#i was gonna post this on my vanessa blog but i've been posting a lot there so i'll put it here <3

[softcitrus2345]

Hey three questions?

Are requests open besides commissions?

Do you have any female ocs?

Will requests solely be for your ocs?

Three answers!

1. Unfortunately no, I don't have requests open. I can't afford to do art for others for free, and now that I just got my first job I'm gonna be a lot busier than I used to be, so finding the time/motivation to draw is gonna be harder for me to navigate

Also I feel like it defeats the purpose of me having commissions open while also making art catered for others for free, I gotta make money somewhere yknow

And from what I've seen in this community a lot of the requests artists get are for one-off prompts or characters, which just isn't my cup of tea. I can't get invested in a character or a drawing that is just like a one-time thing, if that makes sense?

I don't want that to snowball with me getting flooded with requests from people for random prompts they wanna see drawn out

I hope that makes sense, and please don't see this as me being upset at the question, I just like to be thorough with my answers and explain why /gen

2. I do! Unfortunately not a whole lot that I draw, my main female oc is Vanessa, and I just love her to bits. Her and Damien are stuck like glue so most of my drawings of her also include her lovely hubby~

If you're wondering about me drawing female weight gain, I'm just not really into that, for a number of reasons, but the main one being my feelings towards the female weight gain community, and how it treats women mostly just as an object for pleasure. As an afab person, it just makes me really uncomfortable how I see women portrayed in the feedism community, since from what I can tell most of the people that create/seek out that kind of content are cishet men just looking to get off.

I know that's not the entire female wg community but it's unfortunately the majority of what I've encountered, and it's just turned me off from the subject completely. There are *very* few times I'll see female weight gain portrayed in a way I can appreciate, and those few are like little gold nuggets that I gotta find by sifting through all the shitty stuff, it's just not worth it for me

It just feels dehumanizing, idk

As a fat person who has always been fat, and who is (unfortunately) still perceived by the general public as female, I've seen first hand the way society treats people like me, the backhanded comments and fatshaming and diet culture, and the horrible things I've been called before.. I see it all too often in the female feedism community, it's just a big no no for me overall

Sorry, I kinda went off on a tangent there, hope I didn't derail this post too much-

3. If I were to ever open up requests, I would say yes, they would only involve my ocs. I use this blog sort of as a public sandbox, where I can just kinda play around with my ocs and share my art with you all. I want the focus to be on my ocs and my own original content, with the exception of my friends and mutuals ocs which I do enjoy drawing from time to time

TLDR, yes, if I hypothetically opened requests they would only be for my ocs, just to keep my blog clear of clutter and random prompts I'm not interested in. I don't want to add another layer of stress to my life with requests and stuff that I can't keep up with

Maybe someday TTwTT

But yeah! Thank you for your questions, anon, it's always nice to have a prompt like this so I can share my thoughts, however messy they may be TTwTT

#softcitrus asks #softcitrus rambles #softcitrus ocs #niche blog #holy shit that was a lot XD #with every new ask I respond to I realize how much of a yapper I am DBFDNN-

[destinyc1020]

I really dislike people that think they know the chemistry of a real life couple even though we just get glimpses of them. This is like the people that say that Tom and Z don't look good together. They really don't give a fuck if strangers don't like what they perceive is their chemistry when they've made clear their relationship is sacred and private not about entertaining the public. And I would say something similar about Austin and Kaia. Kaia may like her pap walks once in a while but Austin and Kaia life is not a reality show selling their relationship. I'm not saying that they are each other's soulmates but they have been together already for 2 years so it's not just a fling

Wth??

Tom and Z have AMAAAAAAZZZZING chemistry with each other, what are you talking about lol? 😅😂

Nobody has EVER said that Tom and Zendaya lack chemistry at all. EVER. Not even when they were pretending to be "just friends" lol 😆

You can NOT show PDA in public and still exude excellent chemistry with each other, just like Tom and Zendaya did during the 1.0 era.

Just because SOME antis don't like them together doesn't change the fact that Tom and Z have always had wonderful, palatable, "Best friend", "soul mate", lover type energy with each other for years. Chemistry that quite frankly, I never saw them have, when they were dating other people 😆

Re: Austin and Kaia (Kaustin)

I've been saying since 2022 that smthg seems off about their rlshp. Look, I read body language pretty well. I'm the one who did posts upon posts of "Tomdaya Energies" on my blog. You can go back and search. 😏

Sometimes, your gut just senses things. 🤷🏾‍♀️ I can't explain it. But Kaustin has always usually given me "Big Brother" vibes lol 😆

Even if you just go and Google a search of Austin and Vanessa, or even Austin and Lily Rose Depp, the vibe is very different from what I've ever seen him with Kaia.

They're a cute couple ngl (I haven't heard anyone saying they don't look good together), but I have yet to sense the same vibe with her that he had with Vanessa.... not even by a long shot lol 😅

Nobody said Kaustin is a fling. Where did you get that from? 🤔 After two years, I assume they're not?

But ppl commenting on vibes and chemistry is just that. Plain and simple. You can only go by what you see, right? 🤷🏾‍♀️

Nobody is saying they need to break up or smthg rofl 🤣 People are just noticing and picking up on stuff.... and apparently I'm not the only one picking up on this stuff.

Look, to each his/her own... I'm not gonna judge who someone chooses to date... They may end up marrying each other for all I know. 🤷🏾‍♀️ That's their choice.

I only go by what my gut tells me and what I see and sense with my own eyes. 👀

But to try and lump Kaia and Austin into the same boat as Tom and Zendaya is just NONSENSE to me lol 😆

We all know that a lot of ppl/antis don't like Tom and Z together for racist reasons. 🙄 It had nothing to do with a "lack of chemistry", cuz there's been no instance when that's even been the case with them.

[naffeclipse]

So, about that specialty as a fanfic writer post! I've been thinking about it a bit and wondering what to say that isn't just repeating all my gushing I've already done about your writing in general, but then I realized the post says fanfic author specifically so I'm gonna focus on just that! (thinking about fanfic as its own kind of genre in a way, even though definitions like that can get pretty complicated on what constitutes what but I digress and it's just the start of the ask fkjghskjdgh)

So anyways! I think your specialty as a fanfic author, regarding what I know about fanfic, the communities, and all the shapes it can take, is the construction of a story and the way you put the characters of the source material in it. And I know this might sound pretty general for fanfic (your writing is so good in general after all XD), but I'd explain it like this:

You are incredibly good at creating a world, a plot, with its own rules that might be completely different to the source material, and yet the way you build the characters is very recognizable. Of course when it comes to Sun and Moon, there really isn't that much that canon offers to us, but the few aspects that we do have, the fandom has kept secure and transformed, analyzed, subverted and played around with them to create many wonderful scenarios! And I just absolutely love the way you play with all of them! And not just Sun and Moon! You clearly know a lot about fnaf in general and you apply that to make the AU you are working on all the much richer! The way afton is always this looming evil figure, in whatever version you are using (glitchtrap or the man himself), how you have had different versions of Vanessa, from a vicious antagonist, to a friend trapped by the circumstances (just like it's up to interpretation in the games!) and how there is also glimpses to such a wider story whenever you mention characters like Michael or Charlie, or even Freddy.

But then you are also very good at sticking to your plot! Fanfic is, of course, a medium to have fun and exploring all sorts of branches to a story is fun (and you do that a lot in your blog too, which I absolutely love and will always be excited about!), but when it comes to a world you have planned, the specific fanfic you are writing, I'm just so impressed how you can choose what to focus on, and while you imply things, you know what is relevant to the story you want to tell, and how to stick to it, even though worldbuilding about all the rest of the source material tends to be very tempting, but might not be what the story requires from a technical standpoint. Again, I feel there's no wrong way to go about fanfic! It's just the method you use is very, like, precise? And for what you want to achieve i'ts just perfect! You figure out what your structure is, what your plot needs, and the fun thing is that if we wonder about the rest, what goes beyond the story or little details you feel might not be able to be included, we can still send asks about them! So it's not like it's lost or anything. You have your beginning, your middle and your end and you nail them every time! It's so cool!!

So yeah! I think your specialty as an author of fanfic in particular, is your way of figuring out what you want to do with your story, structuring and building it really well, and knowing how to make the characters fit the world while maintaining all those little references to canon, no matter how different the world is to the source material!

Sources (aka fanfics I had in mind while writing this XD): Deep Dreams, Sleuth Jesters, and Cryptid Sightings.

Chaotik, I've been rereading this over and over and I am completely melted. I'm just a puddle now, thank you ♥ You are so sweet and kind, ahhh! I'm gonna smooch you on your head *smooch*

#i'm so happy rn #this ask has been one i've read so many times just because it gives me happy butterflies #chaotikanvas #compliments

[essayofthoughts]

🌠🎈💝

For the ask game :D

✨What’s a fic you’ve posted you wish you could breathe life into again and have people talking about it? (or simply a fic you wish got more credit)

Uhhh. Keeping it to Critical Role only (because I think I've gone on at length about my opinions on my favourite of my other fics) I think probably even his worst for the main question and Ride A Rearing Dragon for the parenthesis.

even his worst is a close-focus Percy character study set basically right after the Feast and Crimson Diplomacy and is meant to act as in insight into his headspace then. It's one of the first fics I ever wrote for this fandom and I'm so so pleased with some of my phrasing and similes in it - but it's not Perc'ahlia so it tends to get ignored.

I really don't like the way fandom prioritises ship content over all other kinds of fic.

The other fic, Ride A Rearing Dragon is about Vanessa Cyndrial and a little about Osysa and with a mention of Murtin. Because of the phenomenal job Mercer does with all of the NPCs, they all get to feel as real as the player characters, and while everyone knows that for the more prominent faves like Gilmore and Allura, Victor and Kynan - it's true for all of them, Desmond, Samson... and those we see of the Slayer's Take. I wanted to explore that, and to wonder how exactly leadership of an Iounian monster-hunting organisation might be passed on.

🎈describe your style as a writer; is it fixed? does it change?

I would personally describe my style as a writer as veering between character study and what if with a tendency to get wordy and deep in the weeds and a persistent liking for stories of traumatised characters. There's a lot of like... surface? shifting of style? in how I write, because I default to third-person focalised storytelling, which means I'm telling it from damn near close to inside a character's head and so the narration will take on aspects of their personalities. As you especially can verify - when I'm not writing Percy, I can get much less wordy write in a much more relaxed, casual way, while when I'm writing Percy...

Boy is wordy.

But the thing is, I don't consider that to be a real style change - the underlying style using third-person focalised and digging into how they express themselves in that narration as characterisation is all still there. The difference is the character and how they express themselves.

If that makes sense. Maybe I'm just rambling.

💝what is a fic that got a different response than you were expecting?

Basically all of my The Touch That Grounds fics? They're fluff! They're largely substanceless! But people seem to have really liked them and commented on them more than I'd thought. I did put in some character study stuff, to act as lead-in and lead-up to the prompted touches, and people seem to have been thrilled with them but I don't personally consider those notes very special - I've put much the same character study notes on my blog in metas and analysis and in my other, longer fics.

But I guess because those are meta posts on tumblr and the other fics are longer and angstier people find these things being noted in fluff fics revelatory? I dunno.

I just. I like my angst, and I like some genuine tragedy to things, and I like a good exploration of trauma. I don't really understand what people find so fulfilling in fluff so much. I know there's something, or else it wouldn't be so popular, and I like it fine, when I'm in a mood for something light like that, but... I generally prefer something denser that I can sink my teeth into. I don't get why people get so thrilled over fluff.

So when my fluff things do well it's always gonna baffle me a bit because to me, I've expressed and elaborated on these thoughts before, better in other fics and it surprises me to see the idea get suddenly latched onto when I sketch it out briefly in a tiny fluffy oneshot.

Maybe it just puts a better spotlight on it? I dunno.

#fic things #fandom things #writing things #blorbologist #ask game #ask