#and i never want a sequel

[ringotheman]

fuck zodiac signs what's your favorite game changer episode?

[arealtrashact]

Lisbeth and her bag of tricks...

[yrsonpurpose]

He kisses Henry's knuckle, just below his ring. "I have some ideas."

[arttsuka]

Fiddlestan 2: Electric Boogaloo? 👀

Sorry, this got out of hand

This was the best quality I could find of the poster (I didn't search that much but still)

[c-rowlesblogs]

the last time I made a post about a character type I really like it went well, so here's another one: I love a character who is a piece of shit loser.

Let me explain: a very specific kind of piece of shit loser. This is a character who is almost never (at least not at first) a major protagonist or a major villain. They might be a mercenary or thief or black-hat hacker or in some other sort of antisocial "bad guy" line of work. They are some sort of henchman, or at least have strong henchman energy: dangerous and/or talented in specific skills perhaps, but also, importantly, undeniably a loser. Their personality sucks. They're uncharismatic and unpleasant. The heroes interact with them only when they must-- and this character deliberately cranks up the cynicism around especially sunny or optimistic heroes. They know the world is a cold, hard place, and the only thing they trust is cold, hard cash (if they're even getting paid for this shit). Things like "hope" and "friendship" are for suckers.

Until... somehow, some incident or confrontation or compounding sequence of events puts a crack in their armor. It's a crack where the light can get in-- and also, alarmingly (to others and to them), shine out. It turns out this piece of shit loser had a little spark of goodness buried deep inside all along, and no matter how much they dig in their heels and insist they don't care, their conscience is steadily pulling them over to the "good" side, and it's winning. And the heroes know it, too: this character might still be a piece of shit loser, but now they're their piece of shit loser, and there's no going back.

[gophergal]

SubScorp Week 2023 - Day 5: Mortal Kombat Legends

"Such sloppy footwork, Sub-Zero. Get up and try again! Unless, that is, you'd rather stay down here..."

@subscorp-week

[dayurno]

Do you ever just think about how the headboard on Kevin's bed on the Nest doesn't budge. Of all the hints about what his life there was like that's the one that gets to me the most because it's so deliberate. Because even though he's probably physically stronger than Riko or at least evenly matched, Kevin wouldn't fight back. But he wasn't given the choice to anyway

honestly i think putting neil in kevin’s side of the room is such a telling choice during the castle evermore scenes. we spend so much of the first and second book hearing about how much kevin fears his so-called family, their haunting of the narrative as bloodthirsty hounds who can sniff out his fear, and when we actually get to finding out why that is we see it from someone who was immediately shoved into kevin’s old place. riko wasn’t just hurting neil because he wanted to (“i’m going to enjoy hurting you just as much as i enjoyed hurting kevin”), he was making sure neil knew he was inferior by putting him in direct contact with the roles kevin and jean played in the nest, using him as a substitute for the one that got away. neil gets a speedrun of some of the worst moments of kevin’s life, and he gets not a single breathing moment for it before he has to be shoved back into exy, like kevin was

i wouldn’t dare presume nora sakavic’s intentions on anything at this point, but i like the idea that neil’s stay at evermore was supposed to tell us all we needed to know about kevin’s time there, without kevin ever having to actually recount the years (he wouldn’t, even if he could): that it was horrifying, and that being in his shoes will never be as glamorous as neil previously thought. i like the breaking of neil’s expectations for kevin; i like how it makes neil realize the life kevin led was not better. and that’s the point, isn’t it? when neil is lying in kevin’s bed, handcuffed to kevin’s headboard, his legs pinned under kevin’s only friend, getting hurt by kevin’s brother, that’s what neil realizes: this is not better. it might be different than life on the run, but it is not better.

[ganondoodle]

(while i am crumbling into pieces from cramp pain)

back when they announced the totk masterworks book i said i wasnt happy about it bc it would either

prove they thought all this was good from the start and everything went as planned

show us that they had unbelievable better ideas and plans but for some unknow reason scrapped it all

as it stands now with the concepts i have seen ... they somehow did both, some things seemed to have been planned fro mthe start (the whole focus on sonau/zonai stuff for example, which i personally just dont like bc i liked them better as an unkown mystery you never get to meet) and other stuff (like ganondorfs concepts, or the infinitely cooler castle in the sky esque concepts for the sky islands, instead of some nonsensical, meaningless little stone crumbs) was much, much more interesting initially (together with the interviews that said they initially planned to have the battery be a magic meter and make the sonau more magic than tech- but then decided to build their stuff around modern electrical devices just so players would immediately know what it was an what it would do -why????? thats so boring?? and unecessary ?? and they still give you tutorials for it anyway, multiple times??!!- for some ungodly reason)

it makes me more and more sure that this game, that took 6 years to make with most assets already being there (the same time that botw took to make?????????), went through a similar development hell as that one final fantasy game did where the director decided to make it an entirely different game every few weeks bc he saw something cool in another game-

its the only thing that makes sense to me, why else would it be so weirdly ... unfinished, its full of grand ideas badly executed, or like i said in a previous post, like an alpha build (weird! did someone in charge also see cool stuff every few months and decide they wanted it in there too no matter what so everyone had to scramble to try and put it in making the whole jenga tower fall over and over??), just to test how far you can push things, with placeholders everywhere, the same cutscene pasted in where another should be and a placeholder reason to get players to go soemwhere (fake zelda) and rough ideas for puzzles etc, that was never finished, jsut highly polished (in looks, sounds and presentation) in hopes of it being 'good enough' or players not noticing (like, take the underground for example, the idea itself is fantastic and cool as fuck, but its feels like an idea that was never finished and just barely fileld with some things to try and cover up the fact that it was never done, like a statue that wasnt done being carved but ran out of time so they painted it anyway- take the base map and invert it, put some easily accessible points of jumping down into it in random spots to test if the game can handle it- no time left to actually get that idea anywhere more specific and well thought out/put together, so its left like that, put the same texture everywhere, barely modified copies of the same enemies, and some little reward spots that make no sense, modelling three types of trees and an enemy camp is way quicker to do than actually making an entire new map (they didnt have to make it the same size btw, just make it big but unique caves, put the gravity effect down there in enclosed spaces! makes it less weird to have randomly happen in the sky! etc) but its there!! its in the game and if they are lucky most players wont go down there enough to notice how meaningless and unfinished it all is)

knowing they would most likely never admit to it though, probably bc of their reputation, is just addign to the frustrations i have with it :I

(i just hate to not know the reason for things, if the devs, who are usually the ones being worked to the bone for things they know arent good, where put through that bc some executive big shot threw their tables around every so often or neglected their project bc they wanted to focus on something else first ... id like to know, i dont enjoy making up these conspiracy (?) theories .......... but i cant shake this feeling, its jsut makes no sense)

[marlynnofmany]

One delightful thing about being a writer is when you get to make references to your own stuff.

The new space shanty sung by one character turns out to be based on something that happened to the other recently. And the same song will probably be years-ago history in the thing I'm going to write next week.

I always loved that sort of thing in the books I grew up reading. "OMG the ghost in this one scene is the main character from that other trilogy! And these other characters are reading a history about the stuff that happened in the first books! I am going to read this very carefully."

It's pretty awesome to be able to do bits of that same thing in my own writing. Even if I'm the only one who ever gets some of the more obscure references, I'm having a great time with them.

[rosencrantzsguildenstern]

Best Shakespeare Adaptation

since the 1600s, people have been rewriting shakespeare and writing spinoffs in good, bad, and frankly just kind of insane ways. today, they will compete until only one is left standing!

during the poll craze i ran a lot of brackets and had fun, but ended up with a couple spare blogs i ended up having to delete, so i'm running this one off my main.

q. is this a tournament for productions or adaptations?

a. adaptations! stuff that changes dialogue or medium (beyond play -> movie) or takes a really new spin on it! west side story counts, romeo and juliet (1996) doesn't.

q. will there be a limit on contestants?

i'll cut it at 64 or 32 depending on how many submissions we get! if we get a lot of adaptations of a few plays and less of others, i won't cut any of them out, but i'll make some of them face off in round one

q. are you biased?

yes. fortinbras sweep. i've been reading 'these violent delights' too and it's pretty good. oh and can't forget haider, and requiem of the rose king is an all timer... basically, yes i really like rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead, but i have much room in my heart

q. is it most best portrayal/analysis, or best on its own merits?

a. a little of both, but mostly the latter

q. does [x thing] (that's pretty different than the original inspiration) count?

a. if it is common knowledge that it's shakespeare inspired

q. does the lion king count?

a. yea

signal boosting! if yall great bracket blogs will help out @gayest-classiclit @byronicherobracket (this one's still in qualifiers, it seems cool!) @straightplayshowdown (this one's getting going again!) @bestadaptationtournament @gayestshakespearecouples

[qin-ling]

paved in gold - excerpt

sequel to as lions. as lions tldr: time-travel fix-it in which TGM mav wakes up in 1986, relives TOPGUN, and makes some distinct changes to certain fates. paved in gold is set approximately a year later.

i’ll preface this to say aug/sep has been hellishly busy for me and i’ve been having enormous difficulty finding free time to work on this—but i’m too excited by the premise not to share a little of what i have. 😔

—

It’s too warm.

Maverick wakes in darkness. For a second, he’s groggy, slow, lost, surrounded in unfamiliar shadows, unfamiliar shapes, dimly lit in the amber bars of the streetlight beyond the blinds. The nightstand is strangely bare. No phone, no tangle of cables. Just a watch and a pair of dog-tags, glinting.

Then he remembers, and—oh. Notices the weight of the arm around him. There’s the culprit.

The arm loosens as he shifts, as he settles down again, before drawing him into a firm chest and the cradle of another body atop the sheets. Maverick grumbles, but soon sighs, mollified, when a large hand charts a lazy path beneath Maverick’s cotton tee.

Blearily, he asks, “Time?”

“Five,” says Ice, sounding far too lucid for what just came out of his mouth. Maverick feels the gentle drag of his nose against his ear; despite Ice being a veritable hot water bottle, the tip of it is slightly cold.

He smells like mint and Maverick’s shampoo. Already up and about, then. Nothing new. Their circadian rhythms are so rigid that Maverick only checks the alarm clock before bed out of sheer habit.

He closes his eyes again to the gentle press of lips against his nape. His heart thumps against Ice’s palm; something Ice clearly catches, because his mouth curls against Maverick’s skin.

A year now, and Maverick’s still not entirely used to the affection. A year, and Maverick still starts, sometimes, when Ice leans in.

“Rise and shine,” says Ice, a soft gust of breath against Maverick’s ear, raising gooseflesh up and down Maverick’s arms.

“You were the one who climbed back in.”

“Couldn’t resist.”

“Little old me?” says Maverick playfully. He rolls backward just as Ice sits up—carefully. In the muzzy darkness, Maverick can just barely make out the shape of him: already dressed, his khakis perfectly ironed and creased in all the right places.

“Calling yourself little, are you?” And old, Ice doesn’t say, but Maverick hears it anyway.

He stretches out into the warm spot Ice left behind. “Nothing wrong with it. Works in my favor.”

“Only in the cockpit.”

“Only place that matters,” says Maverick, with a breezy smile.

Ice returns it. He gets to his feet. “1100 hours,” he says. “Don’t forget.”

Maverick slaps a hand over his heart. “I’ll always be where the captain wants me to be.”

“Is that so?” says Ice, who was present when the base commander visited the TOPGUN complex that spring and Maverick was nowhere to be found. In Maverick’s defense, he’d been helping Stomper with a family emergency. Easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission, all that. Viper had nearly popped a blood vessel.

“You know it,” he says.

Ice only shakes his head. He reaches over to pat the hand still on Maverick’s chest, and Maverick grabs it, hangs on. Ice smiles. “See you in a few.”

“See you,” says Maverick. Reluctantly lets go.

He watches until Ice disappears from sight. A moment later, the front door opens and closes with a quiet click.

It’s still dark outside. The days are getting shorter and shorter, and in a sense that’s a blessing. Ice doesn’t like to linger—especially in the summer, when daylight stretches long and neverending.

He loiters a few minutes longer in bed, seeking the elusive peace of earlier. The duvet is still warm, the pillow next to him sweet with the familiar scent of Ice’s cologne. It melts something in him, even after all this time. Reminds him of a tidy home office, well-lit and welcoming; of an arm around him on the flight deck, steering him through the crowd; of a glaringly bright ready room twenty-odd years ago, Ice asleep against Maverick’s shoulder.

The ceiling fan whirs over his head. It’s the only sound in the silence of the early morning. It clicks with every rotation, lists slightly to one side.

Maverick gives himself one more moment. Then he gets up.

[mistress-light]

The answers you seek lie beyond Athia's borders. Come to me. I will be waiting.

[showrunnerihardlyknowher]

me n the bad bitch i pulled by breaking company containment regulations

[kayvsworld]

having the impulse to watch 2012 avengers. what is going on

[the-meme-monarch]

something i see a lot in books is like. capitalizing a word where it really doesn’t need to be? like for an example in Who Censored Roger Rabbit they spell toons as Toons. and i understand it’s probably supposed to make it clear that this is a deliberate Word For Something That The Author Kinda Made Up but like. to me it stands out too much. humans are just humans. a cat would still be a cat and a dog a dog. but toons are Toons. idk i think it just feels unnatural and unnecessary. if toons are natural to the world here why do you need to capitalize the T

[anghraine]

Aww, Ash admitted to me when we were discussing Star Wars opinions that she's not only thought about these things before, she's actually really feeling like using her advanced creative writing degree to write ...................... fanfiction, and has actually done so in the past.

me, shoving my 67 SW fanfics on AO3 under the bed: Oh hey, awesome! That sounds really interesting.