PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
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@ashmenrir
if i had a nickels for every piece of media about teens in secret gay relationships while at a boarding/preppy school featuring a coming of age storyline, i would have 4 nickels
which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that i happened four times
just because it's a short film doesn't mean it's incomplete and should have a full-length movie adaptation
just because it's an amazing movie that did really well doesn't mean it needs a sequel
just because it's a well loved classic tv show doesn't mean it needs to be remade anew
let stories be exactly the length they are, they don't need to be extended and drawn out and added onto and redone until they're not good anymore. if your story is short but it works that way then it's done. you don't need to add more. knowing when to stop is so important
You have been sentenced to death in a magical court. The court allows all prisoners to pick how they die and they will carry it out immediately. You have it all figured out until the prisoner before you picks old age and is instantly transformed into a dying old man. Your turn approaches.
I think I’d have minded less if I’d committed a truly heinous crime. Something that warranted death. Or even if I was the kind of person who would enjoy flinging a last defiance at my execution.
It was all just a show, anyway. They did it every year. They brought out a selection of criminals, and the Sorcerer who ruled us showed his power by bringing about their deaths by magic. Just to show, every year, what happened to anyone who crossed him.
There was a time, probably, when the people he executed really were rebels or assassins. In latter days he had to take what the dungeons offered. I was dragged up in chains between a pickpocket, sobbing in terror, and a man who’d killed another man in a brawl. There were few criminals of any note, by then. So instead of choosing the wickedest criminals, they chose based on appearance. The man who’d been in the brawl had a face like a clenched fist, and looked like a ruffian. The pickpocket, aging and with hands beginning to tremble, was a different kind of example. As was I.
“There aren’t many pretty ones, this year,” the man who chose me had said, examining me. “But this one will do. Not young, but not old, a woman, well-favoured enough for the gallows… what was her crime?”
The warder shrugged. “She tried to kill one of the sheriffs.”
The man looked down at me and I shrugged. “I hit him with a washing stick, because he tried to extort money from me, and he was a baby about it.” I refused to treat this as anything but pathetic, even after my sentencing. “I didn’t even break any bones.”
“Treason, then,” the man said, nodding. “Attacking the servants of the law. That will look well on the list. Send her.”
I had been debating ever since what to choose. Something quick? Something painless? I considered demanding that I suffer the attack I supposedly made on the sheriff, but then I realized the Sorcerer would only give me what the man had said I was going to do, and that was not a pleasant way to die. I had all but decided on something swift and relatively painless. Beheading with the sharpest of blades sounded good. It would be quick.
Keep reading
and of course i've been thinking about tragedy and how you can say "there was a way both rose and jack could have survived", "there was a way for achilles to save patroclus and himself from their fate", "there was a way for orpheus and eurydice to both get out of the underworld", "if only they had done this", "if only they had thouht of this" but in the end the people involved are not gods, they are stirred by their emotions and preconceptions and the limits of their knowledge and their fears and ambitions, and in good tragedies i think there's always a way out that is completely plausible and even easy to find but the humanity of the characters drives them to mistakes that ultimately add up to the most heartbreaking conclusion you can imagine. and i think that's beautiful.
Something always hurts. Remember that sunlight makes the leaves glow with a warmth that shows your soul that life branches out in all directions where they meet.
Something always hurts. Remember that sunlight illuminates the glitter of rocks embedded in the sidewalk. Eons of sediment, millennia of ingenuity, all giving you a place to step.
I’m human. A little too human. Something always hurts. The whole world hurts. I do my best to make sunlight out of myself.
the (magnificent) seven
Are there any works in the post-apocalyptic genre with post-apocalyptic librarians? People who worked in the public library and after the Bad Thing decide to stay and keep the library clean, safe and available for anyone who needs it. People can’t remove books from the premises anymore, because they’re too precious, but you can stay as long as you want and read them or copy them out–the librarians encourage making copies, so that the information can circulate beyond the physical boundaries of the library.
After a while it becomes an unspoken reality of the post apocalyptic society that you Just Don’t fuck with the library. You don’t fight there, you don’t steal from it, you don’t allow harm to come to librarians when they have to leave the building for supplies.
People donate food and books and paper with no expectation of reciprocity, because the librarians don’t ask for anything when you need a place to hide or information or, fuck, to read a schlocky crime novel because you need to escape reality in some purple prose.
i need this like water and also air
Civilization crumbled into chaos. Grocery stores were the first to be looted, followed by places that sold camping supplies, tools, and/or weapons. Hospitals, medical facilities, and pharmacies were close behind. From there it was a mixed bag of who would get looted next. A few people tried to protect their businesses, but when they had to fight off even their employees, it generally didn’t end well.
A surprising pocket of resistance to the chaos was a library. Six librarians, three custodial staff, a computer specialist, the head of children’s services, two clerks, and the barista from the coffee shop next door turned it into a haven. Initially, they had each come to the library to escape the destruction going on, but when the mob’s appetite turned to their small little sphere of peace, they stepped up and defended it.
Some windows were smashed and a small fire started in the book return box, but overall there was very little damage.
Between the 14 people, they were able to board up the broken windows, reinforce the remaining ones, secure the entrances, and rearrange the shelves based on medieval castles built for defence. The next time the mob struck out at them, them were ready.
They soon developed a reputation for being brutal and efficient at defending their territory–but also welcoming the weary. Troublemakers were dealt with harshly (and those who damage the books are lucky to leave alive), but for everyone else, the Library became a welcome respite.
Factions slowly rose from the ashes of civilization, forming small communities and governments, while the Library remained neutral. The 14 figured out how to grow enough food to sustain themselves, so they have no need to join any of the (often warring) factions.
The Library took over the trashed remains of the neighbouring buildings and converted them into sparse (but clean!) rooms that travellers could rent. They add a small medical wing–they can’t treat anything needing more than a splint and stitches, but having a neutral place to receive care is cherished.
The 14 take in apprentices and train them how to run the Library. Years go by and a small community of neutral businesses cluster around. A pawn shop, herbalist, and small electrical station become staples of the community, while other businesses (a tailor, a barber, and a florist, among others) are more transient.
The 14 are beginning to feel their age. It has been 24 years since they first defended the Library. The youngest of them is 46 and the eldest is 87. They all have families comprised of children, adoptees, proteges, and actual relatives from before the collapse. And they all think of each other as siblings.
The success of the Library has inspired others to try and reclaim the lost books and knowledge of libraries in other cities. Most haven’t lasted for more than a few years before being forced into a faction, or simply destroyed. All but the eldest member of the original 14 agree to strike out with a specially chosen group of people to help these fledgling libraries become the havens that the Library is.
Nothing is heard from these groups until, over five years later, a messenger appears wearing a tattered leather jacket with a large patch on the arm of a stack of three books, the words “Library Representative” wrapped protectively around the image. They hand the eldest of the 14 a letter. It’s the first inter-library loan request in almost 30 years.
**
Enjoyed this? I’ll be posting a short piece of original fiction every day in June as a thank you to all my amazing followers. Send me (non fanfic) prompts for it!
“I saved you!”
“You didn’t. You killed me and you called it love.”
Plot Bunnies, Plot Chickens, Etc.
As a lot of people aren’t familiar with plot creatures, I thought I’d shed some light on the members of the mental menagerie…
The Plot Bunny - Story ideas that come bounding in and start multiplying.
The Plot Chicken - They squawk, flap around, and shit everywhere, but when you actually need to do something with them, they scatter.
The Plot Sloth - Takes its sweet goddamned time turning into something useful.
The Plot Mule - When you mash two plots together and get something cool, but you can’t get a sequel out of it to save your life.
The Plot Cat - Lazy little bastards who take up your headspace, scare away all the other plot bunnies, but won’t actually do anything except lay there.
The Plottweiler - Barks loudly and viciously so you can’t ignore it, distracts you from everything else you want to write, but leaves you too paralyzed with fear to actually put words down.
The Plot Squirrel - Cute, distracting, full of nuts, and just TRY to keep up with that train of thought.
The Plot Bedbug - Shows up during the night, chews on you so you can’t sleep, and disappears in the daylight.
The Plot Tick - Burrows in, bleeds you dry, and leaves you with the creepy-crawlies. Mostly preys on horror writers.
The Plotroach - Totally unappealing, but so tenacious they’ll survive anything until you finally give up and write them.
What Plot Creatures have you encountered?
The Plot Dolphin - Either something very intellectually stimulating and probably surreal, or porn without plot, no inbetween.
The Plot Fin Whale - It’s a longfic, but a surprisingly fast-moving one that just flows right out of you.
The Plot Dragon - A gigantic pile of your most treasured tropes that probably don’t go that well when mixed together haphazardly like that but so shiny
The Plot Gryphon - A crossover.
The Plot Chimera - An especially ambitious crossover.
The Plot Hydra - WHERE ARE ALL THESE SUBPLOTS COMING FROM
The Plot Salmon - A love story that ends tragically.
The Plot Peryton - That deathfic you don’t want to write because you like that character and don’t want them to die but its shadow will be cast upon you until you give up and write it.
The Plot Stick Insect - You thought the plot was going to do one thing but SURPRISE! The characters have decided to go in a completely different direction.
stop using hospitals as horror settings
fun alternative: cruise ships. cruise ships exploit workers and can pollute as much as a million cars on a daily basis while dumping endless shit into the ocean and endangering all passengers on board because the on board air quality rivals some of the most polluted cities in the world while being a breeding ground for disease. cruise ships deserve to have negativity associated with them
also all crimes commited aboard a cruise ship is under the juristiction of whichever country they’re registered to once they’re a certain distance away from land so you have the added bonus of the crimes being very unlikely to be properly investigated (due to usually being physically so very far from the actual police whose juristiction they’re under)
terrifying!
On top of THAT cruise ships tend to have their own morgue, as people tend to die on ships all the time. Good for those spooky scenes.
plus u can just like…leave a hospital. good luck escaping a killer or a monster or a curse or w/e in the middle of the fucking ocean
As an ex cruise ship employee, let me give you some stuff to work with!
Water tight doors! You get a special training video on interacting with these correctly because they will literally cut you in half if you try and go through them while they’re closing!
Freezer vaults for food in the sub decks - you can only get into these with the correct code and they have very thick walls. Good luck if you get shut in one of these just after the last round of checks bucko
There are cameras everywhere…except in the crew cabin corridors. Also there are no windows down there because unless you’re an officer, you live below the waterline. Day and night have no meaning because everything is in the same slightly unsettling yellow light.
Don’t piss off the guys who deal with the rubbish. They have machines down there that can crush metal barrels
As well as morgues, cruise ships usually have one basic operating theatre with all the attendant horrifying equipment in it
One cigarette thrown carelessly in the wrong place WILL start a fire that will gut half the ship.
When we’re pitching side to side, the anchor swings out and then back in, striking the metal outer shell with a noise that shakes half the ship
People disappear overboard more often than you’d really want to be a thing
A lot of cruise ships now have theatres on board (usually towards the front) with all the potential for dark corners, creepy costumes and electrical calamities you could want.
And as op says, you can’t really escape a ship in the middle of the ocean. Particularly during a storm, as then you can’t even evacuate to lifeboats unless the whole ship is going down. On the upside being on board during a storm means most guests hide in their cabins and the staff walk around like drunks, which would likely throw off a skilled murderer’s plans.
Takes notes
You also have the bonus of a corporate overlord who doesn’t give a shit about anything but profits and can be reliably counted on to downplay any disaster in an attempt to avoid publicity.
Writing Prompt: Dialogue
"Did you... Did you think that I wouldn't be able to-to... You taught me how to shoot, how to defend myself. Did you think that I couldn't do it?"
"No. You've always been stronger than you realize. I knew you could kill, if you had no other choice. I just never wanted you to be in this kind of situation."
"...You couldn't protect me forever, [----]. Life isn't that kind."
"I know. You now have blood on your hands and I... I regret that I've made you more like me."
"And I love you still. This... This won't change that, not for me."
"But it will change you."
“He lieth through his teeth.”
“Well you’re about to dieth so I would shut up if I were you.”
hot take here but the way people talk about “redemption arcs” and how they require that the sinner repent, debase himself, and then atone for his sins in order to be accepted back into the warmth of readers’ love, but there are some unforgivable sins for which no atonement is enough
is INCREDIBLY culturally christian
Another fascinating thing about responses to this post: whether they’re agreeing with me or disagreeing, whether they think people’s insistence on this arc is good or bad, a huge portion of people use the word “forgiveness” and center their entire response to this post around it.
Please observe that I never once used the word “forgiveness” - although I should have, because the idea that forgiveness is a necessity for ceasing-to-be-a-sinner, and indeed that forgiveness is the primary goal, is itself christian.
I have at no point in the original post or in any of my further discussion of it said that the end goal, or even a significant feature of, a villain-to-hero arc was forgiveness.
Yet everyone who thinks this arc is indeed the only valid option phrases their arguments in terms like “Would you forgive someone who didn’t…”
Maybe I would - maybe I wouldn’t! But I never said anything about forgiveness being a requirement!
And everyone who wants to tell me that Christians Don’t Think Like This, Actually, says it in terms of “But Jesus forgives everyone, all you have to do is repent and you will be forgiven.” …okay great who says the characters need to be forgiven, why is it RELEVANT whether Jesus would forgive them or not - unless you’re operating in a Christian framework where God’s Forgiveness is a central feature of your belief system.
People who agree that yes, this is a culturally christian thing, and further believe that another form of arc would be superior, are saying “you should be able to just stop doing bad things and only do good things, and that should be enough for you to be forgiven” - okay you got the spirit but why do we have to be forgiven.
Forgiveness - as least as it is being used in this context - is someone else granting salvation to you. It is someone else absolving you of your guilt. It is you having shown someone else that you are worthy now, and them casting judgement upon you, and then agreeing that you are enough better than you were before.
Why does someone else get to sit in judgement and decide if you’re a good person now? Who besides a god stands in that position of omniscience and moral superiority and moral infallibility?
What if a character chooses to end his life of villainy, anonymously transfer all his ill-gotten gains to those he harmed, and devote the rest of his life to curing cancer alone in a lab on a deserted island, finally releasing his cure anonymously on his deathbed. No other character even has any idea this has happened; they all figure he just died or went into hiding. No one has forgiven him. Does that mean he’s still a villain?
What if all the other characters have hardened hearts for whatever reason, and no matter how much penance the ex-villain does, even if he only did one tiny bad act and then spent years in pain in punishment and then spent decades saving the world over and over at great personal cost, they will never, ever forgive him? Does that mean he’s still a villain?
What if everyone he personally wronged died in an accident, he was the only survivor, it was that shock that caused his change of heart, so everybody he knows now loves him and knows him only as a hero, but the people he hurt can never forgive him? Is he still a villain?
On the other side, if, say, a child continuously forgives their abusive parent, does that mean the parent isn’t a villain?
Forgiveness does not have a one to one correlation with goodness. In either direction.
I am concerned that what people are doing is translating “…in order to be accepted back into the warmth of readers’ love” as “be forgiven by the readers” (which is not inaccurate, in terms of the christian framework) and then all agreeing that yes, that should indeed be the central goal of every villain-to-hero arc. Which opens a WILD can of worms.
Because that means - We, as the readers, are in the position of gods to the characters, casting judgement upon them, looking into their hearts and deciding whether We will grant forgiveness to the characters for the wrongs they have done to others.
Like. Aside from all the other implications. At the point where you are granting someone forgiveness for something they did to someone else, something’s gone very wrong. Assuming you’re not, in fact, actually yourself a deity.
But also for people to make translation of “…warmth of readers’ love” to “readers’ forgiveness” you have to already be assuming that we can’t love a character if we haven’t forgiven them for every wrong they’ve done. And that wouldn’t even be true if they were a real person, and super duper isn’t true if they’re fictional. I love my mother with all my heart. I’ll also never forgive her for what she did to me and my brother. Forgiveness and love are two separate emotional axes and one does not imply anything about the other.
Look. Here’s some advice for actual real life. You don’t need to forgive someone to let them participate in society. You don’t need to forgive someone to love them. And you DEFINITELY don’t need to forgive them for them to be a good person. Whether they’re a good person is in their heart - not yours.
I already loved the first post, but this addition lays it all out in such a clear, concise manner, that I’m actually in awe. 11/10 OP, it is, if you’ll forgive the pun, absolute god-tier
harley rolling up to the wayne manor is her bedazzled heeleys: omg brucie you’ll NEVER guess what happened—oh are you busy?
bruce laying in the grass as his kids spray him with a hose from ten feet away: no go on I’m listening
harley laying down next to him: alright cool SO!
bruce rolling up to her apartment in a rolls royce and bedazzled sunglasses just straight up honking until she comes outside: harley, you wouldn’t believe what lex luthor wore to the board meeting this time
harley in matching sunglasses: o my god, not the blue prada sw-
bruce nodding his head: the fucking prada sweats
#i don't like batman the comics or batman the movie#i like batman the tumblr experience#*tumblr voice* i take a hammer and FIX the toxic masculinity
“What is it that the child has to teach?
The child naively believes that everything should be fair and everyone should be honest, that only good should prevail, that everybody should have what they want and there should be no pain or sadness. The child believes the world should be perfect and is outraged to discover it is not.
And the child is right.”
— Rabbi Tzvi Freeman
“Westerners are fond of the saying ‘Life isn’t fair.’ Then, they end in snide triumphant: ‘So get used to it!’ What a cruel, sadistic notion to revel in! What a terrible, patriarchal response to a child’s budding sense of ethics. Announce to an Iroquois, ‘Life isn’t fair,’ and her response will be: ‘Then make it fair!’” –Barbara Alice Mann
The age old dilemma in genre fiction: how to make your protagonist meaningful in the world without making them “special” and “the chosen one”?
One possible solution I’ve thought about is reframing how you think about protagonists in the first place. Instead of focusing on why your protagonist is the only one who can fix the plot or counter the antagonist because of some inherent character trait, try thinking of how your protagonist is in the right place at the right time because of the combined efforts of many. Consider all the people that have come before that have made the protagonist’s journey possible. Some hypotheticals:
Why can the villain be defeated only now? Perhaps it is because some hero of the past made an attempt, chinking a weakness in the villain’s otherwise indestructible visage?
If your protagonist seeks a hidden knowledge to counter the evil despot, consider who has kept this knowledge. Who helped remember it? Who helped hide it even at fear of death?
Who built the powerful weapon that your protagonist wields? Who helped build/forge this weapon to make it so great? What line of technological development or technique went into its creation?
What acts of compassion or mercy from others allowed your protagonist to continue on when they otherwise most certainly would have failed?
To get an example that isn’t a hypothetical- consider how Star Wars expanded upon the “Many Bothans died to get us [the Death Star plans]” from simply a throwaway line to a valuable effort by a background group that made Luke’s effort against the Death Star possible. Perhaps you shouldn’t spend an entire movie’s length of time developing this background effort, but maybe have your protagonist encounter these inner workings along their journey instead of just paying them lip service.
Acknowledging that change on the large scale is made up of numerous individuals instead of only one can both humble your protagonist and give the audience greater insight into the world beyond their point of view. It’s an excellent excuse to introduce more worldbuilding and thematic components into a story.
