#im writing a book guys

[jmscornerlibrary]

Welcome to Zylocke's.

If you're ready for a 1880's fantasy world with the interactions of Pride and Prejudice and the aesthetic of Phantom of the Opera, I present to you: Zylocke's Wandering Spectacle, something which I have been working on for months now, and which is nearly ready to be released. I cannot wait to share it with you people. Enjoy!

"So you have come to do something entirely new,

something wonderful, magical, beheld only by few,

where the sparks and brilliance stick eyelids open, like glue;

to experience amazement, fascination, anew.

Here the stars splashed into black are in each every hue:

flaming red; wealthy purple; green; sapphire blueー

winking singular, coupled, or as one split in two.

Yet keep your mind ticking, whilst admiring the view

for not every colour or star will appear to be true,

and keep your eyes open, lined up in fate’s queue,

for you’re in Zylocke’s playground; here, his show will play you."

~ Zylocke's Wandering Spectacle, chapter three: The Contract.

[sugarcoatednightshade]

thinking about how Humans Are Space Orcs stories always talk about how indestructible humans are, our endurance, our ability to withstand common poisons, etc. and thats all well and good, its really fun to read, but it gets repetitive after a while because we aren't all like that.

And that got me thinking about why this trope is so common in the first place, and the conclusion I came to is actually kind of obvious if you think about it. Not everyone is allowed to go into space. This is true now, with the number of physical restrictions placed on astronauts (including height limits), but I imagine it's just as strict in some imaginary future where humans are first coming into contact with alien species. Because in that case there will definitely be military personnel alongside any possible diplomatic parties.

And I imagine that all interactions aliens have ever had up until this point have been with trained personnel. Even basic military troops conform to this standard, to some degree. So aliens meet us and they're shocked and horrified to discover that we have no obvious weaknesses, we're all either crazy smart or crazy strong (still always a little crazy, academia and war will do that to you), and not only that but we like, literally all the same height so there's no way to tell any of us apart.

And Humans Are Death Worlders stories spread throughout the galaxy. Years or decades or centuries of interspecies suspicion and hostilities preventing any alien from setting foot/claw/limb/appendage/etc. on Earth until slowly more beings are allowed to come through. And not just diplomats who keep to government buildings, but tourists. Exchange students. Temporary visitors granted permission to go wherever they please, so they go out in search of 'real terran culture' and what do they find?

Humans with innate heart defects that prevent them from drinking caffeine. Humans with chronic pain and chronic fatigue who lack the boundless endurance humans are supposedly famous for. Humans too tall or too short or too fat to be allowed into space. Humans who are so scared of the world they need to take pills just to function. Humans with IBS who can't stand spicy foods, capsaicin really is poison to them. Lactose intolerance and celiac disease, my god all the autoimmune disorders out there, humans who struggle to function because their own bodies fight them. Humans who bruise easily and take too long to heal. Humans who sustained one too many concussions and now struggle to talk and read and write. Humans who've had strokes. Humans who were born unable to talk or hear or speak, and humans who through some accident lost that ability later.

Aliens visit Earth, and do you know what they find? Humanity, in all its wholeness.

[lampcry]

my practice of drawing ideal triangle is a failure

[xxplastic-cubexx]

cant stop thinkin bout charles and erik readin together on the couch but instead of reading with him charles is listening to eriks thoughts while he reads. Live mind commentary ……..

[mummer]

i dont mean to be gauche but larys absolutely wants to do fucked up torture porn to aegon but the thing is aegon is just gonna be like okay ❤️ yay ❤️ and then theyre both gonna feel really confused

[vivitalks]

Last night I saw the Great Gatsby musical. Before I went, I reread the Great Gatsby book (for the first time since 11th grade!) to get a refresher on the source material and the original story. Having the book so fresh in my mind made seeing the musical really interesting, and now I am going to do something I never thought I'd do, which is post some lengthy meta about The Great Gatsby. If you haven't seen the musical, this post may still be interesting to read, but it does contain some mild spoilers, so I leave that up to you. If you also haven't read the book, godspeed lol.

There's a lot I could talk about here when it comes to the way the book was adapted for the stage. But there's one particular thing I want to zero in on in this post, and that's the "unreliable narrator" of it all.

In the book, Nick Carraway is our narrator. He's an unreliable narrator practically by default - the idea is that he's retelling events that occurred two years prior, from memory. But even knowing that Nick is probably not reporting all events and characters with complete accuracy, it's hard to know which parts exactly are wrong, or what might have happened in reality, because even though he's an unreliable narrator, he's still the only narrator and this is the only version of events we know. We're forced to take Nick as our surrogate and take him at his word. Until the musical.

(I wondered how the show was going to deal with the fact that the story of Great Gatsby is not only told by an unreliable narrator but also by an outside perspective - generally speaking the events of the Great Gatsby aren't happening to Nick, they're just kind of happening around him. Yet he's the voice of the story, so in that way he's central to it, and I was curious how they were going to balance that fact with the fact that Gatsby is functionally the main character.

I think they struck a really good balance in the end. Nick's beginning and ending lines, lifted verbatim from his book narration, frame him clearly as the anchor of the story - I think that's the best word for it; the audience jumps from scene to scene, many but not all of which contain Nick, but we know that Nick is always going to be where the action is, or that he will at least know about it. He may not be the main character, but he's an essential character. But I digress a little bit.)

The difference between the way the story is imparted to the audience in the book versus in the musical boils down to this: in the book, Nick "plays" every character, so all their dialogue and actions, their mannerisms and the way they're described and reported, it's all informed by the beliefs Nick holds about them. Whether he means to or not, his biases paint certain characters in certain lights, and because he is our eyes and ears to the story, we have no choice but to absorb those biases.

But in the musical, every character is literally played by a different actor. Nick can only speak for himself. Nick can only tell his own parts as they happened. He may be "telling" the story, but we're watching the story. We have the benefit of an unblemished perspective on things - we can watch the events the way they actually unfold, regardless of how Nick believes or remembers they went down.

This difference - between Nick as the narrator and Nick as merely his own voice - is crucial in how the musical develops each character, some of them fairly different from how Nick described them in the book. And there's one book-to-stage change - a fairly small one, all things considered - that, to me, illustrated this difference perfectly.

There's a line towards the end of the Gatsby book. Something Nick says in narration, after his final conversation with Tom Buchanan, talking about how Tom gave away Gatsby's name and location to George Wilson (which ultimately led to Gatsby's death). Nick writes:

"I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…"

When I read this line in the book, I couldn't help vehemently agreeing. Screw those rich assholes! Money does corrupt! Tom and Daisy ARE careless wealthy people! It was easy to side with Nick, not only because he was the only perspective on the situation that I had, but also because he said this in internal response to a conversation with Tom, who, I think we can all agree, is a major jackass and a deeply unsympathetic character.

But in the musical, this line is spoken aloud by Nick. And he says it to Daisy, in her house, as she's packing up to skip town after Gatsby's death. In fact, he doesn't just say it; he shouts it, visibly and audibly outraged at her audacity to lead Gatsby on, ghost him, skip his funeral, and then move away to avoid the fallout. Nick is angry and highly critical of Daisy. But because we're no longer confined to his shoes, we also get to see Daisy's reaction - not as Nick remembers it, but as Daisy actually reacts. And because of that, we're able to really see, and confirm, that "Daisy is rich and careless" is not the full story.

I have to credit Eva Noblezada for a phenomenal performance (duh). Daisy in this scene is emotional, grieving, and it's clear she has been trying to contain these feelings for the sake of her husband and her own sanity. She's remorseful, not that Gatsby is gone necessarily, but that she allowed herself to entertain the fantasy of running away with him, only for it to be torn from her. She is trying to make the best of her unavoidable reality. And then Nick tears her a new one, calling her careless, accusing her of destroying things and being too rich to care.

And as I watched that scene, I was no longer wholly on Nick's side. I understood that this situation was so much more complex than Nick's chastisement acknowledged. Sure, Daisy wasn't innocent, but she also wasn't the callous rich girl Nick made her out to be. She did love Gatsby. And she also had a whole life with Tom. She had a daughter. She was a woman in the 1920s! That's a kind of life sentence even wealth can't erase.

The way Daisy responded may not quite have landed with Nick (if we consider the kind of fun possibility that the musical is the events as they happened and the book is Nick retelling those events as he remembers them two years later, then clearly Nick's disdain for Daisy's actions overtook whatever sympathy he felt for her), but the musical gave Daisy the opportunity to appeal to us. The audience. Having this omniscient perspective of things allowed us to draw our own conclusions, and I found myself a lot more sympathetic towards Daisy when I could both see and hear how she responded to Nick's verbal castigation.

In the book, Nick is the narrator. In the musical, Nick is a narrator. But he's no longer the sole arbiter of the story. The audience got to make our own judgements on the events as we witnessed them. Every one of us was a Nick - beholden to our own biases, maybe, but at least not beholden to his.

[nyxi-pixie]

it is immensely funny to me that the beast afterword is just like. an endorsement of fanfiction.

like i know people talk abt asgr saying theres a universe where skk joined the ada tgthr but like. its a fanfiction prompt. bro gave us fic prompts😭😭😭😭

'what do i want you to think after reading this novel' and his answer is MAKE SO MANY AUS. also why is one of the ideas 'what if the ada was broke' like?? major plot point: they do unpaid overtime together

[firefly-factory]

Astorvember Day 11: ASTROMANCY

This fits the theme in the loosest sense but y'all I'm so excited to get to include some Bargainer headcanons. In a world defined by the constant battle between "Good" and "Evil" the idea of a neutral deity is so intriguing to me.

A while ago I saw a joke post about how everyone should thank Astor for trying to keep the timeline from splitting again and - while it was 100% a joke post, I've been thinking about it ever since. Because what if that was his main stakes in the conflict? What if he wasn't siding with Ganon because he agrees with him, but because that's what is meant to be?

The Bargainer has a lot of potential in this context as an entity who is similarly uninvested in who wins, and would prefer to focus on ushering lost souls from one world to the next. It was a small leap (in my mind) to connect the Bargainer with Fate itself (and therefore, with Astor). I also liked the idea of the Bargainer being able to hijack a Goddess statue (like it does at the Temple of Time) and feel like it was probably able to do so because of Astor's alienation from Hylia.

At this point in his life, Astor has cut ties with most of the major powers that had directed him thus far. He's distrusting of authority, uneasy of anyone - or anything - that speaks in absolutes. The only thing he knows is that something - what he calls Fate - is dragging him towards a destiny he still can't make sense of.

Though he is terrified by the Bargainer, it also speaks in a language he can understand. It acknowledges his fears and assuages them. It assures him that there will be answers without chastising him for questioning.

[wolvesbaned]

sad butch werewolf i love you.

[jmscornerlibrary]

The long-awaited tales:

Greetings and salutations!!

I've always loved the elite school environment, magnificent capes and hats, steampunk, unexplainable powers, schemes and monarchy, philosophical and theological dithering, humour, drama, dramatic men, magical creatures, secret societies and boys will be boys.

In fact, if you like those things too, I invite you on a journey! It's turns and bends are yet to be sighted, but the foundation is there!

The Victor Sparrow saga is something I've been working on for four years now, and have six books planned! I reckon you'll all enjoy it, when it comes out - anyway, here's the poster I'm working on, so you can see what I mean:

[runaria]

Part 3

[megamindsecretlair]

Book Update:

If ya care lol. I have reached 20k words 🥳 I'm not sure how long this will be, but im shooting for under 40k, for sure. I'm almost at the half way point which works.

Somehow I can crank out fics almost like it's nothing but agonize over every word I put into my original writing lol.

I've made Zora shy, only because it fits with my whole Theme. But it's also easy to get into my head too. Too many great books are ruined by an annoying MC and I hope you fall in love with Zora as much as I have.

[livelaughliushen]

Some days I wake up and think about if Hua Cheng hadn’t come back. And that Xie Lian had just been left waiting.

Because that’s what MXTX protagonist do, they wait, like loyal dogs. They’ll wait until the end of time, until weeds have grown up their leg and their stories and actions have been forgotten.

I want to see that unwavering devotion carried out hopelessly until eventually he rots always because a god with no believers is no god at all.

Other days I wake up and think about HuaLian fucking nasty in Xie Lians broken down shack of a shrine.

[semothekat]

me when im crazy about two characters that dont even know each other.

Thank you to @oathofkaslana for writing the id for this!!

[general-grey]

people on this site are sleeping on Corvus Corax, holy hell

[caitlynmeow]

ugh gonna try to conjure my dimitrescu hyperfixation back by watching some videos and hoping for the best