#also i gotta say. the Gender Of It All (TM) compels me

[thelivingautomaton]

alright, since the Remedy brainworms got me I've been replaying Control, got to the AWE expansion last night and picking up on all the echoes/foreshadowing for Alan Wake 2 is making me go utterly bonkers, but like. has anyone picked up on or talked about how in all of Alan's Hotline messages to Jesse, when he's writing about her POV, he exclusively calls her 'Faden'

like, maybe it didn't poke my brain the first time I played it since he does the same thing when talking about Hartman, but coming from AW2 it's pretty jarring as a stylistic oddity...almost like there's a reason (in-universe and/or out-of-universe) that he doesn't call her 'Jesse'...almost like there's only one Faden in his story...

and given how in AW2 we also get some (quasi-) clarification regarding the limits of Alan's ability to "make stuff up" vs alter and rewrite "real-world" events that he sees in clairvoyant flashes...given the Night Springs screenplay pages you can find in AWE that parallels the FBC and the events of Control (i.e. a Director and a Scientist opening a portal to another dimension, finding an eldritch Entity, the Director trying to take its power for himself and then getting taken over before shooting himself)...given how literally all of the "dreams" Dylan tells Jesse about are descriptions/viewings of stuff that takes place on one level of reality or another ("I was the director and you were an intern"; "we were in a game, and it was a fucking boring game but you couldn't stop playing it"; Mister Door, and "a world with a writer writing about a cop, and another world where the writer was real"; a "musical" about Jesse), except, seemingly, the dream about "Jesse Dylan Faden"...

guys. are you picking up what I'm putting down here. guys. GUYS

[writerseven]

Im physically holding myself back from sending all the reader ask emojis, but how about: 😍🤷‍♀️🏆💏😭

(from these asks)

😍 What is your favorite fic trope?

If we’re sticking to Dark Content Brand TM here, then listen...I just never stop coming back to ‘bruce wayne is an abusive parent and also probably fucks his kids’. Delightfully horrible. Extremely excellent. Nudge Bruce just sliiightly to the left and he becomes the worst parent ever, while keeping most of his characterization.

And the endless options to chose from in which kid(s) he hurts and how! and how they all interact based on that! and who finds out and when! and what pieces of canon I can take and shift slightly to fit this new backstory, or not even have to shift at all!

At any given time, I am having three new ideas about bruce being a terrible father.

(If we’re going in the more general sense for tropes, then I just love extreme angst with a happy ending. I want my faves to be okay eventually but they gotta hurt first.)

🤷 What thing that your fandom loves do you just not “get”?

sdfghjk I could list so many little peeves and bits of fanon characterization that I Do Not Jive With and could probably do a whole ask meme about just that. But for now I will just say I’m not that into a/b/o! For reasons unclear to me, it seems super common in the DC fandom.

There’s some stuff in there that works for me, but a lot that doesn’t: I’m not personally into some of the common kinks involved, a lot of times I feel like characters have the entirety of their interesting characterization stripped away for very flat ‘big rough alpha’/‘whimpering weak omega’ archetypes (and ‘beta’ meaning ‘the writer does not care about this character’), and on occasion I feel like the playing with gender and fantasy worldbuilding just loops right back around to barely-modified old-school misogyny in a way that bugs me.

I definitely have enjoyed some PWP a/b/o fics nonetheless! But when I think of the one or two a/b/o fics that I found genuinely interesting and compelling as more than just horny content...I think they’re all deconstructions of the trope lmaosdgfhj. To each their own! But, yeah, I don’t really get it. 🤷

🏆 What do you wish more authors in your fandom would write about?

also so many things, and I could really just @ myself for half of these. (you all are permitted to yell at me to write any of these things.) More comics!titans content, especially the fab five! More terribad luthor/superman content where lex luthor is the horrible man he was meant to be! More terribad Tim/Ra’s, because for a dark pairing that seems to get talked about a lot, there’s really not that much actual dark fic for them! More preboot Roy Harper! More Cass and Steph and Barbara included in the batfam, and less Bruce-And-Four-Boys-Only. (I know I said I wasn’t going to lists peeves on the last question, but I get to slip in one, okay. The new52 and following reboots distorted so many things, and I think one of the worst things it did batfam-wise was convince everyone the batfam is Bruce And Sons And Maaaybe Barbara.)

Also, just in general, I think we could all stand to go back to the source material a little bit and draw from there again. (I definitely include myself in that!) It’s so so easy to just ping pong the same concepts back at each other, but sometimes I feel like we’re stagnating without new ideas. Some of my favorite (mostly not dark) fics I’ve read are really clearly pulling from distinct comic refs, and it lends a grounding and history to the characters that I really enjoy.

💏 Who is your OTP?

You know, I wrote like five answers to this question before realizing that I just don’t think I can answer it. Honestly, it’s very rare for me to strongly ship anything in the sweet/romantic sense. Technically I could say RoyDick for this because they currently are one of those rare cases (and when I was reading NTT I really did love DickKory), but that feels misleading because I rarely-to-never seek out shipfic. I mostly go by individual characters I’m invested in!

When it comes to darkfic (because that is what I made this account for), there are some classic combos that work well--Slade/Dick, Ra’s/Tim, Bruce/all his children--but still, I go a lot more for “which character do I want to see cry today” than seeking out pairings. I do get excited every time there’s a new BruTim darkfic posted!! But, still, I feel like that’s more “I want to see Tim cry in this specific way” than something I’d classify as an OTP. Character >>>> Ship for me every time.

😭 Has a fic ever left you inconsolable?

Sometimes I read a fic where everything is awful to the bitter end and ends hopelessly, but I find myself consciously pulling away from those fics when I sense where they’re going specifically to avoid this. Which I guess implies the answer to this is a firm yes before I learned to do that, but GOD if I can remember which fics they were.

(The only fic I can remember atm that made me uncontrollably cry is ‘the gentle sin is this’ which is actually a largely sweet fic that ends on a decidedly happy note! and also is a neither dark nor taboo roy/dick fic that in no way resembles any of the content anyone here followed me for! so do what you will with that ig????)

Thanks so much for the ask!! Feel free to send others if you want ♥