writeinmysoul

[writeinmysoul]

Sometimes the lack of like, in real life friendships, especially in person able to hang out with someone, kind of friendships, really puts me in a depressive mood. I enjoy being alone more often than not, but I also enjoy being with people I enjoy. And it makes me sad when I realize I don’t really have too many people I can just call up, especially indiscriminately, and even fewer people to actually do things with and get out the house with.

[writeinmysoul]

“The girls are fighting.” And it’s literally just my autism and ADHD.

[writeinmysoul]

Something I really hate reading, especially in fics, is when someone is talking and says maybe one sentence or even two and then it’ll say “he/she rambles/rambled” or something along those lines. Like bro. Rambled where. Stop that.

[writeinmysoul]

Latest tattoo. Inspired by St Jude for the boat as well as lyrics from the song by Florence + the Machine, the bird in reference to St Francis. Both st Jude and st Francis in part because of Jude St Francis from A Little Life.

[writeinmysoul]

Trying so hard to follow a normal conversation routine. It’s hard.

[writeinmysoul]

Sometimes, well often actually, I wish I were better at being a person. I wish I knew how to not only feel but also understand and express emotions. I wish I knew how to exist and interact with people and feel the friendships you see on tv. I’ve almost always accepted and taken pride in my ace and potential aro identities, but sometimes I wish I could feel the kind of affection and give the kind of affection you see given so easily in movies and books and shows, and I understand that it doesn’t have to be a romantic thing, but it so often feels like that’s the only option, and I’m comfortable with the knowledgeable that a romantic relationship, let alone a sexual one, may never be the kind of thing I want, but then I feel like I’m going to be missing out on all these things that people act like are the end all be all. And tho most of the time all I want is probably a qpr, or even just to live with a friend and get to have actual time with that friend, most people I’ve met still prioritize a relationship to their friendships 100% of the time. I don’t even know what I’m trying to say anymore honestly.

Just, a good 95% of the time, I’m so happy with my ace/aro identities, but then every once in a while, it feels like I’m lacking something. But I can’t even say it’s just the ace/aro, I think it also has to do with the autism/adhd and all of it combined. With not always understanding social cues and social situations. With not understanding feelings more often than not. With hyperfixating or having absolutely no interest in anything. And so much of it. And idk. I’m constantly losing the point.

I just want to be a person who can feel things and understand those feelings and know how to exist and interact with other people in a way that doesn’t leave me lonely and with a vague undertone of sadness and invisibility afterwards.

-

Lonely creature born without a place

[writeinmysoul]

I want an iron man edit to Jericho by Iniko.

[writeinmysoul]

Good Anthropocene Reviewed tattoo ideas?

[writeinmysoul]

I love that music plays such an important role in both The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green and An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green.

[writeinmysoul]

Not well. Not well at all. Between the canon bisexual Buck (911) and the build up to The Sunshine Court (AFTG), I will never have peace. But for this, I’m okay with that.

[writeinmysoul]

Most of my attraction to men lay in fictional characters, and it is very funny to me when it’s a show or something and I’m not particularly attracted to a male character until he portrays vulnerability and is heartbroken and sad and crying. And then suddenly, I’m in love. Too many characters this has happened to me with.

[writeinmysoul]

an unreliable narrator doesn't have to be intentional though, saying that they never outright lie to us totally skips over the "unintentionally misguided" part of an unreliable narrator. being one isn't a bad thing, and it makes the story more interesting, we see things from their perspective (which sometimes doesn't reflect the truth) and it makes the story engaging and interesting

For one, I did include the part of it being unintentional and the misguidedness. However, I also stated how literally any main character could be wrong. Sometimes being wrong or even misguided has nothing to do with being unreliable. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having an unreliable character, and I agree that it can make the story interesting. But I’d also like people to stop referring to characters that aren’t unreliable as unreliable. These specific two I mentioned do not meet that criteria. I gave the definition and ways to determine if they were unreliable. What I specifically added was

“Google says, "An unreliable narrator is an untrustworthy storyteller, most often used in narratives with a first-person point of view. The unreliable narrator is either deliberately deceptive or unintentionally misguided, forcing the reader to question their credibility as a storyteller."

Furthermore, it also states "when looking for indicators that a narrator is unreliable include contradicting stories, incomplete explanations of events, illogical information, and even questions of the narrator's sanity."”

Another site also specifically uses the word misleads, and again, in the examples I’m specifically arguing for, we’re not being misled, intentionally or unintentionally. We know that at least in terms of the audience, especially the more we get to know both Neil and Katniss, neither are untrustworthy. Their biggest hindrance to the truth are their own skewed self perceptions, which does influence how they interpret the world and characters around them. But also as the audience, we start to pick up on that ourselves. Neither of these main characters fall far enough into any of those categories. They explain most of their own thoughts and plans and reasonings for things to us directly. But also, just because a character is wrong about something, does not make them any more unreliable as a real person in real life who is wrong about something. Everyone, fictional or not, will be wrong about things sometimes. That’s not enough to qualify as unreliable. Not understanding every situation one is in is not enough to qualify. Misunderstanding certain things is not enough to qualify. It’s human, shit happens. At no point are we sitting there questioning the validity of it because we know enough about these characters to know where at least some of these misunderstandings are coming from and aren’t questioning the validity of what they’re telling us.

As someone who is often lost in a lot of situations, I more than understand that in these characters. They’re both people who are mistrustful and watchful of others, for good reason, and are always noticing details other people miss but they also have severe low self worth and lack social understanding because of how they grew up, which means they miss things other people notice. And that’s just human and potentially  neurodiverse of them.

Also. A large part of my gripe was the way so much of what we don’t see in AFTG gets chalked up to Neil being unreliable as if some of it wasn’t just things he wasn’t supposed to see.

But also, say we’re reading a romance novel that starts with the main character in a relationship but turns out their partner never actually cared for them and has been cheating the entire time and they break up and eventually they meet the actual love interest, was the main character unreliable for believing they were loved by the first partner and being wrong?

Say we’re reading a murder mystery where the main character is investigating a serial killer case, and they’re onto someone, all the clues point to this random person, but turns out, it was the spouse or best friend, someone close to them. Were they unreliable in this term for not noticing that it was someone close to them when all clues point seemingly elsewhere?

Say someone is in a situation where someone has apparently been flirting with them but they think this person is just being really friendly and kind and are excited they made a new friend. Or someone who’s either never had a friend or have only been used by former friends, so now they’re inherently suspicious and untrustworthy of new people and think someone wants to do the same again when they try to befriend them despite nothing seeming to point to that being the reason for befriending them?

People are wrong sometimes. Misguided. People miss shit. Sometimes shit that’s directly in their face. And past experiences and perceptions will influence future perceptions and interpretations of situations. They are not all inherently unreliable, even when we can see where they may be wrong.

Now, a few examples that I can think of, tho also don’t know entirely too much about, Sephiroth from FF7, Snow from TBOSBAS, someone on TT mentioned to me Rue from Euphoria, and tho Furina from Genshin isn’t technically a narrator, she’d definitely qualify for her main arc had she been one.

But anyway, this is also me being super specific because people themselves are unreliable but in terms of the literature terminology, I want specific. And also, there’s nothing hindering Neil or Katniss from showing us what they see. Each time I google different types of unreliable narrators, it’s either people lying to themselves so much that they believe it to be true or they’re deliberately lying to the audience (tho even when Neil lies to himself, he acknowledges that to the audience) and the rest are all people that are hindered from being able to properly recount events because of age or mental faculties or prejudices etc.

[writeinmysoul]

Okay. So I’ve been regularly getting frustrated about people calling Katniss and especially Neil unreliable narrators. To the point that my friend says I talk about it too often, but every time I look on tumblr, there’s another 3, 5, 7 posts referring to Neil as an unreliable narrator. And it becomes increasingly clear that many people do not actually understand what an unreliable narrator is. I also have so many different points that kind of verge into its own thing, that I have no idea how to fit it all together, but lets try.

Google says, “An unreliable narrator is an untrustworthy storyteller, most often used in narratives with a first-person point of view. The unreliable narrator is either deliberately deceptive or unintentionally misguided, forcing the reader to question their credibility as a storyteller.”

Furthermore, it also states “when looking for indicators that a narrator is unreliable include contradicting stories, incomplete explanations of events, illogical information, and even questions of the narrator's sanity.”

In my opinion, I do not believe that either Katniss or Neil are any more unreliable than any other main character that is the narrator in their story. Both in fiction and in real life, every human could be considered unreliable to some extent. As people, past experiences and perceptions are bound to influence future perceptions, how we view the world and people around us, as well as how we handle new situations. How we've been conditioned to think and believe, and especially how we've been conditioned to view ourselves will have heavy factors in this.

No two people will have the same exact experience in the same circumstance, and our re-relaying of the event could be completely different while also neither being wrong. As someone who is AuDHD, I do not always understand what is happening in a situation and could relay it the opposite of what technically happened while also never lying or deliberately misconstruing the situation. And so its clear that the same will still apply to fictional characters. They're human, tho fictional, who's past and self perception influences every interaction. So when we have two characters like Katniss Everdeen and Neil Josten, who both have a massive load of trauma and such an incredible skewed misconception of themselves, we're bound to get some sort of unreliable playback, but for one, it is not intentional, and two, as we start learning these characters and the story we are in, we can also see where this starts taking place.

For this point, neither Katniss Everdeen nor Neil Josten has ever lied to us, the audience. Yes, Neil is a liar, and he lies to everyone within the story at some point or another, but he never deliberately misguides us. He tells us every thought behind his lies, and even when he’s wrong about something, it is not intended as misdirection or any other malicious reason. More often than not, it is because he did not have all of the facts himself. Katniss has also never intentionally lied to us. She manipulates a few people around her occasionally to ensure her own and the people she cares for's survival, but it is no way to to purposefully keep us in the dark to her methods or her reasonings. We never have to question whether or not either are being honest with us, and we always know when they are lying to other people.

Additionally, we also never have to either character's sanity. We know they have a lot of trauma and both come to view themselves as expendable and come to regularly try to sacrifice themselves for the people they care about. They both have a hard time understanding people actually caring for them or wanting to be their friends, like when Katniss never understood that Madge was her friend or how shocked Neil was when Nicky called him a friend, and how they were both always shocked when anyone else did anything nice for them. But despite doubting their place in other people's hearts, they are willing to give up so much for these people. (this paragraph has started getting away from me because I'm just now realizing how similar Neil and Katniss are and how neither of them believe other people when they point out positive things about them and I have to stop before I lose my whole original point). Anyway, while both Neil and Katniss pull incredibly reckless stunts that they should possibly not survive, and we question their sanity for that, we do not question it in terms of whether we can trust what we're seeing and being told.

Moreover, I regularly see people make comments about how us not seeing this or that or not understanding something or other is because he is an unreliable narrator. And again, this is not what it means to be unreliable. Most main characters are not omniscient and will not know everything, especially things they have no reason to know or see, even if they speculate, and so not seeing or knowing something does not make them unreliable. I saw a post saying that we don't see the abuse Riko suffered because Neil is unreliable. But that makes no sense. While we know to some extent that Riko must have had his own difficulties and potential abuse, Neil would have literally no reason to see it happening. The rest of the ravens would have no reason to see it considering he is meant to be King and be the best, he cannot afford to show weakness to them, so of course he wouldn't be showing that abuse to an outsider that he is trying to bring to heel. These are regular kinds of post I see that frustrates me because not only is the unreliable narrator aspect misunderstood but so is the writing itself and these characters.

@blinksager If I don't stop here, I will literally never shut up. Sorry for making it so long and kind of all over the place lol. I just really love these books and these characters and for whatever reason, hate things being mislabeled like unreliable narrators.

Actually, if I have to hear Neil Josten (or Katniss Everdeen) referred to as an unreliable narrator one more time, I’m going to scream and lose my mind.

They simply are not.

[writeinmysoul]

I LOVE YOU

[writeinmysoul]

Small Hands by Keaton Henson (andreil coded?) 👀

[writeinmysoul]

The way your favorite son of a mobster serial killer who’s obsession will get him killed can be so personal

[writeinmysoul]

Actually, if I have to hear Neil Josten (or Katniss Everdeen) referred to as an unreliable narrator one more time, I’m going to scream and lose my mind.

They simply are not.