Everyone Got That One Homie Who Hasn't Been Whole Since The Incident

Making a magical elixir of feeling like an alive human person existing within the confines of time.

lol i tricked you i actually have no soul or interiority. my actions are merely a hollow imitation of a complete being. and you totally fell for it too

Neutrality is complicity. Your silence is so loud. CEASEFIRE NOW‼️ 🍉🗣️🍉🗣️

"So you collect ghosts?"

"Not intentionally. Ghosts are just drawn to me. I'm a ghost sponge. A ghost magnet. When I'm hired to check out a haunted house, I walk in and take all the ghosts with me when I leave. And if it turns out there's a demon the ghosts eat 'em. It's a very efficient system."

"...Say that last part again."

"The ghosts eat the demons. Like a pack of hyenas taking down a wildebeest. I've seen the ghost of a 90-year-old Ukrainian babushka tear apart a demon with her teeth."

Good Traits Gone Bad

Exploring good traits gone bad in a novel can add depth and complexity to your characters. Here are a few examples of good traits that can take a negative turn:

1. Empathy turning into manipulation: A character with a strong sense of empathy may use it to manipulate others' emotions and gain an advantage.

2. Confidence becoming arrogance: Excessive confidence can lead to arrogance, where a character belittles others and dismisses their opinions.

3. Ambition turning into obsession: A character's ambition can transform into an unhealthy obsession, causing them to prioritize success at any cost, including sacrificing relationships and moral values.

4. Loyalty becoming blind devotion: Initially loyal, a character may become blindly devoted to a cause or person, disregarding their own well-being and critical thinking.

5. Courage turning into recklessness: A character's courage can morph into reckless behavior, endangering themselves and others due to an overestimation of their abilities.

6. Determination becoming stubbornness: Excessive determination can lead to stubbornness, where a character refuses to consider alternative perspectives or change their course of action, even when it's detrimental.

7. Optimism becoming naivety: Unwavering optimism can transform into naivety, causing a character to overlook dangers or be easily deceived.

8. Protectiveness turning into possessiveness: A character's protective nature can evolve into possessiveness, where they become overly controlling and jealous in relationships.

9. Altruism becoming self-neglect: A character's selflessness may lead to neglecting their own needs and well-being, to the point of self-sacrifice and burnout.

10. Honesty becoming brutal bluntness: A character's commitment to honesty can turn into brutal bluntness, hurting others with harsh and tactless remarks.

These examples demonstrate how even admirable traits can have negative consequences when taken to extremes or used improperly. By exploring the complexities of these traits, you can create compelling and multi-dimensional characters in your novel.

Happy writing!

hey, so i just read "the psychology of the transference" by c.g. jung bc my psychoanalyst told me to. all of the misogyny, rampant racism and overconfident speculation on the role of incestuos desires for the human psyche aside (lmao), i found it a worthwhile read. one of the main points that he seems to make in regards to alchemy is that it wasn't *really* about chemistry/material processes, but more about the images and metaphors used to describe the alchemical process. and jung compares this alchemical imagery, which in large parts revolves around themes of divisions and fusions, to subconscious (psychic) processes that in his opinion also revolve around divisions and fusions (like dissolutions or integrations of the self, contradictions in gender relations and other social relations, etc). and idk, that part makes sense to me. did alchemists really care about the physical world? or did they care about gender, sex, identity, art, death, the horrors, etc?

YES. THE TEXTS HE IS TALKING ABOUT ARE PROTO-CHEMISTRY WORKS.

Alchemy was demonstrably, overwhelmingly, about the physical world. Jung's psychological interpretations of them are --and I cannot stress this enough-- entirely invented ahistorical bullshit.

I cannot overstate the amount of damage that Jung has done to alchemical scholarship. His interpretations of alchemical texts have caused literally thousands of historical proto-chemistry texts to languish in the historical wastebin of "Psychological mumbo jumbo" or "it's just old therapy language tee hee!"

What's worse is he actively misrepresents many of the actual religious or mystical ideas present in the texts he cites. For example, many alchemical texts in the Arab world we're the result of Isma-ili mystics from northern Africa and more gnostic-influenced parts of the early Muslim world. Their equivocation of Hermes Trismegistus with the biblical Enoch, and unique relationship to both hermeticism and Jewish apocrypha, gets ENTIRELY sidelined in Jung's reading, in favor of "it's just early psychology."

Furthermore, Jung tries to make the argument that these images present in alchemical texts are somehow representative of some deeper, universal structure within human psychology. Which is, --again I cannot stress this enough-- howling clown bullshit. Alchemical texts are similar because chemistry works the same wherever you are on the planet. He actively ignores the hermeneutics of different alchemical theories, which change RADICALLY depending on culture and location.

All this in service of adding a pseudo-historical foundation for psychological theories that are about as scientific as astrology.

Even sharper than the agony of being opened and remade is the joy of becoming

saw a poll about whether you prefer corruption or redemption arcs and i realized that for me it's not really either, it's a distillation arc: when a character becomes the most intense version of what they could be, everything inessential falling away or being discarded so that only the core remains.

people always talk about evil clones like oooh a dark mirror oohh what if you saw what are cruel person you were/are capable of becoming. and well yes but what if you were the evil clone. what if you looked in the mirror and what you saw was so bright it blinded you. what if you had to know exactly how good you could have been.

Where is my fantasy female protagonist who's a little too socially adept maybe I'm tired of the assumption being that all fantasy female protagonists don't really understand the nuances of conversation in politicised situations. I want a girl who knows exactly how to play people and is always a little privately concerned that she's evil for it.