A King Who Doesn't Really Want To And Isn't Able To Run The Kingdom Properly Catches Wind Of A Noble

How to Read

some references for the writing tip: "read a lot" / "read widely"

Active Reading ⚜ Tips for Active Reading

Critical Reading ⚜ Identifying Character Descriptions

Evaluating Sources ⚜ Primary Sources ⚜ Source Integration

Narrative Elements ⚜ Note Taking ⚜ Read like a Writer

Scientific Article ⚜ Your Reading Journal

More: Writing Tips & Advice ⚜ Editing ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs

"someone who allows you to rest" is the relationship dynamic of all time

[TRANS] Taeyong interview with News1: I am a leader

Nice to meet you. Please introduce yourself. I’m Taeyong, the leader who is in charge of ‘greeting’ (laughs)

How did you become NCT 127’s leader? I didn’t expect to be a leader, but naturally, I became the leader. The company told me that I was very motivated when I was a trainee. I take great pride in our team, thanks to this I think they (the company) thought I was suitable to become the leader.

What kind of leader do you think you are? A leader who can say his lines at once without making any mistakes. (laughs). A responsible leader. Someone who works hard with the mission to fulfill the role of a leader.

There must be some burden that comes with being the team leader. In the past, I used to really worry about what I should do as NCT 127’s leader. There is also the pressure to show a different image of myself for each NCT team, I really put a lot of care into that by myself. As we’ve been promoting, I feel a lot less burden now.

Out of all NCT units, only NCT 127 has a leader. Do you have more burden because of that? That was also a big part of the burden. Still, all the members of NCT 127 work hard, have outstanding skills, and a lot of affection for the team. So I was able to lose that burden.

What role do you take as the leader? As a leader, rather than taking care of the bigger things, you tend to take care of the smaller things more. It starts from choosing what to eat (laughs), how to organize the schedule, those things are decided by talking to the members. Furthermore, the members too, value showing our capabilities through the stage, so we talk a lot and arrange all our ideas. Of course, it’s also my job to talk to the company when there’s something important.

As the leader, what do you think is NCT 127’s exclusive charm? There’s many units under the NCT brand, but NCT 127 feels like home. Thanks to this we can chat even more comfortably with the members. We see each other when we’re unwell and we’ve been through a lot together, it’s hard to explain but it (NCT 127) just feels more close-knit.

As the leader of an idol group, what is something you focus on the most? Boosting the atmosphere within the team. I want to make the members laugh. (laughs) Before we would be talking about performances, but now everyone just works hard and we share our opinions about trivial things. I also want to make sure there’s no misunderstandings between the team and the company, wouldn’t that be a leader’s job.

Keep reading

some people think writers are so eloquent and good with words, but the reality is that we can sit there with our fingers on the keyboard going, “what’s the word for non-sunlight lighting? Like, fake lighting?” and for ten minutes, all our brain will supply is “unofficial”, and we know that’s not the right word, but it’s the only word we can come up with…until finally it’s like our face got smashed into a brick wall and we remember the word we want is “artificial”.

Remus: I'm not sure what this sentence means.

Sirius: "Ignorance is bold and knowledge reserved."

Remus: You can read Latin?!

James: You can read?!

Sirius:

Sirius: That's cold, Potter.

Mont Saint-Michel, France by Allyson Beaucourt 

hendery’s gift to winwin ☺️🎁

Do you have any good words for pain? (Hurt for example) Like being in pain or exclamations of pain (ouch for example)

Pain—unpleasant bodily sensation; mental/emotional distress or suffering

Ache - a usually dull persistent pain

Affliction - a cause of persistent pain or distress

Agony - intense pain of mind or body; anguish, torture

Anguish - extreme pain, distress, or anxiety

Bruise - an injury involving rupture of small blood vessels and discoloration without a break in the overlying skin; an injury especially to the feelings

Burn - to produce or undergo an uncomfortable or painful sensation like that of being injured by fire

Chafe - to make sore by or as if by rubbing

Clonus - a rapid succession of alternating contractions and partial relaxations of a muscle occurring in some nervous diseases

Colic - an attack of acute abdominal pain localized in a hollow organ and often caused by spasm, obstruction, or twisting

Cramp - a painful involuntary spasmodic contraction of a muscle

Deleterious - harmful often in a subtle or unexpected way

Discomfort - mental or physical uneasiness; annoyance

Distress - pain or suffering affecting the body, a bodily part, or the mind; trouble

Fester - to generate pus; putrefy, rot;; to cause increasing poisoning, irritation, or bitterness

Gripe - a pinching spasmodic intestinal pain—usually used in plural

Inflamed - to cause inflammation (i.e., injury that is marked by capillary dilatation, leukocytic infiltration, redness, heat, and pain) in (bodily tissue)

Lancinate - pierce, stab, lacerate

Malaise - a vague sense of mental or moral ill-being

Misery - a circumstance, thing, or place that causes suffering or discomfort

Noxious - physically harmful or destructive to living beings

Pernicious - highly injurious or destructive; deadly; (archaic): wicked

Prickle - a prickling or tingling sensation

Sore - a source of pain, distress or vexation; affliction

Spasm - an involuntary and abnormal muscular contraction; a sudden violent and temporary effort, emotion, or sensation

Sting - a wound or pain caused by or as if by stinging (sharp or piercing)

Suffer - to endure death, pain, or distress

Throb - to pulsate or pound with abnormal force or rapidity

Travail - a physical or mental exertion or piece of work; task, effort; agony, torment

Twinge - a sudden sharp stab of pain

Woe - a condition of deep suffering from misfortune, affliction, or grief

Exclamations of Pain

ouch, boo, ow, aw, woe, shucks, ay, rats, yuk, sheesh, alack, tush, pooh, yuck, wirra (Irish), phooey, alas, tsk, pshaw, bah, humph, tut, pish, ho hum, faugh, fie

Hope this helps with your writing. Do tag me, or send me a link. I'd love to read your work!

The impact of toxic family dynamics in Till the End of the Moon (长月烬明)

A bit random and I have never done character analysis posts so it might not be as good as some other posts on here but bear with me.

I'm watching Till the End of the Moon (ep 25) and the recent development of Ye Bingchang's character into a full blown villain has made me hate her, but also empathize with her in ways I didn't expect.

To contextualise, Ye Bingchang 叶冰裳 is the second child and first daughter of the Ye family, and she is basically the perfect daughter of a noble Chinese family. She's sweet and kind, beautiful but not attention seeking, smart but not a smart ass, dutiful and filial, delicate and thoughtful. She shares a beautiful love story with Prince Xiao Lin 萧凛, the 6th son of the Emperor, so she's going to marry in the Imperial Family and no doubt bring honor to the Ye Clan. She seems to be doing everything exactly right.

And yet she's a second class citizen in her own family, who openly favours her younger sister Ye Xiwu 叶夕雾.

Now there are two levels to this.

1) They're openly and unabashedly favouring one child over the 3 others, but then still ranking the other kids, and somehow Ye Bingchang ranks lower than her brother who is a lazy and stupid gambler. Her family simply doesn't see her, she's completely forgettable to them, like her existence only matters because sure, she's their blood, but she's a complete afterthought.

2) The daughter they favour over her is Ye Xiwu, and Ye Xiwu is a monster of a golden child. She's completely selfish and narcissistic, she explicitly abuses her husband, she schemes again and again to seduce and try to rape Prince Xiao Lin, her sister's one true love and fiancé, and when this doesn't work she becomes physically violent towards Ye Bingchang as well.

Ye Xiwu is an extremely abusive and horrible person, straight up. And her family continuously makes excuses for her violent behaviour, dotes on her, spoils her, and barely has a look for Ye Bingchang, expecting her to forgive and turn the other cheek. The golden child / black sheep dynamic is at its peak.

I find it quite rare that in this type of situation, a show will have the golden child as our hero ; almost always, if there are complicated family relationships, the main character is the one who's rejected, underestimated, and who has to rise through those challenges (which applies to our main male character Tantai Jin 澹台烬 btw, and I think we could say a lot of the parallels between Tantai Jin and Ye Bingchang).

I can think of other cases where the child who was favoured is the main character over the child who is rejected (Jiang Cheng 江澄 in The Untamed 陈情令, Feng Chang 丰苌 in Who Rules the World 且试天下) but they're not as clear cut as this (Jiang Cheng being his mom's favorite and the only actual son of the family while Wei Wuxian 魏无羡 is also a black sheep on many levels, Feng Chang's more favoured brother Feng Lanxi 丰兰息 being fairly rejected as well and having to fight not to be poisoned).

The golden child as a main character works here because it isn't actually Ye Xiwu : we discover her character and the situation when the spirit of Li Susu 黎苏苏 travels back in time and takes possession of Ye Xiwu's body. Our main character is really Li Susu, and like the audience she's horrified to learn everything Ye Xiwu has been doing, disgusted by her abusive behaviour towards her sister and her husband, and at first disapproves of how much the Ye family favours her over Ye Bingchang. But she also comes to love the Ye family as her own, and the fact that they would neglect one of their daughters so much doesn't impact her affection for them.

We only learn about Ye Xiwu's abuse through flashbacks, so it doesn't have the same emotional impact for us as an audience, and we only brief moments of those memories so we don't have to confront the full magnitude of how horrible she was, including to Ye Bingchang. Again, Ye Xiwu tried to rape her sister's one true love and fiancé, and even after getting married herself she continued to throw herself at him, and when it didn't work she turned to actual physical violence on Ye Bingchang.

And throughout this, the Ye family excuses it all away, and even Ye Bingchang excuses it away. She forgives before Ye Xiwu even apologizes, because she knows that's what's expected of her, and she just tries her best to be a kind soul still defending her sister from people spreading rumors about her. In a way, she's a victim of domestic violence who forgives an abuser and thinks she just needs to be softer, sweeter, weaker, so maybe they don't feel like bullying her anymore.

So when Ye Bingchang tries to use the affection of men to get protection, to feel love and be sheltered from her condition, it's very understandable and to me resembles a lot of things I've seen in real life. And when she turns to resentment over her condition and decides she needs to gain control over her situation through getting some amount of power so she can protect herself, it's an arc we could expect from a main character.

She only becomes a villain after the arc of Bo're Life, in which our four main characters Tantai Jin, Ye Xiwu/Li Susu, Xiao Lin and Ye Bingchang are absorbed into a dragon's dreams of its past as a War God centuries ago. Ye Bingchang is "reincarnated" in this dream as a powerful immortal, a scorned lover but who has the power to actually be vengeful over the woman who steals the man she loves. The object of her ire being Ye Xiwu, reincarnated in a very sweet clam spirit woman, Ye Bingchang gets a taste of what power feels like, of what manipulation feels like, and of what revenge over Ye Xiwu would feel like. And when even in this dream life, Ye Xiwu is preferred over her and she ends up dying, she comes back to herself determined to change and not let others control her life anymore.

Every character (except Xiao Lin really) seems deeply influenced by what they lived in Bo're Life, having identity crises of sorts over who they actually are now. As an aside, it works as a pretty good plot device to suddenly get Tantai Jin a lot more open to Ye Xiwu/Li Susu and move their romance along, it almost feels like cheating but I'll allow it.

Anyway, Ye Bingchang has now slowly become as manipulative and cruel as her counterpart in Bo're Life, and it's easy to just see it as that counterpart taking over her body in a way.

But this manipulative and cruel streak is born out of the profound reality that she can not count on her family to protect her, and that the people who were supposed to love her unconditionally preferred her literal abuser over her.

She did everything right and it was never enough, so now it's time for her to claim her life back.

And again, in another show (like the Story of Yanxi Palace 延禧攻略 for example), this urge to climb to power so no one can hurt you anymore and take revenge on the people who ruined your life along the way, it would make you the hero.

But here, Ye Bingchang still can't win, and she actually turns into a villain.