The Grouchy Lion

I do a lot of things that aren't relevant to fandom, but for the purposes of Tumblr I'm an avid TV watcher, and I enjoy reading and occasionally writing fan fiction. The shows that I currently watch with my full attention are The Good Place, The Orville, Jeopardy, Full Frontal With Samantha Bee, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Jane the Virgin, Star Trek: Discovery, Bojack Horseman, Brooklyn 99, Stranger Things, The Magicians, Better Things, This Is Us, A Million Little Things, Russian Doll, and Orange is the New Black. Shows that I watch while doing other stuff include Madam Secretary, Survivor, Modern Family, black-ish, Fresh Off the Boat, Speechless, Schooled, Supergirl, The Bold Type, The Good Doctor, Charmed, Manifest, and Grey's Anatomy. All-time favorites include Halt and Catch Fire, The Americans, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, every incarnation of Star Trek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Everwood, thirtysomething, Once and Again, Gilmore Girls, Friday Night Lights, Veronica Mars, The Good Wife, and (as should be obvious from the artwork I'm using here) Futurama. You can find more of my fandom works at AO3 and YouTube

[hollowgods-deactivated20250921]

Non-writers don't understand how much of writing is just googling things like "when was the croissant invented" for worldbuilding reasons and staring off into the distance.

[chxrry-bombs]

5 Tiny Writing Tips That Aren’t Talked About Enough (but work for me)

These are some lowkey underrated tips I’ve seen floating around writing communities — the kind that don’t get flashy attention but seriously changed how I write.

1. Put “he/she/they” at the start of the sentence less often.

Try switching up your sentence rhythm. Instead of

“She walked to the window,”

try

“The window creaked open under her touch.”

Keeps it fresh and stops the paragraph from sounding like a checklist.

2. Don’t describe everything — describe what matters.

Instead of listing every detail in a room, pick 2–3 objects that say something.

“A half-drunk mug of tea and a knife on the table”

sets a way stronger tone than

“There was a wooden table, two chairs, and a shelf.”

3. Use beats instead of dialogue tags sometimes.

Instead of:

"I'm fine," she said.

Try:

"I'm fine." She wiped her hands on her skirt.

It helps shows emotion, and movement.

4. Write your first draft like no one will ever read it.

No pressure. No perfection. Just vibes. The point of draft one is to exist. Let it be messy and weird — future you will thank you for at least something to edit.

5. When stuck, ask: “What’s the most fun thing that could happen next?”

Not logical. Not realistic. FUN. It doesn’t have to stay — but chasing excitement can blast through writer’s block and give you ideas you actually want to write.

What’s a tip that unexpectedly helped with your writing? Let me know!! 🍒

[zombiepatch]

there's no such thing as a medicaid freeloader. everyone needs healthcare. it does not matter if you don't believe someone has a valid reason to not be working or in school- they are still a human being and human beings need healthcare. even if someone IS this strawman ""just lazy"" unemployed person, they deserve healthcare. sorry but i do not believe that the right to medical treatment without financial ruin is predicated on someone's "usefulness" to society. it's depressing that this is apparently too radical a belief.

[nondelphic]

editing is just you vs. past-you in a duel of questionable comma placement and emotional instability

[lonelyroommp3]

imo a discord server should be like a breakout room for fandom. like the place to run your wips by your besties or discuss your otp in more detail with a few people who were insane about it on your post or organise events with a handful of trusted mutuals etc etc. if it’s where ALL the fandom activity is going to happen it will inevitably foster a cliquey environment where the fandom is divided into “those in the server” and “those who aren’t”, lurking is disincentivised if not made outright impossible, people who feel uncomfortable joining in conversations and would rather interact with fandom through reblogging etc are largely excluded because there’s no repost mechanism, and the fandom itself becomes an enclosed space so new fans are limited in how much content and meta they can access without having to make the plunge into Joining The In Group, there’s limited scope for interaction between different communities within the same fandom, god it’s just an altogether dogshit stupid idea. what if we moved all fandom activity to really massive private groupchats. STUPID

[lonelyroommp3]

the children yearn for forums but they forget the good thing about forums was that anyone could browse them at leisure and there was absolutely zero pressure to contribute if you did not want to

[mikkeneko]

the whump fan’s dilemma

[mikkeneko]

the notes on this post really do paint a picture of the psychology of fans, don’t they

[rogueofcrows]

[clarityofhatred]

YES. YOU GET IT.

[grouchylion]

Current fic: competent/badass ----> hurt/broken ----> competent/badass

[maykitz]

biggest L i've had to take from morning people is that the hours between 5 - 9 am really do have 7x as much time in them than the ones between 9 pm - 1 am and you can get your whole day's worth of shit done by noon

[obsidianpegasus-deactivated2025]

Reading my own fanfiction is basically just a rollercoaster of emotional whiplash.

20% of the time: “Hold on. I wrote this? This is fire. This is emotionally devastating in the best way. This scene is dripping with tension. I’m a literary perfectionist. Someone give me a book deal.”

80% of the time: “Straight to jail. Immediate prison. Why is everyone’s breath hitching?. I used the word ‘gaze’ three times in one paragraph like I was possessed. Did I think 'his eyes darkened' was profound? Why is everyone clenching their jaws? Why is someone whispering 'their name like a prayer' again?? No one talks like this. What is this dialogue. Why are there so many weird metaphors and em-dashes…”

[kendallroyjenner]

i don’t think hacks is queerbaiting i think they’re tapping into the universal truth that having a true creative partnership is inherently romantic. and gay.

[x-fag]

a good sailor will always return to the sea

[wikiipediabf]

YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND THE MOVIE STARTS WITH THE CAT LOOKING AT ITS REFLECTION ALONE AND ENDS WITH IT LOOKING AT ITS REFLECTION WITH ITS FAMILY 😭😭😭

[starberry-cupcake]

not to talk about flow again, but the thing is, a lot of people talk about independent film making and its importance etc, but it's hard to get more independent than flow this year

not only because it was made with a free and open source software anyone can use, not only because it beat competitors from major studios with an average of 3% of the budget they had, not only because it represented a country that had never won an oscar before, not only because it didn't have any star power involved, not only because it didn't come from a filmmaker with past history, not only because it was made by a small team...

but also because it's an animated movie

animators often get the short end of the stick in the entertainment industry and, for the past years, it was starting to look as if the only way to make an animated project happen was to sell your soul to a major studio and see your work transformed into what they need and how they want it marketed

especially for movies from outside the US, from non-English speaking countries, where insanely talented animators tend to be used as freelance cheap labor for major US studios or have to adapt as much as possible to fit into their market in order to find work

passion projects for animation seemed to only be reserved to the shorts category, or needed to be as high brow as humanly possible to be perceived as "high art" to be valued and, even in the spaces of the industry dedicated to the genre, the way in which awards are distributed are a poor reflection of the vast work animators do

it's major for this film to win awards, let alone the oscar, an award which is notably judged badly for animation and often prefers the marketable easy way out of voting rather than genuine interest

this movie used a resource that is open to anyone and, with good storytelling, made an oscar winning film

in a world in which art is constantly being attacked by capitalist greed, I'm happy that a movie with heart and little resources could do something like this, whether or not people care about the oscars anymore

[darlingofdots]

at a conference I attended recently, a researcher pointed to the difficulty of finding material in archives because so much depends on the metadata and the terminology used to describe things changes over time. "it would be so helpful," the researcher said, "if I typed 'lesbian' into the library of congress database, it would also show me results that were categorised in the 50s, when the materials were interpreted as 'intimate female friendships'"

which is what tag wrangles at Archive Of Our Own do incredibly effectively: searching for "omegaverse" also leads to "alpha/beta/omega dynamics" and "alternate universe: a/b/o" and so on. but ao3 achieves this frankly incredible categorisation and indexing system by the power of countless volunteers putting in hours and hours of unpaid and unthanked free time, and it's completely understandable that most archives do not have that kind of infrastructure, but also how incredible that a fan-run website has better searchability, classification, and accessibility than the library of congress

[ohwhatagloomyshow]

“First and foremost I’m writing for myself,” I hiss through my teeth, resisting the urge to refresh my email for an Ao3 message for the 100th time.

[molabuddy]

the insane experience of missing a fictional character . like you can always go back and reread the book , replay the game , rewatch the show or movie , you can always go back & see them , but you can never experience them & their story for the first time again . its absurd to miss them because they'll always be there , but you'll miss when there were still new things for them to say .

for a small time they were real & growing and changing and you hung onto every new word, but now all they can do is repeat the same story forever&ever & they're not real anymore because you know everything they're going to do. & you miss them. its fucked man...

[meanao3thoughts]

a feel like the new generation of fanfic readers NEED to understand that clicking on a fic (interaction) does nothing. ao3 has no algorithm. your private discord discussions of fic do not reach the authors. if you do not actively engage with writers they will stop posting. this isn’t social media this is community.

[nkp1981]

It's Finally Happening: