#i never put my ocs online!!!! except in the server

[shirecorn]

Tricks or chance, a treat?

You get! Chancey!

Join my discord via patreon or ko-fi to see Hundreds of exclusive drawings!

[cpulysses]

I dont think I ever poster my Whipped Cream Cookie obsession here bcs at the time I would "consistently" post I was also obsessed with We Happy Few but oh my DAYS!! HES GETTING A SKIN. HES GETTING STUFF HES GETTING SO MUCH FUCKKNG STUFF IM SO EXCITED!!! So I'm infodumping all here

OK first of all were starting from the beginning. when i was born anyways when I was like 13/14 or something around that age and on a bigggg road trip with only me and my dad, I was feeling super bored. Me and my friends just finished a roleplay we had so we were speaking in a groupchat and my boyfriend mentioned trying a Cookie Run roleplay! We all joined but I was the only one who stayed, everyone left immediately because their favorites were taken.

BUT NOT MINE!!! I really liked Whipped Cream Cookie, when I picked up the game again after a really long time I just looked at him and decided yeah that one and oh my god why did that like change the trajectory of my life. He wasnt taken and I knew jack shit about his lore, but I picked him up and later on Cyborg Cookie too

I wasn't... heh... known for my whipped cream..! 🤓! But I still really liked him, people liked how I wrote his dialogue, but I was cooking so well with Cyborg Cookie that theg were the main focus really, eventually I decided to connect the twos lore for fun! I knew like all of Cyborgs lore except for stuff with the future skins really, so I just interwove Whipped Cream as someone related to their past in a way where Cyborg makes that stupid pink egg Whipped Cream has, and Whipped Cream just kinda found it and was like this is FIRE! and Cyborg was like noooe :( Thats basically it shortly put but I had a lot of fun roleplaying the two and found my best friend ever while in that server and now were big and grown and :3!!!

But yeah, I basically ONLY have good memories with the character. I continued to grow to like HIM, when the server was sadly deleted I ocified him and Cyborg alongside other cookies, with my friend also taking them in as ocs as well. And I grew more attached to my ocified Cyborg cookie due to how different they were to the base, but my ocified Whipped Cream Cookie could never fucking take the wheel. I love him sure but canon Whipped Cream just always had a special spot for me, my friends literally told me they've never seen someone so infatuated with a character while barely posting about it online or anything (now here i am) or just in general so captured by a character, he was like my fucking mascot to my friends, they'd see ANYTHING with him in it and send it to me, to the point where I wouldn't be shocked if I've seen almost every fanmade and canon Whipped Cream cookie thing like in the world

And for part of that massive fixation I knew jack shit abt what lore he actually had 😭 I knew small things and then again all he really had was small things, but I didn't know all of it. Then randomly on his wiki page I was doomscrolling and found a link to an article all about him! Not an article just a long google doc, but thats where I learnt a bunch and could look into the Dessert Paradise and all the characters to know how each connect and know more about him and I was very joyous,,, I was content for SO LONG. Just knowing he was a fellow brownskin who loves ballet and pink, with my little headcanons. Now I knew real shit I felt like the man.

And now me, one of my friends, and my boyfriend are all ocifying some of the Dessert Paradise cookies that we see as family ^^ So like Sugar Swan, Wind Archer, Fig Cookie etc etc. I wish I knew who made that Whipped Cream Cookie document but if your out there just know you changed the trajectory of my autism for life. I won't say more I'm already rambling so much, but I love Whipped Cream with all my heart and this update has me so so excited because I've had dreams of being on my fuckjng death bed with one wish and wishing for an update about him. Its bad.

BUT!! I will draw him and my ocified version more to post here and on Twitter even if nobody gaf bcs i gaf. I love him so dearly I've grown with hum through time the span of like 4-5 years just because I randomly pointed to him and went that one!! And moved on. I could legit die happy now. Like my life is over this is my peak. My peak.

[ravenwolfie97]

2020 Art Summary

Yep, it’s 2021 already. 2020 is finally over. It felt like it lasted forever, and it felt like the end would never come, but here we are. Crazy how the time flew by.

I felt like I didn’t get much art done this year because of Current World Event, but I made a lot more than I thought I did. Even some of my new favorite pieces came out of this year, so I think that’s worth celebrating and looking back upon!

I was insanely productive during the first month of 2020, and looking back I was surprised at all the stuff I did, but then I remembered that that winter season was actually one of the best times of my life! I started being more socially involved, and I think my newfound drive at the time translated into all the art I pumped out this month. This is just a small fraction of what I made in January, but I only have so much space. Quite a few complex pieces in both style exploration and polishing my own style.

Apparently February was a rather intimate month. Things began to slow down in terms of my own art here, with me spending more time in social settings and school work ramping up, I didn’t have as much time to coop up in my room to draw. I did wanna do something for a friend’s Valentine’s Day OC art challenge, so I drew my lovey-dovey couple from Dance of 1000 Words havin’ a dance. Nothing actually came of that challenge, but it was fun to do regardless.

One of the things I was most proud of in the winter season was making more friends, and one of the closest friends I made was completely coincidental. I met a person named Kiri on the bus one night I decided to volunteer somewhere by myself, and we ended up chatting and getting along. They quickly told me their tumblr username, and I shot them a message immediately after they left. A couple days later, we met up for brunch, and we started becoming really close friends and creative partners!

Not much else happened in March cuz that’s when Current World Event started becoming an issue, but Kiri and I still kept in close touch and we randomly started developing a concept for a Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Galar Edition. These are a handful of characters we thought up, with Skipper the Scorbunny and Dross the Dreepy as the main characters, Morgrem as the main antagonist, and some shopkeepers such as those of the Greedent Bank and the Indeedee General Store. This was also my first time drawing all of these Galar Pokemon (except Scorbunny, but I also made Skipper a bit more unique than a regular Scorbunny).

Lots of events happened this month. First of all, Steven Universe Future ended, one of my favorite and most influential shows was no longer continuing. I had to do something as tribute, both as a send-off to one of the greatest cartoons in the world and as a cathartic release for my feelings towards it.

A while later, I got the opportunity to start playing an MMO in beta called Fer.al, by the same people who made Animal Jam, which coincidentally I had also beta tested for back in the day. I ended up getting really attached to my first character, a Senri I named Sasha, and though I’ve made more characters than them since, they’re still my absolute favorite. Though I haven’t touched the game in a few months, I was really engrossed for a long time and enjoyed playing through the beta and early access phases.

At the end of the month, some friends of mine invited to a roleplay group with some mutuals, and we all played characters in a crime syndicate. Just a bunch of ragtag thieves and criminals who ended up together in order to protect an artifact called the Crown of Thieves, which was essentially a flag to be taken by other groups to prove that they are the best thieves in the land. My character was based heavily on my sona (if it wasn’t obvious) and was also influenced by Cloud Strife, since the FFVII Remake had just come out and I was super into watching the cutscenes at the time. My character’s (code)name is Valkyrie, and they are a mercenary, going between multiple different employers to carry out whatever duties they need to do. They have a more complicated backstory, but presently they were recently hired by recommendation of their friend Shark (played by @shmoots-universe​ who is also My friend now ily maya) who works with a group called the Court Cards who are currently in possession of the Crown of Thieves. Valk never really had a place to call home, but staying with this group of people had to be the closest they could get to that feeling. They still sleep with a knife under their pillow because of trust issue but that’s okay.

Okay, so technically these examples started in April, but I continued making content with them in May, and the month was just pretty void of art in general, so here I am addressing them.

There were two main things I worked on this month: a Steven Universe AU of my own and the whole #sixfanarts thing that kicked off around then. Let’s start with the fanart bits. I did two and a half of them (six in April and nine in May), and it was so much fun to be able to draw stuff I don’t normally do! My personal favorites are shown here: Blake Belladonna from RWBY, Roll from Megaman, Yuki Konno from Sword Art Online, and Link from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. The other thing I’d been planning for a while was a Steven Universe AU, probably to cope with the show being over but also because I was inspired by a lot of those SU AU artists I started following at the time. I won’t share the details here because it’s gonna have its own blog at some point, but the example I’ve shown here is of a comic I made loosely in order to introduce a divergence in the plot of the story as well as introduce a character unique to my AU. It was a lot of fun figuring out how to draw the characters and get a feel for the style.

As the year progressed, my amount of art I made per month began to dwindle, this time mostly because school was kicking my ass especially hard with finals. However, I took what time I had to get some backburner pieces finished, like the Tigerlily picture which I sketched out a couple months back, and the Gunvolt picture which I started working on SIX YEARS AGO. I don’t quite know why I got the urge to work on it again after so long, but it was nice to finally realize. The other drawing for DOTS was done in the dead of night but I was really happy with how it came out.

Despite only having two summer classes left of school, this month was really rough because they demanded a lot of my time and attention. I did not have the gumption to do anything digital, so I stuck to my sketchbook to get out what I felt like getting out.

My friends and I did a stream of the game Helltaker, and I really enjoyed the concept, so in following my friends I made my own Helltaker demon OC named Raksha the Ravenous Demon (it’s a pun but also got mythical insp). I also got super into Hazbin Hotel at this point, mostly because the Addict music video dropped and I couldn’t get enough of it, so I doodled Angel Dust cuz I felt like it. The other drawing I did was actually a free commission I gave a friend of mine as a prize for a trivia game show I ran back in June. He along with a couple other friends got some free drawings from me for getting the top three scores, and this one in particular was fun because of how interesting it was. He wanted me to draw a video game reviewer called the Irate Gamer from a specific moment, and I decided to go ham and just make it as dramatic as possible.

University classes finally wrapped up and right after that I was in the process of moving out of my apartment and getting adjusted to living with my parents again. I did a couple of agg.io drawing sessions with my friends from the Court Cards group as well as a new Dungeons and Dragons homebrew group I had joined. I drew some more of Valkyrie and came up with a design for my DND character Qakuqtuq (or Kai for short). He is monkey grandpa and I love him.

My main focus was on finishing a polished piece for my friend Cake, whose birthday was in the upcoming month. I wanted it to be as amazing as possible, so I put a lot of time into getting more detailed and making them look good. In addition to that, I did a few TOME doodles just for fun. The creature on the bottom was for this month’s art challenge on my Discord server where we made original TOMERPG monsters, and I created Hundylow, a Crystal-element monster based on the Grindylow from English folklore.

This month was a lot more productive than the past few had been. I tried to do a 31-day art challenge called Creatober but failed to get past the third prompt because I was still swamped with other work. I’m still happy with what little I did, including the piece with my characters Kyle and Guarudan from DSWD.

I don’t remember how, but I also suddenly rediscovered an old Flipnote Hatena series called Tales of LostClan, a Warriors fan series that I would say was the most obscure thing I’ve ever been super invested in. It was what got me into the actual Warriors books, and I liked it so much I redrew the animations into a comic... twice. Didn’t get nearly as far the second time but clearly my love for this little fanfiction had not waned after nearly a decade. I felt like drawing a book cover/movie poster for the series, just to get it out there and see how much I’ve improved over all that time.

Also I felt like making a vampiresona just before Halloween because I never dress up for Halloween in art (or real life anymore, for that matter), and I wanted to do something like that for once. It was short-lived but I really liked the design!

The focus of this month was definitely on Pokemon stuff. As per usual I contributed to the current Gotta Draw ‘Em All collab, and I was tasked to draw Regieleki. It was really fun to figure out how to make it stand out and look like it was made of electricity.

I also committed a lot of my spare time to my Fakemon Gym Leaders, as I had been working on bringing them to life in the past year or so now. As of this post, I’ve finished rendering their full body poses and gym badges, but I’m still working on completing all eight VS portraits, the first half of which are shown here.

I... didn’t draw anything this month, actually. What I’m showing here was worked on in the last few days but has actually been in progress for a couple of months, and I just finished it earlier today, in 2021. But I needed to show something off, and it’s also about time I mentioned it.

Back in October, I kept seeing people rave about this game called Genshin Impact, and I was interested but not so much as to start playing it... until my friends started playing and I was like “fuck it, let’s download it”. Since that day, I have been super immersed and in love with this game, to the point I came up with my own canon based on my gameplay experiences. This also included the creation of an original player character: Astra, the non-binary Traveller. And now, I’ve finally drawn them and brought them to life.

It has been one hell of a year. I had some of the highest highs and lowest lows in 2020, lots of changes, and I have now officially moved onto the next chapter of my life now that my time at university is finally over. I’m very excited for what 2021 has to offer, and I’m going to go forward with great ambition.

[the-final-sif]

interview about writing processes

Hey Lady Sif,

thank you for taking time for us and agreeing to answer our interview questions.

Since this was of short notice we decided to change the deadline to June 19.

We hope the time frame suits you.

Here are our questions:

Can you shortly describe us your writing history? How did you start off? How did you come across fanfiction?

Do you have a writing philosophy that helps you overcome challenges in writing?

Could you describe your writing environment? (workplace, prefered writing tools, fandom discourse, discourse with friends)

What inspires you to write and post in and for a fandom? What triggers your headcanons? Does your educational background influence your writing?

In how far does your fandom experience influence your writing?

In how far do you work with others to create fan content? And what ideas do you integrate in your writing?

Are there certain steps you take/decisions you make when/before responding to a post/prompt?

When and why did you decide to host writing events like your fake fics event? What was the purpose and how did you approach the title prompts?

How would you describe the difference between writing alone and writing spontaneously with others (first in creating fan theories and headcanons and second in creating fanfiction)?

Do you think knowing that others read and can comment on your texts subconsciously influences your writing?

What motivated you to create a story where your readers can decide for an ending (name)?

Is there anything else you consider important in your writing process that you would like to tell us?

Thanks again for your time and effort, we are very much looking forward to your answers!

If you’re interested we’ll keep you updated on our findings.

Kind regards, Dana and Helena

----

Can you shortly describe us your writing history? How did you start off? How did you come across fanfiction?

I started writing when I was very young! I was a huge reader, and even before I was writing stuff down I was a storyteller. It’s a really important part of my family & how we communicate with each others and others.

My first experience with fanfiction was when I was,, 7 or 8? That sounds about right. I hand wrote a fanfiction called “ShoppingCats” which something between warrior cats and Cats vs Dogs, but also made primarily of my OCs (+ a handful of warriors characters I liked). I still have most of it, it’s sitting in my desk drawer in it’s original binder, since my mother saved it.

I came across fandom spaces / online fanfiction in 2012 with fanfiction.net, and published my first fanfiction in 2013 (under Rosae-Sif on fanfiction.net). I’ve taken breaks as my interests changed & life got chaotic, but I’ve always enjoyed retelling stories that I hear and changing them to suit me more / explore new themes, so I’ve stuck with it after all this time.

Do you have a writing philosophy that helps you overcome challenges in writing?

Yes! I write for myself above all else. It’s fun to write stuff for other people sometimes, and I like getting feedback and what not, but I never let that be the focus of my writing. I always try to write what I want to be reading, so when I go back and reread what I’ve written, more often than not I find I’ve produced something that makes me happy, and that helps keep me going when a lot of other things couldn’t.

Could you describe your writing environment? (workplace, prefered writing tools, fandom discourse, discourse with friends)

Uhhh, I don’t really have any one set thing. I mostly write on my laptop, sometimes I use a notebook + pen. I have 5$ fountain pen that I got that I really love when I have writer’s block.

I think the most consistent “workplace” for me is actually discord/my friends. Almost all of my AUs/fics/ideas start as me storytelling (either typing things out or out loud) to someone else. That’s where the spark comes from, and then that slowly is refined through several iterations until I have something I like. 

I really like taking long walks with headphones & nobody else around. That’s when a lot of the very early forms of my favorite ideas come to me. It’s a key part of my writing process the few times I get stuck on stuff too. I just go walk till I figure it out.

I don’t really get involved in discourse much. I like debating people, but I try to stay away from destructive stuff and just have my own fun corner where I create things. I’m in fandom for fun, and I refuse to let me experience be tainted by people who try to turn it into Discourse Central.

What inspires you to write and post in and for a fandom? What triggers your headcanons? Does your educational background influence your writing?

As I mentioned before, I write and post primarily for myself! I have a lot of ideas in my head all the time, and things I want to see, so I create those things and then put them here. It’s fun when other people interact with me + add onto my ideas + create things in response!

My headcanons are usually just kinda,,,, coming out of my brain. I think it’s just how I am. I have a question or a thought and I start looking into it and before I know it, a whole new thing has come out of it.

I think my family actually influenced a lot of my writing style more than anything else. I mean, I was homeschooled for a long time, and my parents were very encouraging of whatever weird projects I was creating (my dad once even let me cut down and drag actual brambles into the basement to create a warriors style fort). I was allowed to dress however I wanted (during high school I worn nothing but PJ pants b/c they were most comfy for me, and also I had/have several capes that I would rotate through), I was allowed to dye my hair (still do! it’s current a side shave in red + purple + blue!), and I was encouraged to just,,, be weird and happy. I think that shows in how I write. I pursue the ideas I want to go after, I indulge myself, I commit to thinks and I focus more on what I want to write rather than what I feel I should write.

That being said, a lot of science nerding that comes out in my writing is def from my educational background. I’ve got a bachelors and stuff. I did take some writing classes, but to be honest, I think my fanfiction experience influenced those a lot more than they influenced my fanfiction (years and years of writing constantly and quickly paid off in college where I would BS papers the night before and get top marks on it).

In how far does your fandom experience influence your writing?

Hmm, I don’t think it does that much? I mean, for the BNHA fandom in particular, I think that seeing all the cool content + ideas other people create really keeps my brain chugging along and creating new things, and god, having seen people make fanart and fanfiction for my stories has been one of the best feelings I’ve ever experienced, but I don’t think that’s really changed how I’m writing.

At my core, I’m still doing the same thing my 8 year old self was doing with her pencil and that binder full of paper. I take the strange thoughts out of my head, and I follow them onto the paper until I create something that makes me happy.

I’ve had some negative experiences of course. I mean, everyone does. They’ve all been fairly minor, mostly just people trying to tell me I’m wrong about stuff that’s either in an AU that’s already not supposed to be canon, or stuff I’m right about. Most of the time it’s just annoying. Sometimes it’s concerning. I ignore or delete the annoying stuff, I don’t want to give it any of my time or attention. 

The concerning stuff I try to reply to. It’s been rare, but sometimes I get comments on certain fics trying to tell me what’s being depicted in my fic isn’t abusive when it absolutely is. I try to correct that and link to resources when I do get that. I usually don’t get a reply, but a few times I’ve had people realize that what they thought was normal was actually abusive behavior. I’m happy that I’m able to help people come to that realization.

In how far do you work with others to create fan content? And what ideas do you integrate in your writing?

Hmmm, I’ll be honest, I’m not quite sure how to answer this one. I don’t exactly work with others when creating my fan content? All of my writing (save one RP collab homestuck fic from ages ago) is done by me exclusively, and most my ideas are also mostly from my own brain. Although I will say one exception to that is @windschildfanfictionwriter​ whose an amazing bnha writer I chat with fairly frequently when I need help figuring something out.

It’s less of “working” with people, and more discussing things/ideas, and being excited about stuff. Sometimes literally all I need is someone to be my rubber duck while I talk about an idea for 2-3 hours to get it solidified. People in my discord server often help me by betaing (editing/reviewing) my wips. My adhd means I often make weird mistakes, and they’re wonderful at helping me catch that.

As for ideas I pull into my writing, it’s hard to pick out specific ones. I think I kinda create + absorb + integrate lots of stuff at once. A lot of the times my ideas don’t come from things other authors write, but instead come from things other authors didn’t write. When I see an thought/idea/thread in a story that isn’t followed up on, or isn’t handled how I think it should be handled, that often inspires me to either use a similar base concept or similar thought but in the way I wish it had been done.

Are there certain steps you take/decisions you make when/before responding to a post/prompt?

Not really? I tend to just go with whatever comes to me or what I already had prepared. I’m rather impulsive, so unless it’s a delicate subject matter, I roll with whatever’s going on.

I do always make myself take a step back before responding to stuff that annoys me/any sort of anon hate. I have to remind myself it’s not worth the effort and I should focus on positive/fun stuff. I’ll admit though, I have a very combative nature that can get the better of me sometimes. I’ve gotten better at that though! Hooray for proper adhd medication to help prevent destructive stimulus seeking behavior and therapy! Although I do still like to debate stuff for fun, I just don’t let myself get hostile about it.

When and why did you decide to host writing events like your fake fics event? What was the purpose and how did you approach the title prompts?

Oh, I just saw the post and thought it looked fun so I reblogged it. Stuff like that is mostly an impulse more than anything else.

I just kinda went with the flow for the titles. God, I got so many of those, I still have a lot of them sitting in my inbox, most of which I probably won’t ever post. For the ones I did do though, I picked ones that sounded like fic titles I would actually use, and then asked myself what sort of story I would use that title for. Then I just kinda wrote whatever came to me.

How would you describe the difference between writing alone and writing spontaneously with others (first in creating fan theories and headcanons and second in creating fanfiction)?

Hmmm. This one is also a bit hard. It’s rare I truly “write alone”, most of my stories start as a form of oral storytelling and then are adapted to “proper” writing. Most of my theories/headcanons start the same way.

You’ll notice a lot of my posts start with “Also” “Okay” or “I’ve been thinking” or “You know”. When I’m writing my headcanon/theory posts, it’s all written very conversationally because I’m still following my family’s storytelling in a way. It’s a public post, but I’m not just making statements to a void. I’m still talking to people, addressing them, leading them through stuff. It’s just how I communicate on a very fundamental leave.

I’m still writing for myself, I’m creating for myself, but I’m doing it with others. I’m telling a story constantly, and sometimes I’m telling that story to myself, but I’m still telling it to someone.

I think you can read that in my fics, with the perspective I tend to use. I use limited third person POV, but when I’m writing, I try to write it how the character I’m writing from the POV of would tell their own story. I’m not just describing what’s happening, I’m letting this character tell their story through their own voice, to others, to me. It’s a core part of my writing, and that makes it hard to say that it was ever really written alone.

Do you think knowing that others read and can comment on your texts subconsciously influences your writing?

I mean, it’d be impossible for it not to. But I don’t think it influences me that much. I’m still writing for myself most of the time, and I hold onto my bullshit tightly. I don’t change my writing based on what I think other people want to see from me.

That being said, it’s still something I think about. It’s more of a conscious choice, but specifically regarding my stories that have abuse in them, I try to connect in elements of realism and common underrepresented traits/habits of abuse (which I do try to check via research when I can) and ensure that they are then called out as what they are. I’ve gotten a number of comments/asks/discord messages from people telling me that my works helped them realize they were in a crappy situation / understand what they were going through, and that’s something that’s important for me.

I think The Green Eyed Monster is an example of that, where I explore platonic stalking/obsession/pressuring. It’s something I don’t see taken seriously often enough, so I wanted to frame it in a serious but realistic light and make it clear that what was happening was wrong and harmful. I wanted to explore this concept, but I purposefully did it in a way that I hoped would help others who might’ve dealt with it on some level understand it for what it was, and I think it really shows. In the comments of that fic, there’s a lot of very personal responses/stories from people who went through similar experiences. I think that’s important, so it’s something I try to do when I can.

The other thing is I do 100% put references/lines in certain stories with an evil grin on my face knowing that a certain handful of my commenters are going to rip their hair out over it, either because they have no idea what I mean by it, or they know exactly what I mean by it. But hey, I’m a hurt/comfort writer at heart, so you can hardly blame me.

What motivated you to create a story where your readers can decide for an ending (name)?

Oh, uh, “Seven Year Old Katsuki Has The Ability To Kill A Grown Man And No Concept Of Legality”.

I actually can’t remember the exact inspiration for this one? I think I saw uhhh, Markiplier, playing a text adventure game, and I got curious about creating something similar.

I considered using a platform meant for text based games, but true to my family’s long history of needlessly complicating things and creating things where they aren’t meant to be created out of some mix of spite and creative hubris, I decided I wanted to make it on A03 instead. I looked up a style formatting guide, and went to work.

That whole project took like 1-2 months, around school work and everything else. It was created entirely using links that sent you to the next page. That’s it. That’s the only ‘code’ functionality I had to work with. So I made a whole paper map of the routes, separating them out into “steps” and then created unique text blocks for each step based on prior choices. I used a secret point system for one of the main routes, and ended up with 97 unique steps, and 155 different text blocks/variations.

Fun project. A03 was having some trouble/going down right after I released it, and to this day, certain members of the discord server still blame me for that as I was forcing the website into bullshit it was not meant to contain.

Is there anything else you consider important in your writing process that you would like to tell us?

Nothing I can think of off the top of my head. Other than maybe I have an African Gray named Cecil, and sometimes when I’m not ready to share an idea with humans, I’ll talk it out with him first. He’s an excellent listener sometimes, and by that I mean he’s usually ignoring me or I’m giving him scratches and he’s not paying my rambling any mind.

Though sometimes I get lucky and when I finish up a point and ask for his opinion, he’ll just look at me for a moment and say “I love you.” He does it because I’ll always cave and give him treats since I’m weak for him, but it still makes me smile.

[crqstalite]

.

so here i was, about to go and find a reference of kodelyn + brione for what i thought they looked like, compared to how i made them in the games. except, i found out of most of the art i’ve done recently, except for one, they’re nowhere to be found. this isn’t a game of i just misplaced them, it’s a matter of i haven’t actually done any.

but out of most of them, it’s mainly other people’s ocs. not that it’s a bad thing, i love reinterpreting people’s characters and making them smile. but it’s probably a deeper issue that i literally have no art for a majority of my characters. im pinning the blame on the fact i grew up (still growing up really) really socially isolated as a kid. people didn’t like to bother with me because i didn’t have other friends to balance to absolute love i had for people who put up with me.

which pushed them away from me after a while.

also, probably, because i went undiagnosed for anxiety and adhd for a long time. since i jumped grades, and i also had stunted social skills for a really long time (not my words, my mother’s -- which is entirely fair). i mean hell, i still do. it’s always been something that bothers me, that i’m shit at knowing what to say or what to do beyond being the advice friend.

i never realized it jumped over to me making online friends. i mean, the person you meet behind this account online is probably really bubbly, funny and has a lot of hyperfixations she likes to talk about (to an annoying degree -- anyone who’s had to look at a wall of text in our server about me ranting back and forth about kaidan, i’m so sorry). but the person behind this account you meet in real life doesn’t have room for all that personality. she stutters, she’s a little all over the place, disorganized, and while extroverted around people she trusts, tends to cling to what she knows to an annoying degree and doesn’t take change easy.

beyond that point, what i mean by that is that i’ve begun to do the same thing online. i give people things with the assumption it’ll make them like me better. which is a horrid habit i’ve had for a really long time that could be worse, but because people happen to like what i draw for them and i’ve shrugged it off (i don’t think ANYONE in the server is that materialistic, not at ALL) i mean i made friends who like to talk back and forth about art techniques and that’s great. but i sort of wish i put that much dedication into me. i want to be able to put that trust in my personality, not my abilities, that people will like me for me. forget whether i worked for two hours on a piece that they ended up making their pfp.

it’s a little hard sometimes. 

sometimes i feel like i have to serve a purpose.

this isn’t a ‘i hate drawing for other people >:(’ sort of thing. it’s a ‘i haven’t really taken the time to enjoy the things i make more than what other people have done and i don’t have much hope for them liking me if i don’t do something for them’, because i probably will just keep drawing for other people. because i love that moment where they seem so happy about what i’ve made for them, even if i wasn’t inherently proud of it at first.

anyway this was just supposed to a gen-z sort of joke about my lack of social skills and confidence. i’ll probably delete it later when i feel a little more on track. and PLEASE don’t think you’re part of the problem if i give you art. if i do, it’s because i like you so much that i want to show you that -- and i just don’t have the tools needed to do it any other way. it’s the same reason i love it when i get people talking about their ocs. i can tell they like talking about certain subjects, the little details in their toons, why they do what they do and their relationships with other characters -- but sort of clam up if you ask me anything about mine.

you’re probably wondering ‘but what does this have to do with the refs? you’ve been babbling for like five paragraphs now’. well, it’s just a problem i always have. i’ve never been happy enough with my ocs to think they honestly deserve pieces of themselves. since i picked art back up a while ago, i just discovered people who’s ocs are better thought out, have better motivations and the like. and mostly because i’ve surrounded myself with people who are honestly the kindest and warmest people i’ve ever met, i feel safe enough to show them my appreciation in that way. only that they tend to be a lot older than me, so i feel more of a want to show them that i’m not just some annoying kid they plucked off tumblr.

and i honestly just don’t know any other way to show it beyond drawings and discussions about their character motivations.

okay now i’m done for real, back to our scheduled programming!

[petitetiddiez]

Favourite of your own characters.

Oh that’s really hard! It changes a lot, but as of right now I think it’s this:

1. Preeti - She’s honestly like the world’s hottest lesbian to me??? This gorgeous, outdoorsy musician who’s just a little big egotistical, but has a soft side. Kind of stereotypical, but I just love it. I’m a sucker for that kind of oc. Plus, she’s really cute with her girlfriend (who was almost on the list but JUST BARELY missed it)

2. Helen (who is now latina/indian like she DESERVES) - A huge brat that I’ve owned for many many years and who has been through MANY different fandoms (including some original work set in medieval times). She’s my baby--she’s complicated and deep and has one of the most in-depth backstories of any oc. She’s fun to ship and I can always think of good interactions for her. I just. Would die for her.

3. Tiffany - She’s new, but she’s another stereotype I really like: bimbos who are smart, but just unconventionally so. She’s obviously based really heavily on Elle Woods from Legally Blonde but also has developed her own kind of thing. She’s girly, but knows how to speak her mind; she’s privileged, but tries to be aware of it and put other people in the spotlight; she’s gay, but wants what most girly teeny-boppers want out of a relationship. She’s just fun to write, and I really love ocs that are just NICE FUCKING PEOPLE. Plus, her hair is super fun to draw!

4. Phaerie - I love old school Punk and other counter-culture movements, so that is what Phaerie encompasses. I also used to have a HUGE fixation on Drow (dark elves, a race in Forgotten Realms and other fantasy settings) and that’s originally what Phae was. She’s wild and fun and impulsive, she’s hilarious, she’s EVERYTHING I WANT in an oc! She’s so fun to rp as well. She has her soft side, her talents, her flaws, but they all feel like the most sensible ones? Like her actions are wild, but her motivations and development is simple and relatable. She struggled and felt like she had to force her way into the world, so she forces her way into EVERYTHING and fuck anybody who doesn’t like that. Plus, it’s fun to draw super punky or glam rock outfits for her to wear AND she’s based on Pizzazz from Jem and the Holograms so where can you go wrong??

5. Xander - So he’s uh... Also based on some existing characters. But, he’s become enough of his own oc to where I feel comfortable sharing.

My favorite game EVER is Baldur’s Gate, and there’s a certain mod that makes you able to romance the character Xan... Who I totally love and always end up romancing even though I’m a lesbian. This is Xan

MY Xan has developed into a super depressed bartender. He’s Jewish and anxious and has an insanely huge family that constantly picks on him because he’s anxious and easy to pick on. He grew up into a mess of an adult, especially since his only real skill is cheap magic tricks. He can’t keep a relationship because he’s so cynical and self-sabotaging, but he REALLY wants one and is a freak for romantic comedies. Whenever he manages to date a girl for long enough (and he usually picks girls who treat him badly because he doesn’t think he deserves better), he tries to make some big romantic gesture and fucks it up. He’s a mess and a slob. I adore him.

6. Xanthe - Yet another anxious wreck of a person, but this time the MOST anxious wreck there is. She’s agoraphobic, overly-critical, and her entire life is online. She’s a lesbian, but hasn’t figured that out yet and instead thinks she’s aro/ace. She’s very good with details and complex problems, which manifests in her being a talented programmer. SHe’s also a hacker by trade, paid to hack into company servers and point out their flaws so the company can patch those up. She also likes models and dolls--anything with lots of tiny parts and details that she can obsess over to pass the time.

7. Jules - First of all: he’s Helen’s half-brother and I love him. Jules was a really dramatic character back in the day, but after meeting his future wife he’s developed into more of a comedic character. He’s a loser musician--not UNTALENTED but also lacking any of the motivation to do what he needs to do to make a living with music. He’s... basically a slutty bisexual bard who has settled down and chilled out. Idk, he’s just funny. I love him. He also has the MOST detailed backstory of all my ocs--it’s about 20 pages long if written out. It’s. Whew. A lot.

8. Manda - Based on one of my best friends, she’s another extremely detailed oc (probably #2 behind Jules). She would’ve been my favorite, but since I’ve kind of ‘finished’ her story I find myself not using her much. She’s the spoiled child of a shady ass celebrity lawyer and doesn’t care about much of anything EXCEPT her skill as an actress. She struggled in relationships, thinking she was bi pretty much until she met her wife and NEVER UNDERSTANDING WHY she got so attached to the women she dated. She met her wife on a reality show, they dated long distance, and then Manda flew her to California to be together forever. Her story is crazy (she was married to her weed dealer for a while??) and I think her becoming the head of a production company after a successful film career is the perfect ending for her.

9. Nia - Not a lot to say about Nia, but more I love her design and I’m excited to develop her more? Mom friend lesbian ballerina twin. Love it. Really outspoken and direct. 

10. Rae - I have a huge soft spot for Rae because I think she’s the most similar to me?? Creative young girl from a small town who desperately wants to go somewhere more accepting. Spent most of her time online, and when she finally goes to college she goes ALL OUT trying to join every club, befriend all kinds of people, follow all the trends, and be the ‘It Girl’. It’s exhausting and she ends up crashing a lot of the time, but her optimistic/bubbly personality keeps her going. I said before that I love perky nice characters and that’s Rae to a T. Also she’s poly/bi so that makes her fun to work with when it comes to shipping

[norisxfics]

Hopeless (fanfic) Ch.1

Title: Hopeless Characters: Jinyoung, Jaebum, Alice (OC) Chapter 1

Can also find this story here on AFF

Humans. Human's are the most intelligent beings on the planet, but that does not mean we are flawless. In fact, we are full of flaws, but we work on these flaws, we learn, and we change, that's how it works. We make mistakes we regret, we make the wrong choices. This is what this story is about.

Infidelity.

Dishonesty.

Love.

Pain. 

I was in the bathroom finishing up my make-up since I had a date tonight. My boyfriend and I had planned this about a week ago, we agreed we had been too pre-occupied by work and not spending enough time together. If we weren't working we were usually just lazing around at home, gaming or sometimes he would go out with friends or invite his friends over. So yes even though we lived together we still didn't give each other a proper amount of attention. As I was applying the last up my make-up my phone starts ringing, it was him.

"Hey babe! I'm almost ready, when will you be here?"

"What? Oh..I was just calling to let you know I'm watching a game tonight with my friends,"

"Um...no, we have a date tonight,"

"Oh shit...I forgot! Sorry babe I promised them last night tha-"

"you promised me a week ago! just cancel and tell them we have a date tonight..."

"babe it would rude to break a promise on friends like that"

I grew furious, this wasn't his first time doing this "Jaebum...are you fucking with me right now? It's okay to break promises with me but not your friends? You always do this shit,"

"Babe chill it's-"

"No no no, don't tell me to chill, whatever do what you want...you know what don't even come home tonight."

I hung up the phone and smacked my make up off the counter before walking out to the living room, pacing back and forth to calm myself. He's been doing this a lot lately, he always cancels last minute with some dumb excuse. Bros before hoes right? "Ugh!" I yelled in frustration.

I sat down on my computer and opened up my discord application, clicking on the server my online friends and I made game together and talk.

AliceTheBunny69: ugh I'm so pissed off right now!!!

wildnsexy328: Wassup??

Alicethebunny69: my boyfriend canceled on our date again, he keeps doing this, this time the "boys" wanted to watch a game together and god forbid if you cancel plans on your bros, right?

randodude100: hate to be that guy but are you he's seeing "the boys"?

someguy2: ....yeah I agree with rando that's kind of suspicious

wildnsexy328: ....

alicethebunny69: tbh...I've been a bit suspicious but I'm scared to find out...

wildnsexy328: does he let you see his phone? maybe you can pretend to be playing on his phone or smth and check if there's anything?

gamergirl22: my ex bf hated when I touched his phone, i mean i respect privacy but the way he acted when i touched his phone got me suspicious of him,I later found out he had been cheating on me with my best friend.

alicethebunny69: ugh he used to leave his phone laying around and never had a pw on it, but idk he suddenly put a lock code on it and won't tell me what it is...he only let's me play with his phone if he's next to me

randodude100: yup he's most likely cheating...

wildnsexy328: oooh are we about to do some secret agent shit and invetigate??? Agent Jackson here to save the day!

alicethebunny69: Jackson....I think you're right, I'm going to see whats up, I'll talk to you guys later!

I logged up and grabbed my phone. I decided to call one of Jaebum's friends who was close to the both of us. He picked up pretty quickly when I called "Noona! What's up?"

"Hey Youngjae, so don't tell Jaebum I called okay? But I wanted to know, is there anything going on tonight?"

"No not really...what's wrong?"

"none of the guys are getting together for some game or whatever?"

"not that I know of- I don't think there's any games going on that we care about tonight, besides most of them have work tonight,"

I pursed my lips and sighed "okay so, I don't want Jaebum knowing I called you or anything, okay? But can you see if the guys are up to anything and get back to me?"

"um, sure I'll text you, is there something going on?"

"I hope not, I hope I'm just overthinking...anyway I'm hanging up, thank you," I hung up the phone and bit down on my lip nervously. I felt my stomach twist as I thought about whether he was cheating or not. I walked over to my fridge and pulled out a bottle of water. I twisted the cap off and began gulping it down. I soon got a text from Youngjae.

"They're all either busy, or at home with their parents...Except Yugyeom, he said he's out to party at the club or something"

Why did he lie? I took a deep breath and sent him "thank you" 

Maybe he's out with Yugyeom? I thought. If he wanted to go clubbing he knows he I don't mind, hell we could have gone together even, so why would he cancel on me? I groaned in frustration and started pacing again, my heart was racing.

"Wait...I know which clubs they usually go to...maybe I can find out if I go," I called a taxi and put my shoes on before heading outside. When the taxi arrived I got in and told him to drop me off in Gangnam. The road took about half an hour to get to since we lived a bit far away from Gangnam. I paid the taxi when we arrived and I got out the first place I went to was a club Yugyeom frequented. I got in and began looking around for either Yugyeom or Jaebum. It took a while of me moving around through everyone until I spotted them.

I went home that night regretting that I had gone to find him at all. As soon as I got home the first thing I did was get into bed under my blanket, hugging my teddy bear. The images of him all flashed through my head as I began to tear up. 

There was, dancing, not with Yugyeom, not by himself. He was dancing with a girl, grinding her up, feeling her up. She turned to face him and they started making out as he squeezed her stupid little non-existent ass. Rage grew within me but I just stood there. I watched it go on for a while before I rushed out of the club and took a taxi home, the whole ride I was angry. I felt betrayed. 

But that feeling of anger soon turned to loneliness. I started questioning everything, mostly myself.

Where did I go wrong? Am I not attractive anymore? Does he hate me? Am I too boring? Just why? Why does he feel like he needs to go and see other girls? We even talked about marriage on time, was that all just talk? What happened to us?

I remember when were piratically inseparable. He asked me out in our senior of high school and people would always tease us about how we were always together. Like that one time...

We were sitting outside on one of the schools benches during lunch, I was feeding Jaebum and he fed me. He then pulled me into his lap and placed a fruit between his teeth. I knew what he was waiting for. I chuckled and leaned in taking a bit from the strawberry before we kissed softly. "gross, get a room" one of our friends, Mark, interrupted us and we laughed. I chewed and swallowed the strawberry "this could be you but you're to dense to notice that your crush is head over heals for you, just ask her out already!" I chuckled before kissing Jaebum again "wait-...what?! She likes me?! Hey guys... guys! Stop kissing and listen to me, you're not lying right?" I tried to break the kiss to reply but Jaebum didn't let me pull always, he gestured for Mark to go away already.

I really missed that. What happened since then?

At this point I started sobbing heavily into my bear, tears pouring out of my face as I screamed into my bear. What do I do now? I love him too much I don't want to break up.

So many thoughts went through my head before I finally fell asleep.

"Hey, babe, wake up," I woke up a bit when I heard his voice as he pulled the blanket off of me "Jesus...were you crying?" I opened my eyes and saw Jaebum grabbing a tissue, trying to wipe my make up off. I turned on the back, facing my back towards him and he let out a sigh. 

"I'm sorry...I didn't mean to make you cry, I want to make it up to you today, so please get up I want to take you somewhere, so go wash your face I'll be waiting in the living room,"

I was trying to be stubborn and not listen to him. I stayed about ten minutes thinking about it. "So what if he cheated? I'll just work harder and maybe we can fix things...people fall into temptations sometimes right? I'll let him tell me about it once he feels he's ready, for now let's pretend nothing happened." I told myself. I know I was only fooling myself but I had so much hope that it could work out, I love him. 

I got off the bed and wiped off my makeup and decided to just apply some eyeliner and lip gloss, I stayed in the clothes I had worn last night and just fixed myself up before heading to the living room. He got up and smiled at me pulling me in for a hug before pressing his lips against mine. He then rested his forhead against mine and closed his eyes "I'm sorry I keep making you cry, I don't blame you if you hate me, but for now let's just go out on a date, yeah? We can talk things out..."

I nodded "okay..." 

[greyias]

OC Asks 3. How did you choose their name?

Also asked by @captainderyn​

Hahahahaha… okay, the short answer?: I’m an idiot. I didn’t realize I was going to love this game or this character as much as I did.

The long answer, well, I’ve alluded to it once or twice in the past, but I guess I should actually delve into it for real. But under a cut, because it’s probably going to get long.

I’m not sure if this should come with any kind of warning, but it’s kind of long and does delve into some personal stuff. So hopefully that doesn’t bother anyone!

Okay, so, when I first heard about this game in 2011, I had been out of fandom for several years, and had played a few MMOs here and there, but never really got into them for very long, mostly because I got bored very quickly with how repetitive they were. And then I read about this supposedly story and character-driven MMO, and I was intrigued. I was talking to my sister-in-law at the time about it, and ultimately realized I’d never be able to play because I didn’t have a PC capable of running it, and I was heavily into debt because of medical issues, to the point where I was having a difficult time affording my car payment, mortgage, and groceries.

So then Christmas rolls around, and my family has just about finished all of the presents when my brother and his wife go and bring in a special gift they’d been working on for several months: a frankensteined gaming PC that had one game installed on it, with several months of a subscription pre-paid: Star Wars the Old Republic

Needless to say, I was kind of bawling because no one had ever done something that nice to me before. And like? It’s kind of hard to describe what that previous year had been like without having a long, long side story but… it was difficult. It kind of sounds melodramatic to say it was hellish, but looking back on it? It kind of was. I was barely doing anything besides surviving, much less having fun. And here my sister-in-law had actually listened to a one-off conversation about how I was interested in this game but probably would never be able to play it, and like… took it upon herself to make that happen.

So of course the first thing I do is hook up my brand FrankenPC, load up the only game on it, and create a character! But it’s a MMO – and even though it’s billed on being story and character-based, I kind of don’t really believe it? Or at least don’t think my character is going to matter. So I do what I did with every other MMO, I used my online nickname to make a character (Greyias) so my friends can recognize me if they’re in-game, create a character that vaguely looks like me, and get to adventuring! 

The last name came when they rolled out legacies, and hey, I used “Highwind” for my short-lived Pirates of the Caribbean MMO toon. It’s also the last name for one of the main characters in my abandoned steampunk novel series, but that’s another story for another time.

(And then after about three days of learning the mechancis, re-roll said character on a different server, because OOPS! That wasn’t the server my brother and sister-in-law had started their guild on. She looked a little less like me this time. Probably should have changed the name, but I just wanted to see how the story turned out and eventually quest with my fam)

I realized my mistake around Coruscant when Kira joined up as a companion and I went “…uh oh.”

Because I’ve started to recognize I get a certain feeling when I like something, really like something to the point when I get… ideas. Story ideas. Character conversations and wondering “what if”. Of course, this is still in the open beta period, the game hasn’t even launched yet, there’s still long queues to log in and the grind is real, and I just want to see where this story is going and what Darth Angral is going to do, and why is this character so damn sincere and genuine and I don’t like characters that are the literal embodiment of sunshine, I like snarky snarksters and–oh. No I actually do like the Sunshine Jedi. A lot.

Now, a few of you may be like “I really don’t see what the problem is” – this is kind of an old school thing, and something that seems to have thankfully gotten a lot of pushback in the time since I had left fandom and the time since I rejoined it, and that is: The Dreaded Mary Sue

From about the time I had started writing fic when I was in my early teens and onwards it had been drilled into my head that Mary Sues were a bad thing. And self-inserts were worse. Especially if they were *gasp* FEMALE CHARACTERS. (We can’t have those girls having characters they identify with now, can we?) And like, those very relevant discussions aside, I was kind of… ashamed? That I had made a self-insert without realizing it? Despite the fact that like, the character that resulted from my playthrough was very much not me. Like, a significantly different person.

But I was starting to get story ideas and snatches of character bits, and like, I hadn’t written in so long, I hadn’t been inspired in so long. And honestly I just loved this little do-gooder goober, in all of her naive, happy-go-lucky glory. As well as her red-headed sidekick and this amazing dynamic that I had only really seen depicted between male characters previously. And so I promised myself if I got a story idea, I’d write it out and… just change Grey’s name to something else. So no one would know my secret crime, and I would be free, freeeee to scribble in the margins of canon.

It was a great plan, except, I had been playing with subtitles for the game on, so every time Grey would speak, her name would appear above it. And wouldn’t you know? I associated that name with that face, and well, I didn’t get that story idea yet, so it was. Fine I tell you. FINE.

I kept playing the game. In fact, I played the game a lot in the middle part of 2012, because wouldn’t you know? I had another round of medical issues that put me on short term disability and I actually had to retrain my body to sit in a chair for long periods of time (look, it’s a really long story, and this post is long enough as it is). So let’s just say… I got really attached to my little Sunshine Jedi who could go out and save the galaxy when I could barely walk a hundred feet.

And continued to play it off and on over the following years, until finally, finally the devs removed the grind wall in preparation for KotFE, and I was able to finish the Jedi Knight storyline and see where her story ended up. Then I played the next expansion on Makeb. Which was fun. Then I made the mistake that we all know I was eventually going to make: I played Shadow of Revan.

And met Theron fucking Shan. And my perfect little Jedi suddenly fell in love and oh crap. I’m escaping out of cutscenes to rewatch them. Like rewatching them an absurd amount of times. And as I’m going to sleep I’m like, getting entire bits of narration and brand new scenes and fic ideas in my head, and oh god. It finally happened. I try and resist the pull, but I play up through KotFE and I have no more story to stall any more. And the snippets just keep lulling me to sleep every night and… okay.

I probably need to rename this character now. Like, there’s an actual ability to do that in-game so I should get to it. Chop chop.

Nothing works. Nothing at all works. This should not be that hard, she can have any name, no one will know. Why can’t I think of a different name? I go to every single name site known to man, and none of them are her. Besides the fact, that’s her name, and I’m starting to feel kind of guilty for taking it away from her. Poor girl has been through so much in canon and now I’m taking away her name? What kind of monster am I? Okay, fine. I roll up a different Knight during the Dark vs Light event, gave that one an actual name that was not my online writer name just to see if I could trick my brain into writing about them.

Nope.

Maybe I’ll change my online name? “Let her keep the name Grey and I can just have a different name and…” – at this point I’m starting to realize I might be getting slightly neurotic over this whole thing.

Completely annoyed with myself for spending nearly a year trying to come up with a new name I’m starting to get desperate, thinking up ways to maybe just… write around it and not let people know her name until they maybe fall in love with her and hopefully just forget how it’s weird. That can work right? Okay, whatever at least I’m writing and it’s shutting these two up, and it’s all going good for several stories in and then suddenly I get to a scene that has more than one female character and I’m like “Shit… the jig is up.”

Meanwhile, I’ve started up a Dragon Age Origins playthrough, and like a dumbass, DO THE EXACT SAME THING with a female Cousland, and start whining to poor @for-the-flail on Twitter, on my fainting couch about how I can never write this character’s name because I named her after myself, and, bless her heart, she’s just like: “…um. Why?”

And I’m like “Because… we share a name… and that’s weird for people…?”

She goes “It’s not that weird. Why don’t you just write your stories? People will like them or not.”

And sheepishly, I realized she was right, and stopped being so diligent about hiding poor Grey’s name, and eventually, because you are all such lovely and encouraging people, eventually embraced it. (Come to think of it, I never did wind up writing about poor Cousland!Grey. Oops.)

So! That’s the long and ramble story of how she got her name and why it never changed despite my best efforts.

In summary: I’m an idiot 🤷‍♀️ but I think you guys love me anyway?

[ghostliied]

i honestly like you and think you would make a good friend except that the constant complaining about getting no attention is so intimidating and discouraging and exhausting. if we became friends would i have to constantly reassure you that you're liked and your stuff is good? or would i always feel not good enough and like it's my job to make sure you don't delete because you feel like nobody cares anyway?

Hi Anon. Before I even remotely begin to attack you, (as I believe as a human I should), I will ask you this. Are you happy? Does it make you feel better that you got it off your chest? Yes? 

Well, here, let me tell you how pathetic and how much of a inconsiderate coward you are. But before I begin with even that. I want you to unfollow me. Block me. and if not. Well you know what, fine by me. But message me again on anon I’m going to ask somebody to log onto this blog to deal with you. 

I really REALLY, did not fucking deserve to read this. Not like this. Not how you said it. 

And I will tell you why.

Feel free to read. Or not. I don’t care. But this is going to be a psa for anybody else who wants to read anyway.

But I’m not going to make this dash suffer. I’ll put a read more. tag the triggers. and tell you of the warnings beforehand.

But before I do, please do fucking tell me. Are we mutuals? Do I follow you? Cause if I do. I don’t want to follow you. I don’t even care if I admire you at this point. I dont want to follow and admire somebody who says this. I dont even care if you have social anxiety or what have you. I did not deserve this. 

TW: drama, hate, unpopular opinion, swearing, caps lock.

First of all. Fuck you. You’re an asshole.

If you liked me, then you would wouldn’t have said this. Not like this. and definitely not under anon. 

another thing. If you like me. THEN YOU WOULD FUCKING KNOW THAT WHAT YOU JUST SAID IS WRONG AND 

IS A FUCKING ASSUMPTION.

Get the fuck out with your shitty assumptions.

I have an open communication policy for all of my FOLLOWERS. Not just mutuals. Do I have a preference over mutuals? yes. Of course I do. But that does not mean i ignore people. I have honestly never ever fucking done that and will continue TO NOT DO THAT. I dont even ignore the people I blacklist let alone try to cut off from my life. Do I stop talking to them? yea. But I dont fucking blatantly ignore people. even if they are assholes.

No you don’t like me. And if we were friends IF WE WERE FRIENDS 

You wouldn’t have to hear about complaining or whining or bitching. Are you in a server of mine? Am I in yours? Yes? No? maybe? WHO THE FUCK KNOWS!!!!  well. YOU DO APPARENTLY. cause you sent the fucking ask like a shitty coward. 

No, we wouldn’t be friends. Why would I want somebody like that.

Another thing. And you can ask anybody who talks to me. I don’t actively seek attention. I never EVER ask for reassurance. Now. Did I just go and show and tell two friends about you and what you said? Oh of course. why two friends and not like lets say other people I talk about? Because i only ever (semi)fully explained and ranted to two people about this issue and those two people only. Like I have people I talk to. I have talked to many people about our muses. I could name them right now honestly. but from all of those people. There are not many people that I go and physically go to and ask for help. I dont. That’s not who I am. I don’t complain and whine to a lot of people. I fangirl and scream happily to other people. 

But I never ever EVER bring negativity to my friends’ dms unless i trust them and/or explicitly ask them if i can rant to them.

Why? because THAT IS WHO I AM. I chose to suffer in silence. 

I dont have many irl friends. Especially not thought that I can trust to cry about. No. I have always been strong for others. Both irl and online. I can tell you the poeple who i trust enough to actually cry and be depressed to. And I can tell you that they can all be listed on one hand. But I can also tell you that even then. EVEN THEN I don’t tell them about even my WORST emotions that I have. 

I would tell you right now, but naw, you dont fucking deserve that. If I said it I would say ONLY to tell my followers. and maybe thats what you all need to fucking realise. That I’m fucking human. I’m not perfect. And behind this fucking computer I have to deal with the emotional struggle and abuse EVERY. SINGLE DAY. And I have been since high school.

I have a chronic cough from the stress I put myself through. because I internlise everything. and you think that me ‘crying’ about getting no attention is intimidating? well jesus fucking christ if thats the case then I cant even imagine how you would feel if I listed everything that has ever happened to me. No but that’s in the past. If I even tell you what stuggle I have to deal with RIGHT NOW, you would be like ‘shit man, okay maybe it’s not so bad that you’re complaining.’

I don’t go and look for professional help. I should but I can’t. I dont have the money.

But that’s not the fucking point now is it. Oh fuck no. ITS FUCKING NOT.

the PROBLEM IS THAT YOU FUCKING CAME TO MY INBOX. YOU CAME TO MY INBOX ON ANON. like the fucking coward you are. IT wouldn’t have been a problem if you came to me as a human. No. I have to post tis publically for everybody to see because thats waht YOU did.  and was even more terrifying is that I have a second anon asking about an IC thing and it makes me NOT want to answer it BECAUSE I feel like its you. But I know better. and I will happily take that other ask cause its a HC ask and I want to get to that. But no, I wont today BECAUSE OF YOU.

mOVING THE FUCK ALONG IN THIS HATE FUELED REPLY.

You think i would be good friend? You think? Lmao. LMAOOO Alright. Well feel free to ask the people i DO interact with and talk to. Anybody who is my friend would tell you that i AM a good friend. I mean well for those i care about and i put my heart in my sleeve for them. And honestly anybody who IS my friend has seen that i DO put in the effort to be active FOR them. You may not even see if cause i dont post it. But for my friends?? I give them content they deserve. I talk to somebody every single day about our muses. If you fucking asked me how much ive devoloped and plotted. I would give you 30 pages of shit for A SINGLE AU thay ive talked about.

I send asks to the people i care about. I also send asks every now and again to those who i dont talk to cause yea i do know what it feels like to not get asks. I may not be fucking active here. But its not that im not active. Its just that i see no motivation in it.

Its a fucking hassle and chore to refresh my dash to see nothing happening. Ive opened my ims and inbox for anybody to plot. Ive gone to countless people okay?? And I go to them to ask to send things or to reply to something. And okay i fucking get it. We are all busy.

Sometimes it takes a while to respond. But that’s not why I’m fucking angry. 

THATS NOT WHY IM PISSED.

When i fucking write for hours upon hours headcanons, drabbles, answers and asks. Just those alone. And to see that NOBODY says anything about it?

Somebody once told me. We are reciprocal creatures at heart. And even if we say we dont expect much response. It feels good to get a reaponse. Its nice to see that people are reading what you write and reacting to the things you make.

And holy shit there is only ONE person that i know of that actually reacts to what i post. Wait i take that back. I have TWO PEOPLE that react to what i post. That react to 90 percent of what i post. With an occasional third or fourth. But its THESE people that i talk to. That dint deserve me deleting my blog.

And its these people that will fucking tell you that i very rarely bitch and complain about not being wanted. Because it is THESE people that i spend my days plotting and going on about what if intereactions.

If you really wanted to know me and be my friend. You would realise that i simply just want to talk about my muses. I AM NOT ONE FOR SMALL TALK. Talking about feelings is hard for me.

Why I dont personally understand is HOW CAN A FEMALE OC LIKE MIMI GET BLATANTLY IGNORED. AND YET WHEN I GO TO A MALE MUSE??? EVERYBODY?? WANTS TO??? FUCKING??? INTERACT???

that’s not fucking fair. And if you honestly wanted to understand my point you wouldn’t come to be like the shitty little coward you are right now. You would ask why I feel that way. Why ANYBODY would feel that way. But naw. You directly attack me. I showed some friends this ask cause I was visibly upset and one of them literally said:

That is not how you address this issue.

If we became friends. IF WE FUCKING BECAME FRIENDS??

yOU WOULDN’T??? HAVE TO??? REASSURE ME OF ANYTHING????

what fucking drugs are you high on?Get the fuck out of here.

Any person who fucking knows me would know that i ALWAYS fucking PUT MYSELF OUT THERE FOR THEM. I have time and TIME AGAIN run to those who were upset and down. 

Get this fucking in your head right now anon.

I AM THE FUCKING ONE TO REASSURE PEOPLE.I DON’T LOOK OR ACTIVELY SEEK OUT REASSURANCE.

I already get my validation from the people I fucking care about. I got my validation yesterday when my submission was published. I get my validation from my FRIEND ON FUCKING DISCORD WHEN SHE MESSESGES ME EVERY SINGLE DAY.

Holy fucking shit I GOT MY VALIDATION THE DAY I MADE THIS FUCKING!!!! BLOG!!!! FROM A VETERAN OF THE RPC!!!!

I don’t need your fucking validation for fucking shit.

But again not the point.

and not the fucking point as to why I even remotely posted ANYTHING about how nobody pays attention to me.

But you know what. Here is my fucking 2 cents on this. I believe that a majority of the Pokemon RPC doesn’t give a damn about me BECAUSE NOBODY SAYS ANYTHING TO ME OTHERWISE.

Again I’m not talking about everybody. IM TALKING ABOUT THE FUCKING COMMUNITY. 

And I really REALLY don’t need to bring up names to fucking bring my case to point. it’s just fucking FACT. 

Me as a mun? honestly I don’t give a damn. Sometimes I kinda wish to remain anonymous or aloof. But Mimi? cause thats the point of me ever bringing up anything anyway?? Mimi????

She gets very VERY little traction. Course there’s a few interactions here and there. But I cannot say that I can ACTIVELY post some quality IC shit or HC shit every day CAUSE AGAIN i DON’T SEE ANY FUCKING POINT. 

A psa that I reblooged so fast one time furhter proves my point. 

I will link it here for your pathetic and lazy ass if you want.

don’t wanna click then here. allow me to EMPHASISE ON WHAT WAS SAID.

the way the rpc treats female muses & female ocs is DISGUSTING.

allow me to repeat it if I havent made it obvious. 

the way the rpc treats female muses & female ocs is 

D I S G U S T I N G.

THATS why i fucking posted anything.

I didn’t post to make people feel sorry for me. I made it a post to show you HOW FRUSTRATED I AM WITH THE FUCKING SHITTY COMMUNITY.

And allow me to reiterate. Its not the people in the community. IT IS THE FUCKING COMMUNITY IN GENERAL. It is what we make the community. 

And honestly im not trying to fucking attack anybody here. I just cannot stand what the RPC fucking is right now. 

And the fact that I’m pulling AT FUCKING TEETH to get any interaction is sad.

I don’t try to make myself fucking intimidating.

I said this to a friend as a rant this morning BEFORE YOU FUCKING SHOWED UP IN MY FUCKING INBOX. and I TOLD them i was ranting i wasn’t expecting anything aside from them to listen because i had to get it off my fucking chest.

dilectam Today at 09:59

so. can you tell me what the fuck im doig wrong then??? like people and their sorry fucking asses are like oh we are picky with OCs they have to be well developed and have a backstory and blah blah blah or something like I dont fllow or interact with OCs that have very little info on them and yet WHEN I FUCKING POST AND WRITE AND YELL ABOUT THIS FUCKING BITCH NOBODY LITERALLY NOBODY (except for like you and [redacted]) FUCKING SENDS ME ANYTHING. ITS LIKE I AM FUCKING TRYING TO PULL OUT TEETH WHEVER I REBLOG A MEME. I haven't gotten any asks iN WEEKS. like look at my fucking inbox.

[image of the THEN empty inbox]

NOTHING IVE BEEN STARING AT IT FOR DAYSnot done

dilectam Today at 10:00

And then when i go to try to do replies, which, of course i have some, I CANT FUCKING PULL OUT THE FUCKING MUSE CAUSE A: THE THREAD HAS BEEN FESTERING AND ITS OLDB: THE THREAD IS LONG AND I DONT WANT TO REPLY TO A LONG REPLY CAUSE HOLY FUCKING SHIT IM BURNT OUT I CANT WRITE.but no. I send asks. I send memes. I do dash comms. I do start calls. I do inbox calls. like

IshouldnotfuckingbebeggingTO GET FUCKING INTERACTIONS.

and then to make matters worse. [REDACTED BECAUSE PERSONAL INFO THAT IM NOT GOING TO FUCKING SHARE WITH YOU]. and when i WHEN I ASKED PEOPLE if i should do commissions you know what happened? nothing. just you liking it. I DIDNT FUCKING ASK IF I SHOULD DO FUCKING COMMISSIONS CAUSE ITS FUN. i hate asking people for money. I want to draw whenever i want for my friends whenever i want without taking their money.but no i get no replies.

and thenAND THENt make fucking matters worse.CAUSE IT GETS WORSE.

Mimi's birthday is coming up soon. and im honestly fucking terrified. I'm kinda starting to cry now about it. [redacted] I'm terrified that her birthday is gonna come and its gonna be like what happened on MY brithday even though i posted about it

I get fucking one ask that wishes her a happy birf.

I'm tired. like I have considered of deleted. not leaving. ACTUALLY DELETING the blog cause likeits fucking depressing and pathetic

sorry i'll stop now but i feel so undervalued and underapprciated i feel like I've i disappeared again, nobody would fcking message me or ask

wanna know why i fucking ranted? because f THIS FUCKING PICTURE.

What is this picture? THIS PICTURE REPRESENTS JUST THE HEADCANONS I HAVE FOR THIS BLOG that ARE LOCATED HERE.

27 pages.

single spaced

times new roman

font 12

wanna know who actually read them?

well aside from many of them having 0 notes.

THE SAME 3-5 PEOPLE LIKED THEM.

which honestly is fine. I don’t mind. But what I am not fucking comfortable with is the fact that aside from those people (only 2 of which i actively either ploit or interact with IC) I have nothing going for me. NOTHING.

Nobody comes in to ask about headcanons.

Nobody fucking asks about why mimi did what she did.

nobody even bothers with me.

and I say nobody losely because OF THE PEOPLE WHO ACTIVELY POST, THE PEOPLE SENDING ME THINGS ARE ACTUALLY PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT ACTIVE.

holy fucking shit its a plot twist.

Hahahaha fuck you anon. 

Another thing. If you knew me.

You know know i never EVER fucking delete. Even the blog where shit happened last year, I just abandoned. Why the fuck would I delete 27+ pages of good quality content. Nevermind the bio. the bio alone is 14 pages. 

But you had the NERVE to fucking say that youre scared of me deleting??? like its assholes like you that make me want to delete.

and honey. I would never say you’re not good enough. just talking to me about our muses is all i fucking ask. if anything YOU find yourself not good enough. and that’s fucking sad. because if I knew who you were. like if you actually took the time to sit down with me to talk to me like a human. You would realise that you are more than enough.

Another thing before I fucking end this rant. cause I jsut randomly got SUPER FUCKING ANGRY AGAIN.

You would have never sent this to my other 2 blogs. why? Because I wouldn’t have posted it on the other blogs. BECAUSE I DONT FIND THIS PROBLEM ON MY OTHER BLOGS. why? because they are both male blogs.

So get your misogynist ass out of here. Fucking trash.

[rekarra]

Breaking Through Shadows | Chapter 1

Plot: What has started as just a dream would end up changing the course of my life. But what else could I have expected when vampires get involved.

Genre: Fluff, angst, eventual smut.

Word Count: 3.2k+

Pairing: Leaving this blank for now, for plot reasons, or something.

Point of View: First person oc

Warnings: Language, medical talk, nothing too intense

Rating: Teen but eventually 18+

Author’s Note: Well, here’s my first chapter. I hope you all enjoy it. I’m not sure when chapter two will be up as I have some real world stuff going on in the next week, but I’m hopeful I’ll have it up by the middle of next week. A quick shout out to my beta reader, best friend, and my own personal Bunny, @xxfxckitxx, who is also my number one hype woman and my constant support. Thank you for pushing me to do this, even if I drag my feet on occasion.

| Prologue |

Reaching over to my phone, fingertips just brushing the thin piece of glass, circuitry, and metal. I silenced the obnoxious blast of my alarm with a slight thought. I knew what the time was, what the weather was going to be, how a friend from high school had posted a picture of her newborn baby to social media, and several other things from just that one brief touch of the phone. Being a technomage did have its advantages sometimes.

Technomages were the natural evolution of witches. It seemed that as technology advanced in the mundane world, magic needed to keep up. We were no longer bound to the stereotypes of having to brew potions. I still did, though, as a matter of practice. Most everything a magic user needed to be able to do is done through the ever-growing world of cell phones and computers. Most every human interaction, magical or not, had an element of technology to it. Everyone in the modern world either always had a cell phone on them or they are attached to their computer, both for work and pleasure. Magic had to adapt. So here I was, hand hovering over my phone as the dream I had just woken up from streamed on to my private server, just like uploading a YouTube video. It had only taken a small thought for it to happen, but I wanted to be able to reexamine this dream, just like I had the past three nights. Always the same dream. Always ending before I could see their faces. There was a reason I kept dreaming about this, and I was going to figure it out. It had that feeling of a life-changing event, like the way a major thunderstorm can be felt in the air. An almost electric feeling that set my teeth on edge and put a small buzz just behind my eyes. As if on cue, my phone rang just as the stream of my subconscious events ended. I would have known who it was in an instant, even if my magical abilities had rendered caller ID useless, just like if Chyler was not psychic, the fact that she was my soulmate would have let her know that I was awake and slightly on edge. With nothing more than a thought, I answered the phone. “You had the dream again, Mallory.” It was a statement, not a question, as Chyler’s voice drifted from the speaker. I sighed loudly. “Yeah, for the third night in a row. I just got done pushing it to online storage, but I don't have the time to go back over it now. It feels weird though, doesn't it?” I paused, considering why it felt odd. “Like, I should know who they are or something. We are never that hyped for that kind of show. Hell, we don’t even go to shows like that! When was the last time you saw that many preteens with their parents at Slipknot? We’re usually dodging guys wearing too much black leather and metal.” I racked my fingers through my hair, getting out of bed to get myself a cup of coffee, leaving my phone where it was, knowing I’d still be able to hear Chyler, and her, me, from anywhere in my apartment. I pulled a cup from the dishwasher and turned on the coffee maker, not wanting to waste the small amount of energy it would take to turn it on with my magic. “Have you been able to catch anything from it, Bunny?” I asked the girl on the other end of my phone. She didn’t have to see what I had uploaded to my private server to know what I had dreamed about. The bond between our souls and her abilities meant that she didn’t even need to be in the same room with me, let alone touch me the way she had to with others, for her to “see” my dreams. She only had to send out the conscious thought to pick out the dream. Her breathing increases for a few seconds before she let out a shuddering exhale. “No, Mal. Nothing that you haven’t already felt. But it does have a flavor of something familiar. If you could get a look at their faces....” She trails off her sentence. That is how Chyler’s powers work. She either needs to be touching someone, or she must see their face, and with a bit of concentration, she is able to know everything about them. I was the exception to those rules. We had discovered it not long after we had met. We had become friends so fast, feeling like we had known each other forever. Chyler had confessed to being a psychic and had requested to read me, wanting to know herself why we had this instant connection. Agreeing, she took both of my hands into hers and looked up at me, her normally brown eyes turned a breath-stopping shade of blue as she saw my past. And not just my past in this life because when her eyes turned back to their rightful color, she blinked back tears, asking me if I wanted to see too. I had quirked an eyebrow at her but nodded anyway. She had settled her hands in a slightly different place, her middle and ring fingers placed on the pulse points on my wrists. I had just been able to ask her what she was getting at when her eye changed again, and suddenly I was seeing what she had seen. It felt like an eternity, but it was only a few seconds. I relived my life in reverse. From sitting down in the little mom-and-pop cafe we were in, to meeting Chyler for the first time, back to high school and the insignificance it was to my life. Back to when I had learned about my abilities and I had accidentally blown up the T.V. in a fit of puberty induced anger. Back to being a small child and not having a care in the world, back to my first breath. But it did not stop there. I saw my death in my most previous past life, all the things I had carried out then. Seeing all those events, up to the first breath. Then, again, seeing my death in the life before that one, and the one before that, and before that. All of them. And in each one of them, there was one defining spark in each one. Chyler had always been with me. Always there. We had been everything to each other over our lifetimes. Friends, sisters, mother and daughter, lovers. From the moment our souls sparked into existence, the link between them became iron-bound. With tears streaming down my face, I came out of the trance and just stared at the woman sitting across from me, her hands still in mine. She searched my eyes, her own the size of dinner plates. “Well, I guess this explains why we’re so close.” I had laughed as I gently removed my hands from hers to wipe away the remaining streaks of moisture from my face, hearing her own laughter on the heels of mine. “And now you know what I am now and why I’m always so good with electronics, huh?” I had asked her while still laughing. “I’ve actually always known, Mallory. I was just waiting for you to tell me.” She smiled softly at me. “But we know why it seemed like we have known each other forever. We have. Literally! And I think that’s the first time in my life I’ve been able to use that word properly.” She was in full-out belly laughs now, doubling over on herself as she laughed with her whole body. “Mallory!” The voice over my phone snapped at me, snapping me back into the present. “Mal, your focus back with me again? Unless you can get a look at their faces, I can’t do anything other than say it tastes like something I know but can’t put my finger on what it is.” That is how she would describe it when she couldn’t see everything. It “tasted” in some way. “Well, fuck, Bunny....” I whined slightly out of frustration and the need for caffeine. “What if this is something really big? You’ve always been able to see what comes our way. Why is there a block on this?” “I don’t know, Mal, but I’ll keep going back on it and see if I can figure anything out. Also, your coffee is done, you addict,” she chuckled. “Go get ready for work and I’ll come over once you get off, okay? I know I don’t need to touch you to pick everything up, but maybe I’m missing something for some reason” I nodded before remembering that she couldn’t see me. “Sure Chyler, I’ll see you when you get here. Love you, Bun.” “Love you too, Firefly.” And with that, she hung up. I smiled softly at her pet name for me as I finished pouring my coffee, leaving just enough room for the vanilla creamer. This will be the only good cup of sweet, glorious caffeine I will get before getting to the hospital, and I intend to enjoy for as long as I can. As soon as the first sip passes my lips, I felt the buzz of the brew on my tongue, just sweet enough to cut the underlying bite of the bean’s bitterness. I took a few more sips, humming softly to myself before taking my cup with me into my bedroom. Setting the mug down on my dresser, I walked into my modest closet and set about readying for the day, picking out a scrub top that had all the Marvel comic book characters on it and matching teal scrub pants. This was the part that was so off-putting about the dream. There were aspects of it that were real to my life. I was a first-year nursing student when I had first met Chyler, and we both had received outstanding job offers when we had graduated. Outside of the concert and the seven mystery figures that were on stage, that was my life. Rolling my shoulders back, I left the closet, clothes in hand, and reached for my cup. I drained the contents before tugging my scrubs on. Another 15 minutes of getting my hair to look suitable and putting on light makeup, I was out the door. My drive to work was always a curious one, the 7pm to 7am shift means that I leave for when most people are just getting home, their workday ending as mine begins. I had just finished locking my door when my neighbor came walking up the pathway, her 2 kids in tow. She smiled at me as her little boy, who couldn’t have been any older and 6, looked at my shirt and started excited babbling over all the superheroes on my shirt. Bending down to his level, I asked him if he could name them all off, which he did with unexpected speed. I laughed as he started talking about who was his favorite and why. His mom smiled at the exchange before softly telling her son that I needed to get to work, so I could help save people who were hurt, just like all the characters on my top. She picked the small child up while he stared at me in wonder, wishing me a safe and uneventful night. I said my goodbyes and headed towards my car. The freeways heading into downtown were clear, just like they always are for me when I headed into work. It was moving out of downtown that the traffic was bad at this time of day. It would take me an hour or more to get to work if I had the normal 8-to-5 schedule that most people stuck to. As it was, I pulled into my parking stop at the hospital a mere 30 minutes after I had left my apartment complex. I walked into the building, heading to the emergency room staff locker room. As I was putting my backpack and lunch in my locker, the charge nurse for the ER, Mark, approached me. “Ms. Adams.” I cringed slightly at his use of my last name, knowing he was about to stick me with something I probably wasn’t going to like. “I hope you’re ready for this evening. We have a VIP coming in and while I normally wouldn’t assign anyone to it and let whoever gets it, take it, but you are the only nurse I have who knows multiple languages and it seems our patient and his manager only speak Korean. We won’t be able to get a translator here for some time. You don’t happen to know Korean, do you?” I didn’t actually, right now anyway. A simple touch of the phone in my pocket and a muttering of the Romanian word “Traducere” under my breath and I was a fluent as a native-born immigrant. I nod as I look up at my head nurse, confirming to him that I was able to communicate with whoever it is that will be coming in. “Who’s coming in, Mark?” I asked the middle-aged man in front of me. “I really don’t know, Mallory.” He answered. “He’s supposedly come famous rock star or something, on tour with the rest of his group. The whole thing is being treated as quiet as we can. These guys are important enough to garner full security measures. They contacted the hospital director to make sure there were enough guards in place to keep anyone who isn’t supposed to be here out.” The tension in my shoulders pulled them back a little straighter as Mark filled me in, my nerves getting to me slightly as I began to feel the weight of the situation that was about to be placed on me. Trying to relax them, I asked, “What is he coming in for, Mark? What should I be expecting and what all do I need to get prepped?” “It seems he fell off the stage during rehearsals and might have a concussion as well as potential broken bones. He’ll need x-rays as well as a CT scan and a full blood workup. We should also check for any internal bleeding, potentially broken ribs, and if there are, a scan of the lungs just to make sure there’s nothing that’s going to hinder his breathing.” My eyes widen slightly at everything Mark was telling me as we walked on the emergency room floor. “Shit, Mark. How big was this stage he fell from?” Mark sighed. “I don’t know, but the hospital administrators want everything on this guy checked. If everything goes well, this will be an amazing boost of publicity for the hospital. And I don’t even want to think about what would happen if something went wrong while this guy is under our care.” I could understand Mark’s worry. It wasn’t that long ago that an actor had died in a hospital in California and the hospital had taken a serious hit in benefactors for it. I took a deep breath, holding it for a moment in hopes it would help me calm down. Letting it out, I slipped into “work mode” where anything that was not an immediate concern about the patients who would be under my care faded away. “How long before he gets here?” My voice has gone a bit softer with a calming cadence to it. “He should be here in the next….” Mark was interrupted as an ambulance pulled up, the paramedics getting the occupied stretcher from the back, rushing inside. I glanced at Mark with a slight smirk. “You were saying?” Turning to the paramedics, I told them to take the patient into room 7 quickly, a tall man who was wearing a breathing mask following close behind them. I nodded my head slightly in his direction, hoping he would take it as a sign that I was to be the one taking care of his talent. “Well, I guess it’s time to get to work.” I said in Mark’s general direction before heading off after the group that had just passed me. The paramedics had just finished moving my patient on to the examination bed as I approached the door to the room, two security guards heading towards me. Smiling slightly, I showed the guards my badge before they had a chance to even question me. I was waiting for the paramedics to leave, with the stretcher before entering the room. Walking in, I smiled warmly at the two men who were left. “Hi there. My name is Mallory and I’ll be your nurse this evening.” I said in nearly flawless Korean, intentionally making a mistake or two to keep suspicions down. I walked over to the man lying in the bed, my calm and professional demeanor taking over me, pushing the last bits of nerves from me. “What would like for me to call you?” “You can call me Taehyung.” My patient told me in a muffled but surprisingly deep voice. I couldn’t see much of his features as he, and the man behind me, both had on masks that covered the lower half of their faces, but Taehyung’s eyes were among the most striking I’d ever seen. The mop of obviously dyed blonde hair was tousled in such a way that, even with the intensity of his eyes, he had boyish quality to him. Nodding, I quickly reached for the in-room computer so I could start filling in his information. “Okay, Taehyung. Tell me about what happened and why you came in to see me tonight.” I smiled brighter, trying to make him feel at ease so he’d tell me everything I needed to know. He started to recount the fall from the stage, looking at the man behind me as if for confirmation of the events. I turned and addressed him. “Were you present when Taehyung here fell, Mr….?” I trailed my sentence off, waiting for him to fill the bank in. “Mr. Sejin. And yes, I was there. I’m the boys' manager.” He said. “Okay Mr. Sejin, how about you tell me what happened while I start getting Taehyung’s vital signs?” I asked of the man.

Mr. Sejin began to tell the exact same story that Taehyung had started telling me as I turned away from them both to grab the cart that housed the blood pressure monitor. I closed my eyes to keep from rolling them while taking in a deep breath. They were hiding something and I wouldn’t be able to do my job unless I knew everything.

I turned back to Taehyung, reaching out to grab his arm. As soon as I made contact with his skin, I knew what it was they were hiding. My eyes widened as my fingertip touched skin that was much too cold for the ambient room temperature and as I watched, Taehyung’s eyes flashed the pure and blinding green that could only mean he was one thing. Vampire. I sucked in a sharp breath at the realization, knowing my heart rate had increased as a small pang of fear cut through me. Taehyung, however, seemed to be mesmerized by me, grabbing on to my hand with a gentleness that would only be reserved for you had spent a lifetime caring for and loving. I quickly leaned in, whispering, "I know what you are and I know you're not hurt. Why are you here?" When he spoke, it was but a breath and it held the same respect and softness with which he was holding my hand. “I found you again.”

| Chapter 2 |

[normalcartoonic]

You can’t please everybody

This is a followup to my last post I made.

So in the last post, I already published two of the humanization pictures of a Mr. Men character (both safe and lewd, alts not withstanding) and once they’re posted on DA that I won’t do anymore on that take.

I was blocked by zanymonsterman/ticktacktickle (not exactly a friend, but still) saying that I didn't learn my lesson, despite the fact I stated "So any future humanized Mr. Men pictures made after the two Miss Calamity pieces I drew a month ago (both safe and the explicit one) are not gonna be in that format anymore, and would go back to the previous style as it's more safe compare to the real human designs." The one Miss Calamity I posted a few days ago was the last picture I would post publicly as it's already been posted on twitter before my apology. So it was thanks to this miscommunication that we are no longer friends. I tried responding back, but the user blocked me on all social media just recently and he left a server were both in. Was it a dick move on my part? I don’t know, maybe it would’ve been better off if I would’ve posted both pieces as the same time before I found out what the artist heard what I drew, just don’t post them on DA or if I never found out about the artist in the first place.

I think just trying to do another humanization take of the Mr. Men characters was a bad idea, and I wish I never heard of that artist. All it did was burning bridges between the three of us. And I don’t care if you said I was in the wrong. I understand the boundaries of OCs, but the issue is that Miss Calamity is a character from a show, so is it alright to draw pictures on that take of the character (safe or lewd)? And even then, I had no way to contact the original artist who made the human designs as they blocked me before I drew the designs. If I had some proper communication between me and the original artist who made the design, maybe things would’ve been different. I know some of you are saying “You should’ve just not bother with the design”, but the thing is that I like how the human take of the design and I couldn’t stop thinking about drawing it. Maybe it would’ve been better if I just drew it safe, but because no one told me about the artist beforehand, I had no reference on how they are aside from what they draw. And again, I’m sorry about this whole thing and I wish I could go back and prevent this mess, but what’s done is done.

I think that’s the problem with the Mr. Men fandom is like nowadays as it’s not as good as it used to be in the late 2000s as I felt like the users there were able to express a lot of things. But now it’s more on being secretive on telling certain users on who should they should only be with as I feel like it’s just forcing people on who they should only be friends with rather than just let them pick for themselves. I understand that we should try our best to keep kids safe, but the Mr. Men franchise is already 50 years and adults can like it as well if they want. I just feel like the fandom needs to be restructured in a way that anybody can be allowed without drama. But we don’t live in that ideal world.

However by this point, I just give up pleasing people on what I should draw or not. All I said was that after I post my next piece based on the take of the character, but that person didn’t read what I said before and just blocked me on all platforms. I just felt like the relationship we were trying to build upon was just nothing but hatred considering we had different paths. And I understand that they doesn’t want to do with anything with me anymore even before the drama.

What’s this mean for me? At the moment, I already put the humanization Miss Calamity pictures in deviantart storage for the time being after that mini rant the user placed onto me, but the damage is already done (whenever or not I’ll put them back online is up in the air as I feel like that user isn’t gonna talk to me anymore). I know some of you in the other servers already think I’m a bad person and don’t trust me even before the drama, but by this point I don’t care anymore. It’s the internet; everybody is gonna be iffy on who they want to talk to especially what’s going on in the world. All I want is to draw pictures on a underrated show that was mishandled by the company that owned it at the time and I feel like people telling me on what I should draw or not is just dragging me down. I just felt like this whole situation would’ve been handled better if I had contact with the original artist if it was okay to draw their take of the characters.

After what happened in the past few weeks, there’s some lessons I learned. Never draw someone else’s take of a character (regardless if they don’t own the character) unless they said it’s okay or they already NSFW on them. Never let people force you to be whatever they want you to be (safe or not). Not everyone wants to be friends with you and as Phil Vischer said, “You can try pleasing some people, but you can’t please everybody”.

Anyways, that’s all I have to say. I just want to point out that I admit the mistakes I made and I’m sorry again if you were hurt and you don’t trust me. And that’s fine. I learn from someone who apologized to me that “you don't have to accept this apology. But I hope things are going well for you”. There are some things I know was wrong, but I’m only human and we make mistakes from time to time and learn from the mistakes. I wish I had better actions that would’ve prevent some of this drama from being worse, but what can you do? Nothing I can do about it except for make better choices and move on. I just want to forget about this drama as I don’t want this to be dragged out anymore as I want to focus on other things.

[rhapsody-crossing]

S2: IYHO Tournament - A Reflection [Part 1]

Splatoon 2: Ink Your Heart Out Tournament - A Reflection (Full series can be read under this tag)

On 26th May 2018, Malaysia held its first online Splatoon 2 tournament called Ink Your Heart Out. The tournament was organised by a small group of friends in hopes to raise awareness for Splatoon 2 as well as to liven up things in Splatoon Community Malaysia. 

Turf War-- a 4v4 mode in which victory is decided upon which team inked majority of the ground-- was the chosen mode for the tournament to lower the barrier of entry, allowing players both experienced and new to join.  

In the midst of trying to get friends into forming groups for the tourney, I got roped into a team myself and begun a memorable journey that I’d hope to eternalise here:

0) Team Members

slap - The captain of the team (who doesn’t act like captain). If life is an anime, slap is more of a bulliable/butt monkey character of the team where we poke fun of him (in an affectionate manner). Likes drawing holes on the corner. Can be serious when he wants to. Uses Dynamo Roller.

louhai - Enthusiastic Ink Brush user, a social butterfly. His positivity is infectious and inspiring to both his teammates and opponents. His gung-ho attitude makes up for his inexperience; he’s always eager to fight strong opponents as it empowers him to improve his combat skills. All these qualities was why I roped him into the tournament.

Low - Skilled Dualies user, and one of the main reasons I was roped into this team. His participation in something competitive comes as a surprise, but Low is a companion I trust to fight by my side. As a S ranker, his combat skills is honed to the point of being instinctive. Our team’s main slayer.

FreedomTan - Affectionately known as Furi to us. A single registrant who was adopted by our team one week before the tournament. Her inclusion into our team was a blessing in disguise. As another S ranker, her skills greatly supports the team. Uses Octobrush and Clash Blaster.

And then, there’s me. I took one for the team by playing NZap 89. Unlike the others (whose role is to have fun/kill as many as they want), my role was to turf and harass others with Tenta missles. I would like to think of myself as the mediator who balances all, the grandmother who is attune to my team’s feelings, the bridge that connects everyone, the information gatherer, trainer, and a bit of a schemer.

1) How did it started?

It all started with me trying to encourage friends to join, but the ball started rolling when slap invited Low. There were some... complications which will not be addressed here just to be safe, but all was resolved with the blessing of an organiser, and I then joined the team.

With three members on the tow, we needed one more. We invited louhai.

slap was chosen to be captain because Low can’t due to reasons, I’m part of the organising committee (OC) and wanted to give myself some leeway in case I had to help out with the tourney, and louhai have three kids to raise. Admittedly, I’d hoped that him being a captain would also give him some form of responsibility it didn’t.

Almighty Goddess was what slap named our team, West Mountain Tofu was what louhai wanted. Low voted for the former, I changed our team’s name to the latter due to having OC rights, hah.

2) Inner Struggles

In the beginning, team morale was pretty easygoing. slap and louhai were really chill about the tourney, especially with Low and I on team. It’s infuriating but very human.

Aside from Low, each members have their struggles.

slap's major struggle was shaking off skill rust and motivation. The tournament is especially hard on slap as he struggles to shake off the rust on his skills, it’s admirable that he tried but he could never really play Splattershot Pro like he used to. His greatest nemesis isn’t other opponents, but the shadow of his former self... and this affects his motivation. 

louhai’s struggle is his inexperience in the game itself. He shook off his rust easily despite not playing for so long, and using Ink Brush gave him strength as said weapon was inspired by a certain strong Singapore player. The major problem was his gap of knowledge that could have made his life easier, but he makes up for it with his willing-to-learn(-as-long-as-it’s-simple-enough-to-understand) attitude and has high motivation to do so.

My struggle, though, was using NZap 89. As I’m used to weapons that doesn’t require much aiming (Tri-Slosher, Roller, Rapid Blaster), NZap was a pain to use. Fortunately, I played more of a support role... but sometimes, it could take its toll on motivation. 

In my experience, playing a support role means accepting to be an unsung hero. Players will generally be awed at people’s strength, reflex and skill. Everyone wants to be a hero, making high kill counts and shit. In my early tRO experience, everyone wants to be an Emperium breaker so that their names will be broadcasted throughout server when they broke the Emperium. No one gives a shit on support roles because it’s boring when support roles are usually what defends the castle, heals one's wounds, turfs the ground, provides escape routes, or splats someone behind your comrade’s back. 

Yet, sometimes, it’s enough when it’s just one person who knows what you’re doing and believes in you. As such, I appreciated Low’s presence in the team, for he was the only teammate who understood the value of support, and that itself was enough for me to be strong for others.

3) Two Weeks Before Tourney - Making the Gears Turn

It was agreed that everyone really wanted the eshop $20 prizes. So everyone's here to win. Therefore, our goals seems to be aligned!

On that particular month, there were three consecutive weeks (instead of following the usual once a month pattern) of TMNT themed Splatfests, which was a blessing as it gives tons of Super Sea Snails and allows us to train as a team. To explain, one cannot team up with friends in normal Turf War modes (you can be in the same room, but 4v4 match-ups are random), one can only do so during Splatfest. We had a pretty good run on 1st Splatfest, but that only bolsters too much confidence on the other two, prompting one to skip the 2nd Splatfest. 3rd Splatfest practice was bad due to connection error hell.

In order to keep the team on their toes, daily training sessions with other teams were organised two weeks before the tourney.

I had thought that having a routine session may instilled some form of discipline and interest in polishing their skills. It certainly worked on louhai (who would then develop a habit to challenge others PERSONALLY like a shounen anime hero), but not so much on slap (no, his struggles were more personal, and required more reflection on his part). 

We continuously trained with other teams. Ipoh team, GuGu Clan (one of the official tourney participants), MwS. Strategies were changed, limits were tested. I dropped tri-slosher and opted for NZap 89, Low continued honing his dualies skill, slap tried to work off his rust and settled in learning Dynamo Roller, louhai swapped Ink Brush Noveau for Ink Brush.

Beginning was hard, having to work through a team's... dismotivation? It just feels that the team wouldn't budge unless they were told to do so, which was in turn worrisome.

Team practice was exciting, but the constant matches ate into my sleeping time. By the time Wednesday came, I was tired and on the verge of burning out, I came to the point where I thought that maybe I'll just take a break, because I was tired and everyone's probably tired, and I couldn't win this, I couldn't beat their dismotivation.

Turns out that when one gear spins, the other gears spin as well. Because come Thursday, louhai excitedly told he found us a Singapore team to practice with, and slap even used my words of encouragement to him on me, something like polishing skills together. It is unsure whether the latter is saying it out of sarcasm or he felt my efforts indeed, but I took it as a nourishment and fought on.

4) One Week Before Tourney - Gears Connected

Word has it that everyone except one registrant found a team.

On Monday, one of the organizers came to us and ask if it's alright to adopt this single registrant. We agreed. Personally, I feel that this decision set us to a path of victory.

Admittedly, I was worried. There are only 4 prizes, and Spla2n in general is a 4v4 game. If one joins in, there is a chance that one person will not get the prize... but the feeling of not being able to find a team despite their interest is worse, and I thought that if we had to cross that bridge, I would probably give up mine to this newcomer as long as they contributed.

Nevertheless, the inclusion of Freedom gives me more excuse to organize more practice to test out team dynamics, and in terms of motivation and skills, Furi was a firepower to be reckoned with. (P.S. the nickname Furi was derived from my attempts to romanize Freedom’s name into Japanese (Furidomu), it picked up; also doubles as a subtle pun on what a Fury she is). 

However, the inclusion of Furi also lowered slap and louhai's confidence, who thought their skills as inferior. slap turned to the corner more often, and louhai offered to be a sub due to their somewhat similar main weapons (Furi mains Octobrush, louhai mains Ink Brush). Low and I put a stop to those attitude and utilized this opportunity to make slap work hard.

On Tuesday, we trained with MwS. 

On Wednesday, our team also received a wake-up call in the name of Team Avengers, and to be honest, I half expected that. Sapphire is an S ranker, Fishy is brilliant at support, Meizi is an aggressive vanguard. Meanwhile, they have a new member name Maiki but her positioning is top-notched and her aim is true. We had a rocky beginning of losses, only to end with some victories in the end. At this time of writing, I forgot the main reason of our loss. Low reminded me that the missing puzzle was “me”, that I wasn’t in battle until one of our members went to bed... but I vaguely recalled that Low wasn’t in battle either? Or perhaps we had rotate spectates that not all three experienced players are playing together...? Nevertheless, the fact that we won gave us great confidence that the final prize would be ours.

On Thursday, the desire to improve further caused louhai to discover the finer details of gear abilities. Due to his confusion in our attempts to explain re-rolling and add abilities, I wrote him a guide that he never read. I decided to let him stumble his way through the game, because it’s how he learns best.

We trained with Team 7 (who is not in their full power) and LittleSotongs (who is in their full power). The training allowed us to ascertain their skills, and our confidence grew tenfolds more.

On Friday, I took a break from training to attend OceanInk Battle (https://www.twitch.tv/videos/265356637) as a Knife and Banana member.

Saturday was the day of the fateful tournament...

To be Continued...

[periakman]

A Loose Amateur Compilation to Good Writing Community Guidelines

Everyone wants to create a space where writers can kick back and ooze with creativity, be it a club an irc channel, a discord server, a skype group, or something different. And the fact is, it’s harder than just starting up a group, providing a link, and letting people pour in, so let’s look at some basics...

What Do You Want This Community to Be?

  -   There is more than one type of writing to exist. Most of the young folk online are usually in the midst of writing their big sci fi/fantasy epic. But that’s not everyone. Some people write nonfiction. Some people do it as a 9-5. Some people only ever want to write poetry. Figure out what type of people you want to attract. Decide if you want to accommodate a wide spread of people, or if you want to focus on one specific aspect.    -   There is more than one type of writing community to exist. Some are just for encouraging writing. You give your word counts. You engage in writer sprints. You cheer each other on. You gripe when something doesn’t work. Others are more about gushing and celebrating. You might not have anything written down, but you love your oc and want to share that love. Others are about research, ironing out problems, or maybe getting in depth feedback.  Decide what type of writing community you want, or if you want to take on multiple aspects    -   Don’t overclutter. It’s easy enough to decide you want a catch all server, but unless you have a pre-made base audience, it can very easily turn into a situation where you only get a few casually passionate people about a bunch of topics who have no desire to interact with each other. Additionally, while “bigger is better” might be your goal, keep in mind that not every service can actually keep up with a large group of people. You can’t have a “everyone gets a turn at being given criticism” if there are more people in a group than there are minutes in your free time.    -   There is no “every community has this” truth. If you think something exists in every community, you are wrong. Not every community has a problem child. Not every community has terrible flame wars. Not every community has trolls. When you’re creating a community, it’s on you to moderate. It’s on you to decide what you don’t. As some quick and obvious things to consider:        -   Slurs (written or discussed)        -   Traumatic Situations (written or discussed)        -   Off Topic Conversations        -   Therapy/Comfort        -   Harsh Criticism        -   Drama Importation/Exportation

   -   How do you plan on accomplishing this? If you want a community with Super Serious Published Writers, maybe don’t just post a link for anyone to join. If you want a casual server but with a polite atmopshere, maybe don’t post it in a place known for abrasive and divisive opinions. If you want to create a community for people you have no contact with (I’m a creative person with no creative friends! How do I find them D:!) then you might want to consider joining other people’s groups. Get a lay of the land. See how they do things. Meet people, befriend them, build your base, etc.    Additionally, think about the other things you want! Make sure each thing you want has a planned strategy. Don’t just say you want it and hope it comes, research into it!

What Is Required Of You As A Leader?

   -   Moderation! You are the one who decides who comes and who goes. If two people jump into a fierce argument, you are responsible for settling it, and even if it gets resolved, making sure it doesn’t happen again (unless you WANT fierce arguments). Remaining neutral is not a boon here, but being fair and unbiased is of tantamount importance. If you don’t think you’re capable of doing this, recruiting someone else is a good idea.

   -   Catalyzing! People are easily distracted and are not obligated to contribute. Figure out easy ways you can ignite your chat with fresh new topics. Merely posting a million writing prompts isn’t going to help. If you are busy and don’t want to do such a thing, then once again, recruiting people who will do this is a good thing. If done right, this will self propel by itself, but you need to lay that initial spark.

   -   Positive Role Enforcement! We’re all humans, and we’re all flawed. If a random newcomer says “ugh I hate everyone who likes Naruto! Why can’t they all just Stop LoL”, then most naruto fans will take umbrage, but probably not necessarily go to war about it. If a mod or a leader says it, it can take a very different tone. By being the leader, you have power. That doesn’t mean you can’t be mean or negative or weird or stupid. but it means you should figure a way to clearly distinguish yourself when you’re “on” and “off” and realize that if you are the type to speak bombastically or harshly, it could affect potential nervous newbies. 

   -   Cultural Enforcement! If you want a culture where everyone gives detailed feedback, you need to give detailed feedback. If there’s a queue, you cannot jump the queue. Live the status you want to see everyone else do. If there are exceptions (such as if you are dedicating a server to your work specifically) clarify and write it out clearly.    -   Communication! Do you have dreams of a large spanning community, with subcategories and many moderators? Or do you just want to not have to read every single line that is written? Well, communication is your friend! Specifically, vertical communication! If someone complains about something that goes on in the community, will it reach your ears? and also, horizontal communication! If you have multiple authorities (or perhaps are doing a collab with other communities), does information hit all parallel groups? Now, in small groups this is fairly easy to deal with, but keeping these basic ideas in mind for measuring success of information distribution can be a great rule of thumb.

What Actions Are Detrimental to the Community?

Now, for this section, I’d like to draw your attention to a little thing called “Benne and Sheats’ Group Roles.”  It can give a great quick example of how there are different ways to contribute to a community, and how to tear it down. It’s honestly a nifty little way to think of people, and while it doesn’t provide all the answers, it can give options you hadn’t even thought of! With that out of the way, let’s talk toxicity! But as a general disclaimer, these actions don’t mean the person should be banned, or that the actions are detrimental all the time. Just that they can be if not done in a pre-agreed manner. And this doesn’t cover everyone, but it covers some of the bigger issues I’ve seen.    -   The Self Server: The one who will provide mountains of information about their own story, lovingly detailed and lovingly explained, but will often falter when other people’s writing comes up, or anything that doesn’t involve them. Online, this can often result in personal messaging out of the blue, where they will encourage newbies to read their work, even if they have no intention of doing the same in turn.    Self Serving can show up in truly toxic people who just want the praise and attention, but also can show up in people who are well intentioned. They want attention, and don’t know how to get it, so they go through the only thing that’s a technical success, not realizing the awkward position they put everyone else in. Many might also have social issues, and not know how to give people attention that they desire. Having some default sentence starters can be useful here. As an example:       “I like your X thing. It’s similar to my thing, Y. I like my Y because Z reasons. Anyway, Question about your X?”     It is also important to recognize that everyone shows their attention differently. Some might be willing to listen, but not feel so good about commenting and complimenting. Others might show their support in paying money, but never mention it. When dealing with this action, it’s important to codeify what others require in order to feel validated, and the best way to go about validating someone who might have counter-intuitive values.    -   The Drama Starter: They start arguments. They complain. They whine. They never quite do much else, but whenever they type something up, it’s sure to start drama. They might not even ever discuss what they’re writing, but boy are they Suffering (tm).     Toxic Drama Starters are people who usually want to get attention, but also want to feel vindicated in some way. They are about being right and being told they are right. More well intentioned drama starters probably have a lot of going on in their life, with no idea on how to solve it. So they vent, and vent, and vent. The words help them form a frame of reference, and maybe a way to rationalize it in their head. Unfortunately, if all someone contributes to a community is constant complaining (unless it is, of course, a community based on complaining), then it will rarely turn out to be productive. These are the ones who seem to always start fights, even if they don’t intend to.     It’s worth heavily moderating people who keep starting unwanted fights. You don’t have to ban them, but you have to uphold a standard of rules. Some people improve, some people don’t. Use your own judgment.

   -   The Con Artist: They’re going to start a huge project. They’ve started it already, in fact. It’s going to be huge. They’ll get famous. And when they do they’ll totally hire you to contribute! In fact, why don’t you do something now? The ideas are solid and of course they’re writing it. Of course, at some point, the information dies down. And then there’s nothing. Maybe a chapter comes out, maybe it doesn’t. And then they resurface, a new idea, a new passion, and a new enthusiasm to drum people up with.    At best, a con artist is just someone who has no solid work ethic but strong passions. They honestly mean every word they say, and feel terrible guilt about the pile of old projects left behind. At worst, well, they’re an actual literal con artist. The latter is someone who does not belong in a community, the former is someone who can exist, but needs to be informed of their cycle. It can be tough, of course, to find the line between “happily gushing about new project” and “gushing about a doomed project to the point of community detriment.”  In the end, it’s up to the community to decide what they want to tolerate, but also up to the community to make sure other newcomers don’t get swept up in a wave that will come crashing far more shortly than they thought.

   -   The Elitist: There is a tiered system in writing. On the top are the mainstream famous writers. They don’t actually exist, but we know they do. Then you have the successful writers, who people might  know of, but are unknown by the common populace. Sometimes you might meet them briefly. You keep going down the rungs, and you hit “published author who sold three copies” and keep going further down to “person with ten WIPS with not a page written” and finally to things like “fanfiction” and “roleplay” and “popular posts on the internet”.     This system is completely arbitrary. There is no form of writing or existence in writing that is truly “better” although I think we’d all prefer to be in a situation that made our bank accounts better. Despite the arbitrariness, there are people who will hold their hearts to it, or to some tiered equivalent. And that is where, of course, elitism comes in.    Elitism can show up in any category. No matter how lowly or equal. There is always a way to be Better. It’s something humans are incredibly good at, unfortunately. And it’s an extremely detrimental aspect to any community, especially if it’s growth focused.    Toxic Elitists are exactly what they look like. They want to feel better, and they don’t want to help others. While there’s nothing wrong with admitting a community might not be proper for someone of a certain skill level, there is of course a polite way to do this and a rude way. Additionally, many “innocent” elitists might be younger folk, or people who never bothered to interact with a group, and are just spouting off pre-canned lines that they never considered the implications of. Merely informing someone of this can be a very easy way to offset the toxicity.    Additionally, things like age and having english as a second language can also set off issues with elitism. For instance, a twenty six year old might be at a loss as to how to interact with a thirteen year old, and vice versa, especially in the world of the internet where it’s not immediately known. These situations are complicated and require personalized and contextualized moderation.

   -   The Judge: All Love Triangles are badly written, they say. It’s common knowledge, so it must be true. There’s no debate or discussion around it, it’s just correct. This person has learned the tools and tricks of writing, but has no concept of what it’s actually like to fruitfully discuss something. This one is fairly simple, and can easily go hand in hand with the Drama Starter. It’s bad arguing, and it’s not helpful.    Toxic Judges are ones who refuse to admit they’re wrong, or that their world view is anything but all knowing. More innocent ones might be honestly perplexed as to how things could go differently, or are employing clumsy arguing tactics they developed without the self awareness to realize how or why they work.   It is a good idea to try and inform people of when they fall into this, and encourage them not to make such objective statements. Maybe don’t say something is obviously bad when someone else was just talking about how much they liked it. Maybe don’t dismiss a work with “oh this is romance it’s obviously bad” etc. A community will only improve when nuance in opinions is accepted.    -   The Single Issue Wonker: The person who is way too interested in one Specific Thing. Perhaps it’s a sexual interest, perhaps it’s not. There’s nothing wrong with liking something passionately. But if taken to an extreme, it can mean every conversation is a derailment waiting to happen. It doesn’t matter how mundane the interest is, if forced unnecessarily, it will eventually cause discomfort to the community at large, unless that is something everyone loves together.    This is a tough one to deal with. Most of us are nerdy folk. We have the things we love, and want chances to gush. There are also many neurodivergencies that can lend itself to creating an environment where you do have a Very Specific Interest, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that! However, in a community, striking a balance is important, and making it so that all facets of the community’s goals can be discussed and interacted with is what will help it live longer.     The other common form of this is the “fetishist” so to speak. They are clearly sexually turned on by something specific, and are going to constantly showcase it. This is semi understandable. Many people have sexual interests, and folks have a right to depict it in ways that satisfy those interests. However, constantly bringing it up, or using a writing server as a masturbation area is rather rude, for multiple reasons.     Even if there is an “nsfw” section, not all nsfw categories are about things being sexy, and it’s crucial to figure things like that before dumping those interests in such a category. And even if it IS about the sexy things, it is still good to allow others chances to exist in their own sexy canons, without necessarily adding a specific one to the mix.    In short, if someone’s interest in something specific is eclipsing the point of the community, it needs to be addressed.

   -   The Wounded Heart and the Hurtful Heart: Two sides of the same toxic coin. This one is one we all know, so I will be brief. Either they take criticism too harshly, even if they beg for it, or they give it far too cruelly for it to be considered anything but bashing. Sometimes they are even the same person. Maybe they want to give up writing, maybe they want you to give up writing, maybe it’s just a giant dramatic blur and everyone is confused.    At the end of the day, if someone cannot emotionally handle the guidelines you set, then you have to either consider changing your rules, or dealing with the person in question. Everyone needs to learn how to give and take feedback, but not every community is conducive to that environment, and not every person is conducive to actually learning.

On the Topic Of Feedback    -   What Is Feedback? The golden question for all communities. Define what your feedback is! Recognize that not all people want the same feedback! Some people just want emotional responses! Some people want their execution to be looked at. Others want their actual ideas to be criticized. Some want criticism. Others also want criticism, but their definition of criticism is completely different than the other person, and now they’re fighting. Define your feedback! Force other people to also define their feedback! Some ways to clarify:       -   Where are you looking to improve with sharing your work       -   What problem areas do you think there are?       -   Do you want grammatical feedback?       -   Do you want content feedback?       -   Do you want the sandwich method (compliment-critique-compliment), or do you just want straight honesty?

   -   Speaking of the Sandwich method! it’s a very well known tactic and is quite useful if you are just starting out and don’t know how to word things. It’s very simple, you say something you like. You say something they need to work on. You say something else you like. It can be a great method if you have something you need to convey and don’t want to hurt someone.    With that being said, there are some issues with this method once you get into tougher and more nuanced issues. For instance, if a story has something that must be addressed (maybe it’s unreadable, maybe it depicts a graphic scene that you were not warned about), sandwiching such a complaint will probably not be as helpful. It also can create a sort of false equivocation between the sentences, or just make the whole thing seem strange.  As an example:    “I think the story is clearly very passionate. Also your worldbuilding, characters, plot, and grammar all need a lot of work. I like the names you picked for your character, very unique.”     Would just be strange and demeaning. So while it’s not always a good structure to use for everyone, it’s a way to start.

   -   Recognize Premise v. Execution when giving feedback. This is a very specific sort of advice, but for people just starting out, it can be hard to understand the difference between going “this is why I dislike it” and going “this is why it’s going to be disliked even by people who want to like this.” One mentality to really drive home is that when you’re giving feedback, it’s to help the writer, not to help you read it. So you are helping them achieve what they want to achieve. If they want to write some strange story where bunnies are actually aliens and the main character dies a a third of the way in, only to be replaced with an omniscient narrator, then your goal should not be to dissuade them from writing that, your goal should be to help them turn that into something readable.    You can still of course say “I don’t think this premise will work without serious reworking” but in order to give good feedback, you need to accept whatever internal core exists for the story, and starting from there.

   -   Some people don’t want feedback. Some people just want to share. It is up to the community to decide what’s the norm. Should feedback be expected unless told not to give it? or should feedback be only allowed when asked for? What’s the difference between idle negative observation and negative feedback?

   -   Decide how feedback will be given. The general rule is “look at the thing above you and then post yours.” Others do queues, where no one is allowed to post until X amount of opinions are posted. Personally I try and employ a “2 for 1″ philosophy. You must give your opinions on 2 things (if possible) before posting up yours. This means there’s less of a tit-for-tat going on, and it means there will always be more feedback than posting.    There is a downside to this, obviously. It means people who don’t feel comfortable feedback won’t be posting. To which, you as a community maker need to have a decision. What is important to you when setting up your system of feedback? People feeling comfortable posting something, even if they might not ever get anyone looking at it, or people who will get feedback, but it might be disjointed and half-hearted, in a rushed attempt to just post theirs?    Now, this ignores the best possible ending. That people will give feedback willingly and in abundance. Now, to be honest, that is rarely going to happen. Usually it just means that one or two people give all the feedback, and other folks just keep producing content without bothering to contribute, because they know someone else will deal with the feedback.    One strategy some communities employ is by making sure they’re also recruiting people who love to read and edit, but this falls into another issue...

   -   Remember that giving feedback is a skill. Not just a skill, one that people get actively paid to do. That means when you are asking for feedback, you are asking for someone’s time, energy, and brain power. And you’re doing it for free. Art, music, these things can be consumed in sets amount of time, very easily. Reading someone’s manuscript is homework. Even the action of excitedly telling you someone about your work involves paying attention and keeping track of a bunch of fictional facts to form a story you’ve never read inside the confines of your brain.    The people who are best at giving feedback are being paid to do it. You are probably not paying people. So you must adjust considerations accordingly. Relying on a few people can make those people feel unloved. Forcing everyone into one standard might end up becoming actual homework and actual unpaid labor. It is unfortunate, but at the end of the day, despite how important feedback is to a writer, no one is obligated to run a whole marathon just to help with what is put forward.

   -   This is ultimately the double bind I see in a lot of communities. What it devolves into is a chaotic sprawl where no one gets feedback, but everyone wants it, and giving it can be a bit of a nightmare. This is why guidance is so important, especially if you want a feedback focused community. In the beginning, it does mean doing a lot of legwork yourself, at least until people realize what they can get out of it. This is why I personally prefer structures where effort must be put in before you get to put up your work for feedback. In Conclusion   -   The most important philosophy to take into account is that Good Faith and Not Taking Any BullCrap can exist in a mutually beneficial relationship. There will be many people who want to write, all of varying desires and oddities. Accepting people’s desires in good faith is imperative to a healthy community, and for others to do the same. But at the same time, to know what a problem looks like, and how to seamlessly remove it, without causing issue.    Trust that the people you encounter want to be happy in your community, that they want to grow and improve. But do not blindly believe it in the face of contradicting evidence. As a reminder, do check out the benne and sheats group roles linked above, as it does provide more broad overviews of positive ways to contribute on a general level and personal level, and more common issues that can show up in any group, not just writing. Writing is an incredible experience, and naturally we want to share it with other writers. We want to be in that community of nerds, all gaggled together chuckling about our injokes. And there is nothing wrong with that, but every community needs active positive influence, or it will crumble. It’s like a plant, or a pet. You can’t just say that because it’s alive and healthy now it will always be alive and healthy. Your job is not done. It’s only just beginning.

[miss-m-calling]

Fandom 5k letter

Requests:

Adult Wednesday Addams (webseries) -- Wednesday Addams

American Gods (TV) -- Laura Moon/Mad Sweeney

Kingdom (Netflix) -- Prince Lee Chang/Seo-bi, Prince Lee Chang & Seo-bi

Starred Up (2013 movie) -- Oliver Baumer/Eric Love

Dear writer,

Hello and thank you for writing for me. I’m very excited to read whatever you come up with.

Without further ado…

Adult Wednesday Addams

Wednesday Addams

I belatedly discovered this webseries, and it resurrected (see what I did there?) my love for Wednesday and how the Addams Family canon runs on the endless possibilities of this loving, happily eccentric family being 100% true to themselves and the world just having to deal with it. The show was everything I never knew I wanted till I watched it, the perfect blend of Addams-macabre and cozy slice of life with bonus Wednesday navigating the world alone, without always knowing her family will back her up, and it made me crave more of adult Wednesday’s mini adventures in LA. For this canon, I’m good with gen or, if you want to write that, more of Wednesday’s adventures in dating guys who really aren’t up to the challenge, and you can absolutely have Wednesday interact with OCs I haven’t listed as part of a pairing. I’m keeping the prompts pretty short, just to (hopefully) pique your creativity, as I expect I will love any way you make these or any similar scenarios play out:

-Wednesday goes to IKEA

-More of Wednesday’s interactions with the nice interns at her receptionist job. Maybe they invite her out to happy hour, or to the beach or a club. Or maybe we get to eavesdrop while they shoot the breeze on their lunch break, possibly over barbecue-chicken pizza from CPK.

-More of Wednesday’s gigs. She already babysits and walks other people’s dogs, what else might she do for extra cash that would be both really common and seemingly ill-suited to Wednesday, except she totally makes it work for her? Cat sitting (especially if the cat belongs to someone incredibly rich whose house is full of secrets – and expensive things for the cat to knock over), driving an Uber/Lyft, becoming an AirBnB host, catering/server, working the late shift in a New Age/occult supply store where none of the woo is real…?

-Or, alternately, Wednesday finds a career that is perfect for her, in which she can have success and respect. What ever could that be and still fit into the non-Addams world?

-Wednesday tries speed dating

-Or, she runs into Brian a.k.a. chains guy (I cackle with glee every time I rewatch the bit when he tries to kiss her at the pet store) a third time – how does it not go quite as he wanted or expected this time?

-Wednesday’s family comes out to sunny, plastic, image-conscious LA to visit her and make sure she’s doing alright. She gives them a tour of the city, and LA will never be the same again.

-Wednesday takes an evening class, or goes back to school part time, or enrolls in an online degree program

-Wednesday takes a road trip, alone or with her apartment mates/colleagues/Brian/strangers she met for carpooling purposes. Bonus points if you work in real roadside attractions, or tourist traps, or famous sites/landscapes.

-It’s Dia de Muertos, and Wednesday goes out to celebrate and soak up the atmosphere. It may or may not live up to her expectations.

Canon-specific DNW: smut (keep it no higher than an M rating, please!)

  American Gods (TV)

Laura Moon/Mad Sweeney

I ship it. Yes I do. They had me at “gimme-my-coin-dead-wife”-flicks-him-into-wall. The snarky road trip was the best thing I never knew I wanted until it happened, and I adored every second of it, not to mention the upped shippiness in S2. They’re both such assholes and so fascinating, even if they start to mellow toward each other a bit, and all the gods/magic/resurrection stuff swirling around them begs to be explored further. Also I love love love how their dynamic is about equal parts spikiness, pathos, and humor (they’re funny! and the canon doesn’t shy away from putting them in ludicrous situations), and it weaves seamlessly between those three. Plus she’s half his size yet can and does beat him up with literally one finger, and then there’s the angst of he having killed her, feeling really guilty about it, and then bringing her back. And the way that their New Orleans adventure makes clear they have feelings for each other (S1 was more one-sided SweeneyàLaura) but neither wants to admit it. And and and… yeah, I just love them.

My prompts are a combo of prompts I had after I binged S1 and others I added throughout S2. Even if some of this is addressed or hinted at in canon, feel free to diverge – canon divergences and canon-adjacent stories are my jam!

Please give me either missing scenes from the road trip (if you can work in a divergence, that’s great - for example, I like Salim, but if you want to have him boot Sweeney and Laura to the curb and go off on his own, or Sweeney to boost his taxi before Salim catches them, or whatever else to have those two alone, go for it!), or a divergence from either season (instead of going to Ostara, they go where? to see whom? about getting Laura resurrected. Or things go down differently in New Orleans, or Cairo, or anywhere else) or something about these two post-canon.

-Laura discovers (how? you decide!) that Sweeney gave her back the coin after their accident – whatever happens next, some punching may be involved. (If nothing else, Mama-Ji mentions that the coin is now in Laura’s heart, and we saw Sweeney place it on her ribcage after the accident, whereas it was originally in her gut like she’d swallowed it. Laura might ask herself how the hell it moved.)

-Wednesday’s big war finally comes, and “don’t you dare die on me [again], you asshole” is a line either Sweeney or Laura (or both) might say to each other.

-Laura asked “What does Wednesday have to lose?” and the answer is…? (Yes, give me that sweet poetic justice. One possibility, though not remotely the only one, but as of S2E3 Laura is technically a god-killer...) Or later when she straight-up says she’s going to kill Wednesday, but is warned to bring power with her when she does, how does that work? How else might she damage Wednesday or ruin his plans, just in case she can’t actually kill him?

-At the end of S2, Laura hoists Sweeney’s dead body over her shoulders and strides off, seemingly leaving Cairo, Shadow, and all of it behind. Tell me what happens then – does she use Baron Samedi’s potion to bring him back, and whose is the blood filled with love she uses (does she still bleed? You could get creative here, worldbuilding is also my jam)? Does her/his coin play a part – and how come the coin still “powers” Laura despite Sweeney’s death? Does she bring him back another way, maybe figuring out how to keep herself around and be able to give Sweeney back his coin? Does he come back like she did, more undead than alive, or does his godhead, however depleted, help with that? That still leaves Laura to be fully resurrected too… Or does something completely out of left field happen – surprise me!

-Possible divergences from “Treasure of the Sun”: Sweeney manages to kill Wednesday, and then Laura rolls up, and then…? Or Laura rolls up and makes like Mama-Ji told her – destroys some motherfuckers? Or Sweeney gets killed temporarily but Laura brings him back, or brings herself back, or does something else with the Baron’s potion, and is Sweeney’s blood the one filled with love, or can we interpret voodoo spells in a non-literal way? Or what happens with Gungnir hidden in Sweeney’s hoard? And definitely how do they deal with each other once they meet up in Cairo, given how they parted in New Orleans (I don’t know what hurt more to watch: Laura deflecting at the diner, or Sweeney rambling drunkenly about her when Shadow finds him, or later on telling Shadow with such desperate sincerity to keep her away from Wednesday)?

-Or how about a wild divergence from the last several episodes? Sweeney and Laura manage to settle their differences (ahem, more fucking, on this plane of reality, might help) and don’t part ways before leaving NOLA. Or they roll up in Cairo separately but at the same time, and confront Wednesday together, and neither of them die (or die more, in her case). Or they’re there together when the police nearly raid the house. Or they have Wednesday (the ultimate cause of Laura’s death) and Ibis (a death deity) and Bilquis (a love/death/life deity) on hand, surely they can concoct some kind of resurrection thingamajig for Laura, and if they have to twist some divine arms then so be it. Or or or…?

-Wednesday told that luckless cop that Sweeney had been against the big gods’ war from the start, and while Wednesday lies, what if Sweeney decided much sooner to say to hell with Grimnir and his war and his having Sweeney kill random people? I’m guessing Sweeney too drank three glasses of mead so he can’t back out without dire consequence – but he does have a fierce, dead woman in his corner.

-They go to some as-yet-unnamed old god (feel free to bring in whatever mythology you want) in order to bring Laura back to life. Between Sweeney’s mouth and temper, and Laura’s mouth and temper, it doesn’t go well. Now one or both of them are in big magical trouble with a pissed-off deity and have to get themselves/each other out of it.

-Speaking of other deities, I really enjoyed their brief canon interactions with Ostara, Anansi, and Mama-Ji, and I’d like to see more of that, especially Ostara’s polite yet over-it attitude, Anansi very obvious over-it attitude and his dramatic flair, or Mama-Ji being one of the few capable of giving Laura pause.

-All the petty, ridiculous ways in which Sweeney’s bad luck manifests itself make me laugh (can’t help it, won’t even try), and I’m down for more variations on that theme.

-Sweeney and Laura fighting together, like they did on Mr. Town’s train of torture. Whether it’s a bar fight of their own making, or the big gods’ war they find themselves embroiled in, or something else entirely.

-Things happen and Laura finds herself in the position to throw Sweeney under the bus but also help/save him, and while he knows it’s only karma (he did kill her way back when), he can still be pissed off about it – how do they navigate this?

-Related to that, the Baron said: “In death is her true love, but she betrays him also.” If that meant Sweeney, or can mean Sweeney in the future (I don’t like destiny-wills-it stories, and they’re definitely not there yet, but they could maybe get there at some future point, and even then It Would Be Complicated), was the betrayal Laura rejecting him after the loa ‘fuck them,’ or is it something that hasn’t happened yet, and if so, what?

-Laura gets fully alive again, but traces of her (un)dead state remain – what are they, how does she cope, what price did she/he/they have to pay for her resurrection, and how does their relationship change? I’d especially be curious how it would work if they’re already a sorta-maybe-item and then she’s alive again and it’s weird in a new way.

-For reasons I’ll leave up to you, Sweeney and Laura have to stay put in a single place for a while and end up essentially cohabiting, regardless of what their relationship is at that point. Take “cohabiting” as literally or as creatively as you want – in any case, I’m sure it will be marvelously disastrous and amazing. If the place they have to stay happens to be NOLA, all the better, I find everything about that city fascinating. Or, if you wanted to use book canon, Laura and Sweeney (rather than Shadow) are the ones who have to spend time living in Lakeside and deal with its creepy Norman Rockwell-ness and with Hinzelmann.

-Slight or major AU from the opening of “The Ways of the Dead”: Laura has hitchhiked with Sweeney instead of going off in a huff with Wednesday, or she otherwise gets to New Orleans sooner, and she and Sweeney tear up the town together. Gimme bar fights, carnival shenanigans, all the food and drink porn, backstage craziness with the Christian rock band (Sweeney seems to have a backstage pass on a lanyard around his neck when Laura finds him)… Maybe they even cross the paths of some loa and it doesn’t get all angsty (for what it’s worth, I think the reason the sex magic didn’t bring Laura back to life was because she couldn’t accept the truth(s) revealed during the astral-plane sex and just ask Sweeney to prick his finger for the potion – instead she defaults straight to “this is all Wednesday’s evil plan” the morning after – not because the loa fucked them over). They were actually getting along nicely in those first couple of scenes in NOLA, only ribbing each other a little while still being their grouchy selves, before they got to Le Coq Noir. I wouldn’t have minded seeing some more of that.

-AU from the end of “The Ways of the Dead”: they still have their big fight (which was amazing as well as painful) or some variation thereof, but they don’t split up. (Maybe the reason is as mundane as Sweeney refusing to get left behind or they have a shared ride out of town, or maybe the more time passes the less Sweeney can afford to be far from his coin – or maybe the coin needs him close by to work at full capacity.) And then what?

-All the old gods hide their true appearance to an extent. A situation arises in which Laura sees Sweeney’s true, or at least old, self (I’m thinking of his surprise!poignant monologue about when he used to be a king, and him in full Celtic warrior mode in the S2 flashbacks). Or Wednesday’s war ends in victory, meaning the old gods again get belief, worship, and sacrifices. How does Laura, the ultimate skeptic even when she’s on the other side of the mirror, react? How does this new knowledge and new reality change her opinion of/attitude to Sweeney? Or to flip that around, if Sweeney were again relevant and believed-in, would that actually change his bad attitude and fix his issues (my guess is it would be complicated)? On that note, Sweeney’s decline from Lugh to king to leprechaun was more sketched in than really explored in canon, ditto I didn’t really get why he couldn’t seem to remember his own history except in snatches (the curse that made him a bird/madman of the woods?) – I’d love to see more about it and his (not) dealing with it, or with a reversal of that decline. Eorann told him long ago to adapt and change with the times – but what does that mean after humpteen centuries in a rut and becoming used to always feeling angry and unappreciated?

-The power of names, since they never use each other’s in canon: for all his “dead wifeing,” there comes a time when Sweeney (has to) call her by her actual name, and that’s a tricky moment for them to navigate. Or, Mad Sweeney is not his actual name, and true names have great magical power and so must be kept secret; Laura discovers or learns his name, from someone else or from himself; what does she do with that knowledge? Or, Sweeney gets to say “cunt” in a situation (sexual or otherwise) where, not only does Laura not peel his lips from his gums, but she finds that she can’t object, even though she knows that he knows that he’s getting away with it.

-So far in canon, it’s pretty clear that Sweeney has a lot of complicated but sincere feelings for Laura. Laura is still pretty focused on Shadow (or rather her idealized vision of Shadow and what their relationship might yet be), whom she seems to equate with her own lost-maybe-to-be-regained life, although that’s starting to change at the end of S2. For one thing, she’s starting to soften toward Sweeney as she realizes he’s doing things for her that are not all about getting his coin back (and her sparring match with Wednesday in “Muninn” as well as Shadow refusing to be called puppy anymore in “Moon Shadow” may finally force her to accept that her relationship with Shadow died alongside her and Robbie on that road in Indiana). Not to mention the shared truth revealed in “The Ways of the Dead” (bullshit was that just Laura’s truth!) and how Laura flips out rather than deal with it and Sweeney can’t spit out that it mattered to him either, or how obviously cut up she is about Sweeney’s death despite refusing to admit it. Tell me the story of how Laura stumbles her way to feeling – and acknowledging that she feels – more complex, maybe kinder or softer, really annoying for her blunt-force-trauma-personality things about Sweeney and about the notion that her dynamic with him is different from the way she tended to use men for her convenience without really letting them in in the past. Also I’m pretty sure that even if they can admit they feel the same – or sorta in the same ballpark – about each other, their relationship would still run on a lot of conflict, and I would so be here for it.

-On that note: in “Munnin” it also becomes clear that Laura has, without realizing it herself, started to rely on Sweeney. The “I trusted you” line made me think, whoa she’s too furious to catch herself doing it but this is huge for Laura, and the fact that she goes off with Wednesday (!) basically because she’s mad at Sweeney because she thinks he’s prioritizing his debt to Wednesday over her… Yeah, I would like to see that explored some more and/or to see Laura and Sweeney get to a point where they trust each other and rely on each other, and know it and accept it, however difficult the getting there and being there may be for them.

-Sweeney has this intense need to see himself as a brave person and someone worthy of the world’s respect – but his past and his long experience as just a leprechaun have chipped away at that. Add the guilt of having been the instrument of Laura’s death and then all the pesky feelings he develops for her, and it’s a lot. Obviously his final actions in S2 are his trying to reclaim that courage and nobility of old (also to spite Wednesday, who’s messed both him and Laura up), but I would love to read about his character development under different circumstances, where Laura is there all the way, as opposed to them parting ways and meeting up again multiple times like in canon.

-And since I’m on the subject of Laura, you know how she’s not actually an abrasive bitch all the time to everyone? And when she is, the people on the receiving end of it sometimes richly deserve it, or very occasionally they push back (ILU, Mama-Ji!), and anyway it’s refreshing to see a female character who defaults to confrontational and doesn’t bother flirting and accommodating others for the sake of social harmony? As much as I enjoy watching her rip into people (ahem, Sweeney), I also love it when she acts differently, like her genuine interest in getting to know Salim and her joy in seeing him again in S2, or her running passive-aggressive battle of wills with Wednesday. Her beginning to feel sympathy for Sweeney and her anger and disappointment when she feels let down by him are a part of that, and I’d love to see all that explored more. Nuance! Give me all the nuance and seeming contradictions in both Laura and Sweeney’s characters!

-Sweeney and Laura get drunk and wake up married. Or some sex and/or blood resurrection spell results in basically an unbreakable marriage bond, whether it also secures resurrection or not. Or marrying the dead keeps them (sorta) alive. Or being married makes it possible for them to share magical/supernatural abilities. They’re both pissed about it, but secretly having to make it work may not be the worst thing that’s ever happened...

-My perfect AG spinoff would basically be Sweeney and Laura tooling around America, looking to get her resurrected (whether they succeed or not is up to you), stealing ever more ridiculous vehicles, arguing/fighting and having those pesky moments where vulnerability and genuineness creep in – and fucking. So yessiree I’d be down for porn, including “it’s technically necrophilia/zombiesex” porn, including a canon-divergent first time, or their second time, or all the later times after they had their first time in NOLA in canon.

-If you wanted to throw in some worldbuilding, maybe something exploring living death. Magical bargains. What kind of favor did Sweeney do for Ostara that would be worth her bringing someone back to life as repayment? What other powers might Sweeney have – or have left from when he was Lugh? How long can a dead wife keep going before she’s “soup”? What other superhuman abilities might dead!Laura have? Can the dead do magic? What even are the rules governing and the limits of different beings’ magical abilities? For example, why can’t Sweeney just take his coin back, or why does Laura gain super-strength as part of her undead package deal? Is the hoard in the same space as the behind-the-scenes accessed through the merry-go-round, or it’s a different place? Why does the coin seem to start to “run down” the longer Laura has it? Why did Wednesday need Laura to kill Argus when he killed Vulcan himself just fine? What happens with Gungnir now it’s in the hoard – can only Sweeney get to it, has it been transformed somehow (it’s now the treasure of the sun), etc.?

If it helps your inspiration, you can find some of my meta and lots of tag-burbling about these two here. I have read the book though I remember it only in bits and pieces, and while I prefer the show characters and the fact that they get thrown together, you can use or riff on book material if you want, though I’d prefer a story that isn’t just a retread of the book. With reference to one of my DNWs, for this canon, describing Laura’s physical decay is totally fine. Also, Shadow/Laura don’t interest me except as a part of Laura’s backstory (so if your story wants to include Laura figuring out or having already figured out that pinning all her hopes on Shadow to make everything right is unrealistic, unfair, and not how it works – by all means, go for it!), and Shadow/Sweeney interest me not at all.

Canon-specific DNWs: Sweeney dying/staying dead (at least not permanently), Laura being treated as just a part of Sweeney’s story, and Laura being Essie’s reincarnation/descendant/reincarnation of Sweeney’s wife from back when he was a king in old Ireland. Reincarnation/“new love looks like old love”/“lost love found again” plots bore me, and I don’t enjoy ships that hinge on characters being somehow destined to be together. Characters having agency is my jam as much as canon divergences are. Anyway I’m certain that Laura would have neither time nor patience for the notion that Destiny Fate and All That Jazz threw her together with ginger minge, and even if it were technically true, she’d still want this relationship to work on her terms – and Sweeney obviously has a problem with Laura’s cheating, her relationship with Shadow, her personality (though he also recognizes they’re alike in many ways), and all that maps onto his anger and sadness over becoming irrelevant over time, so it’s not just about Laura. So yeah, let them be their own (grumpy, spiky, dysfunctional) people, and let Laura’s dynamic with Sweeney not be shaped solely by his past and his issues.

  Kingdom (Netflix)

Prince Lee Chang/Seo-bi

Prince Lee Chang & Seo-bi

I fell so hard for this show. So hard! The beautiful production values, the wonderful cast, how the characters develop, how the show slowly but surely unfolds one reveal after another and packs so much into two short seasons, all the period detail, the genuinely tense action scenes, the moments of humor and intense emotion, the intertwining of political intrigue and zomg! really scary zombies, how the zombie outbreak works on multiple levels both literal and metaphorical…

I love the brave, kindhearted, but sheltered prince, whose whole life has been so privileged yet shadowed by the possibility of death if he loses his position as heir, learning what it means to actually rule and lead people, to protect them and be protected by them in turn. And I love Seo-bi the fearless, dedicated, selfless physician, who notices things and figures things out regardless of whether this annoys the people in power. I ship them, but I also love their platonic interactions, how instantly and fiercely loyal she is to him (not just because he’s the crown prince, but because she’s seen how brave and altruistic he can be) and how he immediately takes her advice and experience seriously despite her being a woman and a commoner in this super-hierarchical setting. So I’m good with either / or & for this pairing, and you can work with any of my prompts accordingly. In a / fic, I’d even be good with a totally sublimated, “they both must kinda know what’s going on between them but for reasons of both their personalities and their respective genders and social positions, nothing overt ever gets said or done” scenario! So don’t stress too much over which flavor of dynamic you write for them.

Also, I love most of the cast (not a huge fan of Chancellor Cho, but he is an effective antagonist), and would be delighted to see any of them in fic too. Especially the loyal and funny and badass Mu-yeong (he was loyal, despite the Haewon Cho clan’s blackmail, and if you want to diverge from canon so he lives, I would not mind that at all), the even more badass and wounded and snarky Yeong-sin (or is that “Yeong-sin”???), Chang’s sparky, exiled uncle several times removed, and the terrifying and frankly unhinged young queen are my favorites. I even have a soft spot for that mostly-useless coward Cho Beom-pal, but really, they’re all great and I would love reading about them too, or just about the prince and the lady physician – whatever works!

Finally, before I get to prompts, I know a bit about the Joseon period, but we’re talking the bits and pieces I remember from a college class, and what I’ve read on Wikipedia and picked up from this and other Korean movies and shows. I know a bit more about some of the cultural background, like the Confucian values, the social stratification and feudal system, the gender segregation among the aristocracy, the wars with Japan, but again – my knowledge is limited. So if you want to teach me stuff about Joseon, go for it! If you want to invent or handwave stuff, as long as it fits the canon’s mood and broad cultural parameters, go for it! And if you want to treat me to some worldbuilding, period detail of any kind, and/or costume porn, definitely go for it.

Prompts:

Zombie fighting anything! Learning to survive in a society that’s rapidly breaking down, having to transcend their habitual social roles and challenging each other, anything! Maybe one of them teaches the other to hunt, or to make herbal medicines, or to fight with a sword, or heck, to cook or clean dirty clothes. (FYI I wrote most of these prompts before I was quite done with S2, and the time-skip took me totally by surprise. So while my prompts ignore Chang renouncing the throne, I’d also be down for the untold adventures of the former prince and his traveling companions, as Chang learns how to be just regular folks and they pursue clues about the resurrection flower, or for your take on what happens in S3. Use whatever works for you in my prompts in any way you want!)

Figuring out how the zombie infection continues to evolve and/or working together to find a cure beyond dunking the infected in water – whether that means to destroy large numbers of the undead, or to develop an antidote, or to cure and bring back those afflicted. One plot detail that really struck me: more experimenting with zombies, like Chancellor Cho started to do, might also hold the key to a cure?

Political intrigue anything! Having to fight zombies and/or factions at court with both friends and unexpected allies (not gonna lie, I would have loved to have seen the young queen unleashed on some zombies, even if that did not make her the prince and Seo-bi’s ally).

More road trip/survival/battle goodness – maybe Seo-bi offers Lee Chang some advice while they’re navigating their new situation, or she witnesses him developing his leadership muscles, and it brings them closer together than before. Or maybe a moment of humor, relaxation, or quiet affection on the road or in between zombie-slaying, especially if it catches them both a bit by surprise. Or one of them gets a non-zombifying injury (nothing too gruesome or life-threatening, please!) and the other one has to care for them – extra points if Seo-bi is injured and the prince kind of bumbles through the most basic things so she has to talk him through her own treatment. Or nightmares/being triggered by something, like we saw both Chang and Seo-bi react at the sounds of zombies growling and people screaming in S2E5.

We have seen Seo-bi insist on staying loyal to the prince, and Lee Chang rely on her repeatedly to the exclusion of all his other people – give me a situation in which he has to make clear his own loyalty to her, as a part of both his becoming a better leader and as a step in advancing their relationship. Or, there comes a time when Seo-bi really pushes against the rules of what someone like she can and cannot say or do to/around a crown prince – we’ve seen Chang refuse to stand on his dignity to the point where so many of his interactions with commoners would end in the commoners’ death, but I imagine even he has his limits, and that kind of clash can only drive this dynamic forward!

Canon divergence in which Seo-bi gets sent to the capital and assigned to be the personal physician to the petulant, frustrated prince we meet at the start of the show (handwave the gender segregation and impropriety). She knows her place, but she also does not suffer fools or male nonsense. Sparks fly, social conventions get tested, zombies may or may not happen, and a new mutual understanding is born.

Canon divergence from the scene in S2E2 when Seo-bi finagles her way to being allowed to see the prince and he instructs her to resurrect Ahn Hyeon – what if instead of that, they came up with another plan of escape? Or maybe Chang sending Seo-bi to spy on the queen goes a different way than in canon? And really, anything that requires those two to pass secret messages while grabbing each other’s hands and staring intently into each other’s eyes is A++ with me!

One theme which emerges gradually, and I really loved, is people having to compromise their principles to survive and ensure the safety of those they feel loyal and/or obliged to: Ahn Hyeon agreeing to turn the sick villagers into zombies, dear Mu-yeong having been a spy but also protecting the prince all along, Seo-bi resurrecting Ahn Hyeon, Lee Chang instructing her to do it as well as his thousand-yard-stare after having to finish off what’s left of his father… I’d love to see more such compromises, how their consequences ripple out, and the emotional fallout.

In addition to zombies, other magical and/or supernatural events and creatures start to appear in Joseon. If you want to bring in something from Buddhist mythology or Korean folklore, please do, and any and all worldbuilding would be awesome.

Post-canon something in which Lee Chang is king, possibly of only a part of the country (maybe a zombie-free enclave, or a part he won in a civil war against the Cho clan or a cadet branch of his family), and Seo-bi is there as his advisor, physician, and unofficial chancellor. Gimme policymaking to deal with the lingering zombie issue, and assassination plots, and servants/guards/ladies in waiting gossiping like it’s their real job, and all the palace intrigue!

Kind of related to the previous: even as a “spare” prince, Lee Chang can’t marry a commoner. Would he ever think to offer Seo-bi to become his concubine? I don’t think she’d go for it, and he might realize it, but maybe I’m wrong! Or maybe being intensely platonic at each other is as good as it gets for them, and they’re kind of okay with that. Or they get married in secret and have to very careful not to let slip anything by word on gesture in public, or not to let Seo-bi get pregnant. Or, y’know, one day or night on the road or in a fortified town, in between scavenging for supplies and fighting zombies, they decide to bone just because their lives are weird enough now to forget about propriety and all that jazz for an hour. (For this canon, I’m DNWing smut, please keep it M rated at most.)

Role reversal: Seo-bi is the sheltered, willful princess fearful for her position (especially since she’s a woman as well as the daughter of a concubine only) and Lee Chang is the proper yet willful provincial physician. Do they meet as in canon, or under different circumstances (maybe she must flee the court to escape assassins, accusations of treason, or an arranged marriage, with or without bonus zombies)? How would their dynamic be complicated (and made awesome of course!) by the gender reversal? Also, burning question: does Princess Seo-bi already know how to fight (because she forced Mu-yeong to teach her back at court, of course), or does she have to learn once zombies/brigands/insurrection/whatever happen? And does Physician Lee Chang know one end of a musket or sword from another, or does he need rescuing at some point?

I realize that some of these prompts could work as well (better?) as a no-zombies AU, and that’s fine if you want to take it in that direction. Just so we’re clear. :-)

Starred Up (2013 movie)

Oliver Baumer, Eric Love

Yes I do ship it, I do, I do!

Ahem. Don’t get me wrong, I liked what the movie did with the father-son relationship and its influence on both men’s character development – but I really wish they hadn’t got Oliver out of the action before the story’s climax (not like that!). The final denouement with Love father and Love son was great, as was the hint at the end that Eric learned something in anger-management group and has a support network that will help him a lot. But. I would have wanted to see more of the intriguing dynamic between Eric the intelligent, semi-feral, yet not-incorrigible, young thug and Oliver the educated, dedicated, kind yet aware of his own potential for violence (what was he on about with “I need to be here”?), slightly older counselor. They had me at Oliver’s “I want him” and Eric later telling his father that Oliver’s a better man than Love Sr. Also the not-flirting and the push-pull in the scene when Oliver picks up Eric from his cell - yowza!

Prompts:

-I would love to see Oliver return to holding his group in prison, so the two of them can interact more, either in the movie’s immediate aftermath or years down the line, as it’s implied that Eric will be serving a long sentence. Give me more scenes from anger management or the ribald, honest, free-flowing conversations in group, either with the other men present (I liked Hassan and Tyrone especially, among the group members) or a one-on-one session.

-An oblique or open-but-undramatic admission/declaration that they both know there’s something there, even if they don’t know what to do with it. Or, one or both of them knows exactly what to do with it, and the push-pull that would result from that.

-Dirty talk: used for arousal, as a defense mechanism, as a form of flirtation. Eric using slurs to assert dominance, and Oliver not letting him hide behind profanity, when he can use colorful language to express emotion and/or sexual interest. There could definitely be some verbal taunting/flirting about who wants/is eager to do what or is good at doing something. There may be some sniping comments about logistics and (lack of) condoms and barebacking and what men get up to in prison. There probably wouldn’t be deep discussions about sexual identity.

-An emergency in the prison requires a lock-down, so Oliver gets temporarily stuck in Eric’s cell or another room with only Eric for company. Things get porny and/or emotional.

-Eric is eventually released (you can handwave this so it happens soon after the movie or have it happen years later) and crashes with Oliver while he adjusts to the outside world. You guessed it: things get porny and/or emotional.

-How do they get to the point where both can cross that line from friends/whatever the hell they are and become, to lovers? (There’s Eric’s personal history and general discomfort with vulnerability, plus all the ways prison sex can be or make things complicated, and if it helps, I headcanon Oliver as either gay or bi and at least somewhat closeted, at work especially.) Who initiates and “directs traffic”? How does their always-contentious dynamic shift during and after sex? Is the sex an isolated (series of) occasion(s), or a progression/escalation over multiple encounters (how would I love especially an escalating series of encounters, let me count the ways)? Eric might seem like the logical initiator and/or dominant partner as well as using the possibility of sex to manipulate and exert control, but then Oliver might (or might not!) surprise him and is definitely the one more in touch with himself as well as aware of his custodial duty toward the men in the group.

-At some point in their intimate relationship (probably not right at the start, and probably not in prison, though if you can make it happen in prison, more power to you!), Oliver decides he’s going to take his sweet time and make Eric fall absolutely apart with pleasure, while using dirty talk to both arouse and empower Eric to own his desires – by that point, Eric is in a place where he can let that happen and enjoy it, even if he still talks tough.

-Role reversal: Oliver as the con (jittery, shut off, sticking out like a sore thumb in prison with all his fancy learning, yet no pushover) and Eric as the newbie counselor (kid from the wrong side of the tracks made good? Youthful hoodlum turned around his life, now trying to help others via tough love and lots of swearing and maybe a bit of manipulation when called for?)

BTW, for this canon my blanket DNW for dubcon does not apply! If it calls to you, I’d prefer if it ends with everyone getting just what they want -- say, one person needs to be dubconned into what they secretly want but can’t admit, rather than one person getting off just as they wanted and the other one feeling used or cheated.

  Likes:

I love pre-canon, canon, post-canon, canon-divergent, and missing-scene stories. I love character-driven and plot-driven stories equally, and I love fics which mix humor and angst/serious business when appropriate for the canon.

I love stories about characters at work and play, group dynamics, family dynamics (including constructed families), professional partnerships, friendships, alliances, rivalries, intimate couples (new lovers/first times as well as long-term/established couples), UST-ridden couples who are not just UST-ridden but connected in other ways too, etc.

I love irony, snark, humor as well as angst arising from the characters rather than the plot crowbaring it in, linear, non-linear, and 5+1 stories, hopeful endings, happy endings, bittersweet endings, worldbuilding, spiky characters who keep their jagged edges and spikiness in adversity as well as when their lives are going well, square-peg-in-round-hole characters, characters who are their own worst enemies as well as those who can get over themselves when the occasion calls for it, characters with conflicting values which may or may not be reconciled/resolved, characters who treat each other with respect and as equals even if they hate/annoy/can’t stand/love to dislike each other.

I especially love workplace stories (this can mean anything from an actual workplace/casefic/procedural setting to anything that revolves around the canon world in which the characters live) in which the characters are competent and dedicated to the job, and while they may not be exactly friends and they may well irritate one another, they still manage to rub along to get the job done and maybe even grow to care about one another (much to their surprise and sometimes reluctance/discomfort). Or, if they can’t get along, show me why not and what’s preventing them from finding common ground.

In terms of ship dynamics, I love (where it fits the characters) banter, competitiveness or antagonism shading into attraction (this tension need not be resolved), oh-god-why-did-it-have-to-be-you-what-did-I-do-to-deserve-this, bickering yet loving couples, characters who are serious about their romantic interests, characters who think they are much better at flirtation than they actually are, characters forced to work together only to prove much more compatible than they initially assumed, fics which mix an exploration of characters’ professional and everyday lives with shipping. A dynamic I cannot resist is shipping a couple who are incompatible in some important way (they are ideological enemies, cop and criminal, spies from opposite sides, one betrayed the other or they betrayed each other), and while they love and want each other they’re also not willing to change sides or surrender/compromise their identity for the other’s benefit, and how they might (or not) make their relationship work anyway.

I don’t have any very specific likes for smut, other than smut fitting the characters – show me how their canon dynamics spill over into the bedroom (or other place of congress). I also like sexual scenarios that subvert expectations a little and surprise the characters themselves (e.g., the person who’s usually quiet or more passive taking charge, the more aggressive person goes with it possibly snarking or commenting on it as long as they can). And I like sexual scenarios that contain an element of competition, antagonism, oh-god-this-is-a-bad-idea-but-we’re-going-for-it-hammer-and-tongs, not wanting to admit feelings or show vulnerability except oops it happens anyway, whether the characters acknowledge it or not, or just people getting way more into it or being more affected by it than they thought they would. When it fits the characters and their canon dynamic, you also can’t go wrong with we-both-wanted-this-for-forever-and-now-we-both-know-it-so-here-we-go-diving-in-headfirst. For het and/or slash, oral, vaginal, anal incl. pegging, manual (ifyouknowwhatImean) – it’s all good. You can go as veiled or as explicit as you like, but please avoid excessive medical jargon – I don’t find a lot of mention of “penis” or “clit” sexy.

 DNWs:

MPREG, A/B/O, knotting, D/s, kinks, incest, underage, genderswap/genderbent characters, xeno, non-/dub-con, torture and abuse (this and non-/dub-con can be mentioned if the story needs it, but please don’t dwell on it in loving detail or subject any of my requested characters to it), dwelling on bodily fluids (mentions of gore/blood and come are fine), toilet humor, character bashing, issuefic, gender/sexuality/race/ethnicity/religion/ability/identity headcanons, unrequested ships, soulmates and soul marks, major character death (the exception is Laura Moon in American Gods dying so she can become undead), serious illness or injury, pregnancy and children, holiday or wedding setting/theme, secondary characters shipping the main pair like it’s their job, reference to RL current events, 1st/2nd person POV, unrequested crossovers or fusions, AUs which have nothing to do with canon

[foxgloves-fox-love]

Self-shipping AU

Just wanted to do these questions hehe ;w;

1. What kind of blog does your f/o have? Do they selfship on main? Do they look like a regular fan? Quiet reblogs or lots of gushing? Lots of analyses of your character and your source or incoherent blabbering? Do they have a headcanon blog? Do they try to roleplay as you?

Ren is shameless and only has like one sideblog that he reserves for creative stuff. He posts everything else onto his main blog. He also gushes a lot just lots of keysmashing and talking about how cute I am, and not a lot of analyses just tons of blabbering. He posts all his headcanons on his main blog and frequently tags pictures with our ship name if they remind him of us.

2. Do they prefer selfshipping by inserting themselves into your source, or by daydreaming about you in their own little / personal world, or by imagining you by their side during their daily life?

He definitely daydreams about me in his own little world especially before bed and also imagines me by his side during his daily life. He would probably insert himself into my source as well bc he's not satisfied with where he is in his life. He just wants to do everything.

3. What’s their self insert like? Is their s/i literally them? Is it basically them but with just a few changes - to be more like the person they’d like to be, or to “fit in” your source better? Is their s/i totally OP or extra or more realistic? Is it an OC that’s totally different from them?

His s/i is literally him. He doesn't change parts of himself to fit into my source or to be more like he wants to be because he uses self-shipping as coping and wants me to love him for him.

4. Do they spend more time on wikipedia, on your fandom wiki, on your TV tropes page? Looking for official content they might’ve missed, like fun trivia? Looking for fanart, for fics? Looking for information and details and references for fics or art or other fancontent they’re making because they want to make sure they get everything right?

He's definitely a fandom wiki kind of guy and scours the internet for content. He doesn't need to look at references that much because he has me memorized pretty easily. There are multiple looks I've gone through in "canon" and while he loves all of them and it's hard to remember all of them, he tends to stick with the one that's most currently out in canon because it makes him feel like he's living beside me.

5. Do they create anything inspired by you and/or their ship with you? Fanart? Fanfics? Gifsets? Moodboards? Edits? Songs? Dances? Crafts? Playlists? Cosplays? Do they post them (or pictures of them) online? Do they sell any merch (online, at cons, etc)? Do they make pics of their selfship in dollmakers? Do they spend hours on otp prompt generators? Do they commission art of their selfship?

He creates fanart but doesn't draw much anymore and is kind of sad about it because he misses how much he used to draw. Instead he tends to write fic and create songs and playlists. He posts his music and stuff online on his sideblog for creative stuff and doesn't sell merch when he goes to cons. Because he doesn't draw as much anymore he LOVES making us in dollmakers and picrews. He also commissions a shit ton of art for his selfship and is completely shameless about it.

6. Does your f/o have a selfship wedding with you? Do they celebrate it on their blog or more privately, with their fellow selfshipper friends? Do they make any content (like art, fics, etc) to celebrate?

He wrote a song to propose with and is waiting for anime canon to catch up to his favorite part from the manga before posting it and making a huge deal about it. When he does have the wedding he commissions a really extravagant wedding picture and has it framed and put in his room.

7. Does your f/o have fankids with you? If not, maybe pets?

We own a dog and he wants to have kids when we get married so he can cope with his anxieties of being a bad father.

8. Do your f/o and your friend’s f/o plan for double dates since their f/os (you and your friend) are from the same source? How would that go?

lmao :') idk? >w> Maybe Farz and Ren would do that...

9. If you have multiple f/os (romantic, platonic, anything), imagine them making or joining a Discord server or a group chat about you or your source. Who gushes, who shares art and fics, who analyses everything, who sends memes?

Oh god lmao. So like I was doing this for Ren, but imagining everyone in a discord server is killing me!!! Vincent would do nothing but post porn gifs and be an absolute butt and laugh at people all the time and Jack would like never talk in it except to post the occasional psychological profile of me and talk about how interesting I am every once in a blue moon. Gengar would just cry type all the time. Craig would shitpost with memes and laugh at people because he’s a dick and not actually into self-shipping and Shino would analyze EVERYTHING from the show. The people who would gush and talk the most would be Ren and Omen ;w; Ren would share his music and Omen would think it's all very interesting. Omen might even develop a crush because Ren is so interesting and Ren would be completely oblivious bc he’s guzzling that self-ship juice lmao.

10. Does your f/o have very creative ship names, or are they bad with finding tags / ship names, or do they just use regular fandom tags?

Ren likes the ship name Rae and uses that irl, but he likes to do the fun creative ones in order to tag stuff. He uses "Little Star" for it.

11. What’s your f/o like when they read / watch / play your source? Do they reread / rewatch / replay their favorite parts over and over? Do they make comments aloud? Which parts of your story made them laugh? Made them cry?

Ren gets really happy when he watches the anime because it's very relaxing. He watches his favorite parts over and over and over again until he can say the dialogue by heart. He doesn't make comments aloud but he gets super emotionally invested. His favorite parts that make him laugh are when I say goofy or dumb things and then comment on the irony and break the 4th wall. The parts that make him cry the most are any time I get hurt and start crying. When I got bullied or felt bad with my classmates or was hurt when I was very young. All of those hurt him a lot and he cried about it.

12. Do they post any videos related to your source? Like AMVs? Or reaction vids (with them reacting to your source as they read / watch / play / etc)? If your source is a game, do they make a walkthrough? Is it a perfect walkthrough, a more casual one?

He would like to make AMVs but doesn't really have editing software for it, but wants to learn! He wants to post reaction vids but is nervous about posting his face online for...reasons. lmao

13. Which of your f/os has “y/n’s husband / wife / partner” as a username online?

Ren would definitely call himself my biggest fan. He wouldn't use husband but he'd definitely use fanboy.

14. Do they have merch of you? What kind of merch? Posters? Keychains? Stickers? Stuffed toys? (And if they have a plush of you, do they kiss it and sleep with it?)

He has a plush that he cuddles and sleeps with and sometimes makes out with lmao. He also has so much merch!!! He is the type to make ita content. On Christmas he decorates the tree with stuff and has posters all over the walls. His favorites tho are figures. He looooooooves figures the most. He's constantly shelling out the big bucks for the biggest and most detailed ones because he can look at them and feel like I exist in a 3d space.

15. What kind of content do they like / make the most? Is it fluff? Angst? Hurt / comfort? (btw: imagine your f/os going to you when they need comfort, because they love you and you’re comforting to them.) Do they respect canon or do they make lots of AUs? What kind of AUs do they like?

-rubs hands together- His favorite content is hurt/comfort both with me being hurt and me hurting the other party, depending on his mood. When he gets unstable and lonely he plays out angsty situations to further his spirals. He knows it's unhealthy, but it comforts him at the same time. His favorite when he's feeling like being healthier is making irl AUs where he can play out his trauma with me as a caretaker figure or alongside him and comforting me.

16. Which of your f/os has 1341 pics of you saved on their phone / laptop? What kind of pic did they choose as their phone / laptop background? Is it a canon pic of you, or fanart, or art of their selfship with you?

Ren definitely hoards a lot of shit on his phone, he has so much content of me on it it's ridiculous. Omen kind of does the same but not nearly as much because he has multiple f/os and has to share space with them lmao. Vincent's phone is just filled with porn ok just lots of rule 34 shit but he also like doesn't have a lot of content on it because like he's just a horndog and only really gives a shit about the dirty content. Jack has pictures but not a lot because he prefers to fantasize.

[miss-m-calling]

Chocolate Box 2020 letter

Requests (all fic):

Adult Wednesday Addams (web series) – any (Wednesday/Brian, Wednesday & Warren Agency Interns, Wednesday & OFC, Wednesday & OMC, Wednesday/OMC)

American Gods (TV) – Laura Moon/Mad Sweeney

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (TV) – Lenny Bruce/Midge Maisel/Susie Myerson, Lenny Bruce & Midge Maisel & Susie Myerson, Lenny Bruce/Midge Maisel & Midge Maisel/Susie Myerson

Starred Up (2013 movie) -- Oliver Baumer/Eric Love 

Dear writer,

Hello and thank you for writing for me. I’m very excited to read whatever you come up with. I hope my burbling and prompts spark your creativity, and feel free to reach out through the mods if you have any questions! My likes and DNWs are all the way on the bottom of the letter.

Without further ado…

Requests:

Adult Wednesday Addams

Wednesday/Brian

Wednesday & Warren Agency Interns

Wednesday & OFC

Wednesday & OMC

Wednesday/OMC

I belatedly discovered this webseries (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYQE9dh6f78), and it resurrected (see what I did there?) my love for Wednesday and how the Addams Family canon runs on the endless possibilities of this loving, happily eccentric family being 100% true to themselves and the world just having to deal with it. The show was everything I never knew I wanted till I watched it, the perfect blend of Addams-macabre and cozy slice of life with bonus Wednesday navigating the world alone, without always knowing her family will back her up, and it made me crave more of adult Wednesday’s mini adventures in LA. For this canon, I’m good with gen or, if you want to write that, more of Wednesday’s adventures in dating guys who really aren’t up to the challenge, and you can absolutely have Wednesday interact with OCs I haven’t listed as part of a pairing. I’m keeping the prompts pretty short, just to (hopefully) pique your creativity, as I expect I will love any way you make these or any similar scenarios play out:

-Wednesday goes to IKEA

-More of Wednesday’s interactions with the nice interns at her receptionist job. Maybe they invite her out to happy hour, or to the beach or a club. Or maybe we get to eavesdrop while they shoot the breeze on their lunch break, possibly over barbecue-chicken pizza from CPK.

-More of Wednesday’s gigs. She already babysits and walks other people’s dogs, what else might she do for extra cash that would be both really common and seemingly ill-suited to Wednesday, except she totally makes it work for her? Cat sitting (especially if the cat belongs to someone incredibly rich whose house is full of secrets – and expensive things for the cat to knock over), driving an Uber/Lyft, becoming an AirBnB host, catering/server, working the late shift in a New Age/occult supply store where none of the woo is real…?

-Or, alternately, Wednesday finds a career that is perfect for her, in which she can have success and respect. What ever could that be and still fit into the non-Addams world?

-Wednesday tries speed dating

-Or, she runs into Brian a.k.a. chains guy (I cackle with glee every time I rewatch the bit when he tries to kiss her at the pet store) a third time – how does it not go quite as he wanted or expected this time?

-Wednesday takes an evening class, or goes back to school part time, or enrolls in an online degree program

-Wednesday takes a road trip, alone or with her apartment mates/colleagues/Brian/strangers she met for carpooling purposes. Bonus points if you work in real roadside attractions, or tourist traps, or famous sites/landscapes.

-It’s Dia de Muertos, and Wednesday goes out to celebrate and soak up the atmosphere. It may or may not live up to her expectations.

  American Gods (TV)

Laura Moon, Mad Sweeney

I ship it. Yes I do. They had me at “gimme-my-coin-dead-wife”-flicks-him-into-wall. The snarky road trip was the best thing I never knew I wanted until it happened, and I adored every second of it, not to mention the upped shippiness in S2. They’re both such assholes and so fascinating, even if they start to mellow toward each other a bit, and all the gods/magic/resurrection stuff swirling around them begs to be explored further. Also I love love love how their dynamic is about equal parts spikiness, pathos, and humor (they’re funny! and the canon doesn’t shy away from putting them in ludicrous situations), and it weaves seamlessly between those three. Plus she’s half his size yet can and does beat him up with literally one finger, and then there’s the angst of he having killed her, feeling really guilty about it, and then bringing her back. And the way that their New Orleans adventure makes clear they have feelings for each other (S1 was more one-sided SweeneyàLaura) but neither wants to admit it. And and and… yeah, I just love them.

My prompts are a combo of prompts I had after I binged S1 and others I added throughout S2. Even if some of this is addressed or hinted at in canon, feel free to diverge – canon divergences and canon-adjacent stories are my jam!

Please give me either missing scenes from the road trip (if you can work in a divergence, that’s great - for example, I like Salim, but if you want to have him boot Sweeney and Laura to the curb and go off on his own, or Sweeney to boost his taxi before Salim catches them, or whatever else to have those two alone, go for it!), or a divergence from either season (instead of going to Ostara, they go where? to see whom? about getting Laura resurrected. Or things go down differently in New Orleans, or Cairo, or anywhere else) or something about these two post-canon.

-Laura discovers (how? you decide!) that Sweeney gave her back the coin after their accident – whatever happens next, some punching may be involved. (If nothing else, Mama-Ji mentions that the coin is now in Laura’s heart, and we saw Sweeney place it on her ribcage after the accident, whereas it was originally in her gut like she’d swallowed it. Laura might ask herself how the hell it moved.)

-Wednesday’s big war finally comes, and “don’t you dare die on me [again], you asshole” is a line either Sweeney or Laura (or both) might say to each other.

-Laura asked “What does Wednesday have to lose?” and the answer is…? (Yes, give me that sweet poetic justice. One possibility, though not remotely the only one, but as of S2E3 Laura is technically a god-killer...) Or later when she straight-up says she’s going to kill Wednesday, but is warned to bring power with her when she does, how does that work? How else might she damage Wednesday or ruin his plans, just in case she can’t actually kill him?

-At the end of S2, Laura hoists Sweeney’s dead body over her shoulders and strides off, seemingly leaving Cairo, Shadow, and all of it behind. Tell me what happens then – does she use Baron Samedi’s potion to bring him back, and whose is the blood filled with love she uses (does she still bleed? You could get creative here, worldbuilding is also my jam)? Does her/his coin play a part – and how come the coin still “powers” Laura despite Sweeney’s death? Does she bring him back another way, maybe figuring out how to keep herself around and be able to give Sweeney back his coin? Does he come back like she did, more undead than alive, or does his godhead, however depleted, help with that? That still leaves Laura to be fully resurrected too… Or does something completely out of left field happen – surprise me!

-Possible divergences from “Treasure of the Sun”: Sweeney manages to kill Wednesday, and then Laura rolls up, and then…? Or Laura rolls up and makes like Mama-Ji told her – destroys some motherfuckers? Or Sweeney gets killed temporarily but Laura brings him back, or brings herself back, or does something else with the Baron’s potion, and is Sweeney’s blood the one filled with love, or can we interpret voodoo spells in a non-literal way? Or what happens with Gungnir hidden in Sweeney’s hoard? And definitely how do they deal with each other once they meet up in Cairo, given how they parted in New Orleans (I don’t know what hurt more to watch: Laura deflecting at the diner, or Sweeney rambling drunkenly about her when Shadow finds him, or later on telling Shadow with such desperate sincerity to keep her away from Wednesday)?

-Or how about a wild divergence from the last several episodes? Sweeney and Laura manage to settle their differences (ahem, more fucking, on this plane of reality, might help) and don’t part ways before leaving NOLA. Or they roll up in Cairo separately but at the same time, and confront Wednesday together, and neither of them die (or die more, in her case). Or they’re there together when the police nearly raid the house. Or they have Wednesday (the ultimate cause of Laura’s death) and Ibis (a death deity) and Bilquis (a love/death/life deity) on hand, surely they can concoct some kind of resurrection thingamajig for Laura, and if they have to twist some divine arms then so be it. Or or or…?

-Wednesday told that luckless cop that Sweeney had been against the big gods’ war from the start, and while Wednesday lies, what if Sweeney decided much sooner to say to hell with Grimnir and his war and his having Sweeney kill random people? I’m guessing Sweeney too drank three glasses of mead so he can’t back out without dire consequence – but he does have a fierce, dead woman in his corner.

-They go to some as-yet-unnamed old god (feel free to bring in whatever mythology you want) in order to bring Laura back to life. Between Sweeney’s mouth and temper, and Laura’s mouth and temper, it doesn’t go well. Now one or both of them are in big magical trouble with a pissed-off deity and have to get themselves/each other out of it.

-Speaking of other deities, I really enjoyed their brief canon interactions with Ostara, Anansi, and Mama-Ji, and I’d like to see more of that, especially Ostara’s polite yet over-it attitude, Anansi very obvious over-it attitude and his dramatic flair, or Mama-Ji being one of the few capable of giving Laura pause.

-All the petty, ridiculous ways in which Sweeney’s bad luck manifests itself make me laugh (can’t help it, won’t even try), and I’m down for more variations on that theme.

-Sweeney and Laura fighting together, like they did on Mr. Town’s train of torture. Whether it’s a bar fight of their own making, or the big gods’ war they find themselves embroiled in, or something else entirely.

-Things happen and Laura finds herself in the position to throw Sweeney under the bus but also help/save him, and while he knows it’s only karma (he did kill her way back when), he can still be pissed off about it – how do they navigate this?

-Related to that, the Baron said: “In death is her true love, but she betrays him also.” If that meant Sweeney, or can mean Sweeney in the future (I don’t like destiny-wills-it stories, and they’re definitely not there yet, but they could maybe get there at some future point, and even then It Would Be Complicated), was the betrayal Laura rejecting him after the loa ‘fuck them,’ or is it something that hasn’t happened yet, and if so, what?

-Laura gets fully alive again, but traces of her (un)dead state remain – what are they, how does she cope, what price did she/he/they have to pay for her resurrection, and how does their relationship change? I’d especially be curious how it would work if they’re already a sorta-maybe-item and then she’s alive again and it’s weird in a new way.

-For reasons I’ll leave up to you, Sweeney and Laura have to stay put in a single place for a while and end up essentially cohabiting, regardless of what their relationship is at that point. Take “cohabiting” as literally or as creatively as you want – in any case, I’m sure it will be marvelously disastrous and amazing. If the place they have to stay happens to be NOLA, all the better, I find everything about that city fascinating. Or, if you wanted to use book canon, Laura and Sweeney (rather than Shadow) are the ones who have to spend time living in Lakeside and deal with its creepy Norman Rockwell-ness and with Hinzelmann.

-Slight or major AU from the opening of “The Ways of the Dead”: Laura has hitchhiked with Sweeney instead of going off in a huff with Wednesday, or she otherwise gets to New Orleans sooner, and she and Sweeney tear up the town together. Gimme bar fights, carnival shenanigans, all the food and drink porn, backstage craziness with the Christian rock band (Sweeney seems to have a backstage pass on a lanyard around his neck when Laura finds him)… Maybe they even cross the paths of some loa and it doesn’t get all angsty (for what it’s worth, I think the reason the sex magic didn’t bring Laura back to life was because she couldn’t accept the truth(s) revealed during the astral-plane sex and just ask Sweeney to prick his finger for the potion – instead she defaults straight to “this is all Wednesday’s evil plan” the morning after – not because the loa fucked them over). They were actually getting along nicely in those first couple of scenes in NOLA, only ribbing each other a little while still being their grouchy selves, before they got to Le Coq Noir. I wouldn’t have minded seeing some more of that.

-AU from the end of “The Ways of the Dead”: they still have their big fight (which was amazing as well as painful) or some variation thereof, but they don’t split up. (Maybe the reason is as mundane as Sweeney refusing to get left behind or they have a shared ride out of town, or maybe the more time passes the less Sweeney can afford to be far from his coin – or maybe the coin needs him close by to work at full capacity.) And then what?

-All the old gods hide their true appearance to an extent. A situation arises in which Laura sees Sweeney’s true, or at least old, self (I’m thinking of his surprise!poignant monologue about when he used to be a king, and him in full Celtic warrior mode in the S2 flashbacks). Or Wednesday’s war ends in victory, meaning the old gods again get belief, worship, and sacrifices. How does Laura, the ultimate skeptic even when she’s on the other side of the mirror, react? How does this new knowledge and new reality change her opinion of/attitude to Sweeney? Or to flip that around, if Sweeney were again relevant and believed-in, would that actually change his bad attitude and fix his issues (my guess is it would be complicated)? On that note, Sweeney’s decline from Lugh to king to leprechaun was more sketched in than really explored in canon, ditto I didn’t really get why he couldn’t seem to remember his own history except in snatches (the curse that made him a bird/madman of the woods?) – I’d love to see more about it and his (not) dealing with it, or with a reversal of that decline. Eorann told him long ago to adapt and change with the times – but what does that mean after humpteen centuries in a rut and becoming used to always feeling angry and unappreciated?

-The power of names, since they never use each other’s in canon: for all his “dead wifeing,” there comes a time when Sweeney (has to) call her by her actual name, and that’s a tricky moment for them to navigate. Or, Mad Sweeney is not his actual name, and true names have great magical power and so must be kept secret; Laura discovers or learns his name, from someone else or from himself; what does she do with that knowledge? Or, Sweeney gets to say “cunt” in a situation (sexual or otherwise) where, not only does Laura not peel his lips from his gums, but she finds that she can’t object, even though she knows that he knows that he’s getting away with it.

-So far in canon, it’s pretty clear that Sweeney has a lot of complicated but sincere feelings for Laura. Laura is still pretty focused on Shadow (or rather her idealized vision of Shadow and what their relationship might yet be), whom she seems to equate with her own lost-maybe-to-be-regained life, although that’s starting to change at the end of S2. For one thing, she’s starting to soften toward Sweeney as she realizes he’s doing things for her that are not all about getting his coin back (and her sparring match with Wednesday in “Muninn” as well as Shadow refusing to be called puppy anymore in “Moon Shadow” may finally force her to accept that her relationship with Shadow died alongside her and Robbie on that road in Indiana). Not to mention the shared truth revealed in “The Ways of the Dead” (bullshit was that just Laura’s truth!) and how Laura flips out rather than deal with it and Sweeney can’t spit out that it mattered to him either, or how obviously cut up she is about Sweeney’s death despite refusing to admit it. Tell me the story of how Laura stumbles her way to feeling – and acknowledging that she feels – more complex, maybe kinder or softer, really annoying for her blunt-force-trauma-personality things about Sweeney and about the notion that her dynamic with him is different from the way she tended to use men for her convenience without really letting them in in the past. Also I’m pretty sure that even if they can admit they feel the same – or sorta in the same ballpark – about each other, their relationship would still run on a lot of conflict, and I would so be here for it.

-On that note: in “Munnin” it also becomes clear that Laura has, without realizing it herself, started to rely on Sweeney. The “I trusted you” line made me think, whoa she’s too furious to catch herself doing it but this is huge for Laura, and the fact that she goes off with Wednesday (!) basically because she’s mad at Sweeney because she thinks he’s prioritizing his debt to Wednesday over her… Yeah, I would like to see that explored some more and/or to see Laura and Sweeney get to a point where they trust each other and rely on each other, and know it and accept it, however difficult the getting there and being there may be for them.

-Sweeney has this intense need to see himself as a brave person and someone worthy of the world’s respect – but his past and his long experience as just a leprechaun have chipped away at that. Add the guilt of having been the instrument of Laura’s death and then all the pesky feelings he develops for her, and it’s a lot. Obviously his final actions in S2 are his trying to reclaim that courage and nobility of old (also to spite Wednesday, who’s messed both him and Laura up), but I would love to read about his character development under different circumstances, where Laura is there all the way, as opposed to them parting ways and meeting up again multiple times like in canon.

-And since I’m on the subject of Laura, you know how she’s not actually an abrasive bitch all the time to everyone? And when she is, the people on the receiving end of it sometimes richly deserve it, or very occasionally they push back (ILU, Mama-Ji!), and anyway it’s refreshing to see a female character who defaults to confrontational and doesn’t bother flirting and accommodating others for the sake of social harmony? As much as I enjoy watching her rip into people (ahem, Sweeney), I also love it when she acts differently, like her genuine interest in getting to know Salim and her joy in seeing him again in S2, or her running passive-aggressive battle of wills with Wednesday. Her beginning to feel sympathy for Sweeney and her anger and disappointment when she feels let down by him are a part of that, and I’d love to see all that explored more. Nuance! Give me all the nuance and seeming contradictions in both Laura and Sweeney’s characters!

-Sweeney and Laura get drunk and wake up married. Or some sex and/or blood resurrection spell results in basically an unbreakable marriage bond, whether it also secures resurrection or not. Or marrying the dead keeps them (sorta) alive. Or being married makes it possible for them to share magical/supernatural abilities. They’re both pissed about it, but secretly having to make it work may not be the worst thing that’s ever happened...

-My perfect AG spinoff would basically be Sweeney and Laura tooling around America, looking to get her resurrected (whether they succeed or not is up to you), stealing ever more ridiculous vehicles, arguing/fighting and having those pesky moments where vulnerability and genuineness creep in – and fucking. So yessiree I’d be down for porn, including “it’s technically necrophilia/zombiesex” porn, including a canon-divergent first time, or their second time, or all the later times after they had their first time in NOLA in canon.

-If you wanted to throw in some worldbuilding, maybe something exploring living death. Magical bargains. What kind of favor did Sweeney do for Ostara that would be worth her bringing someone back to life as repayment? What other powers might Sweeney have – or have left from when he was Lugh? How long can a dead wife keep going before she’s “soup”? What other superhuman abilities might dead!Laura have? Can the dead do magic? What even are the rules governing and the limits of different beings’ magical abilities? For example, why can’t Sweeney just take his coin back, or why does Laura gain super-strength as part of her undead package deal? Is the hoard in the same space as the behind-the-scenes accessed through the merry-go-round, or it’s a different place? Why does the coin seem to start to “run down” the longer Laura has it? Why did Wednesday need Laura to kill Argus when he killed Vulcan himself just fine? What happens with Gungnir now it’s in the hoard – can only Sweeney get to it, has it been transformed somehow (it’s now the treasure of the sun), etc.?

If it helps your inspiration, you can find some of my meta and lots of tag-burbling about these two here. I have read the book though I remember it only in bits and pieces, and while I prefer the show characters and the fact that they get thrown together, you can use or riff on book material if you want, though I’d prefer a story that isn’t just a retread of the book. With reference to one of my DNWs, for this canon, describing Laura’s physical decay is totally fine. Also, Shadow/Laura don’t interest me except as a part of Laura’s backstory (so if your story wants to include Laura figuring out or having already figured out that pinning all her hopes on Shadow to make everything right is unrealistic, unfair, and not how it works – by all means, go for it!), and Shadow/Sweeney interest me not at all.

Canon-specific DNWs: Sweeney dying/staying dead (at least not permanently), Laura being treated as just a part of Sweeney’s story, and Laura being Essie’s reincarnation/descendant/reincarnation of Sweeney’s wife from back when he was a king in old Ireland. Reincarnation/“new love looks like old love”/“lost love found again” plots bore me, and I don’t enjoy ships that hinge on characters being somehow destined to be together. Characters having agency is my jam as much as canon divergences are. Anyway I’m certain that Laura would have neither time nor patience for the notion that Destiny Fate and All That Jazz threw her together with ginger minge, and even if it were technically true, she’d still want this relationship to work on her terms – and Sweeney obviously has a problem with Laura’s cheating, her relationship with Shadow, her personality (though he also recognizes they’re alike in many ways), and all that maps onto his anger and sadness over becoming irrelevant over time, so it’s not just about Laura. So yeah, let them be their own (grumpy, spiky, dysfunctional) people, and let Laura’s dynamic with Sweeney not be shaped solely by his past and his issues.

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (TV)

Lenny Bruce/Miriam “Midge” Maisel/Susie Myerson

Lenny Bruce & Miriam “Midge” Maisel & Susie Myerson

Lenny Bruce/Miriam “Midge” Maisel & Miriam “Midge” Maisel/Susie Myerson

I’m here for Midge’s adventures in the intoxicating, foul-mouthed, and often-frustrating world of comedy, so her dynamic with Susie and Lenny is where it’s at. Shippy or platonic, I just love the interactions between these three, and between every pair combination among them: Midge and Susie bantering and swearing and tits-upping even when they irritate each other, Midge and Lenny bringing the pathos as well as the humor, and Lenny and Susie both being hardened old pros with still a little glimmer of starry eyes. I am good with L/M/S or L&M&S or L/M & M/S – so, if you go the shippy route, either a V-shaped triad or hey, Susie (whom I absolutely read as gay) might find a way to be good with a full-on triangle… If you want to keep it platonic, True Companions all the way, always there for each other, even when they want to strangle each other. And as much as I like the comedy inherent in the characters, I also love that they’re all three, each in their own way, messed up people and dysfunctional to various degrees. So yeah, I just want Midge to hand the kids over to her parents, ditch Joel once and for all, marry (interpret that as literally or as loosely as you want) both Susie and Lenny, and for the three of them to ride off into the sunset to make comedy history.

Most of these prompts are from before S3 dropped – feel free to work with canon or diverge however you see fit:

-Does Susie manage them both? Does Midge open for Lenny on tour? Does he open for her??? Or they become equal stars on the comedy circuit?

-Maybe Lenny joins Shy Baldwin’s tour, or they run into him while touring Europe or the US, or after Shy fires Midge, Midge and Susie cobble together a Miriam-only tour of America and keep crossing Lenny’s own touring path, and they all tool around, and yes I would love as much period detail and geography porn as you can throw at me. And while Lenny and Midge have seen the world, Susie hasn’t – her reaction to different foods, languages, customs, landscapes would be spectacular to witness. Especially if “different” is someplace as close to New York as Jersey or Connecticut, or someplace as far away and different as, say, Japan.

-If they do go to Europe, somehow or other they also tour the Soviet Bloc. Cue culture clashes, getting followed (or thinking they’re being followed) by the secret police, getting hammered on vodka and herring and pickles, and then when they get back to the States, the Feds grill them. It’s all dead serious, and Midge and Lenny refuse to take it as seriously as they should, while Susie is trying but the whole thing is really pissing her off…

-Lenny’s burned out, and Midge is just getting started. This dissonance may or may not find some sort of resolution. One thing’s for sure: Susie has limited patience for both Lenny’s depression and Midge’s need to make everything pretty.

-Instead of going to Joel for a no-way-is-that-closure fling after the Steve Allen Show taping, Midge goes to have a drink or seven with the two people who have, in their own ways, always been there for her and never let her down.

-Midge goes on TV again, this time as the star: longer set, prime time slot, dressing room, the works. She’s dying of nerves. Lenny and Susie coach her through it.

-More radio work to make ends meet in between gigs: hilaribad period ads, hilaribad radio drama, running all over town to be on time, getting paid in all kinds of dubious merch…

-Midge and Susie head out west to make it big and stay with Lenny once they’re in Los Angeles, and it’s marvelous (ha ha) and disastrous in equal measure.

-More of Susie being the hypercompetent manager we saw especially in S3! (And please don’t dwell on her gambling problem, I was not a fan.)

-They all three get drunk, maybe with a hint of sadness if it’s the holidays (you can ignore my DNW about holidays, but please let that be just the background, not the lynchpin of the story) or someone’s birthday, and there’s a bar fight, running from the cops, eating greasy food at ass o’clock, and possibly kissing, not necessarily in that order.

-One or two or all three of them get arrested/have court appearances all over America and have to bail each other out, or find someone to bail them all out, or secure legal counsel – you get the drift. Or all three of them are trying to explain to a single lawyer what happened, talking over each other, the two pros not being able to resist landing zingers and Susie not being far behind, and the lawyer just getting more and more confused.

-They get in trouble some other way – offended patrons, surly management, shitty hotels, tour bus breaks down in the middle of Wyoming – and have to have each other’s backs because no one else will.

-Three-person road trip or tour, and only Susie knows how to drive. So Midge decides to learn, right then and there. And Lenny… Lenny may or may not be too lazy/hungover/lying about not knowing how. There’s supposed to be a rotation so everyone gets to stretch out on the back seat for equal lengths of time, but you know the system doesn’t work too well in practice. Also, they play games in the car to while away the time, and they do it their own way of course: I spy, cows on my side, never have I ever, 20 questions, or riffing on whatever’s playing on the radio…

-They sit down to watch the moon landing (you can move it up a bit so it’s not happening a whole decade after S2) – by which I mean, Midge is all gung-ho about the moon landing, and Lenny and Susie are like whatever – and things don’t quite go to plan, but a good time is eventually had by all.

-It’s Yom Kippur again, and Midge wants to do the whole production: synagogue, breaking fast, the lot. Lenny and Susie would rather eat glass. Midge gets her way, of course. Does she decide to bring Susie and Lenny home to meet – or meet properly – her parents??? I bet Abe and Rose’s reactions would be something to see. (This too is an exception to my DNW about holiday settings – I just want stuff to get as crazy as it did the two times we saw Yom Kippur celebrated on the show, and for everything to still somehow turn out relatively OK.)

-Midge and Lenny have cheered each other up when the going got extra rough. I want for Susie to be especially down in the dumps – maybe her boozehound of a mother died and Susie took it worse than she does in canon, maybe some asshole told her she’s a shit manager and got her right in her insecurities – and Midge to rope Lenny into trying to cheer her up. And for Susie to fight them every step of the way but still be glad they care enough to try.

-Inspired by Susie’s brother looking just like her, by which I mean she and he and their sister look nothing alike, and by Lenny’s “she’s my mother” quip about Midge at the TV studio and then his “let me introduce my wife or maybe my sister” in Miami – Midge, Susie, and Lenny pretend to all be blood relatives, or mafiosi, or spies, or something else they’re not, while out in public, say in a restaurant. Just to be assholes and see how long they can keep it going before they break character or people figure them out, or call the cops, or something. There’s totally a bet on who corpses and breaks character first. Or, nice hotels ca. 1960 weren’t very big on letting unmarried couples, let alone threesomes stay in rooms together – pretending to be family might make that easier; forgetting what they’re meant to be to each other, or mixing up their backstories might make it harder. This could also work platonically, if they’re trying to save money by only getting one room, there only being one free room in the hotel, or for any other screwball reason you can invent.

-Lenny and Midge do a (comeback) tour of the Borscht Belt, and all the Steiner Mountain Resort guests (especially the gossipy old hens from the beauty salon) and staff go to see them – and heckle.

-Stuff happens and they end up performing at some hole in the wall place where no one knows who they are (or no one believes it’s really those people they’ve seen on TV) – tough crowd, but a good workout for the two comics, and if Susie gets to threaten to rip off someone’s head, all the better.

-Lenny and Midge honing their routines – and maybe developing a double act – and Susie being all “oh my fucking god, what the fuck!!! … They’re actually good. I’m so proud.”

-Sharing a bed with two other people is an ongoing project: who sleeps (or refuses to sleep) in the middle? Who gets up during the night and why? Who starfishes across most of the bed? Who snores, and how does this get handled? If alcohol or pot have happened, how does that affect the sleeping arrangements? Also, Susie and Lenny witness and react to Midge’s beauty routine, ‘nuff said. Or, for various reasons one person after another ends up decamping to another room/bed/couch, but it doesn’t help them get much sleep or even stay there very long (this is inspired by my love of Shirley Jackson and her short story/humorous essay “The Night We All Had Grippe”). If you prefer to keep it platonic, most of this would work if they’re just sharing a double bedroom on tour (I leave the reason for why Lenny is bunking with the women up to you).

Canon-specific DNWs: explicit sex and pairing any two as a / couple with the third as a & hanger-on. I’m here for equality in this three-way dynamic and the banter and the surprise!feels and the companionship. And of course all the comedy, situational or stand-up. Oh, and Lenny can still be his RL messed-up, drugged-up self – albeit the gentler version the show gives us – but it would be good if he didn’t kick the bucket a handful of years down the line.

  Starred Up

Oliver Baumer/Eric Love

Yes I do ship it, I do, I do!

Ahem. Don’t get me wrong, I liked what the movie did with the father-son relationship and its influence on both men’s character development – but I really wish they hadn’t got Oliver out of the action before the story’s climax (not like that!). The final denouement with Love father and Love son was great, as was the hint at the end that Eric learned something in anger-management group and has a support network that will help him a lot. But. I would have wanted to see more of the intriguing dynamic between Eric the intelligent, semi-feral, yet not-incorrigible, young thug and Oliver the educated, dedicated, kind yet aware of his own potential for violence (what was he on about with “I need to be here”?), slightly older counselor. They had me at Oliver’s “I want him” and Eric later telling his father that Oliver’s a better man than Love Sr. Also the not-flirting and the push-pull in the scene when Oliver picks up Eric from his cell - yowza!

Prompts:

-I would love to see Oliver return to holding his group in prison, so the two of them can interact more, either in the movie’s immediate aftermath or years down the line, as it’s implied that Eric will be serving a long sentence. Give me more scenes from anger management or the ribald, honest, free-flowing conversations in group, either with the other men present (I liked Hassan and Tyrone especially, among the group members) or a one-on-one session.

-An oblique or open-but-undramatic admission/declaration that they both know there’s something there, even if they don’t know what to do with it. Or, one or both of them knows exactly what to do with it, and the push-pull that would result from that.

-Dirty talk: used for arousal, as a defense mechanism, as a form of flirtation. Eric using slurs to assert dominance, and Oliver not letting him hide behind profanity, when he can use colorful language to express emotion and/or sexual interest. There could definitely be some verbal taunting/flirting about who wants/is eager to do what or is good at doing something. There may be some sniping comments about logistics and (lack of) condoms and barebacking and what men get up to in prison. There probably wouldn’t be deep discussions about sexual identity.

-An emergency in the prison requires a lock-down, so Oliver gets temporarily stuck in Eric’s cell or another room with only Eric for company. Things get porny and/or emotional.

-Eric is eventually released (you can handwave this so it happens soon after the movie or have it happen years later) and crashes with Oliver while he adjusts to the outside world. You guessed it: things get porny and/or emotional.

-How do they get to the point where both can cross that line from friends/whatever the hell they are and become, to lovers? (There’s Eric’s personal history and general discomfort with vulnerability, plus all the ways prison sex can be or make things complicated, and if it helps, I headcanon Oliver as either gay or bi and at least somewhat closeted, at work especially.) Who initiates and “directs traffic”? How does their always-contentious dynamic shift during and after sex? Is the sex an isolated (series of) occasion(s), or a progression/escalation over multiple encounters (how would I love especially an escalating series of encounters, let me count the ways)? Eric might seem like the logical initiator and/or dominant partner as well as using the possibility of sex to manipulate and exert control, but then Oliver might (or might not!) surprise him and is definitely the one more in touch with himself as well as aware of his custodial duty toward the men in the group.

-At some point in their intimate relationship (probably not right at the start, and probably not in prison, though if you can make it happen in prison, more power to you!), Oliver decides he’s going to take his sweet time and make Eric fall absolutely apart with pleasure, while using dirty talk to both arouse and empower Eric to own his desires – by that point, Eric is in a place where he can let that happen and enjoy it, even if he still talks tough.

-Role reversal: Oliver as the con (jittery, shut off, sticking out like a sore thumb in prison with all his fancy learning, yet no pushover) and Eric as the newbie counselor (kid from the wrong side of the tracks made good? Youthful hoodlum turned around his life, now trying to help others via tough love and lots of swearing and maybe a bit of manipulation when called for?)

  Likes:

I love pre-canon, canon, post-canon, canon-divergent, and missing-scene stories. I love character-driven and plot-driven stories equally, and I love fics which mix humor and angst/serious business when appropriate for the canon.

I love stories about characters at work and play, group dynamics, family dynamics (including constructed families), professional partnerships, friendships, alliances, rivalries, intimate couples (new lovers/first times as well as long-term/established couples), UST-ridden couples who are not just UST-ridden but connected in other ways too, etc.

I love irony, snark, humor as well as angst arising from the characters rather than the plot crowbaring it in, linear, non-linear, and 5+1 stories, hopeful endings, happy endings, bittersweet endings, worldbuilding, spiky characters who keep their jagged edges and spikiness in adversity as well as when their lives are going well, square-peg-in-round-hole characters, characters who are their own worst enemies as well as those who can get over themselves when the occasion calls for it, characters with conflicting values which may or may not be reconciled/resolved, characters who treat each other with respect and as equals even if they hate/annoy/can’t stand/love to dislike each other.

I especially love workplace stories (this can mean anything from an actual workplace/casefic/procedural setting to anything that revolves around the canon world in which the characters live) in which the characters are competent and dedicated to the job, and while they may not be exactly friends and they may well irritate one another, they still manage to rub along to get the job done and maybe even grow to care about one another (much to their surprise and sometimes reluctance/discomfort). Or, if they can’t get along, show me why not and what’s preventing them from finding common ground.

In terms of ship dynamics, I love (where it fits the characters) banter, competitiveness or antagonism shading into attraction (this tension need not be resolved), oh-god-why-did-it-have-to-be-you-what-did-I-do-to-deserve-this, bickering yet loving couples, characters who are serious about their romantic interests, characters who think they are much better at flirtation than they actually are, characters forced to work together only to prove much more compatible than they initially assumed, fics which mix an exploration of characters’ professional and everyday lives with shipping. A dynamic I cannot resist is shipping a couple who are incompatible in some important way (they are ideological enemies, cop and criminal, spies from opposite sides, one betrayed the other or they betrayed each other), and while they love and want each other they’re also not willing to change sides or surrender/compromise their identity for the other’s benefit, and how they might (or not) make their relationship work anyway.

I don’t have any very specific likes for smut, other than smut fitting the characters – show me how their canon dynamics spill over into the bedroom (or other place of congress). I also like sexual scenarios that subvert expectations a little and surprise the characters themselves (e.g., the person who’s usually quiet or more passive taking charge, the more aggressive person goes with it possibly snarking or commenting on it as long as they can). And I like sexual scenarios that contain an element of competition, antagonism, oh-god-this-is-a-bad-idea-but-we’re-going-for-it-hammer-and-tongs, not wanting to admit feelings or show vulnerability except oops it happens anyway, whether the characters acknowledge it or not, or just people getting way more into it or being more affected by it than they thought they would. When it fits the characters and their canon dynamic, you also can’t go wrong with we-both-wanted-this-for-forever-and-now-we-both-know-it-so-here-we-go-diving-in-headfirst. For het and/or slash, oral, vaginal, anal incl. pegging, manual (ifyouknowwhatImean) – it’s all good. You can go as veiled or as explicit as you like, but please avoid excessive medical jargon – I don’t find a lot of mention of “penis” or “clit” sexy.

 DNWs:

MPREG, A/B/O, knotting, D/s, kinks, incest, underage, genderswap/genderbent characters, xeno, non-/dub-con, torture and abuse (this and non-/dub-con can be mentioned if the story needs it, but please don’t dwell on it in loving detail or subject any of my requested characters to it), dwelling on bodily fluids (mentions of gore/blood and come are fine), toilet humor, character bashing, issuefic, gender/sexuality/race/ethnicity/religion/ability/identity headcanons, unrequested ships, soulmates and soul marks, major character death (the exception is Laura Moon in American Gods dying so she can become undead), serious illness or injury, pregnancy and children, holiday or wedding setting/theme, secondary characters shipping the main pair like it’s their job, reference to RL current events, 1st/2nd person POV, unrequested crossovers or fusions, AUs which have nothing to do with canon