lol

>People are going to be rewarded for doing well

There is no way you need over $200k to live a comfortable life in Alabama

https://old.reddit.com/r/Alabama/comments/1cufz7s/mercedes_union_vote_fails_workers_reject_uaw/?sort=controversial

https://twitter.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1791561907104874849

https://twitter.com/MadisonKittay/status/1791569172507353433

https://twitter.com/Phil_Motta/status/1791569428305625218

https://twitter.com/nypost/status/1791379719906083077

“…my short time alive in this world should be spent serving Jesus Christ rather than serving my own ambitions” ??? Is this not an insane thing to say 😭😭😭

— Tweaker (@cringe_fan) May 17, 2024

Context: There are full fledged pokemon fangames and romhacks because Nintendo is lazy and shit. You can use a plugin for rpg creator to make any kind of pokemon fangame. Beekeeping game? All new region with a new story? Fakemon? Rogue-like? Auto-Chess? Yep all possible. Recently though someone made like the 7th Rogue-like and this one is REALLY good with a ton of features quickly becoming so popular that like now twice as many people know fangames exist at all.

Out of the blue he says Christ is calling him so he quits. The game is basically finished but now he won't add more features personally. Atheist cucks sneed in the comments.

I love all of you

R-slur's only problem seems to be that Ted won't stop talking about having s*x with other men, but Ted has other issues

and their fight has ended, with absolutely nothing gained or learned from it:

she has continued to text spal

5300 comments of seethe over the fact that none of these r-slurs know what a bird hotdog is.

This post has it all.

Seething burgers:

seething aussies:

She told me I should focus on my studies for now, and that I'm still young. It didn't really help and I've got serious urges to cut because I'm so depressed. I hate my life.

Sorry for all the circumcision posts. I'll stop now.

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.

I'm proud of myself.