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shinneth · 4 years

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subject to future deletion

Normally I wouldn’t resort to that and I might end up being too lazy to do it anyway, but between getting sick again, dealing with some very intense verbal abuse every day irl, and the monthly burdens of the gender, I’m really not in a good place right now and I need to vent something.

It’s officially gotten bad enough to interfere with my ability to write, even though I’m at a point in my current story that I’ve been very eager to reach... and every step of the way I’m struggling to write it and I hate what I currently have and it’s taking everything in my current power to not just scrap it entirely.

Basically, I think I’m failing as a writer.

The irl stuff is actually not what I’m gonna get into because it’s really nothing new and it’ll probably resolve itself, but the side-effect of suffering that kind of negativity is that it enhances lingering negative feelings you’ve had about other things.

Namely, things you do to get away from the pains of the real world. The things you do to have fun and get some enjoyment out of life, no matter how challenging it is to be in this thing because it’s so wrongfully derided and demonized by the majority of your peers.

I try to keep telling myself it’s just because I’m still relatively very new to the fandom compared to my contemporaries, but as I’m typing this right now and listening to my favorite wrestler Shelton Benjamin in an interview, immediately I see the pit I’m starting to fall into.

Like, it’s uncanny. This is what he said as I started on the above paragraph:

“If I sit and constantly compare myself to other people’s successes, you would drive yourself crazy. Because no matter what, there’s always someone who’s gonna be more successful.”

“I need to remember where I come from; how far I’ve came.”

Basically, in the very small world of Stevidot (and to a lesser extent, SU’s fandom as a whole), despite my efforts, I feel very much like the Shelton Benjamin in a small, dedicated group of talented Stevidot content creators.

Which is to say, I’m basically a midcarder in the mix with a bunch of top-tier legends. Shelton graduated from the same group as some modern very well-known mainstream stars that I can easily associate with a very well-known and accomplished Stevidot contributor.

Shelton graduated with the likes of John Cena, Brock Lesnar, Dave Batista, and Randy Orton. At least half of those names should be at least vaguely familiar for my followers as most of them have had such great success that they’re known in avenues beyond wrestling (save for Randy Orton, but he’s well past outshined his father as a legendary wrestler who’ll never be forgotten).

I could easily say Watcher is the John Cena of Stevidot, while Platon’s probably the Brock Lesnar... sinderella0069′s the Batista. But I honestly don’t feel like I’ve done enough (or stood out enough) to even be a Randy Orton for this pairing. I’d at least give that honor to Ig just for being so active with it on Tumblr despite the wave of hatred thrown her way (even though she’s shifted focus onto Stevinel now).

Again, I keep trying to tell myself that it’s because I’m not even remotely as tenured in the fandom as any of them are.

Then I see this said in a review on a very recently-made Stevidot story...

And said reviewer has not once ever left a review on any Stevidot story of mine. Not even a follow or a favorite or a goddamned kudos. Considering I currently have an actively-updated Stevidot story going on (and a two-shot that I just did last month), I highly doubt my stuff was just overlooked.

Now, is it true that Stevidot is hard to come by? Of course it is. But this isn’t the first time I’ve seen a fellow Stevidot fan lament about the lack of Stevidot content while completely disregarding anything I contribute.

I know there’s one that outright doesn’t like my content based on personal taste (nothing to do with Stevidot itself, just how I execute it). There’s another big-name who shows no interest whatsoever in reading what I have to offer - and at this point I feel that’s for the best, because I have a feeling they’d hate my execution as well.

While I’ve always primarily written for myself, I also felt a great fulfillment for providing content for a niche crowd that really deserves more than what they have. I think Stevidot’s a fantastic pairing with tons of unexplored potential and should be much more readily available than it actually is. Even if I tend to not get many reviews, I keep track of the site traffic every day on my stories and I know for sure that there are people reading my stuff. Since I’m really bad at leaving reviews myself, I go out of my way not to whine about not having very many overall for my series since I’d be a huge-ass hypocrite to do so.

However.

Statements like the the aforementioned review and statements I’ve seen elsewhere by those who I know are at least aware of me are like stakes through the heart.

Because it can only mean one thing: my content doesn’t count.

I’m honestly not sure which is worse for me; being critically panned for the stuff I’ve put my all into over the past year, or being treated like my stuff doesn’t even exist.

I prided myself on contributing as much as I did for Stevidot over this past year. Quantity doesn’t = automatic quality, but I’ve got 20+ years of writing experience in, so even someone with a shit self-esteem like myself can’t just say I’m an objectively bad writer, because I’m not.

But apparently it doesn’t matter that I put in over half a million worlds in the name of Stevidot to a good chunk of the very tiny Stevidot fanbase; according to them, my contributions are irrelevant.

Is it my fault?

One thing I will admit is a detriment to my particular brand of Stevidot is that, save for one story (which happens to be by far my most successful Stevidot story in terms of recognition numbers), the rest of my series follows a continuous narrative that greatly deviates from canon as of Change Your Mind. I’m also notoriously a very verbose kind of writer - I have the tl;dr curse something fierce.

So all stories I’ve written since my main 3-act series (which ended up being nearly 200k in length on its own) have been direct sequels to that. Because of the heavy deviation from CYM, the environment of the following stories is very different and easy to get lost in if you skipped GA entirely.

Because there are so many dangling threads and new opportunities to be had after GA ended, I basically committed myself to my AU.

It’s not like anyone else is going to explore these possibilities.

Beyond that, honestly, I just don’t want to rewire my brain back to the canon status quo - not after the shitloads of character development I’ve not only given Steven and Peridot, but nearly everyone at this point has had a moment or two of really intense character growth.

I like having Peridot co-star with Steven. I like having her become a more competent and active teammate than she’s portrayed in canon (while still giving her comic relief moments). I like that I didn’t redeem the Diamonds and instead had them killed off to force our protagonists to deal with the fallout of the collapse of a mighty empire on a much grander scale than what’s going on in the actual show.

In a way, this AU of mine has helped me cope with the shortcomings of the show itself. I already went on a stupid tirade once about how the sadistic nature of my writing has basically made me no-sell whatever trauma Rebecca Sugar’s throwing on Steven and upsetting everyone else. I’m still fairly certain I’m still outdoing her in that department.

And because 100% of my passion for creating Stevidot is through this narrative I weaved, I have no desire to leave it.

So I’ll admit my stories aren’t exactly the most accessible to the average reader who hasn’t been following my work since Day 1.

Then again... I first got into Sinderella’s series completely ass-backwards at first. I eventually read it in the proper order, and like many of the great Stevidot epics, it’s canon divergent from a much earlier point in the series, so it was very easy to get confused about why certain things happened differently at first... but ultimately, I wasn’t that bothered by it because I just wanted some good Stevidot. I’d figure out the finer details later.

I really do owe this author more props than I’ve actually given - she’s one out of two readers I know for a fact have been following my series since the beginning without missing a beat. I’ll probably review her newest story sooner or later now that it’s complete.

Not gonna lie, though... when I saw our numbers side-by-side like this:

Considering they’re very similar stories (Stevidot smuts that were originally meant to be one-shots), mine is over a month old and hers is only a few days old and there’s already that big of a gap in our numbers?

It’s hard not to feel like a failure; like I did something horribly wrong to suck this bad by comparison.

I really should stress that I bear no ill will against Sinderella or any Stevidot author; this isn’t a competition, so this isn’t a matter of popularity. I knew coming into this that I wouldn’t get popular overnight; especially not with such an unpopular ship being the focus of my story.

But when other Stevidot stories get frequent reviewers that I’ve never seen once acknowledge my stories even passively, I can’t help but feel like I’ve massively fucked up somewhere. That despite all my efforts, I might as well be invisible. When they say “Oh, good thing your story is here! It’s been such a Stevidot drought around here until you came along!” to other authors after I’ve written half a million fucking words in under a year for this ship...

You know, is it unreasonable to feel that I utterly fucking failed in several ways?

I guess it’s no wonder why I’m struggling to keep writing. I still want to - like I said, I’m at a part I’ve been eager to write for a while now - but ever since I started it, I’ve just hated almost all of what I have so far (almost 8k words). And I’m really having trouble trying to salvage it.

I’m honestly not the type who’d scrap all my progress and start from scratch once I’ve gotten this far in. But maybe I’ll have to make an exception this time, because I think I finally made the mistake of trying to write while being mentally and emotionally distraught.

I thought I’d calm down once I wrote all this out, but honestly, I’m not really feeling it. Now I’m wondering if I should have just reached out to someone instead of making this, because now I’ll come off as a whiner with my pansy-ass first-world problems.

But then again, I’d be an asshole to subject anyone to my idiotic woes.

Maybe this’ll pass. I’m hoping it’ll pass. I really, really really really don’t want to lose my drive to write again. I was used to it coming and going in short and random spurts for almost all my life - then it finally came to me and stayed with me just a little under a year ago, and I’ve been desperate not to let it go because I’ve been more productive now than I’ve ever been in my 20+ tenure as a writer.

I don’t want this to go away. There’s still so much more I want to tell.

But then my logic goes... if you tell the story and no one’s there to hear it, is it ever really told?

#irl shit #stevidot #fanfiction #writing #self-esteem issues #self-worth issues #a cry for help #or therapy #or something #I probably shouldn't have made this #where did i go wrong

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ittakesrain · 4 years

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and now, an essay thing I have nowhere else to publish

One of my most vivid memories is of what happened one sunny April morning when I was sixteen. My parents had brought me to a random doctor’s office for a random appointment, and it pissed me off because I should have been in school. I should have been sitting in my AP chemistry class learning about radiation. It would require so much time to catch up on all of what I missed, and even though I was acing the class, the ever-present whispers of derisive thoughts emanating from my brain were particularly loud that day. Their volume increased until they were almost deafening, until I could barely hear the sound of blood rushing through my head, until I could barely concentrate on standing up, barely fight to stay on my feet as black spots clouded my vision. They told me everything would go to shit because I was going to fail chemistry and not get into college and never amount to anything. They told me I should have fucking been in class.

But instead, I was pacing in the waiting room of this strange, unfamiliar office, painfully cold as always despite my layers upon layers of clothing. I had my belt pulled tight, as it was the only thing holding my baggy 00 jeans onto my ghostly and withered body. I genuinely didn’t know why I was there, yet I had an overpowering feeling that something life-shattering was about to happen.

A nurse called me back. I followed her into an exam room. She instructed me to undress entirely and put on a gown. I did, and it finally hit me what was coming. Panicked apprehension coursed through my veins with every pained, frantic beat. She told me she had to get my height. I slid off the exam table to be measured, stood tall, steadying my shaky hands as they fell to my sides. Five feet.

Then, with nerves reaching an insurmountable level, she told me to stand on the scale. The heavy-duty, never-inaccurate, medical-grade scale. I stepped carefully onto it, as if I didn’t already know what it was going to say. A lifetime passed by in a second, my heart stopped as time froze. The machine beeped as it landed on what it had declared as my weight. I didn’t look, I didn’t look, I didn’t look. Nothing was happening. Don’t look, don’t look. But after I’d stood there forever and ever, holding the air in my lungs until it hurt, I looked at the nurse. She was staring at me. I breathed out. I looked at the scale. I sucked a lung-full of oxygen into my body involuntarily.

My heart leaped at the number, three pounds below what I’d last seen, and then plummeted into a free-fall. There was no derisive voice in my head telling me I wasn’t good enough. There was just a pitter-patter of words bouncing off the edges of my mind, echoing loudly between reverberating silence: Sick. Shame. Sick. Broken. Sick. Sick. Sick.

In the sheer terror of the moment, I had no idea how it had happened, how I’d gotten that way. But the truth was that I was nearly seventeen years old and I weighed sixty-five pounds. And at that point, I knew what I was doing and how I’d gotten that way.

It was simple in the most complex and intricate of ways: I had an eating disorder. And I’d had one for three years. It had been all I’d known for three long years. The gnawing, excruciating hunger that had long since dissipated into expansive internal emptiness. The bitter cold that lay so deep within me that it had settled permanently in my bones. The sheer, unrelenting anxiety, the weighted feeling of impending doom. I’d been trapped.

And in an eternity that lasted only three months, I was released into a freedom I hadn’t realized existed. I could write novels about what happened during those months, those wonderful, terrible, frightening, uncertain, beautiful months. And I will write those novels. But the point is that the identity I’d been chained to for so goddamn long would no longer be attached to me. Being reborn like that? It’s indescribable.

But it’s twelve years later. Twelve fucking years later. And I once again officially fall into the category of “someone with an eating disorder.” Instead of three years, it’s been three months. Instead of being grossly underweight, I’m just 25 or so pounds lighter. But the thoughts, the fears, the discomfort...it’s all there. Again. As if no time has passed. I’m afraid of jelly. I’m afraid. Of fucking. Jelly. I’ve arbitrarily attached emotion to jelly as if the main ingredient of the stuff is “paralyzing anxiety.”

I hate it. I hate that I’m doing this again.

It’s different now, though. I just keep telling myself to “cut the shit.” I’ve done it before. I’m no longer in the dark. I have knowledge. I’m well aware that I can be released into freedom, that the chains holding me to this identity are nothing compared to the supernova of resilience powering all that I am. But I feel too far gone. It scares me.

Not to mention, as I’m ashamed to admit, that I like my body better now. Superficial as it maybe be, it’s a relief to have gotten rid of all the weight I’d gained after getting on the new meds (which, by the way, are a literal gift from whatever god might be up there). I know I shouldn’t like the weight loss, but I do. I have a sick pride in it, just like how I’m stupidly proud of the fact that I was 65 fucking pounds two months before turning 17. With that at least it was because, after three years of suffering, that number was all I had to show for it. But now? I don’t know what the deal is. I guess it’s just nice to be able to be good at something again.

It probably also has to do with control again, with how I desperately want it. It just isn’t making me feel any closer to that elusive concept anymore. Like, why is it that when I’m waging war with myself over the simple act of sitting down to eat, I never have control over the outcome?

It probably has to do with how I was bored. How I wanted to be distracted, wanted something to focus on. How I was morbidly curious.

It probably has to do with the low self-esteem I’ve begun to wear even though it doesn’t feel right on me.

I keep telling myself that I just “went at this a little too hard.” That it was really just an attempt to lose weight gone wrong because my brain naturally just jumps to this shit when life gets stressful. A result of the fact that I’ve never known any sort of middle ground in regards to anything. I’ve never understood healthy dieting. If you want to lose weight, why not just stop eating altogether? It’s a miswired translation code in my head. I’ve never been able to fix it. I’ve only ever worked around it.

Maybe that’s the problem: I never got around to rewiring everything.

When I write, it’s to give people something they can read to understand something. Something they can read to be dragged down to the depths of my mind and come out with my feelings and desires, as fucked up and crazy as they might be, as souvenirs. I don’t think many people need to visit hell, though. I think it’s enough for me to do so.

Maybe writing this will help me rewire. Maybe afterward I’ll remember even more vividly how fucking insanely disgusting my eating disorder was at its peak. Maybe I’ll drag myself down to the depths of my former mind, the mind I used to try like mad to learn an entirely new way of looking at things, processing things, and understanding things. The mind I used to smash the title of “anorexic” into so many pieces that it no longer lingered above my head and next to my name.

I can’t fathom where in the fuck to start. But if my brain is made of wires, the wires are reduced to words. So let’s just call this a beginning.

#personal #thoughts #ed recovery #ed thoughts #eating disorder #eating disorder thoughts #anorexia

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princelucivaryaslana · 5 years

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I need to rant about my D&D character because a lot of heavy shit was revealed to me by the DM last night because even tho we are only 2 sessions in, pure luck and die rolls have accelerated the plot very quickly and i’m dying, it’s very long and i don’t expect anyone to read it, i just love my character and his brother and i’m DYING

So my character is a pink tiefling named Valafar Nemonis, but he goes by Mercy, right. He’s the firstborn of a fallen aasimar named Lillith “Lila” Nemonis and her tiefling husband Barnabas “Carrion” Nemonis, who also happens to be the head of the largest criminal organization in literally the whole continent and is also a VERY powerful politician. Valafar was his dad’s best assassin for YEARS, was deliberately groomed to be such, and he was a force to behold.

There’s a lot of backstory backstory ‘cause this game’s taking place in the same universe that our old campaign took place in, but essentially there are these big amorphous gems that represent and contain the power of each plane of existence, and at one point due to Old Plot Reasons they shattered and now exist as thousands of small shards, which people have found and used for many purposes.

Valafar’s dad, specifically, is in the business of finding as many of these shards as he can because of the power they contain. In order to make Valafar the heartless killer he desired him to be so as to achieve this end, he deliberately groomed Valafar to think himself superior to all but his father and drove a MASSIVE wedge between Valafar and his little brother Iari (who is the spitting image of his grandfather, Barnabas’s abusive dad; it’s tragic), to the point where Iari was moved to the servants’ quarters to separate them physically and was often used as a literal punching bag by both Valafar and Barnabas in Barnabas’s attempts to separate them emotionally, to reasonable success. (This is especially tragic because Valafar and Iari loved each other to the point where a 10-year-old Valafar got his mother’s help in creating a small heart-shaped dangley earring for his 4-year-old brother while their father was absent on business, simply because Iari had come home from an outing with their mother and excitedly told him about “a rose-colored tiefling woman who looked just like you! She was so pretty and had the most beautiful earrings!” He still has the earring. I’m dying inside.)

The problem was, near the end of this training, Barnabas wanted to make sure his son was truly ruthless, and he did so by giving Valafar a puppy to raise, with a name and everything, and then ordered him to kill it a few months later. This trauma, plus the fact that Valafar couldn’t crush the pity he held in his heart for his brother no matter how much his father beat them both over it, led him to make the decision that rewrote his entire everything.

Valafar was sent to complete a botched mission that a few of his father’s underlings had failed to accomplish some weeks before, wherein they not only managed to kill the wife of the man they were after and not the man himself, but also failed to acquisition the piece of the Faewild shard they were sent to take from him. The man was, of course, on his guard this time, and he was able to arm himself with the sword that held the piece of the shard Valafar was after and fight back.

Unfortunately, as providence would have it, three things happened at once: the man’s very young son entered the room upon hearing a racket; Valafar saw the little boy, about whom he had been previously unaware, and immediately realized he didn’t want to kill the man and orphan the child; and the man took Valafar’s hesitation as an opening and chopped Valafar’s shoulder with the sword. The green shard in the sword reacted to the magic that resided thick in Valafar’s blood, and the resulting explosion of green light killed the man, knocked the child unconscious, and bleached Valafar’s once solid-black eyes a fair mint bluegreen and rewired his brain a considerable amount (aka turned him from a lvl 10 assassin rogue into a lvl 1 druid and lowered his Intelligence to 10 in favor of boosting his Charisma).

Panicked, confused, and filled with a resolve he had previously found lacking, Valafar took the unconscious boy to a family in town to raise, stressing very heavily that he needed to leave and that he was relying on them to protect the boy. Then he took to the woods and lived alone for a few years, becoming acquainted with his new abilities, taking on the name Mercy, and desperately formulating a plan to save his brother from their father before it was too late.

Meanwhile, Iari had made massive progress towards becoming a top-class assassin in his attempts to garner his father’s approval and become like his brother his whole life, but with Mercy on the run, his father’s approval still didn’t come; in fact, all he was given were assignments paid for by a new-money noble family across the continent and the overarching assignment to “Bring my son back to me, dead or alive. Do not fail me as you have your whole life.” His despair at his father’s hatred of him paired with his brother’s final abandonment of him unlocked the magic in HIS blood and expedited his growth as a top-tier killer. Now known as The Lavender Death, Iari is the most feared assassin in the entire world, and he is coming after Mercy.

Mercy was given the warning by a messenger from his father’s organization under Iari’s orders and is currently on the run to avoid “running into that little shit until I’m old and ready to die,” now teamed up with a goliath barbarian, a warforged wizard, and a baby silver dragon who recently lost its caretaker (the guy was playing a dragon trainer ranger and quit two sessions in lmao).

Now, the reason that the plot has been accelerated very quickly is because, in an attempt to get out of the city and muddle any trail his brother might use to find him, Mercy asked the warforged’s creator to opened a portal to a random location for him and the goliath, who is also a target of The Lavender Death because he’s the escaped slave and murderer of a few of the members of the new-money noble family Mercy’s dad has contracts with (he’s also the son of a giant slave and a human woman from said noble family, it’s complicated and sad), and where should we be teleported by the luck of the dice

than to Mercy’s home country, three miles away from his home city, near enough that Iari could sense him via their mutual connection to the positive energy plane and begin his game of cat and mouse about three or four LEVELS early

So now we have a level 10 Iari after our little level 4 party of three (and a half) and i’m very scared and very tired and very Emotional and one of three things is gonna happen:

1) Iari is going to kill Mercy and then himself (he goes by the name Parricide, which the DM told me means “to kill someone dear to you” and i’m fuckin dying he still wears the earring Mercy made him 16 years ago the DM’s so cruel) 2) Mercy is going to have to kill Iari and deal with the trauma of watching his baby brother die in his arms because he failed to save him 3) By some power of luck and providence, Mercy will manage to stave off the deaths of his party and Iari long enough to make peace with Iari and become his ally and brother again

If Iari and/or Mercy die, their mother is going to finally get fed up with their father and leave him and take his eye out with Inflict Wounds (oh yeah me mommy is a DEATH CLERIC btw) when he inevitably tries to stop her

If Mercy lives, regardless of Iari’s fate, Mercy’s gonna build up his power and then D E S T R O Y his father

I’M AN EMOTIONAL MESS

TL;DR: My character’s brother is a better assassin than my character was before my character’s levels were replaced with druid levels and now there’s a lot of complicated and heartbreaking plot underway and i’m very emotional about it because I am also irl a shitty favored older sibling who engaged in the mistreatment of my younger sibling and it’s amazing how much life imitates art

#this is very long #it's all just so complex #and i'm so afraid and emotionally exhausted #and i'm in love with everything that's happening #it hurts so good #D&D #Dungeons and Dragons #tieflings #tiefling

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