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wot-tidbits · 4 years ago

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Live Signing Session—Dragonmount Patreon Stream

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SPOILERS FOR THE WHOLE SERIES!

QUESTION:

It has been 13 years since you were selected by Harriet to finish the Wheel of Time. After 13 years have passed, like, has the shock worn off yet?

BRANDON SANDERSON:

Yes and no. There are times when I look back and I just I’m like that was really a surreal event in my life. Nothing quite can ever compare to getting a phone call being asked to finish the Wheel of Time. I look back and I’m like how did that even happen?

For those who don’t know, I didn’t apply for it. Harriet just called me and it’s really, really strange. At the same time the fact that I am a best-selling author has kind of settled in because I have to deal with it every day and I’m very used to it at this point. And so the public’s attention being on me, I have gotten used to that. The fact that I got that random phone call still is really weird when you look back at. I don’t know if you have things in your life like that, where you’re like: “Man, that really happened!” That is really strange, like winning the lottery, right? I always describe it as winning the lottery that you didn’t know you’d entered. It’s more like actually getting an inheritance you didn’t know you were getting, but someone you loved of course had to die for you to get the inheritance. So it’s still wrapped up in weird emotions for me.

QUESTION:

The way that Harriet became aware of you was because her friend Elise Matheson was printing out blog posts and other news clippings that were online where there was a news report or tribute to Robert Jordan and yours was on that list and Harriet read that and ran with it from there. So it almost seems to me that you’ve written some amazing things, but maybe that blog post might have been the most important of your career in some ways.

BRANDON SANDERSON:

The single most significant three paragraphs in my entire career are probably that little blog post. […] The weird thing is that I was late. I spent about a week thinking about, “What do I write?” and everybody had tributes come out like the day after and I didn’t jump on that. You see me posting things later when I do blog post reactions. I often am like, “I want to think about this.” And so if I hadn’t waited who knows if that would have come up in the search results. First, because it was brand new when Elise was looking for things. Who knows, if I’d waited one more day it wouldn’t have popped up? If I’d written it the week before, maybe it wouldn’t have either. That’s just one of those things, right?

QUESTION:

What would you say to 2007 Brandon?

BRANDON SANDERSON:

I have read this book where you go back in time, and it never turns out well. I would not go back in time and say anything to myself because I would end up as my own grandfather somehow. And then I would need, like, Christopher Lloyd to show up and help me fix all the problems in my life.

But if I take it non-jokingly, I don’t know. I’ve never been asked this one before. It’s usually your young writer self, what would you say? I honestly have no idea. Maybe I would say it’s gonna be alright. You’re gonna do a good job. Don’t stress this as much as you are. But maybe it’s stressing it that made me do a good job? And I haven’t stressed over a book as much as those books ever. Except maybe my very first release with Elantris. But I am not high stress person, so even that level of stress is nothing compared to what I know a lot of other people stress about.

The nice thing is that by 2007 I was confident in my writing. There were things I needed to learn. There were going to be some hard things I needed to learn and I learned them over the next five years. And it was a tough growing period of writing.

I might say take another stab at Mat once you think you got him. Listen to Jason (Denzel) when he says Mat’s off. Because you (Jason) were the first to point that out to me. I might say Padan Fain. A lot of people are going to think there needs to be a little more. Can you write like 2000 more words on the Padan Fain narrative arc for a Memory of Light? Remember to do that. Brandon, they’re gonna split into three books anyway. Stop stressing about trying to get them all into one book. They are not gonna let that happen. Tor’s not gonna throw that money away. They are going to insist on three books. So plan it that way from the beginning and maybe the timeline issues and Towers of Midnight would have been solved. I’m mostly looking at warning myself to prepare things for the future.

QUESTION:

You and I have talked about that in the past. Rand had a very climactic moment at the end of The Gathering Storm. And then you had some moments but it largely became Perrin and Mat’s book in Towers of Midnight. And then we got back to Rand again…

BRANDON SANDERSON:

I actually like that breakdown. I don’t think I’d change that. I think that Rand in Towers of Midnight being a little bit like Rand in the Dragon Reborn where you’re getting some distance from Rand, because he’s gone through a major change and you’re seeing him externally for a little while.

Actually, I think that’s a selling point of the Dragon Reborn and I like having echoed that in my three, where you know that distance [is there] and then you get back in his head and you’re like: “No, this is the Rand I still love”. This is the same person, he’s just developed. He’s changed a little bit. And that distance, that time with distance, it just gives you a different perspective on the character.

Like I said you are in Rand’s head in the Dragon Reborn, but he feels like a different character, and then we get our Rand back in book 4. I really like how Jim pulled that off. I wasn’t doing that intentionally, but in hindsight looking back, it feels like the right way to do that.

I would try to fix the timeline issues though. I did a lot of work in the Gathering Storm when it was one book to overlap Perrin’s climax and Rand’s climax at the kind of center point of the story which became the two endings of Towers of Midnight and the Gathering Storm. And because those originally had been overlapping back and forth timelines and were split into two books—which again I kind of like how it went—it was clunky since it wasn’t designed that way from the get-go.

QUESTION:

About the deleted chapters you did for the charity novels and are there anymore that might appear?

BRANDON SANDERSON:

No, the only other scene I think I’ve mentioned before; I have like that brief like two-page scene where ladies weave the bridal wreath for Rand. I’ve talked about that before. That’s the only significant chunk they got cut that’s left and it’s only like two pages. The ones were like full things, so someday we’ll find a place for that. I don’t think we have yet, but someday we’ll find a place for that, but it’s only two pages. It is real short.

Did I tell you why that got cut? I should mention it. So it was actually really cool. I wanted to get Rand engaged, have the bridal wreath and have all three of them like weave it together and kind of use some Aiel tradition there and whatnot. And it was a really great scene. I enjoyed it. Everybody liked it.

Then we put the book together. Because often I will write—when I have a large number of viewpoints, I will write a chunk of viewpoints from a character’s viewpoint, and then at the end is when I really start putting things together and then I have to smooth between these things and make sure that the pacing is right. Because you don’t want all sorts of dry scenes together. You don’t want too many action scenes together, unless it’s at the end where you do want a lot of action scenes, and you want to kind of be bouncing back and forth. There’s just a rhythm and feel to it that usually I have a pretty good instinct [for] while I’m writing knowing how they’re going to fold together.

But once in a while you get something that just sticks out like a sore thumb and this was one. Because it was opposite the Talmanes’ scenes going in Caemlyn and like dramatic scenes of people getting stabbed by myrddraal and nearly dying and all this stuff. And it was more powerful stuff. It was really nice tense stuff and then you jump back and the girls were like “Tee-hee, I am like this branch that I’m weaving into the bridal wreath. It has thorns!” And it just did not work!

I’m making it sounds sillier than it was. It wasn’t that silly, but it did not fit thematically. Harriet was like “Oh, this does not match at all.” I’m like “Yeah, you are totally right.” So we cut that one up, which made me feel sad because I did want to get them engaged. I know a lot of people have been waiting for that, but it had to go just for the strength of the opening narrative. That one’s around. It’s fun. You can imagine [it] exactly as what it is. All three go out and gather different things to put into the thing and you don’t seem them gathering, they just come together and say “Here, I brought this. It’s a good match for us because of this” and they kind of weave it all together. Maybe someday we’ll get that but there’s not a whole lot left.

Getting the Perrin through the Ways out—like, I had wanted to find a place for that for a while because I really liked that sequence. I’ve mentioned before that when I look back at it, I’m like, “it needs a lot of revision,” so I actually had to spend a lot more time revising that sequence for the charity anthology than I did the other one, which I just kind of chopped up and it was good to go. Because that had lasted all the way until the last edit, but the Perrin scenes got cut out earlier after we did a bunch of just timeline rejiggering and things like that. Harriet had not been pleased with my depiction of the Ways, and looking back��I think I mentioned this in the Forward—she was right. And that took a lot of revision to make feel right, which I wasn’t planning on spending, like I spent two weeks revising that little sequence for the charity anthology, but I wanted it to be good.

It was fun because when I sent it to Maria to look through to make sure I hadn’t broken anything too big continuity-wise even though it’s not canon, she wrote back. She’s like “This was so nice, being able to actually read Wheel of Time and edit it again.” It was like a bright spot. And that’s kind of how I had felt on it. So it was nice to work on but it was way more work than I expected. The bridal scene will not get similar treatment if we find a place for it in a future Unfettered or something like that.

QUESTION:

Aside from that do you have other scenes still remaining, deleted scenes that could potentially see the light of day?

BRANDON SANDERSON:

I don’t think there is anything else at all. I don’t think there are even any scraps or fragments. Everything that Jim wrote I put in the book in some way. There is maybe some Q&A stuff that didn’t get in the book. In one of his Q&A’s with Maria in the notes he was talking about … No, no, this wasn’t from the Q&A. It was just notes from books back that they found dug in there that they were having Rand use the Choedan Kal. Jim had in the notes Rand using the male one at the end of the series but that one was destroyed. It was the access key that was destroyed. I’m like so do we find another access key or was this just old information contradicted other things? Because this was like he was writing book eight or something, he was thinking about doing that and they found a little note file for it. They’re like maybe we use these things, maybe we find another access key or whatnot.

There is stuff like that in the notes that would be fun to release. The fans could like imagine the what if because it’s entirely possible that rather than going with the Callandor solution, Jim would have gone with the Choedan Kal that he would have decided: “No, no, the right thing to do is to find another access key” or something like that or whatnot. And then you have a different twist on the ending using that. There are things like that that could be fun to see from the notes. I don’t know how much has been dug up, how much of it Harriet put in the library.

QUESTION:

Mat and Tuon are my favorite characters. Is there anything little or unknown about them that you can share with us?

BRANDON SANDERSON:

Everything I had from Jim that was in the notes I was given—now, remember, I had people look through the notes and give me the stuff that they thought was relevant, Maria and Alan did. So there’s entirely possibly like a lot of the things that are notes that I didn’t see were drafts of appendices that Robert Jordan added things to, and then taken out from like book 7 and 6 and 8 and stuff like that. And there might be things in there.

Everything I had either was in the books—or because that last scene was written by him, the one with Mat and Tuon in the epilogue—he had done a draft on that scene so I was pointing everything toward that scene to just get it in. So that I could drop it in as close as how he’d done it as possible. The only thing that I know is that Mat does go to Seanchan and that eventually he’s found in a gutter without his hat having gambled it all away. And he’s muttering “I lost it all” or “I gambled a lot away” or something like that. That’s in the notes for the outriggers.

The notes for the outriggers are three sentences and one of them is about Mat having lost it all. We can guess he goes to Seanchan. We can guess that he ruins, messes things up and then spends several books fixing them again which is how Mat basically rolls. That would be my guess.

We can guess that Perrin has to go. We think Perrin thinks he has to go to kill Mat. We don’t know but one of those sentences is Perrin is going travelling on a boat thinking about how he’s got to go kill a friend. So there’s got to be some tensions between the continents and things like that, and I would assume that hijinks ensued, but your imagination has got to go on this one. That is literally all I know about Mat and Tuon going forward.

Fun fact is that this was somewhere in the notes but they hadn’t shown it to me, I came up with a new name for Tuon and then Maria’s like: “Oh, Jim came up with one of these” and it was two letters off. We’d both come up with the like exact same new longer name for her. And that was cool, that I had been enough on the same wavelength. And we of course used his. But that’s kind of fun because I think we were both looking at the list of Old Tongue words and found something that worked together and came together and it sounds like fortune and that’s the same direction I’d gone.

Maybe he’d written something that had told me that I should go that direction but either way, that’s a fun thing. There is a little email from Maria saying: “Hey, we should use Jim’s name for this!” And then it was almost exactly the same. I felt very cool on that day. I can’t remember what mine is because Fortuona ended up in the book but mine also started with f, o, r and then I think I had an extra syllable in there and I had Tuon in there as well but maybe my ending letters to it were different or something, I can’t remember.

QUESTION:

I know you’ve spoken a lot about that you’ve read some of these early scripts and…

BRANDON SANDERSON:

Yeah, I’ve read the first six. Still haven’t seen seven or eight.

QUESTION:

I know you’ve had a chance to talk to Rafe (Judkins). I am really curious what your take is going to be and how you’re going to be involved or how, if I can use the word “possessive” of it, that you’ll be when they hopefully get to the end of this saga. When they’re in their season seven or eight and it’s covering your books and to see how much they keep and change. And how much they’ll have to change because their previous changes will lead to, you know, have ripple effects.

BRANDON SANDERSON:

This is uncharted territory for me. And I have no idea. It could be like Game of Thrones where despite the changes they stay pretty much according to what are the big events, so what I wrote ends up there. But it could go completely different.

As I’ve said to people, I envision this as a new turning of the Wheel. It’s the same souls but in a different actual turning of the Wheel. It’s not the one that Jim and I worked on. It’s a different version of it. And so some of the same events are happening, others are different and being rearranged and so. I don’t know. Like my experience has been fantastic working with Rafe (Judkins) so far. But the sum total of my involvement is: I talked to Rafe and tell him what I felt about various scripts and things. I went on set one time and I was mostly there so they could interview me for b-roll to use in their “making of” and to actually let me meet the actors and things like that.

I am not a significant player in the series. I don’t know, maybe they will want me to be more of [one] when it gets to my books. My instincts say that I will become less and less needed. And I am not even sure how much I was needed right now because Rafe knows, has a vision, and is doing a good job with it.

I’ve been in his shoes before but it’s almost like the handoff, at least the way it’s supposed to work, between past presidents where they like leave a letter and are there for a phone call if you have a question for them, but mostly you find your own way. And that’s kind of how it is with me.

QUESTION:

Did you ask them about having a cameo?

BRANDON SANDERSON:

I didn’t ask them about having a cameo, no. Maybe eventually in my own things I want to have a cameo but in the back of my mind I was like if I do a cameo I should do it when they get to the material I wrote. That’s more appropriate and so I haven’t asked for one yet. I hope the series takes off and then they get to mine and then we stick in a Brandon cameo.

For those who haven’t heard one of the things I want to do for my books when they get made is I want to die in various different—like I show up, I’m like the Kenny from South Park of the Cosmere or whatever. In every season there’s a version of me that dies in some horrible way, you know, just like a redshirt [from Star Trek] or something like that. I think that would be a lot of fun. You need people falling off the wall, getting eaten by koloss. I’m one of those people. Stuff like that. It just feels like revenge the characters could have on me and it could be this fun little thing. Stan Lee covered the cute cameo. I could cover the gruesome death cameo role.

QUESTION:

Having been through a full three books and years of working on it, what sort of high level general advice would you offer to the people, the writers in the writing room working on the series?

BRANDON SANDERSON:

I actually talked to Rafe about some of this stuff. Number one was of course, Mat’s harder to write than he looks. I actually did say ask Jason (Denzel). Mat is harder to write than he looks.

I talked about the kind of soul of the Wheel of Time. What makes the Wheel of Time work. I remember talking to him about the interview that I heard with Jim where someone asked him summarize the Wheel of Time and he hummed and he didn’t want to do it but he eventually said what it’s like to be the normal person and be told you need to save the world. They put that burden upon you that you’ve got to save the world and you’ll probably die doing it and it’s not a burden you wanted. What do you do with that? If there’s a core theme of the Wheel of Time it is either that, or the core theme of old things become new and new things become old, used in interesting and different ways both with the characters and the world building and things like that.

I talked about some of that stuff. But really what worked for me and what anyone has to do who’s in this situation is read through the books, feel the books and then try to have that in mind when you’re working on it. Anytime I started to get lost, I just went back to the books and read what Jim had written and it pulled me back in. When I was working on—and I reread the Eye of the World when I was working on the deleted scene we talked about—it threatened to do that to me again. I was pulled in I’m like “Ooh, this and that!” and the books are just so descriptive, with lush use of language in a way that never feels like it bogs down. You just have to go to the books. He won’t do it the way I did it and that’s all right as long as he’s going to the books and he’s like feeling the soul of those books.

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Huge thank you to @highladyluck for being my editor.

#Wheel of Time #SPOILER #brandon sanderson #WoT on Prime #TV series #wheel of time tv series #WoTonPrime #Wheel of Television

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rivetgoth · 4 years ago

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I had this friend I met in the Hetalia fandom in like 8th-9th grade who was like, a lot older than me (I was like 12-13 when we met and she was like 17 or so), and we were REALLY close for a really long time, we'd talk and call every day and it got to a point where she was really dependent on me in this awful way where she would like constantly threaten suicide if I didn't answer her texts fast enough and shit like that. She was really rich cuz her dad was a doctor and one time she bought me an entire fucking Xbox One (I did not ask for it like... I'd always been a PlayStation gamer LOL) because she didn't have anyone to play Halo with her. My family still has it and uses it as a DVD player/Netflix machine.

Anyway the really batshit thing about this person (BESIDES the fact that she was like, definitely a pedophile who loved shota and frequently sexted me after she'd turned 18+ and I was like 14 and she also had both a bestiality and incest fetish that she'd talk to me about constantly — I was a kid I had no moral concept of anything and just liked being edgy and feeling mature) was that she was like. A chronic liar who constantly faked identities. And for years after cutting off contact with her I would look back and realize that she had faked even more than I had noticed at the time. The thing is, I knew for sure she wasn't lying about her home life -- Her address, what she looked like, her dad's profession, her age, her house, her pets, etc, were all things I had proof of. But when I knew her she was constantly remaking her Tumblr to escape drama she'd start, and she would constantly make side blogs under pseudonyms and pretend it wasn't her (sometimes it would be random shit like aesthetic blogs under different names or ask blogs for characters or smthn, other times it was like, callout blogs for people she had gotten into drama with where she would pretend to be someone else defending her). I assumed back then that I was always going to be in on it, because she would always tell me whenever she made one of these fake accounts, and sometimes she would encourage me to make a new account too as a sort of roleplay thing where we both pretended to be people we weren't... Until I learned that she wasn't always telling me. Every so often, I would become mutuals with a new account who would start messaging me about my interests and strike a conversation with me. Then something would slip and my "new mutual" would admit that they had actually been my friend all along... Which should have made me immediately cut contact because that's weird as shit, but I was young and she was a close friend, so I would just sorta accept it.

She ended up being like, horrifically transphobic. She got run off her blog twice for being specifically transmisogynistic, first insisting that she was allowed to headcanon canon trans women as feminine men and then on her next blog insisting that lesbians couldn't be attracted to trans women. I was still young and closeted and she was one of my closest friends and was constantly messaging me that the situation was making her suicidal and she was just wording things wrong and totally supported trans people and people just weren’t giving her the benefit of the doubt and she was still learning so I tried to just stay out of it without losing her. Then... I came out as trans lol. She stopped replying to me when I first came out and then made a bunch of vents on her tumblr about how much it upset her and about how “using he/him pronouns for AFAB people is triggering” for whatever fucking reason. She told me her “best IRL friend” who she had introduced me to once on Skype but who never logged in again after and who refused to ever do a group call or anything (definitely another fake account) said that it was irrational for me to expect my friends to respect my pronouns so soon after coming out and that I shouldn’t be upset if I get misgendered. Then she apologized but told me my name and pronouns would never fit me. As you can imagine, as a little baby trans kid who was closeted from my family and terrified of even having come to terms with being trans, I didn’t really have a great defense.

Soon she started being really woke like 2014 style Tumblr SJW to save face, she came out as nonbinary and told me in private it was because she felt bad when people called her cis during discourse (she absolutely wasn't nonbinary) and she coined a "new sexuality" that was "attraction only to people you perceive as feminine, regardless of how they identify" -- what this actually meant was "attraction to cis women and not trans women." She ran an aroace help blog despite not being aroace? And made a bunch of pride flags that I still see around sometimes to this day. She would start fights a lot and try to out-woke people and got into a bunch of drama with other SJW types of the day, got into a bunch of drama with TumblrInAction and Mogai-Watch and shit like that, and she claimed for a short while that she had a headmate (FWIW I totally believe DID is a legitimate thing but like. Trust me on this one.) who was transphobic and that it made her so sad, she told me that it was actually that headmate that had been transphobic before, and every so often her headmate would front out of nowhere and misgender me and use really abusive language like calling me a cunt or a bitch or whatever. She started making these "intersex nonbinary" OCs who she would constantly make porn of under the guise that they were representation for LGBT people who were just like, extremely fetishistic cuntboys and dickgirls (they were “intersex” to explain why they could be “girls with natal penises” or “boys with natal vaginas”).

At that same time, she somehow always managed to have these random, very sporadically active trans women mutuals who were apparently amazing friends of hers, who shared some interests with her but also would defend her when people brought up her past, with these long-winded “Well, I’m a trans woman and I think what she said is perfectly justified and everyone makes mistakes and she’s always been a good ally!!” Then one day some trans woman received an ask from her account where she claimed to be a “black trans woman” (she was, of course, a white cis woman) and she freaked out and claimed she had “been hacked by TiA or 4Chan to make her look bad” — I realize now she had just been sending anon messages pretending to be things she wasn’t and forgot to hit anon LOL. Late in all of this she also got into a bunch of hot water for being really antisemitic and saying she didn’t trust Jewish people because they were just like Christians and like, 5 seconds later she came out as Jewish and wrote this whole long sad vent about how she had had internalized antisemitism and then started going by a random Hebrew name LMAO.

In the end the final breaking point was when I found her secret TERF blog, where she had been making posts for months about how trans men are just insecure women who are trying to escape misogyny by stepping on the backs of “fellow women” and using me as a fucking example, and also saying that me not coming out as a trans man had been “basically rape” since she had been SEXTING me when she was 18+ and I was 13-14+ and that it was traumatic to know someone she had trusted was secretly identifying as a man LMAO. She was also obviously saying all sorts of transmisogynistic things, but also had these really bizarre fetish posts about wanting trans women to fuck her...? I confronted her about it and she literally fucking out of nowhere told me that she was in the emergency room with a mysterious illness that might kill her and she was allowed to have her phone but due to privacy laws couldn’t send a picture as proof. While “in the hospital” she deleted the TERF blog and her personal blog. I had known her for literal YEARS at this point (we had met when I was 12-13 or so and by the time we no longer spoke I was a few months from 17), and I was completely stunned to fucking hear this person trying to pull “I’m in the hospital with a deadly disease” at being confronted for some shit like that LMAO. I made a post about it on my public and another “trans woman friend” of hers logged in to vehemently defend her by saying that there’s nothing wrong with AFAB women being untrusting of trans people because female oppression is uniquely traumatic and that there’s nothing wrong with women expressing their sexuality by sexting minors as long as the minor consents and that I was the real predator for “hiding that I was a man” (remember, I’d been a 13 year old closeted trans boy), before never logging in again... 😭 One of the last times we ever talked was when she demanded I refund her for the fucking Xbox and I refused.

Anyway, the long-term aftermath of that is that a few people online (in some random cringe areas of the internet) who archived some of her antics still think that I also wasn’t a real person, since they caught onto how much she lied about too, so they think I was also a sock puppet and I have no interest in clarifying and making myself known to those people LOL. I have no fucking idea where she is now, she deactivated everything after her being a TERF came out. There’s like, so much more to that I could say because I knew her for YEARS and, like I said, she was one of my “closest friends.” Her parents had wildly expensive pure bred designer dogs that she would make Vines of. She wrote Beatles real person fan fiction. For her birthday one year I made her a shirt on Zazzle with an inside joke about one of her OCs... does she still have that? Either way, she was easily the most batshit person I’ve ever known closely online and I will forever associate the Hetalia fandom with people like that.

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letterboxd · 4 years ago

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Beautiful Day: The Don Hertzfeldt Q&A.

In which the singular creator of It’s Such a Beautiful Day and the World of Tomorrow trilogy answers 57 questions put to him by the Letterboxd community, about death, gills, snacks, back flips, the best time of day to watch a movie, and the sick pleasure of emotionally destroying people.

Since his first animated outings in the 1990s, filmmaker Don Hertzfeldt has had a way of staring deeply into humanity’s soul via a humble stick figure, and his skill at blending existential questions with situational humor breeds intense reactions. To browse Letterboxd reviews of Hertzfeldt’s animated works is to meet film lovers at a rare, collective gathering point: heaping great piles of love for films that do “the exact opposite of helping with depression”.

There’s something optimistically anti-feel-good in Hertzfeldt’s works; a bleak view of the future, and a frank appreciation of death’s inevitability, that makes viewers urgently want to fix the way they’re living right now. “I’ve built a lot of my life philosophy on the messages of this film,” writes Misty, of his acclaimed It’s Such a Beautiful Day. “It has kicked my ass completely,” writes Dirk of the first, Oscar-nominated World of Tomorrow instalment, “making me angry at myself for letting trivial stuff take over things I love and making me happy I have so very, very much in my life to enjoy and be grateful for.”

The filmmaker’s magic lies as much in the process as the content: “Hertzfeldt is able to make every moment count,” writes Artpig, of the second WoT instalment, The Burden of Other People’s Thoughts, “every line of dialogue, every moment of silence, every note of music, every line of animation.” The World of Tomorrow films, says animation expert Toussaint Egan in our Letterboxd Show animation episode, are “some of the best science fiction films, period”.

And his timing. Oh, his timing. Just as the northern hemisphere days were turning cold, and the drawn-out misery of the pandemic was really taking hold all over again, Hertzfeldt tweeted:

WORLD OF TOMORROW EPISODE THREE everywhere october 9 5pm est 🚀

— don hertzfeldt (@donhertzfeldt)

October 8, 2020

And like that, World of Tomorrow Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime was ours, an overnight gift to the quarantined and bereaved-weary, on Vimeo for all to rent or own. The gifts, they keep coming: a master list of movies that have their fingerprints on the World of Tomorrow universe, and now, in recognition of our community’s love for his films—and in his signature lower-case—the answers to questions asked in an exclusive Letterboxd Q&A.

To make things easier for Don, we grouped similar questions (and have noted which members asked what). Read on for more than you ever thought you might get to know about Hertzfeldt’s process, brain, heart and influences.

Filmmaker Don Hertzfeldt.

From “holograms that yell at you!” to the stunning colors, textures and folds of the blue mountains, to attributes David progressively deletes to make room for memories, would you please give us an insight into World of Tomorrow Three’s world-building process? —Letterboxd in the grand scheme of the series, episodes one and two still felt like baby steps to me. episode three was my first chance to really start blowing things up and exploring this universe. when i’m writing, i don’t want to worry about going over the top or think about structure or meaning or really much of anything yet. writing is playtime, it should be fun and messy. i want to go over the top. there is no top. i don’t want to start thinking too much until i’m rewriting and sorting through it all. thinking too much too soon can get in the way, like being too aware of when you’re trying to fall asleep. when you write a diary entry or a text to a friend, there’s no self-consciousness or creative blocks, you just write. it’s casual and fluid and automatic. but if you’re asked to write a term paper or a screenplay, suddenly all those lights turn off. it can be paralyzing. it’s hard to get to that place of truly not caring what anyone thinks and approach all forms of writing just as freely as writing those immediate thoughts in your diary. but that’s what i try to do.

When you start writing a new piece, do you usually start with a plot idea, a thematic idea, one uniform philosophical notion, or a little bit of each? —Kodiak J. Sanders, Trenz, Mr. Tables i don’t think i ever write in a straight line. i’ll jot down a hundred stray ideas over time, and one day i’ll sit down and see what connections might be made out of them. i really want this scene to be in the movie, so how do i get there? this is a good line, how can i get a character to say it? so the actual story usually only starts to reveal itself when i sit down to logic all these bits and pieces out. hey, in order to connect this strange idea to that strange idea, suddenly there is a very interesting third scene.

I’m astounded by how much the animation and the visuals improve with each instalment of World of Tomorrow. What have you done differently for each one? —Aske Lund, Cringetacular the characters needed to physically perform a lot more in episodes two and three so there were more demands put on the animation. when emily 4 dances or david staggers up a mountain, those sorts of scenes were animated in “ones”, which means doing 24 drawings per second versus my usual twelve. it’s still all 2D hand animation, just more of a classic disney approach that gives the movement a smoother look and a little more room for nuance. and obviously it takes a lot more work. but i hesitate to call such things improvements because i’m not sure i like the idea of different techniques being thought of as good or bad. it’s just another way of doing things. it really depends, sometimes super limited animation can be more effective.

Likewise, Part Three’s sound design is incredible. What conditions did you create it in, and what are all those sounds, and how do you have such an incredible command of the cut-to-silence trick?! —Letterboxd thanks, the sound design is always my favorite thing to do. other than julia’s lines, it’s easy to forget that all the animation starts with dead silence. obviously there’s no sound coming from a live-action set. so adding sound and music to everything, usually pretty late in production, is when all the stuff i’ve been working on suddenly starts to feel like an actual movie. this is not a future that works very well—particularly david’s, which predates everything else we’ve seen so far by a century or two—so you’re hearing a lot of creaky old hard drives booting up, electric distortions, and bent circuits from broken toys.

Emily and Emily Prime in a still from ‘World of Tomorrow’ (2015).

World of Tomorrow used to fill me with existential dread, but now with the current state of the world it’s become more and more comforting in a strange way. Do you feel that at all as you make new episodes? —mariano gg i wish that were possible but when i’m making something i’m usually so close to it i’m unable to see anything but all the things i need to fix.

Can you talk a little bit about sourcing the photo-realistic images for the backgrounds in Part Three? —Jack Moulton most of the environments were 2D images i built in photoshop, usually starting from close-up photos of different textures (like sandstone), all sort of reshaped and puzzle-pieced into something new. an easy to see example was david’s cockpit, which was cobbled together from all sorts of different old aircraft engine and machine parts. the trick in building and lighting these locations was always figuring out where the line was drawn in making these places realistic, but not too realistic for minimal characters to inhabit. i kept landing on a sort of painterly looking middle ground.

If the cloning process in World of Tomorrow existed right now, would you go through that process and create clones of yourself to prolong your life? —tim probably not, that process doesn’t seem to work so well.

If you were put into the world you’ve created, would you buy gills? —Lauren Torres i tend to avoid putting my head under because i almost always get water in my ears so i guess i wouldn’t need them. gills also seem like they’d be a real nuisance to keep clean.

What does love mean, and why do your characters go through so much effort to find it? —Andrew Michalko oh man.

In this year of years, what do you hope people will understand about death and its inevitability (or is it all there on the screen, and if so, that’s okay too)? —Letterboxd understanding death and its inevitability is maybe the most valuable thing a person can do for themselves.

Was the absence of Emily Prime in Part Three a practical decision [Don’s then-four-year-old niece Winona provided Emily’s voice] or an intentional departure from the first two films? —Michael it was both. i couldn’t find a way to fit her in naturally and i also felt like the series needed to start growing in other directions and not rest on the past. episode two had also been really difficult to write, it was so reliant on winona’s recordings, and it felt like the dam was really broken when i was finally able to write without any restrictions this time.

In a series like World of Tomorrow, where you headed in a direction that is a lot more plot-driven than your previous work, how far in advance do you plan? Did you always know this was in David’s past, or are these stories told one at a time? —Ryan Welch, Kodiak J. Sanders, julius, Alex Leon i could tell early on that this wasn’t a story like it’s such a beautiful day with a clear beginning, middle and end, but a much wilder thing that could continue to grow. the openness of it is still what makes it so interesting to me. i have all sorts of notes for the next episodes but if i already knew what would happen in episode nine i think that would take a lot of the air out of the tires and i’d start to feel like i was just connecting the boring dots. while writing, i’ve also had to be aware that there someday might be an episode nine so i can’t go wrecking the timelines before i get there.

What were the rocks and the gas pump that Emily fell in love with meant to represent? —Ekaneff she was learning how to love, and like all of us, in her youth she gravitated to a bunch of individuals that were wrong for her.

Aside from the ability to release more frequently, is there something about the episodic structure that you prefer/appreciate, as opposed to creating one larger feature-length film? —SiddFinch1 there’s just more freedom. the traditional running time of a feature film, 90 to 120 minutes, is a totally arbitrary number.

Have you ever considered writing a World of Tomorrow book or graphic novel? —Jay Smith the earliest ideas for world of tomorrow were sloshing around in a graphic novel called the end of the world that came out in 2013. but i don’t have any talent or much confidence in making another book like that. it’s a different world. when i look at someone like chris ware and then look at something like the end of the world, it’s like, “wow, baby made a mess”.

A page from Don Hertzfeldt’s graphic novel, ‘The End of the World’ (2013).

What attracted you to the unique style [of minimalist stick figures]? Is there a sense of intimacy that you feel you can achieve with this simplicity? —Evan Whitford when i was little, before i wanted to make movies i wanted to be a newspaper cartoonist. i think my drawings today might have more in common with newspaper comics than the sort of characters you usually see in animation. comic-strip panels were always composed in a very reserved way because they were generally intended to be skimmed. you needed to be able to read the strip in five seconds so you could be off to read the sports pages and obituaries. the comics pages were also under constant size and space restrictions. so they were minimal by design and the artists reduced their characters to only their most essential parts. there was no room for fussing. charles schulz said “i only draw what’s necessary”. and that’s actually incredibly hard to do. you’re accomplishing so much more with so much less.

i’ve also found that if there’s a scene that’s not playing right and bothering me, most of the time it’s because my composition was too cluttered. i almost always find myself removing things from the frame and trying to pare it down to only what’s necessary. very rarely do i ever think ‘i need to add more stuff in here’. because this shot is only five seconds long and i want you to be looking over here when this moment happens and this character says something, and if you’re distracted by this other flickering junk i put in the corner it’s going to throw everything off.

Animation-aside, which creative medium do you resonate with the most? —Bronkdan music.

How much did you pull from real-life experiences to make It’s Such A Beautiful Day, if any? What research did you conduct into memory? —Gunnar Sizemore, David Sigura, Micah Smith whenever i got a little stuck writing it’s such a beautiful day, i’d go back and reread my journal and pull more things out of it. dreams, conversations, small scenes. reading the journal now, it seems like i stole something from it every few pages. i also heavily researched neurological problems. it’s never said in the movie what exactly’s going on with bill, but i needed there to be a real diagnosis to base the medical writing on. so all the things he’s going through are real treatments or symptoms based on an actual condition. i didn’t want to ever come out and say, “he’s got terminal brain clouds”, or whatever in the movie, because then it becomes a “brain-cloud movie”, and that’s too easy for the audience to compartmentalize and distance themselves from… “brain clouds are so rare, that will never happen to me”. but not being told exactly what’s wrong with bill might help make the story more relatable and universal.

In what ways have you kept your mind fresh creatively? How do you keep yourself from slipping into complacency? —Watchmoviez, Drew’s reviews most creative blocks or stagnation come from anxiety, second-guessing and doubt. over the years i’ve learned to just sort of calm down and trust myself more. it’s like the old aesop fable: when you stop thrashing around in the water, the water becomes clearer and you can see more. if a scene isn’t working right, i can more easily chill out about it these days and trust that i’ll eventually figure it out—because i’ve figured these sorts of things out a hundred times before and i know by now that i’m not the sort of person who’s just going to allow a scene that isn’t working to remain in the movie. there’s a little more panic about that sort of thing when you’re young: “oh no, the movie sucks right now, will it always suck?!” i’ve reached the point where i know that i will not let it suck. and that sort of thinking allows all the movie gears to turn more easily.

Do you have a specific thematic, emotional or other miscellaneous motive in mind when including classical music pieces? —James Y. Lee when i’m listening to music and suddenly the right piece arrives, it’s usually blindingly obvious to me: there’s just no doubt this needs to be in the movie somehow. it’s like the idea has always existed and i’ve just finally uncovered it. it’s the same with writing. when the right thing floats along, it is striking and obvious and into the pile of notes it goes.

How much of your animation style lends itself to experimentation, such as discovering new tricks and pretty shots, that is then discarded if you learn it doesn’t work as intended? —Adam, Jacob i think i’m always experimenting. i figure if it doesn’t work, at least i’ve learned something.

What is the strangest compliment or critique you’ve gotten personally or of your work? —Elliot Taylor i’ve always remembered this one. i am so proud of you came out a couple years after everything will be ok. it was a continuation of that story, so it was basically the first time i had ever made a sequel. and everything will be ok had done really well when it came out. it won sundance and got all these great reviews. so i am so proud of you comes out and i remember reading this review that says, “everything will be ok was probably my favorite animated short of all time. it honestly changed my life. it was funny, sad, beautiful and just so wonderful. everything will be ok, boy did i love it. incredible. two thumbs up. truly, best thing ever. wow. so, unfortunately, its sequel, i am so proud of you, just feels like more of the same.”

A still image from ‘It’s Such a Beautiful Day’ (2012).

Are there any pieces of fiction that have influenced your work that we probably wouldn’t think of? —Gyani Wasp, Mikolaj Perzyna, Aaron McMillan, Harrison, Axel, Cringetacular, The25centman, Hunter Guidry one thing that pops to mind is the phantom tollbooth. my favorite children’s books were the ones with all the fun metaphors and clever wordplay. when i was plotting out episode two i wanted to lean into that, where visiting different sections of emily’s brain would be like milo visiting the land of math, the land of letters, the land of sound, with different looks and logic to it. so we had the bog of realism, glimmers of hope, broken memories, the logic center, and all the stuff in triangle land and square land. i guess that’s a lot but i wish there had been a bit more.

How did your friends and family respond to the “my anus is bleeding” part of Rejected? —Alex Tatterson they were pretty used to me by then.

Do you know of the work of David Firth, the internet animator? His work is also surreal and has dark humor, but more sinister than whimsical. Would you ever consider making an animation in the realm of horror in future? —KEVIИ HДWKIИS i’m afraid i don’t know him. i’d love to make a horror movie. from a certain point of view though maybe it could be argued that most everything i’ve made is a sort of horror movie?

My first tattoo is of Billy from Billy’s Balloon hanging from his ankle and it was the best decision I’ve ever made. How do you feel about people having your work tattooed and do you have any ink from other creatives that have meant something to you? —Elias it really fucking enrages me when people get my stuff tattooed on them. no just kidding. mostly i feel embarrassed but i’m glad you haven’t changed your mind about it yet. sometimes i wonder how many people have.

Have you ever thought about directing live action? —Abeer, Noah Thompson yes.

Is there an update on your feature film Antarctica? —Rylan California it’s one of many things swirling around.

Will you do a remake of Robocop and why not next year? —Simon no, because robocop is already sort of perfect.

Do you ever see yourself directing a large studio film? Or working with a large team to make something with a higher budget, maybe through a crowd-funded project? Or do you just strongly prefer working on your own? —Vteyshev, Monotone Duck sure. i’ve never preferred working on my own at all. it was usually just the only way to ever get anything made. i haven’t had the funding to pay a big crew, or really much of a crew at all. there’s the old saying: you can make something good, you can make it fast, and you can make it cheap, but you can only pick two. if you make it good and fast it won’t be cheap, if you make it cheap and fast it won’t be good, etc. so my only route in hoping to make something good and cheap has been to totally forget about making it fast.

What did you find digital animation added or took away from your work, and what did those changes do for your storytelling? Will you continue using the digital medium when/if you decide to move on from the World of Tomorrow project? —Alec Lai, Slipkornbizkit, Aldo digital just sped everything up. it’s still one person drawing everything, so we need to remember that speed is relative here, but i felt like i went from riding a bicycle to driving a car. there are many pleasant, wonderful things about riding a bicycle but you’re not going to get anywhere very quickly. and i’m not in my 20s anymore, in fact my 20s and 30s were mostly entirely devoured by making movies in what was maybe the slowest way possible. so these days i am appreciating the speed of digital.

If you could have a conversation with any filmmaker, dead or alive, who would it be and why? —ToBeHonest, Cringetacular if i could resurrect one of my heroes from the dead i think i would feel terrible wasting his time forcing him to have a conversation with me. he might also just sit there, covered with graveyard dirt, screaming in horror.

What is the best time of day to watch a movie? —Sammy night. i always feel a little nuts coming out of a movie and the sun is still up.

What’s your all-time favorite science-fiction film, and why? —Letterboxd 2001. because come on.

What is your favorite of Julia Potts’ films, and why? —Letterboxd i like the one with the severed foot.

Are there any animated films that you felt had a profound impact on you as a child? —Sprizzle probably fantasia. and ray harryhausen stuff. whenever there was a sunday-afternoon movie on TV, my brother and i learned that if in the opening titles there was a credit for “special effects” we should keep watching because we might eventually see something cool.

Which one of your movies is your personal favorite? —Jakob Böwer, RodrigoJerez i don’t know. sometimes it’s the newest one because it’s usually the one with the most experience behind it and therefore feels like it has the fewest mistakes. but then over time i realize they’re all riddled with mistakes. of the it’s such a beautiful day pieces, i think my favorite has always been i am so proud of you. and then i’ll see reviews that say “clearly the second chapter is the weakest one”, and i’ll think, man you guys don’t know what you’re talking about.

One of Don’s layout sketches for ‘I Am So Proud of You’ (2008).

What’s your favorite Pixar film? —Jordan inside out.

What film would you want to be the last one you watch before you die? —Gavin honestly if i’m in the process of dying i hope i won’t be watching movies at all.

Do you have faith in humanity? —Connor Kriechbaum not often.

What is something that worries you about where humankind is headed? —Felix_Bouchard social media.

What is the most valuable thing you have ever lost? How often do you think about it? —Siminup well now i’m getting sad.

Can you do a back flip, mister Don? —Doug maybe with the help of a catapult.

What is your take on the after life? What do you think happens to us when we die? —Luisdecoss i guess that it’s probably a lot like our memory of what the year 1823 was like.

Do you want anything from McDonald’s? —Andrew Rhyne only if i’m in an airport and desperate.

What’s your favorite meal or snack? —Pfitzerone, Evan lately in quarantine i’ve been discovering this particular breakfast burrito.

How’s your quarantine life, Don? —Ivan Arcena it’s okay thanks. eating lots of breakfast burritos.

Hi! I can’t believe you’re going to read this. I am currently filled with an unparalleled amount of joy, wow. This is a long shot but here I go. I’m 17 and your (self-proclaimed) biggest fan. I’ve seen It's Such a Beautiful Day eight times now and every single time I pick up on more details. I’ve watched a few of your interviews and in the AFS one about Rejected you said that the louder you play a movie, the funnier it is. On my seventh watch of It’s Such a Beautiful Day I hooked my laptop up to three huge speakers and I must say—you were so, so right. I made a video essay about the movie. Lol, I’m not sure if this will get to you but Michael Jordan once said something about missing shots or not taking shots or maybe about tequila, I am unsure but I know it was important. Thanks MJ. Not you, Mr Jackson. I’m sorry Ms. Jackson…

I actually do have a question, sorry about the rambling. Every single time I watch the guy at the payphone flip his pencil and go “fantastic, fantastic” I cry. And I think what really does it for me is that “we’ll finally have our day”. Earlier in the movie, Bill’s co-worker talks about how all of time is happening at once. So what I constantly ask myself is if the guy at the payphone is simultaneously having his day and waiting for it. And I’m no longer speaking to that one specific example or even to the movie as a whole but I guess I’m wondering if the idea of all events happening at once comforts you?

In Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut writes: “The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.” When I read this I immediately thought about your movie. I think the idea of all of time happening at once makes all of life feel less important but more special. You know? Anyway, I suppose I’d just like to know what inspired the lines about time in the office scene. This isn’t much of a question, more an incoherent ramble but thank you so, so much for all you’ve done. I feel so incredibly inspired and so deeply moved by your work and I know that so many people in this comment section and around the world would agree. I can’t believe I’ve been given the opportunity to ask something. It really is such a beautiful day. :) —Eli Osei (co-signed by Vooder) that old guy at the payphone was someone i saw at the laundromat once and he borrowed my pencil and the whole thing just played out like in the movie. i just thought it was such a perfect little scene that i’d just witnessed. anyway, the idea of time being a landscape and everything taking place “at once” just came straight out of a science magazine. i don’t know how, but apparently it’s been more or less proven to be true? we perceive time in one direction, but the past and the future are always all around us. think of it as though we’re driving our car through a landscape. even though the mountains we saw ten minutes ago are behind us now, it doesn’t mean those mountains have ceased to exist. they’ve only ceased to exist from our point of view. we’ve only just driven past them. the mountains, like your childhood, are still going on back there. anyway, i had never heard of that before and thought it needed to be in a movie.

A still from ‘World of Tomorrow Episode Two: The Burden of Other People’s Thoughts’ (2017).

Are you a fan of Kurt Vonnegut by any chance? It may be coincidental, but I love how you both utilize science-fiction settings and concepts like being “unstuck from time/memory” to explore the human condition. I feel his writing and your animation are both capable of making me laugh wholeheartedly one minute and weeping genuine, sorrowful tears the next. —Vooder i’m embarrassed to say i’ve never read him and i’m told on a regular basis that i should. that all started after i am so proud of you came out with those discussions about time being a landscape. but i almost only ever read non-fiction. it’s a long story. but now i’m almost afraid to ever read vonnegut after all these years of build-up.

Hey Don, this is really cool. I don’t have as much of a question, more of a comment. It’s Such A Beautiful Day has gotten me through a lot of hard times, being in middle school sucks, I think everyone knows that: and your movie has made life just a wee bit better for me. It also gave me the inspiration and motivation to finish my first feature! Thanks lots. Love from Indiana —Blood Mountain: Experimental Cinema <3 hey thank you. yeah middle school was pretty much the deepest pit of hell. there’s this old saying, “if you find yourself in hell, keep going”. and i’ve never understood that saying. “keep going”, because, i guess, you can always just go deeper into hell?

Hi! Has the vitreous humour in your eyes started to deteriorate and have you experienced floaters within your eyeballs? If not, that’s okay. Just remember it’s part of life, so don’t get scared when it happens! Just keep moving on! But if you do have them, follow-up question: Do you think it’s funny that the body of vitreous fluid that allows your sight to be clear is called the vitreous humour, and when it detaches it’s anything but humorous? I find that pretty humorous myself, in, like, an ironic way. —Clbert1 i actually blew a blood vessel in my eye a couple weeks ago and the whole thing turned bright blood red. it didn’t hurt or anything, i just walked into the room all disgusting and my girlfriend was like, “what the fuck?!” and then the next day i had further weird eye problems. i just went to the eye doctor yesterday. i think i will be fine but i was thinking, wouldn’t it be like the most heavy metal thing ever for my biography if i just suddenly went BLIND? “and then in 2020, HE WENT BLIND.”

Will Intro ever be released to the general public outside of theater screenings? —Melissa okay yes you’ve talked me into it. on that note, i noticed that the poster of intro used on letterboxd is a weird fake and i’m not sure where it came from. someone just used a picture from rejected. if fake posters are to be made i would prefer it if they used a picture from raiders of the lost ark or something.

Do you have plans to combine the World of Tomorrow shorts into one feature-length film à la It’s Such a Beautiful Day? —David Sigura, Sam Stewart, An_Person no, it’s going to be much longer than a feature-length.

Will we ever get a ‘Hertzfeldt 4K Collection’? Or at least a Blu-ray with It’s Such a Beautiful Day and all episodes of World of Tomorrow? —Teebin, HippityHoppity there is actually already a blu-ray for it’s such a beautiful day. up next we’ll do some sort of world of tomorrow blu-ray of the first three episodes. but 4k is too many k’s. you don’t need that many k’s.

Would you ever consider comprising an OST album of all the songs you used and mixed from your films? —PhiloDemon i don’t think so. i read that for many years cat stevens resisted releasing his original songs from harold and maude on any records because he thought they were more special if you could only ever hear them in the movie. i like that.

Do you get a sick kind of pleasure from emotionally destroying people with your movies? —MaxT26 yep.

What’s been your ongoing experience of the outpouring of joy and love of your work? —Henry gratitude. how sad for me if, after all this work, nobody was watching at all.

Related content

Don’s invaluable Twitter thread about “old-school animation camera stuff”

A Few of the Fingerprints on the World of Tomorrow Universe: a list of influences curated for Letterboxd by Don Hertzfeldt

Modest Heroes: the Letterboxd Showdown for indie animation

The Drawn Cinema: Analena’s list of rough animation, pencil textures, watercolor effects, dynamic brushes and other poetic artistry.

Beloved Indie Animation: a list by Gui

Animated Sci-Fi and Fantasy: an extensive list by Stonefolk

‘World of Tomorrow Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime’ is available now through Bitter Films on Vimeo.

#don hertfeldt #world of tomorrow #it's such a beautiful day #animation #hand-drawn #hand drawn animation #2d animation #animated film #animated short #emily prime #david prime #science fiction #sci fi animation #animated sci fi #letterboxd

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todaydreambelieversfic · 4 years ago

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Author Spotlight: Redheadgleek Day 2

Author: @redheadgleek

Share one of your strengths.

Okay I had to ask @snarkyhag because this made me feel like it was a job interview. Here's what she said: "Strengths = being able to fold nuanced ideas into a scene through looks and just the right dialogue. When you characters connect, they do so in a masterful way. Weakness = being too awesome."

Share one of your weaknesses.

I struggle a lot with connecting my ideas. Putting the scenes that I can see so clearly in my head together in ways that make sense and move the story forward is challenging. @snarkyhag will tell you that I don't use em dashes the way that I ought to.

Which fic has been the hardest to write?

"A Wedding: Production Draft" took me about 14 months to write and every word felt like pulling teeth. I knew what I wanted to write, but getting it into words and the format that I wanted was excruciating. Plus it was my first fic that I had written in this fandom and I had a lot insecurity around posting it.

Which fic has been the easiest to write?

Fic writing is never particularly easy for me - I'm a slow, deliberate writer. That said, setting a goal to write every day meant that I saw steady progress in Once Upon a Time and it made it much more easy to write a 30K word story.

Is writing your passion or just a fun hobby?

Just a hobby for which I don't have nearly enough time to devote to it.

Is there an episode or character or arc above all others that inspires you just a little bit more?

Well, I've written two stories around the reunion scene in A Wedding and wouldn't be hard pressed to write another. Honestly, I love the fic potential of the season 6 break up (even more so than season 4), but when they choose to be together again: yes yes yes.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever come across?

Two bits of advice that I resonate with from this post. One: write by putting one word followed by another and write your story as it needs to be written as best as you can. (x)

I also like the advice here: Find something you love and write about it but also create a community with people who are writing what your love as well. (x)

What’s the worst writing advice you’ve ever come across?

Just ignore the advice about using "said" too much or not enough. Nobody can decide. Write it how it feels natural in your head.

If you could choose one of your fics to be filmed, which would you choose?

Well, I wrote "A Wedding: Production Draft" as if it was to be filmed. That said, I would love to see Once Upon a Time come to life. We need more LGBTQ fairy tale stories!

What’s your process? Do you write your story from start to finish, or do you write the scenes out of order? Do you use any tools, like worksheets or outlines? What are the perfect writing conditions for you?

So my process includes: thinking of the idea and then writing down whatever thoughts come to my head about it - such as "okay, I really like the idea of an Emma AU. Kurt is obviously Emma which makes Blaine Mr. Knightly, but I don't want him to be older because that's not necessarily my kink? So how do I work the character so it better fits Blaine while staying true to the story? David Karofsky would make a fascinating "Harriet" character, with Kurt taking him on a project as he is newly out, etc." I do a lot of "okay, what exactly am I trying to do here? What's the story that I want to tell?" free writing in my documents that I then delete later.

I also attack @snarkyhag or @klaineharmony in their PM and ask them for their ideas and input because they are both fantastic storytellers and very encouraging. I find that working with betas to be helpful in my writing process because I can ask about my sticking spots and they can tell me where they were seeing the story flowing - and if I agree, it helps the story move along, and if I don't, I then have a place where I can take a closer look.

I then sit down and write and I write as the ideas come to me, so it tends to be mostly in order, but I've also written out of order as well. My latest WIP story (not the one above) I started writing from the beginning, but I've since decided that I want to alternate POVs in each chapter (Kurt followed by Blaine), so I've gone back and added additional scenes.

How many times do you usually revise your fic/chapter before posting?

I revise a lot while I'm writing, my beta usually has one go-through, I then will read through for their comments and make adjustments, and then I'll do one or two more slow read throughs to see if anything more catches my eye.

***

Check out Redheadgleek’s Fic:

Pierce My Soul. Blaine Anderson/Kurt Hummel. Rating: Teen. Summary: After meeting Kurt, the costume designer for the up and coming musical Jane Austen Sings, Blaine instantly regrets his hard-earned rule of not dating cast or crew. He briefly considers setting it aside, but he reminds himself sternly, it’s a rule for a reason. He doesn’t need the distraction. Written for the 2016 TodayDreamBeliever’s Fic Exchange.

Closed Door. Coach Beiste. 100 word reaction fic to Never Been Kissed.

season of grace. Blaine Anderson/Kurt Hummel. Rating: Teen. Summary: They thought they would never have this again. From their reunion to the marriage. 24 drabbles/double drabbles (100-200 words) written for the Klaine Advent 2017 challenge.

#author spotlight #redheadgleek

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moogiwarah · 5 years ago

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🐓

Hi! I want to have comprehensive list of the BL manga/manhwa etc. that I’ve read because I want to spread the love for this genre 💜. This post is a list of works that I’ve read which is not in this page yet + my comments on each work. I hope some people will find something that they like here ^__^

🐣 All BL recs from me

manhwa 🐓

💜 Never Understand

Yuri, one of the school's most handsome guys,and Jaerim, one of the school's ugliest, collide!...or don't they? Can't understand what's going on between these two! It's Out of Control!

shounen-ai, completed, 87 chapters

THE STORY IS SOOOO GOOD. The art also improved by a lot upon reaching the later chapters. Jae-rim is dubbed as “ugly” (he’s a whole cutie tho) and I’m glad to see a non conventional character design for an MC! I highly recommend reading this!! 👌💯

Incorrigible

A sequel to “Never Understand” which is focused on Cho Ayeon’s story after being free from Soyeon’s control.

yaoi, completed, 8 chapters

This has few chapters so maybe that explains the fast pacing. Nonetheless, it was a nice read, I have a really soft spot for Jae-rim so seeing his r-18 experiences with Yuri really got me ahkdjashdkajshd ;W;

💜 Dirty Vibrations

Best friends Yeong and Nohae thought it was a joke when they downloaded the infamous “cursed” app. It’s said to command the user to perform…sexual acts and punishes those who disobey or delete it. It started with making them kiss. When they disobeyed its order…the punishment was anything but a joke.

yaoi, ongoing

This one is from Fujoking (author of Youjin)! In all honesty, I love this for its sex scenes. They are so well made, the art, the dialogue, the expressions, and just *chef’s kiss* 👌. When it comes to expressing sexual scenes in BL, my top authors would have to be Fujoking for manhwa and Zaria for manga.

💜 Paid

Executive director Heejae is nicknamed "Chaebol Prince" by the public. But his life is turned upside down when documents linking him to an embezzlement scheme are unexpectedly found by an accounting collegian Taekyung! So he pretends to have a crush on him, but.. Taekyung wants more than just flirting!

yaoi, ongoing

This is another one from Fujoking! This has a heavier plot as compared to Dirty Vibrations, so you get amazing smut AND an engaging story!

💜 On or Off

Yiyoung is building a startup with his college friends. They get a chance to present their proposal to SJ Corporation, one of the leading companies in the country. But in the meeting room he sees Kang Daehyung, the extremely handsome company big shot that's so very much his type, and Yiyoung's heart starts to race...! Can pretty-faced Yiyoung win both in love and his career?

yaoi, ongoing

Okay this! It’s really funny and the pacing is nice and the characters are nice and the art is nice and the perfect mix of romance comedy and slice of life i just HUHDADKAJDHJK it’s rly a feel good read and both MCs are SO ATTRACTIVE.

Penthouse XXX

Siyeon, a contract killer, has declared a boycott on men after being screwed over by his ex. That is, until he moves into a penthouse owned by Taekyung, a rich heir with killer looks.

yaoi, completed, 49 chapters

It has meme worthy illustrations xD. The graphics are nice but I found Taekyung (one of the MCs) to be a little toxic. Also, some parts of the story were not wrapped up/discussed enough imo. But overall, it was a pleasant read.

Home Sweet Home

The last thing Jungyeon expected was for his mom to ask if she could remarry. The new man was kind, considerate, a perfect match for his mother but there’s a catch: he has a younger son. Sunwoo is an introvert. He’s shy and has trouble opening up to others, until he meets Jungyeon and finds himself opening up for the first time. As their parents get closer to marrying, they become close, too close, and that’s when Sunwoo learns Jungyeon is already seeing another man.

yaoi, completed, 57 chapters

I honestly don’t know why this has quite a low rating on mangago because I found it to be a good read! It’s like sitting through a romance-drama movie. I liked the ending and the relationship between the main couple.

K’s Secret

Employee Kim Doyoon has been working for 5 years. He has one secret that he can't tell anyone else - the fact that he's a half-vampire born between a human and a vampire.

yaoi, ongoing

The art is so good in the recent chapters ugh. Also the sex scenes are well made. The plot is a little unclear though, and I feel like the relationship of the two MCs are kinda forced and unnatural hahaskdhakjdh. Still reading it tho since it’s ongoing.

💜 I have a Boyfriend

Kang Hyeon Ho, who belongs in the university soccer team goes into a breadth class and encounters the person he went to middle school together with and was his first love, Han Gyeol.

yaoi, completed, 44 chapters

THIS IS BASICALLY COLLEGE AU ROM COM ADDITIONAL TAG: FIRST LOVE AND IT’S AMAZING. Just a really well rounded story with the right amount of drama to bring out its slice of life 😭💘 Also, this is tagged as yaoi but the sex scenes were few and not that explicit.

💜 Voice of Love

After experiencing a traumatic incident involving a previous lover, Jiho is too afraid to tell his classmate Soohan that he likes him. Thankfully, Soohan can hear otherpeople's thoughts and asks him out first. But, as we all know, love isn't always that easy. Will Jiho and Soohan really get their happily ever after?

shounen-ai, completed, 37 chapters

Just a really cute story about mind reading and high school boys being in love. Ah, youth. This will make you feel good like ,,, awww young love :( <3

Base to Base

The elite Sung Moon High is fields one the country's top 5 high school baseball teams. Kim Soohyun was the ace pitcher of his middle school now started his first year at Moon high baseball team...since his beloved sunbae Choi Woojin(captain/catcher) is there....Kim Soohyun is an cutie puppy with stalker tendency exclusive for his beloved sunbae.

shounen-ai, completed, 28 chapters

Sports manga/anime always had a little (or lots) of gay, well this one made it officially gay! A cute rom-com bUT I feel like the ending was rushed. I would have loved it if there was more, but nonetheless, a good read! :)

manga 🐓

💜 I Seriously Can’t Believe You

"I don't think you've realized your true nature yet." That's what Kon tells Iida, the hottest guy at school, wondering how anyone could be so proper. As popular as he is, Iida doesn't seem interested in any of the girls who come after him. Kon and his buddies try to look into the matter by flipping a coin and having Kon approach him with his confession of love, just to see if he's really interested in guys. "I've... never looked at guys like that..." says Iida, falling for Kon's ruse. Kon takes him home, hoping to straighten out the misunderstanding, when Iida suddenly grabs him by the shoulder, and... A story about a mysterious hottie at school and a prince of a certain kind.

yaoi, completed, 5 chapters

THIS IS FUNNY AND CUTE AND HOT AND SHORT BUT REALLY GOOD JUST READ IT YOU WONT REGRET IT!

💜 Yoru to Asa no Uta

(Chapter 0) ; (Sequel)

Asaichi can't play any instruments, his voice is average, and he's only in the band for the girls and the sex. Plus, he's homophobic. For some reason, the new bassist is infatuated with him despite the treatment Asaichi gives him.

yaoi, completed, 1 + 8 + 8 = 16 chapters

It’s by Harada (author of ‘Yatamomo’ and ‘Color Recipe’) so expect dark themes. Trigger warning for rape. I suggest you skip the rape if you can’t handle it because this manga is so good. Its art and story (much like Harada’s other works) will really suck you in. This left a deep impression on me because the characters felt so alive. I respect Harada so much for that ability.

💜 Eigyou Nika!

Sakisaka, stationed in the second Sales Division, has an unrequited love for Toujou, his directing senpai. He had no intention of confessing his feelings. However, Toujou has been awfully touchy-feely lately… Is there a glimmer of hope? Please don’t let it be a misunderstanding! Which path will these vexing feelings flow down to?

yaoi, completed, 10 chapters

I had fun reading this because it’s so fluffy!! aaaAAAA I love friends to lovers and cuddling and the sweetness that comes from a relationship that is a more than friendship but less than lovers. A lighthearted read <3

💜 Mou Ichido, Nando Demo

On his way home from picking up a rings for himself and his lover, Fuji Takahiro is hit by a car. His resulting amnesia degrades his live-in lover Kotou Tarou to a mere flatmate, and a series of misunderstandings threatens to tear the couple apart. Tossed around by desperation and confusion, can Tarou and Takahiro rebuild their once blissful relationship?

yaoi, completed, 11 chapters

This is like watching a really good mature drama. The characters feel real and the situations presented in the manga were also something one can easily imagine themselves being put into. A short and good read.

💜Ookami-kun wa Kowakunai

The world is filled with animals that can evolve into beastmen. There is a young and earnest wolf who was always mistaken for a showy person because of his flashy looks. The easily mistaken wolf has fallen for an attractive looking rabbit named Usami, who is cautious of carnivores.

yaoi, completed, 6 chapters

I mEAN,,, LOOK AT THEM!!! This is wholesome and very fluffy huhuhuhu no more words needed. A short and cute read! <3

💜Ookami He No Yomeiri

Kaede is a rabbit person chosen to be the 'bride' of a distinguished wolf family. Although he does not wish to marry a wolf, his family pleads for him to go so that they can have enough supplies to last for the next two years. However, how will his new husband act towards a little bunny rabbit stuck in the wolf's den?

yaoi, completed, 8 chapters

The art is good and the story is cute :((( They’re so cute aaaa I’m a sucker for grumpy looking x ray of sunshine it’s just uGH the contrast never gets old.

💜 Encirclement Love

Ryou had a sleepover and saw his friends - Issei and Tadahiro - kissing while they thought he was asleep. He asks them about it and feels betrayed as a childhood friend when they pretend nothing happened. Determined to catch them red-handed, Ryou ends up inside a closet with Issei's little brother - Yuusei -, who has a unexpected reaction to the situation.

yaoi, completed, 6 chapters

It’s basically four high school boys being horny. All four of them are friends and I find their dynamics really funny. Also, they’re all hOT 🥵 I had lots of fun reading this!

Mother’s Spirit

University employee Ryouichirou is ordered by the Chairman to take in an exchange student. That exchange student, Qaltaqa, is a native from a developing country who can't understand Japanese!! Though he is a warrior of his tribe and a man of great beauty, seeing him afraid of the phone and the TV, and even the toilet, Ryouichirou gets fed up… But while being called "Ryouichirou" in such a clumsy manner, he has a change of heart!?

yaoi, completed, 13 chapters

This is funny and interesting! A short read to boost your mood and get your yaoi fix ;D

Dakaretai Otoko Ichii Ni Odosarete Imasu

Saijou Takato's 5 year reign as the "Most Huggable No. 1" has been snatched. Stealing his thunder is the newbie actor with a 3-year debut, Azumaya! Towards the stuffy hostile Takato, Azumaya's sincere sparkling smile starts to become effective. Even as Takato sets his alert level on MAX, Azumaya catches Takato in his shameful drunken state and uses it to blackmail him! In exchange for Azumaya's silence, Azumaya states, "Please let me hold you"'?! "Embrace me, who was the Most Huggable No.1? What the heck is he saying!"

yaoi, ongoing

I remember dropping this because MC was obviously raped, but upon watching the first episode of the anime adaptation, they made the sex consensual (thank God) and the story is not so bad after all. I suggest skipping the first chapter altogether and just start off at episode 1 in the anime, then you can pick it up in the manga to see the explicit scenes xD

That’s it for now! Will continue updating in this tumblr acc. as I continue on reading more BL ehe. Hmu on my twt if u wanna talk about BL and/or anime and manga in general hehe. Love lots~ 💜🐓

#rec #yaoi #shounen ai #ongoing #completed

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dungeonmalcontent · 4 years ago

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Thoughts on Encounter Balancing and the Meat Grinder

I’ve talked about running a meat grinder, and given a brief description of what that entails. But I want to go into detail on the matter. Below the cut there will be some visuals and ttrpg philosophy discussion for how to run good and balanced encounters in 5e d&d, primarily through the use of Roll20. This is a long post. I would put it on my Wordpress blog, but that’s getting some work and requires more effort.

So what is a meat grinder?

A meat grinder is a combat only one shot that allows for variety of play at high speed. Key aspects of the meat grinder are challenging encounter composition, terrain (re-positionable), and increased difficulty with every encounter round with the players leveling up between each. Ideally, the players have pre-planned how they want to level up their characters, have a different character ready for every level, or use a character manager tool like Aurora Builder, Fight Club 5e, or DNDBeyond (which I had my players use, because they could randomize and build widely varied characters) to facilitate fast level ups.

So how did I run the meat grinder? What does it look like? How do you even start this sort of project?

Well, let’s look.

This is the setup I used on Roll20. This is without FoW on, and I’ll zoom in on various aspects as I go on, but it isn’t that complicated. At the top we have a waiting room, where players can pick a token that speaks to them, and a “lion cage” with the tokens for each planned encounter (I deleted a few during the game I ran). Below that is the “arena,” which by itself isn’t all that special, as it was emptied out completely at the end of every encounter. At the very bottom, and pretty much never visible to the players, is the terrain room where I have shapes or tokens with terrain. My terrain was essentially just columns of various size that ran from floor to ceiling and either made walls or obstacles, but that was only because I put this together in a couple of hours.

Lets start with the waiting room.

At the start of the game, this is all the players should be able to see. There are a variety of tokens and instructions for how players can pick theirs; which in Roll20 you will then have to assign to the player (and then ideally color code as shown with the last four). All the tokens I threw on there, and I picked for variety, were pulled from the free assets on Roll20 (though I have plenty of my own, this was faster than uploading to my library). You can add on player/character names to help differentiate, but that also takes some extra time. The important part is that the players use this space to get used to what is about to happen. I also used an airlock room attached between the arena and the waiting room, just to give them a little more immersion and warning when the next round was ready, but that’s not really necessary.

Next is the “Lions Cage,” and I call it that in the spirit of the Roman Colosseum.

This is where I kept the tokens for each encounter. I had then arranged in rows with the first being at the top (which was deleted after it was beaten, but contained an Evil MageTM, two zombies, and two skeletons). I started at CR 1 (with four level 1 players), and went to CR 2 (animated armor and dragon wyrmling) and so on, following basics for balancing encounters based on CR. I will get into monster selection more later, but this is the room where I had all of that laid out. It is always blacked out for players. (I also had two spiderman PNGs and a barrel to use as variety tokens like Spiritual Weapon or familiars, they’re a running joke in my games.)

Now, the arena.

This is a big empty area. Every round I add in the tokens for the encounter monsters, the terrain, and I adjust the lighting as needed. The lighting is probably the biggest brain thing I’ve ever done on Roll20 and I encourage the use of this system for any arena or massive dungeons you build on the platform. You write out “Lighting” as well as “bright,” “dim,” and “dark.” You add this text to the background layer (along with all the boxes and things you don’t intend to move). Then you get boxes big enough to cover whatever lighting options are not in use. For bright rooms where there is enough light for all characters (save those with aversion to bright light) to see clearly, you cover up “dim” and “dark.” It’s that simple and it does so much for the players too, because it gives them actual use of their darkvision and they don’t have to ask you what the light in the room is like, they can just see. If they have disadvantage due to lighting, they can see the precedent based on the setting. It’s a good system and I am quite proud of it.

As a secondary note, FoW is interesting in this room. For after round cleanup and next round setup, it is recommended to black out the arena. When starting out a round, particularly if you are using sneaky creatures, it is advised to reveal the room gradually as the characters move about it. This is a great place to use the token lighting feature thing you get with a premium Roll20 subscription, as this feature enables rapid revealing and occluding of space in the arena based on the token’s given sight range. But that costs money. I got along just fine doing it manually.

Lastly, the terrain room.

This is just an empty space below the arena map, used to store terrain pieces. For my meat grinder I used six objects. Three squares and three circles, made to equilateral sizes with the shift function (should use high contrast colors and have both line and fill colors selected before making shapes, hence the purple and green). More shapes would have been ideal, but weren’t necessary. And shapes aren’t even required, you can add in terrain features from whatever map builder you use, but shapes are the easiest to prepare and move.

Another good option might be to add in one big solid black square to cover the whole arena and use other colored squares to represent platforms (possibly even color coding certain platforms to indicate height from a base level like the precipice of the waiting room). This adds an additional challenge to navigating the room and rewards characters with mobility based abilities like flight, or spells like spider climb. Alternatively alternatively, the room could be indicated to be submerged and the players given potions of waterbreathing, as this allows for underwater combat and aquatic monsters.

So what might an encounter look like? Here’s an idea for CR 4.

It doesn’t look that hard, honestly. Nothing in the lineup is actually even CR 4. But you also have to remember that most classes don’t get anything interesting or impactful at level 4. Level four is the designated ability score improvement level. So they aren’t going to be able handle anything much more challenging than before, even if they all take super useful feats instead of score ups (if you use those rules). The challenge of this setup is the terrain and the cube. Gelatinous cubes are a menace in group fights with small spaces, and gargoyles and werewolves have a lot of basic damage resistance and high speed.

So, suppose you open the room like this.

“The room is dark. You can see several pillars in front of you and not much else. There are vague shapes near the tops, as though they are ornamented with some statuary that you can’t quite make out. The room smells foul, like decay, and you can hear an uncomfortable squelching noise coming from further in.”

The players guess: Well, something is clinging to the tops of the pillars, and there’s some form of ooze in there. They probably won’t split up, so they can avoid getting taken out by falling creatures, and they expect to gang up on the ooze to take care of it quickly. But the cube is a tank and they have no clue the werewolf is hiding in the shadows. They are going to get ambushed, boxed in by the cube and divebombed by gargoyles. Now, if they’re smart they will take advantage of the tight spaces between pillars and act like tunnel fighters. The center middle or the bottom right are ideal for using the cube in their favor, as it will likely absorb the werewolf or careless gargoyles on accident if they don’t all have enough space. Worst case scenario, they all fail to see the cube (which I’ve made a size larger, arbitrarily), they stay in the open and split up to get picked up by big swooping maneuvers (which I would play out to the sound of Roundabout by Yes playing in the background).

So say, you run a round and the players win easily. Then what?

When the players win a hard fought battle I give them loot. One item from each killed monster, and there is usually at least one monster per player. I used the donjon random loot generator set to uncommon magic items. In the case of an easy victory you can adjust to no loot or less loot, or maybe just non-magic loot.

The players beat an encounter. I move them to the waiting room to level up and sort loot, cover the arena back up, move tokens and terrain around, and start again.

How did I select the encounters? Why certain creatures and why put them together?

The answer isn’t satisfying. Gut feelings, matching mechanics, and CR. I like thematic encounters for the meat grinder, though those themes are sometimes very arbitrary. My CR 3 lineup was themed “This looks like the dumbest and best hippie van art ever” and consisted of a gnome bard riding a gryphon and three centaurs. It used mounted combat, high speed, and mobile casting. Terrain would be sparse and likely against the walls to make crevasses for players to trap or get trapped in. If it felt like it was going to be too tricky, I could drop one or two centaurs from the encounter.

Generally speaking a creature of a certain CR is balanced for a party of 4-5 players of the same level as the creatures CR, with “boss” monsters being occasional outliers. So typically, an encounter consists of a high CR monsters (at or just above the PCs level/CR) and some fodder minion of a lower CR. Some monsters are also designed as fodder monsters, however, so putting just a lot of fodder monsters of the same CR as the players level is also an option. The beauty of the lions cage is that it allows you to also mix and match lineups on the fly, you can add or subtract monsters easily to make it harder or easier for your players. My players got wiped out by the animated armor and wyrmling, and had I used one less armor, they would have definitely survived, but it might have been too easy if they had picked up on the theme of the round (high armor, low health, so using save spells and abilities was the most effective method).

When putting together an encounter, I start by looking at the donjon creature index (another great tool you should have bookmarked) and browsing for a key creature for the encounter. This is usually the same CR as the players level. I pick one and then build up complimenting creatures from the same or lower CR. And that’s most of it.

The beauty of the meat grinder is its simplicity. It’s perfect for practicing combat balancing, getting new players used to the mechanics of combat, or running a quick one shot with little prep. You can even adjust it into a sort of tournament arc sort of narrative or a game show sort of last man standing operation (with killed players running pvp fights).

If you read this whole thing, holy cow. You’re a trooper. I hope you learned something useful or got some ideas. If you run a meat grinder of your own, I wish you all the luck in the world. It’s fun and can be very rewarding. Think of it like the infinity train (the one from Adventure Time, not the show [I haven’t watched the show and probably should]), lots of possibility—itty-bitty living space.

#dnd #d&d #5e #gming #dming #dungeons and dragons #meat grinder #combat #encounter balancing #monsters #arena #pvp #options for running a quick one shot

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sunshinexlollipops · 4 years ago

Note

Hello! Just wanted to stop by (hopefully not being a bother) and say I have recently just went through all of your red dead fics on ao3 and wow. I've gotten into a/b/o fics more after reading yours! But also your amidst fic made me feel all types of things, and I know however it ends will leave me messy with f e e l i n g s. And I want to prematurely thank you for those feelings xP. I was also wondering, if that's alright, how your writing process is like? You put in a lot of words in amidst and some of your other fics. Do you make outlines? Do you first write down ideas for a chapter/fic and then draft it out? Are there scenes you add/take out? Is there a length goal you usually set for yourself? You don't have to answer, but I wish you well and thank you for fics that brightened my life a little!

LONG POST!

omg, hello anon! your ask 100% got lost in my notifs, so I just wanna start this off by saying you aren't a bother whatsoever!

in fact: I love receiving asks about my fics, as well as opening up about the writing that takes to get them to you guys!

so I'm gonna start this reply off with a quick thank you about my works! I'm so happy you're enjoying or have enjoyed what I've written.

RDR2/Arthur Morgan is a pleasure to write about, but I've also really enjoyed the fandom. it's been one of the sweetest and most supportive, and I've found one of my best literary periods with you guys! so thank you! :>

but enough pitter patter about that-- let's get to the fun stuff!

since you had a few questions, I'm gonna answer these in a separated list so it'll be easy to follow along! :)

-------

What is your writing process like?

well, in truth anon, I don't exactly have much of one.

that may surprise some, and others not. in truth, I think that sometimes the idea or concept of a "writing process" kind of scares anyone trying to get into writing.

I'm not sure if you are, anon, but your questions just make me want to cover this, just in case.

writing should come to you how it comes. I'm definitely NOT a textbook writer. I don't have a method where I have cardinal rules and a set up I have to have.

I simply embrace when inspiration strikes. usually while listening to music or absorbing some other media. frankly, if you treat writing like a science, you're gonna get stuck. it isn't an issue you have to fix, or a challenge you have to tackle.

allow yourself to get comfortable and just think whatever comes your way mentally. even if you think an idea is bad, encourage it! you can't write if you don't let yourself think.

so for me, I suppose my "process" is just encouraging my writing and for my brain to pop out ideas or scenes. just write away and see where it takes you!

You use a lot of words-- do you outline by chance?

ah yes. I am a wordy potato, frankly. albeit ACW is an overall outlier at being ALMOST A MILLION WORDS. even then, I don't think any of my over fics have ever really gotten past 150k, and I believe only ONE had done so.

this was... not by design.

believe it or not, I intended ACW to actually be short. 6 chapters like the game and boom, done. I thought I could summarize everything and just show snippets of a growing relationship between Arthur and my unintentional OC, Wolf. it almost would've been like a one-shot just broken up into chapters for homage sake.

but then I overplotted the prologue and next thing I knew, ACW had become this massive, sprawling monster of a slow-burn.

as for outlines... I don't necessarily outline. I'll explain this more in my next response. :)

Do you write a summary of a chapter or fic down, then draft afterward?

so in terms of summary, no. these stories live in my head, and I tend to feel that writing things down is more of a waste of time for me.

my brain flies through stories at such quick speeds I feel like I will lose my spark or my ideas if I take a second to write things down.

I am known to do audio recordings where I talk about my writing though. this is an amazing way to brainstorm on the fly, and some of my best ideas have come from just voicing what I'd like to see happen aloud. additionally: the recordings are a good way to keep track of what I've said and want, just like an outline!

otherwise I don't outline. I'm not sure what the terminology is, but I apparently go after my stories a lot like Stephen King does.

write first, worry about the rest later. I'm very much a "swim and swim even if you're sinking" because I would rather put the work in than fool with floaties to keep myself up.

personally this works wonders for me, as I don't like restraining myself or my head once I'm in motion. it doesn't end well if I do-- like snuffing a candle. I just go for it and I will make sense of it later.

even so, I have general ideas for what I want to happen, and I remember my basic outlines. the details come later, as long as the big picture is visible to me.

as for ACW: the only "outlines" I did was timing of the game missions. just to make sure I didn't miss major happenings, and that I had the timing in a way that flowed for what I wanted both logically and narratively.

as for drafts, I also don't draft. again, I go for it. that being said, I have restarted updates a couple of times, or have deleted entire scenes out of dissatisfaction. most of the time though, it's one and done for me! and it's all done on the fly. :)

Are there scenes you add/remove?

as mentioned above, yes. I have deleted a lot of content from ACW. some ideas never came to, but more often than not, it was repackaged in a way I liked better. so if anything, content was recycled and you all still got to see it in some way.

but there are some things that I want to do that just aren't possible. like many stranger missions. there's no good way to include certain events or characters in ACW without derailing what is going on. so alas: aberdeen pig farm is not a stop on Arthur and Wolf's itinerary.

but for another example, I wanted to showcase more of Wolf's past with her father (specifically her shut in life before his death), and I wanted scenes and more examples of her being disconnected unlike everyone else as a result.

these will come as flashbacks or other scenes in the upcoming chapters, but I intend to add these changes or additions during my revisions! :>

Is there usually a length goal you set?

as for word goals, I never quite had any apart from "at least 20k words" just because that was usually my average, I noticed.

additionally, this made sure I didn't end chapters without putting the bare minimum of content in them, and to have solid continuity. can you imagine have a 20k update and then a 3k one? no thanks!

20k just became my running baseline, after that. otherwise, my limit is when AO3 reaches theirs for the character limit (fence why some updates were split into multiple pieces).

with my other stories, I simply write until the story is properly paced or finished: however long it takes!

---------

whew! what a post!

but I hoped that gave you some more insight, anon.

writing is crazy, and I'm always learning something new. more now than ever, since I'm looking into actually getting something original submitted for publication.

if you (or anyone reading this) are inspired to write yourself, don't be discouraged! writing is one of the most intensive forms of creation. it's not easy. it's not instant. it's a lot of passion and time, let alone a utilization of language and grammar fluency!

it's easy to feel overwhelmed or lost, or feel like it's better to not try than struggle to start. but I can assure, writing is such a splendid thing to do. write for enjoyment, or pleasure, or simply because you want to.

as long as your story isn't intended to be hateful, is your own work, and is fun for you to create... what else matters?

if you want some additional inspiration, just know that I started writing fic in 2012/2013 and have gone through so much in my near TEN YEARS of fic writing. I've learned a lot, and I've grown so much!

be proud of yourself no matter where you are at and start from, and pride yourself in your progress or beginnings.

just go for it! you may surprise yourself!

hope you're having a good one, anon. and thanks for the ask! :)

#luffy asks #anon #fic writing #writing advice #acw #amidst a clash of worlds #luffy posts #long post

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radramblog · 4 years ago

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Game of the Year 2020...?

Ive scrolled the list of games that came out this year to see what my GOTY ended up being, but turns out the only game I played in 2020 that released that year was, uh…….

Fucking good game but like I’m not gonna hand it GOTY by default (That goes to Hades, based solely impressions from other people). Actually, I’m not handing out any awards, really. So I guess I’m just gonna go over a bunch of the other games I did play last year, regardless of whether or not they came out then.

Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition

A mate got me this for my birthday in December 2019, and unlike the other games I got then (Kirby Star Allies which I burned through that month and Octopath which I still haven’t played) I spent a fair few hours playing it last year. This was before the sequel was announced, and also a little bit after the fact- figured I should try and finish one before playing the other. Unfortunately, I have yet to purchase Age of Calamity nor finish Definitive Edition, because the former is expensive and the latter is expansive. Holy shit there’s so much fucking content in this game. I don’t think I ever will finish it to be honest, though despite the repetitiveness it never really felt boring to me. It’s the only Warriors/Musou game I’ve played, and I’d be interested in trying others based on the experience.

(I’m not playing Fire Emblem Warriors though fuck that)

Pokemon Sword and Shield DLC: The Isle of Armor and the Crown Tundra

Sword and Shield felt somewhat lacking on release, and while the DLCs released this year did much to try and fix this its still a bit shit that it required an extra paycheck out of you to get the full game- outside of outsourced mobile games like Go and Shuffle, or services such as Bank or Home, Pokemon has never actually had DLC/microtransactions, so this was a little disappointing. I’d argue that it absolutely wasn’t worth it when Isle was released, as fun as the content was it was again, lacking. Crown Tundra I would argue exceeded my (admittedly low) expectations, however- the new and returning mons are cool and welcome (I despised Calyrex’s design on first reveal but their behaviour in story redeemed it more than enough), and the Max Lair Adventure offered a surprisingly replayable romp that has been great to just try and grind out with friends. I can’t say I’d recommend the DLC pack though- only if because you’ve probably made up your mind already as to whether or not you’re getting it, or this doesn’t apply to you at all. I could also put basically every main series Pokemon game on here, seeing as I’m pretty sure I nuzlocked every region at some point during the year, but I don’t want to make this *that* long.

Super Smash Bros Ultimate Expansion Pass

Smash is still Smash. I don’t find myself playing it much on my own, and even in Perth get-togethers weren’t super common last year. As neat as the DLC characters released this year are for the franchise as a whole, none of them convinced me to play significantly more than usual, and I can’t wrap my head around half of them, so.

Also, I’m still salty about Byleth, and I actually really liked Three Houses, it was my first FE game. Why the fuck wasn’t it Claude????

Rivals of Aether

On the other hand, in the last few months I’ve found myself grinding match after match of Rivals with one of my best mates and the game is a fucking blast, holy shit. I still haven’t bought it for myself, but its basically 100% of the reason I have played 0 smash for the last few months since we’re too busy mashing Orcane vs Ranno over and over and not really getting tired of it. It requires a specific type of person to get into it, but if you’re in that group then its just an excellent game.

VA-11 Hall-A

I first played VA-11 Hall-A (Vallhalla, since typing that is a pain) by pirating it and playing it on my laptop in the dead of night.

It quickly became one of my favourite games of all time.

When the Switch port dropped, I felt obliged to actually pay for it this time around, since the developers had more than earned my money. And then I replayed it again, playing it on my switch in the dead of night (At least this time I had the excuse of being a nightshift worker). With the sequel unfortunately delayed into 2021, it might be time to run it back once more or drag more of my mates into Glitch City since I already forcibly exposed a few of em to it.

The post-credits title screen is still my phone background.

Fallout: New Vegas

I don’t really have much to say about FNV that hasn’t been said already, especially considering HBomberguy’s recently released video, but it is also on my top 5 list and I only got around to playing Lonesome Road and Dead Money this year. Also went out of my way to 100% achievement complete the game on Steam, which I believe is the first time I’ve done that for a game.

Zero Escape Series (Nine Hours Nine Persons Nine Doors, Virtue’s Last Reward, Zero Time Dilemma)

The Danganronpa series’ less colourful sibling, Zero Escape was a series I finally got around to finishing after having borrowed a friend’s copy of VLR back in high school and playing it wrong due to not deleting his save file (oops,). I think VLR remains my favourite, and I really hope the series continues at some point (unlikely as it seems now) considering how ZTD missed the mark pretty hard. The first 2 games are still excellent mystery games and a lot of fun, though you do need somewhat of a tolerance for words.

A Hat in Time

Oh god this game is so fucking cute. Also, just an excellent platformer. Is the DLC still on sale? I should buy that.

Fallout 4

Its just not New Vegas. It just isn’t. I really tried with this game, I really did. The gunplay is great, modding and building shit is fun, but its just not the same.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

A couple years ago I bought a SNES Mini, but until 2020 I didn’t really have a convenient way of playing it seeing as my monitor didn’t have an HDMI port. But now I do have one with one, so I got to start playing this classic! And then stopped because of uni. Should finish that, probably.

Pokemon Super Mystery Dungeon

Shit Keara I still have your copy sorry I’ll get back to it :<

Pokemon Stadium

I also managed to get my N64 up and running, and despite being the wrong region for most of the games available in local shops, I somehow managed to get Stadium for a great price. Got to dig out my old Red cartridge and anything. Fuck me though, this game is brutal. Seriously, Gen 1 battle mechanics are tough to deal with at the best of times, having to do battle after battle with said mechanics without losing is just nuts. I still haven’t managed to get Round 2 unlocked.

God, fuck you Blaine. Goddamn fire spin Rapidash motherfucker.

Super Mario 64 Speaking of, I managed to pick up a Japanese cartridge of SM64, complete with BLJ glitches and 3 entire save files. After much effort, I managed to actually get it working, and spent most of the night of Christmas getting smashed and trying to beat Bowser in the Fire Sea. I played a lot of the DS remake as a kid, and I feel like an idiot for struggling as much I did with the original.

This is all of course a buildup to the fact that I was lying about not assigning a GOTY. Because there is only one N64 game in my small collection deserving of Game of the Year, because its deserving of Game of the Year every year since its 1999 release.

BEETLE ADVENTURE RACING MOTHERFUCKEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEER

#ramble #video games #retro games #pokemon #for real tho beetle adventure racing is actually good #mario kart who?

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millennialzadr · 5 years ago

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WHY I LOVE ZADR!!!

HEY GUYS WHASSUP? LMAO

So this is a whole ass giant long post of me absolutely spewing my feelings of love for ZADR, it was the very first thing I wrote when I made this blog and I think it’s a nice, positive thing for my fellow shippers to inhale and enjoy 👌👌

it was originally a reply to mitarashiart’s post about why HE loves ZADR (link in replies) but I decided to delete that and make my own post since MY WHOLE ENTIRE TEXT WALL WAS SHOWN IN THE REPLIES and drowned out anyone else who was trying to talk (thanks tumblr mobile u fuckin idiot)

I had also posted a summary of an AU that I’m working on in the original post, but decided to remove it since it just about doubled the length (I’m thinking about posting it separately along with the wips I’ve been putting together, we’ll see 👀)

But ANYWAY, here is about a million reasons why I think ZADR is the fucking best, so if you like reading gushy gay ship feelings, please enjoy ❤️❤️❤️

[Posted June 2019][WARNING, LONG ASS THOUGHT BARF]

SOOO, holy hell y’all my journey back into this fandom has been a wild and unique experience for me, i went from adding invader zim to my bookmarks on kisscartoon, rewatching the series, finding out theres a movie coming out, finding out there was a shitload of content i’d never seen before (commentaries, lost episode scripts and audios, panels, the COMIC, episodes i’d never seen because the dvd i used to watch was scratched!! and a FUCKLOAD of quality modern fan art like oh my GOD) and finally curiously googling ‘zadr’ (which i was way into when i was maybeee 13/14) to see if there was any interesting new art, and holy hell, mita (the artist above) singlehandedly THREW me down the hole into modern zadr hell, first with his absolutely stunning IZ art (all his art is dope tho check him out yo), then reading the above explanation put the final nail in the coffin like, 100%

so i wanted to add onto his post here on why this ship got me so fucked up, both for anyone who might be wondering why on earth i’m shipping two characters from a kid’s show (i’m very aware how weird that is at first glance trust me) and also so i can get some ideas down for possible future reference (will i ever draw them? maybe)

(first of all, a disclaimer, and this is not pleasant to write but it’s important to address for clarity’s sake: I have no interest in romantic or sexual relationships between minors, and do not ship zim and dib as they are presented canonically in the show (as children). what i’m interested in is the conceptualized relationship they may have as modern adults, and i view zadr more as taking the concepts of existing characters and experimenting with them with different interpretations, which i personally think is a constructive and fun creative outlet, especially if these characters hold personal significance for you (childhood faves of course). growing up together is an important facet of their relationship, and certainly they were important to each other even as children (see: mopiness of doom) but as an adult i’m personally curious about what kind of adults they might’ve become, and that’s the focus of my interest. i’ll still be reblogging regular IZ art because it’s dope but if you see shippy looking art of them as tiny lil beans its either friendship or chibis (and i personally headcanon zim as getting taller with dib but some people stick with his canonical height when drawing them as adults, which is super short. it still doesn’t mean he’s a kid). aaand i wish i didnt have to write this and it would just be obvious but we live in a sick sad world and it is sourced from a children’s cartoon so i feel its necessary. end of disclaimer)

NOW THAT THAT’S OUT OF THE WAY

- ok, first reason’s a bit obvious - the nostalgia. holy hell, the feeling of rediscovering a ship that was popular when i was a preteen during the mid 2000s and discovering a totally new perspective on it as an adult comes with an almost totally overwhelming sense of nostalgia and comfort, as well as inspiration!! the kind of art that seems so common for zadr, these sketch pages of scenes and expressions and visual gags where artists would just scribble every idea they had and LOVE doing it, this was exactly the kind of art that made me so passionate about drawing as a kid, and it still sparks such a powerful feeling of love and admiration for me to this day. fan content of iz and zadr is simultaneously achingly familiar and totally new and fascinating, and it just makes me SO damn happy to consume, it is most definitely my new comfort content. and just, GOD. THE ART!! SO GOOD. FUCK

- now for the characters themselves: for some reason i just really love the thought of a mid twenties, modern Dib?? lanky goth dork, disaster bi, depressed as shit, uses bad sweaters and memes to cope?? when i was a kid i didn’t even LIKE Dib, but now i totally sympathize with him! he’s just a hyper obsessive nerd wishing there was more to life than the situation he got stuck with, how wildly relatable. he was a pretty big asshole as a kid (even to people besides zim) but he was also totally isolated and constantly bullied, so there’s a lot of room for growth. i feel there’s a lot of juicy character development potential for that boy, and there’s always been a special place in my heart for characters who are totally sad and screwed and hopeless, but there’s one thing, or person, that means the world to them and could possibly save them…

- aliens. Zim. i love nonhuman characters, i love monsters, i love aliens, i love characters that don’t understand human shit (and thus have much less room for shame or fear bc theyre just totally oblivious the negatives of modern society) and need guidance (bonding!!) from their human. i also love morally grey characters and characters with skewed logic, they’re always really interesting, and Zim himself just has such a unique personality and set of mannerisms, he contradicts himself a lot and you can never quite expect how he’ll behave, and i love that in a character, it makes them super versatile and fun, especially since there’s so many different possibilities for their development. Also, Zim is a gremlin, a little shit, and a disaster. I also love those traits in a character. And don’t even get me started on his character design?? big sparkly eyes? expressive antennae? monster teeth? complimenting colors? he’s adorable.

- mutual obsession. for someone like Dib, who seems almost repulsed by how boring and slow the people around him are, Zim quite literally personifies Dib’s escapist fantasies, both as an inhuman entity from beyond the stars, and as a person who’s knowledge, charisma and mystery far exceeds that of anyone Dib has met in his entire life. (so basically what i’m saying is that for a shunned, jaded misanthropist, an actual alien is terribly alluring, even if said alien is dangerous, stupid, and possibly insane). not to mention Zim vindicates Dib’s entire life passion, the supernatural! Even when their relationship is totally negative, there is not a single inch of room for Dib to get tired of Zim. as mita explained, they validate each other. for Zim, WHO AGAIN, IS TOTALLY SHUNNED, ISOLATED, AND HATED BY EVERYONE HE KNOWS, Dib is the only person in the universe who gives a single shit about him!! he gives Zim credit as a threat, a capable invader, which if you ask me is the sole thing Zim is after (he’s hellbent on his mission because it would win him the approval of the tallest, all he’s ever wanted is recognition from the people he thinks so highly of). He literally gets depressed when Dib isn’t around to pay attention to him, not even the tallest were enough to motivate him before Dib came back. these two have no one and nothing without each other, and while lifelong nemeses is fine and dandy, i personally prefer friendship, affection and love, cause i’m a softie like that. how could they possibly get there after years of actively trying to kill each other?? well, i think under just the right circumstances it could become a possibility after a long, long time.

- growth. i. love. me. some. good. character growth. especially for characters with trauma/mental illness, bc again, relatable. these boys have issues, and as mita mentioned, their canon stories are actually INCREDIBLY sad! but the happy thought is, they could recover! they could help each other recover, for little reason other than the two are the only source of happiness for each other. now of course this also opens the gate for angst lovers, but at the same time offers potential for comforting, uplifting content of the boys supporting and inspiring each other, maybe even to the point of becoming happy and healthy enough to create the lives they want for themselves (as in appreciating life and doing things that make them actually happy instead of the delusions of grandeur they both sought when they were younger). gimme that positive shit and let the poor beans be happy щ(ಠ益ಠщ)

- LITTLE THINGS. LITTLE THINGS THAT ONLY COME WITH CHILDHOOD FRIENDS. WITH HUMAN/NONHUMAN. WITH THE SHOW’S WEIRD LOGIC. Zim being the person Dib knows best and vice versa. Zim having an involuntary respect/admiration for Dib because he’s tall. Learning each other’s needs, limits, and communication methods, both emotionally and biologically. Sensitive antennae. Affectionate bickering. Being less insecure bc your partner literally has no idea why you see your flaws as flaws. Laughing at the flaws they do notice because they make no sense. Zim only wanting to eat waffles and chow mein. Dib being forced to overcome his depression lethargy and stay hygienic/keep the apartment clean because Zim has a sharper sense of smell and is afraid of germs. Endless conversation about anything and everything because they’re from literally different worlds, and endless intrigue. TOUCHING. TALKING. DOING EVERYTHING LIKE ITS THE VERY FIRST TIME AND ALWAYS NEEDING THE OTHER TO GUIDE THEM. HOLY HELL THERE IS SO MUCH POSSIBILITY FOR TINY LITTLE MOMENTS THAT MEAN THE WORLD. FUCK. GOT ME FUCKED UP.

so that wraps up the why. fuck man. its just such a good ship. if you read this big ass text post, thank you for indulging me, i hope you enjoyed it! because i enjoy it very much 👀 so stick around if you’d like to for a shit load of IZ and zadr content on this blog, possibly (MAYBE) even from me!! come roll around in alien hell with me why dontcha ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ its a fun time! thanks for reading!!!

SO THAT’S MY MANIFESTO Y’ALL, FEEL FREE TO REPLY WITH YOUR OWN REASONS!! I WOULD LOVE FOR THIS POST TO JUST BECOME A BIG GIANT PILE OF LOVE AND YELLING!! GO NUTS! SCREAM ABOUT IT! INFODUMP! DO WHATEVER YOU WANT! I’LL READ EVERY LAST REPLY! Y’ALL DESERVE TO ENJOY YOUR SHIP BC IT’S LITERALLY THE FUCKING BEST!!! LOVE Y’ALL!!!!!!

#in this trying time of shippers being stressed over discourse #i offer a gift<3 because i love you guys #and we should spread the love #i want yall to go OFF #tell me every little fuckin thing about zadr that makes ur heart doki OK #LETS GO 👏👏👏#invader zim #zadr #text post #my post #long post

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popculturebuffet · 4 years ago

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Top 10 Regular Show Episodes

Close Enough is Close! 2 more days and a show i’ve waited without hyperbole years for will finally land offically. While i’ve seen three episodes preelease, one because of a french film festival the other two because HBO made an oopsie, and it’s more than likely i’ll be seeing those episodes again thursday, it dosen’t make it any less special, as with an offical release comes the fandom finally becoming a thing and the ablility to watch the episodes over and over again.. on computer till HBO gets it’s shit together but still. IT’s a great time. And my hype for the show made me revisit it’s big brother: Regular Show. Created by what would happen if you condesned california into a person, JG Quintel, Regular Show, as you all damn well know but I like doing anyway so as rigby would say, STOP TALKING, was about two slackers and best bros: Laidback hipster and hurricane when it came to talking to women, Mordecai and Rigby a high strung, idiotic, impulsive, and frequently angry racoon who worked, when they absolutley had to, at a park. Joining them at the park were their coworkers and later closest friends: Benson, their constnatly angry boss who constnatly belts out empty threats to fire them and has a rather sad personal life, Skips, a centuries old yeti whose literally seen it all and despenses advice for the duo and is voiced by everyone’s faviorite grandpa/jedi/murder clown Mark Hamill, Muscle Man, a grotesque blob of a man who likes “My mom” jokes and breaking things, Hi Five Ghost, Muscle Man’s sidekick who got like.. one episode focusing on him alone over 8 seasons moving on, and Pops, an odd but unfailingly sweet and kind vicotrian era gentleman whose also basically immortal and is Bensons’ boss in name only. The Park Crew spend their days working, or in our main duo’s case trying to get out of work to do anything else, while dealing with every day issues that would quickly ballon into insanity. Getting pops a birthday present of Fuzzy Dice from a local pizza place ended up with the crew having to fight a bunch of anamatonic animals that were stashing diamonds in there. Trying to get concert tickets involved getting caffine from the nipples of a giant sentient coffee bean in order to stay awake long enough to do the extra work. And Mordecai trying to delete an embrarassing message off his crush Margret’s voice mail lead to him and rigby getting hauled in front of a bunch of a message guardians, one of which is a sentient smoke signal that wanted to burn them while the other replied with “we’ree not going to burn them when have we ever burned anybody”... I love and miss those guys. Oh and it’s resolved by having to playt he embarassing song he sang while said message beings groove to it then ask him to colaberate with them on their album. THis show was on all the drugs and I am all the hear for it. I could go all day obviously but this section is long enough as is, let’s move on.

Regular Show came at JUST the right time for Cartoon Netowork: Similar to how the 80s doom patrol comic started off really bland and cookie cutter and not at all doom patrol and then grant morrison came in, had hte previous writer kill almost everything, then rebuilt it from scratch with crazy, CN had few shows left and was coming off a really terrible attempt at competeing with NIck and Disney Channel’s live action dommance with a bunch of dude broy reality shows and other ill conceved ideas. The network had a few shows, Total Drama, The Clone Wars which got better and I need to watch those better seasons at some point, but they weren’t enough to make the network thrive again. SO enter adventure time and regular show: BOth were creative, funny , a bit rough around the ages, and kind of nuts, but both were massive hits: The shows hit almost every demographics sweet spots: Kids like the bright colors, fun designs, and insanity, teens loved the edgy bits of the humor and also the insanity and 20 somethings and older both found refrences they got and loved, and well.. insanity. I mean being fucking nuts but also wonderful is kind of the watchword for most animation nowadays. While in the past in my own head i’ve played down Regular Show’s part in things, after all it came second and had a rough patch I told myself.. but I was wrong. Both shows had a lot of the same elements; insane stuff, great voice acting and good humor especially as they evolved.. but both also evolved in largely the same way and that way helped change animation for the next decade: Both, despite being comeidies, regular show keeping to it a bit more than adventure time did as they evolved, had the characters grow, something a lot of animated comedies didn’t do as much ast the time, even the good ones. THey had season long arcs, things that are now standard features in most cartoons for good reason were MADE standard by these shows. It’s just regular show’s legacy got diluted by shows that TRIED to copy it but both failed to see that it grew past season one or that it’s being okay for kids but really based in adult life and problems meant copycats like fanboy and chum chum, sanjay and craig and breadwinners, all thankfully long dead, eventually sputtered out and died. That and Nick is REALLY shitty at maintaing shows or treating creators with anything resembling respect. Somehow Teen Titans Go is still alive despite having similar failings but you can’t win everything. It didn’t help gravity falls came along right after and proceded to be even more influentail than both of these shows. Hmmm I just realized I haven’t done any gravity falls reviews here.. I gotta get on that. But while the show got eclipsed in quality and popularity I do still think it holds up for the most part as funny, charming and with , for the most part, good character arcs, it’s just that a bit of incosntientcy, some abrubtly done actions and a REALLY fucking terrible arc in season 6 dull the show a bit in comparison to what came after, but I do realize now it’s still worht watching, remembering and laughing at. It may of not been the greatest, but damn it was good. So with my nostaliga for the show popping up, my faith in it restored, and it’s sucessor showing up in a few days, I decided to do a little something for the ocassion. I WAS going to do a full on review, but had troulbe finding an episode as some of my faviorites are part of a larger arc that was hurt by a later arc, and the show ping ponged between slice of life and utter insanity enought hat it was hard to peg down to jus tone or two episodes. So while I WILL review the show eventually, it has both good and bad episodes needing it, I decided instead to dig out something I hadn’t done in far too long: a top whatver lists! Now while I do get these things are clickbaity, because they are, I.. honestly just love making them. Even if i’ts not for any specific purpose I just love ranking, the stress, even if I normally hate stress given my anxiety, of trying to narrow them down, and the satisfaction of taking a ton of episodes and melting htem down into the best of them. And with a show as long and varied as regular show, If igured this was the best way to show it off before I dived into it eventually. I’ll obviously be doing more top, and bottom lists in the future, but for now this seemd like a godo place to get back to it. As Now a few more things before we finally get started. Yes I know i’ve gone on for a few years now but i’m almost done. This list is obviously, my opinon. If you disagree fine, and feel free to comment or shoot me an ask about it but I stand by my list and what I choose. I had to boil down over 60 episodes I picked to possibly be on the list and even after it was down to 40 cuts were really difficult, .. Also just as a quick note there are no episodes from seasons 1, 6, 7 and 8, and that’s not on purpose, as the last two seasons are really good, it just fell out that way and i’m sorry about it. So with that out of the way grabs some sodas and wings, get out your maxi gloves, and bring out your best sentient earworms wearing sunglassses, after the cut I count down the top 10 Regular Show episodes. OOOOOOOOO!

10. I Like You, Hi (Season 5, Episode 26) As you’ll be able to tell by the rest of this list Season 5 is my faviorite, and it’s where I feel the series hit it’s peak before next season lead to it’s valley. It’s got a ton of great episodes, as this list will attest, some great character development, and was still really damn funny. But what put it over the top for me was the Mordecai and CJ arc. At the end of the last season as you probably know the show wrote out Margret, having her finally get into college like she’d wanted since she got an actual character back in “Camping Be Cool” instead of just being “that hot girl mordecai really likes but is too scared to persue”, and another fantastic episode we’ll be getting to, Mordecai was in position to move on. Re-Enter CJ. CJ was introduced earlier in the season 3 ep “Yes Dude Yes” which itself is really good, where Mordecai thought margret was engaged and with Rigby’s encouragment, ended up meeting CJ, stands for Cloudy Jay if your curious, a sentient cloud voiced by the wonderful LInda Cardenelli, aka wendy from gravity falls and currently co star of the equally wonderful show Dead to Me. Seriously go check it out on netflix, it’s really good. It naturally went pearshaped since Margret wasn’t engaged, he tried going out with both, she turned into a thunderstorm out of rage... as you do.. it’s like the season 6 plot but less infurating and more understandable. But the two remeet, and had a kiss on new years while not knowing it’s the other person under am ask.. and then CJ ran and both thought the other was upset: MOrdecai for him being MOrdecai, and CJ for running out on him and agreed to be friends. That didn’t last, though it did give us another classic on this list, as while exes can be friends and all, the two still had something between them. Thus came this one. And it was a hard one as it barely inched out the finale of their relationship arc, Real Date, which had the ceo of a dating company try to break them up and be really damny funny but it’s ulitmatley this one being just as hilarious while being a great character piece that gets it the rub. As the episode opens Mordecai and CJ have been spending a LOT of time together and i’ts clear there’s a spark there.. but Mordecai insists it’s platonic. And yes there is a bad habit of animation being unable to accept females and males who are into the oppistie sex can’t be friends without being attracted to each other. It’s being cleared up more lately, but as Star Vs showed it still happens sometimes. But it works here: The two STARTED with dating, made out on new years, and are attracted to each other it’s just clear both were in denial about it. It’s not saying “well they have chemstiry so fuck their partners’ like star vs or “if you loved someone once those feelings will return and destroy yoru current relationship” like next season.... season 6′s arc is a tirefire burn it. But the issue is forced when, while texting about an extreme baking show together while CJ’s at her job at a sports bar, it autocrrects from Yuji, the show’s host, to you hi, sending the title message “I like you, hi”. Mordecai, being even less adept with his feelings and anxiety towards women than me and trust me that’s saying something, spirals and we do get the episodes best scene, narrowly beating out it’s climax, where Mordecai summons a war council.. aka the rest of the main cast minus benson but plus Thomas, the intern who I wish stuck around longer even after he turned out to be a russian spy because they ran out of ideas for him, voiced by Roger Craig Smith and distractingly using his future sonic voice.

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I just.. love everything about the scnee. From the term pulling a mordecai, to Rigby joining in, deservedly as he’s had front row seats for a lot of this bollocks, to everyone’s suggestions especially Muscle Man’s half assed one that somehow, but unsuprisngly, works for him and Starla. Naturally Mordecai comes up with what Rigby HIMSELF admits is a Rigby level half assed scheme to get an actual photo with Yuji rather than just admit the truth. Yuji himself is an utter delight, having had his star not rise as fast as he’d like thanks to autocorrect and being entirely on board, and when it backfires as MOrdecai ends up autocorrected and sends the message thrice and gets sucked into the phone again, admits i’ts “pretty extreme’. I love the guy and i’m prety sure he showed up again, to my delight.

In the phone Mordecai meets some old friends, the message guardians who I mentioned in the “insane shit this show has done” bit earlier: old forms of messaging who police texting, all voiced by Rich Fulcher of the Mighty Boosh and Snuffbox Fame.

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I love Rich and wish these guys could show up in close enough. Maybe they can, I don’t know how rights issues with turner properties work when it comes to two diffrent audiences entirely. Anyways what really makes the episode, besides the great callbacks in this scene, is when confronted with everything going on, Mordecai.. tries to run into the void, with Rigby, The Message Recorder and the Smoke Signal all encouraging him to come back. “There’s nothing out there for you, literally it’s just a blank void”. With the leading tape recorder pointing out from their text history not only how great CJ is but how much he seems to like her with Mordecai finally coming back and admitting the obvious: He does like her.. he’s just scared of beefing it again. Which he does but that’s not the point. Rigby, who as part of his character development helps Mordecai quite a bit with this stuff by being a neutral party, though he also likes CJ better than Margret which is a mood even though I don’t care which one you ship mordecai with frankly, you do you, I have my prefrences. And with that Mordecai finally texts her and asks her out, with her accepting via winky face.. with an added text to clarify it for his neuotic ass.. which is also a mood as my neuortic ass could use that a lot. Overall just a wonderful , hilarious and good bit of character growth.. that season 6 throws in the oven, but that’s a long rant for another day. On it’s own, “I LIke you, hi” is a good character piece for mordecai whlie still being really damn funny.

9. Thanksgiving Special (Season 5, Episode 15)

Regular Show was really damn great at holliday specials. Their terror tales from the park every halloween were always a nice treat and a good replacement for Simpsons “Treehouse of Horror” which still exists, it’s just no one cares at this point, and their christmas and new years episodes are both really damn good, the first Christmas Episode being in contention for this list even. But to me the best of the best was easily Season 5′s thanksgiving episode.

The premise is simple: Mordecai and Rigby accidnetly destroy thanksgiving dinner, which the park crew is having for everyone and their famllies and, refusing to take Benson trying to dismiss their attempts to help fix their mistake, end up joining a songwriting contest to try and win a Turducken.. a natural one that’s born every 1000 Years because this is regular show. To do this they have to beat a parody of everyone’s least faviorite president Donald Trump, Rich Buckner. The fact that trump was basically the main villian of a holliday special a year before he became president is not lost on me and is one of the most accurate depections of the man i’ve ever seen. The fact Rich steals the prize despite our boys winning from his blimp with a grappling hook is peak trump. The fact Trump has’nt stolen more things with a grappling hook in real life is only because his hands are too small to use one.

Getting past our president for my own sanity, the episode also has really great subplots: Muscle Man and Fives go to a sports bar to get sides and end up pissing off a former football player and getting into a touchdown dance comppetition, sadly not set to the super bowl shuffle, while Benson, Pops and Skips go to get a turkey and end up fighting over it with men dressed up like a piligrim, a first thanksgiving era native american and a turkey, to which they don’t even really give an explination for.. granted most explinatoins on this show are insane but even by regular show standards, this gets none. And I love it for it. While as you can tell the episode is really damn funny, what really sells it is the emotional core: For once while they do fear for their jobs a bit Mordecai and Rigby’s main motivation in this messup is genuine guilt and wanting to fix their mistake, and they work hard at it, even giving a genuine and awesome heartfelt song that notches itself up with other thanksgiving classics “That thankstiginv themed soul sketch on snl” and adam sandler’s turkey song also from snl. Not a high bar but it’s really good regardless

The episodes’ real strength though is it’s emotional core: For once instead of saving their own asses or understadnably wanting to get one over on the cranky and in the worse written episodes obnoxiously overbearing benson, they simply feel terrible about possibly runing the meal for their arriving parents and everyone elses parents and families and their friends and work to right the wrong. It’s not the first time they worked to do something genuinely good with no benefit to themselves, but it’s probably the best and Benson’s I forgive you, while hilarious is also really sweet. And speaking of sweet

It ends on a really sweet and touching note, as Mordecai and Rigby, after escaping a blimp via a wish on a golden wishbone because of course, make it home to find the various weirdos the park crew met have brought them thanksgiving, and their parents will be there and we get a nice touching ending as the main duo get a well earned toast from Benson. Just an out and out amazing thanksgiving special and a good reminder of what the holiday means.

8. Trucker Hall of Fame (Season 3, Episode 37)

Moving on from Season 5 for a second, Season 3 was where the show really started to hit it’s stride to me. While Season 2 was a nice increase in quality from the sometimes choppy and heavy on “everyone is an asshole” comedy season 1, Season 3 was where the increased focus on the rest of the cast outside of our main duo balloned and what seeds of character were planted in season 2 beautifully bloomed. And this episode is one of the best examples of that. This one focuses on Muscle Man, who earlier on was basically the main duo’s rival alongside his buddy high five ghost, and kind of a dick. While “Kind of a dick” never left any discription of Mitch Sorenstein, this and previous episode muscle woman showed there was more to the goblin man than we thought. It’s also one of regular show’s few early mostly serious episodes and unlike the benson ones, again this list was tough don’t come at me with a machete, and realy showed why muscle man is the human tire fire he is. The episode introduces, and quickly kills off, muscle dad, mitch’s dad who gave him a love of pranks and was a truck driver who died as he live: mistaking a fake bear for a real one during a prank. Muscle Man being not the most stable person on a GOOD day, spirals, as seen above, and Benson tasks mordecai and rigby, since Fives isn’t good with death ironically and isn’t holding up much better, and as a much later episode shows the two became besties in high school so he probably knew muscle dad for a good ten years so he’s probably not in a great place either, nice stuff, to go with him to put his dad’s ashes in the trucker hall of fame. What follows is a sweet and damn sad episode. While Mitch’s frequent breakkdowns can be hilarous their also really sad and having lost my grandpa since this episode aired, I can relate to being fine one minute and a total shrieking wreck the next over the smallest thing. But it also shows that Mitch genuinely thinks of our main duo as his friends, and that beneath his testorrone positned exterior he’s a decent guy, being genuinely greatful. Of course being regular show the 3 end up squaring off with some truckers, while Mitch also grappels with the revelation his dad wasn’t one but a forklift opperator who faked being a trucker for his son’s benifit and dleft a tender note in his picture, figuring correctly his son would break it open when he found out... oh and because this show is still nuts his ghost ends up saving them at the end which is really sweet , as mitch decides trucker or no his ashes deserve to be there. Also his ghost shows up again at thanksgiving so apparently he can just come back once in a while, which is nice but dosen’t demnish the bittersweet feeling of this ep. And as I said the show has a good grasp on continuity as this ep marked a turning point for our main duo and muscle man: while the’yve bonded before after this, aside from mitch’s habit of christmas pranks and his faking his death, they really don’t nearly get as annoyed by him ever again. i’ts a sweet touching ride tha’ts uncharacristic of the show’s usual chaos but really works.

7. A Bunch of Full Grown Geese (Season 4, Episode 19) After a few episodes that were more sentimental on this list, it’s good to get back to some good old regular show madness for this one, which was also the series 100th in production order and is a worthy milestone episode. Season 4 was really good building on the good will from Season 3 and FINALLY having payoff to the margret and mordecai thing, more on that in a bit. Not as much to say as seasons 3 or 5, but it was still spectacular. The sequel to another ep, fittingly given it’s #100, full grown geese has our duo tasked with removing a bunch of obnoxious geese, with Benson in dick mode refusing to give the two more help, though it does lead to one of the show’s best scenes when he gives his usual your fried threat.. and fitting a milestone episode, Rigby calls him on never going through with it and the threat being as empty as my dreams. Benson responds by going nuts and angrishing them out of his office.. really funny. But yeah with the geese attacking them and , in their first attacking, poor pops, and no way to combat them, the two turn to the baby ducks, a bunch of baby ducks from the episode titled that who show up to help.. and this being the 100th episode of an already grant morrison level nuts show, it turns out the geese seek to conquer earth, voiced by david warner of course and have laser eyes.. and can combine. And the ducks do so again, mecha style, and add in our heroes and a bunch of call backs in one of the series best and most batshit sequences> The ending is also throughly satisfying as while our heroes win, Benson chews them out for tearing up the park in the process.. only for the ducks mom to call him out for not only yelling at the ducks, who are just kids, but at mordecai and rigby after they just saved the park from being a smoldering crater and not just trashed and he backs off. Just a fun episode where the crew just went nuts and the results speak for themselves.

6. This is My Jam (Season 2, Episode 13)

Now this one I couldn’t NOT include. This is one of the series best even after it’s immense growth, and a beloved classic for a reason. And like the above it’s a good classic case of regular show hyjinks while also being relatable this time: Rigby gets a brainless but catchy pop song from the 90′s stuck in his head and despite growing to hate it, and Mordecai hating it because this episode establishes him as a hipster, and seemingly exercises it.. only for it to manifest as a GIANT CASETTE WEARING SUNGLASSES THAT PLAYS THE SONG JUST BY EXISTING AND DANCES CONSTANTLY. it’s utterly glorious and used to great effect, also annoying benson because he’s constnatly annoyed. To beat it the main duo get the rest of the park’s help at Skips suggestion to form a band and craft an even BIGGER earworm to cast it out. Oh and there’s a great scene where Pops is forced to awkwardly dance with the incarnation of the 90′s “But I won’t use my best moves”. The climax also has one of Benson’s best moments as, after he’s irritated all episode, he comes in hot, with both the cast and audience expecting him to chew out mordecai and rigby.. only he’s mad because they forgot drums are key to an earworm and saves the day with his drumwork. It’s a great subversion and one of the first times Benson was more than just the angry but understandable, at times, dickhead boss. Just an utter standout and one of the show’s most memorable episodes for a reason. Also the line “you can’t touch music but music can touch you’ is great.

5. Meteor Moves ( Season 4, Episode 28)

This one was a long time coming and to me is a great example of writers taking their own shortcomings and making something awesome out of them. I prefer that: instead of just retconning away bad writing use it as a tool.. I try to do that myself when possible. See early in the show as you all probably know, Mordecai’s crush on Margret was just a plot device: he had a crush on the cute waitress at the coffee shop so they used it to get him to do things. A gratioutis shot of her in bike shorts got him to bet all computer rights for life that sort of thing. The show.. wasn’t great with female characters till season 3 and even as it grew, as season 6 and just.. forgetting to give CJ a proper ending as a character shows, still grappled with it. It took writer Kat Morris saying “no no stop go to jail” to them wanting ot make CJ a difficult woman type, whatever horrifying thing that is. I don’t want to know, let’s move on. The point is it wasn’t till season 3 that Margret and her best friends, and Rigby’s future wife, Eileen got fleshed out a bit: Eileen got smarter and turned out to be good at wilderness stuff while Margret was chill, nice, if annoyed by the chaos around mordecai, and funloving, while also having a clear goal in stark contrast to her future boyfriend: going to college. Even after coming back it was botha fter finsihing college and to start a career. It wasn’t incredibly deep, but it made me not be ehhh to her mere existance like before. The show also started developing her and Mordecai’s relationship seriously with the two bonding and the previously shown Butt Dial showing for the first time, after previously having a terrible taste in men and then just not noticing his crush, that she was receptive to how mordecai felt. And the two had several moments and two dates even, it just.. never went anywhere for some reason.

And this was INFURATING to me: See back then shows had a tendency to just pop in love intrests SOLEY for plot fuel like margret with no intention of following through with things either through rejection or a relationsihp upgrade and by then I was sick of it. The whole spike and rarity thing in MLP (which to be clear I wanted her to just reject him but nope, even after I stopped watching she never did. ), Isabella and Phineas. I was fed up so I went from being “eh” about it to annoyed supremely.. but the thing is the writers realized this.. and course corrected. The first step was picking up Margret, where Mordecai agrees to pick her up to get her to the airport for a college interview and we get a nice deconstruction of things as Margret is anticpatiing things going wrong, and wrongly blames Mordecai for it.. I mean it is his fault sometimes but half the time weird shit just follows him. However she’s won over by him working past it, getting her there in time and kisses him. That blew me away and made me think well it’s finally here.. and it was.. ALMOST. However the creators wisely, if frustratingly to past me, took one more episode to iron it out: Metor Moves has the two growing closer, and semi-going out, but Rigby pops mordecai’s bubble pointing out he never actually made a boyfriend girlfriend move and her move could’ve gone either way. So Mordecai , after seasons of being wishy washy and awkward, finally decides to go for it as he, rigby, eileen and margret go to a metor shower. Being Regular Show it dosen’t go as planned as his attempted kiss is blocked by the guardians of the friend zone.. which is a real, phantom zone esque place here and that’s just fantastic. And it’s also clearly mocking the hell out of the concept, which is dumb. if you want to ask someone out just do it, I learned that the hard way. And if you really are friends, if she says no then you’ll accept it and keep a friend anyway as I have. But it’s clearly parodying it and Mordecai get sreplayed all the times he ALMOST made a move but didn’t but refuses to accept this clusterfuck, realizes he was a screwup when it came to this.. and kisses her.. and this time the two enter a relationship> Granted it barely lasted but still, it was nice while it did and this ep is just great for it. While not the funniest, it’s up this high because it took somethign the show did wrong.. and turned it on it’s head and into a character flaw and had mordecai grow past it, with a genuinely romantic moment on top as well as an utterly funny and batshit concept. It also had some Rigleen, as by this point rigby stopped being a hateful wastebasket to her and warmed up to her, and I regret there’s no reigleen episodes on this list. Their the shows best couple and utterly adorable. Just wanted to mention that at least once this list.

4. Laundry Woes (Season 5, Episode 1) From the begining to the end. While sadly Morderet didn’t last too long in canon, which blows, it did give us some great episodes while it lasted, as with the above entry and their breakup in Steak Me Amedeus. As mentioned before Margret left for college, which while abrupt feeling did pave the way for great stories: The Mordejay arc mentioned above and that will pop up again very soon, This was one of them: the ep while lacking on laughs is a good emotional rollercoaster and starts with an amazing montage that catches us up from the end of season 4: Mordecai is miserable, as you’d expect and wallowing in it with Benson, of all people, letting him. And given Benson seems to have a heart attack any time Mordecai and Rigby aren’t working, that’s huge. But eventually his friends refuse to let it go on and in a really touching montage help him through it, taking him out places, giving him good times and eventually.. the fog starts to lift and he starts to enjoy himself and by the end.. he’s himself again. It’s one of the series best sequences, told with no dialouge and showing just how far the rest of the cast had come: Benson actually wants to comfort mordecai but is encouraged not to at first, underfstandably as it probably woudlnt’ help, and a crew that were once, aside from Pops who much like Krillin is everyone’s friend, just coworkers who barely tolerated each other, and are now close as family and help their own in need. But Grief isn’t a straight line and just as Mordecai’s recovering he’s sent spiraling when he finds Margret’s sweater and uses ita s a flimsy excuse to go return it. It’s here I also get to talk about Rigby, who grew from an impatient idiot who hated Mordecai’s romantic endevors and actively sabtoaged them at times, to an understandting wing man who, while understandably frustrated with his best friend’s own idiocy with women, turned out to know more and be the wise council he needed, triggering both is relationships and only bailing out during the season 6 clusterfuck and even then was there to comfort him after it was all over and go to his aid to pull him out of another misery hole. And here he gives Mordecai the hard truth: He shoudln’t do this, it’s just going to tear both him and margret up again and he just put himself back together. He’s not going to let his best friend do this to himself. And while there is a supernatural elment, the sweater comes to life and tries to get Mordecai to force margret back with him and give up college, likely voicing his darkest wants that he hates himself for wanting, but it feels more like a manfiestation of Mordecai’s own issues than the usual madness. Like “Trucker hall of Fame”, a rare senntence, it’s a less funny packed more grounded episode. And in the end it’s mordecai himself, after rejecting the ghost sweater and seeing his ex truly happy , that gets him to NOT talk to her and just.. let it go. IT’s a good emotional episode and SHOULD HAVE BEEN the end of their relationship... but i’ve ranted about the cheating storyarc enough here, moving right along.

3. Portable Toilet (Season 5, Episode 16) Back to the Mordejay arc. And yes this arc is my faviorite and while I didn’t make it clear at the time I really shipped the two, even before it became canon. I had nothing against morderet, these two simply had more chemistry and these episodes built CJ up as more of a character than Margret was at the time. It’s why that later arc sucks so much to me: it destroys a perfectly good relationship and story arc for dumb reasons and never really did enough with it to justify doing so. I’ll get to it some day, or if someone comissions it soone rthan some day, but as you can tell i’m still sore over it and great eps like this are part of the reason why. It’s the same reason i’m sore on how Tom was handled on star vs. But as you can also tell as bitter and lemon scented as I am.. these eps are still objectivley great and thus took up a third of the list basically. Case in point Portable Toilet, which zooms back a bit to when neither would admit they were into each other but were now friends at least. Also Eileen was CJ”s friend now because plot convience. I mean they worked, and it bothers me a lot that the creators claim cj washed her hands of her even though she’s not the one who made out with margret... which come to think of it adding her to rigleen.. not a bad idea. I mean Rigby didn’t really like margret true, but they did almost go out before mordecai killed him and then reset time because Mordecai’s always kinda sucked. I’ll file that away for later. But my new OTP aside, I did like the two bonding and what not. Anyways with their outside park friend/RIgby’s future girlfriend now friends with Mordeai’s future girlfriend the four have apparently been hanging out which, while i’ve bemoaned off screen stuff at times, works here and regular show uses it better than most shows. While Rigby can clearly see Mordecai and CJ are into each other Mordecai is as we covered in denial and while that dosen’t really progress here, it does lead to one of teh shows finest hours. When talking would you rathers, CJ semi-flirtly dares Mordecai to eat his lunch sandwitch in a portable toilet, which he agrees to and drags a reluctant rigby along for. This being regular show, it goes south fast as the two get stuck, with Rigby’s clautrophiba kicking in leading to an amazing exchange Mordecai; Dude that makes no sense! Rigby: You’s makes no sense! While our dynamic duo try to get mordecai and rigby out the two are carted away and repalced with a new portable toilet, a deluxe one. Also we get another great bit when our dynamic duo find Muscle man, in a robe with choclate’s claming “Eileen, other girl, this isn’t weird” before screaming “This isn’t weird”. Turns out old portable toilets are taken to be blown up by the miltary and we get one of the shows best one off characters in the general, who not only explains it as “toilets being about the same size as the enmy” but when told he should call the president says “the preseident is not my father i’ll blow up as many toilets as I want.”. Spectacular. So now it’s a scramble for one twosome to rescue the other, Rigby lets out a cathartic “THANK YOUUU MORDECAI” over the flirty toilet dare, and the day is saved> This one is another pure comedy one, even if it ties into a plot I really like, and i’ts gold for obvious reasons and manages to take blowing up porta poties, a premise that dosen’t seem that funny, and make it utter comedic gold. Speaking of pure comic episodes that are utterly insane...

2. Cool Bikes (Season 3, Episode 7)

This one feels like regular show boiled down to it’s core: semi-relabtale hyjinks dovetalling into pure madness. And the premise sounds like a shit post i’d make: Mordecai and Rigby want benson to admit their cool and get into progressively weird outfits and tricks to their bycycles to do so, eventually becoming so cool their put on trial by the council of cool , ending up having to make a runner when Benson finally breaks down and admits it. The premise is utterly stupid in the best way possible, with the conflict being the kind of petty bullshit we all get into from time to time with our aquantinces: not wanting to admit something and loose the argument withthings escalating. And in regular show terms it escalate sperfectly into the entire unvierse being threatned adn our heros being on trial for their lives. There’s not much to say here, it’s just pure comedic gold with a premise that just works. It also has good moments for Benson with his finally admitting they are cool and saving the duo’s lives whne he realized he just gave them a death sentence. Utter fun. And now we come to the finale, my faviorite episode...

1. Dodge This (Season 5, Episode 15)

Yup this arc again. But this one has more than my ship going for it, and it’s why it soared to the top: It takes the excellent character work of other episodes and weaves it with excellent comedy to create an utter delight and the episode I remember most fondly and most often. It’s just great. The second part of the Mordeijay arc, not counting yes dude yes, the episode is half that and half sports movie: The Park Guys have been taking part in dodgeball as a team bulding thing and it shows how far Benson’s come as he not only praises mordecai, and launches the mordecai and benson ship in the process, but gives his team full wings and his full support, a far cry from his usual self. It’s also the first big instance of him getting hammered on wings and it’s glorious to see drunk flirty benson. Benson is also genuinely congratulatory to the team’s ace mordecai, and most of them realy for b eing valuable and hopes to win this year. IN their way are two things: The magical elements, aka the floating baby heads that gave skips his immortality, his friend with sparkly eyes who works for them and death himself whose a recurring character and fucking great and who were their bowling rivals too. The other is CJ is back, and Benson in another good moment actually talks mordecai through it and his nerves over it assuring him. So we get a great sports piece as our heroes work through various callbacks and even beat the magical elements iwth Rigby’s hilarious and rediculous rignado manuver, which is as dumb as it sounds and winged a guy hilaroiusly before with Benson scolding him like a toddler. Of course it ends up with Mordecai and CJ against each other, both incredibly awkard over things as mentioned before, and both ending up in a stalmate that magical dodgeball guardians have to resolve because, let’s do this one last time. IT’S REGULAR SHOW. We do get a good moment though as the two work through their awkwardness: both thinking the other is rightfully mad: Mordecai for his two timer date with her and Margret and CJ for running out without talking to mordecai after they had a moment on new years. The both work past it, the park strikers loose,benson likely gets hammered again off screen.. it’s a good one and I have no shame in putting it at number one. It’s got heart, really great jokes, and some good charcter stuff, not to the level of other episodes on this list, but it wasn’t a full episode of that like those were and still works to move the plot forward and is still a classic. Just a fun, breezy, well done epsidoe fully rooted in the cast’s characters and getting laughs out of that.. mostly benson. And with that this giangantic list comes to a close> I hope you enjoyed it, if you liked it follow me for more. I’ll be doing close enough coverage every week, as well as amphibia and owl house among other reviews. Until we meet again, later days.

#regular show #mordecai #rigby #cj #eileen #margret #muscle man #benson dunwoody #high five ghost #pops mallerd #skips #death #yuji #rich fulcher #close enough #top 10 lists #cartoon network

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sultrysirens · 4 years ago

Text

Story Time

Out of nowhere I decided to share a bit of my story as a fanfiction writer, starting with my original introduction into the profession. It’s going to be a long one, but hopefully, and inspiring one. Skip if you’re not interested.

NOTE: This includes spoilers for certain anime and fandoms. If you don’t know Dragonball Z or Inuyasha, specifically, you’ll be quite lost.

The Beginning

How everything started was just through surfing the net. Back then my interest was Dragonball Z. I was 14. I had only had the internet for a few months, so everything about it was new. This was 20 years ago, now, back in 2000. I used Yahoo! for all my searches. Google had not yet been born. Fanfiction.net was the main hub where all these amazing stories were birthed, and yet at this point I had not yet found it.

What I found, first, was a fanfiction writer who had a website. Geocities, I believe. I can’t recall how I found it, exactly, except that I had only just learned about Bulma and Vegeta getting together and thought they were an amazing couple. I looked up art, and it led me to this site. I can’t recall the site’s name anymore, but I remember the tagline for it was something like, “Bulma and Vegeta’s Cove.”

One thing I can distinctly recall is a small gif in one corner of the main page, displaying a chibi Vegeta with a microphone in one hand, going between 2 or 3 singing poses. It was cute.

This site was coded in such a way that it linked directly to fanfiction.net, displaying the owner’s many, many, many fanfictions in an embedded window. The stories were largely explicit, included sex and, in a few stories, rape, all of them AUs from all the rest. But each had a singular goal: Bulma and Vegeta’s romance, how they ended up getting together.

Some of the stories I remember very clearly. Others have faded. Some were modern AUs, one included dimension-hopping via a magical device Bulma created and recharged every 24 hours (sound familiar, anyone?), and some were painfully OOC but in very sweet ways.

I devoured these stories. There must have been two dozen, with most of them multi-chapter works. And, eventually, I started to notice the format with these stories, how it seemed to be a miniature explorer window within the website. Eventually, I clicked on the mini website and was given a full introduction to fanfiction.net and its massive breadth.

Back in those days, fanfiction.net (or FF.net, as it was usually called) allowed explicit content. And this I looked for very directly. I enjoyed the “lemons” more than anything, easily reading the most ridiculous stories just for the porn therein.

Eventually, I figured it out. I understood fanfiction and what it meant. And though I’d only been using a computer for a few months, I started writing.

It was a painful process at first. Think back to your first months with a keyboard and how difficult it was to get used to the format, how to move your fingers. I had to stare directly at the keyboard to write anything and it was a pain, a slow-going endeavor of passion.

My first fanfictions were Dragonball Z, unsurprisingly. I made a few silly ones, a few serious ones, a few sexual ones. At 14, with no grasp of the anatomy of sex, I was writing porn, using the porn I’d already read as resources. I didn’t know what a clitoris was, but I knew ladies apparently went nuts when men tongued them, so that’s what I wrote.

Eventually I got my first hit: Temptation. It was a Bulma/Vegeta story. I don’t remember it very clearly, and this is probably for the best. The plot, as I recall, was Bulma getting sick and Vegeta having to be her nurse for a time. Eventually she got worse and worse, until she recognized why she was sick: she’d cut herself one night with a device that’d had a compound on it. I can’t recall what the compound was designed to do, but the short version is it made you feel weaker and sicker until you increased your physical activity to burn it out.

This led to wild sex. Like, very wild sex. For hours. My lack of experience evidently was not a consideration; I was given compliments by the dozens. I’d done good.

And now I was addicted.

The Second Hit

I was 16 now. We’d be moving out of my childhood home soon, but I didn’t know this yet. I’d been spending a lot of time with my sister, who was 26, and soaking up Adult Swim shows on her cable. Inuyasha was my new obsession, as well as a liberal amount of Trigun. I lived, slept, ate, and breathed these shows. My head was constantly alight with ideas, concepts, and desires. I wrote near-constantly.

Through this, I managed my second big hit: Transformations.

It’s been a long time, now, and I can’t recall the beginning as much as the ending. I think perhaps I called it something else at the start.

The premise was simple: Kagome, the main character, suddenly transforms into a half-demon, a hanyou, after a demon bites her in battle. I remember that initially I was just writing bullshit; I had no filter and didn’t edit or delete anything. What I wrote got posted verbatim. And, at first, it was cringe-worthy.

I can distinctly recall two things: first, Sesshomaru -- Inuyasha’s full-demon elder brother -- caught Kagome’s scent and investigated and had difficulty resisting her. She was a half-wolf demon, and he was attracted to that. Earlier she and Inuyasha were together in a cave, and her transformation had given her a tail -- which she didn’t like. She chased it, trying to catch it and rip it off.

That’s when the accusations started coming in.

Out of nowhere, and totally unexpectedly, I was getting a slew of comments accusing me of copying another popular fanfiction. I’d legitimately never heard of it, and I had to search it out. I remember reading the first chapter or two and feeling surprised; they were very similar, to the point where I couldn’t blame anyone for thinking I’d copied it.

This was a case of great minds thinking alike, or so I said at the time. I was amused more than anything, but it was clear the accusations weren’t going to stop. Eventually I deleted the story and started over. I’d learned a bit in those few chapters I’d posted and decided that I didn’t really want the events to unfold the way they had, so starting over sounded like a great idea.

And it was.

Now came Transformations as it remains today. The beginning is the same -- Kagome is bitten by a demon and transforms into a half-wolf demon -- but the events following take a different turn from the original.

It was a monster of a hit. I got multiple comments and reviews on every chapter, and I can remember doing this thing for a long time in which I threaten the readers at the end of each chapter with various weapons, only to have the weapon backfire somehow and hurt and/or kill me. The readers seemed to enjoy it, and soon they were suggesting new weapons for me to use.

I loved it.

Eventually the story ended at 64 chapter, but back then my chapters weren’t nearly as long as I write them now, and the final chapter was just a family tree of sorts leading the characters from Feudal Japan to modern day. It was a great, beautiful monster and I had drawn dozens of pictures to go along with it.

It was actually through this that I decided I needed a better place to post my art and thus discovered DeviantART.com. That’s been my main art gallery ever since, around 16 years now (I believe I created it in 2004, a year after I started the fic). If you go there and head all the way back to the first images I posted, you’ll find all of that art remaining even today.

It’s...pretty bad. X’D

But the story doesn’t end there. I wanted my fic to have a greater reach, so I started looking for more websites. I found MediaMiner.org, which was appealing because it hosted both written works and art. And once Transformation was finished, the story concluded, I found I couldn’t quite let it go.

So I did something I’ve not done since: I created an alternate ending.

Titled Changing Lives, this story picked up after chapter 28 of Transformations and went a different way. It treated the story of Transformations as just that: a story, written by Kagome, which Inuyasha read while she was gone one day. He was thunderstruck by it, given it so clearly screamed “I love you” and was full of romance -- and sex.

This led to them getting together, but soon thereafter, tragedy struck.

Kagome was kidnapped on her way home from school. By the time Inuyasha found her, she’d been gang-raped and discarded.

The story very deeply included time travel and revenge aspects from that point on, and I can also recall giving the character Miroku a reincarnation as a detective. He was put on the case, and with Inuyasha’s help, had all the men arrested -- there were seven of them.

Then they started dying.

Inuyasha wasn’t doing this, but he was happy to allow it to happen. The detective did his job per the law, trying to keep the criminals safe as they started dropping like flies. The killer left notes written on the cell walls in the criminal’s own blood, though I can’t quite recall the sequence anymore.

What I do remember is this: the first one read, “He touched her first.” The rest followed that sequence, killing the men in order -- second, third, fourth, etc. I remember one said “hurt her”, one said “made her cry”, and so on.

Eventually, the truth was discovered: Inuyasha was killing them, but not “young” Inuyasha. “Old” Inuyasha. The one who’d lived through the centuries. And his story was the most tragic of all.

In his time, Kagome had been raped and her rapists arrested, as normal. Then, years later, they were freed, having served their time, and immediately they tried to track her down. She was pregnant at the time with Inuyasha’s child. When she saw she was being chased, she jumped down the well back to his time, and the men followed her.

They traveled through time with her but had no idea. They killed her there, then climbed out, and Inuyasha arrived too late to help. But the men were there, confused and lost, and the blood of his wife and child were on them. He slaughtered them all.

But now the well had ceased functioning. He couldn’t return to her time. And, at first, he was just...sad. He mourned. Then, with time, he began to plan. For five centuries, he planned.

His plan was to keep Kagome from ever getting raped. Alas, he failed in this, so instead he decided to get pre-revenge and kill the men while they were imprisoned. He succeeded, but along the way grew...exhausted. By the time he murdered the last man, he had little will left to do so.

But he finished it. For her.

Then he showed himself to Kagome and Inuyasha, explaining what had happened. And he wished them well.

Changing Lives was significantly shorter than its predecessor, only 35 chapters, but I felt it was the better story, overall. I never made art for it, I don’t think, but it was more emotional.

To Present Day

I kept writing, on and off, ever since. Any time I got sufficiently involved in a story, my mind immediately began making my own stories for it. Movies, shows, video games; nothing remained untouched by my mind. I made stories for Labyrinth, Dragon Age, Trigun, Spyro, Jak & Daxter, Naruto...the list went on. I started posted on a third site, adultfanfiction.net (comprised specifically of explicit stories), and I started existing solely on my stories and the feedback I received from them.

I got better. And better. And better. I started looking back on my first stories, my first “hits”, and cringed at the horrendous grammar and articulation of my youth. But it was nostalgic as well, bringing back fond memories of writing on my home computer before we had internet and then rushing to my sister’s with a 3.5″ disc to post them via her internet.

I had a friend around this time, named Leila (Lee-lah), and drew and wrote together. We came up with original stories and though we never really posted them, we had so much fun it didn’t matter. Mostly we talked and drew together, and while I considered myself the better artist, I considered her far better at clothes designs.

Then...a dry spell. I went into college at age 20 and there I met my husband, Eric. He was 17 at the time. And he introduced me to so many more worlds than I’d known before, including the aforementioned Jak & Daxter series and the Sims 2.

Years passed. I still wrote from time to time, but it wasn’t such an obsession as it’d been before. If I had a good enough idea, I’d write it, but I tried to keep my things to oneshots. I posted many such stories on adultfanfiction.net, and I generally got positive reviews and ratings. In the meantime we were more addicted to World of Warcraft, us two and a few friends, and we played that often.

Eventually I slowed down. Time blurred together. I had a lot of good stories, but no major hits. Then came Megamind, and with it, an interesting idea that a lot of people took a liking to: Megamind as the indirect hero, and Metro Man as an abusive spouse of Roxanne. I titled it Bad to be Good, and it was an incredible story.

I started counting words with this one, only posting chapters when they reached around 6,000 words.

The story was a very serious one. It struck cords with a lot of readers, one in particular saying it helped her through some similar times with her abusive husband. We eventually became friends and remain to this day. (She since divorced him, so don’t worry about her. ♥)

Ultimately I never truly completed that story. I remember getting up to 12 chapters and then having difficulty figuring out how to proceed. I used to open the Word document from time to time, check what I’d written, and try to edit things or continue it, but it never really took. Eventually I abandoned it, but luckily the 12th chapter was a softer ending of sorts, so my readers were satisfied.

Then came the Marvel films and, with it, a resurgence in an activity I’d long since stopped participating: roleplaying.

The Crazy Train

It started simple enough. The Avengers just came out, and I was starting to see Facebook RPs popping up between the characters. Curious, I tried to find the pages in question but couldn’t locate them. I did, however, come to find out that there were dozens of pages dedicated to the main characters, alone, with dozens more popping up by the month.

Eventually I stepped in. I’d grown to love Loki’s character and subsequently found he had a canonical wife, Sigyn, but hadn’t found any pages for her. So I made one. Without checking with the other RPer, I just threw myself into a Loki page and, thankfully, that Loki accepted his “wife’s” presence.

We had fun. And our group steadily grew. A Thor, another Loki, and Odin, a Sleipnir, and a whole slew of original characters joined the ranks. I, too, began adding more pages to my roleplays, starting with Narfi and Vali -- Loki and Sigyn’s twin sons.

At the start, these two shared a page. Then, when it became increasingly obvious that people had their favorite of the two boys, I separated them. Funny enough, Vali started off as the clear favorite (he was flirty AF), but Narfi steadily became more so.

Their relationships grew. They both fell in love. They were both tricked by a succubus, giving each an unwanted child at different intervals. Narfi soon had a family of his own, as his lover had an adopted daughter and he was given a daughter of his own.

We spent years here, six or seven I think, just roleplaying with one another. Our group grew and shrank as people joined our circles or left it. There was drama in and out of the roleplay setting. Friendships were forged and abandoned. At one point a Thor page (titled Fatty Thor) targeted me for my roleplay choices and tried to get his followers to harass me. Eventually he left, deleting his page, and our RPs continued without him, never addressing his disappearance.

Then Ragnarok struck -- but not the film’s Rangarok. No, this was worse. We were impatient to have the event occur, me in large part because the mythology says that Vali slays Narfi during the sequence and I couldn’t wait to put all that pain into writing. But what really kicked this off was a friend’s page getting repeatedly deleted.

Sleipnir.

In this RP setting, Sleipnir was a fully intelligent horse capable of speech and even transforming for short periods of time into a humanoid form. He fell in love with a half-demon woman and they had a son together, a centaur named Grani. And then his page kept vanishing.

Initially, we believed the page was reported because there was a rape sequence between his character and the half-demon, though -- and this is imperative -- the two RPers had discussed this in detail before agreeing to the RP. A great deal of thought went into it before they started the roleplay.

And yet, Sleipnir’s page went down.

The RPer made a new one, and that too, went down a short time later. This was disheartening for her, and though we all did our best to help, even creating the page for her in case it was her account getting it flagged, the pages kept getting deleted. The only cause we could work out was that Microsoft just came out with a Sleipnir program of some form and were removing all other pages with that name regardless of content.

So we kicked off Ragnarok and wrecked our Facebook RP world, killing off some of the characters and leaving others behind. We moved platforms, taking our remaining world to Gaia Online, but it wasn’t to be.

Though the RPs increased in quality while there and we created avatars for each of our characters and it definitely helped the process, we just couldn’t keep it up. We were too disheartened for our friend and how things had ended on Facebook.

Slowly but surely, our RPs died. We tried just once more by moving to a new forum called Valucre, but we couldn’t quite get steam going there, either. Eventually all of the RPs died, most of them without conclusions. In some ways, we mourned the loss.

But our remaining group, a total of four of us, remained friends for a great while longer. Three of us, in particular created this very blog some years later with the purpose of posting all of our NSFW works here.

Art, writing, roleplays, etc; this blog was meant to be a joint page to display all of our wicked wiles.

For several months we didn’t post much. Kyone did the most posting during this time, art for her favorite yaoi couple of the time, both NSFW and SFW, and it was moderately popular. Then came my contribution: The Dancer.

The Resurgence

To this day, I’m not sure what really got me back into TMNT. I know I was tired of RPs but wanted the stories to continue, and thus did I begin writing fanfictions again after years of never touching them -- or, at least, never posting them.

The Bayverse movies kicked this off. I’d always loved TMNT, since I was a kid, but the Bayverse films put them in a new light. They weren’t anthropomorphic turtles under 5′ tall anymore, naked 100% of the time. They were tall, big bois, more humanoid, and more like hybrids. I loved them. I wanted them.

I wanted them to be loved.

At the start, I was under the false belief that they didn’t get much love -- i.e., no romance. I especially believed Raphael didn’t get much affection, being such an angry and brash character. Oh, how wrong I was, lol.

Thus did I start with Raphael.

At the beginning I was inspired by a story written by another page, @teradoration, featuring a merman. I wasn’t too interested in the story, personally, as it’s m|m and I’ve never enjoyed those types of stories, but the inspiration came from the fact that it was a multi-chapter work -- on Tumblr.

So I decided to write some porn.

Initially, the idea was to make a short story, something like 10 chapters. I put thought into it, into the character I wanted to create and introduce, into her appearance and history and passions. I considered Raphael, his personality, and crafted a character designed to intrigue and challenge him. Then I looked at both popular and unique character tropes and the kinds of characters I’d made and turned in another direction.

Thus was Jocelyn born, a half-black, half-Polynesian ballet dancer with blonde hair and freckles. And, at first...it was a dead story. No one saw it. No one liked it. No one took a chance on Jocelyn.

For nearly a year, I wrote chapters to an empty audience. I tried not to let it get me down, but the consensus seemed clear: no one was interested in reading it. Still, I’d started it and come to love the characters very dearly, and so I continued. For my sake, for their sake, I continued.

Then came my first big break: tmnttrashcan. If you’re wondering why I didn’t @ that one, it’s because it’s been deactivated. But this amazing woman found my story, loved it, and began sharing it. And because her blog was one driven by reblogs and gifsets, it was far more popular than this one despite its younger age.

And thus did The Dancer begin drawing attention, fans, and feedback. Thus did I finally feel as if this labor of love was validated, that I wasn’t posting just for me anymore. People were enjoying the story, and in return, I poured more effort and love into it.

This is how I thanked my readers: with better content. More drama, more emotion, more love, more heartache, more sex, more everything.

Even before this happened, however, my head had continued the story far into the future. I made a sequel -- The Dragon -- before I’d even had a concept of The DJ. But in this sequel I’d begun laying the groundwork for something in between the two, and through this I began creating Lisa.

With Lisa, I wanted to create a character that fit more securely with the next turtle on my list: Michelangelo. Rather than opposing the turtle in many ways, as Jocelyn does with Raphael, I wanted Lisa to mesh very easily with him.

The DJ had begun.

For a time, tmnttrashcan’s admin and I were fantastic friends. We talked often, over text and over voice chatting. I told her ideas I had for the future, plans going years down the line both in and out of the story, and even let her read what I’d written of The Dragon thus far. She loved it, every last word, and heaped praise at me.

I loved this woman very deeply. I’d tell her as much from time to time, and she echoed the sentiment.

Then she simply...vanished. She stopped talking to me, stopped responding. Eventually I asked her if we were no longer friends. She never answered.

It was heartbreaking.

Soon thereafter, I was also left behind by Kyone. She unfriended me. And then Tumblr decided to ban all NSFW content, so in order to preserve this blog, I was forced to delete all her NSFW art. And when she went further and removed herself from the blog, I went further too and removed all of her posts. But it wasn’t easy.

It’s been a few years since then and I remain heartbroken. We’d been friends for over a decade. I saw her grow up (we met when she was 16), saw her graduate, saw her go through schooling and jobs and hard times. Between her, myself, and Fluxx, we’d amassed a mountain of great times and greater stories. We’d been a sisterhood in all but blood. We’d even called ourselves such.

To this day there remains a hollow place in me. In short, I’ve been jaded. My whole life, I’d seen this pattern repeated: I make a friend, we become close, then they abandon me, usually within a year or two. But with Fluxx and Kyone, I’d truly believed this pattern had finally been broken. I’d believed I finally had friends for life.

Between the loss of tmnttrashcan and Kyone, however, I learned a hard lesson: not to trust so deeply.

This was repeated twice more before I gave up on sharing. With Blue Blood, twice I made a close friend, got to the point of talking near-constantly and voice chatting. Twice I shared previews of what was to come. Once I even told the entire story, everything, every last detail I have planned to the end of the series. And twice, after hearing so much of the tale, the friend vanished from me. They stopped responding. I was talking to air.

It hurt.

By now you may be wondering why this is included in my fanfiction autobiography. Well, because it spurred me on. If I can’t keep friends for long, then I’ll keep my own company. I won’t let myself down. I decided to focus on my stories, for in this I am always the most important person. I am the one who will never be abandoned. I am the creator, the god, of the worlds I shape for the entertainment of others. Readers may come and go, as much a slave to their interests as I am, but I remain. For those who stay and those who arrive later, I remain.

There is a power in this which cannot be matched, but more so, there’s an enjoyment and responsibility. My stories are unfinished but demand an ending from a slew of followers. And so I keep writing, even though the stories are largely complete in my own mind. I know how they end. I know how they intertwine, how they connect. I know the backstage dancers, how the plot lines link together, where each thread is leading; my readers do not.

And so I continue writing, even as I remain cautious about how much I share.

To The Future

What comes next is largely unknown, even to me. I have many, many, many stories, both in original settings and fandoms. I work on some of them from time to time, in between trying to focus on my bigger hits. Sometimes I just open one and begin reading what I’d already written, refreshing my memory and contemplating where I want the story to go.

I’ve considered other forms of storytelling as well. Otome games have my interest, specifically, because of the nature of them; a single protagonist and multiple love interests with their own unique tales to tell. I love that format and have tried crafting numerous stories for them, but they’ve yet to gain any real ground.

This is partly because it’s a huge undertaking. It’d require more than myself to get them made. I can do art and writing, but I know little to nothing of coding. I’m unsure how I would turn words and images into a novella-type game. Originally I wanted Fluxx and Kyone’s help -- Kyone because I felt her art is better than mine, and Fluxx because she has experience coding. I tried to get them involved. They did not get involved.

As far as otome games are concerned, I am alone.

But this is fine. I am a better writer than anything else -- better than I am an artist, a gamer, or a friend, based on my history. So I’ll continue to write. And if I never truly create an original story, if I never get published, if I never receive royalties for my years of painstaking effort, then so be it.

I made people happy. I made people gush and scream and keyboard-smash. I made people laugh and cry. I made people fall in love with that which I love.

That’s enough.

I’ll see you soon with more updates. My stories are not yet finished.

- Nightshade

#siren nightshade #autobiography #sfw #written #personal

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