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siriuslywicked · 5 months ago

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Tangled Hearts - Chapter One

Pairing: poly!wolfstar x reader

Summary: After years of isolating yourself from old school friends, you find yourself thrown back into their world after an invitation from Lily to celebrate her and James' recent engagement. As you, Sirius, and Remus reconnect, it becomes clear the chemistry between the three of you is as vibrant as it was at Hogwarts. Having been burned before, are you willing to let yourself trust them again?

Tags: drinking, no use of y/n, reader is nicknamed "fluffs," ignoring actual timelines and canon for storytelling reasons, reader is half blood, hidden relationships, wolfstar are closeted babies, ignoring peter bc he gives me the ick, reader is afab, reader wears makeup and can put her hair up

A/N: I am so so excited to be posting this fic. I don't think I've published anything since like 2017, but it has been really fun getting back into writing. I'm open to friendly feedback, ideas for the main story or any extras! I have a couple short extras I might write but please send me your thoughts and ideas! Enjoy!

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You weren’t a stranger to walking home alone on the cold, dark streets of London. Working a demanding Ministry job meant you often left work late. Due to the short distance home you often opted to travel on foot, preferring it to more magical methods of transport. While not unusual, this particular walk left you in low spirits. It was five past seven on a crisp Friday evening, and as the city bustled with life around you, a feeling of loneliness seated itself in your chest at the idea of returning to your empty apartment.

In the few years since you had left Hogwarts, the state of the Wizarding world—your world—had steadily grown darker. Coming from a half-Muggle, half-wizard household had always left you in a precarious position. You were grateful for your stable position at the Ministry, working in the Muggle Relations Office, it provided a small sense of security. That was one of the things you missed most about being at Hogwarts: the stability. When you were inside the castle walls, it had felt like nothing could harm you. You would always be warm, fed, and surrounded by good company. You often found yourself longing to be back in the Gryffindor common room with your friends, talking late into the night around the fire.

The common room had been replaced by your cozy little flat in London where you lived alone. It was small and in need of renovations, but had unique charms and a homey feel. Your friends had been replaced by a few coworkers who you met occasionally for drinks at the Leaky Cauldron. The sense of security, belonging really, had been replaced by a near-constant unease and loneliness that seemed to follow you around like a shadow. Occasionally, you’d receive an owl from Lily, updating you on her life with James. They were recently engaged, and you couldn’t be happier for them. You and Lily had been fast friends at Hogwarts. Your mixed magical and Muggle family meant you could understand her, and help her adjust to life at Hogwarts. After being sorted into the same house, the two of you had been inseparable for years, only drifting apart slightly when Lily and James grew closer. Sharing Lily’s attention had been an adjustment, but it had come with a larger friend group, as Lily and James had quickly welcomed you into their circle, introducing you to Sirius and Remus. The five of you had spent your seventh year causing quite the ruckus. Between parties, weekend trips to Hogsmeade, and sneaking through the castle’s many hidden passageways, you had never had a better time at Hogwarts.

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Walking up the red brick steps to your flat, you shook yourself free of thoughts of the past and focused on the evening ahead. Unlocking the door with a discreet flick of your wand, you stepped inside and took in the warmth of your small home. Sitting on the kitchen counter was Lily’s most recent letter, informing you of her engagement. With it, she had sent a picture of herself and James, both smiling and waving up at you. Holding the photograph in one hand, you contemplated the contents of the letter. The happy couple would be in London in a couple of hours to grab a pint and celebrate with Sirius and Remus. You had been invited to join, of course, but you found yourself hesitant.

As close as your group had been during seventh year, there was an unmistakable shift in dynamic as Lily and James became closer. It had left you, Remus, and Sirius to your own devices. The three of you had always enjoyed teasing one another, conversations always full of quick wit and laughter. But like so many good friendships, you had gotten too close and ended up burned. Turns out Remus and Sirius didn’t really want to turn their duo into a trio. Outside of a couple of dinners at Lily and James’s, you hadn’t spent any time with the two boys. In fact, now that you thought about it, more than a year had passed since you’d seen any of the old group, aside from Lily.

As much as the idea of seeing everyone again after so long made you nervous, you knew how important it was to Lily that you made an appearance. For this reason, you found yourself shrugging off your heavy cloak and padding into the bedroom to change. After changing into a burgundy cardigan and your favorite jeans, you fixed your makeup and messy updo with a flick of your wand. Throwing on an overcoat, you prepared yourself to brave the night once again, feeling the familiar flare of anxiety pool in your stomach. It was just a couple of drinks with old friends—what could be so bad about that?

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Trudging along the castle halls back to Gryffindor after a long week of classes hadn’t been easy. You had felt weighed down by exhaustion, impatiently awaiting the moment you could curl up under your covers and say goodbye to the stress of pre-Christmas exams, if only for a few hours. Arriving back at the common room, you found it unusually quiet. Unlike most of Gryffindor House, you had spent the last Friday evening before end-of-term exams in the library, pouring over notes and trying desperately to recall Professor Binns’s most recent lecture. You assumed the younger students were asleep in their dorms, while the older students—your friends included—were almost certainly at the little bash Hufflepuff was throwing to try and outdo the Gryffindor party that would be taking place the following weekend. An impossible feat, but don’t tell that to any of the Puffs.

Climbing the stairs to your dorm, you recalled that you had lent your copy of Advanced Potion Making to Remus, and you would need it to continue studying in the morning. The chances of getting the book back before noon tomorrow seemed slim, so you opted to sneak into the boys’ dorm and fetch it before crashing. No one would be in right now, and it wasn’t like you and Lily hadn’t been in their dorms before. Quickly changing course, you found yourself in front of the boys’ dormitory and cast a quick charm to unlock the door. Slowly stepping inside, you began searching for the textbook near Remus’s things. Taking in the room, you noticed that the curtains around Sirius’s four poster had been drawn completely closed. Odd for a messy dorm. Surely Sirius hadn’t brought a girl back so early in the night—it was only half-past ten. You flushed at the thought and felt your heart rate increase at the idea that he might be behind the curtain with some girl from the party. Sirius was good-looking, no doubt about it, but you wouldn’t reduce yourself to being jealous of whoever his conquest of the night was. You silently thanked the heavens for the existence of silencing charms and hurried your search.

It only took a moment longer for you to spot the potions book among some of Remus’s school clothes. You quickly grabbed the book and made your way to the door, but before you could grab the handle, you heard a great thump and the unmistakable sound of Sirius groaning in pain. Turning to look, you saw Sirius on his back, looking rather disheveled—his curly black locks untidy, cheeks flushed, and the majority of the buttons on his shirt undone. But instead of seeing some sixth-year Hufflepuff girl on top of him, you saw... “Remus?”

“Hello, Fluffs,” he said breathlessly, looking rather sheepish. If you thought Sirius looked flushed, it was nothing compared to the pink staining Remus’s cheeks—not that you were any better off.

“I was just coming to fetch my book… I thought you’d both be off at the party with the others—sorry.” The explanation came out squeaky as you clutched the book to your chest. Both boys stared at you, rooted to the spot, all three of you seemingly at a loss for words. Remus seemed to catch up with himself first, he extracted himself from his position between Sirius’s legs and stood quickly on wobbling legs. His mouth opened and closed a couple of times, struggling with how to proceed.

“The others don’t know. You wouldn’t mind keeping this between the three of us, would you?”

Glancing between his nervous expression and the still red Sirius on the floor, you nodded slowly and took a step back towards the door.

“My lips are sealed. Promise.” You gave a small smile, still blushing, and quickly exited the room.

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A short walk later, you found yourself standing outside the small pub Lily had mentioned in her letter. You felt anxiety settle in the pit of your stomach as you looked down at your watch: eight twenty. You were early—perhaps you would get lucky, and it would just be Lily and James there. Sirius and Remus tended to be just beyond fashionably late. Keeping that thought in mind, you took a deep breath and opened the door.

The pub was dimly lit, and the air was thick with smoke. The bar was full of Muggle patrons watching whatever match happened to be on. Along one wall was a series of round cushioned booths, each outfitted with its own oil lamp and ashtray. Taking in the scene, you spotted two familiar faces. To your great surprise, Sirius and Remus could be seen sitting in one of the booths. Sirius noticed you first, a large grin spreading across his face as his pale eyes met yours. Despite the hammering in your chest, you felt yourself smiling back as your feet carried you towards their booth. Sirius looked as ever—his curly dark hair pulled into a loose bun, his cream button-down hugging his broadened shoulders. Remus gave you a soft smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes, and as you got closer, he ran a nervous hand through his hair.

“Well, if it isn’t our favorite Fluffs!” Sirius grinned.

He stood and pulled you into an embrace as you reached the booth. Standing on your toes and throwing your arms around his neck in return felt as natural as coming home. His cologne smelled of spice and something woodsy, and it stuck to you as you stepped down and went to take a seat next to Remus.

You weren’t sure what you had been expecting seeing just the two of them again after all this time, but the enthusiastic welcome from Sirius had been enough to settle your nerves.

“Still calling me Fluffs? I was really hoping that after all these years, the two of you would let me live that down.”

“Don’t be silly, dove,” Remus said with a smirk. “That nickname is going to stick around as long as Pads does.”

You let out a small huff at Remus’s comment. It came as a relief that he felt comfortable enough to tease you alongside Sirius, even if he had seemed apprehensive seeing you again. You relaxed further into the booth as Sirius sat down on Remus’s other side.

“I must say, I’m surprised to see you here before Lily and James. Since when were you two so punctual?”

Sirius smiled into his pint as Remus explained, “We’ve got a flat nearby. Prongs asked us to save a booth.”

Rather than linger on the fact they were living together—and what that implied—you leaned across Remus and asked Sirius if he would fetch you a drink. He obliged with a grin and quickly made his way to the bar.

“It’s good to see you again, love,” Remus said, turning toward you. As you took him in, all deep eyes and silky light-brown hair, you felt yourself flush once again. While Sirius had always brought out the bubbly side of you with his exuberant energy, Remus often gave you butterflies with just a look. Despite the years that had passed, it was clear the pair still affected you like you were seventeen.

No sooner had Sirius returned bearing your drink of choice—because of course he remembered—than the happy couple materialized at the booth. After warm greetings all around, the five of you settled into comfortable conversation with drinks all around.

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It was the first time since Hogwarts that the five of you had had so much fun. A great deal of catching up had been in order, Lily and James gushing over the engagement and wedding plans, Remus and Sirius about their many London adventures, and you about the happenings at the Muggle Relations Office.

Lily and James were seated on one side of the booth, and somewhere between round two and three, you had ended up squished between Remus and Sirius on the other.

“Did the boys tell you about their flat?” Lily piped up across the table. “It’s just around the corner. Real nice place too! What with two boys living there and all…” She trailed off with a giggle.

So, if it was common knowledge they were living together, did that mean—

“Ultimate bachelor’s pad if you ask me! They’ve even got Muggle foosball all enchanted. The little players have got a mind of their own at this point,” James chimed in.

Apparently not.

Not dwelling on the fact Lily and James were still in the dark about certain aspects of their friends' relationship, you quickly downed the rest of your drink. Head feeling fuzzy and cheeks radiating heat, you focused your eyes to look at Lily. She gave you a wide smile before grabbing James’s arm and announcing to the group that it was past her bedtime, prompting the group to finish their drinks as well. You all stood and staggered out onto the street, you yourself stumbling slightly and gripping onto the table to help you stand. After Lily and James had said their goodbyes, Lily giving you a tight hug, Remus and Sirius turned to you.

“How are you planning on getting home, dove? Please don’t tell me you’re thinking of disapparating in this state,” Remus teased, clearly amused at how tipsy you’d gotten after just a few pints.

He had a point. You didn’t have a good way to get home besides walking, but it was rather late for that. The other option was casting a sobering charm on yourself, but that just sounded plain unpleasant. “I hadn’t thought that far ahead. Suppose I could always take the night bus,” you giggled, feeling a little silly for your lack of forethought.

Sirius shook his head before you had even finished your sentence. “Don’t be ridiculous, Fluffs! You can tag along with me and Moony, crash at ours, yeah?”

“Yeah?” you said hesitantly, your eyes darting between the two tall boys. The last thing you wanted was to put them out right after reconnecting had gone so well.

Remus nodded his agreement without hesitation. “Perfect idea, Pads. We’ve got an extra blanket and everything. Don’t you worry, love.”

And so, you found yourself arm-in-arm with Remus and Sirius, walking down the streets of London toward their flat. Correction: street. Lily hadn’t been kidding when she said it was around the corner. During the short walk, you couldn’t help but feel like you were exactly where you ought to be. Something about being back with Remus and Sirius felt so unbelievably right that it made you giddy.

As you rose the steps with Remus’s help, the last drink from the pub hit your system, and you felt yourself lean into him ever so slightly more. Once inside, he laid you down on the couch with the promise of a blanket and a couple of pillows that felt cool on your flushed cheeks. Remus pulled off your boots, and you could hear Sirius talking animatedly to him from what you imagined was the kitchen. You let your eyes slip closed as you settled into the couch, feeling warm and sleepy. The boys' voices became more hushed, and you heard footsteps indicating they were walking toward the couch.

“Dove?” Remus’s soft voice prompted you to peek your eyes open.

“Mmm?”

“Just wanted to say goodnight, darling,” he explained, his hand rubbing soft circles on your arm.

“Night, Moons. Night, Pads,” you murmured, looking at the pair of them and smiling.

“Goodnight, our darling Fluffs,” Sirius replied, smiling brightly.

You let your eyes fall closed once more, drifting off to the sound of hushed whispers and a door closing down the hall.

#poly!wolfstar x reader #poly!wolfstar x you #wolfstar x reader #wolfstar #sirius black x reader #remus x sirius #remus lupin x reader #sirius black #remus lupin #smites writes #smites fics #tangled hearts

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fictionstudent · 8 months ago

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Why even "show, not tell"?

You must have heard the famous advice “show, not tell” around a hundred times by now. It’s one of the most used writing tools today, I’d argue. Recently in a blog post, I’d even talked about what it actually means and how you could execute it.

But now you must be thinking why it’s even such a thing, you know. Why do we follow this advice? What’s so advantageous about it? Why do even people care? Or do people care?

After much brainstorming, I have the answers to these questions. I hope it can spark some discussions on the issue.

***

#01 - Why yes

So, why you should “show, not tell”? Classic authors didn’t use this technique often. Most of the literature at the time was written in third-person omniscient narration technique, and that means the authors had no means to actually describe how the characters felt or what they thought.

There were a lot of classics that used first-person narration, but maybe those were the only times we could notice the advice actually in use historically. Third-person limited was non-existent, perhaps. Personally, I’ve never read a classic novel that’s in third-person limited narration.

Anyway, time began passing, and people noticed that somehow, this “show, not tell” thingey kinda works. It can convey emotions and information in a lot more efficient way. So editors began searching for stuff like that.

So, one reason can be that it’s simply a superior way to convey emotions. Taking from the example I used in my last blog,

I was angry at Sara. But she didn’t care.

It’s a lot worse than,

She couldn’t believe this. Was this for real? Was this… really happening? Really?

Her fists clenched hard. Her arms were trembling. And her eyes… They tried hard to fight back those tears. But the dam could break any moment now.

How could someone do something like this? And… And to her? What had she done to be betrayed like this?

The latter one actually makes you feel what Sara is feeling—you feel like you are Sara. You can understand her feelings on a much deeper level—you do not just know that she’s frustrated, you know how frustrated she is at the whole ordeal.

Another reason—it’s immersive. Reading in detail how the character is feeling is really a lot more interesting than just reading what they feel and understanding it on an intellectual level. This way, you can relate to the character on an emotional level.

And because it’s immersive, the readers would love the novel. And if they love it, they’d buy more of the author and publisher—and that’s more profits for both of them. So why not?

A third reason—the world is changing. And so are our forms of entertainment.

Today, most of our entertainment is in the form of visual media. When we read novels, we do not always imagine them as someone speaking to us—as readers a century or two ago used to. But rather, we try to create mental images based on the information we’ve gathered. Why?

Because most of our entertainment now is visual. Comics, social media, films—all these widely consumed media are visual. So subconsciously, we all agree that story means visuals. And visuals—along with monologues—are a part of “show, not tell”.

Readers today have a set of expectations that the stories they consume in novels would be visuals, based on happenings. Yeah, there are monologues and narrations, but they sit on top of the foundation that the visuals create. Most commercial fiction does not stand on monologues alone—they need visuals.

Now, I’m not saying that all novels are like this, or all readers are like that. No, far from the truth. I’ve read Murakami’s short-stories that are certainly based only on monologues, with little to no visuals. Or even dialogues, for that matter. And believe me—these stories are just as immersive.

So we can argue that not all fiction needs visuals, but most do. And it’s the same for monologues—read McCarthy.

***

#02 - When to “tell”

Yeah, you heard it right. There’s time you absolutely need to ignore this advice. Writing is subjective, after all—every rule and advice has instances where it needs to be ignored. Exceptions form a big part of learning the application of any sort of rule or advice.

Firstly, time-skip. If you’re writing a scene where you need to have a time-skip, but you also need the reader to kinda know what happened in that time, you can just tell instead of showing.

For example,

And we crossed the seas. The journey wasn’t long, but those days we had nothing to do. We were bored the heck out of our brains. Those days felt like an eternity. Until today, when we finally found what we were looking for—a piece of land in the middle of the Pacific. The Hirohoto Islands.

It's completely fine to write stuff like that if whatever happened in that time phase has little to no relevance to the story whatsoever. If you want to, you could have expanded a chapter or two out of this little paragraph, or even a whole full-length book (lol, really). But if you feel that expanding it would provide no extra meaning to the plot, and you can just skip to the better part, writing like this is extremely fine. In fact, adventure novels are filled with this sort of telling narrations.

Secondly, you can’t show the monologues of the other characters that your narrator is interacting with. Yeah, you can still make use of the visuals, but not the monologues, which is half of the “show, not tell” advice. So you’re heavily dependent on the visuals in terms of showing. But in such cases, remember that you can tell—it’d be the narrator’s interpretation of the emotions of the other characters. It’d be better than head-hopping, I mean. Not recommended, but definitely correct if executed well.

Thirdly, action scenes. You may tell during action scenes because remember that action scenes are supposed to be quick-paced and punchy. This doesn’t really leave you enough space to show the narrator’s emotions and monologues—or the scene would turn up to be slow. And you don’t want an action scene to be slow.

An action scene relies heavily on visuals, though. But if, by any chance, you need to describe anything other than the actual action, you can just tell at that moment to make sure you don’t break the flow and pace of the scene.

Fourthly, you can use tell literally anytime, anywhere. You can use it without restraints. Remember, there’re no hard rules about where you can show and where you can tell. There are gonna be instances where you feel you can apply any one of them—so do apply any one of them. It’s your novel, write it the way you want.

But don’t just keep on telling. It’d be boring. But sometimes, it’s necessary. And sometimes, it’s just a shorter, better thing to do. Use “show, not tell” as many times as you can, but don’t overuse it.

***

Conclusion

I’d said in a recent post that I wanted to talk more about “show, not tell”. And now that it’s over, I guess I’d be doing something else with my life lol.

Anyway, explore the blog if you want more helpful content about writing like this one. Love you guys.

#writers and poets #writers on tumblr #writerscommunity #writeblr #writing tips #writing advice #writing #creative writing #writing help #how to write #writing guide #writing resources

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leprosycock · 1 month ago

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chai, what do you think separates a good fanfic from a great one? i've been trying to write more lately, but it's just missing that zing you get when you read something really evocative. do you have any tips?

some of my favorite fics that i’ve read throughout the years and often call back to are fics that have really good pacing on top of sharp, witty writing. if someone has a very clear voice when writing, a specific style of incredibly human prose that i can connect to, i’ll consider it above the pale. really good examples of human prose are adellyna’s faII out boy fics and goodoldfashioned’s redIettermedia fics. livejournal authors seemed to have a specific style of prose that tapped into both extremely realistic dialogue and prose that fell between blunt and breakneck and also pretty and delicate and intimate and i think this is because a lot of prose style in the early-mid 2000s was based around the rise of internet accessibility and the new and exciting way we could communicate with each other and find ourselves connected at all times in the midst of extreme sexualization yet simultaneous extreme prudishness and glitz and glamor and the rise of art film and the quiet and recent accessibility of contemporary art. i would say that you should just study writing that you, yourself, really love and try to replicate the beats that you recognize in it that really seem to scratch an itch. read REAL books—yes, i understand that fics being fics don’t make them less valid in terms of creative writing, but i am saying that someone who has the resources to edit and publish their own work might lend it more credence and professionalism and they’ll go through checks and balances to fix things like grammar and inconsistencies.

i would definitely recommend authors like dennis cooper, a.m. homes, and nick cutter for fic inspiration because they excel in terms of prose and both long and short form stories. great artists steal etc etc. i also really genuinely adore judy blume and she’s great for studying emotional and sexually-charged but also intimate and gentle prose. stephen crane and vasilina orlova are incredible poets that i use as a great source of romance and worldbuilding. use a blend of online writing that you love and real books. check out books that you know nothing about from the library. get random tomes from secondhand bookstores that intrigue you from a few sentences alone. explore everything around you!! art is everywhere!!!!

#bunnyaskz

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thecurioustale · 26 days ago

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More Thoughts on Jennyffer

@fipindustries / Amanda Avila recently published Episode 10 of her animated webseries Jennyffer, which is about an edgy trans high schooler. Last year I watched through the rest of the series and wrote down my thoughts, the short version of which is that I enjoyed it and was excited to hear that Episode 10 was coming out.

I didn't know that Episode 10 was going to be the series finale until Fip mentioned it after the fact, but it's a great note to go out on. Anyway, I figure that I should write down my thoughts for this episode too, since it's the big finale after all.

This post contains full spoilers for Jennyffer. You can watch the series yourself on YouTube. I do recommend it! This is one of those small indie works that I would probably never have sought out on my own, but one thing that friends are good for is getting introduced to new stuff through them, including sometimes their own work!

Some Stuff Before the Episode 10 Review

Before I start talking about Episode 10, I want to talk about the series as a whole.

I'm kind of an outlier queer person. I'm not gay; I'm not trans; and in fact the way my own sexual identity works is that I don't actually like looking at the topic of human sexuality all that closely most of the time and in most ways. A lot of sexual stuff grosses me out; I am a sexual person but am very particular about it. And I have no gender at all: I am agender. I don't like gender. Cis, or trans, or other for that matter. In my ideal world "masculine" and "feminine" would not be a thing; the traits from each binary would be assorted into all human beings on the basis of their character alone. This is one of several reasons I say that I would probably never have sought out this series on my own initiative. Other people's explorations of sexuality usually don't mesh well with my own, and explorations of gender irritate me with their very premise. Jennyffer is a series specifically about a trans girl coming into her own in the world, with a lot of overt sexual and genital stuff thrown in the mix, too. Transgender identity itself is both the main theme of the series and the main axis of virtually every plotline. I don't usually seek these things out. And so I just don't see this kind of work very often.

Watching Jennyffer, therefore, is a healthy thing for me, I think. It's good for me to look at more gender-exploration stories. And, on the sexual side, there's a certain level of reptilian-brain discomfort in me when it comes to looking at many spaces in human sexuality (queer or straight), and I would like to have less such discomfort with it, and Jennyffer is exactly the kind of acclimatizing art that helps me progress in that. Fip is an incredibly raunchy person; she really exults in getting nasty and freaky. Jennyffer itself is probably a whole lot tamer in regard than it could have been, yet even in its actual form it runs right up against the limits YouTube's Terms of Service—often satirically, e.g. daring YouTube to classify Jennyffer's bare breasts as female nudity. (A fight which has become significantly more salient given the corporate roll-overs to appease fascist ideals in the new Trump era, as we have seen a marked contraction of overt support for queer rights in the tech, media, and retail sectors, and a collapse in trans rights specifically.)

In any case, my friendship with Fip gave me the occasion to watch Jennyffer, and I am better off for it.

Speaking of: I also look at Jennyffer, the character, and can't help but wonder how quintessential she is to Fip. I know through my own experience with character creation in my storytelling that, for those of us who use art to explore and express ourselves, our central characters can be extremely intimate for us in the sense that they come to serve as vessels, "One Rings" if you will, for pouring so much of our essence and desires into. Fip wrote some things in her blog after publishing Episode 10, which I'll get to later, but, without considering any of those writings now: After observing my own deep-rooted discomfort with Jennyffer's heavy, proud focus on sex and gender, I couldn't help but step outside myself and wonder what Fip herself was seeing when she was creating this. What did it mean to her? Where did it come from? These kinds of questions probably have some pretty obvious answers—fun and goofs, general horniness, power fantasies and wish fulfillment, etc.—but there are probably some deeper rabbit holes here too. In any case, Jennyffer is a very personal work and I evaluate it as such—even more so on my second watchthrough than on my first. This series is not just grist for the mill; this series is someone's naked honesty, and that's special. It is a privilege to get to see artists bare their souls to the world in this way. The thing about passion is that it always says more about us than we mean it to. Something like Jennyffer can never be limited to being the face-value version of itself; there is always more to it underneath, intended or not.

Jennyffer isn't really a coming-of-age story to me. If I had to shoehorn it into a big formulaic category like that, I'd pick "slice of life." Jennyffer is mostly about Jennyffer being Jennyffer (in our messed-up, transphobic world). There isn't really a narrative "point" to the series—no central arc or final showdown—that is, until Episode 10. But Jennyffer's shit is about as together in Episode 1 as it is in Episode 9. Even Episode 10 is climactic mostly because it is declarative; it fills in more about the core of Jennyffer's character, and it does so with a much more serious tonality. Some of the subplots in the series have arcs across episodes, most notably the love arc, but these are never central; they are more like amusements. Jennyffer is a work that rewards paying close attention to detail and assuming that the creator's artistic decisions are always deliberate and intelligent. But most of this power is dedicated in the background simply to being clever and funny—Jennyffer is conceived as a comedy series, after all—and not to making any self-indulgent, grandiose philosophical statements about Jennyffer's "evolution" from child to adult or boy to girl. Arguably, this doesn't apply to Episode 10, which definitely does tread into this more ambitious space, but I think it's also arguable that Episode 10 is simply one more slice of life.

Ahead of writing down my thoughts about Episode 10, I rewatched the entire series (including Episode 10 again at the end), and on my second go-through I found I was immediately familiar with and comfortable with the format. When I sat down to watch this show for the very first time, I had no idea what I was going to get. An indie production can be anything: pure gold, pure crap, or anything else. Fip is a friend and my biggest worry was that I wouldn't be into her work. But that wasn't a problem on my second watchthrough, because I'd already seen the whole series and I knew that I liked it. On that first watchthrough, though, I was very much a stranger in a strange land at first.

Engaging with somebody's art really is like stepping into another world. All the rules are subject to change. So are all the conventions. And I've found over my life that what we bring with us as audience members on our travels into these new worlds is critical. Fip is a friend and so I had a lot of premade goodwill going into the series. I am always telling myself that I should try and be more like this when I engage with strangers' works, too, because the extra patience and good faith often pay off. I got a lot of extra benefit from this series because Fip is a friend and I went into it with so much more good faith and alertness; these postures would benefit me from watching works from strangers too. This is hard to do, of course, because, in general, extra patience and good faith and alertness more often don't pay off, as many works don't deliver on the higher degree of audience investment, and I do find myself becoming less and less patient and attentive as I get older. But Fip got maximum good faith from me, and it paid off handsomely, because Jennyffer starts out pretty rough but it drastically improves.

The title sequence is actually great and was great right from the beginning, an Episode 1 has plenty of good humor and interesting ideas and emotional effects in it, but on the whole it was very unpolished to me when I was watching it for the first time, and my mind was constantly on a tightrope between perceiving it as good and perceiving it as bad. Because I had stepped into a new-to-me world of the artist's own creation, I had to learn what I was actually seeing before I could judge it. But in so doing I also had to resist the temptation to pre-judge it on the basis of tropes, like Jennyffer's smartass behavior style, or cringeworthy elements, like the poor sound design or Fip's uneven voice acting. I also had to keep in mind that this was a one-person animation team. I'm spoiled on animations that cost millions of dollars to make, so I have to recalibrate my expectations to watch one-person, low-budget productions and not get caught up on the animation. (That said, Fip's animation is actually pretty decent, and, once you get used to the style of it, it's completely adequate to the task. Indeed, if anything, Fip's animation is actually probably one of the strong points of the series, because I for one can't imagine animating roughly 90 minutes of runtime with just my ole self to do the animation.)

One thing that stood out to me on my second watchthrough is that Jennyffer got over its uneven starter phase real fast—and I adapted to its idiomatic style even faster. Almost every post-as-you-go indie production starts out pretty rough, and Jennyffer is no exception, especially in production value issues. On second watch, I think Episode 3 (the one where Jennyffer's hormone gel turns the big burly sports team into ladies) is the first one that I unambiguously dig. This is where the show first finds it footing, and this is where I first get really into it. That means it only took Fip two episodes to basically get a feel for her show, which is pretty impressive and speaks to her artistic talent and smarts, her ability to learn from other productions and digest their lessons, and most of all to her passion for the subject matter and characters. This is not a given: All creators improve with practice, but not many improve so quickly or to such heights. And, in that sense, maybe the most exciting thing about Jennyffer is that it invites us to imagine what Fip might create in the future.

But would I have made it to Episode 3 if Fip wasn't a friend? I don't know! I've become a notoriously disloyal YouTube viewer; I used to finish a lot more videos through to the end, but these days I will bail readily. I don't know if Episode 1 would have persuaded me to click on the next one. And Episode 2 is the one and only episode in the series that I dislike more than I like—though I disliked it less on my second watchthrough, as, this time, I got to thinking less about my own lack of amusement at the episode's central joke and more about what parts of Fip went into creating it. But would I have clicked through it on my first watchthrough to see Episode 3 if Fip wasn't a friend? I honestly doubt it. I do know that creators usually have a rough beginning, and in the past I've trudged through many a bad show or webcomic to see where it goes once it improves, so it's possible. But it's definitely not guaranteed. Only Fip's preexisting friendship guaranteed I was going to watch the whole thing. And I don't know if this can really be generalized to an actionable principle for anyone reading this, but the power of friendship certainly profited me this time, because the series really is clever and funny and does all sorts of cool things, if you give it a chance to get there. And I guess I mention all of this to reiterate what I was saying earlier, about how our friendships and other associations can take us to new places we wouldn't otherwise go. It's good to cultivate these opportunities for ourselves in life.

Moving on, I wanted to mention how much I like Jennyffer's character design—that is, the visual design of Jennyffer herself. She's kind of amazing, with a mixture of traits coded as both ugly and pretty. There are moments where she looks cute and charming and sometimes even downright beautiful, like a kid from a faerie-tale; and there are other moments where she looks like a troglodyte or an utter slob or Helga from Hey Arnold. This is one area where animation has more power than live-action, because live-action can only do this through costuming, makeup, and great finesse by the actor of their facial expressions and body language, but animation can redefine the reality of the character's entire physicality from moment to moment. Jennyffer has a believable range of appearance and aesthetic attractiveness, and it's clear that Fip approached the character with a sense of dignity for Jennyffer but also an aversion to making a sacred cow out of her. Many storytellers go one way or the other, either cynical and self-deprecating to the end, or unable to let their precious creations be truly ugly or horrible. Fip can harbor both thoughts simultaneously, and the result is pretty compelling for me. I love that sometimes Jenny is so cute and other times she looks just hideous. It's also interesting to contrast this with Jennyffer's pre-out self in Episode 10. Her male-presenting form is exclusively hideous. (Or, I should say, coded as hideous; an important distinction but not one that I'll necessarily be spelling out each time.) Her female-presenting form is still hideous sometimes, but only rarely, and only as one bookend of a much wider range of good and bad. There's a lot of truth in that. No metamorphosis brings us to Illum, that paradise of the inner mind, the state of perfection spoken of by the Relancii in The Curious Tale. Being true to ourselves only gives us the chance to glimpse paradise once in a while. It does not entitle us to permanent happiness.

Anyway, here's a few scattered notes from my second watchthrough. Apologies if I already said any of this stuff in my first review, and double apologies if anything I say at any point contradicts anything I said in my previous Jennyffer review:

In Episode 4, the fact that the school councilor is by definition unhelpful is some really sublime humor. Fip's acting here is also noticeably improving. The art was good right from Episode 1, but some of Jennyffer's poses and expressions in this episode show a growing familiarity with and grasp of the character that open the door to my favorite thing: nuance!

In Episode 5, Jennyffer's outrageous attitude and ridiculous evil scheme (crack her tutor's egg in order to be able to spend more time with Peter), is channeling pure Calvin (from Calvin and Hobbes). It's delicious! I also love how her cat ears move like real cat ears.

In Episode 6, "Hello dear. You know you don't have to break your computer ever time I come into your room, right?" is still one of my favorite jokes in the series, just because of how dry Peter's mother delivers it. Also, can I just say, growing up in the '90s with a family computer in the den and two parents who scarcely knew how to use it and rarely came into the den was a wonderful thing! I was rarely intruded upon. Granted, I was mostly playing games or writing stuff of surfing the web, not doing anything "dirty," but I think we all know what it feels like to be walked in on when you're doing something private and comfortable. So I can relate to Peter here.

Episode 10, Part 1

I don't really buy the news story opening, because it omits the role of the House of Representatives and because Republicans nowadays would never vote for a teen sex reassignment bill; even many Democrats would not have the courage to pass such a law. However, I do appreciate the jab at single-issue anti-Israel haters on the left being against the Democrats doing anything whatsoever so long as their pet issue isn't being addressed. Single-issue blinders are a huge problem on the left in America, and it's all the more glaring when these issues happen to be greatly overstated or outright illegitimate, which sadly isn't uncommon.

I appreciate pre-out Jennyffer's / JJ's grim, annoyed, completely hopeless self pep talk to "just get through the fucking day" even as the day is only just beginning and nothing has had the chance to go wrong yet. I've become all too familiar with that mindset in my old age, and I have a lot of sympathy for it in others.

JJ struggles, for obvious reasons, to choose the sex of their video game character. That only stands out to me because I have never hesitated to play female characters (and in fact I rarely don't play them when I have the choice). Goes to show how different strains of queerness (and different subjective experiences of the same strains) take different forms for folks.

2'30": The reference on the wall poster is lost on me—I often miss allusions due to my lack of exposure to whatever other people are talking about, but I appreciate the fat tummy on the light-haired, scantily-clad chick in front. Looks a lot like Cherry from Galaxy Federal in her past when she wasn't gaunt. I only point it out because I bet no one else will. Just goes to show that every detail, no matter how small, will find its appreciators, if the audience is large enough.

3'10": I mentioned this in my YouTube comment when Part 1 premiered, but the fucks being given here when JJ catches the bird midair and snaps its neck have dropped below zero and are now in the negative! This is an instance of the artistic exaggeration of emotions and situations that was common in the rest of Jennyffer but is less pronounced in Episode 10 due to the much more serious overall tone. You need to maintain a certain minimum level of over-the-top stuff if you want to keep it in at all, or it gets taken at face-value and stands out too much, creating a likely-unintended reaction in the audience. This bird-neck-snapping gag—and the others, like the headlight-punching gag that occurs shortly after—keep the episode grounded in its series' idiomatic style.

The simultaneous action of the present-day conversation and the two-years ago one is digestible enough, but probably would have benefitted from some supporting sound design and added visual cues to better demarcate the two, although the existing use of darker grays for the inside of the house in the flashback definitely helps.

It's fascinating how supportive and kindly Jenny's parents are to her, considering how hard her life has been and how jaded she is. I suppose they weren't necessarily always this way, but, supposing they were, I think this illustrates how even people in relatively good situations can have miserable lives—which is also an important theme in the Galaxy Federal Inaugural Novel and therefore one that I've thought about a lot in the past several years. I find Jennyffer and her troubled past completely believable.

Overall, this sub-episode sets up the premise of Episode 10 as a whole pretty well: Jenny's transition, and her finding of herself in her new identity. It establishes more definitively (though there were clues earlier in the series) that Jenny's social transition is fairly recent, and also establishes that she was actually even more violent and assertive before she transitioned, which means that her hard edge isn't (solely) a coping mechanism for the discrimination and mistreatment that come with being out as trans. And it also sets up her anatomical transition as the central plot of Episode 10—which, given that this is the series finale (though I didn't know this on my first watchthrough), gives it an incredible amount of weight and retroactively focuses the entire series around this issue of identity and self-acceptance.

This sub-episode, and Episode 10 as a whole, are much more plot-heavy and narrative-driven than the series up till this point, and, together with the much more serious tonality, Episode 10 definitely feels like a step up in Jennyffer's gravitas.

As a critical viewer it is relevant to question why Jennyffer begins having flashbacks to two years ago before she actually commits to the sex reassignment surgery or is even seriously considering it. In fact, in the brief moment where she addresses the matter herself before her parents invite her to pursue it, she actually signals that she is willing to wait. I'm prepared to believe that this is just a continuity error (in the service of telling two simultaneous stories set at different points in time), but I much more so suspect that there's something going on in Jenny's psyche here. I think it implies that, even though she is out as trans and is accepted as such by her family and friend, her journey isn't actually complete yet. I didn't think about this at all on my first watchthrough, because I took the plot device of sex reassignment at face value, but, knowing as I do now that she ends up rejecting reassignment surgery later in Episode 10, I think her moderate stance and flashbacks here are clear indicators of the cognitive dissonance that is brewing inside her. She's smart, and she had seen the news report earlier in this sub-episode, so the premise of reassignment surgery is already in her mind at this point, forcing her to confront a future that she has always deliberately avoided looking at in the past ("Just get through the fucking day.")—and, with it, the question of who she really is.

Episode 10, Part 2

I immediately appreciate how JJ's teeth are almost all a different shape from each other, each one irregular in its own way. This not only contrasts with Jennyffer's dental braces but transforms those braces into a compact yet powerful metaphor: JJ's life was a rudderless, uncaring mess, while Jenny's is "willing to make the effort," whatever that might entail. It also retroactively provides narrative significance to the braces, above and beyond being a teenage character design trait. And Jenny's braces are so essential to her facial expressions!; this is definitely not a trivial or peripheral thing. I absolutely love stuff like this in storytelling, where the significance of something in plain sight isn't evident until later on. We did see JJ at least once earlier in the series (not to mention in the title), so this isn't new to Episode 10, but JJ gets a ton of screentime here so it's much more apparent.

I talked about this a moment ago, but I really love the visual design of this character of Jennyffer. Not only is Jennyffer everything I said earlier, but her pre-transition incarnation as JJ is also really compelling. JJ looks like a muppet monster. This is someone who doesn't care, and whose physical form reflects this lack of care. Trans-haters often accuse trans people, especially transwomen, of looking ludicrous, like they are making a joke of womanhood. Lipstick on a pig as it were. Jennyffer however is drawn in a way that shows she clearly cares and makes an effort to appear feminine and (usually) dignified. It's actually JJ who looks ludicrous, with the snaggle teeth and mop of hair swallowing their head. Again, this is merely coded as ugly; this is not an inherently ugly look (so no shade to anyone who looks like JJ!); but I'm taking it as "ugly" because I think that is the narrative intent.

Now, I've said a couple times that JJ "doesn't care," and actually I know that that's not true; it's actually the exact opposite: JJ cares a lot! If they didn't, JJ's misery wouldn't exist, and we wouldn't have Jennyffer the character later on or Jennyffer the series by Fip. But an outward lack of expression of care is what I'm talking about. I love how JJ's visual design projects their total rejection of the world and life. It's obviously no surprise that Jenny / JJ are drawn with such attention to detail and such artistic oomph, since that would have to be an important component of the point of Jennyffer as a series, but it's still impressive, because a lot of main characters out there do come across as pretty generic or otherwise underwhelming with respect to their narrative and thematic substance (if such things are even present). I love Fip's thoughtfulness and performance of talent here.

Moving on, it's interesting how, in both of the sub-episodes so far—and I noticed this on my first watchthrough too—Jennyffer is more put-together in Episode 10 than we've ever seen her. Her conversations with her parents and the staff at the health clinic show a maturity and well-adjusted attitude that is definitely not present in most of the series. Jenny is also much more frequently drawn in her "cute" poses than in her "gross" ones. I assume this is to deepen the contrast with JJ, but the narrative effect of it is to imply that Jennyffer is already coming more fully to a point of self-acceptance and adult maturity, and is therefore ready to confront the question of an anatomical transition—and I wouldn't put it past Fip to have been clever enough to do this on purpose for this reason, and kill two birds with one stone with respect to also deepening the aforementioned contrast with JJ. But, either way, this maturity and good behavior are a major step forward for Jennyffer as a character, and further legitimize the role of Episode 10 as retroactively giving focus to the entire series. In fact you could almost imagine the boundaries of a metaphor to exactly this effect wrapped around the entire series. I wouldn't expect it to have been deliberately planned from the start of the series, where Jennyffer would become mature just in time for Episode 10, but, if it was planned out this way all along, that's very impressive.

I like how Rebecca, the receptionist at the health clinic, is really obviously the grown-up version of a Mean Girl. The Mean Girls were dropped as a series subplot pretty early on, which I missed, so this callback is nice. (It's actually not that; I subsequently saw in the credits (and the YouTube comments) that it's actually an allusion to another piece of media I'm not familiar with: one of many such instances!)

Since my first watchthrough, I had forgotten that it is a de-transitioner at the clinic who sows the primary seed of doubt in Jennyffer's mind about the reassignment surgery. I don't claim to speak for trans people or detransitioned people, but I know it's a contentious and complicated topic within the community, especially since a not-small number people who detransition go on to become enemies of trans folk and trans legitimacy, sort of like how many fat people who lose weight go on to become some of the worst anti-fat bigots. But the detransitioner in this episode isn't one of those; they're actually very reasonable, and have a valid perspective. I compliment Fip for tackling it head-on, though, in retrospect, I think it is a weakness in the drama for this person to be the main source of Jenny's own doubts, because, even though it is entirely reasonable to imagine that a detransitioning person would be a valid and likely source of such doubt, in storytelling we look for dramatic patterns, and this signal implies that Jenny herself may not be clear in her gender identity, which would be a very significant development for the character and would also establish an incredibly strong symmetry with the events happening concurrently in the two-years-ago storyline.

4'10": I know these are window blinds, but, for the life of me, they look like those metal drop-down barriers that you see in high-crime areas, implying the prison that JJ psychologically dwells in.

In my YouTube comment when Part 2 premiered, at the scene of JJ's mom walking in and dropping the pizzas, I wrote:

This is pretty raw! Wasn't expecting an episode like this, but I like the earnestness of it. The doubt, the uncertainty. I love how pre-out Jennyffer is drawn like a slovenly monster (or a monstrous slob, maybe?) while present-day Jennyffer seems to be drawn more beautifully with each passing episode, and I love all the unspoken things that this says. And most of all I'm digging the parallel storyline and curious to see where it all goes and how it all fits together. I got a laugh when Jennyffer's mom came home with the pizza because I knew as soon as I saw those boxes that their sole purpose in life was to be dropped. 😂

Fip mentioned in reply that it was annoyingly difficult for her to find a sound effect for the sound of them dropping, which made me smile. She also mentioned how hard it was to find a voice actor for the detransitioner, which I suppose is understandable.

I think media like Jennyffer do important work in the space of trans legitimization. Trans representation in storytelling is one thing. I have trans characters in all of my stories. It's good to give as many people as possible the chance to see themselves. But that's sort of a minimum bar. Actually confronting contemporary trans issues and even the stigma on trans legitimacy emanating from the hateful quarters of society, through representation, is a much higher accomplishment, and it's one that is much easier to tackle—and more readily acceptable to others—if you're actually trans yourself. Whenever I talk about trans issues I know I am wading into a minefield, and as a result I am much less assertive and combative than I would have been in the past (in the past I was quite fierce on many issues even if I wasn't super-knowledgeable on them). But that lack of ferocity also makes me less effective as a messenger, not to mention my preexisting level of being less-informed and less experienced. Fip obviously knows a thing or two about being transgender and going through a transition, and Jennyffer is an important work that has the potential to reach a lot of people and sway a lot of minds—and this is certainly a timely time for it, given that the fascists in the US have made trans people and immigrants their two chief scapegoats. Jennyffer is not preachy at all, but it handles the subject matter with a familiarity and an approachable irreverence that get through to some people in a way that well-ordered essays do not. I guess, to put it in other words, it assumes from the onset that the viewer is onboard with trans identity being legitimate, and tells stories on that basis, and this can have a way of drawing people into its underlying premise through the accessibility and relatability of the storytelling. It also helps, I think, to soften many people's shock at the fact of transgenderism, since our thinking about sex and gender is often very tightly codified by society, and even to some extent by our instincts.

Stepping back a couple sentences, and speaking of the US, it's interesting that Jennyffer is set in the United States, considering that Fip is from, and still lives in, Argentina. It takes a lot of knowledge and bravery to do that. I don't think I would dare to set a work in another present-day real country, myself. I'd be uncomfortable even setting a work in a place like Chicago or New York City. But I guess this speaks to Fip's worldliness and also to the freshly-expired US global hegemony. Because we situated ourselves at the center of the world economy and world culture for nearly a century, people all around the world know an unusually high amount about American life, culture, and politics. That will begin to dissipate now that America under Trump has cut itself off from the world, but for now at least we still get things like Jennyffer, where a creator from another continent will set one of her works in the US and voice it in English, because she absorbed a ton of English-language media and hangs out in a bunch of English-speaking communities online, and is actually more comfortable writing dialogue in English! (Fip told me so herself when I brought it up in a conversation a while back.)

Moving on, kudos to Fip for JJ's cross-dressing visual design being clearly distinct from the look she settled into when becoming Jennyffer. That's the kind of attention to detail and realism that I really appreciate, and I always miss it when creators omit it. This essentially required drawing a completely new character, and not only that, but one who has to look relatable to two other characters. Neither of these things is trivial! It's common in storytelling for storytellers to connect two known points with a direct bridge and no intermediate nodes or steps, i.e. to turn a JJ immediately into a Jennyffer with nothing in between. Sometimes this is done to save work but more often it is just done out of lack of imagination; people often don't think of it! Yet it is entirely plausible and extremely likely that JJ's first attempt at presenting as feminine would not be the end of that particular journey for her. What we see in the series title (the animation of JJ becoming Jennyffer) is highly stylized and works very well for what it is trying to do, but it isn't by any means a literal representation of How That Works.

I appreciate the end credits hanging on "Georgie Girl" long enough to not let the song feel cut off.

Episode 10, Part 3

This is my first time realizing that JJ's therapist looks a lot like Fip's own avatar—a not so subtle subtext, if intentional.

I'm always careful never to assume a one-to-one direct relationship between an artist and the surrogate characters they create. None of my own author surrogates are a one-to-one representation of me. They aren't intended to be (with the very asterisk-laden exception of Silence Terlais), and in fact I deliberately give these characters (including Silence) traits that I wouldn't have. I do this for a variety of reasons, but one of them is that otherwise readers who know anything about me can begin to make mistakes about their readings of these characters by mapping what they know about me onto the characters. I also want to be able to put my characters in situations where they can behave in ways that I never could, not in the "power fantasy" sense (although I do that too) but in the "let's explore this from another angle" sense.

And, so, I have never taken Jennyffer as Fip, or Fip as Jennyffer, despite my knowing that there are doubtless manifold similarities between the character and the person, and some profound explorations of self that Fip is doing through Jennyffer, and even despite Fip's own statement (which we'll get to later) that Jennyffer is very much a part of Amanda herself. So to see Fip's own avatar [seem to] appear as Jennyffer's therapist underscores my confidence in the rightness of my decision to keep them separate. And for good reason, lol: I recall a conversation I had with Fip a while ago, where I mentioned that Jennyffer, at least at this point in her life, probably wouldn't like Silence, whereas Fip does like me. 😂

Anyway, moving on: This sub-episode has some issues with the balancing of the sound levels, which had also come up again in Episode 6 (though I don't know if I mentioned it at the time). So I was riding the volume knob here, because being hard of hearing means the soft parts were too quiet otherwise.

In my YouTube comment at the time, I wrote this:

This is my favorite part of Episode 10 so far, and one of the top installments of the whole series!! I'll save most of my thoughts for my eventual Tumblr write-up, but I wanted to say your voice acting during the therapy scene really hit hard, the humor on this one hit me just right, and the photo montage during the song was so heartwarming and one of my favorite moments in the whole series! 🥰😭🥰

I stand by this comment! The therapy scene was very well-done. That said, I think it had more of an impact on me the first time than on my second watchthrough, because it was such a breakthrough moment for the character and I as an audience member could only experience that breakthrough once, but it still stands out as very well voice-acted and drawn by Fip. And the montage afterward is 100% my favorite moment in the series, and Jennyffer has never looked more adorable or more herself than in these extra-effort still images. And she's still Jenny, after all, as shown by how she starts decompiling the face of a classmate who makes fun of her after she's out as trans. <3

And now I guess the time has come due to pay the bill on my "eventual Tumblr write-up." I had intended to write down a great deal of thoughts about Episode 10. The essay you're reading now is only an echo of that intention, because in between then and now Real Life happened to me and I don't have a lot of mental bandwidth for intellectual exercises like composing and articulating my thoughts. I hope this post is readable at all, and that it has anything of value to offer. I don't know when I would have gotten to writing this if Fip hadn't nudged me with a reminder recently. And with her birthday coming up shortly, I knew I had to make the best effort I could, even though it won't be as good as I really wanted.

But such things must be as they are, and, echo or not, I will say this:

Whenever an artist attempts to undertake the actual, on-screen depiction of a major transformative moment in a character's life, that's sort of a sacred calling to me. Not in the religious sense, since I'm not religious, but it really cuts to the heart of our art. It's always appropriate, I think—and it's bred into our nature as human beings, too—that we tend to notice these moments when they happen to others around us, and we naturally give these people the space to have their moment. In moments like these, most rules of social etiquette are suspended. Most norms of conduct are suspended. There is an inherent understanding, that most of us possess, that, in these defining moments of our individuality, we will be given space to act and react naturally and true to ourselves. I like that the therapist knew when to push JJ, and how to push, and that she also knew when to be quiet and listen. This scene illustrates an example of one of the uncommon cases where I think it's okay to adversarially yell at your therapist (or at another person in general). And I like how Jennyffer's mom also pushed, because it's not the choice I would have made in her place, but it was the right choice. It sent Jennyffer over the edge, and "cracked her egg," and that's what she needed and that's what she was heading for. If it had been me in her mom's place, I would probably have never have been tone deaf enough to go pounding on my kid's door like that. I say "probably" because the way Jennyffer was acting in that moment, marching to her room, could plausibly have looked a lot to her mom like something really bad had just happened to her, like a beating or mugging or sexual assault even. And in that case, if I'd inferred that, maybe I would have pounded on the door after all. But, regardless of what I would've done, that's what her mom did, and then, afterward, her mom gave Jenny the space to have her carpet-ruining moment of awakening. It is a privilege and dare I say even an honorable burden to bear witness to these most intimate and stressful moments of metamorphosis and personal development in a person's life, and to depict it in art is a difficult and ambitious undertaking that is incredibly easy to fail at. Especially if the artist is not relying on tropes and formulae, these situations can be really hard to pull off with the right dramatic weight and tonal color. They can be hard to depict in a way that is convincing and compelling. They can be hard to pace properly. In visual media, they can be hard to storyboard and block out. What is the camera doing? What is the lighting doing? What angles and elevations are we using? What props and scenery are going to be in the shot? Etc. Humans have a good nose for sniffing out insincere or uncompelling moments of great personal transformation, and any artist who attempts such a thing seriously is putting themselves at a lot of risk. But it is noble to try; it is that sacred calling; and all the more so when the subject matter is of deep and vulnerable personal significance to us. Felicia's egg-cracking from a few episodes back was played mainly as a joke. While it's not impossible that an adult might realize they are trans by the obvious machinations of a precocious teenager whose main goal is to get out of her lesson and hang out with her friend, it's more likely that this was not intended to be taken as a literal representation of the moment of awakening. But Jennyffer's moment is (notwithstanding the giant beams of energy). And I think Fip pulls it off; I really do. In so doing, she achieves something that most people have not: capturing one of these transformative moments in media authentically. That's a great feat, and it makes me proud of her, and it also makes me dream about all the potential this series has to break through to people and help them in their own journeys of personal understanding within themselves or perhaps with others in their immediate lives.

And, in a nod to Fip's artistic prowess, the therapy and home scenes would not pay off the way they do without the immediate and powerful catharsis of the incredibly upbeat musical montage afterwards where we see the first days of the new life of Jennyffer. That montage is the reward that Fip earns in succeeding with the previous scenes so well.

7'51": Lol at Peter's written note including all the "umms" and so forth. 😂😂😂

I haven't said much about Peter, or the love arc he has with Jennyffer. This arc is the biggest narrative structure in the series, as it becomes clear relatively early on that Peter has a crush on Jenny, and in several episodes we see him trying to confess his feelings for her. (I feel for him, by the way: I confessed to my high school love in senior year, after two-and-a-half years of suffering, and it was the scariest thing I ever did.) Peter is one of those characters who doesn't have a ton of meaning or purpose in and of himself—or, since Fip says that he's a part of her, I should say that Peter doesn't have a highly independent purpose in Jennyffer, but, rather, exists more so to help define Jennyffer as a character and give her a conversation partner whom she can be real with. But despite these humble origins Peter becomes a charming character in his own right relatively early on in the series. The consistency of his characterization as a schlemiel (including in the past) makes him kind of lovable and adorable. He's a cinnamon roll who needs to be protected, and this plays wonderfully well against Jennyffer's headstrong independence and fierceness. As for the love arc, I'll say more about it in the next sub-episode.

Finally for Part 3, I have to say that it caught me by surprise on my first watchthrough that Jennyffer backed out of her surgery. I had been assuming uncritically that this surgery was going to happen and serve as the culmination of her journey. This was set up in Part 2, so that's actually when it caught me by surprise, but Part 3 here is where the actual surprise drops in-plot.

I have to admit to some personal ignorance here. I'm aware that plenty of trans people don't get bottom surgery. But my assumption had always been that this was usually a matter of money or health concerns. For a long time it didn't even occur to me that people with gender dysphoria would pass on sex reassignment surgery if they could get it without much issue. It's one of those things where, once I think about it directly, of course it's obvious that changing your genitalia isn't a direct equal sign with transitioning, and not everyone is going to want to do it. But because I don't watch a ton of media that specifically deal with the issues surrounding transitioning, Jennyffer was one of the only times I've actually seen this reasoning process play out. Like I said before, it caught me by surprise when Jenny backed out. My natural inclination would be to ask "Why wouldn't you go through with it? Isn't it what you want?" And the answer of course is that "It's complicated." Indeed, Jennyffer herself never truly, fully explains it. Once again, this series isn't afraid to go in a difficult direction, and I appreciate that. I appreciate that it isn't all Disneyland and neatly-bowtied ribbons where everything works out the way you expect it'll work out, but instead frequently veers off in other directions for valid and well-articulated reasons.

Episode 10, Part 4

It's a subtle touch that Jennyffer's hair in the bathroom has partially reverted to JJ's hairstyle.

The front-on confrontation of the fact of Peter being gay but also being attracted to a transgender woman falls into a category of queer relationship pairs and sexual preferences that doesn't get explored nearly enough, I think. Jenny herself asks Peter what he's pulling, since at face value that's pretty invalidating toward her. Peter admits that she is essentially his only exception, and she takes that well enough, but in real life this can go all sorts of directions.

This is something I think about myself sometimes. I have a policy: Never apologize for your sexual attractions. You don't get to choose who you're attracted to. It just is what it is. But there's room within such a policy for bias to hide out, and I think we all have to ask ourselves from time to time whether and how guilty we are of harboring such bias, if we should find ourselves habitually unattracted or infrequently attracted to sexual minorities, people of various colors and ethnicities, people of various shapes and sizes, and so on and so forth.

I'm pretty fuckin' straight, personally, or at least "straight" is the word I'd use if I weren't agender. Instead the precise word is the super technical "gynosexual," i.e. "attracted to female bodies"; hence why I usually still use "straight." And so I do occasionally find transwomen attractive, but usually not, because they usually don't scan to my nether-regions as "female-bodied"; and on the other hand I've found more than a few transmen attractive over the years, mainly the ones who go for a look of androgyny and/or possess fat and highly pear-shaped bodies. And that's a difficult position to be in, because, on the surface level at minimum, it is insulting to both transwomen and transmen, but it is also a part of my identity that I don't control and therefore—per my policy—don't apologize for. I would like nothing more than to say that I am pansexual myself; attracted to everyone. But the simple truth is that I'm not. In fact my sexual preferences are very specific (and not just in this one area). This reality, in its commonness among people, is one of the many things that helps populate the cloud of dread that often darkens the sky of trans people's daily lives. "This person's cute, but what if they think I'm just an ugly freak?" Trans people know that a much higher than usual proportion of people are not going to be into them when compared with cis folk. It's a hard pill to swallow, and it's unfair, and it makes me upset because I contribute to the problem and can't authentically be any other way. I've tried to flush out any bias that may be motivating my preferences, and, to the extent that I can trust my findings, I haven't found much. The part of my brain that conceives of things like the peaceful existence with and acceptance of human diversity doesn't live at the same address as the part of my brain that wants to fuck. If anything, finding correctible bias within myself would actually increase my odds of moving closer to being pansexual, because it would imply that I can decondition or unlearn some of those biases, whereas unbiased sexual preferences are basically there to stay.

In any case, I especially appreciate Fip acknowledging this issue, in her own way, by finally addressing Peter's attraction to Jennyffer despite being gay himself. This kind of complexity exists abundantly in the real world, and we don't talk about it often enough, deeply enough, or maturely enough. In Peter's case, it may simply be an instance of him being not completely homosexual, just as most straight people aren't completely heterosexual. Or it may be, less flatteringly, that, like me, his southern brain is something of an essentialist when it comes to matters of sexual orientation, and doesn't process gender as sexual. (As an agender person, my brain definitely doesn't do that, and, in fact, while I am only attracted to bodies that I perceive as female, I am also highly inclined toward female bodies that present as agender or androgynous, not "feminine.") Or it may be that Peter is fully gay, but that his existing bond with Jenny overrides Peter's orientation. The end of the episode suggests that it was actually the second possibility, by stating that they broke up once Peter realized he was too gay and Jenny was too much of a woman, but I'm gonna invoke Death of the Author and state my preference for the third possibility. :p

But seriously though, it's an interesting and fraught topic. Most stuff concerning sexuality usually is. It's good to bring up and grapple with in storytelling.

5'00": I don't imagine this camera shot of the bathroom ceiling light is a deliberate allusion to Taxi or anything else, but it's funny how public bathrooms are such a common setting for "gritty" storytelling and human love and pathos, and there is an episode of the TV show Taxi where such a scene is occurring, and at one point they talk about the ceiling light, and how it's a good light. I always liked that moment.

I don't know how I feel about the culmination of the love arc between Jenny and Peter. I believe that it wasn't meant to be. I do like that all the promise and buildup was delivered upon by Peter finally confessing his feelings—and doing so at a moment perfectly suited to a plot climax. And the two of them consummating their relationship right there on the spot is, well...very Fip! 😂 But I guess I don't know how I feel about whether or not all the buildup was worth it. This was, after all, the biggest arc of the series, and nothing correspondingly big came of it. They just settled back into being the friends they were always meant to be. I suppose it's honest enough that one of them might have developed feelings for the other at some point; that's quite common, especially among teenagers. But in a story with a pretty limited runtime, playing up a romantic tension wasn't necessarily the best use of time, energy, or focus, at least in my opinion.

Then again, as I type that, I can't help but feel that Peter would have been pretty underdeveloped if Jennyffer had not had its love arc. I guess maybe in another timeline there would have been a different arc or arcs in its place, or other material to flesh out Peter's character. But, yeah: Speculation aside, the love story didn't do much for me.

Moving on, I like how Jennyffer's parents aged like twenty years in just two years, heh! I think this is one of those things where you're damned if you do, damned if you don't: You can't really make a character drawn in this style look two years older. So if you want to make them look visibly and noticeably older, you have to overstate it.

I also appreciate Jennyffer's mom putting on (more than) a few pounds. Her dad, too, actually. Given the power of cartoons to play around with body shapes, I really wish we saw this more often, but we rarely do.

8'03": I remember seeing the title in the end credits on my first watchthrough and thinking "This needs to be scrolling credits! It would fit with the ambition and scope of Episode 10!" And, lo and behold, the credits begin scrolling down, movie-style. Very classy, Fip! Well done.

Overall Thoughts

I read a lot of the YouTube comments and was clued in to many references and other artistic flourishes that I missed, despite my being on the lookout. I like it when a work is bigger than me like that. I didn't get even close to catching everything, and, probably, not all of what I did get was actually intentional. But, regardless, there is enough substance there for me to get a lot out of it, and for others to do the same despite loading up their proverbial plates with different food selections. I am reminded once again of how the experience of engaging with the art of thoughtful people is partially a mirror that shows us things about ourselves by fact of what we notice and how we interpret things.

This is a good series. If you've read this far and haven't seen it yet, you should watch it. Doesn't take long; the whole thing is roughly one feature-length movie in runtime. The first few episodes are just a couple minutes apiece. And if you watch it and like it, and have a few coins to spare, you should donate to Fip's Patreon fund! Which I say as a total hypocrite, because I'm not a patron myself, because I'm absolutely broke. (Not figurative "broke" either.) But maybe you are in a place to support. It's important to support small artists. Your money goes so much farther with them than it does with a creator who has dozens or hundreds of patrons. It's Fip's birthday soon, so go give her lots of cash!!

I mentioned earlier that this isn't a work I would have sought out on my own, most likely. I mentioned that sexual stuff kind of grosses me out a lot of the time, and gender stuff kind of pisses me off a lot of the time. I'm also not super heavy into bawdy, raunchy storytelling and humor. But one thing I've noticed over the years is that there is no one genre or category or topic that I categorically dislike. There will always be artists who speak to me, for whatever reasons, in a way that welcomes me into places where I don't normally choose to go. Fip is such an artist, and Jennyffer is a series filled with masterful creativity and genuine human warmth in spite of all the cynicism, and the humor is clever and adorable, and so are the characters. I enjoyed this series a bunch.

There Is No Need to Be Angry Anymore

Fip wrote down her own post-finale thoughts on Tumblr a while back, and I wanted to respond to some of that, too.

long long ago, back in 2008, i made a deviant art account and i started sharing my works online. i made the very concious and very deliberate choice back then, to fake it until i made it. every time i posted something, every time i updated my journal, every time i left any kind of note for a potential audience, i would talk with the register and confidence of someone speaking to a huge audience of adoring fans. would apologize for delays, i would advertize big ambitious porjects i had in the works (which i never finished or published). i would explain what i was going for with every work as if i had my dms filled with questions and fan theories.

much of that was me mimicking the style with which pretty much everyone posted at the time in deviant art. i did this when i only had like 4 followers there.

[...]

except this time is special, is it not?

this time i do have an actual, proper audience.

I used to do this too, a very long time ago—except that my confidence in those years was sincere, not faked. You, Fip, were probably just learning about my existence at about the time that I was definitively dialing back on this. I had gotten tired of promising big things and never delivering on them. And, by the mid-2010s, I was running out of things to say in the nonfiction space, having already articulated all the broad brushstrokes of my philosophy and worldview. And, so, when the Troubles came, I just stopped saying as much. And what I did say was not in the supremely self-confident style of yesteryear; it was in fact the exact opposite: a reflection of all the suffering I was going through at the time.

I never chose the right platform: I was on LiveJournal, a few niche web forums, and my personal website, lol. And I never had a consistent pipeline of published works. And so I went from having maybe a dozen followers to ultimately having the same four or so that you began with: very much the opposite trajectory from you, except even at my biggest I was still small-time, whereas you've built up a much more substantial audience!

I've become pretty familiar with disappointment in my own life, and so it has become all the more important to me over the years to take vicarious pleasure in the adventures and successes of others who richly deserve it. Especially when those others are friends. I hope your next projects build on what you have accomplished, and grow your star ever toward the elusive goal of a livable income as an artist. And if you ever get rich, buy me a house or something!

I'm kind of glad Jennyffer is over. When you mentioned around the turn of the year that you were working on Episode 10 after a hiatus, I remember thinking that, usually when this kind of thing happens, the artist comes back to it briefly and then falls off the wagon again—this time forever. But by choosing your comeback to also be your series finale you completely preempted that timeline and gave completion and closure to your series. It's a good size. And Episode 10 does a lot to cast the rest of the series in a new light. It's almost as long by itself as the rest of the series put together, and it really does serve nicely as the centerpiece, even though it comes at the end. And finishing Jennyffer means you are that much more free to work on something else. When you were posting some animation studies recently, I couldn't help but wonder if there was any secret information to be gleaned from reading those tea leaves.

i was perfectly content to be someone on the same tier as, say, tom sidell or zach morrison or scott dewitt. someone with a well liked webcomic who could feed a relatively small but loyal group of fans that would spurn discussion, analisis and fanart. that was the thing i was looking most of all, praise i can do without, i wanted engagement, i wanted analisis, i wanted the kind of fan interaction that is measured in fan content. i wanted reviews, even bad reviews, it meant people were thinking about my work.

That's exactly what I wanted for my own work, too. There isn't a much more meaningful and valuable gift a fan can give a creator than thoughtful feedback, good or bad. We've talked about the importance of artists doing this for one another in our one-on-one conversations, Fip, but, for anyone else reading, I hope this is something you'll take to heart. Give small creators thoughtful feedback! Don't worry so much about the popular creators who get thousands of comments on everything they post and probably won't even see your comment; spare your energy for the people who often get nothing at all except a few praises. Praises are wonderful, but thoughtful analysis is priceless. Take the time to do it; it's a good deed! That's why I'm doing this, despite my brain hurting to do it. It is meaningful to me because there truly is very little that you can give an artist that they will prize more than your thoughtful and honest feedback.

the actual biggest success of this project id say is the fact that people got me. people truly understood what i was going for. i have heard many analisis of what is art in the last few months, wether there is such a thing as objective criticism of art, what is art for, what is the purpose of art, why we make art. and one position i heard over and over again was that art is not for communication. you know, death of the author and all that, what the creator meant has no bearing on the work and the experience of the work itself.

and yet i cannot help but disagree on some level, because if so what else can i call jennyffer other than an absolute triumph of conveyance. people understood it, time and time again i would see comments where people descrive pointedly, incisively, precisely what i was going for. i felt seen.

🥹

(That just shows up as a black rectangle on my computer, but it's this emoji of eyes welling up with tears of gladness.)

Yes. It feels good to feel seen! Even if the part of us that we are feeling is seen is only a little bit of our entire whole. To steal the conversation back to my own work for a moment, the absence of this feeling of being seen is very closely related to the central theme of the Galaxy Federal Inaugural Novel. I have gone through my life mostly without feeling that I have been seen, and it is deeply dismaying. Wearying, too. The best I have been able to do, in lieu of being seen, being understood, and therein being accepted, is to write down what it feels like not to be, in the voice of my character Cherry, and grapple with the meaning of a world where that is so. It's not a fun book. It's not the book I wanted to write in years past. But it's the best I can do in this lonely world of mine, because it is honest and it is central.

I am always so glad when people have a chance to feel seen. We don't do enough of that in the world. We don't try as hard as we should to understand each other, and indulge each other in the act of gazing upon them with insights and interrogatives. Despite growing up on a media feast of affirmations that we should all embrace our individuality, the harsh truth is that human civilization is viciously conformist and will punish ruthlessly, or ruthlessly ignore, anyone who deviates outside the social order. Counterexamples exist only in the exceptions. Even cultural and political movements do not bring the true, full-figured inclusiveness we wish for them to.

Moving on, I agree with you about your personal importance to the series, and I always have: Your intentions matter to Jennyffer; they deeply enrich it. And this is true in general. The creator's intentions matter, and when those intentions are lost, a part of the work is lost.

Now I want to end this with a talk about the characters themselves in this story. Jennyffer and Peter.

They are based on many many different things, things that i have descrived many times in the past. but one thing i want to put emphasis on is that they are very much two sides of myself. the sensitive, morally punctillious and enciclopediacly nerdy Peter, and the assertive, sarcastic and ebullient Jenny. those who have known me for a while would have seen my inner peter poke out whenever in talking about some interest of mine, or when i first met them and want to cause a good first impression, or when im kinda tired or melancholic. and they would have also noticed my inner jenny get out whenever im salty, or stuck in debate mode, or excited or enthusiastic.

They are two lovely kids. they are endearing, they are funny, they are a little messy and sometimes a bit too much to handle. but it was an absolute delight and a priviledge to have them live in my head for four years and im very greatful that i had the time, the energy and the will to bring them to life.

:333

Actually, I'm not gonna say anything in reply to this. I'm only gonna explicitly appreciate it.

#Jennyffer #fipindustries

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veliseraptor · 1 year ago

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April Reading Recap

Stars of Chaos vol. 2 by Priest. I'm not quite grabbed by this one yet. I'm not not enjoying it, but the main relationship doesn't quite have me compelled, and the politics aren't quite sharp enough to get me either. I'm not totally sure I'll keep buying the published volumes, at least not at this time, and just read the rest online to see how I end up feeling about it as a whole before making the financial commitment.

Medea by Eilish Quin. Listen, I'm a Medea apologist, but I'm a Medea apologist who is very much of the "she absolutely did all the awful things she's accused of and she is valid" and the author here is going "she did all the awful things she's accused of but it's not as bad as you thought it was because she didn't mean it!" and I'm just. I'm not mad, just disappointed (again). I was so hoping for a book that would do something interesting with a Medea retelling but I probably should've known better than to think it'd be this one. Why, you may ask, do I keep reading myth retellings about my problematic faves when all I do is complain about them? Hope springs eternal, I guess.

She Who Became the Sun and He Who Drowned the World by Shelley Parker-Chan. Exceptional. Might be my favorite books I read in April. I'd already read She Who Became the Sun back when it was first published and knew I'd enjoyed it (was rereading to refresh my memory for the sequel), but I felt like I enjoyed it more the second time around, and I might've liked He Who Drowned the World even more than its predecessor. If you're looking for works of just-barely fantasy with delightfully fucked up queer characters, come get 'em here. I won't say most of them are happy (they're not) or that things end well (they don't), but boy is it good reading.

The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling. Decent horror but not particularly outstanding, in my opinion. I liked The Luminous Dead more.

Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee. I continue to struggle with novellas. This was a perfectly good novella but it felt like it could've been a stronger short story, which I guess is better than the other way I usually come out of novellas, which is "this was a fine novella but it should've been a novel."

The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. I really liked this. It has more of a thriller-ish edge than I expected, but for all that I think it's a thoughtful book with some interesting things to say, and I feel like it's one I want more people to read so I can talk to them about it. It's set in a sort-of spooky, near-future dystopia, but a lot of it is about, like, the nature of thought and consciousness. Anyway, I found myself compelled.

Islands of Abandonment: Nation Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape by Cal Flyn. I found myself reading this thinking a lot about The World Without Us, a book I read many years ago and would kind of like to reread, and which I think I liked more than this (at least in my memory). I was hoping for more analysis than I got from this book, which was beautifully written but more nature/travel writing than science. One thing I did appreciate was the attention paid to the human cost of the "abandoned" places examined in this book - the pain that abandonment often signifies, and the trauma it indicates, in spite of the beauty that may come after.

Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World by Mary Beard. I really liked the way that Beard chose to do this one - namely, taking it by theme rather than by emperor, and breaking down different areas of the emperor's life over time rather than trying to tell a linear narrative. It also let her do some of the better "skeptical" reading of sources that I've read in a popular book on ancient history, where she was actually digging into the "rather than what this says about what this person may or may not have actually done, what does it say about expectations, beliefs, and tropes that people had" kind of reading. And after some of the other popular histories of Rome I've read, thank god for that.

Metamorphoses by Ovid, trans. Stephanie McCarter. Continuing on with my "reading new translations (by women!) of classical epics" run (started with The Odyssey, The Iliad is on my list). It was fun to reread Ovid! As usual one of my favorite parts of this was reading the translator's note and introduction, and I wanted about 500% more of that through the text (tell me about the assonance you're preserving in the Latin!) but did get some of (thanks for the information on the penis/pubic hair puns!). Overall would recommend as a good translation of Ovid that very much does not flinch away from - and makes/keeps appropriately uncomfortable - the sexual assault.

Dark Rise by C.S. Pacat. Slightly more YA than I usually like, but I enjoyed it! I was a little :\ about it for a while, very much feeling the YA cliches of it all, but the late hour twist got me interested again, and I will be picking up the sequel. Did miss the full balls-to-the-wall iddy joy of Captive Prince, though, since I probably wouldn't have picked this book up without the author recognition.

Subversive Sequels in the Bible: How Biblical Stories Mine and Undermine Each Other by Judy Klitsner. I really liked this one, particularly for its commentary comparing and contrasting Eve, and the other women of Genesis, with later Biblical narratives. I don't know how much I buy all of her arguments when it comes to intentionality of all of the comparisons she's drawing, but it certainly makes interesting food for thought, and a good sampler for me of what literary-based Biblical scholarship can look like (and an indication that I'm interested in trying more of it).

Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks. I read most of my way through this book continuing to really appreciate what Banks does with the Culture novels and planning to continue on reading the next one, but not enjoying this specific one as much as I did The Player of Games in particular, and then I got to the very end of it and went "hang on what the fuck???" but in a decidedly good way. And I'm still kind of thinking about That even though it's been a while, which I think is a positive. Anyway, I don't think I'd recommend this as a starting place for anyone to read the Culture novels, or as a must read, but it was on the upper end of a three star rating.

Juniper & Thorn by Ava Reid. I wanted this to be more gothic horror and less romance and it ended up being more romance and less gothic horror, was my feeling. Not necessarily the book's fault, but if anyone else is eyeing it wondering...now you know.

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik. I really enjoyed this one! I was kind of skeptical going in - I'm not a big magic school person, as a rule, and the more I feel like something is hyped to me the more I tend to drag my heels about it - but Naomi Novik is really good at what she does and she clearly had a lot of fun here. It's tropey for sure, but I enjoy the narrative voice (very important, in a first person narration), and the action moves along with what I felt was pretty good momentum. The other thing I was worried about - that it'd feel too much like this was just ~commentary on/against Harry Potter~ without saying anything for itself - didn't materialize for me. I'm looking forward to reading the next ones.

The Monster Theory Reader ed. by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. I'm so rusty on my academic/theory reading and I felt it reading this collection, some of which was definitely better than others. Kristeva's essay on abjection was particularly rough as far as "I'm reading words and I know all the words but something about the order they're going in is just not making sense to me." Overall...it was a decent primer? There were a few very interesting essays in there; my favorite might've been the one on tanuki in modernizing Japan's folklore, but there were a couple on "monstrous" bodies that made me wish I had someone to discuss them with. That's probably my main problem reading academic works these days: I want a seminar to dissect them afterwards and I just don't have that.

The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man by Abraham Joshua Heschel. I'm trying to read something Jewish on Shabbat now and finally getting around to reading some Heschel after years of meaning to. I thought "oh, I'll start easy with something nice and short" - yeah, no, Heschel's got a very particular style of writing and there's a lot of theological depth packed into a very short volume. I'm looking forward to reading The Prophets, though.

The Husky and His White Cat Shizun vol. 5 by Rou Bao Bu Chi Rou. I think we're juuuuust about caught up now with the official translation to where I started reading the machine translation, so I'm very excited for (a) things I don't remember as well (b) reading it not in machine translation. Also looking forward to everything about what happened with Nangong Liu and Nangong Xu making more sense this time around, on account of not reading it machine translated, because I didn't follow it so well on my first read and I feel like I'm already doing better. (Though that could also be because it's a reread, no matter how different an experience of one.) Still feel real bad for Ye Wangxi, on so many levels. Mark that one down for 'characters I'd love to know more about what they're thinking.'

The Water Outlaws by S.L. Huang. I really enjoyed S.L. Huang's other work with the Cas Russell series, and I liked this book a little less than those. It felt like an almost winner, for me. Certainly I read through it quickly enough, and I can say I enjoyed it, but I'm not sure I'd give it an enthusiastic recommendation. It falls somewhere in the middle between "a fun action/adventure story" and "something I can sink my teeth into" in a way that didn't quite satisfy either itch. Still, it did make me curious about the source material, which is one of the Chinese classics (Water Margin) and I might go and find a place to read that, if I can; if I'd had that background going in I wonder if my experience of this work would've been more edifying.

I'm currently rereading A Memory Called Empire so I can (finally) read the sequel (A Desolation Called Peace); I also checked out from the library the next two Scholomance books so I'll be reading those. I'm going to try to throw some nonfiction somewhere in there (maybe The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman, which I also have out from the library, but maybe something else), but I've still got the sequel to The First Sister sitting on my shelf (also from the library).

Outside of that I've got no big reading plans - I'm working my way through some of the unreads on my own shelf (despite what it may look like, about the library books) and eyeing The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchaikovsky or a reread of Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett so I can continue that series.

#long post for ts #reading recaps #sometimes i read things #sometimes i wonder if i should have more like. summary information on what books are about #but i am lazy and also that's not really the point #important text posts

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mzannthropy · 2 months ago

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Anne of the Island Book Club Chapter 36

Another good one! And a proof that LMM would have made an excellent sitcom writer.

Anne had a short sketch published! So glad for her that she didn't completely give up on her writing ambitions, even if it is just a side hustle.

Phil suggesting they should go to town and get drunk, lol, you wouldn't expect this from LMM.

Priscilla remarking that having an author live with them is a great responsibility--isn't her aunt a famous writer? Mrs Morgan? The one who came to visit in AOA? It was her aunt, wasn't it? Or some relation. Anne mentioning Averil's Atonement means she discussed that story at Patty's Place and I would like to know what they all thought of it. I think they'd be more like Gilbert, supportive. I wonder if Aunt Jamesina's remark is something LMM heard herself?

I guess I'm like Christine, bc my walk is not graceful. I'm clumsy, so what?

Well, Roy had to introduce Anne to his family at some point. They've been seeing each other for a year now and it's a sign he is serious about her. It's natural of Anne to feel daunted, as the Gardners are an old and rich family, and she has experienced prejudice about her origin, even in Avonlea.

Stella always vowed she never could write anything unless she threw each sheet down as she completed it.

This is what I wanted from this book. Chaotic scholar energy! Anne playing with cats, Priscilla baking, a cosy home-like atmosphere. Then, of course, there's a knock on the door and everyone loses their heads. The way LMM describes it is so funny.

Anne scrambled to her feet somehow, emptying two indignant cats out of her lap as she did so

They're not gonna forgive you that easily for this, you know.

And Priscilla hiding her cake under a cushion! You know how it's going to go.

Rusty and Joseph, left to themselves, began a game of chase, and sprang madly into Mrs. Gardner’s silken lap and out of it in their wild career. Mrs. Gardner lifted her lorgnette and gazed after their flying forms as if she had never seen cats before, and Anne, choking back slightly nervous laughter, apologized as best she could.

Pure comedy. Please, somebody make a film so that we can have this scene.

Inconsequently she remembered that Mrs. John Blythe was so fond of cats that she kept as many as her husband would allow.

Oh really, did she? Did she?

You'll probably never going to like every single one of your in-laws (heck, you probably don't even like every single member of you own family/extended family), so the Gardners seem quite standard. I like the name Aline better than Dorothy, though, so I wish they were swapped. But at least Aline, too, likes china dogs. Then she had to go sit on the cake, of course, so I guess she is not winning any of the book club members' hearts.

"What glorious times you girls must have here! Won’t you let me come often and have a share in them?"

Dorothy speaks for all of us.

“‘Of all sad words of tongue or pen The saddest are it might have been,’” quoted Priscilla tragically, lifting the cushion.

The lines are from a poem titled Maud Muller by John Greenleaf Whittier. Another writer also wrote a parody of it, for which I don't blame him bc it is indeed ridiculous.

“I fancy it was Roy’s mistake,” said Phil. “That boy isn’t really responsible for what he says when he talks to Anne."

We never learn whose mistake it was, so I take it that Phil's explanation is the truth. Misunderstandings and mistakes are frequent occurrences in LMM's works. Anne's adoption by the Cuthberts, the doctor in Blue Castle sending the wrong letter to Valancy, then there's a Christmas short story in which an absent minded school teacher invites the wrong family over for Christmas dinner.

Altogether a funny chapter. But the destruction of the chocolate cake is not easily forgivable.

#anne of the island book club #l.m. montgomery #lmmblogging #mypost

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callsign-king · 3 months ago

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.... Do you know the feeling, when you are hyped and want to write, and then you open your social media and... All of a sudden, you are not good enough anymore?

Tips how to get out of that?

You are awesome though and I adore you and your mun. <3

You are too kind my Liege, but yes it is quite a familiar beast. While writing is not my creative curse to bare per say, I feel that way about my paintings. It can be quite devastating to have this picture of grandeur plague ones mind calling out like a siren begging to be seen and heard and yet like a shy maiden she refuses to show. So you are left aching staring at the blankness before you. You're chest gnawing as she chews at her tail caught in a bear trap of your own mind scrapping against whatever drive one has slowly tearing even that away.

It hurts physically, bringing even I, a strong willed man, to my knees wanting nothing more then to indulge in a desire to make, but sometimes it's not the act that is the problem but rather the muse or medium. Sometimes a short story needs to become a poem. Something a painting needs to become a sculpture.

Or even sometimes you need to focus on something else entirely. Something that gets you locked not noticing as the time flies by as everything goes still. Most importantly it's okay to step away and come back later.

Of course I dare say the most valuable asset to combat such a creative block is a valiant advisor to talk your thoughts out with. Have someone to parry the ideas back and forth until it could be sculpted into something you can be proud of. Seriously the biggest blessing I have ever had is having a fellow creative to sit there and help me see where the flaws are that I know exist but cannot tell.

After all sometimes we are so often blinded by our own greatness that the glory of our creation is lost to our perception and all we can see is the flaw of it's silhouette.

Find your person or your people and listen when they praise and listen when they offer help. And of course in the most highest priorities be that person for them. Help your fellow creative see the greatness in their work and help them see where they're blocked maybe from.

(thank you! I'm glad you like me and King! Also know you are not alone. There are so many writers on this site who struggle with that self doubt who look at their writing like it was drawn by a kindergartener, but to everyone else it looks like a Renaissance painting done Michelangelo himself. I personally perceive my writing like that often where it feels lacking in so many ways.

Another tip that is incredibly helpful for me is type it up in notes app on your phone or computer.

Doesn't matter if you decide not to publish it later, just having that separate source where you can put whatever bullshit you want to text is helpful. For me it feels less like I'm writing to a large audience and more like I'm writing for myself which I often forget is ultimately who I'm doing it for.

If I like the idea and it brings me joy that's all that matters and if only one other person finds joy in my creation then it was worth publishing. And if none of that works out take a day or two breathe focus on the world around socialize with others do something silly. Grab your friend and write whatever silly thing comes to mind, doesn't matter if it's unhinged or makes sense use it as a pallet cleanser. Create with the intention to silence the critic in your head if only for a moment.)

#fishy is rambling #[callsign king 👑]#cod oc ask blog #writing advice #I rambled a lot because I have a lot of feelings about this topic #I am constantly riddled with self-doubt but I have started to learn to adopt King's attitude #king would never apologize for creating self indulgent art #he would be flustered if he did not believe it good enough #but he will never apologize for the creation process and neither should you nor I #have that voice in your head who gives you a false ego #the world deserves more writers the world deserves more creatives #you are great at what you write and no one can tell your stories #you have ideas that are worth sharing that no one else will think of

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theluckywizard · 4 months ago

Text

2024 Writing Round Up

thank you for the tags @queenaeducan and @lykegenia 🥰 As always I am super grateful to the Dragon Age Fan Fiction discord community! I couldn't have done any of this without them!

words posted:

237,776

additional words written:

Probably another 30-40k

grand total of words:

270,000ish! (about half as many as last year, but the words are a much higher quality and I didn't yeet 120k of them LOL)

fandoms:

Dragon Age!

highest kudos:

In the Shattering of Things with 206 (Cullen x Trevelyan, Hawke x Trevelyan DA:I epic)

highest hit oneshot:

Unvarnished with 1,852 (Blackwall x Trevelyan smut)

new things I tried:

1. Alternate Universe with Kiss Me Moonstruck 2. multi-pov fic with Something Wicked This Way Comes (where five companions search for Inquisitor Rose Trevelyan and manage the situation after she disappears from the Winter Palace ball: Vivienne, Josephine, Cullen, Garrett Hawke and bard Fidencio Frye). 3. my first exchange! I wrote Love at First Fight for Windwalker57 featuring his OC Aedan Cousland and his old flame Marie Trevelyan as they dance around their attraction at the Grand Tourney mid 9:20s

fic i spent the most time on:

My DA:I long fic In the Shattering of Things! It's still going strong and I am super proud of the 80k words I added this year. I've grown a lot as a writer since I first started and my additions to the fic this year have been lovingly and deliberately crafted.

fic i spent the least time on:

Together Alone (Cullen & Bethany DA2 fic) I love it, but it's just lower on the priority list.

favorite thing i wrote this year:

I am super proud of everything I wrote this year, but like last year my fic Kiss Me Moonstruck is right up at the top. (Matchmaking fic based on the idea that Leandra Hawke and her old friend Alsatia Trevelyan are trying to fix up their kids, Garrett and Rose) This time last year it was a nascent fic with just a few short chapters formed, now it's published, about 16 chapters long and still growing. It represents a type of romantic story I just can't seem to find enough of that's both a little bit madcap the way romantic comedies of old are but also real. One with flawed characters that feel authentic to the world that made them and one that explores the juiciness of Kirkwall and the nature of attraction/falling in love and how timing often shits on us and ultimately how to prevail when the world insists on being the worst. Being a DA2 fic necessitates some degree of drama and tragedy because Thedas is still Thedas. I'm really proud of it and I'm so grateful for the people reading it because it is such a niche pairing.

favorite one shot:

Probably An Inexplicable Pull, a little fic I cooked up from a prompt @caitlam sent me that pairs with my DA:I long fic. I was trying to capture that very early glimmer of attraction between Commander Cullen and my out-of-her-depth-but-trying-her-best Herald Rose Trevelyan.

favorite thing(s) I read:

Destiny is Just in the Timing by @crackinglamb (Varric x Cadash, DA2-DAI) The Varricmance we all need! Lamb's fic is so wonderfully snappy, like the whole thing is just smirking right back at me as I read it. I love Varric paired with the Cadash hired to follow him around Kirkwall and keep an eye on him. Spicy, sweet, snarky, FUN. Garrett & Shae are the friendship I needed. Loved this fic front to back! Kingdom Come by @nirikeehan (Blackwall x Trevelyan, post-Trespasser). I adore this grief-addled second chance fic where the Inquisitor makes a whole bunch of questionable decisions with ex-flame Blackwall after the death of her husband Cullen. So good. So crunchy. So hot. Ropes of Fate by @delicatefade I don't think a fic has ever made me scream-laugh as much as this one. Dalish life, written in the perspective of a preteen. Deep Dalish headcanons. So many universal truths about teens. It's brilliant. cut down at the garden gate by @carnalapples (Sebastian x f!Hawke) OH THE ANGST. This fic made me swoon and cry. It's heartbreaking and grabbed me right at the start with a hundred flaming questions.

writing goals for 2024:

1. keep a sustainable pace and avoid burnout 2. get through Here Lies the Abyss in my long fic and beyond 3. continue to learn and grow and stretch myself 4. RESEARCH especially grief stuff 😩

new works:

So many companion fics for In the Shattering of Things! Rumors (Hawke POV), A Sense of Duty (Cullen POV), Thirst (Cullen POV), Serah Bird (Hawke POV), An Inexplicable Pull (Cullen POV), Something Wicked This Way Comes (multi POV) and In Search of a Wayward Bronto (Hawke POV) The Firmness of his Resolve a comedic smut fic written as a gift for my friend featuring her Trevelyan and Cullen. Kiss Me Moonstruck of course New chapters for The Coldest and Warmest Dawn, Together Alone, Chaos Turkeys: Hawke Family Drabbles, In the Shattering of Things.

Tagging the above mentions as well as @skinwalkingxana, @warpedlegacy, @ammoniteflesh, @plisuu, @hekaerges

Template under the cut:

words posted:

additional words written:

grand total of words:

fandoms:

highest kudos:

highest hit oneshot:

new things I tried:

fic I spent the most time on:

fic I spent the least time on:

favorite thing I wrote:

favorite thing(s) I read:

writing goals for 2024:

new works:

#long post #dragon age fan fiction #in the shattering of things #kiss me moonstruck #dragon age inquisition #dragon age 2 #my writing

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shadelorde · 4 months ago

Note

💖 ✨ 🦷 💥 for the writing ask !!

💖 What is your primary writing goal for this year?

My primary writing goal is to publish my short story version of "The Greater Cosmic Ocean" for school! I am...not. Doing well on that goal right now. but NEVERTHELESS. WE BALL

Another goal I have is also just to write and share more and worry less about making it all organized or cohesive? One of my biggest obstacles to writing is being afraid of just doing little snippets and instead trying to do massive projects.

✨What's one area of your writing that you think needs the least amount of improvement?

I think that I'm doing really well with describing emotions and the pacing of them! It's something that I often get compliments on, particularly using recurring phrases to drive home a theme or motif.

🦷 Is there a chapter, scene, or WIP you're dreading to write (but is necessary to your plot)? Share a snippet or tell us about it!

Hmmm...I would say mostly I just really hate filler scenes, they're always really hard for me to manage. In "The Darkest Sun and The Brightest Star," I'm particularly struggling with the lulls between plot points where they just wander freely - unfortunately, there are...a lot of those.

💥Is there a chapter, scene, or WIP you're most excited to write? Share a snippet or tell us about it!

In "The Greater Cosmic Ocean", I'm most excited to write Raava (or the oc that Raava will become) waking up from her crystal. In this part, she will become enraged with Amma and try to fight and lash out against her. I always like writing high-emotion scenes, so I look forward to the challenge!

In "The Darkest Sun and the Brightest Star," I most look forward to the betrayal scene, when Wan finds out that Vaatu killed his people who were burning down the forest. Another high-emotion scene!!

#asks #writing #shadelordewrites #fanfic #original writing #raava #vaatu #avatar wan #amma (oc)

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docholligay · 1 year ago

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Do you think having such a personalized and detailed headcanon makes it harder to enjoy fic about the show/game that's written by others?

I mean sure, probably.

But unfortunately things I adore, for people named Doc who are me, fall into one of two buckets:

The character work and plot in this show are incredible, I find myself turning it around in my mind like a rotisserie chicken. I constantly discover new things about the show/book/game or the characters in it. I do not read fic about this, because why would I? Every answer I search for is in the text. I want to talk about this with someone, but about what is THERE, not what could be there. Ex: The Haunting of Hill House, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Piranesi, Bioshock:Infinite, Watership Down, Yellowjackets, among others.

The concepts of this could be amazing but are handled so fucking badly so consistently, in a shocking contrast to how INCONSISTENT the character work is, that all I want to do is steal it and make it better. All i want to do is turn it into something that doesn't suck ass when you look at it too hard. So I am going to take it SO seriously, and I am going to develop the rich inner lives for these characters that they lack, with intense backstories and families and motivation for how they got to be the person we know, or know sometimes, in certain episodes or shorts. Ex: Sailor Moon and Overwatch are the biggies here obviously, this is actually not an emotion I feel very often. I don't have intense backstories and extra-textual feelings and ideas about most of the stuff I read and watch, these two are just my Spiders Georg.

So! The odds on me being into something in the correct way to make me want to Seek Treasure Elsewhere but also I have a chill enough attitude about how the characters are that Any Dream Will Do is almost nil. I do not in ANY way mean this in a shady way, but I mostly read published adult fiction for entertainment and not fanfic. I am very picky about my fanfic. So, "plus these two new red and blue girls into Starbucks" often won't work for me, because the reasons to have Haruka and Michiru meet in a coffee shop are completely different from any of the reasons Fareeha and Angela might meet in a coffee shop, and so many of those types are archtypical plug and play stuff. Honestly, I have skated the idea of making a cheat sheet of fanon archetypes of various characters and buying a typewriter to sell 100-200 word 'quick fic' at cons with my sister. That's how common it is to use these archetypes. This is not a criticism! At all!

But, to take the two couples above, I have read so much BORING SHIT about both HM and FA that I could throw up. Lesbian couples have a lot of very milquetoast writing about them, and a lot of meet-cute which isn't really my bag.

But there are authors I love! @oathkeeper-of-tarth was and is one of the best harumichi writers out there and we don't even have all the same headcanons. The rare occasions @verbforverb decides to grace me with "Jewish Mercy I don't Have To Write" I pop a can of bubbly in the tub. And on both fields of battle @keyofjetwolf has stuff I've had bookmarked for years, and there are some things even within Rei's backstory and history that we disagree on.

Actually, to that point what I like is good writing. You can write me into believing nearly anything. There are things I believe about Amelie when I'm reading @lemon-embalmer's stuff that when I go back to my own world, aren't true, but when I'm in her world who the fuck cares, I'm having a great time. EVEN MORE to the point, I read @moonlight-frittata's stupid sun and moon lesbian League of Legends shit and I would rather shoot myslef than know ANYTHING about the game, but unfortunately she has a beautiful turn of phrase and plot flow to her work that I just....read anyway, because it is good. Fucking @tallangrycockatiel had me like 25 pages or so into a story before I was like, "OH SHIT, IS THIS SLASH??? WAIT I DON'T WANT TO READ ABOUT BOYS' LOVE!! NO!!" *hits next page* And I still could not care less about that podcast and would never listen to it, and if I did I would be massively disappointed because to my mind, her John and Arthur are the actual article, and whatever the fuck is going on in the source material can eat my dick.

So, yes, I DO think that having a very particular point of view is going to mean I back out of a story where like, "Lena stepped out of her Chelsea flat, custom leather high heels clicking against the step" sometimes, or, you know, "Haruka put down her copy of War and Peace, each meticulous note codified by a color-coded tab. Blue was for historical references to research, green for character analysis, yellow for themes, blah blah blah*" But I am actually shockingly open minded in what I will read, often to the point that I'm reading stuff from SHIT I DO NOT LIKE OR CARE ABOUT, because the quality of the writing is excellent. So, also no.

*I met someone who read books like this and I suddenly realized what the literary equivalent of 'knowing someone is a serial killer' was.

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saturnine-saturneight · 10 months ago

Text

Writerly Questionnaire

@davycoquette posted this up and it looks fun :)

About You

When did you start writing?

I started writing poetry somewhere in my early teens, then expanded to short snippets when my school had a creative writing workshop as part of a week long retreat. I did some minor roleplaying on the [Country redacted] version of Facebook, then started roleplaying on a fandom specific forum at 17... Started running with a group on Discord and Tumblr and learned how to write well with a dictionary always open in another tab. It's how I learned the majority of both my conversational and my writing English!

Are the genres/themes you enjoy reading different from the ones you write?

There are themes I really don't like to watch or read, but love to write, for example medical horror and body horror. I get squicked out when I'm not in control of those. I also adore detective fiction, especially Poirot, but don't have an interest in putting together a murder mystery myself.

Is there an author (or just a fellow writer!) you want to emulate, or one to whom you’re often compared?

I think the way I write is very conversational and very stream of consciousness. I'm a child of the internet, and you could make an easy comparison to other people writing indie online, but I'm not sure the comparison is as easy when you're looking at bigger, traditionally published authors. I think about the way I write in comparison to the Realism art movement sometimes. I want to emulate how people really talk, and I want to get deep into the nitty gritty of a psyche.

Can you tell me a little about your writing space(s)? (Room, coffee shop, desk, etc.)

Laying down ✌️

What’s your most effective way to muster up some muse?

Daydreaming! Dozing, napping, taking a walk, doing the dishes; anything that lets my mind wander.

Did the place(s) you grew up in influence the people and places you write about?

Not really. See above, child of the internet, but I'm also not sure I can capture what my country is really like. I never feel all that informed or all that "with it" here.

Are there any recurring themes in your writing, and if so, do they surprise you at all?

Come back with a warrant, lmfao.

Your Characters

Would you please tell me about your current favorite character? (Current WIP, past WIP, never used, etc.)

This is hard for me to decide because I really do love most of my characters equally when I just spend enough time with them. Of course it's Ron right now, I'm writing his story and he's living in a bigger corner of my brain than usual. I never really figured out what he had to say until pretty recently, he's always been a very taciturn narrator and loathe to talk about his feelings in dialogue. Throwing him into a fully moving plot and inflicting The Horrors on him really makes him react, and it's endearing him to me a lot.

Which of your characters do you think you’d be friends with in real life?

Matcha! She's goofy and sweet and she has a lot of things to talk about. We'd just need to set boundaries early because I'm not a fan of being flirted with. I also think I could get along with most of the rest, at least on friendly terms.

Which of your characters would you dislike the most if you met them?

Nat is an amalgamation of the worst traits and tendencies that I see in other people and myself. They're also a bully, which is something that personally makes me see red. They can go be a sympathetic villain somewhere else.

Tell me about the process of coming up with of one, all, or any of your characters.

So the very first one of the bunch was Teo. He was originally a pirate, and I made him to be weird and angsty and complex, but also kind of a liar who'd just boast about things unfounded. I thought this was easy to figure out, but I started noticing people taking him at his word, so I made Haru to call him out on his shit. These two were good foils, but didn't talk that much, so I made Rabbit who can never shut up to deliver some exposition.

When I make a character, they fill a niche in a dynamic, and/or have behaviors and beliefs that I want to write about. The rest is vibes.

Do you notice any recurring themes/traits among your characters?

I try to make them pretty diverse from each other, but there's always a general sense of overcoming and survival that I think is fascinating and write a lot about.

How do you picture them? (As real people you imagined, as models/actors who exist in real life, as imaginary artwork, as artwork you made or commissioned, anime style, etc.)

I don't have 20/20 vision in my imagination, things are pretty fuzzy. Real people, but stylized, I think.

Your Writing

What’s your reason for writing?

To create a space where I can really dig into the things I like and the things that are on my mind. I'm also pretty competitive towards myself. I always want to be better at something than I have been so far.

Is there a specific comment or type of comment you find particularly motivating coming from your readers?

I love comments that really pinpoint which moments or beats a reader enjoyed...

How do you want to be thought of by those who read your work? (For example: as a literary genius, or as a writer who “gets” the human condition; as a talented worldbuilder, as a role model, etc.)

Just some guy, please.

What do you feel is your greatest strength as a writer?

Character depth and dialogue.

What have you been frequently told your greatest writing strength is by others?

Dialogue also, and a certain sense of... chaos? Urgency? My longer form stuff has been described as 'one long rollercoaster'.

How do you feel about your own writing? (Answer in whatever way you interpret this question.)

Eh. I'm happy when it turns out well.

If you were the last person on earth and knew your writing would never be read by another human, would you still write?

Oh that's a mean question. I do have a little bit of a "what's going to be my legacy" thing going on. Yeah, I think I would still write, though. I really do it for the fun of it as well. It's just a lot less fun when I can't bounce it off other people and see what it turns into where it meets their lives and their experiences.

When you write, are you influenced by what others might enjoy reading, or do you write purely what you enjoy? If it’s a mix of the two, which holds the most influence

On a line by line basis, I have an issue of trying to write to a worst faith reader that I'm trying to work through, but the larger picture is completely just what I enjoy and not written to a specific genre, reader, or market.

I am tagging @marlowethelibrarian @fortunatetragedy @paeliae-occasionally @lychhiker-writes @rotting-moon-writes and YOU 🫵

#tag games #about the author

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one-idea · 1 year ago

Note

Speaking of Deuce I know in my heart that when it got out that Ace is Roger's son the WG tried to change his bounty poster to Gold Ace, like not even writing it the correct way. And I know that Deuce has the biggest vendetta against that shit, like "IF THEY DO THAT IS JUST REWRITING THE PUBLIC NARRATIVE TO FIT THEIR IDEALS OF COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT AND DISMISSING HIS PERSONHOOD". Ace's poster still says Portgas D in the timeskip because Deuce, Olivia and Sabo kept getting rid of all of the Gold ones and the Marines got fed up with having to print new ones every time

I love this!

No chosen names are such a big thing for Deuce and Ace.

I can imagine Deuce siting there worried about his friend. Knowing he just lost his little brother who he loved so much. And there is nothing Deuce can do for him. He’s paper that he’s so proud of couldn’t sway the public in time to save Luffy. (He had such short notice, there was no way he could have, but that doesn’t matter to him) he doesn’t know where Ace is, he can’t support him.

And to top it all off someone spilled Ace’s closest secret to the world government.

Deuce is sitting there feeling like all his work is meaningless if he can’t help the people he cares about when someone (probably Olivia) slams Ace’s new bounty on his desk. Normally he’s trilled when Ace’s bounty comes out. He knows Ace loves when his bounty goes up. (And he totally doesn’t have a collection of Ace’s bounty posters)

But this one is different. Ace is still standing there with the same smirk as always (it’s the same picture as always) but the name is wrong. Gold Ace is brazenly printed across the poster.

“If they’re going to be blatantly disrespectful, they could at least spell it right.” Olivia says with a sneer. But it’s white noise to Deuce because, How. Dare. They. How dare they put a name on Ace he obviously didn’t want. How dare they use a name Ace had worked so hard to distance himself from.

Deuce is furious. His true name isn’t known to anyone. Not the Revs, not the reverse crew, not even Ace (he didn’t want to know after Deuce told him he rejected it) Ace is the one who dubbed him Deuce. Who created his new name Masked Deuce. The name the world knows. It’s his name! He would be livid if the World Government tried to tie his brith name to his current life. He rejected it and his family.

Ace did much the same. He chose to go by Portagas because he loves his mom. Deuce knew the name was important to Ace. Whether it was a decision made to hide his connection to Roger didn’t matter to Deuce. No one had the right to make Ace go by a name he didn’t want.

Add on to that it’s to fit the world’s government’s narrative of punishing sons for the sins of their fathers. That it puts Ace’s life in jeopardy for something he didn’t do.

Oh Deuce is hopping mad.

“So what are we going to do about this?” Olivia asked as she watched the rage build across Deuces face. He turned to face her with nothing but righteous furry.

He thought of the brilliant orange flames that often danced around Ace. “We’re going to burn them to the ground.” This he can do. He couldn’t help Ace at Marineford and he can’t be with him in the aftermath. But he can do this.

He’s publishing story after story highlighting PORTAGAS D. ACE and his accomplishment. He’s doing research about what Gol D Rogers was actually like (incase Ace ever does want the name) Sabo and Olivia help him destroy every copy of that stupid wanted poster. (He keeps one, 1) because it enrages him and reminded him what he’s working to prevent, 2) incase one day Ace wants it, even if it’s just to burn it himself)

He figures out where the World government is printing them from and raises it to the ground. No more posters for them! The world government finally relents when he sends them the correct poster (same increase bounty right name) and offers to stop burning all their bounty if they will just print the right one. They have to give in, he’s destroying all of their bounty poster, how are they suppose to bring in anyone if no one knows who to look for.

It his the price on Deuces own head but he’s more than pleased with the resulting new bounty that reads Portagas D. Ace. It’s worth it.

He hopes Ace never had to see the Bounty with the wrong name, no reason to add that to his plate when he’s already dealing with enough.

#masked deuce #acedeuce #ace x deuce #portagas d. ace #gol d. ace #fire fist ace #one piece ace #reverse strawhats au #reverse strawhat pirate au #nico olvia

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thoughtportal · 2 months ago

Text

The first time I was called Mom by another adult, my husband and I were out for dinner, our firstborn dozing beside us in her car seat. “What will you have, Mom?” our server asked. I looked down, as if to locate myself: That’s me she’s talking to. It didn’t matter that I was also a partner, a teacher, a colleague, a daughter, a sister, a friend. What I most clearly and emblematically was now, I realized, was a Mom.

I thought of this moment often during my journey to publish my debut book, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters: A Memoir in Essays (Chronicle Prism, 2025). The first time my mind flashed back to it was during the submission process. I’d prepared myself, as all authors must, for rejection. The editors who passed on my manuscript, I imagined, would point to some aspect of its style or feel that wasn’t working for them. But nearly all of them cited an entirely different “flaw” in it: “I love the writing, but I’m just not sure how I’d break this out from all the other mother books,” one editor wrote to my agent. “The mother shelf,” lamented another, “is just so full.”

I pictured a dusty rack at the back of a bookstore, crammed with miniature mothers jockeying for space. I’m not sure I’d envisioned any sort of “shelf” for my book, but if I had, it would have been the Memoir shelf, or the New Nonfiction shelf. It was true that my book, a deeply personal account of the ways women are urged to betray their truths, explores motherhood. But it also explores adolescence, middle age, desire, infidelity, friendship, beauty, mortality—in short, the sorts of themes that have intrigued humans since time immemorial. Why did this one category, “Mother” with a capital M, so thoroughly negate all others, a badge of shame like Hester Prynne’s scarlet A? I felt as if I were being addressed as “Mom” all over again—this time by not just another adult but an entire industry, and by the very artistic and professional community I cared about most.

It only takes one editor, a friend reassured me—and mercifully, she was right. My book became a book by the skin of its teeth, because of the single editor who believed in its broader appeal. Thankful as I am for her, I’ve remained troubled by the assumed smallness of the audience for books like mine. No one would assume that only soldiers can enjoy war memoirs. No one would claim that the love story has reached its saturation point in the market. Literature centering mothers, by contrast, is often treated as a niche genre, like books about quilting or lady detectives. This sidelining persists even though most of us on earth have had a mother, or are partnered with mothers, or will one day become mothers—even if we aren’t mothers ourselves. I can think of few human experiences that touch us as universally.

The notion of a finite Mother Shelf also suggests that to have read one or two “mother books” is to have read them all, as if mothering were a one-size-fits-all experience rather than the endlessly varied undertaking it is. Many of my favorite contemporary books are by authors who are mothers and whose writing is informed by this identity. But beyond this overlap, these works are as diverse in voice and spirit as the humans who crafted them. When Jennifer Case, an environmental writer in Arkansas, explores the animal physicality of mothering in her gorgeous new essay collection, We Are Animals: On the Nature and Politics of Motherhood (Trinity University Press, 2024), this is not at all the same as when author Camille T. Dungy conjures the intimacies of tending to her daughter in Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster, 2023). The styles and genres of my favorite “mother books” vary wildly as well. Rivka Galchen’s spare and lyrical essay collection Little Labors (New Directions, 2016) captures the daily textures of caregiving, while Yael Goldstein-Love’s speculative novel The Possibilities (Random House, 2023) uses psychological suspense to evoke the disorientation of early parenthood. To “shelve” books as divergent as these together is like shelving eggnog with egg bagels because they both contain…eggs? It is to erase these books’ distinctiveness entirely—and it is to do so in a way eerily reminiscent of how I and so many women I know felt after becoming mothers, the fullness of our being reduced to a single identity.

In many books that might easily get housed on the Mother Shelf, motherhood isn’t even the main subject but rather a lens through which another experience gets filtered. In Cindy House’s memoir Mother Noise (Marysue Rucci Books, 2022), the author’s decision to tell her nine-year-old son that she was once a heroin addict becomes a powerful magnifying glass through which a reader comes to understand her recovery journey. And in Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “The Apocalypse” (Henry Holt, 2024), raising two Black sons infuses Emily Raboteau’s investigation of climate change with heightened urgency. “My pathway into climate writing was through motherhood, simply because I want my children to live,” Raboteau told me in an e-mail, stressing that those of us “concerned about the survival of generations to come ought to be mothering, whether we are mothers or not.”

It’s hard to imagine a more pressing reason to free the “mom book” from its proverbial shelf than this.

An acquaintance of mine, an accomplished novelist, recently told me that after becoming a parent, she began a third novel inspired by this transition. Her agent at the time was far from enthused. “No one wants to read about motherhood anymore,” she pronounced with such airtight certainty that my acquaintance was beset by writer’s block.

This wasn’t this year, or even in the past decade, but in 2008.

Before hearing this anecdote I’d wondered if the “mom book” resistance I’d encountered was simply a case of unlucky timing: Had I written a memoir with the word Mothers in the title at a moment when the world was uniquely sick of mothers? But my acquaintance’s story made me suspect a more perennial problem under the surface.

When I reached out to book marketing and publicity expert Kathleen Schmidt, author of the popular Publishing Confidential newsletter, for insight, she pointed to entrenched assumptions in the book industry about audience and gender: “It’s terrible, and I hate that I’m even saying this,” she told me, “but unless there’s a strong male figure in it, a book written by a woman about womanhood or motherhood is going to be tagged as a book for women, whereas a book by a man tends to be marketed to everyone.” In other words, it isn’t necessarily motherhood but motherhood’s unmistakable relationship to womanhood that can set a book on a rigid, predestined path.

Yael Goldstein-Love experienced this gendering firsthand when launching The Possibilities in 2023. Goldstein-Love, who is also a psychotherapist, feels that her novel is as much about the mysteries of the human mind and quantum mechanics as it is motherhood—but she now sees how these themes got downplayed when her book was positioned. She often wishes she could travel back in time and rewrite the novel’s jacket copy, which was crafted to appeal to women and mothers. “I think the description did a good job getting the book into the mommy machine,” she said, referring to the subgenre of women’s media geared toward mothers, “but I’m not sure the mommy machine was where it truly belonged.”

The Possibilities was recently named a finalist for the World Fantasy Awards. Since then Goldstein-Love has been receiving e-mails from an entirely new fan base, fantasy and science fiction enthusiasts far more diverse in age and gender than her book’s initial audience. Connecting with this new wave of readers has strengthened Goldstein-Love’s conviction that the mother “brand” can be a sort of literary vortex.

“I think it’s really hard to capture anything outside that funnel once you’re in it,” she told me.

In the end, the greatest tragedy of the Mother Shelf isn’t the disservice it does to authors but to the readers it excludes. Literature has always been a means of bridging differences and fostering empathy. To presume that only women can appreciate a book like Mother Noise or Soil or any other that considers motherhood is to grossly underestimate the capacities and imagination of non-female readers.

Two of the most enthusiastic early readers of Mothers and Other Fictional Characters in my MFA program were male, and another was nonbinary. None were parents. One told me how my essay about learning to forgive my mother made them pick up the phone and call their own. Another told me that my exploration of beauty standards helped him better understand his sister’s eating disorder. Would these readers have eventually chanced upon my book if it weren’t a syllabus requirement? Sadly, I’m skeptical.

The undiscoverability of works on the Mother Shelf also has dire implications for our culture at large. In a country where the invisibility of caregiving has paved the way for policies that ignore the needs of families, non-mothers might just be the very readers these stories most urgently need to reach. As We Are Animals author Jennifer Case put it, “So many people who aren’t mothers are making decisions that affect women and mothers. With everything going on around reproductive justice, it’s frustrating how hard it seems for people to conceive that books about motherhood might be relevant to a broader audience.”

If more people were to embody the perspective of women and mothers, how much louder might the rallying cry be for universal paid leave or access to quality maternal health care? How much more outrage might there be over the mounting threats to women’s freedom and autonomy?

When it comes to the Mother Shelf, it’s tempting to shrug our collective shoulders and say, Well, that’s just how book marketing works. But the uncomfortable truth is that publishers, like all commercial enterprises, take their cues from the culture in which they operate. People hardly bat an eye anymore when a woman pursues “male” interests, but for a man to do the opposite remains suspect, opening him to ridicule and worse. One of my favorite recent books was Lucas Mann’s riveting collection Attachments: Essays on Fatherhood and Other Performances (University of Iowa Press, 2024). Did I worry this book might be unsuitable for me because I’m not a man or father? Not for a second. A woman who reads about fatherhood is simply a reader, but a man who reads about motherhood is…what? I shudder to think of the choice words that might go here.

I asked Kathleen Schmidt to imagine she’d been hired to expand a publisher’s readership of its “women’s” titles: What strategies would she suggest? She mentioned what she called micro-targeting—picturing, in detail, the categories of readers who might connect with a book and meeting them where they are. “If the desired customer is male,” she said, “what brands do they like? Where are they shopping? What podcasts are they listening to?” She believes the best way to reach secondary readers is to emphasize aspects of a book that overlap with their existing interests: “It’s very hard to reverse the marketing and say that a woman’s memoir should appeal to men. You can’t change the psyche of the consumer. You have to work with what’s already there.”

Practically speaking, this approach makes perfect sense and reminds me a little of when I hide my dog’s heartworm pill in a scoop of peanut butter. It doesn’t matter why he eats it—just that he eats it. And yet the idealist in me can’t help but believe that, over time, with small shifts in the way we talk about, write about, and recommend the “mother book,” it is in fact possible for its stigma to fall away. A magazine roundup of books by mothers for Father’s Day? Yes, please. Elif Shafak’s Black Milk: On the Conflicting Demands of Writing, Creativity, and Motherhood (Penguin, 2012) on the first-year syllabus? Why not? A company-wide read of Lessons for Survival? Bring it on.

For all of the term’s anonymity, what is any one “consumer,” after all, but a human, as capable of expanding and evolving as any other member of our species? The consumer could very well be your brother, your parent, your child, the love of your life.

The consumer could even be you—in which case, I say, Welcome. Thank you for reading this far. And now, if you’ll come with me: There’s a shelf I need to show you at the back of the store.

Nicole Graev Lipson is the author of the memoir in essays Mothers and Other Fictional Characters. Her writing has appeared in the Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Millions, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe, among other publications. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, nominated for a National Magazine Award, and selected for The Best American Essays 2024 anthology. She lives outside of Boston with her family.

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