#(even if it might look cool from an external perspective)

[age-of-moonknight]

“8-Ball,” Vengeance of the Moon Knight (Vol. 2/2024), #5.

Writer: Jed MacKay; Penciler and Inker: Alessandro Cappuccio; Colorist: Rachelle Rosenberg; Letterer: Cory Petit

[pb-dot]

WIP Wednesday: Le Fin Du Monde

A bit of a shorter one this time around, that post-Christmas lethargy has hit me like a bag full of hammers. Anyway, I've noticed I don't really deal with memorable locations much in my writing. It isn't so much that I avoid them as much as my style not really including a lot of description of external stuff. Oh, if you want to know every nook and crevice of the protagonist's soul, I can help you there, but where are they doing their soul-searching? I don't know. A café perhaps?

Well, today I'm going to talk a bit about a location from His Impossible Brushstrokes that buck the trend, in that I feel I have a fairly complete picture of how the place looks and feels. This is Le Fin Du Monde, a café in San Francisco that sells alcohol or a bar with a barista that opens uncommonly early. It's one of those perspective trick puzzles, duck-or-rabbit pictures, but for serving of drinks.

Monde as the place is most frequently called by people too cool to say the whole thing, which is to say most of its customers, is Oscar and Mara's preferred coffee spot. Oscar likes to think he's above day-drinking at the establishment as pregaming for a wild night, but he is lying to the world and himself, and not for the first time either.

As one might expect from an establishment with a foreign name, Monde is tooled towards the art crowd, the black-painted walls and felt sofas and chairs in muted colors seem to be hand-picked to be the kind of dour that'll get an artist thinking along the lines of art or mania. Oscar for his money considers the whole place to be a den of the pretentious and the wannabe, but he hasn't found another place that has unlimited refills and a sufficiently dank interior yet, and so he keeps going to Monde.

Now, keen-eyed readers might remember me writing about the John Carpenter Masters Of Horror episode Cigarette Burns as a source of inspiration. I chose to name this café after the cursed art film the protagonist seeks after in the movie, although I did feel compelled to shorten it a bit. La Absolue Fin Du Monde did feel a bit long for the name of a café, even if a shortened version was available.

As for real-world inspiration, Monde is a bit of a tribute to my former favorite cafe, a nameless thing on the first floor of the Norwegian Film Institute. Back in my film school days, I used to spend many an afternoon there with my friends as we drank ourselves silly on black coffee with free refills, discussing some film project or other that we'd never get around to actually making, or writing screenplays or other coursework with the measured panic of the habitual student. The place is shut down now because apparently, it's a crime to host nice cafés in downtown Oslo, but it will forever live on in my memory, as well as on the pages of Brushstrokes. I've made the fictional place a bit cooler, I will admit, but all is fair in love and war fiction.

[goblinchivalry]

Summary of Oren Cohen’s Neverafter Interview with Brennan Lee Mulligan

The full interview is available on YouTube here! Brennan talks with Oren about just how scary this season is, how the cast and crew stayed genre-savvy and more.

“Fear not. Except in very small moments where we would ask you to fear.” Brennan Lee Mulligan about Dimension 20: Neverafter

This season is still very much seven people telling a story, and it won’t be abandoning comedy for horror. Brennan doesn’t want people to be nervous about that, though the fact people brings him a little bit of villainous delight. Dimension 20 is still first and foremost a comedy show, and this season honors all of the genres in this horror fairy tale mashup.

There’s gonna be a scene Brennan will definitely jump out of your laptop screen at you, The Ring-style and shout “Roll for Initiative!!!”. There will be scary moments, but they will be in the spirit of making entertainment and not trying to antagonize people.

One way Brennan and the players prepared to tell a horror story was by trying to invest in a richness of character that firmly puts them in a certain type of horror, that being one that a ~20 episode series could sustain. This meant going beyond just the external-facing, primal horror of something like a slasher flick and looking towards internal-facing horror such as the horrifying _aspects _of how people react/respond to horror, and relationships to the unsettlingness of this “freaky world”.

“There are some moments of actual “fright” but even more than that, there’s whole beats and thematic chapters of dread.”

This season is 20 episodes, a first! (Other than FHSY) Brennan thinks this might be a new normal for the most part. With a new studio space and investments from Dropout it seems like we can expect more episodes from the longer seasons.

The entire crew popped all the way off this season! You can see some ofit now with the crazy dome lighting in the trailer, and prepare to getblown away by the technical side of this season. They’ve got people working to bridge the art department with the camera department, more projectionists for the dome, and even in-studio sounds that the players can react to. Brennan himself has some control over the dome too for those necessarily time-finessed horror moments.

This is the first Brennan-DM’d season to jump back to physical minis! [The miniature sets on Coffin Run were so cool!!!] The sets allow some of the verisimilitude that A Crown of Candy had in its gritty, challenging combat. The degree of Ominosity evoked in the battle sets is something to look forward to.

The world-building in this season is so important that Brennan says talking too much about it starts to verge on being spoilery :0 “The Neverafter is indeed wrapped within the times of **shadow **and will take its dreadful time in revealing its true nature to our audience.”

What Brennan can tell us about the Players

They’re all classic fairytale characters: Pinnochio, Puss in Boots, Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Mother Goose, and the Frog Prince

Some strong vocal choices were made and committed to. (Looking at you, Lou Wilson!)

.This season is very driven by the players and the PC’s perspective in terms of accompanying them through the sense of dread in the world is important.

There were some of the funniest moments of side-wracking laughter in this season.

There was enough real-life stress in some episodes that there are some Adventuring Parties of which Brennan says he has never been in a more chaotic interaction space anywhere in his life. Expect the chaos of people cutting loose after 2 hours of creeping dread. Tune into the APs!

Brennan was unceasingly roasted by the players this season. (by the players at the table, but also by some of their mechanical play!)

Fan Questions

How scary is Neverafter? Are there more relaxed moments to breathe each episode? Brennan says there will be moments to breathe. He recommends maybe talking to friends after they watch episode 1 to gauge it. Fundamentally though, it is a comedy show, and it’s still got _fairy tale _elements in it. “More than 50% of it is the Intrepid Heroes having a ball”, and our desires for camaraderie and comfort and laughter and seeing friends hangout will be satisfied. 

“Fear not. Except in very small moments where we would ask you to fear.”

Favorite episode or battle this season? Brennan loves them all and can’t pick a favorite amongst his children.

Can Brennan give us something that we can see and recognize later (if he wants)? “When you start to see the ink.”

What’s the most fun way you established ambience... ? The projections. It made it feel visceral and real; and rather than having the players have static focus on the table and other players, it made them look over their shoulder, and feel a bit smaller than the world in this looming horror season.

How did you check in and support the players after a heavy session AND how can I support my GM after a story ends?

Brennan checks in by saying “Hey, I’m checking in. How are you doing?”. Trust is huge. Having a relationship based around already doing that makes checking-in easier and makes it become regular rather than unusual (”It’s a good habit to have.”)

“Having emotional care be routine is pretty helpful. It’s like hygiene, and brushing your teeth, right? Are you already in the habit of, after a session ends, having a little 3-5 minutes just to babble and be excited and talk about how great it was. Do you have a little ritual around, like, "Hey I want to talk to you sometime this week before next week [...]"

If that’s a lot of work, you can always show your DM that you care ♥

How many NPCs are planned vs. improvised in a campaign like this? Certainly some are always improvised, but of course this season draws from source material, fairy tales! There were many amazing consultants this season with deep folklore knowledge. There was a huge list of fairy tale characters but not so much with written backstories as it was how they had been corrupted/changed by horror (Brennan’s got a good memory). Some were assigned ahead, others were kept up his sleeve.

Was this campaign high lethality, did the players have backup PCs at the ready? Brennan pauses and ponders before answering. He “cannot fault any of our logic in these observations”. That’s all he can say.

Did EXU: Calamity inspire the farther move from comedy? A Starstruck Odyssey was so wild and fun that a change was already on his mind before EXU:C scratched an itch that he wanted to try with the Intrepid Heroes. Of course EXU:C is tragedy, not horror, but the stretch of tonal difference was really engaging and exciting.

What kind of safety tools do you use?

Formally, X-cards, Lines and Veils, the classics. Additionally, if Brennan can anticipate something could be challenging he will hip his players in advance - avoiding spoilers - but as a way to communicate a level of comfort in advance & gauging collaborative enthusiasm for exploring topics that may be challenging. The formal tools are there for a reason (and recommended!), but are not used as a substitute for the main informal route of building trust, checking-in and communicating clearly.

There weren’t too many instances of that this season, most things were hashed out in pre-discussion, pitching the season, world-building, character creation, etc.

Making everyone feel safe and secure, even when exploring the scary topics, was always a priority.

On a scale of 1 to EXU:Calamity, how broken will this leave us? Brennan’s hope is that nobody is broken and that nobody was broken by EXU:C either! ...

“I think if you are broken... by Neverafter, it will be only to come back patchwork, pieced-together, re-glued, fused into something stranger and stronger than you were before.”

How did you balance horror and comedy elements? Creating atmosphere and leaving room to riff?

They go hand in hand! Monotony (being of just one tone) doesn’t really exist in nature and reality. Horror comes in to interrupt other things, and it’s not sustainable for very long. No one tone could persevere for 40 hours. How do you balance them? How do you not? Some people’s responses to fear is shock, and sometimes that means laughter!

[Brennan’s discussed similar things on podcasts he’s appeared on too. I recommend watching this question to see his full answer, it starts here]

How did character creation work for this season? Did the figures come first or did the PCs propose them? Character creation was them picking their characters. Each player brought a few and pitched them, their behaviours and their takes on them.

If you were a player this campaign, which fairy tale character would you like to play? Fearnot. A deep cut (though he appears in Jim Henson’s ‘The Storyteller’), about a little boy who cannot be afraid and went forth to learn what fear was.

[juriyuna]

Top five best and worst doppels!

Narrowing down only 5 of my favorites is hard, but I'll give it a shot!

5 Best Doppels:

5. Halifax (Kasane Ao):

[slaps roof of doppel] this baby can pack SO much symbolism into it. Really, all of the doppels are full of symbolism, but something about Ao's always gets me. The resigned, exhausted look on her face, rusted shackles binding her to her guilt, the black blood around the guillotine, the way it literally decapitates Ao when she summons it (you can see her head on the ground after the blade drops)... oouuughhh. I might have to dig into this one in another post later before I go off on a Monzenbashi tangent, haha.

Design-wise, the black/blue/glowing cyan combo is pretty, so there's that too!

4. Cuauhtitlan (Kimochi Rabi):

One of my favorite doppel designs in the game for sure. The dull, washed-out colours are very pleasing to look at (and a nice nod to Rabi's fading hope), and there's something poignant about the massive stone wings framing the bodies of the Kimochi, with Rabi hanging as a sacrifice in the middle. I also like the way it operates and interacts with its master-- Rabi believes that the only salvation for magical girls is death, so Cuauhtitlan vaporizes its targets in an attempt to free them from suffering... but because Rabi (though she tries to ignore it) still has the tiniest scrap of hope in the back of her mind, she can't help but fear that this isn't what she wants after all.

3. Merkava (Kirari Hikaru):

Hikaru is solidly under "characters I'd love to see a doppel ver. alt for" because of how good Merkava is. One, it's got an awesome design (which would transfer very well to a suit of armor), and two, there's a lot of potential in how it's basically the embodiment of executive dysfunction. A lot of characters have mixed feelings about their doppels, but Merkava is particularly hard for Hikaru to accept because of how it represents her inability to Do Things (even the things she wants to do) without a proper external motivator.

side note hikaru must be one strong draft horse if she can not only haul this thing along behind her, but pick up enough momentum to be able to grab it by the ropes and throw it over her shoulders. my girl has been eating her veggies, god damn

2. 9daime Nue (Kagura San):

I love 9daime Nue's colours and cool antique style, but the way its gangly arms move reminds me so much of this gif that I laugh whenever I see it in-game:

Still, it's an awesome doppel! I also like how it can be either very gentle or very brutal, depending on the circumstances-- if a natural cause displaces something in its environment, it will carefully sort things back to how they were before, which is kinda cute for how large it is. But if someone intentionally changes something, it will immediately hunt down the offender to beat them senseless. Doppel of Keep Your Hands To Yourself. (More seriously, it's interesting how it takes San's fear of change to an extreme degree.)

1. Catacombe (Izumi Kanagi):

Still my favorite doppel in the game after all of these years. :') It's a four-armed lion with gold teeth, ancient bronze swords, a skull necklace, and a mane of billowing smoke; what's not to like? And according to Magia Archive, it's blindfolded by two masks over each of its eyes, so that's cool too. (i wonder what its eyes look like......)

Catacombe was one of the earliest doppels released, so it has a bit in its description about how overusing it may cause Kanagi to become similarly unforgiving. I love notes like that; I think the concept of doppels influencing their masters is fascinating, even if it's only a temporary issue.

5 Worst Doppels:

5. Victoria (Kaharu Yuuna):

Very good from a symbolism perspective; very unpleasant to look at. I suppose that's part of the point- it's meant to be gaudy and self-absorbed- but... still...

4. Elsie (Shinobu Akira):

Does anyone remember how goo candy, blue raspberry, and blue raspberry goo candy were all the rage in the early 2000s? Like Juicy Drop Pops and those Ooze Tube things? I can TASTE this doppel. My mouth feels bad just looking at it.

3. Gosirsa (Natsu Ryouko):

I love Ryouko! I love what Gosirsa represents! The horns on the cart are awesome! But EEUFGJHJFGHH something about the cluster of wheels looks too much like tendrils or something and totally wigs me out ;_;

2. Hund Balou (Sarasa Hanna):

Props to Hund Balou's designer for making a doppel so viscerally uncomfortable to look at that I can't even bring myself to include a picture of it in this post. Its arms...

1. Poker Alice (Nanase Yukika):

I can only fit one more image in this post (mobile limit) and I'm not using it on Poker Alice. Why does it have teeth around its eyes??? Why is it so fleshy

[kikizoshi]

An Example of Working Something Out in Real-Time (Thoughts on How Fyodor's Ability Interacts with Him)

I rarely get such good examples of my thought process, and I think this one is really cool (you can see my explanations form and change in real-time), so I'd like to share here. I'll add in some context in brackets (what I was looking at/watching/reading while thinking about a particular point), but mostly, I'll let it speak for itself.

I was trying to see if I could explain how Fyodor's Ability works (referred to as Curse in my notes) from an Orthodox Christian perspective, so here's how that went:

without shedding of blood there is no remission [I was searching for a reason that Fyodor's Ability would cause blood to spray, and all I ended up finding was some stuff about the shedding of blood being necessary for being saved, so I ended up concluding that it was another point of evidence towards Fyodor's Ability being focused on saving people.]

Fyodor's Curse exists to save those who can't save themselves, just like Fyodor himself does [that is, Fyodor himself believes he exists to save people]

Those who wish to be saved, but for some reason cannot [an answer to the question "who can Fyodor's Ability save?"]

So why does that manifest through death?

Because they can't be saved otherwise.

But then, that means that the Curse is saying that some people just can't change. Or that they can't change enough. That they have no hope in this life. I don't like that message. Maybe that's what Fyodor believes though. Maybe he even goes into finding out he's Cursed with this core belief. [Here, I begin to look up hand symbolism in Russian Orthodoxy, and come across these three posts (categorised in order that I read them): 1, 2, 3] Maybe he, himself doesn't know that he has another power in his right hand. In his left hand, he has "punishment", or the "law" (external power), such as written code and principles. In his right hand, then, he has "the influence of blessing and cursing". This "speaking and blessing" are tightly related, they work hand-in-hand. One doesn't exist without the other.

[While working, I'd pasted some significant quotes that stuck out to me from the webpages.]

"The explanation most often given is that Christ’s right represents his merciful side, while his left represents his rigorous side."

“When the soul of a man departs out of the body, a great mystery is there accomplished. If it is under the guilt of sins there come bands of devils, and angels of the left hand, and powers of darkness take over that soul, and hold it fast on their side.”

“Question: Why is the footboard of the Cross of Christ pointed with the right side up, and the left down, and the head of Christ is also inclined to the right? Answer: Christ makes His right foot light and lifts it above the foot board in order to lighten the sins of the ones who believe in Him. And His left foot He lowers on the foot board in order that those who do not believe in Him should be weighed down and descend into hell. His head is inclined to the right, that He might incline all the heathen to believe and to worship Him.”

"[...] it is nonetheless very important as it shows most strongly how Christ in his person unites these two opposites which are born from the very fall of man, which are born from the identification with duality, the knowledge of good and evil. [...] And in the icon of 6th century Sinai we find these aspects of duality brought together beautifully “without mixture” into the person of Christ ."

I kept thinking "If the left hand condemns, then why does Fyodor use it to kill?" But, Fyodor doesn't believe in a fire-and-brimstone Hell. He believes that Hell is made of the suffering brought about by the inability to love. So then, when he says "grant you the great silence", I think he means that he can cleanse someone of their troubles so that, while they don't go to Heaven, they don't suffer in Hell (which is the absolute best he can do for them).

[Here I go to look at Fyodor's "I am Crime, I am Punishment" scene in Dead Apple, which I continue to look at for the rest of the session.]

Fyodor is Crime, and his Curse is Punishment. Crime holds Shibusawa's skull in his left hand, stands on the left side. Punishment hold an apple in his right hand, stands on the right side. Crime appears in white clothes. Punishment appears in Fyodor's normal clothes. The gem is on the back of Punishment's right hand.

Does this mean that Punishment has the correlation with divine? That would mean Crime, who is Fyodor, has the correlation with earthly litigation? Is Fyodor the damned, and his Curse the righteous? And yet, we see Punishment holding an apple in its right hand, mirroring the scull in Crime's left. The apple appears whole, unbitten, but Punishment offers it to the viewer and says to let loose.

The scull represents Shibusawa's death, maybe. His earthly litigation is already over—Crime ended his physical form with the knife. So now, Punishment is finishing it. Yet, while Punishment should oversee the righteous, it seems to instead mirror Satan in the Garden of Eden.

Or perhaps it's framed as Crime and Punishment using Shibusawa to judge the world? It's possible, but I don't like this idea.

Maybe things being so twisted is the point? Just as Raskolnikov twisted facts to believe he was a Napoleon, maybe Fyodor has twisted his own Curse to be a Demon? Since Fyodor believes that he, himself is a demon, perhaps the manifestation of his Curse also follows that. And so, the right and left would both be corrupted.

Right becomes a connection to the unholy—rather than lift up the righteous, Punishment lifts up the damned. Left becomes an releaser of the damned from their burden through spilling their blood and releasing them from the yoke of sin.

Wouldn't it make more sense for Left to condemn the righteous? No, because that doesn't fit with what Fyodor believes.

But I can't get past that the right hand is used to cleanse, not the left [referring to how the right hand is used to cleanse in Orthodox tradition, while Fyodor uses his left hand to "cleanse" Karma]. Unless that's inversed too? So that Left is Right and Right is Left? That would mean that Crime, Left, is assigned to lifting, and Punishment, Right, is assigned to damning. That isn't right though, since Fyodor doesn't un-damn anyone. He just releases them from their sins, so that they won't suffer unduly in Hell. I suppose you could say that Left is helping people from the side of the damned, who, as said, can't help themselves.

So then what is right doing? If this isn't inverse, but just a different take. Right is supposed to lift up the righteous, to deal more with matters of the spiritual. Since Fyodor, a human, can't touch the soul of someone (especially once Crime works on them), how does Punishment interact with people?

Does Punishment guide Fyodor's actions the way that person was saying about the mystics guiding the lawmakers? Is Punishment the voice God speaks to Fyodor through? Is that what he meant by "praying"? [Referring to when Fyodor says something to Dazai like, "I simply sat here and prayed."]

Oh my God, I think that's it. And this voice would have been present for Fyodor's whole life, though for his childhood he thought it was how God spoke to him (and still does, but also understands that it's part of his Curse).

So then, how does this fit thematically? ...Shit. Well, I need to know my interpretation of this. How much of Punishment is Fyodor? They're practically the same person. Practically? Are they not completely? Punishment can't be the voice of God, since it guides him to do this evil. But it can't be the voice of Satan, because my story is based on flaws driving conflict. It's Fyodor's own voice, it always has been.

How does God guide people. Sometimes, he's a voice in their head. Other times, he speaks through the people around you. Maybe Fyodor's arrogance had him assume that God only spoke to him through himself. Maybe Fyodor ignores every other word from God, that didn't come from Punishment. And that makes it so easy for Satan to plant misdirections in Fyodor's mind.

All of this would be allegory for me, since I don't believe in that. [It's important to me here that I don't believe in God because I'm trying to write my story as realistic as possible (other than the whole Ability Users thing), and confirming the existence of God wouldn't be realism, from my worldview's perspective.] Though I suppose Misha [my Bulgakov OC] makes God and Satan canon characters, I don't like the idea of Satan literally interacting with Fyodor outside of Misha. Irl, though, it's always complex. People make mistakes because of their traumas, their flaws, whatever, and it can appear at times as though Satan is guiding them. I'll probably follow a similar concept with Fyodor.

But concretely? 'Crime and Punishment' is the name of Fyodor's Curse, and 'Punishment', or 'Right', is the inner, spiritual manifestation of it. It reflects him because, ultimately, it *is* him. It's not like DID, with a different personality in the same head—this is Fyodor, with his talking to himself a bit more complex than other people. It will, then, reflect what he's going through. Maybe it's a bit like talking to your subconscious. Since it's also him, maybe it can give perspectives at right angles—ones that still come from Fyodor, following a different line of inquiry. Essentially bouncing ideas off yourself, because yourself is capable of looking at the same thing from two different angles at the same time.

So, growing up Fyodor had this voice in his head, which was his own, and which he believed God spoke to him through. Then, at some point in my story, something happens to make Fyodor (and therefore Punishment as well) begin to spiral. I think it's possible for Fyodor and Punishment to enter a viscous spiral. Like when you think yourself into a pit, but far worse, since he can essentially double think himself into a pit. That could explain why he's gone so downhill so quickly. Both Fyodor and Punishment have failed to regulate themselves, and are spiralling.

So in my current story, something similar will happen. Some inciting incident causes something fundamental about Fyodor to shift or crack, and it begins a viscous spiral that somehow culminates in Punishment telling him to use Crime for the first time. Fyodor uses it, it solves the problem beautifully (from his perspective, but ultimately, this event has to culminate in something much worse farther down the line), and Fyodor has that experience to ground his belief that his Curse is for saving people.

[This post has been in my drafts for about while, and I now have come across something that may support my "Fyodor talks to his Ability" idea:

This could actually make a lot of sense. The Devil spoke to Ivan, reflecting Ivan's own thoughts and ideas back at him, but twisting them somehow to make them demonic. I wonder if Fyodor's Ability had a similar effect?]

[sabrinatvband]

The making of a fake ad for my portfolio [comprehensive breakdown]

Here's a breakdown of how I made a fake advertisement for my portfolio.

For the past month or so I've been making some fake advertisements to show potential employers. Before making this manga ad I made a fake advertisement for Vinegar Syndrome's UHD of Freeway. When making these ads I use Blender for most things, but other software is used as well.

The origin of this project started with something completely unrelated; a photo projection recreation of part of my living space. The goal was to create my entire home in 3D for a short film I was conceptualizing. It's something I'll maybe revisit, but in the process I decided to use photogrammetry to create a 3D model of my bookshelf.

Photogrammetry is when you take a bunch of pictures of something and a piece of software, identifying common elements across multiple images, processes depth and other related things to make a 3D model. To create this model of my bookshelf I had to take 106 pictures, which wasn't much of a hassle. I used Regard3D and Meshroom to create different models using the same pictures. Surprisingly, Regard3D gave me a better end result.

The reason I say it's surprising is because Meshroom's website and operation generally seems a lot more professional and funded, while Regard3D's website won't even load for me [which might be because I'm using a VPN but I'm not going to check]. Regardless, almost any photogrammetry model is going to be riddled with weird imperfections, most commonly awkward bumps that don't exist in real life.

It's worth experimenting with both pieces of software; it may have been something about the specific set of images I used that created a less desirable end result with Meshroom. It's worth noting that the materials [basically textures but not] on the Regard3D model were broken when I put it into Blender, and I had to fix the shaders for it to render properly. Meshroom only works with Nvidia graphics cards. Both pieces of software are free. [Also, I used the Meshroom and Regard3D models in the ad. The Meshroom one is only used in the first shot.]

After making the bookshelf model I decided to make another ad. The reason the ad uses a vertical aspect ratio is because I made it after seeing a job listing looking for someone to make ads for tik tok specifically. I realized after basically finishing the demonstration ad that they were looking for an influencer and not someone who makes cool 30-second CGI things . . .

The reason the ad is about manga is because the manga books came out looking very good in the photogrammetry model, because most of the pictures focused on the manga books specifically. Also, it wouldn't have been a good idea to make two fake ads about Blu-Rays in a row.

Making the book models without the bookshelf was very simple; I took photographs of my books, measured their dimensions, and mapped the textures onto cubes in Blender. I used Sand Ripper to get the textures from my photos; Sand Ripper is a simple browser tool that allows someone to take a picture slightly out of perspective and make it "flat". Because it's a browser based tool I had to first scale down all the images in Gimp using a plugin that allowed me to bulk modify images. Because the spines of most of the books were so narrow they got very pixilated by Sand Ripper, I used the UV editor in Blender on the original pictures I took to get better spines.

Blender can basically do the perspective fixing on its own, and so you might be wondering what the point is of using an external tool like Sand Ripper at all. Basically it's just better and less confusing to use fewer images in Blender; only having two seperate materials for a book is better than six, one for each face.

For a few books I cheated and used one "page" texture for all three "page" faces. Also, some manga books have the spine on the left, and others have it on the right; it largely relates to the age of the book, but it's something that's very inconsistent either way.

Creating the shot with all of the manga pages was simple but time consuming, especially since I didn't want anything but the pages to be visible, which sometimes meant setting up an entire page just to cover up a corner in the shot. Turning on the "Import images as planes" add-on in Blender helped a lot; it's essential for any user. For whatever reason Blender's Eevee renderer has a glitch that made pages that were actually behind other pages look like they were infront, and so I used Cycle's render view for basically everything.

I used this Ian Hubert tutorial to give the pages a little bit of texture, and I did a little bit of loop cutting and knife tool stuff to add slight wrinkles to the pages. The video David F. Sandberg made talking about his "homemade" shots in Annabelle Creation was a big inspiration. I cheekily threw a page from Adam Warren's Dirty Pair comic on the bottom left, which is not a manga.

Some of the manga pages I found were a little too low res to use, and so I upscaled them using Waifu2x.

The mirror shot with the books falling took a long time to render but it was a very simple shot to put together. The pool shot was a bit more complicated. If you refer to the photo projection thing from the beginning of this breakdown you'll notice that the tiles in the pool are the tiles from my floor. Setting up most of this shot was very simple, but getting the caustics took a lot of hassle.

If you're not familiar with what caustics are, they're basically the white lights you see on the bottom of a pool, or when light passes through a glass of water. They appear in a lot of contexts but those are two of the most noticable ones.

Blender added "real" caustics to their software for the first time around a year ago, but people had been making do with "fake" caustics for a long time. Even today people still use fake caustics because Blender's real caustics frequently are so underwhelming it's hard to notice when they're turned on.

In the picture above you can see the node based shader editing I had to do to get the caustics to appear. I followed this Polyfjord tutorial, but this other tutorial by Cartesian Caramel also seems good.

I edited the video together in Kdenlive. Kdenlive is a FOSS [free open source software] video editor that's great for making short videos like this. Relative to something like DaVinci Resolve Kdenlive is lacking in features, and it's not suitable for certain kinds of professional work yet. But I find it very fast and intuitive to use. Maybe a few years from now it will become very competitive and feature rich and Avid users will still derisively laugh at it for no justifiable reason, but unfortunately Kdenlive hasn't found its cult yet the way many other open source softwares have.

There are two video files in the ad that have alpha channels. This requires encoding the videos in Blender using Quicktime. The rest of the shots used the AV1 codec; many of the files in this video are less than a megabyte in size using Blender's "perceptually lossless" setting.

For the text in the ad I used the font Shin Go, which I guess is the Japanese equivalent to Helvetica, at least when writing stuff in the Latin alphabet. It's probably most famous to English speakers for its association with the Wii.

The piece of music used in the ad is called Goth Slut (Wet Acid Mixxx). I recorded it a few years ago using a Volca Sampler and Volca Bass. It was recorded to be a soundalike of Aphex Twin's Windowlicker (Acid Edit). I thought it sounded austere in a way that was good for a "cool" advertisement.

I hope this breakdown answered any questions you may have had. I think the real takeaway here should be that it's very easy to create something interesting without a ton of technical know-how using Blender; if you come across something you don't understand, simply pull up a tutorial on your second monitor and follow along [make sure you have a second monitor]. Make sure you have a lot of RAM as well, especially for photogrammetry, or if you plan on using your computer while rendering; since I upgraded to 32 GB I haven't even come close to having a problem.

The other takeaway should be that I did literally all of this using free software. Barely over two decades ago the thought of making an ad filled with CGI imagery for free was inconceivable, but now it's no hassle at all. The other other takeaway should be that it's normal to use a lot of different pieces of software in a project like this. I've already mentioned Regard3D, Meshroom, Waifu2x, Blender, and Kdenlive. DaVinci Resolve has a free version that's very good and feature rich. I used MediBang Paint Pro to create the text PNGs. In many other projects I use Krita, a FOSS raster graphics editing program.

A final piece of software that was indispensable was Stéphane Claudon's Blender Render Queue. As you might expect it allows you to queue up a bunch of different renders so that you don't need to babysit them. It's essential for rendering a bunch of different shots overnight, or during a day you're mostly out of the house. I think it's marginally less resource intensive than using Blender itself, which is great if you're using your computer while stuff is rendering.

Hope you enjoyed the breakdown, and I hope I didn't inspire you so much that you make your own ad instead of hiring me.

[yuttikkele]

Also! C!george being able to see the multiverse through a lil window dreamXD made to show him

What does he see?

CC!george, sapnap and dream watching a football game (cc!george isnt really watching anyhow) (XD explains how everything is pacific and domestic here without wars or dumb monarchies and betrayals they all just live together and chill)

A swapped places AU where c!dream isnt a weirs puppet thing and is actually c!george who is that weird monster (that c!dream stares back and just stares confused until some weird god comes by and XD changes the universe quickly) ("who was that?" '...did i tell you im divorced?' "...loser." '...LOSER???!!')

....flowers from 1970... But its just a room with poems in the walls and the palms marked in them with that specific song playing ("...what happened here?" 'Some dimensions are good and have nice endings and some dont! Thats just how it is' "oh...not my problem anyway") (i alao dont know if you know abt the fanfic its pretty good but also quite old) (no good ending tho)

Manhunt

Mcc

Squid craft 2 (the part where george finds dream just dead as hell) (i dont even know if you even watched the event)

And well if you thought the cc!au was upsetting!

The window opens to the inside of the castle that is decorated with blue and white and c!george sitting in the throne and c!dream is just by the side of the throne with a knight kind of look just talking to him about his day

C!george gets upset and closes the window "this sucks youre an idiot and this is dumb" '...making that window is hard you know?' "I dont care leave me alone i have things to do" 'mean.' "I dont care"

....ALSO

Yess! Draculaura just starts assigning superheroes to her friends (most dont make sense thanks to her lack of knowledge in the topic) then she finds a comic where they did make batman a vampire and she just refuses to think that it isnt the principal story

Clawdeen hates Twilight

She wakes up and posts abt how much she hates it everyday for like 4 months until she finds a good book of werewolves to read

oh my gosh i forgot to answer this i’m so sorry 😭😭 i looked at it and was like “ok i’ll answer that later” and then forgot about it

WINDOW BEDTIME STORIES!!! George gets an au bedtime story POG

weirdthingC!george and actuallynormalC!dream is a cool little swap :000!! AND XD BEING DIVORCED BAHAHAHAHA

i think i remember flowers from 1970? probably? it’s a dnf fanfic right? i think my dreamteam friend told me she was reading it at one point

OK SO. I feel like the external videos, previous smps, and contests are still a part of the dsmp. At least most of them. Like, the characters are an extension of the CC and their YouTube/Twitch journey. The characters join the dsmp, and they come from different places, and those places are the series the CC is currently working on. Like they have a built in backstory.

For instance: Tommy, SMPEarth and Skyblock are canon for him. Philza, hardcore world and SMPEarth. Techno, Hypixel, MCM, SMPEarth, so on and so forth. BadBoyHalo, MunchyMC, videos with Skeppy, and MCM. And Dream, MunchyMC and Manhunts. MCC for all of these too. I gave a lot of examples just to show a lot of the different places they come from. There can ofc be more!

And I KNOW they said it wasn’t canon, but I think the Fundy marriage was canon too. Just to put into perspective how many of these things are considered canon for anyone who might be in doubt, everyone thought the Fundy proposal videos were canon until they said it wasn’t. Which obviously I didn’t listen to.

I will say, I do continue the “characters are an extension of their CC” thing with the QSMP (like the dsmp part of the character is canon in the qsmp), but with the QSMP, they knew they were making characters, so not all things really flow over the same, at least we don’t know if the dsmp is canon yet (some other old smps seem to be though), but I still headcanon that the island tried to wipe the characters memories and make them forget about important things they left behind so they wouldn’t want to leave the island. Thus, the character is still carried on, they probably just don’t know it.

Anyways, carrying on. I actually haven’t watched Squid Craft 2. I did not know that existed :0

And dw I was not saddened by the window. But like I did just sorta explain, George looking at the manhunt would be like George looking at his happy past. The knight thing’s totally an au tho.

“Why’d I get stuck with the janky old broke hobo Dream?” —c!George

Draculaura says that Ghoulia is the Flash, and Ghoulia is upset that Draculaura assigned her as the “off brand Dead Fast.”

and clawdeen WOULD hate twilight. I actually just started reading it, and it was going pretty well until the whole “dude makes girl uncomfortable but it’s ok because she actually secretly likes it!! Haha!!” thing. I feel like clawdeen would hate twilight mostly though because she sees herself in the main character, but the story reacts in such ways that are just unsatisfactory and not at all what actually happen to a girl like Bella, which Clawdeen experiences because she feels she is actually a girl like Bella and she HATES IT. She’s like, “That’s not how it works! Vampires might have all these super awesome powers, but that’s not what makes them likable!!” (as I haven’t read enough of twilight yet, I just have a hunch about this hc, so I will say my main basis for clawdeen relating to Bella is because she also has a crush on a vampire.)

And instead of a werewolf book, she actually finds the dog version of warriors.

[jdgo51]

The Story Under Our Skin

Today's inspiration comes from:

The Gift of Limitations

by Sara Hagerty

John Calvin said, “Our wisdom . . . consists almost entirely of two parts: knowledge of God and of ourselves.”1

"'We can have the same conversation with God, much like we have the same argument with our spouses, over and over and over again. Rewind, repeat. And often we name this “stuck,” as if God isn’t responsive or we’re not creative enough to capture His attention. But what if there is a third way?

Paying attention. I take time to notice myself. I notice the fog, rather than pushing through it. I pause to observe — without evaluation and strategy, but simply to understand what might be happening below the surface so that I can bring that understanding into my conversation with God. Paul says in Ephesians 4:22–24,

Put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and... be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and... put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. — ESV

At fifteen, I thought following God and putting off my old self meant drinking soda at parties, not alcohol, and “staying pure.” I stopped cussing and felt guilty when I tried cigarettes to look cool. Behavioral changes. Clearly I missed the full perspective of this verse, but I wonder whether you, like me, sometimes ask yourself what you’re putting off or putting on. Perhaps these verses are an invitation to pause, consider, notice: What is old in me, God, and what is the new You want me to wear?

I often find myself frustrated with the dated parts of my home and my unkempt closets, imagining my friend’s updated floor plan and organizing system. Without a minute or five to consider what’s leading to my grumpiness after we gather in her home and I catch a glimpse of that closet, I’m spending my Saturday cleaning closets and tearing pictures out of the Restoration Hardware catalog for a dream board.

But with those three or five minutes and a quiet space and some practice at looking a little bit deeper, I see that I feel overwhelmed with our chaos and wishful that I could return to days when decorating could be a priority.

I have something to put off. And I have something to put on.

I have something to put off.

And I have something to put on.

But it’s not about setting aside a beer can for sparkling water (or even the Restoration Hardware catalog for my Bible). It’s about what’s on the inside.

Recently I heard a woman described as “impressive.” She could lead a room. She had a quick wit and sharp intelligence. In her young life, she had accomplished much and seemed to continue accomplishing much. She worked late into the night and won the attention of clients and prospective clients because of her willingness to go the extra mile, no matter the cost. More than that, she loved God and prayed with power.

But I’d seen behind the scenes. I’d seen the dark circles under her eyes and her nervous habits. I knew she felt frayed as a mom, not enough as a wife, a failure as a friend. She wasn’t pleased with the work that wowed others.

She had a remarkable exterior life, but her inner life appeared to be headed for burnout. Christians around her applauded her diligence and her fervency in prayer, but they failed to notice the tightness in her gait.

We are often weak observers, of both ourselves and others, measuring the external and not looking beneath the surface. But the more I strengthen the skill of observing myself, the more I can see my neighbor. There are stories underneath our skin.

Most of us are not merely ignorant of them, we’re scared to see them. We’re afraid to look.

Seeing the stories beneath our skin can start as small as building moments into the day when we notice ourselves and our reactions to the world around us. Simple questions draw our attention to our interior lives, which crave God but often don’t know how to access Him. They draw our attention to the stuck parts of ourselves.

How did I feel after that conversation?

What made my heart race today? And what did that heart-racing tell me about myself?

When did the fog set in and I was merely reacting and not present? What happened just before this fog that might have made my brain go offline?

Underneath my mad, was there sad?

At what point did I start to feel bad about myself?

What couldn’t I erase from my mind?

What happened in my body and my thoughts after that conversation?

The pages of the Word tell us that God delights in truth in the inward being and teaches wisdom in the secret heart (Psalm 51:6). God cares about these deeper parts of ourselves that the questions uncover. He made space inside us to implant wisdom in, but when we’re mostly reacting, that secret heart from Psalm 51:6 is buried. Paying attention to what He cares about — the inner workings of our hearts — is a gentle process of excavating.

We can’t know the anxieties and the fears to bring to God unless we first notice them. Our response to our limits is worth our attention. The Word is full of God’s care for the intricacies of the human heart, that heart we often ignore and shame with phrases like “Why can’t I just get over this? I don’t know why it feels so hard.” He understands the intricacies of our hearts, but we have to first notice them before we can ask Him for that understanding. The psalmist said,

But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task, until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I discerned their end. — Psalm 73:16–17 ESV

God gives discernment to those who ask for it, but we must pay attention to know how to ask."'

John Calvin, The Institutes of Christian Religion (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2008), 4.

Excerpted with permission from The Gift of Limitations by Sara Hagerty, copyright Sara Hagerty.

[cheesey-rice]

Theory on the Soul in Deltarune. (Warning for spoilers on all routes.)

In case you didn't know already, there are two routes in the new Deltarune chapter. I think each one gives us a different perspective on Kris's motivations and their relationship with the soul that inhabits them.

I think the important thing that underpins my take on the game is assuming that the two other lighters who accompany you in the game, Noelle and Susie, are used to voice perspectives that Kris as a silent protagonist might share but be unable to express. This is a common tool used in silent protagonist RPGs, but if you don't agree with it my take might not hold much water for you.

I'll start out by talking about a fairly regular pacifist playthrough of this part. The main scene I'd like to discuss is the one at the end, where it is discussed that opening a dark fountain could bring about the Roaring.

Because it's pretty obvious that we are to think Kris is the "Knight" sneaking off to create these dark fountains with their knife, some people think that they intend to bring about the Roaring. I think their intentions are far less malicious than such a theory assumes.

Because the main thing is that we know that Kris as a character cares about the people in their life. They have a loving relationship with their family and take care of their friends automatically without us prompting them. When Susie consistently alludes to wanting to stay friends with Kris throughout the pacifist rounds, I assume these feelings are reciprocated. I also assume that most of the feelings Susie expresses about the dark world, that it's cool and fun and easier than the real world, are also feelings felt by Kris.

There's also another layer we can see to Kris's feelings about the dark world that comes from their own reactions. We know that Kris is a weird kid in real life, a lonely kid who looks up to their older brother and doesn't have any trophies on their wall like he does. In the dark world, Kris does get trophies on their wall in the room Ralsei makes for them. In the dark world, Kris is a confident, accomplished leader who can make as many friends as they want to thanks to help and guidance from a goat who is very similar to their older brother who they can't contact because of the internet currently.

It isn't really a ground breaking conclusion to say that Kris probably likes the dark world just as much as Susie does, as she talks only of how she wants to go back and have another adventure. Because Kris is the one making the dark fountains, one can see that the worlds are made for them. Made for their adventure with friends in a world makebelieved out of all their childhood toys and imaginings.

We also know that Kris has the ability to walk around, slash tires, eat pies, and make dark fountains without any input from us at all. They don't need us for that and have the ability to take us out whenever they want.

So if the theory that they resent the soul that controls their actions held true, why would we still be in control? Why would they choose to let us do that?

This is where it's important to consider Noelle in the alternate route, whose inner feelings we are often privy to due to Kris's strong understanding of her from childhood.

The alternate route is activated by forcing Noelle to kill people in the dark world. At one point, Noelle asks herself why she's following Kris's commands when they're asking her to do such awful things. The conclusion that she draws is, "but I keep getting stronger... They're just trying to make me stronger."

If this is the reason Noelle obeys Kris, then perhaps in turn we can extrapolate that this is the reason Kris obeys us.

Because we get results.

No matter which ending you get, Kris had an adventure, became stronger, defeated enemies it would have been impossible to go up against without us.

We also see that in scenes where we don't help Kris, where we aren't in control, they often suffer at the hands of these enemies. How Susie hit then against the locker in the first game, howthe King almost strikes them down after they help Susie, how Spamton would have killed them all alone in the basement if their friends hadn't interceded.

Kris wants to be cool and strong and have a fun adventure. For that reason, they are relying on another, external force to make their choices for them. To make choices that will matter.

In the Pacifist run, Kris gets their wish. A fun adventure with their friends where no one has to get hurt. Kris can just sit back and enjoy as a friendly dark power holds their hand through the whole thing.

In the alternate route, however, we see the start of a darker path. One where the dark power with hold over Kris makes malevolent choices that make them question themselves. Is this really the right thing?

We see this hesitation in how other characters react to Kris in this route. After Kris and Noelle kill Bertly, Susie notes that Kris's expression seems to be off some how. That something seems wrong with them, even offering to heal them because of it. Later on, Noelle notes that she sees some other voice coming out of Kris, something scary that she needs to investigate, foreshadowing a continuation of this plot in later chapters.

Kris experiences some amount of turmoil due to the actions of the player. But they still open the dark fountain and put the soul back into themselves later.

How do they justify that to themselves?

Think about Yoshi. If you talk to Garrison's descendent at his grave, they tell you that Kris drops Yoshi into the pit on purpose to complete a level in the video game. In video games Kris is already the kind of player that can distance themselves from necessary sacrifices.

Maybe they justify it to themselves the same way Noelle does at first. It's in the dark world, things are different there, it doesn't matter, it's not real. I'm still getting stronger. Isn't this what I wanted? Who cares if Berdley is dead, he sucked anyway, let's close our eyes and not even look so toby doesn't have to draw the sprite when we hide his body in the wire closet.

Perhaps the resign themselves to it, acclimate to it, become numb to the traumatic event in order to justify carrying on, like Flower or Chara in Undertale might be assumed to on a genocide run.

Because that's what having the soul allows them to do. It allows them to carry on.

On the notion of Noelle carrying on her investigation, it would be interesting to me if the endgame of deltarune turned out to be a fight where all the friends whose levels you raised by killing turn on you and try to either a) save Kris from you, or b) stop a Kris who is too far gone into apathy. That ending would seem sort of karmic to me so I would enjoy seeing it. I think a battle where you play as Kris but try to make them lose to their friends in a pacifist run ending might be interesting too seeing as they are the "knight" and all and are being set up as the big bad.

So basically my actual theorizing boils down to a) on pacifist run you're like Kris's replacement older sibling cajoling them into making friends on a little video game adventure and they're trying so hard to make you stay, or b) you take the alternate route and are just kind of traumatizing Kris into thinking murder is ok if they get to be cool and have fun adventures.

I also have some things to say about how Ralsei takes on Asriel's place of influencing Kris to experience empathy and when you follow those actions Kris is reminded of their big brother who they love and how the alternate route makes Kris cut themselves off from that empathetic power as part of maintaining their own self justifications but I should just make a different post if I'm gonna talk about that.

TLDR; Kris just wants to have a fun adventure like everyone else, I don't think they resent our control but are instead actively seeking it out to make their life easier.

[castielcommunism]

those posts about dean being better as a deuteragonist are so interesting because there's that thing in fiction where the main character is so boring you wish x was the lead instead, like why cant we just have dessert for breakfast feeling, but in this case fulfilled badly in a cursed monkey's paw kinda way. anyways rambling but do you think that it could still work if there writing was better? or is samantha only that fun because carrie's there as a comparison doing main plot things?

Yeah I think “Dean should be a deuteragonist” is sort of a catchall statement for “the writing should be better” with a bunch of nested arguments for what you think “better” actually means. Like in an alternate universe where Sam remained the lead I’m sure you’d get a lot of people saying they wish Dean was the main character instead (alternate universe me might even be saying that!), because the question of who exactly is the main character doesn’t necessarily determine the quality of the show itself. spn is bad for reasons beyond this character imbalance (which I think most people understand when they’re making this argument anyway).

Like PERSONALLY I think the problem with Dean being the protagonist is that all other characters flow from him. What needs to be removed is that, not necessarily Dean being the main character of the show. I consumed spn by binge watching the entire show in the span of a few months, and it felt like an exercise in watching everyone slowly bend to his whim. All external goals are discarded in favour of following Dean. Cas especially suffers from this (“you just gave up your whole army for one guy” well Cas you didn’t need to do that! That’s pretty unreasonable of Dean to ask you to do that!), but Sam also definitely suffers from it in pretty egregious ways. Him wanting to get out of hunting and be independent is always punished, but it’s almost always done through the mechanism of his brother pulling him back in.

And these things aren’t inherently bad, like it’s fine if your protagonist is an obsessive controlling dick to his friends and family, but the show doesn’t seem to be aware that this is what they’re making Dean out to be. And that’s where I want to seriously tone down these traits in Dean’s character, because they’re SO overblown and dramatic and harsh with virtually no resolution or reflection that I cannot take it seriously. Sam and Dean do horrific shit to each other and the show goes damn that shit was crazy. anyway tune in next week where the brothers make up and never discuss this betrayal of trust and autonomy again!

I feel like I need to add a bajillion qualifiers to any post where I say what I just did in the above paragraph, but like canon Dean IS pretty unpleasant pretty frequently. Like I don’t think that’s really debatable. Carver Era and Dabb Era are especially egregious. I think part of the reason people enjoy Kripke Era is because Dean being an asshole was at a reasonable level with much more sympathetic motivations and reasons behind it, and we also got a more balanced perspective from Sam, the guy who has to deal with his brother’s issues while also dealing with his own. They were both abused and neglected as kids and they’re dealing with it in unhealthy ways as young adults and hurting each other in the process, but not to such a degree where it feels like your soul is being ripped out of your body. Like these are two kids on the very cusp of adulthood who are scared and alone and don’t know how to talk about their feelings or work through the trauma they endured, and a lot of the time they’re just trying to get out of bed every day. I feel like the show lost that when they became adults, not because you can’t show adults the same level of sympathy and patience, but because they’re slowly morphing into gritty edgy action heroes. They have to look cool more than they have to look sympathetic, and any gestures towards vulnerability (Dean’s issues with substance abuse being intermittently brought up, Sam’s desire to be “pure” and “clean”, their various interpersonal issues, their loneliness, etc) are used as set dressing much more often than they’re used as like, actual starting points for character development. These guys are serial killers but they also like puppies and feel sad sometimes, so it’s actually very morally complicated! That kinda shit.

And like again, if you want to make your lead guy a huge asshole then go for it, but you need to take that seriously. But the show doesn’t, so I’m not going to take it seriously either! Like I really can’t take #deantransgressions seriously most of the time because Dean being insane or an asshole is used to make the drama of the week/season spicier. If you want to take it as a commentary on familial trauma or cycles of abuse, the conclusion you will likely come to is “it’s inevitable that abused children will become abusive as adults”, which is horrifically shitty and depressing and I reject that completely. I don’t KNOW if the show is even trying to argue that, but again, I don’t think it’s aware of how murky and complicated these topics are, especially if you don’t treat them with an appropriate amount of care and nuance.

Anyway lol this has drifted way off topic but like, I think a lot of the show’s writing problems (at least re: character development) would be “fixed” by decoupling Dean’s perception of reality with reality itself. Like when he’s wrong, let him be wrong! Let there be consequences. And also let that still be a sympathetic position to be in and not this huge massive fuck-up that you need to be brutally punished to atone for or whatever. The show does this with Cas, it does it with Sam, it does it with all kinds of characters. I want Dean to get pushback on his behaviour and be told to snap out of it, and then watch him work through his bullshit and come out the other side a more self aware and well adjusted guy. I want to be his character development cheerleader! Having figures like Bobby who are fundamentally on Dean’s side but also know he can be an asshole sometimes and have no qualms telling him when he’s being one is sorely needed. If all the side characters on spn are meant to be in service to the mains, then at least have them do interesting things like that instead of all becoming epic cool girlboss hunters who join the brothers on hunts once or twice a season.

So anyway to maybe sort of answer your question, I think that balancing out the cast more events between Sam/Cas/Dean would go a long way, but also changing the way “being wrong” is handled on the show. It’s not a huge moral failing or character flaw to be wrong. Pre-supposing the characters’ humanity and operating from the perspective of “I want to help you get better” would massively improve a lot of the character problems on the show imo. Allow Dean to grow, give him the supportive space to do that in, and write the other two leads as fully fleshed out people who have goals and desires that have nothing to do with Dean, and I think you’d get a much more compelling show with much better character drama. Whether Dean remains the main character then becomes a matter of preference more than anything else

[perpetual-stories]

How To Fight Writers Block

hello, hello. hope everyone is doing well. as you can all tell, this post will be about how to fight writers block.

it’s really annoying to me when I hear people say “oh you don’t have writers block, you’re just lazy.”

first of all, yes, I am naturally lazy. second of all, how dare you. writing isn’t as easy as many think. granted, all you have to do is write down words on paper, but it’s not always easy to find the right words to express what you are feeling, or what you wish to say.

I have had terrible writer’s block for the last few days and it’s horrible! as a business owner or a small writing store, I have to be ready to write and fulfill my clients’ ideas and orders.

it’s not easy. It takes a heavy toll on my imagination, and digs me a deep pit of blockage, drowning in the lack of originality because of the constant writing and repetition or certain phrases and sentences in different projects.

i am making this post in the hopes to remind myself about over coming the dreaded and sometimes skeptically believed writer’s block.

What is writer’s block?

Yeah, I know. We all know what that is, but let me define it.

is the state of being unable to proceed with writing, and/or the inability to start writing something new

some people believe it to be a real problem, others believe it's “all in your head”

What Causes Writer’s Block?

in the 1970s, clinical psychologists Jerome Singer and Michael Barrios decided to find out

they concluded that there are four broad causes of writer's block:

Excessively harsh self-criticism

Fear of comparison to other writers

Lack of external motivation, like attention and praise

Lack of internal motivation, like the desire to tell one's story

How to overcome writer's block: 20 tips

1. Develop a writing routine:

Author and artist Twyla Tharp once wrote: “Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is a result of good work habits.”

it might seem counterintuitive

if you only write when you “feel creative,” you're bound to get stuck in a tar pit of writer's block

The only way to push through is by disciplining yourself to write on a regular schedule. It might be every day, every other day, or just on weekends — but whatever it is, stick to it!

2. Use "imperfect" words:

A writer can spend hours looking for the perfect word or phrase to illustrate a concept

You can avoid this fruitless endeavor by putting, “In other words…” and simply writing what you’re thinking, whether it’s eloquent or not

You can then come back and refine it later by doing a CTRL+F search for “in other words.”

3. Do non-writing activities:

one of the best ways to climb out of a writing funk is to take yourself out of your own work and into someone else’s

Go to an exhibition, to the cinema, to a play, a gig, eat a delicious meal

immerse yourself in great STUFF and get your synapses crackling in a different way

Snippets of conversations, sounds, colors, sensations will creep into the space that once felt empty

4. Freewrite through it:

free-writing involves writing for a pre-set amount of time without pause — and without regard for grammar, spelling, or topic. You just write.

The goal of freewriting is to write without second-guessing yourself — free from doubt, apathy, or self-consciousness, all of which contribute to writer's block. Here’s how:

Find the right surroundings. Go somewhere you won't be disturbed.

Pick your writing utensils. Will you type at your computer, or write with pen and paper? (Tip: if you're prone to hitting the backspace button, you should freewrite the old-fashioned way!)

Settle on a time-limit. Your first time around, set your timer for just 10 minutes to get the feel for it. You can gradually increase this interval as you grow more comfortable with freewriting.

5. Relax on your first draft:

Many writers suffer form perfectionism, which is especially debilitating during a first draft

“Blocks often occur because writers put a lot of pressure on themselves to sound ‘right’ the first time. A good way to loosen up and have fun again in a draft is to give yourself permission to write imperfectly.” — editor Lauren Hughes

perfect is the enemy of good,” so don't agonize about getting it exactly right! You can always go back and edit, maybe even get a second pair of eyes on the manuscript

6. Don’t start at the beginning:

the most intimidating part of writing is the start, when you have a whole empty book to fill with coherent words

instead of starting with the chronological beginning of whatever it is you’re trying to write, dive into middle, or wherever you feel confident

7. Take a shower:

Have you ever noticed that the best ideas tend to arrive while in the shower, or while doing other “mindless” tasks?

research shows that when you’re doing something monotonous (such as showering, walking, or cleaning), your brain goes on autopilot, leaving your unconscious free to wander without logic-driven restrictions

showering is my favourite thing to do if I may add

8. Balance your inner critic:

successful writers have in common is the ability to hear their inner critic, respectfully acknowledge its points, and move forward

You don't need to completely ignore that critical voice, nor should you cower before it

you must establish a respectful, balanced relationship, so you can address what's necessary and skip over what's insecure and irrelevant

9. Switch up your tool:

a change of scenery can really help with writer's block. However, that scenery doesn't have to be your physical location — changing up your writing tool can be just as big a help!

if you’ve been typing on your word processor of choice, try switching to pen and paper. Or if you're just sick of Google Docs, consider using specialized novel writing software.

10. Change your POV:

great advice from editor Lauren Hughes: “When blocked, try to see your story from another perspective ‘in the room’ to help yourself move beyond the block. How might a minor character narrate the scene if they were witnessing it? A ‘fly on the wall’ or another inanimate object?

11. Exercise your creative muscles:

Any skill requires practice if you want to improve, and writing is no different! So if you’re feeling stuck, perhaps it’s time for a strengthening scribble-session to bolster your abilities

12. Map out your story:

If your story has stopped chugging along, help it pick up steam by taking a more structured approach — specifically, by writing an outline

13. Write something else:

Though it's important to try and push through writer's block with what you're actually working on, sometimes it's simply impossible

feel free to push your current piece to the side for now and write something new

14. Work on your characters:

It follows that if your characters are not clearly defined, you’re more likely to run into writer’s block

15. Stop writing for readers:

write for yourself, not your potential readers

this will help you reclaim the joy of being creative and get you back in touch with what matters: the story.

this is something I really need to do. because of my etsy business i don't write for fun anymore, but instead as a business and a deadline. i'm going to have to pull out my old crappy wattled fanfics or write some new ones.

16. Try a more visual process:

when words fail you, forget them and get visual. Create mind maps, drawings, Lego structures — ideally related to your story, but whatever unblocks your mind!

17. Look for the root of it:

writer’s block often comes from a problem deeper than simple “lack of inspiration.” So let's dig deep: why are you really blocked? Ask yourself the following questions:

Do I feel pressure to succeed and/or competition with other writers?

Have I lost sight of what my story is about, or interest in where it's going?

Do I lack confidence in my own abilities, even if I've written plenty before?

Have I not written for so long that I feel intimidated by the mere act?

Am I simply feeling tired and run-down?

once you identify what's wrong, it'll be so much easier to fix.

18. Quit the Internet:

If willpower isn’t your strong suit and your biggest challenge is staying focused, try a site blocker like Freedom or an app like Cold Turkey

19. Let the words find you:

meditate, go for a walk, take that shower

Word Palette is a great app that features a keyboard of random words, allowing you to simply click your way to your next masterpiece.

You can also try AI auto-completers like Talk to Transformer, where you can enter a phrase and let the app “guess what comes next.”

even though they often produce nonsense, it's a great way to help that writer's block.

20. Write like Hemingway:

And if your biggest block is your own self-doubt about your prose, Hemingway offers suggestions to improve your writing as you go

it's a pretty cool app if you ask me.

it highlights your sentences (if need be) and makes suggestions on how to improve them!

well, there you have it! a lengthy post on how to fight writer's block. now i just hope i can combat my own soon.

like, comment and reblog if you find this useful! feel free to reblog in instagram and tag me perpetualstories

Follow me on instagram and tumblr for more writing and grammar tips and more!

[reflectionsofneptune]

little things I associate with the Mercury signs.

Little dreamy, abstract things I associate with the Mercury signs in Astrology.

Aries Mercury

Authoritative. When I want something, I make it clear. Crystal clear. No beating around the bush. A forceful way of speaking. Don’t talk about it, be about it. Short sentences. A hint of arrogance. Competitive edge seeping through my words. What can I say, I like to be a winner? At all times. A raspy voice. Adopting a youthful charm when it suits me. Attuned to perceiving danger in my environment. Disliking an over-emphasis of niceties in conversation. Keeping it real. Exercising to clear the mind. Pep - talks. The rev of an engine. Pedal to the metal. Talking to me, I need you to bring your A Game and something new. Conversation needs to be stimulating. 

Taurus Mercury

Savouring. Words need to be savoured. Like beauty, they only get better with age. Listen carefully and hear what I stand for. Slowing down. Something about the handwriting. Cursive. An even tone. Words flow out of my mouth like maple syrup oozes down the height of a stack of fluffy, warm pancakes. Stubbornness. When am I ever wrong? Pictures, or it’s not real. Proof being recognised from what my base senses pick up. Inspiration from nature. A level-head. Choosing to see the beauty in my environment. For better or for worse. Don’t be fooled by my lack of conversation, I peep everything. 

Gemini Mercury

Riddles. I’m not going to tell you the answer but the curve of my lip might reveal itself when you’re getting close. Starting one conversation with one subject. Finishing the conversation with a completely different one. Playfulness. Humour as a tool of deflection. Quick texts. Leading conversations. Making a best friend in the supermarket. Another one, on the bus.  Seeing the duality of things in my environment. Information is like crack. I can’t get enough. Multiple tabs, open. Nervous energy. Fiddling. Mimicking your mannerisms if I like you, verbally ripping you apart if it tickles my fancy. Or not, I get distracted quite easily so you may be let off the hook.

Cancer Mercury

Introspective. Thinking about the past. Sometimes not finding my way back to the present. Emotions filtering through my words. Perceptions are protective. A vintage film, the introduction devoid of colour. An interest in knowing where one comes from, what comforts someone. Needing to cleanse myself of everybody’s emotional baggage. Again. Pathetic fallacy. Finishing your sentences. Promise its not on purpose. Wanting security from my environment. A psychological slant to conversations. A rich inner imagination. A diary, signed, sealed and under my pillow. Withdrawing into the cocoon of my thoughts when I feel threatened. 

Leo Mercury 

Commanding. A leadership position sounds good to me. Confidence in my thoughts. Words that can brighten up your life. Disney movies. Teasing conversations. Class clown. My thoughts are copyrighted. Bluffing. The curve a chest, puffed out to its maximum, makes. Talking loudly so I’m sure you hear me. Describing something in such detail, so you can feel as if you were there. Piping hot tea. Intellect and ego tied together.  Creativity expressed through speech. Seeing my immediate environment as a stage. Conversations in the mirror. The little grooves formed at the corner of the eyes when the smile is genuine. Blowing my own trumpet because if I don’t, who will?

Virgo Mercury

Organised. Seeing flaws in my environment. A to-do list, covered on both sides. Polite but not foolish. The spine of a book, crease free. Stepping back in conversation. The few creases that appear on the skin when a nose is wrinkled. Monotone. Advice given freely. Or withdrawing all help if I see it going through one ear and out the other. Discernment in conversation. Sticky notes. Attuned to see the bullshit in conversation. In life. Helpful suggestions. Take it or leave it. Mind feels like a hamster wheel. How do you turn this thing off?  An upward line of a tick, in red. Not an excuse, but know that the harder I am on you, the harder I am on myself really. 

Libra Mercury

Flirting. Feels as natural as breathing does. A sweet talker. The stem of cherry. A gentle lilt that comes alive in conversation. A fickle mind. Forever weighing up the pro’s and cons. Birdsong, cutting through morning dew. Wanting peace from my environment. Trying to maintain peace in my environment. A white flag fluttering in the wind, atop a hill. Indecision feels paralysing. Waiting for you to finish speaking before I provide an opposing point of view. Feigning innocence. Learning about myself through conversations with others. Sometimes not liking what I see. 3 sides to a story. I am capable of a decision, I just feel better when the internal scales of my thoughts are balanced. 

Scorpio Mercury

Power. Power plays in conversation. Checkmate. Words are comparable to pieces on a chessboard. Not a fan of small talk. Unless it’s for my benefit. Intuition on point. And then some. Probing. Trust issues. Talking to someone for a minute but deducing years of their life from a single meeting. Burner phones in a drawer. The eerie silence that comes around, say 4 AM. Secrets, mine and yours, help me fall asleep at night. Receipts for weeks, days and months. I’ve got it all. Past hurts cut deep in my psyche. Eyebrows pulled together. Pretending to be deaf when convenient. Subject changes. A full stop. Knowledge is power. I am capable of sharing intimate details of myself…..you first though. 

Sagittarius Mercury

YOLO. Sending those kinda texts to the wrong group chat by mistake. Saying what we were all thinking, even if it’s not the ‘right’ time, ‘cos fuck it. Slidin’ in the DM’s. Popping up like it’s nothing. You know me. Is time even real? The underside of a desk, covered with tags, love notes, and condom wrappers. Going off on social media. For a good cause, most of the time. Falling back on spirituality when life gets tough. Thought patterns are expansive and influenced by cultures and theories different than mine. Appreciating the differences in life. In people. Gift of the gab. That person who’s laughing when no one else is. Believing in abundance because that's what my environment reflects back to me. Stretching the fine line between truth and fantasy…….’cos fuck it.

Capricorn Mercury

Blue ticks. Time is of the essence. Thoughts are disciplined. A 3 tier desk organiser, stuffed to the brim with documents. Elocution lessons. Did you know I used to stutter? Deadpan jokes. A raised eyebrow. Judging people. We all do it, it’s innate to us. Keep your friends close. Enemies closer. Voicemail. I don’t need people to like me, but respect me is all I ask. A calculating mind. Always planning ahead. Sudoku puzzles. People give themselves away all the time, you just need to listen. Believing people’s actions over words. Thoughts focused on external recognition became a burden I often didn’t ask for, weighs me down.

Aquarius Mercury

Observant. Seeing the subtle layers that make up human behaviour. People are fascinating. A 360 way of looking at things. Reverb on an electric guitar. Solution-focused. A finger on the pulse of undiscovered knowledge. Static from a radio dial. I’m not afraid to question everything. An outdated statue, tipped. A love and hate relationship with time. Flashes of intuition. Needing time to process thoughts. A cool perspective. Shades of sunglasses, tinted yellow. Including people I’ve never met in my thoughts. In my dreams. My wishes. A Brave New World? I’m still waiting for people to step up and take responsibility.

Pisces Mercury

The red and white swirls of a helter-skelter ride. The path connecting my thoughts and my words is a little beaten. But not many people have bothered to venture this way. Pillow talk during the day. Drifting off in conversation. Overspilling in conversations. Or people, overspilling details of their life onto me. Missing appointments. Two circles merging into one if you stare long enough. Tapped into Source. Weaving you a dream with my words so good, I start to believe it. The afterword in a novel. Doodles in a margin. Sensitivity in conversation. Picking up a million and one signals from my environment. Using music to lose myself and ironically, find myself in the end.

————

| little thoughts about venus placements

| little thoughts about the mars placements

| little thoughts about the saturn placements

[tracybirds]

Paper Dreams

John receives a prestigious invite and he’s not sure how to respond.

Many thanks to @gumnut-logic for the encouragement because I am nerves!!

*                      *                      *

The crisp white envelope was heavy in his hands as he hurried from the room. Paper was a formality, a mark of distinction that would surely draw his brothers’ unwanted attention. Letters didn’t just arrive unannounced in this era of high-speed data connections and quantum supercomputers. In fact, they didn’t arrive at all.

So, John was more than a little apprehensive when Grandma Tracy silently handed him the sealed envelope and walked away.

It took only a few short minutes to read through the contents and he sat back against the window in his room, the words whirling in his mind.

Mars Colonisation Project. Distinguished candidate. Invited to apply.

An opportunity of a lifetime.

A way to prove for once and for all that he was more than his father’s famous name.

John clutched at the letter, the paper crinkling in his grasp. He mouthed the words as he read them, over and over.

He looked up at the sound of a loud yell calling his name, hurriedly shoving the letter into the envelope and dropping it at his side. Snatching up a nearby tablet, his flushed ears were the only hint of the letter that remained when Gordon shoved open the door.

“John, dinner, hurry up.”

His brother tore out of the room before he could respond.

*                      *                      *

John slipped into his seat, mouthing an apology to Grandma Tracy as he did.

“Finally!” cried Alan. He wriggled back in his seat, staring hopefully at the food. “Grandma said we had to wait for you, you took forever!”

“Is Dad not eating?” asked Virgil. “I heard him come in.”

“He’s taking it in the study tonight,” said Grandma Tracy, shaking her head slightly. “Brains dropped by and they’re holing up together on that project of theirs.”

John glanced over at the conspicuously empty seat at the head of table. They all knew what ‘that project’ meant.

In the heady rush of excitement, he’d all but forgotten the silent expectation that accompanied his studies and extra-curriculars for the past five years. A pet project alone wouldn’t have been enough to deter him from his own ambitions, but the Thunderbirds, they offered something different, something more than the office politics of academia, squabbling over research grants.

He’d never known anything that could compete.

Until now.

“Hey,” said Virgil in a low tone, nudging him from his thoughts. “You okay?”

John pulled himself back into the present with a slight grimace.

“Fine. Just thinking about an assignment.”

Virgil nodded slowly, looking him up and down with a critical eye.

“Are you going to eat anything, or just push it around?”

John automatically lifted his fork, blinking as the peas fell back to the plate and landed in a pile of mushy, grey potatoes.

“Actually, I’m not that hungry.”

“Can I have yours?” asked Alan, already reaching over to grab at his plate.

“Not hungry, John?” asked Grandma Tracy. “You’re not coming down with something, are you?”

She examined the pinched look in his face and the nervous twist of one hand inside the other.

“No,” said John, wishing he hadn’t said anything. The last thing he wanted was any level of scrutiny. “I’m fine, Grandma, honest.”

He let Alan scrape his leftovers from his plate, realising with a pang than he’d had another growth spurt over the previous semester at his boarding school.

If he left for Mars, he’d return to a brother he’d hardly recognise.

Colonisation was a long-term project, the result of years in planning and decades of dreams. Countless people would put their life’s work into its development and they had every right to expect the same of their astronauts. The application process alone was heavily involved and would severely limit time with his family, to say nothing of the many years ahead for him on Mars if he made it all the way into space. He’d be travelling millions of miles from home, only to find himself living with a group of strangers that he couldn’t escape without logging an external environment report.

He didn’t even like sharing a bathroom at the university housing that much.

Still the piece of paper called to him.

“Can I be excused?”

Grandma Tracy nodded and he hurried from the room, not noticing her troubled look.

The warmth of the room followed him into the hallway and he shut the door firmly behind him. He thrust his hand into his pocket, searching for the reassuring touch of cool paper.

It was real.

It was real and if he let the opportunity pass by, he might regret it for the rest of his life.

Or he might be wasting his time, pinning his hopes on something that would only serve to distract him in the long run. He could only imagine what Scott would say, who’d never once taken his eye off a prize once he’d decided to aim for it.

He didn’t know what to do, didn’t know what he wanted, and found himself climbing into the cramped space under the roof that had generously called a playroom, then a study, then an attic.

He blinked as the bare bulb overhead lit the small room, filling it with old memories and dust.

His first telescope was still standing in the corner, pointing high in the sky and he lifted the edge of his T-shirt to wipe the dust away. Surrounding it, lay stacks of books that his mom had picked up from the local thrift store, that Mrs Delaney, the owner, put them aside just for him.

John walked carefully among them, tugging the small window open and staring out into the night. The stars shone bright in the clear, crisp air.

Crouching down, he peered through the eye piece, adjusting the focus with a practiced hand. The little reflector was nothing like the giant telescopes available at the college department, and he had to hold his breath to stop the stand from wobbling. But the universe was still out there, the same as it was when he was a kid, still holding an infinite number of mysteries despite the years he had spent uncovering the rules that held it together.

He looked up, eyes darting through the familiar patterns, searching for the anomaly he knew was wandering between Gemini and Taurus.

And there it was.

Mars.

A planet with so much to offer the world they lived on. Where he could work with a team of people who loved space just like him, where he could devote his life to researching astronomy from a new perspective and developing technology for interplanetary life for generations to come.

Where he could leave his mark alongside all the heroes of his childhood. Alongside his dad.

“After all, why shouldn’t I go?” he said, scowling up at Mars.

“Go where?”

John spun around with a start.

“Kayo! When did you get in?”

She shrugged, propping up her head with her hand.

“Long enough to see you come up here,” she said. “I waited for you, but then Mrs Tracy said you hadn’t eaten. Figured something was wrong.”

She looked him up and down with a piercing eye. John tried not to squirm. He’d always felt Kayo had something of a sixth sense when it came to knowing things that should have been a secret.

“Seems like I was right,” she said, raising an eyebrow.

“Everything’s fine.”

“Then where are you planning on going?”

“Nowhere. I don’t think, that is…”

He flopped down and tilted his head back with a huff.

“Not right now, at any rate.”

Kayo pulled herself up onto the floor and drew the ladder upwards.

Neither spoke as the trapdoor shut with a small ‘click’.

The dust swirled in the air, dancing in the shafts of light above them.

“Is it a graduate program?”

“No.”

“An international program?”

“No.”

“A long-term space colonisation program for specially selected candidates who have already proven themselves in the fields of communications, astrophysics and astrotechnology?”

John stared at her.

She shrugged.

“It’s my job to know.”

“So, why even ask?”

“I’m trying to get you to lower your guard.”

She smiled at the dumbfounded look on his face.

“You’ve met Brains, right? He’s got some server tracker that flags your name. They asked your advisor for academic and personal references months ago.”

“Oh God,” said John, dropping his head in his ands and staring wildly at the floor. “Does Dad already know?”

Kayo shook her head.

“Dad and I do. Security details and all. But we don’t tell him that kind of stuff, you know, he’s not spying on you.”

“You’re right, that’s a real comfort,” said John, drily.

Kayo tossed her head.

“I’m just saying.”

Her eyes softened as she watched him draw his knees close to his chest.

“He doesn’t know.” She hesitated, still watching him. “Would it be all that bad if he did though?”

John huffed a little, still staring at his knees.

“International Rescue’s all we’ve ever talked about,” he said. “I didn’t think there’d be anything else I wanted. What if I let him down?”

“He’s already proud of you, John.”

“But we’ve been working towards it for so long now. This would change everything. Delay the full scope of the project for months, or years even.”

Kayo snorted.

“You really think Jeff Tracy, resident billionaire and with access to the best tech in the world, wouldn’t be able to find another genius astrotechnician and communication expert?”

John shot her a withering look.

“Okay, so maybe he’d have to find two super geniuses.”

She easily dodged the picture book he threw in her direction.

“Leave off,” he said, rolling his eyes.

Kayo spotted the slight smile though, and grinned broadly in return.

“Can I?” she asked, nodding at the space between him and the wall.

John nodded and shuffled over as best he could, trying not to topple the book stacks around them.

Kayo wriggled into the gap, and John paid her no mind.

He hadn’t thought of who would take his place because, of course, someone must. He’d been preparing for an International Rescue without him, one where his family diverted communications for a few years and focused their efforts on establishing themselves on land and sea until Alan stepped into his role on Thunderbird Five.

He hadn’t imagined an International Rescue where he wasn’t even needed.

Kayo seemed to sense the turn in his thoughts, nudging him gently to pull him from them.

“He wouldn’t trust them half as much as you, you know.”

John shrugged.

“I don’t want to disappoint him,” he said slowly, choosing his words carefully. “But I don’t want that to be the only reason I don’t go.”

He took a deep breath, and glanced back up at the slowly setting planet.

“And I want to go,” he admitted. “I do. I need to tell him.”

Kayo nodded, a sad look in her eyes. They sat in silence together, lost in their own thoughts. The bustle of the house downstairs filtered upwards. Muffled bangs and indistinct shouts of Gordon and Alan playing some ridiculous game, loud music from Virgil’s room – the kind he put on to drown out any interruption to his painting. Grandma Tracy seemed to be having some kind of one-sided conversation with herself, until John remembered, with a pang, that it was Saturday morning out in Guam and she was likely speaking to Scott at that very moment.

Kayo sighed and dropped her head on John’s shoulder.

“I’d miss you though.”

John swallowed carefully past the sudden lump in his throat.

“I’d miss you too.”

*                      *                      *

John was too old to be summoned to his father’s study, but somehow deliberately interrupting him felt worse. Nausea sat like a rock in his stomach, his voice box left in tatters as he knocked on the solid oak door.

“Who is it?”

He couldn’t reply.

His eyes flitted across the family photos that littered the hallway, landing finally on the image of his father and crewmates waving to the masses as they entered the Herschel-VI.

The photograph didn’t show the way his father was blind to the crowd, his farewell only for the woman who stood half a mile from the launchpad, proud, so proud, and sick with worry too. She held tight to her eldest son with one hand, and rested her other on the stroller she was rocking back and forth. She didn’t see the way he had wriggled out of his restraints nor how he was preparing to drop to the ground and run away, already intent on chasing after his father at three years old.

Jeff Tracy, first man on Mars, opened the door with a frown and a touch of impatience, and John knew there would be no escape this time.

“John.”

“Dad.”

His throat closed around his words and his hand closed around the letter in a fist.

Jeff looked down at the sound, and looked back at John, an assessing look in his eye. He stepped back wordlessly and John entered the severe room.

“What’s happened, son?” he asked, holding his hand out for the letter.

He smoothed down the crumpled edges as he read, his eyes leaping from phrase to phrase on the page.

“Well, it seems congratulations are in order. I assume you intend to accept?”

The knot in John’s chest loosened and he collapsed into the chair opposite Jeff.

“I intend to apply,” he corrected, staring down at the desk between them.

“John, they don’t reach out like this unless they want you onboard. They intend you to be on that shuttle, regardless of the formalities the bureaucrats put in place.”

“Yeah.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the blueprints, Brains’ small, neat handwriting annotating each design and his father’s looping comments scrawled liberally across them.

Jeff followed his line of sight and smiled.

“Five won’t be operational for a few more years, you know that. Don’t let her be what holds you back.”

“But this was always it, this is why I’m getting space rated. And the satellite network still needs to be launched, and the orbital mechanics calculated.”

“An opportunity like this doesn’t come your way twice, son.”

John stopped.

“You think I should accept. If they say yes.”

“Don’t you?”

There it was. His father’s blessing laid out in front of him, just waiting to be taken up like a pennant.

Everything they’d worked for, everything they’d sacrificed, gone. In its place, a single shining achievement, a global community on their sister planet. The first of its kind.

It had been a long time since John had allowed himself to dream his own dreams.

“Alright,” he said, a giddy rush spinning his head so that he hardly knew what he was saying. “I’m gonna do it.”

[botwstoriesandsuch]

hey Kip! I’m sending asks into different writer’s askboxes, inquiring about cool themes/development facts/stuff the author wants to share about their personal favorite work of their own. What’s yours? :)

Ok so this ask is old and when I first got it I was like “dang I don’t really have a lot to talk about, what should I talk about I could those revalink headcanons the Kip Cut that turned into a working fic uhh hmm maybe I’ll just make something new to talk about real quick” and then I did and now there is a 12+ chapter Revalink fic in my drafts and I’m gonna talk about that now, whoopsie doopsie [click "j" to skip]

aHEM, OK so allow me to break out the primary school white board because yeah, I have a lot of thoughts and the oxford comma has not yet made it’s home into my brain. oh and spoilers for paraphrase. for both all of Chapter one and future events in later chapters, but it’s really nothing you couldn’t surmise from the AO3 tags

so I really wanted to tell the story of Revali and Link learning and struggling to love again after the less-than-fortunate events of Botw, but I wanted a...how you say...fresher, approach on the subject? Like I know we always say that fanfic writers writing the same tropes and stories time and time again is good because we eat that shit up--but at the same time I had asian parenting as was told never to half ass anything ever, no matter what. So now I'm gay and extra and have depression maybe and oh would you look at that @motherhyrule has dropped a beautiful revalink prompt right into my lap

Great so now that we have, that, I shall take you on the step by step process on how to make a :sparkles: story. So step one is to spend at least five to eleven business days for your white board to dismantle your genre and themes and work them around your character arcs. Luckily I have prepared one ahead of time

s*breaks out those laser pointers that uni professors use* So let's start with defining genre. As define because I HATE you, fuck you. I want you to suffer and writhe on the ground, motherfucker. How dare you think that I would give you nothing but pure predictable fluff, fuck you and yours

is the set of expectations that your audience has when consuming a piece of media

And the great thing about fanfiction is that unlike movies or book where the genres are more vague like, "oh it's a noir mystery genre. so there's a crime, maybe a murder, and a detective and a criminal." or "oh it's a teen romance. so there's some white people and a morally questionable six-pack 18 year old love interest that will be painted as desirable for some reason" BUT with fanfiction HALF of the work out the window, because as soon as you see those #revalink #aro sidon #zelpha #revali is an idiot and #found family tags you already know what's up.

Now what's so great about genre and expectation? Well the fun thing about it is that

I will use it to fucking break you.

... ... ...

<3 For example! <3

In Chapter 1: Holes, you already expect there to be revalink, you already expect them to be soulmates with the soulmarks and there's angst and yadayada ya. Revali and Link have to match because thatttss what this is all about, this is about them! This is about cute, little soulmarks and romantic words!

But whoooopsie doopsie [disney channel laugh track plays] they DON'T match anymore! Link's got a different mark! The number one rule of this entire genre has been broken whoooooooooooooooops. *ba dum tiss*

You might notice with a lot of my writing that I do this a lot, this whole..."oop but there's one little thing that's different." TebaSaki sick fic? Ok cool, but what if Teba burns an irreplaceable relic of the Rito champion to fight a wizzrobe first to characterize why his dumbass clicks with Saki. Mipha deciding to persue Link? Ok what if she chases after a dragon to externalize this conflict as she pierces it's flesh for a scale. Link fighting a Lynel? Ok but what if it's actually a sidlink angst fic in disguise and it's also world building on how Link deals with the bloodmoon that erases all of his efforts which is sort of similar to how his existence was erased from Hyrule 100 years ago mwaahahaha! Ok now that I say this outloud I think I just have a pattern of using fight scenes to externalize character growth. I like fight scenes...anyways.

I think another great thing about the realm of fanfiction is that with the tagging system, I can basically use a chekhov's gun sort of deal, without doing any writing. You know I'm gonna use that gun marked "soulmates" but you don't know when I'm gonna shoot it, and you SURE as hell don't know how.

And huzzah! One of the main points of conflict both drives the tension between Revali and Link, solidifies the unique genre and setting of this world, while also creating a new mystery that will carry over for the next few chapters.

Is Revali right in that Link's rebirth makes him destined for someone new now? What will Link do with the information that his soulmark has changed? Why did it change? Did Revali's change as well? How does anything fucking work right now?

And sure, you might be able to tell where things will end with them, but you sure as fuck will not know how because I HATE you. Fuck you. I want you to suffer and writhe on the ground, motherfucker. How dare you think that I would give you nothing but pure predictable fluff. I am not your goddamn fairy godmother, I will do as I fucking please. You will suffer as you fucking deserve, fuck you and your little tiny--

/j

Oh! But you might have noticed on my little planning whiteboard thing that there was a little T-Chart! For Revali and Link! That's because the next important thing besides plot (and in a lot of cases, including this one, it's argued to be even MORE important than plot) is

~CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT~

[to the tune of that history of the world video on youtube]

So yes, it's a little T-Chart outlining their character views in relation to the themes. And the great thing about themes is that they're not something you can necessarily predict in the same way you can with the genre and plot.

But now see, I'm very lazy so I'm just gonna plagiarize @hyrule-kingdom-updates thingy [that you should read btw] because they said my point quite clear enough

Now I don't really need to care about those points about bond and relationships and being understood, because I'm dealing with already established canon characters. I'm not some NERD who dabbles with entire casts of ocs who even cares about ocs not me that's for sure ahaahahaahahahahahaahahahahahAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH *cries in my orphaned WTTU fic* AHAHAHA*sobs*DONT FUCKING LOOK AT ME THAT WAY I SWEAR--

/j I love ocs

But the points I do wanna focus on is the idea that characters provide new perspectives on the theme, and that characters growth can be tracked based on their wants, lies, and needs.

So see, themes can be predicted the same as genre/plot because while you can have the same fanfic plots and tropes, theme will always vary!

Sometimes it's a journey of selfworth with Revali! Sometimes it's an exploration of trauma with Link. Sometimes it's about how you deal with the vulnerabilities of love with Mipha. Sometimes there's straight up NOOOO theme, and people just be fucking, and kissing, and baking, and having a good time. And that is totally fine too!

But I'm not a fucking coward.

I'm gonna weave in themes with my plot, because I fucking can.

I'm not a weakling like you.

Do you hear me, 2019 Kip? Do you hear me Demmers? Do you hear me Quill? I'm coming for your ass. You think you're so great, but I'm coming for you. Rest assured that your graves will be as deep as your sculptured pride--

Heeeere is that T-Chart again, plus more!

yyyyyYou might notice that Revali and Link are quite parallel, to paraphrase. Ayoooo, see what I did there? *dabs* I'm a genius. Anywho

They both start off the same way: 100 years ago they were in love and happy. Basically the equivalent of childish naivety. For the first time in their lives, life is whimsical and charming, and they make each other happy. In fact, it's almost a flaw with how they perceive this happiness. But don't worry! It doesn't last long!

You know what happens.

I think the chart is pretty self explanatory. Revali builds walls fast enough to give a republican a wet dream. Meanwhile Link makes every aromantic in the chat groan with his doubled down sentiments in the idea that his chances of being truly happy again are gone.

Now, I can't exactly describe the full on process of the inbetweens, and where Revali and Link are gonna go from here, because...you have to read it for yourself! Heehee...but something I did think was fun was how these character views on the themes are revealed. Because you'll notice that, I never give exposition. Ever.

Ok well, let me rephrase that. I never give exposition scenes. I will never give you a big LOTR fancy wizard scene explaining the ins and outs of a character's question or the world's magic or whatever. I'm a very impatient Kip, and I value efficiency. Nonono, it's all about multi tasking, baby!

Chapter 1: Holes is divided into three parts.

Post 100 Years - Medoh (Establishes Ghost Rev/Bonk Head Link's view)

100 Years Ago - Flight Range (Establishes old Revalink views)

Post 100 years - Mark (Develops Ghost Rev/Bonk Head Link's view in contrast to who they once were)

I think the way that you structure flashbacks is incredible vital, as it's a very quick way to characterize people without having them say stuff like "I used to be like you, until I took an arrow to the knee" or whatever.

And with the main structure of the chapters and the fic as a whole is focus on their characters, that means I can hide whatever other stuff I want in those scenes, becuase you're too busy absorbing the fun character stuff to realizing I'm giving you boring exposition. Like for example:

Post 100 Years - Medoh and Mark

Foreshadowing for the end of the fic

Set up connection to Medoh with Revali

Link has defeated Windblight

Link has been visiting Revali every night for the past few days

Link has already met Kass and presumably Teba

Link doesn't have the Mastersword

Revali's Gale is still an ability that needs master and practice on Link's end

And that's just some of the stuff.

And see, the only reason I can efficiently give all of this information regarding character, and even exposition, is because of the theme. The themes make everything relevant, and everything circles and encompasses one another, so there's absolutely no wasted space. I mean don't even get me started on how it's gonna be to characterize the other characters around this

I don't wanna talk about the other characters too much either because that's spoilers, but you can probably take a gandar based on my notes.

And oh my god this is just on the theme of the faults that come with "soulmates" and "true love" and all that, and how even magical destined relationships still require work and effort, and that no one thing or person solves all your problems. And that's not even TOUCHING the shit on trauma and scars. I didn't think it was even possible for me to talk about botw without touching on that, ha. Ah well, I've been talking for too long.

Revalink has a lot o' writing potential so das pretty cool yeah, I am excite

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Conspiracy fantasy

When we talk about conspiratorialism, we tend to focus (naturally) on the content of the conspiracy. Not only are those stories entertainingly outlandish — they’re also the point of contact between conspiracists and the world.

If your mom is shouting about “Hollywood pedos,” it’s natural that you’ll end up discussing the relationship of this belief to observable reality. But while the content of conspiratorial beliefs gets lots of attention, we tend to neglect the significance of those beliefs.

To the extent that we consider why the beliefs exist and proliferate, the discussion rarely gets further than “irrational people have irrational beliefs.” This is a mistake. The stories we tell one another are a kind of Ouija board, with all our fingertips on the planchette.

The messages it spells out don’t describe external reality but they do reveal our internal, unspoken anxieties and aspirations.This is why we should read science fiction: not because it predicts the future, but because it diagnoses the present.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/26/meaningful-zombies/#oracles

Sf is an ever-mutating ecosystem of fears and hopes, and readers apply selective pressure to those organisms, extinguishing the ones that don’t capture the zeitgeist and elevating the ones that do, a co-evolution of our fantasies and our narratives.

http://locusmag.com/Features/2007/07/cory-doctorow-progressive-apocalypse.html

This is why Alternate Reality Games are so central to their players’ lives. They’re a form of narrative co-creation, with the players throwing out theories and the game-masters actually changing the story to incorporate the best of them.

ARGs are an environment where your coolest and most deliciously scary ideas become reality. It’s a powerful way to galvanize collective action.

As anthropologist Biella Coleman writes in Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy, it’s the organizing principal behind Anonymous.

Anon Ops begin life as victory announcement videos. If the vision of success captures enough Anons, they execute the op.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-anonymous-ghost-in-the-machine

In other words, the degree to which a shared fantasy of victory compels its audience predicts whether the audience realizes its fantasy. Long before the alt-right, Anons were memeing ideas into existence (no coincidence, as both were incubated on 4chan).

On the Conspiracy Games and Counter-Games podcast, three left academics — Max Haiven, AT Kingsmith, Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou — analyze “conspiracy fantasies” (as opposed to conspiracies, e.g. the Big Lie behind the Iraq War) for what they reveal about late capitalism’s anxieties.

As leftists, they naturally focus on the relationship between material conditions and people’s behaviors and beliefs. This is an important part of the discourse on conspiratorialism that’s often missing from liberal and right-wing analysis.

Conspiracists aren’t just “irrational” nor are they just “racist.” They may be both of those things, but unless you look at material conditions, then the surges and retreats of conspiracism are mysterious phenomena, strange tides raised by unseen forces.

A decade ago, then-PM David Cameron — the architect of a brutal, authoritarian austerity — dismissed the Hackney Riots as “criminality pure and simple,” and demanded a ban on discussion of the relationship between austerity and unrest.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2011/aug/09/david-cameron-riots-criminality-video

But without that discussion, there’s no explanation. Even if you believe that “criminality” is a thing that is latent within some or all of us, what explains a rise or fall in that criminality? Is it like pollen that alights upon some of us, turning us bad? Or the full moon?

Likewise the “conspiracists are just racists” or “they’re just deranged.” Without looking at the material world, there’s no explanation for why that racism suddenly became more (or less) important to how conspiracists live their lives.

We can’t talk about conspiratorialism without talking about material considerations, and we have to talk about the form and substance of the conspiratorial belief. The ARG-like structure of Qanon is a hugely important part of its popularity:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/05/behavioral-v-contextual/#adrian-hon

Memeing things into existence in a game-like way is hugely compelling. You can tell when a D&D game is hopping when the players and the DM start co-creating the story, with the DM slyly altering the dungeon and the NPCs to match the players’ super-cool theories.

A recent episode of the CGACG podcast present a mind-blowing analysis of the interplay of the material conditions, mythology and structure of Qanon. It’s a two-part interview with Wu Ming 1:

https://soundcloud.com/reimaginevalue/wuming-one-1?in=reimaginevalue/sets/unmanageablerisks

https://soundcloud.com/reimaginevalue/wuming-one-2?in=reimaginevalue/sets/unmanageablerisks

Wu Ming 1 is part of Bologna’s Wu Ming Collective, the successor to the 1990s Luther Bissett net-art collective. Bissett did many wild, weird things,including publishing “Q,” an internationally bestselling conspiratorial novel in 1999 (!!)

https://www.wumingfoundation.com/giap/what-is-the-wu-ming-foundation/

The plot of “Q” involves a high-level government official, privy to top-secret info about a state conspiracy. It closely mirrors Qanon beliefs, right down to a call for a Jan 6 uprising (!!!!). The major difference is that “Q” is set during the Protestant Reformation.

In the interview, Wu Ming 1 talks about the proliferation of conspiratorial, ARG-like 4chan hoaxes that predated Qanon, and hypothesizes that the original Q posts were plagiarized from the novel.

The strange experience of seeing a novel turn into a cult prompted Ming 1 to write “La Q di Qomplotto” (“The Q in Qonspiracy”), a book that defines and analyzes “conspiracy fantasies.”

https://edizionialegre.it/product/la-q-di-qomplotto/

Ming 1’s interview digs into this in some depth, including setting out criterial for distinguishing conspiracies from fantasies (for example, a conspiracy doesn’t go on forever, while a fantasy can imagine the Knights Templar running the world for centuries).

I was taken by Ming 1’s discussion of the role that “enchantment” plays in conspiratorialism — the feeling of being in a magical and wondrous (if also anxious and terrible) place. He says this is why “debunkers” fail — they’re like people who spoil a magic trick.

Ming 1 and the hosts talk about replacing the enchantment of conspiratorialism with a counter-enchantment, grounded not in the conspiratorialist’s oversimplification and essentialism, but in the wonder of reality.

Ming 1 analogizes his “counter-enchantment” to the “double-wow” method of Penn and Teller: first they blow you away with a trick, and then they blow you away with the cleverness by which it was accomplished.

He describes how the Luther Bissett collective performed a double-wow during Italy’s Satanic Panic, creating a hoax satanic heavy metal cult and a counter-cult, promulgating stories of their pitched battles, then revealing how they’d faked the whole thing.

The action was taken in solidarity with actual Bolognese heavy metal fans who’d been framed for imaginary Satanic “crimes.” Luther Bissett wanted to demonstrate how a panic could be created from nothing, to reveal the method behind the real hoax with a fake hoax.

The double-wow method reminds me of Richard Dawkins’ manuever in “The Magic of Reality,” his excellent children’s book about the virtues of the scientific world, revealing how the numinous wonder of faith is nothing compared to the wonder of science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_of_Reality

The idea that conspiratorialism is a leading indicator of capitalism’s anxieties is a powerful one, and it ties into other compelling accounts of conspiracy, like Anna Merlan’s REPUBLIC OF LIES, which discusses the importance of trauma to conspiratorial belief.

Like Ming 1, Merlan stresses the kernel of truth underpinning conspiracy fantasies — the real aerospace coverups that make UFO conspiracies plausible, the real pharmaceutical conspiracies to cover up harms from drugs that underpin anti-vax.

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/09/21/republic-of-lies-the-rise-of-conspiratorial-thinking-and-the-actual-conspiracies-that-fuel-it/

In the podcast, Ming 1 and the hosts stress the importance of identifying and addressing the kernel of truth and the trauma it produces in any counter-conspiratorial work — that is, a successful counter-enchantment must address the material conditions behind the fantasy.

I really like this approach because of its empathy — its attempt to connect with the conditions that produce behaviors and beliefs, not to be confused with sympathy, which might excuse their toxic and hateful nature.

It reminds me a lot of Oh No Ross and Carrie, whose hosts have spent years joining cults and religions and digging into fringe practices and beliefs in an effort to understand them; they laugh a lot, but never AT their subjects.

https://ohnopodcast.com/

But Ming 1 brings something new to this discussion: an analysis of the role that novels have played in conspiracy fantasy formation: not just the plagiarizing of “Q” to make Qanon, but things like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion plagiarizing Dumas.

The interview also brought to mind Edward Snowden’s recent inaugural blog-post, “Conspiracy: Theory and Practice,” which seeks to separate conspiracy practice (e.g. the NSA spying on everyone) from theories (what Ming 1 calls “fantasies”).

https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/conspiracy-pt1

Snowden connects the feeling of powerlessness to the urge to explain the world through conspiracies, relating this to his experience of revealing one of the world’s most far-reaching real conspiracies, and then becoming the subject of innumerable conspiracy fantasies.

Snowden’s perspective is one that has heretofore been missing from conspiracy discourse — the perspective of someone who has been part of a real conspiracy and then the central subject of a constellation of bizarre and widespread conspiratorial beliefs.

These different works, focusing as they do on the character of conspiratorial beliefs, the nature of conspiratorial practice, and material conditions of conspiracists, comprise a richer analysis of our screwed-up discourse than, say, theories about “online radicalization.”

As I wrote in my 2020 book “How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism,” the “online radicalization” narrative requires that you accept Big Tech’s unsupported marketing claims about its power to bypass our critical thoughts at face value.

https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

Claims to be able to control our minds — whether made by Rasputin, Mesmer, pick-up artists, MK-ULTRA or NLP enthusiasts — always turn out to be cons (though sometimes the con artists are also conning themselves).

But there’s a much more plausible, less controversial set of powers that Big Tech possesses. By spying on us all the time, it can help scammers target people who are ready to hear conspiratorial explanations.

By monopolizing our discourse, it allows SEO scammers to create default answers to our questions. By locking us in, it can keep us using a platform even if the discourse there makes us angry and anxious.

And by corrupting our political process, it creates “kernels of truth” for conspiratorial beliefs.

As with Scooby Doo, the monster turns out to be a familiar villain in a fright mask: a monopolist whose abuses and impunity create the anxiety that make conspiracy plausible.

[novantinuum]

On the corrupted!Steven theory...

So, originally when I mused on this yesterday I was just playing around with random possibilities.

After combing the series for info about corruption, though, I’m mildly spooked at the increased potential for this to... perhaps be a thing? I’m not saying that this is what I for sure believe will happen- to be honest, I’m not even sure Crewniverse would go this direction at all- but just for funsies, let’s see what kind of “evidence” or “foreshadowing” exists that might support this potential story path in the context of canon.

(EDIT: 10/7/19 

I honestly no longer think this creature is a worm at all whatsoever, it’s either more akin to a horned caterpillar or potentially has limbs. Either way we can see so little right now that it’s hard to tell. I’m not editing the rest of this post because I want it to exist in its original form- but do keep this in mind reading the rest! XP)

1) The design of this worm creature.

Let’s start simple. Let’s start tangible. 

For future reference and simplicity, I will be henceforth be referring to this creature as... “Wormy Boi.”

So, let’s see what we’ve got here. I’m definitely not the first person to point out this fella’s pink nature, and the jarringly human-like nose they’ve got. (Compared to other corruptions, which have had distinctly non-humanoid features.) In the photo above, we also have Wormy Boi sporting glowing pink eyes, which then send out a flare of pink light/energy. So, seemingly a powerful entity.

If you watch the short segment before they sit upright, you’ll see that Wormy Boi is super, super big. They’re in the background, but BOY do they loom. The shadows cast upon them especially push that sense of size. They’ve also got a whole bunch of spikes on their back and framing their face.

So, then. What evidence could be made for this being a corrupted!Steven, as opposed to some other run-of-the-mill monster?

Steven Universe Future is a limited series, described as ‘tying up loose ends.” To me, as a viewer, it would make far more sense for the antagonists/conflicts to deal with big concepts that have already been established since there’s such a limited amount of time we have left with this world. Introducing a completely alien species in the last act of the show would feel offbeat from both a writing and a viewing perspective. Corruption- on the other hand- is something we don’t have full answers to yet.

We don’t see any gem, yes- but Steven’s gem is- of course- on his belly. If this theory were to be true, that would translate to the gem being on Wormy Boi’s underside, far out of our sight in this shot, due to how massive they are. As an addition to this, not showing the gem gives an air of mystery to this creature’s true nature- which makes it seem like there’s something surprising to discover here.

A corrupted diamond would surely be MASSIVE. Also, very powerful. The beam of pink light hints at Wormy Boi being quite a powerhouse.

The spikes on Wormy Boi’s back and around their face highly resemble rose thorns. We all know how much the Crewniverse loves their rose symbolism, and design wise, this aspect would make a lot of visual sense for a corrupted Steven. Running off of that:

The face/nose shape and the five horns on this creature’s head give off a very Steven-like silhouette. 

The nose, of course. The face has a very Steven-like shape to it, overall- although noticeably more angular and sharp. The mouth is reminiscent of the Watermelon Stevens’ mouths. And as for the horns, there’s five of them positioned equidistant around their face, just as Steven’s hair is always formed from five lil’ bumps at the same positions.

Okay, moving on.

(Read more under the cut!)

2) We do not yet understand the true nature of corruption.

“I guess it’ll take more than a kiss to heal damage from the Diamonds…” -Pearl, Monster Reunion

Corruption is still- bafflingly- a huge mystery. The Gems we’ve watched the CGs bubble since season one have been healed, yes, but there are still many gaps in our understanding of it. With Steven Universe Future’s promise to address some lingering story threads, it would make sense if corruption was on the plate for further discussion. So, what DO we know?

We know it’s something the Diamonds can do. Interestingly, it doesn’t seem to require all four diamonds. Three of them together were able to cause all the damage to Earth. There’s also no statement made that more than one Diamond is required to cause effects like that. 

In Legs From Here to Homeworld, Blue and Yellow Diamond weren’t actually aware the corruption was something they were capable of producing. They seemed to assume they obliterated the Gems on Earth. Corruption is then, even a mystery to them. That’s... odd, isn’t it?

Pearl states that it’s “something nearly impossible to describe.” Garnet goes further to say... “It’s sorta like... if MC Bear-Bear didn’t tear the fabric of his arm, but the fabric of his mind.”

"A sound… A song?” There’s a lot of association between corruption and music.

It causes Gems to lose touch with their usual forms, instead warping into a more outwardly "monstrous” version of themselves that appear to be “just a bundle of fight-or-flight reflexes and survival instincts.” As seen by Centipeetle in Monster Buddy and Monster Reunion, it appears as if corrupted Gems try to regenerate with their original forms if unbubbled, but are simply not in a state where they can maintain that.

As seen with Jasper in Earthlings, extreme emotional distress very much seems to speed up corruption’s effects. This is less of a stated fact and more of my read on that episode, but I believe it to be an important tidbit, especially since Garnet states that corruption’s damage is mental rather than physical, at least at its core. This can also be seen in Monster Reunion with how Centipeetle’s partial healing backfires when she remembers the trauma of being corrupted and reacts strongly.

Now, when it comes to healing corruption, Steven tries to heal Centipeetle himself, and does make some nice progress... helping her regain a hold on herself as he treats her with love and compassion and understanding... but it’s ultimately not a healing that can occur in isolation, helping her on his own. She needs more support before she can heal from this corruption to a state where she can truly be herself again.

And that eventually comes in the form of the other Diamonds. So, all four diamonds can help relieve the corruption if they help these Gems all together. 

3) How could this theory potentially fit into the story anyways, you nutter?

Well, here’s the part of this post where I make some broad conjectures. I honestly am shooting fish into a barrel here because again- we know barely anything about how corruption actually happened initially, and my thoughts are very jumbled. Please forgive me.

"I don’t really know how the corruption works. It’s like they’re sick. They don’t remember who they used to be.” -Steven, Gem Hunt

So, corruption seems to be a mental ailment of Gemkind, turned manifest. It also seems to have a deep connection to a Gem’s emotions, with Centipeetle growing smaller and slightly calmer upon feeling more secure in Steven’s presence, and corruption speeding up as Jasper grew more and more emotionally overwrought and self-deriding about herself. 

When it comes to the Diamonds and how they perhaps caused it originally- without fully realizing- we know that at least Blue and White have abilities focused on causing others to act in certain ways. Blue has sway over one’s emotions, and White has a knack for forcing her thoughts and self upon others. (I’m not sure how Yellow’s ability would play in here.) Mayhaps, mixed with their grief and guilt and anger, their power simply pressed all of that hurt emotion onto all the Gems on Earth in one whole fail swoop...? Tearing their minds in the process of it all?

The question I still have, though- is whether a single diamond could produce effects like this. And whether a diamond could turn that ability on themself.

Could Steven accidentally corrupt himself? Why might that happen?

Well, let’s look at our boy here. 

He’s got a wide circle of support at this time in canon, but notably, he’s notorious for bottling up his emotion and not letting others in to help him- instead dropping everything to help them with their problems. Just to name a few examples (a few):

The Test. He feels betrayed and hurt at the Gems for a moment about the way they’re babying him with the rigged test, but instead of admitting the hurt he feels about the scenario, bottles that up to help them feel more like good guardians.

Joy Ride. He opens up to the Cool Kids about deep, incredibly troubling stuff that’s long been on his mind, but he’s never once talked about it with his family.

Mindful Education. The perils of bottling one’s emotions is literally the whole plot of the episode. The kid has a full out sobbing breakdown while he’s plunging to his death. Connie gets through to him a little here, but later episodes show that the resolution we see here is merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Steven’s internal issues. 

Storm in the Room. Externally, Steven tries so hard to put on a guise of content and positivity, but once alone in Rose’s room feels safe enough to let the full brunt of his emotional trauma come out in an almost explosive manner. Geeze, get this kid some hugs. 

Gemcation. Steven actually fails bitterly on putting on his customary smile in this episode, simply because the weight of his problems have become such an impossible burden to him. When the other Gems are trying to help him open up, he isn’t immediately responsive to their efforts. 

What’s Your Problem? Amethyst spends the whole episode trying to cheer Steven up and find out how he’s doing, and instead Steven downplays his own feelings on the matter and ends up helping her sort out her own emotional issues.

So to sum: Many an Emotional Issue, a chronic tendency to avoid outwardly addressing said issues in favor of helping everyone else instead... and to avoid accepting other people’s help.

Even if he’s surrounded by all these people who love him, the fact of the matter is that Steven still feels as if he has to face his own inner demons alone.

Now, let’s look at the lil’ teasing synopsis that was given for Steven Universe Future:

“After saving the universe, Steven is still at it, tying up every loose end. But as he runs out of other people’s problems to solve, he’ll finally have to face his own.”

Blatantly sounds like we’re gonna finally get some addressing of Steven’s emotional state, now doesn’t it?

4) A concept on what could, theoretically happen

“Maybe… it IS a guy in a monster costume. I don’t mean literally, silly! What I mean is... there might be a conscious Gem still inside there, somewhere. What if the monster is turning back and forth into its original form? If it is, it might not be as corrupted as we think! There might still be a chance to save it!” -Steven, Gem Hunt

Suppose Steven- by some as-of-yet unknown means- ends up accidentally corrupting himself. His sorry emotional state only further amplifies the effects of this corruption, and makes it really hard to retain control. Wormy Boi as a form could be like... all his inner demons made manifest, a metaphoric mirror into his current mental state. But- as he is half-human- he’s not entirely unaware of what’s happening. Perhaps... as the quote above could be sneaky foreshadowing for... how he’s turning back and forth between this corrupted form and his normal form. 

He likely wouldn’t want everyone to see him like this, doesn’t want everyone to visibly know the sheer depth of how much he’s hurting. But just like the corrupted Gems were only able to be helped in community, with the support of the CGs and the Diamonds in preparing the fountain, Steven can’t fix this on his own. 

He can no longer face the dark alone.

At some point, everyone has to take a brave step. Reach out. Accept help. 

Steven’s helped so many people, and surely he deserves that same love and care in return, too.

And perhaps, when he’s eventually healed from this- and has gotten the opportunity to be open with his family and friends about the hurt he’s facing- he’ll be left with “corruption scars” as well. I think it’s an important thing to address, that no one goes through experiences like these without lingering effects. Stuff stays with you. Healing is not always linear. But life is a continuous journey, and with the support of people who love you surrounding, you too can make a change... can continue to live to the fullest at every moment possible.

I think the above would be a lovely moral for Steven Universe to tackle in its last run of episodes, no matter how they approach it- daft corruption theory or not.

Now, in the end- a reiteration. This is just a wild theory. I’m not trying to be any authoritative voice saying that this is for sure what will happen, because in reality I have no idea what Crewniverse is cooking. However, I do think it’s fun speculation, and I am kinda spooked at how well things fit. 

Whatever happens, I’m sure it will make me weep like a baby, though. Hoh boy. Grant me sanity in these coming months as we wait for answers.