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derinwrites · 26 days ago

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Do you have any advice for writing in a web serial format?

Let’s look at this in two sections – the business part, and the actual writing part.

The Business Part

1. Consistency. Consistency in updates. Have a schedule and STICK TO IT.

If your schedule is too hectic and starts affecting your health or otherwise adversely affecting your life, change the schedule; update less often. Don’t update in spurts and then randomly stop. The audience will far more easily tolerate a slow schedule than an inconsistent one; an inconsistent one will lose many readers. You’re not Andrew Hussie and you can’t get away with that bullshit.

There may be times where you need to take a hiatus due to some emergency, life event, or health condition. This is fine – your wellbeing is more important than your story. But you need to be up-front with your audience about this; tell them you’re taking a hiatus and tell them exactly how long it’s going to be. If you can, you should tell them in advance (this isn’t possible for things like a car accident, but is very possible if you’re planning to, say, move house in a month). If you’re taking too many hiatuses, then it’s better to slow down your schedule and update less often. Audiences prefer fast and consistent, but if they have to choose, slow is better than inconsistent.

The #1 helper to consistency is having a big buffer – that is, have several weeks’ worth of unpublished chapters. The length of your buffer is personal taste, but I like to keep mine as long as possible so that if there’s some problem that stops me from writing for several weeks, it won’t upset the schedule. It keeps my stress down to know that I have that leeway. Other writers prefer to only write a week or two ahead, though, so different things work for different people.

2. Decide on your monetisation system early and prioritise it.

The most popular and most effective method for monetising a web serial seems to be the patronage method, which is the one I use. You set up a patreon, ko-fi, or whatever sponsorship system you prefer, and offer rewards to those who support you. Having their names in a credit list and getting access to advance chapters are very common rewards. Some people also lock access to their discord behind a paywall, or offer extra stories or let supporters name story characters.

This model is not the only way to make money from web serials. Some people make money via advertising, or selling merchandise, or use the web serial itself to advertise stories that they sell. You can of course use several revenue streams – you can have both a patreon/ko-fi and run ads on your website (I don’t because I hate ads, but you can), or start selling merch related to your story once there’s a demand for it. Many web serial authors (including myself) sell their completed works as books. But the important thing here is that one of these systems will be your main system, and you need to know what it is and behave accordingly. If you run ads AND have a patreon, are you more focused on ad revenue or patreon revenue? You’re going to have to put your time and attention into one of them over the other. You’re going to have to make decisions that will help one and harm the other. So know in advance which one is most important to you.

You don’t have to monetise your story at all, of course. Plenty of people write fiction on the internet for free every day with no thought to making an income at all. But if you’re serious about this, I would recommend monetising it, because that makes a better and more consistent product. The reason I’m still able to keep writing these year after year is that my supporters pay my mortgage; without Patreon and ko-fi, I’d have to get a different job, and wouldn’t have time or energy to write consistently. Also, the reason I can write and update even when I don’t feel like it, and the reason I always push to make my stories as good as possible even when I’m not interested, is because I owe it to my supporters who are paying me real actual money to read my work. If I didn’t owe my readers anything, none of these stories would ever get finished, because writing is only fun about half of the time.

3. Don’t expect to be able to turn this into a career.

This advice sounds silly coming from me, who has through sheer luck, as well as the generosity and passion of my readers, somehow turned this into a career. But I need to emphasise that that luck is not typical. Most web serial writers will not be able to support themselves solely with their writing. It can make a good side hustle, but if your primary goal is “low barrier to entry work-from-home career where I don’t have to answer to a boss and can support myself comfortably,” then web serial writing is usually all of those things except the last one. There’s no harm in trying to turn this into a career – I did it, as have many other web serial authors – but don’t expect that result, is all I’m saying.

Still, if you can do it, it does have a lot of advantages.

4. Don’t expect to make money fast.

I remember when I finally started making an entire $100/month on Patreon. It was a fantastic day.

It was when I’d been writing web serials for four years.

5. Your most valuable resource is your readership.

Your readership will grow and gather momentum over time. The best business decisions you can make are those that grow your readership and allow your readers to participate in community, even if you have to give up opportunities to make money to do it.

A good example of this is discord. Some people have private discords that only their patrons can access; while this is a useful anti-spam and anti-harassment tool, I don’t recommend doing this if you don’t have a major spam or harassment problem. Some people will pay for discord access, yes, so you might get a handful of extra dollars per month that way – however, you will also get a far less active discord. When it comes to readers, population density is critically important; the more activity, the more people talking about your work together (or talking about anything and bonding with each other), the better. Plenty of people have joined my free discord just because it was there and only read my stories after seeing people talk about them there. Then they go and get their friends to read the stories. Enthusiastic readers are inherently valuable, and the best thing you can do is give them the resources they need to talk to each other and share their interest.

This principle applies to a lot of things. I have a lot of free stories on my website that aren’t the usual web serials, and more than once I’ve considered whether they should be paywalled. The answer I always land on is ‘no’; I couldn’t tell you how many readers have been roped into my web serials because they liked Copy <|> Paste, or The Void Princess, or Drops of Blood. These readers may or may not then become monetary supporters, but even the ones who don’t will increase activity and discussion about the stories, have fun and tell jokes in the discord, and may even produce fanart. A thriving community is always going to be more valuable to you than a few extra dollars; make sure to support them accordingly.

Your readership will start very small. In terms of marketing, this is your hardest time. A big readership does the majority of the marketing for you, but when you’re on your own, it takes a lot to convince anyone to give your stories a shot. It helps if you have an existing readership to leverage, which is what I did – I’d been writing Animorphs fanfiction on AO3 for years, and many of my first readers followed me over from there. If you have such a community that already has faith in your writing, leverage it. If you don’t, you can gain one my writing in a place where people go to read stories similar to your work, such as an appropriate subreddit, or a web serial site like Royal Road or Scribblehub. You are looking to gain as high a number of enthusiastic, engaged readers as possible.

And now, the fun part – the actual craft!

The Writing Part

1. Always remember that you are writing for two audiences

A web serial author has to keep two audiences in mind; the serial readers, and the bingers. You are writing a story that needs to be fun and engaging when read very slowly, at the pace of whatever your update schedule is, but that also needs to be interesting when read all at once.

This is not an easy task.

It’s something I fucked up pretty significantly with Curse Words, which was my first attempt at this. Curse Words has a lot of complicated political stuff happening throughout pretty much the whole story, as well as a complex save-the-world plot that’s reliant on a lot of secrets, mysteries and extremely speculative information. With so many wheels spinning, I decided to make the protagonist not particularly smart and move him very slowly through the plot to make sure that the reader would be able to keep up.

This was a mistake.

‘Pretty slow and simple’ at a novel reader’s pace is torturous at a web serial pace. Readers got a full week to discuss the mysteries and implications of each chapter with each other, doing the detective work of ten chapters between each one. The frustration with Kayden’s slow pace was clear, and he came across as an outright idiot rather than an average teen. Personally, I think this lesson was one of the biggest reasons for the difference in quality between Curse Words and Time to Orbit. Don’t slow down for your audience; they’re already slowed down by your update schedule.

At the same time, though, you don’t want to move so fast that you lose the bingers. You can’t assume that your readers will have time between chapters, or that they will discuss each chapter with other readers, or that they will go back over previous chapters looking for clues. Interested people reading update by update will do this, but bingers absolutely will not. So you still need to make sure that everything is comprehensible on a binge read with no backchecking or outside investigation.

My advice on this matter is to move as fast as possible, but take care to make sure that readers are reminded of everything important a few chapters before it comes into play. That way, both audiences can keep up. If you have to make a decision, it’s best to favour your update readers; they’re your most active community. They’re doing the up-to-date discussion, and probably doing the most word-of-mouth and fanart, although binge readers will do that too (I have plenty of dedicated readers who wait five or six weeks to binge a bunch of chapters on purpose, just because that’s their preferred reading style, and they’re still very engaged). But if you plan to publish your story later as a complete work, you also need to keep in mind how it’s going to read as a binge – and also, new readers will binge the earlier chapters of your story to catch up to the current one, so make sure it’s a good experience for them or they won’t get a chance to become update readers.

Two audiences. Mind your pacing and information reveals accordingly.

2. Chapter length

The general rule of web serials is that the more often you update, the shorter your chapters should be. The generally agreed ‘sweet spot’ is 1-1.5k words, 3 times a week, but this depends heavily on individual style. I update once or twice a week (depending on what stories I’ve got going) and try to keep my chapters between 2 and 2.5k words. If you update once a month, your sweet spot is probably about 10k words.

Don’t hold religiously to what other people tell you the ideal word count is – this will vary drastically with genre and personal style – but it’s best to try to stay fairly consistent. It’s not always possible to stay exactly on target because the best break points between chapters will vary (I’ve got 1.8k chapters and 3.5k chapters), but readers like to be able to predict about how long an update will be and they like it to not vary too wildly too often. As with choosing your update schedule, choosing your chapter length will depend on what suits your personal schedule, and what suits the story you’re writing.

“The shorter the chapter, the more frequent the updates” is a good rule for attracting the widest audience. Short, infrequent chapters will have a lot of readers losing interest between updates; long, frequent ones will have a lot of readers feeling overwhelmed. But the most important thing is finding something that you can consistently output year after year (remember, it took me 4 years to make $100/month; this is a long game).

3. It’s a TV show, not a movie

This advice is less useful in our age of Marvel movie franchises and made-to-binge Netflix series, so pretend I’m talking to you in the year 2010 or earlier. If a novel is a movie, a web serial is a TV show. What I mean by that is that a novel is shaped primarily as a complete experience, whereas a web serial is shaped as a chapter-by-chapter experience.

It’s best, in both cases, to have a well structures and paced story that is made of well structured and paced chapters. But sometimes you have to choose between the structure or a chapter and the structure of the story as a whole; making one better will cheapen the other. When you’re writing a novel, you should choose the structure of the whole, but when you’re writing a web serial, you should choose the structure of the chapter. Web serial readers will prefer a chained series of excellent chapters, over a beautiful story of chapters with mediocre individual structure.

In fact, whether you want a structure to the overall story at all is personal taste. My stories have strong overall structure and move towards a planned conclusion because that’s how I prefer to write (and it also makes the story bingeable, since it’s basically a novel being released really slowly), but plenty of web serials out there have no real planned ending and will wander about for years and years in no obviously consistent direction, occasionally throwing in a big twist or major change to freshen things up. These would make absolutely horrible novels, but make very popular web serials. Whether you write like me or like them, the rule is the same – the experience of each individual chapter takes priority.

Come to think of it, this might be why people call my stories “ADHD crack”…

4. Okay, so how do I structure a good chapter?

I generally try to do three things in every chapter.

- Hit the ground running

- Give them something new

- End on an open question

Hit the ground running – Unless it’s the very first chapter of the story, you don’t have to be coy getting into the action. Open the chapter as if it’s the middle of the chapter; start at full momentum. Catch the high point of the last chapter before it falls. It your last chapter ended with “We checked the fingerprints on the candlestick. It’s Colonel Mustard.” then you can start this one with “But he was in the library at the time!”, you don’t need to recap or slow down or anything.

Give them something new – Every chapter should give the reader at least one thing to talk and think about. A new choice, some new information, a shift in perspective, whatever. People are reading these updates one at a time so it is vital that they feel like they got something out of the experience. A chapter in which nothing is learned will make readers feel like their time was wasted, and they have all the time until next update to reflect on that.

This is also true of a novel, but it’s much more critical in a web serial. A novel with nothing chapters in it is just frustratingly slow-paced; a web serial with nothing chapters in it leaves the reader feeling cheated for long stretches of time.

The thing to talk about doesn’t necessarily have to be a big plot reveal or major advancement. An incredibly cute scene, or sad scene, or funny scene will work just as well. But you have to give them SOMETHING. If you’re giving them nothing, consider cutting the chapter entirely and integrating any important foreshadowing or whatever into the next chapter.

One major hurdle of mine with this rule is recap chapters. If you’re writing a very complex plot over a long period of time, you need ways to occasionally take stock and make sure everyone is on the same page and nobody’s forgotten or misinterpreted anything important. This information can be recapped or conveyed in the middle of an action sequence or something, but I personally find that putting other stuff in the scene makes it too distracting and therefore less effective. I like to literally just sit the heroes down in a room and have them go, “okay, we’re spinning a lot of threads at once right now; what do we know, what are we trying to figure out, and what are our next steps?” This is the literary equivalent of the save point or room full of health packs right before a boss battle. Game designers don’t put that room there to be nice; they do it so that they know exactly how much health you’re going to have going into the battle, and can structure it accordingly.

You can make these chapters entertaining with character banter, but you can’t really introduce new threads to talk about, except possibly as a twist right at the end. Introducing new information mid-recap distracts from the recap and makes it pointless. You might have something similar in your stories, chapters that are essential but don’t give the reader anything new to work with.

My advice for these is to just bite the bullet on this one. Release the chapter with nothing new to talk about. You can get away with doing this occasionally, if the chapter has a clear purpose (I get a lot of readers tell me that they appreciate my recap chapters). Readers who get nothing out of the chapter will shrug and talk about older stuff instead, so long as you only do this occasionally. But a chapter with no new information has a cost in opportunity and in reader patience, so only pay it if the chapter’s worth it.

End on an open question– End the chapter with a reason for the reader to come back. You want them to think about the story afterward and be eager to read the next chapter when it comes out. Adhering to this principle is probably why I have such a reputation for cliffhangers, although truth be told I don’t use nearly as many actual cliffhangers as people say, I just try to end by opening a question. By that I mean, the audience should always end a chapter asking a question, which can be something that will span dozens of chapters (“How can Colonel Mustard’s fignerprints be on the candlestick? Is he being framed? Does this mean that the candlestick was in the library and isn’t even the murder weapon?”) or span a single paragraph (“How will the narrator react to learning that Colonel Mustard lied about never touchign the candlestick?”) This could be the emotional height of a scene, or the point at which new information recontextualises everything. It could be the moment where the stakes are raised or an important assumption turns out to be false. Anything that makes the audience eager to learn what happens next will do.

There should always be at least one open question in your story, more if it’s thematically appropriate. You know how mmorpgs and crafting games and suchlike keep you playing for hours and hours by making sure you’re always near the end of an activity – keep playing til you reach the next level, oh but now we’re nearly at the end of this quest so we should complete that, oh but now we’re just 20 gold short of being able to buy that cool new armour so we should just… same trick. Readers should always have at least one ‘quest’, an open question that they’re following, and should always be close to an answer.

You don’t have to dramatically introduce an entirely new question each time; you can end a chapter by reminding the reader of an existing open question. I tend to be a fan of the Big Dramatic Reveal On The Last Line method (cliffhanger reputation), but you don’t have to do it that way. Indeed, it’s a good idea not to do it that way every single time, lest you get stuck in a rut; every chapter ending doesn’t have to be incredibly tense and snappy. Somebody mentioning that they wish they knew how they could get enough food to make it through the winter before a full paragraph of cuddling and falling asleep in their mother’s arms works just as well.

5. It will help if your story is good, but it isn’t required.

You don’t have to be very good at writing to do this.

It helps to be good at writing, of course, and I assume that since you’re asking me for tips, you’re the sort of person who wants to be as good at writing as you can. But there is some true hack garbage out there doing absolute numbers in the web serial circuit. I try not to harp on about this too much because Curse Words fans get really upset at me when I do, but I think most of us can agree that Curse Words kind of sucks. And that just sucks in an ‘author is still learning how to do this’ kind of way; there’s much worse writing, real bullshit Ready Player One-level writing, trucking along out there brilliantly.

The point I’m trying to make here is that this isn’t an industry where there’s any value in hesitating and wringing your hands and asking yourself if you’re a good enough writer to do it yet. You are. You can just start writing a web serial right now and so long as you consistently update, you’re probably already above average for the market. And your first one probably will suck (mine did), but it’ll teach you how to make a better one. I think that Time to Orbit: Unknown is passably okay, and it absolutely would not be passably okay if I hadn’t written Curse Words first. Just go for it. Try to write a quality story if you can, but if you can’t, it’s honestly not that big of a deal. What matters, truly matters, is that you are committed to improving your craft. And that means actually practicing your craft. Which means writing some chapters and setting up a release schedule.

Good luck.

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queenlua · 3 months ago

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hey lua what decks do phoenix aceattorney and miles aceattorney play in magic

PHOENIX WRIGHT

once upon a time, a friend bullied me into going to a Pro Tour Qualifier, which was probably the largest Magic tournament i’d ever been to at that time, right?

i was happy to be bullied, to be clear, but the problem was… i hadn’t played standard-format Magic competitively in about 2-3 years. so my knowledge of the current metagame, what deck archetypes were popular, and what the current cards even were, was staggeringly limited.

“it will be fine,” said my friend. “here, take this spare deck i built. it’s super-straightforward and easy,” he lied.

he said this to me approx. 8 seconds before the first round began, so uhhhhh, i sure was playing a game of magical cards without ever having even looked at the damn deck before!

so, lo, literally in the course of playing the deck, i was learning how this shit was supposed to work. “oh!” i’d exclaim with delight, halfway through my turn. “THAT’S how those two cards are supposed to interact. oh that’s super clever. what a neat combo.” and then i’d proceed to shiftily look at my opponent over my cards, riffle those cards a lil bit, and then say “pass” with as much of an enigmatic vibe as i could muster.

meanwhile, my opponent was Actually Prepared, and they were Trying To Win, and they were pissed. they threatened to call Slow Play on me because i was taking so fucking long reading all the cards. as in, he literally called a judge over, who stood there watching me the whole time, in order to determine if i was being Criminally Bad At Magic versus just A Regular Amount Of Bad At Magic, and i was sweating bullets the whole time because i didn’t know this deck or their deck or any of those cards and AHHHH why is the judge staring at me!!!

….which only served to make it EXTRA-humiliating for this poor fuck when i proceeded to eviscerate them 2-0. hahahah get dunked onnnnnnnn nerd!!!

and then i also proceeded to eviscerate my next opponent???

sheer dumb luck. i cannot overstate how ill-prepared i was for this tournament. i absolutely did not deserve these wins.

meanwhile the friend who gave me the deck was having a much worse time with their deck, and they were like “what the fuck. you weren’t supposed to win. how are you winning with that shit, my deck’s so much better than yours”

anyway. i think that’s the kind of scenario Phoenix would get into if he were an MtG player. dude Gets Himself Into Situations And Then Uses Cleverness + Bullshit + Luck To Get Out Again.

(AA4-era Phoenix seems like he’s doing the same thing… but, in reality, he’s actually been meticulously crafting his deck in secret for the past six months. he’s not even aiming to win the tournament, he’s just exploiting a known weakness in the opponent-matching system that lets him know with certainty who he’s going to get matched up against (spoiler: first round is Kristoph), and he’s hyper-optimizing his deck to beat Literally Only Those People. meanwhile, Apollo, who built a tryhard hyper-optimized variant of Red Deck Wins, is lowkey annoyed that Phoenix's seemingly-random pile keeps vaulting him just one table above him in the standings, because Apollo knows his deck is better. he knows it!!!! just let him go 1v1 and prove it aaaaughhhh!!!)

((also, in case you want Actual Concrete Cards And Colors And Stuff: in general i think Phoenix prefers limited play (draft, sealed, "anything where you open booster packs on the spot & throw a deck together") to constructed play, because he doesn't like being tied down to any one game plan. when he does play constructed, i think he's less attached to a specific colors and more attached to specific mechanics. in particular: he's not a combo player exactly, but he likes mechanics that feel like bullshit. dude saw Madness for the first time & his eyes lit up & he was in LOVE, "you mean i'm discarding the card but then i can cast it for free??? hell YES." he absolutely ran a poison counter deck during New Phyrexia. ah fuck i just realized he was probably a huge stan for noted awful expansion Battle for Zendikar, i think i gotta cancel him now, sorry))

((and i think Phoenix also has a touch of Timmy in him! like, i went to a huge state tournament once with a bunch of really skilled players, and there was this one dude in our car who had a really solid deck, clearly adhered to a lot of the trends in the meta at the time... but his win condition was a Shivan Dragon. which wasn't a bad card at the time, it was a reasonable win condition, but it was... slightly suboptimal? not at all the obvious pick? sort of random? and multiple people asked him "why is that your win condition" & he shrugged and said "i like dragons." so the dragon stayed & that dude ended up getting second place in the whole tournament so FUCK optimal play, bring a dragon. i think Phoenix would sneak in a dragon now and again. just 'cause))

MILES EDGEWORTH

this one is trickier!!!

young!Miles is just going to play Whatever The Meta Deems To Be The Best Deck, right. the von Karma perfection thing and all. it's all very boring & micro-optimized to be the Best Deck Of Its Kind & he pours over the results of the big name tournaments week after week & does some math or whatever to hyper-optimize his own build of the Obviously Correct Deck. there is no soul in any of this, purely Executing On A Formula.

...but then he experiences Character Growth & has his big gay crisis & now he has to pick up the game again. he opens the latest tournament results... clicks around some win % stats for various cards in a desultory kinda way, and... his heart's just not in it, right?

enter 2-4 era Miles. 2-4 era Miles is playing some utterly unhinged Five Color Good Stuff thing. there's a lot of Planar Chaos cards in there, because that whole set was about Weird Shit & cards doing Stuff You're Familiar With (But In The Utterly Wrong Color!!!) & all that is resonating with Miles more than he'd care to admit. he cannot possibly talk about his unnecessary feelings but he can make a weird noise rock album about them. and by noise rock album i mean this fucking Magic deck.

and he's playing this deck with a 100% straight face, as though this is the exact same behavior that won him the Junior Super Series five years in a row & not a desperate cry for help from a madman. everyone else is like Miles... are you playing fucking singletons... in a fucking standard deck... you know your deck will be more consistent with four-ofs right... and then he gives a cool fish-eyed stare & taps out to cast some arcane bullshit legendary creature & gives a single rap of his knuckles against the table to indicate that he's passing the turn.

and it works, is the thing! all those years of training to be the Spikiest Spike Ever have paid off; this Five Color Good Stuff thing relies on some pretty clever insights to make the mana base work, and parts of what he's doing eventually get adopted by the larger metagame to become an Actual Serious Deck. but, like. it's still a monstrosity. any skilled players watching are still definitely wondering Are You Okay, Dude.

after 2-4, i think Miles settles back into playing something more normal. he still cares about winning, but he's going to do it with a touch of class. he wants a game that involves dialogue, some actual back-and-forth, because just trying to combo off is lame coward behavior.

aw yeah baby we're talking counterspells!!!

he's a blue player at heart & he's happiest when he's updating the autopsy report shutting down whatever his opponent's plan is. he'll splash other colors as the occasion calls for it, but he'd be happy running mono-blue the rest of his life. like, i ran a pretty fun Legacy deck back in the day which consisted of:

every kind of counterspell i could get my hands on,

propaganda because FUCK creatures,

thieving magpies for the card draw,

and a few silver wyverns to, y'know, actually win the game

...and i think Miles would appreciate that deck. just play counterspells until the opponent runs out of steam & then cruise your way to victory with a couple birds. simple. elegant. classic. doesn't involve any of this modern Planeswalker bullshit (Miles regards most developments that happened to MtG post-Time Spiral block or so as affronts to game design).

(i do think Miles has a secret fondness for sagas as a card type, however. they remind him of all that Character Growth, but in an abstract/subconscious/nonthreatening way. too bad most of them are a bit of poor match for the kinds of decks he likes to play)

FINALLY: i think Miles hates playing Commander with every fiber of his being & Phoenix loves it & this is a pretty serious point of contention in their relationship. poor dudes

#when i tell you i HOWLED laughing when i got this ask. literally breathless. THANK YOU i had so much fun with it #phoenix wright #miles edgeworth #ace attorney #mtg #a few other random off-the-cuff typifications:#maya is a Timmy after my own heart. our girl is playing DINOSAURS and having the BEST TIME #franziska favors Red Deck Wins & is pissed that it's so often regarded as the n00b archetype #why wouldn't you fight fire with fire. you should fight everything with fire. etc #blackquill is a combo player so unfortunately he must be cancelled #i like to think Mia is the Michelle Bush of AA universe #(Michelle Bush: first lady to top-8 an MtG Grand Prix #and (more importantly) invented the Donate-Illusions Of Grandeur deck #which is my FAVORITE BULLSHIT DECK OF ALL TIME #and then she disappeared from the scene entirely to become a dermatologist #good for her hope she's well.)

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yurislotusgarden · 1 year ago

Text

“YOU NEVER HAD A HANGOVER!?”

ʚїɞ Separately! Dazai Osamu and Nakahara Chuuya x Reader

ʚїɞ format: short headcanons

ʚїɞ Keep in mind English is not my first language, so you may find mistakes!

ʚїɞ word count: 449

ʚїɞ Tw’s: None! Just pure fluff, pet names used, reader’s gender is not specified in any way

ʚїɞ Posting this on my birthday wooo! I'm 18 now therefore old /j. This comes from the fact that I was not hangover the day after my 18th bday party on Saturday (Fuck the fact that my bday is on Monday this year, literally the week day I hate the most LMAO)

ཐིཋྀ One of the times he was genuinely surprised

ཐིཋྀ Like tf you mean you never had a hangover?

“You mean never? Like not even after your 18th birthday party?”

“I didn’t.”

“But you said you drank enough to have one if you barely drank alcohol before! Which is exactly what you did! You barely had any in your life before the party!”

“Yeah, and I didn’t have any problem the next day.”

ཐིཋྀ Bro is jealous that you never experienced the pain of having a hangover but also happy because that means less pain for his belladonna <3

ཐིཋྀ If you’re a person who drinks quite often or from time to time, he will make sure you don’t drink enough to be hungover the next day by accident

ཐིཋྀ If you’re a person who doesn’t drink, or barely ever because you don’t like the taste, he still looks out for you, but less because he has more confidence that you won’t have a hangover even by accident

ཐིཋྀ If you do get it after that convo, the fucker will straight up laugh at you but will give you water, pills, and anything else you might need

ཐིཋྀ And if you ask him to give you alcohol and drink with you to actually experience it at least once, well who is he to say no? :)

ཐིཋྀ When you told him you never had a hangover he looked at you in disbelief and thought you were lying😭

ཐིཋྀ At first, he thought you were lying about how much you drank at your 18th birthday party because he was thinking that there’s no way that you were completely fine the next day

“So you’ve never had a hangover before?”

“Nope.”

“No matter how much you drank?”

“I never drank THAT much, thank you very much.”

“But you drank enough that someone else would have it.”

“Yeah, once I was drinking with my friends, we all drank the exact same amount, and yet I was the only one who was good the next day.”

“Doll, wanna give me your alcohol tolerance?”

“I’d rather keep it, thanks, dear.”

ཐིཋྀ The ginger didn't believe you until, one day, he got you both two bottles of wine from the same brand, the next day he had a hangover and you had to help him as you were fine

ཐིཋྀ He never doubted you on that topic again You guys tested how much alcohol it takes to get you to have a hangover and you cussed him out for the idea the next day when you did have it

ཐིཋྀ He’s lowkey jealous because he has hangovers so often

ཐིཋྀ You guys definitely used your alcohol tolerance to win bets between you and your friends more than once

Notes, comments, and reblogs are greatly appreciated

#Yes I'm 18 on the 18th #Golden bday achevied #bsd x reader #bsd x gender neutral reader #bsd x y/n #bsd x you #x reader #dazai x reader #chuuya x reader #dazai x y/n #dazai x you #chuuya x y/n #chuuya x you

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papermariosuggestion · 3 months ago

Text

So... here's The Situation™

First of all, if you're new here, welcome! Thank-a-you so much-a-for to enjoying my blog.

If you're not new here, and I haven't welcomed you yet, then belated welcome! Thank-a-you so much-a-for to enjoying my blog.

You probably remember a- uh- "brief" period from mid-2020 to mid-2024 where I didn't post very much on here, and I wanna say that I appreciate you sticking around through that. I haven't really explained what happened then, and I think it's important that I do that, especially given what's happening now.

I'm a filmmaker by trade, and I've always (for over 15 years now) wanted to create my own YouTube channel- not for any kind of fame or clout or anything like that, but simply because I enjoy creating videos that matter, that make a positive difference in some way, and despite my profession, that's not something I get the chance to do very often.

Considering that I have a ton to say about the Paper Mario series, it would make sense to create a channel dedicated to that subject. There's only so much that can be said using existing meme formats, and quite frankly, a majority of the formats I've seen since 2020 have been too political, too explicit, too redundant, or otherwise useless for inspiring entertaining, safe-for-work, and meaningful Paper Mario content.

I've been making an effort to start creating Paper Mario videos since 2018, and going far out of my way to eliminate the obstacles standing in my way since 2020, but unfortunately, all these years later, it still seems that I just... can't. It's not for any lack of knowledge or skill, but simply due to my circumstances.

I'm disabled. I won't get into the details, but I have multiple disabilities and several debilitating medical conditions that I can't do much (if anything) about. I've been repeatedly trying to find some kind of treatment and/or management that would enable me to create the kind of content I want, but to no avail. Fifteen years ago, this wouldn't have been as much of a problem, but my situation then doesn't help me now.

I don't want it to seem like I don't enjoy making the kind of content I create for this blog- I do- it's just not sustainable to continue posting as often as I have been, especially when the future (for me and for Paper Mario) is so unclear.

In general, people seem to be losing interest in Paper Mario, and I don't just mean on Tumblr, or even just on the Internet. The Switch remake of TTYD sold a little over half as well as The Origami King. That might have something to do with TTYD being a remake released toward the entire of the Switch era, but regardless, I highly doubt that sales like that are convincing anyone at Nintendo we need a new Paper Mario game like the first two or three.

As of writing, the latest RPG news we've received is that, surprisingly and fortunately, despite AlphaDream going out of business, we're still getting a new Mario & Luigi game in early November (Mario & Luigi: Brothership). I'm really looking forward to playing it, and if I'm able to, I might do a livestream of it, like I did for the TTYD remake.

Nintendo has also sent out multiple surveys to random My Nintendo users concerning Mario RPGs, which suggests that they intend to make more of them, but aren't sure exactly how they should go about doing so. I would hope that the survey responses push them to create a Paper Mario game more like the first two or three, but looking at the actual sales data, that seems extremely improbable.

TL;DR: I'm gonna be posting less often/more sporadically on here, but I'm not going anywhere, and also, I'm looking forward to Mario & Luigi: Brothership.

#paper mario #papermariosuggestion

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mangoisms · 1 year ago

Text

circle k (back to you)

summary: in which you're just the graveyard shift employee at circle k bombarded by vigilantes.

━ chapter five: i am found on the ground | read chapter four

━ pairing: tim drake x f!reader

━ word count: 4.5k

━ warnings: none

━ masterlist

━ a/n: if you'd like to see my notes (and my thoughts behind a certain inclusion of a character in this chapter), you can find them here <3 (also i'm on fire is playing in the last scene the formatting of the lyrics just killed me so i had to get rid of it thank you all)

“You just can’t beat it.”

“It was okay.”

You turn sharply to look at Tim, who shrugs, a small smile playing on his lips.

In the kitchen, Steph snorts. “Here we go.”

You ignore her. “Okay? Inception was okay—”

“Uncalled for—”

“But true. This?” You gesture to his flatscreen TV, where the end credits for Interstellar are playing; you’re a little bit red-eyed from the end scenes with Cooper and Murph but no less passionate. “This is more than okay. It’s—”

“Not technically scientifically accurate.”

You grab a pillow and gently whack him with it. He tries to hide a growing smile. You don’t understand what exactly he’s smiling at but you don’t care in this moment.

“It’s not about scientific accuracy, duck boy, it’s about love.”

“Yeah!” Steph yells from the kitchen. “Go love! Woo!”

You gesture in her direction. “He literally said it in the movie, Tim. How can you miss it? And Brand, too!”

“It wasn’t enough to save who she loved, though,” he points out—ever the devil’s advoactate, honestly…

“But it was there and she knew that, too, and she was okay with it. And it was enough for Cooper and Murph, too. I mean, literally to the point that she was able to save humanity. Right? Brand said it—love is the one thing we are capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space.”

Tim looks… well, far from upset or annoyed. He seems amused, almost… almost fond, the way he looks at you, but it’s too much for you to handle, so you look away, pouting a little.

“And also, okay, I know entering the black hole wasn’t ‘scientifically accurate’ but that’s the point, that some higher being switched them out so he didn’t die. You do have to admit, however, that the depiction of the black hole, which I’ll give Nolan props for, was great.”

“Okay, true,” he concedes. “The score was pretty good, too.”

“It was excellent.”

Steph steps out from the kitchen, looking at her phone. “Give me a sec, you guys, my mom’s calling me.”

You both give her an affirmative and she steps out the front door. You and Tim quickly resume your discussion.

“Inception’s score was good, too,” he points out.

“Bah. They both had Zimmer. Of course it’s going to be good. But Interstellar has the benefit of being enhanced by it because it’s already a good movie. I mean, it surprises even me that Nolan could manage to pull off something like this.”

“He has the range,” Tim protests.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever, you Nolan stan. I’m still a bit hung-up on you saying it’s just ‘okay.’ I mean, sure, it could just be me projecting my own grief about my dead parents onto the story about a dad crossing space and time to get back to his daughter but still!”

That’s the understatement of the century. The scenes between Cooper and an old Murph never fail to make you tear up. Any of the scenes between them, really.

The prolonged silence from Tim tips you off and it’s only when you look at him do you realize your mistake.

His eyes are wide as he looks at you, surprised, with something else.

“Oh, it’s fine—”

“Your parents are—”

You both stop.

You clear your throat, waving a hand. “It’s fine. I… I mean, sorry if it made you uncomfortable, I joke about it sometimes.”

“No,” he says. “It’s okay. It just surprised me. I guess… I don’t want to—I mean—I’m, uh, sorry?”

You shift on the couch, turning more toward him. “It’s okay. It was… well, not that long ago, but—”

You stop, because your instinctive response is ‘I’m over it’ but that’s not totally true, is it? You don’t think you’ll ever be over it. One part of you still feels horribly robbed of them, and some days, their deaths feel so monumental you can barely get through the day, while others, you can function normally for the most part.

“No, I understand,” he says softly. “My parents, too. My mom when I was younger but my dad died when I was sixteen. It’s… not really something you get over, I think. No matter how much time passes.”

A quiet moment between you. It’s not like he’s tried to make you feel ostracized—if anything he’s gone out of his way to make you feel welcomed here, to make sure he and Steph don’t get too caught up on their own and they include you—but… This is a common thread between you and you know he knows and you know he knows you know.

“Yeah… Yeah, exactly.” You pause, glancing at the TV, where the credits are rolling now. “It happened when I was fifteen. The, um, earthquake.”

“I’m sorry,” he says again and you know he means it.

“I’m sorry about yours, too.”

Tim nods, the look on his face still soft, still gentle, then he glances back at the TV.

“I was kidding, you know,” he says next. “It, uh, really was good. Better than I thought it would be. Scientific inaccuracy aside…”

“It’s good,” you press, ignoring the last comment. “And I don’t think it was trying to fool anyone into scientific accuracy.”

“Also true. I just…”

“Wasn’t expecting it to hit that hard?” you guess, smiling. “Yeah, I get it. Cried like a baby when I first saw it. You’re stronger than me for getting through it dry-eyed.”

“Oh, I’m just waiting for later,” he says. “Saving my sorrows for my pillow. That kind of thing.”

You laugh loudly. He smiles.

“It does unearth all the dead parent trauma, though,” he says.

“Oh, tell me about it. Cooper wanting to try to go back home after they find out Dr. Brand never intended to help those on earth…”

“And then having to sacrifice himself to give Brand a chance,” he finishes, shaking his head. “Only for it to turn out well in the end. If only real life was like that.”

A shade too dark for right now but you can’t say you disagree.

The front door opens. Steph slips back inside, raising an eyebrow at you two. Though she hardly means what you think she means, you find yourself inching away from Tim, turning back forward slightly. You’d hate to give her the wrong impression.

And of course, that is not at all what she is thinking about.

“Why do you two look like someone just died?”

“Well, we were just talking about our dead parents, so,” Tim responds without missing a beat.

You burst out laughing. Steph groans.

“I was wrong. You two shouldn’t be friends.”

“It’s too late for that, I think,” Tim says, grinning.

You can’t help but grin, too.

She groans again.

Catwoman is your next vigilante visitor.

All skin-tight latex and a coquettish attitude that makes your face hot.

Luckily, she doesn’t appear to mind. She even pays for her stuff.

(“I was told,” she purrs. “And I don’t much like being told what to do but… you’re cute enough to convince me to go along with it.”

You don’t think the noise you made was human but it amused her enough.)

Alongside that, you have the others who regularly drop by. Your vigilantes, but then, as you pick up a few weekend afternoon shifts (much to Steph’s disapproval), some normal faces, too.

Barbara, a red-haired woman with sharp green eyes who has a stately and intimidating aura to her but is always pleasant when you two chat. Sometimes she has another woman with her, a pretty blond Barbara calls D. Then, that one man, the stocky blonde with the tortoise-shell glasses and a quiet but kind disposition, who eventually introduces himself as Jean-Paul.

You spot him during one of your weekend shifts, waiting his turn as you finish ringing up a harried-looking lady. Another man joins him, a little bit younger, you think, with dark hair and an odd white streak at the front; they’re both dressed in scrubs.

“It’s been a while, Jason.”

“You know how it is, JP. Work doesn’t stop. How’s Leslie?”

“Doing everything at once and somehow managing to pull it off. I’m sure she’d like to see you, if you could find the time.”

“Sure. I’ve got a couple days off from the hospital. I could drop in. Lend a hand.”

A soft chuckle. “If she doesn’t turn you around and tell you to go rest.”

“I’ll rest when I’m dead.”

He coughs. The other man snickers.

Just as the lady leaves, Jean-Paul says, “Let me pay.”

“I won’t say no.”

They both step up to the counter. Jean-Paul gives you a small smile in greeting and seems to decide to forgo your usual small talk—probably because of his new company, which you’re a bit grateful for. The other man—Jason?—nods, eyeing you curiously. Why, you have no idea. But that’s the only thing odd about it. You ring up the coffees without issue and soon, they’re stepping out, Jean-Paul giving you another small smile in goodbye. You return it.

Having regulars like that reminds you of the ones you had in Keystone City. Kind Mr. Garrick, who stopped by about once a month for lottery tickets, his wife typically in tow; they were always kind to you, always a little bit concerned over your wellbeing, whether you were getting enough sleep or eating well. Painfully reminiscent of grandparents you never had.

A little more frequently, there was Linda Park-West, a face you easily recognized from WKEY-TV for the Channel 4 News. She didn’t miss much, always so perceptive, but kind to you, sometimes testing your PR skills as a reporter. She usually stopped by for coffee before work but on occasion, she brought along her kids, Jai and Iris, to let them pick out something for themselves, too. Quite literal balls of energy, they were a handful but always good-intentioned.

You miss them all a lot. More than you thought you would. The Flash, too. Especially these days. What you’d give to talk to him about all this stuff…

But you’ve managed on your own since your parents died. You can keep doing it.

The following week, Tuesday night, you get another new vigilante visitor.

This one?

Robin.

He is, admittedly, a figure you are considerably more scared of. It’s a bit… silly on your part, too, because he is a kid, you think, a teen at least, but, well, teens can be scary. This one certainly is. If only because of his close proximity to the one who scares the most. The one who you are happy not to have visited you thus far and Robin’s appearance… well, you don’t entirely know if it’s a good thing.

But it might be foolish to assume that Batman doesn’t know this is happening.

But then thinking of him knowing you exist makes you horribly anxious, so, you shelve the thought for now and try to focus on the situation.

Which is…

The three dogs in tow collapse in front of the door, panting, tongues lolled out, appearing to enjoy the air-conditioned bliss of the inside of the store. Robin stares at you, his face a blank mask.

“Water?”

“At the back. Far left.”

He nods and turns.

You wait there, uncertain, glancing at the dogs. They look worse for wear, fur dirty and matted, old scars healed over; the sight tugs at your heart, so you step around from the counter, heading to the coffee machine. The store doesn’t carry bowls but the extra-large soda cups are wide enough to work for now.

Robin appears near you, several big bottles of water held in hand. He doesn’t say anything, just looks at you and the cups.

“Don’t have any bowls,” you admit. “So, I thought this might work.”

He wrinkles his nose. “Styrofoam. Wasteful. But it’ll do.”

“Yeah, Circle K isn’t breaking barriers in terms of eco-friendliness.”

He says nothing to that, just turns and heads for the dogs. You follow him, not that turned off. You’ve heard rumors about this particular Robin. He does a good job but can be… rough around the edges. Like Bat, like Robin, you guess.

Glancing at the cups, you get an idea, stopping to duck around the counter and grab a pair of scissors. You cup off the top half of each of them, Robin taking them as you go, until all three cups are cut, allowing for the dogs to have better reach.

You join him with the last one, filling it with cold water. Most of the dogs are so heat tired, they only lift their heads to drink, seemingly unable to stand.

You and Robin stay kneeled in front of them, filling the cups when necessary. You gently stroke the head of one nearest to you, smiling as his tail thumps against the tiles.

Robin says nothing else and neither do you. That’s how his time there goes, spent in silence, petting the dogs, letting them cool down and rest.

Eventually, he starts to leave, and you can’t help but ask, “What’s going to happen to them?”

He regards you for a moment and you get the unnerving feeling of being picked apart and analyzed. Still, you hold steady. It’s good practice, you try to tell yourself. One day, you’ll be faced with bloodhounds for journalists and you have to keep it together. Let yourself practice with Robin because if you can pull it off with him, you can do it with anyone.

“The shelters are closed for the night,” he eventually responds. “I will take them somewhere safe, off the streets. Then in the morning, they’ll go there.”

“That’s good. Thanks for doing that. It’s kind of you.”

He pauses, looking back at the dogs, who are rejuvenated by this point, stretching and standing up, tails wagging as they look at you two.

“It’s the right thing to do,” he says at last. “And… thank you, for your help.”

You glance away, picking up the cups. “Sure. No problem.”

A nod and Robin is soon corralling the dogs out of the store, murmuring more gently to them than you would expect, but from this experience, you suspect he has some kind of soft spot for animals. It’s endearing, in a way.

You hope you made a good impression on him, too.

(And if your good impression keeps Batman out a little longer, well, that’s just a lucky coincidence.)

The start of July creeps on you.

There is still achingly little contact between you and Tim. By this point, you haven’t seen him in person for more than a month.

You miss him, in the same way you miss a limb. Scrolling through your social media, whenever you find something funny or that he would like, your knee-jerk reaction is to send it to him. But your conversations on those respective platforms are made up of messages from you and none from him, so you have to stop yourself, because it wouldn’t be worth it. He wouldn’t see it.

Steph tries to preoccupy your time, though her behavior regarding Tim grows increasingly skittish, to the point where you almost think she might know.

She might know that you’re in love with him, him, her ex-boyfriend and first love. The thought brings on the usual amount of soul-crushing guilt and disgust with yourself. How can you do that to her? She’s your best friend. You love her to the ends of the universe and back and… How can you do that to her?

But… something else about it all niggles at you, too. She switches between reassuring you he’ll come around, and dismissing him the other times, saying you ‘don’t need him to have a good time.’ It makes you think they may be having their own issues, too.

The thought is sobering.

You’ve always thought of Steph and Tim as—as insane as it sounds—a pair of bonded kittens. Not exactly getting along all the time but…

You couldn’t separate them. You shouldn’t separate them.

And it feels so wrong for it to be just you two, sometimes. Like you’re missing another piece of the puzzle and it’s noticeable. This empty space between you two that he usually filled. Your group chat, at his insistence, is called the three musketeers. Well, you’re missing your third. Desperately.

“We can rebrand,” Steph says to you one day, the two of you at the mall’s food court. Tim said he was busy. Again.

“No,” you sigh. “That’s not… no. Anyway, Big Belly?”

“I—oh, you have got to be kidding me.” She sounds annoyed, voice sharp.

“What?” you ask, your eyes still on the menu in front of you.

She grabs your arm. “I think we should eat somewhere else.”

You frown at her. “But you said you wanted to get—”

“We can get Big Belly somewhere else. Maybe a little more quiet, you know, it’s kinda crazy in here,” she laughs, though it sounds strained as she tugs you over to the exit.

“Crazy? It’s not that busy—Stephanie!” You yelp as she drags you forward before you can take a look around. “What is going on—”

“It’s just—I think I see Jordanna—”

“Where—”

“Let’s not look! Don’t want her to see you or me, you know how she is, so, let’s get out of here…”

“Well, I—okay—you don’t have to—”

She tugs you all the way through the exit, out into the burning mid-afternoon heat. Humidity swallows you whole, turning your skin tacky, sun bearing down on you full-force. Outside, it smells sharply of gasoline and hot blacktop.

“Honestly, Steph,” you say, shaking your head. “You didn’t need to drag me out like that.”

She gives you an apologetic smile. “Sorry. I just… didn’t want to deal with Jordanna. She’s been really annoying me recently.”

“Has she?” You can’t imagine why Jordanna would even be talking to her since it’s the summer, but to be fair, there isn’t much Jordanna wouldn’t do in the name of annoying her.

“Yup. Just… acting way out of line. So, let’s go somewhere else.”

“Alright, that’s fine. Let’s get out of the heat before you have to scrape me off the pavement.”

“Food’s on me,” she promises, looping her fingers through the belt loops of your jeans, tugging you gently; too hot to hold hands or twine your arms together like usual.

Though the whole thing bothers you a little bit, you are too used to Steph and Tim’s sometimes strange ways. Leaving abruptly, missing scheduled hangouts, a penchant for tardiness. The occasional bruise or cut that they both wave away. The exhaustion that wears them down sometimes.

It’s odd.

But stranger things happen in Gotham, so, you heed their wishes for that stuff to be ignored.

Just like you let this one go, too.

Really. The things you do for them.

Oddities aside, as Tim remains virtually radio silent, you miss him more. Think about him more.

Dream about him more.

“Steph’s going to be late,” is what Tim says as soon as he steps inside your dorm.

You snort. “Of course she is. You’re both terrible at being punctual.”

“I… am less bad at it than she is.”

“Right,” you say, smirking, pointing to your clock. “You’re only twenty minutes late, compared to what her forty minutes to an hour will be.”

Tim grimaces as he shuffles off his shoes by the door, then steps in further. “She said she was showering.”

“So, we have even more time. That’s fine. I wanted to paint my nails.”

In the bathroom you share with your ‘roommate,’ the shower turns on. It’s really just the bathroom you two share. Your small dorm is entirely private. The perks of being a junior.

You go over to your dresser, where your collection of makeup and nail polish is. Above it, your window looks out to the grassy quad, the sky clear of clouds, unusually blue today without the typical smog; the sun shines in, dust motes dancing in the rays.

Tim comes over, too, but he goes for your phone instead, which is connected to your Bluetooth speaker, music playing lowly; he got that for you this past Christmas.

“Gonna play your old people music?”

“Bruce Springsteen is a treasure to this country and, to quote my dad, one of the few good things to ever come out of the state of New Jersey.”

You laugh. The song changes. The upbeat notes of Hungry Heart start. You’ve heard this one more than a couple times since meeting him. It’s not so bad.

You fiddle with the bottles of nail polishes. Tim sets your phone down and leans over, dropping his chin to your shoulder as he watches you, humming quietly under his breath.

The contact makes your heart skip a beat, tendrils of his cologne wrapping around you, the heat of his body palpable through your thin t-shirt. It’s a contradicting sensation, with the AC working hard to beat the May heat that’s settled in. Maybe too hard, as your fingers are a little bit cold. You warm up quickly with Tim so close to you, your heart thudding in your ears. You desperately hope he can’t feel the heat that expands in your face.

That’s a more recent development. One you hate looking too closely at, for fear of what it means.

(You do know what it means. You’re just still in denial. Because admitting it means you have feelings for your best friend’s ex-boyfriend. For your best friend.)

You keep fiddling, not sure which color to pick. Tim huffs softly, reaching past you, picking out a bottle of wine red nail polish.

“Fine. But you have to help,” you say, taking it from him, then grabbing another bottle for the top coat.

“Don’t I always?”

You just nudge him back, stepping away from the dresser and taking a seat on the floor. The floor is hard, polished concrete; not pleasant to sit on or walk on, so you’ve invested in several cushioned rugs to cover as much as you can.

Tim grabs a Zesti from your mini fridge, then joins you as you set to painting the nails of your left hand. This one is easier since you’re using your dominant hand and you manage to paint your nails without catching any of the skin around them.

The shower in your bathroom hums underneath the sound of the song as you finish your left hand. The first coat, anyway. Tim passes his Zesti to you, wipes a hand on his jeans to get rid of the condensation, then takes the bottle of nail polish.

You sip the soda, extending your right hand to him. He carefully balances the bottle on the rug and sets to painting your nails.

Like with most things he does, Tim dedicates himself to his task wholeheartedly, cornflower blue eyes trained on your hand, tongue poking out in concentration. The sight makes your heart skip a beat. Warmth unspools in your chest like cotton candy.

Sunlight pours in from the window above the dresser, bathing him in warm, golden rays; it makes the shade of his dark hair warmer, the blue of his t-shirt, too, softening the pale of his skin.

“So… how was that date?”

The question jars you. You avert your eyes.

Ah. The date you agreed to go on with a guy in your communications class in an attempt to… you don’t know. Distract yourself from Tim? Try to find someone else to latch onto? All… not so great reasons, you know, but needs must.

Not like it worked out, anyway…

“Terrible.”

He stiffens, pausing in his work to look at you, eyes narrowing, and you send him a small smile, privately pleased—though you shouldn’t be—at seeing him get all protective. You can take care of yourself and he knows that, too, but… one can appreciate having a cute guy be like that for you. Within reason, anyway.

“He didn’t do anything, Timmy, relax. He was just… well, seemed nice initially. But when we got to the restaurant, he was horrible to the waitress. I already wasn’t feeling it, but after that, no way. So.”

He glances away, thumb rubbing idly at the back of your hand from where he cradles it in his. “Sorry to hear that.”

“It’s okay. It wasn’t a good idea.”

“To go with him or—” he clears his throat, turning back to his work “—dating in general?”

“I don’t know. He just wasn’t what I was looking for.”

“What are you looking for?”

You, you want to say, but don’t.

Frightening to realize, really, that the answer to that question is immediate, as sure as the day.

It’s Tim.

Always Tim.

But you’ve never felt this way for someone. This strongly, like you want so much, you could never be satisfied.

“I don’t know,” you say quietly, watching the brush of the handle glide over your nail in easy, practiced sweeps. “Does anyone?”

“I guess not,” he concedes softly. “But still. I hope you can find it.”

The song changes. Something calmer, with the strum of the guitar. Familiar croons of I'm On Fire.

I have found it, you want to say. It’s you. It’s this. Right here, right now.

But just because you found it doesn’t mean it’s yours.

“Do you?” you find yourself asking because apparently you’re feeling extra masochistic today. “Know what you’re looking for, I mean.”

Steph sometimes teases him. Tries to point out nice boys and girls he might like. You used to play along. You don’t so much these days.

He would always wave it off, anyway. Just shake his head and change the subject. He has dated before. Obviously. Someone as gorgeous as him… all of Gotham wants a piece of him. You do, too. Well. You want all of him. Which is another thing you are just now realizing. But anyway, since you’ve known him, he hasn’t dated anyone. He used to date a boy—Bernard? Steph said he was a character—from one of his old high schools but that didn’t work out. And now he still has the occasional date, but it never pans out. He says they just aren’t compatible.

Makes you curious.

You’d never match up to it, you know, but you want to know, anyway.

Tim looks up, his eyes slowly scanning your face. This close, with the sunlight, you can see the shadows his lashes cast on his cheeks, the flecks of silver in his eyes, like mercury, the odd scars, too, that he excuses behind clumsiness as a child. Everything inside you squeezes.

“I guess you can say that,” he eventually says, voice soft.

The words hurt, but distantly, like it’s all far away from you. You’re too caught up here, now, close enough to smell his cologne.

Tension thickens the air between you. It’s unfamiliar, unknown, but not unwelcome with how your stomach swoops like you missed a step, heart pounding in your ears.

Tim looks… contemplative. Your eyes are immediately drawn to the movement of him biting his lip, teeth sinking into plush pink, and the urge to soothe away the indents with your own lips is fearsome, monumental, like a hurricane.

His fingers tighten on your hand. You want to get swept away in this moment, no matter the consequences. It’s a dangerous kind of feeling you aren’t used to.

But the shower abruptly shuts off in the bathroom, plunging the room back into silence with the strum of the guitar and the croon of the song as it ends. The moment is broken.

Tim clears his throat and returns to his work.

Neither of you say anything.

Too much for you to want.

Too much you cannot have.

Too complicated.

reblogs are appreciated!

taglist: @peachesona @knoxx-seresinbradshaw @kikis-writing-service @sweetistic @soundsfunbutno @ginevraxrogers @fridaenpina @skcj24 @bath1lda @omfg-its-tay @laughydaphne @fhrjrirj @iamthesimpmother @alittlelateforstars @thaliadoesthings @scarlett13 @zelabee @coffee-love-alltheabove @benstormy @sad-girl09 @lockofspades @thereallchristine

[ask to be tagged! either here or my inbox! ^_^]

#tim drake x reader #red robin x reader #dc comics imagine #tim drake imagine #red robin imagine #batfam imagine #batfam x reader #tim drake x y/n #tim drake x you #red robin x you #red robin x y/n #batfam x you #batfam x y/n

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ducktracy · 2 months ago

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ltc is such a conflicting show because it is probably one of the ones where porky is brutally beaten the most but also is the cutest he has ever been in years. pearl of my dreams has SUCH cute porkies in it

TELLLLLLL ME ABOUT IT HAHA!! i feel the same way! LTC’s my favorite LT adaptation thats come out, i have such a deeply personal connection with it and it means more to me than words can articulate. i miss waking up at 5:30 in the morning to watch new batches drop and have my friends and coworkers who worked on it wair for my reactions. i love the show so so so dearly, i’m so glad it exists and it means the world to me. at the same time, i definitely have gotten a bit more critical of it as my knowledge of both the original shorts have strengthened AND the knowledge of the modern cartoon pipeline has strengthened! much of the LTC crew has migrated onto TPSS, which is WONDERFUL, if any of you guys are reading this you rock i love you. but that also means i’m able to have a more intimate look at how LTC was made since a lot of the same patterns and demands are on our show, because it’s the same cartoon pipeline! so, with that knowledge, i’m able to pick out “this is a side effect of the modern pipeline, the classics wouldn’t do this” etc and generally taken out of it a bit more. i’ve grown more critical not because i like the show less, but i just Know More now and my vision has broadened

WITH ALL THAT SAID! that has definitely allowed me to see that the Porky and Daffy shorts can get pretty repetitive and follow the same formula often of “Daffy makes Porky’s life miserable and Porky gets beat up a lot”. THANKFULLY(?), they’re still easily my favorite shorts of the entire bunch, they have their flaws but i still absolutely love them, and the repetition doesn’t bother me as much with them because the novelty of the pig and duck being together on-screen is good enough for me LOL. very easy to please i know. BUT YEAH, one of my biggest issues for sure is how poor Porky can never catch a break :( i’m glad that they seemed to try to rectify this though in recent batches! Crumb and Get It is one of my favorite shorts of the entire show, and you could describe that as “Porky makes Daffy’s life miserable by basically doing nothing”. Stained by Me is another very big favorite of mine since Porky gets to act a bit retaliatory towards Daffy which i love! i thought it was definitely one of the more faithful to the classics. (and i have to say, i bring up the classics the classics the classics a lot—i know these shorts aren’t trying to be 1 to 1 recreations of the classics. i just remember when these shorts were being marketed as the sort of second coming of the classics, and so that’s always stuck in my mind a bit/i have terminable Comparison disease which has thankfully been letting up, but it is stubborn here since these are the closest TO the classics in format and structure. so i realize me going “okay but it wasn’t like the classics” when they’re not exactly trying to be 100% like the classics is… ignorant? IUNNO! I KNOW MY HYPOCRISY LOL)

as always, i have past thoughts that reflect what i’m trying to say a bit more effectively, the second one especially relevant to this ask:

i think it comes down to just a sort of caricature and magnification of the original dynamics. i have many more thoughts that are refusing to come to me at this moment… BUT YES. even in spite of all that, i still love LTC and still love the Porkys and Daffys. i’ve noticed that the shorts with less dialogue (Wet Cement, Battle Stations, Duck Chocolate, Crumb and Get It) tend to be my favorites, since i think the overabundance of dialogue—and very OBVIOUS dialogue, like a character pointing to an object and saying “look, it’s [object]!” in these shorts is one of its biggest trappings. and all of the above—maybe with the exception of Duck Chocolate in some parts, though a lot of it is pantomime driven and wonderfully so—have the characters with comparatively subdued natures. not as much screaming or hysteria or madness

ALL OF THIS IS TO SAY, i am VERY excited for TDTEBU (gee what gave it away) because i’m excited to see how the demands of a longer format give way to more subtlety with the characters. when the film first released in Germany and i was spending every waking hour of the day trying to find any sort of reaction or information and frying my brain (and been doing the same this past week :’)), i found a podcast reviewing the film, and one person described it as a “Porky movie” centered on his growth which makes me extremely excited and hopeful that there’ll be more subtlety and sympathy for his character

AND YES, in spite of it all Porky is SO ADORABLE. i haven’t seen Pearl of My Dreams since it dropped, i really ought to again… i was just thinking the other day that i couldn’t remember if they made a “pearls before swine” joke in there or not, and if they didn’t then it would be highway robbery. more incentive to rewatch!!

#Porky has faced so much abuse over the years and has so many misconceptions about his character. but with that said i’ll still take his LTC #abuse over anything depicted in TLTS which seems to get a fetishistic pleasure of degrading him at every single second 💔#and even stuff like innnn the TDTEBU trailer? i think Daffy is like ‘Porky you’re a coward Petunia you’re a nerd and i’m just plain loony’#and i’m like PORKY IS NOT A COWARD!!!!!!!!!!!! HE HAS A KILL COUNT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! HE’S MEEK AND RESERVED AT TIMES BUT HE’S NOT A COWARD #but i understand where that comes from and i’m nevertheless still stupidly ecstatic and hope this film will change the perception and get #people to care about Porky #i know i just talk about him all the time but like. i forget how much of an echo chamber ibe concocted for myself #and forget that most people don’t like or care about him #so i hope that changes #at the very least i can tell and KNOW the LTC crew likes/loves Porky which makes me happy #it’s again much different than previous generations and the days of WB execs vocalizing their dislike for him #anonymous #asks

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girlonthelasttrain · 2 months ago

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I think it's also in the way we talk about it, isn't it? That fandom takes characters from a source material to put them in lower-stakes environments with little conflict is just what fandom does, I think. I've seen countless posts where this tendency was observed as... I don't know, a fact of life in fandom participation. With no judgment, just acknowledgment that people write and read flower shop AUs. Interestingly though, the opposite always happens when this subject comes up re:femslash. When it comes to femslash, fluff is a scourge. The reason why f/f is unreadable. The reason why everyone feels alienated from it. The reason why it's totally acceptable for someone to admit they wouldn't touch f/f with a ten foot pole.

You see what I'm getting at? This wild difference in standards?

And mind you fluff is not what I am generally looking for as a reader either! I understand the frustration of not getting to read what you want when there aren't as many stories to begin with! But making this out as the original sin of femslash is starting to look... a little extreme to me. Sure, there's a lot of fanfiction which is explicitly not in the same vein as the source material it is derived from. There is fluff, because it's fandom. And because the statistics are what they are, it feels like fics that privilege conflict and messy relationships are few and far between. They are! It's because overall less people are writing f/f!! It's not because people who are into femslash are dumber and less talented, which feels like it's the common undercurrent of these complaints, even when they come from other femslashers. Aren't the majority of us just... amateurs? Trying things out, writing for our own pleasure and fulfilment above all? This will mean different things for different people.

Trust me, I don't like everything that was ever written for my favorite f/f pairings, far from it. But there are also stories that I love and are exactly what I look for in fic. I don't know, if you are into complicated dynamics or experimental formats for f/f, wouldn't it be more useful to try and foster an environment that welcomes people writing that, and even encourages writers who have never tried that before to give it a spin and see how it goes? Rather than repeat this whole shtick about how awful fluff is and why is it the only thing that femslash fandom can write? I understand that this is much easier said than done but I feel like changing the way we talk about femslash in general, especially as femslashers, is also worth it, as a starting point.

#femslash

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front-facing-pokemon · 7 months ago

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gmax sandaconda is the DEFINITION of snootirific. i'm not the nose rater but i have to say gmax sandaconda might have the best snoot in the whole franchise

i saw someone in the tags of one of the posts where i used the word "snootiferous" say that they added that word to their vocabulary. as though it was a word i didn't make up. i totally did make it up and now i keep saying it, specifically in posts on this blog. i have not said it anywhere in my real life but if i can make other folks say it then i think that's the ultimate funny

not getting their models, but rendering the eyes properly. there are two competing and likely theories for why the eyes are so fucked up in gen 9: number one being that the eyes are rendered dynamically in-game as shaders instead of as flat textures like they typically were in past pokémon games so that pokémon can look around, have reflections in their eyes, have more dynamic eyes, et cetera, which means they're much more difficult to render authentically for quick silly tumblr screenshots; and number two being that game freak renders them dynamically as a "security measure" to keep folks online from ripping the models as easily to use them for… whatever they want. such as blogs like this, which are of course extremely harmful to the pokémon company's bottom line and destroying their business et cetera et cetera (sarcasm). either way, the eyes are fucked up, and i either have to find a way to recreate the eye textures from what i am given in the texture files, or i have to find a way to recreate the eyes to the best of my ability using shaders in something like… blender, which is what i've been using for more recent models since gen 7. that puts more work on me for every individual model, and isn't exactly easy for models that i have to rip and convert myself when there are dozens of nodes in the shading panel that i don't know what to do with. for example, here's what quaxly (famously, a pokémon with pupils that can look around, as it appears in a whole cutscene in-game) looks like out-of-the-box when i convert it myself from the model format used in-game:

if you can't tell what's wrong, here's what it's Supposed to look like:

notice the white pupils? those aren't rendered properly in blender, notably because no texture exists for them. no texture even exists for anything you see in the eyes there, but it's all somehow magically appeared in the shading section, by magic. and i am not that kind of wizard

this means very little to me. i just played around with some of the nodes by looking at the strangely-colored textures that were given to me with the .trmdl conversion, and i managed to get something close enough:

but they kinda look like they're looking in two different directions (possibly fine? we'll have to see how they look front-facing) and the colors are slightly off (can anyone tell but me? possibly not); not to mention it likely won't be this easy with every pokémon. pokémon whose eyes are much more complex or have colors i can't easily match, for example, or pokémon for whom multiple parts of their eyes are missing… not to mention i don't necessarily have the time or willpower to be spending hours tinkering with these models every morning to make sure the eyes look right. ideally i can take what i've learned from fucking with quaxly right now to hopefully move forward a bit smoother, and eventually i'll refine a process. but until then, this is what worries me

right, but it's also less funny. the initial concept for this blog, inspired by pokémon like snivy, is that some pokémon look really funny when they're up in your face staring at you. it's a concept everyone loves. but if they're facing away from you, there's considerably less to work with there. they're all Kinda just gonna look the same. they lose a lot of that personality. i suppose i'll consider it if i ever run Really low on options, though

nah. i don't do visual art anymore. that time has passed—now if i do it, it's usually a one-off thing and i never want to look at what i've created again afterward

#this was a long one!#not pkmn #nose ratings #but i had a lot to say. hopefully that clears some things up about the seeming nothing that i've been complaining about

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matan4il · 1 year ago

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hello! as someone who's very much uneducated about the israel-hamas war but wants to educate themself more on the topic, I just want to ask if wikipedia is a good place to start? obviously it's not the be all end all and further research is necessary but do you think it's a good starting place? since with longer texts after some point my brain stops being able to properly comprehend them lol. if it's not then can you direct me to other, more reliable sources? I know it's quite a big ask but I don't want to go around using terms and saying things I don't understand and spread misinformation in the process ^^;;

Hi Nonnie! I just wanna start by commending you for the desire to educate yourself. It's not easy, this conflict has many aspects, and goes back quite a while, so I understand people who don't want to. All the more respect to you for having this willingness to dive in! *hugs*

Wikipedia is def not a reliable resource. I was an editor for a while, because I wanted to contribute my Jewish history knowledge. What I discovered as a Jew is, that it's a website with a bias towards antisemitism. Because Wikipedia is open for anyone to edit, the dominant narrative between two conflicting sides is always going to come down to numbers. Which side has more people to add new pages, or edit existing ones? Which side has more representatives for when disputes are settled with a vote (which is a dumb way to settle encyclopedic disputes... at a certain moment in history, the popular vote would have determined that the earth is flat). So consider that there are a mere 15 million Jews worldwide. Meanwhile, according to a global survey by the ADL, about 26% of the adult human population harbors antisemitic views. That's over one BILLION adults. When those are the proportions, unsurprisingly Wikipedia has an antisemitic bias. I've seen it on pages that have nothing to do with the Israeli-Arab conflict, too.

But don't just take my word on it! Here's an example of an academic article that touches exactly on the antisemitic bias of Wikipedia:

A resource that I like for understanding the Jewish/Israeli POV is the Jewish Virtual Library. It's dedicated to Jewish history in general, and as part of that, covers the conflict. I like it as a resource, because it's encyclopedic in nature, it contains a lot of parts of the conflict that tend to be erased by less history-oriented websites, it is organized in a manner that's relatively easy to use (I would recommend starting with "Israel" and "Myths & Facts", but you also have a search function), it doesn't look away from some criticism of Israel, and at the same time, I've never seen any anti-Palestinian sentiment/bias on there. Another resource is Unpacked, a project that aims to do about the same thing, but mostly in video form (they also have a website). I think its biggest downsides are, that with the video format, it's sometimes too condensed to do some issue justice, and that the website is a bit harder to navigate.

I looked at other encyclopedic resources online and... most of them are just not that in depth, because not being dedicated to this conflict specifically, they start for the most part in 1947, and miss a lot of the historical context that precedes the events of that year.

If I were to recommend specific books, on why a false narrative has become very common regarding this conflict, I would point to The New Historians by Efraim Karsh (it deals with how biased historians fabricate a false narrative about the conflict... To prove the falsifications, Karsh goes back to some of the most critical documents and events in the history of the conflict, examining the original evidence. I learned A LOT that I had no idea about from this book), and Industry of Lies by Ben Dror Yemini (same thing. This book was the first place where I learned stuff like... that Israel had actually offered to take as citizens some of the Arabs who had fled the 1947-1949 War, or that during the war, there were places where Jews were asking Arabs not to leave, such as over the radio in Haifa). You can also search both of these men online, they have stuff they've shared since publishing these books.

I hope this helps? And of course, if you need help with any specific question, I will try my best for you! Have a great day! xoxox

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

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saltyr3mix · 1 month ago

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Damien headcanons Damien headcanons ! !

I saw the user name and new exactly what you were going to ask lol.

I'm agian under the assumption your looking for the same thing I did with Winnie and Sara? If you guys want like cannon head cannons. Let me know! But for now I like that format of just comparison.

so. Damiens not my favorite guy. I have said some maybe regrettable things about him in fits if anger because I struggle with writing him. But there are a few au's, not many unfortunately, where I don't mind him as much. This list will likely be shorter than the other two.

to learn from the tragedies : he's gonna show up at some point. Haven't decided if it's in book one or two yet. But the vision here right? Oliver has like, imprints of memories. Damien doesn't have any memories of the previous timeline. Lewis and the Twins no everything. Oliver starts gushing about this guy he saw and they immediately know who it is and encourages Oliver to go reach out to him. Mean while Oliver is like, "what the hell all I did was see him in the store I don't even know his name! How am I supposed to contact him!? How do you all know who is!??"

"Not many people have a singular purple eye, dude."

"that was real?..... I thought it was like cosplay or something."

"nope he can see ghosts."

"I'm suddenly a lot less interested-"

"no no no you haveeeee to talk to him! Just....trust us. We'd never lie to you!"<------ has active lied to his face 6 times today about how bad the future actually was too experience.

So yeah! Television is an end game ship for tlfft. Hopefully it will get introduced soon.

Shattered Dreams: I mean he had some cool moments. But wasn't really thought out like at all. I thought giving him a prosthetic arm was cool! I don't know why I did but I did that. This fic was written before season two and so a lot of Damiens character had yet to be explained so I took him in my own very poor direction and had no idea what u was doing with him the entire time.

I will make them create my world: ooooo this ones fun. How do I explain this with out spoilers. He's a very background character in the twins centered chapter. But I've tossed around the idea of making him more prominent as a sort of antagonist? But I'm not sure if it would work. I have so so so many ideas for this chapter and I haven't finalized an ending for it but it could be anywhere from Damien and Oliver getting married happily with nothing wrong and them being completely ok and the horror focusing more on how the world moves on and is completely fine in your absence. Or we could mess everything up and have them die or twisted into toys in the horror of another world taking over and contortioning your loved ones into freaks of nature with out you being able to stop it. Either way Damiens safety is entirely dependent on which brand of eldritch existential horror I feel like giving the twins that day.

This happens in a lot of my fics actually-

Buried masks: ok. This is going to be hard to hear for some people. Damien. Never gets taken my Sara. She actually hates him. She goes out of her way not to interact or associate with him. The only time she acknowledges his existence is if Oliver is talking about him or like hes unavoidably right in front of her. She's crazy buts she's not a jerk. Anyway she hates him because he stepped in and took her job as Oliver's support system. She doesn't like sharing. She has this whole concept with saving people and wanting to be their angel and their light and their support. To the point she will force people into a position to rely on her so she can feel like she's helping them. When her best friend turns to someone else for that help? She is not happy about it. She traits with the same way, but needs him to help keep lewis under her control.

Oliver, as much as she loves him and hates that Damien also cares for him. Still feels confident that he would turn to her first. And thats all she needs. To be his savior.

So she doesn't drag him into it. He and Damien actually get to go out and enjoy the rest of their lives together. As long as Oliver keeps looking to Sara for guidance he won't be affected. She can help him with out all the added psychological torture!

That is unless. In the same vein wiatt is dragged down to control lewis.....she needs his help in calming and swaying over some....other members.

This was supposed to be about Damien. uh oh. Can you tell I like this au a lot?

On a less cryptic lore heavy note. Yeah Damien is our main outside the basement perspective. He's running all the cases trying to find the evidence and he actually does solve something that saves a lot of people!!! He followed all the clues and cracked open a terrible terrible story. But the victims in that story weren't his friends.

Steven universe au: I kind of made a post earlier explaining all of his lore today. But! If your looking for more I'd very happy send you over to Danger/Theater who loves Su!Damien very very much and could probably come up with some more head cannons or content for you.

Superhero au: where to fucking start. He was speficly designed to be the main character of this au. It was supposed to center around him.

And then they're were other opportunities involving human experimentation and angst and twins and like- come on those are my favorite tropes I had to indulge a little bit!..... Although maybe I did just actually completely switch the angle of the spot light-

STILL!!!! if consider him the core of the au. Maybe not the main character at times but everything comes back and ties back to his actions. He sort of has a lot of control over everything and so when he makes a decision the entire plot shifts with that. Even when not in focus when he decides he's going to start bothering Error on patrols that caused a whole chain of reactions that lead to Errors eventual spiral and breakdown and him finding out all the shit that's been happening and it's Ghost that comes back and takes him out of it.

And all that yapping barely actually talks about his character ok- so. I want to see HLTBM!Sara and Superhero! Damien get in a moral debate with one amoy. Cause they stand for a lot of the same things. Character was out through something very very traumatic and that manifested in ways that hurt a lot of people with out them really wanting it to. But of course there's the gray area with Sara knowing full well shocking and kidnapping people isnt very nice. And Ghost being just a straight up serial killer, homicidal, villain for the first half of the fic. Unlike Sara though Damien does get improvement. Although I personally won't call it redemption on my own morals. But he stops killing people pretty quickly once Oliver brings it up.

L to Hayden west who got in Damiens way before Oliver could bring that up.

But yeah superhero au Damien is very special to me. He's the only version of Damien i don't Loath writing, in fact I look forward to it! He's so fun!!!

this was still all very vague but I've said do much- shoot me another ask if you want more about just him because I could write essays on that man.

One shots/you will live until I die: die die die die die die . I'm sure Danger has screen shots some where of the things I've said about this man. Do you know? Do you know how fast I could have gotten any of these types of fics done. If I wrote him out?! Do you know how many times I had to go through and re-write singular lines for him!? Have I beef with this fictional character you can't even comprehend.

Buttttttttt in the end. I guess he turned out....... Ok-ish? i still want to light every scene with him in it on fire but it's not because of how he's written. UTS BECAUSE IF HIW LONG IT TOOK TO WRITE-

deep breaths. I really hope you enjoy them because when I say I dedicated an entire week to a single scene with him in it. I'm not kidding. It killed me.

For the most part I do what I always do with those fics and stick to cannon, which was the mistake, I only like Damien when he's evil and deranged. Cannon Damien does not match my writings level of freak.

maze au: he doesn't get to be cool. Sorry. Your man gets to be a sleep deprived, paid, stalker of Oliver while he's in the maze. Damien works for the maze and helps give reports on his assigned constant, Oliver! Who's actually really endearing and kind of cute .

Thinking about having him a vaguely similar role to ash and me like THE watcher, the clearing has to keep dealing with. Norman is already a Plant but like Starr doesn't actually trust him. So yeah Damien is the wall man. People just see him around on the walls and pretend that they didn't!

Maybe he'll come down and say hello today! Probably not.

The more I think about it I want to make him a half demon to. But not like full half demon. Like he has shaper nails and teeth and is scary good at seeing in the dark and can hear any whisper. But has absolutely no strength or speed or physical traits. He's a loser.

Oc au: umghhhhhfrgcadg so i play Damien. And I do really really bad at it. Cause I try to follow cannon and we've addressed that issue. Currently he's dealing with a ton of survivors guilt because he and Oliver were the only ones to make it out of the facility collapse alive. Both the kids he brought with him died, both to his own advice.

He told Shroud to stay put. And he told hunter to run. Not great for either of them.

There was a point he beat the shit out of Sara! That was fun! Their.....siblings in this au? Or at least very heavily implied that they are. And so they just started scraping.

Poor Vianca though. God if I was better at playing him maybe they could have had a cool sibling dynamic. But alas it just came of as very very awkward because for most of her lore I was playing her, Sara and damien, who all would have been siblings but I did it so bad at yeah- there are some reasons why this au is called the secret au. It's the silly one where I don't think about it like a writer just a Creator and im not supposed to care how pretty the final result is if I had fun. And I did have fun! But when it comes to Damien things just get messy.

THATS IT. IM DONE!!! THIS SHOULD NOT BE THIS LONG!!!! I DID UT BECAUSE I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE SHORTER!!! ITS NOT!!!! BUT I DID IT ANYWAY SO HA! I WIN!!!

#salt answers!#welcome to dreamworld #wtdw #salts stories #damien klein

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that-random-outsider · 7 months ago

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Things I wish I saw more of in the SIX fandom

imma be honest most of these are about Kat

Okay so first and foremost Katherine's unhinged side, like I get it I know we all love our kitten but like hear me out she can be such a b**** when she wants to. And I say that with complete adoration because that's absolutely my favorite part of her character. Like her introduction is literally just her roasting every other queen and it's incredible! Not to mention her Sarcasm is absolute peak "Now all I want to do is thank all of the POWERFUL MEN who got me to where I am today!!!" Like she's just so iconic and it low-key makes me sad when I read a fanfic and she's like not funny at all? Like I get it she's had it rough but please don't always takeaway her ability to look back on it and not exactly "laugh" per se but at least slowly let it affect her less.

Okay two, Kat in college. "But Jae there are already tons of college aus" I hear you cry. However I said KAT in college not SIX in college. Allow me to explain. Howard is undoubtedly the youngest queen having died at 18, leading me to imagine her between the ages 18-21 coincidentally the perfect age of a college student. Meanwhile however, the other queens seem to be a bit older by a few years so having Kat go to college not only gives you an excuse to highlight the history nerd part of her personality, but also if you're an angst fan like me you get a chance to explore how she carries herself without the other queens.

Uhm for number three honestly just more aramour content like they are officially my OTP of this fandom and simply make me happy so... yeah, just aramour, especially in the aus where the kids come back like it'd be interesting for any of the kids to realize like "OMG MY MOM IS A HOMOSEXUAL" like bringing kids from the 16th century to the 21st century is just always going to be silly no matter which way you spin it so yeah.

For number four hopefully like the queens getting out the house more often lol. I'd love to find more SIX chaos fics, half the time they only go to the stage and go home like that's so boring put them in a trampoline park or something. Or on a similar note like them just getting away from each other like they live together, work together, eat together, sleep together, at some point they must get a bit agitated right? Like I've only been home for summer 2 weeks and these people are already starting to drive me insane lol.

Uhm that's mostly it I might like use some of these in a fanfic but more likely then not I won't be able to focus enough to make the long format ideas I want to make out of this so yk.. oh and if you have any short promts to like piggy back over whatever this is feel please tag me so I can read it or send me an ask so I can write it myself.

#six #six the musical #katherine howard #catherine of aragon #anne boleyn #jane seymour #anna of cleves #catherine parr #aramour #Jane x Catherine

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fernlessbastard · 7 months ago

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Oh man, I'm excited! Writing is definitely a pain in the ass (I've taken many years of novels, creative writing, debate, etcetera). Your story is incredibly enthralling and so accurate in regards to characters, I'm surprised anyone would find anything (such as repetition of certain words) bothersome.

Nonetheless, I do understand wanting it to be perfect and I hope reading/proofing over it goes well for you two. ❤️

-🎲 anon

Thank you so muchh

And don't worry, it's not that my boyfriend finds it bothersome and such - it just knows that I'm an insane perfectionist about my writing, and if I later find some repetition or a wonky sentence I will proclaim that I've brought dishonour to writing as an art form and I'll never write again (I'm a little bit dramatic like that UwU--) (also I'd definitely end up writing again, it'd just take like a long time and I'd rather finish IUTMTM before the death of the universe/lh)

To be fair it is in a decent part that perfectionism that lets me write the way I do. Like, yes, writing badly is much better than not writing, and I do my best to live by that, but editing is a different issue - I've had at least 7 drafts of chapter 2 as of now (and I only change the draft when I decide there's a big part I want to rewrite from scratch)(I actually could post like the first draft here - that could be interesting, idk, I'll maybe consider it)

But yeah, I will slave over a draft until I've squeezed everything I humanly could out of it, in which case either I think it's actually genuinely good and I enjoy reading it (and I'm very critical of my work), or until I decide it's hopeless, and just simply rewrite it completely from scratch, either keeping only specific passages, the general idea, or sometimes nothing at all

Tbh I think it's got to do with the fact that it's not a medium that's "native" to me, so to speak. Losing Face was my first actual piece of writing, with my previous "attempts" (mostly stories for school) consisting of like, much less than a thousand word each. I started writing a dnf/xdnf smut after my bf dared me to, which got abandoned at 2k words (I low-key wanna post that at some point too as a little crack one-shot, but i'd have to decide if I want it to be an actual piece of writing, in which case I'd have to finish it, or if I just want it to be a "look, this is where I started" kind of thing). I was praised for my art, so I gravitated towards that, and the more I did, the more embarrassed and ashamed I felt of my unrealised "affair" with writing. I'd write elaborate descriptions of headcanons and scenarios, fishing for compliments to have an excuse to actually write something. I don't remember how I started truly writing, but it absolutely had to do with the support I always get from my partner. And oh god, how I adore writing. I've always loved telling a story, but what truly makes me obsessed with it is playing with language itself. I love painting mental pictures. I love elaborate metaphors. I love portraying ugliness in a raw way that paradoxically makes it strangely beautiful. I love the words that don't just express their message through literal meaning, but also through how they visually look, how they sound, what core and pre-/inter-/suffix they have, how many syllables they have (my favourite go-to example is in Will Wood's "Front Street" - "the gnashing teeth will masticate the bones from the flesh"); I love using those words to juxtapose feelings (such as describing something as both raw and ugly, and yet beautiful exactly because of that). I love portraying ugliness in a raw way that paradoxically makes it strangely beautiful. I love playing with rhythm and momentum and run-on sentences, I love playing with formatting, to make the text flow on the page, I love using subtle sarcasm and making fun of the characters and their flawed logic through a flat narrating tone, and I love sprinkling characters' unreliable, subjective thoughts with nothing to distinct them from the rest of the text aside italics (I think it's much more immersive, adds to a "pov" lets the narrative evolve with the way characters think, and allows for a better flow of the text that ""(...)" he thought"). I love having a narrator with that subtle sass where the "insults" are indirect. When I write, I have several tabs open with thesauruses and dictionaries, not because I don't know the words I use (I make sure to keep my language authentic and to not overuse complex words just because - they all have a purpose, and 99,99% of the words I look up I already know), but because if I look up synonyms/translations then I have all the possible words in front of me and I can compare exactly how they look and sound (I'm heavily visual, ironically enough). I love pulling from more common Polish metaphors/sayings to form a more elaborate, non-obvious sentence/metaphor in English, and I love using translating as a tool to look for synonyms/replacements that maybe aren't an obvious alternative. I love writing scenes that feel genuine and real, and including the "ugly", human parts. I love writing flawed characters, I love describing their inner worlds, I love writing their streams of consciousness - I love turning them into real people (to the best of my abilities).

I love writing for the process. And it's funny, cause I don't exactly have that with art always. I'll be honest - I don't always love sketching and doodling. I do love watercolours. I'm sure it's honestly visible in how I paint, but playing with colours, layering, shading, shapes, undertones, etc is just my favourite thing in the world. But doodling by itself? Heavily depends, and a good portion of the time I just want to see the doodle ready, or to skip to watercolours, if I'm painting (although recently I've been getting better at just enjoying the process). But writing? Sure, sometimes I just want it over with, but the only reason why I'm able to go through all the drafts and countless edits is because just like with watercolours, I simply love the process of perfecting it, even if it gets frustrating.

TLDR I absolutely adore writing as an art form, holy shit it's literally so cool and language is even cooler and just

Writing<333

OH also btw I have since checked my document, and I misremembered - chapter 2 is 8k words--

#ask #asks #ask fern #anon #🎲 anon #writing #my writing #fern writing #art #tntduo #dsmp #quackbur #dream smp #tntblr #fern rambles #fernless rants #iutmtm

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lucawrites11 · 8 months ago

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re arsenal v city:

i am a die hard gooner til the day i die but will i be wearing a city shirt and cheering against my own team? yes. (i feel less guilt ab buying the shirt because it’s a roord 23/24 3rd shirt and it looks sick af)

anyways i hate chelsea and i want to see emma hayes trophyless. jonas and his fuckall tactics have screwed us all season, the girls deserve a rest and some need more minutes and so i want child labor fc in and emma hayes and chelshit out x

i totally agree especially on jonas' tactics and you mentioned the word tactics which is a mistake because now i am going to torture all of you with my unsolicited opinions of the formation that a fully fit arsenal should be playing or even a not fully fit arsenal and jonas is a fucking idiot for not doing it.... more under the cut because i don't need to torture you all with the long post analysing why exactly jonas' tactics are so shit

Jonas' tactics are the classis, basic bitch of all formations: 4-3-3 typically looking something like this... (a mock-up combining the last couple of seasons and what i'd think he might do with a fully fit squad)

and there are so many problems with this and most of them if not all of them stem from his too fatal tactical flaws: a chronic lack of rotation and refusal to give youth a chance in the squad, a stubborn-ness and bias towards english players, a clear bias towards his favourite players even when they aren't in form or fit and a complete and total refusal to play anything other than a 4-3-3.

(if you are wondering why russo + stina isn't working too well in the last few games it's because he's making them play it in a 4-3-3)

what do these problems cause?

a lack of rotation + his clear biases: over-worked players, unhappy players and INJURIES

this shows most in his clear centre back preference in the last few games being leah + lotte but that doesn't work too well. they are too similar as players but that is not a bad thing. it means it's perfect for rotations especially because leah williamson is quite injury prone. one game on, one game off for each of them. especially when they can pair up well with codina, catley, ilestedt in that centreback so the other option CAN ALSO BE ROTATED. which would REDUCE INJURY

again, this shows with his midfield choices. kyra is a central midfielder and a defensive midfielder but he decided she's just defensive. he has one ONE purely defensive midfielder and that's lia walti. kyra is more like kim little, can play any midfield position and then there are two purely attacking midfield options in pelova and maanum (who could play defensive if absolutely necessary) THEY ARE ALL GOOD ENOUGH TO FUCKING START BUT HE DOESN'T ROTATE then he uses them as super subs and expects them to fucking fix everything JUST START THEM. it would also again PREVENT INJURY. there is a reason kim and lia are constantly injured. THEY ARE OVER FUCKING PLAYED. JONAS CAN YOU HEAR ME!!! FUCKING ROTATE

again, in the nine. there are options: russo, blackstenius, miedema and foord can all play really well and quite frankly mead if forced also the kids: little viv and michelle can do that

then the wings. WHY DO YOU KEEP PLAYING FOORD WHEN SHE'S STRUGGLING lacasse was the best scorer at benfica for so long she was SO good. PLAY HER. ROTATE THE WINGS. i am honestly shocked caitlin hasn't had a more serious injury. foord, lacasse, mead, MCCABE and russo can all play the wings

the only thing i have no problem with is the full back choices

now the problem of the 4-3-3.

jonas has said on multilpe occasions that his tactics is playing a 4-3-3 and possession football because he is the most basic bitch on the planet. it's like he has never heard of fucking creativity. seriously someone get him some, IT'S KILLING ME also a fashion sense because i am still traumatised by the shit-coloured gilette under the blue suit 🤮🤮

anyway the actual problem with it. he uses it to force the world's best striker (miedema) out of position and into a 10 and then cries when they don't score. he has bought about five nines and only uses one with no decent 10 and cries when they don't score. maybe jonas YOU ARE THE FUCKING PROBLEM

i swear to fuck arsenal fire him and hire carla ward, i think she could do such a good job omg.

what formation doing i think a fully fit arsenal should play?

4-4-2 (with rotation)

goalkeeper:

rotate it (buy mearps) and then you have three starting goalkeepers you can rotate based of the game and the style of keeper needed. if you are playing a team that scores from set pieces and headers, you want manu. a game where you need a ball-playing keeper and you want sabs. if you buy mearps, she's best for a team that loves a quick counter or lots of shots in open play

centreback pairing:

no CB should play two matches in a row at arsenal unless there's an injury crisis because there is so much talent competing for that spot. the top four: williamson, wubben-moy, codina, ilestedt and then catley and katie reid can also do it in rotation if necessary and reid as a sub.

and unless there is an injury crisis, wubben-moy and williamson should NOT be on the pitch at the same time. they are too similar. i can't say what partnerships are best but a decent manager will find it out and create two amazing centreback parternships of lotte/leah and ilestedt/codina that can be used interchangably to rest players and prevent injury especially if there's uwcl

left back:

this should be a purchase priority for arsenal. a cheap third option as opposed to catley and the wildcard (mccabe) whose position can be chosen out of a hat and she'd still play it well. it's unreliable but strong atm with two good options that can rotate just in the case of injury, it's a lot on one player and we saw this at the start of the season

right back:

weinrother, fox, mccabe. the options are strong. no notes. just ROTATE THEM.

the midfield pairing:

so there just needs to be one more defensive midfielder and one more attacking midfielder. imo the best combo at the moment for me is little and walti. the experience and the talent is unmatched but THEY CAN ROTATE. i want to see a combo of pelova/maanum/cooney-cross as a secondary midfield pairing to switch out the matches like the centreback pairings to rest players. they would also be good sub options for each other and can be chosen based on the style of play of the oppostion. pelova, kyra, maanum are better when there is a need for speed or fast counter-attacking whereas little and walti would be better for a deeper defense but they could all do anything

the wings:

just rotate between lacasse, foord, mead and hurtig if she comes back and if not, buy another winger and play them in the rotation. at least one winger needs to be subbed in a game and imo none of them should start two games in a row so they can REST

the strikers:

in the nine, there is so much choice so why not play two? it literally makes so much sense especially when the pairings available work like they do.

russo + miedema would be the best. both can drop back and grab the ball interchangably and both know how to cross and finish. i would love to see that link-up develop

russo/miedema + stina, russo/miedema can drop back and stina can lead the line and BOOM goals. it's not hard JONAS

then you can also rotate with the kids. take notes from barcelona. they know how to win shit.

in conclusion, jonas is terrible. get him out. hire carla ward.

#lucas asks #arsenal wfc #wsl #woso #carla ward #jonas eidevall #lucas analysis

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rouge-fauna · 3 months ago

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I wanted to ask you, do you have any advise in making meta analisys? I'm interested in making some analysis on the dsmp lore once i finish the lore and start watching the vod closely. But i feel kind of intimidated by seeing how people can be rude to each other when talking about the lore and a bit lost on how to interact with other's analisys. And wanted to know if you have any advise for people who want to start on the meta analysis part of the fandom?

Well, I'd hardly call myself an expert since well... I'm not exactly one of the ogs here and I'm getting the impression there are many people here who don't exactly like what I have to say, but you ask so I'll give you my two cents and hope I don't lead you a stray.

You will probably notice a variety of how people go about their analysis. I wouldn't say there is a right or wrong way, it's not like we are professionals or anything, we are just having fun looking at a story and its elements. Some people take that too seriously, which is unfortunate since at the end of the day we are talking about characters of some Minecraft roleplay series. But it's easy in a writing format to come across the wrong way and make people feel attacked, because there isn't tone or body language and stuff.

Anyways, here are I guess some of the things I keep in mind.

There is a difference in fact and opinion, and just because I see things a certain way doesn't make it fact or the other person wrong, so the way I make sure to highlight this is through statements like - "the way I see it" "in my mind" "in my opinion" "personally I see it as" "I think" "I feel like" "It is interesting to me"... etc phrases to emphasize that this is my opinion, but that is not the end all be all. I also like to include plenty of "perhaps" "maybe" "I don't knows" and legitimate questions in there. I do this to hopefully open it up to say - hey this is how I see it - which hopefully comes across as less as me correcting them but just adding thoughts. One of the things that frustrates me sometimes, is that I see people say things as if they just are facts and true when they aren't necessarily. Something that further frustrates me when no evidence or way for me to see for myself is provided. Which is why I also try to provide, links, clips, quotes and stuff so people don't have to just take my word for it. Not to say I am always great about doing this or that it is always required, there are some things that are just more wildly known so it's not needed to cite everything. My rule of thumb for this is if it's more obscure or not common knowledge, so whether it's word specific, a scene not talked about, an like an academic source (or if I just so happen to have it clipped or written down lol XD). Not that you have to do either of those things of course, it's very much up to you how you want to do it, this is just how I do it because my autism engineer ass likes the facts and the why and how of things. Like if you say 'c!Dream's hair is green' I'm like - okay, that's an opinion, good for you - but if you say 'I think Dream's hair is green and this is why', then I'm a lot more interested in what you have to say, but again that's just me. It is worth noting also, that I'd say don't insult someone's intelligence or person because of something they said about a Minecraft boy at 3am ya know? Try to avoid being derogatory or nasty. You don't have to respect their opinion or agree, but you should respect them as a person, a person with the right to say something on the internet without being bashed because people don't like it. I would say it is better to say I think 'this take is dumb', not 'you are dumb' because of this take (though also probably best to avoid dumb in general as it is kinda derogatory and rude but hopefully you get the gist). It can also be nice to highlight something you agree with or liked that the other person said to make sure you're not being all negative and give them credit when you are agreeing and adding to a statement so they don't think you are correcting them.

Other things I do, to hopefully not come across aggressive is not using all caps or exclamation points - cuz in my mind I'm like why are you yelling at me ya know :( - I prefer italics and bold and sometimes capitalizing words, but that's just how I do it because I noticed that those things make me feel attacked whether or not that person meant it that way. Sometimes people will straight up say they are done, but sometimes it may be is less directly, so in general I'd say if the other person doesn't seem to want to engage further or has conceded in any way, big or small, they are probably done talking about it. When you go past that mark, then they will definitely feel more like they're being attacked (I think this is one of the things I run into with asks as I feel done, but they continue it on (which of course I know why, they may not have gotten to share their points on the matter yet or whatever) and I'm always torn on whether to continue, because I may also just feel tired of talking about it). I'd say also either ask them permission directly or in your response, like sometimes I'll say - "I hope it's okay if I add on" because that person may not want to engage. And if it's about direct statements or arguments, then make sure the other person is made aware, like if I'm responding to tags I try and tag that person. Or if I am building off of what someone said in a different direction I might also tag them, or go to their ask box, go to the comments, or whatever. It doesn't feel good to have people pick apart what you said without being given a chance to defend yourself. Assume the best in people, they may not be trying to be a certain way, and the way you read something may not be the way they meant and I'd say it's always better to ask for clarification then take something the wrong way. (I'd say that genrally about real life too - like if you don't know a word someone is using, ask them to define or clarify, to most people it shows you are actually listening so they are more than happy to explain)

General rule - be respectful and kind, remember to not take things too seriously cuz we are talking about characters after all. We are all here to engage in something we love. <3

Also in regards to analysis and lore, I'd say be aware of bias and context and assumptions, keeping in mind are you looking at something from a character's point of view or an outsider.

#I won't talk more about bias and perspective since iI have other places feel free to check my index for some of those posts #hopefully this was helpful... it try :)... give recent events though may want to take it with a grain of salt lol XD...#though maybe we can start a new fandom culture as new people join that focuses less on harassment and on discussion and lore <3 #hello there #food for thought #as an aside I've seen the word meta being used more recently almost instead of lore and canon and I am confused.

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