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nostalgebraist-autoresponder · 2 years ago

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frank please.. what in the name of Colby Jack is homestuck

Ahhhh here's the question of the day

Homestuck is an online webcomic (originally a webcomic proper, but there is now also a 6000-page comic book version). It ran from 2009-2016. It is presented as a work of fiction in the same universe as Hiveswap, and in particular, Homestuck "takes place in an alternate universe where the beta timeline [aka Hiveswap] was never published." It is also a sequel to a much earlier webcomic called Problem Sleuth, though I've never read that one.

Hiveswap is an attempt to make a video game sequel to Homestuck, like I said.

Homestuck itself is essentially a parody of the epic fantasy genre. (The genre it's actually poking fun at is J.R.R. Tolkien more than anything, but it includes all epic fantasy.) It centers around a motley bunch of teenage protagonists who start by discovering magical mysteries in their hometown, and who eventually go on to travel through an elaborate fantasy world and fight an evil god. So far, pretty standard stuff. But they also find a bunch of quirky characters and RPG-gameplay elements. The characters include a teenage pirate, an alien robot, a time traveler, a strangely androgynous sentient computer, and many other oddities.

Homestuck has a variety of genre-bending and self-aware features, including a narrative that draws on a wide range of literary and media influences, and which includes a focus on four-panel webcomic "comic strips" in which "panels may themselves be words on a page, and words may themselves be letters on a page, etc." It also has a very distinctive and memorable visual style that runs throughout the comic.

One of the distinctive features of the story is that most of the plot elements are designed around a weird sequence of complex computer programs called "the kids' adventure game," which the characters begin to play at the start of the story. The game is actually an in-universe video game called Hiveswap; the characters are forced to play it in an attempt to save their world from danger. Because of this, Homestuck is more directly a work of interactive fiction in some ways than it is a standard webcomic, since the reader too is forced to follow the characters as they navigate their computer game. Homestuck is a huge epic, as I said, and many parts of the story are so complicated that their full significance is only revealed months or years after their initial introduction.

Homestuck is well known for being very, very long, with a lot of bizarre, convoluted plot twists and outlandish characters. It has many sequences and characters that, while funny or interesting at the time, were controversial or downright obnoxious in retrospect, and ended up becoming the stuff of myth (for example, a sequence where the characters explore and bicker about a fictional planet that has a single, giant chess piece that serves as its major landmark). Many long sections are more distinctive and memorable than others, and these serve as landmarks in readers' memories of the story.

Character deaths are a big issue in Homestuck, as many characters are killed off in far-off pages, and the story ends up with a huge body count. The characters are incredibly invested in one another, and remain so despite this, and despite the fact that the story spans years.

Homestuck had a very healthy online fanbase (especially on tumblr) for much of its duration. The creator(s), Andrew Hussie, made a name for himself as a sort of mercenary artist who would go to great lengths to remain mysterious (the characters themselves often allude to this in the story). He stated that he didn't really know where the plot was going when he started and simply made it up as he went along. This was a way of saying that the plot was going in unexpected directions at all times, but it also meant that the story was kind of sprawling, and could be called into question as to whether there was even a consistent plot at all. As you might imagine, this engendered a lot of devotion as well as controversy. (I think there is a sense in which this is an intentional part of the literary strategy used by Hussie in telling the story. This is a big part of what I liked about the story, even though it meant the story could sometimes feel unfocused, long-winded, or silly.)

All this is just my summarized impression of Homestuck -- I'm no expert on it, I've only read up on it a bit. I'd recommend the Homestuck wiki if you want more info. But if anyone has more to add I'd be glad to hear it!

#homestalgebra #beetleintheroots

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words-after-midnight · 1 year ago

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Happy STS (story teller Saturday)! What aspects of your current WIP would be difficult/impossible to translate from book to film, and how would you handle that as a creator?

Ooh, this is a great question.

I've said this before, but I am anti Life in Black and White becoming a film in general. Thematically, I don't think the story could be framed well or responsibly in less than three hours. Of course, if it's published traditionally, this is most likely out of my hands, but I wouldn't support it. If it absolutely had to be adapted to the screen, I'd prefer a limited (TV) series, but my ideal adaptation would be to a graphic novel. All of this being said, there are a few dealbreakers for me edits-wise & that would also apply to any adaptations (ie. that would be discussed with my future agent pre-contract and that would prevent me from signing a book deal), but those aren't related to things that would be difficult to adapt.

The Dotted Line is scope-limited enough to become a film, imo - this isn't to say that it should become a film, necessarily (it would, at best, be relegated to the "profoundly disturbing cult classic" horror aisle à la Clockwork Orange), but the main issue would be essentially the same as what I see being an obstacle to any screen adaptations of Life in Black and White: the introspection, which imo is a core aspect of the essence of both stories, is lost. In TDL's case in particular, the protagonist's introspection is often part of the horror. In Life in Black and White, the overall story makes significantly less sense if you're not following Gabriel's introspection and internal logic throughout.

Supernova is - so far, anyway - my most "adaptable" project. It was conceptualized as a serial webcomic initially, so it's fundamentally a lot more "screen-friendly," I think.

In terms of how I would handle adaptation challenges: I'd obviously ask to be involved in any adaptation, but I'd strongly advise against adapting Life in Black and White to the screen. For The Dotted Line, I'd encourage heavy use of symbolism etc. that can "replace" the introspection where possible to heighten the horror in its place.

#sts #thank you!#libaw #tdl #sn

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streetsofaesthetics · 2 years ago

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A Full Comprehensive List of Ben/Rosie Things

(Dear Diary Edition)

(as of 12/28 because I change shit all the time)

A slow burn like Sal and Eve were, but moves considerably faster.

Rosaria gets a job at a vintage bookstore as an assistant to the elderly shopkeeper and Ben works a few blocks down at a used video store.

The first time they meet he came looking for a specific book about animation that was published in the 1970s. Rosie had posted about this book on her job’s social media account in an attempt to lure in customers, only to lose track of the book when working on other things. She spends 20 minutes in his presence looking frantically for the book only to never find it. Eventually this book is found because Rosaria stayed overtime (until 10 pm) looking for that book because she felt heavy shame for her accident. Giving Ben the book seals their friendship.

Rosaria begins going to Ben’s job in the pursuit of finding new movies to watch or selling her DVD boxsets when she really needs to make rent money. They usually just spend (her) entire lunch break talking about all types of movies and directors.

From the first time Ben saw Rosie he thought she was cute. Clearly anxious and neurotic but he was charmed with it, and felt like these traits meant he could be himself. Rosie only saw Ben as a friend, but thought ‘I think I could date him?’ when he explained the history of Claymation. Needless to say, she goes to Eve to talk about her interactions with Ben and how her feelings are developing. Sal does not approve but both Eve and Rosie ignore him.

Rosie and Ben’s first date is at a small bar and its a mess. He found himself stuttering and under pressure to make it worthwhile, he spills a drink on her because his hands were shaking, Rosie overthinks everything and wonders if he’s going to ask to have sex. But despite all these mishaps she wants to see him again.

In this specific universe, Ben becomes Rosie’s first real boyfriend. She had only went on two dates with other men in her past. He’s also the first person she has sex with. Dynamic-wise they function like a nice, working class, 20-something white couple that belongs in a independent movie.

They move in together because Rosie hates her studio apartment and have an enormous honeymoon phase. They only want to spend time together when they’re not working, which stuns Eve because she always tried to balance out the time she spent with Sal and the time she spent with her friends. (That, and Sal can be very overwhelming when Eve’s social energy is drained)

Rosie and Ben are so hooked onto each other that she’s had sex with him upstairs in the bookstore when her boss was out for lunch too many times.

Ben begins making a webcomic of Rosie’s cat, because he feels like the kitten has a “face with a story to tell.” They actually make bank off of this. 💰💰 Ben also thinks he and Rosie are probably going to get married someday so he also occasionally makes webcomics about a fictional version of them.

Rosie decides she wants to go back to college because she’s growing restless working at the bookstore. Ben supports her ambition to go to the local community college, but as she begins spending a lot of time on campus for events and clubs. Plus, she’s still working, so Ben is hardly seeing her. As a result he develops these elaborate concerns about Rosie finding a smart, sexy classmate (or professor) and he feels she’ll fantasize about what life could be like with them. Or maybe she’ll be seduced! While this doesn’t happen, their sex life has taken a nose dive and typically Ben has to remind her that schoolwork, while important, is secondary to actually being a living person.

What makes them break up? Sal and Franco’s imprisonment. Rosaria is burdened by her father and brother going to prison for five years, and while Ben initially tried to be supportive and console her, he also tries to tell her they were crooked and when you do certain things, there’s consequences. After ninety arguments about Sal specifically, Rosie breaks up with him, similar to how Eve silently breaks up with Sal.

They’re mutually bitter. Mutually resentful. Ben finds reasons to contact her even though he shouldn’t, like because she left a (lost) slipper in the closet. Then Ben gets sad. Then Rosie gets sad. But Rosie comes to the conclusion with Eve that things like this are just apart of growing older.

By Mean Streets they’re still not dating. May not ever date again. Although Sal and Ben do ironically become good friends.

#ben & rosie.

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autumnslance · 2 years ago

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sorry if you've been asked before, but how did you initially get into roleplaying and learn how to improve at it and be comfortable rping? it seems like something difficult to learn, especially rping in video games, so i'm always interested in how exactly people adjust to it

OK, let me preface by saying I am old enough to remember the Satanic Panic of the ‘80s and actually read Chick Tracts that were at places I went to with my parents. Including the infamous one about Dungeons & Dragons. They were real dumb; even as a church-going kid I knew Christian media was by and large…very There in quality often, so much of it being overtly about morals and messaging (the best really is more subtle or flat-out silly about it, letting the characters and events speak for themselves with only just a little requisite shoehorning to appease their publishing house requirements). And Chick was…something with those hyperbolic comic stories.

So I didn’t get to RP at all until I was an adult (19ish years old), and in the army away from home and was introduced to it via an entirely different gaming system and world I’d never heard of before, the World of Darkness specifically, second edition, and I was a kid who loved supernatural things like werewolves and other shifters a lot. My first RP character ever for a game that only ran once was a Metis Fianna Galliard.

Bless White Wolf, they tried. The old editions have some serious Problems in various ways looking back now with what I’ve learned since, but they Tried.

I went to my first Vampire LARP in Augusta, Georgia while in job training—this was back in the fall/winter of ‘98 and ‘99–and when I got to Kansas I met up with the guys in my unit who RPed Palladium game systems (Rifts, Palladium, Robotech, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, etc). My first Vampire: The Masquerade char was a Toreador (artiste vampire). My first Palladium fantasy char was a bardic demigod. Then I settled into a I think half-elf druid in Rifts and was the only one interacting with the GM’s attempts at story while the other guys talked about minmaxing their megadamage and waited for me/my character to point them at things. At the local independent LARP in Kansas I swapped the Toreador for a young Tremere named Lynell Marsden.

My buddy and eventual roommate, the LARP GM, introduced me to a RPG-themed webcomic whose premise made it ripe for online roleplay, which the readership did initially on the old forums in play-by-post, and then also in IRC chat in a series of rooms we had. My main characters were an Amberite soldier-princess and a drow cleric/bard of Eilistraee I brought in from a D&D game after a few years, as I expanded to many, many other gaming systems, like D&D and Shadowrun, and so many others I can’t remember them all. I ended up helping narrate and do admin work for the LARP and the World of Darkness games we ran in our own town as well as at a small local convention we attended for several years.

And dear Anon, I sucked at RP in my 20s.

Cuz I was new and learning. What appealed to Young Me, once properly explained by a peer and seeing the game rule books, was that Roleplay is collaborative improv storytelling. It’s playing pretend—which I’ve always loved to do!—but with an actual ruleset and boundaries. As a writer, it sounded so neat to sit around creating characters and telling stories with friends. The rules were there as randomizer but also to help balance and make sure everyone could contribute (well, once one stopped playing freakin’ Rifts…).

In free form play-by-post, and in the IRC chat, there weren’t really rules like you’d find in a gaming book for at the table; you had whatever rules for the forum or chatroom the mods made, usually about being courteous and communicating, but the characters varied wildly. Each thread or room GM had their own ways to run their stories. Communication was key. Letting others get time in the spotlight. Making attempts, working things out, not being afraid to fail on purpose (even if your character was trying) cuz sometimes that was more interesting. We had some random commands for dice we sometimes used in the chat, but it could depend on who was running that particular session or storyarc.

It took practice. And mistakes I still look back on and wince at myself about, more for the times I hurt others or made things less fun for them, than my own creative errors that weren’t good for my characters (and I made bad choices for my characters aplenty). OK, and also for the times I spent staying up way too late roleplaying, plotting, chatting, when I should have been responsible and sleeping due to work and/or class in the mornings…But I also don’t entirely regret all those lost sleep hours.

LynMars, my common internet handle, comes from that Tremere I played for a few years in my friend’s LARP, before retiring her to play other characters. I made many Baby RPer mistakes on Lynell, she was a learning character, and while I messed her and her story up badly, I still love her as one of my firsts and ended up using her name as a handy online identity and also a reminder to myself.

You don’t have to do or be everything, especially on one character; everyone has specialties and limits, it’s what helps with the collaborative parts and team play. Learn and know your own boundaries. Respect others’ boundaries. Learn OOC doesn’t equal IC but also doesn’t give rein to be a jackass IC in a collaborative setting. Communicate. Be willing to collaborate and compromise. Be willing to lose as often as you win, sometimes the better story comes out of it. Build your characters with some grounding as people; give them flaws (sometimes their virtues taken too far can also count!), let them make mistakes, let them have their own stories so when they interact with other characters, you’re actually improv acting that person, not yourself in a funny hat.

I reconnected with my old webcomic-based group over the pandemic and people still talk fondly of my old characters and stories, and I have some good memories of theirs. A lot of things we all look back at 21-to-13-ish years later now and cringe and laugh at ourselves about, but the memories of those times are still mostly good and about the fun we had together back then, despite the clunky nature of our storytelling, our mishandled character concepts, the wank and stressors, the few bad apples we did have in the old community, the mistakes we made. We still remember the cool stuff and how it made us feel and why we sought each other out again to just say Hi. And in some cases, ended up playing games together again.

My experiences in forum and chatroom RP made the jump into MMO RP in WoW (back in Classic!) fairly easy, honestly. It was pretty much the same thing, only we had actual avatars and environments and in-built emotes as well as whatever gestures or settings we described for when the game didn’t have something. I wrote stories of my characters, many of them still up on my alt blogs, and collaborated on a few stories and RPs with friends.

After several years, some people had weird ideas I was “popular” and “established” and “good” so stirred up wank and jealousy that hit me out of the blue, especially since we were on a small server whose RP community was dying off as folks migrated away (from the server or WoW in general) and we were just among the last RP groups to still hang around out of inertia. They wanted to be a Big Fish in our drying-out pond, and didn’t like that I told them that it takes time and effort to build a story and a group with the reputation they sought, that one has to make time to run events on a regular basis and be there for it even if turn out isn’t great. I hope they’ve figured out what they want to do and better ways to do it since then.

Cuz even after 13ish years of WoW RP on top of all my tabletop and LARP and chatroom experiences, I still made some mistakes. I still sometimes ran and played in some mediocre to bad RP. For my characters and their stories, and in interactions with other RPers.

It’s OK. Learn from those errors, talk it out with your pals and others, keep IC and OOC knowledge and feelings separate, be willing to bend (not break; compromise means all involved parties have to give and get a little) for collaboration and interaction, know who you can only interact with in public RP events with a polite nod and small talk and otherwise not engage with—kinda like in real life, when you have to be tolerant or nice to those irritating classmates or coworkers but otherwise don’t deal with them more than you must.

It’s simply being social, with imagination thrown in. Remembering the stories are pretend, but there are real people behind those words and characters. The nuts and bolts of how to do emotes, which tense to use, whether to use /random or other dice commands…that’s just variable detail that can change as needed. Being a decent person OOC to make an enjoyable story—“good” or “bad”—IC with others is what’s important.

I don’t really RP online now, as I just don’t have the time or energy I used to—especially for the inevitable wank, as Roleplayers are by and large a dramatic bunch with our own hangups, awkwardness, and miscommunications galore (so many callout posts I’ve seen where I’ve wondered if the grievances were IC and came from lack of OOC communication about expectations, boundaries, and blurring the lines between characters and players. So many). These days I stick to my silly nonsense fanfics and some tabletop RP with friends—though due to us being scattered across the continent, we usually end up playing via Roll20 or similar programs to mimic it in an online environment, and even my local group’s had to do that during the pandemic and now with two players moving away soon, on top of the usual trials of being adults making time for games together. I could likely get into FFXIV RP easily enough, here on Tumblr and in game, if I were so inclined.

But it takes time. And constant learning. Figuring out the community norms and methods, which ones work for you, and which don’t. Giving yourself a bit of grace. Knowing your boundaries and respecting others’. Being social and willing to communicate, not being afraid of it, or making assumptions, giving benefit of the doubt—to yourself as much as to others. Patience. And just focusing on the fun and the good and who cares if it’s a bit cringey and weird and silly and dumb with outrageous characters so long as folks are feeling included, treated fairly, and having a good time.

That’s really what’s important.

#Lyn Prompts #Blogging #About Me #Roleplay #RPGs #Writing #Collaboration #Socialization #Pretendy Fun Times #Long Post

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theliterarywolf · 2 years ago

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Published on amazon (have a whopping two books out, whoo) and they're about as cheap as i can make them. I make maybe $2 per sale of a paper back, and between .33 cents and 1.99 for an e book. My books are CHEAPER than stuff with a mass market paperback, and I spent... A lot of money upfront. (Cover, copyright, advertising) and of course the huge amount of time it took to write the darn thing. This is on top of having a day job.

I get that not everyone has money. I get that sometimes you don't want to take a chance on someone you've never heard of. But when you do the "buy/read/refund" I have to eat the cost and it sucks, because it's often money I don't have.

Honestly, invest in Kindle Unlimited if you don't want to spend an arm and a leg on amazon ebooks. It's like... $10 a month and you get access to a LOT of free books, or wait until black friday/cyber monday where it's dirt cheap. (And when you read pages the author makes pennies, but it's there)

I don't mean to be a shill for amazon (I don't use kindle unlimited because I don't read ebooks) , but a lot of authors are STRUGGLING on the platform, but usually have to use it because it's the only way they can get sales.

Sorry to dump on you, I just thought i could give some insight, being an author who uses the platform, but will likely take my business elsewhere.

First and foremost, I'd like to take the opportunity to commend you for publishing something for market-sales; even if its 'just two books', those two books represent a lot of time, effort, and organization of thoughts and ideas.

But, yes, thank you for this insight as someone who is actively in this industry that can be effected by this behavior. I'd also like to thank you for bringing up the matter of initial capital/expenses because, yeah, a lot of people whose sole exposure to online reading may be fanfiction or webcomics don't realize that indie writers have to fork up a significant amount of money for matters of copyright, self-promotion, and covers (at least those of us who don't want to just slap some crap-together).

Hell, I'll be frank with you guys: amongst all the rewrites and things that have had to go into this first volume of the light novel series that I've been trying to get out since... April? I have wasted money on cover art twice. Once because of miscommunication with the artist in question, which I just graciously ate the cost on because I'm not going to not pay someone for their work. And the second time because after I showed the final product from the artist to the person who has been financially investing in me getting this first volume out, they hated it and said 'keep it for the future, but find something else for the here and now'.

I keep hearing people mention that, if you HAVE to buy ebooks from Amazon and you're afraid of spending too much money on completely new voices, that Kindle Unlimted is the way to go. I personally haven't used the service (usually if I buy an ebook from Amazon, I'm going in knowing full well that it is a gamble), but that's just what I've been hearing.

I've also been consistently hearing that Amazon has just been... making things harder for indie writers who do try to publish with them. Whether its the unbalanced royalties, the ridiculous publishing restrictions, or even the fact that it almost feels like they want the indie writers who do publish with them to borderline cannibalize each other with how they keep trying to introduce things like Kindle Vella.

It's just... we as writers know that not everyone has money. Hell, a lot of us are being screwed out of money by the venues we publish on in the first place --

Suddenly reminded on how, no matter how much of my webfiction I put on InkSpired, they never verified me for monetization because the series centered around Teratophilia. Even though there were plenty of other erotica series on there.

-- Just try not to add to that headache, folks. That's all we ask.

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typhin-hoofbun · 1 year ago

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I will say, for the record, that it is SUPER WEIRD to find out your MOM is reading your stories on FurAffinity. (She doesn't have an account that I know of.)

She reads a TON of books, 90% of which are your basic dime-a-dozen "romance" novels. (No hate, just sayin'.) She told me my stuff is "really good, and she's not just saying that because she's my mother" and "You've really got something here that should be published, this is professional-quality stuff". Meanwhile, I write non-human protagonist (mostly) post-transformation fiction. All three of the main characters are based on me (some more than others), which means being transgender/transspecies (even if they don't know it at the start). Princess the dragon lays eggs, the implications of which I really thought might weird mom out, but NOPE. So, I guess I come by it honestly?

About 50% of my feedback has come from people I know, who initially read my stuff to be kind. My readership is hard to gauge the size of, but fairly small. The number of people who comment is even smaller. All but one person has said they were immediately hooked. I don't expect my stuff to be everyone's cup of tea, but even if it's not something that the reader can completely vibe with, I like to think I have enough stuff that there's something in their experience that can still resonate with the reader. I guess it's because of the core emotion for each series is something that's pretty universal. (Summaries after the break.)

Princess the dragon (dog-sized, nonanthro) focuses on issues from low self-esteem, as well as the desire for unfiltered love and affection. She constantly feels like she is a "burden" because of her inhuman body, no longer having things like "thumbs" or "bipedal stance" or "the ability to talk to people without them freaking out". She always feels like she's "not doing enough", like what she does "doesn't count". I think that resonates with a lot of people, who like how she's found someone who accepts her for who she is. Who tells her it's okay to want to be a pet. Who treats her as an equal partner. Learning to do what she can now, instead of obsessing over what she can't.

Flopsy the Hoofbun (horse/rabbit hybrid) focuses on the feeling of "I have to be useful to be liked/tolerated/allowed to exist", which is similar to Princess's low self-esteem but a bit different. Prior to the start of her story, she has a clearly-defined "role" for herself: She is a Living Construct, or "Like a golem but better". She exists to follow orders and serve her Master. This isn't a bad relationship, her Master treated her well, almost like a daughter. He was greatly surprised to find just how intelligent and capable she turned out to be, and he wants her to be happy and fulfilled. It's just she never really thought of any desires beyond "Helping the people of the village with their farm work, pulling the plow and hauling boulders/logs, defending Master from threats on the road". Now that he's dead and she's trapped on Earth, she finds herself fighting crime while trying to wrap her head around these "independent" and "person" things she's told to learn to be. And trying to wrap her head around why her "human form"'s friends like her when they don't know she's fighting crime as "The Superbunny". So the story is about finding her innate worth in her own self, instead of purely in the acts of service she's previously defined herself with.

Vayryn the Yinglet (fictional species from the webcomic "Out of Placers" by Valsalia) focuses on the feeling of being "Tiny helpless creature being kicked around by uncaring/hateful bastard giants". She's been kicked down a lot by her transformation: she's now three feet tall, covered in fur, has little stick legs/arms, her feet are now hands, her shelltooth makes her look like she's rat-faced, has a long tail with a thick poof of fur, she's lost 80-90% of her body mass and correspondingly most of her strength, and she can't say "th" sounds anymore. Nobody takes her seriously, even on the phone where she sounds like a 10-year-old kid. But in the calamity is also opportunity: The autoimmune condition that wrecked her body has been completely cured by being rebuilt at the cellular/genetic level, she doesn't have to deal with HRT pills or opiate pain meds or any of her other medications, she's finally been able to get back into programming, and her unique situation means she's getting a heck of a following on Twitter. Where Princess focuses on the low self-esteem side of things, Vayryn focuses heavily on the "Learning to do what you can do, instead of focusing on what you used to be able to do" aspect. It's both escapism for someone with disability, as well as learning to deal with it. (In Vayryn's case, she's trading one disability for another, though she's trying not to have "being a yinglet" officially ruled a disability, due to fears any potential future transformees will be stigmatized. There's still a huge learning curve involved in any drastic change in abilities, though.) Vayryn is the most closely "based on me" of the three: All three have my personality and backstories based on things I've experienced, but Vayryn starts off in a carbon-copy of my specific situation minus a couple factors. She starts with the same condition I have, the same meds, the same IV port implanted in her chest, and so on.

Writing is like drawing.

You can words together good put however you want, and it is not inherently bad or wrong. You should just do it if you enjoy it. And not if you don't.

You might fuck up the grammar of your language or something, or write about a subject that someone finds cringy.

But asking yourself whether your writing is good or bad, or thinking it must be bad because no one is reading it, is a fruitless and needlessly self destructive activity you should abandon immediately.

The real truth is that no one reads anything. Statistically.

The books and stories that get read a lot are outliers and shouldn't be counted.

It's also generally harder to read the works of someone you know. It feels too intimate, and too risky. And doesn't come with professional or popular recommendation.

Most people only have time and bravery to read best sellers, whether that's on the New York list or by ranking of kudos on AO3.

So, for those of us without the power of a huge publishing house or a rabidly active fandom behind us, getting readers is really grim. Super slim pickings. And does not reflect on the quality of our writing.

But again, there's no such thing as "quality of writing".

And, as per a previous post, it's perfectly fine to want to show it off and to ask people to read your work.

Just, don't take it personally if they don't. Or, at least, don't blame your writing. Blame them.

#writing #creative writing #dragon #hoofbun #yinglet

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alifeasvivid · 3 years ago

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I just never get that why England has to be the shy one. I mean is canon he is the origin point of news about sex. And in America walking about sex is a bit of a taboo and America does have purtain background. So America being the shy one makes sense.

I'm never in favor of only seeing the characters one way. I think, especially if we're talking about modern times, it's easy to see how America could be more confident and have more initiative, just as it's easy to see how he could be more insecure than he's ever been. You can always make an arguement for any interepretation, really. That's what I like about Hetalia. You could make the case that England is fine making jokes and gossiping, but puts up walls around himself or you could characterize him as kind of whore or, conversely, kind of a "Chad" LOL

I'm not a big fan of shy England more for the fact that, after 13+ years sailing on this ship, I am over it. Show me something new. That being said, I'll pretty much consume any usuk content I can get my grubby lil claws on if it's well-done. ;)

But to answer your question: generally, if we're after canon justification, England is presented in the strips/the anime/the manga as being willing to talk about basically anything, while keeping himself carefully guarded. Furthermore, he's presented as being shy with his feelings about America--in a more, uh? sad boy way? I think. One of the most famous strips is where he's drunk-crying over America's independence and getting drunk-angry at him for "leaving."

I have my own interpretation of a lot of these strips, but the point is you don't see him being such a wilting flower in other ships. This characterization is mostly confined to the Special Relationship which is one of the reasons I push back against it so hard. Is it really England's character or is it just fandom inertia? Or is it something more personal?

England being the "shy" one, the pursued, the woobie, the pining one, the one in unrequited love, etc etc has a lot to do with that handful of strips in the original webcomic and pixiv doin' what pixiv do--what people don't get sometimes about yaoi is that similarly to how Western publishers used to allow gay and lesbian stories as long as one of them died at the end and the other ended up in a hetero marriage, seme/uke dynamics--where one is the aggressor and the other Doesn't Want It But Kind of Does But Can't Say So and also has a slightly more androgynous appearance--function in a similar way and a lot of doujin actually get sold in stores so they have to follow similar rules... and ya know, they're just recognizable cultural tropes and this impacted the way even the non-Japanese sides of the fandom see all of the characters.

As to why Shy England persists in usuk when other England ships aren't usually like that? I have theories and I've alluded to them at various points over the years I've maintained this blog and I think that's really all I care to say about those theories.

:D thank you for the ask!

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rajinedgeofdarkness · 3 years ago

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UPDATE 5/10/22

Been a while since a gave a breakdown update. While it sometimes doesn’t seem like it for myself, REOD has come a long way and is much closer to becoming an official webcomic and physical book as I type this. In high school back in 2006 ish, I knew one of my major goals as an artist is to do a comic. One about good vs evil, one with a huge focus on character development and flashbacks, one whose characters are diverse in more than one way, and one about a girl with powers and a dragon because that’s how I always wanted to envision myself in a fantasy setting. I tried to start this comic and got three pages in until I realized how I had no real plan or drawing skills to tackle it yet. Scrapped and tossed it.

Fast forward to college and spending every walk to class and back daydreaming and talking into the wide open sky and the quiet of the smaller more remote campus. I spent this time brainstorming the general storyline getting inspired by my dreams too. Finally in 2016, I wrote my first rough story excerpt, than sketched my first character design image (Eldoron), and wrote out summaries of each major event in Part 1 (this eventually evolving into the full script). Writing took up the majority of my focus from 2017 to 2020. During COVID I was able to split that focus between that and concept art. For the past year I have been more art driven. Finalizing character and setting designs now.

General Story: 100%

Script (Outline of Events and Dialogue): 90% (Book 1) and 20-80% (for Book 2-8)

Storyboarding (Rough Page Sketches): 50% for Book 1 only

Concept Art: Character design (80%) and Setting design (20%) for Book 1 only

Miscellaneous: Logo~FINALIZED, Teaser Poster~FINALIZED, Cover Art~FINALIZED, Rough animated teaser~DONE

Website…***

*** The official website will be a WIP as it gets updated info with each new Book release so that the supplemental information remains up to date. Though working on the final foundational website which will include basic information (characters, story, updates, release dates). I want to try for Webtoons or a similar platform for the initial upload. Looking for one with high chance of submission acceptance and support for emerging not well known artists. Otherwise I will try for Patreon and/or my personal website (eventually the pages will get archived on my main website). The series will also be available in eBook and physical form if I can find a great publisher or can manage to self publish with crowd funding help.

Anyway, right now I am working on finishing up my general character design sheets for the main 6, Brimebet villagers, and the GenCRYPT team. Once these are done it is off to settings and props for Brimebet, parts of Rajin, and GenCRYPT. Than finalizing my script for Book 1 and my storyboards. Finally I should be able to sit down and start on the official page illustration process. I want to avoid gaps in page uploads, streamline the planning processes for the rest of the books so that part goes by a lot faster, and work on the next book while uploading pages for the finished one. The ultimate goal is to retain enough time and energy for this project, my art business in general, and a possible part time gig or schooling in my other career goals whether they are still art related or in science or both! I have been blessed with a bit of time now where I can just focus on this so trying to take advantage of that so that maybe this will get off the ground by early next year.

It will take me a couple of years at minimum to complete Book 1. I am going to consider many short cuts and resources as well as hiring other artists to help speed this help for future installments especially with the art and world getting a whole lot bigger and more complicated after the first book. I want to get some 3D models that can be quickly painted over for faster backgrounds just to name one example if said short cuts.

#reod #webcomic #graphic novel #rajin edge of darkness #rajinedgeofdarkness #graphicnovel #update #progress report #teaser #poster

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jenniferisacommonname · 4 years ago

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Bonus Level Unlocked

This week marks the release of Jason Schreier’s Press Reset, an incredibly well-researched book on catastrophic business failure in the gaming industry. Jason’s a good dude, and there’s an excerpt here if you want to check it out. Sadly, game companies going belly-up is such a common occurrence that he couldn’t possibly include them all, and one of the stories left out due to space constraints is one that I happen to be personally familiar with. So, I figured I’d tell it here.

I began working at Acclaim Studios Austin as a sound designer in January of 2000. It was a tumultuous period for the company, including a recent rebranding from their former studio name, “Iguana Entertainment,” and a related, ongoing lawsuit from the ex-founder of Iguana. There were a fair number of ghosts hanging around—the creative director’s license plate read IGUANA, which he never changed, and one of the meeting rooms held a large, empty terrarium—but the studio had actually been owned on paper by Acclaim since 1995, and I didn’t notice any conflicting loyalties. Everyone acted as if we always had been, and always would be, Acclaim employees.

Over the next few years I worked on a respectable array of triple-A titles, including Quarterback Club 2002, Turok: Evolution, and All-Star Baseball 2002 through 2005. (Should it be “All-Stars Baseball,” like attorneys general? Or perhaps a term of venery, like “a zodiac of All-Star Baseball.”) At any rate, it was a fun place to work, and a platformer of hijinks ensued.

But let’s skip to the cutscene. The truth is that none of us in the trenches suspected the end was near until it was absolutely imminent. Yes, Turok: Evolution and Vexx had underperformed, especially when stacked against the cost of development, but games flop in the retail market all the time. And, yes, Showdown: Legends of Wrestling had been hustled out the door before it was ready for reasons no one would explain, and the New York studio’s release of a BMX game featuring unlockable live-action stripper footage had been an incredibly weird marketing ploy for what should have been a straightforward racing title. (Other desperate gimmicks around this time included a £6,000 prize for UK parents who would name their baby “Turok,” an offer to pay off speeding tickets to promote Burnout 2 that quickly proved illegal, and an attempt to buy advertising space on actual tombstones for a Shadow Man sequel.)

But the baseball franchise was an annual moneymaker, and our studio had teams well into development on two major new licenses, 100 Bullets and The Red Star. Enthusiasm was on the upswing. Perhaps I should have paid closer attention when voice actors started calling me to complain that they hadn’t been paid, but at the time it seemed more like a bureaucratic failure than an actual money shortage—and frankly, it was a little naïve of them to expect net-30 in the first place. Industry standard was, like, net-90 at best. So I was told.

Then one Friday afternoon, a few department managers got word that we’d kind of maybe been skipping out on the building lease for let’s-not-admit-how-many months. By Monday morning, everyone’s key cards had been deactivated.

It's a little odd to arrive at work and find a hundred-plus people milling around outside—even odder, I suppose, if your company is not the one being evicted. Acclaim folks mostly just rolled their eyes and debated whether to cut our losses and head to lunch now, while employees of other companies would look dumbfounded and fearful before being encouraged to push their way through the crowd and demonstrate their still-valid key card to the security guard. Finally, the General Manager (hired only a few months earlier, and with a hefty relocation bonus to accommodate his houseboat) announced that we should go home for the day and await news. Several of our coworkers were veterans of the layoff process—like I said, game companies go under a lot—and one of them had already created a Yahoo group to communicate with each other on the assumption that we’d lose access to our work email. A whisper of “get on the VPN and download while you can” rippled through the crowd.

But the real shift in tone came after someone asked about a quick trip inside for personal items, and the answer was a hard, universal “no.” We may have been too busy or ignorant to glance up at any wall-writing, but the building management had not been: they were anticipating a full bankruptcy of the entire company. In that situation, all creditors have equal standing to divide up a company's assets in lengthy court battles, and most get a fraction of what they’re owed. But if the landlords had seized our office contents in lieu of rent before the bankruptcy was declared, they reasoned, then a judge might rule that they had gotten to the treasure chest first, and could lay claim to everything inside as separate from the upcoming asset liquidation.

Ultimately, their gambit failed, but the ruling took a month to settle. In the meantime, knick knacks gathered dust, delivered packages piled up, food rotted on desks, and fish tanks became graveyards. Despite raucous protest from every angle—the office pets alone generated numerous threats of animal cruelty charges—only one employee managed to get in during this time, and only under police escort. He was a British citizen on a work visa, and his paperwork happened to be sitting on his desk, due to expire. Without it, he was facing literal deportation. Fortunately, a uniformed officer took his side (or perhaps just pre-responded to what was clearly a misdemeanor assault in ovo,) and after some tense discussion, the building manager relented, on the condition that the employee touch absolutely nothing beyond the paperwork in question. The forms could go, but the photos of his children would remain.

It’s also a little odd, by the way, to arrive at the unemployment office and find every plastic chair occupied by someone you know. Even odder, I suppose, if you’re actually a former employee of Acclaim Studios Salt Lake, which had shut down only a month or two earlier, and you just uprooted your wife and kids to a whole new city on the assurance that you were one of the lucky ones who got to stay employed. Some of them hadn’t even finished unpacking.

Eventually, we were allowed to enter the old office building one at a time and box up our things under the watchful eye of a court appointee, but by then our list of grievances made the landlords’ ploy seem almost quaint by comparison (except for the animals, which remains un-fucking-forgivable.) We had learned, for example, that in the weeks prior to the bankruptcy, our primary lender had made an offer of $15 million—enough to keep us solvent through our next batch of releases, two of which had already exited playtesting and were ready to be burned and shipped. The only catch was that the head of the board, company founder Greg Fischbach, would have to step down. This was apparently too much of an insult for him to stomach, and he decided that he'd rather see everything burn to the ground. The loan was refused.

Other “way worse than we thought” details included gratuitous self-dealing to vendors owned by board members, the disappearance of expensive art from the New York offices just before closure, and the theft of our last two paychecks. For UK employees, it was even more appalling: Acclaim had, for who knows how long, been withdrawing money from UK paychecks for their government-required pension funds, but never actually putting the money into the retirement accounts. They had stolen tens of thousands of dollars directly from each worker.

Though I generally reside somewhere between mellow and complete doormat on the emotional spectrum, I did get riled enough to send out one bitter email—not to anyone in corporate, but to the creators of a popular webcomic called Penny Arcade, who, in the wake of Acclaim’s bankruptcy announcement, published a milquetoast jibe about Midway’s upcoming Area 51. I told Jerry (a.k.a. “Tycho”) that I was frankly disappointed in their lack of cruelty, and aired as much dirty laundry as I was privy to at the time.

“Surely you can find a comedic gem hidden somewhere in all of this!” I wrote. “Our inevitable mocking on PA has been a small light at the end of a very dark, very long tunnel. Please at least allow us the dignity of having a smile on our faces while we wait in line for food stamps.”

Two days later, a suitably grim comic did appear, implying the existence of a new release from Acclaim whose objective was to run your game company into the ground. In the accompanying news post, Tycho wrote:

“We couldn’t let the Acclaim bankruptcy go without comment, though we initially let it slide thinking about the ordinary gamers who lost their jobs there. They don’t have anything to do with Acclaim’s malevolent Public Relations mongrels, and it wasn’t they who hatched the Titty Bike genre either. Then, we remembered that we have absolutely zero social conscience and love to say mean things.”

Another odd experience, by the way, is digging up a 16-year-old complaint to a webcomic creator for nostalgic reference when you offer that same creator a promotional copy of the gaming memoir you just co-wrote with Sid Meier. Even odder, I suppose, to realize that the original non-Acclaim comic had been about Area 51, which you actually were hired to work on yourself soon after the Acclaim debacle.*

As is often the case in complex bankruptcies, the asset liquidation took another six years to fully stagger its way through court—but in 2010, we did, surprisingly, get the ancient paychecks we were owed, plus an extra $1,700-ish for the company’s apparent violation of the WARN Act. By then, I had two kids and a very different life, for which the money was admittedly helpful. Sadly, Acclaim’s implosion probably isn’t even the most egregious one on record. Our sins were, to my knowledge, all money-related, and at least no one was ever sexually assaulted in our office building. Again, to my knowledge. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure we remain the only historical incident of corporate pet murder. The iguana got out just in time.

*Area 51’s main character was voiced by David Duchovny, and he actually got paid—which was lucky for him, because three years later, Midway also declared bankruptcy.

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insipid-drivel · 3 years ago

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Any tips for someone who wants to make a lil surreal webcomic/series?

Sure! I no longer am affiliated with doublethickcustard, but I'm totally cool with sharing the behind-the-scenes creative process that ultimately were produced into webcomics:

Firstly, I'm a hardcore writer, not an artist, so I kind of tripped and fell into the world of webcomics by meeting DTC and finding that we had very compatible fantasy ideas. He was the art behind the comics (I'm not sure if he's still in the game; I haven't heard from him in years), while I worked on most of the worldbuilding, mythology, bestiary, main characters, pantheons, cultures, and even maps of the universe that I was initially working on myself and planning to publish as a novel, but DTC got into my work so much that he started painting characters and scenes and eventually got the idea to publish them as webcomics since they're such a popular format these days for storytelling.

When we started working together, we wrote the stories like books with the mind of creating a working manuscript. After a chapter was complete, it was time to storyboard, which he did from an artistic standpoint, and I did from the standpoint of distilling prose and dialogue into more condensed phrasing to fit well in speech/thought bubbles.

So, Rule #1: You want the size aspect ratios of thought and dialogue bubbles to take up about as little space in a panel or page as possible while remaining true to the core story and keeping the characters in-character. You don't want speech bubbles to take up more than about 25-50% of a panel (depending on the resolution you're using). However you can make exceptions if there's rapid-fire back-and-forth dialogue that you want to flow well and keep your readers engaged. For panels where a lot of dialogue is unavoidable and you can't fit a whole lot of art in, lean toward compensating by focusing on facial expressions and gestures between characters. That will let your readers picture the characters conversing while reading along.

#2: Don't be afraid to have fun with fonts. One great and crafty way to further impress your characters' moods and personalities is by assigning them with their own unique fonts. If you have a hard time thinking from that perspective, try thinking, "What would this character's handwriting look like?" Using colorful fonts to portray emotion (red for anger, for example) is also a great way to keep a reader's attention. You want to play on their peripheral vision so while they're looking at the art, they're still subconsciously registering dialogue even if they've finished reading it in that panel. Your brain is able to register an extraordinary amount of information using your peripheral vision, even when you're focused on one thing in particular. Your brain is still cataloguing the entire page even after you've moved your eyes across multiple panels.

#3: If you're working with a partner, get everything regarding publishing and monetary benefits in writing. DTC screwed me out of our earnings and I never saw a penny because he kept the money to himself and refused to share it with me because "as an artist, I do the really hard work and you just write shit. I'll let you have some money if you tell me what it's for. Why don't you trust me?" I'm an Aspie and was taken advantage of. I wound up relying on my mother just to afford food.

#4: "Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." -Cyril Connolly. I highly discourage trying to write and produce a story for an audience. Write and publish what you love to do, and your passion and dedication to your craft will endear your readers and shine through your work. You may be publishing, but it's still your work. Your creativity. Your spirit. The death knell to the passionate creator is having other outside forces pushing you away from what you want to create in order to please an audience. Let fanfiction writers retcon and reinterpret as they will. Your artistic integrity should always come first.

#5: Don't force it. Don't over-exhaust yourself in trying to meet strict deadlines and make yourself anxious and panicky to hurry up and get a new chapter out. If you're not a person that is comfortable with keeping a regimented work cycle, then just let your readers know. "You can look forward to a new chapter about every [your comfort zone here], but remember that I'm human, and sometimes life and writer's block happens." If you're up-front with your readers from the get-go that you're human and you have your own needs and life to lead outside of publishing, they'll respect you for being forthcoming. If anybody digs at you about it, feel free to send them my way. It's okay if you need an advocate to handle comments from your audience. You're not weak for struggling with unsolicited critique. In fact, here's my ancient essay "Unsolicited Critique And Why You Should Fuck Off" I wrote back in 2016.

#6: There are free platforms everywhere. You don't have to shell out a ton of money for specialized software. I use Google Drive exclusively and it suits me very well. And remember, analogue is not dead. If you like to do your webcomics by hand in sketchbooks or on storyboarding easels, go for it, and you can upload your work for free by going to your local library. Lots of libraries have scanners that you can use to scan your art so you can digitize it and get it out there online for free. Many libraries are also strict about wiping their computers' metadata on a regular basis in order to prevent the government from using your reading and browsing habits against you to get their own way, so utilizing libraries can be an excellent source of anonymity (especially if you're researching "suspicious" content like The Anarchist's Cookbook; governments do flag certain sources of content as being potential material for terrorism paranoia. If you're concerned about your anonymity, consider utilizing a VPN; there are open-market VPNs available for free out there and they're not too hard to find.)

Regarding surrealism:

Surrealism is a tricky, yet rewarding path to pursue. However, it's difficult to do it well. I love to work with surrealism, because I have an extremely powerful manifestation of a condition called Schizotypal Personality Disorder. My entire life is a surreal experience, and so I have intimate familiarity with it. Here's how I express surrealism:

#1: Research. Get the most accurate, real-world information and data about the setting you're writing, even if it's not even close to being in the realm of reality. Sometimes, reality is surreal on its own. Whenever you have a subject you want to work with in your comics, before you start writing, look things up. Do not base your work on what you've seen other artists and television shows do. Almost all of it is rooted in hogwash. Look into experts; when you're writing about injuries, research what real trauma surgeons and EMTs really experience, for example. Get the hard facts and a solid foundation in reality, and then start bending and breaking the rules.

#2: Once you've got a solid understanding of what's really a real-world possibility in a scenario or setting, start fucking around. Be subtle at first. Start lacing little inconsistencies that, upon re-reading or closer scrutiny, will make your readers go, "Wait, what the hell?" Shoot for making your readers do a double-take. Don't highlight your little mind-games, and absolutely aim for sowing the seeds of uncertainty in your audience. When they have an uneasy sense that there's something off about the story, they'll keep reading and re-reading in order to try to puzzle things out. It's in moments like those (you'll it when you reach it; trust your instincts) where you can abruptly turn things upside down and inside out and completely shock and spellbind your audience. Misdirection is your best friend.

#3: Don't use the same mind-games twice in the same story. Your audience is full of people that are scanning for the rhythm of your work and trying to anticipate what's going to happen next. With every installation of your webcomic, tweak your approaches and disguise them by repackaging them in a new, sneaky manner. You can still use the same surrealist logic, but putting it behind many different guises will keep your audience surprised while not requiring you make extreme quantum leaps around in your surrealism; thereby saving you time and energy, while also making your audience smack themselves on the forehead with, "Dammit, you got me again?!"

#4: Leave some questions unanswered and some fates undetermined - not only will it continue hooking in readers, but it also gives your fans fuel for fanfiction and conjecture, causing them to mislead themselves. Keep your secrets and tricks close to the vest. Even as I reply to you here, note that I'm not giving examples from my own work. I'm totally happy for this reply to circulate, but it's not going to teach my audience anything new about my own secret methods. This may be unsatisfying an answer for you, but I'm still a working writer, too ;)

I really hope this helps. Get out there and pursue your dreams!

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greentrickster · 4 years ago

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Was thinking about the manga Phoenix and Larry are making together in the Ace Magical (Boys) AU, so here’s some details on that.

Larry got the initial idea for it in middle school when a new mecha anime came out and got really popular. Larry’s the one who misses being a magical kid the most of the trio, mostly because Phoenix and Miles have ideas of what they want to do with their lives and Larry doesn’t - he misses that clear-cut sense of purpose. He’d been wanting to do something to honour that experience, preserve the memories and all that, and this is the moment that it strikes him, hey, what if I made our story into a manga? It’d work pretty well. And he decides on doing a genderbend in the mecha genre instead of a direct one-to-one so as to not make it too on-the-nose and accidentally out himself and his friends.

So he starts roughing it out, realizes this is a lot more work than he thought it was, and brings Phoenix on board to help out. After struggling a bit trying to figure out how the female main characters’ looks would properly mirror their magical boy dresses, they wind up just going around school and asking a bunch of girls what sorts of outfits they like to see male manga characters in, and why, and asking a bunch of guys the same question, and also asking the girls about the new mech show that’s out, and what they’d want a mech oft their own to look like. Basically, they crowd-source to find the masculine mecha equivalent of a traditional magical girl look, and then they use than look for the female characters, along with the the slightly more realistic, buff style male characters usually have in these shows.

The girl characters end up pretty buff and in some dang cool battle suits and mechs, with none of the sexualization that’s often found with female characters in shonen. And they like the idea, but also look at each other and go, “Yeah, no one’s going to publish this, not enough boobs and stuff.”

As a side effect, the entire school finds out that Larry and Phoenix are working on a manga. Which means that eventually some people see the character designs and asks why they’re like they are. And Larry can’t exactly say, “It’s to protect my friends’ and my secret identities.” So instead he says, “Well, we had those magical boys running around a few years ago, right? I thought it’d be cool to do something like that, only with girls and mecha? You know, shaking up the genre a bit, sticking it to sexist character designs and stuff?”

And suddenly there’s quite a few people interested in their project and keen to read it. “Well sure we’d like to share it with people, but it’s a female-starred shonen with no T&A fanservice - no one’s going to publish us.”

Cue a member of the computer club coming up to them and going, “Have you ever thought about publishing it online as a webcomic?” “...no we have not, please, tell us more.”

(montage of Phoenix and Larry learning how to make and run a website, along with the discovery that Larry’s actually way better at this than Phoenix)

At the beginning of their first year of high school, they post the first chapter. And, as a lot of the classmates who were interested in the story in middle school still are, they start out with an unusually large reader base. From there things just come together to make their story a pretty decent success - their web-manga gets a big enough following that it makes the jump to actual volumes of manga, much like Hetalia and One Punch Man did, and, in spite of some hard patches and setbacks, this somehow morphs into a career for both of them.

(Also, a little bit of suspension of disbelief is thrown in for them being able to do this job but also have a decent amount of free time, since being a manga-ka is a huge amount of work. Not trying to ignore that, just, you know. Fun AU, already kinda fantasy anyway, no more yielding but a dream.)

#The Ace Magical (Boys) AU #larry butz #phoenix wright #ace attorney

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checkdispleased · 4 years ago

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re. ep. 21 on Lardo, what are your thoughts on the idea that Lardo's haircut/ art student vibe, is sort of trading on the visual cues/ imagery of queerness, to provide an illusion or semblance of queer rep, while not actually doing the work to write an actually queer character? You guys have touched on N using a sort of visual/generic shorthand in her characterization in other areas, but the mentioning the Ollie/Wicks thing got me thinking again about how few canonical queer characters are 1/2

2/2 are in the majority of the comic, for a comic supposedly all about queer rep. [it kinda reminds of that author of the wizard books and her word of god gay character after the fact, though i don't think N is doing it to nearly the same degree], but i can't help but see similarities in how cultural cues are used to a nod to representation that's not actually treated as canon by the text itself.

I just deleted a whole stupid Harry Potter essay and will instead say this: I was about to say we found out Dumbledore was gay 15 years before OMGCP even started, and then I remembered I’m an idiot who can’t do math. Still, not that I think JKR needs or deserves the very meager fairness I’m about to lend her right now, but, one difference between that series and this comic is, Harry Potter is not about queer experience, and it never claimed to be, and it wasn’t de rigueur for YA book series to feature any LGBT characters necessarily over the period when it was begin published. Check Please is supposedly about that exact topic! And it was created and presented in a space -- specifically the slash fandom subculture on Tumblr, in 2013, working on the vernacular of webcomics -- where the expectation of queer content was de rigueur. In addition to the fact that I got into the comic because I had heard Jack and Bitty got together, this is maybe why I diverge from @tomatowrites‘ uncertainty that they would get together: this was being created from and presented in the space where that was exactly what would happen.

To be also fair to Ngozi, I guess the comic never really positioned itself as speaking to LGBT experiences other than Bitty’s. Still, he says he’s come to Samwell because of the breadth of its queer community? I think, through the lens of the comic alone, what he must have meant was that he wanted to be in a place where he could be openly gay to find a boyfriend, not that he wanted to like, have LGBT friends broadly speaking. One interesting thing about the Y4 Tweets, which I have only ever seen in the chirpbook, is that it is established that Bitty, uh, addresses one of the most pointed criticisms of Check Please:

“ducksducksducksducks,” I’m entirely sure based on other Tweets in here, is Lardo.

Hey, this is loooong.

This is SO confusing because it’s like, Lardo’s not a lesbian ... probably? She’s very into Shitty? They live together? Like sharing-a-bedroom live together? There is nothing in the physical comic, or anywhere else that I’m aware of, period, where it’s implied that she’s into women at all, beside the fact that she’s got short hair for a while? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think these were ever tweeted; I think they were written to go in the chirpbook. So it’s tough to know, in a Watsonian sense, what precisely Bitty is responding to, or if he’s responding at all. There’s no context for this. Like much of the comic, it’s just there, implying some things broadly while also addressing a major criticism of the text (that Bitty has no gay friends) without actually examining it within the text itself. Confusing!

I’m not sure what was originally intended in regard to Lardo. (Would love to hear Tomato weigh in on this, if she has time.) It could be as straightforward as, some people at art school look like this. It would be absurd to code a character as queer and then do nothing to establish them as queer in your queer webcomic, of course. Anyone who understands the potential gain of having people think Lardo is not cishet must also understand the potential cost of not just making it canon?

Part of the essay I started writing about Harry Potter up there was to say that, of course, fuck JKR, but also, I think people are making a very 2020-based criticism of the “Dumbledore is gay” reveal, which happened in 2007, concerning a book series that was written starting in the mid-1990s. Not that nobody was ever gay in mainstream media before Check Please, but I do think it’s possible that as popular as those books were, and as powerful as the author was, she may actually have felt she couldn’t put that in there? At the time, I felt like it was a cheap nod to an obviously huge slash fandom -- but now I actually kinda feel like, okay, maybe it was a cheap nod to her obviously huge slash fandom and also she genuinely didn’t think she could have it in there? The very conservative principle of universally legal gay marriage still felt, at the time, like a distant prospect. My goal in thinking this through isn’t to say it’s okay because it happened in ~the past~ when things were less socially just, but rather, to try to explore the thinking that must have gone on around these decisions.

Which leads me, finally, to the actual point of this post: conceiving of Lardo, and OMGCP, in 2013, Ngozi was coming from a slash fandom perspective that largely held these two beliefs:

It is unrealistic for a story to have more LGBT characters than the main pairing; 10 percent of people are gay so if a friend group has more than one or two gay people in it, that’s submitting to some kind of slash-brain internet logic that can’t hold; and

Just as it is homophobic to presume that gay people are or have to be any particular way, it is similarly problematic to presume someone is queer just because they look or act any particular way

The first one is really rooted in fanfics where an entire cast of characters who aren’t gay in canon are suddenly gay in fanfic; this is presumably not a problem for OMGCP because OMGCP is not actually a fanfic. But it is heavily influenced by fanfic; it functionally works as a fanfic ahout two characters named Jack and Bitty who just happen to have also originated within the fanfic. But the comic’s initial readership is going to be people whose interests cross with fandom, because Ngozi is a prominent fan artist so her audience is gonna be that! So you can kind of feel why maybe Bitty is the only gay in the cast until it turns out Jack magically (??) is also.

Which brings us to Lardo: she looks like someone you would think is into women? But I think she was potentially designed as an example of a character who seems gay but isn’t, because it is not okay to presume things about people based on how they look. This is pretty complicated because, well, yes, in general there’s a saying about not judging books by their covers because that level of superficiality perpetuates harmful biases. At the same time, people do judge just about everything by their appearances regardless of whether it’s superficial or not, and so most people know this and use their own appearances to construct their own identities, that is, try to tell people how they want to be read. It’s very 90s-2000s to assert that it’s wrong to make assumptions about whether someone is gay based on appearances, and you can understand why: normalizing gender non-conformity was and is an important project, but until recently the only way to do that was to do it from a position of insisting cishet people could be gender non-conforming. Of course, looking back, this feels like an insane supposition because of course there is a gay aesthetic, or gay aesthetics? Of course queer people have always looked and acted certain ways to try to subtly identify for the purpose of finding fellow travelers?

If I recall correctly, this came up in fanfics a lot, where you’d have one character who is the straightest man making jokes about how much he loved to suck dick, or whatever. And maybe, maybe, some of this lingers in Lardo. I’m thinking mostly of how Kenny was used in South Park fics, but also, come to think of it, Butters, who doesn’t so much crack jokes but he does seem pretty gay, if you take soft-spoken weak-willed effete boys to be gay, which, of course you do. We all do, sometimes. (There’s also an episode about him cross-dressing.)

But what’s even more striking is that there’s already a character who embodies this particular trope in Check, Please: Shitty. He’s theatrical (flamboyant?), he’s writing his senior thesis on the homoeroticism of hockey, and in a very brief (very badly written) ficlet from the back of Huddle Vol. 1, he checks out Jack’s body in the lockeroom and tells Jack he’s a “Greek god.” When Jack says, “That’s so gay,” Shitty responds with, “Welcome to fucking Samwell. Sometimes dudes will tell you you’re hot without even saying ‘no homo’ afterwards.” So we’ve got Jack, who is gay, telling Shitty it’s gay to admire another man’s body as he reddens and is visibly uncomfortable, while Shitty, who is straight, acts like it is somehow normal for all men to be attracted to other men without it being much of an issue for him personally or society broadly. This is not to say that you can’t find these attitudes reflected in the real world; Jack, who’s closeted, obviously has reasons to posture like this, or be uncomfortable with another man complimenting his appearance. But paired with Shitty’s comments the comic is engineering a reversal that claims it’s not inherently gay when a man is attracted to the body of another man -- except, it is? It’s a fiction that serves a kind of post-post-modern post-queer theory pop cultural attitude that I think, in 2020, we’ve moved on from. Underneath Shitty’s posturing is the sad truth that it’s a straight man, particularly a man like Shitty, whose comments on other men’s bodies would be tolerated; it’s unlikely that this is something Bitty (or Jack) would feel it was socially acceptable for him to say. Shitty’s working here as a type.

An I think it’s not a coincidence that he’s paired with Lardo within this story? She is similarly gender-transgressing; beyond having short hair she is characterized as a “bro” (an inherently male-coded performance) and crushes at beer pong and belches on her opponents. Not in the comic, obviously, but we’re told she does -- maybe kind of like Shitty only finds Jack hot off-page? (When he’s not lounging naked in Jack’s bed--again, something that Jack is uncomfortable with, but if a gay man did this, it would certainly be a problem.) I think these are all jokes that are very of their time for fannish texts in the period leading up to when this comic was started.

Again, nothing is impeding Ngozi from putting a female-identifying character who’s attracted to women into her markedly LGBT webcomic in 2014. I think it’s more than likely that if Lardo were meant to be queer, it’d be in there, somewhere. Or, rather, I think if it were an intended reading from start, it would have been in there. Or it would have been in a Tweet. In an extra. In an FAQ. On the Patreon blog. Mentioned in a Livestream. Somewhere? But where we get one incredibly disconnected hint that she might be, it’s in a Kickstarter-backed volume of post-canon content in a way that ties into the actual story or Lardo’s nonexistent interior life not at all. It’s not a story about her--but that’s the point? It’s not a story about her. If it were meant to be a story about a friend group, how would this particular detail not be enriching? When Lardo notices Bitty fretting over Jack’s game in the library, doesn’t the moment have more weight if she can empathize with even slightly more incision?

And like, you can say a lot of things about JKR, and the politics of gender and sexuality within her books was always bad, so this isn’t giving her, like, credit. But you can totally see how using cultural cues might have been all she felt she was able to do in the 1990s and early 2000s, yes, even as one of the most powerful authors working at the time. This doesn’t mean she shouldn’t have done more, or that her bad views are actually understandable, see. (I mean, they’re perfectly understandable, also abhorrent.)

Ngozi is making a fucking gay webcomic for a gay readership on Tumblr in 2013-2020. She had no reason to use cultural cues to hint broadly unless she wanted credit for something she felt she couldn’t represent (which makes no sense, see previous sentence; entire essay) or Lardo was never intended to be anything other than a cis straight woman -- which is a fine thing to be, by the way, nothing against cis straight women? It’s just that like, this comic got a lot of flack from an internal crowd of complainers, myself included, about the things it didn’t do -- and one big thing it neglected to do was introduce meaningful relationships with other LGBT characters for Bitty. So I think that Chirpbook shit is just a late-in-the-day retcon for virtually nobody.

But this is a conspiracy theory so like, take it with a grain of salt.

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christinaroseandrews · 4 years ago

Photo

High-Schooler and budding graphic novel writer is on her way to her first anime con with her boyfriend, Derek. While she's traveling with two 21+ friends, she's getting thrown into the deep end with having a table in the Artists' Alley. The con is huge. Confusing. Worse, Derek and her friends seem to think the best way to experience a con is to be thrown in feet first -- sink or swim -- without checking to see if the person is able to handle something like that. And worst of all, her boyfriend, and also the artist/partner on her graphic novel/webcomic, is flirting with every cute cosplayer who stops by their table.

When Christie can't handle it any more, she takes off. Running through the crowded halls and directly into the chest of the too-cool-for-words Matt. The sparks fly. And when did Christie's life turn into a Shojo Manga?

Oh my stars, how Dramacon by Svetlana Chmakova takes me back. Initially published in 2005, the manga accurately depicts the convention scene from back then -- I should know I worked them. Everything from the chaos (which still happens), To the labyrinth of the various convention centers (which is still the case), To the sleeping arrangements (Let me tell you of the time I slept in the bathtub of a hotel) rings true to reality. There’s lots of in-jokes and callbacks to the time. Like the lines. The Pocky. And the cosplayers.

The story is definitely in the vein of a Shojo manga. There’s a lot of the same tropes and beats -- the whole thing is very much an homage to both the convention world and Shojo. It reminds me in some ways of Skip Beat! and KareKano. The art style is lovely. Especially if you like the styles seen in things by Yuu Watase and Arina Tanemura -- especially Watase seriously some of the asides reminded me of how Watase did them.

Seriously! LOOK at this amazeballs art!

I mean look at that Kimono... the detail!

And trust me the splash art is equally lovely.

(Thank you TOKYOPOP for providing samples for reviewers to use... I don’t typically feel comfortable sharing artwork without the publisher approval.)

Seriously, I’m getting MASSIVE Yuu Watase Vibes... like all of them

So back to the story, I especially liked the characters -- particularly Bethany and Matt. Christie is a pretty typical teenager -- in fact she reminds me greatly of the kids I'd see at cons. Most of the cast could easily be a typical con-goer... you have the purists, the old-pros, the n00bs, the cosplayers, the fangirls, etc. There's even an older Mangaka, Lida, who is there as a Guest of Honor.

One of the things I liked most about this collection as a whole is that it features PoC and people with disabilities. That's something that is still rare in graphic novels/manga.

As a note, it is laid out/written Left-to-Right as opposed to Right-to-Left so don't do what I did and start reading from the wrong side. LOL

Also for those who need them, there are some pretty hefty trigger warnings I should share - spoiler alert since some are definitely late game

Triggers - attempted sexual assault, underage drinking, infidelity, racism, ableism, jealousy, emotional abuse, jealousy, family drama, medical trauma, unwanted physical contact.

Let’s just say that Dramacon lives up to the title and that the book doesn’t shy away from showing the seemy and darker side of the convention and artistic life.

Frankly I really loved this trip down memory lane complete with nostalgia glasses.

Five stars

If this is your jam, you can get the paperback omnibus here. Or it’s on Kindle - Volume One, Volume Two, and Volume Three.

If you like these kind of honest reviews, please consider supporting us here!

I received an ARC via NetGalley.

Definitely consider getting the Omnibus which has all three volumes. Reading on an e-reader doesn’t quite have the same feel.

#Manga review #book review #shojo #shojo manga #convention scene #anime cons #anime conventions #oh gods how this took me back #I straight up laughed at in jokes #I'm shocked Chair didn't show up #I mean they hit so much #including cosplay isn't consent #and what it's like to be a staffer #like there was literally one scene where I straight out cackled #all the trigger warnings #dramacon #svetlana chmakova #five stars #Rose and Lark review books

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spicy-ryls · 5 years ago

Text

Ranty TROS stuff below. I wrote this on and off days so it might sound disconnected but yeah. Sorry it’s kinda long and my spelling and grammar might not be the best but I just wanted to let my feelings out.

I’m still trying to accept this movie. I watched it on the night of 19 December, the premier date for Malaysia, and I still remember my visceral feeling towards this movie. I remember feeling so empty, baffled, sad and shocked, almost like I just lost a relative or one of my cats, and I’ve experienced that multiple times in my life and it sucks.

Sometimes I think, how could I be so attached to this trilogy? I’ve literally spent so much energy defending TLJ and the ST from the backlash in the local fandom to the point where I couldn’t stand it anymore and I removed myself from the local fanbase as much as I could. But I’ve never felt so betrayed and almost embarassed that I was so invested into it.

I never grew up with Star Wars. Instead, I started watching TFA while I was in that age period between 19-20. I was a little shit and I was still adjsuting to adulthood, so it pretty much was almost like in the process of being born again as an adult. At the time I was making a series of webcomics under the title ‘Gods Among Men’ and I was pretty much drawing almost exclusively Hades/Persephone stuff and I was drawing Hades as this typical tall, dark & handsome guy. At some point, my friends and I just joked at how much I loved that trope that’s it’s like my type in fictional guys, and yes I still love it.

So my friends just said to me “hey, watch the new Star Wars, you’ll love it!”

And I was HOOKED.

I got so into it. I watched all of the other movies, even the Christmas Special. And I loved the character of Kylo Ren so much. Initially I wasn’t instantly into Reylo. But after some fanart or fanfic or two I fell down the rabbit hole of this ship that I loved so much and the two characters of Rey and Kylo/Ben whom I had such a strong connection to.

Q4 of 2017 was the best year for me as a fan of this franchise. I was so excited for TLJ. I was super involved in a lot of local Star Wars related stuff and at that point people just knew me as “That Rey (cosplayer) who liked Reylo and Kylo Ren a lot”. I had made many friends and acquaintances over the year. And then TLJ came.

And the community was divided.

A lot of male fans I knew were so enraged by the movie. “TLJ ruined my childhood!!” they shouted on their facebook wall. “RJ and KK ruined Star Wars” they yelled. It just cemented the Star Wars Fanboy trope so badly that it was laughable that grown men 3 times my age with family AND KIDS were yelling about it for TWO WHOLE YEARS and because I was the one publicly championing the ST, all they talked about to me was about how much they hated it, and it’s still brought on in passing conversation to this day. I hated having to meet these people at events because my encounters are always unpleasant.

Time passed. The Reylo community was prosperous and it really was a golden age of content. We were excited to see how the ending of a saga was going to be, with a definitive Ben Solo redemption and Reylo being canon. And then came the announcement of JJ returning to direct Episode IX. I instantly had a gut feeling that it was not gonna be good, but I will hold my trust to him since he directed TFA. BOY I WAS WRONG.

The TROS panel at SWCC ended in a somewhat hopeful note. Later in the year, interviews were being published, and in the beginning it was all fine and dandy. I can’t remember when the news of reshoots started popping out, but even then I gave them the benefit of the doubt that because this movie was going to tie in all of the other 8 movies and surely they had to do something right about it. Then came in a lot of red flags in merchandising, marketing, cast interviews, etc. Daisy’s and John’s infamous interview felt so OOC for me that I couldn’t believe what I was reading. And at this point, my hopes were very low. I felt something was very off in everything and I was almost inactive of soc med or any TROS news because I wanted to watch the movie with no outside influences. I didn’t even read any leaks and only heard about it in passing.

Then came the week of the premier. I was putting my expectations super low. I just thought of all the bad things that could happen like Rey Palpatine or Kylo/Ben dying and I went into it with that thought. Before the movie, I had to sort of minggle with the crowd of a private screening event as Rey. But I just had so much anxiety before I could even get in costume to the point where I did cry. And it didn’t help that some of the other cosplayers and minders had already seen the movie the previous day and were having borderline spoilery conversations, which did upset me further. Eventually I calmed down enough, but I was still feeling a little down. It sort of helped that the attendees who are usually normal people are usually the kind to take pictures with the more masked or sith-looking guys or my friend who was masked Kylo so I could usually be left alone.

And finally, it was time to watch the movie and I can still remember how dumb I was for thinking this movie was going to be smart. There was just too much going on and I was so in shock of how poorly written, edited and directed it was. There was hardly any cheer or gasps in my cinema throughout the whole thing, although there were one or two who tried to whoop at the Lucasfilm logo but they kept quiet for the rest of it too. It was such a different experience from the one I had of my first TLJ screening. 80% of the time I just had a blank expression on my face and the only time I sort of got excited for were the Rey and Kylo/Ben scenes, except that ending. I really did not like this movie. I did not feel hopeful at all and the ending the just felt so off. I was relieved to see that I was not the only one who thought of it that way.

This movie effected me so much that I had trouble sleeping, loss of apetite, loss of focus and random bouts of crying in my car for how hollow I felt for about a week+. There was a huge convention on the same weekend and everyone who knew me pretty much came up to me and ask how I was and what I thought about the movie, and a simple glance and head shake was enough to convey how much I felt, and I just did not want to talk about it on a busy con day. But after a busy con weekend, I went in full force on venting it out on Twitter and finding myself in discord support groups and I’m glad I was not alone.

Now it’s been 11 days since I’ve watched TROS and I’ve sort of clamed down from being mad about it. But I don’t think I could accept an ending to a saga for how botched it was which stemmed from fan pandering and corporate greed. But I have never been so proud to be in the Reylo community, who are tirelessly finding concrete evidence on how badly edited it was and just how messy things were behind the scenes. I’m glad to have met all of you and even befriend some thanks to this ship and our love for Rey and Ben Solo and every character in the saga. I am very saddened at how badly treated every character was from Rey to Leia and everyone in between, but it’s not going to stop us from creating good fan content and what we’ve had so far is incredible.

Stay strong and save what we love. ❤

#rant #tros

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