#I love all my FF roleplayers and if anyone ever wants me to make them anything

[thatsmrfantastic-archived]

             JOHNNY STORM , REED RICHARDS & VICTOR VON DOOM                             PENNED BY ATLAS , PAIGE & BELLE

A GREAT MAN is A TORCH IN THE DARKNESS. He burns brighter than ANY STARS FLAME. SCIENCE knows NO COUNTRY because KNOWLEDGE IS BORN FROM OUR HUMANITY.   And if people bring so much COURAGE into this world, THE WORLD HAS TO KILL THEM. To BREAK them. Because it kills ANYTHING very good, and very gentle and very brave ALL IMPARTIALLY. And leaves the MOST SCARRED SURVIVORS OF US to bear out it’s BITTER TRUTH.

[thewritingcaptain]

Writeblr Intro

This is a copied/edited post from @capshorty since I’ve decided to do a separate writeblr blog due to the amount of interest it has garnered from people. So yeah! Follow me here for writing stuff from now on! I’m going to repost everything of my stuff I had there on here to make it easiest and continue to post it here from now on. 

Click below for full intro!

So... Hi! I go by Cap, Smidget, or Authoress depending on where you find me on the internet. Any of those are okay. As of starting this account, I’m 18, soon to start first year of college, and I love everything to do with words: reading, writing, singing, everything I can get my hands on. 

I write both fanfiction and original content! My AO3/FF names are Smidget and CaptainS10 respectively. I mainly write fanfiction for Marvel (specifically, Irondad and Spiderson content, and Pepperony) these days, though I used to write mostly Artemis Fowl, which I will repost on here if there ever becomes a demand for it. I dabble in various fandoms as well, though a lot of them never make it to posting, like the Legend of Zelda, or Throne of Glass (though I still hope to post my TOG stuff eventually). If it’s a popular books series, chances are I’ve read it or am open to reading it, so feel free to drop asks/recommendations about it! I am also an active roleplayer, so feel free to drop me a message for a fandom or original roleplay if anyone is interested! 

I have four main original WIPs - none of which have had as much work as there should be done on them due to school, but I’m trying to remedy that. I’ll be doing intro posts separately for each of my original WIPs later, but here’s a brief overlook of them now:

Exile: This story is historical, adventure, and drama mainly, with some romantic subplots. The plot follows a man who was exiled from his home kingdom several years back for a murder of a high-ranking individual that he didn’t commit. In present time, the kingdom he lives in now has been seized by an evil usurper, the royals in previously charge either executed or exiled. When the usurper’s estranged daughter falls ill with a rare but deadly sickness, he is forced to go on a trip to get the one plant that can cure her. The catch: the only way for him to get to where the plant can be found and get back on time is to go through his former home, and he finds himself mixed up in a lot more than he bargained for along the way.

Little Red: This one is modern day, drama, young adult, with high school age kids, but not set IN high school. The main character has it all: happy home life, good girlfriend, about to graduate high school and most of his college covered by academic and athletic scholarships; then one day everything changes. A girl moves in next door to his girlfriend. His girlfriend takes an interest in her, and suddenly his whole world is morphed. The girl is little and meek, but clearly is hiding some sort of secret. As he tries to figure out what it is, he suddenly sees deeper and finds something he would never have imagined…

Untitled Time Travel Story: This story, obviously, I haven’t come up with a name for yet. It’s sci-if, fantasy, drama, with some crime and romance elements. The main character is a young woman who is on the run. When she was little, her father murdered her mother and tried to kill her in cold blood. A man helped her escape, but just barely, sacrificing himself in the process. The catch: her father was a scientist developing secret time travel technology. All she escaped from her home with was the clothes on her back and a prototype of his time travel watch, which she has used since then to move back and forth through time, trying to stay hidden from the man who still hunts her and trying to figure out the truth of what really happened that day.

Undercover Disaster: This story is a conceptual rewrite of a fanfic I wrote turned original. It’s crime, romance, drama, and modern-set. A cadet comes home for the holidays to see her family only to find her father, a cop, going crazy with work trying to hunt down some infamous criminal that has been on the rise and is now believed to be in their country. A company Christmas party turns her break on its head when she gets roped into a crazy plot to try to infiltrate the criminal’s company and find desperately needed information to lead to his arrest. But what they don’t know is that this criminal is deadly and smart - and yet not even the one they’re truly searching for. And when they try to send her undercover into his company… well, it’s just one big disaster.

So! Yeah! If you read through all this, thanks! And if anyone is interested in hearing anymore about any of these, just let me know! I am completely open to DMs, asks, games, whatever! I will do more detailed posts for each of these later, if anyone is interested in them; I just didn’t want to make this too massively long. Thanks for reading! And feel free to like/repost this so I can follow everyone back!

[suprememooselord]

Rawr, complaining

So, yesterday @haybayrhiannon and I sat and talked about all the many many reasons we’re not playing XIV anymore. If you want to read a complaint-laden wall of text about the game, feel free to go under the cut.

But seriously? I can get better combat gameplay pretty much anywhere else. “Press the buttons in the right order and don’t stand in the bad stuff” is pretty damn far from exciting. There are crappy F2P MMOs with more interesting combat, by far. Of course, XIV does so many other things right that it’s hard to not acknowledge it’s probably the best MMO around anyway. But the fact is that I’m just not into anything besides combat, and there’s better games for that. I won’t blame XIV for my lack of interest in crafting and sidequesting and minigaming, but I will blame it for relying on sheer amount of stuff to do to hide the fact that the combat is bland.

However, there is one category I take issue with. The very meat of things. The ‘well, you play an FF game for the story.’ thing.

But here’s the kicker, previous FF games have had better stories, and better combat. Maybe not more active combat, but better. Combat with choices that matter, building characters in a way that could totally change how they play. That isn’t present in XIV. I’m a monk. I’m the same as every other monk, I either have ‘more gear’ or ‘less gear.’ It doesn’t matter which gear outside of marginal differences. My gear either meets the DPS needs for a piece of content, or it doesn’t. My skill with the class? practically irrelevant. Being able to handle mechanics is all that matters, because the skill cap of classes is almost comically low. It does not take much time or effort to learn to press the buttons in the correct order. There’s no strategy to how one plays monk. You just do the rotation. On any enemy, it’s the same thing, just do your rotation. There’s no choices to make, no freedom in playstyle. It is fixed, and rigid. And boring. There’s no choice in skills, no choice in build, and as long as you’re moving your ilvl as high as it can go, choice in gear hardly matters.

But you know what? at least the story used to be good. 

Square did you fire the good writers? 

We’re done with nidhogg. Okay. We killed him. WE KILLED HIM AGAIN. The second time wasn’t even him, it was just his BAD FEELINGS possessing a guy. We’re done with the eyes. That’s enough of that plot thread for the love of fucking god. But no. You have to cling onto it in the literally worst way possible. “THROW THE EYES INTO THE ABYSS.” 

“Hey guys, I found nidhoggs eyes in an abyss.” 

WHAT. What kind of lazy ass ‘we need another chapter’ shonen anime bullshit excuse is that? God, it just drives me nuts, like. I am tired of dragons. We have had enough dragons. It has been over a year. NO MORE. 

Secondly, I’m about done with following the adventures of grandad issues pretty boy Alphinaud. There are a huge selection of more interesting characters who deserve way more focus and screentime.  There’s tons of great characters who are either sidelined, killed, or just given an ‘exit, stage left even.’ I get that we need some kind of protagonist, since the warrior of light gets to have about as much personality as a coconut’s husk, but seriously. Give us different lenses to observe things from, not just “Man, I gotta do this shit because my dead fucking grandfather would’ve wanted it.” 

And then there’s the areas we’re focusing on. I get that it takes time and money to develop new places, but god damn I got tired of Ishgard fast. “Uhhh, it’s cold and VERY serious, and we have comic levels of oppressing the poor and we don’t like dragons (but I guess they’re kind of okay now.)” Great. What happened to literally any of the political intrigue in Ul’dah? Did we just forget about that? Nah, they just talked about all the changes that would happen, and then pretended to kill the sultana for shock value. 

(on a personal note, I couldn’t give less of a damn about ala mhigo, and there’s a ton of other places in the world I’d rather go see, but that’s just me.)

What gets me the most though, is that they killed off their best and most compelling antagonist in 2.0, and the closest thing he’s had to a replacement hasn’t been featured nearly enough.

Seriously, Gaius was a great villain. He was cool, he had a realistic and believable motivation. If you listened to him talk long enough, you’d think ‘hey, I mean, this guy doesn’t sound so bad.’ He was very tangible and believable, and they killed him off in favor of “WE LIKE A DARK SPACE ROCK” and then even worse “WE’RE STILL MAD ABOUT THE THING, AND WE ARE DRAGONS.”

I know everyone was very sad when Moenbryda, Haurchefant, and Ysayle died. They weren’t poorly written deaths (except maybe Moenbryda’s), I get that Aymeric has to run his country, and so doesn’t get to do very much, I understand Estinien is off on his own little path of self recovery or whatever, but y’know what? I’d take any of them over MORE ALPHINAUD. And it’s not even that I dislike him, it’s just that he’s the closest thing we have to a main character and he isn’t particularly suited to the role. Perhaps part of it is the failings of MMOs in general. We can’t be the main character beyond a ‘nod our head and say yes all powerful warrior’, because the devs don’t want us to feel like our character is breaking character, but TBH, even what mine is doing now is totally OOC for her.

Funnily, I feel much more like playing the game again with that out of my system. I think there’s a certain atmosphere that because so many people find their only comfort, their friends, their escape from reality, and a place that accepts them on XIV, that the game itself must be immune to criticism, and I won’t hold that against people. But for me, if I don’t look at what I’m doing critically, acknowledge the flaws, and at least hope for ways they can be improved, I’m just going to find myself miserable. 3.5 is coming soon, and it won’t be changing the core issues I have. That’s going to have to wait until the expansion, but at the least, having come to terms with my own issues, perhaps I can fire the game up again and not feel like I have to smile and pretend it’s a perfect title. 

In case anyone made it this far, and maybe got the impression that I don’t like XIV, that’s not the case. It’s a success story, probably one of the most unlikely success stories I’ve ever seen. It has more to offer than any MMO on the market, even if it might fall short in a couple areas. I’ll give it credit for the crafting. If you’re a crafter, don’t even play other MMOs. Just play this one. There’s no game I know of that even compares in that department. If you’re a roleplayer, like me? The best community for MMO based RP ever exists on XIV’s Balmung server. It has a world I care about, environments that are unique, and imaginative, and it looks pretty damn good by MMO standards. (well, it did when it came out, at least. Might be due for some graphical overhauls soon, but they have to cut off the PS3 players for that.) 

Aaanyway, I guess that’s rant over. Gonna have some tea, maybe some toast and jam.