Every once in a while I remember that, during the last round of workshopping people’s writing in my fiction class, I got into a fight with my teacher and the rest of the class about whether or not motive mattered in writing. This one story was about this guy who was a serial killer and his girlfriend who…evidently knew he was a serial killer for months if not years and did nothing and the last scene was her murdering him with poison in his food. (There were a lot of really heavy rape-y abusive overtones and I was kind of like…sweetheart, have you considered therapy rather than exorcising your issues onto all of us.) And I made what I thought was the totally valid remark of “Well, it’s not clear what makes her snap and murder him; like, she’s known for a while, generally people don’t just suddenly DECIDE to kill their significant other who they’ve shown no violent inclinations toward in the past without some sort of prompting, and like you don’t need to get into the motive much in the story but maybe hint at it? Because murder?”
And the whole class basically sat around talking about how motive doesn’t matter and it’s fine that she just kills him for no apparent reason and how in writing it’s fine if there’s no motive because the characters do what they need to for the writer’s plot to work and I was just like “Wow, that’s right, this is why I fight with most of you about writing so much, it’s because in order for a plot to function, motives need to…like…exist.”
Like, if your character goes to get a smoothie, it matters if they’re getting it because they’ve had a bad day and smoothies are a fave, or because they’re on a health kick and they’d rather have a milkshake, or because they’re meeting someone there, or whatever. It changes the character’s backstory and behavior. Am I crazy?
i don’t understand the “women have to have a child - before its too late” rhetoric
if you’re unsure don’t do it because i realised the other day that ANY time, between now and my death, i can choose to have as many children in my life as i like. i could become a “big sister”, or a foster parent, or work with kids. or adopt kids, or about 50 other ideas i haven’t thought of. i’ve never wanted a child but if i did and i was too old to have a biological one the options are endless
literally the only choice you cant change is having one. that choice you’re stuck with for the rest of your life. whereas im free to choose to be involved with kids as much or as little as i choose. or i can stay being the “mother” of a sillybutt rescue kitty, it’s all still open and available to me and always will be
“Can I tell you a secret? You don’t have to be in a relationship.
I mean it. I know they force it down your throat until you choke on it. Girls aren’t pretty unless they’re wanted. Boys aren’t men unless they’re having sex with someone. People aren’t lovable until they’re dating someone.
But a relationship won’t always make you happy, and as wonderful as romance is, it isn’t the only love that exists. I have seen friendships that are deeper and more pure than couples who swear it’s forever - and yet the friendship is the one people ignore.
I have heard so often “nobody loves me” out of the mouths of people who are single. And it kills me because if you ask them: where are your parents, your teachers, your classmates, your pets - they say, yes, okay, but it doesn’t count. Of course it counts, love doesn’t diminish just because someone doesn’t want to have sex with you. In fact, doesn’t it sort of make that love more real that they want nothing - not even a date - out of you?
It is pretty to be in love. It’s magical, I’m sure. But it’s also wonderful to stop for ice cream in your prom dress with six other girls. It’s also wonderful to go visit the world with nothing but a bunch of buddies who are really excited about learning.
The problem is: we’ve made everything about “the one”. But maybe “the one” is just you, loving yourself, having fun, and being happy. Maybe instead of looking for our other halves, we should be piecing ourselves together.
Maybe I wasn’t born unfinished. Maybe I am the one who makes myself better.”—Single serving size // r.i.d (via inkskinned)
apparently you can’t be employed by the CIA if you’ve ever illegally downloaded music
breaking news: in 20 years, the CIA will operate out of the president’s basement, staffed by four old men and six guinea pigs
Okay so what this really means is that in 20 years the CIA will be staffed only with people who were incredibly paranoid and went to great pains to hide their music downloading activities from surveillance.
…which sounds exactly like the sort of person you want working as a spy so.
In 20 years the CIA will be staffed only with people who have implicitly or explicitly lied to the CIA.
Hey transmasculine and gender-variant folx! If you wear a chest binder, I made an Android app that you can use! It reminds you to take off your binder at the end of the day and also to stretch out your back during the day. You can find it in the Google Play store here.
If you’re having issues with it, or have any feedback for me, I’d love if you could email me at binder.reminder.team@gmail.com. And if you like it, feel free to rate and review it!
the thing that bothers me is that disney and marvel seem to still be under the impression that the only way to get a female audience in the seats for their action films is to add a romance
and this is extremely upsetting
why cant i as a woman like a movie thats built on drama and political tensions?
why cant i as a woman like a movie that has cheeky humor?
why cant i as a woman like a movie where people punch each other and there are huge battle sequences?
why is it that because i am a woman these major studios feel that i will only watch their movies if i see two straight people kiss
but can we consider that Rhodey does, in fact, outrank Steve Rogers?
now picture rhodey meeting steve and steve snapping a salute
that is all
and Rhodey would be totally serious about it until the second Steve walked out of the room and then he’d totally turn and look at Tony with crazy eyes and Tony would be like “JARVIS TOOK PICTURES FROM EVERY ANGLE YOU’RE WELCOME”
@ the people who followed me for one specific thing i’m really sorry my interests are all over the place and that sometimes i will suddenly start posting a fuck ton of something i’ve never mentioned before whoops
like the stress, the pressure and everything ya know. everyone keeps saying like ‘school makes me cry’ and stuff but has it really made you cry bc i cried a lot of times tbh
Headcannon that all demigod children of Poseidon have amazing singing voices because they are related to the sirens.
Except for Percy
No, Especially Percy.
So like pretty much no one hears Percy sing and one day he’s just like “hey what’s the name of this song” and he sings a little verse and everyone just sorta stops and looks at him because they were weirdly compelled to drop everything they were doing and just go over to listen to him and he’s just looking back at them like what??
I’ve got to believe that the Resistance’s intelligence officers are just. constantly Done. With everyone.
Rey’s understanding of aurebesh is more functional than formal, which isn’t a problem until the Resistance starts asking her to submit mission reports—she rarely spells anything the same way twice (”even her name!” the intelligence officer moans) and her sentence structure is….not so much a structure as “a loose grouping of things that might be parts of speech”
“…..I don’t understand, what’s the problem?” Finn asks because Finn’s grammar is impeccable, once you decipher the dense nest of abbreviations, First Order codes, and trooper slang that fill his reports. (This does not save any more time.)
“If you could maybe…..not? wax lyrical about the TIE fighter?” the intelligence officer tells Poe, when he finally gets around to submitting his report on the escape from the Finalizer. “Not that understanding enemy technology isn’t a vital contribution to intelligence, but we don’t need 500 polysyllabic words about how the sun glinted off the casing.”
General Organa still submits reports like they used to in the Rebellion (her battle damage assessment style is about thirty years out of date, and she calculates galactic coordinates like it’s the late republic) but everyone in intel is fucking terrified of bringing this up to her. Instead, they have a designated officer who deals exclusively with translating General Organa’s reports into more modern New Republic standards,so they can be processed.
(At least yours actually submits reports, their counterparts in the First Order would say, if they all got together in a bar somewhere to commiserate about how hard soldiers make military intelligence. Kylo Ren has submitted exactly one misrep in the last 15 years. Thirty-two people died and it just said ‘it was the Force’.)
listen, there is absolutely nothing that gets me going like mutual seemingly unrequited pining like? i live for both people losing their minds over the other person in bitter silence. savoring every single accidental brush of their fingers, elbows, thighs, every stray glance, memorizing every gesture or expression they catch while the other isn’t looking, all while being absolutely convinced that it’s one-sided only to finally!! finally find out it wasn’t in a triumphant moment of bliss after years and years of delicious, soul-rending, torturous, heart-wrenching pining. i literally don’t care about the fact that this trope is predictable af and always plays out the same way i will still go wild over it every single time like they’ll be doing the same reveal scene i have seen a million times and i’m still on the edge of my seat gasping “are they gonna kiss???”
my single greatest weakness as far as love stories go
is when a story is told through one character’s (pining) point of view, but you the reader KNOW that their love interest loves them back
and the pov character casually says something that you the reader KNOW is gonna be completely devastating to their love interest, but pov character has NO IDEA, like:
“[innocently devastating thing],” said pov character
a strange look seemed to pass over love interest’s face. “yeah, [seemingly casual response that comes off as a little stilted, for reasons pov character just cannot pinpoint],” said love interest.
“uh, [joke that accidentally just DIALS UP THE AGONY TO A THOUSAND FOR LOVE INTEREST],” pov character added, to cut the tension.
love interest step’s faltered for a second. “[seemingly casual response that is FILLED WITH EXQUISITELY REPRESSED PAIN AND LONGING].” it sounded a little gruff. probably love interest was just distracted, or wanted some space. who could blame them?
Captain Phasma gets hauled in by the Resistance at some point
and because she’s the highest-ranking officer they’ve ever caught, Leia comes in to question Phasma personally, with Luke in tow
they enter the interrogation room, and behind the blaster-proof viewport, standing at parade rest, is this 6 ½ foot brick shit-house of a woman in stormtrooper under-armor
Leia just sort of… freezes, and then she’s grabbing her brother’s arm and dragging him back out into the hallway
the door’s barely shut behind them before she’s doubled over in laughter, helplessly, the kind of laughter that comes from having to keep yourself together for years before something finally breaks
and Luke is this close to calling for a medic when Leia manages to gasp out,
“Don’t you think she’s a little tall for a stormtrooper?”
those little things on ur nose aren’t blackheads, don’t try and get rid of them they’re sebaceous filaments and they’re permanent and literally everyone has them
every girl has that little pouch of fat on her lower tummy, despite what magazines try n show u, you have important organs there that need to be protected don’t try and get rid of ur pouch
ur body is smarter than u think and it knows what to do when u eat more than normal. one bad day, or even week, of eating poorly isn’t gonna ruin anything at all I pinky promise
if u think u look good up until u try taking a selfie, it’s not ur fault - our faces are asymmetrical and when u see ur face flipped it will look unnatural to u, since u don’t see it that way when u look in the mirror. to everyone else it looks perfectly fine
no one’s stomach looks the same at 8pm as it does at 8am. no one has a chiseled six pack after a day of eating, not even the super fit people u see on tumblr, because ur stomach naturally expands after eating and expecting to have a flat tummy before bed is very unrealistic
no one notices if the bags under ur eyes are bad today. no one pays attention to the bump in ur nose or the zit on ur chin or the piece of hair that u missed when u were straightening. literally no one notices these things except you so stop worrying about it ur gonna be fine
sometimes u just gotta get over urself
this made me cry I needed it so bad
No one is paying attention to your small flaws of the day because they’re too obsessed with worrying about their own
one of the most frustrating things about humans is you can take a group of humans and you can say, ‘look, it’s incredibly important for people to be nice to each other’, and the humans will think, ‘yes, it is important for people to be nice to me’, and then the humans will all viciously fight over which of them the others should be nice to.
Every time someone tries to explain the metaplot of Supernatural to me, it basically ends up sounding like redneck Dragon Ball Z. I’m sure there’s some nuance I’m failing to grasp here.
Care to elaborate on that?
…I’m not even offended, just absolutely curious. From the stuff I’ve seen and heard about Supernatural I can’t see the connection.
Mostly, I get the impression of a show that doesn’t know how not to escalate.
Every threat’s gotta be quantitatively bigger and badder than the one that came before. Every deus ex machina’s gotta be shinier than the last one. Every season’s gotta end with a massive eleventh-hour powerup for our heroes, only for the next season to raise the stakes enough to put them back in the underdog position.
It’s like, you beat the Devil himself? Well, now you’ve gotta fight the Devil’s cousin Phil, who has conveniently gone entirely unmentioned up until now, but he’s totally twice as evil.
That last paragraph was literally supposed to be the most ridiculous hypothetical example I could think of, and people are messaging me to say “his name was Metatron, not Phil”. I can’t even make fun of this show.
People now are like, “Your right to free speech doesn’t mean you can express an offensive opinion”
Like what the fuck does right to free speech mean, then?
when you go from a bad situation into a better one you may collapse exhausted and unsure what to do and full of grief, you may need time to regain the ability to do things as yourself or motivated by anything other than terror, you may need time to process or mourn or fall apart in ways you could not before,
and people may use this as proof that the old situation was better for you, proof that you need to go back, and it is not proof that it was better for you or proof that you need to go back
!!!
It’s so incredibly common to “fall apart” when you’re finally safe. You no longer need to stay so tightly coiled in on yourself, you can finally leave survival mode and process your trauma. You’re not holding yourself up by sheer terror anymore and suddenly the damage that terror has done to you becomes immediate and obvious.
This is so important. Don’t go back. Things are already getting better, even if it doesn’t feel that way.
oppressive jokes aren’t meant to just put down people they target. they are meant to help oppressors bond with each other.
don’t tell me it doesn’t matter to make such jokes when “there’s no one around to get offended”. don’t tell me to let it fucking slide.
i know why a man makes a misogynist joke when trying to blend into a company of other men. i know why white people make racist jokes about their coworker who is a PoC, and how it’s going to affect their work.
They really think “you’re ruining his life” is going to guilt trip me into silence. Victim blaming 101. If you’re a survivor of assault, know you aren’t ruining anyone’s life but saving your own. Abusers ruin their own lives.
They ruin their own life the second they make the decision to abuse you. Never forget that.
I felt so fucking bad when I realised the guy I took to court had a newborn kid. Then I realised - whatever the outcome - HE made the decision to break the law. I didn’t make that decision. Everything that happens after that is a consequence of his decision, not mine.
i assume that, like, all of nyc is in on a conspiracy to hide the truth about blunt force head trauma from daredevil. like, to… protect his feelings??? the cops must be like “oh, yeah buddy, you really dinged those bad guys up! they’ll be feeling it for weeks! they’ll really think twice about Doing A Crime again.” when like, in reality, they are dead. they are dead people. they got busted in the head six times with a carbon fibre rod, and they died en route. i mean lets get real. daredevil showing up to the hospital with self-help books about starting over, “i’d like to drop these off for some of the bikers,” and the nurses all look at each other like, “uh… oh, honey, they were transferred to metro… north…. yeah, insurance thing. we’ll hold onto those for you.” they are all dead matt they’re dead. church is cool but maybe you should spend some more time on the Medical Side of wikipedia
American Eagle’s body positive campaign for men was an April Fool’s “joke”. Not only that, but the models that participated were lied to and had no idea that this wasn’t real and was a “prank”.
This is exceptionally cruel. Fat men’s bodies are not a joke.
So many fat people have trauma around the “jokes” that thin people like to play on us.
Thin people think it’s hilarious to pretend that they are romantically attracted to a fat person or that they want to be friends with a fat person.
The punchline is- HA HA! You thought you were a person! But you’re not! LOL!
These “pranks” leave scars, making it hard for their fat victims to believe anyone could ever care about them. These scars last for years, a lifetime.
That is what this “joke” reminded me of. A deep well of trauma from being subjected to the cruelties of thin people.
Of humiliation and torment, over and over, for the sake of thin people’s “jokes”.
I will not ever shop at an American Eagle again.
I stand in solidarity with fat men and masculine people.
I AM SO ANGRY. SO SO SO SO SO ANGRY. BLACK MEN ARE ALREADY UNDERREPRESENTED IN MEDIA IN POSITIVE OR ANY ROLE AND YOU THINK IT IS OK TO DO THIS EVEN MORE? LIKE THIS MODEL HAD NO CLUE?????????? WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?????????
But…it was so good…
MEN CAN HAVE INSECURITIES TOO.
nice to know people will ridicule me for being a fat man as much as for being a fat woman. awesome.
my headcanon for startrek is that humans look, to vulcans, like a dog frathouse. like signing on to a human ship is exactly that thrillingly loud and frustrating and fast and stupid and fun. the humans are going to dash off to a new sector to see if there are friends there and then they will jump up and down with delight and stuff their faces up against their new friends’ genital array. the humans are going to bark for ten minutes at a rock. the humans want to chase things they can’t possibly catch just because they like running around. the humans are madly passionate about their arbitrary group identities. the humans can be divided into new arbitrary group identities which they will then be passionate about. the humans want to stick their heads out of the window of their starship and go ‘wheee!’. if you step on a human’s paw they will act like you just killed them for about thirty seconds and then want more headpats. the humans can be immediately distracted from crucial duties by the appearance of a small animal. if you howl all the humans in earshot will howl louder just to show off. a human just humped your leg. ‘don’t make it weird bro’ the human says. later the human will dig a weird bug out of the ground and eat it.
I hope you don't mind me asking, and please feel free to ignore if you do, but someone mentioned to me that you had a Phasma redemption theory, and I'll be honest, I'm *all over* that shit, and I'd love to hear it if you'd ever want to talk about it?
oh man DO I WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT
ok look, before we go into anything substantial the reason i have a phasma redemption theory in the first place is i really want to care about someone from the bad guys’ side and so far you couldn’t pay me to give less of a collective flying fuck about kylo, hux and supreme leader snood. phasma on the other hand has the excellent potential of the under-explored and also there’s the whole gwendoline christie in shiny chrome full-body armor thing that speaks directly to my id, by which i mean she has express permission to bench-press me at her convenience
anyway
now that we’ve established that, i bring you: my phasma redemption theory
pahsma went from lawful evil to chaotic neutral in the time it took to say ‘holy shit did a desperately under-staffed, underfunded military offshoot of the republic blow up starkiller base with nothing but a dozen shabby x-wings and four people on the ground??’ drifting among the debris in her damaged escape pod, phasma has a crisis of faith. for the first time ever she experiences bitter disillusionment because she had sincerely, unquestioningly believed in the first order: that it was visionary and righteous, but most of all that it was infallible. phasma was the perfect product of stormtrooper conditioning that had drilled those things into her from an early age. but now it’s all gone. starkiller base, the first order’s greatest achievement, along with most of its command and troops. all blown to pieces in a matter of seconds.
phasma thinks of fn-2187.
she realizes with a dull sort of surprise that she’s not angry with him. not at all. she’s just– curious? why did he walk away from the order? phasma had never really stopped to consider his motives, only to label him as a failure and momentary disappointment, and move on. but something must have driven fn-2187 to the point where he caused the destruction of everything he was conditioned to believe in.
(if phasma knew anything about the force maybe she’d understand this sooner, but she’s about as force-sensitive as half a brick, so)
her escape pod is picked up by pirates/scavengers just as life support is beginning to fail. they very briefly consider turning phasma over to the republic, but then she breaks someone’s legs probably, and then they consider flying her to wherever she wants, no charge, please don’t hurt us we’re just small-time crooks okay? phasma has no idea where she’s supposed to go now. she knows in her heart that she can’t go back to whatever’s left of the first order because Doubt and the uncomfortable beginnings of questioning the ideology she’d submitted to and also a tiny voice that’s telling her hey hey you could do anything and go anywhere, that’s kind of neat, right? it’s a very small voice though, and phasma decides that since her life is meaningless now she’ll just go along with whatever happens.
this is how she ends up in some seedy system in the outer rim where she becomes illegal pit-fighting champion, or something similar. at some point obviously she runs into finn, rey and poe and gets roped into working together sort of grudgingly for the Adventure of the Week.
(and finn knows. the second he lays eyes on her he knows that the first order’s failure broke her and she’s been trying to put herself back together all this time, only it came out different and strange. he gets it. gets it so much it’s pissing her off)
when they part ways they aren’t friends, exactly, but there’s a feeling that when they meet again it won’t be on hostile terms. phasma nods at each of them, nods at fn-2187 and says ‘finn’ before she turns and leaves.
this is where it starts. she has a long way to go.
“villain attempts to go back in time to kill superman as a small child, gets shot in the face by ma kent, who buries him behind the barn with the others” would probably have niche appeal as a comic but i don’t care, i want it
The first time a man from the future showed up at Martha Kent’s house, Clark Kent was two years old.
According to his birth certificate, anyway. She just kind of accepted that the details were a little fudged. Relativity, and all.
Maybe the stranger would have succeeded in whatever it was he wanted to do, except that he really did just show up. Appeared, like a ghost made flesh, right in the backyard. Clark, thank goodness, was out in the fields with Jonathan. He couldn’t bear to be alone, that boy, and they could never bear to leave him.
Which left Martha free to shoot the ghostly intruder in the face.
Martha had not always considered herself a shoot first, ask questions later sort of a person. But that was before she found a baby in a spaceship where her corn was supposed to be.
They’d switch off, Jonathan and her, who got Clark and who got the shotgun. Martha got the shotgun more often than not. Guns made her husband uncomfortable. She was hardly a fan, but she’d always been a terrible pacifist. Too determined to defend herself.
The sight of all that blood and brain and bone was still nauseating. She compartmentalized, told herself it was no different from slaughtering a cow; didn’t think about riot gear or tear gas or the friends she’d lost or all the things she’d moved away from when her heart couldn’t take it any longer. This was different. This was her son.
She prodded the corpse with her foot. It remained a corpse. A real nasty looking corpse, all big and burly and holding a gun much too large. She didn’t like making assumptions based on appearances, but she didn’t imagine he’d been coming for anything nice. She bent down to search his pockets, found a metal wallet and flipped it open.
Born 2018.
Well, hell. Wasn’t that just a kick in the pants?
Probably she ought to have been a bit more unsettled than she was. But she’d been waiting two years for someone to show up on her doorstep, men in black or UFOs or something. Hell, she’d half expected her sweet little boy to hatch into something worse.
Just because she brought home space babies didn’t mean she was a damn fool.
Jonathan had rejoined her in long strides, was holding Clark in such a way that he couldn’t see the corpse on the ground. “Well, shit,” he said.
“Eyup,” Martha agreed.
“Don’t look government.”
“Nope.”
“We burying him?”
“I’ll bury him,” Martha said, standing up. “You get Clark inside and read him a book or something. I don’t want him seeing any of this, getting him messed up in the head.”
“You sure? Looks heavy.”
“That’s why we have a wheelbarrow. I’ll stick him out behind the barn, might as well keep all our secrets in one place.”
Martha had a long time to think as she dug a time traveler’s grave. There were a lot of reasons someone might travel back in time trying to kill her kid. The first was her instinct as a mother, which was: he was a fucking asshole. Who killed a kid? Fucking assholes, that was who.
Now, it was also possible that her sweet little boy grew up to be some kind of space Hitler. She didn’t think she’d raise that kind of a kid, but she didn’t suppose there was any parent who set out to raise a Hitler.
Still didn’t sit right with her. She didn’t much like the idea of killing baby Hitler, either.
My favorite millennials-only linguistics trend of our generation and only our generation is how we can just make a one-sentence pop culture reference and you don’t need to explain what you mean because everyone just GETS IT if they know the story, like, you don’t need to go on this long explanation of something when you can just say “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” or “Shaka, when the walls fell”
