The Work Never Matches the Dream

A monster... but look at those who created him!

En Sabah Nur deserves better 😩

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Idk, this is something after that conversation with Rogue (she had literally one job, but no).

Gonna start with the weird answer and then explain the logic behind it:

I’m fascinated by the concept of obsession.

Like, particularly, when one person is obsessed with another person.

Typically what fascinates me most is the darker end of the “obsession” spectrum—the “I’ll die for you and/or kill for you,” the “I can’t imagine existing without you and will reinvent myself into some sort of idealized person who can support you as perfectly as possible,” the “I literally worship you like a literal actual god because you are that perfect to me,” the “I hate your guts but I can’t stop thinking about you for more than three seconds and I haven’t slept right in months because of it.” So, yandere tropes, “I’m stalking you out of love” tropes, zealous cults, unrequited love, knight & lord, all that stuff. I’m very interested in the psychology of how what ought to be a positive emotion can get twisted the wrong way into something so negative—how something protective can be twisted into something destructive, how something supporting can twist into something harmful, etc. You know, good horror shit. And so that’s something I spend a lot of time thinking about, reading about, and ultimately writing about.

Here’s the thing though. If you understand how obsession works inside and out, you’re like, 90% of the way to being able to write romance. That is, I think, fundamentally why I’m interested in writing romance in the first place. Because on a scale of 0 to 100, with 0 being “total indifference to a person’s existence” and 100 being “can’t go five seconds without thinking about the person and dreams about them at night,” romance clocks in at, like, 40. You’ve just gotta take Full Obsession and dial it back to a reasonable, healthy, sane level, and then paint it pink and that’s the Romance Feeling.

And then you chuck in a bunch of other positives to go along with the “can’t stop thinking about them” factor to make it a convincing romance.

me @ 10

PUT YOUR LIMBS BACK AND HOLD THIS INSTEAD