Boss Is Asleep, Cannot Stop Me From Frogposting

❤️❤️❤️

“I don’t know. Whenever we try to do stuff, me and Zoey, half the time she starts crying and freaking out, and she says it’s not my fault and she says she likes me, but…” Saintjohn Hadouken sighed through pinched lips, hard enough to make his cheeks puff, and shook his head, “...feels like I’m hurting her.”

Johnny Newsroom looked off into the distance and took a pensive pull of his vape. “She said she likes you?”

“Yeah. I just don’t know what’s going on.”

Johnny turned his head to look him in the eye. “Have you ever dated a trans gal before?”

Saintjohn shook his head. “I’m fuckin figuring out some shit about myself, bro.”

“It’s… she’s… let’s put it this way. Imagine if your dick looked like a scary clown.”

Saintjohn flinched. “I don’t wanna do that. I don’t wanna use my brain powers for evil.”

Johnny continued. “Imagine if every time you took off your pants, a fucked-up evil clown was staring back at you. Imagine trying to get close to someone while you’re like that. Imagine trying to have a sex life. Imagine just trying to love when you’ve got an evil clown under your pants.”

Saintjohn’s frown seemed to stretch beyond the limits of his face. “Can I stop imagining it now?”

Johnny took another pull from his vape. “I don’t think Zoey gets to stop. Everyone’s got a different relationship to their own body, I don’t know Zoey personally, but...” he trailed off, letting Saintjohn fill in the blanks for himself.

Saintjohn leaned against the side of the motorhome and sighed again. “So what am I supposed to do?”

“Do you love her?” Johnny asked.

A pause.

“She makes me happy. When she laughs at my dumbass jokes, I feel like I just cured cancer.”

Saintjohn smiled as soon as he started talking about her. Johnny knew that smile, he felt its residual warmth, the second-hand joy. He wanted the two of them to be happy. He wanted one good thing to happen in the middle of this disaster. The Midwest Autonomous Zone could burn to the ground all over again. As long as he helped two people fall in love, he would have no regrets.

“And, y’know, I wanna get all up in there,” Saintjohn said.

“Okay. Well. To answer your question. Be patient. Let her do things at her pace. Let her figure herself out. Give her space when she needs it, even if you never want to be away from her. If you mess up - and you probably will, we’re only human - swallow your pride, apologize, and try not to do it again. Trust that it will all work out.”

“That sounds really hard.”

Johnny gave him a wry smile. “That’s love.”

[later]

“I’m sorry,” Zoey sniffed, pulling away from Saintjohn, “I just can’t right now. I don’t know if I’ll ever…”

She buried her head in her hands. Her body shuddered with heavy breaths as she began to cry. Saintjohn looked at her. He considered putting a hand on her shoulder, then lowered his arm and simply sat next to her.

“It’s okay,” Saintjohn said, “I understand. You gotta deal with the evil clown.”

Zoey lifted her head. She was too surprised and confused to keep crying. “What?”

hey don’t cry. spiro the bald eagle failing at catching a crab, okay?

Or perhaps "how far off are we [the Brits]?"

Executive chef at a top Thai restaurant tells Gordon Ramsay that his Pad Thai is trash [x]

i found a baby picture of my cat please please look at him i'm begging you

It's also okay to describe what the active character is looking at. For example, "I saw her eyes starting to water, and as the first tears fell, I reached across the table and cupped her face in my hand. She looked down and leaned her face into my pain. I wiped her tears away with my thumb, across the ridges and valleys of her crows feet.

Or

Uncomfortable at her tears, Adrian reacted across and held her face in his hand. Her tears ran over her face, highlighting the wrinkles exacerbated by the upset tension in her face.

In writing, epithets ("the taller man"/"the blonde"/etc) are inherently dehumanizing, in that they remove a character's name and identity, and instead focus on this other quality.

Which can be an extremely effective device within narration!

They can work very well for characters whose names the narrator doesn't know yet (especially to differentiate between two or more). How specific the epithet is can signal to the reader how important the character is going to be later on, and whether they should dedicate bandwidth to remembering them for later ("the bearded man" is much less likely to show up again than "the man with the angel tattoo")

They can indicate when characters stop being as an individual and instead embody their Role, like a detective choosing to think of their lover simply as The Thief when arresting them, or a royal character being referred to as The Queen when she's acting on behalf of the state

They can reveal the narrator's biases by repeatedly drawing attention to a particular quality that singles them out in the narrator's mind

But these only work if the epithet used is how the narrator primarily identifies that character. Which is why it's so jarring to see a lot of common epithets in intimate moments-- because it conveys that the main character is primarily thinking of their lover/best friend/etc in terms of their height or age or hair color.

I've only ever seen this in screenshots before..n

me holding a gun to a mushroom: tell me the name of god you fungal piece of shit

mushroom: can you feel your heart burning? can you feel the struggle within? the fear within me is beyond anything your soul can make. you cannot kill me in a way that matters

me cocking the gun, tears streaming down my face: I’M NOT FUCKING SCARED OF YOU

just wanted to share the National Down Syndrome Society’s message for this year’s World Down Syndrome Day (21st March) 💛💙

This too shall pass but like holy fuck

You won’t see this every day but making sure the system cannot proceed unless women have a seat at the table is the best possibly thing you can do in a place of privilege.