#I AM NOT OKAY WHATSOEVER

[carry-on-every-neverland-magic]

Well that was fucking beautiful and devastating and I am legitimately lost for words but I’ll try. Riley and Ellie were absolutely captivating what beautiful beautiful actors this show has, they kept me engaged throughout their magical tragic night in the mall, experiencing the very highest of highs and lowest of lows. I CANNOT I AM SAT HERE IN TEARS. And again bookending and placing the Joel and Ellie scenes how they did was perfect, that Ellie would never leave him like she and Riley didn’t with each other, the hand holding parallels JOELS FUCKING FACE AND WHEN HE HELD ELLIES HAND AND REACHED TO HER I CANNOT I AM ON THE FUCKING FLOOR MAN THIS FUCKING SHOW AND THE SOFT ‘DON’T GO’ THAT ELLIE ASKS OF RILEY AND SHE DOESN’T WANT TO LEAVE JOEL AND RILEY GIVING ELLIE THAT WONDERFUL MAGICAL NIGHT AND ELLIES CHILDLIKE PLAYFULNESS DISCOEVERING ESCALALTORS AND THE ARCADE AND THEM DANCING OH GOD THEM DANCING

THIS SHOW IS GONNA DESTROY ME IT HAS DESTROYED ME AND IT WILL CONTINUE TO DO SO AND YES CAPS BECAUSE EVERY SINGLE ELEMENT OF THIS EXQUISTE SHOW DESEREVES AWARDS THE ACTING STORY CINEMATOGRAPHY MUSIC ARE EXCEPTIONAL AND ITS AN EXPERINECE AND I AM SAT HERE MOVED BY THIS PROFOUND INCREDIBLE STORY AND CHARACTERS THAT THE SHOW IS GORGEOUSLY EXPLORING AND EXPANDING ON AND FUCK FUCKKKK I AM SO IN LOVE WITH IT AND JOEL AND RILEY WERE PERFECT <3 JOEL AND ELLIE ARE PERFECT <3 I AM SO NOT READY AND SO READY FOR MORE

[mightierthanthecanon]

Next time, take her somewhere that doesn't card.

[feelsforsterek]

BRÄÄRIJÄ RIGHTS!!! [◉"]

[landosfenestraz]

just seen a lockyle and and anakin and padme one as well.

i can’t have a moment of peace on this app.

[blujayonthewing]

[aaronstveit]

hi there! you said in your tags that the latest chapter of deep end contains the two scenes you built the entire fic on. i hope i'm not too nosy but i was wondering if you could tell us more about those two scenes? <3

omg hi anon!! yes i would LOVE to tell you more about those two scenes 🫡 gonna put this beneath the cut because i am a certified yapper and this WILL be longer than i intend it to be

the scenes in question are the two arguments with cosette and grantaire at the end. the cosette argument in particular is the basis of so much of this fic — the line "The dutiful martyr Enjolras, who has a flag where he should have a heart." was one of the very first things i wrote for deep end. not a very charitable place to begin from when it comes to enjolras' characterization, but even when i first wrote it, it was less about who enjolras was and more about how he was perceived.

okay i just scrolled allllllllll the way back to the very beginning of the edit history in my original deep end document (still titled "enjolsette siblings?" btw) and first of all i started writing this in MARCH which is wild to me. that was the month i finished reading les mis. wow. anyway apparently i wrote the first drafts of both these scenes in the same evening, and i'm honestly surprised by how much of them remained unchanged in the final version. at the time that i wrote them, they both occurred in chapter 8 of what i PLANNED to be 10 chapters. that's also extremely funny to me. there was really a time when i thought i could contain this story to 10 chapters...

when i wrote these chapters, i hadn't even written enjolras and cosette meeting yet. the original draft of the grantaire argument didn't have enjolras realizing he was in love with grantaire then. i was still in the first 10k of writing deep end when i wrote them. all that existed before these arguments were the original draft of chapter 1, half of the original draft of chapter 2, and the conversation with combeferre in chapter 5 that begins with combeferre saying "You've been spending a lot of time with Grantaire lately." so when i say these scenes are the basis of the entire fic, i really mean it. the whole time i was writing, i was pushing enjolras toward this point.

from the moment that i began writing deep end, it was intended to be an exploration of enjolras & his ideas of duty and justice. it has spiraled into being a story about a lot of other things, but in the kitchen with cosette, it comes down to this again. it comes down to: enjolras, and what he thinks his duty is, and just how wrong he is.

because he is wrong. money, whether she wants it or not, isn't going to "fix" cosette. there is no "fixing" cosette, because she's not broken. has she been hurt? yes. did their father fail her? undeniably. but depositing a check into her bank account isn't the answer to this. enjolras wants to heal her in some material sort of way, and that just isn't possible. all he can do is be her brother.

so, i had to take enjolras to that place. i had to make him obsess over "paying for his father's sins." i had to make him stressing himself out over the money. i had to make him love cosette without understanding it. and i had to make him terrible.

i love making enjolras terrible, i won't lie. a lot of the time when i'm writing, i like to see how terrible i can make him without alienating him completely from the reader. when i was trying to decide what line from this chapter to use as the summary, i sent a few options to my friend cossette, who read an earlier draft of this fic. she chose the line about him being "capable of being truly terrible" for me, because she said that was kind of the whole thing i was going for.

and it was! for him to be able to say the things he says in this chapter — from telling cosette "Look what he did to you!" to him saying to grantaire "Your chest is even emptier than mine. All you have is an empty bottle and a half-assed joke." he HAS to be terrible. these are terrible things to say!

unfortunately, i think they're also very human things to say. i joke a lot about how much i enjoy making characters say the worst possible things to each other, but it's true. i love doing it. because i think it's so tragically human. especially when you're saying these things to a person that you love. it's easy to hurt the people we love, because we know them well enough to know just where to hit them.

when enjolras hurts cosette, it's mostly by accident. he is coming from a good place, but going all about it wrong. when he hurts grantaire, it is with intent. he and grantaire have spent years hurting each other. when enjolras finds himself falling after fighting with cosette, it's too easy for him to cling to the closest familiar thing: fighting with grantaire.

building up to the fight with grantaire was a different beast. whereas the argument with cosette is borne from misguided ideas of justice, the fight with grantaire is entirely personal. as i was writing deep end, i had to write an enjolras and a grantaire who could come to this place, in very different ways. enjolras had to find himself leaning on grantaire; he had to be in more pain than anyone realized, including himself; he had to be terrible. grantaire, in contrast, had to have some amount of self control; he had to be someone who could be leaned on; he had to be able to walk away. the grantaire we meet in chapter 1 meets very little of these requirements. his development is just as important as enjolras', even if he isn't the main focus.

this answer is, as predicted, much much longer than i intended so i will wrap things up. when writing longform fic, i tend to start with the worst thing and work my way outwards from there. these two scenes are the worst things. because i knew where he was going, i knew while i was writing that i had to shape and enjolras who would find himself saying and doing the worst things he could. that's why he's cruel to grantaire in the first few chapters, why he finds himself arguing with grantaire despite knowing better, why he constantly finds himself self-destructing. i always tell everyone that deep end is about enjolras beating the marble statue allegations, and that's never truer than it is in chapter 18.

for the record, you are always welcome to stop by and ask me about deep end! i have soooooo much director's commentary and i love to yap. i could talk all day about what happened in the original draft, what was added later, ideas i toyed with, why i made the decisions i did, etc. thank you so much for this ask <333 i had lots and lots of fun answering it even if my answer is pretty much as long as deep end herself.

[nerevar-quote-and-star]

Trying to transliterate Leara's name into Quenya, and it somehow becomes, uh,

Lëarra

Which basically means "You Sealion!"

And I'm just, "Oh yes, this is That Sealion Woman, and she can breathe fire, as all sealions do."

If Leara, for any reason at all, needed an actual Quenya or Sindarin name for any fun Elvish shenanigans, we'll just use Calairie/Calearil, which is "Light of the Sea" in Quenya and Sindarin, and what Leara actually means.

[paperglader]

has anyone made the modern au where alicent reacts to short n’ sweet by sabrina carpenter or should i make it myself?

[carry-on-every-neverland-magic]

Just watched the Barn Scene™ minus background music at 4am

[gay-victorian-astronomer]

last exam of my undergrad career is shaping up to be long & annoying contour integral hell times

(granted the entire course has been long and annoying integral hell, so... I suppose that's fitting for the final? still doesn't make me want to do it any more)

[criminal-sen]

Omg my laptop is alive... okay...

This morning, I booted it up and after loading for like 30 min, all it showed me was this concerning black screen with a tiny little 'app not loading' window?? What app??? Hello????? It was 3am and not only did I have to leave for work but I was entirely not awake enough to handle Creepypasta Death Screen. But hooray it's working now:3 it's fine:333

[balsee]

i genuinely cannot tell if this salmon is safe to eat or not.

[taintedcigs]

😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 my pussy just started vibrating like crazy damn

[genderqueerpond]

this quora post making me fucking lose it

[monsterkissed]

midnight mass screenshot redraw because some of the shots in this show are very nice

[starredforlife]

some fun facts about me. i’m exhausted and stupid. often insufferable. sometimes i forget this and make it other peoples’ problem. the reason i do this is bc i will legitimately feel like it’s the end of the world if i don’t. i have control issues that r so bad i can’t take weed gummies bc i get too angry that i can’t appropriately order and execute my thoughts and i hate the idea of looking stupid so much that any incident of it happening causes me to lash around like a wounded animal or an exploding rocket. and sometimes this finds a way to hurt others during fallout which obviously sucks. but also. im so chill and so flexible 👍🏻