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youbloodymadgenius · 4 years ago

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Ivarello (Modern!Ivar x reader) Chapter 1

Moodboard by @quantumlocked310

Ivarello’s masterpost here

A/N: This is my entry for @deans-ch-ch-cherrypie 500 Followers Fairy Tale Challenge. It's a retelling of Cinderella. Congrats again, darling 💖

A huge thank you to @mrsalwayswrite, who's a great beta reader and an even greater cheerleader 😂

A massive thank you to @quantumlocked310, @vikingstrash and @serasvictoria. Thank you for agreeing to collaborate and for sharing your talent with me. Your moodboards are beyond amazing 🤩

In this story, Sigurd is alive. Ragnar and Aslaug are dead, but Lagertha didn't kill her. I took a lot of liberties with the show, I hope you won't mind.

Unlike the tale, there will be no magic involved. Not everything will be realistic, however. It's a fayritale, after all!

Let me know if you want to be tagged 😊

Summary: Orphaned five years ago, Ivar and his brothers have been living with Lagertha ever since. Now 16 years old, he wants to attend Harald's traditional Midsummer party, but obstacles stand in his way.

Warnings: description of car crash; orphaned kids; Sigurd being Sigurd; OOC characters.

Words: 1806

Additional note: I'm afraid I'll disappoint some of you. No more newspapers... The articles defined the setting of the story. From now on, it'll be a regular fic.

Hope you enjoy it nevertheless 🙂

🛡⚔️🛡

June 2021

Ivar yawns, rubbing his eyes, when he suddenly hears the front door open. The next moment, Ubbe shouts, "Hey baby bro, we're home!"

Slightly confused, Ivar looks at the time on his computer. Stunned, he blinks repeatedly, shakes his head and checks the time again, now looking at his watch. "Guess I lost track of time," he mumbles as he realizes it's really 5:30 pm. He clears his throat. "I'm coming!"

Yawning once more, he wheels to the kitchen. Hvitserk waves at him with one hand as Ubbe greets him with a grin and Sigurd... Well, Sigurd ignores him, as usual.

"Hello boys!" Lagertha smiles as she also enters the kitchen. "Did you go to the beach this afternoon?" It's a rethorical question, since sand can be seen on the tanned skin of his brothers, shirtless and wearing only swimming shorts.

When she looks down at him, her smile becomes softer. "Ivar, you seem tired. Did you work all day long?"

He nods, glad that for once she called him by his first name and not by one of those stupid nicknames that she likes but that make his skin crawl.

"Yep," he shrugs without smiling back, "I made good progress. The new version of your website is almost done. It could probably be online by the end of the week."

His stepmom flashes him a beaming smile. "Great, thanks!"

The conversation then moves on to the subject that everyone in Kattegat has been talking about for the last few days: the midsummer party thrown by their neighbor Harald Hårfager. Every June, it is Kattegat's not-to-be-missed event, to which every resident hopes to be invited.

Lagertha is invited every year, yet rarely attends; his brothers wouldn't miss it, not in a million years; Ivar never went.

He listens with half an ear as his brothers prattle on about the upcoming party, while taking a seat at the large, wooden kitchen table on which Lagertha has just put cakes and drinks.

"What are you going to wear?"

"Do you think Marit will attend this year?"

"Hopefully the music will be better than last year."

"Can't be as bad! What was the name of that reggae band?"

For a fleeting moment, Ivar entertains the thought of attending as well. Not that he's dying to, but… Sometimes, he feels a little bit like Cinderella in this house.

Don't get him wrong, it's not that bad.

First, his stepmom is not–

Wait, wait, wait, is Lagertha technically his stepmom? He's not sure. After all, she wasn't when his parents were alive, she was just his father's first wife. Anyway, she may be his guardian now, but he sees her as his stepmom and he honestly doesn’t give a shit if it's a little weird.

Where was he? Oh yes, Cinderella.

So obviously, Lagertha is not a wicked, haughty and abusive stepmom like this Lady Tremaine of the fairytale.

Actually, even if it pisses him off to admit it, she's pretty nice, patient and composed. Does he love her? Let's not exaggerate – he doesn't. She may love him though, which is a little bit uncanny, if he's being honest. He was the favorite son of her nemesis. Shouldn't she hate him? He would, if the situation was reversed.

The truth is, when he was younger, he tried, he really tried to hate her, blaming her for everything and anything. When too much pain prevented him from sleeping, he let his imagination run wild. There, bound to his bed of suffering, he could see Lagertha cutting the brakes on his mother's car, causing her crash, causing her death.

Of course, even then, he knew deep down that Lagertha had not killed his mother; that the story he told himself was just the product of his endless nights of insomnia. But what can he say? He needed this. Because blaming Lagertha rather than admitting that his beloved mother was at fault – by being distracted, or by falling asleep, he'll never know – was easier for the heartbroken boy he was.

Anyway... So yes, Lagertha is definitely not an evil stepmother like Cinderella's.

Also, he doesn't sleep on a sorry garret, on a wretched straw bed either.

Actually, he has a very large room on the main floor, with a king-size memory foam bed, a walk-in – well, a wheel-in for his case – closet and his own, huge bathroom, fully equipped for his special needs.

Sure, the bathroom and the dressing room were already there when his parents were alive; however, the memory foam mattress had been Lagertha's idea.

Anyway... So yes, he can't exactly complain about his sleeping conditions, unlike Cinderella.

And obviously, he's not forced into servitude.

Actually, one might think so, but no, he's not. Sure, sometimes he works for his stepmom, like today. But so do his brothers. When she had taken them in, she was a powerful businesswoman, working twelve to fourteen hours a day. Once she had become their guardian, she had rearranged her working time and learned to delegate; but even so, she had often run out of time. Therefore, it had seemed normal to them – yes, even to him – to help her out, each of them according to their skills and abilities.

So, while Hvitserk almost always does the grocery shopping, while Sigurd vacuums and does the laundry, while Ubbe mows the lawn and trim the bushes, he, Ivar, runs her company's website and sometimes even does the accounting. And since he loves computers and numbers, it's not exactly a problem.

Anyway... So yes, he's not a slave in this house. Unlike Cinderella.

So, yes, to sum it up, he can't really complain and he's by far not Cinderella. And he knows it.

But... Yes, there's a but...

Sometimes, he feels trapped, as poor Cinderella must have felt.

Sometimes he feels like a spectator of a life he doesn't belong to.

Sure, he doesn't have to be homeschooled – but gods, he's glad he is. The reasons for him to be continuously bullied by classmates are endless. The simplest ones being: he is a cripple, an orphan, the son of a dead mob boss, the smartest one in the whole damn school, let alone his class. Take your pick. It's no fun, no fun at all. Being home alone is preferable to that alternative.

Therefore, barely leaving the house except for medical appointments, he has no friends. He doesn't do sports either – obviously – and yeah, he lives a lonely life, filled with video games and Netflix series. And he's okay with that. Well, most of the time.

Sure, his brothers, or at least Ubbe and Hvitserk, always try to include him as much as possible. But the truth is that because of his legs, there are many, many things he just can't do.

And the other truth, the less pleasant one, is that he partially did that to himself. He cut himself off from a world that hurt him, yet he still misses this world sometimes. At times, he blames himself. Because his life, honestly, is hardly what you would call a life, is it? Not when you're sixteen.

That's why sometimes, like now, he feels this longing, almost a need, to live. To really, truly, fully live. And that's why, for a brief moment, lulled by the light chitchat of his brothers, he considers attending Harald's midsummer party.

But he knows better. This life is not for him, never has been, never will be.

And so, shaking his head, he chases the thought away and, placing his hands on his push rims, he's about to leave the kitchen while the incessant babbling of his brothers goes on.

"I can't wait."

"Don't tell me! As every year, the most beautiful girls of Kattegat will be there."

"Remember that burger food truck? Best burgers ever!"

"I've heard Y/N would be attending this year."

"There'll be booze and girls! Sounds like Valh–"

Wait. His mind goes blank.

Fuck.

What? Did he hear right?

As he replays his brother's words in his head, it's like there's an earthquake happening inside of him.

Fuck.

He stops breathing. Blinks, then clamps his eyes shut.

Fuck.

When he finally manages to draw air into his lungs, he swallows loudly before asking in a weird, high-pitched voice, his heart pounding in his chest, "What– What did you say, brother?"

Hvitserk turns his head toward him and shrugs. "I just said there'll be boo–"

"No, not you!" Ivar snaps at his brother, pointing his pointer finger at Ubbe. "You, what did you fucking say?" Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Lagertha frowning – 'no curse words in this house, boys'– and even if he barely contains an eye roll, he still mouths a quick 'sorry' at her before rewording his question, impatience coursing through him. "What did you say, dear brother? Who did you say would attend?"

Stunned, Ubbe looks at him with wide eyes. "Y/N? I said Y/N would come. That's what I heard anyway. She's Harald's niece. She was here once, right? Remember her, baby bro, huh?"

But Ivar is no longer listening, the blood draining from his face. Y/N... Y/N... Fuck. Finally. Fucking finally. After so long... He may see you again. Wow.

I'll go! I'll fucking go!

He barely contains the words, suddenly acutely aware of the deafening silence in the room, his brothers shamelessly staring at him.

With her brows furrowed and her lips turned downward in a slight frown, Lagertha takes two steps forwards before crouching down in front of him. "Are you all right, sweetie? You're a little pale."

He barely hears when Sigurd giggles, "A little pale? He's greener than an alien!"

Lagertha shoots Sigurd a dirty look and then gently cups Ivar's cheek. "Do you know her, Ivar? Do you know Y/N?"

Overwhelmed, self-conscious, freaked out, caught off-guard, he doesn't know how to respond. Should he tell the truth? Should he lie? His brothers will mock him, for sure. What is the point of telling the truth? What good would it do? On the other hand, he could really use some advice. Yeah. Sure. Advice from Sigurd. Just the thought of it is enough to make him sick. Fuck, what is he going to do?

Rushed words are out of his mouth before he can even gather his thoughts. "No. No. I don't. I mean, yes, I think I do but–" He's being pathetic and he hates it. So after a sharp intake of breath, he shakes his head and eventually replies in a flat, calm voice, the white lie rolling off his tongue. "I know her, but I thought Ubbe was talking about someone else. Sorry."

With these words, he hastily leaves the room, his eyes riveted on his knees, his heart still drumming in his chest.

Y/N. Fuck.

🛡⚔️🛡

Ivar's taglist: @waiting4inspiration @honestsycrets @lisinfleur @saldelys @gearhead66 @inforapound @readsalot73 @milkkygirls @xbellaxcarolinax @shannygoatgruff @zuxiezendler @hecohansen31 @lonewolf471 @fuckindiva @tgrrose @didiintheblog @peachyboneless @pieces-by-me @funmadnessandbadassvikings @ethereallysimple @destynelseclipsa @cocovikings23 @xceafh @mrsalwayswrite @deans-ch-ch-cherrypie @pomegranates-and-blood @jadelynlace @grimeundglow @quantumlocked310 @alexhandersen-marcoilsoe-fandom

Ivarello's taglist: @not-another-viking-fanfic-blog @hashimily @prepare4trouble @supernaturalvikingwhore @funmadnessandbadassvikings

#ivar #modern ivar #modern!ivar #modern-ivar #modern ivar x reader #modern!ivar x reader #ivar x reader #ivar the boneless #ivar ragnarsson #ivar imagine #ivar fic #ivar fanfic #ivar fanfiction #ivar vikings #vikings ivar #cherrypie’s500 #fairytale retelling #ivarello

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connordavidscamera · 4 years ago

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Slow Burning Love | Connor Brashier

A/n: okay this is literally from March and I don’t even remember writing this, but I’m a sucker for friends to lovers so this is what we’ve got.

Summary: Everyone knows that Connor and y/n are more than friends. It’s time they admitted it to themselves

Warnings: fluff, alludes to smut

Word count: 2.5k

***

It’s a familiar thing. Maybe not for everyone, but it’s familiar for me. You know, when you’re in between with someone. You’re not quite a couple, but you’re not just friends. But you don’t want to put a label on it because that gives it the opportunity to be bad. The opportunity to end. So it’s easier to just not think of it as a relationship. Even if you are technically, maybe, kinda, not really seeing each other. Seeing each other and no one else. But you’re not exclusive.

Yeah, that’s what Connor and I have been dealing with for I’d say about six years now. Since we were fourteen years old, and he was dared to kiss me in a god awful game of truth or dare that neither of us wanted to play. But we were pushed into the room with six of our other friends who were far too excited to see us kiss. It was a first for both of us. And I don’t know how it worked, but from there it was kind of an unwritten rule. I was his and he was mine, but we weren’t each other’s. It made absolutely no sense and it still doesn’t, if I’m being quite honest.

We’ve hooked up a couple handfuls of times. And I can admit that I’ve only had sex with one other guy besides him. It was a one night stand sometime during my first semester of college. The guy only lasted about five minutes and I was forced to get myself off after he left. Connor took every opportunity to make fun of the incident, and if I didn’t know any better, I’d say it’s because he’s proud. Proud that he’s the only guy to have ever gotten me off. (Four times in one night, during one of our particularly needy fucking sessions.) But since we’ve only had sex five - okay, twelve, but who’s counting? - times, you can’t exactly call us fuck buddies because it isn’t a normal enough occurrence. We’re friends. Best friends. Best friends who have really enjoyed hearing our names slip from the other’s lips in a state of bliss.

“I think your hair’s brushed now,” Connor says, coming into view behind me. I set my brush on the counter and smile sheepishly.

“Just wanted to make sure.”

He nods. “I like the dress. But it’s getting a little chilly out.”

“Well then my best friend will give me his jacket, won’t he?” I tease, splitting my hair into three parts so I can braid it messily.

“Who said I was bringing one?”

I roll my eyes, “You always have one in your backseat. Except for the one time where you had, gasp, two!”

He chuckles and bumps my hip with his, taking up the other half of my mirror to fix his messy hair. “What do you think? Do I look sexy?” He wiggles his eyebrows suggestively and I can’t help but laugh.

“Always,” I answer because it’s true. “Which perfume?” I tilt my chin toward my small area of perfumes on the corner of the counter.

“Which one smells like vanilla?”

“They all kinda smell like vanilla,” I tell him.

“No, it’s like a dark vanilla. It’s kinda seductive.”

I laugh. Seductive vanilla? What is this boy on tonight? “Black bottle,” I say, because even with his horrible description, I know exactly which one he’s talking about. I’ve become well versed in Connor speak over our sixteen years of friendship.

He reaches for it and pops the cap off, taking a sniff from the spritzer. He nods approvingly, “That’s the one.”

I tie the elastic around the end of my braid and take the bottle from his hand. Spraying myself a couple times. “Is that enough?”

He places his hands on my hips and inhales behind my ear, his eyes closed. If I’m not mistaken, I think I hear a groan escape the back of his throat. “Perfect.” He pulls away and leans back against the wall. “Are we going in your car or mine?”

I shrug, “Doesn’t matter. You’re driving either way.”

“We’ll take mine then. You almost ready?”

“I just need my shoes.” I slip past him and skip to my closet. “You said it was gonna get cold?” I yell from my spot, not realizing that he followed me into my room and is now laying on my bed, phone in his hands. “Yeah. Little bit. So I wouldn’t wear sandals.”

“Pink low tops?” I ask, holding them up to my dress. “They match the flowers.”

He chuckles, “You’re the cutest thing. Yeah, baby. Those look good.” He sits up. “Hey, what mood are we in today?”

“Why?” I grab a pair of no show socks from my drawer and walk over to sit next to him. I set my shoes in his lap.

“So I know what playlist we need for the drive.”

I hum, “I don’t know. What are you feeling?”

He gives me the look. The one that says “are you seriously asking me that question?”

I roll my eyes, taking a shoe from him and untying it. “Tame Impala. I know.”

“What were you playing in the bathroom? Was that Halsey?”

I nod and take my other shoe from him. “Yeah. I’ve been binging her discography again.”

He nods, “Alright, then I know just what we need.”

“Who’s all going to this again?” I ask once we’re in his car and he connects his phone.

“Honestly? I’m not even sure anymore. Shawn for sure, which means Brian too. I don’t know. My guess, there’s gonna be at least ten of us.”

---

There were more than ten. I didn’t know a good two thirds of them, but Connor was familiar with them which made me feel a little more at ease. But he’s somewhere near the water talking to a couple of guys so I wander, finding my way over to Shawn who’s strumming his guitar by the fire the group had started once the sun set.

“Leave it to Mr. Rockstar to bring his guitar to the bonfire,” I tease, sitting next to him.

“Would you expect anything less from me?” He asks with his award winning smile and stops strumming.

“Absolutely not.”

“You having fun? Where’s Brashier?”

“Talking to some guys over there,” I tilt my head in their direction and Shawn nods.

“Why aren’t you together?”

“We’re not together all the time,” I say.

“No,” he agrees. “But most of the time. Which leads to my next question. Why aren’t you together?”

I scoff and take a sip of my drink, suddenly wishing I had taken Sam up on his offer when he tried handing me a rum and coke that was definitely more rum than coke. “Because we’re not like that.”

“That’s not true.”

“And how do you know that, Mendes?”

“Because I see the way he looks at you. And the way you look at him. Neither of you are good at hiding it. You’re constantly eye-fucking each other. I’d be surprised if you haven’t fucked already.”

I take another drink, not dignifying him with a response, but he takes it as one.

“You have, haven’t you?” he chuckles. “Man, no wonder he never got laid on tour,” he mumbles that second part. I don’t think I was meant to hear it.

I shake my head, “Whatever. What were you playing before I interrupted?”

He smirks, “You know the song ‘what ifs’ by Kane Brown?”

I nod, “Yeah. That didn’t sound like it though.”

“Well it’s a very stripped down version of it,” he says. “Do you know it enough to sing it with me?”

I glare at him. “Did Connor tell you I could sing? Because he’s an ass and I cannot.”

He nods, “He did. He also showed me a video. You’ve got pipes.”

I gasp, “He has a video?!”

“He has multiple,” he confirms, nudging my leg with his. “Come on, sing it with me.”

I sigh, “Okay. Let me just pull the lyrics up. I’d rather not mess up horribly.”

“Alright. You’ll come in on the second verse.”

“Okay. Play it, Mendes.”

He starts strumming and now it sounds a little more like the song, I’ll admit. I don’t know how he does it, but he can play anything. “You say what if I hurt you / what if I leave you / what if I find somebody else and I don’t need you.” He’s only a few bars in and our crowd is already starting to assemble, making me way more nervous than I should be. But I mean, come on. I don’t usually sing around people I don’t know. “You say what if I break your heart in two then what / well I hear you girl / I feel you girl / but not so fast / ‘fore you make your mind up I gotta ask,” he tilts his head toward me, signaling for me to join in.

“What if I was made for you and you were made for me / what if this is it / what if it’s meant to be / what if I ain’t one of them fools playing some games”

I take in a breath when the chorus ends and my eyes catch sight of Connor who’s standing in front of us, his phone out, recording. I stick my tongue out at him which makes him smile and do the same, but he doesn’t stop recording. I take another deep breath and look down at the lyrics, knowing that it’s just my turn now. Shawn gives me an encouraging nod and I take a leap of faith, diving in.

“What if the sky falls / or the sun stops burning / we can worry about the what ifs ‘til the world stops turning / or I could kiss you / what if you liked it / well we ain’t ever gonna know unless we try it,” and he’s back in it with me and I think I can breathe again knowing that not everyone’s eyes are solely on me. But I do feel one pair. And they belong to a boy with blue eyes, perfectly tousled hair and a phone pointed only at me. They belong to my best friend.

My best friend who’s looking at me in a way that no best friend should. My best friend who is making my face burn from his stare. The stare that’s making me rub my thighs together because I’m suddenly imagining those eyes on me while we’re in bed and he’s between my legs, making me feel things that only he can make me feel.

Damn him for being so so good between my thighs.

I don’t notice that Shawn and I are no longer singing. Or that Connor’s now putting his phone back in his pocket. I don’t notice that I’m getting up, walking around the fire, determined to get to my favorite blue-eyed boy. And I definitely don’t let myself notice how he shivers when my hand latches to his bicep.

“You okay?” he asks, his face etched with concern.

“Take me home,” I beg, pushing myself into his side

“What’s wrong?” He places his hands on my waist, staring intently at my face and then down my body, looking for any signs of physical harm, I assume. “Are you okay?”

“Bubba,” I beg again, resting my forehead against his chest. He stiffens. He knows that tone. He also knows that I only use that name when I’m needy. And god am I so needy for him. “I want you. I need you,” I whisper, my other hand tangling in the tufts of hair at the nape of his neck.

“Are you sure?” He’s still looking me over, making absolutely sure I’m not physically hurt. But then he’s looking around us, probably noticing that most everyone’s eyes are on us - not that I expected anything less.

“Bubba, please. Please.” I bring his face down and I do something I would never do in public. I kiss him. I kiss him like it’s the last thing I’ll ever do. I kiss him like he’s the oxygen I need to survive, and not to be dramatic, but at this moment, I think he is.

And he kisses me back with just as much fervor. "Okay. Let's go home, baby."

Neither of us bother to say our goodbyes, mostly because anyone we would say bye to already had their eyes on us. They saw everything and you couldn’t mistake the beaming smiles coming from Shawn and Brian as we walked past them, Connor’s arm wrapped tightly around my waist.

“Wait, Connor.” I press a hand to his chest when we reach the car.

“What is it, baby?”

God he needs to stop calling me that because I will melt right here before I even get the words out. “I don’t,” I sigh. “I don’t want this to just be another hookup,” I say, my voice coming out just above a whisper.

“I don’t either,” he responds without hesitation.

“You don’t?” I look up at his beautiful eyes that are sparkling in the moonlight.

He shakes his head before resting it on my shoulder. “I’ve wanted you since I was fourteen years old. Nothing,” he groans, peppering kisses to the side of my neck. “Nothing has changed.”

I gasp when his teeth graze my skin. “I want you. I want you.” He licks a stripe over the bruising spot. “I want you,” He mumbles, pressing his hips against mine so I can feel the bulge in his jeans.

“Take me home, Connor. Please.”

“Okay. Okay. Let’s go.” He opens the car door and I slip inside, desperate to get back to my place because I need him. I’m aching for him. And with the way his hand is firmly gripping my thigh the whole drive I wonder if I’ll even be able to make it home.

He’s barely parked before we’re both rushing out of the car and into my place, his hands on my hips, his lips on my neck. When we finally get inside, he kicks the door shut before pushing me against it. “Baby, I need you to tell me that this is what you really want. Because I can stop now and we can -”

“I don’t want you to stop. I never want you to stop. Please,” I tug on his hair, covering his lips with mine. “Bubba please,” I whine, pulling on his bottom lip. “I want you,” I say for probably the thousandth time tonight.

He groans and grips my hips a little tighter. “You have me,” he confirms. “Let me take you to bed,” he mutters and drops his hands to the back of my thighs, lifting me up.

I squeal, wrapping my legs around his waist.

“You’re in for a long night, baby.” He grins walking us to my bedroom

I nod, “Promise?”

He smirks, dropping me on my bed. He’s pulling my shoes off and then he’s between my legs, his jeans rubbing against my covered heat, causing me to moan out loud. “You won’t be able to walk tomorrow,” he says. “I can promise you that.”

***

I hope you enjoyed! Please like, reblog, and leave feedback!!

Permanent tag: @soyalimoncada-blog @tinycertain @magcon7280 @homeofpoetry @fallinallincurls @goldenflickerx @sinceweremutual @myyohmyuohmyy @harry-hollands @enchantingbrowneyedgirl @baroness-alison @lostinmendess @linanilssonfurberg @luvluvxx @mariamuses @shawnieeboyy @divinginfearlessly @mendesficsxbombay @shawnsthighs @zaahidahhh @adelaidestreets @shawnandconnor @shawnsblue @turtoix @honestlyimstilllivinginthe90s

Connor tag: @gangofhoes @verlaneswiftie13

#connor brashier #connor brashier x reader #connor brashier x y/n #connor brashier imagine #connor brashier imagines #connor brashier fanfiction #connor brashier blurb #shawn mendes #shawn mendes fluff #Shawn Mendes Imagine #shawn mendes fanfiction

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adelcrait-old-account · 4 years ago

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Lost and Found— Chapter 15,16,17 and 18 are up!

https://archiveofourown.org/works/24522103/chapters/63542560

Luke and Vader go camping in an uninhabited snow planet, what could go wrong? Multi-chaptered.

As always, spoilers and rant under the cut.

Oh boy.

Long, long, loooong few chapters. I wrote this in one sitting, and realised I couldn’t post 20k words in one single chapter, so here we are. I also wanted to post this yesterday, but I accidentally deleted Chapter 18 and had to re-write all over again...yay for me.

1. The Dark Side of the Force, to vibe or not to vibe? That is the question.

Apprentice/Master situation with these two, in this AU, has been tricky to think of. Let’s be real, Luke has never had a teacher, and Vader is so terrified of failing him (and himself) that I feel like he doesn’t know what he’s doing. His last padawan was Ahsoka, and then he trained Inquisitors after that, so he has no idea what to do with someone who is deliberately asking to be trained. He didn’t ask for Ahsoka, but of course he grew to like her and she turned out to be a great Jedi. The Inquisitors are literal dark side demons so I suppose Vader did a great job?

But Luke.

I mean, Ben Starkiller.

The boy.

The Commander.

Vader has no clue what to do. He is already doubting the dark side as per the last chapters on Takodana, because it fails him sometimes, and even Luke says that Vader is barely on the dark side these days. Vader knows what the dark side can do to a person, look no further than Sidious or himself, and he doesn’t want anyone else to go through that experience. Will he encourage Luke to try the light side? I don’t think so. He’s still bitter, but hey. Luke will do whatever he wants, he just needs Force knowledge, because everything he learnt was practical. Vader can and will teach him general knowledge that could apply to either the light side or the dark side of the Force.

Small victory.

2. Anakin Skywalker’s existence: the eternal Schrödinger.

Ah, Anakin, Vader, the Chosen One, Supreme Commander of the Imperial Fleet, future possible Heir to the Empire. When I first started writing I wanted Vader to progress from his canon-ish Darth Vader identity towards an older, more exhausted version of Anakin Skywalker. I feel like I’ve captured this very well in these chapters *pats myself on the back* I’ve noticed that when I’m writing him now, I think Anakin Skywalker; twenty years at the dark side, chronically lonely, basically a 10% of the person he used to be. He’s still Vader, yes, but... I’m starting to see some traces of Anakin when Vader’s guard is low.

Also, he is stressed. When Luke was forcing him to take a break, that was all me speaking. I would send him somewhere nice to calm down, possibly accompanied by a doctor, but plot. If Vader disappeared for a few days, the entire galaxy would go nuts. Sorry Mr Vader, you will just have to get rest like the other mortals do: by sleeping.

3. The Force— Third Main Character and Vader’s Main Headache

In canon, Rhen Var is just another cold planet with some ancient Temples and heavily unhabited because of the climate. I decided to change it, and make the planet super Force-sensitive, like maybe Mortis but not that magical. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE the Mortis arc, but I don’t think Vader and Luke are ready for that rollercoaster.

The Force loves to torment Vader. I have humanised the Force and stuck to the fact that, technically speaking if we stick to canon, it created Anakin. The word created is used lightly, because tbh no one knows what happened there. I just assume the Force is Vader’s second mother, and knowing that Vader made very very wrong decisions in his life, the Force haunts him.

I love angst and writing darker themes, and I have to admit that the ghost child part was lowkey painful to write. Again, it was all to contrast Vader thinking about the child, and then Luke appearing like hELLO WHO ARE YOU THINKING OF.

4.The Kyber Crystals

In canon there are no kyber crystals on Rhen Var. There’s nothing. I really wanted to write the entire scene of Luke getting the crystals, but it would spoil the surprise at the end of the chapters. Vader remembering that he saw Luke when he was only twelve, and now, thirty years later, he is seeing the same person again, who had fulfilled a promise he actually forgot about...

I just....

Yeah. The galaxy doesn’t deserve Luke Skywalker.

5. AUTHOR????????????????????????????????????????

Hey, I know! I know! Scream at me whatever you want, but The Reveal isn’t happening now. I had many many scenes where it was so easy to slip up the name of Anakin Skywalker and bam, Vader would collapse, Luke would freak out, they would be happy.

But hehe...

Not yet y’all, not yet.

I realise that the next chapter will mark 100k words on this story....when I started writing I didn’t think it would be that long. To be honest, I’m just almost at the middle of the story, and I just didn’t think that I would write so much. I love the Skywalkers, and I love the story I’m writing. I’m very excited for the next chapters, and things will get...dramatic. Big changes are coming, and I’m super excited. Thank you for reading!

#my posts #my fics #lost and found

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artificialqueens · 4 years ago

Text

Pretty in Pearls, Chapter 5 (Jankie) - Plastiquedoll

read on ao3 💄| previous chapters

A/N: hi! here's a short update but I still hope you enjoy it! thank you for reading it! <3

-5-

“Good evening, welcome to Lucky’s… I’m Jan, how can I help you?” She smiled brightly.

The flash of Crystal’s phone almost blinded her.

“Aw, look at you. First day of work!” The ginger cooed.

“They grow up so fast.” Jaida pretended she was crying.

Crystal was definitely crying.

“You guys…” Jan whispered. “I work here now… try to keep it cool… please?”

“How dare you? We always keep it cool.” Nicky crossed her arms on her chest.

“Aren’t we banned from that bar in the city?” Heidi asked.

“Technically, that wasn’t our fault…” The blonde mumbled.

Jan counted the people in the group; Widow and Gigi were there too, Widow was telling Gigi something but the girl was a bit too concentrated on certain ginger –she had said yes to their invitation in the blink of an eye when they told her Crystal was going to be there- Rosé and Lagoona would arrive after their rehearsal but still…

“Where’s Jackie?” Jan tiptoed, looking around.

“She had to close the copy room and told us she would meet us here.” Jaida explained.

“Oh… okay.” Jan displayed a new smile. “I’ll take you guys to your section.”

She walked the group to the booths and assigned them two tables next to each other –they were going to need a third table by the time the other girls arrived but for the moment, it would do- she distributed the menus and left them to check her other clients just like Denali had taught her earlier that day.

She had met some of her co-workers -there were other two waitresses working that night, Kandy and Olivia, Olivia was a sweetheart meanwhile Kandy was hilarious- and the day manager, Britta; for what it seemed, the night manager not being there was a recurring thing so Denali walked her carefully through every detail. She explained how the register worked, how to add tables and mark them as occupied or free, she also told Jan about the standards and rules with the diners, what to do, what not to do… and when she thought Jan was ready, she sent her to her first table ever.

“And don’t worry, if something goes wrong you can always say that you’re new and get away with it. I still do it sometimes.” Denali shrugged. “But I’m convinced you’ll do well.”

Jan did perfectly; she served two high school students who stopped by right after school. They ordered milkshakes and Jan was more than excited to prepare their drinks and deliver them while wearing a dazzling smile. They left a good tip for being teenagers so she took that as a good sign.

And obviously, her friends were going to drop by on her first day. She just hoped that Denali wouldn’t scold her in extension so she had asked them to behave… as much as they could.

Rosé and Lagoona walked in next.

“Look at you, baby!” Rosé celebrated her roommate. “Stunning!”

“Let me have a glance.” Lagoona gestured for her to twirl.

“Y’all…” Jan blushed but did as requested showing off her red and white striped uniform.

“I think this is the first time I’ve seen you in a dress or a skirt.” The pink-haired girl noted. “I’m not counting the skorts you wore when we went bowling.”

“You didn’t want me to wear sweatpants to it.”

“Bitch…”

Jan had no proofs or doubts Rosé would have burned the skorts if she had the chance. She knew it was a questionable fashion choice but hey, they surely were comfy.

She also hoped she never told Nicky or Gigi about them.

“Everyone is here already… well, except for Jackie, she’s kind of running late.” Jan guided them toward the booths.

The other girls immediately cheered when the other two girls joined as if they hadn’t had lunch all together the day before.

“I’ll check on you in a minute.” She said before running to the table that was calling for her.

Rosé’s words echoed on the back of her head. She didn’t have anything against skirts or dresses only she had never consider buying one for herself. Other girls looked ethereal with them but Jan still had war flashbacks from that time she attempted to buy a dress for her graduation with her mom… it hadn’t gone well.

Plus, sports clothes always fit her and were practical.

Denali had offered both options –the candy cane striped dress and an alternative set of pants and a white shirt with an apron- but she had opted for the dress for some reason. She wanted to fit into that environment and copying the black-haired girl seemed the first step to it. Trying it on had been a bit weird; she almost didn’t recognize herself in the mirror but the more she looked at herself the more she liked it.

At that moment, Jackie arrived.

She was apologizing even before completely trespassing the door when she lifted her gaze and met Jan’s eyes.

“…and I’m sorry for…” She began losing her ability to speak as she got in a trance.

Seeing Jan always gave Jackie butterflies on her stomach –the good type of butterflies- and she wasn’t going to admit it to her friends not even in a million years because she wasn’t the kind of girl who believed in something as cheesy as butterflies but most importantly, she had promised herself she wasn’t going to fall for that again.

But there she was, with that smile that made all the other smiles in the world irrelevant.

Seeing Jan in a dress made her brain malfunction –not because of the dress itself but because the girl was glowing while wearing it.

Jackie wetted her lips, she had forgotten what she was going to say.

“So… what do you think?” She stretched the dress with her hands. “You can be fully honest.”

No, she couldn’t.

“You look… very happy.” The brunette made a great effort to reply. “You look nice.” This time the words came out a bit more articulated.

Jan smiled, satisfied with that answer. “C’mon, the girls are over here…” She started walking and Jackie followed her. “Don’t you love this place? It looks like it’s been ripped out of the fifties or something.”

For the first time, Jackie actually paid attention to the diner.

“Oh, that’s right… the aesthetic…”

“Hey girls, Jackie’s here!” She announced.

“Miss Cox!” Heidi yelled.

Suddenly the table turned in her direction; they created a fuss, full sentences or loose words were hardly able to comprehend but Jackie was used to it, she spoke the loud language better than anyone. She looked at Jan before sitting with the rest of the group and cracked a secret smile just for her then she rolled her eyes and got entangled in one epic story about the time a cat crashed in the dorms.

Jan cleared her throat and asked very nicely if she could bring them something to drink. She listed soft drinks, mostly cherry coke, regular coke, diet coke, Sprite, and an ice cream soda for Crystal. She walked behind the counter and pressed some buttons to make sure she got it all correct.

It took her a moment to understand the computer’s system for the tables as in the abstract but now that she had some practice with it, she was getting faster at it. She charged table eight and then added a new order of fries for table twelve and finally opened the bill for her friends.

Denali approached her at some point while she was juggling with a couple of trays.

“Hey, how’s it going?” The black-haired girl asked. “Are you okay handling that big group by yourself?” She typed some numbers and printed the receipt without blinking.

“Ah, yeah… Don’t worry, they are all my friends.” It was the first time she had said it aloud and it filled her with pride.

Denali looked at the table; it was a colorful ensemble of people that were having a blast. They were loud and they burst into laughter every couple of minutes. Jan spotted Widow covering her face with second-hand embarrassment while she was laughing underneath, Heidi cackling next to her, Nicky and Jaida holding hands but still participating in the debate, Rosé holding her stomach, Lagoona trying to add something but cracking up as soon as she started a sentence, Gigi with a blank stare trying to discover what she had said that was so funny, Crystal in an attempt to explain it to her –laughing still- and Jackie shaking her head, knowing the situation was irredeemable.

Those were her friends and it filled Jan’s chest with warmness to see them there on her first day of work.

“They came here to support you?”

Jan nodded.

“Aw, that’s so cute!” Denali beamed. “Let me know if I can help you with their order though.”

“I probably will… they already found out there are mozzarella sticks in the menu and when they say «bring mozzarella sticks» they mean all the mozzarella sticks.”

Denali chuckled. “Alright.”

Jan returned to the tables with the drinks and placed them carefully remembering who ordered what. Her friends ordered a ton of food and she had to write it down and register the order on the computer.

They were talking about Rosé and Lagoona’s latest news, they had started preparing the winter musical for a class but one of the girls that were taking part had to step out of the play.

“She said she didn’t want to brag but honestly, Sydney, who the fuck cares if you’re doing Hamilton now?” The blue-haired girl sighed. “Anyway, so we need to recruit someone else this month to play that part.”

“What’s the play about?” Widow asked.

“We’re honoring the one and only Lindsay Lohan and decided to adapt the fictional musical Eliza Rocks from Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen.” Rosé explained.

“So… Pygmalion?” Gigi frowned.

“No, no… well, yeah… It is Pygmalion but with a twist… a remake if you like.”

“So the Glee version of Pygmalion?” Heidi tried to connect the dots.

“There’s nothing new under the sun anyway.” Rosé gave up.

“We still have to, write the music and the script… but that’s the big project of the drama department.”

“We could help you with the costume design,” Nicky suggested. “That could be interesting.”

“I don’t know if-” Gigi whispered.

“I love all the theatrical stuff, can I help you?” Crystal volunteered.

“Alright, yeah… we’re helping with the costumes.” The other blonde corrected herself.

Jan shook her head and left them to discuss other details.

She was tapping the screen of the computer when Jackie sat on one of the stools of the bar.

“Look how the tables have turn… Literally.”

Jan giggled. “Right? The food will be ready in a second… I’m just finishing here.”

The brunette watched her work. “You know, that role on the play Rosé and Lagoona are putting together… you could do it.”

Jan stopped what she was doing and stared at Jackie. “What? Me?” She shook her head. “No, no… I just sing in the shower and when I’m alone… that’s it. I’m not a singer and I’m not an actress.”

“You could be one. Nobody was born knowing but you can learn. I’m sure they’d love to have you on their production.”

“Jackie, I don’t know… It’s really not my thing. Besides, they already have a lot of work to do, I don’t want to delay them even more.”

“It sounds to me that you would be doing them a favor. Just… think about it. This is the perfect time to try new things… maybe.”

“I won’t promise anything.”

“Alright.” Jackie stood up. “By the way, you should bring extra ketchup… talking from experience.”

“Okay, I’ll be there in a heartbeat.”

Jan delivered the food with Denali’s help as she had suggested and then let them enjoy it until it was her time to call it a day, hang her apron and change her dress.

“Great job today. You're a good new addition to our staff.” Denali congratulated her on the back of the restaurant.

“Thank you! I’m glad that you hired me.”

“Don’t even mention it. Now go have fun with your friends.” She winked at her and left Jan to collect her things.

She then saw with her friends and let a big sigh out of her chest.

“The first day is over…”

Her friends congratulated her as well and took turns to compliment her as if it was a Yelp review.

“Let’s make a toast for Jan’s new job!” Jaida raised her glass in the air.

“For Jan!” The table cheered in unison.

“Five out of five stars, excellent service.” Heidi qualified.

“Speaking of…” Rosé whispered just for Jan to listen. “Who is that girl that helped you earlier?”

“Denali? She’s basically my supervisor at this point and she hired me.”

“She’s cute… like… very cute.”

Jan had never seen Rosé blushing until that moment –not even when Heidi had dropped some of her –arguably- best pickup lines during one lunch.

“Oh, so you think she’s cute?”

“Do you know if she’s single?”

“I’ve worked here for a day or so…”

“More than enough time.”

“I can ask her later but she’s like my boss now, you have to promise me you’ll be chill.”

“Baby, have you seen the people around us? I’ll be the chilliest of them all.”

That wasn’t the most reassuring thing to say.

The second week, Jan was more used to her work but her teachers started setting deadlines, and with her baseball practices on top of everything else, she ended up being exhausted by the time her head touched the pillow.

After a long day, the only thing she wanted was to take a long hot shower and put on some pajamas. She walked into the hallway, yawning and carrying her little bathroom basket with shampoo, soap, and a towel.

She had followed Nicky’s advice and always wore flip-flops to the shower. The bathroom was covered in steam most of the time so the girls had to clean the mirrors to brush and dry their hair hoping to see their reflection.

Jan politely greeted two girls from the dorm and got in the shower before closing the curtain. She heard the door as the two girls left and with that, she was left alone. She turned on the shower and let the water cover her entirely to wash off all the stress of the day.

While shampooing, she unconsciously started humming some random song she had heard on the radio earlier in the diner. She closed her eyes and got under the shower when someone moved the curtain.

“I knew it!” Rosé yelled. She had her pink embroidered bathrobe on and her hair was dripping wet.

Jan screamed. “Rosé!” She covered her body with the plastic curtain. “Holy sh… You nearly gave me a heart attack… I thought we had agreed on no Pitch Perfect reenacts.” Her heart was beating faster than ever.

“I didn’t know it was the whole movie, I thought it was just the songs… you know, I saw the sign and it opened up my eyes-” She hummed.

“Rosé…” The shower’s water continued running. “Get out.”

“Okay fine.” The girl closed the curtain. “But I heard you before, you hum when you’re happy.”

“Yes? Like a normal person?” She said on the other side.

“No, no… you’re good. Why didn’t you tell me you were good?”

“Because I’m not a singer… I don’t sing like you or Lagoona.”

“But you could! This is great… I knew you were good.” She repeated.

“Wait a minute, were you waiting for me to come shower?”

“No bitch, I was exfoliating… I wasn’t stalking you.”

“Okay… sure… this definitely crosses some boundaries but okay…”

“Sorry about the curtain thing but hey, here’s a fun idea… you should drop by the auditorium tomorrow. We’re holding auditions this week and I’m just saying… you could be what we need.”

Jan finished showering and stepped out wrapped in her towel.

“Look… I’m flattered that you even consider me good but I’m not… musical theatre material, trust me.”

Rosé stared with supplicant eyes. “I know you can do it… but alright.” She raised her hands in the air in surrender.

She sighed. “Listen, Rosé, I’d love to help you but my plate is full right now… I wouldn’t be able to do it all.”

“Don’t worry… I won’t insist and I won’t bring the subject anymore just… please, consider it overnight. You don’t have to say no right away.”

“Fine… can I brush my hair in peace or is Lagoona going to jump out the sink and start a number about why I should sing?”

“We don’t have that budget but I’m sure she can improvise a song if that’s what it takes.”

“See you in the room and remember that you can’t bring this up again.”

“For someone who’s cheerful all the time you surely are picking traits from Miss Jackie Cox, aren’t you…?”

Jan blushed. “No, I’m not…”

The following day, Jan found herself roaming outside the auditorium for no particular reason.

Well, that was what she kept telling herself.

Because she wasn’t there for the auditions.

No.

Not at all.

She took a deep breath before walking in.

Luckily, most of the auditorium was empty except for the stage where most performers were still doing warm-up exercises and no one noticed the presence of the girl when she entered. Instead of standing still in the middle of the rows, she sat at the back and hid behind another seat hoping no one would spot her from there.

That was a mistake, she wasn’t supposed to be there.

She had told Rosé she would think about it but she chickened out the second she stepped in.

The rehearsal began and some of the members of the club started reading fragments of the play. It was really funny, Jan found herself holding back her laughter at some dialogues and performances. Lagoona played the piano and Rosé sang along with her and some other students joined for the chorus of the song.

It was mesmerizing to watch it from afar and maybe that was all she had to do. She could be supportive this way, without getting too involved.

“Now, what on Earth are you doing here?” The voice made her startled until she noticed it was Jackie who was now hiding next to her.

“Shhhh… keep it quiet. They don’t know I’m here… wait, why are you here?”

Jackie was so close, Jan could smell the green apple notes of her perfume.

“After my shift ended, I went to the administration office to talk with the dean and when I left I saw you walking in.” She explained.

“Ah… well, I’m leaving already so…”

“Please, don’t mind me.” The brunette assured. “So, what really brings you here?”

“Rosé is trying to get all Pitch Perfect and recruit me for this. She heard me sing in the showers.”

“Understandable. I’d call it the troyboltonification of Jan.”

“I’m not… I won’t get troyboltonificated. I’m here just to… take a look… That’s it.”

“Aha, sure.” She didn’t sound convinced. “What is holding you back from this? Obviously, you want it.”

Jan lowered her gaze. “Back in high school… I secretly wanted to participate in the drama club but the rehearsals were at the same time as my baseball practices and well… I always picked baseball over it because that’s what I’m good at it… plus it was an excuse to hang out with Nathan after the practice.”

“I see…” Jackie mumbled.

“Besides, I didn’t think I have what it takes… yes I can hit a couple of notes but that…” She pointed at the stage. “What they do there is art.”

“Listen… you’re not in high school anymore. It might be difficult to juggle the extracurricular activities with your studies and work but… if you want this, you should give it a try.” Jackie said candidly, her eyes reflected the sincerity of her words. “If it’s not for you, at least you can say you tried it.”

“Do you really think I could do it? I mean, being in front of a stage like them?”

“I’m certain about it. Some people might be born with it but I’m sure they had to practice a lot anyway and they probably failed more than once before they could get better. It is easier to say it than doing it but you’re a spitfire, if you put your mind to it you can do anything.”

She smiled even though they were in the darkest place of the auditorium.

“Thank you, Jackie. I don’t know what I did to deserve a friend like you, seriously.”

“Whenever you need it.” She smiled back.

Then, Jan stepped out and walked down toward where the stage was.

“Hi!” She approached shyly the people there, Lagoona stopped playing and Rosé was more than happy to see her. “I didn’t mean to interrupt you guys but I was told you have a vacancy for a role…”

The pink-haired girl jumped out of the stage. “Fellas, this is Jan… she’s my roommate and she has a great voice. I think we could use her talent here.”

They welcomed her warmly, introducing the team.

Jan turned around before going on stage and Jackie gave her a thumbs up.

“Break a leg.” She murmured even when the younger couldn’t hear her from there.

#rpdr fanfiction #jan sport #jackie cox #jankie #college au #lesbian au #slow burn #pretty in pearls #plastiquedoll #concrit welcome

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breaniebree · 5 years ago

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Can you share your journey as a writer? How the idea of writing fanfics came into your mind? Do you have other own fiction too? Also how do start a particular fanfic? As in do you make notes, timeline or character sketches and stuff or do you just go ahead and write and then make notes on facts?

What an interesting question -- thank you for asking! This is literally going to be a novel response (letting you know in advance LOL)

My journey as a writer... I guess I always wrote things down, started as a child when I wrote in a diary and then as I got older I wrote a little poetry, none of it very good (though I wrote a poem when I was twelve to describe the loss I felt when my Nana, my great-grandmother died, and my aunt read it aloud at her funeral). I wrote a few short stories, just little things, prompts from teachers in school and such and then one day I decided I wanted to write my own story. But funnily enough, it actually came about through fan fiction.

I used to love this book series back when I was ten called Trash by Cherie Bennett, and I was completely in love with the characters Chelsey and Nick, and when Jazz claimed that she was pregnant and Nick was the father and it did ended on a cliffhanger and I didn’t have the next book, I remember writing my own version of what happened next -- God, looking back, it was probably terrible, I definitely don’t have it anymore. Pretty sure the book series isn’t that great looking back at it now, but when I was ten, it was great! LOL. I also wrote a side story for Demetrius and Karma, so even then I guess I branched off into subplots. When I was fourteen, I started my own original series, which I am still currently working on and probably will be for the rest of my life if I’m honest -- it’s changed over the years, but the characters and my ultimate goal have stayed the same.

How did writing fanfiction come into mind?

Well, with Harry Potter, it was because of my friend Chris. We used to talk on the phone every single night after school for hours on end and after HBP came out and Harry and Ginny were FINALLY together only for him break up with her, I was so livid that I had to wait to find out what happened! I remember Chris and I debated what would happen in the last book for ages and one day I must have ranted too much because he told me to go write my own story if I didn’t want to wait, so I did.

I was seventeen and it was Harry Potter and the Prophecy Fulfilled: Which looking back at it now, I think it’s not exactly the greatest story lol and you can definitely see where I’ve improved since then. After finishing HPPH, I ended up still having different ideas, all Hinny, and went on to write a few one-shots: Almost Too Late and Beautiful Mess. Then I started writing A Different Beginning, which turned into my Beginning series: A Different Beginning, A New Beginning, Why Don’t We Just Dance?, Life Is Fickle Like That, Graduation Party, and The Reunion. Those of you who have been reading my fanfiction since the beginning know that I originally posted the above stories on SIYE between 2005 and 2007 and had then completed (except for the second half of Life is Fickle onwards before Deathly Hallows was published). I didn’t start posting on fanfiction.net until 2008 and only recently on Ao3. Somewhere in between writing the Beginning Series, I also wrote a few other Hinny one-shots including The Greatest Gift, She Never Lets It Get To Her Heart, I Loved Her First (actually Arthur POV, which I later incorporated into the Beginning Series), The River (which is a standalone but also can be read as part of the Beginning Series), When the Sand Runs Out, and then the mini-series Padfoot’s Advice (Late Night Talks with Padfoot 1 & 2, Padfoot’s Advice, and Secrets from the Past). Then I wrote the short Hinny/Romione story: The Trouble With Secrets and was inspired to write a Jily series, which I did with Crazy Little Thing Called Love, which could technically be a prequel to the Beginning Series as I kept some of the story similar. I also wrote a Jily one-shot called Flowers and another Hinny one-shot called I Don’t Like Your Girlfriend.

I didn’t plan on writing any more fanfiction as university became busy, but then in 2017 I started writing these little Missing Moments for Harry and Ginny both before HBP and then during, and then after. I just sort of compiled them on my computer for a while, wondering if it would turn into a story or not and then the idea came to me one day for A Second Chance after seeing some fan art of a five-year-old-Harry in sunshades and a leather jacket while riding a child’s motorbike next to Sirius in the same outfit and the next thing I knew, this story just pored out of me in February of 2018, I had the first twelve chapters written by March and another five by April. I started posting the Missing Moments compilation, added a few more things including the Remus and Petunia scene from ASC and kept writing A Second Chance and in May, decided it was time to share it and uploaded the first twelve chapters.

By the time I realized it was going to be a long one, I knew which characters I would sacrifice and how it would end, but how I was going to get there I still have no idea. I’m not a writer who methodically plots. I have a few general bullet points at the end of my current WIP chapter and that’s really it. I add to it occasionally as I go, but mostly, I just write as I go along. I can’t tell you how many chapters it will be or how long it will take me to get to the next section because frankly, it’s constantly changes. I do not write in chronological order, which means I am often writing anywhere between 2-6 chapters at the same time depending on what scene has drawn my attention. I might write something today that fits in the chapter I am currently working on and then by the time I finish writing other stuff, I realize that it doesn’t really fit there and stick it ahead into the next chapter or ten chapters from now. I write where my heart takes me and where my creativity flows.

I rarely ever work on more than one story at the same time, though I did write the short Newtina one-shot for my friend Heather as a Christmas present in 2018. She requested it and I couldn’t write it, I found it so hard as I like them but it’s not characters I loved enough to write so I did it with a Luna spin-in, which I found helped. I never take writing requests so this was very different for me, but I think it turned out cute: Say Love, ‘Cause We Got All the Time in the World. I only recently uploaded it a month or so ago because I found it on my computer LOL.

Do you make notes, timeline or character sketches and stuff or do you just go ahead and write and then make notes on facts?

Once I am into the story, my notes are EXTREMELY detailed. I do have a time line and separate documents for the following:

Character lists and family trees

General notes on: Political stuff, bills I’ve written, the sacred 28 document I wrote, tattoos mentioned, important dates, moon cycle dates of Remus’ life, classes I’ve invented (what they are about, who teaches them etc), textbook list per school year, notes on each Animagus form and information about their animals, actual time tables I wrote up Monday to Friday for Harry’s third/fourth, and fifth year, details of Zee and Tonks’ engagement rings, history and outline of Dante’s circles of hell with notes on how to incorporate into story, notes on pregnancy, character’s wands, geographic locations of characters, and any other little notes I think are important but don’t belong in the bullet points at the end of my current WIP chapter

History and ancestry of each family (from Harry Potter Lexicon, Pottermore, Harry Potter wiki, and my own personal creations). This also includes manor information for Potter, Black, Longbottom, Nott, and Malfoy.

Hogwarts lay-out including stuff I’ve added or made up

Ministry of Magic departments and people (known and created)

List of spells (including ones I’ve made up and which chapter and which character introduced it to who)

List and pictures of Sirius’ motorbikes with information on each one

List of Pensieve memories and marauder moments (crossed out which ones I’ve shared already, some are written and waiting to be used and others just a general idea)

Terms and phrases from different languages I’ve used in the past

My playlist of songs I have mentioned in the story

An entire document dedicated to Operation FUVP including a Voldemort timeline which I have now shared in the story itself (also includes when and where each character found the Horcruxes)

A list of some of the recipes I mentioned, and

I have a 72 page document that is literally just detailed chapter summaries to help me remember what the hell I’ve written LOL (also highlights introductions to new characters in a different font colour to help me find out when people were introduced).

Hope this answers your question -- thank you again for asking!

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klcthebookworm · 6 years ago

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Mission on Mimban: My Outline Process

Previous Installments

Introduction, One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve

What Changes in My Fic

Here's the place where I put all my ideas in one place and see what scenes need to happen when to make a story. Normally, I would do this in private but since you have seen all my notes in reviewing Splinter of the Mind's Eye, I figured you guys deserved to see the next step. So first, I'm grabbing my notes from the previous twelve posts.

Cast change: Luke, Mara, and Artoo. Threepio is with Leia who doesn't get stranded on this swamp planet. Mara does need an astromech for her X-Wing so I have to commit to a new character or commit to killing off a droid. Regardless, this adventure will give Mara all kinds of snark when she and Luke end up on Dagobah.

The timeline: I need to move this adventure much closer to the Battle of Yavin to preserve the padawans' inexperience with the Force. Plus the Rebel Alliance suspicions on if Mara has fully defected.

The reason for being there: One of Obi-Wan's complaints in Extrication will be Alliance duties yanking his padawans out of their Jedi training. This could be one of those duties, surveying unexplored and non-colonized worlds for Alliance purposes, and it's Luke and Mara's turn. The beacon is unexpected given their information on Mimban so they approach to investigate, strange energy in the atmosphere fried their ships, and they crash on planet.

I also suspect everything in this chapter can be condensed.

Remember to come back to this book to steal Threepio and Artoo insults. I had a time creating them for Star Wars: My Home Is You, so I need more examples.

In an effort to get on with this project, I'm going with they crashed a roughly two-day hike away to the mining outpost and that was far enough away for the Imperials to not notice crashing ships.

Mimbanites' abuse mini-scene is an opportunity to display some growth from Mara. Since she was raised on Coruscant in the Imperial Palace, the only contact she has had with aliens are the ones who have been subjugated as slaves or the ones trying to survive in the ghettoes created on Coruscant. Humans abuse aliens when they can is all she has seen. The equality in the Rebel Alliance ranks is a cultural shock she is soldiering through in her endearing Mara way (which probably isn't helping her reputation any), but Luke's reaction to the abuse puts her perspective in a different light. Actually that may be the best way to sum up their relationship. It gives Luke's empathy something to play off without making Mara callous, like the scene currently does with Leia.

Luke and Mara's cover story won't involve slavery.

Threatening miners will be threatening without being titillated by a mud-covered Mara.

The miner who loses an eye is unidentified, but I'm willing to say it was the double-bladed stilettos everywhere miner.

Grammel's interrogation technique is to beat up the weaker of the pair. Just how well would this work against Mara Jade? I mean, she'll take a beating to sell her cover story or get her where she needs to go, but really does she have to take it from Grammel? Or can she lash back?

Luke's lightsaber does draw Grammel's notice, which gives Mara the observation that he needs to find a better hiding place for it, and leads to Artoo's flare launcher getting modified.

Luke's lightsaber is what gets them booted up the chain of command here. I don't know if it needs to be in what I write. It depends on whether I write from Grammel's POV or not and I haven't decided.

Star Wars: The Essential Guide to Alien Species by Ann Margaret Lewis had a better reason for Luke knowing Yuzz: a Yuzzem lived in Anchorhead and Luke made friends with him. This is the backstory reason I'm going with rather than "I studied a lot of worlds back on Tatooine" reason Foster came up with.

Hin and Kee's backstory won't change much except I'm going with option three: alien trafficking. These two Yuzzem kids were approached and promised a well paying job, a chance to send credits back home which probably isn't doing so great under Imperial rule. Then they get to Mimban and they are paid, but everything is being docked from their paychecks. The flight to Mimban, their return flight home whenever they fulfill their contract, food, lodging, any equipment they break because it's designed for humans not Yuzzem until there is nothing left to save. They are free to leave once their contract is fulfilled or they pay to get out of it. Hah, hah, you can't pay. There you go, exploitation without slavery.

I have to decide on Puddra's rank, but I'm making him the ranking officer over the prisoners like a warden.

Overall, the prison break is decent, if a bit talky in spots. My problem is there would be less for Halla to do because Luke and Mara both are in training and levitating the tray should occur to them without outside prompting. Also, I'm not sure this qualifies as the midpoint but I'm putting it there unless a later scene makes a more compelling case.

This chapter is continuation of the escape and a reaction to it, so I don't see much of it changing. I'm a fan of Hin and Kee dismembering stormtroopers and Halla being a bad-ass.

But we know lightsabers don't need recharging, so I don't have to bother with that.

Frangi (@teagrl) introduced me to a new term last night: Grudgewriting. The way I understand it is you at least found the premise of the story to have some worth but the execution of that premise pissed you off enough to respond via fic. I was categorizing this under the Fix Fic trope but recognize that doesn't cover the sheer anger the canon work caused by its existence.

I don't know if I need hard numbers on the Imperial forces. I do have the feeling that this is information Mara would seek to gather for Rebellion Intelligence, but I have no idea what to put in Google to start the search for realistic numbers. "How many soldiers do you need to occupy a civilian population?"

I'll probably keep in the wandrella chase, it's not too bad for a complication. But Hin or Kee is picking up Threepio as they flee the thing. Do I want to keep its pathetic death? It's kind of sad that our protagonists don't do anything to defeat it. But it does set them onto a new path.

Showing better trauma victim support: Mara's trauma is so different from Leia and with the bond between her and Luke, I don't see this conversation even having the massive misstep of Luke making it all about him. What will they talk about during this hike?

Lumas will be changed to glow rods. And do a better job with explaining where the equipment comes from.

I want a line from Mara about how bad they are at keeping watch when they wake up.

The underground lake is a good opportunity to touch on what swimming lessons the Alliance has given Luke.

The lightsaber effects the lake monster. Unless it doesn't for the same reason lightsabers don't seem to boil water. Research this.

My revision of the after lake monster fight: Luke's clingy because oh-crap-I-could've-drowned! reaction has kicked in and Mara has pulled him back onboard. Mara discovers she's not opposed to clingy or more accurately hugging with Luke.

Mara's getting the Canu's judgment fight. She's better at hand-to-hand combat and didn't almost drown fighting a lake monster several hours ago. Let's add in that she's having trouble with levitation. She tried it with her droid that sank into the quickclay and couldn't, so grappling with the rock unlocks it for her.

Concentrates versus ration bars: I think I'm bringing back ration bars. There's just something too Jetsons Space Age about one pill keeping you fed for several hours, even though I appreciate the work Foster put into creating them.

The art comparison is a perfect one for Mara to make. Raised in the Imperial Court in the heart of Coruscant, trained in dance as her cover but it and music for dancing were probably the one fun thing she was allowed once her training began in earnest, she has the technical expertise and the Force Sensitivity to figure out what is different between the Coways' dance and the Imperial ballet corps. She wants to dance with the Coway to combine their moves with the ones she was taught. Will she get the chance? Will she take the chance?

Vader or not to Vader: To be honest, I had thought about leaving Vader out of my version of this story despite his pose on the cover art. [IMAGE HERE] Grammel is the big bad at the beginning, so I was considering ways he could continue being the big bad all the way through. Or if he absolutely couldn't, make concrete the more Emperor's Hands with a new character taking Vader's spot to get rid of Luke Skywalker once and for all. But since Foster neglected to give Vader his proper due, I'm back to wanting him. And it will do Anakin some good to be rejected by Luke three times in the series. Trust me.

If anybody knows how to build a booby trap with Imperial weapons, it's Mara. Luke wanders off to be dejected he can't stop the massacre and she does something useful like get them fully charged weapons and tell the Coway what to do with the rest.

Halla muscles her way into the driver seat since she's the one who knows Mimban the best, with the same driving results.

Needless to say, Vader's conversational gambits are changing. He's not ready to reveal who he is to Luke yet (I'm saving that fun for Bespin of course) and Mara's there and of course, she's there to kill Luke again.

The Kaiburr crystal gives Padmé's ghost enough energy to show up to Luke, Mara, and Vader. Luke pulls down part of the temple to keep Vader from killing Mara and has a talk with Padmé, asking if she's an angel. Hin and Kee are not both going to die. But Vader's shuttle will end up at the temple, piloted by one of his Noghri honor guards, and our good guys are going to steal it to get off Mimban. So there will be a new conclusion scene when Leia and Obi-Wan come to pick them up.

My second step is to fill out the expected scenes in bold. This outline started with a worksheet from Larry Brooks (storyfix.com) and I have been adding details from K.M. Weiland's techniques (Helping Writers Become Authors). These are the scenes that must be there for the plot to make sense. I don't worry about the blank numbers in between. As I work on the third step, I will fill in the scenes between the expected scenes evenly so the math works out (at least closer than Foster's finished product did).

The third step is to answer the Questions to Ask to Figure Out the Beats that is under the blank outline. Usually, I don't fill this out while I'm outlining but the way the published novel has beaten me up, I'd rather take the time now to make sure what I picked works before I write the narrative. Also since I want to shorten my version, my plan is to drop some scenes.

My fourth step is to even out the sections and delete all the blank numbers in my outline. Now I'm checking how many scenes are between my plot points. Five scenes before 1st Plot Point, four scenes between 1st Plot Point and the Midpoint, six scenes between the Midpoint and the 3rd Plot Point, and eight scenes after the 3rd Plot Point. OOPS! I left out a scene between the 1st Plot Point and the Midpoint: Grammel and the prisoners conversation through the cell bars. So now I have Five scenes before 1st Plot Point, five scenes between 1st Plot Point and the Midpoint, six scenes between the Midpoint and the 3rd Plot Point, and eight scenes after the 3rd Plot Point. And it's only five scenes between the 3rd Plot Point and the Climactic Moment, so I don't feel the second half is uneven.

So now if you want here's the Mission on Mimban Beat Sheet:

Part 1 – Set up:

Hook = Discovering the broadcasting beacon and an energy discharge in the atmosphere causes both Luke and Mara’s X-Wings to crash.

Luke and Artoo find Mara. Her astromech sunk in the quickclay and she couldn’t save it by levitating it with the Force since her levitation isn’t working. She treats the cut on Luke’s head.

Hiking and then camping. Mara has snark about easy assignment and fun exploring more planets Luke promised her. Luke insists that’s what Wedge told him. Talk around the campfire leads to romantic interest (Mara’s in Luke’s head she knows how much he loved Biggs.) Luke is bisexual, Wedge is heterosexual, Mara is scary. Luke: “You give off a vibe that you’ll tear out anyone’s throat for saying hello.” Mara: “I would not. You and Master Obi-Wan would not approve.” Mara is uncomfortable with sharing snuggles, thinking it is more intimate than they are. Luke explains he and Biggs did the same to stay warm on Tatooine.

Inciting Event at 1/8 or 12% of word count = Luke and Mara discover the Imperial mining town and that the Empire is secretly and illegally mining on Mimban.

They infiltrate the tavern for some real food, see how the Mimbanites are treated, and draw Imperial curiosity. Luke’s cover story: Mara is his Holo Domestic Partner and Mara adds a personal sob story. The Imperial leaves them alone.

1st Plot Point at 2/8 or 25% of word count = Luke and Mara make a deal with Halla to help her find the Kaiburr crystal in exchange for Halla’s help in getting them off planet.

Part 2 – Response:

A group of drunk miners are intent on assaulting Mara, Luke and Mara are intent on preventing that, and a fight breaks out. Halla finds Artoo as she sneaks away and Imperial stormtroopers round up everyone for Grammel to punish.

Pinch Point at 3/8 of word count = Luke and Mara meet Grammel and are imprisoned while their second cover story is investigated.

Luke and Mara are thrown into a cell with a pair of Yuzzem, Hin and Kee. Mara is alarmed, but Luke knows how to say hello in Yuzz and makes friends.

Grammel contacts Governor Essada over the lightsaber. Essada is sending it to the Imperial specialist’s attention and Grammel needs to keep the pair in custody until a decision is made about them. Grammel then hurries down to the prison level to check on things.

Grammel charges into the cell block and is relieved that the Yuzzem have not killed Luke and Mara. Then he threatens them trying to learn what’s so special about them.

Mid-Point Shift at 4/8 or 50% of word count = Prison escape. A good time to show how weak Mara’s levitation skill is with the tray. They underestimated the blood thirst of the Yuzzem.

Part 3 – Attack:

Luke sees his lightsaber on Grammel’s belt before sending the charges down that hallway and grabs it back with the Force. They blow their way out of the Imperial headquarters and steal the crawler. Information exchange while they keep moving at a slower pace.

Pinch Point at 5/8 of word count = Vader arrives on Mimban and meets Grammel. Vader is not impressed, but is oddly proud of the Rebel who orchestrated the prison break.

Cover the wandrella chase and underground hike with exposition and start the scene with the underground lake travel. Luke fights the lake monster.

They land and are attacked by the Coway. They win and chase after the last one, only to find their captured party in the Coway village.

Mara fights to the Coway champion for Canu’s judgment. She wins by finally harnessing levitation to hit the Coway in the head with a rock.

All is Lost Lull = Coway feast ends with the realization Vader and stormtroopers are coming

Part 4 – Resolution:

3rd Plot Point at 6/8 or 75% of word count = Battle between the Coway and the Imperials

Aftermath of the battle, liberating transportation from the Imperials, and racing to the temple.

Vader kills Grammel.

They arrive at the Temple of Pomojema, apparently first, and have to fight off a lizard monster. Luke defeats the monster, but his arm is broken by rock pulled by the lizard monster. Then he gets trapped by the falling ceiling.

Vader’s entrance, Vader fights Mara. Halla and Hin go for the crystal. Kee tries to help Mara with Vader and Mara is able to deflect Vader’s killing blow so Kee loses his arm instead. Vader gives her the gash down the leg.

Halla and Hin come back to Luke and Kee, and Hin pulls the stone off Luke. Vader offers to spare Mara’s life if Luke surrenders to him. Halla gives Luke the Kaiburr crystal.

Climactic Moment at 7/8 or 98% of word count = Luke powered by the Kaiburr crystal pulls part of the temple down on Vader and talks to Padmé.

Vader’s Noghri Honor Guard brings Vader’s shuttle to the temple, so they steal it. They clean up and treat the wounds as they flee in hyperspace. Halla notes that the Kaiburr crystal is no longer magical.

Obi-Wan’s POV: The Falcon lands in the Nanth’ri system to pick up Luke and Mara with Obi-Wan and Leia both on board. They are battered and burned and have the Kaiburr crystal and two Yuzzem with them, one down an arm. Obi-Wan tells them they’re learning healing techniques next as they get them on board. They had exchanged a part of value off of Vader’s shuttle with Halla for the Kaiburr crystal, even though it seems de-powered now. Obi-Wan doesn’t think the stone is suitable for lightsabers and Mara protests cutting it into smaller pieces. Luke agrees with Mara. “It’s not ours. Not really. We’re just keeping it safe until the Empire is gone and we can return it to Mimban.”

Questions to Ask to Figure Out the Beats

What is the conceptual hook/appeal of your story? Rewrite Splinter of the Mind’s Eye to improve it and fit it into the Rescue the Farmboy series

What is the theme(s) of your story? Not completely sure yet, but something to do with the human bigotry against the various alien species. I want to take that aspect of the original book and beat it to death with a hammer.

How does your story open? Luke and Mara arrive at Mimban and discover a beacon broadcasting. They head down to land and the energy discharge causes them to crash.

Is there an immediate hook? Yes, will they survive crashing is a question to keep readers reading.

And then…

What is the hero doing in their life before the first plot point? The assignment was to explore Mimban for potential Rebel Alliance use. Crashing their ships has changed it to finding the beacon and surviving until they can find a way off the planet.

What stakes are established prior to the first plot point? The Empire has established a secret mining facility on Mimban. This makes survival easier (human supplies) and harder (Luke and Mara are both wanted by the Empire).

What is the Inciting Event in your story? Luke and Mara finding the Imperial mining town and realize what is going on here.

What is your character’s backstory? Luke was wanted by the Empire, surrendered to Darth Vader, and was kept a prisoner on the Death Star until he was rescued by his friends. He then blew up the Death Star and saved Mara Jade’s life by finding her after she crashed into Yavin 4. Mara Jade failed to kill Luke Skywalker and would have died for it if not for Luke’s intervention. Her loyalty has transferred to him along with sharing a Force Bond with him. Artoo has finally found Anakin Skywalker’s son that Obi-Wan Kenobi disappeared with eighteen years ago and he is not letting the organic out of his sight again. Even better, Luke is a pilot too. He gets to fly again. This story is set two months after Liberation.

What inner demons show up here that will come to bear on the hero later in the story? What is the lie the character believes? Lie Mara believes: Human are superior. Lie Luke believes: He won’t love anyone else like he loved Biggs.

What is foreshadowed prior to the first plot point? Dealing with the misconceptions Mara has about physical contact and what was between Luke and Biggs come up while they make camp after crashing. Mara sees nothing wrong with how the Mimbanites are treated.

What is the first plot point in your story? Luke and Mara make a deal with Halla to help her get the Kaiburr crystal in exchange for her helping get them off Mimban.

Is it located properly within the story sequence? Yes.

How does it change the hero’s agenda going forward? It seems like a minor diversion to earn them good will of a local who can help them escape Mimban without Imperial reprisal. And that the Kaiburr crystal seems to affect the Force is a good reason to keep it out of Imperial hands.

What is the nature of the hero’s new need/quest? Treasure hunt!

What is at stake relative to meeting that need? Luke and Mara being identified by the Imperials and probably executed.

What opposes the hero in meeting that need? The Imperial forces on Mimban led by Captain-Supervisor Grammel.

What does the antagonistic force have at stake? Losing the secrecy over the mining operation on Mimban (if the local system government finds out, it could change the amount of Imperial resources spent to extract the ore). Losing control over the criminals who have been pressed into mining service.

Why will the reader empathize with the hero at this point? Grammel is horrible, physically violent and threatens torture to get what he wants. And he sees through Luke and Mara’s cover stories.

How does the hero respond to the antagonistic force? Luke lies and lies some more, while trying to protect Mara from Grammel and protect Grammel from Mara. Then he makes allies with the Yuzzem.

What is the mid-point contextual shift/twist in your story? The prison break is when Luke and Mara take charge of their fates. They have no plans to be here when Grammel finds out they are not criminals from Circarpous, so time to use what Jedi skills they have learned to get out.

How does it part the curtain of superior knowledge…

… For the hero? Keeping the Yuzzem under control; neither Luke nor Mara thought that would be a problem. More Luke than Mara, she’s fine with killing off the enemy that would chase them.

and/or, for the reader? Readers will see Mara’s weak levitation skills in action when Luke has to grab the tray mentally.

How does this shift the context of the story? The treasure hunt to reach the Kaiburr crystal and leave Mimban before the Imperial forces regroup is on.

How does this pump up dramatic tension and pace? The prison break ends up blowing up the Imperial headquarters.

How does your hero begin to successfully attack their need/quest? They steal a crawler (or a repulsorlift vehicle) and follow the map toward the Temple of Pomojema.

How does the antagonistic force respond to this attack? The Imperial forces have to lick their wounds and figure out how to track the escapees through the jungles. And then Grammel has to greet Lord Vader. Lord Vader is so not impressed with the Imperial forces, though, oddly enough he’s a bit proud of the prison break.

How do the hero’s inner demons come to bear on this attack?

What is the all-is-lost lull just before the third plot point? The Coway feast ends with the realization that Vader is leading the Imperials straight to them.

What is the third plot point in your story? The Coway successfully beat back the Imperials, but Vader and Grammel get away to get the Kaiburr crystal first. Vader’s reasoning is if Luke is after it, Luke will come to Vader to get it.

How does this change or affect the hero’s proactive role? Luke is determined to get the Kaiburr crystal and get off planet before Vader takes him prisoner again.

How is your hero the primary catalyst for the successful resolution of the central problem or issue in this story? Vader offers to spare Mara if Luke joins him. Luke refuses. Halla gives the Kaiburr crystal to Luke and with the amplified Force, Luke pushes Vader back where the lizard came from and drops more ceiling between him and Mara. Padmé appears and gets to talk to Luke. They steal Vader’s shuttle and leave Vader’s Noghri honor guard to dig him out.

How does it meet the hero’s need and fulfill the quest? They get the Kaiburr crystal, so the treasure hunt is won. And Vader’s wailing on Mara makes both Vader and Luke realize he cares more than just friendship.

How does the hero demonstrate the conquering of inner demons? Mara defeats her lie by protecting the Yuzzem. Luke rescues Mara.

How are the stakes of the story paid off? They’re beat up to hell and back, but they survived and got off Mimban. And the Empire didn’t get the Kaiburr crystal or Luke. And Leia and Han both drop their suspicions about Mara.

What will be the reader’s emotional experience as the story concludes? Relief that they made it out of the adventure. And eager to see what happens next.

If you opened my link to the blank beat sheet, you may have noticed I skipped the beginning details when I just quoted the Mission on Mimban Beat Sheet. That's because my fifth step is to figure out my Comprehensive Concept. This is a tool I was introduced to by Todd A. Stone in Novelist's Boot Camp.

A comprehensive concept is a foundation builder. It is a short statement that combines the following four essential elements to form a strong base for your complex novel: (1) genre, (2) main character, (3) opposition, and (4) macro setting.

I have added a fifth element, the conflict, but I'm not sure where I pulled that from. Maybe Larry Brooks, or maybe Shawn Coyne's Story Grid. What I have found over the years is that sentences makes a great summary that FanFiction.Net and Ao3 both ask for to describe your fic.

So for this story, I came up with this list.

Genre: Action-adventure fanfic

Opposition: the Empire

Main Characters: Luke Skywalker and Mara Jade

Macro Setting: Star Wars, Mimban

Conflict: beat the Imperials to the mystical object

Now you meld these five items into a sentence that describes the story. I ended up with: In this action-adventure fanfic, Luke Skywalker and Mara Jade’s exploration of Mimban is derailed by the unexpected Imperial presence on the planet and their way off-planet depends on finding the Kaiburr crystal before the Imperials do.

That's done and I'm prepared to start on the narrative. You may have noticed I skipped over filling in the theme(s). I have an idea, especially considering the human bigotry of this story, but I generally wait to see what develops and then find it to punch it up during the editing.

So thank you for taking this journey with me. I hope I've given you something you can apply to your own writing endeavors. There will be fic at some point.

#rescue the farmboy au #star wars legends #splinter of the mind's eye #literary analysis #reference notes #mission on mimban #writing process #outlining

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queezleposts · 7 years ago

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Reminder: Cards Unbound As A System Still Isn’t Good

After the dust of HRX has settled and the new patch goes live, I think it’s still important to acknowledge this one fact: cards unbound is still a bad system, to its core. I wrote most of this before OB65 but not many balance changes went through, so it still stands.

OB64 and the new card system released is to me, well...tolerable. This is mainly due to all the changes it received while in PTS, and thanks to a lot of public outcry. Without all the hard as hell feedback we wouldn’t have a bound casual siege, champion chests buyable by gold, FWOTD champion chests in bound mound, etcetera. Let’s move on from that though.

It’s tolerable because the “arcade” mode and the grind inherent to it is only optional now, but it does gate off gamemodes such as onslaught and others along with it. If you wish to have balanced gameplay for any gamemode other than siege, well you’re a bit out of luck. For onslaught lovers like me, this was a bit of a loss.

And despite the rng progression system being optional, it still exists, and the game style known as arcade it is attached to is still being pushed as the core casual experience; if it wasn’t, test maps and the lot wouldn’t be arcade only, and we wouldn’t have had to push this hard just to get a bound version of siege in the casual queues. Arcade is also the option most to the left and most likely to be chosen by new players; that isn’t by mistake.

These I still see as issues because they will inform the way the game progresses from now on. This should definitely be kept in mind; now to my biggest critique, the current existence of Arcade as it stands in Live.

Arcade Mode

Now, what the “arcade” mode with its level ten card system most reminds me of are “multiplier” style custom servers in team fortress two, if you’re familiar with those. What those custom servers do, is enhance the values of the weapons the player chooses to ridiculous and often comical extremes. So “times 10” is the most common value employed, but there are even “times forty” or amazingly “times a hundred” servers. You can see how this would be analogous to me with the extra “levels” given as enhancements to cards in paladins.

The reason I bring this up is because I feel the arcade mode fails at being well…an arcade mode. One of the things that makes “multiplier” servers work is that everyone in the server is playing with the same over the top values; if everyone is overpowered, nobody is. What the arcade servers in paladins do though, is pit people with cards that are overtuned with players that don’t even have their cards at the base “classic siege” level; effectively playing with undertuned cards. That defeats the entire point of playing in a multiplier mode style server – its more fun when everyone is playing on well, the same playing field, EVEN in an arcade mode. It’s just not as fun if you don’t get the same toys everyone else does.

In fact, if you have the bad luck to play against someone with an entire level ten set and you don’t get the same, then it’s the exact opposite experience – it’s no fun at all. This is expounded by the fact that the leveling system for the cards used in this arcade mode is built entirely around rng – you can only level up cards by opening chests. Sure, you can buy champion specific chests, and win those chests as FWOTD, but its still, at the end of the day, a chest. There’s little player choice if at all when it comes to rng, no two ways about it. It adds a lot of frustration to what is supposed to be well, an “arcade” gamemode. Compound this with the fact that this is meant to be a “nearly endless” progression system, for what is again, an ARCADE gamemode, and there’s almost no way to be able to enjoy this arcade “multiplier” style gameplay the way it is supposed to be enjoyed. It’s a lot of unnecessary work for what is traditionally considered a gimmick in literally every other objective based fps game of its kind.

I feel like the way the arcade mode is being pushed with this progression system and as the core casual experience is also unnecessarily limiting. The way arcade mode currently exists it is not a true “arcade” mode and it is also not a true example of “balanced core gameplay” either. It exists in this limbo state where it can’t decide what it wants to be, because of the leveling system tacked on to it. As an arcade mode it is severely watered down and limited and as core gameplay it is an unbalanced joke.

They have to consider what these are cards are like to play with at three points: levels one, four, and ten. If arcade was treated as the side gimmick it should be then we would have just had a single separate queue for playing on arcade style multiplier servers, and we’d have all level tens in that mode and be done with it. And that’s if you get rid of the forced rng based progression system.

Because the highest card values are level ten and any higher would be an even worse slog to grind than what has already been given to us, you can never have or enjoy the wacky experience of say, a multiplier x40 server, or enjoy the player run customizability of the arcade style enjoyed by those who play similar gamemodes in tf2 or even overwatch.

You’ve effectively placed your arcade mode into a boring, boring box by tethering it in this way. Perhaps it seems odd to care this much in regards to the balance of an “arcade” mode, but even arcade modes, in their own way, have their own kind of balance that makes them fun, which is what the end result is supposed to foster. Arcade modes work the way they do because they are supplemental to the core casual experience of the game, not because they are ever presented as the core casual experience in and of themselves.

When you treat them like the side experience they are, you’re able to play with the wackiness that people enjoy in ways you just can’t if it’s meant to be the core casual you’ve been pushing so hard for it to be. This is especially true if you have locked all gamemodes that aren’t siege behind this barrier.

Card Values

While I wanted to focus on the confusion that is the arcade mode as it exists itself, I’d also like to take some time to discuss the card values related here as well. Long story short though, there are issues with the new level four being basically the old level two.

I know Fernando best, so I’ll use him as an example to start off. Many of the cards I use for Fernando feel rather underpowered in their current level four state. Examples include Incinerate which reduces the cooldown of Fernando’s fireball, and Brand which reduces healing when Fireball hits a target. I enjoy playing with cards that revolve around Scorch Legendary based loadouts, so I noticed this immediately. However if you bring their values back in line with their old values under the twelve point system that has issues of its own; one of the reasons the old card values worked, was because you could only have two cards at most at level four; you can’t have Fernando’s Brand, Incinerate, and Last Stand cards all at level four under the old system, so the values under the old twelve point system at level four were justified. I can understand how this can be a balancing act when moving to a leveled system where all cards chosen are well, at the same level – you can no longer have all the cards at their old “level four” values, as the constraints that used to justify their utility at their level – the fact that you’d be giving up similar enhancements for other cards – isn’t there anymore. But it does inevitably have the effect as the system currently exists of making certain loadouts and champions feel incredibly gimped.

An example of this would be playing Pip with a healer loadout. The cards I used to use at their old values, included a card that widened the area of his healing potion, and a card that lowered his healing potion’s cooldown depending on how many teammates were hit – both cards had their inherent values reduced, which makes Pip much harder to play as a healer, if at all (this isn’t touching on the bugs to Pip’s healing potion and its cooldowns on top of that, as this is unrelated to the current subject).

Other cards such as “Possession” for Mal Damba which gives him damage reduction for every mending spirits on an ally hit just feel rather useless at their current values at level four.

But then, you have the exact opposite problem with other cards. In my honest opinion, Legendary Cards should never even have been given “levels” in the first place. Legendary Cards are the ones that alter your champion’s playstyle the most drastically after all; so much so that I would have liked if under the old 12 point system, legendary cards were “unbound” and all available whenever you unlocked each champion.

Conclusions

Just because unbound is technically optional that doesn’t mean its inherent issues should now be handwaved and ignored behind the excuse of “but its just arcade”

If you want a true arcade mode experience, what arcade mode currently provides isn’t it. The way it is being pushed as the core casual only waters down these aspects further.

You will never receive a true arcade experience as long as the current system is being pushed.

You should never treat your core casual gameplay experience as is shown in the classic queues as the side experience to new players, yet here we are.

Basing your progression system around rng chest opening is never a good idea. Softening the blow with champion specific chests is only doing just that: softening it.

“Endless” progression systems have no place in a game like this. A grind sure, but not one built to be endless - this isn’t PVE.

Trying to talk away the progression system by saying “its only arcade” begs the question why they even have it in the first place then. After all, asking people to do all that work for what is being presented as an ARCADE mode is a ridiculous proposition in and of itself.

Allowing card values under the new system in bound to feel both meaningful and not gimped will be difficult if every card can be equipped at the same level.

#paladins champions of the realm #pcotr #paladins cotr #qpgame #long post #queezlerambles

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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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The Hardy Boys: Comparing Hulu’s Show to the Classic Book Series

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First published in 1927, The Hardy Boys series of books created by Edward Stratemeyer has sold more than 70 million copies and been translated into more than 25 languages. The novels have been revised, rebooted, and reimagined at least four times since their debut and the eponymous characters have appeared in everything from comic books and TV shows to video games and cartoons.

Possibly the real mystery here is why there hasn’t been a television adaptation of this story on-air since the late 1990s, particularly when remakes and reboots have been all the rage for years. The CW currently has a hit Nancy Drew series on the air, and shows like Riverdale, Pretty Little Liars, and Veronica Mars have spent years reinforcing the idea that teenagers are surprisingly great at solving crimes. Whither, the Hardy Boys?

On Hulu, at last. This new adaptation of The Hardy Boys, starring newcomers Rohan Campbell and Alexander Elliot as the sleuthing siblings, is the fifth onscreen version of their story and its mere existence will be enough to delight some fans who just want to see their favorite characters come to life onscreen.

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But although this The Hardy Boys series is a perfectly serviceable family mystery with a charming young cast, fans of the original series of novels may find themselves surprised by some of the changes from the source material. Of which there are quite a few – for both good and ill.

Let’s run down a few of the most significant.

The Hardy Boys Are Younger Than Usual

In the Hardy Boys novels, as in the Hulu show, Frank and Joe Hardy are brothers. But in the world of the TV series, they’re actually much younger than any version of their fictional counterparts that have come before. In the books, Frank is usually eighteen and Joe is seventeen – though there’s one set of stories where they’re seventeen and sixteen, respectively – but in the show, the brothers are sixteen and twelve. It’s an interesting decision, particularly since TV adaptations like this (looking at you, Nancy Drew) generally tend to go the other way, aging up their protagonists so that they can take part in more adult stories.

Making the Hardy boys younger than ever before does allow the Hulu series to appeal to a wider audience than it might otherwise be able to do. But the sudden four-year gap between the brothers makes their relationship strangely complicated. They no longer feel like relative equals and, as a result, their friendship here is quite a bit different than it is on the page. And to be honest, although Bridgeport is indeed a weird town, the fact that a group of high school teens is apparently just fine with constantly hanging out with a twelve-year-old is more than a bit strange.

The Hardy Family Dynamic is Quite Different

In the Hardy Boys novels, Hardy matriarch Laura is presented as an example of the ideal stay at home mom. She generally has little to do on her own, though the updated 2005 Undercover Brothers series did finally give her a job. (In it, she is a librarian.)

In the Hulu TV adaptation, she is a dogged investigative journalist and an all-around great example for her kids. A daughter of an overbearing mother, she apparently rejected her life of privilege in Bridgeport to marry the boys’ father Fenton and follow her calling to find the truth.

How Nancy Drew Has Reinvigorated the Dark Young Adult Drama

By Lacy Baugher

Unfortunately, however, she is also dead, and it is her apparent murder that sets her sons off on their path to become sleuths, as they work to solve this very close-to-home mystery. (Your mileage may vary regarding how you feel about the fact that Laura is basically killed off to drive emotional development for the men in her life.)

As for Fenton, he remains a big part of the story but is also strangely absent at the same time. Leaving the boys with his sister Trudy while he heads off to investigate his wife’s death, he seems to struggle with how to be the dad that Frank and Joe deserve. This is something of a shift from the novels, in which he is basically the dream ideal of a perfect father, so perhaps The Hardy Boys is meant as something of an origin story for Fenton, too.

Fewer Mysteries to Solve

In The Hardy Boys novels, Frank and Joe went on all kinds of adventures, traveling all over the United States and occasionally to far off locations like Mexico and Egypt in order to solve cases. In the Hulu adaptation, their story is almost entirely contained within the town of Bridgeport (clearly an analog to the Bayport of the books), where both boys are sent for the summer following their mother’s death.

As a result, a season-long mystery shapes up, albeit one with many moving pieces. As the boys investigate their mother’s death, they unearth dark family secrets, discover an object that may or may not have supernatural abilities, and reveal corruption within local institutions. But they’re not really solving mysteries in the way that many fans might have expected, and the series serves as something of an origin story for the pair as sleuths.

A More Diverse Central Ensemble

In many ways, the Hulu version of The Hardy Boys story has much more of an ensemble than any of its written counterparts do. In the novels, the Hardy boys are occasionally assisted in mystery-solving by a gang of (mostly male) friends, who don’t have much in the way of arcs of their own. In the Hulu adaptation, the brothers’ larger, much more diverse social group is directly woven into the fabric of the story the show is telling. (A trend which we can likely thank popular teen shows like Riverdale for.)

And though these characters are all based on figures from the novel, many of them are changed onscreen in ways that help modernize and update the story for a 2020 audience.

For example, Frank’s BFF Chet Morton is here reimagined as an earnest African-American farm kid; whereas in the novels he’s white, chubby, and obsessed with food. There, his non-athletic nature is usually played as comic relief, as is his love of the bright yellow “jalopy” named Queen he’s always working on. This TV version of Chet is much more of an everyman figure, a regular guy who loves small-town life in Bridgeport. He’s also dating Callie Shaw, which will probably be an issue at some point in the future since she’s Frank’s girlfriend in the books.

The decision to make Chet a young Black man is also a choice that feels particularly important, given the fact that the original books rarely feature characters of color and often include what we would now consider racist stereotypes of non-white people.

Female Characters Have Important Roles to Play

The fact that female characters don’t have much to do in The Hardy Boys novels isn’t really surprising – from a storytelling perspective, these books aren’t really meant for or aimed at female readers, after all. (And the folks behind them probably would have argued that if young women really wanted to read mysteries, well, we’ve got Nancy Drew for that. Which is likely what most of us read instead.)

Thankfully, the Hardy Boys TV show works hard to make space for female characters – and by extension, female viewers – in its world and, for the most part, it succeeds.

Callie Shaw, Frank’s generally nondescript book girlfriend, is here given an arc, a personality, and a story of her own. Technically, she’s not even Frank’s girlfriend yet, and though we all assume they’ll get together, it’s not a done deal. (Especially since she’s dating Chet.) But Callie has dreams of her own, which may not involve hanging on to boys from her small hometown.

As for the younger set, Joe’s very male best friend Biff Hooper is here reimagined as the tomboy daughter of the Bridgeport deputy sheriff. She is smart, brave, and loyal, and her burgeoning friendship with Joe is charming in a way that little else on this show is. Her mother’s occupation often creates very natural friction between the two and gives Biff a perspective of her own that can occasionally be at odds with her friends.

In Conclusion

Hulu’s The Hardy Boys is truly a strange specimen. As a series, it’s a perfectly decent family-focused mystery, but as an adaptation of the novels, it leaves quite a bit to be desired. Changing the brothers’ ages not only impacts their relationship with each other, it basically makes the series feel as though it has little in common with the original story beyond the characters’ names.

That said, the series’ vaguely 1980s-ish period setting does give it something of a timeless feel, which accurately reflects how many of us still see the novels. And this The Hardy Boys does add some long-needed elements to the franchise, like characters of color and women with arcs of their own. But it sort of forgets to get the part that really matters right – and that’s the brothers at its center.

The post The Hardy Boys: Comparing Hulu’s Show to the Classic Book Series appeared first on Den of Geek.

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captainjusthumanthings · 5 years ago

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Most Popular Types of Yoga Explained

One of the most important hurdles to starting yoga is deciding what sort of yoga you would like to undertake. It's often confusing for beginners because the category names and options are so broad. While most styles use equivalent physical postures, each features a particular emphasis. This cheat sheet highlights the differences so you'll determine which sort is most appealing to you.

Of course, the simplest thanks to starting doing yoga is to require a category for

beginners.1 If your local studio doesn't indicate which classes are geared toward newbies, invite advance which class goes to supply basic instruction appropriate for somebody new. If you're seeking out online videos, search specifically for beginner-level classes—almost all online yoga video platforms allow you to search by ability-level.

Just confine mind, if you do not like your first yoga class, that does not mean that you simply and yoga aren't meant to be. Because there are numerous different sorts of yoga then many various instructors with their approaches to teaching, it's going to take a couple of attempts before you discover the proper fit.

Given the various benefits of daily yoga practice, if you do not like yoga initially, plan to try several different classes before you write it off completely.

Beginner-Friendly Options Aside from classes designated as "beginner yoga," generally speaking, classes labeled as "Hatha" are slower-moving, thoughtful practices that specialize in basic, beginner-friendly poses.2 in fact, it is vital to acknowledge that the term "Hatha" is really a generic designation for any sort of yoga focused on movement. In America, almost every yoga class is, technically, Hatha, so confirm you ask the trainer what you'll expect before your first-class.

Vinyasa classes are incredibly popular, but they tend to be faster-moving, which may be confusing for beginners who are unacquainted with basic poses. If you would like to undertake a vinyasa class, hunt down a beginner-level version.

Finally, Iyengar yoga may be a sort of yoga heavily focused on proper alignment. this is often great for people that have injuries or who want to spend overtime getting each pose exactly right. you'll expect tons of instruction, which is great for beginners.3

Remember, any sort of yoga is often perfectly suitable for beginners as long as it's designated a "beginner" class, so if your local studio offers yin or Forrest yoga, be happy to offer it a try. Just make certain to let your instructor know that you're new the practice. By giving him the heads up, he'll know to stay an eye fixed on you and to supply more detailed instructions as required.

Different Styles Explained You can attempt to identify your yoga type or find out what your yoga personality is to ascertain which of the subsequent styles is best for you. There are many to settle on from, but don't let that intimidate you. Try a beginner-friendly class before branching out (if you would like to).

Hatha

Hatha may be a very general term that encompasses any of the physical sorts of yoga. In contemporary yoga lingo, Hatha has come to mean a slow-paced and delicate way of practicing. Hatha classes are often an honest place to start a yoga practice because they provide an introduction to the essential yoga poses during a low-key setting.2

Vinyasa Flow

Like Hatha, vinyasa may be a general term wont to describe many various sorts of classes. Vinyasa tends to be a more vigorous sort of yoga incorporating a series of poses called sun salutations, during which each movement is matched to the breath.

A vinyasa class typically starts with a variety of sun salutations to warm up the body for more intense stretching done at the top of sophistication. Vinyasa is additionally called flow, regarding the continual movement from one posture to subsequent .4

Anusara

Founded in 1997 by John Friend, Anusara combines a robust emphasis on physical alignment with a positive philosophy supported a belief within the intrinsic goodness of all beings.5 Classes are usually light-hearted and accessible, often with attention on heart-opening.

Unfortunately, Friend is not any longer related to Anusara thanks to his indiscretions. Anusara is now a teacher-led yoga school and Friend has started a replacement yoga style called Sridaiva (see below).

Ashtanga

Ashtanga may be a fast-paced, intense, flowing sort of yoga founded by Pattabhi Jois within the 1960s6. a group series of poses is performed, always within the same order. This practice is extremely physically demanding due to the constant movement from one pose to subsequent and therefore the emphasis on daily practice.

It was one of the primary yoga styles embraced by an outsized number of western students and had been very influential within the evolution of yoga within the past 30 years.

Baptiste Power Vinyasa

Baron Baptiste may be a power yoga innovator who studied many various sorts of yoga, martial arts, and meditation before arising together with his unique yoga method, Baptiste Power Vinyasa.

His style is predicated on 5 Pillars: vinyasa, ujjayi pranayama, heat, uddiyana bandha, and Drishti. Classes, which are conducted during a heated room, are typically strong and sweaty.

Bikram/Hot Yoga

Hot yoga was pioneered by Bikram Choudhury, whose name became synonymous with yoga classes taught during a room heated to 95 to 104 degrees. the warmth facilitates the loosening of tight muscles and profuse sweating, which is assumed to be cleansing. The Bikram method may be a set series of 26 poses, but not all hot classes make use of this series.

CorePower Yoga

CorePower Yoga may be a chain of hot yoga studios founded in Denver in 2002. The brand is rapidly expanding throughout us. Expect consistent instruction in a rich gym-like setting. A membership is sweet at any of their studios nationwide.

Iyengar

Based on the teachings of the yoga master B.K.S Iyengar, this sort of practice is all about bringing the body into its absolute best alignment, often using props like yoga blankets, blocks, and straps to help students in mastering proper form.3

Iyengar practices usually emphasize holding poses over long periods of your time rather than moving quickly from one pose to subsequent (as during a flow class). Iyengar has been vital within the development of recent yoga asana.

Jivamukti

This sort of yoga emerged within the 1980s from one among my City’s best-known yoga studios. Jivamukti founders David Life and Sharon Gannon were influenced by the rigor of Ashtanga yoga together with chanting, meditation, and spiritual teachings. they need to train many teachers who have brought this sort of yoga to studios and gymnasiums, predominantly within the U.S. and Europe.

Jivamukti classes are physically intense and sometimes include an inspirational theme selected by the teacher.

Forrest

Headquartered in Santa Monica, California, Forrest Yoga is that the method taught by Ana Forrest. The performance of vigorous asana sequences is meant to strengthen and purify the body and release pent-up emotions and pain to encourage the healing of physical and emotional wounds. Expect an intense workout with stress on abdominal strengthening, inversions, and deep breathing.

Kripalu

Kripalu is both a yoga style and a retreat center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Kripalu maybe a yoga practice with a compassionate approach and emphasis on meditation, physical healing, and spiritual transformation that overflows into daily life7. It also focuses on looking inward and moving at your own pace, making it an honest practice for people with limited mobility thanks to age, weight, illness, or injury.

Kundalini

The emphasis in Kundalini is on the breath in conjunction with physical movement, to free energy within the lower body and allow it to maneuver upwards through all the chakras.

All asana practices make use of controlling the breath, but in Kundalini the exploration of the consequences of the breath (also called prana, meaning energy) on the postures is important. Kundalini exercises also are called kriyas.

Integral

Integral maybe a gentle Hatha sort of yoga supported the ideas and principals of Sri Swami Satchidananda, who sought to offer followers guidelines on the way to improve their lives. To integrate mind, body, and spirit, classes also include pranayama, chanting, and meditation.

Moksha/Modo

Moksha hot yoga was founded in Canada in 2004. In 2013, they changed the name of their affiliated U.S. studios to Modo Yoga. Both styles have supported a series of 45 poses wiped out a heated room. The studios are expected to stick to environmentally conscious building and cleaning standards and to foster a way of the community for his or her students.

Power Yoga

In the mid-1990s, several prominent teachers who were well-trained in traditional yoga were trying to find ways to form flow yoga accessible to more people. The resulting classes came to be known by the umbrella term of power yoga.

Power yoga was initially influenced by the intensity of Ashtanga but allowed for variation within the sequencing of poses at the discretion of the teacher.6 Contemporary power yoga classes are essentially vigorous vinyasa flow.

Restorative

Restorative yoga makes use of props to support the body because it relaxes into poses over several minutes. the thought is to remain in each pose long enough to encourage passive stretching. Seated forward bends, gentle supine backbends, and twists are samples of the sort of poses which will be adapted to be restorative with the addition of props like blankets and bolsters.

Sivananda

The first Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Center was founded in 1959 by Swami Vishnu-Sivananda, a lover of Swami Sivananda. There are now on the brink of 80 locations worldwide, including several ashrams. Sivananda yoga is predicated on five principles, including the practices of asana, pranayama, and meditation. The mastery of twelve carefully selected poses is at the core of this practice.

Sridaiva/Bowspring

After leaving Anusara Yoga (see above) in 2012, John Friend started Sridaiva with Colorado studio owner Desi Springer. This style introduces a replacement alignment system, which they call the bowstring. It's pretty different from other sorts of yoga therein the knees stay bent in many poses and therefore the pelvis is usually tipping forward to take care of the spinal curves. Proponents say they find a replacement source of strength and power from this alignment.

Viniyoga

Viniyoga is that the term employed by T.K.V. Desikachar to explain the methodology that his father, revered teacher T. Krishnamacharya, developed late in his life.8 it's supported an individualized approach to every student, creating a practice that suits his or her unique stage of life and state of health. Even in group classes, Viniyoga is tailored to suit each person's particular needs.

Yin Yoga

Yin Yoga may be a practice developed by teacher Paul Grilley to stretch the body's animal tissue, particularly around the joints. to try to do this, specific poses are held over several minutes. Grilley intended this practice to organize the body to be ready to sit in long meditation sessions and to act as a counterpoint to movement-oriented vigorous yang sorts of yoga.

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lovelesswiki · 8 years ago

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Loveless relationship chart

PINK IS FOR A POSITIVE RELATIONSHIP (usually friendly)

RED IS FOR A ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIP

BLACK IS FOR A NEGATIVE RELATIONSHIP

ORANGE LINES MEAN A FAMILIAL CONNECTION (can be adoptive)

LIGHT BLUE LINES MEAN A FIGHTER-SACRIFICE CONNECTION

PURPLE IS EITHER COWORKER OR CLASSMATE RELATIONSHIP

NOTE: I’d actually reccommend reading this on Google Docs, given that this analysis is very long. It is copied from below but the google file has a table of contents that you can skip around in and is just generally more readable.

Deciding factors of whether or not to put a character in was whether or not they have a red/pink/black relationship with two or more characters. The only exceptions to this rule were Nana, who I put in because she’s important to Septimal Moon due to being a member and her lack of relationships is significant, Chouma, who is on for similar reasons to Nana and had to be there to show a relationship with Kio, and Hatsuko’s partner, who by extension through their informant work shares the client relationships with Hatsuko. It was also significant to show that Hatsuko does have a partner.

Characters I would have liked to include but ultimately didn’t have enough room were the Zero girls (cut because most characters are neutral towards them and their main relationship was with Nagisa, though Yamato is on friendly terms with Natsuo), Hanabi (cut because she only shows up in extra chapters, but seems to have friendly relationships with both Kio and Soubi, as well as with Ritsuka), Mimuro (cut because his only significant relationships are with Nisei and Mei, who has no significant relationships), and Kio’s family (cut because they only have significant relationships with Kio, though I would’ve really liked to put them on).

The flashback characters were also not put on here because I feel as though they deserve their own relationship chart, due to those chapters being centered around completely different characters and almost a different world than the ones we see in the current timeline. I will be making this, because those relationships are also very important.

Look below for how I made this and analysis on the characters’ relationships and how they pertain to the story/who they are as a person.

HOW I MADE THIS AND WHY

haha, take this garbage that ive been working on for literal years

if you’ve followed me on any of my accounts, from way back from @soubis to @davewolfes (asdhiro, akiosensei, gavirn) to @yande-re, i have talked about this relationship chart. i started making it years ago and it looked even worse than this one. it had names and labels on every single relationship and turned into a clusterfuck i had abandoned the project and used it to laugh at myself until my loveless friends on discord and twitter and in particular jess ( @yamadahizashit / @septimalmoons ) challenged me to redo it in one night, at which point i said ‘shit, now i have to do it.’ and i did. it looks way better than the old one. the old one was complete trash. this one might be hard to follow, but the old one was worse.

essentially, this is sort of a simplified, slightly easier to read version of the original chart. it’s also more aesthetically pleasing since I used different arrows instead of sloppily drawing my own over and over again. I cut the names and most of the labels, aside from ones that I felt were the most important. I also used a different method of showing conflicting relationships (like the red/black mixes) by simplifying it and just doing a gradient. I also tried to make it more readable by outlining most of the arrows with a white outline so that when they intersect, it’s easier to follow.

I made this because I wanted to analyze it, plain and simple. I also made this because I see a lot of misrepresentations of certain relationships in loveless in fics and whatnot and im frankly a bit annoyed by it. for example, there’s really no hard evidence that ritsuka has romantic feelings for anyone, but there is hard evidence that he feels positive (friendly/platonic relationships) with both soubi and yuiko, who are considered to be his main love interests. one of the other huge things that annoys me is when i see nagisa written/shown as head over heals for ritsu, when it’s stated that she does have negative (as well as romantic, apparently) feelings towards him.

another thing i see a lot of lack of is the recognition of guardian/familial relationships, especially when it comes to the adoptive/not blood side of things. for example, and ive said before that this annoys me to no end, people try to dumb down ritsu and soubi’s relationship to ‘master/slave’ or ‘teacher/student’ when it’s way more complicated than that. i wanted to point out in this that soubi is actually ritsu’s adoptive son, since ritsu was his guardian. for twelve years of his life, ritsu isolated soubi and was the closest thing soubi had to a parent or a father and still is to this day. ritsu is essentially the only family soubi had until the start of the series, and i feel as though that gets skipped over a lot, which is part of the reason i wanted to include it here.

similarly, i feel as though the connection between soubi/natsuo/youji and nagisa/natsuo/youji gets ignored, as well. along the same veins as soubi and ritsu, nagisa was the only parental figure natsuo and youji had until they went to live with soubi, and she abused and neglected them and then threw them at soubi the first chance she got. their relationships with both soubi and nagisa aren’t just a gag but real, serious things, and they’re kids, in the end. they comment multiple times that living with soubi is very different than living with nagisa and they enjoy it more and seem to be healthier and more morally right (though not anywhere near completely morally correct, let’s be honest)

the main reason i included the proximity line for coworkers and classmates was mainly because of septimal moon. it seems that a lot of the septimal moon members have their own goals and with that, their own relationships with other members. for example, mikado seems to feel neutrally about ritsu, negatively towards seimei, and positively towards nagisa, but even though she and ritsu are connected, they don’t seem to feel one way or another for each other. i decided to show that since they’re still connected, that i would create a line that puts them in close proximity to each other. the same goes for ritsuka and hitomi’s relationship- ritsuka seems to feel very neutrally about hitomi and vice versa, but they’re still connected, hence the need for the proximity line.

id also like to stress that the pink lines do not necessarily mean friendship. they simply just mean that one or both characters has positive feelings for the other that are not romantic. for example, while yuiko and ritsuka are friends and have a pink line, ritsuka cannot be called ‘friends’ with his mother, but still has positive feelings towards her. similarly, the black lines aren’t so clear-cut either. they mean negativity and usually hatred, but it depends on the character. for example, soubi’s negativity towards nisei is violent and deep-set, but his negativity towards seimei takes a different, more recent shape of ‘maybe i don’t want this’. along the same lines, a romantic or positive relationship does not mean that there’s no abuse going on, especially in soubi and ritsu’s case. ritsu has romantic-like feelings (best way i can describe it in these terms, work with me here), but still heavily abused him.

in general, just remember that the arrows don’t mean the same thing for every character, and they don’t mean the same thing going to and from every character. some relationships are very clear-cut (yuiko and ritsuka’s pink line, friendship) while others aren’t (soubi and ritsuka’s lines with seimei and with each other). also, im not a hard authority on this. im willing to discuss and debate. actually, id love to.

on with the analysis.

ANALYSIS

I noticed a lot of interesting things while making this chart. Let’s start with the main characters.

Actually, let’s start with Soubi. I know that Ritsuka is technically the main character, but the vast majority of the relationship arrows on this chart lead to Soubi in one way or another, and there’s a reason for that. Let me tell you the number one thing that I realized while making this chart:

Soubi does not have neutral relationships with people.

Everyone who is shown to know Soubi has either a positive or negative relationship with Soubi, with the exception of Mikado and Yayoi, who seems to have just met him (the Zero girls are debatable, since they had a negative relationship with him that has been settled). Every other character either likes or hates him. The reason that Ritsuka doesn’t have nearly as many relationship arrows is because a lot of the characters on this chart don’t seem to feel negatively or positively about him. They are neutral. Characters like these are Ritsu (red and black with Soubi), Tokino (black with Soubi), Nisei (black with Soubi), Hitomi (red and black with Soubi), and Nagisa (black with Soubi). Similarly, Nana is not shown to have ever mentioned or interacted with Soubi and thus isn’t counted for him, but has with Ritsuka and seems to feel neutrally with him. Soubi has very significant, important relationships with people and seems to split on people very easily and cause strong reactions.

Also interestingly with Soubi, his positive relationships are very new in his life. They include the Zero boys, but their space became too crowded to put anymore arrows down, so I put the familial relationship with those three. Also, with his positive relationships, they typically don’t have much to do with the world he was raised in. While he met both Ritsuka and the Zero boys through being a Fighter, it’s important to say that his relationships with them are not at all built on his identity as a Fighter (which I discussed here). His relationship with Natsuo and Youji is built on him being parental with them, and his relationship with Ritsuka at first struggled because Ritsuka seemed to reject his identity as a Fighter/object but is now doing better due to Soubi’s development of an actual identity of personhood. In the same ways, his relationship with Kio and Yuiko (and Hanabi, who is not on here) is built on his actual personality, though all three relationships had a bit of a rocky/weird/awkward start.

On the flip side, most of Soubi’s negative relationships are from the Fighter-Sacrifice world where the people in question identify him as a Fighter. The exception to this rule is his dislike towards Hitomi, which is caused due to her naivety, inability to take action, and the fact that her being a teacher reminds him of Ritsu. Every other negative relationship is based around his identity as a Fighter and usually, as Beloved’s Fighter. Soubi’s negative feelings towards Ritsu are caused by Ritsu’s treatment of him, which was ‘justified’ by Soubi’s identity as a Fighter. Nagisa and Soubi’s mutual negative relationship was caused by Nagisa mistreating Soubi due to his identity as Fighter in that Ritsu seemed to favor him over her sister, as well as Soubi’s identity as Akio’s son. Soubi and Nisei’s enemyship is caused over the conflicting identities of Beloved’s Fighters. Soubi’s negative relationship with Tokino is caused by him being labelled as the Beloved Fighter. Seimei’s negativity towards Soubi is caused and ‘justified’ by viewing Fighters as dogs and things to be beaten and used.

Soubi’s identities cause a huge rift in how people view him, and people tend to split on him if they view him as a Fighter and as Beloved’s Fighter, since when Soubi displays other identities towards people, he tends to get a positive response. Obviously, this is not something that he has learned in canon yet.

Specific relationships dealing with Soubi:

Soubi and Ritsu: Soubi and Ritsu’s relationship is one of the most interesting things in the series and I cannot stand it when people try to justify Ritsu’s actions, excuse them, or minimize them, because as I’ve said (particularly in this reply to a follower) what Ritsu did to Soubi cannot be explained in a few words, since he so thoroughly destroyed him that there was nothing left of the kid Soubi originally was. As such, it was hard to simplify their relationship into the parameters that I had given myself. I shoved Ritsu’s feelings towards Soubi into a box labelled ‘romantic’, but even I’m not sure that that’s a good label, though I feel it’s more significant than simply labeling it positive feelings, because it’s clear that Ritsu does not draw a line between romantic, sexual, parental, and the other roles that he played and continues to play in Soubi’s life. In his case, the red line is an obsession and an abusive relationship.

While it isn’t so visible due to the other lines, Soubi’s line towards Ritsu is black. This is his relationship with him as an adult as when he was a child, the arrow would’ve probably been a mix of all three colors, given the way Soubi seemed to monologue about him in flashbacks and how abused children usually think. I also put a familial line for reasons I mentioned above, since Soubi is Ritsu’s adoptive son, which is something people tend to unfortunately look over. I say this because Ritsuka was not just anyone in Soubi’s life. He took him in, adopted him, and was supposed to raise him into adulthood. He was the only family that Soubi had after his parents died in the accident, and as a child, Soubi seemed to seek this familial bond with him. He never got it, though, which left Soubi very confused and unable to properly attach, because the person who was supposed to be his parent was simultaneously pushing him away and drawing him closer in an inappropriate way.

The point here is that Ritsu isn’t just Soubi’s former master—he’s Soubi’s adoptive father. Whenever this is brought up, it tends to make people extremely uncomfortable, since things feel so much worse when people apply this identity to their relationship and then look at the way Ritsu treated Soubi. While it’s horrible in its own way, it feels far, far worse when it’s viewed in through a lens that makes it clear that these two are adoptive family and Ritsu was Soubi’s parent, not just his guardian and not just his ‘master’. It also makes their interactions with Soubi as an adult much worse, as well, when you view Ritsu as his father figure, since their interactions are tight, impersonal, and awkward on Soubi’s end, while Ritsu continuously pries, mocks, and generally treats the entire interaction like some sort of sick power game. It makes it worse in many reader’s eyes because, well—this isn’t really the way that father-son interactions are supposed to go, and everything just seems to incredibly fucked up.

Soubi and Seimei: This is another odd relationship, because of the way that it’s changed over time. The relationship chart is sort of the ‘current’ relationship chart as of chapter 131, where some characters have built other relationships and changed existing ones. At the beginning of the series, I would have classified Soubi’s feelings towards Seimei as much more red/romantic and Seimei’s feelings towards Seimei as far more neutral, since as it is right now, it doesn’t appear that Seimei initially left Soubi behind because he hated him, but more because it was part of the plan and Soubi didn’t quite have use to him. However, as it stands right now, both relationships are primarily negative. As of chapter 131, Soubi seems to have lost most, if not all, positive feelings towards Seimei, and Seimei has repeatedly let Soubi know of his disgust of him and how much he dislikes the fact that Soubi can now think and speak for himself.

Seimei and Soubi’s relationship has never been good or healthy, and Seimei is a very fucked up human being who treats people terribly, but where we are in canon, it seems like these two are beginning to actually actively hate each other. Even though Seimei was terrible to Soubi when he was under Seimei’s rule pre-series, Seimei didn’t seem to actually hate Soubi. He hurt him and played with him and did everything he could to put Soubi into more pain, but that seems to be the way that Seimei treats people who allow him to do that to him, especially Soubi, who he had permission and the ability to do anything and everything to. Seimei seemed to enjoy that and was fine with the type of person Soubi was back then. However, Soubi changed and with that, his relationship to Seimei changed.

By the time Seimei took Soubi back or—actually, by the time that Seimei breaks into Seven Voices, Soubi has developed enough of a personality that he actually speaks out against Seimei, and when he does this, things instantly change. Seimei glares at him and his entire tone changes and he puts Soubi down for it in front of Ritsuka. From there, Seimei seems to do his best to punish Soubi for becoming a person by putting him through the most pain possible, all of it adding up when Seimei takes Soubi back. By this point, Soubi appears that he’s beginning to despise Seimei. He tries to resist, tries to speak up, and then falls into catatonic depression when he’s unable to let himself be heard. Seimei forces him to do things that he doesn’t want, including fighting against Moonless. During that battle, Soubi actually actively wishes at multiple points that he was anywhere but there.

Soubi and Ritsuka: Soubi and Ritsuka’s relationship is another one that has changed a lot over the course of the series. At the beginning, I’d classify Soubi’s feelings towards Ritsuka as full red, due to the way he was trying to force himself to feel for Ritsuka. At the beginning, I’d also classify Ritsuka’s feelings for Soubi to be full black, since for the first few volumes, Ritsuka was extremely frustrated, creeped out, and angry with Soubi, who just kept showing back up in his life over and over again. At the current point in the series, though, Soubi and Ritsuka have developed a much more friendly relationship, even bordering on parental, since there’s multiple chapters of Soubi taking care of Ritsuka. Many of the romantic overtones have been toned down or are gone completely and Soubi seems to care about Ritsuka in a much more healthy, acceptable way. Ritsuka, in turn, also seems to care quite a bit about Soubi. I’d classify them as good friends at this point, with Soubi maybe starting to become some sort of parental figure for Ritsuka. It’s also worth noting that Ritsuka is the catalyst for all of Soubi’s new positive relationships (with the exception of Kio), and the catalyst for all his changing relationships.

Soubi and Kio: This is a relationship that was actually incredibly strong and actually pretty healthy at the beginning of the series, and has remained that way. It was hard to tell in the beginning, since Kio was mostly used as a joke flirty character, but it’s been shown that they both genuinely care about each other. It’s also interesting to note that Kio was Soubi’s one positive relationship before Ritsuka came along.

Soubi and Natsuo and Youji: As stated above, this is a relationship often overlooked, or one that’s often chalked up to ‘they all live together’. It’s actually a little more than that. They might have a weird dynamic, but they all do have positive relationships with each other. While Soubi clearly has no idea what he’s doing, and doesn’t think or act like an adult, he’s a good influence in these kids’ lives and has taken on the missing parental role that Nagisa never took on.

Soubi and Nagisa: This is the last specific one I’m going to touch on, since there’s a lot more to get through. Soubi and Nagisa have a…interesting relationship, and it’s quite clearly a bad one, but not necessarily for the reasons that people tend to make it out to be. It’s also quite complicated. Nagisa appears to have hated Soubi even when he was young, but there’s two things about this—the first is that Soubi doesn’t actually seem to dislike her as a child, and the second is that Nagisa seems to subconsciously recognize that she shouldn’t be hating a child and does display some sort of shock when Soubi shows up without his ears. I’m unsure if this crosses the line into concern, but there’s something there and she chastises Ritsu for his actions.

Recently, it was revealed that the reason she actually hates Soubi is not because she’s jealous of his involvement with Ritsu. Before the flashback chapters, many fans seemed to theorize that Nagisa hated him for that reason and ‘taking Ritsu away from her’ (more on her and Ritsu later). That’s not the case at all. Nagisa hates Soubi because in a convoluted way, Nagisa blames him for her sister’s death for the sole reason that his mother isn’t around to blame anymore and Nagisa needs someone to push the blame onto. In response, Soubi has taken to treating her coldly as an adult, as well, and copying the bad attitude that she has about him

That’s the gist of Soubi’s relationships, though more will be covered with other characters and him. Let’s move onto our eponymous main character, Ritsuka.

While he does not have as many relationships with as many characters, Ritsuka’s relationship map is still interesting. If you look at him specifically in the map, you’ll notice one thing that absolutely sticks out—the overwhelming majority of characters seem to like Ritsuka in one way or another, even if they start off disliking him (Kio, Yayoi, even Natsuo and Youji didn’t seem fond of him initially). In fact, there’s really only one character who has a negative relationship with Ritsuka and that’s his own mother, Aoyagi Misaki, and the reason she hates him is very heavily implied to have been caused by someone else.

Even characters without a mark leading to him seem to like him. They just haven’t interacted enough to actually have a marking for their relationship and I tend to consider them ‘neutral’. Examples of this are Tokino, who comments about liking Ritsuka, Nagisa, who seems to want to dote on him, Seven, who reacts positively to his presence, and even Nisei makes positive comments towards Ritsuka, though they’re in his own weirdly creepy way. Characters who I didn’t include, such as the Zero girls and teams who weren’t important enough to make the cut, seem to take a liking to Ritsuka even though they were originally sent out to defeat him. The fact of the matter is that unless they have been tampered with, people seem to very easily like Ritsuka. Whether this is because he’s just a really good person or if it’s something to do with his true name, I don’t know. Nevertheless, I do find it odd that his name is ‘Loveless’ and everyone seems to like him.

Specific relationships dealing with Ritsuka:

Soubi and Ritsuka has already been discussed, so I’ll leave that off in this section.

Ritsuka and Seimei: Ritsuka and Seimei have a relationship that’s interesting because Ritsuka, a child, is starting to finally see that his brother is the villain, an evil person who’s done evil things. At the beginning of the series, Ritsuka absolutely put Seimei on a pedestal, as children sometimes do with people they attach onto to protect them. For a long time in the series, Ritsuka just wouldn’t believe that Seimei would ever do horrible, inhuman things. I’ve discussed this before, but children tend to see the world in terms of black and white. The point at which they stop doing this is the point in which they reach a higher stage of development. It’s key to a child’s development to stop the polar thinking, and Ritsuka is very much starting to do that, especially after Seimei takes Soubi back and leaves Ritsuka essentially alone. However, Ritsuka does still seem incredibly conflicted over his brother and understandably so. There’s still positive thinking surrounding Seimei, even with the negative thinking, which is why their relationship is labelled as a cross between positive and negative.

Ritsuka and Misaki: This is another relationship where it becomes undoubtedly obvious that Ritsuka is a child. Misaki is an abuser and very clearly feels extremely negatively towards Ritsuka. It seems to be hinted at that this hatred of hers was caused by someone who is neither she nor Ritsuka, but that doesn’t change the fact that she abuses him. She seems to pretty much solidly hate Ritsuka, though something seems to breakthrough after Nisei pays a visit to her. It isn’t much, and she’s still suffering through something, but there’s evidence that she doesn’t completely hate Ritsuka. As I stated above, though, a black arrow relationship does not necessarily mean a relationship of hatred; it means a negative one, and Misaki, no matter what, currently seems to feel negatively towards Ritsuka.

Ritsuka, on the other hand, loves his mother, no matter what she does to him. This is incredibly common in abused people, especially children. Ritsuka seems to want to do whatever he possibly can to get his mother to like him, even if it means trying to find a way to give up his current self and revert back to something that he once was before. Despite this being an incredibly toxic and self-harming mindset and relationship, Ritsuka feels completely positively towards his mother, to the point where he doesn’t assign any of the blame of her abuse onto her. He feels bad for her and loves her and brushes off her abuse.

Ritsuka and Natsuo and Youji: As much as I complain about Ritsuka’s character, this relationship is actually one of my favorites. I didn’t have room to mark it on the relationship chart, but it’s a positive one going both ways. I particularly like it because unlike so many other relationships in the series, this one is extremely beneficial to both parties. I’d actually sort of liken it to the relationship Soubi and Kio have, since it’s a relationship where one party (counting Natsuo and Youji as one unit in a party) is almost the polar opposite of the other, everyone is of a similar age, and they do seem to get along very well, even though they had to get over their differences and even if one party occasionally is bothersome/annoying towards the other. This is a relationship often looked over, but the three of them have helped each other. When Soubi leaves him, the first people Ritsuka goes to are Natsuo and Youji and even though it takes a hiccup for everything to get moving, they help him move forward to the next step. In turn, it’s clear that Ritsuka’s presence has helped ‘humanize’ and normalize Natsuo and Youji. They make a good bunch of genuine friends and have a good relationship.

Ritsuka and Kio: This is one that people tend to go one way or another with and hardly ever in the middle. People tend to see this relationship as entirely negative or entirely bordering on romantic when it’s neither. Kio did, at one point, strongly dislike Ritsuka, but this was before he ever met him and for the sole reason that Kio assumed Ritsuka would be like his brother. It didn’t take long after meeting him for that mindset to stop, and Kio seems to feel positively towards Ritsuka and vice versa, but it’s not anywhere near romantic. A lot of characters in Loveless deal with trying to find someone who understands them and their way of thinking and a lot of the characters seem to hold a lot of value to finding someone who understands. Ritsuka and Kio are no different. They’re referred to as kindred spirits, people who think alike and seem to understand each other. At this point in the manga, it’s clear that Kio’s developed some sort of caring, parental friendship with him, something that seems to carry over to Natsuo and Youji, as well.

The last character I’ve chosen for these in-depth relationship analyses is Seimei. Seimei is, by writing standards, our third main character. Seimei is, to anyone who’s known him, really, a little strange. Actually, he’s very strange, and most people know that in canon and everyone who reads quite quickly discovers that Seimei is absolutely not what Ritsuka, the person whose perspective the story is primarily told through, thinks of him.

Above I talked about Ritsuka and how anyone who gets to know him seems to feel very positively towards him and how the only person who really dislikes him or has a negative relationship with him is his mother, and those feelings are hinted at being influenced heavily by an outside force.

Seimei is the exact opposite of Ritsuka. In the relationship chart, all feelings that go towards him are negative to some degree. Obviously, Nisei, Ritsuka, and Soubi all have secondary feelings of positveness or romance, but even that’s tainted with negative feelings. Anyone who gets to know Seimei in the least develops negative feelings towards him to some degree. The only exception of this, which I didn’t mark on the chart due to space constraints, is again Aoyagi Misaki, his and Ritsuka’s mother. There’s a lot of evidence in the series pointing to Misaki somehow being magically tampered with and because of this, she idolizes and loves Seimei while she beats and hates Ritsuka. This is again odd because the way Misaki favors Seimei and hates Ritsuka works out perfectly in Seimei’s favor and her feelings only developed after Ritsuka ‘lost his memories’ and became a ‘new Ritsuka’. Misaki seems to put Seimei on a high pedestal and even goes as far as to refer to him as the man of the house.

However, with everyone else, Seimei burns his bridges at an alarming rate. With where we are now, every relationship that leads to Seimei is negative in some degree. Not only are Ritsuka and Seimei’s true names opposite, but so are the way they have relationships with other people. Right now, Seimei has burned every bridge he possibly can, and I have theorized before that it will most definitely bite him in the ass at some point. Seimei has made everyone around him dislike him in some context or another, and right now, he doesn’t seem to realize what he’s done.

Specific relationships dealing with Seimei:

I’ve already talked about Soubi and Seimei and Ritsuka and Seimei, so I’ll leave that off.

Seimei and Nisei: This is a relationship that seems to confuse and mess up a lot of people in the Loveless fandom, especially when they’re trying to write or portray these two characters together. I don’t blame them, really. This relationship is hard to grasp and the characters themselves are even harder to fully grasp. Often times, I’ll see Seimei portrayed as giving into Nisei and Nisei tends to either get treated like a person that’s done nothing bad ever or Nisei is portrayed as a sadistic monster who’s never felt anything for anyone ever. Both these characterizations for both characters are fundamentally wrong. Seimei is someone who wants control and power and holds himself as higher than anyone and everyone else in the series. He’s stated multiple times that he thinks that only Ritsuka is on the same level as him. No one else. Everyone else is below him. If there’s anyone sitting on a high horse in Loveless, it’s Seimei.

Nisei, on the other hand, may be fundamentally a bad person and he may not be. We don’t know, because Nisei is under Seimei’s complete and total control and it’s been hinted at/subtly acknowledged that Soubi has done many of the same things Nisei has under Seimei’s rule. He is sadistic, but he also does undoubtedly feel emotions. He may not acknowledge or even know it, but Nisei is completely in love with Seimei. That’s what may make this relationship so hard to grasp—Nisei claims at a couple points that he doesn’t think he’s able to feel love or empathy or remorse, but it seems as though Nisei was actually completely wrong about himself or in denial, and that can be a hard thing for readers to grasp, since it’s not often that a character confidently proclaims something about themselves that later turns out to be completely wrong.

Nisei is in love with Seimei, but it’s a one-sided thing and filled with conflicting negative thoughts as Nisei slowly realizes that his life is over and he’s become something entirely different under Seimei’s rule, something subservient and something he never expected or wanted to be. It’s not in Nisei’s character/personality to be submissive or to follow and obey others, so this is where his inner conflict and the negativity towards Seimei comes in—he’s trying to pull himself back from Seimei but keeps getting reeled in further and is ultimately unable to stop it. Seimei, in turn, seems to feel negatively towards Nisei because of the fact that Nisei is trying to pull back and doesn’t want to fulfill orders or be owned. It’s a push and pull relationship and is all kinds of negative.

Seimei and Mikado: On a basic level, their relationship is easy to grasp. Seimei and Mikado were once friends or friendly associates, and then Seimei betrayed Mikado by ripping her innocence and dignity from her. Mikado states that she and Seimei were alike and understood each other, and that’s where people start being confused by them. Mikado seems to have fully trusted in Seimei at one point and was willing to follow him down into whatever rabbit hole he’s in now. Mikado describes herself as not being like other people, as not being able to understand or control her feelings or the feelings of others and states that she can only understand others and situations if she has a reason. She also says that Seimei was the same way and the reason they bonded was because it was natural to get along with each other when no one else could understand them. Many readers don’t seem to realize just how strong her bond with Seimei must’ve been—Mikado viewed him as the one person in this world who could and would understand her. It was a bond even stronger than the one she has with her Fighter, who she has a good relationship with, but still seems to miss the fact that Seimei was someone who understood her.

Because of the fact that their relationship was so strong, the betrayal hurt more. Some people wonder why Mikado is so vindictive when it comes to hunting down Seimei. It’s because of the fact that she thought she’d found someone who truly, actually understood her and her reasons by which she lived her life, and then that same person brutally betrayed her and took the one thing she had away—a reason. Seimei and Mikado are implied to have known each other a long time, as Mikado makes a comment to Ritsuka that he looks like the splitting image of Seimei at 12, and Seimei burned his bridge with her in the absolute worst way possible and took everything from her. She’s developed a need for vengeance from this, as has her Fighter, and in turn, Seimei taunts her multiple times during the battle and decided to have her raped and beaten when he no longer wanted her. Seimei and Mikado’s relationship is one of the most violent ones in the series currently, and it shows.

Seimei and Ritsu: This relationship is pretty straightforward. The two of them absolutely hate each other, Seimei because Ritsu talks down to him and thinks of him as a child, and Ritsu hates Seimei because of his treatment of Soubi, which is ironic given that Ritsu was the first one to really break down Soubi. It does get misrepresented, occasionally.

Those are the three specific characters I wanted to go over in this post, but I do want to touch on a few others who didn’t need a full character-relationship analysis but still have relationships needing explaining.

Misc relationships:

Nagisa and Ritsu: Above anything and everything else, the way this relationship is portrayed in fanworks bothers me like nothing else. I mentioned it above when I talked about why I made this post and wrote all this, but I’d like to talk about it more. Nagisa is absolutely not head over heels in love with Ritsu. There is some sort of romantic feelings on her end, but they’re so wrapped up in negative feelings, regret, and hatred that it’s hard for me to even define it as romantic. She has romantic feelings for Ritsu, but she is not in love with him. Nagisa’s entire character revolves around the death of her sister many, many years ago. Her sister was the only thing in her life that she’s ever cared so strongly about and Sanae’s death left a scar on Nagisa that hasn’t healed, even 20+ years after. Nagisa’s personality and relationships also revolve around this. To put it simply, Nagisa has spent over twenty years trying to figure out a way to close the gap Sanae left behind while at the same time, trying to hold onto every piece of her that she has.

Ritsu is one of those pieces. She’s attached onto him because he’s the last remaining part of her sister. At the same time, though, she despises him because Ritsu had some part in Sanae’s death—namely, leaving Sanae in the pond where she drowned alone while knowing that Sanae couldn’t swim. Nagisa has held onto this, as well. Ritsu, on the other hand, is narcissistic and has a desire for power over people. Nagisa is an easy target because of the fact that she’s vulnerable to him in particular. In addition, it seems as though Ritsu is also holding onto something, whether it be Nagisa’s sister or Akio in some weird, convoluted way. His main goal is power, though, and Nagisa is easy to shove into submission. Throughout the series, Ritsu also insults her and mocks her and eggs on emotional breakdowns so he can get some sort of amusement out of her suffering. Their relationship is an incredibly negative one where both parties are actively using each other for some sort of validation or amusement and even if Nagisa feels romantic feelings for Ritsu, those feelings are still rooted in the negativity and terribleness of the rest of their relationship.

Tokino and Soubi: I didn’t include this in Soubi’s part because of the fact that most of the negativity between them is caused by Tokino’s feelings and pre-conceived beliefs. This is another relationship looked over and a lot of people seem to ignore that the first thing Soubi did upon meeting Tokino was treat him rudely and coldly and the second thing they did was get into an argument that was heated enough that Natsuo and Youji had to tell them to calm down. They both seem to dislike each other beyond what’s normal for a pair of Fighters, and this is mostly rooted, again, in Soubi’s identity as Fighter and in specific, the identity of being the Beloved Fighter. Tokino despises Soubi because he views him as similar to Nisei, and Soubi returns those feelings because—well, he’s Soubi and Soubi’s automatic response to someone disliking him is to start some sort of fight with them and also be incredibly passive-aggressive

Natsuo and Youji and Nagisa: Oh, boy, is this one clusterfuck of a relationship. I talked about how, in this post, Natsuo and Youji don’t seem to have developed real attachments quite yet and because of that, they view their mother figure in an attractive light where they think that it’s entirely appropriate to want to pursue her romantically. Despite this, their feelings towards her aren’t necessarily ‘positive’. They state a couple times in the manga that they prefer to live with Soubi and they seem very disappointed when Nagisa called them back. The two of them have been basically living on their own until they’re taken in by Soubi, since Nagisa never really bothered to care for them. They attached wrongly onto her and developed some sort of crush on her, even though she’s their parent. Nagisa also seems to not like them at all, to the point where she’s seen verbally abusing them and slapping them occasionally. They share a dislike of this treatment, making their feelings towards her both romantic and negative, whereas Nagisa just feels negatively towards them.

Seven: I mentioned above that I put Seven in here because her lack of relationships is important to her character and to the series. In the manga, Seven is said to basically be a shut-in who never really leaves her lab/office. She comes out rarely and the only significant relationship is the one that she has with Nagisa. She’s hardly ever seen with anyone else and actually comes out of her office a total of one time on her own during the manga, which is when she meets with Ritsu and Nagisa in the hospital sector where Ritsu is being treated. She isolates herself and her only friend is Nagisa.

Septimal Moon: The dynamic between the members of Septimal Moon is also a little interesting. Some of them have personal relationships with each other and tend to group with those people. Examples include Seimei and Mikado staying around each other and Nagisa, Seven, and Ritsu having personal relationships with each other. They seem to pretty much stay in their group and don’t stray often and there is a lot of interpersonal drama between members, which I talked about in this post.

That’s all the initial analysis I’m going to do for this relationship chart. I’ll be making one that focuses on the flashback chapters eventually. If you’d like to ask me about or have me discuss any more of these points, go ahead and shoot me and ask and I’ll answer it!

#loveless #Agatsuma Soubi #Aoyagi Ritsuka #Aoyagi Seimei #akame nisei #gomon mikado #sagan nagisa #minami ritsu #theory #analysis #my graphics #my content

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bluebeirry · 8 years ago

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This is dedicated to Suzume42, whose works got me into this pairing and filled a prompt I sent. I didn’t manage to write out a fic, so I just wrote out some outlines of how I think this pairing might have gone down. Slight warning for lime, mental illness not being properly treated, some slut-shaming, and bad parenting from Paragus and Vegeta. Non-explicit.

So I came up with a Broly/Trunks AU where Broly kinda has his abridged personality (though the others are cannon, and the slaves are given the name “Shamoshans”). Except slight expansion on his past, complete changing of Bardock’s origins, and my own half-assed attempt at trying to justify the “crying baby” backstory. And I am of the opinion that the reason future!Trunks had such trouble entering SSJ form when present!Trunks discovered it by accident is because tailed Saiyans fuel SSJ with rage, but tail-less Saiyans do not. Basically Gohan teaching Trunks SSJ form was the equivalent of a right-handed teacher trying to teach a left-handed student how to write. Also my strange opinions on Saiyan mating habits.

So the party spends a night on the planet. Reason: the stupid comet is too big and if Vegeta had wanted to look out the window on the way over he’d have easily seen it & fucked up everything. Since Paragus knew nothing about Vegeta as a person except a) he’s Vegeta Sr,’s son, b) he used to work for Freeza, and c) he lives on Earth now; Paragus knows nothing of Vegeta’s personality and couldn’t take the risk of him wanting to be in the command center of the ship (with all it’s nice windows and scanner equipment) and chose to wait another day. Gohan, Krillin and Trunks spent the day exploring the planet and came home late; by the time they returned they’d missed dinner and raided the kitchens instead.

Unfortunately, the Shamoshans? Aren’t so willing to trust people who look in every way like the (monsters) beings who rule over them- especially since two (and then three) admit to being Saiyans. Even if they saved them, the Shamoshans don’t know if they’re honest or if they orchestrated this entire thing with the guards in order to manipulate them into speaking the truth, especially since no guards were killed or even crippled. From the Shamoshan’s POV’s and cultural understanding of war, this means their “rescuers” are on the guards sides- and ergo not to be trusted. Merely respected and sucked up to and told what (the Shamoshans think) they want to hear. So on that first night, Trunks is kind of still poking around the castle, having done most of his earlier exploring outside it. Broly was in the room when a servant reported to Paragus that the other guests had returned late, but as soon as Goku came up Paragus kicked Broly out so he could talk about him in private. Not sure what to do, Broly figured that their guests were probably hungry- especially the Saiyans. He’s not sure how much non-Saiyans eat but from experience can guess that non-Saiyans probably won’t become immobile if they don’t eat for twelve hours, so chooses to send some food to Gohan’s room and Trunks’ room- y’know, the small one and the cute one. Trunks, meanwhile, is caught off guard when a random servant shows up with a cart full of food while he’s literally picking apart the room (hey he’s Bulma’s son- he can do some “science-y analyzing stuff”). And is reminded by the food that there’s someone else there who might know something.

So Trunks tracks down Broly at a nearby lake; Broly explains that he likes lakes. They’re nice and peaceful and nobody’s around them (usually, since most sapient aquatic species prefer rivers and oceans), so it’s a good place to practice doing “that thing he can do that his dad can’t where his hair changes color and he feels a lot stronger and faster and confident.” Getting back on topic, Trunks asks Broly about the Shamoshans and the planet. Broly doesn’t know much about them; his father handles most of that. He also doesn’t know how Paragus found this planet, why he chose it, how they got the Shamoshans there, or where the Legendary Super Saiyan is- though when Trunks mentions never having heard of them Broly is surprised, then wonders if the LSSJ seems to be following him and Paragus; wherever they go reports of the LSSJ aren’t far behind.

Trunks starts to ponder this, and Broly in turn asks if he can ask him a question: if he knows why his father kept those servants since they don’t seem very strong. By “servants” Broly meant Oolong, Krillin, and Roshi; he assumed from the smell that Gohan is either Trunks’ little brother or else Vegeta’s ward. Trunks figures out that Broly assumes non-Saiyans to be inferiors and servants; Broly is confused by the assumption that they’re not. Except for the Galactic Patrol- but he hasn’t really seen those guys since they left their original galaxy- he’s only known his father and various servants and underlings. Well, not his underlings- they answer to his father, but he can command them. He assumed it was the same with Trunks. Trunks in turn explains that they’re his friends- and again Broly is confused, he’s heard that word used by non-Saiyans in relation to each other but he’s not sure what it means. By this point Trunks is thinking that this guy might be somewhat amoral, but that seems to be mostly his upbringing; so he describes “friends” as someone who’s your equal and who you enjoy spending time with. That, Broly can understand; he sometimes enjoys spending time with his father, but his dad is the superior officer there. But… wouldn’t that make Gohan Trunks’ friend and not the others? Trunks then tries to ask what makes someone “equal”- is it strength? Broly admits that no it isn’t, because Broly can do that hair-changing thing and his father can’t, he’s stronger than his father. His father is older than him, though, especially when you factor in the years Broly spent in Cryosleep when his father woke up.

This piques Trunks’ interest, and he learns that inter-galactic travel is far more recent than he’d thought- the technology to jump galaxies in hours was only developed in the last year or so, and even then the ship they used to get there was cutting edge technology. When Broly and Paragus first came to this galaxy years ago, it took almost a full decade to get there; they and all the other passengers were put into cryosleep to make the journey go by quicker. But Paragus was woken up after only a year of sleep, because the ship lost its best fighter and ran into an unexpected band of Wraiths (Wait what-), they needed someone strong enough to fight off the Wraiths for them and with enough strategic, logistical and tactical knowledge to keep them alive. So even though he’s technically 30, he’s only got about 21 years of memories and physical growth behind him. Ergo he’s still a child and his father is his superior. Trunks thinks that’s a little foolish to call him a “child;” he can fight after all, and besides which Paragus should still include him in his work to show him how he runs things. After all, he won’t learn how to do the things Paragus does if nobody shows him how.

(Wait, wraiths? Oh yeah, big carnivorous space whale-penguins with a hive mind that like eating people’s souls. “…You’re going to have to tell me more about them later,” says Trunks.)

Broly would like to point out that his father does try to include him in planning; but he always gets confused and either keeps interrupting to ask “silly” questions, or he gets bored and stops paying attention. Besides which, he doesn’t really fight all that much. Which is not to say he doesn’t know how, just that he’s… not very well controlled. He kind of… blacks out when he’s in danger and goes into a Berserker Rage, which he can’t really control; once when he was like that, he gave Paragus that eye-scar. Trunks compares it to Super Saiyan form- no, not like the Legendary Super Saiyan, more like a toned-down version that any Saiyan can access- shouldn’t Broly know that? He was doing it earlier.

Thus Broly learns that “that thing he can do that his dad can’t where his hair changes color and he feels a lot stronger and faster and confident” isn’t just something cool that got his father really excited when he first did it. Trunks can do the same- and Trunks can and does prove it. And then Trunks invites him to show his own form- so he does. And it’s kind of… nice to have someone else who understands it.

So the two of them get talking about their forms. Broly explains that his father used to get scared and angry at him a lot, because he was narcoleptic. (Or at least that’s what he assumes- he used to black out a lot and wake up in new places. Still does, sometimes, but now it doesn’t happen as often or in inconvenient places or times.) So his father took him to see a lot of holy people- monks, nuns, gurus, priests and priestesses and shamans and people like that. They’d work with him on meditation, on getting control from the inside, and after a lot of practice he learned how to access “that thing he can-” er, SSJ form. Which basically took finding anger where it was hidden away and accepting it, even without knowing it’s cause (or how to kill the cause), and letting it be replaced by other emotions- positive ones. And Broly talks about the teachers he’s had, the stories they told him, the lessons they gave, and the problems they had that sometimes he could help them with (he liked that, it felt good to know that someone he cared about was doing better because of him). (It tells Trunks something important about this person- he’s not dumb. He’s not a child. He’s just… sheltered.) Trunks in turn explains how SSJ form was a huge part of his past and it took him so damn long to find in himself the rage needed to create it. Broly is silent when he hears about how Trunks grew up in a dying world and so helpless on a personal level- he’s never experienced something so horrible himself and he doesn’t know what he could possibly say in response that wouldn’t sound like pity or dismissing his experiences. Trunks asks if Broly can maybe show or explain how to use SSJ form without the rage; it’s something he didn’t think was possible, but the hardest part for him has always been keeping that rage going- usually it just burns out. Broly’s not sure he can, but he agrees to try.

They spend a few hours flying around that pond, mostly playing around with a little bit of instruction going on, and soon leaving the pond to explore more of the world- there’s a lot of forests and wilderness alongside the rubble, and the unoccupied deserts have some real beauty. Until eventually, finally, Trunks drops out of SSJ form while in the middle of it- and pretty high up, giving Broly a bit of a scare- only to push back in at the last minute, laughing and smiling. He’d never gone SSJ like this before- with the delight of the challenge, the thrill of the flight fueling it. Gohan had always said to be angry, use the pain- he’d only ever seen his own powers as weapons, not something so, so, fun. Not something good, or nice, or- (“Beautiful,” Broly whispered.) (Then he blushed and tried to backtrack.) (“Broly,” he said so softly yet strong, confident, with moonlight shining in his hair, “Thank you.”)

And the moment is just so right, and nobody’s talked to him like this since that one nun who died while Broly was asleep from one of his blackouts, and he’s neve met anyone who felt like a real equal, like a real person only with compassion and a new sort of affection he’s never felt before, and it just seems so right. So Broly asks Trunks if he wants to spar. (He’s never asked this before, and it’s so strange to say and to feel the words on his own lips. Gah, too forward!) And Trunks agrees. And they fight- first in their base forms, but that’s fine because they’re pretty well matched (one is stronger but the other faster, one has more organized training and the other more experience [even if it was almost always against the same two enemies] [even if they’re wrong about who has more experience, but only one of them can remember all of his battles]), as near as Broly can tell. And it’s… good. To have something like this, to have someone else challenge your skills and your strength and make you feel alive and strong while still being so alive and strong. He wants to share that- he wants Trunks to know how he feels and wants Trunks to feel the same way. (Unknown to Broly, Trunks is feeling something very similar.) So when they’re grappling, and Broly had Trunks pinned but he managed to flip them, Broly kisses him. And he kisses back. And they sort of keep going from there- both the spar and the kissing, which just feels so right. Because every bit of pain is a reminder of how strong (and ergo beautiful) the other one is, and furthermore it feels good, at least once they get going. So being scratched and hit and bitten is wonderful, and they both want to share that so they scratch and it and bite the other so that they can see how it makes their partner smile. And soon, they’ve gone all the way. Until they’re united in body, and Trunks starts to feel that feeling of joy in being strong, because Broly is making him feel strong, and he powers up in this newer, better way with that joy and delight motivating him. And to Broly, it’s like being closer to anyone than he’s been in years in ways he’s never felt close to anyone before (not even with that one prostitute he got for his birthday a few years ago- that was just awkward and messy), and seeing Trunks ascend reminds him of one more way he’s not alone. Because somewhere in the back of his mind, behind the repression and damage, he knows what it means for him to be able to transform, and he knows it sets him apart from the rest of the universe in ways nothing else will. And at this moment, when giving in to instinct, it’s waking up all of him- both halves are coherent for just this one time, and he knows full well that Trunks cannot truly match him. But even with that knowledge, he can fool himself for just a few moments into thinking that there’s someone else who can truly match him in every way- and he gives himself this luxury, powering up to the same rank Trunks is at.

So they have fun. They end when the first rays of sunlight from the dawn start to crack- except that they’d flown so far they’re in what amounts to a different time zone. Back at the castle there’s still several hours until the night is over. It doesn’t really matter, it was the changing light and the romance of it that stopped them. Probably for the best that they head back now; Trunks points out that for practical reasons, they probably shouldn’t go a whole night without sleeping. Broly kinda quietly mumbles that he’d rather be impractical and spend more time with Trunks. Trunks blushes a little- which worries Broly, but he’s assured that it’s good blush. Trunks jokes that he feels a little bit like a cradle robber, since Broly’s so sheltered.

“’M not that sheltered- I know things.” “Yeah? Like what?” “Well, I know how to…” [Meanwhile, his brain cannot stop focusing on how Good Trunks looks with those hickeys] “… do stuff. Lots of stuff.” “Such as?” “You.” “…” [One Super Saiyan is instantly worrying if that was too crude or too forward, until-] “Well, I walked right into that one.” “Y-yeah, yeah you did.” “…” [‘Okay, Trunks, now you have to decide- do you really want to do this? You could just go home now and pretend this never happened. Or you could…’] “What, else do you know?” “Um…” “Or, what specifically do you know? About, me?” [‘Think brain! Right now all I can come up with is very, very literal stuff that I only just learned- unless that’s what he wants? For me to be more forward?’] “Well… I know that you’re sensitive behind your ears.” “Oh?” “And, I know that if I kiss you, like this-” “Hoo!” “you make a little noise just like that. I know that… I like that noise. I like it a lot. But… I like the noise you make when I do this-” “Uh!” “-even better.” “Hey- you wanna know what I know?” “Huh? I mean yes- yes please.”

Alternatively, the two just lie there for a while and talk about it. Which is just as nice as the other option, just in a different way.

Either way, they didn’t head back until the entire sun was in the sky. And when they did return had to stop for food- and a bath. They broke apart here, since it was late and was probably a better idea to go alone and actually get what they set out to do done (Broly’s idea).

So the next morning, when Broly doesn’t show up to leave with Vegeta on time and the servants report he didn’t eat breakfast, Paragus has to bluff to Vegeta that Broly must be sick or something (as Vegeta is cranky and ready to go and will take any excuse to leave this dump behind if it’s given to him). Vegeta in fact decides to collect his own offspring to come with him instead, or better yet get “Kakarot” to teleport them home.

Paragus, unable to stop Vegeta without breaking the ruse, quickly goes to wake Broly, and is at first furious that the boy was still asleep, then confused why Broly is wrapped in a blanket like a cape or a toga. Meanwhile Vegeta is also mildly disappointed that his offspring wasn’t already ready to go, and then confused why he’s curled up and holding his jacket around him. Paragus insists the blanket is unnecessary and yanks it away, just around the same time Vegeta grabs Trunks’ arm and sees that the jacket is actually ripped. Goku, Gohan, Krillin, Oolong and Roshi choose then to show up. (Goku says, “Hey Vegeta, are we going or what because Iiiiye holy-” Gohan says, “Trunks are you okay? You look like you got in a fight.” Krillin says, “Huh- I didn’t think I saw any ladies around here. Guess I was wrong.”)

Vegeta is like “you know what, fuck it, I don’t care if you screwed a hundred strangers last night. Just make sure it doesn’t interfere with your ability to function. If someone like Cell, or this stupid Legendary Super Saiyan were to come in and attack while you were asleep and you made it easy for them to kill you because whoever spread your legs wore you out to the point where you couldn’t wake up- then we’ll have a problem. We’re leaving in ten minutes, get your shit together and meet us there or beg Kakarot to come back for you later, I don’t care.”

Paragus is much more anxious and freaking out- it’s one way in which he doesn’t have control over his ultimate weapon. And he didn’t see this coming, so that means that either he didn’t understand Broly as well as he thought he did, or something big came along that changed things outside his predictions (though Paragus doesn’t know it, both are true). Oh, and Vegeta’s about to leave too early.

So when Paragus and Vegeta cross paths near the ship, it’s a bit embarrassing for everyone involved who isn’t named Gohan. Broly and Trunks both have new outfits out of nowhere. Broly got his from various clothing items the staff and soldiers could provide; it covers everything but doesn’t fit well. Trunks is wearing Roshi’s (still somewhat smelly) shirt, and Krillin’s belt. Nobody wants to talk, so Vegeta tries to just go “See ya,” which reminds Paragus why exactly they were there and drives them all back into the plot.

This is where things get complicated.

After some time of arguing, Vegeta makes a nasty insult, Paragus looses his patience and decides to fuck the plan- time to break out the ace. He then chuckles and brags cryptically about how Vegeta played right into his hands. It was hard going, and Vegeta almost “won,” but in the end Paragus will get what he wants. (Trunks looks over to Broly, who just shrugs- he didn’t ask questions about why they came here in the first place.) Paragus claims he has the ultimate weapon (“And despite (Vegeta’s) attempts to send (his) spawn- if that is (Vegeta’s) offspring and not just a hired whore- to seduce him, that power will remain in (Paragus’) hands.”). And Paragus uses it by activating the crown to initiate Broly’s split-personality takeover, and get him to kill Vegeta. (He’s not focused on Earth, but he can’t stand the thought of someone else ruling his empire- and he knows if he wants Saiyan rule, he can’t exactly uphold Saiyan glory if they all die out soon. If the prince is alive, he outranks Paragus, and thus any other Saiyans he discovers would just follow Vegeta around, not him. First he has to kill Vegeta- then he can go looking for survivors.)

They all start fighting, but something is off. Though Trunks isn’t holding back- he understands the concept of mind-control and knows the dangers- the change comes from Goku and Gohan. In that whenever Goku or Gohan shout in battle, Broly flinches and gets angrier, fiercer, stronger. Until eventually the crown breaks- and he’s still in a blood-rage.

When the crown breaks, Trunks is the one who tries reason. It helps that Broly seems to be solely focused on Goku and Gohan, ignoring everyone else and swatting them out of the way like flies. Trunks shouts at Broly to stop, there’s nobody making him do this anymore, what’s going on. Broly in return does talk- about death. Describing death, or rather several deaths, as though he’s experienced them. Then he hits Gohan- and outright says “Now, it’s a daughter, watching the corpse of her parent as she bleeds out, blood filling her lungs, making it harder and harder to breathe, she’s-”

And Broly keeps talking, but Trunks realizes that this isn’t a fantasy- somehow Broly is experiencing another person’s death, every time Gohan and Goku raise their voices (and then Broly stops talking and goes back to beating up everything in sight). But… the way he said it seems like there’s about one vision per yell. And he was rambling a lot, but describing more deaths than Gohan and Goku could have given him in this short time they’ve known him. He tells the others his theory, saying that maybe if they stop yelling they can calm him down (which as Goku points out isn’t easy when he’s beating them up).

As the fight goes on Trunks and Piccolo wind up grouped up at one point and making a plan together. Trunks remembers some of the advice Broly said his teachers had given them and, with Piccolo’s input, they realize in hindsight that those teachers were trying to help him recover from some early trauma. Something repressed in his memories, something he usually can’t remember until he snaps like this; and then they re-enter the fight. They start spreading this guess to the others when they can, and Piccolo informs Vegeta of this while Paragus is still there. Only now does Paragus learn that Goku’s scream has this influence on Broly, and only now does he make the connection- remembering that he saw Goku’s cradle next to Broly’s years ago. He knew there was some trauma that caused this split personality- Saiyans can remember infancy, some even recalling their own births. But he always assumed it was the attempted murder that made Broly so uncontrollable. But now…

(And Vegeta remembers, but doesn’t feel the need to say, that according to the few files he could find on the loss of his planet, that Bardock was reported to have gone mad a few weeks before the loss of the planet- trying to tell everyone that their planet was doomed. At first he thought it was just bitter irony, but now he wonders if he had seen something. If the blood of a seer could carry the genetic potential to one day have a child who is a seer; and if a being whose power is the very epitome of all Saiyan power might be affected by the power of another Saiyan, if that power was unusual enough.)

(At the time, nobody but Broly recognizes or remembers that Kakarot wouldn’t stop crying. He’s a bit too distracted by the [3 hours = 3 x 60 = 180 min, 180 min x 60 sec = 10800 sec. Lets say an average of 15 seconds per death if we assume that a new vision begins as soon as the last one ends if he’s still screaming and/or screaming again when the vision ends, so 10800 / 15 = 720 deaths] ~720 deaths being replayed over and over, fuzzy from time but still there, plus the new ones from today.)

“Why didn’t he try to kill Kakarot, then?” “It’s been 30 years- in that time, your voice changes, your appearance changes, your scent changes, everything but your hair, and let’s be honest- there was quite a few third-class Saiyans with hair like that.”

So. The battle. It goes as it goes. Not much of a choice. They make it out, barely, and everyone’s trapped in a tiny pod. Meanwhile, there’s a guy who wakes up, dizzy and confused, figuring he fell asleep, and everything around him is about to burn up and he can’t really breathe- he needs to get the fuck out of here ASAP.

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visariga-blog · 8 years ago

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Rīga City Elections: 2017

With headlines dominated by major elections in the UK, US, and France in the past year and another major British vote just a month away, you might be surprised to hear that Latvia also underwent a significant vote as well on Saturday. Although national parliamentary elections are still a year away, voters throughout the cities and counties of Latvia spent Thursday, Friday, and Saturday choosing their local officials. While city (and county) elections don't nearly get the same attention or excitement that federal and state elections do in the US, Rīga makes up somewhere between a half to a third of the entire country's population. While mayoralty of a major city is often a stepping stone to higher office in the US, the mayor of Rīga is a national political figure without parallel in the states (aside from possibly New York).

The city council's system is similar to Latvia's national proportional voting parliamentary system. Voters throughout the city choose one “party” to vote for, and parties get a number of representatives on the council proportionate to the amount of overall votes they got throughout the city. Unlike in American cities, there are no “wards” or “districts” that vote independently of one another. There is no councillor from Bolderāja, for example; all members are “at large.” The threshold for representation on the council is 5%, so as you can see below only three parties held seats after the 2013 election even though twelve parties competed overall.

This means that voters do not directly elect their mayor. The position of “mērs” works similar to that of “prime minister” in parliamentary systems, and whichever party or coalition of parties is able to hold a majority of seats and form a government gets to choose the mayor. In practice, this means that the leader of the winning party during the election becomes “mayor.”

Of course, just because mayors are not technically directly elected does not mean that individual personalities don't have an effect on the election. In fact, Latvian politics are quite personality-driven, with party advertisements and promotional materials often prominently featuring their would-be mayors.

Although technically eleven parties took part in the election, only the six that are described here were competitive in any way shape or form. Having only lived here for four years and only now reaching a level of Latvian competence required to watch and understand news programs and articles, I can't and won't claim to be an expert on Latvian politics. Instead, this post will mostly be my casual observations as a semi-outsider.

1. Saskaņa/Gods Kalpot Rīgai! (Harmony/An Honor to Serve Riga!)

We start with the incumbent coalition that has governed Rīga for the past eight years and was the odds-on favorite to win the election. Saskaņa is a continuation of the “Sakaņas centrs” coalition which originally formed in 2005 as an alliance between various “social democracy” parties and regional factions that generally represented the interests of the country's Russophone minority. Going into this election, Saskaņa was the largest single party not just on Rīga city council but also in Saema (the country's parliament).

Saskaņa is routinely accused of being a front for the Kremlin's interests in Latvia, as the party supports closer ties with Russia as well as issues important to the Russian minority such as official second language status and unconditional citizenship for the more than 11% of the country's “non-citizen” residents (most of which are ethnically Russian and migrated during Soviet times). Reports and investigations regarding Saskaņa's connections with Russian government money and influence are a regular occurrence in Latvian media, although like most of the Kremlin's alleged meddling attempts, it's been virtually impossible to prove anything of significance.

The party's national leader and incumbent mayor is the legendary Nils Ušakovs, who first came to office in 2009 at the age of just 32. In the decade before he became mayor, Ušakovs was an active and well-known journalist who worked for a wide range of Latvian media outlets. Having been married three times, his colorful personal life is a constant fixation of Latvian tabloids. You may have already seen him in a viral video that made the international rounds a few months back in which his interview was interrupted by one of his cats jumping onto the table and drinking from his coffee mug.

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Ušakovs is one of the few public figures in Latvian politics that inspires the same sort of vitriol or devotion that personalities such as Barack Obama or Donald Trump do in America. While I rarely hear anything but apathy regarding Prime Minister Māris Kučinskis, people generally think that the mayor is either an honest and competent public servant whose done the best for Rīga that the can, or a cynical and insidious mouthpiece of Russian government interests.

For the past two elections, Saskaņa has run on a unified ballot with the small regional party “Gods Kalpot Rīgai!” This party was founded by anti-corruption activist Andris Ameriks after his former “Reform Party” that previously ran city government in coalition with Saskaņa dissolved due to an ironic massive corruption scandal. As is expected by an incumbent party, much of the advertising and promotional materials throughout the city focused on getting out the vote and “not staying home.” It seems like Saskaņa seemed particularly interested in shedding it's image as the “Russian party,” as some of its advertisements featured supporters with clearly “Latvian” names extolling Ušakovs' supposed achievements in improving city life over the last few years.

Although the other major parties didn't particularly coordinate with one another, there was a general effort to paint the election as a referendum on Mayor Ušakovs, who they saw as vulnerable after eight years of incumbency and lower approval ratings than ever before.

2. Latvijas Reģionu Apvienība/Latvijas Attīstībai (Latvia's Regional Alliance/For Latvia's Development)

After incumbent Sasķana/GKR, the party that seemed to compete the most for Rīga city council was the new Latvijas Reģionu Apvienība, a party formed in 2014 as an alliance of various regional parties just a few months before the national parliamentary elections. The party advertises itself as “centrist” an pro-European, with a focus on developing regions outside of Rīga. Like virtually all major Latvian political parties, “family values” (marriage between only a man and a woman) is one of the “core values” listed on the “program” page of their website.

The party's leader since its founding in 2014 has been Mārtiņš Bondars, a veteran in Latvian politics as well as a former NCAA basketball player and president of the infamous Latvijas Krājbanka during the 2008 financial crisis. Bondars' image featured heavily in LRA campaign advertising, going by the quite optimistic name “Mērs Bondars.” Līga and I joked that he was so confident about winning the election that he legally changed his first name to “Mērs.”

In Rīga the party shared a ballot with Latvijas Attīstībai, Latvia's version of a libertarian party. Despite it's youth, LRA had already had some early success in the 2014 parliamentary elections with 6.66% of the vote and winning eight seats in Saema.

3. Vienotība (Unity)

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. When I first arrived in Latvia, Vienotība was the major player in national politics, and since then has been the largest governing coalition partner (Saskaņa has been the biggest single party in Saema, but has never been able to form a government due to other parties refusing to cooperate with them). Since then, due to a series of mis-steps and PR disasters, their reputation as a technocratic centrist party has been replaced by one of incompetence and inefficiency. Vienotība seems aware of this, and has gone through various attempts at re-branding lately. In case you weren't able to guess, “jaunā” means “the new” in Latvian.

For Rīga's elections, the party put up 36-year-old Vilņis Ķirsis and featured his picture heavily in advertisements throughout the city along with various campaign promises such as “4000 new rentable apartments for young families.” However, the material I got from “Jaunā” Vienotība in the mail a few days before the election painted a very different picture.

Nasty negative advertising is nothing new in politics anywhere in the world, but this pamphlet had me baffled. The very first comparison between “Mērs” Ķirsis and Mayor Ušakovs is that while Ķirsis supports Latvian as the only state language, Ušakovs supports Russian as a second official state language. These opinions should surprise virtually no one, but it was strange to see this as the very first issue that Vienotība wanted to highlight considering that roughly half of the population of Rīga is either ethnically Russian or Russophone, and around the same proportion supported a proposed constitutional amendment in 2012 that would have changed the language policy. Even more shocking is the very third point that highlighted how Ķirsis celebrates the patriotic holiday of Lāčplēša diena every year (the day that the Latvian army successfully held off an invading force of Germans and Russians in 1919), while Ušakovs celebrates the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany on May 9th each year. The issue of May 9th celebrations is one of the most emotionally raw for ethnic Latvians and Russians who see the day through two radically different perspectives, and drawing attention to it on a pamphlet sent around a city almost evenly divided between both ethnicities is a curious decision for a party whose name means “unity” in English.

This pamphlet seemed to me like somewhat of a white flag for this particular election, and I imagine that the party is looking forward instead to parliamentary elections next year. Even so, it's strange to me that a party that built its reputation on centrism and technocracy would dive so enthusiastically head-first into identity politics and have no problem completely alienating a large swath of the electorate. Is this what's “jaunā” about Vienotība? The lifecycle of the average Latvian political party is notoriously short, and Vienotība seems like it's just about ready to go to seed.

4. Nacionālā apvienība "Visu Latvijai!"—"Tēvzemei un Brīvībai/Latvijas Nacionālās Neatkarības Kustība" (National Alliance “All for Latvia!” — ”For Fatherland and Freedom/Latvian Independence Movement”)

Yes, this is actually the party's name that appears on the official ballot, although it sounds long and convoluted enough to be the title of a Japanese anime OVM (direct-to-video movie). The party's platform is a mix of far-right populism, social conservatism, environmentalism, and patriotism that appeals to a lot of nationalists. As you can tell from the long name, many smaller similar parties have been absorbed into what is most commonly called “Nacionālā Apvienība” (or, when written, “NA”). NA these days has a virtual monopoly on Latvian nationalist politics; an rival upstart party called “No sirds Latvijai” (For Latvia from the Heart) has failed to take off despite an impressive seven seats in Saema won in their first national election (2014), and is likely dead in the water after their candidate in the second largest city of Daugavpils released this infamous “rap” video:

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Before the parties that represented the Russian minority successfully consolidated into Saskaņa, NA's component parties controlled Rīga's mayoralty for much of the 90s and 2000s. These days NA seems content being a bit player in Latvian politics, having participated as a minor partner in the last few national coalition governments. Interestingly, mayoral candidate Baiba Broka is good friends with her nemesis Mayor Ušakovs' current wife (as you can see in this trashy tabloid photo of the couple attending her birthday featured in Latvia's version of the National Enquirer, kasjauns.lv).

5. Zaļo un Zemnieku Savienība (Union of Greens and Farmers)

Although ZZS currently controls the prime ministership and presidency of the country as well as many key ministerial positions thanks to an impressive 21 seats in Saema (opposed to Vienotība's 23), the party has never quite taken off in Rīga. This can be evidenced by the fact that although I received a newspaper in the mail printed by the party to introduce their candidates and platform, I didn't see a single poster anywhere in the city during the entire campaign. The party failed to qualify with more than 5% of the vote in the 2013 elections, and it didn't seem like they were expecting to do much better this time around.

While technically a member of the Europe-wide Green Party, ZZS describes itself as “center-right” which is odd for green politics to say the least. Since 2006, the party has been dominated by notorious oligarch and mayor of the 6th largest city of Ventspils Aivars Lembergs, with Lembergs even running for prime minister despite being technically barred from governmental duties in Ventspils due to numerous criminal activities. Aside from Ventspils, ZZS has been quite successful in many other local municipalities in the last decade, including the city of Jelgava where I work every day.

The Dark Horse: Jaunā konservatīvā partija (The New Conservative Party)

Although this upstart party founded in 2014 by anti-corruption advocate Juta Striķe had virtually no visible advertising throughout the city in the past month, there has been a bit of positive buzz about these guys. Their politics remind me a bit of the “liberal” wing of the US Republican party that used to exist prior to the “Tea Party Revolution” in the late 2000s, and they aim to fill the centrist void left by Vienotība's slow and steady implosion and provide an “anti-corruption” alternative to ZZS which is tainted in the eyes of many due to their affiliation with Lembergs.

Nepaliec Mājās!

Thanks to my Irish citizenship and being declared as a resident of Rīga, I was actually allowed to vote. Although I wasn't sure at first if I actually would, I decided that since I always tell my students that they should exercise their right to vote, I decided that I should probably exercise mine. Conveniently, our local precinct was located directly across the street from us at Rīgas 65. vidusskola (high school). I really had no excuse, especially since I was automatically registered to vote and only needed to bring my government-issued ID card.

I wasn't sure if I was allowed to take pictures inside the polling station and decided to play it safe, so unfortunately I don't have any photos to post for you from where the action was. Voting was quick and simple though; I simply handed my ID to the woman sitting at a table near the door, and she wrote down a number on a piece of paper and told me to give it to a man sitting at a different table down the hall. That man took my paper and handed me both an envelope and a stack of eleven different ballots that I could choose from. When I got to my “booth” (a table I sat at surrounded by two walls), there were instructions on the wall that told me to pick only one of the ballots and to add a (+) next to names of candidates that I particularly liked and to cross out any candidate I particularly disliked. This is to ensure that people can choose the party they prefer without having to endorse a specific party member they don't like. Finally, I needed to put that ballot in the envelope and drop the envelope in a large ballot box while throwing the other unused ballots in a trash can (or, I hope, a recycling bin). I waited a few minutes and watched a few other people drop their envelopes in the box before feeling comfortable that I would do it correctly. On the way out of the polling station, I noticed that around a half dozen election observers were standing around to make sure that there were no “irregularities.”

And The Winner Is...

Mayor Ušakovs! While this was the expected result all along, the election turned out to be a lot closer than commonly predicted. Earlier in the night before all of the ballots had been counted, Saskaņa/GKR had only around 42% of the vote and the “Latviskās” parties (as they were being called on TV) were beginning to talk about uniting in what would have been a Frankenstein-ish coalition to block Saskaņa from power. Of course, that talk was a bit premature, as the areas that hadn't been counted were heavily in favor of the incumbency.

A Few Takeaways:

Although the election was indeed a victory for Saskaņa, the 50.82% majority that they scraped by with is hardly a resounding mandate and a far cry from the 58.54% that they received in 2013. I don't want to begin to speculate on why their stock has dropped, but it will be interesting to see how they fare next year.

(Jaunā) Vienotība is officially on life support. While they passed the 5% threshold and haven't been completely locked out of city council representation, they received less than half of their 2013 total of 14.13%. News wasn't much better elsewhere, as they failed to win even a plurality in any of Latvia's nine cities. Things could change, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a mass exodus of top members to parties such as LRA and ZZS before next year's parliamentary election.

How about that Jaunā konservitīvā partija? With virtually no advertising throughout the city, they managed to tie for second place with the far flashier LRA at roughly 13.5% of the vote and 9 seats on city council apiece. The day after the election, one of their top officials boldly proclaimed on Latvian TV that they intend on winning parliamentary elections next year. With how quickly the winds change in Latvian politics, you just never know.

Turnout was higher than in 2013, with 58.72% of registered voters participating. According to various reports, the same was true throughout the country and it will be interesting to see if the trend continues for next year's elections.

So much for the social media campaign to “Gāžam Nilu” (overthrow Nils). When discussing the campaign, one of my friends who is a lifelong resident and lukewarm Ušakovs supporter asked, "are people so dumb that they believe that if they 'gāžam Nilu' that he will be replaced by anything better?” As is the case in so many other elections featuring incumbents, just enough of a majority of Rīdzinieki seem to have felt the same.

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thetygre · 8 years ago

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Dark Souls Lore Ramblings #4

@invokingbees said:

I like reading your ramblings, this stuff is always fun. I had always been under the impression Humanity/Dark were the same thing, physical objects, that Dark is diffused Humanity or something, I don’t know. I’d like to see you tackle Souls themselves, soul magic and how the hell people use it as a currency, what souls even ARE (some kind of energy source?), how we absorb them, that stuff.

Oh man, funny little coincidence here, that is the exact place that I was about to go. My research into the Dark got me thinking about how Humanity and Souls work.

Souls, the Humanity Score, and States of Being

Let’s start with the basics, looking at states of being and the components of that existence piece by piece.

This is your basic human being. I don’t know how all this shit works for Lords, Giants, Witches, and whatever else is out there, but I’m running on the assumption that it’s pretty similar given that they all share a root species. Anyway, your standard human is composed of three different components; the Soul, Humanity, and the Body. When a person has all three of those components and they are properly aligned, they are basically normal people. Even Undead are indistinguishable from humans when they have all their shit together.

When a human loses their Humanity but still retains their body and soul, they become a Hollow. Not a lot to explain here; basically a zombie. Mindless corpse animated by Soul. Hard to tell whether they feel an innate hunger for Humanity or if they’re just acting mindlessly. Not everyone who dies turns into a Hollow, of course; only those with the Undead Curse. That’s why the whole world isn’t being overrun by every Tom, Dick, and Larry who kicked the bucket.

Presumably, they work like the Boletarians in Demon’s Souls. (And let’s get this out of the way now; a lot of this involves the words ‘like/because Demon’s Souls’.) I.E. ‘Weaker’ human beings or those who have been Hollows longer are more feral, while younger Hollows and individuals with more Humanity and Souls in life retain some brain function, at least for a while, and can remember how to use weapons and tools. This hints at a possible link between Souls and cognition which, again, like Demon’s Souls. Heck, some Hollows outright keep their personalities; just look at the two Undead Merchants in the Undead Burg.

Conversely, Humanity and Soul without a body results in wraithes, like the ones in the Abyss and maybe even Red Phantoms. Technically, these creatures have a physical presence, but only in the sense that Souls and Humanity are physical objects. Essentially, they are incorporeal with the bare minimum of existence, relating to their Humanity ‘body’ and Souls. I don’t want to say ‘ectoplasm’, but the word definitely comes to mind.

Finally, a body without Souls is a corpse. Just... a fucking corpse. Can’t make it any clearer than that. Dead. Deceased. Demised. A stiff. Bereft of life. Rest in piece. Etc etera et al. Sometimes, you find a corpse with Humanity still on it (in it?); Hell, Patches makes a business out of scavenging Humanity out of bodies. Again, not everyone who dies, or even everyone with strong Humanity, becomes a Hollow; just those with the Undead Curse. The more interesting (and way more common) scenario is when you find a body with its Soul still on it. Given the nature of Souls, they’re supposed to disappear on death, absorbed by whoever killed the person in question. Maybe absorbing Souls is something unique to Undead? They absorb Humanity, so it wouldn’t be entirely without precedent.

Even though I harped on it a bunch in my last lore ramblings, let’s talk about Humanity just a little bit more. Humanity are little pieces of the Dark Soul, which itself is just a chunk of Dark (or not; depends on which Primordial Serpent you’re talking to). For all we know, Dark is just the overall spread of Humanity across the human species, or maybe it is some primordial force from before time and the First Flame. Probably both, because that would be slightly more inconvenient to me trying to make sense of everything.

Anyway, getting back on topic; every human being has some Humanity. Forget the allegorical version of that sentence, we’re talking about the hard item here. In the Souls community, there’s this thing called ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ Humanity; ‘soft’ Humanity is the Humanity in your inventory, carried around in the same place as your mountain of titanite chunks and Souls. ‘Hard’ Humanity is the Humanity your character has active on them, Hollow or Human. In order to be a Human, you have to spend at least one hard Humanity at a bonfire.

Lore-wise, this translates to everybody having some base, starter-point of Humanity that makes them a conscious human being. Usually, this base Humanity dissipates with the body’s transition between animate and inanimate states (aka dying). Everything after that base is surplus. The best way to see this is to become a Darkwraith and drain friendly NPCs of their extra Humanity. Each NPC has a different amounts; some just have the base-line amount of Humanity necessary to be a Human and can’t lose it without being killed.

It’s actually kind of cool to compare and contrast different NPCs and the amount of Humanity they have. You can come up with all sorts of different backstories and inferences about the amounts they have. For instance, Siegmeyer has four Humanity, but his daughter, Sieglinde, has ten. Rhea also has a large amount, a total of twelve Humanity! I like to think that this implies that everybody actually reaches a surplus of Humanity when they mature, but then it gets gradually whittled down over the course of life and/or the Undead Curse. Both Rhea and Sieglinde only recently started adventuring, for example. Meanwhile, Darkwraiths like Lautrec and Mildred have Humanity to spare, while Kirk has given all of his hunted Humanity to the Pale Lady. Oscar naturally has no Humanity left, non-humans like Ciaran and Quelanna give nothing, and it goes on and on.

Now this mass of Humanity is generally experienced as a singular presence. In other words, every person with more than one Humanity doesn’t feel like they have five or six people inside them. There are two notable exceptions. First and foremost are Twin Humanities; this is a pair of Humanities linked together by some kind of bond. Mother and child, twin siblings, woman and giant spider, etc. Really interesting because it does seem to confirm that, like the wraithes in Oolacile, Humanity is reproduced by fission. Second is the experience Fire Keepers have with Humanity; they are acutely aware of each separate piece of Humanity contributed to them. They actually do experience their surplus Humanity as a swarm of independent cells inside them. I bring the experience of Humanity up because it’s necessary to understanding our next subject...

Souls. Good old, dependable Souls. Series title. We don’t call it ‘Humanityborne’ or the ‘Ephemeral Eye Series’. Frankly though, we should; Souls are almost completely unaddressed as a subject in Dark Souls, and there’s really no explanation for them. The very first line in Demon’s Souls, literally the first thing you see, explains that Souls are equivalent to cognition and the mind. But that role is taken by Humanity in Dark Souls, so that just really leaves Souls as an anomaly. In the end, Souls in Dark Souls appear to be nothing but a leftover from Demon’s Souls. But half the fun in lore is putting together the pieces left by mechanics and game design decisions. So what are Souls?

The better question might be ‘What is Soul?’. Put simply, Soul is the animating force of the universe. It is present in all animate things; living, dead, Undead, constructed, spiritual. All of it. It is a type of energy that gives life, and binds life together. Kind of like that other, mystical force thingy. Magic powers included. Gonna’ be honest, I was kind of going to give magic it’s own thing later. Suffice it to say that Soul is the medium by which an individual makes magic manifest. Or something like that.

Soul is experienced as Souls. Again, like Humanity, an individual has a singular Soul. It’s just measured in a concise, plural metric. Even Hollows and vermin have a couple of hundred Souls. That doesn’t mean they literally have five hundred individual Souls in them, it’s just how it’s measured. Also like Humanity, it can be assumed that a character has an inherent amount of Souls that are consumed in the transition between animate and inanimate; everything beyond that is extra.

Another big question is how exactly Souls are used, both as a currency and as a means of self-enhancement. The short answer is (say it with me now) because that’s how it was in Demon’s Souls. For the moment, let’s just assume that Souls really are representative of experience along with being an energy source and by trading it into the Bonfire, your character is ‘reflecting’ and growing in certain talents. After all, what does your character do at the Bonfire but stare pensively into the flame, contemplating their journey? Whether or not Souls as an energy source actually alter the Undead’s body isn’t really clear; it’s not a theme like it was in Demon’s Souls (that’s it; it’s a drinking game now).

As for why Souls are currency... that one really is just an inexplicable artifact. In Demon’s Souls (SHOT), Souls were used as currency because the world was in such terrible state that money no longer had any value. In Dark Souls, it’s explained that the situation is pretty much the same but localized in Lordran. I’m going to allow this since there’s nothing that necessarily states that people have a particularly easy time traveling out of Lordran, and Lordran itself is basically in the same apocalyptic state as the Demon’s Souls (SHOT) world. But I have to think that if people could actually travel back to their homelands, real life currency like the coins you find would still have some pull. Honestly, Salt and Sanctuary handles this better, but I’ll shut up about it now.

How does your character access these Souls for currency and self enhancement? Same way they access Humanity. Which is code for I really, really don’t know or could find anything addressing it even in Demon’s Souls. I always imagined that it was a kind of pseudo-magic that all Undead inherently known on their transformation, or maybe their entrance to Lordran. I have to wonder what kind of effects a Souls and Humanity trade would have on the world outside Lordran, but let’s keep pressing forward.

Unique entities occasionally have unique Souls in addition to the Souls they give on death. This can be assumed to be one of two things from where I’m standing; either it’s the base Soul that is usually consumed on death but survives for these unique exampleon, or it’s something different from the Soul altogether, like a chunk of Humanity or Divinity or whatever the case may be. I think it’s more likely that it’s the first one given that you can get unique souls from all kinds of different entities; Lords, demons, Fire Keepers, a particularly large insect, etc.

The most obvious examples are Fire Keeper Souls, which are interesting because they represent some kind of dichotomy between the Soul, Humanity, and the First Flame. Also, can we just talk about how weird they look? Like, even for unique Souls, Fire Keeper Souls are freaky looking. I mean really look at it. What does it remind you of? I don’t want to sound weird but, well, it reminds me of a zygote. I’m dead serious here; it’s probably meant to look like smoke because Fire Maiden/fire, but I honestly think it looks like an ovum and sperm. Even the description is weirdly biological; a Fire Maiden’s Soul is a draw for countless wriggling, living Humanity. It’s weird right? Right? I don’t know what point it could be working toward, but it’s not like it’s the only reproductive imagery in the game. We all know the Bed of Chaos and Giygas have some shit in common, that’s all I’m saying. Anyway, just something I wanted to talk about in case I don’t do a separate thing for Fire Maidens.

I stated earlier that Souls are the animating energy of the universe, but I think it goes beyond even that. I think that Souls are literally in all things, both animate and inanimate. Soul is as present in rocks and metal and even piles of poop as it is in living things. That’s where the Serpents come in; they can use their big old chompers to filter out the material (Dark?) existence (re: eat it) and leave the pure energy, the Souls, behind for you to collect. We’ll get to the Serpents on their own terms, but it’s the implications about Soul that interest me.

Literally everything has a Soul. And if you know anything about Japanese culture, then you know about the belief system of Shinto. Shinto evolved from an essentially animistic series of native Japanese religions and shamanistic traditions, and even though it’s changed and declined in Japan, it is still a part of Japanese culture. But anyway, Shinto’s animism is founded on the notion that all things have kami, a spirit. Here in the West, we’re more familiar with the direct characters and creatures that kami manifest as; gods like Amaterasu and Susanoo, animal spirits like nine-tailed foxes and tanuki, or even object yokai like the tsukumogami. But that divine, spiritual energy is still present in all things. In other words, I think that Souls, in Dark Souls at least, draw from the Japanese notion of kami to some degree.

But that’s not the only Oriental philosophy present in Dark Souls, and certainly not the only pertaining to the nature of the human spirit. (Shocking, right?) This might be a stretch, so I’m probably reading too much into it, but in Chinese Taoism, the soul is split in to at least two parts (sometimes it’s three, sometimes it’s ten; still figuring it out). This in itself isn’t unusual; if I remember my Egyptian mythology correctly, then the soul was split into anywhere between five and thirteen different aspects. Anyway, in Taoism, the soul is naturally drawn between yin and yang, being divided into hun and po. Hun is the spiritual, ethereal yang soul that leaves the body after death. Po is the corporeal yin soul that stays with the body. Hun is intelligent, but po is base and crude. After hun leaves the body, the po might control the body and become an undead creature; a jiangshi, the famous Chinese hopping vampire. While a longer stretch then the Japanese kami, there are some parallels between hun and po and Souls and Humanity.

God, I sound like fucking Game Theorists right now. He who fights lore and all that crap. Anyway, I guess there is no ultimate lesson here beyond the reminder that for all it’s Western trappings, Dark Souls is still very much a Japanese game with Eastern mythology, religion, spirituality, and philosophy at its heart. That’s before I get into Buddhism, existentialism, the cyclical nature of reality, the pursuit of power, and all that deeper stuff. I’m was just trying to talk about in-game currency and wound up talking about Chinese vampires. So... not bad. Anything that takes me from video games to jiangshi is not bad at all.

#Dark Souls #Dark Souls Lore #Soulsborne #Souls Series #Demon's Souls #dark souls lore ramblings

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