#re-copied because i wanted to be able to readmore most of it

[bonkersdbobcat]

Taken from here

1: when you have cereal, do you have more milk than cereal or more cereal than milk?

2: do you like the feeling of cold air on your cheeks on a wintery day?

3: what random objects do you use to bookmark your books?

4: how do you take your coffee/tea?

5: are you self-conscious of your smile?

6: do you keep plants?

7: do you name your plants?

8: what artistic medium do you use to express your feelings?

9: do you like singing/humming to yourself?

10: do you sleep on your back, side, or stomach?

11: what’s an inner joke you have with your friends?

12: what’s your favorite planet?

13: what’s something that made you smile today?

14: if you were to live with your best friend in an old flat in a big city, what would it look like?

15: go google a weird space fact and tell us what it is!

16: what’s your favorite pasta dish?

17: what color do you really want to dye your hair?

18: tell us about something dumb/funny you did that has since gone down in history between you and your friends and is always brought up.

19: do you keep a journal? what do you write/draw/ in it?

20: what’s your favorite eye color?

21: talk about your favorite bag, the one that’s been to hell and back with you and that you love to pieces.

22: are you a morning person?

23: what’s your favorite thing to do on lazy days where you have 0 obligations?

24: is there someone out there you would trust with every single one of your secrets?

25: what’s the weirdest place you’ve ever broken into?

26: what are the shoes you’ve had for forever and wear with every single outfit?

27: what’s your favorite bubblegum flavor?

28: sunrise or sunset?

29: what’s something really cute that one of your friends does and is totally endearing?

30: think of it: have you ever been truly scared?

31: what is your opinion of socks? do you like wearing weird socks? do you sleep with socks? do you confine yourself to white sock hell? really, just talk about socks.

32: tell us a story of something that happened to you after 3AM when you were with friends.

33: what’s your fave pastry?

34: tell us about the stuffed animal you kept as a kid. what is it called? what does it look like? do you still keep it?

35: do you like stationary and pretty pens and so on? do you use them often?

36: which band’s sound would fit your mood right now?

37: do you like keeping your room messy or clean?

38: tell us about your pet peeves!

39: what color do you wear the most?

40: think of a piece of jewelry you own: what’s it’s story? does it have any meaning to you?

41: what’s the last book you remember really, really loving?

42: do you have a favorite coffee shop? describe it!

43: who was the last person you gazed at the stars with?

44: when was the last time you remember feeling completely serene and at peace with everything?

45: do you trust your instincts a lot?

46: tell us the worst pun you can think of.

47: what food do you think should be banned from the universe?

48: what was your biggest fear as a kid? is it the same today?

49: do you like buying CDs and records? what was the last one you bought?

50: what’s an odd thing you collect?

51: think of a person. what song do you associate with them?

52: what are your favorite memes of the year so far?

53: have you ever watched the rocky horror picture show? heathers? beetlejuice? pulp fiction? what do you think of them?

54: who’s the last person you saw with a true look of sadness on their face?

55: what’s the most dramatic thing you’ve ever done to prove a point?

56: what are some things you find endearing in people?

57: go listen to bohemian rhapsody. how did it make you feel? did you dramatically reenact the lyrics?

58: who’s the wine mom and who’s the vodka aunt in your group of friends? why?

59: what’s your favorite myth?

60: do you like poetry? what are some of your faves?

61: what’s the stupidest gift you’ve ever given? the stupidest one you’ve ever received?

62: do you drink juice in the morning? which kind?

63: are you fussy about your books and music? do you keep them meticulously organized or kinda leave them be?

64: what color is the sky where you are right now?

65: is there anyone you haven’t seen in a long time who you’d love to hang out with?

66: what would your ideal flower crown look like?

67: how do gloomy days where the sky is dark and the world is misty make you feel?

68: what’s winter like where you live?

69: what are your favorite board games?

70: have you ever used a ouija board?

71: what’s your favorite kind of tea?

72: are you a person who needs to note everything down or else you’ll forget it?

73: what are some of your worst habits?

74: describe a good friend of yours without using their name or gendered pronouns.

75: tell us about your pets!

76: is there anything you should be doing right now but aren’t?

77: pink or yellow lemonade?

78: are you in the minion hateclub or fanclub?

79: what’s one of the cutest things someone has ever done for you?

80: what color are your bedroom walls? did you choose that color? if so, why?

81: describe one of your friend’s eyes using the most abstract imagery you can think of.

82: are/were you good in school?

83: what’s some of your favorite album art?

84: are you planning on getting tattoos? which ones?

85: do you read comics? what are your faves?

86: do you like concept albums? which ones?

87: what are some movies you think everyone should watch at least once in their lives?

88: are there any artistic movements you particularly enjoy?

89: are you close to your parents?

90: talk about your one of you favorite cities.

91: where do you plan on traveling this year?

92: are you a person who drowns their pasta in cheese or a person who barely sprinkles a pinch?

93: what’s the hairstyle you wear the most?

94: who was the last person you know to have a birthday?

95: what are your plans for this weekend?

96: do you install your computer updates really quickly or do you procrastinate on them a lot?

97: myer briggs type, zodiac sign, and hogwarts house?

98: when’s the last time you went hiking? did you enjoy it?

99: list some songs that resonate to your soul whenever you hear them.

100: if you were presented with two buttons, one that allows you to go 5 years into the past, the other 5 years into the future, which one would you press? why?

[writing-is-a-martial-art]

How you self-reblog without being cowardly? Because I am just 😐😐😐 at the thought of it.

How to reblog your posts without feeling like shit:

Okay, so why do we feel bad about reblogging our own posts? Let’s list the things that might make you uncomfy with reblogging thy work and why it isn’t actually a big deal.

It feels like advertisement, and we all know advertisement is evil

Look, I know we all (or at least most of us) live in a capitalistic very-much-not-paradise and are tired of having adds shoved into our faces, but here’s the thing. Advertisement isn’t actually inherently malicious, it’s just that the way it’s usually done these days sucks ass, with pop-ups and non-skippable adds and all that.

Yeah, reblogging your own stuff is kind of sort of advertisement, but it’s very much benign. It’s just a post. People can scroll past it, and it’ll get buried in everyone’s dashes quite quickly. You are absolutely leaving people their free choice to ignore your thing and move on with their life.

For extra peace of mind, if you’re posting a long piece of writing or a comic strip, put most of it – everything after ~200 words and maybe 3 pages – under read more. If you post from mobile putting “:readmore:” in a new column without the quotation marks does the trick.

But it’ll show up on my blog, and it’ll become more annoying to navigate

Honestly, if your blog is so organized a post repeating a couple of times is the most of your worries – good for you! However, if it really bothers you, you can delete reblogs, but then Tumblr may do the wonky thing and people that replogged your self-reblog won’t be able to go to the original post and the read more might stop working, so if you choose to delete your self-reblogs, add a quick disclaimer. You can copy this: “hey, I delete self-reblogs, so please reblog the original post. Thank you!”.

But the people that’ve read it the first time will see it again and think I’m annoying!

In a circle of mutuals, it’s quite often that one person runs into the same post multiple times, be it a day-themed post, a recently viral one, or just a fun thing everyone liked because fandom/shared interest/etc. I have seen the skeleton war recruitment one about five times today, and it’s not annoying at all. It’s just the Tumblr Experience(TM). The same absolutely applies to writing. Plus, if they liked your piece, maybe they’ll want to re-read it. Double win! The chances of anyone ending up thinking you’re annoying are slim to none, and if they do… Oh, well. Can’t have everybody like you always. Still, most people to understand that Creating Things takes time and brain juice, and a little interaction is a small price to pay.

That’s it, folks. Have a good one, and reblog your writing and art and stuff without fear.

[synthient]

Could you elaborate on what you mean about Death T re stanning and fairness? It sounds interesting and I'd love to hear about it if you don't mind sharing.

ajhfakj hoo boy. Okay.

So some time around the summer before last (judging by the point where the first baffled and frustrated readmores start showing up on this blog), I read Death-T. It made me feel…some kind of way. An…unpleasant kind of way.

Here’s the thing about me: I can’t just let myself have an emotional reaction to a piece of fiction. I have to, first, pick apart my own emotions to figure out why I had that reaction, and second, pick apart the story to figure out how it works and how it made me feel that way.

On the Feelings Front, I’ve isolated two main causes:

1. I have a brain that Needs Things To Be Fair. That doesn’t mean I can’t handle unfairness in a piece of fiction. Unfairness creates conflict, and conflict is what makes for good storytelling. But it does mean that I need the story to be aware of its own unfairness. I need the unfairness to be the point. Otherwise I start vibrating at high speeds and shaking my fist at clouds.

2. I’m a Kaiba stan. I accidentally got emotionally attached to the Funny Card Game Boy from the Funny Card Game Show. 

There’s the feelings part. That leaves the “picking apart the story” side of the equation. And I’ve been trying to do that in nice punchy little one-or-two-paragraph text posts for the past year or so, but I don’t think I’ve ever really done the argument justice that way. So I guess that leaves only one option: writing a giant wordvomit essay on Yugioh (1996-2004).

Why This Is A Death-T Hateblog: The Masterpost

An important note: I like being able to back up my thoughts with Evidence From The Text, but I’m specifically working off the (Viz translated) manga. You can read Cards with Teeth here, Capumon here, and Death-T starting here if you want to check any of my facts or draw your own conclusions. Keep in mind that the Toei anime made pretty huge changes to the s0 Kaiba storyline, and the DM anime skipped most of it entirely–if you’re more familiar with those continuities, there’re some major differences in the manga.

(Also this thing probably reads better on desktop. I think the formatting got screwed up on mobile)

How We Got Here

Before we can actually dig into Death-T, we need to start at the very beginning (♫a very good place to start♫). So that means taking a look at “The Cards with Teeth (Part 1)” and “The Cards with Teeth (Part 2).”

For its first 8 chapters, the Yugioh manga chugs blissfully (if repetitively) along with an episodic, conflict-of-the-week formula. No overarching plot. Next to no sense of continuity. No trading cards in sight.

Then this asshole shows up. 

His name is Seto Kaiba (or “Kaiba,” at least–not sure if this is just a Viz thing, but my copy of CwT never mentions his given name). Not that he bears a whole lot of resemblance to the Seto Kaiba we later come to know and love (and/or love to hate).

Almost none of his most defining traits are there yet. There’s no mention of Mokuba, no mention of Kaibacorp, no indicationthat he’s especially rich (besides the fact that he’s carrying around a wholebriefcase of trading cards), no reason to believe he has a specific obsession with Blue Eyes (he just thinks it’s a strong card and it’d help him win tournaments), and no sign of any special hacking/strategy/hand-to-hand-combat/etc. skills (the kid is hilariously incompetent). 

This dude was never supposed to be a recurring character, and it shows.

But anyway, let’s run through the basic series of events:

- Kaiba wanders into the game shop looking forbooster packs. Yugi recognizes him as an acquaintance from school (not as a famous kid CEO, and not as a recent transfer student)

- Kaiba happens to notice the Blue Eyes card lying out onGrandpa’s counter (in this version of events, he hasn’t been stealing rare cards for months before this, he didn’t creep on Yugi’s conversation and followhim home, he had no idea going in that the Blue Eyes was there, and he didn’t already have the other three)

- He offers to trade all the cards in his briefcasefor the Blue Eyes (although he doesn’t tell Grandpa to name his price—again,the millionaire CEO element isn’t a thing yet)

- Grandpa refuses, so the next day Kaiba comes up with alaughably badly thought-out plan to steal the card

- Shockingly, Yugi notices that the “color copy from the catalog” isn’t the real deal. He gently tries to confront Kaiba about it in private

- Kaiba (without showing an ounce of the cool head you’d think you’d need to take over and run a company) panics, starts stammering and unconvincingly denying it, and then smacks Yugi with his briefcase

Annnd then Part 2 plays out like a standard s0 chapter.

“Yami Yugi” takes over. They play a shadow game. Kaiba cheats by slipping the stolen Blue Eyes out of his sleeve (Atem’s like “That’s my Grandpa’s card!” and Kaiba straight up goes “Whaaat, nooo, that’s my card that I, uh, found on the street just now.” A teen genius criminal mastermind, everybody). The shadow magic gives him a spritz from its metaphorical Karmic Cat-Training Spray Bottle and makes his Blue Eyes dissolve (I’d like to think that was Kisara going “I’m not mad, just disappointed,” and Memory World tries to retroactively make that connection, but it’s pretty abundantly clear that nothing about this series was planned that far ahead). He loses. Yadda yadda yadda.

And then Atem goes in for the penalty game.

To recap: 

Some random 10th grader from Yugi’s school stole a trading card, hit someone, and was generally kind of a jerk. As punishment, he was trapped in a hyper-realistic illusion of being ripped apart and slaughtered by half a dozen monsters at once.

Y…ay…?

Let’s Stop and Reflect for a Sec

In theory, I shouldn’t be that much more upset about Cards with Teeth than I am about any other part of s0, right? It’s not like the manga framed it as horrific and wrong when Atem set off an explosion in some teenage bully’s face a couple chapters ago. Giving us the vicarious pleasure of punishing our bullies in over-the-top, Carrie-style ways without actually exploring any of the consequences is, like, the early manga’s whole thing.

But even taking into account the fact that I already had an attachment to this Nasty Bowl Cut Boy thanks to the anime, I do actually think that there are at least two factors that set CwT apart.

The first is that Atem’s karmic punishments are usually…well, karmic. If he inflicts physical harm on someone, it’s because they already inflicted or tried to inflict roughly the same amount of harm on Yugi & co. If the crime was relatively minor, then he only gives out a minor punishment–like, say, when the homeroom teacher was Just Kinda Mean, all he did was allow the class to see her without her makeup on (…setting aside the Let’s Get Into Gender Politics-ness of that chapter).

There’s even a few cases where you could argue that the punishment is too light to fit the crime. Ushio beat Jonouchi and Honda half to death and tried to murder Yugi with a knife, and all he got was this lousy t-shirt an illusion that made the trash on the ground look like money.

In another chapter, the villain of the week tried to rape Anzu, and the only punishment he faced was having his side business exposed as a scam (Let’s Get Into Gender Politics).

Yet in CwT, we see one of the most harmless villains in all of s0 (no prolonged beatings or attempted murder? unheard of!) receive what’s arguably the most horrifying penalty game in the whole manga. At least when that guy got set on fire, it was over fast.

And that brings us to factor number two: Kaiba is the first penalty game victim in s0 who comes back. 

Capumon: Gotta Catch ‘em All!

Well, technically he doesn’t come back in person, at first. Someone else shows up to fight in his name.

Oh hey Mokie. How’s it going?

Rather understandably (imo), Mokuba wants the guy who tortured his brother last week to face some actual consequences for it.

Now here’s an interesting opportunity that the manga has set up for itself. Is it going to dig deep into the balance between defending yourself vs lashing out and causing undue harm? Is it going to remind us that most of the penalty game victims so far, whatever their crimes,have been children? Is it going to demonstrate that when you take out your anger on someone, you don’t just hurt your immediate target, but their loved ones as well?

Nah, who am I kidding.  

Hurting or inconveniencing the Good Guys in any way is Bad. Anything the Good Guys do is Good and Justified. Using magic to stick an already-hurting eleven-year-old in his own personalized hell? Good and Justified.

Before he’s shoved screaming into the Giant Vending Machine Capsule Where Bad And Naughty Elementary Schoolers Go To Atone For Their Crimes, Mokuba mentions that the other penalty game he heard about “made my brother go crazy!”

He also drops a hint of things to come with all the subtlety of an anvil. So I guess by this point, the numbers had come in and the card game chapter had proved unexpectedly popular enough that a sequel was in the works.

Death-Twink? Death-Tastic?Death-Two: Electric Boogaloo?

I’ve been pretty hard on Cards with Teeth and Capsule Monsters Chess so far. But you want to know the truth?

On their own, they aren’t necessarily that bad.

What really matters in a story isn’t the literal events: it’s how those events are framed. At the moment, we’re only midway through an incomplete storyline. Maybe we’re supposed to be horrified. Maybe we’re supposed to be questioning whether or not the hero is really in the right. It all hangs on what these chapters are building to.

As it turns out–as Mokuba just helpfully clued us in on–they were building to Death-T.

And that’s where the shit hits the fan.

Over a dozen chapters after we first met Kaiba, a whole bunch of completely-unforeshadowed facts about him are suddenly dumped on us all at once. He’s rich! The kind of rich that allows for limo rides, a giant mansion, and flouncing around in a fur-lined cape like feudal European nobility! And he’s the president of a company, even though “Whaa?!! But he’s still in high school!” Speaking of which, apparently Kaiba “hasn’t been at school recently.”

The Death-T arc opens with Yugi and Jonouchi attending the world’s most awkward sleepover–the host never shows up, and they don’t even get to paint each others’ nails or watch movies. Also Mokuba tries to murder them in the night, but you know what? If someone tortured my brother, “made him go crazy,” and left him huddled in the house feverishly working on a bizarre project and refusing to go to school for the next few weeks, I’d probably poison them too.

The morning after the sleepover, we learn another new Kaiba Fact…

Ever since the Experience of Death happened, he’s been having horrible recurring PTSD nightmares about it. As you do. When you get tortured.

(This is why, even though I know intellectually that it’s Not That Deep and people arejust having fun, I still get a little skeeved out when I see jokes about howDeath-T happened “just” because Kaiba was that mad about losing a card game or “just”because he had a crush on Yugi and he didn’t know how to deal with it. I’malways internally like “Nnno, I’m pretty sure it was the torture?”)

So far we’ve been shown in pretty brutal detail that our “hero” psychologically broke a fifteen-year-old for no good reason. The manga’s going to have its work cut out for it if it really wants to do a convincing redemption arc for its protagonist. And there’s no way it could possibly try to spin that random act of torture as an acceptable thing, right?

…right?

Crime and Punishment

That’s one of my first big problems with Death-T: to me, it reads as a way of trying to retroactively justify the Experience of Death.

That seems to be the purpose of suddenly giving Kaiba all this wealth and power that was never hinted at in Cards with Teeth. See, he wasn’t just some random high school kid who had the bad luck of crossing someone with magic powers; he was (however improbable that is, as the story lampshades) a high school-aged CEO. He’s so ludicrously powerful that he can torture an old man in front of a live audience and get away with it. Punching up looks a lot better than punching down, doesn’t it?

And you can’t really fault the hero for torturing someone evil, can you? Kaiba used Grandpa’s sanity as a blackmail chip! He ran experiments on human test subjects! He wants to kill Yugi and everyone he loves! Surely a little torture is no worse than he deserved.

There’s only one one problem with that: the Experience of Death happened before Death-T. There’s no way Atem could have known any of this was coming. The audience couldn’t have known it was coming. Takahashi didn’t know. Chronologically speaking, the Experience of Death wasn’t revenge for Death-T. It’s the other way around.

Best Served Cold

So Death-T is a form of eye-for-an-eye vengeance: “Yugi” beat Kaiba at Duel Monsters and tortured him, so now Kaiba’s gonna beat Yugi and torture him, using his own perfect virtual recreation of “Yugi’s” penalty game (oh yeah, that whole “the average person goes insane in about 10 minutes” thing? Kaiba was able to program that detail from personal experience).

But wait! This isn’t really eye-for-an-eye! Kaiba’s going after Yugi’s loved ones, not just Yugi, and that’s worse than what Yugi did to him! And even if it was proportionate, revenge is bad and wrong. That’s how you get endless back-and-forth chains of vengeance and generational blood feuds and stuff. Two wrongs don’t make a right!

And those could all be reasonable points, except…

This entire story is about how great and badass eye-for-an-eye justice is.

“Wouldn’t it be cool if you could take everyone who ever hurt you and make them suffer even worse” is practically the thesis of Season 0. You can’t make something look awesome when the protagonist does it and then turn around and make it seem evil and inexcusable coming from anyone else.

And while Kaiba does wind up targeting Yugi’s friends, that wasn’t part of his original plan. He’s surprised when random people start jumping out of the bleachers/the Kaibacorp employee roster and insisting that they won’t let Yugi do this alone. The writing uses his surprise as proof that he just doesn’t understand The Power of Friendship, but it’s also evidence that his original target was just Yugi.

“If you’re gonna side with my torturer, then you can have the same fate as him, I guess.” It’s not even that far outside the logic Atem’s been using all this time. Just because there’s only one main gang member who personally hurt his friend, that doesn’t mean that Atem won’t rope every random mook who gets in his way into the death game too. (Granted, this doesn’t really apply to Kaiba’s treatment of Grandpa. Or the offscreen experimentation/blackmailing. Or Mokuba, but…we’ll get to that).

…But like I said before, the big issue isn’t the events. It’s the framing. Maybe the point will ultimately be that if penalty games are wrong when the bad guy does them, then they’re wrong when the hero does them too. Maybe this is all leading up to a big reexamination of Atem’s moral code and some much-needed character development.

Maybe. Let’s keep going and see.

*Great Gatsby comic voice* Baby? What Baby

Death-T runs for 14 chapters, but Kaiba isn’t actually there for, like…half of them.

I mean, he’s technically there? Occasionally? He’ll show up long enough to dramatically play chess for a panel or so, or to stick his head on a TV monitor and provide some Helpful Death Game Hints. But for all practical purposes, he’s pretty much absent for the entire middle section of the story arc.

And, uh…let’s just say I 100% understand and respect the DM anime’s decisionto go straight from Grandpa’s heart attack to the final duel and skipeverything in between.

If Kaiba’s real goal is to beat Yugi at Duel Monsters, then all the death games leading up to that one are basically filler. And they manage to be just as contrived and nonsensical as any anime filler arc, without a fraction of the fun.

It’s largely a tonal issue. The writing swings wildly between grimdark dramatics, sentimental conversations about friendship where everyone hugs and cries (tbh that’s one of the few redeeming qualities of the arc), and “comic relief” where the “““comedy””” is all either bodily function jokes or sexual assault jokes (L̠̤̯͍̦e̮̪͎̞t's̞��̳̱̰̦̲ ̲G͖͉̹̻̯͉͖e̜̝̗͓̟͚t̖͚ ͚̰̞̮̝̫͎I͓̜̦̳̭͚͎n̪̪͈t͍̥̰̼o͚͎͇̣̘̝ ̪̼̜̣̳G͈̠̫e̳̝̗̪ṋ͚̞͎ͅd͔̙͓̯̹e̯̺̯̩r͔̣̲͔̳̗ ̘͙P̖̦o̩̺͖͎̞̬l͎̺͕̹i͇̣̼̦t̰i̬̰̝͙̗̝c̜̼̺̪̲̞s).

Honestly, in terms of the “stanning and fairness” argument, there’s not much to talk about here. It just adds insult to injury that not only does Death-T throw my fave under the bus, but it’s really badly written.

The Mokuba Thing

Okay, let’s fast-forward through the filler zone and stoppp…here. 

In the context of the anime, where we know (and see multiple flashbacks demonstrating) that their whole life has been an “us against the world” story, this scene is tragic. Seto’s trust in people has been eroded so much that he even thinks Mokuba is conspiring against him? Their love and support for each other, which has survived through so much hardship, has finally cracked under the weight of this latest trauma? There’s a lot of dramatic and tearjerking potential there.

I think it’s pretty safe to say that most of us bring our baggage from the anime with us when we read the manga. The vast majority of the western Yugioh fandom did start with DM. 

But if we look at this purely in the context of the manga–if we can pretend, for a second, that none of us have ever heard of the anime–this is the first time we see the two of them interacting onscreen. And none of those touching flashbacks of Seto comforting Mokuba and defending him from bullies and promising to be his father exist here. All we ever really learn about their relationship before this point is “They used to be a little closer when they were younger. Source: one (1) photo of them playing chess.”

So instead of serving as the tragic lowpoint of their relationship, this scene sets the baseline for it: Mokuba desperately wants to make his brother happy and earn his approval, while Seto responds with dismissal and cruelty.

In the anime (and to a certain extent in the later manga), Mokuba’s purpose in the narrative is to humanize Seto. But in Death-T, he serves the opposite function. Every interaction they have is an opportunity for Seto to kick the dog and prove what a monster he is.

And it’s all downhill from here.

………………

…So.

I have…mixed feelings about this.

On one level–a meta level–I think this scene serves the same purpose as taking that random high schooler from CwT and suddenly giving him ridiculous amounts of money and power and mustache-twirling levels of villainy. It’s a way of making the Experience of Death seem retroactively justified (and also a way of making the upcoming penalty game look fair).

On the other hand. It’s. 

Horrific.

This scene is supposed to make us hate Kaiba, and it does it’s job really really well.

Personally speaking? I’m of the opinion that trying to hurt the child under your care as badly as you conceivably can is a “don’t pass go, don’t collect $100″ kind of deal. There’s no coming back from that. There’s no fixing or salvaging this relationship.  

(God, this whole thing is wrapped in so many layers of fantasy that I’m not even sure what the real-world equivalent would be. Trying to beat your child not quite to death?)

Mokuba should not have had to continue living with his brother after this, any more than the Ishtars should have had to stay with their dad or Seto should have had to stay with Gozaburo. Mokuba forgiving Seto for this isn’t touching to me, it’s gut-wrenching. Every “heartwarming” brotherly moment in the later manga (all, like…2 and a half of them) feels hollow and sad.

As far as I’m concerned, this scene doesn’t “complicate” their relationship in any interesting or meaningful way. Their anime relationship already has plenty of complications–their sometimes unhealthy co-dependence, the fact that Seto is still a kid himself and he’s not really equipped to be a parent,Mokuba’s difficulty understanding that Seto can’t just “go back to who he was” before his trauma, the times when Seto is too caught up in his own pain to really be there for Mokuba, the manipulation involved in Seto’s takeover plan, etc. This just makes their relationship outright child abuse.

But hey, they hugged that one time in Duelist Kingdom, so it’s fine, right?

ExODiA iiiIIIIT’s not pAHsible

The final duel happens. The big Blue Eyes vs Exodia showdown.

*Bill Wurtz voice* So that’s pretty nifty, I would say.

It’s..? A genuinely cool and dramatic duel. There’s a reason it’s one of the, like, three Death-T elements the DM anime actually bothered to keep. Not much to say about it.

Sure was a whole lot of buildup just to end things with one (1) deus ex machina instawin card, tho.

The Tragic Backstory

So if all this happened because of a penalty game, what do you think the solution could be?

Did you say “another, even harsher penalty game”?

Ding ding ding!

This time, instead of torturing the fifteen-year-old, our hero puts the fifteen-year-old in a vegetative state as he begs for mercy.

Yaaaayy! 

Some fun facts about the Mind Crush that we don’t actually learn until Duelist Kingdom:

1. It lasted for 6 months

2. Mokuba spent that entire time alone, in the big empty mansion, with no parental guidance or adult supervision except the butlers and maids, caring for his brother’s comatose body 24/7

3. When Atem put Kaiba in that coma, he had absolutely no idea if he’d ever be able to wake up or not. He thought he could, maybe–Kaiba’s pretty strong, right? But he also finds the idea that Kaiba died in his coma and came back to haunt him perfectly believable. “Fixed,” dead…eh, it was kind of a coin toss.

But wait, the story’s not over yet! First we have to find out Why Kaiba Is The Way He Is (“Because your buddy tortured him last month” isn’t enough of an answer, apparently).

This is communicated in the most natural way possible: Mokuba just starts monologuing about all his brother’s deepest darkest traumas to a bunch of strangers his brother hates.

The claim that Kaiba’s backstory is “more complex” in the manga than it is in the anime has always confused me, because this is…it. These three pages are the whole backstory. I mean, in Battle City we do get one more passing line of dialog about how Kaibacorp used to be a weapons manufacturer and Gozaburo “sold Seto’s soul to the military industrial complex,” but other than that… The anime took these bare bones and fleshed them out significantly, but from a pure manga canon standpoint, it’s not a whole lot to work with.

But there’s still enough here to rub me the wrong way.

For one thing, this sequence is almost an exact parallel to two later moments in the manga: Pegasus’s backstory dump at the end of Duelist Kingdom, and Malik’s backstory dump mid-Battle City. In both of those cases, the purpose of the scene is to take a villain whose motives seemed cruel and inexplicable and finally reveal the reasons behind his actions. We’re supposed to be seeing these characters in a sympathetic light for the very first time.

But Kaiba’s motives in Death-T, uh, weren’t exactly a mystery. He already made it pretty explicitly clear that this was about the torture. So as a narrative tool, Mokuba’s monologue:

1. seems a little superfluous

2. seems like a way of taking any responsibility out of the protagonist’s hands. Kaiba didn’t snap because of anything Atem did, he just had a bunch of fucked up baggage that Atem couldn’t possibly have known about or accounted for. Who knew some people take it badly when you torture them??

3. seems to suggest that we weren’t supposed to be sympathizing with Kaiba before this point. If this is the big “oh, now that I know why he did it, I guess I feel a little bad for him :(” moment, then that means the part where he got tortured…wasn’t?

And, as always, there’s the issue of the framing.

The grace note of the monologue–the thought it leaves us with, the intended takeaway–isn’t “If only he hadn’t gone through years of abuse, in circumstances he had no real control over because he was a child.” It’s “If only he hadn’t brought all this upon himself by cheating.”

Even if we ignore the fact that it’s physically impossible to cheat at chess (which seems like kind of a big oversight for a gaming manga, but oh well, That’s Yugioh Babe)…

How can you possibly present a ten-year-old cheating at a board game in a desperate gambit to get himself and his brother out of an orphanage as his start of darkness?

Yet that’s exactly what the writing does. This is a story about how games “reveal the true hearts” of their players and bring karmic retribution down on anyone who doesn’t respect the game and follow the rules. The implication is that the child abuse Seto suffered was karma. He rightfully earned it by cheating at chess, just like he brought the Experience of Death upon himself by cheating at Duel Monsters.

Oh yeah, speaking of which…

Wheel of Morality, Turn Turn Turn, Tell Us The Lesson We Should Learn

What was the outcome of Death-T? What impact did it actually have? 

Did it bring about any big moral reckoning? Any questioning of the heroes’ values? Did Atem learn the difficult but important lesson “torture bad”?

Nnnnope!

Death-T is immediately followed by a series of episodic chapters that take us right back to the status quo like nothing happened. Atem keeps merrily handing out penalty games all the way up to the very end of Duelist Kingdom. When he does finally stop doing them, his decision has nothing to do with Death-T. It takes a comment from Pegasus about the Millennium Items having an “evil intelligence” to make him wonder “wait…I’m from a Millennium Item…I’m an intelligence…could evil…maybe include…torture????”

And even after the manga lukewarmly reverses its position to “torture sort of bad I guess,” it never really does anything with that revelation. None of the past penalty games are ever reexamined. No apologies are made. The Experience of Death is quietly swept under the rug, and the Mind Crush, when it’s brought up at all, is framed as noble act that “fixed” Kaiba (because “if you make someone suffer badly enough, you can hurt them into being a better person” is a great message).

Basically, we learned nothing from Death-T, nothing changed, and our takeaway is supposed to be “Atem was 100% in the right and Kaiba was 100% in the wrong, and also he’s an evil monster who deserved everything he got.”

Guess I Need A Satisfying Conclusion of Some Kind Even Through Death-T Didn’t Really Have One, Huh

Wow.

That was…a whole lot of words of Death-T rage that I apparently had in me zjkghzkkf. 

I tend to feel less justified about constantly harping on Death-T then I do when it comes to, like, the racism in Memory World, or the series’ general Miss O’Gyny. It’s not like “magical vigilantism” is exactly a real-word social issue that’s being reflected in this piece of fiction. I realize a lot of my anger pretty much boils down to “hey,, ! thats…my fave. stopp...being mean to him >:(”

But I also feel like the issues in Death-T aren’t limited to Death-T.

The manga has this…this thing where it wants to be able to pinpoint a few clear, unchanging moral rules (“cheating is bad!” “graverobbing is bad!” “patricide is bad!”) and just apply them neatly to every situation, without having to take into account any of that inconvenient stuff like “what were the circumstances of this specific situation,” or “how many choices were actually open to this person,” or “how much harm was done by this choice compared to its benefits in terms of basic human well-being.” Yet at the same time, that moral absolutism is somehow coupled with a reluctance to apply any moral judgement to its protagonists at all. 

The two points where that becomes clearest are Death-T and Memory World. And I feel like even when people acknowledge the issues with those arcs, they still want to be able to write it off as “oh, that was just a problem with the early chapters, it was fixed as the writing matured,” or “oh, that was just a problem at the end because of the mad rush to finish the story before it got canceled, it was never a thing before then.” But it’s not an isolated problem. It’s there at the beginning of the story, it’s there at the end, and it’s baked into everything in the middle.

…but anyhow. 

hey,, ! thats…my fave. stopp...being mean to him >:(

[margridarnauds]

obscure ask meme: 14, 26, and 3

3. what movie/game/etc. helps you calm down?

The Mummy, 1789, and Chronicles of Narnia for me. Also: Star Trek: TNG and Murder, She Wrote. They’re basically like time portals. Also, given that I nearly cried while playing Wii: Endless Ocean recently, I THINK it’s safe to say that that one counts. Even listening to the opening number is just…memories. Happiness. Calm. 

14. do you like makeup?

I like seeing what other PEOPLE can do with it and I’m always impressed and slightly envious of the transformation factor (the possibility of having cheekbones is very enticing, tbh), but I can’t be bothered to learn how to do it myself. It seems like an encumbrance as far as every day life. I DEFINITELY think it’s ridiculous that women are expected to double down on it in order to appear “professional” while their counterparts don’t. 

26. what do you think about genderbent Solène or Olympe? 

Hm…..I’m ALWAYS down for 1789 genderbends, because I think that you could get a really interesting story out of that, probably more interesting than the canon story. I would probably ship Fem!Laz/Fem!Ronan like fucking UPS.

More under the readmore because I ended up thinking way too much about this and very little of it ended up coherent:  

 I THINK Solène would be hard, if we’re assuming that she’s genderbent into a cis dude from a cis woman, given that Canon!Solène puts so much of an emphasis on childbirth=womanhood, which is personally……EH to me, especially when I know her character was written by a bunch of dudes, but….Hm, it’s hard because on one hand, I feel like a genderbent Solène (Solal?) wouldn’t have to deal with nearly the same issues that Solène has to deal with in canon. Obviously, Ronan fucking off to Paris after their father died would STILL be devastating on an emotional level, but it wouldn’t be quite the SAME level of devastation as a woman who’s lost her family home, the only source of economic stability they HAD in the form of the farm, and both of the major male figures in her life, with no inheritance or dowry to give her a cushion. The employment opportunities for a guy in France at this time were significantly larger, even though he COULD still be a sex worker, because it’s not like male sex workers didn’t exist at this time either, though there was always that added sense of danger due to the illegality of it. (Not that that…..REALLY stopped anyone. I mean, the Tuileries and Palais Royal were NOTORIOUS gay hangouts, though most of that, from what I REMEMBER was more casual sex rather than necessarily sex work.) And, tbh, you could even keep the Zuka/Toho thing with him getting a keeper, since it’s not like that would be UNUSUAL, though I could see him taking a more personal job like, say, a valet or a footman, since that would give off some plausible deniability. (Remember when I mentioned in Forgiveness that Ronan tended to act as Laz’s valet? YEEEEEEEEEP.) 

I think that Ronan would STILL be horrified, because it would still be a little sibling of his and Ronan’s deep enough in the closet at this point that he can see Narnia from his house and I think that, for all his posturing, Ronan is still something of a country boy, but it wouldn’t be the same as his LITTLE SISTER, since a lot of Ronan’s issues with Solène and sex work stem from….him being an 18th century man. Solène “gave up her dignity,” and now Ronan’s perfect little image of a societally acceptable life post-Revolution, where he comes back and everything is nice and happy and they can live on the farm together and Solène can get married off to a nice man and have ten kids while Ronan gets married to a nice girl…that’s all gone. I don’t…let Ronan off EASY for seeing his sister as being “ruined,” even though I do think that I ultimately go a lot easier on him than a lot of people do, but I do think that’s very much where his line of thought’s going. One of Ronan’s biggest flaws is probably that, for all that he talks of Revolution and changing the world….he doesn’t really….know HOW to move beyond his own prejudices. He can be surprisingly conservative like that. Which is far from UNUSUAL for a revolutionary at the time; he’s not UNIQUE there. I do think that if Ronan saw his little brother as an aristocrat’s kept boy, he would still FREAK. And then become Lazare’s kept boy because DO AS I SAY AND NOT AS I DO. 

Another thing that would be possible would be Solal becoming a soldier. That would be a job with steady shitty pay, food of questionable quality, a roof over his head of questionable quality. Soldiers occupied a very…ODD place in society at this point, if I’m remembering correctly from the research I did nearly a year ago, because on one hand, they COULD be seen as heroic everymen, but there was also a distinct stigma caused by their itinerant lifestyle (esp. re: women) and tendency of causing trouble in the towns where they were boarded. Because you have a bunch of guys in one town for a certain amount of time, some of them getting drunk and rowdy, particularly on holidays and festivals, and….It’s not the SAME level of stigma that sex workers had, obviously, but Ronan would probably NOT be happy with it, especially since it puts them on essentially opposite sides. I can also see Ronan FREAKING OUT over it because of the circumstances of their father’s death, which could cause a pretty similar argument to their canon argument. The “Je Veux le Monde” EQUIVALENT would then be him snapping against his superior officer and deserting to join the Revolution, where he and Ronan reconcile. Though, tbh, I’m not sold on EITHER of the Mazurier sibs being able to take orders. Like….Solène is pragmatic enough that Solal probably COULD, but I think he would be seething after a while, especially if he had a dick for an officer. 

Tl;dr: I think that a genderbent Solène would still be POSSIBLE, but I also think that so much of Solène’s arc is really inextricably bound to her being a woman in 18th century France.

Olympe would also be difficult, because the entire reason that she meets up with Ronan is that she’s the Queen’s undergoverness/confidant, and I think that it would be very…difficult for a man to be in that same level of confidence. Or, at least, to be in that level of confidence and NOT be accused of having an affair with her himself. Maybe he’s a young, softspoken courtier who somehow gets entangled in the whole situation? Maybe even a friend of Fersen’s, as opposed to Antoinette’s, with his Enlightenment ideals contrasting to Fersen’s conservatism? His father wanted him for military service initially so that he could carry on the family tradition, but instead he somehow became wrapped up in court life instead, learning to keep his mouth closed and smile. (Though in contrast to, say, Laz’s family, his father was very supportive of him taking an alternative path, even if he was disappointed.) But who still has a conscience and so rushes to the Bastille to try to save Ronan’s life anyway when things go south.

I actually think that Genderbent!Olympe would have a lot in common with Laz, since they would both have that military background and both are doggedly loyal to the Royal Family. With the key difference being that M!Olympe isn’t as DEEP into things as Laz is. Laz is just…covered in blood at this point, whereas M!Olympe ISN’T. 

Also, IF we go with the “Solal is a soldier” option, then that gives the two of them more of an opportunity to meet if Solal is anywhere near the Bastille at the time. 

It would also explain a LOT about his fear about getting involved with either of the Mazurier sibs, because THAT could ruin his life at court, and it would give Artois some leverage to try to use. Not that I haven’t written a carbon copy of that plotline with Laz before.

Again, it’s hard, because so MUCH of Olympe’s role is tied into being a woman in 18th century France. Again, not IMPOSSIBLE, but DIFFERENT. I think that you would end up with a completely different plot/character. 

[badaxefamily]

@aelith-earfalas just made an excellent tutorial on using Ninja Ripper to rip models and their textures from WildStar! I’m glad, I want everyone to know how to do it but I’m not good at writing tutorials, and then my energy is limited too. Their tutorial is awesome, so go show them some love!

As an additional bit of info, if you find yourself in need of full-resolution textures because Ninja Ripper didn’t get them for some reason (it usually does, but some environment things just come back with low res textures) you can use Intel’s Graphics Performance Analyzer to grab the full res textures. Under a readmore for length:

This tutorial has a link to the program and instructions for setup. Don’t bother with the patched frame analyzer though, it didn’t work for me. Follow that tutorial for capturing a frame with GpaMonitor, then open FrameAnalyzer.exe that comes with the program. You’ll get something like this:

If nothing is showing up, click “Add” and find the frame file you captured. Here I have three frames to pick from, let’s use the one with the taxi. The reason I captured this frame was because Ninja Ripper didn’t get all of the taxi’s textures (it has three) and the ones it did get were 128x128 instead of the normal 1024x1024 resolution and I needed the full res for a mod.

When you open a frame you’ll get a load of weird info like this:

Don’t panic, most of it isn’t relevant to us right now! Look at the left side, there will be a list of “Render Targets” and each will have a number or set of numbers after it. Scroll down and look for one with several big numbers and click on it.

You’ll get another bunch of weird data, but all we’re interested in is the “Input” dropdown. If the render target you picked doesn’t have anything under Input, pick a different one. Hey look, textures!

A lot of textures, actually. Textures for every NPC, shrub, and rock nearby. Scroll through til you find the one(s) you want. They may not all be in the same Render Target! The taxi’s files were split between a couple of different ones. Once you find a texture, left click it, and then click the circled icon to save it:

Textures will often have black spots on them, I don’t know why. Usually this isn’t a big problem if you can work a graphics editor. You can copy the layer, select by color all the black specks and delete them, then blur the underlying copy to “fill” the holes.

In case you’re wondering, those brightly colored blue and pink textures are usually something called normal maps combined with specular and (I think) ambience. If you don’t know what they’re for/aren’t doing mods, it’s best to just ignore them. The purpose of a normal map is to add depth to objects, like scratches and gouges in armor or the puffy texture of the taxi seats, while the other things control shinyness and glow. It’s done by the rendering engine though so if you aren’t going to render the model it won’t do you any good. Also, each engine handles these things differently so even if you want to use them, you’ll most likely have to edit them anyway. (For FFXIV mods for example, I have to take the green and alpha channels of a WS normal map and paste them into the red and green channels of a new file for FFXIV to be able to read them, and its engine can’t do anything at all with the ambients!)

Also, don’t get too excited about that geometry tab: It does let you export a model, however the resulting model is skewed so you’ll need a fair bit of 3D knowledge to do anything with it. It also doesn’t have UV coordinates (a thing that tells a program how to use a texture) so the model is just flat.

[gay-jesus-probably]

You have a lot of fans wondering what happened to you in fan fiction. Like me. My gay Jesus, where has our savior gone?

...bro....

Okay first things first: that is probably the nicest thing anyones ever said to me???? holy shit anon i love you.

Secondly... yeah theres not really an excuse here, i just... havent been feeling it. 

Not helped by the fact that I got a new laptop back in the spring, and while I transfered all my files over no problem, I was pirating microsoft word on my old computer, and my usual source of pirated materials (read: dad) gave me a file for it that my computer immediately read as a nasty virus and now refuses to ever interact with again, so. while i have everything, and can look at it whenever I want, i can’t interact with my files in any way shape or form. like, no edits, no additions, i can’t even fucking copy+paste. So I’m using google docs now, except with literally all of my WIPs, the outlining and new chapter files were not complete. So if I want to do any work on them, then it’ll have to be split between beginning on a Word doc, and then picking up on google docs partway through, which seems real fuckin inconvenient so it hasn’t happened yet.

My options are to either cough up and buy the microsoft package, which i dont have the money for, or to find a better pirate source, which is also not an option bcause dad is a giant drama queen and he flips shit and has a guilt trip meltdown if he thinks hes not being appreciated, so me informing him his pirated word didnt work several months after he gave it to me? will not go over well, so there is not a chance in hell i’m doing that. The only solution is to go on my old laptop where i CAN alter the files, and copy-paste them all into google docs, but like... hooooly shit. we’re talking a lot of content here. my outlines tend to get... lengthy, because they’re mostly me rambling to myself. and there’s a lot of WIP projects i’ve got. basically i COULD handle it, but i’m too lazy to actually do so lmao, especially since the whole process would take twice as long cause my old laptop has some case damage around the hinge, which is also by the power button, and means that if the screen moves at all there is a 75% chance it will turn off the laptop. and that gets real old real fast.

All that clusterfuck aside, if we’re talking specific projects, then the rough summary is under the readmore:

Displacement and Division: Haven’t been feeling it. Don’t think I’ve written any new content since I last updated, which was... aaa while ago. I promise, no matter how long it takes, I AM coming back to this one. It’s too far to walk now. It just... may take awhile. Doesn’t help that the outlines and a fair chunk of the next chapter for both fics are locked up in Word. Don’t obsessively check for updates, but hang in there. I’m coming back.

Hooked Into A Machine and Nobody’d Even Notice At All: Both were initially created due to the Great Gods of Hyperfixation causing me to lock into Be More Chill when i discovered it, quickly burn through the entire fandom, and start frantically producing my own content out of sheer frustration. When the hyperfixation wore off... i was able to enjoy non-BMC content again, and wandered off. Whenever I wander back in, updates will occur. ...Don’t hold your breath on these.

Ghost in the Machine: Mix of the two problems, as it was written in the middle of a hardcore Tron hyperfixation, and when I came down, I wandered away. Chapter 3 is about halfway done, only problem is that’s... all locked in Word. Yeah. There’ll probably be more whenever I come back to Tron. It ain’t dead yet.

Cold Flame/Lunam Ignis: Honestly, trying to write a full blown fic of this concept was probably stretching it a bit for me. I had ideas and scenes for Axelnort in DDD, and I wanted to use them, but I felt the need to build up to them first. That... was a mistake, because I didn’t really have anything for Days, and only a handful of stuff for KHII. Honestly, I’d safely call Lunam Ignis dead, I have 0 plans of coming back to that one.

Seemingly Simple Things: These were two blurbs written as a joke, that I probably should not have tried to continue. Don’t expect a chapter 3... well, ever. Apologies all, but I feel anything further would roll over from ‘funny’ to ‘forced’, and I’d rather not. It be like that sometimes.

I’m pretty sure that’s all of my WIPs? If any of these made you go ‘wait what the fuck when was that’, I’ve got an AO3 and an FF.net account, and tbh? my crossposting is not reliable. Some are on both, but a fair amount of fics have just been posted to one or the other. It be like that.

I know I’ve been dead since January (on FF.net) and April (on AO3), but you are going to have to wait a bit - we’re back into NaNo season, so fic is not high on the priority list at the current moment. Apologies, fam.

And now the good news! I AM still writing plenty! Just, none of its gotten to the point of being postable. I’ve had some less intense small fandom hyperfixation frustration fic bursts, so if anyone’s also into TribeTwelve, Stand Still Stay Silent, or Check Please!, then there may be some content going up from those - I’ve got multiple fics in progress for all of those that aren’t just self indulgent fuckery, and will be posted if I can work on them enough to make the plausible.

As for my WIP’s, as I said above, Ghost in the Machine DOES have a chapter 3 about halfway done, and a complete outline for part 1, so that finishing is looking very good whenever I get around to it.

With Displacement, while the next chapter doesn’t have much, the outlines done through to part 7, so I know exactly where we’re steering this trainwreck, and I’ve got a few rough drafts of key scenes in part 4 and 5. I’ve also started on interludes 4 and 5. For those curious, interlude 4 is several non-Evie clones in the 420th unknowingly re-enacting Die Hard, and Michelle’s hair dye saves the day while also causing some truly impressive property damage. The stains left by that incident are never coming out. Interlude 5 is less fun, and more character exploration - namely, the main characters and their thoughts on Michelle. After the events of Part 5, trust me - there’s going to be a LOT of conflict in that area. Especially from Obi-Wan.

As for Division, while I admit the outline is a lot more shaky, and there’s less actual work done, I DO know who the cast is and what I’m doing with them, and I’ve got some rough drafts of crucial scenes, even if I don’t know exactly where those scenes happen yet. It’s gonna be a ride, yall.

And the final, most important piece of good news: As I’m sure you’ve noticed, i am a bitch that really likes talking about their writing. Literally anyone can hit me up asking about anything of mine, and I will probs spam you with a small essay, such as I just did. Tbh, if someone actually did message me to talk about my writing, I give it like a few hours of chatting before I’m linking that someone to a relevant google doc, and/or explaining the entire plot. ...Provided they’re cool with the spoilers, mind you. I ask that first. So seriously - while updates may not be coming until december at the earliest, if you want something to tide you over, be it rough drafts or just paragraphs of information, hit me up. I am literally always down to enthusiastically rant about my writing lmao.

...That goes twice as hard for my original projects, fyi, if someone sent me a message asking about my NaNo project I’d probably cry with joy and tell them everything. it helps me Plot.

The other benefit to messaging me is that I have good cats who are very cute and loving, and I have a compulsive need to show Every Single Person i interact with pics of them, so that’s another inevitable to talking to me.

look at these good kids

[slumberinglabyrinth]

langmaor replied to your post “A refine that encourages you to both ignore the weapon’s original...”

yeah this always makes me sad. i noticed it first when OG eliwood got access to Blazing durandal and it was very :/// It really makes me want a way to get some refund for all the units you sacrificed in the form of feathers or sth idk

Basically all the skills I had on my Celica were either building off of Ragnarok’s effect (Atk/Spd Push, Reciprocal Aid, Renewal) or to support the healer (Azama) that I had paired with her (Spur Def/Res and a Def Tactic seal) and, yeah, it would be really nice to get some sort of compensation for the fact that they’re almost all pointless on her now. I know they don’t have some record on the servers of all the actions you’ve performed, so just giving me the units back or an orb consolation is out of the question (and a loss of resources for them), but at this point I’d take the ability to turn just those skills into their own combat manual (even with a feather or badge cost or something) because that’s the closest I could see IntSys ever coming towards making skill inheritance a noncommittal action. And I’ll be honest: I don’t really care to get the 22,200 feathers I spent to upgrade that free Lissa we got back, and getting the STana that I spent orbs to get (which was barely over a month ago, wow! what the hell intsys!? why bother releasing a skill that’s all but designed to be inherited by this unit in particular if you’re going to obsolete it outright a month later?!?) back won’t do much for me since I pulled her solely to pass Atk/Spd Push to Celica (even if Fruit of Idunn ended up being pretty fun) but if I could at least be able to move those skills onto another unit it would make it so it’s not an utter and total loss on my end.

Let me move all the skills I had Celica inherit over the past year that are now entirely obsolete and effectively useless because her refine’s effect asks you to build her completely differently than the original weapon effect did and the original effect does not exist in the way that asked you to have skills to support it. Maybe, if freely shuffling around skills between units is a concern for game balance (which it should), only let me make a combat manual for a given skill slot on a given unit once, or make it cost more each time I take a specific instance of a skill off a unit (ie. it starts at 20 feathers, and increases by a factor of 10 each time before it caps out at 20,000 feathers) so I can’t do things like pass around a single copy of Death Blow 4 to whoever the next the player-phase flavor of the week is without significant cost to myself.

If you’re reading this I’d really appreciate it if you sent IntSys a request through the the in-app customer support inquiry form or whatever it’s called these days asking for a feature like that. Even if what I’m complaining about here doesn’t apply to you, I can’t imagine that you wouldn’t benefit directly from a quality of life feature like this.

I’m contractually obligated to put the rest in a readmore since I’m not even halfway through what I want to say and this is already a very long post. I’ll bold major stuff so it’s easier to skim through; the fun stuff (alternatives to what they did) will be at the end.

Even beyond getting some sort of compensation for all the resources I’ve put into her, I greatly enjoyed how she played before this refine! I had fun with how she was a player phase unit that wasn’t just “Don’t die during enemy phase to win”! Yeah, she wasn’t the best mage or red unit, or even red mage, but I had fun with her. She was at the point where she’d kill most units you’d have her face in one round, but she wasn’t a total snoozefest to use because she still required some level of strategy beyond just “strike first” unlike the vast majority of player phase units.

And now all of that is gone for a unit that’s an easy bake combo of using Ardent Sacrifice and then going ham on the opposing team. Her difficulty of use (which, mind you, is nowhere near the amount of effort it took to have the majority of the cast perform on her level) combined with the results she produced were what drew me to her and easily hitting an effective 68 atk and 52 spd doesn’t mean much if I’m not enjoying how I’m getting there.

And the kicker? No other refine has an issue like this, and especially none of the refines in this update.

On the other hand, a decent chunk of weapon evolutions have similar problems, most notably ones that clearly weren’t meant to be directly connected, like Armads/Berserk Armads, Tyrfing/Divine Tyrfing, and especially Assassin’s Bow/Guard Bow, Aura/Dark Aura, and Excalibur/Dark Excalibur. The one that falls closest to the level of “oops! discard half your build if you want to use this!” is the jump from Awakening!Falchion to Sealed Falchion, since it forces you to ignore any skills you had which capitalized off of the Renewal effect in order to get the stat boost from not being at full HP (which probably ended up just being Ardent Sacrifice and B slot Renewal). Most of these janky evolutions seem to stem from a lack of desire to actually do anything with the original effect and instead take an easy way out by just making them into something that plays substantially different which is (as you pointed out) exactly what happened with Durandal and Blazing Durandal, and with Ragnarok and any refined Ragnarok (eff or otherwise). IntSys couldn’t be bothered to make it work in a way that fits their current vision for the game so they just took it in a different direction that made it easier to work with.

But back to refines.

A handful of prf weapon refines actually change the base effect of a weapon outside of directly strengthening the base effect or adding an additional effect (outside of the +eff refine itself, like Binding Blade getting Eff against Dragons regardless of refine). These are:

Parthia (Warding Blow 2 to ‘Divine Tyrfing but weaker’)

Fólkvangr (Defiant Atk 2 to Brazen Atk/Def 3)

Cymbeline (Hone Atk 3 to Drive Atk 2)

Aura (Breath of Life 2 to ‘Staff/Tome Hone Atk 4’)

Fujin Yumi (Pass to ‘Ignore Terrain’)

Brynhildr (Gravity to ‘Divine Tyrfing but weaker’)

Fensalir (Threaten Atk 2 to Dull All)

Yato (Darting Blow 2 to +2 Atk/Spd/Def/Res)

Of these, only Parthia, Fólkvangr, and Cymbeline can arguably be seen as direct upgrades to the original effect and/or seen as an ‘equivalent’ effect. Jeorge’s Res is middling enough for the new effect to easily break even on the damage reduction for Warding Blow (though he’s now easily smacked in the face by Dragons and Felicia, oof), and for Cymbeline and Fólkvangr the shift from a buff to a combat boost (even with the -1 atk reduction for Sanaki) makes it more effective as a weapon effect. For Folkvangr, this is primarily because the HP threshold was raised and he’s getting a much greater stat boost, but in being a combat boost it allows these benefits to exist alongside buffs from any team support and (as far as I'm aware) completely prevents the opposing side from being able to negate it (through the likes of Panic or Dull Close). Cymbeline is a bit more debatable, but her refine encourages her being on a team with multiple fliers, and flier teams would probably already be using movetype buffs, which would make Hone Atk completely obsolete if they’re running Hone Fliers.

The only thing you could do to build around Parthia’s old effect on Jeorge (keep in mind Waves didn’t exist when it got a refine) was to give him Warding Blow which isn’t exactly incompatible with the new effect, but you’d be better off with, like, an offensive skill anyway both pre- and post-refine and that’s not exactly the fault of the refine itself.

Any ‘forced’ skill changes brought about by Folkvangr’s new effect would, primarily, be the result of Brazen Skills superseding Defiant skills entirely and not the direct result of Folkvangr’s effect being changed.

Buliding Sanaki around a team support role relying on Hone skills would strongly encourage shifting to drives post-refine (which is also encouraged by the +eff, as mentioned above), but unless you have her inherit more than one C slot Hone skill you'd be losing, at most, a unit and the coins you used to upgrade whatever seal you had on her (which can still be used on somebody else) and even then Hone skills don’t outright conflict with Drive skills (and, on the contrary, can still stack with each other). Hardly the end of the world, I'd say.

Julia ends up in a similar position to Sanaki in that respect. If you wanted to get the most out of her pre-refine effect you'd equip her with two copies of Breath of Life 3, but, again, that amounts to 'wasting' a single unit at most.

Fujin Yumi and Brynhildr are special cases in the sense that the new effect is actually related to what it is in the games, so personally I’d be willing to give some leeway if it was a similar case to what’s happened with Ragnarok, but the fact of the matter is that aside from gimmick teams that all share a given effect it’s effectively impossible to build around Pass and Gravity. Aside from Leo’s atrocious +eff there’s not much room for complaints beyond “well it’s still kinda niche”, which isn’t what refines should be setting out to remedy.

Fensalir’s refine acknowledges that, until they get fifth- or fourth-tier double stat versions, Threaten skills are outright obsoleted by smoke skills and all non-niche Daggers and that negating buffs (that will in most cases overpower any Threaten debuff anyway), while dependent on your opponent having buffs, would get far more mileage against not just Emblem teams but also against any team that relies upon Tactic or Wave skills. Most importantly, you couldn’t really build a unit around a Threaten weapon effect aside from not giving them that particular Threaten skill again (since they don’t stack), so the change in effect doesn’t cost players anything unless they already gave her either Dull skill (which the previous effect doesn’t encourage or discourage using, so that’s not the fault of the refine).

Yato’s old effect wasn’t really something you could build off of (Darting Blow 3? Swift Sparrow 2? idk lol) and the new effect doesn’t encourage the use of any specific skills as well. You could argue that he benefits from +2 spd more than +2 to all his other stats but either way you’re not put into a worse position re: skill inheritance because of the refine.

In short: None of the other refines that change the base effect cause you to lose significant skill investment. At most, one or two skills are lost primarily because any team support or builds would either not be built around the effect (because you couldn’t in significant ways) or because the skills that you would use are not mutually.

The activation condition on Ragnarok’s original effect was relatively unique among effect types given that it would, on its own (ie. no renewal, no healers, no aether, etc.), activate ONLY once per battle. This is a handicap but at her release it was ultimately not a ‘flaw’ since Celica was, before powercreep reared its ugly head, still a very good Red Infantry Mage that happened to require a tiny bit of support.

I’d also like to highlight that even with powercreep, Celica wasn’t doing badly as a PVP or as a PVE unit and she was far from an unwieldy unit (unlike Odin, who could perform at a comparable level but it was an absolute pain to get him there), making this refine entirely unnecessary.

Ragnarok’s refined effect makes it, and Celica by extension, easier to use. Ultimately my problem with this design wise, ignoring all the stuff I‘ve said about the sheer loss of investment, is that Every Single Celica Variant in Heroes has used the idea of “stay at full HP to get some effect, but take recoil when you use that effect”. This ‘theming’ wasn’t just exclusive to her; Ephraim’s weapons for instance are all about getting followup attacks, and with the exception of LALyn all the Lyn variants share the concept of preventing their foe from counterattacking (either though negating counter attacks outright or through killing their foe before they get the chance to retaliate). Her new effect removes that condition altogether and makes her far stronger than she ever could have been before (+19 atk/spd when she’d previously cap at +10) but not only does she not need +19 atk/spd but she also is basically losing her entire identity as a unit in the process.

This is why I am unwilling to give this a ‘free pass’ like I did with Brynhildr and Fujin Yumi: While Ragnarok’s new base effect is more in line with how magic worked in Gaiden and in Echoes, Celica nonetheless had an established weapon effect archetype in Heroes and it’s hard to justify changing what existed when it worked in the context it was in. She’s gone from being the polar opposite of Horsechrom to being a dps-focused variant of his basic concept.

I’ll also address that most people have been running +eff/Fury 3 instead of +eff/brazen atk/spd because it gets her into brazen range in one attack: +15 atk/spd is still more than Celica needed.

okey I think I’ve complained enough. Time for some ideas of varying quality.

What alternatives to changing the base effect could they have gone with without discarding her identity?

Lower the recoil to 1 HP so it was on par with Atk/Spd Push (which is an arbitrary change in the end but it’s an ‘improvement’ all the same)

Remove the recoil altogether but keep the 100% hp requirement (rewarding OHKOs, but still requiring some upkeep on your end should she fail to deal a fatal blow)

Expand the HP threshold (>80%? >90%?) making it so she doesn’t have to be healed Every Single Time she attacks, but still requires some support on your part (lowering the skill ceiling for using her, like Odin’s refine but on a vastly smaller scale)

Leave The Base Effect Alone Since It Was Perfectly Fine Anyway Ohmygodintsyswhymustyoudestroyeverythingilove

The problem that creates is that the current +eff is now mutually exclusive, so what alternatives could they have gone with without rustling my jimmies?

If unit’s HP=100% and they initiated combat, unit makes any followup attacks before their opponent attacks (if Lewyn can do it why not Celica? it’s something she’d directly benefit from too since she can consistently double a lot of units)

Double Lion (because at this point? Why not? Its not like it hurts her)

Even-turn Renewal (to make her self sufficient on every turn, lowering her entry level difficulty without taking away from what made her into the unit he was)

Regular Renewal so Celica can have a different B slot skill (Guard? R Tomebreaker? I don’t care for specifics)

Atk/Spd Push 3 (if +19 atk/spd is fair game, +15 should be too)

Life and Death (ideally she’s not going to be taking hits anyway, and plenty of people did run it pre-refine so it’s An Idea)

Phantom HP (applies only to skill calculations; if unit’s HP = 0 at any point they will still be defeated. If unit’s HP would be calculated as a percent and is greater than 100%, treat it as 100% instead). This is a really weird way to go about artificially increasing the activation window while also making Celica less vulnerable to Ploys and enemy Boost skills and the like. Not super useful since both are being run less and less in the Arena, but it capitalizes on her abnormally high hp for a mage in a way that hasn’t really been done before without taking away from what made her into the unit that she was (and obviously it wouldn’t be combined with expanding the threshold as the base effect). For what it’s worth, I’d say this is the most ‘in the spirit of Gaiden’.

Personally? I’d go with lowering the HP recoil to 1 and Phantom HP; AtkSpd Push is balanced by having 1 HP recoil so why not Ragnarok, and Phantom HP is Weird and I like it. But in the end, any combination of these would work to ‘upgrade’ Celica while preserving her identity as a unit.

Does her current refine ‘improve’ Celica? In terms of combat performance, yeah. There’s no denying that a theoretical +19 atk/spd is greater than a theoretical +10 atk/spd, but is it worth it for turning her from into a completely different unit? Celica (and her alts) was one of the most distinctly designed units in the game because her weapon’s activation condition was unique to her, the Ylissean Summer Weapons, and Double Lion, and now what made her stand out from has been ripped away. Perhaps the reason why so few units ended up using the 100% HP condition was because Intelligent Systems felt that it was too hard to use for the benefits it gave, but if that was the case why wouldn’t they just increase the payoff for what it required instead of just removing the requirements altogether?

tl;dr: Ragnarok’s refine fails as an ‘upgrade’ because it fails to keep what made Ragnarok and Celica distinct as a weapon and as a unit intact, and this is the first time Intelligent Systems has so spectacularly and egregiously destroyed the design of an existing a unit through the Weapon Refinery.

[tottwritesfanfic]

I was tagged by @humandisasterbuckybarnes (I totally didn’t even notice at first because I’ve been away from Tumblr, sorrryyyy!)

1. How did you come up with your username and what does it mean?

OOH. Well. This actually goes back a long way! The ‘tott’ part of TottWriter is really an acronym for the title of a series of fantasy novels I started writing in my teens. (They’ve undergone a lot of revisions since then.) I picked TotTWriter as a username when I joined a forum in 2006 because it summed up how I saw myself at that time, and it just sorta...stuck. As for what the acronym actually is? Gotta wait and see. 

2. Which fanfic of yours has the most feedback? (bookmarks/subscriptions/hits/kudos).

Ohgosh. Well, I think that one’s gotta be my Digimon fic Hope’s Fire, on pretty much all fronts. It’s my oldest, longest fic, and it’s posted on both Ao3 and ff, so it’s had plenty of time to accrue attention. 

3. What is your AO3 profile icon, and why did you choose it?

My Ao3 icon is a picture of a pen and paper roleplaying character I rolled a few years ago. (And was drawn by @iddstar, not me, because I am Not An Artist and Vic very much is.)

After finishing this I’m dropping the rest of it beneath a readmore, because it got a teensy bit long, and I complain bitterly if these hog my own dash.)

4. Do you have any regular/favourite commenters?

You know, I feel bad talking about regular commenters, given how irregularly I actually manage to post anything these days. I feel like it’s more appropriate for me to grovel and thank those people who have stuck with me this long. (I’m particularly grateful to @ittybittymattycommittee​ because it has been A While. You’re wonderful.)

5. Is there a fanfic that you keep going back to read again and again?

I’m...I mean, there isn’t really a particular one? I have a few which I’ve read multiple times, but I tend to read the really long fics, which make regular re-reads a bit trickier. I absolutely want to go back over fics I’ve loved and enjoyed and experience that again, but it’s tricky when they take so long, and I have so little time. 

...Actually, probably my most re-read fic is a YoI one called Rumble In Detroit. It’s a goddamn masterpiece which appeals exactly to my sense of humour. (Also only 6.4k, so totally readable in one go if you’re me.)

6. How many stories are you subscribed to? How many do you have bookmarked?

I’m really bad at bookmarking. I’ll read a fic, think, “This was awesome!” and then just...forget to bookmark it and pull my hair out later wondering what the hell it was. I scroll through my history to find stuff entirely too often. I have 53 bookmarked fics, and it should be way more. 

Conversely, I am very prone to hitting that subscribe button. I have ten pages of the dratted things apparently, and okay, some of those are now completed fics, but...every now and then I get an update notification and can’t remember what the actual fic was. 

7. Which AU do you find yourself writing the most?

...I mean, angsty ones? I don’t really have a preferred setting tbh, although more often than not there is something fantastical about what I write. Generally with my fanfiction I try to mix things up a lot more than my original fic. I make a point of trying to do as many different types of story as I can. Statistically though, Apocalypse/Dystopia scenarios and (surprisingly!) Soulmate AUs work out as the most common though. 

8. How many people are subscribed and bookmarked to you in total? (you can view this on the stats page)

25 brave souls have signed up for my infrequent update notifications (bless all of you), and the stats page shows me as having 201 bookmarks. 

9. Is there something you’d like to write about but are afraid of people judging you for it? (Feeling brave? If so, share it!)

I mean, I’m pretty sure people judge me for what I already write. I’ve got fics tagged with MCD, after all, and I’m probably straying into shipping wars with at least one of my stories. I’m plenty nervous about the reaction people will have to the end of some of my fics, but I figure...ehh. I write these stories because I love them, and I share them because someone out there is bound to find them passable. 

The only thing I won’t write under this name is explicit NSFW stuff, which is because, hey, I’m hoping to get YA fiction published someday, you know? I don’t want an underage reader looking my name up (see question 1 for why they might know it) and finding something like that.

10. Is there anything you would like to be better at? Writing certain scenes or genres, replying to comments, updating better, etc.

It’s funny, because this is something I technically am better at than I used to be in years past, but the main thing is actually sitting down and writing more regularly. Despite appearances, I’ve actually written a lot of fanfic recently (Secret Santas mostly), but I could have done more than that if I’d been able to manage my time better. Also if Life hadn’t come along to mess up my day, but, hey. Go figure.

11. Do you write rarepairs or popular ships more often?

I guess it’s a bit of both? I never used to set out to write ships at all, because for me, relationships are secondary to plot when writing, but they do seem to happen more than they used to. I’m a big multishipper though so I like to mix it up.

12. How many stories have you posted on AO3 to this day (finished and unfinished)?

I have 33 works on Ao3 in total. Of those...some are oneshots, 12 are in-progress multichapter fics and...um...one is a complete multichapter fic. Whoops.

13. How many stories do you have saved in/with your writing program?

*coughs and moves on*

For real though, I posted about this recently and it’s...including original fiction, we’re talking more than thirty, possibly over 40 by now. I very deliberately don’t keep track.

14. Do you write down story ideas, or just keep them in your head?

It’s a bit of both really. Sometimes I get an idea, and it’s too fragmentary to really do anything with, so I just sorta leave it in my head to fester and ferment. If I forget it, it probably wasn’t worth saving, but if it gets to the mindworm stage I write it down in my nearest notebook at the time and expand on it a bit.

...If it’s a really fun idea, I then track down that notebook later on and copy it out onto the computer where I can actually find it again.

15. Have you ever co-authored a story?

Not for yeeeears! My sister and I started co-authoring a story back when we were teenagers, but we never actually finished the project. I really enjoyed collaborating though - it’s fun to combine forces and see what each person brings to the table!

16. How did you discover AO3?

I honestly cannot remember.

17. Do you consider yourself to be a popular or famous author in your fandom(s) on AO3?

Hahahahaha...no. It’s okay though, I’m not doing this for fame or attention. I just get these stories in my head and the only way to remove them is to write them out.

18. Do you have a nickname or fandom name for your readers?

I don’t! I...honestly can’t think of a name, tbh. Names are my nemesis, why would I add more to my life?

19. Was there an author who inspired or encouraged you to write?

WELL. 

I’ve been writing stories for as long as I can remember. Probably since I was 6 or 7 (I can remember stapling paper together at school to make a “book” to write in). Probably I was doomed from the start, but the works of Tamora Pierce, Brian Jacques, Tolkien, John Wyndham and Sir Terry Pratchett are what shaped me from my teens onward. Those are the books I read which make me want to write my own. 

20. What writing advice would you give to a beginning author?

Look, it’s really tempting I know, but don’t share online just yet. If you’re just starting out, you really are far better off keeping your work between you and trusted friends. I always look back and marvel at how damn lucky I am not to have had regular internet access until I was 18.  

You see, it meant that all my early stories - from when I was figuring out who I was as a writer, and how I wanted to write - are tucked safely away where no one can shit on them. And people do. Not everyone of course, but some, and those first few years as a writer are the most fragile.

Every author builds up a thick skin over time, because trolls are gonna troll. But it’s hard, when you work on something and do your best, and someone leaves a shitty comment about it. To my mind, the most important thing you can do as a beginner is to shield yourself from that nonsense until you’ve found your feet. There will be time yet to post your stories. Wait until you can leave it to one side for a week and come back and not despise it. (Some level of “ohgodno” is expected for your own work pretty much forever, but you should at least feel some level of pride in your work first)

...it’s hard and it’s pretty unrewarding at first, I won’t lie. But think about it like this: beginner violinists often sound awful. No one wants to hear that. But if a musician can stick it through; work past the squeaking and the cringe-worthy missed notes... What you end up with is something which can reach right into someone’s heartstrings and leave a permanent impression. 

And that is every bit worth the slog.

21. Do you plot out your stories, or do you just figure it out as you go?

A bit of both! I have at the least a rough outline (sometimes a lot more than that) for almost all my stories before starting, but I generally add to and amend it as I go. 

22. Have you ever gotten a bad comment on a story? If so, what did you do?

I think maybe once? It really wasn’t too bad though, so I just left it be. I’ve been stupidly lucky with my readers and love all of you.

23. Is there a certain type of scene that you have a hard time writing? (action, smut, etc..)

I was about to say NSFW stuff, and then I remembered confession scenes, which differ from NSFW in that I actually write those sometimes, and they take approximately five hundred times longer than literally anything else, including the smut which I hate writing so bad I practically never do it. Confession scenes are freaking hard.

24. What story(s) are you working on now?

TOO MANY. For real though, I have 3 secret santas, 3/4 active HQ fics, Hope’s Fire, and more which are sorta lurking in semi-activity beyond that. I have zero chill.

25. Do you plan your next project(s) before you finish your current ongoing story(s)?

...I mean it’d be great if I could finish an ongoing story, NGL.

26. Do you have a daily writing goal set for yourself?

Nope! I try to stick to one during NaNo, but outside that life just sorta gets in the way too often.

27. Do you think you’ve improved as a writer since you first started?

I mean, the answer is yes either way, but I tend to distinguish the various phases of my writing? age 6-12 was half-arsed writing. Just sorta jotting down stories and not really thinking too much about them. From 13-16 I was so preoccupied with writing and finishing my novel that I didn’t leave room for such trifles as quality control. 16-24/5 was slow but steady improvements. 

At 25 I realised hot damn, I have a lot to learn, and that is the point at which I consider that I started getting better for real.

28. What is your favorite story that you’ve written?

You know, it sorta depends? Assuming we’re talking fanfic only (or, sorry, but my novel beats them all), I actually...really like the Trinacrifom series? 

29. What is your least favorite story that you’ve written?

It was for a telephone prompt, it’s less than 600 words, nope, I’m not sharing it XD

30. Where do you see yourself (as a writer) in 5 years?

I mean I’d like to say something like “getting paid for it”, but we all know I’m still gonna be here writing fanfic instead of my original work.

31. What is the easiest thing about writing?

For me it’s actually the ideas! I keep getting them pop into my head.

32. What is the hardest thing about writing?

…Actually finishing things.

33. Why do you write?

At this point, writing is a little like breathing for me. It’s my identity. It’s who I am. I have so many ideas in my head and the only way to get them out is to write them, so I do. I hope that people enjoy them, certainly, and I want to think my words have an effect of some kind, but ultimately storytelling is hardwired into me and I don’t know how to stop.

Oh! Tagging. Right, after that textwall how about I pass the buck to someone else, hehe. @draculasstrawhat, @lethesomething, @iddstar and @quinnlocke as well as anyone else...if you wanna, you know? (No one’s obligated tho)

[not-poignant]

Reading your original works, I'm kind of inspired to post my own on Ao3 as well (I can't publish as I write mostly queer pairings but I live in a place where doing so would put my safety at risk). But I was wondering Pia, is it safe to do so in terms of plagiarizers? Since anyone could access my work for free, would they be able to copy it? (Thanks if you reply!)

The thing with copyright is that if you publish it - it’s yours. If you can establish provenance (i.e. prove that you have drafts on your computer and so on) it’s yours. Copyright protection for original works (artwork, writing and so on) doesn’t require you to do anything special to be eligible for copyright protection, basically.

And AO3 is amazing at chasing up copyright issues.

Also, like, people scaremonger. The chances of original works being plagiarised are exceedingly low. In um...oh god, like 15 years of writing fanfiction, I’ve had my works stolen exactly twice. Once was for a phishing database so I didn’t give a shit (it got shut down anyway - people remember that whole thing right?). And once was someone who basically rewrote all of SALverse in their own words, complete with including Augus and so on - but they accidentally left whole sections in that were mine; whoops. I chased it up on AO3 and it was removed, although the plagiarised version is still on fanfiction.net (honestly that place is trash for site support, don’t use it). That being said, I don’t really care, because it’s not like it’s taking readers away from me (it’s not, it’s pretty badly written).

But that’s like two times out of an aggregate of hundreds of thousands of hits over many many many years.

(Art is a different matter. I’ve had my art stolen a lot and I’m pretty zen about it. I have my template Cease and Desist letter, DeviantArt helps you out eventually, and Etsy is respectful when you chase up that shit.)

To be honest, the biggest risk with posting original work on AO3 is not actually about theft at all, but these matters (rest under a readmore in case you don’t care about the rest lol):

* AO3 explicitly states it’s not a database for original fiction. Which means support and tag wrangling and so on for original fiction vs. fanfiction is low. You can’t for example ‘categorise’ your original fiction into subgenre or anything like that.

* AO3 audiences are generally highly resistant to original fiction (i.e. most have never looked for it on AO3 and nor do they want to read it on AO3). They may read original fiction on Wattpad (and indeed this seems to be the place to put it, I think), but unless you’re releasing chapter-by-chapter or already have like...a fanfiction readerbase who will follow you to original work; it will be very hard to find readers. This is primarily because readers search first and foremost by fandom and not by tag. Original fiction gets drowned as a result.

* If you ever wish to make a profit off your original work that you put on AO3, you cannot link to any profit-making sites on AO3, nor can you ‘hold back’ sections of story and make people pay for it (this isn’t a problem for me (but this is the reason I never say I have a Patreon on AO3), or indeed a lot of people on AO3, but I’ve seen people use original fiction on AO3 for this matter getting swiftly and quickly warned and then sometimes banned from the site - this is so that AO3 can preserve their not-for-profit status, and it will never change as a result - I think it’s awesome and fully support this, and am tired of authors whining about it but that’s a whole other matter).

I would love to see more original work on AO3, and I don’t know your general fandom/fanfiction experience (i.e. if I knew you were a fanfiction writer I’d probably be wording things a little differently? Like, have you written queer fanfiction before? That helps a lot on AO3), but it’s definitely worth keeping in mind that AO3 is first and foremost a fanworks site, and that even if you’re putting up solely original content, it helps to orient to AO3 from a fandom / fanworks perspective (i.e. serialise longer works instead of releasing everything at once, list shorter works with fandom-friendly tags like PWP or hurt/comfort etc., establish a fandom-friendly presence elsewhere, like Tumblr or Twitter or Dreamwidth or something, so that people actually know you exist, because they won’t find you through the Original Works tag, let’s be real.)

As for plagiarism, honestly, people worry about it way more than necessary. To date, that I know of, no person has come to AO3 and stolen original fiction and tried to make a profit off it. (However, I have seen in the m/m original novel industry, people stealing actually published novels and republishing them under another name and making a profit off those, which is like, a consequence of so many novels flying under the radar due to self-publishing lol. And even then, it gets chased up, it gets dealt with.) Works can always be reported; and you know, they are. 9/10 I found out about art theft because someone who liked my art said ‘hey I saw this and am not sure you gave your permission for this’ or ‘this person is stealing your art.’ And that one time the SALverse was plagiarised, a reader told me. So that side of things helps a lot).

(I’m sorry to hear you can’t publish for safety reasons, as well. Make sure your protections online re: publishing are solid in that sense, because the same risks that exist for those who indie self-publish under pseudonyms, also exist for those who publish under the same on AO3, and obviously I don’t know what your situation is - and I think it’s awesome that you’re wanting to take the leap - just...yeah. I imagine this is all stuff you’ve considered already though, and AO3 is an often-overlooked site which makes it easier to fly under the radar on too. But so is Wattpad, and it’s a lot friendlier to original fiction - may be worth looking into as well? Good luck anon!