#I might do another rp ad for event threads later too depending on if I inundate myself with starters or not lol

[duelking-blog]

I never did stop playing ovw last night haha;;;

Anyway here’s a quick starter call for people to slam that mf like if anyone wants to thread with ya boy! I’ll probably keep them short for now and also non-event as I need to get used to this whole rp thing again. It’s been a quick minute y’all

I’ll probably do a general event starter at some point so if you want something event specifc from keep an eye out for that. (Depending on how many likes this gets I could just end doing a general starter on top that and the closed/private starters)

Or you can just message me if you want to plot or have a starter you’d like me to respond to for the event. 

[butweareafamily]

about - please read the rules first

this is not mandatory to read, these are just details about the canon divergences I already talked about in my rules. Explanations/getting deeper into her backstory. 

Please read the rules, those are what you need. 

Now, details about canon divergences, first about Emma in general, then about her big issues with some characters. This is long, but, again, really not mandatory to read:

-After the curse broke she had, surprisingly, more friction with her mother due to their personalities despite having been closer to Mary Margaret, while David was able to understand her need for space better. Still, she loves them both dearly and even when not ready to admit just how much she needs them she’ll defend them ferociously. She may bring up more issues with her parents as a way to solve them in this blog (in universe, because she’s not as delicate and may accidentally hurt their feelings at times. Example: ‘if I don’t want to go to a date, maybe try to find out why and not assume it’s something to help me get over’ can be a theme of discussion). She’s aware of how much they have lost and how much they want to have her around, which initially is even more reason to want to run away while at the same time means she’d die for them.

The idea of her “regretting” giving Henry up beyond a ‘I wish I had the means to raise him’ is laughable since she was a teen in prison with no home, family, money, and Henry, who would not have been left in her care anyway, would have died soon after an attempt to raise him in a car. She doesn’t regret giving him a chance one bit, she just wishes she had been older and with a support-net that could allow her to keep him. 

-Emma is not pushed to “change, grow to be a ‘better’, more open person and heal from her traumas and open up to the world more” as fast as she is in the tvshow, I’m not limited by their schedule and cast, so Emma will show more consequences of her past life (alone, unwanted, losing in violent ways everyone she comes close to, being betrayed and believing she had been just used by the one person she loved, having been in jail, homeless, hungry, and so on, and constantly being punished for trying to trust and hope until she found her family) and have more dysfunctional behaviors that eventually she’ll leave behind, and some that she’ll stay/regress back to every now and then for the rest of her life. 

She didn’t even exactly had a good idea of what ‘healthy’ looks like for 99% of her life, so she can’t pretend for her family’s sake that she’s well-adjusted in every sense of the word. She can close off and run even in later seasons while still having the natural strong instinct to hope and the even stronger need to keep this family and believe that things will work. That also means bringing up past abuse without always realizing how bad it was or how shocking it might be.

-Seeing Neal again and what happened with Walsh was extremely re-traumatizing, as well as remembering Ingrid right in time for her to die. Also all the deaths and near deaths she witnessed didn’t help.

-Her memories of raising Henry did bring her to a ‘healthier’ lifestyle but the result of those memories and real ones existing in her head together left a bit of a mess of ‘responsibility’ + 'impulsiveness’ + 'stubbornness’ + 'walls’ + 'feeling in charge/feeling lost’. She may take a memory potion to erase her memories of being raised by her parents as a cowardly princess, which was a wish twisted by the evil queen anyway, because that together with fake memories of keeping Henry and fake memories of years in a hospital and real memories of her real life is just too much. 

-That doesn’t mean she’s not going to start taking the roles of mother and Savior, and keep following her instinct, always present, to help people, but she also won’t always be sweet or pick the most socially acceptable responses. She also won’t let people treat her badly without fighting, and in times when she doesn’t fight it (for example Gold telling Milah that Emma had a torrid affair with their son and was now dating her ex) it will be because it hurts too much and she’s used to having to 'take’ pain and shut up about it, it’s not positive and will not written as such. 

-Emma never became “friends” with Regina. She tries to be civilized/diplomatic with her for Henry’s sake and to keep her from turning into the Evil Queen again and lose more lives over it (and Emma knows that Regina was up until now a tyrant who killed entire villages, sent children to a cannibalistic witch, and kept a sex slave, among other things, so a jump into the old evil ways means she’d have to kill her, which Emma wants to avoid), but still, she never forgave Regina over Graham, she never moved past all the pain Regina caused her parents and the things she did up until Henry was kidnapped by Tamara and Greg, or the fact that she grew up alone because of her, and in this blog Emma doesn’t lose the ability to snap at her as time passes by, she just chooses her battles better to keep the peace. In this blog she also lets some canon comments pass when they are about her, still to avoid useless fights and of course because used to so much worse, but likely puts a stop to the ones directed to her parents and Killian because no matter how used she is to toxic relationships she also always felt the need to defend others. Regina’s reaction to Marian’s return cements these emotions and the fact that Emma doesn’t trust her change of heart to be that deep.  The idea of finding the author is not something Emma can support: either it would change their entire lives and they’d stop existing as who they are, or Regina would simply be writing a line about finding a happy ending that would force her and another person to fall in love, and then what could the consequences of a happy ending by force be? Especially since nobody in the show can actually say they have a happy ending, they can just say that they went through incredible pain and now life got a bit better, but there are still constant problems and they are just working on being happy and together. Considering the Evil Queen a separate identity is also a no. Considering Regina queen of everything? No.   So like I said there will be no threads with Regina rpers, and when I rp with others if they are close to Emma they will know her real opinion of her. She also doesn’t trust Henry alone with Regina, she may not know about his memory being wiped in season 2 but she knows Regina was willing to kill them all and kidnap Henry very recently (and even while Regina tries to be a hero instead, she shuts him out in every way when upset over Robin, which hurts Henry). OUAT happens in the span of a few years, depending on the thread it could be still a very recent, very fresh wound even just the fact that Regina helped her mother in her quest to become Dark One and was there when Johanna was killed.  

-She was neutral about Gold in season 2 and season 3, but in season 4 he eventually takes Killian’s heart, and once again a man she’s romantically involved with is almost ripped from her, and uses him as a slave for weeks which alone would be traumatic enough to never trust Gold again, but adding up to that Gold did try to kill her too, as she finds out after these events from Killian, who had come to save her when he got his heart taken. Gold is temporarily sent away so Emma didn’t exactly get to express her feelings, but once he’s back? He’ll never be part of the family for her, and his alliance with the queens of darkness was just one more proof of it, as well as him taking back the dark curse once human and free and erasing Killian’s sacrifice which was for Emma a reason to want him to suffer, even if she didn’t go that far with her actions.

So there is no big birthday parties where she and Killian are comfortable and have fun while sitting at the table with Gold or Regina.  

-After Neverland and experiencing a (fake) life in which she got to raise Henry and to tell Henry what Neal had really done to her (which we see in the show, in New York Henry only knows his father is a conman who let her take the fall for his crime and they are both cool with it, Emma had more time to process and got to keep the baby) she’s very aware that she did in fact stop loving Neal and just loved the idealized version of him and what he had promised her, she doesn’t know who he is now after an entire decade and he doesn’t know who she is. She will not get in the way of him spending time with Henry and she’ll be relatively nice especially knowing he wasn’t just using her but did mean to share a future with her, but she shuts him down even more firmly than in canon. She knew by the time he asked her out that she also had feelings for Killian (but then, she knew there was something special about Killian since long before) but the two things have nothing to do with each other, in fact in the fake reality she had moved on with Walsh too. She will fight with Mary Margaret if asked to give him a chance too. If she can’t defend herself in Manhattan it’s because his presence makes her feel smaller and submissive, that will take a while to go away. 

-Walsh was a very traumatic experience she will vent about eventually, a man pretending to love her, sleeping with her, manipulating her into a relationship by acting in whatever way he needed to be in her life, only to turn around and try to kill her is no joke. So was watching Gold almost crushing Killian’s heart, and so was thinking back of Graham and realizing exactly what had happened. (and so was watching Henry’s almost dead body in the hospital and in Neverland, and experiencing too many realities in her head).  

[shadowsong26x]

How do you stay motivated to finish w hat you’ve started? What is your planning process? Did you ever delete a work of yours?

10. How do you stay motivated to finish what you’ve started?

...I...honestly don’t know? It depends on the project, in a lot of ways. Big bangs and exchanges and similar events (with hard external deadlines) tend to help with that? With Precipice (which I know I haven’t updated in six months, it’s coming, I promise XD), it’s that the world and its story feel super comfortable to me, and I’m not even halfway through all the plot I have planned out??? Which, on the one hand, is intimidating (and why I’m splitting off into a second/sequel fic after this arc finishes up), but on the other hand...there’s so much story here I still want to tell.

13. What is your planning process?

Lol planning process.

Uh, I sort of spitball ideas/concepts, RP with myself in my head, talk to my ever-patient roommates as sounding boards sometimes...I don’t outline or anything. I mean, I have a general idea of where things are going/which plot points need to occur (like, in the gardener vs. architect example, I know that I want to plant carrots over there and I’m gonna need some potatoes too, etc.) But, I mean, that still leaves a lot of the garden I need to fill in, right? Especially in stories where I have a huge cast.

Examples follow, beware of spoilers.

So, like...for Precipice, when I start an arc, I generally have a few Key Scenes that need to happen. For the current arc (Milestones), those were: Anakin’s duel with Infernalis, the Jedha stuff and Leia’s vision, and a scene that will actually be in either the next chapter or the one after that. ...and the bit with Rex, but that was added much later. Which is why this chapter’s been fairly light on the Coruscant/Senate side of things, and also Ahsoka hasn’t had much to do, because I didn’t really plan for them and then the other plotlines sort of...started spiraling??

For The Devoted, I knew more or less the beats I needed to hit for the whole fic--Obi-Wan and Padme meeting Anakin and Ahsoka; the two of them deciding to stay; at least one starter mission; Obi-Wan and Padme Cannot Ethically Seduce Anakin; a few bonding scenes; the final sequence.

For for we are a woven thread; find the strand, it was sort of a similar process to The Devoted. I had a general idea of what I needed to do, and what order things needed to happen in, but...like...the entire Obi-Wan plot thread in part three came together at the last minute because I had no idea what to do with him other than it would be another Adventure and probably tie into the very faint “we’re not actually alone in this” underlying all three plot threads (or possibly that was a thing I realized I did after the fact but I like to pretend I planned it that way XD)

In contrast, for a couple of upcoming/in-progress things...our faces like a mirror has a lot of blank space I need to fill in, but I still kind of know what beats I need to fit (both for Bo-Katan’s adventures during the civil war, and the gradual breakdown of her relationship with Satine over the next several years). Dragonshifters still has no plot, but a bunch of Concept notes and a few little scenes, but it’ll shape up to something during the Clone War.

I also have a couple upcoming AtLA projects--an AU outline that I’ve more or less worked out everything except how the arc ends; an Avatar Zuko AU that I’ve worked out more or less how things go up until Aang turns up; a long thing about Lu Ten and an OC of mine where I have...a lot of white space to fill in about their relationship, and then figuring out what she does when she gets her memories back...

This is why I RP with myself/noodle around a lot. Eventually, I’ll fill those pieces in XD

36. Did you ever delete a work of yours?

Yep, but not for a long time. Back when I was in the LotR fandom a million years ago, I got a comment from a canon purist that kind of hit hard. To be fair, I may not have tagged/etc. properly that it was AU, I also had not read the Silmarillion or any of the other fleshing-out things, and I was fairly young/new to this. It might not have been that big a deal for me now that I have a thicker skin, but at the time, it was enough to make me take the fic in question down and stop writing in that fandom.

Everything else is still out there somewhere, maybe on FFN or LJ. A couple things I cowrote are on my former coauthor’s journal on an LJ clone that is not LJ. Some of it is embarrassing/I wouldn’t share with anyone now, some of it I would, some of it I’ve forgotten where it is...but it’s all out there if you really want to find it.

Ask me fanfic writer questions!

[noxtms]

❝       AMORTENTIA finally opens its doors this week, and you don’t need the gift of second sight to see the greatness in their future ! i was lucky enough to be given a private tour of the refurbished & freshly charmed building by the visionary behind it all, madam amare - and it definitely didn’t disappoint. the themed rooms are an absolute delight, and the drinks menu ( lineup wholly dependent on the room you find yourself in ! ) puts the three broomsticks to shame ! i don’t want to spoil the treat you’re in for when you make your way through those lacquered doors for the very first time, but make no mistake : i fully encourage you to put aside your inhibitions and get down there as soon as possible ! you won’t want to be the last person you know having the full amortentia experience !       ❞

WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE :  

young wix have been complaining for years that there’s nothing worth doing for their age group on diagon alley. with no trendy hangout spots available, their business has long been taken elsewhere & into the streets of muggle london, which has never been ideal, but has always been the best they had available. their complaints were always valid, of course, but nothing ever really seemed likely to change until last october when the poison apple on knockturn alley was at the center of a newsworthy event. the successful nightclub ran into difficulties pretty immediately, when it became obvious that even though the werewolf attack had nothing to do with the location of the club... no one wanted to risk it, anymore. it took a long time for business to pick back up again, and eventually, the poison apple began to draw crowds again - but it was too late. one woman saw a rare business opportunity in their brief period of suffering, and like it or not - the concept of amortentia, soon to turn into their only real competition, was born. 

DIAGON ALLEY’S newest and only nightclub opens its doors this week in what first appears to be a cramped stone building but boasts over a dozen themed rooms in the spaces that have been charmed to be twice - sometimes three, four times - the size. among them, there’s one dedicated to cabaret, another that looks exactly like a stereotypical muggle speakeasy. everything in the aptly named love room is bubblegum pink, and small amounts of their namesake potion is added to hidden vaporisers - it’s not enough to do anything too worrying, but they’ve got research to back up the theory that walking in and smelling your deepest desired is the best way to sell drinks. there’s a room of mirrors, a dance hall of strobe lights, a classy rooftop lounge - and the vip area with its silver shelves of expensive liquors, private dj & blacklight covered dancefloor was booked out months in advance of opening by mikaela karkaroff for her shared birthday. 

whether you got your invite ( and the rooms password ) for the karkaroff twins bash, are part of the weasley family pub crawl for percy, are joining the gang to celebrate theodore’s belated birthday & draco’s early OR, godric forgive, are just looking for a night on the town - there’s something for everyone at AMORTENTIA, and on opening night, the back of hand stamp ( a bright pink picture of a familiar vial of potion ) is the hottest ticket in town. 

OUT OF CHARACTER:

information regarding mini event requests can be found in the server that i’ll link you all to when i link this post, but i’d just like to take this opportunity to explain the concept as thoroughly as i can ! we’ve always had the ic channels ( and enjoyed them ), and i’ve always wanted to find a way to incorporate member driven events to an rp where ... members feel comfortable enough to approach me about them, and where they’re able to be given their dues ! discord - and your willingness to engage with what i put down - has encouraged me to try this one more time, and trial the concept of what i’m gonna dub ‘mini events’.

they’ll run the same amount of time as any other & they’ll be treated as seriously, but they’re going to be based in their own server opposed to on the dash. you’ll have full control of the server - no worries there, you’ll be able to create channels for private & open conversations - and you’ll be able to rapidfire, but it’s allowing an opportunity to have something fresh to get into without overwhelming you, on the dash. they’re not meant to take away from regular rping at all - just keep the juices going, and provide an easier setting for anyone who might be on hiatus, or who just wants to do even more writing but can’t on mobile ! 

i’ve always been looking for the best middleground between ... under stimulated and over, and i’m really looking forward to trialing this new idea ! this first mini comes from me, and future ones will have to come from you, that’s where the ‘member driven’ comes in - but we’ll discuss it more later ! maybe do a vote ! for now, please just enjoy the amortentia opening ! 

the event starts today ( with the posting of this message ) and will end two weeks from now. 

on dash does not have to be paused, and please keep in mind that no event threads should be posted on the dash.  

it’s up to you whether your characters would attend or not, but i definitely encourage everyone to give it a whirl ! even if you’re just creating outfits and posting them in the relevant channel, you’re giving it a chance ! 

if you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to message the main ! please like this post once you’ve read it.