#i think short stories is a medium who gives way to very weird stories. mostly bcs it doesn't have the time to very complicated word buildin

[portuguesedisaster]

Two stories into The Target Storybook...and this is something.

[dystopiandilfs]

Dream's discord podcast. Basically him answering questions for 2.5 hours. This will sort of be in order but I fucked up my notes so it might not be in order completely. (From 13th May 2021)

For reference the photos at the end are: A prototype of fidget spinner merch as loads of people asked, a reference photo of his favourite merch and a photo he sent of his hair to prove he wasn't a brunette.

•He said his teeth are mostly straight but he's thought about getting Invisalign. He's never had braces. He has a tiny gap in the left side of his mouth and his canines are longer and sharper (vampire arc). He's never had teeth surgery so has his wisdom teeth still.

•He thinks pineapple on pizza is good.

•He likes seafood like lobster and crab. He had crab made in an air fryer last night. He like peas. He thinks quesadillas are good and likes most food.

•He hates Coffee and most drinks

•The Dream Shorts team is Ken who is his personal reminder (Ken's main job is to spam him with texts so he doesn't forget things as he's got a habit of reading texts and not replying) and also comes up with a list of sets for Dream shorts. The builder is a friend and munchymc builder "his talent gets wasted on Dream's shorts but we pay him so"

•His editors are currently Dizzy, Firesale and Mjcr. Willz doesn't edit for him anymore

•The mask animation isn't done but Mask should be released May 21st. He wants to release them together as "the whole song is a double meaning and the whole nuance will be lost without the animation" but no matter if the animation is done the song is getting released on the 21st.

•He and Sapnap eat together often.

•He and Sapnap prefer medium rare Steak

•He wants a home gym it's something he's willing to splurge on. They currently have a weight rack but they haven't even set it up.

•"Eat the rich? Shut up shut up" - Dream

•Talked about money basically saying "Most people don't understand how money works I don't have millions in my bank account it's in assets like merch, land and warehousing for that stuff" (He's not in his landlord arc)

•He's been debating Pride Merch because of Rainbow Capitalism. He doesn't want it too be seen as a money maker and if he does most proceeds would go to charity. He's currently super busy merch wise with Sapnap joining and George in the middle of joining. He did say "Only if the LGBTQ+ community in this community wants it" He thinks he's going to at least change the merch website to a pride one. Sapnap wants to make pride merch including a rainbow flame on his.

•He wants to create a charity that's centered around helping LGBTQ+ one day because he thinks that there's a lack of them. He mentioned that creating a charity was expensive and took a lot and was a complicated process including a board of directors but he wants to do it someday.

•He wanted to buy a bunch of houses in Florida which was a service to house mostly LGBTQ+ youth and people stuck in abusive households for free to get them out of bad home environments. But he didn't because he didn't want people thinking he was profiting of of abuse victims and LGBTQ+ community.

•He said he's terrible with time management and replying to people which is why Ken helps him (and also helps George and Sapnap). He mentioned how Sam messaged multiple times and Dream just forgot to answer but felt bad "I feel like people think I hate them..... Cause I'd be mad if people did that to me"

•He tries to reply to a few texts a day (community number). He also can't do birthday messages everyday because you can only reply at certain times so it's not abusing the system so if you get one it's special. He said he does try but it's got a weird time gap.

•Him and the manhunt winner are trying to come up with a good time to film

•He wants to stream this MCC on twitch and says his team is good.

•He talks about why he's not partnered with Twitch. Basically Twitch has a lock rate (in which you make money) and you legally can't stream on YouTube. So legally if Tommy wanted to stream on YouTube he couldn't. Someone then mentioned how Bad is a twitch partner but still streams on YouTube "Bad streams on YouTube but he has for a while and I don't think that he cares" - Dream

•He likes to reply to every donation he gets on stream and feels bad when he doesn't so he'll turn them off when he streams and wants a platform deal where he can be payed to stream (not twitch). If he gets a streaming partnership he will stream a couple of times a week. He looked in to Facebook but they don't have an alias system meaning you can see everyone's actual Facebook account and personal info, he doesn't like seeing real names on Facebook so it would require a lot of altering if he was to stream there so he's thinking it's probably going to be YouTube.

•He was asked about if his demographic was what he expected and he said he went in with no expectations, he didn't even know what stans were, wasn't really on social media so he wasn't aware of the fan culture. "You guys are a handful sometimes but it's worth it"

•He also mentioned how he and the DreamSMP changed the twitch audience demographic. It used to be male dominated in both streamers and audience and now it's almost split which is unheard on.

•He has 5 fidget spinners in his house. Two in his bedroom. Two in his office. One in the living room.

•He likes his Minecraft skin as he thinks the arm is cook and you never see the rest of his skin really. He says it's unique and different and "me". Dream: You can't even tell half the skins apart on MC.

•He's not lost the motivation to stream. Most of the times if he wants to stream he gets George or Sapnap to do it and he just turns up. It's more beneficial to them as they have donos and subs on. (Don't we fucking know it "can you say hi to")

•He has listened to Lovejoy. Says the ep was great and they're very talented and awesome. Doesn't know what his favourite song is but probably would pick One Day because the chorus slaps.

•RIP to acoustic Roadtrip. He said instead of acoustic Roadtrip we get Mask so no losses today for Dream stans.

•"With Roadtrip I went to Parker and I said Hey I have a story I want to tell through music. I have no experience with that can you help me" He said sure. He crafted the music and melodies and how things are formed where it's catchy. I have less comfort singing that. I love the song and it's my song, it's very representative of me and I'm sure I could sing it but it's a song I'd be kinds of scared to sing live, with Mask I basically did everything. I sat there the entire time and maybe an hour out if the 100 I wasn't in the call. Dream came up with the lyrics and main melody for Mask (First one he's ever come up with) "That was just notes in my fucking voice memos"

•The clip we heard of Mask was a prechorus not the actual chorus. He thinks he'd be more comfortable to do a mask acoustic and it's more melodic than Roadtrip. The chorus also has a lot of instruments similar to Roadtrip. Mask starts of slow and guitar with minimal reverb and is more raw.

• He doesn't want music to be his main thing. It's something fun to do and he's passionate about it as it's a way to express emotions. He wants to release mask then go from there. He wants to release at least one more song but has nothing on his mind currently. His two ideas were Roadtrip and Mask.

•He wouldn't quit his job to become a pizza delivery man.

•His favourite features on himself are eyes or freckles and he also confirmed that he does have eyebrows.

•He was told that Parkour warrior would be bought back some time in the near future and he got excited for it. "Even if I don't win, which I will, it'll be fun"

•Went on about his MCC team but I'm not going to put that in as we should be getting them today. He did say he wasn't on Pink but he did sound confused. (For reference he's always in Pink as it's the last team announced and keeps the hype up by announcing the biggest streamer last)

•Said he and his mum had the Mr Beast burger. He recommends because he likes the avacado. He mentioned how Mr Beast uses "Ghost Kitchens" which is basically where he gives restaurants permission to cook his food so it's restaurant quality food.

•His favourite piece of merch is the circle smile. (The pool photo on Instagram). He said the quality was bad (he worked with a different company and didn't have his own company) and it was elasticy feeling and he's planning on re-releasing it again but with good quality.

•He's started to send merch out in custom packaging. So his bags have the smile and will mostly be green. Sapnap's has the flame and is either black or white. He's also trying to make it so every order has the sticker packs for both him and Sapnap.

•He loves the coins as it's cheaper than a hoodie but still celebrates the milestones and will last a long time. He mentioned how the old coins are getting removed off the site and how if you have any of the coins your special because only a few thousand get made. He's kept around 100 of each coin that he wants to give away in person.

•He wanted to have a cool store where you could access computers that give you access to the DreamSMP in spectator mode. But it's too costly and would require too much time and isn't safe fight now. He doesn't think it'd be worth it financially.

•Most of the hoodie are black instead of multiple colours because of limited supply and covid. Getting the colours are harder because if the pandemic which hopefully won't be an issue soon.

•He wants to do a short meetup tour with Sapnap and George with a few locations in the US (and if others nearby want to join like Quackity or Karl they can). He also wants to visit Australia, UK, Canada, Mexico and Philippines and do something like that there but definitely at least visit with George and Sapnap.

•He's never been to the Philippines but his mum has. He wants to set up a place in the Philippines where he can ship merch in bulk and it would help to reduce shipping. However it would probably be big milestone merch.

•He's not got the vaccine yet but will get it when he needs to. He doesn't leave the house so he doesn't see the point.

•He's the ideas man. George's footcam video was Dream's idea. The T-shirt video was Dream's idea. Most if not all of the Dream Team's videos are Dream's ideas.

•Said he's got a similar/the same hair colour as Froy (Dream buddy at this point the only difference between you and Froy is that one of you is dating Richard Madden /lh)

[terresdebrume]

01: Migraine

A new ficlet verse is born!

What's a snippet verse, you might ask? TL;DR: It's a low-effort, medium commitment way for me to write fic, where I prioritize actually sharing bits of stories over pretty much anything else, including revisions, finishing the thing, and posting to AO3.

What to expect in this 'verse? Vecna is dead, Billy and Eddie aren't. Steve followed Robin to New York when she went to study at NYU, found a job in a queer bar, and later found Billy Hargrove in said bar. FT. Billy & Steve friendship, Robin & Steve friendship, probably some Steddie + other appearances by the rest of the group.

What to expect in this snippet in particular: M rating for use of the F slur, all by Steve to recount homophobic things or actions he's seen. Non graphic recounting of a homophobic assault. One brief but plainly stated reference to the fact that being queer in a hospital in 1988 is not safe. Medical environment + non graphic discussion of migraines and the one Steve experienced recently. Steve and Billy friendship, though not front and center.

Important: There will be no graphic or intense homophobia or homophobic violence shown "onscreen" in this verse. While I don't personally want to write stories set in that time period that ignore homophobia entirely, I'm also not interested in making myself suffer, so if characters face any homophobia onscreen it will be limited to words, and most likely not very harsh. I will of course warn appropriately when that's the case.

________

Steve sits on the flimsy paper sheet in silence, keeping his hands at his side and his eyes on the clock on the wall. He's trying to follow the thin red hands as it marks the seconds, but his vision is blurry. His eyes can't keep up with it. Outside the room, he hears the occasional footsteps noise, some bits and pieces of conversation.

It's too quiet and too noisy at the same time, and he can't help but think of El. Of the things Dustin and the other kids told him about her past. He's not sure how she managed not to go nuts after so long in that kind of environment: Steve's been waiting for less than five minutes (he's pretty sure, it's hard to see the clock sometimes) and he already hates it.

Eventually, to Steve's relief, the door opens with a burst of noise and a portly graying man in a rumpled blouse comes in. His hair is just short enough to show the hint of curls, and when he looks at Steve there are huge bags under his eyes, but he gives a polite smile anyway.

"Mr. Harrington, right?"

Steve wants to correct him, but it feels too childish for the circumstances, so he just nods.

"I'm Dr. O'Toole. I see here you've come to us about a headache?"

There's a pause, and Steve spends several seconds trying to figure out if the man is being sept—no, wrong word. Skeptical? Skeptical sounds right. He can't pinpoint it though, so eventually he just says:

"Billy said it lasted for two days."

"Billy being the young man who was trying to flirt his way into the consultation room when I got your file?" The doctor asks, and Steve snorts.

"Probably, yeah. We were hanging out at my place when it started."

Steve remembers trying to read the cookbook Robin got him for Christmas, vision going weird at the edges, then the pain hit. Billy talked to him at first, he thinks? Then after that, mostly just a haze of pain until something calmed down and he found himself in bed, covered in sweat and in desperate need of water. He asked why Billy looked like shit, he's pretty sure, and got a quick rundown of what happened…and then promptly forgot it, which then prompted Billy to insist on taking him to the hospital.

"I don't really—can't he come in?" Steve asks after he finishes explaining that to Dr. O'Toole. "I really don't—"

"Don't worry," the doctor says, "the nurses already took down his account."

He points to the folder he came in with, and Steve swallows. It probably makes sense, but it means Billy really has no chance of coming in, and at this moment that is a terrifying prospect. Steve nods anyway.

"Now, Mr. Harrington, was this the first time you experienced that kind of event?"

Steve blinks.

"You mean headaches?" Dr. O'Tole nods. "I mean, not really, but it's never like that. Usually I just get some Tylenol and call it a day."

He watches the write something down on his notepad, and something scared and ashamed rears its head inside of him, making him add:

"I mean, I could probably do without it, it's just…it makes it easier to keep going. And it's not—they don't happen that often either. Maybe once every couple of months. I guess."

"Mmh. Have you noticed an increase in frequency recently?"

Steve has to think hard about it before he can nod. Not only because he's still a little fuzzy but also because…

"Can you think of anything unusual that happened before the increase? Any kind of injury or sickness you might have experienced?"

…That. Steve knows he's not the sharpest tool in any shed, but even he realizes he has to be careful when it comes to talking about his job.

"Yeah," he says, trying not to show that he's being careful. "I uh. I work security at a bar."

It's a tiny space in Greenwich Village, just enough room for a two-person-wide platform, a row of bottles, and about fifty persons all told, staff and drag artists included.

"We had a few angry drunks last month."

And the month before that, and the month before that. Since Steve started moving there, there's barely been a week without some kind of assholes yelling slurs and playing bash-a-fag or whatever it is they call it these days.

"Does that happen often?"

"Kind of. Usually I just scare them away."

It's the steadiness, Steve found. Once you've fought Demogorgons and Vecna, people yelling and shaking a fist at you really doesn't have the same power.

"But not that group?"

"No. Those were more…motivated."

They didn't come with bats or anything like that, thank fuck, but where most of those people accuse Steve of siding with the freaks, this time they actually called him a fag and a pervert. It hit him in a way he wasn't prepared for, cutting deep into a tender part of himself he didn't know existed.

He wasn't ready when they started swinging.

"One of them bashed my head against the wall."

The pain, Steve could have handled—between the Russians and the demobats and even fucking Billy, he's kind of learned to push through it. But the disorientation, the suffocating feeling of trying to find a way to tell someone their assumptions about you are wrong and finding nothing…he remembers thinking he was going to die then and there, feeling like maybe he deserved it.

"Billy's the one who got me out of it, actually."

Came running out of the club in full Marilyn get-up, screaming bloody murder and spreading peach scented perfume all through the alley. Steve has blurry memories of drunken shouting, and a shoe flying, and eyelashes sticking to his shirt under the jacket as Pete--one of the queens who’d finished his show--took him to the nearest hospital.

“Lucky you,” Dr. O’Toole says without looking up from where he’s still writing. “Was that the first time you were in a fight?”

“No.”

“And was it the first time you were hit in the head?”

Images flash in Steve’s mind. His head, hitting the ground as the demobats throw him down. Jonathan’s fist, again and again, concrete at the back. The plate. The Russians. The drunk guys, manic with it.

“No.”

“Mr. Harrington, how many times did it happen?”

“That last one makes five,” Steve admits.

“And did these hits by chance tend to land on the left side of your face?”

Steve rubs the spot before he can think better of it, a familiar phantom itch spreading under his skin. He turns back to the doctor.

“How did you know?”

“Well first of all, most people are right handed.”

Making the left side a better target. Makes sense.

“And also because your friend mentioned that was where the pain seemed to hit the hardest.”

There’s a pause, as Steve ruminates on the doctor’s words. It’s not…they shouldn’t be so hard to parse. They shouldn’t. But Steve is well aware that he was never a very smart guy in the first place, and he’s been even slower than usual in the first place, so it takes him a while to say:

“So…the headaches are linked to that?”

“Yes. However, the symptoms you and your friend reported speak more specifically to a migraine.

“So like. A big headache.”

Dr. O’Toole smiles in a way that reminds Steve of Will, just a little bit. He would like to say it reminds him of Dustin, but Dustin is more the type to frown or roll his eyes when Steve says something stupid. Thank God the kid’s got other qualities.

“In a way, yes. But they tend to be strong headaches who bring friends like confusion, slowed thinking, blurry vision…or sometimes less expected things like food cravings or diarrhea, for example.”

“Oh,” Steve says.

He thought he’d gotten the runs from that new street vendor near NYU. What a stupid fucking symptom for a head thing. At least the blurred vision and the not thinking straight kind of make sense. Same with his light sensitivity and the bit after where he didn’t quite know where he was for a solid half hour. Could do without any of these, though.

“So…what does that mean for me?” He asks once the doctor is done explaining how migraines work. “Is it like…can we make them stop?”

“There are ways to reduce the frequency and severity,” Dr. O’Toole says. “Whether or not they’ll go away entirely is a different question.”

“Oh,” Steve says again.

He’d love to say something more useful or intelligent, but he’s apparently not back to full speed yet.

“It’s a lot,” the doctor says with a comforting expression. He rummages around his desk for a bit before handing Steve a pamphlet in muted colors. “Here’s some basic information to get you started. I’m going to write you a prescription for painkillers, to be used if you have another one in the future, and a referral for a CT scan.”

“A what?”

“A test we do to see the extent of the damage to your brain. That will give us a better idea of what we’re working with, and what to expect in the future. Our contact numbers are at the bottom of the page, please call if you have any additional questions.”

Steve nods, feelings a little like his body is moving without his impulse, and then stands up to shake the doctor’s hand. He goes back out into the corridor in a daze, and finds Billy sprawled across three and a half seats in the waiting room, popping a pink bubblegum as he reads through a faded copy of Times Magazine.

He straightens up when he notices Steve though, getting to his feet and coming up to Steve’s side in the blink of an eye. He doesn’t hug him, of course. It wouldn’t be safe, especially not so close to the Village, but Steve sort of wishes he could.

“Hey. How did it go?”

“It was a lot,” Steve manages, trailing off when he realizes his voice is about to break on the last few words. “I’d like to go home.”

Billy looks him up and down with a frown, then gently takes the brochure, prescription and referral from his hands.

“Sure,” he says. “Sit down for a minute. I’ll take care of this, and then I’ll take you home.”

[utilitycaster]

Actual Play: How it works

This is a collection of how I think of actual play as a medium, because TTRPG actual play is a unique one - a combination of improvisation, a rule set, and randomizing elements. This isn’t fully comprehensive, and I may add to it in the future as I come up with more ideas. I’m also thinking of providing some examples/more in-depth stuff for the items in separate posts, so please let me know if that’s something you would want.

Most of the observations here heavily skew towards D&D and Pathfinder actual play, as they are what I know best. Other systems I’ve listened to (PbtA, Cortex, Savage Worlds) fit in here as well, but this may not apply to all actual play, particularly GM-less games or games that are primarily played as one-shots.

Finally, and I say this only because it is a recurring problem on the social media that I happen to find incredibly irritating: you are also welcome and encouraged to have other opinions, disagree with me, dislike all of this, etc. If you have things to say, my inbox is the best place; this is too long for multiple reblogs and this is a sideblog so replies are tricky. However, if you are the kind of person who is inclined to say things like “Actually, there was an exception to this rule! It’s in the backmasked audio at 06:59:32 in the outtakes of episode 192c of Dungeons and Discotheques! :)” I would like to provide you with this actual play line quote from Adaine Abernant in Fantasy High: I think that you feel like you have a lot to offer, and please take this the right way... you don't.

Onto the thoughts, below the jump!

On narrative devices and rules and the random element:

Foreshadowing is possible, but limited to specific circumstances. A GM can (and should) foreshadow! The point of foreshadowing is to set expectations, and GMs should have hints that indicate things about the world that the party may encounter later, provide potential plot hooks, or otherwise provide the party with information. Similarly, players can do things that nod towards as of yet unrevealed elements of their backstories. However, it is impossible to deliberately foreshadow plot resolutions, because it is unknown what they will be. That doesn’t mean that in retrospect things may happen that echo back to earlier events, but the intent to foreshadow was not there - it’s a happy accident.

I don’t want to say normal narrative rules don’t apply because what are the normal narrative rules, really? However, I think an important thing to emphasize is that narrative satisfaction is not guaranteed. This is especially true if the cast has agreed character death is an option, but even beyond that, an unlucky or lucky roll can seemingly cut an arc short or take things in a weird and unforeseen direction. Because there is an element of randomness, randomness will occur. This, along with the character agency I discuss later, is one of my favorite things about actual play. It strips out the need for a moral or message or specific beats - not that those can’t arise, but they can’t be forced - and as such it can make for unusual, creative, and very true-to-life stories even in a fantasy setting.

On character role, viewpoint and agency:

Actual play stories have an ensemble of viewpoint characters (the PCs). This is perhaps the clearest restriction that exists, at least in all of the game systems I’ve mentioned. There is no good way to depict NPCs acting on their own unless the PCs have a way to observe them, unseen (magical or mundane). It is extremely difficult to have one player play multiple PCs, and if a player leaves there is not a good way to recast their PC. This doesn’t mean NPCs can’t do things with each other offscreen that have implications for the story, nor that PCs can’t come and go or become NPCs, but it does mean a good GM is very careful about NPC interactions because it gets very boring and non-collaborative very quickly to watch someone talk with themselves.

The PCs hold a level of agency that characters in other media do not. Statements about how the characters have a mind of their own in original fiction aside (sidebar: I am team ‘they don’t, you just didn’t realize that the way you wrote their personality and the way you wrote your plot conflicted until you actually started writing it out, which is very understandable’) PCs do in fact have a mind of their own separate from the GM and from each other.

Something I like about this is that unless you are coming up with conspiracy theories regarding the interpersonal dynamics of the players themselves (in which case I think you’re both a creep and a weirdo (derogatory)) or if the GM is not respecting player agency (which I feel is usually very easy to see; see below for more on that) you do not get cases of “these characters are together simply because the author felt like pairing them off” as can happen in scripted media. Any romantic relationship is, inherently, a mutually agreed choice between the originators of these characters, and more generally any plot or relationship necessarily needs to have something that appeals to all characters involved. It may be as simple as “these are my friends and I want to keep hanging out”, but, despite this being improv, it’s a medium where saying “no” is always an option.

With that said there is still room for players to be uncooperative or selfish. It’s rare, but it does exist, and I’m personally of the opinion that it’s in part the GM’s responsibility to have a conversation with that player and to not play into their attention grabbing. That said, with one notable exception, all the accusations I’ve seen about this have seemed to me to be more “I don’t like this player/character/ship/arc and I am going to claim they are stealing focus, despite it being justified,” and not genuinely about a player being obnoxious.

Agency separate from the person who creates the world is perhaps the most unique element of actual play and at this point I’m going to talk a little about how a good GM fosters that.

I’ve said before that when a GM has things happen that are not at least mostly a direct response to character actions, they are typically either world-building or a hook, and can be both. I think of this sort of as a variant on Chekhov’s gun, actually; the gun doesn’t have to go off, ultimately, in actual play, but it is saying the following:

This is a world where there are guns hung on the wall sometimes.

Someone else might do something with this gun.

You can attempt to do something with this gun before they do.

And then the players decide how they want to interpret it and what they want to do, and the dice indicate the level of success in doing so.

A good GM should encourage the players to explore and be creative, and more than anything, reward agency. This doesn’t mean rewarding it with success; rather, it means if someone explicitly indicates they want to interact with an element of the world, you should give them the tools such that eventually, they can try to do so. You can also give them reasons in-game why they should change their mind, or make it so that it’s almost certain to fail if that is reasonable, but if you are trying to flat-out shut it down without providing an in-world reason why, the cracks will almost certainly show.

One important thing to remember about GM-ing: GMs will probably come into the game with some ideas of what’s going on in the world, and some level of understanding of what the world looks like. That will be influenced by the players, both in terms of the consequences of their actions and choices, and also by what the players are interested in. Which is to say: even if there is a session zero, and the GM states a specific premise, that can change! Characters develop, player interests change, dice rolls do weird things, and so a good GM absolutely must if not kill their darlings at least remove, recycle, and adapt them based on the direction of the game and motivations of the characters. Even in a plot-driven campaign, the players and GM and what makes them happy needs to drive the story, because fundamentally, this is a game that should be fun. Which brings us to...

On the Watsonian and the Doylist in actual play:

Stepping back for a second: the context in which people are creating fiction influences them. End of sentence. It’s ridiculous to think it doesn’t. This means everything from political events and worldwide trends, to the media the creator is consuming or has consumed, to personal life events. There are always going to be in- and out-of-universe explanations for choices in fiction.

In actual play, the players and GM know the underlying rules of the world, and it’s difficult to truly split the party and have everyone not involved leave in a way that feels fun, so everyone always has information that they can’t really use in-game. Also it’s a fully improvised medium that is primarily theater of the mind, so unconscious choices, misunderstandings, and accidents are frequently not edited out, and people are human. Which is to say I think it’s important to take this into consideration in one’s analysis; it’s not that you can’t incorporate a Watsonian reason for something that happened, but Doylist reasons are given a weight that they may not have in an edited work.

Three of the Doylist reasons beyond the misunderstandings and accidents I wanted to cover are metagaming, awareness that this is for an audience, and character knowledge.

Metagaming exists in many TTRPGs, and it’s not actually inherently bad. When a DM in D&D says “that just hits” you get an idea of the AC of the creature, and you know your own attack rolls, and you can make decisions based on that, when, in a ‘real’ fantasy battle scenario, you probably wouldn’t gain all that insight from a single hit. The rules of the TTRPG are considered part of normal acceptable metagaming. There’s also the more general one; if you start the first session in a tavern, there is an unspoken expectation that the PCs will interact and form an impromptu group and not just quietly drink their ale and leave - basically, the rules of improv still apply. This is a good thing. And finally, there’s the acknowledgement that you are people with feelings and this is a game and so if someone is upset you stop, or you have discussions about consent between sessions that inform actions in-game. Metagaming just gets obnoxious when someone rolls a nat 1 and then argues that this is obvious information and they should know, or looks up every monster in the manual when you encounter it instead of playing true to the character’s knowledge.

In actual play, the ‘hey fellow tavern-goers, would you like to be a group’ form of metagaming, the “oh right this is a story and we should move the story forward,” is even more important than in home D&D games. This is where I recommend listening or reading some Q&As or watching some after shows, because you’ll hear players talk about this. A 5-hour shopping episode or extensive foraging can get boring to watch or listen to (and unlike accidentally boring or frustrating things, are pretty easy to predict and avoid). On the flip side, a risky choice might seem more appealing when you know there’s an audience who would love the payoff.

I am personally, perhaps unsurprisingly given what I said about player dynamic conspiracy theories and randomness (or, outside of this post, my strong dislike of certain popular fan theories), not a big fan of creators catering to audiences’ every whim...but it’s unavoidable that they will take the audience experience in mind.

Finally, character knowledge, which is the opposite of metagaming - when a character knows something the player doesn’t. This is sometimes covered with, for example, GM statements like “you would know, as a person with history proficiency, that this country is actually in a regency period.” If the character had, in improv, before the GM had a chance to say that, mentioned the king, that’s just because the player did not know that and had made an assumption.

Personally I find going deep down the rabbit hole with things like this - “why doesn’t this character, who CLAIMS to be from this country, not know this?”, or clearly OOC statements - tends not to actually spark any interesting theories, but that is, ultimately, an opinion.

A few final thoughts on different formats of actual play

True livestream/live-to-tape (Critical Role, Into the Motherlands, and the second season of Fantasy High): the main thing to keep in mind is Doylist explanations are even more important because there is quite literally no editing. Also, there will possibly be some of those more boring stretches or even a little OOC metagaming discussions within the structure of the game, because there’s no way around it.

Editing, but primarily just to remove long explanations/math and doing soundscaping (NADDPod, Rusty Quill Gaming): Pretty similar; a lot of them even make the choice to leave in OOC metagaming discussions, so it’s mostly that there are fewer cases of people slowly adding numbers.

More extensive editing and possibly some predefined other elements (TAZ, most Dimension 20 shows): this may fall into a more traditional story structure. It’s not to say that there won’t be surprises, because the players do still have agency, but the ‘rails’ might be a little more apparent; there might be some DM monologuing done after the fact (beyond just cleaning up the audio) or choices that were not scripted per se, but not exactly improvised either (think how D20 tends to have pre-set battle maps and earlier seasons had a pretty strict RP/Battle structure.

Somewhat relatedly there are broad story structures, which is more of a spectrum, ranging from sandbox (Critical Role) to very clearly GM-driven missions (TAZ Balance and, to an extent, Amnesty); nearly all of the other shows here fall into a structure of “here is your overall goal, how precisely you get there is up to you although, like any GM, I will provide in-story information on where it may make sense to go that will often funnel you towards specific places.”

I do have a theory that since TAZ Balance in particular was an entry point for so many people, it takes them time to adjust to the more sprawling, unpredictable, and difficult-to-organize stories other actual play can have, but ultimately it is a matter of personal preference and all of these still fall into the category of actual play.

[canmom]

Do you have any reflections on twine games? I feel the best ended up limited to having glorified page turn buttons, but it was such a accessible format!

honestly i could take or leave twine these days.

the best twines were always charity's, and i have a great deal of anger still for what the others in that little 'community' put her through. but her stuff was great less because of the virtue of the format itself, and more because she's a truly incredible writer, who excels in just about whatever medium she chooses :p

the virtue of twine, at least for me, is perhaps that it pushes you towards short, punchy paragraphs with an enforced break between them, which helps create a particular rhythmic cadence without quite becoming poetry. (charity used physical page turns to similar effect in PNE). Twine also does allow you to implement multiple 'routes', much like a visual novel, with the possibilities that allows: a narrative where the different branches reflect on each other and lend to each others' interpretation. (Vesp for example does this very well).

But that's more virtues of hypertext; as for the tool itself, I feel like it had a weird habit of trying to reinvent the wheel and create new scripting languages that compile to javascript. So before long I settled on the theme that just gives you markdown and JS directly, and swapped out the twine editor for Twee2 or TweeGo or something like that.

I haven't really kept up with the modern Twine scene (or its successors as 'accessible web game tool' like Bitsy). my feeling is that as soon as you start trying to do something more complicated than a basic branching narrative with a few user-set variables, the format becomes more of a limitation than an aid. the pre-set styles are useful at least for a jumping off point!

as far as its potential to make game dev more 'accessible', to a new community or w/e, that kind of didn't happen :p a particular scene of mostly (but not all) trans women adopted it for a while, then a few of them used that as a sacrificial springboard to launch banal podcasting careers or whatever; a few people on the fringes carried on using it, but "very online, mostly white trans girls and their friends" have found many other things to fixate on in the years since, and nobody else really picked it up :p

i think like, if someone is drawn to "make games" as a hobby, they typically don't really have hypertext fiction in mind, so it's never going to get a lot of attention on that basis. bitsy gets us a little closer. but the truth is people will teach themselves quite complicated authoring tools, such as Flash, if there is a supportive community to teach them and some striking examples to show what's possible. Flash may be gone, but we're gradually seeing that kind of 'flourishing' again with the explosion of free game engines like Unity and Godot - though there's so much more financial pressure now to sell games than there was in the days of newgrounds.

i also think the 'accessibility' brings with it kind of a limitation: Twine hides all the inner workings so it's kind of a closed off system that's hard to tinker with without rebuilding it from scratch. sure it's very easy to make a branching path story and put it on the web, maybe use some premade widgets like rotating links, but if you want to customise it visually or create game logic, you either learn a one of several very specific scripting languages that are like, not really useful for anything outside of that one twine theme and typically have a lot of restrictions compared to 'real' javascript... or else you basically learn webdev anyway in a difficult, non-self-explanatory way. (like, it's kind of hacky that you have to put CSS in a special story passage). at best it could be an impetus for some people to start learning webdev concepts?

that said, I really do treasure some of the corpus of twines. Charity's obviously, but there was also this very fun tf porn one called 'horse world' which is now only available on archive.org. (not to be confused with 'horse master', which was also pretty great). the best part of the twine scene was the basic idea of writing weird horny experimental scifi about gay trauma or w/e, which has nothing to do with it being interactive fiction or particular authoring tools!

i don't regret using it for my early experiments in web fiction like house and hacker, even though they're not remotely "interactive". if the scene had been less... *waves hands* like that, maybe it could have been more than a passing fad. but that's the way it is, I don't think I'm likely to use it again next time I make something in the interactive fiction - visual novel space. (which might be sooner than you think~)

[silverthetheorist]

The end of L’manburg was disappointing (and why rollercoasters and fun)

I really wanted to like this war. I really did. And I did like many things (Which I will go through don't worry) but... Look, the event was not bad by any means. But this is the first big event that I can say was mediocre at worst and good at best. A solid 6/10 maybe (All other story arcs and events are from a 8/10 to 10/10), specially after the marvelous festival from yesterday. So let’s see first the things that worked: 

- FUNDY AND NICKY POPPED OFF. Them destroying the provisions before the start was great because it did not only made sense for their (Very tired of being sidelined and very tired of L’manberg’s bullshit) but it also had plot repercussion. In a story, for an action to be significant it has to have two things going for it: An emotional repercussion and a plot repercussion. This had both: Two og L’manburgian giving up on their nation and causing the L’maburg forces to be under-and I can’t stress this enough- very under prepared. In Eret’s case it is a lot harder to justify because her arc was never very consistent as I have said before. 

-The villains were very smart and intimidating. First the chose to attack L’manberg the day after the festival giving them little to no time to prepare. Second, they attacked earlier and devised a plan to cause the most destruction possible. Dream and Techno are many times smarter than many movie villains. 

-Tommy exposed Techno for the hypocrite and selfish pig he is. Good for him.

-Anything Ranboo does is gold of course. But, I think joining Phil is a bit of an iffy decision. For someone who doesn’t choose sides he surely chose the one that caused the most destruction and pain for all of his other friends. He is probably one of the most exciting people to watch in the future

-Tubbo jumping in front of Techno’s blast to protect Tommy (I do not want Tubbo to die because he is probs my favorite but that would have been a cool canon death). Tommy asking about Tubbo every 5 seconds. Both apologizing to each other and reuniting finally. Tubbo looking at everything he had built being destroyed, completely speechless. Tommy and Tubbo meeting Dream in the obsidian thing over L’manber. It had a weird final boss feel to it. I wish something had happened between the three there. Maybe a short fight or something. It was still cool.

So, yeah. There is a lot to like about the event. Now I have three main problems with this event: 

My first problem is that it all felt a bit... pointless. This reminded me a lot of the movie Captain America: Civil War. It was a great movie, but it did not have almost any consequences. In today’s event L’MANBURG WAS DESTROYED FOR GOOD THIS TIME and... it doesn’t feel like anything has changed at all. Tommy is still on about the disks even after everything he’s been through. Quackity is still... honestly I never know what is going on with him. Techno and Phil are still assholes and have all the power along with Dream. The badlands still haven’t done a thing (A shame). You can say that Wilbur is going to be revived, and yes that is pretty big, but he has been alive before (I actually love that he is being resurrected surprisingly, I’ll talk about it later). You can also say that L’manburg is gone now but... was it really there ever since Tommy was exiled considering everyone basically left?

It feels like we could have skipped everything after Wilbur blew L’manberg and everything would be the same. Like everything in between did not matter. Think of it, is there any major differences (Besides minor character changes) between the end of the Manberg vs Pogtopia war and now? Probably not many. This goes back to what I said in my first post: History is repeating itself a little to much. Another exile, another festival, another execution, another time L’manburg is destroyed. At least there is not going to be another election anytime soon. 

I think Tommy’s line to Techno that “You are repeating history but worse” is very ironic. The idea that history repeat itself is tempting and, when done efficiently can be amazing, but this was not the case. I cannot blame theme though, a “history repeats itself” story is very hard to write without feeling like you are repeating yourself. But they were so close. The Schlatt/Wilbur and Tommy/Tubbo parallels are a great example of it because it had the two things that a “History Repeats itself” plot needs: A new emotional background (The Tubbo/Tommy friendship breaking) and a final change (When both decide not to become like their predecessor). That’s right. You can argue that this war had a different emotional background but the end result was the seem. This type of stories are only satisfying if we see the change at the end, imagine how great it would have been if they managed to resolve their differences and truly unite against Dream and stop L’manburg from blowing up. 

That is my second problem. I am not against the idea of L’manburg ending for good. But it happened at a very random part of the story. L’manburg, the place that started it all perished because a pig felt betrayed by a friend and Dream was being his usual self. Compare this to the last time it blew up: A fallen hero destroying what he built because he wouldn’t let anyone else have it. It just doesn’t compare. And honestly, we are mostly sad that it is gone because of the first war, the election and the manberg vs pogtopia arcs. If the end goal of three months of storytelling is to destroy L’manburg, why did they spend three months showing how shitty it has become and how everyone left? This last point sections nicely to my last problem

My third and final problem is that it all seems a little samey. Now listen to me on this one. Do you know why the Deadpool movies are so effective at making you laugh? Because it mixes dramatic moments with comedy very well, each dramatic moment elevates the next joke and vice versa. It is also why Tommy’s lore streams are so good, when you juxtapose both drama and comedy it works very well. Like a rollercoaster, the fun comes from all the ups and downs. But can you truly say there were any up moments since the manberg vs pogtopia war. Not really, maybe some but nowhere new as good as the up moments in previous arcs and nowhere near as present. That is why this past three months feel very samey. It has been just constant dread and sadness with very few good moments storywise. Compare this to before when Wilbur was the main writer: Eret betrayed everyone and Dream blew up some of L’manberg, but they won the war and got their independence. Pog 2020 lost the election but Techno joined them and most people were secretly helping from the shadows. They got back L’manburg from Schlatt but Wilbur and Techno betrayed them. See how it has a great mixtures of ups and downs? Today’s event would have benefited from at least one ray of sunshine at the end, maybe a new piece of information returns, or Tommy and Tubbo have a final talk and resolver everything, or something nice for a change. (Wilbur being resurrected does not count, he traumatised everyone, I would not say that is a very happy thing, more of a mixed bag) 

But I don’t want come off as too negative. But now I am being cautious of the storyline. I think the next couple of stream are going to be key. There is still hope that some of these problems will be addressed. Even if they are not, the story will have suffered it’s first big dud (Which is a testament to how good and capable everyone is of telling a great story). 

PS: English not my first language. You know the drill. I am once again not sending hate to anyone ever. There is nothing wrong with criticizing what you love, I think it is kind of necessary in a weird way.

PS2: I also have hope because I believe that Wilbur is coming back as a writer. On a stream (When he saw Matpat’s theory) he said the was “not currently writing the story” which I found as very suspicious wording. That and Alivebur returning I think makes a pretty compelling case for his return as a writer, I don’t see him as the type of guy that would just return so that someone else would write his character. On another note I hope the current writer don’t feel pressured to follow Matpat’s theory just because he is a big youtuber. While not a bad theory by all means (As soon as Ghostbur said he wanted to be alive my first thought was Quackity and Schlatt) but I would prefer it if they were not manipulated by outside sources to make the story a certain way. 

PS3: I have other things I would like to cover. Mainly, I have three ideas for future essays: an analysis of the medium the smp storyline is being made and why it is harmful to it’s story (Specifically it’s eventual ending), a study of how Ranboo’s philosophy causes more harm than good and a “What if” essay of how many road the smp could have taken with it’s story after the manberg vs pogtopia war. I will probably do all three of them eventually but if anyone wants a specific one I can do it no problem. Also, if anyone wants to interact or give their opinions or criticize my ideas you are more than welcome to. I have no friends who are into mcyt and I love the back and forward of different opinions and ideas.   

[traincat]

if you dont mind i would love to hear your thoughts on how and why peter seems to be more fulfilled by lower paying jobs (i.e photography, teaching) rather than by high paying jobs in STEM

(Sorry for the wait, anon! I did get this first ask, as you can see, it’s just that sometimes I tend to hoard asks that I want to give long in-depth answers to and then they get buried.)

So I think to best answer this the first thing we have to do is look at Peter’s 616 employment history -- what jobs he’s had when and for approximately how long. So here we have a more or less definitive list -- I may have skipped over a few minor jobs that aren’t important in the long run of the character history, but for the most part this is accurate. For the sake of brevity I am not going to count things he’s done as Spider-Man that have earned him money, like a brief bodyguard stint or his occasional time with the Avengers, because this is really more about his identity as Peter Parker and how his civilian employment plays into his life as Spider-Man than about his life as Spider-Man.

Works for the Daily Bugle on and off, through a variety of positions from part time to salaried, from the age of 15 onwards. Primarily a photographer. How good of a photographer Peter actually is varies from writer to writer, but he remains unmatched in his ability to get certain shots ranging from ones of Spider-Man (duh) to particularly high risk environments (different duh). He also briefly worked for rival newspaper the Daily Globe, the Bugle’s main competitor. His position as a full time newspaper photographer is his most well known (and most consistent) job.

A TA in grad school at Empire State University. At this point in time he labeled himself as having “the wrong temperament” for teaching -- and I would personally say I think his stints teaching college are much less engaging than high school.

Published author. His book, Webs, a collection of his Spider-Man photography, was a major bestseller that sent him on a book tour around the country. I hesitated sticking this on here because it’s very tied into his work with the Bugle -- and he was still working for the Bugle when the book was published -- but I figured it was worth including for the novelty of the fact that Peter’s technically a best selling author/artist.

Peter worked as a scientist at Galannan Alternative Research for Immunization Development (GARID) in Portland after his clone Ben Reilly took over the identity of Spider-Man. Although often overlooked in discussions of Peter’s job history, I think his stint at GARID is important in part because it illustrates how much of Peter’s time being Spider-Man took up and how a job with flexible hours was necessary for that balancing act. When he was working at GARID, Peter wasn’t Spider-Man, so it wasn’t difficult for him to keep a position at a laboratory. 

I mean granted the GARID job didn’t last long and there was sort of a whole big mutated monster case going on with it but you know. Anyway he pretty quickly moved back to New York and started working for the Bugle again.

Peter’s next major job at a lab comes in another period where he’s supposed to have quit being Spider-Man. (Which he did, very temporarily, and then he very much didn’t. Anyway, you’re seeing the pattern here.) He briefly worked at Tricorp, a private brain trust. This is a really short-lived position, even as Peter’s science gigs go, because -- Spider-Man.

At this point things get dicey employment-wise as Peter heads into a weird period of canon where Mary Jane was presumed dead. She wasn’t! But everyone thought she was. It was weird. When MJ came back (and promptly left for LA, not that I blame her), Peter exited this period of limbo by becoming a science teacher at his old school, Midtown High. This is the main career, beside news photography, that I think he really shines in.

Civil War/One More Day/Brand New Day hit and completely tank the direction of Spider-Man history. Peter’s marriage is erased by the devil and also he’s not a high school teacher anymore, for some reason, even though nobody remembers he’s Spider-Man anymore which is the reason he initially lost the Midtown High job. Make it make sense. Anyway, in Marvel’s desperate scramble to take Spider-Man back to the unmarried basics, as if they even got new readers that way, Peter returned to photography. When Dexter Bennett bought the Bugle out from under JJJ while JJJ was sick, Peter began working for the newly minted “DB” as a tabloid photographer. It wasn’t great.

He also briefly at some point in here worked at a comic book store for like five minutes. Mostly he complained about people who read comic books and made jokes about how he doesn’t get along with the X-Men. 

Under Slott’s run, Peter began working at Horizon Labs. Slott had a pretty major problem with Peter’s genius not being “recognized enough” and constantly had him inventing new things, showing off, etc. 

Horizon Lab became Parker Industries under Otto Octavius when he bodyjacked Peter during Superior Spider-Man and made himself CEO. When Peter got his body back, he was still CEO. It was bad but Peter did tank the company on purpose so that Otto and also nazis couldn’t get their hands on it, which was sort of fun. 

Peter went back to work for the Bugle, but as their science editor, because Slott was still in charge and there was some weird commentary about photography not being an adult job. Which I think is pretty weird in a medium that’s very dependent on visual art. But okay.

Then Peter got fired because he was busted for plagiarism of Otto Octavius’ work... that Otto did himself... while he was in Peter’s body... and Peter couldn’t reveal this because then he’d have to explain... and maybe I hate comics. 

In MC2 he becomes a forensic scientist! I really like this for him actually. I think it combines his interests and experiences in a very thoughtful way. But I do want to note it’s after a Spider-Man career ending injury, so again there’s not a real conflict there between his work as Spider-Man and a career.

Peter I think is an especially interesting case in how his character ties into his employment history because one of the first things he does in his story is figure out how to make money, and he does this because the Parkers don’t have any. If Ben and May were comfortable -- even comfortable enough that their teenaged nephew was unaware of financial pressures -- Spider-Man’s story would be completely different. But Peter immediately feels he pressure to use his new powers to earn money, at first with brute strength. And what he says he’s going to do with his earnings is that he’s going to take care of Ben and May:

(Amazing Fantasy #15) So the concept of Peter as someone who is very aware of financial pressure and who is pretty explicitly linking money to support is present from the absolute beginning. But at the same time, there’s a kind of selfishness presented in him here -- he’s only going to take care of Ben and May. They’re the only ones he cares about here, because as he’s stated they’re the only ones who have ever “been kind” to him. Peter at the beginning of his story is very rooted in his anger and his bitterness, and it takes him losing Uncle Ben -- because it wasn’t Peter’s “job” to stop the burglar -- to get him to the point where he starts to be able to see beyond that.

Ben’s death also heightens the Parker’s financial pressures -- Ben is the primary earner in the household. (Aunt May in the original context of the early 1960s was most likely a homemaker, and as an older woman especially she wouldn’t be expected to have a job. But even moving the timescale up to a point where she would be expected as a woman to hold down a job, it’s important to note that early in Spider-Man canon Aunt May is depicted as being in very poor physical health.) While it’s not clear in the initial Spider-Man stories what Ben did, it’s clear that with his death whatever income the Parkers had coming in abruptly stops:

(ASM #1) This sets in concrete one of the central conflicts Peter and May have -- both of them lie to protect the other. Peter feigns being an ordinary boy in order to protect May from the stress of his secret life as Spider-Man, worried that she wouldn’t be strong enough to handle the danger he regularly puts himself in. But this is a learned behavior, and here we see that he most likely learned it from May: she doesn’t want him to worry about the very deep financial troubles they’re obviously in, so she pawns her jewelry, and she stresses to him the importance of his education. Again I have to note that there are some pretty significant social differences between the 1960s and today in regards to this story -- Betty Brant, for example, notes that she had to drop out of school and become a secretary because of her own family’s financial problems, something she’s ashamed of. So early Spider-Man is very rooted in money, class, education, and how those things intersect. I think it should be noted that the only early Spider-Man characters who are financially well-off are Liz, Gwen, and Harry. (We don’t know anything about Flash’s financial situation in early Spider-Man comics but retroactively we know his family situation is not well-off.) In high school, Liz’s father is a bigshot who owns a dining club, but later on the Allans experience financial hardship with Liz quite literally being on the streets when Peter reunites with her when he’s in college. Harry’s father is a rich businessman, but from the beginning he’s depicted as emotionally negligent, caring more about money than spending time with his son:

(ASM #40) “After all... I had a business to care of! Money was the most important thing of all! I had to get rich! I needed wealth... for that was the key to power!” So right away you have this link between wealth, corruption, and negligence. Norman’s pursuit of wealth is his given reason for his neglect of Harry. Later on we’d learn that Norman’s father was also abusive and that that abuse formed Norman’s ideas about power and wealth. (Spider-Man! It’s about cycles of abuse!) There’s a very contrast between Norman’s attitudes here and the Parkers loving (but poor) household. Gwen is the only exception here -- she and her father are depicted as comfortable, most likely edging into wealthy, although on nowhere the level the Osborns have been elevated to. But compared to Peter, Flash, and Mary Jane especially -- all from poor households, with MJ and Flash’s fathers both being abusive -- Gwen’s home situation is the picture of stability, both in terms of economic status and in terms of her loving and very present father.

My goal in outlining all of this isn’t to say that Spider-Man’s message is definitively “money is bad” because I don’t think it is. I think as a series Spider-Man is very aware of the comfort that money can provide. But I think there is a frequent message about excess in Spider-Man -- excess power, excess wealth. As Norman says above, in his eyes, money is the key to power. With great power, comes great responsibility. In Norman hoarding and abusing his wealth, he abuses his power. If he provides for Harry, it is solely through money -- there is no love or devotion in Norman’s money-focused world. And I think that’s important when you look at where Peter starts in his story, before Uncle Ben’s death. He’s going to use his powers to make a lot of money and he’s going to provide for Ben and May but he’s not going to care about the world outside of that. I think one of the interesting things about Peter -- and this is where Slott’s run especially fails the character -- is that he’s not interesting in getting rich. He’d like to be comfortable, for sure -- he’d like to have enough money to not have worry about it, to not have the need to hustle impede what he can do as Spider-Man, to be able to take care of his family. (And there’s some machismo stuff linked in here for him too -- in the early days of their marriage the fact that Mary Jane earns much more than him is something he struggles with.) But he doesn’t care about being rich. He doesn’t care about the money; he cares about the support that the money would bring. 

That feels like a simple statement but I think it’s actually a really big distinction, especially when you’re analyzing a character. And I think it’s because Peter understands that value that it makes him so empathetic to others who have financial struggles. One of my favorite short self-contained Spider-Man stories is called Windfall, from Marvel Fanfare #42, where a mixup with a check embroils Peter in the personal affairs of a bank teller, a young single mother who is fired from her job ultimately because she refused the advances of her boss. Peter gets her her job back -- through blackmailing the boss for his other sexual affairs, which some people might think is immoral of him, but I think really speaks to Peter’s understanding of how the greater world works, and what he’s prepared to do to get bigger justice. But more importantly he uses his own money to pay the young woman’s rent, and he does it in a way where she never even knows it’s him. Because he understands her situation, the way someone who had grown up comfortable never could. And that understanding I think puts him a place where it’s more important for him to both keep that understanding and maintain that ability to act relatively freely, in the way that bigger, more prestigious positions in scientific fields might restrict him. There’s a reason he keeps getting fired from these scientific positions and it’s not that he can’t get them, because we can see from his employment history very clearly that he can. It’s because the freedom to act as Spider-Man and what he can do as Spider-Man is ultimately more important to him.

And while high school teacher is my number one favorite profession Peter has ever had, I think that his position as a newspaper photographer is also very important to the character’s history, in part because the Bugle is such a big part of his life and the connections he’s made but also because the Daily Bugle itself is important. I think it’s interesting to note that two of the biggest superheroes of all time from both of the big companies -- Spider-Man from Marvel and Superman from DC -- have had long running journalism jobs, Peter as a photographer and Clark as a reporter. I don’t think I really have to go into a whole thing about how good journalists are so important and why it matters that we have these incredibly famous mythic figures that are positioned in the roll of journalists specifically. But I do think it is important to Peter that he’s put in that position as someone who cares about uncovering the truth. So ultimately I think what I mean when I say Peter is more fulfilled by his jobs as a photojournalist and as a high school teacher than by his comparatively more high paying stints working as a scientist in a lab is that Peter gets the most fulfillment out of careers where he can actively see, day by day, that what he’s doing is helping people, and that it’s a very direct line from him to the people he’s helping. His efforts can’t be twisted, they can’t be used for other purposes the way they can within a larger organization. He has a line of control in what he can do to help other people. It’s like how Spider-Man functions best as a street level hero: what he does best is saving and helping individual people, on a case by case basis. And you can turn around and demonstrate that in his civilian life best in jobs where he gets to directly interact with people. And ultimately to Peter making that difference is more important than a better salary.

(Marvel Knights Spider-Man #9)

[peel-a-potato-with-a-potato]

So I binge read Invincible

What a trip of a story. Gotta say, I’m really hoping Amazon doesn’t screw it up, but what I’ve seen of the show so far seems to be a good update. The comic came out in 2003 after all, so there’s some parts that don’t hold up well 18 years later.

The ending wasn’t to my taste, but it was mostly satisfying. Spoilers if you keep reading beyond here.

The comic makes gratuitous use of time skipping, usually because of Mark being very vincible (yes, bad joke, don’t care), at several points. The worst ones for me were the 3 or 4 months he spent with his father and brother healing from a stomach wound and the 5 year skip after the “reboot”.

And oh boy do I have thoughts on that reboot. Some mysterious entity we are never given any further information on traps him in a cave and sends him back to being 17 with no powers on Earth. He proceeds to do everything in the most efficient way he can before giving up to be with his family. And then he’s back, but 5 years after he left. Was he really in the past or was that entity just messing with his mind? And did it really take him 5 years to process those few weeks? Or did he get brought back to the wrong time? Was that thing vengeful and wanted to rob him of what he wanted for disobeying it? And after that little section is over, we never hear about that thing again.

And then there’s the deaths of Oliver and Nolan. Both were mostly well done, Oliver died in battle (sure he would have wanted it that way), and Nolan died with his favorite son present. Or least favorite, it’s hard to tell at some points. And both were well used catalysts into propelling the story. Oliver’s death convinced Mark he had to act against Thragg. Nolan’s death put Mark in control of the new Viltrum Empire, and in direct opposition to Robot. I refuse to call him Rex. Rex Splode deserved better than that.

Through the whole series, I didn’t trust Robot. From the beginning, I had a bad feeling about him, and when he was revealed to be a human, Rudy, that pretty much cemented it for me. A genius who relies entirely on logic, even when they have an emotional attachment to someone? Yeah, if that doesn’t scream trouble, I don’t know what does. Putting his brain in a jar and leaving Immortal in charge seemed like the best option.

But that also brings up the question of why he left Immortal in charge at all. Having been brought to the future by two people working for Immortal just so he could get his death, don’t you think Mark would have remembered that? Would have known the pain he would cause his friend? Or was there really no better option? It does provide continuity, answers why Immortal was in charge, and I guess prevents a paradox, which is all probably why it was done. Mark doing that knowing what would happen though, it’s probably the most Viltrumite thing he does in the series, cold and devoid of human emotion. Mark does have a habit of disagreeing with his allies at times, and sometimes that leads to what feels like betrayal.

Even Allen got the short end of that stick, with the Viltrum Empire spreading peace at the end, Allen’s coalition fell apart. And Mark makes some good commentary there that definitely applies to Earth today. But wouldn’t you think he’d want to help Allen change the COP to make it better for those planets being exploited? That seemed to be his thing, but instead he just left them to figure it out.

Going back to immortality for a bit, let’s talk about Eve. She gets severely wounded and suddenly she becomes a god just long enough to patch herself back up. This is used a couple times, first on Eve alone, and then on herself and Mark. The first time she gives herself bigger breasts (yup, it’s a guy writing the series) and the second time Mark asks “Did you make me stronger?” while he flexes. Given that Eve was carrying their child at the time, it makes sense why he wouldn’t leave her power to kick in to replace her lost leg, but it ends up making death feel a bit cheap, the way Marvel and DC do by killing off their heroes and bringing them back. It’s really made worse when Eve dies of old age and is suddenly in her 20′s again. “Guess I’m immortal” my ass. If she’s just going to keep doing that, eventually she will outlive Mark’s thousands of years and she’ll be just as lonely as Immortal. Feels like they didn’t think the ramifications of that one through. I do enjoy the fact that Eve is always, and I do mean always, the one initiating their intimate moments though. A woman taking charge of her sexuality is nice to see.

And then there’s Marky. Poor Marky. Left alone on Earth with an adoptive human father while Mark ignored him because of his rage at Marky’s mother. Debbie steps in to help, and it’s clear Mark still has some contact with his son, but he’s definitely not going to have the support his father did growing up, even if he is the new Invincible. Why on earth would this poor half abandoned child take the name of the father that clearly doesn’t want to take much interest in him? I get it’s a carrying on the family legacy kind of thing, but it gives me weird vibes.

For all my griping though, I have to mention Cecil. Almost a perfect foil to Mark’s black and white thinking. Cecil only sees in shades of grey. No matter where someone’s actions put them in Mark’s eyes, Cecil always sees them as a force to be used to his own ends. Cecil’s need to protect people and his search for peace align so perfectly with Mark’s but because of his way of looking at the world and lack of superpowers, he contrasts so perfectly with the hero of the story. I disagree with Rudy that Cecil would have been okay dying to get the world brought about by Rudy, but I’m not really sure how to put those thoughts into words just yet.

But the ending in general, while neatly wrapping up most of the plot threads (looking at you tentacle entity from the reboot storyline), feels a bit too much like a happily ever after. Now that’s personal taste, but honestly, if they’d just ended it with Mark taking over and saying he was going to leave Earth with the Viltrumites on his mission to help the universe, I’d have been a lot happier leaving the rest up to the imagination. Instead, we get flashes of this race of near gods forcefully bringing peace to the universe and we end with another vaguely satisfying callback.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved the series and I’m honestly tempted to read it again to get a better idea of the callbacks and setups we see. The perspective on some things might be different now too, and that’s always interesting. I’m very much of the opinion that if you love something, you should be critical of it. And there’s a lot in Invincible that seems like doing something just to make the story work. I can’t tell if that’s just because of the medium or if it actually makes sense given that Mark is an alien, so maybe I would need to read it again to figure that out.

[whetstonefires]

Since you like the Hellboy...*perks up* Can I ask what you like about it? Does this need to be part of the ask game, if so, smash it in there. But opinions! I would love!

Ooh! Hm. This is actually surprisingly hard to articulate.

I’ve been ‘into’ Hellboy for like. Half my damn life now, and while I could have gone on at length about all the things about it I found fun as a teenager it was at its core very much a ‘this makes me Feel Happy’ thing. And now that glow is less intense but it’s bolstered by that habitual sort of attachment you feel to like. Family members.

Let’s see how far I can break this down lol.

I have never been able to much like most of the BPRD tie-in type materials and I was not at all pleased with the films, so to an extent I think I can say confidently part of what I like is the way Hellboy is situated in a superhero-comic-adjacent space while being very much coordinated by one overarching creative sensibility--like, other people were brought in to work on Hellboy a lot over the course of the run, but Mignola always had a unifying voice and even when I don’t actually agree with his taste or values that level of artistic...intentionality? Judgment? Presence? Something like that. Gives the work a sense of...integrity? Maybe just unity.

Anyway makes it feel less plastic than comics often do. This is a corporate product of course but it’s also just Mike Mignola hanging out doing whatever he thinks would be cool. Drawing rocks and monsters because that’s what he wants to draw. I like that.

Some of the higher-quality webcomics you get nowadays, when they don’t take themselves too terribly seriously but aren’t outright comedic, can land similarly in terms of voice, but even just fifteen years ago webcomics weren’t really at that point yet as a medium, and even now most are still amateurish as well as amateur. Which is fine, but different.

To get slightly less meta, I love the collection of genres that are smeared together for Hellboy--we’ve got a lot of detective noir stuff cut together with cosmic horror and like...the genre where people research folklore and then mostly punch it. Does that have a name? And then there are a bunch of other influences stirred in, sometimes for only a single issue, sometimes more.

Mignola managed to be significantly less offensive than average about the way he adapted world folklore into his weird groddy kitchen-sink fantasy system, which is pretty funny because he doesn’t come across as being careful about it at all. Not that I think there was no effort made, but also he just used research as a basis for narrative much more often than he started with a story premise and stretched the creature to fit, which by default gave him less scope for dickery.

Also I think the only god he ever fights is Hecate and she’s handled from a 19th-century-occultist angle rather than a Classical angle.

Also Hellboy fights Nazis and cyborg gorillas as well as like. Baba Yaga and vampires. The balance of schlock and gonzo nonsense to pathos and sensitive emotional bits is usually about where I like it.

The episodic format is really well used. It lets the storytelling style lean heavily on the late-19th-through-mid-20th-century short story genres that it borrows a lot from, and which honestly has always worked better for comics than end-to-end long-arc serialization. I like how the anachronic order of many sections of the series allowed for a lot of ‘building outward from the middle.’

Also it means the story can stay true to its roots and kill off a lot of characters in gothic excess without constantly sloughing main cast or having to do fakeouts.

...I can’t believe that since Hellboy isn’t really emotionally involved with the issue of his birth parents except inasmuch as it explains the world-ending stone hand, the single angstiest part of his backstory is technically when he went on a drinking binge road trip around Mexico in his teens and made friends with vampire-fighting luchador triplets but then the youngest one whom he was closest to was kidnapped by the vampires and Hellboy had to kill his best friend, and this is all established in a random side story that pushes the intentional genre absurdism to its breaking point and is equal parts comedic and grotesque.

(The second angstiest is probably the bit in volume 1 when he finds his dad murdered by frogs.)

I also just love characters who wear trench coats and are actually really clever and knowledgeable and kind but tend to resort, in extremity, to just hitting problems really hard. Okay? I like that. That’s a fave.

Hellboy’s whole character design is very strong, a bunch of dramatic broad-strokes decisions that contrast interestingly against one another, and then a lot of subtler elements layered in crosswise.

The way his relationship to the narrative ‘occult-fighting antichrist figure’ could be really straightforward, but keeps stepping a little sideways off the usual shape of the tropes in a way that creates depth.

He’s a giant red demon guy who stopped aging in the 50s; he’s never going to be able to be ‘normal’ or pretend he isn’t what he is--but also he’s a dude with a government job and probably a Social Security Number who goes and interviews people about the situation and says ‘I’m Agent Hellboy’ and gets called ‘Mr. Boy’ and is just this guy who knows his shit and can take a beating.

(This was one of the major things I hated in the first movie, that they decided to make him this weird secret cryptid whose dad keeps him locked in a vault when he’s not fighting.)

The way the identity thing is never reduced to comfortable binaries with him except by enemies trying to psych him out is just really satisfying. He fights monsters not because he hates them or himself but because he was recruited into this career young and he’s really good at it, and he feels good about helping people who are being victimized.

When something occult isn’t hurting anybody he’s down to chill, and if it turns out they secretly are after all he’s always so tired and disappointed, and if they really aren’t then he has a new friend. Whom he may never see again or may hit up for a game of cards next time he’s in town.

(I also like how he combines ‘being pretty private’ ‘being very casually friendly’ and ‘being an asshole who makes a lot of enemies’; it’s not that unusual a combo for his type of main character but it’s one I enjoy.)

When he breaks off his own horns as part of his rejection of being Anung Un Rama it’s not ‘choosing humanity’ or w/e it’s choosing not to be used for this. His name is Hellboy, which is an objectively awful name but it was given to him by people he loved and who chose him, not the people who made him or brought him to this world to be used, and he chooses it.

And that has weight. That has force enough behind it to carry a world.

Just in general in spite of all the identity stuff he gets swamped with he’s really good at self-knowledge and letting other people’s ideas of who and what he’s supposed to be just wash over him. As the story goes on and shit gets weirder his sense of identity gets shaken, but he never quite loses that anchor in the knowledge that he is the ultimate arbiter of his own identity.

His exasperation on being told via stabbing that he doesn’t get to be King of England even if he is the first male descendant of King Arthur since Mordred is so funny. Why is this a thing, says Hellboy. Why am I finding out like this. Why do I always find out this shit like this. Why would anyone think I wanted to be King of England. I already punched so many skeletons about not wanting to be King of Witches.

He��s got so much righteous anger that comes out when people are treated as disposable, or as less for being not human or less human or superpowered, and of course it’s founded in his own experiences and his own fight for respect but it’s not about him. It’s about the person who’s suffering now.

One time his combat one-liner before shooting something started with ‘The Torch of Liberty said I was the worst shot he ever tried to train’ that’s so funny! I love that!

He’s my boy okay.

[writingmyheartsout]

..Lost on You..

So this been...unexpected even for me. I have planned a some sort of fluff December but i really don’t know how much i will write, mostly short things since my brain is busy with real life too.

But this some sort of AU kept on living rent free in my mind so i had to do something about it..

this is for @plexflexico​ ...a modern coffee shop au with Paz (consider this a “the start” of the story...so if you ever want to use it and writing down the whole thing, please do :D)

___

It was a new beginning, a new life, and a brand-new city, completely foreign to her eyes. But it was what she needed after years spent thinking about what to do, years that took everything away from her, that had led her to run away from everything she was once familiar with.

This place had always been her happy place in her dreams, so when the opportunity presented itself she took it without thinking twice.

But a new life alone and a new job to support herself also meant new responsibilities...

And there she was, waking up early, ready to face another day. She was confident enough to be able to give her best even today, even if she wasn’t fully awake yet. After all, getting up early was never her forte, but things change...for better or for worse.

For this reason, she had also found the solution for this small problem.

A small and cozy cafe right on the way to work. There, they were able to make a superb coffee), the perfect balance between sweet and bitter, and where the friendly environment reminded her of home in some way.

After quickly getting dressed, and almost forgetting the latest project she spent all night on that needed approval that morning, she left the house. Next stop: Martìn cafè. 

Oh good hell... it's snowing too now? - she murmured as soon as she found herself on the street, seeing everything covered in white around her.

It was not unusual to snow so much overnight during the month of December, but right now it was something she didn't need at all. She was already in a hurry, and slowing down her pace to be more careful trying not to slip was definitely a problem. So when she finally entered the cafe, she stopped right at the door to warm up and remove the little bit of snow that had gotten on her.

She really wanted to stay, maybe to sit down and stare outside at the falling flakes. But thanks to this snowy surprise, she was already late.

"One medium black coffee on the go with two sugar, please," she said, ordering without even looking as she reached into her bag for her wallet. 

"Would you like something to eat with it?" the man behind the counter asked, as he was quickly taking the order.

"No..." she was about to answer but the words died in her mouth as soon as she lifted her head.

She knew everyone who worked in that place, but not the man who was standing in front of her now. She had never seen him, tall and broad, with very short hair, a beard, and arms full of tattoos; he looked like someone you might easily find in a pub or riding a motorcycle, but instead... he was there, smiling, with a ridiculous apron on and a t-shirt that was definitely a size down.

"Ma'am...?" the same man asked again, concerned...

Damn it, why am I staring at him now?

"Sorry...I'm still a little tired, I haven't been sleeping well lately," she replied awkwardly, hoping that he hadn't noticed anything.

Why am I even telling him that...

"So, nothing to eat then..." the man inquired once again.

"No, not this time, thank you" she replied while paying, smiling at him as she felt her cheeks blush a little...

"Alright, your order is coming right away..." he told her and winked at her before going over to the coffee machine to prepare it.

"Thank you," she added, nearly whispering, as she sat down on a stool nearby to wait.

Now that she was taking a better look at him, she had never seen him there at all...she would have certainly remembered someone so handsome and…

Do you really think you have time for that? Last time, it was a complete disaster 

But a girl can dream, right?

Save yourself the trouble…forget it

Well, thanks ... very encouraging. 

The last time she had been with someone, it was really a mess. So much that she almost lost part of her sanity... now it was definitely not the time: she had already set her limits and her priorities. Men, even good-looking ones were not among them.

He's too much for you anyway 

Thank you brain, what a way to cheer me up.

She was deep in her thoughts when someone cleared his throat.

She blinked slightly and looked up…

Oh..damn he's even prettier up close

Shut up!

"Here you go, medium black coffee with two sugar" he announced with a smile so bright and genuine that she felt her cheeks turning red again.

"T-thank you...." she barely stuttered out, when her phone buzzed.

"Shit... I have to run" she exclaimed all of a sudden as she stood up and rushed towards the door "...thank you" she added, turning around one last time before leaving.

"My pleasure, have a good day..." the man replied with a wink as he was still leaning against the counter.

She was definitely late now and whether it was snowing or not, she had to run. But to her delight, once outside, she saw that the sidewalk was mostly empty and the remaining flakes were melting away.

As she started to drink the first sip of coffee, she looked down at her cup to see that there was something, some kind of writing...

Weird, usually they don't do that 

Looking closely, she almost dropped its entire content on the ground. It seemed that the new employee had been very clever and thoughtful, as he had left a very unexpected but highly appreciated message, written in a nice handwriting.

-next time you’re in, name's Paz- 

Good-looking and smart, that was a very dangerous combination, but maybe, she could give it a try. Flirting costs nothing and could be fun if done the proper way.

___

hope that the inner dialogue is understandable...have fun <3

also any error, something i missed...or anything else just tell me. I’m not the expert on starts...i’m usually very bad at those..if it feel awkward, that’s me trying...

*edited a lil bit more, since i’ve posted it at 2 in the morning and i was tired.

[retrocontinuity]

rev, rev, fight the power: thoughts on the first half of chainsaw man

Spoilers through the end of the Bomb Girl Arc.

Devil Hunting in the Age of Fascism

As one of the cohosts of a podcast on Gundam Wing in 2020/2021, I've been thinking a lot about how authoritarian regimes and the concept of societal control is treated in anime. Which is to say: usually in a very limited sense, and based on the actions of a few bad actors, as demonstrated with its effects on a few unfortunate protagonists. It's not that creators don't care about the issue, but rather a sign that the genre (and yes, I do consider manga/anime to be a genre more than just a medium, but that's for another time) and its conventions are not particularly well-suited to showing you those effects.

So, Chainsaw Man. On an individual character level, Fujimoto has some stuff to say about the choice between death and life, and I do want to talk about that and what it says about the characters and what life means in CSM. But it's hard to tell whether or not he meant to create a world with some really fucked up institutions too. 

For instance, the civilian, non-public sector Devil Hunters. These appear to be explicitly authorized by the Japanese government, to the point where it is a crime for the Public Safety division's hunters to kill a devil that a civilian is in the process of capturing. They don't have guns (this is Japan!) and I imagine they are only allowed to kill Devils, but just, like, think about this. What if you kill someone else in the process of trying to kill a Devil? What if you suspect someone is a Fiend but actually they're just acting weird? What if you kill someone, then claim later it's because you thought they were a Devil?

This is likely the American in me talking, but I can’t help thinking about how badly this would be abused and how horrible an idea that would be. And I can’t help but think about how the Devils allow the world of CSM to separate fears from human nature. By which I mean, in the world of CSM, evil is otherized in a very specific way; they’re represented by very individual, very distinct, and very monstrous representations. Here is the fear of scissors, the fear of sharks, the fear of the future, and so on. But in the real world, we know it isn’t just fear itself that is the problem; it’s people, well-meaning or otherwise, animated by those fears that create the most evil, or people harnessing those fears to gain power. This may be unfair—I don’t know what Fujimoto has planned for Makima, whose mythos and power seems very much wrapped up in the idea of using Devils to her own advantage. But there’s an assumption here that all actions taken towards eradication of the Devils, or maybe just one Gun Devil, is a de facto good. And in 2021, that’s a very unnerving position to take.

Death in Chainsaw Man is a sacrifice. In these early arcs of the series, death is a "contract," an expending of activation energy to achieve something else. So Pochita gives Denji life (which is really a contract repaid, for when Denji gave him life), so the Devil Hunters "trade" something in a contract with a Devil for power (like Aki giving away literal years of his life to his curse sword), so Denji dying to the Eternity Devil would have freed the rest of the team. But there are plenty of deaths in the series where nothing is traded, nothing is given. These tend to be nameless victims or, in one harrowing scene, convicted felons who die at the hands of Makima as she chases down Katana Devil. 

What did they gain? What was the contract formed by the deaths of these 雑魚?

Makima says at some point when she's attacking the gangs that are affiliated with the Katana Devil that "the truly necessary evils are always kept collared and controlled by the state." Which I think is at its face about the fiends and Devils kept “collared” by the Public Safety Bureau. But maybe it’s also about the idea of sacrifice, about giving yourself over to the state, in order to control a world thrown into chaos. The contracts formed by the deaths of those ordinary citizens is meant to bring about an eradication of fear. It gives birth to the Public Safety Devil Hunters, to Devil Hunters in general, to the use of whatever means necessary to achieve an end. But whatever those consequences are, we only see them in the fates of Denji, Chainsaw Man, and the impossible characters around him. 

A state under threat, a state that feels like it must collar evil in order to survive, will have ruinous consequences. I just hope we get to see what those are. 

Just A Teenage Dirtbag, (Bomb) Baby

I read some reviews about Denji being the anti-shounen shounen manga hero which I can presume were written by people whose only frame of reference is Bleach, Naruto, or One Piece. Sure, the Big Three were, in their most simplistic forms, feel-good series, and CSM's first half is basically a feel-bad series, but that hardly makes it unusual. It's really not dissimilar from other manga like Homunculus, Freesia, and Oyasumi Punpun. Of course, only old fogies like me, who still remember getting scanlations of these series off of IRC, and query, of course, whether or not those series are shounen at all, or more like seinen. If it were up to me to name the genre, and of course it is not, I would call it “simply another line of stories about fucked up things happen to fucked up people.”

Many fucked up things have happened to Denji. I’d call it traumatic, but I don’t think “trauma” covers what this poor man has been through. The effect, though, has been to make Denji less than human, even in his human form.

Denji and Power's nonchalance towards the fate of their human coworkers who die to Katana Devil and Sawatari is framed by the manga through Denji as a potential sign of callousness. Kishibe notes it as a sign that they are "insane," in other words, "not like other humans," and thus capable of bringing down something like the Gun Devil, which would otherwise drive "normal humans" insane. 

But like, huh? Denji and Power's reactions are, on the contrary, extremely human, because there’s no reason for them to extend feeling towards other humans. Simply put, they’ve never been human to the humans around them. They seem to be bonded most closely to each other, and in fact almost all the Fiends are, because the wider Public Safety employees treat them so poorly. Remember how the Infinity Devil Arc starts? Basically, they're told to be the advance guard, and threatened to be killed if they ever act out. Denji is kept on a short leash, and is so proud (in front of Reze) that he's allowed to go places on his own now.

Which, I'm not saying that that's wrong. Denji is incredibly dumb, holds monstrous power that could easily be tricked into using for horrible purposes, and appears to be the target of a number of Gun Devil's allies. Power is... well. I wouldn't let her out of sight either. But what Makima does that makes Denji feel so loyal, so utterly tied to her, is simply treating him as a human. She convinces him he has a heart, just like any other human. She tells him about all the love experiences he'll have in the future, because he's just a human teenager. And just like Makima, Reze is able to bond with Denji by treating him like an ordinary 16-year-old horny boy. Is it because as a Devil she knows what he wants the most? What he is craving, and never had? It doesn't matter that Denji had been just an ordinary human before fusing with Pochita or before he began his life as a Devil Hunter; as an orphan growing up on the street, unwanted and unloved, he was no more human than a Devil.  

The ending of the Bomb Girl Arc—with Denji asking Reze to run away with him, only to be stood up—reminded me so very much of Aku no Hana. There's the classroom scenes between Reze and Denji, of course, but mostly I think about how Denji—betrayed, injured, manipulated Denji—still asks Reze to run away with him. I'd written about Aku no Hana before, how one of the saddest things about Nakamura is that she cannot imagine a world beyond her current circumstance (and, in fact, the manga ends up dooming her to stagnation). Denji and Reze are Nakamura and Kasuga's perverse mirror. It is because Denji doesn't have the capacity to imagine a larger world beyond his immediate now, three meals a day and a job and this woman who taught him how to swim, that he asks her to do this impossible thing, to run away with him knowing that to do would mean both of them betraying their masters. It is because Reze knows that it is impossible that she does not meet Denji at the cafe. Reze is more human than Denji, because she is capable of dreams, and because she is capable of dreaming, she knows she cannot afford their luxury. She knows too much about the world and its cruelty. And, so, she walks straight into its open maw, and straight into her death.

I don't think we can take Reze at her word that she wanted to be a town mouse, or rather we should say instead that Reze proves that the division between the town mouse and the country mouse is immaterial. The issue is that both, in the end, are only mice, dreaming of a safety they can never achieve. Safety, in the world of CSM, is neither town mouse nor country mouse. It is to not be mice at all. It is to be the dog that digs them out from the cold winter dirt. 

It is, in fact, to be Makima, the person who orders the dogs to kill the mice.

Denji, aim for the top! Transcend the town mouse/country mouse divide! Or else you will constantly be hunted and used!

(Side note: CSM goes at a break-neck pace, and I think the speed through which Fujimoto rushes through these early storylines has made it very difficult for me to actually connect with the characters. Reze and Denji’s relationship is one of the victims to this pacing. Do I believe that Denji could fall for a girl and be willing to risk it all for her after about 3 chapters worth of interaction? Sure, he’s that kind of guy. But does it work for me? Not particularly. We’ve hardly had time to linger with Reze before she swears she’ll protect Denji forever, as long as he’ll run away with her. Though the reader at that point knows there’s something off about Reze, it’s still just not believable. Reze’s actions seem like someone trying to bulldoze her way into Denji’s affections, and though she herself is a bittersweet character, I just really feel like CSM could have spent less time with Bomb Devil vs Chainsaw Man and more time with Reze and Denji.)

No Ethical Women Under Capitalism

The Eternity Devil arc, for all its mini-boss game feel (it wouldn’t be out of place as one of the floors in Tower of God), struck a nerve with me, if only because it felt, however unintentionally, to be a story about working under modern capitalism. A floor you can never leave, that loops endless, where the only way to escape is to destroy it, literally, from the inside, by making it so painful, an eternal feedback loop of destroying ourselves and destroying it, before it opens its heart to us. The Capitalism Devil threatens us, tries to tear us apart. Asks us to sacrifice the strongest, the weakest, anybody among us, as if by climbing over the bodies of our friends and coworkers, we can come out ahead. It makes us suspicious of each other, ready to tear into any weakness for an advantage. 

No wonder this is the chapter where Kobeni lays bare her reasons for joining the Public Safety bureau. She needed to work, to make money. Her options were to be a sex worker or a Devil Hunter. Either way, she was selling her body to the system. Kobeni is a victim of capitalism, which forces her to do what she hates, for goal that are not hers, and then gaslights us into thinking that she’s wrong for being crazy, she’s wrong for losing her shit, for not being able to handle it.

But... that's an asspull for me, even if it's my ass and I'm the one pulling. I'm truly not sure how to feel about Kobeni. Like, what is her deal?! I’m not sure what to make of her appearance in Chapter 20 in her sister’s hand-me-down. Are we supposed to pity her? See ourselves in her? Even in what I think was intended to be a mic-drop-ish line (at least for her), telling Aki that she didn’t quit because she was waiting on her bonus, landed flat for me, too deadpan to be pathetic and not sharp enough to be actually funny. Part of it may be because she is a character very much shaped by her circumstances as opposed to her personality or any interaction/action she does onscreen, but we don’t actually see her family situation in these chapters. We’re left with a painfully shy and cowardly woman who can’t seem to form any human connections with any of the other characters, who in multiple scenes is shown caving to the slightest pressure or threat.

Do the rest of the women fare any better? I’m not sure. Kobeni is unique in that she does not use her gender/sex appeal to manipulate the men around her and/or Denji (even Power lets Denji cop a feel to get her cat back!). Himeno, Makima, and Reze all hide their intentions for Denji behind the veil of his attraction to them (weak or strong) and are either unable or unwilling to be forthright in their desires and ambitions (Himeno to care for Aki; Reze, to accomplish whatever mission Gun Devil had her set out to do; and Makima, for fuck do I know at this point, but she’s up to something!!). Meanwhile, the men are straightforward to a fault. Did Fujimoto intend this? Is this just a subconscious reveal of his own conceptions of gender and Bitches Be Weird? 

I’m not a person who needs to have a strong female narrative in a story, but when you start a story with a protagonist whose life ambition for many chapters was just to feel a boob, you better be careful, you know? CSM doesn’t lack for women; Makima and Power are both formidable characters in their own rights, self-assured and unbeholden to anyone but themselves. But so far almost every arc has featured a woman offering herself to Denji sexually in order to get him to do what they want. It’s getting real old real fast. 

[lifeofroos]

Part 51. Christmas with five people sure is calm. 

In short: Nico gets therapy from Dionysus. In this chapter, Nico tries to have a nice Christmas with Will, but a bad memory overshadows it. The rest of the story can be found on AO3 and Fanfiction.net! And in Tumblr tags like Dionysus, Nico di Angelo, percy jackson fanfiction etc. 

This Might Be Crazy: Chapter 51: Glühwein ‘Nico! So glad to see you!’ Naomi Solace chirped while Will and I walked in. 

‘Yes, thanks, mrs. Solace, good to see you too,’ I answered. She shook her head with a little smile.  

‘You can just…’

‘Just say Naomi. Got it.’ 

She looked at Will for a second. He rolled his eyes. ‘Is anybody else here yet?’

‘Your uncle Jacob.’ Naomi Solace turned her eyes to the heavens. ‘And my poor sister-in-law Marian, of course.’

‘Figures.’

They sighed, before lightly laughing. I looked up at Will, a little panicked. He saw it and grabbed my hand. ‘We’ll just drop off some stuff upstairs!’ he said, before pulling me and our backpacks along to the second floor. 

‘Uncle jacob and aunt Marian are pretty okay.’

‘Yeah, yeah, sure.’ I dropped my suitcase on the floor. ‘Do I get a mattress, or do we make it obvious?’

‘He was here last year as well,’ Will went on, without answering me. ‘He tried to stop, eh, my other aunt from talking a few times.’

‘Yes. I remember him, he was nice.’ I think. I realised I did not really remember uncle Jacob. It was eclipsed by the memory of aunt Natalia.

‘Aunt Natalia is not coming back, Nico, thank goodness. She won’t try to slam the door in your face again or throw a cross at you.’ It sounded as if he was trying to reassure himself of that too. 

‘Not?’ I had almost forgotten about the cross.

‘No. Also, the cross might have been for me,’ he sighed.

‘Ah. I guess it wasn’t a lot of fun for you either.’ Just stating the obvious here. 

He chuckled. ‘No, not really. But Uncle Jacob is nice, really. Let’s go, shall we?’

I gave him a hug. ‘Yeah, we’ll go.’

Wills’ aunt and uncle were sitting in the living room. ‘William! Is he back again?’ Jacob waved at me. 

I took a step back. Will put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Yes.’

‘Eh, yeah, good afternoon, I am Nico…’ I rattled. 

‘We know that, we saw you last year as well!’ uncle Jacob laughed. I looked at the floor. 

‘Eh, right, I just thought…’ I shrugged. I heard Marian sigh.

‘Jacob, cut the kid some slack,’ she whispered. 

Will pushed me further into the room. ‘Come, sit down, there are probably cookies,’ he mumbeld into my ear. 

There were, indeed, cookies. I took two and shoved one into my mouth.

Uncle Jacob looked back at his wife and sister and went on with the story he had been telling, that went on for quite long. 

I had to give it to them, I had been in the room for a good seven minutes and there had been no comment about our relationship. When uncle Jacobs’ speech went on for slightly too long, aunt Marian turned to me: ‘It is very nice that you decided to spend Christmas with us.’

I shot up. ‘I am glad I was allowed to come.’

She smiled at her sister-in-law. ‘I am sure Naomi wouldn’t have it any other way!’ Naomi shrugged, with a little smile. ‘Are you two going to Nico’s family tomorrow?’

Will looked like he found that idea, to spend Christmas with Hades and Persephone, both hilarious and horrifying. I shook my head. ‘I’m afraid my family doesn’t celebrate Christmas, but they don’t want to stop my fun, so I went with Will.’

‘No Christmas?’

‘No. Eh, of course, that was weird for me as a young child,’ I lied, ‘but I am glad I have someone to celebrate it with now.’

‘Well, I hope we can make it better than, eh, last year.’

‘Oh, well…’ 

A small silence fell, before Marian quickly broke it ‘So, William, how's school?’

School was fine, if you're curious. The talking went slightly better after that, they even laughed when I joked we could try to invite Santa Claus today (You probably had to be there). Still I was glad when we could flee to the kitchen. Will had to make his, apparently famous, mushroom soup.

‘I didn’t know you could make soup. Did you do that last year?’

Will rolled his eyes. ‘No. Natalia brought her tomato soup.’

‘I remember the tomato soup. It had been quite good, but I hate it now.’

Will solemnly stirred his soup. ‘How do you feel, Nico?’

I shrugged. ‘Your aunt and uncle are nice, so okay I guess?’

Will sighed while he cut up a few mushrooms. ‘Yes. That’s good. I am glad.’

‘Will, how did you feel about aunt Natalia?’ 

It might have been a little too abrupt to ask. He was silent for a moment. I looked at my feet.‘Sorry, that is…’

‘She called me non-stop for three days afterwards, trying to convince me I was sinning. Eventually I had to block her from every medium of communication I got. I never talked about it again, not a lot at least, because I just wanted to forget it.’ He lowered the knife for a second. ‘Perhaps I, too, have more troubles with it than I thought.’

‘Well…’ I shrugged. ‘Of course, I mean…’ Will stayed silent. 

I felt a little cold. ‘I’ll go to the living room for a bit,’ I muttered, before I chickened out of the kitchen. 

In the hallway, I ran into aunt Marian. When she saw me, her look got concerned. ‘Hello, Nico.

‘Eh, hello.’

She pushed a hairclip straight. ‘I just wanted to tell you that you don’t have to be nervous. I understand you are still a little shaken up about last year, but…’ She shrugged.

I nodded. ‘Thanks. Eh… You know, I thought I had taken everything quite well. It is only now that I have thought about it for a few days that I realise that it got deeper than I thought.’

Marian nodded. ‘I understand. I hope you can still enjoy some of it, at least. Did you like the cookies?’

I nodded. ‘Oh, yes, the cookies were good.’

She smiled. ‘Thanks. I made them myself.’

‘Fancy.’ 

‘Yes. I spend a lot of time on them!’

I snickered. ‘Cool.’

‘Quite.’ She looked up, at the stairs. ‘Eh, I’ll see you in a second.’

‘Of course.’ I stayed where I was.

Would my Italian relatives be celebrating Christmas right now? The thought came to me without warning. I mean, obviously, I must still have Italian family. Unless my mother was an only child of an only child, maybe.

But I had had an aunt, it dawned on me. Which probably meant that somewhere, there was an Italian branch of the family, celebrating Christmas. Hm. Weird, considering they would not be thinking about me at all...

‘Nico?’ Will yelled from the kitchen. ‘Can you help for a second? If you are still there?’

‘Eh, of course.’ I hadn’t moved a foot. 

‘Sorry,’ I muttered when I walked back in. 

‘It’s okay,’ Will mumbeld back. He threw a few mushrooms into the soup. ‘Is it a true witch stew I already?’ I looked into the pan. It looked too good to be witch stew. 

‘A little.’

‘No, Will, not at all. Okay, maybe a little.’ 

Will smiled again. ‘Just a little, as it should.’ He handed me the spatula. ‘Can you stir for me? I have to throw in these spices in the meantime.’

‘Yes.’

It was calming to cook soup together and to think about how we would be eating soup together soon. Yet, just as I stirred some weird herb through the stew, Will scraped his throat. ‘If you are getting sick, you should not be cooking.’

He chuckled, before pulling himself together again. ‘Nico, how about we just enjoy the here and now, and then talk about how we are affected by last year some other time? Maybe we could ask Dionysus to evaluate it with us. Because it feels as if we are both still hurt by it.’

‘Yes. I’ll ask him as soon as I see him again.’ 

Will nodded. ‘Good. In that case, you just need to stir slightly lighter, while I call over uncle Jacob so he can heat up his self made glühwein, which I doubt he actually makes himself.’

‘Does it contain alcohol?’

‘My mother always lets me have a small glass.’

‘And you say you aren’t rebellious!’

‘It is not rebellious if your mother lets you do it!’

‘I mean… point taken.’

‘Well then! Now, I am going to call Jacob over. Be prepared.’ 

I winked, while he went out to fetch his uncle.

While he was away, I sighed. Okay, maybe it hadn’t gone perfect. Yet, we could still make something of it. Anyway, who was aunt Natalia to not just ruin one, but multiple Christmases?

A/N: Secretly, uncle David gives Will and Nico alcohol-free glühwein because he is a responsible adult. 

On tuesday the twenty-seventh my adult responsibilities will catch up to me, AKA I will be eightteen, or otherwise said it’s my birthday :D. Also, by next chapter, I will be an adult (help).

Anyway Nico and Will having Christmas. Did you see the part where Nico thought about this Italian family? Yes ;). 

I know this chapter dragged a little. It is mostly meant to cement some things for future chapters.

[starr-fall-knight-rise]

Humans are Space Orcs, “Tanana.”

This was super fun to write this morning. A little bit funny, and I always enjoy hurting Adam a little, accept in a fun way this time no angst.

Hope you guys like it :)

Just a little bit closer.

The small creature looks on innocently munching on a crop of moss. It has four large eyes, two on either side of it’s head, six legs and is about the size of a small to medium-sized dog. It has really long ears, and if it stays still long enough, it’s going to be my dinner.

I scoot closer over the rock arm raised to the low ready, the spear clutched tight in my right hand.

The creature lifts its head.

Shit, it must have heard me. In my panic, I make a decision out of haste and throw the spear. It goes wild and clatters across the stone. The Drev rabbit takes off, and I am left standing stupidly in the middle of the open field weaponless and looking like a jackass.

“Tsa din dasdarish darat?”

I nearly leap out of my skin, turning around to find Hijan standing a few meters behind me near a coiltree.

“Shit, hijan, do you really have to sneak up on me like that.” 

The old drev looks at me in amusement. I Know she doesn't understand most of what I am saying, but somehow I  think she still gets it.

“Zha deengan.” I say, one of the first phrases I learned how to use. Being able to say I’m hungry is very important in any foreign language.

She tilts her old wizened head at me, “tsa tin danehanish ee dengish?” You were going to kill and eat that?

I shrugged, “Yid zha deengan.”

She crosses her arms, a habit she’s picked up from me, “ene tsa deengan datadish zha dadee sa deeng datahaik.” IF you were hungry I would have given you food.

I sigh, she wouldn’t get it, but still she walks over and hands me a miss twist. I call them that because of their distinct shape, kind of purple and in a strange sort of spiral. When you dry them out they are crunchy like chips though not particularly salty.

I munch absently on the weird plant? Fungus? And she absently plays with my hair. I try to shrug her off, but she’s a lot like my mother in the way that she won't let me be. I am about 100% sure she thinks I am one of her Drevlings. Which has caused a bunch of interesting changes in my life as of recently, not one of which was her decision that I wasn’t colorful enough.

Apparently Drev see humans a lot differently than we do. They can see the way the UV light interacts with our skin. She describes thousands of little spots which turn into swirling stripes. When I asked her to describe the color she said it was similar to turquoise or blue, though I obviously can’t imagine it.

Makes me jealous as hell though.

However, she said my “Carapace” wasn’t colorful enough. When I asked her what she was on about she clearly meant my hair and my nails, which are made up of similar stuff to the Drev carapace.

Long story short, I now have green hair and nails.

Yeah yeah, laugh all you want, but whatever the hell she put in my hair is not coming out. And when I say green, I am not talking like a nice moss green or forest green. I am talking like the color you paint your new Lamborghini kind of electric green.

Not to say that I haven't had my nails painted before, but never this color, and never in tandem with bright flaming green hair. Don’t know why everyone associates me with the color green. I would say it was only my second or third favorite color. Either way, I look super weird as of late, green hair green nails, no shirt, no shoes, and a slowly expanding five-o-clock shadow.

You know I am not a big fan of beards, mostly not a big fan of them on me, but I forgot to bring a razor, so in that department I am kind of fucked.

I mildly wonder if she is going to make me dye my beard green when it finally grows in.

She makes me grab my spear, grabs me by the hand and drags me back towards the village. She doesn’t let go of my hand. I don’t try to fight her, she is stupidly strong, and despite being a grown ass adult, I am apparently her child now.

The other drev find her adopting me very, very funny, but at least now that she has they don’t call me dazhit anymore. The last time someone called me a bitch in front of her, she kicked the crap out of them. I thought it was pretty funny personally. They danced around the circle like a loon expecting her to be weak in her old age, and she just stood there then jabbed them in the throat with the butt-end of her spear when they weren’t expecting it.

I laughed so hard I cried.

Ever since, they have treated me with a little more respect. 

We make it to the village, and with one hand she pushes me off towards the training grounds as if to say, “Go join the other kids.”

I sigh and roll my eyes but go.

The last time I tried to skip out she almost had my hide.

I go at her bidding meeting up with the others who are around my height. Hijan watches sometimes, and she has made it very clear that the kids deserve to get the shit beaten out of them. I don’t like it much, but these kids don’t seem bothered when you knock them around. In fact, most of them like it.

I think our trainer is a bit mad that I can actually fight.

I smile to myself 

Now that I do fight, I am at the top of the class.

The kids think I cheat, difference is I have different training than they do, and a lot more experience in combat despite what the Drev seem to think.

“Tanana! Naktan ts adon.” Tanana, my nickname, or my drev name I guess means alien. Hijan doesn’t like the name much, so she calls me tsata which means gift. Personally I am pretty flattered she thinks that about me.

I walk into the circle at our leader's orders and Dark ‘the other kid’ steps into the circle across from me. He’s an ugly little shit, and I’m not just saying that. He’s a dick to me on most occasions. When our teacher isn’t looking sometimes I make fun of his coloring, that usually shuts him up. I should probably feel bad for making fun of a kid, but I really don’t. He's a dick and everyone knows it.

Problem is now he has a bit of a vendetta against me, and is pretty hell-bent on putting his spear through my throat.

Good thing we only fight in hand-to-hand combat these days.

“Aleeshazh!” 

The kid does not wait till the end of go before he is charging at me hands wide Some of these kids are under the impression that guarding your center is like…. Dishonorable or something. They would be wrong because even Drev now it’s stupid to come in arms wide open. However, at this point I’ll take what I can get.

I dodge past two sets of arms and come in sharply towards hims middle. He has reach on me, so I go in close and brutally aim for what I am hoping is his liver, if Drev have them. My single punch has him staggering back across the circle gasping.

The teacher does not look happy.

I feel kind of smug.

Of course the little brat won’t give up, I’ll give him that, he isn’t a quitter, and charges for me again.

He’s making this too easy, 

I wouldn’t call myself a martial arts master or anything in the slightest, but before he knows what’s happening, he’s on the ground with my legs across his chest. I pin his lower arms with my right leg squeezing his upper arm between both. I have tight hold of his wrist, and just as he begins to squirm, I slowly place upward pressure on his elbow by arching my hips upward.

If I wanted to I could snap the joint.

Damn I love a good arm-bar.

He squirms and squeals for a couple of minutes as I continue to apply pressure until the teacher eventually tells me to knock it off.

I let go and he frowns at me. He doesn’t approve, but there isn’t uch he can do. My move wasn’t against the rules or anything.

He looks at me for a long moment eyes narrowing at my unconcealed expression of pride, and a hint of smugness.

I can see he wants to wipe the look off my face, “zha jasti tsa jej atatchan teeya dzhalakat.”

I grin, “Of course I am too skillful for children. Surprised it took you so long to see that.”

He does the drev equivalent of a frown. I know he can understand most of what I am saying, unlike others, but I think it still annoys him when I speak English.

Tough luck bro, my mouth goes way faster than my brain, its one of my worst qualities. If it didn’t I’d speak Drev More, but for now it was going to take practice.

“Ene tsa ditan atatchan juhkee tsa tehish zheengat s dzhal.”

Well shit. 

His if you are so skillful than you can fight with the adults was not an encouraging statement.

I honestly hadn’t meant that to come out as dickish as it did, but now  I was definitely already regretting my decision to be a smug bitch.

Guess that is what karma does to you.

I see Hijan at a distance, watching as I am dragged over to the next training field. The Drevlings follow at a distance chirping to themselves excited to see me get my ass beat.

We come up over the rise just as one of the training circle is in session. 

Two Drev go at each other with spears so hard sparks are flying. Their feet cut tears in the moss as they push each other across the stone. As we come up one of them is hit in the head so hard they are knocked completely out of the circle.

“Dazhit.” I mutter

Our teacher and their teacher stop to speak at each other. I can see them staring at me pointing and speaking quietly with each other. 

The older class adjusts themselves and looks on in great interest.

I don’t know these guys well, but I am pretty sure I am about to know the butt of their spears pretty well.

I sigh and shoulder my own spear, which…. Is significantly shorter than everyone else’s.

I’m not self-conscious.

“Tanana daeen hajish.”

I walk over as ordered my spear still over one shoulder.

“Tsak nantan tarik.” Your new teacher 

I lower my head, “Tarik”

She seems amused and motions towards the circle, “Tanana ts adon. Zha nin tsa tehish darat zhegingi jastat.” get in the circle, I want to see what you can do.

Oh, great.

I do as told stepping into the circle as she calls one of her students forward. She’s a light colored Drev, the color of cream/orange rose petals. I am pretty sure the Drev would consider her pretty…. Did I mention that she’s at least two feet taller than me?

No

Well she is.

She rams her spear butt into the dirt, and I swallow hard.

The Tarik waves a hand and we begin to circle.

I hold my spear like they taught me, though I am much better at hand-to-hand combat. We test each other for a minute moving forward and back, watching each other’s guard. Of course, she strikes first though.

I dodge out of the way quickly, expecting to come in and wrap her across the back of the knees, but she spends around and blocks me at the last moment. We connect together so hard that my hands go almost immediately numb.

She brings the butt of her spear around, and I am just barely able to duck under it. She comes at me again, and I step back as the spearhead slices past my chest.

My eyes go wide as I stare at my almost evisceration.

I barely look up in time to block her fro the side.

The hit makes my bones hurt.

I flick my spear up trying to catch her in the face, but she knocks me away with impunity.

She has me backed against the edge of the circle.

She doesn’t expect me to make it out. Too bad I have seen way more action movies than she has. As she cuts over me, I slide under the cu on my knees skidding over the rock and past her into the center of the circle. 

She turns to find me and barley blocks my strike.

I’m doing pretty good.

This isn’t so bad.

That’s when the kid gloves come off, and she strikes me so hard and fast I can barely raise my spear to block her. A vicious second later she comes in with the killing blow, or the crippling one.

Did you know you can knock someone out by hitting them hard enough in the liver?

Yeah I didn’t know that either, apparently the body sense major trauma and is just like nah fam I am not about that life. The vagus nerve gets activated too.

So there I am lying on the moss and the dirt curled up in a ball trying not to vomit or pass out.

I can hear that little gremlin Naktan laughing in the background.

God I hate him.

And I am in SOOO much pain. I am pretty sure my liver has been ruptured pretty sure I am going to die right here on the face of the planet.

I groan, “Hijan… help…. hijan .”

Yeah yeah practically crying for my mother like a wuss. I know no need to point it out 

But guys, I am dying. Or at least I am pretty sure I am.

Luckily for me she shows up and eventually the others leave. I can feel her running a hand through my hair, which would be nice if I wasn’t pretty sure I was dying 

Turns out though, I wasn’t dying, I am just pathetic 

[okay-victoria]

Love of My Second Life: Tanya & Romance

This is both my take on why, despite seeming like the easiest and healthiest relationship to write, TanyaxVisha is up there with TanyaxMary in difficulty level for pulling off successfully, what I’ve seen go wrong in fanfic so far, and what needs to make it/any romance go right.

Where to start, where to start...um, a warning, for obvious reasons I’m going to have to talk about sex.

The Age Difference

This has the joy of being a bit creepy on both ends of the spectrum! Yay.

Visha Being Creepy

Visha is probably 5 - 6 years older than Tanya. While as more mature adults that age difference is relatively negligible, Tanya being 17/18 and Visha being in her early 20s doesn’t make it suddenly a non-issue. If you and a coworker, both in your first job out of college, went to happy hour and you met his/her significant other and they were a senior in high school, would you feel good about that?

The age-of-consent laws in bygone eras may help your case for why in-story characters give a pass to such things, but it doesn’t really help explain it to your readers. Unless I’m missing something, no one is reading this story from 1920s/30s Germany, and so it needs to have the relationship explained in a way that tries to work for modern standards. Additionally, I think people tend to mix up age-of-consent with “people found this generally appropriate”. A 19 year old dating a 59 year old violates no laws in the United States, but that doesn’t mean that most people are going to consider it a loving and healthy relationship without any proof. Even your in-story characters are probably going to have some thoughts.

The final issue, from Visha’s end of the spectrum, is that even when Tanya is aged up to 18+ and has gained some secondary sexual characteristics, she is sometimes still presented as being an “eternal loli” who can be easily be mistaken for someone around 14/15, an age at which girls normally have some secondary sex characteristics, but distinctly immature ones. I imagine this problem stems from two places:

1) Scenes when Tanya’s lolidom is brought up are not the same scenes as the romantic ones, so the problem is not as obvious to the author and

2) Author forgets that “short+small boobs+doesn’t have wrinkles yet” does not actually result in people looking like they are mid-puberty. Without being really creepy, as women age, their breast tissue drops down and to the side, waist/hip/leg ratios change, and the face loses its baby fat, among other things. Writing that references Tanya as looking like a teen comes along with the unfortunate implication that she actually looks like she is still mid-puberty, and Visha...is into that, instead of being someone who is attracted to petite POST pubescent women.

These are all extremely fixable problems. Really, all an author has to do is make Visha acknowledge that it’s weird, and probably try to talk to Tanya about her reservations before she starts trying to seduce her. It’s the handwave that is the issue. For the last/puberty problem, unless there is some reason I probably don’t want to know about that the author only wants to write the relationship if Tanya looks 14, simply describe her as a petite but adult woman, and if you need to use her looking young as a plot point, have her make an effort to adapt her adult characteristics to suit or hope that nobody looks hard enough to tell the difference.

Tanya Being Creepy

While Tanya is physically the junior member of the relationship, mentally, she is the senior, and by a lot. Tanya knows this. While I don’t necessarily think Salaryman is the Earth’s most morally-pure man, I have a high enough opinion of him to think that he was not pursuing college girls when he was like 35. Tanya should also have a moment of thought over this, or the relationship needs to wait until Visha is closer to her late 20s, when she is approaching a similar level of life maturity that Salaryman would have felt was close to his own.

Even if you think that Salaryman’s logical side would have been eroded by his “but I’m a guy, I can’t help it, college girls are hot” side [I’m side-eyeing you], I think it’s very unlikely that living as Tanya, and being on the receiving end of that kind of stuff, wouldn’t make her reconsider her stance on it, at least a little.

I know, I know, Visha’s been to war! She’s not the same as some random college girl in 2020! While this is allowable as a partial justification, because it is true, it ignores a whole lot.

First off, maturity is not a straightforward drive. All parts of you do not mentally mature at the same time. If you want to write early 20s Visha as a mature-enough partner for Tanya, a bit of time needs to be spent on what Visha loses because of it - she never has, and never will, get to be that happy-go-lucky girl. While making fun of young women for being dramatic gossips, obsessing about non-serious things, etc remains a popular sport, thinking that you are doing Visha a favor by taking that time of her life away from her says pretty terrible things about how society values women’s relationships with each other. If you don’t mean for your fanfic to accidentally imply that, it’s something that needs some love & care.

Alternatively, you could write a story in which Visha, while being a competent adult, still gets space to explore her “girly” side. If doing so, you are going to have to make a really strong case for why Tanya is willing to put up with this, as Salaryman does not come off as someone who would judge it a good use of time & effort to be constantly letting his girlfriend rattle off about things he thinks are silly and immature - there’s a lot of other fish in the sea, why not find one that is a competent adult *and* isn’t often talking about things you don’t care about.

The Canonical Setup of Visha & Tanya’s relationship

Opposite Goals

In a nutshell, Tanya is presented as a person that wants to live a safe, boring, and non-notable life, is doing her best to get there, and is constantly failing and being stressed about it because she needs to figure out a new plan. Visha is presented as someone who has major qualms about Tanya as a human being, but has a nigh-worshipful respect for her heroic officer side.

This is a massive, and I mean MASSIVE problem. You absolutely cannot ignore that what makes the characters happy is diametrically opposed to each other. Can you overcome it? Yes, by slowly developing the characters towards a compromise, but you can’t just not acknowledge it and expect me to think this relationship has any hope of leaving both partners happy. Either Tanya never escapes her never-ending stress cycle, or she does, and the entire basis of Visha’s attachment to Tanya disappears.

This can be fixed by: 1) Tanya coming to terms with a new side of herself, one that wants to be that hero. This cannot just be a one-paragraph epiphany. Tanya is shown to hate when she thinks her internal self is being changed by her new experiences and she needs a lot of work to get to a point where she is willing to acknowledge this in herself.

2) Visha has to go through a rocky part where she second-guesses herself - she thought she wanted Tanya, but turns out, Tanya isn’t the person she thought she is? How and why does she decide that she likes the person Tanya has become? This is probably the easier route, but I think runs the risk of having an author have Visha *say* Tanya does all these other good things for her, but never really show it happening.

3) The happiest medium is probably one where Visha *mostly* adapts towards Tanya, so Tanya gets to live a quiet but not too quiet life, and Visha learns to love another side. As Visha is compromising more in this sense, a healthy relationship is going to include Tanya realizing what is happening and deciding to make an effort to appeal to Visha and not just be like “Take me as I am. Or don’t.” and Visha unilaterally decides to accept that.

Why Does Tanya want to be in a relationship with Visha?

Tanya betrays no actual emotional attachment to Visha in the light novels. While you can read in rationalization to the reasons Tanya gives to her actions, she herself does not believe that it is because of an emotional connection.

Canonically, Tanya is portrayed as liking Visha because of how well Visha passes the “usefulness” test. This brings up another MASSIVE problem - does Tanya, in any way, shape, or form, actually like Visha as an individual, or just  her ability to conform to the role Tanya wants her to play?

Look, I don’t need Tanya to be in LOVE with Visha in the way we usually talk about people being in love to believe that Tanya can be in a relationship successfully. I’m fully on board with a portrayal in which Tanya can’t quite summon that level of emotion. However, she needs to like and respect Visha as an individual person, and summon a level of emotion beyond friend with benefits.

IMO, it is really hard to do that without showing Tanya and Visha disagreeing on a major piece of Tanya’s philosophy and Tanya actually listening and responding positively to it, not simply agreeing to disagree because it isn’t worth upsetting her useful sidekick, or whatever. There needs to be character development of both characters - Visha finding it in herself to be comfortable rocking the boat, and Tanya having a compelling enough reason to change something that she has clung to for two lives.

Everyone wants to be a lesbian

While I get it, the Empire is not the exact same as Germany, and yes, I know that Weimar Germany was relatively sexually progressive, it’s really not something that a well-written romance should handwave.

“Weimar Culture” in many ways developed as a result of how WW1 went for Germany. If you have a story where WW1 doesn’t go that way for Germany, gay culture is unlikely to flourish to the same degree.

All that aside, Tanya isn’t someone that is going to easily shrug her shoulders and say “you know, sometimes you need to jeopardize your career for the sake of hot sex/love”. She’s pretty clear on which she prioritizes. A lesbian relationship is not going to help her here, and she’s going to be aware of it. She needs to struggle with that choice.

Visha not struggling to accept herself as a lesbian is also somewhat of an oversight. It’s pretty unlikely that a woman born in her time period would come to terms with that easily. Visha is also never shown being attracted to other women besides Tanya, which carries a weird “I’m only a lesbian for you” vibe that is like a gross parallel of a straight guy wanting a lesbian to be so attracted to him she can’t help it, she wants the D.

And now, we enter the realm of Tanya’s relationship with her identity and sexuality.

Tanya is shown to have mental qualms both about entering a straight or lesbian relationship in her new life. The reasons behind those qualms are not explored at all in the LN, but they should be in a story in which Tanya goes into a relationship.

No matter which path puberty takes her down, there is the issue of Tanya being comfortable having sex as a woman. Even if it is with another woman, it is not going to be particular similar to the way she had sex with women as a man. That type of thing is pretty tied up with our identity. Tanya hates having her internal, I haven’t changed identity threatened, and not being able to give sexual pleasure/needing to receive it differently is the type of thing that is probably going to come along with some emotional reservations on her part.

Again, sexual identity being a part of our overall identity, while Tanya may remain attracted to women, that means her identity is now as a gay person, not a straight person. Given her biases from both growing up in Japan and the state of gay rights in her new life, it would seem atypical that she would consider this a non-issue and it wouldn’t make her question her priorities or the type of person she thought she was.

But...The Sex?

Look, I get it, sometimes you wanna see certain characters bang. We’ve all been there.

While yes, I recognize that many humans make terrible decisions solely in pursuit of sex, and so it’s perfectly realistic to have Tanya and Visha do the same and say that’s why you’re handwaving everything else, it is an extremely lazy storytelling technique, especially since neither character seems likely to go to extremes for it.

Because people focus so much on sex appeal, unfortunately, they use it as a substitute for making a good case for the relationship. Visha/Tanya is so attracted to Tanya/Visha, that now they are willing to undergo character development, because the pulsing loins urge them to. Really?

Do at least some of it first, lay the groundwork for romantic attraction before you slam them with physical attraction. While it often works the opposite direction in real life, that undercuts the romantic side in fictional story-telling.

I also think that because of the focus on their attraction to each other, what ends up missing in all TanyaxVisha fanfics I’ve seen so far is the tension. That makes it boring, I don’t care about it, and the entire reason I don’t care about it is because the choice to handwave the inconvenient facts means there is nothing in the way besides Tanya being a dumbass, which you can only do for so long without it becoming boring.

They are both attracted to each other, and admit it to themselves. Neither sees any real problem with the relationship other than not knowing if the other person likes them, but they aren’t even hung up on it and mostly work on straightforwardly winning the other person.

When in doubt, blame it on The Patriarchy

As far as we know, Tanya isn’t pining for relationship, and never thinks about a romantic relationship from her old life. Combined with other things Tanya says, it is hard to imagine Salaryman ever had a “considering marriage” relationship - more like, he may have felt partnership had some desirable aspects, but probably never was able to compromise on his kind of extreme worldview enough to try to make it work with someone, just figuring he’d find “the one” one day that wasn’t going to make him compromise.

While of course, you should not need to change everything about who you are for a romantic partner to like you, saying “you should like me for me” and then putting in exactly zero effort to do things because you know they are important to your partner, even if they aren’t for you, is not one of the keys to a successful relationship.

While it is not a problem inherent to Tanya & Visha’s relationship like the above sections, it is a problem in all forms of how I’ve seen the relationship written. It fails to answer a fundamental question: WHAT CHANGED?

Why did Tanya want love/a relationship/a wife in this life, and not in her last? If she did want it in her last life, why did she successfully find love/a relationship/a wife in this life, and not in her last?

Unfortunately, skipping the answer to this question implies that nothing changed. The success is then entirely reliant and Visha, and that brings along with it a really ugly answer.

Visha’s professional I’ll-do-anything-for-you is equated to a personal I’ll-do-anything-for-you, and she very much accepts Tanya for who she is, through all the flaws that are definitely there and that presumably no woman in Salaryman’s life was willing to put up with. Tanya doesn’t have to undergo any character development to be capable of making the relationship work.

This has some really, really unfortunate undertones. It is the very reason why even legal-but-large age difference relationships often aren’t healthy, because the older partner, instead of trying to be someone capable of contributing to the life of someone their own age, decides it’s easier to find someone younger who doesn’t know better and is more willing to put up with their bullshit. That, then, turns into a creepy grooming undertone - you make the less experienced partner think this is normal.

It really isn’t normal or good that Visha should have to put up with a relationship in which she never discovers who she wants to be because she’s so caught up Tanya’s idea of how to live your life. That is borderline emotional abuse, I am sure no one intends it to be there, but without giving some serious treatment to character development, unfortunately, it is.

To me, this has some of the worst overtones of the worst types of male fantasy - My Manic Pixie Dream Girl is completely devoted to me, and instead of emotionally adding to her life and/or our relationship, she is completely fine with me substituting being a Strong Heroic Man who occasionally buys her Nice Things. She demands I change nothing of myself and completely agrees with my Logical Man worldview, no matter what she needs to change about herself to get there. She’s hot, and I get to simultaneously be a straight man and have hot lesbian sex. Even better, because she’s a “strong” woman who is capable in her own right, not only am I physically satisfied, but I get the ego boost of “earning” the submission and subordination of a woman who is better than most people, because she knows I’m better than her.

Honestly, the more I think about it, the grosser it gets, so as far as fanfic goes I just try to ignore it and understand that the authors intention wasn’t to bring along all this baggage. However, to truly write a good Tanya x Visha story that gets away from all these unfortunate implications is a big undertaking, and it’s really impossible for it to make for a compelling side-plot that doesn’t get much screentime.

I’m generally fine with handwaving issues for sideplots, but if Tanya is making decisions because of her relationship with Visha that are now affecting the main plot, it really isn’t something that *should* be handwaved.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

[phantomofthepairofdice]

George A. Romero’s “The Amusement Park”

George A. Romero might be the man who most directly served as my gateway to critical movie watching. Unlike a lot of the filmmakers who helped me mature my understanding of film as a medium of art rather than a disposable experience, my love for his work has only deepened as opposed to having a twinge of cringe at the pretense with which I embraced some movies and directors that I’ve grown cold on or outright pivoted into disliking. Where, for the latter, they served a valuable purpose but were perhaps able to do so as a result of being digestible or, in retrospect, lamentably simple, Romero’s movies have not a single thread of posturing to something “important” woven in. Romero was always handy in using the backdoor of theme and metaphor to deliver ideas, as opposed to a direct scolding or information session.

At their very best, his movies achieve a balance that few films can when it comes to being experienced as being equally enjoyable and intellectual - while never sacrificing one for the other. There’s almost an elegance to the inelegance that comes from working so far outside of the studio system. The low budgets of his independent fare give a scrappy, tactile quality to locations and do little to glamorize and gussy up things like frequent collaborator Tom Savini’s chunky, visceral makeup effects. His run in the 70s is especially potent as a result of the low-budget aesthetic. The Crazies, Martin, and Knightriders would lose a certain verisimilitude to their outsider art mission statements if they had a glossy studio packaging. 

I’ve been hesitant to write up my love for the late, great Romero since it feels like a daunting task to distill the endless rivers that flow from the massive glacial totem that is George A. Romero. The same thing can be said for a lot of people whose work I have deeply seeded respect and love for like Jonathan Demme or Robert Altman. I know that art and movies are reduced when treated like rites of passage or items on a checklist for credibility, but I have this overwhelming feeling that I want to come correct when it comes to folks like these. It feels like a responsibility to be comprehensive, eloquent, and effective in describing them, their work, or their massive impact on myself.

Well, I finally got enough reason to put down some words when I found out that a bizarre, long-thought-lost missing puzzle piece of this titanic personal hero was going to be released. Not only that, but I could see it in a relatively safe way in a theater. What I was lucky enough to see projected on a bright wall in a dark room was something that filled me with equal parts pleasure and stomach-churning uneasiness. One of the greatest compliments I can give to the film is that felt like it would make a terrific pairing with Carnival of Souls.

The Amusement Park is a film that Romero was commissioned to make by The Lutheran Society about senior citizens being disregarded by society. After having seen what Romero concocted up with screenwriter Wally Cook, it’s no surprise that the film was shelved, and thought destroyed. Like all of Romero’s great films, The Amusement Park operates with a keen but unpretentious metaphor and allegory at its heart. What makes this project immediately different is that it’s bookended with a direct address to the camera from its star, a charming and hammy Lincoln Maazel, breaking down the mission statement and intent of the symbolism within it. What follows is an experiential concept piece that disorients the viewer in an attempt to have them empathize with their elders’ terror and loneliness at the hands of ageism, elder abuse, and death. It’s an effective plea for human decency and a disquieting, haunted trip to hell outside of heaven’s waiting room.

The runtime is under an hour and plot takes a back seat to sensation, so I won’t go into too much detail for the sake of preserving the set pieces’ potency. What I will do is highlight a few moments and stylistic choices.

The Amusement Park is very angry and very sad. The camera is mostly handheld and takes on a documentary texture when it focuses on the faces of other elderly park goers. There’s a lament for the life that these poor folks are trapped within cut between a venomous glare at the ancillary characters who disregard or assault the senior park guests. Romero’s usual distaste for the wealthy resurfaces most notably in a scene where Maazel’s man sees a rich and “proper” man dine on lobster and smoke a comically large cigar before looking back at the old man in absolute disgust. He’s served a slop of beans and bread on a paper plate. Like a lot of the film’s ideas, the dichotomy of circumstances trades subtlety for effectiveness. What makes this scene unique is that when the old man offers to share his meager rations with the other hungry guests, they show no restraint – it’s a nasty collage of shots with bread being torn and people shoved.

The real standout sequence comes as our unnamed protagonist follows a young couple into a fortune teller’s tent while they ask to see their future. The spritely lovebirds want to know if they’ll be still be together in their old age, but the fortune teller offers warning that in order to see their future, they’ll need to see it in its entirety. The couple’s youthful ignorance shows a general feeling of invincibility that many of the young characters have throughout the film, but once they see what the soothsayer has to offer, they are forced to reckon with the ominous vicissitudes that appear before them.

The editing of the sequence is jarring, cutting between the disparate time periods – flash cuts between the crystal ball and the eyes of the woman behind it are slammed into what looks like a documentary or news interview with a building manager who laments the raise in taxes and how it keeps him from fixing the dangerous, dilapidated, low-rent housing behind him. This is an institutional crisis. The film cuts to narrative footage of that same young couple, now old and desperate for emergency medical attention. Outside, a high school marching band blares and trots forward with a brash, spry pace. It’s as if the band is flippantly taunting the old women, life trampling on without her and her bedridden husband. The wife’s attempts to reach their doctor are moot. Chaos overwhelms a quiet passing. Upon seeing his own mortality, the young man targets the protagonist and attacks him in a flurry of confused anger.

The movie has an episodic structure, and some of these interludes work better than others. While I do think that the movie is quite good and a must-see for any curious fans of the director’s career (he even has a great cameo), I certainly wouldn’t hail it as a masterpiece. Working for hire within the specific constraints of an educational film and off of a script that he didn’t write (a rarity within his career), there’s some serious clumsiness to the some of the story beats and how underlined the symbolism is. I also greatly missed the seamless integration gallows humor that spices up even the bleakest of Romero’s other projects. What’s here in terms of levity occasionally undercuts the horror. That being said, its mission to imbue experiential empathy for old folks was undeniably successful in this viewer - the packaging may be a bit busted, but the product is fresh and satisfying. Like The Crazies or his Dead films, the ever-approaching specter of death is the driving force behind the melancholic terrors of the piece. Romero’s knack for satisfying but somber endings is present here as well. Images from this - like the holy men closing up shop - stack up alongside some of the other hauntingly effective moments from Romero’s movies that are emblazoned in my brain like the closing montage of Night of the Living Dead, the opening sequence of Martin, the roaches in Creepshow, and the wall of hands from Day of the Dead.

While it feels weird to offer praise to a man alongside a short review for a movie he was, by all accounts, not terribly impressed with, this is what I’ve chosen to do. *shrugs* I’ll never write the perfect tribute or quite distill the gratitude I have for certain people and the gifts they gave me (along with countless others). I can selfishly make that a burden and never actually put it out there for fear of imperfection, or I can be grateful and embrace the luck that I’ve been able to see another work from one of those people. Especially after watching this, I’ll choose the latter.

The Amusement Park is now available to stream on Shudder.

[deathvsthemaiden]

Hi, so I've recently read the first 2 mistborn books (not 3rd yet because brain hates me) and you seem like a woman of taste, what are some books and series that you like/would recommend?

Hi! And also omg! Taking a brain break before the 3rd book is valid there’s So Very Much that goes down in it and I feel you totally about ur brain hating you 😐 I’m flattered you’d like recs from me! I don’t think I’ve read a lot of books that are like Mistborn? Mostly because I’m not big into dystopia and just haven’t delved into the genre a lot in general. But here’s some recs that vaguely remind me of it for various and not necessarily concrete reasons:

By Light We Knew Our Names by Anne Valente. A short story collection. A mixed bag but the ones I loved most I really loved and they made the whole thing a 5 star read for me. The last story especially (click link to read) took a bite out of my heart and made me super sentimental for like. A week. I think this would be classified as magical realism. A ton of hard-to-place and varied concepts in here, but warning for rape and its aftermath and sexual harassment/exploitation in a considerable chunk of the stories. If you like this one/the sound of it you might also like Census and/or How To Set A Fire and Why by Jesse Ball or The Beautiful Bureaucrat by Helen Phillips (warning for miscarriage) they’re all otherworldly and the kinds of books that don’t give you straight answers to the weird happenings in them but in the specific way that I personally enjoy.

Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett. First in a trilogy, the second one came out recently but I’ve yet to start it. Brandon Sanderson himself reviewed it positively, imo Bennett’s world building is very similarly rich as Sanderson’s. A very very fun time overall!!

Sunshine by Robin McKinley is one of her weirder books. The only urban/supernatural fantasy book she’s read that I’ve tried/can think of. I know there’s some unexpectedly sexual scenes in here but idr the specifics so I can’t give warnings or remember if they’re necessary, but I don’t think they were gratuitous or frequent. Anyway the mc is this short tempered, resilient girl (nicknamed Sunshine) who works at a bakery in a world where vampires and demons exist but are kept out of the public eye. She’s the greatest pull of the book to me and feels like a more vocal Vin? A fun and niche little adventure.

If you try Foundryside and like it/the premise intrigues you also consider giving his much shorter standalone Vigilance a try. It’s intense and considerably darker than what I’ve read of the Founder’s trilogy. Also grimdark and not hopeful but like. With purpose because it’s social commentary but I don’t really remember how I felt about that aspect of the book because it’s been a few years (baaaaad I know! Take this rec with a grain of salt) warning for gore/wanton killing.

Sabriel by Garth Nix is another fantasy book with a teenage girl lead who I like just as much as Vin. Tbh Sabriel and Vin remind me of each other (and it’s not just because they have similar hair I promise whdhsbd!) Sabriel’s the first in a trilogy but works as a stand-alone and from what I have read of Nix’s other stuff, nothing really holds up to Sabriel but I may be biased. I’ve loved her for a long long time💖

Speaking of good female leads, Mistborn is described as a take on Cinderella sometimes so if you’re into fairytale/myth retellings with female mcs: Keturah and Lord Death by Martine Leavitt is (I’m 99% sure) inspired by the Grimm tale Godfather Death and one of my favorite sweet and simple romances. And Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis is a Cupid and Psyche retelling that ironically focuses more on sisterly love than romance. Also an all time fave.

The Dreamblood Duology by N. K. Jemisin. It’s the only work of hers I’ve read (so far!!) and the one I’ve heard people buzz about least, and I had some medium scruples with the ultimate ending but I really loved the characters and the causal diversity was refreshing. I was also really attached to the world she created, I’d gladly read more books set in it if she were to write any.

Damsel by Elana K. Arnold. majorrrr major warnings for graphic rape/sexual assault. A dark subversion of the “maiden rescued from a tower by a knight” trope. Personally I think the ending makes sitting through the violations and abuse the main character goes through worth it but it’s. A lot. It’s dreamily written and the world building isn’t in depth but it’s enchanting. Very (unsurprisingly) twisted fairytale esque.

The Round House by Louise Erdrich. I’ve also read The Plague of Doves by her and loved it. Anyway this is heavy ownvoices realistic fiction, the plot centers around the sexual assault of a Native American woman. The main character is her son and honestly considering the premise I was expecting this book to be even harder to swallow than it was. I left it feeling glad for the characters and hopeful but I also had a long convo with a friend after the fact who was firmly convinced the whole thing was a tragedy (and the book does have a lot of tragedies! So there’s a chance you’ll end up agreeing with her POV instead of mine, which is perfectly valid)