#I barely even have thoughts of blorbos lately it’s weird

[thus-spoke-lo]

Also, I realize lately all I do is come on here and reblog a bunch of horny posts and/or write something sort of melancholy and then dip and for that I apologize.

[ohbutwheresyourheart]

dante and/or the whole dmc 5 crew for the blorbo meme? :)

oh ho HO thank you for this, I love the DMC gang and don't talk about them enough

disclaimer/note to begin with: they all have pretty privelege and they all need to stop being put in situations, because that's just who they all are as people/chew toys of fate

second disclaimer: I made this post while drinking a big old bottle of beer so if this commentary goes off the rails the further you go down the post then that's why

also I'm putting these under a cut bc this got really long

first up: dante!!!

fewer boxes crossed off than I was expecting but when I sat down and thought about it there were some I couldn't justify, e.g. in my heart I want to believe I can fix him and he needs me but let's be real the only thing that ever had the power to fix Dante is getting his bro back </3

also I say most fandom takes are incorrect bc my main contact with the DMC fandom was back in the day where it was very common to portray Dante as this LOL SO RANDOM horndog (i.e. as if his projected persona was his... actual deep-seated personality) and I am a depression Dante truther. not sure what the current fandom mentality on Dante is, if things have moved on then disregard

next up: nero!!!

gonna be honest, I wasn't too fussed about Nero until DMC 5 and then he quickly leapfrogged into my heart because oh my god this poor, poor, POOR kid. born to be the straight man in a universe of wackos. trying SO HARD to keep this mess of a family on track but if you push him so help him sparda he WILL turn this car around.

I need more Nero. I need more Nero and Kyrie, specifically. I need to see them just living their average everyday lives where Nero slops his way home covered in demon guts and sluices off then puts a load of laundry on and helps Kyrie with dinner.

also hahahahahaa definitely nothing in there about growing up feeling like an outcast so thoroughly one might as well have had a fucked up demon appendage, nope, nothing like that!!!

V aka DOUBLE BINGO

I have a thing for pasty ass dark haired skinny twink vaguely feeble romantic poet creatures okay even though I would get so frustrated the tenth time I asked him a simple question and he replied with a blake quote

but also HE WAS HIS OWN PERSON he was REAL he was ALIVE and now he's NOT because he WASN'T VERGIL, he was HIMSELF, he was HUMAN, and now he's GONE but also he lives on but also V as an individual is GONE but they'll still see glimmers and hints of him in Vergil and be reminded of him but but but (bites fingers and screeches)

THE ALPHA AND THE OMEGA

okay so all of my years of fangirling aside I have to be upfront that if I ever met Vergil I would want to tear his smug disdainful face apart with my bare hands in a matter of minutes

HOWEVER in the realm of fandom, the only reason he ranks lower than V is because V exudes that high fructose twink timothee chalamet energy

I cannot fix him. he does not need me. and yet. whomst among the ranks of Vergil fancreatures has not sat up late at night in their early/mid-teens frantically typing barely-disguised self-insert fanfic where we DO fix him, where we are the ONLY ones who can fix him, where we are the Eva to his Sparda, washing away the sins of his past and anointing him with love?

Vergil is the most anti-hero of all time. he has it all. he's a genocidal maniac, except maybe he isn't because maybe the qliphoth was going to grow there anyway and he just got in on the demonic gentrification scheme at the right moment. he literally has an unspeakably tormented and tortured past.

he has mommy issues. he has daddy issues. he has brother issues. he has son issues. he's a weeaboo. he loves poetry. he hates you, both generally and specifically. he has the hauteur and arrogance of christian fifty shades. underneath it all he just wants desperately to be loved and protected. his idea of bonding is a no-holes-barred beatdown.

he has an extremely weird obsession with his brother, whom he hates, but loves, but hates, but loves, but hates, but wants to spend forever with, but hates, but would kill anyone if they tried to hurt him. literally every bad thing he's ever done originally stemmed from the need to be strong enough to protect what he cares about (DANTE) because he can't go through losing his family again.

i love him <3

[violasmirabiles]

@someguywriting tagged me to list five favorites out of my own fics, thanks for the tag <3

(First of all a disclaimer, all but one of these have only been posted in Finnish because my main fandoms -- The Unknown Soldier and Under the North Star -- are pretty exclusively Finnish, and idk if I will ever translate them to English. I might! Who knows! It pisses me off how much Google Translate hates Finnish (fucks up the pronouns every time which might be the single worst thing, like if you look up a sentence that has a pronoun in it the ONLY alternate translation for that sentence will be the exact same thing but with a different pronoun, occasionally translates people's names literally, badly, unnecessarily, and wrong, cannot handle dialects at all). Plus there are a few English-speaking people in the Unknown Soldier fandom, and I happen to own not one but TWO different English translations of the Unknown Soldier because I’m so incredibly normal (lie) about it!! but I seriously doubt it’ll happen any time soon. BUT ANYWAY)

1) Hauntings. This is the first fic I posted in English. It's about Dan Torrance (my dearest darling, Blorbo even), Abra Stone, and the hugely traumatic moment in Doctor Sleep's climax where Dan almost kills Abra with his bare hands thinking she's Rose the Hat. It's inspired by a seminar paper I wrote in 2022 that eventually turned into my master's thesis. I was ridiculously nervous about writing and posting this, which feels a bit silly, but I just didn't have the kind of routine to Writing Fic In English™ that I have now and idk my brain made it weirder than it needed to be. (It goes the other way around in Finnish -- I know I can write decent essays but ohhhhh my GODDDDD it always starts out so sticky and slow and awkward. But it always gets easier after the sticky part. And now that I've been writing more fics in English, that's gotten a lot more natural too.) ANYWAY I got so into writing that seminar paper that even after I turned it in (a week late, running on no sleep and two ADHD medications) I was just. Sitting there vibrating because for the first time it felt like I might actually complete my degree, and also because of Blorbo Thoughts. I wrote this a couple of days later when I was feeling a bit less insane and, you know, had slept, and I really really like how it turned out. Family of all time.

2) Runoilija. Okay here we go. This is an Under the North Star ficlet. This is also the first ever Finnish-language work on AO3 with the Nonbinary Character tag (there are four in total, all written by me). This is the most personal fic I've ever written, but even just textually I think this is one of my most beautiful works. As someone who is Not Neurotypical and Very Not Straight, there's no fucking way the character this fic is about wasn't intended to be neurodivergent and queer. Though, obviously, since the Under the North Star trilogy was published between 1959 and 1962, and the character lives in the early 1900s, that... is not how he’s described. More of a "yeah he's weird but he's harmless, that's just the way he is". Importantly, his attitude to girls™ is described as "genderless" and obviously that particular word choice was what made me go HMM WHAT IF. The theme is basically "having no vocabulary for your gender experience is something that can really be so personal" and to make it super extra personal to me I made the character have an "oh" moment while learning English and finding out about gender-specific pronouns, which are not a thing in Finnish (though gender binary certainly is. Languages are cool and these things are complicated).

3) Ateenalaiset. The whole entire verse, really, but the original fic especially. It's an Unknown Soldier fic about the universally hated but Very Competent officer and the young idealistic approval-seeking officer (and the idealistic officer's fiancée) that I first started planning soon after the 2017 film came out and the fandom as we know it started to appear. Like there are two scenes in the final product that I know I talked about in a group chat in twenty goddamn seventeen. Problem was, I wasn't sure what to do with the story, where to go with it, or how I wanted to go there. I started posting it on AO3 as a multichapter in 2019 but realized it wasn't what I wanted and deleted it after maybe two chapters. Those chapters are incorporated in the final product. When it finally clicked and I started writing it for real I was supposed to be working on... a seminar paper that became the basis of my master’s thesis theory section. Heh. That paper sucked ass. But this fic. Oh man this is some of my best writing.

4) Trio. Speaking of some of my best writing, there's this. You know those posts about combining your old and new hyperfixations to create an AU that 99% of the time makes sense to precisely no one? Well. This is one of those. The Unknown Soldier and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Three guys from an iconic scene in the Unknown Soldier enacting the ending of GBU, over and over and over and over again. I keep switching people's places so everyone gets to be everyone many, many times over. And like. One of these characters is real quiet but somehow still has great one-liners. One is described by the author (outside the actual book) as having blond hair (a golden-haired angel, one might say). One shoots an unarmed POW in the back. All are war criminals, one rather significantly less so than the others. One ran a brothel in an occupied city during the few weeks they stayed there. Two of them, independently of one another, think about how "the worst they can throw at me is death and I can handle that". One always keeps his distance from everyone around him and everyone senses that there’s something cold and cruel about him they can't quite name. We never find out their first names. One loots every corpse he comes across, and in the 2017 film, one of those corpses turns out to be alive and he, horrified, suffocates him with his bare hands. One kicks a plate of porridge in a dead man's face and laughs about it. One says he doubts even God can bring himself to harass him. One avoided the actual fighting part of the war as much as he could but once risked his life getting the whole squad some new boots. I love love love all the implications of having each of those guys play Blondie or Tuco or Angel Eyes. They all speak so differently, they all act so differently, but they all make it work. Also I like to stir it up, have the Angel Eyes character survive and make a surprise attack. Have the Tuco character realize something's up and reload in time. Have the Angel Eyes character be a faster draw and have Blondie get shot. There are versions where everyone dies. There are shovels to hit people with. Bare hands, even. There's the very rickety cross. Truly the possibilities are endless and I'm like foaming at the mouth IASIP Pepe Silvia level insane about this fic.

5) Kotkanlento. Man I was going to put something else here but turns out I’m feeling a lot of feelings about Under the North Star today. Much like with Ateenalaiset, I'm really talking about the whole verse, it's all one big tragic story. And horny. The porn is absolutely essential to the tragedy. I think it's safe to assume that when Mr. Väinö Linna wrote about that one character drunkenly and tearfully reminiscing about how he and his long-dead friend used to get drunk together and fuck the same girls he did not mean to imply that they fucked those girls together, much less that they fucked each other, but, hey. All I'm saying is it doesn't exactly crash the canon, either. And there we have the least responsible bisexual poly relationship this side of the Häme province. I thought I was done with this verse last summer but iiiiiii don't think I am, I think there's another 15-part ficlet series on its way, I just need to figure out what exactly I want to do and what goes where. I really like writing these often nonlinear, independent of each other snippets/ficlets that are all pieces of the same fucked-up puzzle.

wow hehe these are. long ANYWAY I'm gonna tag @radiant-sunlight-blueberry, @vulptilla, @sisiljan and @caixxa. If you don't feel like doing it you can just ignore this, it's fine <3

[delusion-of-negation]

"wow. okay." bro please don't read my phraseology as aggressive, people keep doing this no matter how many posts I make saying that I'm autistic and I'm in constant agony from slowly dying, I barely sleep and I'm grumpy, and tone is hard enough over text for the normies. people getting what I'm saying so backwards is annoying, so I tell them that they were wrong. it's not aggressive and I'm sorry it reads that way.

"I do think it’s possible for a character to be written badly."

this is where we're disagreeing. I explained it. you end it there - the post is about how you shouldn't do that. there is no inherently bad characteristics, only bad execution or ill-fitting contexts, and a critic's job (not yours, you're a random tumblr user idgaf, the post is about critics) is to explain why the character being written that way had a negative effect on this story. so many critics lately have been saying "she was rude. I don't like her. protagonists are supposed to be likable and relatable. this is bad writing." and that's the extent. and I mean the extent. that's all the depth. and that's pathetic. that's not how characters or stories work at all. some stories do rely on you being able to connect to and like the character - they want you to put yourself in their shoes, like them, enjoy being "in their company" so to speak, and that drives a lot of the emotional weight of the story, leaving it hollow for those who didn't connect (a lot of YA literature does this, superhero media often does, etc - if you don't put yourself in their shoes and find them quippy, charming, and blorbo, the emotional weight starts to get more and more hollow). that's the sentence a critic needs to be able to expand upon and express adequately. you're not acknowledging how that was my issue here, you're saying that there are inherently bad qualities to have in a character - specifically, being not worth investing in. that's not true at all. things like blackadder give us protagonists we can root against and also like in comedy, absolutely, and I prefer that personally, but we've also had quite a few (for example) british slapstick comedies with characters that you fundamentally aren't invested in - like, you don't even hate these guys, they're gross and weird, sure, but you just turn your brain off for half an hour while they get hit in the nuts, there's no investment in them deserving to get hit in the nuts, no moralising effort to make you truly think they deserve it (british comedy does not do that as much as american comedy anyway, especially not ones as old as this). I've barely thought about the show enough to remember its name, but there was one where these two guys wanted to go on a date, and over the course of the episode they got beaten up, mauled by dogs, and blew up their flat. at no point was I invested in seeing them succeed or fail, I wasn't supposed to be, their character traits were non-existent beyond whatever was most likely to get them hurt this next second. that isn't inherently bad writing, because the purpose of the show was not to make me invested in these two guys getting hurt, it was to make dumb puns and kick some dudes in the nuts for half an hour. the context in which the character exists matters for whether a particular feature is bad or not. so when you say that unlikable means you're not invested, you kick the ball further down the road - you say "okay, so you're right (if they were using it how you say) that it's not bad to be unlikable that way, BUT if you're unlikable THIS way then that is always bad" when I was specifically saying that it bothers me that critics fall back on catchphrases of fake rules, instead of elaborating on why a particular feature wasn't working here. what about this story makes it unenjoyable when you don't relate, and what about this character or writing style made it hard to do so? of course there are trends - generally a character will work better if they're likable because that casts a wider net and doesn't alienate average joe who's been sold moralising fiction his whole life, and it means you can afford to fail other things because the audience is rooting for the protag and that can carry you, like generally you don't want to "show your audience 4" you want to "show them 2+2". for the most part, as a writer, you can sail by thinking of those as sort of unwitten and mostly true rules. as a critic, you need to be able to assess a story much deeper than repeating a mantra that's only really useful if helping an author spot common ways their story could flop.

edit: hence the ought/is comparison. I thought that would get my point across. this is a post against rules and categories and quick catchphrases. and for seeing stories as a web of moving parts that might fit together and might not, and a critic's job is to analyse it thoroughly, not to shrug it off by saying it didn't tick the boxes. if a critic can't ask "what is the thing trying to achieve?" I do think it's lazy critique and ultimately not helpful to the audience.

the two sentences "this character isn't an ideal protagonist for this book that relies on us liking them to drive emotional weight, which leaves much of the book hollow because they're really unlikable" and "protagonists are supposed to be likable, this one is not likable, so the book sucks" are different. the latter is incorrect. and lazy. the protagonist of berenice is not a likable person - he's gloomy, he's obsessive, he literally steals someone's teeth. hamlet. lolita. death note. rick and morty. greek mythology. grimm's fairytales. these aren't likable people... they're interesting people. and the stories get their emotional weight and tension in ways other than holding our favourite meow meow over a fire. it's sad that so much media analysis has devolved into shallow "protag was unlikable therefore story bad", instead of the deeper analysis of how and why the story fails to carry emotional weight when the reader doesn't find this person cute, charming, funny, or whatever. or if they aren't able to project themself onto this person. tbh most good stories are "hey everybody, look at this fucked up sack of wet potatoes, sure would be fucked up if they self-destructed in a way that harmed everyone around them :)" and somebody analysing media should be aware of that. just think a few steps deeper about these sorts of things.