#endings and new beginnings

[orvstorytimebb]

Hello, Readers!

Art by: @1864shiix

We're here to announce the Big Bang is on its final chapter. We hope you're excited to see the beautiful creations our participants have crafted for you!

[iriemorning]

dancing in the dark

as you might have known already, i work in bursts (re: not your everyday person) it's not so easy for me to commit to something, especially to as dreadful a task as writing. yet i managed to write posts almost everyday ever since i introduced this blog! this month has been a blessing. i have a personal masterpost of all my contents here so far, and i can't believe i reached 11 titular pieces but it's just the 10th of may. i have exceeded myself. i briefly remember the good old days back in 2015-2016, when i was writing a chapter of my book everyday after class and posting it on the same day. now i managed to do it again! this is a tribute to the younger me, ayreng, who was a creative enterprise.

in retrospect, the common denominator that i find now and before is i was inspired. i was in that zone. i was in love with writing before, and now im getting hooked to it again.

writing was my first love, and now that i am older and wiser, i am confident in my current knowledge and capabilities that i can shower it with much better affection from my heart, time of my day, and authenticity from my soul. 

i wasn't always enlightened in my path this way. i was an immature kid, i fought with my siblings and answered my parents back, i was a teenager who explored the internet and the darkest agencies of humanity too early and got involved with online catfights; i was a depressed homebody who didn't want to do the dishes and a grade-conscious student that wanted glittering objects and worldly validations. pursuing literature as a bachelor degree was not even in my mind, because all throughout highschool i was admitted to a class specializing in STEM curriculum that prioritized in practical research. my 'dream job' was to be a civil engineer: designing roads and buildings, constructing sturdy homes in towns and cities. it's only when i got shortlisted in the college of arts and letters requesting for a sample of my piece that i started to reconsider

...that maybe i was really meant for the arts.

arts is too broad to be a job prospect, right? what am i gonna do there? what point am i making here? but that's the exact reason why it's amazing. the universality of arts and how it transcends bounds by essentially functioning on the same processes in different forms gives you the opportunity to be fluid and apply your skill in whatever you choose to do or wherever you end up in. who knows, maybe i'm an online blogger today, and be a published author tomorrow; a scriptwriter in the next few weeks, a director in the next few months, and a series producer in the next few years? who knows? (right from the start, maybe i got the engineering part right... though not in plots of land, but story plots)

the least common denominator among them all is the skill of having your own vision for what you want to make. as long as you get that part in the spotlight, even if all you see around you is pitch black, you can dance your way into the dark.

p.s. i guess this is the end of the first season of my reflective pieces. blog posts will be slowed down here or entirely stop for awhile. i might get inspired again and outline a series of posts for a potential second season once i hit a big milestone again in my life, and i get new realizations that i desire to speak out.

i'm now heading from spring to summer, and so i want to meet my next calling halfway: writing fiction. this next stage will be all about my characters' voices! enough about me for now haha. until then, またね!

[shockpinkrosary]

The beginning and the end

Happy new year !

[isjasz]

Remember, there is always a great big beautiful tomorrow.

[swift-kwikster]

Wow!!

[maybelsart]

Horns

[timethehobo]

I had some angsty thoughts so we shall suffer tgt with my doodle.

[y2kaee]

[neon-virus]

Pinky promise, pt:2

Prev/Next

[kidovna]

🤝🏻 part 1 (next)

[aonik]

The recent movie was so cool I had to draw something!

[franeridart]

The Housecat Philosophy - Ep 40

Ep 00 || < Prev || Next >

Read ahead on Patreon || Catch up on Webtoon || support me on ko-fi~✨

[aroaceleovaldez]

What is the PR disaster in question that made Rick announce TSATS? I wasn’t active in the online fandom at that point

Of course! This was awhile ago so it figures people don't remember it/aren't familiar:

Basically a couple years back (2020) the fandom had some posts circulate discussing the ways different characters in the Riordanverse were written poorly or offensively. There was a masterpost that went around tumblr but the two major points people were particularly focusing on were Piper and Samirah (particularly because Piper had featured prominently again in Trials of Apollo recently and the third MCGA book had further emphasized and discussed Samirah being Muslim, since it was supposed to take place during Ramadan). Basically each had multiple posts breaking down the ways they were depicted incorrectly or offensively. The entire fandom for a little bit was VERY intensely discussing this (and it's around this time the "RR crit" tag got very popularized on tumblr - it did exist before, but suddenly was being used VERY frequently - cause it was that wide-spread - though the discussion took over basically every side of Riordaverse social media on different platforms). People really wanted Rick to respond to these criticisms, so he did!

He made two blog posts, one about Piper and one about Samirah. He has since deleted both so the links are to archived versions. The short version: he essentially tried to justify his poor research and double-down that he hadn't written them offensively, actually, people were just being mean to him. The fandom, of course, reacted poorly to this.

[Further elaborated events under the cut since this got a bit lengthy]

(Fun fact, this all happened within a month or so of the time i posted an open letter on aphobic tropes in the Riordanverse that Rick replied to, and then he immediately followed with announcing that Reyna was intended to be ace-coded [which cause a LOT of fandom debate] before Rick dipped for a couple of weeks, and then came back to post the blog posts in response to Piper and Sam stuff. So I like to jokingly refer to this as "The time I imploded the fandom/drove Rick off of twitter." Twas I that set the house ablaze.)

Rick fully left social media after this and the LT Musical social media manager became Rick's social media manager for the time being.

So this all happened June/July of 2020. Tower of Nero would end up being published in October of 2020 and a few months after that Rick would state that he was done with the series and wouldn't be writing any more series installments involving Percy, and also that he wouldn't be writing a Nico quest following Tower of Nero as it "wasn't his place to" and encouraged the community to write their own versions of Nico's story.

The community continued to circulate the tumblr posts and discuss the topics of Rick's offensive character depictions, and this is also where we see the dramatic shift in how the fandom depicts Piper in fanwork (though in most cases it is admittedly not an improvement 😬) because of all this discussion. This is also around the time when the fandom brought Viria under scrutiny claiming that she was whitewashing Piper as part of the same discussions, through the justification that she was drawing Annabeth as having tan skin (which she does canonically), and if Annabeth has tanner skin then Piper then that's whitewashing Piper? Except they were using completely separate images of not fully rendered Piper art versus Annabeth in dramatic lighting, so it's all very awkward and poor logic, and did actually get kind of racist. A lot of people were calling it "Tannabeth Blackchase" (yeah, i know) or similar and a common sentiment you'd see repeated is "Don't draw Annabeth as having darker skin than Piper, because that's offensive/racist/whitewashing." (Note: it was not phrased "don't draw Piper as having lighter skin than Annabeth" - we also won't get into certain offensive depictions of Native Americans, but I digress). But yeah, the Annabeth stuff in all that did not age well at all.

Anyways, in October of 2021 however Rick would announce that he was co-writing The Sun And The Star - with a lot of heavy emphasis on how Mark Oshiro works as a sensitivity reader, and some false advertising from the official social media that Mark Oshiro was the first time a non-Riordan author would be collaborating on the series (disregarding the ghostwriters completely). One of the big criticisms in the breaking down of issues in Rick's writing was his lack of ever seeking a sensitivity reader, and fans claiming that a sensitivity reader could solve a lot of the problems. This was basically Rick's "look! I totally listened!!!!" (though it did little to actually improve things, based on the book) and in TSATS as well Piper gets a large cameo at the end where the text very directly addresses a lot of points made in criticism of Rick's writing of her.

We also then of course got the CoTG trilogy later, explicitly stated to be for advertising purposes for the show.

So basically, short version: Rick came under scrutiny for a lot of offensive writing within the span of two months, made some bad blog posts doubling down about it, left social media. TOA ends. Rick says he wasn't going to continue the series/write what would become TSATS. Community celebrates the end of of the franchise but also continues to discuss Rick's poor writing and the blog posts at length. Rick suddenly announces TSATS and Mark Oshiro's involvement. Everybody gets distracted from being mad. Show announcement stuff also happens and the discussions peter out.

[nadhie]

this website works on the heisenberg principle of uncertainty bc u either hear about or see other people get new features and never get them yourself or you get some new random shit added without notice or update, but you can never have both

[stagefoureddiediaz]

No no you don’t understand - that it was Buck (and another guy) ripping the sleeves off Eddie’s PINK shirt is so interesting and loud. Pink representing innocence and naïveté this season as a theme - so Buck ripping off a sleeve (and waving it around) is a physical representation of buck being the one to rip away part of Eddie’s innocence- his naïveté

[minty364]

DPXDC Prompt 58 Part 7

The long dining room that held the ornate old dining table that seated way too many people already held  most of the family. Bruce was missing and Damian informed them he was at work, the only other person missing was Jason but it was typical for him to skip out as he didn’t live there and didn’t have the best track record with the rest of the family. That left Damian, Tim, Cass, Duke, and Dick seated.

Damian sat next to the chair that Bruce normally sat in at the head of the table. Tim sat across from Damian followed by Dick, Duke, and Cass. Danny sat next to Damian and Jazz sat next to Danny. 

“So, how was school?” Dick asked his elbows on the table with his head on his hands and a smile. He was the only adult in their life besides Bruce that actually cared about their schooling. 

Danny had actually forgotten that all of this had happened in just one day. The thought was a little jarring if Danny was being honest with himself. He wasn’t sure what to tell Dick, on one hand he was just asking about school on the other… no he wasn’t going to think about what happened right now. Just the thought caused phantom volts to go through his body like he was reliving the accident. He felt a nudge to his foot from the right and looked up to see Damian giving him a quizzical look. He cleared his throat and looked back over to Dick who was giving him the same kind of look. 

“I-I’m, uh… school was fine, didn’t learn much since school just started,” He eventually decided to say after stumbling on his words a little. 

“Dash isn’t picking on you again this year is he?” Dick asked with a concerned look on his face. 

Danny wished it was just Dash, the pain he felt from the portal was a thousand times worse than anything the bullying blond could pull. If it was just Dash, Danny could have just laughed it off and forgotten it probably, but it wasn’t just Dash and Danny couldn’t help but take a deep breath trying to gather his thoughts and calm himself.

He startled as he felt a hand on his knee, he looked to his left to see Jazz giving him a look of sympathy as she rubs her thumb comfortingly on his knee. She then spoke, “Danny you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to, Okay?”

Danny gave her a small nod, a small smile on his face. 

Before a new topic could be discussed Alfred arrived with their food and began serving them. Danny loved the food the old butler cooked especially since he was able to do so in a kitchen that wasn’t contaminated. Alfred did his best to make sure everyone was served food to their liking, as long as it was a balanced meal at the end of the day the elderly butler would serve just about anything you’d request.

Danny picked up his fork to begin on his salad, however when he tried to push the fork into the lettuce his hand felt a cooling sensation with pins and needles and his fork went through his hand. He stared at his hand for a moment wondering what just happened. He then picked up his fork to try again and was able to get a mouth full, but when he went for a second bite it happened again, his fork clanging against the bowl again.

“Something wrong Danny? You're staring at your hand weird,” Danny heard Dick speaking and looked up to see Dick staring at him giving him an odd look. 

Danny couldn’t help but rub his neck nervously with his other hand, he hoped to get ahold of whatever this was so no one noticed. Though knowing his luck everyone probably did notice, over the years he and Jazz both noticed that the Wayne family was much more observant than their media persona’s showed. 

Dinner continued and Danny struggled to eat anything as anything he tried to hold fell through his hand frustratingly and Danny couldn’t help but get agitated. 

Eventually his glass he was holding slipped through his hand and tumbled onto the floor shattering into a thousand pieces. Danny let out a frustrated sigh as he stared at the mess he made. 

Before he could stand to clean up Alfred appeared by his side with a dustpan and broom and began cleaning it up, “are you still feeling unwell Master Daniel? Perhaps you should retire for the evening, I will attend to this mess.” Danny begrudgingly nodded his head and made his way out of the room.

He wasn’t alone for long as Damian and Jazz tailed him out of the room. 

“What was that? It looked like your spoon was going through your hand,” Jazz asked after they were a ways from the dinning room.

“Jazz, honestly I don’t know, it felt cold and then anything I tried holding fell through my hand.” Danny brushed his bangs away from his forehead and they dropped back into his face as he dropped his hands back down to his side.

The walk went silent after that, although it didn’t stay for long as Danny felt the cooling sensation again but this time through his whole body, he let out a yelp as he felt his body sink into the floor.

Damian and Jazz looked at him with panic but as they grabbed at his arms or his hands to pull him back up they went through him just as the spoon and apparently the ground now. 

He let out a panicked yell as the floor swallowed him whole, so now he was sinking further down further into the earth. What was going to happen to him? Would he ever find his way back up?

Thankfully he didn’t have to wait long as the cooling sensation left and as gravity took hold of him again he fell. Apparently there was a cave under the manor and he was able to turn back into solid as he felt air again. There was no way he was surviving this, even with new weird powers now was when he’d get impaled by spikes right?

The cave was too dark to make out much but Danny thought he might have seen a computer with several monitors. That didn’t matter now as he finally landed, and he grunted as he landed on a person who also grunted as having a teen land on you couldn’t be the most comfortable.

He knew he was in big trouble when he realized who he landed on, “Batman??”