#its not really relevant to the story but i still wanted to put the information out there

[mitchell-nihil]

Cassandra character sheet!!!

These keep getting longer and longer...

Reblogs appreciated :D

close ups! kinda! because you can hardly read anything

[vidavalor]

I don't think that The Kiss is the big reveal in The Final 15.

Neither is Aziraphale getting into the lift/elevator.

The very last thing we hear-- Tori Amos' cover of "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square"-- being the song Crowley hears in The Bentley?

That's actually the biggest thing in 2.06.

It's arguably one of the biggest reveals in the series to date. How so?

Because this moment canonizes that "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square" is not only a song that the show chose to play over the end of S1 for only the audience to hear... it is, indisputably, Crowley and Aziraphale's song.

This moment says that they have a song.

This moment says that their song contains lyrics about being "so in love" that "the whole world seemed upside down."

This moment says, without any doubt, that they're already a couple.

It exists in a way that completely undercuts any idea that the kiss that occurred a few moments prior was their first one-- even as the story is also designed in such a way as to lead some viewers to think that it might be.

This moment takes the heavily-evidenced-but-still-kinda-theoretical and makes it clear to the audience that they were correct about what they put together about Crowley and Aziraphale's relationship to this song in S1.

It says that when we heard the pianist in The Ritz scene in 1.06 playing an instrumental version of this song? As we suspected, it wasn't a coincidence. As of 2.06, we can go ahead and see that bit of S1 for what it was-- that she was playing it because Crowley and Aziraphale had requested it, wanting to hear their song.

It says that those of us whose ideas that this song might have meaning to Crowley and Aziraphale based off of Aziraphale's "dine at The Ritz" in 1967 and the song containing the lyrics about angels dining at The Ritz, along with how much of a relationship conversation 1967 is, were correct.

It says that Crowley and Aziraphale have a song. A romantic one, with unambiguous lyrics about being in love. A song they already had prior to S1 because they requested it at The Ritz in the S1 finale. A song they already had prior to 1967, when Aziraphale was using its lyrics as shorthand between them.

In S1, Tori Amos' cover of their song was used non-diegetically over the end of the season-- meaning, only we could hear it. The characters could not. Clues existed that the song had meaning to them but we didn't have overt proof of that in S1.

We do now.

We do as of the end of S2, where the same cover of the song was used diegetically. It's now one that Crowley can hear as well as we can, as The Bentley plays it for him. Likely because Aziraphale asked it to. It now exists within the characters' story-- not just as music playing for our benefit over their story.

I think that this ten or so seconds of the song playing when Crowley gets into The Bentley are given to us so we can reframe our ideas of what is going on-- especially what was happening in The Kiss scene-- around this knowledge.

Like most of Good Omens' important things, it's a narrative magic trick. It's information relevant to what came before it that is only received later. Its existence then changes the context of the prior scenes and recontextualizes our understanding of what we were watching.

Right now, the audience is looking mostly here:

And, if they're not, they're looking over here:

And there's certainly much to look at in those both of those moments, for sure, but... the actual last moment of S2 is the big thing. It's the one that says that this isn't a story about a couple that has never gotten together; this is a story about a forbidden, secret romance.

They're a couple who has spent their existence pretending they're not one-- not to one another but to the world. The last few years? Not really, as Crowley said... but, also, not really openly, either. There's a South Downs Cottage with their name on it in The Finale, though...

[zahri-melitor]

Blade Runner, The Matrix and Robins: if you want to run a conspiracy in your story you need to put in the work

One of the central conspiracies people like to speculate about in Blade Runner is the theory of whether Deckard is a Replicant. It's a high-context theory woven into the plot and cinematography of the film. (I'm aware various people, decades on, have 'confirmed' it's true; I don't think that's particularly relevant to this).

The reason why the theory is so compelling for audiences to discuss is that the film in itself poses the question 'what is a human' and sends the main character, Rick Deckard, on a hunt for those clues and mistakes that give away the Replicants he is looking for. Things like Deckard's evasion over whether he's ever taken a Voight-Kampff test, and moments that suggest implanted and shared memories make for a fun second level mystery for viewers to think about and solve. The unicorn dream sequence, with both the dream and silver foil unicorn, provides another pointer for audiences to consider the idea. Even the Replicant Red Eye moments are subtle clues that get called out via the broader focus on eyes.

What also helps the debate and hunt for this potential symbolism is Ridley Scott's reputation as a director who heavily goes for visual cinematography hints and altering stories by changing them in Director's Cuts.

Similarly, The Matrix has a conspiracy that the real world is another level within the Matrix. This one is easy to understand how it developed. The Matrix, as a film, invests a substantial amount of its runtime teaching its audience the clues used to distinguish the Matrix from the real world. We get explicit scenes like The Girl in the Red Dress and explanations of how déjà vu works to demonstrate alterations in the Matrix. We see how characters can alter the Matrix to their own ends, leading into moments in the trilogy where Neo appears to use those skills in the real world being able to be read as 'are we still in the Matrix?'

The thing is: neither movie fully commits to these readings. They're possibilities that audiences can read in, that feel like they've been woven into the plot for people to consider. The audience is drawn to ask the question via the way the hints/clues are found in things the audience is already directed to consider. At their worst, they're artefacts of the audience taking the themes of those films and extrapolating too far.

My feeling about Robins as a comic is that Tim Seeley and Baldemar Rivas want to suggest one of these conspiracy theory stories, but did not have the skill to convincingly pull it off.

One of my difficulties the entire way through the comic was that the story did not know when it was set, and indeed repeatedly suggested via both dialogue and art that it was set in very different periods.

Robins takes place at least partially in a generated overlay from information based on Bruce's notes on the five Robins and also on various criminals. It's trying to take the log entries from Gotham Knights #1-11 and extrapolate that concept out to 'what if having this went wrong for Bruce'. (And I shouldn't really be surprised that Seeley chose to do this: Seeley is very big fan of Devin Grayson's work in the Bat books and frequently chooses to reference it)

The markers used for this simulation are firstly the level reward bonuses, and secondly the singing robin (that apparently uses the wrong call).

In that light, you could argue that problems like characters wearing the wrong costumes, from non-matching eras, and holding views that don't really accord with those characters is supposed to be a series of hints about the resolution of the title, rather than a set of weird screw ups that involve suggestions that the team didn't both checking details.

My issue is that it doesn't feel earned. If Seeley and Rivas really did want to hint and direct their audiences into reading that the presentation, comments and impressions of each of the Robins in their story were wholly based on Bruce's conception of them, then I think those discontinuities should match each other more clearly within each character.

Take Tim for a moment: he wears his original 1990s Robin costume; is the opponent of Damian's 'gauntlet' (a period in which he was wearing his all red Robin costume); has his overlay stolen for a rant about how Tim things the Obeah Man and other villains should die in a way that explicitly references Red Robin #26 (his post-Crisis Red Robin period); and gets specifically removed from the story and trapped in a way that he has to direct others to find him and try to escape himself (suggestions of both the Ünternet and more specifically Mr Oz during Tynion's Tec run). These do not match. If we're supposed to think Bruce is hung up on a specific conception of Tim, and a particularly backward-looking one (which you would assume, given he's put in his earliest Robin costume), why don't the other elements match? Why not put him in his all-red Robin costume to hint that he's Damian's gauntlet? Why not put him in one of his Red Robin costumes if you're going to keep referring to him as Red Robin, and that Bruce's worries about him relate to specific events in that period? And why, if the early Robin costume is supposed to reference Tim's own 'gauntlet', then is he the only character wearing his original costume from the storyline?

And what does not help with this is that Seeley has several obvious screw ups. The most prominent one is he conflates Rite of Passage with Batman: Identity Crisis. The Obeah Man was the villain of Rite of Passage for Bruce, where he was hunting him down to save the Drakes. Tim's personal combatant during that story was tracking down Lonnie as Moneyspider. The storyline where Tim showed the skills and personal judgement that made Bruce decide that he was ready to be Robin was in Identity Crisis, which was a story rescuing Bruce and Vicky Vale from Scarecrow. While the stories are sequels to each other, they're not a contiguous whole: they take part in different titles, with a gap in time between them. Similarly, Seeley places Felipe Garzonas' death as Jason's first case as Robin, rather than his last case.

The whole concept of the 'gauntlets' is the underlying thread holding the story together, the aspect on which Bruce's analysis of each of the Robins and whether he wants to work with them is based, leading to the computer files, leading to the entire plot.

If you mess up like that, audiences are less likely to grant that you're trying to build hints in that something is wrong by having things be noticeably mismatching, because you've also screwed up the ground on which you're trying to construct the story. You cannot fairly claim that the incongruities you put in to hint at your plot are something that should be analysed as clues when you've already primed your audience to think that you're just a hack making blatant mistakes.

And this problem extends to all of the characters, not just Tim. Tim's just the easiest for me to pick apart because I know the references made so well (and Tim Seeley clearly doesn't actually care as much about Tim as several other characters, making the oopsies more obvious).

The issue with this story isn't simple single-panel moments like "And I need to hear it from you, Tim, because Jason and Damian lie through their teeth" or Tim saying he "demanded" to be Robin where people can dunk on it by showing another panel like the Teen Titans 2003 "I lie to Batman" panel or ALPOD. It's in the fact it tries to be clever but doesn't earn audiences' trust to do that analysis. And it doesn't earn that trust because you can't pick apart what's a deliberate incongruity as a hint from what's a general mistake from the team, and if you do pick at elements that look like outright mistakes, the whole thing comes tumbling down.

Blade Runner and The Matrix train their audiences from the very start of the story to look for these incongruities and hints and showcase what problems to look for openly in the plot, leading to people to heavily analyse background details for further suggestions of these hints. They earn the buy in that leads to the elaborate fan theories.

Tim Seeley forfeited his audience's buy in to the story he apparently was trying to tell by not being exact enough about the details in a story where he wanted them to pick at those details, and not showing early enough that the audience is expected to be picking at those details. And that's just poor writing and biting off more than you can chew.

[blkkizzat]

Hi you’re such an amazing writer and great smut writer!! I was wondering if u had any tips on writing smut cus I wanna start writing it too! Do u have tips on dialogue/action/pacing and being descriptive 😭 it’s harder than it looks!! Ps your suguru bumpy car ride is one of my fave fics!! And I’m excited for sadako!geto 😘😘

hey nonny, pookie tysm ur too sweet! im so glad you enjoy my perversions enough to ask me for advice kcjhdscjkhsdb 😩🩷🙏🏽✨

also sure idk if these will be helpful but these are things that help me:

smut:

i think the cardinal rule of smut writing is if it doesn't make you horny, re-write it until it does. lol.

i am a very visual person so i like to close my eyes and imagine the scene before i write it. not just going through the motions either. if this is me, reader, what am i thinking, feeling (both physically and emotionally).

5 senses (touch, taste, smell, sound, sight) should be covered. not every action needs all 5 but if you are describing something you should at least be hitting two of these. " tears falling, you cry out as he enters you slowly" is fine but "blinking away tears you hiss from the overwhelming stretch of his girth entering you, even slowly, proves to be too much" is better.

sometimes i need a boost and if you partake then a few puffs from a weed pen or a glass of wine (im partial to bubbly) will put you in the MOOD lmfao.

*note i dont think you need to have experienced something to write about it, sex included for any virgins however in lieu of that, with anything you don't have experience in, you need to do research to make it believable.

dialogue:

use dialogue to tell us/reiterate who the character is. you can tell us the character is nervous but then its highlighted by the stuttering, rambling, etc of their spoken words.

break up long dialogue with descriptions. this is also a pacing tip. also can insert memories, i will have readers have a whole dialogue and in the middle their will be a relevant memory to give context and insight to the character and their motivations.

using subtext to explain character feelings, you dont have to be so explicit with dialogue all the time. instead of a character saying "im so fucking mad at you right now," use "alright" your voice is clipped, flipping your hair over your shoulder you go back to your task at hand, not even sparing them another glance.

i rarely use explicit dialogue tags now like "said, spoke, cried, yell" i will still use them but ill weave into the description that follows. ex instead of "please stay!" you cried—i would write—"please stay!" your lip quivers as tears gathered on your lashes.

action:

the last subtext tip also helps with action too, alot of times its what we see that really enriches the dialogue so "show" dont "tell".

this is also a pacing tip but during high action/intense scenes using shorter sentences helps express the urgency. although it all depends as long sentences/paragraphs too can help build tension, slowing down descriptions/actions during the climax (lol non sexual) of a scene builds anxiety/thrill.

explaining emotional reactions of heart racing, sweaty palms, etc, is just as important as physical reactions (even tho these are physiological actions they still are emotion driven).

pacing:

besides the pacing tips above in the other sections i think the biggest pacing issue i think people have is adding in details, actions, etc that don't inform your story. everything action/thought you take time to elaborate on that your character does, should be relevant to their motivations, story or characterizations. if it doesnt apply to one of those then cut it out. (note: sometimes it does apply and needs to be cut out and moved another section if its making a scene go on to long)

edit your stories, i know some people post and go and thats fine. everyone has different goals. some just want to get out thoughts and go. however, pacing can be hard to effectively capture on the first go so you will need to reread at least once to ensure your fic is properly paced.

editing leads into eliminating redundancy. often i will write something where i expressed an emotion/feeling then did it again a paragraph or two down the line just in a different way. unless that feeling is evolving, its redundant. redundant doesnt mean the feeling isnt applicable in both places, it means ive already established this feeling/state of mind in my story and it isnt needed both places. this can be one of the hardest things to identify or even fix. however i think my fics are 100x better when i do.

descriptive:

i think people fall into one of these buckets, 1) having the inclination of being overly wordy descriptive or 2)not being descriptive enough. i am the former, so my issuing is editing is pulling back and giving emphasis on somethings but not others. if you arent descriptive enough you will have to decide where in your story its important to give emphasis.

use metaphors that make sense to the person speaking or narration style. you wouldnt use overly flowery language for example if you were writing how sukuna is feeling about something lol.

hope these tips were helpful!

[homestuckreplay]

Explore Remix (This Time It's Wobbly)

(page 827-835)

This is a neat segment, opening and closing with pesterlogs we’ve seen before, filling in some gaps and bookending three really important things: Dave’s monologue, Jade’s FreshJamz, and the Midnight Crew. One small thing stands out - ‘He is undoubtedly gallivanting around his house in a state of barely restrained birthday mirth.’ (p.827) is a strange perspective on John, and sounds more like Jade herself. She doesn’t recognize him in the Midnight Crew comic (p.831) either, so she doesn’t know what he looks like and also doesn’t really see below the surface of his personality.

Dave’s monologue. Dave messages Jade at 23:14 Jade time which is 05:14 Dave time which means this guy does NOT have a good sleep schedule. In his living situation it’s not surprising if he struggles to sleep due to always having one eye open for the next trap. Dave clearly leans on his friends a lot, and they have subtly different roles – John is who he messages about an unexpected juice windfall, Rose is the person he pesters ‘like clockwork’ (p.415) because he can be honest with her about his feelings, and when he can’t sleep, he wants to talk to Jade.

Jade also helps Dave with the self-exploration he’s otherwise not comfortable with. He’s clearly joking when he’s creating his kangaroo rat fursona Akwete Purrmusk, but he’s still creating them. Jade has a FurAffinity account (p.834) and she’s gotta get Dave on there too so that he can start making ‘ironic’ furry art so many layers deep that it becomes sincere.

Dave – and more importantly Andrew Hussie – should not be using a homophobic slur on page 829, as it’s not in the context of reclaiming it. However. As a person who does sometimes reclaim that word I found it a pretty funny variant of the act 2 title [cw slurs if you click that].

FreshJamz! Jade’s music player confirms that all four kids compose music. John and Rose wrote their own themes, ‘Showtime’ and ‘Aggrieve’, both of which have been remixed by Dave. Jade composed ‘Explore’, which was featured in ‘WV: Ascend’ (I will stop talking about Jade-WV connections when they stop showing up) and now Dave has remixed this too. Dave and Jade co-wrote the top tier ‘Crystalanthemums’, and it is very cute to imagine the two of them trading this file back and forth and building on each other’s work. Jade is not a gamer, and John, Rose and Dave have spent a lot of time playing games together, so this media player establishes a shared interest between Jade and the rest of the group.

Midnight Crew. I don’t think page 831 breaks the fourth wall, more like it puts two or three additional fourth walls up, and man do they destroy the image quality. This image doesn’t correspond to an exact page or quote in ‘real’ Homestuck, but it’s based on the events of p.163-165. I think it’s VERY relevant that John is referred to as ‘GT’ here, which are the Pesterchum initials he would have had if he followed his friends’ pattern (TT, TG and GG). And this is happening five pages after we’ve seen a bunch of new chumhandles.

We currently know of [GT/EB], TT, TG, GG, CG, AG, TA, TC and CA. Using only G, T, C and A, we are missing seven possible combinations: GC, GA, AT, AC, AA, CC and CT (which is my initials so I could get assigned a chumhandle!) I think four of these could correspond to the Midnight Crew, but that still leaves eight unaccounted for characters. It may be a coincidence, but these four letters correspond to the base pairs of DNA, and ‘biologist’ and ‘geneticist’ both show up in chumhandles. I’m uncertain of what this means right now, but there is a laboratory near Rose’s house decorated with the Skaian spirograph. If that’s where the mausoleum tunnel leads, that might give us more information.

I think the Midnight Crew is objectively a worse comic than Homestuck. It’s on Act 1031 (10/31, Halloween) but the story is still establishing its titular characters and having them hit each other with sticks. No wonder Dave’s fallen off this so fast. But I also think this is going to become important, and these stories are deeply entangled – Midnight Crew is a story within Homestuck but Homestuck is a story within the Midnight Crew and it’s not impossible that the Homestuck we are reading could also be zoomed out to find another Midnight Crew. More concretely, the player submitting commands could be one of these four characters, similarly shiny and carapaced to WV, the commander we’ve seen.

The beta kids are four thirteen year olds, and the Midnight Crew are four suits of thirteen playing cards – so they’re like a counterpart group, the after dark, morally questionable version. Time is complex in this story but it would be fun if any time it hits midnight for a Homestuck character, the story switches over to the Midnight Crew before the sun comes up, as is suggested by the sun/moon clock at the start of page 833 – something like the Flatland MSPA[LINK].

MSPA, where Midnight Crew and Homestuck are hosted, is also the only piece of media all four kids are into – John, Dave and Jade have all looked at Midnight Crew (p.112, 327, 833), while John and Rose both have Problem Sleuth art (p.11, 224). The Problem Sleuth characters also show up briefly in Act 1031, indicating that it was the previous MSPA in this universe as well as ours. So my new theory is that John, Rose, Dave and Jade all met on the MSPA forums prior to or at the start of Problem Sleuth, giving them over a year before the story starts to form close friendships to the extent of exchanging addresses and birthday gifts. Given that the forums are where commands are submitted in our world, it would be a cool addition to the many meta layers.

> Jade: Navigate to MSPA Forums and submit a command for the Midnight Crew.

[lxikobsd]

absolutely loving your kunidazai analysis chart and also your kunikida analyses in general!!! hoping to read more

it still saddens me that skk fans will stop at no one, not even the author who gave them everything, to get what they want..

AAAAAAAAA THANK YOU!!!!

I'm glad you like it, when I start getting into analyses I feel like I become less coherent and just feel like this 90% of the time

I do not plan on stopping being unhinged about Kunikida or Kunidazai any time soon. Analyzing BSD is fun between analyzing the series as it is, and also fun looking at the IRL author's life and work and trying to find potential information that could be relevant to the characters.

Also yea about SKK fans they are ummm... I feel like this might come across as being over dramatic but I genuinely haven't been in a fandom this bad at shipping and mischaracterizations since I was into Hetalia. Not all SKK shippers obviously, but there is an extremely loud portion of SKK shippers who are some of the most immature and toxic shippers I've seen in a long time.

I do not believe SKK shippers who are like this are actually fans of BSD, I think they're just fans of the ship. They don't care about BSD outside of SKK shipping and maybe other popular ships like SSKK or RanPoe.

People intentionally misinterpreting Asagiri-sensei's words to boost their flavorless ship kinda irks me. No he isn't being possessed by a SKK shipper every time he tries to write KNDZ, no he isn't prioritizing SKK because its "the better ship", and no its not like he doesn't know what series he writes and all the SKK bait he's put in it. He quite literally said something along the lines of "I want to write the Kunikida-Dazai duo more, I think I could write them endlessly, and I hope to make Kunikida more active in the story again. Kunikida and his duo with Dazai got pushed to the side because my producer wants me to write Chuuya."

IDK if this is gonna get me crucified but I am starting to believe that SKK is kinda ruining BSD. Not because of the duo itself but rather the push to prioritize them bc of money, it takes away from developing other characters. Maybe I'm just an angry biased Kunikida fan, but getting confirmation that SKK and Chuuya are the reason why he's been shafted stings.

And then shippers threatening Asagiri-sensei over him saying the obvious, that SKK isn't gonna be canon? We need to actively put down behavior like this. Its not only gonna ruin the quality of the manga, but it can cause it to be cancelled entirely if he feels like his life is threatened if he continues.

IDK at the end of the day I hope whatever plans Asagiri has for Kunikida end up being really cool and I hope its not ruined because of immature and insatiable SKK fans.

[popcultureoverdosed]

Blood Blockade Battlefront is New York at its Finest

NYC often gets a bad rep. Most people either see it as a smelly hellhole filled with crime and crappy attitudes or a breeding ground for hipsters and vapid socialites. People only see what they want to see without looking at the whole picture. This makes Leonardo's all-seeing eyes of God all the more important. Instead of lumping NYC into a box, he sees it for what it truly is; a chaotic blend of volatile elements.

The storytelling of Blood Blockade Battlefront is pure chaos from beginning to end. Leonardo is thrown into a world of highly deadly scenarios with very little breathing room in between. Each episode focuses on a moment in the character's life. One episode will focus on Leonardo befriending an amnesiac monster who loves burgers and another will feature a brigade of Charlie's angels-esque spies who happen to be invisible werewolves. It's the type of show that always keeps you on your toes because you never know what to expect. Some have criticized the show for its lack of an overarching plot and treat it as if that's inherently bad. Blood Bloockade isn't the type of show that needs a complex narrative. Its biggest appeal is simply seeing its eccentric cast interact with each other. Its episodic nature made watching it a breeze since viewers are never overwhelmed with too much information.

Worldbuilding is done at a casual pace where background lore is only given when it's relevant to what's currently happening. Since most characters are already well familiar with the lore, they usually cut the small talk and get straight to the action. In this way, the narrative mirrors New Yorker's aversion to beating around the bush. Show don't tell at its finest. We need more shows that just get to the point. Rie Matsumoto, director of season 1, feels a bit different about the story than I do, though. She inserted two original characters, Black and White, a pair of siblings who share a character arc that Intersects with Leo's. Under normal circumstances, this would have been an incredibly bad move. Filler in anime tends to feel pointless and just detracts from the story. Luckily, Rie Matsumoto made sure that the filler didn't feel like filler. It was fun watching the mystery surrounding the sibling duo unravel with each episode. It eventually culminated in a finale that was nearly an hour long. Matsumoto took a huge risk with her bold decision, but she definitely stuck the landing.

The production values of the show are also top-notch. Pretty much every episode is a reminder of why studio Bones is such a beloved company. They seriously put their key animators to work in both seasons. The fluidity of the fight scenes always left me impressed. Character designer Toshihiro Kawamoto did a great job at bringing Yasuhiro Nightow's art to animation with his iconic style. I love how even when Toshihiro is adapting someone else's character design, his style still shines through.

Special mention needs to be given to composer Taisei Iwasaki because he really killed it with this soundtrack. It's an eclectic blend of jazz, RNB, hip-hop, rock and more genres that perfectly captures the vibe of a busy New York City. Each track is a different flavor of the city and made me feel at home. The soundtrack truly embodies the chaotic feel of the show and captures its occasional serene moments perfectly.The true musical highlights are the openings and endings. BBB is one of those shows where you feel compelled to watch the full episode because the opening and ending are too good to skip. They're all incredibly upbeat songs that make you wanna stop everything and dance. Sugar song and bitter step is one of my favorite anime endings because of it's colorful animation and cheerful aura.

Blood Blockade Battlefront is the type of show that can really resonate with native New Yorkers. We see all the highs and lows of the city almost every day and you have to be just a little bit crazy to appreciate NYC for what it is.

[literary-illuminati]

Book Review 46 – The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez

Okay the month of August was essentially a write-off for...a lot of things, but non-web serial reading among them! Now trying to claw my way out of the pit and back on the horse. So, some high concept genre fic full of queer people and war crimes, just what the doctor ordered.

The Spear Cuts Through Water is the fantasy epic and love story of a pair of warriors – one a generally despised one-armed checkpoint guard, the other a positively reviled princeling – as they escort the moon goddess in her attempt to escape the prison her sons had trapped her within as they tyranize and empire that spans a continent. As told through a dream/vision of the Inverted Theater, where shades throughout time are called while they sleep to witness a performance put on by the favoured child of moon and sea. Intercut with the same tale as told through out POV’s grandmother, along with vignettes of his life as the son of a failing cloth merchant centuries in the future as the world goes through its equivalent of WW1. All this metaness and layering is either the book’s strongest point or it will make your eyes roll back into your skull so, you know, make an informed choice here.

Being entirely honest I don’t remember exactly how this book ended up on my radar – I believe I was first pointed towards after I expressed some dissatisfaction with this year’s Hugo nominees as something that would have been a more deserving inclusion on the short list. Certainly I’d never heard Jimenez’s name before picking it up. Entirely happy I did, anyway – whoever first rec’d it yes, this does deserve a Hugo nod way more than some of the other nominations.

The plot itself is quite well done, but absent any of the stylistic flourish wouldn’t really have been anything that memorable. The layered framing devices – and the way that they intrude on the narrative in a hundred different ways, switching from depicting the action to saying how it was staged and presented or how the narrator heard the tale told – are really just fantastically well done, enough that even when it got all meta and self-referential I was still enjoying it more than enough to just go with it.

Not that our heroes aren’t fun in their own right. They’re both at times profoundly unlikable, and other times utter idiots, and always totally and completely incapable of intelligibly expressing their feelings. It’s great, love them. Even if on occasion I also wanted to throw rocks at them. The main supporting cast – or at least Defect the tortoise and the moon/empress herself – are even better, really.

Though as far as characterization goes its the extras where the book really shines. It has a trick I really, really like where little snippets of the internal monologue or history of some fellow traveller on the road or sentry being gutter from behind are interspersed into the action in italics like this. Diegetically this would be the chorus in the theatrical performance, but regardless it does a shocking amount to make the world feel like it’s full of actual people and not just mannequins forming a backdrop for the characters who matter.

The book fits into the honourable tradition of modern SFF with cool-eyed and unsentimental portrayals of feudalism/imperialism, war crimes and general oppression (including in this case very plot-relevant and character-informing ableism) but only a vague and attenuated sort of 21st century homophobia, if that. Like all modern queer genrefic it’s also at least kind of in conversation with the looming shadow of Burying Your Gays, with a bait and switch tragic heroic sacrifice that seemed very conscious and pointed.

The framing devices lend themselves well to the book being written in a kind of mythic register, which I very much enjoyed. The epilogue felt like an intrusion of history on mythology, and I do mean that as a compliment, full of messiness and ambiguity and short on heroes and golden ages or utopias. Overall very much enjoyed the book, perfect reading for being stuck in a waiting room for a passport renewal.

[beautifulterriblequeen]

Layers and white lies: a Puzzle House takeaway

I'm not going to delve into too much detail on this amazing book here, but I will touch on a few themey, plotty things I saw and roll around in some angst for a while, so, behold, a cut for big ol' Puzzle House spoilers:

One of the clues that helps Claudia delve deeper into the Puzzle House - and the plot - is the little clue on the bottom of the lantern she picks up: some things are hidden in plain sight. And the deep angst and all of Kpp'Ar's intentions are some of them!

This story, like all of TDP's stories, is written to be understood at a certain level by children. And it is. But for us adults, if we slow down and study what's in front of us - another Claudia clue, which she advises Soren with - we can see more. (this works in the show too of course)

In this case, I'm seeing Kpp'Ar's entire plan - and why he abandoned it - and how it worked anyway.

There's the real angst. He set something in motion, and it became too big to stop on his own. And that's very much relevant to TDP's concept of the cycle too!

Okay, let's break down the situation Kpp'Ar found himself in:

Soren was very ill

Kpp'Ar was engaged with Viren in helping find a way to save him

Kpp'Ar knew about the power in unicorn horns

he captured a giant who was guarding a map scroll that could lead him to one

but then he realized he was not worthy to read its information, and instead of stopping to look at that, he pushed forward in a new direction

This is when things get a little dark.

When the fun cute carousel (that might be made of actual creatures turned to stone? did they all die for this performance?) carries Soren and Claudia deep into the tower, Soren sees the horrible traps and assumes he and his sister are off the planned track for their surprise. At one point he claims that what they're dealing with is literally too big for them.

He's right... but also, he isn't.

Follow the unicorns. That's what Kpp'Ar wanted Claudia to do.

They start on the lantern, and they're present on the balustrade right next to them. She was always supposed to pick up the lantern, remember the snap magic trick Kpp'Ar taught her, and head right up those stairs.

She was supposed to fail at the slide. She was supposed to find a different way to keep chasing what she wanted. Just like Kpp'Ar. When he closes a trap door, he opens a window? Sure.

Follow those unicorns, Claudia! Cutesy and bright, they led her all the way to the giant's prison. She was always supposed to push past the boundaries of "child-friendly" fun and go in there and read the map, so that her father and his mentor could go kill a unicorn for its horn, and then save Soren's life with it.

That was always the plan.

And it was always too big to just ask a child to do. So Kpp'Ar made it into puzzles for her. That way Viren could still save Soren's life, and Claudia would have fun and never be burdened with knowing what she was really doing.

She learned that trick, too, btw. Good job, Clauds.

The hidden angst of what happened to Kpp'Ar is a little harder to see, but it's there too:

Kpp'Ar realized he was dragging Claudia into the same kinds of machinations he'd dragged Viren into

he'd known Viren for years and something in that arc gave Kpp'Ar pause

he could see what Viren couldn't (until S5) - that he was hurting Claudia's future despite her trust in him

something in Kpp'Ar broke, and he had a tantrum (like Viren in S2) and a big change of heart (took Viren 3 more seasons)

he gave Claudia those snake bracelets just before he vanished because he wanted her to free the giant

she'd still have to follow the unicorns to find him - she still might find and use the map - but he couldn't control that now, all he could hope for was that she would show compassion for the giant too

And she did, because she was pure of heart. Kpp'Ar helped set things right, with one of his final acts. But he'd already put into place a whole big plan to kill a unicorn, and there was no way to separate rescuing Kruha from aiding that plan in progressing forward. He had to take his hands off the wheel and trust someone else to do the right thing. He had to give up his need to control everything, and start to trust just a little.

Themey, innit.

What's interesting is that Viren gives no clear indication to anyone - Atticus, Claudia, us - that he's aware of this big puzzle Kpp'Ar made, or its goal. All he admits is that things are complicated and the Puzzle House is dangerous. Very on brand with those layers and white lies.

Couple possibilities:

Kpp'Ar knew Viren would not allow him to endanger Claudia, so he didn't tell him about it, and Viren didn't understand the full scope until after Claudia had seen the map - possibly several years later, shortly before Viren proposed his vengeance plan to Harrow

OR, Viren knew all along about the plan to use Claudia (and was willing to risk her life for Soren's), but it didn't matter anymore, because he'd already found another way to heal Soren - possibly with (some of?) Kpp'Ar's life force - so he played dumb with the map paper and only told Claudia to keep it safe for later

Since he couldn't read the map... I lean toward him knowing all along. Coining Kpp'Ar for having a change of heart - something anyone should be allowed to do at any time - certainly added to the darkening of Viren's heart, but surely he and Kpp'Ar tested the map and found that neither of them could read it before going to these lengths.

With the comments Kpp'Ar makes to Viren in his fever dream - which now might be partially... real? - it's very possible that Viren pushed for the whole thing, trying to save his son's life. Offered Claudia up, got Kpp'Ar to give her a book so she could start studying up on magic, and then lost his cool entirely when his mentor basically said Soren should die, and coined him for it.

And Claudia never knew a bit of that. Probably still doesn't!

I wonder if she'll interact with any Kpp'Ar details in future seasons!

Alright, that's my thoughts!

Puzzle House is possibly the theme-iest graphic novel we've gotten so far. It's themes all the way down. They reach down through the PH plot, into Claudia's onscreen tactics, and they reach up to the meta level with the way that The Dragon Prince approaches the entirety of the show itself.

There is something scary in the dark. But that doesn't mean we should run. It's always better to go slow, to have compassion, and to follow your heart.

Because sometimes the solutions are hiding in plain sight.

Thanks for reading

[hifuminto]

Have you see new Hypnosis Mic A.R.B? Part 1

Man i didn't play this game but i suddenly invest with these game after seeing their recent event called "Detective Six Part 1".

Sorry for my Bad English and writing, I am not native speaker and I don't really understand how to write bcos my dyslexia but I really want to make this long post bcos I really exicted! Here we go!

So this event is now about Badass Temple and Fling Posse Cosplaying as some detective to solve mystery. If i am not mistaken this is not first time this game do this. I remember previously they make similar event with Sherlock Holmes's theme with Samatoki, Gentaro and Rei as characters.

I don't really understand Japanese, bcos i can only read Katakana for now. But i like detective stuff, so i will have fun to write my guest here. In the moment i saw the character artwork I recognize some of them. If i am mistaken, please inform me.

Let us starting first with Kuko's base on his card title. 【波羅夷家の一族】 is pretty similar to a Japanese novel name 【犬神家の一族】 or in English title The Inugami's curse.

Kousuke Kindaichi is detective created by Seishi Tokomizo. He is describe as a shabby looking young man with a short height. But have a strong observation skills and logic thinking. His character is feature on 76 novels and appearing in a numerous FIlm, Television and Stage Adaptation.

The Inugami's curse was novel written by Seishi Yokomizo, a mystery novelist as part of Kousuke Kindaichi's series. So of course I think he's cosplaying as Kousuke Kindaichi. Minus the robe but he wears the iconic hat base on the statue. I also doing google a bit and later find out the hat is also part of the costume for 2006 film adaptation. This is a neat reference!

Next is Jyushi. Jyushi card is 【アルゴξ急行の殺人】 that literaly translated in google translate as "Murder in Argo Cart". This is clearly referring to Agatha Christie's novel "Murder in Oriented Express" and who is the star of the novel? Of course its Hercule Poirot!

Hercule Poirot is one of Agatha Christie most famous character. Not much know about his history beside he came from a large family with little wealth in small town on Europe. But he's a former police officer turn into private detective who solve many mystery in his later career. Poirot operates as a fairly conventional, clue-based and logical detective. But sometimes he willingly to hide some important detail of his plan if necessaries. Another fun fact is, Poirot sometimes refer to himself in third person.

Actually before i notice his card name, I already knew he cosplaying either as Hercule Poirot bcos his outfit is pretty familiar to this detective. But i have second thought and think maybe he's cosplaying as John Watson, considering what Hitoya wearings.

But after seeing the card name. I am pretty sure he's cosplaying as Hercule Poirot! But still I am still supersize finding out about this!

And then last, the third member! Hitoya! His card is written 【医師が相棒】 which is literally translate as "Your partner is a doctor". Now who is the famous detective with doctor as their partner? That right. its one and only Sherlock Holmes!

Sherlock Holmes is a detective that no need introduction. Currently he's IS the most famous fictional detective created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that still relevant in this age thanks to numerous modern adaptation.

Hitoya maybe the fourth person who cosplaying as the famous detective from Arthur Conan Doyle story. But I think his outfit is the closest one that similar to the legendary detective compare the other three. I mean look at the old Sherlock Holmes picture that i found as reference.

(But I do admit, maybe not his belt thou hahhaa.)

Anyway here some picture of other Detective trio wearing Sherlock Holmes's inspired outfit!

But then i think He IS the perfect choice to portrayed as the famous detective <3 he just need to put the hat on his head XD

Anyway i finish with BAT for now. I will do Fling Posse soon after this.

[thefinalwitness]

i think i already made this post but i'm in the brain space and i want to be super clear about my intentions re: dawntrail spoilers, so this is the rundown of how i'll handle them, and how i handle all expansion spoilers!

for the first month following the full release (not the pre-order release), i won't be posting anything at all about dawntrail—no story spoilers, no non-story spoilers, nothing at all until august 2nd 2024.

after that, i usually start posting small spoilers, but not major ones, for anywhere from 6-12 months after release. all these posts WILL be tagged with "7.0 spoilers" (and "7.1/7.2/etc spoilers" when it becomes relevant), and since i've seen it's popular, i'll TRY to tag them as "dawntrail spoilers" for as long as possible too, but full disclosure that isn't how i naturally categorize ffxiv spoilers and that tag may be missed even on early posts, and may disappear much sooner than its patch number counterparts. "7.0 spoilers" is by far the most reliable way to block dawntrail spoilers fro me!

whenever i DO start posting major spoilers, these will be put under a readmore and both tagged as stated above, as well as prefaced before the readmore with a warning that it contains spoilers (and probably some details about what kind of spoilers, ie story/non-story, what level any related quests/zones are, etc).

furthermore, i personally take spoilers REALLY seriously, and will be blacklisting any and all words related to the expansion until i complete the MSQ. because this account is just a sideblog to my main blog, the dashboards are combined, so there's also a chance i will be temporarily blacklisting usernames and/or unfollowing people to avoid spoilers, as i would otherwise have to stay off tumblr as a whole, which would be very boring for me LMAO.

this isn't personal at all! i'm just REALLY allergic to even very small spoilers, and especially because i will likely not be playing dawntrail when its pre-order release goes live, i want to make absolutely sure i avoid spoilers as much as possible. again, once i finish the MSQ, i'll unblacklist and refollow any blogs. :)

i also want to touch on something i feel a lot of regret for regarding how i handled endwalker spoilers with friends: specifically, i had a tendency to debunk friends' theories with pre-endwalker information. at the time i didn't think this was a problem because i also didn't know the answer, just that xyz theory wasn't it because of pre-endwalker info, but in hindsight i think this has a lot of potential to ruin the fun of others who really enjoy speculating on the story as it unfolds, so i'm going to aim to not do that this time around! specifically, i'm not going to debunk other people's theories, EVEN if the info i'd be using comes from pre-dawntrail sources. i just think this was an unfun mistake on my part that i don't want to repeat without explicit permission, and i'm sorry to friends i did this to whose fun i soured in doing so. spoilers are really important to me, and while i know these aren't technically spoilers, i think they still have the potential to hit the same, and i don't want to make anyone feel the way i do when it happens to me.

i think that's everything! i hope everyone has fun in the new expansion, and i look forward to joining you whenever i get my own stuff sorted so i can play too! <3

[monsterblogging]

Pacific Rim: Ascension is pretty good, actually

So yeah, Pacific Rim: Ascension is a prequel novel to Pacific Rim: Uprising, and based on that you might think it wouldn't be that great. But IMO, it's very much worth reading for a number of reasons.

The author was clearly very familiarized with the lore developed for PR1, and actually integrates a lot of it into the story in a way that gives it a sense of depth, reality, and drama that Uprising and The Black lack. Characters are also generally written well (and Hermann is written so wonderfully well), and Vik and Jinhai's backstories are, in my opinion, extremely engaging. And if you're one of the people disappointed that the Kaidonovskys and Cherno Alpha didn't get more screentime, you are absolutely in for a treat.

For the lore-oriented fans, the author's clear attention to detail means this book is actually a fairly reliable source on what was originally developed for PR1, including Jaeger details and character histories. It does include at least one piece of outdated data (Romeo Blue having three legs), and the story claims that drift compatibility is something you either have or don't have (something we know isn't true from Beacham's posts), but there's no reason to dispute, say, Vulcan Specter having a drill weapon or Shaolin Rogue having an extra-aquatic design.

The book also gives us lots of wonderfully bizarre kaiju. The somewhat frequent mentions of tentacles (forbidden by del Toro) suggests that these are based on very concepts, or were invented by the author himself. Either way, they are absolutely great monster designs. If anything, some of the things these monsters have going on make the movie's kaiju look a little boring.

That said, it's not perfect. Hermann's cane is never mentioned at all, and - well, the rest of the issues are spoilers, so I'll put them under a cut.

We learn that some people have apparently been using Pons technology to implant programming into people's minds - a detail which ultimately has no relevance on the plot, and feels weirdly edgy for Pacific Rim. And I know it's a common trope in sci-fi, but its proximity to right wing conspiracy theory bullshit makes it... not exactly my favorite trope. I don't know whether its presence in sci-fi is really super problematic, but in real life belief in this kind of thing has been used to basically justify witch hunting. Like, I understand the dramatic value here, but at the same time, people still living today were put on trial and even sent to jail based on belief that this was a real thing. Like I'm not going to tell you that this is an Objectively Bad Trope, but it's definitely a trope with a lot of terrible baggage.

The story also gives an explanation for how it was worked out that kaiju blood explodes when exposed to rare earth minerals, and it's pretty ridiculous. Supposedly a kaiju's blood rained down on a microchip factory, and the factory exploded. Accepting this detail means accepting that nobody's phones, laptop computers, or other electronic devices never came into contact with kaiju blood splatter or mist, and that kaiju blood never splattered into a damaged conn-pod. This is the kind of thing that should have been observed fairly early in the kaiju war, not several years in.

Also the PPDC in this book apparently just classifies information for No Real Reason, like the fact that a particularly violent kaiju cult tried to destroy the world. Like you'd think that this would be the kind of thing they'd want to broadcast, for reasons of "hey look how awful our political enemies are."

Also lol the fact that PPDC records pilots' drift memories and just peek into them is creepy. Like it doesn't exactly make Mako Mori look good when we learn she's been invading cadets' privacy like this, ya know?

But yeah like, I think it's definitely worth a read. The book shows a lot of imagination and makes good use of Pacific Rim's worldbuilding. Even if you don't like Uprising, you'll probably still find something to enjoy about it.

[vertumnanaturalis]

A lot of people seemed to like my last one, so woe! More fic ideas be upon all ye again; compilation of au ideas I posted in LQ and haven't been edited to be easier to read edition!

(below the cut, because theres like 12 of them and its a big messy mess)

Nem?Tang fic where they wake up in some ancient convergent domain plant device with only hazy memories of how they got there but nothing solid enough to work off of, and also why is their hair so long, and where are their clothes, and where is the goddamn colony? Because oopsie daisy! it seems that somebody put them in the ancient alien magitech healing goo and forgot to take them out when they were done, and now two hundred years have passed and everybody else they know and love are long dead, and also apparently some giant ass fleet of earth guys tried to land while they were having a snooze but! oh! whoopsie! yet again! somebody sent them the wrong information about how to safely get through the wormhole and the majority of the fleet did not make it to the surface in one piece!!! and the some of the survivors may or may not have folk stories about people that may or may not be Nem and Tang’s loved ones doing either great or terrible things during those two hundred years they were sleeping through!!

mermaid au where Besk was a mermaid trapped in a research facility and Instance broke her out during her ecoterrorist days but Besk couldn’t go back to the ocean because (hand waves) so she stayed with Instance as a slightly-more-free test subject who could technically come and go as she pleases, and she did, and eventually came back from one of her outings with two whole goddamn babies, and despite their both their hopes both babies seem to be pretty much normal human babies except for the occasional weird non-human thing, like eating whole raw eggs or Tangent having an overnight sex change shortly after saying she’s a girl, and feeling like she’s the only mermaid left in the world eventually leads Besk to doing the same thing she always does, and now Instance is stuck with two ambiguously half-human grieving kindergartners, and now it’s the world’s words hybrid of Wolf Children and The Thirteenth Year (with a mild dose of human experimentation sprinkled on top)

modern day/modern-ish all humans on earth au fic where Sym is a pre-school teacher(or aid??) who just moved to a new town with his beloved edgelord of a boyfriend who never wants to talk about his past or childhood and Sym only knows bits and pieces that he’s mentioned over the past few years (but that’s fine he’s just got his secrets nothing new there), and at his new job with his new class there’s a young single parent of twins that also moved into town only a little bit after he did, and apparently they don’t have anybody in their life besides their kids, they don’t have any family and the kids dad isn’t in the picture, so he does the nice friendly thing and offers to lend a hand if they need help with anything, and one afternoon as he’s supposed to be leaving work after making sure that the kids are all picked up, he spots said single parent and said beloved edgelord talking/arguing about something, because apparently they used to know each other but haven’t seen each other in a long while, and his boyfriend doesn’t wanna hear what “actually super important and kinda immediately relevant” thing that his old friend wants to talk about, and before Sym can really stop them the two kids go running to greet their parent, and look we all know where this plot is heading fellas

(not sure if this one should follow Tang or Dys primarily but Imma go with Tang side for this) fic where there’s more people than canon but they’re still on Vertumna with little research on it & Sol has dream memories (maybe use part of the old idea about the Helio arriving as part of a mini fleet instead of a lone ship?), and Tang’s intelligence is lauded like in canon and she’s put into the best position to learn smarty smarts stuff, while Dys’ rebelliousness gets him no favors with the Man and gets himself marked as a troubled kid and moved away from his sister, with Tang being told that she can seek him out once she’s an adult if she still wants to but for now not to waste her time or energy on worrying about him and focus on her studies. She keeps hearing him being mentioned in passing as being part of some big secret alien-centric program to so she knows that he hasn’t gone awol, but she still doesn’t see him for the next 3 to 5 years even tho she still gets to see most of the other kids (bar Sol, who was also yoinked by the secret alien program). Fast forward to her being an adult enough adult who seems appropriately level headed for doing amoral sciences, so she’s invited to see the big important secret alien project, and “_so Tangent, you know how some of the xenofauna can pass information and feeling between individuals of different species through physical contact, and that there’s some functional technology leftover from the alien civilization that lived here beforehand? And that your brother spent a lot of time exploring ruins? And how sometimes science needs sacrifices? For the greater good and all that? :)?” and Tang gets to see her brother as one of the star subjects of the project’s attempt to recreate a messy version of the array (while not even understanding what it actually is)

like 3 different variants (Geranium, Flulu, and Hal+Tonin+Sol’s she group on a field trip” of “like 3 weeks after landing somebody falls into a mini wormhole and comes out 25 years into the future, except none of them went missing in the second timeline, and now they’re in the future having to deal with the way life actually turned out, and they don’t even know all of the stuff that their other selves do/did, because they may or may not be alive still in this other timeline”. (Actually what got me into working on all those future kid things because I wanted to know who’d be doing what when and with who)

au where Besk blacks out shortly before her suicide attempt and wakes up in a cave on Vertumna, having 0 idea where she is or how she got there, and stumbles around thinking she’s dead until one of the surveyors finds her, and upon getting back to the colony she finds out that she’s supposed to have been dead for the last 11 or so years, with her two five year olds now being sixteen (the same age as her when she left Earth & also how long she spent on the Strato), and she has to learn how to adapt to everything and being alive when she shouldn’t be while there are so many others who died and aren’t magically alive again, and also has to do all this while more or less locked under constant observation, because BOY nobody is going to casually leave her alone for like, so many reasons

fic that opens with Kom waking up in the medbay after the age 14 glow attack and Nem and their younger brothers and all his friends are so unbelievably glad he’s awake and ok, but he keeps learning about the not canon possible things that happened either during the attack or while he was healing (like his mom dying while helping the kids evacuate the creche or chief Rhett and Sol’s parents having died defending geoponics), and he’s just stuck with this unending feeling that he’s supposed to be dead right now, but he’s not, and I’m not sure where to go with the story past that

au where Kom wakes up five years before the Strato reaches the wormhole with the knowledge that he’s going to die ten years from now, and it more or less follows a dreamer Kom story except that he knows that his story only has one conclusion, and rather than trying to prevent his own death he spends that time trying to save and protect as many people in his life as he can (maybe prequel to above scenario?)

obligatory single “nice” modern au fic except that nice has to be in quotation marks because technically it’d be about Dys breaking into Sym’s house after committing a major felony and definitely in a big hurty thinking that it was abandoned, but like surprise! it’s not! and even tho Dys fully expects Sym to call the cops on him and wake up in jail he instead wakes up in Sym’s guest room and immediately assumes that he either died already, accidentally tripped into the fae realm, or Sym is some kinda polite hannibal ass serial killer, and it’d be just a whole bunch of Sym being genuinely kind and nice to Dys while Dys is just “y tho like literally what is wrong with you”, and it takes like 2 years and several more major felonies for them to get together. also this might’ve spawned off of the earlier pre school teacher one but it’s not 100% attached to it so that’s why it has it’s own bulletpoint

2.5 flavors of a Hunger Games AU, which are "special games where its announced that this year each district has to send two siblings/other close family members, and the twins get reaped in their district", "one of the younger boys gets reaped but Kom volunteers in their place", and "Tang watching as Dys gets reaped the first year he's applicable for it and she can't do anything about it, and then having to watch as Kom (in his last year of being applicable) volunteers in her brother's place and all of his siblings are now freaking out" which only came to me as I was sharing the first two.

also have this flawless related image

au where Sym sees videos of wild animals in urban areas being relocated to a better habitat on the data thing Sol gives him and he comes up with a fresh new idea; cut to his two favorite humans (age 13/14) waking up on a strange beach some few thousand kilometers away from the colony several weeks later with 0 idea how they got there (ark opening tune starts to play)

also whatever this is

anyways, that's definately not all of the random au ideas I've had and don't include some of the more developed ones I've actually made effort to work on/flesh out, but these were on hand and I wanted to share them too

[chronotopes]

Time to return the favour. 4, 5, 24!

gonna choose to answer for wryn and mina because they are the latest arrivals in the story and are the central supporting characters in the upcoming chapter that i ... still havent started <3

also thank you!

4. What are 3 of their irrational fears?

i think this is a fun question because perhaps 'irrational' is such an interesting qualifier. in real life and in fiction the world is full of things to fear at least somewhat rationally, which means i cannot promise that all of these fears are 'irrational' even though sometimes the character in question may think of them that way. but let's give it a shot.

mina is afraid that 1) by falling in love with leander (who also grew up in her hometown's upper class), she is simply recreating destiny/her parents' wishes for her in a slightly overcomplicated way, 2) if she is ever too happy or stands too still she will be settling, making herself vulnerable, tying herself down delusionally to something doomed to go wrong, and 3) she is not capable of love at all, not in the right way and not for too long

at the point in the story that is currently written, wryn is afraid that 1) there are key elements of his past and his magic that his guardian knows and is not sharing with him, 2) that by lingering safely in coastal universities he is failing to explore the world and its magic to its full potential in the same reckless and dedicated way his parents did, and 3) that if he DID venture beyond that safe zone what he found there would kill him. (these are all in one way or another extremely reasonable if not straight up true. wryn self-identifies as a Very Rational Person and has at this point in the story not been challenged in this self-conception.)

5. How affectionate are they? What are their top love languages?

LOL i selected the two characters with the most distant affection habits out of the whole gang for this question.

mina is extremely not a 'wow i really like you' person in most cases. in early phases of a friendship or relationship, she demonstrates affection largely by Being Down To Hang Out With You and sometimes by quietly remarking to you about something kind of personal. she is a pretty transactionally-minded person who wants things to be fair and to not be embarrassed, which means she will cook for her friends and get them holiday gifts to preempt a sense of Owing. but her truest sign of Really Loving You is when she accepts acts of service or gifts from you without feeling like she has to immediately find something to offer in return.

that and trying her hardest to kill your evil dad and oppose your enemies, that's another classic sign of mina affection.

wryn is a lot freer with compliments than mina. he's pretty blunt and not shy about telling people he thinks theyre Wrong! but at the same time not shy about pointing out someone's skill or knowledge when they've impressed him in some way. he also shares insight and information with people very freely – he is very driven by wanting to Help And Be Helpful – but when he properly likes you then he starts sharing stuff that he's purely interested in because it's interesting rather than because it's contextually relevant. he did not have the same kind of heroically-oriented imagination growing up that mina and mari and lark did, so when he is put in a position to put himself in mortal danger to protect people he loves he is a lot less emotionally prepared for it. still does it though.

tl;dr in terms of the 'lame and fake science' variety languages both mina and wryn are acts of service oriented in many ways but that's cheating because it's a teen oriented fantasy novel and everyone is trying to die and/or kill for everyone else constantly. outside the context of immediate peril, i would say mina's is time and wryn's is words.

24. Where did their name come from? Does it have meaning?

i will be completely real with you everyone in vital light has names that i thought were nice non-cringe alternatives to their names in the original draft (excluding quartz, whose names are the same across both). so alas i did not think about meanings very much.

[neonmetro]

Hey guys, you're probably tired of me asking about Project Martyr by now BUT THIS ONE IS CHARACTER SPECIFIC I SWEAR. . .

So about Azazel. . .I love them so much ☹️

If you are okay with sharing and it's nothing to spoilery, I want to know more about them. INFODUMP !!!

Also, I hope this finds you well ! Enjoy your day, go outside if that's your thing, treat yourself :)) I have school tmwr so I have to brace myself for that *sighs*

*Floats away into the abyss*

-Ulysses loving anon

FINALLY AN AZAZEL ASK (TEARS OFF MY SHIRT) THE BABYGIRL EVER MY PRINCESS WITH A THOUSAND DISEASES AND IS MORALLY REPREHENSIBLE

honestly atm i no longer feel like i need to be so precious with my story, idm talking about spoilers because it’ll still be like multiple years before i completely finish even one novaturi story in its intended form…

BUT ENOUGH OF THAT. ITS SEXY BABYGIRL TIME. 

azazel is someone who desperately wants to change and will do anything to do so. they hate themselves to their core and shower themselves with self praise just to put on the illusion of a charismatic person.

their first death, and by extension life, is the main reason why they strive to become someone different. It’s honestly really difficult to write them without this information coming up/being relevant bc its the motivator that is behind all their behavior and actions…

while working for project martyr, they always faded into the background, always hanging around michael or raena (whom they met in highschool and have been such a loser for...)

the day they died, however, is the catalyst for their spiral into self perfection. it was a company outing to the beach, ironically without the corporation heads funding the trip being present. at this point only a few still survived, it happens when you’re experimenting with souls. still, peneume, kesabel, samyaza’s deaths weighed on the surviving members’ minds. the project was nearly the end of its lifespan and everyone in the office could feel that it was almost over and they’ll be transferred to different projects, and they all assumed this outing was a last event for all of them to bond before going their separate ways.

instead, it was a planned vagabond attack where all remainder members were meant to be killed. as a plus for the corpheads, only a few non-project martyr citizens were around, leaving very few witnesses to the ordeal. a shadowy vagabond crashed into the barbecue grill and ripped abaddon’s head off of their body, and continued to devour anyone in their sight. (yes this is the beach episode…)

there were two survivors, reficul and michael, with the former dragging the latter away from the still conscious azazel about to be fully engulfed.

azazel couldn’t move, as they watched michael leaving the beach in THEIR CAR. their vision slowly became black as their head was swallowed by the vagabond’s mouth. but before their conscious should’ve faded, their soul shattered into nonrecoverable pieces and they became leviticus 16.

leviticus 16 went on a rampage of their own, wiping out a prefecture in the recreational district before being apprehended by a up and coming magical girl, almagro galiceño before aishire intercepted the processing of the loot dropped by leviticus 16.

azazel's soul was reconstructed and was used in a secondary series of experiments, this time, observing the effects of how long the vagabond state will last in a artificial body.

each project martyr participant was another set of experiments, specifically on studying the behavior of the soul. (a few you could probably guess, arakiel and moloch are what happens to when a soul splits, kesabel is overloading the soul with trauma and watching how long it'll typically withstand it)

and ever since that day, the moment azazel woke up again, they vowed to become someone who would never die such a meaningless death and be forgotten ever again.

they push away their friends, the person they love, just so azazel becomes anything but themselves because that's the worst thing they could be. they don't care what people think of them, they just need to prove it to themselves that THEY ARE THE BEST AND THEY WILL NEVER BE A SIDE CHARACTER.

during the killing game, their entire plan is to kill every single member of project martyr, and eventually kill aishire themselves. at first, they accidentally killed beelzebub, but it works out actually!!! they needed to kill them it was a necessity!! next, they kill bezaliel, after kidnapping and torturing them in the abandoned office project martyr once was operating in. there's of course kills here and there that weren't their fault, they all just need to die.

but moloch and arakiel, they absolutely want to kill by their own hands. they hate that they just left them to die and make them feel like nothing and THEY JUST HAVE TO DIE NOW. AND IF THAT MEANS BETRAYING THE BOTH OF THEM, THAT IS FINE.

arakiel is instead, killed by abaddon and azazel is deeply upset by this. they called dibs, that should've been their kill. arakiel's death causes azazel to snap and quickly speed up their plan, to kill moloch as fast and as hurtful as possible. and they lay it on thick on how much moloch is to blame for everything that's happened.

anyways hope this info was yummy to you guys... hehe i love talking about azazel...

i'm so late to every ask i'm so sorry the demons are beating me up and killing me I WISH YOU LUCK AT SCHOOL ULY ANON!!!

[whatifyoulivelikethat]

Isn't it really disrespectful to the members that people out there are asking such personal questions about them and that too to people who are total strangers? I've seen so many of them on here and don't get me wrong I really like how educative some of your posts can be about sex but this is the only thing that irks me.

I am of the belief that the person whose actions I can control is only me. I'm also aware that people are much more transparent than they think they are. Even so, with my own discretion of course, I consider each ask as is, since I too am the creator of this blog and I am confidant in my stance on how I want to speak of BTS.

In case anyone wonders, I do filter the asks.

Some things are meant to stay in the abyss of the internet. XD

We all have different definitions of respect. Age is also a factor I recognize, too. And even adults can be blind to how their words are a direct indication of learned behavior that may or may not be reflective of the kind of person they want to be. We all look back and sometimes we wonder why we thought a certain way at that time. So, I don't judge too harshly. It is what it is.

Even with this blog, I sometimes think, ah, what if BTS saw this...? (Hello, if you are BTS, please put down the internet and back away slowly. It's for the best, really.) I generally don't mention my personal thoughts as they usually aren't relevant. Just to be clear, I have zero interest in them ever knowing about this blog, lol. But, I acknowledge I've written these stories, I acknowledge that I have written sex scenes about them, and I am intentional about it. All of it, from the words I select to what I choose to write about. I'm very particular. I've made my stance on sex pretty clear, I believe. There are varying opinions about my work, I'm sure, but at its core my writing has always been about people. When I write about the members, I consider these stories as parallel universes. Still, I think it's important for me to maintain their Korean background and how that might affect how they act. I have chosen to keep their individual personalities (or what I know of them that they've shown to the public) since their personalities are why I like them to begin with. Their actions in my writings could be considered good or bad depending on the reader however I, as the writer, want to convey the honesty of circumstance.

People are of circumstance. People work with what they have and know of at the time. Everyone lives by different standards. We all initially believe the people around us have the same standards that we do. Eventually, you learn that they don't. There is a time and place to explain your view. Whether or not they assimilate it into their world isn't up to you.

Can I say BTS themselves would be comfortable with my writing? Of course not. I don't know them personally. I can't know if my stories would or wouldn't bother them. Yes, I do write with the thought in mind that they might be able to understand to some degree, if not all the nuances. I don't use possible language barrier as any excuse. I also do know that it must be weird to know (too many) people write things about you, a sizeable chunk of it involving sexual acts.

And then the possibility of their audience taking those ideas and trying to impose them on you in real life?

It must be difficult to never be taken as you are, and only be regarded in relation to the version of yourself that someone has made up in their head.

It does happen. It happens all the time, famous or not. It's happened to me, on here and at various other points in my life. And I'm not even remotely famous, lol. Maybe I'm desensitized to it since I have already heard people explain their fantasies about me to me and was forced to choose how to react to such information. I can usually sense the intent and I act accordingly. Likewise, if BTS finds this blog somehow (yikes) and confronts me about it (why, idk), I'll accept my judgement from each member as it is (rip me) - good, bad, neutral - and I can see how this looks from their perspective (sus at the very least). I guess I'll cross that bridge if that is my path. Not planning for it, I assure you.

I always carefully consider my answers, both in how I want to respond and how I want to word it. And, hey, maybe I'm wrong or immoral or not right in the head. (I'm definitely not right in the head.) But, I know myself. How someone else thinks of BTS will not change how I think of them. At times, I might have replied in such a way that made anons think more critically about what they're asking. That's all I can realistically hope for.