person: i like you

my anxiety: 📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈📈❗❗❗❗❗❗

littlest furth shop

@laikascomet

h-how do you ever finish any of your work? genuine question because you seem to be productive despite your agreste syndrome and I need to learn your ways. but also how do you ever finish any of your work

unclear. last night i stayed up and finished a report worth 25% of my grade at about 5am, arrived on time for my 9am lecture, and spent about half of it zoned out while thinking about seventeen year old emilie agreste. and i was one of the most active participants in the class discussion

I don't think we talk about xiyao exes to lovers enough. I understand that in canon the "breakup" ended with death and imo it was never going to end any other way (I have a lot of feelings about how jgy is doomed from the start) but even in aus where survival is an option I barely ever see their full potential realized. The fact that there is this heartbreaking gap that is between them now, and yet that, despite it all, they can't stop loving each other. When you have drama this good, why is the conflict relegated to outside threats and we end up with little to no exploration of internal strife, of the fact that these guys have been living a domestic lie for a decade (I cannot stress this enough, the amount of parralels between xiyao and jgy's marriage to qin su are staggering.)

And let me be clear I will NEVER begrudge anyone their hurt/comfort and wanting their faves who are denied happiness and peace at every turn to find it. god knows I need that sometimes. Or even the less healthy but so emotionally devastating fics where the caring isn't good, and it doesn't fix anything- might only make things worse, actually- and xichen ends up recreating his father's fate. I love all of those things. But. Man. This divorce was over 11 years in the making it should take AT LEAST that long to resolve. What do you do when the person you trusted the most lied to you for years? What do you do when the only person who's ever believed in you loses that faith so completely they'd hurt you over a lie without hesitation? I need me some xiyao who try to get over each other for 20 years and fail. I need them to meet after not seeing each other for years and have it hurt like no time has passed at all. I need arguments where no one raises their voice but that feel like a screaming match anyway. Do you see my vision?? Do you see what we could have?

(if fics that do exacly this are out there, recs are of course welcome)

This tournament will return...

Desperately trying to make sense of Alex's motivations in Season Two and you know, I do eventually have to wonder if maybe Alex wasn't actually lying in the majority of those tapes.

Like, we tend to assume that Alex's motivations have been a consistent throughline since the college years, but do we actually know that that's the case? Do we know for sure that Alex was acting in deliberate, calculated ways in 2006; or could it be that he's telling the Truth on those olds tapes when he says he's blacking out and can't remember what's happening to anyone? After all, if we're assuming that Season 2 Alex's motivations are the exact same as his motives in Season 3, then it doesn't make any sense at all that he spend months working with Jay to try to find Amy; Season 3 Alex would have attempted to kill Jay like, on sight just to get things over with as quickly as possible and contain the spread of contamination as best as he could.

But, maybe, if Alex really had been separated from Amy after the events of the 04-04-10 tape, and if he really doesn't know where she is, then maybe that could make things start to make more sense. Maybe he really had been watching Jay's channel, and seeing Jay start going through the same things he went through in college without things devolving into violence and disappearances, and wondered if things maybe could play out differently this time. Maybe he really did send that tape to Jay to ask him for help, maybe he really was just trying to find Amy.

But then, instead of actually being helpful, Jay makes it extremely clear that he's a lot more interested in stalking Alex than he is in finding Amy. Alex asked for help, and instead there's a bunch of masked dudes on Jay's heels that keep attacking him, Jay is breaking into his house, stealing his things, leading the Operator right to him all over again, keeps trying to get other people (namely: Jessica -- if Alex is being honest when he says that his call reassuring her that Amy had been found was an effort to make Sure she stayed away from everything that was happening) involved; and instead of anything getting better, instead of anyone finding Amy, things are just getting worse all over again.

It's not until after the incident at the tunnel that things seem to start rapidly devolving. Rather than a calculated attempt to finally follow through with his need to curb the spread of contamination, this is very clearly an outburst of rage and terror. Alex's "I told you not to follow me" line in conjunction with Jay speculating that Alex didn't know who that guy was, to me, pretty firmly seems to speak to Alex having mistaken that stranger for Jay. From his point of view, Alex knows that Jay and totheark know where he live, have broken in before, he suspects that Jay stole a key to make it easier to get into his house, and he's been followed on the daily for months -- Alex is sitting at the tunnel because he doesn't know where else he can go without being constantly surveilled, hunted, and assaulted. And instead of getting a moment by himself to breathe, Jay followed him out there all over again (it feels like Alex looks directly at the camera in Jay's footage of him from this day; he knew for a fact that Jay was there), and then to make matters worse now 'Jay' won't even keep his distance anymore.

So Alex lashes out. And it's not until afterwards that he looks down and finally recognizes that this wasn't Jay -- it was someone completely innocent. Things have finally reached the low point he was at in college all over again; maybe even worse this time. If Alex doesn't remember attacking anyone in college, but he was at least partially conscious of it this time, then things have reached an entirely new rock bottom, they've reached an absolute point of no return.

He has no idea what happened to Amy, and he's spent months trying to find her with no hint of where she could be; he doesn't know where Jay actually is or what additional trouble he could be causing at this point; he does know that now innocent people are getting caught in the crossfire (in regards to the stranger in the tunnel, and also Jessica now that Jay has her phone number, and the untold number of people Jay got involved when he started posting videos to the Marble Hornets channel); things are spiraling out of control and there's no one left to ask for help. The situation isn't getting better, it's getting worse; things aren't getting easier to handle, they're just getting more out of hand; the negative impact is spreading and who knows how much further it can still go?

So, Alex decides to go scorched earth. He disfigures the body with the rock either to hide evidence or to make sure the guy would actually stay dead and not just get back up to start his own cycle of contamination in a few years. He tries to give Jay one last chance to back off, and Jay instead admits he's been talking to Jessica, acts obstinate and lies about not having Alex's spare key, and then breaks into Alex's house a second time (minimum). If Alex doesn't stop him now, who will? Alex met with Jay planning to kill the others, and then himself, so he could put a stop to this once and for all and keep things from getting any worse than they already were.

Maybe it makes a lot more sense if, rather than being a strangely incomprehensible detour on what should have been a straight path, the events of Season Two were the breaking point that put Alex on that path to begin with.

a friend who'd wait :)

okay can we have a new rule that if you're my friend and know I struggle with rsd from adhd + you're planning on hanging out with mutual friends but specifically aren't inviting me for whatever reason. Maybe Don't Tell Me About It

playing tgaac as a british person is really a trip bc i got to the bit where susato and ryuunosuke are musing about the bricked up windows in london and what possible purpose there could be for bricking up the windows when someone clearly still lives there. they don't know about the window tax......

Random Henry thoughts from my tired butt.

What if Reginald started hiding a spare gun in his hat after ItA, so that he could never be caught unprepared again (to be fair it's hard to be prepared for a human crow in a giant hamster ball chasing you down)

I saw a post referencing the golden safe that has the teddy bear and what if that bear belonged to Terrence? He does have the fancy picture frame and his portrait is holding that golden gun, so what if the safe was also Terrence's?

And if it is Terry's safe and teddy, why hasn't Reginald or other Toppats gotten rid of it, with what Terry did as leader and all.

Does maybe someone miss a friendship/brothership or more with Terrence and kept the safe or even keeping the teddy bear safe and using the safe as an excuse?

And what if the reason Charles was sorta close to the Wall was because he was looking for Ellie on Galeforce's orders (since he was keeping tabs on her from PP) but the Wall got to her first.

I'm late to the party but if you're still doing the fanfic meme...I'd love to know 2 and 14 for Stain!

Woo let's do it! For A Stain that Won't Dissolve:

2: What scene did you first put down?

I feel like I've been saying this a lot, but the first scene I wrote is the first scene everyone reads. I've been writing in chronological order for a while now!

I ran a lot of scenes in my head mentally first. Because my first image of this story was of them as like... the ages they are in the game, and it just wasn't working. They were too young, and not mature enough. Things really kicked off when I was like 'okay, what if Sebastian is a divorcee who leaves and comes back' and then really kicked off when it was like 'what if Alex becomes a cleaner to pay for his grandparent's medical debt.'

All of those things came in stages and I really noodled on this story and its structure for over a month.

By the time I started writing, I was ready to start writing. And I knew I'd start with Alex being like, quite provocative and shocking to set the tone, so the first sentence is literally around him reminiscing on the fact that he used to imagine forcing Sebastian to give him revenge blowjobs lmao.

14: Is there anything you wanted readers to learn from reading this fic?

I don't really like to be didactic with my writing. Like I don't set out to 'teach' moral lessons or anything like that, and I'm maybe even a little selfish in that I'm often not thinking about the reader in that way at all. I'm thinking about writing an entertaining story for myself with entertaining characters. I really want to entertain the people who read the story. I think more about emotional responses than learning. I'm not trying to teach, I'm trying to entertain. But teaching can be a byproduct, it's just not the focus.

BUT, I do think I like exploring themes around classism, small-town dynamics (it's not the first time I've explored this), attitudes of learned helplessness, what real support in a community looks like vs. lip service support, etc.

In a perfect world, I want readers to go away having enjoyed the fic and gotten something meaningful out of it. Even if that meaningful thing is simply that they felt comforted during a tough time, or they got to escape from reality for a while and feel happy for the characters at the end.

I don't know if I need them to learn anything new about something grand or whatever. I'm not out here trying to teach deep lessons, but because my characters are often learning deep lessons, sometimes that happens anyway. Alex for example, devaluing himself the way that he does? A lot of people (including me) relate to that. Giving someone like Alex access to support, means some people (including me) get to vicariously experience that getting support or looking for it can be scary, but often lead to good things.

That's not a bad thing to take away from any story.

But I'm pumped if people enjoy it, and I'm not out here trying to teach big lessons. My goal is always the emotional responses and the emotional engagement and the emotional journey. If people read my stories and feel nothing at all, then I'd be the first to be like 'hey, um, hey, there's better writing out there, you'll enjoy that more, trust me' lol

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From the fanfiction / AO3 fiction meme!

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its time for yet another brain game of am i like fully neurotic or was this genuinely not a cool situation . prize is jack shite and yet im playing anyways👍

I find it soo funny that my main way to actually . y'know . give a shit if others are being assholes is if they start being an ass to beings I care about lmao

Always having to scroll down for the next few posts to load to make the number of the tracked tags update (or, at least that works every now and then, some numbers just don't reset at all though). Mutual checker not working (I think? not sure where that icon would even be atm with the new header-design), most likely because of the mess that tumblr did to the post-headers (and the avatars). Then ofc all that tumblr is doing recently. How empty and cold the dash feels without the avatars next to each post.

I really don't have a good feeling about all of this.

Trying to prime 1:12 Thalia

Hopefully the stickiness is just that the paint is still a bit wet