The Optimistic Authour

Female Power Romantasy novels can be indulgent as they like with giving the MC all the powers and hottest love interests and overcomplicated backstories, and I will cheer that on. Yes, there is a place for this! I see your vision, girl!

But the moment it starts talking about blood purity, her divine right to rule, and how ubermensch her babies will be with the man with the equally super special bloodline? You're doing girlboss eugenics at that point.

This blew up, so let me explain.

"Specialina has rare squirrel blood passed down from the time a secret ancestor married a squirrel god. This gives her super powers to climb trees and find nuts!" 👍👍👍 Inheritable traits are a thing after all.

"Because Specialina has rare squirrel blood, she is entitled to rule over the rodent kingdom, and if she is kept from her rightful throne bestowed by her ancestry, the vile rat people will continue to corrupt the land." ⚠️⚠️⚠️ Oops, no one is entitled to rule over others, especially through genetics. And think about why a certain group of people is your designated "evil" race.

"Specialina's love interest is McBroody, a man with rare rabbit powers. With both squirrel blood who have domain over the skies and rabbit blood who have domain over the land, their children will have domain over everything and become the most powerful beings on earth who will bring the kingdom eternal balance, thus the evil rat people do everything to keep these two apart." 🛑🛑🛑 STOP. DO NOT PASS GO. THINK ABOUT WHY THE HAPPY ENDING OF YOUR FEMALE POWER FANTASY IS HAVING GENETICALLY SUPERIOR BABIES.

This seems poignant!

PATTI LUPONE behind the scenes of Agatha All Along (2024)

I DIDNT KNOW WHAT THIS WOULD BE SO I CLICKED PLAY AND MY MOM IS RIGHT NEXT TO ME AND MY COMPUTER IS ON FULL VOLUME I HATE EVERYONE

for whenever I fuck up

If I ever say “fuck this shit” it’s to this tune. Just. For your mental voice of me.

This is my ringtone for my friend Katie and I have zero regrets

yes this, but also consider the Cranford Collection

I'm surprised no one brought up Chiltern classics

Seasonal affective disorder havers how are we all coping

[ID: Two versions of the cat screaming at food bowl meme. The first has a clock showing 4pm and is captioned "WHY IS IT NIGHTTIME". The second has a November calendar and is captioned "WHY IS IT TEMPERATURES".]

I love how perfectly like clockwork this returns every November. Good morning northern hemisphere take your vitamin D

Vax in Keyleth's headpiece!🌼🧡

TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE

"too sweet" being at least partly inspired by hozier waking up late, still drunk from the night before, realizing he was running late to the airport and running into a wall and falling over, then getting on the plane and realizing he was bleeding profusely from a head wound sustained from his fall earlier that morning, only to look up and see famous irish actor cillian murphy knelt down beside his seat talking to him is the funniest thing i've learned all day.

just gonna leave this here

I’ve said this before, possibly even on this post, but this also means throwing out that shitty attitude of “You can tell this was made by cishets for cishets” just because it doesn’t relate to your specific queer experience. I have seen works created by queer creators based on their own experiences get labeled “by cishets for cishets” because it didn’t reflect a particular experience/reflected a different experience from that of those criticizing it. There is no universal queer experience. Just because it’s not YOUR experience doesn’t mean it’s not queer.

i can’t believe people having the experience of being-other would do it differently from me. surely the point was to recreate the perfect uniformity of idealized 1950s cishet nuclear families, only different in exactly the way i’m different.

This hits the nail right on the head. A great example of why stereotyping and prejudice aren’t useful tools even if you think you’re using them righteously.

I think one of the biggest things I've learned in my own process of trying to be more cognizant of my own writing is that guilt is one of the most counterproductive feelings for it.

I've looked back at things that I've written and realized that they had real, core, structural problems stemming from my own ingrained and socialized issues. These are not just one-line off-color things, but in some cases major elements of how characters are presented or engage with each other or how I did worldbuilding.

Some of it is stuff that came from my own messed up feelings about gender and sexuality and stuff growing up, and some of it is unexamined racism that came from growing up as a white person in the US. But I've looked back at them, including stories that I am still trying to get work, and though oh my god what was wrong with me.

And it's really easy to just live in that feeling. To think, what I did was so terrible and I'm so terrible and it's all hopeless and I can never do it right.

The same feeling can come from seeing posts about how white people write characters of color, about how so many people write women, about the racism and sexism and ableism and transphobia etc. in both fanfiction and published fiction. I'm terrible and it's an insurmountable problem so why bother try because I'll never get it right.

And then sometimes you end up feeling defensive about that guilty, because guilt feels bad, and defensiveness feels like an emotional fix to that, a way to say it's not really my fault or why is this MY problem when so many people are so much worse.

But if you go down that road, then you don't try and it never gets fixed. Because the people who don't feel guilty because they don't care won't fix it, and so we need the people who feel guilty because they do care to turn that guilt into action.

So my recommendation is this: if you look at your own writing or your own media consumption and feel guilty over it, or you feel defensive about it, turn it into thinking about what you can accomplish.

Because that guilt means that you recognize that you're doing something that doesn't match what you want to be doing. So think through how you can get it to be what you want to be doing.

Working to fix something is the way that you fix it. Things get better because we work to make them better, not because we feel guilty about them.

So anyway that's the lesson I've had to teach myself during my own process for this. Sometimes I am the problem, and I can feel guilty about it, or I can try to become part of the solution instead.

this is what being twenty five is like btw

having viral posts is all fun and games until you have clowns in your mentions being like "well, op, i bet you also didn't know THIS" [haughtily explains something i absolutely would and do know] like add whatever to my posts that you think is informative just don't direct it at ME! i know! i just didn't include it in the post i made in 20 seconds because i didn't think 30,000 of you would see it!

i love these tags. WHAT was your viral post i need to know so badly.

some of our collective suffering

I need to be the most fuckable person on this public transport

Got off a video call with my grandma. Asked her what sort of American foods she was enjoying (my dad flew her in from Korea and she's staying with him in Phoenix rn). She said most of the food isn't too impressive but she's addicted to a specific candy, and when she held up a bag of Werther's Originals I started howling