#sure its fictional but its fiction with a basis in things happening in the world

[poppyknitt]

Lately, it's felt like a lot of people didn't understand the message behind the characters of the Onceler and O'Hare in the Lorax 3d animated film, hasn't it.

[cynthiav06]

With Percy, we know that he hates going to school and his goals don’t really line up with Annabeth’s, but Annabeth is kind of forcing him to do it with her because he can’t say no to her. Say Rick didn’t make Annabeth Percy’s entire personality, what do you think he would’ve done in the mortal world rather than go to university?

I was checking my drafts cause I am trying to catch up on all the asks in my inbox ( as I said in one of my earlier posts I was in middle of a medical situation so I have at least a month of backlog) and found this draft.

The funny thing is I had already written most of the post in the draft version, and this ask wasn't even being displayed in my inbox, so I was very confused as to when it was from.

But it's such a good prompt and a sort of controversial question in the fandom, so I wanted to post it asap.

Percy doesn't like studies, but he knows the importance of it, so I am sure he will finish his initial college, probably either in the science or arts section. We know at one point he got better grades than Annabeth at one point so he certainly isn't quitting studies and doing way better than what people expect. He also wouldn't like just staying at home and doing nothing (I am looking at certain Percabeth stans here), so he definitely would be doing one job or another.

1.

I don't think he would study marine biology like most believe. After a conversation I had with someone who had taken the course, I am convinced Percy wouldn't like it. It's heavily based on chemistry, and we know how much Percy is affected by sea creatures being mistreated or caged, so having to study marine biology wouldn't really be something he would choose.

2.

An interesting twist would be if he chose to be a writer like his mother.

We all know that Percy writes or at least dictates and narrates the first five books, which are written and narrated entirely from his perspective. Moreover, there are books on Percy just narrating his own sarcastic takes on Greek gods and Greek heroes. What if he did actually catalogue his own adventures in those books as a sort of manual for other demigods on how to deal with certain monsters and gods and such.

Through Percy's thoughts, even as 12 years old, we can certainly say he has advanced vocabulary despite being dyslexic and given how much he admires Sally, why wouldn't he be interested in following her footsteps. Sure, he has trouble reading, but that's not to say he wouldn't love expressing his thoughts through humorous retelling of his own adventures which he can pass as fiction to normal readers but actual experiences in demigod world. Who doesn't want to know the exploits of Percy Jackson?

Plus, it's a good money hack. And don't for a second tell me he wouldn't. Sally petrified Gabe, and then they sold his statute to a museum as a sculpture and earned money off of that. So Sally would definitely encourage it, and Percy would even follow through on it just for shits and giggles and the added benefit of helping demigods and earning money.

[I literally want this to happen just for the Godly reactions. I am all for god slander, especially Zeus slander. Poseidon would be half laughing at the book and half worried cause of the sheer catastrophes his son seems to fall into almost on a daily basis.

Apollo would be having a grand time, and Hermes will be half depressed and half impressed throughout. Overall, it would be hilarious all around, and it might finally make the gods feel a bit more accountable . It's literally the Reading Percy Jackson Series trope, and that's always fun.]

3.

One other option is that Percy will get into environmental preservation, specifically the protection of Rivers and Seas from pollution by actively involving himself and others in its cleanliness and purification. He would also run Beach cleanliness programs.

I think he and Grover would become environmental activists and would definitely get into preserving forest areas and other places where nature spirits dwell frequently. I can see them doing it a lot, long-term wise, too.

4.

I think he would kind of like marine explorations, but that might cause his powers to be somewhat exposed, so he might not do that, but it's a possibility.

That's all I can think of. I would like to hear everyone else's opinions on this.

[lilareviewsbooks]

The Goblin Emperor 5/5: I’m Bored and I’m Having So Much Fun

5/5 stars

446 pages

Contains: an emperor that doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing; kindness as like a plot point; court intrigue!!!

The Goblin Emperor has been on my TBR for years, now. I’d heard someone say, a long time ago, that it was a weird book, and that “you’ve never read something like this before”. Of course, my curiosity was piqued. I love weird, funky little books, that turn you upside down and shake you a bit, especially if they’re speculative fiction. So The Goblin Emperor went into my TBR, until this month, when the mood to read it finally struck me and I sat down with it.

But The Goblin Emperor is not best described by “weird”, in my opinion, nor is “uneventful” a good descriptor, either. I think those of you who have read the book will agree with me that there are several big events throughout the story that capture your attention and are major turning points for the characters. However, it’s impossible to avoid, when recommending this, the fact that it is… boring?

Let me be clear: I don’t mean this in a bad way, at all – I had so much fun reading The Goblin Emperor. Nor am I using it to suggest that Ms. Addison’s writing choices were inadequate. I’m using this word because I think it’s the best way to describe what happens here. 

I’ll explain myself: it’s not that nothing happens in The Goblin Emperor, but the pacing is slow. And not in a bad way – things just take their time. We follow our main character in an almost day-by-day basis. We watch him wake up, have breakfast… And at the end of the day, we are with him as he puts on his pajamas and goes to bed. 

And then there is the fact that Ms. Addison takes what I called an “almost anthropological approach to describing culture” in my review of the Teixcalaani Duology, by Arkady Martine. Much like Ms. Martine does in her two books, A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace, Ms. Addison takes her time to consider every move in its cultural context. If, in A Memory Called Empire, the most striking element of this approach is the Teixcalaani smile, which differs from how other parts of the world chose to do so, here we see this attention to detail in the elvish language.

In this world, “we” is the default first person singular. It’s the formal “I”, and “you” is the formal second person singular. Watching these characters drop this formality barrier or decide to put it up makes for a beautiful addition to the dialogue and character relationships throughout the book. It also, of course, tells us much about this world and this culture, which is bound tightly by strings of formality and tradition. (And is also a reflection of how other languages work, in the real world. French, Italian and Spanish, for example, have formal yous, as I’m sure other non-European languages do, too. This makes me super curious to see how this quirk was translated in languages that already have this as a feature. If anyone knows, please tell me!)

This almost-anthropological lens, however, adds a stillness to the story that makes it move slower, taking more time in each of the character’s movements. Which, in turn, makes this book a little more boring.

But, like I said, this is boring in a good way. This stillness, this slowness, allows us to spend ample time with our characters, really getting to know them. And the world sparkles around them, made so vivid by this attention to detail, this approach to a fictional culture. It feels alive outside of the pages, like we’ve only popped in for a visit, and the clock will continue ticking when we’re not there.

But the crux of the story, and the reason why it needs to slow down, the most, is our protagonist, Maia. Maia is the youngest, half-goblin son of the elvish Emperor, who scorns him. He is secluded to a remote location with his cousin Setheris, until a messenger arrives – the Emperor and all his other sons have died in a freak accident, meaning Maia has inherited the throne. With no education in politics and no friends, Maia journeys to court, where he will learn to rule.

And although he’s put in this position of power, and finds himself, in several ways, helpless and dependent on others, Maia never loses his kindness. He’s a generous soul who strives to make decisions for the good of others, and this is the axis around which the rest of the plot moves, slowly, forwards.

To really understand this kindness, to dig into it and be aware of its various implications, its causes, it’s necessary to spend quite a while in the company of Maia, as he blunders forward. And what a journey it is! I’ll tell you, “boring” might be a good word to describe this book, but so is “compelling”. When it hooks you, it hooks you, and it leaves you wanting to bury yourself further and further into this world, to know more, to spend more time with Maia, and find out all the intricacies of his language.

Thank you for reading this review! I’m working on a list of similar books, which will be called something like “Books for Humanities Nerds”, so if this sounds like your cup of tea, keep an eye out! Have a nice day :)

[hearsayhorizons]

Holism’s introduction and the confirmation that there are more ships/intelligences on ART’s level with their own idiosyncrasies and quirks has a real possibility of opening up that coven/school house fertile field of fanfiction that makes people grab other series and hold on tight (not that we weren’t doing that already with this one).

Perihelion’s secret function is in confirming lost colonies and providing initial response for the purposes of safeguarding “”assets”” from predation.

Based on its interactions (attempted interactions) with SecUnit, Holism’s function/special interest is to provide infrastructure after Perihilion’s crew has argued/forged their way into securing long-term protection for those people. 

Perihelion is a secret agent ship and befriended Murderbot, who watches thrillers and other media. Holism the infrastructure/”look at this neat thing!” ship is probably going to find a receptive contact in Three, who seems most comfortable with nonfiction and educational materials (some other good poster pointed out that Three’s interests are tied to its introduction to freedom and choice via Murderbot 2.0’s autobiographical files; I want to put a pin in that for later).

This establishes a thematic setup I want to play with. I was going to fiction this up, but I have weather-related migraines and it is WEATHER lately.

My contribution is [namepending]. Once you have safety, once you have infrastructure, you look at connections and community. And you know what would be a great way to jumpstart an ambassadorial program or knowledge exchange? A university where everyone is doing something new, going somewhere new, where you might have interactions that last a few years and still mean a lot to you later, OR they might help define how you choose to live forever—there’s no knowing, even in real life, how experiences as a young OR older person going to school will influence you.

Why does that student wear something no one else does? Why do those hand gestures stand out? That’s an unusual set of facial features. But no one, literally no one, is going to look at a batch of shaky college students and assume they’re all from a/a variety of colonies 40+ years out of contact with the wider world.

So yeah, I know ART is already the Magic School Bus with weaponized pathfinders, but I posit that our next/a great fanfiction point is... [pending], much more a school bus. Maybe ferrying back and forth between colonies to keep the info exchange open too, but I think the university would be SO useful to give colonists a knowledge base without overwhelming them or forcing them to assimilate into other cultures.

Now, I imagine that just like Amena has to do some learning modules before she can join the University, there’d be sims and modules for incoming students or people going between colonies. And just like System Collapse chapter 8, you hit them where it works—right in the media. So this [pending] has a huge collection of, and is interested in, games.

As a side note, part of me thinks a fully mechanical system like ART would be a bit better able to perceive/use games without a SecUnit filter than media; sure, there’s music and mechanics meant to emotionally motivate the player, but non-visual novels non-dating-sims (eg: “game games”) have goals, mechanisms, more hard input than media.

Remember my pin from earlier re: Three’s interest tied to its path to freedom? I posit a SecUnit (either one of the two freed at the end of System Collapse, or someone else if there’s...)

Actually, if I’m already spitballing fanfic bullshit and ComfortUnits presumably have resources for interacting on a more emotional basis with clients, the CU. I want that construct on [pending]. The odds of that happening are miniscule unless it was maybe at a wit’s end, didn’t know what to do with itself like other units after having its freedom foisted on it.

Yeah, so, it has access to surreptitious funds secured by Tllacey. Maybe IDs. It doesn't have weapons and I get the vibe that no one would be looking as hard for a rogue CU, so I don't imagine it's hacking or has to hack anything. Maybe it can't, since it isn't a security system.

But it IS probably meant to be fluent in current events, folklore, random shit random clients care about. Ergo the Ganaka pit bit.

It searches for SecUnit activity in the news. Oh, or maybe info on ART, maybe it picked something up during its last scene. Murderbot does have a whole aside in SC panicking about the news and what info about the kidnapping could mean for the University’s colony-saving scheme, but that doesn’t go anywhere given the timeframes. So, maybe there is something there, some way to pull the ComfortUnit back in.

It finds the University. It finds, or [pending] finds it, and [pending]’s whole schtick is orientating confused people. It introduces CU to some sims, some games, maye interactions in reality or through games with young people.

I posited in previous posts that SecUnit probably wouldn’t be super into games because the ability to passively exist alongside an atmosphere presented by a story or music is the appeal of its media; it is an actor DOING things during its day job. But CU has presumably been always acted-upon in its day job. So now it has a risk-free method to DO things. Maybe it prefers solo games, or it participates in group games where its identity as a CU comes up only as far as it is comfortable.

I’m sure my [pending] would be thrilled to have a contact/friend who can both communicate comfortably with newcomers while also relating really hard to them. Plus, I feel like the CU construct just sort of gets set loose and abandoned by Murderbot and the narrative. Sometimes those loose ends happen, but I kind of see a way we could work it back in now that we know there are more ships and they want filters/friends/units.

Now I just gotta find a name for [pending].

I do think I have the first few lines of the fic, though:

The shuttle came within range of the bigger ship annotated in the smart glass: Perihelion.

This is you. I transmitted an image of a young human and what the news broadcast identified as another human.

Oh, fuck off.

[memory-echo]

What’s a Masterpiece?

Will Chi no Wadachi ever be considered a magnum opus? Should it? To this day, I'm not even sure who is supposed to be its target audience. The comment sections consist of a confusing bunch of people, mostly teenagers I imagine, who cry for incest incessantly while missing the horrific incest happening in every chapter. That can't be the target audience, right? Because the story is for adult males... But too many adult males are too busy ‘choking the bishop’ to a pretty face to pay attention to what's happening. Women are deeply worried they're just like Seiko, or that they’ll turn into Seiko somehow, or they come to the conclusion that they’ll never have children (yours truly included). They can't be the target audience for this manga, right?

There's only one group of people who will grasp the complex message of Chi no Wadachi – victims of child abuse. And that group splits into two: there's a subgroup that is disgusted by the fact that this story hits so close to home for them and they are repulsed by it and they never read it. Then, there's that other subgroup (from which Oshimi comes from); that group of victims who find the veneer of fiction to be the perfect way to deal with their personal traumas. Those folks are attracted to the story like a moth to a flame. I imagine that's Oshimi's target audience, his ideal readers, and that's the group that keeps telling us how great this story is and how it should be called his Magnum opus. The rest of us mortals are just confused by what's happening and the message goes right over our heads, as we wonder if this is supposed to be good?

Art-wise, I don't think there's any disagreement, though. His absolute talent for capturing the intricacies of facial expressions and body language is undeniable. The use of negative space and minimalist backgrounds only adds to the claustrophobic atmosphere, emphasizing the isolation and emotional turmoil that Seiichi feels on a constant basis.

A few readers just can't turn away from the sensitive and brutal, unapologetic and unadulterated psychological drama. Its subtlety and rawness makes it pure. Even if there is no worse feeling than our sense of helplessness, we cannot turn away from the truth, which compels us to keep turning the page.

Many people, however, gave up on this manga as it went along, especially after the time skip. The early excitement is gone and you don't hear anybody talking about it nowadays... Even the fellow who started the whole commotion by making that video about the “manga that breaks you”… I wonder if he's still reading it? 

https://youtu.be/hVYzc2Xpup0

Dr. Yasufumi Nakoshi was the best thing that happened to this manga in a long time, but having a psychiatrist analyze it in Japanese is going to be inaccessible for many readers. Chi no Wadachi needed that doctor to analyze it thoroughly, but with English subtitles.

https://youtu.be/Ivin4VET0Y8

This manga really needs a multidisciplinary dissection: someone to analyze paneling; drawing techniques; the psychological factor and of course provide the context of Japanese culture. I feel like I'm missing so much due to context. Dare I hope that the folks at Deconstructing Comics will someday take an interest in this story, and dissect this manga the way it needs to be dissected.

Ultimately, given the attention Chi no Wadachi has had, I very much doubt it will ever be deemed a masterpiece, which is a shame, but I have a feeling that Flowers of Evil is the big thing for Oshimi's fans. What can I say? The world is unfair.

[ultraericthered]

Star Driver - To The Guy Who Didn’t Get It

It seems like whole decades have gone by since the early 2010s and it makes me feel so old, yet I tend to forget how somewhat different the online fandom/social media scene was compared to now, especially in regards to critiques of then-still running shows done on blogs. And I happened upon one on Blogger (Anyone remember that blogging site? Does anyone still use it?) by an anime reviewer who blogged his thoughts on different anime episodes after they’d aired. And back then in 2010-2011, Star Driver was one such anime.

To say he wasn’t a fan would be almost understating it given the scathing remarks he blogged about it on a weekly basis. While obviously his thoughts and feelings on it and mine could not differ more, I understand that people have different tastes and that’s perfectly acceptable and right even. ...But y’know the saying that goes “you’re entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts and logic?” If your argument for or against something is based in illogical fallacies and disregard for objectivity and truth, even the sort of objective truth in regards to what’s grounded in what is canonical to works of fiction, it’s not a good argument and deserves to be torn apart. It doesn’t help that this blogger was that sort of pseduo-critic anime snob who had some ideas about how good storytelling, character writing, worldbuilding, and overall execution of a made-for-TV animated series should look like that I don’t think has aged very well on today’s online world. So even though it was years ago and on a whole ‘nother site, I just HAVE to rip this hater a new one here!

On Episode 1:

...wait, what the Hell is going on in this show?  It's only episode one and I already feel mired in things that I don't understand, a sense of confusion that only feels all the more jarring after the sudden change in gears from comedy school setting to giant robots and people with masks jabbering about Cybodys. I'm sure this sense of confusion is kind of the point, and that all will be explained in due course, but I can't help but feel that this plunge into "the science bit" was a little too sudden - had it come at the very start of the episode it might have worked, but in jerking us out of our previous sedate reverie it just feels wrong.

In Which Anime Blogger Complains About The Entire Effing Point. The series is meant to hook you in here because you’re sent reeling from what’s going on, because you’re confused and don’t understand what’s being talked about and what’s being done, because of the tonal whiplash and clashing between two types of shows that leads to such insane high octane action and unashamed campiness. There is no “kind of” about it, it is absolutely the point. I swear that this came up elsewhere on the blog but this blogger was not familiar with the creators other works, mainly Revolutionary Girl Utena, and it constantly shows. If Star Driver, right out the gate, is How Not To Make An Anime, then Utena should’ve tanked and never recieved all the glowing critical praise it’s gotten over the years because it did all the exact same stuff with its storytelling and presentation. And he thinks the show needed to lead with the Cybodies and the Crux in order to let the viewer know that this wasn’t just some high school romcom anime and that we’d be in for some weird and exciting mecha stuff? Not only is that unimaginative and belittling of the audience’s intelligence, patience, and attention spans, but it misses that one of the earliest spoken lines was Wako saying “I smell a boy I don’t know”. The guarantee of silly weirdness was already given to us right there, we didn’t need to see the costumes and robots yet.

On Episode 2:

we finally come to what I'm guessing might well be our weekly dose of action, as Takuto and his Cybody Tauburn find themselves under attack by opponents looking for revenge, and of course the opportunity to get their more accomplished foe well and truly out of the way. While it looks for a moment as though they might succeed, in typical giant robot anime fashion Takuto steps things up a gear when he needs it most and wins the day once again.  Hurrah! Again he shows he’s not watched Utena or any of the Sailor Moon shows, where this sort of usual “weekly dose of action” formula was common. And yes, that’s exactly how it goes. You figured it out!

On Episode 3:

On the other hand, it still feels like we're quite some way from understanding exactly what's going on, and I can't decided whether this is a good thing or not - it's certainly leaving me hungry to know more, but by the same token I feel like I need more information to actually settle into enjoying this show or otherwise. 

“Can’t decided?” And no, it’s totally a good thing. If you’re spoonfed way too much information too soon, you coming to see the grand design of the series as it unfolds before your eyes and understanding it better wouldn’t be nearly so rewarding. The best stories give you only the most basic, general and digestible information right at the start, then more pieces of information come at you in gradual doses, big and small, so that the huge perspective-altering bomb drops of later on can come in naturally and feel earned. And once you have all the information and context behind everything, going back and looking over those earlier parts of the story that you’d first viewed through a lens of not knowing all information and context will make you see so much of what you’d seen and heard before in a new light.

Well, we're now three episodes in, and Star Driver remains little more than a pile of nonsense that doesn't know what it wants to be in terms of its plot.  One minute it's a high school comedy, the next its some kind of harem show, then it's a drama of sorts before we move to the week's admittedly impressive action scenes where we get to watch some big robots fighting... now with added swords!  I keep telling myself that there's something big, clever and more intricate in terms of the show's story just around the corner but I'm beginning to wonder - Star Driver is increasingly looking like some kind of "robot fight of the week" anime with little else to say for itself to the point of being wilfully obtuse.

Star Driver knew exactly what it wanted to be in terms of plot, what conclusions it wanted to reach, and how it wanted to reach them - this dude is the one who didn’t know. The high school comedy, harem and fanservice antics, and human drama aspects of the show are all core parts of the show’s identity when on the island outside of Zero Time and are pieces moving in tandem with one another to service not only the mecha anime action-adventure spectacle but the larger narrative, character arcs, and fundamental core themes. The “big, clever and more intricate something” was always right there, thinly veiled behind the campy, stupid, ridiculous “robot fights of the week” show, as that’s the sort of thing Igarashi likes to do.

A commenter on this blog also had this to say:

Seriously, at this point we can dispense with the rest of the show and just fast forward to the part where that caged girl starts singing. :)

Uh, no we can’t, because if we skipped the island stuff and only took in the Star Driver/Cybody shenanigans in Zero Time, everything the story culminates in by the grand finale, and the two arc finales before that, would have no meaning to us, as such meaning was only found in the parts of the show set within Southern Cross Island daily life.

On Episode 5:

I thought that perhaps the previous episode of Star Driver was paving the way for a slight shift in the show's formula and way of doing things... but no, I was wrong, as episode five proves to be another rinse and repeat affair which introduces a character, ties them in to the Glittering Crux brigade and then finishes with a Zero Time battle between said character against Takuto.

I can actually see his point here, at least. It’s rather strange that “Meaning Of The Mandrake” was placed after “Wako’s Song” rather than before it, ‘cause if it had been the other way around, the latter four episodes of the first arc would feel like they had more momentum of importance compared to the first four. The third arc had a similar issue in terms of where they placed the backstory episode - the middle arc (”Innocent Blue Chapter”) is the only one where they nailed the contents and the pacing pretty much perfectly.

Even though we're five episodes in now, I still can't figure out just what Star Driver wants to be (if it even knows itself) - last week's episode seemed set to shake things up a little before this instalment brought us back to the same old episode layout while playing its plot mostly for comic value, right up to our school nurse being defeated while she's checking Takuto out. Okay, that moment was pretty funny (and there were a few other giggles to be had from this episode), but I have to admit that it wasn't what I signed up to Star Driver for and it needs to do a whole lot more if it isn't going to join the rather considerable pile of forgettable mecha series that decorates the world of anime like some elephant's graveyard.

Yes, Star Driver knows what it is and what it wanted to be, this is a “you” problem here, Mr. Blogger. The fact that it does offer such big shakeups every three episodes or sometimes every other episode shows that Igarashi and co. were well aware of what they were doing and how they wanted to play their cards. And oh, the sheer dumb of those later statements. If you “didn’t sign up to Star Driver” for all the goofy stuff that define it as Star Driver, maybe you should’ve thought twice about signing up for Star Driver! And if by even that point your impression of Star Driver was that it could wind up “forgettable” if it didn’t push for being more than what it was at the start, I just don’t know what to tell you. Youv’e got such a terrible attention span.

On Episode 6:

At last, this feels like a real step forward for Star Driver, away from its sometimes frivolous characters and plot progression towards what feels like a more solid footing.

Yes. That was the whole point. That was the whole PLAN. NIMROD!

On Episode 8:

Herein lies the major problem with Star Driver as it continues on its merry way - no matter what happens to the major characters within the show and no matter what developments emerge, it seems like the series is Hell-bent on keeping its episode format intact. This makes for a tiring and predictable viewing experience where we know exactly what's coming, but we still have to sit and wait for most of the episode for it to happen. This wouldn't be so bad if the build-up to the giant robot scraps were packed to the rafters with fascinating drama and character development, but this is rarely the case, instead leaving us with some rather overblown stuff that doesn't have any real impact. Sugata's plight should have made for a huge amount of potential, yet here we are with that part of the story seemingly resolved and yet virtually nothing was made of it. No matter how much I want to like Star Driver (and those fight sequences really are increasingly impressive), it just seems to disappoint me every time I try to give it another chance.

Once again, see Utena, which did the exact same thing of “Episode Format Status Quo Is God, But Not Necessarily An All-Mighty God”. That show had an entire midsection story arc where the conclusion was that its main villain and events were wiped from having ever existed and from the minds of other characters, as though the whole arc that spanned several episodes straight never happened - that’s something that should be decried as a giant time waster and a Filler Arc, but the effects of what happened in it and where it left our characters mattered greatly to the events to follow. A series doesn’t have to break its status quo and throw game-changing, character-effecting, crucially timed, urgently paced, high stakes developments at us every other episode in order to have narrative depth, character development, and plot progression. Sometimes, this way is good enough, where you have the gist of what the show’s all about and know what to expect and what you might predict, but may still be surprised, enthralled, and delighted by the execution and might even find you weren’t as ready for what you end up seeing as you thought you were going into the episode, meaning it’s NOT always a “tiring and predictable” experience, as you won’t always know EXACTLY what you’re in for in terms of the whens, hows, and whys of what gets played out in the story being told. During my rewatch, I noticed a lot of the good, juicy bits of drama and character development that were seeded into those breather periods on the island away from the Crux’s lair and out of Zero Time, and Sugata’s plight was far from resolved by Episode 8 - it simply was transitioned from one point to the next, as oftentimes when things reach an “end”, it’s actually just a phasing out of something that comes with a phasing in of something else semi-connected. The Adventure Of Life Goes On and all that.

If Star Driver was disappointing him, it’s because he set himself up for such disappointment first rather than go with the anime’s flow.

On Episode 10:

Star Driver has become dull and predictable, and there certainly wasn't anything on show this episode to change that.  We're now even at the point where those previously spectacular mecha battles feel run of the mill, leaving us with little to look forward to each week. Something needs to break Star Driver out of its over-used mould, but at the moment I simply can't see anything capable of doing that.

Predictable, yeah. Dull? Hell no, hardly! And “I can’t see anything capable of doing that.” The You twins were RIGHT F**KING THERE!

On Episode 11:

So, another episode of Star Driver has passed, and I'm still utterly bored with its predictable layout and the knowledge that Takuto will always win his battle at the end of the episode one way or another.  Even outside of the action, the whole story surrounding "Simone" felt horribly forced whilst proving to be equally dull in its own right. I'm seriously starting to think that this series is entirely beyond redemption now, but can I really drop a show after sinking almost six hours into it?

If he was so “utterly bored” of this show, what was he doing still writing these posts on it? Takuto having to win all of his battles at the end one way or another is a feature rather than a bug, and does not necessarily break immersion or enjoyment - a lot of the oldest comic books and action-adventure TV serials, the sort of stuff that inspired Star Wars, were like this, where the hero is allowed to be put in peril and leave the audience going “Oh no! How will they get out of this one?” without there being any hint of a doubt that they will indeed  “get out of this one” in the end so that they can go on to their next thrilling adventure, rinse and repeat. It’s not super dramatic because it’s not made to be - it’s made to be FUN. It’s good old fashioned escapism and entertainment. If that’s not one’s cup of tea, then they ought to stop drinking it for no reason but to prove that they can.

On Episode 12:

While the comedy for this episode of Star Driver was far sharper than anything we've seen from the show of late, that's really all it has going for it as per usual - it got a few laughs, but was otherwise as dull and lifeless as ever. There are brief hints of movement courtesy of Kanako meeting and conversing with Mizuno, but considering we're effectively at the half-way point of this series it would be nice to see something other than the odd glacial snippet of plot progression. I too like to throw around words like “dull” and “lifeless” and “boring” and “tepid” and “predictable” and “frivolous” and “forgttable” and even “utterly” without really thinking about whether or not I’m applying them to anything that actually truly matches the meanings of those words but if they make me sound like a real critic who knows what the fuck he’s talking about then I use them, I R super smart! Again, the Black Rose arc from Utena’s midsection deserves mention here.

On Episode 13:

I really have nothing new to say about Star Driver now - it's utterly dull and lifeless, and the plot of this particular episode was plain to see within the first five minutes of the episode, making Takuto's eventual victory even more of a foregone conclusion then it was already. With no peril, danger or intense action to this show's name, what is the point exactly? 

There it is again - “Dull and lifeless!” And in this episode’s case, it’s a Breather Episode and an actually well-placed one at that. I also described already what the point of the show is - to entertain and be fun, sincere and wholesome and even compelling to any who actually engage with it. It’s not a bad show, you’re just mean and joyless.

On Episode 14:

That said, I do have to point out that pretty much everything that was good about the second half of this episode was blatantly stolen from Evangelion (and more specifically its recent movies), but if pinching cool visual concepts and ideas from that series makes Star Driver better than I say go for it.

A mecha anime gets mind screwy and throws in some psychological and existential angst coupled with visual horrors?  “Blatantly stolen” from Evangelion rather than just influenced by it! Overall, this episode hasn't left me with renewed confidence that this series has a clue what it's doing or what its end-game is, but it's at least managed to find a little more potential and promise to keep me watching for the time being. If only it hadn't taken so long to do so...

You’d had to have completely missed the underlining purpose of this episode to come to that conclusion. Everything about the Ayingott project and what Marino was doing as Vanishing Age’s substitute leader was thoroughly schemed out by Head and Ivrogne in order to move things to the next phase, which itself ties back around to earlier set-up with Sugata and Samekh, and what’s truly motivating Ivrogne in her actions. The series’ end-game is a clear picture that comes together like a great big picture puzzle whose pieces you weren’t even looking at ‘cause you were too busy whining about the series!

On Episode 15:

What's this?  An episode of Star Driver that doesn't follow the exact same pattern of nearly every other episode that came before it almost to the second Stop the presses!  After moaning about it for so many weeks, simply breaking out of Star Driver's cycle of drama -> Zero Time -> Takuto wins feels like a breath of fresh air which left me watching the clock and thinking "however are they going to fit a pointless Cybody battle into this episode?".  Well, thankfully they didn't, instead giving the rest of the plot some much-needed room to breathe - something it did reasonably proficiently with plenty of angst and drama to lean on whilst also shifting the positions of a few key pieces on the show's chess board, most notably Sugata and our "mysterious" (or not so mysterious) painter aside from Mizuno herself.  

Yeah, even this asshat couldn’t not give these episodes their due.

only to enter some kind of Endless Eight-esque state where every time she leaves she simply wakes up and has to start all over again - a situation which leaves her a nervous and bawling wreck in a ferry terminal car park after numerous iterations (again, much like most viewers of Endless Eight after a few episodes).

Including this here because it’s actually pretty damn funny. This alone wasn't enough to make Star Driver suddenly seem like a far more compelling series, but following on from last week's more focused offering the signs of improvement are certainly there to be seen. It has a way to go, but at last there's light at the end of the tunnel of mediocrity from which this show desperately needs to escape over the coming weeks.

If it wasn’t, then maybe it honestly didn’t even need to be? What it did for me was make these episodes themselves, and retroactively every episode that featured and slowly advanced the arc of the You twins, far more compelling in and of themselves. The remainder of the show could’ve tanked and it wouldn’t change how great this section was.

On Episode 16:

This leaves me with an episode that I'm rather torn about - the revelations and story built around Mizuno turned out to be quite a nice twist in the tale (although they arguably weren't used to their fullest extent) and the Zero Time section this week was absolutely stunning even by this show's standards, while the Glittering Crux finally reaching their so-called Third Phase after blathering on about it for several months is as much of a relief as it is a sign of some tougher competition for Takuto. Set against that, the whole flashback element into Takuto's past for this episode felt clumsy and bolted on, leading in to a sudden upgrade to Tauburn's powers that was boringly predictable but unavoidably so.

Fair point. I can see why the action grinding to a halt just to give us some backstory that ties directly in with Takuto’s big finisher of that day might feel off for some viewers and take them out of the whole moment, but I personally liked it and will have stuff to say on it later.

Thus, I don't know what to make of it all - certain elements of the series have moved in some decidedly interesting new directions while others look to be stuck in a rut. Overall I suppose that's an improvement, but it still isn't enough to turn Star Driver into a good series at this juncture, let alone a great one.

See what I said before about these Mizuno arc episodes. And to me, Star Driver was always a good series, and these episodes, plus Episode 20 and the final two, just solified it into a great one.

On Episode 17:

Just as it seemed as it Star Driver had broken free of its repetitive episode conventions, it looks like the announcement of third phase combat last time around has seen a return to the tried and far from trusted episode layout of weeks gone by - high school hijinks, Glittering Crux meeting, big battle where Takuto wins via some previously unknown/unexpected deus ex machina.

“This show...is still Star Driver! WHY IS IT STILL STAR DRIVER?!?”

On Episode 18:

I remain both bored and unimpressed with Star Driver again at present - every time is looks set to do something to come out of its coma of predictability, it somehow manages to ruin the whole thing. For what is supposedly an anime about Cybodies which could change the entire world as we know it if the Glittering Crux Brigade succeeds, there's still no tension or drama in anything we see - battles are finished with the equivalent of a flick of the wrist, and more time is spent on school life shenanigans than any form of character building or plot development.  Perhaps someone should get the Madoka Magica team onto a mecha series when they're done with that show?  By all accounts they could do a far better job than this effort which seems to borrow from numerous other similar series whilst completely missing the point of what makes those shows great.

Oh my God, this dude.... The anime is not “about” the Cybodies and the stakes of what should happen if Zero Time was broken and they were all active outside of it again. It literally ends with Zero Time broken yet doesn’t make anything more of it than what’s needed for the immediate focus of the final action. This is called “missing the forest for the trees.” There are some shows, even shows with giant robot fights, that are not made to ride and die on the sort of “tension and drama” that this blogger pines for. And in fact, a lot of the character building and slow-burn plot development to set up the next big advancements are in those smaller, so-called “school life shananigans” that he thinks shouldn’t be allowed in a mecha anime. The reference to Madoka here is important because it’s such an apples-to-oranges comparison; Madoka is a anime with plot and character drama that’s very tightly written, and drama and stakes that escalate by the episode, because it was a 12 episode one cours anime where continous serialized storytelling was necessary and breathing room a no-go. Star Driver, meanwhile...is not that. And how ironic that he said that last part when he himself was missing what made this show great because he was too hung up on his own preferences and expectations, likely influenced by other shows!

On Episode 19:

That aside, I felt that the whole "body snatching" aspect of this episode was rather a wasted opportunity - not much was done with a scenario that was ripe with potential, and Kou and Madoka were both so useless in their body switching roles that they frittered away the chance to cause some genuine chaos far outside simply messing with Wako's head.

Another valid, legitimate criticism. Those are more relieving to come by on this blog than outlier episodes are to come by on Star Driver!

On Episode 20:

After frittering away so many (read: almost all) of its episodes, it's nice to see things finally building in an interesting direction at this late stage - although I can't quite get my head around Takuto's parentage at this juncture (is Tokio really that old?), we did learn some significant information about the man at the helm of the Glittering Crux Brigade, finally see a fire (or at least a slightly damp match) lit under Takuto's feelings for Wako, and perhaps most important we got a Zero Time battle that was interesting for almost thirty whole seconds, which is a new record on my watch. With next week's episode also promising to continue in the right direction, can Star Driver pull out a decent ending to this tepid series?  It won't be enough to save it from the halls of anime mediocrity, but regardless of that I sure hope it does so that my hours of watching this series don't prove to be in vain.

Tokio’s First Phase slowed his physical aging, which is why he still appears to be college aged at most. Oh, and more throwing in big sounding critic words/ “Tepid”? “Mediocrity”? By whose measure?

On Episode 21:

Not for the first time with this series, Star Driver hits upon something interesting only to render it utterly dull and useless with its staunch refusal to add any kind of peril to proceedings. In this case, we were finally faced with a conflict where someone absolutely had to die, no questions ask or no chance to sidestep this brutal truth... until the episode pulls out a deus ex machina so it can all end without anyone getting hurt.  What. The. Fuck. Star. Driver.  This, ladies and gentlemen, is why everyone is raving about Puella Magi Madoka Magica and the world it's woven where everything has serious and realistic consequences; this is also why nobody gives two flying monkeys about Star Driver any more. The sooner this show finishes and puts us all out of its abjectly mediocre misery the better.

I cannot with this doofus and his vocabulary. Here’s where the Madoka thing comes back (ironic since that’s the name of the character in question who didn’t get offed), and for one thing, it aged poorly given how Mami and Kyoko, two characters who we saw absolutely definitely die on-screen just come back to life at the end which sort of negates the weight of their deaths (though Sayaka doesn’t for some reason?), the serious consequences at the very end of the series were so mired in the fantastical that you can’t really call it “realistic”, and then after that initial series, everyone came back and a whole freaking Madoka multiverse was established, so it’s not exactly a super grounded, gritty, true-to-life anime experience. And second of all, it exposes how limited this person’s scope of what can pass for a solid, enjoyable, satisfying series with good storytelling even is. If a series isn’t like a steadily building, super tense, dark, bleak, violent and suspenseful “Anyone Can Die At Any Point” affair like Game Of Thrones, or even a one cours quickie filled with darkness and edge, thrills, chills, kills, shocking plot developments, mindblowing and/or soul-crushing reveals, and constant bordering-on-torture-porn misery and despair at every turn every week like Madoka, then it’s just garbage to someone like this. It’s so sad to me.

On Episode 22:

Mark, who is played by Takuto and really doesn't do anything interesting at all aside from getting to kiss Wako at the end of the entire ordeal.  Which is, to be fair, a pretty awesome thing to do.

Another moment where even a first class fool can see reason.

Above all though, much of this episode is really just about hammering home the current state of Wako's heart when it comes to choosing between Sugata and Takuto, as though the end of last week's episode didn't make that entirely clear and we needed to sit through all of this to explain things. The state of Wako’s heart at the moment wasn’t about “choosing between Sugata and Takuto”, as she was starting to realize more and more after her birthday that she felt equal love for them both. The real drama that was being shaped here was the idea that Sugata could possibly renounce what his heart was feeling for Wako in favor of finally embracing and using Samekh’s power, which is the future that Keito was offering him and hoping that he would take.

I probably wouldn't be so harsh on this episode if it were ensconced within the first half of Star Driver, but with only three episodes to go the series still seems intent on pissing away what little time it has left on incredibly dull and forced plot devices in the hope of somehow seeming "deep" that really add very little to either the show or its characters. I know that Star Driver is a lost cause now, but there's still so much I want to like about it that even at this juncture I get frustrated by its inability to do anything worthy of note with its setting and the individuals within them.  Goodness knows it has enough intriguing, likeable or downright cool characters to play with, so how we ended up with this tepid and clumsy cluster-fuck of a series is becoming increasingly mind-boggling.

You know why that entire paragraph got bolded. Take it away, Luke!

EXCEPT for “Goodness knows it has enough intriguing, likeable or downright cool characters to play with” - those words were right.

On Episode 23:

But what's this?  A major plot twist involving Sugata?  Wow, I never saw that one coming at all.

A good plot twist is one that makes logical internal sense within the narrative and character-based framework and advances the story in an interesting direction, not just one that you don’t see coming. I mean, he even goes on to say this and thus sound contradictory:

Okay, so Sugata's defection does make things a bit more interesting for the final couple of episodes, and it does also fit in better with the evolving relationship dynamic between the remaining maidens, Sugata, and Takuto.  

However, that doesn't make this anything less than another clumsy implemented slice of utter mediocrity where Zero Time also means Zero Excitement and Zero Peril.  Nothing has grabbed or surprised me even at this late stage of the game, meaning that the only real excitement I have left is the thought that in a couple of weeks I'll finally be done with this tepid series - fingers crossed it doesn't get licensed in the UK so that I have to watch it all over again though.

“UTTER mediOCRITY!” “Where’s teh EXCITEMENT and PERIL?”  “This is most tepid series! TEPID, I SAY!” And of course he’s British!

On Episode 24:

Even a show as largely dull and tepid as Star Driver can't screw up its penultimate episode on account of being too dull... although episode twenty-four certainly tries its best at doing just that before the sheer weight of interesting stuff available to the series finally forces its way through.

And I don’t know what else I expected from YOUR penultimate effort!

Okay, I have to confess, the end of this week's episode of Star Driver was pretty damn cool - once I'd suppressed my laughter at the sheer stupidity of nobody recognising any Glittering Crux member until they remove their mask and go "hey, guess who?!", there were some awesome visuals on show and everything seems set up right to deliver a finale free from all the fluff and nonsense that the series has drowned in up to this point. The fact that it took half the episode to get to this "good bit" remains a blatant reminder of everything that's wrong with Star Driver, but at least for once it seems set to actually deliver on its potential - if only it hadn't left it so late to do so.

I’m starting to suspect this dude might actually end up liking Star Driver: The Movie better than Star Driver: The Show, as it gives him basically what he’s asking for in terms of cutting down on the “fluff and nonsense” and hitting off all the “good bits” of lore and drama and fighting action with marked high stakes and twists and turns and all that PLOT PLOT PLOT!, even when said “good bits” would feel hollow and stripped of all deeper meaning due to what was missed out on with the “building block bits” of the high school and island community content that are there to give you an actual connection to the characters, the setting, and the going ons. Again, reading this feels alien in an age where shows “cut too short” and having a lack of breathers and “filler episodes” is more bemoaned than celebrated.

On Episode 25:

It's taken half a year, but we finally we get the episode of Star Driver everyone had been crying out for from the very start.  

................................. This fucking guy just went and said that  “the episode of Star Driver everyone (read: he) had been crying out for from the very start”....was at the very end, as in the final episode, the episode that by its very nature had to be built towards and earned by a whole series worth of episodes leading up to it. 

Crowning Achievement Of Dumb right there. Who thinks like this? That an action-based and character-driven serialized TV series has to lead with a series finale-worth of material from the offset in order to be deemed good?  What is even the point of such a show if it can play not just its full hand but its full deck of cards right from the off-set? This is ludicrous and exposes what an impatient child this guy was. He had zero deep understanding of shit he was talking about!

Okay, it still has an utterly stupid plot (Head's motivations and actions come straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon, and Takuto's decision-making isn't much better), but it had lots of awesome action and visual spectacle to make up for that lack of coherency. 

That was the whole idea. That was his character, that he was like a damaged piece of art where underneath the deep, detailed, beautiful and enticing surface, at his core were some very simplistic ideas and desires. A seflish, petty, ultimately hollow and lacking man pretending to be a boy pretending to be a man and wanted to be a boy again.

Having seen this example of what Star Driver could have been all about somehow only serves to make the rest of the series all the more disappointing - if only the series had this level of tension and peril written into it from the very start, then we might have been able to forgive the ridiculous dei ex machina that turned up on a regular basis and the distracting slice of life shenanigans that would have served better as a spin-off series in its own right. 

Again, ASS. BACKWARDS. It is only because Star Driver was about so much more than the surface level space tech lore and mecha action, because it did not carry itself with this level of tension and peril written into most of its regular proceedings, that this grand finale ends up feeling as grand as it does and carrying such a staggering amount of high quality to it, the quality it feels was built, reached, and earned rather than taken for granted. And if there was anything you found to be “distracting” in the slice of life shenanigans segments, it came from you rather than from the show, which was laying its heart and soul bare in all of those moments, offering up all the smaller pieces that were to be joined together to show you the bigger picture whole of the story, but your mind and your gaze turned away from it.

In terms of wasted potential, this Star Driver must rank at the top of the tree for the last year, and one line in this final episode really said it all: an exclamation of "this battle meant something".  At the show's own admission it took twenty-five episodes to have a meaningful battle in a series built around such action sequences - I rest my case.

Twenty-four episodes of a show built around (but not necessarily super focused on or all about) mech battle action sequences were all stocking up its energy and budget as it built up to the Big One, the one that would be so meaningful that it’d retroactively justify and give validity to all the smaller steps taken towards it, at the very end. This sounds perfectly reasonable, yet this guy puts it as though it’s a serious flaw. Absolutely obtuse, illiterate, unimaginative buffoon.

There were also some choice comments I had to pick out:

There was so much potential depth in SD's universe... the Cybodies, the Entropeople, the Seals... and none of it was really explored that much in depth.

Almost as if those things were never actually made to be the focal points of the story, and that the greater depth lied elsewhere?

Not to mention the lack of focus on the characters. A lot of times it feels like they're there just for the sake of being there (i.e. the lesbians).

The characters who needed to be focused on and earn the shits given about them got their focus, though it’s true that some in this cast got very short-changed, the Vanishing Age lackeys especially.

Star Driver isn't meant to have a complex plot or anything, it's meant to be mindless entertainment. People are raving about it anyway, so I don't quite understand that part o.o

I am with the spirit of this post but not the letter. Star Driver’s plot, unlike Utena’s overarching storyline, is not especially complex, its events easy to follow and dictated by certain patterns that make it pretty predictable and its primary purpose is to entertain - to please, to thrill, to amuse and even to arouse. But to call all that “mindless?” Nah, that is giving it way too little credit. I’ve seen it in its entirety more than enough times to say with certainty that there’s a great deal of cleverness, brilliance and meaning behind this camptastic joyride.

Now here’s the blogger again with some imput on his own:

although it's also interesting that both of those posts are suggesting that "people don't get it" without really explaining what we're missing beyond having not seen Utena.

I’d not seen Utena in full by the time I watched Star Driver and I was able to get it just fine, so he’s right, it really is no excuse.

I comprehend the reason for the repetitive way each episode is framed, but to be frank that framing wouldn't be a problem if the show actually had worthwhile content within that frame - witness the reaction to Madoka's early episodes which were similarly repetitive in terms of their layout compared to Star Driver. I'm also pretty sure I "get" all of the allusions the series is trying to present, but unfortunately they're all tired old concepts that aren't remedied by dressing it up in some snazzy outfits.

It’s a purely subjective matter. If the content doesn’t seem worth your while, then OK, don’t engage. It’s not going to be the same for everyone. And yet again with the Madoka reference, even when in that show’s case it only had two episodes worth of standard formulaic Magical Girl layout before someone’s head got bitten off in Episode 3, so it was never interested in playing things straight and sincere the way Star Driver was. Deeper allusions within repetitious framework are just kind of Igarashi and Enokido’s whole thing, same as Ikuhara.

What really holes Star Driver below the water is that for all of its allusion, big set pieces and attempts to build a compelling character-driven narrative, there's absolutely zero tension in Zero Time - arguably any tension disappeared the moment we were told that Takuto dying would mean "game over". We know what's going to happen every single week, and that's where Star Driver makes the jump from "too deep for people to understand" to "dull". There is shed loads of potential in Star Driver, but by this juncture it's been entirely frittered away to the point where I doubt watching a couple of other series will suddenly help it much or cause some kind of "eureka" moment.

He’s argued this ad nauseum and it’s still not holding water. Stories where the hero overcomes their obstacles and “saves the day” on the regular don’t automatically lack tension just because we’re not biting our nails with suspense or even anticipation over who might die at any given moment or itching to see the status quo upended by some destructive instance of successful evildoing that the hero fails to stop. Sometimes, Saturday Morning Cartoon flavor works and is not “dull.”

Lastly, this is who he was responding to, who has some refreshingly solid, well thought out, well understood and very agreeable things to say on the matter. As such, I’ve bolded the ones that hit the best. 

I generally enjoy reading your blog posts, and you have interesting thoughts on different shows but really it seems there are things you don't comprehend about Star Driver.

What I mean by saying that you don’t ‘comprehend’ aspects of Star Driver is not that it’s ‘too deep’ but more from a narrative perspective. You’re right in saying that the posts don’t explicitly explain what people are missing. But the emphasis is that ‘plot isn’t the point’ in Star Driver, it’s more about the allusions / symbolism / themes / characters. So if people focus on the former opposed to the latter, they’re ‘missing the point’. And it’s the case that most people relate/understand to traditional narrative. In Star Driver, the audience makes out the story for themselves using the allusions / symbolism / themes / characters rather than an unfolding plot and this is where people get lost, ie don’t understand therefore don’t like it. That’s cool. This way of storytelling isn’t for everybody.

I suppose it bothers me when criticisms like yours are based on a traditional narrative as opposed to the jigsaw puzzle way of Star Driver.

I’ll elaborate. Themes / symbolism / allusions / characters are the devices used for the audience to create their own overall understanding as opposed to an unfolding plot granting them this understanding. Generally speaking, this is how it was done in Utena, hence the comparison in the links.

In a conventional narrative we have conflict/tension/resolution (simplified form). Star Driver doesn’t utilise this as stated above. From your posts I gather that the lack of tension is your major dislike, and what I’m saying (and what the links are basically pointing out) is that Star Driver isn’t designed to have conventional narrative/plot (ie tension). This is why it doesn’t resonate with many people. This is what is meant by ‘not getting’ Star Driver.

Basically in Star Driver, there isn’t a straightforward pan of events that involve conflict/resolution or build tension to ‘tell’ us the story. But rather it’s the allusions/symbolism/themes AND how the characters work within these that ‘build’ the story.

I will use your example above of the lack of content within the repetition. Within the repetition we are given clues to characters’ motives. No, they’re not big world changing reveals. But using these clues (such as reactions, dialogue) and combining them with whatever symbolism is floating around, the audience is able to build the story. Star Driver requires the audience to be cluey and build, rather being given the story. Specific example this episode: Kanako notes that Wako was angry at Madoka for flirting with Takuto in Zero Time. This is a hint that Wako is leaning towards Takuto. Combine this with a frame last ep which shows Wako carrying Takuto’s watch (opposed to Sugata’s knife) reinforces this. The ‘story’ point here is that Wako has chosen Takuto, so the audience wonders how Sugata will react to this. Yes the audience will need to use various clues to work this out.

That is how ‘story’ is told in Star Driver. Putting together the puzzle. It requires the audience to be active and build it. Which is not for everyone. Which is perfectly fine.

It’s not that Star Driver is ‘too deep to understand’. It’s that the storytelling method of Star Driver doesn’t resonate with a mainstream audience. I just wanted to enlighten you to other ways of thinking about it because for me, criticising Star Driver using traditional narrative as your frame of reference (as you are doing), doesn’t hold water.

All of that. Beautifully put. This is the link they put out there too :https://revolemina.wordpress.com/2010/11/05/notes-on-star-driver/

Related: a more recent blogging of Star Driver from “Wrong Every Time”, who ironically seems to get it much more right than this guy. https://wrongeverytime.com/tag/star-driver/

And another great one!: https://randomc.net/category/star-driver/

Bottom line of this post: this person had no love for Star Driver to begin with; that’s why he couldn’t see its actual greatness.

[nerves-nebula]

I dont feel like im academically knowledgeable enough about this to be pretentious about this but I recently come to realise how obnoxious I find people's obsession with immersion is. Like this idea that if something breaks their immersion that it's automatically a sign of bad writing.

And I understand why some people view it that way, because it can be in a lot of ways, a lot of the time inexperienced authors break your immersion unintentionally because they don't know how to immerse you to begin with.

But breaking your immersion isn't inherently bad, it just makes you aware that the work of fiction you're engaging with is a constructed object, and if a good author does this intentionally it can be an invitation to interrogate their intentions, and what your place is as the audiance.

This is the basis of a lot of metafiction, yet I see some people refuse to engage with moments of immersion breaking on the basis that it breaks their immersion there its bad.

Like im not expert, I certainly have not studied this topic in enough depth to be 100% confident about this but its just something I noticed and it bothers me

Anyway I need to read more about alienation and epic theatre

Just got off a 6 hour plane and am waiting to get onto a 10 hour one so brain fried . All I gotta add is that sometimes ppls immersion gets broken for dumb reasons too. Like when things don’t make logical sense in the “not making logical sense” genres. Sometimes it’s not even actually that immersion is broken but that a person isn’t interested in the story at all and just wants a reason to look smart about it. Immersion is a weird concept.

Me personally I have a vendetta against the concept of emotional whiplash, namely that it exists and is bad. I don’t think I really believe in either of those things (as they’re commonly talked about at least) and I think that people who can’t get into a story cuz of emotional whiplash are weak and will not survive.

Also I don’t care if inexperienced authors break immersion either I refuse to believe in good and bad authors. I really don’t care about any story telling rule. my only rules are do I like it and was it made with attention and interest and those things are completely subjective. As they should be.

I mean even things like “did the author do this intentionally” are sometimes impossible to tell. Something can seem super obvious and very intentional to everyone and you ask the author and they go “oh I didn’t do that in purpose”

Case in point I named loose stitches basically right before I started posting it and only after I’d been posting it for a while did someone point out that loose stitches could be seen as a reference to the main magic system, the literal strings what make up the entire world. The strings that weave and stitch everything together.

Is it a less fitting name cuz I didn’t see that obvious parallel? Are we going to argue that actually I did subconsciously mean to reference the magic system (that tbh I usually forget exists while writing the scripts) even tho the name is in reference to a few more literal and metaphorical events that’ll happen later in the comic?

This is the issue with thinking too much about authorial intent. It’s basically just an interesting game of gathering evidence to make the point that they did it all on purpose. But even if you get direct confirmation you’ll never know for sure what the author intended because authors change their minds, and forget, and lie out of embarrassment or something else, or decide they like your reading better and change it to that

Anyway none of that really has much to do with what you’re talking about here. I’m very tired

[sgenvs3000f24]

Unit 6 Blog Post

With this quote, Edward Hyams urges readers to acknowledge the past and how it has shaped our present. He emphasizes the need to broaden our knowledge and perspectives about the world. In order to see the “full picture” we need to educate ourselves about our past. As we delve deeper into our heritage, our sense of self may be questioned or strengthened. Sometimes, our sense of self may be intertwined with feeling like we are at the “center of the world”, that we hold more importance than other things around us. Hyams probes into this feeling of perceived importance when he describes a railway station only existing for the moment that a train passes through it. The passengers on this train only acknowledge the railroad for the short moments that they see it, and after that, they forget about it. In reality, that railroad had existed before the train passed through it and it will continue to exist long after the train has gone. This anecdote illustrates our tendency to package an event/experience exclusively using our own point of view. We forget that there are other perspectives, that world history does not only mean human history (Beck et al., 2018). Once we begin to acknowledge that the significance of a place/event is richer than how it is showcased in the present moment, only then can we begin to absorb its interpretation and “transcends time and space” via its personal authenticity (Beck et al., 2018). Kids from Cabot Elementary School discovered the authenticity of their school once they were taught about the school’s rich history (Beck et al., 2018). Learning about the struggles that the school’s founder endured made the students more grateful for what they were privileged with and this heightened their sense of self.  To give the past meaning, Hyams suggest we maintain its integrity. We should aim to keep the past as accurate as possible by maintaining our knowledge and memory of ancient things. It is often tempting to give the audience “what they want or expect” in hopes to keep them entertained (Beck et al., 2018). The basis of most media nowadays is entertainment, even if the subject at hand involves historical events. Movies like Pocohontas or Mulan pick and choose historical facts to enhance fictional stories. Their goal is not to give us an accurate depiction of reality, but rather to entertain us. On the other hand, movies like “The boy in the striped pajamas” do the opposite. This movie uses a fictitious story to emphasize the raw and atrocious truths of the Holocaust. Countless movies, books, documentaries, artworks, museums throughout the decades retell the horrors of the Holocaust and many more interpretations will surely follow. But why must we be reminded of the Holocaust so often? Is it not insensitive to the families of the survivors that we display their traumas? Yes, reliving some parts of human history sows guilt, uncomfort, and sadness for many of us. But let’s reconsider Hyams’ quote: “there is no peculiar merit in ancient things but there is merit in integrity”. There is no merit in what happened in the Holocaust, but maintaining the integrity of the TRUTH has merit. Maintaining and retelling the truth will help us to make sure it does not happen again.

(Holocaust memorial in Berlin emphasizes how the past should not be hidden or re-written; we need to look back at the past to navigate the present and prepare for the future)

References:

Beck, L., Cable, T. T., Knudson, D. M. (2018). Interpreting Cultural and Natural Heritage: For a Better World. Sagamore Publishing LLC.

[j-graysonlibrary]

Heartbeats; Paradise XV

Title: Heartbeats; Paradise

Author: Jay Grayson

Word Count: 112K

Genres: Psychological thriller, drama, sci-fi, LGBT+

Available on: Kobo and my website

Synopsis: Melvin Hardy and Kade Axel appear to be a match made in heaven. After a meet-cute in the rain, the two quickly find themselves in a burgeoning, wholesome relationship.

Yet, things feel…off. It isn’t the ghosts of their pasts that resurface to test the strength of their partnership—no—it’s something nebulous. Something indescribable. Melvin can’t put his finger on it but, the more time he spends with Kade, the more he starts to wonder what’s real and what’s pure fiction. 

XV:

It’s been days—even a week maybe—of constant killing and, while there have certainly been changes, we are still trapped. I’ve seen the same people be shot and hacked up on a daily basis but there is no exit in sight. Though the world no longer looks quite the same anymore.

On our daily trek, we pass by the same buildings as always but over half of them are drastically changed.

Where a brick and mortar shop stood before, there are now bright, luminescent grids and they flicker and glitch as we walk by. It’s especially jarring next to a lifelike building that we can enter and walk about like normal.

Kendra says the program is in its final throes but she’s also been saying that for the past three days. It’s definitely struggling to keep up with the amount of murder happening to its extra characters but it’s still holding together. A couple of times a day, every day, I see Kendra open up a panel in thin air and try to mess with the code to get us out.

But it’s never enough.

I’ve almost become jaded to the sight of people being chopped to pieces and children being executed with a bullet between the eyes but I still haven’t pulled the trigger myself. I’m sure everyone has noticed by now but no one has confronted me about it.

I have a feeling Oz has warned all of them not to.

Occasionally, he looks back at me and gives me a remorseful nod and I know he’s only doing so much extra work so I don’t have to. I really do appreciate it and it makes me feel all the worse that I’ve started to distance myself from him.

Each night I’ve had dreams of my old life and more details are filled into my memory. Some of them have been quite intimate and I chalk those up to the fact I haven’t been able to have sex with Oz since this mission began. My mind is making up for it with these dreams.

Images of my old life with Gavin are often what’s on my mind and I think less and less about who is around me and our desired futures. It’s as if there’s no room to imagine what might come after this as well as room to reminisce about my past.

I just can’t shake how much I miss my husband and son and all of our friends. I miss my old life—even more now that I know I won’t be able to return to it.

Sleeping next to Oz at night just doesn’t feel the same.

“How about now?” I hear Starla ask after she and her brother massacre the patrons of a small book store. She’s got some backsplash on her as well but it’s nowhere near as bad as Kade.

The siblings look over, expectantly, to Kendra. She pops open a panel in front of her face and fusses with it for a moment. Her brow furrows and I can already tell there’s bad news coming.

“Shit,” she curses and closes the screen. “Still not enough. I swear, it’s like we make progress but it resets overnight.”

“Then we don’t sleep and just keep at it,” Kade suggests as if that’s a real, viable solution.

“I need my beauty rest, Kaddie,” Nate responds, sounding more and more off kilter. I’ve noticed some of the repeating dialogue but, honestly, that’s not what’s most off putting to me. It’s his delivery. As if he’s not holding a gun in his hands, as if he’s not shooting down his fellow man.

“We do need some sleep,” Kendra agrees but I don’t miss her cutting her eyes at Nate.

“We just need to do more damage then,” Oz counters. He doesn’t look back at me but I feel the implication in his words.

I need to get over myself and start helping.

He won’t say that, of course, but he means it.

“Anyone want to hear my suggestion?” Starla asks as she holsters her gun. We all turn toward her, giving her silent permission to continue. “I found an interesting book while we were in the shop.”

“A book?” Kendra raises an eyebrow.

She pulls out a small manual from the back of her pants where, I guess, she tucked it into her waistband. It’s a simple looking book and I walk closer to see that it’s titled: Home Made Explosives.

“That was just in there?” Oz asks what’s on my mind.

Starla shrugs. “I thought we might be able to use it. On the buildings that stubbornly hang on, we could plant explosives and take them out. That should destabilize things a lot, right?”

We all glance to Kendra for an answer. She rubs her lips in thought and pauses for a little longer than any of us are comfortable with.

“Well?” Kade urges.

“I’m not sure,” she replies with a little frustration clear in her voice, “In theory, yeah, it’ll be effective but there’s a lot to consider. Like if we’ll have the materials to make the bombs, if we’ll even make them correctly, and then if it actually will be enough.”

“It’s better than just doing the same thing every day, right?” Oz sounds like he’s already on board.

“I don’t know,” I say and step closer to Kendra, “What if we make them wrong and we kill ourselves in the process?”

“We’ll come back, duh,” Kade retorts.

“…That’s not really my point.”

He seems completely unfazed by the possibility of being blown to bits. Sure we might reanimate but does he think it won’t hurt as well? I know for a fact that the pain is still very real even if the wound isn’t.

I’d very much like to not be blown up.

“Kendra,” Starla continues, “To your first point, can’t you import assets into the world? You did so a few times with some of the stuff in the rec center, right?”

“Yeah but…it’s all stuff that was already uploaded to the hub. I’m not sure Anika fixed this place up with C4, you know?” Kendra dryly laughs.

“There are ways to make bombs with household objects though,” Starla presses as she flips open the book. “See? I bet all of this stuff is in a grocery store.”

Kendra leans over to read and I worry that I’ll be, again, the only one not on board. Her eyes glide over the page and she starts to nod.

Damn it.

“This could work…”

“Really?” I can’t hold it back. “Can you be sure we won’t be caught up in the blast?”

“If we can detonate them remotely then we can move to a safe distance first,” Kendra states as if she’s now some explosives expert after reading a single page in a single book.

I can’t believe I’m the only one against this. I fold my arms across my chest as they discuss where we need to go to get all the materials.

The group breaks up to go gather supplies and I stay put, not having been given an assignment and also not wanting to go anywhere. I suspect I’ll be left alone but Oz stays behind while everyone else leaves.

I glance up at him as he approaches me. A look of concern is prominent but I see some other emotions laced within. The worrier in me suspects one might be frustration at my stubbornness.

“Melvin…”

“I know it’s probably our best chance, I just don’t like the risk,” I say before he can reprimand me.

He sighs and places his hands on my shoulders. As he comes even closer, I find myself holding my breath—up until the point where he rests our foreheads together.

“It is very dangerous,” Oz whispers and begins to rub my shoulders, softly massaging. “I completely understand why you’re not into the idea. Truly.”

“But it’s the only way?” I meet his eyes and find some exasperation in the deep brown irises. 

“It might be. I can’t say for sure. None of us really knows what we’re doing right now. No one has all the answers…” He rubs our heads together, nuzzling against me. Our noses brush together. “I’ve been trying so hard these past few days. Every night…I try to remember.”

“…Remember?” I repeat, puzzled.

He lets out a breathy laugh but he doesn’t seem all too amused. In fact, that exasperation and frustration I noticed from before is back in force. “I…I want to remember like you do. I want to remember being with you in our past life but no matter how hard I try, I get nothing.” He sighs. “I’m sorry.”

My heart aches and I feel terrible for both of us. I couldn’t have guessed he was straining himself so hard to try to remember his past. It has to be especially troubling with how easy it is for me. I don’t try at all—it just happens.

But as much as I’m touched by Oswald’s dedication to this, I can’t keep my feelings inside any longer. They’ve been growing and mutating lately and now, especially knowing this, I can’t hide them from him.

My vision blurs and I feel my throat get hot. I don’t really want to, but I have to.

“Oz…” I swallow hard. “I’m…I’m not as sure you were my husband anymore.”

I avoid looking at him because I’m afraid to see the hurt in his eyes. His hands stop massaging me and he puts some distance between us.

He’s mad—I can feel it. How could he not be?

It’s painful but I meet his gaze again and my heart drops into my stomach. He’s not crying but I can see the tears rising in the corners of his eyes.

“You don’t think so?” he whispers.

“I…” My voice catches and I have to clear my throat. “I still care about you, Oz but…the feelings I have in those dreams are starting to point to a different answer. I’ve had a lot of dreams and the more I have the more sure I get.”

“So…we probably never knew each other?” The crack in his voice is like a knife in my heart. 

“I don’t know,” I answer honestly, “And I do love you. I wouldn’t have survived this mess if not for you. I owe you…so…so much. I don’t want to imagine being here without you which is why I had to tell you. I had to be honest. You deserve honesty.”

Oz looks away from me and nods, just enough to count. Maybe he’s not mad but he is undoubtedly upset. “Right…” I watch his adam’s apple bob as he gulps. “I can’t deny that I had hoped we were married but…at least now I know who I wasn’t.”

“…Oz,” I say and reach out to him.

He catches my hand, squeezes it, and releases it. “Thanks for telling me, Melvin.”

There’s too much on my mind and I still don’t love the idea of blowing up the city but I’m in no position to argue. I feel as though I’ve isolated myself from everyone and I definitely have no authority over the group to suggest an alternate path. I also don’t have other ideas in the first place.

I just sit and watch as Kendra, Starla, and Kade get to work on the bombs. They’re simple to make, according to Starla, and Oz quickly joins them. Nate is told to stay put elsewhere since Kendra doesn’t fully trust him and I keep to myself for my own reasons.

As they do all the heavy lifting, I spend the time feeling sorry for myself. Productive, I know. I hug my knees and wonder what Gavin would be doing if he were here.

Probably helping make and plant explosives though I’m sure he’d be actively complaining the entire time. He’d also probably heavily insist I stay back—just in case something goes wrong.

I realize I’d be more worried if Gavin was involved. I’d want to help more and that revelation makes me sick to my stomach.

Am I really so indifferent to my current companions?

I don’t think that I am but are my current actions not proof enough?

I close my eyes to keep the tears from coming. Everyone is working so hard to get us out of here yet all I can do is sit by myself and cry about it? I’ve never been angrier with myself but I still can’t force my body to move.

And, by the time I do manage to stand up, they’re all done.

Kendra directs us to the top of the hill in town and, with some degree of confidence, she looks between us. “Alright…I’m going to blow the charges and, hopefully, the system will break.”

“We’re definitely out of the blast radius?” Oz asks, sounding like he’s asked about a hundred times now.

“Yes,” she responds, “We’re absolutely far enough away.”

“Even factoring in shrapnel, we’re so far uphill, it won’t reach us,” Starla adds.

“Right.” Kendra nods then glances at each of us one last time. “Everyone ready?”

Everyone gives an affirmative nod and I, finally, nod with them. I’m scared—absolutely terrified—but I know this might be our only chance. I can’t hold everyone else back because of my concerns.

Kendra takes a deep breath before she pushes the detonator.

I flinch prematurely and watch the world below us as bright orange and smoky gray emerges from the buildings. Like a line of dominos, the explosions happen in turn as they grow ever closer to us.

Instinctively, I step away and raise my hand over my eyes.

But the explosions stop before they can trigger up the hill and, instead, spread back and to each side of the road—to the east and west. I can’t believe how many charges they must have made for this to still be going on.

The ground starts to shake and I’m nearly knocked off balance. Oz reaches out to stabilize me and I don’t have time to thank him before my eyes are drawn to the disturbance in the sky.

Dark lines shoot out from the point directly ahead of us. Clouds start to shake and break apart into pixels while the blue of the sky falls, piece by piece, like a breaking puzzle. A dark abyss is revealed behind the sky and Kendra shouts in excitement, letting me know this is what success apparently looks like.

“Run!” she cries out, “Run toward the exit!”

No one thinks twice—not even I do—and we take off down the hill. The earth still trembles under us and fire rages on either side of the road but I don’t take my eyes off of the black, gaping hole in front of us. The scenery around the hole becomes blurry and begins to hiss and crackle.

There’s a chance that passing through will hurt but Oz throws his hand out to grab mine and I’m not as afraid anymore.

We exit last and I suck in a harsh, fresh breath—a breath free of that world.

But a bright light switching on all at once makes me close my eyes and wince. I’m sure everyone else is caught off guard since I hear some disgruntled groans and even a yell from Starla.

“What the hell?” Kade mutters.

I force open my eyes though the intense white is quite uncomfortable. We’re in a new area—that much I can tell—but I can’t begin to guess where that is. I find Kendra and watch her, waiting for some explanation.

If anyone knows anything, it’s her.

“Everyone, stay close,” Kendra demands and we all, wordlessly, shuffle toward her.

As I step behind her, I see a figure across the way. Whoever it is, they’re approaching us and Kendra’s tense stance tells me that she’s a threat.

The white light of the room glows off of this woman’s skin making her look even paler. Her long, light brown hair follows behind her like the train on a dress and she wears all light colors, giving off an air of softness and innocence. Her eyes are the same color as Kade’s and her thin lips are painted pink.

“Hello,” she says, her voice matching her appearance to a T, “What brings you all here?”

[villain-sympathizer]

that don't make sense tho, you realise proshipping is also harmless right? is also something that don't exist and makes no difference, is just the same as liking villains, it's fine because they are fictional

im talkin about proshipping that includes ships that have minors paired with adults, ships that involve z*ophilia, abusive ships, incest/pseudo-incest ships, sometimes canonically gay characters paired with the opposite (cis) sex, stuff like that falls into proshipping which is not ok

liking villains is fine because they're fictional, yes, and is what they do harmful? in a literal sense, sure. but its the fact that liking a hot fictional villain who canonically happened to murder or embezzle is not something that just happens to whoever on a daily basis, but the things mentioned above are things that can happen at random to whoever, whenever, for any reason, and are crimes that are easily brushed off or overlooked

its the power imbalances and mistreatment that comes with the kind of shipping that proshippers do that is the problem, rather than what is morally bad to people. is mass murder bad? yes, obviously, but its a crime that people immediately recognize as a crime

incest and p*dophilia and z*ophilia are crimes that people dont immediately see as a crime or even care that its a crime, its something people in the real world can easily get away with, which is why its such an issue

if by proshipping you mean "let people ship themselves/ocs with fictional sentient characters that are their age or are above legal age", then yes that's fine! but that's not what "proship" means in it's context, which really sucks

because "proship" is used by people who think "age doesnt matter/age is just a number" or "theyre step siblings/adopted so technically its not incest" which is so insanely weird and fucked up

[bestworstcase]

@arendelle-citizen

But what if with everything running on dust that just turns in whatever and Grimm's corpses desolving there's no law of conservation of mass on Remnant? Like all the other chemistry works the same but because of like at least 4 magic systems being part of normal life and science no one can reasonably expect that disassembling stuff into molecules won't negate it's mass.

I too like the idea of Penny just not being that smart at physics, but on Remnant a common scroll probably breaks all kinds of laws of physics we take for granted.

so like i mentioned in the op, no one is watching rwby for the realistic physics and as far as applying science to fantasy fiction goes i’m less concerned with realism per se than enriching my enjoyment of the text, bc i like worldbuilding on this granular level. its fun

so

as a rule of thumb when conjuration occurs in a fantasy setting i tend to default to assuming that EITHER the mass is not being created per se but summoned or constructed from existing matter OR magic is such an energetic system that the principle of mass conservation doesn’t hold. (tangential but, one concept i’ve been kicking around wrt ice dust specifically, for fanfic purposes, is that it might “conjure” ice by ripping water vapor out of the air and flash-freezing it—so ice dust would also be a potent desiccant that strips moisture out of things, including you if you’re not careful enough or disciplined enough when you work with it. weiss can have permanent chapped lips and hands and need eye drops, as a treat)

that said, things like grimm dissolving after death and the roseblance as penny described it *don’t* violate the mass conservation principle. if you take a big thing and disassemble it into a million tiny constituent pieces you still have the same mass (less a minuscule amount of mass lost through release of the energy that held those constituent pieces together, strictly speaking, but good enough for government work.) mass conservation means you can’t create or destroy mass, which critically is not synonymous with matter; vaporizing a grimm is akin to vaporizing an ice cube and ruby disassembling herself at the molecular level is akin to disassembling a lego structure.

(one thing that interests me endlessly abt grimm disintegrating after death is that they are explicitly not just poofing out of existence: they crumble into particles and emit plumes of thick, visible smoke. is that a pollutant. does it eventually precipitate back down as ichor to form new spawning grounds. what happens if it seeps into the groundwater. <- invented an entire branch of science based on this idea for fic purposes)

likewise scrolls and computing generally—aside from the obvious factor of running on a type of energy that Isn’t Real—don’t strike me as particularly fantastical in comparison to a smartphone or a computer. (indeed in a lot of ways i think real technology is a lot MORE advanced and whacky than remnant’s scrolls: sure they have rigid force fields, but we have computer chips intricately etched at microscopic scale with photolithography and that’s not even getting into all the wild shit like ion traps we’ve invented to make quantum computing happen. at the end of the day hard-light seems to be basically equivalent to an LCD screen with really high strength.)

so while there’s obv a lot of wiggle room introduced by the factor of there being at least three distinct magic systems stacked on top of each other, i think there IS a relatively solid basis for assuming that physics on remnant is approximately similar to physics in the real world and therefore yeah a cloud of molecules is going to experience random walk and thus not be especially fast. (<- when salem travels this way she does so at a fairly moderate pace, much more sedate than ruby’s blitzes. also the issue with particles re: speed isn’t that they have mass per se, it’s not abt “negating” mass, it’s that they bang into each other and want to careen off in random directions. this is why particle beam weapons have such huge inefficiencies, particles DO move extremely super fast but in really erratic and uncontrollable ways bc they’re playing bumper cars with a gazillion other extremely fast-moving particles.)

Being honest, I thought Penny was just bullshitting because SHE couldn't figure out what Ruby was doing either, but her technological aspects allowed her to figure out what Ruby's semblance was to an extent, and she basically just made up the rest based on what she thought the nearest thing to Ruby's ability was.

Basically, smart robot girl tries to impress her friend with vaguely correct sounding technobabble, that has a kernel of truth in it but not entirely the correct solution.

yeah pretty much. hard to say how much we’re supposed to take what penny says as accurate vs the “penny is a whip-smart child soldier, not a physicist, and Molecules Have Mass” reading and i don’t think it’s all that important either way, in the grand scheme. i just double down on the probability manipulation/bullshit macroscopic matter wave angle every time i see a roseblance theory that makes me roll my eyes abdbjsvk

[slyersky]

Stiles x Reader - Friendly flirting

(A/N): I tried to make this as gender-neutral as possible. I wanted to make this shorter than the stuff I usually do but it was a nice way to relax and get some old ideas out and think I started word vomiting a little-

I’m sorry if the characters are OOC, I’ve never written anything Teen Wolf related in my life and after watching, like, barely one and a half seasons, my friend encouraged me to start writing fan fiction about it. Being the good friend that I am, who is also horrible at telling people no, I did as they said. I hope it’s not too bad… Enjoy! :)

Content: Reader is a flirty little shit, Stiles gets flustered easily, slightly suggestive themes, short mentions of blood (nothing major)

Words: 2,700

“(Y/n),” Stiles tried to get your attention. His attempt was futile, leaving you with a fork loosely hanging in your hand without having eaten anything yet and your mouth slightly agape. It was lunchtime and you were sitting across from him and Scott. Not a word had left your mouth since you guys sat down. You just started spacing out, staring at your friend with a blank expression.

You probably didn’t even know you were staring at him, so lost in thought that your eyebrows were slightly furrowed. God, he loved the look on your face when you were in a world of your own. Where no one could reach you and you were all to yourself, able to think about anything you wanted. Stiles wondered what you were thinking about this time.

Occasionally, you even bit your lip, a very common habit of yours. You did it so often that your lips had grown a little chapped. He couldn’t help but pity your lower lip for the abuse it went through on a daily basis. He remembered that it had started bleeding once during one of the times the two of you studied together. You had been so concerned and stressed about upcoming exams that you kept biting, completely unaware of what that might bring. Stiles wasn’t going to lie, he always grew a little nervous when you did it. Not in a bad way though, of course not. He had to admit when you didn’t do it to the point of self-harm, it looked kinda hot.

But for now, he wanted you to eat instead of spacing out. There wasn’t much time left before you had to go back to class, so he tried to get your attention once more.

“Hey! -”, Stiles snapped his fingers in front of your face- “Earth to (Y/n)!”

Snapping out of your trance, your eyes focused on his fingers and then the face behind them. You shot him a sheepish smile and quickly began eating. Oh, how much he loved that smile. It was so warm and pure. It always seemed like you were smiling just for him, it made him feel special. Was it obvious that he thought you were beautiful?

“Sorry, didn’t mean to stare at you.”

“It’s fine. What were you thinking about?”

Now your smile formed into a smirk. You leaned a little closer to him and lifted your fork to vaguely draw circles in the air in front of his face.

“Oh… You know…-“ a small chuckle escaped you, even though you tried to hide it- “Just you and your perfect, adorable,… annoyingly beautiful face.” You winked and went back to your normal sitting position again. A short laugh escaped you as you watched Stiles’ face turn red in embarrassment. Scott, who was sitting next to him, only sighed.

“Get a room, you two,” he groaned, which made you laugh again.

“C’mon, Scott! You know I’m just messin’ with ya,” you were right. You were only messing around when you let out flirty comments and pick-up lines. Stiles had known that for as long as he had been friends with you. He remembered the first things you said to him like it happened yesterday.

— — —

“Uh, hey… Do you have a pencil sharpener?”, Stiles turned around to meet your gaze. You were holding up your pencil, its’ tip had broken off while you were trying to write with it.

“Oh. Yeah, sure. Gimme a second…. Here.”

“Thanks. -”, you took it from his hand, fixed your pencil and handed it back to him with a smile- “Man… Without you, my life would be a lot like my pencil…pointless.”

Stiles had to suppress a laugh to not get looked at by their teacher. You grinned as he failed to contain a chuckle. He didn’t quite know if you were being serious but according to the look on your face, you weren’t trying to flirt. Even if you were smirking now.

“By the way, the name’s (Y/n)…”, you held out a hand to shake his, which he accepted.

“Stiles… Nice to meet you.”

— — —

Friendly flirting was another common habit of yours, not that he minded. Sometimes it was nice to hear those little compliments, even though he doubted that you actually meant them. He hoped you did. At least every now and then. If you complimented him so often, you must’ve somewhat liked him, right?

The ringing of the school bell made Stiles come back to reality. You made a panicked face and shovelled as much food into your mouth as you could without having to choke. In the end, you did end up choking but at least you were done with your meal. You groaned quietly as you put away your tray together with the other two boys.

“Jesus, maybe you should slow down next time, (Y/n)...”, Stiles commented with a concerned look.

“What can I say...? Maybe choking is just my thing?”, you winked and almost started laughing at the reaction of your friends. Before any of them could say anything you dashed off and yelled that you would see them in class.

——

A long sigh escaped you as you slouched down in the chair you were sitting in. Nothing was as boring as studying for a maths test, even if you were doing it with a friend. With your textbook in your lap and a pen in your hand, you started writing another equation on a sheet of paper.

“Why does this suck so much?”, you mumbled to no one in particular.

“Because there’s nothing fun about it…?”, a response came anyway. You spun your chair 180 degrees and then came to a halt to look at your friend, who was sitting on his bed. He was concentrating on solving his equations as well, book laying next to him, his notes propped up on his leg and his pencil tapping against his cheek.

“That’s one way to put it…”, you huffed and turned the chair around again. At least the two of you were almost done for the day, with only a few more math problems to go through. You wrote down a few equations and then quickly made matching graphs for them so you were able to compare them.

Stiles looked up from his work after he finished to check on you for a second. You mostly had your back turned to him, slightly turning the chair from left to right now and then. You had propped one elbow on the desk and laid your chin in your hand as you scribbled more stuff onto your paper. A strand of hair fell onto your face and you quickly blew it out of the way, only for it to fall back to block your vision. He had to stifle a laugh at your slight annoyance, you were just as beautiful as always. He noticed that you were back to biting your lip in thought. It already looked irritated.

“Hey. No biting.”, he commented and you shot him an annoyed glance.

“Yes, mom.”, you sassed back with a high, childish voice. However, you did stop biting. Good. Stiles didn’t want to run into the bathroom to get a bunch of tissues. The boy admired you for a few more seconds until you spoke up again.

“You like what you’re seeing?”, you smirked as you saw how his cheeks turned a little red out of the corner of your eye.

“I was just thinking that you’re taking an awfully long time to finish… If you keep this up we’ll be sitting here ‘till midnight.”, Stiles tried to quip back. You turned the chair once again and playfully threw an eraser at him.

“I’m going to go extra slow now just because you said that.”

“Noooo… Don’t do this to meee… It’s gonna be so boring!”, Stiles dramatically let himself fall back onto his bed. With an exaggerated sigh, he let an arm fall over his eyes. He heard you chuckle and then continue to work. However, it didn’t take long until he heard you set down your pen. A slight squeak of the chair gave away that you got up from your seat. He could feel the mattress dip next to him.

“Boring…? You’re lucky I’m done. And… I think I have something in mind that will be quite entertaining for us…”, still keeping his eyes covered he felt you move around on the bed until there seemed to be pressure next to both sides of his head. This was weird, what were you doing…?

Removing his arm from his face, he looked up at you. Your arms were trapping his head in between them and your legs were on either side of his waist, pretty much straddling him. Your hair was dangling down, framing your face perfectly as a mischievous smile spread across your lips.

“Woah- Wh-what are you doing…?”, the boy underneath you had trouble catching his breath, the question came out as barely more than a whisper.

“Isn’t it obvious?”, you leaned down a little. Your faces were almost touching and you could clearly see his face grow red once again and his eyes looking anywhere but yours.

Before he could say anything you let your body go limp. Without a warning you fell onto the bed with an exhausted sigh, halfway trapping your poor friend underneath you.

“What the hell, man!”, he let out a string of curses as he struggled to heave you off of him. You only let out a hearty laugh as you closed your eyes and relaxed. His bewilderment slowly started to subside while annoyance took its place.

“What? Sleeping is a good way to pass the time… Plus, all this studying was exhaaauuusting.”, you chuckled without opening your eyes. You didn’t notice how his demeanour changed.

“You’re so annoying…”, he huffed and got off of the bed. You turned onto your stomach and opened your eyes to look at him. Stiles grumpily sat down at his desk with his back turned towards you.

“Hey… What’s got your panties in a twist now?”, he didn’t answer your question. “C’mon, Stiles… You know I don’t mean these things…”

“That’s the problem,” he quipped back.

“…I’m sorry…?”, not sure what he meant, you sat up properly. You could tell that this was turning more serious than you would have liked it too.

“You act like all of this is some sort of joke. Did you ever take the time to think about the effect it has on others? Is any of this ever even serious to you? All you do is toy with people's feelings!”, Stiles avoided specifically mentioning himself, it would only make it more embarrassing for him. He glared at you over his shoulder. The boy watched you shrink in on yourself a little. You looked away from him and frowned to yourself. A bit of silence ensued.

Stiles slowly started to feel bad for snapping at you. This was just what you were like, how you showed affection towards others. And he never thought he would ever put you down for your personality. But it was frustrating. He knew that he could never have what he wanted and you just edged him on. Before he could say anything else, you finally broke the silence.

“You’re right… I was being an asshole. I know that most people take stuff like this very seriously, maybe I need to start doing that too. I’m… uhm… I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to annoy or hurt you.”, your voice was small. Avoiding any eye contact, you stood up from the bed and quickly grabbed your backpack. “I’m sorry that you had to put up with all that. I’ll just… It’s best if I leave now.”

Leaving the stuff that was still on his desk behind, you made your way out the door with your head held low. Stiles didn’t know what he had planned to achieve with his outburst but it certainly wasn’t this! Nooo no no. Letting you walk away would do more harm than good.

“Hey. Hey hey hey, wait. (Y/n) wait!”, he jumped up from his chair and leapt through the door. You were still on your way through the hallway and Stiles managed to catch up. He grabbed your arm with a little more force than he wanted to and made you stop in your tracks. He turned you around to face him but you looked down at the floor as if it was the most interesting thing you had ever seen.

“…Look… I shouldn’t have said that. I know this is not an excuse but I just got so frustrated…”

“No, it’s fine. I crossed your boundaries and made you uncomfortable. I get that you would get mad at that.”, you interrupted him.

“It’s…not just that…”, well, Stiles had started it now, he would not be able to back paddle. Was this even a good time to confess? Then again, when would he get the chance to talk about his feelings like this again?

“What do you mean?”, now you finally lifted your head to look at him. Were those… tears in your eyes? Were you upset because he had yelled at you? Or maybe because you thought you were annoying him? Whatever it was, the look in your eyes made his heart sink a little.

“Uh… I was frustrated… because you keep doing this whole friendly flirting thing. And I know that you’ll never mean those words the way I want you to. Because I’ve liked you for quite some time now and every time you compliment me I don’t know if there is actual honesty behind those words. And it hurts a little.”, now it was his turn to look away. He had to get it off his chest. Would that ruin their friendship? Probably.

“Shit, who am I kidding? It hurts a lot, actually. But I still listen and I still embrace it every single time because there’s this tiny glimmer of hope. The hope that you do feel the same, that you actually mean what you say.”, his hands were starting to gesture now. The silence was too loud, he needed to distract himself from it. You weren’t saying anything, just staring at him. What should he do? Should he keep talking?

“I guess what I’m trying to say… Is that I like you, a lot. And that I was hoping that you felt the same way, even though the odds of that are extremely low and I-“, Stiles was cut off by two hands grabbing his cheeks and pulling him downwards. You managed to shut him up by placing your lips on his. The kiss was short but he still felt breathless as you leaned away again. He could’ve melted into the floor right then and there. His face grew redder than he could ever imagine, making you laugh out loud. Finding the right words to say was hard, he stuttered out a few words that never correlated into a sentence.

“Oh no. I think I broke you.”, you laughed as you removed one of your hands from his cheek and wiped the tears that had gathered in your eyes before.

“Y-you did not.”, Stiles finally managed to protest. “But… does that mean…?”

“Yes, you idiot. I like you too. And to be clear, whatever compliments I gave you, I meant every single one of them. Although I have to admit that messing with you was pretty fun.”

The boy let out an exaggerated gasp and stepped away from you.

“I can’t believe it. I fell for someone so cruel that they would purposefully mess with someone’s feelings.”, he theatrically rested the back of his hand against his forehead and acted as if he faint like a Victorian lady.

“What can I say… I guess I must be quite the sadist.”, you wiggled your eyebrows at him and he only groaned.

“Nope, I’m not tolerating this anymore.-“, he stated playfully and wrapped an arm around your waist to drag you back to his bedroom. -“You’re gonna get your punishment for teasing me for so long.”

“Oh~? And what did have in mind, dear?”, you smirked as his face turned red once again. You could have sworn that steam was starting to rise from his head.

“Get your mind out of the damn gutter, pervert!”

[bythenineshards]

i think the reason which makes me angry about acotar & its fandom as a whole is the double standard that exists in the fanbase. rhysand sexually assaulted feyre? 'it's a dark romance so you should go read your vanilla stories & also he did it for her own good'. but when someone says 'well, if it's a dark romance, surely we can have a tamlin redemption arc 'cause he & rhys are the same 'cause he was also protecting feyre 'for her own good'', they'll come at you with pitchforks about how feyre needs someone who is 'feminist' to have a 'healthy relationship' with. like WHICH ONE IS IT??

i am in the hannibal, killing eve & interview with the vampire fandoms. i do like me some mutually toxic relationships that makes you look through characters psyches & pick apart motives & themes.

but acotar goes for this weird stance in its own morality that it doesn't make an ounce of sense. it would've made sense if feyre had left tamlin even if they had a healthy relationship to go join rhysand & then the story could've had a darker turn there. that could've been the basis of a dark romance. or feyre & tamlin's relationship being built on the same lines of toxicity & feyre betraying/hurting tamlin to join rhysand because she wants more power. & tamlin be an equal adversary for them (not antagonist). then the story be continued from there. give me moral ambiguity so that i don't know who to root for. these kinds of things happen in adult high fantasies all the time.

but sjm chooses to compare two equally bad (or 'morally gray', as the stans love to call it) characters and be like 'see, this one is better!!' but if someone points out that they're equally bad you have to watch them do all kinds of unnecessary mental gymnastics & say 'b-but it is a dark romance with dark themes & it's adult!! and rhysand is MORALLY GREY!!! if you can't handle it don't read it!' or the argument of 'it's fiction & they're fae!! you can't apply real world morals to it!!' like sure but where is the CONSISTENCY???

Hey Anon! I could've sworn I answered this. But apparently I didn't.

I can't stand the justifying of Rhys' deeds. Dark Romance books don't feel the need to do that. The guy doesn't need the justifications and hero framing. The books are thrown around as feminist or empowering. The point is that the relationship is a toxic dynamic. Maas has said in interviews that she writes healthy romances. She views this as a healthy relationship.

You know what's funny? The road to hell is paved with what? Good. Intentions. The best villains are people who meant well but had evil methods to achieve that goal. Rhys did x______ because it was for....? Doesn't matter, still did it. Thanos (in the movies) killed half the universe because it would create more resources for those left. Good intention. Horrible idea considering he had the power to create more resources.

You're right that there were so many other angles this could've gone to make it better. Personally I believe the best idea would've been to just have them grow apart. Cuz that happens and it wouldn't have taken Tamlin being abusive to do. Feyre could've fallen for Rhys knowing what he did was wrong. I'm sorry but there was no excuse or justification for working for Amarantha. Rhys should've been punished. However that would mean more work than comparing a retconned Tamlin to Rhys and made Feyre actually flawed.

Ugh... this series... so glad I'm not buying anymore of her books. You know, it's so weird how easily impressed I am with books that do the bare minimum effort to be decent after reading these.

[penultimate-step]

CW for discussion of fictional sexual assault below.

So, the short version of what happened is:

There's this writer on SV called BirdBodhisattva. He writes a quest called "Equestria: The House of the Sun," a dark horror MLP quest that is among the most popular quests on the site, recently winning best ongoing quest award in the 2023 SV awards.

I would like to reiterate the quest is advertised as very dark. Bad things are constantly happening to good people. Graphic depictions of torture, murder, manipulation, sexual assault, are common, and explicitly warned about in the trigger warnings and by the author directly.

Recently, one of the quest's main villains made an attempt to rape the protagonist's friend, after putting the MC in a position where they would not be able to protect them. A vote in the quest then followed, where the players were given a few different options to stop the villain in exchange for various in-game mechanical drawbacks and story consequences, as well as one option to accept the loss and allow their friend to be raped.

After much debate in the chat, the voters chose the option involving using a powerful demon to defeat the villain, in exchange for causing suffering for others all across the world, but offscreen. (Quite similar to the diabolism/demons from Pact.)

BirdBodhisattva was then flagged by the moderators as violating rule 6, which boils down to "mature content on SV must be handled maturely," on the basis that giving players an option where a character could get raped was exploitative behavior, and then threadbanned from their own thread. He appealed this decision to the staff, arguing that he did not intend exploitation, fetishization, or obscenity, and did his best to abide by the rules.

The staff debated amongst themselves for a while - most of them agreed that the author had acted wrongly in some way, but they had a difficult time elucidating how, and the debate seemed to be "do we let him off on a technicality, or punish even though a strict interpretation of the rules would let him off?"

It ended in a contentious vote, with staff ruling 8-7 to keep the punishment. The public discussion afterwards was even more contentious, with several users expressing dismay towards the staff, and others opposing them calling for harsher punishment for BirdBodhisattva. In the end, the thread was locked. Staff is currently discussing further in private channels. While the final outcome is unclear, it is possible that this whole incident will result in a revamp of the rules about permitted content on SV, which would be a major shakeup if it goes through.

If you want to read it for yourself, the staff discussion can be found here, and the public discussion about the staff ruling here.

Alright. that was me trying to give an objective presentation of the facts. not sure how well I succeeded, my original post made clear that I'm kind of opinionated about this, but I tried. now moving into the realm of my own personal take on it:

I'm still kind of boggled by the whole thing. I don't even necessarily disagree with the outcome! Its completely understandable for SV staff to decide they don't want certain content on their site. If they want to stick a ban on 18+ content that is their prerogative, and I have no issue with that. If they want to say discussion of rape, specifically, is not something they feel fits with SV's intended community vibe, that is fine.

My issue is more in the incredibly bad faith it seems some of the staff were taking it. Several staff members said that they found the author personally disgusting, even those who voted in his favor giving insults against them, one even going so far as to claim that they thought the only reason he was writing in the first place was because the thought of rape and making life worse for SV users was their personal sexual fetish.

How discourse-poisoned does one have to be to claim that the only reason an author has to write a horror story is because it's their fetish? come on now, I've literally seen joke posts like that as a parody of the more censorious users on tumblr. I wasn't expecting to see it used in earnest as a mark against someone's character!

The public conversation was even worse, with some users going as far as to say that the author was keeping his readers in the moral equivalent of an abusive relationship, luring them in and tricking them into getting invested with good prose before abusing them by forcing them to read such disturbing content. Which. What? I don't understand? That's such a strange standard to hold anybody to. "If you want to write things I dislike, you need to be bad at it?" The author who claimed to write disturbing horror wrote disturbing horror.

And I am not saying this because I am invested in the story continuing or anything. On the contrary, on a personal level I don't even like the story. When it won the award back in January was the first time I had heard of it, and I tried to read a bit of it before dropping it. The worldbuilding was interesting but I found it too pointlessly nihilistic for my taste. I find these descriptors basically useless outside of subjective opinion, so forgive me for using them, but - I thought it was some grimdark nonsense. And that is the opinion of someone who stopped reading way before (literal years out of game) it started getting to all the darker stuff that the story is being investigated over. But even as someone who is only tangentially familiar with the story this whole thing feels weird to me. I knew even from the little I read that this was a story about a morally objectionable person making choices between doing morally objectionable things, it doesn't feel like the author was hiding it at all. Getting attacked for this specifically feels strange to me.

In short - I think it's totally fine for SV to decide they do not want this kind of content on their site at all. I would not object to a rules change. But I think any change should be done with the clear eyed knowledge that it was done to aim for a specific site tone, not because they think this author or horror in general is morally objectionable to write. Staff should not invent reasons that things they don't like are morally wrong to exist - if it is not suited for SV that is fine, but that should be acknowledged outright. That is what kind of bothers me, on principle.

just learned about the recent SV drama from earlier this week.

Gotta say, I don't like how this was handled at all. has kind of lowered my opinion of SV as a site a bit. very strange mindsets from almost everybody involved, on all sides. has me reconsidering my own thoughts on moderation a little. not really sure what an ideal course of action would be here or in similar cases.

for all of ao3's flaws I am increasingly convinced that their almost entirely hands off policy might be the best way to go about some things

[iamanartichoke]

Aren't u tired of the "Taika hates tom" thing? I don't think its tom. Taika just doesn't like the british

(Sorry anon, I started to answer this last week and then completely forgot about it until last night, bc I was thinking about Tom's apparent lack of attendance at the London Thor 4 premiere.)

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I don't think I ever got invested in any of the "does Taika like Tom y/n?" wank in the first place. I mean, I'm sure I've been snarky about it, but it's not something I gave a great deal of thought or speculation to.

There's a real issue of lack of ability to separate the person from the work, both in fandom and in life. This is not an issue that's limited to just one side of the wank or even just this fandom (I mean, the whole ideology of purity culture stems from the belief that one cannot separate reality from fiction and therefore fiction depicting Certain Things is inherently ~problematic~ and immoral, but that's another conversation), but it's an issue that is at the root of the "Taika vs. Tom" wank.

By that, what I mean is that my perception of Ragnarok is that Taika was, at best, dismissive of Loki as a character and, at worst, actively disliked him. His comments about Loki being a wannabe goth or emo space orphan or whatever, his "jokes" about Loki getting locked in a porta-potty, etc (deleted, but still scripted and filmed) are indicative, I feel, of an overall sense of disdain toward the character - perhaps coupled with a vested interest in actively making Thor look better to compensate for Loki overshadowing Thor in the previous films.

Now, whether or not Taika actually feels that way or if that's just, like, his sense of humor, man is impossible to say; all I can do is speculate based on the evidence presented (ie, the aforementioned comments and deleted scenes).

^^ This is just my opinion, I'm not asking anyone to agree with me or stating that these are definitive facts. What I'm saying, though, is that I am certainly not the only person to have this opinion and when viewing Taika's personal feelings behind-the-scenes through the "ugh, Loki" sort of lens he's put out there, it's very easy to fall into the assumption that Taika dislikes or hates Tom, or that Taika and his bff Chris were sort of "conspiring" against Tom to ensure he/Loki didn't steal the show again, etc. when that may not be the case at all.

We don't know. We don't know what these people's feelings are - we can parse things from what they say publicly, but even public statements are filtered for, yknow, consumption by the public and aren't necessarily 100% factual, either. Additionally, we don't know what happens behind-the-scenes, we don't know what happens in negotiations and what happens once the execs get their hands on the product or who's ultimately responsible for what, and how. And this is the case for all entertainment, not just the Thor franchise and not just Marvel.

When you're enmeshed in fandom, it's easy to let the lines between person and product get blurred; it's easy to get so invested in these people that we feel like we know them - we're on a "first name basis" irt how we refer to them, their lives and their work is on public display, and we are increasingly living in a world that wants to categorize everything as black or white. All of which makes wank like "Taika hates Tom" flourish. (And, incidentally, is what makes the anti "anyone involved with the Loki series" wank flourish in its spaces, as well, like for example how some people prefer to believe Mike Waldron or whomever made a shitty series bc he had a personal vendetta against Loki bc of Reasons, rather than believe what is more likely the truth: dude's a mediocre writer and part of a larger team that set out to explore the character in ways that are inconsistent with previous characterization [which is kind of the point, though, in that the whole premise is Loki as a variant; I digress] and regardless of the fans' emotional responses, the motivation is Not That Deep.)

Which was an awful lot of word vomit to basically say yes, I am tired of the "Taika hates Tom" thing but in my defense I didn't put much stock in it in the first place; however, I understand where it came from and why it's still a Thing in this fandom, so it just ... it is what it is.

As for Taika not liking the British, well, I'm pretty sure that's an entirely separate conversation but also, again, this is an assumption of Taika's feelings based on limited interpretation of his public words and action and whether or not it has any merit is anyone's guess.

Incidentally, all of that aside, no one has to like anyone else. Sometimes people just don't vibe and neither side is wrong for that. So make of that what you will, too.

[bonesandthebees]

Hi hi! I was just wondering how you stayed motivated writing long fics?

Every time I try I'm always super excited to start and I have a great idea, but midway through I end up losing motivation and hating my writing. How do you avoid falling into this, or just writers block in general?

y'know I've definitely answered this before but I can't find the post on my tumblr so I'll make sure to tag it properly this time lmao. forgive me if this isn't super coherent, I've definitely answered questions like this more eloquently in the past.

this is long so putting it under the cut

basically, it took me a long time to figure out how to stay motivated writing longer fics. like, I've been writing fanfic since 2015ish (and I've been writing fiction stories in general since roughly 2013), and before I started writing for mcyt I'd only finished 6 multi chapter fics. Over the course of 5 years of fic writing, I had only completed 6 multi chapter fics. now, in the past year and a half (to nearly 2 years) of writing for mcyt, I've finished 13 multi chapter fics. quite a jump lmao.

so there's multiple reasons for this. one thing is that writing longer stories takes skill and stamina. you have to build up your stamina over years of writing practice, so that's one part of it. another thing I've noticed also is just the way your brain develops as you get older? like, I definitely have an easier time focusing on a single story for long periods of time now than I did when I was 16-17 and I do think just my brain developing is a factor. because even pre-mcyt, out of those 6 multi chapter fics I finished, 4 of them I'd finished when I was 19-20. compare that to the fact that I've been writing fanfic since I was 15, and yeah it's obvious my brain has done a bit more cooking which helps me stick with one thing for longer lmao

but there is also a planning method that I figured out that really skyrocketed my ability to complete longer works. despite having been writing on a nearly daily basis for 7 years, I didn't actually figure this out until I was starting clinic. and I'm not saying this planning method will work for everyone. you have to experiment with different styles of planning to find out what works for you. I experimented for years jumping between no planning at all versus planning everything out to a minute detail and still found myself growing bored. eventually I found a very happy medium that works perfectly for me, but again, it won't work for everyone. this is just a planning method that appeals to my own brain and ability to focus.

basically, I have to strike a balance between planning a little bit but not planning too much. when I'm going to start writing a story that I know is going to take me a long time to complete, I have two criteria I need it to meet:

1) I need to know what the beginning and the ending is going to be. When you break down a story to its bare essentials, you're trying to get your protagonist from Point A to Point B. Whether that mean in a literal sense of travel, or a metaphorical sense of trying to build a relationship between characters or have character growth. Something is changing in your character's environment, whether it's the world around them or themself, so I have to know what that end point will be before I start so I know what I'm working towards.

2) I need to have some ideas for the middle, but I can't know it specifically. Usually I'll have ideas for several scenes I know I won't be able to write until a bit later in the story because a certain amount of development has to happen for the plot beat to occur. I don't know where these scenes exactly are going to go, but I keep them in my head and add them in as a I plan out my chapters while I write. I think "can I include this scene yet at this point in the story?" and if I can, well, then that's a very exciting chapter for me to write.

if the story idea I have meets those two criteria, then I know I have a viable story. from there, when I actually start writing it, I only plot out 2-3 chapters at a time. this makes it so I don't know exactly how we're going to get from point A to point B in the story. I don't know what context exactly is going to lead up to the big dramatic middle scenes I have in my head. it keeps it exciting for me so I don't lose interest. I don't know exactly how my story is going to go until I write it, especially since I tend to stray from my outline and add a lot of scenes just as I write the chapter as well.

so just try and experiment with your planning methods and try to find something that works! but also don't feel pressured to stick with a single story if you don't want to. this is fanfic. you're doing this for fun and it should stay fun for you. that's what's most important!

hope that helped!