#i have a very specific version of mys and diaries in my head so. canon them migjt not actualy be my favorites just my versions of them ig

[sunnymarbles]

aphmau dump hi guys ^_^ ignore the gross disgusting old 2016-2019 time period art in the corner of redraws

[the-martyrfication-of-the-matron]

Hey new to the aphmau fandom, like days old, and i was wondering what order to watch her rps as its kinda confusing to me

This is going to be such a long post because there’s so much to say! (There is a TLDR at the end if you don’t care about specifics and just want a watch order)

The inclusion of side-series and stuff just convolutes things a tad. But I promise, you will get an answer.

First;

I suggest a side series to start. Which isn’t to say that they’re all short, they’re just not relevant to the Big Two.

But, yeah, just dip your toe in the pool first.

Dreams of Estorra- never watched it. But it’s popular. It should be on the Aphmau Stories channel instead of her main one, if you can’t find it there. If someone can offer me a summary for it I would love you.

A Royal Tale- a weird mishmash of Disney and the Aphverse. A lighthearted fantasy show with some adult humour, Lo (< an icon), and romance. It will introduce you to some of the characters from the other series without overwhelming you with references you won’t understand. Aarmau, but they’re exes who hate eachother. It’s only a roleplay

Mermaids Tale- similar thing to ART, a mermaid au for Aphverse. Very Aarmau centric, there’s lesbian mermaids. I cant actually remember the plot but it got me into my train (the singer) phase. It’s only a roleplay

Mod Mod world- never watched it, but it did get a sequel that I’ll bring up later. Again, would love a summary from someone.

My Inner Demons- it’s one of the only non-aphmau centric shows and doesn’t include ANY aphverse characters. The main character is Ava, and it’s set up like a Harem Anime with a bunch of male demon love interests for her. It has quite adult humour, but it’s pretty cute aesthetically and deserves a second season. It’s only a roleplay

HeartPoint- a girl sees how much people like her platonically and romantically by little stats that appear above their heads. I believe Aphmau is the only Aphverse character, and whilst the romance is pretty obvious to me, I’ll leave who she ends up with blank as that’s kind of a part of the series… iirc. It’s only a roleplay.

There may be more… I’ll have to look.

Anyways.

So.

Onto the behemoths.

Minecraft Diaries is the first of the Roleplays to really get her popularity. It’s a medieval fantasy, with both roleplay and let’s play elements in it. It ran for three seasons, seasons one and two being 100 episodes each, however season 3 ended short. It was never completed. Season three is regarded as the worst season, and most either don’t consider it canon or haven’t watched it at all, but I consider it canon solely because it introduces us Lo, who I love. The two main ships when it was popular were Laurmau and Garmau, and if it weren’t for MyS, they probably still would be treated as such.

If you want to watch the main series in chronological order, I would watch MCD first. It is my favourite tho so maybe I’m biased. The lore can be contradictory and the quality slowly improves over time. It started to get remade with Rebirth, which you can watch before hand to get a general gist of the show before you dive into it, though it isn’t incredibly accurate to how the original is. Seasons 1-2 are on Aphmau’s main channel (I think), but season 3 is on Aphmau Stories. You don’t need to watch MyStreet but, you will probably end up watching it anyways.

Brief intermission: Void Paradox. The Mod Mod world sequel, is also a side series for MCD s1, and was made years afterwards. Very high quality, probably one of the better side series in general, and deserved a continuation. MMW isn’t required to watch it, but for context on Laurence and what’s up with him, MCD s1 is.

The next is MyStreet. It started as a modern Au for Diaries with the side stories and The Big Move, however began to be made into its own series. It begins as a slice of life, and is very light hearted with an Aarmau emphasis. It faces a genre swap for Season 4, before reverting to a slightly more solemn version of what it once was, before it goes back to a darker vibe for s6. Until s6, it existed in a separate universe to MCD, and you don’t need to watch MCD to understand it (though it does provide some context for s6)

There are prequels and side series (and a three episode sequel, which is fun). PDH is the main one, and because MyS was made first, they can contradict, however you will need to watch PDH S2 for context for MyS S4. Otherwise you won’t know the villain or understand what the fuck he’s doing. After them, there is PDH: Graduation days, and FalconClaw University. Neither are particularly important, but again, FCU offers some context for s4, so… you could watch it. It’s just not mandatory. There’s Aphmau’s year after s4, which is just a recovery mini-season, and there’s Her Wish which was released before s6, but set after it. And I will give them credit, they did preplan when they wrote her wish and watching it after s6 and realising everything they did to retain continuity… oh it’s good. Her wish does require watching MCD S3/late s2 though, it won’t make sense without it.

TLDR;

If a series isn’t Void Paradox, Mystreet, MCD, Phoenix Drop High or FalconClaw Uni, you can just watch it whenever.

MCD / PDH / MYS is my personal favourite watch order, because it’s all chronological. But just go with whatever you vibe with!

MCD is the OG and fantasy Medieval, but is a mix of roleplay and let’s play, and doesn’t have entirely consistent lore. It has a partial remake and it’s final, incomplete season, sucked.

PDH is higher quality and a highschool drama with fantasy undertones but less relevant, and is a prequel for MyS

MYS is the most popular and is a slice of life with more fantasy undertones, as well as very high quality, but suffers through genre swaps, and requires some context from the other two in later seasons.

[whumpsday]

i'm gonna talk about my very first ocs because i feel like they deserve it :) when i was a kid i didn't quite have the imagination yet to create whole worlds, so my ocs were often inserts into existing things i was into.

this is a very long post with a lot of useless personal information, and is more a diary entry than anything.

i had many more ocs than what's listed here, but i can't remember most of them, so here are just the ones i remember.

childhood:

at 7, the very first oc i can ever remember making was Maya, a pokemon oc. she was the fourth member of team rocket in the anime canon, and could shapeshift between being a human and a celebi. i remember her being "older" but that could mean anything from a middle schooler to an adult.

also pokemon-related but not quite an oc, i had a lot of fakemon around that time. the only one i remember was a raccoon-like one named Tyco.

at 9, soon after was Tanya, a fairly oddparents oc. she was a little girl who was friends with the main character.

at 10, i really got into oc-making, and the next bunch are all from when i was about 10.

i started getting into "somewhat whumpier" things and made my first "edgy" oc, Deepheart, for warrior cats. she was a black cat with purple eyes and a tragic backstory i can't remember, who eventually got with stormfur.

i was very into danny phantom and continued my tragic backstory experiments with Chelsea. she was a ghost and the younger sister of ember (she was basically an ember recolor) who died in the same fire. she also had fire+music powers, but a polar opposite personality to ember (she was nice).

i can't remember the specifics or names of the ocs i made for a bunch of these, but i also made oc-inserts for the following around this time:

total drama island - multiple ocs, i think i had a whole fancast, which was the closest i got around this time to making an original story.

monster buster club - character existed to be friends with chris, who was my favorite. she was a monster in disguise or something of that nature.

percy jackson - i definitely had one and i was REALLY into it, but can't even remember what god she was a daughter of.

in middle school as i entered early teenhood, i started reading YA books. sadly, my taste was not that great.

preteen:

at 12, i made Chelsea (reused the name from the danny phantom oc because i just rly liked the name), a twilight oc. she was the first vampire oc i ever made, so i guess she was the start of All This. she was the youngest cullen at 14 years old (i do not remember if this was a chronological age or just a physical age and i think i was too oblivious to realize just how significant that difference was), and had a Forbidden Romance with seth, the werewolf kid.

at 13, i realized i could have ocs that were boys! a fantastic revelation! technically i already had ones from the total drama fanseason i had in my head but they were all side characters. made my first main guy, Oliver, a scott pilgrim oc and ramona's 8th ex-boyfriend.

i made a LOT of other ocs for YA books in middle school, but i don't remember much about the others.

teenhood - homestuck:

at 15, i got into homestuck, and that was when things got out of control.

i started with a literal self-insert with my birthname, who eventually got split into 2 alt-timeline versions of herself (i was a girl at the time), one who went with dave and rose during the timeskip and one who went with john and jade during the timeskip. when they met back up, they fell in love and got together, which i think might be the truest expression of self-love i've ever had.

but it didn't end there. i got really into making fantrolls, and made TONS of them. i don't remember their names very well (esp bc they were all made up alien names) but i remember my favorites: a bronzeblood with an eyepatch whose name started with a P, and a violetblood whose name started with an I.

the violetblood was probably my first true whumpee. while violetbloods are normally amphibious, he was born with lungs that don't work, and was forced to remain underwater at all times since he could only use his gills. when sgrub caused the apocalypse, he had a little tank he would stay in on the ship. and when gamzee started killing everyone, he couldn't get away.

this was also where i branched out into creating original characters not tied to an existing IP!!! FINALLY!!! it all started with fantrolls. i made two more significant sets of fantrolls: one centering around an abnormally overpowered purpleblood who had his memory erased and used to be a cruel whumper-type (and a set of supporting characters to go with him), and one centering around a purpleblood who'd been tortured and the lowblood who acted as his caretaker. you can tell i was very much getting into whump at this point, despite not yet knowing the term.

i eventually decided that homestuck's lore was not equipped to carry the stories i wanted to tell for those two, and split them each off into original universes. i am not into homestuck anymore and it's really a relic of its time, but it impacted me quite a lot creatively.

teenhood - original stories:

the amnesia guy came to be named Nova, my first wholly-original character. he existed in a magic/fantasy type universe, and was the most powerful magic-user in his world. he'd previously been extremely evil and caused untold carnage, countless people tortured to death. the heroes, after realizing they could not stop him, decided to try to wipe his memory instead. this did, in fact, work. Nova became a character saddled by EXTREME ANGST about his past wrongs. to make it worse, his pre-memory-wipe evil self eventually started to slowly come back as a separate entity in his mind, essentially haunting him. i daydreamed about Nova for a long, long time, and occasionally still do.

the whumpee-caretaker duo became Dwar and Clobu, members of an original alien species i came up with. unlike Nova's story, which became so divorced from his fantroll beginnings that his origin was basically unrecognizable, this one remained heavily homestuck-inspired. the aliens here were grouped/inspired by the layers of the atmosphere, rather than the signs of the zodiac. Dwar (the whumpee) had skin that looked like the night sky, dark blue with stars all over, while Clobu (the caretaker) looked like a cloudy day. they were pretty :) these guys are a very very early inspiration for the Kane & Jim dynamic.

i also started making non-IP-related ocs without "converting" them around this time. in particular, i became very interested in demons.

first i made Charlie, a teenage demon raised by humans who just wanted to be A Normal Kid. he played the guitar and used tumblr and was all in all very nonthreatening and normal. he was a bit boring.

at about 16, i later made Nicky, a "redo" of the Charlie concept but with more pizzazz. his mother had brought him on a hunt (for humans to kill and eat) while he was an infant, and she was killed by a demon hunter. the hunter couldn't bring herself to kill the baby, so she took him in and raised him instead. Nicky's story is very very long, because he is the only oc from my childhood i still regularly daydream about to this day, and i have been building him up for a decade. some highlights:

accidentally burns his adoptive mom when he's a little boy who's just gotten his fire powers, and it's what makes him realize he never wants to hurt people. she forever has a scar shaped like his tiny little 5-year-old hand.

demons generally need to eat human flesh to be healthy. this is obviously not something Nicky wants to do or even feasibly can do when he's younger. he eats a lot of other meat (mainly pork), and is basically constantly hungry. he carries jerky around with him all the time to snack on.

as a young adult, he and his (human) best friend (mutual pining crush) are stuck in a cave (entrance blocked by rocks) with a bunch of demons waiting to kill them when they leave. Nicky knows he's not strong enough to defeat them, but he could be if he wasn't malnourished. in a moment of desperation, his friend ends up giving him a few fingers to eat so they can make it out alive, and he feels guilty forever that it's the best thing he's ever tasted.

his mom is killed by demons in a fight in his early 20s, and he goes on a ballistic rampage murdering everyone in sight. after this, he runs away and ends up moving to hell.

when he's in his 40s, he sees a little human girl who's been captured and brought to hell, and quickly rescues her. he can't find a way to smuggle her back to earth, so he ends up raising her in his apartment.

when he does eventually get her back to earth years later, he moves in with her dad and they co-parent. becomes a love triangle thing with the dad and his childhood friend who he eventually reconnects with- not for the usual "you have to choose one!" reasons that i hate, but because his relationships with each are honestly very tumultuous.

my other early demon oc was Crimson, a magicless demon who'd been captured by hunters and tortured until a kind hunter rescued him and became his caretaker. this character would later become Kane, but originally there was no "former whumper" backstory, he was just a pathetic little guy.

at 16, my other main obsession as a teenager was dangan ronpa, and of course i made several dangan ronpa ocs whose names i can't remember. one of them was a girl who had a fierce rivalry with togami. i started getting into g/t around this time, and liked to play around with that with my dangan ronpa oc for some reason. i don't know why, it's not like DR had any kind of g/t in it. but i would always imagine a story where togami became tiny and he and my oc came to a begrudging alliance as they tried to fix it.

i also ended up converting this into an original story, taking place in a low-fantasy universe, where a bully character Damien got shrunk by magic, kept in a jar, and was tortured by some of his former victims. his one victim who thinks this is fucked up (can't remember his name) rescued him, and they put aside their differences to fix it. i just love reluctant caretakers and whumper-turned-whumpees.

and that's all the notable ocs i can think of from my childhood! figure they deserve at least a small space on my blog :) and i still might write Nova, Nicky, or Damien's stories someday.

[krikeymate]

Hello lovely person :) I’m not sure if someone asked this before but I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it. I was wondering about what if we’ve gotten a younger Tara while everything else stayed the same? So similar to your 5 years late AU, but it’s not quite 5 years because that might be a bit much to keep things like they play out in canon.

Let’s say Tara is 16 when the first attack happens. Sam still used to babysit Mindy, Chad, Wes etc. even if they’re a bit older than Tara and that’s why she’s friends with them. They’re not in the same grade but the friendship stuck.

So everything still plays out like it did in 5, with maybe a bit more of a focus on why Christina isn’t showing up as Tara’s still a minor here.

How do you think things would continue after the movie? Would Sam stay in Woodsboro with Tara for years, until she finishes school? Would she try to gain custody for Tara so she can take her out of that town earlier, or maybe even just to get her away from Christina’s obvious neglect? Would she manage to get custody? Would Tara even want that?

I’ve been playing around with this idea in my head for a while now and I might actually start writing a fiction in this setting one day (probably not, I still have too many unfinished (Wednesday) stories on ao3 -.-), but you’re my favorite „scream fandom person“ so I’m curious to see if you have any thoughts on this. If you don’t, that’s fine, too :) Please don’t feel pressured to reply!

Hope you had or are having a good day! <3

Man I had the hardest time working out a timeline for this, so the friend group are born in 2004 which makes them 18 when the attack happens. I had to decide whether to make Tara 16 nearly 17, or 15 nearly 16. I decided to keep 16 nearly 17 even though I felt a year younger would be more appropriate, because baby. Tara's born late 2005. God, me and my compulsive need to be very specific about timelines.

In the five years late AU, Tara is 14 when their version of 5 happens, but there's a lot of focus on explaining why Sam wouldn't leave.

So let's look at why she still would. Christina's not the absolute worst to Tara here. She's not the best, and she's got her problems, but she's not actively awful. Sam's 8 when Tara is born. She's 5 when Sam finds the diary at 13. She's 10 when Sam leaves at 18. Sam loves her little sister so much, but she can't get her mother's words out of her head. The fear that she'll hurt her baby sister is too much, she has to get out of there. Tara's still so young, she'll forget about her, she tells herself. In a few years, she won't ever remember she had a sister. That would be for the best, Sam tells herself.

The twins + Wes start babysitting Tara instead, after all, Sam was younger than them when she babysat them. Despite the couple of years age difference between them, they stay friends and they all look out for Tara once she starts high school. (You'd think having cool senior friends would make her more popular, it doesn't.)

Sam's pretty horrified when she comes back and finds out that their mother isn't even here, doesn't intend to be here, and that she disappears frequently. It's ok, Tara tells her, I stay with my friends a lot. Sam's screaming that's not okay!!! in her head, but maintains a straight face and just leaves a lingering kiss on her sister's head.

Sam tries to get custody over Tara, she fights for it - she wants to take her away, get her out of this place - but the courts say no. They declare that Tara was old enough to be left alone at the time of the incident, that there's no evidence of neglect or abuse, they ignore the testimony of the Meeks-Martins that it's been going on for years (well why didn't you report it years ago, they chime back). She's almost 18 anyway, they say, then she'll be free to go where she pleases.

The twins go off to college. They wanted to stay local, to keep an eye on Tara, she convinces them to go, that she'll be fine. Sam promises them that she's not going anywhere, never again. Sam stays.

Her mother won't let her into her home, but her mother is rarely there. Sam rents somewhere dirt cheap and barely stays there.

Tara has a hard time knowing how to be around her sister again. She still remembers her so clearly, unlike her father who she doesn't remember at all. Sam's a little harder, she doesn't smile or laugh as freely, but she still feels the same. Tara doesn't feel the same at all. There's a part of her that's scared that Sam will leave again once she realises her sister is just a stranger to her now. She doesn't know how to bridge that gap.

But that's ok, because Sam keeps trying to anyway. She holds her through her breakdowns, and tells her she loves her, and apologises at night when she thinks Tara's asleep.

You should totally work on this idea, it's a really cool one!! And hey, you don't have to upload anything until you're ready to upload it. Work on things in your own time, the people who want to read it (me) will still be there ready and waiting for when you do.

[queenlua]

FE game: 28, 31, 37

28. Because this fandom doesn’t see enough discourse [citation needed], post a spicy hot take here🔥🔥

with the caveat of, "i haven't kept up with fandom discourse in a while so i have no idea what opinions count as spicy," here's a couple off the top of my head

* during peak tellius years, i always kinda though ike gave off asexual vibes in canon. this take was bound to please absolutely no one in the great ike shipping wars so i mostly kept it quiet lmao

* in a plight that is probably common to most fic writers who glom very hard to a specific character: most fic out there about Claude does not work for me. folks either write him as a Pure Cinnamon Roll Who Can Do No Wrong And Only Has The Goodest Intenions, or (far less commonly) they write him as this strategic genius mastermind made of 110% cunning. neither is correct! i'll fully grant my claude is probably an insane headcanon claude at this point with only a loose relation to canon, but that's because canon was inconsistent with the boy, and the version in my head is the best way to reconcile those inconsistencies. qed

31. Some moments of Fire Emblem you keep thinking of?

* that bit in Three Houses where Claude asks if he can borrow Jeralt's diary... and then the conversation loops until you say "yes" because of course he's the kind of little shit who would just wear you down instead of taking "no" for an answer. a+ character moment

* another good claude moment: asking him "do you hope [rhea's] dead?" post-timeskip causes your support to go up lol

* finally, that IMPOSSIBLE-to-get but INCREDIBLY horny conversation between Tibarn/Nailah during the big battle in FE10. in my head rent-free, as the kids say

37. What’s a weird theory or headcanon you have?

i guess the "ike is ace" one mentioned up above, or... hm. come to think of it, most of my headcanons are more like "this would be a cool plot for a postgame fic" rather than, like, lore or backstory tidbits, which i think makes them not properly headcanons. but in that realm of thought, i'll mention that i think the "peace" of the united bird tribes post-FE10 is incredibly fragile, breaks apart within a year, Reyson ends up holding it against Tibarn and it all does absolutely dreadful things for their relationship

[ckret2]

tumblr you need to stop deleting the question when i edit an ask:

What characters can you think of, that you like, fall under unhealthy obsessive romance?

Sit down we're gonna be here a while.

God is anyone gonna be surprised if I cite the yandere trope? Is anyone gonna cringe away if I say Gasai Yuno from Future Diary? No? We're all good? Okay.

Yandere characters are really hit or miss with me. Too often, I've seen yandere characters portrayed like their bloodlust, their willing to kidnap their beloved or kill potential romantic rivals, is working in tandem with their apparent sweet, affectionate, self-effacing devotion—rather than in contrast. Like a yandere character who's willing to draw blood is an exaggerated romantic ideal. I'm not about that. To me, a proper compelling yandere is a horror character disguised as a cute love interest.

Yuno pulls that off. Even as Yukki gets used to her and even begins to grow attracted to her, he still remains very reasonably terrified of what she might do—and his terror is validated by her actions. What really sells her for me, though, is the series's awareness of the arbitrary nature of her obsessive love. She flat-out tells Yukki, the target of her obsession, with shocking coldness and self-insight, that she doesn't love him because he's really that unique or special, but because he was there and she needed someone. When it feels like so many generic dull lead boys "win" the attentions of the cool interesting yandere for no obvious reason as a sort of wishfulfillment, Yuno's open acknowledgment of Yukki's plainness and the arbitrariness of her own affections would be a great deconstruction of common yandere tropes, if it wasn't for the fact that Yuno was basically the codifier of the modern yandere archetype.

Another character who hits all the right yandere notes is Tarantulas from the IDW Transformers comics. Mad scientist who makes wicked inventions for a high-ranked military officer who's rattled by the brutality they inflict together and terminates their professional relationship by attempting to terminate the scientist; scientist comes back from the apparent dead to kidnap the officer with the help of a gang of terrorists, blackmails him by threatening to reveal confidential information about the officer's army that could tear it apart from the inside and that the officer has gone to great lengths to keep hidden, reveals that he's invented a way to make enemy soldiers effectively invisible and untraceable, and shows off his secret lab powered by a devastatingly powerful superfuel that he's invented... and then reveal he doesn't want revenge, but for the officer to be his partner in crime again, and all these wonders will be used FOR him instead of AGAINST him. He calls the officer his "muse," and feels like he can't reach his peak scientific potential without the officer there, requesting new weapons and acting as his inspiration.

He's willing to burn down the universe if his muse wants it or burn down the universe if his muse scorns him, he kidnaps him just to beg him to be his partner, and he does all this despite the fact that the officer destroyed his life work and tried to kill him. It's fantastically messed up.

Moving away from the yandere archetype: Venom—comics Venom, from their intro through the 90s and then again once Mike Costa got hold of them—is a fantastic obsessive love story, about two people who reject everything that both of their societies defines as normal and acceptable in order to be with each other, and are incredibly tender and affectionate and mutually supportive; but like, they also validate each other's worst beliefs and tendencies in a way that lets them egg each other on into oblivious villainy, and even if "live with and for one and only one person, literally in 24/7 physical contact," is normal and psychologically healthy for the symbiote's species, it's not for a human being. Impressively, they're SO obsessively codependently in love with each other, that they each independently decide that they want to be the best possible versions of themselves for each other, and violently wrest their relationship from the jaws of toxicity in order to become an emotionally mature couple with a support system, outside friends, and the ability to communicate about their fears and insecurities, and it's a beautiful thing. It's too bad nobody's written anything with Venom since Mike Costa's run ended, but I'm sure someone will bring them back around eventually.

The knight-in-love-with-their-liege trope is one that appeals to me in theory, but in practice I basically never see it written as zealously as I'd like, so I usually have to headcanon it up myself. Pearl in Steven Universe is the only solid canon example I can think of that hits all the right notes for me.

Not strictly canon but: Drift from Transformers, who goes from grim street rat survivalist to bloodthirsty mass murderer to repentant ninja vigilante to faux-spiritual warrior with weird flashes of extreme violence while under the wing of four different mentor/leader figures, I like to interpret as a serial zealot whose repeatedly shifting morals and loyalties have nothing to do with his newest leader actually convincing him of the righteousness of their perspective, and everything to do with Drift's becoming smitten with their charisma and being willing to reinvent himself completely to conform with his new beloved leader's worldview. Drift's last writer even ship teased him pretty heavily with leader #4 (for any of y'all that don't read Transformers: not like "ship teased" in a queerbaity way, Drift eventually hooked up with a different dude), and he's shown to go out of his way to perform roles that he thinks will impress leader #4; so like, there's some canon basis to read him like that—even if my main reason is "because I want to."

I also like to slip in shades of knight-loves-leader in how I write Zim being shipped with a Tallest; the unhealthy, destructive obsession with them is definitely canon, even if the romance isn't.

"Characters that are otherwise emotionless for scifi/fantasy reasons except for ONE emotion and that emotion is love and therefore they get really obsessed with their love because it's the only thing in their void of a life, but it's not portrayed in a cutesy 'robot learns to feel' or 'demon is saved by love' way but rather in a 'this is almost as unbalanced and unhealthy as not feeling anything at all was' way" is like... a trope that I keep writing but don't think I've ever actually seen done EXACTLY like that in canon. The Nobodies in Kingdom Hearts are good for this—I've written them as having meaningless sex to try to counter the fact that they can't feel emotions, on the justification that sexual arousal is a physiological sensation rather than an actual emotion but is still close enough that they can almost feel a feeling, and end up getting extremely attached to their cooperative let's-pretend-we-can-feel sex partners. (i realize that physiology and emotions can't actually be disentangled like that but like, it's fantasy.) Axel, you can argue, latched onto Roxas in what can be (and often is) read in a romantic way, also arguably sheerly on the merit of the fact that Roxas makes him feel anything at all.

Shockwave in IDW I've also used to played around with this idea, although I haven't published the main work I've done that with. Yet.

And from what I’ve seen, it looks like the main character in Yandere Simulator is gonna have a backstory kind of like that? I’m looking forward to that game, haven’t played any of the demo versions yet but what I’ve seen from the dev’s videos looks fun.

Also: very frequently, unrequited love. Especially secret unrequited love. "Unrequited-to-requited love" doesn't fit the bill at all. It's gotta be perpetual pining. There's NO satisfaction. The longing just builds and builds eternally, until the internal pressure causes something to shatter. I can think of ships I like to imagine this way (Drift w/ any of his mentors, Starscream/Wheeljack, Hashirama/Madara, Ψiioniic/Sufferer), but off the top of my head no canon ones that reach those dizzying heights of eternally unfulfilled yearning. Sure, plenty of stories have unrequited love—but rarely the all-consumingly obsessive kind, and even more rarely is that portrayed as—oh! I got a couple canon ones, albeit more villainous/predatory ones: the Phantom in Phantom of the Opera and that dude with his mouth stitched shut in the Abarat books, I haven't read those in years. And some spins of Dracula and Mina, although it's no fun if she loves him back. You can also do this with Hades and Persephone, although for this to work it's imperative that Hades still feel like he doesn't actually "have" Persephone even if she's contractually obligated to live with him so long as she doesn't love him, and just sort of wistfully watches her from afar whenever she's in the underworld. (But to be honest I generally prefer "Persephone and Hades: Hypercompetent Goth Power Couple" to spins that lean on Persephone being an unwilling unhappy victim.)

The further I go down this list the more obscure and/or headcanony these examples are gonna get, so I think I'm gonna stop here. But feel free to send any follow-up questions if u wanna hear me ramble more about my extremely specific tastes in romance.

Shoutout to "The Maiden and the Minstrel Knight" by Blind Guardian for being a song that captures peak romanticized out-of-control love.

[confessionsofa-roleplayer]

I’m looking for advice here! Thank you (and your followers) in advance for anything you may say / suggest! So, i feel like about 75% of the time, my character is written super well and in character (which I’m proud of, I’ll admit) but the other 25% of the time I feel like it’s terribly ooc and just doesn’t have the same in character touch (if you know what I mean). It’s like SOMETHING just isn’t right about it! Is there any way to improve my writing consistency? What do you guys do? Thanks again

who is character consistency, who is she I don’t know her

Hey anon!

Obviously I’m not a huge stickler on character consistency. I think the reason why I’m not is because I only have one main muse, and a few side muses I sometimes pick up for fun. I’ve developed my main muse for so long that writing as him is pretty much like writing as myself in a diary.

I did, however, struggle a lot for the first few months or so as I sorta felt out his character. I had a bunch of incongruous traits for him, and I’ve always been an instinctual sort of writer, which means I just sorta write down what comes to mind first (the first answer is always the right answer to me for replies). 

Eventually though, I figured out that the trick was to learn nature vs nurture. What traits are never changing between AUs? What traits change depending on his upbringing? For example, in every verse, my muse hates responsibility and is bad in leadership positions. In most AUs, this doesn’t matter as much, but in AUs where he’s thrust into a leadership position, he doesn’t do so hot (he’s very bad at being a king). However, there are some AUs where his other traits (curiosity, a knack for sneaking around, and a propensity for problem solving) cancel out his fear of responsibility and result in him being, say, a lieutenant detective. I have something of a tier list for his traits in my head, although the tiers are flexible and change depending on the context of the AU.

Something else I find helps is knowing inside out how he would respond to other characters. Not in a “how do they react right now, specifically” way (though that’s also important), but also in a “how does interacting with x character change my muse over time?” Using my muse as an example again, he’s a bit of a bad boy (though not in a stereotypical sense, he just thinks he’s a bad boy), and being with other muses can bring out different sides of him. His main ship partner, for example, swings his alignment towards chaotic good. His other relationships push him towards chaotic evil, or lawful neutral, etc etc. Characters don’t stay the same over time. Let them change.

In addition, when portraying canon muses, I typically choose which traits I want to emphasize, and which traits I let fall aside. For example, my muse is canonically characterized as a suave sort of gentleman rogue figure. I chose to emphasize the rogue portion, while the ‘gentleman’ portion is aesthetic-only, and the ‘suave’ part I threw out almost completely. Other people emphasize the ‘gentleman’ portion, while still others go for the ‘suave’ bit. Each of our portrayals are distinctive from each other because we chose to explore and magnify different aspects of his personality to create a unique version of him.

Hope this helps! Do our followers have any advice?

--Mod Renoir

[samwise-though]

Sabrina’s Top Ten

This is a little bit (a lot bit) out of my blog’s wheelhouse, but I ask you guys to bear with me! For one of my seminars, I have to do a Top Ten project, in which I talk about ten different things relating to Pop culture, music and/or theory. So, if you don’t want to read this, that’s fine! I’m putting the bulk of the post under the cut!! This is basically just me commenting on how weird pop culture is, and fangirling about Taylor Swift.

(Sorry Dr. Burke, you’re absolutely going to have to read about Taylor Swift, and I am realizing that after Adorno I’m incredibly cynical about popular culture now)

#1: Taylor Swift: Archive, Collecting and Identity

I think as I began this year, there was this feeling of necessity to blast off with the song “22” from @taylorswift​’s album Red. All the way back in 2012 little fifteen-year-old Sabrina knew that when she turned 22, she would be playing that song All. Day. Long. 

Here’s the thing though: while yes, I did listen to “22” more than any of the other songs on Red that day, I also spent a lot of time listening to the rest of the album as well. I came to the realization that I could identify with the album better than ever. There was something so profound about the way @taylorswift​​ captured that moment in time, in her life, and have it still remain so relatable. I spent a long time considering this, but it wasn’t until I encountered Jean Baudrillard’s The System of Objects that I really began to find a way in which to understand what was happening for me (and undoubtedly many others, considering Swift’s success). In chapter two: “A Marginal System: Collecting” Baudrillard references Maurice Rheims’ ideas of collecting for children, “For children, collecting is a rudimentary way of mastering the outside world, of arranging, classifying and manipulating”. Ultimately, collecting is a way in which we learn to form identity - and what is an album, if not literally a collection of music that in and of itself acts as an ultimate tool of identity construction? I’ve been listening to @taylorswift​​’s music since her official 2006 debut. That is a lot of time spent self-identifying with a musician and her music. Constructing even part of your identity from something that is a collection that is very much a large part of someone else’s identity is such a weird concept. Why do we do that? 

Even more interesting though, is the fact that Taylor has said on multiple occasions, that her albums are like diary entries (not to mention the great number of other people drawing that particular comparison). Thus making each album that she has released up until this point a small archive, collecting and ordering that point in time. Either way, @taylorswift​​ continues to find success in creating archival collections that are reflective or refractive of her own identity.

With the release of Lover and the inclusion of her diary entries as an addition to the deluxe versions of the record, it follows in the history of including controlled snippets of her life in the physical copies of her albums. From the first five albums, she included secret coded messages within the lyrics of each of the songs. In 1989, Taylor included copies of polaroids with lyrics written across the bottom of them, each numbered - so you knew you got certain ones, and not others. As well, starting from 1989 @taylorswift​​ has also included voice memo recordings from her writing and recording sessions, so that fans can have a better understanding of her creative process. 

All of these details add to the personal feeling that @taylorswift​‘s albums seem to emanate. This feeling is only magnified through the additions of the diary entries in Lover (deluxe). Each album is a carefully constructed archive of @taylorswift​‘s life, that her fans then go on to add to their own ‘Taylor Swift collections’ and continue to alter their identities through the new piece of the collection that she has created.

#2: The Reproducibility of Childhood

If there is anything in recent memory that should be considered with Benjamin and mass-reproducibility in mind, Disney and the company’s capitalizing on re-making all of their old animated films should be discussed.

They did this really clever marketing tactic in which they pretty much re-do the original trailer they released for the original movie, shot-for-shot with the new film footage:

I will admit it didn’t work quite as well with the 2015 version of Cinderella, in which they altered a greater amount of the story, as compared to The Beauty and the Beast. Obviously, the trailer that has found the most success thus far with this tactic, was the most recent release of The Lion King.

What is the most intriguing thing is that Disney is embracing the past iterations of the movie, basically just repackaging the old story in (for most of the movies) live-action acting rather than animation and selling the audience very nearly the same exact thing. And not only are they very blatantly reselling the masses the same thing, but they are also saying, with these side-by-side trailer comparisons that “hey, look, we're doing this thing exactly the same way” and without question, we buy into it because it is familiar and feels of childhood. Having read Adorno’s Culture Industry Reconsidered, I feel as though we should really be taking a moment to question why we are allowing Disney to amass so much capital from movies that we have already seen. By drawing on our cultural memory of these movies that were so fundamental to many children in Western society growing up, Disney is literally monetizing our childhood memories. It is just as Adorno says, “The culture industry fuses the old and familiar into a new quality.”

While these movies get a shiny new paint job, it is still blatantly the old and familiar.

But I guess Disney has always been about capitalizing on memory.

#3: The ‘Classics’ and Aura

I have spent a lot of time over the past year, shaping my identity. I made a lot of life-changing decisions, one of which was to go to grad school. It was not a quick decision, and it more or less happened over the span of a year, during an English course I took. The class was a lecture on Victorian and Edwardian literature. I found myself really fascinated by the Victorian novels that we started the class with. When we got to Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles I was a goner.

I fell in love with Hardy’s story and my love for the Victorian and 19th-century studies only solidified further throughout the semester. However, my entire experience at the university has been plagued with serious imposter syndrome. Thoughts of how “I don’t belong here,” and that “I don’t really know what I am talking about” were the soundtrack playing in my head every single day. I was always worrying that I had grossly misunderstood the texts we were studying, my interpretations were wrong, and that I would make myself look like a fool. All of these feelings, when analyzed at a later time, were all rooted in the idea that we were studying ”The Classics,” narratives that were part of the Western Literature Canon. How could I possibly understand literature that was considered “Great”?

There is a constructed aura around the literary canon that is also extended to the place in which that canon is taught. A very elitist feeling that has been cultivated since the beginning of higher education. For me, when making the decision to continue my university education by taking the leap to apply for Grad schools, this aura only grew - to the point in which it almost feels that it will be impossible for me to get into a graduate program. It feels as though Graduate programs are meant for a specific group of people - and somehow I am evaluating myself to not fit into that group. 

But what exactly is it that still continues to be such a fundamental influence over the population that University is considered elite, and those narratives should be the ones to makeup Western Literary Canon? Is the legacy of Colonialism still so etched into our ideas that we literally still believe that the novels that a bunch of white dudes agreed were good are the be-all-and-end-all of good literature?

What’s bothersome about this is, I didn’t get to start asking those sorts of questions, and experiencing a wider array of literature until I reached my upper-level seminar courses, for my honours degree. 

Courses that you cannot take unless you are a part of the honours program.

Ironic isn’t it? The elitist aura can only be questioned from well within the elitist institution.

#4: The Avengers: [Streaming]Game

Marvel’s first cycle has now come to an end with Avengers: Endgame. It’s odd to think just how emotionally attached the fans (myself included) have become to the superheroes that, many of which will not be returning after this installment in the Avengers franchise.

(Loki Gif included because bae deserved better - and a TV show that I have to pay for absolutely does not make up for it)

Marvel is now going to capitalize on certain character deaths (see above), by giving them TV series and prequel movies to help entice the masses that have been so invested in their stories up to this point in the cinematic universe. The problem is, though, any character receiving a show, it will only be aired on the Disney + streaming service.

The Disney + streaming service comes long after Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and other streaming services have already established themselves. The issue that arises out of this system of individual streaming platforms, is that subscribers have to either subscribe to every new platform that arises or else to pick an choose which content they are willing to not have access to. It's a ridiculous system, and it will make it nearly impossible to have conversations with those around you because it should be a safe assumption at this point - ad if not now, certainly in the near future, that no, they probably haven’t watched it, because they don’t have access to it. 

This is obviously just a new way to control the products that companies produce. But it also brings to mind Benjamin and his ideas regarding mass production (”Work of Art”). Has the aura of the film been diminished because of the sort of re-producibility that come out of easy access (watching it any time you want), or, has there been a new mutated aura created for these films and tv shows because of the lack of access people may have to multiple platforms?

I guess we got what we wanted, easier way to access the tv shows and the movies we love, but at the cost of having to choose where we are willing to spend our money. It's a very Adornian thought, in that we wanted something, it was produced to the best possible economic value for the companies creating them, and then we continue to buy into the product. 

#5: Sparknotes and Memes

If you have a twitter account, and like literature, you should really check out SparkNotes’ twitter account.

They have become more and more popular over the last few years due to their use of the relatable internet language we know as memes. They, of course, are not the first company to engage with their users in such a way, many companies have been using social media to brand themselves in a very personable (and personified) way.

By doing this, they are making themselves appear more accessible to today’s youth, who are primarily influenced by what they see and interact with on the internet. 

There is something less sinister about SparkNotes utilizing the internet and memes to direct themselves to the younger audience - they are after all an educational aid group in which they are providing texts in more manageable and understandable terms. 

Other companies, however, like fast-food restaurants who utilize social media as though they are an individual rather than a company... That is quite a bit more insidious. 

 #6: Concert Movies

I want to return to music once again. But not in the traditional sense. I want to discuss concert movies.

There is something so weird about concert movies! They seem to exist in a separate space from actually attending a concert with live music and listening to the album. There is something very artificial in the sense that most of the time it feels very engineered, because of camera cuts and camera changes, and the difference in going from a front-row perspective to the camera shot cutting away to a wide shot so that the stadium is in full view. But then it also fulfils its purpose as “live music”. There is this sense in which it feels like you can’t look away, in case you miss something, even though you can pause it! 

It is a heavily controlled, or perhaps, curated experience. Realistically, there are so many different cameras that are recording the same moments, that in post-production they are able to choose the best possible moments to cut together to provide to the viewers (I avoid the word audience here, because there is, in fact, a physical audience that we as viewers of the movie, are separated from). 

I looked into the history of concert movies, and a quick google search led me to Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii a concert movie in which Pink Floyd played a short set of songs to no audience and recorded it.

Which is an odd concept, especially when you think about how it inspired other artists to film concerts. 

That they played. 

To no one.

I could see with Pink Floyd it being more of an artistic venture, but more recent concert movies like: Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience, Reputation Stadium Tour and Justin Timberlake + the Tennessee Kids all are more framed as giving the viewers the opportunity to experience the show, but still having them remain apart from it. Some of these concert movies feel as though they were produced to allow those who did not have the opportunity to attend the show in person the chance to experience what that might have been like, others are made with the intent to give the viewer a little bit more of the backstage/behind the scenes experience. What all of them have in common, however, is the opportunity for the artists to profit once again off of the shows that they have already played. 

Whatever the purpose is behind the movies being produced, they all are this weird experience of not-actually-being-there and knowing exactly what it would have been like to have attended. 

#7: Instagram: Curating the Self (Definitely inspired by Sophia’s Presentation) 

The Instagrams of popular artists are heavily curated to really emphasize their brands (”that’s very on-brand for you”), and who they are trying to portray themselves as. I feel as though no one really does this better than @taylorswift​. 

Shortly before she released reputation she wiped her Insta clean and started sharing gifs of different parts of a snake - a motif that she fully embraced for that particular era in her career. It was a practice she embraced again, leading up to the release of the first single of Lover. While she didn’t wipe her Instagram clean again, she did lead up to the release with little hints and teaser images that were all very inspired by the colour scheme and feel of the new album:

If you look at any artist’s Insta account you will find at least some of this curatorial work.

This brings us once again, back to the class on collecting, archiving and how collecting plays into identity construction. Each artist is curating their identity that they want to show the world (not unlike the discussion that we had involving Lana Del Rey and the front that she presents to the world, instead of her true self).

The work that goes into the Instagram account is mirrored in every public appearance, every show they play, and every interview they give. It is an odd concept when considering it in regards to the artist, but it becomes even weirder when we consider it in terms of just everyday people. We curate our lives on social media platforms to present ourselves in the best way possible. And we don’t have millions of people watching us while we do. Perhaps the hope is that the ideal that we portray could someday be reached, and that's why we continue to collect the images and videos to construct the ideal identity for ourselves.

While my life certainly isn’t very glamorous, I definitely do at least some curatorial work on my own Insta.

#8: Nostalgic Television

There has been a resurgence in the love of some older series like Friends and Gilmore Girls through the access to the full series on streaming platforms. Some of these shows have not aged very well (see: a good deal of Friends’ jokes), but the love for them continues anyway. 

Recently, tv shows such as those named above, have been branded as “nostalgic television” and has been slated to be psychologically beneficial to help with anxiety. 

But why do we remain so attached to TV shows such as these? Well, supposedly, just like the way we are drawn to watching the remakes of Disney’s movies as I mentioned earlier, it reminds us of our childhoods:

Will Meyerhofer, a New York-based psychotherapist and author, says watching our favourite old shows can be a useful tool for dealing with anxiety and mild depression.

"For my clients, these old shows are like the food they grew up with. 'The Brady Bunch' or 'The Facts of Life' or 'The Jeffersons' is like that beloved baloney sandwich on Wonder Bread with just enough mayo the way mom used to make,” he told TODAY.

 A recent Facebook post on The Mighty health community got hundreds of responses to the question: "What TV show from your childhood would you want to marathon-watch on a bad flare day?" The answers ranged from "The Waltons" to "Barney Miller."

That's because television from yesteryear can make us feel safe and secure in a world that feels increasingly chaotic.

“In therapy terms, it's an instant — and for the most part healthy — regression in the service of the ego,” Meyerhofer said, adding that he unwinds with old episodes of "Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

We long for a time when we felt safer, less stressed and when we were able to really enjoy the things we liked. TV shows that we watched as we were growing up provide us with the nostalgic fulfillment that we need to feel happy - even if it is just for the length of a thirty-minute Friends episode.

#9: Screen TIme 

 Something I noticed when I was watching Reputation Stadium Tour... for research... there was very few people who were actually just watching the show. There were many screens visible in the crowd at all times. 

Something that has become very prevalent in concert culture, is that you don’t actually experience the concert first hand, you view it through your phone screen, as you record. 

It is something that I have noticed myself doing, and have set the limitation of only allowing myself to record two songs out of the entire concert.

By viewing the concert through the recording, the actual experience of the concert is altered, and even though you are standing there in the room, you are participating at a distance, rather than being involved in the moment.

The need to record and to photograph, I would argue, comes out of the feeling of necessity to archive and sort every memory that we have. Concerts are special occasions and we don’t want to forget them - and if we don’t have a video or photo, did it really happen? We need to archive every moment so that we can go back to it later and remember how great it was. 

But how great was it really if you were staring at your phone screen the entire time?

#10: The Rise of KPop in Canada and the US

There seems to have been a shift lately in Western popular culture in which Kpop (Korean Popular Music) is now being considered more mainstream.

Groups like BTS have found success on Western pop charts, their collaboration with Halsey, Boy with Luv, peaked at #10 on Billboard’s hot 100. Other Korean groups like Blackpink and Twice are also making a name for themselves on Western pop music charts.

What is interesting is that Kpop doesn’t really follow the same frame that most of the Western pop does. A lot of Kpop seems to be more dance-influenced, thus influencing the music stylistically and opening a lot more interesting opportunities for music videos.

Kpop is something different and separate from what Western Pop is comfortable with, and what influence it will have on the framework of the norm will be very interesting to see. I do wonder what Joshua Clover would have to say about Kpop groups and their involvement in popular music, and whether or not he would classify them in with the “Abject, feminized, and inauthentic: *NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, and Britney Spears...[who] dominate the list of best first-week sales”(103). There is, after all, something about the rhythm-based and often synthesized melodies that are prominent in Kpop that feels like a call-back to boy bands and pop stars of the late 90′s and early 00′s

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Well, that is it for my top ten! If you made it to the end, and are not my Prof [who does have to read it all the way to the end - Hi Dr. Burke! You made it! ] Thanks for reading!! 

[maverick-werewolf]

Random Werewolf Fact #20 - How to Kill a Werewolf (Weaknesses)

The age-old question that people like to ask but seems so easy to answer in most movies, because they always die - how do you actually kill a werewolf, anyway?

I wrote a post on silver once, if you recall. But here’s a much more robust version of what can and cannot actually hurt a werewolf.

As you probably already know by now, werewolves are often essentially invincible. Often, but not always. In some stories, killing a werewolf was just as easy as killing any other person or any other wolf. Burning at the stake was common, as you might imagine.

Or more often than not, the werewolf simply cannot be killed, and you have to find a way to fix/revert/cure them instead. For more details on all this and more, you can also see one of my previous posts on werewolf abilities.

Want to get Mav all fired up? Tell me about werewolves with ridiculously stupid contrived weaknesses. Send me an ask if you want a rant. Honestly, I got very angry just writing this post, thinking about the stupid crap people do. But for now, I’ll just stick to info as well as I can.

Did NOT appear in folklore:

Silver - The big one. The fake one. The one completely made up by Curt Siodmak in 1941 when he wrote his movie The Wolf Man. The one I’ve said many times and had some people point at me and just say “So... Yeah. Wrong.” Well, right back at you, O friendly one. You’ll hear people now and then try to tell you that this whole silver thing for werewolves started around the Beast of Gevaudan; it did not, that was a fictional retelling and embellishment someone wrote years later. Some people will try to tell you there are other stories that mention silver for werewolves in a folkloric fashion. The trouble is, I’ve never seen any properly documented and accountable sources to back up these claims, so honestly I can’t bring myself to believe they exist, especially since Curt Siodmak and people who worked with him said themselves that he made up the silver thing completely from his imagination. So anyone scouring legends to find silver, picking up trails of contrivances and mistellings and misinterpretations over the years, trying to hard to make this a real thing - they’re all wasting their time. Folkloric werewolves are not sensitive to silver and never have been. Does silver appear in other folklore? Sometimes, yes. Is it alchemically associated with the moon and that’s probably why Siodmak picked it (because he chose to associate his werewolves with the moon)? Probably, yeah. Does it make for a good story? Well, yeah, it can! But, I’m sorry, it simply is not from any folklore anywhere that specifically werewolves are sensitive to, or can only be slain by, silver.

Holy ground/holy artifacts - This is also not a thing. Werewolves aren’t unholy. They aren’t like vampires or other unholy monsters like evil spirits and demons; in fact, they have absolutely nothing to do with any of those things. And even when some Satanic sorcerer court cases got mislabeled as being werewolves, the wolf sorcerers still weren’t repelled by holy symbols or unable to step on holy ground.

Vampire bites - As I’ll be detailing in a future post, the whole “werewolves vs vampires” thing is a very modern idea made by modern storytellers. Vampires have no special natural “weapons” against werewolves and vice versa. Vampire bites certainly don’t “poison” werewolves.

Fire - No, fur is not made of pure oil that will catch on fire and burn like pitch the second it comes into the tiniest contact with a single freaking match. It doesn’t catch on fire instantly and it won’t stay burning forever like some eternal flame. Also, in berserker lore, they are specified to be immune to both iron and fire. And in fact I’ve been led to understand that really the only thing that causes your hair or fur to burn is the body oils that coat it. Listing this as some kind of unique and special weakness for werewolves, like everyone likes to do, is ridiculously silly, please stop doing this. And listing it because fire scares animals is also silly because werewolves aren’t animals; they’re werewolves. Anyway, no, this wasn’t a thing in folklore, either.

Running water - This is another undead/evil spirits/vampires thing, never once associated with werewolves, particularly as werewolves are not unholy.

Loud noises/bright lights/whatnot - As you might imagine, no one in the days of actual werewolf beliefs was running around with flashbangs, so no, this never really happened either.

Wolfsbane and belladonna - This is a really popular one and another one that originated from The Wolf Man (1941) when Curt Siodmak decided to associate his werewolf with the wolfsbane flower. Basically, Siodmak dictated to the world what his werewolves are like and then everyone decided to copy him and now it’s all but universal canon that werewolves are like his werewolves. It’s pretty wild, really. Wouldn’t it be amazing if that happened to you, if you suddenly just up and told the entire world what this monster is like for essentially the rest of its existence in all storytelling everywhere?

Electricity - This seems to be an increasingly common thing. I mean, yeah, most everything is “sensitive” to electricity, right? This is another new thing, though, so it’s like whatever.

Literally everything else in all those TV shows - Yes, all those shows you watch that have werewolves in them. Supernatural, True Blood, Vampire Diaries, Being Human, Teen Wolf, you name it. They all made up a gracious plenty of things, some ranging from completely ridiculous (sulfate gas, what? What does that even...?) to arguably more reasonable. Of course if you ask me most are ridiculous. Blood loss? Really? What do you think the regeneration is even there for?

Of course, making up weaknesses for your werewolves isn’t a bad thing. I mean, I’m not saying it’s innately bad; not at all (well alright except some of them and especially the unholy thing... can we not?). Especially since I hold to the idea that they should be essentially invincible otherwise. But none of these have actual folkloric sources - that is my point.

Appeared in folklore:

ABSOLUTELY NOTHING - You heard it right. Zip. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Big goose egg. Nothing. Naught. Nichts. Ekkert. Nec entem. Ingenting. And now you also know how to say “nothing” in various ways and languages, too.

Want a few of the weirder instances of how werewolves were actually defeated? All of these only happened once on an individual level. In one case, we get the idea that speaking a werewolf’s Christian name will turn them back to their human form. In another case, if you throw a piece of iron over their head, they’ll turn back.

Do any of these actually hurt, kill, or “cure” them, though? Nope, sorry.

No weaknesses. Good luck with that. You know Wolverine, right, from Marvel? He’s much more of a proper werewolf than like 95% of werewolves in pop culture.

So next time you’re making up werewolves for your world or something, if you want them to have no weaknesses - hey, that can still be on point. Or you can just use silver, because honestly everyone takes that for granted now. And I’m not denying it’s fun (I use it in my own setting, though I have a gratuitous backstory to go with the why and the how, instead of it “just being a thing,” and no one knows why/the creator[s] don’t really know why or care to know either).

But for goodness sake, if you use silver, don’t do that obnoxious thing where people act like you can somehow feed a werewolf silver and it’ll kill them (like they’ll just swallow silver for some reason lololol so funneh and trickseh). Even if they did swallow it, you realize vomiting is a thing, right, especially if it’s something actively burning your insides? Or people who act like you can actually shove it down their throat in the middle of combat. That is the stupidest thing ever in the history of everything. It wouldn’t work and you would die and the werewolf wouldn’t be anything except really mad and busy tearing your stupid head off. Get out.

*ahem* So there you have it! Enjoy.

(If you like my werewolf blog, be sure to check out my other stuff!

Patreon --- YouTube --- Wulfgard --- Werewolf Fact Masterlist --- Twitter)

[lovecanbesostrange]

headcanon meme thingie: Brittany S. Pierce / Anger; Evie Frye / General Physical Contact; Meredith Grey / Favorite Possession; Hermione Granger / Cooking; Lara Croft / Singing

Brittany S. Pierce / AngerMost people think Brittany doesn't get angry, dismissing her rather quickly. Well, that happens with all big emotions she might show and so at a young age Brittany learned to keep a lot of stuff inside. Don't make a big scene, don't act out. And so the way she shows emotions sometimes, it's as "weird" from an outside perspective as her word associations (that always make sense in her head). By now she puts her anger into sneaky revenge actions (ask Rachel, although she doesn’t even understand what’s happening). And if she can’t do that. The only person she just straight up yells back at? Santana. And the reasons to do so are very few, especially the more crap Santana figures out about herself.

Evie Frye / General Physical ContactEvie specializes in not-being-seen, so not-being-touched goes with that most of the time. And training all her life meant that most physical contact had to with punching and kicking. Also well, Victorian era, lots of etiquette there. So any physical contact that is not slapping her brother or shaking hands with somebody, is very deliberate. Okay, so this is headcanon anyway, so my fav Evie ship is of course the Dishonored crossover ship with Emily Kaldwin and now there is all sorts of physical contact! In this one fanfic that I'll never write Evie ends up in Dunwall and she thinks she's being sneaky, but Emily - on her nightly run along the rooftops - notices a shadow, so their first encounter ends with some punches and both being impressed. (The story exists in two versions, one is canon-compliant, so both have other love interests and it's just a flirt. The other has just much more physical contact and Evie will enjoy that very much... and hand-holding is super important, also angsty, because try grabbing your smoke-monster almost girlfriend that's being sucked into a transdimensional vortex of most certain doom...)Anyway, for Evie Frye a hug, a squeeze on the shoulder, brushing a tear from the cheek - it all carries meaning and these are all deliberate acts.

Meredith Grey / Favorite PossessionMeredith is not the most sentimental type. Things are things. At one point she even managed to let go of her childhood home and moved into the perfect family house specifically build for her. And she let that go when the love of her life died and it wasn't a good place anymore. But speaking of, Derek left his scrub cap behind, the one with the ferry boats he loved so much. And if everything burned down, Meredith would grab her kids and this darn scrub cap. She is dark and twisty and she could even spin losing her mother's diaries into something positive (freeing herself from the past and stop looking for clues). But that cap...

Hermione Granger / CookingAin't nobody got time for that, there's a ministry that needs to be run! Knowing the way Hermione likes to follow potion recipes to the letter, I wonder if that carries over to cooking. This is how the dish is described in the book, this is how it should be done and this is the way she will do it. And there is a bit of peace in cooking the muggle way, it takes more time and that could become the stress relief hobby she definitely needs. (Until there is this big holiday dinner and she says she's gonna host and wow, she helped with Weasley gatherings before, but being in charge and trying to do it all and following a plan... oh, no way.)

Lara Croft / SingingSo, 2013 Reboot timeline, because this is of course about Sam. Lara has a good grip on what she can and can't do. Singing is on the can't-side of things. Sam doesn't agree. Well, she agrees that Lara shouldn't audition on the Voice, but oh is she pulling her friend up on stage on karaoke nights! Lara needs a good distraction from all that work and being serious. (Sssshhh, don't tell anybody, but Lara's reluctance was real at first, but now it's only routine, she likes it when Sam grabs her hand and holds on so tight during the song.) This one time drunk!Lara puts up a song first and maybe it was funny at first, but halfway through a duet of Time of my Life Lara is hit with this *pang* emotion and just... damn.

[thornfield13713]

Just got back from Wonder Woman...

...and yes, it is every bit as amazing as advertised. And it also finally inspired me to get out there and make a start on my own DC personal canon, and naturally I’m going to start with Diana. I’m not quite taking the film verbatim for two reasons - one, I’m a mythology geek, and two, it’s a personal canon. I’m definitely taking a fair bit, though.

I’m actually going with the original All-Star Comics version of Diana’s origins - she was sculpted by her mother Queen Hippolyta from clay, and given life not by Zeus, but by nine goddesses - Demeter, Aphrodite, Athena, Artemis, Hestia,  Iris, Hera, Amechania and Persephone. Specifically, she was given life by Persephone, but the other eight blessed her with abilities far beyond even those of your average Amazon and many of the qualities that would later make her a hero. So, not quite a goddess, but at least a demigoddess, and definitely powerful enough to be going on with. Her lasso is the Lariat of Aletheia, given to the Amazons by the Goddess of Truth herself. Her armour was given to them by Aphrodite, forged by cyclopes and impervious to all mortal harm, and same goes for her vambraces. I’m also buffing up her shield a bit - it’s the aegis. Yes, that one. Head of Medusa and everything - given by Athena itself to her champion on Earth. She probably provided the sword as well.

I am, however, keeping her origin in WWI, mostly because it gets much less attention than WWII and also Diana’s slow journey from innocence to experience and the realisation that, actually, sometimes humanity is as bad as her mother said, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth fighting for were just...yes. I am definitely keeping that, and I am definitely keeping her supporting cast from that. With a few minor tweaks. For a start, Steve Trevor is a Brit. Royal Flying Corps, shot down in a dogfight over the Mediterranean. Deal with it, Americans steal enough of our characters that we can steal at least a couple of yours. (Doctor Strange, I am coming for you next.) He’s also very well-educated and studied the Classics before he enlisted, which is good, because the Amazons have been living on their island a very long time without contact with the outside world  and they’re largely either immortal or extremely long-lived. Basically, the majority language on the island is still Ancient Greek, although they do know a little of various other languages from women who have taken refuge on Themiscyra from the cruelty of men, brought by the goddesses. (Going with the All-Star Comics interpretation where the Amazons are resurrected women who have died through the cruelty of men. And yes, ‘woman’ is here identified as ‘person who identifies as such’ regardless of anatomy or the role the world tried to assign them.) Steve knows enough Ancient Greek and they know enough English that they can more-or-less understand each other, even if his accent is appalling because he learnt it as a dead language he’d never need to speak. He’s also pretty seriously injured, it’s 1916 and it actually takes a few months in which to recover, over which time he gets to know Diana and tells her what’s going on and she decides that she cannot stand by.

History will later say that Superman was the world’s first real superhero. This is factually incorrect, but the mysterious figure called the ‘Angel of the Trenches’ is often dismissed as a legend similarly to the ‘Angels of Mons’ earlier in the war, and the death in action of Lieutenant Stephen Trevor did not attract much attention from those who did not already know him well. The figure of the Angel showed up in a few propaganda images and in the diaries of a few men who claimed to have seen her, but this was just one of the many inexplicable things of the whole bloody business, and Diana was so burned out by the end of the war that she wanted nothing more than to put it behind her and help rebuild, and was doubly disgusted with the open craving for revenge that led to the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles. She continued to operate, more quietly, throughout the twentieth century. There were enough extraordinary women working with the French resistance to the Nazis, however, that her supernatural qualities were read as just the exaggeration of another leader, and after the war, Diana Prince began work at the Louvre, where she has remained ever since.

She did not appear to the world as Wonder Woman until the early twenty-first century, probably due to some form of large-scale alien invasion or other catastrophe so massive as to require her to make an appearance on the world stage - I would cautiously suggest borrowing the White Martian invasion used on the Justice League animated series - at which point she was publicly dubbed ‘Wonder Woman’ by the press and her secret identity as Diana Prince, curator of antiquities, got blown wide open.

[perfect-corroscience]

CELIA’s thoughts, probably: MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM

Beating the champion starts you off in your house and the same old things occur: you pick up the S.S Ticket, and get to choose one of the L@tis will be roaming around. Whichever is chosen, they’ll still be totally inferior level-wise to another one you can catch (spoilers), so whatevs.

Spoilers: not the Battle Frontier. Not sure what happened there, presumably it got destroyed by the meteors too.

But we’re not heading there, we’re gonna detour for a bit.

Recall my brief blurb during the Victory Road update that you can find Groudon’s and Kyogre’s abodes just here in Victory Road.

Groudon is pretty much the same as it was in vanilla Emerald.

The next part or two will be dedicated to Pokemon Altair/Sirius’ very own legendary fever! It’s actually not as intense as in its sequel, where it throws legendaries at you at such a rate to make ORAS proud.

The ladder leads to Kyogre’s old stomping swimming grounds. Of the weather trio, it’s the only one to get a new sprite. Procyon/Deneb do a bit of this too, but that’s moreso the spriters seem to gradually giving canon ‘mons new sprites as they get done – more notable since they’re getting evos.

Kyogre’s moveset is the same as in vanilla, so ThunderDance and Sheer Cold ahoy.

We see Steven just standing there, but he says nothing and just flies away, so I dunno if he’s supposed to be there.

Makes sense. It’s only been seen like, what, maybe three times in all of history?

Next stop is the library.

This guy, if you talk to him pre-Champion, bars you from entering…

But let’s you through once you’ve become the Champion.

…This is different.

SILPH CO, the largest company in the KANTO region, developed the artificial POKEMON PORYGON. And then, after major technological breakthroughs, PORYGON2 was completed.

But recently, someone created a corrupted version of PORYGON2, called PORYGON-Z. If PORYGON is not protected in some way, it will be subject to further deterioration. 

Alternatively, a new POKEMON that fills PORYGON's role could be created...

In certain areas, CELIA gets this above her head, as though she felt a strange presence.

Just what was being hidden here…?

My dude, how’d you get in here? Were you just stuck here the whole time?

Although meteors rained down on all of HOENN, there are speculated to have been three tremendously large meteors among them. Those three would account for most of the large-scale changes to the HOENN region. Out of the three meteors, one fell on a mountain and the other two fell into the sea.

There was a large waterfall on the mountain. The impact collapsed the big waterfall into a group of smaller waterfalls.

One of the two meteors that fell into the sea landed on an old ship midway between a town and a city. This caused the ship to collapse further.

The other meteor fell near a city that was partly underwater, and submerged it a bit further.

Something to keep in mind for the next part or two.

The main item of interest is this diary. Worth noting the music goes silent once you start reading this. To supplement this, I won’t be commentating until it’s done, just transcribing some parts of the diary.

We want to get out, but we might make him angry, and he gets unpleasant when he’s angry. I guess we’ll just put up with it.

We are still in the back room. Mommy opened the door and gave us some rice.

…spinning around.

My sister won’t move. Even if I hit her or pinch her, she won’t get up.

But I said I wouldn’t leave!

I took his hand.

No, I can’t leave her behind!

Strange people came up to me. I was given about ten different injections. The purple man was gone before I knew it.

The diary cuts off here.

It ends just like that. It was... rather unsettling. CELIA is kind of… tugged up into the air or something like that after reading the diary. It plays the animation you get when you step in a warp panel.

There’s nothing left to do in this room. As you try to leave, however…

A wild Grimdax appears! Coming in at level 35, she’s quite far below the level curve, unfortunately.

So why not just be on our merry way?

Unfortunately, as you’ll find out, once you flee, you actually cannot move. The music starts playing again and the fog is still there, but for roughly half a minute and some seconds, you can’t do anything (not even open up the menu). I wouldn’t be surprised if there were people who ran from this encounter and thought it caused a softlock.

If you play with sound on, though, you’ll hear the music fade away just before the Grimdax starts speaking with you again. Incidentally, if you wanted I guess you could keep doing this if you wanted a specific nature, or even a specific gender since that’s not actually hard-coded into this encounter.

If you don’t want to bother catching the Grimdax, though, you can always just fight. Pretty cool that they added some dialogue for whether you try to run away or defeat them.

But we’re doing this properly and catching this one. No dialogue for choosing to catch Grimdax, for probably obvious reasons.

So uh, you’re just not gonna say anything about what’s been hidden back there? Nothing? At all? Ok.

Quiet is a pretty bad nature.

In the next part, we’ll see about those three sites the meteors hit, starting with the Abandoned Ship, the “old ship midway between a town and city.” I missed a screencap earlier that did have a bit of colored text. Tried to fiddle with HTML to get it to show, but who knows if it will.

[ourimpavidheroine]

Hello favorite author of mine! Here's a question that you don't have to answer if there are spoilers involved (and if so I'll ask again later, but I can't help but try now because I'm NOSY): I know you've said that Qi just appeared on the page while writing the 5 Times fic, so at what point did you realize what Qi's future in relation to Wu and Mako would be? Was it prior to writing ASoSaA?

So because you are you, I’ll give the long answer instead of the short one!

There may be some mildish spoilers ahead - so read or not as you please.

I’ve said before that I have set myself some challenges as a writer. Please Excuse My Penmanship was me tackling the dreaded letter fic (and there are still some people who will not touch it with a ten foot pole because of it) and I decided early on that Wu as a character would do really well with a first-person diary format (even though, again, there is a lot of hate out there for first-person fanfic and people won’t read it because of that). 

LoLo was planned, absolutely. I wanted someone for Lin, and I wrote that character specifically as someone I thought would be a good match for her (or at least my version of her). All of the kids were planned as well - oh, there might have been some waffling about names (I went back and forth between Poppy and Lily for a long time but in the end I think Poppy suits her better) and even gender (Goba was supposed to be a girl but I just kept writing “he” over and over again and finally gave it up and let him be the boy he so clearly wants to be) but they were planned. (It’s why I know so much about Sayuri as well as Ikki’s kids). Naoki was written as my way of trying to take a character like Azula - a brilliant prodigy - and put her into a loving and supportive family, and see where that would take her. Would she be boring if she didn’t have that villain arc? Or didn’t have a redemption arc like Zuko? Could I make her the best bender of her age and still make her real? Likable? A character people resonate with? A character that people want to read more about? That was my own challenge when it came to the Butterfly, right down to making her a firebender who will eventually be jumping right into a Chosen One trope.

I had characters that were supposed to be relatively unimportant just take off. Nuo is a fine example of that. I was going to write about Wu searching for a secretary but realized it would bog the story down. (Wu’s recounting of it for Iris in AtWtPHM was my original idea that I had to scrap.) So I had to create this secretary for him out of nowhere. She was never meant to be as instantly engaging as she was; there was no plan at all to have Wing fall so hard for her. She quite literally just started happening in Dear Diary; I just got the fuck out of her way and let her run her part of the story. (It’s always best to let Nuo do that anyhow.)

Baatar Junior is my redemption arc, of course. His attraction to Ikki kind of hit me upside the head and I was like…no way! This could never work! CHALLENGE ACCEPTED. (He was also a gift for my betareader - he’s her favorite character of all of mine, and so I knew I had to do right by him, as difficult as he is. And he is! He’s the most difficult of all of my characters, canon and OC alike, to write.)

So that leaves me with my Qi. That scruffy kid of non-determinate gender who showed up sitting in the chair next to a hungry Mako’s desk. As I’ve said before, I never planned for Qi. Qi just showed up on the page and I let them. I had no idea what was going to become of that kid; they took over the story like Nuo did, but in a totally different way. I realized very early on who Nuo was and what her future would be - she was going to stamp her way right into Wing and Zaofu’s heart. 

But Qi? 

Qi was a slippery little koi fish. I could never quite grab ahold of them - I tried to determine gender and it just wasn’t happening and I realized to myself that it was because this kid was actively rejecting gender and I knew I needed to let that happen. I did not set out to write a nonbinary character the way I did a trans character (and yes, I have an OC that is trans that not even my betareader knows about yet, because they will be coming out as part of the storyline). Qi made themselves nonbinary and as a writer I had to respect what the character wanted for themselves. And that’s how it has always been with Qi. I realized early on that this character wanted to write themselves and I made a conscious choice to let that happen instead of planning things out for them. How would this work for me as a writer? Would it be a red hot mess? Or would the character just keep unfolding, like a flower? Hopefully the latter. 

My betareader can tell you that there have been several times that she has read something and said, Wait, I thought Qi was going to that other thing instead of this! And all I can do is shrug my shoulders and say, I know! But what can I do? Qi tells their own story. Qi doesn’t really care all that much for my careful planning, either.

It was during AsoSaA that Qi let me know that Qi was actually in love with Wu - that it had gone way past the mostly grateful crush that Qi had been sporting for Wu for years. Qi also made it clear that there were feelings for Mako as well. And it kept going from there. Qi’s changes as Qi gained confidence and an understanding of their place in the world - the learning to read and write, changing the accent, the true and unique fashion sense - were never planned. I just let Qi lead the way. There a few things I do know about Qi’s future; one or two things that are set in stone already. But Qi IS a slippery koi and just when I think I have grasped something about them they are out of my hands and swimming somewhere new and unexpected. I’m just following along as best I can. So what I’m saying to you is that I still don’t know what all Qi’s future holds for them. I really don’t. Qi will tell me when Qi is ready to as Qi always has.

I’ve had some questions from readers about the whole polyamory thing. Ikki is in a traditional Tibetan fraternal polyandry relationship; I wrote it deliberately that way. (So to be clear: There is no incest happening. Baatar and Huan are not sleeping together and they won’t be having any threesomes with Ikki, either. I’m not kinkshaming, it’s just not what I am writing.) It’s why the folks in Baidi Village are completely fine with the whole thing - it is the cultural norm for them. Because of this, their relationship is never going to cause much comment up north where the temple is. (That is obviously not the case elsewhere.) I am not writing my fic for kids and I have unlimited time and space for it so I can delve into some of those more traditional and geographical influences far more than Bryke ever could, of course. Most ATLA/TLOK fanfic relies heavily on Chinese and Japanese influences; I wanted something different. Asian influence, of course, but something outside the mainstream. Thus Baidi village was born.

My Wu, on the other hand, has been strongly influenced by Imperial China. Which the canon Wu was as well, of course. The Earth Monarch was clearly based on that. I’ve run with it. (I’ve researched and then talked so much about Imperial China that I finally sat down and re-watched The Last Emperor with my son. The movie does have its issues, of course, but it’s meant a whole lot of really interesting dialogue about racism and colonialism with him.) It makes me want to throw my hands up into the air and kick people when I get the comments I do about polygamy. “I’m not into it” or “The characters would never do that” or even “This whole thing makes me sick to my stomach.” Polygamy is a real thing in many non-western cultures. The ATLA/TLOK universe is not set on our Earth; it is not Asia, but rather Asian-influenced. But I will tell you one thing it isn’t, and that’s Christian. Western Judeo-Christian influences do not apply. Wu being a King in a dynasty that was clearly based on Imperial China would have had a consort and concubines. It’s just how it is. He’s not the king any longer, but he is a prince, and in his mind, having more than one partner is not only normal, it is to be expected. Qi obviously just swam their way right into that!

So this is my incredibly long-winded way of telling you that I really can’t nail down a specific time when Qi told me they were going to have a relationship with Wu and Mako! I still haven’t written the whole Qi and Mako thing out because Qi just hasn’t gotten around to telling me what it is yet. I am sure they will. When they do, I will write it down for the rest of you!

[sasslightertm-a]

RULES

I. Mun and muse are separate entities. Please treat them as such.

II. Feel free to ask questions directed at my muse. Also, feel free to tag me in a starter or rp. I’m up for three-ways and/or group rps so long as the other partner(s) already agree(s).

 If it takes me over a week, drop a notice in my inbox. However, don’t flood my inbox just because we’re both online. Sometimes I only have muse for certain threads or I just might not feel up to RPing at the moment.

If it takes a while for me to respond, it will because of these reasons: (1) I do not have Internet access; (2) the thread is in my drafts and I am stuck on how to respond; (3) I missed the inbox ask or reply/Tumblr ate it; (4) I have a life away from Tumblr; or (5) I may need to take a break from role-playing so I can recharge and my muse can come with with ideas. It will not be because I am ignoring you or I don’t like you or your muse.

III. If you ask to RP, you write the starter.

IV. DO NOT REBLOG MY ROLEPLAYS IF YOU ARE NOT INVOLVED. Message me or go on Anon if you have a comment about a thread.

V. Personals, do not reblog my OOC posts (unless tagged 'Charmed' or 'Chris Halliwell'), headcanons, drabbles, and roleplays. Doing so once will result in a warning. If it happens again, you will be blocked.

Regarding NSFW content:

NSFW material (gore, violence, blood, etc.) may happen on this blog. However, please let me know if you want to smut with Chris before we add it in a thread. I tag NSFW and trigger warnings as such. I do use Read Mores for smut on this blog. I'm also perfectly fine with doing a fade-to-black.

I don’t have any triggers; however, threads with suicidal themes, self-harm, and sexual assault on my muse make me extremely uncomfortable. Please discuss it OOC first.

I will not RP smut with minors. (This should be pretty self-explanatory.) If you are a minor and want to RP smut with me, I will do a fade-to-black.

I am of age to RP smut, as is my muse; however, I play Chris as being grey-asexual. He does have a very low sex drive, but it's very rare that he wants to act on it. (That being said, he is fine with both men and women.)

God-modding

Basically, don't do it. If you want specifics, this includes:

Metagaming (using OOC information in an IC thread).

Killing off my muse

Forcing history on my muse

Forcing a ship

Speaking for my muse

Describing my muse’s thoughts or emotions

Doing an action for him

Forcing a situation upon him without giving me, the mun, a chance to respond.

Doing ANYTHING for my muse

Having your muse know mine when they’ve never interacted.

In short, you write your muse and let me write mine.

GUIDELINES

I. This blog is multi-verse, multi-ship, and selective.

II. I track the tag #twicebornwitchlighter.

III. Mun's FC is Sally McKnight (aka Thorn) from the Hex Girls as she appears in Scooby-Doo and the Witch's Ghost.

IV. On my writing style: I use sentences, paragraphs, one-liners, and gifs/icons/icon gifs. If you don’t use icons, gifs, or one-liners, that’s fine. I’m okay with just writing sentences/paragraphs. Basically, I tend to use everything and my style can be rather fluid as a result.

V. My portrayal of Chris is taken mainly from the TV series and is very heavily headcanon-based. I do not read the comics, but I do consider the tie-in novels to be canon to the TV series.

Interacting

I. If you come to me with an rp idea, I request that you write the starter. Please don’t ask me to write it. In addition, do NOT come into my inbox with "Hey, wanna rp?" or "Can we rp?" and not have an idea for what you want to roleplay.

II. I prefer to use the IM messaging system solely for OOC chatting and plotting. I won’t role-play or respond IC over the messaging system.

III. I will not tolerate hate directed at me or my partners. Anon hate will be deleted or responded to IC (if it is directed at my muse), and I am not responsible for my muse’s actions.

IV. I do not smut out of the gate, with a couple exceptions: (1) It has been plotted out with the other mun; (2)  it has reached that point in a thread where both muns feel it is appropriate.  

V. I do not roleplay with muses that have no bios or rules pages. I also do not roleplay with cartoon/anime muses (unless they have a faceclaim), self-inserts, YouTuber faceclaims, and Mary-Sues.

OCs / Crossovers / AUs

I. I am willing to crossover with the following fandoms: 

Buffy the Vampire Slayer 

Teen Wolf 

Shadowhunters/The Mortal Instruments  

Witches of East End 

The Vampire Diaries  

The Secret Circle 

Wizards of Waverly Place  

Ghost Whisperer

If I am not familiar with your fandom, I will not write with you.

II. On OCs: I am extremely wary and selective when it comes to playing with OCs. I won’t always say no, but I won’t always say yes either.

For OCs (and all potential partners), I check out the bio page, rules/guidelines, and read some posts to see if our writing styles will click and if your muse will be a good foil for mine. I’ve had a few bad experiences in the past with OCs, so please respect this. (This also goes for Phoebe and Cole's unborn son.)

I will not roleplay with OCs if

there is no about page

they are a next gen sibling to Chris (my Chris has zero right to regard your muse as his brother/sister/half-sibling/step-sibling)

their sole existence is to be in a romantic/sexual relationship with Chris (or it is part of your OC's backstory that they are in an established relationship with him when we have never interacted). I am not writing Chris solely so your muse can get laid by a pretty witch.

III. All that being said, I do love OCs and AU muses. Hit me up.

Shipping

I. I ship Chris with chemistry. That’s it. However, I do headcanon him as a demiromantic grey-asexual—he has a very low sex drive and will have sex if it is what his partner wants, but he rarely feels sexual attraction. It will also take a long time for him to fall in love with your muse.

II. Don’t assume relationships. Do not assume my muse is best friends with yours, knows who your muse is, that your muse is an acquaintance of or related to Chris, or that they are in a romantic/sexual relationship. The only time this is okay is if your muse is one of the Halliwells or a character Chris has met in-canon. (Even then, I am extremely selective when it comes to Halliwell muses.)

III. Related to the above, do NOT force a ship. If your muse makes sexual advances towards Chris and he shuts them down, do not have your muse continue to pursue him. It is okay if your muse falls in love with him, but he is under no obligation to return your muse’s affections. Also, PLEASE talk it out with me first if you want to ship your character with Chris—and keep in mind that I have every right to say “No” to a particular ship.

IV. I do not write incest or mpreg.

V. Again, I am not here solely to write smut. If that's all your muse wants Chris for, then it would be best if you found someone else.

VI.  All ships are independent of each other, so Chris is not cheating on anyone. That being said, the set ships I have for Chris are the following:

Chris/Bianca

Chris/Morgan

Chris/Mon-El

Chris/Jace

DISCLAIMER

I am not associated with The WB, Charmed, or Drew Fuller in any way, shape, or form. Nor do I own the character of Chris Halliwell. This is just a roleplay/ask blog for fun.

Most icons are from hunts done by charmedindiehelp (found here). I also make my own icons. Gifs and all the background images seen on this blog are my own. That being said, it's best not to take anything you see on this blog.

My version of Chris is TV and heavily-headcanon based. I do not take the comics as canon, nor will I accept the upcoming reboot as canon (if anything, it will be in an alternate universe from this blog). My anti-reboot tag can be found here.

MUN

Call me Jess. Timezone is MST, USA. I'm a 20+-year-old undergraduate student, so I will not be on Tumblr all the time. This is also not my only RP blog.

English is my first language. I know a little bit of Spanish and am an intermediate German speaker/writer (I've been learning German for 4+ years). Sometimes I may lapse into Standard German (code-switching is a problem for me, since I'm at the point where the languages are clashing in my head). If I do, forgive me and I'll provide a translation.

Mutuals can contact me on Skype.

[hellofastestnewsfan]

What’s happening?

This has always been an easier question to pose—as Twitter does to all its users—than to answer. And how well we answer the question of what is happening in our present moment has implications for how this current period will be remembered. Historians, economists, and regular old people at the corner store all have their methods and heuristics for figuring out how the world around them came to be. The best theories require humility; nearly everything that has happened to anyone produced no documentation, no artifacts, nothing to study.

The rise of social media in the ’00s seemed to offer a new avenue for exploring what was happening with unprecedented breadth. After all, people were committing ever larger amounts of information about themselves, their friends, and the world to the servers of social-networking companies. Optimism about this development peaked in 2010, when Twitter gave its archive and ongoing access to public tweets to the Library of Congress. Tweets in the record of America! “It boggles my mind to think what we might be able to learn about ourselves and the world around us from this wealth of data,” a library spokesperson exclaimed in a blog post. “And I’m certain we’ll learn things that none of us now can even possibly conceive.”

Unfortunately, one of the things the library learned was that the Twitter data overwhelmed the technical resources and capacities of the institution. By 2013, the library had to admit that a single search of just the Twitter data from 2006 to 2010 could take 24 hours. Four years later, the archive still is not available to researchers.

Across the board, the reality began to sink in that these proprietary services hold volumes of data that no public institution can process. And that’s just the data itself.

What about the actual functioning of the application: What tweets are displayed to whom in what order? Every major social-networking service uses opaque algorithms to shape what data people see. Why does Facebook show you this story and not that one? No one knows, possibly not even the company’s engineers. Outsiders know basically nothing about the specific choices these algorithms make. Journalists and scholars have built up some inferences about the general features of these systems, but our understanding is severely limited. So, even if the LOC has the database of tweets, they still wouldn’t have Twitter.

In a new paper, “Stewardship in the ‘Age of Algorithms,’” Clifford Lynch, the director of the Coalition for Networked Information, argues that the paradigm for preserving digital artifacts is not up to the challenge of preserving what happens on social networks.

Over the last 40 years, archivists have begun to gather more digital objects—web pages, PDFs, databases, kinds of software. There is more data about more people than ever before, however, the cultural institutions dedicated to preserving the memory of what it was to be alive in our time, including our hours on the internet, may actually be capturing less usable information than in previous eras.

“We always used to think for historians working 100 years from now: We need to preserve the bits (the files) and emulate the computing environment to show what people saw a hundred years ago,” said Dan Cohen, a professor at Northeastern University and the former head of the Digital Public Library of America. “Save the HTML and save what a browser was and what Windows 98 was and what an Intel chip was. That was the model for preservation for a decade or more.”

Which makes sense: If you want to understand how WordPerfect, an old word processor, functioned, then you just need that software and some way of running it.

But if you want to document the experience of using Facebook five years ago or even two weeks ago ... how do you do it?

The truth is, right now, you can’t. No one (outside Facebook, at least) has preserved the functioning of the application. And worse, there is no thing that can be squirreled away for future historians to figure out. “The existing models and conceptual frameworks of preserving some kind of ‘canonical’ digital artifacts are increasingly inapplicable in a world of pervasive, unique, personalized, non-repeatable performances,” Lynch writes.

Nick Seaver of Tufts University, a researcher in the emerging field of “algorithm studies,” wrote a broader summary of the issues with trying to figure out what is happening on the internet. He ticks off the problems of trying to pin down—or in our case, archive—how these web services work. One, they’re always testing out new versions. So there isn’t one Google or one Bing, but “10 million different permutations of Bing.” Two, as a result of that testing and their own internal decision-making, “You can’t log into the same Facebook twice.” It’s constantly changing in big and small ways. Three, the number of inputs and complex interactions between them simply makes these large-scale systems very difficult to understand, even if we have access to outputs and some knowledge of inputs.

“What we recognize or ‘discover’ when critically approaching algorithms from the outside is often partial, temporary, and contingent,” Seaver concludes.

The world as we experience it seems to be growing more opaque. More of life now takes place on digital platforms that are different for everyone, closed to inspection, and massively technically complex. What we don't know now about our current experience will resound through time in historians of the future knowing less, too. Maybe this era will be a new dark age, as resistant to analysis then as it has become now.

If we do want our era to be legible to future generations, our “memory organizations” as Lynch calls them, must take radical steps to probe and document social networks like Facebook. Lynch suggests creating persistent, socially embedded bots that exist to capture a realistic and demographically broad set of experiences on these platforms. Or, alternatively, archivists could go out and recruit actual humans to opt in to having their experiences recorded, as ProPublica has done with political advertising on Facebook.

Lynch’s suggestion is radical for the archival community. Archivists generally allow other people to document the world, and then they preserve, index, and make these records available. Lynch contends that when it comes to the current social media, that just doesn’t work. If they want to accurately capture what it was like to live online today, archivists, and other memory organizations, will have to actively build technical tools and cultural infrastructure to understand the “performances” of these algorithmic systems. But, at least right now, this is not going to happen.

“I loved this paper. It laid out a need that is real, but as part of the paper, it also said, ‘Oh, by the way, this is impossible and intractable,’” said Leslie Johnston, director of digital preservation at the U.S. National Archives. “It was realistic in understanding that this is a very hard thing to accomplish with our current professional and technical constructs.”

Archivists are encountering the same difficulties that journalists and scholars have run up against studying these technologies. In an influential paper from last year, Jenna Burrell of the University of California’s School of Information highlighted the opacity that frustrates outsiders looking at corporate algorithms. Obviously, companies want to protect their own proprietary software. And the code and systems built around the code are complex. But more fundamentally, there is a mismatch between how the machines function and how humans think. “When a computer learns and consequently builds its own representation of a classification decision, it does so without regard for human comprehension,” Burrell writes. “Machine optimizations based on training data do not naturally accord with human semantic explanations.”

This is the most novel part of what makes archiving our internet difficult. There are pieces of the internet that simply don’t function on human or human-generated or human-parse-able principles.

While Seaver of Tufts University considered Lynch’s proposals to create an archival bot or human army to record the experience of being on an internet service plausible, he cautioned that “it’s really hard to go from a user experience to what is going on under the hood.”

Still, Seaver sees these technical systems not as totally divorced from humans, but as complex arrangements of people doing different things.

“Algorithms aren’t artifacts, they are collections of human practices that are in interaction with each other,” he told me. And that’s something that people in the social sciences have been trying to deal with since the birth of their fields. They have learned at least one thing: It’s really difficult. “One thing you can do is replace the word ‘algorithm’ with the word ‘society,’” Seaver said. “It has always been hard to document the present [functioning of a society] for the future.”

The archivist, Johnston, expressed a similar sentiment about the (lack of) novelty of the current challenge. She noted that people working in “collection-development theory”—the people who choose what to archive—have always had to make do with limited coverage of an era, doing their best to try to capture the salient features of a society. “Social media is not unlike a personal diary,” she said. “It’s more expansive. It is a public diary that has a graph of relationships built into it. But there is a continuity of archival practice.”

So, maybe our times are not so different from previous eras. Lynch himself points out that “the rise of the telephone meant that there were a vast number of person-to-person calls that were never part of the record and that nobody expected to be.” Perhaps Facebook communications should fall into a similar bucket. For a while it seemed exciting and smart to archive everything that happened online because it seemed possible. But now that it might not actually be possible, maybe that’s okay.

“Is it terrible that not everything that happens right now will be remembered forever?” Seaver said. “Yeah, that’s crappy, but it’s historically quite the norm.”

from The Atlantic http://ift.tt/2BE9kRB

[nuzblog]

Sunday, October 22nd, 2017

Hello there. My name is Sterling, which you may very well know already. I could bore you with details about me but I'd really prefer not to.

On this day (which is yesterday at the time of writing), I began my third consecutive attempt to do a Nuzlocke Run of Pokemon Blue. I intend to play through every generation of Pokemon in chronological order, using original versions (so no remakes; for the original two generations I will be using the virtual console, and for the latter five I will be playing the original cartridges.) I further intend to begin documenting this quest using this site as a sort of diary, which will be updated whenever the game I am nuzlocking is played, which will probably be daily for a while, but then I might get a Switch, or Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon might come out, and it might become less than daily.

To start out with, let's quickly go over a few things in terms of background.

The Pokemon series started with the release of Pokemon Red and Pokemon Green in Japan, on February 27, 1996, 19 months before I was born. The games were RPGs based on the childhood play of creator Satoshi Tajiri, who as a young boy in Machida, Japan, would collect beetles and have them fight other kids' captured insects. With 151 unique creatures to collect, trade, battle and love, from typical adorable cats and dogs to awe inspiring kaiju, to creepy-cute moths and bees and strange animated plant monsters, and things even weirder than that, the franchise had something for everyone. It made a huge splash in Japan, and when it was rereleased in the United States, it was accompanied by an animated show aimed at children and a trading card game, all of which connected like a plug into the outlets in the minds of children all over the world. It became a global phenomenon practically overnight, with scores of magical monsters becoming household names, and the concepts becoming core for game design. The series is still going, and while nothing since the first generation has become quite so culturally pervasive, the franchise is a well known and renowned one all the same. Every few years new games come along, with a new setting, a new story, and a set of new Pokemon hovering around 100. In seven "generations" (Red/Green/Blue/Yellow, Gold/Silver/Crystal, Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald, Diamond/Pearl/Platinum, Black/White/Black 2/White 2, X/Y, Sun/Moon/Ultra Sun/Ultra Moon), the number 151 has become 804 (and counting, since Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon aren't out yet and may very well have a few new Pokemon.)

You probably know most of that already, but it is important to lay this kind of groundwork so that nobody is confused.

A Nuzlocke Challenge is a specific sort of self-imposed challenge that some players of Pokemon games use to combat the game's otherwise relatively low difficulty outside of PvP. It gets its name from a webcomic that originally simply called the challenge "Pokemon Hard Mode", but featured a Nuzleaf who was named after John Locke from LOST, who became a memetic character inside and outside of the comic, and the challenge is now named for that Nuzleaf. (If you're unfamiliar, Nuzleaf is a grass type Pokemon from Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald, that looks kind of like Pinocchio and evolves from an acorn and into a tengu. LOST was a bad show by the guy who for some reason got put in charge of both Star Trek AND Star Wars afterwards.)

The original Nuzlocke Challenge used the following rules:

1. You may only capture the first Pokemeon you see in each area. 2. Any Pokemon that faints is permanently dead, and can never be used again.

Later players of Nuzlockes have modified and expanded those rules, and today, many rulesets exist. Some mitigate the difficulty of these two rules, some make it harder, and some merely add a new spin to things. But in order to be a Nuzlocke Challenge, these two rules are the bare minimum.

Now that I've given you that background, I'd like to go ahead and list out my own ruleset, which I will be using not just for my playthrough of Blue, but also for all consecutive playthroughs, with the potential for minor tweaks and edits inbetween games and also early on into this first playthrough.

1. I may only capture the first Pokemon I see in each area. 1a. No Ball Clause - No wild encounters count until I have access to Pokeballs. 1b. Duplicate Clause - If the first encounter in an area is a Pokemon I have already caught, and they have not died (even if they have evolved), that encounter can be ignored in favor of the next one. This can be repeated until a unique Pokemon is found. 1c. Shiny Clause - A shiny Pokemon can be caught at any time, if one is encountered in the wild, unless the encounter is scripted. 2. A Pokemon that faints in battle is permanently dead, and can never be used again. A Pokemon that faints outside of battle, such as by poisoning, can be restored to life at a Pokemon Center. 2a. If I ever white out, and my whole team is fainted, it does not matter if I have living Pokemon in the box; my player character is considered dead, and the run has failed. 3. When an important trainer battle occurs, such as one with the rival, a gym leader battle, a battle against an admin of the villainous team, or another battle against an important NPC such as an elite four member or the champion, my party must have exactly as many Pokemon in it as theirs does. 3a. 6 Pokemon team for the Elite Four and Champion challenge at the end. 4. Each Pokemon Center provides only one opportunity for me to heal my Pokemon. When I finish an important battle, I have another chance to heal at the nearest Pokemon Center. I can hold onto this second heal, but I cannot accumulate a third. 4a. Healing outside of Pokemon Centers is infinite, including at home or in strangers' beds. 4b. Struggle Clause - If I run out of PP on all damaging attacks, I am allowed to heal at the nearest Pokemon Center if, and only if, all of my Pokemon are already at full HP.

Those are the major, overarching rules. Other notes include that I will be determining starter randomly when my character has the option unless I have tried and failed with two of them and have not yet tried the third, and that every Pokemon will be nicknamed. A Pokemon nickname cannot be reused for the same species if that Pokemon dies, and a trainer nickname cannot be reused if that trainer dies. (If, on the other hand, I complete Blue with a Pidgey on my team, and I am named John and my Pidgey is named Butts, I can use the name John for my player and the name Butts for a Pidgey I catch in future games, until they die.)

Got all that? Good. Now we can begin.

Well. Actually, first I'm gonna run through what happened on my first two attempts lightning fast.

First attempt - Player name was Red. Bulbasaur, named Metreedon, was my starter. Caught a Rattata, named it Mickey; it died. Caught a Nidoran (Female), named her Lexi. Caught a second Rattata, named it Minnie, it also died. Reached Level 8 with Metreedon and Lexi, and then fought the second rival battle. Was sorely beaten by Blue's Pidgey.

Second attempt - Player name was Satoshi. Charmander, named Sally, was my starter. Caught a Rattata, named it Remy. Caught a Pidgey, named it... I can't actually recall. Progressed all the way to Mt. Moon, beating Brock along the way. Was done in by the first encounter with a Team Rocket Grunt in Mt. Moon, and his illegally evolved Level 16 Raticate.

NOW we can begin!!

(A note: between that writing above and this writing below, I slept and then woke up and then went to work and then worked and then went home. I did not play any Pokemon Blue on the 23rd, but I will today, the 24th. Probably.)

I began my Pokemon journey, naming my character "Gary" and my rival "Ash", at the suggestion of the game. I can't help but feel as though Red being the far and above more popular version was an intentional move on Game Freak's part, given that these names are reversed both in Pokemon Red, and in the English translation of the anime. (I have not played the Japanese versions, but it is my understanding that a similar switch happens with the names Satoshi and Shigeru.) The Blue/Red suggestion switch is a little less notable, since that's a simple matter of the game you're playing. That said, while some of the names have turned out a little cringey ("Hilbert" and "Hilda" in particular), I think the "canon names" changing from depending on your game version to depending on your character's gender starting in the third generation was a good move.

Moving on, I go through the typical motions; I grab my Potion from the PC, I walk into the left-hand square of grass north of Pallet Town, get stopped by Oak and brought to the lab. There, I pick my starter, who, given that I've already rolled a Bulbasaur (using a random number generator) and a Charmander (using a physical six-sided die), I decide to be Squirtle. I name my Squirtle "Shelley", since gender doesn't exist yet and I can do whatever I like. (Not that gender ever really exists.) Squirtle is my favorite of the three starters in this generation, with Wartortle being my preference of the family, so I'm excited to use Shelley. This, of course, counts as my Pokemon for Pallet Town.

My rival battle in the lab is the most clutch it's been, for some reason, which is odd given that I'm now armed with the most useful statistic-affecting move alloted to the starting movesets of the three starters in this game, Tail Whip. I am reduced to one health, very nearly a game-ender, so I use my potion on the chance that my foe will use Tackle instead of Growl (Bulbasaur is faster than Squirtle here.) I win the battle with full health, but one less Potion, which are at a dreadful premium until Pewter City.

I journey north to Viridian, taking the opportunity to grind in the grass a bit. I get the potion from the advertiser, the parcel from the mart, and then head back south, delivering it to Oak. I now have a PokeDex, but more importantly, since I'm definitely not filling that out, the PokeMart in Viridian will now sell me some PokeBalls.  I head North yet again, purchase five, and head south, catching a Rattata in Route 1 along the way. I name my Rattata Lemmy. I could talk about what made me use that name, but I think I will leave that a mystery. The first person to correctly guess what my name scheme is for this run through (before it ends) will get... a Pokemon from the run traded to them in Sun or Moon? Hidden Abilities, yo.

I left off the game grinding back and forth in Route 1, taking maximum advantage of the unlimited healing that my mother provides. This is not a privilege I'll have forever (although I will probably have it back when I get Fly?), especially since, as I recall, there is a temporary point of no return on the other side of Mt. Moon, which, even if Mt. Moon weren't inhospitable to those who are already desperately in need of healing, would make it impossible to take advantage of my mother's generosity.

Current team is Shelley the Squirtle, Level 8, from Pallet Town; and Lemmy the Rattata, Level 6, from Route 1.

Riveting, I know.

See y'all for the next entry.