#is it spec if it's retroactive? lol

[lover-of-mine]

Yk, something about my Eddie fell first essay, I never really went like "oh this is something that could be proven right by canon" mostly because when I wrote that I was still dealing with buddie being a distant possibility not something that's so close I can taste, but then Ryan was let out of interview jail. Then I went full conspiracy theorist. (Please note everything from here on out is a conspiracy theory that will most likely never be confirmed or denied so I'll live in it forever) I had made the post about how I think Ryan is playing Eddie as in love with Buck, the question was whether he was being told to do that or he was just playing it up as much as they allowed him to because we know Ryan supports the ship, and then Ryan said the "this goes beyond friendship and I love you to the core" thing.

He said he talked to someone about what it meant for Eddie to do that, because he didn't understand it at first, and then that's the conclusion he reached. But the thing is, that line "I love you to the core" specifically means so much in the context of the season, to say I love you to Buck like that in season 4 is so MONUMENTAL, that I wanna believe one of the writers straight up told him "yo this is a love confession" and explained it to him like that, and he has been playing Eddie with that line in mind ever since, and that's why he had that locked and loaded for the interview. Because, like, I, in my most normal day, am out here arguing they casted Ryan with a plan, even more considering the way Eddie was written for Ryan, they could very much have told him "look, play with the chemistry you and Oliver have, if the audience likes with might amp it up, if we're lucky we might go there someday" because you have moments in season 2, but season 2 is still very low stakes, but then when I think about the the season 3 of it all, the there's nobody in this world I trust with my son more than you, the lawsuit, and well of it all and the way they put Ryan in pr jail after Eddie begins, an episode that would retroactively be HUGE for buddie but it's pretty big for them anyway, I'm like 🤔 because we all saw Ryan talking about buddie this past month, the guy CANT SHUT UP, and if he was told something during season 3 or 4 along the line of "play it up, we are gonna fight to make this happen", putting him in pr jail would make sense, because they can't risk him saying something if they're not sure they can deliver, because how fast they dealt with Buck being bi while in a new network makes me convinced someone on fox was blocking it and nothing will convince me otherwise. But now they can, so they let Ryan run free. Because you can make a VERY strong argument that Eddie is aware of something during season 5 and 6, season 6 most of all, but you can very much make season 5 queer coded and have Eddie be like "oh I can't ignore how I feel about him anymore", because Ryan also said something about Eddie's breakdown and how that's what allowed Eddie to let Buck "know who Eddie truly is" which is interesting with the way Eddie is constructed, because if Buck is inside the last wall Eddie had up, what's actually stopping Eddie to see he's in love with Buck by the end of the season? Which would make season 6 as a pining season for Eddie make sense. Down to the way the cemetery seems to be pulling these very specific reactions from Eddie that are the same reactions we saw him have in breakups and flights with Shannon. But also things like Eddie's reaction to the lightning being something we never saw from Eddie before AND the way Oliver talked about a scene of Eddie losing his composure during in another life, not during in a flash that we didn't get to see most likely because they completely rearranged 6b because they thought they were gonna get cancelled, so they wouldn't be able to deliver what they had in mind. But now they have nothing but time, season 8 is already confirmed, and by the looks of it abc was like "go for it" with buddie in a way that fox never was, so they finally got to tell Ryan "we're doing it, go crazy" and now we are here. They could prove me right today. About Eddie not about Ryan knowing and some secret plan being in place forever. I don't think it's gonna happen. I seriously don't think it's gonna happen. I'd be more surprised to be proved right than wrong here. But the conspiracy theory is a possibility that felt very real for a second there during promo season lol

[fondnesses]

roscoe’s notebook post

A while back I said I was going to write a post about the way I use notebooks for writing projects. This is the first of several posts about Writing Process I’ve been tossing around in my drafts for a little while as a result of conversations with friends, so bear with me.

I. Love. Notebooks. I genuinely would have to deeply overhaul my whole Process of writing anything on the longer side if I were to go paperless; I find physical paper pretty invaluable when I’m outlining, brainstorming, and researching, and I still probably write ¼-⅓ of all my actual content on paper first. (That proportion used to be a lot higher, but I’ve gotten better at being productive on a computer in recent years, which is great.) I’m a very visual person, so notebooks really help me visualize my ideas, story structure, etc. It’s very helpful to be able to use arrows and diagrams and physically strike things through, and the tactility is really soothing to me. If I show people my notebooks or talk about them, I often get a response like “this is so organized”, which is sort of true, but I have to stress that it’s “organization for a disorganized mind”; I can’t misplace ideas or notes if it all goes into the same physical object, vs. electronic notes, which are much more, like “Did I say that in a voice memo? PM it to myself on Discord? Leave it in a desktop sticky note? Write it directly into the Google Doc? Who knows! It’s lost to time!”. It’s very much an ADHD management strategy.

It helps that I’m a very neophyte stationery hobbyist and appreciate any excuse I have to use my pens, but I also will go off at any opportunity about how helpful I find them for writing projects, which is why I decided to just make a post about it. Right now I mostly use them for (fan and original) fiction projects, but I used a notebook for a very similar purpose when I was working on my undergrad thesis, and I have a slightly different but equally necessary-to-me approach to notebooks I use at work.

My typical structure for a notebook that’s devoted to one project only looks like this:

I always leave the first couple pages blank so I can go back and retroactively index bujo-style. I don’t always actually do the index, because sometimes I get too lazy, but I like having those blank pages there to give me the option. I also usually put epigraphs/inspo quotes on the first page.

After that, there’s often (but not always, I’ll talk about it) a couple pages at the start where I’m frantically jotting down loose brainstorming ideas before they've coagulated into a story structure. Just, like, vomiting into the void.

Stemming out of that, I usually write out about like 5-10 pages of outline-style notes in chronological order, laying out all the main story beats and charting out the story trajectory. This will inevitably get revised and rewritten many times, but I find the process of writing these wide-angle synopses really useful for dislodging ideas, making connections re: thematic threads, etc. from my brain.

I’ll devote a couple pages after that to specific things like "sex scene brainstorming", "random scene ideas/minor details that don't have a clear place in the outline right now but I'll turn to for inspo later" [this is what I refer to as “bits” in one of the later photos], "page where I just outline the Motifs And Themes", "research notes", "to-do list", "stuff to check on a second pass", "things to put in the a/n and AO3 tags", etc.--the specifics vary with the story.

Then, I skip ahead to approx. halfway through the notebook and cordon off the rest of the pages to be “free writing” space, AKA writing of actual content rather than planning, with the expectation there will be no internal organization and I’ll transcribe to laptop as I go. Writing on paper feels less binding than typing something on a computer; it’s like a little secret kept with myself, and it doesn’t need to go anywhere or be seen by anyone if I decide I don’t like it. Setting aside pages in the back half of the notebook means that, as more things come up re: planning, I can go back and add those in the rest of the pages that were intentionally left blank. This is how I avoid (for the most part) having the whole thing be a jumbled mess where there’s no separation between the notes and the actual story writing; I learned this the hard way via the first notebook I’ll show you in a second. I’ve recently gotten really into using Muji sticky note tabs to label any pages/sections of particular import that don't want to have to refer back to in the index and would rather just flip to instantly.

I do use notebooks that aren’t specific to any one project, but those are much less organized and less worth sharing.

Before I look at more recent stuff, here are some selections from my notebook for the project that got me into writing longfic, my Golden Kamuy canon divergence AU (with apologies for the bad photos, my phone’s camera is trash). I worked on this from Sept 2018-July 2019. It was a learning experience in a lot of ways, and notebook utilization was one of those. I’ve always used notebooks for keeping track of writing projects, as I said earlier, but before this it was largely without much organization or structure; just total chaos. Having a physical notebook became really important for this project because it was a sprawling multichapter story with rotating POVs and a lot of historical research. I also learned a lot about what not to do with a notebook, personally, or at least things that don’t work so well (for me). This was a college ruled spiral-bound Decomposition Book, for the record.

By the time I bought a notebook for it I already had a (very basic) plot outline in mind, so I wasn’t doing that very initial ground-zero brainstorming in here; I was copying out of my phone’s notes app, basically, and then going from there. 

This is one of the first pages in this notebook; I wanted to visualize the relationship web between the four central characters in the story in terms of how they feel about one another. The two colours correspond to the POV characters (Sugimoto in orange, Ogata in pink), and I used this colour-coding throughout the notebook with highlighters, etc. to keep track of information that was more relevant to one character than the other. Tsurumi and Yuusaku aren’t POV characters, but they’re prominent in the story and their presence impacts the central relationship between Sugimoto and Ogata, and it was helpful to me to map out the emotional ecosystem, as it were.

(There are coffee stains all over this, because I wrote the vast majority of the story in coffee shops because I didn’t want to be around my roommates, lol. This is part of why I never do fiction writing in notebooks that are too nice, I get neurotic about needing to keep them tidy. I can’t use ones that are too shit though, either, so it’s a bit of a narrow window. I’ll talk more about brands and paper quality etc. later.)

As you can see, this is the first page of many I set aside specifically for jotting down different pieces of historical information relevant to my story. It’s about fictional characters who are members of an army division that existed in real life, and both the canon and my fic involve a high level of attention to detail with regards to which divisions were present for which battles, etc., as well as general historical details specific to the Russo-Japanese War setting--what did people eat in the trenches? What did they do to fill time? How did they get through the winter? What did third party observers have to say about the conditions? What were the specs of their weaponry (particularly important because one of the POV characters is a sniper and gun nut)? I did a lot of reading (and watching of antique gun collector Youtube videos... the things I do for love, eh), and it came in handy so many times, because it turns out it’s much easier to write trench warfare slice of life if you have factual details to pull from when you don’t know what to do with a scene! Imagine that!

This is the first of three “grid outlines” I made; this is a way I sometimes like to visualize a story outline all on one page, with the columns representing chapters and the squares within the columns representing sections/scenes within the chapters. As you can see, early on I was hoping to get this done in five or even FOUR chapters (whatmakesyouhaha.mp3), with POV switches happening internally within the chapters. This proved to be unwieldy for many reasons, so I revised the outline:

Here I’d come to terms with the fact this story was going to have a lot more chapters than I’d planned, and I rearranged things so that it would happen in ten, with each chapter belonging to only one POV character. This also needed revising later, and in the end the story looked a bit more like this (though it did in fact end up being twelve chapters, but only because Chapter Ten was like, 12k, and needed to be split in two chunks):

I must have remembered to bring my fineliners to the coffee shop this time, lol, because as you can see it’s properly colour-coded this time. This outline was made when I was already four posted chapters into the fic, which hopefully gives you a sense of the way in which I am sort of a planner and a pantser; I can’t get into a longer project without an outline, but the outline inevitably changes many times throughout writing and I often end up with a finished product that looks pretty different from what I was intending. My creative M.O. as always is Do The Maximum! Amount! Of! Work! Possible!

This is what a “free writing” page looks like, for me. In this notebook I didn’t set aside any specific spaces for free writing so it’s strewn throughout the notebook in a really disorganized way and I was constantly flipping through looking for bits I’d written and forgotten to transcribe, and I decided to be more organized in future as a result of that. If something’s crossed through, that means I transcribed it. As you can see, they’re often small sections, sometimes just a coupled decontextualized sentences. About 3/4 of what I write in a notebook makes it into the story, I’d say; some of it never goes anywhere, and that’s OK. I have less of an issue killing my darlings if they never make it off the paper page.

A very brief, top-down chapter outline, where the goal was not to get too bogged down in details and just to visualize the beats and pin down what they’re trying to accomplish. Chapters for this fic typically ran about 6k, and five or six scenes per chapter was pretty common, so the average scene length was about 1-1.25k words/scene. IDK why I called it storyboarding when I didn’t make drawings. (Margin numbers are to keep track of word count, since I was using a daily word count tracker while writing this.)

This page was, as titled, for keeping track of the various balls in the air when I was about 2/3-3/4 of the way through the story and really feeling the pressure with regards to tying up the various loose ends. This was... a struggle. I hadn’t ever written anything longish (this fic ended up just under 70k) that had an action plot before, let alone a canon divergence scenario where I had to engage with and explain away various canon plot elements so I could maintain the audience’s suspension of disbelief.

Now, I mentioned earlier that I learned various “things not to do” with my notebooks while working on that project. One of those lessons I learned is to be more realistic when assessing how big a project is likely to get, not least because I RAN OUT OF PAGES around the chapter 9-10 mark. In my defense though, that’s because I’d never written anything even half this long! But I know better now, and try not to be in denial. Finishing the notebook early was a way bigger problem than I’d anticipated, and was part of the reason the last few chapters took several grueling months to finish. The issue was that I needed to be able to use a notebook to maintain my workflow--attempting to do it only on a computer was dismal--but it seemed silly to start a notebook of a similar size to the one I’d finished (80pg, approximately B5 dimensions) when there was no way it would need that much space, especially since the reference pages, like the historical notes, didn’t need to be transcribed over. I was also pretty broke at the time and didn’t want to spend money unnecessarily, lol. I tried to get by using a Moleskine Cahier for a month or so because I had one lying around, but it was horrid; it was too small to be used comfortably, it wasn’t spiral-bound so it wouldn’t lay flat, the ghosting is terrible and I hate the way Moleskine paper feels, etc. Eventually I caved and went to Muji and bought a 30ish page A5 with closer to lay-flat binding, and I finished the story in there. I would take a comparative pic for you of the relative notebook sizes and include some of the scene staging diagrams, etc. I put in there, but I can’t find it :(

So I learned that specs really do matter, and it’s okay to be picky if the pickiness is going to make the difference between actually using a notebook or not. Things that are important to me in my notebooks:

Ruling (gotta have ruling, I can suffer through grid but blank or dot is a no-go)

Size (I can’t use anything smaller than at least a medium-large notebook, I find it claustrophobic and get miserly about page space)

Binding (twin ring is my preference because it looks and feels better than a classic spiral but has the same comfort of use with regards to bending the pages back to suit workspace size and laying flat with ease)

Paper quality and colour (I don’t like anything too slippery/smooth or with too much visible ghosting, and I strongly prefer an off-white paper to bleached paper--part of why I don’t use Decomposition Books anymore, the paper is scratchy and it’s too damn bleached!)

Pagecount relative to size of project

Portability (in non-COVID times; anything bigger than a B5 wouldn’t fit in the satchel I used to bring to work at my old job), etc.

But everyone’s taste is different in this respect, and the only way to figure out what works for you is through trial and error, I’m afraid. I also suspect I’m more neurotic and particular about the sensory experience of using a notebook than most people are, but I yam what I yam.

Now to talk about the notebooks for my current projects, where I’ve refined my approach somewhat. I’ve included less photos for these because they’re ongoing WIPs I don’t want to spoil completely, but I’ve tried to include some outline-type stuff to give you an idea.

My big bang fic is in the very ugly twin ring notebook on the right; I got it at a dollar store by my house because I needed something to work in and didn’t want to wait for an online order, but it’s been very serviceable for my needs. The paper isn’t even bad. The bigger notebook (B5) is my Sangcheng fic.

I wanted something with a lot of pages for this, because I knew it was going to be a long story, and for some reason the fact it’s smaller than my usual preference doesn’t bug me (I think it’s an A5?); it just fits this story, somehow. I’m not sure exactly how many sheets are in here but I’d guess about 150.

Because this notebook has upwards of 100 sheets, I made a lot of use of sticky-note tabs to label high-priority pages. The colour coding of these doesn’t mean anything, it was just whichever ones I had at hand at any given moment. These are those tabs from Muji I mentioned, I’m really obsessed with them--the shape makes them so much less obtrusive and more practical than conventional squares/rectangles OR flag shapes, IME.

My big bang story is nonlinear, so, similarly to what I did with colour coding for the two POVs for my GK fic, this story has two main colours corresponding to whether a given section takes place in the “before” or the “after” portions of the timeline, with blue as “after”, yellow as “before”. This is what the most current version of the outline looks like in there:

If you squint, you can see the alphanumeric notes in the top right of each section entry; I gave them each a code like “A3″ or “B5″ corresponding to their position in the story sequence (so, it goes A1, B1, A2, B2, etc., through to B9 and then the epilogue). [Unintentional that this schema overlaps with notebook size labeling and so is kind of confusing in the context of this post.] At first I was just keeping track of the sections via the highlighted titles, but it got confusing because I’d write down “Wedding” or “Yiling” in my notes and then refer to the notes later like “but there are multiple marriages?? and multiple scenes in Yiling??”. Stuff gets struck through with a straight line if it’s been written in a more-or-less complete form and crossed out with a squiggly line if it’s been cut from the outline or made redundant.

As I said earlier, I started out all the initial brainstorming for my Sangcheng fic in its notebook, instead of brainstorming it in someone’s DMs/my notes app/a voice memo/etc. and then transcribing it into the notebook in a somewhat more organized fashion, which is how my stories usually start out. Because of this, the first five-ish pages are basically just stream of consciousness rambling where I was trying to jot down every disconnected thought I had about the story concept. I don’t have photos for that because it’s too spoilerific for later developments in the fic, but I can show you some of the stages the outlines went through, once I was able to corral those initial notes into a story structure:

All the chapters in this fic have their own highlighter colour, so when I started trying to make sense of my initial brainstorm notes I just went through and highlighted stuff in the colour of the chapter it would make the most sense for, and then transcribed things more-or-less in chronological order into the relevant chapter outline. I later ended up rewriting all the chapter outlines AGAIN to refine them and divide them internally by the individual scenes, which makes them a lot more legible and less wall-of-text-y. They look like this now, with about four sheets per chapter:

Because this fic is on the longer side, I have some pages that are just for keeping track of other story elements, like this, where I refer back to whatever the fuck the “themes” are supposed to be whenever I forget what this fic is about:

It’s all about the visionboarding... Anyway, that’s most of what I have to offer, since most of these two notebooks is Forbidden Content.

With regards to brands/supplies, I really like this Kokuyo Campus Wide notebook that I’m writing Sangcheng in, it’s pretty perfect for me. I also like the B5 Muji twin rings, but those only come in 30 sheets, so I wouldn’t use it for anything above a ~20k project. The B5 Maruman Spiral Note 6.5mm ruled/80 sheet is another good one, though I wish it was twin ring instead of spiral. As you can tell, I like Japanese stationery brands because it’s easier to find decent paper quality and minimalist design without shelling out $$ than it is with American/European brands, at least IME. I like Rollbahns too. But honestly, I can usually find pretty serviceable random notebooks that aren’t brand-name from Asian dollar stores; it’s really not something where you need to shell out tons of money.

[felassan]

When the new game drops, any idea what class you're going to play? Character ideas yet? Sorry if that's been asked before. I'm so excited! I can't wait to see what subclasses or trees will be in the game. I love how different they've been in each. Remember Force Mage, anyone? Ha ha, yeah me neither.

Hi Nonnie! Happy New Year! I’m really excited too. Thanks for the cool questions.

In terms of character ideas, not much at the moment, though not for lack of thinking about them and the possibilities. Sure it’ll take shape a bit more once we know more information about the premise of the game. the possible factions angle is interesting. I collect inspiring things in this tag and I hope that race selection returns. If it does I’d like to be able to play a City Elf this time around. I like the idea of being a Praesumptor or a Gladiator-type fighter, and I’m eternally weak for elf PCs with G-names..

On class I have no idea actually. My canon worldstate has gone rogue-mage-warrior, and so all three have been ‘repped’, as it were, as a Hero of Thedas and there’s nothing along those sort of lines that could help me choose. I joke about rolling another elf warrior as it’s totally my jam and what I default to (the Warden was also originally a warrior lol til I retroactively changed it for more ‘balance’), but I’m not sure really. Might end up defaulting to a warrior, or seeing which seems most interesting or most relevant to the plot, or it could depend on the game’s design - combat changes quite a lot in this franchise and that has an influence on the decision entry-by-entry for me (e.g. I find mage most fun to play in DA2), the available specializations and such change somewhat game to game as you say (I also can’t wait to see these! hoping for some cool new ones given how different Tevinter is as a society and all the interesting lore to be found in northern Thedas), there’s been some speculation about a revamped class system and stuff, etc.

I fondly remember Force Mage, my Hawke picked it up as her second spec. 😃  

[getoffthesoapbox]

[VKM Spec] Ridiculing VKM 18

As expected, Hino’s obsession with dreary funerals continues.

Obligatory disclaimer for my anti-fans: This post is zeki criticism, vkm criticism, hino criticism, and anti ky. Please blacklist those tags accordingly.

Scanlations can be found in the usual places.

The Good

Gotta give credit where credit is due!

Hallelujah! Kaien Cross bites the dust (literally) at last! Praise the heavens! At last, one of the cancers of this story has been eradicated! Screw you, Hino, for trying to make him more than oozing pustule he was. (And LOL @ that guy facepalming in front of his coffin, who the hell is that anyway, I want his autograph? XD)

Kaien’s melodramatic “woe is me, what a shitty way to die” and then his pathetic “oh a girl is finally crying for me after all this time!” dramatics were hilarious. Like...how sad of a person are you that you’re relieved any girl is crying for you at your death?

Ren is a girl. I repeat: Ren is a girl. At last we can put to bed all that nonsense.

Ren is null!Zero’s and Yuuki’s child. I repeat: Ren is null!Zero’s and Yuuki’s child. Farewell, fantasies of test tube babies and clones and in vitro. Not only that, Ren was clearly conceived in the usual fashion of conceptions, not via any Zeusian head-births or immaculate conceptions. 

Null!Zero lived to raise Ren. I repeat: null!Zero lived to raise Ren. At least the “null!Zero can’t have anything Kaname doesn’t get” rule no longer applies. 

Kaname is too much of a chicken to look at the photo album of a man who worshipped him. Methinks nu!Kaname has received some intimations about how much of a shithead he was in the past. Makes me think better of him.

Kaname is actually interested in someone from the past who isn’t Yuuki and what that person might think of him. Also that he actually genuinely seems interested in finding out how much Ai suffered from Kaien’s loss and is trying to empathize for the first time in his life. 

Ai finally showed up for a funeral. ‘Bout time, since she didn’t even bother to show up for Yori’s. 

The little girl the Prince was living with is not the mayor’s daughter, thank god. 

The mad scientist got a stylish cameo! 

And that’s about it!

The Bad

Perhaps I should rename this section to “The Stupid”? I’ll have to consider it.

Hino forgetting her own lore and that pureblood blood can cure wounds and illnesses--see Shizuka with Ichiru. Ai was right next to Kaien--she didn’t need to offer him vamprism, she could have just fed him her blood. For him to die in such a stupid fashion, despite how great it is, is positively mind boggling given the established vampire lore in this story. 

Hino retroactively trying to act like Kaien meant something to these characters when he’d routinely fucked them over in order to rescue his precious Kaname. 

Yuuki boo-hooing over Kaien dying when she didn’t bother to spend any time with him during the 100 years of life she had to enjoy his company.

Kaname’s unexplained “curse” on Touma that came out of the clear blue nowhere with no foreshadowing or set up in order to “justify” Touma’s insane behavior. Hino’s just phoning it in at this point. 

Touma is the Prince, snooze. Boring and obvious and a narrative dud. 

The “Mayor” is useless and already under arrest, and why the hell does anyone even still care about him?

Kaien’s funeral was a joke and got more panels than Yori’s, which is ridiculous.

The timeline is fucked. Ai was acting last chapter like a bunch of time had passed between the mad scientist kidnapping and the Ren pregnancy being discovered, yet the little girl is still the same age. Either she’s a vampire or Hino has no clue what the timeline is.

Instead of talking about how excited they are to meet Ren, Yuuki spends most of her pregnancy screentime rehashing bullshit about Ai’s childhood with Ai. We already spent 6 chapters on Ai’s childhood Hino, you might want to give us some time to enjoy Ren for once yeah? 

Yuuki whining about Kaien and Yori not being there is a complete joke. Bitch, please, you waiting seventy years to get in bed with your side piece is the reason they’re not there with you now. You have no right to complain because this is your own fault. You squandered the time you had with your precious people.

Null!Zero’s apparently barely there as a father figure since Hino didn’t care to show him in more than one panel with his child. 

The Ugly

All of the ugly this chapter was packed in at the end, appropriately.

Hino just completely excised null!Zero from the family. In the montage of raising Ai images, Zero doesn’t even get a panel with Ai or Yuuki--he’s separated in his own itty bitty panel as if he’s still an outsider in his own family.

No sex scene, no waiting for the baby scene, no naming Ren scene for Zeki. That’s a pretty low blow to make us wait all that time and then skip over everything, Hino. Fuck you, too.

Zero’s and Ai’s little argument at the end would be cute if we’d actually gotten some fucking answers as to why Zeki didn’t get together for an entire human lifetime, but no, Hino doesn’t care to tell us why, we can just make the answer up for ourselves!

Whether Hino intends to “make good” on this implication or not (and my bet, given how gross Ai and Ren act in the future, is that she’ll make good on it), it is utterly reprehensible that Hino made Ai have a sexual attraction to a fucking innocent baby. We all know the VK/VKM world has established that vampiric hunger the way Ai experiences it in VKM 18 is sexual in nature. Hino trying to act like it’s cute there at the end is not ever acceptable. It was not even remotely acceptable when Kaname did it, and it’s not at all acceptable now just because the girls are sisters. Just like slapping Aidou, child grooming is not appropriate or laudable behavior. Ai having a sexual interest in her baby sister is not okay.

And last, but certainly not least, null!Zero and Yuuki approving Ai’s interactions with Ren without having any concerns is deeply disturbing to me. Hino trying to play this off as a cute and normal happy family is even more troubling. I’m very concerned about how this all is going to play out in the future. 

General Aside

@vampireknightmeta brought up a few ways in which Hino might be able to salvage the story as it is now in our private conversations, but I will leave any public speculation on future positive developments to her should she choose to share them with the fandom at large. 

At this point in time, I myself have no interest in speculating about potential positive narrative developments because Hino has shown time and time again that she’s happy to sink lower than even the lowest bar I set for her. I’d rather be happily surprised by Hino saving this story on her own and just laugh at her bumbling in the meantime rather than investing my heart into trying to uncover the “secrets” of the story of a repugnant and morally bankrupt failure of a writer. From now on, I’ll only be speculating about worst case scenarios, the worst I can possibly imagine, and maybe Hino will do even worse than that just to prove to me that there’s no low she’s above sinking to. 

As such, if you’re looking for positive theorizing, you won’t find it here until I see some significant improvement in this sorry excuse for a story. Please look elsewhere for your hit of “positivity.” 

Crackpot Theory Corner

Can’t end this debacle without some crackpot theories. Here’s what could happen that could make this story sink even lower than it has already sunk!

Null!Zero might actually get suspicious of Ai’s “attentions” to Ren, but he’s going to die before he can stop anything. =P Null!Zero does still seem to have some fatherly instincts.

Null!Zero is up next for being killed, probably next volume. We’ll probably have a funeral or two every volume, because that’s totally what everyone’s reading for!

In the chapter where null!Zero dies, we’ll have Ren dying in the future while protecting Ai or Kaname! Gotta kill off dem pesky Kiryuus!

When Yuuki meant “short time after Zero” when he died in VKM 4, what she meant to say was “null!Zero died 20 years after I screwed him and I put myself to bed for 900 more.” Hence, “short time.” Time’s relative, doncha know.

After Ren dies, Kaname and Ai will mourn, then resurrect Yuuki to ease their sorrow and the Kurans will live happily ever after. 

Yuuki never intended to marry Zero, and that’s why she let Yori die before getting together with him officially so Yori wouldn’t have to know Yuuki loved Kaname and not Zero (why, only Hino knows). The wedding Yori and Aidou were waiting for will happen after they’re long dead with Kaname and Yuuki instead. 

The baby from Yuuki’s dream is her second kid with Kaname, a boy who she’ll name Zero. Ai will imprint on her new brother and the horror will start all over again with a new generation, this time blessedly free of Kiryuus, who are all dead.

Oh, and the Vampire King will never be found, because who cares. ;)

Until next time, see you later!

[lilnasxvevo]

wolf953 replied to your post

“ive read liiike upwards of 10 neal shusterman books at this point (ive...”

I've only read Challenger Deep, and I keep meaning to read more of his work but I found myself easily distracted from Scythe (so I didn't finish it). I think his prose was different in his spec fic from his non-spec fic? So I don't know if I would like Unwind... Do you have any thoughts/opinions/recs that are more like CD?

hmmmgh i remember when i was reading Challenger Deep i was thinking “wow this is really different from all his other books” but i also think that for. most books by him that i’ve read to some extent. I have not read Scythe and I don’t know anything about it. (I have read: The Schwa Was Here, Antsy Does Time, Everlost, Everwild, Unwind, Unwholly, The Eyes of Kid Midas, Challenger Deep, Bruiser, and...probably a couple more, I can’t remember how many I read out of the two series I’ve read from). 

Here’s what I got:

The Schwa Was Here is his funniest book

14 year old Antsy Bonano is a regular smartass kid who gets swept up in trying to help Calvin Schwa, a functionally invisible boy in his grade. Hijinks ensue but also sadness lol

Bruiser is sad and wistful and has clever dialogue and a lot to say about the power of love and has a lot of the same Challenger Deep vibe

I tried to come up with a description for this book but all I came up with was AAAAAA because I love it so much. There are two smartass high schooler twins whose parents are breaking up, and one of the twins starts dating a boy who everyone thinks is Trouble. But what’s the real reason he keeps to himself and shows up covered in bruises? It’s partially what you think, and partially nothing you’d ever expect. Though The Schwa Was Here is the funniest Shusterman book, this one is probably my favorite.

The Eyes of Kid Midas has a lot of the same surreal dreamlike qualities that Challenger Deep had going on

Do you ever find a pair of magic sunglasses and go drunk with power and almost destroy reality and also you’re a seventh grader? Well, have I got the book for you! To be honest, I don’t remember this one very well, but I do recall the ending packs quite the punch.

The Everlost books (the Skinjacker trilogy, technically) are very Challenger Deep in that caught-between-realities feel and they might be your best bet for matching the tone

It’s literally about kids who are dead and caught between worlds and that is the whole story. They are very creepy and there’s weird body horror a lot. If you’ve ever read May Bird and the Ever After, you kinda get what this series is like.

The UnWind books are so fucking creepy but like so unforgettably good.

It has the most intentionally bonkers premise and I love it so much. America got into an actual civil war (another one) over abortion and at the peace talks one person just really wanted everyone to realize how ridiculous they were being and said “What if we can’t abort fetuses in the womb, but after the children are born we can abort them retroactively up to age 16?” AND EVERYONE IS JUST LIKE YUP, SOUNDS GOOD. And they decide that if you “unwind” someone and then use like at least 99% of their body parts in other people (organ transplants and the like--transplants are very advanced in this near-future story, so it’s easier to, like, give an amputee an actual new arm than a prosthetic) then THEY’RE NOT REALLY DEAD, THEIR SOUL IS JUST “UNWOUND” AND STRETCHED AMONG ALL THE PEOPLE IN WHOM THEY STILL LIVE ON. So most of the main characters in these books are kids who found out they were going to be Unwound, escaped their fates just in time, and are on the run. These books are very depressing. Kinda Hunger Games meets Handmaid’s Tale. But they are very, very good. There’s a Frankensteined boy named Camus in book 2 or 3 somewhere who I still think about ALL the damn time.

Those are...my thoughts! If I did not answer all or indeed any of your questions feel free to ask me MORE QUESTIONS.

[bhadpodcast]

When he filmed it was for both at the same time.//just to clarify he was only announced in the 3rd film. Both the wrap article and ELJ said he was in FSF. It wasn't until later that fans spec he was in both & maybe they considered it but originally he was only in the last one. I'm not saying he won't get cut but it wasn't officially confirmed he would be in FSD. All the Boyce book posters were on set during only FSF scenes too.

Nah, it was said he was there for both movies. Y'all are gonna get enough of trying to retroactively add facts. I was there during the fracas. Y'all heiffas went IN! LOL!