/r/natalism is the more positive (but still weird) antithesis to /r/antinatalism, the most doomer subreddit there is. Naturally, the losers of /r/antinatalism cant stand people actually wanting to bring children into this world, so almost every thread is filled with drama.

Some dramatic threads back and forth on both subs:

The Antinatalist movement makes me anxious

https://old.reddit.com/r/Natalism/comments/1bsp999/genuine_question_for_the_people_here/?sort=controversial

Bonus antinatalism posts:

I'm really sad my best friend is pregnant

🇺🇦 A little bit nose candy to get the interview going.

Ukraine … pic.twitter.com/8O4uppa7ng

— Lord Bebo (@MyLordBebo) May 15, 2024

This one made xitter angry https://twitter.com/yoloswagstudios/status/1791146129377185915

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.

An Indian man was also drowned in Hobart recently after being pushed into the river. For a city with a relatively small Indian community this must be terrifying.

Apparently this is a trend huh

Also learn to swim smh

No word on the alleged perpetrators, related charges (needed for victims of crime compo?) nor any contribution they have or have not made? Ehh

it's sad, but australia no longer wants indians, chinese or non-whites around. We can become like 1950s Ireland or Wales and only have whites and fish and chips. Should be good?

It'll 1950s cuisine and a 1930s economy. Bloody heck.

I genuinely can't make sense of any of these comments

That is a sad story.

He's not Australian and his parents live in India so it's probably best he gets some insurance payout and takes that money back to India where it will go further.

The NDIS is already billions over budget and I'm not convinced tax payers should foot the bill for this. Make the university sector underwrite it - they are the ones who collect billions in tuition dollars.

Based "not with my tax dollars" enjoyer

!strayans !antibharatiya

Calling people r-slur cute twink peepee-lickers is funny. Never forget what they took from you. Also a goth/metalhead Amy Sedaris type would be my ultimate waifu. I know you have to be out there, where are you?

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Went out with my big lens and saw some dragonflies, these red guys like to sun on rocks or perch from small branches or twigs. The Amber wing effects are neat too

Female scarlet percher. Like birds, male dragonflies have the best colors (dudes rock) and the foids are some bleh color.

I also saw an Emerald

These guys are always moving and are fun to shoot in flight , this is best I could do as I was losing light

!animalposters

!spongebob join today

Reddit soys are already out with their predictable film-pseud defence "Duuude, this is going to be spectacularly terrible, I'll love it ".

These are the top comments.

Sounds like it has all the ingredients of a cult film, but not a financially successful one

--

Darn these Reviews are all over the place, people who like it are praising it highly, and people who don't are thrashing it.

Sounds like it's gonna be fun love polarizing films

So basically Coppola lost his sanity and made an unmarketable 120 million dollar epic. I'm so hyped!

120 million dollars to create something you truly love that others absolutely hate… That's the dream baby ! Cinema is back !

__

Can't wait. It's either going to be beautiful, or a beautiful disaster. Either way, it sounds worth watching.

__

The reality is even the positive reviews are handling this film with kids gloves. They struggle to articulate what's good about it and are basically going "uhh...this film is ambitious and Coppola(an industry legend) took a lot of risks and we must respect it for that"

Yeah sure

!kino !fellas !anime

One of my family's three mini aussies he's my favorite one because he'll just flop on you and chill out as long as you'll let him

!animalposters

Top Drama

Relative Drama (takes into account the size of the subreddit)

autodrama: returning jobs to dramautists. Ping HeyMoon if there are any problems or you have a suggestion

let's tear down this wall and bring it in for a big rdrama family hug

good game