#okay end directors commentary lol
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#miles.art#jjk#digital art#jjk fanart#ryomen sukuna#fushiguro megumi#jjk sukuna#jjk megumi#I'm v proud of this one 🥹🥹🥹#bumblebee said smth really sweet too he's told me before that he's noticed trends in the evolution of my art#I learn to do smth new I get good at it things stay the same a long while and then there's a huge spike in skill when I learn a new thing#repeat from there#he said this is one of the spikes 💛🐝#okay end directors commentary lol
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mandatory directors commentary ask because I’m absolutely obsessed with them <333 I just think it’s really cool seeing what you put into each update it’s so interesting :)
OKAY BUCKLE UP
a kind of important piece of context that's probably missing for this conversation wake and tetra have is that they were dating and broke up fairly recently. it felt awkward to shoehorn in a line about it but there u have it. anyway that's why wake feels the need to ask tetra to keep an eye on outset in the first place. like she'd actually say no.
did u know tetra has this image of the hero of time in her room on the ship? this worked out very well for me having that in frame hehe. it's also where the sun motif in the "we're cursed" panel comes from!
i like the idea that wearing big fancy earrings is a part of formal dress across all hylian cultures, and outset is no different! these particular ones wake is wearing are based on abalone shells which i think make really beautiful jewelry :-)
i just want to call attention to this relationship chart panel. wake doesn't even know that the first thing slate did was put a sword to wolf's neck. he doesn't know how right he is
this location is the top of ganondorf's tower. it's a little bit more of a symbolic image than a memory tho. fun fact, when you look at this location in noclip tetra is just standing there without her eyes loaded in. spooky stuff
okay, now onto the big one. the flood scene! this is in fact a vision Loft had of the original divine flood that created the Great Sea, and Loft is putting the pieces together. The one in the middle is actually wind waker's hyrule castle, not a temple like i've seen a few people guess. i had this really strong image in my head of the flood starting by pouring out of Hyrule Castle. does this make sense logistically, given the barrier we see around Hyrule Castle implies it was saved from the flood? maybe not, but I couldn't get the idea out of my head, so in the comic it goes
we don't ever seen WW's castle town in the game, so I actually used OOT's castle town as a reference. I just really needed a reference for this or else my head was gonna explode lol. that's also OOT's death mountain, which is mostly just there to show the spread of the flood.
this ending bit with the flood is kind of intended to be a continuation of the Farosh scene on the bridge. Loft is going to continue to have and be reminded of terrible visions of the future, and that anxiety he has around that isn't going to just go away. But I really wanted a scene where he acts on what Slate told him on the bridge— don't pity this place. He snaps himself out of it and chooses to join the party.
another note on that last panel lol, the person who's waving to him is Rose, the pig lady from the bonus comic!
alrighty I think that's all I got for now
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Fleebay Beepo playlist! [youtube link] [zip link]
it's been foreverrr since i finished a character playlist--i missed doing this! tracklist and director's commentary under the cut teehee :)
if you disagree with any of my choices, just remember: 1) this is my playlist for me to listen to made of songs I like for me 2) you just don't see my vision 3) you don't know him like i do 4) make your own so i can disagree with yours too.
WDKYWMYAK -- Rabbit junk
This is a Killing Game After All -- Gadgetor
chance bought this cd from the comic store. i think the album is Doom-inspired? pretty cool! check it out! anyway this first section is pretty obviously all violence killing and maiming etc
3. All Futures -- The Armed
4. Bears -- Mass of the Fermenting Dregs
5. You Know What You Are -- Ministry
6. 1969 -- Boards of Canada
we're coming down out of the chaotic songs into some confusion for the amnesia arc, starting with ministry and boards of canada. 7 references an unwilling change of the self, and just fits the vibe right now. 8... should be obvious lol.
7. Long Road Home -- Oneohtrix Point Never
8. I Don't Remember -- Peter Gabriel
9. Come Back June -- Pussy
sorry i heard a psychedelic rock song that starts with a big cat meow and blacked out. EBONY MOMENT!!! this and the next couple songs are again more about contributing to the Feeling of the groovy train than a direct relation to the lyrics. though 10 can be justified by the fact he's british.
10. Hey, Mister Sun -- Bobby Sherman
11. Baby All the Time -- Julien Love (NOTE: NOT IN YT PLAYLIST)
12. Handlebars -- Flobots
i didn't think i would end up keeping this song when i threw it on here but it just... works really well structurally. sigh... okay well it kind of works thematically. we're moving into some merger au territory at this point, which is my way as a fan to give fleet more of a self-actualization arc. establish his own identity, make friends, accept his existence a bit more. 13 is again more focused on the caring environment of groovy train (and the idea that this won't last forever) but we'll come back around to merger in a second.
13. Cursis Melodías -- Natalia Lafourcade
14. Flagiolletes -- Billy Mahonie
15. Wake Up To Be You -- The Aesthetics
i'm so obsessed with this as a song from fleet to sonic. esp focused on the idea of fleet being the trauma dump that everyone wants dead and sonic being the one who gets to keep their friends. another lucky cd find--this time thrifted. this band still has their old website up--you can contact them if you'd like to get ahold of your own copy!
16. Every Home a Prison ft. Jello Biafra -- DJ Coldcut (Inevitable Alien Nation mix)
i'm in love with this song. we're back in merger au btw. fleet is now a goddamn hooligan in the street (teenager socializing outside with his friends).
17. Default -- Django Django
we're getting to the end of his life! canon, not au. once again on the idea of fleet (dying, cringe) being a comparative failure. the next two songs are our big explosive end! 18 is another band i found from a thrifted cd. lucky!
18. Werewolf -- Progger
19. light speed drift ft Kasane Teto + Adachi Rei -- frog96
the end! thanks for listening! ^_^ as a treat, YOU get to see the special bonus track: The Adventures of Little White Baby -- No Soap, Radio.
#if you r able to recreate this in spotify and want to then be my guest. i dont use that.#full mix is in the zip. youtube dmca's track 11 :(#fleetway super sonic#stc#sonic the comic#sonic the hedgehog#sth#id in alt text#fanart#character playlist#<- idk if thats a tag ppl use#music draws#<- thats a tag *I* use#anyway it's only 19 songs + a separate bonus bc i make playlists to burn to cd#this is just BARELY within the time limit#it gives a nice creative restriction :) and also thats how i listen to music in my car lol#what else did i want to say?#oh i had to upload flagiolletes to youtube myself bc i couldnt find it there? i say in the upload but the cd i got it from was weird#um and im happy with how the cover turned out :) and also i forgoooot to name the playlist </3#and im glad i did directors commentary this time bc 1) i love sharing my thought process on playlists#and 2) so i can figure out wtf i was thinking when i come back to this later#okay bye!#beepo#merger au
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Hi bb 🐺 can you choose a 500 word snippet from one of your published fics or wips and give us some director's commentary / insight into what you were thinking when you wrote it?
Hi bb! ^^ Sure, I'd love to!
I'd like to take the chance to talk about a scene from intricate rituals, my omegaverse Jaytim fic featuring beta!Tim being courted by alpha!Jason.
This scene takes place near the end of the rising action, at the tail end of the fifth time that Jason was totally courting Tim, and Tim still did not notice. Obviously, spoilers under the cut for anyone who hasn't read it yet, and I am a chatty mfer so this got kind of long, haha:
Tim dozes against Jason’s shoulder as he fiddles with the bedroom door handle, and does absolutely nothing to help when they reach the bed in the corner; so Jason dumps him on top of the sheets without fanfare. He bounces on the mattress with an offended chirp while Jason turns to look through his dresser for something. Tim whines obnoxiously at the sudden cold and wriggles around until he’s under the cool top sheet, his face firmly shoved into one of Jason’s pillows. He squints an eye open when Jason still hasn’t finished doing whatever he’s doing, only to see him standing over the bed. His face is unreadable in the darkness, but Tim can tell that he’s clearly dithering. Why? He better not be getting weird about this. It’s only weird if Jason makes it weird. Tim is not nearly awake enough to puzzle through the why right now. He’ll think about it later. “Jason. Get in the bed,” he grumbles. Jason startles at the sound of Tim’s voice, but does as he’s told. The second Jason is under the covers, Tim invades the inch of space left between them with impunity. But then— Jason stiffens, so Tim stops about point five millimeters away from actually touching him. “Sorry," Tim says quietly. "You're really warm?" He says it like a question, trying to explain himself and ask permission at the same time and he can't really tell if he's accomplished either. Jason seems to get it though; he takes a breath and relaxes, then closes the remaining distance himself. He pulls Tim into the hot cave of his body, leaving an arm slung over Tim's waist and tucking him under his chin. Tim sighs, a purr thrumming softly in his chest as he tangles himself in Jason. He buries his face in Jason’s collarbone and quietly wonders to himself how he got here. He's not sure he knows how he and Jason went from barely tolerating each other in the same room, the same city, (the same costume) to cuddling like packmates in the same nest. Yeah, a nest Tim basically invited himself into, and okay when he’s more awake he’ll feel a little guilty about that— but Jason carried Tim here himself. He didn't have to do that. He had every opportunity to say no. To think that he has Jason's trust now. That Jason would let him in this close, have him at his back, at his throat, have access to the vulnerable parts of him. It's terrifying. It's wonderful. It’s only marred by the smallest hint of apprehension still woven through the sleepy warmth of Jason's scent, that Tim only catches because his nose is practically shoved against Jason's scent gland. With a small, trilling keen, he tries his best to project calm-safe-acceptance. He’s had practice at it since becoming Robin, since joining the Wayne pack, but he's always been better at masking his scent than projecting it. A lifetime of hiding is hard to unlearn.
(you don't realize how long 500 words is until you see it right there on the page lol)
So intricate rituals is practically a study in denial. Tim spends half the fic justifying to himself (and to us) why Jason's overt alpha courtship behavior has a completely platonic explanation, and never ever even hints that he, himself, a beta, might in fact want a romance with Jason. Even though he really, really does.
So when I start writing out the prose for a scene, I try to keep those big guiding principles for the overarching plot in mind, as well as what I'm hoping to accomplish by the end of the scene. There's a few things I wanted from this scene in particular.
First: absolutely gag-worthy #married behavior. This is it! This is the final example of Jason's courtship and Tim's flimsy excuses (AKA the formula for each scene lol). So it has to be truly outrageous. It has to be over the top. The cream of the crop. And this time, it has to be Tim's idea in the first place. Get hoisted (from your own petard), idiot.
Second: it has to set us up for why Tim is in Jason's bed in the final scene. I knew all along how this fic was going to end - with Tim in Jason's bed, but comfortable there already; the tip-over from platonic to romantic that only happens because they're in such a stupidly domestic position that Tim is FORCED to realize that he might not be the only one pretending that This Is Fine.
Third: this is almost a step too far for Jason. But not quite.
In the first half of this snippet, we catch the end of the egregious courting behavior. Jason literally carries Tim into his nest/bed. He has to step away to get PJ's or something - Tim's not paying attention to that, so we don't really find out for sure - and when he comes back to see Tim whining and wriggling and getting comfy in his sheets, he has to take a second. For #strength.
Like usual, Tim clocks that something is bothering Jason; that Jason is Experiencing An Emotion. But also like usual, he doesn't clock what it is. Even though it's obvious to us, the romance pilled and dramatic-irony-aware audience. Even worse, he's so deep in his own denial (which hopefully we've picked up at least an inkling of by now, but it's not explicitly told to us until the next interlude scene) that he blames Jason for making it weird. He gets so close to making the intuitive leap about why EXACTLY Jason might be hesitant about sharing a bed, but he's too ~sleepy UwU (and ~afraid OwO). UGH, TIM.
(I try to balance action with introspection. Action -> reaction -> introspection -> action. Jason dumps Tim on the bed -> Tim whines and gets comfortable -> Tim wonders what's taking Jason so long -> Tim opens his mouth to ask "hey wtf is your problem". But preferably the action/reaction is described vividly enough and in the character's voice enough that we can, like, microdose on introspection along the way and keep the ball rolling lol)
When Jason is told to get in the bed, he startles - he was lost in his own thoughts. I like to think Jason was pondering his own version of what Tim sort of torments himself (and us) with every scene; wondering to himself how they got here, lamenting the fact that Tim isn't interested in him the way he would like him to be, and thankful that he gets to have him at all. Maybe contemplating what might happen if only he was a little braver. If this is it; if this will be Tim's line, and whether Jason's about to cross it. (Tim lies to himself about his feelings. Jason is brutally honest with himself about his.)
Tim moves in for the cuddle - Jason stiffens because he's still boggling at this whole situation, and a little afraid that Tim will realize exactly where they are and finally tell Jason 'no'. Again, Tim clocks his discomfort - "Sorry," - and again he misunderstands its source, mislabeling the motivations behind Jason's actions.
Jason makes himself open, and Tim takes happy advantage. Awww, they're cute, even if I do want to strangle them 'now kiss' style. Cue Tim's 'isn't it crazy how we're such good friends now' narrative monologue for the scene.
(🔥"HOT CAVE OF HIS BODY" MENTION🔥) (i can't resist this phrase OTL i'm weak for it)(it's about protection it's about warmth it's about the primal imagery of being nestled under the weight of something powerful that loves you)(<- werewolf pilled)
In this last half of the snippet, I wanted Tim to kind of show his ass here, re: being in denial lol.
"He's not sure he knows how" - Tim, we all just saw exactly how you and Jason ended up here. Yeah, we skipped some of that early stuff, but we just saw the start of your deeper friendship. It started with an omelette.
"When he's more awake he'll feel a little guilty" - Tim, didn't you just explain to Jason and to us why you shouldn't feel guilty? That it's perfectly normal to share a nest with packmates? Why do you feel guilty about this, Tim?
"He didn't have to do that." You're right. He didn't have to do that, and he did have every opportunity to say no. Why didn't he, Tim?
He tries to explain that it must be because Jason trusts him. That Jason's trust is a wonderful and terrifying thing to have. Huh. Interesting. Why does that terrify you, Tim?
Then Tim picks up on Jason's scent. Jason's own fears are the only thing that can cut through Tim's spiraling thoughts right now. Jason's made peace with having what he wants so close but still so far; and yet, he still can't help but ache.
Wanting to ease Jason's discomfort is what makes Tim bold. He tries to make Jason more comfortable by reassuring him that Tim feels safe here. That he feels accepted, and that he accepts Jason - which is true, regardless of his secret, presumedly unreciprocated feelings. Aww.
The last paragraph was a two for one - transitioning us into wrapping up the scene, but also, low key? The thesis of what we've seen so far. This explains at least one facet of Tim's behavior, prepping us for his breakdown and the emotional reveal in the next interlude.
Why is Tim in denial? Why won't he admit, even to himself, that he wants Jason? Sexually, romantically? That Jason could be courting him, that Jason could want him too? Because he's always been better at masking than projecting. A lifetime of hiding is hard to unlearn.
I really enjoyed writing intricate rituals, and my biggest hope was that everyone would be ready to strangle Tim by the end of this scene - but also hurt for him by the end of the next. When you get used to the idea that you are unwanted or undesirable, in any capacity, it's truly difficult to let yourself be convinced otherwise. But there's bravery and freedom to be found in finally allowing yourself to believe it. <3
#THANKS FOR THE ASK BB#SORRY IT GOT SO LONG LMAO#you say the magic words you get the magic quencies#which is to say. my thots#jaytim#my writing#asked and answered#intricate rituals: director's cut#paprikadotmp4
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can i ask for the hot mess commentary plz?
sure
Before we crack into this, take a moment to read what I said about the neck thing. I write that up a long time ago, but it provides some important context and is a good refresher on the secret history of Spirit's bi awakening.
Also, the director's commentary for this chapter is here, in case you want to review that.
Good? Okay, let's go at it.
So.... they had sex. Yay. Insert jazz hands.
I feel like I actually have way less to talk about here than I did for the neck thing. Granted, a lot of the neck thing is behind the scenes stuff. I guess that's a good place to start.
You may recall the informal hiatus CTB went on after Spirit came back to Warriors's era. I used a lot of that time to actually work out how to end CTB and what character/plot points I would need to hit to have a satisfying conclusion.
During this time, I was listing out things about Spirit and Warriors that I need to return to. Spirit had his codependent histories with the greenhorn and Zelda, or really his strategy for offering himself up as a means of feeling more in control, that needed to be explored. I needed to do some kind of follow-up with Warriors's latent attraction.
The two topics were similar enough to make me want to tackle them at once. But the moment I did, my brain decided that they should hate fuck. (I definitely was also thinking about my old concept of Spirit's unrequited crush-- I still write the characters like that happened, even if it never actually made it into the story.)
Why hate sex? Honestly, it would be kinda funny. Plus, it's a good writing exercise to ask yourself what would happen if your characters in conflict did (not really).
I knew immediately it could only end badly for everyone involved. But I knew I needed Warriors to hit an emotional low point to motivate him to do his Castle Town plan. I knew I wanted Spirit's big speech to come at a time when he and Warriors were emotionally connecting again, and that the response to that speech needed to push him back to Time.
Shit, I thought. This might be what they do.
But, like. I love protecting my peace. I have been skirting around the edges of homo eroticism with Spirit and Warriors as much as I dared. I didn't want to invite angry anons. But then.... did I really care? I understand where people are coming from, but at the same time... this is such a minuscule non-issue. Truly, and with emotion: who even cares?
First off, we already established with the neck thing that whatever fucked up thing these two have going on does not count as shipping. And second, if it does count as shipping, then fine! It's shipping then. This is what the plot is. I've been working on this story for too long to compromise now. I'll reap the consequences, whatever they may be.
I decided to keep it on the books, half believing I would change my mind once the chapter came up.
I was feeling very confident about my choice, up until the day of posting. That was then I got slammed in the face with regret. Luckily, there hasn't been any issues. I may have overestimated as much the general populous care about CTB. If there was ever any confirmation that this story has the world's most niche audience, this is it.
And you all have been great. There's been a lot of encouragement and kind words from you the readers, after you all stopped yelling, of course.
(Though I was prepared to be an obstinate jackass to anyone who tried to complain. I found a loophole and was ready to exploit the hell out of it. I was so ready!)
Funnily enough, everyone's reactions to the past few chapters helped to reassure me the most. There was been a lot of jokes about Warriors and Spirit having the world's worst situationship (lol).
So them having sex turned into an important character and plot moment. Warriors and Spirit got built up and tore down in self-destructive ways. This experience becomes the wake-up call Warriors needed to decide that he was ready to stop being the hero and get his life back.
A lot of people expressed surprise that Warriors and Spirit would go through with it even after talking it out. To be honest, I was a little surprised too! I was half convinced that Warriors had grown enough to stop the self-destructive cycle and turn Spirit down. But when looking at the scenes leading up to them being alone-- from Twilight denounce his friendship with Warriors, Toto turning him away, and Warriors generally in an emotional rut over his intellect and lost beauty--I realized that Warriors was already in the middle of another downward spiral. He would go through with this, if only to feel valued. It was the war all over again.
Also, apparently half of you guessed that Warriors would get cigarette burns from Spirit eventually. I hope you all were happy with the results!
When I posted that snippet from the chapter, apparently all of you knew that a kiss was coming. Ooops. I'm a little glad I surprised all of you with what happened next afterward.
On to funnier things:
I meant for there to be more compare/contrasts between Warriors's nights with Icarius and Spirit. The only one I really managed to do was Link being unable to sleep next to Icarius vs Warriors falling asleep easily.
Because this chapter and the last were supposed to be one, this scene was supposed to come out around Valentine's Day. Could you imagine?
I had the silliest time trying to figure out how to get Warriors and Spirit alone in a room together. I had this grand plan about them needing to get a room in a different inn from the others, whether because they were too tired to walk home after dancing or because they were too drunk to remember the way. Then I realized that Ganondorf could just give the Chain enough money to get more rooms. I realized this way later than I should have.
If you're wondering.... they switched....
I wrote that Warriors thought that sex with Spirit felt like an argument. That is because they are both the bossiest motherfuckers in bed. They both want things done their way or else. It's combative. Unfortunately, they both like the challenge.
I did have an idea for how to end this whole matter in a funny way, both involving someone from the chain finding out.
In my first idea, Time barges into what he thinks is just Warriors's room, in the middle of some kind of rant. Then he sees both of them sitting in bed, pauses, then promptly walks out. Warriors and Spirit quickly get dress before there's a knock on the door. When Warriors opens, Time walks in casually and starts his rant again while pretending none of this had happened. He would wait until Warriors was alone to be like WHAT THE FUCK!!!!!!
My other alternate scenario involves Warriors and Spirit getting a room in a different inn. In the morning, Spirit is hurriedly trying to leave when there's a knock on the door. This time, it's a few members of the chain asking if he's seen Warriors anywhere. He says no. All but one walk away. The one who stays (probably Legend) would lean and discreetly tell him that he knew the room was under Warriors's name, so if they were done, could he tell Warriors to get his ass outside? Cue Spirit burning up in embarrassment.
EDIT: I actually had a third silly scenario idea. Similar to the others, Twilight barges in to talk to Warriors about Midna (they're still friends in this scenario; this was an idea from a long time ago). Warriors is still in the bed, but luckily Spirit is in the bathroom. Warriors tries to have a normal conversation without alerting Twilight that something was amiss. And it almost works until Spirit just walks out of the bathroom, waves, and goes to put his clothes on. Cue Twilight's 404 error.
So, yeah! That's the Hot Mess. As always, it's been really fun to see everyone's reactions. Warriors and Spirit are both extremely polarizing, and I love hearing everyone's hot takes.
Does this count as toxic yaoi? Not until I see an AMV to "Numb" by Linkedin Park. Luckily, Warriors and Spirit will never do this again. Probably.
#same rules as last time: please keep this out of the main tag#it's been fine so far but let's not tempt fate lol#feel free to ask follow up questions as well#me rambling#lu ctb#ctb lore#ctb spoilers#the hot mess#ctb commentary
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Hey, so the 'scene breakdown' ask game is long gone but does that matter? If you're up for another I have a request. 💜
In one of your answers you covered the scene where Wars talks to Malon and is perceived. You mentioned him checking on Legend was a response to that.
So I want that scene. Wars finding Legend by the pond, scars on display and fighting off the curse by inches instead of just letting it hit him all at once.
Did this take forever? Yes. Apologies. But here go go, director’s cut on two emotionally constipated boys talking about feelings. Text of the fic in brackets [like this] with commentary beside it.
[And seeing it, the Captain gets it.
There’s an angry healed burn between his shoulder blades, so reminiscent of Wild’s… well, Wild’s everything. Angry jagged fractal lines spread in all directions from it, just like Sky, climbing over his shoulder, down his arms (the long sleeves make sense now), around his waist. There’s other scars. Raised white lines that can only be from swords and spears and a patch around his right forearm that looks like it was torn apart, and a matching area of raised skin on his opposite hip.] So we have a very fast inventory of a few notable times Legend got his shit rocked in the games. The LA lightning strike. General combat wounds. A rabbit in a predator’s jaws. A kid pinned down by a search dog.
[All of that is easy to ignore in favor of the three evenly spaced, perfectly round patches of deep scar tissue, in an awkward diagonal across the small of his back. Warriors looks at that, and the visual comes to mind without his bidding, of Legend skewered on the end of a pronged spear, pinned down so small and alone under something so much larger than him.] ALTTP Ganon fight. There are several hints throughout Adjuration that Legend barely made it out of that first final boss fight alive, including a flash back to a fairy mid battle. It’s about setting the tone, you know? This is a man who has been barely hanging on to survival for years. He is tired.
[His mind conjures the image, and he can’t help the gasp.] Wars is not thinking about Legend. He is thinking about Mask, and the little kid that Legend used to be, and he is picturing his baby run through by a giant trident.
[Legend drops the cloth and flinches, turning his head sharp to the side, only tensing further when he sees Wars. “Go away,” the Vet hisses.
He shouldn’t have gasped. “Legend, I—”
“GO AWAY!”]
Okay so Legend is immediately playing the “emotional repression game” and this normally works super well on Wars but unfortunately for him Warriors literally just had an intervention.
[Warriors doesn’t move, doesn’t break eye contact. He slowly, deliberately takes a step forward.] Yes we are in fact approaching our brother like a startled prey animal. Not inaccurate. But still. [What are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?” Legend rolls his eyes and picks the cloth back up, dipping it into the pond and wincing as he wrings it out.
Honestly, the Captain isn’t entirely sure.] Because it is ridiculous. This whole situation is ridiculous but we had to go here. I had to address the whole “how do you take a bath with an H2O just add water curse” okay? I had to. [There… there’s a bath up at the house?”
“Not an option.” The pink haired ball of rage] LOL get read for filth, Leggy boy [seems to have decided to accept his presence, now scrubbing in small angry motions a few inches below the earlier spot. All the while his mouth is pinched like he’s holding something unpleasantly hot.
Realization strikes sudden, and hard.
“Is this about the fish thing?”] So perceptive, Cap.
[Legend sighs, tilting his head back to look up at the heavens as if in a silent plea for salvation. “Yes, Captain. This is about the ‘fish thing.’”] I think that literally any other phrasing would have elicited less rage, but here we are.
[“Oh.” He risks coming closer, almost within arms reach. “How so, if you don’t mind?”
Legend’s eyes flick back down and the force of his glare communicates that he does, in fact, mind. But there’s something else there, some other unspoken pain behind the unexplained physical discomfort and Warriors, well…
He knows how to manage that kind of expression. Mask was a damned Farore-forsaken mess.] Okay some fun unspoken backstory: Baby Time was not good. He was a disaster child. He was traumatized and scared and abandoned and hurt and suddenly thrown into a warzone. Wars had to work very very hard to earn that kid’s trust. He knows how to appear non threatening to someone having a Bad Time.
[“How are you holding up?” He asks, pivoting. “After Red, I mean. Everything happened so fast, none of us really… None of us have had the time.”
The small part of Legend’s face that was expressive shuts down. There it is. He’s got him.] Because Legend and Time are actually very similar people, despite how they outwardly behave. Wars is seeing one brother while standing next to the other.
[“I’m fine, Wars. Really.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really!” Legend stops scrubbing and shakes out his arm, rubbing it on the bunched fabric around his waist before starting on another spot, only inches away from the last. “People die. I’m used to it.”] Oh Legend, darling. You shouldn’t be.
[“You’re in pain,” Warriors says, pointing to the wet cloth. “It’s hurting you.”] Decision to deflect. To make Legend think that they are talking about the thing he is comfortable talking about: a physical problem.
[“Fighting back the curse hurts, Captain. It hurts like a fucking bitch, but I can manage, as long as it’s a little at a time.” Legend sighs, and repeats his little process. Stop, shake, rub dry, start again. “But too much water at once, and there’s nothing I can do.”] This my friend, is what we call a thinly veiled metaphor. Curse, grief, it’s the same conversation. Pain is pain.
[“Makes sense.” In a way, it does. Warriors understands the concept of tipping points. The physical and the emotional. The magical can’t be all that different. “When you changed back, last time, that… that hurt you, didn’t it?”
Legend shoots him a blank expression.
He pushes. “Did it hurt more than this? This… bath of a thousand little burns you’re powering through?”] Again, metaphor. Is bottling up all that sorrow actually helping you, Legend?
[The Vet sighs, shaking his head. “What does it matter to you?”] It isn’t. It isn’t helping. But what does it matter to Wars, right? He isn’t Legend’s keeper… no one is.
[“I think sometimes, holding back what’s going to hurt us actually hurts more than just letting it happen.” Wars smiles, trying to look as non-threatening as possible as he takes another step closer, into Legend’s personal space. “I think that you’re in pain, and trying to act like you’re not is only going to do more damage in the long run. I think that you’re a stubborn bastard, and that you should knock it the fuck off long enough to actually feel all that hurt you got rolling around in you before it drowns you, fish boy.”] And the metaphor is now so thinly veiled it may as well not exist.
[Legend’s eyes narrow, flashing in sudden violet aggression. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”
“Your brother,” Warriors feels his smile slip into a smirk. “And the man who’s seeing right through your bullshit.”]
THIS IS IT! This is the exact moment that Wars starts seeing Legend as his brother. Not his brother in arms, but his brother. This is the tipping point. This is the moment that leads Wars to the decision to trade his own life for Legend.
[With that, he takes the last quick step forward, raising his arms and pushing Legend as hard as he can sideways into the pond. About a minute later, Legend’s forehead and eyes poke back above the surface, and if looks could kill, well…
“I’m going to go get you some soap!” He yells as he skips backwards, a not entirely false smile spread across his lips. “Take your time, Ledge! Really soak it all in!”] Soak in the water, and the sloppy therapy.
[“Fuck you!”
“That’s the spirit! Let it out!” Wars laughs to himself and turns, jogging back towards the house.] They’re brothers, your honor. For real, this time.
*sobbing about the Legend&Warriors dynamic to the day*
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please tell me how your perverse big brain came up with the idea of the pirate fic, mister I-don't-like-angst
the tides of fate director's commentary:
ah, okay so thank you for asking! pirates actually came to me in reverse. the first concept was just this strong and visceral visual of charles going to the gallows (spoiler: doesn't happen in the final version lol). he was taking sixteen steps that lead him to the end of his life and that correlating to sixteen different scenes/vignettes of max and charles growing up and falling in love. this changed as i was writing it and the fic started to breathe, and with some lovely notes from @formula-fun, which drove it more toward some other repeating themes i wanted to explore for them. in an out of character move for me i largely wrote the fic in chrono order of events, and then when i finally got to the end and wrote that first scene i'd had in my head - it didn't work! much to my chagrin. but i regrouped and found my way forward with some great advice from @bananasomg which got us to the (fourth version i think) ending we have now. which really is the most heartbreaking. re: angst - it's complicated ;)
once again, a big thank you to the organizers of the motorsport historical fic fest. it was so much fun to participate.
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Curious to know your feels about the 1000 Years Old finale. You didn't post much about it. Maybe that's a commentary in and of itself LOL.
Part of the answer is that I struggle with watching things out of my usual schedule and had a very busy weekend so I'm just getting around to actually watching the finale episode after knowing all kinds of spoilers. I am actively writing this response as I watch the episode. So enjoy my live thoughts on your ask.
And, so far, my entire reaction is that they crammed way too much here in the end. They needed to spread this out more than they did and I get parts of it, I like having the soulmates reveal only at the very end...
But there's a lot of plot and seriousness that they just didn't touch on enough and that I think including in the rest of the show would have improved it greatly as well as helping with the pacing struggling most people had.
If more of the Janja plot had been genuinely spread through the show and more of these serious moments and the understanding of their agreement and relationship had started earlier I might care more about this. But I don't care about Janja at all! I just don't! I wasn't given reasons to care until the very end and that's not enough for me.
Also, having Yoh not fight for any of it really did disappoint me but the director of this show, as seen in multiple other shows they've done, seems to have a thing for one very passive character in the main relationship who will just Allow Things To Happen To Them without ever fighting back. And I never like that, frankly.
Yes, they dropped a few hints here and there but it just isn't enough to tie it all together in this show itself.
It's not a bad finale, it's not the worst, but the end of the show feels so rushed compared to the rest and us not getting all the fluffy times together only to be shown a single scene at the end of a long happy life instead of the time together that I want to see.
I like domesticity, not the end of domesticity.
I get why people liked this ending. I see how people who rewatch things, especially, will enjoy the recontextualization of the show.
But for me? It made everything feel rushed and the rest of the show feel almost empty and slightly worse in comparison. Either we needed more plot or less episodes for this to work.
(Every time I see Somchai I am sad we did not get Somchai and Shin. Every single time. Come on. You crammed this much into the final episode, you could have given me more of them somewhere else!)
Also, I love his random bodyguards, whoever they are. Love them.
Also, this year long time skip is stupid.
Seriously, I am deeply frustrated by Yoh literally finding out they're soulmates and then just... completely abandoning Pun and leaving entirely. It's not interesting to see him just give up and it makes him the most passive character ever. Which we also had in I Will Knock You and, frankly, in 2gether. That's just The Style.
JANJA LITERALLY TOLD YOH SHE WAS GIVING HIM PUN BECAUSE PUN WILL NEVER LOVE ANYONE ELSE. Whatever, at least the confession and whole thing is done and now they can be soulmates together.
9 minutes of happy ending is not enough. Absolutely not enough. Yes, it was cute. Yes, it was a happy ending. But it's just not enough and it leaves me wanting more and wishing that the show were paced differently.
(Still sad we couldn't get any more Somchai and Shin, we deserved more.)
Edit Okay, I didn't mention this originally but I actually hate that the soulmate/reincarnation line takes away the power of Yoh's gift to Pun being his first birthday present. It really bothers me because that moment was one of the my favorite moments and the finale just made it not matter at all and turned it into something much less important and takes away a lot of the importance away of Pun wearing the cross and it BOTHERS ME A LOT.
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end to end for director's cut
end to end, post canon kaneson, 5.8k, rated T
As the sun sets on the last day of Heungmin’s career, the sky over Tottenham Hotspur Stadium turns a deep shade of navy blue.
OMG okay so firstly this fic was written specifically for my beloved @roykentalwaysremains , whose fresh tottenham hotspur fixation i capitalized on to drag him into the pits of rpf hell with me.
In a lot of ways end to end is a love letter to max and you elle and everyone else we spent last season watching footy with. It’s definitely wish fulfillment!! But also me putting the hope out into the universe that a time and place that brought me a lot of joy stays whole & important in some way.
Commentary on specifics below the cut!
When it came to choosing which players would come back for Sonny’s testimonial, I struggled with imposter syndrome in a real way LOL. Obviously, I did not follow spurs at the time (or at this time currently. Or really in any other way than through my pocket of friends who are spurs fans) and don’t have a great grasp of those guys, their talent level & potential longevity, their narratives, etc etc. Future fics will never be evergreen but you never want something you’ve put effort into to be completely obsolete, like, three months later. Eventually, I leaned into the wish fulfillment of it all and decided to be vague about the specific roster of guys on Sonny’s testimonial team (as well as any details about their opposition)
I mean, testimonials are barely even done anymore LOL and I can’t imagine the trend will reverse in the handful of years until Sonny retires.
More than any of them, Heungmin knows Harry’s rough edges. There used to be nothing left of Harry to discover. Then Harry went to Germany. Six years later, Heungmin feels a bit like Brennan, wide-eyed and amazed, not sure what to expect.
This line, as well as a few others from later sections of the fic, is essentially all that remains of the first fic I had vaguely planned to write for Max’s birthday. That fic, discussed in length BEFORE spurs and bayern did NOT play into the kaneson narrative with their friendly in Korea this summer, would have followed their meeting there. messages i sent to Max when we were discussing it:
so much potential here tbh…. kaneson meeting again on the field after h left but in son’s home country….. something something home something strangers something something….. sonny had lived a full life in korea that h would never know, and until a year before son had known h in the only place he’d ever called home, but maybe in five, ten years h would be as strange to son as son’s life before tottenham was to h…..
i’m envisioning them meeting up after the game and son takes him to his favorite place back home and they catch up and realize like. there’s no separate harry or son pre or post spurs. they’re both complete people and always have been and the best thing about loving someone else is spending your whole life getting to know them because no one is ever truly entirely Knowable and spurs is not the end all be all of Harry and Son, it’s just the place where for a while they were able to exist together. and they’ll always love it for that….
spurs is a place and spurs is a time but more importantly spurs was something they chose to be together. and bitch guess what….. NOTHING CAN TAKE THAT AWAY FROM THEM
and then Harry Kane decided he wasn’t a team player and WASNT AT THE KOREA FRIENDLY 👎👎👎👎👎
anyways
I really debated where I wanted H to end up in his retirement MLS career. He WILL be going in MLS I have no doubts about this, but idk for some reason I couldn’t imagine him on the west coast, but I also couldn’t imagine him specifically at one of the two evil New York teams with their multi club owners LOL. For a minute I was like …Boston??? New England Rev?? But then I decided fuck it, if Lamps went into the City system so can Harry. to NYCFC it is
When Heungmin came to Tottenham the new grounds were nothing but an abstract promise, loose dirt and construction vehicles and scaffolding. Months often went by with little to no visible progress. Many times Heungmin wondered if Tottenham Hotspur Stadium would ever be more than a half-constructed pile of steel beams and rubble. Yet despite everything, in front of them shines this glittering, otherworldly stadium that Harry and Heungmin get to call home before anyone else. The gradual transformation makes Heungmin believe that what they’re building, he and Harry and all the other lads on the team, will grow to become what it was always meant to be.
It’s not the grounds, Harry insists. It’s them. Heungmin doesn’t see the difference.
A thread that runs throughout most of my writing is the way that memory dwells in place. This fic is certainly an example of that! My academic research has a lot to do with the way that people construct identities based on place and space, and that comes through in how I connect setting to character.
Taking Harry seriously as a competitor adds a touch of normalcy to their relationship that Son hasn’t felt for a long time. Their friendship is not a sacred, delicate flame to hold close to his chest. It does not need protection from the wind.
This is another remnant of the previously mentioned AU. It’s also one of my favorite lines in the fic.
“It was kind of nice, actually,” Dele says. “Made the rest of us look better for once. I swear, bro, I nutmegged you at least eight times that day.”
I’ve heard that Dele was notorious for nutmegging his teammates relentlessly back in the day.
“Really? All that for fucking Bloodborne?” says Brennan, looking at Heungmin, as Harry walks off.
Heungmin laughs. “Don’t look at me! I still don’t remember. I don’t think I would stay up late for two weeks.”
This moment is a really important one for Sonny, just as important as his and Harry’s kiss a few scenes earlier. When he doesn’t remember a pretty small detail that doesn’t quite match up with how he thinks about himself from back then, he’s prompted to reflect on how much he’s changed since then. In this fic, Sonny sort of lives in the past, especially in the moments of his past where he felt the potential for things that never truly materialized. On a small scale, he’s forced to reckon with the fact that no matter what, he is a fundamentally different person than he was during the period of his life that will forever define his career. I think Tottenham as a club — and Sonny here in this fic, representing them — has a tendency to self-mythologize. And when buy into your own narrative, it can be too easy to overlook the messier parts of your past that don’t fit so well into that narrative.
Anyways those are most of the thoughts I have on that fic!! Thank you for the ask elle ILY!!!
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Hi I just got through reading all of your liveblogging posts about The Bear! It was a delight to read all of your real-time predictions that ended up coming true, you really had this show’s number from the jump lol. Do you have any predictions for next season? Most fans think Carm and Syd are headed for an explosive confrontation, but are any other storylines, scenes, character beats, etc. that you think we might see?
This is super nice of you, anon! thank you so much for following my chaotic ramblings XD and hey it's a lot easier to know what might happen in the show when they've got such competent writers/directors! tho they surprised me a fair number of times (i don't think i'll be over the interplay/intercuts of claire, carmy, and syd at the end of 2X07/start of 2X08 any time soon), which keeps things fun
as far as predictions for next season...i think it's hard to say without having the first five minutes of S3 in front of me (they do such a good job setting up the tone and conflicts of the season in the first little bit of S1 and S2!), but i've got
a couple things i'm pretty sure about:
-more REM songs (only thing i'm 100% positive on)
-more kitchen/cooking time for our mains, especially carmy. last season's renovations + cliche john hughes nonsense kept him mostly out of the kitchen from ep 3 on, and i'm 99% sure he'll be back with a knife in hand come S3
-nat giving birth to a girl (i'd love it but am not solid on predicting she'd be named some derivative of 'mary' (or a name meaning 'victory', such as nicole), given the berzatto family prayer).
i know the temptation for her to have a boy named after michael is strong b/c it's TV, but this series (rightly, in my mind) tends away from Lionizing the Dead simply b/c they're dead, and after spending S2 breaking down mikey (and showing mikey and nat's relationship, which like ever berzatto relationship wasn't super healthy), i'm hopeful and trusting the writers to avoid this. it wouldn't make me hate the show or anything, but it would honestly disappoint me unless done in a way (i honestly can't think of what way) that would make it okay. plus pete kinda screams girldad to me, and seeing carmy and richie with a little niece would be incredibly precious
-sydcarmy dustup of some kind, but i doubt it'll be as explosive as we've seen in the past, mostly b/c syd was stressed but exhilarated by success at friends & family and b/c i think carmy's (lack of) mental health will be brought up in relation to it
-solidifying of a secondary staff at the bear to let our regulars breathe a bit and have the bear feel like a real, functioning kitchen, not a mom and pop greasy spoon -- this started at the end of s2 but it needs to continue
-cicero setting the tone of the first few months of The Bear (and probably his commentary on carmy's relationships) -- we're not out of the realm of Complete and Utter Failure yet, lads, and the money is gonna come due -- whether by the guise of Friendly Uncle Jimmy visiting with Nat, or the mask of Cicero the Loan Shark coming out in full force
-art storyline with carmy figuring out what will replace the awful painting (i'm going to guess it'll be something of his design, but it'll at least be something he feels represents him, given the comments last season)
-major theme of carmy figuring out what he wants vs what others want for him. him analyzing his relationship with claire by himself -- or, my preference, talking it out with Tina, who he seems to be able to open up to pretty well -- is part of this
things that have to happen but i have no idea how/to what resolution:
-carmy and richie addressing the "donna" fight/comment. it's gonna be multi-ep (neither one is great at complimenting the other to their face and tend to do it behind the other's back, but richie is especially bad at it), and it's gonna hurt.
-pete spilling the beans to Someone (not nat but not sure who) about donna being at f&f
-resident claire's poor little hurt feelings from trespassing into the kitchen and eavesdropping on then leaving carmy in the middle of a really, really bad attack (yes i'm phrasing it that way because it's true <3)
-something about tiff's upcoming wedding (marcus getting contracted/recommended to make dessert for it would be painful but oh so crunchy)
-carmy meets syd's dad. he's proud of her and her success and you know he's gonna want to meet her business partner
nebulous predictions:
-ebra's storyline with him carving out a niche at the sandwich window getting screentime
-tina coming more into her own and maybe getting a designated storyline (about what? no idea)
-more gary nonsense. man lives the wildest life and we see almost none of it
-carmy working through what cooking means to him and what it means in relation to the bear/the berzattos/sydney
-nat's water breaks/she goes into labor at the bear. not sure the baby will actually be born there (i'd guess probably not on the whole), but the process will Begin there
-syd distraction/love interest storyline. not even her dating particularly, just her attention being Split and having the shoe be on the other foot for carmy as they navigate what being business partners means outside the kitchen
-fak time. he's a little uncertain, a little wandering in the restaurant, and he was a major...antagonistic force, let's say? in S2. his place in the world of the bear needs clarification and harmony, and his identity needs solidity and sureness
things that aren't impossible/improbable but would be a Little Treat for Me specifically:
-chef jess being invited to the bear by richie (let the man have people outside the bear and his kid/ex! garrett may come too i'll allow it)
-the return of louie my beloved (helping out at the sandwich window? he makes a good foil to Young Carmy, so i would like to see him more -- carmy in Full Mentorship would be a thing to see, and it would be a being-better-than-mikey-was-to-him thing as well. it's narratively crunchy and provides lots of room for growth, but can be done in ways that don't involve louie, so that's why it's here)
-syd's best meal + comment about being a regular at The Beef coming back. do i think they eventually will? yes. am i aware that my desire for them is prolly stronger than it narratively should be be predicted? also yes. could this easily be combined with carmy meeting syd's dad? yes and i will break the sound barrier
-carmy drawing a dish syd comes up with. a hand-drawn menu for the bear would be Incredible, and syd's face looking at a sistine-chapel-style drawing of a dish she came up with? tremendous, chef
thing that i want to be brought up more than Anything but don't predict it'll be touched (at least directly):
-carmy yelling for syd during his attack in the walk-in (i'm sorry you can't have the man yelling "MARCUS GET ME SYD. GET ME SYD" and expect me not to want it on a billboard
that got long, sorry anon, but there we go -- 4am rambling off-the-cuff about S3...only months to go, hopefully....
#the bear#anti claire bear#asked and answered#sorry this is like a novella but i can't keep my mouth shut! y'all know how it goes#syd x carmy#i refer to her as 'resident claire' because 1) no surname and 2) referring to her place in the bear universe as a Type rather than a person#she's not claire a fleshed out character; she's the resident claire; the archetype that is a vehicle for conflict + growth#also because i am as catty as the day is long and i can be! been in fandom too many decades not to call it as i see it#that and it's her job title so like it works but it works in so many different ways#it's like poetry it rhymes dot jpeg#i might be way off base but i'm p sure i'm at least on the field
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Director's commentary on Something About Moths and a Flame, please!
Oh this outta be fun LOL OKAY
So the overall story of how this fic was even born in the first place stemmed from 2 things. I had an idea to write about a shameless self-indulgence about having an overabundance of experience with cismen with hardly any queer experience. And the little queer experiences Blake did have were not good reference points. Using myself as a default source of plot devices (lmao) I self-inserted the desire to get the fuck out of my current state and wanting to move somewhere north to start over. Bing bang boom, you got a basic background and motive for Blake
I honestly should've expected the fic would be more than just 'bisexual character experiences sex with a seasoned sapphic character' and trying to manifest positive things in my life by writing it out in fic format (who doesn't do that, really. If anyone says they don't they're a liar). Everything I make always turns out to be something way more than it's original concept so what I ended up with here was a story drawing on personal elements and wanting for an outcome that probably wont happen, but it's nice seeing it happen to the bees anyway
Blake's feelings about relationships represent a time in my life where my opinion was exactly hers. After a lengthy discussion with Sawrin over dissecting this fic, I've come to the realization that Yang also represents a time frame of opinions as well. Only Yang's core design comes from a time waaaaay in the past that honestly, I had forgotten existed. It's nice to see it manifest despite being buried, and certainly gives me something to think about when I reread it from time to time.
Readers of MM and Moths can draw lines between Blake questioning why things are so easy when she's with Yang. It's the same principle across the board for most bee fics that Blake's past hasn't been kind to her. It's an alien feeling to suddenly have things be so easy, but difficult to accept they're easy at the same time. I tried to picture how the fuck would I react if I were in this perfect dream scenario and how stupid would it be after the realization hits. Blake and Yang have been dating this whole time and just never accepted it for what it was based on what other people have lead them to believe what a relationship had to be.
The talk they have when Yang's AC is out and they're laying in her bed with the windows open is in reference to a talk I once had that didn't have the outcome I wanted. It carries the same essence of dismay - both parties knowing they want each other but because of the boundaries at play, cannot have what they want. But in this version it's not one sided.
Overall, it was nice getting able to write from a quietly honest place without having to worry about literally every other realistic factor ever. This is about as textbook 'I wrote this for me cus I wanted something that applied to me' as it gets. The ending is my dream scenario. I fucking hate living with partners I can't do it anymore JKNFKGNKJGFN but it's not easy finding someone else who'd agree with me. So the bees get my lost dream of permanent independence. I wrote this thing in 3 days and I was morbidly sick while I was doing it, too. So I'm sure it's littered with grammatical errors and what have you. But my best friend has always been completely head over heels about this work, and it astounds me how much he sings its praise. I'm always genuinely surprised when others find something to relate to in this work as well. I never expected it to be anything more than just a glance. It's not even smut heavy. I didn't think people cared about fics like that LOL (silly, I know) but I am glad I put it out there and it got the response it did.
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so, i finally finished (posting) my huge, novel-length teenage mutant ninja turtles fanfic. i just posted the final epilogue over on ao3!
here is my director's commentary on it, if you want to read even more about it. this contains spoilers for the whole thing. maybe read the epilogue first and sit with that for a minute. also this will probably be pretty incoherent if you haven't read the whole thing. it's just a disconnected series of thoughts i have about the story, really
man, this story. this is maybe the longest thing i've ever written? like 'the new hive' and 'hell game' had more words (i think) but they were mostly a disconnected series of sex scenes with thin connective tissue between them. this is ~200k words of a single, linear, mostly-plot narrative. i'm writing scenes that aren't just about getting the two leads to fuck!! that's weird. it's definitely the most ambitious thing i've written. kind of weird that it's tmnt fanfic. that's just how it worked out, i guess.
so back in 2022 i watched the rise of the tmnt movie because people kept talking about the animation quality of the fights and that got me into a spiral of actually paying attention to the ninja turtles. i had never been into them & genuinely i think a huge part of getting into tmnt stuff was that rise actually varied the design of the turtles so that they weren't all basically identical save for color-coding. turns out visual design was the missing mystery ingredient.
also in 2022 i was burning out on writing 'goblin cave', when what i had intended to be a fun little writing exercise ended up getting algorithmically surfaced and getting me hundreds of comments on each chapter. that got a little stressful and i wasn't really enjoying that, so i stopped. but i was like, hmm you know i mostly just write weird porn but maybe i should write something a little more ambitious. with a plot, and everything. 'goblin cave' was (in my mind) all about a character who was created for violence deciding art was a much more worthwhile pursuit. but the main character of that doesn't know what art is. because it's a magical dungeon core. and i was still thinking a lot about dead zones of the imagination, by david graeber. so i was like, okay, let's do this again but in a slightly more self-authentic way and make it weird gay porn with weird animal dicks. let's give michelangelo ninjaturtle a monologue about how the powerful are utterly insulated from any consequence.
(also early on, after watching most of rottmnt, i stumbled across this blog post about the tmnt comics and the end of the world. that ended up being deeply influential on the fic too. i've been kinda in a state for the past few years and this fic is absolutely a part of me working through a lot of complicated feelings about the world and the future. lol people talk so much about people writing dark fic 'to cope' but this was pretty much the first time i've outsourced my emotional processing by having bad things happen to fictional characters.)
so uhhh where to start here. the setting of the fic is this complicated messy mashup of a half-dozen tmnt continuities. it's very rise-heavy, since... that was the only series i had watched(/read) when i had determined the major plot points, but there's a lot of bits and pieces from all over.
to roughly outline the characters here, a huge influence on mikey's personality in this is... mikey's 'dr delicate touch' persona in rottmnt. in the sense that... okay yes yes that is a kid's show and all of his dr delicate touch lines are, you know, setups and punchlines. you think he's going to be nice but actually he's mean! etc. but in-universe it's like, wait hold on a second. mikey is like the most emotionally-intelligent of the four. he absolutely knows when people are on the edge of flipping out and need a calming out to a stressful situation. and instead he freaks them out more! mikey's hobby is: being mean to his friends & family, for fun! what a fun character trait.
i was thinking about this tweet a lot, too. i read some writing advice once that people tend to make characters who are supposed to be likable too squeaky-clean. nothing but positive character traits for them! but actually every 'positive' character trait is exactly the same as a 'negative' one; it's just a matter of focus and degree. a character is light-hearted and comedic? they can never take things seriously, even when they really should. a character is willing to do anything to protect the people they love? so they're violent and threatening and scary if they happen to decide you're something that they need to protect against. etc. i was really dedicated in this to bringing out the worst characteristics of everybody's personalities.
mikey was also very deeply inspired by: all the garbage progression fantasy stuff i've been reading. i've complained about this several times on this very blog, but a constant theme in most progression fantasy is 1. the main character will constantly get more and more powerful and 2. the main character will never really have their relationship with the rest of the world changed via that power. it's just stat-ups. they just have higher stats so they're more powerful. mikey is the most powerful person on the planet and it's fucking ruining his life. he knows that there's nobody capable of actually checking his behavior, & he's in this constant state of thinking he's maybe a few bad days away from murdering half the planet and incredibly aware there's not really anything he can do about that aside from constantly worry. he's kind of an anxious mess.
mikey absolutely thinks it's more ethical to murder somebody out of the sheer glee of seeing people crushed before you than murdering somebody for something as tedious as mob orders. you're satisfying a deep, raw desire felt from the heart! that's good!
what he'd like to do, in some sense, is just hang out in his studio and chill with other artists, but he knows the world is not gonna let him do that. things will come up. a lot of his being a creepy bystander thing while people get murdered is b/c he's very much formulated his morality to be like... it is not his responsibility to fix other people's problems. other people will do what they want and that has no bearing on him. is that a pretty cowardly and self-serving morality? sure! but he was kinda designed to rule the world & his flinch away from that pretty much defines him as a character in this. that's kinda the morality he needed to end up on to convince himself not to be a genocide machine.
he's incredibly aware he could basically be a superhero, & all it would take is... giving up on all his hopes and dreams and constantly engage with his abilities. and being a superhero isn't that many steps removed from living up to his full design spec and just taking over the world and ruling as god-emperror. idk how well i hit all those notes in the actual fic, but, that's what i was going for. mikey as the narrator clearly doesn't want to talk or think about it so it's never really directly confronted.
raph is... okay so i guess a fairly common piece of fanon, for rise especially, is to characterise raph as having multiple personalities? whether that's him just having alters or him having full-blown MPD depends on the fic. my fun little nod to that is that he's kind of a disassociative mess. he has kind of failed to reconcile the disparate aspects of his personality and he switches between one of several different facades depending on the situation. also, you know. the trauma.
(i didn't really mean for it to be as such, but there is this theme in the story about names? despite everything else mikey has a crystal-clear self-conception of himself and has one name, which he gave himself. raph, who has kinda failed to build his own personality, has a collection of name other people have given him, none of which he feels actually fits him. donnie has a more fluid self-identity and also has roughly a million aliases and false identities & constantly slips in and out of character when it's convenient. leatherhead still going by the name mikey gave him goes hand-in-hand with that bit where mikey meanly thinks about how maybe leatherhead's entire self-conception is hung up on something mikey said to him once, etc. this is one of those things that i'd go back and make more present if i did go back and clean up the rough draft, b/c as it is it's there, but it doesn't really do a whole lot.)
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this fic was inspired by... i had read a few big aus that were just like, taking the characters and loose bits of setting and going off in completely different directions. some of NeiNing's aus were a definite influence, plus like, this one au where raph is an ex-con mechanic, etc, etc. just like "i am going to play out a completely unrelated drama using turtles as the dolls". maybe most directly influential was Of Knights and Thieves, where donnie & mikey are corporate espionage hacker/thief types and raph & leo are do-gooder vigilantes. the original concept for this was much more heavily focused on the art forgery. in a very early draft the idea was leo would get involved much more actively in trying to track down the creator of the false takenobus. then i was like, "i am going to crash a completely separate story concept about the dark armor into the side of this art-forgery story". the filename for the story is still 'lol grindr hookup art thief'. that is not really where the story went.
oh man, the art stuff. i made some posts about this at the time! that are now several years old. here's one! i did end up getting a traditional woodcut printing of Tokaido 53 stations, no. 11, Hokone. in a lot of ways doing all the art research was more satisfying and fun than writing the extensive downward spiral that was the latter half of the fic. but, hey, that's life too i guess.
also raph in this is... okay, so, i don't mean this in a mean way. i really liked the fics! but cndrow has written several raph/donnie fics where raph is just like... like a repeated theme in them is raph confessing eternal love & talking about how he's like, mentally planning on them being together forever. on the first date. and sure sure everybody has different tastes; i'm absolutely sure that my interest in guys who are mean leads to some stories that are extremely offputting to some people, etc. but it's like, oh man, raph, please slow your roll a little. if somebody said they were planning our future wedding all of ten minutes into talking to me i would flee the room. & the raph in blinded by the summer sun is very much inspired by that. sadly, i never fully committed to that. originally i even had a line in chapter 9 where slash was like 'please tell me you didn't drop the 'i love you forever' on this guy already' to imply that that was, you know, a theme for raph, but i chickened out and cut it. raph as a kind of rolling series of bad relationships characterized by him falling forever in love w/ his latest crush until the relationship detonates and leaves him not really understanding how things went wrong. but i don't think that's expressed well like, at all. but that ideally should characterize a large part of why he keeps chasing after mikey even well after the point where it would be reasonable to disengage. also to convey some of the downsides of a character believing in true love. it's rough out there in the world.
also thank you tumblr user averyterrible for writing this goncharov post. that was the point in the story where i was like, actually i have been writing raph as way too much of a sad boy. if i want to play in the space of crime drama, there needs to be some crime! he's a yakuza assassin. he needs to chop off somebody's fingers with bolt cutters.
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to me, the central question in the fic isn't really 'will the mikey/raph relationship work out' or 'will mikey succeed in his plans', it's 'why is mikey doing these things'. & i think the leatherhead chunks in chapter 23 finally give enough context to what's going on with mikey to let people answer that? like oh, mikey is a mess.
(lol the initial setup for the early chapters are supposed to give an audience response of like, "oh no, raph has some dangerous secrets" "oh no, raph is a violent yakuza murderer! i hope mikey is going to be okay interacting with raph" "...oh no, i hope raph is going to be okay interacting with mikey")
a lot of the story really is about how... mikey & raph's relationship is in a lot of ways very adolescent? they have not had a lot of prior experience with healthy relationships, and they're trying, but, uhhhhhhh. mikey likes to act like he's so cool and above-it-all and unaffected by things happening, but that's actually just b/c he doesn't really care about most things. when something happens that he genuinely doesn't like he immediately snaps and has a giant meltdown. (we see this once with raph, when mikey has a panic attack and throws up when raph blows him off wrt warning him of bishop, and once with donny about the armor, where mike immediately starts tantruming and threatening to kill himself. mikey is very bad at resolving conflict. he's kind of a brat, actually.)
like every character in this is in some way their worst self. they're all pretty awful people. but they're all also trying to... grapple with their place in the world and try to be better people. to even figure out what 'better' means. this is a story about how 'being a good person' is a constant struggle, not to 'do the right thing', but to even figure out what's 'right'. it's about picking yourself up again after a bad period and going, well, let's keep going. like mikey has a lot of traits but one that i, the author, actually think is fairly admirable is his ability to get back up and keep going after a really bad period. which is funny b/c characterwise that goes hand-in-hand with his callousness. just shrug off all the misery you caused other people, i guess! see above about positive/negative character traits.
(also uh there's another tmnt fic author whose work has a lot of... a Bad Guy is constructed/identified. then helpless children (or teens!) are rescued from him. then the bad guy is ruthlessly & violently murdered. sometimes onscreen, sometimes offscreen. and then it's nothing but chapter after chapter of people being happy and cutesy to each other. and like, i get it. but the, like, recurring theme there of the Bad Guy having done something fundamentally unforgivable that separates from all understanding & mercy, to which the only justice is a violent death, just strikes me as... simplistic. sometimes people do really awful things and part of grappling with that as an adult with an adult moral conceptualization is realizing that you gotta look past your initial reflex to punishment.
or like, mikey's whole childhood in this really fucked him up but a huge part of his identity is him having to form an identity from that. having to make the determination of which parts of him are 'him' and which parts were done to him. lol @ him aggressively and extensively rejecting everything about what draxum made him to do & then blithely being like 'we were engineered to eat humans anyway' as a defense for all the corpse-eating. mikey you just like eating people & have decided that part does align with your self-identity. mikey would really not appreciate anybody being like 'i'm sorry nobody saved you from that' b/c that (to him) would basically be the same as them saying they thought he was fundamentally, irreparably damaged & was going to be forever incapable of being anything other than what draxum made him to be. he wouldn't take it well.)
uhhh what else. i mean there's a lot. fun fact pretty much every time mikey gets mad at somebody else he's hugely projecting. even his pacifism is like... hmm maybe he should have killed draxum. a lot of his talk @ raph about splinter is secretly mikey relitigating his feelings about draxum. oh what's that mikey you think that splinter is only playing happy family b/c he's immortal and he has infinite time to spend humoring somebody's illusions but that when push comes to shove he'll drop all that? gee i wonder if that might apply to any dynamics in mikey's own life. lol at mikey being like "wow red your life is kind of a fucked-up nightmare of weird psychopaths playing like they're happy family" and then two chapters is like "hey come meet my family. we live in my genocidal dad's bombed-out lab and we're treating him like a weird racist grandpa". i kinda wanted something that would complicate mikey just being like "i am a pacifist now and i don't kill anybody"; mikey that's all well and good but like half his inner tension comes from not being sure if he should've left draxum alive. that's kinda the mirror to him debating whether or not actually killing leatherhead would've been better. (in a few years shelldon is gonna go through a period of not wanting to talk to any of them. mikey & donnie are better parents than draxum but that's such a low bar.)
(likewise at the end when mikey is like "this is raph's healthiest relationship so far!" to leo, like, this is more mikey projecting. really the raph/casey relationship was probably better for raph & casey, idk, who can say. but is mikey's relationship with raph the healthiest romantic interaction he's ever had? yes, absolutely. we don't get to see the mikey/leatherhead relationship really up-close and personal but it should be pretty clear that it was pretty awful for everybody involved. compared to that, the mikey/raph is absolutely mikey's healthiest relationship so far. just. low bars.)
lol i am a little concerned that mikey's tendency to monologue, & especially his whole political monologue near the end, will get people to think he's just acting as an author's soapbox. i mean, okay, the little author's note where i'm like "as always, mikey is a perfect role model and everybody should do what he does" was a fun little joke. but, oof, the number of fics i've read where the authors feel the need to loudly and repeatedly disclaim that This Story Contains Things The Author Does Not Condone In Real Life is pretty disheartening. way to have absolutely no faith in your audience. but likie, the part where mikey is pretty much flat-out like, "actually i think my moral framework is whatever is necessary to justify my actions" is meant to be pretty damning. maybe not of mikey specifically as a character, just of, you know. the whole world where that's a pretty common outlook among people with power.
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lets talk about the rape. part of it is that it felt like it would be inauthentic to go through the entire story without mikey seriously violating one of raph's boundaries. part of it is that mikey here kinda has the trifecta of ASPD, ADHD, & bipolar, and the thing with that is it's very easy to just say that but a little more difficult to convey the personality traits involved. this isn't really something ever stated as such in the fic, aside from various people calling mikey crazy + raph calls him a sociopath once. it's kind of too didactic to just flatly state "and this is what's wrong with mikey!" imo. but. this is a story about violent people. imo you can't just gesture to a character with the background level of callousness for the genre and go "okay this is a clinical sign"; you kinda gotta do something more direct. 'wow mikey sure is CRAZY and WEIRD good thing it only shows itself as him being slightly mean to people'. no. mikey has done some pretty horrible things in the past and clearly isn't fully done with that.
(i did pretty much go straight down the list of symptoms there. impulsive, suicidal, aggressive, violent, risky sex, arrogant, limited empathy, no regard for other people or social norms, difficulty with relationships, arson, etc, etc, etc. but it's not like he's a 'realistic' portrayal here, since... i mean, he is a super-powered ninja. there's a level of 'superficial charm' here but we do get enough of mikey's interiority to be able to tell he's a total mess in a way that's not particularly constructed.)
also it's like. raph graphically tortures several people to death & i didn't really feel the need to disclaim that here. murder is usually seen as a lesser crime in fiction than rape. people love their violent blorbos but the second there's the implication of sexual violence people freak out. the usual line people say is that the threat of murder is a little more removed for most people than the threat of rape, which idk if i fully agree with. but part of it is also to draw a line between raph's violence and mikey's boundary violation. like mikey says, well, raph tried to non-consensually murder him a few times too.
anyway i don't think i really stuck the landing with that either, in part b/c raph's response to it. he's a little too pathetically accepting of things at the end instead of being angry + violent. that could use a rewrite or two.
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honestly i'm kinda sick of this story now? which sucks a little, since i kept realizing things about the story all the way up to the very last moment of editing. if i had waited to post any of this until i was done with the first draft... well, it'd be a very different story if i went back and turned this rough draft into something more complete. i never really did manage to hit the character beats with raph i was hoping to. oh well. like, i still like it. but i can definitely see all of its weak points. i guess that's just part of the process of writing. it'd be worse if you wrote a giant novel and came out on the other side not more aware of your failings as an author.
i feel like raph isn't super well-realized in terms of character motivations. or... his relationships aren't shaded in as well as they could be. if i were redoing this whole thing i'd definitely include some chunks of raph pov just to lay out more concretely what he's doing & what his life is like when he's not in the same scene as mikey. i kinda included that raph+donny conversation at the very end just for jokes, but actually ending every chapter with a little section of non-mikey pov would've helped ground a lot of the characters. raph isn't super well-developed and leo is pretty much incoherent absent external familiarity with his character's deal. they're not conveyed super well, in part because, well, any time mikey is onscreen everybody is having to deal with mikey. it's a problem.
but something that absolutely could have worked as a secondary narrative to the story is the whole thing with raph working w/ the oroku. that was a bit of a late addition to the story. it's meant as a reference to, you know, all the times raphael ends up being compared to/assuming the mantle of the shredder in the comics. but as it is since we don't get any real looks into exactly what's going on in yakuza town when mikey's not around none of that got developed very well, imo.
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it was very important to me that mikey not learn any lesson here. where things are at in the end are pretty much the exact same as where they were in the beginning. the bit in the pizza scene where he's like 'you guys get to live and i get a boyfriend' is very accurate. literally the only change in mikey's life through this entire thing is that at the end he is in a relationship w/ a guy who he can tell some of what his life is like to. not that it's a super healthy relationship, but it is there.
well, that, and also now he's maybe out of time. (uh, so the laughter at the very end of the epilogue is mikey realizing he's out of time. the whole epilogue really is about how he's got all these conflicting tensions of who-knows-what in his life, & then right in the middle of the tension it's like, whoops, the utrom aren't coming in 10 years or 20 years, they're coming now. and in a week you're gonna be getting some really pointed questions about how you know the utrom envoy. and in a few years, well, there's gonna be some planetary evacuation) like the whole story is about... anxiety. mikey feeling the weight of the future on him in every moment. actually seeing things collapse would be a relief; you'd get the release of all the potentiality collapsing into an actual problem. the moral of the story is you get what you get and in the end all mikey's actions, good or bad or otherwise, have bought him is nine more months of ignoring his problems.
anyway sorry to all the tmnt fans who were expecting a happy cheerful mikey/raph story. this is actually about the fundamental injustice of existence. whoops!
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I was going thru all of the fics of yours that I have bookmarked, and I'd forgotten about this gem: Parched - so, director's commentary?
Oooh, okay!
The thing about this fic is that while the note at the end is true (that it was inspired by wondering about what Mary had told Doug about Stede), it was also something of an experiment for me. See, I'm just not that into Mary! In the flashbacks to their marriage, I tend to think neither of them comes off that well. There's a running joke that everyone in the fandom is on her side when she tries to kill Stede, no matter how much they like him, but I'm not, actually! So I wanted to try to get into her head by writing a fic from her perspective.
Dearest Mary,
I started by quoting Stede's letter to Mary because that felt like the right place to pick up. I was exploring how she grew and changed, so I wanted to start at their divergence.
The sun comes in at an angle on the letter like a knife, highlighting the words “fond regards.”
Something else experimental for me with this fic was that I was attempting to write in a slightly more literary(?) style. I do focus on my prose when I write, I'll sometimes try a sentence multiple ways or put one together so slowly that it's like chipping marble, but that's a refinement of what I instinctively want to express - I don't instinctively tend to write figuratively, or describe things that aren't either a) absolutely necessary or b) fun for me to describe. So: a sharp metaphor to start with.
“Did Dad go out to ride on Arthur? I want to take my new kite out with him today.”
I also don't subscribe to the idea that Stede was a fully absent father, so put in that line to show him as an active presence in the kids' lives.
This all makes me sound super petty but I did indeed set out to write A Good Fic first and foremost! As ever when I'm challenging myself. I just cannot help but write in my interpretation of controversial things.
Louis is young enough that he doesn’t realize how bizarre and fucked up it all is, accepting it as just one of those strange things adults do and going back to his toast; Alma, however, is thinking about it with a furrowed brow.
And part of the reason Alma responds as she does is that she's surprised and upset because it never occurred to her that her father might pick up sticks and disappear. (If I were writing the fic now, I think I'd have dwelt more on the kids' reactions, or lack thereof in Louis's case. At the time, my focus was on how their reactions affected Mary.)
But this time her eye is caught by a different line: You deserve happiness, as do I.
Here, the tone shifts. I am SO anxious about people thinking I'm too nice to Stede on the whole, and was/am particularly so at this point, lol. That being said, assuming Doug wasn't putting an incredibly positive spin on things (possible), Mary was able to say some neutral-to-positive things about Stede. So she must have come around on him, his leaving, and his part in their marriage, when she thought that it was all a closed book. (And then when he came back he just ripped open the scab!)
She can complain about Stede at length, if she feels like it, but to his credit, he’s never seemed to actively dislike her. What he accepts is that she dislikes him.
This whole bit was also me digging in and almost stream-of-consciousness-ing from Mary's perspective about what we saw of Stede in their marriage in the flashbacks. Analyzing. Working my fingers into the dough.
Nobody likes every person they’re thrust into society with, but that’s just how life is! You smile and make small talk and get them to tolerate you, and sometimes you end up making friends – but he just couldn’t seem to do that, like he wasn’t even trying.
I admit that I was also experimenting with the perspective of a neurotypical person not getting why an autistic person can't just be normal.
The next day, Mary puts on a black gown she rarely wears, plus a hat with a veil, and visits the local magistrate.
She successfully got him declared dead, after all!
The second it’s done, Mrs. Higgins pushes off the wall and comes to Mary’s side, putting her hand on her shoulder. “Okay, Melvin,” she says breezily in a husky tone that fits her perfectly. “I’m going to take the Widow Bonnet for a cup of tea.”
Well, I ship them.
“This story about your husband being lost at sea – it’s bullshit, right? Did you take him out?” She puts a hand on Mary’s forearm, and it feels alarmingly sympathetic. “What did he do – did he hit you? Do you need help getting rid of the body?”
I have absolutely no doubt that it went down like this. Evelyn's comfort level with the idea of murdering a husband implies that she's been ready and willing to aid and abet a woman who's had to kill before. (And I think she tends to see situations through this lens even when it doesn't fit as a result.)
“Relax,” Mrs. Higgins orders, and Mary can’t help but comply
👀👀👀
“Your … rifles?” asks Mary, stunned, and Jemima takes them all on a tour of her house to see the armory, which is packed so heavily with guns of all sizes and types that you can’t even make out what sort of wallpaper is behind them. There’s even a cannon, positioned so that it could theoretically fire out a window.
I don't entirely remember my thought process here - a melange of needing to make up more widows to be part of the circle and "what would be funny?" and the image of a 17th-18th century armory. Jemima's maiden name, Courten, came from the History of Barbados wiki page, and her last name came from my fierce third grade teacher. (Jemima? I have no idea.)
“I have a tenant who’s a painter!” says another, turning from a display of guns inlaid with mother-of-pearl. “He’s always looking for students – if you come to mine, I can introduce you.”
Fate!!!
Their first meeting is inauspicious, but not to such an extent that it loops back around into a meet-cute.
This was deliberate. Mary and Stede are such opposites that I wanted her romance with Doug not to be a sudden soulmate thing like Ed/Stede basically are - their meeting isn't the stuff of stories, they don't have an intense, immediate chemistry. It's still love.
His fingers are still hovering over the canvas, moving here and there to point out what he’s taken with, and for a moment Mary can hardly breathe.
This was intentionally a bit erotic on top of the sexiness of Doug caring so much about her art (and also - Doug is the biggest sweetie, he sees the good even in a piece with a lot of problems).
There is just so much emotion in her, and nowhere else for it to go. For a fleeting moment, she thinks of Stede and the times she found him weeping alone.
Tying this all back into one of the main things, which was Mary coming around on Stede to some extent.
Nobody has ever looked at her like that, like she is a delicate and beautiful person to be treasured.
This is picking up on a thread I established in More Nicer, that the flipside of Stede having been forced into a marriage with a woman when he's not attracted to women is that Mary was forced into a marriage where she was never, ever found attractive. Feeling that someone she likes is actually interested in her would be huge.
one night when he stays for dinner and then helps her wash the dishes after the kids have gone to bed.
I am COMMITTED! to interpreting OFMD as depicting their household as a modern marriage with a period veneer. They don't have servants and Stede isn't a powerful 18th century patriarch.
The moon is huge. If she were to paint it this big, nobody would ever believe it.
Mary gets her "you wear fine things well" moment under the impossibly large moon - maybe at the same time as Stede and Ed's! Only hers can be straightforwardly understood as a moment of love by all participants.
That she is, in fact, too harsh and practical to be loved is a possibility that has haunted her for years.
Again, that thread from More Nicer.
But when she looks into his eyes again, he’s still just confused. Then he flushes and looks down. “Sorry,” he says, “I just – it’s hard for me to believe that he could bring himself to leave you.”
He's a keeper.
A very sudden thought hits her like a thunderbolt: Stede was right. Their lives had been monotonous and had needed to be shaken up, changed beyond recognition.
And that's the point that the fic's been leading up to - Mary becoming okay with Stede. I don't think this makes him right about everything, but I do think he had a point there and that part of the reason she got so upset when he suggested that their lives were monotonous was that she knew it on some level.
She still wishes that he had told her he was leaving rather than simply doing it, but what if he had? Would she have raged at him, guilted him into staying so that they would both continue to be unhappy?
Surprising no one, I have A Take about the idea that Stede was objectively wrong on the way he left. Could it have gone well if he'd been more up-front about it? Maybe. Could it have also gone a lot worse? I think so.
Now that she has a tantalizing glimpse of the happiness that may lie in store for her, she can fully close that door – she can end that desperate, stunted life and begin a new one.
And there we are.
anyone who's interested, feel free to ask for another!
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Oooh alright thank you!! I think instead of discussing just one fic this time, I'm gonna give you the director's commentary on roughly how I come up with new OCs, since I think that's kinda cool to think about and compare
Okay so obviously I write a lot of OC x canon, since I really like using OCs to explore the canon characters' personalities and character development over time. Some of what I decide about an OC is at random, or just based on vibes/what I find interesting, but I also try to come up with some solid themes when coming up with the OC and core conflicts of the fic. I mainly use a lot of opposites to accomplish this, since it gives a good amount of both internal and external conflict to work with
Here, have some examples:
Billy (6 Underground) moves fast, and it's canon to the movie that he was betrayed by his ex-girlfriend in the middle of a high-stakes mission. So I give him Quinn: someone who once could move as fast as him, who knew him so well they were practically chained to the hip, but who was affected mentally and physically by the same betrayal. Billy hates luck, but Quinn's injuries make it clear that he was the lucky one for walking out virtually unscathed.
Peter Maximoff is impatient and impulsive, he can't slow down and gets bored easily. So I give him Robin: someone who he loves dearly, but who he couldn't be with unless he changed his habits, learned to slow down, and pushed past his immediate boredom. She's Deaf, which meant him learning ASL and changing some of his habits (like talking with his mouth full or starting a conversation without getting her attention first) in order to communicate effectively with her. Then she gets a TBI on a botched mission, and recovery can't be sped up, so he has to learn how to be patient and steady as she recovers.
Alex Summers is prickly and hostile, and keeps people at a distance. So I give him Madison: who doesn't at first seem like his opposite, since she does the same thing, but it's growth for both of them. She's not comfortable with a fast-paced fling or relationship, so he has to learn to let those walls down and prove she can trust him before pursuing romance. They're definitely a "behind closed doors" couple, though - in public, they tease and poke fun at each other to no end.
While he's caught in the fighting ring, Warren Worthington feels like he has nobody to rely on, and no future to strive towards. So I give him Rae: who would risk her own life to save the people she cares about, who will claw towards her future with everything she has, who's filled with so much fire and vitality that it gives him a reason to keep fighting, who won't back down from a fight even if she's horrendously outmatched.
Even Kyle and Jasper: obviously they get along well from the beginning, and they end up sharing a lot of interests, but visually they're very different people. It's a play on college stereotypes, seeing the straightlaced frat boy with the queer nonconformist punk. Most of the play on opposites here is less with Kyle vs. Jasper and more Pre-Death Kyle vs. Post-Death Kyle (at this point he's basically an OC too lol, the show gave us so little to work with for him). But there's still a lot of roots that I've laid down for that, particularly in how gentle and patient Kyle is in the early parts of the story.
This is true for pretty much all of my OCs, actually - including the ones like Eris and Nikoletta who I haven't fully written about yet. It's not quite "opposites attract" since usually they've still got a lot of similarities to bond over too, but there's almost always some core trait that drives them both to evolve as characters.
#i mean if you wanted me to outline the others i could but this got long already#my friends!!!#answered asks#my ocs#oc quinn/aces#robin cassidy#rae mckinney#jasper wilson#oc eris#nikoletta bordeaux
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would love director’s commentary on the part of “all creatures wild and tame” where Daniel comes up to Max on the truck to ask if he’s done sex stuff —> their first hook up!!!! I love that fic sooooooo much 🥰🦑
ty liza!! 🦑🦑🦑
On the drivers parade truck in Jeddah, Daniel comes to stand next to Max and says, “So have you done, like, sex stuff?” the people need to know!
Max looks around quickly, but there’s nobody near them.
“Mate, shut up,” he says anyway. i don't love the dialogue in this little section but like, Mate as like an assertion of how totally platonic he's feeling etc
“I don’t mean, like, ever,” Daniel goes on, “I know you’re a man of the world, I just –”
He wafts his arms like he’s a jellyfish or something; he’s holding a GoPro that Max really hopes is not turned on. “Do they jizz?” really important to establish a) do they jizz b) what's the slick situation
“I don’t know,” Max hisses.
“But you’ve seen porn.”
“Of course not with real –”
Max cuts himself off, frustrated, and Daniel leans in, says, “Don’t you want to find out?” BRING BACK THE PARADE TRUCK
“I don’t know why I’m surprised,” Daniel says when he comes to Max’s hotel room after the race.
Max is playing COD, two-player, two of the tentacles holding a controller between them. max gaming with the tentacles is one of the first images i thought about for this fic, along with the tentacles reaching up to the flush the toilet and opening the hotel room door to let daniel in. i think it's funny and also gestures to the kind of matter-of-fact acceptance he has in dealing with them, while at the same time not really Thinking about them/why they're there at all
“They are actually pretty good,” he says.
“Well yeah,” says Daniel. “They’re you.” daniel said max is max!
Max isn’t sure he likes that. max meanwhile is Not ready to acknowledge the way in which the tentacles are an extension of his own desires lol. He pauses the game, sets the controllers on the coffee table.
“Be honest,” he says, twisting to look up at Daniel. “Do you think I’m a freak?”
Daniel grins at him. “Not any more than I did before.”
He sits on the couch beside Max and the nearest tentacle immediately unfolds itself across his lap. very obvious!!
Daniel laughs. “Okay, maybe a little more than before.”
He runs his finger down a row of suckers; they shiver and flex in the wake of his touch. i like shiver and flex
“Freaky,” he says, smiling sideways at Max. Max is afraid to move, to breathe, in case Daniel stops touching him.
Daniel presses his finger to one of the suckers and Max can feel it, the way it wants to cling to him.
“Is this okay?”
Max nods, his fingers digging into the couch cushions. a little thing from this fic which i'm not sure really works/comes across is that max doesn't reach for/kiss daniel himself (i.e. with his arms not his tentacles) until almost the end when he fucks daniel with a tentacle and holds onto him etc - at which point the tentacles disappear bc they've served their purpose
Daniel takes a breath. “What’s it feel like,” he says. “On your dick.”
Max’s brain freezes for a moment. He looks at Daniel, uncertain, and Daniel looks right back at him, intent, a little challenging – not a joke. up to this point daniel's kind of been normalising the tentacle stuff with humour - i'm not sure the way they tip over the line here entirely works but oh well!
“I haven’t tried –” he says, and Daniel says, “I don’t believe you.” i like this beat better lol
Daniel is right, obviously.
Of course Max has thought, in bed, what it would be like. The sheets thrown back, Max’s hand on his dick, one tentacle sliding in and out of his mouth, What if it was –
“You’re hard,” Daniel says. He moves his hand as if he’s going to touch Max, then puts it back on his own thigh. even though daniel's taking the lead here there's still an element of the tentacles as excuse “You should get it out. Go on, Max.”
Max lifts his hips, scrambling to shove his pants down. He takes hold of his dick, which is hard, like Daniel said, aching.
“That’s it,” Daniel says, and Max gasps as a tentacle wraps around him, teasing at the tip where it’s already wet.
The tentacle is thicker than his dick, which is embarrassing, 🤐 but it feels so good: the suckers; the way it twists around him, tightens.
Daniel’s staring; when he reaches out to touch just the promise of it sends Max over the edge.
Covered in Max’s come, the tentacle lifts its tip to Daniel’s mouth.
Max moans with shame, watching helplessly as Daniel opens up for it, sucks it clean, the inside of his mouth so pink and wet. the tentacles doing all the hot awful things he wants to do all the time!!
He meets Max’s eyes and Max feels the pull of it everywhere, shuddering, dick twitching like he’s going to come again.
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killing care and grief of heart director's commentary let's gooo
SO. this is mostly just rambling but considering this fic is relatively short i have many many thoughts about it and the concept... mostly because it ended up being entirely different from what i anticipated it becoming.
the inspiration behind it was reddie fic, because i was an IT writer for years and there were many fics where richie went back to the sewers to pull eddie's body out and resurrect him through the power of belief. i feel like that concept is very similar to how cognition works — a weapon only hurts the enemy if you believe it will, etc etc — and was what i really intended to play with. i miss writing reddie fic but have no new ideas and the concept of going back to retrieve your dead friend is a fantastic and underutilized one!!
and then i was writing it and i kept getting stumped by my own writing... the belief/cognition is still very much important to the story but has been overshadowed by other elements. initial drafts, however, were essentially that akira believed so hard that akechi was alive and he was visible enough in the public eye that he just. Believed him back to life. which still partially happens! but not quite to the same extent.
what happened in actuality is that... well. mostly. right now i am working on a production of orfeo, an italian opera based on orpheus and eurydice. and it's my favorite myth of all time so it really shifted the concept in my mind... also the orpheus parallels Were in some reddie fic. this is a recurring theme.
BUT! i would like to spend a moment discussing exactly what the hell happened in the fic, because it wasn't really clarified. this is because akira did not care and had other things on his mind (namely, akechi) lol
there is exactly one hint as to what it is, and it's this line:
"but kaia," you might say, "this explains literally nothing." and you'd be right! but here is what it refers to:
yeah. that's all the hint you get. sorry!
because it's a persona trait, it's not something joker can use on other party members. HOWEVER, a couple key things are at play here: firstly, that akechi is also a wild card and is inherently attached to him through their fates being literally cosmically intertwined. secondly, there's the belief aspect, as mentioned earlier — akira believes akechi can be healed, so he can. thirdly, ...it's orpheus. it's thematically rich! also, rule of cool. why not!
but, okay. reddie is still here, also very much inspiring it. namely, the inspiration is from this:
absolutely devastating! also i think makes sense given the way akira in-game denies akechi being dead several times. i can't find the screenshots, but you know the moments. he never actually says "akechi is dead", always just sort of trails off, and has several lines about wanting to keep their promise or their fight not being over yet. that was also very much the inspiration behind this, and informed many writing decisions, such as these bits:
:) he's Unwell. anyway, speaking of reddie! i have no idea what the interest crossover here is, but there's one Very Direct reference:
this is a longer page than is probably strictly necessary, but if you don't know the context, i think it helps. in the scene, eddie has died, and richie is trying to take his body back out. ""i don't know," richie said, but he knew well enough" is one of those quotes that the entire fandom knew by heart. i still think of it every time i hear "well enough" in any capacity. it's heartbreaking. so obviously i had to steal it lmao — except that here, akira was alone, so he was unable to carry akechi's body in any regard. and, of course, when he kissed akechi, he was alive :)
i don't really have many other thoughts except that naturally i had to bring up kaguya because... i love her. that's all. and i would never ever get rid of her (currently my party has both kaguya and kaguya picaro lmao) But! it is more interesting if orpheus is there. just know i love kaguya soooo much. kaguya numero uno forever‼️‼️
also, i want to write more horror, because a lot of my non-fic writing is horror in some capacity... this is sort of lightly toeing the line into that because i tried to add properly visceral descriptions :) you will be seeing more of it. this i promise.
anyway i leave you with this: a short snippet of a story i wrote well over a year ago (that's entirely unedited and has gone untouched since then) that was shuake-inspired orpheus and eurydice. everything comes full circle
^ this story was inspired by third semester bad endings... from a technical standpoint it could certainly be better but i do think conceptually it is interesting and may be something i one day revisit. yay :)
ok that's all. if you read this far i love u
#also. i did realize right before posting it that ive written a fic for a much older fandom that is... objectively kind of similar LOL#so. there's that!#yeehaw
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