Meh

Apologies for the drop-off in reblogs, but I've seen a steady stream of clearly AI-written writing advice posts and I'm not about that garbage.

and some extra unused stuff while they are in affectionate mood

Was just thinking about the amount of animals Obi-Wan interacts with compared to literally everyone else and in the Clone Wars episode where Kamino gets attacked he literally gets saved twice by the same ray-like animal and just...

The growth from judging Qui-Gon for the 'pathetic lifeforms' he picks up to whatever he has going on during the Clone Wars era. He must have gotten that from Qui-Gon though, right?

And because it's my brain and it's rotting with all the star wars stuff I am consuming I was thinking of Obi-Wan saving all these creatures and the 212th having to deal with that. Surely they made one of the rooms pet proof in case one of them needs a new home. There also have to be clones who love that because of course Obi-Wan can't really take care of rescues on top of all his duties.

After the first few times this happens Cody learns to order animal food and other necessities. And if the Republic doesn't fulfill these requests or asks too many questions he'll just have to make sure to organize them on planet during the campaigns.

Lester didn't understand that Meg launched herself onto the Tarquin in order to save him (because this is Meg why would she— he doesn't really deserve it does he he is such a terrible friend and he is fine with himself dying) until he was told about it by Meg.

Meg who feels guilty that Lester is dying and she doesn't want to lose someone else who is important dear to her.

oh yeah and they hugged

and Meg cried

and Lester tried to reassure her that he is going to live despite not knowing if he will .

I was trying to write before and it’s didn’t turn out good and I just stop writing and it don’t take practice you just have to be good at writing the first time you do it that is my opinion tho

i'm gonna assume you're like...12 years old...because there's no way an adult would be able to type that with a straight face

i'm not about to coddle you and give you a happy little pep-talk about ✨believing in yourself✨ after the way you treated that author...calling them a "bitch" because they don't PANDER TO YOUR SPECIFIC TASTES was a bully tactic and you should be ashamed of yourself

FURTHERMORE using a gendered insult like "bitch" and then demanding they write you a male reader insert story (while insulting female/gender neutral inserts in the same breath) is misogynistic as hell, i don't feel even the littlest bit sorry for you, so save the "woe is me, i can't write" bullshit for someone who gives a damn

but let me give you something to chew on while you throw yourself a pity-party about "not being good at writing" and pretend that gives you the right to bully people who actually TRY to be good writers:

Do Olympic athletes show up winning gold medals without ever setting foot on the practice field?

Do painters show up to their first class knowing how to use oil paints and watercolors and how to hold a brush effectively?

Did Hemingway roll out of the womb and write The Old Man and the Sea without writing a single damn thing beforehand?

no, they didn't...every writer you love wrote some SHITTY first drafts they didn't share with anyone because they sucked first (in private!) and THEN got good (in public)....and they got good by showing up and failing and trying again, and failing again and trying again and FAILING AGAIN (because that's what practicing is!!!!) until they finally started succeeding regularly...

UNLIKE YOUR CLOWN ASS THAT RAN AWAY SCARED WHEN YOUR FIRST STORY DIDN'T TURN OUT PERFECT

i'm not gonna take the easy road here and point out how fucking LAZY you sound when you say you tried once and gave up, because that's a cheap fucking shot and way too easy (you set me up so badly bro, like c'mon)

what i'm gonna do instead is point out that you just admitted that you were too fucking scared to try more than once

"BOO HOO, i wrote something, it was shitty, i was scared of what people might say and then i gave the fuck up" - you, probably

and that's the difference between we "lazy bitch" reader insert writers who actually post our work, and you: we show up and we TRY, every goddamn day, and we put ourselves out there despite the risk of being bullied by people like you who can't be bothered to try more than once

do you know what writing is, at its most fundamental level? it's showing your work to people and saying "please read this and enjoy it, i worked really hard," and PRAYING they don't tear your hard work apart for no reason at all, but that's what YOU did! you saw someone writing something they enjoyed and went "fuck you, i don't care that you labored and practiced for weeks and months, it wasn't to MY TASTES and therefore you're a lazy bitch," and you're apparently so un-selfaware that you don't realize the irony of YOU, a person who can't be bothered to try writing more than once, A) calling someone lazy, and B) demanding they spend their time/expertise to write something just for widdle ol' you, in the same breath

do you not fucking hear yourself????? huh?????

you tried writing ONCE and found out it was too hard for you, so now your answer is to bully writers and make demands of them? when you should know through your ONE attempt how difficult writing must be?

WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK BRO?

you should never message a writer again with your demands when you can't even be bothered to live up to your own standards, you entitled tone-deaf hypocrite

writing takes courage, and you have ✨N O N E✨

Not an attack or anything but. You seem to talk about Talia semi-fondly? Forgive me if I'm wrong.

I'm a little funny about people being nice about her. Afterall, she is a literal rapist. Canonically. In multiple iterations.

I'm not semi fond of Talia I adore her she's an amazing character and I refuse to let one bad racist writing choice, which the writer themselves states was a mistake and is actually no longer Canon, change my opinion of her - I've said before it's okay to not like Talia but don't base your opinion of her on one racist retcon which every other shitty dc writer chose to jump on instead of focusing on her long complex and interesting history

Building off of what I wrote in my fic "Sparks," I'm really compelled by the idea of Ford genuinely no longer being interested in sailing around in a boat with Stan by the time they were seniors in high school.

I like the idea of it not being just a symptom of the resentment that had been building between them, nor it being a dream of Ford's that only paled in comparison to west coast tech, but it being a genuine loss of interest on Ford's end. I think it complicates things even further in some really juicy ways.

Like, imagine going through high school slowly losing more and more interest in the dream you've shared with your twin and only friend ever since you were little kids. How do you break it to him? How do you explain it to him without making it sound like a rejection of him? Without it making him hate you?

How do you explain it without it feeling like a spit in the face to all the hard work he's put into a plan that started out as a way of him comforting you by telling you "it doesn't matter what people say about you, you're going to be an adventurer who sails away into the sunset and never has to hear their mockery ever again, and there will be babes and treasure and heroism, and then they'll all see how cool you really are!"

And all through high school you think to yourself, "he's going to move on to more realistic dreams any day now, and then I won't have to say anything about it!" But no matter how many times you mention something else he could do with his life that he seems interested in, or bring up the challenging logistics of traveling around long-term in a boat, he sounds just as committed to the childhood dream as ever, and completely oblivious to how apprehensive you sound.

So resentment grows, little by little. Because that's easier than confronting the soul-crushing levels of guilt that are building up inside of you, every time you don't take an opportunity to tell him you don't want to do the plan anymore. You don't have a single person in your life who modeled how to have difficult conversations for you. As far as you know, having this conversation with Stan would crush him into tiny little pieces and then he would hate you forever, and you can't stand the idea of losing the only friend you've ever had.

So tensions grow. A lack of interest turns into a bitter resentment that, if you were really being honest with yourself, is directed more at yourself than it is at Stan.

And then the falling-out happens, and it seems like you were proven right. Stan hates you now, and he's never going to forgive you for giving up on his dream. But two can play that game, so you try to hate him too. Because if you hate him too, then maybe it won't hurt as much that he never came back. That he never even turned up at school, or by the boat, or in through your bedroom window in the middle of the night. He knows what dad's like, and how he says impulsive exaggerated things when he's angry, and haven't you both dealt with his harsh words countless times before and been able to dust yourselves off and joke about it later? So why isn't he back at home, joking with you about how absurd your dad acted that night, being impossible and belligerent about ruining your dream, but at least now you're even, because you've ruined his dream too.

-

And now imagine you find out he risked the lives of everyone in existence to bring you back, right after you had accepted your fate was to die killing Bill. It would be terrifying and confusing and infuriating. If he cared so much, why didn't he do something to reconnect with you sooner? Why did he ignore you in favor of trying to make it big without you? Why didn't he take the infinitely safer and simpler action of reaching out to you without you having to track down his address and send a desperate plea for help? You were convinced that he didn't care enough to bother with you unless you had an important enough reason for him to come. But even then, he thought your plans were stupid. He didn't want anything to do with you, not even with the world at stake.

Did he save your life out of guilt? Does he pity you that much? It doesn't add up with what he did in the decade leading up to shoving you into the portal. And the dissonance between the version of him in your head that hates you, and the man who held out his arms to welcome you back to your home dimension, is so strong that you feel like you're being lied to again, like you're back in the depths of gaslighting and manipulation that Bill put you through, even though there's no way that's what Stan is trying to do... right? You can't figure it out, so you run away from it. You don't want to know the answer to whether or not Stan hates you, because you don't know which answer would hurt more, so you try to make him hate you more than ever, because at least then you would know for sure how he feels.

And in the end, after he sacrifices his memories for you, and for the world, things seem clearer. The layers upon layers of confusion and anger and hurt seem to have washed away like drawings in the sand, leaving behind the simple truth: that you two had an argument, and didn't move past it for forty years, and despite everything you put each other through, you both still want to re-connect.

So you sail away in a boat together.

And at first, it's wonderful. It's exactly what you want. It feels like an apology to Stan, and a thank-you for saving the world, and a once-in-a-lifetime chance to heal the rift between you two, and it's good to be back on earth, and you wonder why you ever doubted the dream you two once had.

But then, after the first long journey you spend on the sea together, when you get back home to dry land, Stan is already talking about planning your next adventure out on the open sea. He recaps every adventure you had on the first trip, over and over again, and he wants to chat with you all through the morning and long into the night, and you don't have the words to explain to yourself that you don't have enough social battery for this, and suddenly you're slipping back into the horrifyingly familiar feeling of Stan being overbearing and needing space from him and how could you think that? How could you think that about him after everything he's done for you and everything he's forgiven you for? But the longer this goes on, the more you realize that you still don't want to spend the rest of your life sailing around with Stan. It's great fun in moderation, but the idea of your whole life revolving around Stan and going on adventures with Stan and being in a boat with Stan with no time to be by yourself thinking about your own things and figuring out your own dreams makes your skin crawl with a claustrophobic kind of panic that you still don't know how to put into words forty years after the first time this feeling grabbed you by the throat and ruined your friendship with Stanley.

But the first time this happened, it nearly ruined his life forever. You can't let yourself feel this. You don't feel this. You're happy to spend the rest of your life fulfilling Stan's lifelong dream, and making up for the time you crushed his dream, and sure, maybe he crushed your dream once too, and maybe it would be nice for him to support your dreams like you're now doing for him, but you can't say that. He saved the universe, and it would be horrible and ungrateful and cruel for you to try to voice these feelings, especially when you don't know how to voice your feelings without it making other people feel like you twisted a knife into their gut. So you try to pretend the feeling isn't there.

You go out on a boat with Stan again. You planned out another incredible journey together, and this should be fun, and you should be happy about this, but the unspoken feeling you shoved as far down in yourself as it could possibly go is eating you alive. The worst part? Stan is starting to notice. You have never been good at hiding your emotions. The trick to it has always been to convince yourself you don't feel it at all, and not think about it, and that has always worked like a charm. But whenever the emotion claws its way back up to the forefront of your mind, you can tell Stan knows something is wrong. So you can't even give him the happy ending he deserves. You can't even convince him that you want to be here on the open seas forever with him, like he deserves. And you keep trying and trying to hide it, but Stan keeps asking in roundabout ways, like "You're being awfully quiet, sixer," and "whats that look on your face?" and eventually it comes exploding out of you like a shaken-up soda bottle dropped on its cap.

And then it's like you're back at home in New Jersey again, standing in the living room while dad grabs Stanley by the shirt. It all comes pouring out of you, in the worst possible way, with the worst possible phrasing, like a pandora's box of monstrousness, and Stan tries to fight back against the sting of your words, but you're made out of acid and you're burning through him and you can see it on his face, and there's never any coming back from this, not this time, you'll just have to either jump into the ocean or become a monster forever, so Stan can hate you more easily again, and-

-and at the end of the outburst, you're still on a boat in the middle of nowhere in the ocean with your brother, in dangerous waters, and you have things to do to keep the boat running smoothly.

You can't run away from him. He can't run away from you. You're stuck here for at least a couple more weeks, even if you turned around and sailed back towards shore right away.

-

And the thing that compels me so much here, despite how unbelievably angsty it all is, is that it sets up a situation wherein the Stans might end up forced to actually address the decades of resentment and confusion and wanting-to-reconnect-throughout-it-all that they thought they could gloss over and heal with enough time spent adventuring together on a boat. They might end up forced to actually address the crux of the issue that drove them apart in the first place: Ford wanting a little more space to feel like his own person, and to feel like he's able to have his own dreams, too.

It wouldn't happen easily, nor right away, but if they were stuck together on a little boat in the middle of nowhere surrounded by magical creatures they have to protect each other from in order to make it back home alive, then after they had one fight where they brought up all the things they silently agreed to never bring up again, it would probably happen many more times, and each time it would leave them both angrier at each other than ever, until eventually something honest slipped through amidst all the saying-anything-except-what-they-mean bickering. And once enough of these honest moments slipped through, then they would have a thread to tug on to start to unravel the gargantuan knot of their decades of unresolved conflicts.

And then, eventually, maybe Stan could learn that he can have a good friendship with his brother without needing to be glued to him at the hip, and Ford needing a certain amount of alone time doesn't mean he dislikes him or wants to abandon him, and Ford could learn that he can be honest and have a meaningful connection with someone without it driving them away and making them hate him.

i'd rather be friendless than to constantly have my boundaries disrespected

random firewatch au detail that has basically no impact on the story unless you want to psychoanalyze fw!grian even further than i did as the author, but it's very intentional that i always refer to both of mumbo's parents but only grian's mom. did i give him daddy issues? i guess so, but not in a way where i really deeply examined the implications as meaningful to the story. it was just a detail i stuck with from the beginning as a way to keep fleshing out the story's background subtly. the idea behind grian's dual citizenship was always that he was born in america to an american dad and british mom, and that his mom moved back to the UK when he was very young since she wanted to be closer to her family. perhaps his dad didn't go with them? or perhaps his dad did, and then later they split and he went back to america? whatever the cause, grian never even mentions his dad in the story, and it wasn't because i intended him to be dead (because that would have come up in a story about grief) if you get me

Watching Danhausen post on twitter like "you tell em, gremlin man"

"I never speak to this companion and didn't finish their companion quest, they're just not that interesting" how the hell would you know if you never talk to them

as I'm going back over my past history and items and journals and years, I come across all sorts of things, like the pencil I saved from that so-precious memory from second grade, and a pair of flip flops I've been missing for two years, and (tw for murder/crime/killings) the modern-high-school-AU-kidnapped-by-a-serial-killer story I wrote in late high school jdfsjdfsjkjlksfd

Y'all do know you can't make Jason be NOT white without changing his whole character, right?

For other characters, yes, because their physical appearance are not that influential in their story, on how they are viewed by people, on their personality formation — you can have a black/asian/indigenous/arab/brown/latino/etc Nico and yes, the hate he gets will have a undertone of racism but at the same time nothing significant on his story, motivation or personality will need to change. This is also true for other characters: Clarisse risks repeating the "aggressive WoC" stereotype but the character itself doesn't change.

This isn't true for Jason, whose main character trait is how he is perceived by others and how he showcases himself to others based on that perception. (specially with how little effort Riordan put on him besides making him perfect-er Percy who's somehow also weaker and less important than him).

Let's not pretend a black, Arab, indigenous, Asian, Latin man, etc, in the USA would ever be treated with the universal reverence Jason gets from New Roma, you can't have the illusion of perfection and most of all, of invincibility they have about him when you see him suffering racism or xenophobia in the middle of a mission. Nothing in his life has ever gone wrong, that's his image, destined to be king, he is supposed to have no weakness on his peers eyes.

He is not trying to prove people wrong, he is trying to prove them right; he isn't worthy despite their prejudice, on the contrary, he only tried to make himself worthy to fulfill their expectations. He can't be a woman or an immigrant or have a visible disability or any other thing that strays him from a perfect ideal by western society standards, and be that same character.

I thought I read somewhere there's a way to ally with both Orpheus and the Emperor but now I'm googling and I can't find it?

unconditional devotion is fun and all but i love when you have to work on your relationships with characters in rpgs. it's so much fun when they openly question mc's decisions if they are not aligned with their morals. when they object and start an argument and must be convinced to do something. when they don't join mc in the final fight if you don't trust each other enough.

the payoff hits so much harder this way. if you're a dick to them they will not put you above their principles and stances because why would they? but if you helped them if you proved yourself to be trustworthy if you were good to them they will stand beside you even if they're conflicted and have to sacrifice something for that. and it's so cathartic when you know they could leave but at the end of the day they didn't! because them and your character are besties! friendship and love are hard to earn but you did it and now it helped you win!

So my suggestion on Derision? Ignore it. Declare it bullshit in author notes. Openly mock it and declare it non-canon. It conflicts with or ruins so many episodes (rewatch animaestro) it is the obvious weak link. It was written from a place of hate and anger at some members of the audience, not one of love for the characters and the show. And so: excise it and retain your love.

It trashes so many more prople than just marinette too.

Like her parents for ignoring multiple years of bullying so bad she made up fake excuses to avoid school? This is the same Tom who went akuma because a boy broke her heart. This is the same caring and wonderful Sabine saying 'its only three more weeks then *maybe* it will be okay*

The hand of the author is just so blatant too. Your example with Mylene is one I hate on a different level, because this *is* a kids show and Mylene just told kids 'every situation is the same. Its your fault if you react differently. André the power-abusing, neglectful, pushover is *exactly* the same as Mylene's supportive, involved, father. If you as a child end up differently in these environments, you are the problem.

Ugh, yeah. So just nuke Derision and don't apologize. It doesn't respect canon, so why should your canon respect it?

Oh, yeah, Derision ruins pretty much every character who has lines in it. It's also hardly the first episode to introduce a poorly thought-out plot point or characterization. I'm normally very happy to take the Nick Fury approach to canon where I recognize the show's decision and then elect to ignore it.

The reason I'm able to do that so easily is that the writing choices I don't agree with usually just disappoint me. They don't bother me on an emotional level. And, sure, I could do deep explanations of why certain plot/character choices are terrible and should never have been made, but I prefer to express my disappointment by just writing fanfiction that does the thing that I wish that the show would've done. It's actually part of why I have so many fics featuring Nino and Alya being great friends to Adrien and Marinette. Because I don't like how the show has treated those relationship so I just say "Fine, I'll write the version that I want." The opposite of a salt fic, if you will? A writing salt, character sugar fic?

Derision hit different. It upset me on an emotional level, which is why I actually wrote up an analysis of what was bad with just one element the episode and tossed it into the ether. Doing that actually did help as have all of the responses to that post. Knowing that I'm not alone in finding this episode upsetting and poorly thought out is helping me move past it. So thank you for this message and for all the replies to that post. I'm starting to turn my emotions from sadness to drive to get back to my reverse crush canon rewrite, which was the whole reason I made the post in the first place! I want to finish that and give the characters the arcs I wish that we'd gotten in the show.

As for posts that go over why certain episodes or characterizations are bad, well, you're always welcome to ask me for my thoughts on stuff and I'll write it up, but unless something about canon deeply bothers me, I'll mostly keep my thoughts to myself and continue to channel them into fanfiction fuel.