#i might also try and make it witchcrafty | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

the-whispers-of-death · 4 days

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something something what if its *only* the magic user!reader who dies. maybe because of their affinity and innate connection to death, theyre hardcore haunting their house. maybe they died in the process of the ressurection (a life for a life or something like that)

i imagine he lived a bit away from town, yknow, as witches and wizards often do. i mean with all the trinkets and oodles and magical doodads used in witchcraft, its understandable why. or maybe he just liked the solitude of it all, and only afterwards the boys moved in? idk, just a vague thought so the plot makes sense. maybe.

if we lean into the witchcrafty side... what if reader had a familiar as well. idk, lets say a crow or a wolf. i like to imagine that they are pseudo-immortal beings. it wouldnt die alongside reader (if the cutesy animal companion baby dies i can and do cry. violently. a psa) but it also fully refuses to leave the body alone. or their bedroom. or grave

maybe criminal!stone and serial killer!stone had their separate living spaces outside the readers witch hut (with kali most likely wanting to go live with serial killer!stone, if i understand his character properly?. wait not retcon that i forgot serial killer stone was fucking dead, unless someone kept paying for the house, they HAVE to live together w someone now)

so like. what do they even do now. theres a now ownerless house, a lone magical critter, a persistent ghost!reader and a whole lotta fucking drama now.

... something something an attempt on bringing reader back to life using the same spells (BAD IDEA BTW... but kinda in character ig) or maybe they left a will somewhere thats like "take my fucking books and dont you dare lose them. i WILL be back, if not by your hands then by mine alone."

or.. the familiar maybe slooooowly feeding magic into ghost!reader now and eventually, after so *so* long, they are pseudo-tangible. maybe they cant touch or interact with objects still, but hes not flickering either. hes just. there. being transparent and visible to the world and seeing the world back

idk. i tried to write this ask like 5 times and i still dont know if it was worded in a way that makes sense, but when in doubt, fuck it we ball

~ rusty

Kali and Serial Killer!Stone are homeless because the house he and Serial Killer!Stone were living in when Kali died got raided by law enforcement (because they were looking for Serial Killer!Stone) and so Serial Killer!Stone had just been living out in "safe houses" that were really just abandoned warehouses before he met you.

So I imagine they both stay and live in your house, if not also Criminal!Stone staying in the house too so he could feel your presence around him even if he couldn't see or touch you.

If anyone would be dumb enough to try and bring you back, it'd be Serial Killer!Stone. He feels so guilty that he's the reason you died and his life's always supposed to end in tragedy so he might as well be the life taken in the "a life for a life" resurrection spell. Besides, he's hopped universes, surely if any of the three have magic, it's him.

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the-interpersonal-is-political · 6 years

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Sometimes people “admit” to being evil because they’re good people with shitty self-esteem.

There’s been posts going round for a while about how if someone says they’re good at manipulating people / lying / persuading people with charm, then they are probably not actually very good at manipulating people - because if they were good at it then they’d keep it secret. Also they are probably horrible people who think manipulating people is cool and edgy. So you shouldn’t be afraid of them manipulating you, but you should stay away from them because they are terrible.

This is really intensely frustrating to me because, well - I’m charming, sometimes. I’m not going to say that I have Amazing Social Skills Level 9000, because also sometimes I embarrass myself and sometimes I rub people the wrong way and sometimes I get in stupid fights for no reason.

But sometimes I walk into a party and within half an hour, half of the people there are gathered around my armchair listening raptly to me answer people’s questions about stuff I keep trying to clarify I know nothing about. Sometimes I gather a group together for a roleplaying club or a workshop or something and they accidentally become my fan club, start calling themselves my cult semi-jokingly, and offer to run errands for me. Sometimes I meet someone and flirt with them, and within a day they’re buying me expensive jewellery, within a week they’re madly in love with me and within a month they’re offering to pay my bills.

This is a whole mixture of different things. Some of them are morally neutral, like being pretty. Some of them are arguably questionable, like being good at knowing how to ask for things or being confident/arrogant. Some of them are prosocial, like being good at structuring problems and making things clear, so that people end up wanting to listen to me because they will learn useful things from it. Some of them are clearly morally positive, like how I enjoy doing nice things for people and making them happy, and if they want to do nice things in return then that’s bonus points I guess but not the point.

But there’s definitely a trend, among some people (cough it’s the same group of people who fall for geek social fallacy cough), toward only seeing the bad parts. People who talk a lot about “status” and “popular cliques” and etc don’t really look at the part of the model where perhaps people like me because I do good things for them; their model is that it’s just this unfair thing that happens because I’m pretty. And there are also people, and writers, and groups, which see this kind of thing as inherently creepy. If people automatically like you, it’s because you’re somehow mind-controlling them with your witchcrafty ~social power~. There’s occasionally a really icky misogynist bent to this stuff - if you’re a girl and people like you, it’s because you’re manipulating them with your ~sly feminine wiles~.

So you end up with people like me, who are really fucking unsure how to feel about the whole business! On the one hand, I’m proud that I do good things for people and that people appreciate them. On the other hand, I have a whole bunch of anxiety about how maybe I have evil social witchcraft powers. People offer me nice things, and half of me goes “yes that sounds wonderful” and the other half goes “oh god, I did it again, didn’t I? I evilly manipulated me into offering me nice things! I’m so sorry for whatever I did that persuaded you to think I deserve nice things!”

I am working on developing a much healthier way of thinking about this. To the extent possible, I am scrubbing my mind and memories and internet feeds of the “status/popularity = social skills = manipulation and deceit = evil witchcraft” type of ideas and posts and memes. They are Banned From Entering My Brain. I am avoiding interacting with people who have other kinds of unhealthy ways of thinking about this stuff, like lashing out at socially confident people on a “what if they’re dangerous manipulators!!!!1111!!11!” basis. I am doing my best to avoid a binary where either social skills have to be Just About Being Nice So If You’re Against Them It’s Because You’re Mean or social skills have to be Deeply Manipulative And Inherently A Barrier To Truthseeking.

But I’m fairly far along, at this point, in the whole “developing a healthier way of thinking about this” thing. I’m certainly much better off than I was a year ago. A year ago I was in a fairly shitty state.

The fairly shitty state I was in looked a bit like:

I noticed that people often liked me, even though I felt like I didn’t deserve it.

People were helping me get out of my shitty abusive situation with my parents, but I was still in the stage of “but what if I wasn’t really abused? my parents said I was just crying for attention, what if they were right? isn’t it normal to hit your kid and threaten them and destroy their possessions?” and so I had a whole bunch of anxiety about whether I was manipulating people into helping me. Plus I was a rare girl in a lot of male-dominated groups, with a bunch of internalised misogyny that manifested in weird ways, like getting it into my head that I could never be well-liked the way that boys are well-liked but perhaps I could use my feminine wiles to seduce everyone.

People trying to compliment me told me that I was pretty and a good writer and that I gave nice hugs, and I internalised that and felt good about myself and decided it would be a trait of mine that I could be proud of, but then I encountered all of the “social status is actually manipulative and it’s very bad to be persuasive because it’s anti-truthseeking” memes and that threw me into a whole bunch of self doubt.

So I went around telling people that I was manipulative and they couldn’t trust me. Because I fucking believed it! Because people did nice things for me, and I didn’t know why and I certainly didn’t deserve it, so surely they must have been doing the nice things for me because I evilly tricked them into it.

I wrote shitty call-outs for myself about how terribly manipulative and deceitful and persuasive I was because I felt like people needed to be warned in advance, like, “just so you know, I’m pretty, and that might bias you into liking me even though you shouldn’t like me, so... be on your guard!”

You can say that I shouldn’t have been vain enough to believe that I’m actually charming enough to magically make people like me, but it’s not like people won’t accuse you of it if you don’t already believe it about yourself. (Someone you dislike is more popular than you? Say that everyone’s biased towards them due to their manipulative social skills! It’s a fucking classic in nerd communities, especially used against women, because we’re used to being low-status and banding together against the popular cliques who think we’re uncool for liking Star Wars.)

I mean, it’s true that I have never actually been very good at manipulating people, and that if I were good at manipulating people then I wouldn’t go around TELLING everyone about that. But that was sort of the point; I was trying to nerf myself, to make sure that I couldn’t accidentally manipulate people by giving them advance warning.

I’m so done with “when people tell you what they are, believe them” type rhetoric. Sometimes people go around warning everyone about their terrible bad traits because they have scrupulosity issues, or anxiety, or terrible self-esteem. If someone tells you they’re a piece of shit, sometimes the correct response is to accept that and avoid that person, but often the better response is - hey, who told you that about yourself? You’re not a piece of shit. You deserve better. I know enough about you to decide for myself whether I like you, and you don’t need to shout about all of your bad traits because you don’t think I ought to like you. How can I help you deal with the issues that are making you feel that way?

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