#Mechanics of Writing 1

[blueish-bird]

Chainsaw Man is about self-destruction. It’s about self-destruction as a means of reclaiming your autonomy in an environment where you are consistently denied it. Chainsaw Man is about denial of autonomy. Chainsaw Man is about how, when you are in an environment where you are denied your own autonomy, you learn to view interpersonal relationships as interactions you have no control over unless you find a means of controlling the other members of that relationship — whether that be through methods of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Chainsaw Man is about how denial of autonomy is framed as love. Chainsaw Man is about how love that denies autonomy is violence.

[skitskatdacat63]

Roleswap anyone??

Tell me Fernando wouldn't make a fantastic general/emperor, and that Napoleon wouldn't make a fanastic driver/tp!!

[asmolbirb]

had a geraskier snippet squirreled away in a notebook under the heading "the worst version" but it's actually not half bad, so please take this tiny drabble while i avoid all the other fic i want to be writing:

Jaskier looks up at the night sky, distracted from whatever task he'd been assigned. "Stars above," he marvels, and chuckles. "D'you get it, Geralt? There's stars above us, and--" The laughter in his voice is swept away by admiration. "And stars above, the stars above us are breathtaking."

There's no response from Geralt, aside from a shift of fabric. It's as likely that Geralt's scratching an itch as admiring the glimmering beadwork curtain hanging over them.

Jaskier doesn't bother to check. Instead his eyes rove from pale dot to twinkling jewel. He's never been an adept with a star chart, but there are some patterns that even the smallest children can recognize. Sure enough, there to the right, he spots a skewed box, with another bright star shimmering some distance away.

"The sailors," he recites, half to himself. He sketches the shape of constellation, on the off-chance that Geralt is indulging him. "Look, that's their ship, there, and that star hanging above marks the sail."

A noncommittal grunt from Geralt. Jaskier chooses to interpret the lack of admonishment as encouragement to continue.

"Who do you think decided those were sailors?" he muses. "Perhaps some unlucky band of bastards being buffeted about by the waves, seeking the kinship amongst the cosmos. If the hunters had gotten there first, do you think they'd have called it the Archer instead?"

"Your neck will cramp if you keep craning it like that," Geralt rumbles. "Come bank the fire."

"Ah, right you are, Geralt, the darkness will make it easier to spot the fainter constellations!"

"Make it easier to fall asleep, too," Geralt mutters, but Jaskier can't help noticing, later, that Geralt doesn't start snoring until long after Jaskier is done pointing out star pictures in the sky.

[volivolition]

wiggles my fingers at you ouuuu… you want to tell me about solace so bad…

HKJGG wiggles my fingers back lovingly!!! i really do, i fuckin LOVE solace :3 hey did you know i really like making fake skill descriptions?

SOLACE

Follow the north star. Find light in even the darkest places. Cool for: Optimists, Recovering lost souls, Sweet summer children

Solace is the skill you tucked away long ago, at the bottom of Pandora's box. The little one that tells you: despite it all, there is still hope. It needs a lot of nurturing -- and it's far from being the most helpful for police work -- but taking care of it is basically self-care. It enables you to find the glow in yourself that you often ascribe to gold lungs or brilliant halos in others. It encourages you to wake up and watch the sunrise, to play board games with someone you love, to forgive yourself and let yourself be a gentler kind of animal. Constantly looking forward to a brighter future, it also helps shield your morale from damage.

At high levels, Solace gives you a heightened sense of childlike optimism - which isn't always the sense to lead with in this precariously harsh world. Always looking for the bright side will blindside you with naivety. At low levels, however, you may just extinguish whatever keeps your soul alight. You've already lost her once. You may not survive the desolation if you let her disappear again.

[181kmh]

williams you’re going down next

[sillyfairygarden]

Of all the works you've published on your ao3, which is your favourite, and why? :D

hi nonnie ^_^

auugh this is such a hard question but if you are asking for one… right now it’s “no number exists for griefs like these” which is my secret life fic about scar & pearl.

if you’ve read my other works with these two characters you know they are. my favourites to explore. and secret life was SUCH a fantastic palette to paint them on with their stories being so. augh. augh. family guy death poses.

i loved writing a different side for them… scar’s bloodthirst and pearl’s inevitable loss of joy… and for portraying the unreliability of scars internal monologue. the way he separates himself from the consequences of his actions from his POV but feels abandoned regardless.

> honestly it was a fun challenge writing the tasks as this somewhat unacknowledged, inner monologue rather than an exterior hand guiding him to victory. there’s a short exchange that ultimately got canned where scar + pearl acknowlegde with each other that there’s a greater force at play? but i decided it was a distraction from the greater story i wanted to tell, which is that scar himself was the catalyst to his isolation and loneliness.

but i love ya :p so heres the scene:

but yeah this fic was sooo self indulgent to me. i loved writing scar on his girlfailure arc <3 and ANY excuse to write about pearlescentmoon is one i will take. they’re my personal dress up dolls and i love putting them in situations.

[aeolianblues]

Does anyone just notice that profs are way nicer and more understanding and flexible in sort of humanities and art subjects at uni? I don’t know if it’s because of the class sizes in STEM classes, particularly engineering and math-ish subjects, but I’ve been able to talk soo so easily with my professors in music, English, writing (as in drama) and art classes: explain my situation, negotiate deadlines, ask for help etc. than I have ever been able to in maths and computer science classes. Or do they just pointedly hire stressed out cunts in STEM

[butshedidnotknow]

Ready To Fall

For @febuwhump 2024 Day 1: Helpless

Summary: Neil Josten returned to the Foxes in a body bag, and all of the proof Andrew has of foul play is a mysterious countdown on Neil's phone, ending the day he died. Andrew takes it badly.

---------------

One man stood alone on the edge of the rooftop, a silhouette against an already-dark sky. It was beginning to rain, gently now, but soon it would turn to a storm powerful enough to crush all of them and wash the entirety of South Carolina away with it. Despite that, the lone glow of a cigarette hung from the man’s lips, still ever so lonely. Nearly invisible against the night was the bottle of vodka that dangled from his fingers. 

“Ninety nine percent,” he muttered, staring at the parking lot down below. And then he laughed, sharp and harsh and as cutting as any of the blades that he kept pressed against his skin. “You hear that, bastard?” he shouted against the wind to no avail; it was beginning to pick up, and carried his words away with it. “Ninety fucking nine percent and I didn’t even get to kill you for it!”

Abram was dead, and they didn’t even know how. Oh, they had been given a body, and everything about it—about the familiar face, muddled and broken and bruised—had pointed to “Neil” being hit by a car in the parking lot, probably trying to escape the riots that had broken out after their game. But Andrew would never buy that, and no matter how much the other Foxes gave lip to the story, he knew that they refused to, either. It was more than a coincidence, more than an accident. The scars, the endless antagonizing of Riko and his Ravens, all of the secrets that Neil had never traded with him in their game—

Andrew dropped his cigarette off the roof and stared at it, watching its dim glow flicker out. From his pocket, he drew out a phone—old, a flip phone, far outdated, but still functional, and now without any owner for it. He gripped it tightly, almost trying to break it, and drew back his arm to throw it right next to that cigarette, now stifled by the rain.

At the last moment Andrew stopped and dropped the phone at his feet instead. There wasn’t much left of Neil: his exy gear, unused brown contact lenses, pages and pages of math work that Andrew couldn’t stand to look at, and his phone. 

He raised the bottle to his lips, took a very long drink, long enough that he was beginning to question what he was doing on the roof like this, with limbs so heavy and a pulse that threatened to leave his veins in shreds. His own scars throbbed, both old and still fresh from the riot. 

Abram is dead.

Is your spine the spine of the righteous?

If he knew who had done this, if he had any way of reaching out, Andrew would have torn them to pieces and not hesitated another second to get back at them for what they’d done to Neil. But there was nothing more to it than this: whoever it had been, they were the Ravens, or something to do with them, and with Neil gone, Andrew’s attention was wholly dedicated to Kevin. 

Andrew stared at the phone at his feet, and raised a foot to crush it beneath his boot.

Before he could, it rang once. 

Andrew stopped. He stared at it. Put his foot back on the ground. There was no one who would text Neil, not now that he was dead. The only numbers that the man had saved had belonged to the Foxes, and to whoever had sent that countdown. 

The countdown is over now, Abram, and you’re not here to see how mad I am. Do you know how much I want to kill you for that? You let them get to you first. You made me break a promise.

Not one, but two. Two promises: he’d hurt Kevin, and he’d failed to protect Neil. One of those he may be able to properly apologize for, in due time. The other—his breath was ragged and something stabbed through the side of his ribs as he thought it for the hundredth time—the other he was helpless to do anything about, no matter how hard he was to try.

Neil—Abram—Josten was dead.

And now someone was texting him.

Andrew bent down, picked up the phone on the ground, flicked it open. They still needed to cancel the phone plan. It had gotten lost in the string of things in the past week—there was so much to do that a cell phone was ranked at the bottom of the list. 

Except.

Except there was a text from a blocked number—a different one than the countdown—and when Andrew opened it, all it contained was a single word:

Wait.

And dread filled his stomach in the same way it had when Neil’s hand was yanked from him in the riot. 

He sent a reply, rash though he knew it was:

Who is this?

But there was no reply, and when he attempted to phone the mystery number back, he reached a message informing him that the number was out of service and he should hang up and try again.

Andrew buried a sob beneath a mouthful of vodka and a cigarette inhaled so quickly he felt nauseous. Who could he begin to ask for answers? A burner phone like this would be no use in trying to track down any further information, regardless of who had sent that text.

Another drink. Standing and taking tottering steps towards the door, more shakily than he would ever let himself be in front of anyone else again. 

He could not be helpless again. Not after all that he had lost.

[superbattrash]

Day 2 of sick leave: my eating disorder is going insane because the stress is slowly leaving my body, but it also leaves behind emotions and I don’t wanna feel them so my ED wants to eat the entire world to avoid it all

[hershelwidget]

wait hang on

HANG ON

DO YOU SEE MY VISION

[dravidious]

You're more amazing than rules

Working on Modified Set 2.0! I've made some commons today and the ally-color archetypes are:

Auras

Modified

Equipment

Supplies

And Enchantments

A lot of these probably really need the context of the enemy-color archetypes to make sense, but this post is already long. One little hint: Red also gets Resonance creatures, but Differently.

[danielnelsen]

anyway ive combed through all the ability trees now so i will take some time to think about it all and report back with my thoughts at some point. no idea when

[serenanymph]

find the word tag

tagged by @space-writes over here, with the words gentle, subtle, ample, and substantial. gonna tag uhhh @halfbit, @faytelumos, @writingamongther0ses, @lyssa-ink and @reneesbooks with the words silence, section, shallow and shatter!

gentle

Iri drops the man back onto the ground, and Beatriz stares at the spike dissolving into the soil with a hiss, turning it black and gooey. There’s a layer of dust hovering above the ground, kicked up from all of the commotion, and she barely has the presence of mind to guide in a gentle breeze, clearing the area so they won’t launch into a coughing fit mid-battle. Any moment now, the Noxx will be coming, but all she can do is stare at the man. The man who had just used the same kind of magic Noxx possess.

subtle (surprisingly this came from the most recent paragraph, though written when I was half-asleep so it makes less sense than usual. does this count as a last line tag I have way too many of those in my drafts)

She plunks the sole chunk of lirstone they have left in the center. The light throws stretching, malformed shadows onto the surrounding walls, paints everyone’s faces in pale, washed-out grey that almost makes them look ghostly. The tunnel stretches before them, winding and dark and no different from every other tunnel they’d passed through. They’d been sticking to the larger ones, the ones that sloped upwards, in the hopes of finding another exit, but she can barely notice any change. She hopes it’s just because of how subtle the transition had been; not because they’ve been going in circles.

no ample, but I did find one instance of plenty

“He’s a kid,” Icarus says. “He’s the same age as us,” she retorts. “That’s plenty old enough to make a decision like this, especially when you’re half Beast. Hell, look at Crys – he’s had anti-Beast values drilled into him since he was a kid. Didn’t stop him from seeing you like an actual person and helping you,” Rhyme points out, though her expression is a little sour. “But the Witchhunter’s Mutt? You saw what went down just now. He hates your bloody guts.”

substantial

Around her, magic flares – Icarus – tugging at the wind, too panicked to actually do anything substantial save for generate a weak breeze, grip dulled by his scattered focus and the fact that he’s currently struggling not to start flipping head over heels.

taglist (lmk if you want to be +/-): @deer-in-headlights-stare, @allianaavelinjackson, @arctic-oceans, @space-writes, @reneesbooks

[dean-is-love]

uni starts in a week and i really need to find a way to cope with that. i will be posting my aesthetic notes

[brown-little-robin]

so I'm working on a fic >:D

[tea-cat-arts]

Saw a post a couple days ago that was something like "the price of wwx staying at lotus pier was his memories of his parents" that also implied Madam Yu was keeping info on his parents from him/ she'd punish him for looking for info on his parents and like??? That's just not how Madam Yu is bitchy.

For one, her beef with wwx isn't directly with him so much as he's just caught in a proxy war between her and Jiang Fengmian. She simply does not care enough about wwx to try and sabotage his life like that.

Secondly, the whole point of conflict between her and jfm is that she's angry that he appears to be trying to adopt wwx and placing wwx above his bio children. Why the hell would she get mad over wwx trying to assert himself as part of a family that isn't hers? Like, I think she's way more likely to tell wwx about his parents in the most loud and obnoxious way possible while jfm is around ("oh? Your mom? She was a brilliant cultivator. Too brilliant to stick around here.") while also taking jabs at wwx's dad's class to remind everyone in the room that wwx is supposed to be a servant.

Thirdly, Madam Yu just wasn't actually around that often. Like, it says when she's introduced that she's usually out on night hunts (with us seeing her as much as we do because the Wens took all the spots). Wwx's got plenty of time to slooth if he wants

But ya- tldr, I don't think Madam Yu would in any way prevent wwx from finding out about his parents, but she'd probably be incredibly annoying whenever it came around to her talking about them