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tedlyanderson · 1 month ago

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Reading posts from someone I follow on why image generators are a legitimate form of art and their use should be normalized, and it's refreshing to encounter some pro-generative-AI arguments more nuanced than "I don't want to pay artists." I still think they're fundamentally wrong, but it's been extremely helpful, because it's forced me to examine my own thoughts on the matter and determine why, exactly, I believe what I do. Something something mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone, idk, I didn't watch Thame of Groans.

(Of course I'm not going to mention the person by name or tag them or anything, and for that matter I'd appreciate it if people didn't reblog this. I'm not writing this to get into an argument; I'm mostly just consolidating my own thoughts into a semi-coherent form.)

There are a number of arguments that have been leveled against generative AI, some of which I find more persuasive than others. The energy usage and financial waste, for instance, are significant, but not relevant in the case of one person using a locally hosted image generator and not selling the results. The question of the quality of the work is similarly unimportant to the bigger question; AI-generated images are going to continue to get better-looking as the technology improves, and "good" versus "bad" art is impossible to define in a meaningful way for the purposes of this argument.

The copyright argument is much more important, particularly to me as a creator. Another user pointed out that copyright cases against LLMs (on behalf of creators whose works were included in the learning sets) could have a potentially deleterious effect on fair use and transformative artworks. I'm not hooked into the legal scholarship on this, so I can't respond to that point. I do think it's somewhat short-sighted of that user to say "AI is a tool like any other, its use can be good or evil, our true enemy is capitalism," and then turn around and attack copyright as some kind of uniquely evil legal technology, rather than a technology that can also be used for good (making sure artists are recognized and paid for their work) or evil (large corporations shutting down parodies). And yeah, the revolution would fix all this, but how long do we have to wait for that? And what can we do in the meantime?

Anyway, the one argument that made me genuinely examine my own beliefs was "what is art anyway, and can you define it in a way that does not disqualify large swaths of what is widely recognized as human creative work and also excludes generative AI?" Because that's the meat of all this—not whether image generators suck up too much energy (because it's not about the specifics of the technology, which will change and improve over time, just as new types of paint do not fundamentally alter the nature of painting) nor copyright (which is a whole other legal mess), but whether we can call this "art" at all. For that, you need a definition, and that's the sticking point.

The original poster named a couple common ways of defining art/not-art (the "smell test," i.e. I Know It When I See It, and the "quality test," i.e. Can You Hang It In A Museum, which are largely the same but from different perspectives), and points out that they and other definitions would exclude quite a lot of human endeavors that most people would describe as art (graffiti, calligraphy) as well as fields that are more difficult to define but could constitute art (mathematics, programming).

(They also ascribed to anyone who attempted to make such a definition the motivation of not just gatekeeping but unadulterated fascism, which is an argument I think holds no water and wins them no friends, but. Let's just leave the paranoia aside and concentrate on the argument itself.)

So what is art? How do we define it, and why do I fundamentally disagree that anything that comes out of an image generator can be considered "art"?

I don't think this is sufficient for a full definition, but after talking it over with friends, I think, in part, art requires a perspective, which is to say that it must be the result of individual human decisions about non-trivial components. Another way to state this would be that the artist (if indeed they are an artist) must be able to make conscious choices about the work that are beyond what is strictly necessary for its completion.

Should the background be blue or green? Would this sentence be improved by an adjective? How large of a flourish should this letter have? What if I carve the gargoyle's snarl more deeply? What color should the hair of my halfling rogue be? These choices are indicative of a product that would be widely recognized as belonging to the category of "art."

Obviously, there are still gray areas. Certain fields have both a creator and a performer; can we say that one is "more of" an artist than the other? What about commissioned works? What if the artist is creating something within a strict limit or form—for instance, the 14-line sonnet, or a novel without the letter 'e'? What about Duchamp's Fountain, or John Cage's "4'33""? What about works with a large number of creators, such as films or collaborative writings? What about works where there is a level of interactivity with the audience, such as video games or certain theater pieces? Those and other questions are certainly open to debate, and should be debated! But to my mind, they do not challenge the fundamental principle, which is that the artist is an artist because they exercise choice in the process of creation.

Thus, by my (admittedly partial and underdeveloped) definition, I don't regard AI-generated images as art. The algorithm does not choose in a meaningful way; it merely calculates the most statistically likely next word/pixel/frame/etc. based on the database and the prompt with which is has been provided. (If you want to claim that this constitutes a choice, please submit a 5,000-word essay on whether free will exists and how we could possibly know if it does.) The remixer samples a specific beat; the collage artist cuts a particular image out of a magazine; the parodist deliberately draws in a specific way. The computer computes. It uses a mathematical operation—which, by definition, is repeatable and will produce the exact same outputs, given the same inputs. (Yes, the results have elements of randomization. We all know that true randomness is impossible for a computer, so they produce quasi-random numbers using things like the system time and so forth. I don't want to split hairs on this specific point. You get what I'm gesturing to. Don't look at the finger, look at the moon.) A prompt limits the database to certain specific sets, which the algorithm assembles according to its internal logic. The input is disconnected from the outputs; anyone could input the same prompt and receive the same art. (Even The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed required an editor.) Generative AI is no more "creating" a piece of visual art than turning a radio dial to a specific station is "composing" the music that plays. The purely mathematical nature of its generative process makes it no qualitatively different from assembling a Lego set according to the directions.

The first obvious challenge to my partial definition is to say that it just restates the premise and shifts the goalposts: art is something that must be made by a person, and thus cannot be made by a computer. Which is fair! This is a verbalization of a belief I've always held about art, and which caused me to immediately (instinctively, unthinkingly) reject the idea that an AI-generated image could be "art." That's how I got into this discursive mess! It's why my brain recoiled when I heard someone call these images "art"!

But it also helps me understand why I instinctively categorize other acts and works as either "art" or "not art." A photograph was taken by a person at a specific time and a specific place, its elements arranged and its moment chosen according to the photographer's visual logic; it is therefore art. A hamburger put together by an underpaid worker at McDonald's is not art; a recipe by a chef that combines existing ingredients in a new way or using a new method is; a meal created by a person who tweaked a recipe might be. (That one might actually run counter to current copyright law, I'm not sure.) A mechanism assembled by a worker on an assembly line, identical in every way to another mechanism made by a different worker, is not art, because there was no choice on the part of the worker. (Could it be art because the designer of the mechanism exercised choice? Depends on the nature of the mechanism and the industry! Venmo me $20 for a debate.) A dance choreographed to produce a specific visual effect is art; an exercise designed to stretch certain muscles in the most efficient and painless way is not art. And so forth.

AI-generated images are not art. (They are also not a medium, which I saw several other commentators claim; an image is an image, regardless of where it comes from. I'm already knee-deep in linguistic debate, let's not cloud the matter any further.) Generative AI is a tool, and there are and can be creative and ethical uses for it! But to claim that it is capable of making art is giving agency to a thing that cannot have it, and claiming that someone who writes "sexy anime girl" in a prompt field is an artist is to expand the meaning of that word to the point of nonsense.

More than one person has brought up Jorge Luis Borges' "The Library of Babel" when talking about the potential of AI-generated works. It's got some bearing on the question, sure, but I feel like the more apropos point of comparison is his story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." In that work, Pierre Menard is a friend of the author's who is attempting to become the author of Don Quixote—not in the sense that he is trying to plagiarize the work, or time-travel and replace Cervantes in history, but that he is trying to make himself into a version of himself that could have independently written Don Quixote. It's partly a critique of elements of literary criticism, in that Quixote would become a far more interesting book (according to the narrator) if it had been written by a 20th-century Frenchman rather than a 17th-century Spaniard (it was written some 28 years before Barthes' "The Death of the Author," for context). But in the context of the current argument of generative AI, and specifically to my fumbling attempts to defining what is and is not art, it's an illustrative example of what I think it all boils down to: any work of art is the work of an artist, who inevitably brings to the work perspective/knowledge/experience/an individual understanding of the world. Ascribing any such perspective to an algorithm is just fetishism. (And not the kind that generative AI is most often used for.)

Or, to put this way more succinctly and directly:

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thetaekookcloset · 2 years ago

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Frequently Asked Questions

Hello! My goal for this page is to have one place where I can address a lot of the common questions I get on this blog, as well as some of the big themes that come up a lot in discussions about Taehyung and Jungkook and the relationship that they have (whether it's platonic or otherwise). I tend to be very wordy, so in an effort to get people the answers they're looking for as efficiently as possible, on this page, I'll attempt to answer these questions succinctly. Then, when relevant, I'll link posts where I've discussed these topics in more detail, for anyone interested in reading more.

My intention is that I'll keep this page up-to-date, adding questions when it seems like they've been asked enough to earn a spot, and adding links to posts that reference things I feel are relevant to the common questions. If you're new here, it might be worth scrolling through this page to get a good sense of my opinions on a lot of the topics that come up consistently.

Putting this together has made me realize what a truly collaborative effort this blog is, so I just want to thank everyone for reaching out with their thoughts, questions, and opinions, as well as those who are just here to think and chat and have fun -- you all make the experience of running this blog unique and genuinely so enjoyable for me, so thank you! I hope it gives you something in return.

Thank you for reading, and if you have any questions that you don't see answered here, my ask box is open! I also have a landing page housing all my frequently-used tags that you can use to help you navigate common topics on the blog.

What do you think the relationship between Taekook actually is? Do you think they're dating?

I don’t claim that Taekook are definitely, absolutely in a romantic relationship, or even that I’m 100% convinced that they are. How much I believe that to be true tends to vary a little bit, because as much evidence as I feel that there is to suggest it, ultimately we know very little about the lives of any of the BTS members, and so I have to, and do, acknowledge that everything I think I understand about them could be incorrect.

That said, I do feel that it’s highly likely that Taehyung and Jungkook are in a romantic relationship. I also feel that, if that’s the case, they’ve likely been together for a long time.

To reiterate, I feel that this is probable, not certain. It’s also possible that they’re just good friends who have what I think is a very sweet relationship dynamic, and that’s cool too. I always try to put my appreciation first, interpretation second.

What I mean by that is that Taekook have the relationship they have regardless of what anyone on the Internet thinks or says about it. I always try to center and prioritize my appreciation for what I can see and observe of their relationship over what I then, myself, interpret those observations to be telling me.

In other words, whether Taehyung and Jungkook are romantically involved or not, Taehyung still goes to Jungkook for help when he throws the basketball on top of the machine, Jungkook still laughs hysterically at Taehyung’s antics, Taehyung still hypes up Jungkook at every opportunity, and Jungkook still looks at Taehyung with the same soft, fond smile.

I like Taekook because I like them, because I enjoy seeing their interactions, and that is more important to me than the idea that they’re dating. Even though I do think it’s likely that they are, my appreciation of their relationship, whatever form it might take, always comes first for me.

More on this topic:

85% Convinced

Taekook in 2022

What makes Taekook seem different to you from any other members?

It can really be simplified down to the idea that, to me, Taekook seem to act like a couple. A lot of it has to do with really subtle things like body language, the way they look at each other, and the way they talk to and about each other, as well as the ways that they're treated by the people around them and by Big Hit. There's plenty of video out there of Taekook being separated when they're on cam, even if you don't put stock in the fact that for years they barely worked closely together visibly.

The members also show the way they associate Jungkook and Taehyung with each other: saying they're the same person with different names; shouting for one of them when that one is actually already with them because they're actually looking for the other; looking at the other when one of them does something funny or cute, showing a subconscious recognition of their association.

As far as Taekook themselves go, they consistently demonstrate their closeness throughout nearly all the content they're in. Their physical contact displays a degree of intimacy I don't see between the other members, they make references to each other and spending time with each other often, they show a possessiveness over each other's bodies/time/attention/belongings that is more extreme than anything I've seen between the other members, and they often communicate silently, with nothing more than a look or a brief touch to convey what they mean between themselves.

More on this topic:

Why Taekook? Part Two: What makes them different?

Body Language that Sets Taekook Apart

How do you explain...?

The Moment I Thought "Maybe"

Taekook Sleeping/Napping Together

Jungkook Being Harsh Toward Taehyung

Taekook don't do anything romantic though, do they?

We only ever see Taehyung and Jungkook interact when they're essentially on the clock, working, with a few very rare exceptions. Taking that into consideration, I feel it makes perfect sense that we haven't seen them do much that we would be able to unambiguously label as "romantic."

Most of the time, it seems to me like Taekook are acting like a couple who are in a professional setting: they're close and affectionate, but they still have to keep it appropriate for the circumstances. Add to that the fact that if they are together, they need to keep it hidden behind, at the very least, a healthy layer of plausible deniability.

That said, I actually think that over the years, Taekook have displayed a lot of behaviors that are highly romance-coded, both on and off the stage. Everything from Jungkook rushing ahead of several people just to hold Taehyung's hand off camera, to his "I Thought You Were Beyond My Imagination, but Then I Think Again and You Are Way Beyond My Imagination" award, to Taehyung mentioning Jungkook at every chance he gets whether anyone asked or not, to the two of them seemingly sharing a ridiculously expensive bottle of wine from the airport -- these two do quite a lot that's pretty romantic, all things considered.

More on this topic:

Most Romantic TK Moments

Taekook Song Analysis

MORE Romantic TK Moments

Moments TK Have Been Visibly Into Each Other

What do you think is the deal between Taekook and Big Hit/HYBE?

I think there's abundant evidence to suggest that Big Hit has historically been very invested in obscuring the relationship between Taehyung and Jungkook -- I think this is pretty inarguably true regardless of whether or not that relationship is romantic in nature.

Personally, I think this is most likely the case because that relationship is romantic in nature, and that HYBE would necessarily have to hide that fact because the consequences of doing otherwise could legitimately be catastrophic, especially several years ago.

It could also be that the company has stepped in on their relationship for other reasons, such as not wanting arguably the two most popular members to overshadow the rest of the group. Please note that I think it's more likely that a corporation would prefer to profit off of that popularity than push it into the background (and the fact that they repeatedly choose not to profit off of it is pretty telling to me), but it's still a possibility.

However, I think it seems like since late 2019/early 2020, Taehyung and Jungkook have had a new degree of freedom to interact with each other in more natural ways. I can only think of one example where they were separated while interacting on cam post-early 2020 (during Bang Bang Con). Since then, it seems to me that they've negotiated a better deal for themselves when it comes to their on cam interactions and relationship, and they're able to show themselves more authentically, now more than ever.

When it comes to things like unit work in photoshoots and music, it's hard to know whether there's a level of separation between them based on Big Hit's decisions or their own. All I feel confident in saying is that it's clear they never liked to be separated while interacting, and that particular practice seems to have been left behind in the last two-and-a-half years.

More on this topic:

Taekook's ITS Convo: A Close Reading

(My) Taekook Timeline

GDA 2020 and TK Being More Open

Why do people say TK have a bad relationship with BH?

What do you think is going on between Taehyung, Jungkook, and Jimin?

If you’re interested in this topic, you’re in luck! It’s a popular one around here.

I think Taehyung, Jungkook, and Jimin are all genuinely friends. I think Taehyung and Jimin seem to have a soft, almost familial kind of bond, but that's just how I read their interactions.

Jungkook and Jimin I think are likely something I would consider to be best friends. They seem to have a lot in common, both in terms of who they are as people and what they like -- they have unique ways of relating to one another, seem to spend a lot of time together, and appear to me to have a close, fun relationship that is actively maintained. The entire maknae line seem to have remarkably few physical boundaries amongst themselves.

I don't personally think there's anything romantic between Jungkook and Jimin. I understand what their shippers see between them, but their bond, while close, has always read as platonic to me, even with some familial undertones.

That said, there do seem to be some moments of tension when the three of them are involved, and I'm not always sure what to make of them. Some I think can likely be chalked up to Jungkook and Taehyung (primarily Taehyung in this case) wishing that they could interact as freely with each other as they both can with Jimin. Some may have something to do with the fact that Jikook is a popular ship. Some may have something to do with the fact that, shipping aside, Jikook is a well-promoted unit by Big Hit.

I don't feel confident saying it's one or another most of the time, partly because I imagine that tension comes from a mix of different things. What I do feel confident saying is that the three of them love each other a lot.

Jungkook and Jimin have a silly, somewhat raunchy relationship. Taehyung and Jimin have a very sweet relationship, the kind where they can sit quietly on a video call for a significant length of time, just being with each other. The Vminkook V Live from November 2021 in LA should be proof enough that these three have a good relationship, I think, regardless of whatever romantic entanglements may or may not be involved within their trio.

More on this topic:

So what about Jikook?

Jungkook Going to Japan with Jimin

Why are there leaked photos of Jikook but not Taekook?

Do I think Jimin unfairly promotes Jikook?

Is Jungkook more affectionate with Jimin than Taehyung?

What’s with the weird tension between Vminkook?

Follow-up on Vminkook tension

With more Jikook content than TK content, why believe in TK?

How do you think the other members feel about Taekook?

If my read on the relationship between Taehyung and Jungkook is correct -- that they're together and have been for a long time -- then I expect all of the members are well aware of this and are supportive about it. I think there's evidence to suggest that many of them, if not all of them, have stepped in to try to keep Taehyung and Jungkook discrete over the years, but it's clear to me that all of the members love each other, and I believe there's plenty of proof that all of them love and support Taekook both as individuals and together, even if they have felt the need at various times to encourage them to behave differently.

More on this topic:

Members’ Dynamics with Taekook

Taekook and Namjoon at Bang Bang Con

Yoongi’s Long “I Love You” Text

Do you think Taekook will ever come out? Do you think their families and friends know about them?

I doubt very much that Taehyung and Jungkook will ever "come out" in any sort of public, formal way. I've been told and have read in various places that "coming out" officially like this is a very Western thing to do anyway, but even setting that aside, I don't think there's any reason that if Taekook are together, they would need to do something like that.

Personally, I feel pretty confident in thinking that if they are together, their friends and family probably all know about it, because they've both been relatively open with their identities even publicly, and because they have strong, close relationships with their families.

If they've been together for a long time, it would just seem to make sense that their families know about it. Beyond that, as long as they can interact in ways that feel freeing and comfortable for them, why would they need to risk the consequences of coming out more publicly than that? I think that in the past, they did chafe against the restrictions on them, but it seems to me like they've found a balance between keeping the necessary privacy and being able to live as their authentic selves. I hope for their sakes that I'm right about that, because they, like everyone, deserve to have that freedom and happiness.

More on this topic:

Do I think their parents know about them?

"Coming Out” is a Western Concept

Do you think Taekook have ever broken up/had an off period/dated other people?

No, I don't think it's likely that, assuming Taekook are together now, they've ever broken up for any significant length of time, or that they have any kind of arrangement that would allow them to see other people while still together.

I think this for several reasons, including the fact that they've admitted themselves to be pretty possessive people where romantic partners are concerned, there doesn't seem to me to be any significant length of time where they've been demonstrably less close, and I imagine that if there were a breakup within the group, the tension that would result from that would be extremely difficult to hide.

More on this topic:

Do I think Taekook have ever dated anyone else?

(My) Taekook Timeline

What are your favorite Taekook moments?

I have so, so many favorite moments. A few that come immediately to mind are the DNA moment from Day 4 in Las Vegas, the GDA 2020 cuddle moment, the Harry Styles concert, basically every interaction they had in In the Soop season one (with the exception of their conversation, which I have a whole post addressing and while I don't see anything inherently wrong with it, I don't find it particularly interesting for its own sake).

I love Taekook when they're being soft together probably the most, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't also love to see those little glimmers of tension, even when they bicker, because I feel like those moments show what they're really like, and I love getting that peek behind the curtain.

More on this topic:

Some All-Time Favorite TK Moments

Most Romantic TK Moments

GDA 2020 Cuddle

How do you explain...?

Weird TK Moments

Favorite Recent Moments (”Yet to Come” Promo and FESTA 2022)

Don’t you feel like Taehyung mentions Jungkook/shows affection more often than Jungkook mentions/shows affection to him? Is Taehyung more invested than Jungkook is?

This is an idea that’s been cropping up a lot lately, but I strongly feel that the answer is no. I think Taehyung and Jungkook are just different people and they have different ways of expressing their love and affection, both for each other and for others as well.

Taehyung is very physically affectionate and focused on words of affirmation. As a result, he touches Jungkook a lot and talks about Jungkook a lot. Jungkook, on the other hand, has grown to be a pretty private person, and keeps a lot very close to his chest. He tends to show his affection through acts of service, like giving massages and making food. I think that between the types of love languages they have, and the fact that Taehyung is a bit more open when it comes to this sort of thing, we just see and hear more about it from Tae.

He tends to show smaller but more consistent displays of affection, such as putting his hand on Jungkook’s shoulder and mentioning him to ARMY when he goes live. Jungkook, on the other hand, isn’t as forthcoming and is less likely to display these small moments of affection (though he does still do it pretty often, just less frequently than Taehyung), but he’s more likely to show a sudden, much bigger/more dramatic display, such as sitting on Taehyung’s lap in Vegas.

In other words, I think Taehyung is casual but consistent, whereas Jungkook is a little less frequent with it, but more intense, especially if you’re keeping an eye out, since he often lets out a lot more of his affection when he isn’t the focus of attention.

Ultimately, I do think we see Jungkook’s love and adoration for Taehyung come out in obvious ways less often than we see Taehyung’s for him, but we still see it consistently -- we just have to be open to seeing it in the ways he shows it, rather than expecting him to show it the same way Taehyung does.

More on this topic:

Recent Differences in Taekook’s Behavior (TK in 2022)

Is Jungkook disinterested in Taehyung?

Anecdotal Experiences from Followers

Jungkook Not Responding to Tae

Taehyung Mentions Jungkook More Often than Jungkook Mentions Him

What do you think Taekook's relationship is like? Do you think they're as jealous as some people believe?

I think we have a tendency to conflate possessiveness and jealousy in this fandom. They're not the same thing. Jealousy is an emotion that can come out of possessiveness, but it can also be caused by other things, and possessiveness itself doesn't necessarily have to lead to jealousy either. I do think Jungkook and Taehyung are both naturally possessive people -- and if they've been in a relationship for a long time, I think it's very likely that this trait has been not only allowed but encouraged in each of them over the years.

I don't think this is something that should be romanticized, but I also don't think it's something that needs to be seen as inherently negative. I do think there are some examples of what seem to be pretty clear jealousy expressed by both Taehyung and Jungkook toward other people at various times over the years, but I haven't seen anything I would call jealous behavior from either of them in content from the last few years, which suggests to me that they have a level of security in their relationship which keeps them from feeling or expressing that emotion as much these days.

I think that if they ever do feel jealousy where the members specifically are concerned, it's likely because they've felt jealous that the others can interact as freely with one another as they like when Taehyung and Jungkook have restrictions -- but that's just a guess based on how generally touchy and affectionate BTS is as a group.

Where possessiveness itself is concerned, yes, I think this is something both Taehyung and Jungkook feel and engage with. There are examples of them displaying it, from things as obvious as putting a stop to moments of fanservice to those as subtle as asking for a particular kind of snack when it's the other's turn to grab something because there's an inherent sense of shared possession of anything that one or the other of them has.

As I mentioned, I don't think this is an inherently bad thing, as long as it doesn't stop either of them from doing what they want to do, expressing themselves freely, etc. Frankly it seems to be something they're both into and appreciative of, so I say let them have their fun.

More on this topic:

Jealousy vs. Possessiveness

Jealousy Moments

What do you think Taekook's living arrangements are?

Generally speaking, I don't think we have much real information on this and therefore can't even really speculate on it, which I think is a good thing. However, if I had to guess, I would figure that they have their own places but spend most of their time together.

Just from a common sense perspective, I think it would be reasonable to assume that even if they're together, they would want to/need to have their own places on paper. It's also interesting to note that while all the members were talking about their individual homes during the FESTA 2022 dinner, Taehyung was missing from the table while the guys were talking about Jungkook's place, and Taehyung's was never mentioned at all.

Speaking of their conversation about Jungkook's place, it doesn't sound like somewhere a person would spend most of their time: extra mattresses scattered around (Jungkook clarified that the guys exaggerated the mattress situation, but did admit that he has some), laundry in the dining room -- that sort of thing does not sound like a place someone spends a lot of time.

In addition to that, when the guys had some time off after their LA concerts at the end of 2021, Taehyung went to Hawaii with his family and Jungkook went back to Korea. While there, he posted to his new Instagram about being bored and not knowing how to entertain himself when he was alone, essentially revealing (at a time when Taehyung happened to be out of the country) that he does not spend most of his time on his own.

Between that and Taehyung frequently talking about spending lots of time with Jungkook, staying up late gaming with Jungkook, Jungkook getting up early these days, etc., I think it makes sense to guess that they spend a lot of their living/non-working time together in the same space.

More on this topic:

What do I think their living arrangements are?

Living Arrangements Past and Present

Can you recommend other places with information and discussions about Taekook?

Yes -- I only really keep up with a couple of blogs here on Tumblr, and I'm not on Twitter very much. Most of my updates and other information/content comes from YouTube, as well as original content from Big Hit. I have a whole post that lists the primary places that I personally enjoy for Taekook content.

Would you be bothered if we found out definitively that Taekook were platonic all along?

To bring things full circle: no, I wouldn't be bothered, because I always try to make sure that my appreciation of their relationship, as it is, whatever it is, comes before my interpretation of it.

I don't feel it's my right or anyone else's to determine what's appropriate behavior for two people to exhibit together -- only those two people can know what's comfortable and genuine for them. Queerbaiting is a real issue, but I don't think anyone in BTS can be said to be participating in it, because I don't see any evidence that they're being manipulative. Ultimately, our interpretations of any and all of the members' relationships are our own, and our own responsibility.

I'm here because I love BTS, I enjoy Taekook's interactions, and I think they might be dating. It's not that deep. If it turns out they aren't dating after all, I still love BTS and enjoy Taekook's interactions. Nothing really changes for me because I have no ownership over their relationship, romantic or otherwise. I just enjoy what I get to see of it and think it's fun to talk about.

More on this topic:

Would I feel like I'd been led on if Taekook isn't real?

Have TK crossed a line?

BTS, Fanservice, and Queerbaiting

#frequently asked questions

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heloisedaphnebrightmore · 3 years ago

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How to grow your blog - For Beginners!

Since I receive quite a few messages about how I grew my blog and how others could improve theirs, I decided to do this post to help you with whatever knowledge I gathered throughout my time on here.

Disclaimer: These are only my personal observations, there's no proven success if used and they may differ in other people's case.

Things I will discuss below will include;

Interactions

Masterlists / Navigations

Tags

Although I mentioned that tags can be unreliable, they're still a necessity. Search for relevant tags and use them when you post your art. Meanwhile reblogging is the easiest way to get your creations out there, people do regularly search for tags when they wish to see something and the only way they will find you is if your post appears in tags.

If you're not sure whether your tags are working, you can always head to your dashboard, click on the 👤 in the right upper corner, go down to the posts menu and look for the post you want to check on. Once you found it, click on the tag that you would like to search for. If it shows up in the recent tab of the search results, it means the tag is working, but if after 5 minutes of posting it's still not there, you might need to reupload your work. Unfortunately Tumblr has some issues with the tags and it takes two or even three attempts at times to upload something correctly, whilst other times it might work immediately.

On a side note, if you reblog nsfw content or triggering content, you might want to tag those appropriately. Tw food, tw blood, tw. etc. Depends on the content of the triggering post.

You can also create your own tags. Such as "XY's inbox" for your asks or "XY shares" for anything that you reblog from others. This way people can block those tags and see only those posts on your blog that they might find interesting.

Taglists

Taglists aren't a necessity, especially because there are many different ways to notify your followers of new creations, but it's certainly useful. The reason I think taglists are important is because tumblr won't always show your posts on everyone's dashboard, especially if they follow loads of people. However, when you use a taglist, and mention people on your newest posts, they will be able to get a notification of your update.

Of course, if you feel like tagging people might be bothersome, you might create a side-blog where you reblog your posts and people can turn on notifications to be notified of your updates. This option has been rather popular recently, because usually we reblog and post many things on our main blogs and people don't want to get notified about every trivial post, so a side-blog with the most important posts might just be it for you.

Simplicity

This might be confusing so let me be less vague. As I said, we can be rather lazy and that doesn't mean we're bad people, we might just had a difficult day or too much to study or work and we just want easy access to content. Being simple is a necessity. Though it's good to be creative and unique, such as creating a Masterlist that's called "Where the stars shine", it's not obvious for many what is hidden behind those words and they might not be curious enough to check it out. By being simple and obvious, as I said before, you're offering your content on a silver platter. Simple and neat. Sometimes people just need things to be easy to find.

I have been told many times before that my blog is very organised and I feel very proud about that because it means people can find things easily. Of course, it's not proven, but I think that could be a factor in growing your blog. But as I've said, these are only my personal observations.

I hope this helps. Have a nice day :) Heloise Daphne Brightmore

#writing #content creation #writing advice #creator advice #blogging tips #blog writing #content writing #heloise rambles #grow your blog

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xbaebsae · 4 years ago

Text

Changes and Deleted Content Part 2 - Far Cry 5: Features and Missions

This is a small passion project series of posts where I share some insight of what’s hidden in the game(s) files, but also some general observations. The main focus will be on character changes or deletions with a few words about functions and deprecated missions.

What will not be touched upon are a lot of the things the Resistance Mod on PC restores, namely deleted store weapons and clothes, weather systems and general gameplay related things like skinning animations. I also won’t go into audio files and their content, as @lulu2992 is already working on an amazing series for FC5 that summarizes them per character.

This part will be significantly shorter Edit from post finishing-Angy: This post turned out really damn long despite only discussing some scrapped or changed features and a couple of deprecated mission strings. I still hope you find this as interesting to read as I found writing and investigating it :)

1. Changed and Scrapped Features

1.1 Guns/Fangs for Hire

Just for reference, the release version of the game has 9 unique GFH/FFH available + 3 slots for random specialists you can hire throughout the world.

Among the game’s UI textures for tutorials is this image, showing an earlier version of the GFH screen.

What this indicates is that the planned amount for active GFHs you can have was originally 4; or the top row could function as some sort of favorites tab. We will probably never know for certain.

Interestingly though, this version has slots for 20 GFHs in total, 18 either filled a character icon or a locked symbol, suggesting the originally planned unique GFH count was 18.

Considering almost every NPC in-game has spawn-able archetypes with battle audio fully in place it is possible that we were supposed to be able to recruit more of them. I will return to the matter of recruitment shortly.

Another thing I’d like to open up for consideration is that there may have been plans for (ex-)cultist GFHs or at least areas where they act friendly towards the deputy. Reason for this assumption is the fact that cultists have recorded lines for when you meet them (spawn them), aim weapons at them (the taunts GFH and friendlies do too), along with idle lines when you use mods to spawn them as friendly followers. The game has no purpose for most of these lines, as you never walk into peaceful cultists outside of the intro. In the intro you have no weapons to aim at anyone, making it impossible to trigger these lines.

You may argue they were recorded for the arcade, but the Seeds are also featured in it and have none of those. However, they may also be a leftover from scrapped missions that would feature cultists that don’t shoot you on sight.

Additionally to that early menu screenshot, I have also found an old reddit thread discussing the game’s Uplay page near release because of the following image:

Unfortunately I was not able to find this particular page myself anymore, and knowing how short lived everything is nowadays, it might be lost in time forever. The commenters discuss that the three additional slots here refer to potential DLC characters, but we don’t get to use any of the DLC companions in the main game (nor do the DLCs share the main game’s art direction). So, this might be another indicator for additionally planned GFH/FFH we never got to see.

One of these was likely the Eagle FFH called ‘’Freedom’’ (Character/Unique/FFH_Eagle_Freedom), which was partially restored through mods on PC as its loaders and everything are still present. It is unknown why this was scrapped.

It also appears that there once were inventory (purchaseable?) items for almost each GFH (Boomer and Jess have none), as these placeholder icons exist inside the game’s ui\icons\inventory folder:

Possible functions: Quest items you needed to obtain to recruit them (implying changed missions); Gift items (for potential level up?)

Now to return to the matter of recruitment: Deprecated mission strings suggest that originally you had to hire unique GFHs similarly to random ones; and that was part of quest lines. These lines appear in ‘oasisstrings’, the game’s main language file(s):

HIRE Jess RECRUIT Adelaide Drubman ADD Adelaide to your squad

In light of the old GFH screen I actually looked up the definition of ‘Squad’, and on wikipedia it is listed that a Squad is a team of 5+ members, further strengthening the theory that originally you could have 4 active GFH (plus the Deputy they’d be 5, therefore a squad).

1.2 In-game Wiki menu

Some of the previous Far Cry titles have a sort of wiki menu that features short bios of characters, explanations of locations, resources and weaponry. New Dawn sort of brought part of this back with the ‘Survival Guide’ (accessible from the pause menu), but 5 does not have this at all. However, in the ui files there are still texture leftovers, implying this feature was planned and it had sections for Animals, Base Jumps, Characters, Destructible Structures, Fish, Locations, Parking Spots (Garages), Plants and Treasure Hunts. The following image shows the ‘undiscovered’ symbols arranged in that order.

Again, no text entries along with a lot of duplicate and unfinished images imply this was scrapped early.

You can view the additional images (minus characters, because they will be handled in the next posts) here.

2. Abandoned Missions

This section will focus on mission strings that still exist in ‘oasisstrings’. For the sake of readability I removed the style code the game uses and the line numbers. You can easily find them by searching part of the text in the files or website listed in References. Please keep in mind that only the mission titles themselves are 100% like that in the files, any assumption as to what they might have been used for is purely speculative, but I attempt to always provide a reasonable explanation with evidence for the theories presented. Also I am not perfect, so it is possible I missed something in-game. In that case please do correct me!

2.1. Investigation Type objectives

There is a set of objectives listed that imply a different setup for Willis Huntley’s mission. It introduces the objectives PHOTOGRAPH, TAG, LISTEN and INTERROGATE:

PHOTOGRAPH potential property PHOTOGRAPH an animal slaughter TAG the target PHOTOGRAPH the target LISTEN to the conversation INTERROGATE the target PHOTOGRAPH cult signs and rituals: BRING the photos back to Willis

The release build mission has you tail someone and steal a VHS tape. None of the above objectives appear. It’s interesting to see that at one point there were mechanics in consideration that included intel gathering.

2.2. Quest centered around Melvin

The only Melvin I could find in relation to Far Cry 5 is Nadine Abercrombie’s grandfather. Melvin Abercrombie joined the cult. It isn’t assured that these objectives refer to him, but if they do it’d mean a potential mission where you speak to a lower ranked cultist.

Please Note that mission strings are not always in correct order.

TALK to Melvin LOOT Melvin's corpse REACH Melvin's house WAIT for Melvin to arrive GO MEET Melvin

2.3. The ‘Redeemer’ Objectives

At some point there was a quest-line revolving around something called the ‘Redeemer’ in Holland Valley. I could not find out what this thing really was supposed to be, but it sounds like it was either a boat or a submarine (???). In this line it appears that the garage in Fall’s End had actual relevance.

FIND a similar engine BRING engine to Mary's garage TALK to Mary's assistant TOW Redeemer Back the Garage (this typo is also in the file) SUBMERGE the Redeemer FLIP the Redeemer upside down GET IN the Tow Truck PUT the Redeemer on the Flat Bed

What this also implies is the inclusion of tow trucks and that there was a ‘Mary’s assistant’ character.

2.4. A few seperate Entries before we focus on plot relevant ones

In light of the afore mentioned wiki menues there is also an objective type that goes very well with its character section:

DISCOVER this character.

This could be attached to unknown entries in the character list.

There also is an unused objective called:

FIND the cow in the field

Which at first glance made me believe it was related to the mission at Cattle co., but it is not used there or anywhere else. I suppose we will never find out what was so special about this mysterious cow.

TAKE Joseph's writings

is also an interesting entry, as it is not related to the mission where you burn his book. This is again an unused string with unknown original purpose.

2.5. Mary May and John Seed

There are two particularly interesting unused mission objectives in relation to these two characters.

For one, it looks like originally we were supposed to rescue Mary May from John’s ranch:

RESCUE Mary May From John Seed's Ranch

This could either be a replacement for saving her in Fall’s End or it is a mission that appeared later on in which John possibly captured her. It gets more possible applications with the next one, though.

FIND John and Mary May's secrets

Now, this one caught my attention immediately, because there are two big things that come to mind in terms of possible application. It could refer back to the novel Absolution in which Mary May gets captured and tattooed by John, heavily implying that part of the plot that made it to the novel was originally intended to be shown in the game (we will get back to this in the character episode when talking about Holly).

Additionally, keeping the previous objective in mind, it could also imply that Mary has been converted during her capture (or her capture was planned) and played a different role in the story overall. Of course, all of this is only speculation as we will probably never know, but the objective specifically says ‘John AND Mary May’s secrets’, refering to shared secrets, not just one of Mary herself (which would fit more into the tattoo theory).

If you have ever even considered the possibility that Ubisoft might have cut a lot of stuff from the Whitetail region of the game, the rest of this Mission section should finally prove this to you. I’d like to make clear here that this is unbiased. I have tried to dig up deleted content equally in all regions but it just turns out that this is the one they really went wild with. There is nothing that stands out in terms of deleted or changed missions in the Henbane area and the Holland Valley content is mostly not that plot relevant minus the last examples just mentioned.

2.6. Eli and the Wolf’s Den

In the final version of the game we are told that Eli is an important character, but he is not very active in any way. Where Mary May assists you on the way to John’s Ranch and Tracey and the others at the prison fight by your side in defense missions, Eli will stay at the Wolf’s Den and have you run his errands for him. Just like the other mentioned characters he has full fight capabilities though. His AI is capable of using that bow, despite him never leaving the bunker.

As it turns out, he used to be a far more active character and there were multiple ways you could encounter him for the first time. For reference: In the game as it is now you will only meet him when he and his people rescue the deputy after Jacob’s first trial. You cannot enter the Wolf’s Den prior to this point.

Inside the game’s animations folders are these three subfolders including the respective files (JJ and Key03 is how Eli is often referred to in the files, I will get back to this in the character post):

This means there were three ways that you would encounter Eli: Inside a cabin, through being captured in a net or by being released by Perkins. This was most likely Doc Perkins, giving her a bit more significance in the game.

The main cutscene files for these are not present anymore, only the animations remain so I could not find out where the exact locations for these were supposed to be at. I however, loaded these animations into a game cutscene so we get to look at them anyway. I have chosen Jacob’s death cutscene for the simple reason that there’s only the player + 1 NPC, it is daytime and there’s no intrusive DOF blurring everything. The video below shows all of them.

Keep in mind that only the player animation matters in the first two! Ignore the rest. The third one features Doc Perkins and has her animation applied to her. As you can see it is very very unfinished, but it shows that she possibly unties the deputy or opens an animal cage, then drives away in a car.

youtube

This unused mission string supports the theory of these different ways further, as it implies that you met him somewhere and he would guide you to the den:

FOLLOW Eli into the Wolf's Den

There are several other objectives that suggest a more active Eli, who might have accompanied you on some missions:

WAIT for Eli to arrive GO with Eli GO inside the Wolf's Den

2.7. Jacob and the Veteran Center

Before swan diving down a very deep rabbit hole, let’s address this unused mission string first:

TALK to Deputy Pratt

Sounds very unspectacular and like something you would do at some point, but this is never an objective in the game. The intended function will forever remain unknown most likely, but possibilities are vast, especially with the upcoming abandoned objectives.

There are hints at an alternate useage of Jacob’s bunker (specifically called bunker here and not armory). Mission strings are:

FIND a way out of Jacob's Bunker LEAVE Jacob's Bunker

Again, on first sight you’d think these are just what’s there in-game. But they aren’t. During the final mission it goes from RESCUE Deputy Pratt straight to ESCAPE Jacob’s Armory. There is no indicator that you’d need to find a way out. The objectives above hint that it was similar to John’s and Faith’s bunker initially, where you had to do a few more things before escaping.

An observation derived from the game’s subtitle file is that at one point there might have been a differentiation between ‘Armory’ and ‘Bunker’ as, most likely, a random NPC says "I don't know where Jacob's bunker is. I'm not sure anybody does, but it's out there somewhere." The armory is (other than John’s and Faith’s bunkers) directly next to a main road, next to McKinley Dam. It is quite impossible to miss. Therefore this statement, along with the inconsistent switch between calling it ‘armory’, ‘bunker’ or ‘gate’, could mean there was originally a different bunker and the armory really functioned as such.

Before moving on to more mission strings, there is one more subtitle entry worth mentioning: "When you tried to arrest Joseph, Jacob got wind of it and things got real crazy here in the Whitetail Mountains." It heavily implies that at some point, Joseph’s family might not have been intended to be present during the opening, and they instead found out about the arrest afterwards. As far fetched as it sounds at first, it does check out with the inactivity and absence of the three heralds after you cuff Joseph (and in case you ever wondered what the three of them are doing while you guide Joseph outside, they de-spawn and are gone as soon as you turn around).

But enough about that and let’s get back to more missions we never got to see.

For instance there is:

GO TO the Veteran's Center

Which, as most of you know, is impossible during the game because you get repositioned everytime you attempt to go close. This string implies a different kind of mission at some point.

HUNT Jacob

No, this also does not appear in the game. The final mission goes from DESTROY Wolf Beacons to KILL Jacob Seed. Possibility in combination with the previous entry is that you were supposed to follow him back to the Veteran Center and that’s where the final fight would be. It could also imply a different kind of trial.

Small observation because we are talking about the final fight: The Prima Games’ guide (based on a pre-release build of the game, it will be featured more prominently in the next post) depicts Jacob at the bottom of the mountain during this encounter. WIth a lot of perseverance I’m sure you can somehow manage to replicate this in-game. But it is interesting regardless that they chose this image. It might imply that at some point he was not positioned on top of the hill, and instead closer to the area he finally dies in.

Before we move on, here are a few other interesting unused strings:

TRAIN TRAIN yourself INTERACT with Jacob for finishing takedown TALK to Jacob

They imply a different way to end the fight along with the possibility to talk to Jacob at some point (unrelated to each other mind you). I have no clue in what kind of scenario you were supposed to talk to him. The only explanation I have is that trials were possibly supposed to be different at some point and maybe they had more intentions to explore the whole brainwashed aspect of it to the point you casually took strolls around St Francis. Now before you say I just made that up, I implore you to wait till after the next part to call me out on it, because there are reasons I offer that possibility up for discussion here.

TRAIN and TRAIN yourself might not be linked to this region at all. But it is interesting to have these sort of objectives as they form the ‘Train, Hunt, Kill, Sacrifice’ part of the region’s theme, when you refer back to other mission strings: TRAIN (yourself), HUNT Jacob, KILL Jacob Seed.

Now to get to the main part. If you ever used mods on PC that let you access the Veteran Center, you will have noticed that the AI acts very strange. Your assigned GFH might wander around, aim at nothing or even attack civillians. Cultists inside the area will not always attack you, while civillians will do. This is most likely why the developers were so quick to patch out the tricks to access the region without mods.

I have seen multiple speculations circling around, but the one that always struck me as the most plausible one is that there was some kind of mission after Pratt rescues you from the cage. It is a very discontinuous cutscene, in which you transition from the cage directly to the top floor of the Veteran Center, implying there were no problems for Pratt and the Deputy to get there, despite having to cross the entire guarded frontyard and going through multiple building floors to get to the office. So, naturally I wasted some time of my life trying to dig up stuff that proves this theory right and I...well I did find something.

Important note so you understand what’s going on here: It is very common in games to load objects underneath the map (outside of sight of the player) to assure they are properly loaded in when they are needed. I have seen posts circulating around which depicted Pratt underneath the building, suggesting they eventually had an area planned there. The more likely case is that Pratt was loaded there for later use in a cutscene.

Why am I saying that? Well, this following screenshot was taken underneath the map during the cutscene where Pratt rescues the deputy and it transitions to the top of the building. I have changed the time to daytime for a bit better visibility.

What you see here is an entirely unused set of either cutscene or gameplay elements. A truck, Jacob (who’s absent in the cutscene we see), Pratt, a random NPC, a bag, a small table (unseen in cutscene), a single door (unseen in cutscene), a double door and 3 small pieces of paper (only two are in cutscene). I have kept watch on these assets for the entirety of the cutscene and none of them were moved into place. Meaning that all of these were here to be used in either a different cutscene or even a gameplay segment.

It brings me back to the mission theory, where there was a potential stealth segment between leaving the cage and entering the office. Maybe there was an alternate cutscene for the case where you’d be caught and the one we see in the game is the one after successfully sneaking up there? We will never know for certain again but it is one possible explanation as to why these assets even still exist. It would also check out with the TALK to Deputy Pratt mission string, as you maybe had to speak to him after reaching a certain area.

Here are also some additional screenshots of the room in front of the office:

It was modelled and filled with a few detail props we never get to see much of.

Another potential mission, which would explain the broken AI behavior better, is the already mentioned theory that they might have planned to do more with the whole brainwashing aspect. Cultists inside the Vet Center area do not shoot and are allied, while civillians act hostile, implying while the player is there they are considered to be allied to cultists. TALK to Deputy Pratt, TALK to Jacob or TRAIN (yourself) could have taken place during this also. Something that could support this theory is also this unused timelapse marking days passing:

youtube

3. The Game’s Title and Closing Words

Internally the game is often called ‘fc zeta’, ‘zeta’ or ‘fcz’. So *sigh* of course I tried to find a deeper meaning behind it all and came to the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet ‘Zeta’. If you count Far Cry: Primal as a real standalone title, Far Cry 5 is the sixth Far Cry release. But because the Greek were special snowflakes or something, the sixth letter actually has the value of 7. So Zeta is actually 7 despite being the sixth. If you count Blood Dragon as a Far Cry release it’d mean FC5 is the 7th release. However, these theories exclude all the expansions and stuff for earlier Far Cry games.

Another indicator that Zeta might have been more than just a number, is this texture used as a decal on some clothing materials:

I have not found someone in-game who has this anywhere, and they might just disable the transparency and use it only for the American flag. But still, why would they make such a decal texture in the first place? Maybe very early name of the cult or resistance group?

Before closing this incredibly long essay, here is an old, unused version of the logo found in the files :)

Phew, we finally reached the end. If you made it all the way down here: CONGRATULATIONS you just read a long af essay! Again, i’d like to remind you that a lot of what you��ve read is pure speculation. I tried to prove my arguments as best as I could with evidence that I provided but only Ubisoft knows what really happened. And they are unlikely to tell us.

The next post will focus on the expansive character list and I may split it into parts because there is a lot to say and show about some characters.

I hope you have a nice day and thank you for reading ♥

_______________________________________________________

References:

text.farcry.info (website where you can look through Oasisstrings yourself!) languages\english\oasisstrings.oasis.bin languages\english\oasisstrings_subtitles.oasis.bin animations\narrative\cin_key03_q01_b00_meet_jj_cabin animations\narrative\cin_key03_q01_b00_meet_jj_net animations\narrative\cin_key03_q01_b00_meet_jj_release domino\user\fcz_proto_ld domino\user\zeta_dlcm ui\resources\textures\04_menu\tooltips ui\resources\textures\06_icons\inventory ui\resources\textures\05_hud\tutorials\_images __Unknown\XBT\AE800D066AB2E84A.xbt __Unknown\XBT\FD080AA2BBABE691.xbt Zeta on Wikipedia (english) Squad on Wikipedia (english) Prima Games guide (2018, collector’s edition, print and digital) reddit.com/r/farcry/comments/89nsf1/so_theres_3_missing_guns_for_hire_here_maybe_3/ __Unknown\BIK\C6AB10EDBC81E933.bik

#far cry 5 #gameinfo #obligatory longessay tag #if you ever wondered how much of a nerd i am #look at these essays #and know that i enjoyed writing and capturing footage of every second of this

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panharmonium · 4 years ago

Note

Hey, do you ship merthur? I have conflicted feelings about it because Merlin does love Arthur but also their relationship is kinda shitty.

short answer: i do not

longer answer: i might not be the right person to ask about this, because i don’t really “ship” anything? it’s not how i engage with fandom. (disclaimer: this is not a value judgment of folks who do engage with fandom that way. just an explanation of how my own brain works.)

extra long answer: under the cut, because i suppose it was only a matter of time before someone asked me about merlin/arthur, and i might as well put my entire response in one place so that next time, i can just link to it.

questions like this are a little tough for me to answer, because i am completely uninterested in romance as a premise. if it’s not there, i don’t care. if it is there, i often wish it weren’t, because it’s almost never developed in a way that lives up to my standards. i don’t always mind if something contains romantic relationships (provided they’re written well), but i don’t want them to be the point of a story. i honestly cannot think of anything less interesting to me than a story that has as its main plotline “x character falls in love with y character.” for me, in my brain, it’s like, “okay...that’s it? do you have anything else to say?” there is literally nothing about that that i care about.

this can be a little difficult to navigate in fandom, because one of the oft-heard commendations of “fandom” is ‘gosh, fandom is so wonderful, we can watch the same two characters fall in love again and again and again in a million different scenarios!’ which is true, for the people who care about that sort of thing, but that’s not actually ‘fandom.’ that’s shipping. and there’s nothing wrong with shipping, but shipping and fandom are not the same thing, and they’ve become so conflated that it can be very difficult to engage in the latter without being absolutely swamped by the former.

many times, for me, fandom can feel synonymous with shipping. there was a post i reblogged recently whose tags described shipping as often feeling like a prerequisite to engaging with fandom, and that is often what it feels like to me, particularly in fandoms where one ship is so ubiquitous that any and all other material is utterly dwarfed by it in scale. (for me, my last two major fandoms have been merlin and teen wolf, so - i’m sure you see my dilemma, heh.)

all of that said, in terms of arthur and merlin specifically...

disclaimer: everything i say here is relevant to me only. these are my own feelings. i am making this post on my own blog, in my own space, in response to a question about my own thoughts. i do not want, expect, or need anyone else to share these thoughts. any commentary i make about fandom trends is not equivalent to condemnations of individual people’s opinions or shipping habits. i do not mind or take issue with folks who ship these two characters. i am glad you are having fun. please do not @ me about something you disagree with. i promise you it is not necessary.

okay. with that out of the way.

part of me is reluctant to expound further on this question, because my personal philosophy is that merlin and arthur as a ship have had more than enough time and space devoted to them in this fandom (way more than their share, frankly) and i generally prefer to focus on merlin and the other people in his life, as a deliberate counter to that. but, since you asked, and because i have been experiencing the “i’m tired of romance” bug more strongly lately, here is the long-form version.

the number one reason why i don’t ship arthur and merlin is what i already outlined above: i don’t really “ship” anything. i have never looked at two characters who were not already together/on an obvious potential path to being together and said “i want them to fall in love.” that has just never happened to me. (again - it’s not a BAD thing to have this happen, it’s just not something that’s ever happened to me. i can’t relate to the experience.)

therefore, when i do appreciate a romantic relationship, it’s pretty much always because canon has shown me something romantic (or clearly pre-romantic) that i find to be well-written and compelling. (it’s rare - as i outlined before, i would usually rather not deal with romance at all - but it happens.)

arthur and merlin, then, never had that effect on me, because arthur and merlin, as depicted in the canon, are not in love.

[to anybody reading this who just snatched up their keyboard and started furiously typing, i beg you - please go back and re-read my disclaimer.]

they’re not in love. the truth about these two is that if i had watched this show without having grown up in fandom as a culture (and without knowing exactly what kind of ships fandom immediately sees EVERYWHERE) the idea of anybody shipping these two together would never have even entered my mind.

(and like. because i DID grow up in fandom, and i DO know exactly what kind of ships fandom sees everywhere, i knew before i even started this show that arthur/merlin was going to be an inescapable thing. but that would not have been the case, if i had watched the series in a world where i didn’t know what fandom was.)

arthur and merlin, in canon, are not in love. the show never does anything to give me an inkling that either of them are harboring romantic feelings for each other. that is never what is happening onscreen. literally the last thing on merlin’s agenda is romantic attachment, ever, and arthur is never, ever shown to be in love with anyone who isn’t gwen. the show, onscreen, never tricks me, teases me, or leads me on. i was never under the impression that merlin and arthur were in love with each other, because they weren’t.

but that DOES NOT MEAN their relationship matters less. just because they aren’t IN love with each other doesn’t mean they don’t love each other, and one of those things is not bigger or better or more powerful than the other.

i struggle a lot in fandom (all fandom, not just merlin) with the persistent idea that romantic attachment is the peak, the natural endpoint on a scale of “how deep is your love?” i am constantly running up against posts where the commonly accepted structure is to cite a moment of devotion or caring or some instance of basic connection between two characters, and then add a caption or tag saying ‘because they are JUST FRIENDS, right?’ or ‘^^totally platonic interaction between characters who are not at all in love, sure jan.’

and honestly? i hate that. that is one of my least favorite things about fandom. it makes me so tired.

i am completely disconnected from this idea that there are like...things you can do that are too caring to count as friendship. like - that there is too much devotion you can show, and if you go over the limit, then it’s laughable that you would do those things for “just” a friend. that’s so unpleasant to me.

(and i do think [when it comes to non-canon queer ships, anyway - straight ships unfortunately have no excuse, sorry y’all] that part of this probably has its roots in pushback at the tendency of people who try to “gal pal” actual queer ships (or literal real life relationships), so this, at least, is something i can understand. i’m queer myself; i get that. and that is why i will never like - attach myself to someone’s post and start complaining. people can vent however they want.)

it doesn’t change my own feelings, though. i hate seeing every meaningful friendship i’ve ever been invested in talked about like it’s just a romance in disguise.

other things: i am uninterested in romance as a motivator.

truly, from the bottom of my heart, i don’t care.

we are, at least in my corner of the world, oversaturated with romance, to the point where any piece of media that doesn’t include it in some fashion is shockingly bizarre. it is EVERYWHERE. it is in EVERYTHING. i cannot pick up a book without running into a romantic plotline. i cannot watch a movie or a tv show without being forced into multiple romances that i don’t care about. (rare exceptions apply, as always, but i’m speaking generally.)

this oversaturation, for me, means that romance as a storyline no longer holds any meaning for me. i see it EVERYWHERE. it is in literally EVERYTHING. making merlin into a “love story,” for me, makes the show so much less interesting, because there are billions of love stories out there. love stories are practically the only kind of story our media remembers how to tell! why would i take a story that is so unique in its exploration of deep friendship (that isn’t even quite friendship, because it’s not real, but merlin wants it to be real, but making it real would also destroy it) and loyalty (that isn’t necessarily deserved, but is still offered, but is damaging to the person offering it) and love (that exists in spite of arthur’s position as the oppressor, but still cannot erase merlin’s oppression, and is patently not a magical fix for the very real problems merlin is facing), and then want to water it down to “and then they fell in love”???

merlin bbc has so much to say about the transformative, redemptive power of love (not just romance), and the bonds we form with each other despite the fact that we don’t always deserve each other, and what we can do to make ourselves better, and how do we make amends for the ways in which we hurt the people we care about, and it is so complicated and there is so much beauty there and i adore it specifically because it is one of the rare pieces of media out there that doesn’t prop up romantic love as the most important and powerful force in the universe. romantic love is not what moves the story. merlin’s love for the people around him is based on compassion. it’s bigger than the familiar and overused ‘i am desperately in love with this one individual person and that’s what drives my actions,” which is a premise all of us know has been done to death. merlin’s love is not about romantic attachment. it’s a deep, abiding love for humanity. it’s based on hope, and faith, and the inherent belief that everybody matters, even in their worst moments.

condensing that kind of story into “and then they fell in love” erases its meaning for me. it makes it trite. uninteresting. i have seen “and then they fell in love” fully sixty thousand times. “and then they fell in love” has been done so often that it is utterly devoid of power for me. boring. i literally do not care.

other people might feel differently, and find a romantic love story compelling. i don’t.

i’m guessing the message that prompted this essay is asking me to evaluate how i feel about the “goodness” of the merlin/arthur ship, aka whether it’s worthwhile to ship it or not based on how healthy/unhealthy it is, which i definitely can’t answer, because i don’t think whether it’s “good” or not really matters. i am definitely too old to be riding the newer wave of, uh...idk, purity culture type stuff that is so oft-debated on here, lately.

but you’re absolutely right, anon - merlin and arthur’s relationship IS kinda shitty! it 100% is. it doesn’t mean you can’t ship them, though, if you want; otherwise i wouldn’t be invested in any aspect of their friendship, either.

the fact that merlin and arthur’s relationship is kinda shitty is an essential element of the show; it’s the microcosmic representation of the macrocosmic problem merlin is trying to solve, and even with that being the case, we can see clearly that this also doesn’t preclude them from having real moments of connection and care and love. this is the contradiction i have to keep in mind whenever i engage with them in the friendship sense - merlin has been wronged by arthur in so many ways, and yet he still loves him and believes arthur can do better, and yet his dedication to arthur really does destroy his life piece by piece, and you really have to walk a line between those extremes and be thinking: in what ways was this a noble, honorable path for merlin to take and in what ways was this damaging, and was it all worth it in the end?

we probably wouldn’t still be watching this show if we didn’t ultimately think the answer to that last question was yes. but there are also equally valid ways in which the answer is, truthfully, no, and i think really the only important thing when dealing with merlin and arthur’s relationship (in whatever capacity you prefer) is to keep that dissonance in mind.

so, to more directly address your question, when it comes to my interaction with the source material, i don’t ship merlin and arthur romantically because i don’t see romance when they interact in canon, and i don’t think their relationship could be improved or made more interesting/more meaningful by adding extra-canonical romance into the mix. that’s really it.

but the other side of things is this: even if i were granted someone else’s ship-goggles to somehow see romance between these two (eg, once, in the distant past i read a harry potter fic that was so well-constructed it sold me on a relationship i didn’t [and still don’t] actually see in canon), i still wouldn’t choose to ship merlin and arthur, and it’s not because they’re a “bad” ship (no such thing, folks - tag your stuff and let people live their lives, thank you), it’s because this fandom has already been swallowed by them and i cannot bring myself to make that imbalance worse.

trying to be in the merlin fandom without shipping merlin and arthur is just...a little bit difficult sometimes. i think probably even people who do ship merlin/arthur are aware of that. sometimes it can feel like merlin/arthur is a given in this fandom, not one of many options - as if you’re not in the merlin fandom, but rather the merthur fandom, and you know you really, really do not belong there.

and it’s not even a canonical ship! it’s not even real. and yet if you like this show, and you want to engage in the fandom, your experience is, without exception, going to be chock full of merlin/arthur content by default.

essentially, my struggle with the merlin/arthur dynamic in fandom is two-fold:

1) the strikingly imbalanced content distribution

the merlin fandom, in terms of content distribution, is a pretty accurate mirror of merlin’s own existence, to be honest, in that pretty much every aspect of it is eventually taken over by arthur pendragon, and in that there’s a reasonable debate to be had about whether or not that’s a good thing.

(spoiler alert: it’s not.)

even so, it is what it is, and as i said before, me commenting on fandom trends is not meant as a condemnation of individual preferences. people like what they like! that’s just how things are. shipping arthur and merlin isn’t a Bad thing to do, by any means, and the fact that so many people do is just, you know, bad luck for me, lol. but at the same time, the wildly unbalanced distribution of content does make it more difficult for folks who don’t ship merlin/arthur to engage in fandom with quite the same level of ease, and even though it’s nobody’s fault, it is still perfectly reasonable for people who don’t ship merlin/arthur to be frustrated about that.

fanfic is a pretty good case study for how this plays out. i saw a post a while back that was titled something like ‘merlin bbc gothic,’ and the first bullet point was “canon ships are rarepairs,” and HOO BOY, that is true. stats-wise, merlin/arthur makes up ⅔ of the merlin fic on AO3. ~25,000 fics. the next most popular tag after merlin/arthur is arthur/gwen, but arthur/gwen have ~2,900 fics in their tag. and when you remember to exclude any instance of merlin/arthur from the arthur/gwen tag, that number drops by another thousand, to ~1,940.

that’s buckwild. come on. merlin/arthur has twenty-three THOUSAND more fics than the next most popular (and CANONICAL, i might add) ship? and every other ship’s numbers are even lower than that?*

and if you don’t want to read shippy stuff in the first place, like me - the merlin “gen” tag has less than 8000 fics in it, by comparison, and then you STILL have to filter merlin/arthur out of the gen fics, leaving you with about 6300 - which number has to be filtered down further to remove OTHER ships that still make it past the gen filter.

in comparison to 25,000.

like. i’ve been in fandom long enough that i’m not surprised - mean, i came into merlin directly off a teen wolf phase, and boy, that’s a whole other bowl of noodles right there, with added squick factors that are irrelevant here - but i’m still just...man.

it still makes my head spin. and it is still frustrating, every time.

*(there is a lot more to be said about how gwen fits into all of this, and i know it has been discussed more thoroughly in other places, but yes, another reason i am leery of arthur/merlin as a thing is that i’m just...not super comfortable with what that implies for gwen and her position in the story. even if i personally am slightly more compelled by gwen/lancelot, technically - i still don’t quite feel comfortable taking gwen out of her canonical place. she belongs at the top. she deserves to be the love interest and she deserves to be the queen. and like - people can say that her relationship with arthur isn’t “developed” or “convincing” enough to warrant retaining in fic, and i get it, the show really did fail gwen in S5 - but i still don’t buy that argument. people literally INVENTED a romantic relationship for themselves and put 25,000 fics worth of effort into building it up; there is no reason why an “underdeveloped” canon romance couldn’t have gotten the same treatment. except, of course, for the fact that one [Black, female] character was being shoved aside to make way for yet another two white dudes.)

(and i’m not saying that everyone is doing this deliberately or maliciously. but we all know this is a cross-fandom trend. there is literally no reason for the gap in content to be THAT wide. a canon relationship with twenty-three thousand fewer fics than an invented ship? just...that is a stat that bears thinking about. it doesn’t mean that merlin/arthur is a “bad” ship, or that you can’t prefer lancelot/gwen, but it IS still important to recognize these patterns where they occur, across fandoms, and to really think about what they mean.)

2) the arthur-goggles

my second struggle with merlin/arthur in fandom is the ubiquitousness of the arthur-goggles, aka: the tendency in fandom, as in canon, to make everything in merlin’s life about arthur, and everything in the show about merthur.

this one specifically really gets to me. i am very committed to the idea that merlin is a complete individual, whether arthur is there or not. i write a LOT of meta about merlin being a whole person, specifically pushing back on the idea that merlin was “born” for arthur’s benefit - my motto is basically that “merlin’s life does not revolve around arthur pendragon,” and the way his life begins to revolve around arthur pendragon in later seasons is not in fact touching or romantic or beautiful; it’s a tragedy. merlin does not exist only in the context of his relationship with arthur; he possesses worth outside of his mission to save the prince of camelot, and he was already a complete person before he ever met the prince of camelot, and one of the many issues we have to think about when dealing with arthur and merlin in any capacity is how merlin is told from the get-go that he is supposed to devote his whole life to arthur, but arthur is never given any such reciprocal responsibility.

merlin and arthur’s relationship, just like the distribution of content in this fandom, is wildly imbalanced. merlin spends all of his spare time thinking about arthur’s life; he ties himself in knots trying to help arthur develop as a person. he is constantly working to keep arthur safe and happy. but arthur, at the end of a long day, doesn’t spend his nights agonizing over how he can improve merlin’s life. he just goes home and goes to bed. he never once thinks, ‘my purpose on this earth is to serve and support my friend merlin.’ he is never told his life isn’t his own, that he is supposed to be one half of some two-sided coin. only merlin is told that his entire existence is earmarked for someone else, that his life’s purpose is to be someone else’s better half. only merlin is expected to devote his entire being to someone else’s betterment. only merlin is expected to say demeaning, self-abnegating things like “i was born to serve you.”

arthur, by contrast, is allowed to have a life of his own. he is allowed to exist on his own terms. he is never told that his worth is dependent on how well he can prop someone else up. and while fic might like to imagine merlin being the most important thing in arthur’s life, in canon that is just not the case.

merlin exists on his own merits, and the idea that he does everything he does just because “he’s in love with arthur” will never sit right with me, because it’s simply not true. merlin and arthur’s relationship is important to both of them, yes, and of course it is undergirded by deep love and care, but it is also way more complicated than that. merlin’s investment in arthur’s life - and his grief at arthur’s death - are NOT solely driven by his love for arthur as an individual; they are inextricably bound up with a sense of obligation and duty and self-worth and, eventually, failure, because he’s been told that protecting arthur is a) the only thing that matters about his own life and b) the only way to free his people and save an entire kingdom. and i think ignoring this very real complexity in favor of “merlin does what he does and feels what he feels because he’s in love with arthur” cheapens the depth of the story and flattens merlin’s character.

arthur-goggles automatically make everything about merlin/arthur, though. so the difficulty, for me, with merlin/arthur as a ship, is that it can be hard to make/find things about merlin that people don’t instantly, always try to link back to arthur in some way. merlin is not allowed to have things that are just his, and he can’t exist in a state where arthur doesn’t somehow factor in - no matter how unrelated to arthur something is, or how non-shippy it’s meant to be - there’s someone out there who’s going to loop it back to merthur in some way.

just like - scattered examples of things I’ve encountered:

all of merlin’s non-arthur love interests on AO3 having massive chunks of their ship tags actually being merthur fics, with the non-arthur ship serving solely as a stepping stone on the way to getting merlin and arthur together

readers, on fics that are specifically designated as focusing on merlin+someone else and in which arthur does not appear, leaving comments asking “so how long until arthur shows up,” “can’t wait to see arthur,” etc

meta about how ‘merlin’s time in camelot was actually really bad for him as a person’ being reblogged and modified by someone else with an addition like “but merlin doesn’t regret a second of it because he wouldn’t have known arthur if he were anywhere else,” and the OP having to reblog their own post and explain that this is literally the exact problem they were trying to critique

in fic, merlin’s friends being utilized only as vessels with whom he can have discussions about his developing relationship with arthur

etc etc

it’s not always huge egregious things, but wearing arthur-goggles means EVERYTHING comes back to merthur in some way, which for me is just...really insulting to other characters, and really limiting in terms of story analysis.

so, for example - this is a VERY specific example that few will relate to, because i am probably the only person on here who has ever tried to search the tag for merlin’s friend will from ealdor (a niche fave of mine) - but with him, especially, it is very hard to avoid bumping into a lot of people wearing arthur-goggles, because everybody seems to imagine him as merlin’s ex, who is only upset about what’s going on in 1.10 because he’s jealous about arthur appearing alongside merlin, never mind that will and merlin have known each other since birth and have a relationship that LITERALLY predates arthur by two decades.

so with him, as an example - the other day, i saw some post in the tag that was like “will gets teary when arthur makes his inspirational speech in ealdor because he finally understands what merlin sees in arthur and he can’t be mad anymore”

and that is just patently untrue. it is not even remotely close to a legitimate interpretation of what is happening in that scene. will hasn’t come around to arthur’s way of thinking yet; he literally still packs his things and leaves after this happens, and he is - i mean, first of all, he’s not crying, lol, and he stalks out of that scene weary, angry, and fed up, because he thinks the village is delusional and all of his neighbors are going to get killed in the morning. his arc - his dissatisfaction with what is going on, his anger at the ignorance arthur wields as a nobleman with all of that wealth and privilege, his resistance to the big “let’s fight kanen’s men with sticks” plan - that is about him and his history and who he is. it is not about an (imaginary) merlin/arthur love story.

but when the arthur-goggles are on, all roads lead to merthur. even when the other characters in question (*coughWILLIAMcough*) would be beyond mortified to have merthur, of all things, assigned as their motivation.

SO. now that i’ve gone over both the canon and fandom aspects of my reasoning, the succinct summary in response to your question is just that no, i don’t personally ship merlin/arthur. because:

a) i don’t see it b) the fandom is already trying to drown me with it and i choose to center other characters out of spite c) i just think merlin deserves better lol

however, as i said in my disclaimer - that doesn’t mean other people shouldn’t ship and enjoy it! merlin/arthur is very much not my cup of tea, but that’s no reason why other folks can’t have fun with it. i think the best portrayals of it, probably, will be those that keep in mind exactly what you said - that merlin and arthur’s relationship is “kinda shitty” - but this is fandom, so if what folks really want to write is just lots of happy AU’s with no issues, then they should go for it! the point of fandom is to have fun connecting with people over a shared love of something, so i am happy to let others have fun doing their thing, and i will just be over here doing mine. 🙂

#thanks for the question!#hope this is helpful #fyi to everyone else; this is the most space i will EVER devote to this subject so #wave goodbye as it flies past!#XD #the once and future slowburn #meta #(sort of? fandom analysis? idk)

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ashesarrows · 4 years ago

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The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two by Catherynne M. Valente- FULL REVIEW

This review is the complete version of its counterpart on GoodReads.

This book really disappointed me. The roughest thing is that it’s right in the middle of the series, so you have to read it if you want to continue. There are bright spots (Ell! Saturday!), and I can sense the incredible book Valente was trying to write, but overall, this was a flop. Would’ve been a DNF if I hadn’t promised myself I’d finish the series.

So, firstly: I’m a longtime fan of Fairyland, and I commonly list the first book and Valente herself as my favorite book and author. I had no negative preconceptions about the book going in. In fact, I know I have an irrational fear of series, and at first I thought my struggles with this book could be chalked up to that.

But I loved the second book. It was entertaining, a good follow-up, and a unique new story to explore. When I picked up the third book and only got a chapter in before forgetting about it, I had a lot of excuses—I was burned out. I didn’t like the Blue Wind, and I didn’t want to read about her. I was busy with school.

As it turns out, having picked the book up three years later and finished it this time, none of that was true. This time, I was yearning for more of Fairyland, I quite liked the Blue Wind, and I had ample time to read in.

It just wasn’t a good book.

I talk about planning/pantsing a lot, and that’s once again relevant. I’ll excerpt from my review of another book:

There are two types of NaNoWriMo writers: the planners, & the pantsers. Planners have an outline ready before they write, and pantsers go "by the seat of their pants"—very few, or even no, plans. Both have pros/cons; here I'll focus on a common pitfall for pantsers.

Almost every Western narrative… follows something akin to the 3-act structure. There is a main conflict which builds to a climax and is then resolved (think Star Wars’s Death Star.) For any good narrative, you need MOTIVATION-GOAL-CONFLICT—and occasionally stakes[.]

This book does not have a conflict.

So where do you find 300+ pages of writing? Just have something happen & see what comes next as a response!

The problem is that this makes an unworkable first draft. Things Happening =/= Satisfying Plot Arc. In editing, you have to take everything you've written and organize it into a plot shape, often cutting things that don't fit. (Planning is the opposite; tons of work upfront/you usually end up UNDERwriting.)

...The most common method of writing on Wattpad is pantsing. 99% of the time, writers write & then post chapters on a set schedule. Can't edit plot structure when you upload one chapter a week.

Now, I knew that Valente was a pantser before I read this book, and that she originally uploaded Fairyland one chapter a week. I was very impressed when I first found out; I don’t recall sensing any of these pitfalls in the two previous books. It is hard to write a book with no editing—it is damn well near impossible. Whether I liked this book or not, the first two are a triumph just for that. Valente has been writing this entire series with both hands tied behind her back and her eyes taped shut, and I have to commend her. Even my feelings of frustration are almost overshadowed by how impressed I am that it took three books for her to fail.

Valente herself acknowledged editing concerns in multiple / interviews. From the latter link:

I remember being at a convention right after it really hit, and somebody in the audience asked, “Well, you realize you can’t go back and change anything, because you’ve already posted it online.” And I said, “Oh, shit.” It had never occurred to me that that was gonna be a problem. I kept a couple weeks ahead of the posting schedule, but again, much like writing The Labyrinth in ten days instead of thirty, I just ran ahead with something without knowing that I couldn’t do it and it worked out incredibly well.

Did it? I feel differently, and this review aims to explain why.

This book lacks plot. Valente is attempting a 3-act structure, which relies heavily on a central conflict. There has to be some big mission; some big goal. First book example: September has to beat the Marquess (goal and conflict) OR ELSE everyone in Fairyland suffers (stakes/motivation). Every moment of the book ties back to this larger goal.

The central conflict of this book appears about halfway through. You know the moon, and the yeti, and splitting things? This comes up over a hundred pages in. September, and the audience, has no idea about any of that for a hundred or so pages, and so for that amount of time, the book is unconscionably boring.

The beginning of the book sees September afraid she’s too old to go back to Fairyland, which is a great central conflict idea for the one chapter in which it exists. Aha! A book about growing up and the associated trials and tribulations. That’s a fantastic theme, and yet I forgot about it entirely until the end, where it briefly awakens again, after an entire book of Not That At All. More on this later.

For now, the book takes September back to Fairyland, which should be wonderful, but Fairyland seems to have become all exposition and no action. A whole chapter of The Blue Wind lecturing September, for example. This is a character we don’t know, have no reason to be attached to, and are being actively hindered by as she relentlessly slows the plot down. And then September gets talked at by an alligator or something, and then another something something… I don’t remember any of this, because it was not relevant.

This isn’t like Fairyland #1, where September might need to befriend someone to gain access to magic which would help her on her quest. In fact, for this first half of the book, September doesn’t even have agency! Someone hands her a MacGuffin (I refuse to recall its name) in the form of a box, and she Must carry it to some city or other on the moon. Why? Who knows. She just must. And she does. And you’re thinking to yourself, why isn’t September making her own ship and leading revels? We know, as an audience, that she’s more than capable. What on Earth has got her seeming so meek? She even sasses characters, but somehow always ends up doing as they ask.

The book also takes all this time to reach any characters we know and love. The readers want Ell and Saturday! We do not care about a horde of lecturing adults with no connection to a central plot or September! Looking back, I can see how Valente may have been hoping to pull off something similar to Alice in Wonderland, but in Alice nobody speaks for a full page. This is just one example:

direct link

I’m hard pressed to even call this exposition, because it tells us nothing about the world we’re in. It’s just a sermon Valente wants us to hear. And worse, because I’ve read the last two books, I know she can pull this off. It doesn’t have to be this way. Many people said many things in Fairyland #1, and it worked because there was a plot that the speeches were part of.

(If you just look at the quotes page for this book, you can see how many there are—and how repetitive they get. X is a Y, okay, alright…)

But this sort of thing reached its peak when it almost ruined Saturday. Don’t worry, he’s generally well-written, but when September meets him and he starts lecturing? It’s just awful to read. Suddenly it’s not Saturday talking but Valente speaking through his mouth, giving those sermons again, and it just makes you want to scream.

This made me recall an old writing rule—“never remind me of the author’s existence.” I want to feel as though real people are really saying these things, and when all of them speak identically, it’s really difficult to believe that. I won’t deny Saturday his right to say poignant things, obviously, but in this case due to the volume of lectures, and the proximity of his to the others, and the obvious preachiness of all of them, it really got in the way of my even enjoying the scenes with Saturday. And come on; that is unforgivable.

But there is a plot. There is an, ahem… other MacGuffin. A paw? A yeti’s paw. Something about time. Look, at this point I just wanted to finish the book. The original MacGuffin had become a new one, which would lead them to the third, and all this because at 100 pages in someone said “hey there’s this yeti we really hate around here,” and September went “sounds awful I’ll go hunt him right now.” And of course she can, because she has been DOING NOTHING FOR THE LAST HUNDRED PAGES. What is she going to do, something else? There IS nothing else to do in Fairyland apparently. Again, what this book does to the world & inhabitants of Fairyland is near criminal.

So the plot starts here, and it’s not great—September takes it up because there’s nothing else to do, and of course her friends come along, but (at least to me) it seems obvious that Valente invented the moon’s political situation and the Yeti just to come up with SOMETHING for this book. It never felt convincing that this had really been happening behind the scenes in the other books. On top of that, since we get very little context (despite the lectures!), it feels less like a vital quest and more like September (again) doing something because someone else told her to. We really don’t get any other perspective on the issue until the very end.

But talking about the end will require a spoiler tag, so I’ll avoid it for now. Let’s take a break to talk about how confusing the book was overall. I often didn’t know where the characters were heading or why, or what role a new character played, or even if they were there or not.

After seeing a GR query about this particular issue, I went back and researched it. The character Candlestick allegedly leaves the party on page 189:

Candlestick had not come with them after all, turning up her peacock tail and refusing to speak further with any of the lot of them.

But then shows up in not one but two lines in the next chapter anyway:

The Tyguerrotype, the thirteen bouncing Glasshobs, the quivering houses—and September and Saturday, A-Through-L and Candlestick—had a little thickness, but no more than a thick sheet of paper. (201)

“Did we see what?” called Candlestick. (204)

I understand why Valente wouldn’t want to make major plot edits to the books after posting them, but why didn’t an editor read through this even once? It would have been easy to fix—delete one line, or even just a word. It seems clear through surrounding context, looking back, that Valente intended to leave Candlestick out of these chapters, so why didn’t anyone confirm that for readers?

It’s just not fair to your audience to leave things like this in. It’s not professional. It makes me look down on the publisher, to be quite honest, because they apparently couldn’t take the few months necessary to re-read the draft and offer Valente edits on these bare minimum issues.

So you can understand why I wasn’t sure what was going on most of the time. Especially in the beginning, when multiple characters existed just to lecture, it was hard to get attached to any one addition to the party because I could expect them to be gone without incident or importance within two chapters.

For example, the Periwig (whose name I refuse to look up) who works with Ell in the library says she has cursed him to stop him from flaming around the books. Yes, Ell is having uncontrollable flaming issues now. As a reader pummeled by random lectures, watching September ferry around MacGuffins, this just felt like an “oh shit we have to come up with a NEW conflict for these characters” ploy, without much thought or logic. And I had no idea what the curse was for over fifty pages, until on page 173 there’s a specific reference to Ell getting smaller after he shoots flame. I’m sure there were more earlier on, but I missed them, and who can blame me after a hundred pages of content that was not relevant to the story.

This plot point is never satisfyingly wrapped up, either. Why did the Periwig think this was a good idea? Could she have undone it? Why did nobody address her about it? And why was it solved the way it was? Nothing made sense.

What’s really frustrating is what could have been. Near the end of the book, I turned to the back cover just to avoid continuing to read, and I looked once again in total bafflement at the two starred reviews of the book pictured there. Booklist’s back cover quote reads as follows:

As usual, Valente enlightens readers with pearly gleams of wisdom about honesty, identity, free will, and growing up. September often worries who she should be and what path she should follow, but the lovely truth, tenderly told, is that it's all up to her.

And, despite having read roughly two hundred pages of this book, it was only once I saw this quote that I understood what Valente was trying to do.

This is a great idea. And there are ELEMENTS of it here, and even elements I quite like. Occasionally, the lectures September hears do in fact correspond to some aspect of this theme (“you become what you are called” is one example of a line I could tell meant something, but needed to be expanded to accomplish anything.) It’s hard, as a reader, to differentiate between lectures addressing a vital theme in the story and lectures that are just talking.

Returning to Ell’s curse, it turns out that [SPOILER] Ell was just flaming for what is essentially dragon puberty, which is a GREAT opportunity to build on this theme! Somehow, though, we don’t get that.. I would have loved to see Ell have to deal with, essentially, a sexual awakening, and that did not happen, and it feels like the cure scene is random and therefore wasted. [END SPOILER]

It doesn’t help that Valente also wastes a scene with FANTASTIC potential where September literally destroys her fate by giving it no prior context, no weight in the plot, no relevance to the conflict, and fifteen tons worth of expositional lecturing to drown in. I want to love these scenes; some of these scenes utilize my favorite tropes! I just can’t get around all the ways Valente is leaving her story out to dry.

Then there’s the clothing September wears, her new designation, Aroostook the car, the attempted blossoming romance between September and Saturday: so many elements which could have made that theme great. It’s like a broken puzzle.

This brings us to the Yeti. I’m just going to go full spoiler, because I’m mad.

[SPOILER]

The Yeti is a reverse twist villain?? Can we stop with this? It’s not interesting & not an engaging surprise & also feels like going “ha ha I fooled you.”

From the moment September set off to beat him, I was wondering—are we really doing this? Based on one random person’s complaint? September has made it very clear that she doesn’t understand the politics of the world she’s inhabiting, and yet: this. Unlike in the first book, where the Marquess’s evil is confirmed by every person she comes across and September ends up fighting her out of personal connection, this just seems like meddling. September has no skin in the game; it’s almost a white savior trope—especially when the history of the Moon parallels colonization!

And then The Gang sees future-Saturday helping the yeti, and instead of thinking “maybe we got this wrong based on one person’s lecture” they think “ah FUCK maybe Saturday is going to be evil” and manufacture totally unnecessary conflict.

But it’s not even that they misunderstood, or that their source was biased; the end result is that the Yeti was seen as evil because he DIDN’T CARE THAT HE WAS. He gives this “none of their business” answer that is fundamentally unsatisfying (and makes no sense—had he explained, THEY WOULD NOT HAVE BOTHERED HIM) because at the end of the day, it means none of September’s actions in Fairyland were necessary. She just showed up and left. Nobody, not even the story, needed her. I guess September and Saturday have now kissed (twice!) which is great for them but not something that makes the whole book worthwhile.

[END SPOILER]

And on top of this, there are typos. I already covered the issue with Candlestick, so here are the others quickly:

“All of us,” September said gently, and held out her hands. “I know what you said, Miss Candlestick, but however you count it, our fates are stuck together and stitched up good.” She paused for a moment, looking down at her flowing black silks and her own small hands. “Closer than shadows, she finished.” (170)

“If you’re not to tired after your cannonades.” (179)

The full moon rose passed the high barn windows, spilling in like milk. (248)

(First sentence ought to have put the end quotation mark after the word “shadows,” but accidentally places it after September’s dialogue tag. The second sentence should use “too” instead of “to”. The final sentence needs to either say that the moon “rose past the high barn windows” or “passed the high barn windows”, likely the former.)

What gets me is that this last sentence is on the last page. Even if Valente and her editors never flipped through most of the book, surely someone would’ve noticed this? It just drives home how little anyone cared. About Fairyland, of all things!

And then Valente, who DID NOT EDIT THIS BOOK, has the audacity to include lines like these.

September reached inside and took out the red book. It was heavy. A girl’s face graced the cover, finely embossed, but it was turned away, gazing at some unseen thing. Perhaps it was her own face, perhaps not. A miniature version of herself, after all. Was it an answer? Was it everything already written? “You can’t argue with something that’s written down,” she said, stroking the red locks of hair on the cover. “If the heart of my fate is a book, there’s nothing for it. Once it’s written, it’s done. All those ancient books always say ‘so it is written’ and that means it’s finished and tidied and you can’t say a thing against it.” Oh, but September, it isn’t so. I ought to know, better than anyone. I have been objective and even-tempered until now, but I cannot let that stand, I simply cannot. Listen, my girl. Just this once I will whisper from far off, like a sigh, like a wind, like a little breeze. So it is written—but so, too, it is crossed out. You can write over it again. You can make notes in the margins. You can cut out the whole page. You can, and you must, edit and rewrite and reshape and pull out the wrong parts like bones and find just the thing and you can forever, forever, write more and more and more, thicker and longer and clearer. Living is a paragraph, constantly rewritten. It is Grown-Up Magic. Children are heartless; their parents hold them still, squirming and shouting, until a heart can get going in their little lawless wilderness. Teenagers crash their hearts into every hard and thrilling thing to see what will give and what will hold. And Grown-Ups, when they are very good, when they are very lucky, and very brave, and their wishes are sharp as scissors, when they are in the fullness of their strength, use their hearts to start their story over again.

(page 184).

Like... all of that, and then she didn’t edit September’s story? I’m appalled.

At this point, you might well say I’m being far too harsh. I understand that. These next five paragraphs are for you.

For the first few months of (re)reading this book, I genuinely felt like I must be a bad reader, or my attention span was gone, or I just didn’t like Valente or her work enough. Looking at all the incredible reviews here, I felt jealous—and frustrated. Why couldn’t I just enjoy this book the way everyone else did?

Obviously, I never want to dislike a book, but this was one that I almost feel betrayed me. I know there’s a significant amount of entitlement there; Valente doesn’t owe me any stories, let alone good ones.

At the same time, I made every effort. I owned all the books, was working hard to read a series despite my long-time struggles with them, and, well, I LOVE Valente! I constantly talk about her work! And even someone like me—someone who’s usually a pretty fast reader, loves the series/author in question, and was determined to finish this book—struggled throughout.

So I’m frustrated that the book made me feel like an idiot. I’m frustrated that, for the apparent crime of being devoted to Valente’s work, I was put through this. This book would be one star if not for the world of Fairyland and the returning cast—if this had not been a Fairyland book, I would not have finished reading it. For that first half, I was bribing myself (with better books) to read one or two pages at a time. Really.

Like I said, it didn’t have to be this way. I know damn well that Valente can do better than this. If Valente had been given the opportunity to edit this draft into a polished book, she could have done it. It’s only because of these restraints that she chose—and she is a grown woman who may choose what she likes—that the book came out this way. It’s genuinely hard to review, because I understand why she wrote the book this way, and I understand why she did not later edit the majority of the text, and I also have the perspective of a disappointed reader. It’s hard to balance all of that.

So two stars it is. I’m a little sad it took so long to review this book, because I was REALLY pumped to review it when I first finished, but I hope that on the contrary letting it sit has allowed me to be more objective and less emotionally upset by it.

I hope to pick up the fourth book soon, but with the combination of it being unrelated to the main cast and the letdown that this book was, it’ll be a while before I feel up to it. Don’t worry, though, because I will come back to update you as to whether the series overall is worth continuing. I have every hope that it will be.

#full review #goodreads #The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

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btsficfinds · 4 years ago

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google searching: a step-by-step guide (with examples)

hey guys, admin rumu here~ we’ve already provided a fairly straightforward guide to google searching in our tips, but it seems some people are still having some issues. if you needed something a little more in-depth or if you were just curious about the process, this is for you! this will be very lengthy as i will be going through every step with different asks. i will not be addressing searching with google cache but if you’d like to see how that's done, dawn has already explained it in this post.

our searches are based on what you send us. if you’re looking for a fic but are confused about what terms to use in your search, write an ask like you’re going to send it to us (but don’t actually send it yet). i’ll be showing you how asks get turned into google searches using some of the asks we’ve previously received, so try this with your own!

general rules (these apply to all examples except example 1)

1. as you might have seen in the google section of the tips, there are some keywords that every search should have:

-the pairing (namjoon/seokjin/yoongi/jimin/taehyung/jungkook) (if you don’t remember the pairing, use the generic ‘bts’) -the platform (tumblr/ao3/etc.) (*if you don’t know where you read it, do not include this) *IF YOU READ THE FIC ON AO3, YOU MAY NOT FIND IT ON GOOGLE. you can (and should) still try, but google gets weird searching for ao3 fics. you might have better luck using ao3′s fic searching system first.

2. USE QUOTES IN APPROPRIATE SITUATIONS. quotes are only useful if used correctly, but they can make a HUGE difference. conversely, use them incorrectly and your search will not work.

3. make sure to actually read through your search results! don’t just assume it’s not what you’re looking for. if it looks like it could be a potential match, click on it and find out.

now let’s take a look at some examples:

*example 1: looking for a specific blog

we already have a tutorial on how to find lost blogs (you can find the link for that in the tips) but maybe you still can’t find it. thinking about asking us? try tumblr search/tags first, then google, then check our lost blogs list (link also in the tips), THEN ask us.

for these asks, you would search the blog name in quotes followed by ‘tumblr’ (e.g. “mintedmango” tumblr or “bluesxde” tumblr)

example 2: you remember...something (it’s extremely vague)

maybe you sent an ask without reading our tips (specifically the part showing how to write an ask for the best results), or maybe you did read them and unfortunately this is really all you remember. we hate to say this, but if you send us an ask like this your chances are slim to none.

the fic relevant parts are highlighted. based off of that, you would know the following: pairing: seokjin/reader fic type: one shot au: best friend

as you can see, there is little to no information here. even if we’ve read the fic they’re looking for, we probably wouldn’t have any idea what you’re talking about. in these situations, we probably would not make any suggestions because there are far too many to list. if you don’t send us more details, then there’s nothing we can do :(

example 3: you remember the title

depending on how unique the title is and how accurate your memory is, this should be fairly easy.

the fic relevant parts are highlighted. based off of that, you would know the following: title: somebody else pairing: taehyung/reader writer: aiscka

unless you misremembered the title or the title is an extremely common word/phrase, you should be able to find the fic simply by using quotation marks. if the title is a common word/phrase it would help to include other details in your search, but if the title is unique enough you probably wouldn’t need it. for this example, you could search: “somebody else” taehyung bts fanfic tumblr and you would be able to find this:

this is one of the top results but maybe you don’t feel like clicking through all the potential options to find the right one. the anon knew the author is this case, so they could also find the fic by searching: “somebody else” aiscka taehyung bts fanfic tumblr which would allow them to find a reblog from the writer’s previous name.

having more details will narrow your search down and make it faster for you to find what you’re looking for.

example 4: you remember the plot and specific/unique keywords (best case scenario)

the more details we have, the better chances we have of finding it. we are not exaggerating when we say we want you to send us EVERYTHING YOU REMEMBER. think we can find it even without all that? or perhaps you aren’t sure if it’ll help? maybe so but it doesn’t matter, we want it anyway!

the fic relevant parts are highlighted. based off of that, you would know the following: pairing: namjoon/reader au: aquarium, veterinarian/doctor, single parent, twins plot: reader meets namjoon and his sons at the aquarium while working

more specific details = more search options but this is enough for us to work with because these details have unique keywords (note: we would still prefer you give us more details than we need than not enough. PLEASE SEND US EVERYTHING YOU REMEMBER). my first search for this would be: namjoon reader tumblr fanfic "aquarium" i can immediately find:

i’ll still skim through the fic to double check, but just based off this i can already tell this is probably what we’re looking for! some other searches we could have tried are: namjoon reader tumblr fanfic "aquarium" vet namjoon reader tumblr fanfic veterinarian “twins” namjoon reader tumblr fanfic single father veterinarian all of these would find the fic we want, and i’m sure you could try other combinations as well. notice that some words have quotes around them and some don’t. how do you know which ones to use quotes for? if you are SURE that those are the exact word/words, put them in quotes. if you don’t know for sure how it was phrased, consider trying searches with and without quotes. ‘single father’ with quotes will only search for ‘single father’. ‘single father’ without quotes will give you results for ‘single dad’, ‘single parent’, ‘single fathers’, etc. in this example, you can see that the correct phrase was ‘single dad’, so not using quotes was the right idea!

example 5: you remember the plot and a name

searching for names is tricky. keep in mind that names must be exact. if you get the spelling wrong, a name will be useless as a keyword and will probably ruin your search.

the fic relevant parts are highlighted. based off of that, you would know the following: pairing: taehyung/reader au: best friend, fuckboy(?) plot: reader is best friends with taehyung, taehyung is blowing reader off for his girlfriend named vicktoria

there are a couple of issues with searching for this: -there is no universal spelling for fuckboy/fuckboi/fuqboii/etc. we all know they mean the same thing, but people can spell it however they want. unfortunately, google doesn’t know how to handle that. it’s also possible that the fic was not tagged with fuckboy, but there was fuckboy behavior present. either way, very difficult to google. -plot events can be hard to search for since it could happen over the span of multiple chapters and/or be explained different ways and google doesn’t know how to search for that either. plot points are useful for fic verifying, but not so much for fic searching. -the aus for this fic are very common. if not for one keyword, this would have been near impossible to search for and to verify.

you could probably guess what the initial search would be: taehyung “vicktoria” bts fanfic tumblr from that you would get:

based on the description, this search result is worth checking out. note that if they had remembered the name as ‘victoria’ or ‘something starting with a v’, this probably would not have worked.

example 6: you vaguely remember the premise, but nothing in detail

unfortunately there isn’t much you can do without specifics. there are TONS of fics out there and we simply cannot find what you’re looking for if there isn’t enough detail. we will try our best, but just know that you should not expect much.

the fic relevant parts are highlighted. based off of that, you would know the following: pairing: taehyung/reader/? fic type: multiple chapters au: yandere plot: reader is in some kind of danger and is saved by taehyung

not very specific, which is why we ask that people try to be as detailed as possible! this ask is pretty vague and it’s difficult to search for a fic without concrete details. ‘yandere’ is a pretty unique keyword so you might want to put it in quotes (some yandere fics aren’t tagged as yandere, but i’m going to assume it was in this case). NOTE: each exact term/phrase should get its own quotes. for example, it would be “taehyung” “yandere”, not “taehyung yandere” so from there you could have: tumblr taehyung “yandere” reader fanfic this search is still extremely broad so there will be a lot of irrelevant results. if you have the patience to check all the pages on google you can, but it would definitely take a while and you might not even find it. too many terms could confuse your search but less terms means more to look through. unfortunately everything from here would be guesswork. if it’s not in quotes, google will include results that are a match for synonyms and/or different tenses. let’s say my search is: tumblr taehyung “yandere” reader fanfic die rescued you can tell i’ve chosen those words based off of the plot detail. from the term ‘rescued’, google could give me results for ‘saved’ (synonym) or ‘rescue’ (word tense variation). click through the google pages and scan through your results. if the google summaries seem like they could be a match, check it out. if not, try a different search. from that search, i found:

it seems like a potential match since it’s a yandere taehyung fic involving another member, so i skim through the fic and check the details (reader is involved in a life or death situation and is saved by taehyung, fic is not a oneshot). this fic is only a suggestion as it’s possible this isn’t the right fic. from there we would ask for confirmation/denial, and unfortunately a lot of fics get left as pending. if your fic is pending, PLEASE let us know if it’s correct or not!

*edit: this fic was not the fic the anon was looking for, but we’ve received a potential fic suggestion from another anon. if this was your ask, please check back in!

example 7: you remember the plot and details, but you don’t remember the pairing

this might be tough since the pairing really helps narrow the search results down, but it’s not a deal breaker if you have enough unique keywords.

the fic relevant parts are highlighted. based off of that, you would know the following: pairing: jungkook/?(taehyung/hoseok/jimin) platform: ao3 au/genre: soulmate (red string), demons(?) plot: jungkook can manipulate his string, jungkook cuts his string, jin and namjoon are in a relationship, jungkook gets sick at jin and namjoon’s house, alex(?) is a demon(?), jungkook gets tricked by alex(?)

lots of information so lots of potential searches, but unfortunately a lot of unsurety. the concrete words here are going to be ‘jungkook’, ‘soulmate’, and ‘red string’, but everything else is up in the air. it’s even more complicated because it’s an ao3 fic and like i said before, google gets weird with ao3.

my first search for this would be: jungkook fanfic “soulmate” “red string” “alex” note that i did not include the other half of the pairing in my search terms. if you want to take a guess for the pairing you can (i would have guessed taehyung because taekook is the most popular pairing for jungkook on ao3), but it’s best not to take too many leaps in logic from the very start. i usually save that for the end when i’m just trying my luck with different searches. i also chose not to include the platform in this search in case it was crossposted and could be found elsewhere. the initial search does not provide any promising results. after that i might try searches like: jungkook fanfic “soulmate” “red string” “manipulate” jungkook fanfic “soulmate” “red string” “alex” jungkook fanfic “red string” manipulate sick jungkook fanfic “red string” “soulmate” demon but unfortunately the fic doesn’t turn up for these either. now we’ve got to start guessing. i won’t lie, this is pretty difficult. i typically try to think about how the fic might be written/consider the most obvious or common way for them to say something and make guesses from that. i might try something like: jungkook fanfic “soulmate” “won this round” that doesn’t work, so i try: jungkook fanfic "cut his string" "soulmate" from that i get this:

looks like it could be the fic, so i skim through it for the details in the description and it is! obviously this will not always work, but sometimes you’ll get lucky.

example 8: you remember a quote (word for word)

the success of finding a fic based on a quote is dependent on how accurately you remember it. if the quote is unique to the story and you know the exact wording, you have a very high chance of being able to find it! *if you DO NOT know an EXACT quote, this probably will not help. i would advise searching using your other details instead of a partial quote because misremembering even a few words will ruin a quote search.

the fic relevant parts are highlighted. based off of that, you would know the following: pairing: jungkook/reader au/genre: college, f2l plot: jungkook asks reader for a pencil, reader remembers him from high school, jungkook remembers reader from kindergarten, reader defended jungkook when he was bullied for his knockoff ninja turtle shirt

lots of information here, but what stands out is the quotes! it’s SO specific that it would be surprising if other fics had them. assuming you didn’t misremember the phrasing, you 100% want to use quotation marks for this. my first google search would be: jungkook “it’s morphine time” bts fanfic tumblr

as we thought, there it is! alternatively you could have used the other quote (the search would have been jungkook “it’s morphin time” bts fanfic tumblr) and found it as well.

example 9: you remember lots of plot but no unique keywords

this kind of ask probably won’t be found through google searching (or if it is, there is a LOT of guesswork involved). hopefully the community remembers it or one of the admins will read it somewhere and recognize it (i’m always on the lookout for old asks!), but unfortunately google isn’t your friend this time.

the fic relevant parts are highlighted. based off of that, you would know the following: pairing: jungkook/reader au: established relationship, cheating plot: reader is dating taehyung or jimin, jungkook is dating someone, reader goes to taehyung/jimin’s apartment to give them food and sees jungkook in the hallway, jungkook’s girlfriend is in taehyung/jimin’s apartment, jungkook and reader sit outside and eat the food that was supposed to be for taehyung/jimin and jungkook’s girlfriend, taehyung/jimin and jungkook’s gf leave the apartment and see jungkook and reader together, taehyung/jimin is pushed back by jungkook

this is a very specific plot, but unfortunately there’s nothing concrete we can search for. these google searches would be all guessing, so i’ve tried variations such as: jungkook reader tumblr fanfic cheating "hallway" eating food jungkook reader tumblr fanfic "his girlfriend" eating food cheating jungkook reader tumblr fanfic "eating" "apartment" pushed and a lot of others, but none of those worked (as expected).

we’re still looking for this one so if anyone knows this fic or has other information please let us know!

JUST A REMINDER: please try all your search options BEFORE sending us an ask! i would recommend trying google first, then our tags, then the search bar for our blog, and if all of those don’t work, THEN try us.

if you send us an ask, PLEASE GIVE US ALL THE DETAILS. it doesn’t matter if it’s super long or you think the detail might not help, the more the better. maybe we might end up not needing everything you sent, but it increases your chances of the fic being found and helps us confirm what you’re looking for. so assuming you really want to reread it, tell us everything you know! if you aren’t sure what to write, you can check the ‘be detailed’ section of the tips for the best way to write an ask.

hopefully this cleared up some things about googling :)

#info

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sweetsyncraft · 4 years ago

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SweetSyn’s Guide To Etsy

(I will add more as I learn more)

When I officially started my Etsy in 2018, I had no idea what I was doing. I’ve constantly had people asking me what tips I had for getting started. Unfortunately, I told them you needed a following to make sales. Boy was I wrong. SEO is the key. Buckle up, I’m going to learn you a few things. (I’m Texan don’t judge me for that sentence.)

“Search Engine Optimization”, which is the reason when you search for something on Etsy, you see a bunch of bland titles. Being Creative with titles will only hurt you. You need to have targeted, keyword-based titles and tags, to make sure you end up at the top of the food chain.

Listing Titles

This part is long due to the fact that I never knew how important this was.

The best way to do this is to start typing in what you’re selling into the Etsy search bar. Any related autocomplete phrases that are related to the pop-up list, is what should be in your title. (Keyword 1 - Keyword 2 - Keyword 3 - Keyword 4) and so forth. For example, I simply clicked on the search bar and it gave me a list of the current most popular searches. One of them was marble earrings, and the first listing had the best selling badge. Their title was “Handmade Polymer Clay Marble Triangle Earrings | Minimalist Geometric Earrings | Hypoallergenic Surgical Steel Stud | Multiple Size”. The second listing, from another shop, was “Marble Stud Earrings, Marble Jewelry, Round Stud Earrings, Wedding Stud Earrings, Marble Studs, Statement Studs, Minimalist Studs”.

I know how tempting it is to come up with a clever name for your listing, but Etsy doesn’t like that. Putting a long title full of keywords makes it more likely for someone to see your listing without searching through 240 pages. Yes, there were exactly 240 pages of marble earrings. The last one, way at the end was simply titled “Rosé Marble Earrings”. I don’t know about you, but I have no idea how to put that little mark over the ‘e’ when typing on a computer.

The second part of this is being more specific than just ‘marble earrings’. If someone is looking for something more specific than marble earrings they’re going to search more of what they want. This is how you separate yourself from everyone else on those 240 pages. The two listings I found were round studs and the other was geometric triangles. Maybe I hate circles, and I specifically want triangles, so I search “marble triangle earrings”. That’s in the title of the first listing, I’m going to find that listing.

DO NOT PUT YOUR SKU’S IN YOUR TITLES! You will lose sales because of this. Your title is very important, no one is going to be searching “866798Q”

Additionally, Etsy will not show more than one or two items per seller on any given page of search results. That way smaller shops have a bit more of a chance. Make sure you’re targeting different keywords per listing, or you’ll be competing with yourself.

After a few months, go into your listing analytics to see which keywords are getting that listing more views. You may find that your main keyword, or the first few words in your title, isn’t working as well as another one. If something is working better, make it the first part of the title, and you should even more views.

Adding titles in other languages will not help your listing. Etsy automatically translates for other languages.

I’ve seen a few people say that Etsy has changed and that they don’t like ‘title stuffing’. However, that’s not the case in what I’ve seen. The entire first two pages of marble earrings were nothing but long ‘stuffed’ titles.

This is a comment from an admin of one of the Etsy Facebook groups I’m in, he is a social media marketer:

“YES title stuffing is bad and you should not do it, because Etsy & Google do not count that as quality SEO.

However, we must first understand exactly what "Title Stuffing or Keyword Stuffing" really is.

Keyword stuffing is when someone fills a webpage (in this case an Etsy title) with the same keywords they want to rank for, over and over again in hopes that the more times they use the keywords the more relevant Etsy and Google will see their page or listing.”

...

“Now as far as your Etsy title goes you should absolutely use your keywords, but not repeated over and over again, while also keeping a non-robotic tone.

2 examples of title stuffing:

Basically stuffing the same word over and over again.

2. Title stuffing for the maximum keywords: Comfy Baby Shirt, comfortable, for boys, for girls, gifts, cheap, organic, cotton, romper, jumpsuits, newborn, baby clothes

Both of these examples are using spammy tricks to rank high. But this will not work and both Etsy and Google will ignore you.

You want your title to sound fluent and not like a robot while using your keywords.

Also, you want to avoid changing up your titles too much, because your listings SEO needs to season a bit for maximum effectiveness.”

Tags

A major thing that I have learned over this process is that your tags must be written in sentences and not individual words. For example instead of marble, earring, earrings, geometric, geometrical, your tags should be Marble Earrings, Studded Earrings, Geometric Jewelry. MOST IMPORTANTLY! Use ALL 13 tags! Think about what makes your product unique, you don’t need to repeat categories and attributes. You also don’t need to use the same keywords as your title, unless you want to highlight a certain keyword. Tags and titles that do not relate to your listing, can have a negative impact on your visibility.

Fill out everything you can on the listing, such as categories and attributes, which also act like tags. The more you fill out the more likely someone will find your listings.

Adding tags in other languages will not help your listing. Etsy automatically translates for other languages.

Pricing

Be mindful of everyone else’s prices, customers are not only going to look for quality, but also the best deal. Though, you don’t want to end up making a negative profit.

Cost of goods (per product) + Profit (I like to do the cost of supplies x2) + Shipping (if you’re doing free shipping) = Price

The reason I double the dost of supplies for my profit is for in case something goes wrong, I still made a little money for my time. You made need to adjust this to compete with other sellers.

Shipping

Etsy gives priority to listings with free shipping in the search results, it also sounds a bit better to the customer. Don’t worry you won’t lose out on money by offering it, all you have to do is include the shipping cost in the price.

However, if you do plan on offering international shipping, I recommend charging for it. I live in Texas, and it costs $8 dollars to ship a sticker to Canada. Whereas shipping to Maine only costs 70 cents.

Play around with shipping options, it took me a long time to learn that sending stickers as a letter, instead of a package or flat envelope, is MUCH cheaper. The downside, there is no tracking number. So I only recommend this for items that are very cheap to remake.

Photos

Your product photo is the first thing that is going to be seen when someone is searching for an item. I made the major mistake of not caring what my photos looked like for the longest time. From lazily taking a screenshot of my Cricut design space for a decal listing, to setting my mugs on my tacky paint-covered table. Don’t do this, make your photos look professional. Now I’m not saying go hire a photographer to take your photos. Simply lining a bix with paper, or draping a sheet over a chair can create a perfect backdrop.

Put your best photo first.

A 2017 survey showed that 90% of Etsy shoppers said the photo quality was very important in their decision making. Think about it as, if you don’t take the time for quality photos, that most likely means you’re not taking the time to make quality products.

When posting your photos on the web browser version of Etsy, your image needs to be at least 2000 pixels wide. A simple way to fix this, the way I do, is resizing the photo in Paint 3D or a photo editor. Another way is simply making the listing on the mobile app because it won’t have that requirement.

Description

I don’t know if this is true, but I’ve heard it from a few people, repeat your title in the description.

This is yet another thing I struggled with. I felt that the title said enough, what more was there to explain about a car decal, other than the size? Well, a lot. Now I’m not saying be one of those annoying recipe pages, that gives their life story before getting to the ingredients and the actual recipe. Just make sure it tells exactly what the customer expects to receive.

Don’t copy someone else’s description, develop your own voice. Give all the details you can about your product, because just like policies, this can save you from something going wrong. The customer isn’t able to touch your product and get a full feel of what it is. A well-written description can be the make or break of a sale.

Play 20 questions with yourself.

Reviews

You’re bound to get a bad review at some point. Don’t let it be the thing that shuts you down, and ruins your shop. Message the customer and see what you can do to change their review. If you can’t change it, don’t worry. Learn and improve from it. When looking at reviews, I hardly ever take the negative ones seriously, unless there’s a lot of them. If you have 50 good reviews and 5 negatives, you’re going to be okay.

Sometimes you have to take the hit and lose some profit. Say their package gets lost in the mail, and there’s nothing that can be done about it. You may have to refund them or send them another. Something I’ve always done to keep customers happy, if something goes wrong I send a small freebie with the replacement. Usually, it’s something extra that I have laying around.

Marketing

Social Media is your best friend! Use everything you can, and HASHTAGS! HASHTAGS! HASHTAGS! Before I even started TikTok or Etsy, I wanted to have a huge Instagram following. I ended up with 1,000 followers, just by using a ton of hashtags. No matter what site you’re using, if it allows you, use every hashtag under the sun. This is where you can get extra with it, especially Instagram and Tumblr where you don’t have a limit. Just make sure you separate it from your caption.

Using social media to grow a following can help so much! I would never have made it through 2020 without my following. Seeing a more personal side of you can help a lot, and you’ll even make some amazing friends along the way! The most rewarding thing is when you’re told you inspired someone to start making arts and crafts or living their dream.

Other Information

Make sure your policies are clear. If you do not offer refunds or returns, and a customer reports you for not refunding them, this will save you!

Experiment with things, see what works best for you! Having a following and ignoring all of this worked for me for two years. Eventually, my TikTok views dwindled, meaning sales went with it.

The more items you have listed, the more likely you are to be seen. Try to post something new once a month. Additionally, the more you have the more likely someone that found exactly what they wanted, will buy more from you. If they see something else they like while looking at one item, you’re making more money.

Categories are much easier to do on a web browser. All you have to do is type in what your listing and it will give you suggestions. Mobile Etsy is nearly impossible to figure out where to list decals and stickers. You’d never guess to look in electronics, would you?

Helpful Sites

https://keywordseverywhere.com/

https://www.thesaurus.com/

https://erank.com/

https://www.keysearch.co/

https://www.keywordtooldominator.com/

https://seller.tools/

Resources

https://printify.com/blog/2020-etsy-seo-secrets-all-you-need-to-know/

#etsy #etsy seo #seo #search engine optimization #search engine organization #etys seller #small business #sweetsyn #sweetsyncraft

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dictacontrion · 5 years ago

Text

About the Draco/Harry Nazi AUs

In response to several asks and messages about this round and the last.

First, I want to summarize and center the takeaways that come at the end of this post:

Complicity with, silence around, or diffuse support for bigotry matters. It is not neutral.

This is not - it is never - about one or two people, but about how communities signal that they will or won’t tolerate bigotry.

But do beware of people who are more interested in trying to garner sympathy than in taking responsibility

This recurrence may be in part because popular members of this community have defended and protected people who were involved in propagating romanticized misinformation about Nazism in the past. Certainly, this community has not taken a zero-tolerance policy towards this content.

This type of event is not isolated to two events or to antisemitism - see e.g. RaceFail

If we want to make fandom a space that does not support bigotry, we must stand against it loudly and unequivocally

We must do this even - especially - when it involves holding our friends and community members accountable, and even if it is uncomfortable.

If we are not willing to speak up and take action in defense of our principles, those principles mean nothing.

That said:

I’m not going to name names in this post – not because I don’t think there are good reasons for people to want to know who was involved, but because the naming of names was used to derail the conversation last time. All of these people are still active in fandom and on tumblr, and if you want to know who the main players are, I’ll tell you in a private message.

Last January, an artist posted a picture that depicted Draco as a Nazi and Harry as a Nazi prisoner. The caption (with tags that will become relevant in a minute) read:

I - as a Jewish person, as a queer person, and as a member of this fannish community – found this disturbing for a number of reasons. The idea of a Nazi AU squicks me hard enough on its own. This piece also used anti-semitic language, suggested that a “Jew servant” would fall in love with a Nazi soldier and that it could be the case that “war brought them together” when the war was predicated on the genocide of Jewish people, Roma people, disabled people, and queer people. That last bit is important too; the piece ignored/erased the Third Reich’s internment and killing of queer people, and suggested that same-sex love could flourish in the Nazi regime. All of this adds up to misinformation that is – always, but especially in the current global political climate – dangerous.

A well-known author and blogger in the H/D fandom reblogged this piece, including the caption, with supportive tags, as pictured above. They were the first, and at that point only, person to reblog the piece, and without that reblog it's unlikely that it would have gained attention or been seen by many people. Several people pointed this out to them. They responded to private messages from me and several others and, iirc, to anons, saying that they hadn’t been aware, that they hadn’t seen the caption, that they hadn’t done anything wrong, that “the art by itself is lovely and it was for that very plain and simple reason that I reblogged it,” and that they shouldn’t have to and were not going to apologize or remove the art from their blog.

It would have been very, very easy at this point for the reblogger to apologize and remove the piece. They chose not to.

I contacted the artist and the reblogger privately before making any public statements. The artist defended their work unequivocally. The person who reblogged it continued to defend their reblog of and support for the work across several back-and-forths.

While this was going on, I made a very general post about it: "so some of y’all are starting 2018 by adding antisemitismn and ignorance of historical homophobia to the giant flaming pile of homophobic stereotypes in the tumblr drarry fandom, huh? not a good look, folks. "

A third person – also a well-known author and blogger – entered the fray at that point. They replied to that post, saying that I was "having fun vaguely calling people out" and "mak[ing] people paranoid."

In response to that comment and other ongoing conversation happening in the moment, I then reblogged and added on to my post. I named both the artist and the reblogger and said that that their actions, in creating the art and in giving it a large platform, were “moving into a territory of softening and downplaying the significance of horrific actions taken against, and ideologies that still endanger, queer and Jewish people. I don’t know about y’all, but I have less than zero tolerance for that.”

I stand by that statement.

Following that addition, along with several other bloggers’ posts about it and continued criticism from a number of people, the reblogger took down the art and apologized.

I had never engaged with either the artist or the reblogger before this encounter. I have not engaged with them since. I would have been content to leave it there.

However, the third person reblogged and commented on my expanded post. In that reblog, they defended the reblogger's actions, said that I was being unfair to the reblogger, that the reblogger was very upset at being attacked like this, that I wasn’t really concerned about the post but was using it as an excuse to attack the reblogger (who, again, I had not named prior to the third person's accusation that my vagueness was making people paranoid, and who I had never previously interacted with), and said that I should leave fandom.

The third person is someone I had engaged with beforehand, though have not engaged with since. I had not contacted them about this set of events; they initiated this exchange.

I will also note that they had left provocative comments on my posts prior to this, including telling me that I should leave fandom. I have heard through multiple grapevines that this, generally and in the specific instance of the debate around the Nazi AU, was intentional – that, because I wasn’t excited about their work (though also did not criticize it) and because I was critical of fannish trends their friends supported, they were trying to get me to do something that would give them reason to call me out, to make me look bad, to paint me as a bad actor. This is consistent with other interactions I had had with them – with they way they spoke to me about other people, and the way they had behaved towards me previously.

What that means, in this case, is that this person exploited the fact that I – as a queer person, as a Jewish person – was upset by and angry about antisemitic and homophobic art, to get a reaction that they could use towards their fannish political ends.

This person used the vulnerabilities that are an unavoidable part of my life in the real world to provoke me so that they could malign me in fannish space.

This third person has since made a public statement, as well as a private one to me (which I have not responded to), about their actions. These statements have had several things in common. They have consistently painted themselves as in need of and deserving of sympathy. They have never named or apologized for the harm they caused. They never take responsibility - there is no “I’m sorry for defending the spread of misinformation about Nazism” or “I acknowledge that my actions may have signaled to white supremacists that they can spread their ideas in this space” or “I apologize for supporting an action that harmed people within my community” or “I was wrong to stand up in defense of the spread of the romanticization of the Third Reich." They have never, to my knowledge, come out and said that their defense of someone who gave antisemitic and homophobic art a platform was wrong. They have, however, talked about why this has been hard for them, about how difficult it is to hear other people tell them that they are wrong, about how it’s made them cry and how they feel so bad about it all.

It’s made me cry, too. It’s made me feel more uncomfortable and unwelcome and unsafe in fannish space than anything else ever has. It was and continues to be a reminder that the people who I am in community with may very well hate the things I am, and may have no reservations about using that against me. It’s made me withdraw from fannish spaces.

As all of this was happening, a number of other creators and bloggers seemed to get on side with the reblogger and the third person. A number of authors who I had known for some time and had respected and counted as friends or friendly acquaintances unfollowed me after this third person’s very vocal insistence that I was a bully (which, I'm told, extended beyond those public posts). Several people have told me that, following this, reccing my fic or referring to my posts became unofficially verboten in the Drarry Discord and other semi-public fannish spaces. The reblogger and the third person have a lot of sway in this community. They used it - used my reaction to antisemitic, homophobic work that glamorized Nazis - to provoke a reaction and use it isolate me from a space that had been a respite, to create an environment that felt so hostile and uncomfortable that, for a long time, I couldn’t stand to be here.

This whole string of events - the creation and promotion of bigoted works, the defense of that creation and promotion, the unwillingness to learn or hear criticism or take responsibility, the framing of people who are asked to reckon with their actions as victims, the framing of people who insist on naming and resisting bigotry as bullies or problems, the isolation and vilification of people who speak up - is not unique to me, or to this case. It happens over and over and over again, in spaces online and off. It will keep happening unless we stand in its way.

I still do not regret my refusal to tolerate antisemitism and homophobia in this community. I would do the same again. I only hope I would - I perpetually aspire to - do it with just as much conviction and just as much willingness to take risk for those of you who are marginalized in other ways, and who also look to this community as something of a respite from that.

At the time, I was too upset to say any of this. I was panicked. I was hurt. I just needed to get out. But I’ve since wished that I had said more, so I am now, particularly as I see some dynamics of it playing out again.

Again, if there are takeaways worth taking away, it’s these:

Complicity matters. Silence matters. Support for people who give a platform to bigotry matters, even if you call it by another name. It is not neutral. I know that no one has the energy to respond to every thing at every time - but if you use the energy you do have to defend and excuse it, you are worse than complicit.

This is not – it is never - about one or two people. There were quite a few people who supported and excused the artist’s work, the reblogger’s decision to give it a platform and initial refusal to apologize, and the third person’s defense of the reblogger.

But do beware of people who refuse to apologize, who paint themselves as victims instead of taking responsibility for what they’ve done.

If this is recurring, it may well be in part because popular members of this community defended and protected people who were involved in propagating romanticized misinformation about Nazism. It may well be because people have signaled that those who want to tell stories and spread ideas that glamorize Nazism will not only get away with it, but will be defended and protected.

This is not an isolated event. This pattern of behavior has recurred again and again in fandom. Especially if you are not already familiar with it, please see the fanlore entry on RaceFail.

If we want to keep fandom from being a space that does not support Nazism, white supremacy, racism, homophobia, antisemitism, ableism, and all other forms of bigotry, we must do what I still do not regret doing: we must stand against it loudly and unequivocally.

We must do this even – especially – when it involves holding our friends and members of our community accountable. We must do this even when it is uncomfortable.

If we are not willing to speak up and take action, if we are not willing to risk our comfort, risk our status, risk our ease in order to defend freedom and equality, than we are not defenders freedom and equality. If we are not willing to speak up and take action in defense of our principles, our principles mean nothing.

#antisemitism #nazism #white supremacy #bigotry #drarry #fandom is not immune from prejudice #which is all the more reason to be aware of it and to reject it

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professorspork · 6 years ago

Note

Can you talk a little more about why you found Endgame devastating in a bad way and not a good way?

I sure can! I can talk a lot more, in fact! I’m going to put this under a cut because Ihave a feeling it’s going to get Quite Long (ETA: it is, this is 6k words I amso sorry) so if anyone just wants the tl;dr version, I recommend GaviaBaker-Whitelaw’s excellent article ‘How the straight agenda ruined Avengers:Endgame.’

If you want my own personal take, well. Enter at your ownrisk, here be monsters, etc:

First of all, the very short answer to your question: Itagged this photo as emblematic of all the ways Endgame was “devastating in thebad way and not in the good way” because, if I’m being really honest, Steve and Natbeing queerplatonic life partners (who maybe occasionally fuck but mostly don’t)was my absolute favorite thing about the MCU. (Yes, despite all the words thatfollow hereon about Bucky, I stand by Steve&Nat being my Absolute Favorite,because it was entirely about what was onscreen and nothing about the fanon thatfollowed.) And now it’s Gone and not only is it Gone it was Taken From Me, andI’m salty.

The much longer answer:

What’s maddening is that I honestly loved the vast, vastmajority of Endgame. I adored, like, 92% of it!! It’s just that the remaining8% is the part that’s a) most relevant to character arcs and b) permanent,which leaves me at a bit of an impasse. It’s hard to remember my delight overthe way Natasha laid down haphazardly over old take-out containers whilebrainstorming at her peak adorableness when she’s, y’know, dead. (Which isn’teven my biggest issue!)

I’m going to break it out by character, from most toleast irksome to me so we get the heaviest stuff out of the way and then by theend I’m just shouting on my lawn going “AND ANOTHER THING.” I’m also not goingto go into The Thor Thing, because I think everyone worth talking to is inagreement about that being fatphobic and offensive.

Okay, here we go:

STEVE

I fucking hate that Steve went back in time to marryPeggy. AND I LOVE PEGGY AND I LOVE STEVE/PEGGY SO I’M SO MAD THIS IS WHERE I’VEBEEN LEFT. I have tried to make my peace with it, I have failed, and I amhonestly not used to being this mad at a fictional character. I know it’suseless to hold it against him—something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately isthat argument some fans make about like “why are you slutshaming X characterfor wearing skimpy armor, she just feels most empowered riding into battle withnothing but a strip of leather over her tits” when like, the characterdid not make this choice, the writers made it be that way—but unlike, say,the characterization of Steve in Age of Ultron, which I can happily disregard becauseJoss hates Steve, Markus, McFeely, Russo & Russo have been the architectsof everything I love about Steve. It’s straight from the source! And soI… I’m taking it personally, though I know I shouldn’t. I feel like Steve turnedhis back on me and left me behind.

Well. Me and Bucky Barnes.

It’s probably no secret if you follow this blog that I’ma big Stucky girl. I have admitted it’s one of my top three ships of all time;my steve and bucky tag is 21 damn pages long. But I promise, I PROMISE, thisisn’t even about that. Regardless of whether or not you think these two are orever were in romantic love with each other, their best friendship is one of themost important and indelible parts of the MCU.

Steve’s emotional arc over the last several movies hasrevolved around his intense obsession with all things Bucky. He bailedon his concert tour, defied orders and became Cap-in-combat to save Bucky in1944. He tore down SHIELD, HYDRA and the whole world for Bucky when he foundout he was alive. He became a war criminal on the slightest chance he couldprove Bucky’s innocence! And then, when they were finally reunited, finally foronce on the same page at the same time, Bucky was taken in the Snap. And so,like. It seems a bit WEIRD to me that Steve’s heartbreak over the Snap isframed as a Peggy thing (see: him looking at the Peggy compass before their first act attack on Thanos; his talking exclusively about Peggyin the Snap support group he runs WITH GAY MEN) when Peggy died a natural deathafter a long life in Civil War and not, y’know, Bucky, his oldest, mostintimate relationship-haver, or even Sam, his best friend. It seems a bit ODDto me that we see dozens of cute, short reunions and meetings in the finalbattle with 2014 Thanos—known Extremely Important Relationships Tony/Dr. Strangeand Peter/Carol are given significant on screen exchanges—but we don’t seeSteve and Bucky reunite with one another. It feels a bit CONSPICUOUS to me thatSteve does not tell Bucky what he plans to do when he goes to take the stonesback, full on SUSPICIOUS to me that the two don’t say boo shit to each other—can’teven stand in the same group together when Steve comes back from histime vacation—and outright UNBELIEVABLE to me that Steve Rogers would choose tolive seventy years of his life without Bucky Barnes.

I just don’t buy it.

I don’t buy that after four movies of you telling me itisn’t the case, Steve Rogers’ happy ending doesn’t include Bucky. (Andwe’ll touch on the whole idea of what it means to have a “happy ending” in abit.)

It feels like a deliberate side-step. It feels like thecreative team tried and failed to come up with anything approaching a normal,just-two-bros reunion scene for them and with the weight of their past intimacyeverything they wrote came off as a marriage proposal so they scrapped itentirely. It’s insulting. Not on a “my ship didn’t go canon” level—I never in amillion years expected Steve and Bucky to ‘get together’ in any concrete sense,I wouldn’t even have known what to do with it if I got it, I never wanted that.All I wanted was for the text to honor the affection, the bond between thesetwo just as much as it did in any of the other movies. One of the best featuresof the MCU is its consistency when it comes to character detail andrelationship nuance. So how on earth (I know how, we all know how) did theydrop the ball on what is literally their flagship friendship?

But it’s not just that Steve goes back in time withoutBucky, or without saying a word to him about it. It’s that Steve goes back intime and then, apparently, does absolutely nothing for seventy years, includingsaving Bucky.

The time travel rules in Endgame are… unique. They areunprecedented. And it’s easy to tell that’s true, because not once have thedifferent members of the creative team been able to give a consistent answer onwhy or how it works in interviews after the fact. So like. I accept that mytake on this may not be the “canon” take, and until we get a post-Endgame moviethat addresses these things there IS no canon take. Regardless of what their “thisisn’t Back to the Future” rules means about whether or not changing the pastmeans changing the future, in the future all of these characters lived Buckywas on ice/doing murders until the events of Winter Soldier, also in which theworld learned SHIELD was HYDRA. The Russos think Steve created his own branchreality when he went back in time, and the question is then how he got back toour world to hand off the shield; Markus and McFeely don’t think that’s true;they think Steve lived concurrently to his own regular timeline and was always Peggy’s husband. YOU WOULD THINK THEY’D HAVE REACHED AGREEMENT ON THIS EITHER WAY BEFORE THIS POINT, BUT I DIGRESS. This meansthat either a) M&M are right and Steve went back in time and neither toldhis new wife Peggy “hey honey, you know that startup you’ve got going withHoward, maybe don’t invite Arnim Zola unless you want your entire legacy to beNazis,” nor did he save Bucky when he knew he was somewhere in Eastern Europebeing fucking tortured and brainwashed. He didn’t stop Howard and Maria fromgetting in the car. There’s a lot of joke tweets about how Captain America just“let 9/11 happen” and like—it’s a joke but it’s also NOT A JOKE--- orrrrrr b) theRussos are right and maybe Steve did all of those things in a branch reality,which they felt no need to mention when they were wrapping up the emotionalstoryline for their marquee character, which is lazy at best and kind ofunforgivable at worst. Even in the Best Version of Events, where not only arethe Russos are right and Steve went back in a splinter timeline, but in thatsplinter timeline Steve co-founded a Nazi-less SHIELD with Peggy and theyfought crime Hart to Hart style, saved Bucky, stopped the Vietnam War fromhappening and cured AIDS, it still means Peggy no longer did everything she didon her own, fighting and clawing for it like a honey badger. And should shehave had to? No, of course not. But is it her defining trait and greatestaccomplishment that she did? YES! This matters to me! Erasing it without givingher a say matters to me!

And the fact that all of this is in doubt is BONKERS. Iwould feel less weird about if they didn’t leave all of it unsaid! If they’dincluded a scene with Bucky before Steve went back where Bucky just went “Steve,listen. I know what you’re thinking, and you can’t save me, okay? It wouldbreak the time continuum or something. Now go be a reckless idiot like I knowyou’re gonna and say hi to Carter for me” it would at least feel like theycared the slightest bit. Hell, if they gave Peggy ANY LINES AT ALL it wouldfeel a heck of a lot more like the reuniting of two characters I love and lesslike a mortifying hetcon where Steve erases all of Peggy’s professionalaccomplishments and canon husband and other family just to have hisfairytale happy ending with a voiceless woman-shaped smilebot.

Do you have any idea how much I would have cried if we’dgotten a scene were Steve showed up at the Stork Club in time for his dance?Peggy doesn’t even need to have A LOT of lines (though she should!) A tearysmirk and a “you’re late” reprise would have gone so far! (Especially if they’dhad a final, heart-wrenching goodbye for closure and then he’d returned to thefuture, giving us the best of both worlds, but what do I know.) But no, EdwinJarvis gets a line in this movie and Peggy doesn’t. She has no say in the endof her story—it’s a decision that’s made at her. She’s a bit player inher own life. Steve isn’t reunited with Peggy, he gets a dance with the idea ofPeggy. But like. The real Peggy is brash and terrible at emotional honesty! Shewould be a nightmare to be married to! So is Steve! That’s why I love them,they’re awful! And it just feels like all of that was erased in a moment infavor of a vision of unsustainable hetero bliss.

(Honestly, the way I make peace with this is by thinkingthat after maybe six months with Peggy they were both like “oh godwhat were we thinking, this is never going to work” and broke up, and thereason Steve didn’t tell Sam his wife’s name is that it wasn’t Peggy andhe’s too embarrassed to say so.)

And like. I’m trying not to feel like an awfulbitch/bitter old crone about it, because the thing I keep circling back to inconversation with others is them saying “can’t you at least be happy for himthat he’s at peace? Don’t you think he deserves to rest? After everything he’s done,shouldn’t Steve get a chance to be happy?”

Listen. Do I think Steve deserves a chance athappiness? Yes. Do I think Steve Rogers actually has the capacity forsustainable, long term happiness? … Honestly, no. That’s one of the reasons Ilove him.

Steve is miserable. His life is hard, he’s got PTSD, hehas trouble adjusting even in the best of circumstances. But he’s a fighter.And the reason I admire(d) him so much is that no matter what life threw athim, he was relentless in his forward momentum. He had to go on, he had to keepstanding up for others. He didn’t know how not to. Does this mean he needs ashit ton of therapy? Yes, it does—and the therapy is better in the future, Imight add! But like. As much as the creative team keeps going on about howtheir overall arcs were “Tony needed to learn to be more selfless, like Steve,and Steve needed to learn to be more selfish, like Tony” I think there’s adifference between learning to grasp happiness with both hands in the unlikely,miraculous event it comes your way, because it’s brief and shining and worthcelebrating, even though it comes with heartbreak, and just… noping out of yourlife and ignoring your problems for seven decades while everyone else worriesabout it. I’ve never seen Steve sit still and keep himself out of trouble forseven minutes—now I’m supposed to believe he managed it for seventy years? Hewas Peggy’s weird secret attic husband no one knew about? I respected him,loved him, and identified with him—I felt represented by him—because not onlydid he have to fight for every scrap of happiness he’s ever had, he felt likethere was honor in that fight. That’s why Mjolnir declared him Worthy!! And forhim to then lay down his responsibility and NOT FIGHT for 70 years momentsafter being given that distinction… it stings.

I appreciate my happy endings when they’re hard-won. Thatoften means they’re bittersweet. And if Steve’s ending were framed that way—yes,he got back his Era and he got the girl, but he lost his best friend, his foundfamily, and any determinedly-etched-out balance—I might be more okay with it.But it’s presented as the uncomplicated ride off into the sunset he deserved,and… I don’t want my stories uncomplicated. Steve Rogers is not anuncomplicated man. I know a lot of this is YMMV and I’m maybe a bit more darkin my tastes than others, here—hell, I think it’s cheap that the Elrics got alltheir flesh back AND Mustang got back his sight in FMA:B, that feels like toohappy an ending for me—but telling me that what Steve’s really wanted allthis time was to have a house in the ‘burbs and chill doesn’t resonate. Steve’swhole thing since Day 1 was “how can I sit idly by while other men risk theirlives? I can’t stand that.”

It feels like a How I Met Your Mother ending. If Stevehad had the option to go back at the end of Avengers 1, I’d have bought itcompletely that he’d take it (both for character arc reasons and for “he didn’tknow Bucky was alive then” reasons). But he’s not that guy anymore. Yet itseems like they decided a long, long time ago that Steve was going to go backin time and get a do-over, and years of development, growth, moving on andbonding with other people be damned. Who cares if Steve got Bucky back, whocares if Steve got Sam back, who cares that he’d lived 13 years, his entireadult life, in the future? Nat’s dead, might as well go back to the other damewho liked him!

And. And here’s the thing. If everything else were equalbut Bucky and Peggy’s roles were reversed—if Peggy fell from the train, and itwas Bucky who founded SHIELD with Howard; if Steve met Bucky again as adementia-ridden old man and Peggy were the Winter Soldier, if it were PeggySteve spent all these movies desperately trying to save and nurture—I feel likeeveryone else would find it REALLY WEIRD if Steve went back in time to do itall over again with Bucky! That’s not a question of romance, or gender. Not forme, who loves all of these characters equally. It’s a question of the emotionalarchitecture the story is built upon.

Historically, every decision Steve’s ever made in theentire time we’ve known him has been about Bucky. And for this ending to work,it requires us to either ignore that, or think this single-minded focus wasnever about Bucky at all—that it was instead a sublimated love where Buckybecame a signifier for Peggy or the past Steve lost, instead of a person in hisown right, the person Steve’s always chosen and who’s always chosen him, sincethey were kids. Til the end of the line. Asking me to believe that is a)horrible, and cruel, and frankly homophobic and b) simply untenable—I don’t thinkthat the plots of First Avenger, Winter Soldier or Civil War stand up to thatreading.

And even in the kindest reading of all of this—that Stevedeserves to return to the time he was stolen from, because it’s his TrueTime and Peggy’s his True Love—then my god, doesn’t Bucky deserve that, too?Steve was an orphan with, after Bucky’s “death,” ONLY Peggy and I guess theHowlies to tie him to the world. Bucky has a family! He’s got sisters! Theythink he’s dead! If Steve deserves this, doesn’t Bucky, after everything he’sbeen through, deserve it too? If it applies to one of them, it applies to bothof them, doesn’t it? No matter which way you slice it? (For the record, if Stevehad taken Bucky back to the past with him I'd still be scratching my head aboutthe timeline bearing out—and I think it would make the Sam!Cap offer even morekind of paltry and afterthoughtish than it already is, Sam deserves FIREWORKSand A CROWD damn it, and it also deserves to be a decision not made AT him, seeabove—but at least I could be like “yeah, that's exactly the kind ofhilariously not-thought-out decision Steve would make, have fun kiddo.”)

But I guess Steve inviting Bucky on his Happy Ending Tourof the past would be too much like a fucking proposal so, uh, no, we don’t getthat.

NATASHA

Here is a top ten list, in no particular order, called “I’dbe fine with it, but.”

1. I’d be fine with it—Natasha is a hero, and she deservesa hero’s ending, she merits going out in a big swing to save the world—but she’sstill the Smurfette, man. It means something different to kill your only original female leadthis way than it does to kill a male character. It especially means that whenyou kill her in the exact same way you killed Gamora—THE OTHER SMURFETTE—onemovie previous. It feels cheap, and it feels callous. M&M&R&R havetalked a lot about the woman/women in the office who read a draft where Clintdied instead and said “DON’T YOU TAKE THIS AWAY FROM HER” but a) tbh I feellike maybe they were reading a different draft than was ultimately shot, thismovie evolved a lot over the years and b) when you’re the Token Girl, your storyis more than just yours. In a franchise of this scale, it’s just… it’s notequal yet. If the circumstances had been utterly different, if Nat haddied wielding the Infinity Gauntlet, at least it would be novel. And like—I amnot the kind of person who thinks standing against Bury Your Gays means no gayscan ever die or else, for example; sometimes a Good Death is warranted if it’swell-written enough—but again: it’s the “she feels empowered in that skimpysuit” thing. You didn’t HAVE to create a murder cliff that only exists forfemale characters to die for the men who love them. You made that choice. It’speak “why do we even have that lever?!”

2. I’d be fine with it—Natasha loves Clint, of course shewouldn’t let him die for her, not when he’s fighting to get back his family—butit would have made more sense for Clint to die as penance for all of the ninjamurders he did after losing his kids than for Nat to die because she can’t haveany. It feels like it privileges bio family over found family in a way that’skind of dismissive and gross, and it calls back to the mortifying line in Ageof Ultron were Nat referred to herself as a monster over her infertility. And theargument that Clint couldn’t die, there’s a Hawkeye Disney+ series falls flatwhen Nat has a MOVIE coming out and Vision also has a Disney+ series and yetis, as of this moment, still dead.

3. I’d be fine with it—Natasha loves Clint, of coursethey’d bicker over who would jump—but when the “dramatic” scene that precedes amajor character’s death resembles nothing so much as this comic, you’re doingit wrong. I shouldn’t be giggling over their antics right before someone fallsto their death.

4. I’d be fine with it—Nat did it for her family, whomshe loves—but her family didn’t even honor her back, and that’s bullshit. Tonygets a massive funeral and Nat gets nothing? I admit that what I trulywant for her—a long sequence of RENT-style “what Angel meant to me”testimonials—would have been a bit weird to include pacing-wise, even if I dothink if I asked Chris Evans and Jeremy Renner nicely over twitter they’dprobably improvise one for me anyway. But it didn’t have to be that. A singleshot in a montage would be enough. A shot of Clint, Laura, Fury, Steve, Sam, Okoye and Pepper doing a shot of vodka together and pouring one out for Nat would havebeen enough. Simple, elegant, gets the point across. It’s not hard!!!

5. I’d be fine with it—they needed to get the Soul Stone,for skimpy outfit reasons someone had to die, I get it—but then Steve has toput all the stones back to reverse the heist and stop the branch timelines fromcollapsing like The Ancient One warned about. How the fuck do you return theSoul Stone? And Steve could, wouldn’t that cosmically mean we get Nat back? Asoul for a soul, isn’t that the deal?

6. I’d be fine with it—I understand that playing the longgame and forcing yourself to fall in love with Red Skull so you cansacrifice him, though hilarious, is not actually a solution—but it just seemslike there are other ways to write around this moment. Nat and Clint have bothlost so much, sacrificed so much. That doesn’t count? This isn’t like Thanos,who’s never sacrificed a thing in his life. Nat’s given up so much for thecause; Clint lost his family. The Soul Stone couldn’t just sense that?Or—what if they’d jumped together? Full Rose and Jack, “you jump, I jump,right?” Refusing to be separated. What would the Soul Stone math be then? Ifeel like it would have been a cooler story to find out.

7. I’d be fine with it—ScarJo needed a way out of hercontract, after the Black Widow movie (which: how they’re going to make thatwork is a whole other rant I do not have time for here)—but killing Natasha inthe one irreversible way in a damn comic book franchise just feels soneedlessly final. If you’d said “after everything, after holding the Avengerstogether for five years with nothing but the force of her will and some peanutbutter and jelly sandwiches, she’s tired and disillusioned with it and wants toroam the world for a while without the team, maybe fight some normal crime fora bit” and had her phased out quietly I would have understood! It would havebeen fine! Preferable, even!

8. I’d be fine with it—I don’t think it’s total bullshit whenM&M&R&R say that this was the end of her arc, she’d found herfamily and become a true hero—but the implication that death is the only way toend an arc is lazy and, in this case, hurtful. It comes off as “we couldn’tthink of anything else to do with her, so we killed her.” You can’t do betterthan that? Tony and Steve were gone. Natasha ran the Avengers, andpulled Nick Fury duty on top of it, for five years and death is the onlyend of her arc? Again, I know ScarJo’s contract is up, but that answer is justoffensive. In a perfect world, given the circumstances you’ve described the endof Nat’s arc would be continuing to lead the fucking Avengers.

9. I’d be fine with it—maybe all those office ladies wereright, maybe it would have felt pandering and sexist and deflating if Clint hadstolen Nat’s moment and died for her—but it’s kind of conspicuous that thereare only two female leads in this movie, Natasha and Nebula, and when both trulyexhibit their agency in their climactic moments, they choose to die. And Nebulakilling her past self to save Gamora is one of my favorite moments of the film!But god, there’s more to female agency than suicide, right?

10. I’d be fine with it—the way Steve cries when he findsout is gratifying and in-character—but Tony’s question of “Did she have anyfamily?” is fucking horrifying. You know she doesn’t, Tony, Jesus Christ.It was a sloppy, lazy setup just so Steve could say “Yeah. Us.” Which wasfucking unnecessary because we know that, that’s why she died for you. (Thecomedy reading, which is that Tony was implying she, like Clint, had a secretFarm Family is hilarious but, y’know. Not the right time.)

And speaking of the sir himself…

TONY

This one is a big case of “it’s not what you say, it’show you say it.” I didn’t expect Tony to get out of Endgame alive. (In fact, Ihad braced myself for a total party kill for the original six, which, if it hadbeen a TPK, I would have felt way better about it tbh. If they’d gone down one byone Rogue One style, at least the playing field would be even; that wouldremove a lot of the sting.) Tony’s the bedrock, he’s where we started, and ofcourse this would be the end of his road. He was going to go out big, he wasgoing to save the world. I knew that was the deal.

But they also gave him a little girl.

To my eyes, you can give Tony the ending he deserves—the endingwhere he and Pepper get to settle down, where he gets to be the father he neverhad, the one where he’s finally stable, finally at peace—or you can giveTony the Ending He Deserves—the one where he, the flagship, the starting pistolof the MCU, gets to vanquish Thanos saying “I am Iron Man.” Epic.

You… you lose me when you do both.

Here’s where I get my hackles up:

Were there any other outcomes you considered for Tony?

MARKUS No. Because we had the opportunity to give him theperfect retirement life, within the movie.

McFEELY He got that already.

MARKUS That’s the life he’s been striving for. Are he andPepper going to get together? Yes. They got married, they had a kid, it wasgreat. It’s a good death. It doesn’t feel like a tragedy. It feels like aheroic, finished life.

It is a fucking tragedy! Pepper is left alone with a fiveyear old girl! Pepper does not get a perfect, finished life. It’s a gross,reductive, alienating view of fatherhood, which is all the more starkly (punintended) contrasted when you compare him to Scott, a good dad whoactually gives a shit that he missed out on three years of Cassie’s lifein prison and then ANOTHER FIVE in the Quantum Realm. Honestly, this is whathappens when you don’t let women write these movies—the characterization formen suffers, too, not just women. Because it wasn’t even a factor to them.Like. They literally cut a scene from the movie where a vision of Morgan fromthe future absolved him of guilt for leaving his family behind. That’s… reallyawful, fellas. Surely you can see how awful that is?

I want to feel good about Tony’s death. I want to feelinspired. Part of me does. But god, that little girl. God, Pepper.

But then, it’s pretty much par for the course. Because it’sworth it to talk about

WOMEN

This isn’t about how the one “Girl Power” shot wasshallow fanservice instead of substantive representation, how it makes no sensein the plot of the moment, or how it’s a totally empty gesture unless they planon giving us an A-Force movie (though all of those things are true).

It’s about how this movie has a gender problem in whichthe vast, vast majority of female characters got to be “badass” by bucklingunder the will of their male counterparts—and those who didn’t mostly justweren’t in it enough for that to be true.

Peggy doesn’t get any lines; she is presented not as thestrong, capable individual we know her to be but as a storybook reward forSteve’s good behavior after all these years. She is a prop, not a person.

Pepper is, for the thousandth time, defined as strong andcapable because she’s able to withstand all of the crap Tony puts on her. Ilove Tony/Pepper, I think they’re the beating heart of the MCU, their screwballenergy left a positive and indelible mark on the MCU that redefined how loveinterests work (well, barring Betty Ross, I’m so sorry Betty your movie isawful and you deserved so much better). But like. Tony gives her a company whenhe doesn’t want it anymore, he gives her a suit even though he knows she’s notinterested, he talks her into having a child together and then he leaves herbehind. Pepper is like an amazing, super intense version of one of those cookswho up-cycles leftovers into new, amazing, even-better-than-the-originaldishes. But she shouldn’t have to be, and she deserves better.

The same goes for Valkyrie, who is literally handedthe crown of Asgard for no other reason than because she’s there. It’s notthat she’s not capable, it’s not that she doesn’t deserve it, and it’s not thatshe won’t do an amazing job, but again: it’s a decision made at her. Why isthis still happening? (See also: Sam!Cap, and another way that Sam is stillgetting the Love Interest treatment after all of these years).

Carol was underused, and utilized entirely as a Deus ExMachina instead of as a person with feelings every time she did show up. Whileshe has the raw power to back up that plot usage, aside from her little smirkand “hey, Peter Parker,” we got almost no humanity from her. It’s not like theMCU is bad at establishing loads and loads of nuance in just a few lines—the massivejuggernaut that is Clint/Coulson shipping was launched when they exchanged twosentences to each other!—so it doesn’t feel like a lot to ask that Carol bein the scenes she’s in. You know?

For the most part, I really love how they handled Gamoraand Nebula, but the fact that 2014 them were Super Team Thanos flies directlyin the face of where both of them were at the start of GotG—and for Gamora tochange her mind after learning that in the future, she and Nebula are trulysisters when it’s Nebula who always wanted that for them is… a littlereductive. This was Their Movie—five more minutes to really tease out thenuance here would have really gone a long way.

Plus there was that whole scene where Frigga was like “actuallyit’s fine if I die; I’m just glad you’re okay honey. I feel so empowered inthis skimpy outfit. It has to be this way!” If Nat didn’t die the way she did, this scene would read differently! But she did! So it doesn’t!

Okay. Okay. I’m sure I’ve forgotten things that botheredme, but I have to stop somewhere so it might as well be here. In fact, here’s alist of things I really liked, to remind us all that I did like this movie:

America’s ass! “I could do this all day”/“I know!” ThePB&J cut diagonal! Cooper’s baseball mitt! Tony and Nebula playing PaperFootball! Nebula and Rhodey being best friends / “he’s an idiot!” Clint and Natforehead touch! Nat lounging on the takeout containers! When Hope calls Steve ‘Cap’and Scott gives her a little Look about it! Instant Kill Mode! Bruce and TheAncient One talk metaphysics—and the fact that Bruce is what is astrallyprojected out of Hulk! The redo of the elevator scene being subverted with “HailHydra!” Tony and Howard! Rocket’s much-needed frank pep talk to Thor! Ding dongditching 1970 Hank because he deserves that and so much worse! Tony revisitinghis Age of Ultron mentality at his lowest—frankly, it made me buy it in a wayall of AoU didn’t! Nebula murdering who she used to be so she can becomesomething new (let the past die, kill it if you have to amirite?)! Theindulgent credits sequence with the original 6 and their autographs! Quill’sface when he saw 2014 Gamora! TIME HEIST AS A CONCEPT LBR. Everyone’s funeralfashion choices, some of which are patently Bonkers! Smart Hulk having to riphis shirt off and pretend to enjoy smashing to blend in in 2012! The whole tacosight gag outside the compound! I love you 3000! Scott reuniting with Cassieand saying “you’re so big” instead of “you’re so tall!” Steve being Worthy!Thor doing a self-Fastball Special by hitting Mjolnir with Stormbreaker! YIBAMBE!

I don’t think I have ever cried as hard as I didwhen Sam said “on your left” and all of the Snapped heroes came back in Strange’sportals. Desperate, sobbing, joyful, elated, transported, awe-filled GASPINGkind of crying. I could hardly breathe. I really freaked out the guy next tome, I’ll tell you that.

I’m upset because these movies are good. This movie isgood. It made me feel… I don’t think I can describe the acute, painful ecstasyof that moment as long as I live, when everyone I loved, everyone gone,returned and returned and returned. I’m tearing up just describing it to younow.

I say these things because I care. I say these thingsbecause I don’t want to stop caring, and when characters I love are written inways I cannot understand, that I cannot abide, I am removed from the equation.And I am the damn target audience for this fucking movie. What I think matters.And it matters that I say it.

If you actually made it this far, I am very impressedwith your fortitude, and I thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

#hoo boy #i do not want this in any tracked tags #not that those even work anymore #but here's some filler #and one more #okay #avengers endgame #endgame #mcu #avengers endgame spoilers #endgame spoilers #Anonymous

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angst-fairygodmother · 5 years ago

Text

Who Wants To Live Forever (The Witcher, a Highlander AU)

A/N: A warning was given. No assassins were sent. I wrote The Sad. Summary: Jaskier is not immortal, but rather is An Immortal. What better way to keep your head than to hook up with a witcher and pretend to be helpless? But time marches onward. And all things must end. Content Warning: Major Character Death, implications of suicidal thoughts Word Count: 1628 Cross-posted to AO3: here

He would be needing a new name soon. “Jaskier” had gotten a little too popular and started bringing the wrong kind of attention. In the last town, while Geralt was off fighting a particularly vicious vampire who had been plaguing the region, a hunt that he said was too dangerous for Jaskier to tag along on, he had encountered another of his kind.

“We don’t have to do this,” Jaskier offered. “I just want to be on my way, entertaining the masses. I don’t care about the Game.”

“Well I do,” the other man sneered. “If you don’t want to fight, just stand still and let me have your head.”

“I said I didn’t care for it, not that I was willing to surrender and die.” His sword came out in a flash from where it lay, hidden, along the back of his lute case.

He held it before him, waving slightly, taunting the other swordsman. The man was larger than Jaskier, with a massive two-handed broadsword, clearly the sort to rely on brute strength over actual skill or talent.

“Last chance, don’t make me do this.” Jaskier’s eyes were stormy and the warning firm, dropping all the cheer of his normal tone of voice.

“Hah! You can’t possibly think you’ll win!” The man lunged, a move Jaskier was easily able to sidestep, graceful as a dancer compared to the lumbering fool.

“Okay, so we’re doing this.”

The fight was over even faster than Jaskier had predicted, the other man bleeding and on his knees, sword in the dirt far from him and Jaskier’s blade pressed to his throat.

“Promise me you will leave, never trouble me again, and you can still walk away from this,” he offered, pacing in a circle, never taking his eyes off his enemy.

The other man spit at his feet. “Just kill me already. You know how this goes, know the rule.”

“I do.” The bard sighed, raising his sword back and swinging it down viciously. “There can be only one.”

The storm rolled in from nowhere, making the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He quickly set about tucking his lute and doublet into a safe spot, sheltered from what was to come by a trough, upturned and placed on the distant edge of the open field.

The first strike of lightning drove him to his knees with a scream. It was unsurprising that the man, with all of his self-assuredness and aggression, was a powerful player. Still, that meant this part, never his favorite experience, would particularly suck today. He could only hope he recovered and made it back to the inn to change out of bloodstained clothes before Geralt noticed. Someday, he might tell the witcher the truth, but it wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have now.

It was funny, he thought, how easy time escaped you when you knew that you had centuries. He hadn’t considered that when he’d attached himself to Geralt, all the way back in Posada, those witchers live an extraordinarily long time if they’re not killed by the creatures they hunt. And Destiny had been kind. The pair had managed to keep each other alive for so very long. Yennefer was of course, a sorceress, and the closest thing to truly immortal besides his own kind that he knew of. The one time she seemed to have died, it failed to hold her. Even when they added Ciri to their little family, she was a child with something magical about her, and seemed just as determined to outlive the average human, by will alone if she had to.

But he knew all too well that, whether it be a ballad or an adventure or a life, all things must end. Even love could only keep something for so long, and a life was not a flower, to be pressed between pages and held close with care until it was preserved for eternity.

If he had been able to keep them, it wouldn’t have been fair. The world had moved on. It was tame now, and quiet, with no need of monster hunters and mages in the wake of science and settlement. Geralt had seen it long before him, proclaiming that the world had no place for witchers anymore, and Jaskier had denied it, fleeing from the idea as if it was the worst monster they’d ever faced.

The four of them had stopped their adventuring near Oxenfurt. Jaskier had taken up teaching full time, Geralt guest-lectured when he wasn’t busy running the orphanage he’d founded. Even Yennefer occasionally deigned for a class or two, and then got bored of it and went back to her usual…whatever. Ciri was the least settled, serving as a diplomat and travelling the world still, only coming home on occasion to visit.

He never did tell any of them about his particular affliction. It wasn’t that he’d intentionally deceived them, but with their own longevity it never seemed relevant. Ciri was the only one who ever questioned it, once late at night while they both sat up with a cup of tea. He had shrugged and told her that he was nothing special, just very long lived. Which hadn’t technically been a lie, there were in fact a number of his kind (he didn’t know exactly how many but he’d wondered more than once), and her suspicious glare told him that he hadn’t completely fooled her, but she had dropped it anyway. He wasn’t sure why he didn’t admit everything, but after so long of avoiding it, it had come as a reflex to deflect.

The occasional challenger came for his head, and always he offered them the chance to walk away. He had no interest in power or being the last man standing. He just wanted all the time he could to read and wonder and learn, to love the world and love the three people he called home.

“Come back in a century,” he would say, “come back when they’ve left me. Maybe then I will give you my head; I will have no more need of it once I’ve lost my heart.”

When they refused, he would lead them away from the city, dispatch them quickly. He was not one to toy with his competitors, or even to take their heads if he could prevent it. A last offer of mercy, a feigned distraction to let them escape, a dive into the sea to end things a bit early.

Losing Yennefer had been…confusing. She had been caught up in some sort of magical accident at Aratuza that had left the magical school a crater of ash and smoke and death. At first, none of them believed that she was truly gone. After all, she had survived a fatal event before. But as weeks, and then months passed, they began to accept it. Geralt openly wept; Ciri returned early from her latest assignment, heartbroken and hollow, and tried to be strong for her adoptive father. And Jaskier carried on, the stability they sought as their world turned upside down.

Geralt had the unique honor of being the only witcher in all of history to die of natural causes, fading away in bed, a peaceful sleeping death. At the funeral, Jaskier had laughed about how he would have hated the distinction. They buried him beside Yennefer’s empty grave, and every three weeks they refreshed the wreaths of lilacs and forget-me-nots against the headstones.

It was just Jaskier and Ciri for a long time after that. He occasionally nudged her toward other people, suggesting that romantic connection and a family and all of that typical stuff might be more enjoyable than spending the rest of her days a spinster with her dear uncle. Secretly, it was because he was afraid. He didn’t know if he could handle losing her too, and if he saw her happily settled with someone who wasn’t him, he could disappear into the night, reinvent again, and not have to face the reality that such a day would come. It might hurt, but not as much as watching her die.

She refused. It had led to a horrific fight once, and they didn’t speak for months. He thought to leave then, but couldn’t bring himself to let their end be angry. So instead he had watched the Last Rose of Cintra blossom and grow, and eventually wilt, as all things did. By that time, the world was nothing like her youth, and a part of her had decided that it was time to move on from it, that it wasn’t meant for her anymore.

“But what about you, Jaskier?” she asked, lips dry and voice rasping. “You never aged, and will be the last of us. What will you do?”

“I am a bard above all else, and consummately able to adapt. I’ll carry on, and carry all of you with me.”

The night he buried the princess beside her parents, he used his savings to buy a boat, too small a craft to be called a ship, something he could pilot alone. The world was changing, and he needed time. A few years adrift to come to terms with who he should become, with everything that had gone.

He looked at the map and set his sails toward a little, distant point on it, marked now with his own flowing script as well as the cartographer’s.

“Here there [might still] be monsters.”

One could only hope. Otherwise, he might come back around and just let one of those pernicious little upstarts with only decades under their belt have him. Let pride be damned and it be said that only the witcher kept him alive all those years.

#The Witcher #The Witcher fic #Highlander #Highlander AU #Jaskier #angst #frankly a philosophical ramble #here are technically other characters here too but its really more that they're talked about than actual #Ciri #I suppose she is actually present for a tiny bit #There Can Be Only One

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modmamono · 5 years ago

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A Dark Arle (and by extension Ecolo) thinkpiece

I love Dark Arle, probably next to Doppelganger Arle my favourite villain in Puyo Puyo. I tend to view her as Puyo Puyo 7′s Final Boss figure like Satan, Doppel, Popoi, and the possessed Klug before them. Despite Ecolo being that.

But I’m biased, the only way I can swallow the Ecolo pill is with the water that represents Arle. Not a fan of the dominant force of Dark Arle on his own. That’s my opinion, I am not here to crack on the guy, don’t worry.

As I’ve said. Dark Arle is one of my favourites. Should she finally make a return in a game... Well, I finally would have a main.

But I like them on concept alone. Because in execution... They’re’s kinda wasted. Ecolo acts all dark and mysterious. And that’s so unlike we know him today. Plus Ringo has no real attachment to Arle for Dark Arle to be really effective.

So will you read my reasoning on why Dark Arle’s even more underwhelming then you may think? Can a rewrite of Puyo Puyo 7 using Puyo Puyo 20th, and Puyo Puyo Quest solve it? Click for more.

Note: I’m calling them Darkle for short I came up with it myself before I saw someone else use it. Also: Valkyrie Dark Arle = Varkle. I think that one is unique.

Also when I say them/they in reference to Dark Arle I mean Ecolo and Arle together. So you know when I say Her/She in reference to Arle, and Him/He/ to Ecolo. Normally Darkle is a she to me.

Let’s begin!

The Mystery

Let’s start with that Arle being possessed was never a surprise to anyone. What reason would Arle have to turn evil? Having a headache in front of a redhead?

Even if PP7 was your first game and you know what possession is, you know Arle’s possessed.

About the only thing to show it could actually be Arle is that his fondness of Carbuncle seems true. (I’m going off memory here.)

Arle: Emotive. Especially back in the Compile days. Darkle: Not really. Not outside of the Arle’s spell animations, and even then.

Ecolo doesn’t even pretend to be Arle on-screen beyond saying they are Arle. It wouldn’t have hurt to act a little like a person, I’m assuming that’s all Ecolo knew Arle as. It wouldn’t have hurt his plans.

Well. The reason Darkle doesn’t emote is... Because Ecolo didn’t emote... Not physically anyway.

Pretty sure they needed a bad guy for having bad guy’s sake in PP7

This is all assumption of course, but Ecolo is barely a character himself in Puyo Puyo 7 just an obstacle. He wasn’t a fleshed-out character, and since he is in the driver’s seat neither is Darkle. Take a look at Darkle and Ecolo’s wide array of emotions in 7:

(FTW: Ecolo relies on other characters’ animations for his attacks and such while Darkle just does Arle’s. Darkle doesn’t even change shape during transformation. And Ecolo changes into Feli or Klug. Who’re only barely space-related like he is)

Compare to Arle in the very same game:

She has more than one! To be fair, anyone not named Ringo gets the short stick. Let’s show their expressions and poses in the next game, where everyone gets the spotlight and more importantly where they actually had a decent idea what to do with Ecolo (To make it easy for myself I’ll just put their faces on their skin colours, but trust me that Arle has two lively poses to go along with them):

Arle’s lower right one is my favourite in the game.

And look at Ecolo’s face... Gee. This backfired. He only has one extra expression... Take note, fanfic writers.

Actually, this didn’t backfire.

Imagine a world where PP7 went down but no Dark Arle. And then 20th with its more fleshed Ecolo and he became Darkle for kicks? Him having access to Arle’s emotional range. Pretending to be her, causing a ruckus in the town Arle love so much. But giving away it’s him through their expressions because 20th Ecolo wouldn’t be able to hold a poker face in a human body? (Someone, make that Fanfic, please.) I’ll get back to that, though it should be obvious where I’m going with this...

...Meh, I forgot my next point. I’ll get straight to it.

Puyo Puyo Quest and Darkle

I don’t follow PPQ actively, so I could be wrong about things.

I don’t know if Darkle has any story relevance, does Quest even have a story? I just like to see characters in costumes.

They gave Darkle an alternate form: Varkle (That almost sounds like “pig” in my language.) (Also: Dark Arlematsu, but let’s ignore that, not relevant.)

Atop of this blog post, you see the six pictures (sans Dark Arlematsu) so far.

What you see here in order are: *4 Dark Arle *5 Dark Arle *6 Dark Arle *7 Dark Arle *6 Valkyrie Dark Arle *7 Valkyrie Dark Arle

Aside from the Costumes... See the difference?

...

Is it because Varkle actually looks like someone foreign with his own personality is in Arle’s body?

That’s what I see. And that’s not all. From what I’ve been told. They actually sound like Ecolo using Arle’s voice. That was not the case in 7.

Ladies and gentlemen!! I present to you: Dark Arle fully realised without drool!! It’s Ecolo’s true face channelled through Arle’s.

It’s a really mischievous one. Big surprise. It actually fits with both, of Ecolo’s personality. And the freakiness of heroic Arle pulling sinister faces like that.

Meanwhile, regular Darkle is left unemotive (outside of *4 but that’s an attack of Arle’s, I think). Why?

Darkle is Arle as possessed by Ecolo as shown in 7. Varkle is possessed by Ecolo as shown in everything post-7. One is a concept. The other is a character.

I don’t see post-PP7 Ecolo to have the patience to have to play the unemotive game that long.

In other words, Darkle is an artefact of the only game they were ever relevant in. And they are hesitant to change it to be more reflective of what Ecolo turned into in 20th. Something they had no trouble with a new iteration of Dark Arle.

Rewriting Ecolo and Darkle with what we got post-PP7

That should be obvious by now. But PP7 is a mess. Not an unfixable one. All I advocated for was to make Darkle more interesting and have a more emotional pull. For Primper should they be more active, and the reader. Perhaps have Dark Arle tag along Ringo’s quest while secretly undoing it behind her back. Pretending to be friendly, earn his fascination on Ringo? Have Amitie or Suketoudara be suspicious.

Should I write Dark Arle again, I am basing it in Valkyrie Dark Arle. That’s for sure.

That ends my think piece.

Thanks for enduring.

I do wanna say that I appreciate PP20th’s writing more.

#puyo puyo #puyo #puyo puyo 7 #puyo puyo 20th anniversary #puyo puyo 20th #puyo puyo quest #dark arle #valkyrie dark arle #ecolo #fav

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transienturl · 5 years ago

Note

the first half of the ask post you didn't reblog because you're doing them all anyways

Thanks, me!

1. coffee mugs, teacups, wine glasses, water bottles, or soda cans?Option 7, None of the above: highball glass. I looked up the glassware model I like; apparently the manufacturer calls them “nordic cooler glasses.” I much prefer glassware made of glass to any other type, and dislike the ridges/patterns on a lot of drinking glasses. Yep, I’m this picky.

2. chocolate bars or lollipops?Chocolate. I like chocolate’s texture and the way it melts, and I don’t like eating bits of paper.

3. bubblegum or cotton candy?Cotton candy. Bubblegum is gross.

4. how did your elementary school teachers describe you?Uhh… hm. “Smart,” probably, which wasn’t particularly helpful. They probably had a bunch more to say but I don’t remember what anymore.

5. do you prefer to drink soda from soda cans, soda bottles, plastic cups or glass cups?I like this ask post! As mentioned, glass cups. I like how soda cans feel in the hand but the drinking experience is just alright. Plastic is just unpleasant.

6. pastel, boho, tomboy, preppy, goth, grunge, formal or sportswear?I had to google “boho” and I’m still not super clear on what it encompasses, but it seems kinda neat! Also I have no idea what grunge really means. If I had a feminine body and thus felt like dressing up, I’d definitely pick boho out of the google image results of each of those terms.

7. earbuds or headphones?Both; if I wear either for too long I switch to the other for comfort. But I’m at least somewhat an audio enthusiast, so I could go on for a long time here. Ex:

The soundstage of open-back headphones is really unparalleled for one. Apple’s earpods/airpods actually fit me and have basically no microphonics, which usually are a big issue with IEMs for me, plus their resolution on the high end is surprisingly great.

Insert the rest of this discussion here.

8. movies or tv shows?I watch either of these not from seeking them out but from circumstance, but often wind up liking them. I’m one of those people who thinks, “I’d watch that,” and then never watches whatever that was. So I don’t really know which I do or would prefer.

9. favorite smell in the summer?Uh… hm. That’s a really good question. What’s most interesting about it, I think, is just the list of smells people associate with a season. Of course there’s environmental ones like rain, but for summer I assume you have to go with, I dunno, fair food or something like that.

Anyway, no idea! I can’t think of a lot of meaningful smells that aren’t food, honestly.

10. game you were best at in p.e.?I remember enjoying capture the flag a lot. I dunno if I was actually good at it, though. I did have pretty good short-duration speed, so I was a decent defender. I don’t really remember what else we did.

11. what you have for breakfast on an average day?Nothing. (I don’t like most American breakfast foods much, though that’s not why.)

12. name of your favorite playlist?I called it “the playlist which is entirely fire” because why not. Alternately, the playlist with all of my music is just named after me.

13. lanyard or key ring?Key ring; I’m not a… yeah actually that joke would only work for people who went to my high school and follow this blog (hi Xander).

14. favorite non-chocolate candy?That’s also a really good question and I’m positive I have an answer, but I can’t think of it. I eat candy once every like 3 months, so it doesn’t exactly come to mind easily. The candied pecans I just tried are pretty good, though. Insert reference to my halloween fanfiction.

15. favorite book you read as a school assignment?Y'know how there are some things that you remember deciding at one point were your favorite, but don’t remember well enough to properly consider now? A lot of my favorite pieces of media are like that, but I have at least some confidence in the decision I made at the time. Not so much here. I remember thinking with surprise that I enjoyed The Mill on the Floss when I read it in class, so that’s what comes to mind, but I think it’s the wrong answer. I’m pretty sure there are some books I really enjoy that I’ve forgotten were originally for class. Random example that I think is also wrong: The Hobbit. The Giver is pretty darn good, too. Fahrenheit 451. I don’t remember this being the case but we might have read A Wrinkle in Time in a class. Et cetera.

Wait, no, actually, I figured it out: Island of the Blue Dolphins. (Which, actually, goes in the “this might be too much of a childrens’ book to enjoy rereading” category along with Summerland, The Great Tree of Avalon, The Marino Mission, What the Moon Saw, The Secret of Platform 13, and Island of the Aunts, all of which I loved at the time of reading. And potentially also The Book Thief, although I doubt it. Can you tell I like award-winning children’s books, though?)

16. most comfortable position to sit in?With crossed legs or on my feet, which people seem to find weird.

17. most frequently worn pair of shoes?I only have one regularly-used pair of shoes.

18. ideal weather?Still. I can’t stand wind of any kind. A range of temperatures is nice (not too hot; not *too* cold but snow is pretty so I’ll allow a wide range in that direction.)

19. sleeping position?In a ball, or at least partially curled up.

20. preferred place to write (i.e., in a note book, on your laptop, sketchpad, post-it notes, etc.)?I haven’t written on paper in like a decade. I had to recently in order to leave a sticky note on something and had actual trouble making it legible. Essentially everything I write is on this 2013 Macbook Pro keyboard.

21. obsession from childhood?Um… existentialism? The pretend world my sisters’ and my stuffed animals lived in? Popular science topics and things from video game worlds, all of which went into said pretend world? Jet aircraft? Algebra and geometry puzzles? Configuring laptop computers?

22. role model?John Green. People who can communicate/present things effectively.

23. strange habits?I’m sure I have a ton. I’m not going to delay posting this to come up with any, but I’ll think about it. But especially if we’re using western society as the ‘norm’ for the sake of the question, I think there’s a ton of stuff I do that’d surprise people.

24. favorite crystal?Hm. I like the colorless ones like diamond, I guess? I just generally like gemstones, especially in fiction when they have powers. Oh, how’s this: I tend to like crystals that are (semi)transparent, so they have depth to them and change appearance as they’re rotated.

The other weird, mostly-unrelated thing that comes to mind is when I made a necklace for my best friend in elementary school and spent a lot of effort picking out the right sort of pendant, but I don’t think it was actually a crystal. (I often wonder what it would’ve been like if I hadn’t moved; I bet we’d still be close.)

25. first song you remember hearing?Neat question! I have no memory of a particular song being the first. My parents played music a lot when I was little, so a lot of their CD collection makes me think, “I’ve been listening to this since far before I noticed that I was.” The most recent one of those I heard and wrote down was Cathedral of the Pines by Tim Janis.

26. favorite activity to do in warm weather?…complain about the heat? :D Hm, I don’t have a lot of outdoor hobbies.

27. favorite activity to do in cold weather?…complain about the cold? :P I do like to ski somewhat. And I like hot cocoa.

28. five songs to describe you?

Eric’s Song – Vienna Teng

Doubt – Ruby Day

…hm. Looking through my playlists and the #media tag on this blog, there’s a ton of songs that I like, and where that fact tells you something about my taste in music, but it’s hard to find songs whose content particularly tells you something. Let’s just go with songs I find some meaning or relevance in?

Laughing With – Regina Spektor

Rainbow Connection – Kermit the Frog/various covers

Okay, I ran out of songs with particular meaning; let’s finish up with one whose meaning is arguably a lack of particular meaning?

Both Sides Now – Joni Mitchell

29. best way to bond with you?Talking, I guess. Boring answer, maybe, but I think most bonding experiences I’ve had were just two people talking about something important.

30. places that you find sacred?My elementary school? Is that a weird answer?

Other than that… a lot of places, really. Depending how you use “sacred,” I think it could apply in my mind to lots of unique places, especially natural-wonder type things.

31. what outfit do you wear to kick ass and take names?I haven’t got one. None of my clothes are things I’ve picked out to look good, honestly. The thing that makes me feel more “ready to go out and kick ass than usual” is, like, bringing a phone charger with me in case I run out of battery in the process of whatever ass kicking it’s going to be, and that’s not an outfit thing.

32. top five favorite vines?Remember vine? Good times.

1. A Legendary Argument (https://vine.co/v/enUmZjLFgw2/); the “just do it” “no” one

Yeah, that’s it. I don’t know of any other ones.

33. most used phrase in your phone?I… don’t know how to tell. That sounds like a cool thing to figure out but I dunno how to see that.

34. advertisements you have stuck in your head?None, thank god.

35. average time you fall asleep?Too late.

36. what is the first meme you remember ever seeing?No idea.

37. suitcase or duffel bag?I don’t really know what context to think of this question in. Like, is there a time both would be valid options? Anyway, suitcase. Honorable mention: backpack.

38. lemonade or tea?I only like either of these in moderation. Usually I’d say lemonade, but lately I’ve been disliking acidic drinks more than usual, so maybe I’ll say tea. Actually, what I like is chrysanthemum tea, which you can get at dim sum places sometimes.

39. lemon cake or lemon meringue pie?I’ll go with lemon cake. I can only eat a really small amount of lemon meringue. If someone made more of a lemon meringue tart with a really thin layer of lemon (maybe 10mm or a bit less) and a lot of crust and meringue, that could be really good though.

40. weirdest thing to ever happen at your school?If “bad” counts as “weird,” let’s just say it involved sexual misconduct.

41. last person you texted?My dad (a link to instructions to get free in-flight wifi; nothing interesting).

42. jacket pockets or pants pockets?I prefer to put stuff in pants pockets so I have them if I take off my jacket, but then my pants fall down because I have no hips and my pants are all regular-person sized.

43. hoodie, leather jacket, cardigan, jean jacket or bomber jacket?I immediately crossed off everything except hoodie and cardigan. With a different body I’d definitely pick cardigan.

44. favorite scent for soap?Unscented.

45. which genre: sci-fi, fantasy or superhero?Eh, I mean, I think they all have potential. I’d pick sci-fi or fantasy over superhero; print comics have never interested me at all, though I’m sure there’s interesting stuff in there too.

46. most comfortable outfit to sleep in?I feel like it’s just whatever you’re used to, honestly.

47. favorite type of cheese?Maybe fresh mozzarella? Either way, it’s going to be something people who really like cheese would barely count as cheese.

48. if you were a fruit, what kind would you be?If I were a fruit… not to take it too literally, but I can’t think of a better way to interpret it. Um… a ground cherry, because it’s cute and has a place to hide in.

49. what saying or quote do you live by?“Hope is the correct response to the human condition.”

There are probably better ones that correspond to things I live by more, but that’s the one I have a quote for. Guess who it’s by? I’ll give you one guess.

50. what made you laugh the hardest you ever have?Not sure. Show of the Weekend (@outsidextra) definitely wins “hardest laugh that I can remember recently” though.

#long post #personal

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