rosyandraw

[rosyandraw]

Having curly hair is great in the sense that I only wash my hair once every 7-10 days and I can get up and go most days and everything

but like

A full wash routine on days when you cba is looooooooong

[rosyandraw]

@forgetmenottpott

Omg don't because I will revert to being a teenager and I will tell you every detail of our every interaction lmao

[rosyandraw]

✞ 666 ✞

[rosyandraw]

'This,' said Laurent, 'is a little more—' It was a word of sharp points: '—intimate,' he said, 'than ice.' 'Too intimate?' Damen said.

[rosyandraw]

Respectfully, if you think Pacat’s full attention is on Laurent, then why are your fics also mostly focused on Laurent and not on Damen?

Anything that starts with respectfully usually means you're about to be disrespected lmao. But good question!

There's a lot of reasons I write the way I do tbf and in general I tend to write from the character we don't have a POV from already in all my fandoms. Namely because the contrast isn't as stark between what I'm writing and what the audience knows if you haven't already spent XYZ amount of time in their head.

But for Damen specifically:

I write from Laurent's POV because I always think I won't do Damen justice.

It's also imperative that I write from the POV of someone as obsessed with Damen as I am so I can wax lyrical about him

Writing from the POV of someone in love with Damen makes so much sense to me because yes this is a man you fall in love with. You know?

There's also this thing where I find it easier to write from Laurent's POV because I reckon, quite frankly, Laurent hates himself as much as I do and there is a great deal of catharsis in that for me,

To be uncomfortably honest for you Laurent and I share some traumatic experiences so I have way more first hand knowledge of Laurent's brand of fucked up than Damen's

Strictly from a narrative perspective the plot twists in the book all come from Laurent so when I write from Damen I know I get lazier because there's some pretty dark stuff hovering there and there's an audience expectation about it- the if and when of said reveal or whatever. Writing from laurent's pov gives me (and you) more of a question mark over Damen and that's fun to utilise.

But ATKH I think, kind of spells the end of my long run of Laurent POVs though. All the stuff I am currently writing is from Damen's POV anyway and because i'm a mess there are like 10 of them.

[rosyandraw]

I am fucking obsessed with this guy at work.

Like, fucking feral. It's been a very long time since I was crushing on someone this hard.

he's a big fucking deal, not my boss but he's kind of everyone's boss in the sense that he walks into a room and we have to stand up and shit

And I'm not being subtle with him. like at all.

And I know it's the thing i have for authority slamming right into the thing I have for people that I know would cause me trouble if it went sideways cos who doesn't love a bit of forbidden/off-limits/here-be-danger with their flirting and I know i'd lose all interest once I know I can have him but I cant stop

im a mess

[rosyandraw]

Side by Side, together.

[rosyandraw]

I want to write a Beauty and the Beast AU so so bad, like you don't understand

Damen as the sacrificial lamb all noble and pretty and judgemental and Laurent cursed into a Beast being a total fucking asshole (mean, coarse, unrefined? Laurent 100%)

Like the implication please, the only way to break the spell is for Laurent to fall in love? When the person that had him cursed knows damn well Laurent has 1000 intimacy issues?

Urgh the sense it makes.

I want it. I want to do it so so bad

[rosyandraw]

capri plot holes and dropped plot lines my beloved <3 its like playing in someone elses sandbox except i had to bring my own sand. like why out of all the blue eyed characters does damen only explicitly describe the regent and NICAISE as having eyes that remind him of laurent. why does nicaise have prince of vere eyes where was this thread going who was auguste fucking around age 18. and then it’s chopped off unceremoniously lol. the books are pretty shallow but there’s just enough to be a good playground for my own world building and somehow that keeps me hooked

The plot holes make me mad if I think about them for too long LMAO

Bring Your Own Sand has me dyiiiiiiing hahaha that's so true.

Honestly the Nicaise thing? Pacat is not subtle and they're really bad at characters so to me it just goes back to Pacat drawing an explicit parallel between Nicaise and Laurent. In that Nicaise is a representation of Laurent. I bet he was blonde originally as well but people might have mistaken him for also related and it would have ruined "the reveal"

Jokaste, for example, had brown hair originally but Pacat was like nah i'll make her blonde so it's even more pronounced that Jokaste is as 2D as they come lmao

Frankly, Pacat wasn’t that clever and certainly wasn’t thinking anything except erotic slavery in book 1 so you give them way too much credit imo. Because lowkey this is how it went with Pacat: they needed a “reason” for gay relationships to be okay in Vere. That’s it lmao, and a reason to put a “bad” mark against kastor external to Damen in Vere.

That was it unfortunately.

But saying that I’m gonna tin hat with you. Because THIS!!!! This is my new head canon and no one can stop us. THIS would have been a far FAR more compelling storyline than Jokaste’s never-mentioned-before-makes-no-fucking-sense pregnancy/baby.

The regent could have revealed it and sent a missive asking for Laurent to exchange himself for his nephew. It makes more sense than what we got. Laurent could have made a grand and much needed gesture for Damen in another way, but this provides the same end-of-my-bloodline thread in the plot and gives Nicaise more depth/nuance/point. Also makes the Regent more hideous and he was totally absent and flat in book 3 so this would have heightened the stakes.

We care about Nicaise, no one gives a fuck about a baby no one knew existed and it made no sense to bring Joakste in to just to have to get rid of her again hastily for the plot and to have Laurent nonsensically send her away.

This though? Oooooh imagine the way the Regent/Laurent reveal would have gone down if Nicaise was there? Imagine us having Damen & Nicaise interactions on the way to Ios, wouldn’t it have been SO cathartic if instead of thestupid trial we got a real fight scene and idk man, Nicaise and Laurent killing the regent together? (Also Damen should have been the one to kill Kastor, the post beating was supposed to be the balancing of the scales, so narratively the prince killer should have doubled down on his moniker and gone full circle from marlas, not to save hundreds but to save just one... not to mention the fun little lines to be drawn between what people thought of Kastor and what Damen actually became, Laurent too- both of them killing the only family they had left and choosing each other instead? Could have been golden…. But that’s just me)

AND AND AND

The regent is gross and bastards are frowned upon- Aleron would have been so disappointed to learn Auguste had fathered one, we know the regent had his fingers in all the pies long before he killed Aleron so it would have been easy for the regent to just… offer to take care of it, hide it, keep him safe and in sight seeing him as a threat and an ace in his back pocket if he ever had a need, would have put Auguste "in his debt" and that could have been a fun little side quest we got wind of.

(Also Kastor could have been complex, instead he was a tantruming 40 year old man who embarrassingly still blamed his daddy and baby brother for everything... Pacat fumbled hard with how crazy one dimensional Kastor is)

But anyway, yes, yes, and yes. I’m all in baby. I love it. So here for it 💕💕

[rosyandraw]

@forgetmenottpott

Don't omg, you don't know how many times I've thought about it

Or lowkey just the entire thing as is but from Laurent's POV... I've been so close a thousand times haha idc how many times it's been done

[rosyandraw]

"The truth is you're very sweet, aren't you."

[rosyandraw]

What you writing right now girlie pop? I need to be fed 🫶🥹

Heeeeey

Was meant to be writing a Hate-fuck-catholic-guilt one shot which has turned into something longer buuuuuut

The actual last thing I wrote was for something entirely different and it is a little more... something.

The something being:

Laurent wasn’t so dismissive when he was choking on a cock. There was nothing cold about him when his mouth was stretched wide and his eyes were leaking tears. He wasn’t aloof at all when his shoulders were heaving, choking as his abused throat was fucked relentlessly. With his shoulders heaving and his stomach contrasting with every deep fuck in, with every broken wet gurgle, and muffled whimper, Damen knew Laurent was close. The bile was dripping down Laurent’s chin, soaking Damen’s cock, running down his fucking balls and the pressure let him know it was happening, the way Laurent’s throat tightened, an altogether different sensation. Damen thrust forward one last time before pulling back and stepping away, gratified when the second he pulled out Laurent was curling over, spewing a mass of foamy bile onto the floor, pouring out of him in two contracting waves.

so like idk babe, but I'm in the mood to write something gross and depraved or something that will rip my heart out to write, you know?

Might do both at once idk, i'll keep you posted lmao.

But apart from all that the next thing going up is the Book 1 "what if" scene after the assassination attempt in Laurent's rooms.

Thanks for checking in though 💕💕

[rosyandraw]

I remember you mentioning that u don't really like pacat's writing style and that they're only capable of writing one kind of character well (aka Laurent's type) and u wouldn't be reading Dark Rise or anything. I hope I'm not misremembering, but may I ask why you don't like the other capri characters/pacat's writing? Do you not like Damen as a character? I mean no offense, just curious

No you're good don't worry you're not misremembering. I am pretty balls out about it lmao. But you don’t have to have been around here long to know Damen is my favourite. Maybe in spite of Pacat lmao. Which I will get to.

And lowkey... what other characters?

There are none.

Every other character is a mirror of, or portrayal of, Damen or Laurent. It becomes somewhat tedious, is very lazy, and leaves all of the side characters flat.

This is canon. Everything thereafter is a projection onto the possibility of those characters. The fanon has taken on a life of its own but I'm talking explicitly about the text and from Pacat's mouth themselves.

All of the feminine coded characters are either a reflection of Laurent or represent his past, present, or potential future (Aimeric, Nicaise, Jokaste etc) or don't really matter and lack any depth in the main trilogy (Vannes, Ancel, Kashel etc)

All of the masculine coded characters of any note are versions of Damen or represent his past, present, or potential future, (Nikandros, Kastor, Torveld, Jord etc) or again, lack any real depth or development (The Regent, any of the other soldiers etc).

Think of any other book, literally any book, and the mass majority of side characters stand alone. Almost all of them have their own arcs, their own personalities away from the MC. This is how it should be.

Compare that with the side characters in CP and it's very painfully obvious CP's side characters are see through caricatures of the main pair and they completely lack depth beyond this mirrors and foils idea that Pacat is obsessed with -to their own detriment.

I love Damen as a character. More specifically I love the potential of Damen as a character. I haven't read Dark Rise and won't be so I can only go off the works I have read by Pacat and I don't like their idea of character development.

I enjoy spaces in characters to intuit and infer, however there comes a point where it is lazy and I think the further into the trilogy you get the more obvious it becomes that the only character really getting Pacat's full attention is Laurent. And even then they bite off more than they can chew in act 3 (KR) and Laurent’s characterization…. Yeah not going there but it is a problem and a better narrative editor could have helped re-shape it. Or just a narrative editor tbh. Assuming they only had a line editor… which yeah, nah, they definitely did.

My major beef is how little we actually know about Akielos and about Damen's life specifically when we spend 3 books in his head. Pacat hand waves a lot and I think lack of character dimension is symptomatic of the lack of depth in the book overall. Pacat makes attempts but they fall flat, and an example of this is the world building beyond sex and slavery.

In part this is why I am probably still here because it always read like a draft to me. I love fantasy, it's my favourite genre, and Captive Prince has this feeling of micro development on a blank page. By that I mean the scene, the immediate, is fleshed out, but take a step back or look beyond into the actual world created and it gets hazy, blurry, or straight up blank. A lot of this is Pacat's lack of (at that time or maybe just in general idk I haven’t read Dark Rise) political understanding, it's clear it was never meant to be political and they switched from erotic slavery. Which quite clearly led to numerous developmental issues that were never addressed  or -you guessed it- hand waved away.

By their own admission. Pacat literally said it. They’ve made several comments over the years to this effect.

There are also the numerous plot holes and some terrible narrative choices but mostly I'm irked because the potential of Damen and Laurent and the bare bones world created is great but the execution left a lot to be desired.

I don't think I've made a secret of the fact that I think book 3 is quite frankly, silly, unbelievable, and rushed

I could go on and be more in-depth about my issues but really the fact is this was written as a self-insert-y slave erotica on livejournal and was published before the actual politics and narrative (or characters) could be fleshed out properly. And it shows. The plot is swiss cheese, the overwhelming number of characters are flat which makes the core relationship greater than the sum of its parts when it exists mostly in a vacuum and relies a lot on things that happen off-page. Or what the reader can infer.

And to be clear, I am fandom old. I heard about Captive Prince before it was published. I was on livejournal lmao and I know people who did read it first on there. All of these issues I have with CP I’ve always had, but I can’t let Damen/Laurent go quite yet mostly because I’m frustrated and it always felt unfinished or vaguely dissatisfying.

Now, I’m well aware I spat out some heavily unpopular opinions here but they are my opinions and I don’t really care too much if people disagree and I deffo have no interest in hearing about why anyone thinks I’m wrong. I don’t come on tumblr to argue; I’m lazy, I’m tired, I have far too much going on to be stressing online lmao

But you asked and that's the basics, sorry if you got more than you bargained for here my lovely, i'm in a slightly bad mood because life, you know? sorry if it felt snappy at you in anyway, that's not the case at all.

As always, I appreciate you guys and the messages you send me they give me life and lowkey keep me here 💕💕

[rosyandraw]

One of my immediate icks in fantasy books is when the bottom half of an outfit is referred to as pants.

It just really breaks it for me. It's just so cloyingly American I have to automatically demote a star.

Another clothing related book ick that has nothing to do with American's specifically: overly descriptive about an outfit when it isn't relevant. It starts reading like a child being let loose with a creative writing task for the first time.

Or a wattpad self-insert fanfic that starts with i reached for my really cool of-the-time trainers and my over sized band-specific hoody because i'm not like other girls.

[rosyandraw]

some days I love my job and then some days I'm trapped in a tiny 8x8 room across from someone who's done some of the worst shit you can think of and I have to pretend this dude doesn't make me fucking sick.

[rosyandraw]

Gang I know i'm like SUPER behind on replying to my AO3 comments, I'm not being an ignorant bitch, I will get to it, but I'm gonna post the next part first.

And thanks as always for being so patient and kind

[rosyandraw]

OMG URE BACK!!!!!! HOPE UVE BEEN OKAY!!!! I JUST SAW UR NEXT FIC LIST AND I'M LKKE WHOAAAS SO EXCITED FOR WHAT'S TO COME, GOOD TO SEE U AGAIN!!! Hope ur well!!!! 💕

Ahhhhhh thank you so much

I'm glad you're excited! I know I keep dipping in and out but it means a lot that you guys stick around and like, care

Very very appreciated (esp when I feel shit haha)💕💕💕💕