Soulmates are not your ~other half~, that’s just nonsense. You are a whole person already, not half a person. A soulmate isn’t even inherently romantic. A soulmate is just the other sock in a matched set. You’re still a whole, complete sock on your own, you are perfectly functional paired with any other sock, it’s just that it’s even better when you match. A soulmate is literally just the person who makes your soul go “!!! Same hat!!!” and wave excitedly.
can i just say that i’m a slut for supergirl angst? like, kara zor-el remembers krypton. she’s not removed from it, like clark. every person she ever knew, everyone she ever passed on the street, went to school with is dead. the first boy she had a crush on in school- dead. the first girl she kissed, red-faced and young and embarrassed- dead. yorin, a student in her father’s lab who would keep sweets for her in his pockets.
dead
(she spends 3 months doing the calculations; her birthday is september 22 in earth time. this is what she tells her foster-parents when they ask why she’s holed up in her room, doing complex astrophysics.
krypton was destroyed in february and she mourns silently and alone)
the culture, too. she tries to teach clark kryptonese but he can’t buzz the words correctly in his throat, he can’t twist his tongue around the syllables all the way and he sounds wrong. she tells him the name Rao with reverence and he repeats it with flat incomprehension and she wants to cry and rage because she was supposed to teach him these things. she was supposed to pass krypton on to clark, but she’s twenty years too late.
her angst about not protecting her cousin is valid, but it makes more sense that she’d feel more about not being able to teach clark his heritage. clark may be superman, but kara is the last daughter of krypton.
Bonus:
Not even the sky is the same here on Earth. Everything is too yellow and blindingly bright. Her eyes have grown accustomed to the light, but there is a reason she like sunsets and sunrises the best.
She doesn’t know how to explain the animals that existed on Krypton. Oh, she tries, but there are just no words. None that can describe the breadth of diversity that was Kryptonese flora and the fauna because they’re too different, too alien to truly understand their beauty without experiencing it.
(”No, it was more like…It’s so…”
“I guess you kinda had to be there, huh?”
“Yeah. I guess.”)
Even the landscapes are beyond description. She tried painting a few a couple times, but the closest she got was only an echo of the real thing. A child’s memory that faded along the edges before her talent could catch up.
And even if she could draw the sharpest image of her planet, it would still be missing the sound and touch of the place. The way the air tasted and the feel of the dirt between her fingers. She doesn’t know how to capture the way the rain trickled down in a storm or how the winds sang against the spires of Argo and Kandor. And then there was the hum. Everywhere on the planet, there was always this slight vibration that she can’t quite describe, like a constant heartbeat thrumming from the ground all the way to her fingertips.
It’s not just the people, but the physical place that Kara misses. The one place that Kara will always belong to without question, where she doesn’t have to fight for the right to exist or justify her place in that world. It was her birthright. Her home.
Krypton.
She says the word as if doing so would breathe life back into it, as if her repeating it is the only way it can stay alive. It only exists now in softened images in her mind, in poisoned fragments of rock that are lethal to touch, and in the broken family links of the House of El.
Kara Zor-El, last true child of Krypton. There will be no one else after she is gone.
no one asked you kay
what the fuck no why get these feelings away from me
Interesting thing to note: of the times we’ve heard Kryptonian on this show, it’s always been Kara or J’onn speaking it. Clark understands but is never shown to speak it (which is a typical language thing with 2nd gen bi-cultural kids).
Just more things to think about in fannish spaces, since the show seems to have abandoned Kara’s Kryptonian backstory and how it informs her character in the narrative these days.
Ever wonder how big wolves are and why running from them is a really bad idea?
This had me so fucked up the first time I worked at the zoo. Because honestly they just look like big German-Huskies when they’re not wild. They look like big puppies. And then… they get close to you… And it’s suddenly kinda fucking terrifying. Like “oh this is the animal that used to scare people shitless.” “This is the animal that used to run through nightmares and poems so much.” And you suddenly fucking get it. As cool as these animals are far away, as important as the animals are in their natural environment, as much as we need them to survive… they’re still pretty fucking terrifying
can you believe these things became our friends
And then people domesticated them and now sleep with them in their beds.
We’re not a species meant to last
I’d actually argue the opposite!
We took these super efficient killing machines and befriended them and now they love and protect us as much as we (ideally) love and protect them
Cats basically domesticated themselves so that they could share in our food, medical care, and affection
In urban spaces, prey species know that there’s a higher likelihood that humans will help you if you’re stuck or injured than them killing or maiming you
It’s just, over time we see trends of our species overcoming environmental pressures that would and do lead to extinction in other species by sharing and forming close bonds with other sentient organisms and just kinda… aggressively community-bonding our way out of it?
For a long time there’s been this pervading idea that we, as a species, are just innately violent and terrible and “sinful” and it’s been that violence that let us survive (see the hunting hypothesis of human evolution). But that’s not what we see
We are, at our core, a species that looks into the face of something other, and thinks “I wonder if they want to be friends?” so long as the individual isn’t actively trying to kill us. Sure, tons of people do awful things every day, but for every terrible act or thought on this Earth, there are a dozen acts of kindness that people do casually for complete strangers
So yeah. We looked at these massive fluffy monsters with the sharp claws and crushing jaws rooting in our garbage just beyond the campfire and thought, the way no other species before or after us has done to the same extent; “They look friend-shaped!”
And they were. And that is how we got to be the dominant species on this planet
“They look friend-shaped!”
I’ve been to this place before! We went for my youngest sister’s birthday, and a bunch of the wolf dogs were used in the filmimg of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. I got a nice kiss on the cheek from one of the she-wolf dogs!
This is something that happens every day in your life. A shift of your eyebrow in skepticism, or the way your lip may twitch to a half smile cause you’re trying not to laugh. These behaviors are vital for writing in character, because not only do the allow you to visually see what is happening but it is also reaffirming whatever emotion your character is showing.
So why should you write it?
Much of human communication is non-verbal which means you need to also translate this non-verbal reaction in a post. It allows you to greatly enhance the emotions of another character and always another person to ‘visually’ see how they feel in a post. Most of all, this will add depth and volume to your post to make it feel more real. IT will make your character feel like a human instead of just another fictional person you look at from above.
Below you will find a list different type of emotions and what sort of body language can be exhibited to them.
Three ways to accent an action.
When writing about emotions, there are different ways to verbally write them out. Each one is unique in their own way, allowing you to show more about the emotion.
Emphasize the Emotion.
But doing this, you are expressing both the emotion and the body language. We’ll use a simple example. It’s short and simple yet you can sense he is happy.
John felt so happy that he was humming a tune while walking down the hall.
Complicate the Emotion.
Sometimes, even when you are feeling one emotion, deep down rooted underneath the facade of it all, there is actually an underlining emotion they feel. This is something you have to truly express otherwise no one will know.
John felt so happy that he was humming a tune while walking down the hall. However, it was obvious by the way his nose crinkled that he was disgusted by the actions beforehand. Instead, John covered it up by appearing pleased today.
Contradict the Emotion.
This is a little different than complicate. Contradicting means that you are claiming one thing when in fact its the other. In many ways, this has a variety of uses, from inner depth of the truth to what you see in person, or someone creating a wall. It could be considered a lie, but when is anything that easy?
John felt so happy that he was humming a tune while walking down the hall. In truth, once he was in the classroom, his shoulders slumped and a pout crossed his lips when no one was around, showing just how displeased he was with the situation.
Remember that you do not always have to contradict or complicate anything. Sometimes all you need to do is emphasize and that will be just fine. You don’t always have to have an underlining complicated for an emotion to make it more enhanced.
Do be afraid to use the Thesaurus to also improve an emotion. Such things as “happy” is a nice emotional word, but think of how much more powerful it is when you heard some is “overjoyed” or “content.” She how these emotions matched up with a body language can give two different styles of happiness? Mix and match to find what works best for your character at the time.
More In Depth Information
What I’ve stated above is more of a simplistic overview. IF you truly want to improve yourself, go to this
To see just how much body language can reveal about a person. You will find things such as how a person lies, how the eyes reaction, the positioning of a person in personal space, mouth, and head body language and so much more.
Use these resources to greatly increase the reactions of your character to another and create a more life-like world.
Listen, you ever have the problem where you’ve got a biological conundrum where someone’s got a mutation, or superpowers, or the dog is an alien, but you’re wondering how you can make it plausible that vets, doctors, scientists just MISSED this little bit of information during lab tests?
I present to you:
Dark DNA <–[ psst, link to youtube video about it. Or, like, just google it ]
It’s like dark matter, but in your DNA!
It goes like this:
Genetic sequences do things like tell your body how/when to produce insulin (or the proteins responsible for superpowers).
But the genome of the mice being studied were MISSING the sequences that do that, despite the fact that they were OBVIOUSLY producing insulin since the mice weren’t dead, even if the genome didn’t actually explain HOW they were doing that.
Scientists DID eventually deduce where they’re pretty sure the missing
sequences are, but literally only knew to go looking because they knew
there was something to look for in the first place.
So. When pseudo-science fails to explain how
superpowers/mutations/supernatural markers could go undetected, fall
back on the Real Science of:
I’m working on a new riso zine! This one will be about convergent evolution!
The cover shows off a bunch of different times opposable thumbs have evolved in the animal kingdom (specifically, mammals.) Primates are most well known for having thumbs, but other animals, like the Virginia opossum (back paw), giant panda, red panda, koala, and pencil-tailed tree mouse (back paw), also evolved some good grabby grabbers! The really cool thing is that giant pandas and red pandas aren’t actually related to each other (giant panda is a basal bear, red panda belongs to its own group called ailuridae) but BOTH evolved “thumbs” in a unique way by using a wrist bone instead of a finger bone. This is because both animals primarily eat bamboo, and that sorta hand shape is perfect for gripping onto bamboo!
A small list of random ass sites I’ve found useful when writing:
Fragrantica: perfume enthusiast site that has a long list of scents. v helpful when you’re writing your guilty pleasure abo fics
Just One Cookbook: recipe site that centers on Japanese cuisine. Lots of different recipes to browse, plenty of inspiration so you’re not just “ramen and sushi”
McCormick Science Institute: yes this is a real thing. the site shows off research on spices and gives the history on them. be historically accurate or just indulge in mindless fascination. boost your restaurant au with it
Cocktail Flow: a site with a variety of cocktails that’s pretty easy to navigate and offers photos of the drinks. You can sort by themes, strengths, type and base. My only real annoyance with this site is that the drinks are sometimes sorted into ~masculine~ and ~feminine~ but ehhhh. It’s great otherwise.
Tie-A-Tie: a site centered around ties, obviously. I stumbled upon it while researching tie fabrics but there’s a lot more to look at. It offers insight into dress code for events, tells you how to tie your ties, and has a section on the often forgotten about tie accessories
Even more:
Types of High Heels: A page describing twenty five different types of high heels. It gives a description and pictures. Shake it up from just “stilettos and kitten heels”
Random Job Generator: Exactly as it says. The site offer more generators like characters, plots, or town names.
Question of Smoke 