#metaphores

[sadlynotabambi]

[eiro00]

A piece that I finished last week. I really like metaphores related to food so I took a bit of liberty and went off with the themes.

🍎🍓🍒❤️🍇

[b3m0r3ch1ll]

solo litwtc episodes with chris feels like driving around with your insane uncle who won’t let you get a word out because he’s yapping the whole time

[aikoiya]

Ya'll, I'm trying to compile a list of Hyrulean sayings, both canonical ones & made up ones.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I already have a handful.

One is "peahat parent" meaning helicopter parent.

[concernedbrownbread]

Blank Page

“The best thing about a blank paper, Adrien,” Father said to the little six-year-old, “Is that you can make it into whatever you want to. It’s perfect.”

Later down the line, when Adrien was older but not much wiser, he would look at a wonderful, perfect poster of himself, and wonder if he was the blank page that his father shaped.

(Chat Noir was supposed to be his blank slate, but Nino said Chat Noir was annoying, so back in the box he went, with all the other useless versions of himself.)

Word Count: 883

Chatacter: Adrien Agreste

Rating: General Audience

Warnings: Implied/Referenced Child Emotional Abuse, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Self-Esteem Issues, Minor Depression

Author's Note: This was written on impulse and is just a somewhat rambling introspection with much angst and a singular blank page metaphore.

Set after Rocketear

“The best thing about a blank paper, Adrien,” Father said, “Is that you can make it into whatever you want to. It’s perfect.”

Adrien’s eyes went wide, as he leaned forward to try and gauge the fascination his dad had with the blank page. His six-year-old mind didn’t really get it, but he so rarely got to spend time with Father that he would try his best to make sense of the wisdom that was imparted.

Father chuckled, “Don’t worry if you don’t get it son. You will one day.”

His father picked up a pen then, and time was up. He was dismissed before he could make sense of the white page, the moment slipping through his fingers like sand.

“Just five more minutes?” Adrien pleaded.

“Your Father has work,” Mother said, and that was that.

Later down the line, when Adrien was older but not much wiser, he would look at a wonderful, perfect poster of himself, and wonder if he was the blank page that his father shaped.

---

When he got Plagg, it had been many years since white pages and five more minutes in Father’s office. After his second or third mission was when the memory came to him again, in the dead of the night as he groaned to Plagg’s incessant snoring.

(The snoring was nice though. Something to remind Adrien that someone was here for him, in the huge house that he haunted. Something to break through nightmares and spiralling thoughts that creeped into his head at night.)

He remembered that memory of the blank page, a slow smile spreading across his face.

Chat Noir was his blank page. Adrien was already painted, in colours that he’d never wanted, but Chat Noir could be anything he liked.

It’s fitting that he dressed in black, like someone had dumped ink on him and left him to dry. He quite enjoyed being not-blank and not-perfect.

---

“She thinks he’s annoying - “

And Adrien, like the bad friend he was, stopped listening there.

Of course Chat Noir was annoying. What else would he be? Stupid, stupid Adrien, to think that he could make something good, to think that he could be something good.

That night, he shook in bed, squeezed his eyes shut as the spiralling thoughts took him down, down, down.

Down where he kept the boxes of all the blank pages he ruined. Where he kept model-Adrien, and funny-Adrien and sensitive-Adrien. All the pages of himself that he made, because he had been foolish enough to think he was a blank slate.

Things that you drew on damaged paper never turned out well, anyway.

He made a nice little box for Chat Noir-Adrien, and locked him away.

---

Adrien explained the blank page analogy with a frown on his face, trying to figure out what he was saying as he was saying it. Mother listened to his then eight-year-old babble with the indulgence of a woman who had to be in the studio in a few minutes.

She said, “We are all born as blank slates, and as we grow older we add colours to the canvas. What colour do you want to add to your painting?”

“Black,” Adrien chirped, “Cause it’s the opposite of white.”

Mother smiled, “You should try something more colourful! People like colourful things.”

But I like black, Adrien wanted to protest, but Mother’s agent started talking to her again and the moment ended, as all moments did.

---

Adrien tailor-made every part of himself to be colorful. Plagg called him a people-pleaser, but pleased people kept him safe.

He tweaked the Chat Noir image until it was tailor-made too.

“It’s nice that you focus on battle more,” Ladybug said, off-handedly one day.

“Well, I don’t want to be annoying,” he joked lightly.

Ladybug smiled, reached her hand out but hesitated.

She drew back.

“I miss the old you though. I didn’t mind his jokes.”

Keep tweaking, he told himself. Keep pleasing.

Paint over yourself.

---

“Bro, you okay?” Nino asked, hand on Adrien’s shoulder and concern written across his face.

There’s space there, for a bad joke, or for a meaningful reply. Instead, Adrien smiled.

“I’m okay.”

Nino frowned, “You sure?”

Adrien nodded.

Nino’s-friend-Adrien, another version of his page, one that he had once liked, had been boxed away too, neatly compartmentalised. He couldn’t come out, because he was just as annoying as Chat Noir.

Model-Adrien would have to do.

---

He cycled through the many paintings of himself, none of them a self-portrait that he liked.

He wished, most days, to go back to being a blank page.

To become whoever he wanted to become. To be perfect.

---

Later down the line, when Adrien was only a little older, and wisdom came from his therapist and Plagg, he would startle awake at a memory he hadn’t remembered. Back at the office, where his little obssession with blank pages started.

“Useless,” Father hissed, ripping the page of his notebook and throwing it in the bin.

He stormed off in a rage and Adrien, who had been hiding behind the door, finally felt safe enough to come out.

It was the drawing of a pretty dress, and though Adrien didn’t know anything about fashion, he liked how the green and gold melded together.

He put it in his pocket. Like Chat Noir, and the Model, and Nino’s friend, neatly tucked away, an imperfect drawing that his father discarded.

-----

A/N Um, first time posting on tumblr. Did I do alright? I posted it here and not on my Ao3 account because this was quite short. Hopefully the jumping between the past and the present wasn't jarring.

[isa-of-the-dancing-snow]

so i’m not sure if this counts as some sort of revelation or just an idle thought but it definitely felt like a big realization at the time despite being about something that’s not a huge deal.

why do cis people make an entire production out of their contrition when they get pronouns wrong?

like, it’s not all of them and it’s not always huge but it is a thing that i’ve seen come up a bunch and i’ve heard a bunch of stories about it. what i think is going on is that they’re treating their mistake like a moral issue where to us it’s more of a manners issue. they know they made a mistake and they know that you can’t know what they’re thinking and feeling so they feel the need to perform this song and dance to prove that they’re still “good” despite that mistake but it makes the apology they feel you need take forever. but in trans spaces and dealing with a bunch of queer people it’s always preferred that it be something apologized for and corrected in passing. shit, it’s even okay manners to thank them for the correction in lieu of apologizing if that’s the angle you prefer. in those spaces it’s usually a second or two at most acknowledgement before moving on, because the point isn’t to prove anything, it’s just to remember better going forward so everyone can be comfortable.

misgendering someone is more akin to stepping on someone’s toes in a crowded room than accidentally walking out of a store with some of the merchandise. as long as you stop doing it the other person probably isn’t even gonna remember it happened and it’s usually assumed to be an innocent mistake. that said, yeah, some people snap when their toes get stepped on because they’ve had a long day and are really stressed, it’s even easier if they’ve been getting stepped on all day, but even that anger is probably better faced with the rushed politeness of repeated small apologies and acknowledgments than laying down excuses or making your intentions clear.

idk, i’m sure someone will figure out how to word this better eventually, but i hope the rough shape of this idea is helpful to someone

[president-coriolanus-snow]

I’m so sick of hearing people say “Oh they didn’t die from Covid, they died from (enter underlined health condition here)”

No. They died from Covid. I’m going to give you an example of what this means.

I have asthma, I have my entire life. The last time I was hospitalized for my asthma was almost 30 years ago. My asthma is maintained and under control.

The chances of me ending up in the hospital in the next 5-10 years (or more) are likely slim to none. Because it’s controlled.

Now if say in the next month I got Covid, which landed me in the hospital, and I die because I can’t breathe. Is it my asthma that killed me? Or the Covid?

If I didn’t have Covid, then my asthma would not have killed me, by that definition, it was Covid that killed me.

An example of this reasoning, if I picked up a knife and stabbed someone, and they died. Was it the knife that killed them, or the blood loss?

Technically the blood loss killed them, but they wouldn’t have died of blood loss had I not stabbed them with a knife.