Ad Astra Infinitum ☆⭒˚.⋆

Left Side, Poll 2

Sonic Icebound belongs to @sonic-wildfire [link to masterpost]

CONTENT WARNINGS: Psychological horror, depictions of visual & auditory hallucinations, syringes/needles

Reach for the Stars belongs to @reachforthestarszine [link to carrd]

Logo Design Credit: @firbetmakes CONTENT WARNINGS: N/A, canon-typical everything

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Right Side, Poll 2

Microchip City belongs to @niko-jpeg

CONTENT WARNINGS: Violence, allegories for racism/prejudice

Infinite Silver AU belongs to @jesterjesteringjesterly [link to tumblr tag]

CONTENT WARNINGS: Blood, injury, death, emotional distress, deteriorating mental health, and suicidal ideations.

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it's not fair that twitter's phm tag has a rocky emoji so i stole him for you all

We're having our turn in the heat wave and reports from the National Mall are brutal already this week. That screenshot is today's forecast (courtesy of the Capital Weather Gang) and tomorrow and Saturday are confidently going to be worse than this is.

The national Mall has no shade on the grass and you will be exposed to the sun constantly while also experiencing extremely high humidity. You will not be allowed a bag over a certain size to enter the mall and it has to be clear. You cannot have an insulated water bottle, it has to be clear. Reports are that there are two entrances to the area so you'll have to wait in line to even get in. I cannot find a number on how many cooling stations there are, except that it's "few" to "none" depending on what accounts I read online. Vendors are allegedly charging more than the posted prices and seem to be unprepared for actual crowds - these are the official vendors not the scam food trucks that park all around the edges of the mall. And that's the extent of the planning done because it was not a priority to make sure attendees don't pass out.

My local friends and I have reached a consensus that tourists are going to get extremely sick and none of us know what the EMT response or planning is on the mall this year. People are going to die.

There is historically an assumption that attendees will have access to planned amenities. It's not in place this year of all years. There is a very real risk here and I'm trying to warn people, because people simply don't know how awful this is about to be.

this study got out of hand haha, but it's a perfect shot for the text from the book (opening of chapter 24) - what a brutal passage :(

empathy:

is responding to a person’s emotions by experiencing the same emotion as them (i.e. feeling sad when something sad happens to that person, or happy when something happy happens to that person.)

is an automatic response that cannot be controlled

cannot be learned

sympathy:

is recognizing that another person is in pain, even if you do not experience that pain, and offering comfort to that person

is something a person must actively choose to do

can be learned

compassion:

is showcasing care and support via words and actions

is something a person must actively choose to do

can be learned

if you need an example of a person with no empathy who practices sympathy and compassion, look no further than data from star trek: the next generation. he doesn’t have emotions at all, but he’s still kind to people and wants to help them.

Guards! Put the blond man in spandex in situations!

Right Side, Poll 10

Sonic Underground: Reprise belongs to @anxious-art-block [link to AU blog]

CONTENT WARNINGS: LOTS of discussion of past-character death (In relation to Bernadette and the old citizens of Mobotropolis), character is an avid smoker, and discussion of Robotization and “amputation” by association.

Lucente AU belongs to @chaosquillcollection [link to carrd]

Project Mods: @firbetmakes, @amyrosedefensesquad, @summers-art, Aster, Anniemist, & @summoning-chaos CONTENT WARNINGS: Canon-Typical Violence, Psychological Horror, Discussion of Mental Health, Major Character Death, Depictions of Panic Attacks

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Right Side, Poll 16

Sonic Star AU belongs to @starzdeath [link to tumblr tag]

CONTENT WARNINGS: Death, Injuries, Kidnapping, Self-Sacrifice, Major Character Death, Grief, Past Child Exploitation, Angst

Lost World belongs to @mang0-draws [link to masterpost]

CONTENT WARNINGS: Family issues, a character death, violence, harassment

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Left Side, Poll 1

Warped Perspective AU belongs to @totaleclipse573 [link to AU blog]

CONTENT WARNINGS: (In canon-typical starline fashion) Gaslighting, manipulation, mind control, stalking, medical malpractice. (Other things) Paranoia, heavy mentions of death (both the intent to kill and Eclipse dealing with the death of the black arms/the guilt that comes with it,) instances of blood and injury, trauma bonding, mental instability/breakdowns, hallucinations, suicidal ideation, dehumanization

Two Motes of Golden Light belongs to @selendred-thelibrary [link to ao3 series]

CONTENT WARNINGS: Suicidal thoughts, violence, blood, deaths, spiralling, self-hate (such as in thoughts but also evident in interactions between Sonic and Star), horror in the form of time travel loops

Explore each world below the cut!

⟢ ⟢ ⟢ LONG POST!!! ⟢ ⟢ ⟢

⋆˙⟡ Grief is not sad all the time and that will mess your character up more than the sadness does. There are going to be hours where your grieving character forgets. Where they're laughing at something stupid on their phone or annoyed about traffic or genuinely hungry and thinking about what they want for lunch and then it comes back and the forgetting makes it WORSE. The return of it after a moment of normal is its own specific violence. It feels like betrayal. Or it feels like proof that you're not grieving right, that you didn't love them enough to remember every second. Writers keep their grieving characters sad in every scene because it reads as respectful and consistent and it is WRONG. The grief that ambushes you in the cereal aisle is realer than the grief you perform at the funeral.

⋆˙⟡ THE STUFF!!! nobody talks about the stuff. Someone dies and suddenly there is a BODY and there are OBJECTS and both of these things require immediate logistical decisions that do not pause for your feelings. What do you do with their half-finished cup of tea. Their reading glasses on the nightstand. Their voicemails still on your phone. Their shampoo in the shower that you cannot bring yourself to use but also cannot throw away so it just. Sits there. Getting lower somehow. Did someone use it. Did you use it without noticing???? the material reality of someone's absence is brutal and specific and most grief writing floats above it in abstraction like feelings are the main event. The feelings ARE happening inside a body that is standing in a house full of objects and that matters. SO WRITE THE OBJECTS.

⋆˙⟡ Grief makes people act completely out of character and everyone around them handles that badly. Your character might get mean. Might get inappropriately funny. Might make a terrible financial decision or sleep with someone they shouldn't or stop showering or clean the entire house at 3am for the fourth time this week. Drief does not make people into better, softer, wiser versions of themselves on any reliable schedule. Sometimes it makes them into someone they don't recognize and that is terrifying on top of everything else. Snd the people around them (friends, family, whoever) they want the grief to be legible. They want it to look like grief is supposed to look so they know what to do. When it doesn't look right they get uncomfortable and then they get scarce and then your grieving character is also somehow dealing with the secondary loss of people who couldn't handle it. which is its own thing.

⋆˙⟡ Someone died and your character didn't like them very much. Or loved them and also resented them. Or is relieved and then immediately guilty about the relief. Or is grieving someone who hurt them, someone with whom things were unfinished in a way that can never be finished now, someone who they had been estranged from, someone who they were about to reconcile with, someone who they had been slowly losing for years before the actual death so the death was almost anticlimactic except that it closes the door in a way that slow losing doesn't. Grief for a complicated person is complicated. You grieve who you wished they were alongside who they actually were. You grieve the relationship you deserved and didn't get. None of this is clean. None of this resolves. Stop writing grief like the person who died was beloved and simple. MOST PEOPLE ARE NOT SIMPLE.

⋆˙⟡ The body keeps doing its thing and that's horrifying. You know what happens the week someone close to you dies? you get hungry. You get tired. You wake up at the normal time. Your body does not know. It has not been informed. It wants breakfast and it wants to stretch and at some point it is going to want things you feel like you have no right to want right now. The physical continuation of your own life in the immediate aftermath of loss is one of the stranger things a human being has to experience and almost nobody writes it. Your character needs to eat. They need to sleep. Their back hurts. They have a headache that won't quit because they've been crying and dehydrated for four days. They are a body doing body things in the middle of the worst thing that has ever happened to them and those two realities exist at the same time with no resolution.

⋆˙⟡ Anniversaries and dates are only half the ambush. the random Friday is the other half. Everyone knows about the first birthday without them. The first holiday. The one year mark. Those dates are braced for. Your character knows they're coming and steels themselves and sometimes that even works. What nobody warns you about is the random Tuesday in March that isn't any significant date at all except that something small happens: the light is a certain way, a song comes on, they see someone wearing the same jacket, and it is somehow worse than the anniversary was. Grief has terrible aim. it does not respect the calendar you've organized it into. it goes quiet for weeks and then destroys you on an unremarkable Wednesday because you drove past a gas station you used to stop at together. Write the random Tuesday. it's realer than the anniversary scene and it will devastate people who know.

⋆˙⟡ People say insane things to grieving people and the grieving person has to just stand there and take it. They're in a better place. Everything happens for a reason. i know exactly how you feel, when my dog died--and your character cannot say anything because this person means well and grief has a strange etiquette where the bereaved is somehow responsible for managing the comfort of everyone who comes to comfort them. The grieving person ends up performing okayness for the people who came to check on them. Ends up reassuring people. Ends up saying thank you for coming when what they want is for everyone to leave and also for no one to ever leave. This role reversal is so common and so rarely written and it is one of the most exhausting parts of early grief. Your character is drowning and spending energy making sure everyone else feels good about the life jacket they brought.

⋆˙⟡ The person who died keeps getting fixed in time while everyone else moves. This one is strange and i don't see it written enough. Your character ages. Changes. Has experiences. Develops opinions. And the person they lost stays exactly the same age they were, exactly the person they were, forever. Which means the gap between who your character is now and who the person was gets wider as time passes. You become someone they never knew. You have thoughts you can't tell them. You reach an age they never reached. Eventually you outlive them. You are older than they ever got to be. And the version of them in your memory is younger than you now. The relationship you carry continues to evolve even though only one of you is still here to evolve it. That is bizarre and sad and completely human and almost nobody writes it. WHY??? :///