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books · 1 year ago

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Writing Workshop Week 2: Paying Attention

Welcome back, writers of tumblr! I’ve loved reading your prompt fills for Week 1 and answering your insightful questions, and I’m looking forward to seeing what you come up with for this next prompt.

Last week we talked about the things we love, the things we go and retrieve, that we can hold in our hands. This week we’re talking about loving the things that find us, the parts of the world that come into our gaze by happenstance. In other words, the anatomic matter of all art: observation.

Observation relies on attention, and our ability to attend relies on circumstance. It’s impossible to pay attention to everything at once, so the mind selects what to notice and what to ignore. Sometimes we attribute conclusions to our observations and move into perception. I think as children we make great observers, but when we grow up and gather enough experiences, we fall into the trap of mundanity. Things we’ve seen before and that we’ll see again, so they’re not worthy of note—eating breakfast, putting on your shoes, going to a restaurant and telling the host how many people are in your party.

The art of noticing, of curating all the rich details of life, is a fight against mundanity. To do that, you have to carry your inner child around with you, pointing things out that you’ve seen a hundred times before and allowing yourself to witness them with new eyes. As writers, newness is a skill we can always improve.

Airports are one way I practice newness. If I have to choose between a one-hour layover and a six-hour layover, I’ll always choose the latter. There’s no mundanity in airports. Aside from employees and people who travel frequently for business, everyone is doing something outside of their usual routine, and it’s so much easier to soak up the minutiae that we otherwise miss when we’re walking our usual daily paths.

On Love

Someone once told me, “Love is paying attention.” The person who told me this was an artist and her subject was her family. Portraiture of the people she loved was the closest attention she could offer. And I agree—you naturally attend to that which you love. When you love a person, you pay attention to the clothes they wear, the tenor of their laugh, their mannerisms, the things they carry in their purse or pockets. But I think it can also be expanded: the more attention you pay to yourself, the more you love yourself. The more attention you pay to the world, the more you love the world. This idea can be a two-way street: love will direct your attention; attention will lead you to love. In other words, if you practice paying attention, you will come to love things more than you already do.

A quick note about neurodivergence: some people attend to the world differently than others, in different patterns and with different guiding forces. Some people have the ability to shift attention quickly, and some slowly. Some people have more control over their attention than others. Some people attend more closely to certain senses (like hearing or feeling) than others. Wherever you’re at, whatever is driving your ability to notice, use it as a strength. There is no mode of observation that is inherently better or worse than another.

Many writers struggle with motivation to write. I have come to reluctantly agree that there is some discipline necessary in being a writer. I don’t believe in “butt in chair every day” mentality, but I do think any skill requires a patterned dedication no matter what your practice looks like. A self-promise. That promise is much more easily kept if you focus on love.

I don’t mean writing love stories (although that’s often what motivates me). I mean sincerely meditating on what love means to you. What you love, who you love. I’ve participated in so many generative workshops and there’s always a moment I receive a prompt and go, “I have no idea what to write about.” And then I ask myself, “What do I love?” Many things come to me, both big and small, abstract and concrete. I love my family and friends. I love to travel. I love holding a book in my hands and the satisfaction of turning its pages. I love parts of myself and I don’t love others, and this is something I’m working on.

When you ask the question, “What do I write about?” the answer can always be love. When I ask my students to write about what they love, some of them write about their relationships—the joy of a present relationship or the ache of a past one. They write about their hobbies and friends and interests. Once I had a boy write twenty pages of poetry about frogs. Some people write about passion that toes the edge of love and hate. Love is not always good. Love can be destructive. It can motivate people to cruelty; it can distort perception. Love can be complicated and weird. Love can lead to regret. But love is a strong feeling, and strong feelings drive creativity.

On Sharing

I think sharing the things you notice, the way you see the world, is an act of love. Carrying around your inner child to show them what they’ve never seen is a way to nourish yourself, replenish what you expend. You can apply this to any aspect of writing you want to work on. If you want to set a story where you live, you can go around your city pretending you’re showing it to someone who’s never been there. If you want to develop your characters, pretend you’re about to introduce a close friend to someone else, and you know they’re going to get along once they meet. If you want to better explore your themes, pretend you’re talking to someone who has no concept at all of your worldview, who maybe has an opposing worldview but is interested in learning yours.

People, especially writers, can be so afraid to put themselves into the world. To see and be seen. But when you begin to view sharing as an act of love, it becomes easier to listen, to bear witness and say, “Thank you for sharing that with me.” And when you say that enough to others, it also becomes easier to share yourself, in hopes that you’ll be met with gratitude.

Prompt time!

What I’d like you to do today—or tomorrow, if it’s late—is to notice three things. Three seemingly insignificant details, things you would otherwise forget or maybe not even see (or feel, hear, etc.). Bonus points if you write them down in a notebook, but the notes app on your phone will do.

Even if you don’t want to do it, simply by virtue of reading this, I think you’ll begin noticing things. If you’re a very observant person with a good working memory, maybe you can think of three things you observed earlier, and maybe that’s effortless for you. If this is you, your task is to write not just three observations, but three paragraphs of observation throughout the day.

Here’s an example: I am at this aesthetically pleasing coffee shop but I’m concentrating on the flimsy paper menu fluttering beneath a fan, held down with a ceramic plate. The tapping sound of my sister’s acrylic nails on her MacBook. My own self-consciousness that everyone has a better sense of style than I do. One of the baristas is a young man who looks like an ex of mine, and I’m wondering where that ex is, if his hairline has fully receded, if he still works at FedEx, if he ever married that nice veterinarian’s assistant who was way too good for him and always wore tye-dyed t-shirts for some reason, and I honestly liked her a lot, she seemed like a genuinely good person, and he knew it too and that was why he treated her well, so why had he treated me so poorly?

And now I have a narrative question: Why do people hurt some loved ones and not others? What is it about the chemistry two people make that causes this to happen? The only way to answer these questions is to either live it all again and take notes—and I’ve had too much therapy for that—or write a story about characters navigating this chasm I’ve found in my understanding of being human. And I got all that from sitting here on this uncomfortable stool in this nondescript coffee shop, hanging out with my sister on a Friday afternoon.

I recommend taking an entire day to find your three things. You’ll find many more than three, but for the purpose of this activity, I think focusing on the three most interesting or compelling ones is best. Once you have your three things I’d like you to work them all into a piece of writing. Here are some ways you can approach this:

If you want to write nonfiction, write about your day, focusing on building around your three things to eventually pull a story out of them, the way I did above. Follow the associations and memories that arrive to you.

If you want to write fiction, write those three details into a new story or the world of your current work in progress. If you’re not sure how, make the first your inciting incident, put the second in the middle of the story, and end the piece with the third.

If you want to write poetry, make a poem of your three observations, and note what happens to the meaning when you squeeze three disparate observations together.

If you want to do something experimental, convey your three things with a stylistic constraint of your choice. For example, write only in sentence fragments (by that I mean, no verbs).

A quick caveat: You might be thinking, but Betts, I write science fiction (or fantasy, horror, etc.) and so nothing in reality is of relevance to me. I would argue that everything you perceive in reality can be applied to all things that are created. You think they don’t have pretentious coffee shops in space? Well, maybe not. And definitely not in a magical version of medieval Europe. But there might be something akin to a nondescript strip mall in Midwest America with cracked asphalt, half abandoned, with some kind of sketchy dentist or urgent care in it and a vape shop. Every place, even places that don’t exist, possess some realistic texture, and when you render these images, that space becomes real to the reader. You could argue, even, that the goal of genre fiction is the highest possible suspension of disbelief. And the only way to do that is to make the world you build feel as lived-in as reality.

Questions? Ask ‘em here before EOD Tuesday so @bettsfic can answer them on Wednesday. And remember to tag your work #tumblr writing workshop with betts if you want her to read your work and possibly feature it on Friday!

And, for those just joining us: @bettsfic is running a writing workshop on @books this month. Want to know more? Start here.

#tumblr writing workshop with betts #writers' room #writeblr #writers on tumblr #writing advice #week 2: paying attention #long post #long text post

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saltymongoose · 2 years ago

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player with kitten sneezes

Player with kitten sneezes

Player with K i t t e n S n e e z e s

THE MAIN BOYS REACTING TO PLAYER THAT SNEEZES LIKE A LITTLE KITTEN.

P L E A S E

This, I can do. Hope you like these short hcs, Anon! <333

(Also, just another note, the second set I had planned is gonna be way longer than I thought, so I'll be posting it tomorrow instead of splitting it into parts. :))

The Player Sneezes Like a Kitten ft. The Main 3 + 2BDamned

(TW: Yandere, Obsessive Behavior, this is quite fluffy)

Even if you discussed the anatomical difference you had with grunts with your boys from time to time, you never got around to explaining everything about what your body parts do.

If you add this to the fact that grunts don’t exactly have noses like most creatures in your world - so to see or hear anyone doing anything similar to sneezing is incredibly unlikely - it made for a real surprise when your vessels actually heard you do it.

- [2BDAMNED] -

2BDamned had just paused in the middle of sipping his coffee when the noise of your sudden inhale and sneeze reached him, and at first he was met with confusion and slight concern. Your short apology and sheepish look is the only thing that told him that it was from you, and that it wasn’t at all intentional.

(Of course, Doc is always fascinated with little traits and actions that come from humans, so he quickly pulls you into a discussion about what exactly that was. It lasts for many hours, and he now has a full file on his tablet about sneezes and human noses alone, thanks to you.)

However, after that revelation, he realizes that the way you sneeze is honestly really cute. It's enough to make him look at you and chuckle fondly whenever you do it, silently noting how adorable you are before returning to his business. It seems everything about you just makes you more adorable to him.

A part of him is even tempted to record the sound of it, but unless he deliberately makes you sneeze, he knows being given the opportunity to do is unlikely. Plus, he has enough self-awareness to realize that being so entranced by a "sneeze" could be considered sort of foolish.

But the thought is very tempting to him. (He can almost convince himself that it would just be just another resource to use to study your species, but to no real avail.) You always end up making him a lovestruck fool in some way, so he supposes this is no different.

- [DEIMOS] -

Deimos was more confused than anything, and to be honest, he didn't think the noise actually came from you at first so you can't fault him. It also didn't help that he was half asleep when it happened, which only made his disorientation worse.

("-What the hell was that?" You heard his raspy voice call from across the room, thick with sleep as he drowsily rubbed his face and looked at you. You raised a brow, and then he asked you if you'd heard it as well, and you couldn't help but laugh.)

He was stunned when you let him know that it was you that made the noise, and embarrassed by his rather crass reaction. He literally thought it was an animal and now he feels bad for making that mental comparison in the first place.

(Deimos also mentally scolds himself over this long afterward. Lucky for him, you actually thought it was more funny than anything.)

He's quick to point out how cute and kitten-like you sound, cooing and awing over you with an affectionate look on his face. You'd call it teasing, but it's too genuine to be even the slightest bit mean-spirited. Instead, it just makes you blush, which only makes him fawn over you more.

(You really must have no idea how adorable you are to him, he concludes. Otherwise, you'd realize that this is just a fraction of how he feels about you.)

He almost thinks it's unfortunate that these sneezes are relatively uncommon; any chance to compliment you on anything you do is one he'll take as soon as he can. Besides, he knows you appreciate it. Your flushed cheeks tell him all he needs to know.

- [SANFORD] -

Sanford falls more into the territory of being concerned, since if you suddenly make an unfamiliar noise, he thinks something must be going wrong with you. It usually wasn't good to jump to the worst conclusion, but if it's your safety at risk, you can bet he's going to.

He saw you sneeze as well, so he was immediately at your side to ask if you were alright, even placing a comforting hand on your shoulder to reassure you. You laughed at his worry and waved him off, explaining that it wasn't unusual for you humans.

Now that he knows it's normal, he's relieved, but this leaves room for him to speculate on how it actually sounds now. He's not surprised to hear that it's a unique trait to you; you're the Player, of course even this sneeze of yours would be special (if anything that makes it even more fitting). What's weirder to him is the fact that he actually finds himself awing over the noise of it so much.

It must be weird to enjoy hearing your sneeze; it's not like you put any effort or anything into it, and it wasn't even that big of a thing to begin with. It was just so cute though, and he catches himself thinking about it later with a dopey grin on his face.

(You're his crush, of course he'd find himself falling further for you with every little thing you do. Or at least that's his justification for doing exactly that.)

Unlike Deimos, who openly fawns over you when you do sneeze again, Sanford won't give a very large reaction. However, if you happen to glance at him shortly after you do, you'll catch him staring at you with a warm smile and an almost love-sick gaze. He can't help it; you've always proven yourself as someone to be admired and loved, even if it's for something as simple as sounding like a little kitten when you sneeze.

- [HANK J. WIMBLETON] -

Hank, on the other hand, wasn't really that surprised at all. Why? Because he'd already heard you sneeze once before, when you were still separated by that computer screen of yours and you controlled him from afar.

(On that note, he is also one to gloat about being the first to hear it. The others find it insufferable, but he genuinely delights in making it clear just how close you two were before any of them. You've had so many "firsts" together, and he believes it's his right to make it clear that it's just one thing that makes you both so naturally close. Closer than any of the others in your group could ever hope to be with you.)

Hank thought your little sneezes were adorable even before hearing them "in person"; they reminded him a bit of a small cat, and if anything, it's a detail that just makes him fawn over you more. (You have one of the traits of his favorite creatures, if anything this is a sign you were meant for him.)

Hank won't even think about making you sneeze or anything like that, but you will find that he's a tad more affectionate than usual after you do so. He just can't stop himself pulling you into a tight side hug or giving you a quick nuzzle whenever you do something cute, and this is no exception.

You find it hilarious that his hands shake even when you do something so involuntary, and while you do know that your sneeze is "kitten-like" from the many comments of your chat, you'd honestly say that Hank is more comparable to one. He's the one who always seems to loudly purr when you show a reaction to Nevada's dusty buildings, after all.

#tw: yandere #yandere hank j. wimbleton #hank j. wimbleton x reader #hank j. wimbleton #yandere 2bdamned #2bdamned x reader #2bdamned #yandere deimos #deimos x reader #deimos #yandere sanford #sanford x reader #sanford #yandere madness combat #self aware m:pn au #samau #my writing #madness combat x reader

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kpopimaginings · 1 year ago

Text

Feel - Bang Chan (NSFW)

A/N: This was requested ages ago and I am so sorry at how long its taken!

Trigger warning: Mental health, depression, anatomically female reader

Your roommate Chan walked into the living room to find you sat on the sofa picking at your lips. As he sat beside you, he gently swiped at your hand, knocking it away.

"Stop doing that, you'll hurt yourself."

"Yay, a feeling," you replied, dryly.

Chan's brow furrowed as he looked back at you, only to find you now chewing at your bottom lip instead.

"Hey," he scolded, "Stop." He squeezed your cheeks forcing you into a pout so you would stop gnawing at yourself. "What did that mean?"

"What?"

"The sarcastic comment about feeling," he prompted, releasing your face.

You let out a sigh. "You know me well enough to know that my mental health isn't great right now," you started to explain. "I've just got to a point where... It's as if emotions are too much effort. I don't have the energy to feel anything so I just don't. I'm kind of numb."

"That doesn't mean you can hurt yourself so that you can feel something," he continued to tell you off.

"Well, it would be great to feel something. I'm so done with this void of nothingness."

There was a pause then as he looked you up and down, clearly thinking something over in his head.

"It doesn't have to be a bad feeling," Chan then said, not quite looking you in the eye.

"What do you mean?" you asked.

He looked down as his hand ventured onto your thigh and he squeezed lightly. "I'm sure I could make you feel good."

"That's confident," you commented, even though his tone was anything but.

"Do you want me to help?" he asked, sounding almost timid.

You swallowed and fidgeted slightly as you considered his words, but really you wanted to see where this would go. In fact, your libido had been as non-existent as your emotions recently, so you were just impressed that you were seriously thinking about this. You nodded your head, "Yes, please."

Chan's hand ran further up your leg as he kept his eyes on your face, making sure you were still comfortable. While you couldn't bring yourself to meet his gaze, he knew that was nothing to worry about and eye contact was something that you often avoided especially when your mood dropped like this.

He began to run his hand along your clothed core, allowing you both a chance to get used to this new level of intimacy. You couldn't be sure that it wasn't just your currently muted emotion, but this didn't feel as weird as you expected. Subconsciously, you began to bite your lip again.

"Stop it!" Chan reacted immediately.

"Make me," you retorted almost as quickly.

He raised an eyebrow inquisitively, and your expression didn't falter, your lip once again caught between your teeth. He leant in and captured you lips with his. As he'd hoped, you stopped your previous action in order to kiss him back. For a moment you grabbed on to the shoulder of his shirt, holding him in place as both your lips and his hand continued in their actions for a moment.

Once you had both fully started to relax into the moment, Chan pulled away from your lips and slid from the sofa to his knees in front of you. Hooking his fingers in your waistband, he looked up to you for permission. When you gave a nod and raised your hips, he swiftly pulled off your bottoms and underwear and crawled between your legs.

As he drew closer you sat further back in the chair.

"I can't reach you from there, princess," he commented, but made no effort to move you closer again.

"Yeah... I just..." you stuttered actually starting to feel a bit self-conscious.

"It's ok," he told you, rubbing your thighs soothingly. "You can stop me. I just want you to feel good, not uncomfortable."

"It's just weird, that its you seeing my.. seeing me... like this."

He shrugged. "It's different, but I don't care what you look like, that's not why I'm down here."

Feeling reassured by his words, you started to move back towards the edge of the chair. When you were where he wanted you, he wrapped an arm around each of your thighs and leant in to lick you once, taking his time. Breaking away to look up at you, he noticed your head was resting back against the sofa showing no signs of wanting to stop him, so he continued.

As he continued to stimulate your core, it was almost as if your nerves were slowly coming back to life. You just focused on the feeling of Chan's tongue as it explored you. Even though there was now a sensation flowing through you, it still felt muted, it wasn't quite enough.

"Chan," you breathed out.

He pulled back immediately and waited for you to tell him what you needed to say.

"Can you use your fingers too?" you asked, unable to meet his gaze. "I need more."

You missed the smile on his face before he continued, now using his fingers to toy with the parts of you his tongue was neglecting. Eventually, he settled with his mouth over your clit and his fingers pumping in and out of you. You let out a gasp as you felt your high suddenly approaching. His tongue was now working over the perfect, most sensitive spot it could, and you fought the urge to clamp your thighs around his head.

With your breathing becoming quicker and shallower, Chan knew you were nearing the end. His movements intensified, working quickly to push you over the edge. You felt pleasure tingling out across your body as your muscles started to tense. Your eyes screwed up tight as you let out a long, drawn-out moan, an orgasm washing over you.

As Chan slowly came to a stop, and pulled away, he noticed you were shaking slightly. He carefully reclothed your bottom half before sitting next to you and pulling you into a tight embrace.

"Feeling something yet?" he asked, despite already knowing the answer.

"Thank you," was all you could think to reply. "I should return the favour," you added, sitting back to look at him.

"I just wanted you to feel better, as long as you do, I'm happy."

You couldn't quite believe the selflessness of the man sat beside you.

"That doesn't seem fair," you protested.

"You can sort me out next time."

"Next time?" you questioned, your eyebrows raising.

He simply grinned at you. "Unless you don't want to."

You couldn't stop the chuckle that you let out. He was right, you certainly wouldn't mind doing that again. In fact, you were starting to see your roommate in a whole new light, but that was a discussion for another time. For now, you were satisfied with curling up in his embrace.

"I'll be sure to come to you next time I need to feel something," you assured him.

NAVIGATION | STRAY KIDS MASTERLIST

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hotnsweetnprimrose · 18 days ago

Text

Who am I? Well,

I'm part boy part girl, boygirl, the protector and mayor of transgenders! Well. Not that last one, that's not an official position nor would I claim it in a non-joking manner. I'm just a silly t4t slut :P

If you see this blog in sfw areas or engaging with sfw blogs, I’m just there to shitpost and I cannot be bothered to do a main blog switch thing lmao. But if it makes you uncomfortable, that’s okay too! I will also probably reblog sfw memes and such too. A laugh is a powerful thing.

Last Updated: Nov 14 2024

My name is Prim or Clark (switch 'em up when it's been a while). I'm 22, I am trans, non-binary, and bigender (androgyne flavor), and I'm here to fuck and get fucked, at least in what ways are possible over the internet. I'm interested in all genders, but have far more fondness in my heart for my fellow trans folk. :P

I'm a HUGE switch and vers! I am 5'1" and a tad fragile. This makes me better at domming too as well as subbing, I promise.

I prefer they/them pronouns from people who aren't close to me, but once you get to know me, we'll figure it out further :P. I might use it/its for myself while in subspace being a toy, don’t change any of your language in response unless I ask, please!

I strongly believe in trans joy and t4t joy. Transmasc transfem transneutral trans [fill in the blank] we are all so hot and cool. <3 It brings me joy to lend aid whenever and wherever I can. This blog is focused on trans 4 trans first and foremost. Cis people are an afterthought, almost always.

Send me asks if you want! DMs even! I love meeting people! Don't be shy! Unless you're cis, then I have high standards so yes do be shy. And if you’re cis and heterosexual? …. Sorry, if you’re attracted to me, you absolutely cannot be both of those things! I have a discord available after I get dm'd because tumblr dms my behated.

Please don't interact if you're a minor or don't have your age in your bio. I will block you. Immediately. Be patient and you'll have a chance to explore when it doesn't endanger yourself or others.

I also just block liberally if you aren't firmly on the side of t4t solidarity and mutual support. We're all having a hard time out here. (I also will not hesitate break mutuals if you post content that damages my mental health that I can't filter for. This is my safe haven.)

Top Surgery (No Nips!!!! Wahoo!!): 10/16/2024 [if you're seeing this in less than 3 weeks after that date, know my sleep is probably still in disarray and my ability to reply/exist is impaired.]

Anatomical Terms:

clit, tdick, tcock, cunt, pussy = GOOD!

boygirl + any term that's deemed good already= GREAT!!

hole = fine. a bit boring

vagina = BAD! too technical

If I'm dominant in your scenario, call me mastress, mixtress, or captain. Sir is on the table for those who earn it. If I'm submissive in your scenario, call me toy, pet, diminuitive names, or kitten (but only if you make jokes about it :P).

I tag my original things "Prim/Clark~" + [type of post] (space in the middle). My reblogs are tagged by kink/focus when I remember and rambling/my thoughts no matter what. [for specific tags I use for post types/original content, check under the cut for the list] I tag reblogs "primclark rbs" so I can sort them.

More stuff under the readmore including limits, kinks, and other tidbits.

Due to me being bigender (androgyne edition), I try not to reblog posts with "men dni" or "women dni" on them as I feel like that's denying part of my identity. Also out of principle so maybe people will be less broad with those kinds of statements OR remember multigender folks like myself exist. Please don't binarize me, that sucks.

I call the rp/kink fiction/pretend element "kayfabe" because wrestling is y'know. somewhat analogous to kink in some ways!

Setting up my queue to post all the reblogs I drafted then forgot about!!!! Please be patient!!

Not Planning on Going On T Please Don't Act Like I Am [I use tcock and tdick with the t meaning trans or t4t, not testosterone <3]

List time!!!!

g = giving, r = receiving

BIG YESES!!

body worship [g+r]

praise [g+r]

tentacles & monsters [...g+r] (used to be this blog's main theme, but I'm revamping! might still post/rb it though)

bondage & restraint & shibari [g+r]

hypnosis [g+r]

bimbofication & dumbification genre [g+r]

creampies [r+g but that requires a strap and/or imagination]

overstim [g+r]

edging [g+r]

Objectification in the sense of being a toy, a tool, something with a function that does a job [r, unsure about g]

petplay [g+r I am a kitten thank you not a puppy sadly]

gentle gender affirming genderplay/forcemasc/forcefem!!!!!! [g+r]

size kink [I'm so damn short I gotta sexualize it]

DEFINITELY MORE I DON'T REMEMBER OFF THE TOP OF MY HEAD

CONTEXT DEPENDENT (not always a big yes but the version eithout context is a no)

anal [giving ONLY, and only with gloves or a strap]

intox [giving/domming ONLY]

Consensual non-consent but ONLY if it's clearly established as such with the post/fiction (I know I'm rare in that I find the prep and negotiation hot but hey, I love communication and trust!)

Painplay [giving/domming ONLY]

Breathplay [giving/domming ONLY] (picky about this one because safety but also I got asthma so I need to breathe normally)

NOS!!!!

Any kind of pregnancy or pregnancy focused kink

Any sort of inflation (cumflation is case by case)

Breeding with the INTENT of pregnancy (see creampies above, I do love the raw sex and being cum in but pregnancy still makes me dysphoric)

Nipple/breast focused content and/or kink (don't have those anymore and they gave me dysphoria) [except if you want to do like. breast theft. then we can talk about it but I'm super picky it's basically a no] {okay I’m cool doing it for others tits but not Mine}

Detrans kink and misgendering kink (I respect you but not my thing and usually makes me dysphoric. More power to ya though!)

Kinks involving urine, scat [shit], or filth [literal] in any large capacity

Consensual Non-Consent when it's in-universe just non-con

I respect y’all but no f4uxc3st and please tag it!!!! I have it blocked because my brain goes “you want ocd symptoms abt this? Okay!” I don’t even have full ocd just traits n trauma 😔

Nudes. Not without my express and enthusiastic agreement (rare)

[all of this is subject to changes and updates when I remember things not listed here or I learn more about my tastes!]

Original Writing/Pictures Tags:

#Prim/Clark~ Says = non-horny posts/writing/updates (that's what this is tagged as)

#Prim/Clark~ Whimpers = horny writing (submissive focus)

#Prim/Clark~ Smirks = horny writing (dominant focus)

#Prim/Clark~ Moans = horny writing (generally)

#Prim/Clark~ Reveals = if I ever do post suggestive pics (probably no actual pussy in it, tasteful museum style) this is the tag for that. we'll see how I feel.

There are two sideblogs off this blog but they’re both secret. Thank you <3

#t4t nsft #nsft t4t #trans nsft #nonbinary nsft #bigender nsft #pinned post #don't rb #t4t yearning #Prim/Clark~ Says #please do like if you read it and liked it

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xxnashiraxx · 1 month ago

Note

24, 37, 53, 56 and 63 for the writer ask game! 🥰❣️

Thank you for asking, lovely friend! You can find the original post here!

24. Worst Writing Advice Anyone Ever Gave You? I don't have too many instances where I'd specifically reached out and asked, honestly I was trying to hide it as much as possible, haha. But I think the one that sticks out the most, through no particular source, would be to write all the time, constantly. That doesn't help you, it drains you and takes a horrible mental toll on you if you don't regulate yourself and take a break from time to time. I struggle with feeling like I should always be doing something, always be productive, but trust me- taking a nice step back from time to time can actually help waaaay more. 🖤🖤

37. How Do You Choose Where to End a Chapter? This is such a good question- I like to make a slight impact with my chapter endings and I guess, though it really isn't this complicated in my head when I'm doing it, is to play on an emotion. For romance, I could end on angst or longing, for complicated feelings and emotions I like to end on a realization or the struggle of further confusion and its resulting aggravation. I also like to pepper in little crumbs regarding an ongoing plot that hasn't been fully unraveled yet, mostly so the readers feel like they're wrapping their heads around the mysteries along with me. It's fun! But not always super clear cut. 💕

53. How Do You Spend Your Time When it Comes to Fanfiction? Are You Primarily a Fic Reader, Writer, or a Perfect 50/50 Split of Both?

I have alternated and balanced this ratio out as time has gone on! Back when I first started in high school, I was primarily 50/50. Over the years I kind of lost my muse, or I'd write for myself very sparingly (maybe once a year or so, and less than 10k during that period) with things that I found interesting, but I didn't really delve back into the hobby until last July. I was a reader, consuming literally everything Nalu (Fairy Tail) until resuming a long fic I'd planned out 4 years ago and never finished. Unfortunately, or in other words, fortunately for me, I discovered Baldur's Gate, and after Astarion, there was no going back (rip my Alvarez Arc rewrite, may she rest in peace). Now I tend to lean more towards the writer portion since I'm writing my current long fic (With Stars to Fill My Dream) and doing some Astarion Kinktober prompts, but once this month ends and I'm on my longer post schedule, I am hoping to catch up on all the fics I haven't been able to read that are sitting in my browser (I have 30+ tabs open, it's ridiculous...)

56. What's Something About Your Writing That You Pride Yourself On?

Oh boy... I don't say this as a fish for compliments, but I'm not really sure I do anything too different from other people! I have heard a kind of general consensus on my horror aspects, and while I personally think they're extremely tame for my own standards and I know I'm my worst critic and think they can always be improved upon, that's something that really sticks with me. I have never published in the excess that I have now, and it literally means the world to me when anyone comments on anything they think sticks out when they read my fics. If I had to go with anything else, I'd say that my little details have really improved during the time I've been a writer. I've done many little links back to earlier conversations and imagery with callbacks in WSTFMD that I'm very proud of. I just hope it's not too obscure that people miss it!

63. Something You Hate to See in Smut.

Look, I'm really open-minded, and if anything isn't my cup of tea of course I wouldn't seek it out. That should always be established. Glaringly obvious things would be anything illegal, but going into the real bones, I'd probably have to say some "terms" for "areas" on the body being overused or out of place kind of bother me. I really don't have too many crazy ones here, I'm guilty of using some anatomically incorrect situations simply for the sake that it pleases me and I find it hot- nothing more, lol. It doesn't have to be 100% factual, it's fun and that's all that really matters! Unless you're hurting someone or doing something shitty, I really don't have a lot of issues. 😊

Again, tysm!!! 💖💖💖

#get to know me #answered 🦇#ask game

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lord-squiggletits · 1 month ago

Note

For the fic-writers' asks, if you fancy them:

1. What fic of yours would you recommend to someone who had never read any of your work? (In other words, what do you think is the best introduction to your fics?)

4. What detail in We Are The Music-Makers are you really proud of?

7. Any worldbuilding you’re particularly proud of?

17. What highly specific AU do you want to read or write even though you might be the only person to appreciate it?

30. Have you ever written something that was out of your comfort zone? If so, what was it, and how did it affect your approach to writing fic thereafter?

Ask source

1. What fic of yours would you recommend to someone who had never read any of your work? (In other words, what do you think is the best introduction to your fics?)

Is it cheating to say Pay Unto Evil? It's not just because it's my most popular fic by all metrics, the longest project I've written, and the first complete novel I've ever completed, though. I just feel like, particularly in the later chapters, it's a good introduction to the themes that I often write about (mental health/suicidality, searches for meaning, bonds with other people, etc) and is the most complete summary of who I am as a writer in a way.

Though, if someone were to prefer something lighter, I'd honestly recommend An Endless Form Most Beautiful because out of all my fics that I started a year or two ago, I feel like AEFMB is the one that holds up the most strongly w.r.t. prose, characterization, romantic pacing, mystery, and so on. It's also dark, but far less grueling than PUE.

(On that note, it kind of amazes me how many people have told me they found PUE to be more depressing/hard to read than WATMM, considering the latter involves a bittersweet ending w/ major character death.)

4. What detail in We Are The Music-Makers are you really proud of?

Off the top of my head, I'd say that it'd be 1. Orion and Megatron interfacing right after escaping prison and basically cementing their love/bond with each other for the high emotion of the moment. I like how it (and moreso their later interface during their rebellion period) is incredibly romantic and affirming and shows how M/OP uphold each other's best traits, but it's also a little dark in that they're clearly codependent on each other and almost... not sane/well when they're not together.

Or 2. The major character deaths in chapter 6, both how I built up to them and how the characters actually died. That one is because that plot point was one I came up with from the very night I conceptualized WATMM, so in my mind, it had a lot of buildup to it. I knew what was going to happen from the start, and it was one of (if not the) most important climaxes of the story, so I was incredibly keen to be sure that the actual execution of it matched what had been in my mind for a year or more by the time I finally wrote it.

7. Any worldbuilding you’re particularly proud of?

I'm really keen on the stuff I've been cooking for Cityspeaker AU Tarnma as far as the psychology of a Titan goes. Like, Tarn is a sort of eldritch being (already a fun concept in its own right) that has a sort of collectivist mindset; not in a hivemind kind of way, but his sense of scale and level of awareness is so broad, and he's literally a living nest/colony for his smaller species members to live on. The way that anatomical differences pave the way for massive differences in perspective. Hell, the concept has even opened my mind in general to the concept of like... almost insect colony-esque Cybertronian interspecies symbiotic relationships.

On top of all the mechanical and worldbuilding aspects of it, it's also been really fun to ponder how being a Titan would then in turn alter Tarn's characterization. Pharma's characterization is more or less a slightly different angle on what exists in canon, but for Tarn he has this massive shift in perspective that changes a lot. Not least of which is that Tarn is Tarn without having been converted by Megatron, but he's also not Tarn of the DJD that we know in canon, and neither is he Damus/Glitch. So there's just a lot to play around with there in terms of defining Titan!Tarn's key traits as carried over from canon, and how he'd express himself while also being an eldritch being that Pharma needs training to even talk to without dying.

17. What highly specific AU do you want to read or write even though you might be the only person to appreciate it?

IDW1 MegOP role reversal AU in which Megatron is a cop and Orion is a miner. No one else swapped: so for example, Megatron would be around people like Ratchet, Roller, and Senator Shockwave, and Orion would have Impactor and Terminus.

I think it'd be hella interesting to see how differently everything would go if M and OP were in swapped positions. Like as an example, Megatron probably would've been more conscious of stuff like Senator Shockwave putting the Matrix casing in him without asking and be aware that he was being manipulated somehow. Orion would very likely reject Terminus' teachings on how leadership is lonely and you have to cut off all your relationships so you can sit on the heights and do what you need to do. Or then again, maybe Terminus would be a slightly less evil (but still toxic) influence on Orion making him have the same martyr complex he has in canon.

And you could even do further splits from there like how Megatron deals with increasing evidence of corruption in the government, or how Orion would handle killing someone for the first time in the arena. You could fuck around with whether Megatron becomes the Prime or if Orion still does somehow. Honestly, I feel like in this scenario, M and OP would be way more likely to be able to meet peacefully and help each other out because... it just feels right to me that they would be able to see the evils and prevent their moral downfalls, but only when walking in the other's shoes.

30. Have you ever written something that was out of your comfort zone? If so, what was it, and how did it affect your approach to writing fic thereafter?

I think there's a list of fics that've pushed me in some way or another, honestly:

Pay Unto Evil and The Wicked for finding a way to fit reasonably accurate psychology/therapy into a dramatic story, but without falling into purely clinical explanations for things or making it seem "therapy speak" ish

Cityspeaker AU/Un solo cuerpo is currently pushing me on how to accurately translate characterization from canon to an AU that's so wildly divergent from it, given that I'm normally extremely canon compliant and tend to work off canon divergence rather than completely making up a new AU with a different premise and new lore. This is my first plotfic that, imo, could be more accurately described as continuity soup/original continuity rather than being strictly IDW-based (honorable mentions to Let the Poets Pipe of Love for also having this conundrum)

Every single plug and play scene I've written, PWP or plot, for pushing me to try to describe eroticism from an entirely alien perspective without falling back on human-like sticky sex

For Once, Nothing is Burning, because writing a multichapter plot-focused story where there's literally only two characters present and they are each other's sole source of social interaction (and where the POV character is largely stuck in one place for most of the story) is harder than you think it'd be for someone who's been writing Megatron and Optimus as long as I have

Through the bitter, sweetness: Because trying to describe the eroticism of a foot fetish through strictly a written medium was a big challenge for a kink I see as way more visual/tactile and hard to make appealing with words/imagination alone.

No comment on how it's affected my ability to write moving forward because I basically forget about every story I write as soon as it's done AND because my brain is soup and I can barely keep up with real life, much less look back on hobby writing and do some sort of style study/reflection on it.

#squiggle answers #wip stuff #i could prolly think of some things ive learned from writing if i sat long and hard about it

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highlordofkrypton · 4 months ago

Note

I am going to ask way to many of these

2, 3, 5, 7, 20, 31

I want to ask many more but I am restraining myself

PLEASE ASK AS MUCH AS YOU WANT, I'M IN A YAPPING MOOD!!

Linking to the ask game in question!

2. Anything you want to write but feel like you're unable to?

Porn. Straight up raunchy multiple thousand words for just filth. Feelings get in the way, we're all laughing or crying. I think it's an art to be able to focus on just the kinky stuff in a way that's engaging but not too anatomical. That's dirty but in a way that isn't gross, but just right, if you know what I mean?

I love smut, but the mental toll it takes on me to write pure smut is wild. I can usually shoot out 1k words in 15 minutes if I'm focused. It can take me three days to figure out like... where the character should kiss next 😭

3. How would you describe your writing style?

Oh gosh, are we supposed to use real writing terms? I don't know what styles there are out there, but my way of describing my writing would be: lived in.

I always say I'm a lazy writer, so I don't describe anything more than I have to. Usually, I will describe what matters to the character. I live in their shoes at that moment, and when I write, I embody their emotions as well. If the character is crying, my ass is sobbing over the keyboard. If they're angry, I'm rolling my eyes.

I do think that my style also means that the details I do include are a bit miscellaneous. It's natural to describe the setting, and clothes and items, but I feel like if you're really living in a universe, you get attached to the really random, if weird, shit.

5. What's a tag you never want to use for your works even when it applies?

THIS IS A TRICKY ONE!

Okay, let me start off by saying I am both pro and against tags. I think tags are a great way of searching up fics to make sure that you get exactly what you want, but I also think that for some fics it does a disservice to the fic. Disclaimer: I'm new to AO3 and I don't think I tag well enough.

So, on the point of disservice, I'll use my fic for example because I've been thinking about it for a while. So for Wildflowers, I consider it an ACOTAR prequel, first and foremost. While Tamsand is the main ship, I think by tagging the ship, it does the fic a disservice because the world is so rich, it doesn't just focus on the ship. There's so much more I want to gush about with people, and I find it answers so many complaints I see from ACOTAR fans who were disappointed by the rest of the books, but people will stop at the ship tag.

Also both characters are so polarizing in the fandom that if you hate one, you won't give this fic a shot which is FAIR but one of my goals was to convince readers to fall for the one they might not have thought they would, but yeah, I played myself with that idea.

I also tag to be safe than sorry so not to trigger anyone, but I'm very much a reader that is in for the ride no matter what, and I feel like tags can be spoilers, etc. Still, I do want to be respectful of others, but for me, I worry that if I tag 'SA' the fic might be misconstrued as it focuses on that topic whereas it's one scene that impacts later character development.

I wouldn't use the term never tag, but that's how I feel about tagging.

7. Your favourite AO3 tag.

Clark Kent/Bruce Wayne.

That's it. That's the whole tag LMAO.

20. Do you work on a single project or many at the same time? How does that work for you?

I've tried both and HOLY CRAP, I'm bad at multi-tasking. A SINGLE PROJECT. DO NOT LET ME START OTHER SHIT AT THE SAME TIME, I WLL FORGET TO UPDATE THE OTHER PROJECT.

Hyperfocus or bust, apparently.

31. What was the most difficult fic to write (but in the end you made it)?

Pick any of my smut oneshots, except Regrets and that is probably one of them.

I would say that my Lucien x Elain (Elucien) fic Warmth was difficult because I knew the setting and how I was gonna start it, but I don't know Elain very well (I haven't finished reading the series) and I don't write Lucien enough. It's one thing to know the character, but another thing to know how they are when they are being intimate. That was really tricky.

I always try not to re-use the same tropes, positions, expressions and wording in my smut, but since I don't write enough of it, to me, it reads like I'm writing more or less the same and... I hate that.

MY GOD I RAMBLED SO MUCH I'M SORRY

I STILL LIKED IT IT WAS FUN!!

#frick i love these ask games #writing #writer asks #my asks

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canmom · 9 months ago

Text

The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere: 013-032

Previously: 000-012, spinoff post about entropy [all Flower posts]

Time for more flower...

youtube

...no, not that flower!

Unless...?

Welcome back to my liveblog of sorts for web novel The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere by @lurinatftbn! Shout out to the Flower discord for giving me such a kind welcome. You're making me want to go all out on this liveblog, but, I musn't...! So I'm going to try to just comment on things that jumped out as especially noteworthy rather than write down everything that went down.

Especially since... a lot happened in these chapters. We have a perfect androgyne tree thing! Magical duels! Questionable student/teacher relationships! Steamed hams! Intense political arguments at dinner! Metafictional assurance of fair play! Prosognostic events! Transgender AIs! And of course........

a murder!!!!!

...ok that one was kinda obvious. But the first body has hit the floor! I don't feel like I have nearly enough information yet to start speculating about who might have dunnit.

That's a lie. It was definitely Kinzo Ushiromiya. That bastard.

So, from the top!

We're introduced to a few of the members of the Order, with by far the most screen time going to Su's mentor and ah, kinda-girlfriend? Neferuaten. And like, damn, lot going on there!

Before I get into the meat of that - first the bit where I search a character's name on Wikipedia. Neferuaten's name is most likely a reference to an Egyptian female king/pharaoh (a rank that's apparently distinct, conceptually, from a queen) variously called Ankhkheperure-Merit-Neferkheperure, Waenre, and Aten Neferneferuaten. Most often shortened to just Neferneferuaten.

Her exact historical identity seems to be a little unclear - she may or may not be the same person as Nefertiti for example. Whoever she was, she apparently reigned for a couple of years around 1334–1332 BCE, and was then succeeded by the famous child king Tutankhamun. Or maybe Smenkhkare came in between them? Seems to be a matter of some debate. Girl really needed to leave a few more vast and trunkless legs of stone so we can figure this stuff out.

In any case, this version of Neferuaten goes way back with Su. Her introduction is to launch a magical attack on our poor girl while she's contemplating the 'everblossom'. One of those classic 'master surprise attacks the student to see how much they've learned' deals. This servers as a fine exposition for the exact mechanics of magical duels.

Zettai! Ummei! Mokushiroku!

Let's briefly note how magical duels and magic works here, since it seems like it will be very relevant later.

The more we learn about magic, the more explicit is that this system is not some natural property of the universe, but something that's designed by the mysterious Ironworkers. It seems like it's kind of an API to the Ironworker admin console. The Ironworkers wanted to make it difficult to do magic on human bodies, and therefore they designed a system for detecting what is 'human', based on three heuristics - anatomical, motion and neurological.

Humans, being the freaky little hackers that we are, of course set about figuring out how to bypass this system, and created standardised means, consisting of three spells, termed [x]-beguiling arcana. In a sense the three criteria are something like three 'hitpoints': the primary way to win a duel is to get all three spells off, thus making your opponent vulnerable to magic.

To achieve this, you can either speak the words of a spell or sign them by drawing them with your fingers - i.e. one way or the other express the appropriate string of symbols. This is risky because if you're interrupted at the wrong time, your spell can backfire and blow up, and getting a spell right requires precise pronunciation and also rapid mental maths. So the general 'gameplay' of magical duels involves attempting to disrupt the opponent's focus and aim, while fast-casting the spells that are most familiar to you.

We're introduced to a few spells that could be useful in battle, such as

Matter-Shifting (telekinesis spell with a geometric bent, used to move a cube of dirt to act as a smokescreen),

Matter-Annihilating (deletes stuff),

Entropy-Denying (essentially a shield that freezes objects and fluids in relative motion),

Air-Thrusting (creates a shockwave air blast),

Light-Warping (fucks up the light for visual cover),

World-Deafening (mutes all sound, which can interrupt casts)

Entropy-Accelerating (disrupts coherency, causing rapid aging-like effects - can be used on a 'higher plane' to disrupt all magic in an area)

Entropy-Reversing (rewinds matter along its path of motion - reference to entropy here seems a tad dubious but w/e)

It's clearly a pretty carefully thought out system - I appreciate that it's approached from the point of view of someone trying to exploit the shit out of the system and figure out what the real meta would be. It does kinda seem like if you got the drop on a wizard and shot them with a sniper rifle they'd be toast, but we'll see later that much more powerful weapons than mere chemical firearms exist in this world, and presumably in a combat situation everyone would have entropy-denying (or equivalent) shields up, so maybe that's a moot point.

Anyway, we are later informed by the closest thing to authorial voice that everything we're told here about magic can be assumed to be axiomatically true, similar to the red text in Umineko. Which pretty heavily foreshadows that this is going to be on the test, if you like!

the magical metaphysics

With apologies to Neferuaten, who will get more detailed comments shortly, there are some other big revelations about magic and the nature of this world that I should talk about while we're on the subject of magic!

In the last post I wondered whether casting magic is an innate quality or a 'skill issue' situation. It turns out the answer is sorta 'neither'. In fact, it's something that has to be unlocked, using special equipment and a particular ritual. The cost of this ritual is not yet entirely spelled out, but we definitely get an inkling. It's rather ominously implied by this exchange in chapter 22:

"We're supposed to want to save people, to make the world better. To defend a bunch of people who practically committed murder--" "You're a murderer too, dour girl." I stopped, and blinked. It took me some moments to process the words. They'd come from Lilith, who now seemed to have finished with her dessert. Now she was just slowly swirling her spoon around in the last remnants of the chocolate sludge on the plate and, occasionally, dipping a finger into her cream bowl and licking little bits of it up. Her expression was irritated, but disconnected. "All arcanists are," she said. "It's how it happens. So having fights over moral high ground like this is very stupid and annoying. Please stop."

In the same chapter, Su uses something called an 'acclimation log', in which she records her 'association' with a series of diary entries from her childhood self. It all suggests that Su's present consciousness has somehow taken over the body of another character, who we could maybe call original!Su.

A few chapters later, we find out what's the deal with prosognostic events. In fact we get a pretty extensive exposition. It turns out that iron is magical in this universe, providing access to higher dimensions, FTL and all sorts of shit. However, because the Mimikos and other worlds are running on a 'substrate' of iron - sort of like a simulation - we are told this is why they can't recursively include iron within. And since the human body includes a certain amount of iron (most notably, in the haemoglobin protein in red blood cells), it is not possible to fully realise the human body inside these artificial worlds.

a self-referential quibble

Here's how Su puts it:

A substrate cannot exist within itself. That sounds awkward when I put it so directly, but it's not too hard to understand if you think about it in abstract-- A foundation obviously can't support another foundation of equal weight and nature, because… Well, it would make nonsense of the whole premise. A book is a device for storing information, but it cannot contain within its letters everything about itself and what it contains, because that is already more than it contains. A box cannot hold another box of equal size, unless it is bent or otherwise changed. A mind cannot hold another mind…

On the face of it, this seems on the face of it... not entirely true, at least in some domains? You can run a virtual machine program on a computer, representing any particular combination of hardware and software, which is from the perspective of software 'on the inside', essentially indistinguishable from a computer running on 'bare metal' hardware. The only real difference is that operating the virtual machine has some computational overhead, so it will be slower. The more virtual machines you nest, the slower it gets.

But 'from the inside', the only way to tell which layer of virtual machine you're on would be to refer to some kind of external clock signal (which can trivially be spoofed) and notice that it's running slower than it should!

We could also mention here the subject of quines, which are programs which print their own source code.

Let's consider Su's examples. The book that completely describes its contents might be able to get around this problem in a similar fashion to a quine, by exploiting redundancy and self-reference.

For example, let's try creating a string that completely describes its own content, using a quine-style technique.

This string begins with a sentence followed by its quotation, and then 100 letter ws; the sentence is: "This string begins with a sentence followed by its quotation, and then 100 letter ws; the sentence is: " wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

In fact the '100 letter ws' could literally be the entire string that follows. Suppose the length of the 'real content' of the book is S, and the length of the rest of the 'metadata sentence' describing properties of the book is M; then the total length of the book is 2M+3S.

You can add as much additional information to the 'metadata' string as you like, provided you quote it again afterwards. If you don't like having a book be three times the length it needs to be, you could compress the 'real content' string using an algorithm like DEFLATE, and include instructions in the 'metadata' on how to decompress it. (Text tends to compress really well.) This is where we run up into notions probably all too familiar to rats, or indeed anyone who recently read Seth Dickinson's new novel Exordia, such as Kolmogorov complexity.

But... I think this might well be intentional. Given how common notions like 'stacks of simulations' and 'self-reference' are in rat space, I suspect we may be being misled! The 'rules' of the game - more on that in a moment - say that Su won't deliberately lie to us, and won't withold information without saying so, but her perceptions could be mistaken. Maybe she's been given a false explanation of why the world works the way it does.

It's also totally possible that while the general point (you can't contain a thing in itself) may have some edge cases, the specific instance - you can't build a universe on a giant higher-dimensional iron spike and still have that universe contain iron - may still be true. We don't know the first thing about building universes using magic iron after all.

anyway... the Deal with Prosognisia!

The Ironworkers had a hacky workaround to the 'no iron' rule: they had a few tens of thousands of preserved human bodies on board their Tower of Asphodel. Asphodel, incidentally, is a genus of flower, said to carpet the Asphodel Meadows, one of the three divisions of the realm of Hades. (In their game, Supergiant decided to convert it into a lava zone.) It looks rather pretty actually!

So, they were able to instantiate these bodies in their rebuilt worlds by sort of making them into a reference to one of these stored human bodies. Here's Su again, chapter 26:

Some human bodies, or at least the impression of them and the iron within, had been preserved as part of the Tower, frozen in a timeless place. And because of that, it was eventually discovered it was possible for them to exist in the artificed planes as a sort of stable paradox. After all, while a book can't exist within itself, it can still reference other stuff it does contain internally, even if it makes for somewhat awkward reading. A few tweaks and workarounds solved the problem of the iron associated with that human body staying a part of it, and just like that, human beings were walking something at least akin to the earth once again. However, this only permitted replicas of those bodies within the Tower to exist. The creation of new ones remained impossible, and births not incubated by anima taken by the same mechanism would inevitably fail. And there were far fewer preserved bodies than minds; scarcely more than ten thousand or so for each party.

So every human born in the Mimikos is forked from one of these human bodies. For... mysterious reasons, if you recognise that someone nearby is forked from the same body as you, you both straight up die. If you touch such a person (a 'contact paradox') it's even worse, and all the iron in your body disappears, leaving behind a 'greenish sludge', which seems to be a severe enough disaster to cause deaths of nearby people as well.

(This is a little surprising given that the iron in the human body is only about 60 parts per million by mass, but it would kinda destroy your blood's ability to carry oxygen, so it would definitely be pretty fatal.)

The 'distinction treatment' we heard about is able to mitigate the risks somewhat - with quick medical intervention and time magic, it's possible to allow the people involved to make a full recovery. An interesting wrinkle is that it's implied either Ophelia or new character Balthazar is trans, because normally people of the same gender can't share an upstream body.

That definitely leads to a very fascinating fucked up medical emergency scene, but the reason I'm discussing it now is because it's got bearing on this big-deal question of 'what's so fucked up about arcanists anyway'...

so what's so fucked up about arcanists anyway?

Having finally answered one of the major questions, we can start zeroing in on another. In a flashback scene in chapter 30, we learn that the 'original' bodies have innate access to the magic API, but when you're given a distinct identity at birth you quickly lose it. To have your sv_cheats 1 restored, you have to go through a process that, it would seem, downloads a new mind into your head from one of those original bodies...

The man sat back a little in his chair, crossing his legs idly. "It's intimidating in concept, but please do understand that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, there are no observable effects whatsoever. Around half of the individuals who go through it don't even lose consciousness, and of the other, four out of five don't report any abnormalities when they reawaken. And even of the remaining 10%, the symptoms are negligible for nine out of ten-- Fleeting false memories, minor alterations in temperament that self correct, usually in under a day..." "And the others?" I inquired. "The remaining one percent." He considered this question for a few moments, obviously choosing his words carefully. "The technical term for the rare cases where confusion persists in the longer term is pneumaic assimilation failure. We have a program for treatment, using a combination of various phychological and medical means. It's time-tested. It brings people back to themselves quickly, usually within only only a few months at most." 'Confusion.' 'Brings people back to themselves.' I wasn't feeling fond of the way he couched everything in euphemism. It wasn't helping. "What do you mean by 'it brings people back to themselves'..?" I furrowed my brow. "They just... Forget everything?" "Not immediately," he said. "But they lose a sense of association with... Well, with anything that shouldn't be there, and that leads those memories and feelings to fade over time." He smiled. "The human mind is very adept at excising anything it judges to be out of place. All it needs is a push in the right direction."

The new mind tends to rapidly adjust to its new context, connecting to the memories stored in the body and assuming continuity of identity. But in rare cases it fails! Nuts! And we can infer poor Su appears to be one such case.

Presumably this is what Lilith is referring to when she says that all arcanists are murderers. It's not clear if there is continuity of consciousness when you get /mode +o'd - since you (usually) inherit the memories it is perhaps hard to say whether such a thing is meaningful.

In any case, Su's mega-guilt complex, the reason she seems to want to visit the mysterious egomancer Samium, seems to be at least partly that she's evicted the previous consciousness to inhabit this body. I don't think that's the whole story though! Her grandad seems to be involved somehow too. I don't think Su is literally the reincarnation of her grandad, because it seems unlikely that he'd be motivated to carry out ego suicide like this.

introducing teacher mommy

All those major revelations aside, let's get back to the subject of Neferuaten, aka 'Grandmaster', Su's old mentor in entropic thanatomancy. She quickly establishes herself as one of the most likeable of the inner circle of the Order - she's funny, understanding, generally affable and a little self-effacing. Su definitely puts her on a massive pedestal - though other characters such as Ran find her a little more sussy.

I gotta say, the author is really good at writing old academics. Each one of them comes across as strongly believable, distinctive, motivated and flawed characters. I'll talk a bit about the others in a bit but first let's talk age gap yuri! lmao

Anyway, at the end of chapter 20 we get this:

Then she leaned over and, in an impulsive, almost casual gesture, kissed me on the lips. Before turning, heading to the exit.

'Huh!' thinks the reader. 'That sure is an unusual thing for someone's teacher to do.'

It is quite a few chapters later before Su gets round to telling us a bit more about what's going on...

After that, we met outside of the university more and more often, her becoming sort of a source of emotional support. At some point, I became aware that what was happening was probably quite inappropriate. It's not like I was underage, having turned 25 two years prior, but she was my professor. But I'd been bad at making friends in both of... Well, in both my past contexts, and I'd felt so lonely living in Tem-Aphat, away from Ran and any reminders of the resolutions we'd made. And it all somehow felt so natural. Things got out of hand. One day, I'd had a fight with my father over the logic bridge, and had got a little drunk when I was due to see her. I don't know exactly what I was thinking, but I did something uncharacteristic of me. Inappropriate. But she didn't respond in the way I'd expected. To my shock, she didn't act like it was inappropriate at all. It wasn't as if we ended up dating. That would never have worked, and I was pretty sure she was past wanting that sort of thing anyway. On some levels, she always kept her distance. But it became something we did together, an avenue of private expression that became part of her support for me - and mine, eventually for her.

Su then expresses a bunch of guilt over the whole thing. (Not least because it's a 'selfish' thing she's doing in a body that, implicitly, she doesn't think of as hers.)

The issue of age here is interesting lol. Definitely my gut reaction, and probably the one the story is aiming to elicit, is to be a bit 'wuh oh' by all this, maybe think of Makima wrapping Denji round her finger. That said, by vastly expanding the range of human ages, it's definitely poking pretty hard at our intuitions about what's 'appropriate'. The vibes are like... the students are constantly referred to as 'the kids' by the hundreds-year-old wizards. I don't think we're told Su's current age, but if she was 27 in this flashback, and in the present she says a 29 year old computer is close in age to her, so I would guess currently early 30s. Neferuaten's age is not stated at this point but given her position she's def a few hundred years up there.

The vibe though is that Su is infatuated with someone who has vastly more emotional maturity and experience of the world, not to mention social power over her, and that person is all too happy to encourage it.

The way Su tells it, it sounds like this fling went pretty ok for them? But I definitely feel like things are probably not gonna stay ok, given how clearly the 'inappropriate' nature of this relationship has been foregrounded!

Dark yuri is literally one of the things I'm here for, so I'm looking forward to the fireworks lmao.

Anyway, besides that, we get a bit of a sense of Neferuaten's ideology. She actually shares a lot of Su's skepticism about the viability of the whole immortality project. She makes a big point of making sure the gang get a sense of the order's culture and rituals, apparently viewing this as a chance for their project to be judged by outsiders for the first time. On a personal level, she raises the issue of if the project might be able to save only the young - whether they might be the last humans to not become immortal. Nef's attitude seems to be that she'd be good with that - something she clashes with Kam over.

Otherwise, she's kinda... world-weary, I suppose you could say. She seems to look at the firey youngsters with an attitude along the lines of 'wish I still had that'. She does love to perform to an audience, asking leading questions to set up some lesson or another.

She's a fun character, I enjoy reading her a lot.

Also she seems to have made a sapient AI in the basement! Only everyone says it's definitely not sapient - it is in some sense not agentic, it can't change its motivation, allegedly. Still, it definitely has a 'passing the Turing test' sorta vibe.

don't mention the war

Besides Nef, we get introduced to a few of the remaining members of the class, and also the masters of the Order. Of note is Bardiya, the former revolutionary. He's a very 'speak his mind without preamble' sort of character, which can land him in hot water.

So, returning to Chapter 22, we have a really juicy scene in which a dinner conversation gets very heated after Bardiya mentions his role in the war, provoking a political row with Durvasa, a member of the order. It's a really well observed social dynamics scene - the characters dancing around the topic and the way a row is almost avoided, and then it isn't - Bard's determination, Kam's brown-nosing, Su getting drawn in against her better judgement in a deeply relatable way.

Thanks to this convo, we get a sense of the events of the revolution! So, as @nightpool helpfully informed me, I actually got things a bit mixed up in my rough timeline last time. The 'gerontocrats' were not a feature of the distant-past imperial era - rather it's a figure identified as an oppressor class by a very recent movement, still within living memory for even the youngsters.

The events broadly seem to reflect something like the Paris Commune. There was a famine under the hand of a 'Meritist' city council, killing thousands, which led to a popular uprising let by a 'paritist' movement. The paritists executed a handful of people and redistributed property based primarily on age, intending to break the power of the 'gerontocrats' who had neglected the 'younger generations' by hoarding resources. The Administration overseeing the whole world alliance then cracked down hard - deploying a poison gas that, though it was intended to be nonlethal, turned out to have unexpected lethal side effects.

In the aftermath of the revolution, it seems many reforms were made - besides relaxing the rules on what magic is banned, they changed the equation of scarcity so that food could be replicated more readily? Little unclear on this part. Su mentions that the situation is different now than it was when the Alliance was built, with the material scarcity mostly gone, but clearly there was a famine in recent memory.

Anyway, there is naturally a big generational divide over this. The older generations lived through some pretty fucked-up sounding wars, called things like the 'Great Interplanar War', and in the aftermath built a political system that was supposed to secure peace. (c.f. League of Nations, UN). Although she broadly sympathises with the revolutionaries, Su seems to extends the older generation a fair bit of understanding for having built this system and fearing what would happen if it were destroyed. Though the most relativist view comes from the mouth of Neferuaten:

"I think a common problem with inter-generational communication is an inability to really convey context and scope," Neferuaten said. I noted she didn't actually convey if Kam's understanding of what her point had been was correct or not. "Someone who lived through the Interluminary Strife might tell a young person from the modern day that they have no understanding of hunger, only for the latter to stubbornly retort that they lived through that Ikaryonic famine that preluded the civil dispute… Except that one was a catastrophe that lasted decades and killed tens of millions, while the other slew less than a thousand." She sighed. "People try to relate the experiences of others to their own lives in order to contextualize their understanding of the world and how it might be bettered, but those second-hand experiences inevitably become caricatures, conveying no useful truths. It makes me wonder if human beings, both young and old, are capable of learning from history at all."

Around here is raised the question of a person's political development - the arc from a young person's anger at the state of the world and determination to tear it aside for something better, against the resignation of an older person who fears losing what is already there, however flawed. (We might note of course that there exist young conservatives and old radicals. Circumstances have a lot to do with it.)

Of course, with this whole 'gerontocrat' business at stake already, the mission of the Order hoping to achieve immortality is naturally cast in a dubious light. Fun conflict. On the one hand we have 'can immortality be achieved, and what will it cost', on the other 'who will benefit from it, if it is'! So much narrative force is obtained by politicising this, attaching it to characters with personal motivations and histories, instead of leaving it up to an abstract 'living forever good/bad'.

But it's not all political debates and shagging your teacher...

Over the course of these chapters we get a sense of what the order's been up to!

Let's talk flowers. Just prior to the meeting with Nef, Su comes across an enormous freaky plantlike thing. This turns out to be an experiment to create a being that can survive in even the most extreme environments, like the bottom of the ocean - an attempt to demonstrate that immortality is possible at least in principle. This lifeform is termed the Nittaimalaru or 'Everblossom'. It seems like a pretty good candidate for being the story's eponymous Flower - symbolically, the underwater immortality-granting plant that appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

It's worth noting here that 'indefinite lifespan' is actually not entirely impossible in our natural world. I was talking about this with a friend who raised some interesting points:

reading the first post i wanna bring up that while the concept of cancer is fundamental to any multicellular organism the presence of cancer as a problem is actually pretty niche. same with telomere degradation, which is a purposeful anti-cancer measurement. like pretty much all perennial plant life is capable of absolute immortality. while the lobster grows forever until it can no longer use its legs to push its great weight along the sand towards food, if a tree overshoots its growth it's more than happy to break off its unnecessaries, though with both of them at a certain point it's always good to have help after a while. as mammals we're very obsessed with the concept of like ending death as this sort of ultimate goal, prime directive, whatever, when that shit was deliberately turned on in the first place (assigning intent to evolution sue me), because in terms of cost benefit it gave us something in return that we as students of medicine or biology are still not fully grasping.

After a little more discussion:

@play-now-my-lord wrote:

even if humans weren't causing climate change, climactic fluctuations over centuries upend a lot of what is normal in specific areas. if the people on a farmstead in bronze age sweden lived 500 years, the methods and habits they internalized when they were young would habitually be incorrect for the conditions as they existed, the weather, the soil

other friend:

that's how most trees die in the end the root system operates as a weak parallel to the tree's neurons, with a more physiological bent than say our chemical one. patterns around balance, nutrient access, hydrology, and wind are ingrained and learned over centuries and the more regular/consistent that cycle is the more a root will grow. if a tree's roots are built around buttressing from a wind tunnel due to forest conditions and the trees around it fall for whatever reason, it has to relearn what used to be a hundred year old certainty that it needs to lean against the westerly gale every winter, etc. - this is generally a pretty brittle process altogether when it comes to the base of the plant n stuff

some caveats:

should be noted i overlooked a lot of nuance about perennial mortality, like, some plants are more used to investing into survival than others i'm thinking of like how beech bark disease doesn't affect the roots of the beech, so the trunk dies but new shoots continue to grow out and eventually catch the disease and repeat, so the plant is essentially still immortal but forced into a perpetual state of adolescence. but i think for a great number of trees if the tree falls it just goes "eh the rot consumes us all " and dies

Among mammals, we could also note the cancer resistance of the naked mole rat, which loves to defy all sorts of generalisations (also one of the only non-arthropod eusocial animals). They're not exactly immortal, living around 37 years on average, but their chance of dying at any given year is pretty much flat rather than increasing with age.

Of course, longevity and resilience are different things. Nef mentions the resilience of tardigrades as an inspiration. As far as their experiment goes, the 'everblossom' is not an entirely successful experiment, requiring twice-yearly maintenance to address an imbalance.

Given how prominently it features, and the invocation of Gilgamesh, it seems pretty damn likely that the everblossom will in fact be a key to immortality, or something like it.

Religion exists after all!

Other parts of the facility are also pretty funky. We learn that it was patterned after the old headquarters of the Order, which was destroyed when they got found out; that headquarters was built in an old church compound. What sort of thing does a church worship in this world? Actually it's kinda goffic as fuck. Makes Catholicism look downright tame. It's a polytheistic religion and the deities involved are figures like this...

In the center of the circle was a statue, about 8 feet high, and of the kind of ornate-but-formulaic design that characterized art from the Second Resurrection. It depicted a tall, skinny woman, though her two sides, left and right, were very different in nature. The left was beautiful and youthful in a generic, almost ethnicity-less way, dressed in the most delicate of silk peploi, with long and unrealistically tidy curls falling elegantly over her shoulders. Her lip was curled into a gentle half-smile, kind but slightly mysterious, teasing. Her right... Well, her right, to say the least, was very different. On that side, she appeared to be skinless, although it was hard to tell with a statue; I recalled it being a matter of hot debate among the boys in my class back in secondary school. It was possible she was simply incredibly emaciated, or that there were supposed to be growths - like scales - erupting from her flesh. Her hair was made up of hateful, eyeless wyrms, biting and hissing at each other, and her flesh, which was naked save for a tasteful rag covering one area in particular, was covered in numerous stab wounds, bleeding openly. As for her face, it was grim and wide eyed. Mournful and contemptful both. I recognized the figure depicted at once; I passed one of her temples whenever I went to the distribution hall to pick up groceries. This was Phui, Dying Goddess of Love Given Way To Anguish, one of the eleven deities of the now largely defunct Ysaran-Inotian Pantheon.

In the stories, Phui was the third-to-last of the gods to fall during the end of the world, who attempted to take her own life after the death of her lover. But the breaking of the heavens had left her unable to die, meaning that no matter how she much she cut into her flesh, how much she starved herself of food and drink, reprieve would never come. Only relentless, unceasing pain, and grief for that which she had lost.

Metal album cover ass-religion, I'm into it.

The mysterious Ironworkers seem to have really drummed into the population of their new Mimikos that there was a very nice world once, and they'd better be damn sad about what happened to it. However, religion has waned in the present day, and it seems most characters are atheists of some sort.

What did happen to it, anyway? It's referred to as 'the collapse' with a lowercase c; I noticed an author's comment where the author says it's not a case of just a name for the apocalypse. A few people in the comments started speculating about false vacuum collapse. This is a physics thing. Basically, a remote possibility exists in the standard model of particle physics that the existence of matter in our universe could be in a kind of local energy minimum, but it would be possible for it to locally fall into a true minimum, creating a kind of bubble that expands at the speed of light and just deletes everything. We're pretty sure that isn't true though. If it did happen we literally would not be able to do anything... at least in a universe without FTL.

(Curiously, Su mentions special relativity at one point. With all the funky cosmology stuff I kinda wondered if special relativity is still real, but apparently it is! Electromagnetism has been mentioned as still being a thing a couple of times now, so rather than being totally absent it seems like the physics is a bit different, with an electric shock being sufficient to cause radiation poisoning.)

The fair play interlude

In between chapters 22 and 24 we get a curious little interlude called Intermission ∞ 1. The introduction presents it as something that is happening on one of the 'higher planes', translated into terms we can understand, which is grounds for it to get metafictional.

Two entities, calling themselves the Playwright and the Director, discuss the direction of the story so far before laying out the version of fair-play mystery rules this story will be operating under. They are as follows:

THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE PROTAGONIST IS ALWAYS TRUTHFUL

ALL EVENTS FOLLOW THE RULES OF CONVENTIONAL REALITY, UNLESS INDICATED OTHERWISE

ALL SYSTEMS INTRODUCED CANNOT BREAK THEIR OWN RULES AS DEFINED WITHIN THE NARRATIVE, UNLESS INDICATED OTHERWISE

I made them red because it feels like they would be red in Umineko.

Further clarifications and caveats allow that Su can withold information (for dramatic tension or whatever I guess) but she'll always tell us when she does, and an example of 'system introduced' is the magic duel sequence: the characters know accurately how magic duels work.

The two entities are performing this story for some sort of audience, and during their double-act credit themselves with control over the direction of the scenario, sometimes disagreeing. (Another one, the chorus, enters at the end.) Probably best not to think too hard about what that implies for our characters on the 'main' level of the story being 'real', it's probably just a cute bit to take the audience aside without completely breaking the fourth wall. Then again... who knows!

What this means is that my concerns about professed liar Su being an unreliable narrator are unfounded. It's still a limited POV, so Su could fail to notice things or be deceived, but she's not trying to pull one over on us.

I bring this up because...

There's been a mordah!

So, in the last chapter I read - strictly the beginning of a new arc - we find someone dead!

Well, this was kinda foreshadowed earlier. The chef disappeared, the assistant chef was knocked out by magic, and some kinda crazy time magic happened in the pantry - with the heavy implication that someone was trapped in some kinda hyperbolic time pantry for many years. At least they'd have plenty to eat..? The characters don't pick up on the implication of the tally marks and write it off as a stasis field malfunction.

So, it was natural to suspect the cook is dead. Indeed they are: Su finds a mysterious note in the book given to her by an academic at the school as a parting gift, warning her not to trust the inner council - inexplicably written two years prior and warning her to check the archive in a certain position. Investigating this, she and Kam find a secret armoury room. In there is a tunnel, and at the bottom, the cook appears to have committed suicide, leaving a suicide note vaguely implying the Order is up to some seriously sussy shit.

Of course, Kam and Su immediately suspect foul play. But they also both have ulterior motives for coming to this conference, so they agree to keep it hush-hush. This is definitely a great idea that won't get everyone killed by Beatrice... I mean uh. Whoever the murderer is.

The obvious question is, who dunnit? And why? Unfortunately, we don't really have alibis for most of the characters. Many of the inner circle haven't even shown up on screen yet. So there's a lot of people who it might have been.

More suspects! More suspects!

I haven't even mentioned several of the characters. We also have Sacnicte, steward of the house - she's an arcanist, and Su is kinda insanely horny for her aesthetically appreciative, in a way that the other characters notice and are literally like 'I don't see it'... which makes me wonder if we have a situation where someone has fucked with her perceptions. She's very down to earth and casual.

Her name is probably a reference to the Maya princess Sac Nicté, meaning 'white flower', who according to legend was involved in the migration of the Itza people from the Chichen Itza. Mind you the article I'm getting this from is kinda horrendous; the sole source is in Spanish and appears to be some random website from 2004.

Among the older generation, we have Theo's dad, Linos. He is a generally affable chap, kinda socially awkward (he's responsible for prolonging the political discussion by a botched apology) but otherwise not particularly standing out among the Order members.

Linos or Linus is another Greek name with a few referents.

The Order member who really does stand out is Anna, or in full, Amtu-hedu-anna. She's the one who's properly old, having dodged many of the 'kills people around 500' bullets of this setting, and not especially inclined to make nice. Very 'straight to the point' kinda lady. We meet her fairly briefly - Ran seems to have landed in her good books.

This one really took some digging! It seems to be based on Enheduanna, who was a Sumerian high priestess of Nanna and the oldest named author in history, credited for tablets like The Exaltation of Inanna, although it seems there's some debate over whether she definitely wrote them. Her rank in Sumerian was Entu, and I could fully believe 'amtu hedu anna' is a different transliteration of 'Entu Hedu Anna'.

As mentioned above, we're introduced to two logic engines, Sekhmet and Eshmun, built respectively by Neferuaten and (the as yet unseen) Hamilcar. Sekhmet has more biological components and wants to be a human. She wants to be human, and she's also expressed a distinct pronoun preference and gender id, which I suppose makes her trans. Eshmun is a more traditional logic engine with a lot of cogs; Sekhmet calls him 'big brother', so I guess he gets he pronouns from that.

Sekhmet is of course named for the Egyptian lion-headed warrior/medicine goddess. Eshmun is a Phoenician god of healing. Hamilcar was a name used by a number of Carthaginians, mostly generals.

Ezekiel is another one of the student gang. We haven't seen much of him yet, so I don't have a lot to say about him. Abrahamic prophet.

Balthazar is a student from another school - another thanatomancer in fact. He's something like the protégé of Zeno, and his presence is Zeno's condition for having this whole affair go ahead. He's got the same eyes as Ophelia, and Zeno failing to do his paperwork and allowing to happen is a big deal. But Zeno's kind of a bigshot so it might not come to anything. Anyway, Su is kind of suspicious towards Balthazar, but he takes it all in good humour.

Balthazar was one of the three magi in Christian mythology. There were a few Zenos, but the best known is surely Zeno of Elea, who came up with his famous "we need to invent calculus to solve this" paradoxes around infinite sums.

Yantho is a member of the Order staff, who was cooking when whoever did shenanigans in the kitchen... did shenanigans in the kitchen. His roast was ruined, but sadly he was too unconscious to order fast food and pass it off as his cooking. He can't speak and communicates by writing on his tablet.

The name crops up as an obscure Maya deity, part of a trio of brothers with Usukun and Uyitzin, but I can't find any source that seems particularly definitive.

Samium is an old egomancer, whose presence is a secret that only Su and Ran are in on. Su wants to speak to him, for reasons that are probably to do with finding out if he can restore 'original!Su' into her body, or maybe resurrecting her grandfather, or something?

...is that everyone? I think that's everyone. At some point I probably need to make an Umineko-style character screen lol.

can we solve anything yet?

Since this chapter is the beginning of the arc, I suspect there's more info to divulge before we can think about trying to solve this one. And, given the Umineko inspo, the problem to solve probably isn't simply 'whodunnit' but something more fundamental to the nature of this world.

Still, it seems all but spelled out explicitly that current!Su failed to properly assimilate into her body after she became an arcanist. Her grandfather's final 'kindness' is less clear. Her intentions with Samium... I've mentioned the obvious theories about already. She's mega guilty about overwriting this poor girl and has decided the only course of action is to try and restore the mind that inhabited her body originally. But I don't think we have the whole picture just yet, because I still can't figure out what her granddad did.

Given her discussion of 'dragon' vs 'phoenix' resurrection, and of how her meeting with Samium might change the order, I also theorised - before I really twigged the arcanist thing - that she was here to resurrect her grandfather in her own body. Body-hopping is like, the classic immortality strat after all. But... I'm less convinced of that one now? It doesn't seem like Su particularly liked the old man, she definitely doesn't want to follow in his footsteps, and 'saw him die unexpectedly during the revolution' does not seem like it would inspire the same sort of guilt.

Still, he surely did something to her, she's definitely cryptically alluded to that enough times.

Besides that?

Obviously really digging this story! Honestly, this one rules. It helps that the author is clearly into a lot of the same shit I am. All the long discussions and beat by beat narration could potentially feel a little dry, but honestly, I'm pretty hooked, it's definitely pulling me forwards. It's a fascinating, conflict-rich setting, that raises all sorts of interesting concepts. It's confident in knowing what it wants to be. Umineko is a hell of a tough act to follow, but this one has a distinct identity of its own. Can't wait to see what happens now the mystery seems to be about to kick off for real.

With that in mind, I'm sure it won't be long until the next one of these. I may have to dial back the detail a bit, this is kinda having a bad effect on my work right now. There's just so many fascinating corners to follow up ^^'

Anyway, I realise these posts are kinda massive for tumblr, so I'm gonna start copying them over to canmom.art soon. <See you next time>.

#the flower that bloomed nowhere #tftbn #sff #novels #fiction

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callipraxia · 5 months ago

Text

Even Further Interview Analysis - On the Portrayal of "Otherness."

Maybe fourth fifth sixth time will be the charm when it comes to attempts to communicate what I'm thinking about this topic, post-Hirsch interview. I'm drawing from several quotes here that don't immediately link together at all, but trust me, folks. If you want to, of course. The full transcript of the interview, conducted and generously shared by @fordtato and @hkthatgffan, can, as always, be found here. The three previous interview-related pieces of content I've written can be found in their own section here on the handy-dandy directory post on the dreamwidth archive of my less ephemeral blog posts.

For some variety, we're going with a quote from one of the Interviewers, a Hirsch quote I only made a joke about in my original post, and...uh, one of the same quotes from Hirsch from my last post. I...have a lot of thoughts, I guess. At the same time. In no order that can be translated into the English language very exactly. Anyway....

[Hana]"...with Ford in particular, with all of the content in the journal about him feeling “strange, on the outskirts of society, not understood,” it resonates so much with LGBTQ+ fans. Everyone I know who’s a big Ford fan is from some part of the LGBTQ+ community. There’s lines in there about romance baffling him, and stuff like that, where we’re like, we get it, we understand it, it makes sense, it resonates. Regardless of whether or not this was intentionally planned when you wrote it, how do you feel about Ford being interpreted as a bit of a queer icon for so many in the fandom?" -------------------- [Alex Hirsch] "When you do a clone story, the point of a clone story, in my mind, is a character seeing themselves in a different light, right?" -------------------- [Alex Hirsch] "I think that Bill was trying to find Ford, but I think- I always think of Bill as like, this guy who has, like - you know, he’s stirring the pot of soup that is the Ford plan, and he’s got like 900 pots of soup across the universe of different things he’s working on, and at any given moment, he’s so cocksure that it’s all gonna work his way eventually. Bill’s a trillion years old, so it’s like, Ford disappearing for thirty years is like- [snaps fingers] is like somebody saying they’re ghosting you and then texting you the next weekend, you know what I mean?"

This...thing will be divided into three parts: The Part Where Calli Talks About Sex and Gender and Neurodivergency, The Part Where Calli Talks About Mental Disorders, Addiction, and Fiddleford McGucket, and then, last but not least, The Part Where Calli Talks About Different Approaches To Writing Aliens. These do not, however, each correspond to one quote, and there will be some overlap here and there, so bear with me, if you will. There's also a stronger element of "reader response" in here than there was in the "Ford Plan" essay - there's still a good amount of canon analysis, but I do talk a bit about my own reactions to things and compare my writing process to Mr. Hirsch's toward the end, so I completely understand why those parts might fail to interest people. That said...let's begin.

--------------------

I. The Part Where Calli Talks About Sex and Gender and Neurodivergency TW for mentions of toxic masculinity, possibly homophobic aspects of queer-coding, domestic abuse, and my view that Bill is so close to being a sexual assaulter that his, er, anatomical limitations are a moot point.

There's a certain irony to Ford's status as a queer icon that I don't think I've ever seen pointed out before. I'm basically writing a book about this, actually (sort of - long story), but since I have no idea if that will ever go anywhere, I'll talk about it a bit here anyway. It's how, in a story where one of the threads is Dipper sorting out what it means to be a man, it strikes me enormously that his personal idol ends up almost personifying Traditional, Slightly Unhealthy Masculinity, at least at first glance.

Ford's first major action on-screen is, of course, picking up J1, so that we can see his hands...and then he hauls off and punches someone in the face. I wrote a 10,000 word essay (readable here) about Ford's anger issues and how they interact with his sense of self; the reason I wrote it was because of the revelation that Ford's actually a lot more casually violent in his limited screentime than Stan is. I won't go over all that ground again, but the second thing we ever learn about Ford is that he can and will shoot first, basically. And possibly literally, since he's carrying a massive gun throughout the scene and the very next episode establishes that he keeps at least one firearm (or...shooty-weapon of some sort, anyway) concealed on on his person at probably all times, considering he had it on him for game night with his nephew. Based on the weird mix of manual weapons and (if Stan was telling the truth, anyway) firearms in the Mystery Shack and in the Bunker, it seems entirely possible that he's been a bit of a weapons aficionado for a long time, well before he started walking the multiverse. As for afterward, well...afterward, the man sets his head on fire for a laugh, swings around with his magnet gun like the illegitimate love-child of Magneto and the Amazing Spider-Man, and I read a degree of awe in Dipper's statement that the aftermath of Weirdmageddon was the only time he'd ever seen Ford cry...in the whole month he's known the man. Given how few contexts he's had to reasonably see Ford have much a reason to cry in, I assume the remark was made just to underline the severity of the situation: Ford is this tough, stoic space cowboy who just went through days of torture at the hands of a mad god without breaking, so you know it's Serious Business if he's crying. Manly men like him just don't do that, do they?

Of course, along with all this testosterone poisoning, we also did always see plenty of evidence that Ford wasn't actually a talking sci-fi cardboard cut-out of the Marlboro Man. For one thing, there's the way he introduces himself verbally, once he's past the whole fistfight phase of events: "Greetings!...I like this kid! She's weird!" I suspect he started making his way toward also being something of an icon in the neurodivergent communities at about that exact moment. The moment also had the effect of reminding us: this potentially intimidating figure in black with a gigantic gun who can beat Stan in a fight is also, after all, also the Author of the Journals. We don't know much about the Author, but we do know that he was a scientist so brilliant that McGucket, a genius in his own right, accepted a place as his assistant. Hard to be that without also being something of a nerd, right? We also know that he's a very talented artist, and that he writes in oddly-structured sentences, and also that he writes in cursive - maybe that was just something I noticed, since I also write in cursive and occasionally oddly-structured sentences, but it was endearing and relatable to me, anyway. Most importantly, we also know that he apparently finds the unusual as cool as Dipper, our protagonist, does. In other words, we are reminded that, dramatic entrance notwithstanding, he's one of us, and as Hana noted...a lot of us ain't exactly Models of the Elusive, So-Called 'Norm,' are we? This is only emphasized as time goes on, given his enthusiasm for DD&MD and how we soon learn he is significantly more complex than he might have seemed at a glance - aside from being severely flawed, fully aware of it, and riddled with guilt, he also quotes poetry at what it seems safe to assume was one of the lower points in his life, an action shortly followed by philosophical reflections on the nature of heroism. It's also established that, in the sharpest departure of all from the Traditional Masculinity tropes, he didn't have a female partner before his long exile and isn't still griping about that fact to this day. In the America of his youth, just being a single man in his thirties who had never had a girlfriend, or even just didn't complain loudly about not having a girlfriend in between relationships, was the kind of behavior that could make the government suspect you were both gay and/therefore a Communist, especially if you were someone high-profile enough to be working on science with an enormous grant not all that long after the Space Race. Plus...look, the idea of a domestic abuse victim being shipped with their abuser is...not something I'm all that comfortable with, but I get where people get the idea from, and while Bill is definitely not a man, he does use the same pronouns as one. I can imagine people imagining it as a gay-adjacent ship even before the Journal came out and all but explicitly labelled Ford as One of Us when 'us' is defined as the Not-Straights as well as one of the Not-Neurotypicals. It's possible, as I said in my first interview overview, to use the Journal to build a case for Ford's heterosexuality, but the balance of evidence seems to tilt toward the idea that he's Something Else, even if it's not all that specific about what, probably to some extent because there's good reasons why Ford himself might not know, or at least not know the words to apply to the situation. That, however, is material for the post I'm thinking of putting out, like, the day before the new book comes out in July or something. Here, we're discussing not so much sexuality per se as the experience of Otherness.

As I mentioned briefly in the previous paragraph, the LGBTQ+ community isn't the only one which has taken Ford to its heart. Members of the neurodivergent communities - autistic people in particular - have also related strongly to Ford; in fact, this is actually the primary reason why I related to the guy so much. I'm asexual, so I'm in the Not-Straight Club, but for various reasons, my feelings of alienation began long before I noticed that I still thought kissing sounded vaguely unpleasant while others my age had revised their elementary school opinions on the subject. In fact, one of my earliest memories is of feeling that I was...off to the side, somehow, whenever other people were around. I was just an observer, never quite understanding what I saw, always reading like mad to try to figure out how people worked and apparently coming up with some...odd...ideas in the process before high school, which was when I started running across words in classes that seemed to describe the world as it appeared from my point of view. I wouldn't be diagnosed formally with any of my several DSM-V entries until many, many years later, but there was a profound relief in knowing that there even maybe was an explanation better than just "u a freak, lol." Having those words, and with them some sense of history and community, made it all seem more natural, not less so. This is similar to how a lot of people have said they feel about finding out that there's a word for being gay or trans or otherwise queer in some way, and there was some relief tied up in that, too, when I eventually found out that there's a whole world of other aces as well as other people otherwise wired like I am, but it was less of an issue for me, and therefore not what I first "clicked" with Ford over, even though I kind of read him as some kind of ace as well. Instead, for me, it was over how I related to the feeling of being the one person in the room whose occupational interests didn't align with everyone else's - of being the kid who could never quite get it right at Show and Tell. Over knowing what it's like to have your classmates nearly put you in the hospital when you hadn't done anything to them. Over how even the things your family says to make you feel better just underline how you're Different, how you're not really part of the circle even with your own parents. And yes - over having developed a certain amount of bitterness and distrust and general unfriendliness toward the 'normal' world over time. That's definitely a place where there's the potential for the portrayal of Otherness to become...an issue. Another such place is when we get to the matter of Bill.

Bill is presented as a highly alien being, but there's a lot of ways in which he's all too human. Far too many of the ways in which he's all too human happen to be ways that strongly imply that if he had a human body, he'd be one of the not-charmers we used to see getting interviewed and then arrested on To Catch A Predator. And he uses male pronouns in English, appears with accessories which allow big dramatic gestures, has a high-pitched, whiny voice, is a relentless sadist, and is most frequently shipped with human males. All taken together, if one looks at Bill through the lens of queer coding, he can come across as something not dissimilar to the stereotype of the Depraved Homosexual, a homophobic stereotype used to imply that gay people, and especially gay men, are inherently villainous and dangerous...and that's even before we get to the Penthouse scene, where Bill makes his entrance singing a love song to someone he's abused for years who, at that particular moment, he also has on a short leash. Literally.

Did the writers intend for Bill to come across as The Dangerous Gay? I...like to think not, but as Hirsch himself admits in both the discussion of Grenda and to an extent the discussion of the intent behind Ford's alienation - the world was radically different back then, so that you could end up unthinkingly writing certain things then that you know would never fly today, and which you wouldn't even try to make fly today, not least because now you know better than you knew back then. To his credit - well, the thing he specifically apologized for wasn't my apology to accept, as I am exceedingly cisgendered, but I do feel he handled having that brought up about as gracefully as possible. As far as Bill goes, though...maybe you could convince me he wasn't deliberately portrayed as a gay pervert specifically, but I'm not sure there's an argument which could persuade me to buy the idea that Bill wasn't intentionally, or at least knowingly, portrayed as some form of pervert, especially in season 2 and the Journal. The first time I read the Journal, after a steady progress of growing more and more uncomfortable with the overt psychological, financial, spiritual, and physical abuse, I threw the thing at one point in Ford's first section while exclaiming, "what in the sam-hell?!" - which, for me, is the equivalent of much stronger profanity, because I usually swear like Fiddleford, if I must add any embellishments to my expressions of disapproval at all. That was how overtly rape-like I found the post-betrayal possession plotline in the Journal. Okay, so, Bill doesn't have a penis. Cool. I don't care. He's still shown (repeatedly, even) to take sadistic pleasure from robbing others of their physical agency, of reducing them to helpless objects which he can treat however he pleases. Even once he loses the ability to do this to Ford completely, he goes out of his way to overcompensate for it: when we first see the two interact in "The Last Mabelcorn," Bill introduces himself by warping Ford's dreamscape into his own image before he proceeds to box Ford in even further, surrounding him with copies of Bill's self and also getting into his personal space and touching his mental representation of himself, to Ford's obvious consternation. And then we get to Weirdmageddon, where first he turns Ford into his backscratcher, and then the next time we see them, the scene is played almost like a literal attempt at seduction - though, of course, with nasty little details like the "literally on a leash" and "the sofa is alive" bits, just to keep Ford off-balance, so that he reacts instead of thinking. It's possible that they also, to some extent, to play into the depiction of another Other category often associated with Bill, though I don't tend to personally share this view. in a...questionable way. This topic is the portrayal of mental illness as Other.

The Part Where Calli Talks About Mental Disorders, Addiction, and Fiddleford McGucket TW for, well, discussion of mental illness, addiction, and how both Fiddleford and my grandfather had those issues.

I suppose we all see the issues that touch us personally first, so let's just jump straight into it and speak of probably the first thing in Gravity Falls that made me uncomfortable. That thing was Fiddleford McGucket.

"Legend of the Gobblewonker" is a great episode, but I'll be honest: the whole bit with McGucket at the beginning of the episode made me cringe the first time I saw it, and it kinda makes me cringe whenever I rewatch it to this day. There's just not much getting around it: McGucket looks and sounds like a caricature of people from the same part of the world as me. The way the other characters regard McGucket makes me self-conscious (well, moreso than usual) about the way I sound when I talk, and I kinda want to kick Blubbs a little every time I see the episode. Or maybe even say something exceedingly unkind to him about how he's a fine one to make comments about other people's mental capacity when he's dating Deputy Durland. Not something I'd actually do, of course, because it's not Durland's fault that he is like he is, but dang, do I want to put Blubbs in his place in that scene sometimes. It then gets even less comfortable for me once I consider that McGucket is also portrayed as a caricature of people with dementia, severe mental illness, or both in that scene, and it becomes more uncomfortable because when I combine that with everything else about McGucket, it starts feeling an awful lot like the butt of the joke is someone with an uncanny resemblance to one of my real-life grandfathers. And then came the twist of the episode, and that...actually opened up a whole 'nother can of worms for me, because to me, the way McGucket acts at the end of "Gobblewonker" and during some asides in "Society of the Blind Eye" makes me think that he is, essentially, faking insanity in order to manipulate people in the "present" times of the show. And that's...not the same issue, exactly, as him being written as an insulting caricature, but it's kinda uncomfortable, too.

I will give Gravity Falls this: it does a decent job of sympathetically portraying characters who are clearly not mentally well or neurotypical all the time. Dipper and Mabel are all too familiar to those of us who grew up with unacknowledged stuff going on, and you'd have to try pretty hard to write Stan more like someone with ADHD and moderate depression, not to mention some compulsive behaviors. Ford's mental breakdown in 1981 is also played completely straight with little to no effort to inject any humor into it, even though he falls into the category of "visibly 'crazy'" toward the end of it. We know very little about Dipper and Mabel's background, but the troubled circumstances in which Soos and the Stan Twins grew up are also handled fairly realistically and sympathetically. Notably, however, while Ford acknowledges he came close to "losing [his] sanity" in the past, none of the Pines family ever acknowledges that there might be something "wrong" with them in the present - that is a label reserved for others, mainly Bill and Fiddleford, with a side of every member of the Gleeful family and a sprinkling of Pacifica to taste. This makes it a tad awkward that all of them originate as villains of one or another caliber...and yes, I did mean to include Fiddleford there. Watch "Legend of the Gobblewonker" with the assumption you've never seen anything else about the character and listen to what Fiddleford says after his robot is wrecked, and then put it together with the nature of the problem Fiddleford was trying to solve. Fiddleford wasn't just looking for attention - he was specifically trying to convince the people that there was a dangerous monster in the lake. Later in the episode, when Soos and the Mystery Twins have the bad luck to get too close, he also plays the role to the hilt, seriously endangering their lives before he's stopped by a quirk of geology. The outlines of his plan become obvious from there: if the robotic nature of the Gobblewonker hadn't been revealed, then either the stories of what happened to Soos' boat (or, in the worst-case scenario, the dead bodies of its occupants) would have seemingly confirmed Fiddleford's ravings about a dangerous beast that destroys watercraft living in the lake. At that point, Fiddleford would have gotten validation, sure...but even more importantly, fishing season, whether officially or unofficially, would have gotten cancelled as a result of his shenanigans, despite the effect this would have on the local economy, which is why I tend to think he went with the 'lake monster' strategy in the first place. It seems to me that his reasoning ran something like, “if Tate's excuse for refusing to interact is that I frighten the customers, the obvious solution is to create a situation where there are no customers in a way that can't be traced back to me.” And if someone has to take significant property damage, or even get actually hurt, to make that happen, well....

So yeah. Swap him out with someone doing absurd things for the sake of his love life instead of because of his desire to induce his son to speak to him and it's pretty classic villain behavior. This is underlined by Fiddleford's own descriptions of his other stunts: the pterodactyl-bot he built in response to his divorce was "homicidal," and his next project is apparently going to be a death ray. In the Journal entry which corresponds to the episode, Dipper is still clearly wary of him. Anyone who didn't know how the story was going to end could easily buy this episode as an indicator that Fiddleford would at least sporadically be a threat, perhaps along the lines of Gideon - who, incidentally, Fiddleford is more than happy to work with at the end of the season, even though building the Gideon-Bot would have necessarily given him some insight into Gideon's predilection for illegal mass surveillance operations. In every other appearance he makes in season one, though, Fiddleford merely acts out a parody of psychosis, with his two bouts of conflict-enablement at the beginning and end of the season merely bracketing the act; once we learn about the essential falseness of his act in "Society of the Blind Eye," the brackets become underlines that reinforce what the episode shows us retroactively. "Society of the Blind Eye" shows a man who perhaps, based on his reaction to the image of the Blind Eye, has PTSD or something similar, but except for his moment of panic after he sees the Eye in the Journal, he is clearly shown to be in full command of his faculties throughout the episode. It happens twice, in fact, in his first scene of the episode: after throwing up an almighty clamor, he stops carrying on about Lee and Nate vandalizing his home once he thinks he is out of earshot of others and mumbles that they did indeed "get [him] good." A moment later, he spots his "visitors" and then slips right back into character, yammering about his hourly arguments with his own reflection...at least until Dipper flatly tells him to drop the act, and he does. Instantly. Without hesitation. He no more thought that his reflection was some other hillbilly watching him bathe than I did. The implication in "Blind Eye" is a bit pitiable - that he pretends to be the happily deranged Ol' Man McGucket character to cover up his loneliness and lack of self-esteem - but it's still him faking insanity, which is...not good behavior, at least. He ends up being a cringy stereotype of people from my part of the world and from my social background (my father was born as poor as it sounds like Fiddleford was in a state which shares a bit of border with Tennessee), and he also seems to be someone who is exaggerating the symptoms of his mental problems the way so many of us in Diagnosis Club are often accused of doing in real life. And he comes across as a bit of a pot shot at homeless people, sometimes, too. That's...a lot of issues for one dude to have, especially given his relatively minor role in the series proper.

Of course, the dirt-poor cackling hick stereotype...I'm not partial to it, but I don't actually really hold that one against the writers too much. Southerners make fun of ourselves all the time, after all, and the line between laughing with people and laughing at them is a treacherous boundary, one which everyone probably perceives a little differently, which is why it's always more comfortable to write about your own people. The way I 'read' the Folks Who Talk Like Me - that is, Fiddleford, Bud, Gideon, and kind of Farmer Sprott, I guess - in the series makes me generally feel that the writing staff was in fact laughing at us and not with us, but since I am not Jewish or Hispanic or even a man and yet presume to write from the points of view of the Stan Twins and Soos on a regular basis, I...don't reckon I'm quite standing in a glass house, but I'm close enough to doing so that it would probably be a bad idea for me to throw around any stones no matter how careful I try to be about that sort of thing, y'know? But the "Fiddleford crazy" narrative - that one kind of bothers me.

I mentioned a couple of paragraphs ago that my first impression of Fiddleford was that he's not dissimilar to what you would get if you wrote a somewhat unkind parody of my grandfather, who had severe bipolar disorder with psychotic features in his later years. To a degree, I still see Fiddleford that way even after it becomes apparent that he's not half as out of it as he pretends to be, and that's because when do we learn for sure that Fiddleford is sane, it's in the same episode that we learn about something else he has in common with my grandfather: that is, a history of addiction. They even both created the instruments of their own destruction: Fiddleford invented the memory gun which gradually eroded and scarred his brain to the point that there's a bit of an implication that he might not ever fully recover, and Pawpaw spent several decades as an alcoholic after making a decent chunk of his lifetime income bootlegging, a classic case of getting too high (or low, as the case might be) one one's own supply. In the "Blind Eye" tapes, we get the impression that Fiddleford also genuinely did descend into madness for at least a while in the year or so after the Portal Incident, and it's shown to be a direct effect not of trauma from his experiences with Ford and Bill, but of his chronic use of the memory gun. Mr. Hirsch even compares him to an alcoholic in the Interview, and while my grandfather was luckier, it's not at all surprising or unrealistic that Fiddleford's habit ends with him homeless, wifeless, friendless, cultless, and estranged from his only child. The McGuckets are as much of a tragedy as the Pines family in their own way, and you could easily write a decent neo-Southern Gothic about them alone...if, at least, you figured out what to do with Fiddleford post-breakdown a little less clumsily than the showrunners did.

There's a gap that doesn't make sense. Fiddleford in the "present day" is clearly far more rational than he was at the end of the Blind Eye tapes and is just playing up his former symptoms when he deems it useful so that he can avoid confronting his problems directly, but in the last Blind Eye tape, he was so out of it that he was speaking about Bill in tongues. What the heck happened? Is the implication that once he was kicked out of the Blind Eye, he just...automatically recovered enough to use his new reputation strategically for no reason other than lack of access to the gun, instead of seeking out other drugs? And then, when he ends up facing his demons by sheer accident at the end of the episode, he just...spontaneously finishes getting better instead of being even a little re-traumatized by the horrors floating back to the surface of his mind, or the sight of what he looked like as he fell apart back then? And then he is just effortlessly forgiven for everything by everybody? Bear in mind that he probably abandoned his son before he finished his mental collapse (it's possible that Fiddleford just stayed in Gravity Falls and started the Blind Eye because Emma-May had already initiated their divorce, but when he walked out on Ford, there's no evidence that there was anything at all preventing him from continuing to walk right on back to Palo Alto) and that it's canon that for a while, he was non-consensually wiping Ford's memory when he deemed it necessary. Since the memory gun is presented as Fiddleford's drug of choice, him secretly using it on someone else is...well, to put it extremely mildly, not cool, dude, not cool at all. And far from using the Journal to patch up this uncomfortable fact the way they tried to use the Journal patch up how equally uncool it was for Mabel to slip drugs into people's food, the writers actually used the thing to establish these events as canon shortly before having other characters begin singing Fiddleford's praises to the skies with no acknowledgment whatsoever that he, like his fellow older adult characters, is a messed up person who's done some seriously messed up stuff in his day. It also surprises me that I can't recall ever seeing a single person imply that Tate might have only "forgiven" Fiddleford in hopes of getting the money after the old man kicks the bucket. Where everyone else has a variety of fallout to their sins sooner or later, Fiddleford only pays on-screen for what he did to himself, not for how it affected other people, and the degree to which he even had to pay for that is glossed compared to what other members of the cast get. What makes him so special?

It's possible that, having played Fiddleford as nine kinds of potentially offensive stereotype throughout the series, the writers just decided to not go any further in the hopes that this would even up the tally sheet and sweep the issues with the character under the rug, so to speak. It's also possible that he and Tate are being shielded from exposure to the full fallout of the plot solely by their status as minor characters - I had to dig release-the-balrog levels of deep to construct any kind of canon-based personality for Tate for my fics, and though his role in the backstory is huge, Fiddleford's actual contributions to the story are fairly small. He doesn't even get to remember "wait, Stanford Pines is the Author, and his device leads to demon-land?!" before we find this out by other means. Redemption arcs, too, are one of the show's weaker points; this is most obvious with Gideon, who snaps out of what has appeared to be a near-delusion at the end of one speech near the very end of the show and is just readmitted into society without much comment, but the process of showing someone changing instead of just showing them changed is one the writers seemed to have struggled with a little in general. I think, though, that at least part of the reason why Fiddleford's redemption comes about a bit awkwardly is really just because of an inherent weakness of allegory: when you use a thing as a representation of something else, it's never going to fit perfectly. It will always have extra baggage and individual quirks that, once you look at it for a few minutes, start to undermine the message in some way.

Fiddleford may be genuinely mentally ill to some degree - aside from his apparent breakdown about the time he got kicked out of the Blind Eye, he's also fairly realistically portrayed in the Journal as anxious and possibly dealing with a "functionality-allowing" level of OCD - but he definitely isn't actually an alcoholic: he's a symbolic representation of an alcoholic. In "Society of the Blind Eye," Fiddleford is really just a means to an end, the vessel through which the show conveys one of the lowest-key "don't do drugs" messages ever written by showing that trying to cope with your problems by blacking them out will just make things worse for you in the long run. This fits in with how the writers intended to use Fiddleford in "Legend of the Gobblewonker," where I was supposed to come away with a message about being nice to my grandparents instead of with the impression that this man is as dangerous and unscrupulous as anyone or anything else in this town, and it fits in with the characters-as-tools approach to writing that Alex Hirsch mentions several times throughout the Interview (remember that thing? The thing I was originally talking about? Yeah...). It's obviously more successful than anything I've ever done, but my objection to that approach is that it causes the exact kind of snarls I've been talking about in this section here: when the character is a character, you play out the consequences of these things, but when the character is just a symbol for something else, you're likely going to end up with these dangling issues that create uncomfortable snarls the second you take a closer look at them. I'll continue to elaborate on this theme in my next part, where I talk about Dipper's clones and Bill and the Axolotl and other such non-human entities.

The Part Where Calli Talks About Different Approaches To Writing Aliens. No real TWs here, but there are spoilers for some of my fanfics.

I made a joke about Mr. Hirsch's comment on clone stories in my original running commentary, but it really was a line that surprised me a little. This is because it never, ever would have occurred to me that the point of a clone story could be to see their "template" in a different light. Probably this is in part just due to other fiction I'm familiar with which deals with the clone idea in a lot more depth, but I do think it is also at least in part an effect of philosophy and/or habits of character creation.

The role of habit, of the tendency we all have to write things the way we always have done without thinking about it, cannot be underestimated. I come from a play-by-post roleplaying background; until GF and the idea for For Want of a Jailbreak slammed into my life like a freight train in 2021, my game was also the context of all of the creative writing I’d done for the past twenty years. Creating a character who exists solely to play a role in someone else’s story therefore just sounds odd to me, considering I have sunk hundreds of thousands of words and the majority (a slim majority, but still) of my life to date into something where literally everyone is the main character of their own story while simultaneously playing a supporting role in two or three or seven other characters’ stories. If you recognize this format, it’s because it’s not entirely dissimilar to how the plots, such as they are, of American soap operas work. Characters may start out as just adjuncts to the plots of established cast members, but if they gain any traction at all, they’re quickly going to start developing their own storylines, just like Tracey and Quattro did after I tried to put them in FWJB Part II to create a specific conflict. They created the desired conflict, all right, but they also created fifteen others and somehow ended up being absolutely essential to the thematic unity of the piece – it doesn’t work without them, even though I never intended for them to contribute to any themes. I didn’t even intend for the series to have any themes; I had absolutely no plans to explore ideas in this fun little AU I’d cooked up. The themes just arose from the characters instead of me manipulating the characters to prove a theme.

This approach does, admittedly, have its compensations, or at least compensates for one of my greatest creative weaknesses: I suspect I would have gotten bored and/or never figured out how to end Part III if I’d had a Message in mind when I started talking. I’m not a terribly organized person, and if I try to get organized, I have so much fun making plans that I never get around to actually doing anything. My imagination also, though, to put it mildly, is rather weak in areas where Mr. Hirsch’s seems to be quite strong. This is probably no small part of why I find analyzing what he says about his writing style so interesting, really, and after doing so for a while, I think I’ve found an essential difference. It’s that he seems to generally know what he wants to say and then just says it instead of waiting to see what he ends up with, and he doesn’t spend an awful lot of time worrying about all those grey areas on the fringes that complicate the message. The first half of that sentence is a strength; the second half is...more complicated.

One of the perks of knowing what you want to say and saying it boldly, without worrying too much about all the finer shades of grey around the edges, is (or at least, I imagine it is) that it makes writing symbolically much easier for authors like Mr. Hirsch than it is for authors like me. Things are rarely symbolic in my universes; I can write you a twenty-page essay about [insert symbol] from [insert famous novel] if you give me two days and a source of pressure, but that’s because I am really good at participating in English lit classes, not because I really feel the symbolism. Symbols just aren’t what I think in – I’ll never forget reading about how zombie stories are apparently often written in times when people are anxious about immigration and that vampires represent fear of the Gay, because I’d never been more baffled in my life. It just failed to compute. If people wanted to write xenophobic and homophobic rants – or so I wondered as I read what the undead were apparently supposed to really be about – then why didn’t they just...do that, so the rest of us could avoid them and get on with wondering “but no – what if everybody at the cemetery did just pop up one night? How would we really respond to that?” A few years ago, in one of my Charlotte Bronte moods, I wrote 48 poems on post-it notes at work and then revised them all into a Mead composition book, and not one of them means anything. Half of them are descriptions of actual events, with minimal commentary. They’re poetic in form, but they aren’t really poetry because I’m not really a poet. Mr. Hirsch’s work is not (generally, though some of it is) poetic in form, but the imagination behind it is a poet’s. Therefore, he could write “Double Dipper” and use the clones to make a point without proceeding to get into all those side issues that go with the kind of clone story I’m more familiar with, such as personhood and legal rights and all that kinda stuff. The clones to Mr. Hirsch are symbolic representations of introspection, not characters; it’s debatable, really, the degree to which anyone in Gravity Falls should be considered a true character outside of the Pines family, because even though the show uses the town’s name as its title, it isn’t actually about the town of Gravity Falls: everything else in the setting exists solely to tell the one family’s story, and that’s that. It's tidy and compact, like a poem.

I, as established, am more of a “spend ten years cross-hatching tiny different areas with subtly different pencil points to create a greyscale drawing” person (metaphorically – I like metaphors much better than symbols), but I have to admit – there is something attractive about the idea of drawing in broad, bold lines like that. Attractive and a little frightening. Part of the reason it’s frightening is because, of course, overlooking those details means someone is going to get angry with you sooner or later. Unfortunately, that's also part of the reason why it has a certain appeal. It's when you write like that, after all, saying things without fifteen qualifying statements tacked on at the end or a lot of deep dives into the minds of the characters, that you create room for audience engagement and therefore create an intellectual property that can, in theory, outlive its first audience and attain a lasting degree of success.

Some years ago, I formed a theory about the Harry Potter books, and so far, nothing I’ve come across has contradicted it. That theory is that the series owes part of its success to its “dormitories based on personality” system and the way that encourages people to identify with “their” House, and that it owes most of the rest of its success to the ways in which it betrays its own ideals. From a very early point in the fandom, after all, there was a certain...tension over the places where the series said one thing but seemed to practice another one, to greater or lesser degrees. The books knock us about the head with the idea that individual choice is destiny, but sons always look uncannily like their fathers, somehow. I could write a whole essay about ways Book 7 takes every issue the series ever had, magnifies it, covers it in high-wattage lights, and then...just walks off, apparently having never noticed there was a problem at all, much less that the problem had just got worse. These contradictions grew sharper and sharper as the series went on, to the point where eventually, it became clear there was a real issue in the foundations of that IP rather than just a failure to think about the full implications of a few things, but I suspect there is something universal about successful properties in the broader idea, because all things which bold-strokes authors seem to never, or at least only minimally, think of and which people like me can’t stop thinking of? Those things make up the boundaries which define the spaces where fandoms grow. There’s a lot of books I’ve loved passionately in my life, but only a very few I’ve written about outside of school. The balance of good points and unpalatable implications cannot be anything other than precarious anywhere it occurs, but it’s on that razor’s edge that a certain kind of personality feels compelled to explore the areas that cause discomfort instead of doing what I did with, say, Divergent, which was “loudly express my displeasure to anyone who would listen after getting halfway through the second book before my distaste for the main character became so overwhelming that I couldn’t finish it.” I don’t think that Gravity Falls’ issues are as deep-rooted and insidious as the ones in Harry Potter, but there’s some issues just the same, and...well, here I am, aren’t I? How many words have I written about this one interview so far? The document I’m typing this in is using Times New Roman size 12 font and very narrow gaps between the lines, and these words are about halfway down the tenth page. I’ve written three reasonably competent novels set in this universe and a handful of short stories I wouldn’t be embarrassed to produce in an undergraduate fiction-writing class and also some fairly well-received canon essays. And in July I reckon Disney is, indeed, going to part me from yet more of my money, even though it’s a book about Bill when “Bill dies” is one of my very favorite moments in the whole series because I hate him. I also consider him one of the problematic issues of the franchise for – believe it or not – even more reasons than the ones I’ve already discussed in the first two body sections of this document, though he could be the ultimate expression of those as well.

I already discussed in part I why I find some aspects of his portrayal uncomfortable as far as it comes to sexuality, so I’ll not repeat that. As for part II, the reason I don’t take any particular offense to him on the mental health angle is that I don’t personally regard Bill as a depiction of a mentally ill character. He says he’s insane, but Bill says a lot of things and even the most honest of them are no more than half-truths. Bill cheerfully classifies himself as "insane," but like Fiddleford, he isn't, at least not by any definition of the term which is precise enough to be useful. Bill's behavior can come across like a bad dose of anti-social personality disorder with narcissistic and histrionic features, which is quite an unfortunate combination to have when he also is a sadist, but he knows right from wrong, as he proves by how quickly he goes from gloating to groveling once he’s trapped inside Stan's mind. He may not understand exactly why it works or how it would feel to have someone do it to him, but he understands perfectly well that he’s putting the emotional thumbscrews to Stan and Ford by attacking Dipper and Mabel, and he understands just as well that they are not in any mood to play games after they turn the tables on him. He also betrays a clear consciousness of guilt in the scene where Time Baby raids the Fearamid and he acts like a teenager who just had the cops called on his noisy party full of underaged drinking. He is not at all confused about why Time Baby and company want to rain on his parade or under any impressions that appear to be out of touch with reality. When he does things like present Dipper with a screaming head that he treats like a gift, I truly don't believe he's so "lol crazy," or even so alien that he doesn't understand that nobody would want that thing; I believe he does things like conjuring the head and the living sofa and whatnot because he understands humans and therefore knows they will disturb his victims, who will therefore be off-balance and who will therefore continue to react instead of think. This keeps them right where Bill wants them, in positions where he has the maximum advantage before he offers a deal. This is controlled, well-reasoned behavior, not the result of a lack of comprehension of what a human boy in the 21st century finds desirable or of what Ford might consider appealing interior design. Here’s the part where I get around to those aliens I mentioned in the section title, because while I can’t fathom liking him, I do think I would have loathed him less it if he had been a little more alien. As it is, though, he ends up compacting everything I dislike about humanity into one geometric figure and not, to my mind, doing much else.

While a character like Bill has to have a good grasp of human psychology and an ability to imitate it in order to manipulate his victims, one of my issues with Bill is how I never really got the sense of how Other he is. We’re told that he’s Other in ways that aren’t just versions of villain stereotypes, but we’re not really (in my opinion, mind you) shown it. From even the limited amounts we know about Bill and the GF Multiverse, we can deduce logically that he probably does have incomprehensible numbers of plans going at once, and that he can somehow process them all at the same time when even the slightest attempt to do the same would probably drive one of us to madness or force our heads to collapse into black holes, but emotionally, I don't ever feel it, and so it’s relegated to something Alex has to remind us of, because Bill ended up too human for the thought to flow naturally, somehow. Hopefully we'll get some good dirt in July, but for now, Bill is an alien, but he doesn’t quite feel like one. He doesn’t feel like something with answers, like something above us, like something older than the galaxy. He feels more like a human being than some of the actual human beings do. He feels like...well...to quote Ford, “the scam artist he is.”

To be clear, though, I’m not bashing the writers here: for one thing, writing alien intelligences without stumbling into insulting some category of people by pure accident is hard. Most writers are human, and the less like you something is, the harder it is to imagine the world from that entity’s point of view. For another thing, too - no matter what else Bill is, he's also one of the most effective representatives of evil I’ve seen in fiction in a very long time, and since he is a central villain in a high-stakes story, that means he succeeded in the most important part of what he was there to do. The writers had the guts to follow through with making him a virtual singularity of unpleasant traits without softening him up around the edges along the way or even giving him the excuse of an alien's incomprehension of why what he is doing is bad, and they had the skill to write him as pure, unabashed evil in a way that nevertheless acknowledges how complicated people’s motives for dabbling in the Dark Arts can be. He is a symbol even I can work with: I find it believable that he could get a lot of people to do the wrong thing for the right reason, because his alienness just makes him generalizable, a sort of talking abstract concept, like a sentient but bodiless force of evil that looks a little different to everyone who looks at it. Most people who do evil things, after all, are not born declaiming the “now, gods, stand up for bastards!” speech from King Lear: there’s something we can, with a greater or lesser degrees of effort, understand about many people's reasons for stepping onto the slippery slope even if we still firmly denounce the act of taking that step. Bill also seems to start small, at least on the surface, in what he asks of his marks, so that it feels like: oh, surely I can be just a little selfish just this once, and it won’t hurt anyone, and probably no-one will ever even find out about it – that’s the routine he runs on Dipper in “Sock Opera.” Or he uses those groomer traits of his to slowly skew your view on normality and/or morality, so that perhaps you’re Ford, and view stealing nuclear waste as a “public service” after he whispers in your ear for long enough. I can understand how he managed to get by so long before he resorted to the inelegant tactic of using people's family members as hostages to get his way; although evil and unappealing in himself, he has the skills to present what looks like an appealing deal to others a lot of the time. It's a sign of an intellectual maturity in the show's composition that we see Bill, most of the time, as less of the mad god and more of the guy you don't want to do business with, really, but who you know you might well end up needing to do business with - as the manifestation of all the little compromises everyone makes, which for some ultimately spiral out of control. And while he is annoying, even that can work in his favor under the right circumstances, because he’s the kind of annoying that makes at least some people (ie, me) want to put him in his place. I think I’m sensible enough to realize I couldn’t really outsmart him, but I dang sure would want to try. He can get an emotional reaction from anyone, and generally the one he wants at that. He’s a brilliant creation, really, and an accomplishment for a creator to be proud of regardless of whatever else he is.

The Part Where Calli Tries To Draw Some Conclusions

In the beginning, five tries to get this far ago, I had no idea what, if any, coherent point I might end up with. I didn’t even really expect to end up with one. I just had reactions to what I read in the transcript, and I knew that if I wrote about them, I’d get a clearer idea why I was reacting and maybe some new insights into something I love, ie, the show. I was not looking to write an essay about how Gravity Falls is Problematic in its portrayal of the Other, and I was not looking to write an essay to defend it from such charges. I was just writing to figure out what exactly it was I thought about the issue. Now, here at the end, here’s what I think I’ve written:

1. There are some ways in which some of the depiction of Otherness in Gravity Falls are indeed potentially problematic. 2. These issues are not, on the whole, crit fails. Every work has its flaws, and, as usual, the ones left in GF just highlight the excellence of the rest of the final product even more. 3. Commercially successful writers and fan writers may, in part, be distinguished by the approaches taken to character selection and usage; we're also symbiotic organisms, where we get improved quality of life and they get fans who stick around and spend money for a really long time. 4. I...may have figured out how to get rich? Pretty sure I can't use it, but I think it just might work for someone with the skills. Let me know if you're the one who pulls it off, somewhere out there.

There's a lot more I could have said here - and, in fact, a lot more I did say in one draft or another. Sometimes I ended up cutting passages when I got to the end of them and realized I no longer agreed with my original premise, and sometimes I gave up on a point as so convoluted that it would have made it difficult to get back to the main point afterward. In several places, there's ideas that feel important, but I can't quite pull them out of the air yet. But here's where I think I'm going to wrap this one up for now.

#gravity falls #gravity falls characters #gravity falls analysis #ford pines #fiddleford mcgucket #bill cipher #writing #writer problems #tw: mental health #tw: abuse #tw addiction #essay #gravity falls essays #essays #my essays #somehow turned a TV show into a poem I guess?#also I just realized I don't fundamentally understand symbolism and now my whole life is a lie #but it's cool

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