#obv what i choose to use depends on circumstance but i think my fave is the cup

[toughtink]

just curiousssss 👀🩸

for the purposes of this poll, i’m not counting things like forms of birth control or other situations that stop menstruation entirely.

[kings-highway]

Hi King!!! I absolutely adore your fics my dude, I found your trapped in the wilderness fic like a year or two back, forgot about it, and then found your Daichi time travel fic. So you can imagine my delighted surprise when I looked at your ao3 account and found out this was the same author! I was like “0o0, I KNOW YOU!! :D” Suffice to say I love your Haikyuu fics they are an absolute gem to read (Time Enough to Risk it All and Paranormality are my personal faves)

I had a question for you, similar to a previous ask you got about tips on writing? Not general tips mind you, I’m trying to write a Haikyuu fanfic myself starring Oikawa, and I wanted to know if you had any writing tips regarding character writing specifically? Like, in regards to getting into a character’s head and how that influences the POV? I’m probably going to have multiple POVs in different chapters, but I don’t want to run into the old trap of, “These are two separate characters but they sound like the same person” y’know? Also want to make sure I’m avoiding OOC territory, while taking any potential plot developments and how that would change a character into account. And I know you’re good at that, all your interpretations of the Haikyuu cast feel distinct yet true to the characters at their core!

aaaaaaaaaa oh my god thank you so much 😭 I'm very glad you've liked my silly stories so much. I will do my best to provide advice for your question here...

**Keeping Characters In Character - this is VERY fanfic specific!!**

[obv. writing original work requires strong character voice but the question and this response is super focused on characters that you have source material to work with]

1. my immediate first thought, and the thing I default to the most, is **Pay Attention To How Other Characters Talk About Them** yes, its all fine and dandy to go off and say "oh theyve got these secret other side-" because yeah!! they probably do!! everyone is multiple people depending on the circumstance!! but the way other characters talk about them or act around them really will define how your character is behaving, because it shows how they are *choosing* to behave (and what can be seen from the outside) Paying attention to the relative relationships of these characters describing them matter too. Here are examples (all from Haikyuu) of how I do this:

1. Daichi

[in early season 1, when Daichi gets mad at the duo, Suga and Tanaka both start trying to fuck off out of scene in preparation; similarly, both Suga and Tanaka try to hide their secret practice from him.] = People are generally afraid of him, or aware that getting yelled at is on the table, but he's predictable. They both start acting afraid BEFORE he gets angry because they are familiar with his patterns. [Suga and Asahi comment on it feeling weird when he's nice to them, and he snaps at them to say he could be mean instead.] = His casual conversational tone isn't very complimentary. Since we dont see him being overtly mean, I asssume this means he is on the quieter side, probably very reserved, and typically speaks up to correct someone or direct and take control of a conversation. Being overtly nice is seen as a deviation is his conversational habits. [Noya acts very distinctly interested and pleased when he learns Daichi has given him a cool nickname] = People hold a lot of respect for him. Given the previous details, we can assume this is at least in part due to him often withholding such praise, but also we can use it to temper the previous notes. His "meanness" is not coming across as malice, but rather something worth respecting or justified in some way.

Application in Writing: Dialogue should be direct and consistent, use shorter sentences and have him think before he speaks. He finds annoyance and anger easier to express and will likely withhold affectionate conversations from everyone regardless of closeness of friendship level. While he comes across mean, he is not insulting, belittling or cruel, and since people have significant respect for him, he likely avoids situations that would make him look foolish, and will probably be the last to join in on the fun.

QUICKER EXAMPLES:

2. Suga [Every character describes Suga as nice and kind, there is no "bad review" of him.] = No matter his opinion of someone, Suga will use kind, gentle language with them and avoid giving them a reason to dislike him.

3. Oikawa [Iwaizumi, in voice over, says something to the effect of: "despite how he might seem, Oikawa is actually a pretty goofy guy."] = While not given the opportunity often, Oikawa is playful, unserious and silly - the word "goofy" is important to note. Its not funny. Comedians are funny. Dogs with long floopy ears are "goofy" - However he either intentionally or unintentionally chooses not to behave this way often. Either way, he has distinct "sides" to him that can be identified. However, his natural state is far more goofy than we give him credit for, so he will likely be the first to crack jokes, laugh at dumb things, or general want to lighten the mood. He doesnt like things to be gloomy and may actively resist that kind of conversation or situation.

4. Leon calling Ushijima a "super volleyball idiot" says way more about his behaviour off the court than anything Ushijima ever did. Oikawa and Kageyama and Hinata and Atsumu get to be monsters but no, Leon says its the term "we" are most "satisfied with". Did they pitch other names? They do not take Ushijima seriously at all. So his terrifying persona is probably very superficial. None of the team has ever had an actually bad experience with him, and he is very consistent in his likes and desires: probably doesnt have a (conversationally) confrontational bone in his body. "We could call him a monster but nah, he's too fucking weird for that." Like what more of a character study do you need!! Leon STOP.

This is dragging on longer than I want it to. I apologize. I could have more to say on the matter but to sum it up quick:

People, humans, are multifaceted, but ultimately are most defined by how they are remembered, and how they choose to present themselves to the world. This is will affect that "voice" that you're worried about sounding the same. Ultimately, all your characters will be the same. Everyone is insecure, everyone wants to be seen as attractive, everyone things theyre not good enough, everyone worries their lover will grow tired of them, everyone thinks they are the only person to have ever felt that way. The change, that voice, is how they want everyone else to look at them.

Using the previous notes, we can answer the question: "Oh my god, You look really good today!!" 4 ways. Internally, they're all very happy to receive a compliment because they wore a new shirt and they weren't sure it looked good. Externally...

Daichi: "Oh. Thank you."

Suga: "Ohh, Thank you! That's so sweet of you to say."

Oikawa: "I look really good today? Did I not yesterday? Ah, just messing with you - I know I looked good yesterday."

Ushijima: "I do? Good."

LAST TANGENT:

if you are NATIVE ENGLISH and youre writing fanfiction for NON-ENGLISH SHOW. IDC if youre a subtitles purist, WATCH IT IN ENGLISH. being able to (in your native language) use the characters voice in your head to read dialogue makes a world of difference. I DONT CARE if you can head Sugas Japanese VA perfectly - UNLESS YOU SPEAK JAPANESE IT WONT HELP.

Whenever I'm struggling with writing Sugawara, or a l think he's OOC, I just mentally replay the soundbite from the dub of him going "Good Grief!" like a goddamn oeanuts character and then its like "oh yeah. he's back. i know how to write him now."

I have a few of these little soundbite grounding things for some of them. Its REALLY helpful to be able hear the characters voices saying the lines (sorry if youre deaf..) and if you CANT (and you normally can) then maybe the dialogue is ooc.

WAIT ONE MORE TANGENT:

"King, you've only talked about dialogue??? what about-" Dialogue controls actions!!! if you can get a characters conversational tone and linguistic habits down, you'll have NO ISSUES keeping their physical habits in check.

thus concludes another advice corner. i am working on the other questions atm but i have limited time and cannot do more than 1 after work without my brain melting so :)

thanks for reading :) happy writing

xx

[b-rainlet]

Here it comes, the post that about two people have been waiting for:

Watching tua I saw a lot of parallels between Vanya and Luther, so much that I decided to make a little post about it (based on my knowledge after watching the show one time)

So let's look at them, shall we?

One of the first things I noticed is their clothing.

I saw a lot of people joking on how Vanya dresses like a gay (which I def support) but looking closer to her clothes, you can see that she mostly wears stuff that’s ill-fitting on her, baggy jeans and too big shirts. Plus, compared to for example Allison or Klaus she wears muted colours, nothing flashy or memorable (the only thing that stuck in my head was the suit and even that was -at first - a normal suit, nothing extra-ordinary. Someone else may have worn a dress, or even some jewellery with the suit, little things that catch the eye).

I think we can all agree that she doesn’t wanna attract any attention, she tries her best to hide herself, be it by blending into her surroundings by avoiding too colourful clothing or by actively hiding her form under too big clothes.

Luther tries more or less the same, although you can argue about how succesfull that is.

Luther is even more obvious about hiding his body, never taking of his coat and even wearing gloves to conceal his hands. He can’t really wear anything that’s big on him because he already is incredibly big (and probably has clothing made extra for him, made to fit) but I bet if he had the chance, he’d also wear baggy things to hide himself.

At the same time, his stuff also isn’t all too flashy (and as far as I remember, he always wears the same stuff? He doesn’t seem to have a big wardrobe).

In both Vanya and Luther’s case, their clothing style stems from low self-esteem. And they both have low self-esteem because of their father.

So while Vanya probably had to live with very low self-esteem since she was a child, due to being reduced to being ‘ordinary’ - and that being treated like it’s a bad thing - and Luther’s problems with his body most likely only started when he was transformed, both of those incidents were engineered and executed by their father.

(But you could argue that Luther seemed to have a very tense relationship with food even before that, binge-eating or not eating at all and feeling guilty about eatogn too much, so maybe he had body issues way before his transformation. But I’m not sure whether the show really intends to explore that, so I stuck to post-monkey body Luther).

(Also also Luther canonically hates his body enough to self-harm (the scars on his chest) and in an interview it was stated that he thought about suicide because of it, both of which are things Vanya can probably relate to but aren’t addressed in the show, so I’m leaving them out on her part).

The only other person I could see having similar problems with his body is Five (Allison and Klaus both seem to be comfortable and Diego calls his body a temple, so it’s save to say they are content how they are body-wise). Ben is dead so I don’t know whether you can say he even has a body. But Five - although surely not happy that his time traveling plans didn’t turn out as planned - seems to be more annoyed at people treating him like a child and not at himself for looking like that (Also his hair is really fly, I keep getting jealous of it)

Speaking of low self-esteem, did you notice something?

Looking back on the show I realized something: Luther and Vanya are both alone.

If you think about it, there aren’t a lot of people outside of their family any of them interact with. But the others do have people they know and they are close to that aren’t family.

Diego has Eudora and even though they don’t have a relationship anymore, they continue to be close to each other and Diego obviously trusts her a whole lot.

Allison had Patrick and Claire. Those two aren’t as prominent as Patch but nevertheless Allison shows that she loves her daughter a lot and at one point in life, seemed to have loved Patrick enough to marry him and have a child with him (there’s also the fact that they seem to have divorced because of Allison using her powers on Claire and not because they had problems as a couple).

Klaus....is a bit trickier. He doesn’t have anyone in the present timeline he seems to be really close to whose not one of his siblings, but he does seem to know a lot of people. He seemed to have a good relationship with the people in rehab, the paramedics seem to either already know him or took a liking to him real fast (I usually don’t high five my paramedics) and he seems to interact with loads of people and he’s had at least one boyfriend in the past (the guy who’s good at cooking).

Then there’s also Dave, who Klaus seems to have loved deeply, actively trying to get sober to summon him. Interesting how every non-familial relationship is immediately romantic

Five and Ben are a bit out of the loop but since one of them died and the other was alone for several years, they are definitely special cases.

And even then, Five had Delores to project a personality onto and have a relationship with to mimick the human interactions he sure as hell craved and he also spent some time working for the commission and it seems like he was well-liked there for his effiency (and the Handler seems to have a weird, creepy crush on him).

And what about Luther and Vanya? Well, Luther never left home and never had any contact with anyone except his father, Pogo and Grace (and even then, Reginald seemed to spend as little time as possible with his kids when it wasn’t about training and he seemed to have stopped training Luther at that point, Pogo is somehow only ever present to be a dick under the guise of mystery and I don’t remember any flashback with him really genuinely interacting with the kids or Luther and Grace may have been a good mom but she doesn’t really count as a human, does she now?)

(And from what you can see, she also doesn’t seem to interact with the kids a lot once they’re adults and mostly sticks to making food for them. Also Diego is obv her fave askalja)

And well, after the mission gone wrong Luther is supposed to spend the rest of his life on the moon, so there’s not a lot of possibility for him to socialize.

Vanya on the other hand has the best chances of starting a new and normal life with loads of friends since she was never required to dedicate her life to the academy like the others had to.

But what do we see of her before Leonard comes into the picture?

She lives alone, no mention of prior partners, no friends, the people who work with her in the orchestra don’t even know her name.....

(Granted, she does have a relationship with someone outside of her family during the first season but I don’t actually count that as a genuine relationship since Leonard only uses her).

The others also have all those added relationships established from the beginning, while Vanya has no one in the beginning and Luther continues to be completely dependant on his family concerning human interaction.

Which brings me to my next point: They both don’t have a real relationship with their family

The one who seems to get along best with everyone is Klaus. He has a good relationship with Diego, they have a lot of scenes together, he and Allison seem to get along, being the only two who actually hug each other and of course him and Ben are really close due to circumstances.

Diego has - as already mentioned - Klaus and also he’s close to Grace (something the others aren’t, even though they all are obviously very fond of her).

But Luther and Vanya are both kind of on the sidelines.

Vanya because she always was and her father encouraged that by not letting her train with her siblings (which I still think is stupid because she could’ve learned combat?? Both Klaus and Allison don’t have powers that grant them a lot of fighting skills and they were still trained how to to take out enemies, so why not Vanya, honestly). He didn’t let her get a tattoo, didn’t let her be on family portraits, her room was moved from being closer to her siblings to being up in the attic as far as I know, basically she was taught she isn’t part of this family.

And that shows in how little she really interacts with her siblings and how in all of those interactions she gets put down, mostly by Diego.

Then there’s Luther, who was part of the academy, who was granted all the things that Vanya couldn’t do and still he doesn’t have a better relationship with his family.

He was obviously closer to his father than his siblings and there’s a wedge between them based on the way his father favoured him over the others (good example is his relationship with Diego).

I personally also think that taking on the role of leader made him distance himself more from the others? Like, you obviously have a different relationship with your co-workers than your boss and I could see the others being cautious around him because what if he snitches on them? Also they obviously didn’t share his views on how good their Dad is and that obviously further divided them, although all of that is more of a hc since we don’t get a lot of general Luther flashbacks about him as a kid.

Notice how in all those scenarios Vanya is the one who deliberately chooses to push herself further away from everyone else whereas Luther doesn’t seem to have a choice about it. Even with their family, Luther doesn’t seem to get out of his role as the leader and genuinely tries to be there for his family even though it only makes matters worse whereas Vanya chooses to write her book (something that really breaks her relationship with Diego) even though she must’ve known about the consequences.

You can argue that Five and Vanya seems to have had a good relationship as kids but looking at the show Five really seems to not ��belong’ anywhere, spending some time with Vanya, then Klaus, then Allison and Diego, then Luther and then he’s on his own again for some time....

He’s a bit like that one kid in school that doesn’t have a fixed freindgroup and just changes every other week, which makes sense considering that he spent a lot of time apart from his family (even longer than they spent without him) and he’s changed a lot due to that and probably needs to properly reconnect with the others first.

But who did I forget? Oh yeah, Allison.

See, I didn’t mention because Allison she’s another factor where Luther and Vanya parallel each other.

Allison is the only Hargreeves who seems to try and reach out for the two of them on several occasions.

We already see that both their relationships with Diego are tense but we also see that they both seem to click best with Allison.

Allison tries her best to include Vanya in the family again, telling her she belongs there and trying to be supportive when Vanya tells her she met someone (and later on going on a whole detective tangent because Leonard seems shady, that’s peak older sibling).

With Luther, there’s the romance subplot of course but even without that, Allison tries to comfort him about his body and the fact that everything he did was for naught (something none of the others by the way do when the chandelier drops on him. They all see his body, but only Allison tries to talk to him about it as far as I remember. Diego makes fun of it).

Seriously, Allison tries very hard to reach out to those two especially.

(And in the end, both of them end up pushing her out. Vanya by lashing out and hurting her and Luther by not listening to her repeatedly and locking up Vanya).

Both of them are also the most emotionally vulnerable.

Vanya is manipulated by Leonard easily because she desperate for love and approval, even though Leonard screamed ‘shady guy’ from a mile away, let’s be real.

And Luther was blinded so badly by his Dad’s teaching that even when he nearly died, he didn’t leave him and even when his father was dead, he kept acting exactly how Reginald would’ve wanted him to.

All the others don’t seem as perceptive, with Allison seeing through Leonard’s bullshit right away and Diego clearly stating what a monster their Father actually was (and even though all of them are affected by their childhood trauma, they all seem to realize that there was something traumatic happening at all, Luther never really got that far only after he found the unopened sample he had sent his Dad).

So basically, Luther’s and Vanya’s arcs have a lot of similarities that are probably 100% deliberate and they seem to go through a lot of the same stuff even though their original placement within the story (Number One versus Number Seven) seems to frame them as opposites.

And they are opposites, just thinking about how exactly they were isolated from their family shows that. But at the same time even though both their stories are happening on opposite sides, they always end up paralleling each other.

I like to say ‘Two sides of the same coin’

This is basically a long rambly post of me saying that I really think those two could help each other a lot and have an arc about growing closer together, especially considering something  @deweysdenouement has said:

Luther’s whole arc goes from believing your Father was just and always made the right decisions and being convinced that your life had a very specific purpose to learning that everything you thought was basically a lie and that you just wasted your time doing something completely useless because your Father couldn’t stand the sight of you (also your Father was abusive and what you suffered through was, in fact, abuse, and not justified in any way).

And Vanya goes from I am only ordinary and I will never be special in any way and therefore everyone is right to just brush over me and my feelings to I actually am the most powerful out of all of my siblings and I have a right to speak my mind.

(Basically from One to Zero and from Zero to One in one Season).