#complexity of being a writer

[mywordfulcanvas]

being a writer is so complicated. like which part of me should i write about without contradicting the others?

[shadelorde]

paraphrased from a conversation I had on Bluesky but actually the more I think about it the more utterly insane it is that the major thing Korra is hated for is losing the past avatars. You want to know HOW she lost the past avatars? by trusting an older member of her own family who then proceeded to GRAPHICALLY violate her and destroy an actual part of her in front of her with utter glee - but Unalaq isn't denounced as even a creep and no thought is given to any of the themes behind such a scene, it's just "how could korra let this happen??!?!?!"

life imitates art i guess.

[rawliverandgoronspice]

re: sympathetic ganondorf vs evil for evil’s sake ganondorf, i think this is misrepresenting and underselling what’s actually offputting to people

“i’m evil because i’m evil” or “i’m evil because demise is evil” and the associated lust for power simply for its own sake has always been lame and low effort. there’s a reason it’s “shit tier” on the classic “villain motive tiers” thing

“i’m evil but there’s enough nuance to make the player at least somewhat sympathetic to me even if i’m still ultimately a bad guy” is a good thing that people like? i’ve never personally interacted with a zelda player who thinks windwaker ganondorf ruined the character or anything - he’s generally regarded as the gold standard of villain writing both in and out of zelda. this is roughly “high tier” on the tier chart

“actually TWIST i’m not evil at all, it’s the good guys who were evil all along, i’ve done nothing wrong and i’m completely justified in my righteous quest against the status quo, you’re the real secret true villain for being complicit in preserving it” is technically regarded as “elder god tier” on the motive tier chart but i would personally label it as “oscar bait tier”. these things *can* be compelling in conversation with the existing landscape, but often it comes across as a deliberate effort to subvert the audience’s expectations for the sake of being unpredictable (or worse, for the sake of proving you’re the smartest one in the room). in separate works where this conversation/critique is the entire point (eg. Watchmen or The Boys), that’s not necessarily a bad thing, and the audience sets their expectations accordingly. in an established, long-running franchise, however, this almost always reads as dripping with contempt for the audience, like walking into a room and going “you morons like this shit? let me, a person much smarter than you, explain what it’s Actually about, because you’re an idiot if you’ve been a fan of this series before now”

on top of that, in the context of a series like zelda, this type of story feels myopic and disrespectful to the future of the series. “welp i burned down the 20+ years of lore behind this character so i could do a deconstruction, good luck using them in any capacity in the future, sounds like a you problem”

all this is to say, i think it’s a bit disingenuous/strawman-y to suggest that people put off by this want ganondorf to have 0 depth at all. there’s a lot of room for different kinds of depth, it’s just that the trend of the last decade has been for “depth” to mean “condescending deconstruction”

Hey!

Thanks for taking the time to write this ask, I think it warrants an interesting conversation. To me, there's like, a lot of things about what you're saying, and tbh I do see where you're coming from --in part.

First thing first... No yeah unfortunately some people Are hostile to even WW Ganondorf. It's been a rising trend in the fandom since TotK was released --people being very against the concept of any additional complexity to the character, either not getting it or considering anything he says pure manipulation that doesn't even warrant a conversation, literally making fun of people who were intrigued by this and wanting more out of this particular thread. This position not only absolutely exists within the fandom --less so on tumblr, I'll agree there-- but it's not even hard to stumble upon as a pretty regular opinion that gets tossed around. I had some interesting asks thrown my way, let's say. The idea that Ganondorf is a remotely interesting character that deserves more thought than what he gets is very much Extremely not the norm, and the very fact that you, as a fan, likes him as a guy is perceived as weird and missing the point by a lot of people. Like a lot a lot of people.

So I'll just... I guess I haven't clarified my position in a while, so I will reclarify my position on our favorite evil dude: I do like him perfectly fine as a villain, I do not want him to be "redeemed" by the narrative, I think he works fantastically as an ongoing threat, I think they could make him even scarier and more offputting and that would be super fun and thrilling... and I also think he already is complex. Like, inherently. Everything Nintendo has been putting into him since his first appearance is complicated --even their attempts at flattening him back in TotK do not fully work because they can't scrub him of the extremely loaded ideas they injected into him from the get-go. Nobody forced Nintendo to do a Mega Orientalism when inventing him, nobody made them write the NPCs to have this super weird antagonistic relationship to the gerudos in OoT, nobody made them have all this lore of the one man born every hundred years, raised by twin witches --and then nobody made them press on that tension point in Wind Waker explicitely, and then, in a more subtle fashion, in TP too. Nobody forced their hand when it came to having the strange "round ear" situation, suggesting (confirmed even, in additional canon) gerudos are born unblessed. The fact of the matter is: everything to make the relationship between Hyrule and the gerudos complicated has been there since 1998. There's no need for a Switcharoo to prove that anyone is smarter than the audience: everything messy has always been baked within the worldbuilding itself. It's in the cartridges already!!

Perspective on it is what could change, though --because, except in Wind Waker, we never get even a hint of a sense that we should think, as an audience, that Hyrule's super weird relationship to the gerudos is maybe questionable. Worth thinking about at least. Which, given the optics, is wild to me that to bring this particular can of worms up is still very largely considered crazy talk within the fandom (that, or the Sheikah situation across the series, also insane in many ways). And yes, it would perhaps lead to themes that are a bit heavier than what Zelda has been overtly dealing with (though, again, Majora's Mask exists --and I do find a lot of unpacked ideas in the Wild Era, like the very unquestionned gerudo bridal pipeline, very uhhh unfortunate already if I'm being honest --even moreso because it is unquestioned). But Zelda, when well handled narratively, can do wonderful things with evocative subtext, open doors never fully crossed, a lynchian pressure on what should feel offputting. We don't even need a sad monologue about it. It doesn't even need to be handled explicitely. But I think the pressure point is just better when understood and incorporated in some form, instead of being denied so hard the world itself start to feel incomplete and unlived.

I do want to say... I get what you mean with the whole "oscar bait" thing. There has been, historically and in recent years, a tendency to be driven by an external, almost panicked sense of morality rather than by the internal drive of a story, its internal thematic logic. I also do think it can feel very corporate, very "Disney looking back at its own movies and scrubbing off everything Buzzfeed deemed problematic in 2014 while making everything glossy and lifeless and awful" and it's not that great!!! and tbh I can't say I would trust Nintendo to handle any appreciation for the fact that the story of an eternal golden kingdom cheering on beating the evil outsiders who want to corrupt everything good and pure and blonde about that perfect inherently good place, is like, extremely not neutral. It absolutely is a delicate thread to weave, and I agree that putting a definitive end to Hyrule is probably not the smartest IP move to do. But, Hyrule doesn't have to be condemned as Bad, it can be merely complicated. And ongoing, regardless. To keep on with the Disney parallel: The Lion King would feel weird if we started to peel off the internal politics of the hyenas, it's just not the right place for it, when everything about this story revolves around the Righteousness of the Divine Right to Rule. But if the Lion King was an ongoing series that had been looping on itself for a while... wouldn't it make sense to figure out how to achieve majesty by studying other angles too, eventually? Is it that strange to suggest the exercise is like, possible? That it can be handled with artistry and soul?

I feel like... Yes, to acknowledge Ganondorf's humanity --not even to coddle it, just to acknowledge it-- implies taking in everything that makes him who he is, and that might rattle some foundational ideas about why this ancestral fight is even happening in the first place. I also do not think it means that he must be Good now. He can still punch a child and cackle maniacally, he can still be unredeemable --he can still destroy himself and others out of the most unconstructive spite ever, and we can still see the purpose in defeating him while basking in the "yea....." left in his wake (Wind Waker did that!!! Wind Waker did that and then we had more Zelda games!! crazy how that happened). This is hardly undoable. It does take some narrative skill, and some commitment to taking a bit of a risk, but Ganondorf is genuinely unmanageable as a character if you insist on your refusal to acknowledge his foundations --and I think it's partially why TotK's story is such a mess. He sells a TON, but you can't have him breathe slightly too loud without risking the entire world falling apart. They did try in TotK, so very hard, and to me they still failed--as insane as he behaves, Hyrule still doesn't come out of this looking good or particularly justified, because the very central core of Ganondorf's character is to be subjugated, and then rebelling in a destructive and brutally selfish, uncompromising manner that ends up robbing him of humanity --and the discomfort of that premise will therefore always haunt the conversation. Nintendo dug themselves into that mess. I feel like a lot of the Ganondorf fans I know merely... point at that. At the mess. And I feel like the longer the games avoid this mess, the more coats of spinach green they slather ontop of his skin, and the more nonsensical characterization they pile up, and the more Ganondorf will become a parody of who he once was, and what made him compelling to begin with.

And to top it all off, as if he wasn't contentious and complicated enough to handle already, they leaned into the internet turning him into a sex symbol for some fucking reason??? Yeah I genuinely have no idea how Nintendo will manage this dude moving forward, because to me, he is, at best, an endless source of (very lucrative) headaches, and at worst a ticking time bomb. I'm not sure how long they can get away with that TotKification strategy, is what I mean.

(Also: I tried to not overdwell on all the incredibly complicated conversation re: race and orientalism, but it's borderline impossible to have this conversation without acknowledging that I have never seen a major pop culture villain receive more pushback against "woobification" than him, and I don't think it's a complete coincidence let's say :) )

[zahri-melitor]

"Young Master Timothy brought Conner with him to dinner. They have a proposal of their own." "A very expensive proposal, I'm sure. I'm still paying off the last Titans Tower..."

(Batman #96 2016)

Yes, thank you James Tynion IV for that. A very expensive proposal, you say?

Okay, for context Bruce is currently drugged on a cocktail of Rogue toxins and hallucinating the future, but I laughed.

[redlyriumidol]

the plot of inquisition is fairly basic/unoriginal imo UNTIL you factor trespasser in as the real ending. that elevates the story so far beyond a simple fantasy "bad monster guy wants to take over the world. the plucky hero and his friends stops him" to something much more compelling. the moment you find out corypheus was really just small potatoes and you should have been worrying about the unassuming, soft-spoken elf who you thought was your friend and would always be by your side.... unparalleled. of course trespasser shouldn't have been a dlc I mean... we shouldn't have had to pay extra for something which is absolutely critical to the story of inquisition, but anyway...... it's truly the plot twist of all time. corypheus was a bit blah as a bad guy but really he was just a distraction- all you've been doing this whole time is cleaning up solas's mess so he can freely carry out his plans. solas is already an incredibly good villain, just being able to see and get to know the "human" side of him for an entire game is amazing set-up for da:d

[urfavcrime]

dsmp is still SO insane to me. still not completely convinced it wasn't a social experiment. it is something that can never be replicated again due to the really specific circumstances that attributed to it's creation and popularity

[stateofdreaming14]

And if I say that sqh Mr. Airplane shooting towards the sky himself is kind of Black Swan- BTS coded

Like the song is all about the fear of losing your passion for your art and the idea that the moment you do is your first death (based on the quote that goes something like "a dancer dies twice. The first when they stop dancing and that's the more difficult of the two" or something like that) and just think about every day he ground out 10k a day each day the words become a little more soulless a little less hopeful and somewhere inside he's slowly dying his first death

Then he dies

Only he's alive again and watching all of the heart be brought back into his last work all of the little beloved details he forced himself to forget

And oh he's alive again so so alive

[factsilike]

One of the things I very much hate about modern AUs in MDZS is how the fic writers Americanise everything about the characters until the only thing Asian about them is their name.

[howinkonvenient]

wait, so you're telling me the show about unreliable narrators has an unreliable narrator as the protagonist??????????? what do you mean I'm not supposed to agree with everything they say and do, how else am i gonna know how to think or feel about anything going on in the plot???? make my own conclusions?????? fuck you!!!!!!!!

ignore all the other times they were objectively wrong or did a bad thing before, that doesn't count, obviously. they are always morally good and correct and nothing bad can happen as a result of this mindset, especially not in the show itself as a character flaw the protagonist has

[oros-ash3s]

yapping about atlas again because I never stop thinking about this guy

⟢⠀ more under the cut:

To understand Atlas the first thing you need to realize is that he lives off of validation.

He was turned into a ruthless killer starting at just six years old. Of course growing up with someone as emotionally distant as Cato as his primary guardian shaped him to be so dependant on validation, on making other people proud. He needs to be wanted, needs to have a purpose. And if he won’t be wanted, then he’ll be needed. He’ll make it so they depend on him — otherwise, who’s to say they won’t throw him to the side? Who’s to say he won’t be abandoned?

By the time he is 20, he has not shed this mentality, even with all the healing from the many years of trauma at Eden’s hand that he has tried to do. He is still convinced that the most important thing is earning validation from those around him. He’s sure that despite having such a tight-knit group of friends around him, despite having so many people willing to stay at his side, even at his worst, he is not more than his contributions to the Alliance, to their mission.

Then bring in his and Alastair’s falling out.

For the first time in his life, it is not he who is freezing out Alastair, but the other way around. Alastair will not look at him, talk to him, acknowledge him. All his efforts to try to fix things, to make up for what he assumes are his many downfalls, Alastair will not budge.

And so, he seeks out validation elsewhere.

The thing about his and Daphne’s relationship is that it is founded on touch. He does not confess to her, instead just finds himself making out with her after one of his gigs, and then the next thing he knows she is calling him her little boyfriend.

He’s starved of touch, of validation. Kauri’s mind control took an effect on him, one that he hasn’t fully come to terms with, even three years later. Alastair shows visible disgust at just touching Atlas, and so Daphne, who touches him and fawns over him and speaks about him — his body — like it’s something to be revered, is exactly what he needs.

She makes him feel wanted. Makes him feel whole again, gives him a purpose, a part to play.

To many, Daphne’s control over Atlas makes no sense. The period in which she makes Atlas feel good, feel special, doesn’t last long. It’s not very long after they start dating before Daphne starts dragging him off to parties, pressuring him to drink and have sex and change things about his appearance and who he associates with.

But to Atlas, Daphne makes perfect sense.

She is the first choice he’s actively made in a long time. He’s had his autonomy stripped from him, over and over and over again. His sense of identity is fractured, especially due to ONLY regaining his memories a few months ago. He doesn’t exactly know who he is, always revolving himself around what others want him to be. So making this choice, picking Daphne out of everyone, is revolutionary to him.

To Atlas, he can’t be wrong. She was nice, she was good, until she… wasn’t. Except he couldn’t have been wrong about who she truly is, if she truly loves him. Atlas is prideful above all else. He’s stubborn, set in his ways. Daphne has to be good for him, otherwise, that means he made the wrong decision.

The very thing he had been warned about. The very thing he was scared of. He can’t be wrong, because that means that maybe everyone else was right about him, maybe he is just better at following orders.

It’s what causes a divide between him and Wren. Atlas desperately is seeking control over his own life, stuck in an abusive, controlling relationship. Then there’s Wren, his best friend, who’s concerned for him. But they’re messy and worried and stressed about a million things and have no clue how to properly talk to him about it. So they yell and scream and get mad, the only thing they know how to do at this point.

Atlas sees all these people who are worried about him, and he feels trapped, because they’re telling him they know what’s best for him and that’s the last thing he wants to hear after YEARS of being told that by the people who are hurting him.

So he misconstrues Daphne’s control as worry, and Wren’s worry as control. He sticks by Daphne through it all, even when she shit talks his best friends, even when she pressures him to drink and smoke even when she knows his history with it, even when she grows violent and forces him to do things he doesn’t want to.

Because in the end, he chose to be with her, so it can’t be that bad. She was nice and sweet and loving so this must be what love is like. If he really wanted her to stop doing this stuff, he would.

(Right?)

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[megsiepoo]

"Time of Our Lives"

            "Because that is too easy," Spy said, rolling his eyes as he explained the problem yet again. "And anything Engineer would ask for of his own accord would have little to no romantic value. He would be more likely to ask for scrap metal than a proper gift."             "But if he would like it, then it makes for a good gift, ja?" Medic interjected. "Besides, for all his intelligence, Herr Engineer is a simple man."             "Doctor is right. Little Spy is over thinking problem," Heavy concurred. Spy sighed heavily, rubbing at his temples to ease the headache threatening to take hold.             "It should not be this difficult to find something that can be both romantic and practical. Merde, this is useless."

WOO DAY 7 LET'S GO

And Happy Valentine's Day everyone!

Man, I so did not mean for this last fic to be so long compared to the others. I did the rest in one or two sittings while this took the better part of the last 3 days lol. But I'm really happy with this one! And what a fitting end to this challenge!

I had a lot of fun doing this prompt week. It was a challenging experience but super enjoyable, and it's been neat exploring different ships and character dynamics I haven't spent much time on up till now. I fully intend to do more stuff like this in the future. After some much needed sleep!

Thank you to everyone who's enjoyed and commented on this series. Somehow my favorite tf2 author even discovered it! That's been a major trip on its own.

Thanks for reading and feedback appreciated as always!

[thepersonalwords]

Simplicity saves strength.

Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

[skullmoss]

Do you think the veil should've came down like honestly what would that have really done? The elves become immortal again right? Well ok but that doesn't really fix the oppression issue anf like now there's demons right? solas should've rallied the people currently present instead of trying to bring back a long dead world

solas never cared about anything or anyone except mythal and what He Can Do for the elves that look up to him. he has a savior complex but only for one singular race. he doesn’t care about anyone who dies in the process, and used people to achieve a means to His end.

qunari are savages and dwarves, the original denizens of the part of thedas he helped the other ancient elves overthrow and mine titan blood for don’t count as actual people.

nobody was ever going to convince solas the world as it currently stands deserves saving. a big doe-eyed lavellan he sucked face with once and snatched her heritage from was never going to change his mind. she was just one more person he could feel sad about as he continued on his way.

some ppl are upset about how the “solavellan ending” removes her agency but idk man she was never going to actually “save” him. lavellan’s just a tradwife at that point, collecting eggs in her egg apron as solas shuffles through purgatory lmao.

sera was so right calling them out on their elf purity bullshit. i wish she was in veilguard but i know her presence would have pissed people off…

[mariocki]

Lalla Ward makes a brief appearance as Lady Augusta, intended bride to an ill-fated aristocrat, in A Ghost Story for Christmas: The Ash Tree (BBC, 1975)

[wa3jetisbestpony]

revstar fans we need to put on the best talent show this towns ever seen and save ReLive!!

[the-mpreg-guy]

i’d make such a good samgirl. i understand him fundamentally. my sam studies are phd worthy. i can younger sibling project onto his stupid ass. he loves women the same way i love women. he sticks his dick in crazy and it makes my brain dick go WEEEEEE!!! unfortunately he’s played by jared padalecki