#Sort of Writing Related

[author-a-holmes]

Top 5 movies you've seen for the first time in the past few years?

Oooo! Tough one. I watch more tv series than movies, but I think I can probably grab five movies I've seen for the first time in the last 3 years...

Boss Level (2020) with Frank Grillo and Naomi Watts

The Lost City (2022) with Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum

Mr. Right (2015) with Sam Rockwell and Anna Kendrick (I picked this one up because I love Anna Kendrick, but I loved Rockwell in Mr. Right so much that I went and looked at other his other films, which led me too...)

The Best of Enemies (2019) with Sam Rockwell and Taraji P. Henson And last but not least, the film that helped spark the inspiration for the Kavians in my novel Changeling...

Dark Waters (2019) with Mark Ruffalo and Anne Hathaway

[rox-and-prose]

i love the french, i love the way they pronounce Rs like they're disgusted with them

[change-name-later]

Guys if a character shows empathy towards someone they hate. That does NOT mean they’re forgiving them. People can have complex feelings towards others. Especially if they learn things about them that makes them understand why they are the way they are. But that does not mean they’re excusing what they’ve done. It just means they have a better understanding of them. And may show a bit of empathy towards them in the future.

You see a character give an ounce of sympathy towards the other’s situation. And immediately jump to the conclusion that they’re forgiving them for everything they’ve ever done and moving on. Even though they constantly repeat how they don’t like that person and don’t want any sort of positive relationship with them.

[avemstella]

So yes I have been losing my mind over the Interlude Teaser. So many thoughts, but I'm going to focus on one in particular, My New Favorite Theory.

Istaroth just is Venti.

Not a child, not a fragment, not some other relation, just is Venti. We know he has transformation powers, he used them to take his dead friend's form. Basically, he just lied to us about being a singular wind spirit. Not sure if the nameless bard knew or not, but I'd like to imagine Venti just took the form of a wind spirit to get away from all the shades stuff. And then they befriend the bard and co, get caught up in the rebellion, and when their friend dies, they take his form.

And along the way, they start to really enjoy being Barbatos, being Venti. Slowly but surely, Mondstadt stops worshiping time and only worships the wind. Yes occasionally they have to meet up with the other shades as Istaroth, and it's a miserable sad time, but then when she gets to be Venti, just a little guy, he is having a great time (for the most part).

... I see you 🏳️‍⚧️

Genshin would never do a proper trans version of this, but one can dream. But even beyond that, soooooo much drama potential. Maybe during the cataclysm Tsaritsa found out that Venti was secretly upper management and got suuuuuuppper pissed hence their falling out. Istaroth as Time is probably the cause of Errosion, which effects even his fellow gods. They probably did some nasty things for the Heavenly Principles. The traveler asking about the Unknown God, and Venti going "yeah definitely don't know her, she's definitely not my sister (?) or something noooooooo"

Also during the teaser Istaroth is like, "does Asmoday need to be here... maybe she swapped sides, let's stop talking about her...." There's the theory that the Asmoday was sealed away, and Venti probably has some kind of sealing magic... (also the sustainer is dying from that one line that was translated kind of wrong so most don't know that lol). Ista what did u dooooooo. Or they are on the same side, and she's covering for her, that is also a possibility. But Istaroth being a little traitor stabbing her sister(?) in the back is funnier to me.

But yes, back to specifically Venti being Istaroth, here's a fun piece of evidence. While the webtoon is dubiously canon, I still find this fun:

Oh hello there three suspicious figures. The other three shades perhaps... god Venti being the rebellious runaway sibling is sooooooooo compelling to me. Absolutely miserable as a Shade, as Istaroth, but finds joy in humanity and fights to protect their freedom. AHHHHH the best of boys.

[white-weasel]

Thinking a lot about the implications that Bernard’s parents are/were physically abusive towards him… makes me ill

[wackywatchdotcom]

im so mad were never gonna get to see the characters doing horrifically boring things i want to see what 24 hours in the circus is like bc yeah theres the adventure but once caine leaves how DO you occupy that time. it cant all be fun i need to see them have an extremely uninteresting activity or no activity at all it makes me nauseous

[overthinkingmoth]

transmasc Xie Lian this transmasc Xie Lian that.

I raise you transmasc Hua Cheng.

[canisalbus]

I want you to know that your art is very important to me, and I'm very invested in all of the characters I have seen from you. Also, the discussion about Finnish and other languages having gendered words or not has been the last little push to get me to start learning Finnish which I think is fun.

I'm making this a little compilation post of all the language asks I got. Thank you for sharing, this was genuinely really interesting!

[fatehbaz]

About the entanglement of "science" and Empire. About how children are encouraged participate in these imperial "scripts".

Was thinking about this recent thing:

The caption reads: "Toys and board games, 1940." And I think the text on the game-box in the back says something like "the whole world is yours", maybe? (Use of appeals to science/progress in imperial narratives is a thing already well-known, especially for those familiar with Victorian era, Edwardian era, Gilded Age, early twentieth century, etc., in US and Europe.)

And was struck, because I had also recently gone looking through other posts about the often-strange imagery of children's material in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US/Europe. And was disturbed/intrigued by this thing:

Caption here reads: "Game Board. Walter Mittelholzer's flight over Africa. [...] 1931. Commemorative game board map of Africa for a promotional game published for the N*stle Company, for tracking the trip of Walter Mittelholzer across Africa, the first pilot to fly a north-south route."

Hmm.

I went to learn more about this: Produced in Switzerland. "Africa is for your consumption and pleasure. Brought to you by the N#stle Company!" (See the name-dropping of N#stle at the bottom of the board.) A company which, in the preceding decade, had shifted focus to expand its cacao production (which would be dependent on tropical plantations). Adventure, excitement, knowledge, science, engineering prowess, etc. For kids! (In 1896, Switzerland had hosted a "human zoo" at the Swiss Second National Exhibition in Geneva, where the "Village Noir" exhibit put living people on display; they were over two hundred people from Senegal, who lived in a "mock village" in Geneva's central square.)

Another, from a couple decades earlier, this time English-language.

Caption reads: "The "World's globe circler." A game board based on Nellie Bly's travels. 1890." At center, a trumpet, and a proclamation: "ALL RECORDS BROKEN".

Went to find more info: Lithographed game board produced in New York. Images on the board also show Jules Verne; Bly, in real-world travels, was attempting to emulate the journey of the character Phileas Fogg in Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days (1872).

Game produced in the same year that the United States "closed the frontier" and conquered "the Wild West" (the massacre at Wounded Knee happened in December 1890). A couple years later, the US annexed Hawai'i; by decade's end, the US military was in both Cuba and the Philippines. The Scramble for Africa was taking place. At the time, Britain especially already had a culture of "travel writing" or "travel fiction" or whatever we want to call it, wherein domestic residents of the metropole back home could read about travel, tourism, expeditions, adventures, etc. on the peripheries of the Empire. Concurrent with the advent of popular novels, magazines, mass-market print media, etc. Intrepid explorers rescuing Indigenous peoples from their own backwardness. Many tales of exotic allure set in South Asia. Heroic white hunters taking down scary tigers. Elegant Englishwomen sipping tea in the shade of an umbrella, giggling at the elephants, the local customs, the strange sights. Orientalism, tropicality, othering, paternalism, etc.

I'd lately been looking at a lot of work on race/racism in British scientific and pop-sci literature involving natural history or geographical imaginaries. (From scholars like Varun Sharma, Rohan Deb Roy, Ezra Rashkow, Jonathan Saha, Pratik Chakrabarti.) But I'd also lately been looking at Mashid Mayar's work, which I think closely suits this kinda thing with the board games. Some of her publications:

"From Tools to Toys: American Dissected Maps and Geographic Knowledge at the Turn of the Twentieth Century". In: Knowledge Landscapes North America, edited by Kloeckner et al., 2016.

"What on Earth! Slated Globes, School Geography and Imperial Pedagogy". European Journal of American Studies 16, number 3, Summer 2020.

Citizens and Rulers of the World: The American Child and the Cartographic Pedagogies of Empire, 2022.

Discussing her book, Mayar was interviewed by LA Review of Books in 2022. She says:

[Quote.] Growing up at the turn of the 20th century, for many American children, also meant learning to view the world through the lens of "home geography." [...] [T]hey inevitably responded to the transnational whims of an empire that had stretched its dominion across the globe [recent forays into Panama, Cuba, Hawai'i, the Philippines] [...]. [W]hite, well-to-do, literate American children [...] learned how to identify and imagine “homes” on the map of the world. [...] [T]he cognitive maps children developed, to which we have access through the scant archival records they left behind (i.e., geographical puzzles they designed and printed in juvenile periodicals) [...] mixed nativism and the logic of colonization with playful, appropriative scalar confusion, and an intimate, often unquestioned sense of belonging to the global expanse of an empire [...]. Dissected maps - that is, maps mounted on cardboard or wood and then cut into smaller pieces that children were to put back together - are a generative example of the ways imperial pedagogy [...] found its place outside formal education, in children's lives outside the classroom. [...] [W]ell before having been adopted as playthings in the United States, dissected maps had been designed to entertain and teach the children of King George III about the global spatial affairs of the British Empire. […] [J]uvenile periodicals of the time printed child-made geographical puzzles [...]. [I]t was their assumption that "(un)charted," non-American spaces (both inside and outside the national borders) sought legibility as potential homes, [...] and that, if they did not do so, they were bound to recede into ruin/"savagery," meaning that it would become the colonizers' responsibility/burden to "restore" them [...]. [E]mpires learn from and owe to childhood in their attempts at survival and growth over generations [...]. [These] "multigenerational power constellations" [...] survived, by making accessible pedagogical scripts that children of the white and wealthy could learn from and appropriate as times changed [...]. [End quote.] Source: Words of Mashid Mayar, as transcribed in an interviewed conducted and published by M. Buna. "Children's Maps of the American Empire: A Conversation with Mashid Mayar". LA Review of Books. 11 July 2022.

Some other stuff I'd recently put in a to-read list, specifically about European (especially German) geographical imaginaries of globe-as-playground:

The Play World: Toys, Texts, and the Transatlantic German Childhood (Patricia Anne Simpson, 2020) /// "19th-Century Board Game Offers a Tour of the German Colonies" (Sarah Zabrodski, 2016) /// Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (David Ciarlo, 2011) /// Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875-1919 (Erik Grimmer-Solem, 2019) /// “Ruling Africa: Science as Sovereignty in the German Colonial Empire and Its Aftermath” (Andrew Zimmerman. In: German Colonialism in a Global Age, 2014) /// "Exotic Education: Writing Empire for German Boys and Girls, 1884-1914". (Jeffrey Bowersox. In: German Colonialism and National Identity, 2017) /// Raising Germans in the Age of Empire: Youth and Colonial Culture, 1871-1914 (Jeff Bowersox, 2013) /// "[Translation:] (Educating Modernism: A Trade-Specific Portrait of the German Toy Industry in the Developing Mass-Market Society)" (Heike Hoffmann, PhD dissertation, Tubingen, 2000) /// Home and Harem: Nature, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Inderpal Grewal, 1996) /// "'Le rix d'Indochine' at the French Table: Representation of Food, Race and the Vietnamese in a Colonial-Era Board Game" (Elizabeth Collins, 2021) /// "The Beast in a Box: Playing with Empire in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain" (Romita Ray, 2006) /// Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games (Mary Flanagan and Mikael Jakobsson, 2023)

[tathrin]

I saw a mention of Celebrimbor in third age AU in your tags and I deeply wish to hear more about it 👉👈

Ohhhh my goodness, okay!!

So, it's a canon-divergence whose pivot-point is set on the idea of Celebrimbor returning to life from the Halls of Mandos shortly before the War of the Ring, and—somehow—begging a boon of the Valar that allows him to return to Middle-earth to help in the struggle against Sauron.

(Is this plausible at this point in time? Probably not, no, no matter how badly they feel for Celebrimbor's pain and how proud they are of his defiance of Sauron before he died. I don't see anyone being allowed to sail back post-Istari, but it's plausible enough that I can build a fic off it if I want to lol.)

So, we pick up in Rivendell with the Council, except this time Celebrimbor isn't just a name in the story of the Rings of Power, he's there. With all his history and skill and knowledge.

(And his trauma and guilt and grief, but shhhh.)

So all of a sudden, there are three options for the Ring: throw it into the sea, throw it in the fire...or entrust the elf who helped make the Rings of Power to take it to a forge, and unmake it.

Of course, with Ost-in-Edhil in ruins, there aren't a lot of forges that are equipped for that kind of work. In fact, the various members of the Council can only think of two: Sauron's forge in Mordor...or Sauron's old forge in Mirkwood.

So that's where the Fellowship heads for.

But since "attacking Dol Guldur" is a lot less stealthy of a mission than "sneak into Mordor," this time the Council decides they have to be more active in providing distractions for Sauron than in the books. They have to have enough attacks going on in other places that the one on Dol Guldur can get lost in the noise. It's one of Sauron's places of power, sure, but it's not really one that matters a lot to him (they hope, probably) so they figure if they have enough battles going on elsewhere, that one will rank low on his priority-scale.

It's a fortress of last resort, a fall-back position he flees to when things are bad elsewhere. If he has to choose between Mordor and Mirkwood, he'll pick Mordor. If he has to choose between attacking the elven realms where the Bearers of the Three Rings are (no longer) hiding, he'll pick Lórien and Rivendell. Who cares about Mirkwood, with its silly flower-crowned king who doesn't even have a Ring?

And if he has to choose between conquering the Dwarves of Erebor and fending-off an assault by Gondor on the Black Gates, or protecting his old half-abandoned home in Mirkwood, he'll surely choose the former two and forget the latter. At the least, if they can split his forces enough that he has to prioritize where he sends his armies, the one he sends to Dol Guldur is sure to be the smallest and least powerful, right?

That's their hope, anyway! So they instigate war everywhere else they can, and hope that while they're keeping Sauron busy there, the Fellowship and the little army sent to help them can both take Dol Guldur and hold its walls against whatever force Sauron sends to take it back long enough for Celebrimbor to do his work.

And if you'd like to read it, here's where it all begins.

[southofsound]

G/T Fairytale

I'm currently writing this very elaborate g/t au fanfiction and I ended up making this as a sort of, fun exercise to get the plot down for the first act? Anyway, I turned it into a fairytale and it kinda works as a stand-alone thing, I like it a lot so I wanted to share it!

A Folktale for the Big and Small

Once, there was a young man in a world of giants. 

Eager to search the world for what little adventure it might offer, he left his small town in hopes of bigger stories. 

But in his search, rather than stories he found Massive, Vicious beasts. One such beast stole him away and locked him up in a tower so that he might never breathe free air again.

The young man, small as he was, passed many days and nights in the big bad man’s house, and feared that he was doomed to stay there forever. But, just when hope seemed at it’s lowest; The Big, Bad Giant’s sister helped the Young man escape. 

Go, she told him. And may my evil brother never find you, she said, before helping the Young man into the bag of another visiting giant.

The sister had promised the young man that this giant would be good to him, kind and honest. But the young man, too troubled by his imprisonment of the big bad man, did not take her heed. He hid himself from this new giant, even as they left the Vicious man’s tower together. 

Even as this new Giant brought them both to his home. 

The young man snuck out of this Giant's bag and hid, hoping for the perfect moment to escape. But to his horror, this new house seemed just as much a cruel, locked-up tower as that of the Big Bad Giant’s,. There was no way he could escape! 

Many days and nights he spent there, too, with no chance of escape. But in his stay here, this new Giant didn’t seem so bad. Not as bad as the Big Bad Man from before, at least.

He was clever, The young man could see when he watched the new giant talk to his giant friends. He was a talented cook, who loved to draw, and detested the rude. The young man rather liked this giant, he thought—brave and clever, never letting slip any discourtesy. Everything a gentleman should be.

As the young man stayed hidden in this new tower, over his many days and nights he began to grow attached to the place, to the New Giant. Eventually, he didn’t want to escape as much anymore, he even considered staying. 

 But the young man had grown complacent, clumsy even—leaving traces of his presence all over this new Giant’s house. And when the new giant finally realized what was going on, he was furious!

In a blind rage at such a discourtesy, at an unwelcome guest making a home in his house without so much as a word, he tore the tower apart to find this wrongdoer. 

But the young man was still clever as ever, especially after all his years living with the big, bad, giant. He managed to escape the new giant’s grasp, even if by no more than a hair. When The New Giant had looked in all the places he could think to, checked every cranny and opened every nook, he gave up. 

After all, he couldn’t continue to ruin his home all for one discourteous guest. Perhaps, with all this ruckus, the intruder had left and his search was fruitless after all..

But the young man had not left. He was frightened and reminded terribly of his old captor, but he could not leave even if he tried. 

 Still, the young man knew well that he had wronged this giant—-so he left him a note. Apologizing. Though he couldn’t leave his message without reprimanding the Giant for all of the hardship he had put the young man through—that was one dreadfully nasty fit of rage!

A little more sure in his ability, after evading the giant once, the young man grew more bold. He left traces behind, but in all the wrong places. He watched as the Giant tried and tried to find him—but he was always one step ahead. 

This young man had been watching for so long, that he could imagine anything the giant might do, and soon enough even the giant realized it. 

But the giant, the young man did not know, was lonely. Perhaps he had visitors, and perhaps he enjoyed their company, perhaps he had more people to converse with than he could ever wish for—but he was lonely.

His guests could never truly understand him. Could not see him. This young man, although it was hard to admit it, filled a hole in his heart that had been empty for many years. This trespasser, the young man, knew him. Saw him. 

And before long, where once the Giant had been filled with fury for the young man, he found love for him. 

He loved every clue. He loved every small, out-of-place book, every cup, pen or chess piece.

He loved it all. 

Without ever once seeing his face, this new giant loved the small young man as much as one could possibly love another. 

Eventually, the giant wondered if he stopped trying to hunt out the young man, if he would show himself. So he played along—He pulled the books open to his favorite parts, circled his favorite quotes. He filled the shifted cup with tea. Placed a blank sheet of paper beneath the discarded pen. Moved the next chess piece.

I am not angry, anymore, he tried so desperately to tell the young man. But he would not show himself.

Not after the big bad giant from before. 

The young man liked the giant, he enjoyed quotes and the tea, he drew for the giant and played chess with him. 

But he did not trust him. 

One night, their dance was interrupted. A giant, sent by the Big, Bad, man from the young man’s past had arrived. He was there to take the Young man back. 

He stormed their tower of books and tea and struck the young man’s giant, smashing in his legs and forcing him to the ground. 

The young man watched in horror, for he did not know what to do. But, he could not simply sit back and let this life he had so happily made for himself go. He would not let the big, bad giant take his drawings and his chess pieces from him. 

His giant lay on the floor, staring up at the intruder with wide, vicious eyes, fearful that these moments would be his last—but those eyes did not scare the young man. His viciousness did not faze him. They were his to protect.

With nothing more than a sewing needle, stolen from the Big Bad Giant a long, long time ago, the young man lept from the highest point in the tower he could find. With no small amount of strength or courage, the young man drove his blade into the back of the intruder’s neck, killing him instantly. 

He and the intruder crumbled to the ground, a great, booming crash flooding the tower at their fall—but the giant, his giant, heard none of it.

All he could hear was his heart, beating in loud in his ears. Still too hurt to walk, the giant could do nothing but watch as his beloved guest fell, killed, and crumbled.

You are beautiful, he managed to tell the young man, who was suddenly closer than he had ever been before—within arms reach.

You are so beautiful. It was all he could say, because he’d never beheld so much beauty in so small a thing, in nothing larger either though. 

The young man, after defending his giant with his life, finally came closer. Approached his host and wished to beg for forgiveness, but could not force the words out of himself. 

Because he himself was too busy thinking about how beautiful the giant was. They met halfway, the Young man taking hold of the giant’s fingers and then realizing something very, very special indeed.

He loved the giant too, even if it would take a long, long time, before he could ever tell him.

~The End~

[t1sunfortunate]

I truly do think one of the largest pitfalls among the "media consumption is my passion" crowd is the tendency to treat characters as human beings with agency rather than narrative tools manipulated by the author

[cookiedough77]

i love writing marinette because she has a wack sense of thinking so i have to adapt that and i love ittttt, especially with anxiety you just put a bunch of what ifs and rapid thinking and yes....

[goldfishinaplasticbag]

if anyone cares: new fic out now on ao3

the rundown to grab your attention: dexter au. dark/morally grey tim drake. lead forensics analyst of GCPD. older tim drake (he's like 25, finally). foster son of commissioner gordon. still a freak who likes the bats.

if you like smartass, witty, devilishly calm and annoying tim drake who can't stop bantering with people (esp barbara), this is the fic for you. low stakes, much shorter chapters than my usual 10kers

[fideidefenswhore]

so tired of tudor dramas where there are no women… and even when there are women… there aren’t…ykwim?

[astranauticus]

actually can we talk about how hypergryph went and named one of the story vignettes in the new leizi alter event '石头记/Story of the Stone', aka the alternative title to Dream of the Red Chamber, one of THE canonical greatest words of chinese literature of all time, AND the event story was so good people just let them get away with it. like is that not kind of fuckin wild actually