yin!

i put the her in disasther https://keepleft.carrd.co

[closestexit]

hello! it’s maelstrcms closestexit, you may know me from ao3 ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ as of right now, i write for any fandom that i find myself even mildly interested in, so don’t expect anything specific from me. i just talk nonstop about anything under the sun on here so if you’d like to see that, do stick around :)

📘

this is yin :D

[closestexit]

😧

[closestexit]

not me fully crying at 4am bc of poet artist. every time i think i’m over that beautiful song it plays and i cry

[closestexit]

you know you’re returning to traditional abo roots when terms like luna and bond sickness start popping up <3 i’m at the point where i’m wondering if i should write shifting too lmaoo

[closestexit]

haha. so they are in fact werewolf shifters, we are returning to the ancient texts!!!!

[closestexit]

you know you’re returning to traditional abo roots when terms like luna and bond sickness start popping up <3 i’m at the point where i’m wondering if i should write shifting too lmaoo

[shiruba-tsuki]

Brushbuddy ✧ Tongari Boushi no Atelier ep. 06

[catchymemes]

[closestexit]

hello hi i rewatched words bubble up like soda pop and just wanted to yap my head off abt it

this story makes me feel homesick for a life I’ll never live, in a rural town that probably doesn’t actually exist beyond the cobbling together of many lived experiences and memories. even after many (many, many) idle rewatches, it shocks me how i can still manage to notice new details every time. while this story objectively fails to stand out, it’s far from a bad thing!!! i don’t think it would have been as enjoyable as it was if it had strived to be more than what it is, and it executes what it is so well that i truly wouldn’t have wanted it any other way i think.

just like the fleeting nature of sakura blossoms, the effervescence of soda bubbles that inevitably fizzle out, and a single summer holiday that seems to both hurtle by and stretch out forever at the same time, this story is a reminder to slow down and listen to the people around you, say the words you want to say without hesitation, open your eyes and heart to care, and smile for no reason more complicated than simply wanting to. i feel like i should get to know my local mall a little better, and i think i would’ve if it had half the personality and charm of the oda nouvelle. what a sweet message, what a sweet movie.

[eedweiz]

Witch hat atelier AU 🍂🍂

[soyouddancewme]

shifu is HOMOPHOBIC :(

once ao bing mentions shen gong bao, ao guang quickly clears up the misunderstanding because that guy? homophobic? there's no way... like actually. haha.

[closestexit]

4.6k into my starry skies haobin fic wip!!!! so excited!!!!!! this Will be the longest fic i’ve written, as i am barely through the setup and it’s already this length… it honestly doesn’t seem all that good to me but i don’t think i can write any better so that might be an issue actually. at least i love my concept. its like i’m telling this story for myself and myself alone. but isn’t that what fanfic is anyway? oh well

[closestexit]

the thing about strattland is that in another world, another lifetime where they had met under completely different circumstances, they maybe could’ve worked. like there might have been a chance, but the stratt that grace did get to meet is not stratt as she is, it is captain stratt, separate from eva stratt the person, and on a completely different plane of existence than grace. grace might have met a few fragments of the human left in her, but at the end of the day grace is just a human choosing to help save the planet, stratt IS the saviour. she WILL save the planet by any means possible, no matter how humans feel about it. she has to put herself above and away from it all or she will not achieve her task.

the grace that truly understands the stratt that the petrova line has created could only have been developed through being sent on the hail mary. stratt finally found, created, whatever, someone who understands this version of her, becomes the saviour above all else just like her (except grace endeavours to save rocky and the eridians too, he expands his burden), understands her lonely path and sacrifice and perhaps hates her a little for it just as she might hate herself, but they will never meet again. and maybe grace is the lucky one who gets to put some fraction of his personal joy over being a saviour, gets to put dr. in front of captain and choose some form of companionship and love as an end even on a suicide mission in space while stratt puts captain in front of inmate and knows she won’t be remembered as a hero once she saves the world. he is a martyr, and she is a sacrifice. it’s kind of poetic, how grace’s autonomy being robbed from him leaves him with the biggest choice from the end, while stratt’s hands were honestly tied from the start — i highly doubt there was any other way this could’ve gone for her. sending the saving grace of her humanity on the hail mary was truly the best decision.

i think stratt herself sang it best: we can meet again somewhere / somewhere far away from here. i wholeheartedly believe that it was only at the end of project hail mary when grace was filming his final tape, with all his memories returned, that he fully came to know and actually meet stratt as a whole, nearly 20 years later and so many light years away, so far away from that science classroom in grover cleveland middle, and that bar in that boat in the middle of the ocean.

[closestexit]

because i have free will, i am writing eva stratt into my zb1 fic and no one can stop me

[yunsound]

Translating the last line of Ne Zha 2 (2025)

When Ao Bing asks Ne Zha how he knew he'd come back, Ne Zha says something that I think might be the perfect ending line.

因为我们都太年轻，不知天高地厚

Yin wei wo men dou tai nian qing, bu zhi tian gao di hou

I think the theatre I watched translated this as "Because we're both too young. Too young to fear."

Honestly, this translation is pretty good! It's touching and impactful.

Bu zhi tian gao di hou, 不知天高地厚, is a saying that is used to refer to someone that is arrogant or foolish and doesn't understand the power or cruelty of the world.

It means: To know not how high the heavens stretch, nor how deep the earth goes.

Usually it is used to admonish someone, usually an elder scolding someone younger that they're overly confident or idealistic, and don't know anything about the realities of what's out there.

Ne Zha and Ao Bing have both technically lived thousands of years. They were originally the Chaos Pearl, so they've witnessed a lot. They do, in fact, know how unfair the world is, and have seen the heavens and the earth.

However, since their bodies and minds are still young, it's especially impactful for Ne Zha to say this to refer to himself and Ao Bing. Essentially, he is saying that despite them both understanding the cruelty and unfairness of the world, they still choose to be young and foolish.

It's not that they're arrogant and overconfident. It's that they understand they have little chance, but they must fight anyway. They are choosing to be young and wild, choosing their three year old naïveté over their thousands of years as the Chaos Pearl.

IDK, it really got to me.

[hawberries]

taking my folks to see Nezha 2 again tonight 🥰

[mortalityplays]

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

[closestexit]

got a horrific (in my standards) grade for an essay i really liked. i’m fine it’s fine actually it’s not the end of the world nooooo it’s not like academic validation is all i rely on these days to keep my sanity in uni hahahahahahahahahahahahhahahaahha