Another Vampire Juicebox!

That's bad enough!!!!!!!! But the entire idea of needing permission from state authorities to access anything labeled mature by our friendly AI overlords is some fucking Boll shit. Die Gedenken Sind Frie baby. This is all a reaction to people getting uppity about their lowly lowly rights and is being propped up by the same bad actors tht have made life unlivable. Fuck that shit.

"Well it's only being rolled out in Brazil and UK" Yeah, to start. "Well they're being forced to do this by laws." YOu know it's always really funny when these tech giants (Or whatever you call owning tumblr dot com) get really antsy about laws considering they pick and choose which ones they abide by.

It’s surprisingly easy to come up with an incredibly cool plot and characters without giving the characters enough motivation to make it actually compelling enough to read or even write. If you have a cool af idea that you somehow just can’t bring yourself to write, ask yourself what the main character wants, and how is that driving their decisions?

They need to want it so bad that it makes them look stupid. They need to impulse-buy a half-broken spaceship by mortgaging radioactive land, because they’re just that desperate to prove themselves more than a discarded scrap of a far greater history. They need to want their home and their people safe so much that they’ll risk their own soul to march across hundreds of miles of unknown and terrible danger to throw a cursed ring into a volcano. They need to love someone so much, and need them to know it, that they’ll blurt it out in the middle of a press conference or royal ball, or surrounded by enemies with a garrote at their throat or about to be frozen in carbonite or in the middle of a storm-tossed sea battle between pirates, British Navy, and the undead—or, they need to love someone so much that they’ll swear fealty to an evil emperor and kill a bunch of friends and children for the power to save them. They need to be so balls-to-the-wall insane in at least one regard that the plot isn’t just happening to them, they are in some way causing the plot.

As an Aro-Ace who was very uncomfortable with your post until this point: THANK YOU!

Also, one caveat: there is one rare type of story where the protagonist cannot become stupid over what they're after. This is the detective story where their character is in many ways a placeholder for the audience to try to solve the puzzle (as opposed to more thrilery types of detective story) and the detective's internal motivations are basically irrelevant because they are in many ways a framing device.

How do you write a protagonist where the thrust of the story is that they don't know what they want?

the character's want at the beginning of the story is to find out what they want, so they'll try anything once

they do a bunch of dumb shit chasing the feeling of wanting something, no matter how fleeting, in case THIS is The Thing

they have something they think they want at the beginning of the story that turns out to really be something else

throw a character at them that DOES want a thing and is dragging them into said hijinks whether they like it or not -- especially if not, then their initial Want is "get me the fuck out of here" (possibly with a side of "but also I need to rescue my friend from themself" if it's too easy for them to otherwise just nope out of the plot XD)

But, when you're sat there staring at a character who is coming into the space of the story crunchily fucked up in some way which is flattening their ability to want things, or rendering 'what they want' so abstract or orthogonal to what's actually happening that it isn't providing the driving energy...

Just say you loved reading it - “I am sure that you will not think it an impertinence if I write to tell you how very much I have enjoyed reading Dracula.”

Comment on a detail of the craft or structure that impressed you - “It is really wonderful how with so much exciting interest over so long a book there is never an anticlimax.“

Comment on how it emotionally affected you - “It holds you from the very start and grows more and more engrossing until it is quite painfully vivid.”

SHARE YOUR BLORBO FEELINGS - “The old Professor is most excellent and so are the two girls.”

Show appreciation for them as an author - “I congratulate you with all my heart for having written so fine a book.”

MEN WHO NEVER LEARNED HOW TO BREAK

𒁍 “I don’t talk about it because nothing good ever came from me doing that.”

𒁍 “I learned early that pain was just something you carried quietly.”

𒁍 “No one asked if I was okay. They just assumed I could handle it.”

𒁍 “I don’t remember the last time I felt relief, just less pressure for a moment.”

𒁍 “I didn’t grow numb overnight. It happened slowly enough to feel normal.”

𒁍 “I don’t feel angry. I feel hollow.”

𒁍 “I don’t know how to explain how bad it gets without scaring people.”

𒁍 “I learned to lock things away so deep even I can’t reach them.”

𒁍 “I learned that needing anything was dangerous.”

𒁍 “I don’t know how to ask for help without hating myself for it.”

𒁍 “I don’t explode because that would mean someone would notice.”

𒁍 “I keep going because stopping feels worse.”

𒁍 “I don’t know who I am without the weight. I just know I can’t put it down.”

𒁍 “I don’t talk about the thoughts that show up when everything’s quiet.”

𒁍 “I learned to survive by turning myself off.”

𒁍 “I don’t trust happiness. It feels temporary and suspicious.”

𒁍 “I don’t cry because I don’t know where it would end.”

𒁍 “I learned that pain was normal and rest was weakness.”

𒁍 “I don’t know how much of me is left under all this control.”

𒁍 “I keep everything locked down because once it breaks, it breaks for real.”

𒁍 “I’ve been holding my breath so long I forgot what air feels like.”

𒁍 “I survived by becoming someone I don’t recognize.”

𒁍 “I don’t feel broken. I feel used up.”

The pain of that deep cut fades, but never goes away.