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if you told vin diesel fast and the furious you were gay he'd be like "Some people like driving stick…some people like driving automatic…what matters is you cross the finish line.." and then he'd rev up a dodge challenger and drive through a building and kill 16 people

I'm on my third reread of Red White and Royal Blue and wow I will never tire of it. This is literally one of my favorite books of all time I love it!!!

I just had a dream that I was (kinda) Neil Josten from the fucking All For The Game series, (yes Andrew was there and yes we were lovers obviously) and it has inspired me. To reread the entirety of AFTG cause I forgot about it but adore that terrible trilogy with every inch of my soul.

If anyone needs me, don't. I'll be busy reading about a bunch of gay nerds playing stickball and being fools for the second time.

stop trying to make your draft perfect on the first try. your characters don’t care. your plot doesn’t care. even the imaginary readers in your head don’t care because they don’t exist yet. just write the terrible version. write the cringey dialogue and the scenes that go nowhere and the metaphors so bad they make you cringe into next week. because guess what? you can’t edit a blank page, but you can edit a hot mess. embrace it.

I knew we would eventually reach a point where masses of people would misinterpret Arcane, but I never imagined it would be this bad.

Yes, I absolutely agree that season 2 was rushed, especially Act 3, and it is undeniable that the series would have benefited from at least one more episode if not an entire act. However, the current discourse about the show is so superficial that it's impossible to have a conversation about anything deeper but a mere synopsis of the characters and story.

So many of you expected this series to hold your hand and dumb everything down so you can understand it. But when it wasn't the case, you all started rioting and calling the characters vague, the plot bad, and the ships underdeveloped.

The amount of people who value spoken text more than the actions of the characters is worrying. And more worrying than that is the amount of those who interpret the said actions so superficially. I can't believe it needs to be explained that it wasn't Vi's death that led to the "good" timeline, but the lack of hextech. The result would have been the same if either of them had died. It wasn't about Vi, but about the child that died because of dangerous technology and that therefore that technology must not be used. The mischaracterization of Vi in general is insane. Call me biased and unfair, but the moment I hear you don't like her I will assume you didn't understand the show.

Also, the whole discourse around Caitvi scene in episode 8 is giving brainsmooth. No, Vi didn't choose Cait over Jinx, quite the opposite. No, Cait didn't plan all of it to fuck Vi. No, Vi didn't do it because she felt forced or because she is a horny animal who doesn't care about her sister. No, them fucking in a cell is not about the class difference, but about the fact that Vi felt an insane rush of emotions after realizing that Cait would let go of her revenge and help Jinx escape, all for her. Yes, I do agree that it would be nice if we got a longer conversation between Vi and Caitlyn and it would feel great to hear Cait apologize, but I'll always value actions over words. Her talking to Jinx, recognizing that she is just as bad as her, and choosing to trust Vi that her sister can change, thus letting Jinx escape will always mean more than any verbal apology and I'll die on that hill.

Also, it was Jinx's decision to let go and walk away. It was not about Vi trying to get to Vander, but about Jinx being tired of everything. Even if that fight didn't happen, the result would be the same: Jinx would leave because she knows that Vi couldn't do that. She knew that the two of them couldn't have a normal life together and that Vi would never give up on her. Jinx didn't "die" because Vi pushed her or failed her, but because she loved her too much. Whether you believe that she is dead or that she escaped, it's her decision either way.

Again, I agree that too much happened too quickly, but stop confusing your stupidity and inability to read between the lines with the quality of the series.

Arcane is flawed but still brilliant.

"Ice, is my character a stereotype?Is my story stereotypical?"

Lesson 6: "Let's Have a Talk, First"- Stereotypes, pt 1

Lesson 6: “Why’s she so rude?” (She’s Not)- Stereotypes, pt2

Lesson 6: "Is He the Threat (Or Are You?)"- Stereotypes, pt 3

Application Example: How to spot a Stereotype: An Example

Before you ask me this, I need you to read every lesson and click and search through every single link!

There are as many ways to accidentally (or purposely!) scribble up a stereotype as there are stories to tell. It takes our entire lives to learn and keep up with the ways media (fiction and nonfiction) will find ways to depict us negatively in a narrative. Why would it be any easier for you? 😅

If you actually want to develop the skill to see what and how stereotypes manifest in your media, you have to study it. It will take you time! You will have to read, and then you will have to apply what you've read! That's part of media analysis and comprehension! Because at the end of the day, I could present you with a surface level, lovely story containing a stereotypical narrative, but if you didn't know what to look for and why, you wouldn't see it.

And again, I will always tell you to engage with Black stories. Why do you want to put me in your stories, but you don't want to engage with anything created by me? Why do you want to know how to write my voice, but you're not willing to read anything spoken by my voice? How else do you plan on figuring that out? What is your intention, here? Let's ask ourselves these questions!

youre offline because you have an irl life and miss one load bearing post on here and all of a sudden you dont understand any of the vagues on your dash for the next week

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I'M DOING AN EXPERIMENT

To prove something to a friend, please

REBLOG IF YOU THINK ASEXUALS BELONG IN LGBTQ+ SPACES

LIKE IF YOU THINK ASEXUALS DON’T BELONG IN LGBTQ+ SPACES

In the past fifty years, fantasy’s greatest sin might be its creation of a bland, invariant, faux-Medieval European backdrop. The problem isn’t that every fantasy novel is set in the same place: pick a given book, and it probably deviates somehow. The problem is that the texture of this place gets everywhere.

What’s texture, specifically? Exactly what Elliot says: material culture. Social space. The textiles people use, the jobs they perform, the crops they harvest, the seasons they expect, even the way they construct their names. Fantasy writing doesn’t usually care much about these details, because it doesn’t usually care much about the little people – laborers, full-time mothers, sharecroppers, so on. (The last two books of Earthsea represent LeGuin’s remarkable attack on this tendency in her own writing.) So the fantasy writer defaults – fills in the tough details with the easiest available solution, and moves back to the world-saving, vengeance-seeking, intrigue-knotting narrative. Availability heuristics kick in, and we get another world of feudal serfs hunting deer and eating grains, of Western name constructions and Western social assumptions. (Husband and wife is not the universal historical norm for family structure, for instance.)

Defaulting is the root of a great many evils. Defaulting happens when we don’t think too much about something we write – a character description, a gender dynamic, a textile on display, the weave of the rug. Absent much thought, automaticity, the brain’s subsconscious autopilot, invokes the easiest available prototype – in the case of a gender dynamic, dad will read the paper, and mom will cut the protagonist’s hair. Or, in the case of worldbuilding, we default to the bland fantasy backdrop we know, and thereby reinforce it. It’s not done out of malice, but it’s still done.

The only way to fight this is by thinking about the little stuff. So: I was quite wrong. You do need to worldbuild pretty hard. Worldbuild against the grain, and worldbuild to challenge. Think about the little stuff. You don’t need to position every rain shadow and align every tectonic plate before you start your short story. But you do need to build a base of historical information that disrupts and overturns your implicit assumptions about how societies ‘ordinarily’ work, what they ‘ordinarily’ eat, who they ‘ordinarily’ sleep with. Remember that your slice of life experience is deeply atypical and selective, filtered through a particular culture with particular norms. If you stick to your easy automatic tendencies, you’ll produce sexist, racist writing – because our culture still has sexist, racist tendencies, tendencies we internalize, tendencies we can now even measure and quantify in a laboratory. And you’ll produce narrow writing, writing that generalizes a particular historical moment, its flavors and tongues, to a fantasy world that should be much broader and more varied. Don’t assume that the world you see around you, its structures and systems, is inevitable.

We... need worldbuilding by Seth Dickinson