#League rambling - Nurse the nerd is out

[yumesei]

I like seeing people loosing their mind about Ambessa's kit because yes it is way too op (20 dashes???). But like every other new characters, everyone is gonna ban her every games for two weeks, then Riot is gonna nerf her to the ground and you'll never hear about her again.

[lettersofsky]

For the "Get to know the Author": all of them. Every single one. Because I adore you and love knowing more about you.

Get to Know You AuthorYou asked for it! And now have a lot of rambly answers! Under a read-more line because I’m still a decent person. 25′s probably longer than it should be but I just love that scene, I love it so much.

1) Isthere a story you’re holding off on writing for some reason?

The Later DEEPGROUND AUthing I wanna do; it’s got all the notes and plot points down include quickrough drafts of some ‘drama’ scenes, I’m just not really ready to start it yet?I’ll get there eventually though! There’s also my own thing which exists onlyin concept design and small character pieces and that I’m far too willing toadmit that I’m not ready to start yet.

2) Whatwork of yours, if any, are you the most embarrassed about existing?

I tend not to getembarrassed over my things because even if they’re not the best thing, I’ve atleast been able to get the idea down or I’ve tried something different aboutthe thing so they’re all experience and the chance for constructive criticism.

3) Whatorder do you write in? front of book to back? chronological? favorite scenesfirst? something else?

It varies depending onwhat I’m doing; like some things I’ll start with a specific scene and thenwrite the build up for it, others I’ll write a scene I’m looking forward too,the afterwards of it and then the start, others will be chronological. The besttimes are when I write out notes for the thing then I can work out of orderwhile retaining all the few key points that I wanna touch on and where they’d fallin the timeline of the story.

4) Favoritecharacter you’ve written

Genesis is such adramatic, lit nerd and I love him. Writing him is fun because he’s just thisbig ball of conflicting thoughts and contradictions and I absolutely love him,especially the way I try to write him; kind of a more mature, softer, ‘realizedthat I’m never going to achieve this thing that’s completely out of my leaguebut hey! That doesn’t mean I don’t have achievements to be proud of!’ He’s alsoreally easy to angst!

5) Characteryou were most surprised to end up writing

I’d never thought that I’dwrite Rosso! Nobody cares to write about the Tsviets! But I am because she’s my murder girlfriend and I absolutely adoreher! She’s very much a femdom whenever I write her, it’s a thing

6) Somethingyou would go back and change in your writing that it’s too late/complicated tochange now

I don’t know? Because if Ireally have a problem with something then I can go back and redo it, which Ihave done in the past (not for anything I’ve posted here, but other things).

7) Whenasked, are you embarrassed or enthusiastic to tell people that you write?

I’m neutral about it, Ithink? Not a lot of people around me would think to ask and the one’s thatwould already know because I’ve shoved things in their face to tell me if the wordsmake sense.

8) Favoritegenre to write

I love writing fluff! Cuteslice-of-life, romance stuff! Warm feelings in my chest as I break my face fromsmiling at my own stuff! Ecto’s probably calling me a liar right now because ofall the angsty stuff I write…

9) What,if anything, do you do for inspiration?

OTP Prompts are mysaviour, I would be left with character-centric things exploring ideas I haveabout them otherwise (read Truths and Crownless)

10) Write in silence or with background noise? with people or alone?

Definitely backgroundnoise, I usually put on some music (I’ve been listening to Starset and NWTB alot lately) or a video (I like Plague of Gripes stuff, he goes a lot intocharacter development and worldbuilding). I can write around people, but I preferto be alone when I write, mostly because I kind of end up roleplaying thecharacters a bit, especially when I’m stuck on dialogue.

11) What aspect of your writing do you think has most improved sinceyou started writing?

I’d like to say that I canwrite dialogue better now but I’m not sure about that. I’ve definitely improvedwith my NSFW pieces, they’re apparently decent now!

12) Your weaknesses as an author

Dialogue is difficult. Plotsare difficult. A Decent Ending is difficult. Titles are hell.

13) Your strengths as an author

Hyper fixation on things Ilike. Willingness to completely abandon all of fanon to run with a characterizationI like. I can write dumb idiots being cute real good!

14) Do you make playlists for your current wips?

Not often, there are a fewthat I have but not many.

15) Why did you start writing?

It was a way suggested tome to help deal with depression by a councillor; they probably never expectedme to write about… what I currently do.

16) Are there any characters who haunt you?

Ravus Nox Flueret. He’s myabsolute favourite thing from FFXV and Crownless is my longest single thing fora reason! He just keeps creeping into my other FFXV stuff! Like an AU I’ve beenbouncing around, started one way and then I wondered what he’d be doing in itand the whole thing shifted to include him in the main narrative.

17) If you could give your fledgling author self any advice, whatwould it be?

Stop thinking and worryingabout the thing and just do them, it’s fine if not a lot of people see thestuff you’re doing someone definitely is and it’s probably put a smile on theirface and that’s good.

18) Were there any works you read that affected you so much that itinfluenced your writing style? what were they?

I don’t think so? Maybeand I just haven’t realized it? I used to have a very Victorian-style ofwriting (or so I was told) but I might have lost that somewhere along the way.

19) When it comes to more complicated narratives, how do you keeptrack of outlines, characters, development, timeline, ect.?

A document absolutely filledwith the information; that’s how I did it with my Bloodborne AU, just some 40pages of characterizations, backstory, weapons and their backstories, acomplete timeline of events and things to touch upon in the works. But yes, foranything that’s large and complex then I’ll just have a separate document (or two) tohave up that has all my ideas; for example, TSoaF, my Dragon AU, has the mainstory file, the info file, the draconics file – with all their designs, characterizationsand backstories, and a predecessor fic – which is only dot-points of plotpoints and will probably remain that way.

20) Do you write in long sit-down sessions or in little spurts?

Both, considering my moodand what I’m working on. If it’s a part I’m feeling up to like my smut bender lastweek then I can do the long sit-down, other times I can’t sit still and haveto get up every few minutes just to move.

21) What do you think when you read over your older work?

It pretty much boils down too,‘Oh! Look at my OTP being cute together! *heart eyes* I love them!’ or ‘… Oh,no! Why did I write that?! Now they’re crying and I’m crying and, god damnitme!’ It’s a fifty-fifty chance.

22) Are there any subjects that make you uncomfortable to write?

Some of the more extremekinks or fetishes maybe? Other than that, I can’t really think of anything.

23) Any obscure life experiences that you feel have helped yourwriting?

Unfortunately, myexperience as a nurse, both in age care and in the neurological section of ahospital, have not helped me with my writing at all. Damn you, four years of specializededucation!

24) Have you ever become an expert on something you previously knewnothing about, in order to better a scene or a story?

Not an expert, but I ammore versed in kink after writing for Kinktober than I ever thought I would be.I also looked up numerous method of torture for one of my Bloodborne fics, thatwas pretty fun.

25) Copy/paste a few sentences or a short paragraph that you’reparticularly proud of

Genesis had liftedhimself to a seated position and had dropped his head into his hands, hisshoulders shaking with soft sobs. | Cloud dropped down to his knees next to theother, gazing at him in concern. “Genesis? What’s wrong?” He asked, voiceclearly distressed. | “I can’t,” Genesis whispered, voice thick with emotion. “I can’t do this anymore.” | “Genesis,”Cloud coaxed, pressing closer to the other man. “Talk to me.” | “I’ve tried so hard,” Genesis stressed, lifting his gaze to stare atCloud with wet eyes. “But I just can’t handle this anymore Cloud.” | Cloud didn’t understand what theother meant by that but whatever it was, it must have been important to causethis much distress in the other man. “Tell me about it,” he coaxed in a softvoice. “Let’s talk about it.” | Genesis shook his head sharply, a harsh noiseleaving his lips. “I’m trying to make it up,” Genesis told him, stressing hiswords in a desperate tone. “But I can’t handle having you like this anymore.”| Cloud was stunned silent, staring at Genesis’ face. | “And I know I don’t deserve to be picky,” Genesis continued, reachingout to grip Cloud’s arms in a tight grip. “You’ve been so kind to me, eventhough I don’t deserve it after I threw you away.” | Cloud felt hisbreath quickening as Genesis continued to speak, his eyes widening as he beganto realize what the other was talking about. | “I promised myself that I’d takeanything you gave me when I saw you out in the wastes. I promised that I wouldn’t interferewith your life any more than I already had.” Cloud swallowed heavily, his chestheavy as he continued to listen to the other’s ramblings. “But I can’t deal with this, I can’t handle you looking at me like I don’t mean anything to you.” | Cloudfound a harsh noise falling from his throat, interrupting Genesis’ ramblings.He dropped his own head into his hands, smothering the noises falling from hismouth. | A wounded noise left Genesis’ throat as he took Cloud’s face in hishands. “Look, I’m still ruining things,” he pressed his forehead to Cloud’s astears started leaking from his eyes once again. “I just keep hurting you, precious.” | Cloud shook his own head softly, pullingaway from the other’s hand to stare at his face, admitting in a soft, fragilevoice. “I had Mako Poisoning,” Genesis stiffened, freezing at his words. “I, Iforgot everything. I don’t remember ever meetingyou before.” | Another wounded noise left the other man before he was wrappedin a warm embrace and pulled into the other’s space.

I’m also really proud of AnOld Hurt (a KH fic) in general. I just really love how it came out and how Iwrote Xemnas in it, it’s really great.

[natuolicityfan]

Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards) started out as most women do in the comic book world – as a side story. Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) was the egotistical yet charming womanizer, a familiar superhero type. Felicity was the rambling computer nerd who was drawn to his mystery and cause. Their first meeting consisted of him chucking a bullet-ridden laptop on her desk before blaming a latte spill for the damage. The pair’s relationship would go on in that vein for a while: Oliver coming to her for help with his secret vigilante side job and Felicity using her STEM background to unknowingly put away some of the city’s worst criminals. Eventually, Felicity clued into Oliver’s double life and chose to join him and his partner, John Diggle (David Ramsey), in their quest to protect Starling City.

But over the seasons, Felicity morphed into something more than just Oliver’s techie sidekick – a played-out cliché in the superhero verse. The series molded her into a fully rounded character, one with agency and abilities that didn’t come courtesy of a cape.

The show that began as a bro-laden ode to everything a comic book TV series should be – fast cars, bulked up men, action, violence, and vigilantism – ended up giving us one of the most complex, realistic, and role-model worthy female superheroes on the small screen, and they didn’t have to dress her up in spandex to do it.

In the early days, Arrow placed Felicity on a kind of pedestal. While the show’s hero could reliably be found brooding in his knockoff Batcave over having to kill bad men, Felicity was his antithesis, a woman with brains and a bubbly personality. She infused humor and wit into the show but also seemed to sport a moral compass that never wavered. While Oliver and Diggle fueled the action, battling villains, infiltrating criminal networks, and littering Starling City with green arrows, Felicity stayed behind the scenes, guiding them by hacking into secure servers, breaching firewalls, and dismantling bombs.

Yet even early on she served as the show’s way of flipping the “geek gets girl” trope on its gender-confined head but more importantly, she was a female character of worth, one slowly developing her own story that didn’t solely hinge on being the love interest of the man saving the world. Though she nursed an affection for Oliver, she was refreshingly unconcerned with catering to him, often challenging him to abandon his black and white view of the dangerous criminals he pursued. And over the course of five seasons, Felicity helped Oliver, Diggle, and the team of vigilantes they would come to work with take down kingpins, mobsters, cyber terrorists, serial killers, super soldiers, and the League of Assassins, and she did it all without a hood or a mask.

For a series that began after the world discovered it loved watching billionaire playboys dress up in spandex to fight crime – thanks Batman, Iron Man, The Green Hornet – the decision to devote entire episodes and season-long storylines to the development of a supporting female character that was meant to last for just one season — Rickards has gone on the record, sharing that she initially auditioned for just one episode, but fan response kept getting her episode call backs — said a lot about the show and its commitment to an audience that didn’t originate from the comic book fandom.

Arrow was the CW’s way to draw in an older male crowd. The network’s bread and butter up until the show’s premiere had been teen romance and vampire drama. They wanted to age with their audience and widen their fan base and nothing does that quite like comic book heroes. The show’s second season midseason finale boasted the CW’s largest male viewership in the 18-34 age demographic, but despite drawing in legions of male DC fans, but the network’s demographics haven’t changed all that much: It’s still catering to a large female base. With the addition of fellow comic book fare like The Flashand Supergirl, the network discovered that the superhero genre had pull with young women too. That means we get to see more of Amell’s washboard abs on display as he climbs the salmon ladder, but we’re also getting characters like Felicity that might not have existed otherwise. A Jewish computer geek isn’t the traditional love interest, let alone superhero, but fan response to the character and her arc over the first three seasons meant Felicity slowly creeped into the spotlight.

In the season three installment “The Secret Origin of Felicity Smoak,” the show dedicated an entire episode to her back story. Raised by a single mom who worked as a cocktail waitress in Vegas, Felicity overcame setbacks and circumstance to go to college, graduate from MIT and work in a field dominated by men. She was reckless and impulsive, had a criminal for a father, and blamed herself for her ex-boyfriend’s supposed suicide.

The episode took what had been a hollow caricature of what a strong female lead should look like and made her deserving of the title. It gave her dimension and purpose: Felicity wasn’t relentlessly optimistic because her archetype was “bubbly blonde comedic relief;” she was hopeful because she had been through devastating situations and emerged better and wiser for them. After three seasons of watching Oliver struggle to accept his own flaws and responsibilities, to finally get a glimpse of the woman who offered him her unwavering support was a welcome change.

In seasons four and five, Arrow chose to expand the character further, having her face trial after trial while pursuing a romantic relationship with Oliver. Sure, that romance often hindered the storytelling — it also caused a legion of male fans to spew hate on the internet (there’s an actual “F*ck Felicity” forum on Reddit if you’d like to check it out) — but it did provide an opportunity for Felicity to gain more agency over her own storyline.

In the past two seasons, Felicity has been paralyzed, broken up with her fiancé, experienced great loss when her boyfriend was murdered, and failed to stop a nuclear bomb from exploding. None of these plotlines were handled particularly well — in fact, the way the writers chose to “solve” Felicity’s handicap in season four was downright offensive — but let’s pause for a moment to appreciate the fact that though Felicity suffered a major setback by being paralyzed, she still held onto her wit and enthusiasm for helping others; though she lost the love of her life, she still decided to stand by him, help him recreate a new Team Arrow and take down the man responsible for torturing him.

The show’s fifth season marks a return to what made Arrow great the first time around. New players have been introduced, a promising villain has caused problems for our hero, and romantic triangles aren’t sucking the life from otherwise intriguing premises. For her part, Felicity has morphed from the cheerful, dependable girl-next-door she was introduced as in season one to a woman hellbent on revenge, making questionable decisions to protect the people she cares about, and using her own talents to bring down the bad guys. In a way, she’s become what Oliver began as.

For some, this change in character might chafe. The comic books fans who want to see more of Oliver kicking ass and taking names see the amount of screen time devoted to a female character’s development as unnecessary. For them, Felicity pulls focus from the hero – it’s inconceivable that she might just be one — and if she isn’t fulfilling her role of being the beautiful blonde with a sassy mouth and short skirt, she’s unnecessary to the story. They don’t want the promise of more romantic entanglements, they want action For that other subset, the Olicity shippers, seeing Felicity go down such a dark path sparks fear. The chance for Felicity and Oliver to reconcile and resume their relationship is still very much alive and the farther Felicity strays from the woman we met in season one, the more distant that particular fantasy becomes – underground bunkers aside.But it’s not romance or her skewed morality that’s the problem, it’s the idea that Felicity can only be one of two things: a love interest or a prop. In both cases, she only has value because of her relationship to a male character, Oliver. Instead, what the show is trying to do, what it’s been doing since the beginning, is giving us a layered character, a complex woman who can be right and wrong, lovable at times and easy to hate at others, filled with the desire to do good but doomed by the probability she’ll end up making the wrong decisions in order to accomplish her goal.In that way, Felicity has become the most realistic (and relatable) superhero on the show. She’s not infused with metahuman abilities like Barry Allen (Grant Gustin) on The Flash. She doesn’t come from another planet like Kara Danvers (Melissa Benoist) on Supergirl, or drive a time machine like the team on Legends of Tomorrow. She can’t fight particularly well, shoot arrows worth a damn, or crawl through the streets at night in a cloaked get-up complete with an alter-ego, but she’s better for her perceived lack of powers.As we’re treated to more and more comic book superheroes on the big and small screen, diversity matters, and not just in terms of race, gender, and sexual orientation of characters but in the value they bring to the table. Watching someone like the Green Arrow battle evil in the world with a team of supernaturally gifted friends, an arsenal of cool gadgets, and highly stylized martial arts skills, is fun. Watching Felicity risk and sacrifice for the greater good and those she loves, making a difference using her unique gifts — her wits, her tenacity, and her perseverance — is empowering, inspiring, and real. She’s what a superhero shoud be.