#but the story and feel was so very different from most of those

[crystallilytarot02]

A little bit of 18+ MDNI

I wanted this to be compliments from your future partner. But these are more like messages. Bear with me, I am coming back to reading after a while. Hope you will still enjoy it!

Pile 1

Okay, I see a whole story. They know that you went through a lot, and they think you are so strong, but also feel bad because they weren't there for you in the past. But even if you are this strong, they will be there in the future, if you need them. They like your humor and the way your brain works. You will have some inner jokes together. You also have a passionate and playful side, and they will like that too. You can be as silly and joyful with them as you want. They will admire you. I feel balance too, you can be serious and funny too. And it's a good combination for them. Also your body feels balanced for them too, I mean just the right amount of everything, and also your bodies fit perfectly.

Pile 2

A little similar as pile 1. You had some hard things, but you were able to move on, start over, you are strong, ambitious. And you are still kind and have a big heart. Here are some signs of traveling or different cultures, this can resonate with some of you. You don't live in the past for so long, you are able to have an optimistic way to look forward to the future. You are also very talented. I think you have good intuition too. But you don't play dirty, even if you are competitive, you play fair. But your strong will and wisdom will always get you where you want to be. They will love your butt, your back, and if you have any kinks or fantasies, they will love it too. Your chemistry will be insane. You are a gem to them.

Pile 3

You are the sweetest soul in the world. You will be their literal sunshine. It's hard to see the messages, because all I see is deep love for each other. You are kind, but you can be passionate about things you like. Don't give up, you have so many gifts in you. You don't really fight with people but you still can be succesful. You don't have to be loud or very extroverted, you can succeed as you are. You still have a playful, joyful, positive side. You are like a perfect friend. Your smile is the most beautiful thing. You two will be always there for each other in bad and good times too. I feel passion, but it's sweet, gentle. It's a feeling like those cute older couples who still walking while holding each other's hands.

[filmtv2022]

The Mirror: Forward Together

Previous Part

Pairing: Bob/The Void/Sentry x Reader, (platonic) Bucky x Reader

Story: (This can likely be read as a standalone, but does follow the previous installments of "The Mirror"). On the morning before another mission, Bucky catches you on the helipad. Things have been different between the two of you since "The Incident". The man who'd found you in one of your worst moments is struggling to come to grips with the full extent of your power and the decline of your mental health. Your history of pain and failure makes itself known, forcing you to come to grips with the reality of your situation. Bob stands by your side, confessing the truth of his feelings, and hoping beyond it all that you two can find a life together.

Warnings: Mentions of a suicide attempt (very brief and not graphic) & rough language + reader is having a bit of a breakdown and is in denial about her recovery + small kiss + reader is harsh to Bucky as a method of deflection

A/N: Things have been a bit rough here on my end. I'm still working on my other series, but I wanted to keep writing in this too. As always, I apologize for my mistakes.

___________________________________________

Time passed slowly as you attempted to tackle the endless task of crawling out from under the weight of your latest low. You’d lived this many times. Years had been spent behind closed doors, or walking the streets when there were no doors to take shelter behind, trying to fend off the disastrous tendencies that littered the battlefield of your mind. 

You never meant to do it, to fall into the neglect and self-destruction, but it always came back, like a dangerous friend ready to steal you away when you needed help the most. And when it happened, because it always did, there was no one to go to, no one to help salvage the pieces of you from the wreckage. This time… this time that couldn’t have been further from the truth, for there wasn’t just one man, but a family of beautiful people, all broken and battered in their own specific way, who reached out to pick you up. Even when you weren’t particularly fond of their assistance. The instinct to shove away their kindness, to pass it off as pity… proved to be a hellish cycle to fight.

Daylight peaked over the horizon, painting the New York skyline in lovely hues of pale pink and yellow. Weeks spent trapped in the Watchtower, hiding from Valentina and trying to recover had taken their toll. Your skin was sallow despite the vitamins Yelena left on your bedside each morning. Your sweats hung looser on your body, even with the smoothies Bob brought to you each day, hoping you’d take more than a few sips as he searched for the right combination of flavors to entice you into eating. 

But then there was Bucky, the man who’d saved you from yourself all those months ago. The connection had been instantaneous, almost as if he was watching a version of himself unfurl before him. One that was dangerous, chaotic, and always on the verge of losing control. A version of himself that could have easily existed in the lost days between deadly missions and the time locked behind the bars of Hydra’s facilities. But something had changed since the incident. He was hesitant, cautious even when the two of you were together. When you ventured to hold his gaze, you felt him start to crumble. His words had been few, and his time with you had been scarce, letting Lena look after both you and Bob. Which made the sound of his voice breaking over the wind more surprising. 

“What are you doin’ out here?” Bucky called, hovering at a safe distance. His approach drew your eyes from the horizon. 

From this spot on the helipad, you’d watched the sunrise, gilding the skyscrapers in molten gold. It was stunning. High above the city, it was easy to see what so many were hoping to find when they came to New York. A new start, an opportunity around every corner, but you knew that reality was very different. Down on the streets, life took a turn for the worse. Unhoused people crowd every corner, hoping for kindness and finding none. Among the masses, people who'd fallen into a life similar to yours ended up trapped in the dark corners of the city, hoping to disappear. Some did, their families unaware or uncaring of what had become of them. Others found glimpses of hope, only to be thrown back into the depths without ceremony, their demons ready and waiting.

“I’m not gonna jump if that’s what you're worried about. Besides, it'd be kinda pointless anyway. It wouldn't work, trust me.. I've tried.” You huffed a fake chuckle, hoping to break the obvious tension in the man’s posture. 

“That’s not- I didn't mean-” Bucky stammered, horrified at thinking that he’d overstepped a boundary in coming out here, and immediately putting his foot in his mouth. 

“You’re a bad liar, Barnes. I’m afraid you didn’t spend enough time in Congress to hone that particular skill.” This time, a genuine smile graced your lips, tipping up the corners and crinkling your eyes. 

“I was an assassin and a soldier… lying was second nature for a while, but now, not so much. Do you honestly think that's a bad thing?” The man beside you exhaled deeply, checking you over from head to toe. 

“No, I don't.” You turned away from him again, breathing in the fresh air, and letting words come unchecked. “Say what you need to say, Bucky.” 

He stood stock still behind you as the nervousness from before crashed back in, pulling his shoulders up to his ears. You could feel it, the vibrations thrumming through his body, the increased rate of his heartbeat.

“You’re all leaving on a mission that Valentina wants you to take care of, right? God forbid she’d do the work herself.” You turned further toward him as you spoke, taking in the way he crossed his arms over his chest, holding himself together and blocking out any possibility of accidentally touching you.

“Yes.” That was all he managed. Your head tilted, your arms loose by your sides as you stepped toward him. The terror in his eyes was unmistakable, and it glued you to the floor. Going no further, you couldn’t help the flare of emotion that rumbled in your chest. 

“An’ you’re worried about Bob and me being here… alone.” When Bucky didn’t speak, you kept going, pushing with words, but still giving him physical space. “Jesus Christ, James. Give us a little credit!” 

“Hey, I just want you to be okay… both of you.” He pleaded, his hands locking tighter over his chest. 

“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, Barnes.” You broke your stance, powering forward even as the air around you rumbled with power. “I know what goes through your head. You’re fucking paranoid that the pair of unstable, drug addicts you’re currently cohabitating with are going to destroy all this-” You gestured wildly all around. “You think Bob-” 

“It’s not-” He tried to cut you off, seeing the venomous flicker in your eyes.

“It’s not what, Buck?” You spat the questions through gritted teeth. 

“It’s not Bob that I’m worried about.” He was quiet, letting the confession hang in the air. He watched it slam into you like a speeding bullet.

Your brows scrunched, trying to process what he’d said. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” 

The crack in your voice was too much for him to handle. He needed you to know, to understand, but he doubted anything could undo what he had already done. 

“It’s just fresh, is all. I know you, I also know that things have been…”

“Shitty?” You quipped sarcastically, deflecting the raw emotion in your friend's voice.

 

“Yeah, shitty.” Bucky took a chance, moving a half step in your direction, but it did little to ease the moment. “You’re a good person, and I know you’d never do anything to intentionally hurt someone, but… Bob is doing the work, showing up day after day, and you’re… you’re not.” 

“What the fuck are you on about? I go to therapy. I’m there every time.  I take the medications that quack pushes at me with no questions asked. So what is this really about?”

“Oh, come on! Be honest with yourself for once! You go, but do you actually try? Sitting on a fucking couch in silence isn’t doing the work, Y/N/N! Swallowing meds, but neglecting everything else, isn’t helping you get better!” 

“That’s rich coming from you! You make bullshit amends, and you think you've healed yourself? Fucking delusional! And 'better'? What does that even mean? You rubbed viciously at your forehead, turning the skin red as you screwed your eyes shut trying to squish the rise of shadows that begged to be let loose. “I’ve never been ‘better', it’s never gonna be ‘better’… not really. It’s just highs and lows, and that’s it. Nothing more.” 

Done with the conversation, you blew past Bucky, making your way toward the Watchtower. 

“Y/N/N, stop. Listen to me, for just a second.” Bucky called to you, barely audible over the wind, but you’d heard more than enough. Whipping around, rage roiled off of you in a visible spectrum of light, an oil-slicked aura. 

“Why should I ever listen to you? Hmm? You truly are out of your mind, Barnes. You’re not a goddamn hero, you’re fucking lab experiment, just the same as me. A soldier who was discarded like trash and forgotten by your own damn people. You’re the one who buried your shit so deep that it’d take a fucking bomb to unpack it. What’d ya hope would happen with that, hmm? That no one would ever find it? The nasty broken bits? Well, you were wrong. They did… an’ what has that done for you? Nothing, it's done nothing other than alienate the only living person who actually gives a shit about you. Don’t you try to lecture me about putting in the effort, солдат (soldat)” 

“Don't you dare talk about Sam like that! You've got no right! And what about you?! I care about you, and I thought-” Bucky's voice was low and steady despite the anger and hurt that coursed through his veins. 

“ You thought what, Buck? That the feeling was mutual?!" You swallowed hard, desperate to control yourself, "It was... until you decided to start looking at me like I'm a fucking monster." The life in your eyes faded, giving a glimpse into the titan that lived within, and it was terrifying. The door flew open as you drew close, letting you sweep down the stairs into the wide expanse of what had become the ‘living room’. Skidding to a stop, you felt waves of energy cover your skin, distorting the streaks of darkness that inked like poison over your arms and neck. The abyss was near, roaring for you to jump, to let the bars of the cage fall.  

A blood-curdling scream ripped through your lungs, releasing the shockwaves into the room and shattering the collection of bottles that hung behind the bar. Shards of glass flew through the air, tinkling lightly as they dropped to the ground. A stray fragment sliced through the delicate skin of your cheeks, as you made no effort to block its approach. The cut began to heal just as fast as it had happened. Drained of your control, blackness rimmed your vision, and you buckled. Only the sudden presence of another kept you from hitting the ground. 

The moment his hands found you, the sense of hopelessness eased. Its grip softened just enough to let you breathe. Robert brought you to his chest, ignoring the way your fingernails bit into his back through the thin cotton of his shirt. 

“Hey, hey, what’s goin’ on? Talk to me… please.” He struggled to hold you, fighting the way you tried to push him away. “Stop, stop- don’t do this.” 

“What’s the point?” You snarled, drawing back to look him in the eyes. 

“Of what?” A pained look of knowing flashed over his countenance. He understood what you meant, but needed to hear the words from your mouth. 

“Everything… trying. Why does it matter? Nothing ever changes, not really.” Bob heard the crunch of glass beneath heavy bootsteps, drawing his eyes to the top of the staircase. Bucky’s hardened stare fell on the pair of you. 

“Because if you don’t, you’re letting them win. Don’t give them the privilege of being right.” He locked eyes with Bucky as he held you more surely

In theory, Robert had no problem with Buckey. In fact, the man had played an integral part in saving him, at least that’s what Lena had told him, but there was something about the look in his eyes that had him reeling. Just as he opened his mouth to speak, the sound of new footsteps filtered into the cavernous room. 

“What’s going on?” The blonde assassin stood across the room, looking around at the destruction. 

“It’s nothing. We’re fine…” You looked back at Bucky as you continued to speak, "I'm fine.” 

Ignoring the stares that pierced you from all angles, you stormed out of the room, retreating to the safety of Robert’s space. You knew he’d be there sooner rather than later, but that was a bridge you’d cross when the time came. For now, you let yourself sink to the ground, letting the hard surface pinch at your pressure points, the pain a welcome reminder that you still existed, that reality continued to move around you. It was like this that you let yourself begin to feel the truth of what Bucky had spoken. 

—------------------------------------------------------

“The hell are you doing, Y/N/N? I thought you were…” He found you sitting in the corner, pinned between the bed and the wall, your temple resting on the smooth, drywall. When you caught his broken thought, you pushed to stand with lightning speed. In seconds, you were on him, shoving hard against his chest. Even with his own strength, he stumbled back a few steps. The golden ring in his eyes flared at your display, matching the crimson in your own. Lights flickered in the Watchtower, the pair of you were keyed up like primed bombs set to destroy everything in your wake. 

“You thought I was what? Getting better? God, not you too! Over there buying the bullshit. We don’t get better, Bob. We’re fucking addicts, who went for some new shit, the next high, and ended up discarded rejects they were hoping would die quietly. Bad news for them! That didn't happen. You nearly destroyed New York City, and I – even if we try to tell ourselves we did it to be better, to make something of our lives, it's a lie!” 

“That's not true!” You could feel frustration radiating off of him, the darkness inside you rolling in your chest, clambering to meet his. 

“Yes, it is, Bob! People like you and me, we’re failures, always have been-” Your voice caught, snagging on itself, “I try and I try, but the outcome is always the same. I fuck up. Not once in my goddamn life have I ever done anything worthwhile. I have always made things worse.” 

“No, you don't.” The rage bottomed out, lost in a wave of something raw and pained. A watery look settled over his features, his brows pinched in hurt for you, and for him.

“What?” You were startled, shocked by the sudden change, and it stole the air from your lungs. 

“You don't make everything worse.” Bob took a half step in your direction, testing your reaction. 

“You can’t be serious? Everything I've ever done has failed. It’s failure after failure. I-am-a-failure! Why would this be any different?” 

“Because it has to be!” He yelled, louder than you’d ever heard him before. “It has to be.” Bob's breathing came in heavy pants as he struggled to control the power that flowed through his veins. Silence descended on the room, letting the energy die with it. Tired of waiting and needing you to understand, needing to feel you, he approached with abandon. Broad hands, found the swell of your hips as he rested his forehead to yours.

“Because I can’t lose myself again… an’ because we have each other, for real this time. This can't be another fuck up, I won't let be.” 

“How can you be so confident?” Your arms hooked around his neck, holding him tenderly, and with zero intentions of letting go. 

“I don't know… and maybe I'm wrong, and maybe things will go to shit again, but I'm not going to waste this time with you.” Bob threaded his fingers through your hair, tipping your face to his. Your lips ghosted over his as you spoke, wanting an answer, but wanting him more. You could feel him breaking; the hitch in his lungs told you just how badly he wanted this, too. 

“But I need you to do this with me.” Bob made space to look at you, holding your gaze as he talked, “Neither of us is better off alone, history has proven that, but together… god. When I'm with you, it's- it's like I can start to see a future for myself. I've never had that before, and fuck is it good. Just promise me you won't try to push me away, please, that's all I ask. Tell me what you need and we'll do it together.” 

“I don't know how to do that, to let people in.” You confessed, embarrassed by the truth though you had no need to be. 

“Like I said, we can work on it together. You and me.”

“You're sure?” 

“More sure than I've ever been.” Bob felt you exhale, your body going soft in his arms, finally off the proverbial ledge you'd been clinging to for god knows how long. Your warm touch drifted to his chest as you pressed up to find his lips. He hummed into the kiss, letting it linger for a moment before breaking away to look at you. Nothing but pure adoration and love lingered in his gaze, and it was more than enough to soothe your weary soul. 

[utilitycaster]

Watching the Mighty Nein conversations and seeing people post about Watch Machina I really am struck by how much like...generally well-meaning misunderstandings or accidentally insensitive statements or even just two valid but conflicting viewpoints come up in conversation from the very start, and how utterly vital this is to the characters feeling so real and having such clear motivations.

Molly accidentally says the worst things possible to Nott every time, because while he needs to believe he is not the person who was put in a grave and who Cree knew, just a different person who happens to share the same body (that he's endeavored to make his own), she needs to believe that despite being in a different body she is still able to be Veth Brenatto, a halfling woman from Felderwin. Fjord has designed his entire current persona about being someone who commands respect after a powerless childhood in which he was bullied and abused and an adulthood in which he was horribly, even lethally, betrayed, and so the others aren't wrong about his tusks (and, notably, he's even able to listen) but it's part of that precarious scaffolding, along with the accent; and people like Caleb and Yasha in turn (as many people have said in the notes) need to know that someone else can move forward from their past, even though they can't yet.

With the conversation about Kima, Vex - victim of racism over her mixed heritage and having experienced an early adulthood as a homeless wanderer who was undoubtedly treated with suspicion simply for being new in town too many times to count - needs Keyleth to have more than just "vibes"; Keyleth, on the other hand, is terrified she lacks leadership qualities not just of intuition ("vibes") but also expressing that to others. Much later on, Scanlan's outburst in A Bard's Lament is both very real - Scanlan feels (and might even be right) that if he'd never met Vox Machina, he'd be less powerful but he also wouldn't have died twice, and he wouldn't have to care so much about others and he might not even know about Kaylie - but in expressing that he blames the rest of Vox Machina for caring back and making that attempt to disconnect impossible.

These are all in my opinion either absolutely necessary groundwork for characters who develop satisfyingly over the course of a campaign, and remarkably efficient too: each of these serves to set up both the characters as individuals (even if we as the audience did not know the entire story at the time, which, in many of these cases, we didn't) and their relationships with each other.

And I think, and I would apologize for making so many posts about where Campaign 3 fails where the other two succeed but I find it personally helpful to do so and I'm not going to stop until it no longer is, that this is perhaps its greatest failure point: there was no space given, in the narrative or by much of the fandom, to work through well-intentioned insensitivity or disagreement. Especially with the examples of the Mighty Nein, this doesn't even need to rise to the level of outright conflict! Molly and Nott's conversation is at most prickly, and the conversation with Fjord is even supportive, and Vox Machina had, notably, much more time with each other than the Mighty Nein had had at the time of both those conversations and could go much harder without destroying a nascent social connection.

And, of course, the Mighty Nein were also not without more outright conflict - we've already seen Fjord (life ruined and nearly destroyed entirely by someone deviating from the plan in a high pressure situation and betraying the group) threaten Caleb (pretty much solely motivated by the pursuit of arcane knowledge and Nott at this point, history of extensive abuse) and Nott (family saved because she went off-book), and Bowlgate (Beau's value of personal freedom vs. Caleb's suspicion of strangers' intentions, both informed by their pasts) is coming up fast. And clearly, it is not uniquely a campaign 3 issue that the fandom decided that one person was right and one was wrong instead of understanding that these are people with two separate perspectives - that stretches back to Vox Machina (the initial source of much Keyleth hate was that conversation about Kima), and the cast is still joking about Bowlgate - but I am struck by how there was pretty much no one who both loves Bells Hells and embraces this sort of misunderstanding. I still recall the seething hatred towards Orym's mother Alma for an utterly innocent statement re: the Ashari avoiding any Ruidusborn children even though she is personally entirely unaware of Imogen's past and the end state of the world ends up being...no more Ruidusborn ever.

We've seen what happens when everyone takes those misunderstandings and instead of trying to dig into them with empathy for both sides (Vax re: the argument about Kima) or talking it over after the fact even in veiled terms (the team conversation with Nott immediately in episode 13, and the oblique conversation between Fjord and Caleb in 14 and several much later ones and more explicit ones re: Swordgate) tries to just skip past them and maintain an illusion of peace. Ironically, instead of having heroic assholes who can deal with the fallout of the problems they cause and who learn to take unintentional insensitivity in good faith, you simply end up with regular old assholes, who can't, and who as a result treat most outsiders with disdain.

[fresidoll]

★ DON'T FORGET TO KISS ME OR ELSE YOU'LL HAVE TO MISS ME. tsukishima kei

.ᐟ Content summary: Boyfriend Tsukishima headcanons part 2

.ᐟ Includes: Tsukishima x fem!reader

.ᐟ Word count: 1.75 k

.ᐟ Content warnings: none, just fluff, sfw, kinda realistic?)

.ᐟ A/N: Since the first Tsukishima bf hc were so well received, i wrote a second part as a thank you for all the support on the first work <333. The title of this it's lyrics of this song by beabadoobee.

.ᐟ ☆ Part 1 ☆

☆ He gets very offended if you don’t want to share a spoon or straw with him. He actually finds it disgusting to share any cuttery, straw or glass with somebody else because well, ew, only god knows where their mouths have been and he’s not taking any chances. But with you, it’s a whole different story. If you even dare to wipe the rim of his glass before drinking from it, he looks at you so offended and literally gives you a narrowed eyed look like daring you to keep wiping. He takes this as you non verbally saying you find him disgusting, just a little dramatic, right? But of course it’s nothing serious and he knows you both are joking. After the aforementioned occurrence, he would act very much offended until you give him some kisses to show him you are not disgusted by him and of course, he always gives in.

☆ Asking for affection isn’t something he does, but when he wants you to hug him or kiss him he starts to play with your hair or gets really close to you. If you are oblivious to his attempts to convey his affectious needs, he just sulks for like 5 minutes before asking something dramatic like “why are you being so cold with me today?”,while looking at you like this. He does initiate affection with you often but he just likes to be dramatic because he knows you play along in his little game and after his dramatic complaint, you give him all the affection he craves.

☆ His phone has a different notification sound for you. You are the only person on his phone who has a distinctive ringtone and notification sound, it sounds like something normal but considering how Tsukishima doesn’t look like he cares for those little details, it took his family and friends out of guard when they figured it all out. The call ringtone he chose for you it’s the Nana theme song or some sound similar to that one because for him you sound exactly like that, and for the notification sound it’s something that sounds like the sparkles in the movies, something cute and whimsical like that. It’s a little cheesy but this is peak Tsukishima being a discrete loverboy for you.

☆ Gaming together it's a must. So any game works for him and most of the time lets you choose what you want to play but i feel he 100% loves to play cozy multiplayer games with you, like Minecraft or Stardew Valley, these two are his favorite. In Minecraft you are mostly building stuff and having a competition about it, and you always win because he has 0 creativity sense and what he builts always looks plain and a little wrong placed. Now, Stardew Valley was a game he found silly and a waste of time because it looked boring, but he actually got hooked on it pretty quick after he tried it for the first time. As I mentioned before, he sucks at decorating so you take care of your little farm so everything looks pretty while he goes in search for all the items you need, you forage, make artisan goods and fish while he collects wood, rocks and goes into the mines to fight the monsters there because it’s fun for him and he always gifts you your favorite crystal at the end of the day <3

☆ It may be a little silly but you have a shared tamagotchi that it’s like your child. The idea of this was surprisingly his. It happened because he got the tamagotchi as a plus gift after his mom bought something in a random store so his mom let him keep it even though he didn’t want the damn thing, he thought of throwing it away but thought that you might like it so he gifted it to you. After that, you were constantly taking care of the little virtual mascot to a point that got Tsukishima wondering about all the effort you put in taking care of a bunch of pixels and how you got stressed sometimes you got when you were busy and couldn’t attend the necessities of the virtual thing, so being the sweet boyfriend he is, he offered to take the tamagotchi and take care of it even if he didn’t saw the appeal in taking care of it. Soon he came to find that even if the whole thing of taking care of some virtual pet was a little dumb, it was funny (in a good way) to think of you basically co-parenting that dumb virtual pet that he grew to like. Then one day he said you should share the tamagotchi because it was already like your child, when you agreed, he took his role as a father very seriously and actually took good care of your virtual child.

☆ You know how in some couples it happens that there’s a person that it’s really picky with food and the other person eats basically everything that’s edible, yeah well, in your relationship Tsukishima it’s the picky eater. It may be that you are also a very picky eater but he takes that to a whole new level. Yes, he doesn’t like green peppers, he can’t stand any onion except spring onion and yes, he doesn't eat chicken if it’s not nuggets or chicken breast because he’s disgusted of the cartilages and chewy things, that’s all very reasonable and all but he sometimes he has very specific and a little odd pickiness habits. There was this time when you had started dating in which you were having a little date in a cafe and of course you both ordered some cake, he ordered a strawberry shortcake and started to take the strawberries off the piece cake… When you asked the reason for this, you expected that maybe he was saving them for the end but no, his answer was calm and nonchalant: “I don’t like strawberries.” You were dumbfounded, he just shrugged and continued his task before explaining he liked the taste the strawberries left lingering in the cream of the cake but he hated strawberries and only liked that almost unnoticeable flavor they gave to the strawberry shortcake…  Dating him after that meant to deal with his very unusual picky eater preferences, but well, you learned to love his suspiciously neurodivergent habits. For the record, if you are the kind of person that eats pretty much everything, he’s gonna be placing on your plate everything he picks off out of his food <3 (as i was editing, this tiktok popped up in my feed and this is basically Tsukishima i'm afraid lol)

☆ His family loves you a lot. His mom loved you even before personally meeting you because of how much Tsukishima talked about you to her, a mother knows, and she knew you were good for him because she could see how Tsukishima seemed more cheerful and full of life after he started dating you and that gained you her approval. Now, his mom always invites you constantly to lunch or dinner at their place, invites you to family outings they have and you regularly receive some food or baked goods from her. Now Akiteru, Tsukishima’s brother, he absolutely likes you and it’s happy about your relationship, but since he and Tsukishima are still working in building their brotherly relationship up, he keeps his distance a little bit but he’s always nice to you and stubbly let’s you know how glad he is you are taking care of his little brother.

☆ His love language is acts of service and physical touch. So, he isn’t good with words and love it’s a very complex kind of feeling, expressing it it’s hard or easy depending on the person and Tsukishima in this case, couldn’t bring himself to say all he feels for you out loud, he just can’t, so instead of just keep quiet and no do anything about it, he found another way of letting you know how much he loves you; acts of service and physical touch. He always carries your bag for you, even your handbag if you use one, he always pays for everything and doesn’t accept your money when you want to pay him back, walks in the side of the sidewalk, always gets you your favorite snacks and food, fixes your hair when the wind ruins it, tells you when your makeup it’s smudged and sometimes he even tries to fix it, pays attention to everything you say, opens the doors for you, places his hand on your head or covers the table corners when you bend down so you won’t hurt yourself and so on. Now physical touch it’s a tiny bit more important to him because he is very vulnerable when he’s affectionate towards you, he’s shy about it but tries his best to be nonchalant and casual when he holds your hand, wraps his arm around your shoulders as you walk, when he hugs you by the waist, when he nudges your noses together, when he kisses your cheek or your forehead, when he kisses your lips as his hands cradle your face… In all of those acts of service and touches, he completely pours out his heart and hopes you know how much you mean to him.

☆ Like it’s stated in the previous point, kisses are a very meaningful thing to him, whether the kisses are pecks, small kisses, long kisses, makeout sessions and any of that, kisses are not something Tsukishima takes lightly. The first time you kissed he almost passed out from the rush of emotions, the memory of how it felt and how you tasted it’s engraved deep in his brain and the more you kissed with the pass of time, his fondness for kissing you grew and grew more everytime your lips met. His kisses depend on the place you are, it can be a peck if there’s too much people around or it can be a long lasting kiss if you’re alone, whatever it is but he always has to kiss you goodbye, that became almost a non-spoken rule, he has to kiss you whether it be on the lips or your cheek or your forehead but he has to or he’ll be feeling so uncomfortable about it, like an itch that he has to scratch to kiss you as soon as you see each other again. If he forgets to kiss you, he’ll be missing you until his lips met with yours once again <3

[theresattrpgforthat]

Do you have any recommendations for library or book themed ttrpgs?

THEME: Library / Book Themed TTRPGS

Hello there! Most of the games I found this time around were solo games, although I think there's one or two that can be played multiplayer. Without further ado, let the recommendations begin!

The Librarian's Apprentice, by Almost Bedtime Theater.

Infinite, ever-shifting, and sometimes dangerous, the Library exists in the space between worlds and times. Among the many who call it home are the Librarians, and only those who truly understand it may join their ranks. You seek to do so.

The path of a Librarian’s apprentice is a long one. Your current task is designed to test your skills at traversing the Library and finding information. Retrieve the six documents requested by your Librarian before the day is out and you will have completed one more step on your journey.

Good luck.

Using the Firelights System, by Fari RPGs, The Librarian's Apprentice contains three brochures, called volumes. Volume I is the game rules & character creation. Volume II contains the bestiary, as well as the oracle for locations, events & secrets. Volume III has more oracles, this time for NPCs.

As a solo journaling game, this is a story you can follow at your own pace, using dice and a deck of cards to generate new and unexpected moments that your character will have to navigate. If you love the limitless feeling of inter-dimensional libraries, you might like The Librarian's Apprentice.

The Sealed Library, by Sealed Library.

“How DARE you and the rest of your barbarians set fire to my library? Play conqueror all you want, Mighty Caesar! Rape, murder, pillage thousands, even millions of human beings! But neither you nor any other barbarian has the right to destroy one human thought!” ― Sidney Buchman

The Sealed Library is a solo journaling RPG played with a deck of cards, a tumbling block tower and a notebook/scroll.

You are the sole surviving librarian of the greatest library in history. It sits in the centre of culture for an ancient land, now fallen to invaders. They pillage and raze.

The library has been barricaded and you are under siege. What important texts can you move down into the vaults and seal away forever before the barricade breaks?

What will future generations discover inside the Sealed Library?

The Sealed Library is not designed to have a happy ending. Wretched & Alone games rarely are. No, what you play to find out is instead how your ending arrives; will it arrive in a sudden, painful attack? Or in a slow, painful wasting away as the invaders whittle away at your resources? If you play with a Jenga tower, you'll likely meet the first kind of end; if you just play with some dice and a deck of cards, you'll likely meet the second.

Reference Hopping, by Calenmir's RPGs.

"Reference Hopping" is a solo journaling one-page RPG where you play as an intern of the Multiversal Library Network. Since today's most urgent tasks are distributed across 15 different branch locations, you'll need to travel between them via reference hopping.

To play this game, you need a very specific book - a dictionary. You use word association to direct your travel. In order to hit specific targets, you need to find connections from some specific words provided in a list; each target word includes a description of the location's architecture, and task your librarian character is expected to accomplish, If you're a big fan of wordplay or word games, you might like this one.

Duelists of the Pages, by StarshineScribbles.

Duelists Of The Pages is a game where you use your books to create duelists. And then pit these duelists against each other!

This game is suitable for 2 or more players. And each player only needs a book and a bookmark to play.

Players pick a book and swap bookmarks. The other player fills in the { } with numbers and returns the bookmark to its original owner. The player then picks a page from their book and uses the numbers given to generate their duelist.

Players then set their duelists against each other! Either in a tournament or round-robin format!

A great little game to play with another person, and you get a bookmark out of it! It looks like you can play this with just two people, but you can increase the size of the party if you like!

Arcanacademia, by Ostrichmonkey Games @ostrichmonkey-games

Arcanademia is a no frills Forged in the Dark game where you play as a member of a Department at a Magical University. You and your colleagues will embark on all manner of magical hijinks on your journey to the top.

Sabotage rivals' projects, wrangle magical mishaps, court favor with the eldritch Administration, and maybe get some grading done.

Competition is fierce and weird and it takes everything you’ve got to get the funding and resources you really deserve.

Arcanacademia isn't solely library-focused, but being about academia, I have a feeling you'll be hitting the books fairly regularly. You can play anyone from an undergraduate student to a tenured professor; with unique abilities attached to each class. Since the game advertises itself as no-frills, I'm assuming you create the lore yourself. I think the game is still on sale, so now is a great time to check it out!

Ex Libris, by Argyx Games.

EX LIBRIS is a solo roleplaying game that lets you experience an adventure by following the course of a novel from your bookshelf. Randomly generate a Hero from the text, then play through a series of scenes as you progress to the end of the book!

Ex Libris uses a novel of your choice to set up a character by using words found in the book to create a character, and dice rolls to refer to which pages you'll end up flipping to next. I'm personally curious about whether or not you could switch up the dice or add extra ones for a larger book.

The instructions for this game are fairly short and sweet. I think Ex Libris is a good option for someone who only needs a little bit of guidance to let their imagination soar.

The Bookshelf, by Lin Codega.

The Bookshelf is a game about taking the time to organize your books, remember their value, and rewrite a story based on the stories you have already created. If you have toys, photos, or magazines, you think about different merits and continue the narrative.

At the end of your bookshelf you can choose to write another part of the story, put your writing aside, or pass The Bookshelf --and your own story--along to a friend. Perhaps they will add to your story or write a new one themselves.

Half roleplaying game, half meditation exercise, The Bookshelf allows you to re-explore your book collection and pick out little tidbits. You can also use other parts of your bookshelf; little tchochkes, photographs, newspapers.. to flesh out the story or poem that you create as you go.

Also check out…

The Third Library, a micro-setting by ehronlime.

The Breathing, by Fistful of Crits.

If you like what I do and want to leave a tip, you can check out my Ko-Fi!

[flowerparrish]

SOAPBOX: On Podfics as Transformative Works

So I decided I wanted to write my SOAPBOX on one thing, after going off on a mini Soapbox the day before challenges dropped for Voiceteam and it gave me an excuse to do it. But then I spent a week thinking about where I wanted this to go, and came up with an adjacent-but-different direction to head it in, whoops?

That said, welcome to my Soapbox on Podfic as a Transformative Work. This will include some of my original ideas such as the inherent podficcer desire to embrace chaos that is evidenced by the way we on the whole flock toward things like texting / social media fics and non-traditional narrative formats, and our desire to embrace the challenge of finding a way to bring those stories to life in audio in a way that fully represents the way they appear on the screen, BUT. More than that, at the core, I really want to talk about WHY podfic is a transformative work, because a lot of people—particularly those who aren't familiar with podfic, and haven't listened to much if any of it—don't seem to understand that it is more than just reading aloud the words of a text.

I get it, I do. At its most basic level, that IS what podfic is, right? That's often how we start to explain podfic; my go-to definition is "you know audiobooks? you know fanfic? cool, imagine audiobooks of fanfic." I stand by that; at its most basic level, that IS what podfic is. And yet one of my favorite things to rant about is that podfic is so much MORE than just an audiobook of a fanfic, or at least DIFFERENT/DISTINCT, in the same way that fanfic as a genre is distinct from traditionally published works. Why? Because podficcers have the same freedom and flexibility, due to the nature of fanworks and the fact that they are created for love and joy, not for profit, to get really weird and experimental with what we're making. You don't have to, obviously; you can make a podfic that is more or less an audiobook of a fanfic and it's perfect valid as a podfic AND as a transformative work—I'll get to that more later. But I think the easiest way to see how transformative something like podfic can be is to listen to something absolutely WILD that a podficcer put their whole soul into, be it through ridiculous voicing or over the top effects, and understand that this is an art not bound by the chains of capitalism in its need to be something that will appeal to the largest possible audience. In fact, podficcers don't get very much interaction on our works, a couple of comments on a single pod is a raging hit as far as we're concerned. People have already done great meta on this point this week, so I won't go too far into it beyond saying—we're not in this for popularity, or even feedback (as nice as it can be to get it); we're doing it for fun and joy and community and, yeah, a little bit of chaos.

Sure, you say, that makes sense. And maybe I can see how a really weird podfic is transformative. But ALL podfic?

Yes. All podfic. Let me put it to you this way: have you ever been in a classroom with a teacher who is just the most boring human you have ever had the misfortune of being forced to learn from? I feel like chances are high most of us have, and if you haven't, you've probably at least witnessed it second-hand from some kind of media. Compare that experience with the joy of learning from someone who is really good at teaching—not just at knowing their subject matter, but at engaging their students in a way that makes learning actually enjoyable, whether or not you're equally invested in the subject.

Podfic is like that. You can have Text-to-Speech read something to you, sure, but comparing it to a real person is like… even if you don't like the real person's style, or the way their audio turned out, it's got LIFE in it. THAT'S what makes podfic transformative. A real person is VOICE-ACTING as they bring a text to life in audio, putting in expression and empathy, and THAT is what makes podfic a transformative form of art.

Do you have to like it? No! Many people don't enjoy listening to audio-based stories, or only enjoy them in certain contexts or formats, and that's fine. But it's not the same thing to say "this isn't for me" and "this isn't actually a work that transforms the original in any way because it's just reading the words aloud". To those people: I challenge you to make a podfic. Any podfic. Learn how to record, and how to narrate, and how to edit, and when you're done, see if you've learned anything from the process about what makes this an art. Because it is enjoyable for those of us who do it, but it is a skill that you learn and practice the same way writing and painting and photo editing and a thousand other skills and art forms are. It is human artistic expression, combined with practical creative skills, and it can be so, so magical. From the most simple narration of a fic to the most complicated multi-voice with sound effects and music, every podfic is a work of art, and in my opinion, if a single person bothers to read this and grapple with that idea, fandom will be better for it.

[dumbgoondog]

Jealous, Much? (P1)

Cw/Tw- Jealousy, possessiveness, threats

Tags- GN!Reader, pre-established relationship

Ft. Gojo, Geto, Nanami, and Choso

First chunk is exposition, then it’s the boys. What happens when your man sees you being flirted with?

PRELUDE

When a guy slides up next to you at the bar, grinning like he’d just won the lottery, you didn’t immediately brush him off. Mostly because he wasn’t annoying—yet—and partly because you were curious to see how far he'd go before he took the hint.

“Did it hurt?” he asked, eyes gleaming with anticipation.

You blinked. “Excuse me?”

“When you fell from heaven,” he clarified, finger-gunning with zero irony. You actually laughed—not with him, more at him, but he didn’t seem to notice the difference.

“Wow,” you mused. “That’s vintage. Do you dust that one off for special occasions?”

He chuckled like you were flirting back. “Only when I see someone who makes it worth it.”

You rested your elbow on the bar and gave him a look, still smiling. He wasn’t threatening, just... kind of ridiculous. He probably meant well. Or maybe he was just drunk enough to think he stood a chance. Either way, it was easier to play along with a few sarcastic quips than to go full shutdown mode. You figured he’d get bored eventually… He didn’t.

“I’m serious,” he went on. “You’ve got this whole mysterious vibe. Like... someone with stories. I could listen to you talk all night.”

“You don’t even know my name.”

“Then tell me.”

You tapped your fingers on your glass, swirling the last bit of your drink. “That’s usually how conversations go, huh? I tell you my name, then what? You try to guess my favorite color?”

“Let me guess—black,” he said confidently, eyes flicking to your outfit.

You snorted. “Wow. You cracked the code.”

He leaned in a little closer, clearly not getting the hint—or maybe refusing to. “You’ve got a great laugh, y’know that?”

You smile and roll your eyes, your boyfriend should have been here by now, and glancing to the clock? Oh he should’ve been here 10 minutes ago! Where is that-

SATORU GOJO

“Hey baby.”

The hand snakes around your waist and you feel that familiar sensation of what you’d describe as wind whipping past when riding a bike. Infinity. You’re straightening up though now, the nickname a giveaway that Toru isn’t as amused as you are with this guy.

“Huh? Who’s this, Angel?” The guy asks maybe starting to realize or maybe thinking it’s another guy to hit on you. Toru’s cursed energy prickles and spits at the nickname, like a mosquito just bit him. You were going to say anything but Satoru is already speaking, looking this guy over with a raised brow and his lips in a unamused pout.

“Who’s this?” Satoru repeats, his voice deceptively light. The kind of light that means someone might be about to have a very bad night. He doesn’t even glance at you, all his attention zeroed in on the guy like he’s calculating how many ways he could erase him from the planet—and which would be the most entertaining.

You recognize the look in his eye. It's not rage, not jealousy exactly. It's territorial. Protective. That unshakable confidence wrapped in smug arrogance that only Satoru Gojo can carry without getting punched in the face—most of the time.

The guy’s smile falters. “I was just talking to them, man. Didn’t know they were taken.”

“Mmm,” Gojo hums, pulling you tighter against him. “They are taken. Very taken. As in, point and home run taken.”

You elbow him in the ribs for that one, but it only makes him grin wider.

“Hey, no hard feelings,” the guy says, holding up his hands and starting to back off. “They didn’t say anything about a boyfriend.”

Gojo’s head tilts. “Well, maybe they were enjoying watching you crash and burn in slow motion. They do have a sense of humor.”

You bite your lip to hide your laugh, but it doesn’t go unnoticed.

“And for the record,” Gojo adds, slipping off his blindfold so the guy gets a clear look at those glowing blue eyes, “next time you use a pick-up line like that, make sure the person you’re talking to doesn’t already have the strongest sorcerer in the world wrapped around their finger.”

“Wha—?” the guy mutters, clearly confused now, staring between the two of you like maybe he missed a step.

“Oh,” you say, finally speaking up, resting your hand over Gojo’s. “This is Satoru Gojo. He’s... complicated. And very dramatic.”

Gojo gasps. “Rude! I bring you flowers once and now I’m dramatic?”

“You got them from Italy, Satoru.”

“Romance isn’t dead!”

The guy is already gone by now, muttering something under his breath as he retreats. Gojo watches him go with narrowed eyes, then finally turns to you, lips tugging into a pout that’s almost convincing.

“I was only ten minutes late,” he murmurs, pressing a kiss to your temple. “And look what happens. My sweetheart gets hit on by guys with middle school flirting skills.”

“More like fifth grade,” you mutter, but you’re already smiling again. “You’re lucky I was just bored and not tempted.”

“Tempted? Tempted?!” Gojo gasps again, hand clutching his chest like he’s been shot. “You wound me, angel.”

“Keep calling me that and I might actually leave with someone else next time.”

He leans in, lips brushing your ear. “No you won’t. Because no one else makes you laugh like I do.”

You roll your eyes, but your fingers lace with his anyway. He's right. And he knows it.

“C’mon,” he says, dragging you off the barstool like it’s the most natural thing in the world. “Let’s go somewhere less... pedestrian. I owe you a real date.”

“You owe me two.”

“Fine. Two dates. And dessert.”

“And flowers?”

He grins. “You drive a hard bargain.”

You don’t look back. Neither does he. And the night, finally, starts to feel like yours again.

SUGURU GETO

“Hey.”

The voice behind you is calm. Unhurried. But it settles like a weight in your chest, immediately familiar—low, smooth, and with just enough edge to make your skin prickle.

You glance back, and there he is: Suguru Geto, dressed down but somehow still managing to look like power incarnate in a black button-up, sleeves rolled to his elbows, dark hair tied back like he hadn’t rushed at all… even though he absolutely did.

His eyes flicker past you to the guy at the bar, not bothering to hide the calculation in them. And just like that, the easy buzz of the night turns thick. The air shifts. Tense.

You open your mouth to say something—maybe a casual “Hey, you’re late,” maybe a warning not to hex the guy into another plane—but Suguru moves first. Not with violence. Just presence.

He steps in close behind you, hand sliding around your waist like it belongs there—because it does—fingers splaying firm over your side. There’s nothing showy about it. It’s not possessive. Just final. Like a signature.

“Oh,” the guy says, straightening up, smile faltering. “Didn’t realize you were, uh… waiting on someone.”

“I was,” you nervously chuckle, “And he’s very late.”

Geto doesn’t break eye contact with the guy. His mouth curves into something polite, but the warmth doesn’t reach his eyes. “Traffic.”

“Traffic,” you echo dryly.

“There was a... delay.”Translation: Gojo. You sigh internally.

The guy shifts awkwardly. “Well, uh, I wasn’t trying to step on any toes.”

Suguru smiles now, slow and knowing. “you stepped on mine anyway.”

The man goes pale. “Right—uh—yeah.” He slides off his stool and makes a hasty exit, muttering an apology to no one in particular. Silence lingers for a beat after he’s gone.

“You were late,” you say, turning slightly to face Suguru, your hand resting on his chest. “And you missed the pick-up line of the century!”

“Let me guess,” he murmurs, brushing a knuckle under your chin, lifting it just enough to meet your eyes. “Something about heaven?”

You laugh. “You did hear him!”

“I didn’t like how close it was,” he murmurs into your ear. “Didn’t like the way that monkey was looking at you.”

“You don’t like anyone looking at me.”

“Touché,” he laughs, lips brushing the shell of your ear.

You raise an eyebrow. “So, what, if he hadn’t backed off, you were gonna sick curses on him?”

Suguru hums, noncommittal. “Wasn’t sure yet. I was weighing options.”

You laugh now giving a smack to his chest, “You're lucky I was bored and not tempted!”

His gaze flickers to yours again, sharper this time. “I’m not worried about temptation.“

You search his face for a second, and something softens in you. He doesn’t need to say it aloud, but you knew if you asked—“You're mine. I’m yours. That doesn’t change.”

“Good,” you chirp, kissing his cheek. “Because next time you're late, I’m making that guy buy me two drinks.”

Suguru grins. “Next time let’s just have Larou or Miguel cook for a home date hmm?”

Then he pauses. “Actually… next time, I’ll just bring you with me.”

You smile. Yeah. That sounds more like him.

KENTO NANAMI

“Apologies.”

A new voice cut through the noise. Calm. Deep. Precise.

You didn’t need to turn around. The shift in the atmosphere was immediate. Your shoulders relaxed. Your drink suddenly tasted better.

The guy blinked in confusion as Kento stepped into your space, not quite brushing you, but close enough that you could feel the warmth of him. His hand resting on the back of your chair.

Nanami adjusted his tie with one hand, gaze directed firmly at the man beside you. Not angry. Not even annoyed. Just... done.

“I believe you’re in my seat,” he said simply.

“Wha—?” the guy stammered. “I was just talking to them.”

“So I gathered.” Nanami’s expression didn’t change. “And now you’re done.”

The guy laughed, weakly. “Hey, look, no offense, man. I didn’t know they were with anyone—”

“They are.”

You didn’t even need to say anything. Nanami was already calmly intercepting, laying down the boundary like it was protocol. Professional. Efficient.

The guy raised his hands and stood up, clearly deciding not to argue with someone who looked like he could file a tax return and break your wrist in the same motion. “Alright, alright. Chill, man.”

Nanami didn’t respond. He waited until the guy disappeared into the crowd before turning to you. His expression softened marginally.

“Sorry I’m late.”

You gave him a dry look. “That was almost twenty minutes, Kento.”

“There was a call from the higher-ups,” he said, and you could already hear the disdain layered into the words. “It ran longer than necessary.”

“You didn’t pick up when I called.”

“I didn’t want to answer in the middle of a meeting just to say, ‘Yes, I’m still being held hostage by incompetence.’”

You huffed a quiet laugh, then let your fingers slip over his wrist, tugging him into the seat beside you.

“You looked like you were enjoying yourself,” he noted as he sat. “Am I interrupting?”

“Oh, absolutely. He was this close to asking me my name after 15 minutes of failed pick up lines.”

Nanami arched a brow. “Wow.”

You raised your glass in mock toast. “And he still didn’t even get it.”

A faint smile touched his lips as he reached for your hand under the bar, lacing his fingers with yours.

“Next time,” he said, “you’re not waiting alone.”

“I can handle myself.”

“I know. Doesn’t mean you should have to.”

You didn’t argue. Not because you agreed, necessarily—but because Nanami didn’t say things he didn’t mean. And behind every calm word, every small gesture, there was always care. Consideration. The kind that said: you matter. I saw you. I came for you.

And just like that, the rest of the night felt right again. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just... steady. Safe.

CHOSO KAMO

“Your name, is it Mine?” he added, leaning in like that would help his case. You were seconds from telling him your very large, very intense, sometimes-blood-covered boyfriend would be here any minute, when—

“Back away from them.” The voice wasn’t loud. But it didn’t need to be. Low. Flat. Final.

Your shoulders dropped in relief even before you turned. The guy next to you froze, his smile faltering as Choso stepped into view.

He wasn’t glaring. Not exactly. But something about his presence—the stiff set of his shoulders, the way his eyes never left the man’s face—spoke louder than any threat could.

“Uh,” the guy said, eyes flicking between you and Choso. “Hey, man, we were just talking—”

“No.” Choso's tone sharpened like a blade. “You were talking. They weren’t interested.”

You placed a hand on Choso’s arm, trying to gently keep him from escalating. Feeling your hand his gaze flickers briefly down to you, then back up like he was recalibrating how mad he could get with you so close.

The guy laughed nervously. “Alright, alright. Didn’t realize they were taken.”

“You did. You just didn’t care.” Choso’s eyes narrowed, and for a moment, the cursed energy rolled off him in a low, unseen pulse. Not enough to draw attention—but enough to make the man shift uneasy.

“Okay,” the guy muttered, backing off. “I’m gone.”

Once he was gone, Choso turned to you, “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” you said softly, brushing your thumb over the fabric of his sleeve. “He was just annoying.”

Choso nodded slowly. “You shouldn’t have had to deal with that.”

“You’re late,” you said not to accuse, just to shift the mood. “I thought you got lost.”

“I didn’t,” he said, glancing down. “I stopped by the market. I thought you’d want these.”

He pulled something from his vest—a little bundle of dried flowers. They weren’t pretty in a traditional sense. No roses. No bright colors. But they were carefully chosen: yarrow, mugwort, something fragrant and earthy you couldn’t quite place.

“Protection,” he murmured. “Old ones. For wards.”

You blinked. “You brought me spell herbs instead of regular flowers?”

“Yes,” he said, completely sincere. “Why would I not?”

Your mouth twitched. You took the little bundle from him and held it to your chest, “I love them,”

Choso visibly relaxed. The last of the tension left his shoulders as he pulled you in gently, like you were something he could still break if he wasn’t careful.

“I should’ve been here sooner,” he whispered.

“You’re here now,” you said, resting your forehead against his. “And you brought me anti-creep herbs. I think that evens it out.”

He didn’t smile exactly—but his eyes softened and when his arms wrapped around you, shielding you from the rest of the bar, the world finally felt quiet again.

[farawaydoe]

"I’ve been musing on what exactly happened with Bebop that, despite so much content pointing otherwise, people ended up with Julia as the prime love interest for Spike. The answer I finally arrived at was that Julia was deliberately built in the image of the “typical love interest” character trope with Faye intentionally designed as the exact opposite to maybe drive home a point. Keiko Nobumoto as a writer has built in very strong messages around women in her works and what she has done with the love interests in Bebop seems no different.

Faye Valentine as a love interest was a feminist statement way ahead of its time (and maybe still ahead of this time). In Bebop, some of the most thoughtful and introspective sessions are written by her directly including Asteroid Blues, Honky Tonk Women, Sympathy for the Devil, both parts of Jupiter Jazz, My Funny Valentine and the two-part finale. The much more sensitive and emotionally heavy Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door is again written by her. For me, one of the key themes in Bebop which, in line with her writing of female characters in other works, is a satire on how women are viewed by society. She created two characters, one appearing as the typical demure and “respectable” woman and the other an archetype of the “cheap and easy” woman and then flipped the tables on both. Appearances and narrow mindsets can be deceiving, seems to be the message. What is the commonly believed version of the story seemed too simplistic, too base, too…macho. When Spike talks about his “other half” it is very easy for us to imagine the uber-feminine Julia as the counterpart to this man who oozes “masculinity” and charm. That’s what wives are supposed to look like, dressed in aprons, smiling, and singing for you. The image of Faye Valentine is not a ready fit and most people still struggle with the idea because that is simply not how they view women. How can a woman who dresses in tiny bits of clothing, who is assertive and difficult, who is very flawed in ways real women usually are be anyone’s “other half,” much less that of a guy they look up to? The idea here was not to shame anyone for being feminine or glorify the opposite, but call out the general societal tendency to put labels, boxes, and irrational expectations on women.

In Bebop, neither Spike nor Jet are ever, at any single point in the entire series, seen commenting on Faye’s body, calling her out on the way she dresses, leering after her, or “slut-shaming” her. Other men are seen doing these kind of things but they are always treated by the series with ridicule and contempt, never respect. The crew call each other out on their idiosyncrasies and bad behaviour but never do anything uncomfortable. Faye never feels the need to “use her body” with the boys, something she has had to build her entire personality around because of how the men in the rest of the world are. She is just one of the crew as far as they are concerned.

Ed, a thirteen year old girl, is completely safe around both of these men. Jet, an ex-cop and a very “typically masculine” character does all the domestic work without every making a big deal out of it. When Spike flashes back on Julia he thinks back on both her in the “homely” attire, which she happened to be wearing during those memories, and also her “Syndicate” avatar in the black leather. Spike understands mid-way through the series that Julia made a different choice and chooses to accept that choice and move on. He does not take it on his ego and hunt her down to make her pay. It is only when she has to play against him in the end at Vicious’ behest that he gets back involved with her but never vengefully. He cradles her head and reassures her life is just a bad dream when hers is slipping away from her.

He gets irritated by Faye’s behaviour and bickers with her but begins watching out for her from fairly early on. When she needs emotional support while facing up to Whitney, he hangs around to be there for her but does not make a big deal out of it. Through these characters, Bebop tries to show us how men should be toward the women in their lives. Neither of the men are perfect but they try in the ways they each can. And that is why, for Spike, how Faye chooses to dress is depicted to not matter since he loves her regardless. That is her choice and irrelevant. He falls in love with the woman, not with what she wears or how she possesses flaws every human being will have. And that is why it is important to understand that his feelings for her begin before he gets to know about her past. They are not strong and he does not act on them because there is already someone else in his life, even if currently absent and ambiguous. He does not fall for Faye only after learning about her past, indicating that she was sweet and homely once. That just happens to be the point where he is no longer emotionally encumbered and committed to Julia, and can allow himself to get invested with her.

So how does Spike end up here? Hopelessly smitten, aware of it, and filled with a life-wish for the first time ever? The movie is set right after Session 22, so this goes back to the episodes post Jupiter Jazz. We know he liked Faye on some level already and then the realisation about Julia strikes, allowing him to let go of things finally, or at least begin to. Spike probably takes an emotional breather, needs some time to reset.

Going back to their motif of “entwined journeys,” from ‘My Funny Valentine’ the second half of the show builds Spike as the one to get a peek into Faye’s past and secrets. By accident, he ends up hearing her real story, waking up after 50 years to a new world and no memory, saddled with debt, and scammed by someone she liked. Bebop has this habit of covering up extremely poignant moments with humour and so he is shown saying idiotic things like her story needs editing and Whitney is probably crying in the afterlife, rather than sympathising with her.

But honestly, if it was really too long and he didn’t care at-all, he actually didn’t need to stay stuck in the bathroom eavesdropping till she finished it.

The story he hears causes him to feel pain on her behalf. While he is brushing it all under calling her out on not paying Whitney’s debt and the story being yet another fake past, when she tells him this is her actual story, we are shown a certain expression on his face, again like he feels pain or concern over what she has gone through. He belongs to a troubled and difficult background himself so it would not be a stretch of the imagination for him to comprehend what it takes to go from a woman who trusted the first guy she met to someone who trusts no one. This is where his emotional wheels begin to move I believe, since he gets to see behind her tough exterior for the first time to understand who she really is.

As the episode progresses and Faye runs away with Whitney to try and get some answers, Spike ends up going after her. Whitney is Jet’s bounty and the episode again goes out of its way to establish this is a small fry Spike would never be interested in. Even if Faye ran away with him, Jet could have very well gone after her but Spike makes it a point to, resulting in what can only be described as a lovers’ quarrel executed through a dog fight.

He knows she is hurting, lost, and confused. She is alone and feels she has no one at her back. He perhaps also begins guessing now at exactly how vulnerable and untethered she is. I get the sense from that scene that he goes out to make sure she is ok, especially because he knows how difficult it is to confront your past. He distracts her, engages her, does not let her fall prey to something irrational. There is also a chance Whitney could harm her, distraught as she is at the moment, and I feel Spike wants to ensure he is in the vicinity to prevent that from happening. The pattern continues with him making it to the police station, waiting for her outside, albeit under the guise of cashing in the bounty. He makes sure she is ok and not going through all of this alone. She is sad about not knowing her past but he gently points out she has a future and that’s what’s important. It’s very uncharacteristic of his interactions with her, much more caring, and tender.

The next couple of episodes deal with other subjects but Mushroom Samba is significant in what both Spike and Faye experience while high. He sees an unending staircase and she sees herself drowning in water way over her head. The episode draws another parallel between the journey and current situation of these two characters.

'Speak like a Child’ shows things no one is expecting. It’s a beautifully over-the-top episode with the Bebop boys risking hell and high water (quite literally) to watch one tape which has nothing to do with either one of them. Spike launches into his “doing things for no reason” mode, the one he takes up when pretending to do something weird with the actual intention of helping Faye. This time he does so by acting like he has no brain cells left alive. Just as Jet is talking of returning the tape, he opens the parcel so he can’t.

From the moment they walk into the pawn shop, Spike starts doing things which will irritate the owner and will get them thrown out so the sale of the tape will not go through. He finally succeeds when the tape player begins eating the tape and he smashes it to pieces, kicking it unnecessarily hard till it breaks and getting them chucked out from the shop. A man so skilled in Jeet Kune Do would know when to stop kicking. Over here, I also wonder what Jet knows about Faye’s past (he was an ex-cop and could have found details about her cryo situation) since he walks the unnecessary extra miles with Spike to get the Beta player. Of course they get the wrong one and of course, once the correct one finally arrives, Spike immediately proceeds to open it up before Jet can return it.

We know what the last few scenes of the episode are like and the series deliberately cuts to Spike as the younger version of Faye is wondering if there is a wonderful person next to her.

I feel the theme of Spike understanding Faye’s overwhelming circumstances comes to a head here as he sees the young girl she once was on screen. Again the reactions shown on both his and Jet’s faces speak volumes. It would break anyone’s heart but I feel the protective streak Spike has anyway been harbouring for her so far reaches a critical point post this.

The episode Wild Horses sets up a hilarious reminder of how similar Spike and Faye are as individuals when they both cannot comprehend the computer jargon and then decide to shoot both purple penguin delivery trucks, unanimously agreeing it is a good idea without even considering that both might be real. Spike also comments how he is not one for delicate operations, reminder of similar statements Faye has made earlier in the series.

The truth is both of them are actually very similar. Spike’s ‘whatever happens, happens’ philosophy is mentioned by Faye as a life philosophy as well in Mish Mash Blues, though using different words to describe the same idea. Both characters are tough as nails and have managed to survive in impossible circumstances. Both are emotionally stunted due to their trauma but also capable of intense emotion and care.

Faye is the very embodiment of the survival spirit. The circumstances she was set up with three years ago, she should not have been alive now. I feel that is what begins to awaken the will to keep living in Spike somewhere around this point. He has seen what she was like in her earlier life and the contrast is stark. He’s been wrapped up in his misery but then sees someone who has had it equally bad, if not worse, but hasn’t given up. Likely a sense of bonding and affinity emerges from the realisation.

This also goes back to the idea of seeing a woman who was “truly alive” which I spoke about in the last piece. He loved Julia who, despite all her strength, could not find the courage to break away and walk the line with him. She stayed shackled to what she had always known and abandoned him when he needed her most. Then he sees Faye who found herself in a situation she knew nothing about but was courageous enough to adapt and keep going. She is shoulder to shoulder with him, never giving in.

It likely also comes both from knowing how incredibly difficult things have been for her but she has kept going and from realising she has no one else but the people on the Bebop to take care of her. I feel he begins feeling the fear of death because if he dies he does not know if she will be well and cared for or not. Even though they are not in a relationship and multiple factors may be preventing him from taking that step with her yet, perhaps he realises eventually that he wants to live so he can be there for her.

That’s also reflected in what we see him do during Pierrot Le Fou. After Spike has received a solid beating up and is lying mummified on the Bebop couch, Faye makes fun of his recklessness and leaves an orange peal on his head, feigning indifference.

However, we see her moments later smoking with a mix of worry and anger on her face. The moment she sees Pierrot’s mail addressed to Spike, she gets panicked and asks Ed to hide it, knowing he will go.

He sees it though and realises if Pierrot can mail Ed then he can definitely trace the people in his life and likely hurt them while trying to get to Spike. So he has to go and face up to Pierrot. But I feel at this point Spike’s feelings are intense enough to want to know if Faye feels something for him as well. Perhaps, seeing her so concerned about hiding the mail from him, he senses that she might but doesn’t know for sure.

So he asks her in the most juvenile and adolescent way possible, asking if she will come rescue him. Faye is not amused but then she does come. She’s not much use to the fight and ends up being shot down almost immediately but it tells him for the first time that she cares for him as well and how much. This romance in his life is very different from whatever he may have had earlier since it is very much reciprocal, authentic, and really quite innocent on both ends. But he has not experienced such reciprocation before.

When she shows up he likely realises how idiotic he was in riling her up to this level of concern, thus explaining his reaction at seeing her there (again the Bebop theme of covering up a poignant moment with an opposite reaction). He said what he did just to see her reaction, not expecting her to actually act on it, believing his own feelings to be one-sided. Since she acts indifferent to him, he probably feels she does not like him that way or, even if she does, her feelings don’t go deep. But the fact that she comes in the face of sure death tells him finally that what he feels is equally reciprocated, even if she hides it. Faye risking her life to try and save his, regardless of how futilely, is the ultimate test of commitment. It’s part of the progression which leads him to refer to her as his “other half” later, since he knows he is as important to her as she is to him, even though they never actually reach a point to be able to admit it openly to each other.

Unfortunately, during the entire time Spike is falling for her, Faye continues to care for him but the perception built in her mind of Julia’s presence in his life keeps her guarded. We see that in the finale as well, the intense, suppressed emotions she is carrying around after meeting Julia. It continues till the very end of the series and he never does get a chance to tell her how he feels about her. It causes her to stay away from him, keeps fuelling her sense of not belonging on the Bebop, and he doesn’t quite know why since he is unaware she knows about Julia’s existence.

Boogie Woogie Feng Shui has some hilarious sequences of “dumbass guiding dumbass” as Spike and Faye conjecture at Jet’s relationship with Meifa, get kicked out by Jet for smoking, and then he declares themselves fairies as they defend the ship together.

Cowboy Funk is a love letter to fragile masculinity and Faye takes Spike’s case with the comparisons of his personality to Andy. The events of the movie happen right after this one but we don’t see Spike too overtly bothered by Faye spending time with Andy. He has not made any kind of commitment or confession to her so what can he really expect? I always feel his reaction to the can of stew had more to do with Faye returning from Andy’s place in the morning than his hatred for Andy itself. Anyway, the episode is an allegory so we can’t exactly take it at face value.

The events of the movie happen, which I have already covered earlier, and we see Faye kidnapped by Vincent. Despite the threat of death, she refuses to be an accomplice to someone like him. Even without the definitive jail scene between Spike and Elektra in the film, the story of Spike and Faye is traceable, but that piece was deliberately woven in later to go back and enunciate what is shown in the series. It shows the point where Spike finally accepts for sure how important this woman is to him. He already knows he is important to her as well. It ties in very well with what happens during the next chronological episode.

Analysing the relationship of Spike and Faye within Cowboy Bebop

Part four of four

[thydungeongal]

I wanna ask your thoughts on a piece of GMing I've been struggling with despite myself

Namely, it's about structuring a campaign in a specific kind of system

Namely, it's this sort of Lancer, or perhaps DnD4e style system, where there's lots of combat, and it's a big draw of the system, but at the same time the combat is expected to be something resembling "balanced" and players walk out on the winning, - or at least, living, - end of most encounters. Now, I think this style of "tactical" combat is awesome, and I can set them up just fine and have lots of fun running them

But then there's the narrative side. Cuz these systems are usually ain't no PtbA or BitD, but they have some focus on their blorbos and the overarching plot they're stuck in, in a way that something like OSR-I-don't-bother-naming-them-until-they-live-to-lvl-3 doesn't

Now, I've run BitD specifically just fine, and had lots of fun there too. When the system is 100% about the character moments and the plot, I'm happy to just do that

But in these systems where the meat is the tactical combat, I struggle to both fit in interesting combat and narrative play that doesn't just fill like obligatory filler between the combats. And I was wondering if you'd have some insight on how to square that particular circle

I feel the struggle, but I think what helps is reframing what you think of as "a good story." I'm going to be referring to D&D 4e for the sake of my answer here, because it is the one I'm more familiar with of these two games, but it should be applicable to almost any game with tactical combat where the most important character verbs are variations of "Fight."

And to do that I'm going to quote Valiant Quest, a cool game I recently when nut nut over and that I'm currently organizing an online game with the girlies for. Valiant Quest has this quote in its section detailing what the game is for (which should be included in the free demo you can follow from that link):

Don't tell stories that can't be solved with swords, this isn't the system for political thrillers. Keep things simple and the goals clear. Only once players are invested should you even consider adding nuance. Broadly speaking your plots will start as either: a bad guy threatens a cool status quo or a bad guy enforces a terrible status quo. In either case, hit them with a sword.

I think you have identified an issue that sometimes pops up in these games, which is that you get a feeling of player characters being flown from one action set piece to another with the "story" content happening in between those action set pieces. The issue with that in the long run is that you end up with a disconnect between the gameplay and the narrative. The way to address this, I feel, is to think of the characters as action heroes. Action is their main vocabulary for interacting with most issues, so you want to give them issues which can be solved through action.

Now, there is a bit of an issue with D&D 4e (and this is also a problem in 3e and 5e, as those games have very much the same assumptions as 4e) and its kind that they very much do expect characters to win most encounters, which from the point of view of conventional storytelling doesn't necessarily make for the most interesting fiction. This is largely an issue of two different playstyles butting heads and D&D as a system never having really evolved to match this newer playstyle. But I think the solution to this very much isn't to artificially make sure that the player characters keep on winning, nor is it to conjure up endless contrivances that undermine the characters' victories. If the player characters keep winning each combat encounter but bad things out of their control keep happening off screen to ensure that their victory is short-lived it can ultimately undermine their sense of agency and make it feel like the characters are just observers to some series of events.

And the best way to do this hinges on transparency and communication but also fairness. Let your players know when their characters are rushing against potentially deadly odds, but when they do play the threat presented to the hilt. When the party wants to escape because they realize they've misjudged the odds, let them, because even though it is easy and fun to approach these games as fighting games where you the GM pit your toys against the players' toys in the fiction those goblins are creatures with hopes and dreams and they don't stand to gain from chasing after the heavily armed adventurers. If the party is forced to retreat and they can't recover all of their fallen, the enemy actually stands to take hostages they can use for leverage.

So to recap: you want to tell simple stories where issues can ultimately be fixed through the actions the character sheet provides the player characters; if you try to go for plots that hinge on things that the player characters can't really interface with it will make the action feel disconnected from the narrative and undermine character agency. And while these types of games do, much more so than your traditional OSR games, rely on empowerment and expecting the player characters to emerge victorious you as the GM should still strive to be an impartial judge, and that also means running things at the appropriate level of danger to them. But this type of play, even more so than many other playstyles, relies on high trust and openness. So be fair, but also open with information.

[nostalgebraist]

on exordia (a "rant"?)

Yesterday I said I'd write a longer post about Exordia. Here it is.

This will be... sort of review-shaped, but not quite a review? I dunno.

I'll try to avoid spoilers, although some amount of (largely minor or indirect) spoilage will be inevitable.

As I said in my earlier posts, there was a lot I liked about this book, but also a lot that frustrated me. This post will focus almost entirely on the latter; it will be a big long list of gripes, which I'm posting mostly to relieve a certain mental pressure that built up over the course of the reading experience.

I want to clarify at the outset that the negative angle here doesn't faithfully represent by overall stance toward the book.

Yes, I often found it extremely annoying, but it was a lot of fun, too – often it was both, at the same time. I am normally a pretty slow reader, but I sped through Exordia's 500+ pages very quickly; even when I was annoyed with this or that feature of the book, I was pleasantly engrossed, too. And I feel like writing out a bunch of thoughts about it, which has to mean something good, right? Even if those thoughts are critical in nature.

----

Why do I feel like writing so much about the book? And why do I care so much about the fact that it was "frustrating"? (There are lots of bad books out there; sometimes, I read them; in itself, this is just business as usual, and not worthy of note.)

I think it comes down to what I said in my first post (see link above). Because Exordia feels so much like something I would absolutely love, I feel more incensed about its flaws than I would be about the more thoroughgoing flaws of something that was simply, wholly, and straightforwardly bad. There's a tantalizing sense of unrealized potential, unfulfilled promises.

Exordia would be so good if it were good.

----

Talking about this book's flaws is difficult, because most of them are closely related to one another, and it's difficult to break down that big ball of tangled-up string into manageable chunks.

But there are a few things that are relatively self-contained, so I'll pick them off first. (The main course starts in section "3" below.)

Oh, also: this ended up extremely long. As in, just over 10,000 words. If you wanted to read 10,000 words of Exordia critique today then this is your lucky day I guess.

----

1. frontloading

Exordia has a very strong opening. When I was 30 pages in, I was almost certain that I would end up loving this book and recommending it to everyone I knew.

Ha! Little did I know!

----

The book is divided into five sections called "Acts."

Act One is very brief. It ends on page 38, less than 10% of the way into the book.

And it's very, very good. Or more precisely, it's very, very promising, as a way to begin a story.

Right off the bat, we get two instantly charming and intriguing characters, with an instantly charming and intriguing dynamic.

Then – starting barely five pages in – we are suddenly assailed by a rapid-fire barrage of incredibly cool sci-fi shit. Bizarre neologisms, alien biology and psychology, quasi-theological revelations about physics and the early universe! "Narrative prisons"! "Weapons that mark their victims for damnation"! An "observatory" that can see the afterlife!

All three of those examples I just quoted are from one single page (p. 21).

And Exordia is over 500 pages long.

I was like: holy shit. If this is what it's like now, what is the rest of it going it be like?

Well. Now I've read the rest of it, so I know. What was it like, then?

----

What it's like is this:

On page 38, Act One ends.

Act Two begins by switching over to a completely different set of characters.

In Act One, it seemed obvious that we were meeting the book's main characters. All the usual conventions of novelistic storytelling were practically screaming at us: behold, the protagonists! Better figure out how you feel about them in short order, reader, because you'll be strapped in with them for the long haul.

But – psych! Turns out that we are not strapped in with the Act One characters for the long haul. Eventually they do show up again, but they spend most of the book on the sidelines due to a succession of plot devices which seem designed specifically to keep them there.

The fast pace slows to a crawl.

We discover that we're in a completely different genre: not wild-eyed cosmic science fiction, but Tom Clancy military-techno-thriller. And so a large fraction of the text, by volume, is stuff like this:

"What's up?" Mike Jan asks, like they've just bumped into each other at the gym. "Something bad?" "Something undetermined," Erik says. "One of the EBADs broke. One more check, then we go in." So they do a final test on their MOPP protection, which is an absolute nightmare in the rising sun. Masks that fog up if the seal isn't perfect, baggy JSLIST oversuits, paper wraps that turn bad colors if they contact known agents (what good will that do?), gloves and booties over their boots. All perfect for poaching them in their own sweat. "Can't see shit in here," Ricardo says, without unhappiness: just the condition of things. "I know. Mike, bodyguard Anna. Skyler, get the drone up. Ricardo, load a mouse. All call signs, Zero-Six, now proceeding into the target area. Out." They walk straight toward Blackbird. Skyler flies a quadcopter drone ahead: a Teal Drones Golden Eagle with a fifty-minute charge. Ricardo Garcia follows its course, waving a ten-foot spear with a live mouse in a plastic lattice canister. The idea is that the mouse will die in time to warn the rest of them. "Pretty out here," Mike Jan remarks. "Looks like a Windows desktop." Of course Mike has never changed a default desktop wallpaper in his life.

I'm sure some people like this kind of thing – it's an established genre, after all, and it sells well. But it's not really my jam, and (more importantly) it's not what the opening led me to think I was getting myself into.

(Sidenote: the last two lines in that quote have nothing to do with the point I'm making, but I included them anyway, because they confuse me and I want to know whether I'm missing something that would make sense of them. "Has never changed a default desktop wallpaper in his life" is apparently meant to be some kind of telling character detail, and it's delivered as though we'd immediately grasp its significance. But what IS its significance? "Oh, we all know those guys – the ones who don't change their desktop wallpapers. You know what I'm talking about, wink wink." Huh???)

The new characters are mostly U.S. military/government/intelligence guys (at this stage anyway – later on there will be even more new characters, and then more, etc). The book tries its hardest to make us care about them, but it's fighting an uphill battle because it has to work against our frustration at the bait-and-switch that has been pulled on us.

Plus, frankly, they're just not all that interesting. Sorry.

Sooner or later, we realize that Act One was the odd one out. When Act Three arrives, it's just "Act Two: The Sequel" – and so on. Except in a few parts very close to the end, the book never recaptures the energy and wonder that it used as a hook in Act One.

It gets worse. Remember how I said that Act One rapidly reveals a bunch of sci-fi lore to the reader?

Well, a large fraction of Acts Two through Five are a mystery story in which the new, less-interesting characters study a classic BDO and try to figure out what its deal is, plus a bunch of related ancillary mysteries. And in some cases, the reader can guess the answers long before the characters get there, because the answer is something we were told back in Act One.

(This is only possible, by the way, due to the previously mentioned sidelining of the Act One characters. These characters re-appear, and the other protagonists get to know them, but for most of the book the two groups are unable or unwilling to communicate for some reason or another. If these communication blockers weren't there, the Acts Two+ guys could just ask the Act One guys what was going on... and the book would be several hundred pages shorter.)

This is a baffling structural choice.

I have no idea how one could possibly try to justify it; I simply can't think of any arguments in its favor, even bad ones.

2. the path, grant!

This isn't even a complaint, per se. Just something about my reading experience that seems like it should get mentioned in this post, somewhere.

In a lot of ways – big and small, important and trivial – this book feels weirdly close to the kind of thing that I would write myself.

Indeed, it feels weirdly close (in a lot of ways, big and small etc.) to some things that I did in fact write, myself.

Namely, Floornight and Almost Nowhere.

I'm not claiming that Seth Dickinson ripped me off, or anything. It seems very unlikely that he's read any of my work, or even heard of it. Like I said in my earlier post, it's probably all just a matter of shared influences and/or pure coincidence.

Still, I have to talk about it, because I couldn't stop noticing it.

In the first ten pages, I learned: this is a story about first contact with aliens. It involves a lot of exotic invented terminology, and the worldbuilding includes novel connections between fundamental physics, psychology, and ethics.

And I thought: wow, this sure is right up my alley. Nice!

On page 11, the book started talking about the Shahnameh.

Ten pages later: souls are real! But this is arguably bad, because it's been used as the basis for exploitative and dystopian technologies.

I dunno, it's not like I has a monopoly on that concept. (I stole part of it from Madoka, for one thing.)

Nor, as I happens, do I have a monopoly on the concept of "wacky eccentric scientists who live in a remote setting apart from most of humanity, studying Lovecraft-style mind-bending entities from the beyond." That's just taking well-worn, well-liked tropes and combining them in a natural, appealing way. (And what's more, I stole part of it from Annihilation.)

But in any case – monopoly or no – Exordia does in fact have those wacky scientists, and that remote zone, and those creepy, soul-physics-related objects of study.

It also has a character named "Anna" – with a sort-of-similar role in the story to Almost Nowhere's Anne.

And a character named "Rosamaria," who...

But I'm sure you can guess how that sentence ends.

Some of this stuff is hard to talk about without violating my rule about spoilers.

But, uh, that said – remember that big scene about 2/3 of the way through Floornight, the one with a raised platform that gets used as a stage? The one in which [HUGE FLOORNIGHT SPOILER] happens?

And then the chapter right after that, which has an unusual name, because it portrays things from an unusual point of view?

Oh, you haven't read Floornight. Well, then. Do you remember that scene near the end of Exordia...

Some of the "connections" I thought I saw are flimsier than this. Some aren't really much of anything, in retrospect. Early on we learn that the aliens have some technology called "the way of knives," and I thought: ah, just like AN's "knife-power"! But in fact the two things have nothing else in common. And surely I don't have a monopoly on the word "knife."

I dunno. How about this? Is this anything?

The Ubiet burbles away in her arms: clarification and amplification of aretaic event in self-like past, recursive self-caricature by protoprecosmic influence, WARNING WARNING WARNING pathology! pathology! pathology! pathology! pathology! Until that word, pathology, starts to sound like path-ology, the study of paths. The discovery of the way.

3. the geeky badass hive mind

Okay, here begins the part I called "the main course" above, where I lay out the really big thing that irked me about Exordia.

Hmm... where to start...

There is a problem with the characterization in this book. There is also a problem with the narration in the book.

These two problems are sort of the same, and the fact that they are sort-of-the-same is itself a noteworthy symptom of the problem.

Whoa, whoa – too broad, too abstract! Let's start with something small and concrete. Something that anyone who's read the book will have noticed, and which I am definitely not the first person to complain about.

So: Exordia is full of geek culture references.

The characters make incessant references to specific sci-fi/fantasy books, anime series, video games, and popular movies and TV shows. The 3rd-person narration also does this frequently.

It gets pretty "cringe" at times.

Here's a very early (and hence memorable) example. Anna, our Act One pseudo-protagonist, is learning the deep secrets of the universe from a snake-headed alien. The alien tells her that souls exist.

And in response, Anna says:

"Souls? You mean immortal souls? Are those real? Is this some kind of, like, Evangelion thing?"

I was like: seriously? Seriously? Come the fuck on.

But a moment later, I got my balance. I thought: wait, I see what this is. This is a character trait. It's a feature of this person, not the book/world.

Anna is a person who makes these kinds of nerdy, "cringe" references at inappropriate times, just like (as we learn in the first few pages) she is a person who has been fired from multiple jobs for being too abrasive, too upfront with people. That tracks. There's a coherent person, here, and I'm getting to know her.

Ha! Little did I know!

Act One ends, and Act Two starts.

We are introduced to our first "Acts Two+ protagonist": Clayton Hunt, Deputy National Security Advisor in the book's alt-universe version of the Obama administration.

Clayton is a slick charmer, a skilled and versatile liar, a power-hungry schemer who deliberately orchestrated his rise through the ranks of the National Reconnaissance Office bureaucracy. He is – if we are to judge by his (disturbing) past deeds, which are recounted as crucial backstory – a cold-hearted psycho sonuvabitch who's way, way too eager to kill people "for the greater good." At first glance, he seems to have nothing at all in common with Anna (too honest for her own good, a basically normal person struggling to keep her basically normal life afloat, etc).

Does Clayton make nerdy, often "cringe" geek culture references – incessantly, come hell or high water? You bet he does.

We meet Clayton's once-and-future best friend and right-hand man, Major Erik Wygaunt: Rhodes Scholar, badass soldier, doctrinaire quasi-deontological moralist. Totally different guy from either of the forenamed – or so one would think.

But in practice, in what he actually does and says? Erik is exactly the same sort of argumentative, obscure-trivia-knowing, geek-culture-referencing dork as Clayton and Anna and – yes – virtually every other character in the book.

Here's a typical passage, from page 86. Clayton (dialogue in italics) is in conversation with Erik (no italics):

“My guess is that Blackbird is dispersing some kind of communication agent. It seeks out information-dense substrate and … interfaces with it. Tries to use it to grow a message or a system. It’s trying to talk to us by amplifying patterns it finds. Not how I’d go about first contact. But how I might do it if I were very, very strange.” Erik can’t help making a technical protest: like they’re both optimizing their colonies in Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, arguing over the details of the science fictional technologies in play. “Then it should be bursting open every cell in our bodies. If it’s looking for information coding, then DNA would be the first thing it’d find. Seven hundred megabytes of digital data in each cell.”

By this point, I had long since discarded my "characterization for Anna" hypothesis. I'd gotten the hang of what was really going on.

And so I didn't even blink when, on page 103, a character is introduced as "Captain Davoud Qasemi of the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force" – and he immediately begins rattling off the names of specific video games he liked as a kid, rambling about the homosexual overtones in Top Gun, and saying things like "It's marvelously ironic! It's so classically ironic that it's invented pederasty and gone to war with Sparta."

That's just how everyone in the world talks, apparently.

Everyone in the world. This book is about a Kurdish village that is suddenly crisscrossed with deployments from the U.S. and Russia and China etc., in what seem likely to be the last days of the human race; it is, in large part, about the culture clashes and strained attempts at international collaboration that result from this arrangement.

But the characters are helped along in their efforts by the fact that there is at least one culture to which they all belong.

They would all seem perfectly at home sitting on a big couch in a dorm common room at some nerdy liberal arts college, nominally watching a movie but in fact talking over most of the dialogue as they strive to out-do one another in the game of pointing out its scientific and historical inaccuracies.

Now, don't get me wrong. This is a perfectly fine way to be.

But it is not the only one.

----

It is probably clear that I did not like this aspect of the book. But why?

Well, there is the thing I just mentioned, about how it undermines the attempt at portraying culture clashes. But that's not the only problem, and it's not really the main problem.

What else, then?

In his (in)famous essay about "hysterical realism," James Wood wrote (my emphasis):

By and large, these are not stories that could never happen (as, say, a thriller is often something that could never happen); rather, they clothe real people who could never actually endure the stories that happen to them. They are not stories in which people defy the laws of physics (obviously, one could be born in an earthquake); they are stories which defy the laws of persuasion. This is what Aristotle means when he says that in storytelling “a convincing impossibility” (say, a man levitating) is always preferable to “an unconvincing possibility” (say, the possibility that a fundamentalist group in London would continue to call itself KEVIN).

Exordia is not hysterical realism, and it contains plenty of events which deliberately contravene the (known) laws of physics. Nonetheless, while reading it, I kept thinking of that line about "defying the laws of persuasion."

In the case of any one character, the traits I'm pointing to would be perfectly acceptable. (We saw this with my reaction to Anna, above.)

What's more, they would be acceptable even if they went against the expectations set by other attributes of the same character. The world is huge, and contains billions; every oddball combination of traits you can imagine quite possibly does exist, at least in someone, somewhere.

And besides: as Wood says, the "laws of persuasion" are not the same as the "laws of physics." The requirements needed for something to "feel plausible," in a work of fiction, are not the same as the requirements needed for something to be plausible, in real life.

But there is a set of requirements in the case of fiction. It's just a different one.

Meet the terms of the contract, and the reader will happily "suspend their disbelief," even in the face of actions and dialogue that would be extraordinarily unlikely in the real world. But if you break the contract? Then piling on more "realism," more geeky period/setting detail and laws-of-physics plausibility, will only heighten the disconnect and slide things further into the uncanny valley.

It's like watching a 3D 60-fps movie, back when Hollywood was going through its simultaneous 3D and 60-fps fads.

Yes, yes, there is technically more information, it's technically closer to the signal your senses would receive from the real world. But you have broken the terms of the illusion, suspended the suspension of disbelief, and so I am no longer seeing your world and characters, anymore. I am seeing the remaining gaps in your inevitably flawed illusion.

On page 136 of Exordia, we meet a female Kurdish shepherd. She's an extremely minor character, really just a horror-movie extra who's there to get picked off (ambiguously, "off-screen") by the spooky powers at play, and thereby give the reader an (ambiguous, tantalizing) hint of what those powers can do.

But, as is the convention in such matters, Seth Dickinson gives her just a smidgen of characterization, to humanize her before she goes.

What kind of person is she, this poor doomed shepherdess?

You already know the answer, don't you?

Tonight she thinks only of her sheep. Oil smuggling paid for her phone and the rifle on her back, but this flock is part of the village’s common wealth, and she is responsible for it. Or so her mother is always reminding her. And even if she watches too much anime and spends too much time getting into fights on Facebook, she wants to do her mother proud.

She watches too much anime? Fine. Maybe she does. Maybe she does.

Maybe – if it were only her. If the seams in the illusion were not showing through so plainly.

I'm a fairly cooperative reader. The implausible and the impossible do not bother me. I am capable of believing just about anything.

But not like this.

----

The characters of Exordia are geeks. That much I've covered already.

They are also badasses, every one of them. Geeky badasses.

That's the phrase that came to mind, pretty early on, when I was trying to formulate what bothered me about these guys. "Every single character in this book is a geeky badass," I thought.

I'm sorry. It's a very, uh, "cringe" phrase. But that too is apposite.

What do I mean, "badasses"?

For one thing I mean that they are hypercompetent. They know all kinds of stuff – geek culture trivia, academic esoterica in seemingly every discipline, hands-on working knowledge of whichever military or scientific devices the plot needs them to use. They are quick on their feet, relentlessly thoughtful and logical, cool under pressure (or hot under pressure in an impressive and charismatic manner), capable of creative problem-solving.

They never fail.

Nothing fazes them. Or rather: when they are fazed, it is brief, and they look great doing it, and it doesn't matter in the end anyway.

Many of them have dark, traumatic personal histories (exciting! dramatic! potentially sexy!), but however bad their trauma, it does not dare disturb their hypercompetence when the latter is at work.

This book is about the cataclysmic end of the world-as-we-know-it. It contains a staggering quantity of violence and death: on-screen and off-screen, mass-scale and intimate, dealt out by a diverse range of human and inhuman actors and weapons. But no one ever just breaks down in the face of it all. Or rather: if they do "break down," they do so only briefly, and they look great doing it, and...

One of the main characters is, explicitly, an alcoholic with PTSD. But this doesn't really ever come up as a serious obstacle, either to her or to anyone else. Mostly, it just means that she jokes around with the other characters about being the town drunk, sometimes, in between one moment of epic badassery and the next.

One might argue that this is sort of... I don't know, "tasteless"? I don't know. I had some sort of problem with it, anyway, that or some other one.

For a book that is so thoroughly about nerds, it is remarkable how little it contains in the way of humiliation. Of straight-up, unalloyed uncoolness.

As always, things start off with uncharacteristic promise. In the first few pages, Anna loses her job, then breaks up with her boyfriend in a very awkward manner and instantly regrets it.

This, remember, is the same character who says that cringe line about souls and Evangelion. So far, so good! We've gone from zero to #relatable in record time. We have a confirmed blorbo, stable under laboratory conditions. Sources familiar with the situation report that she is "a hot mess" and "literally me."

But that's all in Act One (may it rest in peace). Soon enough, Anna is taken up into the geeky badass hive mind, and from then on she too is never seen to fail. Except in a cool way, sometimes.

Soon enough she is just like the rest of them. Quick-witted, effortlessly articulate, situationally aware, ready for anything, an endless font of witty geek banter.

Is this bad? Why?

I'm not sure. Maybe I just don't like it. Maybe there's nothing more than that.

But... okay, look. This is a book about the likely end of the human race, about humans trying to work together in the face of cultural differences and mutual mistrust. It wants you to hope. In its moments of triumph, it wants you to feel proud of your whole species.

And, in the name of these goals, it tries so very hard to humanize its characters. It tries, it tries! They have so many traits, so much specificity! They will tell you all about their home towns, their cultures, their hopes and dreams and fears! Look, look, the book says: surely these are people? Look at them, they're doing so much people stuff!

But at the moment where "being human" might entail "not being effortlessly cool and badass literally all of the time," the book suddenly relents. That cannot be allowed, of course. Every threshold can be crossed, except that one.

Maybe it's just me, but I can't relate. I'm not a badass. I do embarrassing shit all the time, and I'll probably just go on doing it until the day I die. I don't think I could hold my own with these demigods in the anime-referencing game, much less the high-pressure-military-operations game.

I guess "people" are like this, sometimes. But only because the world is big, and so for every X, there are some people who are X, somewhere.

This book is about the human race, except it isn't. To be human is (among other things) to kind of suck, and no one in this book kind of sucks, not even the military psychopaths, not even blorbo-candidate Anna.

On page 10, Anna asks her alien how she views humanity, and the alien's characterization is humorously blunt, underwhelming, and undignified:

“You’re a species of gangly distance runners, adapted to sweat and throw stuff. You like watching each other fuck. [...] “You are wired for small social groups, so all human organization degenerates into power trading and gossip between a tractably sized elite, no matter the stakes. You have two sources of authority—dominance and prestige—which conflict in interesting ways. Something killed most of you, and so your survivors are very inbred. Very similar. Your meat smells the same.”

Act One really is so very different from the rest, isn't it?

Ah, those were the days!

4. differentiation of hive mind tissue

In the last section, I argued that the characters were overly similar. Possessed of the same "geeky badass" traits in a way that defied "the laws of persuasion."

That is true, but it's not to say the characters don't have distinguishing traits. They definitely have those.

But even here, in the realm of differences, something feels... off. To me, anyway.

It's sort of like this:

To a zeroth-order approximation, every character in Exordia is identical. Just another dollop of homogeneous geeky badass paste, scooped up from the same wellspring as all the rest.

That's only the zeroth-order approximation. Look closer, and you can see differences.

What kinds of differences?

Well, here's an example. There's a character named Chaya. Who is she? Besides a geeky badass, I mean?

She is [takes a deep breath] a Ugandan-Filipina Catholic butch lesbian plasma physicist!

That's a long list of traits, but it was very easy for me to recall them all from memory just now, even though Chaya is just one member of this book's long roster of protagonists. Why?

Because whenever Chaya appears in a scene – whenever she says anything, and whenever the narration is filtered through her perspective – these traits are mentioned over and over again.

Virtually everything that she says or thinks is:

A) Narrowly pragmatic, directly related to what's happening in the immediate plot, could have been said/thought by any one of the characters

B) Directly related to one or more of the traits listed above (e.g. she's Catholic, so she's praying or talking about God with one of the irreligious / differently religious characters)

C) Some mixture of the two (e.g. she is making some smart practical comment about a current dilemma in the plot, which any one of the characters might have said, except that where one of the other characters would have said "fuck!", she says "mama Mary!")

I almost feel kind of gross, dissecting a character in this way. Especially when it's a character like Chaya, who I kind of liked!

I almost feel that way, but then I remember it's not really me doing the dissection. The characters come this way, marked with convenient labels for ease of disassembly.

I said I "kind of liked" Chaya, and I did. When I was reading the book quickly, swept along by the story – when I sort of defocused my brain, and didn't pay too much attention – I felt that she was a likable character. She had the general shape of a "likable character." My brain could match her against familiar templates, and accept the match, if I let my brain work without too much conscious deliberation.

When I focused harder, though, the joints began to show.

When I focused harder, I could watch (well-crafted, clever) lines of dialogue and narration flow past, and see through the Matrix to the calculated flecks of trait-relevance which adhered to each and every one of those lines.

This is a Chaya section, so I am getting told over and over again about God and rosary beads and plasma physics and what Uganda is like and what the Philippines is like and the woman Chaya has a crush on and how Chaya has a crush on that woman and how these two have a vaguely butch/femme dynamic.

(Sidenote: although this book seems like it's taking great pains to be culturally sensitive – or, perhaps, because of that fact – I kept noticing that the American characters are not constantly thinking and talking about what America is like. Only the people from places presumptively unfamiliar to the reader do that kind of thing. And it almost feels like the American characters are given more "slots" in which to fit distinct character traits, because they don't have to spend any slots just to establish their national origins.)

These are the Chaya topics. I am being told about them, and I will be told about them later, in other Chaya sections. Except for "the plot," these are the only topics I will ever be told about in Chaya sections.

If this were a Clayton section, I would be hearing for the 50th time about how Clayton is manipulative and conflicted about his manipulativeness. Or, hearing about one of the other Clayton topics. There's a list of those, with maybe five or six items, just as there was with Chaya. In Clayton sections, you hear about these things, and only these things.

It reminds me of the kind of improv where you're handed a brief description of your character, and have to immediately start acting as that character, with no time to prep. There's no way you could invent a whole fleshed-out human being in under a second, of course. So you lean hard on the traits listed on your character sheet. You find ways to weave one or more of them into each and every line. See: I'm doing it right! I'm playing my character!

----

Exordia's characters have no small traits. Only big ones, like "being Catholic" or "being Chinese." They do not act whimsically or inexplicably, ever; they do not play against their fixed types, ever.

Real people are microscopically detailed, incompressible, differentiated from one another by millions of little quirks that are essentially arbitrary and cannot be satisfactorily "explained" except by narrating huge segments of their life histories ("see, that's where it came from," one might say, after relating years of experience in unsparing detail).

In fiction, this stuff can't possibly be conveyed in full, and so a faithful portrayal of its consequences tends to just look like "noise," arbitrary behavior, the whimsical, the inexplicable.

Which is fine. Good fictional characters often come with such halos of static around them. It's a part of making a fictional world feel real, rough-edged, lived-in.

And on the other hand, sometimes it's fine for a fictional character to just be a type, and play out that type. A lot of science fiction is this way: it simply isn't much interested in character, which is okay, because it has other interests with which to keep your attention.

But Exordia is trying to have it both ways.

It's not just a standard hard SF story where the characters are types, and are clearly and only those types, and that's okay. Compared to that sort of story, Exordia spends way more time lingering on its characters, "zooming in" on them. Inviting you to consider them, study them, love them.

But this causes a feeling of intuitive wrongness, an uncanny valley effect. We should be zoomed in far enough to see the details, the noise-haloes. So where are they?

You can zoom in and in, but all you see is a magnified version of the stuff you'd already seen at lower resolution. A surface of unreal smoothness, unmarred by dust or fuzz.

4b. so meta

It's annoying (I keep using that word...) to talk about these aspects of Exordia, because the book involves a sci-fi conceit that could potentially explain its unusual flatness of character.

Explain it in-universe, I mean. As a "real" thing that causes these people to be this way, for a specific reason, in a specific place and time. Leaving everyone outside of the frame potentially intact, with dust and fuzz still in place.

(Wait, that was in Floornight too! Huh. I literally didn't realize that until just now.)

I'm not going to say anything more about this due to the spoiler rule, except that I don't think it really works when you think about it. The stated causes don't actually match up with the effects: the former are too narrow in scope, the latter too pervasive. The characters are flat even when the sci-fi flat-causing mechanisms aren't supposed to be in effect.

At most, I guess you could say the flatness is "thematically appropriate." Connected to other stuff that the book talks about, elsewhere. But... I dunno. Who cares? What's the point?

4c. the voice of the hive

Like a lot of modern fiction, Exordia is mostly written in studiously maintained free indirect speech.

If you don't know (or don't remember) what that is, the Wikipedia page I just linked has a nice example, which I'll reproduce here.

Quoted or direct speech or narrator's voice: He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. "And just what pleasure have I found, since I came into this world?" he asked. Reported or normal indirect speech: He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. He asked himself what pleasure he had found since he came into the world. Free indirect speech: He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. And just what pleasure had he found, since he came into this world?

It's third person. But the third-person narration is commingled with the perspective of one of the characters (where this focal character can vary over the course of the text). Often the "narrator" just says stuff as though it's objective reportage, when in fact it is (and the reader knows it is) what this specific character thinks or believes.

The use of free indirect speech accidentally provides a useful way to "directly measure" the characterization problems described above.

Consider: although the book is written this way almost all of the way through – and you can discern that fact if you pay attention – it is easy to forget in the moment that it is written this way.

Why? Because, although the narration follows the thoughts of one character and then another, the characters are too similar to one another for this to make much of a difference.

Mostly, the narration just describes things the way you'd imagine a "geeky badass" might describe them, with lots of flashy clever phrasing, and lots of arguably pedantic detail about science / engineering / military matters / etc.

Free indirect speech already blurs the distinction between the authorial voice and the character voices, by design, but here the blurring is taken to its limit, and the distinction collapses entirely. Is "the author" describing events this way? Or, is one of the characters describing it in that way? Or not them, but a different character? We can't tell, because all of these people would say precisely the same string of words.

Of course, we can usually tell who the focal character is, because the items listed on their character card are getting sprayed all over the place. If every other sentence of the narration mentions a Clayton topic, then Clayton must be the focal character, and likewise for the others.

Even here, though, there's a curious departure from the way free indirect speech works in most other books. Note that referencing the "Clayton topics" is not the same thing as conveying Clayton's moment-to-moment thoughts: the former is a fixed list of 5 or 6 items, while the latter presumably roves all over the place as time passes.

I say "presumably" because if the characters' thoughts do rove around in this way, we mostly don't see it. All we hear about is their "topics," again and again.

Maybe these are Clayton's thoughts; maybe Clayton is an obsessive monomaniac who just thinks endlessly about the fact that he's manipulative and so on. Maybe they are all like that. Who knows? It's impossible for me to tell, because the narration is ambiguous in this odd, specific way.

One section, late in the book, begins as follows:

An awful light from the sky finds Anna. She’s, barely, smart enough not to look straight at it.

I was briefly startled by this. I interpreted that "barely smart enough" remark as something said by the omniscient third-person observer. I was like: dude, that's kinda harsh, isn't it?

But a few sentences later, I realized: oh, the focal character in this scene is Anna's mom. It's Anna's mom who's judging her like this. That makes sense.

This particular example is just sort of a narration glitch. I'm not sure it'd be possible to avoid the effect I'm describing, here, without rewriting the scene so it's clear who the focal character is before the "barely smart enough" judgment occurs.

But this case stuck out to me when I encountered it, because that feeling of disorienting perspective-realignment – although it's just kind of awkward, here – is what good multi-character free indirect speech usually feels like, all the time.

"The book should have more of this," I thought. "It should be constantly calling the characters stupid, or whatever, from the perspective of other characters."

(It's not like that doesn't happen at all, mind you. It just happens way less than usual, and way less than it ought to, IMO.)

"With this much perspective-shifting, I should be getting vertigo," I thought. "So where is it? Why is everything so smooth?"

5. the forbidden word

My division into sections is sort of breaking down, here. There's a thing I want to mention that doesn't really deserve its own section, but doesn't quite fit anywhere else. Whatever.

It's yet another annoying quality of Exordia's characters. ("Wait," you're saying. "You said you enjoyed this book?")

Basically everyone in this book is so...

Look, guys, I really don't want to say "woke," okay? If no one ever used the word "woke" again, we would live in a better world. I have said it twice already in this paragraph, and thus made our shared world worse, twice. Sorry.

I'm just not sure what else to call it.

They're feminists. They're against racism, and it's not the kind of hollow and unreflective "opposition to racism" that (e.g.) most Americans will assent to if you poke them about it – no, these people have subtle, thought-through ideas about racism, and its causes.

And so on, w/r/t other forms of bigotry, and the like.

And it's not just that the characters hold these views, themselves. These views are a fluid in which they swim, in a mostly invisible fashion. Everyone assumes without asking that everyone else is like this, and acts accordingly.

Or, more precisely, all the main characters are like this. There are a few bit players who are vaguely suggested to have more right-wing attitudes: the "Mike Jan" who we briefly met above, he of the unchanging desktop background, seems like the type of guy who'd watch Alex Jones, for instance. And on really rare occasions – like maybe 2 or 3 times total – some barely characterized nonentity will actually say something racist or sexist, but nothing much comes of it (remember, our mains are emotionally impregnable badasses), and then the guy who made the comment gets beheaded by an alien laser on the same page or something.

Meanwhile, all the Important Characters are (I guess) invisibly equipped with Important Character Detectors that let them hone in on each other, ignore the hapless maybe-bigoted redshirts around them, and proceed immediately into sophisticated conversations about social justice with one another. No need to feel out the other party's general point of view beforehand: this guy's a protagonist. He's cool, he's one of us.

Is this bad?

I mean, if it is, it's not really a big deal, I guess? Not compared to the other issues I talked about earlier, the deeper ones that plague the fundamental ingredients of the work (character, plot, structure).

But I did find it kind of offputting. Especially at first, before I'd accepted that the Exordia world is just like this.

I remember specifically being startled by an early scene, during the part where the Act One characters are getting introduced to the Acts Two+ characters, in which Anna and Erik suddenly – without warning or preface – launch into a discussion of Kurdish feminism, and potentially distorted/simplified/problematic Western views of Kurdish feminism, and whether Kurdish feminism really matters at all in light of the dire geopolitical position of the Kurds, and that sort of thing.

Again: the problem is not that this is "implausible," in itself. We barely know Erik at this point, and insofar as we know him it's mostly as some hardcore soldier type of dude, but – sure, whatever. There are plenty of feminist men in the military, I'm sure. The military is big, it's got all kinds of people in it.

Again: the violation is not against the laws of physics, but against the laws of persuasion. It's not that this couldn't happen. It could!

And yet.

"Yes, this could happen. I guess it could. But like, come on. Really?"

Sometimes the reader is a harsher master than reality.

And beyond that, this just seems like... I don't know. Like a half-assed, cowardly way to make your book "about" social justice in some sense, without ever really confronting the topic head-on?

A book in which everyone verbally agrees with one another about their enlightened views is not a book about the content of those views. It's just a book in which some characters happen to agree with one another about some things, and also some other stuff happens.

(I'm being at least sort of unfair here: the book really is "about" the Kurds and the Anfal campaign, for instance.)

For a book about culture clashes and genocide and the struggle for international collaboration under tense circumstances, Exordia has a remarkable lack of ideological tension. Or even non-ideological international tension, depicted "on-screen."

Mostly, people in the book... just kind of instantly get along with each other? And then immediately start exchanging packets of nerd banter and/or trenchant commentary on the evils of U.S. imperialism. Members of the geeky badass hive mind, recognizing one another on sight, conversing in the native language of the hive.

Once again: is this bad? Even if so, how bad is it, really?

I think, maybe, that if your book is about the sorts of things that Exordia is about, then sometimes your characters should very much not get along immediately. That they should be riven apart, and driven to extremes, by identity and ideology – if not forever, then at least for a time.

Maybe.

6. proof by intimidation

Man, this post is long!

And somehow I haven't really touched upon what Exordia's prose actually feels like, most of the time, word by word.

That's what this last section is about.

I don't mean the prose style, exactly. Actually, the prose style per se is... really good, mostly! I don't have that much to say about the ways in which it is good, but for the sake of balance and accuracy, I ought to make it clear that they exist.

Seth Dickinson is clearly a very good writer. In the "writes high-quality prose" sense, at least, and – despite all that I've said – in plenty of other ways too. (I'm told that his other books are better than this one; I will probably read them sometime. And I look forward, warily but with a considerable measure of hope, to his future work.)

But. You know what's coming. This post is negative-only. I've got something bad to say about the prose, it seems. Not about the style, but about... something else?

What, then?

Well, let me show you some examples.

He [i.e. Clayton] has seen enough satellite timelines of mass graves to know exactly which stage the corpses have reached. Their skin and bone cells are still alive. Their suits are bloating with gases now. Death signals the beginning of a final uprising, when the three pounds and 60 percent (by count) of your cells that are bacterial clients claim their last meal. They eat you so greedily and so well.

Sixty percent, huh. TIL!

I didn't know that, but Clayton did, apparently. (Free indirect speech in action.)

Of course he did. Clayton is a geeky badass, and like all of his kind, he knows every gee-whiz fact (and factoid) in existence.

And like all geeky badasses – like the book itself – he is not shy about letting you know that he knows.

What else does the book know? Here's some chemistry:

Their X-ray frequency gun isn’t working. Maggie Gaboury breaks out the breakdown spectrometer. A neodymium-doped yttrium aluminum garnet laser attacks the hull; the plume of excited vapor releases a rainbow of light that the spectrometer can read like a bloody fingerprint.

"Breakdown spectrometer"? I've never heard of those. Am I supposed to know this? Is it important?

Two pages later:

The US Radar 110XLS is designed to survey down to two hundred feet below ground, seeking out oil deposits and land mines. Emme didn’t expect the radar to work���after all, their radios are burned out, and radars are giant radios. But radio doesn’t go through metal. The radar’s storage unit protected it. So now they’re aiming it at this alien hull, which Joel says isn’t metal. It’s some kind of stable excimer, or Rydberg matter.

"Ah, the US Radar 110XLS, huh?" I say, smiling and nodding.

Just keep smiling and nodding, I tell myself. Keep your mouth shut. Or else Seth might catch on that you're a fucking moron who doesn't even know what a "breakdown spectrometer" is.

Later, here's some physics:

She knows how matter behaves around black holes. This thing is not behaving like a black hole should: it ought to be pulling in nearby air, forming a friction fireball. It’s not. But even if it isn’t actively pulling, some air is going to move into it anyway. Air molecules at room temperature move shockingly fast—about 350 meters per second.

350 meters per second. Smile and nod. Smile and nod.

God, I'm dumb. All the fucking things I don't KNOW.

The areas which the book knows all about, and which I know virtually nothing about, are too numerous to name. Does it know aeronautical engineering? And astronautical engineering? You bet:

Volume around 12,000 cubic meters. Assuming the same density as a 747, this implies a mass of 5,400 metric tons, just short of two fully fueled Saturn V rockets. Blackbird has wings, but they’re too thick to produce much lift. The fuselage shows no sign of area ruling for efficient transonic flight. It’s not a plane. As a spacecraft design, Blackbird almost makes sense. The entire fuselage could serve as a lifting body while Blackbird glides down to a water landing. In space, the wings and their jagged trailing edges could act as radiators. There are no visible engines, but maybe the tail stuck in the mountainside is the exhaust.

That all sounds logical enough, I guess. But then again, if it wasn't, how would I know? Man, I don't even know what the phrase "area ruling" means.

Perhaps, despite my pretensions, I am not in fact cut out to disparage this book at all. It's above my pay grade. It's smarter than me.

You want more? Here's, um, a "BLEVE":

The blast tips the nearest helicopter on its side, snapping rotors, the fueling hose lashing like hell’s elephant. The helicopter carries a tank of helium cryogen for food storage and magnetic resonance systems. The heat of the fireball envelops the tank and pushes the helium above its boiling point. It tries to revert to a gas but it can’t: no room in here! For an instant the tank holds back tons of super-pressurized liquid helium trying to boil off into gas. Then a seam fails, and every molecule inside flashes to steam. The result is a BLEVE: a boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion. It ruptures the kerosene fire and kills the luckier men instantly. The inert helium snuffs the fire and replaces it with a zone of asphyxiation and paradoxical cold. The blast wave slaps the lab complex’s tunnels taut and snaps the laundry lines in Tawakul.

Maybe you knew what that was already. Not me!

Is... is that what the blast wave resulting from a BLEVE would do, under those circumstances? Look, I'm not saying it isn't. I'm not casting doubt. I'm just saying, I have no clue.

Did Seth Dickinson do some sort of calculation, here, to make sure this made sense? How much research did he do, how much homework? Did he run simulations?

This stuff reads like he did. It reads like he was so careful, so laboriously conscientious about the science and engineering details, that he just has to tell you everything he learned along the way, or else it would all be for naught.

The book knows about military hardware. Oh god does it know about military hardware. The following excerpt is merely a drop from an ocean:

A column of Spetsnaz BMD-4s roll south down the riverside road, bristling with hundred-millimeter rifles and thirty-millimeter autocannon and anti-tank missiles and active hard-kill defenses. Spetsnaz riding atop their transports watch every incremental tick of the compass. Brand new Azart-P1 radio sets squall with static, still picking up the aurorae hidden behind the low gray sky.

Seth, is there anything you don't know?

I'm not even touching on the learned, labored excursions into history and geopolitics, here – just focusing on the science-y parts for brevity (ha ha, "brevity," I'll be here all night).

But even then, there are plenty more domains of science and engineering left to cover! Behold:

The copper tracks that connect components on the board have been duplicated, as if the etching process was performed twice before the final UV burn. Some of the pin connectors have dwarf copies. The CPU socket is crusted in a dark mass, like over-applied thermal paste.

The world is vast, nearly as vast as my own ignorance of it. Would you believe I have no idea what "over-applied thermal paste" looks like on a circuit board?

Like Seth, I do an arguably excessive quantity of research. Look, I spent a while this morning finding all those quotes, and there's no way I'm going to leave them un-quoted after all that work, okay? Here they come:

The KingFisher can read DNA sequences at targeted locations, but it can’t physically examine the structure of DNA. For that, she needs to get purified DNA extract from the KingFisher machine, then mount the DNA on slides of mica and put them under an atomic force microscope.

But of course. (Smile and nod.)

Did you know that certain ways of getting killed cause you to ejaculate as you die? Clayton does!

"Gunshot trauma to the cerebellum causes post-mortem erection and discharge," Clayton says.

More physics, and some speculative engineering:

The engine that forms the “quill” is a sheared-flow-stabilized Z-pinch fusion rocket. This is a fancy way to say that it turns spin-polarized heavy hydrogen and light helium into a continuous thermonuclear explosion. This is itself a fancy way to say that it runs on a rolling nuclear fireball. The magnetically confined tailpipe puts out about 100 grams of helium-4, protons, loose neutrons, and unburnt hydrogen-helium fuel every second. Add gamma and X-rays for taste, and, in situations where you need extra thrust at the cost of efficiency, dump some extra mass into the beam as a kind of afterburner. The resulting exhaust plasma moves at 3,500 kilometers per second: Mach 10,000, or about 1 percent of lightspeed.

Even more:

Some of the atoms take direct gamma-ray hits to their nuclei, breaking apart the strong-force bonds that tie protons to neutrons: a process called photodisintegration.

Did we really need to be told, after having this phenomenon explained to us, that it was called "photodisintegration"?

I mean, maybe we did. Or at least, maybe I did.

Since, you know.

Since I didn't know that, before.

Of course I didn't.

----

One last time: Is this bad? If so, why?

Maybe the problem is that I've written too much fiction, myself. (And SF, even, sometimes.)

And so, I can no longer look at this stuff and just think, "ooh, cool science facts, described in a flashy way. Fun!"

Instead, I just feel an immediate, intimate sense of exhaustion.

"God, how much work this must have been. How long it must have taken to gather all this info, and double-check it, and integrate it with the story in the right places."

(The fact that it has to actually suit the story means that a lot of this kind of "homework" never even makes it to the page, because the plot points that might once have required it get edited out or modified! Ugh, I'm feeling drained just typing this.)

Exhaustion – and self-doubt.

"God, so many things to potentially get wrong in an embarrassing way. So many fields that I'm an amateur-at-best in. And since I'm writing fiction, I'm taking those fields 'out of distribution,' taking them places that have never been studied by their real-world practitioners! Fuck, I have to make novel predictions! I'm screwed. Everyone is going to know exactly how much of an idiot I am."

This isn't just about science, mind you. It's about everything. Writing fiction inherently requires one to assume a posture of staggering arrogance, or what would be staggering arrogance in any other context.

"Here's what happened, to these people who are not like me, in all these places I've only visited, at most. Here is exactly what they did and said and even thought, inside their heads, where no one else could see. How the hell would I know, you ask? It's simple: I know everything. I know all the things there are to know, about all the things that exist. (And the ones that don't exist, for that matter.)"

I do manage to assume the posture, at least for long enough to get the words written when I want them written. But outside of that trance-like state, I start to doubt myself.

Who am I to do this thing? My ignorance is vast, nearly as vast as the world of which I'm ignorant.

And it's there, in that world, that they live. The readers. Aren't they going to notice how badly I'm getting it all wrong? They will, won't they?

This is neurotic, I know.

And so, perhaps the only thing that we're learning here is the following:

A) I am a writer who is very intellectually insecure, and

B) Exordia is a novel with a majestic stock of implicit intellectual self-confidence.

Is that bad? Could it be bad, "objectively," apart from my issues? I mean, surely not, right?

Nonetheless, I notice that reading Exordia filled me with this kind of tetchy, defensive intellectual competitiveness – which is a thing that most books do not do to me, though "my issues" remain a constant.

Perhaps – to psychologize myself further – this objection is downstream from the others, and has no life of its own. Perhaps I just felt annoyed with the book for other reasons, and at the same time felt like the book was asserting itself to be superior to me in some sense, and so I felt a need to say:

"No, all of this is bad somehow, because if it were good it would mean this whole book is good – and that would have dire implications for my own work, given how similar-and-yet-maybe-inferior it is to the incredibly-annoying-and-yet-objectively-superior novel Exordia."

Which is... extremely neurotic, and self-regarding, and also barely even makes sense. I don't want it it just be that, but maybe it is.

(The legitimately high-quality prose did not help, in this respect. It really is good! Five hundred and twenty-nine small-print pages of good. It's so fucking polished, way moreso than anything I could ever imagine putting out. And so fucking clever, so fucking smart...)

(Jeez. Get it together, man.)

----

However, there is one more thing that I notice.

There are works of fiction that make me feel smart, and works of fiction that make me feel dumb.

And I think, all else being equal, it is preferable to make the reader feel smart. Not by cheating, not by lowering your intellectual standards to what you imagine the reader can handle. But by trusting them, and then giving them something hard in a way you trust them to digest themselves.

Rather than... I don't know, bludgeoning them into cowed reverence through sheer force of accumulated, exhaustive, exhausting showing-off?

I don't know how objective this quality is, this feel-smart/feel-dumb thing. I'm sure it's reader-relative to some extent, maybe a huge extent. Maybe it varies so much that it's not even worth talking about in the abstract; you just gotta hope the right reader finds your stuff, and feels smart.

Still, here I am, talking about it.

What defines the works that "make me feel smart"?

Mainly that they are complicated and difficult by virtue of the complicated and difficult novelties they create, as part of the creative act that they are. They involve things which are equally hard for anyone to wrap their mind around, because no one had ever needed to wrap their mind around such things at all, before the work existed.

That, and the fact that these works – despite being inherently complicated and difficult – do not talk down to you, or hold your hand too much.

They act kind of like you already know what their deal is – which you don't, but then again, no one does. (The playing field is level.)

They say:

"Congratulations. You have passed the entrance exam. Welcome to the class. It will be hard, but I trust you to do your best. If you aren't smart enough now, perhaps you will become so, by your own efforts, by the end. Good luck."

They expect the reader to be a genius, but they know, deep down, that the reader is not really the right sort of genius – not yet, anyway. That is the point of presenting the challenge: so that you will rise to it, and see a new kind of thing, beyond what you had believed to be the horizon.

This is how I feel about Homestuck, say, or The Quincunx.

Or The Lymond Chronicles, or The Recognitions, or Ulysses.

Some of these are extremely dense with learned and carefully prepared authorial research. And, where this is the case, they are certainly not shy about showing it to you.

And yet, these works make me feel smart.

And then, there are works like Exordia, which make me feel dumb as fuck.

The end!

[mikuyuuss]

I think one of the reasons why I ended up loving Mitsuri despite normally disliking fanservice female characters is that not only is she of course, more than that, but the way she was portrayed in the story is very refreshing to me. She comes off as trope-y at first and I'd argue that it's part of her gimmick. Majority of the hashiras were introduced as kinda stereotypical until we eventually learned that there's more to them than meets the eye and ofc, Mitsuri is no different! She has depth too that I think it's worth digging on.

Most fanservice female characters from my experience, tend to be either super mature oneesans. They have very womanly™️ hobbies, basically the token milf or the girl next door. That or they are the overly cutesy girl who has an archetypical traits like the token tsundere, kuudere, manic pixie dream girl or a bimbo or etc. I'm personally just not the biggest fan of it

It may seem like Mitsuri falls under the latter, or maybe a combination of the two, but imo her ditzy personality makes more sense. Rather than seeing her as the typical bimbo, to me, she's more like someone who retained her childlike positivity. She was surrounded by loving parents most of her life, so it makes sense that she would be more naive and clumsy.

She's also caring and nurturing, all stereotypical traits for the "mature oneesan" but then it makes sense bc shes the eldest daughter of many siblings. At the same time, bc of her peaceful and protected lifestyle, she still retained a lot of childish qualities, that's why she has a very joyful design. It reflects how she wasn't exposed to demons at a young age. It's something I personally found refreshing bc not many "oneesan" characters were like that to me.

All those little details about her character makes her personality feel more grounded, at least to me. Kana Hanazawa also nailed her performance, she made Mitsuri's cuteness feel so natural rather than forced. Even her love breathing and her magical girl vibes contribute to all of this. Her charm isn't just fanservice, it's multifaceted. My irl friends even said that she's cute more than anything. Perhaps it may not seem much, but the fact that she is in a bleak story is why these aspects of her character stood out. It's what makes her unique.

There's also the way that her relationship with Obanai isn't sexualized. Now I'm sure Obamitsu are very physically attracted to each other in universe, but what I mean is, from a story perspective, there's so much more emphasis on their emotional bond.

Maybe it's just me, but whenever I see the fanservice female character get a love interest, she will have moments where she gets groped or ogled at by the guy. Of course, there's nothing wrong with two characters showing sexual attraction or them having sexy moments, but I guess to me, it's often done in a tasteless manner and feels like an excuse to insert cheap fanservice (often at the female character's expense)

We don't see that with obamitsu. Instead, we see how Obanai loves her because she is bright, cheerful and makes him feel like a normal boy. We also see how he respects her and makes her comfortable. Obanai loves her for who she is. He values her as a person.

Also given the cheerful girl x brooding guy trope, I initially thought that Mitsuri would be the manic pixie dream girl, but instead, there's more emphasis on how Obanai comforts Mitsuri and how he's considerate of her feelings. It doesn't feel like she's only there to relieve Obanai's pain. Obanai's there to relieve hers to.

These are just little moments in the manga but even then, these details further humanizes Mitsuri's character to me. It shows that she isn't meant to be solely framed through sexual lenses.

So even though I normally don't care for fan service female characters. I came to love Mitsuri a lot because her humanity and cuteness still shined through. I feel that it is because of this that she managed to be a comfort character to many people, and why she's grown so dear to me the more I look into her <3

[emptymanuscript]

Lost Horizon now always makes me think of Harlan Ellison going off on "cultural illiteracy."

And in the middle of dinner I'm talking about a cover idea that I had for my comic book, Harlan Ellison's Dream Corridor, and I said it's this great idea: you got a guy who's climbing Mt. Everest, you know, climbing back to Shangri-La. And, and the wind is whipping the snow in a curtain off to the left. And it's like Ronald Colman climbing back to Shangri-La. And as he looks toward the summit he sees McDonald's arches.

Now, I thought that was very funny. And in fact, here's a xerox of the cover that Kent Bash actually did. But I suddenly realized as I was talking to them that they were looking at me as if I fallen off the moon. I said, "Ronald Colman? - you know, Lost Horizon, the movie? The black and white movie? Hello -Hello? Ellison to Earth". They didn't know. they didn't know anything about Lost Horizon. They didn't know Ronald Colman. They didn't know Shangri-La. It's impossible, almost impossible, to write anything today that an audience today knows anything about if the audience is under 20. They just don't give a damn. they don't know and they don't care. And it turns into a kind of situation where even the most famous stuff becomes no price.

So, you know, always the same problems, always the same feelings. Nobody knows their Enheduanna Hesiod Ovid Dante Boccaccio Chaucer Shakespeare Austen Dickens O’Connor Angelou Jemisin anymore.

Lost Horizon is worth checking out because it's one of those movies that has a lot of reach. You'll recognize elements in that disturbing way that feels ultra cliche until it hits you that this is the movie that those cliches come from. It's the original that has been copied to the point that we all just know it even without ever seeing it. Same experience as Casablanca. It's in the zeitgeist. You already know the story. So it hits very different to us than those who saw it originally.

4 Star Theatre, Los Angeles, 1937

[guardian-of-time-if]

sorry for the code diving question, but, the ROs have attraction stats in MCs customization and race selection. Will their preferences come up later in the story or will it just be a hidden stat thing?

Hi Anon, I want to open with a general reminder that I don’t usually answer code diving questions. There are some spoilers in the code that I really want to keep hidden, but I know a lot of readers really like the convenience of it, so I’ve decided to leave it on for now.

This question isn’t very spoilery, and I’m pretty sure a lot of people will be curious about how it works once it starts coming into play in the next chapter, and I haven’t really seen any other IF’s utilize an attraction mechanic. I’m still going to leave it under the cut for those who would rather experience everything blind 

Before I answer Anon’s specific question, I want to give an overview of how the attraction system is going to work. So each RO has an attraction stat that is completely separate from the romance stat and the MC’s general attractiveness stats, that will track how physically attractive the RO finds MC at first glance. These points are acquired during the customization sequences. Not every detail of MC’s appearance will influence these points, and some will accumulate points easier than others. All of the attraction points will be based on the type of woman the RO’s are typically attracted to. 

So, what do they actually affect? Their exact usage will depend on the specific RO, but in general they affect the initial flirt interactions where the RO will react differently if he has a high attraction stat vs a low one. OR if you have a high attraction with an RO you aren’t intending to romance, you may get a unique reaction than if you have low attraction and don’t romance them. Once you lock in a romance route, currently outlined for the opening of chapter eight, the attraction stat will be used much less, and on some routes potentially not at all. 

If you successfully romance an RO, they will always find the MC attractive. I just want that to be clear before people start panicking. That’s part of why it’s a hidden stat, I want people to make the MC how they want her to look, but I also thought it would be interesting to take the RO’s existing preferences into account.

Will their preferences come up later in the story or will it just be a hidden stat thing?

I’m going to leave the exact preference a hidden stat thing, at least for now, if people are really desperate to know, I might make a post about it, but I’d rather people build the MC they want instead of the MC the RO’s will find most attractive. That said, I can’t say with certainty if any of the guys will mention their preferences in the story. I don’t really plan the specifics of the RO moments except for what character arc information needs to come out when, so we’ll see what makes it into those conversations once all of the RO’s are introduced. Plus, sometimes the characters like to change my plans in the moment. (Nax especially likes to disregard my opinions and do whatever he wants.)

That is the main ideas of how it works, but I’ll get into more specifics below.

Luk and Tzesar, tend to use their attraction stats less because they’ve known MC for so long. For Luk it will mostly come into play right after he returns for the war since he’ll be gone for most of MC’s teenage years, and for Tzesar it probably won’t be referenced much at all except in how he reacts to seeing MC all dressed up. What it does do for both of them is affect how fast they catch onto their feelings for MC if you romance them on the oblivious route. (Which I don’t think I’ve talked about on Tumblr yet.) 

Sentinel, if I remember correctly, is the hardest RO to gain attraction points for, and his are mostly only used if your MC is more forward in flirting. If he has low attraction (which most people will get) then he’ll be more resistant at first, but if he has high attraction, he’ll be more like ‘I’m not sure how to feel about this, but I’m listening’.

Nax with high attraction will be more flirty with MC even before you’ve acquired any romance points, basically, him starting with a high attraction will make him more likely to make the first move whereas the others need MC to express interest first. Once you start acquiring romance points he’ll be more forward regardless, it's more for before the romance points.

Albien is one of the most reserved ROs, and like Sentinel, he’ll be less reserved with an MC that has a high attraction stat. 

Gaderous, probably the one who relies most on the attraction stat. He starts off wanting a more physical relationship with MC, so having a low attraction stat will actually make him realize he has feelings for MC faster than if he has a high attraction stat.

[ezlo-x]

Are you at liberty to talk about how any of your characters have changed over the course of your aus development :)c? I always love seeing how things started and what they were finalized as !

Oh absolutely! I'm gonna see how much I remember from the early days of my au cause I know stuff has changed a lot. There are certain characters that haven't changed much from their early days. Mostly cause I think that what I established at the beginning was good enough for now and perhaps in the future I can revisit this and change aspects to it. Which is what usually happened to many of my side characters. There are some characters where I haven't payed much attention but I hope I can develop them even more in the future! So for this I will focus on the ones that had the most changes.

Ganondorf

Originally in my AU Demise was meant to be the main antagonist, but I think Demise lasted as an idea for less than a few days in my AU. I originally thought for Ganondorf to be the incarnate of Demise wanting to break free from the cycle. I thought of it and changed it for Ganondorf to not really be connected to Demise nor the canon Ganondorfs and for him to be his own character. Especially with the fact that in my story he becomes the Hero of Courage.

Ganondorf is an insecure person, this is due to him being the black sheep of the family. With no powers such as his mother's, in his own eyes, he deems himself worthless, even with his skill in combat. This still holds up in his story, but originally, he was meant to project this insecurity to Sheik, with Sheik wanting to unlock his powers (this was WAYY BEFORE I figured out what to do with the Triforce I was following very close to BotW's story). I scrapped that part of Ganondorf's character arc, cause I realized it was stupid and out of character for him. In story he does get upset with Sheik but not in a way to project his insecurities to his own child. So even if Ganondorf is insecure of himself and worth, I'm going to tackle it very differently than what I originally thought.

Sheik

With Sheik it was more about things around him changing. Like figuring out the Triforce for my au, the dragons, Lord of the Mountains, and the Blupees. Also his dynamic with the Scourge King as well. I think with Sheik I'm still scoping things out, there are things in her story that I'm thinking to improve, as I really don't want her to be pushed aside and barely have a role in this story.

Tarú

This is specifically Post-Calamity Tarú. They were initially meant to be more soft-spoken, less outgoing like her father. Especially due to the trauma of the attack of The Calamity. Tarú was meant to forgive Ganondorf for disappearing for so long and was presumed dead.

Well THAT was changed, Tarú is now bitter and resentful towards Ganondorf for abandoning him for almost 20 years. Tarú's trauma of losing his father in The Calamity, became a fear of losing his own son Yunobo. Tarú's a grouch a grump and there is tension across the board between him and Ganondorf.

HOWEVER I still had in mind that these two would reconcile by the end, but after much further thought and talking to friends about my story. I came to the conclusion that it would be best if these two didn't end up together. Cause I forgot to mention-

In pre-Calamity, the relationship between those two changed. Especially when the Calamity began to approach, their relationship became rocky, and tension began to arise. Tarú wanted to follow in the footsteps of his father and take Ganondorf along with him. But Ganondorf had other goals in mind, and his insecurities held him back from continuing the relationship forward. This lead for these two to feel unsure about each other and were unable to resolve it cause The Calamity awoke and all hell broke loose.

Skall

She had a pretty simple rewrite, though it was almost an overhaul of her story. In Post-Calamity time, Skall attempted to fight back the Divine Beast Vah Medoh, failed, and plummeted to the Hebra Mountains, hiding for 10 years.

This was simply changed so that when she lost her beak during the battle, it was too traumatizing for her to continue fighting. She eventually retired and lives in a small town in the Hebra region until Ganondorf and Nabooru meet her.

Scourge King

THIS BITCH

Alright, so originally Scourge King was just meant to be a force of evil, just like Calamity Ganon. Nothing crazy nothing grand, just that.

I was feeling unsure about it mostly cause it felt a little ironic that my antagonist for my au story barely had any form of motive or character as a villain. When I am THEE Ganondorf enjoyer, I am a villain enjoyer. The dead body behind that mask was just a dead body. MAYBE it was meant to be someone but not the character that I currently have now. It was irrelevant, I just did it cause it looked cool.

So after MUCH thought, all the pieces fell down into place for me. And I became oh so excited about Scrouge King as a character and villain. And his dynamic that he will have with Sheik and Ganondorf, as well as the relationship of the Triforce. I would love to share more about him but I REALLY want to keep it as a surprise for you all. When I one day eventually reach to that point of my story.

I know I have more to share but these are the guys that just came to me at the top of my head and also are the ones with the most recent changes to their character and story.

[imabiscuitinthousandworlds]

i just read treacle walker all in one go and i couldn't tell you what exactly it did to me but. it sure is gonna stay with me. it felt like my childhood came back to hug me and fill the dirt with wonder.

[caligvlasaqvarivm]

wanna ask how you feel about the eridan bpd headcanon/theory(?? not sure what to call it!) you're so good at your character analysis and i'd love to see your outlook on it

Since I don't have a degree or any formal training in psychology, I feel deeply uncomfortable diagnosing characters. I've made an autism joke before but only because I'm on the spectrum. He's definitely traumatized and anxious, but I mean those as descriptors of his behavior rather than capital-D Diagnoses. I try to focus on those when I can - the cause and effect of cognition, self-image, and behavior - and those factors may very well match up with DSM criteria, but I try not to touch an actual diagnosis with a ten foot pole unless the author has explicitly stated that X character has Y condition.