“No, No. Trust Me; It Works. Humans Love To Take Care Of Pregnant And Baby Things. I’ve Even Seen

This.

The thing about Mu Qing is that a lot of the time we see him, he doesn't have much but he offers all he has and beyond.

All he had were the few cherries he picked at the cost of being beaten and humiliated and called a thief (as the only poor disciple among many rich kids who could have bought those cherries any time they wanted) to give to his mother and yet when the poor children surrounded him he gave those cherries to them.

He had a cursed shackle and yet he was the only one who offered to accompany Xie Lian, Hua Cheng & and Mei Nianqing to Mt. Tonglu. (even though Jun Wu had told him that his friends would assume that he was a traitor and leave him to die and MNQ & Hua Cheng obviously hated him and he thought that XL & FX hated him, too.) He not only had a cursed shackle but burnt hands and feet and injured legs and yet he threw himself in the lava to fight and buy time for XL. He could barely walk but attacked Jun Wu head-on with his Zhanmaodo. The shackle tightened around his hand and it was draining his blood and his spiritual powers were sealed and his injuries and burns weren't healing and he was dangling from a freaking cliff and his hair had nearly touched the lava and yet! Right when MNQ wanted to help him up he asked him to send him further down so he could retrieve XL's sword for him!!

When XL had just saved Mu Qing and Bai Wuxiang dragged him down Ruoye, which earlier was explained wouldn't do pointless things (and when asked by XL to grab onto something firm and reliable grabbed onto FX & MQ after HC) made a lunge for Mu Qing, because it knew that Mu Qing would grab it and maybe could do something to save Xie Lian. And Mu Qing, having just been saved, balancing on a sword on burnt legs in the middle of running lava grabbed onto Ruoye with burnt hands and didn't let go even when he was overpowered and dragged along with Xie Lian.

And for all of these, he never expects anything in return! No gratitude, no credit, no friendship, and no affection. He just does these things because that's the kind of person he is.

He's the kind of person who refuses to recruit child soldiers, he's the kind of person who sees a random lady going through forced abortion and tries to save her and the baby, he's the kind of person who even when he's chased out of the house by a broom by his friends, leaves the rice he brought with them, he's the kind of person who even if he assumes XL threw the clock on him & pretended not to know him on purpose disguises himself and goes to XL's help, he's the kind of person who tries to save FX even when he has a cursed shackle, he's the kind of person who not only doesn't abandon his friends under Jun Wu's threats but goes after them knowing that at every step Jun Wu will try to frame him and as far as he knows, his friends don't trust him or like him and he doesn't even think they're friends. he's the kind of person who couldn't bring himself to steal one golden leaf from the prince who had hundreds of them in the depths of his poverty to help his mother yet doesn't blame XL for trying to steal that one time because he understands, he's the kind of person who claims that "truly, there's no point in being a good person" but still helps every time everywhere he can. He's the one who when he can't do anything, when he's lost his attacking powers after going for Jun Wu all he can think about is XL who is grabbed by Jun Wu and calls out for XL to run even as he throws up blood. He's the god who when he ascends what we hear of his followers are: "General Xuan Zhen is generous and kind!"

Just...Mu Qing and his unfailing kindness!

Writing Notes: Halloween

REFERENCES (Banshee; Ghost; Ghoul; Goblin; Haunt; Specter; Vampire; Wraith; Origins of Halloween)

Banshee

A female spirit in Gaelic folklore whose appearance or wailing warns a family that one of them will soon die.

Banshee came from combining the Gaelic words meaning “woman of fairyland,” but any positive associations with fairies ends there.

Are female spirits that, if seen or heard wailing under the windows of a house, foretell of a death in the family that lives there.

Today, the word is most frequently heard in the idiom “scream like a banshee” or “wail like a banshee,” which shows the power of myth and the imaginative power of language, since probably no one has actually heard one.

Ghost

Most common meaning today is “a disembodied soul” or “the soul or specter of a deceased person”, which came next, a meaning based on the ancient folkloric notion that the spirit is separable from the body and can continue its existence after death. It originally meant “vital spark” or “the seat of life or intelligence,” which is still used in the phrase “give up the ghost.”

An older spelling of ghost, gast, is the root of aghast (“struck with terror, shocked”) and ghastly (“frightening”).

The German word for ghost, geist, is part of the word zeitgeist, which literally means “spirit of the time.”

Ghoul

A legendary evil being that robs graves and feeds on corpses.

Ghoul is a relatively recent English word, borrowed from Arabic in the 1700s.

Because it’s spelled with gh-, it looks vaguely like the Old English words ghost and ghastly (which share a common root in the Old English word gāst, meaning “spirit” or “ghost”).

In fact, it comes from the Arabic word ghūl, derived from the verb that means “to seize,” and originally meant “a legendary evil being held to rob graves and feed on corpses.” The word was introduced to western literature by the French translation of Arabian Nights.

Goblin

An ugly or grotesque sprite.

Usually mischievous and sometimes evil and malicious.

Haunt

To visit or inhabit as a ghost.

However, this is not the original sense of the word.

For centuries, it had a perfectly unfrightening set of meanings: “to visit often” and “to continually seek the company of.”

In the 1500s, it began to mean “to have a disquieting or harmful effect on,” as in “that problem may come back to haunt you.” The meaning here is simply the lingering presence of the problem, not the possibly scary nature of the problem itself; it is applied to thoughts, memories, and emotions.

The noun haunt retains this fright-neutral definition, “a place that you go to often,” as in “one of my favorite old haunts.”

A lingering idea, memory, or feeling may have led to the ghostly meaning of haunt, or one by a disembodied or imaginary spirit.

Specter

A visible disembodied spirit.

Specter originally meant “a visible disembodied spirit” in English—a good synonym for ghost. But, unlike ghost, the notion of being visible is paramount in specter, which came to English from the French word spectre, which developed directly from the Latin word spectrum, meaning “appearance” or “specter,” itself based on the verb specere, meaning “to look.”

Specere is also the root of many English words that have to do with appearance: aspect, conspicuous, inspect, perspective, and spectacle.

Vampire

The reanimated body of a dead person believed to come from the grave at night and suck the blood of persons asleep.

Legends of bloodsucking creatures go back to Ancient Greece, with harrowing tales of them rising from burial places at night to drink peoples’ blood before hiding from dawn’s daylight. These stories were popular in eastern Europe.

Originally comes from the Serbian word vampir, which then passed from German to French, coming to English in the 1700s.

The extended senses of vampire, “one who lives by preying on others” and a synonym of vampire bat, were both in use within a few decades.

Wraith

The exact likeness of a living person seen usually just before death as an apparition. The distinguishing quality of a wraith, compared with other ghosts, is its specificity.

Originally, it referred to either the exact likeness of a living person seen as an apparition just before that person’s death as a kind of spectral premonition of bad news, or a visible apparition of a dead person.

When referring to a living person, it’s a synonym of doppelgänger, or the “spirit double” of a living person (as opposed to a ghost, which refers to the spirit of a dead person). Doppelgänger is now frequently used in a broader sense to mean simply “someone who looks like someone else.”

When referring to a dead person, wraith is a synonym of revenant, which originally referred to a ghost of a particular person and subsequently has been used for a person who returns after a long absence.

ORIGINS OF HALLOWEEN

The traditions of Halloween have their origins in Samhain, a festival celebrated by the Celts of ancient Britain and Ireland.

Samhain marked the end of summer and the onset of winter, and occurred on a date that corresponds to our November 1st.

It was believed that during the Samhain festival, the world of the gods was visible to humans, and the gods took advantage of this fact by playing tricks on their mortal worshippers. Those worshippers in turn responded with bonfires on hilltops and sometimes masks and other varied disguises to keep ghosts from being able to recognize them. Things tended to get spooky and dangerous around Samhain, with bloody sacrifices and supernatural phenomena abounding.

Samhain chugged along for centuries, until Christianity poked its nose in: in the 8th century CE, All Saints' Day, a somewhat new Christian holiday, got moved from May 13th to November 1st.

The evening before All Saints' Day became a holy—that is, a hallowed—eve. Within a few centuries, Samhain and the eve of All Saints' Day had been merged into a single holiday. Protestants of the Reformation and all that came after largely rejected the whole thing, but the holiday persisted among some communities.

19th-century immigrants to the U.S., including many from Ireland, brought their Halloween customs with them and deserve no small amount of credit for the holiday as it's celebrated in the U.S. today.

More: Writing Notes & References ⚜ Word List: October

“Don’t… wink at me!” The hero snapped at the villain. 

The impact of toxic family dynamics in Till the End of the Moon (长月烬明)

A bit random and I have never done character analysis posts so I won't be as good at it as some other people on here but bear with me.

I'm watching Till the End of the Moon (ep 25) and the recent development of Ye Bingchang's character into a full blown villain has made me hate her, but also empathize with her in ways I didn't expect.

To contextualise, Ye Bingchang 叶冰裳 is the second child and first daughter of the Ye family, and she is basically the perfect daughter of a noble Chinese family. She's sweet and kind, beautiful but not attention seeking, smart but not a smart ass, dutiful and filial, delicate and thoughtful. She shares a beautiful love story with Prince Xiao Lin 萧凛, the 6th son of the Emperor, so she's going to marry in the Imperial Family and no doubt bring honor to the Ye Clan. She seems to be doing everything exactly right.

And yet she's a second class citizen in her own family, who openly favours her younger sister Ye Xiwu 叶夕雾.

Now there are two levels to this.

1) They're openly and unabashedly favouring one child over the 3 others, but then still ranking the other kids, and somehow Ye Bingchang ranks lower than her brother who is a lazy and stupid gambler. Her family simply doesn't see her, she's completely forgettable to them, like her existence only matters because sure, she's their blood, but she's a complete afterthought.

2) The daughter they favour over her is Ye Xiwu, and Ye Xiwu is a monster of a golden child. She's completely selfish and narcissistic, she explicitly abuses her husband, she schemes again and again to seduce and try to rape Prince Xiao Lin, her sister's one true love and fiancé, and when this doesn't work she becomes physically violent towards Ye Bingchang as well.

Ye Xiwu is an extremely abusive and horrible person, straight up. And her family continuously makes excuses for her violent behaviour, dotes on her, spoils her, and barely has a look for Ye Bingchang, expecting her to forgive and turn the other cheek. The golden child / black sheep dynamic is at its peak.

I find it quite rare that in this type of situation, a show will have the golden child as our hero ; almost always, if there are complicated family relationships, the main character is the one who's rejected, underestimated, and who has to rise through those challenges (which applies to our main male character Tantai Jin 澹台烬 btw, and I think we could say a lot of the parallels between Tantai Jin and Ye Bingchang).

I can think of other cases where the child who was favoured is the main character over the child who is rejected (Jiang Cheng 江澄 in The Untamed 陈情令, Feng Chang 丰苌 in Who Rules the World 且试天下) but they're not as clear cut as this (Jiang Cheng being his mom's favorite and the only actual son of the family while Wei Wuxian 魏无羡 is also a black sheep on many levels, Feng Chang's more favoured brother Feng Lanxi 丰兰息 being fairly rejected as well and having to fight not to be poisoned).

The golden child as a main character works here because it isn't actually Ye Xiwu : we discover her character and the situation when the spirit of Li Susu 黎苏苏 travels back in time and takes possession of Ye Xiwu's body. Our main character is really Li Susu, and like the audience she's horrified to learn everything Ye Xiwu has been doing, disgusted by her abusive behaviour towards her sister and her husband, and at first disapproves of how much the Ye family favours her over Ye Bingchang. But she also comes to love the Ye family as her own, and the fact that they would neglect one of their daughters so much doesn't impact her affection for them.

We only learn about Ye Xiwu's abuse through flashbacks, so it doesn't have the same emotional impact for us as an audience, and we only brief moments of those memories so we don't have to confront the full magnitude of how horrible she was, including to Ye Bingchang. Again, Ye Xiwu tried to rape her sister's one true love and fiancé, and even after getting married herself she continued to throw herself at him, and when it didn't work she turned to actual physical violence on Ye Bingchang.

And throughout this, the Ye family excuses it all away, and even Ye Bingchang excuses it away. She forgives before Ye Qiwu even apologizes, because she knows that's what's expected of her, and she just tries her best to be a kind soul still defending her sister from people spreading rumors about her. In a way, she's a victim of domestic violence who forgives an abuser and thinks she just needs to be softer, sweeter, weaker, so maybe they don't feel like bullying her anymore.

So when Ye Bingchang tries to use the affection of men to get protection, to feel love and be sheltered from her condition, it's very understandable and to me resembles a lot of things I've seen in real life. And when she turns to resentment over her condition and decides she needs to gain control over her situation through getting some amount of power so she can protect herself, it's an arc we could expect from a main character.

She only becomes a villain after the arc of Bo're Life, in which our four main characters Tantai Jin, Ye Xiwu/Li Susu, Xiao Lin and Ye Bingchang are absorbed into a dragon's dreams of its past as a War God centuries ago. Ye Bingchang is "reincarnated" in this dream as a powerful immortal, a scorned lover but who has the power to actually be vengeful over the woman who steals the man she loves. The object of her ire being Ye Xiwu, reincarnated in a very sweet clam spirit woman, Ye Bingchang gets a taste of what power feels like, of what manipulation feels like, and of what revenge over Ye Xiwu would feel like. And when even in this dream life, Ye Xiwu is preferred over her and she ends up dying, she comes back to herself determined to change and not let others control her life anymore.

Every character (except Xiao Lin really) seems deeply influenced by what they lived in Bo're Life, having identity crises of sorts over who they actually are now. As an aside, it works as a pretty good plot device to suddenly get Tantai Jin a lot more open to Ye Qiwu/Li Susu and move their romance along, it almost feels like cheating but I'll allow it.

Anyway, Ye Bingchang has now slowly become as manipulative and cruel as her counterpart in Bo're Life, and it's easy to just see it as that counterpart taking over her body in a way.

But this manipulative and cruel streak is born out of the profound reality that she can not count on her family to protect her, and that the people who were supposed to love her unconditionally preferred her literal abuser over her.

She did everything right and it was never enough, so now it's time for her to claim her life back.

And again, in another show (like the Story of Yanxi Palace 延禧攻略 for example), this urge to climb to power so no one can hurt you anymore and take revenge on the people who ruined your life along the way, it would make you the hero.

But here, Ye Bingchang still can't win, and she actually turns into a villain.

Many years after the evil overlord was deafeated by the forces of the light, there are whispers rumors that the evil overlord has secretly returned to his citadel. You know immediately it could only be an imposter, as you are in fact the evil overlord, living a peaceful simple life in exile.

SuperM′s As We Wish EP.1 preview

to everyone else in school right now: 

please use sparknotes. please use khan academy. please listen to school house rock songs and watch the history of the entire world i guess and tim and moby and bill nye. any documentary you watch in class can be found somewhere online with a quick google. get your books from project gutenberg and z-lib. download textbooks off the internet whenever you can find them. use desmos for a free online graphing calculator. if you’re learning something and you don’t get it look up the wikipedia page on it and put it into simple english to get the gist, then put it back into regular english to get the full story. cheat if you have to. school sucks so bad rn and if you’re like me and you get all your materials secondhand or from the lost and found, online resources are really useful rn; all of the above have helped me pass a class in some way, and i hope they can help you too.

stay inside and stay safe. best of luck to all the students out there. 

She-Who-Fights-And-Writes FAQ

If any of your asks can be found on this page, I probably won’t answer. (Sorry!)

I also don’t really answer asks that can’t be applied universally to everyone; I can’t tell you how to write your story! Sometimes you have to be able to work out issues in your WIP on your own! It helps you become a better writer!

There’s A LOT more than this, so if you need anything feel free to check out my answering asks tag!

Once Upon A Time (Starting)

How to Outline (For Short Stories and Longer Works!)

How to Overcome Writer’s Block

How to Get Into Writing Fiction

How to Choose Which POV to Use (Source @evans-writing)

How to Write Certain Tenses

How to Write First Person POV

Is Your Story Better as a Fanfic or an Original Work?

Stuff Happens (Plot)

How to Write A Scene (AKA get through the boring parts) (Source: Jerry Jenkins)

How to Write a Fight Scene

How to Write Gangster/Mafia Fiction

How to Make Your Story Longer

How to Make Your Story Less Sad

How to Make Your Story Scarier

How to Write About School

How to Write About Medieval Europe

How to Write About the Mid-Nineteenth/Early Twentieth Century (In America)

How to Write an Apocalypse

How to Write Magic

How to Write a Missing Person’s Report

How to Write Pain

How to Write a Sub-Plot

How to Write a Terrorist Attack

How to Write a Villain Redemption Arc

How to Write Switching POVs in Fanfiction

Subverting Common Fanfiction AUs and Plot Ideas

How to End Your Story (Source: Now Novel)

Descriptions + Dialogue

How to Write A Realistic Argument

How to Expand Your Vocabulary and Utilize English Idioms/Figures of Speech

How to Write a Smooth, Rhythmic Narrative

How to Write Dialogue

How to Avoid Purple Prose

How to Balance Description and Dialogue

Prologues and Info Dumping

Master List of Speech Tags

Characters (Who you will inevitably wind up torturing)

Regarding When to Change Your Character’s Name

How to Describe Bodies

How to Describe Clothing

How to Write Complex Characters

How to Write (Good) Female Characters

How to Write a Villain

Villain Motivations

Ways To Tell if Your Characters are Too Similar (How To Cut Characters)

How to Write Young Children and Babies

How to Write Siblings

Love Stuff

How to Write a Romance

How to Write Falling In Love

How to Write Healthy Relationships

How to Write Make-Out Scenes

How to Write Toxic Relationships

How to Write Teasing in a Romantic Relationship

How to Write a Long Distance Relationship

How to Write a Non-Explicit Sex Scene

Fantastic Beasts (And How to Write Them)

How to Write Shape-shifters

How to Write Characters With Wings

How to Write Angels (A History of Angelic Lore)

How to Write Characters with Tails

How to Write Zombies

How to Write Gods, Goddesses, and Deities

How to Write Animals in Battle

How to Write a Hive Mind

Diversity

I am a straight, white, cisgender woman and shouldn’t give you any advice but to DEFINITELY include diversity! Here are some great blogs for you to follow!

@writingwithcolor

@yourbookcouldbegayer

@scriptautistic

@actuallyblind

@cripplecharacters

Writing Deaf of Hard of Hearing Characters

Miscellaneous

My Writing Playlist

How to Become a Writing Advice Blog

How to Write Constructive Criticism

Books You Should Get As a Writer

Writing Memes

Worried About Your Search History?

My Book

I’m currently working on a novel titled Wings of Faith, and often post content such as art, aesthetics, and writing updates.

A one-winged angel must team up with a ragtag band of demons to escape from Hell. Haloes and harps must go on the backburner if it means clawing his way out of the fire, and if the world burns to ashes in his wake, so be it. Because let’s be honest here: Hell’s humidity got old after, like, a day. 

You can find all my Wings of Faith content under #wings of faith on my blog, (if you’re looking for progress reports, check #writing update) and feel free to check out @wiingsoffaith​, a blog run by my amazing friend and fabulous reader @gettinhellaturnt​. 

some people think writers are so eloquent and good with words, but the reality is that we can sit there with our fingers on the keyboard going, “what’s the word for non-sunlight lighting? Like, fake lighting?” and for ten minutes, all our brain will supply is “unofficial”, and we know that’s not the right word, but it’s the only word we can come up with…until finally it’s like our face got smashed into a brick wall and we remember the word we want is “artificial”.