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lavendeerstudios · 5 months

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Threads of You: Beyond the Bay 🌊 Monthly Devlog #2: November 30th, 2023

Yet another month, another devlog... Hey, everyone! 🎉 Welcome to the mass post for all things Threads of You: Beyond the Bay, where we spill the beans on what's been brewing... behind the scenes.

This month has been a whirlwind as we inch closer to the big reveal of our demo! Crunch time has hit, and the Lavendeer team has been putting in extra hours. How about a virtual pat on the back for our hard work? 🙌

But, hey, enough about that. Let's dive right in! ✨

Our socials! @lavendeerstudios | Follow our Twitter!

Programming wise, it's been busy this month! Relationship modifiers, arguably one of the most important things in a romance otome game, between the MC (You) and the characters were successfully implemented.

Alongside that, we've refined our scenes with proper animations to both our characters and UI to make it flow smoother and look pleasing to the eyes! It should also easier to navigate.

On the aesthetic front, our commissioned GUI is now not only complete, but seamlessly integrated into the game! Huge thanks to @sitraxis! We've shown a couple of sneak peeks, but look forward to more now that our key art made by Somate Studio is finished! Big thanks to them as well, we can't wait to show you guys how it looks!

The character customization progress has also undergone a significant overhaul. With a keen focus on every one of our players getting the representation they deserve, we've decided to add more options! Down to more skin tones (including albinism/vitiligo) to even adding religious wear and fashion styles. Feel free to send suggestions under this Twitter post!

Last but certainly not least, the programming team (it's just Lumi) has implemented a series of choices which can further personalize the main character and will reflect in-game (such as height or education)!

Our art team has also achieved a significant amount of milestones as well! The car interior/exterior BG art is now a finished masterpiece thanks to chuupew, Lumi, and newcomer, Jin!

BG art of the Hostel and its interior is currently a WIP, but we are expecting its completion pretty soon. All character sprites have been finished and 6/7 have been posted to all of our socials! Glad you guys are loving them. Huge thanks to @134340zzz and chuupew!

We have one more CG in the works as well! Keep an eye out for that~

Our commissioned keychains and standee designs have also been finished! Big thanks to mochibunny & Luii Lafete! The designs were made for Kickstarter, but Kickstarter's been sort of an issue for us recently... so we'll keep you updated with what we decide to do with these newly made designs.

Fun fact! Our character release sheets were actually inspired by my (siilycat/ai) scuffed Apple notes drawings. I was not home, but I still wanted to share my ~~artistic~~ vision SOMEHOW and I'm glad I did so through my notes app! (I am the only one on the team with no artistic talent whatsoever, but they turned it into something great!)

Who let me cook?

After further inspection, we realized how... lifeless and subpar some of the writing feels. So we have decided to revisit it and put life into an otherwise mediocre script.

Writing is pretty important in a visual NOVEL and we don't want to disappoint the people who play it. Hope you guys enjoy the new, revised script. We also had a concerning amount of... grammatical errors relating to past/present tense.

We also added more descriptive sections based on the player's choices which is always fun!

This has been a HUGE month for social media, most especially over on Twitter! We released 6/7 of our characters and VAs were announced! In case you missed it, here are the posts announcing the characters!

The stars ⭐ are the fan favourites! And their VAs in respective order are...

[not yet announced] Cam Raleigh, Wyatt Quinn Quiggley - Twitter | Twitch Noah Keawekane, Vince Matador - Twitter Noir Thornton, Jean Williams - Twitter Phil Ava, Andrew Mitchell - @philsterman01 | Twitter | YouTube Jerron Bacat, Kevin Zuño - Twitter | Twitch and one more coming soon...

In other news, we went from 100 to 1000 followers on Twitter in a month! Isn't that crazy? We were really worried about marketing the game, but I think we're making good progress!

Besides that, we have also started working on the itch.io and kickstarter page! Speaking of kickstarter, we're having issues with it so we're thinking of approaching a couple of publishers... Any suggestions or advice? Hit us up on Twitter!

We also received fanart for the first time! A huge win! Our dear artists were so happy to hear that someone loved their character designs enough to draw them themselves!

Go check these wonderful artists out!

bluuescluues - @BluuClr haven - @vipersiia GreenVampBun(Only peace) - @Mesaku18

Thank you so so much for the fanart, you have NO IDEA how happy you've made the Lavendeer team 💖

Our plans for the next month include things like revealing our beautiful key art and final character, holding a raffle to celebrate the support we've gotten, finishing character customization and character expressions, and implementing a unique OST for the demo!

Commissioning music as a person who doesn't know anything about music is a really hard thing to do by the way. Shoutout to our composer, Ben Sigerson for putting up with my bullshit and going COMPLETELY based off of vibes. It's genuinely really good music and we're really low on budget so we thank him for all that he's done.

We really can't wait for you guys to see what we've been cookin' up for the past year. Also, stay on the lookout for an in character q&a soon!

#devlog #game development #visual novel #renpy game #otome game #renpy #vn #vndev #indie game #renpy visual novel #interactive fiction #indiegamedev #indiedev #gamedev #lavendeerstudios

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skelleste · 4 months

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2023 Art Summary

Some of the many things I worked on over the past 365 days. More details below.

Happy New Year!

Just like last year, 2023 was full of even more character art, including a brand spanking new OC. You haven't seen much of the comic yet, because it's not done, but there's been progress on that in the background as well. I also started commissions last March. None are featured in this post so I could focus more on original art, but I wanted to give a special thank-you to all my past commissioners. Not a single one of you were a customer service nightmare, in fact it was quite the opposite. I appreciate everyone who's been kind enough to give me work and treat me well.

The rest of this post is going to be some of my favorite pieces by month, and a little about them. I usually spare my followers from most details in my posts, because there's often not much of interest to the public to say, so this is mostly self indulgent.

January

I decided to revisit Tom and Maudlin, as I hadn't drawn them much since creating them. Whenever I make a new character of importance, I try to go out of my way to put them in varied poses and expressions so that I am able to understand how their bodies work by the time I need them for a real project. It's also a great way to explore their personalities, although I feel that I'll have to push Tom's emotional side more in the future.

February

Props for the comic! It sucks to have to design things on the fly, so it helps to have notable objects designed beforehand. Especially if it's important to the plot. Some of these appear in more panels than others, but it smooths out the comic process nevertheless to have ample references on hand.

March

More character designs to spare me from designing mid-comic production. If they don't have lines in the comic, then I ask random people to assign names to them to make it fun, and because it's easier to keep straight who's who when they're not named Man 1 and Man 2. Left to right, they are Johnifer (you can already see why I name the ones with dialogue myself), Wanda, Jean Vincent, Booker, Charles, Maribelle, and Gertrude.

April

It'd be silly of me to pretend as if 90% of my output isn't shitposts. When you dedicate most of your art time to a project, then you're not going to end up making any other art unless you satisfy primitive monkey brain somehow. In my case, that's usually addressed by drawing funny shit. Early this year is when I discovered how easy it is to crack jokes with Scatterbrain. This goofiness is now embedded into her personality permanently. Expect more of this.

May

April-June is when I do my Art Fight preppin', which usually consists of me making a list of my most neglected OCs and giving them some attention. I also try to get around to eventually making all of them a reference sheet in this style, just so they have something standardized between them. This year, Walla Walla had her turn. She's a shitpost character, so I won't be drawing her much again, but she's a good excuse to draw some J-fashion doodles. My interests outside of cartoon stupidity don't really make it into my art often, so she's a minor outlet for some of it.

June

I've made even more character designs this year than last year, but they were all background characters, making Raoul the only new important one. He's been officially-unofficially written into the story since 2022, but it's very hard for me to make OCs that are written before they are designed. Everyone else was designed first and assigned a role in the plot later, so he got put off for a good while. I finally got around to it though, after I killed some darlings. He is now an all-new species, and I modified the chain design to something less clunky compared to what would be historically accurate.

July

July is, of course, Art Fight month. All other art is put on pause. This year, my favorite attack was a drawing of Enchanted Bones for my friend Bugles. I drew the character independently from the background, which is why the lighting situation is as unfortunate as it is, but we don't talk about that. Thank you to everyone who attacked me and made awesome art, I'll revenge you maybe in a few years. Sorry for the wait, but the backlog is mighty long.

August

Stanson got a slight redesign in the last year, so he can fit with the style of the comic better. He's actually the oldest character out of the bunch. I had no purpose for Scott when I made him and threw them together in the same folder. I had a few one-off designs that I figured I'd keep around in case I ever did an OCT, but these two got yoinked out of it when I started getting story ideas for the them. Stanson is a cowboy (not really), so it became a western setting to make sense of it. I plan on giving him the same sketchpage treatment the other characters have gotten, but I've been putting it off purposely for a while. You'll just have to wait.

September

And there it is, the inevitable page of Raoul getting into various mischief (and subsequently getting his ass beat half of the time). He has a very abrasive personality that gets him into trouble. I don't want the comic to be heavily action-based, but he naturally lands himself in these positions and it lets me draw characters in new situations. His introduction to the story is still a long way off at this point, but I can't wait to pit him against Scott in some slapstick shenanigans.

October

Spooky month is incredibly busy for me in real life, so there isn't as much time for art as I'd like there to be. That's why I dedicated all my time that month to trying to get Halloween art done in time. I've been a fan of Homestar Runner since childhood, and as soon as I thought that Raoul would pull off a Jigen Daisuke look, I knew I wanted to do a full Homestar-esque set of costumes. The other ideas quickly fell into place. My version came out way more detailed than theirs usually are though. The spirit of Halloween possessed me.

November

I started going full gear on the comic around this time (I think 28 hours in one week when I stayed home), so there's an absence of polished personal art here. Scatterbrain eating some spaghetti is my placeholder art for "I worked on a website a bunch instead". It's far from done, but I've made major strides since then.

December

A secret santa gift for my friend, Toby! I continued doing mostly comic work, but I also made room for a secret santa and scheduled a bunch of art trades to complete between December and March. The rest still have to be completed, so you'll see that throughout 2024. Anyway, Toby's OC, Thomas, is based on the state of Michigan. I plastered him on a postcard in front of a highway sign with some Robins because they're the state bird.

There were many more drawings of course, and you can find them scrolling through my Tumblr, or on my DeviantART (I switched to Tumblr as my main site in late August). I hope the new year brings many improvements and happiness for everyone. Last year my goal was simply to start on the comic, which I did, but it was also to get it uploadable, which I didn't. I'm gonna have to aim for the same goal again. Life things were largely fine but still tumultuous enough to throw me off-course, but now my most dangerous family member has moved out and it should be somewhat safer to live here. Not 100% safe though. It never will be. I generally avoid talking about the comic extensively as I won't have a solid release date for some time, so this is the last you'll hear of it for now outside of the rare WIP screenshot. Wish me luck and have a wonderful new year!

#art #artists on Tumblr #Happy New Year #long post #art summary #2023 summary #summary of art #summary of art 2023

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hawkshadowwrites · 9 months

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Barbie (2023); Gloria learns to have hope in Barbie again; 1k, character study

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Gloria loves her life. Truly. Sasha is a beautiful daughter, strong and opinionated and everything she wants her daughter to be. But she is also a teenager, and as such, hates her mother.

It’s not a surprise, really. Gloria remembers hating her mother at this age, the age where everything is too much and not enough, the age where the world is blossoming around you but also breaking around you, the age in the hopes and dreams and limitless possibilities shatter into a million pieces, forced to face the fractures of what once was and what once could be.

Barbie.

A doctor. A lawyer. An astronomer. A scientist. A planner. A dreamer.

Barbie was supposed to be the ideal, but as with all gilded houses and rose colored glasses, the ideal is much more of a poison than a promise.

Gloria remembers her childhood, the joys she felt when she could just be, the joys in all of the ways that anything was possible if she just believed hard enough. The outfits and the adventures, the way that Barbie was Barbie and Barbie is Barbie. In the ways that anything is possible.

She remembers though, growing up. The ways that life came too hard to fast too soon; crying in the bathroom from shame of blood soaked jeans, looking in a mirror and realizing you aren't the same as everyone else, realizing that there are limits and expectations and somehow you are not enough.

Not enough.

Never enough.

The burning shame of realizing that you don't look a certain way or sound a certain way, that the world wants you to be a hundred million things, a thousand impossible things. Watching the years go by, understanding that it doesn't matter what you do or how hard you try, you will always fall short of impossible standards created by people who don't actually want you to succeed.

A pawn in the patriarchy, systemic oppression enforced to encourage infighting and complacency, a redirect away from the glass ceiling down to the glass bars of the gilded prison in which is just what womanhood is.

So Gloria can't blame Sasha. Beautiful, wonderful Sasha, an extension of herself but with so much more bravery and agency that somehow she can't find anymore.

A job where she is just a face — not even a name – but someone who sits at a desk and allows the men to make the decisions for and about women.

She can't blame her own daughter for losing faith, not when she doesn't have faith of her own. When her entire identity has been stripped down to motherhood, that the hopes and passions and fire inside of her has long since frozen, that the aspirations that she could be anything was a carrot on a stick designed to keep her running.

Do you ever think about dying?

Gloria does. Or doesn't. Sorta. Or kinda.

Isn't that the existential horrors of intrusive thoughts? The ones that creep in at the edges of consciousness and awareness and lingers in the ways that make you feel.

She loves her life. She does. She loves her daughter. Her husband is... well. He's there. There's nothing wrong with him but she doesn't love him. She does, but not in the ways she knows she should. He is sweet, and kind, and a good father, but he doesn't make her heart race in her chest, cheeks flush with exuberant joy, in the ways she longs for more.

Life is... there.

People call this depression, but is it really just that? Or is it that she finds herself moving through life without a purpose? Why is she here? What was she supposed to do? Was she always supposed to be here? In a job that she once found joy in because it was an embodiment and expression in what she believes in, but is now a room of male executives that keep their doors shut and ideas dismissed for everyone else.

Is it really a surprise she wanted to go back to where it all began? It is a surprise that in her job, and family, and life, wanting to revisit the hopes and dreams that Barbie offered? The adoration she had over the doll, the way Barbie could have been anything and was everything.

There were days she wanted to be an artist, months where she found joy in the drag of pen across the paper, in the seep of ink that blooms into color that stains the page. She used to draw, until one day she stopped drawing. One day she closed her sketch pad and never opened it back up again. One day the creativity that she used to cultivate seeped away until there was nothing left.

Barbie as a child was a conduit of her future, but now she is a marker of her complacency. She stopped trying. She stopped believing. She stopped creating.

The first sketch was nothing, broken charcoal on paper, smears on her hands as her fingers clench too hard with too much pressure. The second was more of the first, but she felt something uncoil in her with each tear of the sketch pad.

Ideas came to her: Barbie, as who she is now. Barbie, that is a representation of who she, Gloria, is now. Barbie — with her effervescent enthusiasm and energy — as a representation of the trials and pitfalls of life.

Of human emotion.

Of the crack in her heart and soul but also the warmth of her child in her arms, the smell of her hair pressing into her cheek. The way she can watch her daughter grow into something.

A Barbie who can allow herself to be. Cellulite, and anxiety, and depression. Barbie who is something more than perfect.

Barbie who is real. Barbie who feels and loves and dreams, who is a creator, not a thing created. Who is a dreamer, not just a dream made. Gloria knows that Barbie is a conception, not real, but isn’t that the whole point? That the reality and truth are the things we speak into existence? That the power we give to concepts are the concepts that hold the most weight.

Gloria needs Barbie now, more than ever. So she grabs her sketch pad, and she draws.

And hopes.

And believes.

And dreams.

#barbie #barbie 2023 #Gloria (Barbie 2023)#margot robbie #Margot Robbie’s Barbie (2023)#Barbie (2023) fanfic

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mappingthemoon · 4 months

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Books Read 2023

Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations / Mira Jacob

A Grief Observed / C. S. Lewis

Grit Lit: A Rough South Reader / ed. Brian Carpenter & Tom Franklin

Two or Three Things I Know for Sure / Dorothy Allison

Weather: Air Masses, Clouds, Rainfall, Storms, Weather Maps, Climate (A Golden Nature Guide) / Paul E. Lehr, R. Will Burnett, Herbert S. Zim ; Harry McNaught (ill.)

Improbable Memories / Sarah Moon

Endless Endless: A Lo-Fi History of the Elephant 6 Mystery / Adam Clair

The Difference Between / Billy McCall

The Submissive (The Submissive #1) / Tara Sue Me

Last Night at the Casino [v. 1] / Billy McCall

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing / Marie Kondo ; Cathy Hirano (tr.)

Pnin / Vladimir Nabokov

My Heart Is a Chainsaw / Stephen Graham Jones

"Waltz of the Body Snatchers" / Alfred Bester, in Andromeda I: An original SF anthology / ed. Peter Weston

Blue Highways: A Journey Into America / William Least Heat-Moon

The Stars My Destination (The Gregg Press Science Fiction Series) / Alfred Bester

Laughter in the Dark / Vladimir Nabokov

Man and His Symbols / Carl G. Jung

Mysteries of the Unexplained / ed. Carroll C. Calkins

The Westing Game / Ellen Raskin

The Seven Ages / Louise Glück

The Wild Iris / Louise Glück

Vita Nova / Louise Glück

Doctor Who: Impossible Worlds: A 50-Year Treasury of Art and Design / Stephen Nicholas & Mike Tucker

Where's Waldo? (Where's Waldo #1) / Martin Handford

Where's Waldo? The Fantastic Journey (Where's Waldo #3) / Martin Handford

Doctor Who 50 Years #3: The Doctors / ed. Marcus Hearn

Rabbit, Run / John Updike

Mother Night / Kurt Vonnegut

Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (Books) / Bibliographic Standards Committee, Rare Books and Manuscripts Section, Association of College and Research Libraries, in collaboration with The Policy Standards Office of the Library of Congress

"Descriptive Bibliography" / Terry Belanger, in Book Collecting: A Modern Guide / ed. Jean Peters

The Essential Doctor Who #2: The TARDIS / ed. Marcus Hearn

Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited / Vladimir Nabokov

Chicago: City on the Make / Nelson Algren

Gustav Klimt, 1862-1918 / Gilles Néret

American Gods: A Novel / Neil Gaiman

Marcel Duchamp, 1887-1968: Art as Anti-Art / Janis Mink

The Empathy Exams: Essays / Leslie Jamison

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families / James Agee & Walker Evans

Hallucination Orbit: Psychology in Science Fiction / ed. Isaac Asimov, Charles G. Waugh, Martin H. Greenberg

Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith's Pittsburgh Project / W. Eugene Smith ; ed. Sam Stephenson

Twilight / Gregory Crewdson ; Rick Moody

Magic Eye: A New Way of Looking at the World / N.E. Thing Enterprises

Bowie: Stardust, Rayguns & Moonage Daydreams / Steve Horton & Michael Allred ; Laura Allred (ill.)

After the Ecstasy, the Laundry: How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Path / Jack Kornfield

The Gin Closet: A Novel / Leslie Jamison

The New Kid on the Block / Jack Prelutsky ; James Stevenson (ill.)

A Book of Common Prayer / Joan Didion

Mariette in Ecstasy / Ron Hansen

Camp Damascus / Chuck Tingle

The Mass Production of Memory: Travel and Personal Archiving in the Age of the Kodak (Public History in Historical Perspective) / Tammy S. Gordon

Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas / Rebecca Solnit & Rebecca Snedeker

Other Voices, Other Rooms / Truman Capote

Fabulous New Orleans / Lyle Saxon ; E.H. Suydam (ill.)

Weird Pennsylvania: Your Travel Guide to Pennsylvania's Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets / Matt Lake

Griffin & Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence (Griffin & Sabine #1) / Nick Bantock

Sabine's Notebook: In Which The Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin & Sabine Continues (Griffin & Sabine #2) / Nick Bantock

The Golden Mean: In Which The Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin & Sabine Concludes (Griffin & Sabine #3) / Nick Bantock

Breath, Eyes, Memory / Edwidge Danticat

Last Night at the Casino, v. 2 / Billy McCall

What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions / Randall Munroe

Collection-Level Cataloging: Bound-with Books (Third Millennium Cataloging) / Jain Fletcher

Speaking Pittsburghese: The Story of a Dialect (Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics) / Barbara Johnstone

My Misspent Youth: Essays / Meghan Daum

Slender Intuition: Essays on Artist's Block / Brian Hitselberger

The Mister / E L James

Crapalachia: A Biography of a Place / Scott McClanahan

The Transcriptionist: A Novel / Amy Rowland

Explanations/Opinions below the cut:

Ok so I have several reading lists/stacks that I rotate through: my to-read spreadsheet (which has almost 300 titles listed in chronological order by date added, with the oldest being from 8/22/2014), my to-read bookcase/nightstand (which holds ~50 books I’ve acquired over the past few years but haven’t yet read), a stack of oversized unreads that don’t fit on the nightstand shelves (this gets its own list bc I need to read them and find a permanent home for them before the stack gets too tall), and “interruptions” (books that override the list order bc I didn’t want to wait to read them, for whatever reason).

Maybe it’s weird that I’m so attached to reading things “in order”? Idk. I’ve always been like this. It’s only a mild compulsion – obviously, I am perfectly capable of ignoring what’s supposed to be next on the list, in favor of reading something that catches my interest more strongly in the moment, but in general, I like to read things either in the order I added them to the list, or the order I personally acquired a physical copy (if I went by the list only, I’d be drowning in unread books [yay, college town thrift stores], so I gotta stay on top of that pile pretty regularly). So that is why I am often reading things that I first became aware of/added to my list nearly 10 years ago. Sometimes this practice results in feelings like, “Dang, I wish I would’ve actually read this 10 years ago,” but also sometimes, “WOW, I’m so glad I’m reading this RIGHT NOW, as opposed to 10 years ago when I first heard about it!”

I think my favorites this year were Mariette in Ecstasy; Other Voices, Other Rooms; Crapalachia; and Speak, Memory.

Mild disappointments were the essay collections by Leslie Jamison and Meghan Daum, two authors I’m pretty sure I discovered via popular and relateable quotes reblogged on tumblr ca. 2014, but the collections taken as a whole just had too many moments of cringe – casual classism, arrogant self-absorption, and other annoying and unrelateable qualities typical of privileged 20-something writers (this tone definitely appealed to me when I was a naïve and melodramatic snotty 20-something, so there’s that).

As a kind of memorial, Rachael and I read David’s three favorite books: The Stars My Destination, Mother Night, and American Gods. In all the time I knew him, including all the times we used to sit on the porch together, reading quietly while he drank whiskey, I never thought to ask him his favorites. I kept looking for pieces of him in the stories, wondering what lines stood out, what made a book memorable, what did it say about him that these were his favorites.

Being an elder Millennial, I’m in the stage of nostalgically re-acquiring important artifacts from my childhood, so that’s why there are some children’s books on my list. Where’s Waldo? was one of the most coveted books in my grade-school library! There was always a list of people waiting to check it out, but usually, whoever actually had the book that week would let the other kids gather around and look together.

My Heart Is a Chainsaw was a recommendation from my goth teenaged birthdaughter <3 which I probably read too much personal symbolism into but maybe not!

I thought John Updike was overrated, lol.

Favorite photography book: W. Eugene Smith’s Dream Street. His pictures made me so homesick, and it was wild because he took them from 1955-1957 but they still really, REALLY, to me, looked like the Pittsburgh of my ‘80s/’90s memories (bc Pittsburgh doesn’t change, and also the “idea” or “brand” of Pittsburgh in the ‘80s/’90s was ofc consciously referencing its industrial working-class past). He took over 10,000 photos but was never able to “finish” the project to his intense, obsessive standards of perfection (I KNOW THAT FEEL) and felt it failed to capture the multifaceted essence of the city. WELL, not in my opinion at least!

PS I'm moonmoth on LibraryThing.

#books #lists #personal #Dear Sir Decadent

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kaija-rayne-author · 4 months

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I wrote something hard today. It's long. Please mind the content warnings, this one is heavy.

We Must Remember

ON DECEMBER 30, 2023 BY KAELENRHY/Kaija Rayne

Content Warnings: AIDS epidemic, queer death, queer abuse, child abuse, child neglect, mention of attempted rape, sexual harassment in the form of catcalling and whistling.

My generation of queers, the ones who came of age in the middle of losing most of a generation of our queer siblings… we don’t talk about it.

It’s got to be pretty obvious why we don’t. I can’t think of a queer person who knew they were queer who didn’t lose someone. And we all lost when it comes to some people. Freddie Mercury, for one, the lead singer of Queen. He died a day after announcing his diagnosis in 1991. He was 45 years old.

And there were so many others.

I’ve been aware of the lack of people who lived through it talking about this for a while. But it really brought it home to me when I asked my eldest, who is openly queer, if they knew what the AIDS quilt was. They didn’t. And generally, they’re interested in queer history, so tend to be better informed than a lot of queer youth about our collective history. It helps that I was a history teacher at one time and have always lived and breathed teaching it to anyone willing to learn.

So, here’s a story from a time I hope never to see again, but one which, when I look at the world, I deeply fear is coming back.

The moral panic we see now is like déjà vu for people like me. It was this exact same moral panic that caused medicine, and most of humanity, to completely ignore it as loved ones died. To treat human beings without the care or respect any human being deserves simply by drawing breath.

I grew up in the mountains in a very Christian cult-like atmosphere. It was honestly so close to being an actual cult. There really is such a minuscule difference. But it wasn’t an official cult. Just… very poor people backbiting each other any way they could. Praying like good people on Wednesdays and Sundays, but doing anything they wanted every other day of the week. You’d think with all the mountains around, they’d have anything better to do than gossip. But gossip ran as life’s blood. The internet didn’t yet exist in private homes in that piss hole in a snowbank. There were 3 churches in the town, and 6 bars. For 300 people. The closest store was a good 20-minute drive away, the closest library an hour.

Christ, it’s hard to remember these things. It’s been 33 ish years since this story happened in real life, and I still don’t want to revisit it.

But it’s important.

The memory of this day is ingrained on the inside of my skin. I can almost feel the heavy summer sun.

Sad Summer Day

I’m around 14 years old. I’m barefoot, because my family doesn’t see the point of buying shoes for summer wear. Feet toughen up just fine.

I’m wearing a fourth or fifth-hand t-shirt that is far too see-through and cut-off jean shorts. The tickling of the strings falling against my thighs as I walk is a soothing sensation to me. I’m finished with my chores, the horses are cared for, the dog fed, the abusive younger sibling has stopped screaming and throwing things at me because I wasn’t a suitable big sister and had gone to hide in her room. I’m an embarrassment to my allistic sister. I’m an embarrassment to my mother too. If she ever crawls out of the bottle long enough to give a shit about anyone. My brother lives elsewhere.

I stink. I don’t know that or understand it, but I stink. Getting clean means swimming in a scummy mountain lake most evenings. My mother hasn’t taught me anything about personal hygiene. She smokes like a damned chimney and always smells of booze. There is no way I don’t smell bad. We had bath nights once a week in the winter. The only reason I knew my period was a thing was school health class.

I hang around in the barn a lot. Or in the ancient maple tree in the pasture. Ar Bazara is my beautiful Arabian mare. Her hide is the stunning red of particularly vociferous sunsets. She often patiently lets me lie on her back with a book open on her rump while she grazes. My new goat, Esmerelda, is still adjusting to not being the house goat she was used to being. She’s miserable, mourning her friend and old life. I do what I can, but it doesn’t help very much. Goats grieve as much as humans do, maybe more so.

It’s my job, and escape, to walk to town and get the mail for my father, who works more than not, and can’t get to the post before it closes at 5pm. I have no idea when or if my mother will come stumbling in blind drunk.

I hope to see my friend, who lives at the top of the road to the post office. He hasn’t been feeling well. Wrapped up in a quilt in his mother’s rocking chair on the porch is how I’ve been finding him lately. It’s not very odd, it never gets truly warm in the mountains, so people in heavier clothes or a blanket around their shoulders isn’t uncommon. I think nothing of it.

He’s a relatively recent addition to my life. He moved into his mother’s house last year. Esmeralda had been his, but he’d asked me to take her last week and love her like he did. I really don’t see it coming, or maybe I don’t want to add up the clues.

He’s my only friend there. He looks much older to me, but in reality, is likely in his late twenties. He wears dark tortoise-shell rimmed glasses, always has interesting books to read and ideas to discuss. He’d made it out of the mountains, so has seen so much more of the world I long desperately to experience for myself. His butterscotch blond hair is always a curly mess, and he’s always running his hand through it. I hope I can sit on his porch steps, picking at splinters, while he tells me another story. I’m not supposed to talk to him. No one does in that town. We might catch it, if we do so much as look at him. But I like him, and he treats me like a combination of younger sister and wild animal. He always speaks in such a gentle, calm tone. A tone I never hear at home. Except for the day he gave me Esmerelda. He couldn’t talk through the tears he was trying to hide.

My aunt lives next to him and warns me away every time she sees me. I suppose she likely told my parents, but my parents either aren’t there or are drunk. He’s the only adult in that town other than my grandmother, who even sees me. Much less talks to me like I’m a person. My aunt is happy enough to take his money to make an extra portion of food for him when she cooks for her family every day. She drops it off on the porch and will only take the dishes back if they’re soaking in bleach water when she comes to get them.

I’m tanned dark brown. My mother kicks us out as soon as the snow melts and we’re expected to stay out until dusk. But I’ve got my summer colour, my hair is frizzy from the yearly perms, and sun-bleached. The stench of lemon juice in my hair is still strong, but I know better than to not use it every morning. Having my mother yank the black, spiral hairs out of my head hurts worse. But I hate the smell of lemon juice in my hair.

It’s a short walk to a mountain child. Though if you’d called me a child then it would’ve infuriated me.

I am still a child, a very naïve one. I only know the words gay and lesbian because I’ve read the OED cover to cover. But they’re nascent, formless concepts to me. I’m in the midst of my first crush. A girl in my class with the prettiest brown eyes and lush, curly hair. But, I’ve told no one.

There’s sand on the sides of the beaten-up tarmac of the road. I’m avoiding walking on the road itself because prickers from wild roses and blackberry bushes are vastly preferable to burnt feet.

In shade areas, the mounded sand is cool, a treat to dig my toes into, and there’s a place where rain makes interesting patterns in the sand. I stop there for a short time to look at the swirling patterns in that section. It’s different every time it rains.

The air is heavy, like a wet wool blanket, presaging another evening rainstorm. I cuss because it means I won’t get to swim that night. If I want to rinse off, it’ll be in the cold rain. Hopefully, there won’t be thunder. Loamy earth and the particular faintly metallic scent of slightly damp, lichen-covered stone coat my tongue with a musky taste. The lighter, higher sweet honey note of spreading dogbane makes the walk smell like a slice of heaven. They’re poisonous, of course, but they’re beautiful and one of my favourites. Bunchberry shows little red splashes of colour. Orange hawkweed is blossoming, and so is the milkweed. Soon there will be so many monarch butterfly caterpillars I’ll have to watch where I step. The unnatural stench of old, oft-tarred tarmacadam adds an unwelcome element of human activity to the interesting scents.

The forest sings, murmuring to each other with the slight breeze that’s the only coolness I’ll find unless it rains. And the creaks and groans of the poplar and birch trees provide a symphony. I walk by my grandmother’s house. She’s outside tending to her flowers and checking the bird feeders, so I wave instead of meandering over. My grandmother loves to talk. I’ll stop on the way back. I’m later than usual going to get the mail because of my sister’s abusive outburst.

My hands are stuffed in the far too small front pockets of my shorts. My hand is tightly wrapped around the mail key. I always hold it in my fist, my father says it’s a trust, and I don’t want to blow it. A hopped-up pickup truck with a custom paint job, jacked tires, and glass-packs roars by. The boys inside and riding on the bed cat call me, but I don’t understand it.

By this time in my life, my mother has dived into a bottle and never looked back. She taught me to drink on hanged man’s bridge when I was 11. Vodka. She’d already moved on to vodka from wine by that time. In a lot of ways, I didn’t have a mother anymore, if I’d ever really had one at all in anything other than the physical sense.

It’s 1990. Big hair is falling out of fashion, but I still have the perm that my (at the time) stick-straight hair needs to look like Bon Jovi.

It’s mid-summer, the sun is high in the sky and it won’t get dark until after 9 pm. I won’t have to go inside until 10. The voracious bugs are preferable to listening to another argument. And Gram will let me in and likely feed me. Maybe my brother will be there.

As long as I’m on my father’s or grandmother’s land by dusk, I don’t have to go inside. The crab apples aren’t quite ready, but I pick one to eat, anyway. The bitter, tart juice is still green-flavoured, but it fends off my hunger. I didn’t get to eat my food; I cleaned it up from where my sister had thrown it at the wall and took it out to the hens. I wonder if they like grape jam?

It’s not the first time I’ve been hungry. Hunger is basically my ground state. So much so that I don’t even feel it when I’m hungry.

I pause on hanged man’s bridge. Just for a moment, while I warily scan the church parking lots at the end of the road.

They’d kicked me out when I was 12, but if the minister sees me, I’ll get scolded for breathing. I’m lucky, the lots are deserted and I continue on my way.

There’s no tree cover here, but there is down by the water. The beavers are busily building a dam that the men will burn come fall. It makes me sad because I can see kits with their parents. Beaver has a lot of fat in the fall, so it’s good meat.

I turn left at the end of the road and walk past another not-so-distant relative’s house. I stop for a moment to pet the Percheron workhorses who obligingly hang their heads over the fence so I can pluck handfuls of fresh green grass for them. Their slobber on my hands is green, but it doesn’t register as anything other than something to wipe off on my butt. I love these gentle giants, but the sun is lower in the sky, so I hurry on. I pass two more relatives’ houses. I have a tendency to walk with my gaze on the ground, partially to make sure I don’t step in anything, but partially in hope of finding a new, interesting stone or a bone for my collections.

So, I just… don’t notice. I’m in my own head a lot, working on stories. I started writing 3 years before.

There’s a sharp, rattling sound I associate with caster wheels and I look up.

My friend isn’t on the porch and he can’t tell me any more stories.

The glaring canary yellow of haz-mat suits screams brightly from his faded house. They look like aliens to me. Fierce, terrifying aliens. We don’t have TV, or rather, we don’t have TV reception, so the only reason I know what the suits are is because of my long habit of reading encyclopedias.

One of them is roughly handling his body as the other wraps a second roll of cellophane around him, over and over. They’re great yellow spiders as they finish wrapping my friend in cellophane and put him on the emergency bed from the ambulance. There aren’t any lights on, it’s turned off, and the driver has his booted foot hung out the window while he looks at a playboy. He whistles at me and winks. I hear one of the aliens say the body bags are too expensive to waste on trash. One of them fetches a floral sheet from my friend’s home. They wrap him in that.

I stand there like a rock has landed on my head.

I’m mute. I can’t even make myself move to go yell at them for laughing over my friend’s body and trading slurs for him as if it’s a game. Even if I were brave enough to confront adults. Which, I am not.

They very carefully take the gurney to the ambulance, avoiding all possible touch with the cellophane cocoon. The straps are so tight around my friend’s body that if he could feel them, he would have cried.

The doors make a doubled, muffled thump and the engine of the ambulance starts. It jerks me into movement, but I’m too late. They drive off.

They haven’t closed his kitchen door. So I do it, thinking in that odd way that he’ll be sad when he comes back to find it left open. I never have seen inside his house and I don’t breach his privacy as I close the door.

I have no way to lock it, and he told me he hasn’t any family left.

I step quickly down the top of the searing hot grey metal culvert cover to my aunt’s large backyard. I’m grateful to not run into my cousins. One of whom has already tried to rape me. I can fight him off if I have to, again, but all I need is to escape. I hopscotch across the brook and into the old potato field. I leap like a yearling deer from one mound to the next before I can disappear myself into the forested lands on my dad’s property. I practically live in the forest, and my friend’s habit of treating me like a wild animal isn’t off. I am.

The next thing I clearly remember is hugging Esmerelda’s neck, finally understanding why he’d asked me to take her.

Finally understanding a lot of things a 14-year-old probably shouldn’t have to think about.

I never did get the mail that day. I had to scour the area I’d walked to find the mail key I’d always been so careful not to drop.

Years later, when I was 19, and I’d escaped those fucking mountains, I was in university and doing very well. The only semester I didn’t hit the president’s list was the semester I had mono, and I still made dean’s.

I and a couple of others had recently been thrilled to get the B added to the LG group (lesbian and gay). Bisexual erasure is still prevalent, and it was worse then.

It was meeting night for the club, and one of my friends, one of the first openly gay men I knew while understanding what that meant, had a square of heavy white cloth. He explained it was for a project to remember those we’d lost to AIDS.

I took it home to my dorm room that night and feverishly embroidered a little grey goat wearing a green collar and a shiny gold jingle bell. I’ll never know why he named her Esmerelda.

The last time I visited those mountains, just before our move to Canada… I walked over with my eldest on my hip to look at my friend’s house. The door gaped open like a missing tooth in a smile, but no human scavengers had touched anything. (In those mountains, scavenging is a way of life. It’s a testimonial to their prejudice and discrimination that his home wasn’t pillaged.) The roof had fallen in at some point, always a danger in those mountains, from the weight of snow. The porch step I’d sat on to listen to his stories had fallen off and lay almost rotted through. I stood there looking at his house for probably longer than I remember. They’d closed the post office. The workhorses had been sent to make dog food when the man of the house died and his widow couldn’t care for them. Pound for pound selling them to the butcher was more practical.

My mother sold Ar Bazara just before she left my father. My beautiful mare had died at her new owners from pneumonia not long after I’d graduated high school.

Fall asters bloomed, making shockingly bright splotches of colour around his house. No one would even go close enough to do the neighborly thing and mow the tiny area of land that went with the house. Perception was everything to those people. It wouldn’t do to be perceived as less than a ‘good Christian’. So it spoke volumes that no one had shoveled the roof or mown the lawn. The only way people survive up there is by banding together when needed. My cousins may shoot each other (true fact) but they’ll band together if someone threatens from outside.

My grandmother was gone. Still with us in the flesh, but Alzheimer’s took her from us long before she actually died. She didn’t even remember I had a kid.

My father had cut the ancient maple tree I’d loved so much for firewood years before, sometime when I was in uni.

There weren’t any horses anymore. Esmeralda had gone. She never recovered. The sweet, gentle goat I’d agreed to love turned vicious and mean. I didn’t know how to help her and no one I dared ask could help. My father made me get rid of her when she butted him in the knee.

I kissed my little one’s head when he reached up curiously to touch a tear on my cheek. I doubt he’d ever seen me cry before that. I don’t cry easy. My therapist has me working on relearning how to cry.

That isn’t a problem right now. I can barely see to type. No matter how many years pass, I can’t forget the tearing, sticky sound of the cellophane as they wrapped my friend up. I can’t forget the things they said about him while wearing those stupid haz-mat suits. Which they hadn’t even been wearing correctly. I can’t forget and it’s so bloody hard to remember these things, much less talk or write about them.

Within my lifetime, we’ve seen amazing changes in queer rights. But I, and a lot of older queers, are watching the current political climate of the world and… we could so easily lose everything we’ve gained.

Trans people are always the canaries in the coal mine; always the ones sacrificed first. They will come for the rest of us.

If you’re queer, don’t ever fall into the trap of thinking it’s ancient history. I’m currently 47. This day happened 33 years ago. Don’t fall into the morass of thinking our rights can’t be stripped from us.

They can. And I fear, deeply, that they’ll strip our rights from us again. We could so easily fall down the slippery slope until all of us are disrespected as my friend was. He died alone. And I suppose I should be grateful my aunt noticed right away, that anyone noticed at all. He was a pariah. He’d come home to die after his partner did, only to face massive social exclusion by people he’d grown up with. My aunt only fed him for the cash. Even then, barter was still common. Hard cash wasn’t always easy to get.

I went to the cemetery to try to find his grave and plant some flowers on it. I found where it was supposed to be. Right on the very edge next to the pine forest. Just a slight depression marking what was likely a cheap pine coffin, if they even paid him that much respect. There wasn’t a crematorium anywhere close by. So they’d stuck him as far away from the other dead people as possible. As if the dead could catch it. We didn’t name it. It was the illness variety of the boogeyman. If you don’t name it, it can’t find you.

Starflower had grown to cover the area, so at least I know every spring he has a blanket of small, ethereal white flowers. We lost most of a generation of queers due to medical negligence and reprehensible cruelty from humans to other human beings.

But these stories shouldn’t die with us. Queer youth need to understand what we lived through so they don’t get too complacent. I’ve fought for queer rights since I was 14 years old.

My eldest can just be openly queer. Something I’ve never been able to be except for a few short years in university.

I don’t want to see us lose our rights again.

I don’t want another misunderstood, abused, hurting queer kid to have to watch as their only friend is wrapped in cellophane and denied the honour of a body bag. Denied the honour of a decent grave with a simple headstone.

We’re already losing queer rights. Please don’t be complacent.

Phew, so… I’m a sobbing mess. If my work of words touched you, please consider a tip or becoming a patron. We live in poverty. My husband is recovering from one of the likely three back surgeries he needs for his broken back. We have two autistic/ADHD kids and finding a job is impossible. I’ve been looking since January 15th, 2023. I have $50/$1220 I need for rent for January. We can’t get any government aid because I’m an immigrant.

Far too many queer creatives live in poverty. I’ll do a series of these memories as I can. They’re very emotionally difficult for me to write, but I feel they’re very important things.

http://ko-fi.com/A630KKM

https://www.paypal.me/KaelanRhy

#AIDS #aids epidemic #queer #being queer #queer history #AIDS Quilt

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catelyngrant · 4 months

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My Year in Fic: 2023

I had a fun and kind of wild year in fic-writing this year, diving back into four (!) fandoms I haven't written for in over a decade but that all consumed me for years on end once upon a time. There was also a great deal of Succession, shocking no one. I was going to reblog this as a "send numbers" post, but I actually wanted to revisit this year in fic so I answered them all anyway below the cut.

what have i become, my sweetest friend? 24, Jack Bauer & Nina Myers (~2k, T)

let your faith die, bring your wonder: Battlestar Galactica, Laura Roslin-centric (~5k, T)

what falls away is always: Doctor Who, Sarah Jane Smith & The Fourteenth Doctor (~2700, G)

not a single word was said: Star Trek: Picard, Beverly Crusher/Jean-Luc Picard (~1700, G)

the blood sacrifice: Succession, Ensemble (~1k, T, Crack)

if there’s a rocket tie me to it: Succession, Gerri Kellman/Roman Roy (~2700, T)

the name we’ve long held back: Succession, Gerri Kellman/Roman Roy (~4400, T)

not broken, just bent: Succession, Gerri Kellman/Roman Roy (~4k, M)

something is always between us: Succession, Gerri Kellman/Roman Roy (~2k, T)

we even flew a little: Succession, Gerri Kellman/Roman Roy (~4000, T)

years from now, i’ll cry to remember: Succession, Shiv Roy & Gerri Kellman (~1400, T)

Thoughts below!

How many words have you written this year? 30,695, which is quite a lot for me! How many works did you publish this year? Eleven (plus a playlist).

What work are you most proud of (regardless of kudos/hits)? There are a few! Digging into BSG and Laura Roslin after so much time was really intimidating and overwhelming, but it was so interesting to explore sides of her that land so differently all these years later, and I was really proud of how let your faith die, bring your wonder turned out given how much I angsted over it. Beyond that, I wrote a lot of Succession fic this year, which was intimidating in different ways. I had a really clear vision for the name we’ve long held back and I was really gratified that it felt like I brought that into focus and that it was received well. I also really liked digging just a little into Gerri and Shiv in years from now, i’ll cry to remember, just because I find their relationship fascinating and underexplored.

What work of yours has the most hits? the name we’ve long held back

What work of yours got more feedback than you expected? not a single word was said had a really satisfying response for a fic in a fandom I’ve written very little in and that ended up being jossed very shortly after it was written. I really liked this one, though, and felt really good about the emotional beats, so it was great to see that received well. I also was surprised that years from now, i’ll cry to remember got the love that it did—gen fics rarely perform as well as shippy ones, but this held its own.

Favorite title you used: It’s got to be not broken, just bent (aka the one where Roman breaks his penis).

If you use song lyrics, which artist’s songs did you pull from the most? Vienna Teng, as always! (let your faith die, bring your wonder; years from now, i’ll cry to remember; the name we’ve long held back)

Pairing you wrote the most for this year? Roman/Gerri

Favorite pairing you wrote for this year? Roman/Gerri definitely took up most of my year, but Picard/Crusher also consumed me a great deal even if that wasn’t reflected in what I ended up writing.

What work was the quickest to write? the blood sacrifice. The inherent absurdity of crack fics tend to allow me to give fewer fucks, which is fun.

What work took you the longest to write? I started both what have i become, my sweetest friend and we even flew a little well before the start of 2023 and then let them sit for many months before returning to finish them. what have i become, my sweetest friend takes the cake, though—I think I started that 2+ years before posting.

How many WIP’s do you have in your docs for next year? Dozens, but only 3-4 that I’m optimistic about finishing.

What’s your longest work of the year? let your faith die, bring your wonder

What’s your shortest work of the year? the blood sacrifice

What WIP are you taking into next year with you? Nothing currently live, but my two remaining Supergirl WIPs will be finished eventually, and then I have a couple of DW threads dangling.

What’s your most common “Additional Tags” tag? AU - Canon Divergence (that tracks!). if there’s a rocket, tie me to it was one that didn’t get a lot of love comparatively but that I really enjoyed writing; it explored the various ripple effects of how the series may have played out if the rocket launch had gone off without a hitch in 1x10. I love identifying small moments like that that, had they played out differently, can create an entire AU.

Your favorite character to write this year? Gerri, probably. She’s complicated and scary and in some ways a blank slate and in other ways tremendously specific, and I feel like I dug into a lot of different sides of her. She’s also the character that I wrote the most this year, which makes sense.

The character that gave you the most trouble writing this year? Picard/Crusher. As much as I adored ST:P, it fucked with my characterization and I started many, many more fics featuring them (separately or together) than I completed.

What’s one pairing you want to explore next year? I feel like I’ll be living in Doctor Who-land for a little while longer, so maybe I’ll finally get to exploring my extensive headcanons around Sarah Jane and Twelve!

Which work of yours have you reread the most? the name we’ve long held back, probably, just because I posted it early in the year.

How many kudos in total did you get this year? 1,199

Which work has the most comments? the blood sacrifice and not a single word was said. I'm inconsistent in replying to comments, though, so I think my responses on those skew them.

Did you do any collaborative works this year? With the BSG Minibang, yes! There’s a podfic of let your faith die, bring your wonder.

Did you write any gifts this year? not broken, just bent and the name we’ve long held back, both for Jerk Matron January.

Did you receive any gifts this year? Yes! Vast_difference wrote when I'm broken down and I can't stand (would you be man enough to be my man) for Jerk Matron January—highly recommend!

What’s your most common category? F/M

What do you listen to while writing? I don’t listen to anything, usually. I prefer silence.

Favorite work you wrote this year? This is hard, honestly, because I wrote more than usual and also wrote in a lot of different fandoms, including several that I wrote a lot for and/or was heavily involved in many, many years ago. The nostalgia factor was very real this year! Beyond the works that I’m proudest of listed in #3, I’m most recently enamored by what falls away is always—for all of my love of the Doctor and Sarah Jane, this is really the first time I’ve written just the two of them together, and I didn’t think that there would be new material to explore between them at this stage! It was really fun. I also have a soft spot for we even flew a little, which I started in early 2022 and found myself too intimidated to continue but managed to complete before season four started and rendered it obsolete. Finally, I didn't include this originally but in looking at favorite lines/passages from this year, I originally had four from not a single word was said, so maybe that should get a little more love!

Favorite line/passage you wrote this year? This is always very hard. I generally have been happy with a lot of the dialogue I've written this year, which is notable because there's such a range of distinctive voices. Roman's voice in particular was a beast, but coming up with things like this (from the blood sacrifice)—

“It’s about fucking time,” Roman grumps, the irritation in his words belied by the way his face collapses into relief. He straightens up, resting his elbows on his knees. “Shit-fucking-Jesus, after Gerri comfort-fucks me into oblivion and I sober up—” Gerri elbows him, hard, but seems distracted by the shape in the distance even as he rattles on— “I’m going to destroy every last one of these blubbery blimps. I’m gonna buy a beach house and wallpaper it with their skin, I’m gonna, fucking, start a whale-burger chain and bankrupt the animal-fucker groups and—”

—well, it's just fun.

In terms of opening lines, I quite liked this from let your faith die, bring your wonder:

There was a time when stars were a wonder and rain had just been rain.

And for closing lines...

There’s not much space between them, a couple dozen feet, but somehow Gerri seems glazed, blurred around the edges. Shiv can’t read her expression before she’s turned back to the railing and lifted the cigarette back to her lips, her gaze once again fixed firmly in the other direction as she says, softly, “I’ll see you, Shiv.” Shiv doubts it. Her father’s dead, and her stomach is swelling; no one will be looking at her again.

Character-wise, I liked this bit in Gerri's POV from we even flew a little:

If. It’s as close as she’s come to admitting to either of them that it wasn’t just her career on the line—that his messy, reckless heart isn’t the only one aching, here at the end of this. Because he’d done more than want her, had seen more in her than her competence (and wasn’t that a giddy thing, in and of itself, to be seen). He’d found, somehow, the little seed of insanity that’s kept her at Waystar all these years—the masochistic desire to control the uncontrollable, to beat the unbeatable, to smooth thin veneers over rotten ground and get away with it because she alone knows where it’s safe to step. He dug it up and brought it to bloom and it felt good, to pour her poison into him.

And in terms of pain levels, I really loved this Picard/Crusher moment from not a single word was said. The show itself took a different take on what tore them apart, but I felt like this perspective could have made a lot of sense as well:

He’s given her everything he’s ever had to offer, given her patience and space and the sort of trust that feels foreign to him now. He gave her comfort when she needed it and silence when he wanted to speak; he bottled up his own useless love into something so small and stunted that it hurt just to offer, and he offered it nonetheless. It was always hers for the taking. She even reached for it, once.

Biggest surprise while writing this year? Oh god, honestly, I’ve just felt like a teenager again. Writing and posting fic for 24, BSG, Star Trek: TNG, and Doctor Who? It’s been wild.

#my fic

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accidental-geo-main · 1 year

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What's their warning label?

If you could see warning labels above their heads, what would it say?

Characters: Childe, Rosaria, Nahida, Dainsleif, Jean, Cyno, Katheryn

Tags: Crack/joke, Very OOC, "Dainsleif is divorcee" joke,

TW: cursing in Katheryn's, none that I know of

A/N: I made this in 20mins. It's fully Crack/ not meant to be taken seriously.

Word Count: 71 words | No editing/proofreading | OOC

Childe - Will start fights just to finish them

Rosaria - Looks like they will kill you and will kill you

Nahida - Is reading your mind as we speak

Dainsleif - Divorced and will make it your problem

Jean - One bad day away from their villian origin story

Cyno - Trying to set up for a joke in the middle of a conversation

Katheryn - Wishing that beating the shit out of people was an option

---------------------------------------

Thanks for reading! I'm not very happy with this but i'm trying to get back into posting more. Maybe one day I'll revisit this and take this more seriously.

If you have any suggestions for me, feel free to send them in! If you see any typos, etc. let me know!

This is my first Joke/crack post so please don't take this seriously.

Published: 3/5/2023

#genshin headcanons #genshin impact #genshin #character headcanons #childe headcanons #rosaria genshin impact #dainsleif genshin impact #jean genshin impact #childe genshin impact #cyno genshin impact #nahida genshin #lesser lord kusanali #Katheryn genshin impact #genshin imagines #Adventures guild genshin #crack headcanons

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into-the-sky-under-the-sea · 3 months

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𝘤𝘶𝘳𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘮𝘰𝘰𝘥𝘴 & 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘴

💠 𝑨𝒄𝒂𝒅𝒆𝒎𝒊𝒂-𝒊𝒔𝒉

-inspired by Saltburn (2023) and the art it references (or reminded me of) 🏰🍾 ▪ Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh [a fav book of mine] ▪ Brideshead Revisited (1981) miniseries ▪ The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith ▪ and I have to mention Purple Noon (1960), my favorite film, just because it is the first adaptation of the first Ripley book ▪ The Secret History by Donna Tartt [another fav book] -rolledover from autumnal mood -books on my tbr 📚 ▪ Ticky by Stella Gibbons ▪ Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey ▪ Possession by A.S. Byatt, which can also connect to The Romantics below

💠 ℂ𝕒𝕡𝕠𝕥𝕖'𝕤 𝕊𝕨𝕒𝕟𝕤 & 𝕞𝕚𝕕-𝕔𝕖𝕟𝕥𝕦𝕣𝕪 𝕘𝕝𝕒𝕞𝕠𝕦𝕣

-currently reading Capote's Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era by Laurence Leamer, which I've had for a while but am now reading because it is the basis for the new season of Feud: Capote vs. The Swans (series on FX) -Answered Prayers by Truman Capote is now one of the next books I want to buy -I read a couple articles pertaining to the book and surrounding figures, which then lead me to watching the documentary Always at the Carlyle (2018)

💠 ƑคเгץՇคɭєร

-I am in my fairytale era 🧚🏼‍♀️✨️🦢⛲️🪷❄️🏹🍎🪞🥀🫧🪺 -seedlings were planted back in December with reading E.T.A. Hoffmann's and Alexandre Dumas' Nutcracker stories, and watching Frozen for the first time and then reading "The Snow Queen" by Hans Christian Andersen -it was cemented with rewatching Donkey Skin (Peau d'ane) (1970) early in the month and then reading that fairytale 💍 -I've continued / am now I'm continuing to do that with other titles ▪ "The Red Shoes" 👠 ▪ "12 Dancing Princesses" 🩰 ▪ Up Next: "The Little Mermaid" 🧜🏼‍♀️ -specifically, watching (or rewatching) Czech and Soviet adaptations ▪ Снежная королева (The Snow Queen) (1957) ❄️ ▪ Three Wishes for Cinderella (1973) 🦉 ▪ Perinbaba (1985) 🌨 ▪ Up Next: Русалочка (1976) and Malá mořská víla (1976) (both are "The Little Mermaid") 🧜🏼‍♀️, and Двенадцать месяцев (The Twelve Months) (1973) -and on my immediate tbr is The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter 📕

💠 𝔐𝔬𝔬𝔡𝔶 𝔞𝔫𝔡 𝔈𝔱𝔥𝔢𝔯𝔢𝔞𝔩 𝔉𝔢𝔪𝔪𝔢

-this is the only way I can think of describing this mood/interest and it's not even a complete phrase, just adjectives of the aesthetic -I'm just listing movies and books that illustrate this to me ▪ Currently Reading: Brutes by Dizz Tate ▪ Currently Watching: Jean Rollin's vampire films: The Shiver of the Vampires (1971), Fascination (1979), The Living Dead Girl (1982), Two Orphan Vampires (1997) ⚰ ▪ on my book wishlist is Mine-Haha: or On the Bodily Education of Young Girls by Frank Wedekind, which was adapted into the film Innocence (2004) 🌳 ▪ I swear I had other things to put here, but I can always do updates posts later -taken from one of my Letterboxd tags "ethereal femme horror" which I started/came up with when I first watched a couple Jean Rollin films late last summer

🏹 [Also, Fairytale + Moody and Ethereal Femme = my "growing up in a land far far away" list on LB]

💘 𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝚁𝚘𝚖𝚊𝚗𝚝𝚒𝚌𝚜

-in October I watched Haunted Summer (1988) and rewatched Gothic (1986) and in doing so I realized I haven't read much from Lord Byron. I then bought his Selected Poems and Don Juan 📜 -reading his work is also likely to lead to finding a biography about him, and works by and about the other Lake Geneva attendees: Mary Wollstonecraft (Shelley), Percy Bysshe Shelley, Claire Clairmont, John Polidori (I have previously read Frankenstein and The Vampyre)

💘 ᑘᘉᕼᓰᘉᘜᘿᕲ ᘺᓍᘻᘿᘉ / ᖴᘿᘻᗩᒪᘿ ᖇᗩᘜᘿ

-at the beginning of January I really wanted to start reading Boy Parts by Eliza Clark, but soon afterwards I found out an internet booktube friend died suddenly, so I was a little out of it last month. Boy Parts was actually on her 2024 tbr, so I definitely want to get to it soon when the spur strikes again. 📷 -honestly, since finding out about her death, though it has taken me some time, I'm even more determined to get to books and movies I've been wanting to read and to watch for years! things I've put off because of high expectations or whatever. things I think will be new all-time favs, 5/5 stars, etc. I'm going to read them! and one of those is A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers 🍖🍇 -I'm now realizing, when you think about it, certain Jean Rollin films could probably be categorized here 🧛🏼‍♀️

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