#just bc i've never really encountered them so they are very alien to me

[prince-liest]

I just wanna gush bc omg I love the 666 series so much. I think it made me realize I might be... furry-ish? adjacent? I just find it so satisfying how you go into detail about the unique body features of both of them, the way it feels to have deer ears or kiss a TV and just generally how much thought is put into the way their bodies work, and I've realized that my interest in that kind of idea is a pretty good reason to partake in more explicitly furry media lmao. Anyways

I'm also really in love with how you maintain the balance of each of their personality traits. Vox is simultaneously so pathetic and cringefail (also your dialogue for him is perfect, I can hear it crystal clear in my head) but also he has vastly more emotional intelligence than Alastor, no doubt at least in part because he has to deal with Val, and he's able to marginally calm down with his obsession to deal with sticky situations, but even then he still retains his personality and bumbles things sometimes because of the flaws in said personality! It's great. I also really appreciate the balance you've struck with Alastor, I feel like often Alastor is either written to either soften up so immediately that it feels disconnected from his character or is written overly mean and heartless for my liking and the way you've written him is such a delicious balance between softer aspects such as the prey instincts or moments of vulnerability and his untouchable and manipulative self, and also the way this side of him is neither written as wholly a front or wholly his real nature and the complex ways this makes him struggle with his increasing vulnerability. TL;DR arghgr your characterization is so good it makes me go a little feral

Also while I'm here, I'm curious whether you can give an answer to the degree to which Alastor is touch-averse. There's obviously a lot of ways in which he fundamentally dislikes touch but it also seems like there's at least some kinds of touch where he doesn't dislike the touch itself so much as he's afraid of the way it brings about feelings of caring and/or enjoyment being cared for. I'm curious how much, in general, you would say his touch aversion comes from either cause and possibly what kinds of touch do/don't provoke those flavors of aversion

Omg, what a lovely ask to receive. Honestly, everything you said that you enjoy about how I characterize these two is very much what I've been actively gunning for, so it's an absolute delight to see it outlined back to me. Success!!! Thank you so much!

And ahaha - I'm not a furry but I fucking love inhuman characters. Being raised in the pits of Homestuck fantroll RP made me enjoy the whole "they're bug/fish aliens" thing and it definitely rears its head again any time I encounter characters with inhuman qualities. I love writing Vox's TV/computer-ness and Alastor's deer and radio bits, and integrating them into who they now are as people.

As for Alastor's touch-aversion: It's funny that you ask about this, because the next chapter of 666 is going to dive into it a bit. Specifically into the fact that it's not, like, a set of boundaries that is consistently defined, and I write him that way on purpose. The very first time he and Vox sleep together, Alastor bottoms. He becomes significantly less amenable to touch after he goes through an uncomfortable rut cycle that gets sexual. By the time Vox convinces Alastor to fuck him, Alastor would never let Vox do that again and frankly only agrees to topping because Vox gave him an option that didn't involve getting his dick out. Then in the next episode, they're having clothes-off sexual contact. So, what gives?

Things that play into Alastor's willingness to touch and be touched as far as Vox is concerned:

How does he see Vox at that point in time? Disgustingly entitled (ew)? Hilariously beneath him (haha who cares)?

Does he care about what Vox thinks of him? Does Vox touching him draw his attention to positive or negative assumptions he has about Vox's perspective on doing so?

What value has he attached to this particular touch in the power balance of their relationship? Is he humoring Vox? Does he assume Vox thinks he's owed this? Does he perceive it as something Vox is genuinely doing for him?

Has he tried this particular kind of touch before? He's pretty willing to experiment, but that doesn't mean he'll do something twice without a compelling reason if he didn't like it the first time.

Is he getting off on this situation sexually? If so, is it fully willing (read: not a byproduct of uncomfortable hormones) on his part? That only really happens when he's in a submissive role and Vox is hitting a few very specific kinks, a major one of which is basically CNC tilted 30 degrees to the left.

Is he enjoying the touch in platonic ways? How does he feel about that? Is it a vulnerability to want something? Is it feeding his ego to be catered to? Is he worried that what he enjoys platonically is being read into in ways he doesn't like?

Is he fucking drunk? Things that bother you when sober often seem like a non-issue when you're not, both on a physical and emotional level.

How much touching has been happening recently? Has he hit his limit? Did he deliberately put himself into a situation earlier to have his limit be hit and surpassed, and now he's in the aftermath?

He does have a certain fundamental purely physical dislike of touch, but it's something that is really affected by how he perceives each individual situation as well as his relationship with Vox at that time, and his previous experiences!

#ask #personal #Anonymous #t #hazbin hotel #my writing #666 live on air #I'm not a furry but the perils of being agender aromantic and asexual #aka the full complement of “none of the above” box checks LOL #means that a lot of the time I feel vaguely detached from the ways people tend to even subconsciously define humanity #I think that's where a lot of my appreciation for inhuman traits in very human characters comes from #(also my favorite SFF genre is “non-human entity struggles with very human emotions” as well a la murderbot and imperial radsch) #(ANYWAY. tangent.) #long post

[secretmessages1983]

was the left hand of darkness hard to get into?? i wanna read so badly but i haven’t read much sci fi and i am… intimidated

i might not be the person to ask just bc i love sf a lot and i also do the thing where if i don't understand some made up term or word in sf i'm just kind of like okay i'll figure it out as a read and is dumb and never really figure out what it means if that makes sense 😭 like it takes me multiple reads to understand some things so i can't always articulate what i've read when it comes to sf

i do think the gender and sexuality of the gethenians can be confusing at first but also it reflects how the main character understands it too i think

i also think the way it's set up narratively can be confusing but that just have been me who had been used to how typical old classic sf usually goes which narratively is also pretty straight forward

personally i feel like if you feel intimidated by sf i think getting an anthology of sf short stories helps because it's more bite sized and manageable i got this one in college and it's full of amazing classic sf authors and authors in general and if i liked a short story in it i would look up the author and find other stuff by them to read like this anthology is what got me to discover octavia butler because i really liked speech sounds

also not pictured but it also has a table of contents split by thematic listing which is very clll so it lists like what stories in it are about say alien encounters or gender and sexuality for example

also if the left hand of darkness seems intimidating i really liked the word for world is forest which is a part of the hainish cycle which takes place in the same setting/universe but the books aren't set in the same worlds so they aren't really tied to one another in a sense

#sorry if this is a lot i just really love science fiction lit it's great #groovy asks #pictured in background my overflowing bookshelf of sci fi lit

[whump-captain]

ok now im curious, i wanna know about bianca!

Omg yes thank u for emabling me i love her so much

So my favourite thing about Bianca is that she dies an awful death pretty early on in the story and she's also the only character who gets what she had wanted throughout it.

Basically I made her when i decided that i wanted to make Kintsugi into a proper novel and realized that i needed a stronger character motivation for Ethan ("curiosity about weird island" was enough for whump shorts but for feature-length i wanted something more defined lol). Since a big inspiration for it were survival horror games (Silent Hill, Dead Space, RE7) and all the lads in these always seem to be looking for someone, I decided to go with that as well: when Ethan crashes on the Weird Island™, he's not alone but accompanied by Bianca. When he wakes up, she's gone, and so he has to find her. Who exactly she is to him has gone through a Bunch of rewrites but i feel like i've finally arrived at an iteration that i really like (and one that doesn't just make her an accessory to the male protag's plot).

Essentially, Bianca should be the protagonist of the story. The alien entity hiding on the island and fucking everything up around the narrative? She's encountered it before and she was forever changed by it, dedicating her whole life to finding it. She has a whole plan, a whole conspiracy plot going on before the novel even begins and all of it gets thrown out of whack when Ethan does something fairly shitty to her that puts all of her life's work in danger. So obviously she tries to murder him.

She only doesn't succeed because the boat crashes but like, that's where she wants to be. That's where the alien is, that's where she can find what she's looking for! And she dies as she finds it! And that's a Good thing, somehow! The happenings on the island upend and ruin the lives of everyone involved with them Except for Bianca whose life is put back on track. In a different story, it would have been an inciting incident for her journey but we're in survival horror and so we follow Ethan who has no business being there whatsoever and for whom everything gets worse.

And like!! His whole Thing, his entire driving force as he crawls through horror after horror, is to find Bianca and apologize to her. The Second he wakes up after the crash he realizes he has Fucked Up and that while she very much owes him an explanation for trying to kill him, he owes her an apology just as much. He has put her future in jeopardy and he won't rest until he makes that right! And he never gets to!

And Bianca doesn't care!! She gets exactly what she wants and her story is complete all the while everyone else's stories are going entirely to shit. She thanks Ethan at the end, all her dreams fulfilled. She's decomposing alive as she does that.

The reader barely even finds out what the hell her deal is!! She's actually present for like 3 scenes bc we're mostly with Ethan who sees her once at the beginning when she has a gun to her head and once towards the end when he begs her not to succumb to what to him is a fate worse than death. It would be a fate worse than death to literally Anyone except Bianca bc she has something fuckin Going On!! And maybe half of it is ever explained, all of it too late to save her!

Fuckin. epitome of Good For Her™. Girl had a goal and she Achieved it!! Should she have? Probably not! But she's literally the only character in the story who isn't left among the ruins of their life so like she's having a better time than all of them lot!

#answers #ocposting #this is so long but hhhhdjdkfgd blorbo

[dykeferatu]

inch resting

#buzz buzz #first of all: the body mutilations one lol yeah that makes sense #second of all: #the animal contaminants one i don't rlly understand bc they weren't rlly contaminating anything it was just kind of like do u hate worms #the restaurant with a former cockroach infestation was tricky bc it's not the roaches that bother me it's what the standards were like in- #-the restaurant to allow an infestation #and honestly i'm not grossed out by cockroaches but they are one of the few bugs in kind of scared of #just bc i've never really encountered them so they are very alien to me #from a distance they are very cool i just think if i had like a pet one on me i would freak out at the slightest movement #i think it's just bc they move fast bc i have had weird shit on me for fun #i volunteered to have a leech on me once. it was part of a college's biology dept so it wasn't just like a wild leech i'm not that weird #i really went on a tangent huh

[goyangii]

How much radfems do you personally know in Korea? What do people tell you when they know you're a radfem?

ok so like just first off i live in america? idk why ppl assume that asians don't...exist in other places like. yes my family is from korea, yes i am korean. but that doesn't make me Korean Authority 101 and fwiw i wouldn't want to live in korea for a multitude of reasons so i can't answer your question the way you probably want,, 

also ive gotten DMs from ppl with weird questions like this as if even if i lived in korea i'm somehow like, this mouthpiece for the culture or as if koreans are some alien species like? i already have to deal with ppl assuming i don't speak english, that i'm not from here, when i go outside fdssgdgds like idk how to impress upon you that it's super highkey annoying to get the online equivalent of ppl saying 'oh! ann yung horse say yo' to me at work, on my blog,,, pls if this is how u guys interact with poc online, don't do this offline. also koreans aren’t like what you see in kpop, kdramas, etc. i have encountered a weird and surprising amt of ppl operating on this assumption and i just. screams. koreans aren’t a monolith, korean culture is heavily patriarchal and this has an impact on the way misogyny is inflicted upon kr women but it’s the minutiae that’s distinct and unique, kr women face (generally) remarkably similar issues to jp women, sea women, white women, hispanic women, etc. such as male violence, restriction of reproductive rights, religiously motivated misogyny (fsr ppl don’t seem to know a lot of koreans, esp korean americans, are at least passively religious? i think they get this assumption bc a lot of cn aren’t, and ime a lot of jp aren’t), sexual assault/harassment, pay gaps, familial issues like second shift, etc. this isn’t to say koreans don’t have unique cultural issues — beauty culture is a big one ime — but rather that there are a lot more similarities than differences when it comes to misogyny across the world. addressing this intersectionally doesn’t mean othering woc or their cultures, imho, but rather recognizing the differences that do exist. idk if this makes sense..          

all that said i put my exp under the cut, i hope it helps! 

my exp is that most younger koreans, esp korean americans, i know are libfems if they are feminists (which isn't really common at all ime, at most it's younger women who buy into libfem beliefs but wouldn't go as far as calling themselves feminist. the ones who do are very much edgy art student socjus types and i've only met them on my college campus lol). i have never ever met any older korean feminist here, and older koreans (men and women) tend to be pretty regressive/conservative in general. i can't count how many times i've been told off, directly or indirectly, by older koreans for how i talk, dress, groom myself, not having a bf/husband, and so on. younger koreans aren't much better, even the 'woke' ones, just the verbage changes.

interacting w/ korean relatives living in or visiting SK, radical feminism is the feminism of choice there but it is not by any means a "normal". feminism, even libfem, is not looked upon highly and being openly feminist is not normal or 'cool' outside of western facing circles and even then you'll probably get backlash from other koreans (usually men) for it. when i talk with my korean friends, fob or koream, about women's issues a lot of the time they might agree on certain things or join in on the ‘men suck!!1!!1′ venting, but once the topic veers towards feminism they're usually pretty withdrawn on it. i think it's interesting that doesn't seem to really change.

the only woman i know who is even vaguely feminist or accepting of me being feminist, let alone a radfem, is my mom surprisingly. maybe bc she's from busan lol. but she's very much unusual for a korean woman and while not feminist let alone radfem, refuses to date or marry men ever again (so ig she's an unintentional separatist queen? ..i'm joking gsdgds) and agrees with me on a lot, but not all, feminist topics like abortion and reproductive rights, women's rights in the workplace, domestic violence (which she/we were victims of, so ofc), etc. even lgb rights she's warmed up to quite a bit since i was a teen. but she is literally the only one, even my halmoni and aunties — who had abusive relationships with men! — think/thought feminism was unnecessary or even useless, despite being strong women in their own right.

what is interesting imo is that trans issues are a little complicated in sk. there are notable trans celebrities, but i’ve only known them to be hsts mtfs. when i came out as a tif, the logical conclusion was i was a super butch who was so gay i wanted to be a man to be ‘normal’ (i mean...not wrong in a way?) and this is the general perception a lot of koreans have of trans ppl. and while most are probably going to be polite about it, i don’t know any koreans, even younger ones, who are super pro trans rights or anything. i’ve met only one korean trans person who was a transbian mtf, but dozens of white trans ppl. that said i do find it interesting koreans seem to at least turn a blind eye to hsts mtfs but there’s still a lot of bristling about homosexuality. again this isn’t that dissimilar to how it is with other cultures, i guess, but it is interesting. 

last disclaimer that this is my exp and maybe other koreans have different experiences? feminist movements seem to be particularly strong in unis/college campuses and ive never been to a korean college/uni. maybe there is a stronger radfem presence there? but the only big radfem groups i know of operate mostly online (like WOMAD), much like in the west. imo radfem is just too radical to really make it mainstream, regardless of the culture. 

this ended up super long sorry 😩

#long post #mine #sorry if i sound rly miffed i am running on low sleep and havent eaten more than a croissant today #i am on a hair trigger

[flying-elliska]

sorry if this is like. the weirdest question ever but i thought you would be an ok person to ask. i've recently gotten into writing again and discovered that the hardest part of writing characters different from me isn't when they have a marginalized experience i don't know (ex. writing poc as a white person), bc there's research and guides available for that, but rather when i have an experience they don't (like writing straight or neurotypical ppl as a mentally ill queer person) 1/2

so i was wondering if you ever had the same problems or any advice on how to write characters with more “mainstream” lives when you can’t remember how to connect to that pov? it’s fine if you don’t, i just have a lot of respect for you as a writer and a person and i value your thoughts! sorry i wrote so much :/ 2/2

oh don't apologize, i love love love questions about writing, especially the weird ones ^^ and this is truly a fascinating question. it did puzzle me a bit at first because the thing about the mainstream perspective is that it's, well, everywhere. and it's absolutely an experience in itself too ! like as queer people we've grown up surrounded by straight love stories, and so on. so it made me wonder why exactly you have that difficulty, and whether i also sometimes encounter it (maybe a little at times).

- is it a problem of legitimacy ? as a person that has been 'otherized' in certain ways, do you maybe feel like your perspective on 'the norm' is less valid/adequate ? I especially have this when it comes to mental illness, I have these weird moments of anxiety about whether all the characters i write end up being mentally dysfunctional without me realizing it, etc - i don't think it's true, but the anxiety is there. and honestly i think the concept of 'mentally sane' in the society we live in remains somewhat nebulous and to be defined still. if you share these anxieties, it's good to remember that it's a proven phenomenon that marginalized people are forced, for reasons of survival and because they are socialized to the norm anyway, to quickly acquire insights into the experiences/minds/habits of privileged people ; and have been taught to see privileged people as human and complex in ways where the reverse is not necessarily true. This is why, for instance, women's writing perspective on men can have a depth and humanity that the reverse often lacks. in general i think as baseline that people can write really valuable things about experiences they don't share, the 'stranger's perspective' can be really interesting in itself because it forces you to ask more questions ; unless it has been blighted by privilege (which functions on a basis of seeing the other as inherently lesser and the atrophy of empathy). i really don't believe in the idea you should only write about experiences you know or have ; after all empathy + research + curiosity + imagination + questioning why things are the way they are, are a fundamental part of the writer's craft ; it's just crucial to be aware of how power can skew that. so i hope this reassures you a little if you struggle with this.

- is it a problem of interest ? ever since i realized i was queer, i have had this desire, more or less strong at times, to only consume and produce stories containing a majority of queer people. i was accused once of making too many characters queer in my fic (lmao i was so proud). and you know what ? i think that is abso-fucking-lutely fine. if people have an issue with that they can go back to the 99% of literature that caters to them. if you don't feel like writing about straight people but think like you 'have to' for some reason, please don't force yourself lol. and don't be ashamed to want to write about people who do share your experiences in that way, especially since we have been starved for representation for a long time. sometimes it's also just a detox phase you need to go through. i have had more m/f ships as of late and it almost feels fresh again to me lmao and focusing on queer pairings for a long time has given me a new way of looking at love and relationships and general which is great.

- is it a problem of connection ? ok so maybe you do want to write about those mainstream experiences but you just find it hard to be inspired for some reason. if you have checked that it isn't one of the problems above, i think the next step is to just look for the core reason of why you're writing these things in the first place. where's the issue, the spark, the zing, the problem, the crack, the fatal flaw, etc. Mental illness and queerness are interesting to write about, of course. but when you don't have that, you should still have other interesting things to write about. and you can go back to the universals. what is love ?how does sexuality impact people's experiences ? what does it mean to be mentally healthy ? what's the mind anyway ? how does our society affect those things ? how is the 'typical neurotype' qualified and why ? i have always believed anyway that true universals are made of an infinity of diversity, and not some sort of generic mold. so you can find a connection to an experience you don't have via an experience you do have. (again, as long as you're aware of power dynamics etc). will it always be perfect ? no, but it's still interesting to try. 'being straight' as an identity is not equivalent to 'being queer' because 'being straight' ties into heteronormativity as a tool of social control/oppression and therefore, heteronormativity deserves to be destabilized and written about in weird/new/original ways by queer people who don't entirely understand what it is to be straight ; this will always be more interesting and liberating than straight people writing about gays who 'are just like everyone else!!!!' uwu'. as a neuroatypical person i actually believe i have very interesting things to say about the nature of the mind and selfhood because i am constantly thinking about it in way neurotypicals don't ; i have experienced first hand how much of our selves are influenced by chemistry and how willpower is not everything in life and how the self can be a fluid thing. I choose to believe that i am not some sort of alien freak that cannot understand 'normal' people, but rather that i am a specific mode of the human species that just has a lower statistical recurrence, and therefore society is not adapted to me and i have to think about things that other people can ignore and that is thinking and writing material !!!!! the 'norm' is not more central, more human, more valid, more basic, more by-default, etc. and barriers between identities are often more porous than we think. even if you 'fuck it up' it's actually interesting !

anyway i think my point is, in general, this is not an area that you have to be super careful about ! experiment, go nuts ! write about straight couples as if they were gay ! imagine what it means for you to be mentally healthy/stable/thriving ! don't feel bad if you don't understand something, invent shit and it will still be interesting ! and like, you can still very much do research here. like there is a shit ton of love advice columns that mostly cater to straight people, stories full of straight people, books on love in general...you can study that just like queerness has been studied lmao. for the neurotypical thing in particular I have just started a book called "Explaining Humans" by Camilla Pang, a brilliant scientist who has autism/adhd/generalized anxiety disorder, and who basically created a manual of 'how do people work' through science and it's so interesting, there are a lot of things that are implicit and that they never really explain to you and you can kind of miss if you're neuroatypical and it's really fascinating.

good luck ! and please feel free to tell me more if this has made you think haha <3 thanks again for the question !

#writing #writing advice #writblr