#i want to make an actual good structured post about it but i haven't had the time :(

[bubblegumr1ck]

morty from this angle btw

[tojisbbygworl]

He’s Not Actually That Cool - Hobie Brown x Black!Reader

Based off of this post

Part 2 bonus bonus ii

Masterlist

Imagine Hobie, the undeniably coolest person in the Spider Society, is a virgin nerd with a big dick

Tags: Hobie is a pathetic virgin loser, 18+, a lil smut, Oral (m receiving)

"How are you even cooler under your mask?"

"I was this cool the whole time."

A scoff behind the both of them. It's you shaking your head in your mask.

Hobie smirks at you. "Something funny there, love?" You don't say anything, just pretending you don't hear him and looking away innocently.

Hobie was the reason you were a part of the Spider Society. He and Miguel had captured the anomaly in your own universe with your help, of course. You knew Hobie had immediately took a liking to you what with the way he stared at you through his mask when he first laid eyes on you, frozen in place, color palette pink.

You liked him the moment he ripped his mask off when it was all said and done. He looked real good with his wicks, his sharp facial structure, wide-set nose and even larger lips. You actually believed him when he said he was briefly a runway model, emphasis on the briefly.

He invited you to join them and pulled you into the portal before Miguel could even say anything. You two have been inseparable ever since.

As you met more people, they all told you of their opinion of the man who seemed to be your best friend. Everyone says the same thing, that he's effortlessly cool and it makes him a little obnoxious. It always made you tilt your head.

You've seen the anime action figures in his room ranging anywhere from Naruto to Tokyo Ghoul.

"Oi, don't touch my things. You're the only person I trust to let in here, don't ruin it."

He's talked your ear off about the intricate lore of FNAF (he HATES MatPat btw)

You've groaned at how many times you've heard the name 'Afton' leave his mouth.

"So the place shut down again after the victim lost their entire frontal lobe"

"And that's the bite of '83, right?"

"No, that's the bite of '87. Thought I told you about '83?"

He probably did but he talked about it so damn much that you forgot. "It's cool, I'll tell you. So the bite of '83..."

This man is a fucking nerd but the BIGGEST misconception everyone has is that he's probably great at sex.

He has a reputation of "running through" everyone who wants him at the society...and yet no one has actually done anything with him. Everyone whispers about it, but no one has ever come out and admitted to having sex with him.

He's without a doubt your closest friend, so you asked him about it while you were chilling at his, watching him strum his guitar.

"So I heard you been running through the Spider Society like a tomb raider."

He cackled, "Yeah, that's what they all believe, innit?"

"It's not true?"

He shook his head. "I haven't got bottle, luv. Don't know what the bloody hell I'm doing."

"Oh really?"

He stopped strumming to look up at you, his smirk falling upon seeing your sultry and mischievous face. He grew a bit nervous, but was more excited if anything.

"What's that look about?"

"Would you like someone to teach you?"

He dropped his pick from how badly he was shaking. Hobie gulped and slowly nodded his head. You walked over to him and slowly lifted his guitar off his body, then pushing him back into the couch and sitting on top of him.

That's how this current make-out session started with you doing most of the work, taking off yours and his clothes feverously.

Hobie just sat back and let you do whatever you wanted. He especially loved watching you strip down to your underwear, blood shooting to his dick as soon as he watched your breasts bounce out of your shirt. He watched you pull your panties off of you leaving you completely naked and him only in his boxers.

He shifted in the couch to relieve some tension. You giggled at his starstruck face.

"You good?" You asked him. He nodded. "Do you need me to pull it out for you?" He nodded again.

You laughed, but was quickly shut up by his long, curved shaft slapping back onto his stomach. His underwear did him no justice, nothing could have prepared you for this.

He shyly looked away and bit his lip, not wanting to admit that he liked the way you gazed at it. It fueled his ego, but he didn't know how to tell you without stuttering.

He was actually shaking pretty bad, and it worried you. "Are you okay?"

"Y-yeah...I just..." he gulped and looked back down, his dick jumping upon looking into your eyes. Just like his, yours were a deep brown. Your eyes were furrowed in concern, and your full lips were parted. His breathing got deeper.

"You really want to have sex? With me?"

You deadpanned him, then leaned your head down to his base. Hobie gasped when you stuck your tongue out and licked all the way to his tips. Your played with it for a couple seconds, leaving him a shuddering mess. His precum leaked from it and you licked it all up reveling in the salty taste.

"O-oh..." he moaned when you grasped it gently and began to pump. He closed his eyes and tilted his head back, so glad that he didn't have to imagine it was your hand beating his dick. He humped into it a little, and he looked so sexy crunching his abs that you couldn't help but to enclose your mouth over him.

"Oh, fuck," he exclaimed. He threw his head back up and gazed upon your form. You were giving him the sloppiest top he had ever seen, (he only watched BJ and missionary porn and you were much better than those girls)

God, he couldn't wait to get you under him and hump into you like's he's thought about for so long. He's used his hand, his pillow, he even looked up how to make his own flesh light because he would never be able to hide a real one from you. It was gross but fuck, how else was he supposed to get his rocks off? If he didn't do any of those things, he would have no control around you.

"Fuck, babe. Please keep going~" Hobie was drooling - actually drooling - out the side of his mouth. He panted and clenched his hands. You had to reach out and move them to your hair.

The poor thing panicked, he had no idea what you wanted him to do. He gently pet your small afro, more concerned that he was close to cumming down your throat.

You stopped and popped him out of your mouth, laughing a little at how cute he was.

You didn't notice how stressed he looked, him sitting up a little more in the chair. "Ngh, wait, no-" he whispered.

His dick bounces with each spray of his cum with him letting out a string of moans and curses as it lands on his stomach and chest. "Ffff...uh...uck..."

"Oh, I'm so sorry," you say, watching his fucked-out face. His head bounces with each deep breath he took.

"Why...did you...stop?" he asked in between pants.

"Why did you pat my head?" you asked, standing up, begrudgingly putting your clothes back on despite the ache between your legs.

"What was I supposed to do?" Hobie stares at your ass lustfully, feeling the blood rush back into his dick from how it moved.

"You were supposed to grab my hair and choke me with your dick, baby."

He gulps not being able to take his eyes off of you. "Oh."

You turned after putting your panties back on and froze. His dick was standing straight up again, the head glistening with thick white liquid. He stared at you embarrassingly, hoping that you would just come back over and kiss it.

"You could have said something before I started putting my shit back on."

"Sorry," he said, not being able to contain his excitement when you walked back over to him. His smile went away when you instead hovered yourself over his lap. His cum was still on his stomach and his dick. "W-Wait-"

"Yeah?" You whispered sensually, grabbing him again and pulling your panties to the side to line him up with you.

"I'm still-, I still have-, Is this okay?"

"I'm on the pill."

He starts getting nervous again, but he doesn't know why.

"You scared?" She asks.

He looks at her and rests his hand on her hip. "I don't want to hurt you. Or make you uncomfortable."

You giggled again. "I promise you I'll be fine."

"But, I still got my cum on me, babe."

"I know." You leans over to his ear and lick it. He shivers. "Isn't that so nasty?"

Hobie moaned as you begin to sink yourself onto him. You moan too, Hobie splitting you like you never imagined.

"You really want to shag a virgin?" He finally asked her, his voice wavering.

She rolled her eyes and sighed in frustration. "Virginity is a social construct. Don't be ashamed. Now shut the fuck up."

Definitely making a part 2 and a lil bonus and another bonus (ii)

Taglist is closed!

Masterlist

[utilitycaster]

Honestly I did have some points re: other themes of the story but given how massive and, if I do say so myself, damning, the colonialism post is I think they can be addressed pretty succinctly. Here's what I've seen and a quick debunking:

Theme of self-sacrifice (as either a good or bad thing): would have been nice to have actually explored the party's grief and anger after FCG died then. Again, I can understand why this might not have happened given the real-world situation but that still means said theme wasn't well-explored.

Theme of the inevitability of change: as discussed, change will come regardless of the outcomes for Predathos, due to unprecedented international cooperation, revelations about the nature of Ruidus, and aliens. Unleashing Predathos doesn't really add to the theme - it's just more change. It's perhaps a more drastic change, but still, more of same. I'd also add that the fact that most of the party really hasn't changed a lot or their transformations have been rushed through to get to the moon plot also undercuts this theme, as does the focus on the titans - is this radical change, or is this a desire to return to an idealized past that the party never knew and which may have never really existed, which is a pretty conservative/reactionary viewpoint? I'd also add that generally a message of "change is good", "change can be good", or "change is inevitable" is best conveyed by a change that either happens no matter what and the characters or party must cope with it; or a change the party must make with significant drawbacks that, and this is crucial, they grapple with in terms of implications. I've sideswiped Rusty Quill Gaming a few times and they had, frankly, a structurally sound campaign with plenty of time for character development that simply failed to stick the landing of this message because the DM didn't bring up the issue until the last session. The fact that Bells Hells have had a billion circular conversations with themselves about this and never considered any implications truly cuts this theme off at the knees.

Theme of The Power of Friendship: even people who genuinely love this campaign have pointed out it fails to spend enough time developing character relationships and that the party members are often oddly silent when it comes to their commonalities. Watch a late game C1 or C2 episode that isn't all combat and the party is joking with each other or checking in to a degree that would be unprecedented with Bells Hells. I happen to think that the Power of Friendship is a perfectly good theme if we are talking about shows aimed at young children and is eyeroll inducing if it's the main theme on a show for adults but like...if this is the theme where the fuck was the downtime to develop it.

Theme of the difficulty of making decisions: this seems to be where a lot of people have landed - that actually Bells Hells' hesitancy is GOOD because there's no easy answers here. The trouble, of course, is that those same people have been banging on the KILL THE GODS drum much of the campaign and in some cases still are (and were, as of a few days ago, still on about how this is an anticolonialist work). Which is it? Is unleashing Predathos something that could have horrible consequences for the party and in the long term for Exandria, thus actually backing up the idea that this is, indeed, a diffficult choice? Or was it OBVIOUSLY the answer the whole time? And within the narrative why wasn't the aftermath or even the immediate impact of those possible decisions explored? It's rather like the inevitability/importance of change theme - doesn't hit if you haven't spent time considering what will happen. Bells Hells has been almost entirely focused, in fact, on the past and present and their own personal grievances that they never actually considered the world they might want to make. Which makes for a good tragedy, for what it's worth, but means their dull handwringing over the outcomes fails to hit because they never once thought about the outcomes.

Theme of power: hits better if you didn't have Keyleth on speed dial. hits better if the world didn't shower you with money and gifts from the start of the campaign. hits better if the fact that (for example) Ashton was relatively powerless for much of their life and then the second they got power went fucking nuts with it were explored. Hits better if we actually considered that the people of Gelvaan were terrified of Imogen and with just cause given that she nearly killed two of them in a way none of them had access to. Hits better if Laudna had actually leaned into Delilah. Hits better if they spent even a fraction of the time among commoners as they did among world leaders. Definitely doesn't hit if a rapid rise to power is seen as an excuse for one's behavior rather than as a condemnation of one's power.

If there's a potential theme I missed, please feel free to let me know but I think that covers everything I've seen and why, again, the building blocks were there but the party's general "meh" response to almost everything and the weird pacing puts a damper on pretty much any message.

[takavasen]

Tumblr dashboard in Night Vale simulator

🧪homo-genius

Today's science fact:

Spiders have an open blood circulation system, which means they do not have veins and their blood is different from the blood of mammals. Unfortunately many healthcare professionals do not know this, which can lead to improper methods in...

Read more

🎙️voice_of_night_vale

Spiders are a valuable part of our community and deserve good healthcare.

But more importantly, I want everyone to know that Carlos the Scientist made this post, he is my husband and I love him very much! 💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜💜

🪬a-thousand-fingernails Follow

Cecil everyone knows you and Carlos are married and most of us are happy for you but you don't need to tell this in every post you make

🎙️voice_of_night_vale

Wait have I mentioned it before?

809 notes

⭐sheriffofallarts

Hah saw some loser (@ marble-eyes) bring the same girl (@ mountainbeliever343 I think, couldn't see her face clearly from the cameras) home for the third time this week lol

cmon just say you are girlfriends already dont be shy

💎marble-eyes Follow

Hey you can't just share private information like that!! And besides that is not true, I haven't brought anyone home for a long time, I don't have time for that anymore!!!

🟡secretly-in-your-home

No. I can confirm that what Sam said is true. I was there. I am always there. Also, I put the rest of your cereal to your washing machine. They have been in the cupboard for a while now, I thought they were getting quite dusty and needed cleaning.

31 notes

🏀basketballpalmer Follow

We had an another great season with @nvwheelchairbasketball team again! Thank you everyone, it's an honor to be the captain of the team! See you guys next season <3

👍wallabyyy Follow

Aaaaa congratulations! I miss you guyssss

43 notes

☀️prophet-of-smiling-god

I just had the most delightful date with the most gorgeous theologist in Desert Bluffs Too!!! We had a lovely dinner at my house (some eyeball salad, mushed tarantulas and fried human fingers), watched some movies and of course made sure to serve our great Smiling God by making each other as happy as possible!! Unfortunately Charles said that it would make him unhappy if I shared the details, but I can confidently say that I have never been more joyful!!

🦷smiling-mayor Follow

Kevin, you missed a service in the Temple of Joy because of this. Surely you would remember doing that for an old friend, wouldn't you? 😊

☀️prophet-of-smiling-god

Oh, Lauren, of course I wouldn't ignore anything like that on purpose, you know how much I love tolerating you!!

98 notes

🪽not-an-angel Follow

Does anyone happen to have 10 bucks?

You can send them here: absolutely-not-a-scam-link

🌟erikaaaaaaa Follow

Does anyone happen to have 10 bucks?

You can send them here: absolutely-not-a-scam-link

���ex-vanston Follow

Does anyone happen to have 10 bucks?

You can send them here: absolutely-not-a-scam-link

💡erika-the-black-one Follow

Does anyone happen to have 10 bucks?

You can send them here: absolutely-not-a-scam-link

3 notes

😎violentfootstool-deactivated20230416

Hey guys, so I just spoke to the new scientist lady and found out I don't actually have three pairs of arms. The lower two were just robot limbs that I tried out when I was seven years old and forgot to take them off. So hows your day ://

🔬janet-lubelle

I am always happy to help with explaining your problems away.

🎀tinfoilforteeth

Hey bitch how is it going under the cow

754 notes

🎙️voice-of-night-vale

Alright, I'm going to say it. Steve Carlsberg does NOT know how to be a basketball coach. He knows nothing about any game structures, and he only allows one ball per game!! He talks too loud, except when you can't hear him. It will be ALL HIS FAULT if we end up losing this season!!!!!

🌠lines-in-the-sky Follow

:(

🎙️voice-of-night-vale

For everyone who finds this post now: I made this many years ago. Things have changed a lot. I'm very sorry, Steve. I couldn't hope for a better brother-in-law. You are my best friend, and I was the irrational one in this situation.

I have changed the way I look at people. I will not treat them the same way I used to treat Steve anymore.

1,642 notes

🎙️voice-of-night-vale

Alright, who let Susan Willman be in charge of anything? She is the absolute worst at making desicions, like, who asks an obelisk its NAME? She had an oppoturnity to ask almost anything, and that's what she chose?? She better stay away from our way for at least seven decades, and keep her "Huntokar"-nonsense with herself!!!

11 notes

[fancyfade]

Massive comic bookbinding progress post.

Making a massive bookbinding post with my progress and what resources and steps I use. I do not claim to be an expert and recommend if you want to get into bookbinding yourself you look into any linked tutorials (or find some yourself), because they are made by people with much more experience.

So. When I just got into bookbinding, I was following an instructables tutorial for (link) most of the book. the sewing part, I was following this (link) tutorial. The cover tutorial (instructables) wasn't great for what I currently do, and I changed a lot looking back on it, but it had the bonus of suggesting cheap materials (Cardboard for covers, elmer's glue for spine, any spare fabric for bookcloth) that helped lower the barrier to entry and let me decide if I wanted to buy nicer stuff.

This is the first book I ever bound, using the instructables tutorial.

It's not the prettiest construction wise, but I can still hold it and read it which is at least successful for a first book (tho I did test on comics I didn't care as much about, in case I messed up).

I did a couple more books like this, one being Blue Beetle: Graduation Day (in Spanish) and the other being Artemis: Requiem, and another being Knight Terrors.

Artemis Requiem I think was the last

Next, I found and started using Dave the Designer's tutorial (link) and also got some materials actually targeted at bookbinding. I got bookbinding needles and thread (much thicker and stronger, it's easier to pull the threat through and it feels stronger) and davey board -- though since then I have tried chipboard which is muuuuuuuuuuuuch cheaper and works just as well unless you have a giant comic. Sometimes you have to lay weights on chipboard after gluing it to make sure it doesn't bend though, it likes bending when it is wet a lot.

I did a ton of books in this period. I was mostly interested in making books that had good construction and were good for protecting the comics I sewed together and felt structurally sound. I did not care at all about what the covers looked like, and just wrote titles on them with sharpie. I used mostly linen cloth, buckram cloth, or occasionally spent money on book cloth

After this, my friend linked me this (link) youtube tutorial. It does not get into sewing, because the goal of that person's tutorial is not how to sew but how to rebind paperbacks as hardbacks with fancy covers. The main focus for what I watched is on covers. They use a cricut, I got the cheapest I could find (Joy xtra, not maker or any of the big kinds). It still is expensive (like 150 dollars), and in the linked playlist the youtuber includes how you can decorate without a cricut, though that does leave less freedom for what you can choose... UNLESS you are an artist already!

Shortly before I got the cricut, I did Eric Luke's WW Run

This was when I was getting frustrated I couldn't make the books look pretty on the outside, so I drew a sketch in pencil and colored in with paint pens i had bought for action figure modding (tho im sure any type of sharpies would work).

Anyway, after that I started using the Cricuts for covers. This is the first one:

i messed up on the heat transfer vinyl stuff, so I had to repaint some parts with yellow paint. I haven't had these issues since I started using the bookcloth materials recommended by the cricut youtuber I linked earlier, which are also generally cheaper per unit than where I was getting bookcloth earlier (but shipping is expensive)

Now I do almost all my bookcovers with cricut because once you have the machine it's reasonably priced, the vinyl is pretty cheap, and it's easier on my spoons than hand drawing everything and lets you customize a lot

Lately, I've been trying to make my sewing/construction technique better, and I've been watching videos from DAS bookbinding (link). I tried to do my most recent Huntress comic with the rounded + backed spine with shoulders, not sure that I succeeded, but that's definitely on me because in the tutorial where he explains how to do it without the official material he's like "You should try this with proper equipment first, this is just for binders who took a course and could do the shouldering in a bookbinding course and want to try it on their own without having to buy the proper equipment" and. I have never done a real bookbinding course or used the proper equipment.

Hope this was informative/fun if you made it through!

[drchucktingle]

Good day Dr. Tingle. I haven't read your stories, but I've known about you from afar in this website for a while. Your recent post about separating Ideas and Message is very similar to how I teach a class. I wanted to ask you, if you could share some of your Messages, in whichever structure/length/complexity you think about them before writing, to have some real world examples to show in class.

Personally I tend to simplify and shorten my messages as much as possible, like "everyone deserves forgiveness" for example, so that I can permeate it throughout the story, and so that anyone experiencing the story can come to a similarish conclusion.

I'm curious as to how your Messages look like inside your head, during the creative process. Not the refined versions used for marketing and sales and stuff.

Thank you!

sure buckaroo.

high concept idea of the book STRAIGHT was this: zombie apocalypse story but the rage only effects straight cis people (there is also a second high concept idea in there which is: what if zombie plague only happened one day a year? how would culture handle this politically and otherwise?)

so i had this idea that i thought was good, but before i can write it i think 'well what do i want to SAY about this? what am i FEELING?'

and i realized that i was a little torn about how to write this story because of the one day a year thing. when is it okay to fight back? can you hurt a zombie if it turns back into a person the next day? is that right or wrong? and WHEN is it right or wrong? what situations?

then i realized that with the metaphor of this story what i was really asking was something bigger: why is it up to the victims (in this case queer buckaroos) to be forced to make these decisions? marginalized groups have TWO kinds of violations done to them, the first is the obvious act of violation, but the second is that they are forced to use their time and mental space and emotional tolerance to learn how to HANDLE the first violation in an 'acceptable way'

so THAT became my message. if you want to know how i feel about these questions you can read STRAIGHT and find out.

CAMP DAMASCUS high concept idea was (SPOILERS IF YOU HAVE NOT READ CAMP DAMASCUS STOP READING HERE) what if the church really DID decide the ends justify the means and instead of stopping demonic possession they were inflicting demonic possession to counter sinful acts.

but that is not the message of the book. that is just the idea. if i just had that idea i would not write it, but as things evolved i realized WHAT i wanted to say with this story

in this situation WHO is the force of 'evil'? would it be the demons? would it be the possessed? or would it be the SYSTEM AND MENTALITY that was creating this situation in the first place? so the book sets out the answer this question and express the conclusion that ive made for myself

i also noticed that many churches who are anti gay have a sort of infantilizing trot with how they handle their young buckaroos. this idea that gay feelings will just go away if they are ignored and that they can almost keep young queer buckaroos from ever aging into fully realized adults. obviously i think this is WRONG and so fighting back against this mentality became part of the message as well, and that informed most of the metaphor and symbolism in the book.

it is important to keep in mind that sometimes the message can change. as the book trots along i am LEARNING myself, working out these thoughts on the page and coming to a conclusion of my own. this is actually VERY true of BURY YOUR GAYS, which is probably most autobiographical thing i have written. i will save talking about that MESSAGE and HIGH CONCEPT for after book is out though

EDIT FOR CLARITY OF MY WAY:

when i say i write MESSAGE FIRST that does not mean i think of the message first in TIME (although that does happen sometimes) it means the message is the most important thing over plot or characters or anything like that (although those are important too). it means that i write with message as my north star, which is rare, but it is how i make art

[dogtoling]

General life- and blog update , since I assume at least a few people might have been wondering where I've been and what i've been up to recently. I obviously haven't been posting or drawing much this year in general. This will probably be an important post if you care about stuff on this blog, and I already rambled on Sheezy, but that site isn't very populated yet and it's also very good at hiding journals so let's just ramble again...

The summary of this post if you hate reading: I'm heavily considering just stepping away from Splatoon. That decision obviously would affect this blog (mostly, my OCs, which is kinda most of the blog at this point). I don't think the blog itself will go anywhere, and I'll probably use it for something in the future... alternatively i'll cherry pick stuff from here into an archive for people who like the worldbuilding.

Longer post under cut:

So what have I been up to this year? The answer is quite simple: NOTHING. Like, actually absolutely nothing. Aside from Art Fight, this has probably been one of my worst art output years of all time, which is really frustrating. That's between my horrendous mental health and depression chasms this year and a complete lack of both focus and inspiration (which can also get chalked down to the depression to a degree, yeah). So the very real reason to why there hasn't been much activity on this blog this year is because I just haven't Done Anything in general.

Now because I know there will be a few people who think "that's fine! you shouldn't judge yourself based on productivity!" you're right! I also agree. However the issue for me specifically is that most (if not all) the time I spend NOT drawing or creating, I spend sitting around wishing I could start drawing or creating, because that is like the 1 thing that keeps me sane on this freaking earth. Unfortunately coming up with OC scenarios in my head doesn't really result in output I can feel fulfilled by in any form as much as I wish it did, lol.

Now; The Issue. It doesn't take a genius to see that if you spend 9 months trying to finish like a dozen OC pages that you COULD do in a week or 2 if you wanted to, then there's probably more than just the problem of executive dysfunction (even though that's at least 60% of it for sure). Obviously my other major problem is that I live by imaginary rules and structures that make sense, but aren't actually useful at ALL in reality and are more than a hindrance if anything (the mental to do-list in my head that says i can't do X until I've done Y doesn't do very much if task Y takes 10 months and I also don't want to do it, and it also has no structured ending).

How does this tie into stepping away from Splatoon, you may ask. Well, the issue is that I have foreseeably fallen out of love with the series. Which isn't exactly news lol. Currently, I'm not even sure i will get the next game, if and when the time comes. Yes, the loss of interest is also expected, given that Splatoon 3 has ended and every fandom has this kind of downtime and lukewarm in-between-titles period. But the truth is that modern Splatoon (almost 10 years old!!!!) is tangibly different from the way the series was back when I fell in love with it. That was Splatoon 1, and while the series has improved in a lot of aspects and is thriving, it's grown in a direction that I just don't really like. Splatoon 3 had the most freaking horrendous, immersion breaking story mode they could've done, then they followed it up with a DLC story that was pretty cool but also compounded a lot of my fears about the series' future and played into every single thing i do not want Splatoon stories to be - fully character focused, random fucking villain, mundane event that's unrealistically world-threatening just because a kids video game needs a scary climax even though it's immersion breaking AGAIN, the whole thing taking place in cyberspace and thus offering basically no worldbuilding even though there is SO MUCH WORLD. I COULD GO ON.

The gist of it is that nowadays, rather than playing Splatoon and being inspired and excited at what comes next, I mostly find myself dreading what dumbass plot they will do next to throw a wrench in the otherwise good stuff. And when that's like THE main approach I have to what's supposed to be my favorite series, it is HARROWING. I can't even really blame the game for this; the story is NOT its selling point, the developers probably do their best to get the bits to us that they really want to tell, and at the end of the day the game is unfortunately a product. Worldbuilding for Splatoon is fun to a point. It's less fun when in order to actually write or create something coherent, instead of filling in the blanks, the blanks are 90% of the freaking thing. At that point you're just better off making something of your own instead of being anchored onto an IP that gives more problems than answers and occasionally shoots you with like a machine gun. Working in the realm of Splatoon is frustrating because more often than not, the questions I have ARE NOT MINE TO ANSWER, and the likelihood that the specific-ass questions I need answers to will ever be actually addressed is really low.

Tying this back to my OCs. Obviously I love my OCs more than I love myself which admittedly isn't that high of a bar but you get the point. The problem is that I spend a lot of time mulling over worldbuilding that, again, frankly isn't mine to do. Because if I want it to be Splatoon, then it should be mostly accurate to how Splatoon is! But the problem with that is that there's really not THAT MUCH worldbuilding in the series that you can work with, and most of the core game mechanics are just abstract enough that it's actually horrendous to try and come up with workarounds and ways for things to make sense that don't require just constructing a full knockoff version mirror dimension of the game and saying fuck everything that's in place here because Inkopolis Plaza literally has no roads in or out of there and I have no fucking idea how that's allowed when your only option is to jump the fence (or, nowadays, take the train which also isnt connected to a street as far as I remember). Between the face value issue and the lack of REALLY IMPORTANT worldbuilding, like - I will always come back to this - THE INK TANK'S FUNCTION 10 YEARS DOWN THE LINE - there's a goddamn ocean of plot holes and things that end up being obstacles to creativity rather than inspiration. I feel like I'm pretty solidly at the point (and have been for a while) where hanging onto Splatoon is really only contributing to creativity block and frustration with lack of freedom and the ability to actually do things.

So I guess those are my reasonings that I've put together just sitting here for the time being. The TL;DR is that I wish I could just do stuff without Splatoon's canon getting in the way, which is a really stupid problem to have if you're making Splatoon OCs. I feel this frustration extremely strongly every time I have to work with actual bigger aspects of the world; we still don't have an Inkopolis map, we don't know what the world around Inkopolis looks like, we don't know what the wilderness is like aside from Just Normal Forest and Desert and very few snippets as to what modern wildlife MIGHT be, I still don't know how the fuck the Inklings teleport to the goddamn arctic ocean to play a turf war at Shipshape Cargo co. These are all actually really important things if you're trying to establish a setting in any kind of storytelling that's outside of immediate city bounds (and even there, you need to know the layout of the city and its important areas). Also a fucking mutant bear and a baby salmon and a squid not wearing suitable gear went to space and fought on a rocket in space. These are some things that would give me peace of mind to not have to deal with in my own writing, probably.

So where do we go from here? Unsure. I haven't really made a decision on this front yet, though right now I'm leaning more towards actually going ahead with trying to do my own thing. That will result in obvious design and setting changes for my OCs whenever I get around to it. This blog probably won't go anywhere (again, unless I impulse delete it during a mood swing like i've almost done on like three separate occasions this year), but it will probably get less use, and I will probably end up making a new blog to post about whatever I end up doing once I get to a point where it feels like it makes sense. There's a chance that I will delete this blog and put all the interesting stuff on an archive blog for the people who are here just for the worldbuilding. My actual true passion for a long time now hasn't even been Splatoon anymore, it's just been cephalopods. I'm kind of done having Splatoon get in the way of the cephalopods, as thankful as I am that it introduced me to them...

If you read this to the end heres a treat for you = 🍪

[sototallynormaliswear]

I really don't care for the "true alpha" thing, and there are plenty of other people's posts about why, but I can't stop thinking about what it does to Scott and his character.

like, seasons one and two he's constantly fighting for NO ONE to be murdered, because he believes that you can't justify it and it's wrong. fair enough. this insistence places him at odds with people he might otherwise get along with, solidifying him as an underdog. even his alliance with Derek is tenuous, as Derek sees murder as necessary to keep people safe and Scott doesn't. but BECAUSE he's an underdog he has to work with the people around him and convince them why they shouldn't kill, he isn't powerful enough to stand on his own.

but in the later seasons.... he doesn't have that??

as the true alpha, his power hinges on him not killing people. while it would be unreasonable to say that his former stance is completely GONE, pessimistic fans (like me, hello hi how's your day) can make the case that he doesn't kill because he would be less powerful if he did, at least in part. it COMPLETELY cuts the teeth off his moral argument, which sucks because the show still has at least twelve more moral arguments left.

hes also completely LOST the underdog angle. he and Derek are finally chill, thankfully, but he's suddenly the most powerful cool guy in the area, the first of his kind in years, with super special powers just for him. about a season before he lost a fight with a guy who had been a werewolf for all of two seconds. and you know how before he had to convince other people to join his side and work with his plan? yeah no now he can just yell at them and they'll do whatever he says, magic rules.

No matter how you feel about season one and two Scott, it's undeniable that he is fighting an uphill battle that just kind of plateaus as of Season Three. and I love season three, but I feel like, if it did happen, it should have been closer to the end of the show

(And for all the talk about the McCall pack being weird and unconventional, they still fall in that same power structure that EVERY PACK EVER falls into. I think it would be more interesting if they didn't and their pack is even MORE of a mess to werewolves. take, for instance, the underlying subplot of seasons 1-3 that Beacon Hills doesn't have an alpha (at least a good one sorry Derek) and is there for ripe for the taking. a big reason that Derek wanted Scott in his pack was that he didn't want to be seen as weak or targeted by hunters, even other werewolves. they don't get along but they HAVE TO or else they straight up DIE. But then in 3A they suddenly have an alpha (at least a good one sorry AGAIN Derek) and that plotline is dropped. they're still being hunted, but that anxiety about being a good enough pack is gone. which is weird, right? wouldn't you want to increase that tension?

imagine if they didn't actually HAVE an alpha. They still consider each other pack, but that's not good enough for anyone but them. especially at the start of season four? no alpha, their former alpha has gone MISSING, they haven't told anyone, they have to go get him but every second any of them is away the more their town is in danger, and oh FUCK our former alpha is a TEENAGER NOW?? AND NOW HES BASICALLY NOT WVEN A WEREWOLF??? not only having to deal with the mercenaries and Kate but also other werewolves trying to nudge into their territory?)

[twig-tea]

Why We Are Gives Me Anxiety

I have been fighting myself on this We Are post for weeks because I wanted to make sure I knew what I wanted to say and was able to say it. I feel the need to say off the top that I don’t begrudge anyone who enjoyed this show and I’m genuinely glad it brought comfort to people. The show in and of itself, as 16 hour-long episodes of fluff (shout-out to @stuffnonsenseandotherthings for using this word to pinpoint the genre for this show, because it’s perfect), is not offensive or bad or wrong or any judgmental or moralistic word. And it does some things well; the centrality of the friend group was a lovely aspect to this show, and the chemistry in the friendship group scenes was on point. All of the couples have good romantic chemistry as well, and the show is packed with butterflies-inducing moments. 

That being said, I did not enjoy watching this show. I watch television mostly for the story; This show felt more like watching 16 special episodes for a show I hadn’t seen (I think this can be attributed to the point made by @italianpersonwithashippersheart in her post here that the show assumes the audience comes to the show with a pre-existing buy-in to the ships). The lack of overarching narrative structure of We Are gave my brain nothing to hold onto and I spent so much of every episode futilely trying to figure out how scenes worked with what had come before, what the show was trying to say, what these characters were thinking–all of which I knew was the wrong way to be watching, but it’s the way my brain works, so I spent a lot of the show frustrated. In short, this show wasn’t for me. 

But that’s not why I feel the need to write about it. Shows are fully allowed to not be for me, I usually can differentiate between when a show is doing something I don’t like well, or when it’s failing at its own goals. And I don’t begrudge people with different taste getting catered to sometimes; my refrain is that most problems of representation are not solved by calling for less of something, and rather than wanting something not to be made, I’d rather champion for more and a greater variety of content. And lord knows there’s enough BL to go around these days (shouting out @respectthepetty’s post along these lines, which I loved) . But We Are still worries me, and I’ve been trying to find a way to articulate that my concerns are not actually about the show itself, in isolation, but rather about how it feels like part of a pattern. This is my best attempt at laying that out. It’s going to get a little ramble-y, so apologies in advance.

Shout-out to @bengiyo who first articulated this anxiety in his post from relatively early in the show’s run . Ben gets into some of where I’m coming from with concerns about what this show means for the genre in this post, which as he mentions we've chatted about in DMs. I’m really grateful to him for these conversations because in isolation, I worried that I was being alarmist. It was helpful to have confirmation that he was feeling the same way so that I could get out of my own head.  

Ben mentions in his post that New Siwaj has been in this business a long time, and I, like Ben, have jived with him for years because he manages to imbue queer angst into his shows in a way that resonates with me, even when he’s had missteps. I'm going to lay out some of the major highlights of his work for those who haven't followed New for years.

He was an editor on Love Sick, arguably the start of the Thai BL genre as we know it today, and a show full to the brim of queer angst. He directed Make It Right, one of my favourite Thai BL comedy series. This show was also an ensemble centered around a friendship group (though admittedly it didn’t balance the friendship and romance content as strongly as We Are), and it covers so many topics that felt refreshing at the time and still are rare (morning-after sex visits to the clinic because things went poorly, hooking up on the apps, sex acts beyond just penetration, suicidality, I could go on). He also was involved in the GMMTV Waterboyy series–this was his first work for GMMTV that I am aware of. That show had a lot of issues but did explore internalized homophobia and bullying.

He worked as a cinematographer on En of Love, which is again similar to We Are in that it has several couples connected by a friendship group (and is several novels in one series), but each couple was given its own miniseries instead of bundling them into one show. En of Love also still dealt with some serious queer angst, especially in the Love Mechanics story [Sidenote, Niink, the director for En of Love, stuck with New and moved on to work for Wabi Sabi].

At this point, New created his own company, Studio Wabi Sabi, which he's said in interviews was to gain more creative control over what he was working on. And his stories became arguably even more explicitly queer and inclusive of queer trauma. He screenwrote and produced Love By Chance (which folks may not remember or know, but that core story starts off with Pete being blackmailed for being gay until Ae convinces him to come out to his mother and shut down the leverage for blackmail, and a good chunk of Pete’s character arc is unlearning internalized homophobia and not seeing himself as ‘corrupting’ Ae) and then Until We Meet Again. The queer angst in UWMA probably doesn’t need my help spelling out, but just in case anyone doesn’t know the summary, this show was about a queer couple who committed suicide in the face of homophobia in the 1980s, and were reborn and given another chance to be together in present day. I did want to note that in both of these series (LBC and UWMA) the core romance itself has no major conflicts; both AePete and DeanPharm felt like they were intentionally side-stepping so many of the usual BL drama tropes of jealousy and misunderstandings through trust and communication. Dean and Pharm’s story took that even further by having so many of the usual drama pitfalls for a gay couple just not be a problem; their only drama comes from their past lives, in a beautiful exploration of the breaking of intergenerational trauma. So many external threats to their relationship ended up being non-starters, and this was my version of a comfort series for that reason. 

From there, New started working with GMMTV again, and directed My Gear and Your Gown. This series was, to my knowledge, the first GMMTV BL series to mention HIV and to show characters getting tested at the clinic, and while it wasn’t perfect representation (didn’t get into PrEP, treated HIV as a death sentence), it felt like an important milestone.

[I’m skipping the sequels and specials he did for series I already talked about, because they don’t feel that important to the story I’m telling here and this is already so long, but I wanted to acknowledge that I’m not covering everything in his oeuvre.]

He then directed 7 Project, which had some serious storylines dealing with bullying and struggling with life in the closet, out of Wabi Sabi, and then Star and Sky out of GMMTV. Star in My Mind included one of the main characters in a beard relationship for years, and some controversy over the adaptation choices to make Daonuea (Dunk’s character) less polite than in the books. There was drama around the pronouns and characterization in that show (both Daonuea and Khabkluen use guu/mueng in the series, but in the novel, Daonuea uses rao; he also curses in the series and novel fans complained that he was too ‘masculine’). I thought it was an interesting attempt at a departure from BL character tropes to try to make Daonuea more evenly matched with Khabkluen in terms of his gender presentation in the show. Sky in Your Heart also included some angst about whether people of a particular station could be gay. Both of these shows (SIMM and SIYH) were also very trope-y, but they had clear throughlines. 

My Only 12%, the next show New directed out of Wabi Sabi, contains one of my favourite moments in all of BL, in which Seeiw sees Love of Siam and cries because it makes him realize he’s gay. There’s this heartfelt moment where he asks his sister, if there’s nothing wrong with being gay, why doesn’t the film let the gay characters have a happy ending? Despite the weird PSA ending, this show remains one of my favourites.

This is an aside but I’ve long been fascinated about this moment in New’s history: he played himself in War of Y, as a director of BL who is sick of being forced to make BL shows full of fanservice; he treats the actors with disdain and cuts marketable high heat scenes from the show which makes everyone nervous for the show’s future. Later we see him and the actor characters on set for My Only 12%, much happier. I ask myself about this moment at least once a week: Did he write this self-insert? Did someone else write the character and he just played it, and the similarities to his style were (were not?) a coincidence? I hope someone knows and tells me one day,

From there, New functioned as an Executive Producer of Dear Doctor, I’m Coming for Soul [I think this was the first outsourced project by Wabi Sabi]. This series’ entire plot is a metaphor for living in the closet and waiting for the time when the main couple can be together fully without having to hide. 

He directed A Boss and a Babe for GMMTV (which had its problems for sure, but also had Cher as an out gay man at the workplace dealing with casual homophobia in a way that was extremely satisfying), and then Between Us, which is maybe the least queer feeling show Wabi Sabi produced on its own, but did go into the issues of dating and the closet while trying to become a star (if I’ve forgotten something from this show let me know, I only watched it the once). One of the things that was so strange about this show was it being a sequel to UWMA but not engaging with the same themes. The only mention of real world queerness I can remember was the acknowledgment that they can’t get married in Thailand and Dean and Pharm discussing again going abroad and getting married there. 

Absolute Zero was a complete mess of a show; New directed this one for Wabi Sabi, and it has some similarities to UWMA in the sense of there being an attempt at saving the gays from the bury your gays trope, this time via time loop rather than reincarnation, but it did not take the issues it raised seriously enough (including the age gap created between the two characters by virtue of time travel). 

And that leads us to We Are for GMMTV, which as Pluem (@happypotato48)  wrote in his excellent post about this, includes Toey using nu and other 'feminine' or 'youthful' sounding language, but also apparently dropped the main conflict of the novel between Phum and his father (because his father disapproved of Peem).

Why did I go through all of that? Because I wanted to lay out how I've watched New Siwaj’s career go from finding a way to tell incredibly poignant and healing queer narratives (by creating his own company, and fitting these moments into the GMMTV series he did work on) to stripping out queerness from the shows he’s creating in the last year or so.

And this is a pattern we’re seeing more widely at GMMTV in particular, but also in Thai QL more widely. This is something that was touched on but not really discussed in the most recent episode of The Conversation podcast (the 23.5 and only boo! episode here). In both 23.5 and Only Boo!, the show faked out a homophobic parent and then treated their kids like they were silly to assume the worst, and I hated that.

Both Ongsa and Kang had internalized homophobia in their respective series. Both were terrified of telling their mothers about their homosexual love interest. And in both cases, their mothers told them something along the lines of 'of course I will support you no matter what'. In Ongsa's case, even though she was outed by Sun without her consent, she's the one who ends up apologizing for her hesitancy and feeling foolish for her concern. In Kang's case, the show never challenges his mother's assertion that she'll always support him even though we know she hasn’t (she was the one who wanted to prevent him from studying art before his father died), and it’s the audience that was left feeling foolish for our concern. 

In the GMMTV round table for Pride Month, it was mentioned that the decision for Ongsa's mother to be accepting of her relationship with Sun was made in order to model good parental behaviour for the older generation in the audience. In the novel, Ongsa's mother presents a significant conflict, but this conflict was erased from the show. I don't know if the same decision was made in Only Boo! for the same reason or not, but either way, the show definitely signalled to Kang's mother having an issue with Kang's relationship with Moo, and then said "sike", which I did not enjoy. The Conversation panelists were correct in the conversation linked and transcribed above that this wasn't the most egregious misstep either show made, but it feels like a telling symptom of the larger overall narrative problems that New is also now succumbing to.

It seems as though telling stories stripped of queer conflict is being seen as progressive, and possibly also easier to sell, and this is where my anxiety lies around what this will mean for Thai QL content in future. 

For the record, I am all for creating queer content in which we envision a better world for ourselves. But when that is the goal, understanding where internalized homophobia comes from and thinking through how removing parental objection will affect the character and the story is vital to the story and characterization remaining coherent. Otherwise it just ends up feeling like the show is telling queer kids that they're paranoid, rather than rightly worried (like I wrote about in this thread on My Love Mix-Up Thailand, where the same decision was made again to fake out a homophobic subplot that was removed from the adaptation but was present in the source material).

These choices speak to adaptation choices with an eye for specific moments and story points, rather than to a narrative or character arc, which is where it feels like they fall into the wider pattern of what @bengiyo, @shortpplfedup and @ginnymoonbeam were describing in their discussion: shows caring more about hitting specific meme-able story points listed out on a whiteboard than about making cohesive sense or having something coherent to say. 

[So as not to leave it out: I don’t think there were concerns of homophobia in the Wandee Goodday novel (novel readers feel free to correct me if I’m wrong about this) but the show faked us out about homophobia concerns anyway, which again really bothered me during that watch and which adds to the pattern.] 

Now, of course, as I stated up at the top there is value in the creation of different kinds of media. These shows sell different fantasies than the ones I want to see, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have value.All of BL has some amount of fantasy that it’s buying into, that’s what comes with the territory of ‘fiction’. The BL bubble (in which homophobia doesn’t exist and all men are gay for each other) is a version that is at its most extreme; nothing bad ever happens that isn’t quickly resolved within an episode, so there is never narrative tension, and nobody really needs to be that concerned about how anything will go ever. I do not find these relaxing because I can’t buy into the fantasy they’re selling; for me, the lack of narrative tension is so unbelievable as to ruin my immersion. But I can see why that would be appealing for someone whose brain is not always on alert and running at 11/10! The problem I am anticipating is when the majority of content is made that way, and when it is done in a way that takes up all of the mainstream space. I think it’s notable that the only show that’s really felt not in the queer bubble from GMMTV in 2024 is Cooking Crush, which was done by a subsidiary team within GMMTV (and the same team went on to make Only Boo!). And this is why We Are caught my attention and made me nervous; When a director who is known for his representation of poignant queer angst makes an entire 16-hour series in which there are no significant conflicts at all and the only hint of homophobia is in Toey’s reference to being bullied prior to the timeframe of the series, I get worried about who is going to be making the queer angst shows in future!  

For the record, my personal preference for comfort shows are the shows that do not pretend the world is perfect, but do depict an idealized subset of that world→where there’s a group of people that support one another through the bullshit of others and the less than perfect world that surrounds them. Shows that teach us to be kind to one another, and ourselves. Shows that say the world is going to suck sometimes, but we can be good to one another, and not lose sight of who we are, and make space for others to be themselves. A few of my favourite Thai series that do this would be: 

Bad Buddy

Cooking Crush

City of Stars

Knock Knock Boys

Miracle of Teddy Bear

My Only 12%

Secret Crush on You

To Sir With Love

Until We Meet Again

(and of course these occur in non-Thai shows as well. A few examples of my favourites: What Did You Eat Yesterday, DNA Says Love You, Light on Me, Oppan, Marahuyo Project, TsukuTabe, Tadaima Okaeri, Koisenu Futari, Joshi-teki Seikatsu, Gameboys, Hehe and He, Twilight out of Focus, She Makes My Heart Flutter)

These are shows in which there are explicitly external judgments on the relationships in the show and/or the characters for things intrinsic to who they are, and the characters build a support structure in which folks are encouraged to be themselves within that ‘bubble’ (Bad Buddy walks a fine line because it’s within the BL bubble but the problems that the main couple face are so a direct allegory that everything feels familiar; this is also the case with Tadaima Okaeri, which is both omegaverse and one of the most beautifully kind shows of all time). 

So for now, I still have the other smaller Thai studios including Kongthup Productions (who made Knock Knock Boys; we’ll see whether their latest series Monster Next Door deals with any queer angst or not), idolFactory (just finished My Marvellous Dream is You, which had a ton of queer angst, and is currently doing The Loyal Pin, which I have hope for on this front), DeeHup (currently making I Saw You In My Dream, which I’m holding out hope for) and StarHunter Entertainment (who made City of Stars, but whose record is a little spotty on this front; Their latest, Sunset Vibes, has not done a great job of handling the theme of office relationships and blackmail so far, and feels very much in the bubble) to look forward to. 

But as you can see even just by virtue of the caveats I included above, it feels like this shift is happening in the smaller companies too (harder to see a real pattern with fewer data points, which is one of the reasons why I picked on GMMTV–in addition to it being the largest media conglomerate in Thailand and therefore able to take it). Maybe it’s nothing, maybe I’m just an anxious person. Or maybe I’m just wrong about what would be best for the genre and for queer people in Thailand as well as viewers all over the world. But I, for one, would find it a loss if Thai QL decides en masse to pivot away from queer angst, and right now it kind of feels like that’s what it’s doing. In this context, to reiterate my original point, the existence of We Are is not a problem, but is one in a set of exemplars that raised specific alarm bells due to the people involved and their history in QL and queer representation, its deviation from the source material, and the surrounding shows that seem to indicate a pattern rather than a one-off. 

[tyrantisterror]

A couple months ago, one of the kids at the daycare brought in a D&D starter set and asked me to DM a game for him and some of the other kids in my class. Now, I had considered doing this in the past, but written it off for a variety of reasons, mainly asusming it'd be a couple days of chaos before the kids get sick of all the math involved and lose interest. But if a kid broaches an idea and others seem on board, I feel it's kind of my duty to at least try it.

So far my assumptions have been... mostly correct? Like, 70% of my predictions have come true, it is chaos, ten-years olds are the most murder-happy murder hobo PCs you could possibly imagine, and they've really been pushing my improv skills to their absolute limits with the choices they've made (and the constrictions I have on me as a daycare teacher). But they haven't gotten bored with the math, and they absolutely love playing the game still, which is nice. I like it when my students are passionate about something.

Anyway, I bring this up because seeing how children play with D&D canon has made me realize one critical fact:

D&D needs a Mons Game spinoff.

Kids love monsters. This is not my bias, it is something that has been categorically proven to me in my four years of working at a daycare. Every kid loves the idea of weird, impossible creatures, and they love the idea of befriending a whole horde of those creatures even more so. One of my kids in the daycare D&D campaign is making it his goal to find and tame every monster he can find in the kid-friendly monster manuals I bought for the class. He wants a Tarasque and a Bullete and an Owlbear and on and on and on, and keeps proposing tactics for capturing them based on his time playing Ark: Survival Evolved, a game where you can tame dinosaurs and mythic beasts while trying to survive a wild world full of danger and obstacles.

And it turns out that, while the mechanics of D&D don't support this, the philosophy of how its settings are structured according to those mechanics does. D&D is filled with hundreds of wild and imaginative monsters, all with distinct appearances, habits, adaptations, and environmental needs. The need to make the "dungeons" part of D&D interesting has required it to build really interesting monster ecosystems, and, much like mons games, the need to keep players buying new content has resulted in them building a vast library of creatures, because selling $50 books containing a slew of new monsters is a pretty guaranteed way to get money. D&D may not be a mons game, but it's accidentally made its setting perfectly suited to be one.

And what a money-maker that would be! Skew it more towards a child audience in tone, use simpler mechanics so kids can hop into it without spending, say, three solid weeks of afterschool daycare time crafting character sheets more or less one on one, and you'd have a game that would easily hook a younger audience while planting seeds of interest into the bigger game.

Of course, there are already indie TTRPG mons games, and I imagine some of them are actually good, but unfortunately they're not exactly easily obtainable on a daycare teacher's budget. And, you know, they wouldn't let you make a team of a bulette, an otyugh, a gray render, and an owlbear.

But then again, Wizards of the Coast continues to be absolute bastards, so maybe this idea is too good for them. Which makes it a good thing they're never going to read this blog post.

[drconstellation]

Chiastic Structure of S1

Here it is!

Yes, I deliberately made it detailed. You NEED to see the detail, it is, quite frankly, eye-opening in parts.

If the image I have posted is not clear, let me know, and I'll post a broken-down version in sections so you can read it. I'm just not sure how this is going to work.

I've got five footnotes for various sections where I want to make extra comments, so see them below.

If you don't know why some of us are looking into this - a chiastic structure or pattern a literary device where a sequence of events is presented then repeated in reverse order. For a complicated story like Good Omens this can and does gives us some interesting insights into the hidden stories we meta writers like to speculate on and discuss.

I have to admit it got a bit messy in places, so there still might be some tweaking to do in the middle parts.

The plain parallels still exist - I have a couple to mention in the footnotes. I'm also very excited about taking this challenge on because I've basically found proof that backs up my theory about the scene at Tadfield Manor telling part of the story of the Great War in Heaven, and also proof that the Flood may have been the time of their first "vavoom."

[1] M-pair: When Newt turns up to his new job there is an office meeting called and the upcoming "training initiative" is discussed. This then leads on to the paintball fight at Tadfield Manor. I discussed how the two scenes give us an insight into the past and the Great War in two metas, The Great War of Tadfield Manor, and The Newton/Crowley Mirror-Parallel in S1. The mirror-pair here is Dagon is rousing the troops with reminders of the "Glorious Revolution," providing us with a direct connection to the events of Tadfield Manor.

[2] Q-pair: This is a really interesting pair, as as it is still tied in with Tadfield Manor. Does it give us any insights into Crowley's role in the Great War and his Fall? I'll be looking more closely at this in the future!

[3] There is an interesting set of parallels around this area that didn't quite fit into the chiastic structure proper that I though was worth mentioning and I have already flagged for a meta before I had finished plotting this out. It's to do with Newt and Anathema and the prophecies in the book - oh, and the Velvet underground reference. Actually, I really need more space for that...you'll have to wait for the meta, sorry.

[4] Ohhh yeah. This one. The Vavoom moment. I wondered if the sex under the bed between Newt and Anathema would reveal anything. It certainly did! If you haven't read @vidavalor's meta about the first time they probably kissed, then you should. Stat! This pair backs it up - and maybe more.

[5] There is a parallel noted here that doesn't fit in the structure, that Crowley signs to start everything rolling, and Aziraphale signs to end it.

On to S2. Then I'll see if I can work a three-series structure together for some predictions.

Link to S2 Chiastic Structure Post.

@aprilodite @kayleefansposts @ineffable-endearments @sendarya

[abearinthewoods]

Hi, I have in fact ended up on this page from velvetvexations reblogging you to mock you, so you've got that right lol

And scrolling through your blog for a while I agree with almost all you're saying, but I'm left with two questions I'm really curious about, and I hope you do take them in good faith

Why do you describe yourself as, as you said in that post, MRA? I kinda get both people being extremely wary of hearing that term *and* wanting to reclaim it, since yeah, "men's rights activist" shouldn't be an inherently bad thing to be, but it does associate you with a specific movement that was actually really shitty, and did way more to be sexist to women that to even address the actual issues men face - which you genuienly do! That's the reason it perplexes me. In my country there's a really cool charity that works for men's rights while making it known that it's working for equality and not what the MRA movement wants - and while a lot of people do hate them just because they don't care about men at all, like, I've seen their subreddit - it's an extremely toxic environment that very much supports the same structures that do oppress men.

And second question, what do you mean when you tag your posts with "anti feminism"? I haven't seen a post when you talk about it more, sorry if I've missed that, but it shows up in your tags a lot and I think may be the other reason people are fast to dismiss you. Because, yeah, the general feminist movement has a fuck ton of flaws, and a lot of it is way closer to radical feminism than the people involved would like to admit. The theory behind it, the central idea is about equality, and there are a lot of people who still do care about it though. I generally consider "the purpose of a system is what it does" a good rule, and I'm certainly not opposed to critiquing the current feminist movement, but calling it "anti feminism" specifically does sound more like opposing the core idea, and it is what usually people mean when saying they are anti feminism . It didn't seem, reading your posts that you're against actually treating women equally, so why do you choose to use a term that does imply that? It feels kinda hypocritical if you discard the whole movement/idea, but still align yourself with the MRA movement when it's even further from ideal

Again, I'm asking this out of genuine curiosity. Sorry if you've discussed it before, I didn't manage to find it, but I also haven't scrolled too terribly far.

I get why people dismiss you, but I don't think that's fair. I'd be really happy to see more of your point of few

Context: https://abearinthewoods.tumblr.com/post/768152067433021440/everytime-misandrist-assholes-like

This ask has three parts:

Why do I call myself an MRA given the connotations™?

Simple, the connotations were always bullshit. I have been posting on reddit about men's issues since obama's first term. (and arguing about it among school since the bush administration) People have always had an *idea* about what a mra is about before they ever meet one. Reactionary people (as in reacting negatively out of impulse to the basic concept of men's equality or caring about misandry) have an even stronger idea. It infects how they see the entire movement and how they interpret our words. They read this bias into everything we write, and it doesn't matter what we say or how we say it, its always some how coming from a place of misogyny.

We want to end the male only draft because it re-enforces harmful gender roles and male disposablity? Clearly its just an excuse to imagine women dying on the front line if we actually cared about men instead of using it as some excuse for hating women, we'd fight to end the draft altogether. We want to call out misandry among women? Clearly we are just neckbeard losers who can't get laid and are lashing out at women. Want to address male rape? No if we didn't hate women we would fight against rape culture and rape of women so that there would be time for men's victimization. We want to discuss our experiences being discriminated against? No, clearly we just want to drown out women's voices. Accused of claiming women oppress men, or of hating women. Interrogated with questions to prove we aren't trying to dismiss or take away from xyz "real" oppression.

Hey wait a moment, this is starting to sound like the transmasc oppression discourse. You can take any post of a trans man talking about why they use transmisandry and transandrophobia instead of what ever assholes on tumblr tell them to use and transplant that post on to my answer to the question of why I call myself an mra and not a feminist.

I'm not interested in preforming my gender advocacy under the banner of feminism, and I am not interested in giving way to people operating in (sometimes subconscious) bad faith misreading our posts to fit the ideals in their head by changing what words I use to advocate for myself or my gender to fit their biases. Its pointless because subconsciously what a lot of them object to is the advocacy in general. They are so clearly doing it to trans men now that anybody who has been paying attention on tumblr shouldn't be blind to what I'm talking about. Is it really that farfetched to some of that which was directed at trans men's advocacy was directed at cis men's advocacy?

The rest of it, the bad apples, i consider to be a counter part to something that exists in feminism. We have our terfs you have your terfs. We have our tradcons, you have your radfems. A lot of the most "known" MRAs are just the most viral who are only viral because they are controversial and get shared via ragebait. (To the point that even the less reactionary/hatefilled MRA influencers admit to dipping into ragebait just to compete. (i'm people)).

I think MRA in particular should be protected because I found it at 4th grade. it was the obvious set of words. This would be y2k bug panic year 2000 pre reddit, google, youtube, tate, peterson 4th grade me. Its a descriptor. it can not ever be allowed to be anything else. In the name of every boy who will naturally stumble upon it after facing sexism against themselves and waking up to the concept of sexism against men like I did.

Why do I tag posts anti-feminism given I seem to genuinely be for gender equality for both genders?

One reason I do it for is to normalize criticizing feminism. Its gotten way too easy to dismiss as originating from misogyny or bad faith something or another. That needs to change.

But on a bigger note, I do consider myself a kind of anti-feminist.

I think feminism has gotten too comfortable having a presumption of the moral high ground that it does not analyze its own biases about men.

A big example of what I mean is how feminism will all too often try to theory craft some gender stereotype and harmful trope filled reason for why men do xyz thing and what I need you understand is that from my position, this theorycrafting is itself an expression of bigotry. Manspreading being casted as a "patriarchal signal of domination over public spaces"? How the fuck is that not just 100% stereotype fueled bigotry? Men spread their legs in the train more than women because parents teach only girls to cross their legs (for mostly dress reasons). Not because we are operating out some malicious desire to dominate the world. Jesus fuck. It is anxiety inducing to know feminists are looking at your actions under this kind of light purely because of your gender.

There is also the issue with how feminism's way of looking at the sexism issue actually contributes to misandry. I'm referring to the obsession with privilege and "oppression" as class descriptors and how this is used to excuse "punching up" or denying men access to services they also need, its just women need a bit more. I consider this to be a core aspect to the overall ideological identity of feminism that opposing it is essentially opposing feminism as it currently exists.

The path forward is to remove the concept of oppression and privilege and patriarchy and all the petty dick measuring and bullshit excuses about "punching up" they entail from the conversation. I think this is required to move forward on gender equality. Anybody who has seen how the same fucking arguments mras were having 16 fucking years ago about the existence and validity of misandry as a concept and term, are playing out on the transmisandry tag can plainly see by now the oppression olympics have done more harm than good. Its time to stop.

Allowing this way of looking at gender issues to exist in the culture zeitgeist harms men. I read a post on here about a guy who got SA'ed in highschool because someone made his ride back home contingent on, well, things. He mentioned how he didn't have a cell phone to call his parents for a ride home but his younger sister did, specifically so something like that wouldn't happen to her. Because of this us vs them oppressed vs privileged bullshit he was not given a tool to prevent sexual assault his younger sister got.

Nope, no more. Whats good for the goose is good for the gander. I will except no less moving forward.

Aren't I a hypocrite for doing both at the same time given I'm trying reclaim the MRM from the connotations set by the worse while holding feminism to the worst?

Here's the difference. When I find out somebody calls themselves a feminist, I don't assume things about them, laugh at their face, make some flippant remark based on my ideals about feminism, or even make them prove what kind of WRA (Women's rights advocate/activist) they are. I watch, listen and let them demonstrate what that means to them.

Be mindful of the distinction between The movement(the waves, etc), the general concept(anti-sexism), the ideology(the theory and written work), and the people who are associated by means of either of the three (feminists).

And lets be real. Feminism sits in the culture limelight, the men's movement does not. Feminism has the sway within corporate culture and mainstream political ideals to actually harm men when its misandry is allowed go unchecked. Meanwhile the MRM is listed as a hate group by organizations that command respect purely because of the existence of the same types of bitter hate filled vocal minority. This listing subtly hinders any men's advocacy, because, as i've said, Men's rights Advocate/Activist, is a *descriptor*. Like Civil Rights Activists or Women's Rights Activists. When you tie that strong of a negative connotation to a descriptor people will have a hard time differentiating between what ADL and SPLC are talking about and men's advocacy (what the the descriptor points to) in general. This can not be allowed to remain the status quo. It has to be pushed back against.

If feminism as a whole starts getting listed as a hate group because of "the worst of the worst" members by orgs with a lot of respect around the world and this hinders feminism's ability to gain any traction or do any advocacy for women calling me out for hypocrisy would start to become a fair cop.

One final note, I'm not even defining feminism by the worst of the worst. That once piece of shit radfem with her male tears coffee mugs aren't the standard i'm judging feminism by. The countless men and women who took to twitter to defend her right to have said mug and mocked any man who objected to it, is. The feminist leaning major publications that were pushing articles defending it as punching up and mocking any man who dared to express his emotions about it as a fragile wittle wite male, are. They (sadly) define feminism more than intersectionists on tumblr do. (as does Jezebel mag bragging about their staffers domestically abusing men) Ps: saturnian-catboy, I hope this helps you view my prospective a bit better. I could write for ever on the topic of feminism. thats why i got this blog, so i'm sure there are points i'll punch my self for forgetting. thank you for the kind words about my blog. I appreciated them.

[havendance]

Tagged by @acediscowlng and @dustorange!

Tagging: uhhhh, I don't know who has or hasn't been tagged and I am too tired to figure out so if you haven't been tagged yet and you're interested, consider yourself tagged by me!

number of stories posted to ao3: This is the year I got involved in multiple niche archives so counting up everything gets a little more tricky. I posted a total of 26 fics this year! (17 to ao3, 3 exclusive to Superlove, and an extra 6 on CFAA). I also did a lot of prompt events and writing challenges this year so a lot of these works are shorter, only 8 being over 1500 words. 

word counted posted for last year: 41,501! Less than last year, but I got into a really good writing grove last year whereas this year I had to worry about graduating and finding a job and actually driving on my commute instead of writing.

fandoms i wrote for: It’s all DC comics baby (except for the short Saga fic I wrote)

pairings: A bit of everything really. I think Helena & Barbara is the combo that stands out. Been thinking more about Helena/Dick as well though I only wrote a little thing for it.

stories with the most kudos, bookmarks and comment threads: Batman for Dummies comes out on top, but since I only posted the epilogue for it in 2024, I’m ignoring it in favor of Help! I was Reborn as Robin’s Father! which makes since as the fic I wrote that’s probably the most accessible to the larger fandom audience.

work i’m most proud of (and why): Hmm I think probably either Delta T or Cassanda Cain: Orpheus Special #1.I’m just really happy with how both of them turned out.

work i’m least proud of (and why): I as a manner of policy, don’t like to talk about my negative feelings towards my fics publicly, but I have to say probably white knight | black knight. This was my first time doing a mini-bang event and I feel like this fic could’ve used about 6 months of time to sit and a second draft but with the pressure of the deadline, I couldn’t give it that. I’m hoping I can look back and appreciate it more later, but for now it’s still got that feel of it in my mind.

share or describe a favorite review you received: I have gotten so many lovely comments this year and you all are wonderful, but I want to give a shout out to Scilly’s comment on Fatherhood for Dummies because you are like the Jack and Dana expert to me so I was so glad that you liked it <3 Also Melo left a wonderful comment on Wild Roses that I treasure.

a time when writing was really, really hard: 

white knight | black knight 😔 I just hit a wall there and needed to keep pushing. Figuring out how to write the first scene between Cass and Shiva in Cassandra Cain: Orpheus Special #1  was also tricky but satisfying when I was able to get it done.

a scene or character you wrote that surprised you:

Hmm I’m not sure if anything really did. There was a whole Helena & Barbara subplot that sprouted up in Delta T but I don’t think that was really a surprise lol.

a favourite excerpt of your writing:

how did you grow as a writer last year: 

I tried a lot of new things last year, a chunk of which has not actually seen the light of day, but whatever. I signed up for a lot more things and wrote a lot of little stuff.

how do you hope to grow this year: 

Hmmm, I think I’d like to work more on tackling my multi-chapter fic ideas. So far I’ve been able to do it with ideas that have a limited number of chapters, but I have ones that feel less structured that I keep foundering on and I want to get them on page! (See: the spyral fic, the knightfall fic I still think about sometimes, I have a War Games idea that probably won’t come to anything, Black Queen)

who was your greatest positive influence this year as a writer (could be another writer, beta, cheerleader, etc.): 

I would like to give shout outs to Zahri for always leaving lovely comments, Mika for my Cass week stuff, and Scilly whose posts have given me several ideas to poke away at <3

anything from your real life show up in your writing last year: 

I actually don’t think so. Though I did write that one self-insert…

 any projects you’re looking to starting (or finishing) this year: 

I sort of touched on this already but I really want to get back to the Robins don’t make great roomates universe this year! I’ve got a few different wips I want to get finished up and some ideas I’d love to get to (Nightwing: Year One, that Spyral fic) but I’ll have to see where things take me!

[writingquestionsanswered]

I've got all the writing structure/craft books, watched tons of advice videos and have been checking out novels to learn by example. But just because I can write doesn't mean I can write a book. This is hard. At what point should any writer consider taking writing courses or hiring a book coach?

When to Consider a Course or Book Coach

Reading books, reading craft books, and watching advice videos isn't enough to teach you how to write a book. You also have to practice...

Imagine if you'd never sewn anything before, had never pieced together and hand sewn or machine sewn anything in your life. You could spend years reading books about sewing and garment construction and could watch hours upon hours of sewing videos on the internet, but that doesn't mean the first time you sit down to actually sew a garment, you're going to end up with a garment worthy of a ritzy department store...

Writing books IS hard, even if you've written a lot of them. I've written a dozen books (though they're not all published), and I still don't find writing a book to be a piece of cake. Part of that is just because different books present different challenges--and where you are in life can also play a big role--but the point is, no amount of learning or practice is going to make it easy.

There's an unfortunate myth among aspiring authors that being an author looks like this: spending some time learning to write, writing your book, and voila! You have a book to publish! The truth is very few authors publish the first book they ever wrote, and if they did, they probably have mountains of short stories and/or fan-fiction or other writing behind them. Most writers write two or three books before their skills are honed enough to write a publishable book. Which doesn't mean you can't write a publishable book on your first try, it just doesn't happen a lot.

So... writing courses... there's not a lot you're going to learn in a writing course that you haven't probably learned from reading, reading a lot of craft books, and watching a lot of advice videos. Certainly, anything you would learn in a writing course you can learn online for free. The main benefit of a writing course is the interaction with others, but even that is really dependent upon the teacher and your classmates. You really have to go into it with a thick skin, knowing that the opinions of your teacher and classmates are not the end all be all.

Writing coaches can be great but they're expensive, and you get more out of the experience if you go into it with a complete or near complete WIP that you want to query or publish, but can't quite get where you want it to be.

So, having said all of that, before pursuing either a writing course or coach, I would recommend trying to finish one or two WIPs to at least first draft stage, but preferably second draft stage, and see how you feel. They don't have to be good. In fact, if you haven't completed a WIP before, they're not going to be your best work (because that comes much later), but remember that part of the writing process is taking the "rough draft" and improving it, and revision is where you really start learning things.

Ultimately, though, follow your gut and follow the path that feels right to you. ♥

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

I’ve been writing seriously for over 30 years and love to share what I’ve learned. Have a writing question? My inbox is always open!

♦ Questions that violate my ask policies will be deleted! ♦ Please see my master list of top posts before asking ♦ Learn more about WQA here

[crescencestudio]

Devlog #35 | 09.26.23

Hi everyone!

Hope the beginning of Fall has been kind to you all <3 To be Frank, it has not been Kind to me LMFAO. But I'll get into that, so let's dive in yippee!

Before I do, someone liked this post recently, which was such a throwback. It was before the full demo was out and everything!! I was so young and full of life. I'm going to sprinkle some comparison shots of the new assets with the old ones to break up the text and also walk down memory lane with me! (Full GUI not shown as I'm still waiting on the assets)

Chapter Cards (Left: After | Right: Before)

The "Progress"

I'm going to structure this devlog a little differently from the usual template. The main reason being, for those of you who didn't see, I have not been feeling Myself recently.

This month I found myself all out of sorts. While I felt like I was making progress and doing so much everyday read: fighting for my life, when I looked back on things at the end of this month, I didn't feel like I really did much.

On a higher level, I finished fulfilling Kickstarter physical rewards, opened a Kofi shop of the remaining merch, edited Druk's route and continued writing Etza's route, updated assets and code for the updated demo, and then general commission stuff (BGs from Vui, soundtracks from Peter, etc.).

But overall, Alaris felt largely like it was kinda sitting at around the same spot as it did when I entered this month. Which made me a little sad! I had wanted to make So Much Progress on Alaris because next month I won't be able to work on it really. Then, I realized I haven't taken a break from game development since I started it two years ago HA!!!

The Real Progress

Development for me has been back-to-back. Chapter releases every 1-2 months during my first half year of development, Full Demo release shortly after, Kickstarter shortly after, Full Game Development shortly after. When I was feeling burnt out from Alaris, I made intertwine. Then I was Heavily Involved in the development of two games shortly after.

All of this on top of my IRL responsibilities, which include a job, PhD school, and well, functioning as a normal human occasionally.

And then here we are at the end of September 2023, and I'm wondering why even though I creatively want to work on Alaris, I find my brain literally just getting too tired to think.

Etza CG (Left: After | Right: Before)

I think ever since the Kickstarter, I've put a lot of pressure on myself to consistently put out LOTS of updates for each monthly devlog. I don't want people to think I'm not working on things or I'm not committed to delivering after giving me their hard earned money. But now, with two years under my belt, I'm realizing that is... HMM maybe too high of a standard to put on myself for my first game ever. There are many much more seasoned developers than me who don't put that pressure on themselves (which is Good and Healthy).

So this month, I debated scrounging around and gathering all my crumbs to give you all a devlog that you'll be satisfied with. But I decided ultimately that wouldn't be good for me and would honestly not be the most transparent way to present the current process of things.

And so. Here I am. Head in my Hands. Letting you all know that while I'm not "burnt out," I am.... only human LOL (one human at that). And so some months, like this one, will just not have much progress to report. Not because I'm not working on it or any other deeper reason. But because it's physically impossible and unreasonable for me to be continuously pushing out a steady stream of content.

In-Game Sprites & BGs (Left: After | Right: Before)

Next month, I'lll be taking a vacation. It's actually my first Big, Official one in a Long Time! I'm very excited for it. And while I did initially think about working on Alaris while I was traveling on trains or things like that, I decided to respect my own need to be a Human and just take a break for once in my life. I don't even want to say I Might work on things, because that sentiment alone will pressure me to make some progress. So yes. Next month, there will be no devlog or updates. But please rest assured, I am "working on Alaris" by letting myself just Exist and Rest Up!

Not an Alaris screenshot but it is market research that deserves to be included because I played House in Fata Morgana recently and it was Phenomenal!

Thank you all for understanding and your continued support. I'm extremely appreciative to have such a kind and patient community. Hope you all have a wonderful October filled with Fall Treats, and I'll see you in November! <3

[khywren]

✨Let's talk about OCs!✨How would you describe your OC's personality/aesthetic? What's your favourite thing about them? Tell us a fun fact(s) about your OC or their creation!

❤️Send this to at least 3 people to spread some OC appreciation!❤️

eee, thanks for this! i was curious when i saw your other post!

in terms of personality, the three main words i would use to describe ysera are impulsive, awkward, and resilient. she's not very bright, so she usually acts on instinct without taking the time to actually think thinks through. girl runs purely on vibes, and as a chronic overthinker i applaud her for that. she's also spent a good chunk of her life living on her own and purposely avoiding contact with other people, so she's not always great at social interaction, hence the awkwardness. i think this definitely bleeds into her impulsiveness because she'll just say whatever stupid thing is on her mind.

she's also pretty resilient; she's had a rough life and has felt the sting of betrayal on more than one occasion, but she isolates herself out of fear of causing others more harm than anything else. she desperately wants to form genuine connections with people if and where she can and still tries to see the good in people despite what she's been through.

out of curiosity, i took the MBTI personality test for her and ended up with ISFP-T: the mediator. this little bit stuck out to me as a good representation of who she is:

Your spontaneous nature leads you to embrace life’s adventures with open arms. You’re not one for rigid plans or structures; instead, you prefer to go with the flow, adapting to situations as they arise. This flexibility allows you to make the most of every opportunity that comes your way. Beneath your easy-going exterior lies a heart of gold. Your empathy runs deep, and you have a genuine desire to understand and support those around you. However, you’re not one to wear your heart on your sleeve – your feelings often run deeper than others realize.

i don't know if i have a single favorite thing about her, but one of them is just her design. she's fairly basic, but i like that simplistic design and haven't seen a lot of tavs who look like her, which makes me happy. her scars are one of my favorite design elements; originally i just thought they would look cool, but eventually i came up with more of a backstory for why she has them and i think it added more to her overall character!

and, let's see… a fun fact about her creation… oh, okay! so, i've mentioned it briefly before, but ysera was originally supposed to be multiclassed as both a sorcerer and bard. her unstable magic was one of the foundational aspects of her character when i was concepting her, and the thought was that she would use music as an outlet for her emotions to keep herself from accidentally hurting other people (since her magic becomes more unstable when she's worked up). i ended up cutting that from her because it didn't really fit in with everything else i wanted to do with her, but i still think it was an interesting concept~