Baby, you sing to me like the petals around you.

Characters must make choices.

Characters should often make bad choices before they make good choices.

Character choices should drive the vast majority of the plot. Characters reacting to having random stuff thrown at them is far less interesting than characters reacting to the stuff they've thrown after it's ricocheted around and comes bouncing back toward them.

If a character refuses to make a choice, there better be consequences for that too, and you better have a damn clear way of showing those consequences to the reader and the character.

Now I’m an adult and people my age have their lives in order and I’m stuck here, confused, because I never planned to be alive and I’m so far behind.

I want to make an addition to this. I made this post a long time ago.

I’m currently back in university, and I’ve made so much progress with my trauma. I’m in a loving relationship.

Things can and will get better. It’s not too late.

I’m getting married. I’m still in that loving relationship.

I’ve been married a little over two years. I just got home from friendships that feel like home and family. My husband and I have our own place. I have a full ass book ready to be published.

Freppa has this also, they kind of bond over that at some point, but Määnin...

You maybe know how there's always the phrase that Määnin doesn't talk a lot because well, does he? Not really. He just accepts. To me he's a character that acts so indifferent towards everything happening, whether it's towards him or something just happening around him. He just shrugs, opens a beer and calls it a day.

And in FCM he makes a decision. Which is perhaps the worst decision he could have done and it's making me sick every time I think about it but it's so important that he does that and finally chooses something. He is hitting low before he can come high and that makes sense for him.

He crushes, breaks out, it's his right. After endorsing and doing nothing for so long. I mean, he could've done this in a nicer way, for sure, but he is loud too, and passionate, Määnin can only act very big or barely at all.

I don't hate him for what he did, I could never actually judge him, even if I want to punch his guts, I just understand him too fucking well to judge him.

And I know it will turn out alright. And I wrote about how he feels after making that decision but I can't be mad at him.

Määnin Mannerheim, you will always be famous.

I managed to capture this phenomenon with my phone

1903 Aino Malmberg published the first known lesbian short story in Finland, named "ystävyyttä" ("friendship").

1963 Christer Kihlman publishes a break trough novel Den blå modern ("blue mother"). One of the book's themes is homosexuality, and the book ended up winning the national literary price.

1966 Ilkka Taipale publishes a book "Sukupuoleton Suomi" ("genderless Finland"). In it a lawyer Herbert Gumpler criticizes the law that criminalized gay acts, because it left gay people vulnerable to extortion and violence.

1968 Keskusteluseura Psyke becomes the first registered queer association. It later starts to publish a magazine "96" for queer people.

These literary works and formal associations might seem boring compared to the "first pride was a riot" we hear from America. But the truth is that these published materials slowly moved people's opinions, and in 1971 "gay acts" were no longer a crime.

Also reminder that our nowadays well known and beloved gay icon Touko Laaksonen, "Tom of Finland" started his career in 1956 by publishing his art with that pen name in a magazine based in USA, because that stuff was still illegal in Finland, and even publishing with his real name could have got him into trouble before the law changed. But damn it he found a way to get them published anyway.