#tumblr reblogs are FAR beyond my recall lol

[thelaurenshippen]

Hiya Lauren! I remember a while back you reblogged something about mark being romantically involved with nearly all other queer atypicals and it did mention oliver/mark as unrequited and I wonder if you could elaborate a little more on that?:D I'm just curious:) You don't have to of course! Ty!

oh gosh, I WISH I remembered this - I don't reblog very much that isn't fanart, so I'm having a hard time recalling what post this would've been and what I might've said/added to it!

I don't think of Mark/Oliver as unrequited at all. That said, in The AM Archives specifically, we were not writing toward that ship - it wasn't the intention and we had no idea that Andrew and Kristian had that chemistry until we were recording the whole season all at once. And then we weren't sure if we were going to get another season at all! So there definitely was a period when I was more uncertain about it, mostly because it was unclear what the future would hold for any of the characters.

While they don't get together in The College Tapes, I do think that they very slowly figure things out in the months and years afterward. In the TCT planner (which is technically the last bit of canon that exists in the Bright Universe, in terms of timeline), there's heavy implications that they're living together - or at least spending a lot of time together - and I think all of us who made The College Tapes were thinking of them as a romantic ship when writing that show.

They both have buckets and buckets of trauma and unresolved issues (as did Mark and Sam - and their inability to work through it together/the way they first met and got together, etc. is one of the reasons they didn't ultimately work out) so I can't say what their future holds, but as far as I'm concerned, they're headed toward romantic involvement the last time we hear from them (or already there).

I hope that answers your question!

[nerdanel01]

Top Five vs. Bottom Five Meme

Rules: tag the person who tagged you, always post the rules, answer the questions, and add the date

What are your five most popular works? What are your five least popular works? Are you surprised? Why? Optional: If you want to calculate this, what are your works’ average number of notes? [lol math, not gonna happen] Today’s date, so you can see how your results might change if you do this again in a year.

Tag six people to do this next!

I was tagged by @tel-abelas-mofo for this! Using overall counts on my posts to come up with the tallies... honestly I wasn’t even sure if I had posted ten things to tumblr yet but I guess I have so...???

There are couple of things I have posted that would have been on the “bottom” list also, but I did not include them here; they are mostly lil drabbles that I wrote for DWC that I am not as proud of, and therefore not keen to bump beyond the notes they’ve gotten. (I take more risks with writing when I am drunk writing, sometimes they pay off, sometimes they don’t. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

if you want to do this, consider yourself tagged, but in addition to the people tel-abeles has tagged I’d also love to see (only if you want/are comfortable!) what @dragynfox (who apparently is writing a LOTR/DA crossover fic?? how did I miss this I NEED this) comes up with? tag me back so I can read everything :)

Top Five

1) Untitled, DWC prompt “Red Wine Stained Lips,” Thanduwen Lavellan x Solas, Solas POV, post-crestwood (angst I guess?) 45 notes

2) Untitled, DWC “Fingertips Smudged in Blue Ink,” Thanduwen Lavellan x Solas, Solas POV, (sfw, but with nsfw implied at the end) 35 notes

3) The Pups of Fen’Harel, Thanduwen Lavellan x Solas (mostly Solas and his two sons), Solas POV, Papa Solas. 32 notes

4) Untitled, DWC “Your bed after traveling,” Thanduwen Lavellan x Solas, (vaguely nsfw ish?) 24 notes

5) Untitled, DWC, Thanduwen Lavellan and Cole, (solavellan if you squint) post-trespasser. 27 notes

Bottom Five

1) The Vigil at Vir Vian. Thanduwen Lavellan x Solas, Solas POV. 18 notes

2) Vacivity—the Lonely Quiet. Thanduwen Lavellan x Solas, post-trespasser, vaguely horror-ish and a little bit off from canon, I think. 12 notes

3) He should have burned the clothes a long, long time ago. DWC. Solas POV, post-trespasser. 11 notes

4) The Lights in the Shadows, F!Lavellan x Solas, Lavellan POV, sfw. (excerpted from my longer fic.) 8 notes

5) and at the very bottom I’m just going to put There Is Only Forward generally, which is my long(ish? 100k words) ongoing fic on AO3. I always cross-post here when I update but it’s mostly for my own record as the updates rarely get any notes.

Are you surprised? Why? This was a really interesting exercise! I was not keeping track of this before so it was cool to see what pieces of my writing people have reacted to most/least.

Some things surprise me, some things don't. I am not at all surprised, for example, that Papa Solas quickly became one of my most shared works. Nor am I really surprised that my top 5 are mostly works from Solas’ POV. I can understand why that kind of work can be more interesting and pleasurable to read than, for example, something from Lavellan’s POV. (You pretty much play the game through her eyes, if you play as a F!Lavellan, so I can see how reading Solas’ POV is more refreshing.)

I am a little bit surprised that the first DWC prompt I filled is up there in the top 5? I remember re-reading it the next morning and actually being a little embarrassed about it (if I recall correctly I had a lot of drunken typos to correct) but I’m glad that people are enjoying it! I do love writing Cole’s dialogue—his little speech at the end is (I think) the strongest bit of writing in that piece. 

I am not surprised at how There is Only Forward does, really. I update about 2-3 times a month, but the chapters are usually somewhere between 8k-10k words. I don’t really expect anyone to read 10k words on tumblr—I assume that most people who see it here follow the link through to AO3 and then respond (if they do) via kudos/comments instead of reblogging. I mostly keep reblogging here to remain accountable to myself, I guess?  But I do make an effort to post excerpts of the fic that I think are interesting/worthy on their own, and I am always surprised they don’t do as well; then again, I think most of my notes come from people following DWC, so perhaps it is not so surprising? 

I was surprised about the notes on the Vigil at Vir Vian. Before I went back and counted, I expected that one to easily be in the top 5. (It is not far off, but still.) Maybe this is because it is a little longer (I think) than some of the others?

Mostly I am surprised I don’t write more NSFW. I really thought when I joined DWC I was just going to write a bunch of really raunchy stuff and I kind of haven’t written like... any. Which obviously means I need to do that this week.

Today’s date: July 20 2017