When Your Characters Just Start Revealing Lore You Didn't Know About Them, As You're Writing Them

When your characters just start revealing lore you didn't know about them, as you're writing them

The best thing on this site is that you can save drafts of reblogs. So every time I get that urge to post something depressing I wrote in my drafts, I have to scroll through at least twenty things I liked and wanted to share, or misclicked trying to queue, or saved for later, and usually by the time I get to the depressing thing I wanted to post I am no longer quite as depressed.

Instead of apologizing for liking "trashy" media, consider: what is it doing well? If you like it, if it's making you feel pleasure and interest, then it must be succeeding at something. Is it shaping a set of emotional beats that you find satisfying to watch play out? Did it craft a character you find really compelling? Is something in the styling and aesthetics speaking to you? Did it unexpectedly resonate with a mood or experience you needed to see reflected right then?

However shallow or flawed a piece of media is, if you like it, it's because of something it did well - at least well enough to affect you, on the day that you encountered it.

There are a lot of good reasons to acknowledge this. One is about gratitude and manners: someone worked hard on that thing, and if they provided something that gave you happiness and pleasure, it's nice to honor that. Another is about breaking down the insidious habit of sorting everything into simple good/bad boxes. A piece of media, like a person, can do a lot of things wrong and a lot of things right, and the things on one side do not magically erase the other.

But the most important reason, I believe, is to get in the habit of celebrating what brings you pleasure and happiness. All your life there have been and there will be people telling you that you find joy in the wrong things, that if a particular thing makes you feel good it shows that there's something wrong with you. I reject that utterly. If a particular thing makes you feel good then there's something right, about you and about that thing. I'm not saying that pleasure is the only important thing or that every pleasure should be indulged indiscriminately. All I'm saying is that pleasure is in and of itself a good thing, and deserves notice.

The fact that there’s an actually functional website for the library of Babel is one of those things that fucks me up more and more the more I think about the implications.

girls be “like im fighting demons” and the demon is a degree they chose for themselves