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adarkrainbow · 2 years ago

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Cinderella’s shoes: Glass or fur? The big French debate

You might have heard that “Cinderella’s shoes weren’t originally made of glass, but of fur, and the glass thing is just a misinterpretation/mistranslation”. You might also have never heard of it, then congrats you just did!

As I said in a previous reblog, @gosagacious wrote an article already covering the “glass VS fur” debate that you can read here and that provides interesting informations and points of view. But I want to push further the exploration of the glass VS fur debate from a French point of view and perspective, because this debate all started in France and is ultimately a French question.

To tell you how important this question is to the French: the French Wikipedia has an ENTIRE PAGE dedicated to the question, titled “Controversy over the composition of Cinderella’s slippers”.

So what is this debate about? Well, Perrault wrote about Cinderella wearing “glass slippers”, in French “pantoufles de verre”. The question is to known whether the French “verre” was actually the other French word “vair”, pronounced the same way, that is the term designated the fur of the grey squirrel when used for things like clothing.

# The debate begins, so to speak, in 1841, when the great French writer Honoré de Balzac writes in his novel “About Catherine of Medicis” how originally Perrault wrote “a fur slipper” (a “pantoufle de vair”), but due to the word “vair” falling out of use for “the last century”, the “current” editors (those of the early 19th century) copy versions of the story in which the shoe is made of “glass” (verre), not “fur” (vair).

Or at least this is what people like to repeat and parrot around without having read the actual book. Because one key fact often forgotten: this book is a fiction novel, not a literary analysis. It is not Balzac himself who speaks there, but actually one of the characters of his fictional stories that present this theory as the “right” and “correct” explanation. Second point... the character in question who claims that is a fur-seller himself. A furrier. And before he explains his theory about the fur slippers, he gives a lengthy lesson about the origin and trade of furs in France. It is obvious that, as a result, his own point of view would be quite biased! In fact, it is fascinating to see that the literary debate proper never began during Balzac’s lifetime - and even more, beyond this simple mention, Balzac never defended or exposed this idea anywhere else, in his books or outside of it.

# It could have stopped there, if it wasn’t for Emile Littré twenty years later. Littré is known for his “Littré”, one of the most famous French dictionaries. In 1861 he published his “Dictionary of the French Language” that would later become so used and popular it would just be called “Le Littré”, and in it, at the article of “vair”, he includes the words of Balzac’s furrier character as a citation to illustrate the word. Thus, while Littré doesn’t say anything about the topic, he helped popularized the idea of the “fur slipper” in France - especially since the citation was cut (so you didn’t know who said it) AND the author (Balzac) was not named, leaving to it the feeling it was more of a general quotation than a literary citation. Was it a subtle way to support the “vair” idea, or just a careless addition of a quotation whose effects Littré couldn’t predict? Mystery.

And thus, Balzac and Littré set out the ground from which the “fur theory” would start overflowing.

# Next step : 1885 and the famous writer Anatole France. In his “The book of my friend”, he invoked again the fur theory and one paragraph of the book became massively famous and was shared among people as another “proof” that Cinderella’s slippers were made of fur: a paragraph in which the “glass” (verre) of the slippers is questioned as being ridiculous and impossible, while the “fur” (vair) slippers are described as more practical and a much better choice to go to the ball.

So, France was a defender of the fur theory? NOT AT ALL! This paragraph mocking the glass slippers and promoting the fur slippers was in truth a cut citation. Anatole France was against all those “rationalist” interpretations of Cinderella, and what people tend to cut from his text is the second paragraph following the one quoted above: a paragraph in which the fur theory is dismissed due to “common sense not being of any use” when reading fairytales. Anatole points out how the shoes are said to be “fairy shoes”, and that the fairy origins of the shoes explicitely spelled out in the story is the only argument worth of consideration as it obliterates all the doubts one can emit towards the “practicality” of the shoes. He similarly points out how a carriage can be created out of a pumpkin specifically due to how it is “fairy work”. In fact, he concludes by saying: if things were following common sense in fairytales, THAT would be baffling.

# After Anatole France, the fake “vair supporter”, we got a “real” vair supporter with Pierre Larousse, the writer of the other big dictionary rival of the Littré, the Larousse. When Pierre published his “Great Universal Dictionary of the 19th century” between 1866 and 1876 (what would be known as the “Petit Larousse”, Small Larousse), he explicitely talked about the vair VS verre issue and claimed “vair” was the right explanation. He claimed that while Perrault like the “magical”, he wouldn’t have in his right mind given Cinderella glass shoes, while “vair” was very common in his day. Larousse theorized that a later editor, upon seeing “vair”, thought it was a typographic mistake and rewrote it to “verre” - and while Larousse also theorizes that maybe “vair” was willingly changed to “verre” for the sake of the “marvelous”, he rather pushes forward the theory of a “correction by ignorance”. He also invoked the fact that people forgot about “vair” due to the term being used for heraldry, and the heraldic language having slowly lost itself to the common culture (we’ll return to that).

# And the fight was on. You had those that defended the “verre/glass” explanation, others who used the “vair” one. Authors of the 19th century either wrote about “verre” or “vair”... And sometimes you have funny cases where an author will actually mock or play with the whole debate. At the very beginning of the 20th century (1909 to be exact), Emile Bergerat wrote a “Cinderella in an automobile” and in it reinvented the whole debate as being born from how the scientists and scholars of the court (in the story of Cinderella) were unable to explain how it was possible to create the glass shoes Cinderella wore, and so instead of confessing their lack of results simply decided to write about “vair” shoes, fur shoes, to cover up the mystery they couldn’t solve.

# As a personal note, from having encountered this on my study time, another defender/spreader of the “vair” idea was André Breton, the leader of the surrealism movement in France. In his book “L’amour fou” (Crazy love) he wrote extensively about Cinderella’s shoe, describing a project he had of making a “cendrier Cendrillon” (Cinderella ash-tray) based on discovering a shoe-shaped spoon at a flea market - and in it he also talked about the “vair” topic, and pushed the idea that “vair”/”fur” was the original word used by Perrault.

Now, all of that being said, the answer is definitively: glass. Pantoufles de verre is the correct writing, they were always glass slippers in Perrault’s tale, and the fur slipper defenders are wrong.

Mind you, it is always interesting to see the argument of both sides. And what were the arguments of the “fur” partisans? “Verre” and “vair” sounds identical. It is more logical and rational to have slippers made of fur instead of made of glass. Glass shoes would be very hard to wear. “Vair” was a material for rich people, especially used for luxury clothing since the 14th century. But overall the main argument is: “in the name of reason”, “let’s be reasonable”, “let’s be logic”...

And with the same logic answer those that defend the “glass slippers” (and who are right). The idea of a “later correction by editors” seems absurd due to Perrault having published his tales when he was alive, so he knew he wrote “verre”. Some might invoke the fact that “verre” could be another spelling of “vair” in medieval texts, or that Perrault made a mistake himself writing “verre” erronously but... we are not in the Middle-Ages anymore, we are in the Renaissance, and Perrault isn’t just a renowned writer he is also a member of L’Académie Française (The French Academy, aka the institution whose ENTIRE JOB AND PURPOSE is to fix grammar and ortographs and who say what is part of the French language and what is not). That Perrault would have written “verre” over all his story when he wanted to write “vair” is an entirely ridiculous argument, when we know how careful he was when writing his tales (and when we have several earlier drafts of the stories).

But even beyond that other arguments can be pushed forward, such as how “vair” was a word mostly known in heraldry at the time of Perrault and not truly used anymore by Perrault’s time ; how there is no record or testimony of shoes of any kind being made of “vair” fur in real life (as the vair was kept for more visibly parts of the costume, and smaller due to being quite costly) ; and finally, one can invoke the symbolism of the slippers being made of glass. Glass was by Perrault’s time a rare and costly material put at the same level as crystal ; it was renowned for being thin, elegant, light and fragile. As a result, to wear such shoes, a person must be just as grateful and as elegant as the material - if the glass slippers only fit Cinderella, it is because she is the only one worthy of such an exquisite material. PLUS there’s also the fact that the glass industry was one of the rare industries where aristocrats and noblemen were allowed to work without being dishonored. And of course, from the same “practical” thought: if the shoe is made of glass, it makes much more sense that it would fit only a specific girl whose feet is the exact shape of the glass encasing ; instead of a “fur” shoe that could be worn by a lot more people.

Ultimate sign of the “verre” truth winning: a century after the Petit Larousse’s original publication, the quotation about “vair” being the right term was changed. Now you can read in it: “It has been theorized that the shoes of Cinderella were made of fur, vair, instead of verre as Perrault wrote it: but in a fairy tale, such a research of reason seems useless”.

#cinderella #cendrillon #glass vs fur #charles perrault #perrault fairytales #french fairytales #glass slippers

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masonscig · 2 years ago

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i don't really know how to explain it but with the overarching plot of book 3 it somehow feels like it both needed way more time/words to properly get into the depth of what was going on with the antagonist plotline, yet with the more personal subjects (rebecca scenes, the pov shifts to UB without MC, etc) seems like it would be a lot cleaner/better paced if it was a couple hundred thousand words shorter.

book 3 was always going to be a sort of 'interlude' before rogue/agency shit really kicks off in book 4 - which in my experience can be even harder to write than major plot points since its such a change in pace - and i think choosing such a heavy topic while getting away from the usual MC-focus villain at the same time burned mishka. its a complete departure from how books 1 and 2 were written and i think having some familiarity there would make the pacing much easier to navigate.

with all that i still enjoyed book 3 more than a lot of IF i've read recently, and its not bad as much as its like...a 7/10 game that had to come after two near perfect ones so it's hardly the worst development in the world, even if it is a bit disappointing. pacing issues aside there's still so much there that I love about this universe and most of those are on full display when the antagonists aren't involved. and i'm hoping that getting back into familiar territory for book 4 will help mishka get on track pacing wise.

hiii ty for this ask! <3

you hit the nail on the head with the first paragraph – it's like the plot itself needed to be slowed down, maybe split into two books, so that the relationship/friendship developments could line up with the rest of it? like truthfully the romance and the plot feel like two different books and that honestly could've been a fairly easy fix if she would've made some harder decisions about where she wants this game to go

which tbh, i do think that a huge part of that is the fact that she knows what she wants to happen in every book to fit into the 7 books she originally planned, so... maybe that goal is taking priority over the game organically fleshing itself out/books naturally ending when it feels right? it's like no matter what she knew she had to hit certain plot beats and she DID but at what cost yk – i think she wants to introduce and have the option to capture a smaller villain in every book and that fucked with this book's pacing issues for sure

and yes to the rest of the ask, too, you get it !!! the whole vibe is different, and yeah this book was a massive undertaking, so huge kudos to her for that, but overall i personally am not quite sure if i think this was worth the wait. certain aspects definitely were! and the amount of new canon knowledge we have now is gonna fuel fic writing till book 4 for sure! but i find myself wondering how often i'm going to replay this – and i don't think it'll be that much in comparison to book 1 and 2 :/ and YES i love so much about this universe that i'm unwilling to let it go – so i do hope this is just an interlude and that book 4 is a return to form, because it's what she does best

#asks #twc book 3 spoilers #twc book 3 #twc spoilers #i love that there are like layers to this (yours but also just generally speaking) criticism #because it's not just 'this character said something ooc' –#it's pacing/plot/etc (i had more to say but accidentally deleted my tag and forgot what else i mentioned LMAO)#and what scares me the most is if this will or won't cause a ripple effect of some sort?#like i am just terrified that this is going to change the quality of the other books but you're right #if there's a return to form in book 4 then maybe it'll be even better #anyway! thank you for this <3 you put a lot of my thoughts into words!

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knight-of-ashes · 2 years ago

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So You’re Getting Bullied By Leftists and Trans People for Wanting to Revisit Your Childhood: A Primer on Navigating the Complex Emotions Surrounding the New HP Game and How To Decide For Yourself if it’s Worth Buying and Playing

I’m writing this because my brother keeps getting messages from people who are getting bullied over wanting to play the new HP game and it’s making them less sympathetic to our cause. This sucks, but I don’t feel I can tell off my fellow LGBT and Jewish friends for being angry. So to you, dear reader who is feeling alienated and abused by us, I wish to offer an olive branch and a way to see through our anger to our actual point, and why we’re asking you not to engage with the game.

First, dispel the notion that you’re going to be pirating this game. It features one of the strongest versions of Denuvo yet, which can only be cracked by one person who calls herself Empress (and is herself pretty wildly transphobic), and she promised to crack it in 10 days. If you want to play it for free before February 20th, you’re SOL, and that’s if she cracks it as promised. It is a very real possibility that this will never be crackable. More than likely, if you want to experience this game, you’ll need to either watch a Twitch streamer or YouTuber play it, wait a month to purchase a used copy, or purchase it new.

One of the main talking points about this game is that buying it gives money to original HP author JK Rowling, and this is true! She receives royalties for everything WB does with the Wizarding World, which is the current official franchise name. She has been spending a lot of money on lobbying politicians in the UK to dismantle the NHS’s transgender care programs. She claims that this is because she’s trying to prevent men from getting placed in women-only jails where they rape their fellow inmates, and I see this get parroted a lot, but even if it was only about that, it’s still a massive transphobic dogwhistle.

Side bar: I’m gonna be talking about dogwhistles a lot. I’m gonna explain what those are real quick because frankly I think a lot of why we aren’t getting our message across is baked into the nature of dogwhistles. See, dogwhistles are a method of talking in code where members of an in-group (and people opposed to the in-group who study them) know what a phrase really means, but it has plausible deniability to anyone not familiar with the lingo. Common dogwhistles are things like “we’re just trying to keep men out of women’s prisons” (which is a wink to other transphobes about trans women not actually being women in their eyes), “I’m just concerned about the influence of the Hollywood elite” (”all of your media is being controlled by rich and powerful Jews with a secret agenda”) and code numbers like putting 1488 in their usernames. It feels crazy to type out or read because they’re by design meant to make you feel crazy for noticing them. It’s a bit of psychological warfare. If as we get through this you feel like some of the things I’m telling you about JK’s beliefs or the contents of the game are too crazy to be true, please come back to this paragraph and remember that they want you to doubt us when we ask you not to the play the game for X reason.

Anyways, back to the money issue: one defense I see a lot is that JK already has a ridiculous fortune and buying the game is a drop in the bucket compared to what she’s already made. Frankly, you’re not wrong. If the movies had never been made JK still would’ve been set for life and able to go on her little crusade against trans people because the books alone made her a multimillionaire. With the right investment profile she would easily be at the level of wealth she’s at now without any of the other Wizarding World properties getting published. Toss in the movies, the theme park, the merchandising empire and the game really does become a drop in the bucket. But, your money is still going to her. You know what she spends it on. Even if she managed to set up a veritable perpetual money maker, the royalties from what you spend on the game go directly to someone who is spending a lot of money on making sure trans people in the UK are barred from transitioning. Is that something you can live with?

Some people have decided they can live with that. Others are donating the same cost of the game to orgs like Trevor Project to offset the impact of the royalties Rowling will get. If that’s the route you choose to go, realize that your trans friends will probably still be pretty upset with you. It calls to mind the Catholic concept of indulgences, where one could commit all manor of crimes but with a simple donation to the right priest still get into heaven. That’s harsh, I know, but we make the comparison because it genuinely feels like our charities are being used just to offset the guilt of buying the game instead of being donated to because people actually want to help us. That hurts. It’s hard to articulate exactly why that hurts so bad, but it does. Your friends are lashing out and bullying you because of real pain. And what you experience as a result of that bullying is real pain too. But consider the source. Walk it back to its origin point. When someone has been fighting for their very life, and they ask you not to spend money on the game or watch streams of it, and you try to find a way to do it anyways after they’ve illustrated the very real harm your dollar causes, and you feel hurt when they lash out at you or unfriend you, do you stop to think of the pain they were in first? This is your chance to do so.

This part is hard, I know that intimately. Again, I’m writing this post because my brother is hurting, because people who want to play the game are reaching out to him and expressing their pain. We are all hurting over this in various ways for various reasons. I know how hard it is to cut something off that was a tremendous part of your life because I had to cut this out too. It wasn’t easy. You can read my other post on this topic to see how big of a fan I was.

Which leads me to streaming. I have very bad news for you. We’ve hit a point in media where the amount of money people collectively make off of a game is not just from sales. You see, there’s a barely hidden mechanic in the stock market that rewards people for gambling on the success of a franchise, and success is not just raw sales numbers. Piracy, streams on twitch, number of concurrent players and viewers, and social media engagement all play a part. I’m benefiting those guys right now because I’m posting about the game on social media! It doesn’t matter that my post is negative, because the attention I’m giving it is part of the commodity being sold. It’s not just about the game anymore, it’s about the brand. The more popular a series is, the more the value of the stock owned by shareholders increases. The more that value increases, the more the shareholder’s portfolio is worth, which is more leverage to use against high dollar loans, which the shareholders then use to buy yachts and houses or even use to purchase stocks and futures for another company or commodity, and then pay the loan off by selling off lower value stocks. It becomes an oroboros of money, a juggernaut fueled by speculation and gambling and hashtags. I’m gonna say this right now: it’s already too late. If you want to watch someone play the game, you can do that and have a clean conscious. We’re on day 2 of the proper release and day 5 of it being streamed by various people on Twitch. The game is already second only to Elden Ring in stream numbers. If I’d written this a week ago I would’ve expounded upon how giving this game any attention just signals to WB that making more Wizarding World content is good even if you didn’t personally give WB and JK money, but the cat is out of the damn bag. This is also how a lot of us leftists are getting info about the game so we can talk about it more intelligently, so it would be a little hypocritical to tell you not to. Go nuts.

Except, maybe don’t. Here’s the final part of my essay begging you not to play or watch this game even as the bullying makes you want to play it more. We have spent a lot of time talking about trans people for a very good reason, but frankly they aren’t the elephant in the room. We need to talk about antisemetism, cognitohazards, and how choosing to consume content with an obvious bias can slant you unconsciously to that bias. Now, I am not saying that playing the game makes you an antisemite! Again, I’m not here to bully you and that would be bullying. I’m just here to help you see through the bullying. But, when we engage with such content, it does form a little bit of bias in our heads if we aren’t careful to examine and undermine that. If you continue to consume content with that bias, it cements itself further. Eventually, if you never consume content with the opposite bias, you will find yourself believing what wormed into your subconsciousness way back at the start. This is how the so-called Alt Right Pipeline works. For more information about that I would ask that you go watch Innuendo Studios’ “The Alt Right Playbook”. He’s much nicer than me and the videos clearly demonstrate the effect.

This game is meant to be part of the alt right pipeline. The original director, Troy Leavitt, runs a youtube channel that promotes alt right content meant to funnel viewers deeper into the pipeline. He stepped down from the game but not after the president of WB Games stated that he was fine with employees like Leavitt posting whatever they want to their personal social media, a milquetoast endorsement of Leavitt’s influence on the game’s antisemetism. Lest you think that Leavitt leaving the game was the end of the problems, voice actor Greg Ellis, who voices 12 of the characters in the game, is an antifeminist who’s created revenge porn of an ex, something JK is actually strongly opposed to, yet she thanked him for his work on the game. Other employees who worked on the game to the bitter end have confirmed that the plot of the game didn’t change after Leavitt left.

One final sidebar: this game is way more antisemetic than what JK wrote originally. I know a lot of people talk about JK’s antisemetism in the original books, and it is bad, but the goblins are little more than set dressing for most of the books, only becoming plot relevant a couple of times across tens of thousands of pages. Mostly she pulls from the original goblin stereotypes of the early 1900s that every other property from DnD to WoW was pulling from, being hooked noses, a penchant for banking, a very insular community, abrasive behavior to outsiders and being very protective of things they made. There’s a lot of plausible deniability in what JK wrote, which has made it very hard for Jews to speak up about the problems.

This game launches plausible deniability out the window. I’m going to copy and paste some things from my last post on the topic, and this will spoil parts of the game, but if you’ve humored me this far I think you’ll understand why I need to.

“This game presents to you a fantasy race based on antisemetic caricatures and gives the fantasy race a number of real-world antisemetic stereotypes like blood libel, greedy banking, and collaborating with their own persecutors to cause a Holocaust. We currently live in a world where a large number of people are convinced that a secret Jewish elite is conspiring to use COVID vaccines to sterilize white people so they will cease to exist in a generation. The game has its fantasy Jews collaborating with a dark wizard to wipe out the wizarding population. You can choose to join them, or you can choose to put down the rebellion. The game allows you to collect a shofar as a trophy. Joanne didn't have anything to do with this and the game is actually on a special noncanon license where WB Games can ignore or add whatever they want to Joanne's worldbuilding, and they added that goblins use shofars. And you can collect it. As a trophy.“ Further, the final boss no matter which route you go down is the goblin leader of the rebellion. Whether you’re a good wizard putting down the rebellion or a bad one helping it, you have to kill the guy who organized the whole thing. Shofars are an important Jewish instrument used in many ceremonies from synagogue services on Rosh Hashanah and at the end of Yom Kippur to every weekday morning in the month of Elul running up to Rosh Hashanah. and they look like this:

And here’s the in-game screenshot, with a little bit of extra commentary:

This is probably the single BIGGEST dogwhistle in the game. You could even call it a dogshofar it’s so loud. You wouldn’t recognize this unless you were either Jewish/very steeped in Jewish culture or if you were an antisemite. Remember what I said about psychological warfare? This is that.

Also, here’s a good article on blood libel: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/blood-libel I actually think blood libel was present in the original books, but it gets way amped up in this game, with the goblins genuinely kidnapping and killing wizard children, just like the antisemetic stereotype. A lot of people don’t know what blood libel even is so please read about it.

Again, playing this game by itself does not make you antisemetic. But if you play it and then go on to consume other media with these antisemetic stereotypes, you are getting primed to become more antisemetic, and to slide down the pipeline. You have to ask yourself, is playing the game really worth that? Do you have the fortitude to play it or watch someone else play it and stay an ally to Jewish people against the current onslaught of antisemetism? And if you do have that fortitude, then why do you want to play this game? Is it just so you can see Hogwarts again, is it to soothe the part of your soul that needs nostalgia in troubling times, and is there other ways you can do that? Is this a cultural moment that you really need to participate in, or can you sit this one out and support the people asking you to not engage for all the reasons I’ve listed above?

I can’t answer that question for you. I can’t stop the people bullying you. I can’t stop myself from feeling disappointed when friends I have engage with the game even after I’ve explained myself a dozen times. I just know that I have a responsibility to keep explaining this, and hope you can see why I’ve written this massive essay. Please, if I can sway you in any way, don’t buy the game. If you absolutely must see it with your own eyes, watch someone play it. But don’t give money to WB and JK for this.

#hogwarts legacy #harry potter #jk rowling #i'm opening myself up to a lot of trouble with these tags but #someone's gotta #I got yelled at by local politicians yesterday while protesting at the only legislative coffee they hosted this season #so realize i do this irl too

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passionpluto · 2 years ago

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Presenting: The Big Four Preservation Project (AKA Operation: Release the Vickles-Shaye Cut)!

What if the first four Altador Cup MVPs were all part of a secret society, and the only one who knew was Tandrak Shaye? That's the question Jair Tollet finds herself asking when her team captain uncovers a sabotage scheme targeting the Altador Cups's high scorers and asks her for help. All Jair really wants to do is lay low and train her new apprentice Scout, but when an old frenemy from her Team Maraqua days is linked to the sabotages, Jair finds herself pulled ever deeper into the mystery...especially once the saboteurs begin to target Scout for her own burgeoning abilities...

The Big Four Saga was an unreleased Altador Cup 'verse written from 2010-11 for the Neopian Times. It was extensively advertised on Neopets forums, mainly Jellyneo Forums. Two stories (Jair's backstory Jumper and the intro short story Big Four Minus One) from it were eventually published, but its main series The Vickles-Shaye Battles was never released because, even after massive edits, it was continually rejected by the NT. It has only ever been read in its entirety by one person, a suburban father from Kansas City...until now.

Okay, so I wanted to do the crazy Defunctland-style narration for at least one paragraph to make this sound more important than it is, but putting that aside, I asked you all if you wanted to read my old AC fanfics in their uncut, ninth-grade glory, and boy did you guys deliver! I'd been thinking about doing this for some time since I'll be switching computers soon for the first time in a long time and wanted a way to preserve these silly things that still have a place in my heart, but wasn't sure if I should do it publicly or just add them to my Google Docs and call it a day. Due to extensive work writing and marketing my current WIP Premiere Nebula to publishers, I knew I wouldn't have time to fully remaster the Big Four Saga, but figured I'd leave it mostly as-is (more on that later) so readers could see the progress I've made in 13 years. I'd like to think I've grown a lot since then!

But point is, thanks to all your morbid curiosity (that you may end up regretting later), the full Big Four Saga is coming to AO3, alongside Paging Doctor Sparkle and the rest of If You Give a Little Love from FiMFiction. This will include both published stories and the full, unpublished Vickles-Shaye Battles 10-part series. Finally, someone other than my dad is going to see these! Maybe the people who actually waited for this on JNF will stumble on it and finally get to read it!

To finish this little self-promotion segment, I'd like to preface the release with one thing: this is a finished series that I'm releasing purely so I can have someplace online to preserve it. The Big Four Saga ended over a decade ago, and I have since moved onto other projects, one of which actually exists because of the Big Four Saga! You see, after Vickles-Shaye, I had intended on writing a sequel series called Valkaine, which was permanently cancelled due to continued rejection by the NT and me realizing the planned genre shift from a sports story to a magical girl-inspired sci-fi was a bit too jarring. If the concept for Valkaine sounds familiar to some of you, that's because it was the basis for Premiere Nebula! So hopefully, you'll all get to read some form of Valkaine someday, or at least a spiritual successor to it.

This brings me to the one change I will be making to the Big Four Saga before publishing it: Scout's name has been changed. The story explains that she was named for a central figure in the Resistance, but in the original version, her name was Valka. This change comes entirely because the name of the magical girl rebel leader in Premiere Nebula is, you guessed it, also Valka. They were actually the same character for a really long time, but as I developed PN!Valka, she got further and further from the original Valka concept that I thought "why not just name OG Valka something else?" So PN!Valka stays Valka while BF!Valka became Scout, purely to avoid future confusion between the characters should Premiere Nebula ever be published. But for those of you who follow PN, it might still be cool for you to know that Scout was the proto-Valka. :)

#neopets #altador cup #long post #my post #fanfiction

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chellyfishing · 2 years ago

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well, i finished the last book i meant to read for the year, and i’ve been wanting to do a lil year in review of all the media from this year, but the main problem is that i don’t log movies/tv anywhere and my memory is uhh?? real bad?? i also definitely didn’t listen to nearly as much new music this year as usual :\\ anyway i figured i’d start with books for now and maybe ponder music/tv/movies/games over the next couple days.

NO i will not include fic even though i definitely did spend like a week recently accidentally reading a 600+k fic for a fandom i’m NOT EVEN IN, i can’t believe i read the whole thing

my storygraph is here

i read fifteen books this year, which makes it my best reading year since 2016, when i inexplicably read 40 in one year?? who is she i gave 5 stars to three of them:

confessions by kanae minato: this is a thriller told from multiple POVs about the supposed accidental death/actual murder of a teacher’s young daughter and the fallout that happens when she reveals she knows the truth. it is hard to root for anyone in this but that’s not really the point. every chapter reframes the original story again and again and again up until the final page so honestly don’t bother making your mind up about anything at any point before then.

the last house on needless street by catriona ward: i feel like explaining almost anything about this book and why i loved it so much would be just one massive spoiler, because its strengths lie in its abilities to subvert. subvert what? kind of... everything? it’s about a man, and his cat, and his daughter. it’s about a woman searching for her missing sister. it’s about illness, and abuse, and a serial killer. trigger warnings abound, especially regarding things happening to children. i don’t really know how to recommend this, except that it’s just Good and i haven’t stopped thinking about it.

you’ve lost a lot of blood by eric larocca: this is the book i just finished. it is very short, you could almost class it as a novella, in fact there is a novella in it? but also other things? i literally just finished it, so i’m still processing, because SO MUCH happens in a very short span of pages. i might reread it quickly because it really does go so fast, you almost don’t have time to breathe. the novella within the novel(la) is told in present-tense, in very short sentences and paragraphs, and you especially fly through those sections. i don’t know at this point if i think the whole thing could have benefitted from being longer or not. i might even change my rating of it later, but i sat for a minute after the last page and felt pretty strongly it was a five-star read so for now i go with my gut. i could feel myself going on a face journey the whole time, from sentence to sentence. it has things to say, in a sort of recursive way, it’s hard to explain. i think what it’s about is art, and also identity. i think i’m going to be thinking about it for awhile.

several other books i read this year probably would have been 5 stars if i was still using goodreads instead of storygraph, like a powerless fool, with the top ones of those being:

the seven husbands of evelyn hugo by taylor jenkins reid: you all know this book!!!!! i’m late to the party. there is a lot in here that is so beautiful and compelling. there is something about her writing that i also felt in malibu rising (which i also read this year) that keeps things from being a full five stars from me. i don’t think i can really explain it succinctly. but i was still very moved by this book, i cried a lot, and i do intend to read more by her, because her work is very readable.

piranesi by susanna clarke: i think this is a book that i only didn’t love quite as much as other people because i heard how good it was going in and expected something more revolutionary or life-changing instead of just A Very Good Book. like if i didn’t have any expectations i probably would have finished it and gone “wow!” instead of “oh, that was nice.” it’s about a man who doesn’t know much living almost entirely alone in a place that can’t be real, and what happens when both he and outside forces start to peel away at that reality.

all the feels by olivia dade: this is the sequel to spoiler alert, which i also read and loved this year, but slightly less. both of these books are very wonderful funny wish fulfillment romantic comedies about fat women and gorgeous prestige television star men (the show they’re on is like game of thrones but make it greek myth), they were the kind of thing that i just kind of needed to read at the time. what puts this one slightly ahead of its predecessor for me is that most of the conflict comes from the characters not being able to get out of their own way and sort of having to learn how to grow and be better people both for themselves and each other. i also just liked their romantic dynamic a bit more and i think anybody who is familiar with both pairs and also me would be like “yeah that tracks.” there’s a third book in the universe featuring a very minor background couple from the first two coming out soon!! ready for it!!

and the other good to very good things i read:

the ghost bride by yangsze choo (4.5): this book is set in 19th century malaysia and is about colonial chinese families (the author herself being chinese-malaysian). it’s about a woman whose family is Respectable but in a precarious position, and so naturally that means hoping for an Advantageous Marriage. there’s a man she loves, but he’s out of reach, and then his family proposes the idea of her marrying... that man’s dead cousin? which she’s not into (for whatever reason). but then he starts haunting her, and she has to figure out how to get him off her back so she can actually live her damn life. it’s very cute and fun and adventurous and sweet and romantic. it’s also a series on netflix which is somewhat faithful, it changes some things for the better and some things for less so, i enjoyed it though! the dead man, who is a limp weirdo in the book, is kind of a banger character in the series (i mean, still a weirdo, but with killer fashion sense).

the bright spear trilogy by hl macfarlane (all 3.75): these are three books classed as “gothic scottish fairy tales.” in terms of writing they are very light and frothy, kind of romantic drama with a fairy tale backdrop. there’s a bit more plot in the first one but things gradually become more about the relationship drama as things progress. slight spoiler but absolutely approve of the heroine having two handsome suitors and deciding she will keep both. they aren’t amazing books overall but they were fun fast reads and i honestly appreciate them being kind of just lightly poly. the third book is... unexpectedly dark? like trigger warnings for SA among some other things. things never get truly grim but after i read it i was like oh yeah that was kind of a lot wasn’t it, if you think about it. the author has promised a sequel series about the child character born at the end and... yeah. yeah i’m gonna read it.

malibu rising by taylor jenkins reid (4.5): another book in the taylor jenkins reidiverse, about the family of a minor evelyn hugo character. he’s a rock star, he’s got a wife who’s been with him from before he Made It, they’ve got kids who love to surf. the action focuses on the kids, taking place over one night, with flashbacks filling in the stories of their parents, and how actually, their dad kinda sucks. this is a lighter read than evelyn hugo but deals with similar ideas and themes.

penpal by dathan auerbach (4.25): this is kind of a famous no sleep/reddit horror story that was published as a novel. it’s about a man who’s reflecting on his childhood, putting together a lot of seemingly disparate, out-of-order events to form a truly disturbing narrative. the most important thing about this book that you should know is that it’s a bummer. you won’t walk away from this one feeling very good about anything. the pacing is kind of slow as things build over time and then A Lot happens in the last bit and then you just kind of have to live with it.

neverworld wake by marisha pessl (3.5): this was easily the most disappointing book i read this year. it’s about a group of friends who are stuck in purgatory reliving the same day over and over again, and it’s also about their friend who died a year ago and what happened to him. i... don’t really know what to say about this book. it wasn’t bad, obviously. maybe i just don’t get it. i don’t know what it was trying to say. i don’t know what i was supposed to feel. but i wasn’t feeling conflicted in the way i was with something like, say, confessions. it was just kind of like, “...okay? and?”

spoiler alert by olivia dade (4.25): as mentioned above.

autumn of the grimoire by jl vampa (4.0): listen... i read this because it’s arranged marriage. more broadly it’s about four sisters who are like, seasonal witches, and they pass around a grimoire from season to season that gives them tasks passed down by their predecessors. our protagonist is sister autumn and she always gets the absolutely worst most grim and traumatic tasks, and now she’s inexplicably being forced to marry Some Guy. the thing that i liked the least about this book is how it was told from different viewpoints of characters who have different amounts of knowledge but the reader is constantly being kept in the dark for no real reason, like, we weren’t learning with the characters, the characters already knew!! we were just being teased with constant reminders about how there’s More Going On, which is so tedious to me. “had i but known” and related writing tropes are among my least favorites. also, i knew it was going to be het, but there was a teeny tiny part of me that thought maybe the male half of the marriage was already in a relationship with another man and he and his wife were just going to end up bffs and i read like half the book through that lens and it took quite awhile before the book reached a point where i could no longer pretend that made sense. i recommend trying this anyway because if the author is going to repeatedly remind me there are things i don’t know it’s my right as a free american to pretend the thing i don’t know is gay. overall in spite of all that there are some fun characters, and some fun plot twists! i didn’t expect it to end how it did and i’m actually kind of looking forward to reading more in the series when they come out!

i didn’t read any books i hated this year, which was nice!! i think i read more 5 stars last year but i also read some real duds too. the “worst” was just being disappointed by

neverworld wake

i started so many others but i don’t consider any of them DNFs becaaaaause i start books all the time and put them down and it has nothing to do with the book and everything to do with the fact that i have a squirrel brain and reading is so so hard. hopefully i’ll finish some of them next year?? i don’t think anything i read this year was an aborted attempt from last year tho sooooo idk. i wish my brain was better but i still consider this a pretty good reading year overall!

#deep thoughts

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5amanthus · 1 year ago

Note

For the ask game :) 😈🎶🎯

Ask game

😈 Has there been a point in a story where you did something just to be playfully mean to your readers?

I don't know if I've ever been playfully mean to readers 😂 I'm either genuine, or just mean (i.e hurting blorbos, added angst, killing characters).

It's not really playful, but probably the closest example I have is this one person was obsessed with Purple/Xander, literally the biggest bigot/not-in-the-fun-way asshole™️/just downright awful character I had in the earlier part of my series and they shit all over my massively diverse/queer/disabled/neurodivergent cast of characters because I refused to give him a redemption arc, so later on I ended up taking some of their direct quotes and putting it in some of his dialogue while he was being an idiot and then I got rid of him a few chapters later.

"Perhaps you can give me some valuable insight then. Tell me about the crew."

He paused upon realizing the other man was actually trying to talk to him, "Where do I even start? Cyan is an absolute snake, don't trust that one. 'They' will backstab you. Lime is gross and has made 'gay' his whole personality. Black is creepy and a dad. Red is really fucking weird. I thought Pumpkin would be cool, but I hate her too. Yellow is okay, I guess. The Captain doesn't take anything seriously and he should have been fired ages ago. Pink is the nervous one. Uuh, honestly everyone is so forgettable. It's so hard to keep up with everyone, they might as well just be a bunch of colours with vague personality traits."

🎶 Do you listen to music while you write? What song have you been playing on loop lately?

I'm always listening to music and I absolutely do while I write! I've got over 100 playlists and pretty well all of my characters have at least 1 song if not more.

youtube

These are two I've had on repeat a lot because this band is great for just a specific vibe I need for a current original WIP about a trans woman going into a cabin in the woods to discover herself and she ends up coming out with a trans monster girlfriend 😄

youtube

Also been listening to this one a bunch because it fits a possible WIP I have about two characters who love each other trying to find the other again and again even as their ripped apart while their realities constantly change around them, but I won't say more because it's going to be a big project that I'm still trying to figure out a format for. (Brain says show, but I don't really have access to those kinds of resources, so I might write it but I think it's going to be difficult to capture in a story.)

youtube

This one is always on repeat cause it's a major Fuchsia and Dijon song and I have so many feelings about them, but they're not showing up again for a while. I have a whole scene planned for this one though, and some art too.

youtube

And I've got a whole playlist for the Spot/Venom fanfic thing I'm working on, but these two songs I've been listening to a lot out of the whole playlist. I should probably slap the playlist down, maybe in the fic when its done.

🎯 Have any of your readers accurately guessed major plot points? Care to share which?

I don't really have readers that comment their guesses usually? Also I'm terrible for just blabbing about stuff instead of writing it, so people either know what's going to happen, or they comment that they were surprised by things! Like this comment, I love it a lot :D

"This has to be my fav fic in your Crews series yet. For context, I have binge read up to this chapter over the last two days.

Cyan having an altered imposter parasite was a fall-off-my-seat plot twist. Whoa! That explained what they were freaking out about when they had to get scanned and I thought they couldn't get their gloves off, but they weren't able to temporarily get the parasite to leave their body (because it was protecting them from the spawn of Chartreuse, but Cyan didn't know at the time). I want to go into more, but this paragraph alone is too long already."

Or I did have someone really accurately read a scene/the hints I left, which was great!

"When she flinched away from his hand the first time he went to touch her, I wonder whether he thought he'd partly reverted back to impostor form and that was what scared her? It must've been confusing for him to see her flinch away from a normal hand and realise it had nothing to do with his nature as an Impostor.

When Fuchsia comes during the night shift, it becomes clear Dijon is bad at hiding not only his strangeness, but even his ability to see in the dark; I wonder whether Orchid knows he's an Impostor. If so, mentioning she'd kill Pantone if she had a chance might've been an indirect approval for Dijon to get rid of him."

And the only other closest one would probably be people accurately calling Black and Red as impostors in V-Crew, but I wasn't really trying to hide that one 😂

#Ask Game #Writing #Pyroweasel #Thank you for the ask! 😄

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blooming-violets · 2 years ago

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Yeah, I’m not trying to start an argument with you. I was giving you some perspective on way people who are massively unrepresented in Fandom spaces would like a neutral reader. I don’t know why you responding with multiple paragraphs like I was saying POC don’t exist at all. They just don’t seem to exist in your writing. You’re white and ignorant. Shocking.

I literally replied to someone who was saying they wanted to name their female character but didn’t feel like they could because people wouldn’t read it by saying that she should name them. That was it. I’m well aware of why people want neutral readers. I write them and read them myself. Like I said, I was speaking in hyperbole to hype them up. You’re the one who took my words the wrong way. At no point did I actually think I was genuinely complaining about not having a detailed character. I don’t give a shit how people write their stuff and what they like. I was trying to hype up and support a fellow writer to give her character a name. That was literally it. That’s all I was doing.

Writing a detailed response to your sudden appearance in my asks and explaining what I meant was not arguing. I was letting you know what my actual intentions were since you seemed to misinterpret them a different way than I intended them to come across. You showed up to my house wearing the mask of an anon. I’m just answering you! I don’t know who you are. Your anonymous. We can’t have a proper conversation because half of that is masked in the dark. All I can do is attempt to explain my intentions of my original post in the best way that I could. That’s what I did. I’m sorry it was too long for your liking. Next time I’ll keep it short and sweet with me groveling for a strangers approval.

You weren’t even a part of the conversation with the person I was replying to. You just showed up in my asks acting as if I had no idea why people would like a y/n. You’re weird af. I’ll say it again.

You showed up, unprompted, with aggressive intentions and I’m not going to pander to that. If you have genuine concerns about the way I write, feel free to privately message me and we can talk about it, but I won’t do that with a faceless stranger. Otherwise, block me and move on. It’s that easy.

I hope you have a good night. ✌️

#asks

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transsexualhamlet · 3 years ago

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alright it’s time for as requested part two of rowan reads the original sherlock holmes and compares it to yuumori

i finished a study in scarlet and holy shit was yuumori accurate to it

obviously they changed the case so that... well, moriarty was involved, and they didn’t go into detail on why drebber was an a-grade piece of shit (lol i wasn’t expecting the mormons but it was a great perspective actually doyle went big brain time on that one lmao)

Hmmm i mean the other main difference is that Watson Is Gayer In The Original but yeah obviously that’s for a reason and the reason is william james moriarty

I have some highlights of “oh my god I need to see yuumori sherlock do this right now because he Absolutely Would” and they’re WILD

So yuh here are your Sherlock Moments

-when watson asks stamford why he might not want to board with sherlock bestie went “he’s a little queer” and watson was basically like “i like that in a man :)” like i am Fully Aware that’s not what queer meant back then but it’s FUNNY alright

-stamford is also like “yeah i mean he’s the kind of guy who would probably perform human experiments on his friends without telling them”

-watson walks into sherlock’s lab like hello new roommate :) and the dude immediately starts SCREAMING

-he’s all I GOT IT I GOT IT I GOT IT LOOK and fucking stabs himself and drips the blood in a container, yeah yeah it makes a reaction and he’s like I AM GOING TO SOLVE ALL CRIMES EVER ACTUALLY wait who are you

-SHERLOCK THEN PROCEEDS TO SEAL UP THE CUT WITH P L A S T E R AND THEN HANDLE POISONOUS CHEMICALS WITH HIS BARE, INJURED HANDS

-watson moves in with this dude and is like “oh wow im really interested in this guy but im Polite so i cannot ask him anything” so he starts snooping around trying to figure out what sherlock does for a living?????? like he couldn’t just fucking ask???? and he’s like wow he has these clients and he kicks me out of the house every time they come over i Really Don’t Want To Think He’s Fucking Them

-obviously, and to watson’s embarassment, he wasn’t. sherlock is a virgin and it is very clear

-watson describes sherlock in the most homoerotic way possible i don’t even know how to describe it bestie goes on about his hands for a full paragraph it’s really gay man

-WATSON IS SO POLITE ABOUT IT ITS ACTUALLY HILARIOUS ISTG HES LIKE I AM KIND OF SERIOUSLY OBSESSED WITH THIS DUDE BUT I COULDN’T POSSIBLY JUST ASK HIM ANYTHING OR LIKE TRY TO GET CLOSER TO HIM I WILL SIMPLY WRITE LISTS ABOUT HIM AND DIAGNOSE HIM WITH AUTISM

-he’s also like “i don’t know i really think hes on drugs i would say he’s on drugs but also he’s like this all the time and he might just be mentally ill” lo and behold it was both

-SHERLOCK GOES TO BED AT TEN PM AND GETS UP AT 4 AM EVERY DAY WITHOUT FAIL

-m o t h e r f u c k e r d o e s n o t k n o w w h a t t h e s o l a r s y s t e m i s

-and when asked why he doesn’t know! he’s like my dear watson! i simply cannot be bothered! my brain is filled up with more important things!

-watson compares him to some fictional detective that edgar allan poe made up and sherlock is like HIM OH MY GOD DO NOT COMPARE ME TO THAT MOTHERFUCKER I AM BETTER THAN THAT

-it’s honestly really cute watson apparently will sit and listen to him play the violin and like request pieces and stuff and yeah sherlock can play those fine

-but most of the time if he picks it up on his own sherlock will just start plucking it with his fucking hands while slouching in a chair and sitting like L Death Note and playing random notes that Vibe

-watson HATES it

-watson once picks up this paper sherlock has lying around about yknow. deduction and all that and how you find things out and watson is like “this is Bullshit who wrote this what the fuck this is the most unrealistic thing i’ve ever read” and then sherlock is like I Wrote It Shawty and watson is like. um. oh haha i take back everything

-MAN I JUST GOTTA POINT OUT I AM A TEENAGE BOY AND I COULD NOT STAY SERIOUS WHEN DOYLE THOUGHT “EJACULATED” WAS A GOOD WORD TO PUT IN PLACE OF SAID

-lol he was like “ahahahhaa my deductions” and watson was like “but How Did You Do It” and he’s like “I WANT TO LOOK COOL WATSON DONT MAKE ME RUIN IT BY EXPLAINING”

-GHHHHHHHHHH BESTIES when sherlock was Infodumping to watson About Crimes watson was like “oh my god that’s so cool bestie!” like Once and watson described it like “i was complimenting him like he was a girl and i called him beautiful and he blushed” LIKE DUDE THATS GAY

-that one time sherlock yelled “THE PLOT THICKENS” and lestrade was like “i t w a s t h i c k e n o u g h a l r e a d y”

-dude thinks he’s wrong ONCE and has a mental breakdown in front of the entirety of scotland yard before like five seconds later realizing that he was not, in fact, wrong

I’d say that the main difference between him and yuumori sherlock is that og sherlock has a massive fucking ego and yuumori sherlock is very loud but has no ego at all. Og sherlock will brag about how smart he is to anyone who will fucking listen. Yuumori sherlock will only boast abt his intelligence around Moriarty because he knows they’re both mindfucking

Other than that... I honestly cannot come up with significant differences between them. You can really tell how similar they are especially with the sign of mary episode- dude was just like >:((((( the entire day because watson has a fiance and then he walks in on a dead body and goes now hERES SOME FUN

He’s very accurately and enthusiastically portrayed, as far as I can tell, and I think that’s really epic. I love him. I might kin og sherlock too guys ngl

#rowan screams into the void #rowan views moriarty #moriarty the patriot #sherlock holmes ?????#yeah #sherlock holmes #yuukoku no moriarty

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thesimperiuscurse · 4 years ago

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THE CHALLENGE — show a certain part of your story process based on you being tagged by other creators.

Thank you @herpixels for tagging me in your wonderful challenge! Here’s a behind-the-scenes essay for En Pointe ❤

WRITING PROCESS — show us a part of your script or explain how you write your scenes. do you write in screenplay format or novel format?

I write in novel format, and have a very methodical process. I have a Planning Notebook which covers all the general elements of the story; cast list + descriptions, main plot, themes, overviews of all chapters, timeline, world + settings information, research links, and a massive section with all my notes on relationships, character styles, history, writing goals, arcs, and most crucially, what to avoid from the absolute fucking mess of Fallen Angels.

At the smaller scale, before writing, I plan out each chapter in my Chapter Workbook. First is the Outline, which is a synopsis of the main events. Going off that, I write a list of Chapter Shots which describes in writing all the pictures; what kind of shot it is (long, over-the-shoulder, etc), the location + atmosphere, and what the characters are doing. Corresponding to these I list the Poses, for each character and what expression they have. I then write a To Do List for what sets to build, new sims to make, number of poses to create, the cc I have to find or make. The final section is Details, which notes down all the little things I have to remember; running gags, nuances, and themes; current state of relationships and character arcs to keep track of their development; what my aims are for character perceptions + issues I need to fix from the last chapter. This section is super important to make sure the story unfolds smoothly and revelations make sense, or else I get something abrupt like Mako x Raven, because I didn’t foreshadow clearly or early enough in advance. Here are snippets of what this looks like:

Once I finish all this planning (the current word count of the two documents is 20k lmfao), then I begin writing. It’s a lot less structured because I just start with the most exciting scenes or ones I’ve been thinking about for a while. I organise the paragraphs according to the Chapter Shots. A bit of light editing then the writing is ready to publish!

SCENE BUILDING — show us you in the middle of scene building through pictures, gifs, or a video. explain what is the best thing about scene building and what is the worst!

I dislike scene building because TS3′s weak ass makes everything so tedious. I have a Pinterest board to inspire the settings. The worst part is definitely when the game moves at 0.001 m/s and crashes, which happens far too often and pisses me off. Here’s a screenshot I accidentally took when setting up the big family dinner scene in Chapter 8. I tried my best to minimise the amount of sims that were actually there because I take shortcuts whenever possible. Crowd scenes suck.

CC + POSE MAKING — do you make your own cc/poses for your scene? If so, what is your process like to create? do you just go off the top of your head? do you use reference photos?

I make all the poses that aren’t singular and ‘normal’, due to height differences and also so I can achieve my exact vision. Depending on the length of the chapter, this can range from 20-50 poses, which is looking to be around 700 poses by the story finale. I try to find reference photos (essential for ballet poses) when I can to make them look natural. I also convert or mesh clothing + objects, but I’m lazy so I often cheat with Photoshop.

GETTING IN THE ZONE — what do you do to get in the zone to work on a scene? examples include: show us your playlist you use when working on a scene, what’s your go-to scene snack/drink, etc.

I don’t actually have anything for this. If I don’t feel like doing a particular task on the To Do List I just try something else. Sometimes I listen to Eva and Mako’s playlists when working though, and there are certain songs I associate with certain parts of the story which help me when I’m thinking of them.

SCREENSHOT FOLDER — give us a look into your screenshot folder to show us just how much goes into one scene for your story. scrapped pictures encouraged!

I also have a linear method for pictures. Firstly, I create the poses, and test them in a blank background, which is when I figure out the most flattering angles, and edit the poses if needed. After that I begin series of test shots in the actual set, redoing up to three times until it looks passable. Since I use natural light almost every shot has a double (or even triple), with outdoor lighting for the environment and controlled interior lighting for the sims, which is then spliced together along with other atmospheric editing. There’s a lot of screenshots to ‘build’ the final visual but I rarely have alternative or scrapped finals because that would be a terrible waste of time. Why do I do this ridiculously tedious process? Because I’m stupid.

CAPTIONS — are you a caption on the picture kind of storyteller or captions in text box type of storyteller? why? do you do both?

I don’t do caption format, because for me, it removes lots of detail and nuance. Long prose means my audience is much smaller, but I wouldn’t be able to convey half the things just by still visuals and dialogue. As you might be able to tell from the aforementioned question, picture taking is also just immensely tiring.

EDITING — explain and show us your process editing a scene through a video, gif, or picture. a before and after will suffice if you aren’t in the middle of editing a scene as you answer this.

Corresponding to the Screenshot Folder question:

I no longer rely on Reshade for post-processing, except for DOF, but even then I blur in editing. Lately I’ve been trying to create a more realistic, atmospheric look with strong DOF, bloom, motion blur, and smoothing out light + shadows with exposure brushes.

THROWBACK — show us an ancient story scene you done in the past and explain how you would do the scene differently today!

You mean every scene I’ve ever done before En Pointe LOL If we’re talking ancient, I might as well go back to the very beginning of The Kingston Legacy, in 2015. It’s the classic legacy opening of the founder moving to a new town, with basic writing and terrible low-setting-no-cc pictures. I would do literally everything different. I can’t even begin to describe so here’s something to laugh at.

I tag — @lazysunjade (watch her post it 1 second later) @amys-snapshots @notjustabooksims @simnights ❤ Please check the challenge post for the full and original format, and anyone else who wants to participate can also reblog it as an ask game!

#bruh #this tired me out but it was very fun #now time to sleep before work #genfour #lilaremonn #thesimperiuscurse #enpointeprep

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sassysnowperson · 3 years ago

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writer's meme - TY to @r0b0tb0y for the tag!

How many works do you have on AO3?

168 - oh man that's more than I'd realized. I passed 150 and didn't even notice!

What’s your total AO3 word count?

1,133,901

So many.

How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

Since r0b0tb0y and I were just talking about this, I conveniently have a list of all 20 ranked by number of works

134 - Star Wars 7 - Original Works 7 - Marvel 2 - Pirates of The Carribean 2 - The Old Guard 2 - Discworld 1 - Good Omens 1 - Leverage 1 - The Good Place 1 - Avatar: The Last Airbender 1 - Ocean’s 11 1 - Harry Potter 1 - The Goblin Emperor 1 - Gundam Wing 1 - Star Trek: TNG 1 - Hades (Videogame) 1 - Sailor Moon 1 - Russian Doll 1 - Mummy/Wonder Woman crossover

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

Lol, looking at my top five - it falls into two categories

1. Fics I wrote right at the height of a fandom's popularity that got a massive reader boost because it was the Hot Thing Right Then

2. Star Wars Fix-Its

A Series of Better Decisions - A Padme/Obi-Wan/Anakin SW Prequel Trilogy fix-it where Anakin talks to Obi-Wan and spends Revenge of the Sith in a stressed-out bisexual panic instead of becoming a Space Fascist. He winds up fake-poly-dating Obi-Wan to try to bring down Palpatine, and eventually winds up in a better place due to the power of Quitting Your Job and becoming a househusband.

Galactic Response Time - Captain Marvel - an at the time MCU canon-compliant gen fic that ran the universe forward and explained how Carol really TRIED to show up for all those other crises that happened, but it turns out most of the major MCU disasters only lasted like three days and space is real big, y'all. Featuring Nick Fury cathartically bitching with his Space Bestie.

New Lands for the Living - Fix-it where the sequel trilogy ends Even Worse, Poe goes back in time to mercy-kill the timeline, and much to his dismay winds up married to just-before-Original-Trilogy Luke Skywalker. He has an existential crisis about his own existence, meets some competent women, and starts fixing things.

Life's Little Pleasures - The Good Omens fic where I put all my ace feelings, featuring metaphysical bonding and good scotch.

Flustered - Another Padme/Anakin/Obi-Wan SW Prequel Trilogy fix-it, where Order 66 never happens. Anakin gets some therapy and Padme gets a horrible crush on Obi-Wan.

Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

I do! I love getting to talk to people about fics, and I so appreciate people making the effort to comment I want to spend some time with them! It's so much easier not to comment, I know.

What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

Hmmm this is not my normal wheelhouse. I usually go angst that gets resolved by the end. Let me look to see what the options are.

Okay, I think we've got two contendors: In Waystation an exhausted Poe Dameron crash-lands in a station where a Bodhi Rook that lived and then hid now lives with Baze and Chirrut. There is a little epilgue that implies they're going to meet again, but the bulk of the fic does end with Poe making the decision to go back to the Resistance, and leaving Bodhi behind. Still, I think it's more wistful, rather than angsty.

Time Enough for Mourning takes it though, I think. Davits Draven/Antoc Merrick, that is entirely about Draven mourning the fact that Antoc has died. The end is still, I think, more cathartic than angsty, but it is overall probably the strongest "break out the waterworks" of my fics.

Do you write crossovers? If so what is the craziest one you’ve written?

I do occasionally, usually when someone prompts me and I find something in there that makes my brain go!!! I think the strangest is probably The Face Underneath. It's a Cassian Andor/Elim Garak fic where I drag Garak into the Star Wars Universe for a triple drabble series where he is an old mentor of Cassian's.

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Mmm, not proper hate. Realtalk, the most devastating one for me was when I posted a fic that the only comment was a spelling critique.

And yes, there was a spelling error, but still, very crushing to have that be the only feedback. (It has since found a few readers that said nice things, very healing :D)

Do you write smut? If so what kind?

Yes! Uh - consensual, between adults, often M/M adults, tho I have written explicit femslash, hetfic, and poly piles. It's usually affectionate, often plays with power dynamics even if it doesn't go into full dom/sub.

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that anyone has made me aware of, I've never looked.

Have you ever had a fic translated?

Had a request or two, but never been linked the result - so not sure if it didn't happen or if I just didn't get linked. I welcome it!

I have had several fics podficced, and I LOVE that. What a joy! Making a blanket permission statement that allowed podfic is one of the best decisions I've made as a fic author. Suddenly, Podfic!

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Once or twice! I like the idea of doing it, but follow-through is hard. Hoping to do some co-writing soon though, so we will see!

What’s your all time favourite ship?

Sorry, unrepentant multi-shipper here. I like possibilities, and finding the story that will bring people together, more than one specific thing.

What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

I don't have ANYTHING I've given up on, but there are a few fics in my unpublished drafts that were beautiful ideas, and really struggled to become contained stories. They all want to be sprawling things, and I have not felt sprawling-thing-writing passionate about those ideas. But, you never know! Inspiration may strike.

What are your writing strengths?

I'd say character voice, along with that, dialogue. Also humor moments that still have real weight and don't undercut the story, as well as straight comedy writing.

What are your writing weaknesses?

You see, I, uh, do this thing where I don't really end a sentence - I think about ending it, I even assume, at some point while I'm writing that I have ended it; I have not and it meanders, persistently, until I have constructed a whole paragraph made out of one chain of words and a hodgepodge of punctuation.

Also the thing where I accidentally use an unusual word five times in one paragraph because my brain has grabbed onto it like an excited puppy and keeps offering it up as the Perfect Word.

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

I love having multilingual characters. When writing, I tend to keep all the words in English and use dialogue tags to denote language shift - unless I am inventing the language, or have a speaker of that language willing to beta the bits to make sure I don't mess them up too badly.

What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Actually wrote and posted? Rogue One.

Fandom of my heart my younger self spun out stories in my imagination about? Where if I had my own computer and easy access to a fic archive they almost certainly would have become spectacularly earnest fics?

ReBoot and Sailor Moon. The Sailor Moon was an AU that took place on the sun and they all had kick-ass horses. Baby Sass knew what was up.

What’s your favourite fic you’ve written?

Nope, sorry, can't pick, love them all in different ways for different reasons.

Tagging: @semisweetshadow, @anamelesstraveler, @jules-of-the-crown - and generally if you follow me and want to do it, do so and tag me in it!

#fic talk #about the writer #long post #text post

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pokelolmc · 4 years ago

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10 Danny Phantom Episodes with Good Concepts that Sorely Disappointed Me: “The Ultimate Enemy” (Part 2)

Alright, here I am, everyone—part two of my critical analysis on “The Ultimate Enemy”, and how its faulty writing let down a good episode idea. For those stumbling across this for the first time, I am in the process of composing an analytical list of ten Danny Phantom episodes whose concepts I liked, but didn’t like the execution of. “The Ultimate Enemy” is the first on this list. Due to the size of my complaints with the episode, I’ve split my arguments into multiple categories across multiple posts; I highly suggest you start from the beginning with part 1 here before moving onto this post. It covered the main introduction, and Category A of my problems with the episode: the plot points that were primarily irrelevant to Dan’s character.

For those of you continuing from the first part, I apologise for this part being overdue. I proposed I would edit and upload part two roughly a day after part one, but those days dragged on due to constant re-editing and problems with my mental health. Parts three and four shall probably take longer than a few days to edit and upload as well, as I discovered arguments in the essay that needed massive overhauls before posting. I can guarantee they’re coming eventually (the whole thing essay is fully written, point-wise); I need to rework and trim the fat off some paragraphs.

Without further ado, this post will take a look at everything I’ve chucked into Category B—my issues with Dan’s characterisation, and how what the episode showed us about who deserved responsibility for Dan contradicted what it told us about how Dan was created.

(Also, because of my saltiness seeping in when I was writing, my captions for the images got a little too snarky for an analytical essay, but I am too tired of re-editing this section to remove them. Hopefully, they’ll serve as humour; if not, I apologise.)

1. The episode incorrectly portrayed Danny as the only one responsible for Dan’s existence, and for the wrong reasons (the wrong events in the timeline). Upon scrutiny of the actual sequence of events that led to Dan’s creation, the direct responsibility for Dan’s birth was either an even split between Danny and Vlad, or slightly more Vlad’s fault (depending upon the interpretation of the event that did actually cause Dan).

(Spoiler alert: No. No, it was not.)

The episode initially chose to establish Danny cheating on the CAT as the cause for Dan’s existence. While this was partially, indirectly true (since it set up the chain of events that led to Dan’s creation), it was not the event that directly caused Dan—yet, the episode treated it as a highly important tipping point, close to the point of no return that led to Dan. Looking at Dan’s backstory from the information Future Vlad gave (as dubious as it was), and working backwards, it was clear that Danny cheating on the test was not the vital “point of no return” by any means. Neither was the explosion at the Nasty Burger, for that matter (which the episode treated as the point of no return after Dan cheated on the CAT in Danny’s place, which required the episode to postpone the narrative stakes of preventing Dan’s creation to the Nasty Burger fight).

(Well...not exactly--it didn’t ruin Dan’s future, but it did ruin Danny’s. There’s a distinction.)

Kick-starting the entire chain of events that set up the eventual moment of Dan’s birth was not synonymous with directly creating Dan, and blaming the causality for Dan’s existence on Danny cheating (the leap of logic that “Danny became evil in the future because he cheated on a test”) or even his loved ones dying at the Nasty Burger was incorrect.

To demonstrate the argument, I’ll shift to an in-universe hypothetical:

Imagine yourself in Clockwork’s shoes: an “evil future version of Danny” has been created, and you have to prevent Dan’s existence by searching through the events that led his creation to find as many openings between key events as possible, in order to change one and subsequently avert all the events (including Dan’s creation) that followed.

To lay it out in full, the chain (separating the events based on intervention windows) was as follows: (1) Danny cheated on the CAT -> (2) Mr. Lancer met with Danny’s parents at the Nasty Burger to discuss it -> (3) they (including Sam, Tucker and Jazz) died in the Nasty Burger explosion -> (4) a grief-stricken Danny went to Vlad in Wisconsin -> (5) Danny requested that Vlad numb his emotional pain -> (6) Vlad split Danny’s ghost half from his human half—only for the ghost half to immediately pull out Vlad’s own and fuse with it into Dan.

Dan’s existence being the result of (what was essentially) a disastrous line of falling dominoes made his origin more sinister, but also highly easy to prevent (at least, without taking into account the mess caused by the story’s poorly thought out use of time travel, which I’ll explain later in section C). After all, the more complex a system (the more elements necessary for a system to successfully operate and achieve a desired result), the more weak spots it has—as meddling with one part can affect all the other parts and lead the entire operation to fail.

Utilising any of the intervention room between the events in “The Ultimate Enemy’s” alternate timeline would prevent Dan’s entire existence. The only event, therefore, that could be labelled the direct cause of Dan’s existence was the event that immediately resulted in Dan’s birth, and the most dire pivotal point—which rendered Dan inevitable—was the event directly before that. The event of Dan’s creation itself (or the cause of Dan) was event number six—the removal of both Danny and Vlad’s ghost halves using the Ghost Gauntlets, and their subsequent fusion with each other. The event which led to this—event number five, which was Danny’s request for Vlad to remove his emotional pain—was the direct catalyst for the procedure, and therefore the important “point of no return” leading to Dan that the episode tried to make Danny cheating on the CAT (and once that was over, the act of losing his loved ones) out to be. (Technically speaking, it was one of possibly two options for the event upon which Dan’s existence truly hinged��number four was also a likely candidate).

Danny cheating on the CAT was not the cause of Dan (even if it set the eventual stage), because there were numerous ways to interfere after the incident of Danny cheating the CATs and still prevent Dan from existing. Clockwork could’ve interfered between events one and two, by changing Mr. Lancer’s parent-teacher meeting location to anywhere safer than the Nasty Burger, so no one died (he could’ve utilised Jazz to sway Mr. Lancer, perhaps—it’s safe to assume Clockwork was aware of her knowledge on Danny’s secret, and she was the one Mr. Lancer approached about Danny cheating). He could’ve interfered between events three and four—had Danny’s loved ones still die at the Nasty Burger but convinced Danny himself not to go to Vlad. He could’ve popped in between events four and five and convinced Danny, right after moving in with Vlad, to not ask for a way to numb his emotional pain. However, Vlad proved to be a dubious source in the flashback of Dan’s origin story, and was typically too much of a wild card, so preventing Danny from moving in with Vlad at all is likely the safest option.

Ergo, either event four or five should’ve been treated as the important point that led to Dan’s existence. On top of that, Vlad’s role in event six proved he was partially responsible for Dan’s creation, but the rest of the episode outside of the flashback neglected this fact in favour of pushing the “Dan was all Danny’s fault” message.

(Begin Vlad’s unreliable narratorhood in 3...2...1...)

However, Future Vlad behaved like an unreliable narrator of the “Dan’s creation” flashback, so his explanation of events shouldn’t be taken at face value. Assuming the basic outline of events was trustworthy, however, the episode indicated to us that Vlad was roughly equally as responsible for Dan’s creation as Danny. He conceded to Danny’s desire to escape his emotions and responded with the halfa-splitting operation that caused Dan’s fusion.

He stretched the reality of the event to Present Danny when he exaggerated the delivery of some (if not most) of his narration lines in the flashback. It was most blatantly clear in the line where he inflated his importance to Danny after the tragedy, “With nowhere else to go, you came to me—the only person left on the planet who could possibly hope to understand your situation.” He verbally emphasised the words ‘me’ and ‘possibly’, and the phrases “the only person left on the planet” and “could possibly understand” were hyperbole in their own right. Another was the line, “No more painful human emotions to drag you down,” where he spoke the italicised words with overt disdain for Danny’s emotions. It could be interpreted simply as Vlad’s typical habit of speaking in a dramatised manner, rather than trying to make himself look good to Danny by stretching the truth. However, even if choosing to interpret Vlad’s delivery as the latter, he still skewed his recount through vagueness and omission in the literal content of his narration (when linked to the visuals that ran alongside his lines).

According to Future Vlad, Danny asked for his emotional pain to be taken away; and Vlad removed his ghost half to “[honour] [his] wishes,” while the shot changed from Vlad’s sympathetic face at the grieving Danny to the procedure with the Ghost Gauntlets. Future Vlad never explicitly stated whether it was Danny or him that decided removing Danny’s ghost half was the course of action to take, Vlad only explained that Danny “wanted to make the hurt go away”, and then the shot cut to Vlad removing Danny’s ghost half with the only explanation that he was acting in accordance with that wish.

On top of not explicitly saying whose idea it was, (though, with Vlad’s knowledge and experience with halfa research far exceeding Danny’s, it was almost certainly his) the episode did not explain how his logic leapt from “remove Danny’s emotional pain” to “remove Danny’s ghost half”, which was an insensible method to solve Danny’s problems.

The “no more human emotions” line indicated that his intention behind the procedure was to remove Danny’s human emotions, yet he knew that the procedure entailed removing Danny’s ghost half.

It made no sense, in universe, for Vlad to competently assume that removing Danny’s ghost half from him would work to remove an emotionality rooted in his human half (the episode overall, by the way Dan referred to human emotions and sentimentalities as a “humanity” he gave up, implied that it intended to frame the emotional attachment to Danny’s loved ones as part of his human half). If it could be chalked up to an external fault, like the lack of clear research into the procedure’s outcome, and not Vlad’s failure to realise the logical inconsistency, the episode needed to give evidence of this. Without that information, the only feasible assumptions were either that he wasn’t making any sense in-universe, he was supposed to be sensible but the episode’s writing didn’t make sense, or he had an ulterior motive for convincing Danny into going through with the operation. Either way, it was yet another part of Dan’s creation that Vlad was responsible for, not Danny, and the episode’s message was illogical to contradict this.

Through potentially exaggerating his sympathy for the alternate Danny in his verbal intonation, and blatantly failing to mention the details of why he chose removing Danny’s ghost half to fix a “human” problem, Vlad told his version of Dan’s birth in a way that would minimise his moral fault in the incident to Present Danny. His only logically feasible motivation for this was to hide further moral accountability for Dan’s creation than what we already saw in the face-value version of the flashback.

To summarise this entire sub-category of arguments, the episode was wrong to pin Dan’s existence on Danny cheating on the CAT (and even on losing his family, as the second half of the episode changed gears to), rather than his desire to remove/escape his emotions (even if the deaths resulted in the pain that he wanted to remove in the first place, which I shall explain later in Section D). It was also mistaken to portray Danny as the primary cause of Dan, rather than acknowledge that Vlad was equally (if not more), responsible than him.

Additionally, the fact that Vlad, as an in-universe character, tried to minimise his moral role/accountability in the physical causality of Dan’s creation by skirting around the truth in his retelling was something that the episode itself should’ve acknowledged or called out, through more reliable information from a third-person or other characters’ perspectives such as Danny, Dan’s or Clockwork’s—but it didn’t.

2. On top of physical responsibility for Dan, the episode was wrong to pin Danny with the moral blame and identity of Dan. It treated the two of them as essentially the same person, and portrayed Dan as just a Danny from the future who turned evil because of a combination of Danny’s potential evilness (potential to do “selfish/evil” things) and tragic circumstances. Considering Dan’s backstory, it made no sense for Danny to be the sole owner of either Dan’s immorality or identity/personhood.

Dan’s backstory told us that physically Danny wasn’t solely responsible for his creation, but the rest of the narrative still deeply connected Dan to Danny alone by treating Dan as what would happen if Danny let his pre-existing moral flaws take over him—that Dan’s villainy (or evil nature) came from Danny.

Clockwork referred to Danny Phantom as “grow[ing] up into the most evil ghost on the planet” in the cold open (which, given that Dan was a product of a fusion, was blatantly false.)

“The Ultimate Enemy” attempted to build up the idea that Danny had the potential for evil, and that Dan was him realising his own evil, in the scene where the trio entered Clockwork’s lair. As they watched Dan’s carnage through the observation window, Danny excitedly admired Dan’s Ghostly Wail, completely oblivious to the seriousness of the situation, and Sam called him out for not reading the room.

(Though, Sam’s condemnation of Dan’s villainy was extremely underwhelming—calling a world-destroyer and (presumable) mass murderer just “kind of a jerk” in a snarky tone did not do the severity of Dan’s actions any justice.)

When they confronted Clockwork, Danny scoffed at him to find just “one” evil thing he’d done. The shot then immediately focussed onto “examples” of Danny’s “evil” in the time window—first, Jazz finding out Danny was going to cheat the CATs (which, as established in point one, was not as morally significant as the episode tried to portray it—that shall be further elaborated later in Section D). After Tucker sassed at Clockwork, “[I] bet you can’t find two!”, the time window changed to Dan standing atop his destruction in the alternate future, and Clockwork replied, “How about two thousand?”—implying that Clockwork was referring to what Dan did in the future as at least part of the (supposedly numerous) evil things Danny did (or would do). This made no sense unless the episode was implying that Dan’s immorality was Danny’s own. However, this implication was incorrect, leaving Clockwork to state that he had seen countless instances of Danny Fenton/Phantom being evil with no valid examples to show for it whatsoever.

Dan’s atrocities had no weight as examples of Danny’s morality flaws due to the fact that Dan’s evil was not primarily Danny’s to begin with, creating a feedback loop of invalidation; evidence for the argument was invalid because its own validity was dependent on the validity of the very argument it was supposed to be supporting.

(Danny, despite the episode’s reluctance to be fair to him with its accusations of his “potential villainy”, was actually justified in asking this of Clockwork. You know there’s something wrong with your story when your self-centred, short-sighted teenage protagonist is righter than your supposedly all-knowing Master of Time in this situation.)

(Cheating on a test is not evil, Clockwork, try again.)

(Nope, sorry, Dan’s evil is not Danny’s “evil”; your argument is invalid.)

(I typically put the “improvements/fixes” part at the end of each point, but for the sake of its direct relevance to the aforementioned example, I’ll put it here to avoid structural confusion in the essay:

“The Ultimate Enemy”, for some reason decided that its reason/foreshadowing of Danny’s potential for evil had to be self-contained; ironically, almost all (sans a small few) of the episode’s examples of Danny’s moral flaws weren’t “evil” at all, and they would’ve been far better off using actual events of Danny showing potentially villainous traits from previous episodes. Danny may have been justified in asking Clockwork to name one evil thing he’d done, because that accusation had no basis at that point, but Clockwork’s response should’ve been to show previous instances in the series where Danny took advantage of others with his powers.

For example, imagine if in the episode, when Danny demanded, “Name one evil thing I’ve done!”, Clockwork’s time window had switched to moments like the end of “Maternal Instincts”, where he manipulated Vlad into lowering his guard, or his acts of overshadowing Dash for petty revenge in “Splitting Images” or “Reign Storm”? Not only were they more legitimate examples of morally corrupt characteristics—tricking people for his own gain/victory and abusing his powers to the detriment of others—it would’ve given such a significant episode in the series more continuity with the previous ones. In fact, the examples in two of those previous episodes resulted in Vlad pointing out that Danny was becoming more like him, as a way to use Vlad’s relationship as Danny’s nemesis/character foil for the sake of tension. “The Ultimate Enemy” could’ve used those examples in its own narrative to turn Dan into a proper payoff of this long-term build-up of Vlad’s whole “We’re not so different, you and I” thing going on with Danny.

Also, it would add to the thematic irony of Dan being a fusion of Danny and Vlad’s ghost halves, if that aspect of his backstory was not altered in a rewrite of TUE.)

Vlad owned Dan’s evil nature equally as much as (if not more than) Danny because Dan was also half-Vlad. However, the episode neglected to acknowledge this outside of a few seconds on Dan’s birth in the flashback. While explaining the scene of the two ghost halves fusing into Dan, Future Vlad’s most honest lines of narration (because they straightforwardly confessed he was morally accountable for Dan to Danny, and thus had no motivation to be a lie) explained that, “My [ghost half’s] evil side overwhelmed you”. This implied that the reason Dan turned out evil in the first place was that Vlad’s evil took over Danny’s mind during the fusion.

Given that we trust Vlad’s line, Vlad (or Plasmius, as Vlad’s ghost half) deserved most of the accountability for Dan’s lust for destruction and lack of a moral compass, not Danny. So, calling Dan “Danny’s evil future self” was only accurate in the literal sense of “this is what remained of Danny’s mind/existence in the future—his ghost half—even though it’s only a part of a larger fusion with another ghost, and this fusion is evil”. Dan was not a warning that “Danny was going to turn evil”, because Danny was not the primary source of Dan’s villainy.

In regards to overall personal identity, rather than just morality, Dan was also not “Danny’s evil future self” on account of the fact that he was not “Danny’s future self”, period. He shouldn’t have been an “older Danny” (or essentially the same person as Danny but older and evil), according to his backstory’s statement that he was half-Phantom, half-Plasmius. Yet, for some asinine reason, Dan only identified himself personally as “Danny” for the duration of the episode (without mention of Vlad).

After travelling to the past under Danny’s guise, Dan referred to Danny’s bedroom and face in the mirror as his own.

(Whoops--another image where I goofed the subtitles, this time in formatting...and MS Paint’s lack of layers makes redoing it an unnecessary pain. Sorry about that.)

When he met Sam and Tucker in the future, he explained his cold response to seeing them again as a result of “[surrendering his] human half a long time ago”. His singular human half. Not plural…because even Dan himself wanted to pretend that he wasn’t half Vlad, for some reason.

Perhaps it could be chalked up to people behaving differently in different social contexts; in that case, it was understandable that—even if he was part-Vlad—his Danny-side and memories influenced him the most in front of Danny’s friends…but that alone didn’t justify him stating that he only had one human half as a fact. The only other option that made in-universe sense was that it was a deceit/falsehood on Dan’s part, and therefore knowingly untrue. Perhaps Dan didn’t want to admit that he had more than one human half to Sam and Tucker—because he was not obliged to divulge that information to them—or that he preferred to mentally distance himself from Vlad’s human half because the latter was still alive, and separate from Dan. However, it was still untrue to link Dan and Danny together as people, but not Vlad, with the idea of only owning Danny’s human half.

The assumption that Dan was a future, evil Danny in person (and not also part-Vlad in person, or a new person from either of them entirely) implied that the fusion resulted in Plasmius’s mind giving his evil to Danny’s and then disappearing into the aether. It implied that a fusion of two people resulted in a powered-up being that was solely one of them psychologically, in order to purport that Danny (or, at least Phantom as his ghost half) was still Danny in sense of self for the last ten years in the alternate future. This contradicted the more logically valid implication that Plasmius’s mind or identity still existed as a component inside Dan, and Dan was at least both Danny and Vlad mentally.

Vlad explained in the flashback, “[Vlad’s] evil ghost half mixed with [Danny’s].” The general interpretation of “mixing” implied that the two ghost halves merged together into a new being and their traits and minds blended together. His identity should, theoretically, be either a half-and-half joining of the two halfas, or a whole new person with Vlad and Danny’s ghost halves as mere fusion ingredients. Ten years of existence and experience after the initial fusion would also, theoretically, give Dan enough time to develop this new mixed mind into his own individual sense of self beyond who/what either of Danny or Vlad were as people (prior to the ghost half fusion). In that case, Dan was not Danny’s “future self” in identity, and had little reason to identify Danny’s face, room and family as “his old [life]” (or, at least his only one).

The next most obvious theory (about Dan’s psychological makeup as a fusion) is that one half was more dominant than the other during the fusion, leading to Dan to become primarily just one of them in identity. That dominant one had to have been Danny, based on how Dan identified himself in the episode, but that wouldn’t make sense. Phantom taking full control of the fusion and assimilating Plasmius into himself required that a grief-stricken fourteen year old was somehow capable of winning against a more experienced forty-something in a battle of minds, thoroughly enough to the point of absorbing the latter. Considering that Phantom was mentally weak enough to be the one “overwhelmed” by Plasmius’s evil (a single facet of Plasmius’s larger mind) almost immediately, that hypothesis seems unlikely. The notion of Phantom overwhelming Plasmius in the fusion to gain dominance, and Plasmius being the one to overwhelm him to turn him evil, contradict each other. Ergo, Dan being a mix of both Phantom and Plasmius was the most likely (and sensible) outcome of the fusion.

In that case, the episode was thoughtless and inaccurate to treat Dan as “Danny’s future self who became a villain”. Dan was not inherently linked to Danny in either the majority of his morality or his identity, due to the part Vlad played in Dan’s creation, and his mental component in Dan’s fusion.

2.5.A notable counterpoint, for the sake of not one-sidedly flipping all of the fault for Dan onto Vlad:

To be fair—as the idea of solely blaming Vlad would also be inaccurate to what Dan’s origin story showed—I should acknowledge a piece of evidence explicitly indicating that Danny still contributed some of his own darkness to Dan’s villainy, albeit less than Vlad. Once separated from his human half, Phantom ripped out and fused with Vlad’s ghost half of his own volition, all with a malicious grin on his face.

However, there was no clear motivation or reason for the separated Phantom to fuse with Plasmius (the physical cause of Dan that Danny/Phantom could be blamed for) —in fact, it made no sense for there to be any premeditated intention for Phantom to fuse with him, since he couldn’t have known that fusion with another halfa’s isolated ghost half was even possible at that point; it was an untried, never-seen-before method, hardly likely to mentally occur to Danny in the first place. Phantom resorted to attacking Vlad, stealing the Ghost Gauntlets and pulling out Plasmius for some unknown reason, but ghost-half fusion could not have sensibly been it. The Gauntlet attack simply demonstrated that Phantom took ill-willed pleasure from the act of hurting or depowering Vlad. After removing Vlad’s ghost half, fusing with it was the second step. Danny could be held responsible for his ghost half explicitly harbouring malice/potential evil in the attack (and his ghost half’s response to being removed was part of Danny’s responsibility in Dan’s creation), but that wouldn’t explain the crucial next step of the fusion itself.

This is where my ideas for potential improvements for the story of “The Ultimate Enemy” come in, as the exact extent of Danny’s contribution to Dan (in physical responsibility and mentality) wasn’t entirely clear—outside of this explicit evidence of Phantom’s facial expression. This uncertainty leaves the room for a do-over of the narrative to ask a lot of questions about how physically and morally accountable for Dan’s birth and evilness Danny actually was.

We could assume implicit evidence that Danny had some sort of inner darkness which contributed to Dan, even if only the minority, from the possibility that his grief at the loss of his loved ones (as well at helplessness at not being able to do anything to save them, and low evaluation of his own worth as a person) led to buried malice, anger and a desire for power to compensate.

Based on how splitting halfas apart worked in “Identity Crisis”, it made sense that Phantom had a sense of hostility and motivation to hurt Vlad once separated from Danny in “The Ultimate Enemy”. When Danny was split in half the first time, the halves took on the mental characteristics of the whole Danny’s momentary intents and desires. When Danny wanted his ghost half to do all the hero work so his human half could have the time to have fun, his ghost half took on an exaggerated hero personality and his human half an irresponsible teenager personality. Assuming this logic consistently determines the split halves’ personalities each time, and the fact that Danny’s desires in the alternate future revolved around escaping his emotional pain, it was logical that one of the split halves inherited a condensed majority of Danny’s pain (in this case, the ghost half), while the other half (the human one) was innocently blind to most of Danny’s grief and self-hatred—and that the suffering half acted out aggressively or malevolently as a result.

However, since we could logically assume that fusing with Plasmius was not the initial reason Phantom removed him from Vlad (and we assume the fusion was a spur-of-the-moment decision that occurred to him afterwards), why did he remove Plasmius in the first place? Was he intending to spite Vlad after all the grief he caused Danny in their rivalry? Was it a sense of inferiority telling him to tear Vlad down from his superior position? Was it to avoid letting Vlad stay a possible physical threat to Danny? There is such a large gap here, one could brainstorm countless possible motivations.

Furthermore, if that only covered his motivation to remove Plasmius, then what made him decide to fuse with him? Was he attempting to possess Plasmius as one ghost half trying to possess another for some reason? Was it internal panic? Was it a hunger for power pushing him to seize the opportunity that opened up? Why didn’t/couldn’t Plasmius fight Phantom off in the fusion scene?

These questions could be explored if the story of “The Ultimate Enemy” was redone. Present Danny, the Danny whose point of view we saw the episode from (rather than the Alternate Danny) hadn’t experienced the Dan future himself, so he didn’t know what was going through his alternate self’s head (human or ghost) during Dan’s creation. How much of it was his fault? How much of it wasn’t? How did he fill in the holes in the story Future Vlad told to him based on his own insecurities, and what did he blame himself for?

For that matter, why not get present Vlad wrapped up in it too? Have him take responsibility for what is HIS. If not, the episode should’ve at least acknowledged that Dan was not entirely “Danny’s evil”, and made it clear that he was cleaning up both his and Vlad’s collective mess by himself. If the message of the evil future self being Danny corrupted to the side of evil was so necessary for the episode, then simply remove the fusion plot entirely from Dan’s origin and have Danny become a villain by his own moral corruption. It weakened the impact of the future-self villain being a warning of “what the hero should avoid becoming” by having the main character only become evil by fusing with an already malevolent character.

3. The Observants’ conclusion that they had to kill Danny to save the world from Dan didn’t make sense, due to Vlad being primarily responsible for Dan’s evilness—but the episode, instead of acknowledging this inanity, actually reinforced the opposite.

Having now established that Vlad was half (if not more) at fault for Dan’s evil than Danny, the plot to kill Danny in the episode lost any of the ground it had to stand on.

(Nope...no, he didn’t have to.)

It was illogical for the Observants to assume killing Danny was the best way to stop Dan from existing when killing Vlad would equally achieve this (not to mention that either of these options were overkill, in the presence of the intervention methods mentioned in Section A). Without Vlad, Dan could not exist either. Eliminating Vlad would stop his continuous crimes against both worlds, and let Danny live to continue doing the good he’d done. After the events of “Reign Storm”, a large part of the Ghost Zone knew that Danny had saving Amity Park, and the entire Ghost Zone, under his belt—if an entire wasteland civilisation like the Far Frozen came to worship Danny for his victory against Pariah Dark (as shown in season three’s “Infinite Realms”).

(For that matter, where were the Observants hounding Clockwork to get on Vlad’s troublesome ass when he tried to steal the Crown of Fire and the Ring of Rage in “Reign Storm”, if Pariah Dark was so dangerous?)

If they were being somewhat rational, it was possible that they chose Danny as Vlad’s less powerful counterpart, and an easier target—even though they delegated the task off to Clockwork because intervention wasn’t their job, and they clearly acknowledged Clockwork’s power and competence to some degree. The Observants openly referred to Clockwork as the master of time while shirking their responsibility for fixing the future onto him, so whether or not killing Vlad would be too difficult for themselves would be irrelevant, since they made it Clockwork’s problem and became backseat commentators. Though, Clockwork would’ve probably foreseen Vlad’s importance in Danny’s emotional growth as his nemesis and also kept him alive anyway—but from a purely logical standpoint, it made little sense to execute Danny over Vlad, if they ever needed to kill anyone at all.

To be honest, the episode could’ve used the invalidity of the Observants’ plan to paint their incompetence more, expanding on Clockwork’s disdain for them and how he told the audience they “just observe”. However, to do that, the episode itself would’ve had to actually portray the Observants’ plan (not just the Observants themselves, but their actual plan to kill Danny itself) as nonsensical. The episode never did, however, as it had Clockwork—the character portrayed as bolder and wiser than the Observants—reinforce their proposition as worth trying and go along with their request for Danny’s demise. He sent two ghosts to attack Danny (although the fight with Boxed Lunch was more of a moral test about giving Danny the CAT answers, rather than an attempt on his life, Danny “failed” that moral test before Clockwork sent Skulktech after him—so, the latter at least counted as a potential hit on Danny) to the extent of attempting to kill Danny himself on the last attempt. That Clockwork went along with the Observants’ plan showed that the episode saw the plan as reasonable, despite its illogicality.

(While there is a possible argument for Clockwork’s knowledge of how the episode would end—insinuating that he knew Danny would never actually end up dying—justifying why he went along with the plan in the first place, the next section of the essay shall tackle that. Since Clockwork is the Master of Time, and the issues with his character were heavily intertwined with the effects the time travel lore had on the plot, that shall be addressed in Category C, the section covering the mess created by the time-travel in the episode.)

...actually, that just gave me an idea. You know what would be interesting, if a little too much to content to stuff into the narrative? Having an Observant character distinguished as their own individual, who doubts the other Observants’ unreasonable decisions and becomes a rogue element to the rest of the council, directly intervening in the timeline themselves. The rogue Observant could abandon the council of Observants to side with Clockwork, and characterise Clockwork by having him change his globalised impression of the Observants to understand this new, non-conformist one as an ally. Or, perhaps the Observant plays a more compassionate foil to Clockwork, choosing to himself save Danny’s life from the ghost attacks Clockwork sent after him?)

#danny phantom #danny phantom analysis #danny phantom essay #the ultimate enemy #danny fenton #vlad masters #dan phantom #the observants #danny phantom clockwor #time to get into one of the longest sections of this essay hoo boy #I apologise for the verbosity

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wexhappyxfew · 3 years ago

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i literally choked on my pizza when i saw your writing and analyzing questions post, I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS!! first of all, what sort of process do you go through when creating characters? what kind of things do you take into consideration when creating them? i’m fascinated because creating characters is far from easy, especially when you’re creating someone like agent mortem! i’m always interested to know what the writer’s thought process was when creating a new character!

okay, so secondly, i wouldn’t say i’m having trouble with keeping all my planning organised and ‘precise’ in a way, but it’s really not easy 😅 i was wondering what kind of processes you go through when planning, whether you have like a specific structure or a set of steps to follow, or if you just kind of roll with it? at the moment when i plan it’s okay and it makes sense, but it’s literally just 4 or 5 pages of really chunky paragraphs which makes it really difficult to pick out the events again when i come to needing the plan to help me. i don’t really know if you do anything different, but if there is any way you know of that i could keep it more organised and easy to follow, that would be great :)

i’ll keep the last ones a little shorter because this ask is already looking veryyy long — what have you enjoyed writing about natia, what struggles have you faced and what have you learned? and basically the same with agent mortem if that’s possible :) i have asked a LOT of questions in this, so don’t feel like you have to answer them all because it will probably take quite a while 😅 anyway, thank you for putting up with my endless questions, and i hope you have a good day <33

ROSE AH HELLO MY FRIEND!!!! <333 sorry ive just gotten to this omg! it’s been sitting here for a little while but i’ve just had so much going on right now and wanted to make sure when i answered that my *full attention* was put on this! (because i’ve been very excited to answer this ESPECIALLY as i see agent mortem questions poking up on here and that just makes me even more hype!!! :D enjoy! <3

Ooooo this is a cool question! I’ve been asked it before but I feel with different characters and such, it always seems to fluctuate for me at least? In the sense, it’s almost never the same process for me in the developmental stages of a character haha! Sometimes I get characteristics first hand, or sometimes a certain scene pops up that just makes the character click and I can build from there, or sometimes, it’s just a last name or a first name that I work with and suddenly have an idea for!

For example, since we’re on the general topic of Landslide, I’ll talk about some things I did when creating specifically Natia. The “Natia” who is currently portrayed in the fic, was not always really like that. Natia initially was not a SOE Agent/Polish Resistance Fighter and instead a Dutch Resistance Member who would meet with Easy in Episode 4. I always sort of knew Natia, in whatever form she was, would meet Easy in Episode 4, but I wasn’t sure how, so the building in the first 17 chapters was the toughest part to come.

I did heavily feel the Polish were underrepresented in terms of the situation of the war along with everything that happened in the Warsaw Uprising and so I felt it was important to see if I could do something with that and that’s really where Natia came into play!

Natia means “hope” essentially and something I really like doing with her character is to parallel or juxtapose different ideas together, to continue on this sort of theme of her being a quite ominous and ambiguous character — you get the general sense of what her morals are, but in certain points it’s questionable. Morally-ambiguous characters have always been fascinating to me, especially female morally-ambiguous characters and so creating Natia in that respect I felt would be interesting to see what I could do!

Something major that I’ve slowly began to take into consideration with characters more and more, is the sort of general theme I want to be present with them — what’s that goal i that they are moving towards in the end and what’s the them surrounding it? For Natia it’s a multitude of things; family, revenge, being silenced, numb, grief, mentor vs protégé, lone wolf etc….the list could truly go on! And with these basic sort of ideas and themes, I can then move on from there and expand.

Why did she want REVENGE? Because the enemy killed her FAMILY, which is extremely important to her, and she wants to feel some sort of REDEMPTION for them.

Why was she BEING SILENCED? Because of the *past* conflict of the HARMFUL MENTOR VS SILENCED PROTÉGÉ situation that occurred between Agent Mortem and herself, where she allowed herself to be silenced by someone who abused the SUDDEN POWER he never had before in his life, ultimately leading to her continued issues of TRUST that she would meet throughout.

Why is she NUMB? Because at a fairly young age she experienced heavy and intense GRIEF that struck unforgivably at a time where it seemed things were safe. To rip something from a character, especially the main character, like FAMILY which is extremely important, you pull at the heart strings and it makes that character move forward on a quest for that in a way, ultimately by the end of the fic. (Basically you up they are least get a semblance of that lost thing, found again by the end)

Why is she a LONE WOLF? Because of the MENTOR VS PROTÉGÉ situation yet again, where she was taught to rely strictly on herself and no one else and so when TRUST and COMPANIONSHIP and TEAMWORK were introduced to her character, she didn’t know how to cope because she had been so desensitized to the ways of Agent Mortem that working back in the morals of family and friends was a challenge in its own respect.

It’s sort of a like a ripple effect if you think about it and that’s what helps me eventually move forward and develop the character arc I want to take place. She’s this way because of this — sort of like cause and effect. It’s really helped me out with major scenes or plot holes that have risen throughout the fic!

AGREED! Writing in general is not an easy feat and now including mind you ORIGINAL CHARACTERS, you’re literally, essentially, creating human beings from scratch and giving them characteristics, a backstory, trauma if you wish, friends and family, people they love, people they hate, morals, standards EVERYTHING! ITS INSANE! AH AND AGENT MORTEM! I’m so very glad that you brought him up, because his creation definitely stemmed directly from the want to experiment with the relationship of failed mentor vs protégé, entirely. I wanted a foil to Natia that was not directly with her all the time. Mortem plays such a MASSIVE role in her story and yet any interactions between the two are either from her mind or from memories and that’s just such a fun way to play around with their dynamic! (I just finished the creation of his backstory and character arc I want him to take and it’s only made me even more excited for what’s to ultimately come for him as well as Natia!)

A song that HEAVILY represents their dynamic is Ghost by Marvin Brooks (2WEI) and I’ll explain why. Even though Mortem is not always inherently *with* Natia, he still is a huge factor of her life, and still heavily controlling many aspects of her life such as recurring memories, reactions, and how she is also conditioned to react to certain things as well. He is essentially a “ghost” who is “haunting” Natia and I feel that’s an interesting take on their connection because they’re two people who clearly had a power struggle and a difference of opinions of multiple things and that just makes it so incredibly interesting to write!

song:

OOOOOO good question!!! So many people have such different ways of approaching story writing and planning and drafting and writing and editing and it’s honestly amazing!! I will say, I’m not an excessive planner or even a real great planner with writing, I never really have, and even as I’ve developed my writing and learned that “it’s okay to slow down”, or “it’s okay to take time for different portions to provide a deeper focus”, I still have not been someone to plan out every bit of my writing.

Reason being is I enjoy seeing where I can take the story in that time and place. Maybe if I’m doing a quick little writing segment and suddenly this idea just appears and hits me, I work it into the fic and it takes it a whole new direction and I end up not being super upset about it because it just…it works! And of course, this is not how other people operate and I have every respect for people who plan and have every detail laid out and figured out and just….completely and utterly planned to the dot. Lile kudos to people who genuinely get the planning all cleaned up before even writing, truly.

I just finalized Agent Mortem’s backstory and where I want his character arc to go and I’ve had him as a character since August of last year LOL! But ya know sometimes, I sit and I think back and go, maybe I wasn’t ready at that time to develop him completely yet because I, the writer, didn’t understand him enough to and I had to write more of him to be able to get a grasp of who he was and his character (and just about everything else!) and that’s okay!!! :)

Going with this idea I just stated above — the 4 or 5 pages of info — KEEP IT MY FRIEND!!! I swear, half the reason ideas even come to me is simply because I just write a big info dump that has all my little ideas somewhere inside and will ALWAYS be there. I recommend maybe taking a day though - away from focusing on writing or editing - and just picking that apart. (That’s what I did the other day and it helped me out MAJORLY! and it was worth it in the end!) Maybe keep the original 4-5 pages and then copy and paste the same thing in another doc so you always have the original!

And then just go through and split ideas apart! If you start reading and see it moving into another realm of headspace of ideas, just press enter and separate the two — you didn’t delete it, it’s still there and still intact! It’s just easier to look at now because instead of two, jumbled and completely different ideas, you now have two paragraphs and portions of text that relate to their own respective idea. It definitely makes it an easier pill to swallow when trying to get yourself organized!!

This really helped me when I was in my beginning stages of figuring out Landslide ESPECIALLY the first 17ish chapter where Natia was not in contact with Easy yet. I’ve explained it before but those chapters are there because we are seeing her final days with the resistance in Warsaw and how she ultimately ends up with Easy PLUS we see who she is as a character by herself and how she is not merely an extension off of Easy, but her own character, her own person. She has her own story and her own morals and ways of going about her life that don’t even relate to Easy. Their paths just happened to cross!! :)

By getting those first 17ish chapters planned, not extreme planning though I will admit, half the scenes were very much thought up on the spot for example like Natia driving to Munich in disguise or the introduction of Zdzich — two very important scenes that show us something about Natia. (1) She’s willing to go to extreme lengths for the people she loves to ensure that in the end they are safe, even if it means sacrificing herself and (2) she has trouble realizing that there are people out there that genuinely care for her, a connection to her ultimate, unruly and upsetting past. And the best part about it is THESE WEREN’T EVEN PLANNED! So sometimes, just let the story take the reigns and your mind and just guide you through it. Sometimes it is for the best :)

If you have your basic ideas and concepts and themes for how you want your fic to eventually go, the scenes for me most of the time just appear I guess when they should. Sometimes even in the times I'm not writing, I sit theorizing and questioning and thinking and developing ideas in my mind and it's a real good exercise, so when you get back to writing, you already know where you want the fic leading in the end!

MAN I LOVE THIS QUESTION. Anytime I can provide some meta or give some insight to Natia who is just one of the best characters I’ve gotten the pleasure of working with, I’ll gladly answer!

The thing I enjoy writing about Natia the most I feel, and I’ll probably always say this, is her complexity — as a writer, her character orders a healthy challenge for me that I gladly have accepted! You don’t know everything about her as a reader and as you read each chapter, that’s how you slowly uncover and discover what she hid about herself to protect herself. There’s so many different aspects of her that I could discuss truly!! (There has been so many parts that I’ve scrapped because I read through and just think “Man this doesn’t seem like Natia!”. She’s tricky sometimes to stake down exactly how she would react because of her past and her trauma and how long she’s been in war, but I just LOVE it!)

Many different aspects of her character though, come from her past and that’s what makes her interesting. I’ve really enjoyed working with the ideology of “Chekov’s Gun”, a writing device that can be used, with how I will mentioned something and it almost might seem out of the blue, yet later it all just makes sense?! When the flashback is revealed or a small portion of her past is finally allowing *light* in. It's a device I've used with Natia that has just really helped to develop her story at the pace I want it to be revealed! :D

For example, the OCEAN is mentioned many times. I make constant reference to the WAVES, the RECESSION of them from time to time, the comparison of the OCEAN both ABOVE and BELOW surface — all of that sorta stuff! For her character, it seems a bit out of place. She’s COLD. She’s NUMB. She’s BROKEN. What does an open body of water consuming at least 70% of the Earth have to do with an OC based in Warsaw, Poland?

This is where the importance of her PAST will play it’s role, as it has a major INFLUENCE on her and her CHARACTER and her MORALS. One of the main reasons the OCEAN is inherently connected to Natia is because of her PAST and one of those main reasons is AGENT MORTEM and her TRAINING, especially WATER training. I can’t comment further on this though as readers have only touched the tip of the iceberg for the use of the OCEAN and it’s IMPORTANCE so far in this fic! (Ask me again about it once this fic is finished up for the most part, unless….by Part 4 readers understand why!)

Natia just remains a character who constantly is developing and changing inside my head - where I want her path to ultimately end up leading by the end of the fic, where I want both her mental head space vs emotional head space should be and etc. So many portions of this fic are dealt specifically on her internal monologue and how she calculates and problem solves from that portion of her sort of *engagement* within the conflict. There never seems to be a dull moment when writing her!

Another thing I really have enjoyed about writing Natia is her clashing personality traits that make her interesting to write in both different scenarios and reactions. She's stubborn yet humble. She's numb and cold but internally extremely caring and giving and filled with these bottled up emotions. She's mentally strong yet she's been through so much and let the war take so much. She never complains about what she's doing, but she's lost nearly everyone she loves. She's a fighter in this war and refuses to back down from a battle she know she can wage, but the second she is pulled from the aspect of war, things crash and burn around her. Just even these few combating sort of things, really show her character and what, through writing, has slowly developed! They always lay around in the back of my mind and it's one of the main things I remind myself when I write Natia all the tme.

I think one of the most important things I've learned from both writing and creating a character like Natia is that (1) it's okay to ask for help, about anything, literally anything. You don't have to confine everything to yourself and build up this immense pressure to do what you must to continue moving forward. It's okay to have people there to help you and support you. (2) It's okay to be strong alone and even if you seem to be the only one on the current path you're are on, it does not mean you are wrong. it can still lead to the right destination in the end!

Oooo okay! AGENT MORTEM!! I am totally down to chat about some things I've loved to write with him with and some challenges I've discovered, but as far as what I've learned from him, I will be holding off and could answer that when the entire fic is both completed and then updated on platforms....just because ;) don't want to give away any spoilers haha! <3

Something I've enjoyed about writing and crafting Agent Mortem is letting him remain as mysterious and secretive as he is for so long. Initially, I can't even begin to recall what his character would be like even a year ago, but seeing where he has developed now, I'm really happy with where he is. He's mysterious, he's shadowed, he seems like a figure in the background, a past mentor who is half deranged and lost his mind with a background with so substance. It makes for such a fascinating way to begin to reveal his past! (something I've began to insert into part 4 of Landslide and man I'm just so HYPE!)

I feel I'm excited simply because he's finally getting the time and moment he deserves to finally explain and show himself as to what has occurred. There's so many fractured and disconnected parts of what is currently going on with Natia and her connection to both Agent Mortem and then Death is tossed in the mix and it seems this big complicated mess of 'how' Agent Mortem got to be this way, 'why' he does a thing such as this, just different and varying aspects such as that. it makes for those big final reveals to all be even more worth it!

He has been quite the challenge though I will admit. There's so many perspectives he could quite possibly be viewed from and his *character* + morals/values could be pulled in a various amount of ways as well. Making sure he accurately comes across the way I want him to both appear and come across to the reader and to myself has definitely been tricky. He's not as easy as suspected, you know, not just a 'dude who had a bad day and went insane in the end', there's a whole multitude of levels and reasons and a deep, heavy and traumatizing background starting from his birth really (which is a whole other story). Managing and balancing that all in one has definitely been something I've had to keep on top of and monitor but I feel has really been worth the challenge in the end. Because at the end of the day, I'm someone looking to constantly challenge myself.

And a good challenge, whether it be writing or academics or a workout, is healthy and GOOD! That's what Landslide in a whole has really shown me, to challenge yourself daily to see where you can push yourself and your imagination and creativity, just to see where you can even go!! it's exciting and refreshing!

Thank you so much for this wonderful ask Rose! I appreciate it more than ANYTHING as you well know, and I know it's taken me *quite* some time to answer, but I've been working on it for weeks now and finally got it out because it was ready! I really wanted to take my time with it and develop it to its full potential in the end and I feel I have (without giving away any spoilers haha!) As always, please know if you have any further questions regarding Natia Filipska, Agent Mortem, Death (along with other characters of Landslide), writing, the process (my own included), tips for writing/planning, or just anything else in general, I will always be happy to help in anyway I can! You're always welcome, anyone always is!!! <3333 Thank you again, I had so much fun doing this more than anything! :D

#writing #writing tips #band of brothers #bob fic #band of brothers fic #also hello landslide day tmr and it’s a good one hehe :d #natia filipska #agent mortem #death (character)#basic aid on characters + writing/planning #plus gathering thoughts #thank you again for this rose! i had so much fun! <3333

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snarktheater · 4 years ago

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Ready Player Two — Opening Cutscene & Chapter 0

Hello again.

It’s been a while. I haven’t been active on this blog since, fittingly enough, Ready Player One. I was going to do this sooner—even had an alarm set up and everything—but then, it turns out, I’m feeling so much negativity about the world in general that a book just pales in comparison.

Seriously, I had to scrap this post’s entire intro because it’s not even 2020 anymore as I write this. And you know, maybe that’s for the best. I’m not really in the mood for doom and gloom and bitching anymore. I uninstalled Twitter from my phone a while back, I’ve been doing good at my daily writing sprints, my biggest fanfic project concluded on a positive note from people I didn’t even realize had been following it for years.

So I don’t know what this is going to be like. My commentary, I mean; I’ve heard echoes of what the book is like, so I’m not expecting a surprise there.

The book opens right after the end of Ready Player One, in a “Cutscene” where Wade recounts to us what happened after he won Halliday’s contest. It also assumes you remember exactly who the main characters of the book are, which is a bold move for a sequel that came out almost a decade after the original.

Technically, I could just look up the details I’m fuzzy about. But also, I think it’s more authentic if I don’t. I trust my memory enough that if I’m wrong, it’ll be in subtle enough ways that it’ll almost be a private jokes between all of us. An “if you know, you know” sort of error system. And I don’t think there’s anything more true to the spirit of this book than that.

Shoto had flown back home to Japan to take over operations at GSS’s Hokkaido division.

So Wade starts his tenure with nepotism. Wasn’t Shoto really young? Why is he qualified to run anything?

Aech was enjoying an extended vacation in Senegal, a country she’d dreamed of visiting her whole life, because her ancestors had come from there.

You know what, I’m not touching “send the token black character back to Africa.” This isn’t my lane.

And Samantha had flown back to Vancouver to pack up her belongings and say goodbye to her grandmother, Evelyn.

Why is she saying goodbye? Why, she’s moving to Columbus to be with Wade, of course! It’s not like there was anything else in her life. Was there? And why isn’t she referred to as Art3mis? I’m pretty sure Wade found out all of their offline names in the last book, and the inconsistency mildly bothers me.

These three sentences are back to back, by the way. Someone—I forget who—once described Ready Player One as a book that’s fun to write a wiki about, because it’s got fun concepts to summarize about until you realize that all the emotional connective tissue you need to turn a list of things into a story is missing, and that’s roughly how this first page feels.

Hell, the first line of the book is Wade telling us he remained offline for nine whole days after winning the contest, but by the end of the second paragraph we’re already to him logging back into the OASIS to "distract himself from [his and Samantha’s] reunion.

I’ll give Ernest Cline one thing: it feels like he wrote this opening nine days after the first book and did about as much maturing as a teenage boy would do between the two books.

Way more time is spent describing Wade’s OASIS rig, or the in-game planet where the climax of the last book happened, than anything else in this introduction. He is immediately greeted by a crowd of adoring fans who have been waiting over a week for him to come back in the game, because they’re all grateful that our protagonist and his friends restored their avatars after they were annihilated by the Sixers.

You’d think the adoring fans would serve some kind of purpose, or that something would happen, but no. Wade immediately goes “ew, people” and teleports away, since he essentially has ultimate powers within the game. With a caveat: the powers are actually coming from the Robes of Anorak he’s wearing, and I’m mentioning that in the hopes that it will pay off sometime in the book’s future, assuming Cline at least learned to do that. But still, let’s not skip too fast the fact that we introduced that crowd of adoring fans for no other purpose than to tell us they’re out there, because it fits right in with the last book’s attempts at saying as little as humanly possible in as many words as possible.

Anyway, Wade went back into Anorak’s study, where he arbitrarily checks out the Easter Egg he got at the end of the last book, and finds an inscription on it. I was dreading another riddle, but no, it’s just straight-up instructions to a vault in the GSS archives, so Wade logs off and goes to check it out.

Of course Halliday had put [the archives] [on the 13th floor]. In one of his favorite TV shows, Max Headroom, Network 23’s hidden research-and-development lab was located on the thirteenth floor. And The Thirteenth Floor was also the title of an old sci-fi film about virtual reality, released in 1999, right on the heels of both The Matrix and eXistenZ.

I’m equally shocked that it took two whole pages (on my ereader) to get to the first slew of references, and that one of these references is from 1999. I didn’t know we were allowed to think of anything that isn’t the 80s. Speaking of which, I’ll spare you the whole paragraph, but the book does feel the need to explain why it’s vault 42.

Inside the vault, there’s another egg containing a super-fancy and advanced OASIS headset. The egg also has a video monitor that plays a video message from James Halliday shortly before his death.

But despite his condition, he hadn’t used his OASIS avatar to record this message like he had with Anorak’s Invitation. For some reason, he’d chosen to appear in the flesh this time, under the brutal, unforgiving light of reality.

That oh-so-important message? An infodump about the headset’s working. He called it an OASIS Neural Interface, ONI for short. It basically lets you experience the OASIS through all your senses with sensory input just like the real thing, you know, that thing Wade had to get a fancy suit and massive rig to do in the first book. And yes, Wade does spend a paragraph or two comparing it to other works of science fiction. Of course he does.

More importantly, it also records all the sensory input into a separate file, which can then be replayed over to re-experience said sensations, or live someone else’s experiences. Halliday tries to frame it as a tool to generate communication and empathy, seemingly all without acknowledging the potential creepiness of that. But hey. Who knows. Maybe that’s because this is the setup stage, and it’ll pay off eventually.

I also wondered about the name Halliday had chosen for his invention. I’d seen enough anime to know that oni was also a Japanese word for a giant horned demon from the pits of hell.

Add “reducing Japan to anime” to the list of things the book has failed to improve upon. By the way, the narration insisted on spelling out ONI letter by letter earlier, so it’s weird to make that link now. It’s also just kind of inelegant to just tell us “this is the symbolism behind the name”, but that’s just the sort of thing I’ve come to expect from this book.

Anyway, the reason Halliday kept this for his successor to find is he wants Wade to test out the technology and decide if humanity is ready for it. Why Halliday thinks the most glorified pop culture trivia / video game competition qualifies you for such a decision should be a problem, but sadly, a lot of billionaires have said and done a lot of dumb and eerily similar things in the past few years since I read Ready Player One, so actually, I can’t fault the book for that one. Tragically, our fates really are in the hands of people who should rightfully be cartoon villains.

To his credit, Wade does question Halliday’s motives in keeping this under wraps at all rather than releasing it himself. So hey, maybe it really is setting something up.

Wade goes back to his office with the ONI, and we’re treated with this lovely piece of narration:

I was grateful that Samantha wasn’t there. I didn’t want to give her the opportunity to talk me out of testing the ONI. Because I was worried she might try to, and if she did, she would’ve succeeded. (I’d recently discovered that when you’re madly in love with someone they can persuade you to do pretty much anything.)

There’s a lot to unpack about the implications this has for their relationship, but it’s way too early in the book for me to editorialize when one character hasn’t even been on the page yet. So I’ll just leave it here for the record. Hopefully you see the problem without me needing to point it out anyway. If not, feel free to hit my inbox.

So Wade, confident in the fact that Halliday would have warned him if there were any risks to using the ONI, decides to try it out. Even though he immediately follows up that statement with this:

According to the ONI documentation, forcibly removing the headset while it was in operation could severely damage the wearer’s brain and/or leave them in a permanent coma. So the titanium-reinforced safety bands made certain this couldn’t happen. I found this little detail comforting instead of unsettling. Riding in an automobile was risky, too, if you didn’t wear your seatbelt…

Wade. My dude. What the fuck is this simile. And why don’t you see that maybe a machine where you’re forcibly trapping yourself inside a virtual reality might be dangerous? Hell, when I said this was setting something up, I was expecting something vaguely interesting about the potential breach of privacy, or how you don’t need to literally walk in someone’s shoes to feel empathy for them, or anything substantial, but now I’m worried it’ll just end up as “man, sometimes science fiction machines will scramble your brain, isn’t that weird”?

Like, I don’t know, to me “it will put you in a coma” sounds like a good reason for Halliday not to release the ONI. Maybe we can still make it into a commentary on how corporations will sell stuff they know is directly harmful if it can make them a profit. Who knows.

The book waffles on about more risks, and the mechanics of how the ONI activates, and the warning disclaimer when it does turn on. Specifically, there’s a time limit of twelve consecutive hours, after which you’ll be automatically logged out, because yes, using the thing for too long can also cause brain damage.

Gregarious Simulation Systems will not be held responsible for any injuries caused by improper use of the OASIS Neural Interface.

See, now there’s the sort of thing that could be a source for commentary, but no, instead it’s thrown in there like it’s nothing and Wade glosses over the entire warning, and instead keep wondering why Halliday didn’t just release the ONI if even the safety disclaimers were in place.

By the way: this whole system has apparently gone through several independent human trials already, so I’m finding it hard to imagine that it’s actually a secret Halliday took to the grave as Wade says. Unless he also had everyone involved in those trials killed afterwards. Or maybe they all ended up with brain damage which rendered them incapable of talking about it.

And before you think I’m being unfair and maybe we’re supposed to understand that ourselves even if the protagonist doesn’t, I’ll remind you that the book didn’t trust its reader to know what the number 42 is a reference to, or what an oni is, even though I don’t think anyone in the target audience wouldn’t know about these two things.

There’s also the fact that, since this book came out, a video game did release with a scene intentionally designed to cause seizures, and it had countless fans flocking to defend it over that fact. So you’ll have to excuse me if I’m not assuming this book’s stance on whether your video game console causes brain damage and possibly coma is actually a bad thing, or just an acceptable risk.

Wade certainly seems to think so, since he agrees to the terms of service.

As the timestamp faded away, it was replaced by a short message, just three words long—the last thing I would see before I left the real world and entered the virtual one. But they weren’t the three words I was used to seeing. I—like every other ONI user to come—was greeted by a new message Halliday had created, to welcome those visitors who had adopted his new technology: READY PLAYER TWO

Well now that’s just silly.

And that’s our opening cutscene. And while this post is already long enough, I feel like I have to go on to chapter 0, because it feels like barely anything has happened so far. We didn’t even introduce any new character motivation or conflict, or a mystery to set the plot into motion, unless I’m supposed to think “why didn’t Halliday release this?” counts.

So Wade is back into the OASIS, and tells us about how much more real it all feels thanks to the ONI. I especially have to question how he can smell or taste anything—both of which he tells us he can. Like, who coded that? Did Halliday implement every single smell and taste himself, without anyone noticing? I hope you don’t need me to tell you that’s not typically how features are added to a large-scale video game.

If it feels like I’m nitpicking at the logic of the book, even though I always say I’m not very interested in that and would rather talk themes, it’s because I am, because there isn’t much else to discuss so far. Wade is happy about tasting virtual fruit. That’s the scene.

He tests out if he can feel pain, but no, the ONI reduces pain (a gunshot is translated as “a hard pinch”). On one hand, good, it would be a nightmare otherwise. On the other hand, I sort of hope there’s a setting for that in there, because otherwise, you just lost an entire clientele of kinksters.

This was it—the final, inevitable step in the evolution of videogames and virtual reality. The simulation had now become indistinguishable from real life.

Ah, now we have some juicy themes. Because if you think this is the inevitable final step in the evolution of video games, I invite you to look at literally any other art form, and what happened to them once hyperrealism became easy. Hint: they didn’t stop evolving, because it turns out realism isn’t the only goal one can achieve with art.

The realism discussion is not a new one in video games, mind you. In case you’re out of the loop: most of the big-budget blockbuster games (“AAA” as they’re known) are aiming for hyperrealism nowadays, and it results in development teams being forced to work in horrible conditions (known with the equally horrible euphemism of “crunch”). And, because it turns out that 1) humans working themselves to the bones isn’t healthy and 2) racing for realism with little to no vision besides it makes for poor creativity, a lot of these games come out as disappointments. Oh, there are hordes of Gamers™ who will defend them to the bitter end, but inevitably, in the months following release, the defense cools off while the criticism keeps on going, because the defense was a knee-jerk reaction born of a mix of people hyping themselves up for a game they hadn’t seen that much of yet, then attaching a part of their identity to liking that thing.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that this throwaway line feels like it comes from someone who is so out of touch as to accidentally support a world view that has in fact resulted in the biggest part of the industry stagnating artistically while growing more toxic for the people working in it. All the while, more and more independent games come out every year, proving that that realism is nowhere near the most important thing to making a game good, and that you can achieve much better results with a small team.

What I’m trying to say is: watch Jim Sterling’s channel, they’ve been bleeding out subscribers since they came out as nonbinary and make much better commentary on this topic than I could, and play Hades.

Back to the book, which sadly hasn’t become any more interesting since I decided to go on a tangent. Wade tests the ONI functions some more, all the while musing on how he knows Samantha would disapprove but that he doesn’t care, because what loving relationship doesn’t consist of that?

Among the functions, he tries the ONI files, the aforementioned recordings of someone else’s experiences. Specifically, a woman, which Wade tells us by telling us he suddenly has breasts, I suppose because Ernest Cline saw that subreddit about men writing women and went “I want a piece of that”. Oh, and also, those sample files were recorded from real people, in the real world. And yes, this goes exactly where you think it does.

SEX-M-F.oni, SEX-F-F.oni, and SEX-Nonbinary.oni

Look, I actually started writing a complaint about the boobs thing, and I deleted it, but now Cline is doing it on purpose. So, here goes: I saw a quote from this book on Twitter that looked like Cline attempting to make up for Wade’s casual transphobia in the first book. It wasn’t good, but it at least sounded like he was trying. So to immediately get this is…a lot? Let’s go for a lot.

I can almost excuse the use of “M” and “F”. You gotta name your files and you could excuse a non-exhaustive list. But…nonbinary? On one hand, I want to know what Cline means. On the other hand, I don’t think he can come up with an answer I’ll find satisfactory.

We are thankfully spared from finding out because Wade has just lost his virginity to Samantha a few days ago and he’s 1) not ready for this and 2) pretty sure this counts as cheating. You could make a case that this is more like porn, but I can see that this is more of a personal distinction anyway, and I can respect that one. Plus, you know. I don’t want to find out.

Wade logs off, and he can’t tell the difference between the OASIS with the ONI, and decides this will change the world. And then it’s back to the “how did he do it and keep it a secret”, even though Wade now finds out in the documentation that this had been in development for twenty-five years, basically since the OASIS launched. So it’s not really that it’s a secret, so much as there are a lot of people under very strict NDAs out there. Or, again, they’re all dead and/or otherwise incapacitated.

The ONI is the product of the Accessibility Research Lab, and Wade tells us about other stuff that the lab has produced using similar technology, mostly for medical purposes.

GSS patented each of the Accessibility Research Lab’s inventions, but Halliday never made any effort to profit from them. Instead, he set up a program to give these neuroprosthetic implants away, to any OASIS users who could benefit from them. GSS even subsidized the cost of their implant surgery.

Look, it’s nice that you want Halliday to be the good guy through and through, but it’s kind of hard to take any social commentary seriously when you think this is how a billionaire is made. Hell, even when he shut down the lab and fired its entire staff, he gave them a big enough severance package to set them for life. You know. Capitalism!

Hey, remember when Samantha said she was going to end world hunger if she won the contest, a thing billionaires right now could be doing, but aren’t, and she is now the co-owner of GSS? Yeah, I kind of hope the book remembers that too.

Speaking of the co-owners, the book just completely skips over the debate that our four main characters have over whether or not to release the ONI to the world. All we know is that they voted, and the vote goes in favor of releasing it. I mean, why have characters who could have opinions and feelings that could create a discussion? That might make us care about them! And who wants to care about characters in a story?

We put them on sale at the lowest possible price, to make sure as many people as possible could experience the OASIS Neural Interface for themselves.

What exactly is “the lowest possible price” here? Your company literally owns money. Like, OASIS money is real money. There is literally nothing stopping you from giving them away, especially because what you’re giving away is access to the platform you’re already running for a profit.

It’s almost like, even trying to make “good billionaires” out of its protagonists, the book can’t stop and actually make them significantly good.

Oh, I should mention. If you thought my Ready Player One review was angry at capitalism, wait until you see what the past couple years have done to me.

Anyway, once they his 7,777,777 simultaneous ONI users, a new riddle shows up on Halliday’s website. Because yep: our plot is apparently not about the implications of releasing the ONI, or any of the potential ideological discussions associated with that, it’s another riddle. Oh boy, do I wish I’d known that.

Seek the Seven Shards of the Siren’s Soul On the seven worlds where the Siren once played a role For each fragment my heir must pay a toll To once again make the Siren whole

I cannot wait to have the book give me just not enough information to solve the riddle until it’s solved by the book itself. That was so much fun the other…what was it, five times? Six times? Something like that. Wade already tells us the Siren might be Kira Morrow, because her alias was named after one of the sirens of Greek myth, so I can’t wait for that plot point to stick around. It was so fun to hear all about this man pining for another man’s wife the first time!

So this is the “Shard Riddle”. People are apparently convinced it was made by Wade and his crew as a publicity stunt, but of course, they know that that isn’t the case, and they also don’t know what that riddle is supposed to lead to. So, that’s great. We have a puzzle, and we also don’t know what the stakes are. All we know is that Wade wants to solve the puzzle essentially because it’s a challenge.

We skip over a year, and Wade tells us about how IOI collapses and gets absorbed by GSS because of the ONI’s launch. Remember IOI? They were the bad guys, so I guess we have to cheer?

GSS absorbed IOI and all of its assets, transforming us into an unstoppable megacorporation with a global monopoly on the world’s most popular entertainment, education, and communications platform.To celebrate, we released all of IOI’s indentured servants and forgave their outstanding debts.

On one hand: good for the slave. On the other hand: not gonna cheer for a monopoly, you guys.

Another year’s skip, and now 99% of the OASIS users are using the ONI, and yes, that includes trading their experiences with one another too. And I guess we’re still hand-waving any possible problems associated with that technology, because the technology is made so that all recordings must be shared and played through the OASIS.

This allowed us to weed out unsavory or illegal recordings before they could be shared with other users.

How? Do you know any of the problems associated with content moderations on the current platforms? I don’t know if I want to point to Youtube’s extremely faulty algorithm, Twitter’s complete apathy towards its Nazis, or Facebook doing moderation by making underpaid staff watch all potentially problematic content, which resulted in serious psychological damage to said staff.

You can’t just say that as if it solved everything. The chapter later says this is handled by an AI called “CenSoft”, and as an AI engineer myself, let me tell you: this is not going to work. Again: Youtube is the way it is for a reason.

It also let us maintain our monopoly on what was rapidly becoming the most popular form of entertainment in the history of the world.

And again, monopolies are totally a good thing as long as it’s in the right hands!

When I’m implying that the book does not care for any of these potential problems, I mean it. These enormous ethical issues are sidestepped in cold narratin, and we just keep going on introducing new slang that I hate, but have to quote so help you keep up.

“Sims” were recordings made inside the OASIS, and “Recs” were ONI recordings made in reality. Except that most kids no longer referred to it as “reality.” They called it “the Earl.” (A term derived from the initialism IRL.) And “Ito” was slang for “in the OASIS.” So Recs were recorded in the Earl, and Sims were created Ito.

There. You have been infodumped.

In the midst of all this (still extremely dry) exposition about how this changed media, we also get this tidbit:

You could take any drug, eat any kind of food, and have any kind of sex, without worrying about addiction, calories, or consequences.

Now, I was going to rant about this, but then, a page later, this happens and spares me the trouble:

I’d struggled with OASIS addiction before the ONI was released. Now logging on to the simulation was like mainlining some sort of chemically engineered superheroin.

So, you are aware that addiction isn’t just possible, but extremely facilitated by this. But sure, no worries! It’s perfectly safe! Because our protagonists are good.

Also, remember how the last book ended on a weak attempt at having a moral that maybe the real world is good, actually? Yeah, Wade tells us the ONI helps poor people live enjoyable lives in the OASIS. So. Fuck that message, I guess. It only applies if you’re the literal wealthiest man on Earth.

And me? All my dreams had come true. I’d gotten stupidly rich and absurdly famous. I’d fallen in love with my dream girl and she had fallen in love with me. Surely I was happy, right? Not so much, as this account will show.

Aside from the aforementioned returning OASIS affiction, there’s the Shard riddle that Wade is now obsessed with, to the point of offering a billion-dollar reward to anyone with information about the riddle’s answer.

I announced this reward with a stylized short film that I modeled after Anorak’s Invitation. I hoped it would seem like a lighthearted play on Halliday’s contest instead of a desperate cry for help. It seemed to work.

On one hand: good, Wade finally has a character flaw that the book actually acknowledges as a character flaw. I can work with that. On the other hand: this is all told to me in such a dispassionate that I am dreading how the book will handle this character flaw. Which is to say, I’m not expecting it to be very good.

(For a brief time, some of the younger, more idealistic shard hunters referred to themselves as “shunters” to differentiate themselves from their elder counterparts. But when everyone began to call them “sharters” instead, they changed their minds and started to call themselves gunters too. The moniker still fit. The Seven Shards were Easter eggs hidden by Halliday, and we were all hunting for them.)

Especially when this is something the narration feels is more important to tell me about.

Anyway, skip another year, and a gunter finally leads Wade to the First Shard. Solved that riddle, I guess. And wait, wasn’t part of why IOI was ~evil~ in the first book that they were paying people to find the Easter Egg for them? How is this any different, Wade?

And when I picked it up, I set in motion a series of events that would drastically alter the fate of the human race. As one of the only eyewitnesses to these historic events, I feel obligated to give my own written account of what occurred. So that future generations—if there are any—will have all the facts at their disposal when they decide how to judge my actions.

And that is the end of our chapter 0. And can I just say: what a mess already. I don’t think my snark can properly convey how utterly devoid of emotion this book’s writing is, and that alone is honestly more of a turn-off than anything else in the book so far. Even, knowing that I railed about it in the first book, I still feel newly unprepared for it. And it’s not like this double-prologue is making me hopeful that the book will show an ounce more critical thinking—or decent fucking humanity towards marginalized groups—as its predecessor.

So, that’s a lot to look forward to! For the sake of my sanity and schedule, don’t expect me to do such big posts every time. I’ll probably do one chapter a week from now on, if that. We’re in for a long ride, but I hope it’s worth it, at least.

#ready player two #ernest cline #st: ready player two #book reviews

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decaffs · 5 years ago

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HOW TO WRITE A HIGH-GRADE RESEARCH PAPER

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The first time I had to write a research paper for university was one of the most stressful experiences I’d ever had - it was so different to anything I’d ever done before and caused me so much anxiety! It turned out that I’m pretty damn good at writing research reports and I’m now looking to pursue a career in psychological research.

I have never received less than a First (or 4.0 GPA for you American studiers) in my research papers so I thought I’d share my top tips on how to write a kick-ass, high-grade research paper.

*disclaimer: I am a psychology student, my tips are based on my personal experience of writing up psychological research (quantitative and qualitative); therefore, they may require some adaptation in order to be applied to your field of study/research*

These tips will be split up into the different sections a research paper should consist of: abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion.

ABSTRACT

The aim of an abstract is to summarise your whole paper - it should be concise, include key-words, highlight the key points of your paper and be written last.

When I say concise, I mean concise! The abstract is what other students and researchers will read in order to decide whether your research is relevant their own work and essentially determines whether or not they’ll read on - they want to know the key details and don’t want to be overwhelmed with information.

I always aim to keep my abstracts under 250 words. I set myself this limit to stop myself waffling and dwelling on unimportant points, it helps me to be really selective of what I include and ensures I’m gripping the reader from the start.

Your abstract should discuss the research rationale, the methods and designs used, your results and the general conclusion(s) drawn. One or two sentences on each of these topics is enough.

Make sure you’re using key-words throughout your abstract as this will also help the reader decide whether your work is relevant to theirs. You can make key-words super obvious by highlighting them in a key at the bottom of your abstract (see below) or just used jargon consistently. Using key-words is also important if you’re looking to get your work published, these words will help people find your work using search engines.

Finally, write your abstract last! An abstract is a summary of your whole research paper which makes it practically impossible to write well first. After writing the rest of your paper, you will know your research inside and out and already have an idea of what key things you need to highlight in your abstract.

INTRODUCTION

For me, the introduction section is always the most intimidating to write because it’s like painting on a blank canvas - massively daunting and leaving you terrified to make a mistake!

The aim of an introduction is to provide the rationale for your research and justify why your work is essential in the field. In general, your introduction should start very broad and narrow down until you arrive at the niche that is your research question or hypothesis.

To start, you need to provide the reader with some background information and context. You should discuss the general principle of your paper and include some key pieces of research (or theoretical frameworks if relevant) that helps your reader get up to speed with the research field and where understanding currently lies. This section can be pretty lengthy, especially in psychological research, so make sure all of the information you’re including is vital as it can be pretty easy to get carried away.

This background should lead you onto the rationale. If you’ve never written a research paper before, the rationale is essentially the reason behind your own research. This could be building on previous findings so our understanding remains up to date, it could be picking up on weaknesses of other research and rectifying these issues or it could be delving into an unexplored aspect of the field! You should clearly state your rationale and this helps lead into the next section.

You should end your introduction by briefly discussing your current research. You need to state your research question or hypothesis, how you plan on investigating the question/hypothesis, the sample you plan on using and the analysis you plan to carry out. You should also mention any limitations you anticipate to crop up so you can address these in your discussion.

In psychology, references are huge in research introductions so it is important to use an accurate (and modern as possible) reference for each statement you are making. You can then use these same references in your discussion to show where your research fits into the current understanding of the topic!

METHODS

Your methods section should make use of subheadings and tables where necessary and should be written in past tense. This can make the (potentially) lengthy section easier to navigate for the reader. I usually use the following headings: participants, materials, design, procedure.

The participants section should describe the sample that took part in your research. Age, gender, nationality and other relevant demographic information should be provided as well as the sampling technique. Personally, I use a table (see below) alongside my continuous prose as an alternative way of viewing my sample population. Please note, if you’re using a table make sure it adheres to your university guidelines.

The materials section of your methods should include any equipment, resources (i.e. images, books, diagrams) or any other materials used in your data collection. You should also reference the program that helped you conduct your analysis. For example, if you are writing a qualitative research paper, you may want to include Microsoft Word in your materials if you use the program to transcribe interviews.

You should then describe the design used in your research. All variables should be identified in this paragraph, if relevant. You should also discuss whether your research is within-groups or between-groups, again only if relevant.

Last is your procedure section - the most important one! You must write this section with enough detail so that anybody could pick it up, read it and conduct the same experiment with ease. You should describe what participants were required to do, how data was collected and it should be written in chronological order! While it’s important to provide enough information, try not to overwhelm the reader with lengthy sentences and unnecessary information.

RESULTS

Your results section’s sole purpose is to provide the reader with the data from your study. It should be the second shortest section (abstract being first) in your research paper and should stick to the relevant guidelines in regards to reporting figures, tables and diagrams. Your goal is to relay results in the most objective and concise way possible.

Your results section serves to act as evidence for the claims you’ll go on to make during your discussion but you must not be biased in the results you report. You should report enough data to sufficiently justify your conclusions but must also include data that doesn’t support your original hypothesis or research question.

Reporting data is most easily done through tables and figures as they’re easy to look at and select relevant information. If you’re using tables and figures you should always make sure you’re stating effect sizes and p values and to a consistent decimal place. Illustrative tables and figures should always be followed by supporting summary text consisting of a couple of sentences relaying the key statistical findings in continuous prose.

DISCUSSION

The discussion section should take the opposite approach to your introduction! You should start discussing your own research and broaden the discussion until you’re talking about the general research field.

You should start by stating the major findings of your study and relating them back to your hypothesis or research questions. You must must must explicitly state whether you reject or accept your experimental hypothesis, if you have one. After stating your key findings you should explain the meaning, why they’re important and where they fit into the existing literature. It’s here that you should bring back the research you discussed in your introduction, you should relate your findings to the current understanding and state the new insight your research provides.

You should then state the clinical relevance of your research. Think about how your findings could be applied to real-life situations and discuss one or two practical applications.

After this, discuss the limitations of your research. Limitations could include sample size and general sample population and how this effects generalisability of findings, it could include methodological problems or research bias! These limitations will allow you to discuss how further research should be conducted. Suggest ways in which these limitations could be rectified in future research and also discuss the implications this could have on findings and conclusions drawn.

Finally, you need to give the reader a take-home message. A sentence or two to justify (again) the need for your research and how it contributes to current understanding in the field. This is the last thing your audience will read so make it punchy!

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That’s it folks! My tips for writing a kick-ass, high-grade research paper based on my personal experience. If you have any questions regarding things I’ve missed or didn’t provide enough detail of, then please just send me an ask!

Also, if any of you would like to read any of my past research papers I would be more than happy to provide you with them :-))

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