#very productive half an hour

[aflawedfashion]

I am working on two Mel/Ben fics

One short one where Melanie is in episode 5 and one longer one that takes place post season 4

[front-facing-pokemon]

[the-illustrative-interloper]

Jonathan Harker’s Journal - May 28th

[skyberia]

jun's "tell horoscope" contact dialogue

[chronotopes]

Hi Katia My Friend Katia. Tell me some more about archetypes in Vital Light please :)

HI ESTHER!!!!! i put off answering this until i ACTUALLY DID MY STUPID WORK, which makes me wish i had summoned the energy to ACTUALLY DO MY STUPID WORK like maybe yesterday afternoon but whatever jenny and i are both getting over stupid dumb colds the household is in turmoil* whatever.

*kind of tired

anyway. archetypes in vital light. time to type way too much.

A million years ago (2021-ish probably) I answered an ask along the lines of "Is there a trope you couldn't be paid to write?" I answered, basically, "I'll write any trope but you have to let me put my spin on it," throwing out 'Kanaya as hypercompetent lesbian comforting Karkat about his feelings' as a simple example of something that is at base unappealing but that I would find interesting to complicate and ~problematize~ through the lens of writing. Vital Light is, in many ways, pretty 50% narrative turns I really do still self-indulgently love and 50% exactly that. Part of its dubious mission is to take a story very vaguely conceived by children on the brink of becoming Young Adults, then loosely streamlined into a real story with an arc by one young adult in particular (me). As a result, it was always going to be an engagement with the tropes and archetypes of young adult fiction (and, more nichely, Tumblr Appeal Fiction) in the 10s.

I guess Aivide does this too to some extent. Lark and Quartz are not Aivide and Nora – they start a lot younger and largely less horrible for each other, even at their worst – but in their 2023–2024 iterations they are a similar game of "take a romantic dynamic archetype I find kind of distressing to write or think about, write it in a way that is interesting to me." The excerpts below – respectively from 2019ish and from the 2023 outline, try to ignore the stupid old versions of everyone's names – reflect what I was interested in doing with their knight/princess adjacent dynamic when I was younger, in contrast with what I'm trying to do now.

I think part of what conceptualizing Vital Light has led me to engaging with the concept of 'subversion' as it was carried out by mefromthepast without self-describing what I'm doing as 'subversion' myself. As the most obvious example – 'Subverting the Zuko Archetype' is what I thought I was doing when I was 16 and writing Leander, but I would say that what I was actually doing was writing a fairly sympathetic and compelling Smart Boy Who Hates His Dad and then failing to think through what could make him Backslide And Become More Like His Dad, just knowing that it had to happen because it was what the story had planned. You know, when the handsome sadboy doesn't successfully complete his Redemption Arc that's #subversion which makes it awesome and complicated. 

What I'm trying now is to take those very well-trod types of teens one encounters in a fantasy novel and think of them as Committing to The Bit for as long as the bit will have them – rather than, as me-from-the-past framed it, turning away from the bit at the wrong moment. Leander never stops thinking of himself as someone striving towards selflessness and 'redemption,' which eventually backs him into a corner where, no matter which way he turns, he has to lose something. Lark never stops thinking of herself as a protector – Quartz's protector in particular – but protecting someone when that's not what they asked you for is a great way to hurt them in a way they find difficult to forgive. Those are the two clearest examples of a character's fate in Vital Light being tied to the expansion/extension of their archetype because I think those are the two characters who were most evidently More Archetype Than Dimensional Character in the 2016 draft.

[phagodyke]

taking an extra half an amfexa before I leave work bc [redacted] (popular artist) is playing my city tn and I'll need it to cope with how awful the traffics gonna be when I'm on the bus 💀

[wall-eye]

Now that I'm over 12 hours after the fact. It's a little funny of the universe to take away my braincells and let me burn my fingers so badly I got to give my work a doctor's note saying I'll be out for the weekend. After I complained for the nth time that 5 day weeks aren't good for me and I can't wait til end of summer for it to stop

Blisters under the cut! It's not gorey I just wanted to show what I'm dealing with but it is blisters so

Big ones are circled with thicker lines. Small ones are w smaller lones. The docs note us mostly so I don't risk infection at all, cause he thinks the blisters Will pop (which sounds Awful)

[six-of-ravens]

this is one of those days where one part of my mind is like "literally just get enough stuff off the counter that you can cook supper" and the other part is like "no you see I have to clean out the jar cupboard to do that, even though all the jars on the counter came out of the cupboard and I know they'll fit back in it"

[dashiellqvverty]

local community theater is doing newsies so i will be auditioning for a show for the first time in my life

[amrv-5]

exploding and dying forever and ever <- didn't drink coffee, hungry cranky tired. Also yeouch cramps! And I forgot to pack lunch (boo!). + I don't want to do the work. Anyway getting over it going to start the shot analysis for Jeanne Dielman before screening, watch Cure, finish the Dielman shot analysis at home (and start Sedmikrásky / finish that??? I can power thru these mini analyses pretty quick and then I only have to wrap up the. dubious. argument and then intro which can happen. later in the week. by which I mean tomorrow and friday, leaving all of next week open for fine tuning the Conference Paper From Hell + final week preparation / readings / etc). Then dinner and do some writing

[zoueriemandzijnopmars]

I tend to write down what I did in a day on work as a way of crossing stuff of my todo list and to be able to look back on it when I wonder what I was doing last week and today my list is:

Meeting

Started submission process paper 😱

Checked recent work relevant researchers and wrote short overviews

Stared at my paper

Meeting

[floral-hex]

It’s hard to make music when you have no instruments or software or skills or talent and also you don’t actually know how to play anything or make music and you’re dumb as hell

[the-mad-prince-of-denmark]

And I’m having powerful feelings about the 60s sitcom Bewitched’s queer subtext in this chillies tonight

[sharkieboi]

everyone’s talking all these sophisticated points about Glass Onion but i personally cannot get over the lingering camera shot on the ass of the statue Benoit hides behind to eavesdrop on Miles and Peg

[proteuus]

skipped class to clean my room which was a dubious decision at the time but actually that was the best decision I've ever made

[carterinwanderlust]

I love the magic of live theatre but boy howdy do I hate sitting still