cannibalizetheself - Tumblr blog

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Oh yeah, I finished the first draft of Iseult’s novel a few weeks ago. Too bad life is suffering.

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So, during the recent Kanazawa Hyakumangoku Festival, someone made two lanterns, one depicting Popuko and the other Pipimi, wich got quite the spotlight

Look at them go

Together

Unstoppable

And then, in a dramatic turn of events, one of the lamps combusted

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That’s right, I make the best investments, I earned my spot as leader.

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Ryuji: [visiting Yusuke] Hey, you got anything to eat? Yusuke: [holds up cup noodles] I have noodles.

Later-

Ryuji: Hey, you don’t have no tissues! Yusuke: [holds up cup noodles] I have noodles. Ryuji: How are you living? Yusuke: I’m not.

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Yes, this looks fun! It's harder than it sounds, too.

Aria no Tenshi Book One: You'll find yourself in your journey, not your destination.

Book Two: Part of growing is learning what to fight for.

Book Three: Despair is not absolute; humans can rise above villainy, excuses and nihilism if they are willing to raise the bar.

Prequel (Iseult's Story): One must walk their own path to find truth, justice, and happiness, and they are not guaranteed.

0:00 AM: Growing up is accepting the world as it is, without fatalism or delusion.

Deux: Real relationships are complex, strong, and can be far removed from societal "ideals".

Der Freischütz: Humans are defined by their character, not their origin.

Dust and Snow: The past cannot be forgotten.

Hoodlin: A Primer on Thieves: Innocence is not the same as naïveté.

Bonus

MYLITY INC.: Learning a career is a bitch and your coworkers are assholes.

The Moral of the Story is...

I was tagged by @merigreenleaf​ to do this ^.^ (I’m not going to include short stories in this because that’ll just make it crazy long)

For all of your WIPs and completed works, write a line that describes the moral of the story. It can be as funny or as serious as you want.

Legend’s Legacy: Just because it’s what’s always been done, doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do

Poseidon’s Wrath: Appearances are deceiving (not can be. Are)

Demons in Between: Revenge will ruin your life and the lives of everyone around you

Chesnia’s Princess: Good intentions are worthless

Harpies Song: Determination and hard work can overcome anything

Elgovina’s Crown: Nothing is ever as simple as it sounds

Killing Wishes: Love is messy and unexpected (also, putting aside your differences and working together can save the day)

Daemon in the City: Don’t make assumptions

Help Needed: Must Not Be Afraid to Die: Success always comes at a cost

A Princess and Her Knight: Give people a chance and they’ll surprise you (in good and bad ways)

Dawn Guardians: Tradition isn’t always right

Choose Your Poison: Holding up fairy tales and “happily ever afters” as the ideal is toxic and dangerous

Son of the Dragon: Our experiences as children shape us in ways we don’t even realize (also, don’t sell your children to the enemy…that’s how you end up with a Vlad “the Impaler” Tepes)

Captive Nightingale: Even a ‘broken’ spirit can find a reason to fight

A Daughter’s Duty: Prophecies are ambiguous pieces of shit

The Rose Knight: Trust your instincts–if he seems like a huge jerk, then he probably is

Dead Reasoning: Don’t buy into stereotypes

The Diary of Evynne Jeffries: The real monsters are people who don’t care about anyone else

There are lots more… Most of them are the start of various series and every book in each series has been outlined… But I stuck with these initial ones because they’ve either had at least a first pass, or significant world building prep.

Not sure who to tag, so anyone who wants can do this (please tag me so I can see!), and if I tag you directly and you’ve already done it, then just ignore this :) @sevendeadlyformsofaffection​ @brynwrites​ @kiramartinauthor​ @barkingpup49​ @elumish​ @elisalromagnoli​ @kanarenee​ @monpetitchatonnoir​

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I want to write a DnD campaign but just play it by myself and DM myself

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Makoto: My sister said it was wrong to encourage cheaters and to profit from them.

Akira: So, she’s giving up being a lawyer?

Makoto: I asked her that, and I’m sure some day we’ll once again be on speaking terms.

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Persona5 ペルソナ5 新島真 Makoto Niijima

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i noticed almost every character in overwatch has supportive dialogue lines so i decided to put them all together in one massive audio post and i maybe… got a little too emotional

music: undertale - his theme by toby fox i got all the dialogue lines from here: x

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Anyway Persona 5 is fun

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Here come the buffs!

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Narrator: Akira had never said something like this before. Akira: I have feelings for you. Ryuji: I have feelings for you! Narrator: That feeling was friendship. But, neither of them had ever experienced it.

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Starting a Novel Series (A Prequel to a Rewrite of a Rewrite of a Shitty Medieval Fantasy, Also Trying to Stay Sane During Finals)

So, after that first post, you’re probably thinking “Author, you asshole! You’re just one of those neurotic ‘perfectionists’ that can never finish anything, aren’t you? Are you even writing anything right now, fuckface?” The answer is, yes, actually! Granted, very slowly. 

As I already admitted, I have a few story concepts and folders of varying girth that I thought to spend some time explaining and throwing around in future posts. But I’d be shooting myself in the dick if I didn’t remember what I’m writing right now and why I’m doing so in the first place. They say that the first novel is always the worst for a new writer. It’s gonna be the one with the most mistakes and errant brushstrokes, never mind actually finishing the damn thing. I have many stand-alone concepts that are good for a book, maybe two. I thought to myself that none of those deserved the first carving, considering I love each dearly and I would be sending my firstborn to be judged and sent to the firing squad, as it were. Instead, I looked to the novel series, the medieval fantasy that I wanted to write, yet also thought it would definitely be disastrous to start an entire series on a faulty premise. Which is when I realized that this novel series had an almost self-contained story within it that I could work on, that felt like a much more solid foundation and could possibly withstand my mistakes.

Aria no Tenshi, the working title for my medieval fantasy novel series, started as a much, MUCH crappier short story called “A Silver Flower”. It was about a mercenary mage escorting one of the last light mages in the country of Evaniel to some epic destiny. Oh boy, let me tell you, I don’t look back fondly on it. Sure, the country seemed interesting and diverse, kind of a hodgepodge of different city-states. The mechanics behind the magic were interesting enough, particularly because, in retrospect, even then I valued a more interesting and asymmetrical balance of power in the underlying mechanics of the supernatural rather than thinking of it in strict shounen terms. But holy shit, the characters were flat and uninteresting and the story arc made a straight line look like non-euclidean geometry. I got two things out of that first draft, though: first, if the character isn’t interesting or real or alive in any way, you are most certainly looking at this world through a fucked up lens, and second, world-building is worth keeping, even if everything else is garbage.  

The second run was a little better. I kept the characters that mattered from the first, which was the General Amidius Dant and his adopted son, Greyfell. They took over as protagonists, along with new, more interesting characters. The villain was still the same, political intrigue was added, which thankfully kicked up the story arc, and more world-building happened. Still not very good, but improving. 

My focus tilted more and more towards Greyfell, and on a personal level I was being exposed to more and more stories, being heavily influenced by things like the shounen genre, My Chemical Romance (I’m fully aware you just laughed at that), Stephen King’s Dark Tower series and Iain M. Bank’s The Culture. Because of this, the story absolutely exploded in my mind, and I found myself conceptualizing often over the course of years and years to come. It resulted in a worlds-spanning story concept served in three major arcs: 

1 - Greyfell and other civil war orphans from the medieval Evaniel are kidnapped by the opposing faction and brought to a strange land. Greyfell yearns to return home to his father, but his journey is interrupted by myriad conflicts which escalate with the arrival of an ethereal villain called Tsukikage, come to collect a debt on the civil war faction’s leader. This develops into knowledge of the existence of other worlds and a full-blown war against the old forces, empowered by the ethereal woman’s dark gift.

2 - Greyfell and his motley friends each deal with personal demons and major crossroads in their life, as they grapple with their newfound power and knowledge in the wake of Tsukikage’s defeat. This second arc happens in separate stories, with each member of the group being focused on, away from the group as a whole. 

3 - The protagonists are faced with a new group of world-crossing Swordmages, who profess the goal of crossing into the foundation of all existence, to rewrite it as they wish. Their immense power results in total war and devastation across many worlds, even as the protagonists struggle with harsh truths and crises of self. 

Evaniel, being the country of origin of the initial protagonist and the setting for much of the lore’s foundation, became a focus for world-building and a great source of fun. In contextualizing the events that led up to the novel’s three arcs, I had to polish hundreds, even thousands of years of rough history and cultural evolution that would give rise to the many cultural and historical implications that make an Evahn an Evahn, and different from people from other worlds. Rather than working in large chunks, though, there was also the immediate necessity for contextualizing the motivations and events prior to Greyfell’s birth and young life, particularly those of his adoptive father and birth parents. That’s where the idea for a prequel came to mind. 

It was important that Greyfell was raised as a knight, in a stringent and moralistic way, not by a man who was evil, but merely a tad too inflexible. It was important that this man, the General Amidius Dant, arrived at his station not because he fully earned it, but because there was no one left alive that could fill the role. It was important that Amidius be a Swordmage, be part of an Order of said Swordmages, and so should Greyfell’s birth mother, whose conceptualization was already fairly solid in my mind. Because the specifics of the preceding events were not necessarily important, considering that most of these characters need not exist in the present of the novel’s events, it allowed me to build events in backtracking, from effect to cause, and allowed me to build characters to the best of my ability without worrying whether they would last or not, because ultimately, they wouldn’t. I’d always had a better time of envisioning a story in its grandest strokes first before getting to the specifics, especially in knowing how a story ends more than how it begins, but this had been the first time I had found myself building a castle from the roof down, to put it one way. 

The result was Iseult’s story, the prequel to Aria no Tenshi, a medieval fantasy with more political intrigue than fantasy fighting, and an entire cast of characters who I now mourn retroactively. Iseult, the brilliant leader, grieving widow, and morally compromising hero, along with her Swordmage comrades, set off myriad events and motivations that ripple into the proper beginning of the novel series, even some that once seemed vague or flat. After reading all this, hopefully the least you, reader, can take away from it is that if you don’t know where to start writing and, like me, you fear failure far too much, it definitely helps to backtrack in your stories’ footsteps.

I will try to ramble with more specific details about the story’s characters and structure in the next post.

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Goro: You should have had the decency to die when we needed you to.

Akira: Sorry, I’ve been going through a bit of a rebellious streak. I swear it’s almost over.

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I love the kind of woman who can kick my ass.

Akira, about Ann (via incorrectp5)

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- Here’s the promo video, btw:

- Blink-182 dropped out the first day of the festival bc they saw how much of a mess it was

- Some more gems:

(video link)

I literally can’t stop laughing at this mess. You can google ‘Fyre Festival’ to see what else is up–this whole this is so hilarious and such a rich-kid flop. 

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Whenever Makoto was spying on Tarienn, he spent all this time stocking up on food and drinks. But she was still so sure... She’s just that good. 

(commissions!!)