#before i discovered this i'd have to go through adding another line break for every new paragraph

[aintgonnatakethis]

Formatting. If it's just a wall of text without paragraph and/or line breaks I just can't take it. I understand the ao3 uploading system can sometimes be funky when it comes to that.

Lifehack that saved me:

C+P your fic into googledocs.

Without changing anything copy the version in googledocs.

Select 'rich text' on the AO3 upload page.

Paste your text there.

[veebs-hates-video-games]

I think maybe I'm going to try to figure out how to do a post about both The House in Fata Morgana and Chaos;Head Noah simultaneously, because I just finished both recently and they're both horror VNs, but one of them succeeds at what it's trying to do a lot better than the other.

Spoilers: The House in Fata Morgana is consistently great, while Chaos;Head Noah is frequently pretty good, never amazing, and too often a bit of a disaster.

I think I'm going to start in kind of a weird place because it's what made me start comparing the two in the first place: the amount of time I had to spend skipping over dialogue I'd already seen. Well, that and they both have main characters who spend most/all of their time stuck in their house as they gradually deteriorate over time, which like they just like me fr.

With The House in Fata Morgana I started it about a year ago, took a break for like ten months when I stopped being able to read pretty much anything, and then finally went back to it and finished it last month-ish. I was maybe a third of the way through when I stalled on it, and by the time I came back I remember enough of the story to jump right back in but couldn't remember the structure of the VN or what any of my saves were for. Probably some of them were at the very sparse decision points, but I didn't want to load every single one of them again and try to figure it out.

I think it was probably after getting the very first ending that I tried to go back and start over to see if there was any new dialogue added or new decision points or ones I hadn't previously checked before. It seems like the skip button skips really fast, but oh no it does not. It was like half an hour of waiting to get to the first decision point (not counting the one at the very beginning), but I guess I made the same choice again and there was nothing new.

I kept skipping, and another half an hour went by before I made it back to where I'd stopped the original time almost a year earlier. Then I went back again and loaded the save from that previous decision, chose the other option, got like 500 words of new dialogue, still wasn't sure if that would affect anything later on, and got to skip through another entire half hour to get back to where I was and discover it does not have any effect.

Finally after 90 minutes of fast forwarding I was able to get on with the story and my life and the rest of it was great, but that was really not an awesome experience and I nearly gave up on it entirely. If I weren't bad at video games and had realized that it's almost totally linear and the decisions don't affect anything down the line that would've all been easily avoidable, and that's probably how it would've gone if I hadn't forgotten so much about how the game worked during that time. I'll keep that in mind next time I decide to have ADHD and various other health problems that prevent me from sticking with something until I'm done with it.

Chaos;Head Noah on the other hand requires that you spend at least as long as that, probably significantly longer, fast forwarding through stuff you've already seen, because it's part of the incredibly poorly thought out structure of the VN itself and not just a consequence of being a dumbass. I had been spoiled by mostly only playing stuff from the past five years or so recently and forgot how much it blows goats in some older VNs getting all the right flags set for certain events or routes. It would've taken even longer if I hadn't given up like three chapters into my second playthrough and just used a guide to get through everything as fast as possible, and I still had to waste at least a few hours just on the skip button.

This is quite frankly terrible. I get what they were going for with the gimmick and how stuff was laid out, but the different endings don't actually branch out until the end of chapter seven (out of ten) on average, and the stuff before that is 95% the same every time through. You also just have to kind of magically intuit several three way choices and correctly answer five yes/no questions to get onto each of the different routes (and for one of them way, way more than that), which you can sort of figure out some of it but a lot of it is just guessing and hoping for the best. This is in fact bullshit and does not respect my time, and in this case is a deliberate design decision and not just me being stupid like with the other one.

This one thing that I've already gone on for far too long about kind of sums up my experience with both of them. Most problems I had with The House (I don't know why I started shortening it to that, but I blame talking about it with @dragonsbutalsorabbits) were my fault or could've been avoided, while most problems I had with Chaos;Head were on purpose because someone (incorrectly) thought they were a good idea.

They both are full of characters who are completely a mess because of the things they've been through in their lives, often but not always deliberately inflicted on them by someone else for their own benefit. The character arcs in The House are much, much better fleshed out though, and anyone who recovers or is redeemed (or gets worse for that matter) gets a lot more development, and the end results feel a lot more earned.

Chaos;Head does that to some degree with some characters, but I wasn't entirely convinced by all of them. I actually am totally down with the main character being kind of a shitty person and the biggest loser in the world (and generally a parody of stereotypical imageboard otakus from the 00s) and don't need my protagonists to be good people or anything, but I feel like they didn't put that to as good use as I would've liked, and I was very not sold on stuff like the "secretly he was a Mary Sue all along" ending.

I feel they could've used it to actually say something a bit more beyond "this guy is a shitty person at least partly as a reaction to the shitty circumstances he was put in outside his control" (totally reasonable) and "maybe girls should be nice to incels because that would fix them (and also they might secretly be superheroes)" (uhh try again chief). It came close a few times, but they never really quite went anywhere else with it.

The House is in some ways the way more fantastical one of the two, but I found it a lot easier to suspend my disbelief for it. It doesn't pretend anything works like the real world does, but it has its own weird but consistent internal logic, and I never really felt myself questioning it. It serves the story, and the story is compelling enough to just go along with it.

Meanwhile Chaos;Head tries to be heavily grounded in the real world, with plenty of psychology and physics and other jargon thrown in to try to tie it in with real world concepts. Unfortunately the writer(s?) have next to zero understanding of how any of that stuff works, so it gets pretty silly pretty frequently. I'm not even going to get into it because I'd be here all day, but even as someone who dropped out of high school twice and only finished like a semester and half of university before dropping out of that too, I still know infinitely more about pretty much every single thing like that they tried to drag into their story and would exhaust the entire world's supply of Cinema Sins dings if I tried to point them all out. The short version is if you know even the absolute bare minimum about psychology or physics or anything like that you're going to have to pretend you don't and just roll with it.

I feel like I've been saying a lot of nice things about one of these and not very many about the other. Let's completely not even things out by saying that I think The House would've been better if it'd ended like ten minutes sooner at the fakeout credits and left some stuff implied at the end instead of actually showing any of it. I was still overall very happy with how things came together in the end, but I would've been even more happier if they'd had a tiny bit more restraint.

And, uh...what can I say nice about Chaos;Head? The first and last/true endings were kinda lame in my opinion (pretty much anything involving the main villains in any of the routes kept making me go "oh no has this secretly been stupid all along?"), but there were some genuinely interesting moments in some of the individual character endings, and I did actually like a decent amount of stuff in the main common route at times too. They did make a pretty interesting world, and some of the characters can be pretty interesting at times too, even if the overall package left something to be desired.

In the end I think The House in Fata Morgana might be the best/my favorite pure VN I've played/read in the past year (although if we count hybrid stuff I think I'd still put 13 Sentinels ahead of it), and Chaos;Head Noah is probably the worst that I enjoyed the least, even if it had its moments and was still ok enough that I finished all the routes. I look forward to one of these days going back to do the side stories for The House and moving on to the next game in the Science Adventure series, Steins;Gate, which I already know I like the characters and story of because the anime adaptation was great when I watched it like a decade ago. I might need a break to do other stuff for a while though, because this last one kind of burned me out.

[harry-hook-me]

Hello! I really enjoyed "Boating" (Harry x Moana's daughter) so much that I'd like to request another story featuring the two of them, if that is ok. I was wondering if you could write one where Harry proposes to Moana's daughter, with a bit of encouragement from Uma (who happens to like Moana's daughter and is a very good friend) and Gil (who likes her too). Huge pirate/ Polynesian wedding if you know what I mean! Thank you

The PirateAnd The Polynesian Princess

Writer - @harry-hook-me (myself)

Request - @demigodgirl91

Disclaimer - I do not own any of the Descendants charactersor scenes from the movies, all credits goes to the creators and producers ofDisneys descendants.

Summary – Follow up to Boating; Harry and the daughter of Moana’swedding

Warnings – none… I don’t think.

Word count - 1630

Five years have passed since Harry helped me get over myfear of sailing, since then we both graduated from Auradon Prep and planned tosail the world together. He had always promised me he would take me toNeverland one day. What else happened? Oh yeah, we got engaged.

Flash back – Harry’sPOV

“Come on Harry, since when were you ever scared. Your Harrybloody Hook for Christ sake. Man up.” Uma nagged, I was planning on asking Y/nto marry me but I’m scared out of my mind, what if she says no? “Uma this is abig deal, you would be scare if you were in my position.” I fired back. “Sheloves you Harry, She’s so completely in love with you, and so are you to her,you both deserve to be happy, and together I know you will be. You love herdon’t you” Uma added “of course, more than anything” I replied, “so go for it,follow your heart” she encouraged.

Y/n’s POV

Uma had told me Harry wanted to see me down on the beach, asI walked down I thought about what my life is going to turn out to be like,will I be like my mother? Will Harry and I stay together? As I got closer tothe beach I saw hundreds of little candles all lit up in a row leading to theold shed with all the boats in, the place where Harry had encouraged me to gosailing with him. As I walked round the corner of the shed I saw Harry stoodleant against the wall of the shed, his signature red coat placed on the sand,with is hat and hook on top. “Harry?” I said softly, he turned and smiled hisbeautiful smile at me, coming closer and kissing me gently. “hey” Harry saidback after pulling away from the kiss. “What’s all this?” I asked referring toall the candles and rose petals scattered around the small blue wooden shed.“It’s for you” he grinned, looking down at the hard work he clearly had put in“do you like it?” he asked looking back up at me, locking eye contact “I loveit” I giggled in response. “So, Y/n, there’s uh- something I want to ask you”Harry said, I nodded gesturing him to go on. “I- I’ve loved you since I firstever saw you on my first day, I know that’s sounds all cliché and love at firstsight doesn’t really exist, but for us, well I guess it does. The first momentI laid eyes on you, something changed in side of me, I think it was my heartfeeling this strange feeling for the first ever time, that feeling is calledtrue love. I could not ask for a better best friend and girlfriend, I don’tthink I could last a day without you, you truly mean the world to me so…” Harrygot on one knee and pulled out a little box from his pocket. I coveted my mouthin shock, was this really happening. “Y/f/n will you marry me?” he asked. Everypositive emotion known to man hit me like a ton of bricks, Love, Happiness,joy. Tears began pricking at my eyes from sheer happiness. “Of course I willmarry you” I answered, Harry’s smile bigger than I ever imagined. He placed thering on my finger, it fit perfectly. He then stood up and we shared a long andloving kiss and a warm embrace.

End of flashback –Y/n’s POV

Today was finally the day I was marring my true love.Everything was perfect, beautifully organised with the help of Uma. We had persuadedfairy godmother to help us get the pirate ship sailed over to Auradon for thewedding, it was decorated with candles, flowers and very Pirate and Polynesian themedto represent both and Harry and I. The bides maids and grooms men were dressedin pirate type clothing, but a bit more formal thanks to Evie’s help. They alsohad red orange lays on. Evie had made my dress and it was stunning, I beautifulcream coloured dress with a muted orange sash round the waist. My long (Y/h/c)was loosely curled and flowing down my back, my makeup rather natural just theway I usually did it. As something borrowed, something blue and something old,my mother had given me the necklace she wore to return the heart of Te Fiti. Somethingnew, was a ring that everyone on Uma’s crew had, “you’re a part of Harry now,so you’re a part of the crew. Welcome to the family” Uma smile after placingthe ring on my right middle finger then hugging me.

Mals, came into the room me and my brides maids were gettingready in. “wow Y/n, you look amazing” she exclaimed before hugging me, shepulled away. “It’s time” she said with excitement evident in her voice.

Standing at one end of the else, I looked down to see Harry,in his typical pirate get-up, but a little more formal, and his trademark redleather jacket, and the red and orange lay round his neck. His smile biggerthan I have ever seen it before. God he’s beautiful.

A soft piano melody begun playing, my grandfather, ChiefTui, was giving me away. I linked arms with him and slowly began walking downthe else which was covered in orange rose petals and palm leaves. As I reachedthe end, my grandfather kissed my cheek and I went to stand with Harry. Once withhim I held his hands I mine and smiled followed by a tiny giggle. I can’tbelieve this is actually happening. His eye a little teary and his cheeks asoft shade of red, he looked so happy, which makes me happier.

Skip to vows

“My dearest Y/n.” he begun in his think Scottish accent thatI’ve grown to absolutely adore. “I don’t think I could have got any luckier,when I was first told I was coming over to Auradon, I didn’t really want to.Thank god I did. Because if I hadn’t come here, then I would still be stuck andcompletely lost over there. You found me Y/n, you found the true me. My goodside, the person I truly want to be. I saw you and instantly I was struck. Everythingchanged. Like lightning. You are everything I ever wanted and ever needed. You completeme. And I know that while I’m with you, and while you’re safe and well, nothingcan be wrong… because to lose you would break me, in a way I don’t even want toimagine. I promise to forever protect and care for you. As long as I have you,there will never be a day where you won’t feel loved, or appreciated, or beautiful,or cherished. Be my love, you are so beautiful, so appreciated, so cherished,and most of all, so incredibly loved. I will truly and forever love you with everythingI have. Y/f/n, I love you” Harrys words flowing so smoothly, I believed everyline, he would never hurt me and wound never hesitate to protect me. I’m somadly in love with him. My turn.

“Harry Hook, where so I start. From the moment you steppedout of the Limo on your fist day here, you took my breath away, and you never failedto continue doing that up to this very day. I could have never asked for abetter person to fall completely and madly head over heels in love with. I wantto run away, just you and me, take me to Neverland. I’ll take you to Montunui,we can explore the world together, that all I want to do because as long as wehave each other, I know nothing can stand in our way. You have made me thehappiest girl in the world, I know that sound totally clichébut it’s true. Your one of a kind and the only person I need in my life. If youhadn’t come onto my life I probably would still be terrified of sailing, letalone know everything there is to know about it. You guided me into my passion,well my two passions. One; sailing, and two, the most important one; lovingyou. Let’s spend the rest of our lives together, sailing the world together, discoveringnew things together. Doing whatever. Together. I love you more than you willever know, and I can’t wait for our happy ever after to begin.

After the ‘I do’s were said and the party had come to itsend, it was tie for Harry and I to set off and sail the world together. Ourdream was finally coming true, and we had each other making it even better. Forbetter or for worse, I will always love him, “hey” Harry came up behind me,wrapping his strong arms around my waist and nuzzling his head into my neck. I smile,continuing to look up at the stars. I placed one hand on his that was restedround my waist and the other hand ran gently through is dark brown hair. “Youalright Mrs Hook” my smile became wider at his comment, I felt his chuckle onmy neck, I turned around in his arms, they still were wrapped protectively and lovinglyaround my waist. I wrapped my arms round his neck, he bent down a little to myheight and passionately kissed my lips, I pulled away and smiled at him, “I’m perfectlyand completely alright Mr Hook” I giggled at him, his cheeky grin plastered onhis face. “So where to first m-lady” he asked. “first stop, Neverland”

[clan-fuildarach]

I'm not sure if you talked about it more before I started following your blog, but I'm pretty curious about the origins of your dragon characters tbh. Like, are they like ur OCs you had in a big story you had in your head or smth that you adapted to write as dragons in a separate AU-type thing? I'd love to hear more about it or be directed to a place where you've written about it somewhere.

well you’re mostly right! many of my characters here (luke rúth delta neven john mikaelxandra rezann leo) are just au versions of characters i already had. and it’s less a big story i had in my head and more a 10-year project that’s over 2 million words long and 2 rewrites deep atm - i’ve written eleven or twelve books (it’s subjective) and done countless more au stuff and exploratory stories that just get into anatomy and worldbuilding and stuff like that (so like... stuff that would be really boring to anyone but me). i’m not saying any of it is any good or worth reading, but it sure is a thing. 

i stopped incorporating my old characters into fr dragons in 2015 so any dragon i’ve made since then is original to my fr lore (which started off as a fantasy version of my other story but then diverged wildly off into completely different territory) 

i do have a blog dedicated to it but it’s password locked and i’m not giving out the url. i do have a blog supposedly dedicated to my personal creative work over at @fuildorcha but it’s been a while since i posted there (but i might start posting soon since i’m starting to get back into writing and planning and what have u) 

uhh i’ll do a really basic bare-bones plot summary and a quick intro paragraph to where each character comes from under the cut here so u all know where i’m coming from 

basically it’s a first-contact story? but with alternate dimensions/parallel universes rather than straight-up aliens. each one of the characters listed above (except for the last 3) belongs to a different dimension, and the story is basically about how they meet. and there’s the added uh emotional poignancy in the fact that the first 6 of them are not human and are supposed to be the only ones of their kind, so basically each one has lived a life expecting to never ever meet another like them, to only have humans for company. but obviously they do meet. and they end up doing some really dumb but also heroic stuff while also liberating a bunch of people from oppressive regimes. they also learn that maybe the real treasure was the friends we made along the way 

the main character is luke who is fond of making these super unhelpful crusades against those he considers to be his allies but really no one wants his help because he just makes things worse like constantly, as a habit, without really caring about consequences. he’s a jerk of course and permanently fucked up after the death of his sibling way back when. but one day he makes a Big Terrible Mistake that killed a lot of people, irradiated a major city, and would have resulted in him being imprisoned for basically the rest of his life and also introduces the concept of laser superweapons to humanity (this can only go well lmao) and - as a knock-on effect - the ability to break the dimension barrier. like he really fucked up. but instead of being sent to jail he gets forcibly drafted into the service of a government scientist, emma, who gives him an ultimatum: work for me for free and get exploited endlessly, or rot in jail for the rest of ur life. his treatment at the hands of his captors (who pretend they’re on his side, they’re very evil) results in a vengeance crusade on his part that sets off the whole first-contact chain of events. he lives in a world like ours, except that there was a rebellion against the british monarchy a couple hundred years ago. on the run from the law he meets a very lost and very confused stranger who doesn’t speak a word of english and is also rúth. the two of em fall in love. aw (luke is still nonbinary and given the chance would use ‘they’ pronouns here too but i wanted to make the world like ours as much as possible and luke hates standing out in any way so he wouldn’t want to use a non-standard pronoun set. so he just uses the set that matches his name) 

john comes from a radically different dimension, one where the monarchy spread and basically controls the entire planet. but, unsatisfied with that, his queen alexandra began colonising other dimensions and stripping them of their resources (and thus ensuring that her own home is the best-equipped and richest and all that). john is the queen’s weapon, it’s his job to “quell dissenters” which is a nice way of saying that he goes in to contested areas and massacres everyone. but he is beginning to doubt his role and the ethicality thereof, and is very curious about the numerous blank patches in his memory that seem to coincide with every previous occasion he entertained potentially treasonous thoughts. seeking to put an end to luke’s campaign against her, emma reaches out to the monarchy to ask for aid. the queen sends in john to do his normal job but things don’t go as planned. john switches sides and becomes basically the most wanted person in the universe.

rúth’s dimension is inextricably linked to john’s - it is the victim of the monarchy’s first attempts at extra-dimensional colonialism. the monarchy fucked up a lot back then, before perfecting its technique, and the battle between rúth’s predecessor and john’s predecessor over the territory completely destroyed the entire mediterranean, turning it into a desert. rúth’s predecessor lost the fight and the monarchy took root in france and spread south. but an unintended consequence of the battle were the chemical reactions in the soil and atmosphere that led to the formation of dye deposits - the only ones of their kind in any dimension. if not for them, the population would have left the desert, but they hung on to mine out the dyes. rúth lived a relatively peaceful normal life until accidentally stumbling through a monarchy portal into luke’s world. with a french-english dictionary and a lot of sign language, luke manages to communicate to rúth that he needs help to fight against john

now ok, neven comes from a parallel version of rúth’s world where the monarchy lost the big battle, but the desertification happened anyway. neven’s people sought safety in the monarchy dimension and took on the mantle of being imperialist jerks. eventually a bunch of bad shit happens and the dimension becomes uninhabitable, so they do the most logical thing and build a space ship to live on. neven is there the whole time, being treated as the avatar of god and the champion of their race etc etc. in the early 1900s, the space ship breaks into a new dimension which it allies with, and neven finally meets another one like them. the two never get a chance to communicate much, but they fight together for about a hundred years and neven falls in love. aw. eventually one of the space ship’s oldest allies - the monarchy from john’s world - gets absolutely destroyed via mysterious circumstances. commander of the space ship, rezann, decides to take the opportunity to cannibalise the monarchy’s remains and execute anyone who might attempt to resurrect it - this includes john.  

delta (for it is he whom neven loves) is literally the parallel version of luke. like they are the same person, genetically identical, but their dimensions veered off very early on, so due to the two of them growing up in completely different circumstances, delta bears almost no resemblance to luke besides appearance (and then only barely). delta comes from a wonderfully idyllic background - sent to a workhouse when he was young, he was part of a rebellion that saw the workers take control and basically start their own little settlement. this prospered for hundreds of years, with delta as its guardian, until that world’s monarchy went to war. the men of the village were hit by the draft and delta decided to go with them to keep them safe. unfortunately he was discovered as Not What He Seems by the king and instead of helping his settlement, he inadvertently causes it to be wiped off the map by revealing its presence (and the presence of its pagan, blasphemous population) to the king. delta gets mind-wiped, forgets his real name, and gets thrown onto the front lines to fight beside neven. later - years and years later - he gets in some real bad shit, gets basically everything taken from him, and would probably die alone and in pain, but he gets rescued. he gets a happy ending 

leo comes from a completely different unrelated story, he’s a frustrated IT technician working in a computer shop who basically becomes the plaything of the gods. but there’s no real plot to be had, i just liked his character enough to move him over into fr at the time (2014). fr!leo has had way more character development than og!leo who i don’t really write about any more