木漏れ日

trauma dumpling

🥟

A character trait/dynamic that I'm endlessly compelled by is someone dealing with (or, like, failing to) being the child of people who were too busy being good people to have the time and attention to be good parents. This can be anywhere from 'was a public defender who gave a shit working 60 hour weeks with basically no vacations' to 'left their family behind to join the revolution/war effort and is now a universally beloved martyr-hero who saved/remade the world with their final breath' on the groundedness spectrum. The important thing is a viscerally felt but confused and ugly mess of longing, resentment, and guilt about feeling the resentment.

the best fanfiction you've ever read was written by a woman in her 40s before she made dinner for her kids. it was written by a teenager after school when they should've been studying for a history test. and a barista came up with the idea while they cleaned the espresso machine and busser fact-checked it on their break and the post-doc edited between writing grant proposals and the nurse apologized for typos in the notes after a long shift and behind every drabble and one-shot and multi-chapter fic there is a person with a wonderful and interesting and chaotic life and it is such a privilege that we get to be apart of it because they decided to do this thing we all share, for fun.

"Idiots," I say, referring to the characters I have spent hundreds of my real life hours contemplating.

I do really love it when women write graphic and fucked up things. I feel like so often people react to fucked up fiction with “of course a disgusting man would write this 🙄” and it often carries an unspoken (honestly sometimes spoken) message of “a woman’s PURE and DELICATE and FEMININE mind could NEVER think of something this VILE”. Thank you women in fucked up fiction 🫡

i have the soul of an author and the work ethic of a gen z young adult who quite frankly did not choose to be born

saw someone say that they don't read fics under 10k and had to laugh because more fool you, that is where all the bangers are. obviously I'm biased but truly nothing hits like a 1.5k fic with a lowercase title from some obscure poet where nothing actually happens and yet you emerge blinking with a completely new outlook on the character. infinitely rereadable. like a perfectly crafted pastry. I'm gobbling them up!