🤗

Slay

this is basically a short horror film

LMAOOOO THATS SO FUNNY I CANT

Stanley’s face is making me cry lmao it’s so disappointed/concerned. He’s so concerned. Zeno the children need you. Come home stop talking to children on the internet.

My cursed friend’s takeaway after we watched Senku’s and Xeno’s flashbacks in s4 ep7

Yep that’s our guy alright.

Asagiri Gen is the character ever, he’s vaguely evil but nobody gives a shit so he just gave up. Has the strength of a house cat (canon) Threatening but nobody takes him seriously cuz he’s just such a goober. Left the bad guys in order to join the good guys, just to get absolutely bullied by everybody. Pathetic wet cat of a man, the buff old guy loves him for reasons that are completely unknown to everyone (canon). One of the smartest characters in the show, risked it all for a coke. Magnificent.

drew that fuckass science twink from that one anime

Og image below

*cough* canon *cough*

How to Write a Character

↠ Start with the basics, because obviously. Name. Age. Gender. Maybe even a birthday if you’re feeling fancy. This is step one because, well, your character needs to exist before they can be interesting. But nobody cares if they’re 27 or 37 unless it actually matters to the story.

↠ Looks aren’t everything… but also, describe them. Yes, we know their soul is more important than their hair color, but readers still need something to visualize. Do they have the kind of face that makes babies cry? Do they always look like they just rolled out of bed? Give us details, not just “tall with brown hair.

↠ Personality isn’t just “kind but tough.” For the love of storytelling, give them more than two adjectives. Are they kind, or do they just pretend to be because they hate confrontation? Are they actually tough, or are they just too emotionally repressed to cry in public? Dig deeper.

↠ Backstory = Trauma (usually). Something shaped them. Maybe it was a messy divorce, maybe they were the middle child and never got enough attention, or maybe they once got humiliated in a spelling bee and never recovered. Whatever it is, make it matter to who they are today.

↠ Give them a goal. Preferably a messy one. If your character’s only motivation is to “be happy” or “do their best,” they’re boring. They need a real goal, one that conflicts with who they are, what they believe in, or what they think they deserve. Bonus points if it wrecks them emotionally.

↠ Make them suffer. Yes, I said it. A smooth, easy journey is not a story. Give them obstacles. Rip things away from them. Make them work for what they want. Nobody wants to read about a character who just gets everything handed to them (unless it’s satire, then carry on).

↠ Relationships = Depth. Nobody exists in a vacuum. Who do they love? Who annoys the hell out of them? Who do they have that messy, can’t-live-with-you-can’t-live-without-you tension with? People shape us. So, shape your character through the people in their life.

↠ Give them a voice that actually sounds like them. If all your characters talk the same, you’ve got a problem. Some people ramble, some overthink, some are blunt to the point of being offensive. Let their voice show who they are. You should be able to tell who’s talking without dialogue tags.

↠ If they don’t grow, what’s the point? People change. They learn things, make mistakes, get their hearts broken, and (hopefully) become a little wiser. If your character starts and ends the story as the same exact person, you just wasted everyone’s time.

↠ Flaws. Give. Them. Flaws. Nobody likes a perfect character. Give them something to struggle with, maybe they’re selfish, maybe they push people away, maybe they’re addicted to the thrill of self-destruction (fun!). Make them real. Make them human.

↠ Relatability is key. Your character doesn’t have to be likable, but they do have to be understandable. Readers need to get them, even if they don’t agree with them. If your character never struggles, never doubts, and never screws up, I have bad news: they’re not a character, they’re a mannequin.

↠ You’re never actually done. Characters evolve, not just in the story, but as you write them. If something feels off, fix it. If they feel flat, dig deeper. Keep refining, rewriting, and letting them surprise you. That’s how you create someone who feels real.

Now go forth and write characters that actually make people feel something. And if you need a reminder, just ask yourself: Would I care if this person existed in real life? If the answer is meh, start over.

dunno what to caption this. I was looking at my hxh character pinterest boards and snagged some stuff off of there to make these

So today I want to talk about puberty blockers for transgender kids, because despite being cisgender, this is a subject I’m actually well-versed in. Specifically, I want to talk about how far backwards things have gone.

This story starts almost 20 years ago, and it’s kind of long, but I think it’s important to give you the full history. At the time, I was working as an administrative assistant for a pediatric endocrinologist in a red state. Not a deep deep red state like Alabama, we had a little bit of a purple trend, but still very much red. (I don’t want to say the state at the risk of doxxing myself.) And I took a phone call from a woman who said, “My son is transgender. Does your doctor do hormone therapy?”

I said, “Good question! Let me find out.”

I went into the back and found the doctor playing Solitaire on his computer and said, “Do you do hormone therapy for transgender kids?” It had literally never come up before. He had opened his practice there in the early 2000s. This was roughly 2006, and the first time someone asked. Without looking up from his game of Solitaire, the doctor said, “I’ve never done it before, but I know how it works, so sure.”

I got back on the phone and told the mom, who was overjoyed, and scheduled an appointment for her son. He was the first transgender child we treated with puberty blockers. But not, by far, the first child we treated with puberty blockers, period. Because puberty blockers are used very commonly for children with precocious puberty (early-onset puberty). I would say about twenty percent of the kids our doctor treated were for precocious puberty and were on puberty blockers. They have been well studied and are widely used, safe, and effective.

Well. It turned out, the doctor I worked for was the only doctor in the state who was willing to do this. And word spread pretty fast in the tight-knit community of ‘parents of transgender children in a red state’. We started seeing more kids. A better drug came out. We saw some kids who were at the age where they were past puberty, and prescribed them estrogen or testosterone. Our doctor became, I’m fairly sure, a small folk hero to this community. 

Insurance coverage was a struggle. I remember copying articles and pages out of the Endocrine Society Manual to submit with prior authorization requests for the medications. Insurance coverage was a struggle for a lot of what we did, though. Growth hormone for kids with severe idiopathic short stature. Insulin pumps, which weren’t as common at the time, and then continuous glucose monitoring, when that came out. Insurance struggles were just part and parcel of the job.

I remember vividly when CVS Caremark, a pharmaceutical management company, changed their criteria and included gender dysphoria as a covered diagnosis for puberty blockers. I thought they had put the option on the questionnaire to trigger an automatic denial. But no - it triggered an approval. Medicaid started to cover it. I got so good at getting approvals with my by then tidy packet of articles and documentation that I actually had people in other states calling me to see what I was submitting (the pharmaceutical rep gave them my number because they wanted more people on their drug, which, shady, but sure. He did ask me if it was okay first).

And here’s the key point of this story:

At no point, during any of this, did it ever even occur to any of us that we might have to worry about whether or not what we were doing was legal.

It just never even came up. It was the medically recommended treatment so we did it. And seeing what’s happening in the UK and certain states in America is both terrifying and genuinely shocking to me, as someone who did this for almost fifteen years, without ever even wondering about the legality of it.

The doctor retired some years ago, at which point there were two other doctors in the state who were willing to prescribe the medications for transgender kids. I truly think that he would still be working if nobody else had been willing to take those kids on as patients. He was, by the way, a white cisgender heterosexual Boomer. I remember when he was introduced to the concept of ‘genderfluid’ because one of our patients on HRT wanted to go off. He said ‘that’s so interesting!’ and immediately went to Google to learn more about it. 

I watched these kids transform. I saw them come into the office the first time, sometimes anxious and uncertain, sometimes sullen and angry. I saw them come in the subsequent times, once they were on hormone therapy, how they gradually became happy and confident in themselves. I saw the smiles on their faces when I gave them a gender marker letter for the DMV. I heard them cheer when I called to tell them I’d gotten HRT approved by insurance and we were calling in a prescription. It was honestly amazing and I will always consider the work I did in that red state with those kids to be something I am incredibly proud of. I was honored to be a part of it.

When I see all this transgender backlash, it’s horrifying, because it was well on the way to become standard and accepted treatment. Insurances started to cover it. Other doctors were learning to prescribe it. And now … it’s fucking illegal? Like what the actual fuck. We have gone so far backwards that it makes me want to cry. I don’t know how to stop this slide. But I wrote this so people would understand exactly how steep the slide is.

love the periodicity with which these freaks return back to the forefront of my brain. like clockwork

The funniest bit in Doctor Stone is still Senku insinuating that another male character has feelings for him to make fun of them but never being homophobic while doing so

"oooh you want to kiss me soo bad well too bad I only like science."