Hi. I'm Piffy. Someone made a typo on "Piggy" and it stuck. Other variations on my handle are still fine. I'm married to a lovely man, have a small fluffy daughter, and like writing horror. My work includes a handful of SCPs, my original setting The Forest That Is a Mountain
, and a drabble series called The Man With Eyes Like Polished Bone (available on Pillowfort and AO3). Some things I'm not ready to share yet are more of the "With Eyes Like" universe and a fantasy novel my older brother and I are cowriting.
Tropes I see in myself
- Actual Pacifist: I don't like hurting people or seeing other people being hurt. I recognize that any ideology becomes dangerous when taken to an extreme, but I believe that least violence is always something worth striving for.
- Angst Aversion: Don't get me wrong, I want characters I love to go through the wringer, but anything bleaker than Bittersweet Ending and I'm out.
- The Anti-Nihilist: Optimistic existentialism is go.
- Creature of Habit: It's an autism thing.
- For Happiness: I'm a secular humanist, and this is my morality. See also "Actual Pacifist" and "The Anti-Nihilist", above. I stan the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
- Good Feels Good: See "For Happiness".
- Mean Character, Nice Actor: I try to be as kind a person as I can. I also like to write horror.
- Nice to the Waiter: Being polite to people who are doing something for you is good.
- Nightmare Fetishist: I've loved horror for longer than I can remember. I enjoyed Batman: Mask of the Phantasm when I was three, even though the part where Batman pulled the newspaper away to reveal a gray Jokerified corpse made me scream every single time. The Nightmare Before Christmas and The Dark Crystal are both lifelong faves, and I picked up Goosebumps in second grade.
Tropes I use often
- Dark Is Not Evil
- Deliberate Values Dissonance
- Fantastic Fragility
- Fridge Horror: I will find it, and I will run with it.
- Green Thumb
- Magic A Is Magic A
- Meaningful Name
- Power Incontinence
- Uncanny Valley
- Worldbuilding
Other tropes I like
- Bizarrchitecture
- Blessed with Suck
- Blue-and-Orange Morality
- Creepy Cute: Cute-to-creepy is a spectrum and I love all of it.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones
- The Fair Folk
- Inverse Law of Complexity to Power
- Irony
- Light Is Not Good
- Logical Weakness
- Magibabble
- Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant
- Pure Is Not Good
- The Sacred Darkness
- Starfish Aliens
- Sufficiently Analyzed Magic
- Token Evil Teammate
Tropes I dislike
- Contrived Stupidity Tropes
- Cypher Language: I cannot maintain Willing Suspension of Disbelief around allegedly-alien languages that are really just obfuscated English.
- Death by Newbery Medal: Legit had trauma related to being forced to read so many of these growing up.
- Diabolus ex Machina
- Downer Ending
- Goal-Oriented Evolution
- Human Aliens
- Humanoid Aliens
- Men Act, Women Are
- Misery Poker
- Never Be a Hero
- Played for Laughs when the thing being laughed at is actually abuse, a trauma response, and/or a symptom of mental illness. For example:
- Rumiko Takahashi's romances. I just cannot, and I'm not sorry.
- Firo from Light Novel/Baccano is so scarred by an Attempted Rape in his teenhood that he's afraid of his own sexuality. Even fantasies as tame as premarital handholding fill him with horrible guilt. His inability to come clean to Ennis about his feelings is still a punchline in the 2000s, where he can't bring himself to call their cruise trip a honeymoon.
- The dynamic between Sinbad and Jafar in Magi: Labyrinth of Magic is super exploitative, especially when you take into account that Jafar was a child slave who had just been discarded by his masters when Sinbad swept in with his dazzling charisma all like "serve me instead" and Jafar latched onto that for dear life. As an adult in the main series, Jafar has an anxiety disorder (breaking out in hives when separated from work for too long is not a sign of good mental health, nor is having "work" listed as one's hobby in the databook) fueled by Sinbad's careless and irresponsible behavior, and he's treated like a nagging sitcom wife for it.
- Rubber-Forehead Aliens
- Shoot the Shaggy Dog: Really fast way to render a plot or subplot completely pointless. Don't waste my time like this.
- Slapstick
- Omniscient Morality License
- Thanks for the Mammary
- True Art Is Angsty
- Virgin Power
