#it was an actually great show with lots of audience

[bonus-links]

MY TIME HAS COME please discuss in great detail the GrooZeLink dynamics in prologue part 5. I am so intrigued by the stark differences between this shot:

And this shot:

The scar on triforce. The hiding. Please tell me everything there is to know

this is 4 u groozelinkers

why did i do text bubbles this way. how did anyone read this comic. god bless.

this is essentially Loft Monologues His Feelings The Update. It was very important to me that the audience understands where Loft's head is at from the get-go. and like listen, sometimes u have to have a bestie debrief even if ur bestie is a dormant sword spirit who can't talk to u. if bonus links was a musical this would be Loft's I want song lol

jokes aside I think Loft comes here to talk to Fi a lot. it makes him feel both better and worse

LOFTS FI IMPRESSION i feel like he used to do this a lot and thought it was so funny and every time Fi would be like. objectively that is not what i sound like. also, peep the textbox pattern!

even though Loft has trouble acclimating to life on the surface, it was important to me to show that it's not all like. angst and doom and gloom. But that's kind of the problem right? things are good, and he feels like this anyway. also I did my best to include most of the young adult skyloft npcs, I feel like the older one have mostly stayed up on Skyloft for now. LAKE TRIP!!

this is a direct reference to this shot from the game. this line of dialogue is an important thing to keep in mind. tbh the entire reason this comic exists is bc i thought too hard about the implications of skyward sword— what if you found out your girlfriend was really your god, who had orchestrated your entire life? wouldn't that make everything feel a little strange, even if you love her more than anything? much to think about

I like the scar through the triforce mark as a kind of symbolic gesture, but there's not really any intended meaning behind the two pieces of the triforce is goes through. feel free to interpret it however u like tho lol

AND THIS SHOT my headcanon is that Loft doesn't actually help much with the early building in Faron. It's partially because he can't- he pushes his body to the limit during his quest, and then completely crashes when it's over, and it takes a loooong time to even start recovering. He spends most of the time sleeping.

But it's also partially because he doesn't actually want to move to the surface. He wants to stay on Skyloft. In my mind it's like. he fought really hard to return to a state of normalcy that doesn't exist anymore, and that's hard to come to terms with. This is Zelda and Groose's project, and while he'll go along with it, he's not that enthusiastic about it. It's a source of tension in their relationship. Combined with Zelda often acting as a mouthpiece for the gods, it starts to grate on Loft that this aspect of his future has also apparently been decided.

tldr groozelink love each other a lot but things are definitely not perfect, and especially not right now

this is actually something I intended to get a little bit more into in ch2, but the chapter kind of. wrote itself away from it. every time I tried to include a scene with it, it felt too much like I was forcing characters to have too many heart-to-hearts too early. we'll get there eventually

this is an important update in the grand scheme of things :-) mystery mouseketool etc etc

[kiturak]

hi, thank you, these are great questions.

"We might be talking past one another regarding what content is child safe or child friendly, what constitutes 'adult' content or 'adult' spaces."

I am sure we do, and also that there are cultural and language barriers at play, as well.

"What constitutes an adult space, in your mind, and what differentiates it from a general audience or kid-oriented space?"

An adult space, as defined by OP, would be one where children have no right to enter. So, the public library would not be an adult space, but a casino would be (in most European countries). An "adult" section in any space would be. A kid-oriented space would be the library's kids section, or a playground. General audiences would be any space where everyone can enter - with assistance, if needed.

"What barriers or sanctions do you suggest to enforce these distinctions?"

I do not have a one size fits all answer, really. No one does, I think? This question was very surprising to me, but it makes sense, since it originates in how OP wants to "get (children) to leave (by force, if necessary?)", and I think actually was what made me react.

We do not usually do that, in most cases, the barriers and sanctions thing, except for the casino type of adult spaces, where there will be an ID control. Where I live, children as young as 6 will use public transport alone and go to stores or libraries. They are absolutely expected to get to school by themselves from the first grade of elementary school. That does not mean they're not babies! They absolutely are, and at 6 or 8, they know where they are supposed to go to, and come back afterwards. (They might instead end up at a friend's after school, in which case the parents will call.)

If I understand things right, parents in (some regions of) the US will have the police and/or CPS called on them if children as old as 12 are seen alone outside? So this is one of the cultural barriers that I think might be at play here. We do not really have a default "adult" space where children are tolerated when accompanied by adults. There are official guidelines considering what degree of independence is age appropriate. Of course the parents are still responsible if their child sets the library on fire, but it's normal and expected that children share public spaces independently. Bike safety is an issue in streets, etc.

(Another thing is that US media seem to care a lot about sex, and not a lot about violence, re: children, which often can be really troubling if unexpected, even as an adult. I'm the type of person that needs to be prepared for murders in my media, and pre teen's books or TV shows are generally not the type of media where I'd expect that.)

So, to get back to the question about access control - idk?? it depends on the space? In most cases, I would consider clearly noticeable markings to be enough, that was what I meant by "tags count". Just like library sections. That doesn't make it an adult space, or a kid-centered one, just a space shared by all.

Maybe instead of asking what if a kid sees/hears this adult thing, we ask why is that kid in an adult space and get them to leave, instead of forcing all the adults to change and cater to the child who wandered into THEIR SPACE.

[grison-in-space]

okay so I wanted to show @coffee-mage-sans-caffeine some terrible field Beagle stacks, so that they could see how uncomfortable the dogs look, and therefore I went hunting for field rabbit beagle kennels.

I turned up one pet "rare color" breeder and one that turned out to be a breed-specific article from a fucking content mill. Which: Gross. But the third one actually was a field rabbit-hunting beagle breeder, one who had the most good ol' boy [appreciative] blog description of his goals I've seen in a very long time:

Woodpont Beagles are a pack of dual-purpose (show and field bred) hunting hounds located in Southern Ohio, USA.  Some of our female lines now stretch back as many as 16 generations, spanning nearly 40 years.  Hounds from this kennel have been very successful in the past at field trials and shows, although the primary focus the past 20 years has been on pack work after cottontail rabbit or snowshoe hare. 

[...]

Feel free to contact us if this sounds like the type of hound for you.  Not everyone likes the same kind of beagle.  If your interest is field trials, or showing, you may want to keep looking.  If you want good, honest hounds for pack work or gunning, these just may suit you.  Puppies occasionally available.

Like, you know that is an old white man with the most rural of backgrounds and interests. His philosophy is fantastic, mind you, the dogs themselves are a blend of conformation and working beagle lines with the goal of maintaining the best of both worlds, if I wanted a beagle or to hunt rabbits I'd be on that man's doorstep in a heartbeat. I'm reading his stuff and I'm watching very carefully, and I see a post title and pre-emptively flinch:

Immediately what pops into my head is QAnon and hideous right-wing politics have invaded all kinds of circles over the years, and look I was starting to really like this guy, his opinions about working hounds are kickass, and oh no he's going to take time out of his day to make it clear he thinks people like me are scum--what does it read--oh no, oh no, what is it gonna say--

Things You Will Not See Here

Hounds with No Show Blood

Hounds with No Field Blood

Hounds in above ground kennels (i.e., raised on wire rather than being reared on the ground. always. no stacking kennels or god forbid runs.) ...

Yeah. Okay. I can live with this. It's a website straight out of 2013 (or 2003) rather than 2023. And oh, what a breath of fresh air the blog is!

[twinsarekeepers]

Reading some of the critiques of pjotv and now I know why y’all are on tumblr and not in the writer’s room 💀💀

[justablah56]

ok about to go to bed but um I'm having thoughts about sylvester from scorpion so I'm going to say them bcs I have to post every single coherent thought I have or I'll die <3

anyways ok so I do love scorpion, it's a lot of fun and I'm really enjoying watching it. I am very. attached. to sylvester. and I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that I also have fast math brain and anxiety and ocd tendencies and am overly emotional and- anyways. I like him a lot. and I also. *really* hate the way the show has the other characters "motivate him" to do things despite all his things, usually his anxiety. idk if it changes in later seasons or anything, but as of season 2, what happens when he's talking about being particularly anxious about a job and his ability to do it, the thing that usually "works" to get him through it is another character telling him, often very harshly, that if he *doesn't* people are going to die and it's going to be his fault. and then it cuts away from him and now he's doing the thing. now this could very easily be me projecting, maybe that is something that is helpful. but i. cannot even begin to explain how much that would make it worse. even if guilting someone like that did maybe get them to do whatever task, they are not doing good mentally. and it just. makes my skin crawl that at least right now, that's the way they solve this "problem" with Sylvester, and it's the thing that pulls him out of his anxiety spiral. and then he's fine. just. no, I actually don't think that is how you should help someone who is a chronic overthinker with crippling anxiety and ocd.

anyways. erm. besides that the show is great, I'm having fun 👍

[nostalgia-tblr]

genuinely feel like a baffled alien when i read posts about how 90s-00s media was all made for the love of the craft, with not a care about profitability, and how the budget for famously expensive tv shows was in fact thruppence ha'penny and the fancy CGI effects were somehow intended to look shit because wheeeeeee people just enjoyed things back then!

[iwritenarrativesandstuff]

so, final verdict: I’m neutral on the Netflix live action avatar. It’s ok. It had some really effective scenes that made me super excited and cheering at my screen, and one particular scene that actually made me tear up, but also a lot of clunkiness and odd characterization and narrative choices that weakened the experience. Overall, it was decidedly average to me, but I’m really really hoping it doesn’t get cancelled. What a treat to see an entirely poc cast kicking ass on my screen. Now someone please give them a better script and dialogue for season 2.

[callixton]

hmm i think another thing i like abt kencen is chess should be played on a smaller stage. now i am an intimate staging truther for almost every play so i may be biased but that doesn't make it less true for chess. like i get the appeal of the big sets bc of the way they travel thru location and our initial reaction upon literally visualizing chess on a stage, but i think it makes it so easy for characters to get swallowed and for the stage to feel very empty. which may work like. conceptually but i think in practice it just limits the actor's effect. & i know that you can argue that chess is a show that needs to get by partially on spectacle bc of the quality of the book but i disagree just choose a good book. or make up for it w staging and strong character choices. it's not like it has a shallow plot bc it really doesn't it just doesn't have a well resolved one. which is actually another argument for it to be in an intimate space bc it will make the audience feel more personally invested in the characters rather than the story and will care what happens to them even if they leave with questions (does this distinction make sense?). i'm also not saying that chess Couldn't be done well on a big stage i just think most of the time it isn't

[oveliagirlhaditright]

-randomly sees a screenshot of jamie and lily from the city of bones movie, where they seem to embody jace and clary, and am once again sad that we didn't get a city of ashes movie-

[thedreadvampy]

I mean sure, I can understand this perspective, but I'm not sure whether most people feel less shaken to be thrust into conversations about "self-unaliving" than conversations about "suicide"

and I for one as a survivor would much rather unexpectedly encounter somebody talking about "rape" than somebody talking about how funny it is to have sex with somebody when they don't want to, a normal thing that doesn't need to be named because it's So Normal.

which is to say. this is a post about words. the words are not the distressing thing about the discussion. the distressing thing is the distressing thing about the discussion. sugarcoating, dodging or renaming the distressing thing doesn't make it less distressing but it DOES often make it harder to have a frank discussion about it or address it in serious terms.

[pinch of salt: solid probability from their blog that this person is a Literal 14 Year Old and the perspective from 30 and 14 are very different. I do stand by all the points I'm making but I think this conversation lands a lot different for people at different life stages - there is something to be said for the general issue that the internet has flattened social groups to the degree that I as a 30 year old can make a post to my audience of largely adult millennials that immediately enters the same conversational space as people half my age and still in school. that seems. ungreat. as the primary way we engage in conversation. but I don't have solutions to offer.]

you gotta be able to say "die"

you gotta be able to say "suicide"

you gotta be able to talk about "sex"

they're uncomfortable topics, YEAH for SURE

because LIFE is uncomfortable. Death and suicide and sex and pain are straight up going to happen. not having words for the way it discomforts you doesn't make it more comfortable, it just makes you less able to reach out about it.

even more vital, you gotta be able to say words like "rape", "abuse", "queer" or "racist". cause we fought fucking hard to name those experiences. to identify "rape" as distinct from "sex" and "racism" as distinct from "acceptable behaviour" and "queer" as distinct from "invert"

like the function of communication is not to minimise immediate discomfort. we gotta be able to talk about stuff that's hard or sucks or causes difficult conversations.

[pa-pa-plasma]

look i know it's probably just really petty (it isn't, the whole message of this episode, even ignoring the twitch namedrop, was disgusting tbh) but i don't think i'll ever get over how one day at a time decided to alienate an entire chunk of their audience because of an assumption/stereotype they decided to not look into at all before making a whole ass episode about it. "oh just get over it" THEY DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT A SUBSCRIPTION IS. OR AN EMOTE. I DON'T EVEN THINK THEY KNOW WHAT STREAMING IS LIKE GENERALLY. TWITCH IS FREE. THERE IS NO PAYWALL TO USING THE SITE OR APP. THEY COULD'VE JUST LOOKED THIS SHIT UP OR ASKED SOMEONE WHO USES IT. DO YOU SEE HOW STUPID & FUCKED UP THIS WHOLE EPISODE IS COMPARED TO EVERYTHING THAT CAME BEFORE IT. I CAN'T GET OVER IT.

[oatmealaddiction]

Okay but the weirdest thing about the whole "Brotherhood is better you should skip 03" discourse that's become commonplace now, it sort of forgets the world Brotherhood came out in and why you should watch the original Fullmetal Alchemist. When Brotherhood came out, the original Fullmetal Alchemist was one of the most beloved and most watched animes of all time. Brotherhood assumes you the audience have already seen it because of course you have, everyone has seen it, so it skips important information and speeds the story up because it doesn't want to bore you with things you already know. Have you ever wondered "hey why does the first episode of Brotherhood kind of suck, and why am I being introduced to like 50 new characters, and why are they acting like I know what the hell an alchemist is?" It's because Brotherhood thinks you've seen 03.

The first 7 or so episodes of Brotherhood constitute dozens of chapters in the manga, and the first 25 or so episodes of the original Fullmetal Alchemist. The Nina Tucker episode in Brotherhood, in FMA 03 takes up nearly three episodes. Yoki gets a backstory in 03 and it's genuinely one of the best episodes and taken directly from the manga and Brotherhood glosses over it because: duh, you've already seen it. And so if you skip the original you miss out on dozens of really great character building episodes like Ed and Al meeting Hughes for the first time and getting to spend a whole episode helping him free a train from terrorists, or Ed and Roy having a duel that expands on the relationship they have, or episodes where the brothers just help out random people in towns before the major story gets going.

The original also paces itself quite a bit better than Brotherhood and is more in line with the mangas storytelling. In the manga we don't find out about The Gate until nearly two dozen chapters in, and the same goes for the original anime. Like, that's a twist reveal in those stories, and it's weird that the most watched series is the one where they tell you all about The Gate in the first two episodes because they assume you've already seen the original show.

What's more, people don't know that Hiromu Arakawa helped write for the anime while she was still in the middle of writing the manga, and as a result was inspired to write scenes in Brotherhood that the anime did first. That scene of Edward getting impaled by a falling beam? Directly inspired by a similar scene in the original anime. There's a lot of little instances of that and they're great when you can recognize parallels and things in Brotherhood that are direct references to the original anime, but people don't notice any of that anymore. Because the original anime is just an automatic skip these days, and it's a bummer because people don't realize what a giant it was back before Brotherhood was released. They treat it as *bad,* not realizing it was one of the most beloved anime of its time and the problems people take issue with have a lot more to do with personal taste than any kind of actual flaw in the writing. Brotherhood was never meant to dethrone it, and the original anime was always supposed to be part of the viewing experience which is why those first few episodes of Brotherhood are so fast paced. So like, please stop telling people Fullmetal Alchemist 2003 is a skip, or it's bad, or you don't need it because Brotherhood is better. Regardless if you think Brotherhood is better or not, the original wrote Brotherhood's check. It was huge, it was beloved, and Brotherhood is *banking* on the knowledge you've seen all of it and loved it. And trust me when I say there is so much to love about the original series. It's still my favorite branch of the FMA franchise, and it's worth your time, I promise you.

[neofelis----nebulosa]

watched the second full scene released from kfp 4 and it is significantly lowering my expectations

[twopercentboy]

god I'm devastated about almost 6 year old drama about a relatively mediocre show 😭 like they had options to either continue the show w the actors who actually cared about the project or at the very least give Riggs a happy ending and they chose neither ???? I'm devasted at the ending they gave Riggs, after all that character arc buildup for him to finally get his happily ever after and they do THAT like are you fucking with me right now 😭

[whispers-whump]

Some writing advice

that I like to use when I write. None of this is meant to be taken as hard and fast rules, they’re just things I like to do/keep in mind when I’m writing and I thought maybe other people would enjoy! <3

Never say what you mean

This is an offshoot of the very common “show don’t tell” advice, which I think can be confusing in application and unhelpful for scenes where telling is actually the right move. Instead, I keep the advice to never say exactly what I mean in stories.

By using a combination of showing and telling to hint at what you really mean, you force your reader to think and figure it out on their own, which makes for a more satisfying reading experience.

You might show a character getting angry and defensive in response to genuine care and concern. You could tell the audience that the character doesn’t see/talk to their parents often. But never outright give the real meaning that the character feels unlovable because of their strained relationship with their parents and as a result they don’t know how to react to being cared for.

Your readers are smart, you don’t need to spoon feed them.

Be sparse with the important things

You know how in a lot of movies there’s that tense scene where a character is hiding from something/someone and you can only just see this person/thing chasing them through a crack in the door? You get a very small glimpse of whatever’s after the character, sometimes only shadows being visible.

Do that in your writing. Obscure the important things in scenes by overdescribing the unimportant and underdescribing the important.

You might describe the smell of a space, the type of wood the floor is made of, the sound of work boots moving slowly across the room, a flashlight in the character’s hand. And there’s a dead body, laying in a pool of blood in the far corner of the room, red soaking into the rug. Then move on, what kind of rug is it? What is the color, patterns, and type of fabric of the rug?

Don’t linger on the details of the body, give your reader’s imagination some room to work while they digest the mundane you give them.

Dialogue is there to tell your story too

There’s a lot of advice out there about how to make dialogue more realistic, which is absolutely great: read aloud to yourself, put breaks where you feel yourself take a breath, reword if you’re stuttering over your written dialogue. But sometimes, in trying to make dialogue sound more realistic, a little bit of its function is lost.

Dialogue is more than just what your characters say, dialogue should serve a purpose. It’s a part of storytelling, and it can even be a bridging part of your narration.

If you have a scene with a lot of internal conflict that is very narration-heavy, breaking it up with some spoken dialogue can be a way to give some variety to those paragraphs without moving onto a new idea yet; people talk to themselves out loud all of the time.

Dialogue is also about what your characters don’t say. This can mean the character literally doesn’t say anything, they give half-truths, give an expected answer rather than the truth (“I’m fine”), omit important information, or outright lie.

Play with syntax and sentence structure

You’ve heard this advice before probably. Short, choppy sentences and a little onomatopoeia work great for fast-paced action scenes, and longer sentences with more description help slow your pacing back down.

That’s solid advice, but what else can you play with? Syntax and sentence structure are more than just the length of a sentence.

Think about things like: repetition of words or ideas, sentence fragments, stream of consciousness writing, breaking syntax conventions, and the like. Done well, breaking some of those rules we were taught about language can be a more compelling way to deliver an emotion, theme, or idea that words just can’t convey.

Would love to hear any other tips and tricks other people like to use, so feel free to share!!!

[wolflover2426]

I agree! The finale is clearly set up in a way that has left a lot to be explored much later in the next season and hate it as much as you want but some people actually liked how it wrapped up and I’m part of that crowd even though I also have some criticism on the execution.

istg half of the post-s5 finale fics i see have some sort of disclaimer in the tags or summary (or i even just saw one in the title!!) saying the fic was written because the show sucks or the finale sucked or they just hated everything about it

and it's frustrating because i probably would have enjoyed a lot of these fics! but now i'm not even going to touch them because i don't want to engage with people shitting on the show