#which I’m also struggling with

[1moreoffkeyanthem]

I have quite a few hang ups with Come Morning Light, the hunger games au I posted one chapter for back in November and have yet to update.

The first and foremost personal challenge is the fact that I, PCE, a certified Angst Wimp, am gonna have to kill off sooooo many of my faves. Like Hunger Games has some dark ass subject matter, kids forced to kill each other. I’m struggling with that, especially with what I have planned for Craig.

Along that same line, it’s gonna be a HUGE cast of characters, which I’ve had difficulty with in the past, it’s one of the reasons I primarily operate in oneshots. I love a good The Gangs All Here fic, but fleshing out 20+ characters is HARD. Bc a fluffy 2k word oneshot of Stan and Kyle in an awkward meet cute where there’s maybe one other character (usually kenny lmfao I’m a creature of habit) is a WHOLE different animal than a multicharacter multichapter. That’s something I had to figure out recently with TWITR, and character introduction held me up a lot in ATLCTS.

Okay this one may seem really inconsequential to a lot of people, but one thing I didn’t think about when developing this concept was the fact that there’s not really away for me to get around Stan eating meat lmao that’s one thing that over my time writing sp fanfiction has become ESSENTIAL to me characterizing that boy. I’ll probably just have him make a comment about how he could never kill animals himself WHICH BRINGS ME TO:

Kyle as our Katniss character. So if you’re familiar with my bs, every time I write Kyle, he’s inherently less angry until it’s called for, he’s very idealistic in his worldview and it takes something actually really pissing him off for him to snap. This is NOT gonna be the case here!!! This boy is ANGRY BY DEFAULT, the worlds out to get him? fuck the world right back! Plus, the entire story is gonna be from his perspective, bc I love writing Kyle, but it’s gonna take all my willpower not to turn him into my usual empathetic to a fault sweet people loving Kys.

Also, I usually tend to leave the adults mostly out of my stuff, but they’re gonna play quite the role in this. We got Garrison as Haymitch, Big Gay Al as Effie, fuckin Mr Slave as Cinna. I’ve never even WRITTEN the three of them. The dynamics gonna be fun tho.

Ofc there’s the problem of it being an adaptation too. There’s a fine line between just replacing hg characters with sp names and copying the plot, as opposed to making it your own. I do have some plot changes planned, but this is an issue I faced with We’re Gonna Sing It Even So, and that almost led me to abandon that fic when I felt like I was just plagiarizing Hadestown.

Also I’m not planning to adapt more than the first book. I reallllly couldn’t handle Kenny taking out Ike with his trap in the third one.

BUT!!! This won’t be abandoned, it’ll just be slow going!!! Ya wanna know the main reason?

Because the first idea I had for CML (other than Kyle volunteering for his little brother) was STAN AND KYLE IN THE FUCKING CAVE SCENES. A major change is that both of them are already deeply down bad, but those scenes??? Yeah no one’s playing for the cameras. I wanna fuck Stan up in the arena so bad lmfao that boy is my original sp whump muse and NATURALLY Kyle taking care of him I love that shit. Girl we gonna GET that prosthetic leg the movies left out (Ship In A Bottle Stan moment, I love that fic btw) as the Style Injury Dealer, I MUST deliver.

So, yeah, if anyone’s down, I’ll eventually pick it back up lmao.

[bookalicent]

yeah so this was insane

[keferon]

*clasps your shoulders gently and looks you straight in the eye*

Keferon. Please read Ninth by Kyn on AO3. I think you would love it very much. It has a large chapter count, but don't be intimidated, it's very easy to get into. It is currently unfinished, but is being updated regularly.

You are the seventh person that recommended this fic to me so ahahahaha yeah

I’m doing great Help I hate some parts of it but I love the other parts I’m spinning in the blender

…..I made the moodboard….

[mammomlette]

People don’t talk about MC needing to wear a magical ring to not accidentally yk cause NATURAL DISASTERS with their powers??? Not only accidentally but without realising???

Diavolo or smthn is asking too much of MC or being a bit too annoying and their other hand slowly drifts towards the ring and they hold onto it while maintaining dead eye contact. Like continue to piss me off hoe I’ll blink and blow a hole in your castle idk

Obv they never do it (or do they?) but the threat is there and it’s a risk dia (or whoever but I’m using dia) can’t take

[sisaloofafump]

I love your Diana so much but Please🥺 give her body hair 🥺

The lack of body hair had been a conscious choice originally because I wanted her skin to seem more like clay than animal (thus all the texture too). However the moment you sent this I went 😳 omg hairy Diana 😳. I am a firm believer in Diana having a lot of body hair in other interpretations, and I’m going to experiment over the next while to see how I can a) better render her skin to be clay-like, and b) see if body hair works.

But in the meantime, have some hairy Diana! ❤️

Version without clothes:

[heyclickadee]

Doodling things

[paperglader]

imogen: *is known to have suicidal tendencies*

Me, as of late, whenever she shows any glimpse of those suicidal tendencies: NO BITCH YOU STOP THAT!! YOU STOP THAT RIGHT NOW!! YOU HAVE TO LIVE MF!! YOU HAVE TO LIVE FOR ME!!

(i love her with my whole entire heart)

[paleode-ology]

number one suffering of all wicked fic writers is deciding which aspects of which canon they want to include in their fics

[myfairkatiecat]

Psychologist really went “yes, adhd is what I would call this. But I don’t believe in labels so I’m just going to not diagnose you so colleges won’t have to know :) you can still come to therapy every week though so I can help you learn to turn your adhd into something good!”

[appropriatelystupid]

this might be an unpopular opinion but i’d rather have a full agnes of westview spinoff than only get more future agatha as a mentor/sidekick to billy and tommy

[gentlebeard]

i miss editing videos :((

[wavesoutbeingtossed]

The whole discourse about the privacy/secrecy/support thing has been sitting with me for a few days (I mean other than it always does to a certain degree) thanks to all the excellent discussion happening and I know I'm not saying anything that hasn't been said a million times before, but I think what we're seeing and what we're going to learn (e.g. from TTPD) is that it wasn't just the support issue, but how it was shown/handled.

We've all gone out of our way to show that introversion =/= lack of support. Someone can be shy, reserved, etc. and still show up for their partner, whether in public or at home. To chalk any of the differences up to the clash between introversion and extroversion is unfair to folks who count themselves among either tbh.

@thisisctrying said something the other day that hit the nail on the head about how if that support had been offered in private, there very well may not have been a Joever to begin with, or at least not at this point in time. (Sorry for loosely paraphrasing, and for namedropping you! Long time listener, first time poster.)

If this were a case where the "shy" partner said, "I am really uncomfortable with the spotlight personally and do not want to court it, but I will support you in your ambitions and offer you whatever you need to make them happen and make the glare bearable," I suspect that would have gone a long way to making Taylor feel seen and comfortable in pursuing her goals in the way that she now has. Again, that might have been more akin to the balance that seemed to have been struck around 2019 from what we can see, but even speaking in a general sense, there are lots of couples out there, celebrity or not, that have similar approaches where there are highly driven people and busy careers involved.

(A famous example being Dolly Parton's marriage. Tbh I know next to nothing about her and Carl, but she's always heralded as an example in this regard, because her husband is famously uncomfortable with the spotlight and hasn't accompanied her to public events in decades, but she's said that she never minded that because that was always work to her, and what was important was that he supported her in pursuing all her career goals and basically ensured she had a place to call home to return to at the end of the day.)

We're kind of in a brave new world with her current relationship because it felt like, at least at the start, we were maybe watching her figure out her boundaries in real time as to what she was comfortable with or not and adjust accordingly. Like so many have said, I fully believe the extreme privacy thing was initially driven by herself and her experiences in 2016, and she needed that quiet time to recover from all of the things and figure out how to exist in the world again.

Stating the obvious, it seemed like eventually privacy was equated with secrecy, turning the relationship and the celebrity into the elephant in the room and something to never be spoken of to the outside world. People are free to choose whatever works best for themselves and their relationships, and for some the separate public lives might work, but the “kept me like a secret but I kept you like an oath” theme is all over her work and it’s clear that it’s a sore spot for her, because she’s been made to feel shame just for the life she leads so many times in the past.

What I’m trying to say is that it’s pretty obvious something Not Great was happening behind the scenes, which didn’t just amount to “she wanted to be a public celebrity and he wanted to be a private hermit.” (Also, in case anyone forgot, this is a person who also chose a public-facing career who also has to engage in press for it, but I digress.) As her career reached new heights post-folklore, if she had the support at home to do all the things without judgment and with encouragement, and in turn offer the same support to her partner, she may have very well lived just fine with that, not unlike Dolly Parton’s case.

By reading between the lines in all the press since, as well as comments on tour and general ~vibes~ with TTPD teasers, it seems like one of the issues was that that was likely not the case. There was all the stuff that we saw — the reticence to acknowledge each other in the media (particularly on one side), the lack of public support even at events at which they were both in attendance for their respective jobs, the great lengths they went to not to be photographed together at events they attended yet no problem taking pictures with other friends and coworkers, the jobs that separated them, the withdrawing from the public even for work accomplishments, etc. Which could all be manageable if a couple chooses to do so together and are not inherently a sign of trouble in themselves.

But what we’re seeing now I think is a reflection of the things we weren’t seeing then, and it seems to indicate some very deep hurt. (I know, call me Captain Obvious.) And like so many have been saying, it feels likely that that part of that hurt is rooted in that very lack of private support where a person would expect it from their partner. Obviously as a Taylor fan blog I’m going to be more inclined to understand her side of a story, but tbh, it’s also because… this is sooooooo common, and something I’ve experienced in my friend group. (@taylortruther is right when she says most breakups are the same one way or another lol.)

One partner is resentful of the other’s success, or resentful that the other’s priorities begin to evolve as new experiences unlock new goals, or feels the other’s ambitions are not worthy of pursuit, and coupled with perhaps their own struggles in the same domain, it’s easy to see where that can chip away at the other partner’s morale and faith in the relationship. I know I’m just speculating here, but I also don’t think it’s totally unfounded. (Again, because a) I’m picking up what she’s putting down and b) it happens to sooooooo many women even among us dull normals.)

With all the pointed mentions about how much Taylor feels supported in her current relationship and how she in turn loves to offer the same show of support to not only her partner but other loved ones, how she’s stepped out more in the last year to a whole host of events, how she’s mentioned feeling like she locked herself away for years and she’s just proud of her partner and happy she can show up for him even if the chaos around it is unsettling, it paints a picture of what perhaps was happening before last year.

To feel like you’re all alone in carrying the weight of the relationship (or burden of it), of twisting yourself into knots to accommodate the other person’s boundaries (or insecurities) but not feeling reciprocity for your own has to be so painful. (The idea that it may have been even darker and to have a partner not only be unreceptive to your own needs but even perhaps resentful/dismissive/belittling of them is even more painful to think of. I guess we’ll find out when TTPD comes out if that was the case, too.)

At a certain point, that lack of acknowledgement will force your hand to be able to reclaim yourself. And it feels like the further removed Taylor in particular is from it, the more she moves from being sad about the life she felt she gave up by leaving, to angry at the life she felt she was giving up by staying. Especially being in a relationship now where it seems like everything comes much easier, where she can be open about the person she’s with and show up for them, all the stuff that seemed as challenging as climbing Mount Everest in her past is nothing more than a molehill at best in her current life.

TL;DR: I don’t think it’s privacy that inherently spells doom for a celebrity relationship like this; it’s the mutual support and respect that does. If Taylor had felt that in the later years of her previous relationship, I think we could be seeing a different, though not necessarily unfulfilled, person right now in 2024, who’d be happy on tour but whose personal life would look a little different. But it seems like by losing that support she lost parts of herself, and we’ve seen her reclaim that in spades in the last year, and perhaps to degrees she didn’t even realize she could from before all the Bad Stuff started happening in her young adulthood.

I know this was extremely long-winded and unnecessary, especially about total strangers we only know through scraps fed through the media, but I just always bristle at this idea that issues like these boil down to “personality differences,” as though one person wants to live in a city and the other on a remote island, or some shit like that. The whole support (and gender tbh) issue is one that’s just very close to my heart because again, I have seen it play out with so many of my friends in long term relationships and marriages and I just think people in relationships (and women in particular in some circles) deserve better than to feel like they’re being, well, tolerated.

[candyheartedchy]

Hoping I’m not dealing with burnout again…

[avantgardechild]

Woah hey,

So I decided to start rewatching fantasy high from freshman year to junior year since the season finished. In Gorgug’s introDUCTION, he talks about breaking his bed and having dreams where he’s angry all the time and in the context of the roleplay, yeah Gorgug is a pubescent barbarian who is struggling with wanting to connect with his biological parents.

But in the context of junior year there’s so much that could be said about this intro scene. Is it typical for all barbarians to go through in this period of their lives or was this the inception of the rage stars? Did Brennan take this bit and run with it for the whole rage god idea, because rage plays such a huge role in so much of early fantasy high if you think about it. So much of adolescence is rage inducing, you’re older than a kid so a lot of things are expected of you but you’re still not an adult, and couple that with the fact that hey remember, the Bad Kids are FOURTEEN in freshman year. They literally work to save the world multiple times.

Anyway, I’m excited for more of this to be revealed/bits to analyze now. Brennan did say that a lot of this was 5 years in the making. I just want to see when he started to build things up and find connections in his own story because we know that it was Emily/Fig’s insistence that Porter was evil that inspired Brennan and not him already being evil. And that’s the wonderful thing about collaborative story telling and role playing, there is some structure required for it to feel like a satisfying story but the players have as much say in this structure as the DM does.

God I love the fantasy high universe.

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

The Teller of Small Fortunes

lighthearted fantasy adventure

follows an immigrant fortune teller who travels between villages telling small fortunes for people

when she runs into a (mostly reformed) thief and an an ex-mercenary searching for his lost daughter, she ends up traveling with them in the hopes she can help, along with a baker they meet along the way,

they encounter various magical creatures and adventurous situations, and eventually she has to face her past

no romance

[wakeupthemembersofbylernation]

All the explicit love triangle imagery on the show (this isn’t even all of the examples):

Bonus: Kaypeace’s brilliant video from 4 years ago

Am I a joke to you?