#or the whole story doesn’t work for me

[lioneliness-etc]

The thing that DC doesn’t seem to understand is that, to me at least, the moment that Batman acts abusive or antagonistic to his kids (and not just like making mistakes or being a flawed parent, but being an actively bad parent) he stops being a hero. At that point he is just a villain who fights crime to me.

Thats not a “superhero” story anymore, its not even a complex or morally-grey character, it’s not even a supervillain story. It’s a story about a shitty guy who happens to save people’s lives sometimes. And no amount of saving people makes up for him being terrible to the people in his personal life.

And maybe some people are interested in that story, but that’s just not a character I’m invested in reading about.

If I’m supposed to see batman as this cultural icon of of superhero media, the dark and vengeful protector of his city who hides his good heart and secret identity under the cowl and cape, then he needs to ACTUALLY have a good heart under there.

And in my book, people who mistreat those they claim to care about just aren’t good people. People who are bad parents (NOT flawed parents, NOT people who are bad at the difficult skill of parenting, I mean people with kids who don’t care about them but continue to be parents) aren’t good people.

[thefandomexpert]

ok. i see u complaining about how long it takes to get to shb, how are you supposed to get your friends into the fucking WONDER that is shb when they have to get through all of The Other Stuff First

I used to have this problem with Homestuck, people who wanted to skip to the trolls, or pass on the intermissions. I will repeat what I said then now:

The later stuff is mind-blowingly good BECAUSE of the setup slog. which is also fun btw, you’re having trouble selling it because you keep saying it’s a slog. it’s good storytelling! yes even arr and sb (i didn’t say it was the best storytelling!! but i’ve seen way fuckin worse!!!). You need to spend 300 hours with the characters and to watch them grow gradually for a LOT of the little character moments to even register later on, and i’m not even talking about the ascian reveals. estinien is a completely different character. thancred’s deep-seated issues have been brewing subtly since 1.0. the socio-economic political climate of the universe is SO important and SO well set up by the arr random task/fetch quests (BABY INCONSEQUENTIAL QUESTS. YEAH THE STUPID ONES IN THE INTRO PRE-SASTASHA SEQUENCES WITH THE NPCS YOU DONT REMEMBER. THOSE.) and that info is integral to character decisions made in every expansion afterwords, and is built upon consistently. the consistent build-up of the lore is, in my opinion, almost entirely the reason ffxiv’s writing stands out against other games of the genre. and it’s BOLSTERED by the fact that it’s a live service game with a shit ton of expansions you HAVE to play through single file when you start fresh. narrative games are usually 15-20 hours. ffxiv is giving you 500+ in msq alone (won’t get into how much the optional and side quests support the storytelling as well).

It’s like one of those long-running book series. you can’t ask someone to read Just the last book of animorphs and expect them to understand the narrative implications of what’s happening, or to get attached to the characters enough to care. that attachment and understanding is built by spending time and reading the other 1500 books prior. shb should not be treated as a stand-alone. in fact it’d be a bad standalone. it’s good BECAUSE there’s 500+ hours of playtime required to get there.

[feyres-divorce-lawyer]

“no one ever wants to discuss the complexity of apple white” YES! now, leave

[pyrosomatic-metamorphosis]

au where qbad chose the other way. his other home. finally return to heaven and the embrace of his first family. and his body lay rotting in that field never discovered forever. and pomme knew and dapper knew that he was dead and never coming back and pomme accepted it first, started acknowledging it first, and dapper kept searching for a full month before finally accepting the truth.

and then she gets to work.

she even has some of the theory worked out beforehand. he’d discovered all he’d wanted in this dimension before, and started to research others and how to go there. it’ll take time, and effort, and fieldwork, but Pomme will help, and then it’ll go even faster.

after all. what is heaven but another dimension to explore?

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

The Sword of Kaigen

standalone fantasy set in a rural mountain village at the edge of an empire that still holds traditional values, with families of powerful water/ice magic warriors

follows a powerful young heir who begins to question his beliefs about the empire when a new boy comes to his village from the city

and his mother, a housewife who has tried to forget her youth as a warrior and vigilante in the city since she moved back home to a loveless marriage

when there’s a violent attack on their village that they’re unprepared for, everything changes, and she has to embrace her old skills to protect her family and people

[catboy-a-day]

Catboy 134…..

[daisyachain]

The nature of time is that (culturally) Christian Euro/Anglo colonial consumers (hereafter white ‘people’) fetishize the idea of being ‘close to nature’ or ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ and latch on to the idea that there are groups of people in the world who are somehow bestial or who have some kind of special powers from holding animist beliefs/beliefs that acknowledge the body as opposed to the Christian belief that the body is a kind of useless appendage to a person. We see this across decades from the 19thC to today in the racist fetishization of indigenous people across the globe, particularly residents of the Americas, Australasia, and southern/eastern Africa.

White consumers use a warped conception of other cultures to live out the fantasies that the Christian soul/body stuff engenders. You keep getting told that your emotions and physical sensations are the devil’s work? You want to get in touch with those physical sensations, but you don’t want it to interfere with your worldview? Simply project them on to a convenient group of people with slightly different conventions from you. Imagine how cool it would be to be 100% physical sensation (especially those pesky violent and/or sexual urges) and no mental burden, then unleash that in a way that causes millions of deaths worldwide via the dehumanization of entire nations of people just trying to live their lives. White consumers love a Proud Warrior Race Guy.

Flash forward to the 2010s, it’s generally considered impolite to spread the same propaganda that justified the genocide and dispossession of many different groups of people. However white culture hasn’t changed that much and normal human activities still need to be explained away to maintain the veneer of white intellectualism that has been used to justify white violence for years and years. You can’t just stomp around and clap your hands and dance badly, you’ve got to project it somewhere else.

But wait! There’s a community of people considered ‘tribal’ and ‘savage’, considered violent and bestial, who were never colonized! It’s…the Norse. Fetishizing early medieval North Sea raiders can’t be cultural appropriation, see, they’re white! It’s not offensive to replace an entire culture with white (male) ideas of what’s cool if that culture is totally unassociated with colonizer stereotypes and is in fact a culture of colonizers!

And that’s my theory on why there are so many Norse-inspired folk bands/video games/tv shows/memes/literally anything in the 2010s. VSaga not counted because that manga has been running since 2003 and is actually well-researched and comes out of a culture with a similar but distinct tradition of racism. The Euro storytelling tendencies of needing some kind of violent avatar have taken on ye anciente Norseman now that people care a little bit about the gallons of blood used to sketch other ethnic stereotypes. Done and dusted. Except the other side is that the fetishization of early medieval Norse culture is literally just white supremacist 101 and a lot of artists don’t step around that nearly as carefully as they should

[cream-and-tea]

pallas in book one is definitely at it-cannot-possibly-get-worse-than-this ABSOLUTE rock bottom but god. there is such a specific flavour to their despair in book two that only happens because of the realization they have at the end of lay me down. like. how do you move on after admitting that everything you believed in was a lie. how do you live with what you’ve done (with what has been done to you). is it possible to pull yourself up out of the pit you’ve dug. what do you do if it isn’t. what do you do if it IS. and once you look at the damage how do you stop looking. past the first layer of hurt there’s just more and more hurt and you were used by the one person who was supposed to keep you safe to cause even MORE pain and no matter how deep you go none of it means anything! it never meant anything at all!! motherfucker your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for NOTHING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[roys-our-boy]

His sprite is so CUTE. Getian loml

[rollercoasterwords]

What other fandoms do you think you’d write for? Or are you strictly an HP writer?

PS. Love ATWMD and THTF. Your writing is impeccable.

i’ve written a captive prince & succession fic as well so! & have also briefly written fics in some other fandoms when i was much younger which r now too embarrassing 2 name lmao

honestly not sure what other fandoms i’d write for it honestly just comes down 2 whether i’m gripped w an idea for certain characters…would love 2 escape hp fandom lol but i think part of why it’s sucked me in so bad is that i like fucking around w the holes in the canon universe…like most of the marauders fic i’ve written has been either canon compliant or canon divergent & me going “hmmm what would these characters do in this context” & now bc i’ve spent so much time thinking abt & writing them it’s just also becoming easy 2 plug these characters into aus 🤧

actually thinking abt my fic writing experience generally the thing that tends 2 make me wanna write fic is if there’s something abt canon that i wanna patch in…like my captive prince fic is just canon but from a different character’s pov & my succession fic is just “what if kenstewy were canon” lol. have thought abt writing aftg from andrew’s pov & the first book of the feverwake duology from dara’s pov simply bc that’s something i enjoyed doing w atyd & captive prince but never actually did…guess i could also see myself potentially writing spn fic if i came up w an idea i liked…& honestly i think if i ever reread trc i might go crazy for real & could then potentially decide 2 write fic who knows. but atp i feel like marauders fic has just become my comfort zone…it’s just a weird balance to strike where a story has to have characters i love but be unsatisfying (poorly written/queerbait/not actually queerbait but i’m delusional/would be fun 2 see from another character’s pov) enough that there r gaps i wanna fill. so like there r various stories/franchises/series i’ve loved where i’ve just never felt compelled at all 2 read or write fic bc i got everything i wanted out of the story etc!

[ntaras]

we could talk about how hanzo’s rage is a metaphor for his grief and trauma and his title of scorpion represents his difficulty to let go of his anger how he can never stop mourning his past because he refuses to stop mourning and how kuai liang’s taking of the mantle is representative of the ability to move forward rather than be stuck in constant mourning of the brother he lost. we could also talk about how hanzo’s protection over kuai liang was out of guilt of how hanzo could not stop himself from allowing emotion to control him and killing bi-han, and his ability to allow kuai liang to live instead of exacting more blindness vengeance allowed kuai liang to prosper and grow and end the years of rivalry between their clans.

[hearts401]

God tssiu au mike makes me ill

[cosmicheartz]

I think abt how the two most well adjusted campers in my future au are Vernon and Chloe

[baronessofmischief]

Rebel Moon on Netflix is sooooooo soso bad guys 😂 like at least there’s space Charlie Hunnam with a Scottish accent and sometimes the main character has a flashback where she has a better haircut AND there’s a sibling duo who have the best costumes in the movie but the story? The script? The movie structure? Cohesiveness? Absolutely terrible. And there’s still 45 minutes left

[daisyachain]

The time has come at last to close the Daiya no Ace tab that has been open in my browser since spring

[gayvampyr]

it sucks posting art you poured your heart into and spent hours creating, knowing that it’ll never reach triple digits :’)