Just Some Void on The Internet

I'm a creator: art and writing. My posts vary, my fandoms are many.

[dick-hardboiled]

There is absolutely a platonic explanation for that

[dick-hardboiled]

But I will also entertain the non platonic for my own edification do u understand

[goldensunset]

[ebaybumpstock]

BITCH = Believe It Truly Can Happen.

[kuroiyuki96-art]

A round Sonic drawing that was done while studying the work of Mika Pikazo

[kuroiyuki96-art]

Made a matching Shadow version (tried to at least)

[depsidase]

[bowditch]

one way to combat this is to be confidently proactive and no-shame reactive. they're still little enough that they think the world of you as a parent or an adult. the key is being casual instead of shocked and upset.

"oh, i don't think that's just for girls. it's pink, but anybody can like pink."

"oh yeah, purple is a great color! colors are for everybody."

"you're right-- i am a girl. that means i have a strong body just like a boy, and i can [climb/use a drill/take out the trash] with my arms."

"hm i don't think we're letting private parts make a decision about this toy."

"if other kids give you a hard time, you can just say you like this toy (or this color) and that's why. if anyone is rude to you, it might hurt, but they're the ones being wrong."

"i think it's cool that we both have eyes that can cry if we're feeling overwhelmed or sad. it helps us communicate how we feel."

"some kids might tell you this is for girls, but it's really just for people. we can have fun and play with anything safe that's interesting. it's sad that some kids don't have adults that teach them that."

"it's important to play and learn all kinds of skills. what if you find out you like to cook? what if someday you have a friend who needs help?"

"you know who buys the MOST glitter? people who make paint for boats. guys who go fishing spend more time with glitter than anyone else."

"it's divided into girls and boys because some grownups maybe care more than they should about colors. but that's not a real rule."

like. you gotta prepare them to stand up for themselves and you gotta normalize *recognizing* and dismissing those comments, or they WILL start to win out. walk your toddler sons or nephews down all the toy aisles. let them hold a baby doll. take your girls through the hot wheels and nerf sections.

and don't make the mistake of swinging to the other extreme. trying to talk a four year old boy into the pink version, or trying to talk a four year old girl out of wanting a frilly dress are JUST as gendering. you're sending signals that they should ignore their own preferences to appease an adult's preferred worldview, and they're going to equally cave when it's in support of an ideology you don't like. let them gravitate toward what they like and give them the language to recognize it as personal preference-- to identify and disregard comments, or defend others-- even if their preference is 100% mainstream.

the goal isn't to make sure little boys have pink toys and play house, or that little girls get construction tools and wear blue.

the secondary goal is to strip away the gender-signaling in toys and prepare kids to stand up for OTHER HUMANS.

the primary goal is to equip kids to play and wear what they like without shame or fear.

and it's so fucking sad it starts so early, but it can work both ways-- you can have kids going home from the same daycare suddenly equipped by peers to say, NO I DO WANT THE TOOLBOX FOR MY BIRTHDAY, NOAH SAYS HIS MOM FIXES EVERYTHING IN HER HOUSE and I LIKE THE ONE WITH FLOWERS, SOPHIE SAYS HER DAD LOVES FLOWERS.

maybe this means liam in kindergarten spends most of his playtime with baby dolls and glitter stickers. or maybe it means liam plays with monster trucks and wears red shirts with basketballs, but will tell a peer, "oh it's cool that you like pink. is that your favorite color? i like red but pink icing is my favorite on cake." and it's because a beloved uncle or big brother or parent said, "oh strawberry icing is MY favorite, too! i always want pink icing on my cake. the cake doesn't care if i'm a boy or a girl."

or maybe liam had an experience like my five year old, where he was going across a construction store parking lot in his bright pink crocs and a man tumbled out of his SUV fifty feet away to stick a leg in the air and yell, "HEY, WE BOTH HAVE PINK CROCS!" just to be nice. because pink is for humans.

tl;dr -- i get the grief here. i've felt it, too. but the way we change this isn't with shock or dread. it's with intention and grace and being involved. in modeling conversation and comments without spite or criticism.

[biglawbear]

I finished reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time in my life. With all of *vague gesture at everything* this going on.

I Am Not Okay

[biglawbear]

You have to understand. I watched the movies maybe once as a kid when they came out twenty years ago. I've somehow avoided learning like anything about these books my entire life. Literally everything about these books was a complete unknown and surprise to me. Totally blank slate going on. I barely even knew how it ended.

Holy shit.

[biglawbear]

Frodo didn't complete his task. Sam literally carried him up Mount Doom. And when he got to the end, he couldn't throw the Ring away.

But for Gollum biting it off with his finger, it wouldn't have been destroyed.

So Frodo's journey saved the world nonetheless.

And it broke him.

It was too much for him to bear. He could no longer live in the Shire or live in Middle-Earth. He wasn't of the world anymore. He had to go to the Undying Lands.

He took on the task that no one else would. He saved the world. Everyone got a happy ending. Aragorn became King, Sam rebuilt the Shire, Merry and Pippin became heroes. They all lived in renown.

But Frodo had the hardest task of all. No one else would do it. A simple hobbit who came by the Ring by chance. Not a King, not an immortal. Not a wizard. No power save his will and his friends. And he did it and saved everyone.

And he never got to rest. He never got to remain in peace. The task destroyed him. It was too much.

But there was no other way. Nobody but a simple hobbit could bear the ring all the way to Mount Doom and resist its power so long. Not a man, not an elf, not a wizard; they would have succumbed. Gandalf knew this, which was why he chose the hobbits in all his designs.

It's amazing that one of the precedent setting works in the fantasy genre holds up so well because it subverts what ultimately became the genre's core tropes. The hero was not the King, or a chosen one. In fact, the hero not being the King was a key point that allowed Aragorn to distract Sauron and allow the task in the first place. The hero was someone unassuming but courageous, who did the thing because no one else would, even though it was just by chance he came upon it.

But Frodo couldn't resist the Ring completely. He wasn't superior to anyone else in that way. And in the end it left him broken. The burden crushed him. No one else could do it, and in the end, he couldn't either. He wasn't so special that he was invulnerable.

I'm not okay. Holy fuck you guys.

[biglawbear]

It's been a week and I'm still not over this, I'll never get over this.

Something that I've been thinking about, as I struggle with depression and anxiety and *another vague gesture at everything* is that LOTR does not criticize Frodo for being broken. It does not shame him or deny him what he needs.

The task was too much and it broke him and that's okay. His friends nonetheless take care of him and let him go with understanding. The book doesn't treat it as a bad thing.

This seems to be a theme throughout the books. The characters rest and heal. They spend time recovering in Rivendell, Fangorn, Lorien, Ithilien. It's treated as good and necessary. They don't heroically endure endless torment from the second they set out until they're done.

And in Gondor's march from Minas Tirith to Mordor, Aragorn recognizes that some of the very few men he's taking with him don't have the heart to go to battle against the Enemy. And he says that's okay. He gives them other tasks the they can do. They hold other strategic points. They aren't shamed for not going all the way, or kicked out, or told that they aren't manly or whatever. Their limitations are recognized and respected. The task was too big and it was okay that they couldn't do it.

I don't know man. I've held on through some absolutely crazy shit. White knuckled through mental health crises when my doctors were begging me to take a break, to go to the hospital before I hurt myself. My therapist has tried to slow me down and tell me that I've been going through it and it's understandable that I am feeling some kind of way. Even one of my colleagues remarked that I've had an absolutely fucking wild career and that I've seen more as a lawyer of seven years than she has as a lawyer of forty. But I've gotten it into my head that I have to be strong, I have to be independent.

Fuck me, man, I'm currently white knuckling through life and hanging on by a fucking thread. A few weeks ago I was about an hour away from checking myself in to a mental health facility until my best friends swooped in to help me. And then I went right back to work.

And then I read this book. This fucking brilliant and beautiful book written by a man who had seen the horrors of war and spilled it all over the page. And I read it for the first time as an adult with full understanding and experience of what it all means. And it hits me like a fucking truck.

And it says that you can't endure everything. That at some point you need to rest and heal. That if you take on too much you will break. And that all of that is okay.

How am I supposed to move on with my life after reading this?

[three--rings]

Certainly there are many messages within Lord of the Rings, but you have to think that Tolkien would have been happy that this message in particular was still being conveyed all these years later.

[nonbinary-bosmer]

Last person on earth keeps calling the last functioning telephone helpline, desperate just to listen to their hold music and the echoing artificial approximations of a human’s voice on the automated systems.

Sometimes they pretend they are just paying a bill or reporting a fault. Other times they’re playing the role of the disgruntled customer wanting to make a complaint or cancel their service.

Call after call, year after year of sitting in endless queues that will never move, desperately clinging to the sounds of the old world so that they don’t feel entirely alone.

And then one day…the call is answered

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

O_O

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

#we could make this into a sapphic robot au

I like how you think :D

[nonbinary-bosmer]

“Please stay on the line. Your call is important to us and will be answered the moment one of our agents becomes available”

“Okay, I think that’s enough make-believe about bills for today. It’s starting to getting late”

“….please don’t go”

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

<3_<3

[millyblank]

"Please hold on the line. Your call is very important to us. Please hold on the line. Your call is very important to us.

Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line. Please. Your call is very important to me."

[inbabylontheywept]

In the D&D campaign I'm running with my wife's siblings, one of them learned about how trolls regenerate within minutes of any damage not caused by fire or acid, and then asked why people don't just like. Cage them and eat them, forever. Why there aren't troll meat dungeons in the king's castle as a safeguard against sieges or famines.

And you know, I thought it was a fair question, so I said that if you eat enough troll meat, you start getting troll-y. And then I went further and just treated it like troll flesh is a general contaminant - if you eat enough troll, you'll turn into a troll, but if you bury enough dead troll flesh in a forest, the trees will start growing in strange ways, and will scream and heal and bleed when you hit them with axes.

I liked this idea. So as we played further, I just played around with the idea of Troll Origins, and I came up with something sort of like the Odyssey, but instead stealing Helios's cattle, it was Hathor's, and the horrible, awful, unending immortality was her curse of the army that pillaged her lands. A god of healing does not condemn you to die, she condemns you to live.

And then I got this fun idea for maybe the king that led the army is still kind of alive in the troll taint. Like a sort of literal fisher king. The kingdom is sick because he is, literally, the kingdom. The trees that bleed, bleed his blood and their screams are his screams. He is both the faintly green bear running down the mountain and the faintly green deer and there is no way past this without suffering. He is the entire ecosystem, and he eats nothing but himself and he dreams nothing but death and yet still, on and on and on and on, he lives.

Anyway they're traveling next session so I'm throwing this shit at them. I already have some gross ideas for like. Describing everything like it's a body (flowers red as blood, white as bone, pink as meat, grass fine as hair) then finally throwing horrible living things at them. Trees that grow eyeballs that turn and stare at them, or flowers with teeth instead of petals and trolls that speak in long dead tongues about how they wish they'd never tried to rob a god.

Anyway I'm passing this on because this is my new troll lore and I want it to become canonized in the way that all D&D lore becomes canonized: By having eople read it and go "oh, neat" then start doing that too.

[prismatic-bell]

Not my circus, not my monkeys, but holy shit, this is the kind of worldbuilding I LIVE for.

[rebornofstars-deactivated202510]

ok time to lock the fuck in *opens discord* ok time to lock the fuck in *opens tumblr* ok time to lock the fuck in *opens gmail* ok time to lock the fuck in *opens youtube* ok time to lock the fuck in *opens an unstable vortex in time and space* ok time to lock the fuck in *opens ao3* ok time to lock the fuck in *opens discord* ok time to lock the fuck in *opens tumblr*

[rebornofstars-deactivated202510]

oh this one resonated huh

[rebornofstars-deactivated202510]

thats too much resonating. thats too much. you can stop now

[rebornofstars-deactivated202510]

no. no!!!!! SHUT UP!!!!! lock the fuck in and CLOSE TUMBLR EVERYBODY

[jvhdb]

"im going to see lilo and stitch tomorrow at the cinema so i can see how bad it is and laugh at it"

YOU ARE STILL GIVING THEM MONEY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[jvhdb]

if disney makes $20mil from a movie release, they dont say "oh but we need to deduct about $2mill from ticket sales because those were just hatewatchers. they were just people watching it ironically as a joke. so technically we only made $18mil." they say "awesome, we made $20mil"

this goes for anything you spend money on. the studio that made that shitty gollum game didnt strike your $60 from their records because you only played as a joke to see how bad it is. you still gave them $60 for a game you didnt even enjoy and didnt think was worth $60. You Gave Them Sixty Dollars.

[xshrimpcake]

and they were workmates

for patreon

[losstfrost]

🦋 ; It is because of "love" that "death" gains meaning

[nmri]

[imastoryteller]

20 Compelling Positive-Negative Trait Pairs

Here are 20 positive and negative trait pairs that can create compelling character dynamics in storytelling:

1. Bravery - Recklessness: A character is courageous in the face of danger but often takes unnecessary risks.

2. Intelligence - Arrogance: A character is exceptionally smart but looks down on others.

3. Compassion - Naivety: A character is deeply caring but easily deceived due to their trusting nature.

4. Determination - Stubbornness: A character is persistent in their goals but unwilling to adapt or compromise.

5. Charisma - Manipulativeness: A character is charming and persuasive but often uses these traits to exploit others.

6. Resourcefulness - Opportunism: A character is adept at finding solutions but is also quick to exploit situations for personal gain.

7. Loyalty - Blind Obedience: A character is fiercely loyal but follows orders without question, even when they're wrong.

8. Optimism - Denial: A character remains hopeful in difficult times but often ignores harsh realities.

9. Humor - Inappropriateness: A character lightens the mood with jokes but often crosses the line with their humor.

10. Generosity - Lack of Boundaries: A character is giving and selfless but often neglects their own needs and well-being.

11. Patience - Passivity: A character is calm and tolerant but sometimes fails to take action when needed.

12. Wisdom - Cynicism: A character has deep understanding and insight but is often pessimistic about the world.

13. Confidence - Overconfidence: A character believes in their abilities but sometimes underestimates challenges.

14. Honesty - Bluntness: A character is truthful and straightforward but often insensitive in their delivery.

15. Self-discipline - Rigidity: A character maintains strong control over their actions but is inflexible and resistant to change.

16. Adventurousness - Impulsiveness: A character loves exploring and trying new things but often acts without thinking.

17. Empathy - Overwhelm: A character deeply understands and feels others' emotions but can become overwhelmed by them.

18. Ambition - Ruthlessness: A character is driven to achieve great things but willing to do anything, even unethical, to succeed.

19. Resilience - Emotional Detachment: A character can endure hardships without breaking but often seems emotionally distant.

20. Strategic - Calculative: A character excels at planning and foresight but can be cold and overly pragmatic in their decisions.

These pairs create complex, multi-dimensional characters that can drive rich, dynamic storytelling.

---

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[anef-29]

Eclipse

[windcarvedlyre]

I've been following @druidposting's DR2 playthrough on discord and we just had a really good discussion about DR's Closing Arguments. Specifically the way the murderer is depicted as grey and featureless, which until now I found a bit annoying.

In Danganronpa it's repeatedly the case that we don't have the full picture until the talking actually stops- which always goes beyond the end of the trial. We generally vote first and come to understand what the murderer's actual motive was, sometimes filling in important pieces of the timeline in the process, afterwards.

But none of that matters for the killing game because characters' emotions aren't directly relevant to who was the 'blackened'- the only thing that matters to Monokuma- so it comes out afterwards and does nothing to change their execution. It doesn't matter how sympathetic they are (basically everyone) or whether other people share responsibility for the situation (eg. Hanamura, Pekoyama, Momota) or whether they intended to murder at all (Nanami). They objectively pulled the trigger and nothing else matters. Nothing about them as a person matters.

The Closing Argument mechanic might illustrate that problem- literally. They're a dramatic, conclusive summary of the entire case... constructed before the vote even happens, before we know if we're actually right, and they're missing something really important:

The actual perpetrator.

We quite literally don't even begin to see the real person behind the crime, any real exploration of their mental state, anything besides the cold, hard facts of the murder that are necessary to convict them, until the comic finishes and the protagonist makes their final accusation- replacing the grey figure with their real appearance in a shot that's often intensely emotional.

And these comics lack crucial parts of the case's timeline and sometimes important parts of the very scenes they depict that we only find out about afterwards. And those are what we know; characters may die with some pieces of the truth and prevent us from ever learning them. These aren't objective depictions of the murder, they're the protagonist's subjective attempt to connect the facts they have. A join-the-dots portrait of someone with missing dots and no colour.

Even characters' expressions may not match how they truly feel, with the grey placeholder potentially looking way more confident and sinister than they were in reality. Pasting Falter's commentary here since they put it well.

For obvious reasons this could especially be a problem for characters that die before the trial- the ones we never get a post-vote testimony from. DR1 chapter 4 really highlighted that in the way Asahina's huge misinterpretation of Oogami's feelings took up a lot of the post-trial discussion, only for Monokuma to reveal Oogami's real suicide note and recontextualise everything.

It might really be a problem for how Komaeda's depicted in DR2 chapter 5. While he isn't greyed out, we get panel after panel where he's either level-headed or maniacally evil, and even the depictions of his self-torture and death don't humanise him:

But we know that his real feelings were more complicated than that. We have his actual corpse to compare the last page to.

He died afraid.

If we approach the comic as Hinata's mental image of him instead of reality, he died without anyone truly understanding him. He was alarming, very hard to relate to, actively fought against people doing so, ensured even the killer didn't watch him die, and the survivors couldn't begin to understand his motive until a chapter later. The Closing Argument reflects that.

Early in DR1 Togami calls out the rest of his class for judging others by their own standards. However, he, too, is doing this, maybe more so than many other characters; his inability to view other people through anything but the cold, brutal logic of the killing game bites him in the ass in chapter 4. In DR2 chapter 2 voting without a good understanding of Pekoyama's motive or Kuzuryuu's involvement nearly got everyone killed. Komaeda's a walking embodiment of the problems with flattening people into caricatures and not empathising with them, suffered from people doing that back to him, and his case- the Closing Argument for which turned everyone else into grey placeholders- was impossible to solve with objective facts. It was only survivable because the survivors cooperated and one person tried to analyse things the way he would.

The games have always been a critique of the justice system and Japanese society and push us to care about others as individuals, not reduce them to- and judge their right to exist by- something they've done or their net impact on society. There are always consequences when someone neglects to do that, and the above might be yet another way the games explore that theme.

[funstyle]

ppl complain abt everyone being so boring/inauthentic/detached these days but the second u have interests they deem unusual theyll be like "waitttt thats giving neurodivergent..." like damn its so awesome that were pathologising giving a fuck about anything they dont sell at a tj maxx

[failure-artist]

i feel that existences causes harm, everyone who exists causes harm and the best we can do is minimize it.

[failure-artist]

you can only exist if someone got pregnant and that's a very unpleasant experience.

[failure-artist]

everywhere you go you shed skin and hair that must be cleaned up by someone and that's an unpleasant experience.

[geekandmisandry]

Lots of people like being pregnant and having that feeling. And there are whole ecosystems of bugs and bacteria that LOVE cleaning up your skin and hair.

For every unpleasant there is likely a pleasant. Swings and roundabouts.

[failure-artist]

yeah i am being melodramatic about losing my ex's boxers when doing his laundry.

[geekandmisandry]

There shall be no forgiveness for such a sin. To hell with you.