Cinderfeather

REMEMBER. STAYING OFF FOR ONLY ONE DAY DOES NOTHING. If you want to see change you NEED to wait until they revert the update

Here's a list of things you can do instead of go on the private info snatching website:

Watch Twitch Streams

Watch Movies/Shows

Pick up a new hobby/do your current hobbies

Go outside for a walk (or outside in general)

Create something

Talk to/hang out with friends

Try a new video game/play games in general

Check out some cool websites on Neocities

Pirate things you can't afford (like me)

The reason Mr Darcy has enduring appeal is because he transforms from a rich, conceited and utterly unpleasant snob into the best version of himself after a thorough rebuke from the heroine. Instead of resenting Elizabeth when she tells him how much she dislikes him, he realises that she was correct, that he cannot stand the person he has become either. Darcy listens, learns and grows as a person following her reproach of him. For all this, he expects absolutely nothing in return for it from her. Not her love, or her approval, or her thanks. Nothing.

I often hear a discourse where Celine in K-pop Demon Hunters, Alma in Encanto and Ming in Turning Red are seen as vilains. They’re the ones who restricted the younger generation, hurt them, and are ultimately responsible for their pain, trauma and self-doubt. They’re framed as the real villains of the story. But I’d like to differ.

These are stories of intergenerational trauma. They are women who survived, repressed, and tried to protect their families the only way they knew how: through control, perfectionism, and emotional suppression.

And yet, when the next generation begins to reclaim joy, freedom, softness — they become the obstacle. Not because they’re bad people, but because they’re scarred. Their minds cling to survival strategies, unable to recognize that the environment has changed.

Alma is still stuck fleeing the colonizers.

Ming is still afraid of her true self.

Celine believes that fear and mistakes must be hidden.

It’s not about hating these characters. It’s about how unprocessed trauma twists love into control. How survival, unexamined, turns into rigidity. These women were never given space to process their own pain and they project it onto their daughters and granddaughters.

And here’s something we rarely say enough: intergenerational trauma can create toxic patterns but that doesn’t always mean there was abuse or conscious harm. Even when their love becomes suffocating or controlling, these women are not necessarily “abusive parents.” They are daughters of silence, fear, and sacrifice. And they were never taught another way. It’s important to make that distinction, especially in a world that often pushes a binary, punitive reading of family dynamics.

They’re the product of a generation that was told to endure. But endurance without healing becomes its own kind of violence.

What’s powerful in these stories is that they don’t end in vengeance. They end in confrontation and transformation. The confrontation is necessary: the younger generation refuses the silence. Refuses the shame. Refuses to carry a burden that wasn’t theirs to begin with.

The house is destroyed in Encanto.

Mei accepts her full self.

So does Rumi.

And in the best cases, this confrontation allows the elder to soften too. Alma opens up. Ming listens. And I’m hoping in the sequel, Celine will open too.

Maybe that’s also why these stories speak so deeply to POC audiences. These aren’t stories about cutting ties. They’re stories about how hard it is to transform them, to protect ancestral bonds while refusing to perpetuate inherited pain. In many racialized families, collectivity, loyalty, and intergenerational duty are sacred... even when they come at the cost of personal boundaries.

And sometimes, Western individualist frameworks read these tensions as dysfunction or villainy. But for us, they’re just the difficult truth of growing up and trying to do better.

These women aren’t villains. That would be too easy. They embody the fragile, necessary work of bringing change without breaking the thread. These stories are about refusing to inherit their pain without reflection. Because love, without accountability, is not enough.

These stories show us that each generation has something to learn from the next. And the new generation must also break free from the chains they inherited while preserving what is meaningfull.

But it’s not just their story.

One day, we’ll be the older generation.

And we’ll need to be humble enough to learn from the ones after us.

So don’t be a fool.

We may be Mei, Rumi, or Mirabel today.

But tomorrow, we could be Ming, Celine, or Alma.

And when that time comes, we’ll realize how hard it is to unlearn what once kept us safe.

So let’s have compassion for all these characters.

Because these stories show us not just how the cycle of generations works, but how it can make us better, stronger, and more connected... if we’re all willing to go through the change.

∘₊✧──────✧──────✧₊∘

If you’re curious, I’ve written more on K-pop Demon Hunters:

A post on the mental health themes woven through the songs — right here.

A breakdown of Celine-Rumi in comparaison to Gothel–Rapunzel dynamic — here.

An analysis about Rumi, Jinu, and the danger of sinking together — here.

Just because a book explicitly says 'actually, we're the good guys', /the author/ can have a super skewed view of what 'the good guys' means. If the narrative excuses and approves of a character using a Jedi mind trick on an innocent person to get them to do what the Jedi want despite that person not being comfortable working with colonizers to destabilize their own government, that doesn't make that action suddenly ok. It's still bad even if the author doesn't think so. The argument 'well, she was so nervous so I helped her by calming her down with the Force (so that she would stop resisting me and do what I wanted her to do)' is the argument of a manipulative abuser! If the only reason you're using the Force to calm someone is so that they'll do what you want, YOU ARE BAD! I don't CARE that our protagonists think it's good!

This argument that 'the Jedi back then weren't all about violence, they cared more about the diplomacy and completely non-violent aspects of helping the galaxy!' holds absolutely no water when you look at Vernestra Rwoh. She was made Jedi Knight at 15. Why? What part of a 15 year old child is qualified to control negotiations between adults of independent planets? What part of a 15 year old is mature enough to be a cop? What qualifications does a 15 year old have to lead civilians in a clean-up effort on their own planet?

None. So why was Vernestra given a title that made her an authority over grown ass adults (who don't have the force)? She was extremely good at deadly violence. She could out-lightsaber duel most people. Those were her qualifications: she's very good with deadly weapons, therefore, she deserves authority.

If the Jedi ACTUALLY weren't all about violence in the High Republic, it wouldn't have mattered to them that Vernestra was so good at dueling - that wouldn't have even been a part of Jedi qualifications. She would have had to continue to learn and grow and MATURE from being a CHILD before being placed in a position of authority. But they didn't. They gave her power because she was capable in her violence. That was the sole reason.

If the only way you can rise in the ranks of the Jedi and have any sort of authority is by being violent - if it's not allowed for ANY Jedi to not be capable in combat - then the whole group is militant. You cannot make the argument that they are anything but a violent, religious military. If even librarians and teachers and diplomats have to reach a certain level of combat training, YOU ARE A MILITARY!

Any 'negotiations' will have the underlying threat of violence to them when you know the person you're negotiating against could murder you on the spot OR that that's the only galactic group allowed to exist that could help you if you DO need military protection and that if you disagree with them, they'll refuse to help.

Making both the military protector and the political negotiators and aid workers be the SAME group is BAD just like making aid workers in our real world be exclusively military is BAD.

People have been doing book clubs since forever. They do not put George RR Martin on the phone so he can join the chat.

Oh, thank you, kindly court jester jingling into my life under the brave banner of anonymity, for illustrating the exact problem of current fandom.

(This ask is about this post about private fanfiction "book clubs," for those of you who are not following my jester's ire.)

The bedrock of the problem entrenched fandom is having with the newer "TikTok fandom" element is that we have a fundamental disagreement about what fandom is, and what is the social relationship between the people who write fanfiction, make fanart, etc, and the people who read that fanfiction and enjoy that fanart.

(I am not going to use the term "content creator." Because that term is not applicable to fandom, fanfiction authors, or fan artist. Kill the capitalist in your brain. Content is hummingbird nectar made with artificial sweeteners. It resembles the real thing at a distance, but it is devoid of nutrients. It will fill you up so you're not hungry while starving you. Generative AI can produce content because it's empty; it doesn't mean anything. It doesn't even want to engage with you. The sole purpose of content is to get you to sit still long enough for the people who own the platform to squeeze whatever it is they want from you out of you and then abandon your malnourished husk until the next time they can get something from you.)

George RR Martin is not a member of fandom, and the relationship he has with his readers is fundamentally different, because his relationship as an author is explicitly a professional one. When George RR Martin sells a book—not to his readers, but to a publisher who acts as intermediary—he is given a lengthy contract outlining the terms of the sale. How much he will be paid, what can be done with his work by who, etc. George RR Martin is not your peer.

Fanfiction authors are your peers. They're your next door neighbors. They write fanfiction to connect to other fans in celebration of a canon everyone involved loves. Nobody makes a single red cent from writing or sharing their fanfiction. George RR Martin has sold 90 million copies of his books, and he gets money for every one. Because TikTok has trained you that people who are putting their creations out there are monetizing the experience of you reading or watching their art, the "TikTok fandom" element has you sorting your peer posting fanfiction on AO3 into the same category as George RR Martin. But your relationship with George RR Martin is a professional one, and the expectation from fanfiction authors and artists is a social relationship.

When you have a private book club reading and discussing fanfiction without ever telling the author or, God forbid, leaving a comment about how much you enjoyed the story—which is the expectation entrenched fandom authors and artists who view fandom as a social relationship—you think you're reading a mass produced novel from someone who has already been paid for it several times over, but this isn't even Walmart vs. local mom and pop. What are you actually doing is going to your neighborhood block party, picking up the cake someone made and brought to share, and taking it back to your house to eat with friends.

We are your peers. We are your neighbors. We are doing this for free because we want to talk to you about our common interest. No, it's not "payment." We offer our work for free, and you have the option of treating us like vending machines or ChatGPT or Walmart. This is a social relationship; you have this option just as you have the option of leaving your shopping cart in the middle of the parking lot instead of walking it to the cart return. You have that option just as you have the option to stick your chewed gum on a park bench or park your car across three handicap spaces or take a shit on the floor of a public bathroom. How you treat your peers and neighbors, how you treat the people in your community, is up to you.

You can keep stealing cakes from block parties. But don't be surprised when people get fed up with it and stop having block parties. Then you'll be stuck buying cake from Walmart or consuming artificially sweetened hummingbird nectar from ChatGPT while vultures raid your corpse for data.

A discord fic club recently advertised they would be reading one of my fics. I was actually really excited about this! Hopefully new people get to enjoy a thing I worked hard to make for them, and I was really looking forward to hearing what they thought about it.

Except the advertised date came and went with silence on the actual fic, so I assumed that it got canceled or something.

But, no, it didn’t - I heard later that the group had in fact read my fic and apparently loved it. Quietly. To themselves.

And, like, look — I’m trying to write this with a minimum amount of snark, because on one hand I’m a fic reader too and I firmly believe that people have a right to enjoy fic however they wish. As I writer, I also don’t think I’m entitled to comments, but like 90% of writing fic for me is to be part of a community, and being a part of a community means commenting on fics so that there are more fic and the community continues.

On the other hand, as a writer, I have to be honest — hearing that people specifically scheduled time to read a fic I wrote and then loved it while not sharing any of their thoughts with me? That doesn’t make me feel good. I feel like it should, but it doesn’t. It makes me feel like my fic is just content to be consumed without regard to the effort that went into making it.

The fic in question? I worked on it on and off for literal years. It had to be betaed. It had to be formatted to be posted to AO3 properly, I had to work on the meta bits to properly tag and warn people.

All of that is work, and the only thing I ask for (and any fic author, really) is engagement and encouragement from the people reading the fic.

This isn’t snark or bitterness to say that if the trend is going to be people talking amongst themselves about my fic in a group chat with total silence to me as the author, then I don’t see the point in going through all the effort to post fic publicly. I’ll just send it to my own group chat. If that’s the community now, then that’s where I’ll go. I’ll hate it, honestly, but like. If that’s the deal, that’s the deal.

I can see this shit happening! I will all of a sudden have a week where I get a whole bunch of kudos on one specific story (like 20-50 people all at once, which normally only happens for recently posted stories), and it's like, "Oh, okay, I am the assignment for a book club this week," and that is all I hear about it. It's maddening.

I am a real human person. I am right here.

Even if it takes me 5 minutes to post my comment (yes, that number is real. My data is horrible and I am WiFi less) I will do my best to fight for it.

I KNOW THERE ARE YAPPERS OUT HERE! PULL UP!!

If my anxiety ridden ass can take the time (even with the "is it okay for me to just say 'very cool' because I can't think of anything else?" sometimes) you can too! Yapp more!! Compliment more!!

I have literally created new possum meme to tell YOU: say kind things more!!!

According to the CDC, in 10 percent of those drownings, the adult will actually watch the child do it, having no idea it is happening. Drowning does not look like drowning—Dr. Pia, in an article in the Coast Guard’s On Scene magazine, described the Instinctive Drowning Response like this:

“Except in rare circumstances, drowning people are physiologically unable to call out for help. The respiratory system was designed for breathing. Speech is the secondary or overlaid function. Breathing must be fulfilled before speech occurs.

Drowning people’s mouths alternately sink below and reappear above the surface of the water. The mouths of drowning people are not above the surface of the water long enough for them to exhale, inhale, and call out for help. When the drowning people’s mouths are above the surface, they exhale and inhale quickly as their mouths start to sink below the surface of the water.

Drowning people cannot wave for help. Nature instinctively forces them to extend their arms laterally and press down on the water’s surface. Pressing down on the surface of the water permits drowning people to leverage their bodies so they can lift their mouths out of the water to breathe.

Throughout the Instinctive Drowning Response, drowning people cannot voluntarily control their arm movements. Physiologically, drowning people who are struggling on the surface of the water cannot stop drowning and perform voluntary movements such as waving for help, moving toward a rescuer, or reaching out for a piece of rescue equipment.

From beginning to end of the Instinctive Drowning Response people’s bodies remain upright in the water, with no evidence of a supporting kick. Unless rescued by a trained lifeguard, these drowning people can only struggle on the surface of the water from 20 to 60 seconds before submersion occurs.”

This doesn’t mean that a person that is yelling for help and thrashing isn’t in real trouble—they are experiencing aquatic distress. Not always present before the Instinctive Drowning Response, aquatic distress doesn’t last long—but unlike true drowning, these victims can still assist in their own rescue. They can grab lifelines, throw rings, etc.

Look for these other signs of drowning when persons are in the water:

Head low in the water, mouth at water level

Head tilted back with mouth open

Eyes glassy and empty, unable to focus

Eyes closed

Hair over forehead or eyes

Not using legs—vertical

Hyperventilating or gasping

Trying to swim in a particular direction but not making headway

Trying to roll over on the back

Appear to be climbing an invisible ladder

So if a crew member falls overboard and everything looks OK—don’t be too sure. Sometimes the most common indication that someone is drowning is that they don’t look like they’re drowning. They may just look like they are treading water and looking up at the deck. One way to be sure? Ask them, “Are you all right?” If they can answer at all—they probably are. If they return a blank stare, you may have less than 30 seconds to get to them. And parents—children playing in the water make noise. When they get quiet, you get to them and find out why.

Source/article: [x]

I’ve been a lifeguard for 6 years now and of all the saves I’ve done, maybe two or three had people drowning in the stereotypical thrashing style. And even those, like the save I made last weekend, it was exactly like OP describes where the person’s head is going in and out of the water but it isn’t long enough to get any air. Mostly you recognize drowning by the look on someone’s face. If someone looks wide eyed and terrified or confused, chances are they’re drowning. That look of “oh shit” is pretty easily recognizable. And even if you can’t tell for sure: GO AFTER THEM ANYWAY. I’ve done “saves” where a kid was pretending to drown and I mistook it for real drowning, but that’s preferable to a kid ACTUALLY drowning.

Also please remember that even strong swimmers can drown if they have a medical emergency, get cramps, or get too tired. If your friend knows how to swim but they’re acting funny get them to land. And even if someone can respond when you ask them if they need help, if they say they do need help? GO HELP THEM.

However . If the victim is a stranger, I can’t recommend trying to get them. Lifeguards literally train to escape “attacks,” because people who are drowning can freak the fuck out and grab you and make YOU drown as well. If you do go in after someone, take hold of them from the back and talk to them the whole time. IF YOU ARE GRABBED: duck down into the water as low as you can get. The person is panicking and won’t want to go under water and should release you. Shove up at their hands and push them away from you as you duck under. Don’t die trying to save someone else.

When the lifeguard got us both out, a woman came running down and accused me of harming him and said he had been completely fine in the water. That there was no reason to drag him out of there. The lifeguard had to explain to her that her son had been drowning, to which her response was to say that she didn’t hear him call for help.

Obi-wan & Yoda: you absolutely must not under any circumstances fight Vader

Luke: no I'm gonna

Obi-wan & Yoda in ROTJ: okay now we need you to go fight Darth Vader

Luke:

Source (couldn’t find the original post to reblog):

Stop telling people to just orphan their fics.

Orphaning a fic means giving up any and all ownership over it. No way to claim it back, edit it or delete it. Yes it's an archive but an author should still have the right to delete their work if they feel like they don't want it to be up anymore.

Readers always scream for authors to orphan their fics instead of deleting because they feel like they have a right to the fanworks that is shared with them for free. If it's so important to you to not lose a fic, download it. Also comment and encourage the authors, instead of telling them to give up all ownership to their work.

To authors, if you think about deleting your fics, there are other options you should employ first. If you don't want it connected to your name, put it into an anonymous collection. As long as it's in there, noone can see you wrote it, you still can edit ot or delete it and moderate comments on it. You can even move it to anther account, just create another one, add it as co author and then take your main account off. Then you can still edit it from your second account but it's no longer connected to your account.

If you don't want it to show anymore put it in a unrevealed collection, that way, the fic won't show up but it's still there, you can still see it, read comments and make it public again.

If you feel the urge to delete your fic, try one of these options first and see how you feel about it after a while, you can still delete or orphan afterwards, but this hopefully makes your decision easier.

DRAGONS! 

Dragon AU, again. I regret nothing. 

Preview:

While Vader was a Sith, a dragon who had lost its internal fire and fallen to the cold darkness, Luke was a skywalker, a true dragon, though he was still far too young for his internal fire to keep him warm. Thus little babies had to be kept warm. Luke slept close to the bottom of the nest where the rocks were warm from the lava below. He looked like Vader once had. Golden scales and sky blue eyes.

Vader let out a soft snort of a laugh. Luke was laying on his back. His wings spread out. His round belly, full from his meal, was up in the air. Surely it was not comfortable. Luke’s back spikes may be nothing more than little nubs right now, but still he had them. Vader lowered his head and sniffed his son. Then he started to lick Luke.

He started on Luke’s exposed belly. At once the baby started to stir. Vader knew Luke wasn’t in a deep sleep. Earlier, Vader had fed Luke first and put him back in the nest while he ate. Luke let out a few squeaks as he woke up. He rolled him over to his side. Vader continued to groom his son. Blinking blue eyes looked up at Vader. Luke let out a long, loud squeak. The baby was far from being able to roar.

“For most dialogue, use a comma after the sentence and don’t capitalize the next word after the quotation mark,” she said.

“But what if you’re using a question mark rather than a period?” they asked.

“When using a dialogue tag, you never capitalize the word after the quotation mark unless it’s a proper noun!” she snapped.

“When breaking up a single sentence with a dialogue tag,” she said, “use commas.”

“This is a single sentence,” she said. “Now, this is a second stand-alone sentence, so there’s no comma after ‘she said.’”

“You can also break up dialogue by placing the em dash inside the quotation mark, but—” She took a moment to catch her breath. “—you must treat the action like a sentence. It must be capitalized with an end punctation.”

“When humans speak, we often get sidetracked (and share information that may not be all that pertinent, a secret, or something we probably shouldn’t be talking about). Use parenthesis in your dialogue when you want to demonstrate this.”

***

“If you’re writing a long monologue, then it likely needs to be broken into multiple paragraphs. Because one long paragraph of dialogue that takes up an entire page or multiple pages is very hard on the eyes.