#and i left their fights vague but she's hosting a weird entity and not dealing with it well and they aren't dealing with her well either

[hazellvsq]

trc au - drive

Leo leaned his forehead against the door. Remembered the vision of Frank. Frank as a ghost, bathed in ethereal flames. Burning forever. 

If you kiss your true love, he will die.

Leo picked up the phone, dialed without trying to think too hard. Frank answered. “Valdez?”

“Frank. Can you pick me up?”

“Yes! Yeah.” He sounded worried. “Are you okay?”

No, Leo wanted to say, but he wasn’t hurt or anything and he didn’t want to worry Frank. He settled on something simple, keeping his head against the wood of the door. “I just...I can’t be home right now. If you’re not doing anything-” He let the words hang.

“I’ll come by, I’m not busy.” Leo heard muffled movement from Frank’s end. “Did you see Hazel this afternoon?”

Silence. Only the crackling of the line. Then Leo said, “Can we talk about something else?”

A month and a half ago he would have said nothing, because Frank very clearly had feelings for Hazel and very clearly thought Leo was a shithead. Four weeks ago he would have said nothing because Frank was mad at Hazel and trying to hide it, and Leo wanted to be nowhere near the inevitable eruption. Three weeks ago Leo wasn’t sure if he and Frank were even really friends. Two weeks ago even, they were, but Hazel was still Frank’s older friend, the one who was there first, the one who would win the friend group when she and Leo’s whatever had imploded.

Now Leo didn’t know if Frank and Hazel were still friends at all. And after this afternoon, he didn’t know if Hazel would ever speak to him again.

The quiet static hissed for another long moment. Frank said, “I’ll be there in five.”

Leo waited on the curb, knees hunched towards his chest, trying to think of nothing at all. The air was humid, breezeless, almost oppressively tense. Mosquitos hummed and whined. Frank made it in four, a knight in shining Volvo. He pushed open the door and tossed the keys at Leo.

“Yeah?” he asked, surprised.

“You need it,” Frank said seriously. 

Both Frank and Leo struggled with carsickness, but Leo could typically withstand Frank’s cautious driving. Frank would also give Leo shotgun recently, despite Leo having way shorter legs than Reyna. This had made Reyna like Leo even less, if possible. Oh well. 

Leo took it easy on the way out of Jo and Emmie’s neighborhood, kept the speed of the road past the residential areas, but the second the empty streets straightened out he hit the gas and held it. Instead of grimacing, which Leo was watching for, Frank rolled down his window and held on. Under the streetlights over head, appearing in flashes and bursts, Frank’s white T-shirt practically glowed. Looking ahead at the road, eyes narrowed against the wind, he held none of his normal awkwardness. He had all the solidity of a tree trunk, a thousand year old boulder.

Frank reached forwards toward the radio, turning it on and skipping past the dad rock station Leo had laughed at him for liking. Settled on something more interesting, with a heavy bassline that matched the rumble of the center strip beneath Leo’s feet. 

“How was Canada?” Leo asked. Neither he nor Reyna had been invited. He was annoyed about it deep down, so he was sure Reyna was madder. Neither of them had voiced it, to his knowledge. He kept the annoyance tamped down, tough - he’d already used all his words on the topic on Hazel earlier. Now he was just curious about Frank’s family home.

Frank frowned in the corner of Leo’s eye. “I thought you didn’t want to talk about Hazel.”

“I don’t,” Leo said. “I’ve just never been to Canada. Or met your family. How was it?”

Frank told him about the coniferous forests around his house, the national park he lived in the backyard of, and grizzly bears and little red foxes that roamed nearby. Then he talked about downtown Vancouver, the places he’d hang out as a kid. Seafood by the harbor and a trip to Seattle, once. He talked about his grandma conscripting him into kitchen duty, described how homesick the food made him.

Leo listened. Before Jo and Emmie, he’d been a foster kid for six years. Before that, he lived in a crappy part of one of the hottest cities in the country, but he missed his mom’s apartment there with an intensity that made his heart feel like it was withering away to ashes. 

Whatever was replacing it was steelier, harder. 

The tiny glow of the stereo lit Frank’s knees, the thick muscle in his calves, the sparse hair on his legs. The furrow of his brow, the finally-relaxed set to his shoulders. Leo stopped looking, checked back at the road. Then looked back at Frank.

“It sounds nice.” They had reached the mountains. Leo slowed down a little to drive uphill. “I mean it. I’m glad you went.”

He was, now. He had been mad that Frank left, but he wanted him to be happy.

“What did you get up to?” Frank asked.

“Oh, you know. Worked on the truck. Kissed Nico. I saw Reyna across the street and waved at her.”

“Liar.”

Leo was lying. About Reyna, who he hadn’t seen once.

“Me and Hazel are done, I think.” He hadn’t meant to say that. Not now?

Frank didn’t look at him, kept his voice neutral as he stared out the window. “I was never sure if you two actually got together or not.”

Do you still like her? Leo wanted to ask. He couldn’t. Everything was too loaded.

“I don’t know what we were doing. But we’re not anything now.”

He couldn’t say who had dumped who. The fight had gotten too heated for specifics. 

Suddenly, Leo couldn’t stand it. He pulled the car over, and the lights of the city spread out before them. He slammed it into park.

“Well,” Frank said. “You got out of the house.”

Leo huffed a half-laugh. Drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “Yeah. Thanks.”

Both of them stared out at the city. Leo reclined his seat a little, then realized that that action, in this context, felt more than a little illicit. Because Frank, still sitting up, was now above him, and staring down at him.

Leo stared back, now very self-conscious about being half-leaned back. He felt like he’d just ripped off his shirt. He wanted Frank to recline his own seat and rescue Leo from this feeling. He wanted to crawl out of his skin.

Frank swallowed. Leo still didn’t move, just looked back up at him.

Then Frank grimaced and shook his head, turning his head away. His ears were red. Now he was awkward. “Sorry. I’m sorry, I don’t...”

“It’s cool,” Leo said. He had absolutely no clue if it was cool. He thought it might not have been, actually. He rolled sideways to face Frank so that he wasn’t feeling quite so vulnerable. 

Frank swallowed again, then sniffled. “I don’t know if we’re still gonna be friends.” He wasn’t talking about Leo. “I’m scared she hates me right now.”

“She doesn’t, man.” Leo might have been lying, and he was fairly sure that Hazel hated him right now. But Hazel and Frank were different. “She thinks you’re hot shit. A fight won’t change that.”

Frank’s voice was small. Defeated. “This thing is...it’s so much bigger than us, and she wants to take it on by herself. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to fix it.”

Leo couldn’t answer that. He’d gone out with Hazel to avoid his prophetically-ordained male true love. He probably shouldn’t give others advice. He’d been wrong about Hazel, wrong about Frank.

Frank had seemed so bumbling and insecure at first. Leo thought it was nearly unforgivable for someone to have access to all that money and strength and potential and still not know what to do with themselves. He had been mean to Frank in a way that made him squirm now. Then again, Frank had been nasty right back. So Leo had allied himself firmly with Hazel.

Before Hazel had made a deal with a creepy primordial entity that would sometimes seize her mind and soul.

“I don’t know either,” Leo said to Frank. He exhaled. “All this stuff she was seeing was scaring me.” Hazel had scared him. And the way she buttoned up every single thing - her silence didn’t scare Leo, no matter how ominous it became. It just worried him, but Hazel had made it very, very clear that he should keep that to himself.

Frank hunched forward. “I just want her to be okay,” he muttered. “I can’t stand it when she’s hurting.”

Leo watched his profile. If he reached- 

No.

There was no way to go through here without wounding somebody. Hazel was hurting. Leo was hurting. Frank was hurting.

If he did what he wanted to do, here, now, would Frank survive it?

No.

Leo checked the backseat in the mirror, wondering for a second if some spectral Hazel would be there, if she could materialize like Nico did. He did not want the presence of her here. He wanted to be able to be her friend, or her boyfriend, in something that wasn’t going to blow up. Something that wouldn’t be ruined.

Or, as he watched Frank, something that wouldn’t be a betrayal. Destroy three friendships for the price of one.

He wondered if Hazel and Frank had actually hooked up last year. If he’d been crushing on not just Hazel’s best friend but her ex boyfriend, or at least ex something. Nico didn’t even know, because he’d made a face when Leo had asked and said he made a point of not finding out. 

Frank scrubbed a hand over his face. “God. This is miserable.”

“And you’re usually such a ray of sunshine,” Leo said, ducking away when Frank swiped a hand at him.

“I wish we could just...” Leo flapped both hands at the windshield. “Get a redo. Through this car.” The city kept glowing beneath them. Leo would forgive any billionaire all their crimes if one invented a flying car that he could have. 

“Did I get one with you?” Frank asked. 

Leo snorted. “You know I actually wasn’t mad at you, right? I was messing with you.”

“You got me.” Frank smiled for the first time all night. “Easy target, though.”

“Very.” Leo smiled too, almost helplessly. For once, he wasn’t fidgeting, wasn’t wandering off.

Frank looked at Leo’s mouth.

Never, thought Leo. Never. He couldn’t know if Frank was his true love or if he’d wake up tomorrow feeling nothing towards him. So he couldn’t kiss him.

A ghost on fire, a boy built like a man, his face obscured by the flame.

Who are you? Fai.

Burning, burning.

Frank reached forward. Touched Leo on the cheek.

Leo stopped breathing. Imagined that his face was combusting with heat.

His other hand. His other cheek. Frank was looking right at him. Leo could nearly hear his own blood sloshing through his heart, quickening, hurting his chest.

He wanted to push Frank away. He wanted to pull Frank on top of him. He reached up and wrapped his hand around Frank’s wrist, not tugging or shoving, just leaving it there. 

Frank leaned towards him, and Leo finally flinched. “You can’t.”

“I won’t.” Frank was still looking at him. “Trust me, I won’t.”

Leo hesitated, then nodded. Frank leaned in until they were chest to chest, cheek to cheek - Frank was as red as Leo imagined he was himself, which was a little vindicating. Leo reached up, touched his neck, then moved his arms up behind it, around Frank’s shoulders. Breathed out slowly. Their chests were touching, moving together. He could feel Frank close his eyes, feel his lashes brush against Leo’s temple. Leo’s next breath in was a little shakier.

A car passed by, headlights briefly flicking into the Volvo. Both of them tensed. Frank hung on a moment longer to Leo, then pulled back, taking his hands off, returning to his seat. Leo sat up and followed him over, reaching out and covering Frank’s mouth with his hand. Kissproof.

“I’m going to start having to do this,” he said. “If you’re gonna go around doing stuff like that.” 

He could feel Frank’s smile underneath his palm. He wanted to pull it off and keep it with him, in his pocket so he could pull it out whenever he needed it. They had to go back to real life in a moment, a real life where they couldn’t blow up their friend group or kill each other, and having that smile with him would make everything easier. Make anything more possible.

He pulled his hand away. “Let’s go home.”

[therealvinelle]

The illustrious then-@keerka, who now goes by @troquantary, sent me the following ask. Tumblr, of course, ate it, but luckily for us all I store all my asks on an outside server, so it wasn’t lost.

(A moment of silence for the fact that I took so long to answer this one that the ask was eaten and the asker got a new blog in the meantime.)

This was the ask:

Hi! When you have time, I'd love to hear more about your thoughts on the worldbuilding in Twilight and its logical consistency (if that's not too vague a question to even pose). For me it's almost hard to assess because the canon universe feels very...sparse? Kind of undeveloped? But that also means more room to develop headcanons, so I'm not complaining. Curious to know what you think, though!

This is my answer:

I think I’ll divide my answer in two sections, first I’ll give you an example of a franchise that has poor worldbuilding, then get into my thoughts on Meyer’s worldbuilding.

Supernatural.

Low-hanging fruit, but all the better an example for it. 

Supernatural introduces us to a world where everything is real. Everything that goes bump in the night, every myth and every monster, it’s all real, and 99% of them are out to hurt people. Who will stand against this evil, you may ask? Why, a scruffy but all-American bunch of self-declared hunters. These people are not organized, in fact most of them work alone. They are all outlaws. Their expertise is questionable, as Bobby Singer is considered remarkable for the fact that he usually knows what something is.

That’s it.

These people, all of them independent, most of them weird as fuck, are it. You’re in 21st century America, your country wields the most formidable military force in the world, and if something supernatural is wreaking havoc in your town you’d best hope one of these hunter nutjobs happens to have spotted the right newspaper clipping.

We’re offered no explanation as to why the American government doesn’t know about the supernatural, or why the world doesn’t look completely different. In our world, people don’t believe in ghosts because ghosts aren’t real, but in the world of Supernatural, people don’t believe in ghosts because [footage not found].

There’s no demon nor government conspiracy to keep the world at large ignorant, in fact this subject is never broached.

Hunters would make sense if they were bountyhunters, but they’re not. The secrecy could make sense if the angels were behind it, but they’re not.

“Maybe the military does know!” you might say, “it’s just that they don’t let the hunters know they know!” Well, we would have found out in season 5. Dean and Sam were caught up in the apocalypse, the government would definitely have gotten involved with that one.

Then we have the fact that the supernatural entities aren’t internally consistent either. We have angels, demons, humans - good, got it. I know what these three are in relation to each other. But, wait, we have wendigos, banshees, ghosts, witches, vampires, and tricksters as well. How do they all fit into the same world? How does the Christian God and every pagan pantheon, both of which are canon per Supernatural, fit into the same world? Who knows? Not Supernatural.

Supernatural is a world that is written on an episode-to-episode basis, by writers who wanted that gritty bounty-hunter aesthetic for their show about supernatural marks.

Back to Twilight.

Twilight, by comparison, makes a great deal of sense to me. 

I’ll admit that some of this is me reading into the text a lot, but I do that with every fandom I’m in. Twilight is a rare one where I can find an answer to every question.

We have these insanely powerful vampires whose exploits leave no survivors and whose numbers are kept low because it’s so hard to create a new one. They’re kept in line by a powerful organization no one can fight, and new laws are created as Aro discovers new threats (Immortal children, his debate on what to do with Renesmée). There are at least two other supernatural species out there, but of the two mentioned one is in place to protect humans, and the other was run extinct by the very organization that keeps vampires in line as well. None of this is fantheory, this is canon as Meyer created it.

Of course, I’ve gone some strange places in guessing why the Volturi exist, why the world of Twilight looks the same as ours, and why the supernatural world appears so limited. However, all of these things are extrapolated from canon. And I can extrapolate very easily because Twilight canon is consistent.

And this here segues into section two of my reply to you, as I imagine you (and many others reading this) are now saying “It’s not solid worldbuilding if the fans are doing all the work!”

Well, again - the difference between her and a lot of other authors is that when I overthink her work I find satisfying answers. That’s not a given, for instance I can’t do that with GRRM’s A Song and Ice and Fire, and half the point of that series is the worldbuilding! (My complains are many, I had to cut them from this meta, but the big one: why don’t the peasants revolt?)

I can’t think of a single plot hole in Twilight, nor of a logical inconsistency. Something either makes sense right off the bat, or I can look a little closer and easily piece together a logical explanation.

More, there’s no excess. I suppose this is what others don’t like about Meyer’s worldbuilding, but I enjoy it. Characters don’t prattle fun facts about things that ultimately don’t matter to the story, and if they do then it turns out later that yes, it did matter. Quite notably, when Carlisle gives Bella a crash course on vampire history, Meyer skips all of it except the part about immortal children, because that’s what was important. Later in that same book we meet Amun and the Romanians, and learn what the world used to be like, so it’s not like Meyer hadn’t come up with it. She left it out because it would have been off-topic and meandering.

This is where Meyer’s approach to worldbuilding comes in. It seems to me that she created the people and the story first, and then let the world they lived in fall into place around them, rather than the other way around. Now, there’s no right way to worldbuild, but I personally prefer authors who do it this way. To my tastes it generally leads to better stories, as this kind of author will show you the world through the story. We discover it as we go along and it becomes relevant to our characters, and if we don’t learn everything about it then that’s fine, though we’ve been given enough clues to guess. Consistency is key in this.

By contrast, authors who do it the other way around and build the world in full detail first, usually end up with worse stories. They get lost in their worldbuilding more often than not, their worlds end up so complex they’re inconsistent, and the story gets off-topic. Too much worldbuilding distracts from the story while adding nothing.

(There are of course exceptions to both, and I have more thoughts on this, but overall this has been my experience with fiction. Too much worldbuilding is in fact too much.)

The world should always serve the story, not the other way around.

(Again gonna use GRRM as an example. I don’t give a fuck about Aragorn’s tax policy. It’s not important to the story.)

So, these are my rambly thoughts on how I think.

There’s also the fact that, judging by Twilight and The Host, Meyer is just plain good at worldbuilding. She gets very good ideas, and she’s intelligent enough to successfully implement them into a story (look to Supernatural for an un-intelligent way of impleneting good ideas). And that’s all I ask.