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an-annyeoing-writer · 3 years

Text

vulnerability. – chap. 1.

Read the prologue here

Story info:

Pair: Byun Baekhyun x Reader

Rating: +18 for mentions of s*x and violence (future chapters)

Genre: angst, smut

Chapter info:

Release date: 16th May 2021

Word count: 3 727

Warnings: mentions of trauma (nothing descriptive)

Vulnerability Masterlist || Fanfiction Masterlist || Ko-Fi

Taglist:

@shesdreaminginoverdose @mybiasdashboard @marimsun @byuns-asscheeks @multi--kpop--fanfics @vunv @making-me-blush @skittlez-area512 @bloopbloopkai @byuns-asscheeks @baekyeonoreo @kimcarinaa

Please, always comment on the newest chapter if you wish to be added to/removed from the taglist. I will be also checking the tags, so if you're shy – feel free to leave a note this way.

Previous (Prologue)

Chap. 1.

Living in a small apartment close to the city center was not always convenient.

You regretted you couldn’t buy all the pretty things that you saw in stores or on Pinterest, because they’d easily overwhelm the limited space. Your neighbors constantly reminded you that they’re a few meters away from you, with screams, children’s cries, music, or chopping meat at 2 AM if that’s what a particular neighbor decided to do.

Fortunately, as the time passed, you got used to most of it and started to appreciate the small space, almost effortless to keep clean, close to both your university and the workplace, and the city center – an area that was always restless during the long days and nights that you spent watching it through your tall window, as if waiting for someone to look back at you.

Despite the comfort of living alone that you tried to indulge in, you couldn’t help growing lonelier and lonelier with every passing day. At the very least, your job and university often took the worries off your mind, and they eventually became your whole life, an existence that focused on never-ending effort in the name of better future, as though there was nothing in the present worth fighting for.

You studied finance; you didn’t give it much hope at first, but it ended up becoming interesting as you started connecting the dots and realizing how broad and important this topic was. Yet, as any newborn financier, you used your secret knowledge in the mysterious field of retail. In other words, you worked part-time as a cashier in a convenience store. Twenty four years old, on your way to getting that famous Master’s degree, already more than halfway through the process, yet – education without experience mattered nothing, as you realized the very moment you started looking for your first job, unable to keep counting on your parents. Not like you wanted to stay in touch with them, anyway.

Adulthood was difficult; the small apartment, due to its location, costed more than your whole family’s used to in your hometown. A small scholarship kept you set up with electricity and water fees, but for WiFi you needed to depend on a close-by library with a good signal; it turned out to have the connection good enough to reach from at least one place in your apartment, the one you coincidentally used for occasional observations. You weren’t sure whether you discovered the WiFi while sitting or if you developed the observing habit upon having to spend your time there over any other place. The only downside of this solution was that some sites were blocked after a scandal over men in the library performing actions other than polite studying, with the help of library computers. The event was outrageous to some, but primarily it became an object of jokes and memes all thorough the city, and maybe even country-wide to some extent. Either way, in times of need, your phone still had its meager data transfer. Good enough.

It was Saturday now; Saturdays were good but busy, because you worked at nights, then slept the shift off, and after you woke up, you could go and study all that you missed throughout the week, if for any reason the classes didn’t sound appealing enough or something else happened, distracting you from them. You spent Saturday afternoons either by the window of your room (where the WiFi reached) or just went straight to the library – a place way more spacious than your own apartment, and quieter as well. The only issue was, that you couldn’t snack in there and you ought to stay quiet. You decided to go with the latter and set foot towards the library.

Therefore, when your phone suddenly rang there, a few faces snapped towards you in obvious disapproval; you cursed internally, before you even managed to pull the phone out of your pocket, because you panicked so much that your hands shook at the initial attempt to do so. You got up from your seat and quickly disappeared between the bookshelves, where the people staying by the tables wouldn’t hear you so well anymore.

“Hello?” you whispered into the phone.

“Hello. Am I disturbing you?”

Your heart dropped as you recognized the voice, although you weren’t completely certain if you recognized it well, it sounded a bit different through the phone. The number was unknown on your phone, but there was only one person that could be calling you today.

You took a few seconds to compose yourself; less than you actually needed, but just enough so that the silence would not turn awkward.

“Um… I can’t talk loudly, but that’s okay.”

“I can call you later.”

“N-no need to, I’ll just whisper.”

“Okay, then.” He was quiet for a few seconds, but you heard some shuffling on the other side. “Do you have time tonight?”

The question was sudden, so you weren’t completely sure, if you did. But your mind felt too empty to figure that out, anyway.

“No. I mean, yes. Sorry, I meant I don’t have plans. So, um, yes, I’m free.” This didn’t sound professional at all. However, you heard quiet laughter on the other side and exhaled almost audibly in relief; it was the first time you heard him laugh with you, and it served to calm your nerves like a wave of calmness coming over you.

“Well, do you want to meet? I’m going to a museum and I don’t feel like going alone. What about that?”

“A museum? That… sounds nice.” When was the last time you’ve been to one? What a perfect opportunity to make a fool out of yourself. “What time?”

“Around six? If that’s okay with you.” If you remembered well, it had to be around three now.

“Sounds alright, where should we meet?”

“I’ll pick you up.”

“Okay. Thank you.” What were you exactly thanking him for? Hard to tell. But you heard him laugh again; you felt like he’s mocking you, but you quickly realized it couldn’t be the case – a warm voice like this couldn’t be ill-intended.

“Sure thing, you’re welcome. We’re set up, then?”

“A-actually, I have a question, if it’s not a problem.” You bit on your lip, knowing than in less than ten seconds, you were going to probably embarrass yourself in front of an educated and serious adult.

“What’s the matter?” he asked politely.

“So, um… What should I wear?”

* * *

You were grateful for the few tips given by Byun Baekhyun at the end of your conversation, because otherwise you’d either be underdressed or overdressed. You ended up wearing a more elegant university attire, something you usually wore for exams, but which didn’t make you appear too formal; a long, woolen skirt that was your private treasure due to its ability to keep you warm even in winter (and it was still spring; the weather was questionable), as well as leather shoes, a beige shirt and a thick, knitted cardigan. You felt quite modest; something told you that it wasn’t a regular date. You didn’t feel a need to reveal anything, or to focus on your feminine attributes. You just felt like it wouldn’t serve any purpose. As long as Baekhyun was concerned, you had an impression that he’s more interested in your mind than in the way you look – the clothes you wore last time, just a little bit revealing and suggestive, had done nothing to save you. You wanted only to look appropriate, and you were sure you managed to achieve at least that.

As you found out soon enough, he wasn’t particularly dressed up, either. A button-up shirt without without a tie – bow or neck type – and jeans, made of high-quality denim, not like the ripped through or worn out ones people sometimes wore. And a suede coat. Although he wasn’t dressed up to look attractive, it would be difficult not to feel attracted to him. Byun Baekhyun had his own aura of independence and considerate distance connected with subtle proximity, and this time, you had the chance to appreciate this harmony, working perfectly for him, highlighting his soft masculinity. Even more so, when you noted a small, gentle smile that appeared on his lips when he spotted you leaving your apartment block.

“Hi there” he spoke.

“Hi there” you replied.

“The museum is nearby, so I didn’t take the car, is that okay?”

It was probably too late to change the means of transport anyway, so the question was pointless. But no, you didn’t mind.

“It’s okay. What museum are we going to?”

He put hands in the pockets of his coat and tilted his head to the side, observing as you approached. You crossed your hands over your chest; it was a bit colder than you expected, and the skirt only warmed you up at the bottom, the wind still reached the top.

“You should put on something warmer. It’ll get even colder on the way back” he spoke. “Go back and get yourself a jacket, I’ll wait.”

You wanted to oppose and say it’s alright, but you didn’t; it didn’t feel right to argue with him. You only nodded and went home to retrieve a better outwear; you were back in no time.

“So? Which museum?”

You looked up at Baekhyun: the man walked by your side, or – in fact – you were walking by his; he stayed in control of the situation, but resonated with warmth and peacefulness rather than the coldness and stillness you experienced last time. And especially as he spoke, you found yourself easing into the conversation more naturally, and your initial fear quickly turned into innocent shyness upon the older man’s presence.

“A complex of museums nearby. There’s everything there, a historical museum of the region, one about the history of mining worldwide, and an art museum. I wanted to see the last one, I heard they unveiled a few new pieces since the the last time I went. You’re not local?” He glanced at you with polite curiosity.

“Not really. I moved here to study” you explained. “I know the nearby area, but I’m not too… um, social. I only know where to do the cheapest groceries and where they sell the best bread.”

“Where?”

“Behind the river, by the intersection with the highway. It looks small but really, you should try it out. Especially their cinnamon rolls.”

Baekhyun hummed.

“That sounds nice. I can recommend the best pizza in return.”

“You eat takeouts often?”

“Yep.”

“You’d save money if you cooked for yourself. Pizzas are expensive.”

Another warm laugh reached your ears, and through them, your heart as well.

“I’ll save money if I spend the time for cooking on working instead.”

“Okay, that’s a valid point. But homemade food is healthier.”

“Depends on where you buy your takeout.” He seemed to have an answer to your every doubt. “I wouldn’t trust just any restaurant, you know? It’s basically what my diet consists of.”

“Variety is also important. Don’t argue with me on that.”

“I won’t. But I won’t take you for a pizza, if that’s your stance on that.”

“I didn’t say I don’t want it” you remarked right away; he replied with laugh, which you found yourself copying naturally.

The conversation flowed smoothly, reaching more or less unimportant topics: the city life, current events, your university, possible career, Baekhyun’s interests – you found out he likes music; it’s too sad to work in silence – and the museum you were going to.

The place you felt initially quite neutral about, brought you more peace than you expected it to. It looked harmonious and the lights were soft. No one hurried through the gallery, and the paintings, although not so interesting at first, you soon learned to appreciate, trying to catch onto small details that, you could tell, Baekhyun already knew by heart, but he smiled every single time you pointed at something specific that caught your attention, even if it was as silly as matching colors, or realistically portrayed lights – these were your favorites.

And, slowly but surely, you got accustomed to the pretty sights, excitement turning into relaxation, and even Baekhyun himself seemed more content than you thought he’d be in your presence.

“You’re different,” you spoke as the two of you sat on a bench in front of one of the tall, monumental pieces; this one was a modern painting full of splashes and mixed colors, soft browns, yellows, and greens, so big that it definitely wouldn’t fit in your bedroom – the first thought you had upon seeing its size.

Despite the painting being in the very center of the gallery, you were the only ones watching it now.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re different today than you were yesterday” you elaborate. “Less… intimidating” you tried to put your thoughts into words.

Baekhyun laughed in response; the laughter was soft and warm, which made you exhale in relief – you feared that he’d feel offended at the remark.

“Yesterday was different. I needed to test you.”

“What do you mean?”

He stared at the painting as he leaned forward, resting elbows on his knees and shifting a little bit, probably thinking how to say the thing he had to say, without causing misunderstandings. You stared at him, completely having lost interest in the painting by now, ready to hear out whatever was to be spoken.

“People often come to me because they’re attracted to me. Well, not blaming them” he grinned; you rolled your eyes a little, but it did relieve the tension, most likely according to his own intention. “However, I’m not interested in romantic relationships. If you come to me expecting a date, you’ll get disappointed. And you won’t be able to handle what it is truly about, if I’m the only thing keeping you interested. It’ll be a hassle for the both of us.”

He glanced at you only briefly, ensuring that you’ve heard him so far before shifting his eyes back forward.

“So I’m always like this at first, just to see how determined you are, and how you behave under pressure. Then I leave you for a few minutes so you have the time to reconsider and leave if willing. That’s a safety measure for you.” He stopped for just a few seconds. “And you – all of you – always check what’s on the other side of the sheet. That’s a safety measure for me.”

“Safety measure?”

“Trust is the basis of the whole deal. If you don’t admit, that you looked at it, it means you’ll keep hiding things later on as well, and I can’t have that.”

“So if I…”

“Yes. If you didn’t correct your statement, we wouldn’t be here right now.” The words sounded ominous even despite the calm tone that Baekhyun used.

“I understand.”

You actually did; the strange aura of yesterday’s meeting finally started to clear out, leaving the simplest facts that all fit into the bigger picture. Yet, you still didn’t know enough. There were more things, more questions, each of which demanded an answer of its own. However, you were still unsure of your stance, and of what Baekhyun had planned for you – for the both of you.

“Will you accept me, then?” you asked finally, breaking through the silence.

“I don’t know yet” he replied in an honest tone, finally reciprocating your gaze. His features were soft, you could tell, he tried not to hurt you with his words. “You’re a nice girl, but I’m not sure if it’ll work out. I need more time. Primarily, I need to get to know you better. And I feel like you need more time, too.”

You nodded slowly.

“Could you, um… tell me more about it?”

“About what I do?”

“Yeah. You didn’t tell me much last time. You mostly only asked questions.”

“True. I may answer some of yours, if you’d like. What are you interested in?”

You cleared your throat; some questions seemed more intrusive than the others and you preferred to leave them for later.

“What would you want to do with me, if we set up a um… a scene?” Is that how you professionally call it? You didn’t remember all that well; you were, in fact, with no experience, only the Internet and your own curiosity to lead you forward – the temptation to explore your interests had been progressing in silence up until now.

“Well, depends on what would be suitable. I do different things with different people. Sometimes, it’s about what they like, and sometimes about what I like, and, the most often, it’s about what we both like. Everyone needs a different approach. I enjoy finding the right approach, and exploring it. It’s different when you start with a virgin, different when you start with a brat, different when you start with someone experienced, different when you start with someone with trauma. The last type is a person I don’t like engaging in. It’s a vulnerable ground and the person often seeks relief instead of therapy. I’m not a therapist. I’m a dominant.”

You took your time to analyze his words and put them all together in your head before you spoke again.

“You wrote something like that on the sheet. That I may have trauma.”

“That’s different,” Baekhyun was quick to elaborate. “Everyone has trauma of sort. Childhood traumas are more common than you think. I meant specifically trauma that comes from similar ground as the one I’m on. It’s not the case for you. According to what you said, you’ve never had any experiences like this and never engaged sexually or romantically.”

Pointing that out hurt a little; yes, so what if you’re 24 years old and a virgin? You had the right to choose your pace. But, you quickly realized, it was your own insecurity poking at you, because Baekhyun sounded anything but judgmental. He didn’t seem particularly impressed either – and you were thankful for that as well. You’ve seen enough men sounding excited when a woman was discovered to be unexperienced. You hated that even more than those who made fun of you; and in the long run, you just learned not to overshare. Telling Baekhyun this truth wasn’t the easiest, so having him say it so casually was definitely weird in your ear.

“However, that’s also a vulnerable point. You don’t know what you’re getting into. It looks different on the screen or in the books than it is in real life. I’m not going to reject you just because you’re new, because everyone’s been at some point. But you must understand, it’s a responsibility, and I don’t want to take one I’m not capable of handling.”

“Have you ever been with someone else like that?”

“With a virgin?”

“…Yeah.”

“Yes. Once. But I didn’t handle it too well back then.”

“What do you mean?”

Baekhyun rubbed his chin, pressing his lips together in slight uneasiness. But you didn’t revoke your question – maybe you should have, for the sake of his comfort, but you felt that the answer wouldn’t be meaningless to you.

“She wanted to be exclusive,” the man finally answered. “I tolerated her for too long. I should have broken the deal as soon as I started seeing red flags, instead of ending up sleeping with her. It made everything only worse.” He spoke quietly, making sure people passing by at times would hear no word. You heard everything clearly, though. “That’s why I’m more picky now. Breaking the deal is not a good thing if it comes from one side. It may leave the other devastated, that’s why I’d rather reduce the risk in advance.”

He looked at your face, seeking understanding and acceptance. You nodded slowly, trying to keep your face as neutral as possible. You didn’t want to add to the pain already displayed on his own. But you appreciated his transparency.

“Does it mean that sex is not always involved?”

“With me, it rarely is” he admitted patiently. “I’m not against it, but I usually do other things. People rarely expect it, and I never pry. Mainly, because in this particular case, I do expect exclusivity. So, as long as no sex is involved, I know some of my subs are dating other people, or even engaging with other doms. However, for safety reasons I demand health checks prior to intercourse, and so on. Not just for me, but because I’m not exclusive myself.” You wondered if his choice of vocabulary was meant to make things less awkward. “However, actual sex is only one of the possibilities. Sexual pleasure that doesn’t involve direct touch may be used as a tool for training, for rewarding and for punishing, even as entertainment… not necessarily to the person it influences. As I said, it depends on who it’s done with. And it may take different forms, too. What’s your stance on that?”

“I don’t feel like I’d be able to as much as undress in front of someone who’s not my doctor” you answered almost instantly, the answer obvious to you, a matter you’ve thought about enough. “Although… well, I suppose it takes time. I’m not against the idea, just… you know.”

Baekhyun only nodded; you glanced at him, feeling a need for any reply that’d soothe you a little.

“I understand. That’s okay.”

You figured it out now; using more formal language made it less embarrassing to listen to. It’s like he tore the words off emotions and left facts only, and you found yourself easing into saying more and more, your embarrassment dissolving as well. No judgments were made.

“Is there anything else you want to know?”

“A lot, to be honest. But I think I know enough for now.”

Right as you said the last words, a sound echoed in the museum, in a soft female voice saying that the museum will close in fifteen minutes.

You took one last glance at the huge painting in front of you, but you felt like, at this point, you wouldn’t find anything new among the random stains and splatters. Baekhyun got up from his seat on the bench and so did you. You spotted him hide a small yawn behind his hand.

The day was coming to an end, and so was your small date – as un-date-ish as it could be.

* * *

Please, reblog if you enjoyed, it'll help me a bunch!

Author's note: hope you're enjoying it so far! Trying to give it a bit sense before more things happen, and, hopefully, this chapter clears it out a little bit. Feel free to talk to me if anything is unclear!

Next (Chapter 2.)

#exowritersnet #kdiarynet #bbh-net #exosnet #exo baekhyun #exo bbh #bbh x reader #bbh #exo #byun baekhyun #exo fanfiction #baekhyun fanfiction #exo x reader #baekhyun x reader #vg: vulnerability #vg: exo #vg: baekhyun #vg: series

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queensparklekitten · 3 years

Text

Draft of the story I’m gonna tell my children if I ever have them

Will edit and revise and edit more and more and add things as time goes by and I recall more events and think of more ways to phrase it in a cool way. I’ll multi-chapter it. here’s what i have so far.

(whatever word the kid said to set off the story) Now there’s something I haven’t heard in a long time.

My teenage years were more average than you’d expect, that is until the pandemic hit. But I guess you want a historical perspective on ALL of it, don’t you.

So I guess we should start at the beginning.

Part 1

It started with Harambe, I guess. I’m sure you’ve heard that name before.

It was an ordinary day in 2016. I was almost 12. I didn’t know anything about politics, except that the NDP were the good guys because my moms put their sign on our lawn every election year and we ordered a bigger sign when the neighbours put up a sign in a different colour that was way bigger than ours, like a sign contest.

Please don’t take it for granted that you don’t know a lot of stuff about politics. Your life is much easier when you don’t.

Dabbing was still a thing, but I only tried it once. Everyone was saying that nine plus ten was twenty-one. So now you have an idea of how long ago this was.

I had begun using the internet more often. It’s not like I didn’t use it before, I liked to play dress up games and look at memes. I’d even begun learning to make my own memes. Most of them were terrible and I thought they were great.

So I was using the Internet, and I went to look at a funny BuzzFeed article. And every article on the side was talking about something called Harambe.

At school, everyone was also talking about it. I quickly learned what happened. Some toddler crawled into a gorilla enclosure and the zookeepers shot the gorilla, even though she didn’t attack the kid.

Everyone was talking about Harambe. In fact, when we had some caterpillars in class and we watched them grow up into butterflies, the class voted to name one after Harambe.

If someone from the future had told me that this was the event that kickstarted the worst timeline you could think of, I wonder how I would have reacted.

[2020 start, bring up world war 3 threats that became a meme and then didn’t happen]

[exaggerate 2020′s breaking of time a LOT. say time actually broke.]

(just gonna write down the Nov52020 stuff because thinking of that’s what made me start writing this)

And this is very important, because it’s where it all comes together. Remember how I told you about Supernatural? Remember how I told you all the lore of Tumblr that I could think of? This is where it becomes relevant again.

Because it still feels like the entirety of the 2010s had been building up to that one day.

I remember it like it was yesterday. Probably because, for months afterwards, it still felt like it had been only a week ago. Just shows how broken time was that year.

I was scrolling through Tumblr, looking for election updates. Everyone was talking about the election. Mostly, about Nevada.

All the other states were either red or blue, and only Nevada was left. Everyone was waiting. You could cut the tension with a knife. There were memes all over my dash about how Nevada was taking ages. This election could mean the end of the world. Millions of lives were at stake here.

Then, next thing I remember, everyone was talking about Destiel.

I don’t remember how it started. I just remember it not having happened yet, and then it was in full swing.

I suppose that only makes sense. It was like a fever dream. And if Inception is to go by, you never remember the beginning of a dream.

When you think about it, the same goes for the entire pandemic. It wasn’t there, then it was all over the news, then it started happening in my city

They said that 2012 tumblr had returned.

I still don’t know what emotion I felt that day. But it consumed every part of me. They compared it to being on crack. That day was a blur,

I hear other websites were freaking out as well. But nowhere near the way it was on tumblr. They didn’t have the lore we did.

[ok now mention georgia turning blue and me learning this from a crab rave meme, and how there were rumors of a sherlock season 5, and then finally the election results]

And so that’s how the insanity of those last few days ended. Between a dildo store and a crematorium.

It’s rather poetic, if you ask me. Because when you think about it, all of life happens between a dildo store and a crematorium.

And after all that, I’d had enough of a lot of things to last anyone a lifetime.

I remember most of what came afterwards as a hazy blur, drifting between moments. [spn finale] [spanish dub] [other stuff]

I wish I could say it calmed down in 2021. After a real life season finale, shouldn’t things calm down?

But it wasn’t a series finale. There were far too many unresolved plot points.

[ok next part]

[Ending]

And so that’s how things calmed down. They went back to what you think of when you think of life. But they didn’t go back to normal.

They still aren’t back to normal. Because what I thought of as “normal” during the pandemic was never normal. It was always the apocalypse, only in more subtle ways you don’t know are there until they all come crashing down on you at once.

#future story

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szopenhauer · 4 years

Text

If money was no object, would you change your wardrobe? I would add to my wardrobe more than change

How do you/did you get to school? walk, then by bus

Have you ever been in trouble for something you honestly didn’t do? yep

Is the idea of having a secret admirer creepy or romantic? creepy

What was the last song you sung out loud? https://youtu.be/wycjnCCgUes

Were you excited to learn to drive, or scared? worried that I’ll waste my money

When was the last time you felt incredibly tired? today

In your opinion, who doesn’t deserve to be famous? many people

Was it hard for you to get up this morning? not really

When was the last time you colored with crayons or colored pencils? few months ago

Do you feel comfortable talking about your disorders, if you have them? depends

Where did you go on your last field trip? not sure which was last

Do you think you make a good first impression? no

Do other people’s first impressions stick with you? might

Have you ever had to give up on someone? sure

Would you rather break up with someone, or them break up with you? them break up with me (not my decision) but usually it’s the other way around

Do you think it’s okay to like a cover more than an original? umm...

Are you calm in emergency situations? depends

Who are you most attached to? my dad

What do you depend on other people for? money mostly :(

What goes through your mind when someone breaks up with you? depends

Do you match your shoes with your outfit? sometimes, it’s not that I have enough shoes to do that lol

Do you feel more comfortable with a male or female doctor/nurse? female

What was the last thing you bragged about? not sure what was last

What’s the ugliest thing on your wall? umm...

Who’s your favorite philosopher? Schopenhauer because of all the memes

Do you think Freud was out of his mind? well I prefer Jung

Einstein? he was cool

Who’s your favorite painter/artist? I like many

What day is it? Friday

Are you wearing anything blue? nah

Do you know anyone named Graham? just bread :P

Are you sitting next to anyone? not currently

Do you dislike the last person you Facebook messaged? nope

Who’s the quietest of all your friends? K. always was

Are you home alone right now? If so, where are the people you live with? my mom’s home, my dad is at work

Are you a chocoholic? noooo

Is there a song that reminds you of the person you love/like? Do you listen to that song often? one of them is t.a.t.u. - All the things she said

Do you listen to music while you fill out surveys? sometimes

In the past week, what song have you listened to the most often? not sure

While playing video games, do you prefer being first or second player? second

How many people do you depend on? not many

How many people do you think depend on you? they could live without me

What is the worst color combination? brown and black?

Have you ever injured yourself walking around in the dark? yeah

What’s so scary about clowns, anyway? nothing to me and it’s annoying that they’re part of so many horrors

When was the last time you acted like someone you’re not? sigh...

How many hats do you own/wear? shitload

Do you ever receive comments on your weight? ppl are jealous of my weight so basically my illness :(

Is there anything that you do just to make other people happy? of course

What was the last thing that you wrote down [with a pen/pencil]? not sure what was last

Has anyone told you that you have a nice smile? my gf only

Are you uncomfortable with being photographed? yup

Do you like playing tic-tac-toe? I always win What about hangman? I played it couple of times Are you dangerously in love with someone? woah

Are you cute or sexy? cute Is English your 1st language? it’s not Did you ever perform in front of your entire school? elementary - more than once Did your older sibling ever tell you freaky stories that you believed? one time she told me that school was flooded and there were fish and frogs and then I said that to my mom and she called me a liar and got mad even tho I explained to her it was my sister’s idea :( Are you single and proud? you can be single and proud as well as be happy in a relationship too, I am in one now Are you more happy when you’re with people or alone? 90% of time alone What do you think about guys shaving their legs? that’s their life Do you wear lipstick? nah Name something you lost or gave away that can never be replaced. I don’t wanna talk about it

What music album would be used for a movie about your life? soundtrack to my life would have to be a mix of songs from different bands/vocalists

Who was your first crush and what made them special? she was just adorable with her clumsiness and her perfect body and that face and voice and she was just a pretty cool friend to me and I wanted to take care of her so badly, she was the very first girl I ever had a crush on irl if not in general but she was hetero and she changed a lot (not in a good way in my opinion) Write about your first kiss. Was it everything you wished or hoped it would be? I... I never imagined my first kiss before it happened?...

Write about something you now know that you wish you knew earlier in life. How could this knowledge have helped you? blergh

Name one thing you feel brings out the good in people. there’s no such thing, it’s all about the person If you invented a device that could fix one problem you are facing right now, would you use it? What problem would you like to solve? absolutely, my health issues Name something you found; what was it and where did you find it? I’ve found shitload of stuff but one thing was the most odd and that’s a taxidermy ferret shawl someone left on a bus stop - at first we thought with dad it must be alive but we came closer and realized someone lost their piece of cloth and we took it Describe the longest amount of time you have ever been away from home. almost a month, I was in hospital Name a celebrity or famous person you wish would take you out on a date. - Have you ever seen a ghost? it seems, it was not just white but a little bluish, no legs and weird face - shaped like in a clay, mostly transparent, slightly glowing, it was in open doors of my room, I woke up with a weird feeling that someone’s watching me and I got really scared so I hidden under a blanket and didn’t look there again until morning, I was trying to convince myself it’s just a shirt that was hanged in the hall but mom said there wasn’t anything like that there at night, now I wish I could see that again hoping I would try to do something more brave about it, I kinda worry I was rude towards them whoever it was

*btw my grandma said that after death some chemicals leave the body and fly like a fog through the cemetery if casket and grave aren’t blocking it too much Describe your note-taking style and habits. everywhere and usually not in line, can be even upside down, just random, different size, clue words etc. Do you believe that we are all here for a reason? What might the reason be? suffering to deserve heaven? Have you ever done something just to feel the danger, or to feel alive? I hurt myself today To see if I still feel I focus on the pain The only thing that's real What are all your thoughts on god? overthinking... What did you learn today? for example - that explaining things to people make me realize more than just thinking about something What 5 traits do people first notice when they meet you for the first time? ask them Have you ever carved your name or initials into a tree or stone? poor tree :( In what ways have you traveled? car, bus, train, bike, even a little bit by ship What historical events happened the year you were born? nothing interesting

Do you watch really old tv shows or movies from the 1970’s or earlier? sure

What would you do if you saw a complete stranger dealing drugs in public? nothing If you don’t have to be up by a certain time, do you like to sleep in as late as possible? no longer than 11 am What are you wearing at the moment? Is it for any particular reason? pajama because it’s past midnight and I should be asleep but I have to finally finish this survey then dry my hair and drink some water first Are either one of your parents retired? my mom is and my dad will be soon Do you buy a lot of DVD’s, or do you tend to just watch everything online for free? watch online, I have no money for buying movies that I’ll watch less than 3 times Does everyone in your household own their own computer? nope

Are you a good gift giver? I try my best and been told that I am despite not being rich

Do you know what XOXO stands for? hugs and kisses

What’s the first person who comes to your mind when you hear the word blue? me

Have you seen any of the Harry Potter movies? first ones

Do you like your significate others siblings? I don’t know her brother

Have you ever recieved a singing birthday card? omg I loved those and I wish I got one :(

Do you remember who your kindergarten/pre-school teacher was? I liked her so much I’ve been sending her cards on holidays years after

Were you ever a girl scout or a boy scout? never

Do you own anything made of lace? hmm...

How many people do you share a name with? I don’t know anyone with my name

Imagine your dream home, does it have a fence around it? if it’s not an apartment then of course it does, highest possible and thick as I don’t want to see or be seen by my neighbors

Do you own any yellow shoes? yep

Can you type fast? very

In school were you bullied? I was

Are you sarcastic? yeah

Do you read the newspaper? nah

If you died today where do you think you’d go? hell :(

Have you ever been to therapy? few times, didn’t help

Do you use online dating? did

Did you miss alot of school? I was sick often

What was the last thing you got falsely accused of? not sure what was last

What was the last thing you ordered online? shirt, I’m waiting for the package now

Have you ever been kicked out of a store? no :o

Do you feel like you accomplished anything today? hmm...

What is/was your favorite teen magazine? trzynastka or however this shit was called

Would other people describe you as creative? I guess

What color are your slippers? grey and white

Are you haunted by memories of stupid things you’ve said and done? constantly

Did you like high school or college better? didn’t go to college

Who was your favorite Olsen twin? I didn’t have a favorite

Do you ever listen to Celtic music? used to, with John

Do you know a lot of rich and spoiled and selfish people? had classmates like this and neighbors too

Do you enjoy mornings? rarely, not really

Have you ever feared going to jail or thought about what it would be like? thought

Did you know that the zodiac signs (the regular ones) are Greek? ok

Have you ever learned about Greek mythology in school? didn’t like it

Do you stay up late? as you can see

what do you hear right now? nothing

what is one thing in your life you feel truly guilty for? personal

have you ever been slapped in the face? I’ve been slapped without any reason, I was bullied

how about punched? hit with a ball only and my head was hit with a bottle too once

have you ever come up with a memorable quote yourself? I’ve been quoted

what do you think about masturbation? personal

What color did you first ever dye your hair?: either red or black

What’s the color of the bath towel you use most often?: green

Ever eaten a piece of dog or cat food out of curiosity?: ewww, nooo

Can you name one song by Prince?: Purple rain for example

Would you rather paint or make pottery?: paint

Are you currently taking this survey before or after 9pm?: after, I started over 5 hours ago...

Is the sun shining bright outside right now?: it’s the middle of the night!

Would you rather watch a horror movie or a romantic comedy?: romantic comedy ^^”

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fistsoflightning · 5 years

Text

unending character meme // zaya qestir

RULES: repost, don’t reblog! tag, and good luck!

TAGGED BY: tagged in spirit by @to-the-voiceless

TAGGING: any and all who want to do it but haven’t actually been tagged by anyone!

BASICS.

FULL NAME: Zaya Qestir

NICKNAME: none, really.

AGE: 29 by the end of Stormblood. 30-ish by the end of SHB? Haven’t figured out the time distortion thing.

BIRTHDAY: 17th of the 4th Umbral Moon (8/17)

ETHNIC GROUP: Au’ra; Xaelan

NATIONALITY: Nomad? From the Azim Steppe’s Reunion, if that helps.

LANGUAGE / S: Eorzean Sign Language, Xaelan (crude/unpracticed); understands most languages through use of the Echo

SEXUAL ORIENTATION: Bisexual

ROMANTIC ORIENTATION: Demiromantic

RELATIONSHIP STATUS: dating Thancred Waters??? unsure of status during post-SHB but getting there.

HOME TOWN /AREA: Reunion, Azim Steppe

CURRENT HOME: A shared room in the Rising Stones or a shared house in the Mist; depends on where they are at the time of night.

PROFESSION: jeweler, weaver, gladiator of the coliseum, bard teacher (appointed reluctantly by Sanson after many a problem with Guydelot’s schedule), adventurer and warrior of light

PHYSICAL.

HAIR: Straight and somewhat below shoulder length. Most of their hair is black, but slowly changes to blue and white at the tips.

EYES: Dark blue; navy color? Light blue limbal rings that glow in the dark, too.

FACE: Sharp jawline accented by their scales, often covered with some royal blue facepaint similar to Arenvald’s own.

LIPS: Often chapped, but otherwise normal.

COMPLEXION: Ashen brown? Hard to describe bc of weird lighting everywhere they go.

BLEMISHES: None

SCARS: There’s a lot, and I might make a scar map at some point??? Major ones happen to be their legs and their left arm; the legs from Ifrit and the arm from Elidibus in Zenos’s body in 4.5

TATTOOS: None, no matter how much people think the facepaint is one.

HEIGHT: Taller than the average Au’ra, about 5’4

WEIGHT: about 135 pounds

BUILD: Muscular, especially due to their main fighting style requiring muscle literally everywhere. Fistfighting for money is no small feat.

FEATURES: Their scales are an odd color (think black and blue borealis dice, but as scales), and their horns definitely look a bit… ragged. Watching them fight will give the odd realization that lightning sparks in cobalt blue come off of them sometimes.

ALLERGIES: Some undetermined fish allergy. Higiri fed them some assorted sushi once and never did again, so the Scions (and themselves) have no clue what fish they need to avoid.

USUAL HAIRSTYLE: Tied into a loose ponytail at the back. Sanson often comments how they share a hairstyle, but it’s simply from need of clear vision when moving around for monk skills and attacks.

USUAL FACE LOOK: Stoic as all hell. Not used to making full-on facial expressions outside of conversation, so normally looks bored.

USUAL CLOTHING: Tabards, cyclas, or generally something with flowy fabric that doesn’t restrain movement all that much. Metal boots and gauntlets/knuckles are also common, but not always.

PSYCHOLOGY.

FEAR / S: being the last one standing, change, losing their younger siblings/younger friends, spiders, breaking a promise with their mother.

ASPIRATION / S: To have a proper adventure, and to inspire others to live their fullest lives.

POSITIVE TRAITS: Devoted, comforting, slightly protective, carefree

NEGATIVE TRAITS: Easily angered, impulsive, emotional, stubborn

MBTI: ISFP-T (Adventurer)

ZODIAC: Leo, apparently? Sort of fits, if you look at it closely.

TEMPERAMENT: Some crazy blend between phlegmatic and choleric? Generally carefree and easygoing with friends and willing to spend a lot of patience on them, but unrelenting and downright frightening in serious situations, especially when involving Garlemald.

SOUL TYPE / S: Server/Caregiver

ANIMALS: Birds and dogs.

VICE HABIT / S: Drinking, although the Echo does prevent it from having any effect whatsoever, so its more of a taste thing? Tends to sleep a lot when stressed, and often spends their leftover money on gemstones for their shared collection.

FAITH: Polytheistic; the Twelve and Nhaama are gods they generally believe in.

GHOSTS?: Yes, mainly because they’ve seen one.

AFTERLIFE?: Yes.

REINCARNATION?: Probably, with how they’re sure they’ve seen someone who was supposed to be dead before

ALIENS?: before becoming Warrior of Light, it would be no, but with the revelation of Elidibus on the moon and Midgardsormr and OMEGA‌‌ (ALIEN‌ ROBOT????) they aren’t so sure anymore.

POLITICAL ALIGNMENT: Does not care enough even though they are staunch friends with Nanamo. Didn’t care enough to try and challenge Oktai for the seat of Qestiri Khatun, certainly doesn’t care enough to take a political stance in Eorzea.

EDUCATION LEVEL: Barely any; just enough to read letters written in Eorzean and faintly Ishgardian (courtesy of Alphinaud and Haurchefant).

FAMILY.

FATHER: there was one, once, but he’d rather he be forgotten in pursuit of a happier future. Zaya remembers him as Baatar, but they don’t remember if that was actually his name.

MOTHERS: Erhi, Odgerel.

SIBLINGS: Oktai (older brother), Taban (older sister), Sarnai (sister), Delger and Tuya (fraternal twins)

EXTENDED FAMILY: any of the Scions (former or current) or their fellow Warriors of Light, if we’re talking found family. House Fortemps, Aymeric, Estinien, Sanson, Guydelot, Sidurgu, Rielle, and all of the Qestiri tribe are up there too, but you know, that’s kind of a lot of gifts to be sending around during Starlight. (zaya totally sends them all gifts anyways.)

NAME MEANING /S: Zaya means fate in Mongolian, which all of the other Xaelan names seem to be based on. Their previous name, Dzoldzaya, meant light of fate.

HISTORICAL CONNECTION?: Recorded history on the Azim Steppe is easily lost, but if asking around the different tribes, one could learn about a rather prominent Qestiri warrior whose image is painted in some of the caverns nearby where much of important, unforgettable Xaelan history is recorded by the Gharl, swathed in blue cloth. In the days of Amaurot, there was one standout Amaurotine who shared a love for lightning and birds…

FAVORITES.

BOOK: They don’t know enough Eorzean to read a full book, not even a children’s book. The Echo doesn’t help with reading. Urianger has read a book of myths and legends that turned out to be true to them, however, and that has been their favorite for a while. They’ve been considering asking him to read more for them, but that’s been placed on hold after the events of the First and following Mt. Gulg.

DEITY: Nhaama, or Rhalgr, if talking to someone who thinks ‘what’s a Nhaama’ when they mention her.

HOLIDAY: Starlight Celebration. Something about the festive mood always makes them happy.

MONTH: August (4th Umbral Moon)

SEASON: Summer

PLACE: On the Source, Reunion in the Azim Steppe just because interacting with other tribes is rather fun. On the First, Il Mheg all the way!

WEATHER: Clear nights where they can trace the constellations, but it isn’t too cold to need a blanket.

SOUND / S: Excited chatter, harp, singing, small hammers clinking against metal.

SCENT /S: Rain, fresh wood, the air in Gridania, light perfume, Syhrwyda’s food.

TASTE /S: Snurbleberry, honey, most Doman seafood, buuz.

FEEL /S: Soft and smooth fabrics, cold metal, the grip of someone’s hand around theirs, wind blowing through their hair on a warm day.

ANIMAL /S: Yol, chocobo (birds!).

NUMBER: 17, for their nameday and the first year they spent in Eorzea

COLORS: Cobalt blue and indigo, pale gold, soot black.

EXTRA.

TALENTS: Extremely good when working with cloth or metal; even more so when tinkering little trinkets. Interestingly enough, very good at playing flute and harp without much practice. Expert at pulling a person’s true emotions out with simply body language.

BAD AT: Sneaking around/stealth. Do not, under any circumstance, give them a job involving secrecy or stealth unless you want it to fail. Speaking/reading is also pretty horrible, due to how they were raised. Also bad at taking change or lies well.

TURN-ONS: Loyalty, bravery despite all odds, kindness and love even when it would be easier to be otherwise, being able to understand other beliefs, and a love of freedom or new experiences

TURN OFFS: Lying to their face knowingly, extreme greed, lack of self-worth, anger for no good reason

HOBBIES: making music with Guydelot and Sanson, attempting to keep a journal, idle tinkering, dancing, gardening

TROPES: Good is Not Soft, Hope Bringer, Magnetic Hero, Omniglot, The Power of Friendship, The Quiet One, Silent Snarker, Dark is Not Evil, Five Stages of Grief, Horrifying Hero, Magic Music, Warrior Poet, Dance Battler, Warrior Monk, Determinator, Pintsized Powerhouse, Pragmatic Hero (don’t let me stay on TV‌tropes pls)

QUOTES: have a snippet of some writing?

Scrawled onto a piece of paper underneath his arm in Thancred’s handwriting and marked with Zaya’s name reads, “Your words, no matter how I react, do not change how I love you all.”

MUN QUESTIONS.

Q1: If you could write your character your way in their own movie, what would it be called, what style would it be filmed in, and what would it be about?

A1: Honestly, I think there would be two movies that could include Zaya; some comedy musical revolving around Zaya’s bard lifestyle while placing their active lifestyle in the background (called “A Bard Knock Life” bc i think puns are cool) or an action drama framed around Zaya and the Scions living some sort of high fantasy/DND type adventure bc I love that stuff called “The Unbroken Thread”. (THAT‌ QUEST‌ NAME STILL GETS‌ ME)

Q2: What would their soundtrack/score sound like?

A2: Something featuring a flute, probably. I got attached to Zaya playing the flute being a former flute player myself. (I only wish the oboe performance sound bank clicked with me a little more…)

Q3: Why did you start writing this character?

A3: Originally, Zaya wasn’t meant to exist. I was literally planning on just creating A’dewah, Syhrwyda, and maybe Lumelle and Elwin in different roles. Then the Au’ra came out; I‌ used my free Fantasia from the sub rewards just to be an Au’ra (I was a miqo’te before; shh, i was still babu who liked cats) and suddenly Zaya started being formed as Menphina Jewel. Before I knew it, that Menphina Jewel grew a whole backstory and a new name and new friends (Azim Steppe arc of Stormblood MSQ? Final nail in the coffin.) that slowly took over the previous two Warriors as the focus of my attention. I wasn’t even supposed to keep playing FFXIV‌ past HW, dude. I had like a million other things to be doing at the time, but here I am, lying in my grave 3 years later still attached.

Q4: What first attracted you to this character?

A4: They’re (mostly) mute. I really wanted to explore what it’s like to not be able to talk and only converse in body language, but then I discovered that might be a problem, so my interest in sign language collided with Zaya’s backstory. It also helps me work out a personality without them sounding/looking too much like what I think is Basic Story ProtagTM like I tend to do on accident (see A’dewah and Valdis’s dialogue sometimes.)

Q5: Describe the biggest thing you dislike about your muse.

A5: They can’t really speak. Funny how the thing I like most is also the thing I hate most. It’s very frustrating when I want them to convey something and then they can’t without using actual words and a voice because I haven’t got a clue on how to convey that through body language. How in the world do you convey ‘I feel like I’m doing arcanist calculations when you speak’ in nonverbal language??? I have no damn idea and every attempt looks like I meant something else.

Q6: What do you have in common with your muse?

A6: The snark, man. I have friends constantly commenting on how I’ve made a burn without me realizing I’ve done so, and it’s hilarious. The love for music also carried over big time, especially after discovering how fun the bard NPCs were to write and how they’d fit into Zaya’s relationship web. (they’re totally the more comedic side, but I love Guydelot and Sanson anyways.)

Q7: How does your muse feel about you?

A7: No clue, dude. Maybe thinks I’m boring? I don’t tend to want to drastically change things or look for new adventures; the biggest leap I’ve taken in two years is probably changing to a reed instrument from flute, and even then I don’t have to change key when‌ I read music, so it’s not that big a deal.

Q8: What characters does your muse have interesting interactions with?

A8: Urianger and Lyse, maybe? I like the exploration of repairing relationships after something that might have ended another, weaker bond. It’s also kinda fun trying to see how Zaya would react; they’re a lot more rash than I am in real life, and that’s honestly saying something. Alisaie and Alphinaud, however, are the most fun just because I know what I’m doing when I write them, and it’s funny to see how Zaya reacts (or has a lack of reaction) to their dynamic. Guydelot and Sanson fall into another category of ‘dear god I simultaneously love and hate these two’, while Thancred, Y’shtola, Urianger, Syhrwyda, Duscha, and Ryne fall into some sort of strong found family vibes that just get me everytime I think about it

Q9: What gives you inspiration to write your muse?

A9:…Doing job quests or side story quests or even MSQ I haven’t caught up on yet. Watch as I slowly rewrite as many MSQ‌ and job quest scenes as I can in any of my Warrior of Light’s viewpoints. (currently chiseling away at some backstory/before they were Warriors stories after reading too deep into the race/subrace text and lore keep an eye out LOL-)

Q10: How long did this take you to complete?

A10: A day or two; don’t remember when I began. It was probably when I was procrastinating on homework, though. I didn’t post it until a week later whoops.

#ffxiv #ffxiv character meme #zaya qestir #whee i wrote a bit much #oh well #zaya cm #tales from the blue

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himboholhorse-moving · 5 years

Note

1 2 4 7 8 9 13 18 20 26 27 29 30 32 39 40 41 43/44 45 46 49 51 53 55 56 57 59 63 65 that is. so many dghsdghsdgv I'm sorry I just see an ask meme and go crazy aaaa go stupid aaaa. You can just answer whichever u like from those!! also 69(nice): you seem rly nice and funny from your 🅱️osts and I appreciate u... I hope you can find better irl friends who aren't trash

HDSKFJKS I completely understand but lucky for u I LOVE to talk !!

1) How are you?

Pretty good, actually!! Which is a nice change of pace. I went to Walmart with some friends yesterday and got a few things, baked a family recipe that my friends LOVE, and finally did my laundry (it’s been a couple weeks we love depression and executive dysfunction dfhkjsfd). I went to Cracker Barrel with some friends and earlier and played a 4-way game of Tetris after. :3c

2) Post a picture of yourself.

Here you go !!

4) What is your entire name?

Sierra Alexis and my last name is something constantly misspelled so I’ll give you the name of a historical figure whose name is a letter off from mine: George B. McClellan, to whom I may or may not be related because last name variations are fuckin’ WEIRD.

7) Your zodiac/horoscope and if you think it fits your personality.

I’m a Capricorn sun and moon, and Libra rising !! And from what I’ve read on Twitter from various astrologers, like Milkstrology, I LOVE her, I’d say it’s pretty accurate with my personality!! I like to say Capricorn’s aren’t cold bitches but, I Have A Tendency To Be One !!

8) What did you do on your last birthday?

God what DID I do on my last birthday… it was in January, so like, I SHOULD remember… OH I went to IHOP with my friends !! I share a birthday with another friend and I got a JoJo notebook and something called a Fuggler! They’re stuffed animals more or less but designed to be “ugly.” I got one that looks like Philadelphia Flyers mascot Gritty because I LOVE Gritty… he’s so fun and funky.

9) What is one thing you’d like to accomplish before your next birthday?

Get all my requests in my inbox over on my writing blog done KJHFDJKSF it’s been a few months and life has been. Hectic to say the least.

13) If you could change your eye color, would you?

There’s so much weird as hell brown-eye-phobia so like… I think blue eyes would be pretty neat. OR PURPLE… give me some unnatural eye colors pls...

18) Do you have any tattoos?

Not yet!! I’m going to get one the next time I go back home for break. :3c And I have a few ideas for other ones!! I wanna get a big-ass “Dragon Age: Origins” tattoo that’s the dragon on the cover on my thigh. I also wanna get a DA2 and “Inquisition” tattoo… and the Joestar birthmark… too many ideas…

20) Left or right handed?

Right-handed !! I could have been left-handed or ambidextrous if I broke my arm AFTER I started kindergarten, but alas that was before.

26) Something you are working on right now:

This !! But also the script for my next podcast episode that I record on uhhh Monday I think. Should probably figure that one out dsjfjhsf

27) Do you have any “rules” about food?

I answered that in the last ask !!

29) What would you say is your best quality?

I also answered this in the last ask !!

30) What do you think you’re really good at?

Writing, I’d say! And memorizing trivia about the stuff I’m super into. If it’s stuff pertaining to “M*A*S*H” or old movies or TV shows or actors or specific historical events, I will know that shit FOR LIFE. Don’t ask me to do math pls thank u

32) What talent do you wish you’d been born with?

I wish I was able to do stuff with music. That was never really in my blood, despite all the music classes they make you take in elementary school. I just never learned how to memorize or read sheet music. :/ I would have loved to play violin, tho… my friend plays and she says I would have been a good cellist.

39) Do you sleep with a stuffed toy?

YES… have for years. I still have my Care Bear from when I was 5, Gritty as mentioned above, a plush of my school’s mascot, and a little Fugo !! He’s so tiny.

40) What do you think about the most?

Everything and constantly and all at once. But the past really because I can never let stuff go and even the small things I mess up on haunt me forever… Wish that wasn’t the case but it is !!

41) Share two habits:

Biting my nails and having a very specific routine in which I get ready when I wake up. Like, I’ve gotta go brush my hair before I put my important cards in my left pocket, then put on my silver bracelet, then my beaded bracelet, then my earbuds in my right pocket, then put my earrings in. I HAVE to do it in that order…

And other oddities that include, like, if I need to go around something I HAVE to follow the urge to go one way and not the other, lest I feel the need to go back and fix it. And then which foot goes first before I reach a crack in the sidewalk, or up or down a curb, etc.

43) What are your career goals?

If I can just make people happy or get some kind of joy out of the things I do, I’d call that enough. :)

44) What is your ideal career?

Mmm, either a film historian or a film professor !! Preferably at the college I’m at right now but wherever the wind takes me, I’ll go! Or a Twitch streamer or YouTuber, it really depends on my mood jdhfjskf

45) Is your life anything like it was two years ago?

It was pretty much the same !! Freshman year was pretty lively, I didn’t have a job on campus yet though, or my podcast. Everything else is basically the same!

46) Do you replay things that have happened in your head?

CONSTANTLY… good or bad it’ll play back over and over and over again.

49) Do you have any phobias?

HOO BOY, DO I… fear of heights; fear of insects/bugs/arachnids/bees/wasps; I have a strong dislike of the number 13 but I don’t know if it’s a phobia, I just. REALLY hate it; the unknown, more or less what lurks somewhere beyond where I can see. Not so much a fear of the dark with that one, just what could BE in it.

51) Are you allergic to anything? If so, what?

I answered this in my last ask, as well!

53) Ever come close to death?

Two or three times, maybe? Two of them involved what’s called a laryngospasm, typically it can happen when your sick, which is what happened to me both times. Basically your throat just closes up on your for a hot minute and you can’t breathe. The first time I genuinely thought I was going to die (and my dad still sent me to school that day… HOE), the second time I was also sick and was losing/had lost my voice DURING A JOB RETREAT and it happened in the middle of the night so that was funny sitting there gasping for breath in the pitch dark.

At the FIRST retreat I went on for that job, you had to take pictures as part of a scavenger hunt, and the place used to be an old military fort, so there were still the old bunkers there. We had to take one on top of it and I was taking the picture, and it’s a wide shot so I go to take a step back but before I do I look behind me. If I hadn’t I would have fallen a good 10-15 feet down onto solid Civil War-era bunker concrete. I’d consider that being a “close to death” moment because I really could have died!

55) A random fact about yourself:

I have a half-brother !! My sis and I finally found him after her 23andMe results came back (which she decided to do despite us being like THE GOVERNMENT WILL COLLECT OUR DATA) and we didn’t think our mom would be happy she found him but she was !! My sis might reach out and contact him, she just wanted our mom’s permission first to do it.

56) What are three things most people don’t know about you?

Well, that I have a half-brother. I don’t mention it a lot. Aside from y’all on here and my sister, most everyone else doesn’t know I’m nonbinary! Everyone else knows I’m bi though lmao. And that there were times I’d stretch or bend the truth or lie about something just to impress someone else. It’s a… Bad Habit. Another thing is that most people don’t know I like coffee? Like I need to put a shit ton of creamer in with it because I’m a Bitch, but yeah.

57) An unknown fact about your life:

I wouldn’t call this an “unknown” fact but I’d used to go to work with my dad every now and again when he worked at the Home Depot and he was assistant manager. I’d either chill in the back room which was an office he shared with two other guys, or walk around the store with him. I had my own apron, too, which was my name with “Mini Mac” next to it, “Mac” being my dad’s nickname and something easier to say than my last name. I actually helped a few customers out so I wonder if I should have gotten paid for that despite being like, ages 9-13 when I’d go jshfkjd

And I guess I technically tested video games as a kid? Basically, when my dad was stationed at Fort Knox, they’d get demos of video games that hadn’t come out yet to test I suppose? and I still have a few somewhere. He’d hand them off to me and I’d play them so there’s that.

59) Five weird things that you like:

Eating globs of wasabi for no reason.

Scaring my friends also for no reason.

I wouldn’t say using cotton swabs to get wax out of your ears because it feels good is weird, just more medically inadvisable if anything.

When I was younger I’d like to floss really hard because the slight pain from it felt good. Young me was a #Freaque KJHDFJJDHF

I don’t know if being fond of alphabetizing and reorganizing things is considered weird but I LOVE doing that.

63) A quote you try to live by:

“It matters not how strait the gate, / How charged with punishments the scroll; / I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.” It’s from the poem “Invictus” and the last two lines are what I’m getting tattooed !!

65) Weird things you do when you’re alone:

Practice the “Lucky Star” dance. I GOT THE LYRICS DOWN… JUST NEED TO DO THE DANCE NOW…

69) Leave me a compliment:

“you seem rly nice and funny from your 🅱️osts and I appreciate u... I hope you can find better irl friends who aren't trash”

Anon pls 🥺 I do my best to be nice but my friend really do test me sometimes... my feelings bounce back n forth like if they do something my feelings can switch to angry or like, hate, and then if they do something nice I’ll like them again. It sucks but ! I just take it one day at a time. Anon I care for u 💜💜💜

#anonymous #asks #ask games #I love u anon 💜 thank u for letting me just Talk jdhsksjf #Anonymous

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sp4c3-0ddity · 6 years

Note

Misfortune for the wip meme

WIP Meme

*sweats* ah yes this fic. so…let’s start with a status update: five chapters posted, two more finished (though not edited), and two more outlined, which means what’s left is…one to outline, three to write, and five to edit (although three of those five need to be written first, of course). but you’re probably not interested in the logistics!!

so this angst-fest went through a couple iterations before it became the fic it is now. originally meant for a prompt, i had the Totally Not Silly idea of a world where it’s customary for parents to get a fortune for their newborn children (easiest to read someone’s future within a couple days of their birth) and…Pidge’s fortune (hehe much different right) is that the love of her life would die on their wedding day

cue certain events happening similarly to canon, except Pidge stays on the wrong side of the law and Lance, a Law Enforcement Person (it was a vaguely historical/fantasy AU…easily my fallback), that she befriended (i never quite worked the details to how), helps her snatch some Important Documents. naturally they’re friends, but Pidge finds herself developing some…inconvenient Feelings, and although she has no real certainty that Lance is fated to die per her fortune, she decides it’s time to start keeping her distance to be, you know, cautious

…and i hadn’t quite planned it out from there. I know Lance had his own fortune and they talked:

“Didyou have a prophecy when you were born?” Lance once wondered. Off-duty, he worehis uniform coat unbuttoned, his hands stuffed in his trouser pockets whilethey strolled through the city’s park.

The scent of jasmine filled the air, thevines that climbed wooden trellises and archways loaded with small whiteflowers. Easier to domesticate than juniberries - which only grew in themountains - they weren’t quite as stunning, but Pidge preferred their simplicity andsubtle sweetness.

(And they didn’tirritate her allergies half so much as many other flowers.)

Pidge glanced sharply at him, stunned atthe question. “I…do,”she admitted.

Lance quirked an eyebrow at her. “And?”

“And…I’m not going to tell you,” she said,crossing her arms and trying her best to feign nonchalance. “It’s silly anddoesn’t have anything to do with me.”

i love jasmine that’s why it features

it wasn’t supposed to be a long fic so…it culminated in a Heated Moment and probably would’ve ended there ah Open Endings my old frenemy

and after it was that, i had the idea to switch their roles so Lance got the fortune. it started in a Modern AU and i can’t quite remember all the details but there was this Conspiracy involving Zarkon and Alfor and the Holts and…yeah the plot got complicated so i (thanks to a suggestion from @rueitae) adapted it to canon-verse and kept all the essential elements which is how i got the fic i linked above!!

let’s not talk about the major face lift Chapter Three - and therefore the whole fic - suffered though

now…i don’t want to say much about the future in the fic because Spoilers (is that a thing people who read fic care about avoiding??) so I’ll leave you with a little preview of Chapter Seven:

“Aw, you were really close to beating your high score thistime,” Pidge said to Allura, patting her on the arm as she lost her lastship in Galaga.

Her high score was dismalcompared to Lance’s and Pidge’s, but she smiled, pleased with her progress. Shestepped away from the machine, her hand falling from the joystick. “Ithink it’s time I called Coran,” she announced. “I promised to updatehim soon after the meeting, and it’s already been a few days since then.”She cupped Lance’s jaw and, when he turned his head in surprise, she pressed akiss to his cheek. “You said you’ll be staying with your familytonight?”

Lance blinked, touching thespot she kissed him - Allura wasn’t one for any displays of affection andscarcely wished to hold his hand in public if someone could see it - butrecovered enough to clear his throat and say, “Oh, yeah. I’ll call you inthe morning.”

“All right!” Allurasaid, grinning at him before turning to Pidge and taking her hands. “Makesure he doesn’t waste all his currency here; he promised he’d take me to see anEarth movie before we return to New Altea.”

“Uh…return to NewAltea?” Pidge’s eyes widened in something like alarm, but her expressionrelaxed quickly. “Oh, uh, okay.” She smiled and rubbed the back ofher neck, and as Allura left, the door to the arcade swinging shut behind her,she mused, “Not like there are many new movies out lately though…”

“Really?” Lancequirked an eyebrow. “My sister told me there’s even one about the invasionout now.”

“Yeah, and it’s only thethird or fourth since then,” Pidge told him, rolling her eyes, “butthey’re not much fun when you lived it.”

Lance frowned, crossing hisarms as he leaned against the Galaga machine. “Pidge, everyone on Earth lived it, unless they weren’t born yet.”

“I-I know,” she said,sighing and staring at her feet. “It just seems…insensitive? Dideveryone in Hollywood shelter under a Galra-resistant rock during theinvasion?”

Lance snorted, half inamusement and half in surprise. “I take it you haven’t seen any of theinvasion stories then.”

Pidge shook her head, hershoulders hunching. “None,” she confirmed.

They lapsed into a tensesilence broken only by the gleeful shouts of gamers and discordant music fromthe arcade’s games. Lance sought for something, anything, to say before trying, “D-do you want to maybe getsome…coffee with me? I’ll buy.”

Pidge glanced up, his breath catching when she finally met his eyes, and smiled veryslightly. “Make it hot chocolate and you’ve got a deal.”

#honestly my ask/answer tag should be something like 'reem rambles' because h o n e s t l y #thank you for your interest i'll be getting back to this fic soon...#i hope #qna #plance #reem writes fic #Anonymous

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lia-nikiforov · 7 years

Text

Fall 2017 Anime Watchlist

Blablabla school is kicking my butt blablabla I shouldn’t even be doing this blablabla THERE’S A LOT OF GOOD ANIME THIS SEASON

So naturally I’m gonna go back to my worst to best format for this list. Get the trash out first

Dropped

Dies Irae: Aren’t these villains named after actual historical Nazis who were directly involved with orchestrating the holocaust soooo cooooool , so interesting, such tortured profound souls that--- ugh, I just threw up in my mouth a little. I don’t care if the Nazis are the villains, making them into complex, appealing characters is unacceptable, less so given the times we live in.

(get it, it’s a real nazi getting punched in the face, aren’t you glad you follow me so I can provide you this quality content)

Yuki Yuna wa Yuusha de aru: Yuusha no Sho: Because I wasn’t a big fan of the first season, I thought this might make for decent hate-watch, but it’s just not bad enough to warrant it. It’s also criminally boring. And because part of what made the original so bad was the ending, and this being a prequel we already know how it ends, there’s no point to it imho. I enjoy screaming at the void about shows I find stupid, but this one isn’t even worth the time. Ballroom is all the hatewatch material I’ll ever need

Black Clover: I could say a lot about this show’s egregious lack of uniqueness and originality, or how poorly executed the whole thing is, but really the only thing you need to know about this and why it’s an insufferable watch is:

THE!!!! PROTAGONIST !!!!!NEVER!!!!! STOPS!!!!! YELLING!!!!!!

Inuyashiki: My first problema with this show is the main dude is supposed to be 58 years old but he looks older than most 65+. It’s a dumb little thing, but it completely breaks my suspense of disbelief. Other than that, the writing is just so viscerally hateful it’s extremely uncomfortable to watch. What I’d understood from the synopsis was that the aliens had accidentally merged the old man and the young dude into a single robot body, but the way it is presented -with the old guy as the hero and the young guy as the villain- the moral of the story seems to be basically “millennials are killing the diamond industry”, or, in terms of a more well-known -though perhaps too easy- meme:

Urahara: I really wanted to like this show and support these young female creators in an industry that tends to not give them any opportunities. It’s not like it’s bad at all, nor is it offensive, it’s just really boring. The visuals are adorable, but the characters feel completely unreal –three high school girls run their own shop in Harajuku?-, especially pigtail girl who delivers every line like she was trying super hard to sound like an ojousama archetype. The show is completely committed to its Harajuku kawaii culture aesthetic and attitude, which is commendable but also something that honestly make me a little uncomfortable for no particular reason. I also feel extremely robbed off actual transformation sequences in this magical girl show. In a less busy season I might hold on to see where this went, but as it is, I’d rather wait and see how it ends and then decide if I should spend time on it.

Utter trash that I’m still gonna watch because I hate myself or something

Ousama Game: I think it’s important to make a distinction between hate-watch and irony-watch. Hatewatch is something you do with a show that’s terrible and probably offensive, but it never touches so-bad-it’s-good territory. You can pick the show apart for all of its flaws, be it an ill-conceived plot, poor characterization, or, you know, being grossly mysoginistic. Examples of shows I’ve hatewatched include KADO, Sailor Moon Crystal and Super Lovers. An Irony-watch is a show that pretty much everyone can agree is a dumpster fire, and it succeeds so much in its terribleness it’s histerical. Hand Shakers and Neo Yokio are prime examples of quality irony-watch material. And so is Ousama Game. It’s not even worth pointing out its flaws because there’s just nowhere to start, there is not a single thing this show does right and it’s hysterical. Of course it has the squick factor of having some gross fetish with people’s tongues lolling out and their faces getting ridiculously contracted in gross fashion when they die, but other than that, it takes itself so seriously and mixed with its 2006 low budget aesthetic the whole thing is madly hilarious.

Welcome to the Ballroom: This is my choice for hatewatch show of the seaon. After the disgusting dung that was episode 15, I’ve lost all hopes of the show ever getting “better” as was repeatedly promised by fans of the manga once the queen lord and savior Chinatsu appeared. Lo and behold, Chinatsu’s character arc is to learn to be more “feminine” and to let herself be “controlled” by Tatara. Throw in some casual homophobia just for good measure. I really have to wonder why the mangaka set out to write a manga about a sport that necessarily requires a man and a woman in partnership if she hates women so much and can’t treat them as anything above second-class citizens-

(srsly show, why do you hate women so much)

Sengoku Night Blood: It’s been a while since we got a dumbass Sengoku bishonen show that wasn’t aggressively boring. This one though, still challenges my tolerance limits for being dumbass ridiculous with its premise of vampire/werewolf Sengoku daimyo. The costumes and character designs are super ridiculous yet strangely non-distinctive. I have a hard time figuring out who is who because most lack their historical counterparts most notable features, and there’s a lot of same-face-iness everywhere. The show is clearly not afraid of embracing its otoge origins, the “love event” moments are terribly transparent. I just wish either the female character was completely erased or that the guys would stop treating her so badly. I know she’s useless, but I don’t understand why the show has dudes saying things such as “it’s really bothersome that you’re here” and frame them as if they were suuuuper romantic.

(lmfao there are no gifs for this one, maybe I’m the only sucker watching it)

Juuni Taisen: To be honest I was ready to drop this one after confirming it was gonna be more Nisio Isin fake philosophical bullshit that is actually just otaku fanservice. Instead I got schlocky ultra violence garbage and it’s actually kinda fun? Look, I’m gonna come clean, I’m just watching it for the necromancer chip’n-dale rabbit with high heels and a huge fluffy tail, but if that’s not a good reason to watch a show, none is.

Not bad, but not quite good

Shoujo Shuumatsu Ryoukou: This was another one that wasn’t quite on my radar before the season began, I only checked it out because it got excellent reviews. It’s actually surprisingly charming, although the pacing is slow, the muted color palette can be tiring and nothing really seems to be happening. I honestly struggled to stay awake during episode 2. Although there is nothing inherently wrong with the show, I’m considering dropping it because I’m just watching too much stuff and don’t have time, but I’ll wait for episode 3 to make my final decision (I’ll probably watch it Monday)

Shokoku no Altair: After the really good Sultan arc, apparently we had to go through another speed course on how to acquire new members for the party. I’m pretty much resigned to this not being the epic historical drama Arslan also failed to be, but it’s still sad to see this one getting the crappy production values while Inuyashiki is a lavishly animated production about bitter old men hating youngsters. Anyway, as long as further arcs can replicate the level of excitement and intrigue of the sultanlu arc, I’ll be looking forward to it and how Mahmut’s story unfolds.

Fate/Apocrypha: You can tell how trashy the summer season was that Fate, which was one of my favorite shows of the season, is barely in the middle of the pack of this crowded Fall season. It’s also worth noting that I’ve lost a lot of the goodwill I’d mustered for the show after the writers remembered Palurdo-kun was supposed to be the protagonist, so now that he’s taken the center stage (and become Astolfo’s Master, which is a travesty, Astolfo deserves so much better than satisfying otaku’s otokonoko fetiches orz) I find myself rolling my eyes more often than not. Still hope to get cool fights out of this one and more Astolfo and Mordred.

GARO Vanishing Line: MAPPA brings us a new iteration of the GARO franchise, this time with a modern setting that throws back to ultra macho 80s anime OVAs aesthetic –I wouldn’t know, never watched those-. The hero is a buff uber muscular dude that literally prays at women’s boobs and Zaruba is a giant motorcycle that thinks women stink. The production values are impressive, both fight scenes are incredibly cinematic and exciting. The hypermasculinity borders on the hilarious, but I wish it could do away with the sexist humor, which luckily hasn’t been abundant enough to be insufferable. It’s a little soon to judge because they’re barely introducing us to the characters, but I’m still hoping this won’t devolve into shit territory like Crimson Moon did.

Kino no Tabi: Full disclosure, I only watched the first season of Kino a few months ago, so I have it very fresh in my memory. Since I didn’t know that this new season was more a soft reboot rather than a sequel, I thought I needed to watch the first one to check this one out. Turns out it wasn’t necessary, but I’m still glad I did it because the first season is fantastic. Which is why I’m a little concerned about this one, because the reinterpretation of the Colisseum story was… not good. It rushed through the story and made Kino look like a psychopath. The first episode was good so I’m crossing my fingers that this won’t turn into a horrible mess, but so far I’m feeling cautious and worried. But even if this one turns out to be a good reboot, I’d 100% recommend you check out the original.

Anime is in Fact Good

Classicaloid: Another show that came back with a different director and that I worry will struggle to replicate what made the first season special. There are some tonal things that make the change very evident, but so far it has overall been pretty great nonetheless, Classicaloid insane business as usual. I must say “New character appears claiming to be X’s relative, X believes it and starts treating N better to the detriment of the established cast” is a trope I’m not too fond of, but I’m willing to give them some time purely because they have a Hippopotamus that can do Musik. Honestly watching anime makes one write the weirdest of sentences.

Hoozuki no Reitetsu. Something comedy shows have in their favor is that if they come back, even after a long time, it feels like they never left. Hoozuki’s the same old Hoozuki and it’s a load of fun. I’ve loved both episodes so far, I can’t even pick a favorite skit of the ones we’ve had so far because all of them were so good. There’s not really a lot to say, if you liked the first season you’ll like this one. As usual it’s only detriment is you may miss some of the jokes if you’re not familiar with Japanese folklore, but there’s a lot of fun to be had nonetheless.

Recovery of an MMO Junkie: Honestly, I’m very quick to judge a book by its cover, or in this case, an anime by its title. In this case, I promptly dismissed this as yet another otaku oriented harem videogame fantasy or whatever without even reading the synopsis. Then I heard the positive reactions to it and decided to give it a shot and boy was I pleasantly surprised! Not only does it feature a woman in her thirties as a protagonist –which is insanely rare! But it also focuses on delightfully adorable romance that breaches the barriers of gender. And honestly, there’s that scene in episode two in which Moriko sends a text and then horrified realizes it’s 2:00 am and feels super ashamed about it and it was so relatable I was 100% sold.

Best of the season

(don’t mind the order, I’ve loved all of these equally

Kujira no Kora wa Sajou ni Utau: So I may have misunderstood what this was about. I rarely read plot synopsis, so for some reason –I guess at first I thought the title was Kujira wa Sora- I thought there would be flying whales. There aren’t, but that’s definitely not a detriment to this incredible fantasy dystopian world. The color palette and the watercolor texture of the backgrounds gives it a magical atmosphere that is just a delight to watch. Although there’s a lot of exposition, none has felt like a forced infodump. The pacing is overall fantastic, and although the characters are a mystery for the most part, they’re already very endearing. This season is ripe with enchanting fantasy worlds and I’m really hyped about it.

Houseki no Kuni: I was concerned about the CG designs on this one, but they work surprisingly well! The plot is still a bit unclear, but they’ve done a really good job in building the characters through their relationships to one another. Even though we don’t know a lot about them, I felt a lot of empathy for Cinnabar and Diamond and Bort, and Phos is a pretty nice point of view character to follow around. I’m definitely intrigued by the concept, and the execution has been great so far.

Blood Blockade Battlefront & Beyond: I hadn’t realized how much I missed this show until I watched the first episode of this new season. The loss of Rie Matsumoto’s wonderful directorial vision is very noticeable in the straightforwardness of the storytelling, but otherwise the show is surprisingly still a load of bombastic fun with endearing characters and fascinating world building. I particularly liked the hospital episode. I’m not sure where this story is going, but I’m excited to go along for the ride.

The Ancient Magus Bride: It’s important to note that the first episode has a lot of questionable material (please, can Elias never ever call Chise a puppy ever again), but I have to commend a great production when I see it. Readers of the manga assure that the questionable content will be contextualized later on, so I’m hopeful, because I’m already really sold on this show and I really don’t want it to be gross. It’s hard to explain or describe, but it just has this fantasy magical charm and a beautiful production that got me hooked from start to finish. It has been hyped to hell and back and so far it has lived up to my expectations. I think, apart from the lovely production values, the characters feel very real and deep from start to finish. It’s hard to explain why I feel so drawn to this show that should have so many red alarms ringing in my head, but I can’t help feel completely charmed by it

How am I gonna survive such a busy season with so much homework? Will I die trying? Will Ballroom ever stop hating women and gay people? Stay tuned to find out! And let me know which shows you’re watching this season!

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heartofoshun · 7 years

Text

Writers and readers meme

I got tagged by @dawnfelagund and @nimium-amatrix-ingenii-sui! Thank you! ^_^

1) How many works in progress do you currently have?

I have one original novel (I call it my Mexico book) it was a memoir/travel book at first. But I realized that I could tell more of the truth about my experiences if I presented it has fiction. OMG! Started it at least 13 or 14 years ago and work in it for a couple of days every year. I wish I could just plow through it and get it finished. I even had an agent for it once, but her mother got sick and she dumped me! That took away a lot my original impetus.

Fanfiction? I am scandalous about accumulating WIP. I haven’t abandoned any of those--some have a lot of work in them--like from over 20,000 words to 150,000 and those are the long ones. I have bunch in the 5,000-20,000-word range. I try to finish at least one of those on the back burner a year. Meanwhile, I write in the neighborhood of 30-100,000 finished pieces a year.

2) Do you/would you write fanfiction?

Really a lot and really a lot of fandom-related non-fiction. I have 715,511 words on AO3 (Oshun) and 106 fanfic stories (oshun) on the Silmarillion Writers Guild and 87 character biographies.

3) Do you prefer paper books or ebooks?

I’ve always loved the touch and weight of books! But now, due to vision problems, I can really only read ebooks for pleasure. Still occasionally use paper books for research, but it kills me. (Pet peeve online is a website and or a blog with pages that are illegible/unzoomable--automatic exclusion of me! So sad, but usually I get mad. I hate to feel left out.) Twenty years ago I would have been at this point in my degenerative state limited to audio books and unable to write at all without a private secretary! Yay, for technology!

4) When did you start writing?

I wrote a piece of fanfiction--a rip off of Edgar Allen Poe when I was about seven or eight. My big brother read it aloud to my whole family, laughing like a hyena! I wrote a fanfic play based on the first chapter of Little Women and staged it with my younger brother, sisters, and a cousin in our living room when I was 10 or 11 years old. The acting was terrible, but the costumes were great! (Beth was my chunky, red-cheeked cousin. I was scrambling to cast that part. She wasn’t pretty enough in my mean little heart to be Amy and my youngest sister was and had golden curls. Would you be surprised to discover I cast myself as Jo?)

5) Do you have someone you trust that you share your work with?

I have always had close fandom friends with whom I have shared by work before publishing, although I will do without a Beta if it becomes a nuisance to find one. (If you look at my stories, I always have given credit to anyone who has read my drafts.) Currently, @dawnfelagund occasionally reads my fiction drafts and goes over virtually all of my non-fiction. For over 12 years or so, @ignoblebard has probably Beta-read 90% of my fanfic. My two sisters closest in age to me read all of my non-fannish writing and my daughter reads a lot of it also.

6) Where is your favorite place to write?

On a desktop with a great big screen at my writing desk in my bedroom. (The vision problem again.)

7) Favorite childhood book?

OMG! There were so many! Little Women was one (actually everything by Louisa May Alcott), the Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (countless times), a bunch of Arthurian legend books (none of the really good ones were available to me), Pinrod and Sam by Booth Tarkington, and Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott, I was addicted to Jane Austen. I read a lot of history and historical fiction also (enough Anne Boleyn fiction to gag a maggot!). I started reading adult books at about 8 or 9. My parents did not censor books and the house was overflowing with everything from all of the classics to mysteries, everything but romance novels--actually those were forbidden.

8) Writing for fun or publication?

Both. Mostly for myself over the last ten years (ha! I called it teaching myself to write fiction!). Most of my adult life I’ve made a living doing some sort of writing or editing--everything from translating and writing for a wire service to working at newspapers to freelance journalism, to copy-checking for law firms.

9) Pen and paper or computer?

Computer. I hate to write by hand, although I have a good hand. But it’s double the work to type what one has written out of a legal pad or notebook. And now my eyes would kill me! (I do carry a tiny notebook for ideas or notes at a public event.)

10) Have you ever taken any writing classes?

I majored in English lit. We churned out papers back in my day like we were being paid by the page--copious amounts of copy and generally pretty thoroughly pulled to pieces by our professors. (It’s kind of made me a rebel. I get a huge kick out of breaking writing rules.) I was raised on Strunk and White, however, which I still consult when something worries me.

11) What inspires you to write?

People? Ruminating about what makes people tick? My fanfic, for example, is character-centered. I love to tear apart Tolkien’s characters and put them back together in a manner that is satisfying to me--human, emotional, flawed, likeable, complicated, funny, and sometimes ridiculous, while being tragic. Plotty stories can be OK, but I used to say that most of the action in my fics takes place inside of my characters’ heads. I also like examining political, cultural, and historical motivations in fanfiction. Setting is important to me also. And I can write a love story between two people that is packed with family interactions. (I came from a huge family.)

Who wants to be tagged?? I tag you people all the time and probably tag the wrong ones! Please answer these questions if you want and tag me so I can read your answers!

#@dawnfelagund #writing #reading #books #me as a writer #@nimium-amatrix-ingenii-sui

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kaoruyogi · 7 years

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Another Tag Meme Monsterpost

I realize I’ve been tagged in a whole bunch of stuff lately, and I mostly haven’t been doing them because I haven’t been at my computer. I also wasn’t doing them because I’ve been in a funk lately, and we had a few bad days recently. Long story short, a co-worker died unexpectedly, we adopted a puppy who had aggression issues toward our dog and we agonized over our eventual decision to give her to a local rescue, I’ve been trying to find work in Washington so we can get out of SoCal, and my parents were over (that was awesome, it just kept me away from the computer).

So, let me start by tagging everyone who tagged me. I won’t be tagging anyone to do these memes, cause that would just be cruel and most all of them have been done to death.

@gugle1980, @ladydracarysao3, @galadrieljones, @kagetsukai, @aerismoon, @thevikingwoman, @princessvicky01, @inner-muse, @makers-breath, and @roguelioness. Thank you all for your tags, and sorry for the spam that is about to occur.

30 Random Things About Me Meme

Rules: answer 30 questions and tag 30 people.

Nickname: Red, Ginger, Ginge

Name: Amanda

Gender: Female

Star Sign: Scorpio

Height: 5′8″/173 cm

Time: 8:46 am

Birthday: October 30

Favorite Band: At this very moment, probably Fleet Foxes, but there are too many I love to pieces for that to be anything but momentary

Favorite Solo Artist: At this very moment, probably Andrew Bird, but there are too many I love to pieces for that to be anything but momentary

Song Stuck In My Head: Eivør - Trøllabundin

Last Movie I Watched: Dragnet

Last Show I Watched: Preacher

When Did I Create My Blog: Years ago, though I started posting in June 2016

What Do I Post: Cullen everything, fanfic, random musings...

Last Thing I Googled: 5′8″ in cm

Do You Have Other Blogs: I’m a mod for @cullen-in-command and I have an NSFW blog that you can ask me about if you want it

Do You Get Asks: Occasionally

Why Did You Choose This Blog Name: It’s my tag for pretty much everything

Blogs You Are Following: 195

Followers: 1,049

Favorite Colors: Rainbow, then blue then green

Average Hours of Sleep: 4-8

Lucky Number: 17

Instruments: Voice

What Am I Wearing: Blue slouch t-shirt and black yoga pants

How Many Blankets I Sleep With: 1

Dream Job: Video gam attorney

Dream Trip: Next? Belgium to The Netherlands to Germany to Denmark to Sweden

Favorite Food: Italian or Sushi

Nationality: 98.2% Ashkenazi Jew

Favorite Song Now: I will never, ever be able to answer this question

Kissing Meme

Rules: name 10 characters you would kiss, then tag people.

Cullen Rutherford - Dragon Age

Alistair Theirin - Dragon Age

Nathan Drake - Uncharted

Joel - The Last of Us

Shadow Moon - American Gods

Zeke Tilson - The Brink (You can replace this with Mad Sweeney from American Gods if you want. It’s still Pablo Schreiber.)

Solas - Dragon Age (mostly because I’m curious?)

Blackwall - Dragon Age

The Iron Bull - Dragon Age

Knight Captain Rylen/Professor Bram Kenric - Dragon Age (I cheated)

10 Songs I’ve Been Listening To

Links are on Spotify or YouTube

Fleet Foxes - On Another Ocean (January / June)

Fleet Foxes - Kept Woman

Eivør - Mjørkaflókar

Royksopp - Forsaken Cowboy

Ludovico Einaudi - Promessa

The Rapture - In the Grace of Your Love

alt-J - 3WW

Joshua Messick - Woodland Dance

Gorillaz feat. De La Soul - Momentz

Thomas Newman - Accidental Happiness (from the “Passengers” score)

10 Questions Meme (from @thevikingwoman and @galadrieljones)

1. Dream car?

Audi R8

2. Favorite animated movie?

Wall-E

3. Something you really want to learn to do?

Fly helicopters and speak every language

4. What is your eye color?

Hazel

5. A fanfic you wish someone else would write (any fandom)?

I don’t really have anything i wish someone else would write. I like to write my own ideas.

6. If you could undo one historical event, what would it be, and how would you think the world would be different.

I don’t believe in changing the past. The human race as a whole is incapable of learning unless it learns from its own mistakes.

7. When playing games, which class do you usually pick? Do you have a go-to class (mage/archer/healer/stealth/melee/etc)

I usually go with mages or something that can do long-rage damage, though if I’m clunky enough at a game, I usually pick something I can use to get up close and bash shit with.

8. Place you think everyone should visit, if they can?

The place they want to go most. Everyone is different, but everyone has someplace they’d like to go.

9. Video game character you would like to go drinking with?

I don’t drink, but I’d love to see the DA:I crew cut loose.

10. Favorite breakfast?

Eggs Benedict with Cheesy Hashbrowns

1. Favorite small town? Real or fictional.

Whitefish, Montana

2. Video game or DLC you’re most looking forward to right now? (sans DA4)

Besides DA4...ummm...The Last of Us 2

3. Favorite fictional world? (i.e.: Middle Earth, Thedas, etc.) Why?

Thedas, cause it’s beautiful and complex, and Cullen lives in it.

4. Where/what was the best cup of coffee you’ve ever had? If you don’t drink coffee, what’s the best meal you’ve ever head?

That’s a really hard question. I’ve had amazing steak in Paradise, California. I’ve had amazing fish n’ chips and king crab in Alaska. I’ve had amazing sushi in the Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo. I’ve had amazing food down the street and on the other side of the world. I just love food.

5. Where/when do you do your best daydreaming?

Whenever and wherever I’m supposed to be doing something else.

6. Favorite TV show right now?

This is also a super hard question. I love Game of Thrones, I really enjoyed the first seasons of American Gods, A Handmaid’s Tale, and Harlots, Insecure is a guilty pleasure...the list goes on and on.

7. Is your canon Inquisitor reluctant about their power, or do they embrace it full-force, or something in-between?

Something in-between.

8. What’s the best purchase you’ve ever made?

It might fall somewhere between my engagement ring (my husband and I split the cost) and my first law school book. Hopefully soon it’ll be a house.

9. Favorite or go-to clothing brand/designer/store?

Target. All day. It sounds silly, but they actually have really good quality, versatile clothes that I really like.

10. Are there any popular TV or video game character arcs that really bother you? How would you change them, if you could?

I get annoyed and bothered by a lot of characters, but I wouldn’t necessarily change them. They are who they were intended to be, and it’s not my place to say they are right or wrong.

15 Associations Meme: Belle

Rules: Repost and fill in the answers you most associate your character with to each question.

1. ANIMAL: Fox

2. COLOR(S): Rainbow

3. MONTH: October

4. SONG(S): The Maccabees - WWI Portraits (these lyrics aren’t the complete verse, and they’ll read a bit disjointed at the start and end)

A go-getter, go-getter You’re the best of all You’ve seen it four, five hundred times on repeat You’re like a leftover better than a ribbon-tied treat Narrow roads, never limit, never temper your speed And when the river froze solid you’re still swimming upstream You’d hold your own in the presence of pauper and a king Leave a singing bird silent, make a hummingbird sing You are a rope-a-doper coming back queen

5. NUMBER: 17

6. DAY OR NIGHT: Night

7. PLANT(S): Hydrangeas, Coniferous Trees

8. SMELL(S): Pears, Peaches, Lilies, Garlic/Basil/Oregano Trifecta

9. GEMSTONE: Opal

10. SEASON: Autumn

11. PLACE(S): Skyhold, The Emerald Graves (once she finally goes (if ever))

12. FOOD(S): Pasta and Sushi, but in Thedas, Roasted Duck or a Ham and Cheese Sandwich

13. ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Scorpio

14. ELEMENT(S): Fire, Water

15. DRINK(S): Water, Fruit Juice

#memes #meme monsterpost #ask meme #oc meme

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amorremanet · 7 years

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“what am i writing” meme

Okay, so, @bizeke tagged me in a, “what are you writing right now” meme, and I’ve been trying to figure out how I wanted to answer it because, for once in my life, I don’t have a huge pile of WIPs. Like, I’m deliberately trying to rein myself in and refrain from letting the rabid plot-bunnies have their way with my brain to the point that I end up getting nothing done because I get overwhelmed by how many possibilities there are and how many ideas I have.

Let me tell you what: as a Ne-dom (ENTP), this is one of the worst punishments that I could ever imagine and I wouldn’t wish it on anybody, like, ever.

But I’m actually trying to stick to it, because it’s in the name of trying to focus on and do right by the project that is my main Thing right now, in basically all areas of life. Unfortunately for my desire for instant gratification, it’s going to be long. I mean, it’s a novel, so that’s part of the deal and one just has to suck it up and live with that, or just never write novels unless you can crank them out at a Stephen King-esque pace. Unfortunately for how much I like the community (and validation!) that comes built in with writing fan-things, it’s also original fic (which is also scary as fuck, but hey).

So, to get this part out of the way first: the “as yet untitled because I suck and titles are hard fml” project is a novel. It’s a superhero story with LGBTQ protags who are also largely neurodivergent, mentally ill, and/or otherwise disabled. The main story concerns a ragtag bunch of misfits — some of them super-powered mutants and some not — who come together in a new team and in just trying to do some good in the world for various reasons (and working together because they all realize that they can’t actually do that much on their own), they stumble into a bigger plot and wind up pitting themselves against a half-shadowy cabal of big deal neo-fascist supervillains (some mutants, and some not, though in their case, the non-mutants are generally treated like pets, rather than people and full team members).

ngl, the three biggest causes for this project were:

1. I needed a new project for my thesis because fuck this shit, I don’t wanna be in grad school anymore, and after having my project jerked around by practically everyone in my department at one point or another, the fanfic thing I settled on wasn’t working and I am really well and truly beyond fucking sick of grad school;

2. I had this one character in particular — the oft-mentioned mutant disaster, Sebastian — who I initially drew up for this game that my Sunday night tabletop group was playing last summer. The idea of there being mutant superheroes was similar, but Double Cross’s system is heavily inspired by the Parasite Eve series of video games, with a little bit from the novel that inspired them (by which I mean that the rule-book is pretty explicit about it; sure, they build on the world in their own ways to give players more options for their characters, and bring in some other influences, but they don’t hide that their primary source of inspiration is Parasite Eve).

Anyway, the Double Cross system relies a lot on character-driven drama and works it into the gameplay (one example is the “Lois” system, where you make up NPCs who help keep your character tethered to their sense of humanity, so they won’t get completely taken over by the shiny super-mitochondria that have gotten inside them and could make them turn into a monster). Additionally, I’ve been playing with my GM, Jake, since we were in high school, and I know that he likes having as much stuff to use against the characters as possible. I also know that it makes games with him more fun because he gets better ideas that way

(which is also why I knew damn well that the short, historical setting horror thing we did in January and February was going to be short, but still gave him a ten-page backstory for my French Jesuit priest that I could’ve backed up with sources for, “yes, this was actually a Thing in early to mid-17th century Paris” or, “yes, this was part of the process of becoming a Jesuit in that time period” had he asked for them)

Which, for Sebastian, meant that I started writing with the intent of it being three things

a brief apology note to Dr. Maeda (a scientist Jake borrowed from Parasite Eve because he’s a really fun character, whom Seb hadn’t really had an altercation with? But with his self-deprecating humor that almost no one else finds funny, Seb had accidentally made Dr. Maeda think that he’d offended him, and he wanted to apologize for that);

one letter to his older brother Max that would’ve been written while Seb was in rehab (which, in an idea that I straight up lifted from Augusten Burroughs’s memoir, Dry, had the prompt, “write to someone close to you and express your feelings about them and your relationship” and it had a lot of instances where Seb quoted something from Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis and somehow, whether fairly on himself or not, connected it to his and Max’s situation, in which he cast himself as a fuck-up on the level of Bosie Douglas. It also had a lot of snarky footnotes);

and one that he would’ve written to Max after the party’s first big adventure together (the major TL;DR point of which was, “ahahahaha, I was trying so hard to get my life together but oh no, shit, I fucked up and everything is terrible, you were right and I was wrong and now I can’t give you all the details of why you were right because the FBI says a lot of it’s classified but you were right and I fucked up and oh my god why” — just… with a lot of tangents and backstory and yet more snarky footnotes)

—but because I’m me, I quickly lost control of that idea.

I figured out the entire timeline of major events (largely but not entirely by hand, and in a few places, there is arguably too much detail, like how I know all of the classes that Seb took in undergrad, where it all fit into his substance abuse history, and exactly how that exacerbated his already Not Good mental health)

I did a lot of writing and a lot more revising and then more writing and then some research — like sketching out a list of TV Tropes that applied to Seb and his backstory, and by, “sketching” I mean that I listed them, and in most cases, I wrote up explanations for why he deserved the tropes or how I was trying to play with them

some of which were fairly brief (e.g., the explanation for his exact brand of being a Stepford Smiler is only 185 words, most of them actually being about how he made it to nearly 30 without having anyone suggest that he might be living with depression)

while others were kinda not (like, the 2,400-word explanation of why he got, “Angst, What Angst?” and “Conditioned to Accept Horror” on his list, which got listed together because they were part of the same larger problem and helped to fuel each other)

I went through multiple versions of all of those letters except the first one (and, in the case of the second, even made the drafts full-on “canon” things in their own right, documenting Seb’s ongoing attempts at paring a draft down enough to share in group therapy, because that was part of the in-universe conceit about why he was writing to Max in the first place)

I added other letters still (like, one to Pete that Seb was writing in rehab, with the in-universe prompt, “list 99 problems that you have that don’t have anything to do with your brother or his wife, because seriously? you’ve been going on about him so much, it’s starting to feel like you’re talking about shit with him in order to get out of talking about anything else in your life”; and one letter to Max that Seb wrote before his first overdose, which would have jossed his, “oh yeah, totally an accident, can I go back to class on Monday please” lie because it was explicitly a suicide note)

—and all up, by the time Jake decided that he was having trouble bringing things together into a larger game after the first adventure, I’d written about one order of words

”Order” here meaning, “a unit of word length measurement equivalent to the length of Harry Potter and The Order Of The Phoenix, i.e. 257,045 words”

—which I exceeded somewhat but not by enough to make too big a difference, not least since most of these drafts will not be making an appearance in the novel itself.

So, I was like, “Well, fuck. I did all of that and we’re not even going to keep playing that game? ……Screw this, I didn’t do all that work for fuck-all nothing, I’ve gotta find something else to do with Seb and his story”

This first necessitated going back to the drawing board, scrapping a lot of the stuff that was directly related to Parasite Eve or Double Cross, or finding a new way to reconfigure it so that it wasn’t just me lifting shit from either of them

Because I’m me, that led to more and more ideas coming up, which in turn pretty much guaranteed that…… okay, yes, Sebastian got to be a POV character first, because in all due fairness, he was here first and the story wouldn’t exist without him…… but he’s not quite, “the main character” in the same way that, say, Harry Potter is (nor would he really want to be)

And TL;DR: this whole thing started because I wanted to help my GM make my character suffer, only for him to drop the game, after which I didn’t want all the work I did to go to waste and be totally meaningless, so hey

and 3. ……Well, I mean. I had a lot of ideas that I kept trying to turn into fanficcy things, but at a certain point, I just had to admit that they would have gotten into, “unless you can show why this is a legit interpretation or development for these characters, it’s going to be OOC” territory

and after enough rounds of this, I gave up and went, “Okay, fuck it, FINE. Rather than try to shoehorn any of my pre-extant fictional faves into these ideas that they do not actually fit into, only for the sake of writing them as fic and getting more or less immediate Validation, I’m gonna go write my own story! With mutants! And canon LGBTQ characters! And canon neurodiversity! Because FUCK IT, that’s why!”

I guess that one could say that I finally hit, “fuck it.”

In universe, the mutant thing isn’t being treated as an oppression allegory in its own right (I say, definitely looking pointedly at the X-Men, but not exclusively at them, because in fairness, they are so not the only guilty parties here), and the issue of metahuman licensing isn’t being used as a metaphor for any example of governments illicitly keeping tabs on oppressed or marginalized people.

Like, there are still major flaws in the system and how it’s enacted on people because it’s the U.S. government, but the entire thing is treated more like taking driver’s ed and going to the DMV because the fact of the matter is that we are talking about people who have shit like super-strength, telepathy, and heat vision, and it’s fair for other citizens to want to make sure that they can control their powers, and that they know and agree to abide by certain laws about how they can and can’t use them

(e.g., yes, it is considered rape if you telepathically coerce someone into sex. Exactly what charges you’ll face vary from state to state, but it’s still rape, and unless there are some seriously extenuating circumstances — like, say, if you have two teenage telepathic mutants who didn’t know that they were mutants and thus couldn’t control their powers, so both of them have broken the law here, but unless there was some other kind of force or coercion involved, neither can be held criminally responsible — you will be prosecuted if you get caught.

Whether or not you get caught is another issue entirely, and it’s a huge mess for a lot of reasons, but in theory, this is how the law works.)

The novel I’m working on now is also going to be the first in a series of four or five — give or take “Dunk and Egg”-esque tie-in stories, mostly because I’m still a Ne-dom and, even without all the world-building being set in stone at present, I’m already attached to and intrigued by several characters and parts of my world that aren’t part of the “main” storyline

(which is, itself, already an ensemble cast production, just with focal/POV characters for each installment because otherwise, I would probably pull a GRRM, get overloaded by all of the different POVs and trying to balance them effectively, and then either die or be photographed running around in a giant hamster ball because I’m trying to run away from my problems that I created all by myself)…

…but also partly because it is annoyingly easier to find potential “legit” places to publish shorter works and get yourself “legitimately” established by putting out some of those first.

You lot get three guesses each as to why I find this annoying, the first two don’t count, and if you guess literally anything but some variation on, “But, Kassie! You’re in the exact same TL;DR club as GRRM! One of your more popular TW fics was a 23k vaguely stream of consciousness beast in which you committed the same literary sin that you bag on Marcel Proust about all the time, because almost nothing actually happened”?

……then I probably love you for having such faith in me, but you have way too much faith in me because… yeah, no. That’s pretty much it. The “legitimate” “grown-up” publishing world’s fondness for short stories annoys me entirely because I don’t like being brief, or cutting things out, or so on and so forth.

Shit, I’m having enough trouble in Pages right now today, because I decided that this one beat in one scene of the novel was getting too far into territory that is actually meant for the chapter right after it, so I’m trying to figure out where to cut it, so I can then relocate the dialogue to where it makes more sense. Trying to be succinct…… is not one of my strong suits, period.

To be fair? The novel… well. It wouldn’t be a Thing without my years in fandom and my immersion in fan culture. It just would not be possible without that part of my background.

On one hand, that’s due to how many ideas I wouldn’t have been exposed to without fandom discussing them in the different ways that we have, and how many things I wound up reading or watching because I saw that other people were enjoying them and I wanted to know what was up, and then all the criticism that I saw from fans of said things about issues of how stories and media are shaped by the sociopolitical structures that content creators live with

And on the other hand, it’s because my story is a literary pastiche that is not entirely a deconstruction of the genre, but rather a recombination of different tropes and pieces of the superhero genre, plus pieces from other genres because fuck the idea that genres can or should be strictly delineated and kept separate from each other at all times that’s why, where I acknowledge that there is little room to actually do anything that is “entirely new” — both in the sense that we’re all influenced, both consciously and not, by everything around us, so you can make the far-end argument that nothing is “purely” or “entirely new,” since that would require things to be made in a vacuum, and in the sense that… well. I mean.

Come on, I’m working in an established genre that has had several different voices and perspectives chime into it in various fashions since it first got started with the original Superman comics in 1938 (and even that is arguably not the start, since the origins of the genre go waaaay the fuck back, and almost no one writing about the genre critically likes to let it just be its own thing without bringing up precedents like Gilgamesh, Heracles, and the Scarlet Pimpernel), and even if I weren’t also bringing in things from outside the superhero genre, I would have no significant chance of doing something that hasn’t already been done at some point, by somebody, somewhere.

Moreover, uh. I get why the Ang Lee Hulk isn’t everyone’s taste, I do. It’s not my favorite anything but any means, but I enjoy parts of it. But that being said, there are, in the superhero genre, certain expectations that certain tropes and story or character elements will appear in some fashion, even if they’re being brutally deconstructed, and Ang Lee tried his best to weasel out of a lot of them because he didn’t want his movie to have the, “stigma” of being, “just a superhero movie.”

Which is a shame, because a lot of his ideas about how he wanted to interpret Bruce Banner as a character, interpret the dynamic between Bruce and the Hulk, and so on? Those actually could’ve been really fun…… but he didn’t want to make, “a superhero movie,” so he ignored the value of all the shit that he should’ve been using to actualize these ideas on the screen, and he had to essentially paste that stuff on like, “Fine, here’s your superhero bullshit, you fucking comic book nerds”

Which all sort of adds up to, “I mean, I’m trying to challenge or play with some of these genre staples — and some of the more optional ones, I’m doing away with because they’re common but not necessary and I think they’re not part of the stories I want to tell, or they’re very particular to certain mediums that are not the one I’m working in — but…… fuck, man, it’s still a superhero story. It’s not like you can’t tell superhero-influenced stories without these things, but if you’re telling a flat-out superhero story, then…… yeah, you kinda do need to at least acknowledge them, and if you don’t have some kind of appreciation for the genre, then why the fuck are you working in it”

(And this is a brief aside to point out that Ang Lee isn’t the only content creator who’s been called a genius and has been guilty of going all like, “fuck superhero stories, they’re just pointless stupid trashy kid stuff for babies, lmao” while also being involved in working on one.

The list is probably even longer than I know, but I feel especially obligated to point out that Heath Ledger had nothing but disdain for the entire superhero genre before playing the Joker in TDK, literally only agreed to do that because Christopher Nolan was involved and Batman Begins had been noticeably “higher-quality” by most people’s standards than the Joel Schumacher Batman movies and the then-extant X-Men movies, and really only seemed to have come around about the quality of certain stories that he read as character prep — like The Killing Joke, The Man Who Laughs, and Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth

—and frankly, he and Nolan both seem(ed) to see those stories [plus a handful of others, in Nolan’s case] as special exceptions were, “not like all the rest of the genre,” rather than seeing them as indications of what the entire genre can be capable of.

Which is not to say that I acknowledge the validity of any other non-Cesar Romero live-action Joker, because unless someone really wows me or they come up with an idea that Mark Hamill could do live-action and managed to talk him into it, that’s probably not going to happen, and both Nicholson and Leto can eat me because they were just awful as the Clown Prince of Crime. Awful in different ways, admittedly, but still. Just. AWFUL. Absolutely abysmal.

It’s also not to say that the superhero genre is entirely awesome, since… lmao, Sturgeon’s Law, people. 90% of everything is probably some kind of bullshit. It can be entertaining bullshit, sure, but it’s probably still some kind of bullshit.

What I am trying to say, though, is that the entire genre is not special for having a lot of bullshit in it, because frankly, EVERY GENRE has mostly a lot of bullshit in it, so holding the superhero genre to some special double standard is ridiculous and elitist, and no, we shouldn’t look at things like Watchmen, A Serious House on Serious Earth, or anything else you might want to put on a, “special exceptions” list as being separate from the genre that spawned them.

They’re superhero stories. Barring some examples like Watchmen that have characters that were new when they first came out, these stories literally have characters like Batman and Superman and Wonder Woman running around, having adventures and fighting bad guys. Being of an allegedly, “higher quality” than any random issue you pick off the rack on Wednesday does not mean that they aren’t superhero stories

—and I realize that most of the people reading this already probably kind of feel the same about the elitist nonsense that goes on regarding pretty much every example of genre fiction, except for like big-budget sci-fi and fantasy that either sticks to very conventional models, and/or is written and/or directed by someone we might call an Auteur™, like Ridley Scott, James Cameron, or Guillermo del Toro, or like GRRM would be called if he made movies

……but this tendency grinds my gears anyway because the fuck what even, people. All of the genre fiction that gets bagged on like this has an established history with enough examples to prove that they are is just as widely varied in content and “quality” as yet another movie about a cis white dude and a cis white lady who want to be together but they can’t because of Reasons Or Something, wow such innovation, very forbidden, etc. etc. obviously NO ONE has EVER told a story like this before in the entire history of human storytelling, ha ha ha, GAG)

But anyway, as I was saying. Pastiche or something.

Still, it’s not a deconstruction properly because as much as I love and am creatively indebted to some of them — with Watchmen on the, “it has problems but I overall love it even if I don’t always agree with what Alan and Dave had to say or how they said it” side, The Dark Knight Returns on the, “Frank Miller can go step on a rusty nail and get tetanus, what a douchebag” side,

Deadpool in general on the, “I mean, I respect that you have a vision of what kind of fourth wall-breaking self-aware hijinks you want to get up to, and I enjoy it sometimes, but on one hand? For all I don’t agree with everything that’s said in Wisecrack’s “Philosophy of Deadpool” video, I do think it’s fair to say that you guys often have a lot in common with hipsters, and that you have the potential to do cool shit like Cervantes did Don Quixote, but that you often don’t go as far as you could with it, which can sometimes be kinda disheartening. More importantly, though, your vision is cool and has a place at the table too, but it’s not MY vision, so you do your thing and I’m gonna do mine and if I ever do get published, I hope I can meet Gail Simone because I would just die” side

and several others falling at various points of somewhere in the middle and shit — uhhh? It’s just??? Like?

I just… don’t… really… want to write a massive deconstruction?

I mean. I enjoy reading some of them (or there are others like TDKReturns, where it’s less that I enjoy them and more that they’re important to the genre’s history but I hate them and the only reason I haven’t literally set fire to my copy of that book is that…… shit, man, that thing was expensive, and if I set it on fire, I’d have to either buy a new one or get a .cbr file for free, which would be illegal and I obviously do not condone it, nope, not at all, nudge wink ssssh)…

and I won’t deny that they’ve influenced how I approach the genre as both a reader and as a creator (I mean, ffs, I have a minor character who was literally inspired by a mix of Rorschach and my desire to petulantly piss off every fucking dudebro fanboy who reads Watchmen and doesn’t get that Rorschach is supposed to be seen as completely reprehensible. Yes, he’s a different kind of reprehensible from Eddie Blake and Adrian Veidt, but all of them are still pretty reprehensible, that’s kind of the fucking point. The only so-called “heroes” in Watchmen who accomplish anything of major historical significance are either completely reprehensible, or they’re Doctor Manhattan and so far removed from their former sense of humanity that they might as well be on a different existential plane entirely)

……but, for all I enjoy deconstructions, I don’t want to write one, personally.

And anyway, the original point to all of this is that my story wouldn’t exist as it does without fandom because, on one hand, I got exposed to pretty much all of this through/because of fandom, or while I was in fandom; and on the other, the way that fandom relies so much on envisioning new possibilities for characters and stories, and combining seemingly disparate elements into new shapes, and mashing up tropes and ideas that don’t seem to go together but finding a way to make it work…… like?

That’s shaped me so much as a writer, even outside of fandom, that I don’t know where to begin finding examples of it in action, because it’s just everywhere in my writing tbh. And I don’t think that it makes anything I’m doing, “new” as such, because I’m probably overly aware of what most of my different influences are and how they’ve influenced me in which ways and so on…… but I don’t need or want to completely reinvent the wheel, I just want to have fun making up my stories and maybe bringing in something that other people enjoy and can read without feeling like their time was wasted, y’know?

…also, I will totally admit to certain fandom mainstay tropes and idioms having different degrees of influence on my story, and to deliberately trying to work in phrases like, “to toe out of one’s shoes” that are almost exclusively found in fanfiction because…… uh, I know where I came from, and while I might have various problems with where I came from on a pretty much constant basis, I still love and respect where I came from, so why not use some of our idioms and popular tropes?

………also? I’m doing it because I want to, that’s why.

Just like how there was no actual NEED, as such, for me to make Yael and Elizabeth a deliberate middle-finger to Marvel and their penchant for baiting Cherik, and then screaming, “OH WAIT NOOOOOPE, NO HOMO, DON’T LET’S BE SILLY, CHILLAX YOU STUPID FANGIRLS!!!!” — like I could’ve had them in the story and the world without doing that…

…but I wanted to do that, so I’m gonna do that, and since I’m not violating any copyright or intellectual property laws because what I’m doing doesn’t rip off anything more than general concepts that Marvel has no exclusive or protected ownership of, and even if it did, what I’m doing would count as a commentary or satire and be protected by the First Amendment and the US Supreme Court, therefore no one can do shit about shit to stop me from having my two badass older lady lesbians who are, in fact, married and are co-headmistresses of their school for the exceptionally gifted. Nah nah nah nah nah nah, ha ha ha ha ha ha.

(……………I am a serious adult writer who takes her writing seriously. …also, I’m sorry, and I’m done now, and thank you for reading if you have, and if you got to this finishing point, please go help yourself to like…… a cookie. Or five. Or idk, any kind of treat you want, I don’t know you and I’m not your boss, so I can’t guess what your idea of a treat is much less tell you what to do. Okay, I’m done now, bye)

ETA: ……oh, and I guess that I tag whoever wants to do this themself, because I just spent a few hours writing it and I don’t wanna look at it anymore, not even to pass the meme on, so…… heeeey, free invite, you can do a meme just because you want to and then blame me

#bizeke #ella tag #memes for ts #mine: writing #that story with the mutants that i should find a working title for fml #opinions for ts #i wouldn't say that i'm being exactly critical of marvel or dc or anything that i mention by name in this #but i'm not being NOT-critical either bc i'm talking about how they all influenced my approach to the superhero genre & writing in it #and since i perpetually have some kind of criticism or some kind of problem with pretty much everything……… well.#things that vaguely resemble criticism do kinda tend to come up a bit #……also i yell for a while about the elitist bullshit that most genre fiction is subjected to and how much i hate it #because it's always a good time to hate elitist bullshit

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cambridgewritersworkshop · 7 years

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https://twitter.com/carriganak/status/873986775768866816

I recently moved to the D.C. area for a new job, and one of the things I was most excited about with the area was the opportunity to see and do new things in a large city. Living in this area, I’d be able to see concerts, films, shows of all kinds, and the sort of social activism that I normally wouldn’t see in towns I lived in before. It wasn’t that I lived in places without these events and attitudes, but they weren’t to the scale that excited me.

I wasn’t able to go to the Women’s March back in January. I was in the midst of a move, and driving up to the area was a bad idea. I had to make due with looking at photos on Facebook of people I knew who were able to go, including members of my family. The only other social event I went to was the Climate Change March, but I ended up there accidentally and felt somewhat detached.

When I heard there was a march for LGBT+ rights, I knew I had to go. I knew that no matter what, I had to go. Last year, I started openly identifying as an LGBT man, and that openness made me want to start getting involved. I began watching more queer media, I started to go to LGBT+ events, and I wanted to start expressing myself in ways that allowed me to explore different facets of myself, both heterosexual and homosexual.

Thus, I prepared for the Equality March on June 11, 2017. First was assembling my marching look. I knew there would be people in much crazier outfits that I couldn’t seek to compete with, so I settled for a shirt I got from Charlottesville Pride 2016. I had some beads I got from the Pride Parade the day before (and from other Pride/LGBT+ events in the last year or so), and I had some buttons I got from the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop’s Writers in Resistance reading at AWP 2017. I also had some nail polish for my fingers, mostly cause I like how my nails look painted, and I did eye black with some red lipstick I had, paying slight homage to Shoshanna from Inglourious Basterds.

The most important part of it all (aside from sunscreen, sunglasses, and water) was the sign. I knew I wanted a sign to carry. Signs stood out, signs get photographed in crowd shots, and they’re also just really fun to make. I wanted to make one that referenced queer media, mostly cause I’m a total nerd, but also because I knew these were the people who would understand whatever I put on there. I had spent months going back and forth on what to do. I had considered Venus Extravaganza’s famous line “You’re just an overgrown orangutan” from the film Paris is Burning, as well as Trinity Taylor’s “I call ‘Shade!'” line from season 9 of RuPaul’s Drag Race. I knew pieces like these would be popular and seen throughout the march, but I mostly changed my mind because of my extremely limited artistic abilities. Plus, I saw someone else do the Trinity Taylor one, and they had a much better looking sign.

https://twitter.com/RuPaulsDragRace/status/873959964410167298

I finally settled on a line that wouldn’t raise any concern from the elderly, conservative neighbors in the new apartment I just moved into: “Not today, Satan!” The line was uttered by drag queen Bianca Del Rio in season 6 of RuPaul’s Drag Race. For those who don’t know, Bianca is a drag insult comic who has described herself as “Don Rickles, but in a dress, and prettier and not as old.” After winning season 6, she became one of the more known subversive comics in LGBT+ media. No one is safe at a Bianca Del Rio show. Everyone will probably be offended by a few jokes, but find themselves laughing at them anyways. Bianca Del Rio is the kind of person I admire because of her ability to say whatever she wants, make it funny, and show enough intelligence, wit, class, and soul that she ascends most insecurities and can float through the most ugly of situations with her head on right and zero fucks to give.

So naturally, she was the perfect person to emulate for this march. Also, because fire is way easier to draw than a human being.

Getting to the march, I was worried about the responses I’d get on the bus or the subway. Fortunately, everone on the bus didn’t care, and when I got to the subway, I saw more people heading to the march, so I was in good company. I even got to chat with a nice girl named Miriam on the way there. I wish I didn’t lose her upon arriving, because she was a very smart and kind person who would have been a good friend to make at the event. And after all, I had just moved to the area, so I am up for making new connections.

Once I joined the line and we started to march, that’s when the rush came in. I got a taste of it in the Climate Change March, but I really felt it here. I walked with all kinds of queer individuals from all over the country. I saw people from Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, and even from outside the country. I saw people who were calling out members of the Trump administration, such as Jeff Sessions, Betsy DeVos, and Jared Kushner.

And like me, I saw a lot of people taking various figures as icons for the march. Not only did I see other RuPaul’s Drag Race queens represented via signs, I saw signs using images of figures like Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia, The Babadook, and more. Even the sign I chose resonated with a lot of people. Not only did people ask me to let them take my picture (which allowed me to show off my Bianca Del Rio bitchface), but I also had people look at me and cheer “Not today, Satan!” to which I shouted back “Not today!”

What I also found interesting was the chosen route and how it related to the march. Along the way, we walked past the White House. I could see figures on the roof, no doubt wanting to see if anyone would go too far with the march. People would stop on the march, look out the White House, and chant things like “Shame! Shame! Shame!” The whole way, I could also see notable Washington D.C. monuments like the Washington Memorial, and the Capitol Building, which is where the march ended.

https://twitter.com/carriganak/status/873986709733724161

What I took away from this event (aside from a bit of sunburn) was a perfect blend of social activism, popular culture, meme theory, and historical relevance. I saw men, women, and children from all over the nation marching together for the sake of equality and to fight against a system that would try to install a travel ban and would pull out of the Paris agreement. I saw the use of images used in creative ways and to play with the idea of icons.

But what I mostly felt was proud. I felt like every person I saw with a stitch of rainbow on them was a friend. I felt so comfortable and joyous surrounded by all kinds of people who were so comfortable expressing themselves and using that expression to call for change. I saw gay couples holding hands, I say gay couples walking with their children, I saw people of various races and creeds coming together to make a stand. And through all of that, I felt so much bigger than I am, and it made me want to continue to be a part of this community. It made me want to pay attention to these matters, and it made me want to be willing to get out of my home and do something about these issues.

I really hope to do more with the D.C. gay community in the future, even if it’s just going to a drag show in the city. At the very least, I hope something like this happens again next year, because I would love more time to prepare something fun and exciting for the march.

And if anyone tries to stop me, I’ll just say “Not today, Satan! Not today.”

— Alexander Carrigan, CWW Manager

Pride Month: CWW Manager Alex Carrigan on Washington D.C.’s Equality March I recently moved to the D.C. area for a new job, and one of the things I was most excited about with the area was the opportunity to see and do new things in a large city.

#Alexander Carrigan #Bianca Del Rio #Equal Rights #Equality March 2017 #LGBT+#LGBT+ Rights #RuPaul&039;s Drag Race #Washington D.C.

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