#my GOD I LOVE your storytelling prowess the way you build worlds AND i don't know if you've noticed ;3

[mythvoiced]

@tenderpulsive | the GBEP

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Eunjae is careful in their observations.

In a field such as theirs, allowing their mind any sort of leniancy, allowing themself even just a tad of ease on the job would mean a life lost, blood on the tracks. They can't afford to be carelessness, similarly to how they can't afford to have their attentive stare be too intrusive - the souls they speak too are not the kind you can be that unapologetic too, after all.

But there is no good enough excuse that would warrant their taking this necessary habit into an unnecessary context.

There is no need to chew on the same chip for moments on end - a tasteless mass between their teeth at this point - just because too preoccupied with staring Calum down as he answers.

Calum is not naive. Anxious people are not naive. The naive trust too easily and to be trusting is not something that combines well with anxiety - as far as their humble take on it goes.

But there is some...thing... something about the way he answers that has them wonder how readily he could answer like that if forced to deliver the same response in the face of the worst case scenario they'd painted. Making universal truth-statements like that, because yes he is right, is always easier when the heart hasn't been gutted first.

Or maybe they've grown too jaded, maybe a part of them needs to see something in an adult that would justify their avoidance, their cynicism.

Eunjae watches Calum punish his lips with his teeth for the pause in his words and their hands drop. As if stilling an automated response to a scenario, as if they're hardly more than an AI running an algorithm no one had asked of them, not one meant to appease and put at ease, but one... designed to do what, exactly?

"What good are memories for if that's all you have?"

Or if you don't have them.

Their eyes narrow and they lean forward. Has Calum lost? Could Calum handle loss the way he handles Eunjae? Would Calum be devastated and angry or devastated and sad?

They tilt their head.

"Memories aren't always a good thing, you know. Are you going to rely on them? Will you live to create memories? If I asked you, choose, you can either call your wife now - and you can't do it ever again if you miss this chance - or you can relive your wedding as if you were truly there, what would you choose."

[aspiringsophrosyne]

Episode 11: Whispers at The Ziggurat

The beginning of the end....in more ways than one. 

We have soda, snacks, and popcorn with so much greasy butter you gotta wipe your hand on your jeans, and that shit never comes out. 

Curtain's rising.

Why don't we find our seats?

There are a few neat little easter eggs in Delilah's chanting; they're even more noticeable with the subtitles on.

Looking back after Campaign Two, everything the Briarwoods do makes even more sense as, during the second campaign, we met quite a few of their contemporaries: wizards of privilege and power who were heavily afflicted with self-serving tunnel vision.

They're together. 

They got what they wanted: they achieved their goal.

As they deserved to. 

Why should they care if the rest of the world burns? 

There are parallels between some of C1's and C2's villains is what I'm saying; it's neat.

The Good.

They had to dance around copywrites here, but they managed well. 

Vagueries honestly serve the narrative in some ways, as it makes sense that little would be known about the Whispered One; secrets are his thing, after all.

Bad Influences

God, when the manipulative monsters of Critical Role stop playing nice by their standards, they really stop playing nice.

Orthax throwing away every pretense of subtlety is dread-inducing, but it's also strangely cathartic.  

There's no more bluffing; the time has come to call.

There aren't words for how much I love that awful little moment between Cass, Sylas, and Delilah before Percy storms up. 

Cass, knowing what Delilah wants, her immediate acquiescence, the older, healed bite marks on her neck...In just a few seconds, a complete, agonizing story is told. 

Just Cassandra addressing Delilah as "Mother" is enough to trigger your gag reflex.

I adore how much just these couple of seconds does with so little. 

This kind of subtle show-rather-than-tell storytelling rings every one of my bells.

The Fights

On multiple Q&As, the CRew has talked about how they had to find ways around doing too much work for what wouldn't have merited the price, effort, or time. 

It's a sad fact that animating is difficult. 

It's time-consuming. 

It's expensive: especially when you've got seven characters to animate.

At once.

So they've split up the party here and there over the seasons to alleviate the burden, and frankly, even if they could do a prolonged fight with every character on screen, I'm not sure it'd be worth it. It would be easy to confuse the audience's focus. Or let the choreography become disorganized.

All that is to say, I appreciate how they broke up the Ziggurat fight. 

Not only is this way more convenient for the crew, but it also gives us multiple unique dynamics between combatants.  

Delilah silences Scanlan and then repeatedly tries to blast him.

The two sibling pairs square off. The twins use only their physical prowess against each other, while there's more at play than just the blows the de Rolos trade, as not one but both of them are fighting the influences that push them against each other.

Pike and Sylas do battle. 

(This fight in particular was incredible, by the way. Richly dynamic; it's a joy to watch every time. Ashely couldn't be there for this fight on stream, so everyone went out of their way to show off how badass Pike is here.

Also, Cleric vs. Undead is a classic.)

Delilah and Pike have a beam fight and Scanlan plays his Uno reverse card.

Grog shakes off Sylas' charm, which is a nice nod to the campaign. (Raging Berserker Barbarians can't be charmed at that level.) Likewise, Sylas' influence fading from Vax and Cassandra as he gets more and more hurt (failing that concentration check) as Keyleth's and the Sun Tree's power builds alongside Neal Acree's beautiful score was also a nice touch.

All these fights and none of them overstay their welcome. 

As I've said and will say again, titmouse makes a damn good action sequence.

(And baby de Rolos. Taliesin said in the commentary that was the nicest they ever were to each other and I believe it. Siblings.)

The woman who broke

Grey does a fantastic job here, as usual. You feel her pain and frustration. If she ever cared, she obviously does not anymore, but Delilah got hooked when she was in undeniably desperate straights. Now, this is all she has. 

She broke the world for her husband: she can't turn back; she has to collect the Whispered One's debt. So the more setbacks she suffers, the more Grey lets Delilah's composure falter. Until her veneer of confidence and upper crustiness is completely burned away in that final confrontation with Vox Machina. 

If nothing else, she put on one hell of a light show for Whitestone. It'll be fine, I'm sure.

The timing of Pike's fading out here is, as it was in the campaign, impeccable. 

And that is the end of the Briarwoods.

For now, anyway.

The Bad. (Or at least, not so great.)

Magic:

Before Ripley makes her escape, there's more of her acting like she knows Percy when based on season one, she shouldn't.

This moment was why I pointed out the magic options available to Vox Machina in episode five; yes, Percy can't attack without alerting the Briarwoods, but Keyleth absolutely can.

All she needs is her standard: grasping vine. She doesn't even try to use that to grab Ripley?

Trying to snag Ripley and failing could've made Keyleth's big moment later even more powerful. She loses Ripley, Sylas punches her into a wall, and then she's out of a lot of the fight. Awkward, dirpy Keyleth messed up again.

So you take that and let it fuel her fire. This time she's determined not to fuck up. To put all that considerable power of hers into ending the threat to her friends.

And then she does.

It would've been cool to see.

Grog

And Grog's out of the fight again; I brought this up at the top of the season for this. It gets a little exasperating at this point. For a half-giant, the boy is strangely more prone to unconsciousness than his other, less hardy teammates.

A potentially better, funnier option would've been to have Grog awake the whole time but trying to get to the fight. Sylas and Pike were jumping around a lot. Maybe there could've been a background gag where he kept trying to run up the stairs before Delilah blasts him back down? Or Grog yelling in the background of Sylas and Pike's face-off that he'll be there soon; just a minute now, almost there. Plus, that would've been another fun nod to the campaign, where Grog's mobility was his Achilles' heal, and Matt used it multiple times to keep him out of the fight for as long as possible; so that there would be a fight.

Nitpick: 

In hindsight, the "Be the light" thing is unnaturally on the nose, especially without a moment pre-episode three where Pike provides light for the team, or somebody calls her Vox Machina's light or both. Establishing that light is specifically Pike's thing��before she loses that ability and passes the mantle on to Keyleth would've tied things together better and made that feel like a less contrived setup for this scene.

Writing like this will come up again in season 2, so I'm pointing it out now, even though it's not a huge deal here.

But that's about it. 

This episode was fantastic, and it was hard to imagine they'd be able to top the action and emotion of episode eleven. But then they did. 

That's coming up next. 

[touchmycoat]

I LOVE YOUR PORN AU!!!!! LIKE SO MUCH - and i'm just. if you don't mind me asking, how - the way you flesh out the characters, their motivations, and feelings in every scene in such an eloquent way, and just little things here and there, a habit or an activity that adds dimension to who they are, and - your prose is wonderful. you achieve this addictive, engrossing narrative space that readers just absolutely melt into, and i have to ask - how did you develop your writing style? 1/2

what books did you read that formatively shaped the way you write? or you know, what did you do to improve your writing? i'm so in awe of how you world-built and established the porn au - like lqg & hc being national taolu champions?? how do you come up with that stuff? i cannot comprehend the amount of research and effort that must've gone into porn au, and i'm just so deeply thankful that you decided to share that with us. i apologize if i'm coming on too strong, but wow. thank you 2/2

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oh my god please don't apologize, when i saw your ask i rolled on the floor giggling hysterically for a solid 15 min, bless your heart

part of the answer to your question—i've taken like, 8 years' worth of creative writing classes/workshops! there was also a transnational literary component to my degree so whenever possible, i took literature classes fksjdfksd so whatever you see and like is definitely the result of a lot of work. My writing from not even 10 years ago but like, 5? horrid, ridiculous, wild, cringe. The Porn AU itself is the second draft of a MUCH more lackluster piece.

about my writing style. gosh, you really know how to make a writer blush. "I like your writing style" is literally an instant kill LMFAO okay okay, the useful answer: my primary criteria for choosing what to write is, don't be obvious, be interesting. Fiction tells us to show, not tell, right? Poetry is about concretizing the abstract. Screenwriting says cut all useless lines. A lot of writing rules and advice—never start with the weather, avoid detailed descriptions of the characters, don't use adverbs, etc.—are all really about this exact sentiment.

I once took a seminar on writing for horror movies. The golden rule of the horror genre is Never Show the Monster, because whatever the audience is imagining is always going to be scarier than what you actually show them. There are obviously exceptions to this (to all writing rules), but in my mind, it's all the same principle.

LONG answer under the cut

So you start with building a scene. I approach it like essay-writing—I state my thesis for the motivations/main propulsion of the plot. "In this scene, LQG and SY are motivated to save Cang Qiong's porn production, so they have sex on camera." Then you build the sub-motivations: "LQG is also doing this because he's pining after SY."

I learned this "thesis-writing" from theater, specifically from writing 10-min plays. Theater is all about characters being driven by their wants and needs, and the reason I say 10-min plays in particular is because longer forms of writing will give you more leeway, but in 10-min, you pretty much need your character motivations established from their very first line. That's why you need that very clear thesis for yourself—if you don't even know what the character wants from the get-go, then you can't establish who they are, what they want, and where they're going to go in a dynamic and interesting way.

So this thesis drives EVERYTHING that happens in your scene, just like an actual thesis for an essay, just like topic sentences for your paragraphs. Once I do this, I have the emotional direction & narrative scope of how much this scene will cover, I have a sense of where it begins and ends. "Begin with the dynamics of their sex. LQG starts showing signs of his feelings. Reveal LQG backstory for exactly what those feelings are and why he isn't telling SY. The rest of the scene implies that LQG's feelings may not be so unrequited, but also sets up the fundamental problem at the heart of the whole fic—SY's inability to comprehend his own feelings." This is kind of my new thesis now. They're having sex; LQG pines; SY doesn't know he himself is pining.

Now it's time to manifest. This is the "storytelling" part, and the hardest lmfao.

Personally, my approach is largely shaped by my very cool screenwriting teacher, who hammered into us: don't fucking waste lines. The Golden Rule of screenwriting is that every line should reveal something new. I found my old writing kind of repetitive, especially on the emotional front, so this is kind of my editing mantra now—is this line either propelling the story or revealing character? If it's revealing character, is it a revelation that has to happen right now, or is it slowing the momentum of the scene?

But these aren't rhetorical questions! "Momentum" doesn't just mean tumble forward as fast as you can, it also means taking the time to draw the bowstring back further, so your next move has even more propulsion. That's why you get the little "LQG has been in love with SY..." cut scene in the middle of the fucking (at least, that's my reasoning for putting it there). Every line has to bring a fresh revelation that "proves" your thesis further.

That brings me to the details. You said you like the details I inject into the world-building, and honestly that's so gratifying to hear, because that means I'm successfully manifesting my intentions, y'know? "Every line has to bring new info" kind of sounds like a tall order, but the most effective way I've seen it done in books and onstage/onscreen is with these hyper-specific details. If you're writing a scene in which someone feels dirty, never have them just say that—have them say they want to take a shower. Show them running out of bleach again as they scrub down the stall after they wash. Begin the scene like "Steve always washes his throat first now." Then pack the scene with even more revelatory details: "Soap in hand, he heard the pipes above his head groan for a half note on adagio, and readied himself for the blast of icy water that always followed." Shitty shower, probably not rich, is likely a classical musician.

By the same token, I want to build LQG's character. The "Liu Qingge has been in love with Shen Yuan" section is the first insight we get into his background and perspective, right, so: I need to establish LQG's emotional context for filming this scene -> I can characterize him as a nut for martial arts in the same stroke -> so this takes place at a gym, beating up sandbags is a classic way of showing manly emotional distress -> so give me more details on this gym -> Puqi Gym, XL the martial god is obviously the owner -> how do I have XL & LQG a relationship beyond gym owner & client? They spar together -> I want XL & HC's position in this AU to mirror their god/ghost king statuses in TGCF canon -> how can I concretize their fighting prowesses in real-world details? -> they're martial arts champions -> what's an actual competitive martial art form that involves weaponry? -> wushu -> wikipedia Wushu, find taolu weapons sparring

(I just realized that in my songxiao daycare AU, Hualian are Olympic gold medalists by the same narrative logic laksjdnflaksjdnflsd)

So, that's the flow of logic behind my world-building lmao. It's all in the details. Leverage is one of my all-time favorite TV shows and the way they build their stories is super inspiring. If their thesis is "the rich and powerful take what they want, we steal it back for you," they manifest it in the most specific and concrete narratives: mine workers who like the work but are fighting for workplace safety vs. the money-grubbing mine owner who will blow up their livelihoods if it means a bigger payday; the little girl from Iraq with refugee status forced to be an accomplice to antique smuggling vs. international smuggler with a fetish for British royalty.

Last pieces of writing advice I've gotten: pay attention to the real world. A writing exercise we did was just sit in a public spot and make concrete observations on our surroundings. There are stories in everything!!! I learned to observe things like weird holes in the concrete (earthquake? drilling accident? bullet mark?), odd patches of moss or bird shit (look overheard: it's an AC unit dripping water for the former and nesting swallows for the latter), ladies in flipflops walking alongside ladies in high heels (excited mother walking her antsy daughter to the bus for the daughter's first job interview—the daughter's shirt collar is unfashionable and she's taking the bus, so there's a good chance the shoes were passed down, maybe from an office lady aunt. Maybe she's even overdressed for the interview, so will her outfit be an unintended source of tension once she gets to the interview? Is it a group interview, to make the comparison more stark?).

Also, write what you know. You know why SY is a video editor in porn AU? Because I'm a video editor. One of my more popular MDZS fics is set in a plant shop 'cause I worked in a plant shop. SL was First AD in Bachelor!AU 'cause I was First AD on a set once. Concrete details like the editing software having a split-screen, always answering questions about how often to water plants, and being up until 3AM editing call-sheets are the ones that will fully immerse your readers.

And if you can't do the actual things, just watch someone who is, listen to them talk, pick up lingo, and fake it. I watched like a 15-min vox video on fencing for the fencing!AU and a 45-min music theory video on the hospital pianist!AU (also I started learning piano sklfjnlsdjlfkjsd). Of course, I just finished reading a wangxian fic that had me going, "holy fucking shit, the author is literally getting their masters in a music program" so my 45-min youtube video ain't shit, but if you just need a little bit of character establishment, then it's enough to do the trick.

Anyways, tl;dr. Find the details, find the tension. Never tell outright what the tension is supposed to be, manifest it instead. Make the manifestation as interesting as possible, and if it's meant to be funny, make it funnier.

Sorry this turned into a fucking lecture lskjnflskdjnflskd but last thing, someone asked me before if I had formative authors, and this was the list I wrote at the time:

Angels in America (play) by Tony Kushner

The God of Small Things (novel) by Arundhati Roy

The Penelopiad (novel) by Margaret Atwood

“Litany in Which Certain Things are Crossed Out” (poem) by Richard Siken

Night Sky with Exit Wounds (poetry) by Ocean Vuong

Giovanni’s Room (novel) by James Baldwin (and then Go Tell it on the Mountain and then his essays)

Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger

And, ooh, now that I have this list I think I can even roughly sort it as such: Kushner, Atwood, Siken, and Salinger I really latched onto for their dialogue and very present narrator voice—same is true for Go Tell it on the Mountain. Roy, Vuong, and Giovanni’s Room, I think, are texts more representative of the kind of saturated figurative language I like, and emulate. Of course they all do imagery and voice and overall structure amazingly, but that’s the rough dividing line I’d draw.

But yeah James Baldwin is my fucking hero.