#but i know some ppl have it harder than me obviously so thats my motivation for not feeling like its the end yet

[oddvanilla]

When you stay on your phone to distract yourself from being upset but it actually makes you even more mad lmao

[kendev]

⋆｡°✩ dev log 03 ✩°｡⋆

updates and general rambling under the cut!-

ok. havent updated in a bit but talking to myself. yeah. im very good at that. reminder that there's no rush to progress and things take time first of all Carly!

but anyways. first!) i've gotten a lot more character designs and motivations fleshed out but i can admit some routes definitely have a bit more poored into them than others atm and thats something im trying to fix. not force. just... add a lil something more yknow. bcuz there ARE many pieces of media like that where you can tell that a creator just had more care for one thing than the other and I dont at any point want to come across that way bcuz i do genuinely love all these characters, and I think they each deserve to be enjoyed and loved by someone that isnt just me! so I want other ppl to feel the love as well through ALL routes! not just a "Oh you can tell these handful of characters are the creators faves" So essentially not favoring certain kids over others like good parents would lol

secondly) I've started properly separating routes in different documents... lol. I'll be honest I had EVERYTHING. and i mean EVERYTHING all stored in one document. Names, notes on things, character bgs, clothing inspo AND the actual routes all on one big document. at some point i was like ok there needs to be some separation here. OBVIOUSLY. so I did that, and now i'll be able to actually say like "Oh Reapers Route is now currently at _thousand words making good progress there :)"

but yeah. theyre separated by:- -a document just for writing tips/advice/things to remember -a document just for character profiles (what they like, family bg, info like that etc etc.) -a document just for route plans. like an outline ig. briefly with notes like ok I want X character to have X arc, and X happens and progresses enough until they get to X -separate routes for each character in a diff document -and then just a main document to fall back on and compare notes or there's a few extra things there. like for example, im still not sure on some names. In this doc there's a section just for me to look at a long list of names i've saved to mull on later. :)

it's kind of still. a lot. but ideally more organize,, for me at least

third) lost contact with that one project manager i'd gotten </3 I still have their info yeah but ig due to the fact that there's not much I've given them info wise theyve left me to my own devices (which makes sense(?). but thats fine. I may reach out again when things are a little more fleshed out i suppose. I definitely do run off of compliments and people expectations unfortunately, so having ppl interested and asking things is what keeps me working. im not as much of a 'do it yourself for yourself satisfaction person anymore, I need outside sources to drive me so that I can feel like I'm actually leaving a proper mark on something

WHICH. I know is not good, but that's been my process while working on the game and most things. -I share a little tidbit (but not too much with friends or mutuals. -They express interest or tell me abt which characters they feel drawn too -I feel good and want to keep working harder! its like that and lastly) concerning things going on with the relationship between creators and other ppls entitlement to their OCs (which i will not name directly), that is something ive talked abt in depth in private but I would like to at least put this down somewhere one day in case anyone finds it. Please do not treat my OCs like they are yours. its much different as a small indie creator to have characters than to claim a character from a big company game or series is your OC. I'd feel so bad if people overlooked what I say and cross boundaries

[marshmallowprotection]

i fell asleep lmao but im still mad so

lately i've been working on this united nations model that my school has every year for those in high school, and since last year we were virtual this is my first time ever participating and im like, expected to work with ppl who are both older than me and who've done this before and that uh scares the shit out of me, i hate this project with a burning passion and would rather fall from a window and be hospitalized for six months than participate but unfortunately my windows have iron bars so i can't jump from it and have to do it. as if that wasn't bad enough when the project was first announced my name didn't appear on the list so i couldn't know what i had to do and even now i have no way of communicating with my "president" or get any feedback from him. very fun. but i've been doing my best and although i've procastinated a bit i still turn everything in in time and according to my teacher i've done an excellent work and only have to fix one thing. this one thing has been breaking my brain bc i have no idea of how to fix it and im supposed to turn it in this monday. my mom has been helping me with the project and for some reason decided to become my agenda and tell me when im supposed to do everything without even bothering to ask my opinion. this naturally means that she expects me to be working every single day and gets mad when i take a break. yesterday i spent hours trying to fix that thing but couldn't find what i was supposed to put instead and i got kinda stuck and that was beginning to make me cry so i decided to stop for the day and try again today.

and what did my mom do? she told me that i couldn't use my ipad anymore for an indefinite amount of time bc "it was distracting me and making me act stupid" 🧍‍♀️ she also gave me the ever-so-reassuring "you've done this multiple times before" bs that pisses me off more than anything bc this feels very obviously much more serious and is far more complicated than any other investigation project i've ever done and sjshxjahdsjnxsn i can't stand her and her stupid ass help that doesn't help in the slightest

so yeah 👍 thats the drama this time. sorry if it doesn't make any sense im not rlly thinking rn

Yeah, I'm sorry to say this but your mother isn't doing the right job in this situation. Taking away things from your child doesn't make them work harder. It just stresses you out and makes you feel like you're in the middle of a disaster zone. You deserve to have free time, even if you're supposed to be working hard. You can't be working all day all the time. You'd suffer from burnout and make yourself exhausted and sick to your stomach. That's not going to make you a better student. That's going to frustrate you. She's not helping. She needs to learn that this isn't how you motivate your children.

As far as your assignment goes, it's my best advice that you talk to someone else on the team. If you can't talk to them, talk one more time to your teacher. It doesn't mean you're stupid if you ask more questions. It means that you're able to understand what you need to do. If that fails, Google is always a Godsend. Don't be afraid of trying something new for the first time this way, it will be okay. You just need to break down your tasks into parts and do that one by one. Don't listen to your mother about how to do your work, you know what goes best. Just ensure that she thinks you're listening to her so she doesn't do worse again.

[therewas-a-girl]

I was watching s1 of Arrow, bc it's on Netflix here (FINALLY) and... what happened to Laurel? She was so good in s1. WHAT WENT WRONG AFTER S1???????

Short answer - the writers think women are interchangeable, not really deserving to be treated as people and, really its easier to replace them (with the added bonus of the story they can squish out of their gruesome deaths), than say, spend brainpower to write them as humans, and allow the audience to built connections and empathy with them… and not just the whoever they are there to prop up. 

long answer… is longer, and a mess:

one of the ideas i have - one of them - is that, the whole idea behind the end of season one was that tommy’s death would affect both oliver and laurel. oliver by getting him not to kill anymore and laurel by being the ‘tragedy/loss/pain’ that would push her into becoming the Black Canary. 

(this is my intuition just from the way their journey was going, like, by following the narrative etc, and by knowing how these writers think, a little. like, what to them is the birth of a hero: death, loss tragedy. it bores me, generally, sure, but i know it when i see it.) 

i dont know what happened, but they seemed to change their minds - maybe halfway. or after s1 ended?… idk. and started casting calls for the Canary. tore laurel down to the freaking bone - and used her character to prop other characters, general at the expense of her development. or rather, her opportunities to bond the audience with her, build sympathy for her. because all those opportunities were used to build sympathy for whoever she was facing against.

(seriously, they gave laurel in s2 some emotional reactions to stuff that are so far from human emotions, i can hardly conceive of it. and im not talking about her cleaving at sara or oliver by the way. i think she had all the right in the world to feel all the rage in the world. im talking about how all her emotional reactions were framed as wrong/bad/over the top! as opportunities for oliver to act like a self righteous dick, his behavior framed by the story as ‘right’ and ‘just’. 

(i will never be over the fact that he said, to her face and utterly unironically, ‘i am still standing here, i have loved you half my life but im done running after you’ like it was an accusation, while she, and everyone else, had just found out - in laurels own home… at a dinner he was not invited to… - that he and sara were boning. like… “im fucking your sister, dropping you neck deep into the shit that is one of the most gruesome deja vu experiences in the history of ever, but how dare you be angry, you dont know whats happening in my life right now!!!! that’s obviously more important than YOUR feeling!!!”   meanwhile, im standing here o_O ???? is this walking dick foreal????), 

laurel framed as selfish? opportunity for her to apologize to sara instead of, idk, both of them forgiving each other for the fucked up things they did to each other???

[lmao i still laugh my ass off at how, in needing to frame sara less negatively for the whole ‘sleeping with her sister’s boyfriend’ thing - a gross device they used in s1 to to build sympathy for laurel; the writers did a whole ‘i saw oliver first’ thing with her, like that somehow means sara ‘planted the flag on him’ and that means something??? or gave her some sort of ‘get out of jail free card’ that essentially turned LAUREL in the boyfriend-thieving sister. LMFAO  how the tables turned!!! 

one of the most gross things arrow has done is the relationship between sara and laurel and the way they were pitted against each other - with oliver at the center. and im not saying that’s how i think of it - i like to think their issues went deeper and had fuckall to do with oliver’s dick, but that’s how the show framed it]. 

like, if there were scales, laurel would always be put on the lower one - you could tell they didnt respect her character much, because they always sacrificed it to make someone else look better. using laurel as the ‘bad guy’ to buy empathy/sympathy for some other character?) 

so, what went wrong? 

im fucked if i know. 

maybe nothing. plenty of people love laurel the way she is. including me: beautifully fucked up and flawed and, this is my idea, angry as fuck but still good. or trying to be. or maybe this is my version of laurel. as i have a version of all the characters i love - essentially everyone on the show, with the notable  exception of merlyn. 

maybe s2 was meant to be laurel’s ‘island’ - because according to arrow thats the only way to birth heroes. 

fake, that sounds. but okay. 

or maybe they thought nobody liked laurel and she wouldn’t work as the black canary anyway. so her replacement was premeditate, her journey, as some say, only a fulfillment of contractual obligations towards katie. 

or maybe the s2 journey/breakdown had been planned from the beginning?  

i don’t know. 

whatever the answer is, the result is still ??? and fucking stupid.

because the mantel was passed on from sara to laurel. sara gave laurel the proverbial jacket and went on her own way, without harm. having made up with her family, having gained her freedom (and then compromised it), having made up with her sister, redeemed herself in her own eyes and in the eyes of those she loved and who loved her. having started to see herself as a hero, and believe , finally , that she was one. or could be. 

regardless of the reason for sara’s existence, sara was and IS beautiful and so is her journey, because to me, hers is a journey of homecoming and hope.  

BUT - in s3 they killed sara regardless ??? 

even though the ‘hero mantel’ had been already passed…. and here is where i get utterly lost because, why? i dont know. i honest to god dont know.  these people put two canaries on our screen but couldn’t keep them there? neither one can live while the other one survives, apparently? there was absolutely no need for sara to die - and the shameful way she did die - NOW THAT’S WHERE I START GAINING INSIGHT - because it exposes the true nature of the writer’s hypocrisy and reasons: a woman who said the iconic line ‘no woman should suffer at the hands of men’ was murdered by a girl being controlled by a man to get TO another man, while sara was shoved into a trashcan and then a literal fridge.

this ^ is where it starts to get transparent.

like, maybe they didn’t try so hard with laurel because, they don’t try that hard with women in the arrowverse in general. 

maybe, they didn’t really know how to write laurel like a person, out of the archetype she was built to be. a woman written by and FOR the kind of people that think its important to give her stuffed bras to puff up her breasts does not bode well for her future.

i would however like to take a moment to point out the fucking hypocrisy of them reinforcing, in dinah, this whole ‘defender of women’ thing that they had going with sara AFTER WHAT THEY DID TO SARA ^^^ !!! they are trying so fucking hard to copy paste the traits of the ‘successful canary’ (whom they still killed) onto dinah, (perhaps even as a way to distance her from the ‘unsuccessful canary’) – but every time dinah says something like that, i cant help but be reminded of sara and what these same writers did to her AND HOW HYPOCRITICAL THAT MAKES HER LINES SOUND, KNOWING WHERE THEY COME FROM. like, generally the reaction i have is  -

WITH YOUR FUCKING VILLAIN MUSTACHE! 

I SEE YOU!

ps: i do not like the trend i notice that heroines are more easily accepted as heroines in arrow, when they mirror Oliver’s journey to heroism.  sara did; then her latest reincarnation - dinah - mirrored sara’s. (they tried to do it with Laurel, Felicity. in a kind of way even with diggle - though that might be a stretch)  it’s one of the reasons, i think, that sara and dinah are more successful with the fandom? they fit the mold more easily. easier to box in, pin down. their reasons, internal pushes, are easier to grasp - because they mirror the hero’s. and the hero gets plenty of exposition, and we are also basically programmed to empathize with him.

while its seems harder for people to accept that other kinds of journeys for women - not because it is harder, but because then they’d have to figure out the internal workings of these women who are DIFFERENT from the hero. people would have to really THINK about it, and generally, i find that’s not a natural inclination , when it comes to the internal worlds of people who are not the white male (presented as straight despite various queer!baiting flags) hero. 

There are other forms of journeys, motives - that would be just as brilliant as Oliver’s - or generally the ‘tragedy-born’ hero’s. And that would fit the personality of the characters better, individualize them more, make them stand out on their own. Like Laurel’s need to do good, her disappointment with the system and want to fix it, keeping a different moral code from the others. Felicity’s plain need to make an impact, do something with her life, just because. No need for ‘dark arcs’ cause that’s just how she was born as. 

But that’s a journey that would require energy to absorb, something one would have to figure out for themselves, whole watching, oftentimes even making it up, imagining it. and yeah, most ppl just dont bother.