#dw dw i have so much wally on my brain

[jazzzzzzhands]

I had a Wally dream! Well I actually do dream about drawing him a lot. But this time he was real! Like I was drawing him into existence, mid-air.

Actually manifesting him irl lmao.

He was so so patient too!

Oh but have another dream sketch, this one is a bit older bc I was thinking of finishing it but ahh well

Wally was sitting so peacefully on a river bank. But then these eyes faded into existence! They did not belong to the scene. They looked slightly digital and glowy. They made the scene distort like an old messed up VHS. Then they disappeared.

I recall one other dream. But I did not doodle for it. But I did write it in my dream journal!!

Oopsie!!

[pawfulofwaffles]

This was supposed to be a small textpost but, as evident in the story I tell in this textpost, if I'm passionate about something a short piece can turn into a lengthy tale. Just me going on about my unnecessarily angsty Welcome Home story and the way it began, read if you want.

Randomly remembering that I started writing my Welcome Home story(or fanfic ig but I like calling it a story) all because of one TikTok I watched... I could probably find it, I watched it on the day that I fell down the Welcome Home rabbithole and got unhealthily, addictively, and obsessively hyperfixated...

Basically it was just a joke suggesting the idea of the neighbors making Wally go work at Howdy's whenever he stole, paired with audio from Brandon Roger's "Elmer HATES his job" skit IIRC. Now, in one post I mention that my brain LOVES making stuff angsty. Normally, I'll see one prompt, I'll write a oneshot about it. One incorrect quote can turn into a short, written scene to match it. However, if it has the potential to be angsty? Yeah, I'm going to expand on it, I'm going to find a way to make men cry if it's the last thing I do.

So, of course, upon seeing a simple funny TikTok about Wally going to work at Howdy's for misbehaving, my brain went "Ok but what if he was stealing for a good reason, like he was starving or something? What if he started mentally deteriorating while there, what if it got super bad and sad and-" and at first it was a simple, small idea I had in my head, where Wally needed to work at Howdy's for like a few days but in that time-- because of Home's manipulation(sorry Home lovers Home is like the Disney villian of my story 😔😔 dw tho I don't really have an opinion on actual Home even tho I wanna kill my version of him in my story) Wally was like "damn now all my friends will hate me" and there was gonna be self-loathing but then comfort when Howdy found out-- ANYWAYS, I'm not gonna give too much away if I actually ever do put part 1 on my ao3, but basically it was simply a TikTok turned 14 yo's angst prompt.

Until sometime,

unknowingly on Clown's birthday,

I began writing.

Now, I have a 74-page long fanfiction, one part being 58 pages long and being about Wally stealing and then being forced to work at Howdy's, and the other part, yet to be finished, I'm not telling you about lol it's a surprise

(I just know this is gonna be one of those things I post about then regret later ok anyways)

[threewaysdivided]

I just wanted to say: I love your art and especially your banner rn by talos! also your fic as well thank you for creating everything that you do for people, it’s awesome!

Second: what’s something that you’ve been chewing on lately, story wise? What character conflict, or plot point can you tell me about (that doesn’t spoil too much of course)? I wanna hear your thoughts about the characters you write and your head-cannons on them too! Just spit some word vomit at me!

Thank you! 

My current banner art is actually a crop of the first paired piece I ever did to go with my Deathly Weapons fic.  (Specifically Chapter 11, which I still have a soft spot for since it’s one of earliest chapters that really let me lean into scratching the thing-I-haven’t-seen-too-often-in-fanfic itch.) 

I recently got my hands on a discounted Wacom (my digital art process got tanked a few years ago when my poor art-compatible hybrid tablet-laptop was tragically taken from us by a cracked motherboard) so I’m looking forward to getting into a faster art workflow again and maybe putting some new pieces out more easily.  I’d like to do more comic art pieces for the Chapter 18 mission, and there’s a silly little concept drawing for the planned Mission 5 that might be new-blog-banner material if it turns out nicely.  We’ll have to see how that goes.

As for what I’ve been chewing on story-wise lately… I’ve sort of been all over the place.  I’m still on burnout recovery so I’ve been letting myself move non-sequentially, working on the bits my brain feels like focussing on rather than trying to force creativity where the juice isn’t flowing.   (One of the things about being my type of writing-nerd is that “self-indulgent” for me means a story with plenty of material to analyse, which is very fun as a reader but has created a lot of work for myself as the writer.  As mentioned in another post, I have a full-blown TV-show-style story-bible for this one.)

Recently, my authorial ping-pong-ing has been going into a fair bit of spoiler territory.  There are some chunks of the Act III endgame plan which are underdeveloped in the specifics of what the big-boss bad-guys’ plan is, whether I want to involve the Anti-Ecto Acts more, and the logistics of both the counter-strategy our heroes are planning to use and how to make its more action-heavy parts look cool in writing.  When I’m not doing that I’ve been focussing a lot on the upcoming Wally-centric chapters, which are a set I’ve been wanting to keep schtum about since there’s a small potential spoiler mixed in and I don’t want to risk giving the game up or pre-setting people’s expectations before they have a chance to blind read (even if a few people have already made some close guesses in the comments).  It puts me in a bit of an odd-spot right now because the chapters I’m drafting are an immediate spoiler, the later sections I’m working on are a major spoiler and there’s a good chance that a lot of the character stuff going on in the middle won’t make a whole lot of coherent sense without prior context because of how I like to layer foreshadowing/development.

That said, Wally-centric chapters mean Wally thoughts, and of those I have plenty to share:

First of all, I want to establish that I really do like Wally as a character.  The DW chapter set comprising Flashpoints through to Equilibrium is going to explore and develop some of his flaws and insecurities, which means he isn’t going to be looking his best, but it’s not meant to be a Ron The Death Eater situation.  He’s just a complex person, and taking him warts and all means sometimes you have to get up close and personal on the warts.

Something that I’m maybe a bit over-conscious of when reviewing my DW story notes is worrying about letting Wally slide into just being punching-bag joke-fodder.  Wally is quippy, irreverent, a little tactless and prone to being a bit of an impulsive goober who sometimes gets possessed by teenage boner-brain, which makes him easy to fall back on as a default source of incidental levity (whether cracking the joke or being the punchline).  Because I’m now writing an 8-character ensemble where most non-focal characters only get a few lines per conversation, it’s easy for characters to slide into being defined by their strongest surface level trait(s)… and something I worry about with Wally is that his availability as a source of jokes runs the risk of Flanderisation into a disposable Scrappy/ Flirty Comic Relief, which isn’t his character.  Wally is actually really important – not just for his scientific book-smarts but for his perceptiveness, earnestness and ability to function as one of the emotional barometers for the squad – so I always have it in the back of my mind to make sure I include enough moments that actually demonstrate those qualities and the other characters’ appreciation of them/ their friendship, so that it counterbalances the more light-hearted goofery.

I think he’s walking the same tightrope as Sokka from Avatar: the Last Airbender – yes, he tends to take the L more often than the others for comedy purposes and sometimes he gets stuck with supremely dumb side-plots for the sake of tonal balance, but to claim that it’s the entirety of his characterisation really misses the point by a wide mile.

On that note, I actually really like the decision YJ!Animated decided to go with in its first and only season (ahem) in giving Wally a normal and functional family background.  I know that’s not the typical background for his comics counterparts (and no shade on other fan-writers who want to write AUs exploring the abuse dynamic, those are really interesting stories) but I think it was a smart deviation for the purposes of a large ensemble, and offered a fair bit of potential for cast-balance.  It lets him serve an important role as the normal one – not only as an easy window into what the current lives of ordinary middle-class civilians look like (which is good because ordinary people are who our heroes are donning the masks to protect) but also as a touch-stone for the others, most of whom either come from different cultures or from very atypical backgrounds.  Even if we discount the Impure Atlantean with military training, the ostracised White Martian and the Half-Alien clone-weapon, the other members of this line-up are an orphaned circus acrobat adopted by a billionaire, a girl from a dangerously dysfunctional criminal household where she was forced to fight her sibling, and a fledgling sorceress raised by an overprotective single Dad.  The others might intellectually understand what a “normal” childhood and family look like but they don’t necessarily know it as intuitively and intimately as Wally does.  That normality gives Wally the potential to be a more stable foundation for the others, a source of emotional contrast and of a necessary wholesome mundanity.  That is a good thing for the Team to have.  I think it also speaks volumes to the heart of his character.  For this Wally, the Flash and heroism weren’t an escape from a bad personal situation.  His life was actually pretty comfy and privileged - he didn’t experience a brutal wakeup to the injustices of the world or some other personal call to action.  This is a Wally who opted into the game because he loves the players and sincerely believes in their values and mission.  And while that might mean he has a more romanticised idea of what heroism entails – and will probably face some rough shocks down the line as that rosy vision runs into those more brutal realities – it also means he brings a sincere hopefulness to the job that is less hardened than a lot of his roughed-up, pre-jaded peers.  Underneath the teen sarcasm and surface-level lancer/smart-guy traits, this Wally has as much power to be a stealth-Heart as any of his Flash!counterparts.

Something else I find interesting when using Wally is how a lot of his strengths and flaws feed into each other – and I think this alternate backstory is part of it.  For all of his good heart Wally can come off as insensitive, and I think some of that could be read as a product of living a more charmed life.  I think he’s susceptible to a thing that a lot of real people do – universalising their own personal experience as the default – and that while he is canonically a geek and somewhat genre-savvy about hero cliches, he’s a geek about in-universe media so he probably doesn’t think to apply those tropes to “real people” like himself or his colleagues.  While this Wally is a skeptic, he’s not a cynic, and I think he might forget how much of an outlier he is in a world where things like living parents and loving parents are often mutually exclusive.  He’s smart enough to connect dots but there’s a little blind-spot where he simply might not think to until one of the others jabs an elbow into his ribs, because his default view on humanity is in some ways a little kinder than typical due to that small but still significant amount of privilege.

At the same time, Wally is also someone who has probably run into (or watched his mentor run into) a lamp-post at high-speed at least once in his career.  He contains multitudes and among those multitudes is an endless capacity for some absolute Looney-Tunes nonsense, which the world is 100% better off for having.

I love him, your honour.

[liketolaugh-writes]

attempting to express the depth of my gratitude for your clear and concise response to my ask thru text is impossible so just imagine me bowing down on my hands and knees forehead to the floor, repeatedly and emphatically. i dont always get responses, and on top of replying at all, urs is so Clear. u might not be the hero of hyrule but ur the hero of my heart. goofball dramatics aside, thank u! if i do write things (hopefully i will! i have so many thoughts and im dying) i likely will give a shoutout n a direct link to ur AO3 on whatever works i post so ppl can eat from the source material and hopefully develop some good taste headcanons themselves. (I AM ALSO THINKING OF MAKING. A CROSSOVER COMIC CUZ LINKED UNIVERSE IS GOOD BUT ITS NOT WHAT I WAAAANT. BUT THATS AN EVEN BIGGER PROJECT. if i do tho ur name/handle is getting slapped on all relevant related surfaces when it comes to the specific BOTW headcanons)

THANK YOU AGAIN. also, dw abt how long it takes to reply/rambling cuz i dont shut up and to prove that heres some secret names for the links: ive been calling botw link Honey since games release cuz for some reason i saw his hair n i was like wow lol honey. omg his hair looks like honey. i got rly excited when i saw u use honey nut i was like BIG BRAIN MF HERE. I ALSO SOMETIMES CALL HIM BEE but thats less common. LBW is wally cuz he. cuz. cuz walls. painting. wall painting. wally. TTP is topaz because saying To The Past rly fast and muffled can sound like Topaz to me. and i like coming up with nicknames for all of them. even hyrule warriors, hes rio (from war-rio-rs) because i dont think hed like to be called something associated with battle (bcuz headcanons) and i wanted to be nice to him and i love him and i love all the links. wally and honey r my big biases and so is a super secret third link i cant talk abt yet bcuz no one can see him coming. NO one can see him coming. thanks for listening and i am so sorry for the epic goofball spam ask

Thank you so much, and good luck with your work!! <3 And yes, I love Linked Universe to death but halfway through reading the first fic (thank you, Unraveled) I was already designing Circuit Breaker. (This sounds like damning criticism but I promise it's not, Unraveled and the Linked Universe are great, I'm just extraordinarily picky about my headcanons.)

I completely feel you on the Links from the different games, too - it's entirely too easy to fall in love with them, lol. I could probably go on a rant about every single one of them. (And I did, frankly.)