional tension of the dog that i'm working with here, right? the sit and stay and will i get a pat or a kick of things, the what is a pack and what are they owed of it, the animal caught in a little box with the human and the realization of how little space there is between those two things. which is all lovely delicious good food for me, personally, and of course i am capable of making something tangibly offputting out of those compelling pieces.

but the bird monster is a different game. that's a different part of the uncanny valley, and i hesitate to call it a more physical part, but the physicality IS part of it. a bird has warm blood, like you or like me (with apologies to any reptiles, amphibians, ectothermic fish, etc. reading this). it breathes air. it's often social and intelligent. it has a voice—more importantly, it makes music. we connect with these qualities, as fellow warm-blooded social tetrapods. we think, oh, this is a familiar creature, this is a creature i can easily empathize with (again, apologies to those reading this who, like me, are thrown into a tearful cute-aggression frenzy over the japanese giant salamander).

but a bird feels different from a human in a way that a dog doesn't. it's got feathers. it's got hollow bones. it's got an expressionless face and eyes that don't convey the same warmth as a dog's or a wolf's or even a cat's. there are tame birds and domesticated birds, yes, but in general there's not the same cultural sense of the bird as companion animal that smooths the way (or burdens) the dog or the wolf-as-dog.

and it flies. that's fuckin' different.

so it's a different tension there. where the werewolf's sense of alienation stems from the uneasy knowledge that there's gray area between wolf and dog and human, the bird monster's deal is a more classic disjoint. a human is not like a bird. these two things are (or feel) more diametrically opposed. and yet in the bird monster they exist within a single body anyway. the human in you is content to travel in two dimensions. the bird in you understands that there's a whole lot more world if you just look up. the human in you needs the solidity of earth underfoot and the comforting anchor of gravity. the bird in you knows those things for chains and cages in disguise. the human in you tastes blood and grimaces, gags, spits and screams and weeps. the bird in you swallows, expressionless, and sings.

ok so then imagine if it was will graham,,,

[gisellelx]

Opinion on Jalice x ocs

Okay, sorry asker (and I still have a bunch more things in my asks but this one just made me want to unleash). But sit down, because here is "Giselle gets too srs bsns about OCs."

Disclaimer: I want to be completely clear here. The absolute core of fanfic, IMO, the thing that makes it so much more valuable culturally than commercial fiction, and the thing that makes the world go round, is this: in fic, you get to write for yourself. You get to spin the story you want to see told, in whatever way pleases you most, with no interference from the commercial publishing industry, or readers' taste, or anything other than "I wanted to experience this story, so I wrote it." This is super rare. Writing for just the sake of it is totally misunderstood--with any other hobby, we wouldn't go, "Oh are you trying to become a professional pickleballer?" or "Are you planning to try out for symphonies on your ukulele?" But for some reason, writing confuses people--we don't imagine it as ever being done just for fun.

Fanfiction is for fun, and that's what makes it so subversive and incredible.

So if you want to write a story that is you in the story, or Jalice in space, or wolfpack ABO--you should do that. That is literally where all the value in fanfic comes from. We get to hedonistically write exactly the thing we most want; to spend time with the characters exactly the way we want to, and sometimes a few readers come with us, and sometimes more readers come with us, and sometimes lots of readers come with us. And that's the whole amazing thing of it. So nothing I say here should be construed as "Don't write OCs." If OC x Jalice is your jam, fucking write that because that is literally what this whole thing is for, and what makes it so valuable and what makes it so unique.

HOWEVER.

Characters exist because they add something to the story that otherwise wouldn't exist without them. This is all characters, "original" or not. So any time you write a character, the question to ask is, "Why is this character in the story? What do they add? What's missing if they aren't here?"

This is not how most people write OCs.

OCs are often written so that the writer can imagine some scenario that they can't see happening with canon. That scenario is often, "What if I was in the story?"

"I" is a very seductive person to put into a story. As I said above, the whole fun of fanfic is the ability to imagine exactly how we want the world to go, and adding ourselves to the story is a logical extension of that. But what becomes difficult about that is that when you write a story, your reader needs to care about all the major characters in the story. In fanfic, we get to shortcut a little because our readers are already invested in the canon characters (although I still think it is well worth it to act as though we don't have that buy-in and to develop the canon characters just as much) but for an OC? You've got to do a lot of heavy lifting to make the reader convinced that this character is someone we should care about achieving their goal.

If the OC is a self-insert, that's tough emotionally, because of course the author cares about achieving her imaginary goal, so it's easy to accidentally leave out of the writing the part where we convince the reader that it matters. Then readers are mad, and we as authors feel like we've stuck our heart out there and gotten skewered.

If the OC is not a self-insert, it still takes time and skill and practice to draw a character in such a way that the reader agrees they belong in the story. This is hard, period, but doubly hard in fanfiction because the reader already has expectations about where the edges of the world are. So if you introduce an extra character, you really have to sell them, in a way you do not if you are writing a novel that is 100% yours. The result is that a lot of OCs feel like they serve no purpose, and readers don't buy them, and they don't understand why they are there.

Characters need to advance the story. If they get a name, they need to advance the story. If they do not advance the story, they do not belong in the story. If the answer to "what does this character add to the story" is "I just like them," then they don't belong. The story should be different if that character was absent, or if that character was different. (Different rant for a different day but this is why I don't buy for a minute the argument that published fanfic has changed the story enough to warrant its publication.) If you write an OC, or even if you give serious time to a character who was just a side mention in canon, you must do that work of making their story and their perspective integral to the story you're trying to tell.

I actually love this about OCs and near-OCs. Because they have no grounding in canon, you can make them serve whatever purpose you need them to, and however you choose to characterize them is entirely up to you, which gives you a lot of writerly freedom. I put OCs or near-OCs in almost every one of my fics—even the short ones. Off the top of my head: Tony Mason in Ithaca Is Gorges, Elizabeth Bradshawe in Stregoni Benefici, Dierdre in "For a Season," Dorothy in Stregoni Benefici, and more. And that's nothing compared to the canon-mentioned characters I've given fuller life in my fanfic. The reason I do this is because that freedom lets me show something about the canon characters, or the canon situation, that is more easily revealed by another party. But the onus is on me, the writer, to make it clear to the reader why this character matters so much and to tell the story in such a way that the OC becomes a fully fleshed-out character, and the story is such that it seems inevitable that the OC would be a part of it.

The most effective OCs in fanfiction are ones which drive the story of the characters that most people came to fanfic to read about--the canon characters--in a way that feels intrinsic and real. That means a lot of legwork on the part of the writer to understand the OC, and to create them in a way that makes the reader identify with them and care about their role in the story, and in a burden that is additional due to the nature of fic itself--convince the reader that they belong in a story the reader is expecting to only consist of the canon characters.

This is hard. It's hard to do well, especially if you don't have a lot of experience writing, as many fanfic writers do not, and it's hard to receive negative feedback when and if people don't connect with the OC that you've imagined being such an amazing person. This difference in what the writer thinks they're doing (having some fun with a new person) and what the reader wants to read (a story that makes sense with all the characters on the page) leads to a disconnect, and that disconnect is the source of a lot of the "people don't like OCs" / "OCs are bad" discourse in fandom.

So. I don't really have an opinion on any given paring, Jalice or otherwise, or any given character, "x OC." I love a good OC; I think they can do a lot in fic that canon characters cannot. If you can sell it, I will read it. But the less clear it is that this character has, well, character, and the less clear it is why this character is necessary to the story--the more it's going to feel like the OC is some strange, authorial hand.

And that's a hard sell in fanfic, period. It's not just because there's an OC; it's because it's genuinely difficult to do.

(My tumblr title is based on the idea of characterization, and for me, exploring characterization is at the center of why I write fic. That approach not true of everyone, so apply grains of salt as appropriate.)

[miss-peanut-butter-cups]

i also found you through catboybiologist :3

can you tell me about warhammer 40k lore please maam

So.

Warhammer 40k is a table top miniature game, set in a semi-satirical, grimdark sci-fi universe. For reasons lost to mankind, people decided to write 500+ books about it.

It takes place in the year 40,000-ish.

The Imperium of Man, encompasses a million worlds spread across the galaxy. United in worship of the Immortal God-Emperor of Mankind, who has ruled from the Golden Throne of Terra (Earth) for 10,000 years, humanity has claimed the stars as their own.

It is the cruelest and bloodiest regime imaginable.

It is a fascist, totalitarian empire, that worships a corpse, kept barely alive by the sacrifice of 1000 souls a day. It strives to kill every alien, mutant, or critic out there. It does not care for the individual, who toils their whole existence to feed the hungry beast that is the Imperium. After all, the cheapest and most abundant resource in the 41st millennium, is a human life.

Mighty battle fleets cross the stars, carrying the endless regiments of the Astra Militarum, the rank and file soldiers of humanity. The bioengineered super warriors of the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines lead every counter offensive and spearhead. Tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanics uncover lost secrets from the dark age of technology, in reverant praise of the Machine God. Inquisitors carry the authority of the Emperor to root out heresies and conspiracies that threaten the Imperium in secret. Ultimately, everything is in service to war. Only war.

For all that, there is worse.

The Imperium is besieged on a thousand fronts every day. Orks coalesce in ravaging, warmongering hordes, intent on fighting purely for the enjoyment of it. The more they fight, the stronger, smarter, and more well equipped they get. Ancient Aeldari use their natural psychic might to cling to the last vestiges of their fallen empire. Their dark mirror, the Drukhari inflict unimaginable tortures on moral souls to sustain their own. Hive-minded Tyranids arrive in the galaxy in greater and greater numbers every year, each of their nightmarish bioforms fashioned by an immeasurably vast intelligence to strip the galaxy of all biomatter, and feed its hunger. The Necrons, the undisputed synthetic masters of science and technology, awaken for the first time since the War in Heaven (a 65-million year old conflict that shook reality to its firmament), intent on reclaiming their place as rightful rules of the galaxy. The T'au, a young upstart empire, seeks cooperation and unity among species. They're actually ok, but they're naive.

And then there's even worse.

Let's talk about FTL travel. Most ships in 40k achieve this by taking a shortcut through a dimension where time doesn't flow normally called The Warp. While the galaxy exists in a material universe, The Warp is an immaterial one. It's a realm of emotions, ontology, ideas, that sort of stuff, all of which are a reflection of the souls in the material universe. Enough people feel strongly enough about something? It might just exist in the Warp. Naturally this proves challenging for ships travelling through the Warp. Firstly, it will drive a mortal to insanity. Secondly, it's full of Daemons.

The Warp is Hell

Quite literally. Negative emotions tend to have a stronger presence in the Warp, and can form into living entities. These entities grow in strength as their feed off more emotions/souls, eventually being able to influence the Materium (the physical universe). This creates a feedback loop, where Warp entities (Daemons) corrupt people into doing more and more things that empower them. This is usually some form of murder/violence/betrayal/ritual. This malevolent Daemon-Warp synergy is called Chaos, and is often considered the arch-enemy of mankind.

And if that wasn't bad enough, there are gods in the Warp. Supremely powerful aspects of Chaos, they are in a state of near-perpetual conflict with each other. Most Daemons are also a part of one of the Chaos Gods. There are some minor gods, but I'm only gonna talk about the main 4. Briefly, Khorne is the god of blood and skulls. Nurgle is the god of disease and decay. Tzeentch is the god of change and fate. And Slaanesh is the god of excess and pleasure in all things.

As long as humanity will exist, the threat of Chaos will remain present. Chaos cults are extremely common across the Imperium, and it's not uncommon for entire planets and subsectors to fall to Chaos corruption and turn Traitor. The last and most persistent of all the Imperium's enemies.

How did things get this bad?

In the year 30,000-ish, the Emperor of Mankind wasn't dead yet. Humanity had crashed and burned into a 5,000 year long galaxy wide apocalypse called the Age of Strife, caused by the birth of the Chaos God Slaanesh. Having been around since the dawn of civilization, the Emperor decided to take the reigns of humanity and lead it Himself.

After unifying Terra, and reuniting with Mars, He launched the Great Crusade. A multi-century endeavour to reconquer the galaxy, reunite the scattered remnants of humanity, and kill all Aliens, Mutants, and people who politely declined.

To achieve this, the Emperor created 20 incredibly powerful sons (in a lab), called Primarchs. They each lead a legion of Space Marines, which were also invented at the time, to conquer the galaxy with. All was going well that The Emperor decided to put his favourite son, Horus, in charge of the entire crusade, while He went back to Terra to work on a secret project.

Unfortunately, the powers of Chaos corrupted Horus, inciting him to turn against The Emperor along with half of the other Primarchs and legions. This caused a 7 year civil war known as The Horus Heresy, and culminated in Horus dying in a duel with The Emperor. The duel practically killed the Emperor too, forcing him to be interred on The Golden Throne, an arcane mechanism capable of sustaining Him in a state between death and life. With the Emperor silent, the ideals of rationality and science he instilled in the early Imperium faded away, in favour of paranoia and theocratic rule that would define the Imperium for the next 10,000 years.

The Emperor's dream was dead, damning humanity to an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

=========================

And now you know about Warhammer! I feel like I've barely scratched the surface though. Each of the bold topics could easily have their own essay, but I am not well informed enough to write about all of them.

[whatudottu]

You know I’m starting to fixate on something where I actually care enough about it to ramble something something- so let’s give it up for NSR! *tiny applause of me doing whatever the hell i want to do on this blog*

An odd thing for me though is that I’m specifically doing a whole character ramble and practically ONLY a character ramble so no biology stuff here (only slight astronomy). Please welcome to the stage, my scrimblo bimblo: DJ Subatomic Supernova!

As I once again shove aside my not only in-progress work but the ‘actually read to post’ work too, I’m here to spew words about my favourite egotistical space orb and not only am I going to do that, but also compare them to someone else of a unique mind. Because of both of their particular quirks about identity, self-importance, and ultimately expression of art, I like to think DJSS may share some grounds with Eve, perhaps enough to decently get along with each other if not even form a friendship.

If you’re one of my typical followers interested enough in reading this to get to here - the second paragraph UNDER the readmore - I will give a summary of the DJ and the Diva. DJ Subatomic Supernova, a space themed NSRtist with an ego so dense it can cause a singularity (which may or may not be an actual literal thing that has or did happen) and underappreciated ex-professor of university grade astronomy, strives to preserve their name and music to extend not only beyond their own time but for the future beyond humanity’s own existence in order to stave away fading into obscurity and truly becoming everlasting. In this battle of existential dread and their entire ‘Avatar of Earth’ schtick, we have a character who’s ego comes with a twist of not being selfish even though it is significantly self-centered, their motivations though using the medium of themselves being to create a legacy for humanity that will spread to the furthest reaches of the galaxy and back.

Eve meanwhile - real name Nadia - views the world in ways that seems only she can, seeing herself as the only one to understand the way she thinks and feeling so incredibly lonely in that fact - a realm of existentialism in of itself - especially since the one person that had begun the attempt had ended up losing thanks to his hair being set on fire. Expressing herself not only through her psy-dub music, Eve is an artist of multiple mediums from sound to visual, of sculpture, fashion, and paintings, many themes of her work centering on her personal experiences and insecurities, of eyes staring at her peculiarities and of turning those eyes against the viewer.

And what do you get when you cross an egotistical existentialist with a suffering surrealist? Maybe you get a little common ground to stand on. Perhaps not enough to satiate Eve’s personal desire to find like-minded brothers and sisters, perhaps not enough to bring Nova back down to Earth to appreciate the present for what it is. But perhaps enough that at least among coworkers, there’s even remotely enough broken ice to hold a conversation, perhaps enough that if in friendship, Eve may look towards the stars and Nova may look at the self of another.

Of course, this is not simply a character analysis based solely on canonical information, as it is now that I will elaborate (at least from the perspective of DJSS) with some headcanons of my own.

I’ve always been particularly an NSR lurker, not really doing much of actual engagement with the fandom but certainly sitting by the wayside and looking in. A thing that I have seen for folk’s take on a younger Nova is that they weren’t always a supernova one Bunkbed Junction away from going singularity- instead, they were a star. It’s always been one of the larger blue stars, but here I’d like to just go out and make it an O-Class main sequence star and be essentially a miniaturised equivalent; and when I say equivalent, I mean EQUIVALENT!

If you were an object head of maybe a G-Class main sequence star (the star itself significantly smaller than what it would actually be), you’d have on your head a miniature sun that would be a little portable and ultimately dimmer version of our very own Sol (or specifically if you had a G2-Class star which is more accurately our own sun). But if you had the misfortune of having an O-Class (O2-Class in this case for reference) star, with 800000 times the luminosity of the sun you’ve got a very VERY significant issue about just existing if you don’t wear something for the protection of literally anyone and anyTHING with eyes or cameras.

The ‘not yet named Nova’ Nova had to grow up early on wearing a super shaded helmet for the entire time they were star - already a thing one might be self-conscious about - up to and including the very moment they went supernova, another thing I must touch on. Depending on the size and general energy output of a particular celestial object - such as; a star - the point in time in which it collapses in on itself and, in the sake of stars, supernovas changes. And this particular case, let’s change a rather heard of saying for the sake of elaboration; the bigger you are, the faster you fall-

Not only was most of Nova’s early life spent hiding their star for the sake of other’s, anyone from astronomers themselves to any old star object head would say it was simply an inevitability that their star would collapse in on itself and become someone completely different, not a matter of if but when... and most certainly ‘young’ while it’s at it. Insecurities from being beheld a wonder to being seen as weird to even having adults already mourning their existence as a star, Nova may in fact turn to the stars above and retreat from the stars below in order to even begin to attempt to cope with their inevitable demise, embracing the existentialism and relying on their inherent knowledge of the astral sea to pursue a career in education. To teach people not to fear the end, the whatever theorised death of the universe, the collapsing of stars. To say that they shouldn’t be feared and shouldn’t be mourned just because they will change - and they will - and that the supernova that has been the subject of so much misplaced misery is in fact a dispersal of resources that can build to something much greater than the some of its parts.

And they are left unheard in the vast emptiness of space, of the classroom, of the home.

The inevitable happens, sparked early (far too early even for an O-Class) by a numeral amount of factors that would cause their world to spin, the light to bend, and an insurmountable level of stress and pain and misery and insecurity influenced supernova.

Too many lights and sounds and senses, DJ Subatomic Supernova particularly hates the design of Akusuka and Metro Division. Cast Tech, the district they hold Charter to, is low lit for a reason. Natura does not induce the swirling of senses, but DJSS has no particular interest in the gardens, for all the worth they put into Earth as a whole. And Dream Fever, something about the eyes that stare and the oddities that twist and turn.

Perhaps it is not their first choice to take in the work of Eve - of Nadia; the artist behind it all - it is not a reflection of their own story, nor does it reflect where they stand now. But there is meaning, meaning they can take in, take pieces of and relate them back to the past. The past that no longer exists, not if they have anything to say about it, not that they had any say in the first place. The artist Nadia, the diva Eve, the balance of the insecure and the expression. Reveling in the dual tones a much younger Nadia tried to hide (concealer rubbing off to reveal a hot pinkish red), the criticism of the viewer, to make the audience feel what had been felt constantly not entirely that long ago. A desperate plea to find someone that will listen, someone that will understand, someone that will hold their memory and share their story ad nauseam.

Perhaps there is something to share solace in, knowing that back on Earth there was another like Nova themselves seeking to engage to the world beyond them.

Though for different reasons, perhaps the two find even a slight solidarity with each other, whether friends or simple coworkers.

[daisychainsandbowties]

Agreed on ava’s vibes

not my main hc for her (tho honestly my main hc for her is just that regardless of gender identity she likes called beatrice’s boyfriend/girlfriend/husband, etc, as long as she’s being called beatrice’s, and she’s well, nonbinary, no other notes beyond that)

but i love hcing ava as a transmasc woman, simply because transmasc women & transfemme men are such underrated genders

and fuck, now i’m getting teary eyed over the thought of beattice getting to just getting to be and experience gender euphoria and/or contentment

beatrice handing out treats on halloween for the trick or treaters, some kid being like “thanks uh-“ and struggling as they try to guess how they’re supposed to gender bea

“thanks ma’am-sir? miss? mister?” beatrice impulsively shrugging for ? reason, the kid taking it as some sort of cue and finally settling on “thanks mister!” or “thanks mister-miss!” and beatrice can’t stop smiling for the rest of the night

also same hat on the autistic bit, will be sure to check out that fic soon, and also please do elaborate on the autistic beatrice thoughts 👀

i love how autistic vibes beatrice is, not just in the show but in many stuff by the fandom as well, my fav fics are the ones where the autistic beatrice vibes are ^1000

Also yeah, lilith is so nd, love how her story can be so easily read as a metaphor for autism

like lilith’s line about her mother “being unable to accept the reality of the woman in front of her”, sounds an awful lot like a convo between an autistic child & their ableist parent

lilith being successful but being rejected bc she isn’t fitting this unobtainable ideal (being the warrior nun/being neurotypical) that she’s literally died for

seeing & experiencing the world differently (being nd/lilith’s wraith vision), being obviously different from others (being nd/lilith being a demon), desperately trying and failing to repress those differences

but then accepting them making you better than ever (no longer trying to be neurotypical/lilith accepting the demon stuff)

and then aside from the obvious ways lilith’s arc can be read as an allegory, lilith’s whole 🧍‍♀️(menacingly) energy she has so often in the show

like girl obviously has absolutely no idea what to do with herself when she’s not being a menace and it shows

also i saw her dragging her nails and doing yhe nail clack thing on the walls of arc tech and then her noticing what she’s doing and being like 😧 as her subconsciously stimming and it bothering her because she’s used to, supposed to repress those behaviors, but then ever since she came back from the dead, she can’t do the repression anymore, in more ways/aspects than one, and stuff like her stimming & neurodivergency is one of em

like yeah ik she was 😧 about the demon claws ig, but no reason it can’t be both

i am kind of drawn to the idea that Ava expresses her gender in relation to things/people. like yes, absolutely - she is with Beatrice in any (every) capacity.

but also that she approaches gender as something nebulous and shifting and as complicated as dressing sometimes in really feminine clothes because for so long she basically wore a hospital gown so dressing up and having that experience of getting dressed up as a teenager, the weird giddiness of girls sharing their clothes and their accessories and going ‘ah shit, this does look better on you’ - *strips the shirt off and flings it across the room unceremoniously* & also sometimes Ava dressing in a shirt and a suit jacket and looking masc and handsome & really just existing as herself, orbiting gender elipitically so sometimes she’s closer or further away or curving dramatically thru space.

picking the male avatar in video games bc she likes the animation better. being just really drawn to long-haired Link in Breath of the Wild. like yeah, Ava’s relation to gender as ‘idk?’ but in a typically Ava way which is also somehow effortlessly compelling & honest & true. 

tearing up at the image of Bea giving out halloween candy with Ava next to her going ‘make them sing a song’ but Beatrice just giving way too much to each person & complimenting their costumes and taking whatever form of address comes her way which - yes - varies wildly bc she’s rocking short hair & half the time comes to the door with the hood of her hoodie pulled up (by Ava, who is doing ‘hood surprise attacks’ in the spirit of halloween). the peacefulness of that image & gender as peaceful…

gender + autism being so good and Beatrice getting to escape from the rigours of social gendered-ness & just exist without being pressed into these various contortions of gender. something about authenticity and being as an act of radical self-love. also defiance. 

oh yeah i def think that Lilith’s whole story is very neurodivergent-coded. it might be another ‘casper can’t write neurotypical’ but my ligaments Lilith is veeeery neurodivergent. doesn’t like touch as a general rule but likes it very much from specific people. the way she is just in general echoing so many autistic experiences.

the way that she occupies space inconsistently and uneasily. the very visible ‘signs of otherness’ in her demonic wings and the scales and i guess i’m thinking about masking and her inability to mask. she is consistently outside looking in, relegated to the borderlands of the narrative.

how i think in s1 she is so wonderfully alternating between this playfulness (lounging on the car outside the orphanage, her laughter when she and Mary are beating each other to hell, the way she interacts with Ava - 'it's a stick') and then her absolute intensity at other times. how revealing that is of the fact that there is a Lilith stacked underneath the mask-version she has so carefully construed to help her and keep her safe. what i am raised to be vs who i am.

how soft she is and how caring with those she loves, & i think how the narrative itself misunderstands her (deliberately) and how we gradually see that NOTHING she does is really selfish, but that she’s let down - so often - by those who are supposed to be her family, and because she masks so well her needs aren’t appreciated. i think ppl take care of Beatrice and Camila and they don’t take care of her in the same way. she ends up alone and isolated. she is tricked by people, used by people (Jillian, Adriel, Duretti)

this is a mess of thoughts but just how she is constructed, and how much it speaks to being an ill-fitting thing. not fully belonging in a world built for others and around their needs. how she clings to the first person to acknowledge her difference “you are something entirely new”. & her energy of i think very badly wanting to reach out and be SEEN but not knowing how, being overshadowed and forgotten and discarded.

how i think in a way she saw Beatrice as the Mary to her Shannon, what it must have been like to see that fall apart in front of her, to watch Beatrice go with Ava after the Vatican. to be finally divested of every hope she had for her life. 

& i am always every day feral about Lilith’s background. i am always tempted to hc her as an only child - last scion of my house & so on - but also thinking that from the very beginning she is not living up to expectations. i do hc her as having some learning disabilities growing up, & her mother making her suffer for it, terribly. the convo they have sounds like an old wound being picked open.

Lilith growing up with not one person in her life ever believing in her, being sent to the slaughterhouse anyway. the expendable one - the one we shall not allow to have children. Lilith with cousins who share her name but not her fate. so she makes everything about the halo. trying to fit into this box (coffin) that has been built for her since birth. dying for it, and even that is not enough. 

i really wish we could have seen Lilith grow to love and accept who she is. like yes, the fact that she is framed as liminal by the narrative, caught between two worlds, two sides of a conflict.

she is neither/or. her scales are spectres of inner difference, but they are also beautiful. Lilith learning that what she sees and feels and what she is - they’re all different but not bad or worse. Lilith using her demon sight to help the OCS. learning that she doesn’t need to be the halo-bearer (but also that she doesn’t need to be valuable. she just needs to exist).

Lilith being permitted to take up space and time and energy, instead of folding herself away to nothing. the teleportion as a metaphor for self-erasure, for masking and making oneself still and silent.

writing Lilith as neurodivergent (probably autistic +) is really beautiful because it opens up all of these possibilities for exploring what is gorgeous about neurodivergent existence, and what it means to unmask after YEARS of suffocating inside of a body that was controlled by the expectations of others. & let’s not forget that when you start stimming after not being allowed to for your entire life it DOES feel scary and it does make you uncomfortable because it sets off alarm bells and there are a million instances of people saying ‘stop it that’s annoying’ or ‘what is wrong with you’ & Lilith’s initial horror being THAT, too, but how eventually it will be okay and good and easy. 

i just LOVE Lilith to pieces bc her whole story just aches but it’s also this incredibly difficult and worthwhile journey towards self-acceptance. & when you start to see HER slip through the cracks of the walls she’s put between herself and all of the things that have the potential to hurt her it’s just searingly beautiful and SHE is searingly beautiful and neurodivergence is poetic and fantastic and good.

anyway tysm for these thoughts. i rlly appreciate them.

[khepiari]

Hello, children of lusty void. I need to vent about censorship nonsense brewing up!

[first published as note on a fic of mine that has age gap and child marriage as the plot of romance, this here is an updated version of the author’s note for more people.]

Before the TiffnanyG election debacle, my OTP, and my fellow OTP fandom had been caught between pro-ship vs antis and the whole age gap is problematic idiocy.

Recently, I came across same problems on other fandoms where posts and accounts were created that have been exclusively targeting shippers, creators and consumers on Twitter and Instagram and Tumblr which have “problematic ship” dynamics namely characters with age gaps or have NSFW and other such things.

Look if you have faced bullying because of your ship preference, do not engage for your own mental well-being, report the account, share the account details with your fellow friends from the same ship fandom and do a mass reporting, and don't stop at that, send email to your respective social media companies and take screenshots at every step of it and keep it. In case you find no action has been taken, you can use the screenshots to make your case stronger when you re-report.

Shipping is a personal choice and no one has the right to ship-shame you, if these bullies can't distinguish between fiction and fictional characters and reality, then they are definitely in need of classes on critical reading and thinking. Please read this to understand what Proship means!

Fandom is meant to be a safe space you curate by your own choice where people with similar interest communicate, create, collaborate and fiction is the best way to explore one's ideas; sometimes those ideas can be cringy, problematic, vile or outright scary and that's okay and that’s why Dead Dove: Do Not Eat exists. Because we are channelling our ideas, thoughts and traumas and curiosities and thriving towards a path of self awareness with help of our fan art, fanfic, fic prompts, podfic, fmvs, amvs, animatics, songfic, character role-playing, cosplaying, writing threadfic or just engaging in speculative discussion or just vibing.

Thinking is not a crime, writing or creating creative work is not a crime. As long as you do not harm people in real life or practice the evil elements of your imagination in reality; you are fine as a person. Trust me; my mind is a wonderland of gore and angsty stories where I want characters to burn someone or declaw an animal for the story I am telling, and I have never gone and tied up a lover of mine with leather belts and poured burning liquid wax on them just because I imagined it and assumed it is a language of love, and I have many pets as well whom I will never hurt.

We should never shame shippers or fangirl, fanboys, fanperson for their OTP or headcanons, they are harming no one, if you don't like something, just ignore it!

Before ao3 existed, reading fanfics on Fanfiction dot net was playing a Russian Roulette. All the fics basically came with K, K+, T, M, MA, and it came with a warning Don’t Like it Don’t Read it! And then came the purge, overnight MA content was gone! And worse things happened, people stopped rating their insane stories! Instead of preventing people from reading triggering stuff with the rating, the rating system was used to censor people out and their work deleted!

Having Ao3’s tagging system is a privilege that has been built on years of trial and errors and loss of many stories! We are literally standing on a graveyard of purged and exiled stories! And it is a fanperson/fandom’s duty to make sure that you select your tags wisely and read the tags and story summary. Even after that, if people choose to violate the barricades put to protect them, why should the creators be blamed? [Read this]

And it is an awful and unhealthy attitude to engage with fanworks with so much hate, why would you waste your time hounding people of ships, ficwriters or fanartists you don't like? You cannot change the world with meanness. And how is sending CSEM (child sexual exploitation material) against Ao3 volunteers helping the cause of your protest?

I can understand why many of them oppose and demand content moderation, because of age difference, complicated and complex topics that need supervision and proper understanding before a person delves into them, and of course the NSFW stuff. First, they are fictional. Second, each creator changes or adds their own details in their creation.

Each writer can deal with age gap stories or any kind of topic the way they interpret it! Each artist will put their own twist to NSFW. Soulmate AUs sound loveliest, but they can be a horror story of about predestination vs free will! Yes, Soulmate AU horror story can make people uncomfortable because of the way it is written. Similarly, body possession trope can be a story of transition and self acceptance instead of presenting it as an invasion of body, or it can be written as a story of change!

Context brings clarity. Proship and Antis are by-product of same fandom. So how does these divides crop up? It is simple, people interpret things from different contextual standpoints. Many factors play role into the whole process of thought making; hence the terminology Thought Process. No two minds think the same because no two minds process the same information in the same way. Two people from the same fandom might come to a same fanfic; one for SMUT, while another comes to elongate the established emotional relation they have with the story. One can hate the fanfic for being NSFW and feel it is a corruption of their beloved story, and second others will love it for the NSFW because the OG Work didn’t have anything, and they wanted to read it. Both can be right and both can be wrong at the same time. Contextual reading/consumption is common, it is critically thinking and examining stories what makes aware brains. And by principle I am against censorship, because someone’s world view or imagined discomfort should not take away someone else’s right to express. Even if I don’t like a work of fiction, I will defend its existence. Words on paper [I mean all mediums] don’t hurt people, people hurt people.

Difference lies in how a story or art work is created, and if I had written a Soulmate AU Horror Story with tinted lenses, it definitely could be a read as a predatory story. I understand the concern about running into things that are “bad” in fiction! But not every work of fiction owes people comfort. We write the stories that we think needs to be told. Everyone has a right to be concerned, hence we think like this— “If we don’t let 10 years old into an A+ film in theatre, why should they be exposed to A+ stuff in words and artworks?”

Hence, the tags have been put up for better navigation. Hence, we have warnings and rating on Netflix screen when we turn on Squid Games. You cannot read a Mature story on Ao3 without consenting to read it. Many will argue —“But the trigger warnings and tags were not properly done.” No, you can’t expect every author to tag every possible thing that can trigger a reader. The trigger warnings are in place to give you a heads-up, a moment to understand what you are getting into, and should be used it as indication. No writer or creator wants to hurt you, we all write and create something because we love and want to share joy. How are people reacting to books in real life? Do you think Little Red Riding Hood should have a trigger warning for people with Lupophobia or Thanatophobia because Red Riding gets eaten by the wolf? And what about its rendition at the hands of Angela Carter, where beastiliy is written and printed in book form? Shape of Water has Monsterfucking, people knew about a monster from teaser, but not about the fucking. Like life, literature [including fanfics] are full of surprises, and we might not like many of them, it is part of growing up not just 16 turning 17 then 18, then 19; no you have to face shitty stuff your entire life because growing up is painful. And not liking something is a natural reaction, sometimes the dislike is overwhelming, and turns into rage and revulsion and yet you should not demand censorship!

Censorship kills creativity. If we give an inch to the voices of “but what about this and this group of people who suffered?” we open a crack to a system that is meant to preserve. The group who suffered, suffered at the hands of real physical people. A book murdered no one until it was held by a hand that saw it as a weapon, similarly reading/watching a “vile” fanfic or fanart could damage no one in real life, because there is no direct action and reaction that left consequences. Archive of Our Own is an ARCHIVE. It is meant to digitally preserve everything ever created in it, and slowly they are bringing in other fan works that are in danger of extinction as more and more people are capitalizing on the internet like it is real estate. And Ao3 was never meant to be the only fanspace! Tumblr used to be one, look what the purge did! When you implant censorship, you are pushing creators who are already marginalized to the extremes end of the internet. As Kis aka blow_me_a_kiss on Twitter said, Ao3 is not a business that needs a manager for people to complain about every time they run into things that don’t align with certain world views, it is a collective. This is how things and institutes and systems are meant to run publicly! You have to learn to curate your own reading/entertainment lists, and you really can’t appreciate the good without having your face slammed by the bad. Why should you or anyone need a pre-formed judgement about things they consume; reviews, kudos, comments, praises are all there to show what people felt after coming in contact with a creation, it is not a universally common experience! Hence, some people love Inception and hail it as masterpiece, while some people like me find it very basic storytelling. You have to have learn to face the bad! You must. Censorship is not about protecting the vulnerable! It never was, censorship has always been about exercising power over the vulnerable one. It takes a lot of courage and time for creators to present their beloved works to the world. Remember what happened to Isabal Fall? All she did was write a story, and people’s inbuilt fears and apprehensiveness turned into bullying which they projected on her, and she was forced to out herself! The same happened to Becky Albertalli author of Simon Vs The Homo Sapien Agenda.

I request you all not to engage with so much hate, I have been shipper/fanperson since I was 13 and been active on internet since 18! I began working on fics when my first ship was a rare pair, I am 29 today, and it is one of the biggest ships; biggest queer ships in my fandom!

Because of this OTP, I have made many friends and read amazing fictions and seen glorious fanarts and doujinshi and watch cosplayers do beautiful concept photography.

Please do not be mean and rude and do not bully people because you don't like something.

Death threats are not cool, they hurt, and can suck away a joy of participation from people. Even if the account you are bullying has an anime/manga image with no real name, there is a real person behind the screen.

Be kind.

Be kind.

Be fucking aggressively kind!

[wiserodin032402]

my 21 hour long video essay on people who make ‘realistic’ D&D plugins

by someone who worked on one of said ‘realistic’ D&D plugins.

You want to play Warhammer Fantasy RPG 2nd or 4th Edition, or Symbaroum, or The Witcher RPG, or Zweihander if you’re a bootlicker. Please stop lying to yourself and making whole-ass RPGs for free.

I fucking despise D&D but please understand that mechanics exist in the way they do for a reason. It’s not a good reason, but let’s take it from the top:

1. Hit Points AKA Meat Points AKA shit morons fight over that don’t matter

HP is metric of measuring how much you can fail. In the world of D&D failing is being in melee combat.

No for real in D&D throughout the editions everything is better at melee combat than you, usually because it’s bigger, which means it has higher strength so it hits more and deals more damage. The only time this wasn’t the case was in D&D 4e because it had roles which dictated a bunch of stuff about your character so being good at something meant you picked the right role.

So your hit points measure how many times you can make mistakes, which is to say being hit and taking damage. They start off low at low levels and increase at an entirely random rate depending your edition, but hypothetically you get more so you can survive stronger encounters out in the world.

This is the part of the game that’s actually been optimized by developers so it’s like, semi-functional. It’s so fucking functional that there is a literal table for generic monsters in the DMG page 273 of the 5e PHB that will let you wing monsters on the fly (this looks awful scroll really quickly)

These are like reasonably competent numbers (though they kinda suck ass to fight) and are roughly adjusted to the DPR of the average 5e party that isn’t sandbagging. Again, only part of the game that like, functions.

But people just insist in sticking their dick in it.

Every time they either massively reduce HP, make it so there’s an alternative type of HP that also goes down that you have less of which kills you, or they just add more stuff that kills you, or they massively increase damage.

This is for the sake of ‘realism’ because ‘how are you getting better at tanking sword blows’ but nobody ever applies the ideas in reverse, like ‘how are you stabbing through full plate’ or ‘how are you hurting a creature made entirely of stone with a rapier’. Sometimes the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings trilogy comes up, as if D&D is a game about being Tolkienesque heroes, and they all conveniently ignore the scene with the cave troll where the entire fellowship team up and beat it to death in roughly twice the time it takes for the average D&D party to carve up a similar creature.

So they want you to be able to fuck up less and take the consequences for it. The problem is that the game is founded on randomness, and especially in 5e, there’s very few ways to ‘rig’ outcomes without spells and magic. In order to make HP more ‘realistic’ there needs to be ways to avoid failing. In a game like Warhammer or GURPS you’d use cover, employ ranged combat, aim your weapons carefully, and attempt to attack from stealth or ambush your targets, aiming for vital points to deal with them swiftly. While cover exists in 5e, there are no hard stealth rules, and ambushing is a uh...

TOTAL NONSTARTER OH BOY

Which means that it’ll take up more design space (which we will cover in a bit)

Oh and nobody applies these changes to monsters for the most part, which means player characters have a bad habit of dying due to leveling up.

2. Armor Class (you are a boat)

Yeah say it with me everyone ‘this mechanic is from an obscure game about civil war ironclads and your characters are boats’. Fun fact, armor class hypothetically works in 5e and this wasn’t fucking intentional. A lot of people noticed early on that to-hit numbers as you leveled vs AC was a steady 65% hit chance, which was like super cool and modular and totally a departure from 3rd edition where numbers got big n’ stuff, which made it good, and it meant you didn’t need magic items to keep your hit rate competitive. That was called Bounded Accuracy. Bounded Accuracy is a fucking lie and you need magic items because the upper half of the monster manual will laugh you out of the room if you aren’t rocking a +15 to hit and magic weapons. Literally, it’s such a lie that it’s disproven in the PHB, since Archery Style gives a bonus to hit outside the normal hit rate.

Which leads me into the first part of why people have so much of a hard time with AC: morons give their players magic items, surprised the magic items make their players powerful. D&D has a lot of AC boosting magic items, and this is intentional, as AC is your primary defense against damage. That’s why there’s spell that gives a +5 bonus to AC on reaction. What people don’t get is if you give players a magic suit of armor, a magic shield, and a ring of deflection, that you’ve basically given them the medieval equivalent of a wearable bunker and a magic force field against anything that would harm them. You’ve made the player linearly more powerful. now instead of having an AC of 20 they have an AC of 24 and that means a lot, that’s a 40% survivability increase, and it crosses a lot of important thresholds that mean mundane people don’t stand a chance against you (not that they did anyways).

The second part of why people are morons about AC is that AC doesn’t make sense outside of an abstracted context. Dexterity (how good you are with your hands) makes you better at dodging attacks with your whole body somehow so you get an AC bonus from that, but if you wear heavy armor you also get AC from that, and that doesn’t make sense because you’re not harder to hit so much as you’re harder to hurt. Except, you know, fighting in plate is about getting your opponent to the ground (prone, which coincidentally gives advantage), grappling them, and then stabbing a bunch of tiny little gaps on their body until you do enough damage to make them stop or make them bleed out. Those gaps are coincidentally very hard to hit normally.

And you know, actually, when you get down to it, dodging is a horrible way to avoid attacks, it takes a lot of energy and is tiring, it moves you around a lot and puts you out of position often. Often you want to deflect or parry incoming attacks while attacking with your own attacks. And if those attacks get through, it’d just be better to be wearing a suit of armor that just...deflects the blows away from all those tiny narrow gaps in the armor by how the armor is built.

But anyways clearly armor class doesn’t make sense because the armor preventing my attack from getting through...wouldn’t...prevent my attack from getting through if I just hit the armor. It’s the Morrowind argument of ‘I made the models intersect why didn’t I do damage’ but in tabletop format jesus christ.

Look this guy hit dead on and did fuckall, you can see the sword fucking bending backwards because he also fucked the edge alignment.

See, funnily enough this was less abstracted in 3rd edition, since you had your total AC, your AC without your Dexterity Bonus or any other dodging based bonuses (Flatfooted) and your AC without your armor bonuses (Touch) which certain special attacks targeted but you know, babies going out with bathwater.

The reason it all works like this is so the game runs faster, by the way. Rolling to-hit vs a semi-static target number means you can run the game faster and spend less hours of your life doing the combat and more of your life roleplaying. You wouldn’t get that from how long combat usually takes but that’s because even before we had phones to be distracted by people would be playing smash bros at the session while other people did their turns. Otherwise you can get too granular with a system like this, because of all the raw factors that can go into a fight. You need a level of abstraction to keep shit snappy.

This isn’t helped by the fact that 3rd edition onward had Damage Reduction which is such a fiddly fucking mechanic that everyone immediately latches onto as a replacement for armor

3. There aren’t a bunch of other mechanics to the combat because morons rightly disliked how badly 3rd edition managed those options

3rd edition dropped the ball. I have two posts people like to give me notifications about. But tl;dr it has a whole ass system where you could do combat maneuvers in place of attacks so you could do cool shit like take a dude’s sword, stab them with it, and throw it at someone else. It just took a billion feats to get there and you needed to be high enough level that that kind of trick didn’t much matter.

So to make D&D combat more realistic you have to re-implement all the shit that was taken out and put on the Battlemaster Fighter only, but now that we have a dichotomy of ‘Fighter who identifies as being good at fighting’ (Battlemaster), ‘Fighter who identifies as being bad at D&D’ (Champion), and ‘Fighter that identifies as being good at D&D’ (Eldritch Knight), you have to re-implement these features without shitting on Battlemaster.

So in order to make the game meaningfully interesting you have to struggle to re-implement all of these mechanics

Which you aren’t gonna do or do particularly well, and it won’t fix the fact that the Wizard player will still fuck your game over a barrel and not call back the next night.

So why the fuck are we here

I’m not one to victim blame but you clicked read more.

We’re here because you should play a different fucking game if you want realism. I’m serious. Fuck like, I could summarize my entire blog with this:

I keep seeing people wasting massive amounts of design talent on a game that will not love them back, toiling away miserably trying to make a game into something it’s not. Also because D&D’s core assumptions of shit are flawed and built on horrible legacy bullshit, but that’s more shit for another post.

D&D is your bargain bin scaling fantasy game. It doesn’t do anything else:

TL;DR

[riseofthecommonwoodpile]

"i don't think fracturing communities into ever-smaller microlabels, implying vastly different community needs, and enforcing rigid distinctions between them is really as helpful as you think it is."

I will have to disagree with you here. This is one of the main point exclusionists use and it doesn't sound right. You're not one of them I'm pretty sure, so it's probably a misunderstanding.

Microlabels are not "fracturing" communities. They're giving voice and space to people who don't feel like they fit in the mainstream. That's the whole reason why Queer as a community exists, why MOGAI is a thing, too (that's also the reason why "queer is a slur" is a thing, because it's too broad and fits too much individuality and self-expression, and "mogai is cringe" is a thing, because of its micro identities feel like a threat, it's too freaky and abnormal and not like the palatable LGBTs).

There's more to people than being Lesbian, Gay, Bi or Trans. Some people don't like being the + in the LGBT+ and they have all the right to come up with their own terms, words and labels, create their own spaces and have their own rigid definitions. LGBT people have rigid definitions too, that's why microlabels exist.

We can be strong as a community even if we have individual needs, and strengthening individuals so they can find what works better for them, strengthen communities. It can work from the top to bottom, of course, the community influencing individuals. And it can also work from the bottom to top, where individuals influence the community. One thing doesn't negate the other, or invalidate them. Trying to gatekeep or exclude people does it.

Ok, I wasn't gonna respond to this, but I guess that I'm going to, because I like to put way too much effort into things that I should really just let go.

To start, I don't understand what you mean by "exclusionist" here. Excluding...who, exactly? The exclusionary, gatekeeping people you are speaking of and throwing me in with (which, although you say i'm probably "not one of them", the rest of the ask certainly implicates me of being), what are they gatekeeping? It seems like you're saying they're keeping people who don't explicitly identify as one of the Big Four letters (L, G, B, or T) out of the queer community, which is. idk. a kinda wild claim? Who precisely is being pushed out of the community by me saying "hey it's kinda weird when some pan people claim that bi people don't like nb people"?

If you're talking about a group of gatekeepers who don't think, say, people who use MOGAI terms should be part of the same LGBT community, yeah, those people sure do sound shitty. Never met one literally anywhere but online though. I've been an out trans lesbian for 12 years, lived in Illinois, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Washington, and Colorado during that time, and have that entire time only really socialized in LGBT / queer or queer-adjacent spaces, and I can genuinely say I have *never* met a person who, if you said you identified as pan, would try to stop you from being in that space. Again, I'm sure those people do exist, and if you encountered them IRL, that fucking blows and you shouldn't have been treated that way, I'm sorry. But that's such a wildly specific and small group of people that you are placing a huge amount of importance and blame upon.

In a similar "let's please talk about the real world" sentiment, saying that MOGAI labels are rejected by people because they are seen as "too freaky and abnormal and not like the palatable LGBTs"...holy fucking shit. I cannot leave the house without being stared at, and that's actually just been getting *worse* as the conservative attacks on trans people (and especially trans women) ramp up. Like half of the states in the US are being inundated with laws attempting or succeeding at criminalizing aspects of trans-ness. The overturn of Roe recently just opened the door to the reinstatement of anti-sodomy laws in 20-fucking-22, and multiple elected officials have already said they would support or enforce such laws. The idea that a gay trans woman is more socially palatable than a demisexual person is like, completely untethered from reality, I apologize, there's no nicer way to say it.

People 100% do have the right to come up with their own terms! I have no problem at all with that, absolutely none. Having a word to describe yourself is good, and I support all of them having a home in the whatever-you-want-to-call-this community. The issue with micro-labelling in the way I am speaking of it is that it can cause people to fall so far down the rabbit hole of specificity that they become atomized instead of seeing themselves as part of a larger movement, a larger history. And, not to assume, but the way you are speaking of categories like LGBT as having "rigid definitions" completely backs up this claim, because that is wildly, wildly, *wildly* ahistorical. The incredibly rigid definitions you think they have are recent, and have coincided with an increased desire to make those identities marketable in terms of politics, culture, and consumption. They have been made rigid in order to enable them to be sold back to you.

"Lesbian means you are a woman who is only sexually and romantically attracted to other women" is an invention of the last 20 years, if that. For a long time it was a term to refer to any women who had any intimate relationship with other women, to any degree. it's why, if you listen to any older dykes, i've never seen them phased by ideas like "bi lesbians", "he/him lesbians", etc. etc., because the term was purposefully open-ended. It spoke of an axis of one's romantic or sexual life, but it didn't close it off. It was supposed to be a beginning, a breaking through of the walls of straight society, not a new set of walls.

And it was the same with the other terms as well, with gay just in the last 100 years meaning everything from crossdressers to only men who are penetrated to only men who romantically like other men to men who like both men and women to men who just like men and a million variations in between and beyond. Trans has mutated so many times because its definition is inherently contextually defined against the current mainstream treatment of gender in society, which is constantly and forever changing. The "T" today we say means transgender, and we say it means specifically anyone who identifies as a gender other than the gender they were assigned at birth. But what if we went back in time? What if we mean "transsexual", or "transvestite"? Do we mean pre-op, post-op, non-op, non-passing, passing, man, woman, other, some, all, none? What about drag kings and queens, what about effeminate gay men, what about butch dykes who go by Daddy? These definitions are not rigid. You've been tricked by their mainstreaming into thinking they are. You are being sold something, and you'd do well to stop buying it.

Ultimately, this is the criticism I started with. Rigid definitions and the creation of ever-more-individualized microlabels, yes, may help someone understand what they are feeling, when those words can be so hard to find. But it can also isolate them. Let us bring in the bi / pan distinction once more. What is gained by either bi or pan people from harsh lines, harsh distinctions, rigid definitions, separate spaces? Any differences they may or may not have, aren't all of their lives made richer by having other people in them? Not a single one of them has had the same experiences as the other, and the point is not to try and match one's exact neurological state in that moment as close as possible to someone else's. The point is to get support, to learn, to receive and give care. If we are talking about community, communities are for that support, are for care, are for helping and advocating with others, for group action. If we want to have an actual community and not just one that snipes at each other constantly, we should be creating a bigger tent, not a tent city defined by ever-ongoing mitotic individuation.

There's no way for me to say this nicely, so I apologize, but this ask reads really intensely like someone who is a.) very unfamiliar with queer history and the history of these labels (or the modern ways in which they are used), and b.) is Very Online. You seem like you mean well, and you do care about making sure everyone is heard, and that's exactly the right attitude. Use any label you want, use it however you want- if it works for you, then that is ultimately why it's there, and why it matters. But do not use those labels as ways to define yourself only in opposition against other labels you (hopefully) care about. Ultimately, if we want to bring it back to my original post that inspired any of this, the reason I really dislike when people say that pan is a more inclusive label (by which they mean it literally includes more people under its umbrella of attraction) than bi is that it gives one group an identity at the expense of the other. This is what I mean by fracturing communities, and this is the exact thing I dislike about so much online discourse about these terms and labels.

That said, if you just get offline and meet real communities of real people, none of this matters to people who aren't internet poisoned like you and i, so that's always a nice comfort.

[unboundwanderers]

♚♚♚♚♚ [ i get a chance to compliment you on main ? LET'S GO. i don't think i say it enough despite how much we've screamed at each other over plots and writing, but i admire you greatly. i know literally nothing about the series and you have pulled ( read : dragged ) me into it blind, making me fall head first with your characters, your writing, your lore. i've never met anyone who's so creative and talented at lore and world building as you are ! i know i scream at you A LOT whenever we talk and whenever you hurt me with our ships ( which is A LOT ) but i have so so much fun fleshing out all our pairings, all our ships, all the ideas and plots, the adventures and the small moments. you make writing with you really easy bc you pour your heart and soul into your characters and plots, it's so easy to get lost and absorbed in them bc you make them feel real. you give them life and you make all my muses a part of your muses' world and that's what make me love all of them all the more.

thank you for blessing me with your characters and writing, and your amazing self ! we've literally written books by this point but i'm looking forward to see more of our characters and ships ! could never get enough of them ! stay amazing fam ! love you lots ! ]

Pictured above: Binary pitching a ship to Hina that will go on to infect her brain.

Can I please talk about Hina- I'm going to talk about Hina, now. Sorry, Dash. PLEASE DO NOT SAY YOU ADMIRE ME GREATLY, HINA- BECAUSE I WOULD LITERALLY DIE FOR YOU. Hina is such a good writer, you guys, and I don't think Hina gives herself NEARLY as much Credit as she deserves for simply EXISTING. Hina's WARMTH and Energy are literally something that me and @kemikorosu THRIVE on. We're addicted to Hina, so much so that we literally kick our legs when Hina types in our group chat. We are simply obsessed with her--- BUT WHY IS THAT?? Well, LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY FRIEND, HINA!!!!

Hina has CHANGED my FUNDAMENTAL understanding of how Mun perceives their muse. Hina quite literally changed how I see the creative writing process when it comes to forming ships, plotlines, and interactions. She has such a unique take on all of her characters that often it leaves me (and my characters) BREATHLESS. I think Hina attaches herself to a character and gets into their brain, and the way Hina can GUSH about the way a character thinks, how they act, how they FEEL. You'd swear it's because her characters COME ALIVE and TAKE CONTROL of her. She is in tune with her portrayal. I don't think ANY of MY DOCTOR's would be NEARLY as accessible to roleplay with if not for Hina's influence on them.

Hina and I started DMing after I went through her wishlist prompts and harassed her for like two days until we got a thread going. We moved over to discord, made our server- and all of our ships just existed in that isolated space (to the point where we just STRAIGHT UP have a whole fic series we're getting ready to upload--) THE POINT IS IS THAT HINA CAME IN AND STOLE THE BRAINCELL and it was INSANE. I think Hina and I have crafted some of the most engaging takes on the Tropes portrayed in Doctor Who. So much so that sometimes I get sad that Yelan and Goth aren't canon parts of Doctor Who because their TV run would be SIMPLY AMAZING. Never have I met a muse who paired so perfectly then Yelan and Goth.

PLEASE DON'T THANK ME FOR BLESSING YOU HINA, THANK YOU FOR BLESSING ME BECAUSE YOU'RE ONE OF THE MOST TALENTED WRITERS I'VE EVER MADE AND IT HAS BEEN A PRIVILEGE TO WRITE WITH YOU.

Hina literally stormed into my house, knocked me over the head and became one of my Best Friends in the span of a MONTH. We've been writing for four months. I've adored EVERY second.

[mommalosthermind]

Gonna rant a bit:

Stumbled across another post demanding everyone who follows that person put their age into their bio upon pain of being blocked. This is to prevent minors from looking at their posts.

So. To protect the tiny innocent little babes. You are telling them. To put their age. Online.

You are telling minors to tell you they are a minor.

You are trying to force minors to out themselves and claiming it’s for *your* safety? I’m???

Fandom, we’ve made a shape, but I’m not sure it’s a fucking circle.

I cannot stress this enough, if you are a minor do not tell anyone, literally fucking anyone, your age, your real name, or your location. You owe no one that information. Handing that out is dangerous.

Become a fucking cryptid, kid, tell no one shit about you.

You are now an OC.

You have heterochromatic eyes, magic powers, are older than the sun, live in a teapot, and when you see preps you put up your middle finger at them (but not really because you are laying low. You are quiet. So quiet. Shh. Leave little love notes where you will, but you are being sneaky! So sneaky. Because the first rule of infiltration is shut the fuuuuuck uuuuuup oh my god I am so serious.)

I’ve got a teen and a preteen beginning to feel out unfettered access to the internet, and I don’t really think I’d internalized how drastically different kids’ experiences are now. Full fucking offense, but rule numero uno for my monsters being allowed to more actively engage in fandom was lie your ass off. Second was be kind, be kind, be kind, and third was the block button and the back buttons are your new besties, use them well and often.

Fourth, because these are my kids, was that I expect them to come talk to me when they run into weird or upsetting or baffling shit. Literally whenever.

Oh hidden minors of tumblr: find a friend, a sibling, an actual adult in the real world you can comfortably talk to about shit you find in the insanity of the internet, I’m begging you.

My entrance onto the great wild internet was “Everyone there wants to murder you and eat your eyes, so like, stick to these two websites and nowhere else.” I…did not stay there. I did however develop a fascination with the screensaver and the fuckin…. Pinball thing. Solitaire. Oh, and fanfic. Just. So much fanfic. Literally fucking saved my sanity, by the way, by giving me a place to just. Exist.

Yes, yes, people have a right to curate their spaces and it makes some people uncomfortable to know kids are looking at their shit.

There are kids looking at your shit, man. This is what kids do. This is what I did. Those sites that required a fuckin’ birthday or a special password? I was absolutely not over majority. “Adult only” spaces are valid and all, but please, please stop demanding kids tell you their exact fucking ages.

And for the random ‘wow, so you want your kids to have access to things I dislike and have deemed bad? How bad of a parent are you?” I’d like to point out that the first time I read sex it was in an actual physical novel that my mother handed to me— a gift from one of her nursing home clients. It was. Bad. So much sexual violence. Extremely graphic. Fucked me up for a while, and when I tried to talk to the adult in my life, I was told I was being a little bitch and just wasn’t mature enough to handle a little romance.

I was like. Ten. Maybe.

What I want? Is to know that my kids have a safe space. I am that space. And I’m teaching them how to turn their online experience into as happy a bubble as I can.

Kids are gonna find fucked up shit. There are ways upon ways to make it better but this whole ‘you HAVE to put this personal information in your header because, *I*, some random blog on Tumblr, have decreed it a requirement for Being Able To Look At Me’ is. Maybe not it.

Tl;dr: if you are a kid: shush about it. Be kind, be quiet, hang out. If you are an adult, do not. Do not tell kids to give you personal information. Just. Don’t.