ysabeauwilce
The Eschatanomicon
Give Sanity a Longer Leash, Some of Us Have Sharper Teeth.
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Fucking wisdom
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[26 is answered in this post <3]
17. What is your best piece of advice for writing hurt/comfort scenes?
my number one: know why you're writing the scene, and who you're writing for. Then do it on purpose.
hurt/comfort is tricky. ultimately it comes down to, of course, two key elements: the hurt (catharsis) and the comfort (healing). that's the point of it -- for the reader to experience (via blorbo) a release of negative emotion followed by a smack to the love-comfort-safety button inside their brain. nothing wrong with that! that's great! catharsis rules! there's a reason the greeks wrote tragedies, and it's not just to Be Sad!! [for real, read bryan doerries' theater of war, it fucking slaps.]
the trouble comes when that's all it is.
in the interest of full disclosure: Hi, I'm Wriz, I'm A Sicko, I Read And Write Terrible Things For Fun. the reason i do that is that i find them compelling and often deeply relatable. for me, hurt/comfort is so much more important than just smacking the love-and-comfort-and-safety button in my brain! and i know this is true for like... most people? at least within the circles i frequent, folks who engage with fandom and similar hobby writing and creation have a disproportionately high level of mental illness, disability, trauma, poverty, and a lot of that similar shit. we aren't here because we were popular in high school. and hurt/comfort isn't just a tool for releasing negative emotions and inviting positive ones: in a lot of cases, it's a promise that experiencing something awful is survivable. that even feeling the worst fears and rages and anxieties a human can feel doesn't mean we can't be loved, safe, and comforted. even the worst things are followed by something BETTER.
i mean, if bucky barnes can survive 70 years as a POW enduring constant torture, memory wipes, violence, and destruction, but still be embraced by his best friend and soulmate, damn right a random college kid with severe depression can find love!!
and, oohhhhh, we make it through the gauntlet of fantasy violence or sickness or whatever, to the promised aftercare: the comfort button!! getting that empathetic dopamine boost. feeling like we've gone through something and come out the other side into safety.
so how do we write hurt/comfort? okay, we pick a bad thing, we make the blorbo experience the bad thing, then we rescue them. we heal them. we make them better!
but like. what the fuck is better? and why the fuck is it so often Being Normal?
it's incredibly tempting to slip into the Easy Story -- the one we've heard before, over and over, where A Bad Thing Happened To A Good Person And Then It Was Over. it's a massively influential cultural narrative esp. in anglo north america. it fits our cultural narrative: we protect victims! there is a just world! we lift each other up! we get sick and then we get better! the good guys are saved and their mistakes are forgiven and they are redeemed while the bad guys are punished!
does it feel good to read that kind of story? sure. it smacks the little comfort button like one of those rats with their cocaine water bottles. smackasmackasmacka. there's value in that. it's nice to have something easy once in a while!
it drives me fucking bonkers.
when the focus of the hurt/comfort starts slip-sliding into those cultural archetypes of Martyr and Saint and Pure -- when the protagonist goes through fire only to come out cleansed, being showered with perfect affection, never again to be doubted or harmed, weeping a beautiful single tear into the arms of their lover who realised their mistakes in the moment of peril and knew they would be kind and loving Forever and whose love heals the victim entirely and perfectly so they can go be Normal together forever -- that creeps me the fuck out!! especially in transformative fiction!!
look: for the people who are using hurt/comfort for an easy dopamine hit, you do you baby. but for the rest of us? for the people who are fucking exhausted every damn day being ground down by the millstone of a just world fallacy? chronically ill, mentally ill, disabled, fat, trans+queer, kinky, racialised, impoverished, traumatised, too old, too young -- the fucking backbone of fandom from its very beginnings -- what the fuck is the point of another perfect victim getting beautifully rescued and nursed back into hegemony?
listen. when it comes to The Pirate Show, i like izzy hands best. i like him because he's an asshole. i like him because he's unpleasant and embarassing and short, and he feels things way too strongly, and no one takes him seriously, and he's toxically in love with someone who's pulling away. i know what those things feel like. i relate to them. he's funny and pathetic and con o'neill is a brilliant actor.
i want hurt/comfort for him.
i want someone to reach out and try to understand a messy, imperfect person. i want there to be complications and yelling and mistakes, because that's what recovery is, and i want everything he's gone through to mean something. i want whoever's doing the comforting to be imperfect, too. perfection is boring. perfection is what people ask of folks like me, who can give it the least, because help only comes to the people who "deserve it."
why doesn't izzy hands deserve it?
(why don't i deserve it?)
yeah, i'm nowhere near that much of an asshole. i recently did one of those goofy send-me-a-heart memes and a whole bunch of people made a point of mentioning my positivity!
but i'm disabled. i'm fat. my adhd has tanked my memory and executive function to the point of ruining friendships. my victimhood is not pretty. it's got scars and cellulite and it's kind of a dick sometimes and it can't do the dishes without getting flashbacks and it can't get a normal job because its joints are fucked up. i spent every moment of my life up until i nearly died at age 21 trying desperately to be exactly what the world seemed to want me to be, because by being perfect, i might finally be worth loving. it took nearly dying from organ failure for me to realise that that's bullshit. i still struggle with the narrative, though, every fucking day; is the suffering my fault? did i fail to hold up my end of the promise -- that perfect people are saved -- by failing to be perfect?
spoiler alert: i didn't. horrible shit happens sometimes. it sucks. we do the best we can with what we have, and in a society choked with broken systems that run on christian capitalism, sometimes it's not much. but we still help each other. none of it is perfect. perfection is not possible. to strive for it -- and, in my eyes, to repeat the narrative over and over that the world is inherently just :. therefore all suffering is a result of personal failure -- is to slap all the billions of good people who are suffering this second in the god damn mouth.
so.
to bring this all home:
who are you writing hurt/comfort for, and why are you writing it?
are you writing hurt/comfort to smack an easy comfort button, or are you writing to promise your reader that they're not alone and that they can survive this? or are you writing that promise to yourself? is the point of the scene to end with something Fixed, the harm undone and erased, or to face it with your eyes open and tell it it's not going to take us this time?
make a choice. then take that feeling and use it.
make something beautiful.
❤️xo
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Wisdom of the Ages.
I'm done with modesty and low self-esteem. If Elon Musk is allowed the dystopic levels of cognitive dissonance necessary to believe in himself as a businessman, I'm allowed to think my gay little books about witches and werewolves having a hard time are hot shit.
Like, for YEARS I followed that nanowrimo doctrine of never editing before finishing a draft 'cause common wisdom states your inner-editor is a massive meanie, and the only way to finish a book is to push that editor off a cliff, but I have a clearance sale super power that allows me to forget instantly everything I've written, plus my current mood colours my perception of things. Which means if I'm in a bad mood, I believe it's because everything I wrote previously is irredeemable, steaming garbage, and I don't remember what I wrote so I have no objective evidence to the contrary.
Until I reread it and I'm like 'heeheee, i made funny joke' and also 'ohhh i really want these buttheads to kiss and i'm the god of this world so they're gonna.' I'm tired of it being taboo to like your own work. Boast. Love yourself an insufferable amount. Suck your own dick. It's all free and there's a cost of living crisis.
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couple of rough sketches for potential print things
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A joke that will never get old.
It’s been nearly 11 months and I still find that ‘[insert a picture of a pale, disgusting and unseasoned looking thing] “The Gentleman pirate I presume”’ joke too funny for my own good. Please keep making them, guys.
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loving this fic so much! Stupid fucking nature! You'd think they'd know the rule: Never Get off The Boat...
In case you were wondering why Ed hates nature, bugs and snakes, here’s my lil HC heavy pre-canon fic about it. Feat young Ed, Izzy and Calico Jack.
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Jack "Fuckwit" Rackham's milkshake brings all the gender feels to the yard.
for the writing prompt: literally anything about anne max and jack settling together in that sweaty, loving, texturised way only you can write
okay so first off: thank you for this prompt. i've actually been rotating this ask around in my mind for a couple days while watching black sails and thinking about anne and jack and max and the points at which they meet.... and this prompt has actually given me the perfect opportunity to push my 'jack is a girl' agenda on the world/on my long-suffering followers. so thank you for encouraging transgenderism. here's anne and max conspiring to crack jack's egg: it ran overlong, and i'm actually considering extending it at some point when i have more time!!
1000 words, vaguely nsfw
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“This is new,” Max murmurs, as she presses Anne back against the bedpost; fingering at the lapel of her coat. It’s a heavy black thing, overlarge and stinking slightly of tobacco and sweat, trimmed in gilt and fastened with mother of pearl. Not suited for Nassau’s heat, nor Anne’s usual style of dress, but perfect for her perpetual shell of clothing.
Seeing her without it is strange. The scabbard, the coat, the hat. Stripped down to the thin shirt she wears beneath, she’s pale and slight. Her nipples make peaks against the light cloth; the insides of her forearms are smooth and startlingly white. It’s like seeing a turtle without its shell.
“’S Jack’s,” she grunts, head tipped back against the bedpost as she watches Max make short work of the laces of her breeches. But Max pauses — the reveal is intriguing.
“You wear Jack’s clothes?” Max asks, carefully. Anne laughs — that dry, almost mocking sound.
“He’d wear mine if he could fit ‘em.”
On the chair, the oily candlelight doubles itself in the gilt trim on Anne’s coat. If Max picked it up, crept her fingers along the seams at waist and hem and shoulder, she knows she’d find them altered. Carefully, exactingly; by the hand of someone who’s been doing this a decade or more. Anne is a small woman wearing a large man’s clothes. And Jack?
“He likes your clothes?”
The look Anne throws her is sly. Chin tipped, as if she’s still got that greasy old hat to peer out from as she mutters, “He’s asked me to fuck him in ‘em enough.”
Max touches her fingers to a freckle beneath Anne’s clavicle. “I see,” she murmurs, but Anne’s eyes are closed and her cheeks are pink, and Max knows she’s no longer listening.
The first time Jack joins them in bed, Max sees the way he looks at her — the hang of her breasts from her ribcage, the dimple of her thighs as Anne’s fingers dig in, the way her sweat mats the hair under her arms and on her shins. It’s not the way a man watches a woman. His eyes don’t linger on her arse or her cunt. When he fucks Anne he does it with resounding control; lip caught between his teeth, those black eyes of his boring into Max from over the top of Anne’s head. When he spills he does it in a cupped hand, and seems to take little pleasure from it.
“You’re not all that you seem,” she says to him, later. He lies nude and winded in their sweaty twist of bedsheets; eyes on the screen behind which Anne has disappeared, to wash her wet from her thighs and Max’s spit from her nipples. A long, pale stretch of man — the kind of tall that stoops.
His answer is quick and reflexive. “Well, neither are you, my sweet.”
Behind the screen comes the sound of splashing water. Jack watches the shadow that moves beyond the thin paper like a dog watches the doorway his master left through. Fingers idly coaxing at the curl of black hair between his nipples, so utterly disinterested in Max that she knows he’s feigning it.
She draws a robe to cover her nudity, and watches him settle so imperceptibly that she’s not sure he knows he does it. Then she says, low enough for only Jack to hear: “You’re smaller than some of my girls. I could get you something of your own, if you’d like that.”
Their eyes meet through the gloom. Smoky, grainy, midnight light. Below them the noise of the whorehouse seeps up through the boards; the low roar of music and laughter and secrets traded. Jack’s hand flattens against his sternum. His expression — open and shocked for just a moment — flattens too.
“I’m sure I don’t know what the bloody hell you’re talking about,” he says, voice clipped.
“I think you do,” she replies, but then Anne emerges. Her eyes, flinty in the low light, flick between the two of them with an animal discomfort — confusion makes her lip curl.
“What the fuck’re you two talkin’ about?” she asks, and the topic is dropped.
It remains dropped for some time. Jack joins them in bed a few more times — keeps his hands to himself, and his eyes too, for the most part. Then he relocates to the foot of the bed, to a chair, and finally out of the room entirely. Sometimes his body shutters the light that bleeds under the threshold of the door. Sometimes Max smells his sweat on Anne’s body. But mostly he gives them a wide berth. When he and Max are alone, he talks to the ceiling, and not to her face.
“You said somethin’ to him,” Anne says, one night. Her eyes searching. “That first time.”
They’re laid together, not touching. Max is patiently unravelling a tangled braid from Anne’s hair. Letting the sweat cool on her skin after fucking Anne to wet-eyed orgasm. At Anne’s words, she hums. “I did,” she murmurs, not seeing any reason to lie.
“What was it?”
The answer is slower to come than the admittance. Not because she doesn’t want to tell it — but Max knows she needs to tell it the right way. She’d like to see this come to fruition. It only seems fair for Jack to have a little taste of an awakening, like the one Anne is now enjoying.
“I suggested allowing him to borrow some of the girls’ clothes.” Max keeps her voice light. “He’s tall, but slim — there’s a lot that could fit.”
She knows it sounds reasonable. She knows because that’s how she wants it to sound. As easy as putting on a new pair of shoes. But Anne’s eyes bore holes in her. Lips parting a little, before she speaks. “He said yes, didn’t he?
Max frowns, intrigued. “What makes you say that?”
“Don’t pretend you haven’t noticed.”
The braid comes free. Max runs her fingers through it, and says, very carefully: “He said no. But I think it won’t take much for him to change his mind.” She waits a beat, watching Anne watch her. Listening to the creak of the balcony floorboards beyond the door, the sound almost concealed by the low din below. Then she adds, “For you to change his mind,” and watches Anne’s eyes dip, and slip away.
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This fic has got me by the short and curly feels.
fallow land & bigger sky // 4832 words // mature
Spring is as much of a dying season than it is a living one. Ed had died in the spring.
chapter one // full work
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Yeah, I agree that Ed contains multitudes, sure he performs, but what makes him a genius is that all the performances are real. He is actually all those things at once. That's what makes him so compelling. Capable of great kindness and great cruelty. Sometimes soft and sometimes hard. Leather and velvet. He doesn't need to pick a persona, or figure out who he really is, he needs someone who loves every version of Ed, all the Eds in their Infinite Variety.
Think you are up to the job, Stede?
I feel like a very under-appreciated line in OFMD is “This is who I am, Stede. You were always going to realize who I am.”
It’s said in response to Stede saying that he doesn’t like who Ed is around Calico Jack, but I think it can apply to a lot more. Ed has a lot of wildly different personas—Blackbeard, the Kraken, Jeff, the frat bro friend, the beardless Ed laundry-folder, the talent show planner who doesn’t want to be a pirate. I think it’s tempting to think of many of these as totally fake, not representative of the “real” Ed. I think it’s also tempting to think that *Ed* thinks that of himself, that he believes that he is made to act in certain ways by Izzy or Jack or whoever.
But even though Ed will conceal parts of himself—making up the Kraken story, or claiming “the fire killed those people”—I think that Ed doesn’t really see most of these personas as fake. When he says the aforementioned line, he feels like he’s speaking from a place of honesty. I think the same is true when he admits that he’s the Kraken, or asserts that he’s still Blackbeard, or says he just wants to be Edward.
Things can be performative without being false. It always feels jarring to me to see fanfics that confidently assert that some persona of Ed’s is totally fake, and even worse, that Ed himself thinks that they’re fake. I can see Ed making excuses to others, and perhaps even to himself at times. But I think if he’s being honest and open, Ed believes that they’re all real, and that no one else made him do any of it.
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Stede's flashback of love montage: Ed threatening to put a dagger through a Frenchman's eye.
Stede’s flashbacks of love montage: bonding over clothes, going to parties, sword fighting together, drinking and laughing and having fun, every bit of it together together together together after a lifetime alone and dismissed for the things that he enjoys
Ed’s flashback of love montage: that one time someone made him feel like he was actually deserving of good things despite the entire world and all his life experience telling him otherwise
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The part of my brain not occupado by Fallow Land and To Feel Anything at All is full of Up, Down, Turn-Around.
Come for the ADHD Ed, and stay for the gorgeous musings on art, and love at first sight, and British Library fu.
(One of the glorious things about this fandom IMHO is that the same source material can generate a gorgeously slow meditation on grief and loss (Fallow Land), a heart-wrenching coming out story (To Feel Anything At All) and a high concept modern romance. (Up, Down, Turn-Around.)
“Oh, Ed.” She propped her elbow on the table and her face on her hand. Her earrings were bright green, peridot maybe, and they looked incredible, glimmering like spring. Ed never had a sister. “What are we going to do with you?”
“Put me in a bag and shake me up? That’s what my mum used to say.” She’d never actually done it though. Maybe she should’ve, might’ve shook something loose. Done them both some good.
This is so good I'm giggling, I'm wailing, I'm gnashing my teeth, I'm having a blast. Go read it now.
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this fic made me actual like lawyers and ed/lucius and also want brownies, and to visit cambridge again. And live in an Ivory Tower.
Hey, I wrote a new fic, Contra Proferentem (E). It's modern AU Ed/Lucius so YMMV but maybe you'd wanna give it a go?
Ed's a ruthless senior barrister and professor of law at Cambridge, Lucius is a PhD student and lecturer in English Lit and Stede owns a cafe that makes great brownies. The sex is very platonic, there's 0% cheating and it's Lucius POV so I reckon it's pretty funny. Enjoy!
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#ohyeah #sticks #ilovethisowl
stede being basically suicidal before he leaves home drives a lot of how i read him and what’s admirable about him as a character
because like
ok you know that poster about depression, with the cartoon owl? maybe you don’t, maybe that’s obscure. here’s what i’m talking about
that’s how i think about stede building the revenge. like, he’s in a situation where it’s very tempting to just lay down and die and he says, no, the only way i can imagine staying alive is to build a boat and run away from home and become a pirate so it doesn’t matter if that’s objectively insane, that’s what i’m gonna do. just give me something to fight with. i don’t care if it’s a stick. give me a stick and i can stay alive.
yeah stede can be a bitch about a lot of things but there is something fundamentally admirable about somebody who very clearly has felt like he’s drowning for the entire 40-odd years he’s been alive and has nobody in the world he trusts to reach out for help with it and he gets to the point where he simply cannot bear to do it anymore but then he just. refuses to give up. no matter how absurd the only alternative that’s imaginable for him is. idk i’m having stede bonnet feelings
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was listening to the absolutely brilliant Betwix the Sheets podcast (full disclosure: i have a crush on kate lister)--Lady Chatterley's Lover edition, interview with biographer Frances Wilson about Lawrence etc. Too lazy to go back and get actual citation, and couldn't find a transcript but anyway, of course, they discussed how utter ridiculous the sex bits of Lady Chatterley's Lover sound now, so comical and hilarious, could easily win that Bad Sex Writing Award, maybe even a special citation for Worst Sex Writing EVER--Dr Wilson was so sweet about Lawrence and his Porn With Plot trials, pointing out that (I paraphrase here) that he was really just trying to write about something we don't really have the right words for--
And my first thought, of course, was: get thee to some fanfic, my friend...
By far the best writing I've ever read about sex, lust, longing, attraction, emotion, desire, fear, power and Porn With/Without Plot has been in fanfic. Is there Chatterley Level Awful smut in fanfic, oh yea. But there's also truly amazing insightful incredible writing about sex, too.
Viz, out of many, these two:
Love Me by the Hour by getmean (On AO3)
To Feel Anything Anything At All by 2unfit2quit (On A03)
DUE DILIGENCE: both these fics are rated E for explicit. Read the tags before reading the fic.
There's a lot of good stuff out there; I'm only singling these two because they are foremost on my mind, and they are both sublimely wonderful!
(And getmean has an awesome tumblr but I don't know how to link to it, sorry! search hackerman and you'll find it.)
i have a full Manifesto on Fanfic that i've been boring friends with for months, I was gonna unload it here tonight, but i can't be arsed, so anyway, if you don't wanna read some explicit fiction, go listen to Betwixt the Sheets, it's an awesome podcast, and did I mention I have a crush on Kate Lister? She should do an episode about fanfic! That's a great idea. Someone should suggest it to her...not me, I'm too shy.
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there's only one bed
thinking how i adore the only one bed trope the forced intimacy the lying breathless so close so far thinking do i dare will they dare what will happen breathing in the same air the rustle of sheet an exterior effigy interior roiling i have to say its probably my all time favorite trope
which is why i find it so hilarious within the context of OFMD because mostly throughout history there truly only one fucking bed! (if there was a bed at all--lots of pallets on the floor back in the day). historical blackbeard and stede bonnet probably never slept alone in their entire lives, siblings, servants, spouses, slaves, parents, even rich people shared beds because beds (furniture and fixings) themselves such a scarce and fabulous commodity that people actually bequeathed them in their wills, as famously shakespeare did with his second best bed.
perhaps the most famous there's only one bed in all of literature:
"'But avast," he added, tapping his forehead, "you haint no objections to sharing a harpooneer's blanket, have ye? I s'pose you are a goin' a whaling, so you'd better get used to that sort of thing.'"
No footnotes we die like Badmintons but of course that's from Moby Dick (and yeah I'm aware that the next two pages are reasons why people don't like to share beds but we're talking the middle of the 19th century and separate beds were starting to be a thing)...(along with worries about sanitation sexual purity etc.)
I had it in mind to write a fic where Stede has never slept alone and isn't about to start now (sort of like Lincoln forcing his secretary to sleep with him when Mary was away) so he makes Lucius sleep with him instead. When Ed finds out about *that* oh does a plan start form in his tactical genius brain.
But I didn't write it because I'm lazy. Someone else should. It's a great idea.
I give it to you.
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The sad fact is that in my heart of heart i think ed would have eventually gotten bored of stede. so in some ways stede did ed a favour by scarpering while they still had spark. now ed gets the high drama of big feelings and that should tide him through ennui for quite some time. in the end, that's is probably worth more to ed's long term mood than actual true love. do people fix their shit? maybe, but i have yet to see it. are blood-thirsty pirates without access to anxiety medications, adderall and talk therapy able to fix their shit? nope. not trying to shit in anyone's oatmeal here, cause i'm enjoying this oatmeal very much its very tasty oatmeal indeed...but one can only eat oatmeal for so long, before one eye starts wandering to other starches. ed can't possibly love stede in proportion to his actual heart-ache because he doesn't know fuck-all about stede. his hurt is solely located in the fact that he wanted stede, and put himself out to stede, and stede rejected him. season two maybe they'll learn more about each other and by extension themselves, enough to see beyond their own imaginations of who they project the other to be. lucky for ed and stede they live in a faery tale, not real life. and not the kind of faery tale where stede goes under the hill and ed has to hold onto him while he changes into a serpent, while the wild hunt all laugh, but the kind where they will live get to live happily ever. good for them! i'll love to see it.
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