#( stories ; cliches )

[glow-in-the-dark-death]

The Cliches TM

~

Danny somehow pissed off Ghostwriter,

So now he has to handle the world around him with the added twist of anime cliches,

Yeah, you heard him right

'Anime Cliches'

Now any sane person would stay locked up in their house to escape the worst of it, unluckily Danny is a paramedic and is constantly outside on the move interacting with people.

This effect will continue until Ghostwriter feels satisfied.

Wish Hope him some good luck.

~

Danny swerving the ambulance around the 3rd person today: "No! This ambulance is not freaking 'Truck-kun', nobody is getting isekai'd today!"

~

Danny: "Sir please focus. Your heart is not going 'doki doki' because of my good looks, it's because your going into heart failure!"

~

Danny dragging a hero inside his home because they decided to pass out just outside his door: "I'm going to regret this in the future aren't I?

~

Just an Idea

[romantichopelessly]

I cannot believe Maggie Stiefvater invented this insane character of an old English historian turned assassin with a serial killer brother and a milf he’s in love with who exemplifies themes of detachment and coming back into living your life for yourself and violence and being a tool to the narrative and then DIDNT include him in her trilogy about ‘what happens after the prophecies’ and what family means and finding something to do with yourself after you’ve learned who you are and generational violence. but instead she made another character who makes herself a tool for a cause she doesn’t believe in because she’s trying to escape her serial killer brother. Okay. Yeah. That’s Fine.

[arte072]

you ever think about how the asoiaf fandom will go on and on about Arya’s “traditionally masculine” journey and then you read her chapters and it’s like

being criticized by adult women for not sufficiently excelling in useless gender roles 

getting a puppy!! 🐶

losing the puppy 😿

picking flowers for her dad  💐🥰

being victim blamed for the actions of a guy 😑

being bullied for her appearance 😞

becomes homeless

takes care of a bunch of kids

gets engaged to men she doesn’t know

becomes a prisoner of war 

forced to cook and clean under extremely violent and abusive circumstances

witnessing and experiencing war crimes

female rage 🤬😡💢👿

gets a crush on a boy with shaggy hair and blue eyes~~ 😳💙🔨

talks to god 🌲

gets kidnapped by a loser 🙄🔥

worry that her mother will reject her for getting dirty 😭

gets depression

learns blood magic

becomes an academic 🏫🎓🤓

becomes a theater kid 🎭

awakening the magic from within ✨🐺🌕🌙✨

if all of these are inherently masculine then I do wonder what is considered acceptably “feminine” in these people’s eyes. crying in a dress? because she does that too... but y’know this fandom and their desperation to separate Arya from her girlhood lol

[refinedstorage]

heavy traffic

Nobody Wants to Die 2024

[antianakin]

Broke: Only fucked-up relationships are interesting in stories! Healthy couples are BORING!

Woke: CONFLICT is what's interesting in a narrative and often conflict IN A RELATIONSHIP is what can make a story out of that relationship, but this does not have to mean that the relationship itself is unhealthy or "fucked up" as a result. Conflict can come from anywhere, whether it's inside the relationship or something the people involved are facing outside of the relationship that impacts their dynamic. Healthy couples are not inherently boring any more than toxic/fucked-up couples are inherently interesting. The quality of the story and the way the writing weaves the conflict and the relationship together is what creates a compelling narrative. Simplifying it down to "only fucked-up relationships can be compelling in a narrative" is just unhelpful and untrue.

[swanmaids]

Some of these Takes… do some of yall even actually like the silmarillion?

[biblicalhorror]

Me when I don't like a movie: Ugh I can't stand when people say shit like "If you didn't like this movie, you just didn't get it." I understood it just fine. It was just a bad movie! People are so goddamn condescending.

Me reading bad reviews for Monkey Man (2024): None of you understood this movie at all actually

[arospecsyourblockdudes]

Shang Qinghua is one of the SV characters I can most relate to purely in terms of also being a writer. I know that a lot of the stuff I want to write won’t end up being super popular (a romance with a purposefully unsexy vampire? a story between an m/f best friend pair with a really deep emotional bond and no romance? come on) and publishing is a nightmare anyway. But the difference is that I don’t plan to make a living off my writing. Poor SQH does. So if he wants to do fun things like pay his bills and eat food every day, he has to pander to the big audience.

He’s written other things that weren’t PIDW. Things that weren’t trashy stallion novels. Things he might’ve had a passion for and put his heart into. No dice. So PIDW it is and my god I can’t imagine how annoying and frustrating it is that the one work that you purposefully sold out on so you can, yknow, survive, is the only one that got big. It got really big. Really popular. That’s gotta be so fucking enraging. Imagine that, you think sitting down to write something you like is hard? Try to pump out a few thousand words of some crap you don’t even like every day, crap that you know had potential if following your actual ideas and plans for the characters would allow you to pay rent. Alas. The characters you lovingly crafted are watered down now. No one cares that you came up with a really compelling backstory for this one villain, he did bad things and he got murdered and that’s all anyone wanted to see. Not a real story, not something you put love into

In a way I think that’s partly why he and SQQ became friends. I’m a writer, we like feedback. We like to hear what people think of the things we write, even negative feedback can be appreciated. So if you have this one guy who reads everything, comments frequently, and (most important) can see how absolutely shitty this work of yours is? Someone that also sees the wasted potential of this story? Gotta be worth something.

[keungking]

(kanghan voice) i'm not gay, but if anyone else has any ideas on how to make school bullying gay, i'm open for suggestions

[thekimspoblog]

How are we still making horror movies where the Christians are the good guys? WHY ARE WE STILL MAKING HORROR MOVIES WHERE THE CHRISTIANS ARE THE GOOD GUYS???

[chandralia]

the intimacy of Deku just sitting behind Bakugo in class…

[softpine]

character/story inspiration tag

rules: write up a blurb or make a visual collage of the people or characters (from books, TV shows, movies, etc.) that inspired your story and/or OC, either visually, personality wise, or just a general vibe

tagged by @morrigan-sims & @goldenwaves ♥

FROZEN PINES: Strange Trails by Lord Huron with lyrics from Frozen Pines // The Wall by Pink Floyd // The Sixth Sense (1999) // Life is Strange // Supernatural s4ep1 "Lazarus Rising" // lyrics from Kin by Radical Face // a magic 8 ball // It (2017) // Stand By Me (1986) // Lovers of Modena // SYFY article on black holes

CASPER MAYFIELD: Montero by Lil Nas X // French Exit by TV Girl // Troy Bolton from High School Musical // Carmy Berzatto from The Bear // lyrics from Off My Mind by Joe P // Brian O'Conner (+ Mia Toretto) from Fast & Furious

COCO ARIAS: Lyrics from My Own Dance by Kesha // Fiona Gallagher from Shameless // Back to Black by Amy Winehouse // adult film star Angela White // Lyrics from Gimme More by Britney Spears // Who Really Cares by TV Girl // Xena from Xena: Warrior Princess

ELAINE NGUYEN: Fearless by Taylor Swift // the record by boygenius // quote from Lang Leav // lyrics from Seventeen by Sharon Van Etten // Juliet Capulet from Romeo and Juliet // Jackie Taylor from Yellowjackets // lyrics from Let It All Out by COIN

STEVIE DONOVAN: Lyrics from Big Fat Mouth by Arlie // unknown artwork // Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn // lyrics from Space Cadet by The Technicolors // Broken Bells by Broken Bells // Dreamland by Glass Animals // Nomi Marks from Sense8 // climbing by Lucille Clifton

JADA CAREY: Lyrics from Hush by The Marias // quote from Frank Bidart // When the Pawn... by Fiona Apple // Raven Baxter from That's So Raven // Mystery by Jesse Jo Stark // unknown artwork // quote from Margaret Atwood

ALISA MARCIANO: Lyrics from Under Your Skin by Aesthetic Perfection // Carrie White from Carrie // artwork by griefmother // You Forgot It In People by Broken Social Scene // So Tonight That I Might See by Mazzy Star // lyrics from Desire by Meg Myers

[rockybloo]

PLANNED OUT A MUSHY FERRIS WHEEL SCENE WITH BITTERBAT AND SWEETHEART

I GOT ONE THING OFF MY CHECKLIST OF MUSHY SHIT BETWEEN THEM

[2hoothoots]

Revisiting P2 since the docu epilogue dropped and your AMV (<3) popped up as a sign for me to ask something that hopefully you haven't already spoken about years ago: What did you think of the in-game psych explanation for Maligula, that she's the primitive savage part of the mind? P2 is a weird mix of sketchy Freud/Jung concepts that Tim likes meshed with modern psych, and Maligula's deal seems like something they probably wrote a lot of different versions of but never quite solved elegantly

yeah, i think you totally hit the nail on the head - it's always felt like one of the parts of the story that they couldn't quite give enough polish to before they had to finalize it and move on with development. like - i went to go get my artbook to see if it had any insight into the writing process, and did you know that Nona and Maligula being the same person was apparently added way later in development? that's wild! i didn't know that until literally right now! i may or may not have skipped straight to my favourite characters when my artbook arrived and then put it on my shelf without reading the whole thing

ANYWAY, retrospectively i think it being a twist that was added later actually makes a lot of sense in the context of everything you mentioned. the Maligula problem, to me, is the fact that they're trying to juggle a bunch of different things that she has to be in the story. there's Maligula, the ruthless big bad, and Nona, the beloved grandma, and if you suddenly have to also make them both the same person... well, it ends up being kind of a thorny writing problem to make that work, haha.

here's some art i made so this isn't just a wall of text, rest of the answer under the cut

i think one thing they could have done when they needed to rehabilitate a mass-murderer into a lovable old lady was pull back on either end of the spectrum. make your villain softer and more sympathetic, or give grandma a mean streak like she's one bad day away from a tragedy at the crochet club. and to give the story credit, i'm really glad they didn't. Nona is relentlessly sweet and endearing - and that's great! she needs to be in order to make the audience care about her, otherwise the emotional beats are never going to land. likewise, Maligula is a great villain, she's vicious and ruthless and at the culmination of her arc we see she simply does not give a shit about murdering hundreds of people. i love that for her, honestly, you go girl

but then, like - how do you connect the dots? how do you frame grandma having a violently murderous streak in a way that doesn't make the ending of "but she's over it now" feel kinda weird and hollow? and how do you do that while also being sympathetic to the game's themes around mental health? Maligula's informed by the traumatic things that happened to Lucrecia during the war, but she can't just be a manifestation of trauma, because the moral of the story being that trauma makes you a mass-murderer (until you beat up your trauma and shove it in a giant pit) would feel... really tonally dissonant!

so i think you're totally right that the sprinkling of pop-psych concepts we get ends up feeling a little bit like an awkward band-aid. Maligula's story is about how the horrors of war can shape you into a terrible person, who does terrible things - ...but there's also, like, special circumstances, so it doesn't feel weird that she goes back to being Raz's sweet grandma afterwards. special psychic circumstances! she's not just any war criminal, she's the fight or flight response gone out of control!

which - i dunno, i think that line in particular always stood out to me, because that's not really what the fight or flight (or freeze or fawn) response is, right? it's a temporary boost of adrenaline to the system to rev you up for getting out of a dangerous situation. an overactive fight or flight response is called chronic stress and anxiety. i know the games are pop-psych and not actual science, but it always stood out to me as a little awkward.

if it were me in the writer's seat - with the benefit of all the time in the world to workshop it, and no looming deadlines, and the hindsight of having a full completed game in front of me to think about - i might have tried to frame it around connection. i think you could swing the lens to instead focus on how violence, stress, trauma etc., make it harder to understand and empathise with the people around you. the tragedy of Lucrecia's story is that she came home to try and help her countrymen, the people she cared so dearly about. but the more time passed, the less she cared, the less she was able to see them as people. after Marona's death, the Maligula that remains is one who's unable to even care about killing her own sister. the alternative is too raw, too painful - instead, she sheds her last vestiges of remorse, and throws herself into the easy relief of violence. (we see this again, when Nona "awakens" as Maligula - when confronted with the baggage of her past, she chooses to wash it all away with force, unable and unwilling to care about the people she used to call friends.)

and i think shifting the focus like that ties it in thematically, too. a big theme (of both games, but especially the sequel) is how important connection is, how being able to understand and reach out to and rely on other people is a lifeline during hard times. PN2 touches on how there aren't really "good people" and "bad people" - everyone has the capacity to do wonderful or terrible things, and i think Raz's line to Maligula about how "everybody's got something like you" works. Lucrecia was never a monster, no matter how everyone tried to pretend she was. she was just a person, the same as everyone else - and just like everyone else, she could be pushed to extremes under the right circumstances. it just feels kind of odd when the implicit context is "everybody's got a mass-murderer hidden in the primal recesses of their brain", hahaha.

but like, again, that's the privilege of hindsight, right? i've definitely also been on the other side of the creative process, stuck with something i suddenly need to make work in a story and having to come up with a solution that feels like a band-aid. sometimes you just gotta call it good enough, and move on. and i think the game is overall much stronger for having Nona and Maligula be the same person - it plays into the wider themes, it sets up some great emotional beats, and i think it's overall well-executed, even if there are one or two hiccups in the writing.

anyway, great ask! thank you for the invitation to ramble, this is something that stuck out to me on my first playthrough of the game and it was fun to sit down and get my thoughts in order

[justicecaballer]

why are books bad. they should be good instead

[intramoon]

Nessy circa 2014 (17) — another scrapped/unfinished edit