#taimproblem

[theartbluebox]

For Valentine's requests, how about your favourite romance and favourite bromance from WoT? (Or if they're the same couple, just... do one? or a second favourite for the other? idek :D)

Mat and Birgitte are my brotp and I have actually been meaning to draw them, even started couple times but never finished. Happy Friend’s Day, I’ll put the romance in another post.

[veliseraptor]

taimproblem replied to your post: How old would you say Steve is at this point in...

Sometimes you just gotta Erikson it and handwave the exact number of years that pass between two events.

I feel like if he can get away with it I can get away with it. Right?

[ladypoetess]

slow burn/fake date/enemies to lovers fooooor Mierin, Kamarile & Nemene

Oh Light, ok.

Slow burn: Nemene

Fake date: Mierin

Enemies-to-lovers: Kamarile

[sielustaja]

15, 18, 32, 34~

Kiitos!! :D

15: What book changed your life?

A lot of pressure to put on a book, but honestly American Gods by Neil Gaiman. And that’s the book I’m always talking about because for me it was something ground-breaking when I read it first about fifteen years ago.

It has gods and goddesses! And a half-black African American man as a protagonist! Mixed-raced people! Queer people! A happy ending for a queer couple! A goddess that swallows a man whole with her vagina! Also, it’s written by a lovely human named Neil Gaiman. What’s not to love.

18: Which character from a book is the most like you?

I would love to be as cool as Egwene, I’m not sure - but I AM probably as cool as Luna and that’s awesome. I don’t usually imagine myself as any of the characters I’m reading about so I always have a bit difficulties with questions like these. :D

32: Who’s your favorite fantasy author?

Uh, yeah. Neil Gaiman wins this round.

34: List five OTPs

Garion/Ce’Nedra (The Belgariad etc), Perrin/Faile (Wheel of Time), Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), Vimes/Sybil (Discworld) and... hmmm. I’m pretty sure I shipped those two magicians on the opposing sides in the Death Gate Cycle but I don’t even remember their names now. :F Time for a re-read??

>> bookish asks

[racke7]

taimproblem

replied to your

post

:

perrinmywolf replied to your post: ...

well, yeah, believe it or not, there’s a fandom tracking the WoT tag, hi, nice to meet you. but what we’re getting at here mainly boils down to: while your experience is valid, it’s not universal and neither are your preferences, and you seem to be presenting them as such, and that is going to tick people off.

My experiences are absolutely not universal. And (beyond the tags where I made a joke about replacing Perrin with a telepathic dog), I don’t think I really made any statements to that effect.

And again, there’s absolutely a place for having multiple PoV-characters. However, the idea of making literally every named character in the entire goddamn series into a PoV-character is a bit extreme.

Basically, when you do that kind of thing? You’re removing the screen-time that your main characters need. Not just to develop properly (you can compensate for that by adding another fuckton of pages to an already long book), but in keeping your audience engaged with them and their struggles.

It’s a bit like watching a movie, only to get what seems like an entirely different movie grafted onto it as some kind of bizarre commercial break. The “commercial break“-movie might have an interesting plot too, but then you interrupt that movie with another “commercial break“-movie, and so and and so on.

After a while, it’ll become more and more difficult for the reader to keep track of what’s happening in the different movies, because they’ve simply been too distracted by the plot of minor characters to remember what the main characters were up to.

And that’s a problem.

Like, if you dealt with one PoV at a time (from beginning of the series to the actual end), then you’d be horribly turned around and not have the faintest clue what was happening (because the different PoVs do intersect enough that you can’t just cut them out), and the story do tend to focus on one specific PoV-character whenever there’s something “specifically exciting“ happening to that character.

But these chapters can get massive, and when you don’t hear from one of the main characters for like half a book? Only to then find out that you’d forgotten what the hell they were doing, so you’re really confused when they appear again?

That’s a problem.

It’s not a problem that other stories aren’t affected by as well, and it’s a problem that some people are willing to waive on behalf of a really good story or because they really like doing spreadsheets about what the dozens of main characters are up to at any given moment.

But again, you could’ve probably told the entirety of the Wheel of Time (without missing a lot of the details, as long as you can get the Villain-PoV working correctly) with a total of four PoVs. And the fact that we instead have dozens of PoVs (several of whom are only present once, and contribute very little to the overall story)?

That’s absolutely something that the Wheel of Time should be called out on, because it’s silly.

After all, if you have that many main characters and PoV, it becomes a loop of “everybody is a main character, so nobody is a main character“, where the complete lack of screentime takes away some of the engagement that a reader might feel for a character.

Like, if your “fav PoV“ is among the ones being cut? Absolutely, you might argue that it makes the story less engaging for you. I don’t think I personally would’ve finished the series if Matrim wasn’t tempting me to continue reading, for example.

The problem is just that... well, is your favorite character every character? No? Then my argument of a ridiculous amount of PoVs interfering with reader-engagement is probably still kind of valid.

[varjojentuomio]

6, 18, 35, 48?

Thank you!~

6: Which book was the last one you really, really loved?

Looking at the list, I guess it'd be The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. Feels kinda weird saying I "loved" it, but it was indeed very good, and I'm looking forward to reading its sequel. (The joke here is that the book I read literally before The Sparrow was Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. Sorry, boys, you came close.)

18: Which character from a book is the most like you?

I... honestly have no idea what I'm like. Taking suggestions!

35: Name a book you consider to be terribly underrated

Crap, all my faves are decently well-respected. Like @sielustaja said, this would have been Good Omens some months ago, so i'll continue with the Pratchett line and say Wyrd Sisters. It's one of the earliest Discworld, but it's easily my favourite not only out of them, but in the series in general.

48: Where is your favorite place to read?

Walking around, listening to an audiobook. Not having a good place to read print books has actually been a pretty major problem to me for the past couple of years. :/

[sieldraws]

A cute (and smol) dragon for @taimproblem

[terresdebrume]

So I only just figured out that your "GO Crowley" tag proooobably means "Good Omens Crowley" as opposed to some other Crowleys, and not like, cheering him on in a really enthusiastic manner. :'D

Haha yeah basically xDI was still into SPN when I posted about Good Omens for the first time so I needed something to distinguish the two Crowleys (and now I’m also using it for Gabriel out of regularity). I thought about changing it at some point because of the confusion you mention, but then I figured I was okay with sounding like I’m trying to encourage Crowley (and the cast, and also Gabriel, who all have GO in their tags) :P

[barid-bel-medar]

26. story you’re most proud of; 30. hardest part of writing; 31. easiest part of writing?

Honestly, Crimson Wings and Emerald Lightning. I’m having a blast writing it, it’s the longest fic I’ve ever done, and it’s the first time I’ve actually had a consistent posting schedule. 

The easiest part of writing is coming up with the ideas. The hardest part is actually getting them onto the page.

[rivenroad]

11, 29 & 30 for Cassius~

11. How do they cope with confusion (seek clarification, pretend they understand, etc)?

He's good at figuring out anything he doesn’t understand from context clues and the fact that he is well-educated on a variety of subjects, but if he really doesn’t understand something he will simply ask, very directly, for an answer. He doesn’t enjoy the feeling of not understanding something, but also feels no self-consciousness about things that are beyond his current sphere of knowledge, so he will simply pursue clarification until it becomes clear to him. If he is denied explanation for a long time, though, it will start to irritate him, but at that point he’s probably already gone off and done his own research on it.

29.  Do they usually live up to their own ideals? 

Very much so. To him, the feeling living inauthentically or not living up to the high standards he has for himself is a disgusting one.

30. Who do they most regret meeting? 

Other people are very interesting to him. Even those he personally dislikes - there’s something invigorating about it still, observing traits that he finds unpleasant or even abhorrent and examining why. Even when seriously irritated or angered, he tends to see it as an intriguing challenge to deal with. Regret isn’t common for him, and if it exists it is fleeting, as he moves on quickly. That said, there are situations like his encounter with the adventurers who overpowered him and left him seriously wounded that do evoke that feeling. That is one meeting he regrets, even though the odds were against him and he himself was not really at fault for it taking place, because he is an utter perfectionist when it comes to himself.

[upstartpoodle]

@taimproblem replied to your post:

Oh, right, for some reason I thought you'd read the books. Sorry! ^^; But yeah I agree that the writing doesn't feel entirely internally consistent, and certain characters don't get the development that would seem logical because the show wants to keep George as a "villain" and Ross as a "hero"...

Don’t worry about it, it can be difficult to remember who’s read the books and who hasn’t sometimes. :) And yeah I definitely agree that one of the show’s main problems in the recent series is the pushing of the hero vs villain dynamic between Ross and George. Both of them are very flawed characters, albeit in different ways, so to direct people to see one as a villain and one as a hero is inevitably going to end up alienating sections of the audience and creating inconsistencies in the narrative. Ultimately it doesn’t do the show any favours, nor George or Ross for that matter, since keeping them in the narrative roles assigned to them, in many ways, prevents both of them from growing and developing as characters. It sent George’s character off in a slightly weird direction--logically you’d expect him, placed in a new situation with a new family and no longer living with his uncle, who we’ve seen plenty of times is a bad influence on him, to perhaps soften a little and have an arc focused more on his relationship with those characters, but if anything he ended up losing a lot of the more human side of his character for no reason, as far as I can tell, other than the narrative’s need to have someone for Ross to be morally outraged by and be shown as superior to. Ross, on the other hand, can’t grow as a character because the narrative’s constant need for him to be heroic and in the right never allows him to reflect on the worse of his actions and change his behaviour, or even feel the consequences of them for any significant length of time. Even when he admits to wrongdoings, he is, more often than not, quickly forgiven, no matter how bad his actions, and so there is rarely time for him--or us as the audience--to consider how he might develop and improve as a person. Tbh, I think that if Debbie stopped trying to push them into these roles and keep them there, their dynamic in the last two series would be much more interesting to watch, instead of being repetitive and kind of frustrating, as I’ve come to find it.

[veliseraptor]

Okay okay okay how do you feel about post-Corambis Felix/Kay?

Oh hmmm. I’m more about post-Corambis Felix/Murtagh, personally - for whatever reason I never really attached to Kay as a character, tbh. Which I feel kind of bad about, but he just didn’t click for me. 

Conversely, I find the idea of the flame/shadow dynamic and Felix finding a potentially actually healthy way to deal with his desires being...something that I’d really like. 

[theonlyconstantinlife]

sielustaja replied to your post: We should host a tea party for androids. Everyone...

@theonlyconstantinlife​ @taimproblem​ guys, how would that work in practice?

Um, we’ll have hot beverages and watch movies with robots and ?? I can cosplay as Bishop or Data now that I’m brunette but I need to make a costume :DD

[sielustaja]

taimproblem

replied to your

post

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I want to know what’s that band Erik’s...

…a fitbit :’D

@taimproblem WELL OF COURSE! He has to follow his activity level while strutting around like the dramatic bastard he is.

@jackyjango mystery solved!!

[thesmartbluebox]

Peppermint! & Blueberry-Muffin~

14. Peppermint tea: What is your favourite gif at the moment? 

Now I feel bad y’all want to know my favourite gif and I don’t have one. I will just repeat my favourite reaction image here again.

21. Blueberry-Muffin tea: Tell me a memory, which makes you smile. 

One time, long ago, I was really mad at my parents (this was when I still lived home) and I was sitting on the floor in my room and literally yelling at them as loud as I could (and probably crying too, I don’t remember but I was super upset). 

This was when my cat (that one in that picture above) decided that was enough yelling, ran at me, climbed on my lap and just... placed her paw on my mouth. Just like that. And it was such an adorable thing to do I immediately switched yelling for quiet laughter.

Thank you for playing <33

tea asks

[racke7]

taimproblem replied to your post: The Wheel of Time PoV-problem

…well, this sure is a take. I can assure you plenty of people care about all the “people we don’t know anything about and whom we don’t care about at all”…

There was literally an interlude that was like 120 pages long, that included no character that we’d seen before and several characters whom we’d never see again.

It was just... there.