a-life-without-you-2023

[a-life-without-you-2023]

why is explaining a villains sad backstory always taken as an effort toward excusing their actions. why does the conversation need to involve the question of excusing anything rather than just making their present behavior way more interesting by complicating their feelings or their motivations. why is acknowledging complicated feelings or motivations taken as apologism in and of itself. why is everyone so incredibly boring

[a-life-without-you-2023]

i will ALWAYS clap my hands excitedly and lean forward in my seat when someone tells a character to "keep your dog on a leash" only for it to turn out they're referring to another person

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hey, can we talk for a second? it’s about your girlfriend. yeah, she’s great. no, yeah, I agree. It’s just that… she seems really devoted to you? Like really devoted. Almost as if you were the sole, fragile line mooring her to the shores of humanity. No, that’s not romant—ugh. Listen. Me and the girls, we’re worried you might be the last good thing to happen to her and that were some tragedy to inevitably befall you, she would tear the gods from their thrones and dye the infinite western seas wine-dark with their ichor. Do you think you could introduce her to a new hobby or something? we don’t want to have to argue over what color “wine-dark” is supposed to be

[a-life-without-you-2023]

Pack dynamics for domestic urban fantasy werewolves:

● They're never exclusively werewolves. Werewolves have a habit of aggressively adopting everyone they are fond of and when you've won the trust and affection of one, the rest come along in a package deal.

● They're territorial in the protective sense. No trouble in our neighborhood. No hunger in our houses. No fear on our streets.

● They hold grudges. Shopkeeper overcharged one of the pack members in their store? None of them will shop there again. Restaurant owner yelled at one the cubs who got a job there washing up? They've just lost all their hungriest diners.

● Young werewolves think the word "pack" is way too old fashioned and prefer words like crowd, crew, fam, and swarm. ("Honestly, honey, swarm? What are we, pigeons?")

● They're nosy. The upside is no one with a werewolf pack to back them up will ever be left to fend for themselves. The downside is that everyone is always sticking their hairy noses in.

● They vary greatly in size. In some places, especially more rural ones, it's not uncommon to find entire villages that are basically one pack. In other places they might only have a dozen members, scattered about. And many packs start with a set of two or three going somewhere new to build a life and a community.

[a-life-without-you-2023]

those first couple weeks after escaping a time loop have gotta be disorienting as all fuck. all those little cues that used to tell you what's about to happen are now triggers that cause you to brace for something that isn't coming. you have to relearn the permanence of death -- hell, you have reacquaint yourself with the entire concept of finality altogether. everything keeps changing but it never changes back and you keep having to remind yourself that this is normal. "it won't reset anymore," you echo to yourself, over and over and over, like a broken record, like you're still trapped in a loop, like someone who escaped the time loop but was doomed to bring it into the future with them

[a-life-without-you-2023]

"She dreamt vividly for the first time in ions. It wasn't like her other dreams, the nightmares. It was simply a dream of feelings. It was a dream of hope."

Sam

[a-life-without-you-2023]

“the sea doesn’t care about you!!” ok well just because the ocean is unspeakably powerful and can’t stop the rhythm she’s held for uncountable eons just for one person doesn’t mean she can’t love you. loving and changing are two different things. we wouldn’t have life without the ocean…. and yeah, if you don’t respect her and treat her cavalierly, you’ll perish. but how can anyone say the sea doesn’t mourn when she holds so much life and beautiful secrets in her belly? why are we putting atheism on the ocean that loves us?

[a-life-without-you-2023]

big fan of characters with abandonment + attachment issues so profound that they leave claw marks in everything they touch but would sooner gnaw off their own leg than admit they just want someone to stay for once. in a totally normal well adjusted and not at all projecting way of course.

[a-life-without-you-2023]

Came back wrong this, came back monstrous that

What if they came back loving? What if they came back in love. What if the necromancy worked and you cheated death and it's everything you've ever wanted, but now they love you in a way they never did before and you cannot know if that is because they finally know the lengths you are willing to go for them, or because something in this deathless magic bound their soul to yours to guide them home and it left them no. choice.

[a-life-without-you-2023]

"Screams intercepted my ears before I even knocked on the door. Everything was dark and disoriented. The darkness consumed me, feeling my lungs with this funk I couldn’t possibly begin to describe. It was like I was suffocating in the very air I needed to breathe to live, as if the air itself had become poisonous. But I wasn’t living anyways. At least not really. I was merely existing, too caught up in old memories that I couldn’t erase- no matter how much I wished I could. I had to be the one to remember everything- the war, the chaos, the doom, the prophecy. The end of everything and the way it began again. It was up to me to prevent it from happening again, but I was exhausted. The kind of exhaustion that consumes everything, your mind and your body and your spirit. The kind that makes the world around you feel like a blur, as if you yourself are lost in time- not really belonging anywhere, or to anyone. Gods, I wished everything had just ended the first time. I wish I had just given up with the rest of them- laid down my life as a savior, instead of choosing to continue this fight as a warrior. I was never meant to be a warrior, too broken from the start to really save anyone."

A Life Without You (page 1, first paragraph)

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Basic first attempt at character designs for the main 6 using Tome.

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This is the book cover <3