Thoughts? pic.twitter.com/9tGA1qeVcN

— Wild content (@NoCapFights) May 18, 2024

!biofoids which of you is this b-word.

Sneedfinn

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/1cv66ad/old_reddits_login_form_was_removed_what_happens/l4nasqh/?context=8&sort=controversial

Post 2 weeks ago from @DogShit about this

https://rdrama.net/post/266076/reddit-slowly-eradicating-marseymini-oldredditcom-marseymini

Reddit just announced it 3 days ago with this post

https://old.reddit.com/r/help/comments/1cssv6w/changes_to_old_reddit_login_flow/?sort=controversial

Please note - our updated login pages use Google reCAPTCHA in the background and some browser extensions may interfere with logins. If you have trouble logging in, your first step should be disabling your browser extensions (you can then enable them once logged in).

To quell any concerns - we're not removing old.reddit and have no plans to do so.

Jesus Christ, lady, I hope your book has paragraphs!

Let's chop this up a bit.

...it's in a fantasy setting, it also has a coming of age aspect to it and takes place over about 6 years, and they age from 12-18. im thinking hard about how to write them right in their early ages, like 12-14, and i feel like i'm doing it wrong. i'm putting more focus on their character and specific personalities but i'm wondering if, as a girl, maybe i'm accidentally making them too “girly” and “soft.”

i like to make them enjoy the simple things in life, like exploring and enjoying nature, and they also like to talk about their feelings and their hurts. but is that a thing boys do? im trying to make them realistic but sometimes i forget that i was never a boy and i'll never know what it is like to be a boy. and to top it all off, it's a gay romance (it takes awhile though, so they're just friends in the beginning). it just happened to be that way, i wanted a romance that wasn't straight and i felt my story didn't fit two girls (again, there's a difference but idk what it is!)

... i just want these characters to feel real and not how i “think” they're supposed to be. i can't decide if gender is just a construct and it doesn't matter if they're a boy or a girl, or if their outlook on life IS different and they should be written differently. both? what mistakes should i avoid in writing male leads when i'm not a male?

"Have you tried adding reason and accountability?"

Nah, it's a good question. Writing any type of romance you haven't been in is obviously challenging. Writing the opposite s*x requires observation skills, reading and engaging with their work (a bitter pill for moids), and a healthy imagination. You also have to be able to set aside your preconceptions about how people should work, and your desire to fix them. For example, in this case it's not just that men usually don't talk about our feelings, or that we feel uncomfortable doing so. Often, we don't want to. How do these sorts of things affect a developing gay relationship?

But as usual, /r/writing offers reassurance instead of seriously engaging with an OP who wants real answers. Many also get bogged down making very important points about gender.

It being a fantasy setting changes the answer. Boys/girls/men/women tend to be different but a lot of that is a result of the cultural environment in which they were raised. The jury is still out in exactly what elements are genetic vs environmental. But that largely doesn't matter because environment shapes how behavioural genetics do or do not manifest anyway.

Since this is your setting, gender roles and attitudes can realistically be whatever you want. If you even wanted to aim for realism in the first place. If you want boys to be soft in your setting then they are.

It's MY SETTING, and I get to pick the gender roles!!

If you were writing about two average adolescent boys growing up in Anywhere, USA, I'd say it's pretty unlikely they'd talk deeply about their feelings. Many of us aren't even taught to be aware of our feelings. There are exceptions, of course. But typically, they'd probably mull things over in the privacy of their own heads while doing some other shared activity, like dropping bigger and bigger rocks into a lake, throwing dirt clods at a hornet's nest, or building the coolest tree fort ever.

But this is learned behavior, and gender totally is a social construct. You get to decide what being "male" means in your fantasy world, and whether or not you want to make it analogous to modern western, Judeo-Christian culture.

Actual good advice to tell a story about boys erased in real time by genderslop.

Depends on what your fictional society expects of them and if your fictional society has gender roles they are expected to conform to.

In my fictional society, sexy women with big tits are expected to throw themselves at members of !bookworms and !writecel

Of course you can write a world with different social "rules." But the farther it diverges, the less it has to say about real people in our own world, and the more it has to say about the author's own desires and hangups. Might as well say some coomer's monster girl erotica is commentary about female gender roles.

Given your inspiration, I recommend you research homosexuality and pedecrasty in Sparta and Thebes. I'd also suggest looking at Afghan's Bacha Posh to explore the notion of gender vs construct.

This isn't actually out of nowhere because the full OP mentioned "The Song of Achilles," but lmao

... When writing either gender, it's easy to make characters unbelievably confident or strong in their emotions, knowledge, or physical abilities. Making a teen male emotionally literate stops you having a weakness to their character that would otherwise ring true.

Differentiate your characters from each other. Give them flaws. Let their differences and flaws produce tension. Two guys who are just soft and sensitive and slowly start touching peepees isn't a story. Even a hack writer would make one of them the emotional one and the other the moody, silent one or whatever.

A couple more people actually gave decent advice, like here, but of course low effort "You're perfect just the way you are!" advice is upvoted while interesting stuff is near the bottom.

As a straight man, I'll never understand this trend. If the men in your gay romance act like women, why make them men at all? Reading gay erotica should be a form of escapism where you can imagine loving relationships without having to deal with women. At least, that's why I read it.

!oldstrags

I'm leaving this gay site I'm seething frick you Aevaan

You can't avoid it, sooner or later someone is going to want to take you to eat out, but there's things you can do to not eat more than you should.

• Drink tons of water! This will leave less room in your stomach for your inevitable high-calorie meal.

• Depending on who you're with/what you'll be able to get away with, push aside 1/2 of your meal and have the waitress box it up for you. (You can just throw it out later.)

• Make a comment about how the last time you ate there was some ligament in it so maybe you'll have a salad or something.

• Salads though!! They're full of nasty calories in restaurants. Avoid salads with fried chicken, lots of cheese, and always ask for dressing on the side.

• Never get the House Dressing, Ranch Dressing, or Thousand Island.

• Lastly, if you're at a restaurant with "dessert people", get a more substantial meal. (If you are getting a salad or grilled chicken or add a side.) You just have to make sure that everyone sees you eat enough for it to be reasonable that you don't have room for dessert.

!thin !vegana

Went to a local lake for paddle boarding with my ex-husband that decided surprising me would be fun this morning and then fly home a few hours ago. Lake was cold as shit so kind of funny watching him fall over multiple times and going back to my house for drinks and s*x. Got too drunk so he had to Uber but at least I got a fun morning trip and got laid

Bottom text

!metashit

been killing it on tiktok lately pic.twitter.com/AyaldwTTAK

— tdx (@realtdx) May 18, 2024

Use Vagisil

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_big_cats

https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/mammals/big-cat-british-countryside

I'm not gay but I'm all too aware of how horrible LGBTQ people were treated not that long ago. Violence against them wasn't that uncommon.

One of the things that had the biggest effect on me was seeing circle marks on the pavement back in the early 90s in downtown Vancouver Canada. They were put there by gay rights groups to show where gay men were beaten by homophobes.

!leafs bring it back! @Eleganza You live in strag city you can be a spotter!

@JimieWhales pls ping the women groups this is important development in the discourse

!Christians !Catholics We should all strive to be more like Christ, and in so become the type of men that women feel safe around.

Also I love the passage of Elisha and the bears. Don't make fun of holy men for being bald.

2 Kings 2:

23 He went up from there to Bethel; and while he was going up on the way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him, saying, “Go up, you baldhead! Go up, you baldhead!” 24 And he turned around, and when he saw them, he cursed them in the name of the Lord. And two she-bears came out of the woods and tore forty-two of the boys. 25 From there he went on to Mount Carmel, and thence he returned to Samar′ia.

JUST IN: 29-year-old Dutch woman who is perfectly healthy has been granted to k*ll herself by assisted su*cide.

Insane.

Zoraya ter Beek will soon be dead after officials in the Netherlands granted her request to take her own life.

Ter Beek has been wanting to take her own life… pic.twitter.com/gLLwVFMDOM

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) May 17, 2024