i’ve been thinking about sans and god i forgot how fucking good of a character he is.
like i feel i’ve forgotten after a few years of various fandom interpretation but he’s like seriously such a good character. i mean good god. like, his entire existence is fucked up, being trapped in this world where he’s aware of the fact that the lives of the people he loves can just be destroyed and it’s out of his control. he doesn’t have any memory of these events but he knows and has become apathetic to the world around him because he knows he can’t do anything about it.
like fuck man that’s fucked up what the hell.
but it’s not just that. it’s the fact that he’s just a goofy skeleton who makes bad puns, stacks hotdogs on your head, loves his brother, and drinks ketchup, and despite all of the shit he endures, he’s still himself. depressed and nihilistic, yeah, but still himself. despite knowing that his efforts are literally worthless, he still keeps on for the people he cares about, especially for papyrus. sans enjoys being comic and he won’t stop doing so. he’s not just a quantum physics book hidden in a joke book, he’s a joke book hidden in a quantum physics book hidden in a joke book hidden in… okay you get it. does that metaphor make sense? idk man but w/e.
another thing i think is interesting is the way people see sans in the fandom is kinda meta. when undertale first came out and people began to learn about sans’s secrets, people started to see him as a badass with a messed up backstory who destroys you at the end of a no mercy run. everyone thought he was super cool and saw him as a really serious character. but then as time went by, the interest in his character became ironic. he was so cool that it became a joke. now he’s Sans Undertale, known fucker of moms and finger-er of asses. and i can’t imagine anything else being more fitting to sans’s character than that.
i apologize if this doesn’t make any sense at all, i just started getting really emotional about sans undertale and needed to post it somewhere lmfao
It’s INSANE to me how controversial romance novels are. Romance novels. Like, being openly a fan of them immediately opens you up to people constantly coming at you like “but don’t you think it’s ~limiting- and ~juvenile~ to have a genre of books with happy endings for women?”
Like.
No?
Why is it such a big deal to want to read stories where women have sex and then don’t die at the end? Jesus Christ.
Why is the concept of female characters being happy seen as less creative than female characters suffering? (Trust me, creating a world where women win in the end takes a lot more creativity and artistic vision lmfao)
Anyway, literary bros will pry my romance novels with their happy endings from my cold dead fingers.
Or die in the very beginning of the book. But no one calls out James Patterson for writing another formulaic thriller in which a woman is horrifically killed after getting laid and then some man solves her murder. Every. Damn. Time.
But hey, those romance novels where women get happy endings are so limiting, eh?
Real talk: realizing how common it is for female characters to be punished for on-the-page sex with death was a big part of my embracing the romance genre. Once I noticed it I couldn’t unnotice it. It’s everywhere. A woman having sex in literature or non-romance genre fiction is the literary equivalent of a red shirt on Star Trek.
It’s not just the sex thing, though that’s a key element. It’s that, in romance novels, the heroine gets to be cared for the way she normally would care for everyone else. It’s wish fulfillment in that her romantic partner will do emotional labor, spend a great deal of time thinking about her, or sacrifice his desires or fortune or reputation to be with her, or spend days nursing her back to health, or risking his life to save hers. In romance novels, you’ll find men taking care of children, talking about their feelings, putting effort into their appearance—even if they are adorably bad at it. Watch how many romance novel protagonists fall in love with a man who happens to be rich or handsome, but she didn’t give in until his behavior changed and he starts mentoring her, or providing for her, or being gentle toward her, nourishing her, listening to her, appreciating her… I suspect romance novels are looked down upon not for being juvenile formulaic “beach reads” but because they paint a fantasy world that leaves men feeling uncomfortable or even emasculated. But whether you’re a Midwest housewife or a big city CEO, women who read romance novels just want to read about men loving women the way women are expected love everyone else—with a nurturing and protective form of unswerving loyalty. Great sex they don’t have to die for is also a huge bonus, but the *romance* part of the novel is genuinely more about the woman being appreciated (for her beauty or spunk or intelligence at first, and then for all of her by the end).
In many romance novels, the emotional climax is when the male lead says, in effect, “I have fucked up. I have hurt you. I had reasons, but they don’t excuse it. I will do whatever it takes to make it right.”
Having someone say this to you is … not a power fantasy, exactly, but a significance fantasy. Your feelings, your emotional well-being, is so important that it becomes the center of someone’s world for a little bit, and your emotional wounds are something that have to be healed at all costs.
This is naturally going to read as threatening to men who are used to thinking of their own emotions as the center of the universe, and a woman as a device for taking care of those emotions and doing emotional labor.
an incomplete list of unsettling short stories I read in textbooks
the scarlet ibis
marigolds
the diamond necklace
the monkey’s paw
the open boat
the lady and the tiger
the minister’s black veil
an occurrence at owl creek bridge
a rose for emily
(I found that one by googling “short story corpse in the house,” first result)
the cask of amontillado
the yellow wallpaper
the most dangerous game
a good man is hard to find
some are well-known, some obscure, some I enjoy as an adult, all made me uncomfortable between the ages of 11-15
add your own weird shit, I wanna be literary and disturbed
The Tell-Tale Heart, The Gift of the Magi, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calavaras County, Thank You Ma’am
the box social by james reaney. i remember we all had to silently read it in class, and you would hear the moment everyone reached the Part because some people would audibly go “what”
wHat did I just put my eyes on
“The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury
Not quite a short story, but read in class: “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” from The Twilight Zone
Harrison Bergeron, Cat and the Coffee Drinkers
“Where are you going and where have you been” by Joyce carol oates
“The Pedestrian” by Ray Bradbury
the lottery by shirley jackson
i can’t believe Roald Dahl’s “The Landlady” wasn’t already mentioned
and also it’s not so much unsettling as more absurdist but “The Leader” by Eugene Ionesco definitely made me go wtf
Ett halvt ark papper. I cried so much.
Ночь у мазара, А. Шалимов
A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury
I Have no Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury
Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby, by Donald Barthelme
I read Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer In A Day” in seventh grade (it wasn’t assigned, I was just going through my textbook for new stuff to read) and as a bullied kid with SAD, it Fucked Me Up.
An Ordinary Day with Peanuts, by Shirley Jackson
Eh, this was more like community college, but The Star by Arthur C. Clarke
Lamb to the Slaughter by Roald Dahl
and this story that I can’t remember the name of and can’t find, though it might be by O. Henry? it’s about a bunch of demons who want to stop Santa Claus from going through with Christmas, and he must travel through the mountains they inhabit to escape their vices? (good christ I can’t remember the name for the life of me)
Ok but the laughing man and a good day for bananafish but j.d. Salinger
The City (195) Ray Bradbury. An intense commentary on colonialism and space exploration. I read it for a sci fi survey class.
Another short story I read in that sci fi class was Vaster than Empires and More Slow (1971) by Ursula K. Le Guin. A commentary on humanity and how human we believe ourselves to be. Also, an interesting commentary on mental health.
In the Woods Beneath the Cherry Blossoms in Full Bloom, written in 1947 by Ango Sakaguchi. It made my skin crawl the first time I read it.
I am a True Believer in outlining before you write. (At least, so long as an outline doesn’t debilitate your writing.)
But I think some people don’t understand what that means to me.
To me, an outline means that I know:
Where the story is going.
What beats it’ll take getting there.
The major content I know I want to write.
How that content can be reasonably connected.
Where character development decisions should take place.
What the climax will entail.
What choices the characters will be forced to make during the climax to fulfill or deny their developmental arc.
It also means that along the way I might…
Randomly move multiple scenes to a completely new settings.
Rearrange scenes to make for better pacing.
Throw in conversations I never imagined the characters would have.
Completely change one of my main character’s voices in the third chapter.
Have a random side character mysteriously foreshadow grudges certain characters are holding.
Realize certain characters have legitimately been holding said grudges.
Add in new character arcs for said characters to get them to work through their grudges.
Watch as the main ship progresses way faster than intended.
(Cry over the main ship.)
Let the protagonist chose to go by an alias because he’s more insecure than I thought.
Watch as his brother ruins his alias attempts four chapters later.
Create an entire new arc that revolves primarily around the protagonist wanting to sleep in a proper bed after camping for three weeks. (And do a lot of last minute plot adjusting to make the pacing still work for this bed-related arc.)
Forget one of my main characters exists for five chapters.
Suddenly add her into an arc she wasn’t supposed to be in, to make up for it.
Be bamboozled as the love interest refuses to sit still long enough to let their leg heal and ends up with a permanent injury.
Flat out re-outline entire chapters because the new idea worked better with the character development or pacing.
Realize that the symbolism I had for a certain thing has actually meant something different all along.
Add in a motto I didn’t realize was a huge part of two of the main character’s lives in the previous book.
Take about ten thousand notes on what needs to be adjusted in the next draft.
Cry because I think the novel will be too long.
Cry because I think the novel will be too short.
Cry because I love it too much.
Cry because it’s definitely the worst thing ever written.
So, when I say I’m a True Believer in outlining, I don’t mean that I’m a believer in never letting your story’s surprise you, or never making last minutes adjustments, or never throwing out huge parts of your outline for something better.
I mean that I’m a true believer in letting your story have a foundation before you write it, because any large or complex story built on a weak foundation, like a castle built in the sand, will need to be re-built later.
But the stronger a foundation you build for it, the easier it is to make changes without your entire structure falling apart.
#This is not saying that some writers don’t do better just rebuilding the castle later or that all stories are complex enough to warrant outlines. #Please do not take my post about what outlining means to me and attempt to writer’splain to me how some writers can’t use outlines. #I literally put that disclaimer right below the title. #Read and think before you reply.
Marshmellowmilktea 