evil variant (writer)

1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.

2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.

3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.

4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.

5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.

Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.

Tweet 1: living weapon complex save me...

Tweet 2: living weapon complex favorite character

You know how when kids get nightmares, sometimes they go to their parents' room to sleep in their bed for the night?

Think about the reverse with the Lotus. Who goes to visit her Tenno in their Orbiter when she's not feeling great. The Operator coming home to the Orbiter only for Ordis to quietly tell them the Lotus is sitting in their personal quarters.

Lotus holding on to one of their floofs while she waits. Letting herself absorb the sight of their neatly arranged noggles on the shelves. The colours and patterns on the walls. The haphazardly placed posters and trinkets littered throughout the child's room. Watching only with a hollow gaze when the Operator walks in.

"Lotus?" they'd ask worriedly. "Are you alright?"

She doesn't answer; she just watches.

She doesn't move. She doesn't let go of the floof.

Even when the Operator approaches her and wraps her in a big, warm hug... She remains. She is distant. She isn't really here.

But the Operator can feel her shivering. They can feel her body temperature dipping into dangerous levels of cold.

So they stay with her. They try to warm her up. They bring her a hot flask for her to hold. They drape her in blankets and huddle close to her. They talk about their day and the people they've been helping. They crack jokes and talk to her like how friends do. Even Ordis chimes in; even his usual levity takes a soothing edge.

The lights in the room start to dim. And the Lotus' body temperature is gradually returning to normal.

She still hasn't moved. She's still holding the floof.

But the Operator can hear her breathe again. They can see the subtle droop of her head. They can feel the whispers of warmth returning to her Sentient body.

I LIKE it

someone else might LIKE it

it is FUN to do

I get those THOUGHTS out of my head

it's fun to look BACK on

have I mentioned it's FUN?

it's CATHARTIC

it's nice to see what I CAN DO

FIRST LAW: This character must be a woman.

SECOND LAW: This character must be a loser, but not in a way that can be pinned on her gender. Misogynistic response from the audience does not disqualify the character.

THIRD LAW: If the audience does not enjoy this character, then it becomes impossible to enjoy the show/film/book/game altogether. It is not possible to ignore this character, for better or for worse.

the city of los angeles

the city of new york

sex

how drinking alcohol works

how getting high works

how a child of any age speaks

how nuclear physics work

how [my job] works

how debilitating being shot in the shoulder is

how hypothermia works

things I have never before seen someone fake their way through writing about, until today:

SHRIMP COCKTAIL:

banahbanah: #flashback to that one fic where Peter Parker frets about drinking shrimp cocktail because of the alcohol

generaldeliciousness: adding: what a prawn/shrimp cocktail is

#why is your character turning it down because they're under 21 #do you think prawn cocktail is a cocktail #this lives in my brain rent-free constantly #the rest of the fic was so normal #and good enough that i'll still re-read it #but bro

And then many, MANY, people wondering if this was actually authour mistake, since Peter really would do this!

POMEGRANATES:

zhajhassa: #haha where's that post that was like someone describing someone eating a pomegranate but they ate it like an apple

thornhands: #once someone wrote persephone biting into a whole Pomegranate #had to stop and stare at a wall for a minute

sungsingsanguine: I once saw someone very confidently write about a character eating slices of pomegranate.

FRUIT TREES:

zagreuses-toast: #given a very endearing glimpse into a writers blindspots by seeing them describe someone sitting under a ''pineapple tree''

salatrash: I remember something about picking watermelons... OF A FUCKING TREE

baander: #cranberry trees

DOUGH/BATTER:

maycelium: #I'm a chef so I'm really used to people not accurately describing how to cook food #But I was surprisingly flabbergasted when someone was writing making a cake and was kneading it. Which uh #Not necessary for cake. It was interesting for sure but just bizarre

livebloggingmydescentintomadness: #the one that drove me nuts was when a character set aside a batch of PASTA DOUGH 'to rise' #pasta doesn't have yeast!! #it does need to REST but it will never RISE #you do not want an airy crumb on your noodles

lovesodeepandwideandwell: #THE ONE WHERE THEY MADE COOKIES BY LADLING BATTER INTO A TRAY

Some other topics:

2. The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism Within US Slave Culture by Vincent Woodard

3. "Abolitionists turned the tables on Europeans by accusing them of being cannibals when they ate sugar tainted with the flesh and blood of slaves."

here's the intro

“No age gap??!?!?”

“And no non-con elements”

“NO NON CON?”

“And no coercion or otherwise manipulative behaviors”

“Joe they want a vampire with NOTHING”

Or, I would say it's much broader than being sexual. I struggle to make generalizations about it. People tend to want to whump characters they find attractive, and whump is about the character's body. Obviously bodies can be sexual and are deeply related to sexuality, but it isn't just about the sexuality of the body, it's about the body's vulnerability, the body's need for care, the body's experience of pain, the body's psychological and emotional meanings.

Where whump has a relationship with pain kink, it is just as closely related to masochism as it is sadism.

Whump is not a sexual thing for me, but I've always been interested in whump and I've always been a masochist, and it just...doesn't make sense to me that these things would be totally unrelated. Like, come on now.

I think for most people, whump is about catharsis in some way. For me personally, the appeal is about taking a character who is strong and untouchable and digging into the ways they are weak and need care. It's about a character who isn't expected, or maybe isn't allowed, or maybe is terrified and ashamed, to show pain or weakness finally "breaking" and being able to receive comfort and reassurance. It's about the shame of needing care and the fraught nature of trusting someone with that.

It's about the horror of the body's vulnerability; digging into the ways a body can experience helplessness and violation and really acknowledging how awful that feels and how scary that is.

It's about pain as an inherently private experience, something invisible that can't be objectively measured, and the ways that pain is made visible and the ways pain is judged to need care or to not need care, and how that judgment affects the experience of pain.

Whump was originally coined in reference to Daniel Jackson from Stargate SG-1. It was meant to describe the genuinely RIDICULOUS amount of mental and physical pain he was put through in the show. Just in the first season: his wife is kidnapped, a friend of his dies ugly in front of him, he gets knocked out at least 5 times, he's drugged and raped, he's kidnapped and tortured at LEAST 6 times, he watches everyone he loves die (in another timeline, but still), he struggles under military restrictions while trying to find his wife, and he dies at least twice (it's okay, he gets better). I know I'm missing other things. Probably a lot of wounds.

And, much like with Supernatural, season one of SG-1 was the cheerful season. He dies at least 8 times throughout the series and each time is soul crushing to watch.

Which is sort of the point.

Daniel's suffering is meant to explore just how much a person can take and still believe in goodness. To explore pain, physical and emotional, in a way that's so unrealistically over the top that it feels safe while still offering a feeling of being seen. What does pain do to one's soul when it's the dominant theme of someone's life? How does pain change us? How does it reinforce parts of us? Is recovery really healing or is it growing a new self? And what if that new self is someone that the people you love can't recognize? That they cringe away from?

Whump is about causing a character pain on a level that should cripple them and then poking at and examining the wounds. And, most of the time, it's about seeing them get put back together and comforted in a way that the writer may not have been able to experience after their own pain. Or maybe they did and it's about reflecting that back and processing it.

While I myself don't especially enjoy watching my faves suffer, I absolutely understand the desire to project pain onto a character in order to better understand one's own pain. And the satisfaction that can come from looking in on that pain through writing and being able to feel that you conveyed something that is inherently impossible to share. Pain and our reactions to it are even more individual our fingerprints, but whumping the hell out if a character can give someone the opportunity to put a snapshot of it into the world.

And HELL YEAH Christianity has a massive whump theme. Their whole thing is about how suffering (for God) is righteous. The deeply fucked up stories about some of their saints definitely qualify as whump. If you want to get ideas for how to hurt a blorbo, grab a book on saints and read their stories. Stabbing and throat cutting and incest and hanging and drowning and limb removal are all pretty common. Keeping in mind that a lot of the saints initially survive the damage done to them and suffer for a time before finally dying, you can see that a lot of the stories are about the suffering itself.