My pronouns are and

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.

also like So foid decided to get job (paid leave) came to job interview and was hiding she is pregnant, it was in directors office, and She signed the contract and start giving birth in that directors office, and The companys now paying her birth leave

Short answer: no

Long answer: noooooooooo

Detailed explanation: No, because definitely not.

If they think it's unfeasible (we don't have the tech currently to do it on a large scale) they should at least explain their reasons

No. It's mostly smoke and mirrors. Why are fossil fuel companies so interested in this technology? They use the captured CO2 to extract additional oil from wells. It's just another distraction to avoid the elephant in the room and continue business as usual.

The answer is No

This user is surely negative

https://old.reddit.com/user/greenman5252/

>comments in /r/adulting, collapse, WDP,

I'm a chemist working on the (electro)conversion of CO2 into economically valuable products. In my opinion, making this process profitable would be the only way to convince big companies to significantly invest in the process. I can tell you that we are far from making the process economically viable

Edit: to clarify, I'm not defending that we should prioritize the economy. I'm saying that that's what policy makers/ big companies prioritize, so it won't happen until the process is profitable, which is far from now. We thus rely on different approaches to mitigate climate change

A sensible comment

Bonus on doomering about millions dying in India during heat waves just a few years from now

https://old.reddit.com/r/climatechange/comments/1ct9dhj/fatal_heat_waves_are_testing_indias_ability_to/?sort=controversial

We are going to have a heat wave combined with power failure that kills millions by the end of the decade.

You get a wet bulb temp weather system that settles over a city for a couple days, and the power system goes down.

The opening chapter of the novel "The Ministry for the Future" is a description of just this scenario, and it is hands down one of the most horrifying things I have ever read.

Yup that chapter was sickeningly realistic

The heat wave deaths are then followed by a massive pandemic as millions of corpses liquefy in the heat. The whole city would be a biohazard for a long time

I just started this book yesterday and this post made me do a double take. I had a moment of like, “wait…that's too real”

!bookworms JUST LIKE KSR THE MINISTRY FOR THE FUTURE!

Rip @Sasanka_of_Gauda @ABC and other sexy Indian dudes

!engineering !ifrickinglovescience

I think this is the one situation where it's appropriate to describe one's curiosity as being "peaked", I know I've never been more curious to meet someone in my entire life

https://www.juliefotheringham.net/blog-1/2016/6/19/phone-calls-from-a-pervert

OP of the thread is 73 years old and constantly stalked and harassed by his wife

>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

Above was first thread about the drama

Below is the second, bigger and older.

I will add separate comments soon :)

https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1cuedus/rasianamerican_is_outraged_at_yasuke_being_the/?sort=controversial

''all of these threads in asianamerican were astroturfed by white people...right?"

https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1cuedus/rasianamerican_is_outraged_at_yasuke_being_the/l4i988s/?context=8&sort=controversial

'im afraid that our safe space ThR SRD will be taken over by chuds, this very thread seems astroturfed'

https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1cuedus/rasianamerican_is_outraged_at_yasuke_being_the/l4iajm9/?context=8&sort=controversial

'But ghost of Tsushima exists'

https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1cuedus/rasianamerican_is_outraged_at_yasuke_being_the/l4i522f/?context=8&sort=controversial

'Asian subreddits on reddit are so shit, I fear to acknowledge that I as asian have a reddit account'

https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1cuedus/rasianamerican_is_outraged_at_yasuke_being_the/l4im1al/?context=8&sort=controversial

'Hollywood has an issue with portraying Asian male character, however this isn't a case of that..because Yasuke is very important folk hero'

https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1cuedus/rasianamerican_is_outraged_at_yasuke_being_the/l4i7r8c/?context=8&sort=controversial

' why the frick did Ubisoft make an actual historical figure a main character'

https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1cuedus/rasianamerican_is_outraged_at_yasuke_being_the/l4ia3ji/?context=8&sort=controversial

'I'm an Asian American I'm and I have an issue with this game'

'shut up, it's up to Asian males to speak up and out. To White Hollywood. Just like you guys are making a stink of this. Give the same energy to Hollywood. Let them know you need representation that's positive.

Just like Black Americans.'

https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1cuedus/rasianamerican_is_outraged_at_yasuke_being_the/l4ignf0/?context=8&sort=controversial

'true japanese don't care'

'Oh so theyre japanese when they agree with you and secretly white when they dont

Funny how that works'

https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1cuedus/rasianamerican_is_outraged_at_yasuke_being_the/l4ilqh4/?context=8&sort=controversial

Askhistorians link about Yasuke

Totally fine yet this was written after all the evidence given

'If you've read this and all my other posts and links on Yasuke and still don't believe Yasuke was a samurai, then you either a) prefer to believe your own bias over historical research or b) should post an academic level publication from a PhD level researcher arguing Yasuke wasn't a samurai so I could read it.'

https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1cusf84/im_mad_at_what_we_lost_for_the_sake_of_diversity/l4l8xua/?context=8&sort=controversial

'My assumption is that people whose culture is being put on display want the avatar experiencing their culture to be a direct representation of the average member of that culture rather than a liminal figure.'

'your assumption is wrong because japanese people don't give a shit about AC'

https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1cusf84/im_mad_at_what_we_lost_for_the_sake_of_diversity/l4la2qq/?context=8&sort=controversial

'even if asian men care, they should shut up, women are misrepresented more, black and asian' ( a known twox and srd poster Felinomancy)'

https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1cusf84/im_mad_at_what_we_lost_for_the_sake_of_diversity/l4lqmvo/?context=8&sort=controversial

CHERRY ON TOP OF THE POST

LONGEST DOWN VOTED COMMENT CHAIN

'Both sides only care about this dude, because his black, he was not that significant in Japanese history at all.

PLUS - OP, the anti chud warrior makes a comment AGAINST HOTEPS AND GETS DOWN VOTED. Only in SRD

https://old.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1cusf84/im_mad_at_what_we_lost_for_the_sake_of_diversity/l4ksxax/?context=8&sort=controversial

https://twitter.com/ProfBillMcGuire/status/1789692038033645891

https://www.reddit.com/r/WaltDisneyWorld/s/FEtKt2K88N

https://twitter.com/thinkmickey/status/1792542257876246901

https://twitter.com/ScottGustin/status/1792512476849795352

Most haven't gone through the process yet at Disneyland cuz of the time difference but here's previous discussions

https://www.reddit.com/r/Disneyland/s/6k75mFZzCc

https://www.reddit.com/r/Disneyland/s/ssOqBNUYTQ

TLDR: Disney's old DAS (DISABILITY ACESS SERVICE) pass was abused to heck once the parks reopened during the pandemic and became even worse once Disney took away free fast passes and introduced genie+ and lightning lane. People would make up excuses like ibs and anxiety so they didn't have to wait in long lines. Now Disney says it's only for developmental disabilities like autism

⚡️BREAKING

Fars News reports that contact with the helicopter transporting the Iranian president has been lost. pic.twitter.com/3r1HLs9Huj

— Iran Observer (@IranObserver0) May 19, 2024

“…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.

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