#don't make writers feel bad

[neiptune]

keep in mind that these are stories... that people are writing as a hobby... for free... most times for you to bust a nut...............

[yellowocaballero]

There's a genre of post that I see pretty frequently, which can overall be summed up as, "Modern fandom has a culture problem where fanfic authors are treated as content producers instead of community members and their fanfic is treated as a commodity to be consumed instead of a high-effort labor of love that deserves attention and compliments given directly to the author". I agree with 3/4ths of that. I find the part I disagree with very interesting, the same way I find a lot of writeblr interesting, because it's a perspective that I had to work very hard to actually understand.

Because the posts have such a warped view of what writing is and why we post our writing! They say that fanfic fights against the commodified internet we live in, but all they're doing is changing the currency of payment in this attention economy. Another way you can summarize about 70% of these posts is, "My payment for writing and posting my fanfiction is compliments, and if you do not give me those compliments you are not paying. If you give those compliments behind my back, or talk about them privately without giving them to me as well, then you are stealing from me." I don't want to put it like that, but a lot of these posts use words like 'deprive', as if the reader who enjoys the fic without commenting is withholding something from them that they deserve. They use the word engagement, and they do talk about how part of that engagement is just the joy of talking about AUs and ships with other people, but when people say that comments are their motivation to keep writing, what they mean is that validation is their motivation to keep writing. Which is compliments.

I understand that, because I understand that fanfic writers are not immune to the attention economy. But I don't understand how almost every one of these posts talk about how this lack of attention makes them stop writing - that this act of theft is killing their desire to write. I could understand this if they meant 'desire to POST fic' (I don't post fic I think zero people would read.), but they talk about how lack of payment stops them from writing at all.

IMHO, that is what creates a commodity from fic. People want to treat fic as art, but an artist makes art for themself. Art is made because we want to hold parts of skills and ourselves in our hands. If you won't make art if you get no payment, then you have devalued the art completely.

We think of AO3 as this unique site that's born entirely from passion and is filled with fics written for love of the game. But guilt-tripping posts that shame people for not commenting on a fic they enjoy, and that describe how there's no point in writing fic if it's not getting attention, are directly contributing towards the culture of treating fic like a commodity.

I also really want a fandom culture where the relationship between artist and reader is reciprocal, where it feels like a community, and where I get to talk about my fanfic with people. My favorite part of posting fanfic is rambling about it on my blog, because I can talk about my art all day and I love it when people stop and listen. But I love that because I love my own art. If you love your own art, then it'll always have value.

Also Google your username, just trust me, that's how you find The Secret Discussions. Someone made a TikTok fansong of me once. WHAT?

[baejax-the-great]

If I were a writer at a big game company working on a sequel to a beloved series and the higher ups kept telling me to make the game shittier and kept sending my work back to me to be dumbed down even further somehow, and then once most of the writing was done they laid me and my coworkers off illegally without severance, I'd probably gleefully watch as people trashed the shitty game that shipped.

[elpeadro]

If the writers wanted CaitVi to be their canon OTP so damn bad, they had two ways of going about it:

THE GOOD ENDING:

Caitlyn doesn’t turn to fascism in her grief and rage. Ambessa still takes advantage of the council bombing to goad Piltover’s elite toward supporting martial law, likely installing Salo as her puppet as she originally planned to, but Caitlyn is one of the few who protest and refuse to be swept up in the authoritarian fervor Ambessa stokes. Because:

1) there’s no way she wouldn’t notice how fishy the attack on the memorial was. This is the same person who pieced together the conspiracy surrounding Silco and his criminal empire without ever stepping foot in Zaun. She’s a great detective who has been shown to see through the surface level cover-up. Not to mention the list of potential suspects with both motive and means is very small. Add on Mel’s insight, who she would interact with as one of the other Piltover characters who resists Ambessa’s scheming, and they would definitely pin Ambessa as their prime suspect. The problem is that they have no proof. All of the attackers are dead. Ambessa covered her tracks well, a nod to Noxian subterfuge in the wider lore. 

And most of all, and most horrifyingly, Piltover doesn’t care. They’re angry. They’re outraged. Their bigotry is being preyed on by Ambessa, but they hardly need a push to go from the indifferent oppression of Zaun to active, overwhelming oppression. They already saw Zaunites as a monolith: criminals, street scum, dirty people who need to stay out of Piltover’s golden streets.

That Jinx is the lone guilty party is irrelevant. Her attack threatens their status quo. It has disrupted the utopia of Piltover living in its ivory towers without a care in the world, and they will bring back that false sense of security by crushing any possibility of Zaun fighting back ever again.

and 2) even with the grief of losing her mother fresh on her mind, this is still Caitlyn Kirammen we’re talking about. The woman who gives up her rifle - not just a prized possession, but her means of self-defense and safety when she’s deep in the worst parts of Zaun - without a second thought to save Vi’s life. The woman who hugs Huck, a homeless drug addict with a cancerous-like growth on half his forehead, of her own volition.

Because she cares.

As we are reminded time and time again in season 1, while Caitlyn is an incredibly naive, privileged, idealistic woman with an exceptional ability to put her foot in her mouth and say the most tone deaf things, she has a good heart, and more importantly, is willing to learn. It isn’t easy at the start, but when confronted with the irrefutable proof of how awful Piltover’s treatment of Zaun is, she listens. She feels sympathy for Zaunites, even if they are drug addicts (Huck), convicts (Vi), or gang leaders (Ekko).

That same Caitlyn, the one we see a small glimpse of in episode 1 when she protests that innocents will be caught in the crossfire, would not stand for Piltover’s martial law and mass imprisonment of Zaunites. She would try to fight it alongside Mel, using her position and influence in the enforcers as Mel uses hers as a politician.

(While she still develops an obsession over Jinx and getting justice for her mother’s death, she doesn’t see collective punishment and chemical weapons as acceptable costs of achieving said justice.)

And if the writing stayed true to the themes of class conflict in season 1, then she would quickly be forced to confront the horrible realization that there is no fixing this. The faults are systematic, not individualistic.

It doesn’t matter if it’s Marcus or Salo or Ambessa or whoever. The enforcers and Piltover will always be corrupt institutions stepping on the necks of Zaun. Piltover’s society is rotten from the inside out. And if she isn’t going to stand by and let it happen (because she refuses to compromise her morals and enforce martial law, because she cares - not just about Vi, but about Ekko and the Firelights, Huck, all the innocent people who will be swept up in Piltover’s thirst for blood), then the only way forward is to fight against Piltover.

So she becomes a class traitor. She fights alongside Vi and Ekko in repelling enforcers and Noxian soldiers from Zaun, protects the innocent. 

Her relationship with Vi develops healthily compared to the canon season 2 - or as best it can in the midst of fighting a war and given their personal issues (Caitlyn’s grief and rage; Vi's self-loathing and guilt) - and they are good for each other.

It becomes a loving, supportive relationship and a wonderful piece of queer representation.

It would be beautiful. Not just the love and trust they have in each other, but that such love can flourish even in dark times. That people are capable of being defined not by their class and the systems they are born into, but by their actions and morals.

(Would such writing be too radical for the higher-ups at Netflix, Riot, and Fortiche (i.e. writing a class traitor and class war)? Most likely, but that discussion is for another time.)

Part 2: The Bad, Tragic Ending

Part 3: The Disjumbled, Tonal Mess of an Ending We Got

[angelknives]

[crookedfivefingers]

3.13 | ᴛʜᴇ ʟᴀꜱᴛ ᴏꜰ ᴛʜᴇ ᴛɪᴍᴇ ʟᴏʀᴅꜱ

link to the post I accidentally wound up prattling endlessly about in the tags 💀

[epickiya722]

Admittedly, I will follow an artist because of their art, but when they post things that are not art I don't mind it.

In fact, I enjoy it as much as I do their art because it's like "oh, yeah, I totally get you there" and "you like that thing, too, sweetness" and "you have my support, take your time, get better, we all need a break at some point".

Like, yes show me the part of you that isn't just "the artist". Let me see how you are without having to spend hours working in a piece to post.

So it does annoy me that I'll see people send asks like "when are you going to post art again, I followed you for art only" and "why did stop drawing this or that" and so on and so on with other obviously "I'm entitled" asks.

Like, let's no forget anyone who does art, write and other creative works are human.

They're allowed to have blogs that aren't just solely art and post it every single damn day and it sucks that there are people who make them feel that way.

[stupidlittlespirit]

writing the Spores sequel moodmoard

[qcomicsy]

I have the controversial opinion that maybe, just maybe we stop wanting to go after people with pitchforks for getting characters wrong and not reading the comics inviting them to easy and accessible ways of and making our own content with comic accurate representation

people might feel less anxious about starting comics and misinformation won't spread as easily

[ashtonisvibing]

i've seen the minecraft movie trailer

who was the writer that decided to make steve reference "the children yearn for the mines"

i just want to talk

no ignore the baseball bat in my hands

[monstermoviedean]

season 15 is BAD bad. not even fun bad or so bad it's good. it's just fucking bad. and do not tell me it was because of covid

[deoidesign]

Can you make a tutorial on how you world build and make ocs? I can't seem to make any people in my brain, but then when I try to come up with environments jobs, beliefs and little details to slowly come up with someone, I think: well I don't really know how people have influenced the world- it's a weird loop

To be honest, I don't think I can! Writing is an extremely personal process. The way I write is directly related to how I process things, what I find important in stories, years of my own analysis of my and other's writing, etc... The way you write will be unique to you, as well. But I can explain how I personally think of it.

The short answer:

Write. Write anything and everything, it's a tool to explore your ideas. Analyze your own writing, and write more. Then, as you discover which ideas you want to develop, write more to explore them more. You won't know what you want otherwise!

The long answer:

I think this kind of loop is common. It's easy to feel like everything needs to be done "at once," because our job as writers is to make elements logically fit with each other for our readers. But as you've discovered, developing multiple elements simultaneously isn't really possible, or at least is extremely difficult.

Personally, when I think of writing, I break it into three major elements; characters, world, and plot. As much as possible every scene explores one or more of these, and as much as possible these three things tie back into what I personally consider most important: theme.

Everything I do is in service of the themes I want to present. Without them my events feel aimless. It can take a while to discover them, but they're the core of my work. You will have to discover what you feel is the core of yours. Analyzing other media helps with this too.

Concepts in your brain exist in a state of infinite potential. But when you start writing you have to start making choices, which removes potential as you move forward... But you have to move forward anyways. If there's ideas you want to explore later, you can always explore them later.

What this ends up meaning, to answer your question, is that I don't think of my characters as "people in my brain" or my worlds as something people have influenced... Not at their core, at least. They are tools that I use to represent specific ideas. Obviously they're also my blorbos, but mostly they're serving a specific narrative purpose.

So above all else... Write. Write, and discover what you're writing about, and then start over and write with that in mind. Keep doing this. But you have to write!

[lupins-hehim-pussy]

I wanna know ur Fontaine msq criticisms 👁️👁️👂I’m all ears

I'm not sure if you wanted me to talk about this secretly or publicly but! Here I go!

The TLDR: Fontaine MSQ aestheticised prison, poverty, child abuse, the justice system/court and didn't properly address any of it.

More:

Focalors/Furina has way too much of a sympathetic angle for a dictator who's lets people drown with her inaction.

Neuvillette feels Bad for sentencing some people to death/prison, but that's it. He's one of the most powerful people in Fontaine. If he felt like there are systemic injustices, I.E sending an abused Child to prison, he should be the first person to DO something about it, not just cry and be sad so the audience can be like aw, that's complex character writing isn't it? No it's not! And guilt doesn't absolve you!!!!!!! (These are stuff we deal with in OTCOJ read my fic now /j)

Meropide has children in it, both Sentenced there (Wriothesley) and BORN THERE (Lanoire), and this is just a quirk of the place. Not only that, Meropide accepts prisoners of all genders and crimes. There are abusers and abuse victims in one place. Do you know how bad that is? How much potential for crimes to happen in a place like that— oh wait, Meropide isn't under Fontaine's jurisdiction. If you are assaulted as an inmate it literally means nothing to the court.

Wriothesley had no qualifications when he took over. Depending on how long he lived on the streets, how old he was when he killed his parents, how old he was when he was first taken in by the orphanage, etc, the man might never have more than 4–5 years of formal education. Sigewinne probably had to teach him how to write reports. And do Meropide's spreadsheets. Edit because I forgot to elaborate on this one: This isn't a point brought up anywhere, which is bad, because when poverty and incarceration robs you of a proper education (and the rights to vote in many places too, too, by the way), it reduces your prospects for jobs, reduces many people's ability to get a home etc etc. Wriothesley was just, narratively, Given his position.

Meropide is an industrialized prison, and they portray this as a good thing. Prisoners are paid in coupons for their labour, and this is also portrayed as a good thing.

The One-Meal-A-Day reform was something Paimon gushed about being so great of a perk, that people might want to go to jail for food (could be interesting and reflective of systemic poverty if MHY had brains, but they don't, so I was just Pissed because essentially all Paimon wanted to say was "Prison isn't so bad, but still don't go to prison guys! Prison labour is really hard!"). By the way, in most real-world prisons they are obligated to feed you three meals a day. Because that's how much food a human needs. MHY went with one meal just so they can say "if you want to eat more, you have to work." And then the welfare meal is a goddamn gacha. So imagine you're a starving child who's too weak to work in the fucking robot assembly line, and you wander up for your first meal in 24 hours, only to luck in with a shit one. I'd kill myself.

They wrote Wriothesley, who's a victim of the system, into a guy who's say shit like "I'm the Duke I can do whatever I want" for a cool moment where he choke-slams an inmate (I know he was a bad guy. But also, in copaganda when cops are violent/disregarding protocols, they are always only portrayed to do that against bad guys, so what does our critical thinking tells us about this one?) They wrote Wriothesley, who was an inmate of a prison so bad, so notorious that it is the literal boogeyman of Fontaine, that has a legal (???) fighting pit, with an administrator who abuses his position to be unreasonable, to willingly stay in the place and become an Administrator who would choke-slam an inmate while saying a cool line about how he has the power to do whatever he wants. They wrote him, the guy who had to be fed on the streets by melusines, to think one-meal-a-day was a good enough reform (while he spends god-knows how much on his boat). This wasn't a victim-turns-into-abuser narrative either, they want all this to be seen as positive character growth.

And then, the final kicker is, they gloss over his entire abuse. You can only read about these shit in his profile, which most people don't because they don't Have Him or doesn't care to unlock it/read it online, and they jammed his entire backstory into a flaccid info-dump at the end of his character story quest. This man isn't Allowed to feel abused and neglected and show any reaction to it within the narrative of Fontaine itself, because if they actually Gave Weight to what happened to him, they'd have to confront THE FUCKING JUSTICE SYSTEM they had NO PLANS on criticising. I don't think they ever explicitly said the fucking Crime-Theatre nonsense was Bad either.

I could go on, but this is already so long. But yeah, I hope this gave you an idea.

[bitchthefuck1]

you know what, I actually will talk about this because it's bothering me. The issue with focussing so heavily on syd and carmy's potential for a romantic relationship isn't that there's something inherently unintellectual about romance or whatever, it's that a lot of people seem incapable of doing that without immediately flattening the story and ignoring or intentionally misreading any and all nuance for the sake of that romance. Every scene suddenly becomes about how it impacts their relationship, every analysis is done through a romantic lens, every frame or line of dialogue becomes about finding some easter egg or hint that "proves" these people should start dating. Their dynamic is absolutely a fundamental part of this show, but if you can only see it as a will-they-won't-they, you miss so much of what the story is actually trying to say with these two.

There are good versions of this story where their relationship is romantic and there are good versions of this story where it isn't, but as soon as you decide them being together is "the point," you lose the ability to actually judge the story for what it is, not what you want it to be.

[elpeadro]

Part 1: The Good Ending

Part 2: The Bad, Tragic Ending

If the writers wanted CaitVi to be their canon OTP so bad, they had two ways of going about it…sike there was a secret third ending all along!

THE DISJUMBLED, TONAL MESS OF AN ENDING WE GOT:

Despite the pacing and dialogue issues of the first three episodes, I have nothing bad to say about Act 1’s ending. Caitlyn’s corruption arc, while extremely rushed in getting to this point given where her characterization was at in season 1, reaches its climax as we see just how far she has fallen: being willing to shoot a child, lashing out and hitting Vi, saying some incredibly bigoted things toward Vi, and, the pièce de résistance and one of my favorite scenes in the entire show, becoming the dictator of Piltover as the enforcers and Noxians beat their chests in salute to her. When Ambessa drapes that cloak over her shoulders and Caitlyn thumps her fist against her chest, it feels like the birth of a monster - and I mean that in the best way possible.

And she is a monster…except her actions are mostly confined to two music montages in episodes 3 and 4 and then shuffled off to the side for Warwick in Act 2 and the Machine Herald War in Act 3.

Just as it is a major problem when she goes from naive and priviledged, but good-hearted S1 Caitlyn to “let’s commit war crimes against a civilian population” S2 Caitlyn in the span of the Heavy is the Crown + Hellfire montages, it is even more a problem when the near-entirety of her dictator era is confined to the Paint the Town Blue montage. Because while I would begrudgingly accept the former being rushed to set up the latter’s payoff, the writers don’t pay it off.

At the end of episode 3, Caitlyn ascends to dictatorship. At the beginning of episode 4, she is questioning Ambessa, the justifications for martial law, and Maddie even suggests she could reinstate the council and remove herself as dictator. Can you say ‘jarring’?

That’s not how this works! You don’t write a good character having a fall from grace into a villain arc, then fast forward through the lowest and worst points of said arc. It’s like they made her a dictator just for the flavor it would give her character combined with the angst of her and Vi breaking up. Which, that’s bad writing process to begin with, but it’s especially bad when the writing has her BECOME A FASCIST DICTATOR.

You absolutely cannot evoke the political imagery of fascism only to not follow through on it. It is a conscious, deliberate choice to write and animate the end of episode 3 and the opening montage of episode 4 as they are presented.

In the Paint the Town Blue montage, we see: 

banners with the Kiramman crest being hung up all over the city

security checkpoints for Zaunites with armed enforcers standing watch

a prison with watchtowers and tall, barbed wire fences

enforcers acting as riot police (complete with riot shields)

Zaunites throwing Molotovs at said riot police

unarmed Zaunites running from armed enforcers

a Zaunite prisoner being photographed standing against a wall with a bag over their head (I really want to point this one out)

an enforcer stepping on the head of a Zaunite who is already laying on the ground and being handcuffed by another enforcer

Zaunite rebels hiding in a boarded up shop from armed enforcers

Zaunite prisoners being marched forward with their hands behind their heads

an enforcer beating someone

a line of Zaunites kneeling with their hands cuffed behind their backs as an enforcer beats another prisoner

Caitlyn being framed in shadow with a brooding, sullen look

graffiti of Jinx as a revolutionary figure waving a blue flag

In short, a dictator’s regime putting up propaganda posters and symbols, political repression by the state, mass imprisonment, police brutality, civilian resistance against an authoritarian state, and people rallying around a revolutionary symbol. And don’t forget the opening of episode 3 where we hear the recording of Cassandra Kiramman say “the people of the Undercity deserve to breathe” only for Caitlyn to immediately go “umm actually no they don’t; time to weaponize toxic, carcinogenic smog against them and revoke the most basic of human rights.”

(Side note: “Paint the Town Blue” as the song for this montage doesn’t feel right, tonally. A bit too energetic and idk, peppy? This is a montage showing an oppressed group of people being brutalized by a fascist state. Maybe go for something somber and/or horrifying? Or something that makes viewers sick from how angry they are at the sight? Just a thought.)

If the writers were going to do something with all of this, then they did a good job - song choice notwithstanding. 

The problem is they don’t. Not a single character confronts Caitlyn over the atrocities she committed.

When Vi sees her - the woman who broke her heart, who betrayed her, who became a dictator and stepped on the necks of Vi’s people for a year - she’s more annoyed and mad at Caitlyn for attacking her on accident than she is for, I don’t know, THE WHOLE DICTATOR THING? Season 1 Vi would’ve let Caitlyn absolutely have it, if not outright fought her for what she did to Vi’s city.

In what is one of the most stunning bits of character assassination I’ve seen, Jinx APOLOGIZES to Caitlyn for killing her mom.

Ekko got written out of the story to where he never interacted with Caitlyn this season, because if he was giving her shit in season 1, then he would’ve let her absolutely have it, even harder than Vi did.

Sevika got written out of the story entirely after episode 4.

Jayce never comments on it once he gets back.

Mel never comments on it once she gets back.

The writers try to trick us with Vi and Caitlyn’s argument in episode 8, and then Caitlyn’s one-sided venting to Jinx in the jail cell about how they can never repay their crimes, but those are both so weak and half-assed.

We never see Caitlyn realize the weight of her crimes. She needed to have a scene where she “wakes up” and is horrified at how far she’s fallen and all the terrible things she’s done. We don’t get that. She’s already woken up and questioning things when we see her for the first time in episode 4. Nor does she suffer from the guilt of said crimes. Again, I’m going to complain about the blatant Macbeth reference in her part of the intro credits, because how do you deliberately evoke fucking MACBETH for a character who undergoes a villain arc and commits these horrible actions only to not have her crumble under the weight of her sins…you know…like what happens in Macbeth.

So Caitlyn isn’t held accountable either externally or internally. This wouldn’t be a problem if handled properly. A villain doesn’t have to be held accountable nor realize they’re a bad person to be an effective, satisfying character.

The problem is the tone of everything that comes after the opening of episode 4.

It’s almost like the writers are actively trying to have Caitlyn commit as few on-screen, bad actions as possible during her dictator era. Really all she does is threaten Singed with the prison cells she has deemed too inhumane to use. (Oh yay! She hasn’t been as awful as she could have been). After that, she immediately flips back to Vi’s side to help save Warwick, has a very surface level argument so people can say “but Vi did call her out”, “wins” Vi’s affections over Jinx and has sex in a jail cell with Vi going down on her (that sex scene could be its own post god I hate it), gets to be one of the good guys in the war without any pushback, and gets her happy ending with Vi.

The framing of all of this, both textually and by word of God via the authors, is simply incompatible with the weight of her crimes. 

The jail cell scene is presented as Vi and Caitlyn reconnecting and finally coming together, complete with a happy pop song - ignoring Vi’s sister being clearly suicidal and Vi certainly having trauma from spending 7 years in prison where the warden beat her enough times that he didn’t bother keeping count, to say nothing of Caitlyn not having earned Vi’s trust and intimacy. (Also, Vi couldn’t have gotten any pleasure or attention? They couldn’t have taken it to an actual bed?)

The way Vi talks about herself going behind Caitlyn’s back is unhealthy and toxic. (“I went behind your back (for my sister, who has committed far less heinous crimes than you, who just watched the kid she sorta adopted die right in front of her and is now a mental wreck, after you locked her up using your unilateral power as dictator of Piltover.)”)

Vi being very, very emotionally fragile and in no way composed enough to have sex is ignored. (It shouldn’t have to be said, but if someone is this close to having a breakdown and has already punched the wall until their knuckles are bruised, you absolutely should not have sex with them when they’re in such a vulnerable state.)

The “I’m the dirt beneath your nails” line is framed as cutesy and romantic, when that’s actually a horrible, demeaning thing for someone who is a member of the oppressed class to say about herself when her partner is a member of the oppressor class and quite literally was a dictator that violated the human rights of people like Vi, called them animals, and said their blood made them this way.

And most importantly, Caitlyn never has to confront the fact that she became a dictator and did all of these terrible things while in power.

Which, I truly cannot believe I am having to say this, but if you aren’t going to touch on the fact that a protagonist went down a dark path and became a fascist dictator, DON’T WRITE HER BECOMING A FASCIST DICTATOR.

(Or you embrace the tragic, toxic nature of leaving that stuff unaddressed, as discussed in part two.)

TL;DR: the ending CaitVi got is framed as a happy ending, except Caitlyn didn’t put in any of the work for it to be anywhere near a happy, healthy relationship, so it comes across as hollow, forced, and tonally off.

[aromanticannibal]

btw i have a new crack theory for mystery character now that there's only 3 chapters left: their identity is never going to be important. we're just going to see a civilian almost ignore them with the excuse of "a hero will come" and then remember something that either deku or another important character will say on TV or something and help them out, therefore avoiding the creation of another shigaraki tomura (as was said in 427). The fact that the character appears around when Todoroki talks about how this is the same time during which All For One thrived/appeared feels important to me.

I don't think there's enough time left to introduce a new character or to justify it being Tomura or Tenko. If it isn't that (my crack theory), I think there's a good chance that Horikoshi was either forced/told/encouraged to finish the manga earlier or himself decided against making it as long as he wanted when 425 came out, because it's way too ambitious to introduce a new character or to make it so a character isn't actually dead (when that would need to be thoroughly explained) five chapters from the end.