#writing analytics

[writingdotcoffee]

The Copywork Challenge II.

The Copywork Challenge is back! We did one back in May, let's do another run. The goal is to do at least 1,000 words of copywork this week.

Join us here and let's do the challenge together.

What is Copywork?

Copywork is the practice of typing out another writer’s work, word by word, as they wrote it. Isn’t that copyright infringement, though? Why would you want to do that?

You’re, of course, not copying their story to publish it as your own. The goal is to get a feel for how the author works and become a better writer yourself.

For centuries, writers used copywork to learn to write well. Hunter S. Thompson typed out The Great Gatsby in its entirety to practice writing that he greatly admired. Jack London copied the works of Rudyard Kipling. Benjamin Franklin also used copywork to improve his writing.

When you copy another writer’s work, you really get to internalise the patterns they use in their prose. You get a much better feel for how they construct sentences and structure their arguments compared to just reading them.

Copying fiction is even more valuable. The best stories immerse you completely in their world when you’re reading them. The writing becomes practically invisible. As a result, you miss a lot of the cool things the writer did when reading them.

By typing out the story word by word, you learn how the writer structures their scenes. You’ll see how they weave description and action together.

The goal isn’t to perfectly imitate a single writer’s style — that would be impossible anyway. But as you copy the work of various authors, elements of what makes their writing great will seep through to your style.

Musicians start learning by playing their favourite songs — just listening isn’t enough. Artists paint studies of their favourite pieces — looking at a painting isn’t enough.

When you want to learn from your favourite writers, do some copywork — just reading their work isn’t enough.

The Challenge

Copy 1,000 words or more from a book, short story, article, blog post or anything else you liked.

It should take you about 30 minutes or so to get it done.

Take note of all the little things you will discover about their writing that you would otherwise miss completely when just reading through.

I set up a challenge in Writing Analytics if you'd like to join:

https://app.writinganalytics.co/challenge/64d232d051a90c220973d61f

Let's do some copywork together!

[mischiefiswritten]

Writing Update | 7.8.23

Today has been a tough one. It's been hard to get the words to flow and to see the scene in my head. But I'm still proud of myself for persevering and getting started. I've written for three days straight now and written a couple hundred words a day. That's a big win for getting my writing practice back in order!

I've been thinking about new ideas of this new sci-fi WIP for a couple months now, and I'm starting to see some more concrete concepts. I've been working on the prologue, which is honestly the only part that I know what I want it to look like lol, but it's been fun so far!

[corvidkiid]

nobody talks about how jeffery combs said (in reference to seeing dan and francesca) he doesn't understand what's going on, that's what this whole moment is all about right here 'why don't i have that in my life?' because this is all i think about

[torchstelechos]

I love that Isabeau is the one to bring up the "what do we do if you die" conversation cause its a very good insight to his character at the very start of the game. Isabeau is practical, smart, and loves everyone dearly and wants to know how to help them when shit goes sideways. He's the one to ask about Bonnie too, which is a delightful read on how he thinks because everyone else shuts that down instantly as a "That wont happen and cant happen" but we see later in the game it can happen which is such a startling thing for a game to do but justifies the foreshadowing of Bonnie can die what do we do if that happens? Isabeau, despite everything, is also the one who gets to the heart of the matter even if its not something must people are willing to talk about. All without it being part of his friendquest, thats just him naturally. Which! Says so much about him and how he is! His character when its not about his relationship with Siffrin is a very intriguing thing because it feels like a very classic hard intellectual stance that's been softened after many years of learning to better communicate healthily with others. A reflection, if you will, of Odile but in a very drastic direction. I find him fascinating and I also want to scoop his brains out and study them under a microscope to see all his little brain thoughts.

[sweatermuppet]

i think some of the best literary + film analysis advice i was given was from my high school fiction into film teacher who told us she would grade us well on finding any meaning in any symbol or motif so long as we could back up that feeling or meaning from source material, no matter how personal, minor, or long-reaching that meaning was—if your argument was good & could be grounded, she would accept it, even if you were the only student who interrupted the book/film that way

[crow-caller]

I really do think looking at bad writing is one of the best ways to learn about writing in general, especially for beginners.

the thing is, writing in general is highly subjective- a good sentence will be good in different ways to different people, or not impress someone at all.

a bad sentence? most people can spot bad sentences easy, especially if it is presented to them as 'here's an example of a bad sentence, let's unpack why.'

bad writing can also be very funny, which I think is again often more engaging than 'here's a work of literary genius go analyze it'. Like here's some bad writing from lightlark3:

The moment it was out of Horus’s grip, his body became bones. The flesh turned to ash. He became a corpse.

it's dumb as hell, but I think could foster a solid discussion when you ask 'why? what is the author intending to say? what about it makes it feel 'clunky'? How would you write the same idea?'

[cosmichorrorlesbians]

thinking about Her.

[gennyrthewriter]

I'm celebrating the DEFINITIVE (second) edition of my first book being released on Amazon! If you like colonial-era inspired low fantasy with political intrigue, moral ambiguity, ideological struggle, and of course, two gay men coated in blood fighting each other with swords at the climax, give it a chance!

Click here for a link to the Amazon page

In a forgotten backwater colony, a power hungry general, an exiled city guard, a lost queen, and a rogue agent clash over the scraps that each feel they were entitled to. When those hungry for power fight, can anyone truly win?

[hydeposting]

The realisation that every J&H character is an unreliable narrator is such a key point of the story to me and I’m kinda shocked they never explicitly say this to us. You really CANNOT take anything a character says at face value. They all hide their own stuff from us and have distorted viewpoints.

Why is Enfield out so late? Why is everyone fine with him being the “man about town”? Is it as long as it’s women he’s pursuing? What the fuck is Utterson’s deal, just in general? What was ACTUALLY wrong with Jekyll, before the Hyde stuff? What was ANY CHARACTER’S DEAL, HONESTLY?

[eyeballplanets]

The Viltrumite Empire and Interactions of Racialization in Invincible

(This essay is just under 4k words. I hope you enjoy!)

The animated series Invincible presents the Viltrumite empire in the fantastical tone and symbols expected of space-faring superhumans bent on incorporating a planet of superheroes into the imperial fold of an interstellar empire. Conferred with this imagery is the language of racialized conflict, particularly observed where race is encoded in the subordinating process of building and enforcing the state and the other metonymic structures, such as the family, or the military. This is made most apparent in the climax of the first season, in which Mark Grayson, the child of a Korean-American woman and a Viltrumite who appears and is received as a white man on Earth, resists his father’s attempt at initiating him into the empire, first with appeals to Mark’s ideals as a hero, then by invoking Mark’s Viltrumite heritage as an irrefutable and essential characteristic that must consequently ingratiate him to the empire. Mark refuses this induction, and is nearly killed for it, as Nolan continually evokes his mother in concert with his chosen affiliation with Earth and a presumed weakness which he states is consequential of this bilocation.

This reception is not limited to Mark’s conflict with Nolan: rather, the ineluctability of the racially coded imagery in this conflict draws attention to the other interactions of racialization throughout the series, as white characters and characters of color each play out hegemonic dynamics during physical and verbal conflict. If Nolan’s paternalistic didacticism can be read as his attempt at coercively situating his racialized son with whiteness, then meaningful discursive gestures toward western chauvinism’s enforcement and treatment of its racialized subjects can be gleaned from his other interactions with explicit visual racialization, such as his asymmetrical methods of attacking the Guardians and his attempt at engendering hesitation in Mark toward Titan’s plight. The variance in the outcomes and presentations of these interactions can be read in other Viltrumite characters, including Mark’s attempt at evoking this paternal connection at Darkwing II and Angstrom Levy and the references to the narratives codifying castle doctrine, the symmetry between Nolan’s treatment of Debbie and Mark’s treatment of Amber, Lucan and Anissa’s contrasting attempts at offering assimilation, the latter Viltrumite’s idiosyncratic place of subordination within this hierarchy, and Conquest’s thorough brutalization of Mark as a dissident colonized body within the Viltrumite schema of identity.

This essay does not engage with the comic. The two works are separate (as stated by the showrunner, and as observed in the construction of these themes): nearly all of the racial substance read in the piece is original to the show. It succeeds where the comic wholl­y fails; or, the show’s writing team is correcting for the many missteps in the comic.

It is also worth mentioning that although there is meaningful discourse to be gleaned from the Viltrumite’s perception of their fantastical victims and subjects, this piece focuses on the deliberate presentation of race through the skin color of the human and Viltrumite characters. That is, their appearances are not incidental, and similar ideas can be found according to the identities that these characters inhabit.

The disparity in Nolan’s slaughter of the Guardians reflects the racialized lens through which he views the team, partially intricated in the Viltrumite perception of strength. Before the ambush begins, the signal by which he draws the Guardians is presumed to have originated from Darkwing, a Black man notably solitary and removed from the rest of the guardians, sufficiently enigmatic that the anomaly of his signal is immediately seen as cause for concern. In the fight itself, Darkwing and Alana—the newest to carry the legacy mantle of Green Ghost—are among the very first to die, Nolan predicting Darkwing’s attack from above and striking Alana where she keeps the stone that gives the bearer of the Green Ghost mantle their powers, ending that heroic lineage. In each case, Nolan’s victory required personal scrutiny of his respective targets: he expects Darkwing’s attack from behind, and knows that Alana’s inexperience and kindness would immobilize her upon seeing his gruesome death, therefore opening her up to an attack that her powers would have otherwise avoided, specifically targeting the placement of the stone, the artifact itself nor its location obvious at a glance.

By contrast, Immortal received no such scrutiny. Nolan kills him as Viltrumite executioners kill their prisoners, with a bladed palm to the neck. Nolan’s failure to predict Immortal’s resurrection ultimately leads to the clash that reveals the extent of his cruelty to his son, who therebefore assumed Nolan to be victimized by the Global Defense Agency. That is, Nolan’s inability to foretell these powers puts him at a disadvantage, a blind spot in his analysis of the team’s strengths that stands out from the aforementioned victims. Nolan had treated Immortal like a Viltrumite, in neither of their conflicts incorporating any of the analytical techniques by which he defeated Darkwing or Green Ghost—the alternate universe presented in the next season’s premiere goes further to reveal that it would only be upon a third altercation that Nolan would understand how to prevent his subsequent revival. Immortal does not elicit the suspicion and analysis that each led to Darkwing and Alana’s deaths; Nolan assumes, in both cases, that the two were governed under the same rules, just as Immortal was jealous of Nolan’s strength and speed. These two older white men each display competing, alike white masculinities.

Nolan’s perceiving white heroes possessing abilities like his own as defective Viltrumites is shared and reinforced with dismissal of Red Rush’s speed: “He can run fast” said of a man most effective in resisting his assault enminds the same masculine bravado that permeates Nolan’s taunts in his fights against the Immortal, Mark, and the Viltrumite Vidor. Nolan, too, relies on speed: his ability to cross the oceans in minutes is incorporated into his specific performance of domesticity with Debbie, traveling to foreign cafés, wineries, and restaurants in these rituals of romanticized exoticism, a palatable otherness that stands in contrast to Red Rush’s status as a Russian in an otherwise American team.

Nolan’s second evocation of racialized perception takes the focus away from the physical domination of the first, placing the locus of subtext instead in the house, where he leverages his expertise to dissuade Mark from a heroism explicitly aligned with the racialized characters of Debbie and Titan. The locality here illustrates the intersecting frameworks, the hierarchy of the family made commensurate to their respective engagement with the metaphysical spectacle that saturates their lives. Superheroic and domestic dynamics are unified, as Nolan speaks with a superiority and seniority contingent on his experience as an accomplished hero and on his position as the head of the family. The dinner table becomes a theater of physical, as well as political, power differentials. Nolan is the global juggernaut and the father; Mark is the novice hero and the son; Debbie is the civilian and the wife whom Nolan renders naïve and overly defined by pathos.

Nolan and Debbie’s perception of heroism tangibly diverge here, as Nolan insists that Mark use his strength for globalized conflicts, appealing to the scale of astronomical natural disasters, envisaging a heroic placelessness divorced of localized and politicized context, and Debbie encourages Mark to help Titan, whose sphere of influence is neither enclosed within the house nor expanded to the planet, instead focusing on a neighborhood and community steeped in economic exploitation, his family attending the very same recreation center at which Amber volunteers. Titan explicitly delineates his and Mark’s emotive relations to the disenfranchisement occurring in his community on the basis of their respective cultural ubiety: without any explicit context for Mark’s identity outside of the mantle, he correctly assumes Mark’s suburban upbringing based on his observable dislocation from such spaces in the scale of his heroism. The racialized impermeability of the house is observed in Nolan’s insistence that Mark keep his focus to global and spacial contexts, and in Titan’s understanding that such patterns would incline Mark to withhold assistance.

Revisiting the fight in the finale, Nolan’s brutal punishment for Mark’s refusal to enable Viltrumite imperialism is conveyed to the audience through two complementary thematic channels: the colorful world of superheroes which Mark was eager to join, a unique expression of this would-be colony, and the structure of the house, with Debbie inside as this possessed fulcrum around which their family is balanced. Nolan’s gestures toward these make evident his attempt to twist them into conduits for Viltrumite ideology, but where one fails, exposing Mark to the language that inspires him to resist, the other lingers, perfusing Mark’s conflict and philosophy through the second season.

During this fight, Mark frequently appeals to the first as a pacifying force in contrast to Nolan’s brutality. Notably, assumes that Nolan is brainwashed, a familiar narrative tool to display the dangerous potential a hero may possess while removing them from moral fault, a staple of the genre which the Maulers reference in the same episode, as they fail to do the same to Immortal. Indeed, Nolan’s training Mark was steeped in the conventions of the genre, each undercut with precepts of Viltrumite hegemony: saving the world from an asteroid reflects the lone agent making decisions for a planet without agency; dropping a villain to force a confession reflects the use of fear as a coercive tool; even striking Mark to test his strength reflects, at its simplest, the might makes right mentality that undercuts all Viltrumite doctrine. “I was wrong to raise you like them” makes this explicit, reflecting Nolan’s efforts to translocate the ideology of the empire onto the visual language of the superheroes. However, Nolan’s method of indoctrination instead develops in Mark the ideology to resist him. As superheroes are posited as a unique reflection of Earth—in contrast to Viltrumite and Coalition agents, who possess similar powers but are removed from the genre’s language—this language belongs to the potentially colonized, and with Debbie providing prominent pushes toward this methodology, the racialized.

This appeal to Debbie, as stated before, is not limited to the implicit. Nolan and Mark each structure their arguments around coordinate, enmeshed frameworks, exalting Debbie and the house as paired metonyms for their respective ideology: where Mark posits her as the supposed basis of their heroism, this drive to protect others and a glue for the house, Nolan renders this language more explicitly possessive, positing her as a “pet,” something dear yet ephemeral and without agency. Where Mark was born into the house, and has only known the house, even where characters like Titan illustrate it as stifling, Nolan adopted the house as synecdoche for the coercive structure of the empire. The agent of a vast empire has subsumed this racialized woman of this potential colony by adopting patterns and rituals that she would recognize. The physical ideology of the Viltrum Empire serves to strengthen the references to the western hegemony which codifies this bodily ownership. He recognized the house as a suitable vessel for his control, and by extension, Viltrumite control.

Even after Nolan’s departure, the house remains a vehicle for structuralized, and specifically racialized violence, wherein Debbie and Mark remain and Oliver is inducted. Invincible’s second season presents Nolan’s promise of subsumption into the Viltrumite empire, and the consequent aspirational whiteness, as lingering, contraposed conflicts casting Mark as at once a racialized subject of violence and a perpetrator of racialized interactions, viewed through a lens of fatherhood and the house. At once, the offer is an act of violence, an ideological and personal violation of Mark’s identity as it is rooted in humanity and racialization, and a threat, a gesture either deliberate or situational toward the imperial conquest of the Viltrumite Empire.

Mark first leverages the reputation of his father against Darkwing after spending the duration of their brief conflict denying any emotive or ideological connection to his father’s violence. His attitude suddenly departs from his typical insistence that he does not share his father’s cruelty, a belief he continues to espouse for nearly the rest of the season. It is when Darkwing takes him outside of Cecil’s hearing, in this fantastical realm that GDA surveillance cannot penetrate, that Mark invokes his father, and attributes violence to this descent. “Like you said—I’m Omni-Man’s son. You have no idea what I’m capable of” is Mark’s attempt at conveying an intrinsic, or at least deeply internalized, violence. It frames his typical separation from his father as an active process of restraining a brutality that he only lets slip once more in this season.

Mark’s connection to his father orbits the four physical conflicts between this threat and Angstrom’s confrontation, where it emerges again. Lucan vocally doubts Mark’s similarities to his father; Mark refuses to kill Thula before his father defeats her in his place; Mark aids the Guardians against the sequids to reject his father’s isolationism; and Mark refuses Anissa’s implication that accepting his place in the Empire is inevitable. Where Mark implicitly or explicitly distances himself from Nolan in those conflicts, Angstrom’s arrival at his house compels Mark to summon this imagery. The Black man entering the suburban house leads to an evocative anger Mark has never displayed before, nor since. “Stop threatening my family” renders the house as the origin of this rage, and Mark’s savage beatdown draws attention to Nolan’s brutality against him months earlier. The blows of the father, the superheroic paragon, the imperial agent, brought to bear against this man, again removed from the observation and thus judgment of others. “You have no idea what I’ve been through—how much I’ve been holding back” compares this instance of brutality to his threat against Darkwing, now expressing what he before merely indicated. Mark feels wrongly condemned, and protective of his mother. The anger he metes against Angstrom is filtered through Angstrom’s many instances of surviving Viltrumite subjugation, Mark’s acknowledgment that his father’s anger is imperial and fascist anger, and Debbie’s place as this presumed perpetual victim. It is, in all these context, racialized: the Black man who survived imperial occupation, the son wielding his white father’s anger, the Asian woman reduced to an object. As Mark steps into Nolan’s ideology, he elevates himself to the vengeful father, and reduces Angstrom and Debbie to existential children, disobedient and hapless, respectively.

This emotional expulsion immediately frightens Mark, and he comes to identify his anger’s semblance with Nolan’s. This marks the second time he realizes that this paternally-coded urge to protect a racialized woman from a racialized outside is part and parcel for the hegemonic cruelty that his father embodied: it was the impetus for his and Amber’s breakup. As she describes her lack of agency bound in her inability to defend herself against Mark’s enemies, Mark realizes that his instinctual desire to kill Anissa is not a valorized display of protectiveness, but indicative of the same mentalities that constituted his father’s brutality. He further reflects an understanding of this racialization: what he has done to Amber for months, Nolan had done to Debbie for years. The expectation for Debbie to be metaphysically inferior was a violation, as worth describing as the implicit physicalized threats prior to his departure. Even removed from the optics of superheroism, Nolan’s position as the physically eminent head of the house was violent.

Invincible’s second season therefore thrice depicts Black characters as victims of castle doctrine, the violent codification of the house, in turn a synecdochal reflection of the state, that reinforces and benefits whiteness; notably, each time this allusion is specifically accompanied by visual and verbal reference to Nolan Grayson in his role as an embodiment of imperial violence. That is, in contrast to other works, in which the anti-Black violence intrinsic to castle doctrine is a covert or unexamined byproduct of the author’s reification of the sanctity of the white family unit, Invincible makes clear that this is a harmful act of coercion and possession, monopolizing violence upon racialized subjects.

Mark’s appeal to Nolan’s power and authority are imbued with gestures to the higher colonial power which he represented, therefore lending this subjugation an imperialized emphasis. However, the question of Mark’s identity, indeed whether he can be compelled to assimilate fully into the empire and abandon any significant affiliation with Earth, pervades his conflicts with the Viltrumites, each of whom adduce it jointly with their physicality. That is, despite Mark’s ability to wield racialized and colonized violence in his father’s image, the Empire always casts him as defective agent and dissident subject.

Lucan, though visually racialized, is given the same treatment as other members of the imperial core. This is illustrated after the conclusion of the battle on Thraxa, whereupon Mark watches Viltrumites agents medevac Lucan and Nolan, where Kregg evaluates Mark’s worthiness on the basis of his ability to survive grievous injuries. Mark has to survive first, where he grants the soldiers immediate and equal medical attention. Furthermore, the ease with which he overpowers Mark and the brevity of their interaction better places the tone of his offer of assimilation into a gendered context: Mark’s identity is doubted on the basis of his physical strength, rather than ideology.

However, Anissa’s discourse with Mark demonstrates that she shares his metaphysical interposition: she is neither the white men who render racialized violence unto Mark nor the Black characters upon whom Mark metes racialized violence. This is twice made explicit: at the end of the season, Mark remembers Nolan, Cecil, and General Kregg’s words in sequence as resonant gestures to his and his father’s ideological resemblance, yet forecloses Anissa from this recollection, despite the inevitability of his identity saturating their conversation; after the fight, as Mark consoles Amber, he tells her “I wanted to kill her for putting a hand on you,” and describes this reaction as a source of shame, an emotional agony painted in the rhetoric of castle doctrine which Nolan wielded with Debbie as victim and which Mark would later wield against Angstrom. Though she invokes his identity, and evokes his racializing anger, she receives neither the traumatic reflection nor the force of this protective rage, collocating them in equivalent racial contexts, between these endpoints of subjugator and subjugated.

Kregg chastises Anissa upon her return to his ship, in an act that calls to mind the paternalistic control that Nolan and Cecil direct onto Mark. This scolding reframes the Empire’s order that Anissa induct Mark into a personal need to reestablish her place on the hierarchy, to move a step higher from being the only Viltrumite in such a subordinating dynamic. Though she is an emblazoned member of this imperial authority, she is not afforded the latitude that Mark is granted against either Nolan or Cecil: where he can approach with fist clenched, she is kept at a distance; where he defies Cecil’s fervent orders, Anissa is totally bound to her own. Kregg still treats Mark as a colonial subject, and thus the punishment for his defiance is far steeper, his planet sentenced to scorched earth, but this only follows three orders to conform interspersed throughout a long period without constant observation; Anissa, in turn, receives no punishment on a comparable scale, but she is given more thorough observation in scrutiny. Mark’s consanguinity with Nolan acts as an aegis against this social panopticon, coordinate to Anissa’s brownness, a more apparent racialization from which he is exempt. Lucan can become a Viltrumite first, and Mark can become the son of Nolan, but Kregg’s control denies Anissa this rhetorical shelter: she is only a younger, smaller, brown woman.

Kregg’s scrutiny of Anissa forms a parallel to the hierarchizing control he and Cecil enforce upon Mark, two older white men observe this racialized teenager with an unspoken promise of physical violation in response to any deviation. The similarity in these aspects of control reinforce Mark and Anissa as reflective intersubjectivity despite the uniqueness of their respective placement in these coercive systems, but also emphasizes the racism in this form of control. Mark is rendered a soldier in a proxy war, expected to carry out Viltrumite imperial interest with the threat of decimation overhead, and with a functional kill switch implanted covertly in the case he contradicts American imperial interest. The nonlethality and everpresence of the implant reflects the silent coercion that Anissa faces, the servant whose ideology aligns with the empire subject to a tacit and inescapable manipulation. Each man frames their mission in logic and numbers, but the bloodsoaked strike across Mark’s cheek and the screeching implant reducing him to spasms indicate a willingness to carry out violations of his bodily autonomy as a punishment.

This exploitation and assumption of Mark’s beholdenness to possessive, racializing authorities infest Conquest’s violence upon Mark. Conquest thoroughly effaces the fantastical rhetoric surrounding this domination and consequently centers the language of satisfaction and punishment around Mark’s status as a racialized member of this desired colony. Conquest will not believe Mark is a Viltrumite until he sees “[Mark’s] Viltrumite heart … beating in my hand”—if Mark is not a Viltrumite, then Conquest is not carrying out violence upon a potential peer, but a collapsed embodiment of the other. This is succeeded by Conquest using Mark’s body as a weapon to cause collateral, calling to mind the same punitive violence to which Nolan subjected Mark, and taking advantage of Mark’s physical durability to massacre the people of the planet he holds dear. Though Conquest, as a nominal personification of the bodily control of the Empire, elides all of Mark’s relations to this colonizing power, both those adopted through resistance or those impelled through coercion, his destruction repeats imagery that Nolan established years earlier—the destruction of the state in excelsis cannot be fully extricated from the father, from the hierarchy of the house.

Through race, Invincible explores the patterns of hegemonic structures, and the staggered interactions occurring between those placed on differentiated strata of these hierarchies, through imperial and domestic authority, between soldiers or between colonial subjects, and across the planes. Nolan’s internalization of Viltrumite imperial ideology borrows from and assimilates with the ideology of white supremacy and the ideology of the family; though Mark cannot escape his racialization, and has never willingly aligned himself with the empire, every gesture he makes to one of these structures incorporates the other by their nature. These connections cannot be elided, nor does Invincible attempt to do so: superficial cues are not sufficient to recognize the interactions between these positions, as Anissa’s darker skin does not exclusively reflect less privilege, but neither does her status in the empire solely reflect increased privilege. Where some shared racialization can create dialogue, as Mark and Anissa’s simultaneous recognition of the other’s circumstances permeates their interlocution, others lead to competing appeals to the authority with which they are aligned. The racialized violence and control that Mark himself can wield demonstrates that he exists at a philosophical crossroads, and that all evocations of this violence, regardless of whoever dispenses it, are made actively, even if subconsciously. It is a choice to reify these structures, rooted in their existential localities, and the systems with which they are familiar. In Invincible, as in reality, race is inescapable.

[dancing-dawn]

for the character ask game: Akutagawa, since you already got an Atsushi ask~

*turns around, fluttering eyelashes*

Oh, me? Oh, no, I definitely wasn't just waiting for that name to appear in my inbox, why would you even think that, it's not like the character attached to it has already been running through my head all day every day every moment of my joyous life every fragment of my time on this earth it's not like I had this questionnaire already half prepar-

Favourite thing

Oh. This man. This man has THE MOST compelling character development in the whole series. Possibly even out of all media I've ever consumed. It is impossible to put this little fella in a box. He's Rashomoning his way out of the boundaries of any coming-from-a-13-year-old mentally deficient take on his character that tries to paint him in solid blocks of black and white. Nu-uh, my man here is a whole rainbow (also very gay but that's beside the point), he has so many nuances and flavors he might as well be a 10-course 5 Michelin star meal. He has single handedly broken EVERY SINGLE stereotype for an antagonist and even recently turned co-protagonist.

He is a marvel; he has the heart of an angel and the soul of a devil; he is flawed; he has so many damn issues; he is so fucking hot; also kinda funny ngl; he is a born protector, nourished as a murderer; he is the heartless cur with a heart on fire, burning with the the desire to live, to love, to feel, yet he CANNOT because this wretched world of pain and death and senseless duty is his damnation and you are damn right he is going to crawl his way out of this living hell, find his purpose and make this right.

Least favourite thing

Non-existent. Next question. :D

Favourite Line

“And then… And then.”

listen lisTen LIsteN i DO NOT care this is an internal thought and not spoken dialogue, okay? good. gooood good good. lemme explain myself as eloquently as i can without going insane (i am already insane ty)

This is a turning point for his whole character arc and the new beginning he so desperately needed to go on living. It is the moment of revelation, of clarity, of finding his purpose, escaping the clutches of his false deity, of reaching the light - giving into it, surrendering all of himself, wholly and truly. It is a moment of transcendence, of gazing upon the soul of his rival and seeing nothing but his own fractured reflection, of embracing all of his vices and virtues and giving them a new meaning, a new life, purpose, reason. It is acceptance and understanding and it is everything it was meant to be from the very beginning. He was meant to grow, he was meant to find love, he was meant to not only survive but to thrive, flourish. 

He was born with the most kind and gentle and caring heart, only for it to be ripped from his clutches, shattered across the corpses of his family and buried into the ground where he too belonged. But he never gave into his wretched fate, never listened to the voices, never stopped trying and trying over and over. No. He hung onto the thinnest sliver of hope for existence, seeking something that truly matters. And look just where he found it…

brOTP

Oh, I have so many here, I don’t even know where to start. So many possibilities for wholesome platonic dynamics.  

Aku & Gin - they sooooo need to interact more in canon, I love love love tragic siblings to my bones.

Beast!Aku & Kenji - I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Farmer Aku = Best Aku. Their unlikely friendship is my favourite part of Beast and you know that monologue about the world in halves, yea, that always makes me cry.

Aku & Tachihara - I got this idea from a fanfic (waiting room btw, i can never recommend this one enough) and I’m still not over it. I believe they would make for a fun duo in canon too, given the right opportunity. I sense a lot of fun brotherly protective shenanigans if Tachigin comes into the picture too tehee.

Aku & Chuuya - Chuuya is the best thing to happen to Aku in the Mafia, so that one’s pretty self explanatory. I imagine Chuuya as being very supportive and understanding, which would soothe the wound left by Dazai - for both of them, actually.

OTP

MMMMmmmmmm yea I can’t really make the same joke twice, gets old, gotta think of a new one, ahem…

A boy with righteous soul,

with the most heroic goal -

to bring the world to light,

meets the deadliest of plight.

A soul with no compassion,

in a savage, brutal fashion.

With destiny of bone and blood,

to wither, crawl into the mud.

Until he found a strength reborn,

in this world dark, forlorn.

In the eyes of fated partner

who turned to fallen martyr.

He cried out, born of fire,

with a need so raw and dire,

to reverse the flow of time,

and return that which was mine.

He swore to take him back,

for the boy became his heart,

his hope and reason, fate,

to survive another day.

Until their destined meeting,

in a world lone and fleeting.

Where he needn’t fight alone,

as he found his mirrored soul.

…ye, it’s sskk, big surprise here <3 (yes i wrote that in an hour literally only for the sole purpose of not repeating the jest from the Atsushi one yes)

nOTP

Okay after spilling my heart out in every possible shape and form of poetic ramblings about what I love, it’s a bit hard for me to discuss that which I do not. But it’s Akuhigu, of course, simple as that. It’s not even because “oh it gets into the way of sskk bla bla bla,” no - it’s just genuinely plainly unhealthy as it is even on its own. I feel bad for Higuchi (even tho I accept her role as a character as a reference to irl!Akutagawa’s work) and I’m always going to pray that someday she gets the spotlight she deserves, preferably aside from being a manifestation of Akutagawa’s shadow.

Random headcanon

He has the biggest collection of expensive tea and is soooo judging Atsushi for drinking the cheap supermarket stuff and daring to call that muddied water tea. He also has regular ‘tea dates’ with Gin where they chill with a book and a cup in hand and argue on their favourite flavors.

Unpopular opinion

*cough* bottom aku *cough cough cough* if u know me, u know *faints dramatically to reinforce my statement*

Song I associate with them

Ye, you can blame @gothicmatter again for this one - absolutely and definitely and certainly “Sacrifice” by London After Midnight. I have this shit ingrained in my brain and it is not etching itself out anytime soon. I still listen to it at least once every few days.

Especially the verse…

Darkness is all I want to see

I could never put in to words

What it is you mean to me

is spinning in my head like the Cosmo Clock at all times.

Favourite picture

Oh. Oh, this is where we get um,, how do I say it… a bit unhinged.

HAVE YOU SEEN THOSE MAN’S THIGHS OH MY GOD LOOK AT HIM FFS HOW DARE HE I CANNOT EVEN TAKE HIM DYING SERIOUSLY WITH THIS LITTLE CUNTY SLICK TO HIS BODY OUTFIT. BRO, ATSUSHI, MY MAN, IF YOU WILL NOT, THEN I WILL.

EXCUSE ME UMM WHO DO YOU THINK GAVE YOU THE RIGHT TO LOOK LIKE THIS WHILE GETTING STABBED MY DUDE I AM TRYING MY HARDEST TO PAY ATTENTION TO THE PLOT HERE YOU CANNOT JUST PULL THAT FACE WITH BLOOD SMEARED ACROSS YOUR CHEEK AND LIPS AND TEETH AND EXPECT ME NOT TO BO-

[writingdotcoffee]

New in Writing Analytics: The Draft Library

I haven't posted much recently, and this is why. I've been working on a massive new feature for Writing Analytics. It took way longer than I expected, but it's ready now. And I'm so happy with how it turned out.

Previously, the app only had a chronological list of all your writing sessions. This works fine when you work on a single project, mostly first drafting. However, when you write a lot of stuff, it's easy to lose track of what you did when.

The thing is, people write a lot of stuff in WA. This feature was badly needed for a long time — my first sketches date back to August 2022. I'm glad I didn't build it back then because the idea wasn't fully formed yet. I found the right solution a few months ago and started working on it.

Introducing the Draft Library

One great thing about the library is that it's pretty self-explanatory. It's where your projects and drafts live. Projects behave like folders. You can drag them around to rearrange them. Click on a project to see the drafts inside.

When you open a draft, you'll see its text and some basic stats. Figures like the word count and how much time you spent working on it across all your writing sessions.

Creating new sessions has also changed. I broke the form down into a few steps. It's now way easier to select a project and join a challenge.

This brings me to my favourite new feature: colour coding! You could always set colours for projects, but this is mainly to distinguish them on your dashboard.

Now, you can colour-code drafts in the library as well. Make published drafts green and drafts that still need work red?

Or, when working on a more complex story, you could colour-code different chapters based on the PoV characters or track interweaving threads of the narrative. The possibilities there are endless!

If you'd like to give this a go, you can sign up here (it's free for two weeks).

Coming Up Next

I'm always working on new features for the app. Right now, I'm updating the version history. Every time you create a session, Writing Analytics makes a copy of your draft. You can go back in time and see all the previous versions.

I'm also working on an export feature to the docx format so you can move your work to Google Docs and send it to your editor when you finish drafting.

[sodasa-was-taken]

Why Suletta and Miorine's story is a romance: A Mobile Suite Gundam: The Witch from Mercury story structure analysis by Sodasa

So, I recently watched The Witch from Mercury, and I felt compelled to write an analysis of the show's use of the story structure of romances. I'm a hobbyist in the history of trends in genre fiction with a particular interest in romances. I thought it would be fun to use my area of expertise to talk about how the budding relationship between Miorine and Suletta is intertwined with the story of G-Witch.

Something particular about the romance genre is that, unlike other genres of fiction, it's mostly defined by its story structure. This means that just because a story is about two people getting together does not automatically make it a romance in the same way having magic in a story qualifies it as a fantasy. The flip side of this is that while you can't have a fantasy without fantastical elements, a romance can be put in any setting. As long as the story hits the required plot beats, it's still a romance. This makes Romance simultaneously one of the strictest and most versatile genres, as the plot can be anything as long as it ties into the main characters' developing relationship. Use this structure in a story about financial politics and mechs, and you get a story like The Witch from Mercury.

I think the show uses this structure very effectively. In my opinion, a great romance should, first and foremost, be an exploration of the part of the human condition where previous bad experiences make us reject intimacy. The romance story structure is designed to have the characters come face-to-face with their inner demons by giving them a reason to overcome them. Something that's a lot harder to pull off outside of romances, as not many things in life require us to overcome some of our deepest insecurities instead of just pushing them down.

G-Witch is a great show to use as an example of what makes a romance a romance as it follows the story structure almost to a tee, but it's also not the kind of story that most people usually think of when picturing a romance. I also believe that seeing the show through the lens of the romance structure leads to some juicy character psychoanalysis for Suletta and Miorine. I'll go over all the plot beats of a romance and explain how they apply to G-Witch and, if applicable, why I think you don't see those plot beats outside of romances. The names of the plot beats are taken from "Romancing the Beat: Story Structure for Romance Novels" by Gwen Hayes, which is also my primary source, along with my own extensive experience with the romance genre.

I hope someone gets something out of this. I have seen some excellent analyses and theories for this show, but they have been on things I don't know much about myself. Since the only part of story analysis I excel at is the structure of romances, I thought I'd lend my own area of expertise. I want to clarify that while I might sound matter-of-fact, this is just my opinion. I'm by no means saying that you have to think that G-Witch is a romance. I'm just arguing for why I personally consider it to be one.

[zukosdualdao]

i'm literally insane about the last agni kai and the lightning scene(s). i swear i've rewatched it 10+ times since my last rewatch of the show (which was my first watch in years) and like. azula sees katara come into view from behind. zuko doesn't. he follows azula's gaze and sees katara and is immediately horrified. he doesn't even think or hesitate because he doesn't have time and for once he doesn't have to look back at azula to figure out what she's doing because he knows what she's doing and he won't let it happen. time dwindling into slow motion as a haunting score plays? and zuko literally yelling out "no!" because that lightning absolutely cannot hit katara. as soon as he sees it there's no chance of that ever happening. and then katara watching in horror as the lightning flashes against features in what is probably one of the most hauntingly beautiful animated moments of the show? zuko hitting the ground still convulsing with lightning and katara crying out "zuko!" and immediately trying to run to him before azula attacks again? and the next scene we cut back to with them, zuko is groaning weakly and trying to lift himself up, and we see katara literally gasp in surprise as she realizes he's still alive (i'm sobbing because i do quite literally think she thought he was dead) and immediately tries to run to him again, nevermind that she knows azula is still there, and the hand katara uses for healing is already doused in water as she reaches for him. but then azula starts attacking again. and zuko, despite literally being in so much pain that he can't stand and can barely even move at all without whimpering, still tries to reach for the spot where he can see azula attacking katara. katara is forced to hide from azula's attacks. and as azula is mocking "zuzu, you don't look so good" down to zuko, the perspective shot is such that you can SEE that katara is also looking at where he lies prone in the distance, surrounded by flame (probably wondering how much time they have before it really is too late) before looking back up at azula and realizing she needs to defeat her as quickly and handily as possible so katara can get to zuko. obviously katara would have done this anyway (the whole reason they were THERE was to halt the continued cycle of the imperialist regime of the fire nation), but the scene is specifically framed as katara trying to figure out how to stop azula so the obstacle to her getting to zuko is no longer in the way. katara's defeat of azula was epic and deserves its own post. but then after making sure azula is securely chained, she runs to zuko, looks at him with such immense sadness and horror and fear as she hears him in so much pain, tenderly turns him over so she can get a good look at the wound. and she cups his head? briefly but so gently? so that he won't hit it as she turns him over? and when she tries to heal him you can tell she is so genuinely unsure if it will even work, and so relieved that she starts crying tears of joy when she sees it has (at least enough to keep him alive and somewhat lessen his pain.) they thank each other (and you can tell it's still really hard for zuko to talk and his eyes are barely open but he thanks her anyways i'm.) and she thanks him back and!!! when he starts to try to sit up she makes a little surprised face and then immediately helps him to do so (and puts a tender hand to his chest while she does!!!) and obviously that last shot of them standing together is also one of emotional support, but katara's hand on his back is also partly because i still think (and certainly katara still thinks) trying to walk/stand on his own would be a bad idea, so it's definitely not happening.

[exclamationpayne]

One of the most underestimated friend dynamics in the show to me is Shirley and Abed. They have the cutest little moments sometimes and I think: Damn I want to write that friendship one day (and I will when I figure it out).

I wanna say they get a cute moment per season but only s01 and s02 is fresh in my head because I kind of live there rn (like S01E18 when Abed meets her kids and says she's a good mom and S02E05 when Shirley impedes Abed's Jesus movie after hearing him pray for a way out and by the end both admit they learned/were humbled by each other). There might be other moments but my brain does not retain everything, just moments here or there lol So if I'm wrong about anything I don't mind being corrected lol

Anyway, both moments Abed doesn't object to physical contact either and accepts it from her with a smile. He does with with other characters too but still it's cute. A part of me thinks it's what he misses about his mom because before she left maybe they were close? Or maybe he gets to see the potential of that kind of maternal love that may have been missing? I don't know, hard to tell because she left but then she visited him every year for Christmas but then she just kind of said "you're an adult now, new life and new kid bye" lol So idk how to interpret how close he was with his mom (and any headcanons I have it's usually limited per fic and not necessarily set in stone because I'm not super rigid with headcanons for anything tbh) but regardless I wonder if that correlates with his relationship with Shirley.

Anyway, I know they play on her mom traits of guilt tripping and baking and being the disciplinarian and being sweet but my favorite parts are when she just radiates mom energy in a way that's like a hug or a really good soft cookie. I wish we saw more of this in the show and kind of sad of the could've been for a S04 that doesn't exist where we might've gotten more of that and S06 where Yvette left for personal reasons so no Shirley at all :'c

[angeleyes-xx]

im backkk :] eternal sugar doodles