#it's the overarching theme of everyone having a story to tell

[nikibogwater]

I was expecting this remake to be good (I mean, it's kind of difficult to make a game as perfect as TTYD into something bad), but I was genuinely surprised by just how much love was poured into it. You can really feel the developers' respect for the original game. They could have made a quick-and-easy copy-paste of the original and we would have been grateful enough for that alone. But they took the time to make an already-beloved game into the best possible version of itself. From fully realizing the paper play aesthetic, to cutting out the tedious backtracking, every new detail about this remake was clearly added with such care (yes, even the details I personally wasn't a fan of lol). It's the same familiar and comforting experience from my childhood, and yet it's also fresh and exciting. I never would have guessed that we'd get something like this after so many years of Nintendo awkwardly dodging around the fact that the series just hasn't been quite as good since they abandoned TTYD's gameplay structure and worldbuilding (though I still have an immense amount of love for Super Paper Mario regardless).

Thousand-Year Door holds a very special place in my heart, distinct from the other games I played and loved growing up. It was wonderful to see that the same holds true for everyone who worked on this remake. And even more wonderful to know that now people who were never able to play the original can finally experience what I believe is Paper Mario at its absolute best.

[eightdoctor]

my eda recs :) for anyone interested in getting into this series

i am prefacing this post with the note that i am an avid completionist and generally dislike telling people to skip certain books unless it's a john peel novel or placebo effect. however i understand telling people to read 74 novels is not at all accessible and i need you all to read. these books. please. please

this post is going to be long as shit i know it so i'm putting it ↓ here. books that can be skipped because theyre a bit shit will be colored red, ones that you Can Skip but are good/have some important character or plot bits in will be orange, and ones that are sooo good and necessary and the best books ever will be green. unfortunately i think a lot of the ones colored orange should be colored green but i know restraint. i can stay my hand. kind of

also i should say that i primarily read these for the characters - the plots themselves come second. so lots of my opinions come from the standpoint of which books have good characterizations. basically some of the ones that i color green would probably be skippable if any normal person were reading them but i'm insane!! and this is my list so fuck you!!!

The Eight Doctors by Terrance Dicks: ah my color trichotomy has bitten me in the ass on the first book. because truth be told i still haven't finished this one (nor have i really felt the need to yet), yet it introduces the first companion in the series, sam jones, and contains some other entertaining parts like the doctor getting caught with cocaine. as far as introductory books go it's meh

Vampire Science by Kate Orman and Jonathan Blum: this book. i truly can't sing my praises any louder than i already have. orman & blum took the character of the eighth doctor as portrayed by paul mcgann in a few measly minutes of screen time into a fully fleshed out, compelling and complex character. if you're a fan of the eighth doctor but aren't interested in reading all of the EDAs you have to read this one at the Very Least. it begins, as all good stories do, in a gay bar. it features vampire squirrels, the doctor with kittens, and the doctor infodumping on the beauty of science in a speech? conversation? that still touches me to this day, four years after i first read it.

The Bodysnatchers by Mark Morris: this book is Gross, and i mean that positively. mark morris held nothing back when describing how disgusting and putrid london was in the 1800s (he's primarily a horror writer, and that comes through rather clearly in this book). i genuinely enjoyed this novel a lot, but i know it's not for everyone because again, it's quite gory and disgusting

Genocide by Paul Leonard: don't you just want to see the doctor in a sun hat? being tortured for weeks on end? don't you want to examine his morality in termsof what species he thinks needs to be saved or doomed? jo grant is there

War of the Daleks by John Peel: fuck john peel all my homies hate john peel. for some reason all his books in this range contain daleks and it’s like…why. get some creativity. everyone else did. bitch

Alien Bodies by Lawrence Miles: this novel is So Good. it introduces faction paradox, the war in heaven plotline, humanoid tardises, and a couple of the most interesting & fun side characters in the whole range (homunculette and marieeee <3 cousin justineeee… aaaaaaahh). I shan’t spoil the entire conceit of the story but just know it’s. insane and fucked up and so so funny

Kursaal by Peter Anghelides: this is just a solid doctor who story, really. i wouldn’t call it imperative to the overarching plot of the novels (as tenuous as it is early on), but it’s an enjoyable enough read. it’s about an ancient race of alien werewolves underneath a theme park. what more can i say

Option Lock by Justin Richards: i recall enjoying the doctor and sam’s characterization in this one, and the story is like doctor strangelove meets, well, doctor who. it’s skippable, but i had fun reading it, and that’s really all you can ask for

Longest Day by Michael Collier: this is the start of the arc where sam gets separated from the doctor. actually the most tense and stressed i’ve been reading the edas was reading this and the next three books. it’s so dire, but it’s so so good, with incredible character moments from sam and the doctor. plus you have anstaar, nashaad with his metal legs, and some really fucked up body horror involving Time messing with people’s existences and driving ppl mad and stuff. people tend to either love this one or hate it from what i’ve seen, and i’m solidly in the former category. would definitely recommend 

Legacy of the Daleks by John Peel: ughhhhhhhh… ughhhhjhhhhhh i guess you have to read this one. i guess you have to. it’s definitely an improvement on his last book but still. daleks again john? really? whateverrrrr.. some important stuff happens to susan is in this one though. and the master as well. so if you care about either of those characters you should read this i suppose

Dreamstone Moon by Paul Leonard: a general rule of the edas is paul leonard always writes excellent books (in my opinion, anyway), and this is not the exception. sam and the doctor are still separated, but they’re in the same place and keep missing each other and its like UGGHHHH!!! UGHHH!!! but you have interesting commentary on capitalism’s exploitation and effective revolutionary action and all that stuff. also aloisse is an incredible character and i love her

Seeing I by Kate Orman and Jonathan Blum: HOLY SHIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! FUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!! GOOD LIRD!!!!!!!!!!! kate and jon do it again, those crazy bastards. you know how every author loves torturing the shit out of eight? these guys take that and run with it in the opposite direction, asking the question what if the worst thing the doctor could go through isn’t agonizing torture, but rather just a lack of enrichment in his enclosure? what if he had to stay locked up in one building for three years and couldn’t escape for the life of him? meanwhile sam, now a refugee with no social support (as she technically shouldn’t exist in this time and location), has to deal with homelessness, and has to decide whether it’s better to have a stable, yet soulless corporate job - or do something that’s meaningful and benefits society. she’s at her best in this book for sure

Placebo Effect by Gary Russell: throws up. don’t read this because it is actually rhe worst book in the whole range and i’m not joking. sorry gary you’re a nice guy but i thought the arguments against evolution that went on for like 3 pages were extremely egregious and also plain wrong. you may look at this book and think “oh cool! Stacy and ssard from the comics are in this one!” well they’re there for like a paragraph and don’t do shit. so

Vanderdeken's Children by Christopher Bulis: really fun novel that’s pretty much the epitome of the classic doctor who question “wouldn’t that be really fucked up and crazy?” it also established the fact that the doctor told sam his real name which is really fun and awesome

The Scarlet Empress by Paul Magrs: much like paul leonard, paul magrs Never disappoints. this book is just so fucking fun. in essence, it’s a road trip story. they drive across a planet listening to abba and visiting lots of kooky places and picking up lots of wacky characters. it also deconstructs gender and self-identity and what it means to be an individual. a cyborg and a giant spider get lesbian married. aewsome 👍

The Janus Conjunction by Trevor Baxendale: i really debated on making this one skippable, i did. because while it doesn’t continue any of the established plots or themes or whatever, it does show the doctor breaking the laws of time to save his companion’s life, and that’s really cool we love that. there’s a lot of fun body horror too if you go for that sort of thing. and more giant spiders but these ones are different 

Beltempest by Jim Mortimore: ok honestly? i didn’t vibe with this one. i know some people really liked it but i felt as if the characterization was Off. some wacky wild stuff happens to sam though

The Face-Eater by Simon Messingham: <-doesn’t remember much of this one cuz i was high while reading it. i think it was a solid story though? 

The Taint by Michael Collier: yayyyyyyyy fitz is hereeeee my babyboy… lots of people don’t vibe with this one but i do. because i love fitz and everything he’s in and him and the doctor are such bastards to each other in the beginning it’s great. their repartee is genuinely so entertaining and really elevates the book for me, even if the plot itself is a bit mediocre. either way even if you don’t like it you have to read it because it introduces fitz. so there

Demontage by Justin Richards: telling you to skip this one would be a disservice. because technically it Is skippable, but it has some absolutely hilarious moments that really drive home the fact that fitz is Cringe. they’re on a space casino called vega in the far future and fitz dresses in a (from everyone else's perspective) old-fashioned tuxedo. he smokes indoors and everyone gives him nasty looks because he’s in the future and no one smokes inside. he asks for his cocktails shaken not stirred and the bartender fucking hates him. and he also accidentally gets involved in an assassination plot. but i suppose if you must skip it then go ahead… 

Revolution Man by Paul Leonard: mr leonard does it again. this is an excellent novel for both companions that begins with sam and the doctor engaging in leftist discourse with an anarchist and ends with the world almost ending. it happens.

Dominion by Nick Walters: you have to read this one just for the doctor’s first gay kiss. sorry i don’t make the rules. also it  just features a neat concept imo and has a great moment where the doctor punches a pillow in frustration and then sadly apologizes to it

Unnatural History by Kate Orman and Jonathan Blum: this book is one that i think every doctor who fan who’s ever gotten mad about canon not making sense should be forced at gunpoint to read. it’s a novel that’s essentially one big metacommentary on doctor who canon & why it Doesn’t Matter At All, Actually; the doctor was birthed and he was loomed and both are equally true and untrue. also features the iconic paragraph calling the doctor a (verbatim) “backrub slut”, as well as wrapping up the ongoing arc with sam jones hinted at in alien bodies and a few other books in a way that’ll have you side eyeing moffat very suspiciously

Autumn Mist by David A. McIntee: this one’s pretty good and has a couple great moments (fitz calling himself james bond, for one), but is, i think, ultimately skippable unless youre a world war 2 buff

Interference Books 1 & 2 by Lawrence Miles: nothing i can say will adequately put into words what these two novels made me feel, you hear me? absolutely nothing. good fucking god. jesus christ. holy fuck.. if i sat here listsing all the important and iconic moments in these books we’d be here all shitting day and this post is already obscenely long. read these 2 books. then read them again. 

The Blue Angel by Paul Magrs: ok i know i just said this but HOOOOOO..WHOA NELLY! the blue angel is easily in my top 5 edas. it literally heavily features a canon domestic au wherein the doctor is a “middle-aged gay man”. fitz says he wants to get laid by the doctor. the doctor’s mother is a mermaid. there’s off-brand spirk. someone turns into a giant squid. literally this book is so good they wrote a screenplay adaptation of it and a spinoff short story that you should also read

The Taking of Planet 5 by Simon Bucher-Jones and Mark Clapham: you’re going to be hearing this a lot from me but we Are entering the part of the series where it really takes off and gets sooo fucking good. anyway this novel is sooo fucking good and quite important to the plot and establishes stuff about the war in heaven and gallifrey so. read it. also there's ELDRITCH BEASTS!

Frontier Worlds by Peter Anghelides: i can’t tell you to skip this one because it’s so good. fitz goes by the alias frank sinatra & also talks like him for a solid portion of the book. we get excellent compassion moments. great doctor moments (including that Hot and Sexy dream he has about the tardis!) and all in all it’s a wonderful story

Parallel 59 by Stephen Cole and Natalie Dallaire: lots of stuff happens in this one, especially to fitz. by that i mean it gets referenced quite a bit later so i would recommend if you want to catch all the references. also a woman worked on this one so you already know eight is going to be written phenomenally and very sensually. 

The Shadows of Avalon by Paul Cornell: rather important development happens to compassion in this book (understatement). but it’s also a really good story in general with lots of memorable bits - paul cornell wrote one EDA and did a great job and then vanished from the range. it also has the BRIGADIER and his ROMANCE with MAB the BIG BOSOMED CELTIC QUEEN so like.. read it?? 

The Fall of Yquatine by Nick Walters: a pretty important thing happens to compassion in this one too (another understatement). also withnail & i references galore, fitz has a bad time (has he had a Good time for the past few books? questionable!), and the doctor spends time with a gay baker/contraband parts dealer

Coldheart by Trevor Baxendale: you could skip this one but why would you even want to? it’s literally one of compassion’s best stories and has plenty of excellent doctor and companion moments. it’s just fun and engaging and an outstanding doctor who story. and, as always, fitz is effortlessly cringe as ever <3

The Space Age by Steve Lyons: this one’s just boring and kinda stupid. nothing big or important happens and you can tell steve lyons didn’t care for writing compassion at all. skip it

The Banquo Legacy by Andy Lane and Justin Richards: Big Plot Developments in this one - mostly in the beginning and end. also the only (?) mention of irving braxiatel in the whole run! it’s written from the POV of two Normal people not on the tardis so it’s interesting to see how they perceive the doctor and fitz, and how this contradicts the way they define themselves in other books where we’re privy to their internal monologue 

The Ancestor Cell by Peter Anghelides and Stephen Cole: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGHHHHHHHHHH AAAAGHHHH AAAAAAAAAAAAAAUAAUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU HFHOA8U8OIA AOUIY4P98 YT39 7UGHYIB3!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! FUCKKKKKK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! this one drives me insane and there are parts of it i reread nearly every day. because i’m CRAZY. it’s a controversial novel in the doctor who fandom because of how it handles gallifrey and faction paradox lore but WHO FUCKING CARES? FATHER KREINER IS BACK BABY

The Burning by Justin Richards: this is the start of the Earth Arc, so it’s the first portrayal of the doctor stuck on earth without any of his memories. it’s a bit slow at the beginning, and as a normal doctor who story i would consider it subpar, but the characterization of the doctor really carries it i think. you see how losing his memory impacted his restraint with things such as hypnosis and Other Stuff I Shan’t Spoil

Casualties of War by Steve Emmerson: this has the first appearance of the Note, so it’s especially important for that reason. but it’s also just a neat story that has way more elements of a fantasy than a sci fi and again, seeing how the doctor acts now, stuck on earth without his memories, and juxtaposing that with how he acted before, super fun and neat

The Turing Test by Paul Leonard: if i could graft this book onto my DNA i would. i already KNEW the circumstances surrounding alan turing’s death and yet i still cried about it while reading this!! paul leonard’s portrayal of turing as both a gay and autistic man (though the latter is never explicitly stated) is INCREDIBLE and i really can’t recommend it enough just based on that. but the story itself is amazing and really delves into the doctor’s Differences and his desperation to leave earth after being stuck there for decades. 

Endgame by Terrance Dicks: people really like this one and i guess i had fun with it but i just can’t really get into terrence dicks’ writing style. that being said it features the doctor listless and just so sad and depressed so you kind of have to read it. if that’s not reason enough there’s a fat gay alcoholic spy who absolutely rocks

Father Time by Lance Parkin: i hate that this is green. i hate it. i hate this fucking book. i hate lance parkin also. but this is where miranda (the doctor’s adopted daughter) is introduced so alas, you must read it and imagine a version of this book thats infinitely better in your head. sorry! 

Escape Velocity by Colin Brake: this one’s mid but it’s the end of the earth arc and fitz and the doctor reunite and ANJI KAPOOR IS HERE!!!!!!!! FINALLY!!!!!!! so if you read this and get a lil bored just know it’s about to get so fucking good you guys

EarthWorld by Jacqueline Rayner: genuinely can’t say enough good things about this one. it’s funny. it’s angsty. it’s all in all just a really fun book. and it’s the shortest one i think so like you have no excuse to not read it

Fear Itself by Nick Wallace: this is technically a PDA because it was written after nine was announced, thereby making 8 technically a “past doctor”, but who give a shit. read this one are yoyu kidding me. read it read it read it read it READ IT. there’s a twist in it that rendered me absolutely catatonic for about a week 

Vanishing Point by Stephen Cole: don’t skip this one even though it’s orange. are you listening to me? don’t fucking skip it ok!!! steve cole is the #1 fitz/eight shipper and this really shines through here. also maybe i’m just easily entertained by reasonably accurate science in my doctor who books but i liked all the genetics references

Eater of Wasps by Trevor Baxendale: trevor you sly dog you did it again. you mad bastard. not only is the storyline in this one soo gripping and also Quite horrifying but the characterization?? hoooooo boy. this is the book where “you really love him, don’t you?” “well, i like to think we’re just good friends.” comes from and so even if it was dogshit you’d have to read it just for that like cmon

The Year of Intelligent Tigers by Kate Orman: holy. fucking. shit. good grief. the doctor has a boyfriend and they go on picnics and drink chocolate martinis together. the doctor becomes a catboy for a few months. this story takes place on a colony world whose culture is predominantly centered around music, so you have the doctor playing his violin (hot). you have scientifically accurate zoology/xenobiology. you have a Mysterious lost civilization. most importantly you have fitz’s song he wrote for the doctor

The Slow Empire by Dave Stone: this one’s just FUNNY okay. dave stone has such a characteristic way of writing prose it’s just kind of a joy to read. if you get the hard copy all of the bits from a side character’s pov is written in comic sans. while some of the characterization is a bit meh and anji didn’t Really live up to her full potential in a couple scenes i’d still recommend it. there’s footnotes

Dark Progeny by Steve Emmerson: this is another one i colored orange even though i whole-heartedly recommend it.. it’s a commentary on corporate apathy and greed and how it destroys entire planets and just a really engaging story besides. not to mention we get a “fitz fitz fitz fitz fitz!” bit from 8 <3

The City of the Dead by Lloyd Rose: i can’t even talk about this oine lest i lose my mind… not joking when i say lloyd rose writes some of the best and juiciest angst in the whole series like some of the scenes in there made me feel like i was being helplessly entrapped in flowing grain for a month

Grimm Reality by Simon Bucher-Jones and Kelly Hale: i really do sound like a broken record at this point but this is another one of those books i could never say enough positive things about. there are two novels in this series that genre-hop and this is one of them. the tardis lands on a world where everything runs on logic straight out of the brother’s grimm (hence the title). there’s magic cloaks and evil stepsisters and giants, and the doctor, fitz, and anji all have their own separate adventures so it’s super interesting to see how each character deals with being in a fairytale. not only that but there are parts of the book written in the style of those old fairytales and i really do get a good kick out of  gimmicky stuff like that 

The Adventuress of Henrietta Street by Lawrence Miles: buckle the fuck up everyone and get out your highlighters and sticky notes because this one is so fucking dense you’ll have no choice but to annotate and take notes, sorry! it’s written in the style of a historical nonfiction which occasionally falls flat (where’s the fucking works cited, lawrence???), but the story is fucking crazy. you got arcane rituals, prostitutes doing sex magic that summon great apes, sabbath is here, the doctor is weak and sickly (always awesome), sabbath is here, the doctor gets married so he can save the earth, sabbath is here,

Mad Dogs and Englishmen by Paul Leonard: this is the petplay book featuring multicolored poodles that have human hands. need i say more? 

Hope by Mark Clapham: not the best book but it’s got some pretty crucial anji moments in, and we all love love love anji so much so we’ll read mediocre novels just for her!! (but we also see the doctor struggle with only having one heart so that’s fun too)

Anachrophobia by Jonathan Morris: literally my top 3 book in the series EASY. it takes place on a planet ravaged by a time war (as in a war that fights with weapons that fuck with time. not like That time war), yet despite that particular futuristic conceit the entire atmosphere of the book feels like something out of the 40s or 50s  - almost like the aesthetics of fallout, but instead of nuclear radiation it’s Time. most of the story takes place in this sealed off bunker that’s doing experiments to try and develop time travel, and while they’re successful in going back in time the guinea pigs who volunteered for the trial develop an illness that fucks up their personal timelines so bad they literally turn into clock zombies. and it’s contagious. but no one can leave because theres fucked up time outside uh oh!!! if you liked the themes of war profiteering from boom in the new season you’ll LOVE this book

Trading Futures by Lance Parkin: fuck you lance parkin i can’t stand your ass! you can’t fucking write for shit!!! i’d recommend this book if you want to see anji referred to as ‘the asian woman’ more than her actual name :) and a southeast asian character with a name that might as well have been taken right out of a book written by  jk rowling. really the only good part of this book is when anji almost calls the doctor an otter-fucker

The Book of the Still by Paul Ebbs: this book is a WILD fucking ride. this book is fucking insane in the most positive of ways. paul ebbs writes an absolutely top tier eight that manages to encapsulate all the development he went through in the series as well as evoking the characterization from the 1996 movie

The Crooked World by Steve Lyons: this is the second book that does a genre-swap, but instead of fairytales this time the tardis lands on a planet dominated by saturday morning cartoon physics and logic. but the doctor & co being there begins to introduce Real Life concepts such as death and sex and swearing, so all these wacky cartoon characters who’ve spent their whole lives doing wacky cartoon things like blowing each other up with sticks of dynamite or hitting each other with big hammers suddenly find that these actions actually have very very serious consequences, which really kicks off when this story’s equivalent of tom rips off this story’s equivalent of jerry’s head, killing him instantly. idk i just watched a lot of saturday morning cartoons as a kid so seeing the parodies of wacky races and scooby doo was very enjoyable. to me

History 101 by Mags L Halliday: to put it simply this book is about leftist infighting. to put it more complexly this book is about the spanish civil war and how differing opinions and principles can alter one’s perception of history - and what happens when history actually starts being changed in accordance to these differing principles. there’s also the subplot featuring fitz’s homoerotic, yet very traumatizing, travels with a guy named sasha as they journey to guernica so they can watch it be bombed

Camera Obscura by Lloyd Rose: this is where sabbath and the doctor’s relationship really reaches it’s peak. this is The Esteemed Toxic Old Man Yaoi Novel. but also remember when i said lloyd rose writes the best angst? this holds especially true here. i won’t spoil it for you but Something Crazy Happens to the Doctor! haha. haha

Time Zero by Justine Richards: this is just quantum physics: the novel. while fitz goes on his doomed siberia expedition with the geologist boytoy george in the 19th century, the doctor investigates some strange readings in siberia like a hundred years later, and some crazy confusing hijinks ensue! the events in this book kick off the arc that’ll continue for the next few books until sometime never where the multiverse is collapsing and the doctor has to fix it. even though he doesn’t know how. ALSO TRIX INTRODUCTIONNNNNN!!!!!!!!

The Infinity Race by Simon Messingham: this one’s whatever. the sabbath characterization is wack but there are a few good moments. you think it’s going to be mostly about a cool boat race but sadly that comes secondary -_-

The Domino Effect by David Bishop: this book is ASS, both plot-wise and characterization-wise. it also just seems like the author was trying to be needlessly edgy when he developed the setting, and there are just some baffling moments where characters say and do things i frankly think they would never say 

Reckless Engineering by Nick Walters: the events in this one center around a tragedy that is fucking batshit insane. the universe this takes place in features a post-apocalyptic earth. i shan’t say what this apocalypse was because finding out what happened is all apart of the fun guys. i can’t spoil everything for you

The Last Resort by Paul Leonard: what if a corporation discovered TIME TRAVEL and set up RESORTS all across human history? what if there was a mcdonalds in ancient egypt and advertisements for microsoft in the original version of the bible? also what if something just soooo fucked up happens so many times <3

Timeless by Stephen Cole: anji’s last book. sobs.

Emotional Chemistry by Simon A. Forward: idk what it was but i just didn’t really vibe with this one. it’s not awful by any means and there’s a bit of plot carried in from the last novel that continues into the next but the actions that surround it don’t really matter i think. honestly i’d just read a summary of this one and continue on 

Sometime Never... by Justin Richards: the culmination of the multiverse stuff. i liked it - miranda makes a reappearance, and the fact she’s written by someone other than lance parkin is already a plus. my only qualm is i don’t really like how it handled sabbath but that’s sort of how i felt about all the books post camera obscura… sigh

Halflife by Mark Michalowski: ANOTHER EASY TOP 3. i’m simply obsessed with all of the concepts and tropes in this book, not to mention it’s where fitz’s infamous Ass Dream can be found. there’s commentary on racism, colonialism, and religion, and it also features cannibalism as a metaphor for love :D

The Tomorrow Windows by Jonathan Morris: another case of me coloring a book orange even though i think you should read it anyway. it’s positively saturated with so many interesting alien planets and creatures and societies you’d be missing out if you didn’t read this one tbh. it’s also the first novel ever to feature the ninth doctor!

The Sleep of Reason by Martin Day: this one ok. it’s another book written from the pov of an outsider and her insights into the doctor, fitz, and trix are interesting (and their characterization when they show up is outstanding!) but it feels like they’re rarely in it & this close to the end of the series i just want to see more of my guys you know...

The Deadstone Memorial by Trevor Baxendale: i loved the atmosphere in this one. it’s more of a ghost story with sci fi elements, and the stakes involved aren’t Bigger Than Ever like they tend to be nowadays, but instead surround the wellbeing of a family of a single mom and her two kids which i appreciate - the doctor isn’t saving the Whole Universe and World; just a family from a small town; it’s effective in getting the point across that the doctor thinks everyone’s important and worth saving 

To the Slaughter by Stephen Cole: this one’s fun and goofy and steve cole wrote it solely so he could fix an error from a fourth doctor serial in which the doctor got the number of jupiter’s moons wrong. that being said the reason it’s not colored orange is because the last book of the series is written by lance parkin and i want to help you procrastinate reading his godawful prose for as long as possible. your welcome

The Gallifrey Chronicles by Lance Parkin: fuck you lance parkin

[starlight-bread-blog]

Three Books, Two Characters, One Story

An essay on Zuko and Katara's characters and character arcs

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Zuko and Katara, fire and water, red and blue, one rises with the sun, the other rises with the moon. And yet, they are similar, tied together and grew closer than they could have imagined. In this essay I will discuss Zuko and Katara's characters in Avatar: The Last Airbender. I intend to touch on their shared traits and backgrounds, on their development and on their points of convergence in their over overarching story. Now, without further ado, let's begin.

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The Common Ground

Zuko and Katara share their core traits and core events in their respective lives. Firstly, their loss of their mothers. Zuko lost his mother, Ursa; and Katara lost her mother, Kya. But if you ask me, it goes deeper than that. For Zuko, the loss was a loss of shelter from the cruelty of his father and the bliss of being a child. In Zuko Alone, we see how Ursa took care of Zuko, played with him, and gave him a proper childhood.

With that gone, he remained almost completely unprotected. But more importantly, he lost his childhood. (It is true that he still had Iroh, but Iroh can help to an extent. He can’t be at the dinner table when Ozai tells Zuko he was lucky to be born).

Similarly, when Katara’s mother died, something in her internalized it. As Sokka says in The Runaway:

We see Katara help fill the void many times in A:TLA. Namely in The Desert, where she takes care of the Gaang in ways ranging from giving her bending water to endangering herself to pull A\ang out of the Avatar State. Katara doesn’t like to be viewed as someone who lost her childhood, as her reaction to Sokka’s speech was to join Toph and go scamming. However, Kya’s death is an integral part of who she became. She wants to cling to her childhood, and she partly succeeds,but that speech was made for a reason. A part of it was gone with Kya.

Another parallel between their similar grief is sacrifice. Zuko’s mother left to save his life from Fire Lord Azulon’s ruthless order. Katara’s mother died when pretending to be the last waterbender of the South Pole when a Fire Nation raid came looking for her. Both of their mothers left because they protected them, saving their lives from the cruelty of the Fire Nation. In these parallel narratives, the themes of sacrifice against them are intertwined.

But beyond their grief, I believe that at their center, they are very similar. Zuko and Katara are filled with righteous anger and empathy even towards strangers. Although clearly everyone in the Gaang is a good person, doing their part in ending the war, it’s not a defining trait as it is for Zuko and Katara. In The Painted Lady, Katara insists on helping a Fire Nation village while Sokka pressures that they’ll leave to make it to the invasion, while Toph and A\ang remain natural. Her compassion clashes with the Gaang. When Sokka scolds her for being impulsive with her attempts to aid the village, Katara angrily responds with this:

Similarly, the thing that kicked off Zuko’s arc was this righteous anger. In The Storm, we learn that Zuko’s scar came from him standing up to a general who suggested sacrificing a division of rookies for an operation.

You can't sacrifice an entire division like that! Those soldiers love and defend our nation! How can you betray them?

It is their shared compassion and anger at the injustices around them that makes them and the way they interact with the world so similar. Iroh described Zuko as ���an idealist with a pure heart with unquestionable honor”. How well does this describe Katara?

Moreover, it is not only their anger. They are both incredibly strong willed with how they act on their anger. In The Waterbending Master, when Katara found out master Pakku won’t teach her because she’s a girl, she didn’t give up. She challenged him, a master, to a fight to prove that she can do everything a boy can do. And Zuko’s strong will is almost over talked about. When A\ang escaped his ship, he jumped on his airbender staff. In Zuko Alone, Ursa said to him “That’s who you are, Zuko. Someone who keeps fighting even though it’s hard”.

To sum up, Zuko and Katara’s foundational events and personality traits are parallels to one another. They both lost their mother when they sacrificed themselves for them, and it marked the end of an era for them. They are both driven by compassion and righteous anger and have a strong willed personality. They are guided by their morals first and foremost. They are parallels to one another.

The Development

Zuko and Katara’s character arcs serve as parallels to each other, and bring them closer together. Zuko’s redemption arc is, to put it simply, about unlearning Fire Nation propaganda and coming to realize the horror his country inflicted on the world. In book 2 Zuko sees the harm they caused first hand, and in The Day of Black Sun he fully rejects the Fire Nation.

Zuko: Growing up, we were taught that the Fire Nation was the greatest civilization in history. And somehow, the War was our way of sharing our greatness with the rest of the world. What an amazing lie that was.

He rejects the lie that the Fire Nation is somehow helping the world - that it’s inherently good. His arc was about unlearning Fire Nation supremacy.

Katara’s arc is not as easy to pin down, but it’s nevertheless there. Her arc is about idealism, hope and a change in perspective. Katara started her journey as an idealist, the literal voice of hope in the opening, and with a black and white view of the world - the Fire Nation is evil, and everyone else is good. Throughout the show, Katara encounters both good people from the Fire Nation, and bad people from around the world of Avatar, such as Long Feng, Jet and Hama. In The Puppetmaster in particular she learns that waterbending can be just as destructive as firebending, if not more so. Her arc is about unlearning naivety and Fire Nation inferiority.

The symmetry comes from them learning to lean on the other’s view across the seasons. In book 1, they are rigid in their view. Zuko is still working a full time job tracking the Avatar, while Katara still clings to her black and white view of the world, such as when she had a conversation with a Firebender who told her firebending is inherently destructive. In book 2, Zuko becomes a fugitive and sees the Fire Nation’s horrors for himself, while Katara sees that the one safe haven from the Fire Nation can be evil too. In book 3, Zuko goes back to the Fire Nation to see that it’s not what he’d imagined at all, while Katara goes to the Fire Nation to find people just like her.

Not only are their arcs symmetrical, but they are what allows their bond to flourish. Katara can only forgive Zuko after she’d let go of her ideals, and Zuko can only seek to redeem himself in her eyes after he’d let go of his idealization of the Fire Nation. Their bond is a true testament to their arcs.

The Encounters

Zuko and Katara’s relationship carries a lot of narrative weight. Their journeys are intertwined on many occasions. For Katara, it’s significant that after Katara masters waterbending, it is Zuko whom she has to defend herself to. It’s significant that she sees humanity in Zuko, despite him being the face of the Fire Nation. It’s meaningful that she goes to find her mother’s killer with Zuko, and even bloodbends before him. And finally, it’s meaningful that she spends the 4 part finale with him.

For Zuko, it’s significant that when he truly connects with someone other than his uncle, it’s with Katara. It’s significant that he learns through Katara that revenge doesn’t always help. It’s significant that Katara is the last member he has to earn forgiveness from. And it’s meaningful that jumping in front of a lightning bolt to save Katara is his last act of redemption.

While Sokka and Zuko for instance never interact in book 1 besides some one liners, Katara and Zuko had a subplot around Katara’s necklace. Although their stories do diverge, such as most of book 2, they always return to spend the season’s finales together. They don’t drive each other’s characters forward as much as they represent milestones in each other’s stories. You cannot remove their scenes together and have the rest of the show make sense.

——————

In conclusion, Zuko and Katara’s characters follow a story of mutual suffering, personal development, and deep friendship. They have a common experience of sacrifice, sorrow, and unflinching compassion. These experiences have narrative weight because they act as development, redemption, and forgiveness catalysts, creating a connection that ultimately serves as a reminder of how far they’ve come.

[galoogamelady]

What’s Fallout like? Like I know I can google what kind of game it is but more than that what games would you compare it to? and is it more story-based or gameplay-based?

That's a difficult one to answer and I'm not sure I have the authority to do it lol

But I'll try!

The Fallout fandom is fairly complicated due to the IP being passed around and the lore/values of its storytelling being muddied over the years. That being said I think both old-school and new fans would still agree that the story is the most important element, as they're meant to be role playing games where you make decisions on often heavy matters (especially in the games of the original devs).

Fallout 1 and 2 are turn-based isometric rpg-s from the late 90s. If you like that type of gameplay, they're fantastic games and cult classics. They don't shy away from heavy themes.

Then the IP got sold to Bethesda and their version of Fallout is a FPS/TPS action experience, as seen in Fallout 3 and 4. The combat is fun but even the newest game is shit by shooter standards. If you played an Elder Scrolls game (like Skyrim), they're like that but set in a retro futuristic post apocalypse. A large slice of the fandom has only played these ones and skipped the original turn-based games.

Fallout New Vegas was made by the original team but using Bethesda's engine. Many fans would tell you that out of the modern titles, that's the one with the best writing.

Fallout 4 was a very popular title due to the scrap and build system. As you adventure, you can scavenge all sorts of trash and then build your own little settlements in the wasteland and populate them with settlers. Add mods to that, and the community really did some magic. It made people connect with the world of Fallout on a personal level.

The story in a nutshell: in an alternate timeline, survivors of a devastating nuclear war are trying to rebuild and make the irradiated wasteland of the United States liveable again but every group and faction has a different take on how society should be rebuilt. When the writing is done well, your choices have weight and it's impossible to be fair and please everyone. You get to discover a variety of different factors that lead to the Great War and you have to wager whether humanity is doomed to make the same mistakes all over again. Is there a way to avoid them? What kind of sacrifices does that require? Etc.

A lot of it is supposed to be a critical look at war, 50s Americana and the dangers of nationalism, rampant consumerism, xenophobia, etc.

Hope this helped a little! It's difficult to find two Fallout fans who are on the exact same opinion of all the games. I personally think, the fun part of the games is when you get to carve a little slice out of the wasteland for yourself and your community and the stimulating part is the overarching story and lore.

It's no wonder the original writers made The Outer Worlds too, which I don't consider a legendary game but the similarities are obvious in the themes.

[imbecominggayer]

Writing Advice: How To Write A Tight Story!!!

You are trying to write a story :D

BUT! The characters just feel so disconnected from each other that at this point they come from different genres. The plot lines just seem to be weaving less of a beautiful tapestry and more of a hairball. Nothing seems to be going together.

but fear not, for I am going to be giving advice today on how to connect your characters and plot thematically!

Today, we are pulling out our tool box and breaking out themes, motifs, and great writer shit!

A) Character Design :D

The trick to character design is to make everyone unique enough that they stand apart from eachother but cohesive enough you can look at them and say "yeah".

A trick that I use is to ground them in ~realism~

If your characters live in a cold weather, then obviously they're going to wear clothing that protects them from the cold. Now, there are circumstances that might permit your character to wear non-cold appropriate clothing like superpowers or species-related stuff but just grounding your characters into the setting and just saying "what would they need?" can just do amazing things for your characters.

Other things that cohesive-fy your characters is sharing a fundamental aesthetic but then having different branches of of these aesthetics. These aesthetics tend to also come with the setting!

Sci-Fi = Futuristic (Solarpunk, Cyberpunk, Cyberpop, Oceanpunk)

Fantasy = Nature (cottagecore, ravencore, dragoncore, etc.)

Slice of Life = Mundane Cozy (Academia, Clean Girl, Casual)

You get the point. Even the social outcasts will be using the same materials as the in-crowd uses, unless it's specialized material. The difference is in how they wear it. A social outcast's Sci-Fi outfit will probably be a bit tattered. A bit dystopian maybe. But it's still Sci-Fi!

Two characters can wear a crop top of the same material and still seem distinct enough if their backstories have them being distinct.

Differentiating characters is pretty easy. Have them share the same overall type of stuff and let the details weave the story.

B) Plot Lines

Look, there is no easy way to say this but you probably need to cut out some parts of your story.

Let me tell you, a plot is a summary of all of it's subplots. The goal of a subplot is to gradually build up these elements whether it be character arcs, character relationships and all that good shit so it can light a bigger fire.

It's just like a bonfire. The characters are the spark, the subplots are the logs, and the plot is the fire.

Ask yourself this:

Is there a way I can incorperate this character arc into a grander action-focused plot where I actively demonstrate this character's change?

Is there a way I can morph two subplots together so I can get both the benefits and the lessen load?

Is there a way I can give character responsibilities onto the well-developed characters I already have instead of just making new ones?

All of these questions can help chop off some of the bad filler that is weighing your story down. And also give your story a bit more breathing room so you can have all of those important quiet moments.

C) Themes :D

Let me tell you, having themes just makes my story that much more cohesive. It feels like there is this overarching tie between all of my characters that just makes the story feel that much more well-thoughtout.

A good example of characters being reflective of the overall theme of the show is "The World God Only Knows"! It's a harem anime that genuinely feels very well-thoughtout with the comedic dating sim parody elements and the deeper message about the fight with reality both bouncing off of each other.

It feels like a world wear the characters and the theme are both gently rocking the worldbuilding and story together.

Having themes allows me to identify potential character flaws within my cast, develop characters that I didn't really have an idea about, and the overall worldbuilding of the WIP.

Overall, my themes tend to read more like central ideas. It's less about a moral message in my opinion but an explanation.

Some of my lastest themes are:

" the horrors of love and understanding"

" the alienation of being not human in a world of humans"

"the burden of being forced into selflessness"

"the desire to no longer exist"

"the fantasy of controlling reality"

"the limitations of instinct"

I'll give you a quick summary of how each different theme impacted the characters and the storyline :D

"the horrors of love and understanding" inspired the storyline of being smothered in a Hive Mind and the desire to not be an individual anymore since it's so lonely being singular. It developed my main characters extensively.

"the alienation of being not human" was definitely uplifted by the fact that this is a superhero story about literal non-humans who may look and sometimes act human but will always be eternally aware of the chasm. It shaped my protagonists extensively.

"the burden of selflessness" inspired the motivation behind why Yituing became a villain. It also serves as the mantra for Nonkosi's character arc. The theme was eventually developed into a commentary on the Strong Black Woman

"the desire to not longer exist" was uplifted with heavy religious symbolism. This was demonstrated through an angel trying to use empathy as a way of self-imploding and an ex-pastor using invisibility to try and drive themself away from humanity.

"the fantasy of controllin reality" was developed in an isekai setting which definitely drove home the theme of literally escaping the necessary evils of reality for the simplicity of fantasy. All of the characters are inspired off of motivations protagonists tend to have which ultimately boiled down to a desire for control.

"the limitations of instinct" was a crtique on the argument that what's natural is somehow better. The main protagonists work with their instinctual existences with Nariman lacking in empathy and Hetrunmeass being an android who can literally turn off their feelings at any moment. They grow beyond who they were. They still are what they are but they are also something more.

[zahri-melitor]

Hmmmm. Having so many more thoughts about "Damian's stories are about what Batman can do for Robin, while Tim's stories are about what Robin can do for Batman" as a concept.

And look this is partly me simplifying things way way down. Because ofc there are stories for both of them in the other direction, and I can name a bunch of them off the top of my head. But I'm looking at overarching themes.

Because!!! I think part of the divide in whether people feel particularly close to Damian's stories or particularly close to Tim's comes down to their identification over which fantasy and story they want to overlay the concept of Batman and Robin with. Do they want a fantasy about the strength and change a child can bring even to the adults around them? Do they want a fantasy about how a child can grow and be forgiven by adults for everything, even the dark parts of themself they hate?

"Can I fix others" vs "can others fix me" are both deep concepts people identify with, whether or not either impulse is a healthy one.

For instance. I will fully tell you that part of my problem with Dick and Damian as Batman & Robin, apart from the amount of it being written by Morrison, is that in the stories I have read, I see very few that give me a satisfying answer to 'what benefit is Dick getting out of this relationship', and as someone who helped coparent her own much younger sibling to the point my mother rewrote her will during that period to request that I got custody of my brother, not my father, should anything happen, reading a narrative where I'm supposed to celebrate Dick's sacrifices in taking on Damian is one where I want this situation to be rewarding for DICK. Because I know the suckitude of the situation where everyone is telling you how noble you are for making this sacrifice, and I know the joys you find in it, but by god is it hard and it is work that you can find yourself resenting and it is something where I see myself in Dick and I want a fantasy telling me that this was all worth it and the narrative is entirely uninterested in giving that to me.

[livingthedragonlife]

i want to talk about the mimic chapter!!!!

kui is a genius at weaving overarching story themes and character themes and arcs and details into every chapter, but i love the way it happens in the mimic chapter the most.

the first thing that happens is chilchuck noticing the possibility of a mimic. he notices it instantly, because he remembers what the room looked like the last time the party was there. it's a great demonstration of how perceptive he is, and how seriously he takes his job... but he doesn't tell anybody.

the party could be in danger, there's a monster right around the corner, but he assumes (rightly, but still) that laios and senshi would only want to eat it and marcille would be mad at him for bringing it up. so he says nothing. out of sight, out of mind, ignoring the problem will have Zero lasting consequences. his emotional unavailability demonstrated right after, in a way that feels so seamless!!!

later, he wakes up marcille before he goes to refill his waterskin, but when he gets trapped in the mimic room, he assumes she fell asleep right after he left and therefore can't help him. he finds out later that he's wrong. marcille stayed awake to wait for him and woke up laios and senshi when he didn't come back. they were a little bit late, but chilchuck could have relied on his party members to be there for him, but assumed they wouldn't. he thinks quick on his feet, he figures out the puzzle in the room really fast, but he doesn't come out of it unscathed. he relies only on himself, and it almost got him killed.

obviously getting killed isn't too big a deal in the dungeon, but the point is that chilchuck put himself through unnecessary strife that could have been solved easily if they had just taken out the mimic right when they got into the room together—if he had told them there was danger in the first place. and the mimic turned out to be delicious anyway!!!!

BUT. THEN. when he finally DOES decide to be vulnerable, having learned this lesson, and tells everyone how old he is... they laugh. they still treat him like a child. they don't understand, they assume he's just as young as they did before.

this gets solved too, when he tells them about his family after the griffon/hippogriff fight. and sure, if he had been more open and vulnerable about having a family from the start, he wouldn't have to keep explaining that he's not a child only for them not to listen. but no wonder he doesn't!! no wonder he kept quiet when the one time he tried to open up, he got laughed at anyway! and that's just THIS PARTY, we know he's been through some shit with other parties—he formed a whole union about it

just!!!!!! all the actions from all the characters make sense if you look at it from their perspective, and it's all weaved so delicately into the storytelling you don't even realize how much you're absorbing about the world and the characters. chef's kiss.

[kandadze]

There's a particular quality to Fangs of Fortune that I've seen pointed out as one of the show's weaknesses, and that is the seemingly illogical at times, nonlinear way in which the story is presented to us. And as much as I can see how that could be an issue for some folks, for me personally it's a big part of why the show as a whole works so well.

For one, it's my favorite storytelling technique. Puzzle-like structures, flashbacks, dreams vs reality, story-within-a-story, memory games... I used to incorporate them in my own writing and I look for them in the media I'm consuming, especially visual. Before I even knew what Fangs was really about, based on the trailer (and then the MV) alone, I clocked it as a sort of a fever dream, and I was seated.

Then there is the overarching theme of dreams that the show reiterates often and in many ways. We're being told repeatedly that the lives of these characters are a dream; that there's a moment of falling asleep and there's a moment everyone will need to wake up. The amount of dream-like flashbacks and memories, not to mention the illusions the characters are forced into again and again is staggering; in fact, until the very end I wasn't sure if the whole story won't turn out to be either a memory or a dream told by a descendant of one of the characters.

When we tell a story from memory, due to how fleeting and subjective it is, we will inevitably stumble upon inconsistencies; there'll be time lapses, sudden changes of scenery, continuity issues. When we dream, there's no logic in anything we encounter, time and space have no meaning, and we can't even be sure that we're still ourselves. Like Through the Looking Glass Alice jumping over little streams

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

we continue finding ourselves in different places, very often in a different time, and encountering different people than just a moment earlier.

And so in the show that consistently keeps us guessing what's real and what's not, who's dreaming and who's not, and when the illusion started and for whom... it only makes sense that the way the scenes are cut and edited appears to be - almost random, fragmented, not entirely clear. I for one, am very okay with it.

(I'm also not in any way deluding myself that all of it was a conscious and deliberate choice of the show's creators; other than a simple fact that perfection is not possible, censorship, the limit put on the amount of episodes, as well as time and money constraints all undoubtedly played part in what the final product looks like. I'm just making a conscious and deliberate choice to focus on what works for me. YMMV.)

[qsycomplainsalot]

So I watched Furiosa

Furiosa Road: a Star Wars Story. It wasn't likely to live up to Fury Road, and it didn't. It would have been a tall order. While it was well worth paying to see in theaters, I was still a little disappointed; I'm going to explain why, without spoilers, and then after a very visible cut I'll comment on a few specific things in the movie.

First of all it felt long, but not two hours long so I guess it speaks to its quality. Going through the cast, everyone did a good job, although I wasn't blown away by the on screen chemistry of Anya Taylor-Joy and Tom Burke. More on that later. Chris Hemsworth as the overarching antagonist is this movie's standout performance, in a way that I'm somewhat conflicted about. More on that later too.

Overall it feels as if, after making Fury Road a trim and thrilling movie, the creatives behind it strung together all the piles of amazing ideas they had left on the cutting room floor into another complete movie, but not a very cohesive story with a beginning middle and end with enough connective tissue to captivate an audience. There's no shortage of props, costumes, characters, stunts and just straight up visuals, although the music is not up to the standards set by Fury Road. What's really missing is a tight knit script.

I'd say watch it if you like the franchise, otherwise I'd just wait for it to release on small screens.

My biggest complaint with this movie is that it's split between two relationships, between Hemsworth as Dementus or Tom Burke as Jack with Furiosa, when really with how it's paced it could barely afford one. I am just completely confused by people saying Jack and Furiosa's relationship was the highlight of the movie, it was vague, bland, and Jack died before I could really care about him. All this relationship did was explain how Furiosa became so good at driving a war rig, despite the fact that by this point in the movie she'd fended for herself just fine, presumably using what she'd been taught by the vuvuzela tribe. Likewise Dementus as a character is extremely simple, in a good way, and is the a better representation of time passing in the movie than literal text onscreen telling you it's been fifteen years or some such. It's on the nose, but Chris Hemsworth is acting his heart out and it's always a joy to see him on screen. He's spiraling his way through the movie in a perfect exemple of what Furiosa must avoid becoming. So knowing that, the main plot should be about Furiosa having to lose her way home (the star map tattoo on her arm, which we know she lose by Fury Road) and choose to stay at the Citadel to kill him, setting up a bitter ending where she's gained nothing and is stuck killing more people instead of letting go of revenge and going home. Unfortunately Furiosa: the video game: the movie very much lives in the shadow of its 2015 sequel, and so the plot is split further to set that up. I've talked about how it hurts the pacing and how much screentime the other characters could have gotten, but I think it actually greatly diminished the ending. The end of Furiosa has her catch up to Dementus, bind him and beat him up, asking him to give her her childhood and mother back, only for Dementus to refuse to play along in anyway. He tells her that revenge achieves nothing, that he knows from personal experience and that she can kill him however she wants, that he doesn't particularly care. I don't do it justice it's a pretty good end to his arc this movie. Instead of Furiosa killing him there and then and validating that speech for a cohesive theme to the movie (keeping the hope stuff for Fury Road where it works), the history man voiceover tells us that although the true end of Dementus is disputed, Furiosa told him the truth, that she kept him alive with a peach tree growing out of his dick ?? And then she brings the peach to Immortan's wives in the Citadel, and then the credits are interspersed with shots from Fury Road. I can excuse the impossibility of keeping someone alive while a tree is growing on them for the sake of Mad Max movies very much being wasteland fairy tales, but I think directly linking Furiosa: Road One with Fury Road like that is both pointless and very hamfisted, on top of being a big disappointment when it comes to Dementus' character. Like the guy was clearly fucked up from losing his daughters just kill him and be done with it. Anyway yeah I don't think I'll rewatch this movie nearly as often as I rewatch Fury Road. Shoutout to the Octoboss though, he's the Most Valuable Sidecharacter of this movie.

[allbuthuman]

BSD and loneliness

Loneliness and what it does to a person, as well as how far the attempts to counteract it can go, what they can and can't do, is an overarching theme in Asagiri's writing, and many of the stories portrayed can basically boil down to "this person is suffering because they are really, really lonely", which I love. Here I want to focus more on loneliness of the "existential" type, the one that's almost intrinsic to someone and stems from who they are rather than whom they do or don't have around them, because, in my mind, it makes for great tragic stories.

Dazai

He is the most obvious example, and probably one of the loneliest characters I've ever come across. Able to comprehend everything, yet unable and from a point onward unwilling to be comprehended, no one can understand his mind, and even those "like him" who might, like Fyodor, won't understand his emotions. First of all, of course, he controls them too well. Secondly, although I do think there are moments he shows a need for connection, he does that from the safety of his usual persona (for example, hiding behind his usual teasing), so that, in the mind of others, there is no clear distinction between the two. Thirdly, the awareness he has of his own emotions is probably very low, since he's learned that the only way to survive and make sense of himself and the world is to rationalise. There are meagre chances for Dazai the human being with emotions to be less lonely, until he chooses to let himself be seen and be vulnerable, and, at this point, it would probably be extremely hard for him to actually practice that, even if he did make the decision.

Dazai does understand that it's better for people to be with one another rather than alone. It's clear even in Stormbringer, when his mental health is arguably at its lowest. It's clear in Dark Era, when he says that if everyone around him died, it would be a form of suicide (I'm using these examples even though there are clearer ones because these are probably the times he was doing the worst). But he doesn't believe that he can have true companionship, and is also being taught to believe that attachment is a weakness, that loneliness is where he belongs.

And then there's Oda, who, while admittedly unable to understand his mind, comprehended exactly this loneliness of his. He and Ango both did, and, as per the light novel, they could not manage to interfere, but were by him as he experienced it. And yet he barely knew that was the case, until Oda made it clear, and then the one person who he now knew could see him died.

But what people rarely comment on is how much capacity to care for someone Dazai had. There was one person, the first person who saw beyond the unpredictable Demon Prodigy, the first person who acknowledged his loneliness - didn't even manage to break through it, just acknowledged it and treated him with care, and that was enough for Dazai to care about him as much as he did, and that is heartbreaking in itself.

Lastly, but perhaps the most telling point of all is Asagiri himself admitting that he never knows what Dazai is thinking. I don't want to get too into meta, but being the creation of someone, and still not being understood by your own creator is possibly the loneliest position I can think of.

Verlaine

My second favourite example, because here we have someone who was loved, and he knew that he was loved, but it wasn't enough to change things.

Verlaine's loneliness is objective, in the sense that he really is fundamentally different than those around him, he really is not biologically human. That loneliness of his, combined with the hatred that it fostered, was what led him to seek Chuuya - he thought that the only person who could understand him was one who shared that nature, and incorrectly believed that Chuuya would think so as well. He needed Chuuya, and thought that Chuuya would need him in he same way. He was, however, wrong, because Chuuya, being uncertain of his humanity instead of certain of his inhumanity, put great effort into being among other people instead of discarding them.

Rimbaud knew Verlaine's nature since the beginning. He accepted it, he cared for him and loved him regardless. He knew that it made him suffer and was there for him, and he did try to empathise with him, while knowing that it was impossible, because the gap was not one that could be mended. In Verlaine's case, no love could be enough to change his nature, a nature that made him look at the world with hate, including the person who loved him. To a person who feels like they should never have been born, even the sincerest "I'm glad you were born" would only cause pain, until it was too late.

Of course, that's not to say that he actually hated Rimbaud - it's very apparent from the ending of Stormbringer that he cared about him, and that he did appreciate all the efforts he made for him. I don't know if you want to call it love, but it's the closest thing he had the capacity for. But, at the end of the day, nothing that Rimbaud would do could change the fact that Verlaine perceived the gap between himself and the world as unbridgeable. Yet still, he was affected. Nothing could really change, but Rimbaud reached him somehow, although the ending couldn't have been different.

Shibusawa

Here we have an example of someone who shared a similar kind of loneliness, but never had anything to counteract it. He's portrayed as comparable to Dazai and Fyodor: smarter than everyone around him, detached and bored. But, in contrary to Dazai, he isn't shown having any meaningful relationship that could challenge that. This difference is recognised by Dazai, who tells him to his face that he wouldn't think like that if he had any friends. This is a "playful" way to put it, but in reality Dazai simultaneously empathises with his point of view and discards it, because he now knows better than to view people the way Shibusawa does.

I haven't read the light novel, I'm just basing this on the movie, so I can't say much more, but I think his character works as a good point of contrast between people who still try to find "meaning" and those like him, who have decided it's not worth it.

Curious to see where Fyodor, the other so-called superhuman, will fall in regards to this loneliness, but I think we don't know enough about him and how he actually feels in order not to grasp in the dark.

(part 2 about the less existential type of loneliness if i gather enough coherent thoughts)

[thejesterstears]

This might be a hot take, but I really kind of don't want TADC to end with everyone miraculously getting out of the circus.

Maybe that sounds like a bleak and unsatisfying ending, but I do have a reason. Goose had said that the message (that she’s stated so far) she wants people to get out of the series is that there's meaning to be found in a stagnant life, which I think is a genuinely beautiful sentiment. And so far, the series has done a wonderful job of expressing this theme, this overarching sense of making the most of a bad situation rather than trying to escape the inescapable, which unfortunately is a sentiment I think a lot of us can understand on a personal level (I know it resonates with me deeply). And I feel like that message would be more impactful if it didn't conclude with some daring escape back to the outside world, rather than simply trying to make peace with the situation they are in. I appreciate that the series already isn't solely about trying to break out or defeat a villain (Caine, in this case, who I love and appreciate as an antagonist who is more clueless than evil). It feels like a refreshing change from a lot of shows like this and I'd love to see that carried through to the finale.

I know Goose said she doesn't see a season two being possible, which makes me wonder if the show actually will end in everyone escaping. But that could simply mean that one season is enough to tell the story she wants to tell, who knows. And my own opinion might change the deeper into the series we get, we're only on three episodes now with a long way to the end. That's just my two cents for now. I'll look forward to seeing the conclusion in good time regardless, and I’m sure I’ll be satisfied either way, this is simply a possibility I would actually not mind seeing.

[sapphosscribe]

Writing Advice For Fanfics or Novels

Hello, my dears! As requested by @ilay-snt I thought I’d share my writing process with you all! I’m going to split this post into two sections of general advice and then how I personally construct a story.

Disclaimer: I’m no professional by any means. I’m basing this solely off two creative writing classes I took in college and what I find to be personally helpful so if it doesn’t work for you, that’s totally fine! Everyone writes differently!

General Advice:

1. First and most importantly: You Have to Write for Yourself.

Write the story that you want to read. Not only will it keep you motivated to keep going but it frees you to try whatever you want without being worried how it will be received by others. As long as you’re happy with your work, that’s all that matters. Your audience will find you.

(Hello audience! *waves excitedly*)

2. Write Everday

This one might sound a little daunting, but it doesn’t need to be a lot or necessarily “everyday”. It’s just a way to consistently practice, to help you find your author voice, and create a habit.

Writing everyday could be a poem or a paragraph or a whole chapter! It’s whatever you choose to make it just as long as you get something down. It doesn’t necessarily even need to be good. You can always go back and edit, but if you only write when inspiration strikes, you might never sit down to do it in the first place. Practice finding your way through the words to get at what you want, rather than waiting for the words to come to you.

If you’re REALLY really stuck. Then might I suggest you-.

3. Get Feedback

As a chronic second-guesser, I can’t tell you how helpful it is to have someone read your story and help structure the plot. I’ve had a lot of instances where something I’d been struggling with for days was resolved by getting coffee with a friend and having them look at it with new eyes.

Get yourself a beta reader or just someone who has good taste whose opinion you trust to help you work out problems. Two heads are often better than one!

4. Analyze media you admire

A lot of people like to limit it to reading authors you love and looking at the way they create stories, which is very helpful, but don’t neglect other forms of storytelling like movies and TV shows or even videogames! Think about what you like from your favorite things and why you like them.

As an example, one of my favorite pieces of media is the Mass Effect Trilogy. Mostly because it subverts the narrative of the Lone Hero archetype present in other franchises like Halo and Assassins Creed. The protagonist Shepard relies on their teammates abilities and support throughout the game to complete missions and eventually save the universe. Similarly, I like stories where there’s a cast of interesting and diverse characters surrounding the main protagonist who are essential to the plot.

Go dig through your own favorites and figure out what kind of characters you like, tropes you enjoy, and overarching themes that speak to you. From these, you can draw inspiration for your own stories and figure out what you want to write.

4. Take Breaks and Be Present

Writing doesn’t happen in a vacuum! If you feel like your inspiration is running dry or you’re in the middle of a block, go out and do things you enjoy or, better yet, try new things!

Be fully present in the moment and look at the world around you as if for the first time, talk to people you run into, or draw from your friends/family for inspiration. There’s a whole world of possibility out there just waiting to be written down or reinterpreted. Don’t be afraid to take breaks and have fun! Writing should never become a chore!

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s dig into my own personal process:

My Writing Process

1. Everything Begins with the Outline

When I have an idea for a story, I try to do a rough outline first of the big plot points: the beginning, the middle, and the end, then fill in as much as I can in between.

My chapter outlines are never very well defined up until I reach the point where I sit down to write. It’s only then I begin to flesh out what I want to do. I take everything from the previous chapter and what I know is coming up to shape what needs to happen in the moment. I work better with flexibility so I can wander off the path a little rather than rushing from point A to point B.

2. After the Outline, The Character Sheets

Character sheets are probably the most important part of my writing. I like to give my characters as much agency as possible and allow them to steer the story rather than the story steering them. Unfortunately, the only way to accomplish this is to know them inside and out.

Most of my character sheets start with the basics: what does this character want more than anything, what do they actually need, and what do they fear. From there, I can identify their goals for the story and for each chapter, their personality traits, their likes and dislikes, how they respond to conflict, etc.

When I’m writing, the character sheets are my own personal holy book. If I can’t make them move around the scene anymore, a quick look at that will normally get me back on track.

3. Structuring Each Chapter

Normally, I have a goal in mind (or several) I want to reach. Whether it’s progressing the plot or just one character’s arc, I allow those goals to drive the action, then set the characters loose like rats in a maze.

Often, I try to think “what can go wrong here?” and then how that character would react to the set backs or interact with each other based on that.

In a few cases, the characters just do what they want and then entirely new scenes develop I didn’t plot out beforehand from following after that instinct.

On the whole, I allow the characters A LOT of free will to shape the story while holding up the basic structure for them to work within and I’ve found it really makes the story come to life.

4. The Point of It All

Generally, everyone I’ve met who’s a writer has something to say and the story is the medium for that. The most important thing when I’m writing and I’m buried neck deep in the twists and turns of the plot is to not forget why exactly I’m writing it in the first place. So I have a little manifesto of sorts at the top of my outline, only a couple sentences at most, that strips the entire story down to the one central idea I’m trying to convey or an overarching theme.

For example, if I had to sum up the central idea of House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune (Great book by the way, can’t recommend it enough) it’s that true family accepts you for who you are and can come from unexpected places. Also, it’s essential to stand up to unjust systems in defense of others.

I try to find my own my own theme like this to keep in sight for my story. So I don’t veer too far from the purpose of it.

Anyway, that’s my advice for any other writers who are starting out, hope this was helpful in some way! All of you have a good day! 💖💖

[andrewuttaro]

What the Holy Rosary tells us about worshipping God

Honesty is the best policy. To be very honest: I felt like the Holy Rosary was something only Grandmas do until I was a full-blown adult. My grandma prayed the Rosary, but my family was only anecdotally religious growing up, so the practice was never something I learned in any great depth. That is not to mention even as a child I realized it required a level of repetition, and therefore focus, which I would scarcely possess until adulthood.

Something changed in college as I went on service trips and retreats. While I had also done both those things in my High School Youth Ministry there was a whole different vibe to that in college. In college everyone is there by their own free will, no parents dropped them off threateningly, at worst someone was dragged on retreat by a friend. But there was more to it than that. Some of these trips exposed me to religious for the first time, that is Nuns, Monks, and even an odd oblate here or there.

To be exposed to people who prayed as if it wasn’t a chore allowed me to move outside my previous, very exclusively conversational way of praying. Conversational prayer isn’t inferior, I still do that daily as well, but rote, that is recited or scripted prayer, hit me differently as a college student. Allow me to be frank: I had now realized my very hyperactive, autistic brain, had found a use for repetitive prayer. The “calming of the monkey mind” as the Buddha put it.

Seventy years ago the Rosary was the undisputed centerpiece of Catholic devotional life. This was in no small part because Catholics did not have the Mass in their native languages before the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). That meant that if you wanted to be pious or feel closer to God at Mass before communion then you probably wanted to have some kind of prayer routine. That generation had the Rosary at the center of their devotional life as a result. My own grandmother gave me her mother’s Rosary which dates back to this period (forgive me for showing it off in the thumbnail). October has the Rosary as its monthly Catholic devotion.

Perhaps such a widely known devotion, easily still the most recognizable, distinctly Catholic devotion in our culture, needs a month of focus just to remember what it’s all about. I say that because even when I first picked up praying the rosary in college it didn’t stick, and I have never approached daily rosary reciting like the hardcore folks do. Nonetheless the practice has grown on me more than anything else in the intervening years.

The Rosary is so rich in the mystery of the faith that it reorients you to what faith is in the first place and why we worship the God we do at all. Put another way, the Rosary tells us something about how we ought to worship God. Yes, on the surface its repetition does wonders for the hyperactive mind; but the deeper you go the more you encounter the life-giving stuff the story of our faith is made of. Mystery is one word to use for this, the word that I think gets the point across better in English is peace. Just as mystery is an opportunity for faith, so too is the Rosary an opportunity for deep, spiritual peace.

A brief history of praying unceasingly

Long before anyone knew what a Rosary is there was the fundamental Christian call to “pray without ceasing” (1st Thessalonians 5:17). Echoing the practice of Jesus who frequently both prayed communally with his apostles and privately when he withdrew from them; this is taken as something of a command of the New Testament if not an overarching theme of the whole bible for a holy life (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2742-2745). How this call to unceasing prayer has been answered is an interesting prism through which to view the history of the Church.

You could say prayer was the unceasing practice of the Church as early as the first Christian communities in the book of Acts who persisted in breaking bread and praying together (Acts 2:42). The breaking of the bread was the Mass, and the praying together certainly involved rote prayers in addition to conversational prayer. These practices undoubtedly involved recounting their articles of faith in Jesus Christ and making petitions and intercessions in prayer. While further systematization would come, prayer was this constant practice of faithful Christians from the start.

The great third century scholar Origen equated the fundamental call of prayer to action when he wrote: “He ‘prays without ceasing’ who unites prayer to works and good works to prayer. Only in this way can we consider as realizable the principle of praying without ceasing.” As monasticism developed, first in the Near East and later in Western Europe, the call was answered with the classic eight fixed times a day when psalms, scriptures and other prayers were recited. The formalization of the Canonical Hours, better known as the Liturgy of the Hours or simply the Breviary today, occurred sometime in the early middle ages.

Think of the breviary as a daily devotional book with a little bit of everything prayed multiple times daily. This would be, theoretically at least, the constant prayer of the whole Church for a time. But the Church is a big place with a lot of different people and vocations.

By the sixteenth century revisions to the breviary were needed. As with the Mass and other liturgies, clerics will tell you many rote devotions grab onto the regular prayers of the church like barnacles onto the hull of a ship. Things had gotten unwieldly. Many priests, those who are mandated by their ordination to pray the Breviary, had fallen out of the practice which had long been their answer to the fundamental call. Though the Council of Trent successfully reformed the breviary to the point it was not changed significantly again until the 1960s, there were other prayer practices that were growing throughout the history of the Church.

Call it the Holy Spirit, there were always common ways to pray unceasingly. The Breviary had long been inaccessible to the illiterate masses. Knotted prayer ropes date back to the first centuries of the faith. The monks of the east, also known as the Desert Fathers, would use them to keep track of praying the 150 Psalms or just the Jesus Prayer (More on that gem later). Such rote, repetitive prayer styles evolved and changed based on who was praying them where and for what purpose. By the thirteenth century there existed a folk practice of praying 50-150 Ave Marias (AKA Hail Marys). It was here when St. Dominic comes into the picture.

In the year 1208, Dominic was praying and experienced a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary as the story goes. In this vision Dominic is given the Holy Rosary as a way to pray the central mysteries of the life of Jesus Christ as if with Mary herself. We Catholics see Mary as the central figure of the Communion of Saints which means we can think of her as something like the greatest pray-er out there, our greatest intercessor before God’s throne. It is like calling her the captain of the all-star team in a way. If the Saints are good at praying than she is their Great One. I have at least three other articles at this point about the Blessed Mother so by all means learn more and draw nearer to our Sacred Mommy.

Anyway, the Holy Rosary became the central devotion of the Order of Preachers (Dominican Order of Priests) which St. Dominic founded. The devotion was widespread by the end of the century and became exceedingly commonplace to the point that in 1569 Pope St Pius V (p. 1566-1572) made it an official devotion of the Church. At that point it had grown so popular that there were secondary and tertiary devotions built around the Rosary like Our Lady of Victory which commemorated a naval victory over an Ottoman fleet. It is difficult to call to mind a prayer technique outside of those explicitly spelled out in the New Testament that have reached the level of universal adoption the Rosary has.

Pope Leo XIII (p. 1878-1903) probably put the simple grandeur of it best when he said the rosary is how devotees accompany Mary in her contemplation of Christ. The more you think about Mary’s relationship with her son the more that affects you. Pope St. Leo XIII was the pontiff who instituted the custom of praying the rosary daily during the month of October. At that point in history this would have been like telling people to spend at least an hour a day on their cell phone to we moderns. People already did it quite a bit.

The Rosary historically had three sets of five mysteries: the Joyful, Sorrowful, and glorious. However in 2002, Pope St. John Paul II added a fourth set, the Luminous or Mysteries of Light, after St. George Franco Preca’s 1957 reflections adding five more mysteries of the faith taken from the life of Jesus Christ. The Rosary had now firmly become the people’s unceasing prayer of the Church to the Clergy’s breviary. I don’t think it is unfair to say the Rosary has eclipsed the Breviary, even among clergy.

Crash Course Holy Rosary

If there is any barrier to entry with the Rosary beyond merely knowing the prayers and the patience to pray them all, it is just learning how to let rote prayer open your heart. That little quote from the Buddha mentioned earlier about calming our monkey minds really provided me with an epiphany, my ah-ha moment, about rote prayer. The Rosary’s repetition helps you enter into a spiritually open mental state. Even if your mind can wander while praying the prayers themselves, the mysteries along the way demand your contemplation.

There are simply too many of those mysteries to discuss each in depth and still keep this article within the length of a blog post. Most Christians will recognize 75% of the mysteries of the Rosary right off the bat. Catholics should be able to recall 100% of them if their religious education was worth its salt. I thought a broad overview of the Rosary itself would be appropriate to frame what this all means for how we worship God if we are to be serious about our devotions and relationship with God as a whole.

You start with the sign of the cross and say the Apostles Creed. This is where I often incorporate some kind of dedication: who I am dedicating this Rosary to or what intercession, what I am praying to God for, as I pray the whole Rosary to follow. After that the practice Rosary, or mini-Rosary as I like to call it starts, that is a tour of the repetitive prayers used in each decade, or ten Hail Mary grouping, but only five prayers long minus any specific mystery.

I just made that sound way more complicated than it is. The practice Rosary is an Our Father followed by three Hail Marys capped off with a Glory Be: the shortened version of each decade of the rest of the Rosary. Its simple really.

Now we arrive at the first bead with a mystery attached to it. More on which mysteries to pray on what days in a little bit. After you recite the mystery you’ll be contemplating during the ensuing decade of Hail Marys and perhaps contemplating what fruit this mystery might provide you or some other attached devotion, you then pray an Our Father before the ten Hail Marys of the decade, one Hail Mary for each bead. After completing a decade you pray a Glory Be and boom, you’re at the next big bead where you recite the next mystery. This cycle repeats itself until you go through all five mysteries at which point you have a closing prayer, usually a Hail Holy Queen, at the three-way intersection of the Rosary.

There is an exceptionally devoted practice of praying all the Rosary mysteries at once in a 20-decade rosary. You rarely see this outside the confines of a religious convent or monastery. If you ever come across a 20-decade rosary you might do a double take because it really does look like a factory error.

Depending on the Church season different sets of mysteries are prayed each day. However the traditional schedule is Joyful Mysteries on Monday and Saturday, Sorrowful Mysteries on Tuesday and Friday, Glorious Mysteries on Wednesday and Sunday, and the Luminous Mysteries on Thursday. If you get in the habit of praying the Rosary I recommend being very flexible with this schedule.

My general rule is also that I pray the Sorrowful Mysteries more frequently during the Lenten season and the Glorious and Luminous Mysteries more frequently during the Easter season. I almost never pray the Rosary without some kind of complementary reading on each mystery as I go, it helps remind me the importance of what I am reflecting on as I pray each decade.

Finally, here are those mysteries I have talked up so much. Again, even a lapsed Christian will recognize most of these. See how many you know off the top of your head as we go through these:

Joyful Mysteries:

The Annunciation (Mary is told she’s going to give birth to Jesus)

The Visitation

The Nativity

The Presentation (Jesus’ dedication as an infant)

Finding Jesus in the Temple

Luminous Mysteries:

Baptism of Jesus

Wedding at Cana

Proclaiming the Kingdom (The Apostles sent two by two)

The Transfiguration

The Institution of the Eucharist (Last Supper)

Sorrowful Mysteries:

The Agony in the Garden

The Scourging at the Pillar

The Crowning with Thorns

Jesus carries the Cross

The Crucifixion

Glorious Mysteries:

The Resurrection

The Ascension

The Descent of the Holy Spirit (Pentecost)

The Assumption of Mary (into heaven)

The Coronation of Mary

What the Rosary tells us about worshipping God

Beyond the spiritual openness to God the Rosary can help us establish in our prayer lives, there is something deeper rote prayer practices like this tell us about who and why we worship the way we do. There comes a point in everyone’s spiritual growth as a Christian, or at least there should come a point, when the whole pursuit of religious faith stops being about us as individuals and starts to flow outward. That is outward horizontally to others in service and outward vertically to God in worship.

I could talk all the livelong day about the value of service, it is how the foundation of my faith was built over Service Camps and by way of several Vincentian Priests, but when we’re talking about the Rosary I think its insightful to look to worship. What do we mean when we claim to worship God? What is worship all about, particularly for us modern people, so predisposed to independence and righteous skepticism?

There was an interesting thing I uncovered while brushing up on my Rosary facts for this article. Apparently in some high-liturgy Lutheran circles, Lutherans correct me if I’m wrong, the Rosary is prayed without any Hail Marys. Instead the Jesus Prayer is said in place of the 53 Hail Marys in your average Rosary. This is called a Lutheran Rosary apparently. I found this very interesting, and not just for the normal sectarian reasons.

I found that so interesting because the Jesus Prayer substituting into the Rosary really drives home the point about what the worship element is all about in this. The Jesus Prayer is super easy, I can say it for you before this paragraph is done… Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. That’s it. That’s the whole prayer. There is simplicity there obviously; but stop and take in the humility and the orientation toward God it imposes in just a handful of words.

If one is to believe in God they must also believe they are not God. The Mosaic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) share an understanding of God as “the being which no greater being can be thought of” (St. Anslem of Canterbury) or in more philosophical terms: the four-A God who is all-knowing (omniscient), all-powerful (omnipotent), all-present (omnipresent), and all-loving (omnibenevolent). If such a being does exist, and they have created us with free will to choose for or against them as it would seem they have, that God is indeed all-loving because… well wow, think about that. Such a God is worthy of worship even if you contemplate him/her on a very brief, cursory level like that.

To be very blunt, none of us weary humans fit that bill. We are not God and if that God exists we ought to worship him as such. Frankly, if you have read this far into an article about praying the Rosary I would imagine you already believe God exists. If not, well then wow, thank you for spending this much time on my blog.

Humility before God is the right orientation of worship and all meaningful prayer.

Back to the Jesus Prayer: this ancient prayer is the distillation of that right orientation towards God. If we are to seriously worship God we have to take seriously his godliness and our humanity and the profound blessedness that relationship implies. If God wants a relationship with we human beings that alone is such an incredible blessing worthy of the response of worship. To then take the Christian step to say God was incarnate in Jesus Christ and committed the ultimate act of atoning solidarity with us should bring us to our knees just by believing in such a truth.

The Jesus Prayer orients us toward God properly, and that is why I think the Lutherans really did create something nice there with their version of the Rosary even if I feel somewhat slighted for my divine mother by it. The Rosary, Lutheran or Catholic, provides us with a unique combination of centering repetitive prayer and contemplative belief material to then pray over. In both motions of the Rosary then we find something of a blueprint for how to worship God.

One: clear the chaos of our mind and lives, casting aside what drives us away from being with God via repetition and practice. Two: once open to God’s action in ourselves and in humanity, dive into the sacred mysteries of his action which he has already done for us. Simplified even more we can consider these two steps a simple two-word cycle between conversion and transformation.

Knowing is one thing; believing, loving, and following God is another. To believe, love, and follow God we must be constantly converted out of old and or sinful ways of doing and living into what Jesus Christ has for us: transformation. Conversion is the movement of the heart, the willfulness, to a new way of doing things while the transformation is the work of actually changing. God helps with that, don’t worry.

Fun translation fact I always love to drop in during this discussion is the biblical command to repent. In English the word repent sounds very scolding and possessive. In the original Greek for repent, metanoia, the word is much closer to something like changing your thinking or changing your mind. For we fiercely independent and educated moderns that might be a little bit more palatable. Have the humility to change your mind and embrace God’s Will. If knowing that helps you worship God any more than before than I’ve more than done my job with this article even if you never pray a Rosary.

If nothing else worshipping God is a part of my life I would never want to give up. It is not an intellectual effort for me; though sometimes I must choose faith over the flatly logical choice just because real world relationships are built on faith more than they are built on facts. If my wife asked me if I was faithful to her on a business trip she really only has faith to go on. What I say in response is a mystery to have faith in or not. She could go to lengths to investigate my behavior on said business trip, but would that not defeat the purpose of the faith of the relationship? Can real, tangible love exist without such a foundation of faith?

For me there is a certain kind of joy in worshipping God every time I go to Mass or give him his due in prayer. It is not unlike the joy I feel at a family gathering or when I see my wife after a long trip away from her. Worship practiced in the context of relationship, particularly after some time with it, really becomes a thankful joy. The “pearl of great price” (Matthew 13:45-46) to use biblical analogy. That is the peace I think of when I think of praying the Holy Rosary.

My favorite late night comedian Stephen Colbert put his belief in God in terms of thankfulness as well asking: “If I didn’t believe in God where would all the thankfulness go?” St. John Chrysostom puts the finer point on that same idea: “Prayer is the place of refuge for every worry, a foundation for cheerfulness, a source of constant happiness, a protection against sadness.” That is a place of peace. That is what the Rosary is good at.

That is a prayerfulness worth unceasingly doing. I might try to pray the Rosary daily for the first time this month but even if I am unsuccessful the joyful thing the Rosary does will still be there for me whenever I pick it up. I understand now, after years of maturing, what its spiritual usefulness really is. I now understand how monks and nuns otherwise occupied with far more interesting life pursuits are so enthusiastic and dedicated to their prayer, their rosary praying, than what was apparent to me as a younger man. The joy of the Rosary is the love and faith of God rightly worshipped.

Thanks for reading! My book “How to catch feelings for Jesus” is available online. Share this article! I am in the swing of writing on a monthly basis now and would love to hear your input. Did you really read all that about the Holy Rosary to not have something to say about it?

[safeworksrender]

The Tears I Shed for You - A 7 Month-Long Labor of Love

I know I haven't posted any of my recent works on here for a long time, but I think I'm happy with just using this platform as a way to just dump my thoughts.

After 235 renders and ~7 months of chipping away at this thing, I've finally wrapped up work on my digital novel centered around Makoto and Mitsuru's romance path from P3R: "The Tears I Shed for You"

I'm kind of shocked that I was able to get this done without giving up or burning myself out throughout the process, considering that I didn't make a dime out of it. I didn't do this for money, or to get my foot in the door at getting some kind of gig as an artist. More than anything, I just wanted to make something that I could look back on one day and be proud of. And along the way, I was fortunate enough to have a following of people who genuinely enjoyed and looked forward to what I was making.

It's a bit crazy when I look back at how this whole thing came to be, because it initially started as just 3 separate renders (the ones attached to this post) that I had made for fun. But when I looked at them, all I could think about was how I could tie them together and tell some kind of story with it. And so what I ended up coming with was a story that has Mitsuru reminisce on the events of her social link, and how her relationship with Makoto has left an impact on her for the rest of her life.

From start to finish, all I ever wanted this to be was basically a love letter to Persona 3 and what I took away from the game. The most beautiful thing about art, or entertainment as a whole, is that everyone is going to perceive things differently - take something different out of it. And for me, what I took away from this game is reflected throughout the narrative I was trying to tell with these renders that I made. I historically never cared for romance angles in games, but this one with Makoto and Mitsuru really touched me for reasons I had such a hard time putting into words for a while. It wasn't just because "they are cute together", or because of the Romeo/Juliet-style of vibe they exude. It was because of how well Mitsuru's social link and her dynamic with Makoto encapsulates what P3 is all about for me, which are the little moments and things that are worth cherishing in life. It's very ironic in some ways that P3 is the only Atlus game (or video game in general) with romance paths that had this kind of impact on me, considering it has an incredibly low amount of romance events compared to other entries. It goes to show more than anything that romance angles can still work incredibly well if they actually complement the overarching narrative and themes of a game/movie/book.

I'll have a post sometime next week with a link to the PDF for the digital novel/comic, along with links to some HQ renders and other things that people may enjoy. After that though, I'm not sure what I'll be working on. I definitely won't be working on something of this scale again, but I may have some one-off stuff that I'll post whenever I feel inclined to do so. Besides, I still have a handful of cut renders and finished renders that I never ended up posting.

Anyways I'm not sure how I want to end what ended up being a pretty long ramble, but I'll be back on here next week to share the links for "The Tears I Shed for You". Cheers!

[discountalien-pancake]

A League of Nobleman [sic] is compulsively watchable and also so unsettling, 9/10 ⭐️ would watch again

This kind of turned into an essay, so my non-spoilery thoughts are under the cut.

The Good:

Cinematography was unparalleled. Truly. I praised it before but I have to praise it again. The lighting choices were so good. The way they made the atmosphere early on feel so heavy and almost claustrophobic. Only a handful of scenes were too dark, but even then it didn’t totally detract from the storytelling. The way you couldn’t quite tell right away whether some scenes were dream sequences because of the lens work. The way characters were framed by doorways and windows and lighting and literal theatrical stages. I could go on all day.

And holy shit the acting. The performances are so good and the cinematography really allows every actor to shine. Chen Chou is played by the same actor who played Lan Jingyi in the Untamed and it’s like night and day. Don’t get me wrong, Jingyi was one of my favorite characters in The Untamed, but even though Chen Chou similarly is mostly comic relief in this, his performance feels more restrained, more believable, more rounded. Mental breakdowns in other cdramas often feel so artificial and over the top. In this show, even when the degree of madness starts to strain narrative believability and veer into melodrama, the way it’s portrayed is magnetic. And one of the characters spends 99% of their screentime just sitting and smiling sinisterly but it’s terrifying. Everyone in the show is terrified of them and when you see them and the way they carry themself and the way they speak, you completely understand.

The writing combined with the acting and cinematography makes you willing to suspend your disbelief. That seems like such a low bar, and yet. This show manages to balance the unbelievable magic and sorcery and mysticism with grounded, logical explanations but in such a way that the fantastical still works within this world. Is it magic? Is it trickery? Is it science? It ties in perfectly with the recurring theme of fake vs real.

Another point regarding the writing is that the characters skills don’t exist just to make them more attractive or badass. A lot of period cdramas have a habit of giving the main character some kind of Quirky Hobby at the beginning that is all but forgotten as the story progresses. Talents don’t actually matter to the plot, they’re only there to make the character talented. This show doesn’t do that!

Zhang Ping is a street vendor who makes noodles. The plot doesn’t have anything to do with food—it’s a detective drama with supernatural elements and an overarching conspiracy mystery. The street-vending doesn’t matter almost at all to the plot. But it matters to the storytelling. Hardly an episode goes by without Zhang Ping putting homemade food in front of someone he cares about. Food is how he shows affection. Tired? Sick? Depressed? He will make you food about it. Sometimes it’s played for laughs but there’s more than one scene where it’s a real punch in the feels.

Lan Jue can perfectly copy anyone’s handwriting. Forgery is one of the first ethically questionable things we see him do in the show, and in another show it might just be left at that. But in this one it is completely entangled with his backstory and motivations. It’s so well-integrated that you might not realize it right away when you get to the scene that explains how he came to have that skill. And it once again ties into the theme of real vs fake.

Every single character, no matter how minor, is treated with so much love and care by the storytelling. A lot of dramas treat minor characters as just plot devices. That’s not the case here. Every character has their own realistic motives and narrative continuity even if they’re only in one or two episodes. The show doesn’t just forget characters until they’re plot relevant (*cough*TheUntamed*cough*) and it doesn’t just senselessly slaughter all the characters for the melodrama (*cough*WordOfHonor*cough*). Characters who have a role to play in the overarching plot have frequent appearances and Do Things. They’re not just accessories to the main characters. No one feels like a caricature! Not even the silly bonkers old mentor figure who only shows up for like four episodes!

In terms of production value, the costumes were beautiful. They were not particularly elaborate or heavily embellished, but they felt so believable. The movement. The color symbolism. The literal physical weight of the clothes echoing the weight of their consciences. The fact that the extras were dressed with just as much care. You don’t get Main Character Costuming Syndrome with this show, which so many period cdramas are guilty of. I just love that they let the beautiful fabric and craftsmanship do the work. The textures are subdued but beautiful and there’s nothing that breaks immersion.

None of the props have that plasticky or Fake look. Weapons actually look like they’ll cut something! Gemstones don’t look like gumdrops (*cough*WhoRulesTheWorld*cough*)! And the masks! There are a number of masks in the show that are just so cool. The designs are sleek and simple and so aesthetic, none of that fancy filigree domino mask from Amazon crap that does literally nothing to hide the wearer’s identity. These masks completely obscure the actors’ faces, because they really don’t want you to know who is behind them. You can guess and you might even get it right but you won’t know until the characters reveal the truth.

And then there’s the books. Oh my god they must have spent so much of the props budget on all of the manuscripts and scrolls and books. The BINDINGS on them. Literally exquisite. Much of the plot has to do with the imperial examination system, either directly or tangentially, so they’ve got their noses in books and manuscripts for a significant portion of the show. The delicacy of the writing paper and the way it flutters on the desk when a breeze passes? The heft of the official documents? The way old, decaying manuscripts look brittle? The way Zhang Ping’s most beloved novels clearly look worn but are in such good condition despite how often he has read them?

Messy, grounded, weighty fight scenes. This show is fantasy, but it’s no xianxia or wuxia—if you want wirework you aren’t going to get it. There’s no fancy spinning just for the sake of spinning. Half of the fights end in the characters grappling or getting bashed in the head with a stick or rock. The fights are fights. They’re not there to be eye-candy. Everyone has a realistic level of ability and way of fighting that matches their personalities. The two scholars don’t just randomly have martial arts. Nobody is able to fly over a wall. There are no cheat codes. The fact that the physical limitations are so consistent actually makes the supernatural elements feel more real to me, in the sense that no matter what bonkers shit is happening in-universe, there must be a logical explanation. A lot of fantasy just handwaves things with “it’s magic!” And this show could easily have done that and made it work but it chose not to.

You don’t get those classic cdrama Hidden Villain shots from behind of the BBEG consulting with his cronies. You keep heading about the mastermind from the minor villains and victims, but the scope of knowledge is limited to what the characters themselves are able to learn or remember. Which means that when a character guesses something incorrectly, we’re on the same page and we’re not left banging our heads out of frustration that the answer is obviously something else.

Everything combined means the world and characters all feel so real. I hardly have to put in any effort to suspend my disbelief. So many shows do this smoke and mirrors routine of ‘we’re done with that now, don’t look too hard’ while this one feels like it’s almost daring me to look harder.

The Not Great:

I’ll be blunt, there is some pretty typical cdrama racism. It’s not a lot, but it’s there. The southern kingdom’s armies are depicted in a typical ‘savage’ aesthetic, though you really only see them in one episode and they’re fighting in a dense forest. There’s also the Hidden Ethnic Tribe With Mystic Powers, though this is not quite what it seems and I don’t hate it the way I do in some other shows/stories.

If a lack of female protagonists is a dealbreaker for you, you’re not going to like this. But if you gushed about The Untamed and complain about the lack of female characters in this I’m probably going to give you some bombastic side-eye. It’s a danmei and it’s going to be a long while before they fix the genre’s gender balance.

The editing. Specifically the censorship. A lot of the episodes are barely over 30 minutes long, including the ending credits. Most people speculate that it was in order to No Homo the two male leads, and this definitely did happen, but I think a bit of it was also political. Some of the messaging in the show is a little on the nose regarding corruption and a government’s responsibility towards its citizens. But yeah there’s like 10 minutes of material that got cut out of almost every episode. There’s literally like, 2 hours of missing footage. Which is Not Great! It doesn’t impact the plot, mostly, so you’ll still get a great story and sense-making progression. But it does really dampen the relationship development between the two leads. Even then, they did an amazing job with what screentime they were allowed. And there is a slightly bonkers re-dub in the last episode. I wouldn’t have necessarily realized it was a re-dubbed line if I hadn’t seen mention of it in another user’s post but it still sticks out as Very Weird in a show that until then was very coherently written. It’s very obvious in hindsight though, because they literally cut away in the middle of the character’s line delivery.

This show is based on a book that was not originally a danmei, and I don’t think it adheres to that book very closely (granted, I haven’t read it and won’t be reading it). But for some baffling reason they decided to keep two particular details the could have been cut without making any difference at all to the show itself. It almost feels like they’re just there to act as a No Homo. You’ll know them when you get to them, and trust me they won’t impact the show at all. You’ll just sort of. Be baffled.

The fucking English title.

The Neutral:

The genre of this is hard to pinpoint. I’ve definitely watched things like it before but if you asked me to name one I wouldn’t be able to tell you. It’s kind of horror, but also not. It’s definitely fantasy, but whether low or high is kind of impossible to say. I like that about it, but others might want something more clear-cut. I think that regardless of how it’s classified, the show did a great job of being what it is.

Culturally-specific references. The most important one in particular does get explained in-show, but if you’re not familiar with it, you won’t understand right away why everyone in the scene is so shocked. Name symbolism and poetry and calligraphy are among the other things that might go over your head, but generally speaking the show does a good job of explaining everything that is necessary for plot. Anything unexplained is just additional flavor.

In typical asian drama fashion, this show is a complete story in one season. It’s 29 episodes long and due to cutting is a bit abnormally short. I love the One Season, One Story format but for western audiences this might be a weird adjustment. It means the story has to have a clear ending in mind which keeps the pacing and plotting more coherent than in a lot of western shows that just limp their way to the finish line once funding runs out (*cough*SPN*cough*). Which isn’t to say that all one-season shows end well, but it i find it preferable to have an ending in sight. You’re less concerned about a show being canceled before the plot is resolved (*cough*Lockwood&Co*cough*).

It’s Very Polycule. There is no OTP. There is a slight rivalry and implied jealousy between Zhang Ping and one of Lan Jue’s other boyfriends, but he doesn’t have any such beef with Lan Jue’s other boyfriend and Lan Jue has no objection to Zhang Ping’s close friendships either. But even though I truly, wholeheartedly ship Zhang Ping and Lan Jue, I still enjoy the dynamics they have with other characters. I never felt annoyed at the supporting love interests for “getting in the way” because they…don’t. I can’t say much more without getting spoilery but there is only one vertex of the Love Shape who actually wants to interfere and get between the two leads. I found this to be very enjoyable but if you strongly desire a clear-cut OTP or enjoy dramatic jealousy/misunderstanding arcs, this probably isn’t for you. Yes, there is a midseason breakup, but it’s for other reasons.

Anyway I am now obsessed. I’m gonna wait a bit and rewatch to try and pick up on more of the moments that got cut subtle details.

[secondhandsorrows]

Drafting in 3 Parts

Just popping through to share a tidbit of advice I’d learned from a writer friend some years ago that helps break down the drafting process of storytelling and into perspective. It’s something that’s really stuck with me the more I get into drafting, and has really helped to put the whole, large-scale process into simple terms that makes the drafting stage seem a lot less… you know, frightening. 

It is broken down into three parts:

1. Make it work.

2. Make it right.

3. Make it good. 

Sounds easy, right? Well, I thought so, too. In fact, that’s the whole drafting, editing, and revising process right there, plain as day. In this post, I will walk you through how I understand these steps and utilize them in my own writing, so that you too could incorporate them into your own processes in a way that works for you. 

Let’s begin!

Step One: Make it Work

So what’s actually in this so-called “work” stage?

It’s exactly as the word suggests, but in two ways simultaneously. You do the work by putting the words on paper, while also making sure the story works. This doesn’t mean just grammar or spelling… This means alloting some care and effort to keeping the pace and avoiding any large-scale plot holes that would otherwise derail your entire story, which, of course, makes it harder to keep going. 

It’s not going to be good at first — we’ll get to that in step three. And it sure won’t be pretty. But this is the drafting stage… all you gotta do is show up and do the work. 

Step Two: Make it Right

This is where things get a little tricky. It’s easy to confuse this step with the previous step, as both blend the lines a little of having the story make sense. 

So what does this all entail? 

Well, a few things. Make it right can be attributed to the editing process, be it line-by-line grammar edits, syntax, word choice, and structure. Maybe storywise there’s a few descriptions that need tweaking, some inconsistencies needing a quick fix… what ever you can catch as you read through. Is the POV the right choice for the kind of story you’re telling? Does this character have a clear arc that gets fully wrapped up at the end? Speaking of which, are all those little subplots — or any other loose ends — tied up? Would it help to add a flashback, or get rid of that scene that goes nowhere altogether? Any places where you can show, not tell, or vice versa?

In short, this all boils down to make the story you’re trying to tell right: not only to you, but to the reader as well. 

Step Three: Make it Good

What consitutes a “good” story? Engaging characters, an immersive setting, solid themes and arcs, a gripping plot… we can go on forever. It’s a lot to keep track of, and it’s easy to lose sight of one thing in the grand scheme of writing. But the story has to be good. 

There, I said it! 

Come on, we were all thinking it. It’s clear that not everyone is going to like your story, and that’s a fact. As a writer, you not only want to be sure that the story is good in your eyes, but to that of the readers’, as well, for they are the ones you are going to keep engaged and waiting for your next release. You’re going to open their minds to new things, new ideas… that’s how you build a platform as a writer. What’s going to hold them back is poor pacing, underdeveloped characters, awkward dialogue, predictability, etc. Most if not all of these are what can make or break the story you’re trying to tell. 

But, in the end, this is your story: your own work of art. Have fun with it! Passion works in tandem with creativity: it’s there in your style and prose, your deep explorations of underlying themes and overarching ideas that you love to write about, the characters you’ve come up with that stick with you. There’s a reason why you wanted to tell this story— keep that in mind as you write. No one can tell or write your story quite like you can.