#i should do this longform stuff more often

[fioras-resolve]

This Enemy Is Too Strong

So like, I've been playing Final Fantasy XII again, and I've been thinking about in comparison to that other single-player MMO, Xenoblade Chronicles. There's a lot I can talk about there, and I probably will later, but the thing I wanna talk about is level scaling.

The thing is, right, both of these games let you fight enemies that are far above your current level. They just go about it in very different ways.

Xenoblade Chronicles is largely a linear game. You will go to Colony 9, then Gaur Plain, etc. It's a chapter structure, the Switch version literally has chapter markers.

But these areas are massive, you can spend several hours in one just exploring the place. And from the very first area you can venture off and find monsters way above your level. They're just scattered around the place, Xenoblade has some of the most level diversity you'll ever see in an RPG.

And since a lot of them attack on sight, or on hearing your footsteps, or detecting the game's magic equivalent, it means you genuinely have to watch out when you're exploring. Like, this is an ecosystem that you have to keep in mind, and it's honestly pretty damn lifelike in a lot of ways.

FF12, on the other hand, is different. Let's start out with the major difference in terms of structure. Yes, this game does have a linear story, but you have a fair bit more freedom in what areas you can access and when.

From the beginning, you can go to the Estersand, the Westersand, or Giza Plains branching off from the hub city of Rabanastre. You'll have to go through all of these branches at some point, but the freedom is pretty nice for an open world feeling. If you visit the Salikawood early, and get past a boss, you can visit Nabreus and Nabudis, optional lategame areas that will almost certainly kill you if you try to go through them too early. It's a lot of freedom for a game like this, and I appreciate it for that open feeling.

...But this runs into a problem when you get down to the realities of each area. Because FF12 doesn't really have level diversity in its areas. If you're encountering a high-level enemy, that's because you're in a high-level area. If you can't fight one enemy in Nabudis, you're probably not going to have a good time in Nabudis. And, conversely, going back to an old area kinda sucks, because every enemy is a pushover.

If you want to actually play at the right difficulty level and have a good time, you basically have no reason not to just play the story normally. And it honestly makes the game feel more gamey. FF12 just doesn't have the kind of unique enemy behaviors that XC does, and it makes each enemy feel like, well, mobs in an MMO. I can appreciate in some sense, like FF12 is not trying to hide the fact that it's a video game, and in a lot of ways that's really good. But it kind of makes the game feel more lifeless, you know?

In a post-BotW world, it can be kind of trite to think about these kinds of semi-open-world games. Like yeah, it's the Switch era, everything is open-world now. Fucking Sonic and MegaTen have these massive areas, you can't escape it. But there's a lot of room to talk about how to do these things well.

If anybody sees this, which I fuckin hope people do, tell me what you think about this! How do you like these kinds of games to be structured, and how much do you care about stronger enemies?

[icewindandboringhorror]

"We can get through this by working together, reach out to your friends, community is all we have, a social network will be your security in the world, now is the time to lean on others!"

I do agree, and it's scientifically sound (pretty sure there is data about how people with better social networks live longer and etc) but also....augh..... what about the severe social issues, difficulty to leave the house, physical issues which lead to like zero socialization energy a majority of the time, etc. etc. Social support can be a replacement for structural support, but.. I guess I just wish it didn't have to be. Community is extremely difficult to build, even moreso if you're someone who has issues with social cues or group conversations or even just being around others in the first place. And blah, nuance, of course I'm just complaining or maybe being too negative or maybe misunderstanding, but, I hardly have the energy to brush my hair once every 2 months.. how am I supposed to maintain a wide social network and be active in a Community and Join Groups lol... sometimes it kind of feels like "er.. well if thats my only option then...... ruh roh". It's overwhelming

[brunette-gremlin]

because im a lil shit and im bad at focussing on stuff i should actually do, i have made a tentative death list solely based off my memory and only based on longforms:

AJ- 14 (He died a surprising amount of times, i didnt expect that much)

Luke-13 (This was less than expected but he died less as a side character)

Tom=23 (Did expect a huge number, heis amazing at playing villains but also dies a lot as minor characters ,read: larry)

Sam- 12 (no expectations whatsoever but does die often in shortforms and horribly too :D)

no i dont have patreon, no i am not really okay at the moment and no, my memory isnot amazing

pls free to add more

[starlightkun]

sorry if you've gotten this ask before aljrksjd

you don't have to answer this, but I just wanted to know how you write longform fics or just long pieces in general. it's one of the things I've struggled with as a writer, and I'm having a hard time trying to figure out how I could go about it or do it.

I'd be so grateful if you could provide some advice or suggestions 🥹🥹

i want u to know that i saw this ask when u sent it, but i had a 5hr drive today and wanted to make sure i had time to answer this!! it's under the cut bc i yapped a bit <33

so one thing that i feel the need to say up top is that i never go into pieces with a "goal" length/word count (often times my fics end up being longer than i expected/intended). because i never really write with the goal of a specific length in mind, these are things that i think have helped me write more cohesive and narratively fulfilling pieces in general, which tends to make my fics longer

my first thing is planning/outlining!! i used to just write my fics start to finish in one go with little to no planning, and since i've started slowing down and taking my time outlining/planning beforehand (and even during the drafting process i continue adding to my outline), i've seen the average lengths of my fics go up a lot. you don't have to have every single scene, moment, and piece of dialogue planned out before start writing (lord knows i never do), but you should have a pretty good idea of the major story beats, character dynamics, and any important conflicts, and make sure it's written down in a way that's easy for you to refer back to while you write. never think you're gonna keep it all in your head

build out your characters' lives!! i love introducing a good b-plot involving the main character's friends (see: strawberry sunday) that doesn't take too much attention away from the main plot that it seems out of place, but instead complements the main plot and allows there to be space in between those major plot beats for the readers and the characters to breathe. it also helps make your characters feel more well-rounded and real to the readers if you throw in a scene of their daily life at school or work or with their friends/family both to add texture to them but also to your world. it can also be good to use an establishing scene towards the beginning of their daily life, then a similar one towards to the end that shows any character development, or some other impactful change that happened during your story. instead of just telling us that everything in your character's life changed, show us how it did (or didn't! or maybe it only changed a little, but the little change was important, too)

in a similar vein, build out your world!! im not saying to spend ten pages describing an intricate magic system to us that has little bearing on the plot itself, but feel free to weave in extra details about where/when we are and how the characters interact (or dont!) with the world around them (even if its our normal old world in the modern day)

and i mean i guess my last thing that's really helped me is just sort of getting out my head when it comes to writing? like, not forcing myself to write everyday, not having any sort of word count goals, no posting schedule, etc. just letting myself sit with my ideas for a while and really play around and have fun with them. it's made writing fic something that i look forward to doing when i come from work, or when the weekend is approaching, and i genuinely am making probably my favorite things that i've ever made right now. and they happen to be pretty long!!

i've talked some more about my writing process in some other asks (x, x, x, x, x, x) and i have a writing tag where i post about more general writing stuff if you want to hear me yap some more

[fandomsoda]

Ok so let me start off by saying that this post is probably gonna be very clunky simply due to the fact that I’m addressing a two day old situation and I’m doing so without it being directly prompted,, please bear with me.

So, late Tuesday night an anon expressed concerns over the ways that I’ve brushed over the topic of aromanticism in the past, expressing that I only ever seemed to mention partnering aros and that it came off as if I was saying all of that only in service of shipping. These things of course are not things I intended, but are not unfounded claims nonetheless.

My initial response to that ask was definitely not great, I came off as very customer service-y and expressed that I felt as if it was exaggerated (simply due to the way it was phrased as “constantly”). It didn’t help that it was like 11 pm and for some reason my dumb ass didn’t actually go back and look through stuff, purely going off my notoriously bad memory.

Needless to say, this wound up coming off as dismissive and insufficient, and thus I’m making this post now as I have processed everything and want to give the proper actual respose (and in a sense, apology) that this situation is deserving of.

After going back through past posts, while definitely far from constant, I have been able to observe that whenever aromanticism was brought up I definitely had a really bad tendancy of only mentioning partnering aros and it definitely came off as scummy now that I look back at it. This was never something I consiously did, but it was shitty and potentially harmful nonetheless and should have been something I was being more aware about. I’ve already been trying to boost aromantic voices lately since the Valentine season’s been around, but doing that and centering non-partnering aros especially is going to be top priority from here on out.

Now let me real quick circle back around and address the shipping bit, as that’s like its whole own thing-

Now I definitely stand by the fact that I was never only talking about stuff in service of a ship, at least not consiously, but the topic often came up in reference to or alongside shipping and thus I acknowledge that that extrapolation is not at all a difficult one to make. And the fact that I even acted in a way that resembled that is not good.

And discussions with my friends have brought to my attention that I have not been making a number of things nearly clear enough and that whole mess is entirely on me so let’s get some things straight-

First of all, due to the more fluid attitude I’ve seen a lot of people have towards it, I never realized just how strictly romantic most people view shipping. Maybe I’m just a little bit dense but for the longest time, the term “ship” being used in a more platonic sense seemed more common than it actually is. And for the longest time, I’ve viewed shipping simply as “I think these characters have a nice dynamic and that they should be affectionate with one another”. But it has been a violent wakeup call recently that that is far from the most common thought process.

And in this I’ve come to realize that I’ve not been clarifying or establishing the fact that most if not all my ships are queerplatonic in some fashion because romance is a concept I’ve never fully grasped (not gonna go too deep into that here though, my weird perception of relationships is a topic for another day-). And things involving aro characters have especially always been queerplatonic in my mind.

I have not been nearly as clear enough about that as I should be and have failed to mention or establish that as much as I should. So from here on out, im going to be much more clear about that to avoid future misunderstanding or sending the wrong message.

It should also probably be noted that it’s very hard to convey these things given the type of art I do. I don’t properly write nor do longform comics, so it’s much harder to convey the internal complexities of things in the simple individual pieces my art often is.

Characters are also often left unpaired and single in my mind, but once again these types of things are hard to convey visually and the bonds between characters usually inspire art more often.

So most of this has just been a matter of “it’s all been up in my head but my ability to convey it or actually make content of it has been extremely lacking”. And again, in a sense, that’s on me.

Overall I know my handling of this situation has been incredibly scuffed from an outside view, for a lot of this I’ve been just very confused and all over the place so the few things I have said have been poorly summarized and basically just me completely tripping over myself. I’ve been processing things and getting things in order privately though, as you can probably tell. And in that I have come to the conclusion that I must take accountability for my actions as it is truly the only correct course of action here. I’m sorry to those this whole mess has upset, I hope this post is enough to explain everything.

I’m not super certain how to end this off but that’s about it, please let me know of any futher concerns. I’m genuinely sorry for all this mess.

[chamerionwrites]

Tag Nine People You'd Like To Get To Know Better

FAVOURITE COLOUR(s): Rusty red-orange, deep cool spruce green, bright cobalt blue, wine red, the various shades of slate green/grey/blue.

FAVOURITE FLAVOUR(s): Weirdly difficult question, in that what I think I most enjoy about food is the way that different flavors and textures complement each other to become more than the sum of their parts. But I am a huge fan of deep rich fruity-savory umami (sundried tomatoes, a great red chile sauce, things braised in red wine) as well as absolutely any kind of citrus or fresh herbs.

Also, while this isn't exactly one thing and it might be simpler just to say that I like strong flavors, I fall firmly into the These Are A Few Of My Favorite Things camp on a lot of polarizingly funky/briny things (smoked salmon, goat cheese, blue cheese, olives, anchovies, preserved lemons, etc).

Also the taste+aroma of both fresh bread and corn tortillas hot off the comal is imo the human equivalent of catnip, ie "provokes immoderate feral delight on some bizarrely primal level."

FAVOURITE MUSIC: The very sexy Bermuda Triangle where blues/rock/folk bleed into and/or influence one another. Anything else that takes my fancy, including but not limited to a lot of soul, post-punk, and highly danceable salsa or big band swing stuff. Sad jazz. Gratuitously melancholy strings. Great lyrics, great harmonies, deep rich vocals.

FAVOURITE MOVIE(s): I have never in my life been able to pick one favorite book, but Pan's Labyrinth is easily my favorite movie.

FAVOURITE BOOK(s): This is the impossible question to me but The Periodic Table, Signs Preceding The End of The World, The Things They Carried, The Little Drummer Girl, and everything Arundhati Roy has ever written are all on the list somewhere.

FAVOURITE SERIES(es): The Same Sky is exquisitely good and The Night Manager is my id-stroking comfort rewatch. I also loved Andor and the first season of Hannibal.

LAST SONG: I was just going through this tag earlier.

LAST SERIES: Thanks to holiday craft fair season I have had zero ability to do longform TV anytime within the last few months. (Also, frankly, multi-season TV series are the one of the most difficult media formats for my brain to engage with; it's a fantastic storytelling medium when done well, but I personally have a much harder time sitting down for two hours of TV than for two hours of reading and thus getting started often feels like a huge commitment. I am really a 3-6 eps and done miniseries person at heart.)

That said I am a big podcasts-while-working person and I've been listening to a lot of Friends At The Table and Bad Gays recently.

LAST MOVIE: The Wind That Shakes The Barley, which has been on the Somehow I've Never Seen This And I Really Should list for a while. It has promptly been moved to the OFC It's Possible To Make A War Movie That Doesn't Glorify War, Y'all Are Just Fools And Cowards list.

CURRENTLY READING: ...I have to admit that I'm re-reading Kissinger's Shadow (to Mark The Occasion).

CURRENTLY WATCHING: Nothing (see above), though I have ambitions of giving Black Sails a shot.

CURRENTLY WORKING ON: The sketching stage of some linocuts, some experimental worldbuild-y map-drawing (important as Cartography And Its Imperial Misuses are kinda thematically and plottily relevant to the story, at least in its nebulous conceptual form).

TAGGED BY @silkenred (thanks!), and TAGGING (only if you want ofc) @sassysnowperson, @tobermoriansass, @cosmonauthill, @essayofthoughts, and anybody else who feels like doing this. (No really, I'm shy about tagging but please do the thing if you're interested.)

[greenerteacups]

Frequently Asked Questions

Hi! If I’m asked a question more often than sometimes, it’s probably here. Static page also accessible at this link.

When is the next chapter coming out?

I update on Friday mornings, weekly, usually before noon PST. If it’s a Friday and you don’t see an update, it’s either because I’m on a writing break, or we’re in a hiatus between books. Or I've been hit by a car or something.

Do you have social media?

Aside from Tumblr — nope! I’m one of those hermit types. My AO3 account was previously the only place I was active online. I made a Tumblr so I could offer a platform to interact with people who are more comfortable here than in the AO3 comments section (for instance, there’s no anonymity function on AO3; you can log out and comment as a guest, but that’s a lot of work, and then there's not an easy way to check if your question was answered.)

Can I tag you in [thing]?

Yeah! I check back in here every few days, on average, to scope out my inbox and my mentions. If you make something for my fic, I’ll publicize it everywhere, obviously.

Can I bind your fics?

Yep! Carte blanche. I don’t own the copyright for anything I write, so I appreciate the thoughtfulness of people asking, but you can absolutely go ahead and do whatever the hell you want with the text of my fic. Print it, paint it, burn it, bind it, turn it into blackout poetry. Transformative art is human nature. But if you do, please, please, show me! I’ll scream for a thousand years.

Caveat: I’ve seen some people have anxieties about the sale of bound fics for profit, since they’re worried about publishers cracking down on copyright violation and litigating fanfiction. This is tough, because on the one hand, bookbinding can be expensive; on the other hand, selling fic is a violation of copyright, and the only way AO3 is allowed to exist is by authors making precisely $0 from anything they post. (This is why AO3 will boot you immediately if they catch you trying to make money from non-original works on their site — if I so much as drop a PayPal link in the description for Lionheart, the fic will quickly be taken down, and my account could be suspended.) So my stance is: I’m not going to sell my fics; if you bind for personal use, this doesn’t matter, go for it, live deliciously, etc; if you bind to sell, please be careful and discreet as you can. But you have my OK, for what it’s worth.

Can I translate your fics?

Yes, of course.

Will you write other things, besides Lionheart?

Eventually, yeah. Probably nothing longform soon, however. When I’m writing something, I get engrossed in the world and I sort of tunnel-vision onto the project. When Lionheart goes on a hiatus between books, I may pop out and do something else, just to keep my skills sharp and give my mind a break. That’s where shorter pieces like The Climb and SWLITS came from. But I keep my eyes on the prize, as far as what I’m writing, because I pride myself on having finished most (though admittedly, not all) things I’ve ever started on AO3. I hate having unfinished projects  cluttering up my Works page. 

I don’t read WIPs. When will Lionheart be finished/should I read Lionheart?

Listen, I’m not gonna tell anyone how to read fic. If your reading preferences make you happy, then you’re doing it right. And I’ve also been burned by remarkable WIPs that peter out, or die on a cliffhanger, and they just about break my heart. I can’t promise that won’t happen, because I don’t know what life holds in store. I also can’t promise when Lionheart will be finished, because, frankly, I have no idea! As a full-book rewrite, if you look at the current chapter count, and then look at the number of books in the series, then, yeah, it clearly has a long way to go.

But I also know that the Completed Works filter on AO3 is hiding a lot of good fic, and I think people who only read completed stuff are missing out on the real fun of update culture — of reading something serially, the excitement of waiting for the next chapter to drop, looking for clues about long-running puzzles, theorizing in the comments, getting to experience each new hit live. That’s one of the few things about fanfic that you can’t get in a novel, and it’s a real treat. I’d at least give it a try.

Otherwise, here’s what I can tell you: Books 1, 2, 3, and 4 will all be finished. They will have completed endings, and will offer (satisfying, I hope) resolutions to the major conflicts of those stories. And that’s a fact.

[m4lexxx67]

So City accent in my mind is pretty clean and correct English, almost like written language I'd say. Most prominent about it would be the lack of abbreviations. They have them but not all of them are often used. I'd say they use don't, doesn't and it's pretty often (generally it's rather common for them to abbreviate "not", just to emphasize the cases in which the do not abbreviate it to make it crystal clear it's an important not, yk?). Isn't, wouldn't and won't as well as the shortening of are, have ane would are sometimes used but mainly in poorer parts of the City or in private, and rarely heard in like City Center because it's considered "bad etiquette" (also, they would definitely frown upon my use of "like" in this lol). And stuff like 'till, ain't, gonna, wanna, wouldn't've, nah, y'all and any type of swear word is definitely not approved by BLI. You might hear it in the slums, but in most parts of the City, BLI will call you out on it.

The second prominent thing about City accent is the very clear prnounciation of words. Like sounds that you might swallow like don' or somethin' is definitely not something you will hear in the City. Which is why you have a lot of children language classes where they are taught to speak clearly. Sure they're given some slack until they turn like four, maybe five, but once you go to school, you should speak clearly at least 85% of the time or so. And if you have for example a lisp... it's not forbidden per se, BLI does like to present themselves as "good for everyone" so they're not going to be openly exclusive. But you will see no represation whatsoever of it in the media and you will be send to a lot of speech therapist or whatever you call it. Because you will be kind of a social outcast if you don't speak right because it makes you different and the City doesn't like it when you're different. That's the main characteristics of City accent in my mind.

Desert accent on the other hand... I'm not a native English speaker so I can't really assign a region to the accent. But it's a lot more relaxed than the City accent. They rarely use the longforms of basically everything I listed above. Some desert borns might not even know exactly what the short forms stand for (although most probably do because they've heard someone using the long form at some point when someone's trying to emphasize something).

Also they don't speak nearly as clean and pronounced as the City and swallow a lot of sounds, especially t and g sounds at the ends of words are lost. Grammar is also more of an optional thing, especially with adverbs. And of course, they have a whole lot of zone slang and curse words. The zone slang also varies from different parts of the desert.

So while most people in the City will speak very similarly (like I said, they don't like it when you're different), killjoys will often sound wildly different, depending on your crew, where you from, if you're desert born or not, and so on. Like for example the Venom Siblings both tend to swallow t's a the ends of words because one of them had always had trouble with pronouncing that, and the other adopted that from them when they left and spend a lot of time together without the influence of Bat City (I can not decide who got it from who because I like both possibilities). Whereas Ghoul dropped pronouncing g sounds at the ends of words pretty quickly (whether or not he is a sandpup, I think he drops the g's more often than the t's idk why). And Jet does both a lot and has the heaviest desert accent of all four of them (I agree with anon).

That's all I got on Danger Days accents I think but I'd still say it's enough lol

jet stars zones accent is so thick that sometimes pretty little city born party poison has to ask her to repeat themselves at least 7 times

what do city accents and zone accents sound like... i need to know. for science

also try saying "pretty little city born party poison" 5 times fast

[legionofpotatoes]

10 17 and 22 for the art asks :)! also re one of your answers to this: if you enjoy writing, you should do it. i absolutely encourage it. doesn't matter if its not "grandiose" or "important" - the thing thats important is YOU getting to have fun Doing Stuff. :3

Hey you! Thanks for these ☺️

10. Favorite piece of clothing to draw

It's the one I draw most often I guess. The 2012 N7 armor variant 🙃 otherwise I like capes. Or drapes. In that sexy art nouveau way.

17. Do you eat-drink while drawing? if so, what

Not while I'm drawing, no. I take breaks for lunch, but I can't be chewing on something in the process. That would mess up the focus! I do keep a water bottle around (a redundant statement. my home is dotted with half-empty water bottles, always at hand). There is an enormous chasm between the mess my productivity was back when I spent entire days focused on nothing but drawing, to now when I keep my meat suit hydrated. It's night and day. Water is the real deal, folks. Cannot stress this enough, drink up.

22. What physical exercises do you do before drawing, if any

Nothing before; lots of stretching and wrist-rolling during. I know this is something I need to get better at, especially as I keep pulling longer hours in my thirties. It's on the agenda, he said, and probably lied.

I also like to hold my pen in a way that dents the side of my middle finger... trying to work my way around it to no avail so far. I have big-time problems here, gang. My fingie has ouchies when I draw for more than three straight hours.

Regarding the whole writing thing - I didn't mean it like I hate to express myself in writing or even in longform rambles every now and then because of some stuck-up ethical reasons - I honestly don't care about that and you will have to pay me ungodly amounts of money to get me to shut up, just in general. I am extremely lax on what "meaningful" means, and a 24/7 fun train outta these stupid brains absolutely counts.

What I did mean by my answer was storytelling, and specifically storytelling done through writing. You know - that thing that is all about articulating parables through narratives and worldbuilding and meaning-making, which is something I admire but will probably never seriously dabble in. I am keenly aware of the type of creator that I am; I'm still a consumer first. I genuinely revere storytelling, and my "creativity" or whatever is fully transformative and usually stems from my need to prop that other thing up even higher for others to see. Probably why fan art is most of what I do.

And I can (and do) write a lot in that meta sense of how storytelling sometimes does and does not work - anyone following me here knows that is my main weapon to wield against your tired eyeballs. I love understanding both the humanity at the core and the delivery mechanisms around storytelling mediums and how we're all just trying to say the same things over and over again through convoluted yet effective and novel packages and it's all intimate and grand and gorgeous and terrifying and flawed and fun and meaningful and transient and heartbreaking and silly and different yet always somehow the same. And I am extremely aware of the type of gas one needs to have in the tank to actually tap into that semiotic dance and squeeze out a piece of writing that engages and tells a story that is both an escape and a mirror.

This isn't me bootlicking some esoteric auteur culture either, I have my own reservations with the word "talent." I've studied enough of storytelling to know that its raw craft is a crucial delivery system for its core ethos, and it can be built up and improved by anyone, given time and discipline. But it's that ethos I'm talking about, the payload itself. There is something else you need to have present in your soul for that. Something circumstantial, painful maybe, a wound that yearns both to heal and to share itself with others, adding to the tapestry of the zeitgeist in a way that enriches that moment in time instead of tearing it down with ignorance. And I know I make this all sound grandiose and mythic, but meaningful storytelling to me is literally some self-insert fanfic that lulled you into a bittersweet calm after a teenage breakup, or the romcom that made you laugh on a shitty day, or even a fucking poem scribbled on a wall that you completely took out of authorial context yet found some corny meaning in for no more than five seconds. It's the essence of those things, and I have trouble explaining exactly what I mean by that, but I know deep in my bones that it's something core to them that I don't have. I don't have that need to share my lived experience in that way, for reasons internal and external, and I think that is okay! More than anything else in the world I want to cheer on the people who do. I believe in them, and in storytelling, more than in most things in life, exactly because of how privy I am to its healing effects. So I'll do it in my own incessantly annoying ways, don't you worry about that.

I mean look at all this writing I did just now. That's something I like to do. And again; you will have to pay me to stop. Big money. I'm talking six figures or above straight from James Tumbler

[prydon]

hey so feel free to ignore this, but i was wondering if you had any advice for newish writers? for context, i’ve only written a couple like 2,000-ish word things, but i’m taking on writing a script for a big project of mine, and i’m not sure how to go about it?

how much do you plan ahead before you start writing? do you have an in depth outline with every plot point or do you just have a broad overview and see where it takes you?

ohhh that's a tough question.... i've never had any formal writing instruction (outside of english classes in school) so most of my ability just comes from having been reading and writing a lot my whole life just for fun haha, which is great and all but makes it hard to think of advice beyond just "do it a lot".

though i do also recommend reading, i swear i got 50% better at writing by accident just because i got back into reading and subconsciously picked up on stuff i liked or didn't like in the books i was consuming. especially when it comes to writing a script, i'm sure reading other work in that format would be helpful.

as for planning... it does depend on the story, but my outlines tend to just basically be a chronological bullet point list of everything i've thought of for the story, especially the major beats.

i try to at least have a plan for what every scene is going to be before i start writing a one shot or a chapter, even if that plan is just a single line, and then i tend to flesh out the outline as i think of more things. i don't think there's anything wrong with not having a 100% finished outline before you start writing the story. write down the base ideas, then flesh them out as you keep writing/thinking of things.

idk if you've read my childhood friends fic constellations, but it's the only one i have an outline on hand for lol (because i delete my outlines after i finish writing a story, alas) so here's an example of my outline from ch6 of constellations:

so yeah, not very professional but gets the job done :"D

i guess something that's notable is that i tend to write the *purpose* of a scene in my outlines. like, going into writing this chapter, i didn't plan "okay so a bunch of chorus girls are gonna see peter and start whispering about how they don't recognize him, then go up and ask his name/who he is bc they have a crush, and he'll get nervous thus prompting annie to step in and tell them he's her brother". i wrote "annie calls nureyev her brother". because the lead up to that didn't really matter and could have happened any way that i came up with while writing, the base POINT of the scene was to establish how annie now sees their relationship and that peter knows she sees it that way. that was what was important to me to have planned.

and i do think every scene should have a purpose! that's something i've learned over time. even with longform stuff, every single scene should serve a purpose to the narrative, even if that purpose is just to show character development or to give the audience a breather/a false sense of security before an intense moment. often they can serve multiple purposes! something really fun to do is trick the readers by including a moment that they think is only relevant on an emotional level, but--surprise!--is gonna be relevant on a plot level later. if you just shove a chekhov's gun into a scene, people are gonna be like "what's that doing there" and expect it to come into play later, but if you disguise it as just being for the purpose of character development then they might not notice it. 

in general: set up and pay off good. if you set something up, you should probably pay it off. if you make a big moment happen, you have to have set it up. i know that seems simple but it's something that took me an embarrassingly long time to learn as a writer lol, and it's important for both big plot stuff and little character stuff.

themes are good. parallels are good. motifs are good. is there a way you can connect a scene at the end of the story to one at the beginning? have a character repeat the same thing they did in scene 1 but this time it takes on a different, deeper meaning. have a character be unable to catch their friend before they fall off a garden wall while playing in scene 2 that's passed off as a silly moment, then have them be unable to catch said friend again in scene 19 but this time their friend is falling from a radio tower. do it. be evil. people will be like "OHHH SHIT" and have the entire first section of the story be recontextualized for them upon reread.

uhhh what else... voices?? especially for a script, since they're dialogue-only, giving each character a unique voice is super important. i have it easy with this bc i usually only write fic and the characters in TPP have super unique voices to begin with that i can just copy, but i still think it's v important. if you can change which character says a line without changing the line at all and it still sounds right/in character for them, their voices probably aren't unique enough. that's not to say that every character should talk like a cartoon or smth, but i think it's helpful for them to each have their own recognizable vibe. (and a good shorthand for this can be changing how each character refers to others--by first name, by last name, by nicknames, with mocking endearments or with honorifics?)

that's pretty much all i can think of rn and i'm not sure any of it is useful at all but there you go aisfhuiasfh. and tbh i just appreciate that you respect my opinion enough on this subject to reach out haha!

[spockandawe]

What are your favorite chinese webnovels? What are some of the differences youve noticed between cnovels and other types of novels?

That second question is really, REALLY interesting, and I really want to answer it well, and I am REALLY sure I’m going to do a bad job of answering it, so let me just noodle about that first question for a minute while I try to think XD

I went through some of my TOP-top favorite novels in more detail yesterday, but generally speaking, mxtx and meatbun are both at the top of the pack. They’re really good at writing compelling main characters and balancing piles of angst with plenty of humor and pulling everything together into a very satisfying ending (which is something I don’t alwaysssss see, even in some of the novels I really like). After them, The Disabled Tyrant’s Pet Palm Fish (transmigration, ancient chinese prince falls in love with pet fish) and Golden Stage (ancient chinese gay arranged marriage between bitter enemies(?)) are two novels that I love a lot, which both have very cute romances and go a bit lighter on the main character suffering front, and which I broadly recommend to anyone who’s interested in the genre. They didn’t end stick the landing QUITE as hard as an svsss or tgcf, but they still were very nice.

Then, let me see. I’m trying to remember which books I’ve read in the last year, and am doing a terrible job, haha. I will say that a book I enjoyed for like... eighty percent of it and then the ending let me down terribly was The Dreamer In The Spring Boudoir (modern day career woman transmigrates into barely-fantasy ancient china novel as the disliked primary wife of a nobleman), which is also the only straight webnovel I’ve read so far. The main character and romance were delightful, but that ending... haha, wow, I felt betrayed. But I did like the first half very much!! I’m idly contemplating a deliberately-partial reread. Then I’m currently like two chapters away from catching up with the current translation of The Wife Is First (ancient chinese prince lives out time travel fixit fic, determined to treat his spouse better this time around). I’m also catching up on Heroic Death System (transmigration, across MANY universes, where the goal is to die heroically in each one, and also maybeeeee to find his boyfriend in each one. this shit gets fucking bananas. in one of them, he emotionally seduces his boyfriend while he’s a dolphin. in another one, he’s a sentient mushroom. i’m in the middle of a section titled ‘I Am An Evil Pen’. yes, like a writing utensil type of pen. this is the weirdest book I’ve read so far). Oh, and Thousand Autumns (righteous sect leader gets sabotaged and loses a fight, wakes up blind and amnesiac, demonic sect leader is like ‘lol i bet i can turn him evil’ and accidentally catches feelings along the way).

What else... I’m keeping up with (but behind on) some others. First, there’s How To Survive As A Villain (modern terminally ill CEO transmigrates into stallion novel, wakes up as villain, accidentally seduces hero). Then, we’ve got Transmigrating Into The Body Of The Heartthrob’s Cannon Fodder Childhood Friend (only modern webnovel I’ve read, young man transmigrates into beginning of gratuitous whump book, back in high school, and is determined to protect the protagonist from all the canonical suffering). Then there’s Pulling Together A Villain Reformation Strategy (guy transmigrates into story as the hero’s childhood friend who will eventually become his enemy and get killed, successfully acts out his part and dies, completely fails to realize he’s broken his friend’s heart in the process... and then wakes up in another character’s body). And then there’s The Villain’s White Lotus Halo (a transmigrator keeps bouncing from universe to universe as a cannon fodder villain, who gets like half a line before being killed. he tries to purchase an upgrade package so he can be a COOL villain instead, but accidentally gets sold a ‘white lotus halo’ package instead, so that no matter what he does, everyone is just DEEPLY moved by his appearance and is positive he did nothing wrong). All of those are EXTREMELY delightful. You may notice a running transmigration theme, which....... yeah, I think there are a TON of delightful stories in the webnovel scene that deal with this genre, which seem so rare in English language media.

Which makes a good transition point to what’s different about the cnovel scene! I’ve seen hardly any transmigration stories in English, and I’ve got a couple go-to examples for when I’m trying to explain it, but like. Only a couple. Which is such a shame! Like, there’s the default idea of ‘I was reading this book and then I woke up inside the book!!’ but it’s clearly such an established genre that people are playing with it in all kinds of interesting ways, like in The Villain’s White Lotus Halo or Heroic Death System setups. It’s kind of wild to me, because it seems like such a gimme for a nice easy story structure? Whatever kind of world you want to present, there’s no need to introduce it to the reader from the ground up, or find a good way to hook them in. Either the main character read the book in question and can explain the premise and why we should care in pov, or the main character is new to the universe too, and trying to find their own footing. I enjoy it a lot! I’ve sampled transmigration books that didn’t grab me, but I’ve sampled way more that did. 

And then, the one semi-technical answer I thought of to this question was the way that these novels tend to handle pov. It’s not a hard-and-fast rule that regular novels are restricted to one pov, or that pov can only change at hard breaks in the story, but if I saw a bog-standard american novel glide from pov to pov the way these novels regularly do, I would tend to wonder if it was sloppiness or a mistake, or I would grump to myself about how I don’t like omniscient third person pov. And I still don’t know exactly what I think about this, or why it’s different in here, but I’m pretty sure I like it a lot, especially for stories where the romance tends to play a large part :V 

I used to read a lot of Books About Writing, and read plenty of stuff about why you don’t DO this, but.... I like it! In dtppf, Jing-wang can’t talk, and when Li Yu is a fish, he can’t talk, and drifting from one of their perspectives to the other gives me lots of useful information about how they’re both feeling. Could that be conveyed through restricted pov? Maybe! But I’m typesetting the svsss extras right now, and I’m in the bing-ge vs bing-mei section, and we get a few brief flashes of bing-ge’s thoughts, and it’s so NICE. It’s information I would not have otherwise received, because Shen Qingqiu sure wasn’t going to notice it. But early in the story, that pov was withheld from me, which also made sense (or hua cheng’s pov was withheld from me FOREVER, which makes me so sad ;u;). There don’t seem to be any hard and fast rules, which makes me really nervous about writing fic and trying to match the style, but I do like it a lot! 

And I’m definitely not able to articulate this in the way that I would like to, or speak with any real authority (I’m not that widely read in the cnovel scene, and i’m not very genre-adventurous in english), but there’s something about the role that the romances play in these stories that’s different from what I’m used to expecting, and it’s VERY tasty to me. I only rarely read romance novels, because I’m not often interested in the romance as a primary plot driver, but the romances in these books play a more substantial role than I’m used to expecting. And I’m into it! It’s a balance closer to what I’d expect from, like, a shippy longform fanfic. Which covers a lot of ground and is NOT a precise measure, but there’s more emotional weight given to the romance than I would expect, but without the romance carrying ALL of the emotional weight, and it strikes a perfect balance for me in a way I’m not used to encountering. Now, some of this could definitely be due to me not finding the right authors, or right subgenres, or whatever. But in the genres I inhabit, it’s a subtle difference, but one I find compelling.

Oh, one last thing. The cultural differences, duh :P I’m only familiar with things like, say, ancient chinese court etiquette through a lens of fan-translated novels like these, and I didn’t grow up steeped in the culture in a way I’m used to the trappings of something like medieval european courts. But there’s a distinct flavor to the social dynamics of these novels, from the formal levels down to the casual, and I know it’s super intricate and detailed and that authors play with differing degrees of historical accuracy vs fictional fun, and I wish I was better equipped to speak to the nature of any of this. But I find it really compelling! I recognize that it’s only new to ME because I didn’t seek out chinese media before now. And, the point that I originally wanted to get to before I got super distracted: the flirting. The flirting and teasing are a very different flavor from what I would expect in most english language media, and I love it, even if I can’t speak to how much of that is purely cultural, and how much of it is like... the conventions of How Fiction Is Written varying by culture, if that makes sense. I adore seeing what flirting and affection and indulgence and attentiveness look like in different settings, and these books, with their heavy romantic focus, absolutely deliver.

[shadowsong26fic]

Coming Attractions!

A day late, but ah well...

As usual, we’ll go ahead and do an Open Question Night. Which basically means that, while my ask box is always open, tonight I’ll be keeping an eye on it and answering things as they come in. Any fandom or work I’ve talked about here (or posted on AO3) is fair game, as are general questions about writing, etc. I do accept prompts, but I am. Not very good at filling them in a timely manner unless they Immediately spark something, lol.

So, yeah, what’s on your mind?

Also, since I don’t think I have for a couple months, plug for my Discord server! It’s pretty quiet, mostly intended to be a slightly more interactive extension of this space, but you’re welcome to check it out!

Anyway, the usual Coming Attractions details are behind the cut!

PodTogether 2021:

I participated in this challenge for the first time this year, and it was a whole lot of fun! Of Other Suns is a SW/AtLA crossover, and I think it turned out pretty well! My reader/podficcer and I worked pretty closely together during the initial brainstorming process, working out what we wanted to do, and also bounced off one another during the whole editing/finalizing process. There’s a lot that I didn’t end up putting into the fic (because time and length; I am a. Uh. Very wordy writer; the aim was for 6-12k words, we ended up with nearly 15k as it is...), so I might poke more at this specific AU, or crossovers linking up at a different time (either a different point in the SW canon, or in the AtLA canon, or both). I...definitely have extensive headcanons for SW characters as benders of various elements (or nonbenders), and there are at least two Force-sensitive AtLA characters who were outside the scope of the crossover.

Anyway, if you want to check it out...click this link XD (and definitely listen to the podfic too!!! It’s really great)

Precipice:

So, between the final push on PodTogether and some origfic stuff I got done, I...did not get anything finished and posted for this, alas. But! I am saying it here in the hopes that doing so publicly will for once get me to actually stick to a deadline, which is that I will get either the first Protectors chapter or the next Preludes one-shot (or both!) up by this Sunday, September 12. The Protectors chapter will be mostly scene-setting, establishing where various characters are when we open, six years after we last saw our heroes. The Preludes segment will involved Hondo contacting Obi-Wan (and Anakin, who’s with him when he gets the call) about something Relevant To Their Interests.

I will for sure get that Prelude out this month, and hopefully at least two Protectors chapters, but we’ll see how things go at work and how much brain that takes, which is always a factor...anyway, with any luck, I’ll start establishing a Rhythm. I don’t think I’ll be doing weekly updates, the way I did for the first few arcs of Precipice (in part because there are some other longform projects I intend to start putting out and if I am going to do Weekly Fic Posts, I’ll probably alternate), but we’ll see how things go.

AtLA Fic:

Again, I didn’t finish what I wanted to (other than the aforementioned crossover for PodTogether), but I have been working on stuff in the background and, while I’m not going to commit to a Specific Deadline like I am for Precipice, I do plan to post at least the opening chapter of the still-untitled Avatar Zuko AU I’ve been working on this month, so watch this space!

Other Fic Projects:

I’m poking around at what to do for next years SWBB (if only because my wordcounts have been Steadily Increasing and I’d like to get a head start in anticipation of that happening again this year, lol). Still considering exactly what to do, whether I pour all my focus into OFLAM, like I consider every year, or see if I can work up Bail Unfucks the Timeline or another half-plotted AU I have in the back of my head, or go with a different prompt/storyline that occurs to me at some point between now and then, but I’m starting to Actively Ponder things.

I do have that BSG1 crossover outline in the works, I swear XD I’ve got...uh...maybe half to two thirds of the first third of the overall storyline written up? XD It’s a. Uh. Long one. I might go ahead and release it in three parts, just for length/convenience, and because it does more or less have three distinct sections (the initial contact/New Caprica fallout and establishment of the Haven settlement which makes sense in context; the second contact/algae planet; and then an adventure on a resurrection ship to retrieve a Specific Boxed Five and possibly walk away with Ellen because that would just ruin Cavil’s day and I do so love to ruin Cavil’s day, lol). ...I’m going to go ahead and post a preview snippet at the bottom of this post, as Motivation XD

I think that’s all the fanfic stuff I have specific updates for. There’s generally always stuff noodling around in my brain (lately, for Star Wars, AtLA, BSG, or some combination of the three), it’s just how much of it materializes, lol.

At some point, I plan to revisit some BSG epics I had going on (Serenissima; rewriting For Sorrow Sung or doing a slightly different storlyine with the same concept; The Other Battlestar; a few others), but no concrete plans as of yet.

I also kind of want to explore a far-past AtLA setting I designed for a challenge community way back? But I’m not sure if that would work better as an original work with the serial numbers filed off, if I could figure out how I wanted to do that (I have done it before, as I’ll talk about below, but this concept, while not directly involving any characters from Avatar canon as it’s set 2000 years prior to Sozin’s reign, does to an extent lean on the Avatar specifically as a concept, in a way that the other fic I did this with did not).

Original Fic:

Due to a challenge on rainbowfic, I actually got. Quite a bit written? Most of it was not super plot-relevant, but I dropped some Hints about a character in Lux and I got to play in some heads I don’t very often. I might go back to the Regency AU at some point, and there’s a specific reveal I want to write up for a secondary character in The Farglass Cycle, but I haven’t quite figured out how to structure that one, so we’ll see how it goes.

Had an interesting discussion the other day about the way original fiction sometimes starts as fanfic with the serial  numbers filed off and...well, a lot of my original stuff starts that way? Or has some roots there, anyway.

Lux doesn’t quite as much, but I definitely ported in at least two characters who started as fanfic characters (leaving aside that this is, y’know, The Apocalypse IN SPACE so, like. Various fandoms that deal with that probably influenced things, plus several key players are Public Domain Characters sooooo), plus some of the way the world is constructed draws on the Native Tongue trilogy and I flat-out stole a concept from Queen of the Damned, though the way it works in this world is different (also, to be fair, I think I’ve seen it in other places, too; but I personally got the idea from there).

The Farglass Cycle and Untitled Intrigues Story, however, straight-up started as fanfic concepts. And I don’t think it’s obvious unless I point out what the source materials were? Farglass, in particular (it’s the AtLA fic I mentioned earlier), because it started as an alternate future and then the map and magic system got reworked, plus the Avatar themself wasn’t even super involved in the original fic context, and while certain characters are very loosely based on AtLA characters, by now they’ve been so altered by the setting that it’s...I used the same archetypes, if that makes sense?

And then Untitled Intrigues Story started as a fusion between two wildly different fandoms, and while one character is a pretty clear expy if you know where he comes from, and another character kept the same actress in my head, I don’t think it’s very clear other than that.

...anyway, not sure where I’m going with that, other than it’s been in my head lately, lol.

...I think that about covers it! What about you guys? What are you all working on? Slash any questions, etc.?

Teaser for BSG1 AU outline, as promised:

So, anyway, SG-1 is prepared for rain and mud and a survivable-but-kinda-unpleasant environment. They’re also prepared for the usual shenanigans--Goa’uld, cranky local politics, weird alien tech that Daniel really should know better than to touch but sends him into another dimension anyway...

Just. Y’know. A normal mission.

They’re...not quite prepared for what they actually find when they step through.

Which is a very tense and now slightly Confused crowd of people, and a firing squad made up of very large killer robots, with a teenage girl as their target.

(One of the large killer robots is. Uh. Well. Half a large killer robot now; that particular Centurion was in the wrong place at the wrong time and got kawooshed in the face. As one does.)

(Said Centurion absolutely wins the ‘Weirdest Death’ pool for the week in Download City, because that is clearly a thing that exists because it entertains me)

There’s a beat where everyone just stares at everyone else, trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

The wormhole disengages.

Daniel takes half a step forward, opens his mouth to start the ‘we are peaceful explorers from Earth and y’all seem to be having a Moment here, sorry for interrupting, but, uh...’

And then the moment end and absolute chaos erupts.

[philcoulsonismyhero]

Fic Writer Interview

I got tagged by the excellent @astriiformes Ages ago to do this fic writer interview thing, and I’m finally getting around it! So here goes...

Name:

Mairi (sounds like 'marry'), Kamemor over on AO3 (after a particularly cool Romulan politician in a Star Trek novel, if you were wondering)

Fandoms:

Currently, I'm writing a lot of RWBY fic and that's unlikely to change because I'm deep in Special Interest Hell with no signs of coming up for air. In the past, I've also written a bunch of stuff for Criminal Minds and The Flash/DCTV. I've got a lot of other fandoms, but those are the main ones I've written for.

Two-shot:

Assuming this is asking if I've ever written one, technically no. But I do have a series (Just Hold On, a RWBY fix-it) that currently consists of two fics which could stand alone as they are, although I have plans to continue that one for quite a few more fics if I can find the motivation and time. And I guess I also have a couple of fics that I could have split into two chapters because they switch from one POV to another about halfway through. I like to stick to third person limited POV, and that means I often have section breaks when I want to switch from one character's perspective to another's, and for a two-person scene that usually means two sections. But I like the oneshot structure, and usually I don't feel like what I'm writing is long enough to split into chapters.

Most popular multi-chapter:

I only have one true multi-chapter fic, and it's Moving Forward, a Flash fic based on the idea of Reverse Flash being taken prisoner at the end of s1 rather than being wiped from existence. It's technically still unfinished, but I got a lot of lovely comments on that one a few years back when I was posting it, including a few folks that went through and commented on each chapter and really made my day. Maybe one day I'll actually finish it...

The only other thing I have that’s multi-chapter is a collection of missing scene ficlets, also Flash fic, but that doesn’t really count.

Actual worst part of writing:

My brain tends to be very visual when I'm writing fanfic for a TV show, and few things are as annoying as knowing exactly the facial expression someone is pulling and having No Idea how to describe it in words. Same with tones of voice. Also, I tend to jump straight into writing the bits of scenes that are most interesting to me, and going back and adding in the context that you need to make something actually readable for someone that isn't you can be a bit tiresome.

How you choose your titles:

It depends, tbh. A lot of my older fics are titled with short verb phrases that are pretty straightforward (like 'Moving Forward' or 'Breaking the Cycle'), but recently I've rather enjoyed using song lyrics. Most of my RWBY fics have lyric titles either from songs from the show itself or songs that I've got on my extensive Ironwood character playlist or otherwise just quite like and feel like they fit. I don't tend to find titles all that difficult, and I've got a fair few WIPs that have them already.

Do you outline:

Again, depends on the fic. With longer ones, yes, usually as a list of bullet points describing what happens. But shorter missing scene fics or things that I bashed out in only one or two sessions and only follow a single conversation tend not to be outlined because they just flow as I write them. I've got some more extensive outlines for a few of the fix-it AUs I've been playing with, but even then they're just bullet point lists or mostly held in my own head.

Ideas I probably won't get around to but wouldn't it be nice:

I have. So many. Most of them are RWBY fix-it fic, which is fun to write at the moment of divergence but then A Huge Endeavour to follow any further than that. I’ve planned out a bunch of different shapes for where the three different versions I’ve already written and posted would go, but there’s only one of them that I’m really continuing (aforementioned two fic series). Although I have a dilemma there, because the climax of the story arc that I figured out for that ‘verse would work even better in the other one that focuses more on Penny & Ironwood. But it’s not as simple as just throwing the idea into continuity with that one, because there’s a Major difference between the two in that in one of them, Qrow was the one who got through to Ironwood, and in the other they kinda hate each other over the whole ‘I blame you (and also me but mostly you) for Clover’s death’ thing, so I’d have to plot out a completely different relationship arc there which would have a knock-on impact on how well Ironwood is dealing with everything else. Canon divergence fic! it’s a good time.

I’ve also got So Much other RWBY fic in bits and pieces in various Google docs, it’s ridiculous. (Including a superhero AU that I’m rather fond of conceptually, but don’t really have a solid arc plot for.) A lot of it would be nice to get into a publishable state, but I probably won’t ever be bothered to.

On the not-RWBY front, I've also got a big Criminal Minds/Silent Witness crossover that I've planned out all the beats of, but actually writing it means coming up with the specific details of the murders and the autopsy scenes and a whole lot of technical stuff that I'm not comfortable just winging based on what I've seen on TV. But I also don't like researching real life crime stuff even though I love a good crime drama, so you see my dilemma. I like casefic in theory, but in practice I'm probably not going to write much of it. 

Callouts @ me:

Just because you’re an insomniac who mostly writes fic at night rather than sleeping doesn’t mean that every conversation fic has to happen as a result of one or both characters being unable to sleep, my dude. There are Other circumstances in which people talk to each other.

Best writing traits:

I’m good at character voice, although that’s a pretty standard thing to be good at. I also really like unconventional crossovers, I’ve gotten pretty good at playing around with conversations between characters who never met or aren’t even from the same universe and coming up with a believable dynamic for them. I also like to think that I’m good at getting into the heads of awkward characters and figuring out which bits to poke at in order to get them to do things they didn’t do in canon. (And figuring out how they rationalised the things they did actually do.) That’s a big reason why I liked writing Reverse Flash, the complicated bastard, and it’s why I’m having so much fun with Ironwood now. You’ve really got to work at him to get him to change direction, great big stubborn disaster that he is, and I think I’ve rather gotten the hang of that.

Spicy tangential opinion:

People should write more longfic focused on gen relationships. Some of the most fascinating relationships in stories, at least to me, are the ones between people you’d never expect to be friends, or between adults and the kids they feel responsible for who also feel kinda responsible for them, and that makes for a (imho) much more interesting story than most ships. I Live for a good complicated mentor/mentee relationship, but I hate looking for fic about them because then I have to deal with the fact that a lot of people ship those relationships and it squicks me out. Give me the longfics about types of relationships I actually care about!

(This whole thing is a good 40% of the reason that I’ve ended up get absorbed in planning out a RWBY Vol8 re-write where the parallels and the newly complicated relationship between Ruby and Ironwood is The Main Agenda. (The other 60% of the reason being ‘[x character] deserved better’.) There’s some Really Good Stuff there and I want to play with it in more of a longform situation than my usual oneshots.)

No pressure tagging:

@squireofgeekdom , @catgirlalchemist , and anyone else who wants to give it a go! Feel free to say I tagged you :D

[popculturebuffet]

Close Enough Season 2 Review! or Josh Murders About 10 People

It's been hard to put into words just how wonderful a surprise this season getting released this month was. For starters before JG Quintel announced it last year shortly after season 1, I honestly was convinced season 2 wasn't happened. Do NOT get me wrong, Season 1 of Close Enough was one of the best parts of last year: It was funny, had a lot of heart, a great voice cast, and a great cast of characters that was throughly likeable and broke sitcom stereotypes, having a doofy husband and more straight laced wife with layers who clearly love and respect each other and BOTH can be prone to taking things too far instead of JUST Josh screwing up. Add in two great fellow leads Bridgette and Alex played by two of my faviorite va's, Kimiko Glen and Jason Mantzokus, whose name I finally learned how to spell, an adorable daughter and neat but out of focus neighbors and supors pearle and randy, and the show was just damn near perfect and felt like an improvement on regular show, taking the same humor and animation style but to an older cast and audience with more nuanced and likeable characters, and far more character development per episode. I wanted to see where the show would go.. but I was convinced given the show was leftover inventory from an animation block that never happened held over to give HBO Max some content it'd be canceled after one season, because I can't have nice things. But....

And very happily so: JG Quintel revealed the show had been picked up for season 2 not long after season 1 dropped, having listned to fans. As it turns out though they hadn't.. they just had a ton of faith in the show as I got ANOTHER bombshell earlier this month. While the show had showed up on the schedule for this month late in January, with no release date on said schedule, I wasn't 100% sure the show was coming back this month or that it wasn't just an error. But once again, I was wrong, it was earth all along, and they merely saved it for the press release for their adult animation lineup: alongside the huge and welcome bombshell they were the ones picking up the Clone High reboot and for two seasons, Close enough not only got two more seasons publicly announced, but fimrly revealed season 2 launched February 25th. LIke they likely had with infinity train the show was quitely picked up for another season, and they simply waited to announce it till the right time. Though unlike infinity train, they had faith in it to become a big hit and while they SHOULD HAVE with infinity train and should've accepted it was already a big hit simply not with the target demographic, it's still nice to see that after all it went through Close Enough not only got renewed but is now the network's flagship adult animated show, closely tied with harley quinn, and will likely go on as long as it wants to.

So naturally given I reviewed all of season 1 in the hopes i'td get renewed, I was happy to make room for season 2 and continue covering it and over the moon it was happening so soon. However I'm doing things diffrently this time: instead of flooding the tag with individual longform reviews, i'm reviewing the season all one go, to see if this format could work for me as I have tons of other shows i'd love to cover in this format that are either heavily comedic like say the Great North, regular show or the simpsons and thus dont' lend themselves to riffing as much and leave me less to do per episode, or more seralized shows like she ra or ones that are entirely complete like Steven Universe or Gravity falls that I could cover alone but this format could help expidite covering. Gravity Falls is also one of my patreon stretch goals if your instrested as is a whole lot of ducktales stuff, link on my blog. It also works with my much larger workload with a much tighter schedule, 6 reviews a week with a flex day in case I get behind so everything comes out as good as it posisbly can be, versus my original method of...

TLDR: One big post with smaller reviews each episode and an overall coverage of what changed this season and how good it is as a whole. We good? Good, then join me under the cut for some delightful sentient presents, couch ghosts, and jim fucking crunch as we get close enough to the heart.

I will never get tired of that image. I want it blown up and put on a banner at my funeral. But death plans aside let's get into the season

Slight Tweaks to a Great Formula: Given it's slice of life format based largely around likeable multi layered characters in comedic absurdity, not a lot has changed nor did it need to. What has are just simple tweaks to make things even better. For starters a natural result of getting to the episodes now produced directly for the 11 minute format means the pacing is much focused, subbing in full subplots for the occasional runner instead, and often only using what characters the episode needs. It will use the main five often, but the lack of subplots for the most part allows stronger focus on one or two characters to give the stories added weight and nuance and often laughs. While i'll always love season 1, this allows for much tighter stories and allows for everyone to get some major screen time instead of mostly Josh and Emily in season 1. It does mean we sadly get less of my boy Alex per episode but it's a sacrifice i'm willing to make if it means the show can grow and take more risks and evolve naturally. Though the former probably wasn't help by two of his three episodes being kinda weak, but i'll get to that.

The other noticeable change is Pearle and Randy. While they were promoted as main characters, even getting profiles along with the rest, they were in practice recurring characters in season 1, showing up pretty frequently but with only one starring episode for Randy and none for Pearle. And givne Pearle has an interesting backstory as a cop who likely had to put up with a LOT being a black woman officer, as well as raising a white redneck, while also being hilarious and having a fun energy to her, I felt they kinda wasted her in season 1.

Here though? Both have been bumped up to main cast proper, getting two focus episodes a piece (compared to the other main adults each getting three, some of those shared, and Candace getting one, hopefully more in the future as it was really good, along with, to my delight, mr.cambell also getting one), appearing far more in supporting roles and generally showing up with the main group a lot more. They still don't hang out with our loveable family all the time, but it makes sense as they have their own apartment and stuff to deal with, but it feels far more like their part of the main group. The show always treated them like this mine, but showing up more makes their friendships with their tenants feel more genuine, as it feels like their part of their lives more, whlie having their own to deal with we get to see now.

So while the series didn't change much, as I said it didn't need to and all of this is stuff is the kind of thing I wanted, especially Pearle getting a larger role and Randy being fleshed out from a dollar store version of muscle man into his own similar but difference character, and i'm happy to have it. So now i've talked about how the seasons' changed, let's talk about the episodes themselves. Grab a snack this is going to take a bit.

The Episodes!:

Josh Gets Shredded: 

Our premier and honestly it's a solid one with a singular premise on poking fun at gym culture, though in a nice twist Jim Crunch, the guy who runs the Gym Josh ends up going to to strengthen his core to play with Candace and whose voiced wonderfully by Kevin Michael Richardson is a genuinely good guy and there's no horrifying twist with him. He just wants Josh to get ripped and dosen't know his training is keeping josh from candace. IT's a simple setup of a father doing something for his daughter but getting distracted by it and while not new it works well here and we get plenty of fun gym jokes, including an exchange from Jim and Josh when Josh wants to become an "absolute unit", which in this case ends up meaning turning into the hulk but with the glowing firey eyes of an angry god, feels like it came straight out of the hockey bros from letterkenny, which is a good feeling to have. There's also a nice setup with Candace wanting to play king kong with Josh due to seeing it in class (Specially the Peter Jackson remake, also Candace knows who jack black is which I buy because of who her daddy is. I wouldn’t be surprised if Josh had Saving Silverman on a loop for several days until emily threw it out the window like a frisbee. ), which kicks off the whole thing.. and ends with ultra instinct hulk josh taking her to the top of a building and swatting away helicopters. It’s more of an average episode for the series and the runner about Emily being REALLY hot for buff josh comes off as a weaker version of the plot from family guy where Lois likes a thinner peter, apart from one inspired bit where in order to talk to him about candace without getting distracted, Emily pours an entire bag of ice down her pants.. and subtly after Josh talks about becoming an absolute unit, it’s gone nad rather than animation I like to believe it melted. Still a decent start to a great season. 

Meet the Frackers: A Randy Spotlight episode and unlike his season one episode rather than be a subplot in another episode it’s a full episode about him. And the starting incident is great as the gang gets their ancestry results back from costco, with Emily and Bridgette having ancestors in Guadalajara and Kiyoto.. and Josh being white (”Can you believe it?”). Alex coming from a long line of creeps is also pretty funny, those are his actual results by the way. 

But what the episodes truly about is Randy finding out his parents are alive in Malibu after Pearle claimed they were dead when he was a kid. She had a very good reason though: Randy’s parents were serial gas thieves, and Pearle nearly caught them one night with the two chucking him at her to escape. And to her credit Pearle TRIED to reach out to them once they ended up in jail for their crimes.. but they again chucked him at her which is hilarious. She simply didn’t want him to feel abandoned. He instead feels betrayed. 

His parents are hilariously white trash and played by two faviorite va’s of mine, David Kochner and Wendy Malick, who i’m happy is finally playing a lead roll on Owl House. They drink redneck maragretihas and eat mcribs (As Randy puts it “God’s favorite sandwich!”) every day and still steal gas, just legally now as frackers. Naturally though the two are still assholes and soon use a carnival as a cover to illegally frack and it’s up to Randy an dhis real mom to stop them> It’s a touching story with Randy genuinely wanting to hlep his mom, though I feel it would’ve been more interesting if Randy’s parents hadn’t been scum an dhe had to genuinely deal with having three parents now. Still it was worth it for some great lines from Malick and Kochner , so it works. Decent ep. 

Sauceface: Now we come to both one of the best eps of the season, and the series so far, and one of it’s most unique as it stars Candace and dosen’t feature the other main cast hardly at all, only Emily who kicks things off by, in a great bit, breaking Candace’s illusion their rich as “they live in a castle with alex and bridgette”, with her slowly realizing “Were poor”. Which is just a very kid thing to think that your parents are rich when they very much aren’t. 

But the episode really is a crime boss parody story, as the title would imply as Candace and her best friend start selling hot sauce, which is banned from the school due to it’s political correctness having gone mad and it being offensive to “sensitive palates” (They’ve also banned general tso’s chicken for mitlarialism and everything bagels for being “too much”). This leads where you’d expect: Candace getting drunk with power and forgetting why theys tarted, wet willies, and an art room brawl, all leading to candace’s friend getting pinched and candace having to use the money to buy Mr. Cambell a pelaton to get him off their backs, which leads to this lovely exchange “YOur letting them off just because they bought you a present?” “This is a 2000 dollar bike”. We also get the subtle reveal Mr. Cambell is gay which given how straight the main cast is, is nice.  But this was a great one with too many good gags to mention, a great setup, a great rolling stones song played during the montage I do not know the name of, and I hope we get other candace advnetures at her school in the future, because this was a real delight. Again one of the best episodes of the season. 

The House Guest From Hell: Speaking of best episodes, this is probably the best pairing of episodes yet, as both are standouts of the season. 

Emily’s old friend Becca drops back into her life, to everyone’s annoyance as Becca is an utter leech who constantly take advantage of Emily’s lack of boundaries with her to constantly talk about whatever drama she’s wrapped herself in and mooch off her. Josh and Bridgette want her to set firm boundaries, but Emily fails to and instead only gets Becca to set boundaries with her boyfriend.. which leads to her moving into the apartment temporarily, and annoying the hell out of everyone. Becca is a great character, being that asshole in the most over the top and annoying way possible, to the point she takes alex’s room, watches tv on a loop and doesn’t seem to realize Emily is married (Despite being part of her bridal party), or that candace is Emily’s daughter and not a tiny butler (Which Candace assumes is a game. )

Naturally for this show things escalate hilariously as Emily finds out she’s pregnant when she tries to throw her out and the pregnancy is escalated.. and we soon find out it’s because the pregnancy is demonic: She has Hecate as her dula (And Alex naturally asks if she’s single, get it guy get it), needs goats hoves, locusts and the blood of the innocent (Which is the only item that trips josh up who hopes they can get it at costco, which made me have to pause as I could not stop laughing). This would be funny enough. .but what takes it into making this episode a classic is when Emily tricks her boyfriend Luke over he’s unsurprisingly a devil.. but also a hilariously over the top douchebag dudebro played by Beck  Bennet, who it’s not only nice to see outside of ducktales, but is also just totally game. Luke is so odious it wraps around to being funny, to the point he unsurprisingly hits on Bridgette while his girlfriend is in labor, messily makes out with her and they try to move in, though thankfully Emily cathartically screams Becca out midbirth. Also they end up going to hell, with Luke getting there by doing donuts. Yes really. This episode is a treasure and does the series schitck of taking a relatable problem and escalating it to perfection. 

Joint Break:

Another unsurprisingly good one, as Pearle deals with the fact that despite her decades of service, the force’s health plan doesn’t cover her needed hip surgery after she slides over a car wrong (Which also leads to a great riff on the old csi Miami parody). She then finds herself between her oath as an officer and her needs for help as she befriends a gang of saucy old women at water aerobics who are also bank robbers and want to cut her in. And they provide a tempting offer, getting what their owed and ti feels like a genuine dilemma, even if Pearle ends up siding with the police, not that she should. It’s also full of great bits of the old lady gang weaponizing stereotypes about old people, with the three of them dawning classic old lady getups to fool an officer, and having one of them i a walker slowly cross the street to stop an armored truck. Fun stuff helped by their leader being voiced by Jane Lynch, continuing this season’s red hot guest star streak, not that the series has ever been light on them (They got David Hasselhoff and weird al in season 1, so yeah), but this season ramps up the good guest voices to the point there’s one per episode almost. 

Cyber Matrix: This one’s okay though the setup is good. Unsurprisingly given both his dale gribble-esque penchant for conspiracies and his hipster holier than thou ways, Alex has never had a smart phone, and has a very old flip hone that’s horrifc to look at and naturally gets destroyed, leading to him getting addicted to the thing.. and this being the show it is fusing with it. What makes this one is the climax, as the rest of the main group scramble to take out the cell tower so Alex’s phone doesn’t upload him to the cloud while Josha nd Alex open everything they can to slow her down. The result is the phone hacking Emily’s and ordering packages, task rabbits to punch her inthe face (With randy taking it so they can go) and outright hijacking a car in a clever chase. The ending though does sink this as suddenly their in veirutal reality again and it just feels weird given the series, while not really using continuity much so far, dosne’t have negavite continuity punch out endings outside of this one ep and I hope this dosen’t happen again. Otheriwse a decent one if sadly not one of Alex’s best and he equally sadly onlyg ets one truly great episode this season, compared to having a good chunk of the best plots last season. Still you can’t win em all and i’m sure my boy will return to form and said great episode, which we’ll get to soon, certainly shows they didn’t loose their touch. They just fumbled a bit and that’s okay. 

Haunted Couch: Balancing that out is the fact that Bridgette, who didn’t get nearly as many good eps as Alex or as much focus as the rest, gets some great episodes this season with this one being my out and out favorite as it fleshes her out more and has some really great gags. Josh brings in a street couch (And he and Emily’s argument over it is great including him using the fact she forced them to get a savings account as leverage somehow), just as Bridgette is in emotional turmoil over her latest boyfriend suddenly ghosting her. 

Naturally she ends up falling for a REAL ghost, a french couch designer who had a habit of cheating on his lovers, died for it by one of their hands, and his soul ended up bound to the couch. Naturally hea nd Bridgette hit it off and we get a LOT of good stuff in a montage as the two take the couch everywhere, and her friends, minus Alex who surprisingly rather than being jealous, simply dosen’t like the fact there’s a ghost in the house technically haunting them which surprisingly goes nowhere, are happy for her and like him after the initial shock wears off, though Josh still wants to sit on the couch. He and Bridgette even have really good sex using Randy’s body, with him being a willing vesel for Marcus. And i’d just like to point out that an intensely weird comedy show that also has a sentient present, bob vila with saw hands, and dude bro satan in this very season, 2/3 of those to come.. STILL did this better than wonder woman 87, as they actually asked someone to let the ghost of the couple use his body so they could fuck, and he gave full consent to it. And no I sitll haven’t let that go, it was a very bad plotline with nightmarish implications and the fact close enough did it better in a joke, they also have the song from ghost in the background by the by, than a big budget movie from the same company, is a really large bilboard saying:

But while the episode was thoroughly interesting and funny.. it’s what happens next that makes it one of the series best. While the series is amazing at comedy, it’s the character growth slid in between it that makes it so awesome and this episode is a great example. Bridgette turns cold towards Marcus as it’s clear he’s serious, and he’s even moved a tooth brush in. She gets more and more hostile until eventually Marcus calls her on it, and prevents her from leaving with a vortex of furniture.. which could’ve gone bad very quick but instead just means she has to face him.. and is hit with a rather painful relization when he asks “Do you what me to, how you say, ghost you?” (She explained the concept earlier). She says no.. but quickly a series of flashbacks puts the previous breakup in context as the guy she was seeing asked to leave a toothbrush, a  simple escalation and she got real nasty real quick without saying what the problem was. We see more of this with a previous boyfriend and hilaroiusly one before that guy who not only had a toothbrush in a ringbox but was also in a hot air ballon she casually cuts the anchors too and has float away. Which does mean Bridgette probably killed a man but that’s one compared to josh’s 10 this season. Yes, 10. We’ll get to that. 

Point is she realizes “oh shit i’m the dick”, and has a genuine talk with Marcus, realizing why: “You know how women feign being submissive because society’s taught them to so they don’t get raped or murdered or kidnapped?” “Oui”, best bit of the episode and damn if it ain’t horribly true. But due to tha Bridgette simply got terrible quick to scare guys off when she really just wanted to break it off instead of take things further and breaks it off with marcus.. and is surprised and relieved when he doesn’t want a big fight and takes it acceptably, Marcus having grown from his past of being a women using cad and genuinely wanting to treat them better. For once Bridget gets to have an emotionally mature breakup with someone, and while you could say her relationship with alex is like that, it’s very clear from an upcoming episode it wasn’t a very clean break at first and while their amicable now their marriage was a hot volcano of arguments. This allos Marcus to pass.. if also destroying the couch to Josh’s misery. An instant classic and one of the season’s highlights and one that really fleshes Bridgette out a bit by giving another reason for her relationships not working besides alex that fits the character perfectly and has her grow from it. 

Also just a quick sidenote, this episode vaguely reminded me of the Nightmare Time, theater troupe team starkid’s zoomcast I highly recommend set in their hatchetfield multiverse, episode “Jane’s a Car” , which is about a man’s wife possessing his car and also involves an object. Both are very diffrent mind you, Jane’s a Car ends up way more depressing, but its’ stil la story involving ghost fucking though Bridgette found a vesel instead of straight up fucking a couch the way tom went to town on that car. It also involves the lead’s perosnal issues, if far more severe in Jane’s a Car’s case, reflected by their relationship with a ghost. I mean it is a stretch but these are the weird connectoins my brain makes and I mostly bring it up because an  upcoming episode in the season goes from kind of similar but only to me to very similar, and a very fun concidence that these two episodes existed in the same year, especially since this happened last year with this show and Ducktales. But first josh doing a murder on some people. 

Man Up:

Okay for starters the title man up reminds me of this short lived abc sitcom I never saw but given it was about three guys tapping into their “inner man” it sounds like aresnic somehow took the sentient form of a tv show. This actual poster for it not only proves the point but why it lasted one season if not why the hell I remembered this existed at all despite never seeing it, not recognizing anyone in it and not wanting anything to do with it. 

Given I have 8 more episodes to go after this one, I do not have time to disect all the way that poster is a waking nightmare, though i’d love to, and instead i’m going to talk abotu the episode itself. The intro is funny enough, with the Ramierz-Singletons going to a bank for Candace’s first bank account, the Bank of Hollywood. An alien seemingly attacks, it turns out to be a promotional stunt with high budget effects a great gag in of itself, but Josh runs out on his family.  Naturally he’s horribly rattled by this, and wants to be a better dad, a John McClane type. So two things: I now want a crossover with this show and brooklyn nine nine along with the hatchefield one in my head and the regular show one most fans want. And the second is that John wasn’t the best dad or husband, and both the original film, the sequel josh saw, and the fourth film all spell this out. The fifth does too but I feel if I wish hard enough a good day to die hard will just spontaneously cease to exist and we’ll all be happier that way. 

So Pearle agrees to help him, and we get a fun training montage, with Josh protecting a candace made of eggs Alex made, because of course he did, and an emily made of the same because of course he did, and get punched in the junk by randy in a dog costume, as you do. He actually feels tough and is ready for phase 2, pearle hitting him with something unexpectdly.

Instead what he thinks is Phase 2 is actually a die hard style hyjacking of Emily’s company christmas party, which josh misses due to being in the bathroom after panickily running into corn. As a result.. we get josh killing about 8-10 people not realizing it’s not a simulation but not really caring about that part when it’s revealed. Which granted it is in self defense but he still kills a LOT of people this episode, and I will be forever haunted by the fact that stringbean can REALLY do some murders. Seriously who knew JOSH had it in him. That is terrifying to comprehend. Naturally after he john mclanes his way up, he finds out it wasn’t a simulation panics but instead of running away runs the hans gruber knockoff, whose sadly not very entertaining out of the building and onto some exploding corn, saving the day, earning his family’s respect and cemnting himself as a badass. The reveal of what the text actually was is just.. perfect as it’s just a bat on a string with Alex saying “he’s totally going to shit”. The perfect capper to good ep only hampred by hans being really weak.. seriously he just has a weird sentence sturcture tha’ts hte joke. They can do better. Otherwise a good die hard parody. John would be proud. 

Handy:

Another decent one not a standout but it has a truly astounding bit. Randy finds out, after going to Guy Fieri’s flavor diaster for Pearle, that she hired another handyman and he’s not good at his job as as he puts it “I’m going to do what troubled young men have done for years : i’m going to sea!”. Which is funny enough but leads to him stranded on a desert island, hallucinating and then meeting his idols in handy manning who may or may not be hallucinations: Bob Vila, The Ikea Mascot (Who speaks only in pictures and is a fun gag despite never having seen him before this episode) and my favorite tim the tool man taylor, whose tie is constantly pointed up for some reason and who amazingly only speaks in grunts. I didn’t know I needed this so thank you close enough. We also get the three helping with bob turning his hands into buzzsaws, ikea man creating nails and screws and Tim using his head as a tool. All accurate to their original shows and in ikea man’s case brocures. Really good adaptation. But through this he discovers the clog the guy is trying to fix at the house is loadbearing and rushes home to save the house, leading to a fun actoin scene and a weird version of the celebration from the end of return of the jedi, complete with force ghosts. So we also get a tim taylor force ghost which I did not know I needed and as much as that show makes my stomach churn I badly hope shows up in the finale of last man standing. A decent one and givne how I keep sayin ga decent episode over and over you can kinda see why I didn’t review all these. LIke season 1 I simply don’t have a full review in me for every single one of these episodes. We’re now at the halfway mark, only 8 more to go, I envy the dead, let’s do this. 

Birthdaze: This was the episode most heavily promoted in the trailer and for good reason as it’s the best of the season. Also relatable as while not having kids I do get how Kids Birthday parties feel and how they often end up weirdly close together. In this case both coalse as Josh and Emily have three birthdays in one weekend, their friends Emily’s friend Trish from “Cool Moms”, who is so far some of the only continuity the series has, but a nice sign it has it, and that we could see Jim Crunch (who rose from the grave after an utterly wonderful funeral) or Dog Boy again. Or this episode’s standout gifty. But we’ll get to that in a second.  So Josh and Emily well intentiondly decide to throw a party for the parents at the same time as Candace’s.. but end up neglecting Candace. While their idea is good, to reward the other parents for having to sit through so many parties, putting it at the same time was a horrible idea as giving a bunch of pent up people with low alcohol tolerance booze ends up resulting in drunken antics and them heckling the magicain... and given the world we’re in, that’s a horrible mistake as he makes the children disappear to a world of perptual brithday parties and forces JOsh and Emily to follow him if they want their child back.  What results is an utter delightly as we meet the wonderful and incomprable Gifty, a giant living present who works iwth the magician, named sardini, and is voiced by Kate Miccuci, heart eyes> Just.. evey bit with gifty is great, from her genuinely being animated and looking like a muppet, to her casually going demonic to explain if the kids stay too long they forget parents, to as seen up top playing a pipe organ that is apparently made of gold plated clown bones, and her best bit, which I posted on this very blog, where she assures the trapped kids if JOsh and Emily fail their final test, they’ll get to live of nutricious necco wafers before vomiting a giant cloud of them at the poor children. Those things are gross and we now knwo it’s because they come from a giant present’s stomach. 

We get a great montage before most of that of our heroes treking through a weird and awesome birthday landscape with too many good parts to mentoin, before finding Sardini who puts them through tests before they can get candace back.. and one of those are you human image tests via the ball from phantasm. As gifty puts it “We have to make sure your not a bot”. But the tests, about candaces faviorite things, help the two realize she liked them because they did it together, and a final talk with candace, as the final test has her ask why theyd idn’t want to spend time with her, with the two warmly apologizing and explaning why they did it but that they went too far. Candace reconclies with her parent,s the kids and our heroes go home, and Sardini finds himself sad no one stayed.. but at least he has gifty... and then start making love to her “Unwrap me!” which is far and away the best gag in the season’s best episode by a mile. 

Time Hooch:

Now to talk about two things I hinted at earlier: The only good Alex episode this season and the one that vaugely resembles one of the Nightmare Time episodes. And while their two very diffrent stories with very diffrent outcomes and only one of them involves this guy

And suprisingly it’s NOT close enough that has the eldtrich horrifying goat monster with a goofy cartoon voice who says things like “I’m coming for your ass Teddy Bear!” But both are stories about a sketchy (mildly for alex, entirely for Ted) middle aged man who feels one moment is where his life went wrong then accidently time travels after drinking 80 tons of liquor and decides to use said time travel to save a relationship, and fails at it in some fashion.  There’s even a jaunt to a distopian future with robots and cyborgs. So while it’s not 1:1, alex is far more sympathetic than Ted, Time Bastard is dark horror comedy, and it again dosen’t involve a horrifying goat man suprisingly enough, it’s till way too many happy coincidences for me to outright ignore. Also check out nightmare time and especially the musicals it spun off from The Guy Who Didn’t LIke Musicals and Black Friday. It’s good stuff. But I couldn’t help but make the comparison, or now imagine Alex, Ted and Professor Hidgens as some weird diasterious power trio. This is how my brain works now. 

But to the episode itself it’s just great from start to finish: Bridgette finds out while rumaging for an old photo in an old box of their stuff that Alex never signed the divorce papers. Turns out he was hoping they’d get back together.. and while not doing it and not telling her was a VERY selfish and horrible action.. you still sympathize with him. He hoped things would work out and they’d get back together, and given they had some close calls with that in season 1, to the point I shipped them, you can see where his sprig of hope came from. But with this he’s realized there probably isn’t any hope and drinks some old moonshine he and Josh made in college.  Said moonshine was from a recipie in an old blues record, the titular time hooch that true to form, allows them to travel back in time. And since he was thinking of when he thought the relationship truly hit it’s breakig point, when Bridgette at a sandwitch of his and he’d said in the heat of it he wished he’d never met her, they end up there and Alex tries to use it to help. Also Jason’s delivery of Alex saying what the recipie was “rye, barely, a dead man’s pocket watch, mixed under a full moon (Laughs) okay we probably should’ve seen this coming.  

Naturally here’s where it really gets intresting. As you’d probably guess, our heroes are the ones who made the sandwitch disappear and in desperation, alex kidnaps his past self before he can say the fatal words> We also get another spectacular bit where all past alex needs from alex to know he’s really him from the future is what year he was born (1982), meaning he’s defintely older than the rest of the cast. Though I wouldn’t be suprised if he was held back.. like at all. Look i’m not thinking too hard into it this is also a story about whiskey based time travel. 

But with that said intresting part takes hold as Josh’s past self reminds him of another fight that made things tense for a while.. and you can see where this goes. Alex keeps going back, and back, and back and back and back and back and back... and back, to try and stop the one fight, only to find a bigger one, leading to a montage.. to the point he ends up at the start of the relationship, the day they met at a college bar. The younger Alex’s have decided screw it it was always wrong, let’s end the relationship. 

We also get more of Alex’s backstory as it turns out he’s at a community college rather than UCLA, where he used to teach because of his own dumb actions: He met bridgette, let her enroll in his class and didn’t try to convince her to take another one. Don’t get me wrong the decade age gap and power dynamics are iffy.. but it’s not as bad as it could be. They met before the class, and it comes off more as both being too stupid or too horny to realize how her being in his class came off before it was too late. She got with him entirely on his merits, and yes he has some trust me.  Case in point.. Alex realizes a few things. The first is that no amount of time travel can save his relationship. They fought all the time clearly, and there were inherent problems. It’s also clear just from the series itself that while they have chemistry their just not that compatible as people. Bridgette is obessed with image, social media, and herself while Alex just two episodes ago called phones the downfall of society and likes feeling superior to the exact kind of person bridgette is. They have chemistry but sometimes it’s jut not enough. You have to have some common ground or your going to fall in a big hole. It’s honestly feels like a much more tolerable and realistic version of Leonard and Penny from the Big Bang Theory. And yes I know that show’s not the most popular with my core audience, nerds, and I bring it up because mom’s been watching it a lately, and any time I see Leonard and Penny on screen it annoys me into a tizzy as the two just have NO REASON to be together other than boning, and even then he’s apparently not a good partner so why then. They have nothing in common and she mocks and belittles him all the fucking time, mocking his hobbies, finding his job boring, and mocking him as a person. And not sharing hobbies or finding his job intresting would be fine, and still work but it’s the constant teasing about it that comes off far more vitrolic than probably intended that just makes me hope for a divorce. Here it’s not only much milder but they did actually get a divorce because their just diffrnet people and i’m not mad the ship was sunk. It was done in a poetic way. 

And part of that poetry is Alex realizing that as doomed as things ended up being, via a very sweet montage of their time together.. he realizes he can’t loose this all together. That sure he’d gain a lot and porbably woudlnt’ be living in a closet, but he’d loose all the good times, and he’d loose a friend. His marriage wasn’t so bad he wants to erase it it just ended and that happens. Naturally the other alex’s don’t feel that way but Alex stops them.. Josh is too drunk at this point to help, and ends up creating a time vortex. The vortex sends our heroes home, where Alex realizes his mistake and apologizes for it to bridgette and signs the papers in front of her.  As for the Alexs we get a horrifying and hilarous gag as, given they’ve all commented each other is handsome.. start having an orgy, and are later found in amber and their dna is used to create our alex apparently. How does that work?

Point is this episode.. is a masterwork. It’s emotoinal, hilarious, and really good character work, with Alex having a really stellar arc that shades him in and putts a final button in his and bridgettes relationship. And having seen many ships I like end horribly, it’s nice to have one end in a satsifying way like this. Also we see Alex in his borat thong, and i’d just like to point out how funny I find it that the same year they made a borat joke, specifically on it being from a decade or two ago, we ended up getting a second Borat movie. Very niceeee. 

World’s Greatest Teacher: This one was alright. On the bright side we got a Mr.Cambell episode! I”ve loved the guy since first meeting him in 100% no stress day, it was the first episode and that hasn’t changed and he’s always a bright spot when he shows up. So an episode about him dealing with a rival teacher, MS. Lake a twice a week music teacher gunning for his job and his students love sounded made for me. In practice he gets a bit too petty to be symapthetic which takes things down a peg, even if it turns out  Ms. Lake really is coming for his ass Teddy Bear, but it has enough good gags to help it still be a fun episode.

The biggest one and the biggest reason I sitll like the episode is Timothy’s coffe mug for world’s greatest teacher.. which naturally comes to life, possibly as a psychotic break possibly for real because of the show this is, and starts speaking in the dulcet tones of keith david. ANd i’ve made no secret I love and am thirsty for Keith David on this blog and never will, and having him voice an abusive fowl mouthed coffee mug  is something I dind’t know I need but boy did I always need it my entire life. Yes even as a baby. It’s just glorious every time he shows up. The climax is also great as the two teachers end up bonding over the greatest love of all and george micheal after Candace invites River to a part sh’esd having for her tooth coming out, and end up becoming frinemies, a nice solution i was glad to see. Even if i’ll miss evil keith david coffee mug. Rest in power my dude. 

Where’d You Go, Bridgette? The second major Bridgette episode of the season and like “Haunted Couch” this one’s an instant classic. After realizing Bridgtte’s already out of control addition to her phone has gotten even worse, Pearle confinscates it and takes her to detox. This leads to two great plots; Bridgette going into withdrawl, complete with an inspired nightmare sequence about her aps and missing her friends death because she was on her phone and the rest of the cast thinking sh’es been kidnapped because she’s not on social media, which while stupid is DELIGHTFULLY stupid and makes some sense given how glued to her phone she is. They end up calling a true crime podcast over, two egosticial college girls who quickly blame them for it despite it making no sense and their fans torm the apartment, and don’t belivie it when bridgette actually shows up.. It takes an inspired speech from Bridgette, whose developed as a person and after actually tasting a late for the first time sees how good they are, and Pearle posting that speech online to dismiss them and our heroes are saved. It’s an utterly amazing plot from josh being excited about the mob attacking them, to Pearle revealing part of the reason she’s so dedicated to helping bridgette is due to her own weird addiction to six flags, which is just so oddly specific I love it. 

The Erotic Awakening of A.P. Lapearle This one STARTED well, with Alex reading his viking erotic to everyone, and not getting that Candace maybe shouldn’t be there, only for Pearle to be the only one to actually enjoy it and be inspired by her enjoyment of his work to submit it to a publisher. The publisher ends up making a valid point that women want erotic fantasy from someone they can feel safe by and alex is well.. alex, so he suggests using pearle as a front. it goes how you’d expect: he wants actual credit, the publisher slowly pushes him out, she regrets it, they fight an army of fans and make them vomit with alex reading the book.. standard stuff. It’s just not very funny or a great insight into either characters, and is easily the weakest episode of the season.. though the next one gave it close compettition. 

Men Rock!

This one was a chore to sit through, and is only ahead of the last one because it has some really good josh bits and musical numbers which is more than the last one gave me so hey. In a nutshell Emily is on the verge of quitting her and Bridgette’s music careers as she feels they’ll never be famous only for their latest song Men Rock!, an ironic title for a sarcastic song poking fun at a bunch of toxic masculinty bs that is a good song, has hit it HUGE in a fictonal foreign dicatroship and get invited to go, reclutantly agreeing. If you haven’t seen the ep, you can still guess how this goes: say it with me THEY TOOK IT AT FACE VALUE. So our heroines have to help inspire the repressed women and inspire a bloody cou, helped by josh finding some improisoned femisinists in a bathroom. They also gain a fan. it has a few good gags, mostly Candace trying to remind her dad to help her find a place to pee after he keeps getting sidetracked by being taken back by Emily’s sucess. I’ts just a very bad, very predictable episode with very obvious misogyn is bad jokes. And misgoyny IS bad but other shows, paticuarlly tuca and bertie with one early episode, have tackeld this topic better. This episode did not. Last one. 

Secret Horse:

This one in stark contrast is one of the series best and an utter joy to watch. On a bad day for the whole apartment with some santa anna winds, an adorable, poofy mained utterly precious horse gets free and ends up at the apartment. Thus we get a vingettte episode, as the horse has a delightful adventure with each of our main 7, and each up tot he last try and hide the horse badly only for the horse to suddenly sprout up and help their mood.

I do love a good vinegtte episode, with two of my faviorite simpsons episodes being 22 short films about springfiled (Minus kirk dragging MIlhouse away from the bathroom, fuck you you balding asshat, it makes the episode hard to watch) ,and trilogy of error, and this is a classic example of it as we get some fun adventures fro each of the housemates: Candace plays with the horse, adorably so, Josh finds it in the garage as his car breaks down and takes them on an install with him, even stuffing them into a suit and we get a great bit of the horse getting fed sugarcubes and josh money. Brigette gets help living in the now instead of posting about it all the time.

My faviorite comes next as Alex needs new patches for his suit but obviouslyc n’t afford them so he takes the ponyt ot he track.. to help him pick which horses to bet on. It’s just such an inherntly funny idea, especially since it works, and really the horse is just hilarious wherever it ends up. It next helps randy win a skating contest, we get a touching story as Pearle misses her old tragically dead horse partner and uses our boy as a subtitute and finlaly we get emily who needs help relaxing and while she naturally calls animal control she hangs up as she falls for hte horse. The group all fight over the horse in the end, the horse leaves and they let it go home, wonder if it was a hallucination and it whizes on thier car. Overall a really great finale and a wonderful note to go out on. 

Overall Ranking I’ve decided eveyr time I do one of these, or a post season wrapup of a show i’ve covered every episode of the season to rank them from best to worst sooo

Birthdaze Time Hooch Haunted Couch Secret Horse Where’d You Go Bridgette? Sauce face Houseguest  From Hell Joint Break Josh Gets Shredded World’s Greatest Teacher Meet the Frackers Handy Man Up Cyber Matrix Men Rock!  The Erotic Awakening of A.P. Lapearle

And i’d like to note that outside of the bottom two hear.. I enjoyed ALL of these. WHich leads to

Final Thoughts; This season was excellent. It had everything the first season had the heart, the character and the utterly great sense of humor, and fine tuned it to be a well oiled machine I could hardly stop laughing at and with tons of great character stuff. Before it had the potetial to surpass regular show but now it has as despite having a few dud episodes itself, as is intievitble in any show, now, they still aren’t as bad as a lot of RS’s early misteps. And Regular SHow as a FANTASTIC show and really stuck the landing, so i’m only saying this is even better and can only go up from here. And even if it stays about the same quality wise, that won’t be a bad place to be. This season was near damn perfect, i’ll probably watch it again and again, and I can’t wait to devour more and given the current tragectory probably will this year. And I couldn’t be more excited.

If you like this blog follow for more reviews, become a patreon to help reach stretch goals or comission a review outright, details for the latter two on my blog. And i’ll see you at the next rainbow. 

[fatalism-and-villainy]

Reverse unpopular opinion: favorite analytical lens for mdzs?

So, there’s a few things here. The first is that I think the concept of an “analytical lens” is one whose importance is somewhat overstated when it comes to literary analysis? Or at least, there being one singular “lens” at work in any given analysis, rather than a cluster of aspects in a text that one wants to focus on, or theoretical frameworks one wants to drawn on. There is, in my experience, very rarely only one “lens” at work in a longform analysis, and I think the “lens” framing implies a single-minded application of one theoretical approach, rather than incorporating that in a more contextually modified manner. Not sure if this is clear, but that’s a preliminary attempt at articulating my response to that phrasing. 

I also feel I should point out that fandom literary analysis is, in my experience, pretty distinct from academic analysis. That’s not a matter of quality or insight, but just a matter of having different aims and approaches. There’s plenty of overlap, of course, but a lot of fandom meta does emerge from an environment that puts a lot of emphasis on transformative engagement with a text. So fandom meta is often concerned with characterization, with worldbuilding, with finding canonical support for headcanons, etc. Of course there’s also plenty of meta out there that’s not so concerned with building transformative universes, and that could overlap with a more scholarly approach. But I do think it’s worth pointing out that there is often a distinction in approach in fandom and scholarly analysis due to centering on different communities and aims. And that’s not a bad thing!

So, uh, my actual answer, with the pedantry out of the way - honestly, it’s hard to say? It’s not a work that really compels me to analysis in its actual execution. The story in general has a lot of interesting stuff going for it, but for me to really want to dig my meta claws into something, the actual writing and execution, on a page-by-page basis as well as a broader pacing/structural basis has to grab me (like, for example, the Silmarillion, which has a ton of stuff going on wrt emulating various world myths, lots of metafictional stuff, etc, simply on the level of how it’s written). The one exception to that is probably how its central relationship is portrayed. And this is probably predictable for me, someone who specializes in queer studies, because there is a lot I’m interested in when it comes to how those relationships are represented in a given narrative/generic format. But there’s a ton of culturally specific stuff going on there in this work and genre in general that I don’t really feel qualified to comment on (yet! I would love to do more research into it in the near future). 

[shadowthrone-ammanas]

‘Life’ as a Ghost Chapter One: Bow

The continuation of ‘Ghost Kid’ is here at last! I don’t know how often I’m gonna update it but it’s a thing now. As stated before, it’s gonna be one shots so don’t expect a longform story like the first one was.

I refer to Hat Kid as 'Spensa' here because obviously that's what Bow is gonna think of her as and call her. My headcanon name for Bow is Beauregard which shortens to Bow as a nickname and thus why she's still Bow.

It took a long time but Bow had finally done it! She’d found Spensa’s ship! It was on a planet that she wasn’t even supposed to have stopped at. Bow had only found it because it was vaguely on the way back home from where Spensa was supposed to have been. A lot of it had to do with just being lucky though because it was on the planet itself, making it harder to detect. But even better than that luck was that according to the readings on Bow’s ship, it was intact, meaning Spensa was alive! That was honestly a miracle; Bow had insisted on being the one do this particular mission thinking it’d end with her learning how Spensa had died. Not a pleasant thing to find but most people wouldn’t have bothered to investigate the cause of the death and Bow had wanted to know for closure. Finding out that Spensa was actually most likely alive was so much better.

Now Bow was supposed to contact Homebase to relay the coordinates before going to investigate but… something was fishy here. If Spensa’s ship was intact, that could only mean she’d landed it there, right? Why would she have done that? And more importantly why hadn’t she returned home since she obviously could? There was something going on here and it might be something Homebase would disapprove of and thus it was best not to contact them until Bow knew the exact situation.

She settled her ship into the planet’s orbit – if need be, she’d edit the log of its coordinates later to make it look like she’d never been here. She then pulled out her phone and with a few quick taps was beaming down to the planet’s surface as close to Spensa’s ship as her own ship could land her.

She landed in a dead forest in a clearing in front of a large hollow tree. It was dark and rather spooky looking, the exact kind of place Spensa would love so it was honestly no surprise that her ship was here. Bow would be lying if she said she didn’t enjoy it too though; they were both weird like that.

Tapping her bow pointed her towards Spensa’s ship; off and to the left. Too excited to finally see her friend again to bother with walking, she took off at steady jog towards it.

There had to be a reason Spensa hadn’t returned, but what was it? She hadn’t turned traitor, had she? … If so, then by finding her, Bow would have to as well. … That honestly didn’t bother her much, she cared more about having a space ship she could fly than being loyal to the people who gave it to her. Of course, if she and/or Spensa got caught they’d be brought back home and executed. What were the chances of that happening though? … Considering the fact that Bow had found Spensa’s ship it definitely wasn’t zero percent.

Well, if need be Bow could return home, say she’d found Spensa’s ship damaged beyond repair and then mysteriously vanish to come back and hang with Spensa again. If she had turned traitor of course. Bow shouldn’t be planning on what to do next until…

A creepy giggle that sent a shiver down Bow’s spine came from right behind her. She slid to an abrupt halt, turning to see nothing there. That was odd. She wasn’t afraid though… not much anyway. Something was watching her from the shadows, she could feel it. … If only she’d thought to bring a weapon with her.

“Hello?” she said because maybe whatever it was wasn’t…

“Oh my gosh Bow, it is you!”

She snapped around just in time to see a ghost rushing towards her. Before she could react, it was hugging her. … Well at least it was friendly but what was going on? And… Bow’s translator wasn’t even on right now, how was a being from another planet speaking her language?

“When I decided to stay, I thought I’d never see you again!” The ghost said as she pulled back at last to smile at Bow. “But here you are!” … Wait a minute…

“Spensa?” Bow almost couldn’t believe her eyes but… the ghost looked an awful lot like Spensa and her voice was very similar too, only difference really as that it was a tad echoey. The only thing that was off was that she was a ghost.

“Yep, it’s me!” She smiled wide.

“But… you’re a ghost? You died?!” That wasn’t what Bow wanted to find. “This is a joke, right?” It was a bit extreme but it was certainly the kind of joke Spensa would pull if she had the means to make herself look and sound like a ghost.

“Uh…” Spensa grimaced and looked away. “No, it’s not a joke. I’m dead and a ghost. It’s… really not that bad though.” She smiled again as she looked back up at Bow. “Well, at first it was, but the more power I gain, the more not bad it becomes. And like… now that you’re here everything’s good again!”

Well… becoming a ghost was better than not becoming one. Even if ghosts weren’t looked at fondly by most people, Bow had never fully understood why. It was still Spensa, just… as a ghost now. That was better than finding her dead and not around anymore. … It still meant she died though.

“Can I ask how… it happened?” That wasn’t rude, was it? Probably was but Bow wanted to know.

“Someone who I used think was a friend caused my ship to crash while we were both on it. She survived which is still a load of bullshit but whatever I guess, lucky her.” She frowned, crossing her arms before shaking it off. “But I managed to repair the ship and being a ghost really ain’t that bad once you get used to it so I don’t really care anymore.”

“Well… I’m happy to see you again.” Bow hugged her, trying her best not to be bothered by how cold and… odd she felt now. She was still Spensa though and therefore she was still Bow’s friend and that’s all that mattered.

“You’re so warm.” Spensa squeezed her tight. “Why are you here though?” she asked as they withdrew.

“I’m looking for you. I insisted on being the one to search for your ship to either salvage it or to bring you back home. I assume you’re not going back though, are you?” Because if she’d wanted to she would’ve, ghost or not.

“Nope, this is my home now. It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” It was certainly very spooky and dark, the exact kind of things she liked. And now that she was a ghost, she fit right in. “But speaking of that, you have to meet my mentor, he’s the best. … He’s also maybe kind of my dad? I don’t really know though because I’ve never had a dad before so I don’t really know what they’re like. So, don’t tell him I told you he’s my dad, it’s like an awkward subject for him… me too honestly. But let’s go meet him!” She grabbed Bow’s arm and started dragging her back the way she’d come.

It wasn’t long before they reached the clearing with the big tree again. Spensa paused to check inside, apparently not finding what she was looking for because she grabbed Bow’s wrist again and started down a different path. Not far down it Spensa pulled her off the path to walk alongside it instead.

“There’s a trap there,” she explained. “It’s one of mine though so tripping it won’t summon…” she said a word in a language Bow didn’t understand, presumably her mentor’s name. “I’ll show you it later though.”

With her free hand, Bow pulled out her magic translator and put it in her ear. The last thing she wanted was to meet Spensa’s mentor and not be able to understand him. He had to be quite something if Spensa looked up to him. … What that something might be was hard to guess though because Spensa wasn’t known for being the most level person around.

Eventually they reached another clearing that seemed to be a village; there were little house made from trees by a little river. Little fellows that looked kind of like stuffed toys with glowing faces milled about the place. There was also a large ghost in the center speaking to a small group of them.

“Snatcher!” Spensa called, speaking a different language now as increased their pace towards him.

The big ghost looked at her and then at Bow. “Uh… kiddo, have you forgotten how soul contracts are supposed to work? You’re supposed to make her sign the piece of paper that gives you her soul.”

“This is Bow,” Spensa replied. “She was my only friend back at the school and now she’s here because she came looking for me. And Bow, this is Snatcher. He’s my mentor. He taught me how to do all kinds of spooky ghost stuff and is helping with my magic as I get more powerful and stuff. He also helped me with all sorts of other things too.”

Unfortunately, the translator didn’t let Bow speak the language, just understand it, so all she could do for now was smile and wave in greeting. Like Spensa she was good with languages though so she should be able to pick it up fairly quickly assuming she stayed long enough.

“Great,” Snatcher said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Just what I need, another feral alien child running around my forest.”

“Don’t worry, she’s not as bad as me. Not that that’s saying a whole lot but she’s cool and nice.”

Bow nodded, giving Snatcher another smile and a thumbs up. Since he was Spensa’s friend and mentor, she’d play nice and would endeavor to get along.

“If he ever says anything mean to you, ignore it, he doesn’t really mean it most of the time.” Spensa said, speaking to Bow now.

Snatcher scoffed. “Don’t spread lies kid, I’ve meant every mean thing I’ve ever said to you.”

“Yeah, uh-huh, totally.” Spensa nodded sarcastically, clearly not believing it. “Can I show her around the forest now? Show her the sights and introduce her to the Subconites and all that?” She linked her ghostly arm through Bow’s, pulling her closer.

“If it’ll get you leave me alone for a while, sure, go have fun.” Snatcher dismissed them with a wave noodle-like arm before vanishing all at once.

“This’ll be fun,” Spensa said, reverting back to their home language as she started guiding Bow elsewhere. “Subcon Forest is like the best place on the planet. Though I’ll have to introduce to my other friends too. Oh, and you’ll love the Metro. I’d tell you why but I want it to be surprise. I’m like… not allowed to go there anymore because there’s a powerful gang there and I kind of angered their leader but it’s whatever, I’m a ghost now so I can do what I want.”

“Sounds like something you’d do.” Bow was almost a little jealous, Spensa had been going on adventures and making friends while Bow had been increasingly worried that she was dead. Well, actually she was dead, but not gone and that’s what mattered most.