#gotta change it up or smth

[ace-malarky]

Find the Word Tag #27

@chauceryfairytales and @tracle0 both tagged me for one of these so hell yeah we're just doing one post thanks folks!!

My words are; sweet, poke, hood, line, go, going, gone and we're gonna try and take them just from Shapeshifter WIP and also TSOTP if we run out lmao

n I'm gonna tag @albatris, @fields-of-ink, @sparrow-orion-writes with the words vision, game, and bottled

SWEET (Shapeshifter WIP, Bryn; Music)

Bryn hummed a soft tune as she carded through the wool, the sound a sweet counterpoint to the city life happening beyond her fence. At this time of day, it was all children and their older siblings on their way to school. A fair few of them called out to greet her, waving. Their fathers and mothers had done much the same earlier, on their way to work.

POKE(d) (Shapeshifter WIP, Halliel; Syn is Condemned)

She’d stepped forward before she’d even realised, her hand dropping to the hilt of her sword and ready to pull it free. “Stand down,” someone barked. He tutted, not even looking her way as one of his goons stepped forward to warn her back. Syn was on their knees, slumped over onto the marble flooring. They didn’t have antlers but a matted tail poked out from under their long cardigan. They had thick cuffs on their wrists – hands wresting on the floor, barely holding them up – that attached to a chain held by one of the men on either side of them. “Let them go,” she said, voice like steel.

HOOD (Shapeshifter WIP, Syn; Halliel's House Party)

Halliel released their hand. "You need to go, then? Before they get suspicious?" Syn took a breath and nodded, dropping their hand to their side. "Until the next time." They left, trying not to look back. Flexing their hand at their side, Halliel's warmth burning through it. "Who was that?" They heard someone ask. "A friend – of a friend," Halliel replied. Syn ducked out of the side door they'd come in and pulled their hood up to shield their face. Shoved their hands into their pockets, curling them around the last of the warmth.

LINE (Soul of the Party, Solaris; Meeting Jasper)

There wasn’t a bout or a duel or a joust on right now, but there were still people thronging throughout the area. Street performers had set up from across the worlds, showing off a dozen different tricks of a dozen different mages. Soul Magic didn’t lend itself to flashy performances, but some of the others definitely did. Solaris watched a Techno Mage spark energy through a line of marionettes, so they played their own instruments and danced without need of strings. Illusionists created whole worlds in the palms of their spectators’ hands, tailoring each one to whoever held it. There were stalls of Charm Witches and Runic Mages, carving and painting and imbuing whatever was requested of them into delicate jewellery or plaques to be placed in houses. He thought he spotted a Feral Mage, all black feathers and shiny beak, but when he looked again there was nothing like that.

GO (Shapeshifter WIP, Halliel; Halliel Meets Val)

"Where is Syn?" Halliel burst into the office without waiting to be admitted. "Have you heard from them recently?" "Halliel." "Sir." She pulled herself back, wings tight in. "I'm just - worried. That they're in trouble." "Their last missive gave the appearance of everything proceeding accordingly." "Yes, but that was then and besides, they could be forged-" "Halliel." "Do you at least know what they look like, I could go in and check on them. Just from afar, just to see." "No. No you may not, and no I do not."

GOING (Shapeshifter Wip, Syn; Olympian)

“Verial has been asking for an opening of trade routes, which they claim will be beneficial for both countries.” A buzz of laughter rippled through the room. Syn was alert, awake, focused. Every inch of them locked in on what the king would say next. “In the spirit of such overtures, we thought it best to send you, Prince Jaiel, to head the talks. To show how serious we are.” They were going home. “Father, that sounds terribly dull. It won’t be all board meetings and business lunches, will it?” Jaiel scowled. “I hope not.” They were going home.

GONE (Shapeshifter WIP, Syn; Little Rat Hands)

Syn skipped back a few steps and spun on their heel, dropping to sit on a bench. By the time they were settled in place, their appearance had changed. Their antlers were gone, exchanged for faun coloured floppy ears that draped to their shoulders. Their hair shifted colour to match, shortening and falling out of the bun they'd tied it up in. They caught the tipped earrings that fell from their ears and tucked them into a pocket. Nothing they could do about their clothes, but it was never about hiding fully anyway. For a final touch they rounded out their cheeks, losing the sharpness of their high cheekbones, and gave themself a small tail under their coat.

[skrunksthatwunk]

save me ladyklok save me

[johnslittlespoon]

ok 1. these are my tough and sweet drafting docs, i have never been this insane about outlines in my life this is what getting on adhd meds does to a man. someone sedate me (i have also Never drafted out a fic until i started writing for this fandom jfc) (also sry i forgot to mute spotify b4 making the vid and i cbf to reexport)

and 2. i think i've mapped out the whole storyline for TAS gahhh my heart already hurts. i'm pretty set on an ending and it's gonna rip my heart out to write (in the best way) but leaves space for a long epilogue (or possibly even a second fic lol we'll see if my interest holds, i either fixate for a few weeks on an idea or i'm locked in for a year). as of now the fic will be set from july 2005 to june 2006 + the epilogue aughghgh but i gen have sm more i could write if i were to do a time skip and write a second fic, i just have so many other aus i wanna write if i can prove to myself i can commit to chaptered fics like this so :')

all the major events are plotted, most gaps in between are filled with the scenes i've been brainstorming in my docs, but i'm sure i'll come up with plenty more as i go knowing how i operate rip lol. esp going thru asks, i still have so many to get back to regarding tas i'm sorryyy!! honestly sometimes i read them and have to go straight to my doc to plot and then i forget to respond to the actual ask lol y'all are cooking <3

this fic is gonna be sooo long, def longer than yadiym. i'm thinking minimum 12 chapters if i end up sticking to this stupid long wordcount per chapter but the story/plot keeps expanding as i write so i'm probably gonna eat my words and idm as long as i can keep myself fixated/inspired lol :')

also don't mind me i'm just yapping to myself atp bc it helps me to post my progress somewhere other than in my notes app so i can refer back easier and also bc it makes me hold myself accountable if i speak it into the universe lmaoo i'm peer pressuring myself xoxo

[wybienova]

returning to my TRUE FORM with a huge ass page of doodles

some sort of closeups here :3

[compacflt]

I just wanted to say as someone who has stumbled across your blog and has read your Wednesday wips and posts about anything topgun related that your thought process and consideration of mav and ice, specifically their political beliefs and relationships with their own identities, is honestly so impressive and cool. You have brought such realism and life to these characters which is just so refreshing to see. idk i just wanted to express how cool and awesome i think that is

Because of the thought into these characters does it make it difficult to like them or understand them if you have differing opinions from them? for me personally i feel like if i were to ever actually have a convo with ice or mav regarding identity politics i would actually start to lose my mind (like how one feels when your dad or fun uncle talks for too long at thanksgiving dinner). If it does make them difficult to like, does that make it difficult for you to write them sometimes?

oh yeah! i think, my ice i really empathize with & really love & really could get along with, once he grows out of the sexism of his teens & twenties, but my maverick drives me crazy. someone sent in an ask a while ago that was like “WHY is cyclone simpson your one true love??” And it’s because i too would absolutely hate maverick & hate working with him lol. people who are overly cocky & un-self-aware & a bit self-centered make me CRAZY. (narrator voice: compacflt is a hypocrite as all these things also apply to compacflt.)

Politically… It’s difficult to say. no one really wants to hear the intricacies of one person’s political journey, which is why i won’t give you mine, but suffice to say—since the start of the russian invasion of Ukraine, and my semi-concerted effort to learn more about the political landscape of modern warfare, my own personal beliefs have shifted a whole bunch. definitely aided in that shift by my top gun fic project that specifically aims to understand the conservative straight-passing male mindset as it relates to military matters… there are many end goals to a project like mine, but one end product is a filter you can take away and hold up in front of your eyes and see the world through it. When writing from the eyes of a conservative straight (passing) white man, your priorities totally shift. I had to write from the perspective of someone who doesn’t care about identity politics. Because they don’t! A core tenet of conservatism is very proudly not caring about that stuff, and being very annoyed when people (usually left-of-centers) make that stuff very visible and want you to care about it! “Don’t shove it in my face,” etc., etc. Don’t force me to care about this taboo, private thing I really don’t care about. It violates my freedoms, or whatever, to be forced to care—or even bear witness to—stuff that i don’t care about. Etc. And then, to be nominally a part of that community that you really, really don’t care about, and then to be told that you have to care about it because of your publicity… people asking you to be proud of something that has had a negative connotation for much of your entire life… that’s not a transformation that happens easily.

Jesus, I could write an essay about this. I have, several times by now in responses to asks over my blog. But there is so much that I could talk about. I think… I really worry that some of my writing falls into the first of the below categories:

I really try not to romanticize conservatism in my writing—I tried to show that ice and mav’s happiness is the price they pay for their conservatism. They’re actively choosing to be unhappy—but because they prioritize their honor over everything, due to EXTERNAL PRESSURES they cannot control, and which I think are often ignored in the fandom space for one reason or another. The fact of the matter is, in 99% of IPs, characters prioritize something other than their sexualities. It’s never Maverick’s personal identity that is at stake in either Top Gun or Top Gun: Maverick, because he has built himself so impermeably masculine that there are no grounds upon which to question his personal identity. He just isn’t thinking about it. He’s thinking about how to get into Charlie’s pants, how to win the Top Gun trophy, how to uphold his promise to Goose, et cetera. If he’s fucking guys on the side, it’s because he wants to and because hes maverick and he does what he wants without thinking about it—that’s the whole point of his character, from a story-construction standpoint. That’s his archetype. He’s a renegade maverick superstar who is both thoughtlessly brilliant and thoughtlessly dangerous. He’s thoughtless. His priorities are to survive and to look cool doing it, and that’s it. He is a savant in the Naval Air Force, where honor is your lifeblood, who feels he has been dishonored by his own family name, and who willingly joined the conservative post-Vietnam Navy right when/after Ronald Reagan was elected President, and who wears cowboy boots and who disrespects women to their faces, and who is eager to get into altercations with Soviet-Chinese-DPRK-X-second-world-country-coded-but-EXPLICITLY-Soviet-manufactured-Mikoyan-Gurevich-MiG-28s(-F-5s-painted-black)… I’m sorry. In my opinion, the conservatism is baked into him as a character. I find it extremely difficult to separate him from his conservatism, because in some ways his patriotic conservatism is his raison d’etre. IMO if you take that away from him, he ceases to exist.

Same thing with Ice and his unwillingness to openly rebel or go against the grain. That is his whole reason to exist in the story at all. I know that I’m saying this in a fandom space where the whole point is to change characters & put them in different situations (fanfic) but… in kind of a perverse self aware way, as in I know I sound ridiculous and pretentious, i guess i don’t really understand an impulse to change the core tenets of a character irreparably in fanworks. We are shown that ice always goes by the books in TG. Then we are shown that he achieves the fruits of that labor (four stars) in TGM. So he is rewarded for never rebelling, whereas Maverick, who always rebels (but NEVER in a way that challenges his personal identity), has stagnated in the ranks at full-bird O-6. And that’s Ice’s character. That’s what he’s there for in the story—he’s a tool to show us the value system of rank and prestige you earn by following the rules of the Navy. Why take that away from him? That’s his priority! Canonically, that’s his priority and reason for existence! And historically the way to achieve that priority is through conservatism.

And you ask me if it’s hard to like my ice and mav. Yes, but that’s not my choice. The movie already did that for me. They are not, I’m sorry, likable people. I am not a straight white conservative male writing about straight white conservative men to validate my own beliefs—I’m a queer AFAB person of color writing about straight white conservative men because I want to understand the limits of their conservatism. What they do and do not care about, and what it takes to make them care. And from what we are shown in TG… ice and mav would not care about ME. At all. And they would not want to be forced to care about me. Ice’s casual careless dismissiveness… “the plaque for the alternates is down in the ladies’ room…” mav following Charlie into the bathroom… turning the key in the ignition and driving away while pretending not to hear her… “what?? i can’t hear you! 🙉” … they do not care. They have no desire to care.

Again. Maybe I subscribe to a very very old-school and labored and pretentious ideology when it comes to writing… I know a lot of people write just to have fun. I do not. I wish i could, but I don’t. And when you’re not writing to have fun, you don’t have to like the characters you’re writing about. They’re nothing more than tools at your disposal to get your point across more effectively. No, I don’t like them! Of course not! My ice is cruel and cowardly and careless and hypocritical and subservient and weak, and my mav is demanding and dangerous and dismissive and oblivious and so, so, so unbelievably bitter.

And that’s what my story needed, to get my point across. So, shrug. My point was my priority. I don’t care too much about the characters themselves.

Re: icemav & identity politics. Part of hopefully selling this story is the attempt at empathy for the conservative male, to bring this discussion back to the top. Why write fiction at all if you’re not going to write about people different from you, and why write about people different from you if you don’t want to understand them? So… part of trying to understand them was to understand and have empathy for this shift in priorities. Conservative guys do not want to care about labels, or sexual orientations, or, God forbid, discussion of their gender identities. I can kind of see Ice tolerating it by the end… but, there are limits. Again, it’s supposed to be private. I think he’d chafe against getting labeled gay—he wouldn’t want to be called the first gay compacflt, or SECNAV, etc. He can’t say, “i slept with like a hundred fifty women before I even MET the ONLY man ive ever slept with,” because that’s like intensely private personal information!! No one deserves that information, but people still want to call him gay, even though in his head he really is not!!!! Again—from the conservative perspective, it’s a public imposition of left-wing, overly sexualized, too-neat labels and politics onto an area of life that has typically been kept private and respectable—I don’t agree with the conservatism, but I can at least empathize with it. Pre-Maverick’s death (pre-coming to terms with it), it would’ve been shameful & embarrassing to him; but even after coming to terms with it, it’s still not something he “takes pride” in. I think he thinks of it like this—most people aren’t proud of being straight. Like, it’s weird if you are. Same thing with being proud of being white, etc. Why be excessively proud of things you have no control over? Why not take pride in your ACTIONS—for instance, his career that he has actively sacrificed so much of his pride for? I can really empathize with that thought. I don’t necessarily agree, but I get it, especially in his professional circumstances, where he has so much to be professionally proud of, and yet people keep wanting him to publicly care about this private part of him he has no control over and can’t change.

Maverick though. I think he’d be actively hostile about talking about it in public. He Does Not Care. he does not want to care. It’s all an insult. They call him the first openly gay Ace cause he’s married to another man— “okay, but, like, I’m not. Stop calling me that. Neither of us are. Oh my god we have slept with so many women. Stop calling us that.” Ok then what do you want us, the press corps, to call you? First openly bisexual Ace? “No that’s worse!! That’s a word some teenager made up and doesn’t mean anything!! I’m sixty years old stop asking me to talk about this stuff im too old.” What do you have to say to LGBT kids who want to go into the navy? “😎👍 there’s a place for you etc etc. Let’s go back to talking about all the planes I shot down.” Maverick does what he wants without thinking about it. That’s the core tenet of his character. Very conservative. Don’t ask him to care too much.

Idk. No I don’t like them. But I understand them, if that makes sense. Like their conservative anti-label logic does make emotional sense to me. So that’s part of what I took away from this project, for better or worse… probably worse: I understand why conservatives don’t like the modern over-publicity of sexuality. They don’t care and they don’t want to care. And because they are small-C conservative, my ice and mav still don’t care lol. So, yeah. It doesn’t make them hard to write, because thats why I wanted to write them in the first place.

[dutybcrne]

A very obvious hc but Diluc absolutely does NOT keep a running tab for Kaeya. Never had, never intends to. Kaeya most certainly is getting free drinks each and every time he stop by the Angel’s Share, and anything he does pay, Diluc keeps the money separate from everything else so he can send it to Jean to sneak it back into Kaeya’s salary somehow.

[milogoestogreendale]

coming out powerpoint part 2: electric boogaloo?

[sanchoyoscribbles]

daily may day 14: frame

Yes........this is a meme redraw 😗✌️ (original here)

[piplupod]

goddamn i feel crazy, i can't find any info about it on reddit or tumblr or just general searches either but youtube is somehow giving me ads even though i've got ublock origin and firefox and i have everything completely up-to-date,,,, what the fuck is going onnn 😭😭why do i seem to be the only person having this issue AUGH

there's never a skip button on any of the ads and there is nothing that says "this is an ad" like there usually is (besides the fact that. u are watching an obvious ad. and also the runtime at the bottom doesn't match the video's runtime), u cannot skip forward on the timeline, u are just stuck looking at the ad with no clue as to how many there are going to be and no way to skip them even if the ad is a full 30 seconds or more. this is insane 😭

[universalsatan]

Hey bestie, no need to answer this, but I saw u reblogged something from roach - works, and I just wanna let u know that she's a major terf

oh!!! thank you for this fr. i'm answering this bc i just wanna say that i don't have shinigami eyes and i'm on mobile most of the time, so these pointers are much appreciated <33

[hairclips]

i keep catching myself wanting to send him things and then i remember i no longer fw him like that so there’s no point in sending u__u

[mars-ipan]

i do love my family very dearly but the internalized ableism the men in here struggle with is. so much

[beneathsilverstars]

i know i was just complaining about stylizing loop's body but i figured that out and moved on and it turns out the head is so much harder 😭 i'm very happy with canon loop head and post-bodycraft loop head but the in-between phase is kicking my ASS and i can't just half-ass it bc figuring out the in-between head is the ENTIRE POINT of this WHOLE PROJECT....

i think part of the problem might be that unlike with the body, i do have an extremely clear idea of what is happening with the head physically and how it would look irl, it's just. a very difficult thing to draw. so i keep rejecting ideas that look good bc they're not my actual headcanon, but then also rejecting attempts to faithfully depict the headcanon bc they don't look good. head in my hands

[jkpng]

ant your automatic lockscreen switching is so real 💀 also please perceive my current lock screen googie

nobodys ever seen and asked me whos on my phone but. i cant even risk it. idk what id say. especially not the pic with bam i have rn like “oh thats just a singer” “and ur using a picture of this singer smiling with his dog?” id just have to kms right in front of them i fear . also obsessed w ur lock screen i love that hes reaching out like hes abt to ask u to pass the blunt

reminds me of one of my favourite pics 😭

[volfoss]

my beautiful personal experience with anne rice that im always like haha ok new book ^-^ the last one kind of sucked a decent amount for most of the book but the ending was cool. cant wait to start the next one, sure hope its not anything bad!! and then shes like sneaking behind me with a comically large sledgehammer on my head that is labelled "the beginning will suck heavily". and it keeps happening to me.

[edenslice]

FUCK ITS ALMOST ARTFIGHT ALREADY???

i have at least 4 ocs i want to put in the ring and i haven't done jackshit for their refs cos i genuinely forgot that last year i promised to join artfight 😭 HELP ME