#askception

Ahhh... Your writing is so good, I love your style! It has a spirit! I wish I was as creative and passionate as you are!

Writer's block and exhaustion were a big reason why I had to actually stop writing The Ice Plague for a while.

I've written a lot about writer's block and ways of dealing with it in previous posts, so I'm going to link them, because past Pia was way less tired than present Pia currently is, and therefore way more eloquent as well:

It's one link that's like a masterlink to my other writer's block posts, and an article from memory. :) I hope it helps!

The other night it occurred to me: Do I only think a lot about female characters because, on some level, I see this as a more appropriate outlet for my own emotions?

Let me unpack that a little. Tenchi Muyo on Cartoon Network *really* got to me, to the poijt where that was all I could think about for months, and then for years I would plot fanfics about all of this Ryoko-Washuu feels, just to fall asleep at night. I wrote a couple, but mostly it never came to anything publishable, just this running dialogue between a super-scientist and her bioweapon daughter. I heard about "hurt/comfort" fics and immediately understood what that was, because one of my jams was to imagine scenarios where Washuu is repairing Ryoko in her lab, usually after some big story arc in the manga. There's one issue where Ryoko takes a punch through the chest and she's in one of those anime healing fluid tanks and I came up with so much stuff for that.

Eventually I ran out of steam, or it stopped helping me go to sleep, so I moved on. Then I watched Hellsing and immediately latched onto the Seras Victoria-Alucard dynamic, and that became my new sleep aid for a couple of years. Kind of the same stuff, where there's a deep relationship between the characters but it's largely left unspoken in the source material.

I've had other, minor versions of this, I suppose, but those were the main two things. In a broader sense, Luffa fits into this category, since I have all these relationships that she's in without being aware of them, and the SSJ thing sets her apart, much like Ryoko being artificial and Seras being a squeamish vampire. I can get a lot off of my chest by writing her.

But I started questioning that the other night, wondering if maybe that's some sort of toxic masculinity thing in disguise. Like I need some female proxy to articulate feelings of comfort, romance, platonic intimacy, and so forth. And if so, is that even a bad thing?

I was reading this article about a game designer who went into the romantic literature business. It was kind of a dull story, but she talked about how she preferred writing the men and I could sort of get that. Is that escapism? Or some sort of wish fufillment. Like "These real women are too confusing, so I'm gonna make my own version."

I probably shouldn't overanalyze these things, but it's in my nature to look for some throughline that explains all these things. I really don't want it to be "I find women more interesting because I'm a thirsty dork." Like, I'm fine with that being a true statement, but I don't want that to be the bedrock of all my artistic endeavors. Sometimes I'll look at old paintings where people are at the park and the men are wearing clothes and the women aren't and I'm like yeah I get where this artist is coming from, but this isn't nearly as smart or clever as he or I might want it to be.

I’m thinking maybe he has some super rare allergy that causes him to break out in hives and have trouble breathing whenever he eats vegetables, no matter what kind it is he gets sick after eating. He probably first found this out after Niki made him eat a bunch of broccoli just for kicks, like it was initially planned as a kind of ‘ha ha watch me make my kid eat something he hates’ joke but then it turned into ‘trip to the hospital because turns out the kid is deathly allergic.’ Niki found this more hilarious than concerning and probably began putting veggies in the food just because he thinks it’s funny and he tells the maid that Saruhiko is a stubborn kid and she should be sure to put as many vegetables in his food as possible. Fushimi doesn’t want to admit that he gets sick after eating vegetables because he thinks it will lead to too many questions and give Niki ammunition to tease him with so he just says that he hates vegetables and won’t eat them. Everyone keeps telling him that he’s so unhealthy and needs to eat vegetables and Fushimi continues to maintain the fiction that he just doesn’t like them, not admitting that he gets sick just from trying one.