Hi Yeah Sorry Professor But For The Foreseeable Future I Will Be Fucked Up And Will Not Be Able To Hand

Hi!!!

I'm writing an aroace character and aroace people have told me that she's actually quite great rep and what they'd like to see but there's one tiny detail I can't figure out.

People have told me that she might or might not have had a past relationship and I'm just not sure whether or not I should give her one.

Could I get a little help with this, please? Thanks

HI there! That's so cool that you're writing an aroace character!! There's so few of them so thank you for adding some rep for us!

As for your question, I'd say it's 100% up to you on whether she's had a relationship in the past or not. Without knowing her story, personality, or background I can't say for sure if a past relationship is fitting for her or not. I can say that whichever you decide, both options are okay. Aros and aroaces often enter into romantic relationships.

For example, before I came out as aromantic and aroace I did have a previous romantic relationship in high school. And to be honest, I hated it the whole time. It felt like something was wrong the whole time but I stuck with it because I thought I was supposed to like it, that I was supposed to date. I was trying to be "normal". It went on way longer than it should have and it wasn't fair to me or the guy I was dating but in the end I am grateful for this relationship because it helped me realize that I don't feel those attractions that allos feel, that I don't want to date and that I am indeed aromantic.

Perhaps your character has gone through something similar? Perhaps she dated because she felt like it was something "normal" people do. Perhaps she mistook platonic attraction for romantic and dated someone she just wanted to be close friends with. Perhaps she was in denial about being aromantic and tried dating to prove it. Perhaps she was in a QPR (a queerplatonic relationship) and loved it but the relationship didn't work out. Or maybe it did work out and she's happily in a QPR today.

Or you could choose to have her not have had any romantic relationships at all before coming out as aroace. That's really common as well and perfectly amazing.

In the end it's your character and you should choose whichever fits right with her.

Personally I think both options are great. Just remember that if you do choose to give her a past romance, approach it from the viewpoint of an aroace and not an allo. She wouldn't have had romantic attraction whether she realized it or not so her reasons for dating would be different.

Hopefully this makes sense! If you need any other help let me know!

Gonna add this post the the growing list of things I wish I could show my teenage self

been thinkin about how my ethics professor back in undergrad was like.

look. there’s no such thing as perfect altruism. you’ll always get something out of helping or being kind to others, whether it’s a stronger relationship or returned kindness or just the feeling of having done good. there’s nothing inherently bad about getting something from doing good either, especially since it’s completely unavoidable. people being rewarded for putting love into the world doesn’t make the world a worse place. so just do as much good as you can and don’t worry about being “selfless” while doing it, because being truly selfless is in fact impossible.

and like man did that take the pressure off of Being A Good Person!! you’re allowed to enjoy helping people! you’re allowed to be kind without worrying that you’re maybe secretly just doing it for yourself!! it’s okay if you are doing it for yourself because you’re still being kind to others!!!!!

Have to routinely stop myself from bashing myself for making characters certain races and genders bc “what if this is insanely offensive to some people?” by asking one very simple question:

Do people like this actively exist?

If the answer is yes, then maybe I can stop feeling bad about giving my beautiful, disabled, black, baby boy dnd character a love of the colour pink.

Ya know, bc art is all about translation, and people are gonna people regardless of if some random asshole on the internet decides their existence is problematic.

I'm now offering profile pic commission's if you're interested! It would help me out alot since I've been in a lil bit of a stump rn. Check out what I'm offering here! ☺️

artistree.io

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Elements in your book by order of importance

The order of importance of elements in a book can vary depending on the genre, theme, and narrative structure. However, here are some common elements that are often considered significant:

- Plot: The sequence of events that drive the story forward and create tension, conflict, and resolution.

- Characters: The individuals who inhabit the story and contribute to its development and emotional engagement.

- Theme: The central idea or message that the book explores and conveys to the reader.

- Setting: The time, place, and environment in which the story takes place, which can enhance mood, atmosphere, and context.

- Writing style: The author's unique voice and the way the story is narrated, which can greatly impact the reader's experience.

- Conflict: The challenges, obstacles, or opposition that the characters face, driving the narrative and character development.

- Dialogue: The conversations and interactions between characters, providing insights into their personalities, relationships, and plot progression.

- Pacing: The rhythm and speed at which events unfold, affecting the book's flow and reader engagement.

- Emotional resonance: The ability of the story to evoke strong emotions and create a connection between the reader and the characters.

- Tone: The overall mood and atmosphere of the book, which can range from light-hearted and humorous to dark and somber.

- Point of view: The perspective from which the story is told, influencing the reader's understanding and connection to the characters.

- Symbolism: The use of symbols or metaphors to convey deeper meanings or layers of understanding.

- Subplots: Secondary storylines that add depth, complexity, and variety to the main plot.

- Imagery: Vivid and descriptive language that appeals to the reader's senses and creates vivid mental images.

- Structure: The organization and arrangement of the story, including chapters, sections, and narrative devices.

- Originality: The unique and innovative aspects of the book that set it apart and make it memorable.

So this is going to sound Crazy, but part of why i've been so inactive lately has been because I was lucky enough to have been selected alongside 6 of my friends in Animation to get shipped out to Winton, Australia to spend a 2 weeks making an animated short for their Vision Splendid film festival.

Together, we got to work with locals, film students, Student composers, festival hosts and first nations elders to create a collection of Animated Haikus celebrating this wonderful town, but get to know ourselves and this country in a way we never even would have considered before.

And as if that wasn't enough to make us jump up and down, flapping out hands in joy... guys... We won the Kolperi Award! A first for animation in the entire 11 year history of the festival!

So thank you thank you thank you for everyone who made it possible for me and my friends to experience Winton. It's something i'll be treasuring for the rest of my days.

Voiced by my friend Kiwi and Music by my friends in the Conservatorium (Love, Lisa and Georgia)

You’re married to your phone background/lockscreen how fucked are you

Maintaining Scope of Violence in Your Story's World

I saw an interesting discussion in the Baldur's Gate 3 subreddit, commenting how a player's immersion was broken when a version of the player character, known as "The Dark Urge", is apparently to blame for a particularly brutal murder and yet the companion characters don't turn on him/her/them immediately. The commenter was baffled given the brutality of the killing. Yet many replies pointed out that other members of the party are also murderers or tapdancing on the edge of committing atrocities, not to mention other mitigating circumstances that it would be spoilers to go into.

This got me thinking about scope of violence in genre fiction and how, on top of all the other difficult jobs the writer has before them, establishing what level of violence is "commonplace" vs "shocking" can be a surprisingly delicate process.

(Cut for length. Includes references to Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon, John Wick, and NBC's Hannibal in an exploration of how to establish the scope and scale of on-screen violence. TW for discussions of violence against children in shows like GoT and HotD, though it is largely in abstract terms.)

I'm reminded of "House of the Dragon" (HotD) which, I must confess, I found to have rather patchy and uneven writing.

One moment in HotD that I found rather dissonant, shall we say, was when a child of the nobility loses his eye in a brawl with other children. His mother, an aristocrat, is understandably horrified and enraged. However, some of the threats she makes to equally powerful Houses over the incident feel, dare I say, disproportionate to the event, given that her threats could lead to the world as she knows it being plunged into civil war, all over what amounts to a tussle between children, albeit one that ends in a particularly gruesome manner.

On the one hand, any modern mother likely would completely freak out at such an appalling injury as a lost eye from a knife fight between children. That would be a major shock to a modern community, where such violence is quite rare. And in fairness, the aristocrats of the world of "Game of Thrones" and HotD by extension are largely insulated by their privilege from the day to day violence we see portrayed in the series. If anyone was realistically going to have a modern response to a child's maiming, it would be the sheltered daughter of a noble house with regards to her beloved child.

However, as understandable as her reaction might be to modern viewers and to those who take into account her sheltered upbringing, in my mind, the show's narrative wobbled there in terms of establishing the level of violence that is considered commonplace in the world of HotD/GoT. In the first season of Game of Thrones, we famously saw a child pushed out of a window, permanently disabled and left in a coma for months, and while this is a major event that creates a great deal of tension and conflict, ultimately the family after their attempts at individual revenge the fact is they can't start a civil war over this single event. So in a way we're sort of left with: this is just a thing that happens that we have to suck up and deal with, even if certain individuals might wish to and continue to pursue a personal vendetta. Couple that with commoner children being murdered and the deaths going completely unremarked upon by wider society, we're left with the impression of a world in which brutality, even brutality against children which would grind a modern community to a halt, is simply an ugly and relatively common part of life. A life with so much ugliness and personal violence that it really almost gets lost amidst all the other horrors.

Which makes the HotD mother's reaction feel... disproportionate. Not in relation to her child's suffering, which is entirely understandable, but her view of what retaliation constitutes a proportional response comes across as hysterical. Too modern. Children are horrifically injured in the GoT/HotD world all the time. Frankly, by comparison, a lost eye is almost minor compared to a loss of mobility in a rigorously martial world, access to which Bran lost with his fall. We don't get as good of a set up of what the conflicting morals of this world are, we don't get the comparison between commoner and noble children as clearly as in GoT, we don't really get all the conflicting views of "When is it normal to start a civil war over a child's injury?" - the sense of scope and scale of violence and how we and the characters are supposed to react to it... wobbles.

Along these lines, I've also pointed out that in shows like NBC's Hannibal, the show is scrupulously careful about not really referencing global events like wars. In my mind, there's a simple reason for that. Your average drone attack on civilians in the Middle East kills more innocent people by accident than Hannibal Lecter has ever killed in his entire murderous career. Compared to weapons of war, one murderous serial killer is barely a rounding error in terms of death and human suffering. So the show has to remain almost claustrophobically intimate so we never get confronted with the "So what?" of the individual death and human suffering Hannibal and the other serial killers bring about on a very close, personal basis. The horror style is meant to force us to imagine ourselves if we were the victims (or the killer) in these incredibly intimate murders. If our suffering was writ large. If every individual death was massively significant. But this is in contrast with real world mass casualty events which would dwarf many times all of the deaths in the Hannibal show combined.

As a final example, the moment the first season of "True Detective" lost me was when the value of a single life also wobbled dramatically. The conceit of the show is that a single murder, or a half dozen at most, murders of young white women is worthy of a major, multi-year investigation. Yet when the investigation inadvertently leads to an outbreak of violence in a predominantly black community, shown almost immediately to kill more people (in front of their children, even) than were lost in the entire murder spree of white women that's being investigated, the show didn't seem to care at all. Individual white female victims were worthy of a breathless investigation into their untimely loss, but twice that number of black people killed in an outbreak of violence directly linked to the investigation didn't even seem worthy of commentary or reflection at all. The value of a single human life was no longer consistent. If these deaths aren't worthy of justice, then why should I care about the few individual deaths being investigated?

As with any measuring of scope in fiction, it's very hard for the author to do alone. It really is an instance where an outside pair of eyes is incredibly valuable.

But things to keep in mind while crafting a narrative around violence is just how much are readers or viewers supposed to be alarmed by individual acts of violence. It's common and indeed necessary for modern media to establish the rules of its world. Even stories nominally set in "our" world actually do almost as much worldbuilding as any fantasy tale in this respect. In a cop drama where each episode is built around a single murder, we need to inhabit a world where a single murder is worthy of dozens of people spending time and resources bringing the killer to justice. In such a world, a mass casualty event of several deaths should be shocking. To this end, like in NBC's Hannibal, it's probably best to avoid mentions of mass casualty events caused by war or natural disasters.

By contrast, an action film like John Wick might place less value on individual deaths (beyond the motivating deaths of a single dog, which is thoroughly commented on within the story as feeling disproportionate and therein lies much of what makes the plot so unique. I'd argue it is also the cutest dog ever born, but I digress). We're not going to see a lurid headline, "John Wick murders 26 local men in cold blood, read about this tragic loss along with quotes by their devastated wives and children on page 6". To a certain extent, the violence there is meant to be just shocking enough to thrill, but we're not meant to get too invested in the details of the actual body count.

And, to go even more extreme, in war or disaster movies, we see or have narrated that thousands have died at a time. Again, to go back to Game of Thrones/House of the Dragon, one reason it's hard to see the mother's reaction to her child's maiming as anything but a bit disproportionate is because we see with such brutality hundreds if not thousands of men, women, and children dying directly or indirectly as a result of war. While it's understandable that a mother would burn the world down for an injury to her child, we're not well placed to agree with or sympathize with her reactions on the broader scale, in terms of retribution that would lead to war, against a backdrop of brutal mass casualty events in the thousands where even more families are devastated and more children injured or killed.

As a final, positive word on the Game of Thrones universe, the early seasons of the GoT were actually very good at controlling the audience's reaction to the scope of violence. Namely, the Battle of the Blackwater sticks out in my mind. The world of GoT is so grounded in the mud, in ugly, personal but intimate violence done with hands or blades, otherwise rudimentary weapons, that the first time we see an explosion on a near-modern scale feels as genuinely breathtaking to modern eyes as it might have to the Medieval-eseque eyes of that world. Yet there are movies chock-full of explosions where the explosions lose impact and importance, become background noise, because they're simply one of many. By rigorously tamping down and limiting the scope and type of violence to largely hand to hand combat, Game of Thrones set up a moment where modern warfare-style explosions are awe-inspiring. Against that backdrop, the appearance of fire-breathing dragons on the battlefield is also arresting, though their capabilities would likely be dwarfed by a modern fighter jet and many viewers of GoT would be familiar with films where the scope and scale of violence is much bigger and more explosive. It feels big in GoT because the scope and scale has been so small to that point.

Once you as a writer have established the modernity of your violence, the scope and scale of it, the average body count, the importance of a single human life, it's important to stick to it. If a character has a differing view, then they should be noted as having it by the narrative. A grizzled war veteran might shrug at a small town murder investigation of a single individual, but a sleepy town might lose its mind over it. In the modern world, the lives of children are put on the highest pedestal, but once you establish in your world that some children's lives are of lower value, then showing a mother act with an understandable modern sensibility of horror and outrage still needs to be commented on so we understand where her reaction falls within her society, especially if it's in contrast. That is what teaches us how to watch and appreciate the narrative choices as they're meant to be appreciated.

For me it’s all about how you make the initially awful situation a comfort compared to other stuff, and I don’t mean this in terms of just torture vs worse torture. It’s about the way a cramped closet in the dark feels like hell at first but has since become comforting now that it’s the only place they feel safe because at least here they’re left alone. Or how a whumper can’t help but keep thinking that they’d rather be actively hurt than try to recon with the mind games and forced intimacy because at least when they’re being hurt they feel like they know how to feel about whumper. Or even little things they took for granted like a rag they used as a blanket, or disgusting food that was they’re only option, being taken away.

It’s escalation sure, but in a way that makes recovery for whumper so much harder, because of those constants, and those sources of comfort that make you feel as soon as your snapped back to the reality that it isn’t normal. in constantly choosing between the bad and the worse in their head, wishing things would go back to just being not as awful, they later realise they completely forgot about anything else. And with those few scraps of comfort being the only thing that makes them feel safe anymore, even after being rescued, can lead to some interesting and possibly harmful coping mechanisms as they try to feel normal again.

What feels comforting is often what us familiar, but sometimes what is familiar to whumper can be the furthest thing from comforting to caretaker.

But then again it really comes down to just balancing reader experiences. Too much of the same isn’t fun, you gotta dangle that hope that things can be better even if whumpee doesn’t believe it in the moment. To me they’re stories about how people survive, regardless of how different they come out the other side of it all, and that struggle will always be more interesting to me than everything constantly getting worse with no promise of resolution. Surprises are fun, but the same set up with different unique ways of whumping the whumpee can get tedious.

Idk just my thoughts.

I feel like total discomfort/ constant complete suffering can become sort of numbing for a character, taking away the impact of escalation at a certain point. It's the scraps of comfort the character gets or finds that hit harder then some of the most brutal scenes I've read/seen. That's just me though, what are yalls thoughts on this?

This is 5 days too late, but I felt like re-drawing my half-thrown together Halloween costume because I really needed an excuse to draw something spoopy.

Can you tell I love old timey ghost stories?