The TruthlessSage fic only ever grows longer the more I write it, imagine that. Here's another little snippet, I might post the first chapter on Ao3 soon.
"Which ones are we moving? Where would you like them to go?" Sage asked, his tone almost excited as he surveyed the land.
Truthless hesitated again for a brief moment, then sighed.
"Grab one of the stones around this bush, and move it to the side," he explained weakly. "We'll reroute the walkway so that its not in the middle of one."
"Makes sense," Sage said.
He leaned over and brushed the compost off of one of the large, flat stones making up the walkway. He heaved, slowly lifting the rock until it was just barely above the ground. His arms were shaking. He took a wobbly step to the side, then a second one.
Truthless put a hand over his lower face, covering his mouth.
Sage groaned, hefting the stone up a little bit higher, maybe a centimeter, and made it one more step before the stone fell from his grasp. He leaped away from it, hands raised out of fear of it smashing his fingers.
He turned to Truthless and smiled expectantly. "Is that good?"
Truthless remained silent for a moment. He was kind of overwhelmed by how pathetic that display had been. It was, quite frankly, adorable. The stone had barely moved ten centimeters to the side. This was the cutest thing he'd ever seen and he kind of wanted to make Sage lift all of the rocks in the garden just to watch him struggle some more.
"Yes," he eventually said stoically. "That works."
"Are you sure?" Sage asked, entirely innocent and unaware of the evil thoughts lurking within his head. "Do you want me to move it over some more?"
It terrifies me that there’s so much raging passion in the lgbt+ community that insist on marginalizing asexuals and implying that asexuals don’t deserve to have safe spaces. There’s still so much acephobia so I just wanna know which blogs are genuinely supportive and a safe space for asexuals
Writing TruthlessSage is fun because I can add in my own little ideas of how a Cookie with the knowledge of everything would go about offering comfort to another Cookie and I think it's quite fun!
Little snippet because this fic is strangely actually developing???
"Tell me what's wrong," Sage said softly.
"I'm tired," Truthless sighed, his whole body drooping. "I'm so tired."
"Then sleep and let yourself feel relief," Sage suggested.
"I can't," he said. "There are too many who will never get to feel relief again. Why do I deserve any better than them? Why can't you just leave me alone?"
"Because you are alive," Sage told him, raising his other hand to cup both of Truthlesss cheeks in his palms. "I want you to stay alive, for a long time. So, I can't leave you alone."
"There are others," Truthless began.
"None of them are you," Sage stated. "There exists only one of you. Therefore, I'm going to fight to improve your life until you feel like you deserve to live again. I won't give up on you."
Truthless stared at him for a long moment in silence, then slowly let his eyes fall closed. His hands raised to hold the back of both of Sage's keeping him in place for a moment, then dragged them away.
"I wish you would give up on me," he whispered.
"Your improvement is not a suggestion," Sage replied.
Truthless sighed out his nose, then reopened his eyes to look at Sage again. Sage looked back, his face open and full of honesty. He was truly of the belief that Truthless would improve, solely because he was making it so there was no other option.
"I don't deserve to improve," he said bluntly. "Don't you understand that, you old fool?"
"I decide what you deserve," Sage told him, as though he was still the deity he'd once been, capable of choosing people's fates on a whim. "I'll offer you nothing less."
"Leave me alone," Truthless begged.
His grip tightened on Sage's hands. Sage smiled, something small and smug and punchable.
hot take possibly? but i actually think it’s okay for things to be marketed for adults. it’s literally okay if things aren’t suitable for children. i feel like we are losing the plot
There’s an episode of Sesame Street (on Netflix! you can watch it easily!) where Elmo attends a toy-swap, where you offer up old toys you don’t play with anymore and receive someone else’s toys that are new to you. Cute!
But Elmo, after cheerfully surrendering his old toys, sees that the children who swapped toys with him are playing with his toys “wrong”! They’re imagining entirely different make believe scenarios! They’re pretending the football is a dinosaur egg instead of a rocket ship! Aaahhhhh!!!! And this is so distressing to poor Elmo that he does the unthinkable: He does swapsies-backsies and takes all his toys back!
This being Sesame Street, he learns that you can’t control how other people play pretend, but you can join in if you want to! And if you don’t want to, that’s ok, you can just play pretend your own way by yourself or with someone else who wants to play that way too. You can still be friends with people who play pretend differently than you (and aren’t being mean/harmful/etc, do not bad-faith-read this 🤨).
GAH! Reminded of how Klaus and Leo literally are so important to each other's lives in that they directly improve each other's quality of life and how they trust each other with their lives and are supportive of each other and and and!!!
I just, I CAN'T get over Klaus having glasses, having poorer vision and how that correlates to Leo having the literal Best eyes in universe, eyes that see literally everything Klaus needs them to!!! And how Klaus is big and intimidating and could probably survive just about anything while Leo is small and fragile and so definitively human in all ways, but how it would be so much easier for him if he would learn to fight but he doesn't, he doesn't want to fivht he wants to have peace and so does Klaus and it's so important to me that they have each other ;-;
Physically impossible for me to accurately articulate all the ways they make up for each other's shortcomings but I think about Klaus getting genuinely angry at Zapp for hurting Leo so often, like SOOO OFTEN, because he never gets mad at Zapp for being an asshole, he's incredibly accepting of the fact that Zapp is at times irredeemable, but he does get mad at him, he does get upset, and it drives me crazy that it was his own protectiveness over Leo it's literally driving me mad right this very second I am holding that part of the comics very gently between my teeth and shaking my head vigorously like a dog I just-
I really like Klaus and Leo's dynamic in Kekkai Sensen.
I love them and their dynamic so much because they are on the opposite side of the same coin.
Both are genuinely good people that care for others.
Where klaus looks big and scary, leo is approachable.
Where leo lacks strength to do something, Klaus seemingly has the influence and strength to move mountains.
They also bring out the best in each other and inspire hope to move further.
Like I cannot stress enough how big libra was at a disadvantage before they had leo. Steven and K.K. are really strong and they still got bodied by girka and tonio (whom klaus could seal in mere seconds because of leo).
I also want to talk about this scene in Back to Back:
They make me so sick. They genuinely understand each other without words.
GAH! Reminded of how Klaus and Leo literally are so important to each other's lives in that they directly improve each other's quality of life and how they trust each other with their lives and are supportive of each other and and and!!!
I just, I CAN'T get over Klaus having glasses, having poorer vision and how that correlates to Leo having the literal Best eyes in universe, eyes that see literally everything Klaus needs them to!!! And how Klaus is big and intimidating and could probably survive just about anything while Leo is small and fragile and so definitively human in all ways, but how it would be so much easier for him if he would learn to fight but he doesn't, he doesn't want to fivht he wants to have peace and so does Klaus and it's so important to me that they have each other ;-;
Physically impossible for me to accurately articulate all the ways they make up for each other's shortcomings but I think about Klaus getting genuinely angry at Zapp for hurting Leo so often, like SOOO OFTEN, because he never gets mad at Zapp for being an asshole, he's incredibly accepting of the fact that Zapp is at times irredeemable, but he does get mad at him, he does get upset, and it drives me crazy that it was his own protectiveness over Leo it's literally driving me mad right this very second I am holding that part of the comics very gently between my teeth and shaking my head vigorously like a dog I just-
I really like Klaus and Leo's dynamic in Kekkai Sensen.
None of that "Oh no they bomb-dropped all the episodes in a week 1 month ago, I'm late!" "The tag hasn't been active all week is the fandom dead?" "I only got a hundred shares the first hour no one cares about my art"
Slow down
Take a deep breath and slow down
Fandom is YOU. And me and everyone. If we doodle stick figures for a show that ended 30 years ago we aren't "late" or "doing too little", we're playing dolls in our own time and having fun with works of art that mean a lot to us
You can literally watch and engage with something that aired in 2004 as if it aired yesterday
If the tag hasn't been active for 14 months guess what? If YOU post there, it isn't dead. Literally you can talk about anything you want whenever you want there is no weird law against watching things that people aren't actively talk about
Anyway, I got the Sage of Truth costume and I love him in the story and I was struck by the muses with a semi truck to write a fic all about TruthlessSage so here's my favourite bit so far:
This was a truly negative headspace. Sage was internally panicking again. But no, he'd read enough books, he knew how to handle the situation.
"No," he said bluntly. "I won't leave. If you ask me again, I'll fuse the two of us together so that we can never be apart."
There was a moment of silence. Eventually, with a rustle of the blankets, Truthless Recluse managed to poke his head out to stare at him with something like judgemental disgust on his features. A new emotion. Sage was so good at this comforting thing."
truly the idea of "this scene is (un-)necessary to the story" is such a fundamentally uncurious and anti-art way of engaging with fiction. the story itself is unnecessary, in the sense that all art is unnecessary, because art is not a fucking optimization problem. that's the beauty of it
also there is no theory of “necessary” and “unnecessary” scenes that is not culturally conditioned and a reflection of specific societal biases. modern Anglophone readers of the Iliad tend to find the Catalogue of Ships and the Doloneia and Achilles fighting the Scamander and most of the violence and killing in the poem unnecessary but an Iliad that removes them and telescopes the journey from Book 1 to Book 24 is not the Iliad in any meaningful way.
not really responding to specific people in the notes on this post because I’m not looking to pick on anybody but many people are taking it as a statement against editing, which is not what I’m saying at all. editing and revising are parts of the creative process. the point I’m making is a deeper one and is about people who interact with (other people’s) art - especially narrative art - in a way that makes it merely the sum of its parts by always asking whether each of those parts is “necessary” or whether it “earns its place”. and one person points out that Michelangelo’s David is what remained when he’d chipped away everything that was not-David and I get what you’re saying but (a) I think the logic of subtractive creation is misapplied where it doesn’t really belong - e.g. ok, but was Starry Night what remained when Van Gogh had removed everything that was not Starry Night, or Frankenstein what remained when Mary Shelley had removed everything that was not Frankenstein? - and (b) it’s always presumptive to assume that an artist’s theory of editing should to conform to yours or to some universal standard, rather than approaching a work with a willingness to let it surprise you.
and I’ll also point to this post I made yesterday on the relationship between the logic of “trimming the fat”, eugenics, fascism, and fatphobia, and note that as an anticapitalist I am also deeply suspicious of metaphors like “economy” of storytelling and the idea that every scene needs to “earn” its presence in the story. that doesn’t mean I haven’t ever read a story where I’ve thought “the pacing is a bit slow” (or shrugged at the end and gone “yeah, that one wasn’t for me”), but at the end of the day scenes and narratives are not wage-laborers in a capitalist state. and thank god for that.
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