God I have been struggling so much to explain my irritation with a certain trend I keep running across in LGBTQ+ "cozy fantasy books"
Because everytime I try to verbalize it, it just comes out as sounding like I'm trying to say there's like. An upper limit on how daydreamy an author can be about worlds in which their every fantasy is fulfilled (entire farming village based on mutual aid; where also everyone is queer and/or gender-conforming! And there is little to no conflict! And everyone knows therapy speak and is unfailingly kind and generous and good!)
Because like--there's not, really, an upper limit on these things.
But there is an invisible line of tolerance for me where it turns from "cozy fantasy" to "oh my god grow the fuck up; this is so saccharine it's become one-note and boring and dull that I can't actually ENJOY the low-stakes cozy vibes"
But it sounds like I'm complaining about "there's too many gender queers and not enough homophobia in this book" and it's Not That
Ugh idk take your 2 stars and let me delete this book off my Kobo, I finished it and that's honestly more than I think it deserved.
(a 4.07 average star rating are you FUCKING kidding me)
The problem you're trying to pinpoint is TENSION ISSUES, and cozy fantasy is fuckin RIFE with them. Major chronic problem with the genre, and editors just keep letting authors get away with it instead of developing the story.
Low stakes are fine, utopian settings are fine, even low-conflict is fine -- but you gotta have a source of tension SOMEWHERE, or it pisses people off. If everyone's cooperating together and an amazing team and there's no interpersonal drama, ok great, but hit them with a tornado or a famine or heavy rains that wash out the fields right after planting.
The following have been called the "7 types of conflict" but people always think conflict means fighting or angry feelings, so i do think that "7 types of tension" might be a better wording:
Person vs Person (this is the one that cozy fantasy is most allergic to, and that's ok!)
Person vs Society (cozy fantasy also allergic to this one, we're still fine!)
Person vs Self (inexplicably underutilized, it rules, highly recommend)
Person vs Supernatural
Person vs Fate
Person vs Technology
Person vs Nature
And here is a list of free cozy fantasy tension points for each one of those. Feel free to steal these, adapt them, tweak them, etc -- as long as you promise to commit to the bit and actually make your protagonist face their problems head-on and have feelings about them and actually DO SOME HARD WORK to resolve them instead of conveniently handwaving it all away. (Your protagonist's name is Blue.)
Person vs Person: Blue's neighbor has a longstanding grudge and is trying to get Blue's bakery shut down by any means necessary, including reporting Blue to the health inspectors, who threaten to shut the whole operation down. (If you are writing for adults, then the grudge is bad enough that it CANNOT be solved with the power of friendship or by offering said neighbor free daily croissants. C'mon, don't wimp out. Imagine the Worst coworker you've ever had. Imagine the pettiest HOA lady ever.)
Person vs Society: There is a war in the neighboring kingdom which has impacted the chocolate chip import market. Blue's bakery is struggling financially, and the bank is making ominous noises about Blue's fantasy student loans.
Person vs Self: Blue is having a crisis of faith. They inherited the bakery and they hate running it, but they feel an obligation to their beloved dead relative. They don't know how to balance this against their own dreams, and they feel a ton of guilt about it.
Person vs Supernatural. Blue boasted that they're a better baker than the local hearth goddess. Blue now has a curse that fucks up every loaf, danish, cookie, and sticky-bun they touch. They can't even go into other people's bakeries without jinxing them.
Person vs Fate: Several generations ago, a fortune-teller spoke a prophecy that says the bakery will fail if someone matching Blue's description takes over. Blue doesn't give a shit about that, Blue is determined to make it work, Blue spits in the face of Fate.
Person vs Technology. A new bakery opens just a block away from Blue's, with newfangled magical ovens and staffed entirely by magic robots. Can Blue compete against this? We explore the upsides and downsides between artisanship and mass manufacturing.
Person vs Nature. A really bad winter strangles the town, trapping people in their homes. Blue doggedly wades through waist-deep snow on their daily bread deliveries to the old folks of the town, but they slip on ice and twist their ankle really bad.
(Anyway read my book Yield Under Great Persuasion, which is an M/M cozy romantasy with lots of different tension points -- we've got a lil bit of #1 and #2, a WHOLE LOT of #3, and a smidge of #4 and #5)
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Little does anyone know, but the feathered wing appendages on dragons are QUITE ticklish.
Hi everyone! Sorry it's been a while again - been trying to catch up on my personal backlog + procrastination and a bit of laziness on the side.
Still working on Dragon Starmaker, but when I was on discord and talking about Dragon Au, @forsssnaken gave me brainrot after I mentioned the winged appendages on Azi were ticklish, so here we are.
For anyone unfamiliar with my personal Dragon Au, this is a side au of the main AU where Starmaker and Azi get their human forms pre-earth. That is to say, its not canon to the au (but it doesn't stop me from having brainrot over these designs).
the first chapter of Moby Dick rewritten in tiresome modern idiom
CHAPTER 1. Loomings.
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - it's none of your business how many - being mostly broke, and bored with the land part of the world, I thought I would sail around a little and look at the watery part of the world. I'm probably the most mentally healthy person you know. Whenever I feel my face getting grim; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself accidentally reading the ads in the window of funeral homes, and following funeral processions through traffic; and especially when I'm hangry, and only my extremely strong moral principles stop me from deliberately going out in public and methodically slapping people's earbuds out - then I know it's high time to get to sea, ASAP. This is my substitute for getting in fights. I'm too mentally healthy to kill myself; I quietly and considerately put myself on a ship and sail myself away instead. There is nothing surprising in this. Everyone feels exactly the same way, and if they don't, they're lying.
You think I'm lying? Exhibit A: a city. Go to your local coastal city. Everyone is looking at the water. They drive over from other neighborhoods just to come to the water. They make a day of it. They're not doing anything, they're just staring at the ocean. Why? Is it because they all work office jobs? No! Here come more of them! They cram themselves up to the edge of the water and stare at it. WHAT DO THEY WANT? WHAT ARE THEY LOOKING AT. Perhaps the ships themselves all packed together, each one with several compasses on it, creates some kind of critical mass - all of the small compass-magnets on all the ships in the harbor combining into one really big magnetic field - and the people get sucked into the field and trapped there. That's science.
Exhibit 2: the countryside with lakes in it. Every path you follow in the countryside brings you to some water, such as a stream. There is magic in it. If you take your standard fool with ADHD dissociating in the middle of a supermarket and put them outside and give them a shove, they'll automatically lead you to water (if there is any nearby) (try it). Another good experiment to try is to get lost in the great American desert in a caravan supplied with a metaphysical professor! Try it in the great American desert at home!
Yes, as everyone knows, meditation and water are a match made in heaven. Married forever. That's science.
Here's an artist who wants to paint you the dreamiest, most enchanting landscape. What does he put in it? Trees, meadow, cows, a cottage with smoke coming from the chimney, obviously. He will probably put a path in it and make lots of triangular mountains in rows and have them be different shades of blue (naturally.) But there's gotta be a stream in it. Go visit the prairies in June, and wade for forty miles through knee-deep through tiger lilies. What's missing from this picture? Water!
If Niagara Falls was made of sand instead of water, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why would a guy given a handful of cash have trouble deciding whether to buy a coat (which he needed) or go to the beach? Why are all the best, healthiest, sexiest and most mentally healthy people obsessed with the sea? (You get me.) When you were first on a boat, did you not succumb to VIBES? Consider ancient Persia. Consider ancient Greece. They understood about vibes, and also gods.
SURELY ALL OF THIS IS NOT WITHOUT MEANING.
And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all! You get me! You understand it now.
Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I get weird, don't you dare imply that I buy a ticket and get on a boat. I have never had money in my life. How dare you. Anyway I don't go as a passenger - that's bougie, and something boring people do. Passengers never have a good time. And although my C.V. is incredible - I go to sea SO MUCH, you guys, I have lots of experience - I don't go as a boss, or a cook. That sounds like far too much work. Hard work. Disgusting, respectable, bougie, and far too responsible. I can literally only look after myself. Do not ask me to look after ships or shit. In fact, I have only a vague idea of what a ship is. There's so many different kinds of ships - don't get me started and DO NOT GET INVOLVED. Also, I'm allergic to glory.
It's kind of attractive to go as a cook. I mean, I'm allergic to glory and there's some glory attached to the position of the ship's cook, but, like, you're not management-track and so it's still credible. But I don't really want to cook (say) roast chicken. I really fucking love to eat roast chicken. I'm one of the best at doing it actually. I really appreciate when people go out of their way to butter, season, baste and roast a chicken for me. Picture a roast chicken and I am Looking Respectfully at it. Maybe something more, maybe I'm worshipping it. Don't make this weird. If you want to get weird about my relationship with roasted chicken, why aren't you getting weird about the ancient Egyptians? They ate roasted hippos (look it up) and the pyramids were basically pizza ovens. So it's pretty hypocritical to think that I'm being weird about roasted chicken when I've never made mummies out of chickens or built a religious pizza oven dedicated to honoring them: check and mate, haters.
Anyway - I like to go to sea as a manual laborer. A simple sailor. Salt of the earth… er… sea. Yeah, true: as a job it sucks. They make you jump around, order you around, treat you like shit. They expect you to jump around the boat like a grasshopper. And yes, at first, this sucks. It's degrading, especially if you come from a middle-class family. Worse, it's awful if you've already had some kind of professional job before signing on to be the dirt on the boss's boots - like, if you went to college and worked as a teacher and actually got kids to pay attention to you, really feeling this connection to work/teaching/identity or some shit, and now you are just literally the scum on this captain's boots, in the lowest possible job in the world. It hurts! It hurts your dignity. But the hurt, and also the dignity, both wear off in time.
So what if some old bastard sea captain orders me - ME! - to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, compared to the shit in the Bible, compared to the shit in the news, compared to the shit everyone else has to take. Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that. We're all just serfs under capitalism, right, so why not just be honest about it: I prefer the honesty. Anyway, however the old sea captains may order me about - slapping and punching of course - I have the satisfaction of knowing that it's the same experience everyone else on Earth has, but more honest. Everyone else in the world is being served the exact same way. Either in a physical or a metaphysical way - sometimes people get the shit beaten out of them in person, sometimes online, sometimes emotionally, it happens to you in EVERY JOB, you sign on to get pushed around and slapped in the teeth: so the point is that when you're a sailor, it's a clean and honest slap. All the workers of the world share the same universal slap to the face that gets passed round, one slap passed all 'round the chain, like paying it forward, but it's a slap; and we should all accept this Universal Slap as the price of living, and then offer each other healing back massages, brother to brother, and slap each other and then kissed the places we slapped, and be happy.
I could examine that but I'm not going to.
Anyway: I always go to sea as a sailor. I've said that already. You're welcome. BUT THE POINT IS, they pay you. If you're a passenger, they don't pay you, at least, not that I've ever heard of [citation needed] (do they pay passengers?? Is there a job I can get where I can be a passenger and get paid?? Look this up.) Yeah so passengers have to pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. (That's Adam and Eve. You get it.) But BEING PAID. GETTING PAID IS THE BEST. NOTHING COMPARES TO GETTING PAID. EVERYONE LOVES THAT SHIT. Which is surprising, since we also apparently believe that money is the root of all evil, and isn't there something in the bible about "no rich people can get into heaven," right? And yet it's universal, literally everyone loves payday. Ah! How cheerfully we send ourselves to hell.
Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor (I've said this already) because it's FRESH AIR AND EXERCISE. Okay so think about ships. Normally, bosses stand on the "bridge" thing, and because we're sailing a boat, the nose is going into the wind and the butt part of the boat is at the back. That's how wind works. But if you think about it, winds usually go in one direction more than other directions (unless the men have been eating beans and farting: it's Pythagoras, look it up) SO if you're a boss standing on the boss-deck, the wind is blowing FROM the sailors TOWARDS you, and YOU ARE ACTUALLY BREATHING THE AIR THAT SAILORS ALREADY BREATHED. The boss THINKS he breathes it first, but he doesn't. He gets the air at the BACK of the boat and sailors get the air at the FRONT. So it's better to be at the front of the boat (sailor) for health reasons. This is a metaphor for life and work, etc.
But I have smelled the sea lots of times as a paid sailor and WHY I should decide to go on a whaling expedition - ok so you know how there's an invisible police officer of the Fates who has me under constant surveillance, who secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way? YOU get me. You know him. "The poor FBI agent tasked with reading my search engine history" YOU GET ME. Anyway, "Ishmael, why, after having a perfectly well-reasoned, and very smart of you, part-time job as a spontaneous random sailor, did you decide to escalate that to joining a WHALING EXPEDITION, which is worse in every way?" Well, ask my fucking secret FBI agent, he can answer better than anyone else. Including me. You get me. Also, obviously, this was predestined, part of the Universe's Grand Programme for its talent show, which was all scheduled way before our time. The concept of sending me on the whaling voyage comes in as a kind of interlude or solo between the main performances of the Universe's great talent show. I bet it was advertised llike,
"PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF THE UNITED STATES EMBROILED IN ONGOING LEGAL DISPUTE.
Whaling voyage by some guy called Ishmael.
BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN."
Like a commercial break in between the big acts. A filler episode. Lightens the load for everyone else. Though I can't explain why the stage managers - the Fates - chose such a shitty role for me, a WHALING VOYAGE of all things, when it feels like others were given magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces - it seems a little unreasonable at first. Why doth Ishmael get shat upon, etc. But then I think about all the circumstances, the plot points and motivations that were cunningly presented to me under various disguises - FBI agents, bouts of random hanger, gay awakenings, you get me - and you can see that actually, I was set up. And worse, between them all, these Fates and Circumstances conspired to make me believe it was all my own choice and good judgment. Is Free Will an illusion? Are my decisions bad? We will NEVER know because I, Ishmael, am just a little guy that the Universe plays head games with.
One of the ways the Universe tricked me into starring in this performance and then mocking me for it was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself (whaling expeditions usually contain whales.) Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. Then of course, if you have a whale, you have the wild and distant seas where the whale rolls around with his body-the-size-of-an-island; the dangers and nameless perils of the whale; whales are also found in interesting places I haven't seen; this all tipped me over the edge. Maybe normal people could've resisted, but I am tormented with an everlasting itch for obscurity. I hate everyone else's oceans. I want the forbidden seas.
You know The Horrors? Of course you do. You might be surprised that I, the most mentally healthy person you've ever met, a person who is self-aware enough to go to sea when they're at their fucking limits, a guy who likes fresh air and manual labor and normal things, is familiar with The Horrors. Well, you'd be surprised. I know what's good, I'm an extrovert. But I'm still quick to perceive The Horrors. And how I deal with the horrors is a very extroverted thing: I'm social with them, if they'll let me. It's smart to be on good terms with The Horrors. You should always be on good terms with your permanent neighbors. That's how extroverts deal with The Horrors, and I recommend it.
I think that's enough explanation for why I welcomed the whaling voyage. The great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild figments of imagination that pushed me into doing it, the whales came marching two by two, hurrah, hurrah. They marched into my innermost soul in endless processions and occupied it, you see, I was quite helpless under this occupation - I consented to the haunting and the whales marched in to haunt me - and amidst them all was one grand shrouded white phantom, like a snowy mountain in the air.
You get it.
You know how it is, with whales.
(read the actual first chapter of Moby Dick here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2701/2701-h/2701-h.htm)
So due to other Moby-Dick bookbinding reasons I was remembering this post and then I of course also remembered I have the power to do uh. this.
illustrations (including cover) from the Rockwell Kent edition (1930)
the truly important thing to remember when typesetting a tumblr post is matching the seriousness of the text (you get it) and i think Ishmael would approve and MAYBE just maybe when i finally typeset the whole darn brick i'll pick up the vibes from this post and this typeset and just CONTINUE it in the actual text so thank you @elodieunderglass for this beautiful nonsense
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phm is decently popular in japan and i mostly see this when i check twitter and see accounts posting pictures of handmade rocky plushies that are so fucking round looking it brings a tear to my eye
btw, idk if this will be seen by any of the countless people who already have seen and reblogged this post, but heres the original guide posted on how to make the chibi-rocky! the OP also has a separate guide for a more accurate rocky, though obviously less simple of a guide than the little thingy shown off
(im surprised this post gained any attention, haha, if i had known i would have just shared the guides, the more handmade pebbles in the world the better)
'What if the demon was too scared and too shy to approach the angel of the Eastern gate?What if the angel was feeling so alone, that as soon as Adam and eve went away, he started to look for someone else in the eden?what if.. he found his destiny?'
Crowley's pose inspired by the amazing lastest crowley's drawing by @virevon!
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One of them got too far from the group. Paralysed him and took his form.
Returned to the ship. Everyone keeps asking me where my pants are.
Day 2 of infiltrating the crew.
We have taken off. I have explained that one of the 'native lichens' made me allergic to pants. The rest of the crew seems to accept this.
Day 3 of infiltrating the crew.
I have been helping out around the ship while learning its secrets. And also trying to figure out where my quarters are supposed to be. Got it right fourth time. Managed to talk my way out of three awkward encounters.
Fourth one, not so much. I think I'm dating Crewman Eloise now.
Day 4 of infiltrating the crew.
Brought Eloise some breakfast and used my cunning skills to pump her for information.
So successful that I contrived to bring everyone else breakfast. I am a genius.
Day 5 of infiltrating the crew.
The captain keeps asking for Crewman Vitsie. They are obviously incompetent and lazy and have not responded. Captain sounds very irate. Perhaps I should find Vitsie and eat him to improve crew morale.
Day 6 of infiltrating the crew.
... I'm Crewman Vitsie. Got yelled at by the captain. Grovelled handsomely and explained that I am incompetent and lazy. I think I got away with it.
Day 7 of infiltrating the crew.
Space pirates. Why is it always space pirates?
Replicated one of them, infiltrated the ship, ate their captain. Very greasy.
Swapped back to my Vitsie disguise and pretended I snuck on board and shot the captain.
Luckily nobody asked about why I now weigh 50% more
Day 8 of infiltrating the crew.
Captain mentioned he knew I was a shiftshaper. Now hiding in an airduct. I'm not crying. That's... just... OK I might be crying. Eloise was going to put on a movie and I was really looking forward to it.
Day 9 of infiltrating the crew.
Captain has been yelling into an airvent for the last hour. They say they figured it out immediately.
Turns out Vitsie was an asshole, and they just liked me better.
NGL, feeling kind of proud.
Captain says since I saved the ship from greasy space pirates, they'll call it even if I promise not to eat any more crew.
Asked if that includes Robins from Engineering. Captains says Robins included because he's the only one who knows how to fix the toilets.
This is reasonable.
Day 10 of infiltrating the crew.
Watched "The Thing" with Eloise. Didn't sleep all night. That was terrifying!
some people read an awful lot, but don't read very well. deep reading is itself a skill. being able to untangle the threads of theme, subtext, characterization, narrative style, and more are all things that it takes time and intentional engagement to learn.
if you've ever watched a movie with your film buff friend and chatted about it afterwards, that friend might have pulled hours more of conversation out of the same 90 minutes of screentime, and wondered how the fuck they did that - it's not raw intelligence, it's a skill that's been honed. And I learned a lot about film from talking to friends who knew about film, and reading critique by film scholars
literature works exactly the same. so if you want to get more out of your reading, there are things you can do to train that.
Find a book or short story you think you've got a pretty good grasp on, preferably from a widely read & respected author like Ursula K Le Guin or Ray Bradbury (if you're new at this don't swing for the Toni Morrison or the Samuel Beckett yet unless you feel very comfortable with the complexity of the text - the point is to develop a complicated new skill on good foundations). Then go to JSTOR, create a free account, and look up criticism on the story you've chosen. Find something that looks readable to you and at least somewhat interesting. Read that article, and look at what that writer got out of the same story you've read that you didn't get. Do you see the critic's points? Did they teach you something about the text? Go reread that story and see if the criticism has changed how you read it. Are you seeing more? Are you thinking about the implications of a line that you hadn't noticed before? Does the story feel richer now?
there are other more involved ways of finding criticism. Learning to use academic databases, going to your local library to do interlibrary loans, finding critical voices you appreciate; these are all useful subskills. Literacy isn't just being able to read words, it's being able to read words in context and think about what they tell you about the text, the author, or the time and culture in which the text was produced. Literacy is the skill of being able to look at the world with open eyes and think clearly about how its parts are connected. It'll change your life
this keeps getting shared around and ive seen some different tags responding differently so i just want to make some important clarifications and distillations
you don't have to read more deeply if you don't want to (but i'd recommend it, i genuinely think it makes you a better person)
if you want to learn to read more deeply, the resources are out there. try to find critical literature (that is, academic writing that analyzes the text) on works your familiar with so you can get a sense for how to do that analysis too
learning to deep read literature can help you deep read many areas of your life
writers tend to put a lot of work into their stories. if you learn to read that work you'll (probably) appreciate the stories you love even more. And if not, then you'll have developed your taste. This too is worth doing
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OP: On July 14, 2026, heavy rain pounded Jilin, triggering the Songhua River’s first flood of the year. Water levels surged, and currents turned dangerously violent. A kitten got stranded on a tiny clump of willow branches out in the river, trapped for two full days with waves threatening to sweep it away at any moment.
The river was far too rough for regular boats, leaving no obvious way to rescue it. Crowds gathered on the bridge, scrambling to figure out how to help. A drone pilot heard about the kitten and rushed over with his gear. His plan: hang a blue bucket from the drone as a rescue pod, baited with cat food to lure the kitten inside.
First attempt: The kitten was too scared to step into the bucket. Failed. Second attempt: It climbed into the bucket, but panicked and jumped back onto the branches the second the drone lifted off. Everyone watching held their breath. Third attempt: Another pilot on site guided the drone from a different angle. The kitten finally hopped safely into the bucket.
The rescue worked. The drone carried the kitten steadily back to shore, and nearly a hundred onlookers on the bridge cheered out loud.
Weak and underweight after its ordeal, the kitten was rushed to a vet. It has since been adopted and is steadily recovering.
