#this is my magnum opus. I will never create anything better (even if it was in a bumpy car)

[nefariously-neptune]

trash :3

im very proud of this so rb’ing is very appreciated

[canmom]

So the Tie Fighter guy, Paul 'OtaKing' Johnson, dropped his latest magnum opus: this time, Alien in the same 80s-anime inspired style! Six years to make, which I can well believe looking at every frame of this.

I have mixed feelings about it as a film, but it's definitely worth a watch before you read my words below.

As ever, it's a retro pastiche fan film - this time a tribute to Alien. The animation is, as before, largely 2D-on-3D with a bit of 3D-roto assistance here and there - there's a process video from a couple years back here.

How do I even comment on something like this? The man is a shape rotator nonpareil, drawing complex perspective shots with an ease that makes me envious. At the same time... do you notice how the movement is just... kinda off throughout this film? So many shots feel too evenly spaced, lacking weight, or with odd unmotivated choices in the character acting. It seems churlish to make such a criticism when this guy is singlehandedly drawing animation at a level of detail that would be out of reach for most full-fledged studios, but it feels like the same problem as Umetsu's animation in Megazone 23 Part 2, where they pursued such a level of detail that nothing moved naturally. It's like this guy is some kinda animation minmax build.

Like Tie Fighter, it's a side story that leans heavily on the visual language of the original. It's not as heavily referential of anime shots this time - no Itano Circus or that one shot where the camera flies over the decks of a ship up to the bridge (where did that come from, Yamato?). But it's still got a lot of flashy rotating camerawork and unusual angles and complex character rotations.

Despite this technical complexity, though, there is little of the tension that suffused the original film. Here the alien is in plain sight throughout, somehow feeling more like a guy in a rubber suit than it did in the original movie. This is, I think, largely down to how it moves, and how much the camera wants you to see everything.

It's a tricky balance: on the one hand, the whole thrust of this short is to wow you with its drawings, so it really needs to show you just how shiny the alien is in Johnson's style. But Alien was very much a 'never fully show the monster' kind of movie, letting the alien blend into the dark mechanical environments of the Nostromo as a constant 'could be anywhere' menace. Here everything is brightly lit, the better to show off those delightful anime highlights, so you'll never miss the alien walking down a corridor.

It was also a much slower movie, with waves of 'worse shit happening' washing over you - the escalating ladder of tension and brief relief before the alien does something more fucked up. Here there's no mystery, we know the alien's life cycle already. So in the end this feels like something of a speedrun of the original's beats, to its detriment - when the MC decides to scuttle her ship, you don't get the same sense of a desperate last resort against a relentless enemy, such that destroying the ship is the only option. (In fact it seems rather like she could have escaped the alien once it was floating around in space near the ship...)

Creating a fan film like this, much like franchise media, is a pretty tricky problem! Devotion to the original is kind of its whole raison d'être, so it can't do anything that would really extend or contradict the canon, or really touch the canon characters. But it still wants to hit the images that people associate with Alien! So not!Ripley on the not!Nostromo confronts an alien, as if this is something of a regular occurrence. But the alien must not escape, or it would undercut the original movie. So it's like an echo; it can't mix up the formula.

I don't want to complain too much tho. It's not every day you get something like this drop. More just that I want to learn from it... that 80s shading style still has that power, flat colours and strong shapes beat all the gradients in the world. But if you neglect those animation principles... it won't save you!

[thattimdrakeguy]

anything i see anything new on dc's bat-family it makes me wanna scream "WHAT THE FUCK'S THE MATTER WITH YA" and go after them yelling "FUCK OFF"

(not that bad actually. i'm pretty chill inside most of the time. i'm not what i used to be. a lot of it is performative, but a luke warm attitude towards something you have to say doesn't invoke passion, or anythign exciting that'd make anyone want to read it. not that many do anyways)

so many years of this and none of them get better. it's like it's trying to be pathetic

all those years of things you can research to be sure you get it right, and you fuckers couldn't be arsed to get your ass in gear and make sure all these fans that left have something to go back to?

now this dc server discord. my gosh, i don't think we're seeing the blue skies again. they're catering to a small pond of people, a wee group consisting of those that read panels, and pal around with fan fics and mash-ups that they created and pondered

not the stuff that had plenty of real people going out to the shops and ordering comics, that made them have a love and respect for the medium to the point they were fine calling themselves a fan back when it wasn't right in a cool kind of way in the eyes of many

now they're comics, it's not that serious. whoc ares that much in the end

and i guess i'll never seem like i'm not overreacting a touch

but comics used to tell stories that attached themselves to people's hearts and made them be seen and held, like finally i got something that i respond to

now it's who can rip off the fandom the best, and it's so easy to get content of the same marginal quality on AO3, and fan comics that don't need to blessing of bastard DC Comics

it's sensational the passion people can have despite that, whether or not it's for me. but all those hundreds of thousands of people missing a piece of their prior enjoyment because the 5 stan opinions repeated at nauseum is all anyone important at the writers station (not a real thing, i just mean writers) at the company is making them thing "ah yes, we're doing all right by them"

no you didn't, fucker, you scared the rest away with all the nonsense

now if you want more money you gotta try to earn them back

they think it's hopeless and practically pointless because comics are a dying medium, but they don't have to be. i'm sure it'll never to go back to what it once was, but you can still at least try to have a legacy as a writer that means something to people

when we used to have guys back in the day that could go and fuck around writing stories about peter parker's love life that didn't have much action that you would think the typical reader would desire, that could still effect someone in a way that had them stop and think about themselves, because a fraction of wisdom was hidden in it

now you get characters botched, bastardized, and secretly killed and replaced by those with the same names, and they can't even muster the sense to care. because someone laughed at a character being drawn at the wrong height, or another had a good reaction from people that didn't know the character as they thought they were writing their big magnum opus blockbuster for them

and i don't expect perfection, or the good old days to be possible to back to because they're the old days for a reason

but theirs's still the possibility and ability to go back and figure out the lost art of product control, and ravenous quality that can seep into people's spirits and give them a passion to constantly go back to issue after issue, giving your damn funky company a proper profit that means anything

no there they go ripping off little jimmy on twitter, stan account number 55, who's repeating what their pal jessica said on tumblr about bat-family member that got designated trope number 782 on the list, and that got the writer believing they did a job well done

you can do more

they're all just people, and i admire the fact they got to where they are. bless them for all the accomplishments they have. i can't take that way from them. but i'm also just a person who has what he has to say, and i think there's more to these writers then even they give themselves credit for

whining when people rightfully criticize your poor characterization and (even that's rare given the standards of today's comic fandom population) because it's your interpretation, when that's not how interpretation works

my man the money, and legacy you could create for yourself by doing the job, and research, and making something that actually comes across as a product worth buying could make you name live on for years after your death

comics aren't a large, marginally important industry, that all writers strive to join, but they're a passionate bunch that can make your legacy last for years to come

instead you'd rather sit on the bottom of a barrel being like everyone else typing out the same crap in 5 minutes a junior high student could in 2

batman has made billions of dollars from the excellence of others

and they'd rather sit down and take, what's not even a lot of money given that it's comics, and accept it, then make somethings of themselves, and perhaps with enough lucky make the company and business worth something again

there's no point in not trying

all they'd do is get more out of it with a bit of trying and effort, and passion and metaphorical sweat put into it

why should i read Tim Drake: Robin that can't even remember how Tim would talk about Damian right, and can't be fucked to not make his boyfriend look like a generic twink instead of himself, when i could go back and read something from about a decade before my own birth when it was good (if written by a massive fucker)

i've spent nearly a decade on and off criticizing comics, mainly dc and the bat-family, look at my blog name, it's 'ThatTimDrakeGuy' (yes that's how i personally spell it, with the capitalization), and all i've found are holes and tears in it since i've began back in 2015 when Rebirth was only news and headlines

and i've yet to see things get better when i read some classics and became aware at what was, and what could be

nonsense that people with enough passion to get their asses in gear to get the job and the assignments, with plenty of talents, especially the artists, my goodness regardless if they can remember what characters like tim or damian, and sometimes even easy to remember ass jason todd look like, they still have impressive skill, ability, and talent, that far surpases what the majority of the population on the whole planet can do

so it's not that they can't do it

it's that they don't try

often they try the opposite for quick cheap rewards, in the form of twitter stan brownie points "LOOK THEY HUGGED" "LOOK THEY'RE CRYING" "LOOK HE'S SO SHORT" regardless if that's thhe character, it makes sense, the story needs it, or it'll be remembered in years to come

give me and others a reason to come back

otherwise dc might as well die, which i hate to say, and don't mean all the way because of the jobs that would lose

but how else can i verbalize the general feeling and sensation it gives me, when all of that effort goes to waste with medicore at best products that won't be recalled months from now by any amount of peopel that's substantial?

you could go and be a legend in the field, or another turd in the bucket that's about to fly away in the wind to never be seen 'til their next splatty mess

quite sad and i hate it

and shit, with so many people acceptint it, and talking it up, the idea i can't even see a character i used to enjoy look like themselves at times is a wee miserable

how stupid is that when you think on it

how do you get to that point?

comics aren't serious

but the passion a lot have is

(never hurt anyone over it tho. those people are just wild, and not in a cool way)

[abiiors]

Edinburgh

A/N: Anon who's sent me two more requests, if you're reading this one, I'm so sorry I'll get to that one I promise 😭

Matty Healy x Reader

‘How am I supposed to live, laugh, love in these conditions,’ you groan into the pillow. 

‘Come on,’ he laughs, ‘you’ve got a broken leg, baby. It’s not the end of the world.’

You shoot a glare his way at that. ‘We were supposed to be in Edinburgh this weekend. I was supposed to be walking down cobblestone streets.’

‘Well, you’re the one who decided to “rescue” that cat from our roof.’

‘Because I thought it was stuck!’ you defend vehemently. 

‘You just jumped at the opportunity to kidnap another cat.’

There’s no point denying it. Your attempts at getting as many cats as you can aren’t exactly subtle to him. So you just huff in silence and mutter a few words about being bullied. 

‘Besides, Edinburgh will still be here in three weeks when your cast is off.’

This is a childish grudge, you know it is, yet you cannot help but pout at him, ‘well, what if it isn’t!’

‘Then I will personally, with my own two hands, build you a new Edinburgh. Brick by brick, I promise.

‘Melodramatic,’ you laugh; finally crack a smile for the first time that day and his whole face softens at that. 

He scoots closer to you on the bed and takes your broken leg in his lap. It’s covered in a very cheerful-looking yellow cast which makes you hate it even more. He’s also taken to doodling on it whenever he feels like it. So far it has—a cat, a very wonky-looking box with 1975 written inside (courtesy of George), “get well soon” messages + signatures from all four of them, and what looks like a flower? (it could honestly also be a sunny-side up). 

He grabs the marker he keeps on the bedside table for this explicit purpose and starts drawing a few lines. You strain your neck to see what it is and soon it becomes clear that he’s trying to draw the Balmoral Clock. 

‘The artistry, mmm, outstanding!’ you giggle. 

‘Stop teasing me, I am trying to bring Edinburgh to you.’ 

You lean back again and let him continue. His lips are parted in concentration and his curls keep fighting to escape the headband he’s put them in. One, in particular, manages to escape and falls on his eyebrow in just the most spectacular way possible. It feels like a scene from the movie, this. The bed is messy in just the right way and the sunlight that streams through the window creates the perfect soft halo around him. 

‘What are you thinking,’ he asks without looking up.

‘That I should auction that cast on eBay once they take it off,’ you snicker as he gives you an unimpressed look and goes back to putting the final touches on his magnum opus. He even goes as far as drawing a very elaborate M that’s surrounded by tonnes of little hearts.

Then he bends down to place a small kiss on your cast, just above your broken ankle. 

‘Hmm, Healy, is there a kink I should know about?’ you tease.

‘You twat,’ he chucks the marker cap at you in response, ‘I’m never doing anything nice for you again.’

‘Aww no! Okay, I will frame the cast once it’s off, I promise.’ 

‘You better,’ he says as he crawls back next to you and presses his lips onto yours. 

[embarressment-erradicated]

WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A DEITY.

by: Mt. Unfathoma

When one decides to become a deity, one must remember;

It's really easy, just do it. No really it is. You don't need or even want a fancy ritual. Infact the less known you are the better. Actually while your there, forget everything anyone ever taught you. Knowledge is something which while useful as a mortal... Binds you to the rules of the world.

To do something you have to know you can. If it's in your mind you can't, even subconsciously, you can't. Belief and will are the only 2 things which truly exist. remember this. and you will be a force to reckon with, forget this and you will be a pawn in the schemes of the one who remember.

Magic, a thing which people rely on, is there to limit you. It's rules engraved in the universe's still beating corpse. When one uses magic, their pure potential is limited, confined within rules. Held back so that one can not truly be all powerful.

You can get close. But one can not truly become a deity, if one does not discard the crutches, the chains which bind them.

That being said. Magic is fun, and most don't need or want true potential, accepting the easier rigid systems of magic in exchange for being unable to truly achieve greatness.

It is a con, but not one that harms people directly.

However that is not what this is about, this is a story about a cafe, one sitting within the confines of a pocket dimension. It has hundreds of entrances, and one exit, a regrouping point. Often used by ambassadors for dealings and diplomacy.

It is run by a neutral force, one of the true deities. One so widespread saying the name it has summons it's presence.

So we shall never speak it for who knows what it'll do outside.

It didn't start out aas a deity, infact it was a simple barista, until it wished to make something. the perfect cup.

A cup of coffee so perfect all love it. Yet that was not possible under the laws of the magic. Too long too many things to get perfect. no, it needed more, more than what it could do now, so it started watching the gods, noticing various things. Never did a god speak to another, never did a god show their true image, never did a god utter magic.

And so years and years and years of study. All to create the best cup of coffee in existence lead it to one thing.

Magic is like a bonesaw to a limb. Cutting off something everything can do, limiting it and restricting potential.

Up atop a tall spire. Reaching above the horizon it sat, it was world famous, however to make a magnum opus, one sometimes has to sacrifice all.

Years turned into decades, decades turned into millennia. Till time became just a plane you travel through. Immortality was required, yet you had to forget. So slowly all of it was discarded. Except for 1 thing.

"It Is My Job To Make The Perfect Drink, I Am Nothing Else Except This Fact, Not Anymore."

So it's body rotted away, soul withered until it was a concept. An idea, a spark.

But one can not interact without limitations. So it gave itself a name "The Barista Atop The Spire Of Ascension" And a form, a simple one, it even in it's life never enjoyed complex styles. So a nondescript grey humanoid figure was barely even acceptable. But it had to do.

It walked down, walked to where it worked before death. And started things up once more. It did not need to learn anything for it could be everything. It did not need to think, for it did what it would, and didn't do what it wouldn't.

People felt it's presence. People saw it walk, and they followed, feeling as if something was beckoning them forth. "Enjoy A Taste Of Heaven" It projected "Enjoy What It Is Like To Know Pure Bliss." It spoke, voice infinite and yet finite.

"The Perfect Cup, For Now and Forever."

And that is what it was. Exactly how you would want a cup of coffee to be, exactly when you'd want it, exactly when you'd need it.

No matter the time. Which was strange for most unacquainted with the 4th, 5th, or 6th dimension. But now, suddenly everything made sense. This was the one who did it.

It's realm of influence expanded, people drank the coffee, it was there when they wanted it, and how they wanted it, it was spread, drinking it cursed you with it. The perfect drink. The ones abstaining from pleasure hated it, saying it was a spit in the face to the goals of ascending.

Yet they would never ascend themselves. For they simply wanted to be higher than the confines of their reality. And didn't have a reason besides that.

Dedication, Patience, and Ignorance are the 3 pillars of godhood.

Dedication to your Craft.

Patience in the Process.

Ignorance of all Else.

Without a devotion to all of these. One is trapped by their reality, and will die trying. The truly amazing part is that the truly perfect cup is always there after you drink it. However sometimes you don't need or want coffee, so it isn't. Drinking this coffee would do nothing to ail their quest if that is what they truly wanted.

With all of this laid out. Please discard all else. I have just one question for you. Would you drink from the cup? Would you let go of your ignorance, and know what perfection is? Or would you ignore it all?

[taegularities]

Day 3

I'm reading the cmi for first time AND OMG gurl I'm loving this jjk ffs so much like wow who thought I could stumble upon some good shit on like this

I'm done till cmi~light ✨✨✨✨ seriously 3 damn days it took just to be here

SWEAR these two dorkes like hell they are such idiots and clowns in love how they are not obvious to eachother but to whole world I'm sure even if stranger sits with them for moment they wouldn't able to tell...

The way (yn/oc) tells jk how he also treats her so good in (cmi light) like gurl 🐥👊🏻 what in hell you were expecting!??? A LOVE CONFESSION not in hell baby he is doing he is DUMBASS I cracked up so bad on his bant ass reply like "yea I treat Every women same as you" you ain't no special girl mf 🤭🤭 fuck man i felt second hand embarrassment for BOTH THEM because first of all why our gurl asking those dumb questions when WE know we gonna get dumber answers for that.... jezz that boy WHY HE IS SUCH idiot tell me he gets better on because no way our oc is falling in love with his super idiots ass (besides those delicious moves and sure that 🦴🔫 are very rare can't blam her) but still WHY HE thinks he not good or enough for oc or what's with so much not so required insecurities and looks like boy's all smartness 😒is in his peepee and hands only and god's be good not again those dumb secret why can't he be more open.

The scene in cmi-light gurl where jk appears from nowhere reminds of some old romance movie sitting of where this fl is all sadden up in her own misery sitting outside and suddenly another moment she try to move on and gets up but sees there the ml is all snuggled up in the sunset all the sun light covering him and all she could see is his outline and there he is waiting for her it was so good that it's making jump and paint like I wanna do sketching or water painting of that scene

Anyways I will let you know if I ever able to create one but seriously I WANT THAT SCENE HAPPENING REAL LIFE 😭😭 maybe to us or someone anyways bye

lesson to be learn never to be so desperate kids

🦴🔫 anon

lmfaoooo omg yeah, the story is kind of an idiots to lovers and a bit of a slow burn thing 😭 not sure how to react to the jk slander and the multiple mentions of the word 'idiot' lmfaooo i created the guy in a way that even i fell in love hard 🤣 you'll know why he's not so open!! he's been through a crap ton that makes it not so easy for him to speak his mind and "act" secretive, which is ofc frustrating for both, but also valid since they haven't been in this thing together long enough for him to reveal such bad trauma. be patient!! 😋

i'm happy you've been reading!! lights is somehow the chapter where most people drop by and leave a couple kind words hehe still one of my favs, too!! i hope you enjoy the rest (and them being idiots bc it's far from being overrr 😂) and thank you for going through my beloved magnum opus!!! you described the scene in lights so beautifully, too, bc yeah oc really did breathe that sigh of relief :') if you ever paint anything like that, i'd love to see it :) hope to hear from you again soon 🤍

[hlizr50]

Writing tag game by @bonecarversbestie !

Describe your writing process from idea to posting/publishing?

If I have an idea that I cannot stop thinking about, I immediately scream it at a few of my other fanfic author friends. I workshop a LOT with @mystical-blaise. If it's something small, I might just start writing after that.

If it's a big idea, I'll start planning. Typically my plot points come to me in little movie snippets in my brain, so I know which big (typically painful) scenes I NEED to have, and then build out after that. I also use those if I'm struggling with writing. For example, the first thing I wrote for Verzavar Haz was the end of chapter 15 (iykyk).

I go between writing by hand or typing my first draft. I'm not good at sprinting and tend to edit as I go. Writing by hand allows me to do a pretty thorough edit as I type it into Google Docs, but writing a novel-length fic by hand is... a lot. I think I wrote ~25 chapters of The Raven and the Songbird by hand. Conversely, I wrote all of VH in docs and had beta readers.

For the vast majority of my work, I haven't used beta readers - mostly because I'm very rejection sensitive and even the slightest bit of constructive criticism has a high probability of sending me into a tailspin of self-loathing and feeling like I'm an utter failure. Is it unreasonable? Absolutely. Is it real? Also yes.

What I ALWAYS do is read EVERYTHING out loud before I publish it. It helps me catch repeated words and makes me read through everything without skipping. It's really helpful for spelling mistakes. And, I'll be honest, I'm reading in full audiobook narrator mode - voices and everything. Too bad you'll never hear it.

For Verzavar Haz, I had beta readers, because my goal for that fic was to be the top Crescent City fic. Did I achieve my goal? No. But I learned a lot by having beta readers - namely that I don't suck just because someone had some suggestions for me. And it is the highlight of my writing career thus far.

I don't do anything fancy when I post to AO3. HTML? Don't know her. I literally copy and paste the text. It's a pain when my docs on my iPad doesn't copy over italics...

Are you a plotter or a pantser?

Yes.

I'm a plotter if it's big. Or if I'm trying to create something with a full arc. Once I'm plotted, I'll definitely go off the rails. But I DO plot first. And I have certain non-negotiable scenes that I know MUST be there.

What do you listen to when you are writing?

I am NEVER consistent, but when I wrote VH I listened to a couple RuhnLidia and Gwynriel playlists on Spotify. I should get back to that, because I do think that helped with my productivity. A lot of time I have sports or TV on in the background, which isn't particularly conducive.

What’s your drink of choice (while writing)?

Ummmm probably water or Celsius.

Promote yourself! What’s your favourite thing you’ve written?

Verzavar Haz is my magnum opus. I wrote this after House of Sky and Breath broke my brain, and it is by far the best thing I've ever created. Read the trigger warnings, and HEAR ME when I say that my motto is "the worse the hurt, the better the comfort". But if you stick with it, I think it's pretty great. You know, if I do say so, myself.

Share a fic of yours that you think is underrated/deserves more love.

By Death or Decree is a canon-divergent From Blood and Ash fic. I've lost my love for the FBAA series and universe, and I worked hard to have this fic out before The War of Two Queens was released. I wanted that, because I knew that after TWOTQ we would all know, for sure, that Malik wasn't the cruel creature that I thought would have been MUCH more compelling.

BDOD explores the possibility of Poppy being married to Malik as the Blood Crown had intended, and Casteel coming face-to-face with them again in Atlantia.

Again, check the content warnings (see a theme here?)

Do you have any advice for new writers?

Don't be afraid to write dark things. I learned this from the author of Savage Lands, and it's what gave me the courage to write Verzavar Haz. The reality of the world is that it is often ugly and cruel, and you shouldn't feel afraid to write about it.

Make sure you include content warnings, when you do.

What is a writing style/technique that others do really well that you'd like to get better at?

Prose and scene setting. I don't consider myself a particularly gifted weaver of stories. My writing, though rarely first-person, is VERY internal. I struggle with giving descriptions of people and places. I'd love to get better at being able to illustrate for my readers.

Is there a character you were surprised you enjoyed writing as much as you did?

Pollux Antonius.

This is just another instance of me asking, "WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?!" But there's something about making someone just the ABSOLUTE WORST. Pollux was the definition of diabolical and evil when I wrote him for VH, and I find myself intrigued when other bad guys do or intend to do the most horrendous, soul-shattering things. I'm here to break everyone so I can piece them back together.

Thank you for the tag, @sadiegirl2021!!

No-pressure tags: @aldbooks @captain-of-the-gwynriel-ship @sunshinebingo

Writing tag game by @bonecarversbestie !

Describe your writing process from idea to posting/publishing?

I have a notes app called EasyNotes where I jot down all my ideas as I get them; bits of dialogue I think would work in a fic, interactions between characters (which always come to me just as I'm about to drift off to sleep) and very, very rough outlines of chapters.

Then, I'll word vomit onto a doc and copy in any notes I had.

Because I'm better at dialogue than describing the scene, I'll write out all of that first and then work from there to flesh it out. Like starting with the skeleton.

Once I have the first draft done, I start my editing process. I go paragraph by paragraph correcting spelling and grammar (I have a Chrome extension called LanguageTool), and then I play the whole chapter through another Chrome extension called Read Aloud. Because of my ADHD, it can be difficult to catch all my errors by reading alone, so hearing it out loud helps A LOT! Would recommend it. (Although the voices used are hilarious. Hearing your smut scene's read out by a monotone robot is slightly traumatising 😂)

Once I'm happy with a paragraph, I will add HTML coding to it - the <p> tag. In my head, it's just the easiest way to mark that a paragraph is complete. If I'm still not sure about a sentence or paragraph, I will mark it in red to rework. I also add all my <i> tags as I'm writing, so I don't forget about them later!

I realise I'm doing too much! But, I quite enjoy the editing process.

Once I get a chapter or One Shot uploaded, I try my best not to read it again so I'm not continuously making little changes.

Are you a plotter or a pantser?

I want to be a plotter SO BAD! I've got Excel sheets, multiple docs with outlines, plot points, and a solid plan. And then boom! The characters run off like a crazed toddler in the opposite direction, and all I can do is follow. So… I guess I'm a pantser!

What do you listen to when you are writing?

I have multiple Spotify playlists depending on the mood of the fic/chapter I'm writing. If I need to write emotional scenes, I'll put on some heartbreaking Emo songs from 2006! Or, if my energy drops while writing, I'll switch to 90s pop. Generally, though, I just listen to instrumental music. One of my fav playlists is this one.

What’s your drink of choice (while writing)?

Water. I am booooooring. It is sparkling, though!

Promote yourself! What’s your favourite thing you’ve written?

I think it's Hot Girl Summer. This was supposed to be a little funny, 5-10 chapter fic that wasn't serious. And it has spiralled into a multi POV, 40-chapter story with so much plot! I'm loving the process, though. And I think I will definitely have to get it bound when it's all done.

Share a fic of yours that you think is underrated/deserves more love.

I'm going to say Hot Girl Summer too. I think a lot of people aren't as interested in stories that follow both Gwynriel and Elucien (and sometimes E/riel or another pairing with their favourite characters) at the same time. I haven't seen many fics that do it, but they’re some of my favourites in the fandom, and I’m so happy to add to that list. If you're hesitant, I highly recommend giving them a try!

My favs are:

Call Me Home (by @propagandaprincess)

A Court of Vision and Bloom (by studentwriter666)

Best Laid Plans (by @trappedoutside124)

Do you have any advice for new writers?

First of all, just do it! It took me 33 years to build the confidence to try. For most of my life, I didn't think I was good enough to write, even though I had so many stories to tell. In my 20s, I probably wouldn’t have had the confidence to take the plunge. Writing opens you up to criticism (which I hate!), but I’m forever grateful that 99.9% of my readers have only ever been incredibly supportive and encouraging.

Don’t be afraid to use tools that help you. I know my limitations with ADHD, so I created a process that works for me. Everyone has a different method, and the right one is whatever works for you.

Finally, finding a community of like-minded people makes the whole process a lot more fun. I love helping others develop fic ideas or beta-reading for them, and appreciate all the support they give me. It really motivates me to keep writing.

What is a writing style/technique that others do really well that you'd like to get better at?

Flow and angst! I'm really working on improving these areas in my writing. I'm quite impatient and tend to rush through the plot rather than building up tension. I know I need to slow down and let the story breathe, but it's so hard! I just want my characters to kiss within the first 5 seconds 😂

Is there a character you were surprised you enjoyed writing as much as you did?

Eris Vanserra!

Gods, I love torturing this man! I've redeemed him so much in my fic that I'll be heartbroken if he truly turns out to be just a dickhead in the canon ACOTAR world!

Thank you for tagging me @olenvasynyt

No pressure tags: @sunshinebingo @avabrynne @thevalkyriesshadow @aldbooks @hlizr50

[comicaurora]

Heyo, it's the fool who wants to make a comic with zero experience in drawing or finishing stories again. A lot of people, including you, I think, mentioned that "Your first work will be bad". Any tips how…not to do that? I don't expect it to be a magnum opus or smth, but I at least want to make something people would genuinely unironically enjoy, and "first story is always not good" notion everywhere is very discouraging

It's not like I never tried anything creative ever, but this is my first attempt of putting it down on paper with intention of completing it, instead of having vague ideas of "I know what would be so cool when I make it a thing" in my head for months without acting upon any of these ideas

It's definitely a disheartening adage, even if it's supposed to take the pressure off young creators.

Unfortunately, no matter how good your starting point gets - and you can get it very good, don't get me wrong - you are still going to find it unbearably bad when you look back on it with experienced eyes. You might eventually circle back around to finding it impressive, considering it was your absolute first starting point and you had no experience, but you still won't be able to see its merit the way your audience will.

The thing is, your first project is going to teach you a lot of things you couldn't have known you needed to learn beforehand. This means everything you make after learning those things is going to be smoother in process and better in result. There's also just the fact that the more you do this sort of thing the more practiced you'll get at the mechanical side of it, making it faster and easier for you and leaving you with more energy to punch things up. Compare the Big Fight Scene from chapter 3 with the one from chapter 17 in terms of visual complexity:

Particle effects, ambient glow, soft lighting, atmospheric depth, metallic effects, light and shadow. The seeds of these ideas are present in the earlier shot, but executed in a much clumsier way. Fourteen chapters of gradually increasing complexity and just raw practice got me to the point where drawing that second panel was fun rather than exhausting. If I'd tried that in the first chapter I would've probably been so worn out just trying to finish the lineart that the quality of the rest of the image would've suffered from sheer exhaustion.

And even before that, those first chapters only flowed as well as they did because I'd been drawing hundreds and hundreds of video frames for years at this point, which had gotten my lineart muscle memory polished enough that I wasn't agonizing over every single stroke.

I was absolutely determined to start this comic off at the best level of quality I could, and that determination kept me kicking the can down the road for a decade. I think this was a good thing; if I'd started it any earlier I think I would've been a slow enough learner that the quality increase over those first few chapters wouldn't have been as steep as it was. And that first chapter was as good as I could've made it at the time; I didn't take any shortcuts or laze around, and I used every skill I'd learned over the previous decade of physical and digital art. Of course, if I knew then what I knew now there's loads of stuff I'd have changed about the way I handled the intro. In fact, I'm going to break my One Rule about "never going back or redoing things" and I'm going to walk you all through chapter 1 and what I would change/fix if I was drawing it now.

Remove the outline on the background mountains, add color variance to the further mountains so they appear farther in the background, un-muddy the color of the sky and make those clouds a little more impressive; this could've looked like a full glorious noonday sun. The forest was drawn with an experimental brush I'd created for foliage that I ended up deciding didn't produce the effect I wanted; I'd probably go through and use the technique I developed for Gleicann's forest to cel shade blocks of foliage.

Add at least the bare hint of buildings behind the sword pedestal - just gradient outlines would be fine, similar to the extended backgrounds in Zuurith. Also slap some blue cinder-y particle effects coming up off the sword. Clean up the shading layer so there aren't as many holes. Add metallic shine to the blade and marbling/stone texture to the pedestal.

Un-muddy the colors on this background; they match The Collector's color palette but that matters less than looking nice. The background needs something - speed lines, the implication of foliage - etc. The poses could also be more dynamic and drawn with more confidence. To show the power behind the blows, re-choreographs the fight to show more of the damage it does to the environment - the sword carving through rocks, ploughing furrows into the ground, starting to spark with starfire, etc.

Same problem with the foliage; the special brush adds too much detail, drawing the eye away from the important parts of the scene, and the colors are muddy to cover that up. Brighter greens and cel-shaded layers would produce the effect I actually wanted and be faster than hand-drawing every treetrunk and then shading them so they're indistinguishable anyway. Also, more intense shading on the foreground figure - a neutral tan shadow layer is functional, but it could look a lot more dramatic, and he's shaded much more lightly than the extremely muddied background is.

Of course, "if I knew then what I know now" is a meaningless turn of phrase. I needed to draw these pages this way in order to learn what I know now. If I had jumped straight into the shortcuts I've painstakingly developed without having had that intervening practice, the end result would've been just as bad - if not worse, because it would've been executed shakily, without the confidence that accompanies muscle memory. The techniques I used in this first chapter had served me well up til that point. The techniques I use now were built on these foundations. Lamenting that I could've done it better if I'd started now is like saying the pyramids would be so much taller if they'd laid the foundations at the top part instead.

There's a degree to which this work is sisyphusian. You do your best, you push yourself, and then your "best" gets better. At some point you have to accept that what was your best is still okay, even if you can't see it that way.

When I was working on this comic in the pre-actually-drawing-it years, I came to a realization that helped me get unstuck: "good enough" is a mask that "perfect" wears. Striving for perfection is a pointless task, and this is pretty well known, but it seems a lot more reasonable to just try to get "good enough" at art to guarantee that your work will be good enough. But if you unpack that concept, you likely find that your definition of "good enough" is basically "without flaws." Which is "perfect." Which is, as mentioned, unattainable. Those pages are as good as I could've possibly made them at the time, and they aren't perfect, and I never thought they were perfect, because I knew if I waited for them to be perfect in my eyes I'd never make them. I just had to grit my teeth, make them public and hope that people got something out of them that I couldn't.

There is a baseline level of artistic skill and preparation that I do recommend cultivating - figure and life drawing, anatomy studies, landscapes, reading Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics" cover to cover - but there is no hardline starting point at which you are guaranteed to be good enough to make the story and art good. This is because "good" is subjective, and as long as you are improving as an artist, your own perspective on your old work will never be that it is "good." You have to trust that the audience that likes your story likes it for their own valid reasons.

The thing is, I know this is a bummer. This whole thing is a bummer perspective. Artists want to make good art and the nature of artistic creation is being unable to see your own art as good for long. If you believe that your art must be a certain baseline level of Good to be worthy of existing, this truth seems to be a condemnation to an eternal and pointless purgatorial struggle.

The most valuable skill an artist can develop at this stage is strangling that insecurity with their bare hands.

Trust your audience! Trust that they enjoy what they enjoy, and trust that they see something in your art, even if all you can see are the critiques you'd use to polish it! "Perfect" and "good enough" will tell you that your creation will always be hideously unlovable and must be hidden from scrutiny until it's "ready", but like all insecurities, underpinning this is the axiom that anyone who likes you or your work is lying. Strangle this falsehood, trust freely and openly that your audience is being honest with you, and while you work to improve on the creation side of things, trust that in the eyes of the people who like your work, it is Good Enough.

[space-dragon-ace]

The word with C

Pairing: PLATONIC!!! Albedo & Homunculus!Child!Reader Description: You are Albedo's creation, yet you have his DNA. Will he ever see you as his child? Word count: 1433 Additional info: This is not meant to be romantic, but purely platonic bonding. Tagging @clouds-rambles & @deadlyboyy

You happily smiled at Albedo, kicking your legs as he examined you. It was the second time this week he took your measurements, checked your height, your weight, and just about everything you had. You were his pride, his magnum opus, his creation. A homunculi, a creature that looked so human one could believe you were one. But that was the problem, you weren't. Albedo had created you in his lab, and he was not even completely sure how he did it! It had been an accident, Albedo had been experimenting with his own DNA, trying to find a way to give vision abilities to people who didn't held them. Then Klee had barged into the lab, and before either he or Sucrose could react, one of her bombs went off. When the dust had settled, Albedo wanted to see if he could save any of the data he gathered. Instead, he had seen you, a human looking baby, laying on the floor. In a span of just three days, you had matured into what resembled a ten-year old. All while barely needing any nutrients or hydration.

„That's it“, he said, writing down some notes „You can go now.“ You nodded and hopped down from the table. Carefully, you approached Albedo, trying to hug him, but he pushed you away. „I need to concentrate. Go play somewhere else or whatever.“ He waved his hand, dismissing you. Your smile turned into a frown, and you scuffled out of the laboratory, sulking a bit. Sucrose watched, biting her lip. „You shouldn't be so rude to them“, she said, „They are your child, after all. They want to be loved by you, and want your attention.“ He sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. Her words were true, he knew that, but yet... As much as he loved children, he could not see you as one. Could not see you as his child. He was not even human himself, so how could he be a father? What could it mean if his secret were to get out to the masses, how would they treat him? How would they treat you? He did not dare to think about the possibilities, each scenario his mind tried to come up with was worse than the last. Albedo had never been this afraid before.

Because once he would start seeing you as his child, he would love you. You would become his world, his light, the center of his universe. Like any good father, he would want to protect you from everything bad, would want you to be happy and safe, would worry and fear for you. You would be his greatest weakness, the one place to hit that would hurt more than anything else ever would. No, it was better to keep seeing you as a creature, as his creation. As long as he kept a distance, it would not hurt should anything happen to you. If it did, and you wouldn't be saved, you would just be another failed experiment. Something he tried once and then never again, and would forget soon enough. And for you, it was the best as well, Albedo was sure of it. He was an alchemist, and Dragonspine was his home. The cold, uncaring mountains were no place for a child. While he could withstand the cold just fine, he had learned very quickly that you couldn't, not at all. And you deserved to have friends, Klee already being all over you. So truly, what kind of father could he be to you, if he visited the city so rarely? He would either be never there, or keep you from all the things that made you happy. It was for the best to keep his distance.

A hand on his shoulder brought him back into reality. Sucrose looked at him, her eyes full of emotions he could not name. „Why don't you take a break for today and spent time with them?“, she suggested, a tiny smile on her lips. Albedo sighed again, shaking his head. „I can't. If I do, my creation will get used to my presence. I don't want that“, he said with a huff, focusing on his notes again. At least, he would, if Sucrose hadn't placed her hand on them. This time, he was met with daggers from her eyes when he looked up. „Do you not want them to get used to you? Or do you not want to get used to them? Who are you really thinking about here?“ Her voice was cold as ice and sharp as steel. Albedo groaned, pushing her hands from his notes. „This is not for you to care. Better watch over the experiments!“, he ordered her, staring her down. After a few more moments, she huffed, but turned away, allowing him to go back to his data.

---

The sun was setting already when he left the lab. The people in the streets walked quickly, scarfs and hats pulled deep into their faces. Winter was at the door, the temperatures already low. Not much longer and Mondstadt would be covered in snow, and the children would have snowball fights everywhere. He smiled at the idea of you being among them, happily laughing and having fun. A second later he shook his head. Keep distance, you were a creation, not a child. He could not let himself forget that. Klee ran up to him, a big smile on her face. „Good evening Mr. Albedo! Ready to go home?“, she asked, and giggled when he nodded. „I am. And you, Klee? On your way to keep Lady Jean on her toes or are you doing a slow evening?“ Klee giggled, rocking back and forth on her heels. „I'm doing nothing for the rest of the day. Did [Y/N] bring you flowers?“ Albedo blinked and tilted his head. Flowers? Why should you bring him flowers? „No, they didn't. Why would they?“ Now it was Klee's turn to blink, though it turned into a pout easily. „They said you were angry at them, and that they wanted to cheer you up. So I told them to bring you flowers. Kaeya always brings the women he likes flowers, and they get happy. And then [Y/N] ran off and said they'd bring you the most pretty flowers in Dragonspine.“ It took all but three seconds for the information to sink into Albedo's brain. You went to Dragonspine, alone, in this temperatures. You could be lost, you could be hurt, you could be dead. He was running before he knew it, the city flying past him. He needed to find you, and by Celestia, he needed you to be alive and well. His heart ached at the thought of not seeing you again, not being able to hear your voice again or never seeing you smile again. So much for keeping a distance.

He reached Dragonspine later than he wanted to, calling your name against the howling winds. With each passing second, your chances of survival were getting more slim, and the shiver he felt was not because of the cold. „[Y/N]!“, he called again, desperate for an answer. Tears burned in his eyes as he searched, your name echoing around every few seconds. Albedo prayed to Celestia for some kind of hint that would lead him to you, anything, he would take a miracle if he had to! „P-papa?“, a little voice called, and Albedo felt a boulder drop from his shoulders. He ran to the ledge the voice had come from, kneeling down and opening his arms. You stumbled out, your skin so cold and lips slightly blue. His heart clenched at the sight, and he pressed you as tight as he could against his body, hoping to warm you up a little bit. He thanked the Gods over and over on his way back to the city. You were alive, unharmed, and safe again. Safe in his arms, and he would not let you go. „'m sorry Papa, I couldn't find flowers for you. Please don't be mad“, you mumbled against his neck. Albedo inhaled shakily, hugging you closer. „It's okay, my dear. I'm not mad at you“, he promised. You sniffled a bit, your tiny hands clutching his shirt tighter. „It was so cold and dark. I was so scared“, you admitted, hoping he wouldn't think bad about you. But he merely kissed your temple and forehead, gentle and reassuring. „It's okay, you are safe now. Papa is here.“ You had been his creation. But now, Albedo could only see you as his child.

[immaturityofthomasastruc]

Gabriel Agreste: Interesting Villain, Horrible Character (400 Follower Special)

I'm honestly surprised more people didn't want me to talk about Gabriel, especially with how often I rag on how horrible of a person he is. But, three character analysis posts later, and we're going to talk about why the main villain of Miraculous Ladybug is a real letdown.

Gabriel Needs to give the Whining a Rest

The interesting thing is one of the few things I actually liked in Season 3 was Hawkmoth. His plans actually made sense (for the most part), and by playing the long game, he managed to turn Chloe against Ladybug and deprived her of several key allies. Granted, Season 4 immediately undid the latter, but I was still impressed by his strategy.

Generally, one of the better aspects of Gabriel as a character was just how over the top he was as Hawkmoth. Keith Silverstein is clearly giving it his all with his performance, and he is just so enjoyable to watch as a cartoonish supervillain.

And therein lies the first major problem with Gabriel as a character. While he is fun to watch as a simple supervillain, the show tries to give him more depth and unintentionally makes him worse.

In Season 2, when it was revealed that Gabriel was Hawkmoth, many fans speculated on what he needed the Miraculous for, until the Queen Bee Trilogy showed it was to save his possibly dead wife, Emilie. The idea of that is so the show can give more depth to its main villain, and I think it's an interesting idea in concept. After all, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

The problem is just how radically different Gabriel is normally compared to how he is as Hawkmoth. He always goes on about how he's “doing this for Emilie”, but it's hard to really sympathize with him when you consider he constantly gives evil monologues and evil laughs, really getting into the supervillain role. And let's not forget all of the “I'm going to wear Ladybug's skin as a suit” faces he loves to make.

Clearly this man is the picture of mental stability.

Gabriel's motivation for being Hawkmoth when compared to what he actually does as Hawkmoth is shady enough, but the thing is that the writers clearly want the audience to at least feel a little bad for him. They want to make the audience sympathize with him despite the way he acts with or without the mask. Without Miraculous Ladybug, he is routinely putting innocent lives in danger and never once shows regret for his actions. All he talks about is how “he's doing this for Emilie”, or that “he'll get their Miraculous soon”. There's no real reason to feel bad for him other than “because the script says so”.

Let's compare Gabriel to Malcolm Merlyn from Arrow. His big plan in the first season of the show is to create a machine that will cause an earthquake to destroy a crime-infested portion of Starling City, claiming to be trying to help everyone, but it's clear he is only doing it out of revenge for his wife getting killed by a criminal from that part of the city. In addition, throughout that season and future seasons, he always makes sure his plans lead to him benefiting in some way, showing he isn't just some noble man trying to achieve his goals with a less than noble method.

If we got some moments that showed that what Gabriel was doing was selfish, it would make him a more complex villain. But we don't get anything like that. What do we get instead? Well...

I Could Really Care Less About Emilie Agreste

We have known Gabriel's motivation has been to save his wife for a little over two years at this point, but at the same time, it's hard to believe that motivation because of how underdeveloped Emilie is as a character.

There have been a total of two lines in the entirety of the show that explain what happened to Emilie, and they're both vague as hell. One of them was from “Feast” that implied Emilie used the broken Peacock Miraculous.

Adrien: My mom used to have dizzy spells… just like Nathalie.

And the other that outright tells the audience what's happening to her in a clip show that most people will skip.

Nathalie: As I've watched Emilie falling deeper into an endless sleep, my sadness for her has deepened, too

That is literally all we get for an explanation, and nothing else. We have no idea of what she's like as a person or what her relationship with her family was like other than Gabriel and Adrien saying they miss her. Other than the way the narrative says she's important to Gabriel and Adrien, we don't really have a reason to care about her as a character. There have also been some lines that imply she went along with Gabriel's questionable parenting techniques, like how he was apparently only homeschooled as a kid (Origins) and never had a birthday party growing up (The Bubbler), so how do we even know if she's a good person? In fact, why not set up this question as a mystery to make the audience wonder if Gabriel has another reason to bring Emilie back?

It ultimately turns Emilie into a plot device and not a character that Gabriel and Adrien only bring up to make the audience feel bad for them, and meant to justify Gabriel's actions by saying that he's “doing this for his family”.

But hey, if he's doing this all for his family, surely Gabriel's redeeming traits come from his relationship with Adrien, right? Right?

As a Parent, Gabriel is Far From the Best

I've talked about this briefly before, but parenting in Miraculous Ladybug is written in such a black and white way, even by the standards of this show. Parents are portrayed in one of two ways. They're either amazing people who love and support their children unconditionally, or they're awful people who treat their own children like trash. And much like a lot of things in this show, there are times where the latter is treated like the former.

There are so many times where the narrative insists on making you see Gabriel as a troubled, but wellmeaning person who tries his best to be a good parent to Adrien, but it is far from the truth.

I'm not going to beat around the bush. Gabriel is a terrible parent. Like, he is awful at being a parent in so many ways, even before you find out he's Hawkmoth. In his first appearance, “The Bubbler”, he delegates getting Adrien a birthday present to Nathalie, his assistant. He literally can't be bothered to take time out of his schedule to get his own son a present for his birthday. And as the show goes on, he becomes more controlling and forbids Adrien from going out with his friends in other episodes (Captain Hardrock, Silencer). While this could be used to show Gabriel getting worse, it's never acknowledged in-universe, with Adrien continually defending his father essentially keeping him on house arrest.

“But IOTA!” You might say. “Gabriel has made efforts to bond with his son in some episodes.” While that might be true, most of those come right after his Akumas have almost gotten Adrien killed. He only hugged Adrien and made an attempt to learn more about him after Simon Says invaded their home, he only decided to watch that movie Emilie was in with Adrien after Gorizilla nearly dropped him off a building, and he only hugged Adrien again in public after he was turned into a gold statue by Style Queen.

In fact, let's talk about how Gabriel acts in the Queen Bee Trilogy. He actually decides to quit being Hawkmoth, but it's not because he realizes all the damage he's caused. Instead, he gave up because his “magnum opus”, a stronger than usual Akuma that only got the advantage on Ladybug ironically because of dumb luck, failed. Sure, he says he can't keep putting his son in danger, but he rarely ever acknowledges that he does so in the first place. When Riposte wanted to fight Adrien, Hawkmoth did nothing to stop her other than giving her a stern warning earlier on and nothing else. Where was this attitude earlier?

Hell, even then, he immediately goes back to being Hawkmoth as soon as he sees an opportunity, not even a day after his “mAgNuM oPuS” blew up in his face (because I guess Scarletmoth was just Plan B). If he made such a big deal about caring for his son, why didn't he try harder to spend time with him? Has he ever had doubts about what he's doing before? If Chloe didn't show up as Queen Bee, was he going to follow through on his promise and try to be a better father to Adrien instead of trying to get Ladybug and Cat Noir's Miraculous?

And yeah, the whole irony is that Gabriel is doing this for his family when he is unknowingly fighting his own son, which could lead to some interesting drama if done right. The idea of how Gabriel would react to his son being Cat Noir could really lead to some internal struggles for him to go through. But then we got “Cat Blanc”, which shows just how terrible of a character Gabriel is.

In an alternate timeline where he found out his son was Cat Noir, what does Gabriel do? Does he try to steal Adrien's Miraculous while he's sleeping? Does he reconsider his actions or realize he was endangering Adrien's life?

NOPE! He just decides to akumatize him all while emotionally tormenting him, before causing the end of the world.

This is honestly one of the most appalling things I've ever seen in any TV show, because it's basically an abusive father ordering his son to listen to him all while referencing his (kind of) dead mother to back up his point. And rather than use this to show how despicable Gabriel is, the episode decides to blame Marinette for this happening. Yes, according to the show, her present to Adrien caused several events to happen which caused Cat Blanc, but this logic makes no sense. It's like blaming the JFK assassination on the man who sold a gun to Lee Harvey Oswald, instead of, you know, Lee Harvey Oswald.

Not only was this episode yet another excuse to blame Marinette for something that wasn't her fault, it leads into the biggest problem I have with Gabriel as a character.

Sympathize with Gabriel? Surely, You Jest

After everything I've gone over regarding Gabriel as a character, after all the awful things I've talked about, are you really surprised that I don't feel bad for him at all?

Gabriel is just an awful character and a despicable human being, but the show just keeps wanting me to feel bad for him. It's just so hard to when you consider everything he's done has made him anything but sympathetic. I'm just saying, it's kind of hard to feel bad for someone who tries to start World War III with the only justification being “i'M dOiNg It FoR mY fAmIlY”, especially when he treats his family like crap.

The writers go out of their way to show how horrible Gabriel is as Hawkmoth/Shadowmoth, but they think because they throw in a few moments where he looks conflicted, we'll immediately feel bad for him. What makes so many people interested in seeing Chloe become a better person is that they can tell she's the victim of a troubled upbringing, and know that because she's only a teenager, she still has room to grow as a person, represented by having more honest moments of vulnerability. Gabriel is a grown man who once caused the apocalypse because of how terrible of a parent he is, and has even fewer sympathetic moments than Chloe does. Which one of these two is supposedly irredeemable? The answer may surprise you.

But the frustrating thing is that this kind of villain could have worked. Instead of making him this mustache-twirling psychopath, show how much Gabriel regrets what he has to do, but keeps pushing onward despite all the lives he's risking if it means that he can save his wife. Instead of making Gabriel like Lex Luthor, make him like Mr. Freeze, who is basic a better written version of him.

But as it stands, there's a good reason why Gabriel gets little to no respect as a character in the Miraculous Ladybug fandom, as a villain, or as a father.

[vfucking1]

AAAAAAAAAA OKAY

(NOT GONNA KEEP UP MY ALLCAPS FOR THIS BECAUSE IM ON MOBILE)

When I was God I planted the Tree of Life in an empty universe. How I came to exist before anything else is a bit of a long story, bur all that really matters is that I planted and tended the tree for years and years, which all really passed in the blink of an eye, compared to the eternal nothing surrounding me. My power was incredibly limited before this- there was essentially nothing in the universe to work with, nothing to change or mold, and it took eons just to learn to and actively harness enough energy from the dead void to create the seed from which the Tree grew. It grew the most radiant white bark and its branches and leaves twisted most similarly to a willow tree. One day, after many years, I awoke to the sight of the Tree suddenly bearing fruit- fifteen beautiful red fruit with fragile soft skin like the most delicate peach, that each thrummed with potential beneath their skin.

The first fruit I crushed beneath my fingers, revealing what was inside- pure, unaltered life force, what would later be called lifeblood. I used this lifeblood to shape and form the Heavens- it was like night and day, the ease of creating from lifeblood was inconceivable compared to harnessing the void, and one fruit provided enough substance to create the basis of the entirety of the universe everyone knew, contained in the Circle of the Fixed Stars. The planets and sun were simple, the future City of Angels was only a few blocks and built simply, but it was so much more than the void, it made me cry, to finally have a world and not just the unwelcoming nothing.

The next things I made were the thirteen original supreme angels, called the archangels, each of them formed from one of the fruit. Despite the power of lifeblood to create inanimate things, it took more effort to create something alive, intelligent, powerful. The first angel I created was Michael, he was a natural leader, deeply set in his beliefs, though it led to him being a tad stuck in his ways. Steadfast, bold, and strong- he became the leader of the armies of Heaven in the future, until he formed the Council after my… departure.

The second was Lucifer, and… I truly miss Lucifer. He had a natural curiosity that are through new things like wildfire, always jumping into the next mystery and asking questions, his unstoppable desire to know was… admirable. I wish I had been better at controlling my temper- he was always bound to be the one who asked, who made me question.

I don’t fully remember many other archangels, not even the order I created most of them in. Jophiel was an incredibly kind soul who created the stained glass of Heaven’s cathedrals. Uriel was the keeper of Heaven’s records and libraries and quite quiet, but deeply intelligent. Raphael had a knack for healing wounds unlike anything I’d ever seen, and absolutely radiated positivity. I don’t remember much of Azrael, Ariel, Raguel, Zadkiel, Camael, Metatron, and Jeremiel, as much as I wish I did…

But I’m guessing you noticed a distinct lack of one of them, and… that was Gabriel. He was the last archangel I created, and in all honesty I viewed him as my magnum opus. My practice with using lifeblood to create conscious beings all culminated in him. And I never felt such pride as when he opened his eyes… I never let my favor for him show, of course, and I treated all my archangels with the same respect. Well… at least before what happened with Lucifer. I became much more cold towards them all after that… I didn’t want to become attached and lose another person I deeply cared for.

The last fruit I used to form the Earth and all its creatures- plants, animals, everything down to the last microscopic speck. I had been brainstorming and daydreaming worlds and creatures to keep myself sane in the void for what could have been trillions of years after all, and I finally had everything I needed to actually create them! So Earth became… a sort of playground for all sorts of experiments of mine, while I continued to harvest the fruit of the Tree of Life, creating greater angels like the Seraphs and Powers to populate Heaven alongside my Archangels, teaching them all about the world and to be kind to each other, how to pay me their respects… I guess that’s another regret. Making them worship me- I was hungry for any sort of attention after so many years alone, and I thought I liked the idea of being worshipped. In all honesty, if I could do it all again, I would have just let them form their own opinions on me. There are a lot of things I’d do differently, but that’s all in the past.

sigh. I miss Heaven.

THE URGE TO RAMBLE ABOUT MY MEMORIES VS I DOUBT ANYONE WOULD BE INTERESTED IN ALL MY STUPID STORIES ABOUT WHEN I FIRST CARVED THE ARCHANGELS

[animebw]

Short Reflection: Attack on Titan Final Season (Parts 1 and 2)

It’s hard to believe Attack on Titan is almost over.

I still remember all the way back in 2013, when one of my brother’s friends showed me the first episode of this weird thing called an “anime.” I was completely unfamiliar with the medium back then, unless you count dubbed Pokemon and Ghibli movies, and I had no idea what to make of something so radically different from the stuff I was used to in Western media. But even though I didn’t actually watch AOT until many years later, that first episode lingered in my mind. The imagery, the music, the electrifying visual storytelling, the vision of a dark fantasy world unlike anything I’d seen before, the sheer majestic brutality of Eren’s mom being eaten... even back then, I could tell there was something special about this show. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on, but remained like a whisper at the back of my mind. You’ll return to me eventually, it seemed to say. It’s only a matter of time.

Flash forward almost a decade later. I’ve been watching anime regularly for over four years. I’ve discovered masterpieces that have blown me away, stories that have changed the way I look at media, experiences that have made my life infinitely richer. I have fallen in love with an artistic medium capable of truly dizzying heights, explored it from every conceivable angle, and still find new things to delight me. Anime is special to me, and I could not be more thankful for the journey it’s taken me on.

And almost ten years since that first episode creeped into my mind... I am still enthralled by Attack on Titan.

It has been a long decade for Hajime Isayama’s magnum opus. In the time since its first episode exploded into the public consciousness, Attack on Titan has grown so much that it barely resembles the beast it began as. Beloved characters have died, or changed so much that the people they once were are now little more than distant memories. The world we thought we understood has revealed itself to be far more bitter and cruel than we realized. Countless times, our understanding of even what this show was has been flipped on its head or smashed into dust. And the culture of anime itself has shifted just as drastically, ballooning to sizes that previous generations of fans must have thought impossible. Anime today is no longer a niche hobby for weird nerds: it’s one of the single grandest forces in the global market, with franchises and characters and iconography as recognizable as anything from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And Attack on Titan, time and time again, has stood at the vanguard of that change. It’s the single most popular entry on both MAL and Anilist, a property so mainstream that it’s talked about in the same breath as Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead. Anime fandom’s explosive growth and mainstreaming can be explained in large part by how fucking popular this show has been. It created a space for anime to thrive in the west like nothing else, and it’s maintained the boundary-smashing power even through all its many jaw-dropping evolutions. There has never been a show like Attack on Titan, and there likely won’t be again for a very long time.

And in just one year, marking basically an exact decade since its first episode aired... it will finally be over.

It’s hard to think of an anime landscape without Attack on Titan. Ever since I’ve known about anime had a concept, this show has stood at its forefront. Love it, hate it, don’t care about it, no one can deny how much this show has defined anime for so long. But in just one short year, we will enter a world where we no longer have more Attack on Titan to look forward to. No more dizzying ODM-gear action scenes. No more utterly vicious gore and suffering. No more haunting portrayals of the horrors of war, both physical and psychological. No more gut-wrenching moral dilemmas that force us to choose the better of two terrible options. No more jaw-dropping twists to completely reshape our understanding of the story. No more Levi and Mikasa being the world’s biggest badasses. No more Armin thinking his way out of a desperate situation. No more Zeke. No more Conny. No more Jean. No more Hange. No more Eren Yeager. Pretty soon, all that Attack on Titan will ever be... will be. And we’ll have no choice but to be okay with that.

If it seems like I’m front-loading this review with tons of setup, well, that’s because I am. I’ve never been good at editing my long, sprawling streams of thought even at the best of times. But the reason I’m spending so long talking about Attack on Titan without, well, talking about Attack on Titan, is to help you understand the context I bring with me into this “final” season (By which I mean the first two parts of the now three-part “final” season.Pro tip: don’t label something the “final” of anything unless you’re actually sure it’s the last entry.) I cannot simply approach this show as I do most other anime, because Attack on Titan is not most other anime. It carries the weight of an entire generation on its back, so many memories and expectations and fans new and old. This show has presence. It has a legacy.

And as of this final season?

Well, as of this final season, Attack on Titan has officially become legend.

There’s a lot of reasons why, but most of them come back to the absolutely brilliant basement twist that capped off season 3, and how its revelations reverberate throughout the story from then on. When you look at Attack on Titan on a grand scale, one of the most impressive things about it is how well it grew from a seemingly simple tale of killing big monsters to a difficult, complex world where heroes and monsters are often just a matter of perspective. With each new layer of mystery unraveled, it’s become harder and harder to truly see anyone as wholly doing the right thing. And the reveal of Marley and Eldia, and everything that comes with it, is the moment where that thorny complexity gives way to full-on deconstructive fury. It turns out, these titans we were initially told to think of as mindless killing machines are actually victims of an explicitly Holocaust-esque ethnic genocide, and all this time we’ve been rooting for the protagonists to slaughter their oppressed kinsmen because both we and them bought into in-universe propaganda perpetuated by this world’s version of the Nazis. Gotcha.

It is, without question, one of the cruelest moments in any piece of media I’ve ever experienced. Forget just twisting the knife, this reveal takes the initial premise of Attack on Titan itself and punishes us for believing it. Suddenly, the rah-rah-kill-all-the-big-things edgy action spree we thought we were signing up for reveals itself to be a condemnation of that kind of mindless violence. Suddenly, we’re forced to confront the raw brutality of killing for killing’s sake. Suddenly, we’re forced to take a cold, hard look at the way that society dehumanizes those it believes shouldn’t exist, how rhetoric and media alike can reinforce the idea that some people just deserve to die because of who they are. In this one moment, Attack on Titan reveals that the true, ultimate evil our protagonists must overcome is, well, itself. Or rather, the show it was pretending to be. From now on, Eren and his friends aren’t fighting a mindless horde of monsters that deserve to be slaughtered; now, they’re fighting the forces that made them believe that mindless horde existed in the first place.

And the final season takes that subversion and runs with it. After a four-year timeskip, we kick things off not with our usual band of titan-hunting scouts, but with the people of Marley, the country that oppresses their people. We see how propaganda warps and twists the ordinary people of this country. We see how it molds eager children like Gabi into bigoted zealots willing to slaughter those they believe to be devils for the glory of their motherland. We see how the oppressed Eldians fall prey to its manipulations as well, cursing their bretherin on the far-off island of Paradis for supposedly carrying the sins of all their race. We see how no one, not even reluctant soldiers like Falco, is unaffected by the lies their country has fed them all their lives. And, most importantly of all, we see how those delusions hurt Marley as well, how these ordinary people’s lives are twisted into nightmares of violence and viciousness at the behest of leaders who will never have to suffer the same horrors. Marley the political regime may be monstrous, but Marley the nation is made up of people. People who, just like the people of Paradis, just like us in the audience, were made to believe lies that turn them against their fellow man, made to see them as nothing more than monsters in need of extermination.

In short, what we quickly come to understand is that the world of Attack on Titan is a world where there is to true villain to face. Yet, the Marleyan government is certainly corrupt and fascist, but even if they were overthrown in a flash, the hatred that years of war and propaganda have fostered in its people will remain. You can’t slaughter bigotry with ODM gear, you can’t shoot bloodlust in the head, and there are no arch-villains you can take down to end the pain of centuries of atrocities. The enemy is no single person, or even one society: it’s the concept of hatred itself, in all the cancerous, intimate ways it manifests in the human heart and soul. It’s hatred borne from lies, and the atrocities those lies perpetuate throughout the ages. A kills B, B’s friends kill A in vengeance, A’s friends retaliate in turn, and on and on the blood spills from generation to generation until no one even remembers what they were fighting for in the first place. All that remains is the sins themselves, endlessly perpetuating until, someone, anyone, finds the courage to stand up and say enough.

But it’s easy enough to say that the cycle of vengeance must stop. It’s much harder to be the one to stop it when it’s all you’ve ever known. And over the course of Attack on Titan season 4 (as I’ll henceforth call it), we see how no one is safe from the endless tides of violence. Characters we’ve come to love and trust commit horrific acts in retaliation for the pain they’ve suffered. Characters who perform detestable deeds reveal themselves to be sympathetic, even noble in their aims. Good intentions give way to cruel outcomes, hard choices only make the rivers of blood run blacker, and everyone’s hands end up stained by evil. I can’t remember the last time I watched a show that was so willing to let its characters- characters that a fanbase has spent years falling in love with- do such terrible things and make such impossible choices. Whoever your waifu or husbando is, they are now a war criminal with sins on their conscience that may never be able to wash clean.

Nowhere is this better portrayed than Gabi, one of AOT’s best characters of all time. Gabi is a child who fully buys into her country’s lies, and she does some truly heinous things in support of those lies. But it’s clear that in her mind, she’s every bit the unquestionable hero we once saw Eren and his friends as. The things she does to hurt the people we care about are no different than many of the things they did, atrocities committed unknowingly thanks to the blinders placed over their eyes. Had this show begun in Marley, and only showed us their perspective? We would’ve hailed Gabi as a hero, and cursed the island devils just as hard as she does. Because we are all victims of the sins we never knew existed; all that’s changed now is that which side is doing the killing. Gabi is no more a monster than the people she kills; she’s just a child who was never given a chance to see the world beyond the lies she was fed. But once she’s finally ripped from her comfort zone and forced to confront the truth of what’s going on and what she’s become? Then her slow, agonizing crawl back to humanity becomes the beating heart not just of this season, but arguably of the entire show. Gabi, in all her painful, unforgivable mistakes, represents the hope that when the dust finally settles and the killing is finally over, the children we leave behind can forge a better path than the one we laid for them. She is the symbol of the better future that, against all odds, we must believe is still possible.

Because what is there left to fight for, without hope?

Well, without hope, I imagine you’d end up a bit like Eren Yeager.

I’ve always had a deep, abiding love for Eren. Even back in earlier seasons when most people dismissed him as a shouty idiot, I saw the hidden depths beneath his raw, aching surface that clawed their way further into the light the longer the show went on. But even I wasn’t prepared for how fully season 4 would commit to letting Eren become the person he was always destined to be. Here, the relentless, furious boy who promised to slaughter everyone who stood between him and freedom has grown into a man with the power to make that dream come true and the perspective to understand just how much blood it’s going to leave on his hands. But unlike his friends, who still desperately cling to any possibility they can grasp in the thick mud of despair, he no longer sees any way forward but to plunge headfirst into hell. Let the world burn to ash and humanity curse his name; Eren Yeager will seize his freedom. And just as he vowed all those years ago when he watched his mother die in front of him, there is nothing, nothing, nothing that will stand in his way.

This is always who Eren has been. This willingness to stop at nothing, no matter how many people must suffer for it, has been the darkness swirling within him since the beginning. All that’s changed now is the scale upon which he can pursue that goal... and the understanding of everything he must destroy in order to achieve it. At once tragic and terrifying, unforgivable and understandable, the embodiment of all the world’s hatred and in direct opposition to it, Eren Yeager has grown into one of my favorite anime characters of all time. Call him a fallen hero, a sympathetic villain, an irredeemable monster, or however you see fit to judge him; the weight of his choices speaks for itself. Never before in anime has a protagonist so perfectly switched places to become a main antagonist without ever really changing at all. And never before has a character left me so broken with every choice they make, eternally torn between condemning him and pitying him for the path he’s chosen. Perhaps in a better world, a kinder world, things may have never come to this. But they have, and now we have no choice but to face that agony head-on before it decides the world’s fate for us.

Because the end is coming. Whether we’re ready for it or not, the end of Eren’s journey- and the end of Attack on Titan- will arrive soon. Frankly, I have no idea what to expect; with how desperate the situation has gotten, there’s no telling how things will finally shake out. And I doubt any prediction I make would even come close.

What I do know is this: ever since I started watching Attack on Titan, I feel like I’ve been waiting with baited breath for the moment it all finally falls apart. This roller-coaster ride of a show has been so breakneck at points, so overwhelming and ferocious, that it feels like it can’t possibly survive much longer. Sooner or later, some screw is gonna come lose and the whole thing is gonna crash and burn in a spectacular dumpster fire. Even now, with manga fans complaining to everyone in earshot that the manga ending is the worst thing to happen to humanity since Hitler, part of me still is still anticipating disaster.

But here’s something else I know: every single time I’ve come back to Attack on Titan, those fears have been proven wrong.

I thought there was no way season 2 would be able to recapture the shock-and-awe brilliance of the first season after a four-year gap. Instead, I was given a smarter, more tightly focused story that truly drove home the complexity and weight this series was capable of.

I thought season 3 would suffer from switching focus to fighting humans. Instead, the political revolution arc delivered some of the most jaw-dropping action setpieces yet.

I thought there was no way the basement reveal would live up to all the hype. Instead, the reveal catapulted the story into a level of brilliance I didn’t even realize was possible.

I thought that with the final season switching studios and heading into completely uncharted territory, it couldn’t possibly follow up on the promise of that twist. Instead, I was plunged headfirst into the best, most gripping material of the entire series.

So you know what? Fuck it. I’m done being scared of Attack on Titan going off the rails. I’m done anticipating disaster when this show has proven itself to me time and time again. Every time I doubt AOT’s ability to last, it comes back stronger and surer than ever before. And frankly, judging by the kinds of things the salty manga fans are complaining about (”Waaaaah too much comedy! Waaaaah not enough grimdark! Waaaaaaaah the show isn’t praising Eren for the terrible things he’s trying to do!”), I’m starting to doubt I can trust their word on the matter. I don’t know how Attack on Titan will end, but at this point, I trust Isayama to land this plane just as explosively and beautifully as he began it. What other choice could I make, after everything this show has given me?

In just one more year, marking a full decade since it began, Attack on Titan will end. It leaves behind it one of the grandest legacies in modern fiction, anime or otherwise. It revolutionized a medium, it mainstreamed a culture, it maintained success through years of constant evolution. And to this day, it remains, on its own merits, one of the most astonishing works of art to ever come out of anime. It’s an epic tale of war and violence, pain and forgiveness, cycles of vengeance and children lost in the woods. a vision of the horrors of hatred so raw it’s almost suffocating. It’s an action spectacle second to none and a deep, powerful drama about the people behind that spectacle. It’s an uncompromising journey through the most unforgiving parts of humanity, and yet it never fails to be entertaining- and even hopeful- in pursuit of those painful truths. It’s a triumph the likes of which we almost never see, and likely never will again for many years to come. And I cannot wait to see how the curtain finally falls.

Until then, though? I award season 4, as it were, a score of:

10/10

To think, this is one of the longest reviews I’ve ever written and I somehow didn’t even find space to fit in a comparison between Studio Wit and Mappa’s productions. So real quick, while I have the space; I still think Wit’s look was definitive for AOT, and Mappa’s grungier look can’t really hold a candle to Wit’s lush, sensory-overload portrayal of this world and the chaos within it. That said, while I think the first part of this season struggles to figure out its visual identity, I think part 2 is where Mappa figured out how to make their style work, and while it’s still not as good as Wit imo, it absolutely kills where it needs to and delivers some truly powerful cinematic storytelling on a pretty consistent basis. You can’t ask for much more than that.

[nox-artemis]

Kentaro Miura

It took me awhile to get my thoughts in order. Honestly, as well intentioned as they are, a constant stream of fan tributes on Twitter and Tumblr more-or-less telling me how to process “The End” of Berserk with Miura’s death didn’t do a lot to console me, so I had to take some huge steps away from social media and only conversed my feelings with my other close Berserk fan-friends.

It was very surreal waking up yesterday morning to a friend messaging me simply saying, “did you hear the news?” When shit like that happens, I go onto my Google stories app and scroll through. I didn’t find anything really worth getting too upset over (maybe a bit sad that Queen Elizabeth II’s doggo died?) so it hit me to check my Twitter feed instead.

And that’s when I saw it.

We all know death is inevitable, and life is pretty much spent prolonging the point to that inevitability as well as preparing ourselves for when it happens to us or someone close to us. Being part of the Berserk fandom was the only time we all collectively had this on our mind not only for someone else but for someone we never met or really knew that much about. We only knew Miura through his magnum opus – and that was good enough for us. And no matter how much we discussed the worst-case scenario – pondering how the story would continue and how WE would continue – it still wasn’t enough to prepare us for this amount of shock. Hearing Miura had died and that the Berserk we know and love under his direct supervision is over truly felt like losing a long-lost friend.

It wasn’t just that the Berserk we know of is “over”, but that Miura didn’t have to die. He was only 54: not a young age, but not an old age either, especially by today’s standards. He could have seen the end to his magnum opus the way he envisioned it, yet he died of something so avoidable but is only brought about by a great deal of stress (from what I’ve read). It was always a morbid open rumor that so many of Miura’s infamous hiatuses were actually mental and/or physical health breaks, so the older or more conscious of us fans, while always eager and anxious for a new chapter, learned to not take them so personally. Miura was a spellbinding artist and storyteller, but he was also a human with his own life and conflicts that he was entitled to address at his own pace. This isn’t meant to blame anyone (at the very least, maybe to address some societal/industry issues), but it’s troubling enough to remind everyone – as the story of Berserk has demonstrated – that you need to take care of yourself physically and mentally, and while everyone struggles in life, you don’t have to struggle alone.

I always despised this weird cult of youth that insinuates that life isn’t worth pursuing once you hit your mid-thirties, and how some people so engulfed in their youth insist that they wouldn’t mind dying by the age of 50 or 60. It’s a shame when people live by that because there’s so much to live for beyond your youth – as I’ve learned, I only started buckling down when I transitioned into my thirties. Miura could have had a longer life ahead of him, going beyond Berserk and into his other endeavors, professional and personal, but that will unfortunately never happen now.

Everyone knows I have a lot of thoughts and opinions on Berserk. Most of you found out about me through my blogging several years ago, and I’m pretty proud that I was never the sort of fan that groveled at Miura’s feet and treated Berserk as some untouchable holy book: there were things I disliked about Berserk and things that disappointed me about Miura’s writing, but there were SO MANY MORE THINGS that I loved about Berserk and was proud of Miura for, and I wished him to continue his advancement in narrative growth. He did so and we watched it happened.

And, by meeting so many friends and acquaintances through the fandom, we saw a lot in ourselves change too. It’s surreal how we always joked that it would be one of us fans who would die before Berserk ended or the worst-case scenario of Miura dying; maybe some of us secretly preferred for that happen. But when we weren’t waiting around for another chapter… look at how much we’ve done with our lives! We graduated high school, undergrad, grad school, started and advanced our careers, traveled the world, got together, popped out a kid or two!... And while we experienced a lot of downfalls and tragedies that coincide, can you believe how much we have accomplished together?

We were all personally inspired, motivated, persuaded by Berserk in different ways: a lot of us were inspired for the better and admittedly, some for the not-as-good (if spending countless hours on Tumblr has taught me, there were definitely some toxic fan takeaways that had to be confronted). I’m not going to go to the point of saying that I now live my life by Berserk’s philosophy to a T or live as a reflection of certain characters (because I’m pretty sure that Miura was trying to tell us to NOT live your life like some particular characters) but it certainly helped to brings some aspects of life and existence into perspective, through the lenses of so many characters. Berserk also inspired me to write more, an already favorite pastime of mine, and how I should go about writing and planning a story, taking cues from Berserk on how to and how NOT to write and approach things in my own way, which I think is for the best in the long run. I can only dream that I’ll be published someday – which doesn’t have to be a pipe dream because it’s still much more possible than impossible. And so many other have done the same, creating our own stories and works.

And OF COURSE Berserk inspired me to be a little bit badass from time to time in moments of frivolity and seriousness – but it reminds us all that being badass and being a kinder person who tries to become the best version of themselves are not mutually exclusive. We definitely need more of that in today’s world.

We all made our own little bonfires of dreams happen, and because of Berserk existing, there will be a lot more beginnings than endings, and I don’t see a lot of bonfires being extinguished anytime soon. Miura poured his heart and soul into Berserk and its characters, and while he has passed on, his characters and lessons will live on through us and everything we create and how we live our lives (hopefully for the better).

I was happy to share all of my thoughts with you all – and I’ll continue to do so, since the mythos of Berserk has been a major backdrop of my creative mind for over fifteen years now and there is still so much to dissect and speculate. Personally, I don’t see Berserk ending just yet, if only because I’d be surprised that Miura or his publisher didn’t have some Operation London Bridge type plan in place in the event that this happened (Berserk is, after all, a major title that most likely brings Young Animal a lot of revenue). Again, I never treated Miura or Berserk as divine untouchables, so if there are plans in place to continue Berserk without Miura (BUT with his permission) or just on how to wrap up the story to give it a fulfilling conclusion, I personally would be okay with it (as a friend of mine put it, it’d be more of a tribute than an imitation). Going beyond our lifetimes, works will continue to be interpreted and reinterpreted as they have since time immemorial; perhaps Berserk will reach that point someday.

Honestly, and many have thought so too, Berserk was also meant to be cosmic level in both scale and concept. The plot is so grand and Byzantine that, even under Miura’s direct supervision, I always had a hard time envisioning how a story of this scale would conclude. As much as we love to hate him, a final showdown between Guts and Griffith seems too simple, too “good vs. evil”-esque for Berserk. Maybe having a low-key, vague but optimistic and bittersweet wrap up is what is best for Guts, Casca, and their new-found family. But that’s just another one of my fan speculations.

Regardless or what is to become of Berserk now, I think it’s safe to give adulations. We all came across Berserk at different times in our lives and stuck with the story for different reasons. For some of us, it was just another series that our friend from the campus anime club recommended to us; for others, we were drawn in from a morbid curiosity of its dark notoriety in anime circles. A few of us read for the gratuitous violence and the clout (because we all know you’re so deep and hardcore [/sar]), but a lot more of us read for the journey and the characters that we became a part of. The heaviness of Berserk made us confront a lot of trauma and even relive our own. For some of us, understandably, it was not a good idea to dive deeper (and maybe somethings could have been handled better); for the rest of us, it helped us cope, if not entirely through the story itself, than through the support network we made for ourselves in this fandom and its many realms (some realms, I argue, are more caring and nurturing than others).

From time to time, I always wonder if I would ever “grow out” of Berserk. There were indeed several times I took a step away from fandom and have tried to reduce my exposure to the story - but I always came back in some way, because the essence of Berserk has never left me and never will. Humorously I envisioned myself actually forgetting about Berserk for several decades, decades in which I work at my career, raise my family, mourn my elders, but continue living my life, only to go on the future internet in my mid-50s to find out… Miura is STILL working on that ending, sitting at his desk in the same pose as that famous monochrome capture of him, only he’s grayed and wrinkled, like the great Miyazaki.

The possibility of that future is over, but there are so many others.

[gusu-emilu]

Ship: Wei Wuxian / Wen Ning

Summary: Wei Wuxian gives Wen Ning a heartbeat, but not in the way either of them expected.

Rated T, No Warnings Apply

POV Wen Ning, Burial Mounds Settlement Days, references to WWX's poor health, First Kiss, Pining, Cuddling, Presumably Unrequited Love, or more accurately: whatever these two have going on, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, and the inherent homoeroticism of necromancy

Ch. 1/2, 6k, read on AO3 above or on Tumblr below

Wen Ning has always known that Wei Wuxian is not someone to hesitate.

The moment Wen Ning enters the Demon Subdue Palace after packing up the last sack of turnips, Wei Wuxian grabs his wrist.

“Come look!” He tugs Wen Ning deeper into the cave, slender fingers wrapped around Wen Ning’s wrist. He grins at Wen Ning over his shoulder. “I’ve made some more demonic devices, probably my best batch yet. I’d like to see the impersonators down in the town copy these!”

Wen Ning steadies his balance, not fully recovered from Wei Wuxian suddenly whisking him away.

Wei Wuxian has never hesitated to touch him. Wen Ning still isn’t quite used to it, having grown up in a family of doctors whose every touch felt calculated, and among clansmen more focused on war and strength than friendship. Clansmen who rarely respected him, never mind showed him affection.

Even now, he exists in a constant state of volatility due to his outbursts of resentful energy. Every family member in the Burial Mounds is careful around him, even A-Yuan at times.

But not Wei Wuxian.

Wei Wuxian is entirely different. Has always been different.

The first time they spoke, Wei Wuxian had already been comfortable with casual touch. Wei Wuxian hadn’t hesitated to lay hands on him to adjust his archery posture—steady hands he can still imagine on his upper arm and around the side of his ribs, friendly pressure like a heavy quilt, as Wei Wuxian comforted and praised him.

Then the war began, and Wei Wuxian choked him in Lotus Pier—furious, merciless hands like paws of a frightened animal. Wei Wuxian hadn’t hesitated then, either. He would’ve fully choked Wen Ning had he not held back enough to let him speak.

Then the war ended. Now Wei Wuxian uses him as an armrest, fixes his hair, arranges talismans on him, even once tried to pick him up and carry him as a joke. (He'd been a bit too weak to manage it for long. Wen Ning hadn’t thought that part was funny.) Now he drags Wen Ning around by the hand, all without hesitation.

Had Wei Wuxian hesitated before raising him from the dead?

Wen Ning isn’t sure which answer would comfort him.

“Take a look at this one,” Wei Wuxian says as he places a stone tablet in Wen Ning’s hand. A faint black cloud winds around the tablet, the smoke’s path tracing the red fulu writings carved into its surface. “Still pretty weak, but I’m getting closer to replicating yin iron with just regular stone.”

Wen Ning glances back and forth between the tablet and Wei Wuxian’s tired but enthusiastic smile. His eyes are bright with joy, but dark circles frame them. He hasn’t eaten much in the past few days, instead focusing relentlessly on his experiments, despite needing to save energy to heal the stab wound from Jiang Wanyin.

But Wen Ning still hasn’t figured out how to make him rest. Maybe admiring the new batch of demonic devices will help calm his inventive frenzy.

He nods, giving a small smile at Wei Wuxian. “That’s good.”

“Weak yin iron will be much easier to use. Better for small applications here and there, less dangerous…” Wei Wuxian squats by the scattered piles of demonic cultivation tools and notes, rummaging through to find another invention, the tablet already forgotten.

The black cloud around the tablet continues to swirl, small wisps seeping into Wen Ning’s skin. The tablet feels more like a block of dust than like stone, but despite his dulled senses, he notices…something else. A second sensation.

A throb.

“Wei-gongzi?”

“Yeah?” Wei Wuxian says, squinting at a page of especially messy notes.

“Does…does this have a pulse?” The stone continues to throb weakly, more of a resonance than a physical sensation, its aura cold like resentful energy.

Wei Wuxian looks up from the papers, one eyebrow raised. “It’s still doing that?” He stands and takes the tablet, examines it. “Hm. This might be good! I’ll have to find out what flow pattern of resentful energy caused this.”

Wen Ning closes his hand. Strangely, he wishes for the tablet to still be pulsing against his palm. It had felt kind of pleasant, if disturbing. “Resentful energy can create a heartbeat?”

“Well, it’s not exactly a heartbeat. But yes, if channeled the right way.”

“…Does that mean I have one?” Behind his back to prevent Wei Wuxian from noticing, he presses three fingers to the inside of his wrist, where years ago Jiejie had taught him how to read the flow of his blood. A black vein of resentful energy now covers those lifeless pulse points. “I’ve never felt it.”

Wei Wuxian turns the tablet between his hands thoughtfully. “No…you don’t have a heartbeat.” Then he grins, one of those sly grins that crosses his handsome face slowly, as if an idea has rushed into him so quickly that he needs to pace his smile just to contain it. Wen Ning doesn’t like those grins, because they make something flutter inside him.

“At least, not yet!” Wei Wuxian adds. “Do you want one? I could figure something out—”

“No, it’s okay. I’m fine without one.” The last thing Wei Wuxian needs is another project to stay up all night for—least of all an unnecessary project that Wen Ning requested by accident. Wei Wuxian has done enough for him already.

“I’m serious!” Wei Wuxian says. “It shouldn’t be too hard. I can test it right now.” He trails a finger over the blood-red writing on the tablet and mutters a few words under his breath. The black smoke around it thickens. “Just something temporary, to see if the idea works.” He steps closer.

Nervousness immediately jolts through Wen Ning. It’s unfortunate that death has muted the nerve endings in Wen Ning’s skin but has done nothing to quiet his anxious mind, which is always at both its most overactive and sluggish around Wei Wuxian.

Wen Ning watches the tablet’s red markings begin to glow, watches Wei Wuxian’s expression harden to a chiseled concentration.

“Come here,” Wei Wuxian says.

If Wei Wuxian’s hunch works, Wei Wuxian will ignore his health until he finishes developing the method to give Wen Ning a permanent heartbeat. If it fails, Wei Wuxian will still ignore his health, this time trying until he finds a different method.

It’s best to not let him try. To give him a firm “no.”

But Wen Ning has never been good at those. Especially when it comes to Wei Wuxian.

He has also never been good at lying to Wei Wuxian. Although he must do so for the sake of Wei Wuxian’s health, it’s hard to admit that he doesn’t miss his heartbeat.

He misses many small details of his body. Jiejie had taught him the ways of Dafan Wen medicine, made him attuned to the evidence of life in himself. He knows how fast his heart rate is supposed to be while lying in bed, knows which pressure points she once worked at to calm his anxiety, knows the irregularities of the breaths he no longer takes.

He used to like his heartbeat, his breath, their soothing rhythm as he fell asleep. It was comforting to understand that much about himself, to follow this evidence of life, when in childhood a piece of his soul had been snatched and left the rest of him a puzzle.

Now the lack of this evidence of life feels like a testimony against him.

Wei Wuxian could return some illusion of life to him. Would be happy to do so.

Selfishly, Wen Ning wants him to try. Being a walking experiment has its unsettling moments—more accurately, a constant hum of discomfort—but there is something morbidly enchanting about letting Wei Wuxian mold him into whatever he envisions. Into the magnum opus of a genius.

An even more selfish part of him wants to beg Wei Wuxian to try, because how symbolic would it be for Wei Wuxian to restore his heart, of all things…

“Wen Ning?” Wei Wuxian asks softly.

“Okay,” he answers, and instantly regrets it.

Wei Wuxian smiles again, this time the smile he saves for when he is about to tinker with the Ghost General. Wen Ning has learned all of his smiles by now, and he still doesn’t believe that there is one specially for him. But Wei Wuxian gives him that reassuring nod, the warm curve of his lips, the eager yet slightly rueful glint in his eyes, and Wen Ning can only recall seeing that expression the previous times Wei Wuxian rewrote pieces of him.

Wei Wuxian explains exactly what he’s going to do and how the resentful energy will flow. Wen Ning nods, and Wei Wuxian rests a hand on Wen Ning’s chest—casually, moving without hesitation, like always. “It won’t actually restart your heart. Just give the illusion of a pulse for a few minutes.” He furrows his brow as his focus intensifies. “That is, if it works.”

The feeling of Wei Wuxian’s hand on the center of his chest is stabilizing, yet it sets Wen Ning’s mind into disarray, despite how many times he has felt this before.

Wei Wuxian closes his eyes, preparing to reroute the resentful energy inside Wen Ning.

A cool stream of energy enters Wen Ning. Growing colder, gushing rapidly—

Freezing—

Then over almost instantly.

Wei Wuxian opens his eyes. “Feel any different?”

Wen Ning feels a bit dizzy, which is new. He hasn’t experienced vertigo since becoming a fierce corpse. But that fades quickly, and soon he is left with only the feeling of thick fabric pressing against his chest where Wei Wuxian’s hand rests.

He shakes his head. “Do…do you feel anything?”

Wei Wuxian shifts his hand, presses harder against Wen Ning’s chest. Waits, then sticks three fingers in the groove of Wen Ning’s neck, and that feels nice. Wen Ning almost wants to hold his hand there—

“No. I guess it didn’t work.” Wei Wuxian sounds much more tired than before. He removes his hand.

“That’s okay. I don’t need a heartbeat.”

“You want one though, yeah?” Wei Wuxian begins sifting through the inventions scattered across the cave, perhaps looking for another device, perhaps just hunting for kindling to spark an idea.

Wen Ning had been too selfish by agreeing to this. Who knows how long Wei Wuxian will research this now?

“I don’t want you to start another project,” Wen Ning says, and the faint thread of anger in his voice is stronger than he intended, even though that anger is mostly directed at himself. It's been harder to control his emotions since resentful energy began feeding them.

Wei Wuxian looks up, startled. Then he grins and gives a small laugh. “Are you turning into your jiejie now? Bossing me around…”

The joke only strengthens Wen Ning’s resolve. It reminds him that he can invoke Jiejie’s authoritativeness. He has never been good at following in his sister’s footsteps, but calling upon her immovability is almost as effective at steeling him as resentful energy. “You should sleep or come help us outside instead of always working in here.”

Wei Wuxian rubs his eyes. “I know, I know. You’ve all told me many times.” He seems to regret the slight bite in his tone. He tends to snap once in a while, the effect of stress lashing out from behind his mask, but it always dissolves as quickly as it appears.

“I’ll listen to you,” Wei Wuxian says, gently this time. Wen Ning feels a wave of relief. But then Wei Wuxian smirks and adds, “For now. I really do have some theories I want to test.”

“But—Wei-gongzi—”

Wei Wuxian rises to his feet and walks over to him. Stands and looks at him for a while, then says, almost murmurs, “I have enough projects for myself.” He tucks a strand of hair behind Wen Ning’s ear, and Wen Ning nearly melts. “Let me do something that’ll make you happy.”

This is bad. Very bad.

Wei Wuxian isn’t even telling the truth. His projects are all for the protection of Wen Ning’s family, not for himself. But the fond touch, combined with the sweetness in Wei Wuxian’s voice, is already enough to make Wen Ning bend.

He would much rather take care of Wei Wuxian than be taken care of. But if he weren’t worried about being a bother, he would tangle his hair just for Wei Wuxian to run his fingers through it, to twirl and comb and braid it the way he unravels and reorders the resentful energy inside Wen Ning.

“You really don’t need to. Getting a heartbeat was just an idea,” Wen Ning mumbles.

“And a good idea! We all need more comforts around here, don’t we?” Wei Wuxian nestles three fingers in the groove of Wen Ning’s neck to search for a pulse again, his brow knit in thought. Despite himself, Wen Ning can’t help but be glad that he can feel that touch a second time.

When Wei Wuxian experiments on him, the tugs and surges of resentful energy don’t exactly feel good. It’s like ice cracking under his skin, leaving shards that poke out of him. Or like the bony hand of a skeleton yanking at his insides, ripping him apart and rattling the pieces around.

The pain and discomfort frighten him. Remind him of what Wei Wuxian is capable of. What Wen Ning is capable of.

Yet he finds enjoyment in the fear, in the icy fingers of resentful energy, because those are the shadows of Wei Wuxian’s hands on him, reshaping him.

And before Wei Wuxian experiments on him…that feels too good. The doting—almost loving—attention, the careful examination, mumbled words, soft touches…

Wei Wuxian pulls his hand away and brings it to his own throat. His glance darts around the cave as he seems to calculate something in his mind.

Then he grabs Wen Ning’s hand and presses Wen Ning’s fingers into his neck. The sensation comes delayed, but Wen Ning feels it.

A pulse. Wei Wuxian’s pulse.

Wei Wuxian continues looking around the cave and thinking, as if this is just another ordinary step in a routine. But to Wen Ning, this is—this is—have they ever done something this intimate? How can Wei Wuxian let him feel the rhythm of his pulse, of his life force, and act like it’s nothing?

Somehow that makes it even more intimate, that Wei Wuxian doesn’t seem to mind…

Wen Ning counts the beats to himself.

Too slow. Not by much, but Wei Wuxian’s heart rate is too slow for his age, his size.

Wen Ning would make a mental note to tell Jiejie, but he knows she’s already aware. Wei Wuxian’s health has been deteriorating since he stepped back into the Burial Mounds.

“Wei-gongzi?”

“Mn?”

“I…I have a different idea.”

Wei Wuxian lifts Wen Ning’s hand from his neck, but doesn’t let go. He smiles. “What’s that?”

“You can just give me the tablet.” Wen Ning looks down at the slab of stone, thin black wisps of smoke swirling around it. “I can feel its heartbeat.”

“You don’t want your own?”

He shakes his head.

Wei Wuxian playfully taps the back of Wen Ning’s hand a few times. Four times, to be exact. Wen Ning can’t help counting. “That heartbeat isn’t very human, though.”

Neither am I, Wen Ning wants to say, but he knows Wei Wuxian will scold him if he does. “It would be more than enough,” he says instead.

“You’re going to make the Yiling Laozu feel like a fraud if you let him give you scraps and call it ‘more than enough.’” He sighs and glances down at the tablet. “But you can take it until I come up with something better.”

“Then…is there something that you don’t think is a scrap?”

Wei Wuxian brings Wen Ning’s fingers to his neck again, and the warm pulse hums through his fingertips. “Well, there’s my heartbeat.” He winks. “I’d still call that a scrap, though.”

“No it isn’t,” Wen Ning blurts.

Wei Wuxian raises his eyebrows. Then his expression turns thoughtful. “Would you rather keep feeling mine?”

Wen Ning doesn’t reply, but he knows his face says everything. Not even rigor mortis can hide the answer.

“Forget about that useless rock, then.” Wei Wuxian pats his chest. “I’ll be your heartbeat for now.”

Wen Ning is sure that if he still had blood flow, he would be flushed. Panicked energy begins to twitch inside him. “N-No, it’s okay—”

“You don’t want my finest craftsmanship, and you don’t want my scraps! What am I going to do with you?”

“Nothing,” Wen Ning answers quietly.

“Yes, something.” He takes Wen Ning’s hand and tugs him toward the slab of stone he uses as a bed. “Hm. How should we do this? Maybe—”

“Wei-gongzi,” Wen Ning says, exasperated. He likes that Wei Wuxian never hesitates, never slows down—it’s attractive, in a frustrating kind of way—but it often leaves Wen Ning in the dust with his mind still sputtering and struggling to function.

“Alright, sit here.” Wei Wuxian gestures toward the bed. “If you want to,” he adds.

It’s pointless to ask if Wen Ning wants to. He wonders if Wei Wuxian knows that he doesn’t need Chenqing or yin iron to make him do just about anything.

Suddenly filled with dread, a dread that he is going to like this too much, he steps forward and awkwardly sits down on the edge of the bed.

“Perfect,” Wei Wuxian murmurs. He taps Wen Ning’s knee twice. “Spread your legs.”

Now Wen Ning is certain that he would be flushed if he were alive. “S-S-Spr—what?”

“Hey.” He smirks and points a finger at Wen Ning. “Who taught you to have thoughts like that? Don’t worry. I just need you to make room for me.”

Wen Ning gets out some garbled form of “okay” and spreads his legs, creating enough space for Wei Wuxian to sit on one of his knees.

Which Wei Wuxian does.

Sit on his knee.

He also wraps his arms around Wen Ning’s neck and pulls him closer until his cheek touches Wei Wuxian’s chest.

“I can’t do all the work myself.” He cups Wen Ning’s chin. “You have to move too.”

Wen Ning swallows—by habit, since he doesn’t really need to do that anymore—and positions himself so his ear rests over Wei Wuxian’s heart. He can’t feel Wei Wuxian’s heartbeat through the robes, but the gentle sound of thum, thum seeps into him right away.

Warmth, too. A lot of warmth.

“Good?” Wei Wuxian hums.

Wen Ning makes a small noise of contentment in the back of his throat. He fiddles with his hands in his lap, trying and failing to find a good place for them that isn’t Wei Wuxian’s legs. “I hear it.”

“Only hear it?”

He opens his mouth to object, but he knows that Wei Wuxian will spot the lie before it leaves his lips.

Wei Wuxian opens the collar of his dark outer robes and lets Wen Ning rest his head on the thin red inner garment.

Even warmer. Softer.

He can feel Wei Wuxian’s heartbeat.

He hasn’t felt something like this since he was a child. It’s…not what he expects.

Jiejie had taught him how to take a person’s pulse. How to place three fingers on each wrist and find the six pulse positions corresponding to the meridians of the body, to identify the different types of pulses—their depth, width, length, strength. How sometimes the pulse feels like beads rolling along a table, while other times it feels like the crisp pluck of a guqin string, and so on, each revealing secrets of the body, guiding how to best heal the patient.

All that knowledge had once been exciting. It seems mundane, now.

The medical analogies for a pulse at the wrist, Wen Ning realizes, don’t work to describe what a heartbeat from the chest feels like when it’s pressed against his cheek.

It’s like wading in a warm stream, sunshine beating on him. The gentle lap of current, its smooth rhythm—thum, thum—like the most natural and simple form of expression.

Wen Ning wishes Jiejie had instead taught him how to decipher a person’s soul by listening to their heartbeat, because with this strange, steady language reverberating in his ear, it almost seems possible.

“Now?” Wei Wuxian asks.

Wen Ning doesn’t make a sound this time.

He counts Wei Wuxian’s heartbeats and tries to guess how many fit into a minute. They remain like that, long after Wen Ning loses count, with Wei Wuxian’s warm body in his lap. They both relax, and Wei Wuxian’s heartbeat eventually fades into Wen Ning, like it’s his own.

His awareness returns when he notices Wei Wuxian’s heartbeat slowing even more. He pulls away, immediately missing the comforting solidness of Wei Wuxian’s chest, and looks up to see a calm, drowsy expression on Wei Wuxian’s face. His eyes are heavy-lidded and almost fully closed.

“We’ve been telling you,” Wen Ning says softly. “You don’t sleep enough.”

Wei Wuxian rubs his eyes. “You really are becoming bossy.”

“I just want you to take care of yourself.”

“You and your jiejie are like a pair of vultures. Circling me when I’m weak and picking at me!” He gives a wan smile and reaches around Wen Ning’s back to rub his shoulder. “But I appreciate that you care about me.”

Wen Ning absorbs the feeling of Wei Wuxian stroking his shoulder, the thrum of Wei Wuxian’s heartbeat still lingering in his ear. “I appreciate that you care about me, too,” he mumbles.

He’s not sure if Wei Wuxian hears, but figures he knows anyway.

* * *

The next day, Wei Wuxian lets Wen Ning listen again.

And the day after.

And the day after that.

It becomes a pattern, as reliable as the beat of Wei Wuxian’s heart. Wei Wuxian is more likely to skip a meal or lose a night of sleep than he is to shirk his self-proclaimed “heartbeat duty,” and Wen Ning begins to wonder if Wei Wuxian likes it as much as he does.

Then Jiang Wanyin and Jiang Yanli show up in Yiling.

That night, Wei Wuxian drinks like he wants to waterboard himself.

He forgets about heartbeat duty after that. Wen Ning lets him.

* * *

Two weeks later, Wen Ning brings a medicinal draught Jiejie prepared to the Demon Subdue Palace. The sun outside sank long ago, leaving behind deep blues and browns that bleed into the entrance of the cave. A single candle flickers on a rock shelf in the cave wall, illuminating the craggy wall and the floor strewn with bits of metal and wood and crumpled talismans.

Astoundingly, Wei Wuxian is not hunched in the corner scribbling away. He’s in bed scribbling away, his sleeves rolled up and his tied-back hair slightly disheveled the way they are when he digs in the mud pond for the lotus pods that won’t grow.

He hadn’t come out to farm since the day before. Wen Ning wonders if he’s fixed his sleeves or his hair since then.

Wen Ning steps over as quietly as he can manage with his clumsy feet and waits beside the bed, holding the draught with both hands and feeling a faint sensation of its warmth. “Wei-gongzi?”

Wei Wuxian presses the wooden end of his brush into the corner of his mouth. “Do you know how to make a Spirit-Attraction Flag attract only ghosts of a certain age?”

“…No.”

“Mn. I—wait—” He cuts off and draws what looks like disjointed pieces of an array scribbled in the margins around rejected brushstrokes.

Wen Ning lets him write for a while, then says, “My jiejie made this for you to drink.”

“And why,” Wei Wuxian asks without a pause in his writing, “is she spending resources on me instead of saving them for A-Yuan and the others?”

“You need medicine, too. Because your stab wound still hasn't healed, and—and Jiejie says your body still isn’t used to not having a gold—”

Wei Wuxian abruptly stops writing. Wen Ning clamps his mouth shut, and wishes he hadn’t said anything.

With a lack of pleasure that he fails to hide, Wei Wuxian scribbles a few more things, then stands up, slices a cut in his finger, and begins trailing red lines on a Spirit-Attraction Flag. “I’m going down the mountain to test this.” He looks over at Wen Ning with a softened expression and walks out of the cave.

Wen Ning doesn’t need him to say that it’s an invitation to follow. He always accompanies Wei Wuxian down the mountain. He’d rather Wei Wuxian sleep, but at least leaving the Burial Mounds always puts him in a better mood.

After they pass through the final protective array and the forest around the path begins to change from grim black leafless trees to green trees shaded blue by moonlight, Wei Wuxian seems to relax. But instead of testing the flag in the clearing where he usually does, he continues walking.

They reach the edge of the forest. A few clouds in the sky hide some of the stars, but the moon is out, a bright half of a silver coin. They pass the town from a distance, still close enough to see amber dots of light from the few lanterns lit at this time of night, but far enough that even Wen Ning’s sharp vision can’t discern clear shapes of the buildings. Wei Wuxian stares at the town once in a while, as if he can see something in the muddied blocks of light.

They enter a different patch of forest and stray just far enough inside for tree branches to reach across the sky again.

Wei Wuxian holds up the flag and examines it.

He lowers the flag to his side.

“Wei-gongzi,” Wen Ning says quietly.

“Yes?”

“Did you…”

He trails off when Wei Wuxian begins slowly rolling up the thin canvas. “I think I just wanted to go for a walk,” he says. “I’ll let the spirits rest today.” He sets the folded flag on a large rock and sits on the ground, his back against the stone, looking out at the plains and town from the recesses of the forest.

“I like walking with you,” Wen Ning says, and sits beside him.

Wei Wuxian usually buries his sorrow in his projects, in the crop fields, in his games with A-Yuan. This aimlessness is the closest glimpse Wen Ning sees of Wei Wuxian’s true state of mind. Wei Wuxian ensures that he is alone whenever he truly lets in his sorrow, but Wen Ning accompanies him during the times when he comes close. As if Wei Wuxian wants him to see—wants someone to see—but refuses to reveal everything.

No one else but Wen Ning has sat next to Wei Wuxian while he draws portraits for no particular reason (he never shows them to Wen Ning, but Wen Ning can guess whom he draws), no one else has slept across the cave from him while he mumbles in his sleep, no one else has wandered down the mountain at night with him.

Wen Ning doesn’t know if he should feel privileged or worried that Wei Wuxian lets him see this much.

He doesn’t think he deserves to know Wei Wuxian’s deepest thoughts, but he wants Wei Wuxian to pass more sorrow onto him, let him shoulder some of the pain. Wen Ning’s heart is dead, he can take it.

“Wen Ning,” Wei Wuxian says. He smooths his robes, adjusts his fitted sleeves. “I haven’t done heartbeat duty in a while, have I?”

“You don’t need to.”

“Maybe I want to.”

Wen Ning looks down at his knees, but Wei Wuxian scoots closer.

With their backs against the rock, Wei Wuxian hugs him in, rests his hand on the side of Wen Ning’s head, cradling him against his chest. Wen Ning tucks his arms away, trying not to touch Wei Wuxian, but Wei Wuxian takes one of his hands.

“It’s okay,” Wei Wuxian says.

Wen Ning waits a moment, wishing he had proper breath to steady himself, then carefully wraps his arms around Wei Wuxian, nestling close to his slender frame.

It feels different this time. Not because their position is different, or because Wuxian’s heartbeat is any faster or slower, stronger or weaker.

There is no purpose this time. It isn’t for Wen Ning to experience sensations more fully. It isn’t for Wei Wuxian to find comfort.

They are just two bodies cast aside from life, bodies that struggled to catch each other during their fall until they landed in each other’s embrace.

Holding Wei Wuxian feels as natural as his heartbeat, as inevitable as each thrum beneath where Wen Ning rests his head.

And just as fleeting.

Wei Wuxian is more alive than any person he knows, yet is wasting away more each day, having given up everything to protect the Dafan Wen.

And Wei Wuxian is not his. Only one thing ties them together: they have each made the other into a member of the living dead.

With whom did it start? Was it Wei Wuxian, who brought Wen Ning back as a fierce corpse, or was it Wen Ning, who held Wei Wuxian down as his core was removed? Or was it the world that did this to both of them?

But despite the thread of shared death that ties them together, Wei Wuxian could break that connection if he wanted to.

Wen Ning is bound to his family, bound to this unnatural body, bound to Chenqing's laments. He can never reenter the world.

But Wei Wuxian...

One day, Wei Wuxian may have the chance to belong in the world again. With his shidi and shijie, with Lan Wangji.

Wen Ning will always be banished to the margins of the world.

“How long are you going to live with us?” Wen Ning finds himself asking.

Leaves rustle quietly in the forest, clouds disappearing above their heads to reveal more stars against the dark liquid sky. An owl hoots questioningly far behind them.

“Until tomorrow,” Wei Wuxian says. “Ask me again tomorrow, and I’ll tell you again.”

“I can’t ask you that every day.”

“Then don’t ask me at all.” He strokes Wen Ning’s hair, over the back of his head and down his back. “I’m not leaving.”

Wei Wuxian continues playing with Wen Ning’s hair, running his fingers through it, stopping occasionally to work out a tangle. Not for the first time, Wen Ning wishes he could feel touch more strongly. He had dreamt of moments like these as a teenager, gentle caresses from Wei Wuxian, impossible moments. He hadn’t realized he would receive them one day after they had given up their lives for each other.

“When do you think we’ll get our next visitor?” Wei Wuxian asks. “Think I can make that Spirit-Attraction Flag into a Guest-Attraction Flag?” He chuckles. “We can hang it at the ridge. People will be drawn from miles to come talk to us. Tell Uncle Four to get lots of fruit wine ready." He fiddles with the sleeve of Wen Ning's robe. "I’ll have you test out the flag. Wear it like a cloak, and go walk around Yiling to see how many friends you make.”

“I can barely get anyone to buy turnips from me.”

“Change of plans, then! I’ll make a Customer-Attraction Flag, and we’ll finally be rich.”

Wen Ning smiles. “What are we going to buy once we’re rich?”

“Toys for A-Yuan.” Wei Wuxian rubs across Wen Ning’s shoulders, back and forth. “Every toy in Yiling.”

“We should buy every toy in Lanling, too.”

“That’ll need a lot more money. We’ll have to grow bigger turnips.”

“A giant one.”

“A single giant turnip?” Now there is real laughter in Wei Wuxian’s voice. “I’ll have to plant you as the seed to grow something big enough. Don’t tell your jiejie. Although she might figure it out when you disappear, and meanwhile a turnip the size of the Burial Mounds takes over Yiling.”

“I still won’t tell her.”

Wei Wuxian makes a low humming sound. “I can always count on you.”

Wen Ning melts more into Wei Wuxian’s embrace, surrounded by his warmth.

“Too bad that no matter who we bury in the lotus pond,” Wei Wuxian says with a sigh, “those plants still don’t want to sprout.” This time he doesn’t rub Wen Ning’s back or fiddle with him while he talks.

He’s never said something like that about the lotus crop without following it up with a confident proclamation—But when have I ever not achieved the impossible?, They’ll poke their heads out soon!, My lotus flowers will be the biggest you’ve seen, just wait!

He’s never left hanging the chance that the lotus crop might not grow.

Wen Ning waits for the cocky remark, but it doesn’t come. “They’ll sprout if you’re the one growing them,” Wen Ning suggests, filling in the declaration that Wei Wuxian missed.

“…Yeah.”

Wen Ning’s stomach sinks. He looks up. Wei Wuxian smiles at him and guides him to rest against his chest again.

“It’s only been two weeks. They might take a while,” Wen Ning says, his face nearly turned into Wei Wuxian’s robes.

“I’ll just cheat and make a Lotus-Attraction Flag.”

“I’ll help you.”

“Of course you will. You’ll also help me with the flag for attracting guests to marvel at the beauty of our lotus pond!”

Guests again.

Wen Ning knows that Hanguang-Jun had visited on the day his consciousness returned. Jiang Wanyin and Jiang Yanli had met with Wei Wuxian soon after. Both left marks on Wei Wuxian.

Is he thinking about them?

Wishing he had warmth of his own to give Wei Wuxian, Wen Ning hugs him tighter. He's not sure if they lower to the ground in one movement or slowly slide down, but eventually they lie on their sides, facing each other, arms tight around each other. Wei Wuxian’s heartbeat speaks, and Wen Ning listens.

I’m lonely, it whispers. I’m so lonely.

Who is there in the Burial Mounds for Wei Wuxian to feel the same affection toward as he feels about Hanguang-Jun? Or to provide the same comfort as the company of his siblings?

Everyone in the Burial Mounds has tried their best to provide the support of a new family for Wei Wuxian. He has even called them his family. But try as they might, how could the Dafan Wen replace his shidi and shijie?

The shidi and shijie Wen Ning helped Wei Wuxian save, only to steal him away from. He knows that it was Wei Wuxian’s choice to lead the Dafan Wen to the Burial Mounds and live with them, but would he have made that choice if he had never formed a relationship with Wen Ning and his sister? The thought makes guilt churn in his stomach.

“Wei-gongzi?”

Wei Wuxian runs his thumb in gentle circles over Wen Ning’s shoulder. “Yes?”

“Is that something you want?” He pulls away from Wei Wuxian’s chest to look up at him, though not quite into his eyes. “Guests?”

“Don’t take that all so seriously. If guests come, would they be as good of a drinking buddy as Uncle Four, or as good of a storyteller as Granny, or as energetic as A-Yuan? They couldn’t compete.”

“But you meant it,” Wen Ning says, surprised at the force in his own voice, quiet as it is. “I’ll help you bring guests here.”

Wei Wuxian smiles and brushes his thumb over Wen Ning’s cheek, the touch warm and soft like hushed words. “You’re already too good to me. Don’t worry about me.” He sighs and looks up at the sky. “Each of us will have things we want, but can’t have. It’s just part of living.”

Wen Ning, too, looks up at the star-studded sky through the dark silhouettes of trees. The full shapes of the constellations are broken up, but he can picture which stars are waiting behind the black hands of tree leaves.

As he follows the disjointed forms of the constellations, he decides that he will relieve Wei Wuxian’s burdens.

He is not sure at what moment he makes the decision, but it settles into his bones and becomes his purpose for the night.

Not just for the night. For as long as Wei Wuxian is by his side.

The day Wen Ning’s consciousness was restored, he had heard A-Yuan singing a song about walking the “single-log bridge.” Curious, Wen Ning had asked where A-Yuan learned the song.

“Xian-gege,” had been the answer. The song’s lyrics had been about Wei Wuxian walking alone into darkness.

Wen Ning will not let him walk alone.

If Wei Wuxian wants to walk the single-log bridge, Wen Ning will carry him across it.

“Will you tell me about them?” Wen Ning asks.

“About what?”

“The things you want, but can’t have.”

* * *

Thank you for reading! Next chapter is coming soon. If you enjoyed this fic, come visit me on AO3!

[warrioreowynofrohan]

Thoughts on Mistborn Era 2 (Wax & Wayne):

My main take on these was “ah, looks like Brandon’s taking some time off from his magnum opus to write pulp Western/detective/crime novels”, and I was very amused to look up Brandon’s comments and see a ton of interviews with him saying, “so, this is absolutely me having some fun writing pulp Western/crime novels”. It’s nice to have a writer who’s not too proud to - accurately - describe his own stuff as pulp yet still do a good job of it. They remind me a little of the Dresden Files in terms of the mystery aspects, the urban fantasy tone, the wit, the lack of diplomatic/political subtlety of the protagonists and, of course, the rampant property destruction. But Brandon’s a much more thoughtful author than Jim Butcher, and treats his female characters better.

On the topic of gratuitous property destruction: Wax, for goodness’ sakes, stop shooting the ground! That’s infrastructure, Wax! Fixing the streets takes work, Wax! You’re not a dusty dirt road in the middle of nowhere any more, Wax! Just drop a coin like they dud in the old days! Or a shell casing or bullet if you desperately need to be hardcore. But rampantly firing off weapons in urban areas just to get a base for your Allomancy is a terrible idea.

This was a wonderful follow-up to Mistborn because it was a lot lighter and the stakes were a lot lower, which is nice for a change. I was reading the intro to Elantris where it was talking about people in Brandon’s early writing group telling him he needed to raise the stakes, and personally, I like low stakes. Well of Ascension/Hero of Ages were a grind, much as I liked the ending, and I would be up for more stories like Dawnshard, with low stakes and the heroes resolving the plot by non-violent means.

Marasi and Steris are both very well-done characters - I was definitely shipping Wax/Marasi in the first book and had no expectations of the Wax/Steris engagement lasting, so I was quite surprised, but the switch was well done and I liked it. Marasi and Wax’s feelings were a crush/hero worship and a rebound, respectively. And it’s nice to see a relationship grow gradually like Wax and Steris’ did. What Brandon did with Steris, starting out with a portrayal readers are unlikely to lije and letting her grow on them, is risky (especially with female characters) because readers may hold to first impressions, but I thought it worked very well.

Wayne’s backstory and reaction to it hit hard and was one of the best elements in the series. Another entry in the diverse array of Sanderson redemption arcs. It’s interesting because Wayne both is and isn’t haunted by it - he takes it seriously, it affects him deeply, but he doesn’t habitually brood, and it doesn’t prevent him from being a generally lighthearted, funny, silly person most of the time.

Wayne is absolutely right about the value of certain goids being an arbitrary thing invented by rich people. I’ve had caviar, once (as a garnish on a nice pasta dish at a fancy restaurant). It tastes like nothing. Entirely nodescript. The sole purpose of caviar is to communicate “this dish is fancy (and so, by connection, is the person eating it)”.

I’m deeply protective of Sazed and get very affonted when characters criticize him. I think he’s done an excellent job. It’s hard to wrap my head around the sheer scale of Bleeder’s overreaction to the possibility of her boyfriend moving back to the city. Though on one level it makes sense in that the kandra are of Preservation: she is going to see maintwnance of an existing situation as inherently better and more desirable, even if a change could still turn out well and be something Wax enjoyed. And I don’t feel like Sazed telling him about Bleeder being Lessie would have helped anything - it just would have made the decision to kill her harder, not less necessary, because she was incredibly malicious, destructive, and dangerous and there was no other way of containing her.

The resolution of Shadows of Self is exactly the sort of thing I wanted to see, politically: the mass protests and risk of riot over poor wages, unemployment, and mustreatment of workers is resolved by a committment to address those problems, because the workers’ anger is legitimate and their cause is just.

I’m heartily frustrated by Wax, because it is his responsibility - it is literally his job, he has employees and a Senate seat! - to address the major political and economic problems of Elendel, and he neglects them. I don’t care if you’d rather be out shooting things! You have resposibilities! The workers in your factories are the source of the money and prestige that lets you engage in your gentleman-crimefighter hobby, and you owe it to them to see that the city operates in their interests. You can do far more good in that way than by shootin’ bad guys. Do. Your. Damn. Job. Steris seems to be nudging him in that direction, at least.

In general I’m impatient with a lot of the law-enforcement attitudes. Miles is a villain for whom I have absolutely no sympathy. Oh, so you’ve turned evil because, despite your 15 years of work in law enforcement, crime still exists? Yeah, maybe that’s because your belief that crime will stop existing if you shoot and/or hang enough people was never realistic. Likewise with Wax’s skepticism regarding Marasi’s ideas on how crime can be reduced through better urban planning and social policies - no, Wax, it won’t entirely eliminate crime, there will always be people who are just plain malicious, greedy, venal, or violent, but if you can reduce it by, say, 50-70% by better social policy, that would still be a good thing, right?

The period newspapers are great fun. I want a TenSoon plushie! Come on, Brandon, you’re musding out on a fantastic marketing opportunity! The one thing that bugged me was the ‘Pewternauts’ in The Bands of Mourning. In the first place, it’s a nonsensical name - real-world dreadnaughts, of which these are obviously supposed to be the equivalent, were called that because it literally meant ‘these having nothing they should fear’. The apex predator of military warships at the time, if you will. You can’t just create a random fantasy portmanteau amd pretend that it works - it’s like calling a scandal in a fantasy novel something-gate even though the Watergate scandal doesn’t exist in that world! Secondly, dreadnaughts were part of a massive military arms race in a world where European wars had been commonplace for centuries. The Elendel basin had never had a war in 300 years - these aren’t something that someone would invent just off the bat. Having similar technology to turn-of-the-century earth doesn’t mean it will be applied in the same ways, not with a completely different political context.

In general, New Seran’s complaints seemed overblown. Yes, the transit system treating Elendel as a hub and lacking effective connections between the outlying regions in aggravating. (It’s a provlem that plagues urban public transit systems even now - most routes are either local or feed into the city centre, with relatively few goung from one suburb to another, even as trans-suburban commuting vecomes more common.) But it’s not remotely the kind of thing you fight a war over! I feel like Brandon’s trying to recall the American Revolution, a bit, but the distances are so small (Elendel and New Seran are about as far apart as Ottawa and Toronto) as to make that ludicrous. What they really need is some kind of equivalent to a regional district authority, where representatives of multiple local governments can get together to work on issues of regional planning.

[scenics]

what's your favorite thing about wong kar wai's movies? why do you like his movies so much?

wrote this in the notes app at 3am. this got very long. wkw’s one of my fave directors of all time

first of all, i did not like wong kar wai’s movies growing up. my first introduction to wong kar wai was with in the mood for love, and i always hated how slow the movie was—i could not understand the value of two middle aged people walking circles around each other on when i was eight years old. my mother was particularly fascinated with the movie and every few years or so she’d borrow it from the local library just to rewatch it by herself, or with me as an unwilling audience. maybe she just really liked tony leung like everyone else did, or i didn’t understand what she was going through back then. now, she watches it a lot less, but ironically i’m the one who watches it on a regular basis. when i look back, i realize my hatred of in the mood for love stemmed from my rejection of my mother when i was younger, along with anything related to my culture/heritage. it was my way of reconciling the isolation i felt in my new home at a young age—i thought that rejecting any part of my past would allow me to assimilate better (and for the most part it worked until senior year of high school give or take). i can say now that my former hatred/rejection of wong kar wai’s greatest work—his magnum opus—makes me appreciate him a lot more. like my mother taught me, it is best not to hate if you can love one day.

my real love and fascination for wong kar wai started when i was 18. the week after my first week of college finals, i watched his entire filmography (excluding anything post 2046) in one long sitting. i was exhausted from an accumulation of things: college did not go the way i expected and i hated science with a passionate sincerity by the end of the year. that year, i had also not chosen to go home.  regretted not just going back to vietnam a lot and i spent the entire first year of college just missing it. i was mentally emotionally exhausted and homesick so i found immediate comfort and familiarity in wong kar wai’s films. all of wong kar wai’s films are based around the simple theme of connection, each character desires connection with another —whether through strangers like in chungking express or estranged lovers in a foreign city like in happy together. every character is lost in their own world of loneliness, but they’re not consumed by it as they constantly venture out to find a cure for their loneliness. there’s a sort of warm tenderness to their eternal loneliness. wong kar wai’s characters are all very simple, but that just makes them the more normal. he adds an amusing, yet charming aspect to a lot of his characters, which makes them all the more real. at the end of the day, they’re the most ordinary of people, but framed in wong kar wai’s romantic vision of the world. for me, i can see myself in a lot of his characters, especially as i’ve now settled myself into my twenties.

most of all, wong kar wai’s movies remind me of home a lot. more than anything. vietnamese cinema barely exists, and his films of hong kong are one of the only threads of my childhood memories captured in film. in his films, his characters loneliness stems from an urban isolation and a desire to find home. how can one constantly be surrounded by people, yet feel so lonely?  90s hong kong reminds me a lot of early 2000s saigon, right before true modern urbanization began to take foot. the saigon i return to now is not the place i grew up in, everything i once knew with familiarity has become foreign (you could argue the same for hong kong too). like both the main characters in happy together, i’m very much far away from home now, but what makes it worse is i don’t have a home to return to anymore despite it still being there. the isolation i feel here is much less comforting than the familiar isolation of asia, it’s an entirely distinct feeling i’ve come to differentiate. the night version of hong kong in fallen angels reminds me very much of saigon at night when i was little—when i would cling to my aunts back on the motorcycle. even more, hong kong at night is an unmistakable feeling—a true moment of limbo that you can experience nowhere else as the city seems to slow to a stop before starting up again (the dim sum scene in fallen angels reminds me of my uncle taking me with him to smalls shops buried deep in hong kong’s markets. in my opinion, the most crowded, dirty, loud places have the best food).

one of the things i also love the most about wong kar wais films are they are essentially “of an era.” context heavily influences his films, and watchers should understand that his best films are primarily made in the decade of hong kong’s handover from the uk to china.  looking back now, his films are representative of the end of hong kong pop culture culture. they’re the last threads of a former culture powerhouse in asia—hk cantopop, film, and tv throughout the late 70s to 90s had an immense influence on asian pop culture today. everybody knew and loved hong kong, because it was the only true source of quality pop culture in an age of barely any in asia. hong kong was the beginning of everything essentially. kpop even, i would argue, would not be what it is today without cantopop—many idols are modeled after the cantopop idols of the 80s along with western influence. it’s sad to see that hong kong’s impact has been increasingly erased over the past 20 or so years—hong kong is now a shell of it’s former self as it can never return to its former glory. wong kar wai’s greatest films are chungking express, fallen angels, happy together, and in the mood for love. they’re all made in the years predating or after the handover, and you can see the differences in feeling of each film as it nears 1997. happy together, aside from being a somewhat tragic love story, is also the tragedy of hong kong. the handover of 1997 seems to haunt that film as the characters are also far way from hong kong; they’re on the other side of the world. there’s a sense of fear and desperation that runs parallel to the main love story and i feel like people don’t see that the first time without an understanding of historical context. chungking express and fallen angels are two sides of hong kong—hong kong by day and by night—they’re wong kar wai’s love letter to hong kong itself before it disappears in the subsequent years (which it has sadly). both of those movies are time capsules of an era, they capture an atmosphere that is now gone in hong kong. 2046 is an extension of those four movies above—an imagining of how hong kong would be be 99 years after the “end” of hong kong as it is in 1997. and finally, wong kar wai’s greatest work is in the mood for love. it’s his magnum opus, and the true end of an era: for wong kar wai’s creative capacity, for hong kong pop culture, for the actors themselves. wong kar wai has been unable to follow in the mood for love successfully with other directorial features, it’s a masterpiece in itself in its inability for recreation. the movie speaks for itself, even maggie subsequently quit acting shortly afterwards because she felt she could never top that role—it was the end of her acting career in terms of era. everything that wong kar wai put out in the 90s is of an era, it cannot and never be repeated or recreated just as the old hong kong is gone (which is why his attempt to make sequels for those movies with blossoms and the chungking express sequel will be futile. wong kar wai does not realize that that era has indeed passed (and his his break up with christopher doyle has proved to be fatal for both of them).

finally, a small addition about wong kar wai as a director himself. he’s a cancer, very true to his nature, which explains how he can so fluidly translate and portray emotion in his films. they’re almost overflowing with tender emotion, but very much so in an implicit manner. i could never do that in anything i create, it’d end up being very much lynchian in manner, which makes me appreciate his films a lot more. moreover, wong kar wai has a certain way, an intimacy with all his actors. he brings out the best in them for only his movies, and that’s what makes him so special. also, i relate a lot to wong kar wai’s method of working ..the man is one of the worst procrastinators he’s worse than me. he almost never plans or writes scripts for his movies. most of his films especially in the 90s are very much “go with the flow” improvisation (u can see that the characters are very much the actors even it’s hard to distinguish). he was editing in the mood for love up to the last minute before final submission for cannes, that’s just how much of a procrastinator he was and why it’ll take him a million years to release the chungking express sequel. it’s amazing to think how all of these great movies from wong kar wai are technically equivalent to 2000 word essays submitted a minute past the deadline. what i imagine is how different would his work be if he’d planned ahead (how much better would my essays be if i didn’t write them at 3am?). but i guess we can all see how much he’s changed in the release of his criterion collection—-he’s not the person he once was and he can’t recreate the past.

if u read this far i love you thank u for reading my inarticulate nonsense thoughts. i hope u like wong kar wai a lot more than before