Hi, hello!👋 Before I get into any real introductions, please keep this in mind: this blog is 18+ only, and I occasionally engage with/talk about/actively create dead dove style dark content. While this is rare-ish on Tumblr (because let's be real, this is mostly a reblog-blog!), it's still something to consider if this sort of content upsets you and you've found yourself here on accident rather than on purpose. Please protect yourself! If things like that do bother you, I will not be hurt at all if you block me, and frankly encourage it.
Also, a second note: if you see use any funky letters, numbers, or symbols to change up a character's name, it's because I am actively trying to avoid ending up in their tags! I'm not trying to be cute or annoying, I promise.
And now that we've established that...
My name is skuppo, she/her, old enough to be legal in every corner of the world, and I mostly like reblogging things I find funny + things that are related to my hyperfixations here! I'm obsessed with Dabi from BNHA and also ship him with my OC, so he sneaks in a lot. Outside of BNHA and a handful of other anime, I'm reaaaaally into video games (especially horror games!), so there's a lot of that, too. Horror in general is one of my most favorite things in the world, and I feel like it seeps into a lot of things I engage with, so I guess please be forewarned!
I also write fic (about Dabi and my OC!) As mentioned, it's almost always dark stuff that is dead dove-y in nature, but don't worry! It's nothing I actively post on Tumblr. Still, I sometimes will make vague and mysterious comments about it here, usually by reblogging things that are related to it/the characters in an artsy-fartsy or memey kind of way. Sometimes, I will also answer asks about it!
As a note, if you send me an ask and don’t want it published, just say so; I’ll respond privately! 😌👌💖 If it’s anon, I cannot respond in any way other than public!
Also! I'll happily engage with almost anyone and anything, but please try to avoid being crazy negative if you decide to interact. 🙏 I refuse to engage with rude or hateful people. If you're someone who uses inflammatory language to post scathing opinion pieces about ultimately harmless things (fictional characters and the people who like them, author choices, tropes, kinks/fetishes, etc) in public tags or in my ask box, I will probably block you even if I happen to agree with your take. Like I know some people like to vent, and if it's handled respectfully and in a nonjudgmental way, it's fine! But I just don't personally enjoy being around the aggressive sort, so if I don't engage, it's probably nothing personal outside of me trying to keep my own peace of mind. Thankfully I'm no one special, so you're not gonna be missing out on much!
frequent general-use tags!
[x] #bnha - anything to do with bnha! usually fanart reblogs.
[x] #dabi - my fave. usually reblogged art or memes.
[x] #hawks - another common offender!
[x] #QQ - anything with this tag is something in my reblog queue; it can be literally anything.
personal tags!
[x] #skuppo.txt - personal text posts, usually answered asks.
[x] #skuppo answers! - answered asks!
[x] #tvoefoy - stuff about my main fic.
[x] #tvoe: dabï - stuff about Dabi as he relates specifically to my fic and its canon. I’m using the funky “ï” to keep these posts out of the main Dabi tag.
[x] #tvoe: suzume - stuff about my OC and her involvement in my fic.
Post header is art commissioned by me from Meiichu over on VGEN!
hey, you ok?🥹 I really, really need a new chapter. I’m dying over here, I need to be fed. No pressure though…. Ok maybe a little but still.
Considering this was sent on March 11, I am genuinely SO SO SO SORRY, AHHHH. I got back on my bullshit (bullshit being me having a TERRIBLE time) but now I'm back on my OTHER bullshit (this bullshit being actively living and functioning and writing again) so if you're still around, food's, uh, coming soon! 🤞
hiiiii !!! i just wanted to drop by and say i love tvoefoy so much it has been stuck in my head for the past couple of months ugh!! your work is definitely my fav dabi fic and i can just see how much work and love is being put into it which is so inspiring as a fellow writer!
with that said, if you don't mind me asking (you can choose to ignore this if you do) how do you plan your fic? and so ahead too ?? like how do you keep track of ideas because as a pantser who's learning to, well, not write like a pantser it's so hard 😭
anyway it's fine if you don'twanna answer this!!! sending so so much love to suzu, dabi, and tvoefoy <33
Ohhh, hello!! Thank you so much! I’m so glad to hear that my fic is still holding strong in your affections despite my long absence from these hallowed internet spaces… it really means a lot to me! 🥹🥹💖 (And wooo, especially so from a fellow writer!)
And this is such a cool and fun question! So I shall absolutely try to answer this! Standard warning for anything I do/answer: this will absolutely turn out to be a lengthy response because I am incapable of brevity. 😭 Totally gonna use this as an opportunity to talk not just about how I (HARDLY) plan outside my own brain, but also my silly, convoluted writing process! Apologies in advance!
Sooooooo, right out the gate: I’m diagnosed ADHD, which is like, a blessing, and also a curse. It’s a blessing because I have super power retention skills for anything that makes it onto my hyperfocus list, and, at the risk of immense vanity, I have to confess that my fic is probably front and center at the top of that list. Even when I’m not actively writing it and am just rotting away in some super depressive state, I’m still thinking about it!
It’s a curse because ADHD also comes hand in hand with some killer executive dysfunction issues. There are days where I will be sitting there laying around doing absolutely nothing worth doing, like maybe scrolling through JP social media feeds looking for Dabi art (which is actually absolutely worth doing, but also it takes up a lot of time… 🫠) or, more destructively, watching entire movies in 1 minute stretches completely out of order on youtube shorts, each of which are interspersed with all manner of weird content I don’t actually like (which suggests I like the movies… and I often don’t!)
And like, while I’m doing these totally unproductive things, I’ll feel this immense sense of unhappiness welling up inside of me. Guilt builds up. I’m thinking, why am I doing this? I’m not even having fun. No good pictures for awhile, these youtube videos suck, I feel like I’m going crazy, oh my god, I hate this…
So then I put my phone down and sit there on my bed thinking, “TIME TO GET UP AND WRITE!”
And then I pick up my phone again lol.
Ad infinitum. My phone’s screen time was like, 8+ hours a day at the worst of it. That’s the bad side of ADHD… you’ll try to feed your broke ass brain with any cheap dopamine hit, and that comes at the cost of doing things that you actually enjoy and love because THOSE things require effort before they give you any sort of feel good brain chemicals. And with writing, they require a LOT of effort.
Good news, though! I’ve taken steps to fix my dumb brain rot lately, and that’s mostly involved me locking myself away from all social media access on my phone. Which means we’re now swinging back in the other direction, and it’s a lot more blessing than curse now! Writing is wonderful again! I’ve been doing it for hours a day!
So let’s get into the guts of how that works for me!
When I first started writing TVOE, I’d already been thinking about it for a reaaaaally long time. The bones and a lot of the meat of it were there, and as BNHA’s story developed, I’d rearrange those bones and meat as needed. This was all in my head, mind you. I wasn’t really writing anything down! Ever since I was a kid, I’d do this thing where I’d imagine what was basically fanfic style stories for my favorite games/books/shows, and they’d almost always have a beginning, middle, and end. I’d populate them with scenes that, when I was alone or even around other people but just not talking to them, I’d think about over and over again. It’s like… I’d describe it best like, you’re a director for a movie, and you’re retaking a scene a hundred, hundred times over, just from different view points, or with minor tweaks to the script. Sometimes, you even just think about them the exact same way with no changes. You love the scene, after all. You wanna see it again and again… so, why wouldn’t you?
Do that enough and with that much repetition, and those scenes become things you can’t possibly forget. Even if there’s a million scenes, you hold onto them all, because you’re OBSESSED. Yeah, they might all be out of order, and obviously there are scenes you’re more partial to than others, but the scenes that get that much focus become a part of your own being. Nothing to really keep track of!
TVOE for me was and still is (mostly) like that. And in the beginning, when I actually decided I wanted to sit down and write and see if anyone wanted to read all my self-indulgent nonsense, I really didn’t do any exterior planning outside of what I already had in my head. It was basically just: I have all these scenes I have already fully pre-imagined in my head, and now I just need to write the connective tissue between each scene to get to where I wanna go! Like, I’d just sit down and think, “Okay, time to write this scene I’ve been imagining. Let’s go. Okay, done. Next one now,” and if I needed to write some bits between them to make them make sense, I’d just make them up as I went.
I kept that up until just after Dabi kills Suzu’s dad, with the only outside bit of work on it a single Google Doc that was a sort of… I don’t know, let’s call it a “Post-Planning Doc,” where I’d put down bits and pieces of stuff I’d written into those first chapters that I eventually wanted to do a dramatic call back to in later ones. None of that was done ahead of time, though… I’d just be writing out my chapters and think, “Oh, I like this metaphor, I wanna mention it again later,” or, “This bit of dialogue is real nice, self. Let’s put that aside and maybe have something that references it later,” and then copy and paste that straight up to the doc with, hopefully, a little note about context (if future me was lucky… past me still has ADHD, and sometimes my notes to myself are NOT clear at all, LMAO 😭) and how I think I might make it work in the future.
Dabi killing Suzu’s dad is, at least for me, a transition from what I consider to be Act 1 of my fic into Act 2. Act 1 was a lot more structured by virtue of it needing to set up the story, but Act 2 opened up a lot of space for me to get into what I was really excited to do, which was to build up the relationship between Dabi and Suzu. It felt like getting off a train with a very set track from point A to B (which was, introduce the two of them, get Dabi attached enough that he’d actually risk himself and his goals to go rescue her, and then, move in together!) to getting off said train and stepping into a big old open field full of POTENTIAL.
Act 2 is the big, open field. It is less structured than Act 1 because it’s purpose was not something so concrete as “get characters from point a to point b” but more so just a window into the characters interior lives so both the audience and also me could watch the two of them develop their, uh, very fucked up relationship. I actually DID make a document at the beginning of Act 2 where I very, very roughly mapped out a whole list of scenes/events that I’d, again, already imagined prior, but the order of these was a lot more loosey goosey than Act 1. They didn’t need to be as strict because, for the most part, the overarching plot of Act 2 is relatively peaceful without as much exterior forces acting on the two of them. We’re essentially just watching the two of them grow up together. WHEN a lot of these scenes happen isn’t as important so much as that they happen at all, and there are/were a LOT of these sorts of scenes. Some of those scenes got so much of my mental attention over the years that I’d never in a million lifetimes forget them (or they were absolutely vital to the plot, like Hawks finding out about Suzu’s wings, Suzu and Dabi moving to Chichibu, Suzu meeting Shinsou, etc). Still, some of them are more fever-dream moments of, “YEAH, GOSH, THIS IS GONNA GIVE SO MUCH CONTEXT TO THEIR RELATIONSHIP! ALSO IT’S HOT?”
Only the next day, I’m back to thinking about MY TOP 10 FAVORITE SCENES OF ALL TIME again… and then the next day, and the day after that, and I actually start letting a few really GOOD context-building scenes slip into the recesses of my memory because I’m always super laser focused on Fute Plot Drama Scene.
(Or, more embarrassingly, a Dabi is a Super Pervert and It’s Uncomfortably Erotic scene.)
So, the document of “these scenes should happen!” was and still is helpful for that. It’s just basically a sort of bullet point list with a bolded “title” for each point and a bit of context for said points. Sometimes, if I had/have an idea for some hard hitting prose, I’ll slap it into that document with its associated bullet point. I had a bunch scenes in that document before I started Act 2, and I’ve been adding onto it as I go as things come to me, because again, Act 2 is the space for that. Part 1 and Part 3 are reaaaal structured, but Part 2… well, like I said, it’s just them mostly growing up together with a few key points to keep them on track. Because of the nature of Dabi and Suzu’s very, uh, toxic relationship, I felt a lot of the story needed to be focused on WHY they’re both so attached to each other (particularly in Suzu’s case… like, why wouldn’t she just get sick of Dabi’s shit and run off to Hawks and tell him what’s going on? Why will she behave the way she does in Act 3? It needs to make SENSE, and so we have the years of Act 2 and all the small, interior moments of their lives that build up to explain that.)
Anyway, so that was my “plotting” for a vast majority of writing this fic. But as the story kept getting bigger and I started having more and more things I needed to remember and reference for later, it started becoming… REALLY HARD TO MANAGE, as you might expect. That’s exasperated by my totally batshit tendency to just let my work spread out all over EVERYTHING, nevermind my chaotic style of editing. Seriously, my Google Docs are a FUCKING MESS, LMAO, and it doesn’t help that I often name my documents like, the stupidest shit ever. Like, here’s a few shots of the absolute disaster I was working with before:
(Side note: before I switched to TVOE in my own files, it was always DTC, because my room mate (who is also my best friend in the whole world) and I had some insane joke about “Dabbeh’s Thrabbin Cahk” (or Dabi’s Throbbing Cock, lmao, just in the stupidest accent imaginaable) and for awhile, DTC was how all my files were designated because I’m mentally and forever a child who finds fart jokes funny.)
Combined with the fact that I also almost always write a chapter’s first draft scenes (and often entirely out of order, working on whichever scene inspires me most at the time…) using a little Program called Focus Writer before I even assemble them in GoogleDocs, and, weeeeeeeeeell…
Total logistical nightmare!!! I’d like, write a rough scene, then go write another rough scene later in the chapter, and another, and another. Like it’s so common for me to be in the middle of writing a scene, and then be like, yeah, not feeling this. I’m gonna go edit a scene I ALREADY wrote and come back to drafting later instead! And then later on, I’d be like, okay, WHERE is scene A??? How far along in the editing process was I with that, and is the BEST version of it already in my Google Docs, or is it still floating around on my hard drive somewhere?
To illustrate, here’s a snippet of my Focus Writer folder for an old chapter. These are all my roughest drafts from that chapter, since I never actually edit in Focus Writer:
All those scenes are from the same chapter, and I wrote them entirely out of order. Previously, before I got my new system in place, I’d take them out of Focus Writer and assemble them in order into a GoogleDocs file (usually named something like TVOE32_raw) and start editing them. While that’s changed, my editing process really hasn’t, so I guess let’s touch on that!
Editing for me is usually a three-ish? step process. Once chunks of scenes have been assembled in the RAW file, I’ll keep opening it and picking at it, changing wording, adding things, deleting them, etc. I have Google Docs on my phone, and when I find myself with a spare moment, whether at work or in the bathroom or wherever I happen to be, I’ll go in and read what’s there with a fresh mind (looking at stuff after I’ve written it is SO IMPORTANT for me… I can never trust anything I’ve just written!!) and I’ll just attack the shit out of it. Eventually, once it starts sounding better, I move onto phase 2 of editing…
Which is where I’ll make a new “EDIT” file for the chapter so I can open up both the RAW file and the EDIT file right next to each other. Then I’ll basically rewrite the whole final version while looking at the old garbage, but ideally, better sounding. A lot of the time, more meat gets added here, too! Most grammar and spell check work happens here, and I’ll try really hard to catch basic things that drive me insane, like mistaken word repetition (I repeat words a lot on purpose, but that’s intentional! Accidental stuff is a NO GO. Intention matters so much!!)
(I also tend to pick at these files a lot in my free time. Before they move onto the next and final phase, everything’s fair game for being picked at forever.)
After the “EDIT” file is all properly edited and assembled, it goes through a third round of editing. For this, I’ll load it into Speechify, a program that will read your documents to you with a relatively human sounding voice. (I tried other free programs, but the robotic voices they all had did NOT help me.) I use the Gwyneth Paltrow voice a lot because it sounds kinda theatrical/dramatic and it’s also funny as fuck because I’m like, Miss Paltrow, what are you doing reading this filth? Man, though, listening to your story read aloud is so NICE because you’ll catch a lot of things you’d otherwise miss if you were just reading it to yourself… and, more importantly for me, it’s nice to hear how the cadence of your prose sounds spoken aloud.
Granted, Speechify isn’t the same as having some really ultra premium voice actor do it with some PROPER GRAVITAS like they do in good audio books, but I think it really helps a LOT. I can HEAR the mistakes, like my god, they’ll just slap you in the fucking face. It felt a little cringe at first, hearing my words read back to me, but it’s super invaluable to me now.
It also takes a long time, as you might expect, having a robot read you like 30k+ words at a time while you go and fix it… but really. Cannot stress enough how much it helps me.
I’ll fix little things as I’m listening and highlight the larger bits where stuff sounds especially heinous to come back to later. After that, I’ll go back in and attend to those larger corrections (sometimes rewriting entire paragraphs), and if I’m feeling extra perfectionist, I’ll feed those corrected scenes back into Speechify to make sure they sound better.
From there, finally: format for Ao3 and post!
Like I mentioned though, jumping from Focus Writer to GDocs to PDF files I’m feeding to Speechify can get VERY convoluted. Beyond that process, I will also do dumb shit like text myself very, very rough idea or dialogue snippets for scenes (sometimes for scenes VERY far in the future…) when I’m too lazy to get into my GDocs (which is often). Considering I’m always sending myself text messages for a host of other random shit, like lyrics from songs I wanna look up, or cool words I read in a book I want to remember, or tasks I need to get done… it’s just a lot to sift through. Things are always falling through the cracks lately!
See attached, lmao:
So after a bit of research, I got myself Scrivener, and it’s a fucking lifesaver. You asked about planning, and I think it’s as amazing for planning as it is for organization! Like, here’s a shot of it and how I’ve been making it work for me:
This is a lot to look at, so bear with me, I’ll try to roughly explain it:
On the left there, you can see a bunch of folders buried in other folders. I have three MAIN FOLDERS that are really important. My “FINAL???” folder contains the version that’s almost entirely edited and waiting to be fed into Speechify for it’s last passover. “FIRST EDIT” is where I rewrite/edit my raw files, and “RAWS” is where my unedited first drafts get dumped. The numbered “Chapter” folders in each of those main three contain separate files for each scene. The program allows me to give the scenes little informational note cards (like you can see on the right side of the image!) where I can name each scene and give myself a note about what the scene’s about. Clicking through those informational cards takes you to a file where you can see all the juicy writing inside!
So like, if you want to pre-plan a chapter, you can just populate the chapter folder with a bunch of these scene cards, each with their own little file, and write yourself notes about them. Then you can go in and actually write in each scene file separately, allowing you to easily organize and find the scenes if you like to jump around and write stuff out of order like I do. It’s easy to just delete them, or move them around, or add new ones. It’s also very easy to open two scene files right next to each other, making rewriting from one file to the next VERY easy. That’s SO important to me for editing.
I still write my raws in Focus Writer, because I really love the simplicity of that program. From there, I’ll dump that writing into my “RAW” folder, and then open that up alongside it’s equivalent scene in “FIRST EDIT,” where I’ll rewrite it. Since I can access Scrivener on my phone, I can pick at it wherever I’m at, and I do a lot of the rough rewriting there. Once it’s been edited to death, it gets moved to my “FINAL???” section, and then copied to a GoogleDoc for it’s absolute final pass through. This is where I make it a PDF so it can get shipped off to Speechify, but I tend to fix all the off-kilter things Miss Paltrow helps point out in this final GDoc version.
Then at the end, the final, mostly cleaned up version (because I always miss at least a FEW things because I am not a professional editor!) gets formatted using a GDoc script I’ve been using since the beginning and then posted to Ao3! I also keep a PDF copy of my totally finished work on two different hard drives for back up purposes. 🤓☝️
The benefit of Scrivener is that it’s basically a giant corkboard where I can keep copies of every step of my work process. If I like an older version of something, I can go find it. I can also plan my chapters a lot easier! Now, at the start of each chapter, I’ll make a bunch of those scene files and fill them with my plans for each. If a chapter gets too long (which often happens) I can easily move it to the next chapter. That’s especially handy if I’ve already started writing the scene, which also happens a lot, because I’m always very excited about certain things in the future.
It also lets me make customizable templates for things like “Character Information” or “Places” so I can keep detailed notes relevant to things in one place! Handy for always remembering names or inane details like, is Elixir taller than Dabi? I also try to move all my weird notes and scraps to myself into it, loosely organizing them so I can find or search for them later. For real, it’s a really cool program, and I love it.
ANYYYYYHOW, because of my broke ass brain, I spend a lot of time thinking and writing and trying to keep my disaster of a story functional. 😭 It really is a labor of love! It’d be a lot easier if I wasn’t such an insane perfectionist, but that’s its own struggle, and unlike my social media addiction, I’ve yet to find a way to beat that into submission. 💀 But MAN, I’ve been real interested to see exactly HOW LONG I spend on writing lately, so yesterday I went digging for some kinda program to help me keep track of time I spend working on this thing. That lead to me discovering this thing called Clockify, an app that’s meant to track like, actual billable hours for working professionals or something. Still, it works well for my purposes! I can start a timer, work for awhile, and then end it when I’m done, and it logs it for me, like so:
I’m thinking of maybe posting weekly updates about what I’ve been working on to Tumblr now that I have this juicy hard data I can track. Imagine it: Ol’ Skuppo, clockin in at the writing factory. 🫡We’ll see how I’m feeling next Sunday, I guess!
Anyway… this got insanely long, but it was fun to talk about, so thanks for the question!! I’m sure a lot of it is unfortunately repetitive because I just kinda word vomited all over the place, but hopefully some part of it helps! 🥹
PS. I've been hearing rumors about Gdocs deleting people's lately so I've been trying to move that part of my process off to Ellipsus, but man, it's hard. I've been using Gdocs as part of my fic writing process for literal years at this point! Just keep that in mind, particularly if you're writing dark fic of any kind.
As a huge internet and PC nerd, my advice is to keep stuff on a physical hard drive you own as much as possible. Do not trust cloud services! They're handy to move things between platforms, but always keep hard copies of things, whether on your phone or your PC or your Mac or whatever it is you're using. God forbid you be working on your magnum opus 6 months deep only for some fuckass data provider to just delete your stuff on you. 😭😭😭
This goes for ANYTHING you like, too. You love a fic, you download it! You never know when it might disappear. 😭☝️
Tragically, I have passed away, and am now only able to write or respond to people when the light of the unblessed moon shines down upon my long deceased body and briefly reanimates my corpse.
Actually, though, I'm okay now! I was not okay for a very hot minute, but as of this moment, I am doing all right! There has been a lot of awful things that have happened, but a good majority of those things have resolved themselves (or at least been wrangled into relative submission) and what jackassery remains has become more bearable. As a result, I'm feeling a lot more functional lately, and booooy howdy, is that a relief. 🫠
I've actually been at work on my next chapter a bunch these past few days too, something that I've been able to do with much more zeal than before because I have locked away any access to doom scrolling temptations on my phone behind some complicated and annoying fail safes! And MY GOD, it's really been helping to clear my absolutely debilitating brain rot/executive dysfunction issues. I've been on that journey for maybe two weeks now, and this past week I've actually been finding IMMENSE JOY in writing again, something I haven't felt in... god, I don't know how long. That's its own ridiculous story, lmao.
But life also hasn't been like, a total hellscape, which really contributes so much to my functionality. Hard to want to write or do anything creative when life is falling apart. At least that's how it is for me, anyway!
Thanks for everyone's kind anon asks and comments on Ao3; I'll try and get back to them over the next few days in between trying to slap out some writing! 🤓☝️
I was gonna info dump about Ethel n her straight up bro sis songs (will prob send later tbh) but I was struggling w being anxious for ages help
But yayyy I'm so happy you liked it, like genuinely ur response made my day tbh esp since tvoefoy is one of if not my favorite fic everrrr 💖✨️
-🦭
YEAAAAAAAAH, hello 🦭!!!! 💖
I'm honestly super stoked to hear from you again cause I was worried I'd scared you off by being Too Earnest and Emotional on Main with my last response, ahhhhh 😭 Was really hard not to, though! That song's one of the best things anyone's ever sent me and holy shit did it rip right through me. I'm so sad it's not on Spotify so I can't put it on any of my TVOE playlists... I should really put them on YouTube or something since pretty much everyone has YouTube these days. It's funny, but you sending me that song was a catalyst that made me start using YouTube music WAY more than I used to and now it's actively rivaling my Spotify use on the regular (which was already wild... I have a long hour+ long commute every day!) Sometimes I'll drive home just listening to that song on repeat and get all weepy about it and the stories in my head. Y'know. Like normal people do! 🤓☝️
(I'm being silly about it, but I'm also SO serious about it, too. And it sounds silly to thank you for giving me something that makes me cry so often, but y'know, it's good to have a cathartic cry sometimes. Or a lot of time! I also feel like it's REAL GOOD for writing, personally, so for real, THANKS SO MUCH.)
But YES! Please info dump on me whenever! 🙏🙏 Although I'm pretty sure I went and found the song you're talking about and I gotta say, I LOVE it also. SO MANY GOOD SONGS FROM YOOUU 💖💖
(Minor warning, but uh, this next bit gets a teensy bit heavy and touches on abuse, so please be mindful!)
Like ooooh, the actual sound of it is so haunting, and I love how the lyrics seem to play up this deep love for her brother that also seems to make her feel sick, too. The dichotomy of that is reaaaal good and appeals to me for obvious reasons. Like I think it's really heartbreaking when a victim knows that the love they feel for their one-two punch of an abuser/protector combo is very obviously wrong or bad (sometimes in a way they can't fully articulate), but they just feel that love so strongly that they don't care, they can't care, they're at this point where they can't even conceive of living without it or their abuser. Like there's certainly naivete there, and I think that's really interesting too, but they aren't completely blind. And so the victim kind of starts to adapt this sort of self-imposed (and very much encouraged by their abuser in this situation...) helplessness because they've become just as addicted to the things that make them feel bad in the relationship as they do the things that make them feel good. That line, "Touch me 'til I vomit," hits especially bad/good. Which is kind of ironic, because that's exactly what I'm talking about!
But really, it makes sense that they would feel this way, especially where the two of them grow up together in a terrible situation and only have each other for comfort. And like, there's real love there on both sides of it, which makes it even more complicated because it can't be written off as "Well, it's not real love. It's just abuse." Like the love is unfortunately very much there even if it's super fucked up. So then you've got these two very broken people up against the world together, and hey, isn't the world always teaching us that love is work, and struggle is rewarded, and the best things in life are painful to achieve anyway? And that makes it easy to rationalize how bad or wrong or hard the love between the victim and abuser can feel sometimes. The victim thinks: but this is just what real love is, right? Hard work. Pushing through the hurt.
And then god, the struggle itself starts to feel like vindication, like proof of how much they love the other person, and how much they're loved in return.
Of course I'm a bit feverish right now and very in the thick of it with my characters (when am I not, ahhhhh...) so I'm sorry if this is wildly incoherent! I'm biased and a little more off my rocker than usual 🫠 Song just made me feel a lot of things like the last one did. 😭😭😭 I can tell I'll be listening to this one a lot too!
i DON'T need them to kiss i need them to come to the sobering realisation that their souls are merged and no part of them is extricable from the other anymore
You make soup in a big bowl. You serve it in a smaller bowl. And then you convey it, using a spoon, to your mouth. But what is the spoon? Simply a smaller bowl still
hello, I’m super excited for the new chapter I literally can’t wait. Not rushing you or anything though, please take as much time as you need. Anyways, I was kinda curious, are there are any other characters that you like as much as Dabi and if so why?
Hiya, Anon!! I'm glad you're excited! Hopefully I'll be able to deliver something soon. 🥹 I am definitely grinding away when I get the chance!
I beg your finest pardon for the butchered names! 🙇♀️ as always, I do NOT want to end up in any tags!
As for other characters I like as much as D4bi, ahhhh… to be totally honest, he doesn't have any real competition. 😭 I have a lot of characters I like, obviously! And I even have characters I like a lot. But by GOD, D4bi's really something special. I feel like he's this incredibly potent mix of traits that scratch my brain juuuuust right, like this perfect combination of, "Oh my god, this guy is so cool and I love him," and, "Wow, I totally relate to his very specific brand of wounded on a level that feels weirdly personal." Add to the fact that he's a stitched up mess of a guy (which, thanks to WoW Forsaken is another one of my preferences...) and I sometimes feel like Hor1kosh1 just sorta stumbled into making The One Character to Rule Them All (by Skuppo Standards, Anyway) of All Time. (As much as I'd love to get into the nitty gritty of WHY I like him, I am sitting on another ask that will delve into that more, so I'll keep my secrets for now!)
When I was a kid though, I did get reaaaaally attached to En///ishi from Rur///oni Kens//hin. He's a character that only showed up in the manga and the OVAs, but he was my first real serious obsession/anime dude crush! It shouldn't really surprise anyone to discover that he was a siscon LOL (tho he was the younger brother, not the older!) who dedicated his whole life to ruining the life of his older sister's husband and (accidental, tho En///ishi was under the impression that it was on purpose!) murderer. Like, at 10, this vicious little dude vows his revenge, and then… sets about doing that. Just over a period of many, many long years.
That lengthy process starts sometime in like, 1860s Japan, for context. Our boy takes a ship to Shanghai, nearly starves to death, gets adopted by a wealthy Japanese expat couple with a son who treat him lovingly and with genuine kindness, murders all of them to inherit their wealth (when he was still just a teenager! like I said: vicious!! 🤓☝️), uses said wealth to start his own expansive criminal enterprise, and then shows back up in Japan 14 years later with a crew of super freak murderers to finally see his revenge through. Said revenge included things like terrorizing the town Kensh///in (his sister's widow) lived in and kidnapping his current love interest with the intention of murdering her. You (and Kensh///in!) are even led to think he succeeds! But I hear fan backlash was so fierce that the author came up with a workaround to be like, noooo, don't worry, En///ishi just pretended to kill her. He actually couldn't bring himself to go through with it because she reminded him too much of his sister! (Something I remember being very disappointed with at the time because I was a little trauma whore who LOVED gnarly bad ends.)
Anyway, hilariously, En///ishi's also got wild white (with a purpley tint, tho…) hair and crazy blue eyes (though in my defense, D4bi's hair was very much black when I first got into him!) Also hilariously, En///ishi was absolutely my gateway drug into the concept of an older boy getting reaaaally attached to what becomes a sort of little sister like character to him, essentially adopting/raising her himself only to later fall in love with her. One of my very first OCs became the daughter of that very nice Japanese expat family who took him in, and during the time they live together, En///ishi becomes crazy attached to her. In this story I only ended up writing parts of (and mostly just imagined because alas, I did not have the force of will required to write anything long form when I was an easily distracted teenager!), En///ishi hides the fact that he murders her family from her and pretends to have fought off some random attackers so she comes out of THAT event thinking he's a hero. Then he takes her with him when he starts his criminal enterprise, and… yeah! Considering the stuff I write now, I'm sure you can imagine where all that was going.
Unfortunately, Rur///oni Kens//hin's author/artist got arrested for owning actual real person CSAM back in… 2017, I think? Which made my immense love for the series and the character feel reaaaaal bad. I've pretty much distanced myself from it since then because I don't want to support someone like that, even emotionally. Like I haven't spent any real money on it in ages, but… I don't know. Just puts a bad taste in my mouth. 💀
But! It's an interesting thing to look back on in retrospect because it basically shows that lil Skuppo was very much into The Weird and Fucked Up from pretty much the get go. Give me a crazy "I will do anything in the world for this person I loved/to get my revenge!" sort of guy (or girl. I don't discriminate!) and I go fucking hogwiiiiiild. It's just so easy to imagine them doing The Worst Things to satisfy their own need for love, and that's like, a BIG turn on for me. The biggest!
I swear, I played ONE game when I was like, 7 years old??? Where some moody dude (a very COOL moody dude, I might add, he was absolutely my favorite character!) joins up with the big bad guy of the game and then kidnaps his best friend's girlfriend because Our Cool Moody Dude had also been in love with her his whole life and he wasn't about to lose her to his dumb best friend. And MAN. I was like, wow??? Kidnapping for love, huh? I didn't even know this was possible!! This is awakening something in me!! Cue babby!Skuppo taking SO many notes.
Outside of that, tho, nearly every other character that's had an iron grip on my heart has been a character I've made for roleplay or a friend's OC that I've also roleplayed with! Can you guess what kinds of characters I like to roleplay? LOL. 😭😭😭 Spoiler: nearly all of them are obsessive, scary freaks who will commit the worst sorts of atrocities in pursuits of their desires or like, the prettiest, softest princess-like girls ever. Ahhh, I'm so predictable! (Is it vain to be smitten with your own villainous OCs? If it is, I am guilty as charged. 😭)
Special mentions to a handful of characters from FFXI///V too, a lot of which are also obsessive, burn-the-world-down-for-you mad dogs.
Anyway, as you can see, I very much have a type! I leave you with one of my favorite posts of all time, because I feel it illustrates everything wonderfully:
Like no rush at all but also really rushing you 😞 I just really cannot wait for the next chapter but at the same time I know great things take time. why must you be great 😞
LOL, I am trying to rush, I promise! 🙇♀️🙇♀️🙇♀️ I can't wait to get it out either! I feel like when it's been awhile since I've gotten a chapter out, I start REALLY sweating about it ahhhhh 😭😭 Someone get me a hyperbolic time chamber so I can get a solid year's worth of writing done in a day!
