#I don't know nerf? Or nerfed?

[arty-tardigrade]

I feel like Max needs a break from the Camp Campbell chaos every now and then just so he doesn't go completely insane.

[volivolition]

DAY 4: DRAMA - Put on your prettiest face for the masses!

gonna start adding silly captions actually. [POINTS ACCUSINGLY] MELTY FUCK (AFFECTIONATE)!!

[greenerteacups]

oooh please someday tell us what you think of GOT

oh, no, it's my fatal weakness! it's [checks notes] literally just the bare modicum of temptation! okay you got me.

SO. in order to tell what's wrong with game of thrones you kind of have to have read the books, because the books are the reason the show goes off the rails. i actually blame the showrunners relatively little in proportion to GRRM for how bad the show was (which I'm not gonna rehash here because if you're interested in GOT in any capacity you've already seen that horse flogged to death). people debate when GOT "got bad" in terms of writing, but regardless of when you think it dropped off, everyone agrees the quality declined sharply in season 8, and to a certain extent, season 7. these are the seasons that are more or less entirely spun from whole cloth, because season 7 marks the beginning of what will, if we ever see it, be the Winds of Winter storyline. it's the first part that isn't based on a book by George R.R. Martin. it's said that he gave the showrunners plot outlines, but we don't know how detailed they were, or how much the writers diverged from the blueprint — and honestly, considering the cumulative changes made to the story by that point, some stark divergence would have been required. (there's a reason for this. i'll get there in a sec.)

so far, i'm not saying anything all that original. a lot of people recognized how bad the show got as soon as they ran out of Book to adapt. (I think it's kind of weird that they agreed to make a show about an unfinished series in the first place — did GRRM figure that this was his one shot at a really good HBO adaptation, and forego misgivings about his ability to write two full books in however many years it took to adapt? did he think they would wait for him? did he not care that the series would eventually spoil his magnum opus, which he's spent the last three decades of his life writing? perplexing.) but the more interesting question is why the show got bad once it ran out of Book, because in my mind, that's not a given. a lot of great shows depart from the books they were based on. fanfiction does exactly that, all the time! if you have good writers who understand the characters they're working with, departure means a different story, not a worse one. now, the natural reply would be to say that the writers of GOT just aren't good, or at least aren't good at the things that make for great television, and that's why they needed the books as a structure, but I don't think that's true or fair, either. books and television are very different things. the pacing of a book is totally different from the pacing of a television show, and even an episodic book like ASOIAF is going to need a lot of work before it's remotely watchable as a series. bad writers cannot make great series of television, regardless of how good their source material is. sure, they didn't invent the characters of tyrion lannister and daenerys targaryen, but they sure as hell understood story structure well enough to write a damn compelling season of TV about them!

so but then: what gives? i actually do think it's a problem with the books! the show starts out as very faithful to the early books (namely, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings) to the point that most plotlines are copied beat-for-beat. the story is constructed a little differently, and it's definitely condensed, but the meat is still there. and not surprisingly, the early books in ASOIAF are very tightly written. for how long they are, you wouldn't expect it, but on every page of those books, the plot is racing. you can practically watch george trying to beat the fucking clock. and he does! useful context here is that he originally thought GOT was going to be a trilogy, and so the scope of most threads in the first book or two would have been much smaller. it also helps that the first three books are in some respects self-contained stories. the first book is a mystery, the second and third are espionage and war dramas — and they're kept tight in order to serve those respective plots.

the trouble begins with A Feast for Crows, and arguably A Storm of Swords, because GRRM starts multiplying plotlines and treating the series as a story, rather than each individual book. he also massively underestimated the number of pages it would take him to get through certain plot beats — an assumption whose foundation is unclear, because from a reader's standpoint, there is a fucke tonne of shit in Feast and Dance that's spurious. I'm not talking about Brienne's Riverlands storyline (which I adore thematically but speaking honestly should have been its own novella, not a part of Feast proper). I'm talking about whole chapters where Tyrion is sitting on his ass in the river, just talking to people. (will I eat crow about this if these pay off in hugely satisfying ways in Winds or Dream? oh, totally. my brothers, i will gorge myself on sweet sweet corvid. i will wear a dunce cap in the square, and gleefully, if these turn out to not have been wastes of time. the fact that i am writing this means i am willing to stake a non-negligible amount of pride on the prediction that that will not happen). I'm talking about scenes where the characters stare at each other and talk idly about things that have already happened while the author describes things we already have seen in excruciating detail. i'm talking about threads that, while forgivable in a different novel, are unforgivable in this one, because you are neglecting your main characters and their story. and don't tell me you think that a day-by-day account tyrion's river cruise is necessary to telling his story, because in the count of monte cristo, the main guy disappears for nine years and comes hurtling back into the story as a vengeful aristocrat! and while time jumps like that don't work for everything, they certainly do work if what you're talking about isn't a major story thread!

now put aside whether or not all these meandering, unconcluded threads are enjoyable to read (as, in fairness, they often are!). think about them as if you're a tv showrunner. these bad boys are your worst nightmare. because while you know the author put them in for a reason, you haven't read the conclusion to the arc, so you don't know what that reason is. and even if the author tells you in broad strokes how things are going to end for any particular character (and this is a big "if," because GRRM's whole style is that he lets plots "develop as he goes," so I'm not actually convinced that he does have endings written out for most major characters), that still doesn't help you get them from point A (meandering storyline) to point B (actual conclusion). oh, and by the way, you have under a year to write this full season of television, while GRRM has been thinking about how to end the books for at least 10. all of this means you have to basically call an audible on whether or not certain arcs are going to pay off, and, if they are, whether they make for good television, and hence are worth writing. and you have to do that for every. single. unfinished. story. in the books.

here's an example: in the books, Quentin Martell goes on a quest to marry Daenerys and gain a dragon. many chapters are spent detailing this quest. spoiler alert: he fails, and he gets charbroiled by dragons. GRRM includes this plot to set up the actions of House Martell in Winds, but the problem is that we don't know what House Martell does in Winds, because (see above) the book DNE. So, although we can reliably bet that the showrunners understand (1) Daenerys is coming to Westeros with her 3 fantasy nukes, and (2) at some point they're gonna have to deal with the invasion of frozombies from Canada, that DOESN'T mean they necessarily know exactly what's going to happen to Dorne, or House Martell. i mean, fuck! we don't even know if Martin knows what's going to happen to Dorne or House Martell, because he's said he's the kind of writer who doesn't set shit out beforehand! so for every "Cersei defaults on millions of dragons in loans from the notorious Bank of Nobody Fucks With Us, assumes this will have no repercussions for her reign or Westerosi politics in general" plotline — which might as well have a big glaring THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT stamp on top of the chapter heading — you have Arianne Martell trying to do a coup/parent trap switcheroo with Myrcella, or Euron the Goffick Antichrist, or Faegon Targaryen and JonCon preparing a Blackfyre restoration, or anything else that might pan out — but might not! And while that uncertainty about what's important to the "overall story" might be a realistic way of depicting human beings in a world ruled by chance and not Destiny, it makes for much better reading than viewing, because Game of Thrones as a fantasy television series was based on the first three books, which are much more traditional "there is a plot and main characters and you can generally tell who they are" kind of book. I see Feast and Dance as a kind of soft reboot for the series in this respect, because they recenter the story around a much larger cast and cast a much broader net in terms of which characters "deserve" narrative attention.

but if you're making a season of television, you can't do that, because you've already set up the basic premise and pacing of your story, and you can't suddenly pivot into a long-form tone poem about the horrors of war. so you have to cut something. but what are you gonna cut? bear in mind that you can't just Forget About Dorne, or the Iron Islands, or the Vale, or the North, or pretty much any region of the story, because it's all interconnected, but to fit in everything from the books would require pacing of the sort that no reasonable audience would ever tolerate. and bear in mind that the later books sprout a lot more of these baby-plots that could go somewhere, but also might end up being secondary or tertiary to the "main story," which, at the end of the day, is about dragons and ice zombies and the rot at the heart of the feudal power system glorified in classical fantasy. that's the story that you as the showrunner absolutely must give them an end to, and that's the story that should be your priority 1.

so you do a hack and slash job, and you mortar over whatever you cut out with storylines that you cook up yourself, but you can't go too far afield, because you still need all the characters more or less in place for the final showdown. so you pinch here and push credulity there, and you do your best to put the characters in more or less the same place they would have been if you kept the original, but on a shorter timeframe. and is it as good as the first seasons? of course not! because the material that you have is not suited to TV like the first seasons are. and not only that, but you are now working with source material that is actively fighting your attempt to constrain a linear and well-paced narrative on it. the text that you're working with changed structure when you weren't looking, and now you have to find some way to shanghai this new sprawling behemoth of a Thing into a television show. oh, and by the way, don't think that the (living) author of the source material will be any help with this, because even though he's got years of experience working in television writing, he doesn't actually know how all of these threads will tie together, which is possibly the reason that the next book has taken over 8 years (now 13 and counting) to write. oh and also, your showrunners are sick of this (in fairness, very difficult) job and they want to go write for star wars instead, so they've refused the extra time the studio offered them for pre-production and pushed through a bunch of first-draft scripts, creating a crunch culture of the type that spawns entirely avoidable mistakes, like, say, some poor set designer leaving a starbucks cup in frame.

anyway, that's what I think went wrong with game of thrones.

[dead-leavez]

For bunniehoney's jjk F1 AU, Coanda Effect on ao3. Please I fucking beg of you go read it, it's probably one of the best fanfictions I've ever read, and I'm unhealthily obsessed with it. (And it finally got me into F1 LMFAO.)

[apainintheasgardiansoul]

Kishimoto creating Kakashi:

[dootznbootz]

Since my OdyPen are likeminded in personality/views/behavior in many many ways, those "Ship meme questions" are pretty interesting for me.

Because yeah. Likeminded. Many of those questions have the same answer from both.

And in a way that's super fun for me because everything I write with my goobers, I always try to keep in mind that, at least in behavioral/personality, they would both react/behave the same.

Like, I know I focus a shitton on Penelope as I adore her and love exploring her character so so much but understand that Odysseus would do the exact same shit. Just as Odysseus in my one fic is taking care of her as she is sick from her own recklessness, she would (and will. Different circumstances but you know) do the same for him.

It's actually super fun (as much as it is frustrating too. I'll realize partway through an idea that it's actually OOC and that I got too excited lol) to keep in mind while writing/creating. It keeps me on track :3

[peridots-pixiwolf]

[Start ID. A digital drawing of Minos Prime from Ultrakill, who's wearing a strapless slit dress and sandals of the same deep purple. He faces towards and slightly to the right of the camera, his head is tilted further right. With one hand he gestures in a vague pointing motion, his arm folded and held close to his body. There is nothing in the background, but bracing himself on one arm, Minos is implied to be leaning against something about the height of a countertop. The background is a blank purplish black, save for three diagonal stripes in the colors of the bisexual flag. End ID]

Shading study that quite literally came to me in a dream two weeks ago, after this post apparently beamed itself into my mind

(also a few edits below the cut! they're very slight but whatever :])

[Start ID. Three different versions of the previous drawing. The first changes the tone of the lighting from blue to pink, and similarly the shading from pink to blue. The second replaces the faint black border with pink, purple and blue, syncing with the stripes in the background. The third combines both these changes. End ID]

[lloydfrontera]

screaming crying and throwing up about lloyd being literally javier's weakness i am not even exaggerating for the bit it is absolutely canon and acknowledged in-universe that the best way to get to javier is through lloyd because if you attack lloyd javier will put himself in harm's way to protect him i hate them so much 😭

[ruvviks]

introducing night city's second worst family (please for the love of god click for better quality!) // most of them belong to @reaperkiller =^) diana "vulture" crane >> a high profile fixer from city center's velvet harbor; stays out of the family business and with that avoids most of the drama that comes with it maxwell crane >> diana's ambitious younger brother and ceo of the spaceship elysium; competitive and brash and generally doesn't get along well with others kinsley osborn >> maxwell's wife and ceo of the spaceship elysium; idealistic and somehow still believes that arasaka doesn't own them (they do (but they're also getting fucked over by cobra cybernetics)) jesse colton >> the youngest of the coltons and the only bearable one; doesn't want to be involved but loves to create family drama on purpose to make everyone else worse william colton >> the oldest of the coltons and ceo of cobra cybernetics; sweatiest sack of potatoes of a man you've ever met and that's all you need to know about him luiza colton-vidal >> william's wife and oldest sibling of the vidal family; absolutely here for the money but she's good at keeping up appearances (and yes she gets william killed (it takes everyone almost a year to figure that out)) alana cartier >> brilliant arasaka scientist and head scientist of arasaka's serpent projects; used to be married to sebastian vidal (luiza's younger brother and main test subject of project cobra) andrew colton >> the middle sibling of the coltons, alana's husband, and head of arasaka's special programs branch; he's the cause of everything that happens in the story

[firebirdsdaughter]

Ah…

… I had blissfully forgotten about Nozomi.

[anisohtropy]

kaveh’s really pulling the words out of my brain. this wip was supposed to be just quick practice writing kavetham before I start on my howl’s au for them, but it’s not done and it’s like 13.5k? what’s going on? how did I get here? this isn’t even a complicated wip it’s just my take on kaveh’s participation in the championship event 

idk something about depressed blonde man is making my brain go whrrr and kick out bangers like “guilt is as natural to him as breathing” and “the difference between martyrdom and surrender is nothing on the scale of the universe” like who comes up with that? not anyone who isn’t still unstable from finals that’s for sure anyway I’m almost done with it so watch out

[tastycitrus]

maplestory characters reacting to nexon every time they push out an update or something idk what to caption this with

[averygaylemon]

I feel like the hardest part of having chronic pain at a young age is knowing that other people your age don't feel like this. I'm not even 20 yet and my ankles hurt and my hip keeps cramping and my knees creek and my elbows pop and my fingers are sore and my back aches. All the physical pain but the thing that hurts me most is knowing that other people my age rarely feel pain unless they're physically hurt.

[review-anon]

Honestly from what we seen from Divine Luck in most universes, it's a pretty dangerous power in the wrong hands and given the fact that it makes you avoid consequences and since Utsuro gave his powers to children, it lead to a lot of those Divine Luck Users becoming quite mentally and emotionally immature given we seen how Void acts - it's probably a good thing your avoiding them.

I know...the only good news is that it seems Divine Luck is slightly weaker here then it is normally our own universes.

Like don't get me wrong, its still a horrifically strong power and you still can do a lot of stuff with it, but there is a lot more pushback on the Voidship then there is normally.

In case you are wondering where Utsuro is, he's on the ship but he uses his powers to make himself invisible to any other Divine Luck users, and they also don't believe anyone who tells them he's right there. I guess that's his way of avoidance.

[zahra-hydris]

ammabel baby i'm coming back

[backfromtwitterforw]

Well, giving how the server tries very hard to make it seems like nothing happened, I guess I should've seen it coming, but the whole situation is really frustrating.