hii! im isabela (but pretty much everyone calls me isa)- a sleep-deprived legally neurotypical teenager with way too many character addictions.
my fandoms include: the riordanverse, keeper of the lost cities, school bus graveyard, the owl house, the maze runner, sk8 the infinity, link click, teen wolf, the dragon prince, and [insert a thousand more things im too lazy to write down]. i mostly just talk about sbg here though (especially benlor <3).
i write really terrible self-indulgent fanfiction on here and ao3, but if you happen to read it, i hope you enjoy! comment if you like anything and criticize whatever you want <3. here is my ao3 !!
if you're here from q: old quotev users community
if you're an sbg fan: school bus graveyard community
if you're a benlor shipper: benlor fic masterlist
feel free to send asks, tag, or interact with me in any way!! i dont mind random messages at all <3 (on that note, donation asks and hate anons will be ignored).
Sudden sonder is so strange. Every single moment, everyone you do or don't know is somewhere out there. Sleeping, talking, working. Experiencing. It's sometimes weird to remember that the silly online avatars and usernames that I call my friends are like... actual people. Out there somewhere, living their own lives
Total cornplate observation but I think it's really funny how taylor is showing the other two girls what cards she has. girl turn your hand around they're cheating.
im looking through all my old quotev accounts and everything and im finding notifications from yrs ago i never bothered checking. someone found the very first fanfic i ever wrote and told me it was amazing. and i told them like a yr ago its the first one i ever wrote and its what got me into posting online and they told me they thought that was insane bc it was so good and they were gonna go read all my fics now. bro. i cant do this guys. it was a freaking next gen percy jackson fic. and im rereading it and it was SO much better than how i WRITE NOW .
makes me think sometimes that i had the potential to be a good author and then i just gave up. or i was just hella better then than now. i gave up on something i loved more than anything in the damn world. i wrote three books at the same time and got halfway done on all of them. i wrote so much fanfiction. i was churning out 3k a day every day for months. after school at the age of 11. it wasnt a chore and i wasnt doing it for anyone and i wasnt even doing it to do it. i did it for myself and i havent done that in a really really long time.
ive always been the "writer" friend but its kinda hitting me right now how deeply writing changed my life. i would be a different person right now had i not been a writer. im going through my old google drive and im finding entire poetry books & entire short stories & entire world building plot lines that span dozens of pages. and theyre so fucking good. i couldnt write like that now if i tried.
im getting imposter syndrome or something bc what happened to me. holy shit. i want that passion back. i havent felt it in forever but goddamn i want it back. i remember it just barely. its on the tip of my fingers and im so close to the feeling but its not there, the space is empty and im lost and i dont know how to reach the rope again.
the world isnt as bright anymore and things arent as interesting. i dont create magical realms in my mind or characters i want to be like anymore. i dont write novellas in my free time. however silly they are. i dont always have a wip im yapping about to my friend.
the last thing that ive ever written that i was proud was letters written in incognito. i rawdogged that one and sure it wasnt the best but it was so personal and so real and so everything to me it physically hurts. why cant i want to write something like that again. what happened to me??
maybe its the surge of ai in everything that has made me think its easier to give up bc a damn machine can do it better anyway. maybe school has just fucked me up and made me exhausted. maybe its because once the depression hit it never really went away. maybe its because after i won my first competition, writing because a thing to "win" and not just "do". get awards for college aps, be a "writer" so colleges want you in their english major. but i dont even want to write. i hate it. im exhausted. i never enjoy writing anymore.
but i used to! i used to love it. i used to make masterpieces id show nobody. i used to find joy and comfort in the safety of my room. i used to have a really damn good vocabulary for a 10 yr old. i wrote romance, i wrote fantasy, i wrote fanfiction. somehow even at 11 i was writing gay shit in my books for some reason. the signs were there lmao i dont understand how my mom didnt know when i very excitedly showed her my evil lesbian character </3.
break from the rant to do a cover reveal of all the stories i dedicated myself too lol. the first cover still stuns me its literally gorgeous. and they DREW it for me too like what the fuck. if i ever write a novel to publish i need to find them and make them my cover artist. (and this was well before ai so its all real).
crazy how all of them were like 18k+ words and not even close to done when letters written in incognito was 13k and a MONSTER for me to finish. i really just kept downgrading.
anyway. i miss myself so much. i miss the writer in me so fucking much. i miss having motivation. i miss having a writing community. i miss having friends to talk to every day. i miss feeling alive. what the fuckkkk i cant do this yall.
scremainsdbytwyuioqwiuedygtf ewqiwuyegfdreyuwiqwushgdewu. im actually crashing out. fucksiudytreyuiwo.
this has turned into a rlly long rant and im hoping nobody except me is reading it. and if you are jesus i am so sorry. im just kind of in a state of melancholy slash nostalgia right now. life has been really really shitty this past month, and i suppose its just bleeding into everything else. taking my lil trip down mmory lane today was lowk a bad idea </3
i want my childhood back what the fuckkk im not ready to be an adult. i want to not be tired 24/7 all the fucking time.
ahhhh. okay. im going to go crash my head into a wall.
I was never on there, but you keep making me curious. What was quotev actually like? How different did it work?
dude i was abt to answer and then i was hit with the realization that i barely remember. its been more than two yrs now holy crap.
it was... okay so initially it was a writing website. i joined it to post my first pjo fanfic and join a small rp community. there were a LOT of rp-ers there. that was a huge thing, there were these groups you could make (kinda like tumblr communities? but you could make tons of threads and what not so not rlly like communities) and join to meet other ppl. you could search for them at once point, then they took that feature away, and then brought it back?
the admins are anon and dont listen to anyone so they highkey just sucked.
uhh what else. one major "culture shock" was like on tumblr when you post, you post to everyone. thats not how it worked on quotev. also you cant rlly reblog stuff on quotev. you have an "activity" which is basically a long list of all the posts from people you follow. and you interact w peoples activities and they can interact with yours, and to "reblog" youd just copy the whole thing and put it on ur account kinda. it was very nice bc most of them you just activity-posted to people you knew and followed. i cant really explain it using tumblr terms because till date, there is no social media that has quotev's activity site. it was the heart of the website and super unique to it. a lot of people tried to make like new websites and mimic the style but it was unsuccessful due to money issues, time issues, etc. eventually everything just died down and people gave up so.
they had private messaging AND chat? so like how tumblr has chat, but it also had a private messaging system for some reason. you could send messages to urself i remember that.
OH how could i forget. it was run by immature teenagers. so there were a bunch of crazy rules that everyone had to follow or youd get cancelled and get made a call out post for. very very different situation than tumblr. the biggest thing about quotev was its culture, and thats what made it so loved and also so hated. theres a beauty in thousands of kids connecting on some unknown website and basically governing the lawless land themselves. but obviously, it came with issues.
so yeah tumblr was an insane change for me. i still miss so many things abt quotev you simply dont get anywhere else. the groups and activity features were so personalized, it was so so easy to catch up w friends & make new ones. you didnt "not talk to someone for months" very often bc if they posted and you saw it, you interacted. most ppl posted like, many times a day. i know i did.
god i am WRACKING my brain here. some big things i havent seen anywhere else were the insane graphic culture, there was a main Quotev group and one of the main threads inside of the group was called C&I (covers & images) and it was huge. there were thousands minier threads called "shops" (i had one too!) that ppl ran and made things for others in exchange for followers/likes/reviews in "directories" that ppl made. the system was so professional and proper im in shock just thinking abt it. im looking at reddit posts rn and remembering the sheer amount of "frennies" (friend edits, aka put ur name on a pinterest photo and make it fancy so u could have a picture w/ ur friend on the other side of the world) i got made.
kin culture, activity system, you could get people to read your whole manuscript in exchange for something else yadyada. cancel culture, really solid rp culture (probably the best ive ever seen, groups made it very accessable), and yeah a bunch of other stuff i cant think of rn.
y'all. oh my god. i just found a document (which i titled "links 4 life" </3) on my old gmail from about 4 years ago. and in it, i have linked attachments of all the graphics and designs and stories i "ordered" on the quotev graphics group.
its all quotev stuff. and i mean EVERYTHING it has all my stuff from probably like 10 to 12. and im in fucking shock right now because everything is so so professionally good.
like i had someone make me a whole trailer for my little book ?? and the most STUNNING moodboards and aesthetics ive ever seen, with gifs and everything ?? and im remembering all of this and god i did not appreciate graphics culture on quotev enough. everyone was so damn good at it over there it was fucking insane.
im freaking out now because i cant remember what it was called?? like its on the tip of my tongue but i cant remember what the group was called jesus. how could i forget that.
anyway fuck quotev for ruining groups. the sheer amount of knowledge that were in so many of those threads. 13 year olds making gorgeous blends & banners & covers for literally free. and it wasnt like exploitation or free labor or any of that shit too bc we all actively enjoyed it and supported one another.
i was just hit with the worst bout of nostalgic ever and now i feel like crying. i miss graphic culture on quotev so damn much.
edit: I FOUND IT I FOUND IT IT WAS CALLED COVERS & IMAGES. HOW COULD I FORGET C&I. oh i feel sick
