I Am A(n):

i think about this video a lot

Why is this so true 😂

me as a writer: Oh no I can’t write that, somebody else already has

me as a reader: hell yes give me all the fics about this one scenario. The more the merrier

༉ 𝐜𝐨𝐫𝐩𝐬𝐞 𝐡𝐮𝐬𝐛𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬 .

• like and rb if you save!

RARE PICTURES OF EEYORE SMILING

“Goku’s a terrible father!” “He doesn’t care about his family!”

Yep he sure doesn’t.

Those things plus-size girls “can’t do” - Watch more in the full video

I tried, guys. I really tried. But the TDP team came for me, personally, with Aaravos.

Already seeing posts that Malleus is disgusting (in a not-affectionate manner) for what he's doing to the Shroud brothers.

As you should! That's the entire point of the story; that manipulating people, feeding your ideals upon the unwilling, and forcing them to obey you is an actual evil thing and something that should be condemned, not romanticized! He's literally from an evil bloodline with an actual bitch of a mother. Again, that's the point of his character in particular. That he is an evil creature who happened to be exposed to kindness, liked said kindness, tries to live his life in said kindness, but occasionally reverts to his foul nature because he's not a perfect person. Because he doesn't yet completely understand how to navigate in this unfamiliar kindness.

If that message irritates you so much, then honestly this game isn't for you. And if I had a hand in influencing this story, I don't want twst to change anything about how his character arc goes. We need more characters who change from repulsive to struggling but slightly better, and not just fill the entire fictional universe with care bears type of men who go from kind to godly kind. He's a failure of a man, but he's trying to be better.

And I'd be damned if the final villain in a villain game is not an actual villain.

on fanfic & emotional continuity

Writing and reading fanfic is a masterclass in characterisation. 

Consider: in order to successfully write two different “versions” of the same character - let alone ten, or fifty, or a hundred - you have to make an informed judgement about their core personality traits, distinguishing between the results of nature and nurture, and decide how best to replicate those conditions in a new narrative context. The character you produce has to be recognisably congruent with the canonical version, yet distinct enough to fit within a different - perhaps wildly so - story. And you physically can’t accomplish this if the character in question is poorly understood, or viewed as a stereotype, or one-dimensional. Yes, you can still produce the fic, but chances are, if your interest in or knowledge of the character(s) is that shallow, you’re not going to bother in the first place. 

Because ficwriters care about nuance, and they especially care about continuity - not just literal continuity, in the sense of corroborating established facts, but the far more important (and yet more frequently neglected) emotional continuity. Too often in film and TV canons in particular, emotional continuity is mistakenly viewed as a synonym for static characterisation, and therefore held anathema: if the character(s) don’t change, then where’s the story? But emotional continuity isn’t anti-change; it’s pro-context. It means showing how the character gets from Point A to Point B as an actual journey, not just dumping them in a new location and yelling Because Reasons! while moving on to the next development. Emotional continuity requires a close reading, not just of the letter of the canon, but its spirit - the beats between the dialogue; the implications never overtly stated, but which must logically occur off-screen. As such, emotional continuity is often the first casualty of canonical forward momentum: when each new TV season demands the creation of a new challenge for the protagonists, regardless of where and how we left them last, then dealing with the consequences of what’s already happened is automatically put on the backburner.

Fanfic does not do this. 

Fanfic embraces the gaps in the narrative, the gracenotes in characterisation that the original story glosses, forgets or simply doesn’t find time for. That’s not all it does, of course, but in the context of learning how to write characters, it’s vital, because it teaches ficwriters - and fic readers - the difference between rich and cardboard characters. A rich character is one whose original incarnation is detailed enough that, in order to put them in fanfic, the writer has to consider which elements of their personality are integral to their existence, which clash irreparably with the new setting, and which can be modified to fit, to say nothing of how this adapted version works with other similarly adapted characters. A cardboard character, by contrast, boasts so few original or distinct attributes that the ficwriter has to invent them almost out of whole cloth. Note, please, that attributes are not necessarily synonymous with details in this context: we might know a character’s favourite song and their number of siblings, but if this information gives us no actual insight into them as a person, then it’s only window-dressing. By the same token, we might know very few concrete facts about a character, but still have an incredibly well-developed sense of their personhood on the basis of their actions. 

The fact that ficwriters en masse - or even the same ficwriter in different AUs - can produce multiple contradictory yet still fundamentally believable incarnations of the same person is a testament to their understanding of characterisation, emotional continuity and narrative. 

When you see a progressing fanart of a beginner artist:

When the artist claims their doodle “shitty”:

When you see your OTP/fave characters drawn as Stickmen:

Artist draws OTP together:

Shifting and experimenting different styles on your art:

When ESL people and budding writers post beautiful fanfics as best as they can even with slight grammar errors:

When you saw a fanfic that met your satisfaction: