#but it's also so late when i'm queue-ing this up

[call-me-oracle]

barbara gordon in green arrow #2

[tavina-writes]

Thank you to @nemainofthewater for tagging me! This feels like it's fun but also yes, very long, so I will also stick this under some cut tags lol.

1. why did you choose your url?

To be perfectly honest, Tavina is a character that middle school me came up with for a novel (The full name is Tavina Arax Vale which. Is the most middle school of OC names truly.) Nowadays it's like: I'm Tavina and I write so!

2. any sideblogs? if you have them name them and why you have them.

tavinafanfiction and tavina-hanfu. I feel like these are self explanatory but I also don't...use them. For many reasons mostly I'm lazy and I assume everyone wants to see all my posts anyway!

3. how long have you been on tumblr?

At least 10 years. I grew up here. I think my oldest post and or reblog is from April 2018, but I've been on here for much much longer.

4. do you have a queue tag?

I don't! Occasionally I remember to put stuff in there but most of the time I just reblog stuff when I see it.

5. why did you start your blog in the first place?

To be honest, I have no idea. To write poetry maybe?

6. why did you choose your icon/pfp?

This is an Ibuki Satsuki painting I thought was pretty and Ibuki has illustrated a bunch of cnovels that I enjoy.

7. why did you choose your header?

To be honest I thought it was pretty and it was a fun place I visited!

8. what’s your post with the most notes?

It's that one where I cry about writing, which has just passed 10k somehow, miraculously.

9. how many mutuals do you have?

a number greater than five. But honestly I have no idea is this something people know/can check?

10. how many followers do you have?

437

11. how many people do you follow?

355

12. have you ever made a shitpost?

Probably? I don't make lots of original posts. I guess the crying about writing post is a shitpost?

13. how often do you use tumblr each day?

I spend too much of my life on this hellsite (affectionate) so much so that my sense of humor is permanently altered.

14. did you have a fight/argument with another blog once?

Yeah. I mean. Did we see the dust up last week that I'm still questioning my sanity about lmao lolsob.

15. how do you feel about ‘you need to reblog this’ posts?

I don't really reblog those.

16. do you like tag games?

Oh I love them! it is so so hard for me to remember they exist.

17. do you like ask games

I love them and I am so bad at answering asks. I try! but uh, my askbox is very hefty.

18. which of your mutuals do you think is tumblr famous?

Perhaps @mikkeneko? I see you around in the wild! Also @thebiscuiteternal perhaps?

19. do you have a crush on a mutual?

No

20. what is the last song you listened to?

Burning Desire by Lana Del Rey. It just came up on my youtube suggested.

21. what are you currently watching?

The Story of Minglan with @autumnslantern. It's the 8th or 9th time I've seen these episodes and the first time Lantern's seen them!

22. sweet/ savoury/ spicy?

ALL

23. what is your current relationship status?

Single.

24. what is your current obsession?

YARN YARN YARN YARNNNN

25. what are nine albums/ songs you've been listening to lately?

uhhh lets see:

Tu Honggang's 武家坡 which has me in a death grip

I Love You So F***ing Much by the Glass Animals

Cacophony by Paris Paloma

Poor Sweet Me by Lucette

化 by 西游乐队

random cycling of Mao Buyi songs.

Side Story of the Fox Volant Soundtrack

The Sound of Snow Falling/Yanxi Palace Soundtrack

Mermaids by Florence and the Machine

Tagging @cerusee, @dangermousie, @saiditallbefore, @thebiscuiteternal, and anyone else who sees this and wants to play!

[eraserisms]

Someone has drawn to my attention that I do not have mobile rules So, here you go everyone!

BASICS

21+ Only

This a moderate to low activity blog and most things will run on a queue. I am an incredibly slow writer, so please have patience. I work a full time job and a part time job & writing takes a lot out of me. At the end of the day; this is just a hobby.

This blog will most likely contain violence, drugs and other NSFW themes. I’ll tag it as 'usft' or '/ usft'

I don’t put up with excessive negative posting, vague posting, character bashing, call out posts and drama of the sorts. It’s roleplay, it’s supposed to be fun. This is going to be a hard and fast rule for this blog. If I even see anything even tagged as drama or could easily be identified as vauging, I will not hesitate to unfollow.

Your DNI is your responsibility not mine. I cannot keep up with who has beef with who on this website or the stipulations or exceptions around people's DNI lists. If you see me interacting with someone that you don't want to see on the dash, its your responsibility to unfollow me instead of me guessing what's going on. If you are someone new that I'm thinking about following, I will take your DNI at face value and won't follow back/initiate contact in the first place if I follow people on your DNI.

Do not attempt to 'warn' me about other people unless they are a true danger. It isn't my business & I am an adult and can make my own decisions about people that I interact with. 

FOLLOWING

Firstly, this is a highly selective & mutuals only blog, I tend to get overwhelmed if I roleplay with too many people.

This blog is AU and crossover friendly. I actually prefer to write with characters that are outside of the BNHA fandom or even characters that I am completely unfamiliar with. Lately, I have been trying to steer away from the BNHA fandom in general.

I’m OC friendly as long as I have some sort of background for your character or an about page I can read.

It might take time for me to follow your blog back. I like to be thorough when reading other’s bios and more importantly, rules.

If you no longer want to follow me/interact, I insist that you hard block me and save both of us time.

If I see that you have been inactive for some time, I will likely unfollow your blog however, I will not hard block you. If you ever come back to RP-ing, I'd love for you to write with me again.

INTERACTING 

Shota’s characterization is a blend between the anime and the manga.

We shouldn’t have to talk about this but here we are, godmodding & metagaming isn’t permitted. With this in mind that doesn’t mean that Eraser is granted immunity from his actions. For example; If he chooses to provoke your muse and your muse reacts negatively, Shota will have to deal with those consequences, violent or otherwise.

Considering the nature of Shota’s power is kind of OP, in general I’m going to allow whoever I play with to use their digression as to whether his quirk is effective or not. I also won’t mind discussing this with partners preemptively, in fact I think in some instances I may prefer it. His abilities do have their limits and you can find more about the nature of his quirk here.

I am big on story-building and while I do enjoy winging threads, I also would like to know a general direction that we are going in.

I primarily view asks as 'prompt' work. I’m typically okay with having memes being turned into threads. However, if I don't see it going anywhere as far as an over-arching plot goes/not being able to work it into some sort of storyline, or think that the thread has run it's course; I may drop the thread/not respond. If you want to continue something that I have dropped; just talk to me about it.

I am very big on communication and I think it can really make or break a roleplay experience. I’m far from perfect and if something doesn’t make sense to you in our thread, let me know. If you want to drop a thread? Shoot me a message. If I've accidentally broken one of your rules, please remind me. Hell, if you want to send me a headcanon/random thought at 3am on discord? Go for it.

Anything that I tag you in is free real estate for you to reblog. Do what you want with it. Frame it. Go for it.

SHIPPING

I do play Shota as a homosexual, however I’m a little flexible with this if Shota and your character have some sort of chemistry. (More about this can be found here.)

On the topic of relationships, I generally don’t roleplay smut and prefer to imply what happened or fade to black, I don’t mind writing ‘the-morning-after’ threads.  I may respond to some dash games with USFW content or drabbles/metas. I might even do them in ask memes/send some asks, but don't expect it to go anywhere. This rule may change once I feel comfortable here again.

I will not be shipping Aizawa with any minors, especially his students. This also applies to students who are ‘aged up’. If you even try to approach me about this you will be blocked.

Multi-shipping is fine with me 

With that note, some of the ships I like to write are; EraserMight, EraserCloud, EraserMic, EraserKing, EraserOC but I am fairly open-minded about this.

Depending on circumstances, I will write EraserCloud as a previous relationship that Shota has been in and sometimes I will not.

MUN STUFF 

I go by D.A. & I use he/him/his pronouns 

I don’t have many triggers so I don’t feel that anyone needs to tag anything in particular for me. I will however tag triggers for whoever I write with.

Duplicates are chill, I love duplicates and sharing ideas with other Eraserhead writers. I actually even have a verse specifically for duplicates. Just don’t take my stuff and by that I mostly mean the family that I have built around Shota

My discord is available upon request.

Let’s have fun :)

[auxiliarydetective]

Thank you for your response but literally I'm not sure how to take it at face value because I witness on real time you reblogging stuff for the fyeah blog and there's a number of people you passed over whilst acknowledging others. I just take it because you know them but it's put me off big style because handpicking 'popular' creators to interact with is pretty common on here. I know you can't interact with everyone but it's just suspicious you only pick people with their posts commanding a lot of notes. There's a lot of random people making OCs so I'm guessing you're making sure what is most beneficial to you subconsciously

Don't worry about it we interact with the community in different ways so it's cool you do it your way and I'll just keep away and do my own little thing and won't tag the fyeah blog etc

I think there's been a misunderstanding here. If you want reach, tag the fyeah blog. That's the best way I know and how I met the friends I have right now. I reblog stuff for the fyeah blog, yes. But I only reblog stuff for the fyeah blog that has the fyeah tag. That's how fyeah blogs work. The fyeah blog is an old concept and I'm just a worker bee for one of them. The people whose posts I reblog have that many notes probably because they got reach through the fyeah blog or through the ocappreciation blog. You've got your causalities mixed up, but I get why that would happen. There's no way to tell when a post got its notes. Also I tend to be fairly late on some of the reblogs because I'm busy studying, so that might be another reason.

If the people I passed over have the tag #fyeahonepieceocs on their posts, I honestly don't know how I managed to miss them. We had a phase where all mods were busy and nobody had the time to reblog anything, but I was convinced that we had caught up. If the posts are older than the fyeah blog then that's also a possible reason. The only other reason I could think of is that I could have someone blocked, but I don't block any blogs except ones that look strikingly like bots. Which, for any new Tumblr users: If you haven't changed your profile picture and don't have a description or anything, people will assume you're a bot and block you just to be safe. That's nothing against you personally, that's basic Tumblr safety.

Either way, my point being: I don't reblog posts based on popularity, I reblog posts solely based on whether they have a certain tag, which is stated in the blog description. If there's posts that I'm missing, please let me know. The process for fyeah blog reblogging is literally: I check the fyeah tag, then I queue all the posts since my last check in chronological order. That's it.

My second point: Please, do the opposite of what you said in your last paragraph. I'm asking you to send me a message so I can get to see your OCs. How do you expect me do find your OCs if I don't even know what your URL is? Or just send me your post somehow? If you want me to appreciate your OC, I need to see it, so let me see it.

I hope this cleared things up in case you were confused about how reblogging for the fyeah blog works. If this is a me problem of me not seeing posts in the fyeah tag, I can try asking someone else to help out, but otherwise I don't know how to help you. We as a mod team do not have the capacity to go through the entire one piece oc tag, especially since I'm currently solo-ing the blog because everyone else is busy, so we narrow it down to just the fyeah tag. If your post isn't in that tag, that's not our fault.

Once again, hope this helped, hope it didn't come off as rude and hope to get a message from you with your OCs!

[africanization101]

Dear A.,You've used the metaphor of life today as a realtime softcore IR flick a couple of times recently. A persuasive analogy! My fave instance: I often encounter on my local jaunts a lithe little teen blonde snowbunny, who is NEVER seen without the close company of A PAIR of strapping black boys. Whatever her 'story,' I'm sure it has many happy endings! Have you been enjoying your own personal irl IR soap opera lately too? Sincerely, Tori Reid

Was that a sly prod for me to write about some of my more exciting interracial observations--a kind of literary (extra-)marital aid? Sure, let’s spice things up a bit in here. I’m actually curious how my audience will take to this compared to my usual content.

I should preface this by saying that my Euro town used to be a sea of unbearable whiteness up until the refugee situation a couple of years ago. Things have sped up quite rapidly since then and knowing the contrast between just a few years ago and now makes this all the more exciting.

Something more basic to start things off with then. There’s a dark-blond white woman in my extended neighborhood, probably around 30 at this point, and though I don’t see her around that often, whenever I do, she’s wearing some combination of tight jeans, leggings, tank top and deep-cut v-neck shirt; it’s safe to say that this is her idea of a casual outfit. And she does have the curves to make it work, especially booty-wise.

Definitely a looker, but I never saw her with a boyfriend or anything like that ... until about 2 years ago, when she was sauntering down the street holding the hand of a tall, African and handsome man who definitely complemented her well. Then I lost sight of her again for a bit, figured she had moved, but oh no; some time last year, I spot the same couple pushing a baby stroller. That sure didn’t take long.

Now the thing about women post-pregnancy is that they often understandably don’t feel like dialing up the sexiness for a while because they have other worries. Not this one though. She was still strutting her stuff for her Black beau in her typically revealing attire and we can only hope this was meant to encourage him to keep up the good work on the baby-making front!

The next story requires a little context. I’m sad to report that my general area is frequently the site of what one might call “racism rallies”. I still go and check them out sometimes, but once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all: a bunch of middle-aged to old white men whining about immigrants in some shape or form. Every now and then, “civil society” will feel pressured enough by this to put on a counter-event to signal to the world that racists don’t speak for everyone. Usually these things feature some kind of music or art show and they draw a much younger and more diverse crowd. And one of those events is the backdrop to our next story.

They called it “Reggae against Racism” or something slightly cheesy like that and as you can guess, it featured a reggae show interspersed with some social commentary. The crowd was mostly under 40 with a lot of younger people who looked like college students. There were slightly more women than men present and a certain contingent of young migrants/refugees had found their way there as well.

The college-aged women were extremely interested in the non-white men there, chatting them up in English (obviously not the native language here) and being noticeably fascinated by their stories. There was a good deal of affectionate touching going on, visibly welcomed by both parties, which quickly escalated to intimate dancing on the open-air lot they had rented for the event. It looked like some whiteboi students were also having a bit of more awkward fun with some of the braided Black girls that absolutely need to show up for any reggae festival to feel complete.

At some point it was time for another speech, delivered by a very emotional white woman in dreadlocks. After some warmly received remarks about how racism is bad, she got all excited and closed her speech with: “And I’m SO SO happy to see all the brave people of color who made it here today, thank you so much, we’re all super inspired by you!!”

And I guess that was the queue to go all-in, because after a good round of applause and woo-ing, the music continued and affectionate dancing turned into fairly primal grinding and twerking. As far as these girls were concerned, their dusky dance partners were their heroes for the day and they weren’t going to let any jealous friends cut in. Of course the usual kissing, butt-squeezing and so forth was happening on the sidelines as well.

As the event drew to a close, a lot of tipsy female students left with those newfound paramours they most likely hadn’t arrived with earlier in the day. Sometimes curious middle-class girls just need an opportunity, right?

I obviously don’t know if there’s any relation between the young people who showed up at the reggae festival and the old white dudes at the racism rallies, but given how much time I have wasted listening to their boring speeches about ~European culture~, I find it most satisfying to imagine that while they were preparing the angry talk for next week’s white male masturbation event, their sweet little darlings were grinding up to the refugees that trigger them so much.

Who knows, maybe they’ll mellow out once they get a brown grandchild. Or maybe their daughters will drop them some other hints that’ll make it too awkward for daddy to be racist anymore. One can only hope!

[starlighthan]

about the last few posts i rb-ed in the last few days, let me share some stuff based on my own experience! :D this is about the lack of rbs/feedback problem.

i seriously appreciate comments that i received in my fics like pauwi sa iyo, a rose beside the tall bushes, and returning to balete teaser. those are some of my works that got a good amount of rbs and feedback.

what saddens me is the lack of rbs or feedback in most of my fics. as you can notice, i get around more ~10-20 rbs. the thing here is that majority of them are from me srb-ing or responding to feedback, or from networks bc i've been in more than 10 networks ever since i started writing. so if you deduct a good amount, i barely get any rbs/feedback from ACTUAL READERS.

exhibit a: breather

exhibit b: 16:18

exhibit c: unexpected visits

exhibit d: skz as your sweetest bff ever hc

exhibit e: where we belong

exhibit f: a scientific answer

yes, some of them are less than ten. they were my earlier works. i wasn't in networks yet in that time so there wasn't that much exposure but like i said, a good number of it came from me rb-ing it.

i freaking feel so sad when i check my past works and the ratio between rbs and likes is literally 1:4 or even worse than that. a part of myself admits that i'm not the best in writing but i also want some comments about it or even exposure to get that.

i am very thankful that networks exist. i get some rbs and likes here and there. BUT i just get likes most of the time, seriously.

there have been times that i worry if there'd even be people reading my work. heck, the lack of feedback contributes to the confusion on what should i write, considering that i also want to create something that a good number of readers would like.

if people don't rb a post, nobody would get to see what we made. and what could be the result of that? us losing motivation and inspiration to write. we just want to hear something from the audience but we barely get anything.

there were multiple times of me wanting to not write anymore bc i know barely anybody would read it. but i'm still continuing it since i originally started to write for my own sake, to improve in english as my second language and to show some creativity at least. at this point, i'm just writing for my own. i also wanted to share these to everybody, okay? but it's probably not happening. i just started writing last sept. 2021. pretty recent tbh and atp i got to post a lot of fics already despite that short time. unfortunately, the problem is still the same despite using tags, being in networks now, and having a larger amount of followers (i had 50 around late december, and i have more than 150 followers now apparently).

there are lots of ways to fix this problem. you've seen it in other posts about this. making a side blog, giving us ANYTHING to comment (even if it's one word or emoji, we'd appreciate it), queueing/scheduling posts, and more!!! those are simple things to do, to be honest. pretty easy.

lately, i've been getting more feedbacks and comments not only through rb-ing, but sending me asks. i deeply appreciate that fr, thank you. but i still get the similar rb-like ratio in my recent works even if i received a slightly larger amount of feedback now, it sucks.

for me here, i'd appreciate if you rb and/or give comments. i'm serious. waking up to several tags to my fic makes my day and i get more inspiration to write. if you guys kept on doing that, maybe the writing community would be SO alive rn and your fave writers probably are still here.

i don't know what else to say bc writers have been saying the same things. don't complain if any of us leaves. i might sound a little mean here but you're a contributor to that. watch me announce a hiatus soon, who knows? idk, i've been thinking about that actually but i still want to continue my wips and post them already.

that's all for me, i guess. this was pretty messy, but i hope you get it somehow. i'm not even expecting people to read this.

[celenatriestowriteagain]

The Weekend That Was #12 (Men I Trust concert!)

I won't start with Friday because I wrote about it already in my previous post. Thus:

Saturday, Oct 19

Woke up (late) with a strong urge to update my portfolio. So that's what I did for the morning while listening to a local design podcast.

While working on it I had the realization that I don't really like any of my work in the past 5 years. That can't be good, right?

I'm going to start creating stuff I actually like to showcase in my portfolio. The first few things are probably going to be:

the end product of a bootcamp I joined recently

30 frontend exercises (called frontloops)

MVP of my nihongo reviewing app

honestly I'm still at a loss

Anyway, the good news is I still managed to update my portfolio. Or the homepage of my portfolio at least. The last time I updated it was back in 2016. It said I had 2+ years of experience whereas now I have 5+ years. Time really flies.

Come to think of it, the last time I updated my portfolio was around this time in 2016. That's probably why I woke up today with a strong urge to update it.

Anyway, for lunch K and I had leftover korean chicken and chicken sisig.

After lunch, we worked on our inktobers. The prompts are "wild" and "ornament".

Then we gojek-ed to Tan Tock Seng Medical Center to play some badminton.

After that, we dropped by Dhoby Ghaut to pick up K's ezbuy package again. We also dropped by art friend to buy some pens.

When we got home, we made miso soup and veggie spring rolls for dinner. Not gonna lie the soup was hella salty.

After dinner, I worked on my front loops exercise.

Sunday, Oct 20

K woke up early to go to work today. I woke up really late (12pm) and got out of bed even later (quarter to 1pm). I made some pesto pasta for lunch. I had a really bad headache so I just stayed in bed the whole afternoon marathon-ing Food Wars on Netflix.

Then it was time to go see Men I Trust! I brought some pesto for K and I's pre-concert dinner. I was already in the queue at around 6:30pm so we were able to stand in the front row.

It was a nice and relaxing show! The sound system was very bad though at first. Good thing it got better towards the end. I'm happy we got to see them. It's probably my last concert for the year, and if I were to rank all the concerts I attended for 2019, it would be:

1. Mitski

2. BlackPink

3. American Football

4. Japanese Breakfast

5. Up Dharma Down

6. Men I Trust

7. Phum Viphurit

Ok that's all!

[elizabethrobertajones]

Hi Lizzy, I'm new to the SPN fandom and saw a bunch of bibros making fun of meta writers. As a lowkey Destiel shipper it still pissed me off. I'm wondering- who are your fav meta writers to read?

Pfft, it’s practically a badge of honour that THEY are pissed off by the meta. Interpretation worries them because as soon as you get into the what they’d see as hippie dippy “all readings are valid uwu” part of literary theory, you’ve made an attempt to level the playing field with them and they don’t wanna be on it with us, they want to have the one sacred and true reading of the show to which all roads lead etc etc. Actually buying into the idea you can interpret the show and come up with multiple readings or that the text would DARE support another version (even the interpretation that Sam and Dean aren’t soulmates or something ship-free that gets in the way indirectly - or an argument they are soulmates but that’s basically just the show’s way of conveying Heaven is somehow worse than Hell for them :P) immediately is a threat to the idea of a cast iron version of the show that’s the one they latched onto. 

Strange world where “reading into things” is an insult instead of a sign of healthy curiosity and a desire to learn and understand. And I see people who literally mind their own corner or would agree in spirit with their interpretation as long as you CALL it that and leave others be to have a different one, get dogpiled by them for daring to treat the show as a flexible and multi-layered, analyse-able thing…

Ah well. 

Kinda missing out on the yearly punch up in the parking lot round the back of the fandom right now, tbh, since I’ve been AWOL with hanging around with family and friends stuff. Kinda not missing it. :P Welcome to the fandom, it can get pretty messy, and some of us here just wanna watch the show and ask silly questions to everyone about how many burgers Dean’s eaten on screen recently or whatever important character analysis nonsense is bothering us today.

To which end! :D 

No matter how long you have followed me, even if it’s like a day or 2, you must have noticed my queue endlessly spitting out @mittensmorgul‘s full-show rewatch along with the TNT loop, all out of order and a week late because that’s how I roll. Mittens is a great meta writer to read because everything she writes is fun and the kind of hectic idea hopping my brain glues with..

Everything @awed-frog writes is similarly enjoyable to read in that style but longer and more poetic and dark, and very insightful. (You might be able to tell I’m mentioning the meta writers I reblogged stuff from today while waiting for my long term memory to contribute anything)… Linking their ask tag for starters because idk how to find other long meta at short notice :P

Actually while I’m thinking about rewatches, I’ve always enjoyed @dustydreamsanddirtyscars‘s dramatic, purple prose essay approach to meta and flawless blog presentation… Sadly Jenny’s not enjoying season 12 very much with the change in style from the weird dark symbolism of Carver era, to the sort of fractals upon fractals of weird little emotional references and do-overs this year when Dabb gets to do his thing on a whole season, but if you want Carver era weird dark symbolism, I’ve been really enjoying where she has been lurking in Carver era, meta-ing her way through it. 

(I just generally dig reading re-watches, especially because all that hindsight is paying off so much now because for Dabb era if we’re going to meta it we NEED hindsight and reminders and the TNT loop playing in the background showing us just how layered and self-referential the show has become (and what it’s doing differently, and how much the characters have grown and changed, which, I think, is the point now) - anyway if you’re doing a rewatch, I LOVE to read posts about old episodes, especially the weird old MotW and really early seasons stuff no one seems to talk about much any more)

There’s a LOT of great meta writers out there and after every episode I try to find and reblog the long reaction notes, if they’re done it, from @dorkilysoulless @grey2510 @kayanem @bluestar86 (and awed frog again). @charlie-minion has been busy this season with other stuff as far as I know with a few more infrequent visits, but I know she has a page with every meta she wrote on it and generally wrote a great post per episode for a good chunk of the time I was in fandom, and still drops by fairly regularly despite a smaller presence. @thevioletcaptain also is great and has an episode reaction for most episodes (though again has been busy with IRL stuff for a few weeks/months/I have no concept of time but she hasn’t posted anything for the recent episodes as far as I’ve seen >.>) and also a page with her meta on it that when I was brand new to the fandom I had permanently open in another tab to cross-reference while I re-watched the show :P

(A lot of my favourite meta writers I imprinted on like a duckling when I was new and remember them really well but of course I love all the new people around here but my actual useful visual memories are all the fandom circa season 9 and not all around any more much, because my brain has been stewing in migraines and fatigue since, like, the middle of season 10, and my new approach is to wearily trudge through my dash barely checking who wrote what unless I have to deal with minuscule fonts on a read more, so I’m afraid my memory of active bloggers is totally rubbish and it’s best just to look at my awesome meta tag and see who I’ve been reblogging a lot lately and some really grevious oversights in people I will smack my head for not mentioning if you bring it up, but your question was phrased in such a way I went straight for who do I ENJOY reading not quick gimme a useful list with no explanation thing :P So uh, sorry if this is 100x longer than you expected :D)

[scriptstructure]

What's the difference between third person and omnipotent? I'm trying to beta read this one fanfic, and I feel like the author switches between the two without meaning to, but I can't recognize them well enough to tell, and now I'm confused.

Third person refers to the way that the characters are referred to, third person is saying ‘he does this, he goes there, she walks, she talks, she loves coffee’. There are different degrees of third person perspective, one of which is omniscient.

[Also, it’s called omniscient, not omnipotent. Omniscient means knowing everything, while Omnipotent means able to do everything]

The different degrees of third person perspective are in relation to how much information beyond the protagonist or focalising character’s personal knowledge of the world and events around them the narrative voice or narrator will be able to tell.

A limited third person POV refers to a POV that is limited to being very close to what the protagonist/ focalising character knows.

An omniscient third person POV refers to a POV where the narrator or narrative voice knows not only what the main or focalising character is thinking, but can comment on what other characters are thinking or feeling, and can comment on a more ‘global’ scale of events or knowledge.

Of course, these are done by degrees. The ‘world’ of the story is what the omniscient narrator is privy to, and the ‘world’ might be limited to a single town or a single house. Whatever it is that encompasses the whole of the action of the story.

For example:

Limited: Sarah looked at the snail hauling its shell up the stone wall, she traced back over the trail it left behind and wondered if that was a metaphor for something. A noise from in the house jolted her from her reverie and she checked the time -- she was going to be late! -- and she tugged her school bag higher on her back and rushed up the street to the bus stop.

Omniscient: While Sarah stood in her mother’s garden pondering a snail, the bus driver rounded the corner and saw ahead that one of the students she would be picking up was missing. She wondered if the girl was sick off, but she also knew that that one was often late. Almost on queue, the girl appeared from down her road, running for the stop, her massive book bag jolting against the small of her back.

Incidentally while all this was going on, three towns over someone was discovering a chemical produced by the common or garden snail that could assist with acne treatment, and on the other side of the planet, a small rocket was being sent up to space, with two scientists inside to study a group of important plants and the effect that space would have on their flowering and seeding, and one hungry snail which had somehow been overlooked, but would have enormous consequences for the mission.

This omniscient example is a little overblown, but you can see that in an omniscient perspective you can cover a vast area of the world of the story. This can be useful if you want the reader to see the full scope of the world and how all these divergent plots connect together long before they join up in the protagonist’s personal plot. It can also be useful if there are multiple divergent plots that interact and affect one another, but which the protagonist never knows about.

For instance, if the snail in space and the snail related acne cure both affect Sarah’s life, but she doesn’t know about them except for the impact that they later have on her, then in a limited third person perspective the reader won’t learn about the events leading up to that affect.

In an omniscient perspective, the different plots can be covered at the same time, without ‘head hopping’.

Now head hopping is another element that is relevant here. A lot of stories that use a limited third person POV utilise head hopping to be able to show multiple perspectives. A Song of Ice and Fire does this. Each character that gets their own chapters acts as the focaliser for that chapter, the limited third person perspective means that the reader sees the world through the prism of that character’s knowledge and prejudices.

If there were a chapter where Dany and Stannis met up, and it was told from Dany’s perspective, we wouldn’t know what Stannis was thinking or feeling, only what Dany could glean from his actions and behaviour.

A lot of people slip up when head hopping, and will start writing about both characters’ internal feelings when they should be focusing on one of them and have the other one closed off. I suspect that this may be what’s happening with the story you’re beta-ing.

To continue with the ASOIAF example, if the chapter is Dany’s, and then halfway through the narration starts talking about how Stannis is angry because so-and-so screwed up on something and how he feels about Dany etc, then the POV is slipping. To preserve the perspective, the chapter needs to be kept to what Dany could reasonably know or guess from what she is able to perceive about the situation. Anything other than that that Stannis feels needs to be reserved for his own chapter. For instance, he could have a paragraph or two thinking back on how angry he’d been throughout the meeting for whatever reason. But blending the two will just make things confused and difficult to parse.

So you’ll want to look at the MS you’re reading and figure out:

What kind of narration is this intended to be? Limited or Omniscient?

What issues are making it seem weird? 

Is there inappropriate perspective slippage?

Could the problems be caused by weak transitions between perspectives?