#And I haven't felt the motivation yet to tackle this story

[daemon-in-my-head]

3 & 4 for the ask game!!

Ooh spicy, thank you for the ask!

3. How do you prefer to portrait your Durge? Do you enjoy them in writing or their visuals more? If you're a writer or artist, would you/have you commissioned someone else before? Would you like to, in case you couldn't yet do it?

Honestly I'm gonna say both, cuz I adore both his visuals and his personality. If I draw anything and actually put effort into it/get absorbed in the hyperfocus I usually intend to tell a story anyway and his themes perfectly match what I usually enjoy. With writing it's the same, though I'm ngl it is harder since his head is tackling a lot of thoughts I usually tend to avoid myself. Nevertheless it's still enjoyable as hell.

Haven't commissioned anybody yet but hopefully one day I'll get to do it, broke ass bitch rn for reasons

4. How did Durge come to be? Why them? Was it a vibe you tried to capture or a specific visual you wanted to represent? Did you borrow them from previous works or were they handcrafted for this story you have in mind?

I'm a mmo girlie, the kinda mmo where you are your character. Which is to say, I've never actually did the OC thing before so he's wholly original and crafted exclusively to suit my ulterior motives aka I specifically made him up to suit the story I'm trying to tell.

As for why, well I had no actual OC and my prev Durges didn't quite fit the vibe or the story I wanted to tell.

I love all the marry sues and the unhinged Durges, and I love all the durgetash stuff, doing it myself on the side tbf, but I wanted one who's grounded in reality with just enough whimsy and madness to be an escape and a story that focuses primarily on the torment and contradictions they must've felt, but I found none so I figured imma make my own, hence why i needed someone who can be that person.

At the end of the day, elves, Durge, and somebody who exists so closely to death and is inevitably tied to it, yet desperately clings to an absolute shitshow of a life is a wonderfully heart-wrenching and tragic character. And I'm a sucker for all things tragedy.

Well tbf I had an 'oc' but that was just an unnamed genderless character whom I exclusively referred to as child or young and who was only used for some psychological horror drabbles that never saw the light of day and are more creepypasta than anything lol

[solidandsound]

*checks watch* oh my! it's time for my annual video game retrospective!!

My backlog goal for the year was to beat every game on my backlog that released pre-2004. That's mostly PS2 stuff with just a splash of Gamecube, and also includes some even older stuff that I added in to the backlog and played right away. PS2 and Gamecube will continue to be the backlog focus going into 2023. I tried to get a head start on those games this year as well, but I also moved house this year, and the retro stuff still has yet to be properly unpacked, so I'll have to tackle that in January. I will definitely be completing all my 2004-released games, but may not be able to squeeze in 2005 as well, as there are a lot of games I have to play for that year, and a lot of them are big JRPGs. We'll see what ends up getting done!

All in all, I completed 33 games this year, exactly the amount I beat last year! Most of the recent stuff was received for Christmas last year (a trend that will continue going forward, as that's about all I ever ask for), but there were also a handful of new acquisitions. Some were cheap indie games, two (new Kirby and new Splatoon) were purchases my bf made that I also enjoyed, one (Xenoblade Chronicles 3) was an actual new game purchased day one by me, and some were 3DS eShop purchases that I wanted to make before the eShop closes forever. As a result, I went on a bit of a Shin Megami Tensei kick this year! My favourite of those was Soul Hackers. I loved the writing, and the way it expressed the its demons' personalities. SMTIV was also great, and Strange Journey was good but wore thin after a while.

Here's some more of the stuff I really liked this year:

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim. Probably the best game I played this year and I beat it January 3rd! A lushly illustrated, gripping, touching adventure from Vanillaware. If you love sci-fi in any capacity, I am begging you to play this game.

Persona 5 Royal. I was honestly skeptical that I would find the new story content to be worth it over the original game, but it definitely was. It really deepened my appreciation for Akechi as a character.

Onimusha. Classic Resident Evil but with a katana! It rules!

Earthbound and Earthbound Beginnings. If you have a high tolerance for old JRPG bullshit, Beginnings is great, and a much more solemn, melancholy experience than its better known sequel, which was not overhyped!

Etrian Odyssey Untold. Another happy 3DS eShop acquisition, there's nothing like mapping out a dungeon yourself as you explore it. If you haven't, you've gotta try one of these games before it's too late. I don't think the concept would work as well anywhere else but the 3DS.

Wild Arms 3. What a great cast of characters, and how refreshing to play a game that makes you pay attention to where you're going! If you crave relief from AAA map markers and waypoints, this is your game.

Dicey Dungeons. Everything I love about RPGs distilled into a very focused and charming experience. Great for that 'just one more run' feeling!

Honorable mentions: Paratopic, the horror game that feels the most like playing a horror film; Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, which I commend for daring to be different even if it didn't quite work for me; Kirby and the Forgotten Land, which weirdly felt like crossing classic Kirby with Kingdom Hearts; Xenoblade Chronicles 3, another great Xeno entry which I'm still processing, and still have some quests and DLC to do; and Yakuza Kiwami, more Yakuza goodness. If I keep beating one Yakuza game a year... I'll probably still be way behind because they announced two new ones this year lol.

Splatoon 3 can't be counted as completed, but I'm having loads of fun with it, way more than I expected! I wasn't sure if I would be into more Splatoon, as I thought it would just be more of the same, but there's enough variety to keep it feeling fresh, and some new systems for extrinsic motivation to persuade me to have fun, which is maybe all I needed.

Tears of the Kingdom comes out in 2023, and I might go on a bit of a Zelda kick to prepare (including Minish Cap, which I meant to play this year but didn't quite get to). I'm also stoked for Hades, Soul Hackers 2, Tales of Symphonia, Butterfly Soup 2, Persona 5 Strikers, and maybe I'll grab some more 3DS stuff, too, like SMTIV Apocalypse.

It's been a while since the PS5 came out, and it feels like it's finally getting some games worth considering the console for. Probably not this year, but maybe in 2024? Stay tuned to find out!

[elbdot]

Aight I have to know- we know Guzma hangs with El a lot, but where’s plumeria? Does she ever follow to see what big bro Guz is up to??

Plumeria is still on Ula Ula island! Guzma more or less  “disbanded” the team after the ultra-space incident (it’s...it’s complicated) and returned back to Melemele island and...that’s pretty much the last time they saw each other. Guzma feels very guilty about how he left things off with Team Skull and Plumeria, but feels like he can’t face them anymore. Or...at least not right now. After the Nihilegos made him feel nothing but pure fear and traumatized him through their possession, he doesn’t want to let his old team see that he isn’t the invincible “big bad Guzma” anymore that he made himself out to be.

Plumeria is currently still looking out for her “lil’ brothers and sisters”, at least for those who haven’t found their way yet. When Guzma has found the courage, Im sure he’ll reunite with Plums again and make sure they’re on good terms again. I’m not sure when or if I get to draw this at all at some point, but it sure would be great to tackle this arc!Though knowing my current upload schedule this probably won’t happen for a vERY long time...

[seyaryminamoto]

I've been browsing your blog for Sokkla research as I feel like it has similarities to what I'm trying to write with Azula and Soren. I haven't begun tackling Gladiator yet, as it looks a little daunting, but I feel I should since I keep hearing so much. I am a little hesitant over accidentally using anything you wrote for my own story. I'd be proud if I could make it as long and epic as yours. It's very personal to me. What motivated you to write Gladiator and keep writing for so long?

Yeah, I saw your post about your crossover ship having potential similarities with Sokkla and I agree that it would, since Soren shares a few traits with Sokka, character-wise. Admittedly, Azula interacting with a character like Soren would present quite a lot of fun possibilities, so it seems to be an idea worth exploring :)

As for reading Gladiator and accidentally using similar tropes… well, I don’t know if it will ease your mind much, but there are several tropes that I’ve run into in many Sokkla fics, mine, other people’s, just… lots of them xD and it’s not really a problem. Storytelling can lead to similar places, but usually, every writer handles their tropes and character development differently.

My plan for a certain, poignant scene in Gladiator’s 96th chapter was set in stone in my head back when I started plotting the fic (like I said in that ask I answered yesterday). The scene in question is one I depicted in some artworks for Gladiator’s second anniversary: Sokka defeats Azula in combat for the first time, pins her down, aims his sword at her, and they just stare at each other before things take a pretty heated twist...

A few months after planning this, I read another fic where practically the same thing happened between them (it’s a Spanish fic, I hadn’t tried reading it yet because it was incomplete, sometimes I still scold the writer in question for never finishing it), only, rather than it happening when they could no longer resist the attraction between them, it happened when they were barely getting to know each other: Azula followed Sokka into a forest clearing, where he was training on his own. Upon noticing someone was hiding in the bushes, he leaps at her and pins her down, aiming his sword at her as well. Of course, he freaks out upon realizing it’s her, she isn’t very happy, and no heated things happen other than a lot of blushing, especially on her part xD

So, as you can see, even if the trope is “Sokka holds Azula down, at swordpoint”, the context was entirely different, the outcome was completely different and heck, the wording and even language we used was 100% different.  I came up with the idea for Gladiator before reading Majesty, later on I found out that someone had written a very similar scene already (and it was a close associate of mine, no less xD). As much as I didn’t feel like I was all that original anymore… I didn’t change my plans because of that. As long as I didn’t pull a Cassandra Clare and copy-pasted the whole scene my friend wrote into Gladiator, where was the harm in trying my own hand at it? I wrote the tropey situation in my own way, with my own words, and it’s completely my own thing.

There was something else that happened with Gladiator, another friend read it and thought I was taking inspiration for my portrayal of Sokka and Azula from a couple in a TV show she loved. Turns out I’d heard about the show, but I hadn’t watched it until she nudged me enough to do it (no regrets!), and after watching it I understood where the similarities were, but the context was all different. More than that, a certain situation (Sokka admitting his love for Azula for the first time, she asks him to say it again) was close enough to what happened between the main couple in said TV show…

… But I actually had been inspired by another couple, in ANOTHER TV show, that had a slightly similar exchange too xD

Therefore, tropes are tropes. I’ve recycled so many tropes in so many things I’ve written that people could probably psychoanalyze me and figure out all my brain chemistry damn easily if they did. I tend to have a very particular structure when writing, too (the original story I wrote and finished had 3 parts, Gladiator has 3 parts too, to name the most superficial similarity only), and I’ve frequently explored similar topics in them. It’s hardly a crime to do it again, but as long as you do it in a unique way, there’d be no harm in testing how some tropes would turn out with Soren and Azula. It could be worrisome if you portrayed Soren reacting to events exactly the same way Sokka does, but that’s not very likely to happen. As similar as they can be, they’re also different in several ways and in the post where you compared them you seemed to see those differences pretty clearly.

Therefore, I don’t think there’s any real harm in trying your hand at certain tropes and situations. If the context is different, if there’s logic to what you’re writing, and of course, as long as you write it yourself, there’s absolutely no need to worry about repeating things other people have done before.

That being said, don’t feel pressured to read Gladiator at all. I’m glad people have recommended it, but I understand if it feels not only daunting but that maybe you won’t be sure what to write if you see all the stuff I’ve done so far. Gladiator is many things, and one of them is my playground for testing Sokka and Azula’s relationship in just about every way I can xD it’s so long that I’ve been free to play with all sorts of possibilities with them, to fulfill all my shippiest wishes for these two. Therefore, if you’d rather be true to your own ideas and not get too influenced by it, it’s absolutely understandable not to read it until you feel comfortable about giving it a shot (presumably, once you’ve plotted plenty of own story and feel like you won’t be at risk of taking too much inspiration from it).

As for what motivates me… well, I guess there were many factors. One of them is that Gladiator was an idea worth digging into, with so much to explore that I was completely overwhelmed by the possibilities and I got completely caught up in it. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted the story to exist, so I decided I needed to make it happen. As it’s practically a full re-write of ATLA’s storyline, I had a chance to just… handle everything on my terms. And that meant the developments I didn’t like from the show could change: I could improve on things I thought needed improvements, I could add things that I felt the show needed, and so on and so forth. There were nearly no limits, really, and as I was absolutely lost in the beauty and glory of my OTP, I couldn’t help myself and I decided to dive right in.

It helps a lot that Gladiator’s kind of a multi-faceted thing: as I’ve been developing my art too, whenever I was bored in class I’d sketch things related to it and then, if I had a chance and the sketch was good enough, I’d finish the art digitally later. I have a lot of music that inspires me, so sometimes I just sit down, listen to it, and I let myself evoke scenes that I want to write or draw. Fact is, the whole fifth anniversary project was a mix of art and music: the songs that inspired many arcs of Part 1, along with images that referenced them.

Lastly, though… I generally know where Gladiator’s going, so I don’t usually reach a point where I’m like “Woah I have zero plans for what to do next”. I plot things for the story whenever I have nothing to do (when I’m traveling places, when I’m showering, when I’m waiting for something? Just, whenever, wherever). If an arc isn’t shaping up to be particularly fun, I try to figure out what to do to make it more interesting and appealing for me to write. Whenever I come up with something I’m hyped about writing, it helps me keep on writing until I get there. Sometimes that’s also a curse because I go overboard and write like… 12K in a single day because I am that hyped about whatever I’m doing :’D happened a couple of weeks ago xD

Anyways, always try to fulfill your own needs with your story, first and foremost. Sometimes your public won’t be 100% receptive to your ideas, but sometimes they’ll actually want exactly what you’re putting out there for them. The magic of fanfiction is that, if someone doesn’t like what they’re getting, there’s absolutely nothing to stop them from taking to writing a story they do want, right? So, why should we try to please other people instead of writing what we’d want to read?

Make your story something you can revisit and smile about, make your story something you can find value in, regardless of whoever tries to undermine it. Make it yours, make it everything you want it to be. Want humor? Set up humorous situations (I mean, your lead couple would be Azula and Soren, humor’s basically guaranteed xD). Want tragedy and angst? You can have it too. You really can do anything, as long as you make up your mind to get it done. Figure out what it really is you want to write, the key scenes, the development you’re looking for with your main characters, come up with plans on how to get them where you need them to be, and once you feel you’re in solid grounds for it, feel free to start writing and always keep on looking forward to the big things you’ve wanted to write for your fic.