#but instead you come up with the most fucked plot point to resolve it

[byebuck]

we get over 100 pages worth of bella and edward in love and banging and bella outwardly expressing to both us and edward that this is what’s stopping her from wanting to be turned - something she’s been so adamant about since twilight! - and yet smeyer’s view of a happy ever after to destroy the humanity of her characters (and not just bella) and for her to endure a gruesome pregnancy and have them become teenage parents. something they obviously didn’t want. something they’re now stuck with. this is not happiness for them! for bella! for edward! for jacob! FOR ANYONE!!!!

why would you inflict more terror on your characters? you can have conflict without the pregnancy mess; you can resolve the treaty conflict without jacob imprinting; you can turn bella into a vampire and even delay that WITHOUT A FUCKING PREGNANCY - and instead let her go to college. let us get fluff. let her rework her friendships and have a new perspective on life. let her feel like those things will slip from her and then she realizes after she’s turned that she can still see charlie and renée and jacob and everyone else. you can do both of those things and also get rid of so much of this book and also still have jacob’s pov. but NOOOOO more pain, more unnecessary conflict and predatory plot points, more terror and nightmares and suffering and stereotypes and racist writing because we’re stuck in smeyer’s narrow-minded universe

[mbbmz]

Can’t look away from you!

Shinichiro x reader

I swear I have so many drafts for y’all requests but I’m too lazy to finish them T-T (sorry if I made any spelling mistakes, English isn’t my first language!)

Warnings : semi public sex, oral sex (m receiving), porn without plot

He was trying, really, really hard to focus. But it seemed like he had been tightening the same damn bolt for the past ten minutes. Why, oh why did he think it would be a good idea to take his girlfriend to his shop? His girlfriend who has been so clingy and affectionate since early in the morning, so much he couldn’t help but ask her to keep him company.

Oh was he regretting this decision.

You were looking at him with those eyes. Those you had when you wanted something. And he knew exactly what.

But he couldn’t give in now. He was supposed to be working. Beside, anyone could come in at any moment! His friends, his brother, who all chose his shop as their hangout spot, or even any customer!

In the span of ten minutes, you went from leaning against a wall, to sitting next to him, to sitting on his lap. He was hard, and you knew it. You were just playing with him at this point, waiting for him to break, to lose the battle against his morals and his decency.

And there was a limit to what a man could take, and you made him reach that limit when you laid down, resting your cheek on his thigh.

His resolve crumbled, leaning back as he let out a loud sigh.

- "Fuck… come here, babe…"

You smiled in victory, watching him unbuckle his belt. He looked around one last time, pressing his lips in a thin line, before taking out his semi-hard cock.

You smiled, immediately wrapping your hand around him in a firm grip. As much as you wanted to savor it, even you knew that it had to be done quick.

You looked up at him, noticing he was still looking around nervously, as if someone might magically appear into the shop. Your free hand found its way to his chin, gripping it so he would look at you instead. He let out a silent gasp at the sight, that devious smile stretching your face as you started pumping his shaft in a tantalizingly slow movement.

- "Eyes on me, love."

You muttered sultrily, giving his blushing tip a slow, sensual lick. God, he was so weak for you. You swore you could feel him twitch from the sight.

His free hand rested on top of your head, fiddling with a strand as if he was fighting the urge to just shove you down his length, while the other was on the floor, trying to support his weight so he could lean back even more, leaving you space.

You wasted no time putting both of your hands to work, pumping him while your tongue was brushing against his tip hastily.

His grip on your hair tightened, his breath shaky and his messy black hair sticking to his forehead from the sweat. This was such a beautiful sight for you, which only encouraged you to pick up with the pace.

- "F-Fuck… just like that baby…"

He said, his voice stifled and shaky in reaction to your lips wrapping around his length. He wanted to keep looking around, looking for eventual unexpected guests, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away from you and your bobbing head.

Fuck, it had to be one of the most erotic sights ever. Your lips stretched around his dick, trying to adjust to his size while tears were starting to prickle at the corners of your eyes. Oh fuck, he might just nut right now-

He didn’t even have the time to give you a warning before he shot his load deep down your throat, making you cough, quickly pulling away as you made him ride his orgasm with your fist.

He stared at you, his gaze apologetic yet lustful as he looked at you, cheeks flushed probably from the performance you put up a few seconds ago.

You glared at him, pushing his shoulder lightly, a slight pout on your face. He chuckled, sheepishly scratching the back of his neck as he sat up straighter.

- "Sorry baby… sometimes you’re just too damn hot, I can’t hold back…"

He caressed the top of your head, his other hand putting his softening cock back in his pants. He helped you sit up, scooting you over him. He looked around one last time, before looking back at you.

- "Spread those pretty legs f’me, time to return the favor…"

[genericpuff]

Looking back on it, Rachel really should have called Lore Olympus something else. It really doesn't seem to want to focus on 'lore' or 'olympus' and would rather be a romance with her self insert and celebrity crush. So many plot points and characters got thrown away for her two characters. It reminds me of Twilight having interesting background characters (Rosalie deserved better) and an interesting supernatural world. Yet Stephanie just focused on the dry ass romance of Edward and Bella.

I mean, the title totally worked in the beginning, the comic just lost the plot after its first season and became more like what you're describing, a weird May December romance about a girl who's only empowered enough to wait until marriage with the first guy she ever crushed on before having sex 💀

And yeah true that, a lot of fantasy dark romances like Twilight suffer from the issue of getting too hyperfocused on the main couple doing stuff and not paying enough attention to the actually interesting stuff going on around them. Though I will say, in Twilight's case, a lot of the "interesting stuff" was grossly misrepresented from Indigenous tribes and beliefs so... maybe it's for the best Stephanie didn't expand too much on it all in the end LMAO

Of course, the same can be said for LO, there were some really interesting plot hooks happening around H x P, but by the time S2 rolled around, all of those hooks got shoved under the bed until it was time to hastily wrap them up for those of us who were waiting to see them resolved. I think the Hera and Echo plotline was one of the worst culprits for that, you can tell in S2 she had an idea for some kind of "double agent" story with Echo where Echo would slowly come around to Hera's side and have to choose between her and the job Zeus clearly hired her for (to spy on Hera) - but then it just wound up skipping all that so we could watch Hades and Persephone play golf with diamonds, go shopping, and fuck around in the Underworld, until Rachel had to suddenly wrap up the entire Hera x Echo story in the most rushed, confusing way possible just a handful of episodes before the end.

LO had a lot of interesting concepts and ideas especially with the added benefit of it being based off myths that many readers were already familiar with, but unfortunately they were in the hands of a terrible writer working for a terrible company that didn't provide her with the resources she needed and could have really benefited from to tell a better story. It clearly needed a more involved editing process, more drafts to work through and scrap and work through again, more time to really plan out the full skeleton of the story, but what we got instead was more like a rushed first draft that spent more time on the bland uninteresting DDLG couple because they were clearly the easiest things Rachel could write about - fantasy shipping scenarios of them talking romantically to each other, making out, and having sex, boom, plot 🥴

[utilitycaster]

You mentioned it briefly a few months ago (but it lives rent free in my head sorry!) that the most popular ship from this campaign has almost only AU fanfics and it's really telling me something about the characters from c3, that there is just really nothing to explore about them.

So here's the thing. I do not think the characters aren't worth exploring! There's been good character work (a lot of which gets ignored, actually, because it's not what many of the people who insist that C3 is their favorite as they slowly turn into a corncob want*; see basically anyone on Twitter about Orym), it's just not central to the plot.

I stand by what I originally said and which was validated at a recent Q&A panel: the cast wasn't told that this was going to be the Moon Plot Campaign (they were just told pulpier and deadlier) and Laura wasn't told that Imogen would be as central a character as she was. So I think we have characters who could have, for the most part, had a character-driven campaign around them, but it became clear relatively early on that this was the Moon Plot campaign and that wouldn't be the focus; and because to get all of his ducks in a row for the Moon Plot Matt had to take a heavier hand with the rails and as a result the party didn't have a ton of bonding time early on because they were always taking NPC missions/being ferried around in an airship with no need for watch conversations, and it's hard to go back and fill in those interactions later, which is why they've sort of fallen out of the habit.

With respect to the ship...the thing is, I genuinely believe it could have been good. The reason I'm not a fan of imo/dna isn't because I think the characters aren't good (well, my feelings on Laudna are documented but I do think Imogen is a great character). It's because, ironically enough, every barrier between them did get removed all too quickly in the service of Cottage Endgame and as a result I think many of the people who wanted that are like "wait...that's it?" Like, the gnarlrock fight fizzled out only for the same conflict to come up briefly with Ishta (swordgate) 70 episodes later and be resolved a day later in-game. When they reunited I was like you know what would have made this good? If Laudna had remained angry in episode 65 and turned Imogen down which Laura 100% expected to happen, because they hadn't talked about this and they were awkwardly trying to deal with unresolved feelings for 30+ episodes and perhaps Laudna actually leaned into Delilah wholeheartedly during that time and realized she had feelings for Imogen after all, while Imogen was simultaneously struggling with that rejection and realizing Laudna was going into a dark place but didn't feel like she could get involved, and they both leaned more (platonically) on other characters and Swordgate was the point where Laudna said "oh no, I'm becoming too much of a problem and I do want Imogen to like me" and the soul anchor felt like a culmination of a deeply felt struggle instead of a quick fix for something that had only inconvenienced her a few times and led to a 20 hour long minor spat at best? If we actually got a fucking slowburn? It would have been great! Turns out if you always go for the instant gratification, it makes for a story without any tension! And now we're watching people who were always clamoring for skipping to the good part realizing that in doing so we skipped all the buildup that makes it the good part. There could have been something to explore. It was not explored.

*I think that there are people who for whatever reason do legitimately prefer Campaign 3 for whatever reasons and are in earnest and this isn't about them. While I don't share their tastes I support them and their feelings; we all have our preferences. This is about the people who are already visibly setting up the groundwork for a dramatic rage quit that will make copious, wildly incorrect use of the term "neoliberal" if the campaign ends with the gods still in place while still insisting this is definitely the best campaign and making absolutely brainless statements about prior campaigns not being as political even though this is the least politically inclined or aware group by a country mile. I think the lesson from the above and from here is that you really cannot have your cake and eat it too.

[lurkingshan]

Random BL Grievances, 2023 Edition

Listen. I was going to be nice. I was going to listen to my better angels. Shan, I said, there is no need to hate, it's all love! Just let it all go! But then my Tay Tawan was cruelly ripped away from me and @my-rose-tinted-glasses gave me inspiration. So fuck it, we ball. Hateration turned up to 11, let's go.

Worst Waste of a Good Start: Jun & Jun

Remember when this show started and it was all about scent kink and extremely horny energy, and then suddenly that all evaporated so we could add a bunch of side plots and do four different love triangles instead? Yeah I'm still mad about it!!

Most Overused Metaphor: Dangerous Romance

Hey y'all, did you know windmills need wind to power them?

Rudest Boy: Lomfon, La Pluie

The audacity of this boy. The chaos he sewed. Look at this scene! Immediately after this he not only plotted a secret date with his situationship's brother, he kissed said brother without consent. He made Tien cry. I may have forgiven your lanky ass, but I sure didn't forget!

Worst Retcon: Naughty Babe

This is not Men in Black and you can't just mind wipe me into forgetting these two already worked through half these issues in Cutie Pie. Not to mention suddenly turning a dog into a CGI tiger!! Thanks to Nat and Max for their service though those sex scenes at the end did help me cope.

Biggest Audience Betrayal: Minato's Laundromat 2

Plot contrivance amnesia! In my painstaking slow burn self acceptance journey that I have spent two entire seasons on. I will never forgive them.

Most Egregious Lack of Threesomes: Only Friends

You put me through all that messy drama and all those teases and I did not get to watch even one (1) threesome? Just a couple of kisses and everybody vacates the pool. I ask you, what was the point of Boeing if he wasn't here to fuck everybody! For shame, Jojo.

Most Undeserved Forgiveness: Eun Ji and Tae Hyung, The Eighth Sense

These two assholes are really up there amongst the worst friends in drama this year. I don't care what Jae Won says, I do not forgive you. Ji Hyun should have kept that petty energy for the both of them.

Biggest Character Letdown: Sand, Only Friends

Eternally pouring one out for the rougher, more cynical version of Sand who was wielding a baseball bat in the trailer. I don't know what happened to you, my guy, but you live on in my heart.

Most Baffling Dropped Plot: Thyme, A Boss and a Babe

Why was Drake even in this show? What was the point of all that plot set up in the first half if they weren't going to resolve it?? Why wasn't Thyme the mole??? Make it make sense.

Most Obvious Lack of Purpose: Between Us

How on earth did this happen? You have literal years to write a compelling sequel story for a wildly popular side ship and this is all you can come up with?! Aside from a couple nice sexy scenes at the start, this show really had no idea what it was about and nothing interesting to say.

Biggest Waste of Everyone's Time: Absolute Zero

New Siwaj, you're getting the triple dose on this list!! And AZ is your biggest sin this year because what the fuck was this! You had all that money, all that talent, all that time at your disposal, and this is what you did with it. UWMA squad was lined up to see you finally do another masterpiece, and you delivered this mess instead. What is going on with you, sir, I feel it's time for an intervention.

Worst Derailing of a Good Show: Step by Step

You didn't think this post was ending without me mentioning this disaster, did you? An all-time cautionary tale in how to waste a good slow burn. Jeng deserved better and so did we.

[fosermi]

since animation is literally your major, is there any details from the Sonic X Shadow generations clip we saw today that you might want to talk about?

OK SO major spoilers under the cut for the preview of the Sonic x Shadow gen prolouge

i was WAY too busy fangirling to give a proper analysis BUT when it does come out fully i might just do one, also please take note im still in my second year of studying to be an animator so these are purely my opinion. for now i can point out a few things that i genuinely want to talk about.

first thing that stood out to me was that 2D-3D style of animation, definitely something i dont think we've seen be done for the franchise before (correct me if im wrong) and it reminds me so much of RWBY in a way. There were some bits that, to me, looked choppy BUT THEN AGAIN those were the parts that needed to be choppy for emphasis reasons, specifically it was at the start where Shadow is having some sort of break down. its obvious from how choppy his movements are in comparison to the smoothness of the rest of the preview that shadow was genuinely shaking. with that 2D-3D style that choppyness looks janky as fuck but its so perfect for conveying how uptight and bottled up shadow's emotions are. its so hard to try and capture what im saying but trust me its there!!

second thing i wanna point out are the camera angles. they shift so much to serve the dramatization of the scenes and its so ✨JUICY✨like i shit you not, i cant stop staring at the different camera angles and going "oooohhh ahhhhh" and trying to rationalize the reasoning for those angles because HOLY SHIT they're so good and they actually do serve a really good cinematic purpose!! its easy for people to get lost in the changing of perspectives and camera angles but this? oh this does it so good that it actually drives the plot FORWARD instead of it seeming like separate scenes mashed together.

third thing I'll point out is the scene color shifts. when doing something cinematic, ambiance is key. so when the scene shifted from this soft and comforting blue hues

to this eerie red so suddenly with our only warning being a slight shaking of the screen??

that made it such a surprise that it gets the viewer on alert!! a good thing!!!

now i can go on and on about the different colors for each scene but let me just touch up on this one scene in specific:

it quickly goes from hopeful gold/good light to ominous black/no light, very contrasting, which can mean oh so many things... most notably; maria's hope vs shadow's resolve.

fourth thing ill touch up on are the frames where shadow runs. specifically the one where he runs out of frame from maria.

we get almost 1 frame of a model and then...

these frames here? chefs kiss, perfect. showing us just how fast shadow really is, so fast that we the light from his airshoes doesnt catch up until a fraction of a second later!!! even the glow in the doorway changes to reflect that short millisecond split.

fifth thing ill point out and its a small little thing thats making me absolutely rabid:

he fucking glows.

and yeah, sure, you can argue that its bounce light, its most probably is bounce light since its under harsh light conditions BUT if that was the case the glow wouldnt be this vibrant of a shade and it would give an aura and not specifically on his markings. just a little thing i noticed that i will get to screaming about when i post this.

last thing i wanna touch up on is the sound effects. they were just so very crunchy and pared up with the animation style?? oh it was delicious!! i have some issues with the lip sync but then again they were trying to go for an anime/western cartoon hybrid style here so its bound to be off on the lip sync.

anyway, thanks for listening to my silly ramblings, its nothing too impressive just a fangirl fangirling. now if you'll excuse me, ill go scream to the eclipse nation about glowing hedgehog.

[nautilusopus]

Do you have any advice for anyone trying to get into writing?

Not really a motivation thing or anything, just for improvement. Your writing has captivated me, and I felt like it's better to get advice from an author that is reachable than reading a ton of articles online regurgitating the same steps.

Aw, thank you, I'm honoured!

Apologies if this is kind of a mess, I mostly went through stuff I come back to a lot that helps me. Also tumblr seems to have removed the ability to do indented bullets. Fucking great.

In General:

When I'm first starting out writing a story I'm excited about, I usually don't do things in order -- I'll instead pick one scene I can see extremely clearly and am super excited about, one of the things that made me want to write the story to begin with, and then build the entire outline out from there to set it up (what needs to happen to set the scene up exactly how I want it to be? How do I justify that stuff? What would happen afterwards that would add to the scene even more in retrospect?) This not only helps keep the energy going for parts of the story that might not necessarily be fun to plan, but will inherently cause you to start building a story that is either circumstantially or thematically building to something. It can be something as small as a single conversation but it should be the bit that you personally want to see realised most strongly.

On that note, people like when they can see foreshadowing! That's what it's there for! This has been said by other people plenty, but I'll restate it here: the audience potentially being able to piece together your twist after a while is not a failure in writing, it means you put information into a story that allowed them to engage with it and conveyed something that made sense.

I personally sometimes (but not always mostly due to laziness and because I do try to approach shit chronologically so I don't have to double back and do massive rewrites, also due to laziness) like to write big keynote moments of character arcs in full in advance once I have the whole plot more or less laid out. That way, I know what's coming emotionally speaking and can have characters start clearly building up to things, do stuff like plant specific phrases that come back in big ways or are recontextualised later on, and it makes the story feel more cohesive as a whole and helps the scene hit a whole lot harder when you do get to it. Like I said though I'm lazy and I also don't like creating more work for myself if I don't have to, and if by chance the story doesn't shake out the way I thought it would by the time I get to that moment then god is it a pain to rewrite that sort of thing.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Mostly I find it helps keep me focused on where it's going. It's a late stage thing though, I don't start doing this until I'm sure I know how the story will be laid out more or less chapter by chapter, which brings me to:

GO BACK AND CHECK IF YOU HAVE A MIDDLE OF YOUR STORY. ARE YOU SURE? GO BACK AND CHECK AGAIN. This is like the number one pitfall I see basically everywhere across any genre, both with fanfiction and professionally (and in movies always winds up manifesting in reviews as "the movie gets kind of aimless after a while/the third act kinda starts out of nowhere after a really slow part). People have an idea for a strong beginning, the rising action and the big dramatic moment when the stakes are raised, maybe a quiet moment in the middle reflecting on all the tension of the plot and how it's reflecting on the characters, a thing that sets off the end, probably an idea how it ends and how things resolve, et cetera -- and they will forget that at no point did they actually create any connective tissue between their plot development points. Travel! Character beats! The actual events in between big beat A and big beat B, no matter how barebones! Go back and check if you've made any!

As someone that writes a lot of heavily character-driven stuff I'm very biased here, but: in my opinion, if you have good, solid characters, they can carry even the most barebones dogshit story because they are the lenses that the audience is experiencing the world from and through, and whose actions are potentially shaping the course of the story, and of course who the reader is getting attached to. Conversely, even the richest, most lavishly detailed world and story is going to land with a thud if your characters aren't any good and don't have any more to them than making various political developments happen, because at that point you don't have a story with different elements interacting with each other to create events and tension, you have a lore wiki, which is not the same thing as a story. Maybe you could use that for a tabletop RPG, but people aren't necessarily gonna want to read it.

RELATED: JRRT was a linguist and historian first and a writer second. Lore is great and all and can help your world feel like it's a living breathing place, but think about if it's a good detail to include onscreen or not, or if it's just there to "flesh out the world". Stop to consider if this actually has a demonstrable effect on the things happening in front of the reader or not, and if anyone would notice if it were removed outright. Can some things be assumed? What might need to be explained?

Keep an eye on narrative voice versus character voice! If I stripped the dialogue tags from your story, could you still tell who was talking? Does everyone just talk like the narration? Like each other? Like you? Everyone is gonna sound like you at least a tiny bit because you're the one writing it, but at least try to keep an eye on how much you're doing that. It can be pretty boring to just listen to one guy talk the entire time across multiple mouths haha don't look at how long this post is getting shhhhhh

Any story (but especially horror, and especially especially cosmic horror), lives and dies by its suspension of disbelief. The rules don't need to be realistic because it is all made up, and they can be any rules you want, and if you establish them clearly then the audience will buy in as best they can because they want to engage with your story on its own terms (or they SHOULD grumble grumble but that's another discussion and not really something the author can control), but then once you've made them you need to stick to them, or when you do break them it should wind up meaning something.

Suspension of disbelief in horror or fantasy can be trickier, especially when it's something weird and the rules aren't even mechanically sound in their own setting. In that case, the important thing to preserve is emotional stakes the audience can buy into, about how this situation might feel to be in, or if there are any things in real life it might feel similar to. This one's more intuitive than you'd think. Sure, you might not know that the veil of reality is flimsy and all it would take to destroy it all is to get noticed by something much vaster than you could ever imagine; but you probably DO know what it's like to be one missed rent payment from losing everything and realising your safety was really all that never sound. I don't even flinch if someone's head explodes into gore in a movie, but I'll always wince and look away if someone has their fingers crushed or their eye pierced, because even though the violence is lesser I can imagine that happening to me and I don't like it one bit!

Horror can potentially struggle with this pretty badly. Unless you're writing a slasher where the point is to watch some dumb teens bite it, your movie won't actually be scary unless the audience can in some way feel endangered, and they won't be able to do that if what is going on is too disconnected from anything a human could experience. Writers tend to get fixated on making a Really Gross Scary Thing(TM) or Biggest Evilest Threat Evar(TM) and assuming their job is done.

There's no one right or wrong way to do something, but be aware that sometimes things tend to come up in stories a lot for a reason. The tools you have are just tools. Complaining a story has tropes in it is like complaining a tree is made of wood.

That said, if you're thinking of your story entirely in terms of which tropes you want to use, it may be time to take a step back and think about what you actually want to accomplish rather than mushing the same paste into the same holes for the 800th time (more on that later).

Dialogue. If it's something you struggle with, remember that chances are you're a person that knows how to talk, and so you inherently know how to create dialogue. The biggest pitfall I see is people overthinking it trying to "Write Dialogue in this Story" rather than just typing an idea the way they know inherently that it would be typed. If you wanna try and capture a much different voice, spend time listening to people -- and I mean really listening. People double back, correct themselves, trail off, change their train of thoughts in the middle, do more or less of these things when they're in a certain emotional state depending on their personality.

Frankly I'd spend time listening to real people anyway. Spend too much time online and characters wind up sounding like Twitter threads, or worst case scenario you wind up with perfectly articulated ideas and Therapy Speak. A character might not have the vocabulary you, someone who has been online for eighty to ninety years (est) would to convey specific ideas, and not everyone is perfectly self-aware about what they're saying. Someone's probably more likely to say "fuck you I had a bad day" than they are to go "gosh i dislike how much your own success reminds me of how my own mother held me to impossibly high standards so i have very high rejection sensitivity which is why i'm lashing out". Or, again, if someone does talk like that make it mean something. It could be a good example of someone either being insincere and going through keywords to shut someone up, or someone that's very socially awkward giving a rehearsed speech, and those are all potentially interesting ways to then take a story.

(Sidenote because I see this come up sometimes: Hate to single out a single genre here, but anime and by extent video games but mostly anime is a bad place to learn to write dialogue from -- if you're listening to a dub, they had to translate stuff from Japanese and then make it fit lip flaps on a screen, and if you're watching subs, not only were the subs translated but anime trends heavily towards melodrama and Japanese people typically do not speak that way.)

You gotta know the rules before you can break 'em! Read books. Actual books I mean, not just fanfic. Broaden your horizons. When you start breaking rules it will be because it's what you want to do.

Personal nitpicks, some fandom specific and some not. I'm aware some of these are basic but also you never know who might need to hear this stuff so:

Hentai is not a good place to learn about writing actual sex. It's a great place to learn about sex that is following pure porn rules, in which case go nuts and godspeed soldier, but unless you want your scene to come off as either unintentionally rapey or full of nonsensical leaps of moon logic when you're trying to write an otherwise somewhat grounded setting, you should probably read actual books meant for actual adults about fucking, or pull from your own experiences if you're able.

* This isn't advice but I want it known at this point I've seen at least three fanfics clearly written by a middle schooler that's never fucked before and honest-to-god genuinely seems to think some degree of omegaverse is how actual sex works. So that'll be interesting to encounter going forward. If you aren't committing to porn rules (there's that "the rules can be anything you want so long as they're internally consistent" bit again!) do research is my point.

If you started your character creation with their outfit and can tell me their star sign, bust measurements, the four shirts plus jacket plus socks plus shoes they're wearing, the kind of weapon they can summon, eye colour, hair colour, skin colour, height and weight, their agility score versus their magic score, and their favourite ice cream flavour, and yet you have one paragraph about "personality", your focus might not be in the right place and you are making an MMO character. That's fine for something you're going to be staring at the back of for 200 hours but maybe not for someone you're going to need to live inside the head of. Start with personality, and you can tailor all that fun back cover dossier stuff around who that person is and how it would inform the way they dress.

Bad child dialogue is my biggest pet peeve personally and I will immediately put a book down when I encounter it lol. A bigger portion of people are around children than you think and will notice if you've never interacted with a kid before. Children are not cavemen and do not talk like them. The gaps in their vocabulary tend to come from them having a limited amount of it and adapting new phrases into the few existing frameworks they have. This carries over to their psychology, by the way.

Specific to cosmic horror: you can't just make a Gross Thing, your horrors need actual motivations. Nobody cares how big of a squid you can invent, and going "uhhh it's so scary I don't have to bother can't describe it" can only work so many times and is not an excuse to at least not try to describe something. How it makes the characters feel, what the experience is like, whatever. Now, you don't ever have to tell the readers directly what the motivations of your old gods are, but you the writer should come up with some to shape their behaviour so the readers can see the inscrutable ghosts of clear patterned actions that almost make sense yet remain just outside human comprehension oooooooooo. Also readers can generally tell when that's missing and all you have is Large Squid Scary doing random gross shit so it's not an excuse to skimp.

Stop using hair epithets. Stop using hair epithets. Stop using hair epithets. Stop using hair epithets. Stop using hair epithets. Stop using hair epithets. We have pronouns. We have context clues. We have sentence structures that convey what is going on to the reader. We have nouns. If you are going to constantly refer to your character as The Brunette it better be hugely massively goddamn significant that her hair is brown or it's gonna become clear real fast that you just ran out of ways to phrase things and it's gonna take people right out of the story. If the only way you can think of to describe your character in an intense emotional scene is "uhhh this is the one with the brown hair remember I hope you didn't forget" then that's code fucking red. Stop using hair epithets. Stop using hair epithets. Stop using hair epithets. Stop using hair epithets. Stop using hair epithets. Stop using hair epithets.

And the two biggest bit of advice I can come up with for people trying to improve their craft that I give out every time:

1 Have a point. Have a clearly identified reason in your mind about what you want to accomplish with this story. This will help you get your thoughts in order when you are stuck, it will help you outline the story if you're not sure where you want it to go next, it will help other people troubleshoot with you if you aren't sure how to start solving a problem, it will help you make decisions about what and what not to include to help it feel complete, and it will help motivate you when you start to lose track of why you even started this project. Saying "well it's a Vampire AU and I want to do Hurt/Comfort with an ambiguous ending and a BAMF!Scrongus with Soft!Cromgle" doesn't tell me a damn thing, either as a reader OR as someone potentially trying to help you whip the thing into shape. That's a bit like asking, "How do I write a Cute yet Cool character?" like bitch I don't know it's your story there are a million ways to write this stuff and yes that is a real question I got asked once.

Instead, have an actual, identifiable goal that is personal to you, what you want to write, and what you have to say. That can be anything from "I have a lot of strong opinions about why gender is, across the breadth of experiences possible with human consciousness, a zero sum game that must be internally and deliberately engaged with before one is then able to determine their own relationship to it" to "oh man i love the idea of Mark from Accounts Receivable one day going apeshit and beating Jake from Auditing half to death with an office chair and the fallout that would generate and maybe also someone FINALLY FINALLY asks him for the first time 'hey dude are you okay do you wanna talk'" to "god it'd be so hot if this guy were bent over a pool table drooling onto the velvet and i am going to do everything in my power to facilitate that somehow". Either way, clear mission statement and goal that isn't just telling me what tags you're slapping on the finished product! If you have that kind of clarity of vision it will come across in your piece and resonate with people because it's a complete thought that the work is able to deliberately showcase, instead of just churning out Content™ that fits certain templates that are popular, even if you like said templates. What do you have to say? Why did this idea stick in your brain so hard you had to write it down and tell the world about it? What parts of it especially did you want to convey so badly? Show us!

2 Writing is vulnerability by proxy. Until we get the technology for brain uploading, you are only going to ever be you in your own head with your own thoughts, experiences, biases, and worldviews. If you think you can write something without exposing a lot of really revealing shit about yourself to an audience that notices it, perish that thought now. Quentin Tarantino and HP Lovecraft weren't slick about it and you won't be either. This is neither a bad thing or a good thing, it just is, and whether it affects the work for better or for worse is honestly dependent upon how you engage with that fact. I will say trying to back away from it generally leads to problems (unexamined prejudices showing up in stories, worldviews that it turns out most people don't share going stated simply as fact rather than being supported by the writing around it). It can also lead to a stronger story, though, if you're willing to engage with it. Engaging honestly with what scares you and why, what you find comforting, uplifting, upsetting, et cetera. All of these require vulnerability, and allowing other people to see that, and it's going to happen with or without your consent because you're the one writing the thing, so you may as well make peace with it and lean in. "But what if it's cringe" too late baby most things are cringe and that shouldn't be your focus. You are fighting a losing battle. We are all cringe. But we are free.

Hope this helps. I just know I've left half a sentence fragment in here that I said I'd come back to and then forgot oh god

[warsamongthestars]

I've seen the arguments about "Well characters are flawed and shouldn't take the most logical option!"

Well, yeah. Part of making a character run into conflict, is to see how they will react, resolve, not resolve or make the situation worse.

A watchable character ain't a video game PC.

My problem is "This isn't the rational option that this character would take, based on how they are", AKA, this character was written to have these specific points and they are not following these points.

AKA, the set up doesn't match the action / reaction.

For example.

If you have a scene, where you are placing a puppy into a gift box, because you are preparing for a child's birthday... and when the birthday comes, the puppy just rushes in from off screen with no shown scene as to why...

That, is a problem, because it makes the set up that time was spent on, absolutely pointless.

( That scene actually did occur in the Humongous Game "Fatty Bear", an old old 90s PC click-adventure game. Its set up mishap isn't nearly as bad, because well, limited resources for early 1990s, and it is just a cute point-n-click game for kids. A teddy bear sets up a cake for his friend. Frankly, can't get much cuter XD )

Now on to your favorite part--me going after the TBBshow again.

One of the parts of what broke TBBshow for me, when it comes to reasonable character progression, happened in the first 15 minutes, and then continued to drag until it reached the most unreasonable conclusion.

... And that was Hunter not confronting Crosshair.

When it comes to reasonable reaction, character is a set of guidelines to use for the imaginary object being written. If done right, it looks organic enough that we will follow, discuss or blame the character, and not the writer at their keyboard / wizard behind the curtain. This is part of how suspense of disbelief occurs. This is the magic we all scream about when we say "Oh, the Bad Batch should've done this!" instead of "What the fuck, writers?"

( As you can tell, the magic kinda broke for me in the worst way. )

The prior show sets up that Hunter is very close to his batchsquad. Makes jokes, semi-busts balls, instinctual trusts them both on the field and off the field (and gets extremely antsy when having to trust an unknown element--Echo).

This is a man who, obviously, is very comfortable with his squadmates. If something were wrong, he would be the first to get involved and offer vocal comfort (see Hunter trying to comfort Wrecker when his fear of heights start acting up at the worst time).

So what would you say this man would do, if his very close brother and squadmate, started acting off?

Perhaps a confrontation in private?

As the Sergeant and assigned Leader of Clone Force 99, its not just in his character as a brother, but also his Duty as according to his Rank, to confront as he deems fit, abnormal behavior.

As someone who clearly cares about his brothers underneath the quiet exterior (I refuse to call him stoic--he's anything but), that confrontation would probably be a "hey, what's going on man?"

( Hunter shuts down if he gets yelled at or gets confronted in public. See his reaction to Rex yelling at him. )

That, is the reasonable step, that the set up for Sergeant Hunter from Clone Wars, would likely take. I say likely, because as a fictional character, all his actions have to be written down and you have to sell the reactions.

Its just like roleplay. If you were Sergeant Hunter, what role would you play?

What the TBBshow chose to do instead, is ignore the problem. Crosshair acts abnormal, shooting at kids, AGREEING WITH REGS, and Hunter just sorta shrugs his shoulders and they are at Kamino in the next scene like teleportation.

That sounds more like, the Plot wanted the Batch somewhere, without ever confronting Character action at all.

But you'd prolly point out, they were on the cusp of confronting Crosshair later on in that same episode...

... And then it resolves to thinking "Oh my Gods, Omegawd is IN DANGER MY NEWLY INSTALLED PARENT DRIVERS ARE TINGLING".

That is another trip up.

There is not a character rationality here, where Hunter wouldn't have stomped his foot down and kept his confrontation with Crosshair. Maybe out of actual anger, maybe out of concern turned anger, maybe out of Fear (we don't have enough of Hunter from TCWs to show what he would do--so we'd have to make up something reasonable up).

It wouldn't be rational as the stressed caring brother he is, and it wouldn't be rational as a Sergeant.

Especially for some random kid who... had lunch with them once.

This is because the plot demands that Omegawd takes center stage, and has no skill in writing characters beyond stock and cliche.

So what was being seen wasn't, in fact, character rational at all, but instead, was Plot Demands.

They cannot confront Crosshair, becuase Plot wants him to be Evil.

Hunter cannot do anything but Save Omegawd, because plot demands he be the Parent, even though the plot cannot write parenthood either.

( The way it does write parenthood, gives me PTSD flashbacks, and makes me deeply despise TBBshow's Hunter. Like, I dream putting this asshole through the wringer, and calling him out on every piece of bullshit he's ever pulled. I yearn to beat the shit out of him. )

I have a problem with Plot demanding things when Characters can do so much better, with so much more interesting flair.

So, I don't' really take the "But the character shouldn't act logically!" arguments very seriously, because sometimes, a lot of the problem is the Plotting, not the Character.

So, because deconstruction and destructive criticism is easy and far too common, time to pull in the reconstruction using the elements above.

To reconstruct:

IF WE WANT TO KEEP THE CURRENT PLOT... ... Out of fear of what is going on with Kamino, Omega stows away in the Havoc Marauder when the Batch take their first Mission under Admiral Tarkin.

This is set up already, as she has this habit of A) wandering away from Nala Se, B) causing mischief and trouble, and C) really wants to be apart of the squad she saw grow up.

When they confront Crosshair, it gets interrupted when Omega wanders out to see what's going on, and the Batch collectively go "Oh Shit".

Trying to figure out what to do next, the Batch are tend caught by following Imperal Trooper forces, who were on standby due to the local planet being an Insurgency spot and were alerted when the spy droid was shot.

This results in the Batch's capture, and the resulting escape from the Star Destroyer ends up leaving Crosshair behind when its assumed he died in the resulting escape attempt.

(How this is, can be made up. Like, maybe parts of the ship decompressed, maybe he had a lifesign signal and it got damaged, maybe he got overwhelmed by imperial forces, and it looked like he was shot to death).

This cleans up. A). The refusal to talk about Crosshair in the resulting episodes. B). Having Omega with them that doesn't involve jumping parsecs of space.

IF WE WANT TO TAKE A DIFFERENT TURN, BUT KEEP THE PLOT... ... The reason the Batch became so obsessed with protecting Omega, was because of a secondary / alternative chip installed in their heads by Nala Se in order to protect her assets.

This chip can work in conjunction with the inhibitor chip, but not always. Let's called it the OP, or the Omega Protocol.

In parallel, like how Crosshair Inhibitor Chip worked too well, Hunter's OP Chip worked too well. With alternative effects on the rest of the Batch:

Tech becomes distant from learning, focusing entirely on technical skills.

Wrecker's is actually damaged from the blast he took to the head--so the chip misfires and causes memory issues. He knew hand signs once, but now he doesn't.

Echo's is actually a looping program installed not long after he joined the Batch. This has caused irritation, headaches, and long term memory problems--he can acknowledge that Fives died, but he can't quite muster much about it because of the loopback in his head.

Omega is not aware of this secondary chip.

Crosshair was considered a paid price to the Empire, if it meant Nala Se's assets were protected.

How this would resolve... is a story for another time.

IF WE WANT TO SHIFT THE PLOT BASED ON SET UP...

... The Entire Batch, save Echo, fall under the Chip, resulting in a rival team to Echo and eventually, Rex's Rebellion.

... Omega has always been an active participant with the Batch ever since Echo joined, as she's meant to be Echo's assistant. May or may not coincide with the plot above.

... None of the Batch fall under the chip, because deviancy prevents it, and the show is about them on the run.

... None of the Batch fall under the Chip, because of deviancy, and the show is about them starting / joining the Rebellion. May coincide with plot above.

... The Bad Batch show is actually the sister show of the Clone Wars, and starts when the Clone Wars Starts, and ends just before Anaxes.

... The Bad Batch show takes place entirely between Anaxes and Revenge of the Sith.

... The Bad Batch chips activate, and instead, the show is entirely about their missions with the Empire.

... The Bad Batch chips don't activate, but the show is half them having missions with the empire, only to join the Rebellion later on.

... The reason the Bad Batch don't show up later on to steal the Deathstar plans, is because they inevitably died in action.

SHIFTING THE PLOT BASED ON "RULE OF AWESOME":

... The Bad Batch show actually starts with the Bad Batch being sent thousands of years into the past to face off in the Jedi-Mandolorian Wars, KOTOR style.

... THe Bad Batch show is actually about the Bad Batch entering another Galaxy entirely, marking the first Star Wars show that doesn't occur in the Star Wars galaxy.

... The Bad Batch become Force Users, but are inevitably killed by Darth Vader.

... The Bad Batch Show instead is about how the Bad Batch got frozen and were sent Decades into the Future AFTER the OG Trilogy occurred.

... The Bad Batch Show is actually Echo's dying dream as his cybernetics fail him, leaving everyone wondering if it was real at all.

[alpaca-clouds]

When Trauma Doesn't Have A Point

This was supposed to be a week of writing advice, but I can already feel it being more a "week of venting about certain tropes and things I notice often in writing". However, let me talk about something that I like right now.

I have recently started to rewatch Bojack Horseman. And oh my god, I love this show so much. This is such a good show, in how it deals with mental health and trauma. Especially because it goes into the believe I kinda want to talk about today.

See, media has generally this tendency in writing to write characters in a way that trauma needs to have a point. Like, a character has trauma, so that trauma can be used to progress the plot in some kind of way.

I grew up on anime. And anime (especially Shonen) is really strong with this. Basically, a character has a trauma, then somewhere in the story it gets triggered, then this trauma will serve to have the character realize how important their friends are, and BOOM you get a power up from it.

And don't get me wrong. In some way I do kinda like it. Because yeah, it is fucking carthatic. I am currently really back in my love for Digimon - a show that does this a whole lot with the evolutions. Trauma, crying, confessions of friendship, BOOM, new evolution! And then the music plays and it feels fucking great, if you are watching it.

But of course the real world does not quite work like this. In the real world the likelihood is fairly low that your trauma will lead you to this amazing realization about your friendships - and the likelihood goes against 0 that this realization will give you a new amazing superpower, or will allow the monster companion you very probably sadly do not have, to evolve into a new amazing form.

And here we get back to Bojack Horseman. Because Bojack Horseman goes into this idea of "good trauma". The show deals with this topic through multiple characters, including Bojack, but most explicitly through Diane. Because Diane comes from an abusive family background (like many of the characters in the show) and when she finally admits to being depressed, she tries to write a book about her life story. In her mind, her trauma needs to be worth something, and she thinks that if she writes about it and gets a book it might at least be helpful to others. This goes so far, that she pressures herself into writing this big and meaningful book, that she ends up completely blocked on it.

Instead she gets a silly idea for a YA novel. And at first she does not want to write it, because that is silly, and she is under this impression, that she has to write something meaningful, or else her trauma is useless. And she just cannot admit that this is just the truth.

The real world does not have a nice narrative arc, where a trauma is a nice thing that can be resolved in a wonderful character arc. This is partly, too, because the real world does not have a "last page" (until you die, at least). So there is no moment where the story is "over".

Like, sure, in fiction you have an end to the story. But the lives of the characters are not over then. And technically speaking, there is a good chance that those shonen characters, who are kids or teens, will do get to the point in their adult lives, when the trauma comes back to hunt them. (And, let's face it, very probably with a good helping of the trauma of being made to fight as a fucking child soldier in whatever conflict the show deals with.)

And I... Honestly, I just would love to see more stories in the media out there, where trauma is just that: trauma. Where it is just something that exists, without serving either the plot or the character arc. And where it does not get resolved by the end of the story. Because chances are, that while we can learn to deal, most people will not 100% recover from trauma.

And yeah... The issue is that so many people in real life think like Diane. I find myself thinking like Diane. Feeling like my trauma should be "worth something". But I get that it isn't. Because reality is not fiction and does not follow a narrative arc.

[mayhemchicken-varneyposting]

Varney the Vampire, Chapter 23: That Satisfaction Due From One Gentleman To Another

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Charles sits his uncle down and tells him his secret plan: he intends to duel Varney. The admiral thinks this is a fantastic plan, to the point of wanting to also duel Varney, but Charles asks him not to, and to instead look after Flora financially if anything should happen to him. The admiral agrees; he also agrees to be Charles' second in the duel, and Charles writes out a formal challenge for him to deliver to Varney. The admiral leaves, along with Jack Pringle, on his errand.

While he is gone, Charles works himself up thinking about dueling Varney, including making plans for how to keep him from coming back in case he really is a vampire. He reflects that, based on the appearance of the portrait, Varney must be around 150 years old, and marvels at the thought of what he must have witnessed in that time. Finally, he resolves that his duel with Varney must surely be life or death - either Varney dies, or he does.

Admiral Bell meets with Varney and delivers the challenge. Varney casually insinuates that he will kill Charles if they duel. The Admiral now reveals his own secret plan, which is to offer to duel Varney in his nephew's stead. Varney points out that this is highly unusual, but agrees. He continues to talk as though the death of his opponent is a foregone conclusion, and insists on using swords, which the admiral is peeved by. Varney winds the admiral up a bunch with his usual brand of mannerly insults before sending him on his way.

Oh baby, the DUELS are here. Let's fucking go.

Charles' written challenge to Varney is the most hilariously roundabout way of saying "I want to fight you" I think I've ever read.

"To SIR FRANCIS VARNEY. "Sir,—The expressions made use of towards me by you, as well as general circumstances, which I need not further allude to here, induce me to demand of you that satisfaction due from one gentleman to another. My uncle, Admiral Bell, is the bearer of this note, and will arrange preliminaries with any friend you may choose to appoint to act in your behalf. I am, sir, yours, &c. "CHARLES HOLLAND."

This is so vague. The first sentence of this could just as easily be asking Varney out. (Imagine.)

The admiral is acting slightly suspicious as he accepts the letter; secretly, he's plotting to challenge Varney in Charles' stead. Once he's gone, Charles is left to stew in the pre-duel anticipation, which I imagine is about the same feeling I get when I have to make a phone call.

Rymer seems, at times, almost resentful of the fact that there's a vampire in his vampire story about vampires. It's the way he talks about the characters like they're being silly for believing in vampires, in his story he's written about a world which contains real vampires.

It was strange to imagine that such was the force of many concurrent circumstances, that a young man like Charles Holland, of first-rate abilities and education, should find it necessary to give in so far to a belief which was repugnant to all his best feelings and habits of thought, as to be reasoning with himself upon the best means of preventing the resuscitation of the corpse of a vampyre.

Yeah of course he should find it necessary to believe in vampires in your fucking vampire novel, Rymer, what do you WANT from him.

I'm convinced, by now, that the author has no conception of how long a hundred years is. First there was all that business about rates of decay, in which he was convinced that a coffin sealed in a stone vault for a hundred years would decay away to nothing, and now, well...

"That portrait," he thought, "on the panel, is the portrait of a man in the prime of life. If it be the portrait of Sir Francis Varney, by the date which the family ascribe to it he must be nearly one hundred and fifty years of age now." This was a supposition which carried the imagination to a vast amount of strange conjectures. "What changes he must have witnessed about him in that time," thought Charles. "How he must have seen kingdoms totter and fall, and how many changes of habits, of manners, and of customs must he have become a spectator of."

150 years is only about two lifetimes, it's not like he witnessed the collapse of the Roman Empire. What kingdoms are you talking about? (This gets even sillier if we assume the story is set in the late 18th/early 19th century, as is insinuated at one point, because in that case Charles himself would have been alive for multiple revolutions.)

It would be aside from the object of these pages, which is to record facts as they occurred,

Oh, is it now, Rymer? Is it really? What important facts were being recorded when you went on a tangent about construction projects in Kent? Or when you paused the narrative to soapbox about religion for multiple paragraphs? Or the entirety of chapter 19?

The admiral knew well he could trust Jack with any secret, for long habits of discipline and deference to the orders of superiors takes off the propensity to blabbing which, among civilians who are not accustomed to discipline, is so very prevalent.

This is just...patently not true about Jack. Also further revealing of Rymer's shitty beliefs, which we've seen earlier in the form of the Bannerworth's servants gossiping about the vampire attack to the entire surrounding countryside. This "poor people be gossiping" idea keeps getting worse throughout the story, too.

"Confound the fellow!" muttered the old admiral, "he is well lodged at all events. I should say he was not one of those sort of vampyres who have nowhere to go to but their own coffins when the evening comes."

An interesting statement coming from the guy who keeps getting vampires mixed up with mermaids. Many of the vampire superstitions raised in the story are not true within its worldbuilding, but I like to imagine there are indeed vampires of the coffin-dwelling sort in the Varneyverse, and Varney simply isn't one of them. (Or he is, and that's why he can never get a peaceful night's sleep.)

Now we reach a real treat: Admiral Bell and Varney interacting. You will recall that Varney loves winding people up until they snap, and that Admiral Bell is already perpetually wound up. A conversation between them, therefore, ought to be incredibly entertaining, and it does not disappoint.

"Why, he is a young man just, as you say, entering into life, and I cannot help thinking it would be a pity to cut him off like a flower in the bud, so very soon." "Oh, you make quite sure, then, of settling him, do you?" "My dear sir, only consider; he might be very troublesome, indeed; you know young men are hot-headed and troublesome. Even if I were only to maim him, he might be a continual and never-ceasing annoyance to me. I think I should be absolutely, in a manner of speaking, compelled to cut him off." "The devil you do!" "As you say, sir."

(First speaker Varney, second Admiral Bell)

Varney remains pleasant and good-natured throughout the conversation, which only serves to wind up the admiral all the more. He's also being an annoying little shit, of course, which doesn't help. Behind it all, however, is a fairly serious threat. Varney isn't simply confident in his ability to kill any challenger, he takes it as an obvious fact.

"Ay, with swords; but I must have everything properly arranged, so that no blame can rest on me, you know. As you will be killed, you are safe from all consequences, but I shall be in a very different position; so, if you please, I must have this meeting got up in such a manner as shall enable me to prove, to whoever may question me on the subject, that you had fair play."

Speaking of swords, we get more witty vampire insinuations from Varney.

"I cling to the customs and the fashions of my youth," said Varney. "I have been, years ago, accustomed always to wear a sword, and to be without one now vexes me." "Pray, how many years ago?" "I am older than I look, but that is not the question."

I never get tired of him doing this.

And now...okay, I know the purpose of this series is to keep people from having to read Varney the Vampire, and pasting in huge chunks of text is antithetical to that purpose, but goddammit I just enjoy this next part too much. I'll break it up with commentary so it's not such a huge wall of text.

"Is that all?" "Not quite. I will have a surgeon on the ground, in case, when I pink you, there should be a chance of saving your life. It always looks humane." "When you pink me?" "Precisely."

I love the line "It always looks humane." It really highlights his skewed priorities, and the way he treats the death of his opponent as a foregone conclusion not even worth fretting over.

"Upon my word, you take these affairs easy. I suppose you have had a few of them?" "Oh, a good number. People like yourself worry me into them, I don't like the trouble, I assure you; it is no amusement to me. I would rather, by a great deal, make some concession than fight, because I will fight with swords, and the result is then so certain that there is no danger in the matter to me." "Hark you, Sir Francis Varney. You are either a very clever actor, or a man, as you say, of such skill with your sword, that you can make sure of the result of a duel. You know, therefore, that it is not fair play on your part to fight a duel with that weapon." "Oh, I beg your pardon there. I never challenge anybody, and when foolish people will call me out, contrary to my inclination, I think I am bound to take what care of myself I can."

He may sound flippant here, but Varney really is mostly averse to violence, finding duels annoying and tedious and preferring to run from a conflict whenever possible. I won't say this is a consistent character trait of his, because there are a number of later chapters which blatantly contradict this characterization, but it does come up fairly often, and several times is milked for angst. That's right, Varney is the original tragic tortured unwilling monster vampire, and every adaptor who's ever done that with Dracula owes me 20 bucks.

"D—n me, there's some reason in that, too," said the admiral; "but why do you insult people?" "People insult me first." "Oh, nonsense!" "How should you like to be called a vampyre, and stared at as if you were some hideous natural phenomenon?" "Well, but—" "I say, Admiral Bell, how should you like it? I am a harmless country gentleman, and because, in the heated imaginations of some member of a crack-brained family, some housebreaker has been converted into a vampyre, I am to be pitched upon as the man, and insulted and persecuted accordingly."

"People insult me first," he says, grinning while showing all of his big sharp vampire teeth and constantly making little verbal jabs at literally everyone he talks to.

Varney voice how dare you call me out for being rude when I'm literally neurodivergent and a vampire

"But you forget the proofs." "What proofs?" "The portrait, for one." "What! Because there is an accidental likeness between me and an old picture, am I to be set down as a vampyre? Why, when I was in Austria last, I saw an old portrait of a celebrated court fool, and you so strongly resemble it, that I was quite struck when I first saw you with the likeness; but I was not so unpolite as to tell you that I considered you were the court fool turned vampyre." "D—n your assurance!" "And d—n yours, if you come to that."

Damn, roast him Varney.

After Admiral Bell leaves, so frothing mad that he kicks Varney's servant on the way out the door (uncalled for), he starts to worry about what he's going to tell Charles, now that he's arranged the particulars for his own duel instead of for Charles' like he was supposed to. Yeah, dude, maybe you should have thought about that beforehand.

Next: Varney asks Charles out arranges a not-at-all-suspicious meeting

[snickerdoodlles]

📖

:D ❤

spiritual sister fic to red!! Chay breaks Kim's brain this time with curly hair (why does Barcode look so adorable with curly hairrr).

so that ft jealousy kink, because i adore jealousy/possessiveness kink, where the plot is Chay got talked into doing some music club mentor-mentee thing and his mentor has a crush the size of jupiter on him and keeps trying to monopolize Chay's time hoping he'll start crushing back (but mostly just annoying Chay). Chay isn't oblivious to the flirting, he just genuinely can't understand why anyone would genuinely try to flirt with him when he's dating Kim. obviously???? Kim is the best???? Chay loves Kim and loves dating Kim, who'd be stupid enough to think he'd date them instead???? the only part of this Chay cares about is Kim finding more excuses to visit (read: cling) to him on campus and the constantly refreshed hickies. Chay enjoys that very much.

anyways, ends with curly hair!Chay serenading Kim in public, Kim makes himself into Chay's backpack because he likes him so! much!, and Kim saying something like "bye Dew" to Dew (Chay's mentor) because he's a smug cunt, Dew angrily informing Kim his name is Drive asshole, and Chay going "*blink blink* it is?????" because he never actually remembered the guy's name and somehow his misunderstanding never got corrected. now it's Kim's turn to tackle Chay into a wall because so fucking hot.

idk why this fic got stuck where it did, but it's been stuck for months now rip. maybe i'll return to this one later and figure out how to unstick it or absorb it into something else, but for now, you can read the first scene of this fic under the cut since it makes me laugh;

Kim is about to embark on the most devious and tactical scheme in his whole life.

This isn’t his typical approach to things. He’s always been more of a doer than a planner, and so far his guns blazing approach in life has worked out pretty well for him. But for this scheme, with its potential rewards so sweet, he’s done weeks of recon and meticulous planning until he was nearly sure of his success. He could wait longer, eliminate all variables and refine his plans until things are guaranteed to run like clockwork, but it’s taken ages just to arrive to this point and Kim is low on patience. Sometimes, you just had to jump and improvise during the fall.

Despite his resolve, adrenaline floods his veins that morning as he leaves his shower. He refuses to let any of it show—timing is critical, so he dries his hair and applies his lotion the same way he would any other morning, taking no more nor less time than normal. His motions are smooth and relaxed—he is far too well trained to let his limbs tremble with nerves or anything so pedestrian. An obnoxious alarm sounds from the bedroom, right on time, and Kim’s heart skips a beat, but he forces his expression into something of indifference. The alarm cuts out, Kim just able to make out a faint groan through the door and, with one last roll of his shoulders, because he is the picture of nonchalance, Kim exits the bathroom wearing nothing but a short towel low on his hips and water drops across his shoulders.

He doesn’t actually see Chay as he, very casually, struts past the bed. Another groan emerges from the lump of blankets on it, then an enterprising hand that slaps the bed space Kim usually occupies. Chay whines cutely when his search comes up empty, and Kim forces himself not to smile and keeps on walking to get dressed.

The sheets rustle behind him and Chay grumbles incoherently, but Kim doesn’t turn and opens his wardrobe instead. Every morning, while he’s still fuzzy with sleep, Chay will seek Kim out for a quick nuzzle and a kiss when he first wakes up. If Kim’s not in bed, Chay will force himself upright, rub his eyes and blink blearily at their wardrobe past the foot of their bed, and then—if he has morning wood—seek Kim out for his missed kiss, or—if he’s just sleepy—head for the shower to wake himself up. Kim, positioned perfectly in Chay’s expected sight line, has plans to ensure the first.

“Mm,” Chay sighs, loudly. Kim is so tempted to turn around. But Chay’s extolled the virtues of his back, multiple times now, and while Kim’s not completely sure what he finds so great about it, he’s not above using it to his advantage.

(Besides, the scratch marks have started to fade. Chay could do with a reminder.)

A soft grunt comes from behind him, but Kim ignores it. He hums, some tuneless thing to drown out any of Chay’s soft sleepy sounds, until Chay finally rasps, “Kim…”

The sound scrapes pleasantly across Kim’s nerves, but Kim locks the feeling down and only gives Chay a careless, seemingly half-attentive hum as he looks casually over his shoulder, hips cocked in a way that makes it look like he has an ass but not like he’s trying too hard.

And fuck, is Chay a sight to behold. He’s propped his head up with one hand, staring at Kim with hooded eyes and his shirt sliding up to reveal a sliver of his hips. Chay hums, voice still raspy with sleep, and drags his free hand through his fluffy bedhead before dropping it back down to play with the hem of his boxers and ugh, Kim wants to be the one doing those things to him so bad.

But he has an agenda this morning, one he really wants to succeed, and for that he needs patience and subtlety.

Kim smiles at Chay but then turns back to his wardrobe, pretending to admire his clothing selection while using his peripherals to watch Chay, and subtly flexes his muscles. Chay sighs gustily.

Kim feels more than sees Chay’s eyes sweep up his form. Yes, he thinks, careful to hide his glee. He is so close, just a few more subtle pushes, and surely then—

Then Chay flops back and throws his arm over his eyes with a groan. “Nevermind.”

…On second thought, best not to leave anything to chance.

Kim turns heel and quickly—but casually—crawls onto the bed and into the space between Chay’s thighs. Chay grunts inquisitively, face still hidden, but automatically spreads his thighs to make room for Kim. He’s so good.

“You can’t just say that to me,” Kim complains. Chay moves his arm to squint at Kim, and Kim turns his pout up full force as he settles, half draped, over Chay. “Now I’m curious.”

Chay snorts. “You and your issues with secrets,” he gripes playfully. Kim nods solemnly, turning his pout into a well practiced, soulfully pleading look, and the corners of Chay’s mouth twitch as he tries not to smile. “Like you don’t know what you’re doing.”

Kim blinks guilelessly. “Hmm?”

Chay snorts again, but his hands find the warm skin of Kim’s hips. His towel, already barely hanging on, falls open with the lightest of tugs. Chay’s eyes sweep down, heavy lidded with appreciation.

“Not a single clue, huh?”

“Mm,” Kim agrees, and gives up trying to hide his smile.

A matching smile flashes across Chay’s face and then he’s pulling Kim closer, until their hips push together and Kim can feel the hard chub of Chay’s dick through his sleep shorts, and Kim’s moving from his hands to his elbows and trying not to smile too wide as he moves in for a kiss—

And Chay suddenly rears up to blow his morning breath right onto Kim’s face.

Kim pauses, instincts beating back his lust to keep them from whacking heads, nose wrinkled at the stale smell, and Chay falls back cackling over his prank. He gets exactly two seconds of laughter before Kim kisses him anyways, bad morning breath and all.

Chay laughs against his lips and Kim falls into him. “This is so gross,” Chay complains, even as he holds Kim close and lightly scratches his nails over the fading marks across his back.

“Mm,” Kim hums, not really agreeing, and moves in for another kiss. Kim loves all sides of Chay, from the gross to the clean, and he kisses him without reservation or care. And for all his little exasperated huffs and puffs, Chay yields easily, wonderfully, to the wet slide of their lips. Kim should plan and scheme more often, if it means getting Chay’s thighs around his hips, Chay’s nails scratching through his hair and down his back, Chay’s moans sweet against his mouth.

Just when Kim is about to declare this venture a success and trade in their sweet kisses for something more wanton, Chay’s second alarm goes off.

And. Chay. Leaves.

“Ignore it,” Kim whines as Chay slides out from underneath him, giving up on all attempts to seduce Chay into doing what he wants and finally just begging.

Chay pauses, his fingers frozen over his still-singing phone, a mess of conflicted emotions crossing his face. It’s unfair, for him to try to walk away when he looks so tempting, bedhead tangled in a wonderful mess of curls and his lips wet and red from their kisses. Kim shifts his hips and Chay’s eyes dart to his hard dick. He even moans, a delightful hungry sound that makes Kim want to tackle Chay off their bed and fuck him right there on the floor, but then Chay shakes his head and fully pulls away.

“I can’t,” he says, mournful but insistent, “I have that mentor thing, remember?” Then he shuts off his alarm and shuffles into their bathroom, looking sad and forlorn but not stopping.

Kim flops back on their bed with a curse. Scheme almost a success.

[lenioxoxo]

what do you think abt the way spectra was redeemed?

loving the fanfic btw

Thank you! And ooo I have a lot of thoughts on this

TLDR; I think on paper, his redemption arc was fine, in execution— not so much. The process was okay, but the turnaround was too quick and dramatic to really feel earned and I think he just need the slightest smidge of more time to get it ironed out.

The thing you have to keep in mind about New Vestroia is that it moves an incredibly brisk pace. If you watch very closely then you’ll see that there are a lot of plot points that were raised and either quickly resolved to get it out of the way, or forgotten altogether. Spectra’s redemption is the former, while Ace’s character arc is the latter. So when we enter discussion about how something would theoretically be fixed, you can’t plausibly give an elaborate idea because there just wouldn’t be time for that and retaining everything else that happens in the allotted runtime of the show.

The most obvious explanation for his redemption given via the show is that he came to the realization that he just simply wasn’t strong enough to overcome Zenoheld and Dan, no matter what he did to Helios, and realized that Zenoheld is the bigger threat and therefore it’s better for everyone if he joins up with Dan. We see this in small increments before he joins up with them officially and I think that was a good choice because it eases us into the idea that he might not really be a bad guy later on if he can work with us. So okay, this is fine. But my problem with this is that it doesn’t really force him to re-examine the bad that he did while he was a villain. Had he just bullied a few kids I wouldn’t care, but he was actively torturing (and in the JP dub was implied to have killed) sentient creatures for his own goals. As it is, it seems like he didn’t really care about reforming as much as he just wanted to be on the winning side of things. It would be one thing if he was very open about the fact that he’s only in this for himself, but once he switches sides he acts like he’s a completely changed man and I just don’t buy that with this scenario.

It feels like he gains too much too quickly and doesn’t have that “come to Jesus” moment to warrant it. I feel like there needed to be at least one scene where he sort of unpacks everything he did, maybe one with Drago since he tortured him, and he understands the repercussions of his actions. He wasn’t just being mean to children, he actively ruined (and maybe ended) lives, this is just sort of swept aside.

Now I want to address that him feeling like he has to win this war isn’t the sole factor in him switching sides. While the feeling of powerlessness started this transition, I think the (subtler but maybe more important) nail in the coffin was losing Gus. There are a few wide shots of him alone that really stresses his loneliness, and this does make the sudden shift of him and Mira being best siblings ever make more sense because he would have been desperate for that relationship again. But I do think that everyone being willing to trust and be friends with him is just way too soon. The episode him losing to Dan ends, and then in the first two minutes of the next one, everyone is best friends with him. IIRC (and if I’m not then ignore this) there’s maybe one or two lines by some characters along the lines of “are we sure we want to trust him”, but those fears are really quickly assuaged by him being cooperative and nice, and I’m just needing more of that distrust.

If I was writing this arc, I would make very minimal changes to the lead up and aftermath of him switching. I would have one tiny scene before Gus vanishes of him contemplating how far he’s pushed Helios and he can’t go any further safely, because this plants a “fuck I ruined him too much” seed of doubt and gives leeway to reflection later. Then, instead of him being immediately hopeful after losing to Dan and taking off his mask, I’d show him being a little more apprehensive of his uncertain future. He doesn’t have to say anything, his face just needs to look a little uneasy. And then the last thing I would change is giving him a moment of reflection (whether it be by talking to Drago or Helios) that in his quest to be powerful, he might have been doing the wrong thing the whole time— because he’s now more powerful by having secure alliances/friendships and no one had to be hurt to do it. Maybe replace a couple of the “Omg guys Keith is so nice” lines from the cast with more discernible concern or distrust for good measure. I don’t think anything else would need to be changed. It would still be a little too quick, but I think it would feel more rewarding for him if very minimal adjustments were made to compensate him. If the show had all the time in the world then I’d have a thousand more suggestions, but if we’re keeping this arc as brief as possible to stick closely within the runtime of the show and not step on anything else happening in the plot, then I think this is a decent way to go about it.

So I like the ideas presented by the show, but it needed just a little more time to feel worth it.

[modern-day-classic]

It's been three months and I am still very much puzzled by how the creative team decided to end Ted Lasso for it's main characters. I will not be touching on tedbecca at all here cause for me that isn't why I'm left still feeling so confused and let down by decisions made. So in true me fashion I am gifting you all another essay in which I work through why this still sits as incredibly underwhelming and unsatisfactory for me.

The creatives behind the show have always been very adamant that this was a story told in 3 parts. Perfect we love that. It means they have a clear beginning (intro & initial conflict), middle (dark forest aka working through the conflict) and end (conflict resolution & conclusion). This is cookie cutter narrative structure we should be good!

If we break this down into seasons we have:

The Beginning aka Season 1: The beginning of a story should very clearly introduce the genre of the story, the main characters, the heroes (Ted and you could argue Rebecca fits this description too) the setting and then the conflict and stakes. This was done perfectly and very early on we are introduced to the conflict at the crux of the show, Rebecca's revenge plot against Rupert and the demise of his beloved football team. This is information not privy to all character and we watch as the season progresses to the point where the conflict is realised by everyone involved - in this instance the first truth bomb.

The Middle aka Season 2: Season 2 is in every aspect the middle of the story. It's not only the middle season, but the middle part of the narrative structure whereby the heroes set out to resolve the conflict (Rebecca's attempt to sink the team), it is their dark forest if you will. The middle part of the story should be where the main action takes place. We see the fallout from the conflict and Rebecca's confession to Ted. While he did forgive her instantly he is very clearly hurt by it (coupled with the demise of his marriage yes) we see Ted pull away from Rebecca and the obvious strain in their budding friendship (idk what you'd call it nothing really feels right). This is most notable in the missed phonecall and ignored voice message post Ted's panic attack. All the key pieces of the story should begin to take shape in this portion of the narrative (I'm talking all the Ted x Rebecca parallels etc (I'm not even touching on if they were ever meant to be a romantic hint that's not the point of this)) and set themself out for a nice bow to be tied closing them all out in the next part of the narrative.

The End aka Season 3: This is simply the resolution to the conflict, the portion of the story where our heroes confront their issue. At the end of the story, the narrative should be complete, characters should be settled into the new normal post conflict resolution and all loose ends tied up in a satisfying manner for the viewer. AND THIS IS WHERE THE WHEELS FEEL OFF THE TED LASSO NARRATIVE ARC.

Season 3 should have seen the carefully planted plot points come together. We should have seen Rebecca and Ted overcome the slight estrangement. We should have seen them learn of their connections. We should have seen them achieve their goal to "win the whole fucking thing". We should have seen all the open storylines from seasons 1 and 2 come to a conclusion, be it nice or not that's not the point they should be complete.

INSTEAD we saw the two main characters, the heroes of this narrative be neglected and relegated to, for the most part, periphery characters. Ted has no significant storyline in season 3 outside of the Sunflowers episode and even then it was secondary to everyone else. Rebecca was removed from a lot of the action on multiple occasions getting (this is just a guess I refuse to go watch it to figure it out for real) 10 minutes of screentime in an episode, and not appearing until 15 minutes in on some occasions. Yes we still saw her but it was mostly on her own. This isn't conducive with having the time to close out all the little breadcrumbs and storylines woven for them in the first 2 seasons EVEN WITH the extended episode run times. Rather we had a million new storylines introduced and with them an abundance of new characters. The ending of the story isn't a place for this.

The creative team seems to have forgotten the key part of an ending: the narrative should be complete, characters should be settled into the new normal post conflict resolution and all loose ends tied up in a satisfying manner for the viewer. Yes we saw a conclusion for each, but both Rebecca and Ted's endings were rushed and last minute pieces of information thrown at us. I could have walked away (yes disappointed) but satisfied with Ted going back to Kansas if that's what season 3 was showing me he needed. They instead had taken great care to show how engrained into Richmond and the football club Ted was. So how as a viewer am I meant to be satisfied with his abrupt return to Kansas. As for Rebecca, her want for a second chance at love was always a key element of her storyline. Did I ship tedbecca, yes? would I have been happy with her finding love even if it wasn't a tedbecca endgame? also yes BUT I, as a viewer needed to buy into the love interest, not just have some new character we've hardly seen supposedly be her endgame. We needed to have been brought along on the journey here and not just had it thrown in at the last second.

So what this mammoth essay has made me realise is, my dissatisfaction as how Ted Lasso ended is due to the fact that NOTHING was closed out. No storylines properly ended. No conflict properly resolved and our heroes not shown as settled into their new normal. The creative team for whatever reason didn't follow through on basic narrative storytelling framework and as a result left behind a show with no proper ending.

[thenugking]

more Zephyr - sorry, this idea is FASCINATING to me, but - 3, 7, 11, 26, 27?

3. What would their character quest be titled? Why?

Oh man I fucking hate thinking up titles ahgghjkl. Something with Pirate (their job) or Ranger (their class) in it maybe.

7. Describe their arc. How would a player help resolve it? What choices can be made? Can your Tav be turned down a dark path, or pulled to a lighter one?

I don’t think Zephyr has a path where they become More Evil, I think their bad ending is just that they don’t change at all. They continue to not really trust people, to lash out whenever there’s a problem, to look out for themself above all others. They dump a player they’re romancing because hey, this was fun, but it’s time to move on now. They might not even turn up to the reunion, and just send an impersonal letter saying it was nice working with you.

To get their good ending, I think you have to challenge them to do better, to look out for people, to let people look out for them. Most importantly, you have to show them love and support and maybe even forgiveness when that’s pretty difficult to do. Early game Zephyr is abrasive, being suspicious of other companions for keeping secrets while being unwilling to share much about their own life. 

I don’t think it comes out until Act 3, when you meet Gortash at his coronation, that the two of them are siblings, that he tadpoled Zephyr a week or so before the others and sent them off with the Emperor (appearing to them in the form of their Dream Visitor) to retrieve the astral prism. So you discover Zephyr knew all along that Gortash was involved, that the tadpoles weren’t transforming people but instead forcing them to hear and obey the Absolute, and that the cult wanted the astral prism. And I mean, this isn’t as bad as some of the other things your companions are keeping from you, but Zephyr lets it continue for way too long, refuses to apologise, and starts attacking you for blaming them for their family’s bullshit. And if you try to show sympathy, doubles down harder to try to push you away. To pull them onto a lighter path, you have to… not be okay with them doing this, and probably point out that they’re being cruel right now, but that you understand why, and you’re willing to put this behind you if they’ll try better in future. They’d shrug you off at the time, but during the next long rest, pull you into a cutscene to apologise, thank you for sticking by them and admit that they’re not good at dealing with kindness, and promise to try better in future.

…I don’t know how the Gortash plot resolves with Zephyr there (I’m still not sure how it does in their own game yet). Maybe you get an extra option to spare Gortash, but where that goes, I’m really not sure. I don’t think killing or allying with him effects Zephyr’s personality/arc a great deal, but they’re going to be Uneasy and somewhat guilty if you ally with him. I think if you kill him while on their good arc, they lash out before apologising and telling you they don’t blame you and stumbling through a request for emotional support. On the bad arc, they're more likely to just withdraw.

11. What is your Tav’s go-to comfort food?

Zephyr’s been scavenging a whole lot more food than I usually do--I enjoy buying my party little treats, but Zephyr thinks it’s a waste of money to get anything from a trader when there’s so many barrels of potatoes we could be looting. Until one of the traders had salmon pie, which they immediately grabbed up. Sooo I think that’s the answer.

26. Give us one of your Tav’s secrets! 

I don’t know if it’s as much a secret as a thing they refuse to acknowledge about themself, but they want to be treated kindly and gently, and not have to be the Tough, Independent One all the time. (They’re totally Better and Happier as the Tough, Independent One than the scared kid trying their best to appease their parents so clearly they don’t need to change that!!)

27. What is the worst thing they’ve ever done/said to someone they love?

As a kid, there was a lot of ratting out their brothers/throwing them under the bus to their parents, culminating in betraying their oldest brother while he was escaping so… maybe that. Though in fairness, they were an abused kid at the time, and they’ve also done plenty of shit to people as an adult who refuses to admit they need to fix themself.

The major shitty thing they’re doing in the game that I’m rotating round in my head is romancing Karlach without telling her hey, the guy who sold you into slavery is my brother. I hope they’ll feel guilty enough to tell her before they actually have sex, but it’s not impossible we’re going to be reaching the coronation before it comes up.

Anyway, Karlach reacts badly to the fact that Zephyr’s been keeping this from her, and Zephyr tells her that, whatever, you’re actually just like him for blaming them for something shitty their family did. So. That was a pretty horrible thing to say.

(And here’s where we get Zephyr’s in-game “being pulled to a lighter arc”. Once she’s processed things a bit, Karlach comes to find them and tell them that, hey, what you said was Deeply Shitty and wasn’t okay but look--I’m dying, and I want to make the most of my time left, I don’t have the time to hold grudges against people I care about, and who I know care about me and aren’t actually like their shitty evil bastard of a brother. I’m willing to forget it if you are. Zephyr… is aware they don’t necessarily deserve forgiveness for all that. But if Karlach still actually wants to be with them… They don’t want to hurt her further by pulling back again, even if they don’t quite know what to do with forgiveness.)

[theimaginatrix27]

It's August In Australia, so Let's Talk AUs!

I'm honestly kinda bad at keeping up with things like this, but I thought I'd natter on about some Star Trek: Deep Space Nine AUs that have been spooling out in my head over the past year.

Yes, this will include ones I've already started posting, because fuck it, they're on my mind and I love them.

So let's start with Family Defiant! AKA, the one where most of the main cast of DS9 is an adventuring found family in a setting where the Fae are real and fairy tales sometimes happen. Not like the Five Hundred Kingdoms does it, though—I did derive some inspiration from those books, among others, but it's my own tapestry of folklore and canon references.

Here's the series link, to start with!

There are two fics in the series so far, with more prequels and sequels to come. But it started with Seven for a Secret, which I was inspired to write after reading another fairy tale flavoured fic called Innate Conditions, by the lovely and talented @tokidokifish (Thank you again, my dear. Sorry I have not done the podfic of IC I promised yet, I had to Braille it up and also practice reading aloud, and I have been writing my own things as well, but I have not forgotten! And there's more fic for you to read now than there was before! :D )

Secret is based on one of my favourite fairy tales, The Wild Swans, but with a found family and only two out of the seven being swans for reasons explained in the author's notes of the fic. We're nearly 60k words in and still have not gotten to the beginning of the Garashir I promised with tags when I posted it, because I have tribbles in my head instead of plot bunnies, and they love to worldbuild even when it isn't strictly necessary, so even a fic someone, (like, say, Tokidokifish) can write up a similar fic and get all the finer points wrapped up in about 8k words, I, a notorious rambler and overthinker, end up making the setting more and more intricate, coming up with backstories for everyone (hence the themed prequels) and whole secondary plots that will need their own sequels to resolve), and more ideas just keep coming. And I used to wonder why it kept taking me so long to get any original work ready for publishing. I'm a chronic worldbuilder and the curse of the longform writer be upon me.

So among other things, the Prophets are Fae, which makes Ben half-Fae, and there is a whole B-plot in Secret about Ben which has only just gotten properly started as of currently-posted chapters, but which is also being built up in the prequel fic, One For Sorrow, two chapters of which have now been posted. And I'm sure there's gonna be more juicy stuff added that I don't even know about yet! And some I do know but won't spoil.

Anyways, I'm very proud of this AU, so go read it if you haven't already! Those who have really seem to like it, for some reason! :P

[solarapplejuice]

what the fuck is going on in oshi no ko bruh ;n; (part 1)

155 spoilers / spoilers for all of the oshi no ko manga akasaka is scaring me maybe i just have too many rose-tinted memories of love is war but it feels so much more tightly written than whatever is going on in onk right now. the most recent chapter and really the entire 15 year lie arc feels like a bit of a letdown compared to what was being built up by this entire story.

my fuckin thesis is this: the final arc of this story reeks of akasaka not liking the story or the characters and wanting to get things over with. he insists on ending almost EVERY chapter with a cliffhanger instead of letting the story progress naturally, concluding core and fundamental parts of the story's plot in one to two chapters which denies them of further growth and speculation, the worst thing you can do to your fucking mystery novel. admittedly this is a pretty biased opinion but i will explain!

the recent chapter is the most emblematic of this because it's the perfect embodiment of why oshi no ko is so frustrating, because if i were to describe the narrative up until this point it sounds like it makes sense, but the way it was handled and the sheer SPEED at which it came out is what makes it bad. specifically in 154 and 155 we learn that kamiki just didn't think that ai actually loved him, but turns out she did and now he regrets killing her! and it turns out NINO also had involvement in ai's death and is maybe the actual villain.

none of this is necessarily bad and i actually really like the idea of nino being the true antagonist at the end of the tunnel. nino is just more compelling; she's ai's coworker and peer but can never be an equal to her because she wont let herself, because she wont let ai in, because she both looks up to ai as an idol to be loved and despises her as an entertainer to compete with. if we are to believe that 45510 is from her perspective, it makes this turn of events all the more tragic.

kamiki never playing a big part is also kind of expected. queer manga fan moment but i never thought the idea of ex bf being the killer was super compelling esp since you can see the "she never really loved me" coming from a mile away, so it's good to see it being played straight for AI's development. turns out that ai "lies are love" hoshino was just trying to protect him from the inevitable backlash of the world's top idol having a boyfriend and thought she was doing the best for her first relationship as a teenager who was forced to grow up too fast.

all of this is really cool, too bad it doesnt land like that in the story because it all gets resolved in one chapter! just because kamiki was the red herring doesn't mean that he should have been wasted like that, it would have been nice to see more conflict between him and the hoshino siblings, perhaps threatening other characters the way he has other idols. lets not forget that this dude is a serial killer who likes targeting women! we were waiting for him to try and pull something on say, kana or akane (i have FEELINGS about them and ill get to that). meanwhile all that would have been done to set nino up as the true villain in murder-mystery fashion is to just include 45510 as a part of the manga before the 15 year lie arc. it would be a one-off look into the horrors of the ways in which ai hoshino's would-be peers rejected her as an equal, later re-contextualized as the hiding-in-plain-sight motive and backstory for the villain and the entire plot as a whole.

we don't get any of that, instead we get aqua and ruby moving past kamiki so quickly that you almost get the sense that they knew more than the audience. which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but feels almost insulting considering how important he and the conspirators of ai hoshino's death have been so far. nino being reintroduced again is jarring since the setup with her intervening in kana's attempts to emulate her is not enough of a setup, and instead feels like they wanted to hamfist her in as an 11th hour threat.

and the problem is, pretty much every major narrative plot point in oshi no ko has been resolved like this and its a pattern that seems to not stop. it started when goro and sarina finally found each other, a moment that is so important and we've been waiting for a while, and it spiraled from there. aqua and ruby's incest will-they-wont-they was pretty much handwaved, the very fucking important and good conflict of ruby and kana's competition for success mirroring ai and nino was denied any sort of growth or possibility in the like three chapters they spent on it. it's just like, theres so many things that while they have been alluded to before, that's just it: theyve been ALLUDED to. the reasons for these conflicts to happen are there, but the conflicts never really got the chance to happen, instead it's just a character initiating the fight and the other character shutting them down a chapter later by being the bigger person or whatever, something that is jarring for a cast of characters defined by not simply bad communication but the BELIEF and CORE THEME that LYING IS LOVE! the very thesis that we're supposed to be constantly contending with, if it's true or not, and the reason that these conflicts drag out; because the characters lie, and sometimes those lies can make relationships worse instead of better for some illusion of stability. why are these characters all of a sudden excellent communicators when they historically haven't been, in a MYSTERY story where incomplete information and unresolved threads should be common place? the story ending soon is not an excuse for this to be happening! it doesn't feel like we're earning these conclusions, more like aka is forcefully shutting the lid on pandora's box and letting it blow up in our faces.

ill be making a second part of my thoughts since this is already so long but i also gotta talk about how akasaka did my girls kana and akane dirty.