darthsuki:

cheeseanonioncrisps:

grison-in-space:

annechen-melo:

hiruma-musouka:

#this is honestly how I initially thought hanahaki in fic worked #coughing up flowers for years because you won’t cop to your feelings? #that’s the stuff #the dying thing puts on really uncomfortable pressure for me #like ‘love me back or I’ll die’ is uncomfortable as hell for me #whereas ‘ADMIT YOU’RE IN LOVE YOU JUST COUGHED UP A BOUQUET!’ #hanahaki-suffering person: ‘no’

THIS IMMEDIATELY IMPROVES THE ENTIRE TROPE!  I had really disliked Hanahaki because it’s almost like the other person - if they’re a good person - is sorta blackmailed into either having feelings or being responsible for your death which is Not Romantic, but I can totally get down for FEELIGS made into an aggravating physical metaphor that you could potential deal with if you’d either confront them or get therapy or something.

mzminola:

[http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=539]

professorsparklepants:

It’s like how everyone with autoimmune disorders disappears during flu season! Except with even more drama.

chucktaylorupset:

Prof you fucking genius is it seasonal? Like it happens in spring cause the flowers bloom? Imagine it hitting hanahaki season and looking around a room and seeing whose missing, who’s out on sick leave, thr curiosity the DRAMA

professorsparklepants:

Not enough chronic illness in fanfic. Shout-out to my folks who spend 6-8 weeks of the year in the hospital.

professorsparklepants:

Terminal Hanaki? Boring. Chronic Hanahaki? Exciting.

This puts the song “I Won’t Say (I’m in Love)” in a completely new light.

I am in awe at how much this tweak changes the trope of hanahaki from something I quietly detest from a distance into something I would gleefully read and giggle about to others.

Honestly I don’t even think it’s even the removal of the death thing (like that’s certainly helpful, but you can probably keep it, if you need it for the Drama) that saves it, so much as it is the idea that the problem is caused purely by you not admitting your feelings, rather than the other person not sharing them.

Like, in the standard version of Hanahaki, the point is that the disease is caused by unrequited love, and the afflicted end up coughing up increasingly large amounts of flowers, until either they suffocate or the other person returns their feelings.

A lot of versions do require a confession on top of that, but fundamentally the most important thing is the object of your affections developing specifically romantic feelings for you. Or you die.

As an aro person, I’m sure I don’t need to explain why this trope is uncomfortable for me, considering that it basically paints me as a potential death trap.

Plus some stories also feature ‘The Surgery’, which removes the roots of the flowers from the victim’s lungs, thus saving their life, but in the process makes them incapable of romantic love, which is treated as the highest tragedy.

Chronic Hanahaki on its own would still kind of have this problem, it’s just toning it down a bit— rather than being responsible for your death, your crush is instead just responsible for your continued pain/discomfort and frequent hospital visits. Better, but still kind of icky.

Chronic Hanahaki (that could still be potentially terminal in the long term, if you need extra drama) caused by not saying your feelings aloud, regardless of how the other person feels, on the other hand?

Beautiful. Great metaphor for the real effects that repressing your emotions can have on your body. Lots of dramatic potential.

Like, obviously there’s your bog-standard “I love you but don’t believe that you love me, so I will choose to suffer tragically alone rather than risk making you feel bad for not loving me back” thing that the Hanahaki genre was made for, but there’s room for more here as well.

Especially if you expand it to be about supressed emotions in general, rather than just romantic love.

For example:

• The character who is in a relationship, but still has trouble verbalising their feelings sometimes, due to past trauma/mental illness, and thus still experiences recurring bouts of Hanahaki. Their partner who reassures them that it’s okay, that they know they love them, and that if they want to say it then that’s fine, but if they don’t feel they can right now then your flowers are beautiful babe, and that’s fine too.
• The character who notices flower petals lying around their kid’s room, and doesn’t understand why their child won’t just tell them who they are in love with, so they can support them in confessing their feelings. Only to find out that their kid has actually been dating their same gender best friend for months now, and the Hanahaki was about coming out to their parent.
• The autistic character with alexithymia, who by this point just treats coughing up the occasional flower petal as another, rather annoying autistic trait. “Fuck,” they say, coughing up a blood-stained rose and holding it up for their friends to see. “Anyone got any ideas what this one could be about?”
• The polar opposite of the traditional Hanahaki thing. The ever happy, toxic positivity character who will die from the flowers choking their lungs unless they finally admit that they kind of hate you sometimes.
• The character at the funeral of a family member they had an extremely dysfunctional relationship with, defiantly coughing their flower petals right onto the grave, and refusing to admit that they felt anything other than dislike or indifference for them deep down, because even now, when they’re dead and gone and it doesn’t matter, “you first, bitch.”
• The character who witnessed or was told something that they aren’t supposed to know, and not only has to deal with the secret eating away at them, but also has to come up with more and more reasons for why their Hanahaki isn’t going away, even after they confess all their other secrets.
• The character who, upon clearing out the house of a beloved elderly relative who recently died, finds a whole room full of rotting flowers, and is faced with the question of what their relative’s big secret was.

Reworking Hanahaki to be a material and physical symptom of emotional bottling or stress is absolutely fantastic, especially because it brings several more layers to the AU that weren’t otherwise worth exploring before when it was just a ‘cough flowers up till you die’ kinda deal. Obviously plenty has been said above me by excellent individuals, but I offer a couple more questions/ideas:

• There is a huge following of people who believe the petals or type of flower from Hanahaki symptoms somehow represents a person’s inner feelings, emotions, or state of being.
• Does a rose mean you’re holding back a romantic attraction? If your friend is coughing up daisy petals, are they hiding a secret? If you start finding lavender petals in your coughs, should you think about who it is you don’t trust?
• On the flip side, perhaps each person experiences Hanahaki with a very specific type of flower, and there are some who believe that flower represents the person in some form–perhaps to the degree of astrology. Someone who is a daffodil shouldn’t date someone who is a lilac, the two of them are intrinsic opposites and they’ll never get along!
• Fortune-tellers who say they can read your future if you’re currently experiencing symptoms and bring in a handful of petals you’ve expelled–they’ll read them just like palm lines or tarot cards.

wandering-elf:

ladyhistory:

Me entering any museum: man I’m so excited to learn all the things

Also me: GIFT SHOP GIFT SHOP GIFT SHOP

There are two dragons inside of you. One hoards knowledge and the other hoards trinkets. They’re both very excited when you bring them to a museum

moonlit-aura:

omghotmemes:

No, no it isn’t.

this gif is perfectly timed because it gives you enough time to read it, comprehend it, and still have this too-long-for-comfort moment of suspense before being punched square in the solar plexus

jumpingjacktrash:

autdhd:

I hate that no one talks about just how distressing memory loss from adhd actually is. I always see memes that are like “haha I forgot my phone, I don’t remember where my laptop is, etc”, but no one seems to talk about how it can really fuck you up long term to just, not remember things that are completely mundane to non-adhd’ers. The memory loss is, however, so frustrating to us. I cannot physically count how many meltdowns I have had over the sheer mental frustration and torture of not being able to remember seemingly simple things

in addition to the frustration and shame of the actual forgetting, there’s this constant background dread, because you know for a damn FACT you are forgetting something important at any given moment. racking your brain may or may not bring it to mind, but you can’t be dwelling on that 24/7 or you’d never do anything else, plus it quite often doesn’t even work. so you just. live with it. every second of every day.

you have forgotten something that is going to bite you on the ass at some random future moment. water is wet. this is your life.

drtanner:

rezmacro:

goldhornsandblackwool:

theunvanquishedzims:

o-kurwa:

#i mean. bro #i hate to break this to you but #you are in fact good at the small amount of piano ur playing #it is not fake

Dude taught himself to compose and calls it fake

“Just string it together in any order, the more random it is the more complex it’ll sound" improvising music on the fly was one of Mozart’s party tricks

Not saying this guy is Mozart but he’s smart and clever and talented and way, way underappreciating himself

Bimbo qualities

babe wake up new flavor of imposter syndrome dropped

Yeah 100% the joke’s on him for thinking he’s faking, lmao.

thekijs:

bananonbinary:

bananonbinary:

“oh no we need to practice for our fake dating” is the funniest trope to me cause like. there are so many people who force themselves into a shitty relationship they hate just because of amatonormatiivity that it’s an ingrained part of popular culture to joke about hating your partner.

which is to say, oh my god you dont need to hold hands and go on fake dates, you don’t even need to agree on a single detail of your cover story beforehand. you can literally stand 6 feet apart at all times and look profoundly uncomfortable and all anyone will think is “yikes™. not my problem”

actually people should address this in fanfic more because “i know we could half-ass it, but i would never fake mistreat my fake husband, how dare you” is absolutely delightful

New trope: fake dating for spite.

“Look, my only goal here is for our pretend relationship to be demonstrably healthier than Aunt Rita and Uncle Carl’s fifteen year, three child marriage - which means the bar is so low we probably can’t fuck this up”

himfluenza:

Its so funny how staff finally cracked the code in how to wrench money out of the hands of the idiotic little shrimp people that infest its website and it is letting us pay to punish other people via forcing them to look at our bad posts. It was that easy. there are people at staff screaming and sobbing and spraying champagne bottles in each others faces right now. Miserable miserable years and years of trying to squeeze blood from a stone and it was this simple all along.

eilooxara:

athenasdragon:

athenasdragon:

professors who have only interacted with other academics for years: “what do you MEAN you don’t know multi-variable calculus yet??”

professors with small kids: “thank you for not putting the lab equipment in your mouths when I turn my back”

Bringing this back to share that one time I slept through part of a zoom meeting with my PhD advisor (who has a toddler) and he told me it was fine, that just meant I was a good sleeper

Professors who work with graduate students: if you finish the multivariate calculus work this week you can put one (1) piece of lab equipment in your mouth

tundrakatiebean:

winneganfake:

only-tiktoks:

…I need this track. NEED.

argumate:

tiktoksijustthinkareneat:

okay so that’s at least one person who would have no problem if they got sent back to medieval times, the guild hall absolutely going off to this mashup