THEY ARE IN LOVE AND/OR THEY ARE LOVED

Love love love characters that present themselves as emotionally open social butterflies but the more you see of them the more obvious it is that they’re the most closed off fuckers in the story. Sure, they want to help you with your personal problems and messy emotions, but if you turn that shit back on them, they’ll shut down or deflect every time. Why are you sticking your nose in their business anyway? It’s not like it matters. They’re not a person, they’re just a role being played. They’re the guy who fixes things and saves people. Please ignore the man behind the mask, he’s fine. Everything’s fine.

Putting the term "Catholic guilt" on a high shelf where fandom can't reach it until everyone learns how to identify characters who are very very clearly coded as Protestant.

it’s just me and my Latino Jason Todd and Brown-Eyed Tim Drake agenda against the world…

(unserious joke post ahead) I'm gatekeeping guilt narratives from people who haven't committed atrocities. too many times have I encountered a story with a very promising guilt-ridden character and then we learn what they did and it was something no reasonable person could think was bad and the character just has low self worth about it or it was socially unacceptable in the setting. give me some Nuance to chew on. give me someone struggling to find the stable ground between accountability and self destruction. look me in the eye and tell me just how far your faith in the human power to grow extends. maybe shoot a man in reno just to watch him die then feel really fucked up about it and then your fiction will be better.

niche trope I enjoy: person recounting a story of something terrible they did and the way they describe it makes it sound like an active decision where they were completely in control and knew what they were doing and enjoyed it, but if you look at the bare bones facts, it's like. are you sure about that? are you sure you didn't just panic and lash out and do something irreparable? are you sure that's what you wanted and you aren't just retroactively assigning yourself agency to cope? but you as the audience can't really know the answer to that, because the storyteller is the only one who was there and this is how they're choosing to preserve it, and that matters for how they want to be perceived going forward... but you do still wonder.

love it when an extremely high-functioning and put-together character gets slammed with something that would topple any lesser person but continues to function in an alarmingly efficient manner while everyone who knows and cares about them flutters anxiously around them like "please lie down please rest please accept medical attention" while the high-functioning character just looks askance at all their concerned faces like "what are you talking about? I'm perfectly fine" as tiny cracks start appearing in their demeanor and facade

I am currently watching She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, and one thing I absolutely love about this show is Catra's ability to maintain constant employment. Of all the characters in this show, Catra is the MOST employed person there, and I love that about her.

we stan trans people finally getting the recognition they deserve after like. 20000 years.