wildcreativemastermind
Rational Fangal
she/her/INTJ fan of the Jedi, Star Trek, fairy tales, history, and mythology
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Tumblr: Only neurotypical people do X. Neurodivergent people never do X. It's literally never necessary to do X, and if you do, you are by definition acting out of malice.
Neurodivergent person whose neurodivergence primarily expresses itself as X:
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Elf cooking show: First person helmetcam of a an elf hunting and killing a deer with their bare hands. They sing a lullabye to the deer before they snap it's neck and prepare a side salad.
Dwarf cooking show: America's Test Kitchen but even more rigorous. 20 minutes of discussing how to maintain precise heat just to boil water.
Halfling cooking show: Great British Bake Off with soap-opera levels of internal drama. Everyone is stoned off their ass.
Orc cooking show: Edible mythbusters. The contestants must make bbq with a live dragon. People straight up die sometimes.
Goblin cooking show: Goblins don't really understand the concept of restaurants, but they have a show like Diners Dive ins and Dives for rooting through people's trash.
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i hate to be that guy, but the idea that gender, sex, and sexuality are ontologically pure concepts that can be rigidly defined if we simply police our language enough (our english language, because of course) is—i cannot stress this enough—a total waste of time. you may as well spend your afternoons teaching a brick how to swim
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Fanfic writers, I am begging you- even with dialogue that is clearly attributed, start a new paragraph with each new speaker. The reader shouldn't have to wait until after the dialogue is spoken to understand who is saying it.
Even if it's one word?
Yes.
But it makes things so long!
Great! Your stories will be the king of scrolling, a feast of thumbs, and a gentle stroke across a phone screen.
This convention exists for a reason! Each new paragraph should be a new idea or a new speaker. It's a shortcut for our brains to know that we have jumped across a gap and into the unknown, and you as the writer are about to explain to me where we have jumped to, but at least I know we are somewhere different.
Please practice this! I see so many good fanfic I want to read but except for this huge, glaring issue and it becomes impossible to understand what is happening.
#writing#writing advice#fanfic writing#if i see this in a fic i will click away immediately#because this is something that makes a fic unreadable#if you can't bother making the story readable i'm not gonna try reading it
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On the one hand, it's true that the way Dungeons & Dragons defines terms like "sorcerer" and "warlock" and "wizard" is really only relevant to Dungeons & Dragons and its associated media – indeed, how these terms are used isn't even consistent between editions of D&D! – and trying to apply them in other contexts is rarely productive.
On the other hand, it's not true that these sorts of fine-grained taxonomies of types of magic are strictly a D&D-ism and never occur elsewhere. That folks make this argument is typically a symptom of being unfamiliar with Dungeons & Dragons' source material. D&D's main inspirations are American literary sword and sorcery fantasy spanning roughly the 1930s through the early 1980s, and fine-grained taxonomies of magic users absolutely do appear in these sources; they just aren't anything like as consistent as the folks who try to cram everything into the sorcerer/warlock/wizard model would prefer.
For example, in Lydon Hardy's "Five Magics" series, the five types of magical practitioners are:
Alchemists: Drawing forth the hidden virtues of common materials to craft magic potions; limited by the fact that the outcomes of their formulas are partially random.
Magicians: Crafting enchanted items through complex manufacturing procedures; limited by the fact that each step in the procedure must be performed perfectly with no margin for error.
Sorcerers: Speaking verbal formulas to basically hack other people's minds, permitting illusion-craft and mind control; limited by the fact that the exercise of their art eventually kills them.
Thaumaturges: Shaping matter by manipulating miniature models; limited by the need to draw on outside sources like fires or flywheels to make up the resulting kinetic energy deficit.
Wizards: Summoning and binding demons from other dimensions; limited by the fact that the binding ritual exposes them to mental domination by the summoned demon if their will is weak.
"Warlock", meanwhile, isn't a type of practitioner, but does appear as pejorative term for a wizard who's lost a contest of wills with one of their own summoned demons.
Conversely, Lawrence Watt-Evans' "Legends of Ethshar" series includes such types of magic-users as:
Sorcerers: Channelling power through metal talismans to produce fixed effects; in the time of the novels, talisman-craft is largely a lost art, and most sorcerers use found or inherited talismans.
Theurges: Summoning gods; the setting's gods have no interest in human worship, but are bound not to interfere in the mortal world unless summoned, and are thus amenable to cutting deals.
Warlocks: Wielding X-Men style psychokinesis by virtue of their attunement to the telepathic whispers emanating from the wreckage of a crashed alien starship. (They're the edgy ones!)
Witches: Producing improvisational effects mostly related to healing, telepathy, precognition, and minor telekinesis by drawing on their own internal energy.
Wizards: Drawing down the infinite power of Chaos and shaping it with complex rituals. Basically D&D wizards, albeit with a much greater propensity for exploding.
You'll note that both taxonomies include something called a "sorcerer", something called a "warlock", and something called a "wizard", but what those terms mean in their respective contexts agrees neither with the Dungeons & Dragons definitions, nor with each other.
(Admittedly, these examples are from the 1980s, and are thus not free of D&D's influence; I picked them because they both happened to use all three of the terms in question in ways that are at odds with how D&D uses them. You can find similar taxonomies of magic use in earlier works, but I would have had to use many more examples to offer multiple competing definitions of each of "sorcerer", "warlock" and "wizard", and this post is already long enough!)
So basically what I'm saying is giving people a hard time about using these terms "wrong" – particularly if your objection is that they're not using them in a way that's congruent with however D&D's flavour of the week uses them – makes you a dick, but simply having this sort of taxonomy has a rich history within the genre. Wizard phylogeny is a time-honoured tradition!
#dungeons and dragons#dnd#fantasy#as far as fantasy in general#these terms all just mean magic user#you can decide whether you want the words to have different meanings or not#and you can pretty much make the differences whatever you want
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I know I'm gonna regret posting this, but I just can't not say something: I'm so sick of people who are actively contributing to the ongoing oppression of and violence against Palestinians calling themselves "pro-Palestinian."
In the same way that so many people in the anti-abortion movement are actually pro forced birth rather than pro-child, there are a lot of you who aren't pro-Palestinian, you're just violently antisemitic or in it for yourselves.
If you aren't:
Also angry with the other countries that abuse their Palestinian populations, refuse them citizenship, keep them in displaced person camps under horrific conditions, and/or close their borders entirely to them;
In support of genuine grassroots movements that aim to create some kind of stability, peace, and safety through diplomatic relationships and community building, because that's ""normalization"";
Willing to condemn antisemitism in the diaspora, which helps fuels right-wing rhetoric in Israel;
Willing to shut down lies, propaganda, and disinformation even if it "supports" Palestinians in theory, because lying repeatedly associates the Palestinian movement with lying and makes it harder for survivors to tell their actual stories and be believed outside of the far left movements (and also the truth is bad enough - there's no need to lie);
Willing to focus on practical problem solving over political posturing, especially when it will save Palestinian lives;
Willing to condemn Hamas, which started this most recent disaster, steals aid meant for civilians, uses civilians as human shields, and has been torturing dissenters for years;
Willing to work with Israeli leftists who hate their current government and want peace and full equality for Arab Israelis and their Palestinian neighbors, and also have the best shot at making that change happen; and/or,
Willing to learn about Palestinians as living human beings and value their lives over using them as a political cudgel, whatever that looks like on the ground;
.............then maybe you're more interested in looking radical and jerking off to some fantastical version of The Revolution, and/or hurting Jews than you are in promoting peace, safety, dignity, and self-determination for Palestinians.
Like seriously with "friends" like these, do they even need enemies??
Anyway you should call out the Israeli government for its very real abuses of Palestinians and nothing in this post should be construed otherwise. But if you genuinely care and aren't just in it for internet cool points or leftist cred or feeding your Jew-hate boner or whatever, you gotta prioritize solutions that have a realistic shot at short-term relief and long-term possibility over whatever fits some idealistic goal that will only ever end with more dead Palestinians.
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btw one of the key components of actually being in a healthy relationship is just asking for things that you want. i keep seeing posts on this website saying 'i really want to do/receive [X] but my partner has never done it'. just ask. 'nobody exchanges love letters anymore' ask. 'i want to have my partner's hair in a locket like the victorians' just ask. 'i want to be bought flowers regularly :((' literally just ask. your partner doesn't know they're being held to these expectations and that you're unhappy unless you tell them. it's so unfair to expect your partner to read your mind. 'it's less special if you have to ask :((' grow up and stop pretending you're the lead in a romcom. when people say communication is crucial they mean it !! just ask !!
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this may just be me going into overanalysis mode but i feel like the choreography of spellcasting can tell you so much about a magic user. a snap of the fingers, for example, implies confidence, even arrogance, while hands thrust out and straining to the fingertips suggests desperation, throwing one's whole body into the spell as though hoping the physical effort will make a difference. rapid, jerky body language tells you that a spellcaster is passionate and reckless, while graceful, fluid movements demonstrate calm and concentration. some magic users may choose to stomp their feet or clap their hands when casting, channeling power through percussive motion, whilst others may see magic as a tool separate from the self, and focus is through objects like a wand or staff. a new spellcaster just coming into their power may be tentative and slow, but a practiced study of magic will be able to rely on muscle memory to guide them.
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For those of you who weren’t able to get 100% of the total solar eclipse today… I gotchu <3
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Natalie Portman being confused by the fact that you have to say “hi” to someone before starting a conversation in France got me like ?????
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This might suck to hear, but if you're a people pleaser that is motivated by praise and avoids disagreements, you are easy to manipulate.
When I was in therapy after surviving years of domestic violence, my therapist had to tell me that my personality was primed for abuse and we needed to work on that so I would be better equipped to see the red flags and respond appropriately in the future.
I'm still working on this, and it's been 8 years. If you tell someone how you want to be treated, what behaviors you don't tolerate in your life, what you're looking for in that relationship, and they react negatively, don't compromise yourself. Just move on.
This one's for all the praise-kink girlies: differentiate, self-actualize, stay sexy
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This might suck to hear, but if you're a people pleaser that is motivated by praise and avoids disagreements, you are easy to manipulate.
When I was in therapy after surviving years of domestic violence, my therapist had to tell me that my personality was primed for abuse and we needed to work on that so I would be better equipped to see the red flags and respond appropriately in the future.
I'm still working on this, and it's been 8 years. If you tell someone how you want to be treated, what behaviors you don't tolerate in your life, what you're looking for in that relationship, and they react negatively, don't compromise yourself. Just move on.
This one's for all the praise-kink girlies: differentiate, self-actualize, stay sexy
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Maybe not the biggest culprit behind the Radioactive Bad Takes on this website, but the one that’s bugging me the most lately: Please, I am begging you, learn what genre conventions are and read the text accordingly.
Fiction is not reality and pretty much every genre of fiction has certain standard ways in which it deviates from reality. And I’m not just talking about how we shouldn’t nitpick the physics of how Superman is able to fly. There will be ways in which the characters’ behavior and relationships will be informed by the genre as well and it makes just as little sense to judge them by realistic standards as it does to complain about something in Star Wars being scientifically implausible.
For example, “Adults are Useless” is a well-recognized trope in children’s literature. But that’s not because children’s authors are all going around writing adult characters who are terrible parents or teachers. It’s because the protagonist of a story written for children is almost always going to be a child, and the protagonist of the story has to get into trouble and solve problems themselves for the story to be any good. Yes, in real life, teenagers shouldn’t be fighting in a war. But if the grown-ups stepped in and stopped the teenage protagonist of your action-adventure series from fighting, there would be no story.
Does that mean the grown-up characters in that series are evil people who use child soldiers? No, because we accept a child being in these kinds of situations as a conceit of the genre of children’s fiction, and we interpret the characters and their choices accordingly. We don’t apply a realistic standard because the very premise is unrealistic to start with.
Another example: An adult hitting a child in real life is horrible. But if the child is a superhero, and the adult is a super villain, and they are in a cartoon, then we can’t read it the same way. All cartoons with any kind of action or fighting in them use violence unrealistically, and if the child and adult characters are presented as equally matched adversaries then that’s how any violence between them has to be understood. The villain might be a real bad dude, since he’s, you know, a villain, but hitting a child superhero in the context of a super-fight does not make him a child abuser, specifically.
I’m focusing on children’s books and cartoons here because I think that’s where tumblr fandoms have the biggest trouble with this but it applies to everything. Characters in a romantic comedy won’t behave realistically, characters in fairy tales won’t behave realistically, characters in police procedurals won’t behave realistically, all of them will behave as characters within their specific genre have to in order to make that genre work. The second you start trying to scrutinize every single action a character takes by realistic standards, you miss the point.
Repeat to yourself: “It’s just a show, I should really just relax.”
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i dislike small talk. not because i think im better than everyone and only deserve thoughtful conversation, but because the purpose of it is outside of my field of vision, like infrared light. i dont have access to the thing that allistic people have happen between them when they go through the motions, i'm not smarter than you i'm actually way dumber
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Kind characters are not boring; in fact, due to the vast amount of people who hold that opinion, kind characters are as edgy as it gets. In this essay I will
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