Was tagged by the exceptionally talented @dulcidyne! I'm tagging @camelliagwerm, @transboywriting, @aeriamamaduck, (no pressure for any of y'all though) and anyone else who sees this and wants to answer!
1 - Queer and Disabled/Neurodiverse Characters Being Happy
Maybe this is cheating because I'm lumping two things together, but the reasoning is the same: I wanted to see people like me doing cool shit and falling in love (or not) and just generally being happy.
2 - Parent Trauma
Sometimes the parents are dead, sometimes the parents are abusive, sometimes the parents are both, but I rarely write a story where a character has two (or more) living parents and a healthy relationship with both of them. It's often a way for me to process my own parent trauma.
3 - Found Family
Your birth parents suck, are dead, or suck and are dead? No worries, you're getting a bunch of new family members, even if you try to be emotionally distant! If you're the weird ADHD/autistic kid that didn't have friends because you were weird, guess what?! That's right, not only do you have friends, you have friends who are like a family who love you for your "weird" neurodivergent traits!
4 - Sex Scenes as Integral Plot/Character Moments
I love writing sex scenes because I think they're hot (and because it can be a fun challenge), but when writing fic (or original stuff), I try to include ones that move the plot along or show some sort of character development in addition to just being hot. As someone who writes pretty high-heat stuff, it also helps (I hope) to keep things from feeling too repetitive. Yes, they just had sex in the last chapter, but the circumstances were totally different and the scenes do different things in terms of the characters and narrative!
5 - Snappy Dialogue
Dialogue is something I worked really hard to be good at, and I put a lot of thought into character voice. It's the thing that comes most naturally to me, and is always the part of writing I have the easiest time with.
I'm sorry for the cruelty of this picture, but I couldn't see Amina and not share her story. Trigger warning: eye injury (bloody eyes).
Amina Ghanem, 13 years old, says: We were sleeping and we heard the sound of tanks when they came and walked over the caravan in which I, my father and my siblings lived. The tank squeezed us inside the tin all night, and we were ran over, until the morning. And when they finally let us out, I found that my father and my little sister have been killed. Now we've been brought here.
She tells her story in this video with her little brother beside her. They're all on their own. Their mother is outside of Gaza and cannot get in or get them out. They have no way of communication, their father and sister are killed.
I really feel tremendous grief for friendships that kind of petered away in the face of life's currents. There are people with whom I formed deep, unique, vibrant, life-changing connections, and then we had to go our separate ways and it was too hard to maintain long-distance. There wasn't a fight, it just sort of faded. And I feel like I have more friendships like this than friendships that have endured, so maybe I just have to get used to it. But if grief is all the love we have left over - well, I never did get to finish loving them. I love them, and I miss them, and I probably always will.
Tumblr stop recommending me horny sapphic blogs that all say men dni in the pinned post, go back to sending me posts from the one that's just horny all the time please, I want the fat furries and the queer freaks that are way less respectably normal about me and my body.
love when men cry about body hair bc "it's hygiene" and yet 15% of cis men leave the bathroom without washing their hands at all and an additional 35% only just wet their hands without using soap. that is nearly half of all men. that means statistically you have probably shaken hands with or been in direct contact with one of these people.
love when men say that women "only want money" when it turns out that even in equal-earning homes, women are actually adding caregiver burdens and housework from previous years, whereas men have been expanding leisure time and hobbies. in equal-earning households, men spend an average of 3.5 hours extra in leisure time per week, which is 182 hours per year - a little over a week of paid vacation time that the other partner does not receive. kinda sounds like he wants her money.
love that men have decided women are frail and weak and annoying when we scream in surprise but it turns out it's actually women who are more reliable in an emergency because men need to be convinced to actually take action and respond to the threat. like, actually, for-real: men experience such a strong sense of pride about their pre-supposed abilities that it gets them and their families killed. they are so used to dismissing women that it literally kills them.
love it. told my father this and he said there's lies, damned lies, and statistics. a year ago i tried to get him to evacuate the house during a flash flood. he ignored me and got injured. he has told me, laughing, that he never washes his hands. he has said in the last week that women are just happier when we're cooking or cleaning.
maybe i'm overly nostalgic. but it didn't used to feel so fucking bleak. it used to feel like at least a little shameful to consider women to be sheep. it just feels like the earth is round and we are still having conversations about it being flat - except these conversations are about the most obvious forms of patriarchy. like, we know about this stuff. we've known since well before the 50's.
recently andrew tate tried to justify cheating on his partner as being the "male prerogative." i don't know what the prerogative for the rest of us would be. just sitting at home, watching the slow erosion of our humanity.
hi I don't think this duo gets enough love, so here are my fave screenshots of Raph and Leo mirroring each other! :D
+bonus:
look at this frame! don't their poses look similar, even though they're in totally different places?? well, there's a simple reason for it! we can see raph in the driver seat, his left hand on the wheel, while the other one's searching for someting, it's symbolising his active role as leader, while leo stands alongside him, his left hand on a handhold while he gestures with the other, showing him being less active and more of a passive presence, but he's ready on his feet, it's symbolising his potential as raph's co-leader but also him not yet being ready, still gripping the safety rails instead of the driving wheel-
(nah i'm kidding- like, was it just artists drawing similar poses in one scene? oh yeah most definitively! will that stop me from over-analysing? nope! :D this basically wrote itself!)
Every time I think about the Tree of Feelings I can't help but be a little underwhelmed at how the most popular depictions of it is just. the tree. on a hill. surrounded by miles of nothing but grass and maybe a few houses in the distance.
Yeah, no thanks. I'll just go with my own interpretation on this one
Even CNN is reporting the truth more now. But if you are held without being charged, you aren’t a prisoner, you’ve been kidnapped and are a HOSTAGE. And human rights organizations have said that the other 50%, who were charged, were mainly charged with throwing rocks, and that even most of that was made up.
For all the pro israel who came to my posts of Palestinian children celebrating their freedom, calling them terrorists and criminals. Israel is an occupation state, they don't need a reason to arrest you as long as you're Palestinian.