#was just kind of thinking about dragons as narrative tools and how people of marginalized groups frequently identify with them

[coyoteworks]

IN CASE YOU MISSED THE MEMO: HERE'S THE THING ABOUT DRAGONS

[thedandelionresistance]

Also idk how to tell you that anything depicted in fiction that would be harmful IRL is not in fact harmful in fiction because the DEFINITION of fiction is that anything in it DOESN'T EXIST AND DIDN'T ACTUALLY HAPPEN.

At this point I minimally expect anyone who believes in that bullshit to also not read anything with violence, murder, emotional manipulation, gaslighting, or anything else that would be wrong in real life. I saw someone say, and I quote, "incest, abuse and pederasty doesn't magically become ok because 'iTs just flcTion'. Okay then, by that logic, neither does physical abuse or violence of any kind. You better not be reading anything that even includes spanking because that's just eroticized physical abuse according to your logic, right? In fact, dom/sub dynamics are just eroticized controlling behavior which is abusive, right? /s

(Honestly, they do seem the type to be against even dubcon and need every sex scene to be preceded by an explicit healthy negotiation scene, since they don't seem to understand how erotica functions. The real irony is that they claim to be pro-sex-work and anti-rad//fem while spewing bog-standard anti-kink rad//fem shit about the kinks that make them uncomfy-wumpy.)

Be morally and logically consistent or admit that you cherrypick your values to suit your reactionism.

Anyway, as an actual victim of the things they claim to be against, they are in fact nor helping and actually hurting victims - but they don't care, we're just a convenient rhetorical tool to browbeat people they don't like with.

It's almost as if someone fucking a fictional dragon character and someone fucking a fictional character under their species' cultural age of majority are both equally NONEXISTENT. It truly is "video games cause violence" all over again, complete with fake stats pulled right out of their asses. You can be as uncomfortable or disturbed by the subject as you like, doesn't make it wrong. You're on the same side as the people who want to censor ALL narratives of sexual abuse - including works like the award-winning Speak, the book It's Perfectly Normal which has actively given child victims the words and knowledge to describe that they were being SA'd to safe adults, and those who consider any queer material "sexual" and therefore "not safe for kids" - like the also award-winning Genderqueer.

Oh, but you say it's only if it's sexualized/romanticized? These kinds of things hit marginalized people first and hardest, and conservatives rely on people like you falling for their rhetoric to silence actual victims and our narratives and material that is healing and helpful to us, because that's their end goal and the logical endpoint of banning certain topics in fiction. Also, victims shouldn't have to perform suffering in their narratives for you for them to be acceptable.

(Even if "sexualized/romanticized", it still is not the same as the depicted things actually happening to real people in real life. There's a difference between massive traumatizing harm being done to a real person and the same being DEPICTED happening to a figment of someone's imagination. And no, it doesn't make people more likely to commit those heinous acts and if you think it does we DEFINITELY need to not let you read anything with violence in it in case that belief is projection of your own inner susceptibility to acting however you see fictional characters act.)

This is without even getting into the people who believe that books and fics where two underage characters have consensual sex are predatory and wrong, or underage actual people being attracted to characters their own ages are predatory and wrong, or any other ACTUAL REAL POINT I've seen people who are pro-censorship make.

DEPICTIONS of "incest, abuse, and pederasty" are not any of those things. If you believe they are, you should also believe that depictions of murder are as bad as killing someone (or minimally advocating for it), and are therefore unacceptable to depict in fiction. If you believe sexual violence is uniquely wrong to write about in fiction, aside from helping silence actual victims and our narratives ESPECIALLY if we don't perform our suffering and trauma enough, you also haven't unpacked your own puritanical views about kinks engaged in by consenting adults, whether the engagement is reading/writing erotica or sexual play between consenting adults in the bedroom (or other rooms lol).

If you believe they are, I better see you advocating for censoring all violence, including sexualized and romanticized violence, from media. Otherwise, you clearly think abuse is actually magically made okay by fiction as long as it's a kind of abuse you're comfortable acknowledging the existence of.

(We know this is about your discomfort. Even if you're a victim, when it's about triggers, it is in fact EASIER to avoid that kind of content on a site where you can tag accurately and explicitly for it, then on a site where "grape" is the word that victims use to avoid their education and narratives being censored. Curating your own experience is the first thing most people learn when they know they have certain triggers.)

Also funnily enough, WE ALSO have triggers that affect us in fiction. Untagged eating disorders can send us into a tailspin for days, and we avoid the tagged stuff like the plague. Parental manipulation is something we can only engage with in a good headspace, and even then we don't seek it out. These are things that should also be considered morally unacceptable in fiction - especially the manipulation as a form of abuse - to those that claim that "abuse isn't magically okay because it's fiction".

Anyway, curate your own experience or GTFO.

We are the dandelion resistance. We go by many other names - Stars, The Infinities, all of our individual names - and wear many faces. We do not tolerate intolerance and the only people we exclude are exclusionists.

We are a safe space for all plurals and all identities. Yes, even that one. Yes, that one too. That one? You guessed it, yes. Contradictory? Confusing? Accused of bad faith and bigotry for being yourself/ves? You are welcome here.

Praesigenic, in the process of recovering from disordered to functional. We are survivors of multiple kinds of abuse, including aspects of RAMCOA abuse and programming-adjacent conditioning. We may discuss these here, but we have already shared more than what anyone is entitled to know, and will not answer invasive questions (questions seeking support or help, on the other hand, are welcome, even if they involve aspects of our identity that we have not shared or that you're unsure apply).

Our values (the things we try to prioritize most): Respecting autonomy and consent (including the right to self-harm) liberation not assimilation, anti-hierarchy, compassion, believing people about their experiences, assuming good faith and giving the benefit of the doubt, doing the unpleasant and difficult work of deradicalization, fighting bigotry rather than bigots, reformative and restorative justice over punitive, destigmatizing all identities and liberating especially those whose oppression is most erased, taking care of others and community and coalition building, judging people only on actions and never on thoughts or feelings alone, dichotomies are bullshit and binaries are basically always false and exclusionary (a mutually exclusive either or of two categories is a binary, regardless of how many subcategories it has).

We may be missing some, but these accurately sum up what you can expect from us, and we are extremely consistent in these across ALL categories.

We do not engage with bigots. If you're here to bitch at us for being inclusive, you will promptly be blocked. We will neither engage with you nor platform hate, so save us all the waste of time and block us first.

Edited to add: Sometimes we screenshot posts and comment on them after blocking the original person. This is a safety measure we developed after developing legitimate trauma from internet discourse. If the original posters see our post and want to do anything other than argue about why they're right and we're wrong, we are fine with people block evading to say so, especially if our perspective has shifted their original stance (even if we still don't completely agree. On the same page but a different sentence is different than in wildly different pages, chapters, or books.

And to overextend the metaphor, if we're responding to someone on a different page or even sometimes a different chapter, we usually try to assume good faith. We recognize tumblr is the site of vent posts never meant to escape containment and that people accidentally advocate for harmful things out of ignorance (which is neutral, not negative, since there's nothing morally bad about not having yet known something) all the time. We don't believe people's past mistakes are sins (if they were, babey we'd be going down pretty far), nor that accountability means never letting go of anything harmful someone has ever said or done.

Different book? We still try to be compassionate, even towards blatant and proud bigots, because that's our approach to deradicalization. But we are 1. people and therefore not above making vent posts ourselves and 2. do not generally expect those people to choose to immediately shift their views and have a helpful conversation. We always hope for it someday, because again the end goal is deradicalization, but we're also realistic about the fact that it takes a lot of time and effort on both the hateful person's part and the people working to rescue them from hateful ideologies.

[the-space-case]

Hi! First of all I love your art and I love you <3 Secondly, I want to start a comic of my own but I’m not sure how to do it. I have the briefest of the brief ideas for it but I have no idea how to develop it, plan it, stretch out the story, develop the characters and the such. Could I have some hints please?

Hello and Thank You!!!! I’m not sure if you’re talking about a fan comic or an original, or long or short but I’ll give you some tips. GRANTED I am not a professional and you may find a different way that is easier for you.

1.) Think of a basic storyline or prompt. Like, “Man is dying and is going to a mountain to see it before he dies and meets his DESTINY???” it can be stupid. It can be silly or vague so long as you have something to start with.

2.) Think of the protagonist, as well as a bit of the timeframe or universe. Are they human? Alien? Medieval? Elf? For our example here lets say its a medieval man from a heavily forested area. He is a lumberjack who hates potatoes and his old man told him stories of the mountain in the west that holds a magic temple; only the pure of heart may enter. He is dying, and wants to see this mythical place before he passes. Draw a few examples. You’ll want some basic refs to look back on.

3.)Think of the antagonist. It can be nature, machine, man, elderich horrors, etc....(typical story tropes are something like man vs. machine or man vs. nature). For our case lets say its mainly man and nature. Bandits, bad weather, illness, etc...DRAW SOME OF THOSE REFS. These beginning ones don’t have to be in depth. just basic stuff.

4.)Hash out what you want to happen in the BEGINNING, MIDDLE and END. These are kind of the most important parts. Its definitely important to think of the end ahead of time instead of thinking about it when you’re halfway through; thats a quick way to never end it at all. Our lumberjack begins his journey selling all he owns and getting a horse to set out to the mountains with nothing but a bit of gold, an old axe and a sick ride.  In the middle he encounters various trials that test his “pure of heart”-ness. Probably three, they can be as long as you want so long as they are generally even alongside each other. (3 or 7 are magic numbers WINK). In the end he reaches the temple and is welcomed inside due to his good deeds and it was allllll along a metaphor for the journey to the afterlife.

5.)get some good references. You have a time period set, a scene in mind, and some tools. Gathering from our example, we’re going to want; various forest scenes of pines, plains, dirt roads, medieval towns, mountains, temples, animals, people, cultures, etc. We need refs for our horse, axe, and gold. Remember those quick refs of characters you made in steps one and two? Now is the time to finalize those. They’ll have developed with the level of detail in your story. Add background nonsense no one else will notice but will enliven the story like how our axeman always ties his beard when mad or how he prefers apple cider over beer anyday. Give those fuckers some names. Bandit Bill challenges Axeman Abel for his horse and loses his head (literallly???)

--if you can go to like, museums or lectures or fairs about these things and take notes. USE YOUR RESOURCES!! ASK QUESTIONS!!! (For ilulatte I visited a couple of coffeeshops and roughed out some cafe drawings haha)

7.) Separate events into chapters. Generally theres a prologue, chapters 1-whatever, the end, and an epilogue. Our axeman has a prologue of starting out on the road, chapters 1-3 depicting pure-heart-trials, climax/end of reaching the temple, and an epilogue of someone else starting their journey to the temple based on his influence on the world because this shit is cyclical, baby. 

6.) make a fuckton of thumbnail drafts. You know these characters now; you built em out of your own head. You know how they move and talk, so slap down their journey in tiny pages. add minor details to the sides. (Here’s a shitty example of mine from ilulatte!!!!!)

7.) finish allllll of them. or at least the first few chapters. Its good for you I promise. You’ll notice the pacing much better this way! You can add a bunch of extra details in the margins like extra panels and bg notes. Don’t be afraid to experiment with the direction of your story, but try to keep the overall plot the same! (sticky notes are great for this!)

8.) start roughing out the actual pages. You’ll change things from the thumbnails (like I always do haha); thats okay!!! They’re more of a helpful guide than solid stone rules.  It’s like making the scaffolding to make the base for the rest of the building.

9.) do the lineart, bgs, text, etc. There’s tons of helpful art programs for this like CLIP studio paint or medibang if you’re doing it digitally. Remember those refs you collected for our horse, axe, and bgs? Now is the time to use em. BE VIGILANT. Keep copies of the originals. Go back frequently to look for mistakes or missing details. Keep a check list. Freckles? check. Scar on nose? check. shading???? UHHHHHH----SHIT.

10.)you should probably number the pages. keep em in a nice sized resolution if you want to print but lower it if you’re posting to the internet to dissuade reposters. keep em all in one organized folder if possible. Slap your signature on em for extra safety.

11.) ????? Sell it on gumroad idk.

GENERAL TIPS:

-start with short stories. Build your own stamina.

-have relatable characters with flaws. Tumblr seems to hate “problematic” characters but thats literally the point of character building and narratives. THEY’RE RELATABLE IF THEY’RE FLAWED. If a story doesn’t have characters that conflict with each other its a boring one. Axeman Abel wants to help everyone; Bandit Bill wants to help himself only. LET THEM HATE EACH OTHER.

-its also good to have characters that are friends but still conflict with each other. The Dragon Age series is phenomenal with this (their characters are good in general, take notes!!)

-theres a lot of shitty people out there. USE THEM. (seriously though examine other peoples interactions and you’ll make better characters. )

-bad things happen to good people. Bad things also happen to bad people. Bad things just sort of happen. Don’t shy away from unfortunate events; your story will fall flat without conflict both planned and random.

-Obviously you don’t have to share the same world views as your characters. (dont let the antis fool you.) Axeman Abel can hate broccoli but you can still enjoy it. Bandit Bill can be a racist piece of shit but that doesn’t mean you are.

-have characters of various personality, body type, race, height, etc….it really livens up the story.

-generally you don’t want the bg to overwhelm the characters, so most people do a sort of painterly bg against the solid outlines of the characters but thats all really up to you and how in-depth you want it to be.

-you should also make a regular schedule, if you can. Say, something like “twenty finished pages a month” or “four pages a week” depending on the level of detail. Simplistic style and palettes of course take less time to make than full color/heavily detailed pages, so plan accordingly to prevent burnout. If you post weekly, having a few pages done ahead of time will be good in case you need an emergency break.

-be open to critique but don’t be a doormat, either. ESPECIALLY if you’re doing it for free. People will try to take advantage of you; don’t let them. Block them and move on.

-above all; BE DEDICATED. Comics take a great deal of time by yourself, but doing them helps you develop important skills in the end like time management and general technical know-how like digital programs and writing. It’s not just art, though that’s a major part of it.

-probably should’ve said this earlier but make what you enjoy??? People can generally tell if you dont enjoy your own work. There’s less effort there. 

THIS WAS REALLY LONG SO I HOPE IT WAS HELPFUL IN SOME WAY ILU HAVE FUN BE SAFE OUT THERE <3