Autism and masking are so funny because like internally I despise when plans change or food feels funny in my mouth or there's a tag in my shirt or I talk to too many people in one day or I have to make a phone call, etc so I always feel like a nervous wreck at any point in the day, but on the outside I'm just 😎😊😃 just vibing and I seem so chill and adaptable and emotionally put together, so it's hard to differentiate like am I GENUINELY okay with this or am I masking
I think a lot of being an autistic kid unaware that you are autistic is saying “I’m really stressed right now” and getting the response “you don’t SEEM stressed”. Like u have no idea how good I am at pretending not to feel like this
If you ever find yourself thinking "oh, I can't write this Cool But Impractical thing into my story, it's just not realistic", here are a few perfectly realistic reasons why people and even whole cultures would rather do something in an impractical way rather than the sensible one:
weird flex
religious reasons
religious weird flex (someone decided that they are So Religious that they consider the practical method Sinful, and people got competitive about it)
tax reasons (some ruler put a tax on doing something the sensible way and people started doing the impractical alternative as a legal loophole)
someone wildly powerful and popular preferred doing it that way, and everyone adapted to it in order to look cool
someone wildly unpopular suggested doing the practical thing, and everyone went out of their way to avoid doing that in order to not look uncool
it just genuinely never occurred to them that there is a better alternative, and their current method has been honed to perfection/adapted to the infrastructure so deeply that at this point altering it wouldn't be sensible
a lot of YA and fantasy stuff has always been a little cringe and silly but at least it used to be cringe from the heart instead of designed in a lab to get teens on tiktok to use a certain sentence from it
"No one remembered my birthday-" Well, but did YOU tell anyone it was coming up and you wanted to celebrate it with them?
"I wish someone would see through it when I tell people I'm fine-" Well, but have YOU considered not lying when people ask you how you're doing?
"I am so resentful of my friend because they keep doing this thing that really bothers me-" Well, but have YOU directly communicated that the thing is bothering you?
"I am burning out because my friend keeps expecting me to help them with serious struggles-" Well, but have YOU tried to establish the boundaries you need to feel okay?
"No one ever asks me about this thing I really care about-" Well, but have YOU brought it up yourself?
"I miss my friend but they haven't texted me-" Well, but have YOU been reaching out to them?
Sometimes people are mean, uncaring assholes, in which case you get to be mad. But sometimes you just need to communicate better. Try communication before you assume someone doesn't care!
Having someone who knows you on such a deep level that they see past your mask, or sense you need a check in is such a deep satisfying fantasy. It's up there with living in a cottagecore farm, or buying all your friends houses when you win the lottery. But you have to make peace with the fact that this is also a fantasy. It is unfair to expect people to "just know" when to respect your boundaries or to push them.
Being cared for is not a fantasy. But you have to let people know you need it. And you have to understand that sometimes they will let you down. Just like you totally could live in a cute farm, but you still have to shovel shit, and the crops sometimes die anyway. Or maybe you win the lottery, but you still have to manage your money and learn real estate law.
The fantasy isn't the caring, the fantasy is not having to do the work. And it sucks. It's embarrassing. But like the meme says, it's not rotten if it's YOU. So do it for yourself.
"The fantasy isn't the caring, the fantasy is not having to do the work"! Thank you for that addition. Because it's not a naive expectation to want someone to care to treat you right. But it requires communication and mutual effort to actually get there
the fact that i'm no longer the same age as the protagonists of novels and films i once connected to is so heartbreaking. there was a time when I looked forward to turning their age. i did. and i also outgrew them. i continue to age, but they don't; never will. the immortality of fiction is beautiful, but cruel.
'people can write whatever the fuck they want' and 'its good to approach writing about sensitive topics with some diligence and forethought' are statements which can and do coexist
Eddie Alfaro (she/her) @calicohyde: Eddie Alfaro, she/her. Eddie is the third person narrator of my horror WIP Curse The Messenger, about her and her sibling Fred using their clairvoyant abilities to solve a paranormal murder. Eddie has premonitions in her sleep, where she dreams from the point of view of someone else as they die. She has severe PTSD and Survivor's Guilt from this! Because of that, and because of her grief for her missing parents, she struggles with alcohol dependence.
Normally, Eddie and Fred only solve the typical kinds of Private Investigator cases - theft, infidelity, etc. They are mistrusted in their community because of their gifts, as other witches tend to think clairvoyants are mentally unstable and dangerous. In the novel, they get their first - and only - murder case when Jessica Hase, a secular (non-magical) femme fatale, brings them the very weird case of her girlfriend's death. Throughout the novel, Eddie falls in love with Jessica, starts attending an alcoholics' support group, learns to use her gift to see the positive aspects of death, and tentatively starts to repair her strained relationship with Fred. And solves the murder, of course.
Eddie is Latina, 24 years old, and a butch lesbian. She likes sporty punk fashion, cuts her own hair, and doesn't shave or wear makeup. Her favorite color is red and her favorite flavor is cinnamon.
Chess (she/her) @concealeddarkness13 (the picture for her is made by the wonderful @drabbleitout, and she is the person on the left with the prosthetics in the picture): Chess is a special character, and I hope to show how special and awesome she is! She’s extremely distrustful, but she’ll trust people who even treat her with an ounce of decency, and she’ll protect the people she cares about with her life. She’s flirty and confident, but underneath, she has an abysmal amount of self esteem and thinks she’s a monster that will never have love or friendships. She is my blorbo who has been rotating in my mind for the past two years, and I hope you can love her as well! Someone described her in one of the AUs I’ve done as oscillating “between being a poor, wet little meow meow and a fierce feral protective lioness being held back by the scruff of her neck because she is still little”. (credits to @ratracechronicler)
She did start out with a loving family, but like all good protagonists, her parents were murdered when she was 10, and she was left alone. Especially because the society she lives in ignores violent crimes and the victims of those crimes, erasing them all from society as if they never existed. So, she technically didn’t exist in society’s eyes, so she couldn’t get a job or own property or anything. The people around her helped her for a few years until she was old enough to take care of herself, and then she learned to steal.
At twenty years old, she was kidnapped and forced into prosthetics experiments that gave her fire magic that hurts her, from her prosthetic right arm and left leg now. She has a magic fire in her lungs that flares up during physical or mental stress and burns her throat and makes her cough up smoke. Aeflin, the person running the experiments, believed her to be very strong (because she snarked at Aeflin so much and didn’t let her see her pain as much as possible), so she decided to make Chess into her weapon.
She changed her name (since Chess’s original name was Ezra) to Chess, and she put her through even worse torture. Finally, Naivi, the other person running the experiments, got Chess her own team and sent her out into the world to do what the experiments were for and to get her away from Aeflin.
Chess tried to escape that, but a random person found her and took away her memories and brought her back into the enclosure, where most humans are trapped. And she realized right away that the humans inside the enclosure found she was from the experiments and hated her and hurt her and called her a monster because God forbid women do anything (just trying to survive). She learned that the only way that she could get a warm place to sleep (not an alley) was to make herself attractive to people and flirt. She liked sleeping with people, but she mostly did it to have a warm and somewhat safer place to sleep. And even then, she’d have to stay alert because her partner could wake up and try to hurt her.
That’s where she is at the start of her story! She will get a found family and someone or someones to love! She’s pansexual and polyamorous and flirty, and she loves physical touch! She just wants people to treat her decently, and if she has to, she’ll fight to protect her boundaries. And she loves punching jerks in the face with her prosthetic! And we love a woman who loves to fight, right? Thanks for reading!
Do you support women's wrongs? Do you like magic that hurts the character? Are you a sucker for a woman who cusses and loves to get in fights? Do you love dragons? Because later in the story, Chess can turn into a cat to golden retriever sized dragon! With tiny dragon prosthetics! Or do you just want to see a deeply traumatized character get a found family and find happiness and win for once? Some of this might also apply to Eddie, who's also amazing, but please vote for Chess! I will reshare the exclusive artwork I made for her a few months ago, because she's just so much fun! Gaze upon her beauty, lol.
[Image ID: A drawing with a white background. The drawing is of a woman with dark tan skin, freckles, dark pink eyes, a smirk, black eyebrows, and wavy, long, bright green hair. She has a right arm that is a gray prosthetic, and her right hand is showing the middle finger. Her left arm is just down. Her tank top is colored like the pansexual flag, and it has three white checkboxes with checkmarks in them, for the three statements: Pansexual, Polyamorous, Still not interested. End ID]
Once she learns to control her fire magic so it doesn't hurt her anymore, it's basically overpowered; she especially loves to give herself blue fire dragon wings, like in my profile picture
She loves animals, any animal; but especially dogs and cats because they are fluffy (even though there is no such thing as dogs or cats on her world)
On her world, she will get an azure snake (which is a snake that chooses its person and feeds on that person's negative thoughts)
She also adores mosquagons (mosquito-sized dragons that eat elements), and they tend to follow her around in a cloud because she uses her fire magic to feed them
She starts out neutral about physical touch, only experiencing it when she's flirting with someone to have a warm place to sleep; once she makes friends and gets a found family and a lover, she realizes she loves physical touch because she's finally experiencing it in a positive light
She is extremely protective of her friends, even getting into fights with people who are mean to her friends, when that would put her in more danger
Throughout her story, she will be gaining weight as a sign of healing; she starts out the story underweight, and she'll be very happy to gain weight because it means she has regular, good meals
She totally achieves an enemies to lovers relationship with Naivi in canon, with Naivi actually being the first person that she remembers showing her kindness and care and proving to Chess that physical touch and sex can be a positive experience when her partner cares about her too
Here are the songs I most associate with her (her actual playlist is super long, lol): Bittersweet by Ellie Goulding, Blossom by Kerli, Brittle by Icon for Hire, Circles by P.O.D., I Want to Live from Baldur's Gate, My Name is Human by Highly Suspect, and Nightmare by Halsey
Finally, I did make a more detailed Chess essay about her backstory here (content warning for mentions of sexual abuse, physical abuse, needles, and death)
so this peep is basically saying that they support fictional inc*st because "it's just fiction"? so essentially they could support r*pe or p*dophilia in literature as long as it's "not real"??? hmm seems problematic to me
As in: I support for everyone to read/write/draw art/look at art of anything and everything they want, as long as no actual real people come into it.
If knowing that fiction is fiction, not confusing it with reality, knowing that people are in charge of their own media experience, and knowing that nobody who wasn’t already extremely troubled is going to suddenly commit crimes on the basis of some piece of fiction they consumed makes one ‘problematic’, well. Then I’m ‘problematic’, here you go.
dededos
ellievsbear
jacobvanloon
annaxmalina
izzy806
baratheonpilled
