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my friend took in a stray and she’s the cutest kitty ever but he named her oil so whenever he sends a picture of her me and my other friends look like we’re roleplaying as the US military

in our defense this is oil

Art by Patrycja Wójcik

a little personal response / tribute to "here's the life i've always longed for" by Anna Haifisch. the original means so much to me, and even though it's hard, I feel like every day i'm making more steps toward finally being on the other side of that fence <:)

Anna Haifisch

Monstadt Mons

The stories left behind

kaeya and klee!! 🥹🥹 they were so cute in the recent event, and the new region is so pretty as well

moonlight | print

That post that's like "stop writing characters who talk like they're trying to get a good grade in therapy" really blew the door wide open for me about how common it's become for a character's emotional intelligence to not be taken into consideration when writing conflict. I remember the first time I went to therapy I had such a hard time even identifying what I was feeling, let alone had the language to explain it to someone else. Of course there are plenty of people who've never been to therapy a day in their life who are in tune to their emotions. But even they would have some trouble expressing themselves sometimes. You have to take into account there are plenty of people who are uncomfortable expressing themselves and people who think they're not allowed to feel certain ways. It also makes for more interesting conflict to have characters with different levels of understanding.

i think people have gotten out of the habit of writing characters being untruthful unless they're evil. sometimes people just lie, or they believe and repeat things that aren't true. people just do not and often Can not tell the absolute truth about themselves all the time even during heated and climactic moments. why are you writing everyone being absolutely honest about their feelings!!

People lie. (Whatever your opinions on the TV show House, they got that very right - people lie.) People lie because - they forget. They weren't listening. They can't quite remember, but it's something like this. They're recounting what they felt rather than what was said. They lie because the lie is easier to explain that the truth and it's nearly the same. They're tired. They're busy. They're not good at explaining things, or putting events in the relevant sequence. They're worried about your repsonse. They're worried about looking bad. They have a self image and the truth doesn't match it. They think they're telling the truth, but they aren't. Emotions are a bit like truth, but even worse, because we're emotional creatures, and we will have emotions about our emotions.

Like. Maybe a character is angry. Maybe they don't know why they're angry, but they are angry. They don't assess where the anger came from, or even if the target is remotely the same as the cause, but they're vibrating with it, angry angry angry, trembling and snarling at everyone - now too angry to listen to what's being said. If asked later they say they think they're angry because someone cut them up on the way home. If they reflected, which they never do, maybe they'd know they're angry because they've been feeling bad all afternoon, and maybe trace it to the person they're intimidated by at work saying something snippy this morning, and then work out the bad feeling is insecurity - but now they're home and shouting, and their SO's shouting back, and they haven't had any practice unpicking emotions - and not a single clue about deescalation of conflict - and their pride is already stinging from this morning so no, they are not going to apologise or be able to articulate any of this.

If I can add one tip about how to write characters' emotional journeys over time, based on my experience both in real life and in writing:

The number one cause of emotional conflict is when people feel an emotion that, for whatever social or personal reason, they don't think they are permitted to feel.

There can be a hundred reasons why they feel like they aren't 'permitted' -- maybe it's a gender socialization issue, maybe it runs afoul of a social taboo, maybe they feel like they're in the wrong in whatever the conflict is and so they are obliged to defer to the other party's hurt feelings over their own, maybe this is a maladaptive coping mechanism where in the past they've suffered consequences for feeling and expressing the feeling, so now they don't dare.

This conflict, this dissonance, between what they think they 'should' feel and what they ACTUALLY DO feel can manifest in a hundred different directions, and drives a lot of seemingly irrational behaviors, but if your characters are not doing it, why aren't they? Are they really that perfectly in tune with their emotions? Or have you as a writer just not identified what the underlying emotion really is?

I've been seeing a disturbing number of "queer safe spaces" describe themselves as things like "femme & them" and even worse "she+," conflating femininity & nonbinaryhood. cease this immediately. say it with me: nonbinary people are NOT women-lite and it is extremely violent and straight up incorrect to imply that all they/thems are fem adjacent. this is erasure and this verbiage does nothing but make gnc and nonbinary spaces unsafe for masc and male nonbinary people. nonbinary, genderqueer and other third gender people can be and are masculine and men, we can be hes as well as shes and theys, stop allowing yourself and your peers to view nonbinary as woman/femme-lite, signed a butch nonbinary person.

as a lot of folks in the tags have added, this implies the idea that women are wholesale safer for queer people to be around, which is not the case, as queer women are still capable of being transphobic, biphobic, lesbophobic and so on. the other side of this implication in this verbiage is men & mascs are inherently unsafe to be around, which is violent and untrue rhetoric.

queer men still need safe spaces. queer mascs still need safe spaces. cis gay men, trans men, intersex men, genderfluid men, nonbinary men, nonbinary mascs, bears, bi/pansexual men & mascs, male & masc drag performers, and other queer masculine people are still threatened and made unsafe by cisheterosexual society and need somewhere safe to be ourselves and to be queer.

men & mascs are not inherently unsafe to be around. women & femmes are not inherently safe to be around. women & femmes are capable of queerphobia and violence. queer men & mascs are capable of being abused, mistreated, hurt, abandoned and worse. queer men & mascs still need our help and support, and this goes quadruply for nonbinary men & mascs.

masculinity is not a threat. femininity is not "safer" than any other identity or presentation. make your safe spaces SAFE for ALL QUEERS, not just the ones you think are The Good Ones.

a piece i drew for raging tide, a tartaglia zine that finished last year!

ATLA AU book one: water (3/?)

my main goal in life is genuinely just to have a good day

five year plan? have a good day. plans this weekend? have a good day. why i’m doing what i’m doing? bc i wanna have a good day. it is all about having a good day. nothing’s as precious as the present moment. neither the past nor the future. therefore i will make sure to spend it having a good day