god i love it when a character wears thinks they're covering up their insecurities so well in a way that's actually so transparently obvious you can see their inevitable breaking point off in the not so distant future like a semitruck with its brakes cut doing a steady confident 80mph on the highway

The reason none of my wips get finished

testing some new brushes!

i said it in the tags of another post but among all the talk of how wtnv revolutionized queer media - which they did - i feel like we're neglecting to mention that night vale changed podcasting as a medium. fiction podcasts as we know them now straight up did not exist before cranor and fink got their start. nonfiction pods were very much a thing, but the only pre-night vale fiction podcasts i can name offhand the leviathan chronicles, metamor city, and we're alive. and if you go back and listen to them, they are a lot less like the format we know now (usually diagetic recordings) and were basically just fully acted audio books. and they were good! the leviathan chronicles is a personal favorite. but podcasts as truly immersive fiction? that's night vale, all the way. the fact that they tend to favor horror? also night vale. the fact that you can't swing a cat without hitting some form of queer in just about any successful show? bingo.

i just think that we don't give them the credit they deserve for being the fucking blueprint.

Have you ever felt like you are the quiet ghost everyone can see but chooses to look through. Like your body is there, just transparent, you speak but no one hears you, not really. The act of disappearing is not so hard truly. You can do it even in a room surrounded by people who claim they love you. Just pretend you aren’t there, and everyone around you will pretend you have vanished too.

- Nikita Gill

I'll say that Frankensteins monster was beautiful and people will quote the book where it describes him to me as if that's some gotcha but yeah he looks like that he's beautiful so what

As if "8-foot-tall, hideously ugly creation, with translucent yellowish skin pulled so taut over the body that it 'barely disguised the workings of the arteries and muscles underneath,' watery, glowing eyes, flowing black hair, black lips, and prominent white teeth" literally isn't just some weird goth

I judge how good a book is based on how disoriented I am with my physical surroundings after closing it.

me after finishing a good ass book

i’ve started to think about ao3 audience interaction as kinda comparable to doing a live reading in an intimate little bookstore, like kudos are everybody who stayed til the end and applauded, comments are everybody who waited to come up to talk to you afterwards, and bookmark comments are the little snatches of conversation you overhear outside.

this helps me feel better/less anxious about responding to comments with some form of thanks, because if someone walked up to me in person and said they liked my work right after reading it, i would compulsively say thanks. it also helps contextualize audience size in a healthy way i think, bc most of us naturally crave more attention on our fic, but if we were actually in the room with even like 20 people applauding and five people waiting after to tell us how awesome we are we’d be fuckin elated.  

10/10 analogy, op. Love it.

Broke: Acknowledging that a character who is an objectively terrible person is also a complex and intentionally well thought out individual with different levels of nuance you can empathize with in some ways while not in others is immediately “woobifying” or “poor little meow meowifying” them.

Woke: “This character is a bad person” and “this character is still a person” are two statements that can, should and do coexist and admitting that they exhibit nuance and depth and are more than just their bad actions doesn’t immediately excuse or condone their bad actions or mean that you’re ignoring or trying to soften the canonical version of the character.

Bespoke: That’s the whole point, that’s always been the point, to be made to empathize with horrible people so you can understand that they can be anyone, that bad people can be likeable, can be interesting, can be human, are human, and it’s scary to think about all the ways they’re just like you and all the ways they’re just like everything you hate, forcing the use of critical skills in media analysis, forcing a confrontation of the duality of man.

Whatever Level is Above Bespoke: But sometimes, yeah, sure, maybe they are a poor little meow meow, what are you gonna do, get a lawyer

it’s always the Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known, but never the Irritating Ordeal of Being Known

someone: [correctly infers something about my personality based on my patterns of behavior]

me: [seethes with rage for some fucking reason]

𝙹𝚊𝚗𝚞𝚊𝚛𝚢 𝟸𝟽, 𝟷𝟿𝟸𝟸
𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝙳𝚒𝚊𝚛𝚒𝚎𝚜 𝙾𝚏 𝙵𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚣 𝙺𝚊𝚏𝚔𝚊, 𝟷𝟿𝟷𝟺-𝟷𝟿𝟸𝟹

Writing for yourself first might seem selfish, but it’s essential. You have to be fully engaged in your story. You have to write something you enjoy, something that sets your soul on fire. Otherwise, you won’t feel motivated, and you will perceive the entire process as a chore. Write for yourself first, don't worry about the audience. If something is done with love and passion, it naturally attracts the right audience.

in almost every other children's book where the main heroine is swept away to a land of whimsy she's shown having a lovely time; braving dangers occasionally, trying to find her way home, sure, but ultimately delighting in the magic around her. meanwhile alice spends her entire time in wonderland like

look, here’s the thing: alice in wonderland’s enduring fucking charm is that it perfectly captures the vibe of being a very tired and annoyed child who is nonetheless required to play along with adult nonsense.

alice is dragged from place to place without warning, forced to play stupid games with no good prizes, grilled over her schooling and manners and recitation and dress, scolded, judged, insulted to her face, sent away, given gifts she didn’t ask for and doesn’t like, corrected incorrectly, been subject to shifting and arbitrary rules, and then when she gets snappish with all this bullshit everyone acts like a little girl’s temper is the end of the fucking world.

alice in wonderland isn’t a drug trip or a nightmare or a metaphor, that’s just what being ten years old is LIKE. that’s why kids love it so much. even if they can’t quite articulate how, they recognize themselves in it.