#We Are Full Of Stories To Be Told

[tmae3114]

this may be a silly question but do you have thoughts on verly in we are full of stories to be told? I was wondering who verly was, if anyone, before they became an elemental spirit but I couldn't think on who it might've been so I was wondering if you knew? anyways. that fic lives rent free in my head it is my FAVOURITE df fic EVER. good fic.

Verity!!! Yes, I do have some thoughts on her!!!

The short answer is: Verity is 100% an OC and my intention in writing her was that, prior to becoming an elemental spirit, Verity was an Edelia graduate who had a pretty standard life for a soulweaver in Tkaanie

The long answer is:

Okay, so, the thing with Verity is, she's very much a Purpose-Built Character. That is, there was a Very Specific Narrative Role I needed her to fulfil, so the rest of her was built around that. I knew what actions I needed her to take and what words I needed her to say and then worked backwards from those things to get a person who would do those things. (Compare & contrast the We Are Full Of Stories Ravenloss friend group, who's personalities I let grow naturally around the much broader role of "Tomix's friends")

And because I am a person who adores subtext and coding and things that let me sink my teeth into a text, I put some small hints into her scenes in the text to imply stuff about Verity without outright saying it.

I will now elaborate on some of those things because I am Extremely A Nerd and Very Excited To Be Asked About My Writing. Specifically, the main thing I was trying to get across in subtext that isn't just, like, her personality.

“I don’t think I’m lost,” he says “but I haven’t been able to find anyone.” “You must have been knocked off track when your teacher sent you in,” the elemental spirit says, drifting by him in a way that reminds him of someone falling into step. “I’m not surprised you haven’t found anyone. If you came from the direction it looks like you came from, then you arrived where nobody goes.” He looks back the way he came and then back to the elemental spirit. He’s not sure how expressive his soul is but he hopes he’s being sufficiently quizzical. “That,” the elemental spirit says, pointing off in the distance “used to be Pandora’s Domain.”

This is the first significant detail about Verity that's presented via implication. She knows exactly where Pandora's Domain was. This necessarily means that she's a pretty old elemental spirit. The scene directly prior to meeting her establishes that it's been two hundred years since a Persefona student was last lost in the Plane of Elemental Spirits, meaning the school itself must be more than two hundred years old, which would hopefully have the amount of time that has passed since canon on a reader's mind, to make the connection. Verity knowing where Pandora's Domain means she's been around since before the Tomix Saga finale, when Pandora (effectively) died the second time.

An additional detail which this provides is that, given Verity is revealed as an elemental spirit of kindness (and, thus, a virtue elemental spirit, not a corrupted one, and therefore, a soulweaver or soulsmith in life), she must have trained at Edelia because Persefona didn't exist yet when she died.

(When he stops crying, heart aching but a little lighter for finally being allowed to grieve, he finds that he’s no longer the only one in his room. Verity is there, having felt his distress, and her face is apologetic. The book is cover-up next to him and she has already come to her own conclusions. Quietly, she admits that she had suspected. He asks how long? and she says your soul was called to Pandora’s domain the first day you entered the Plane of Elemental Spirits, which is answer enough. They talk for a while. It soothes something in him, some ragged edge, that she is honest about it.)

It's not so much implication or subtext here as it is, just, indirectly stated text, that Verity has suspected that Tomix is reincarnated from day one. If you read back with that in mind, a couple of things about her behaviour might ring a little differently (her reaction to Tomix calling Pandora's Domain sad, the look she gives him before asking what he's looking for in a soulally).

The implication in this bit is that the first thing that made her suspect was that his soul was drawn to Pandora's Domain. This means that Verity has a reason to associate Tomix Danao and Pandora with one another and, thus, remembers that they were soulallies. The question that implication raises is, why does this one random elemental spirit with seemingly no connection to anything that happened in the Tomix Saga know and remember that?

When you add that to the earlier implied information about her age and the fact that she still remembers where Pandora's Domain was... it's not that far a jump to conclude that maybe she was in the vicinity when Tomix and Pandora became soulallies, is it? And that she suspected Tomix was reincarnated because she recognised him?

...that's what I was going for, anyways XD Who knows if it actually comes across well or if it just seems obvious to me because I wrote it!

[concreteangel92]

Omg these photos are so good!! 🖤

[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.

[kenobers]

[ok spoilers for robin lives incoming]

every day i understand more and more the people who want to consume jason todd content but don’t want to read comics because what do you mean they turned him into the clown

[caligvlasaqvarivm]

wanna ask how you feel about the eridan bpd headcanon/theory(?? not sure what to call it!) you're so good at your character analysis and i'd love to see your outlook on it

Since I don't have a degree or any formal training in psychology, I feel deeply uncomfortable diagnosing characters. I've made an autism joke before but only because I'm on the spectrum. He's definitely traumatized and anxious, but I mean those as descriptors of his behavior rather than capital-D Diagnoses. I try to focus on those when I can - the cause and effect of cognition, self-image, and behavior - and those factors may very well match up with DSM criteria, but I try not to touch an actual diagnosis with a ten foot pole unless the author has explicitly stated that X character has Y condition.

[goldkirk]

it’s so scary and so freeing to just be a person.

[cherry-bomb-ships]

[cator99]

I always get detained at da border because PROFUNC never ended but basically I'm like if a targeted individual didn't even care

[petruchio]

i think i might be moving on from my crush. i have a better one i think

[tmae3114]

It’s been about a month since I posted Part Two, so here’s some bonus We Are Full Of Stories To Be Told art! It’s a Warlic!

I actually did this design long before I got around to actually writing his appearance in Chapter Two. I knew he was going to show up even before Chapter One went up - Warlic being around was actually one of the earliest things I thought of and this design predates Isiros and Meli Lu having names.

I really wanted to design his prosthetic wings (and you may see why they are implictly described as “strenuous” and Warlic doesn’t wear them that often) and I had a lot of fun with them! Aside from that, my main design goals were to throw in some Dean Warlic references to represent his aging (see: the clothes and the eyes) and to give him Very Long Hair, just because I could

[summertimemusician]

No one:

Literally No One:

Me, running on three hours of sleep and only spite and coffee keeping my mortal vessel functioning, also trying to get all of the figurines in Minish Cap to scratch the completionist itch: We, as both the Zelda Fandom and Lu Fandom, don't really talk enough about First, The Hero of Men and The Original Attempted Calamity Hero huh?

And by that, I mean these gentlemen:

[jonathanbyersphd]

The other nice thing about s1 is that you're really only following like 4 stories. And they all feed into the same overarching plot. (None of the random Russia nonsense)

[greaterspawnislands]

im just like. at the end of everything, im so glad i trusted phil.

like i know it had been a running joke for a long time that oh, c!phil “will” die someday, ghostza will be real, it’s not if i die it’s when but like. after techno’s passing and when phil started talking about writing an ending i knew like...that couldn’t be the ending. on a lighter note, what’s the point of ghostza in a server that’s already dead and empty. and on a more serious note, it just... wouldn’t have made sense for c!phil to die after all that. so i trusted phil and i tried not to stress out too much about it. and when the ctommy ending happened i got a little scared, but when phil said he was still planning an ending i felt okay again because like. i don’t know im rambling but

bc like, all the jokes about shitting on annoying loreheads aside, phil knows how much his community cares for his character. he knows how much we all love c!phil and how we’ve stuck with him through all of the ups and downs of the lore and droughts and appearances in others’ streams and he knows how much we love his character, and it’s clear he cared about his character too, from the time he put in to make sure he was playing a good supporting role in other’s streams, to the lore tie-in for the kristin possession stream, to just...everything. he loves c!phil and we love c!phil and i trusted him to give us an ending that reflected that.

and he did it absolutely perfectly. thank you phil. thank you

[carcarrot]

OH MY GOD A YEAR AGO TODAY .

[biblicalhorror]

[More datv spoilers under the cut]

"The Calling is supposed to eventually kill the Grey Wardens, so why did they retcon it so that all of these blighted wardens are just alive?"

Because they never actually died. It's been repeated several times throughout the games that the Calling eventually compels all grey wardens to disappear into the Deep Roads to be devoured by darkspawn. We learn in datv that it turns out there is an entire civilization in the Deep Roads made up of blighted Grey Wardens brainwashed by the taint who have been down there long enough to build their own replica of Weisshaupt Fortress from memory and continue to speak as if they are actively fighting in their respective wars.

Now, let's use our critical thinking skills here. Yes, the assumption has always been that grey wardens who disappear into the Deep Roads and never return simply succumbed to the blight or were torn apart by the darkspawn that live there. Does that mean that is the objective truth, or is that just the best guess of people outside of the Deep Roads who have never had the resources to confirm this theory? Is it at all possible that this is an assumption that went unchallenged for centuries, not because it's undeniably true, but because of the dangerous reputation of the Deep Roads and the nature of legend-driven dogma?

Y'all, it's not a retcon. It's a reveal and a reframing of existing lore. The Calling was never a sure-thing death sentence. The Calling is when your blighted blood warps you into a living manifestation of the blight, the thing you've set out to destroy, but with the memories of a Grey Warden that has lost touch with reality. Isseya is the main character they center in this narrative because she cared deeply for the griffons and had a duty to protect them. She was blighted herself and now lives on eternal, so she naturally begins blighting griffons as well to afford them this same immortality. Only it doesn't work that way, because unbeknownst to her, she is no longer the person she once was due to the blight twisting her mind, and she is actually slowly killing the griffons.

This reframing turns the inevitable heroic death of the Grey Wardens, the most infamous aspect of the order, into a horrifying Sisyphisean fate of eternal, unrelenting, unwinnable war. The blight doesn't even do you the favor of killing you, but instead strangles out your sense of reality until there is no "you" left to kill.

[magentagalaxies]

vent incoming:

got my grades back for my courses last semester and most of it was to be expected, mostly A's, maybe an A-, etc. but i honestly can't get over the fact that my independent study (the buddy cole documentary) was for some reason given a B. like sure getting a B isn't bad per se, I usually get at least one B every semester and i honestly don't really care about what my exact gpa is as long as i can graduate, but come on. this school put me through months of psychological torment over this project and didn't even have the nerve to give me a B+??? i'm still coping with the self-doubt they forced on me and this bullshit is not helping!!