#so she loves these kinds of celebrations

[nivienne-grovant]

Glamtober Day 11 - Holiday

Nivienne has a lot of fond memories of Hatchingtide, so she'll always try to make it back to Gridania to celebrate.

[arrgh-whatever]

[greenerteacups]

oooh please someday tell us what you think of GOT

oh, no, it's my fatal weakness! it's [checks notes] literally just the bare modicum of temptation! okay you got me.

SO. in order to tell what's wrong with game of thrones you kind of have to have read the books, because the books are the reason the show goes off the rails. i actually blame the showrunners relatively little in proportion to GRRM for how bad the show was (which I'm not gonna rehash here because if you're interested in GOT in any capacity you've already seen that horse flogged to death). people debate when GOT "got bad" in terms of writing, but regardless of when you think it dropped off, everyone agrees the quality declined sharply in season 8, and to a certain extent, season 7. these are the seasons that are more or less entirely spun from whole cloth, because season 7 marks the beginning of what will, if we ever see it, be the Winds of Winter storyline. it's the first part that isn't based on a book by George R.R. Martin. it's said that he gave the showrunners plot outlines, but we don't know how detailed they were, or how much the writers diverged from the blueprint — and honestly, considering the cumulative changes made to the story by that point, some stark divergence would have been required. (there's a reason for this. i'll get there in a sec.)

so far, i'm not saying anything all that original. a lot of people recognized how bad the show got as soon as they ran out of Book to adapt. (I think it's kind of weird that they agreed to make a show about an unfinished series in the first place — did GRRM figure that this was his one shot at a really good HBO adaptation, and forego misgivings about his ability to write two full books in however many years it took to adapt? did he think they would wait for him? did he not care that the series would eventually spoil his magnum opus, which he's spent the last three decades of his life writing? perplexing.) but the more interesting question is why the show got bad once it ran out of Book, because in my mind, that's not a given. a lot of great shows depart from the books they were based on. fanfiction does exactly that, all the time! if you have good writers who understand the characters they're working with, departure means a different story, not a worse one. now, the natural reply would be to say that the writers of GOT just aren't good, or at least aren't good at the things that make for great television, and that's why they needed the books as a structure, but I don't think that's true or fair, either. books and television are very different things. the pacing of a book is totally different from the pacing of a television show, and even an episodic book like ASOIAF is going to need a lot of work before it's remotely watchable as a series. bad writers cannot make great series of television, regardless of how good their source material is. sure, they didn't invent the characters of tyrion lannister and daenerys targaryen, but they sure as hell understood story structure well enough to write a damn compelling season of TV about them!

so but then: what gives? i actually do think it's a problem with the books! the show starts out as very faithful to the early books (namely, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings) to the point that most plotlines are copied beat-for-beat. the story is constructed a little differently, and it's definitely condensed, but the meat is still there. and not surprisingly, the early books in ASOIAF are very tightly written. for how long they are, you wouldn't expect it, but on every page of those books, the plot is racing. you can practically watch george trying to beat the fucking clock. and he does! useful context here is that he originally thought GOT was going to be a trilogy, and so the scope of most threads in the first book or two would have been much smaller. it also helps that the first three books are in some respects self-contained stories. the first book is a mystery, the second and third are espionage and war dramas — and they're kept tight in order to serve those respective plots.

the trouble begins with A Feast for Crows, and arguably A Storm of Swords, because GRRM starts multiplying plotlines and treating the series as a story, rather than each individual book. he also massively underestimated the number of pages it would take him to get through certain plot beats — an assumption whose foundation is unclear, because from a reader's standpoint, there is a fucke tonne of shit in Feast and Dance that's spurious. I'm not talking about Brienne's Riverlands storyline (which I adore thematically but speaking honestly should have been its own novella, not a part of Feast proper). I'm talking about whole chapters where Tyrion is sitting on his ass in the river, just talking to people. (will I eat crow about this if these pay off in hugely satisfying ways in Winds or Dream? oh, totally. my brothers, i will gorge myself on sweet sweet corvid. i will wear a dunce cap in the square, and gleefully, if these turn out to not have been wastes of time. the fact that i am writing this means i am willing to stake a non-negligible amount of pride on the prediction that that will not happen). I'm talking about scenes where the characters stare at each other and talk idly about things that have already happened while the author describes things we already have seen in excruciating detail. i'm talking about threads that, while forgivable in a different novel, are unforgivable in this one, because you are neglecting your main characters and their story. and don't tell me you think that a day-by-day account tyrion's river cruise is necessary to telling his story, because in the count of monte cristo, the main guy disappears for nine years and comes hurtling back into the story as a vengeful aristocrat! and while time jumps like that don't work for everything, they certainly do work if what you're talking about isn't a major story thread!

now put aside whether or not all these meandering, unconcluded threads are enjoyable to read (as, in fairness, they often are!). think about them as if you're a tv showrunner. these bad boys are your worst nightmare. because while you know the author put them in for a reason, you haven't read the conclusion to the arc, so you don't know what that reason is. and even if the author tells you in broad strokes how things are going to end for any particular character (and this is a big "if," because GRRM's whole style is that he lets plots "develop as he goes," so I'm not actually convinced that he does have endings written out for most major characters), that still doesn't help you get them from point A (meandering storyline) to point B (actual conclusion). oh, and by the way, you have under a year to write this full season of television, while GRRM has been thinking about how to end the books for at least 10. all of this means you have to basically call an audible on whether or not certain arcs are going to pay off, and, if they are, whether they make for good television, and hence are worth writing. and you have to do that for every. single. unfinished. story. in the books.

here's an example: in the books, Quentin Martell goes on a quest to marry Daenerys and gain a dragon. many chapters are spent detailing this quest. spoiler alert: he fails, and he gets charbroiled by dragons. GRRM includes this plot to set up the actions of House Martell in Winds, but the problem is that we don't know what House Martell does in Winds, because (see above) the book DNE. So, although we can reliably bet that the showrunners understand (1) Daenerys is coming to Westeros with her 3 fantasy nukes, and (2) at some point they're gonna have to deal with the invasion of frozombies from Canada, that DOESN'T mean they necessarily know exactly what's going to happen to Dorne, or House Martell. i mean, fuck! we don't even know if Martin knows what's going to happen to Dorne or House Martell, because he's said he's the kind of writer who doesn't set shit out beforehand! so for every "Cersei defaults on millions of dragons in loans from the notorious Bank of Nobody Fucks With Us, assumes this will have no repercussions for her reign or Westerosi politics in general" plotline — which might as well have a big glaring THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT stamp on top of the chapter heading — you have Arianne Martell trying to do a coup/parent trap switcheroo with Myrcella, or Euron the Goffick Antichrist, or Faegon Targaryen and JonCon preparing a Blackfyre restoration, or anything else that might pan out — but might not! And while that uncertainty about what's important to the "overall story" might be a realistic way of depicting human beings in a world ruled by chance and not Destiny, it makes for much better reading than viewing, because Game of Thrones as a fantasy television series was based on the first three books, which are much more traditional "there is a plot and main characters and you can generally tell who they are" kind of book. I see Feast and Dance as a kind of soft reboot for the series in this respect, because they recenter the story around a much larger cast and cast a much broader net in terms of which characters "deserve" narrative attention.

but if you're making a season of television, you can't do that, because you've already set up the basic premise and pacing of your story, and you can't suddenly pivot into a long-form tone poem about the horrors of war. so you have to cut something. but what are you gonna cut? bear in mind that you can't just Forget About Dorne, or the Iron Islands, or the Vale, or the North, or pretty much any region of the story, because it's all interconnected, but to fit in everything from the books would require pacing of the sort that no reasonable audience would ever tolerate. and bear in mind that the later books sprout a lot more of these baby-plots that could go somewhere, but also might end up being secondary or tertiary to the "main story," which, at the end of the day, is about dragons and ice zombies and the rot at the heart of the feudal power system glorified in classical fantasy. that's the story that you as the showrunner absolutely must give them an end to, and that's the story that should be your priority 1.

so you do a hack and slash job, and you mortar over whatever you cut out with storylines that you cook up yourself, but you can't go too far afield, because you still need all the characters more or less in place for the final showdown. so you pinch here and push credulity there, and you do your best to put the characters in more or less the same place they would have been if you kept the original, but on a shorter timeframe. and is it as good as the first seasons? of course not! because the material that you have is not suited to TV like the first seasons are. and not only that, but you are now working with source material that is actively fighting your attempt to constrain a linear and well-paced narrative on it. the text that you're working with changed structure when you weren't looking, and now you have to find some way to shanghai this new sprawling behemoth of a Thing into a television show. oh, and by the way, don't think that the (living) author of the source material will be any help with this, because even though he's got years of experience working in television writing, he doesn't actually know how all of these threads will tie together, which is possibly the reason that the next book has taken over 8 years (now 13 and counting) to write. oh and also, your showrunners are sick of this (in fairness, very difficult) job and they want to go write for star wars instead, so they've refused the extra time the studio offered them for pre-production and pushed through a bunch of first-draft scripts, creating a crunch culture of the type that spawns entirely avoidable mistakes, like, say, some poor set designer leaving a starbucks cup in frame.

anyway, that's what I think went wrong with game of thrones.

[angelmush]

lalalalaaaa easily the very best part of the night was going to the arcade bar + admiring my beautiful gf in her sparkly plastic birthday tiara that her friends brought her + holding her jacket and her drink and her little plastic cups of tokens for her while she played games

[shalom-iamcominghome]

Fucked up that I'm mildly lactose intolerant and I don't like cheesecake and I have to work on shavuot. g-d has abandoned me like I'm a kitten in a wet cardboard box and I am meowing all night long 😢

[starflungwaddledee]

Ok but what if she went to waddle Dee town in the forgotten land and all the waddle Dee’s just accepted her because they are really nice and not rude and they accept her and she has fun and a good time please I really need this for her

i considered drawing something out to this, and making it a happy ending sort of thing, because i think this is extremely sweet as a concept and i understand the desire for it!

that said, i decided that it would be a disservice to the lore i'm building for her, my biology/magic headcanons, and also the waddle dees as a whole. i might still draw it some day, because i could absolutely perceive a way it would work (ie: all waddle dee signatures messed up by Elfilis's portals, or their magic sensitivity nuked by it.) and i think it would be lovely

but for now, i have too many other things on the backburner to get to this promptly, and i wanted to answer this one sooner rather than leaving it for months

i will say, they're not being rude to her! there might be the odd one or two who is a bit snide, but there are some of those in every society. as a general rule the waddle dees not only understand that she is struggling, they want to accept and help her. many of them even know she's lonely, and feel pretty bad about it. but it's hard, and not just because she makes people uneasy!

i draw parallels with starstruck's gummed up magical signature to autism, as i'm autistic and so by merit (as a sona), so is she. but there are some parts that do not line up with the way autism functions in our world, and one of them is that touching or being around her can be genuinely, literally painful for some of the very sensitive waddle dees.

despite that, her waddle dee doctors actually pushed through it while she was in the castle dedede infirmary. because they were determined to treat her (mostly-surface-seeming) injuries and help her feel better. and they apologised for the reactions that they couldn't control anymore than she could control her signature; the various "sorry"s she parrots in this comic are implied to be from waddle dee doctors.

it's a fine line in alien-storytelling, especially with a real world disability parallel, and i'm trying to tread it as carefully as i can. but i don't intend to villainise the waddle dees at all for their reaction to her; they truly can't help it. many of them even do their best to push through it if she comes into their vicinity, especially because she often arrives with Beloved Celebrity, Captain Bandana Waddle Dee. but like a lot of us, she can tell when she's being tolerated, and so as a rule she just sort of tries to avoid it, one way or another

[itspileofgoodthings]

Taylor returning over and over to the falling through the ice accident in the Bolter—everything to me

[hadesoftheladies]

hate going for christian weddings sometimes because i always see the prettiest women with the ugliest men, the sermon is always some shit about wives being slaves (but not like bad slavery, mutual slavery except the husband is a benevolent master which makes it okay) and making babies for their husband, the music is always lame, the mc is always weird and obnoxious, and older women keep fucking asking me when it's gonna be my turn and never take no for an answer.

[cottageivy]

ava took her little sister to see the fnaf movie...

(can you tell i had this idea a while ago lmao )

[sparkles-oflight]

Sometimes I'm like "lol, the joker out boys did something funny/relatable/cringe/etc that I'm not used seeing celebs doing but I'm glad they do because me too!" and then I remember they are quite literally JUST GUYS IN THEIR 20S DOING THINGS OF GUYS IN THEIR 20S

[hazellvsq]

i think this might be my favorite hazel scene because of how it recontextualizes all her other flashbacks. after three horrible ones after each other, there's finally one where things went right, in the beginning. its the beginning of the end but hazel doesn't know that its all going to go wrong. she's just sitting with her mom in the park and watching the sun come up.

[fatuismooches]

SMOOCHES!! HII ML THIS IS SO LATE GOODNESS BUT MERRY CHRISTMAS!! ໒꒰ྀིᵔ ᵕ ᵔ ꒱ྀི১

I hope you spent the day filled with joy and smiling constantly and got what you wanted on your wish list! After 3 years I finally got my iPad Air and Apple Pencil!! I’ll finally be able to draw and hopefully do commissions to make a bit of money off of it! (My art rlly isn’t the best but I feel so guilty knowing my father spent so much T_T) I ALSO DID IN FACT BAKE COOKIES!!! >.< they came out amazing and I’m so happy my baking skills are improving! Just imagining fragile!reader slowly improving thanks to the help of Zandy and him making sure they don’t over exert themselves when they cook or bake. Especially since he makes sure you take breaks if you’ve been standing for a long time. Is him forcing you to sit down also a silly excuse for him to cuddle on your lap and bury his face into your chest as you softly brush your hands through his fluffy hair? Perhaps, but you wouldn’t mind it at all!

I love you so much smooches I wish I could give gifts to you because trust me I would spoil you to no end sweetheart <3 I hope you continue to spend the rest of your winter break with smiles and laughter!! m giving you so many cuddles n chu chus as a gift, despite me always giving them. Hehe!

-from your dear boo boo bear 🎐 anon! ౨ৎ

MY DEAR 🎐 ANON (LATE) MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU AS WELL!! ❤️❤️ Congrats on your gift, that sounds lovely! I wish you luck on your commissions, and keep practicing your art! No one starts out perfect, it takes a lot of time, patience, and effort to keep moving forward in any craft. So keep doing your best 🎐 anon!! 💗

I WISH I COULD SEE YOUR COOKIES!! They must have been so yummy ehehe i would love to taste them :3 AND YES!! Little Zandy being your little watch guard with hawk eyes despite his age 🥹 Always watching what you're doing and resisting the urge to taste test the food already!! I can just imagine him pulling a chair over and giving you a look with pouty cheeks for you to sit down :( (Zandy won't take no or 'just five more minutes' for an answer!! He will also be expecting lots of head pats and cuddles as you promise to let him have the first bite! [As long as he doesn't tell the other segments...] He may have learned this technique from Dottore's persistence-) In conclusion. Zandy is the bb boy.

AHAHAH YOU'RE MAKING ME BLUSH 🎐 ANON!! I too would love to give you a gift (and lots of cuddles and hugs!!) 🥹 Enjoy your winter break too! (Although there is still time until the spring semester starts I'm dreading it ALREADY 😭💥)

[wayward-sherlock]

chappell roan crying at the microphone during a show makes me want to kill someone actually.

[mythvoiced]

“Are you sure you don’t want to join me in Milan?” It’s a question, but from Kang Aeri, it sounds more like a demand. An appeal if one were to put this interaction into legal terms.  “You wouldn’t have to worry about the cost or the language; I’m learning Italian right now and I’m very good. If you’re that worried about mooching off of me, I have something you could do for me in return.”

Casually, she links arms with them, her best friend and her favorite model. “C’mon Hyun-ah, think about it– no dispatch, no social obligations, no rules. We can even bring our partners along if they’re not too busy with their paperwork.”

( AND NOW I AM HERE!!! with the fashion bffs bc hyun needs a vacay and aeri is HAPPY to provide 🤩🤩🤩 especially if it means she gets to dress her bff however she wants :D )

@stillresolved | the 'girls' are planning~!!!!

Occasionally, Hyun will pretend. Or, well, to be quite frank, she does a lot more pretending than she does genuine emoting, which often leads to particularly interesting memories for the people around her.

She's mostly known for the stern demeanor, the coldness she emanates, look into her eyes when she's working and walk away knowing you've met something more powerful than you, at least because the will in her gaze would insinuate her to be so.

But with Aeri?

Well...

Every rule has its exceptions.

When Aeri links their arms together, Hyun lets her drag her in with the feigned eye-roll of someone who'd started considering relenting about ten minutes prior to the conversation even starting.

It'd be more sensible to remain in South Korea, hell, to remain in Seoul. She isn't the most savvy at her own public relation work - exhibit A the reason she supposedly needs a vacation - but even she would wonder, would going on a trip to Milan with a powerful, well-regarded fashion designer everyone knows her to be close to not just make her look...

Disinterest?

Arrogant?

She's in deep legal shit, after all, defamation lawsuits she's trying to start and others she's trying to battle, flounting money that isn't hers via a connection that is hers...

Wouldn't it be perfectly on brand?

Hyun turns to look at Aeri. The look in her eyes seems to insinuate Aeri is being both terribly tempting and awfully inconsiderate for attempting temptation in the first place. But isn't that what she likes so about Kang Aeri?

It's easy to forget how powerful Aeri's family is when in her presence solely because of how much more raw power she exudes. Wealth and status colour the air differently depending on if its new or old money. Sure, not even Hyun can say Aeri came from a poor background and worked her way up, she's a liar but not a dumb one.

But from the ground up Aeri worked herself anyway. Her background doesn't imply the freedom to do as she pleases. When her designs had started covering the racks she used to throw the brands of others she'd wear, they were sewn together by her own needle-pricked fingers.

And if Hyun were to say yes here, she'd say yes to Aeri's favour. Not the Kang's.

Which is perhaps where the real temptation lies: watching her best friend show off with things she's put together for herself, a ladder she'd not only climbed, but also built.

"You mentioned something I could do for you in return," she says, leaning away slightly to regard her with a teasing look. Honestly, she'd had her at the first hint of an idea of a suggestion here. Watching Kang Aeri turn heads in Milan while she upset the deeply Catholic country with her wife at her side, arms linked or around waists, all while said country could not say anything for how powerful her presence was, how lucrative it would be?

Witnessing that with her own hand stuffed in Boram's, all while she could sit by, smell like the finest of perfumes, dismiss people with 'I don't speak Italian, sorry' and pretend trouble doesn't await her back home?

Oh.

Yeah.

Definitely.

"You're lucky I'd do anything for you," Hyun says, reaching around with her free hand to pinch Aeri's cheek, which is about as obvious a 'duh, I'm coming' as the phrase itself would have been.

[josephslittledeputy]

Sidra Navros (various) - Enjoying the warmth inside with a lactose-free hot cocoa Celeste Night (og verse) - Gabriel insisted that Aidan should get to enjoy the holidays and Celeste didn't have enough energy to argue, so she's indulging him for once Lacy Cunningham (c*d) - Well, she only stepped out to grab a few things but... it seems she brought half the store back with her. But how can she not fully indulge in the holidays when she's got a kiddo at the perfect age that makes the holidays so much fun?

Tagged by @carlosoliveiraa a hot minute ago to do this meiker, thank you!

I haven't seen many people do this one yet, so if you've already been tagged, my apologies! @inafieldofdaisies @adelaidedrubman @clicheantagonist @cassietrn @simplegenius042 @g0dspeeed @marivenah @purplehairsecretlair @direwombat @socially-awkward-skeleton @alexxmason

[sukibenders]

Me, trying to come up with a plot that accurately reflects the complexity and dynamics that are Annabeth's and her father's relationship with one another, as well as her feelings towards his new family, because while there is love there, how much necessarily? Not enough, to be assumed, because Annabeth ran away when she was seven and, with Luke's description of her in the books at the time he and Thalia found her, she wasn't in the best condition. Reading about how monsters tracking on to her scent and made her a target was the cause for many fights between her and parents, all of which was before she ran away and reads, personally to me, as a pair of adults blaming their young child, but these are also supposedly the same parents who, when discovering that she was in danger, actively wished for her well-being and, in her father's case, put themselves in harms way to go rescue her alongside her more than equipped friends, something, something, I could go on!