Character Who Goes From :D To 'leave Me The Fuck Alone' Because They Are So Traumatized By The Horrors

Was scrolling through AO3 and found this gem

Enemy to parent is a trope we have to popularise lmao

whoever invented beds was a fucking genius im just all cozied up in here like u don't even know how cozy i am

I wish I was a mysterious enigma haunting the halls of a castle whose location has been lost to time.

I wish to be a ghost roaming the decrepit halls of a mansion that's slowly faded from civilizations memory.

I wish to float alongside the animals that slowly claim the home as their own.

~

Honestly I would love to live out in the forest with my pets, living for myself and only having a select few people know where I live. It sounds nice :)

I yern for it

Things I’ve noticed are essential in plotting and would probably have saved me a lot of time if I had considered it earlier

The START of your story - how fucked up flawed is your premise/character at the start? what do they have to change? why are they HERE?

The END of your story - How do you want your main character/theme/universe to change after your story? Does it get better or worse? THIS SETS UP THE TONE DRASTICALLY.

What you want to happen IN BETWEEN - the MEAT of it. What made you start writing this WIP in the first place. Don't be ashamed to indulge, it's where the BRAIN JUICE comes from. You want a deep dive into worldbuilding and complex systems? Then your start and end should be rooted in some fundamental, unique rule of your universe (what made you obsess over it?). Want to write unabashed ship content? Make sure your start and end are so compelling you'll never run out of smut scenarios to shove in between scenes (what relationship dynamics made you ship it in the first place?).

The ANTE - the GRAVITY of your story. How high are the stakes? Writing a blurb or interaction? start with a small day-in-the-life so you can focus on shorter timelines and hourly minutiae that can easily get overlooked in more complicated epics. Or you can go ham on it and plot out your whole universe's timeline from conception to demise. Remember: the larger the scale, the less attached your story may get. How quickly time flies in your story typically correlates with the ante (not a hard rule, ofc, but most epics span years of time within a few pages, while a romance novel usually charts out the events of a few months over a whole manuscript.)

Everything else follows….?

Bitches be like, ‘This is my favourite character!’ *Traumatises the ever-loving shit out of them* ‘I love them so much! They’re my precious baby!’ *Puts them through every form of torture known to man* ‘I just want them to be happy!’ *Puts them through so much shit that they have multiple mental breakdowns on screen*

It’s me, I’m bitches.

Me and my serious case of RSF (Resting Sad Face)

So, tattoo shop AUs are really popping off lately and personally I love it. What’s more romantic than bleeding for art? Nothing!

But as someone married to a tattoo artist, I have been experiencing some mild She Wouldn’t Say That regarding tattoo culture. So here’s a few quick tips that may help inform your AU. With a grain of salt for my mostly-second-hand knowledge:

NO ONE REPUTABLE SHOP WILL TATTOO A DRUNK PERSON. EVER. or even a person they suspect of any kind of inebriation. This is not just for Regret reasons, but also because alcohol is a blood thinner. If someone is on an acute dose of blood thinners, you generally do not want to stab them dozens of times per second.

Maybe this is regional, but in my experience most tattoo places don’t call themselves parlors anymore. It has a kind of seedy vibe. I see shop or studio a lot but rarely parlor.

Most tattoo artists are hot, yes, but none are as hot at my wife

Tattooing janks up your hands. Sometimes in a RSI way but definitely in a changing-gloves-every-five-minutes-fucks-up-your-skin way.

Artists themselves are rarely if ever employees of the shop. They will be independent contractors who pay the shop either a cut of their sales or rent on their station like a hair dresser. They are also (usually) responsible for taking care of their own supplies, tools, etc. except for the stencil printer. What kind of dweeb would have their own stencil printer?

There is always a line for the stencil printer. Always.

Artists generally spend orders of magnitude more time working on art, replying to emails, doing consults, etc compared to time with their needles in skin.

A typical schedule for an artist might be: wake up at noon and guzzle half her body weight in coffee, one appointment from 1-4, and another from 6-9. Home to eat one (1) real meal at 10 pm. Drawing until 5 am. This is good for her actually and good for our marriage and she’s so healthy all the time.

An ideal shop receptionist needs to be friendly, knowledgeable, and encouraging. They also need to be willing to get out the baseball bat that is kept behind the counter.

If a shop has to choose between “good people skills” and “will promptly rebuff Nazis and the obviously inebriated” the later is often a more important consideration.

At any given moment in any given shop there’s going to be at least one apprentice or someone bumming around hoping to be taken on as an apprentice. They spawn on tic and this feature cannot be disabled.

Again I can not overstate how hot my wife is

We talk about this far too passionately for me to not reblog this <3

I don't think we're paying half of the attention we should be to the inherent horror of the Isekai trope. God knows I love it, like a stupid amount but can you even imagine?

Typically, the character firsts dies, hit by a bus, some illness, murdered, and that's your starting point. You die, in some gruesome way you are ripped from your world and then thrusted into another. You stopped breathing, you ceased to exist, you died. You didn't though. Because you're alive. All of a sudden, it's like nothing happened. But it did, didn't it? Tell me, is a wound still a wound if there's no scar? Where do you put all your grief if there's no grave?

There's no time to focus on that though, because you're in a stranger body. That's body horror, babe. Your skin is fairer, your hair is curled, your legs are longer, every part of you is not your own. Your hair, the colour of your eyes, the damn figure of your body, you don't look like yourself. Your nose is too straight, your smile lines are gone, your cheeks are rosey. Your hands aren't worn in the right places, maybe not at all, where are your burn marks from the stove, your calluses from your work, the cheap, chipped nail polish. You can't walk on these legs, these aren't the legs that took your first step, they aren't the legs you scraped learning to ride a bike, these legs haven't carried you through your life.

And what of these people who know you? No, not you, the person you're living in. It's their name you must respond to, their memories you must bluff through, their fate you must live through. You must abandon all sense of self to survive, you can never be yourself again because you died, you never existed here, because you are someone else now. You have been pulled on stage without a script, how long until they realize? That you can only echo back what they've said? That their child doesn't know their parent anymore? Their childhood friend, their lover, their rival.

What about them? Did they die for you to take their place? Have they taken yours? What have they endured, what did they love, why did this happen, how are you suppose to carry on when you have you have no idea if they're safe? Every good thing that happens to you should have been theirs, every bad thing that happens to you they've had ten times over.

What about the complete loss of your original world, hm? Especially in a fantasy world. You will never stand in your childhood home again, never eat your regional dish again, never hear the popular songs on the radio. Everyone you have ever known is in a world divorced from the one you are trapped in. You will never see them again and they will never know why.

You are an imposter in every meaning of the word, you never wanted to be, and you can never stop, and no one will ever understand because you're the only real person in this world. You will always be alone, in your happiest ending, you will never escape the world you were dragged out of to be reborn.