really random but i do think if we as “rpf-ers” started to distinguish between “real person fiction” and “shipping” it would make a lot of discourse easier to parse. like i think it is perfectly possible to write rpf and then maintain a level of rational separation of fiction and reality, where you can say “yeah this is my fictionalization of narratives i’m perceiving from real life that may or may not even be there, the point isn’t that its true, the point is the creative outlet”. versus with shipping there is a collapse between fiction and reality, because you are actively parsing through reality to bolster and prove your fiction. and i fully believe the latter has more negative effects on the fan-celebrity dynamic and fandom as a whole than the former.
like to take f1 as a case study, sure there are issues of people posting ao3 links to twitter/tiktok or the mercedes twitter account acknowledging ao3 in a fan groupchat. but the reality is most of the boundary blurring issues we’re facing right now stem from shipping culture and not necessarily rpf culture. the mercedes tiktoks playing into gax or galex aren’t referencing specific fanfictions, they’re referencing the general shipping culture thats looking for evidence from an authority figure. and like the issue with landoscars on other platforms being excessively loud in the face of oscars family isnt them like, sharing ao3 links, its them again looking for evidence from an authority figure. the current issue we’re facing is a feedback loop of “fictional hypothesis im trying to prove irl”, “someone with perceived authoritative knowledge of my celebrity pandering to my hypothesis because its good for socials”, “i’m emboldened by this pandering and precede to go to other authority figures for the same treatment”. and i dont think this is a feedback loop we can easily solve by solely saying “rpf needs to stay private”, we can only really start to solve it between ourselves if we emphasize the fandom cultural difference between “people who enjoy rpf” and “shippers”. and there’s nothing we can really do about the cynical marketing tactics from brands and corporations. but also i dont really know anything sooo
Welcome to 2017, everyone. I hope you had some kind of relaxing or ok holiday break. I visited my parents, and knit their dog a little sweater, and comics about that and pictures of the little dog are on my twitter feed for those interested. Looking forward on working on the world with you all in 2017.
i never use this thing anymore for posting or reblogging because of the “my life fell apart” Depression and how so much of the good parts of my 2011-end of 2021 life came from here and then 2022-onwards it fell apart. opening it is a timecapsule to a happier me. only sad me exists now. i opened this to go find an oc thing and then found a thing that reminded me of personimiss.
now it’s back to the endless aching awful misery of having loving someone so much i changed my life to bring them more into it, managed to fuck it up and lost everything that mattered, and then still waking up longing to speak to my old best friend turned spouse turned ex who blocked me. they who will never speak to me again and just wanted me gone from their life. some of what led me to lose everything was “a confluence of situations being unfortunate on the sides of all people involved” (in like understandable ways that it was overwhelming for them and led to someone needing to pull back), and some weren’t the fault of people involved even when how they reacted are. (sorry i had a rare side effect of a mental health medication - literally, “medication induced psychosis” - and during a state of artificial psychosis damaged things!!!). and it feels so unfair to remember stats that when women get cancer or other major medical diagnoses, often its as recently as 1 in 8 that their partners leave. and i feel like in many ways i was victim to this because the med psychosis was a not-my-faut thing and i tried to fix things after it and i was punished and i still lost everything.
therapist says grief is love with nowhere to go and it’s true. the asymmetry of loving so much when i was not and am not loved back, and i just feel like a pipe leading to nowhere with all this pressure of love that i can’t share and that won’t be reciprocated just spilling out onto the endlessly.
and i want to talk abt it with other people who were there (as in: knew us both) but people are “sorry i don’t want to get in the middle so i don’t want to hear about it” which is fine b/c i get it you don’t want to hear one friend slagging another but like. i wish for a single day. someone would let me vent this all out to them and get it out and tell me some of it, any of it, wasn’t me. like please, i need a friend who was There and Knows to step up and be a friend and make space for me to grieve on a singular day. please. i’m so tired of all the comfort being from folks who didn’t know the good and the hopes and the dreams.
i put on a brave face a lot with people in rl but in the privacy (sort of - people are reading it who know me irl but you can choose not to) of my own blog space i can say it: i’m still not ok with what happened. i will never be okay with what happened. i will spend the rest of my life with my heart wrenched out of my chest because the person i loved most in the world, that i thought understood me more than anyone else in the world, will never speak to me again. and in fact is happy to never speak to me again. this was their preferred outcome. and it doesn’t matter i was sick when i hurt them, it doesn’t matter i tried actively to do better after it happened, it doesn’t matter i went for inpatient psych therapy and rebuilt myself ground up to try to make myself better and heal. it doesn’t matter i love them still. they gave up on me while i was sick, and i can do. nothing. to repair it. i would trade everything i have to get it back and i can’t do anything to fix what i broke. i lost my housing, my rebuilt found family, several friendships, so much of my savings. for…nothing. for everything to end around me with no hope of salvaging it, and they’re happy they’re rid of me and thriving without me.
there is nothing i can do to repair the thing that was most important to me in the entire world, because i am not now loved by them. and maybe was not ever loved by them. was certainly not loved enough to try to fix instead of abandon. and it just. hurts.
in case you’re wondering if it ever got better…no.
the person i fell in love with in 2024-25, the person who helped me with housing, helped me with presence, helped me feel like a desirable person intellectually, and physically, and emotionally, after my family-friends left me… killed herself 2 months ago, leaving me bereft and adrift again. as if i can’t love someone without it burning up either me or them.
lesbian heated rivalry wouldn’t be in hockey because there are already many out queer women in hockey due to the fact that hockey is viewed as a men’s sport. the whole reason hockey is captivating for mlm is because it is a toxically masculine sport and the idea of having out queer men in that sport is surprising (requiring them to stay closeted/have situationships/etc), whereas it is not nearly as surprising for queer women. therefore, lesbian heated rivalry would actually occur in a setting like ballet, gymnastics, or some other stereotypically feminine sport (that has toxic feminine standards) where queer women are not as visible. in this essay i will
Thing 1: There are not only laws but taboos against sharing andalite tech. Ax loves his friends, but he still struggles with telling them about andalite tech when doing so would save their lives. He’s less worried about breaking laws than he is about betraying his entire species, and he’s genuinely scared that telling humans about andalite tech will lead to a second Yeerk Empire. Presumably most andalites feel the same, judging by their appalled reactions any time one discovers human morphers.
Thing 2: As of andalite-yeerk contact, morphing technology is new, poorly understood, and widely feared. We know that ~30 years later, Elfangor and Arbron still don’t understand morphing and have only morphed once apiece — they’re terrified when Alloran tells them to morph, and regard Alloran’s willingness to morph as an outlier. So way back when Alloran was an aristh under Seerow, we can assume that morphing tech was even more rare and widely feared.
Personally, I headcanon that the two-hour limit wasn’t discovered until years into the R&D process, and that even today “two hours” is an estimate based on past nothlitizations. So andalites discover morphing tech, they try it out… and a bunch of them get trapped forever. And they don’t know why. And anyone trapped as a prey animal loses their mind in addition to losing their body. And maybe after much trial and (catastrophic) error, they discover that it’s safe to stay another shape for 5 minutes. For 10 minutes. For 15. So on, until they get up to ~120 Earth minutes and people start getting trapped again. If that’s the case, if 100s of beta testers are nothlits, then no wonder most andalites only morph when they have no choice. No wonder they’re baffled and even awed by the Animorphs’ casual comfort with morphing.
Hm. I wonder if, synergystically to the whole “you get your haircut/piercings/scars back if, and only if, they are part of your self-image when you morph back to default” bit, the morphing limit is just as much about one’s belief and perception as anything else. That would fit with the few times that we see the animorphs hit the limit and struggle and have to be talked through by Cassie.
So you’ve got this new tech, and people have tested it successfully a few times, so you try it out. And yaay, you’re an alien!bird! But wait, what if you get stuck?? And you get terrified of being stuck, and that becomes part of your perception of morphing. And now you can’t turn back. So over time they’re like “okay yeah we’ve got a better handle on the tech, we’ve got people who build up their tolerance little by little, and they can stay in morph longer” and the limit of time before people start getting stuck increases bit by bit. And now you’re like “Okay, the longest that anyone has ever turned into something else and come back from it is 2 hours, that’s the record, but even lower times are obviously still risky” And so no one’s really wanting to do it voluntarily cause who knows what will happen.
So then if you’re told “2 hours is the limit” by some guy who doesn’t really understand the science cause he was sleeping in class then that becomes your assumption and 2 hours is now a hard limit instead of a fuzzy one where before it might be over or under that. But you can still get talked through like “maybe it hasn’t really been 2 hours yet. maybe you have a few seconds left”.
And everyone is staring at these 6 child morphers who every one of them can and regularly do reach the 2h olympic record all boggle-eyed because that is NOT NORMAL.
That is amazing and I’m here for it. Like, in #3 we see all the kids demorph (with difficulty) after they’ve been in morph for up to 2:08:00, possibly even more. So the idea that their misunderstanding of Elfangor’s instructions as “up to 2 hours you should be fine” is the key factor makes so much sense and is brilliant.
I’ve been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard
Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.
Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.
Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.
SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.
SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.
Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.
Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of “how to draw” videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can’t make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.
Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.
Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.
Height Weight Chart. You ever see an OC listed as having a certain weight but then they look Wildly different than the number suggests? Well here’s a site to avoid that! It shows real people at different weights and heights to give you a better idea of what these abstract numbers all look like. Free to use.
Homie gonna share this
.
if i hadn’t been uninvited from [trip A] , i wouldn’t have been home to go on [ trip B] and watch my entire support structure of my heart collapse for the second time in three years.
kind of weird how parts of your soul are left in various locations without any warning… like yes i’m always at the top of that hill, sitting at the bus stop, in the cool light of the Japanese restaurant, standing at the pier etc etc
i never use this thing anymore for posting or reblogging because of the “my life fell apart” Depression and how so much of the good parts of my 2011-end of 2021 life came from here and then 2022-onwards it fell apart. opening it is a timecapsule to a happier me. only sad me exists now. i opened this to go find an oc thing and then found a thing that reminded me of personimiss.
now it’s back to the endless aching awful misery of having loving someone so much i changed my life to bring them more into it, managed to fuck it up and lost everything that mattered, and then still waking up longing to speak to my old best friend turned spouse turned ex who blocked me. they who will never speak to me again and just wanted me gone from their life. some of what led me to lose everything was “a confluence of situations being unfortunate on the sides of all people involved” (in like understandable ways that it was overwhelming for them and led to someone needing to pull back), and some weren’t the fault of people involved even when how they reacted are. (sorry i had a rare side effect of a mental health medication - literally, “medication induced psychosis” - and during a state of artificial psychosis damaged things!!!). and it feels so unfair to remember stats that when women get cancer or other major medical diagnoses, often its as recently as 1 in 8 that their partners leave. and i feel like in many ways i was victim to this because the med psychosis was a not-my-faut thing and i tried to fix things after it and i was punished and i still lost everything.
therapist says grief is love with nowhere to go and it’s true. the asymmetry of loving so much when i was not and am not loved back, and i just feel like a pipe leading to nowhere with all this pressure of love that i can’t share and that won’t be reciprocated just spilling out onto the endlessly.
and i want to talk abt it with other people who were there (as in: knew us both) but people are “sorry i don’t want to get in the middle so i don’t want to hear about it” which is fine b/c i get it you don’t want to hear one friend slagging another but like. i wish for a single day. someone would let me vent this all out to them and get it out and tell me some of it, any of it, wasn’t me. like please, i need a friend who was There and Knows to step up and be a friend and make space for me to grieve on a singular day. please. i’m so tired of all the comfort being from folks who didn’t know the good and the hopes and the dreams.
i put on a brave face a lot with people in rl but in the privacy (sort of - people are reading it who know me irl but you can choose not to) of my own blog space i can say it: i’m still not ok with what happened. i will never be okay with what happened. i will spend the rest of my life with my heart wrenched out of my chest because the person i loved most in the world, that i thought understood me more than anyone else in the world, will never speak to me again. and in fact is happy to never speak to me again. this was their preferred outcome. and it doesn’t matter i was sick when i hurt them, it doesn’t matter i tried actively to do better after it happened, it doesn’t matter i went for inpatient psych therapy and rebuilt myself ground up to try to make myself better and heal. it doesn’t matter i love them still. they gave up on me while i was sick, and i can do. nothing. to repair it. i would trade everything i have to get it back and i can’t do anything to fix what i broke. i lost my housing, my rebuilt found family, several friendships, so much of my savings. for…nothing. for everything to end around me with no hope of salvaging it, and they’re happy they’re rid of me and thriving without me.
there is nothing i can do to repair the thing that was most important to me in the entire world, because i am not now loved by them. and maybe was not ever loved by them. was certainly not loved enough to try to fix instead of abandon. and it just. hurts.
To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don’t get over it because ‘it’ is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?
Cat, 31, they/them. Grew up in fandom, did an anthropology undergrad, wound up with an intense interest in fandom cultural evolution as a result. Loves sci-fi and fantasy and RPing.
You'll mostly find SWTOR, Myst, Star Trek, and Fire Emblem: Three Houses content here.
Genderqueer Glaceon avatar by PokemonColourSplash.
