hiiraeth

it is konoha folklore that kakashi's first chunnin uniform is cursed because 3 seperate tailors tried and gave up on making it cause it was giving them nightmares (Hashirama was haunting a LOT of people when he realized they were making a SIX YEAR OLD a chunnin) so Minato ended up making it himself. minato doesn't have nightmares because he killed the part of his brain that produces guilt years ago so he makes it easy peasy, but honestly that only makes the uniform more infamous and scary because god only KNOWS what seals his paranoid ass snuck into that kid's vest lmao

oh edward elric bleeding out and nearly dying impaled by a massive steel beam shaving pieces off his soul and years off his life because he chose not to kill the objectively worst guy he's ever met but he's just like. ah. if this is the price i have to pay for mercy i'm glad to pay it. 16 years old, unshakeable belief in the value of a life, shortest fuse in the world, mad as hell at all times, heart of gold for all of humanity. no one is doing it like him

something you learn fast and necessarily when you get into the habit of writing is that you are riddled with blind assumptions, prejudices, unpractised rhetoric and all kinds of unchallenged cicada shell thoughts that were left stuck to your mode of being when bad ideas fled you. most people get to move through the world behind a kind of modesty veil that divides their internal thoughts from their external observations, but you have to take that off when you write. you have to suddenly present the whole world to itself nakedly, without the kindness of someone who can stop you mid-sentence and say "hold on, I know you, you can't possibly mean that". people are often scared to show their work to an editor in case the editor points out what they look like without their modesty veil, but god, christ, hell and heaven, you have to be more afraid of what the whole world of strangers will see if you don't let someone pick the cicada shells off you first.

writing is 10% storytelling and 90% rearranging three sentences for an hour like you're trying to solve an ancient curse