#it's interesting to read about and also good for Tangible Perspective on what the time off sitch looks like elsewhere

[goatsandgangsters]

it depends on the country, but it's mostly between 20 and 30 vacation days in europe (by law, many companies offer more, like my country by law has "only" 20, but i've never worked a job where i had less than 25 in my contract) and since it's a law you have to take them and your job forces you to, since they can get in trouble if you don't (and we don't have sick days or have to use vacation days for illness either). the cheap flights are a thing, but they are supposed to be made a lot more expensive or downright banned, because of the environmental impact etc, but people won't switch to trains because those are a looot more expensive and you have to travel like 10x as long, and depending on the railway service in your country, they usually run like shit anyway. sorry, this is probably a really depressing ask, but i saw your tags and wanted to shed some light maybe one day the us will get better re labor rights :(

FASCINATING, thank you! It is helpful hearing how things operate Elsewhere

It really is one of those things where intellectually I know that other countries have more vacation time and that people in the US are less likely to use vacation time that they do have, but I never really... thought about it to quantify exactly what that looks like in practice

the "your job forces you to" made me go WHAT out loud. so do you...... okay so in a lot of jobs in the US, if you don't use your vacation time by [end of the calendar year/end of the fiscal year/one year from when you earned it/etc], you just... lose any time you didn't use. it just like goes away from your bank. your JOB can get in trouble if their employees aren't taking their vacation time? I love that, I wish companies would get smacked with a metaphorical stick if their workplace culture isn't encouraging time off

at my current job, I get 23 vacation days a year (I accrue 2 days a month, basically) which is the most generous of any job I've ever had and it makes the other Americans oooh and ahhhh at me enviously. I am an outlier who should NOT be counted. the standard for Corporate Desk Jobs is 10 days. but nothing is legally required so there are of course many people living life without paid time off, especially in other types of jobs. so that's where WE'RE at as a nation

(I did once have a job with "unlimited PTO" which some companies offer as a "perk," but in my experience it's usually done by shitty workplaces with no HR who just can't be bothered to track it. and psychologically it makes people take even less time off, because they don't have a strong sense for what's "allowed" and it feels more like asking for permission than using time that's Yours)

🤝 on trains being just as expensive/more expensive than flights for some foolish reason, when really we'd all be a lot happier with reliable affordable train travel

I want to bestow robust rail infrastructure at affordable prices, lots of labor laws, and many many vacations on everyone like a little Go Enjoy Life pixie. mAYBE ONE DAY

[weirdmageddon]

💿⚛️ davejade headcanons

sorry for leaving you guys waiting on this for like a week lol i kept being like “tomorrow for sure” but falling asleep but anyway here it is. i might add more to this if i think if anything but reblogs might not reflect the up to date source version so you can always find it here

most of these are pointing out stuff thats basically canon anyway but whatever lol. basically canon headcanons

dave tries to impress jade to get her attention because he likes her

this ones for you *misses hoop by 5 feet*

he doesnt mind jade’s inane riddles honestly. he isn’t perturbed by how she just knows things like rose is, because he doesnt think into it too far. he trusts her

he spends a lot of time indulging in her interests and showers her in his music and poetry

they draw things for each other a lot <3 jade has the pictionary modus and seems pretty good at drawing and of course dave sent her sbahj as furries in the mail. sending jpegs over the internet is BABY NONSENSE. real boys send their childhood friend/crush pictures they drew for them through the INTERNATIONAL POSTAL SYSTEM to an unspecified island in the middle of nowhere, pacific ocean that gets packages dropped by plane so the recipient can tangibly hold it and hang it in their room

actually i was going through the commentary and hussie addresses it as such:

“Also notice her SBaHJ furry poster, which was clearly a very thoughtful gift from Dave”

aww

jade would give dave a "cool" plushie of a tiger or something nd he keeps it on his desk . froot’s beautiful idea

he loves her plushie sensibilities. so much less unnerving than his bro’s phallic puppets. they're still soft but no cognitive dissonance this time about the softness coming from foam puppet ass hoorayyy

theyre still reading homestuck on act 4 but they understood them instantly

jade humors dave’s ironic cool facade because it makes dave feel more comfortable without feeling too exposed, but it’s because of this that he feels like he can open up to her because she isnt prying. (im still not over the smile here btw. only jade could make dave smile after a fucked evening where he spilled juice on his turntables and accidentally skewered an innocent crow with his sword and broke his window this mf is TYPING. also getting a bit of joy out of the fact that the only visible suit on his cards-themed bedcover in this panel is a heart)

but he knows that jade is not unaware of what he's hiding. couldnt even refute her lol

from the knight’s perspective, it’s “i’m not as [blank] as i appear. i want you know that about me if i know you well and trust you, or i DON’T want you to know that about me if i DON’T know you well. the reason is that i want to know that i can trust you to avoid turning my insecurity into a Whole Thing”

basically she allows dave to take initiative when HE feels comfortable and confident in sharing the things he’s self-conscious about. this really helps him be comfortable and form a strong bond with her

dave would wrap his arms around her to “ironically” imitate a pair of tangle buddy squiddles (while actually concealing genuine affection basically unbeknownst to himself) but he winds up looking just a little too into it for just an “ironic” bit yall……

jade is slower to realize her deeper feelings since she shows love to everyone (so long as theyre deserving of it!!!) it just hits her one day that she actually Likes him in a special way, while for dave it is more dynamic and gradual but very on the downlow, expressed in creative acts and services

once dave actually recognizes he’s really caught feelings for her down the line, dave and jade happily do the tangle buddies hug all the time. its like their handshake. its their weird couple thing

these two when together as a unit they do not give a shit about what other people think of them

this shit lol:

Creative Fucking Powerhouse the two of them

davejade ass song to me

jade is quite spacey and super appreciates dave’s level-headedness and steady pragmatism while at the same time not being a rigid stick in the mud about it. for example when they were acting as each others’ server players dave was advising her but it was appreciated by jade

sorry its just literally socionics duality LITERALLY THIS IS THEMMM (also i spent WAY too much time making these graphics and integrating texts from multiple sources please appreciate it)

fittingly with that, as ouroborista writes about the opposite space-time aspect dichotomy,

Space and Time are the fundamental Aspect pair. Their job is to make shit take place. To create novelty. Between them they span not only all of existence but also the inseparable twin approaches of any creative project. Space goes for breadth, for ideas, for expansive, holistic input, while Time goes for needlepoint focus and a rapid-turnover ability to pull through on the prompt. There’s a reason why these are the two Aspects necessary for any successful session of SBURB.

jade is literally always having a little giggle about him. dave is a funny guy. lame court jester ass boyfriend

he’d draw his post-ironic fursona and show it to her with the usual deadpan expression on his face, eyes obscured by his shades. but jade will look at it and when he sees her smile and laugh it makes it all worth it. his cheeks feel warm and he’ll smile slightly like “heh heh”. dave the type to smile like an idiot over anything jade does like his mouth keeps making a thin line and hes trying to fight it but . Jade

dave thought jade looked absolutely stunning in her 3 in the morning dress his mouth probably stupidly hung open the tiniest amount seeing her after swapping into it

of course she only wears it for what she considers "very special occasions"…..spending time with dave seemed to be a very special occasion :)

jade think dave looks sharp in his suits!!

imagine jade adjusting daves crooked bowtie and lapel and his palms start to sweat and he darts his eyes from behind his shades and chews the inside of his cheek she making him nervous bro 💯

jade is definitely the teaser and dave is the teased. still i dont think jade teases dave as much as john and rose which is why he feels more comfortable opening up to her about his shit. her teasings are much lighter and inconsequential

despite how funny and informal he is dave is a classy well-put-together romantic. he is responsible and harmonious in how he choses to present himself. remember when he got secondhand embarrassment from rose when she was drunk before her date with kanaya and he suggested to her and kanaya that the two reschedule? … he’d NEVER do something like that. sober. suit is ON. hair is neatly combed. he is right on time, not too early not too late, and his first words are “yo whats up”

dave has this designated driver energy about him

after dogtiering jade’s dog ears can perk and flatten, adding even more expressiveness

jade has so many hobbies and interests i think she’d get dave into horticulture somehow unironically

theyre both the kinda mf to ask “would you still love me if i were a worm”

dave’s hands are warm

jade’s skin can be cool to the touch in some places like the back of her arms or shoulders and dave places his hands there to warm them. or by rubbing them or something

idk just some associations space is cool and time is warm to me. the vaccuum of space is cold and time is associated with gears which are associated with generating heat and dave’s classical element is fire and jade’s is earth and her planet is initially covered in snow and daves is covered in lava idk…. just makes symbolic sense i guess but its also cute in its own right

dave would love going to the beach with jade on earth c cause the ocean is so boob i mean boob i mean boob i m,ean boob i mean SHIT . blue. blue

this Fucking animation bro

she infodumps about science and he sits his ass down to listen

jade does this (excuse the fact that the url is roselalonde)

[mecachrome]

if you ever wanted to talk about your view of them and their dynamic and what makes them interesting to you? i'd be down to read that 👀

hlksdfhh jasmine i completely forgot about this after hungary... why does Everything Happen So Much 😭

anyway i would love to discuss the joys of 2381!!! admittedly 50% of this is just my 2-pick shipping (which i am wont to do 😔) but i really do find their dynamic/potential dynamic sooo interesting... the gist of it is basically that alex and oscar are very similar people but in a way where it doesn't actually allow them to mesh that well if that makes sense? which is what makes them fun to me LOL 🧡💙

like the way i see oscar's character at a glance is that he has a very strong sense of self but in most cases lacks a desire to rock the boat or overexert himself without good reason to (all actions must be done toward a Tangible Benefit !), so he's good at carefully balancing being an assertive speaker in a very casual, imperturbed manner + being just charming enough despite not being naturally drawn to or really even enjoying social spaces. i've talked at length about the empathy/sympathy split and how in a lot of ways his character is kind a mirror of lando's, or how basically oscar = extroverted thinking / introverted feeling and lando = extroverted feeling / introverted thinking. imo oscar isn't afraid of communication, he's just very careful and diplomatic in public situations and knows exactly how much of himself he's willing to "give" up to an audience, even when he comes off as a little reserved or awkward... i think people often boil oscar down to just being the Mature Intelligent Introverted Listener and lando to being the Reckless Clueless Extroverted Yapper even though they actually possess very similar baseline mentalities; where they primarily differ is just in conversational processing styles and how they choose to communicate meaning/intent.

but anyway. alex meanwhile is clearly SUCH a fascinating and deeply charismatic person who is also very introspective and has gone through a lot of hardship to attain the shrewdness he exhibits today, and although his story is quite different to oscar's and i do think he has more of an extroverted persona than him you can see that they interact with people from a very similar perspective + act in that same deliberate & controlled manner. instead of doing what looks/feels right, oscar and alex are the type of person who operates on the True Belief that their actions are correct, that they've thought through their decisions carefully and are taking the most informed risk possible in every situation; imo they have a very strong need for control in their lives but camouflage it with their desire to come off as ~subtle and effortless~ in presentation lol. like it's not that oscar doesn't swear in the car, he just thinks it's cringe to turn on the radio and broadcast it, etc. etc. so he and oscar are relatively "simple" people but also very deep thinkers who are quite sharp and witty and er... at the end of the day occasionally Judgmental Assholes. hlskdhflh that's why i call them insincere4insincere 🧡🧡🧡

Like when you look at the way oscar talks about guys like dr3, it's clear he's fascinated by their personalities and enjoys them as people but at the same time also feels a sort of... i call it "sociological fascination" LMFAO but in short there's a sense of detachment where he's content to simply observe these Conventional Social Patterns but the thought of actually living that way or thinking and acting that way gives him a headache. he'll be like "this is something dannyric would do/say... but Not Me 😅" and ofc it's meant as a compliment and not at all judgmental but at the same time it's very much implied that >These people live in another world and I live in mine. and he's comfortable and clear about delineating what that world is LOL

anyway i'd argue alex is quite similar, because if you watch his high performance interview there's this bit where he talks about how his self-awareness is simultaneously his biggest strength and weakness— which is such an alex thing to discuss... he's soooo frank and vulnerable in a way very few athletes are willing to be but it always comes from a place of very careful admittance, lessons that can only be imparted with enough distance established to the hardship that created them in the first place @__@ wah — and then is like wow it's So interesting how some guys are literally just no thots head empty ! like verbatim he says he's "intrigued" by their "blissful unawareness" which krills me because mentality is such a tricky thing to discuss in motorsport and sports in general, but alex being like ~i know i'm not like most athletes~ (#notliketheothergirls) but also I'm Capable Of Thinking And Using My Brain... for better or for worse... is so freaking funny to me.

tl;dr: alex and oscar basically just think other people are A Little Bit Stupid. which is very budding pundit/future color commentator à la jb22, just guys who are able to break things down and think things through and talk about them eloquently and therefore believe that Everyone Else Except Them Is A Bit Of An Idiot. and most importantly they enjoy being that person in a one-on-one dynamic; they thrive off being the one who gets to be the smart guy and know things and correct people pedantically and kickstart teasing banter and get the last word in. and because they're so often surrounded by specific athlete types who complement their know-it-allness, it works most of the time — like a lot of why landoscar are comaptible is that the gaps in lando's communication are filled by oscar and vice versa, i.e. they're both willing to do the work the other isn't — so when you look at 234's dynamic it's kind of like... "Why are we the same person and What are we supposed to do about it." and since they're both naturally "polite" characters it's not necessarily awkward or anything but it is kind of like. idk the vibe is just so interesting HLSDFHKH. it makes too much sense to the point that it kind of just circles back to not working 😭

like they're both good speakers but hate doing contentTM and don't like being taken too seriously (or actually don't like coming off as taking themselves too seriously), even though they're also very frank and straightforward and able to speak about themselves and their mentalities with overwhelming clarity. and ofc they're not exactly the same person but when you look at how alex talks about himself, how he's grown in confidence over time and had to rely on purely himself for sooo much of his career, it's super interesting contrasted with oscar being such an entj who clearly values his autonomy, likes to know how everything functions around him and understand the fundamentals of everything he does or tries, and likes believing he's achieving something through objective and empirical methodology — i.e. an "overthinker" but more so one caught up in the facts and technicalities rather than in emotions.

anyway so all their interax are just like >Ribbing each other about padel and random little moments here and there and they do make sense and have things in common but it's also kind of weird and unnerving on another level. they're both too assured in not getting "consumed by the narratives" around them and too unwilling to concede to the #cringe to ever really fundamentally Work... but that's what makes it fun ! insincere4insincere 😌

like when oscar says he's still "grounded" and you hear people talk about him being humble, what's most important to note is that his being humble or introverted doesn't come from shyness or a lack of self-belief, it comes from being secure enough in himself to not need his worth validated by other people... likekhklsdahflh so random but i find it kind of funny when people act like oscar worships mark because obviously he's very important to his life and career but 80% of the time when oscar talks about mark it's with a tone of like Yeah that's just my fuck ass old manager who couldn't even beat sebastian vettel (said lovingly but also a bit pityingly) also he doesn't even run the company by himself put some respect on the other people's names. anw that kind of groundedness, knowing where credit and criticism should be given and never going overboard in his assessment of a situation are all things alex had to learn to develop in himself after his red bull days.

ok what was i saying.

this literally means nothing idk if it even makes sense. but don't you think 23481 is so fascinating like the triangle of oscar somewhat following lando's career growing up > alex being lando's "hero" when he was younger and then alex and oscar are just there and alex doesn't really believe in that cringe shit (except for of course the spirit of valentino rossi at the foundation of all of this). LMFAO

also that's why it's so funny that during this get to know alex albon video he gave THREE answers that were the exact same as oscar's from his own interview in this series and every time it was brought up he was like Oh... Hm... and was kind of weirded out by it 😭 like he gave the same answer about choosing his own team + lewis singing, and then when he said he wanted to be an astronaut for a day and heard that it matched oscar he went: "Does it? Now I feel… I don’t want to be in a space shuttle with Oscar, so I’ll change mine. I’ll be a zookeeper, like in a sanctuary." like when ur no longer not like the other girls... 😔 freakmatched a little too hard

[sleeplesssmoll]

Analysis: Another perspective into Sonetto and Vertin's complicated childhood relationship using new information from Green Lake.

We know Vertin and Sonetto were not on good terms after the frog event in the hallway but after playing through Green Lake, I think Vertin still tried to befriend Sonetto. She didn't give Sonetto things from the outside world, but instead she shared her toffees. Even if they didn't speak much (Vertin mentions this when Sonetto gave her notebook. It's rare for Sonetto to talk to her first), this says volumes about their relationship to me.

Vertin, who's love language is giving/providing, found a way to give Sonetto things without making her mad. Perhaps it was more than her being nice. She wanted to befriend Sonetto, but she didn't know how to bridge the gap since her interests are the main reason they don't get along. They had nothing to bond over, but Smoltin did her best to build something. Sonetto also didn't hate the brat, but she didn't like the rule-breaking. She accepted the toffees because they didn't break the rules.

During the Green Lake event, we see Sonetto decipher Jessica’s learning style and modify her lessons around it. Sonetto is very observant.

Back to Vertin and Sonetto's childhood, What if Sonetto knew Vertin was trying to bridge the gap because giving is how she shows affection? She didn't care about the flavor. In fact, she admits she can't remember what they tasted like. But they were a gift from Vertin and she accepted them instead of breaking her heart again.

Vertin was trying to mend things but she wasn't the charismatic Timekeeper then. She was a kid who really wanted the girl sitting next to her to talk to her. She's genuinely surprised when Sonetto comes to her first after the Parade Protest, which ngl breaks my heart.

She couldn't fathom Sonetto checking up on her because she assumes Sonetto doesn't like her. Placing that into context, she “knew” Sonetto didn't like her, but Sonetto “likes” the toffees she shares with so she continued to share. The pining is real.

Unlike everyone else at the Foundation, Sonetto isn't a victim of her cheeky comebacks. Vertin is unusually quiet and soft spoken when she talks to Sonetto by time the Parade comes around. There's no playfulness in her tone or dry humor.

But her efforts were not in vain. Sonetto was highly aware of her deskmate.

When Vertin was hurt, what did Sonetto do after they spoke again?

She gave Vertin her notebook.

Sonetto isn't like Vertin with a bunch of random crap in her pockets to share, but she shared something very dear to her and wrote little notes to her in the margins. While Vertin was in a coma, Sonetto annotated her notes with the intention of Vertin reading them (can be found in Ch3 Atlas). She even left a little get-well-soon message at the end. The highly focused, no nonsense Sonetto wrote annotations in a way someone like Vertin would understand by associating them with things she might be familiar with. She's trying to speak Vertin's language because she gets that one part of her deskmate.

She is trying to wrap her head around Vertin too, even if it's not obvious in her interactions.

Vertin still has the notebook Sonetto gave her.

Moving on, Vertin might learn in a similar fashion to Jessica. Afterall, Sonetto's notes were effective at keeping her out of the guardhouse.

Vertin is a tactile person. Sonetto teaches Jessica about tangible cognition in a way similar to the notes she gave to Vertin through associations.

It's frustrating to think how much these two understood each other yet kept missing the mark because of the Foundation! Also, we can see Sonetto was distracted in some of her notes when Vertin was no longer at her side. Vertin was always a distraction, especially when she's not around.

Sonetto wanted Vertin to succeed. She wanted her to stop getting punished and just listen to the Foundation. However, once Vertin's made up her mind to leave Sonetto fights by her side, because she in fact does care about Vertin. She doesn't understand her completely, but she gets that this is important for Vertin.

And maybe at the back of her mind, seeing Vertin shot down in front of her finally planted that seed of doubt.

Sonetto never tattled in game, but she threatened to. Why? Because Vertin was going to get punished and she wanted to prevent that. Unfortunately, she couldn't. I wonder if that frustrated her? Did she see the bruises when Vertin shared her toffees after seeing Tooth Fairy? Did she feel helpless? Angry? If she's observant, she must have seen them.

In hindsight we can see TWO IDIOT CHILDREN WHO NEEDED TO HUG IT OUT.

[thelaurenshippen]

How much of an impact has writing and consuming fanfiction had in your writing career?

I ask about fanfiction specifically because it's such an open communication sort of media, it's so easy for author and reader to interact. Do you think you'd write differently if you'd never been in the Fanfiction community? What do you think has carried over from those works and interactions into your current works?

ooh, such a fun question! I've never really thought about this before!

so I will admit, while I have been reading fanfiction since 2006, I never actually wrote fanfiction until 2018 (and then didn't share any of it until 2021). so I think those specific relationships affected my writing in very specific ways.

from a reading perspective, I think fanfic really showed me that a story can be anything, told in a million different kinds of ways. the two fandoms that I was deeply entrenched in/reading fic in were sherlock (lol) and the winter soldier (I stand by it). both of those fandoms - TWS especially - did a lot of very interesting stuff when it came to story structure, multimedia storytelling, etc. while of course there's great published fiction that does the same (I've been a huge David Mitchell stan since I was 20, I read House of Leaves for the first time a few years ago, A Series of Unfortunate Events is such a great example of this tbh), I think there's a lot of freewheeling experimentation in fanfiction that encouraged me to do things like write Some Faraway Place as a mix of journal entries, reddit posts, letters, and tumblr posts.

it's also interesting to me that you bring up the author/reader interaction, because you're right, it is such a huge part of fanfic and a part I rarely thought about for a looooong time. I'm a socially anxious lurker by nature, so I would leave comments (show your local fanfic writer some love!) and I would follow a lot of those writers, but I'd never, like, interact with them directly. and my comments were usually along the lines of "I'M FLINGING MYSELF DIRECTLY INTO THE SUN" rather than openings to conversations lol.

but that changed significantly when I started writing fic. the first fandom I wrote for was SO small and the ship I was writing for even smaller (I'm responsible for over half the fics in that tag), so there wasn't really any interaction there. but then I started writing in a different fandom - still small but much more active - and joined a discord and everything. I'm not really active anymore, but I met someone who now has become one of my best friends and who is a huge reason why Desperate Hollow, my queer outlaw novel, finally got fucking finished.

so being in fanfic really affected my writing in the sense that I found a writer friend who - like a lot of other writing friends - has had a profound affect on me as an artist. but more broadly, writing fic for that fandom - about 200k words of it in eight months - taught me some very important things:

how to write a lot of words very, very quickly

how to let go of something being perfect - no one knows who I am on ao3 and people are just happy to have fic for a small fandom, so it doesn't have to be GOOD

how to write physicality - this is very hard for me, even now. I'm an audio first person, I rarely think about what people look like, how they move their bodies, etc. writing fic is so helpful, because if you're using canon scenes, you don't have to come up with the blocking, you just have to figure out how to describe it.

dialogue/character voice - learning how to mimic a writer's style is good from two perspectives: one, you learn more about style and voice by having to unpack someone else's. two, as a writer working in a scripted medium, you often are trying to write to an established style, because you might be in a writer's room for a world that you didn't create.

this is a less tangible effect, but writing mature works for a fandom that has mostly morally gray characters helped me get more comfortable with being bolder in my own work. Desperate Hollow is about two men in the wild west, one of whom has killed a lot of people, and both of whom are career criminals. the show I'm working on currently has the messiest found family dynamic and it will only get messier. I think in the course of writing TBS, I sometimes got scared of doing the wrong thing, or of leaning too hard into the darker parts of the story, and I'm trying to let my characters and stories be deeply imperfect now.

I hope that answers your questions!

[pikahlua]

Wow, okay, I’ve seen a bit of the translation drama now, and I regret to say a lot of people who very clearly do not know how to speak Japanese are being extremely polarizing about some perfectly acceptable word choices in the official manga. This is precisely the sort of stuff I hoped to help minimize when I started doing my translations. It’s been a while since I had to put out a warning like this, so I’ll do it now.

Be careful about getting too married to a particular word choice in English. A lot of word choices are very much up to a translator’s discretion. Language is fluid, and Japanese lends itself particularly well to puns and wordplay.

For example (and this is a particularly good example to explain my point), let’s talk about this panel:

Re: this post

Which leads into what seems to be the crux of the matter: Toga's "love." I've noted in passing before that having her use the word "suki" to describe this love is very curious. It's just an adjective that means something is the object of your affection. It's not a specific word for love like the nouns "ai (love, but broadly)" or "koi (romantic love)" are. "Suki" is just as often translated as "like" as it is "love."

In the above panel, we have the phrase “suki na mono wo suki to iu” (which I translated as “you tell those you like that you like them.”) The word “suki” is being used as an adjective to modify “mono.” However, there is an interesting nuance that is impossible for me to convey in an English translation!

The word “mono” can mean both “(tangible) thing” and “person.” Usually we can tell the difference based on context and the use of the correct kanji. BUT THERE IS NO KANJI USED IN THE ABOVE PANEL. The effect is that what this “mono” refers to is ambiguous. Is it the “things Toga likes” or the “people Toga likes”? It’s not clear: which means that both readings are correct! In fact, the word is probably meant to include BOTH meanings. “All things or people Toga likes.”

And the reason I can’t properly translate that into English is because I have no word that refers to such a thing. In English, it’s a question of “what Toga likes” vs “whom Toga likes,” but in Japanese BOTH meanings are captured by just one phrase.

The most accurate and extremely awkward translation in English would just be “You say who and what you like.” It’s not really something a person would say naturally, especially depending on the context of the conversation surrounding the phrase.

Additionally, “suki” is a very vague word that can be translated in many ways. It gets translated into English as various words all the time. I just decided to go with “like,” but “love” or “dear” would be just as viable. Like I said, it’s kind of up to the translator’s discretion. (And think about the corollary in English. “Like” may not usually mean “love,” but if you were in high school and told someone, especially of the opposite sex, “I like you,” “like” suddenly takes on a whole new meaning.)

Anyways, the whole point of this is that I just want to caution people against jumping to conclusions about these things, especially as you encounter disagreements about such things by fans in the wild. It may be true that a translator has a particular agenda they’re trying to push that runs counter to the message of a story, but it may also be a much more honest and correct translation than you expect. And if you ever need it, I’m always happy to give my perspective on a specific translation to point out the more charitable and non-charitable interpretations, the potential ambiguities, the nitty-gritty grammar issues, etc. (to the best of my ability, of course--I am not a final arbiter on these things either, just another learner myself).

[misc-obeyme]

Hello! Weird ask, but I’ve been toying with this idea for awhile.

Out of personal experiences, I’ve always wondered how the cast of OM (more specifically the brothers) would react to a human MC who’s a devout follower of God. Even if they’re not super strict about their beliefs, they did grow up in a religious household and had experiences praying to God. (or some kind of god, any specifics of religion can be vague to fit the MC’s background and culture).

I think it’d make for an interesting and weird dynamic between all the brothers, especially Lucifer. Because it’d be hard to ignore why he and his brothers + his sister were outcasted from heaven, when it’s not only essential to the plot of the game, but the brothers entire narrative. Their trauma and collective grief is a big part of their identity. And the way I see it, if MC is religious, having to actually face with the real tangible truth that God is real (like actually, and not some mystified being) but also that they must face a question of their own faith.

Qhosojbejaodlwllspxps not to get existential here 😭 But I fell down a rabbit hole of religion and read a few interpretations of religious texts. There was this one quote about Jesus being a son of a carpenter, that when when he smelled the cross made out of wood, he must’ve thought of home. Not exactly relevant, but it did lead me to a spiral of revelation that Jesus was a human being after all, and he was very much like everyone else; despite how certain biblical texts hail him as a mythical figure. Religious themes and symbolism are my TEA! So I was wondering how the brothers of OM would react to an MC who’s religious.

Man, I wonder how Lucifer would feel. Knowing that the person he’s grown to love believes and loves his very own father that has sent him down from Heaven after he avenged his sister. Would there be spite or shame on his part? Could he and his brothers stay cordial for an MC who worships their father that’s forsaken them? Would they, the brothers, beg MC to worship them—to believe in them as much as they love their god?

Or possibly, how would staying in the Devildom affect an already questioning MC? Would it only reaffirm that the idea of God is not someone humans should mystify as a force of good? All the while, that after meeting the brothers and learning about Lilith, also rectifies that God IS real and very much a being capable of not only miracles, but punishment? Would it even be worth to questioning believing God?

Hope this makes sense 🫶

Hello there, anon!

I wouldn't say this is a weird ask at all. In fact, I think it's something that it makes sense to explore considering the game's source material.

I feel the need to begin by saying that I am agnostic myself. I had a religious upbringing in my younger childhood, so I had a foundation of Christianity. But I've been agnostic for years. I might also add that for most of my life, I lived in a place that had a very dominant religion that I was not part of. So I have a bit of an outsider's perspective on devout religion.

All that being said, I have very much thought about what it'd be like if the human who had been chosen was religious, specifically Christian.

Because yo, if I personally ended up in the Devildom and discovered that demons, angels, and God are real and exist, I would have a HUGE crisis about it. I've spent a stupid amount of time questioning the existence of God and coming up empty on answers, so to finally have an answer that I couldn't deny? That'd be difficult for me personally.

So I'm trying to imagine what it'd be like for someone who has always believed. Where instead of finding the truth they were always seeking but never found, this person finds the truth that they knew all along.

If you truly believed in God, you prayed to him and maybe even to his angels, and then you found out they were all real? I think that MC would either take it all in stride like, yes I always knew, or they would be like so overwhelmed by it that they would go through their own crisis for a bit.

But once things settled down, can you imagine an MC who is a devout believer in God and has prayed regularly even able to handle being with the brothers at all? And I don't mean in a romantic context. I mean even just living with them or being near them. They're demons. They're the definition of God's enemies.

My MC's mother is a devout Catholic, so my MC deliberately does not tell her that they live with Lucifer. Because to her, she's going to hear that name and think her child has been taken by the devil and dragged into hell and that their soul is forfeit. (Most of that would be true lol, technically MC did get taken by the devil and dragged into hell... but anyway...)

The issue is that she would believe that her child's soul was going to be damned for all eternity. If she really believed that her child would spend the rest of forever being tortured, wouldn't she do anything she could to save them?

This is how I think it'd go for religious MC, specifically Christian. Because associating with demons and living in the Devildom would likely be enough to cause MC to be damned for eternity.

Now. Is it possible that Diavolo, as the next demon king, has some sway in this regard? I would assume that it's the Celestial Realm that is passing judgement on souls. That they're the ones deciding who gets damned and who doesn't. So you could argue that MC wouldn't end up in hell because the Devildom and Diavolo have an agreement with the Celestial Realm to have a human representative in their exchange program.

So let's assume this is the case and MC isn't going to be damned for eternity simply for associating with demons.

The next issue is absolutely what all of this means for Lucifer & his brothers. Depending on MC's religion and how devout they are, they themselves might take issue with being the roommate of Lucifer and his brothers. But even if we put that aside, too, then there's the issue of MC likely loving what they consider a benevolent God that Lucifer and his brothers see as the one who betrayed them.

It's been my experience that people are very good at pretending religion doesn't exist. Even when they truly believe. They're able to put it aside temporarily or in the name of preserving friendships. How much of this a person can do depends on how much they believe.

So let's say that MC is at a place where they believe, but it isn't so prominent in their life that they can't put it aside just to get to know the brothers. To do all the things OM's MC does in the story and to develop feelings for one or more of them.

Imagine MC and Lucifer fall in love, but deep down MC has this nagging feeling about it. And Lucifer does, too. He knows that MC prays to his Father. He knows how MC feels about it.

I think in the end they'd have to confront that directly. They'd have to discuss it. Could Lucifer put aside his own trauma and grief over his sister and the fall of his brothers in order to accept this part of MC's identity? I don't know for sure, but my first thought is probably not. So it might come down to how much of their own beliefs MC is willing to give up.

I kind of think all of the brothers would feel awkward about it. Lucifer is the most mature and stoic, so he might be able to just not say anything if he's not in a relationship with MC. But imagine if it was Mammon we were talking about.

Imagine religious MC falling in love with Mammon instead. I don't know, maybe people will disagree with me on this, but I really don't think he would be okay with it. I feel like Mammon fell with his brothers not just because he will always follow Lucifer, but because he saw that they were going to need him. They needed his strength, his protection, the way he was able to keep it together better than any of them. They needed him to hold them together. Lucifer needed him to take charge when he was too injured physically and emotionally himself. Think of all that Mammon had to shoulder in the fall and then imagine an MC who loves and prays to the God that caused all of that suffering to begin with.

Lucifer blames himself for what happened. He has daddy issues, sure, but I think he could look past it. And we saw in the latest lesson that he's willing to accept his Father's love again.

But Mammon? I just don't see it.

I kind of think everyone else could manage to get past it. They might all struggle with it to a certain extent, but I don't know how much it would interfere with their feelings for MC. I think it would vary a little bit for each of them. And maybe some of them would want MC to worship them instead (I could see both Levi, Asmo, and Belphie all kind of getting into that territory lol).

Now, I also think it's interesting to consider a questioning MC.

Because the thing about this is that yeah, you can no longer question whether or not God exists. But you get to decide whether or not you worship him.

If it was me, I'd be like okay well I can't be agnostic anymore because God obviously exists, but there is no way I'm going to worship him. I would refuse. I would side against him every time. I find him and the Celestial Realm's love to be toxic and oppressive and I would never be able to forgive him for what he did (or didn't stop) to Lucifer and his brothers and sister. That whole situation is way too fucked up for me to be like oh well okay, God exists therefore I must worship him. Like hell no lol.

But of course it's going to be different for every MC. And I think it depends partly on what their religion means to them. How much of it are they willing to question or to give up or to compromise on?

OOF sorry this was a really long response. I could probably write a whole lot more lol. But this is just a very interesting topic and I think it really runs deep. I didn't really consider religions outside of Christianity, so there's also that, but that was mostly because that's where my experience lies.

Anyway, I hope this answered some of your questions! I kinda ended up all over the place. And of course this is all just my personal opinion. Other people might think about it differently!

[lakesbian]

i need toknow what the fuck is happening in rose's brain (or was before blake got eated rather) i may have to undergo the mortifying ordeal of theoryposting publicly and all. which is why people wanted me to liveblog in the first place. anyway. why the fuck did she hug him. what's wrong with her brain. i'm compelled by the idea of like. upper middle class bitchy cutthroat cishet white girl doing a very good job at Continuing The Cycle--not necessarily lying to herself that the way she's behaving is because she's the only good-hearted one here being slighted by everyone else like some of her relatives might be--but believing that the ends justify the means, or perhaps that performing those means to perpetuate those ends is inevitable and/or inescapable on her behalf. she was born into & raised by The Thorburns and not only can't escape but quite possibly has no Desire to escape the perpetuation of the involved cruelties--task set upon her which she will grimly carry out as her grandmother did before her and etc etc.

the interesting wrench here for her is that part of carrying out those tasks means watching someone who is literally [deep inhale] Herself But If She, Due To Different Life Circumstance, Left Home, Experienced Different Traumas, Attained A Deeply Loving Friend Group, And Formed A Personality Based Largely Around Kindness And Fair + Equal Exchange march like a lamb to the sacrificial altar to buy her time. perhaps nudging his course on the way to the altar at times but largely just watching it because he's a really blundering meandering lamb who doesn't like being told what to do very much. (neither, i imagine, does she.) which, like, that's an inherently fascinating dynamic. not just seeing but Knowing the person she could've been if she had only stepped away from the cycles of family cruelty. blake is doomed, bound to die (obligatory: badly) and drag people down with him with very little awareness of the fact and without making anything tangibly better for the next generation. he's bullheaded, and he doesn't read the fucking books, and he's quite frequently impulsive and bad at compromising and prone to horrendous mistakes which harm far more people than just him.

he's also the type of person who can talk at length about how amazing his friends' art is, how much he loves the tattoos he got from one of them. who will lend his own jacket to an acquaintance even when he's in worse shape. who will take on nigh-suicidal tasks not because he Is suicidal (or at least isn't yet, anyway) but just because they needed doing and no one but him was willing.

how do you, as a bitch of a woman trapped in (& willing to function within the trap of) the horrors of your particular family, meet a You who turned out like that, and not hate him at least a little? find him bumbling and annoying and ignorant, resent him for not being the best sacrificial lamb he could be, for being the type of person who ran away from home instead of getting it into a chokehold. but also, how are you not at least a little fascinated by him? the vestige of what could have been will be gone the second the illusion of blake thorburn inevitably shatters and she takes back her rightful place, but for the brief period of time where that illusion is solid, how could she resist the urge to entertain the idea least a little? the idea of a version of her that will put up with a hug purely to make her feel better despite hating touch, the idea of a version of her that naively believes there's a good way out for both of them.

like i think perhaps she hates his ass because his ass is, from her perspective, a dumb and cringefail miserable little sacrificial lamb who is going to be a BITCH to play along with until whenever he kicks the bucket. and she is fully aware that she is lying her ass off because she has 0 desire to intervene in the process of this alternate-her marching himself to the altar for her. but also she mayhaps. occasionally. just a little. gets lost in the sauce of that game of pretend where she's pretending she actually respects him as an equal or has real investment in him not dying badly. is this anything. are we going anywhere with this. like literally what If you met an alternate version of you and that alternate version of you is dumb and stupid and unsustainable and totally fucked but also nicey. you would totally Strongly Dislike their ass but also Genuinely find yourself compelled to wring a moment of real affection or connection out of them before they explode. anyway blake has next to none of these complexes about her and thus no hypothetical weird psychosexual obsession with her. but rose? yeah you can get a hypothetical weird psychosexual obsession with blake out of rose.

[whelmed-justwhelmed]

Thoughts about Vincent Valentine and some of his struggles

Some miscellaneous notes before the actual substance of this post.

Loosely inspired by / based on this post, might suggest reading it before my own for a better understanding of the perspectives of the ideas in this post, though not strictly necessary as I think it’s still comprehensible without doing so. This post was made to my understanding + my current interpretation + what I can remember of things at the moment. Anyways here’s my maybe somewhat rambling thoughts, this is what I’ve got thus far. ( @sephirthoughts ask and you shall receive.)

After seeing and being inspired by the previously mentioned post I got to thinking about what I felt to be an interesting character development opportunity for Vincent. The basic premise being how Vincent’s situation, mostly in relation to himself and some of the things that have happened to him in the past, could potentially improve if he could at least start to reconcile his views of things compared to the objective realities. I feel like a step like this could help him to have a healthier perspective and at least somewhat improve his general quality of life.

Now it’s known how feelings such as guilt and regret among other such ones weigh heavily on him, of which a significant amount stem from his time as a bodyguard for the scientists of shinra manor. Although I do acknowledge these things aren’t the only ones that weigh on him and that my proposal of reconciliation is not the only thing that could be done to help his situation, much of his suffering specifically does seem to directly or indirectly stem from that time, his perspective of it, and of how it all relates to him. So with that perspective in mind, I think it’s a good place to start (at least for this hypothetical Vincent character development scenario).

Vincent is the sort where I want to (respectfully) gently grab him by the shoulders and shake a bit going, “It’s not your fault, it wasn’t your fault, it wasn’t your responsibility, you did about as much as you could for the situation, It. Wasn’t. Your. Fault.” Sadly though it seems (at least to me I feel) he’s generally not at a point where such a message would really get through to him in any meaningful or lasting way, so then that led me to wonder, what sorts of things might get him to that point? And what would the process look like?

I feel like he would probably need some sort of external prompting to actually properly start the process and that said process would be a gradual one. Not entirety sure how the prompting would start and be sustained though. Perhaps for example as something to start with, something like the moment in the lament of the damned side quest in rebirth where there’s brief vague discussion of the manor scientists and Barrett expresses how he thinks Lucrecia must not have been all that much better than Hojo causing Vincent to get defensive about her. A gradual process of stuff that challenges him like others questioning things and being faced with tangible evidence of the past, something that challenges him and he actually starts to stop and more seriously consider that perspective.

Here’s where the basic premise as previously mentioned really comes in. I feel Vincent’s situation could potentially improve if he could start to reconcile his perspective and feelings regarding what happened then and the objective reality of it. Challenges and consideration could lead to some acknowledgment that those two perspectives can coexist with each other, that he doesn’t have to choose one over the other.

In regards to Lucrecia, while not always exactly the most pleasant way to think of her, he can still feel fondly towards her and her memory while also thinking a bit more critically about how her actions and the choices she’s made have had serious and more often than not harmful consequences, especially about the harm done to him directly or indirectly. He could still care about her, albeit a likely less idealized version of her, and hold her a bit more accountable for the harm she’s caused. In regards to Vincent himself, it could significantly improve his overall view of himself and perhaps by extension general quality of life. Potential benefits being things like generally improving his mental state, the more specific parts of that could be things like better self worth, less self loathing, at least a bit of self forgiveness, generally starting to be able to take some of the blame off of himself. As such it could help him start to recognize he’s largely not responsible or at fault for what happened (and that he was a victim of the circumstances at that point more than anything?). It could help facilitate him being able to cope with it all a bit better, perhaps even heal the mental / emotional wounds a bit.

All that said, I highly doubt all this would be easy for him to do, I think he’s going to have to struggle for it. Like I’ve said, I think it would be a slow and gradual process that challenges him to think more critically and change his perspective to eventually at least start to understand that he’s not the one in the wrong, such a process would take time and effort. It would also involve a lot of difficult emotions, what emotions, in what context, and how they come up, I don’t really have as much of an answer for at the moment as I feel it depends on how one would imagine the reconciliation process and things as a whole would play out. I’m not necessarily saying I want to see him break down or something like that per se, but I would like for him to have proper opportunities to be more openly emotional about it all. For him to have chances to be vulnerable and be treated with care in return. (And if that means having him break down then by all means let him break down.)

I do want to say that I don’t expect such a process to solve everything with him or that I would expect him to stop being upset about all that’s happened or otherwise take away what makes his story his (etc.), just that ultimately the idea is all about getting him to a point of having a bit more of a balance of his feelings and viewpoint. Bittersweet, but hopeful.

Hypothetically, if I were to try and place the idea where I think it could work well game timeline wise, I would place it around Dirge of Cerberus and / or post Dirge. I think it would go well then for the subject matter being covered, could work well thematically, and for potential opportunities for him to actually have the time and space to think and process (etc.). (Admittedly I think that putting it sometime around DoC is the obvious answer and that it could work at other points in time as well if it was done thoughtfully.)

I think that’s about all I have on this right now.

[schwender-exe]

Devlog #1

Well, I promised a devlog and here it is!

Howdy folks, it's been a while of radio silence but hopefully it's well worth the wait! since the last time I've posted I took a break to think over what I wanted to do with the game. The reason for that is because originally, I basically started with a vague idea of the story without any plot-points or anything tangible. I basically started development with nothing more than the basic setting and a few random area and character ideas, which obviously won't get me far.

So. What did I do about it? well.. not much. Since last I posted, I quit my old job and got a new job which is a much calmer atmosphere compared to my last which is helping with my sanity, drafted a few story plot points and talked to a few artists, which, speaking of:

Say hello to Yo_Hokki, the game's new artist! you can check out Hokki's awesome work here!

Hokki will be taking the sprites I've done so far and giving them more of a polish to them than I could ever do (and shading! ooo!). as much as I enjoy doing pixel art, I don't think mine is exactly at a level I feel proud of and I'm lacking in a lot of skill, which is why I wanted to find an artist in the first place. (Plus it's nice to have someone else's opinion if I ever get stuck!)

Here's a little gif of the new character sprites in action! Hokki's new sprites also come with a new palette which, honestly I think these colors pop more and in general are nicer / more interesting to look at than the palette I had before.

On the more technical side, I've been working on some back-end parts of the game to make it easier to produce new content. I've written a dialogue script reader which lets me write out dialogue like so:

And have it convert that into my EventSystem script which-- well long story short it means I don't have to write a lot to have long conversations between characters. It also allows me to add keywords modularly which is a huge help if I ever decide to add more to the dialogue system later on. If anyone would like a breakdown of the Dialogue system, feel free to shoot me a question and I'll try my best to explain!

I've also been reworking the original stage I had for Chloe (the mushroom headed character) and breaking it into smaller chunks to make it more interesting and have more to it than simply running over and talking to Chloe. One of the big reasons it took me so long to add on to the game (outside of being busy with IRL things) was that I had trouble thinking of new mechanics which really fit with the game and kept the game feeling "chill", which is the goal. I won't get into much specifics, otherwise this'll be one hell of a long devlog- but to keep it simple: It takes me a long time to really nail down something that I feel is a good fit for the setting, the game and will be enjoyable from a player's perspective... which is tough because I am an overthinker :') (If any devs have any tips on this, please do dm me! I could use the help!)

Well, that's it for this devlog! thanks for reading! hopefully next devlog won't be too far off..

[i-am-so-sad-i-cant-cry]

Last night my brother in law was asking about any advice for writing your first story, since he doesn’t know much about creative writing but have ideas. (Btw I’m not any published or professional writer, I’m just a fanfic author who has written a lot giving my two cents)

Since he seemed to find my take helpful I’m gonna share:

Write EVERYTHING down first. I don’t mean a first draft, I mean everything you’re already thinking of for your story. If you have a narrative to tell, writing down your ideas is the best way to start!

If you have specific scenes, write down how you imagine them.

If you have vague plot details or characters, write those down.

Have themes and narrative structure ideas? Write those down!

Writing this all down gets them out of your head and into a more tangible form, and it can feel nice to just have something as a starting point. It also can make it feel less jumbled or confused in your head, since now you won’t need to worry about remembering everything about your story at once by having it in your notes.

Writing outlines or drafts for specific scene ideas are also a great place to start, since then you can ask “what story would make this scene impactful?” It’s working backwards into parts of the narrative you’re more unsure about, and lay down some basic ideas for it.

From my experience, and talking with others, new writers can get stuck due to not having confidence in their skills which keeps them from ever starting. But you need to write badly first before you can write well, and you can always revise later.

Sorry if this is too obvious, but I know there are people out there who are like my brother in law and might benefit from the obvious being laid out for them.

Also here’s some videos and creators which helped me get started and think more about my writing in the technical sense, though mileage may vary depending on interests and such:

Two Professional Writers React to Lily Orchard advice and Two Professional Writers React to Tumblr Writing Advice By We are Not Alive - these videos are from the perspective of people who have written professionally, and they have a lot of solid advice for improving your writing.

Trope Talk Playlist by Overly Sarcastic Productions - This video series is long, so I’d say watch the ones that sound interesting first. Red, the host and artist of these videos, talks a lot about story structure, audience reaction, and how writers might use these tropes as tools in a story.

KrimsonRogue - He makes videos analyzing and reviewing both good and bad books, and his content is great in deconstructing why stories are bad as well as very entertaining. These videos tend to be long, but they’re worth the watch if you have the time!

Dominic Noble - An entertaining book reviewer who has a very good series on changes between books and their adaptations, as well as other good videos talking about books. He doesn’t analyze as deeply as others here, but his videos about adaptations are very interesting and talk about why things are changed.

In general, Analysis and review videos about books and media are a good way to start thinking about stories and how they’re told as well as a good way to find new books you might not have read otherwise. Reading books is important to writing them too, though I think most people intuitively know that anyways.

[miirshroom]

Happy 1 year anniversary of that time when I had a breakthrough on how to read the Pattern underlying everything in Elden Ring. And was immediately struck with the dread of having no-one to talk to about it. I have since then found a few people who are thinking along similar lines.

Here is the key from my perspective: treat the Lands Between as if it is the deconstructed mindscape of an Outer God.

What are the characteristics of a mindscape? Distilled to a single core concept it's a world populated by thoughts and memories.

Memories are solid concepts - things that did objectively happen in the past - but over time some details may be eroded, or upon next recollection the gaps are filled in with embellishments and things that never really happened. I consider it as every tangible item that can be interacted with in the game is representative of "memory". This should be easy enough to understand through the item descriptions that associate them with various factions throughout the history. The "soul" of a person - the thing that makes them a unique individual - is the sum total of their memories. The challenge of Elden Ring is understanding all of the deconstructed memories scattered throughout the Lands Between that reveal the Will of the One Great - the God whose mindscape is being traversed.

Thoughts are more fluid, intangible concepts. "Thinking" is an expression of dragging up memories from past experience and combining them with new information to take decisive action in the present time. But not always do the thoughts agree - a good idea from one perspective may be a bad idea from another. Chronic pain can cause exhaustion that clouds all thoughts and judgement and generate negative thoughts. Painful memories may lead to overly cautious thoughts which lead to stagnation and lack of resiliency in the face of a sudden forced change in status quo. The Lands Between is extensively haunted by "spirits" that represent these thoughts backed by negative memories and resistant to change. Any enemy that bursts into sparkles upon defeat? That's a thought. The enemies that leave bodies upon death are perhaps to be understood as beliefs that have solidified out of certain well-trodden thought patterns.

On the other hand, the Tarnished player is representative of a new perspective entering the picture and capable of overcoming all of these indecisive elements holding back the One Great from overcoming the current dilemma. The Shattering is on one level a Crisis of Faith, but more to the point it is a collapse of self-image. The god Marika is dead and the Lands Between is grieving.

And this is the interesting trick pulled with the multiple endings. Because the Age of Stars ending is the one preferred option of the One Great - it is the ending that FromSoftware is nudging the player towards choosing and it is the one end that does not result in either an attempt to reconstruct a crumbling persona or succumbing to oblivion. Believing any Elden Lord ending to be the best is - consciously or not - an admission that the player does not understand the nature of the One Great. Rather, they choose impose their own Will and force the Lands Between to regress back to a vaguely remembered version of a previous point in time. At least in the past there was faith in Marika, but now she is a dead god and little more than a hollow victory has been won.

Also the player Tarnished is the most powerful person in the Lands Between because they can out-think all other beings populating the land with the assistance of a Torrent of Thought.

[cozycryptidcorner]

I see, I see! Yeh, that makes a lot of sense! I've been in a couple of very reader insert positive fandoms and while a lot of people did try to keep the reader neutral, in order to make an interesting story a lot of the time the personalities and perspective from the authors tended to match the ones from the reader protags. I think exploration of our own selves through writing is a really cool thing to do!

Personally, I'm actually pretty different in a lot of aspects from the readers you write, but that just adds to the reading experience because the plots and twists are some I would have never thought about and I'm always on the edge of my seat because I genuinely have no idea what will happen next. Of course, it also has a lot to do with you just being an overall great writer! The way you describe the inner turmoil and thought processes conveys emotions so well, and it's so cool you can draw from your own experiences and put them into words so beautifully that you create something new out of it!

I hope you'll continue to create to your heart's content because you make some incredible stuff! :D

(i am pretending i am on a late night show btw. )

this is really high praise! I have been writing since I was little, and have been babbling stories before that. I've been obsessed with folklore and fairytales, which is probably why I read the bible extensively as a child (obv i believed it was 100% factual from my conservative christian upbringing but good stories are good stories babes).

I think that I write with the cynicism of a lot of leftist late millennial/genZ women hold, but I have a special tang. I was raised in a very special patriarchal setup with the added bonus of religion. I almost view the concept of marriage as an enemy.

I think a lot of my earlier stories are very optimistic, and then it kind of devolves into cynicism on, particularly, cis men, after being in the dating scene for awhile. And also hearing other women talk about their strives, and also witnessing how conservative christian men treat their wives. it all boils down. its something tangible. a special kind of misery they bring. I see cis leftist men make the same mistakes, so like. whatever.

[book51ut]

My therapist has me learning about integration of self through Carl Jung's idea of the shadow and persona and I wanted to spend some time exploring my "shadow" and what it entailed.

A lot of what I read suggested that a good place to start was thinking of your criticisms of people in your life, and seeing if you can see yourself in them. And wow, I was floored with my identification with these qualities. Part of me knew I had a lot of these qualities and didn't want to admit it. But there is something freeing about being told that though these things are fundamentally not ok and often harmful, denying that they're a part of you holds you back from growing.

I reframed my list into "I" statements and this is what I came up with: I am stubborn; I am egotistical; I am self-obsessed; I am immature; I have a superiority complex; I am more willing to say I'll work on myself than actually tangibly change; I am insecurely attached; I am obsessive; I desire to conform; I crave validation in normative social contexts; I am spoiled; I am invested in capitalism.

I'm sure as I keep going I'll find more.

I think it is interesting to consider that I don't think the goal of this is to ERASE all of those parts of me (though certainly attachment styles, working to change, etc can be changed), but instead to have me acknowledge their existence and SEE and UNDERSTAND when those sensations are being activated, and to be able to manage them in a way that doesn't create harm or conflict. Like we all have ego, we all have "vices" and are not perfect. And to say that we are working towards perfection would be the antithesis of the point of shadow work. The shadow claims that this is just another facet of us, and we need to accept it and treat it as such.

HOWEVER, I want to clarify, I think a lot of people use the excuse "that's just the way I am" when they do shitty things and hurt other people. I think that also misses the point of this- you can't just accept that you've harmed someone and apologize. You need to actually do the work to find and relate to an actually entirely different finished product in order to be your truest and best self. It's not just about accepting your "bad sides" and its not about "erasing" them. Its about coming to terms with them, understanding them, and finding and creating a new outlook and perspective that changes your essence.

I feel like some people get stuck on the "that's just the way I am" mentality (cough my ex bf and also ex best friend cough). And deep down, I'm terrified that I will as well. I really hope not.

[piqueconcentration]

Jitterbug Perfume - Immortality, Sex, and Discomfort

Originally posted January 31, 2024

As is apparently my preferred introduction: It has been quite a while since I have written anything on my computer, but as generally happens after I manage to read or, dare I say it, complete an actual, tangible book, I now am doing so. I type this knowing that Google docs is using my writing to train adolescent artificial intelligentsia, and theoretically I could make the switch to another software, but as is the case with Adobe, the monopoly’s Matrix-style robotic belly-button parasite keeps a firm hold on my psyche, with an extra bonding agent in the form of a powerful distaste for the effort that it would take to learn an entirely foreign user interface, just to marginally weaken the hold that Google has upon my intellectual property, when they are already in possession of basically all of my identifying information. They could probably construct an AI that would perfectly replicate my online presence, idiosyncrasies and ego included, and the only thing that they would have to do at this point to make convincing blog posts from my perspective is post them about as regularly as an agave flowers. If anything, if this particular post goes up on the internet at all, maybe that’s a red flag- I would have to be a mind outside of my own in order to return to a creative project even after my attention span’s honeymoon.

Whatever. I finished a book, and now I am compelled to write. Actually, I finished two books. The first was Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn, the first of the Mistborn trilogy, one that i meant to read way back in high school because some youtuber that I liked at the time had recommended it for its magic system- magic systems, as a concept, I would continue to grow increasingly interested in; the books would remain untouched on my shelf. The second was lent to me by one of my housemates, though I can’t remember the conversation that led to that happening- Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins.

Actually, now that I’m thinking about it, the declaration about me being compelled to write after reading books is only true in the barest sense. Yes, I do feel an urge to write after being exposed to writing that I like, but by no means does that mean that I actually end up, or even begin for that matter, writing anything at all! Also, that same urge doesn’t just apply to writing. I consume manga at a frightening pace, and though by saying this it may imply the opposite sentiment: I do not say that in order to brag- the speed at which I go through webcomics and manga alike is, frankly, detrimental to my experience of the media in question, as I end up retaining almost nothing of what I have had my head immersed in so much that my neck develops knots that hold it at a painful right angle to my torso. I don’t really stop and breathe in the images that the mangaka probably spent hours and hours drawing; if anything, I mostly pay attention to the words written on the page which, in turn, presents a palpable irony in that the reason I have felt unable to read traditional books in recent years is that my attention span balks at walls of text! 

Hey, authors! I won’t read your book even though I’d probably like it, because it doesn’t have any pictures in it! Show me your work once you’ve learned to draw!

Oh, holy shit the irony goes even deeper. Even though I feel that creative urge when I read manga, all of my attempts at making comics or even working to be skilled enough at drawing to feel confident in my capacity to do so are stopped in their tracks by the thus far insurmountable obstacle of not being able or willing to pay attention to the thing that I’m drawing for long enough to finish anything. Good lord. 

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Anyway, the way Jitterbug Perfume was written really affected me. I still can’t tell if I liked it very much (the writing style), but to be fair, I really loved the way George Elliot’s Middlemarch was written, but I have been thus far unable to finish that book by virtue of its inexhaustibly prim density; therefore I suppose that the content of a book and its writing style tend to stay fairly separate considering my enjoyment, and the former aspect seems to have a stronger influence on whether or not I actually manage to make it to the back cover.

In this case, the content was excellent. Jitterbug Perfume was described to me as being about immortality, smell, sex, and beets, and I can’t honestly think of a better way to describe it. It’s a jigsaw puzzle of a story, if all of the pieces on the table were from different moments in time, and at the end, when the pieces fit, you are left with a complete picture that somehow shows an unbelievably cohesive, intimately personal tale, despite the massive scope, time-wise (there are very important events that take place before the advent of Christianity, and plot points of similar influence continue to happen all the way up until modern day).

Now that I think about it, the quality of maintaining a story’s characters and relationships, and especially keeping them as tantamount to the direction and tone of the piece, even when the scope of the story has expanded to include over two thousand years of history, even if that history is embellished upon or entirely invented, is an incredible achievement, and one that I think deserves unending praise. So frequently I find myself put off of pieces of media when, though I once enjoyed them for their characters’ dynamics or their dialogue or their writing styles, those aspects eventually were beaten out of the story by the growing scale of the events taking place. It becomes very difficult for me to continue to be invested in the little things that I like, and for that matter, for the author to continue stipulating on those little things’ presence, when suddenly the fate of the world is at stake, or the consequences of failure become so dire that there is no longer room in the work for mirth. 

Jitterbug does this by keeping the story focused almost entirely upon a static set of characters. In all honesty, I do tend to find it a bit grating when a book throws pretty much all of the people that will be introduced over the duration at me all at once, and I also tend to get annoyed when a book switches perspectives back and forth frequently, as it is inevitable that I will be more interested in one of the followed points of view above all of the others (or vice versa, that one of the points of view is especially dull). Let it be known, though generally the book in question pays most attention to the characters that happen to be changing the most, it does do this.

The upside, though, is that even as the setting around the characters morphs drastically with all the changes associated with the world and culture since literally the year 1, the reader is still anchored in the everyday realities of the main characters. The tone of the story stays heavily reliant on each of their emotional states and their changing dynamics. The plot directly follows in the tracks of the characters’ desires and aspirations. As opposed to them being “interesting” people to be around in situations that they have no agency in, they are the driving force of the plot itself, and in this way the book can get away with a mind-boggling amount of in-universe time passing without it ever detaching the reader from the story, or impeding their willingness to care.

That feeling of detachment is exactly the sentiment behind me dropping To Your Eternity by Yoshitoki Oima, a manga that also tackles the concept of immortality, but in a way that I eventually found extraordinarily grating.

Some pieces of media, especially if they continue for a really long time, and even more especially if they are about characters that live much longer than a normal human lifespan, end up bestowing upon these characters a very particularly draining character arc: eventually becoming the most fucking boring people ever. This isn’t really, I don’t think, a product of repetition of personality beats -One Piece, for example, has a main cast that are each fairly one-note, but to me they remain compelling because of the unrelenting new situations, characters, and settings that they rotate through- rather, a common sentiment on the concept of immortality is that a person who is subjected to it will elect that it is a much smarter thing to avoid attachments and emotions as a way of staving off the pain of repeated loss. Combine that with the formula of introducing a bunch of new people, spending a lot of time with them, and then killing them off and meditating on how pointless it all was, and you will have on one hand: a philosophically engaging story about life’s purpose and value; and on the other: one that I will not be reading anymore. Fuck you.

Each time skip in To Your Eternity, my dejection would build, and even though I did enjoy the concepts therein quite a bit, I eventually quit reading when there was a time skip that jumped over so many years that the archaic setting I had been enjoying was gone, along with any characters aside from the protagonist that I may have liked, and I no longer had the will to continue.

Anyway, the point is that Jitterbug Perfume deftly avoids this problem by holding the human experience as an inalienable thru-line. Longer-lived characters don’t become harder to identify with- if anything they become more dear to the reader, as the sentiments that are the crux of their longevity are easily identified with. Their goals, whether they are aware of it or not, are the preservation of emotion and connection- things that the reader can presumably empathize with quite well.

The writing style I would describe as “irreverently confident and connotatively confusing.” The majority of the instances in which Robbins describes anything in this book are unrelentingly riddled with descriptors of every kind, and often of opposing kinds- many sentences use several adjectives to describe a single thing, and the adjectives often carry wildly different connotations. A single line may depict something as both gorgeous and disgusting, just by virtue of the words chosen. Jitterbug is more than willing to yank the reader back and forth like this, and the literary whiplash results in this sort of all-encompassing feeling of mild discomfort. The prose itself is captivating, but in less of the fashion of a ballet performance and more so like a lapdance that really walks the line between attractive and nauseating.

Regardless of whether or not I enjoy the style personally (I still can’t really tell, but I’m leaning toward the favorable side), it strikes me as being exactly what the author wanted. Off-putting, certainly, but one hundred percent intentional. A significant portion of the book’s subject matter consists of topics and sentiments that are at most culturally taboo, and at least playing fast and loose with modern morals and sentiments, especially when it comes to sex. This book, which I really enjoyed, which made me smile and frown and think and even write… will not shut the fuck up about sex.

Every character is steeped in it. Every metaphor is constructed with it. I feel like I could purchase a brand new copy of this fucking thing and its pages would already be stuck together. To get a sense of my feelings (historically) about this- one of my favorite quotes of a friend of mine is from when they asked me: “Hey [my name], would you rather have sex or be stabbed with a knife?”

My point about the “motion sickness” writing style being that it works in favor of the subject matter. The fact that the whole novel is written in a way that makes the reader a little nauseous, figuratively, creates a tone that is much more conducive to, well, not necessarily the intimate discussion of what our society views as crossing lines in the social sand or what should or should not be allowed, but rather the regular enunciation of kind of uncomfortable topics. Combined with a fairly unconcerned and playful tone, the book is able to deftly accept the discomfort that arises from a journey that holds sex as a central theme while progressing through several different settings -cultural and chronological- all with differing views and judgements about a traditionally awkward topic.

Anyway, I liked the book. There is a sentence in there that goes: “Like jugged bees, the funeral orations droned on (134).”

If you think you can make it past all of the disconcertingly flowery (ha, ha.) descriptions of bodily fluids for long enough to make it to that absolute banger of a quote, this may be one to check out.

[idkhowtopickausername]

🔥 the locked tomb?

I typed out an answer to this earlier today and then somehow deleted all of it and didn’t get around to retyping it until now 😅

I’ve actually been meaning to ask what your thoughts are about it (if you have any you care to share) since I know you finished it recently and I’m trying to sort out my own thoughts.

Putting a read more bc I’m very long-winded

Overall I definitely enjoyed it and I think it’s a very fun and creative story that gives you a lot to think about and I like how each book sort of tries something new in regards to narrative structure/perspective. It definitely doesn’t feel formulaic or predictable which I appreciate. I think it’s really interesting how the cavalier/necromancer system is it’s own fictional oppressive system that people get indoctrinated into and that is used as a tool for control by the empire, and how it connects to stuff like gender roles and class and various forms of exploitation but doesn’t replace or directly mimic any of those things. I think it also ties into a lot of themes about like identity and belonging and social coercion and bodily autonomy in relationship to trauma, and it really gives you a lot to think about and analyze, especially in relation to the very prevalent theme of religion/Christianity.

I think it’s really interesting how Gideon and Harrow’s relationship ties into those themes, and I’m very curious to see how it will play out and how the power imbalance and dynamic between them will be dealt with, since it’s intertwined with the social system they exist within and I think the dissolution of that system will be mirrored by whatever happens between them (I love romances like that where the relationship is tied to breaking out of certain social roles or systems that the characters exist within if you haven’t noticed lol). I wish people confronted that a bit more in fan content and didn’t just take for granted the idea of Gideon being super forgiving and self-sacrificing and Harrow being super guilt-ridden—I think that’s just one stage of what will hopefully be a much more complex and nuanced arc of development for their relationship. I also don’t think the perfect lyctorhood thing is going to be some magic fix either in their relationship or in the empire as a whole, I think a greater and more tangible confrontation of the brutality of the system and how it’s been internalized by the characters and integrated into society will be necessary, and things will need to be completely altered in a more fundamental way.

All that being said, there are a few things I don’t care for about the books. I didn’t really care for the meme references (sorry, they really took me out of it), and I don’t know how to say this without sounding corny but I thought that it’s approach to humor and describing the characters could sometimes be a bit unnecessarily judgemental and it kind of lacked a certain air of openness and compassion in its approach to storytelling that is usually an important characteristic of SFF I really love. I really like the ideas at play and I think it can be emotional and insightful but it’s overall philosophy/mode of storytelling doesn’t really resonate with me or move me as much as other stuff has, and at times the prose and descriptions felt a bit empty to me as a result. Also, while I liked the change of setting and pace in Nona the Ninth and I think it was definitely a good choice to focus more on Blood of Eden and the society of people who’ve been displaced by the empire, I wish those topics had been delved into a bit more and that storyline felt a bit lacking to me in ways that I can’t quite put my finger on. Anyway that was just a very long summary of all my thoughts, which honestly shift around a fair amount and I kind of go back and forth about how much I like various facets of the story. I’d be really curious to hear your thoughts (or anyone else’s) though because I think it’s a very interesting story to discuss.