Hurt people? Hurt People!

tbh im not entirely immune to a villain with a tragic backstory but i do think villain origins are a lot more interesting when the focus is less "here is the original sin, the first big bad thing that happened to them that made them who they are" and more "here is the first time a person who maybe otherwise felt powerless in their life realized that they could hurt someone and get away with it"

you can get a lot more mileage out of analyzing a truly abhorrent character through the lens of like. what sort of conditions would allow or even incentivize this kind of cruelty? what kind of person benefits from those conditions and how? over the more typical who hurt them type analysis. imo.

service industry conditions

ghosts are often presented as cold, which makes sense given their association with death, but personally i think that they should be hot, at least at first. hot with excess life, with blazing spiritual essence; scorching white-hot clouds of gaseous vapour shedding their vitality into the void like blood from an open wound.

ghosts should start out hot and painful to look at and gradually grow colder and diminish, like candles, or dying stars. you understand.

oh and that gap in my resume is when i was digging my own grave

the dirt under my nails is - yeah. it won't wash out. although that's actually from when i dug myself out again. i suppose success and defeat can look the same in a mirror.

i love when a character has something terrible happen to them and as a result they see themself as, essentially if not literally, a ghost. and so that means they only can (and have to) do what ghosts do, ie get revenge and then cease to exist. easy as that. but then halfway through this ghost vengeance they realize hey actually i might still be a human person. with human needs. that’s incredibly inconvenient, considering how much i’ve invested in this whole ghost thing

currently obsessed with british murder mystery tv shows where all the murders happen in the same town in every episode and everyone's just like oh yep there goes another one, just another day in shirefordtonstead

This is where the people who colonized Cabot Cove came from.

The absolutely essential aspect of these stories is complete, unbroken, total genre-blindness of all characters. If they, even momentarily, realize that their small town actually has a shockingly high murder rate, the effect is ruined. In an urban crime show like Law&Order or whatever, the cops can go to anybody on the street and say "We're investigating the murder of Jackknife Bob" and the witness is just like, "He got whacked? Oh well, I didn't do it." But in a Small Town Murder, it is absolutely imperative that everyone the detectives talked to is shocked that such a thing could happen! "Dear me, a murder? Right here in Shirefordtonstead? Good heavens!" Ma'am, it is season seven. You are the fifth proprietress of this quaint antique shop. The first three were murdered, and the fourth was the killer. In the normal, rational world, living among this high a murder rate would have a profound, dare I say traumatizing, effect on your worldview and your perception of your own safety. But you are not of the normal, rational world. Your unshakable and clearly counterfactual belief in the safety and stability in your surroundings is built into your character. And for this I love you. Never, ever change, Tiny Quaint Friendly Villages Full of Constant Murder.

toxic yaoi this toxic yuri that what about toxic lavender marriage. what then

you need to have at least one oc with evil fucking eyes. for your sanity.