#the second i wrote that first line of dialogue i just died | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

katyspersonal · 2 months

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So like... thoughts on Messmer's crew? Not the man himself, just the guys he hired.

I actually found the remaining two Fire Knights just recently! :D I didn't post about it yet, but I assume this is all of them! ...I hope. Shadow's Keep has too many turns. Who knows.

This is sweet how they all are close with Messmer and stood with him no matter what.... Unlike THESE traitors:

(Sorry I forgot to copy the screenshots so have bad phone images fshhds) Like @heraldofcrow said earlier, it is really stupid how they could accept like genocides and whatever but drew the line at him being a snake sdfhfghds Well, Fire Knights definitely didn't!

Queelign was the first one I've met, and apparently in the wrong order since I missed him in Belurat and had to go back there! And I instantly hated that zealot, even before I had the picture of what exactly Fire Knights were!

^ As if Queelign's dialogue was not enough, he also dropped THIS! The reason I will ALWAYS respect Miyazaki no matter what is that he always finds the way to throw a jab at this particular grudge at human race fsdhfdsh

He is still a terrible person, but since then I warmed up to him when I've found some potential in him! He is not only the most fleshed out from the Fire Knights, but also in JUST the right way! He is very passionate and fanatical, but also very genuine and naive with his feelings. And he not only wants to be like Messmer, but also has very strong fixation on Marika! Like I keep joking, she is such a bad mother that even people who aren't her children have mommy issues over her fhhdsf

But he also, interestingly, reflects that weaker, childish part of Messmer that still wants his mom to love him. Whereas Messmer is at least good at repressing it, with Queelign it is completely loose and earnest, and the guy is probably not aware! He IS like a little version of himself in this way.. Not sure whether Messmer dislikes him, or pities him, or maybe at least several times told him to NOT try to be like him! In any case, it is really cool how there is the guy who gives that interesting insight. You could write headcanons essays on the psychology between Queeling and Messmer, or just Queelign. I wrote an essay on what could transpire if Tarnished healed him instead (I believe he dies when we find him, from deadly wounds since we only access his chamber after beating him twice).

Like, you can work with this character, you see what I mean? I never found a similar rambling potential in, say, Alfred or Lautrec. They're religious fanatics too, yet that was exactly ALL I could tell about them. MEANWHILE I've made like FIVE posts about Queelign already and they are all substancial! And, boy, any writer WANTS a strictly cruel, fanatical, irredeemable, negative character to give something to talk about besides just kicking the topic of them being bad. If you are writer, remember to similarly give the topics of discussion to your villains! I agree with what Izunia said earlier:

+ Correction though: Petrus does NOT belong in the list of fanatics xd He has opposite problem! He is a selfish, opportunistic, corrupt, cowardly parasite that benefits from the religious institution and doesn't actually HAVE any beliefs he will kill and die for. He kills for his benefit, like how he killed Reah after her being rescued clearly so she would not rat him out, ie risk his position as elite cleric! There is a good reason why of all cleric/religious/etc characters he is the only one who has no simps!

This guy kicked my ass a couple of times, but if Fire Knights are Messmer's most important people, that makes him second most important person in his army? ...okay third, after his wife Rellana fsdjhdfhssd Really clever how only the captain wears a helmet fashioned after this creature, since he keeps Messmer's military forces in check here

1) I also assume that the "loneliness" Wego experienced was from having outlived the people he held dear as not only being in the military but also elder! Because why else would he be strictly lonely, if he has friends within the covenant? Like look right here, he had a pupil! :p 2) This implies that disagreeing with Messmer was a huge risk.. but not only Messmer spared him, but also actually listened to his request!

So basically, Salza is okay with burning people and their homes, but he draws the line at destruction of like, culture, knowledge and ancient architecture fshfds And not he alone:

It were Fire Knights who asked Messmer to have the Specimen Storehouse, so there is at least historical remains about the species they destroyed! So as funny as the double standard looks, it makes a lot of sense; like it was mentioned earlier, all Fire Knights were nobles at the Erdtree! Of course they have it internalised to preserve culture and knowledge for the future! They all had to be well-educated and well-cultured people, not sympathising with the type of hatred that aims to erase as much as history! And at the same time, being educated didn't help them to consider not participating in the HoLy cRuSaDe to begin with..

And this is so human. It is very realistic. There is a lingering misconception that it is ignorance, poor quality of living, low class, bad past or all at once that makes people prone to crime, but in reality there are criminals in every class and every demographic. We should not attribute the root of all evil, crimes and harmful prejudices only to concrete group, because this is always just a matter of multiple people gathering and deciding to do something. When it is not mistreatment and despair that drives people to evil, it is power and corruption, because people ARE evil by nature.

_______________

So yeah, I really like what they did with this covenant! They did well with giving the sense of each of them being an individual by naming and distinguishing five characters like this! For Soulsborne games, this is rich x) They have some tweaks to their outfits or weapons, they have characterisation that makes them unlike each other, and THIS is what's wild; how so many people that clearly can and always could think for themselves ended up here! Queelign too! I could speculate that Alfred has been indoctrinated and brainwashed since young age, or that Lautrec lost his marbles after some sort of grasp by Fina, but Queelign apparently was no less of a noble that decided to go like his peers, nor he'd be any more embraced by Marika than everyone else with grace! He is Just Like This fshdfhs

They made the covenant very real an interesting. (Also rich for creating OCs if you like writing awful people and want to be close with Messmer 😔)

#elden ring #elden ring dlc #fire knight queelign #(since 50% of the post is just him lol fsdhfhds)#(I know too much attention to this prick but like I said he offers TOPICS)#ask replies #elden ring reference #elden ring observation #fire knights

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hamartia-grander · 11 months

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Alrighty here’s mah lil ranty rant (But long, many apologies I dunno how I could shorten it)

Let’s start with Ada bc mommy- I mean mommy- I mean- (/j)

Ada Wong:

-So I see a lot of people trash Ada for the fact her personality seems to be more cold. She has distant she’s cruel (although she still seems to have lines she won’t cross, like with Wesker and the Las Plagas sample). I see people complain about that but I would like to make a hot take, here: it’s actually better. She’s a mercenary. She’s a gun for hire- her job has to be cold because she could be betraying her friends at any given second. In the older games, she was sort of just… I don’t know… A bit too human for the job, and the role in the story that she is meant to fill. I see people describing her as a Bella, and honestly, I strongly disagree. In fact, I would argue that the original was more of a Bella then the remakes. This is because all she was really there is for the generic “Ooh look pretty woman, bad ass eye candy” trope. I’m not saying that she didn’t have any depth as a character- I’m just saying that the remake gave her much more credit as a character, and made her much more interesting.

all right, moving onto the old man. (#1 Wesker hater over here I’m sorry I’m not sorry lol)

Albert Wesker:

-I know that I hate this guy, but even I have to appreciate that out of quite a few of the Weskers that have been made, this version is just better written. I see people complain that he is too angry and honestly, I disagree. The fact that he has a hidden anger, makes sense from a character perspective. And he’s getting increasingly more cheesed off at Spencer for obvious reasons. No wonder he’s pissed. Personally, I think the fact that they’re showing that he has emotions- he’s just learned to control them- is honestly much more compelling. I still hate the guy, but I can see where he’s coming from- in a twisted and a messed up way.

yeah. That’s it l. that’s all I got for him. I don’t really like him that much so he doesn’t deserve a whole essay like Ada imo. (Still like his character, though he’s very interesting.)

that’s my rant. Thanks for hearing me out -> I know this was ridiculously long. That’s why I asked permission first. I basically just wrote an entire essay in your asks and I am so sorry lmao

hjadsg no need to apologise. I may have to contest you for #1 wesker hater tho,,, 👀 I hate his guts too

BUT you're absolutely right the DLC added so much depth to their characters. and personally made wesker MORE hate-able to me personally because we just further see how messed up he is, to the point where even Ada - who has had to numb herself to the details of the job to survive - had visible negative reactions to his genocidal nonsense. I loved Lily's performance in the base game but she especially got to shine in the DLC, she absolutely nailed the cold look with emotion hidden underneath. Ada's cold exterior is her armour against her own emotions, she can't take a second to feel as that could be the second she dies, she doesn't have the luxury of emotional vulnerability; even though she does feel, she does care, she cannot afford to let herself. And little things like eye movements, lip twitches, subtle body language, and her inflections were all techniques Lily used to portray that tumultuous relationship between Ada and her feelings, and Lily did fucking amazing at it. Best Ada performance ever. Ada's never been allowed that depth before because she's always had to be palatable to the male audience :) so I'm glad she's finally getting it. And Wesker finally feels like a real villain, rather than just another power hungry white guy (which, he very much is, but now there's depth to it lol). Wesker's dialogue in the DLC is scary, and it makes the audience more aware of what exactly he believes and what his motives are. This DLC added so much to the base game that really drives it as my favourite RE game.

#and ofc Ada is mommy #Ada Wong #albert wesker #resident evil 4 remake #Separate Ways #resident evil 4 #resident evil analysis #asks

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merionettes · 6 months

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part 1 of how rubicon got written is here. this is part 2, aka the essay about etc.

the thing about the storyboarding/drafting process that there is no way to describe is how totally obsessed i was for the duration. afterwards i tweeted something like, this is the closest i've ever experienced to demonic possession. i would get up, write all day—like, all day—and go to bed. turn off the lights. then i would just lie wide awake in the dark with lines and scenes and dialogue scrolling through my head until i gave in and opened my notes app. i could not turn it off even if i wanted to. and i didn't want to, i was riding that streak as far as it would take me. because i couldn't look down, right? i could sense what i was attempting to do and anything other than total tunnel vision full speed ahead eyes on the prize would mean i had to acknowledge it.

(context of what made this possible: i was unemployed at the time.)

for the first ~50k or so i was afraid that at any minute i could falter. when i got to the nationals meltdown, that was when i knew i could do it. like, no matter what happened after that, i had the willpower and the chops and i knew where i was going. even if the streak died.

but it didn't. i wrote 100k in a little under 4 weeks. i've never experienced anything like that in my creative life.

—then obviously i had to get a new job and come back down to earth and it took 21 months to get from there to posting the epilogue. still. i will probably be chasing that high for the rest of my life. that was the part that like… made the rest of it possible. no matter how difficult or frustrating it was. that generated the roadmap.

i've talked about this before in comments but i had insanely strong opinions about what was "right" and what wasn't. sylvain's narrative voice was a huge part of that. it's inextricable from the content; it shaped the story; it is the story. for the first couple months it also made me an unhinged stylistic tyrant. if there was one single unnecessary word that struck me as inorganic, as existing solely to make the sentence more digestible or to convey information beyond the fourth wall, it had to go. i could not rest until it did.

once again: this is not generally the relationship i have with writing. lol. it's the demonic possession talking. this is why you have a ton of sentence fragments and stylistic tics and a refusal to let one single shred of information into the text that did not strike me as something sylvain would plausibly think or acknowledge he was thinking. and like, yeah. probably it didn't always make for the smoothest reading experience or the most satisfying narrative development. i'm dead certain there are people who picked this fic up and the bumps drove them out of their mind until they threw in the towel. i just didn't care.

part of that was a reaction to my own old style—you know, the discomfort of shedding old skin. i'd look at those early scene attempts and see all the habits and crutches i'd been trying to move away from over the last two years and double down on The Voice. but part of it… i would get early feedback that wasn't at all wrong, like "what if [clarifying narration]," "what if [more interaction]," and i'd just think, but that's not true. in exactly those words! which is crazy.

(this is why it was fortunate this was fanfiction i was writing for free, i didn't have to compromise my bonkers experience any more than i wanted to.)

to be clear this feeling didn't last two years. i was eventually able to edit like a normal person. it did last probably longer than ideal. and the point when i was no longer running on unleaded creative adrenaline was when i started to really struggle with the middle of the story. i had to make choices as a writer, instead of relying on the purity of my divine vision or whatever, and i second-guessed myself a lot. it was much easier to feel that absolute bone-deep certainty of Right and Wrong, True and False. and the thought of fucking up when i'd gotten so far was unbearable—like, being so close to making the thing in my head reality and then dropping the ball and breaking the suspension of disbelief.

distance also made it possible to perceive what i was doing and be like, jesus mer what the fuck are you doing. why are you devoting so much of your time to a hobby, why are you investing so much of your life in something you will never be able to truly share, why are you living in a hole with no one else in it. why are you putting yourself through the wringer to get it down "right." why does it matter if it's as good as it can be. why do you care. why is this worth it.

i assume this was pretty obvious before this post, but if not it must be now. this story isn't really about figure skating. for me it's about writing; who knows what it's about for you. i didn't sit down and think, great, felix will be a metaphor. that's just how it happens.

the experience of writing a novel for the first time: i'm saying this with my whole chest because at one point i wouldn't have, aloud. but what's the point in calling it anything else? i know exactly how much i invested in this. i'm the only one who can know. that's sort of the point.

here's a giant collage of the inside of my head. i made it for myself and i take it very seriously. not exactly groundbreaking to say this is the ultimate exercise in solipsism. when you're doing that—what greater gift is there than to have someone else meet you in exactly the same place. any writer would kill for the kind of responses this story has gotten, and i don't mean praise. i mean the close reads, the free response essays, the total and complete validation that this thing inside your head that only you can see is real, actually. when i say thank you, it's not for liking it or praising it—it's for taking it seriously. i loved this thing. i still love this thing. thank you for taking it seriously.

#rubicon #writing

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stellavesperis · 28 days

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Death in Days Undying

Hi! I'm finally getting around to putting out some of my lyrics for my pet project The Silmarillion (Noldolantë?) Musical I've been working on. This song is the second track of the musical (third if you include the overture), and it's about Miriel and Finwë. (the first is called Of Eldamar and it's the Hadestown Road to Hell, Alexander Hamilton, Great Comet Prologue track of the piece, so to speak). Since female Silm characters are so few (but always epic) I wanted to make sure that Miriel, in her limited appearance, gets a chance to have a song in which she is the principal actor. Additionally, I really like the notion of Fëanor getting many of his qualities from his mother, so I tried to explore that as best as I could here. Anyway, here’s Death in Days Undying. I hope you like it :D

(These lyrics are still subject to change, mostly for metrical purposes)

Verse 1 In the days before the sun and Moon first rose Miriel Þerindë wove

Her craft was clever Her spirit sang He caught her eyes- High King Finwë

Chorus 1 Love beneath Gold light of day We knew no sorrow Death knew no name

[instrumental] [they dance together]

Verse 2: So soon after they swooned They were wed And thoughts of anything else fled

She handed her whole heart To whatever she worked Weaving, no more-- She planned for birth

Chorus 2:

Love beneath Gold light of day They lent their whole love To their child on the way

Miriel: “Our days of love Have just begun. I have so much to give To our unborn one.”

Verse 3:

During the blissful days A boy was born And High King Finwë was overjoyed

But Miriel was weakened By the warring of birth Her spirit dimmed Her heart held no mirth

[dialogue explaining and transitioning some narrative things]

Verse 4:

In the gardens of Lorien She resides And she expires where she lies A new name now She takes with her last sigh “Firiel” -- she who died

[she rises and walks with Námo off stage]

Final chorus: Death in the Undying Days From the labor of life Her fire fades

Brokenness In Blessed Realm She leaves the king And her son to themselves

These lyrics aren't quite finalized- I have some complaints about the meter that I haven't bothered to fix yet lol (for example: ending that line with "the" in the final chorus forces it to be stressed and I'm not a huge fan of that; I also meant for it to be "death in days undying" for the alliterative meter, but I forgot that when I first wrote the lyrics and unfortunately, the rhymes all have to do with "day" now and I haven't bothered to workshop it yet. And I also have concerns that the placement of "wove" in the first verse renders it unintelligible. And then I just got lazy with the alliterative meter so it's only semi-alliterative now. So yeah, a lot of complaints, actually).

I'm practicing an instrumental piano version of this to share eventually-- I only halfway notated this as I've been recording it on guitar more than anything-- so when that's done I'll share it so you can have an idea of what the melody sounds like. :)

and @eri-pl here's the song I was referring to when we were talking about humanized artifacts as characters in a stage adaptation!

(please credit me if you repost this! If you want to see the rest of my ideas for this I have linked them in my pinned post)

#Silmarillion stage adaptation idea #noldolantë #miriel þerindë #finwë #silmarillion #tolkien

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glorified-red · 2 years

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how do you make your writing do poetic? Cause I see my writing and I’m like what is this hot garbage compared to your brilliance?

Here's literally all the top writing advice I've learned in the past two-ish years because I assure you, my writing was also hot garbage, but hot garbage is still smokin hot bbbyy so dont give up

(brief mentions of smut in passing):

Honestly a lot of it comes down to Quantity > Quality and its not something I talk about very often on here. When I first started writing, I posted almost everyday, if not multiple times a week, consistently. I was writing headcanons of anything I could think of and stupid stories I saw on TikTok, I was answering requests the second they got in my inbox.

How I did it? I just wrote. I didn't think about it.

I was writing because it was fun, not because I wanted the writing itself to be good, I just wanted it to be (insert encanto song here). Some of my older fics are terrible, I reread some of the content and I cant make it past the first few paragraphs without cringing, Ive even considered deleting some or completely revising them because of it.

But that'd defeat the point.

I keep those fics (as terrible as they are) so you guys can see that I too, used to suck at writing. I didn't know what a hyphen was or an em dash, let alone an en dash. I didn't know how to properly punctuate AT ALL (future me, an english major, literally dies inside).

I focused a lot on dialogue when I started out, was it OOC? Probably. Did I care? Fuck no. I wrote anything because the more I wrote the better I got.

Unfortunetly overtime I became obssesed with the Quality of my work and since then I've written very little in comparison (rip my inbox being open to requests lmao). Has the quality gone up? Hell yea. But has my motivation and insecurities suffered? Oh fuck yea.

I focused so much on making my narration more poetic that my dialogue talent suffered tremendously. Which is why I'm trying to get back into more random, silly one shots because goddamit quantity > quality.

And you can see this in Nightmare because that was the series where I started getting creative with prose, pacing, and narration. That series was written and is still being written for me and me only (yall get to see it as a little treat). Its my experiment baby where I throw words at the wall and pray they stick, I talk in metaphors and pray to god it makes sense.

Nightmare is my writing exercise journal basically, everything I learn from Nightmare goes into other fics.

You can easily see how much I've grown as a writer and how because Its just one big experiment. Have you read the beginning of that? It fucking sucks, but the last six chapters? Arguably some of my most poetic work.

Big Brother Intuition was the start of me taping into the emotional side of stories and telling a story through internal dialogue and letting everything else slip in between the lines. Again, it was an exercise. The sole purpose of that fic was to challenge myself to write from Tim's POV for the first time and to write something I myself, experienced and to translate feeling and emotions into legible words.

This is when I started to learn the best writing advice I've ever learned to date that I will scream at anyone who lets me proofread their work:

Show. Don't Tell.

This is huge in writing, especially if you want to write something poetic.

"He walked across the carpeted room."

"Static clung to his socks as they dragged across the carpeted room."

In the first line, you're telling the reader whats going on like youre reading from a powerpoint. In the second, you never actually specify that he is walking, but the reader can tell because you show it visually. They can picture it in their head clearly that not only is he walking, but his shoulders are probably slouched because hes dragging his feet.

Did I ever mention the posture of the character? Nope. Did I mention he's tired? Nope. But can you picture it in the subtext without any more information but that line? Yes (assuming you read into things like me but for the sake of argument just say yes).

(this is also where word connotation comes into play but thats a whole other rant)

The reader can vividly picture your story without you having to spell it out for them.

Now bear in mind, you also have to treat your readers like idiots (sorry not sorry guys).

I like to picture the brain as an empty room, a completely blank canvas. Your story should be vivid enough that by the end of it, the reader has the entire room filled with detail.

When you start writing, you plop your character into that empty room. But how is that character interacting with the environment if its just an empty room? Things only get added into the room if the character interacts with it. If the character doesnt, then you're just telling the reader what to imagine.

What's poetic about that?

If you don't describe the setting, your readers will be confused and won't be able to immerse themselves into the story because they'll be too busy trying to figure out where the door is instead of paying attention to anything else. But reading a long paragrpah describing the room in detail is so much more boring than if the character interacts with it themselves.

(Telling the reader theres a dresser by the bed instead of making the character plop their keys on the dresser before climbing into bed)

You have to specify everything your character is doing to the environment around them so the walls turn from white to red, the room suddenly has a bed in it, theres a dresser next to the bed that needs to be sanded down because the character felt a prick on their skin.

Little things like that make your story more entertaining.

Which starts with the five senses.

I did two Five Senses writing challenges ages ago as a way to get used to writing the senses solo, I highly recommend doing the same (in my masterlist :P). Whenever I write smut, pain, comfort, you name it, the only thing going through my head is "What are they feeling, what are they hearing, what are they smelling, etc"

If you can work with the senses, showing will be so much easier to do because senses is how you show things.

"She felt like she was going to cry."

"The rims of her eyes started to burn."

In the first one, youre telling the audience what shes feeling. In the second, youre showing it. The main difference is that I imagined what it feels like to start to cry (that burn) so I could use a more "poetic" approach but really, I'm just showing instead of telling. That's the difference between hot garbage and poetic writing.

I often like to overexplain things to my audience, I pretend that my readers know nothing before starting my fic, whether its a series or a simple oneshot. This way anyone can read any of my work regardless of if they know Damian has a fucking metal spine or not beause who knows niche stuff like that yk? Its a story, make it enjoyable to anyone because they dont need pre-existing knowledge.

Which brings me to THE MOST IMPORTANT THING ABOUT WRITING EVER.

Come here, this is your bread and butter okay?? This shit is what makes your writing glorious:

Whatever you do, do not make the reader hesitate.

If the person reading your work has to pause what theyre doing to reread a sentence because it doesnt make sense?

You've failed as a writer.

If the reader has to pause what theyre doing to look up a word because it doesnt make sense?

You've failed as a writer.

If the reader keeps losing their place in your story because its dragging?

You've failed as a writer.

Harsh? I know.

The entire point of writing is to tell a story well enough that the readers can fully immerse themselves into your story. If they hesitate for any reason, it breaks the immersion and suddenly that arent ✨reading✨ anymore, theyre R E A D I N G

It's boring.

Now this manifests in soooo many ways and I see it in every fic I've proofread. Assume your readers know nothing!!! I mean it!!! If youre detailed enough in your imagery, your reader will be able to imagine the story without having to readjust their visual (I'm looking at you smut writers, I have no clue what position they're in right now and I'm more confused than I am turned on).

I get bored if the paragraph is more than 4 sentences long because its intimidating to look at, its clunky and boring and it doesnt flow AT ALL. This is when readers skim your work to get to dialogue because dialogue is more easily digestible. (but please, make it obvious who's speaking because If I have to reread an entire convo just to figure out who's talking, you're done and Im moving onto the next fic)

Why? Because the punctuation is easy to digest.

Why do you think my paragraphs are so small? Why do you think my narration is sprinkled in between dialogue? Why do you think I switch between dialogue tags and actions?

So I dont lose reader interest (will I still lose some? oh duh, but not nearly as much as I would if I didn't do these things)

You cannot assume your readers know your story the same way you do, you have a specific picture in your head. Do they? Do they even know what they're supposed to be imagining right now?

And thats where the senses come in!!!

See? It all connects.

Do writing exercises, I promise, they actually work. I treat every fic as a writing exercise.

Self Care Day? Dialogue Training.

Exhaust and Exhaustion? Juggling Characters Training.

Petnames? Tense training.

The list goes on and I could explain it all in so much detail but I'll spare you the boredom.

TLDR:

Write anything and write a lot, even if its shitty, because the more you write the more experience you'll get.

Practice with sensory imagery.

Do writing exercises.

Be creative and visual instead of strict and bulletproof esque --- show, dont tell.

Treat your readers like they know nothing and treat them and their attention span like thats the holy grail.

Be creative and literally just have fun and I promise you will see so much growth in your writing.

Please let me know if yall want me to expand on this or to explain anything, my english major brain is literally hardwired for these types of discussions.

#ah yes #word vomit #i was not expecting this to be so long #sorry not sorry #asks #writing advice #writing tips #writing help

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courfee · 5 months

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20 Qᴜᴇꜱᴛɪᴏɴꜱ ꜰᴏʀ ꜰɪᴄ ᴡʀɪᴛᴇʀꜱ

Thank you for the tag @snarky-magpie <333

1. How many works do you have on A03? 14 published, 1 hidden.

2. What’s your total Ao3 word count? 315,642

3. What fandoms do you write for? harry potter (mostly marauders and back in the day on ff.de also next gen, tho there is a golden era one happening atm), les miserables, and i used to write a handful of doctor who drabbles

4. What are your top five fics by kudos? 1. Operation Walburga's Arbitrary No Kissing Ever Rule 2. blindspot 3. All My Theory Complete 4. Borrow My Name 5. If you ask nicely

5. Do you respond to comments? Usually yes, though I am very very bad with responding (in general, not just ao3 this is a all messages kinda problem) and sometimes im off of ao3 for a solid 3 months before i check my inbox again. i am so sorry for all that, i do read all the comments when i get email notifs for them, i just often dont have the spoons to reply then and there.

6. What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending? Probably On Lies And Spies since it's a canon compliant peter fic, tho i think my prongsfoot fic might also be up there for competiton... (if we go off of ao3 i am currently writing a basically everyone dies fic and have written an angsty fred&george os on my first fic account)

7. What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending? I'd say operation wanker, probably

8. Do you get hate on fics? mm yeah.. amtc specifically... idk what it is with that fic but ive had all kinds of things said there... people who hated the ending, people who thought no one should ever forgive james, people who said no one should ever forgive sirius, people being just in general mean (and not even in english??).. especially the comments in the bookmarks suck, ive had several people rate that fic out of 10, have had people write an entire list of what i should have done different etc etc... it sucks cause i still like that fic a lot, the first long fic ive ever finished, but its reached a point where im scared when people tell me theyre going to start reading it :(

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind? Yeahh ive written one jegulus smut fic. it was supposed to be a one shot for practicing purpose of seeing if i can do it and got slightly out of hand....

10. Do you write crossovers? What’s the craziest one you’ve written? I've started writing one chronicles of syntax hogwarts au before and i did a comic forever ago where the 10th doctor and rose end up in hogwarts meeting the next gen crew

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen? Not to my knowledge

12. Have you ever had a fic translated? someone started translating amtc

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before? I've had plans, but we haven't yet gotten beyond the planning stage. would love to try it some time tho!!

14. What’s your all time favorite ship? whatever the fuck james and sirius have going on, their relationship has been my favourite for all eternity

15. What’s a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will? My jegulus Krabat AU. I so badly want to have it written because i want to read it, but unfortunately the world is just not something i like writing in all that much

16. What are your writing strengths? Writing (un)healthily codependent friendships (aka james and sirius, (or the triumvirate)) and probably also consistency with little details

17. What are your writing weaknesses? Plotting. I suck at it. i am very much a paper thinker, so if i dont write i cant think

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic? depends on the context? it has to work with the story line and characters and id rather use it sparingly

19. First fandom you wrote for? harry potter (my first published fic was next gen, my second marauders all the way back in 2011)

20. Favourite fic you’ve written? probably either operation wanker or on lies and spies

no pressure tagging @messymoony @static-radio-ao3 @otrtbs @iceprinceofbelair @alarainai @delicris

#hp #tagged #mine

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ljones41 · 1 year

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“TOMORROW NEVER DIES” (1997) Review

"TOMORROW NEVER DIES" (1997) Review Recently, I had watched "TOMORROW NEVER DIES", Pierce Brosnan’s second outing as James Bond. Roger Spottiswoode directed the 1997 Bond movie. It co-starred Michelle Yeoh, Jonathan Pryce and Teri Hatcher.

When I first saw "TOMORROW NEVER DIES" many years ago, I had a low opinion of it. I wish I could say that my opinion of the movie has improved over the years after this latest viewing . . . but I would be lying. TOMORROW NEVER DIES had some highlights, but unfortunately, it possessed more negative traits than positive ones. I think it would be best if I list both the good and the bad about this movie: Positive: *What else can I say? Michelle Yeoh. *I found Bond’s romantic scene with a Danish linguist rather sexy. *The film's foreign locations – Hamburg and Thailand (as Vietnam) - looked more lovely, thanks to Robert Elswit's cinematography. *Bond and Wai-Lin’s escape from Caver building in Vietnam proved to be one of the better stunts I have seen in the entire Bond franchise. *Thanks to Roger Spottiswoode's direction and Michel Arcand's editing, I thought the Saigon motorcycle chase was handled very well. *Pierce Brosnan gave a very natural performance, especially during his scenes with Yeoh. *Oddly enough, I rather liked Vincent Shirerpelli as Dr. Hamburg. He proved to be a more interesting henchman than Mr. Stamper. And his death proved to be even more interesting. *Mr. Gupta seemed like a pretty sharp and cool guy. *The movie's main theme song, performed by Sheryl Crow - what can I say? I realize it is not regarded as one of the best theme songs from the Bond franchise. But I have always had a soft spot for it, thanks to Crow's vocals and the lyrics she co-wrote with Mitchell Froom. I mean . . . the song did earn a Golden Globe nomination. Negative: *Brosnan's angsty scenes with Teri Hatcher seemed stiff and unnatural. And his voice sounded odd in scenes featuring Bond's attempt to suppress his emotions. *Why did the director Roger Spottiswode, have Brosnan shooting two machine guns at once during the final confrontation on Carver’s boat? The actor looked like a walking action movie cliché. *I thought Jonathan Pryce had portrayed one of the most overbearing and annoying villains in the Bond franchise. Only Sophie Marceau in the latter half of "THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH" may have surpassed him. *Is it just me or is the plot of this Bond movie seemed like an extended rip-off of a "LOIS & CLARK" episode from its first season? Perhaps the discovery of Teri Hatcher’s casting must have given screenwriter Bruce Feirstein an idea. *Why is it that nearly every sentence directed by Ms. Moneypenny to Bond came off as a sly, sexual joke? Their dialogue grew very annoying. *Spottiswoode managed to transform Bond and Q’s Meeting in Hamburg into a hammy production number. Q was simply in Hamburg to hand over an armored company car to Bond. What a bore and a waste of time! *Carver's top minion, Mr. Stamper, struck me as a second-rate version of Red Grant from "RUSSIA WITH LOVE". Where was Robert Shaw or Andreas Wisnewski when you need them? *The entire car chase sequence inside a Hamburg parking structure featured Bond using a remote control . . . ah, never mind! The entire sequence struck me as a bore. Even worse, it happened after the marvelous Bond/Kaufman scene. What a waste of my time. *Despite all of the gunfire exchanged and the other action during the final confrontation sequence aboard Carver’s boat, I thought it was too long . . . and boring. *Joe Don Baker seemed wasted in this film as C.I.A. liaison Jack Wade. *Bond’s Cover as a Banker – I am beginning to suspect that Bond makes a lousy undercover agent. By opening his mouth and hinting at Carver’s boat, he ended up exposing himself. What an idiot! *Teri Hatcher seemed wasted in this film. And her angsty scenes with Brosnan seemed forced - almost unnatural. TOMORROW NEVER DIES did managed to produce a few favorite lines of mine: Favorite Lines: "Believe me, Mr. Bond. I can shoot you from Stugartt and still create the proper effect." – Dr. Kaufman to Bond BOND: "You were pretty good with that hook." WAI-LIN: "That’s from growing up in a rough neighborhood. You were pretty good on the bike." BOND: "Well, that comes from not growing up at all." "No more absurd than starting a war for ratings." – Bond to Carver KAUFMAN: "Wait! I am just a professional doing a job!" BOND: "So am I." (Then kills Kaufman) Despite some virtues, "TOMORROW NEVER DIES" is not a favorite movie of mine. In fact, it is my least favorite James Bond movie featuring Pierce Brosnan. Unfortunately, director Roger Spottiswoode seemed unable to elevate Bruce Firstein's generic screenplay marred by an unoriginal plot and one of the hammiest villains in the franchise's history. Hmmm . . . too bad.

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ilkkawhat · 2 years

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ten lines

tagged by the lovely @frozenmemories1987 💜💜

Rules: share the first lines of ten of your most recent fanfics and tag ten people. If you have written less than ten, don’t be shy and share anyway.

so I’ve only actually published one fic this year and my 2022 fics were very scattered so the term “recent” is a stretch here lol and I’m also cheating on a few of them since some first lines are just a little too short for any sort of idk. excitement about it?

1. Think About It

Greg hasn't seen Nick this riled up since the day Warrick died.

He tries not to even think about that day, or the day after, or the day after that, and especially not the funeral itself—but he can’t shake off the eerie sense, not of deja vu because this anger that he’s seen bubbling since he stormed into the lab after nearly getting brown up at his own house, rather it’s the apathy. The disregard for his own life, or maybe it’s instead born out of some sort of pride that he’s invincible, or something. He’s no longer the easy-to-scare, naïve, somewhat ignorant man that he met about eleven years ago.

2. The Stokes Family Christmas Chronicles, Chapter 6

It’s her first Christmas without a Santa Claus, and she’s never been more terrified in her life.

And she knows he’s not going to be around because she now knows who Santa really is.

It makes sense, really. Because who else would know what she really wants for Christmas, who would know if she really deserved it, besides her own father?

3. Sleepsong

He’s thought himself to be humble in his tenure as the man in the high chair, the power of the gavel nothing more than an extension of Lady Justice’s arm that holds the scale in balance. A power that’s never to be used and abused for personal gain.

4. Agony, Chapter 28

He had gotten used to darkness. So much so to the point where he would spend most of his time at home “unplugged.”

He even thought that maybe he finally got emotionally unplugged too, when he found himself relieved to see the dead body of a grown woman wrapped up in a carpet, though perhaps it was because what both he and Sara had thought they would find, would be a whole lot worse.

5. Remind Me

It doesn’t crash down on him all at once. The day doesn’t even dawn, not until the end. It starts in the hospital, as a spectator watching an invisible struggle for survival, monitored and documented not unlike a case file.

6. The Stash

“Hey, Greggo, you got my results for the—”

Bursting into the DNA lab through a door that is normally open to all and especially Nick on the graveyard shift, he’s faced with a shock that the lab is empty at the busiest peak of their shift.

7. The Morning After

It’s as if every shed tear from every tantrum, every cry for his mother or father since his birth had finally caught up to him.

8. If Only (I cheated here because the opening of this fic is just straight dialogue from the show so I skipped to one of the first original lines I wrote)

That was the easiest decision, and the only decision he could make at the time. He could catch the stalker, or lose Nick.

But Nick sure as hell wouldn’t agree. The stubborn, thick-headed Texan is bound to whine the second he wakes up about it.

9. all we ever knew

“Gordon, you got a visitor.”

She feels stupid for the split second of hope that she was lied to, that the CSIs used her father’s death just as some sort of leverage into getting more information on that…Nick guy’s kidnapping. Maybe they managed to get the bomb off of her father, maybe there was no bomb at all.

10. I’m Yours

It’s been a year. Maybe more than that. Jack’s kept him so busy that he can see why the elder vampire has said that he’s lost track of time and doesn’t even know how old he really is—though he most definitely does.

He’s found that most vampires don’t seem to be too worried about their age, casually keeping track for bragging rights when rubbing it in the face of the “young ones” and also to express dominance in council meetings—but they find it within themselves to cherish the passing of time for an event that comes twice a year.

#mk.op #mk.fic #i do have a lot of other fics i have been working on and i'm hoping to get at least one fic done this month but #idk it's been hard and i've just been super discouraged which is my own fault #and i know i was a little greedy here sharing more than just one line...i'm sorry

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whileiamdying · 11 months

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“Kiss of the Spider Woman” ’s Voices in the Dark

The Argentinean writer Manuel Puig’s novel-in-dialogue forces the reader to be both director and detective, interpreting how the lines will be spoken and searching each sentence for clues as to what is going on.

By Isaac Butler December 11, 2022

icki Baum, the author of “Grand Hotel,” once wrote that “you can live down any number of failures, but you can’t live down a great success.” After witnessing the fall and rise of his novel “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” Manuel Puig likely would’ve agreed with her. Originally released to critical dismissal—Robert Coover called it “a rather frail little love story” in the Times—the book landed with a thud, managing to make Puig a celebrity in the gay enclave of New York City’s Christopher Street, but not much else. Yet “Kiss of the Spider Woman” had a remarkable afterlife. A play adaptation, co-authored by Puig, became an international success, and led to an Oscar-winning film starring William Hurt and Raul Julia as well as a hit musical written by John Kander, Fred Ebb, and Terrence McNally. Puig disliked the film, and, shortly after a disastrous workshop of the musical at suny Purchase, died from a heart attack, at the age of fifty-seven. Yet for all his frustration with the adaptations of his novel, they guaranteed its longevity. “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is the only book of Puig’s in English that remains steadily in print—his first novel, “Betrayed by Rita Hayworth” was recently issued for the second time this century by McNally Editions—and the cover of the Vintage International paperback boasts the same typeface and image as the playbill of the Broadway production.

The film and musical so overshadowed their source material that, when I first encountered the book, in a course called Subjectivity in Literature my freshman year of college, I thought that my eccentric professor had assigned a novelization to us as a way of challenging our assumptions about which books were worthy of study. Within a few pages, I realized my mistake. “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is a mysterious, formally inventive, beguiling work about two prisoners during the Dirty War in Argentina: a Marxist guerilla named Valentín and a gay window dresser named Molina, who develop a transformative relationship as the latter narrates the plots of his favorite movies to the former. When I was nineteen, “Kiss of the Spider Woman” struck me as a work about finding love and preserving one’s humanity in the most inhumane of places. It is in some ways the opposite of Ariel Dorfman’s “Death and the Maiden,” a play in which the psychic scars of the Pinochet regime in Chile prove a universal solvent, dissolving any attempt at decency, or humanity, or truth. Reading the novel in the period between the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act and the repeal of sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas, I believed it to be a work of protest art, one that defiantly asserts Molina’s personhood even amid the Dirty War’s depredations. Reading “Kiss of the Spider Woman” today, the prison seems less like a real place, and the novel seems far trickier, and far harder to nail down to any one meaning. “Kiss of the Spider Woman” slips between different interpretations, just as its late-night conversations wander from the most frivolous of trivialities to the deepest of truths.

Puig would likely have objected to the idea that frivolity was opposed to truth. His sensibility was rooted in cursi, a word that lacks a direct English translation but is key to the consciousness that underlies his work. Cursi is the Blanche DuBois to machismo’s Stanley Kowalski, passionately insisting “I don’t want realism, I want magic!” Its closest equivalent in the United States is camp, but the two are not exactly the same. There’s a yearning to cursi, and a nostalgic fabulousness. Puig was the great twentieth-century writer of the cursi sensibility. He disdained the self-seriousness of many of his contemporaries in the Latin American Boom, particularly Gabriel García Márquez, who he felt had been ruined by critical praise. “Every sentence pretends to be the maximum phrase of all of literature,” Puig griped, about the future Nobel Prize winner’s “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” “and each one ends by weighing a ton.” Puig’s novels are deliberately playful and provocatively effeminate. They often ride the line between satire and sincerity, producing a result that is somehow both sincerely felt and heavily ironized. As Puig himself put it once in a letter, “that’s the real me: Cursi and truthful.”

“Kiss of the Spider Woman” grew out of Puig’s frustrations with the politics of his era and his contemporaries. He eschewed explicit polemic in his work, which led to his being viewed with suspicion by both the left and the right. His first novel was panned by the center-right magazine La Nacíon for using colloquial Argentinean Spanish and accused of having Peronist sympathies. Living among fellow exiled Argentinean intellectuals in Mexico City, Puig found that he “was still a reactionary for not having joined the movement. Worst of all my book had been banned by the right wing and the Argentinian left didn’t care.” From this pain, he began taking notes on a novel in which two men—one straight and one gay, who “doesn’t have much education, but a great fantasy life”—would “meet through a mediator—movies.”

Puig, who wanted to be a screenwriter and only turned to writing novels after his thirtieth birthday, all but grew up in a movie theatre. According to “Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman,” a biography of Puig by his translator and friend Suzanne Jill Levine, his home town of General Villegas, in the Argentine Pampas, had one movie house, which showed a different film every day. Beginning in 1936, his mother, Malé, with whom he would remain extremely close throughout his life, took him to see “mostly American stuff” almost daily, at 6 p.m. Staring at the screen, he fell in love with the female stars of the thirties, constructing a pantheon out of Rita Hayworth, Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Greta Garbo, and others. “I understood . . . the moral world of movies, where goodness, patience, and sacrifice were rewarded,” he later said. “In real life, nothing like that happened. . . . I, at a certain moment, decided that reality was what was on the screen and that my fate—to live in that town—was a bad impromptu movie that was about to end.” Malé had initially only intended to stay in General Villegas for a year and passed her frustrated dreams of cosmopolitan life down to her son. “It was like living in exile,” he would later say, and, in his first two novels, he would create a thinly veiled version of his home town, called Colonel Vallejos, and treat it unkindly. As Clara, his fictionalized aunt in “Betrayed by Rita Hayworth,” puts it:

When I got off the train, my first impression was awful, there’s not a single tall building. They’re always having droughts there, so you don’t see many trees either. In the station there are no taxis, they still use the horse and buggy and the center of town is just two and a half blocks away. You can find a few trees that are hardly growing, but what you don’t see at all, anywhere, is real grass.

The Puigs left Villegas, moving to Buenos Aires by 1949, and it’s unclear whether Manuel ever returned to his home town, except in his imagination. Much of his life was lived in one form of exile or another, particularly after his novel “The Buenos Aires Affair” was suppressed in Argentina in 1974.

“Betrayed by Rita Hayworth” highlights again and again the contrast between the magic of cinema and the tawdry doldrums of everyday life. Puig preferred melodramas, which he called “the language in which the unconscious speaks,” along with screwball comedies and, once he got over the trauma of seeing “Bride of Frankenstein” at too young an age, cheap horror films. In his essay “Cinema and the Novel,” Puig wrote that the films of the thirties and forties had such lasting power because they “really were dreams displayed in images. . . . When I look at what survives in the history of cinema, I find increasing evidence of what little can be salvaged from all the attempts at realism.” He disliked much of Italian neorealism and the films of Martin Scorsese (“so much pretension and slowness”), and called Meryl Streep, Ellen Burstyn, Jill Clayburgh, and Glenn Close “the Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse” for ushering in a more realistic femininity onscreen.

Escape into the dream world of cinema was an obsessive quest. Later in life, he would write his friend Guillermo Cabrera Infante a long list of the authors of the Latin American Boom as Hollywood starlets. Borges was Norma Shearer (”Oh so refined!”), García Márquez was Elizabeth Taylor (“Beautiful face but such short legs”), Mario Vargas Llosa was Esther Williams (“Oh so disciplined (and boring)”). Among the eighteen names was Puig’s own. He was to be played by Julie Christie, a “great actress, but since she has found the right man for her (Warren Beatty) she doesn’t act anymore.” Years later, after his writing had brought him money and international acclaim, Puig would buy television sets and VCRs for friends, and then cajole them into recording classic films for him, eventually amassing a library of more than three thousand movies on upward of twelve hundred video cassettes.

Popular culture at its most cursi undergirds Puig’s work. It’s there in his titles— “Betrayed by Rita Hayworth,” “Heartbreak Tango,” “The Buenos Aires Affair,” “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” “Pubis Angelical,” “Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages,” “Blood of Requited Love,” “Tropical Night Falling”—which feel as if they could be printed in the most lurid of fonts, accompanied by the most sensational of exclamation points. His frustrated attempts to work as a screenwriter gave birth to his signature style, in which dialogue, stream of consciousness, and fake secondary sources like diary entries, surveillance reports, and newspaper articles bump up against one another. This marriage of high modernist experimentation with low cultural reference points and subject matter frequently led to his dismissal by Argentinean literati. He struggled for years to publish “Betrayed by Rita Hayworth,” and the accusation that he was a lightweight shadowed him even after his death. Reviewing Levine’s biography in the Times, Vargas Llosa wrote that “of all the writers I have known, the one who seemed least interested in literature was Manuel Puig,” before sniffing that “Puig’s work may be the best representative of what has been called light literature . . . an undemanding, pleasing literature that has no other purpose than to entertain.” Vargas Llosa’s estimation couldn’t be further off the mark. While Puig’s novels are entertaining—often riotously so—his formal techniques aren’t mere games, and his experimentations with dialogue still seem radical and groundbreaking decades after his death.

The novel in dialogue form is not new—authors from Diderot to Woolf and Gaddis have experimented with it—but there is something eternally transgressive in its austerity. To work only in dialogue is to limit or altogether renounce such pleasurable tools as point of view, description, free indirect discourse, and narration. Playwrights know that their dialogue will be mediated through a production, through the choices and interpretations of a director and actors, and they can leave instructions in the form of stage directions and notes explaining their intent. But the novel in dialogue forgoes all this. It forces the reader to be at once director and detective, interpreting how the lines will be spoken, and searching each sentence for clues as to the basic facts of what is going on.

“Kiss of the Spider Woman” takes place in prison, yet it is six full pages of testy back-and-forth before the reader gets any glimpse of where the story is situated. Even these clues are related briefly:

The next movie Molina swoons over is “Destino,” a Nazi film about the evils of the French Resistance. The movie, a composite invented by Puig, is an inversion of the Hollywood film “Paris Underground,” its female protagonist rather unsubtly named Leni. Molina knows that it’s Nazi propaganda but loves it, “because it’s well made, and besides it’s a work of art.” The stage appears to be set for an extended dialogue about the relationship between art and truth, aesthetics and politics, naïveté and logic, and so on. Yet Puig shifts gears again, introducing footnotes written in parodic academese that trace a post-Freudian theory of homosexuality. The footnotes grow so extensive that they take over the book, drowning out the prisoners for pages on end. These give way to stream-of-consciousness asides that take us into Molina and Valentín’s thoughts, the former self-pitying and sentimental, the latter obsessive and fevered. The text becomes marked with ellipses to denote physical actions that would normally be described, culminating in a sex scene composed solely of the words spoken by the two men:

I can’t see at all, not at all. . . . it’s so dark. . . . Slowly now . . . . . . No, that way it hurts a lot. . . . Wait . . . no, it’s better like this, let me lift my legs. . . . A little slower . . . please . . . . . . That’s better. . . .

“Kiss of the Spider Woman” moves from an avalanche of verbiage to a space where language is inadequate, and out again, with the two characters, having physically joined their bodies, finding new selves beyond the limits of their roles. It’s not entirely clear whether, were the book written today, Molina would even be described as a man. He often identifies as a woman throughout “Kiss of the Spider Woman” and at one point says, “As for my friends and myself, we’re a hundred percent female. . . . We’re normal women; we sleep with men.” Here, Molina is contrasting his social circle with “the other kind [of gay men] who fall in love with one another.” The objects of Molina’s desires are straight men. “What we’re always waiting for,” he says—she says?—is “a friendship or something, with a more serious person . . . with a man, of course. And that can’t happen because a man . . . what he wants is a woman.” Molina is filled with self-loathing, and unable to form any kind of real community or engage in political action, because “you see yourself in the other ones like so many mirrors, and then you start running for your life.”

Molina and Valentín’s prison cell, a filthy space of isolation surrounded by the threat of torture and execution, becomes a nearly utopian arena where identity can be transcended. The two characters live, briefly, in a world beyond the self, beyond sexuality, beyond gender, beyond language. Molina describes this as feeling like “I’m someone else, who’s neither a man nor a woman” while Valentín describes the feeling as being “out of danger.” The novel that began as a series of oppositions—gay and straight, woman and man, naïve and political, dream and reality, cursi and honest—hasn’t resolved any of its conflicts so much as called into question whether these categories, and many of the others we use to organize our lives, aren’t arbitrary, as limited as they are limiting. Among the book’s many insoluble contradictions is how it demonstrates these categories being overcome but only in a prison cell and only through a near-total deconstruction of the self. “Kiss of the Spider Woman” refuses to neatly suit any kind of political program—Puig called gay readers offended by his portrait of Molina “Stalinist queens”—instead burrowing deeper and deeper into what its author called “the struggle for human dignity.”

As with Puig’s other novels, “Kiss of the Spider Woman” requires far more work on the reader’s part than we are accustomed to, but the result is a profound imaginative and emotional investment. We have, to an extent far greater than normal, created the world of the story we are reading. We are in that jail cell with Molina and Valentín, eavesdropping on their conversations, witnessing their slow transition from antagonistic cellmates to friends to lovers to something that cannot quite be put into language. Our struggle to piece together the action of their scenes together mirrors their struggle to understand each other and, perversely, the struggle of the secret police to determine what Valentín may know about the resistance unit he has until recently been leading.

“Kiss of the Spider Woman” further confounds as it goes along. Just when you think you have a handle on it, it wriggles away and changes shape. The book begins with voices in the dark, as Molina relates the real-life 1942 film “Cat People” from memory, waxing rhapsodic in his micro-detailed descriptions of clothes, lighting, faces. Soon we learn that the two men have agreed to an experiment. To help pass the time after lights out in their cell, Molina will recount films to Valentín. These movies—there are six of them in all—form the book’s backbone. As he narrates the story of “Cat People,” Molina is expansive, romantic, and charming. Valentín is the opposite: terse, controlling, and analytical. When Molina describes the protagonist as “not thinking about the cold, it’s as if she’s in some other world, all wrapped up in herself,” Valentín responds, “If she’s wrapped up inside herself, she’s not in some other world. That’s a contradiction.” (Later, Valentín establishes the rules of their talk, demanding that Molina’s stories contain “no food and no naked girls.”) Valentín only likes the movie once he is able to interpret it in Marxist and Freudian terms. The highest praise he can offer is “it’s all so logical, it’s fantastic.” Our sympathies are drawn toward Molina. He’s the dreamer, the romantic, the sincere one, and Valentín—who studies all day and cannot even tell his girlfriend that he loves her, because the resistance needs them both more than they need each other—feels almost inhuman in his discipline, incapable of recognizing that his dream of Marxist revolution is a romantic fantasy of its own.

It is no wonder, then, that the adaptations, which reduce the story to a romance between two seeming opposites amid a backdrop of degradation and fantasy, proved so much more successful. Ultimately, however, it is the book that will survive. The musical hasn’t been produced in New York since its hit Broadway run ended in 1995, and the film today feels painfully, at times hilariously, dated. William Hurt, an often wonderful actor, was miscast as Molina. Puig had objected to Hurt, responding to his signing on to the film with “in my bed maybe, but not as Molina!” And even though Hurt won an Oscar for his performance, Puig was right. Hurt, physically too large and obviously impersonating rather than inhabiting a fabulous gay character, somehow overacts and underplays at the same time. The director, Hector Babenco, primarily known for documentaries, lacks the sense of visual style the film demands, and the movie seems embarrassed by the two men’s sexual relationship. The screenplay reduces Molina and Valentín’s affair to a one-off favor that Valentín does for Molina, and the camera cannot even show us the titular kiss between the two characters, on which the ending hinges. The film is a work of compromise, between director and stars, between screenplay and Hollywood mores, and between Puig and his pocketbook—one that reinforces the very categories that the novel sought to break down.

Unlike the movie, which feels fixed in time, the novel of “Kiss of the Spider Woman” feels timeless, or perhaps newly relevant again and again. Its meaning has already shifted for me over the decades, from a moving insistence on gay personhood to a prescient and acutely felt dramatization of how the gender binary imprisons us all. Who knows what it will mean when I revisit it again in a decade—but it will be waiting, provocative, defiant, cursi, and ready to challenge whatever boundaries we put around ourselves. ♦

#The Kiss of the Spider Woman #Manuel Puig

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megamindsupremacy · 2 years

Note

Ao3 Wrapped!!! 📝

27. What do you listen to while writing

29. Favorite line/passage you wrote this year?

Ao3 Wrapped

27: I cannot listen to anything while I'm writing lol. Music is to stop thinking, no music is for when I need to get my brain moving and shakin

28:

(Context: Reverse Robins, Steph is the Red Hood-figure, Tim is Oracle, Steph has just come back to Gotham for her insanity murder spree)

Steph’s grip tightens on the window ledge. “What do I want,” she repeats softly, staring out into the city. Her eyes are unfocused. “I want this goddamn green out of my brain. I want to kill everyone in this rotting, horrible city. I want vengeance and I want to try that new hotdog stand down the block. What I need, Timothy, is a reason to not fling myself off this building and let death finish what it fucking started.”

Never let it be said that Tim was good at emotions. He was, despite his claims to the contrary, the worst at emotions, second only to Bruce. What Tim thought, but didn’t have the words to say, was You were my best and only friend and When you died it tore the family apart and Jason has been trained to avoid your fate because we’re all so scared that what happened to you could happen to him and If you die again we’ll never recover and If you die again I might follow you

What Tim says is “Bruce can fix you, if you just talk to him.”

^it's from my Reverse Robins fic "unspoken words" and I like it because it shows how messed up literally everyone is after Steph's death. Everybody started spiraling Very Very hard and they don't really come out of it until years after Steph comes back from the dead. I don't know why i was so mean to everyone in this fic.

Also, it was one of my first forays into writing actual dialogue and improving my writing abilities so I'm very happy about that

Bonus: My favorite thing I've written this year, from a fic I have yet to publish (I have been working on this fucker for months so help me god I will finish it. It isn't even that long it just doesn't want to be written)

Context: Cryptid Batfam AU. Most of the bats are regarded as urban myths, demons, extraterrestrials, or similarly otherworldly beings. Steph has been going out as an obviously human vigilante for a few weeks, ran into The Bat and his Robin, and disappeared for a few more weeks

The Spoiler’s reappearance causes a very quiet, very very small, mass panic.

She moves with a stuttering smoothness, disappearing into shadows in one moment and stumbling across rooftops the next. She speaks in a pidgin of clicks, whistles, and hoarsely croaked English. The crooked, homespun aspects of her costume are gone. Instead of a black shirt and tights with a facemask and a solid purple cloak over her, she is consumed by the color, now a dark, deep eggplant spotted with white and gold. The spots thicken into the shape of a bat on her torso. Her face is completely covered by a blank, black mask. She has, without a doubt, been turned from a human girl into something else.

#i should make an ask tag #ask game #writing (allegedly)#open to more asks!

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warningsine · 3 months

Text

Vicki Baum, the author of “Grand Hotel,” once wrote that “you can live down any number of failures, but you can’t live down a great success.” After witnessing the fall and rise of his novel “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” Manuel Puig likely would’ve agreed with her. Originally released to critical dismissal—Robert Coover called it “a rather frail little love story” in the Times—the book landed with a thud, managing to make Puig a celebrity in the gay enclave of New York City’s Christopher Street, but not much else. Yet “Kiss of the Spider Woman” had a remarkable afterlife. A play adaptation, co-authored by Puig, became an international success, and led to an Oscar-winning film starring William Hurt and Raul Julia as well as a hit musical written by John Kander, Fred Ebb, and Terrence McNally. Puig disliked the film, and, shortly after a disastrous workshop of the musical at suny Purchase, died from a heart attack, at the age of fifty-seven. Yet for all his frustration with the adaptations of his novel, they guaranteed its longevity. “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is the only book of Puig’s in English that remains steadily in print—his first novel, “Betrayed by Rita Hayworth” was recently issued for the second time this century by McNally Editions—and the cover of the Vintage International paperback boasts the same typeface and image as the playbill of the Broadway production.

The film and musical so overshadowed their source material that, when I first encountered the book, in a course called Subjectivity in Literature my freshman year of college, I thought that my eccentric professor had assigned a novelization to us as a way of challenging our assumptions about which books were worthy of study. Within a few pages, I realized my mistake. “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is a mysterious, formally inventive, beguiling work about two prisoners during the Dirty War in Argentina: a Marxist guerrilla named Valentín and a gay window dresser named Molina, who develop a transformative relationship as the latter narrates the plots of his favorite movies to the former. When I was nineteen, “Kiss of the Spider Woman” struck me as a work about finding love and preserving one’s humanity in the most inhumane of places. It is in some ways the opposite of Ariel Dorfman’s “Death and the Maiden,” a play in which the psychic scars of the Pinochet regime in Chile prove a universal solvent, dissolving any attempt at decency, or humanity, or truth. Reading the novel in the period between the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act and the repeal of sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas, I believed it to be a work of protest art, one that defiantly asserts Molina’s personhood even amid the Dirty War’s depredations. Reading “Kiss of the Spider Woman” today, the prison seems less like a real place, and the novel seems far trickier, and far harder to nail down to any one meaning. “Kiss of the Spider Woman” slips between different interpretations, just as its late-night conversations wander from the most frivolous of trivialities to the deepest of truths.

“Kiss of the Spider Woman” takes place in prison, yet it is six full pages of testy back-and-forth before the reader gets any glimpse of where the story is situated.

#manuel puig

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stardust-kenobi · 2 years

Text

Reminiscence

Part 1

Obi Wan Kenobi x F!Reader

Warnings: mention of death, order 66, mutual pining, fluff :’), a lot of dialogue, light smut

A/N: please note! I wrote this right after the premiere so these details may not line up with the show as episodes progress. I am basing details off the trailers and the first two episodes :) SO, of course, spoilers!

Word count: 2.8k

Gif cred: @general-kenobis

The weight of a boulder settled hard into your stomach when you caught sight of something you never anticipated to see again. A bustling crowd blocked your view for seconds at a time. You abandoned your browsing in the market to make your way toward the sight, ensuring that your eyes did not deceive you.

There he stood, that stoic man, his deep golden strands falling comfortably against his cheeks. You immediately noticed some speckles of gray that were coming in nicely. The relentless rays of sun had starting pulling at his once smooth skin. His piercing eyes had not caught yours yet as his hooded disguise limited his range.

Despite the several seconds of doubt, there was no denying it now. It was him. Your Master. The one you were told had died at the hands of his own men, troopers he trusted with his life…Before the galaxy plunged under rule of the empire.

The rambling of noises from the other patrons in the marketplace were suddenly drowned out as his gaze became magnetized to yours. It was as if he felt your presence instantly. The corners of your lips perked slightly, and you offered a subtle nod. There were inquisitors littering this planet, hunting for Jedi. You couldn’t risk that, not now. Not when you’ve just discovered that he still lives.

You spent months mourning your Master, ignoring the rules of attachment and throwing away almost everything he taught you. An awful coping strategy, certainly, but forgetting who you were was the only way to ease the pain.

You pulled back the tears that threatened to pool in your eyes. You wanted to do nothing more than full sprint into his arms and hold him close. Even when you were his Padawan, that would’ve be over the line, but you didn’t care. You loved him.

Obi Wan nodded slightly to the right, quietly communicating to you to follow him. You kept your distance. There were too many people in Mos Eisley to hold a reunion here.

---

The suns nearly blistered your skin and sweat soaked your face. After walking for what felt like hours through the relentless heat, you approached a rock structure with a small opening. He stopped abruptly and awaiting the all-clear signal from a stationary droid.

“Y/n” he breathed out with relief as you led you into the cavern. The temperature dropped significantly as you were shielded from the elements. You took a brief notice of your environment and realized this was his home.

“Oh, Obi Wan” you almost sobbed, but swallowed your tears.

Before you could think about your next step, your arms threw themselves around his neck. You expected hesitancy, but he fell into your embrace, wrapping his strong arms around the curve of your back.

“My young Padawan…I thought you were dead” he whispered against the top of your head.

“Everyone said you were gone, Master. They said you were killed by your own men” You choked into a light sob, unable to hold it back any longer. He felt your despair and simultaneous relief and pulled you tighter against him.

“I’m alive. I’m here” Obi Wan consoled you softly.

“I’ve missed you. Stars, I can’t tell you how happy I am to see you right now”

“I feel the same. I thought my eyes had played a trick on me when I saw you.” He chuckled, “or maybe the suns had finally drained my sanity from me”

You both slowly pulled away from one another’s embrace, and you stared deep into his weary eyes.

“My, you’re even more beautiful than the last time I saw you”

You blushed. You’d always had a crush on him, but hearing those words set your skin on fire.

“I’m taller now, too” you joke, remembering all the times that Obi Wan poked fun at your height.

“Really? I don’t think so. In fact I think you might be shorter” he teased. You smirked and playfully rolled your eyes. You looked around the room, assuming this to be his home. It was desolate, quiet, but also open to threats.

“Are we safe?” You asked quietly.

“There is no such thing as safe anymore. Not for us. But I don’t have to tell you that”

“No,”

"By new standards of safety, we are fine here"

You nodded.

“Where have you been?” He inquired, still entirely baffled that you found him.

“Travelling. Holding myself over with small jobs. Hoping that no one recognizes me. What about you? Have you been on Tatooine this whole time?”

“Yes, 10 years now”

“Why here?”

“It’s…complicated” His brows furrowed together, a look of pain in his eyes.

“Okay. I won’t pry” You smiled warmly at him, knowing there’s no reason to press into his business after a decade of no contact.

“It wouldn’t have been my first choice for refuge” He admitted regretfully.

“I would imagine not” You said, feeling sorrowful for what he must’ve been through. You know this, because you’ve been through those things, too.

“I can’t believe you’re alive, y/n” he whispered, “I thought I’d lost you and Anakin both. This whole time I-…I thought I’d failed”

“Anakin…he’s…?”

“He’s gone. Lost after the attack on the Temple.”

Your heart sunk deeper with every word. You knew Anakin had to be dead, but hearing the confirmation plunged a blade through your already fragile heart. You two were not incredibly close, but you often trained together and through the years you’d grown quite fond of him.

“Obi Wan, I’m so sor-“

“Don’t. This is not your fault” He firmly assured you.

“You did not fail, Master"

His words, however, certainly failed him in that moment. He needed to hear someone tell him he wasn’t to blame. No one had been able to rest that thought in his mind. Obi Wan struggled to comprehend that you stood before him after all these years. You brought a sense of comfort to him that he never believed he’d feel again.

“Without your teachings and guidance I wouldn’t have made it out alive” you reassured him, placing a hand on his shoulder. He tensed for a moment before allowing your gentle touch to sink into him.

“How did you-….You were at the temple when...?”

It all came back with just the simplest question. You took in a deep breath and shut your eyes tight. You looked around, noticing the only place to sit besides his bed, and pulled the chair closer. Obi Wan joined you in the only other chair he owned.

“I hid. For a long time,” You paused, forcing yourself to relive the traumatic moments, “As time progressed, it got quieter and quieter on the other side of that closet door. Screams were hushed, blasters were put away…it was just me...”, You stared away from him, finding it hard to walk through that night again. “I found a scared youngling and we escaped together. Snuck on a cargo ship and got the hell out. But not without a few too many close calls” You stopped again, fighting back the years that crept up. “The youngling, though, I….I lost him. Turned away for a second…he was gone when I looked back”

“What was his name? Did you know him?”

“No...I did not know him. He was too scared to tell me his name. We couldn’t communicate very well anyways. He was very young” You trailed off, looking down to your fidgeting hands resting atop your lap.

“I’m sorry”

“He looked like Master Yoda” You smiled in reminiscence, but sorrow hid beneath your expression, “But I don’t think they were related”

“Grogu” Obi Wan made a sudden realization. He must’ve remembered the little guy.

“Is that his name?” You asked, unsure if this was a name or a place that Obi Wan had identified.

“Yes. It had to be him. He was the only other one of Yoda’s species that I’d seen in the Temple before” Obi Wan said, stroking his beard as stared off into his own thoughts.

You sulked noticeably as you felt responsible for his probable death.

“I’m sure he’s alright, Y/N”

You knew that couldn’t be true, but for the sake of changing the subject away from your horrific experience, you nodded in agreement.

“What brings you here to Tatooine?” He asked after a bit of empty silence.

“I'm a roamer, I take any transport I can hop onto. Just happened to end up here.”

“I see”

“I haven’t been back to Coruscant,” You began, “I don’t know if I can ever go back”

“You shouldn’t. That place is lost”

“It hurts, Master Kenobi” You sighed, unable to avoid the only topic of conversation that seemed necessary for such an unexpected reunion. The pain of reminiscence was the price you had to pay.

“Please” He said, stopping you in your tracks, a painful look struck his features, “Obi Wan is fine. The days of the Jedi are done"

His tone took an unexpected turn. You were taken aback, offended by his dismissal of the Jedi. He called you his Padawan, what changed his perspective so suddenly? You, too, had lost your sense of pride in that identity, but hearing your mentor utter such denial was gut wrenching.

"How can you say that?" You scoffed at him.

"Is it not the truth, Y/N?" He spat back. The rush of emotions you both felt in this moment were pushing you both to the edge. All the loss and grief was catching up to you both in a single conversation.

Your mouth fell open, but you found yourself speechless. He was right. You looked back down at your lap, not knowing what else to say. He seemed to calm suddenly as he took a deep breath.

"I’m sorry. You look well" He mentioned, breaking the tension.

"Thank you. You do as well" You smiled innocently back at him.

He giggled, knowing that to be only a formality. He did look...different. But by no means did he look bad. Still as handsome as ever, just a little rougher around the edges. Ten years and constant fear of incarceration and death will do that to a man. Not to mention the damage that Tatooine's environment could inflict on a human.

"So, do you travel alone, darling?"

Your cheeks were undoubtedly a fiery red. He'd never called you 'darling' before.

"Um...yeah, for the most part"

He tilted his head in curiosity.

"I trust that you are always safe"

"Of course I am. Learned from the best" You kindly teased.

"I taught you many things, but I don't believe I ever got around to teaching you how to avoid imperial inquisitors. You must be on high alert from now on. They are everywhere"

"Oh, I know. I had a close call recently. Let's just say I am glad that I was a woman, and the inquisitor happened to be a man...who enjoyed the company of women"

He snapped his attention to you in shock. He was wise enough to read between the lines and know what you meant. You figured if you had the body to persuade an imperial inquisitor to let you go free, why not use it to your advantage? Obi Wan tried to cover up his jealously, but you noticed it immediately.

"Not very Jedi of me, is it?" You winced, afraid of the judgment to follow.

"Certainly not. Gods, you are going to get yourself killed" He angrily snapped, his protectiveness overpowering his attempt to sound firm.

"Possibly" You pondered.

"I mean it, Y/N. Keep yourself safe. Alive" He emphasized.

"For you, I will"

"Good. I can't lose you, too" He whispered mostly to himself, “or…again”

"Forgive me if this is too forward, but I feel as though I have a lot more to live for now that I know you're alive"

He smiled and refused to tear his gaze away from you. You felt a familiar tension arise that often made itself known when you found yourself alone with Obi Wan. It was a burning tension that warmed you from the inside out.

"Truly, I have missed your sweet face, dear Y/N" He confessed.

His calloused fingers trailed to your lowered chin, and he gently lifted your face up to him. You remained there, lost in the blues of his eyes, wondering if his heart was beating as fast as yours was. You swallowed hard, wishing that you were still in touch with the force so you could communicate silently to him, kiss me.

However, the two of you did not need the force to sense what you both so desperately desired from one another.

Your mouths fused together on impact, your mutual hunger intertwining your lips with such a wonderful passion. A fluttering tingle radiated throughout your entire body as he placed his hands against the sides of your face, pulling you deep into his kiss.

You'd imagined this moment since he first took you on as a Padawan when you turned 18. However you never imagined this interaction would occur under these extenuating circumstances.

His lips twisted with yours harder now, his hunger for you grew deeper within, and he did not know how to stop himself from devouring you right then and there. Obi Wan brought a hand to the curve of your waist and pulled you forward out of your seat. With a leg on either side of his spread lap, you straddled him, satisfied with him taking the lead so you didn't have to.

There was no denying how bad he wanted you, especially after feeling the hardness pressing against where you ached so desperately for his attention. You moaned into his mouth, and his arms gripped you tighter in response.

Your hands explored his unruly hair before moving your fingertips down the veins in his neck. You then rolled your hips against the bulge that was restless beneath you. He groaned so rough, you thought you might melt immediately.

For years you wanted this feeling... the sensation of his hands roaming the surface of your skin, his need for you being ever-so-evident. The overwhelming feeling crashed over you, sending your mind into a euphoric frenzy. The restraint you held as you made the decision to pull away was a challenge.

You smiled down at him, your lips only inches away from his, hovering there without another word spoken. How long had he wanted to do that, too? You both needed not to say a word about it now. It happened, and you'd never dream of wanting to take it back.

His fingertips traced through your hair before falling down your back, leaving chills in their path.

“I’ve waited 10 years to do that” Obi Wan breathlessly admitted to you.

“Me too” You responded while your racing heart refused to slow.

There were more moments of silence, but there was not a single second left empty.

"I won't overstay my welcome, Obi Wan" You broke the silence, your words barely grazing a whisper.

"I'd prefer if you did" He responded, his eyelids fluttering in disbelief that you were finally in his arms.

"What?"

"Stay with me, please" Obi Wan pleaded.

You were stunned and unable to respond. Did he really want you to stay? Were you both so lonely that this seemed like a good idea even if it wasn't? Truly in that moment, you did not care, you just wanted to be near him and never be separated again. You’d just injected the worlds most addictive drug, and there was no turning back now.

"I don't have much space and Tatooine can be absolutely brutal. But I can't let you walk away. Not yet. Please" He continued, not allowing his plea to go unanswered.

"Okay, yeah, of course. Thank you” You accepted, overwhelmed with gratitude. “Truthfully, I wasn't sure where I was going to sleep tonight"

"I don't have much of a bed but you can sleep there. I will be okay on the floor" He smiled up at you as you continued running your fingers through his hair.

"This is your home, Obi Wan. Please, don't go out of your way to accommodate me. Besides, I have slept in worse places than a sandy floor" You giggled.

"That confession is also concerning to me. But, no matter, you'll take the bed."

"Obi Wa-" You objected.

"I insist, really."

"Okay. Thank you"

You stood to your feet and noticed he was still obviously turned on but you looked away to prevent causing him any embarrassment. This sight alone turned you on, but now was not the time. He nervously cleared his throat and adjusted his hips to hide his arousal.

"Would you like some tea?"

"Yes, please, that sounds lovely" you graciously accepted your role as his guest, settling back into your chair as he walked to his small cupboard to prepare your drinks.

This was something you could certainly get used to, toughing it out in the outskirts of Mos Eisley, spending your every second with your mentor, but that was a fairy tale you could not entertain right now.

—————————

I kinda want to make this a series?!

UPDATE: part two is up!

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alpacaparkaseok · 4 years

Text

reposting, modifying or translating is not allowed. appropriate legal action will be taken if any of my works are plagiarized in any way, shape or form.

Most Recent: The Brawl (HTSM) 2/8/24

To all my followers

Hello! All of the content in the masterlist is SFW. Enjoy!

Current projects:

How to Steal Moonlight (sequel to How to Sell Sunshine)

Upcoming project: Amante (Prince!Jimin x Captain of the Guard)

☾ = personal favorite

☀ = reader favorites

OT7 Fics ↓↓

Happy Holidays - BTS Style

A compilation of all the holiday requests I received in preparation for the holidays! (using dialogue prompts)

The Book of Soulmates ☀

A compilation of all the soulmate au requests I received in preparation for Valentine’s day!

Spooked (oneshot) ☀

You + all 7 members of BTS visiting a haunted house. What could go wrong?

So, so much.

The Pact (series) ☾ ☀

The boys made a pact about you. And now they’re each taking you out on a date. To even the playing field or something. (continuation of “Spooked”)

Working Overtime (one shot)

A freak storm forces the biggest band on the planet to spend the evening seeking shelter at your small cafe. Of course, you can't complain about having to work overtime.

Heartbreak Ave. (hyung line) // Heartbreak Blvd. (maknae line)

When they’re in love with you but you have feelings for a different member (reactions)

How to Sell Sunshine ☾☀

“I’ve always wanted to be the villain.” (mafia!au)

How to Steal Moonlight

"When is a monster not a monster? Oh, when you love it." (sequel)

BTS Members as...

sometimes I ask you guys to send in stuff and I write up some stuff for it

Individual Fics ↓↓

Series

7 Secrets

Status: Completed ☾

→ For the past three years, Beth has struggled and fought against the notion that she has a soulmate. It was only when she met six other girls who were in the same predicament that she finally decided that this was her life. The only real problem? Her soulmate has no idea that she even exists. Much less that soulmates are even a thing. Will she ever get to meet her soulmate, the ever popular and beloved Kim Namjoon of BTS? Does she even want to anymore?

7 Secrets Drabbles

Compiled in the link above is a list of all the drabbles I wrote that go along with my series, 7 Secrets. These come from different perspectives and show a bit more of the story! Enjoy!

Oneshots

The one where Beth finds the diss track

It’s Late

→ A peek into your life with Namjoon after an award show. (slice of life au)

Dad of Destruction

→ You love Namjoon with all your heart, and you’re so happy that together, you get to raise this child. However, you also want that child to make it to adulthood in one piece, and Namjoon has a startling talent for breaking things. Mama bear mode = ON.

The Passport ☀

→ You embark on a memorable journey in an attempt to return Kim Namjoon’s passport. What lengths will you go to in order to return his passport on time?

Butter

→ They made ARMY sit through an hour of melting butter. Now we return the favor.

12:22am

→ you were wearing green the last time he saw you.

New Haircut(e), Who Dis?

→ “You’re like a stupid amount of hot no matter what.”

Again

→ In which you and Namjoon both have feelings for each other and finally do something about it.

Little Devil

→ she's a witch. he's a demon. he's her final test. she's his final conquest.

Series

The Other Side

Completed

→ How to survive a soulmate encounter: first, get into separate rooms. Second, call 911 if there are no soulmate assistant present. Should be fairly easy, right?

Oneshots

The one where they just...melted (7 Secrets Drabbles) ☾

Close your eyes

→ friends to lovers au, will Jin finally make his move?

The Escape Room

→ Three words: competitive. escape. room.

If You’ll Have Me ☾ ☀

→ Kim Seokjin. The love of your life. Your boyfriend of three years. The man who insists on taking you to the zoo for every milestone in your lives together. There’s just one thing...you have no idea what you’re celebrating this time.

Cheap Seats

→ “I pay half your cable bill. You wouldn’t survive without me.”

Series

Mine ☾

Completed

→ The first time an up and coming actress sets foot on the Graham Norton show she’s confronted with questions that have less to do with her upcoming film “Young Rising”, and much more to do with BTS. More specifically with one of their rappers, Suga. Cara is an open supporter and fan of the band, however when Min Yoongi is shipped with the bilingual up-and-coming actress after mentioning her in an interview, things start to get out of hand. Fanart, twitter trends, and stalkers ensue, leaving Cara’s career up to an unknown fate. Then comes the moment the world didn’t even realize it was waiting for: a solo track from Agust D that raises more questions than answers, especially for Cara.

Oneshots

The one where Yoongi gets teased (7 Secrets Drabbles)

New Year’s Eve Bliss

→ New Years eve shared giggles with Min Yoongi

Shut Eye // Shut Eye: The Other Side ☀

→ In a world where every night you meet your soulmate in your dreams only to forget their face and voice when you wake up, you’re now more desperate than ever to find them.

Memoir of a Fake Girlfriend ☾ ☀

→ “I need to ask a favor…” “Nope. No way. I am not pretending to be your girlfriend again.” “Oh, c’mon!”

Golden Hour

→ In which Yoongi is the boy you’ve friend-zoned for years and you finally realize that he’s all you want.

Series

Where you should be

Completed

→ There are six words that Jung Ha-rin has carried with her since February of 2019. She repeats them to herself every night when she longs to dream of a certain idol. She chants them to herself at work when her mind starts to wander. And they become her mantra when she can feel Jung Hoseok’s gaze upon her from across the studio. End it before it can begin.

Oneshots

The one where there is no secret cove (7 Secrets Drabbles)

Ivy ☾

→ You’ve been promised to Jung Hoseok for twelve years. You’ve never wanted anything else. Until now. (JHS x reader, JJK x reader)

Make a Move ☀

→ You thought ‘Hope’ was a girl, but looking at the hot dude currently claiming to be your roommate, you might be wrong.

Sunkissed

→ I’ll bring you the sun. (greek gods au)

Series

Lost & Found ☾ ☀

Status: Completed

→ For centuries, people have lied and claimed that the red string of fate is unbreakable. Jimin knows the truth. It’s right there in front of him, in the form of his severed red thread.

Oneshots

The one where Aera gets the hiccups (7 Secrets Drabbles)

New Year’s Eve Mischief

→ Jimin is going to be the death of you.

Walk Away // Come Home ☾

→ "You’re leaving.” “I have to.” “No, you want to. This is your choice.”

Just You

→ Jimin comforts you after a long and stressful day.

You’re Really Gonna Wear That?

→ You attempt to help Jimin set up for a v-live. Keyword: attempt.

The Girl Next Door

→ Jimin can’t keep his eyes off of the girl working the festival stall right next to him. Not that you want him to, of course.

How to Sell Sunshine ☾

→ “I could rip you apart, you know." "That's hardly romantic, Mr. Park."

Series

As Fate Would Have It

Status: under construction

→ “The last time I saw him was July 16, 1392. It was also the day I died.”

Guardian Angel Guidebook

pt. 1 | pt. 2

→ "Kim Taehyung was the most beautiful mortal you'd ever laid eyes on. He was also the most frustrating."

Oneshots

Taehyung birthday oneshot

New Year’s Eve Fireworks

→ It appears that Taehyung forgot about your deathly fear of fireworks. Oops.

Lost in Japan

→ Taehyung gets lost while shooting Bon Voyage in Japan with the members. Thankfully, he runs into you.

Can’t Keep My Hands To Myself // Could you repeat the question? ☀

→ When you lock eyes with your soulmate, you’re immediately teleported to them. So, technically it’s not your fault that you ended up in Kim Taehyung’s lap for all to see.

Falling, falling

→ “I have loathed you since I first laid eyes on you.” “Likewise.”

Cipher

→ kim taehyung is a man cursed to aimlessly wander the earth, gifted with supernatural powers that he can use to sense others’ futures, while his own remains a mystery. he’s sentenced to this dismal life until he finds the one whose fate is intricately entwined with his own. he’s tall - dark - handsome. and he’s currently running a special on palm readings. (first one comes free!)

Series

*coming soon*

Oneshots

The one where Jungkook finds out (7 Secrets Drabbles)

New Year’s Eve Proposal ☀

→ What a way to start the new year.

Whispered Confession

→ “I love you.” “Did you say something?”

Tough Luck ☀

→ doctor!Jungkook, friends to lovers, he’s that annoying neighbor that sings in the shower

Ivy ☾

→ You’ve been promised to Jung Hoseok for twelve years. You’ve never wanted anything else. Until now. (JHS x reader, JJK x reader)

Ended As Quickly As It Started ☀

→ an argument between you and Jungkook ends just as quickly as it began

If I Could Lie ☾ ☀

→ “I’ll feel much better if you let me walk you home.” (exes au)

Divorcee (KNJ, KSJ)

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backhurtyy · 2 years

Note

penny for your thoughts on stranger things season 4 (specifically volume 2)?

alright i wrote out an entire essay last night and tumblr deleted it, so i’m going to try this again and hope it actually works 😭

spoilers and rambling under the cut!

so for the most part i really enjoyed volume two. i loved the cinematography, particularly the part when nancy was shooting vecna and hop was fighting the demogorgon while the remix of running up that hill played. i also loved how it showed the three groups managing to come together, even as spread out as they all were. like! theres my bad ass crew of characters that i love so much, finding ways to win even from three different places!!! and of course we FINALLY got the jopper kiss…. i have been thinking about ‘use your imagination’ ‘who needs imagination?’ for two days straight. no one is doing it like them. just so many little interactions and moments that i loved— el and hopper reunion, lucas and max talking on their pads, lucas holding maxs body 😭, dustin and eddie’s relationship, eddie’s guitar solo, all the robin and steve bestie moments, the way the threads of the story all came together, the little jokes and beats of humor, el piggybacking and saving max… there was a lot i liked.

however. the things that i didn’t like were kind of big sticking points to me, and made it so that i didn’t enjoy it as much as i’d hoped to.

first of all, the episodes were simply too long. like for a complicated storyline, with so many moving parts, the episodes were just…. really dense. during episode nine i kept going ‘is it done yet? is it done yet? is it done yet?’ because i got overstimulated and tired. and i suppose i could have just paused it, but i find stopping in the middle of an episode very difficult. id have rather them be shorter episodes that i could pause at the end of and come back to when i was ready. and that’s kind of sad because like. i KNOW i missed things, but it’s such a big task to go back and rewatch it all that idk if i will anytime soon.

second of all…. eddie. stranger things has such a problem with introducing side characters just to kill then off, and eddie is just another in a long line (robin, murray, and erica being the main exceptions). which is interesting to me, because everyone was talking about how there was going to be this huge emotional character death this season, and like… i sobbed like a baby when he died, because i loved him, but it was almost expected. it would have been much more shocking and devastating if it was nancy or steve (who i thought was going to die). the fact that they did kill of eddie was also just so painful because 1) he was so loveable and i would have loved to see him grow and become part of the group, looking after the kids with nancy and steve and robin and jonathan, and also getting to have that sense of family when he’d only ever had his dad before. 2) the dialogue with dustin…. god that was heart wrenching. that was the one part of his death that i liked. i was sobbing i was shaking i was a fucking mess over it. 3) i can’t help but see eddie as a gay man— his entire story with being a freak, an outsider, unwelcome, and unknown by anyone but hated by everyone was very reminiscent of the gay experience to me. and so the fact that he died…. it was like okay yeah of course the queer coded side character died. of course he did.

and finally… will. i don’t even know where to start. they did him so dirty. this main character, around whom the entire over arching plot of the show has revolved, was treated like a side character. will, who has a connection to the upside down unlike anyone else, barely had any screen time that wasn’t him just setting up mike and el. literally without him there wouldn’t BE stranger things, and yet they just. tossed him aside. the only times he was around was when his own pain and suffering and feelings were used to deepen mike and el’s relationship— which had already had three prior seasons to develop!!! it just felt awful to have this character— who is clearly gay, clearly in love with his best friend, clearly already feeling like an outsider— tossed aside and disregarded. like not a single person except jonathan seemed to notice or care about him the entire season, and it’s like…. it’s just frustrating. like i wish they weren’t using his pain and love and feelings to elevate the heterosexual ship. idk.

so overall, it was good, but those are really big things that i didn’t like and so i don’t feel like i enjoyed it as much as i wanted to.

#hopefully this makes sense!!!#i know i didn’t touch on everything and this may not be clear but i’m so irritated that i had to rewrite it all 😭#answered #anonymous asks #stranger things spoilers #just in case!

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